Only Solitaire: G. Starostin's Record Reviews, Reloaded

 

A-B

 

Intro Notes

 

            Beyond this page the reader will find a bunch of superficial reviews of pop music re­cords, spanning the chronological distance of about a century's worth of recording and of the tastes and judgements of one individual. If there is a primary purpose to all this writing, it can be des­cribed as inescapable egotistic self-assertion over one's record collection, something that each and every individual with a record collection, a computer, and an ability to string together a few coherent lines of text is entitled to as long as «freedom of speech» has any meaning.

 

            Each review tends to consist of a small bundle of facts about the recording (for larger bun­dles of facts, please refer to specialized literature on the artist), a self-honest attempt to describe the music in accessible and meaningful terms, and a few subjective, but systematic, opi­nions on the overall value of the record. No «ratings» are given — rating the value of any re­cord on a numeric scale is fun, but not necessarily harmless fun — except for an overall «thumbs up» or «thumbs down» decision, triggered by considerations of direct, irrational likeability (the «heart» reaction) or by more rational ideas of «artistic importance», «relevance», and «innovation» (the «brain» reaction). A record may be liked, but not respected, or vice versa. However, it does not necessarily need to be both liked and respected to get the thumbs in an upward position.

 

            Reviews are separated in seven chronological categories — artists of the pre-Beatles era covering everything (mostly blues, R&B, and rockabilly) from the 1920s, then six more sections covering relatively distinct chronological periods. Within these, artists are slowly reviewed in al­phabetic order. At the current rate, I may never get beyond the letter C, but I do not really care. This is not science, and getting anywhere is not the main purpose.

 

            Potential readers are encouraged to browse through these texts, and, perhaps, even to fol­low certain recommendations (if they have not yet heard the record in question), provided they have at least a few points of intersection with the opinions offered below. If, on the other hand, it turns out that we come from different planets, there is no reason whatsoever for you, dear reader, to waste your time on what you will unquestionably label as «drivel». There may be other, better reviews waiting for you out there, or, perhaps, you would like to follow your own uninfluenced destiny in this mat­ter. By all means, then, I welcome you to do just that.

 

            Contra my past experience with the HTML version of Only Solitaire, I do not add any more reader comments to my reviews. However, I welcome additional or dissenting opinions on the forum, and I promise to correct any factual, grammatical, or stylistical mistakes and/or typos that you spot (fairly easy to do when it is all in a single file).

 

            Last note: for fun and additional entertainment value, some of the songs in the track list preceding the review are hyperlinked to Youtube videos — but only in cases where there really is an accompanying video clip or live performance that I think is worth one's love (or hate), not when it's just an audio track over a bunch of boring photos. Enjoy — or don't enjoy.

The «Two Cents» Page.

For those who have no need of lengthy reviews, here's just one or two quick thoughts and summaries on all the artists I have covered. Do not forget, though, that even Britney Spears cannot be fully described in two sentences, so these should by no means be taken for final and definitive judgements. Build or burn at your own risk.

 

Note: ☺ Smileys indicate artists well worth getting acquainted with; ○ blank circles are for okay ones who may have reasons to own fan bases but do not rise beyond "decent"; ☻ anti-smileys are just what they are — artists who are only here because of public notoriety and (perhaps) limited historical significance, but they can also be great fodder to make fun of. I'm sure they don't mind — they're supposed to be cool, understanding people in any case.

 

1920-1960

 

☺Albert King: On a good day, this could be my favourite of all the «big fat electric blues gurus». The man had a long, fluctuating, career, but one that is actually worth following for at least one whole decade, unlike that of so many blues purists; in the mid-1970s Fate ceased to mate him with good supporting musicians, but for a whole ten years before that, he was the blues spirit of Stax Records, providing a unique synthesis of the Chicago style with classic R'n'B that, as strange as it may sound, nobody else at the time was willing, or able, to replicate. Plus, he really was one of Eric Clapton's most respected teachers circa the Cream period — it is a downright injustice to love Disraeli Gears and ignore this guy. Pos­sible star­ting point: Born Under A Bad Sign (1967).

 

○ Alberta Hunter: Lady Gracious of 1920s vaudeville-blues and also the most spectacular late comeback in blues history. A bit too refined to relate to on a personal level, but well worth wor­shipping on a universal one. Pos­sible star­ting point: Any decent compilation that cleans the so­und up well enough, or, for the comeback period, Amtrak Blues (1980).

 

☺Amos Milburn: One of the three or four kings of the «jump blues» craze of the late 1940s / early 1950s, nicely distinguished from the others by his tremendous piano playing — a forefather of the rock'n'roll form and one of the first purveyors of the rock'n'roll spirit ('Down The Road Apiece' certainly rocks the house down). Possible starting point: Blues, Barrelhouse & Boogie-Woogie is an excellent 3-CD set that covers most of the important points, but it's out of print; in its absence, any reasonable compilation will do (even the short ones usually have all the classics, but you gotta make sure that these are the original 1940s/1950s recordings).

 

○ Arthur Crudup: One of the first electric bluesmen and, in a way, the progenitor of Elvis ('That's All Right, Mama'; 'My Baby Left Me') — unfortunately, he only performed (I cannot even say «wrote») two songs in his lifetime, the Slow Blues one and the Fast Proto-Rockabilly one, and once you have tasted the two, there is little reason to taste a hundred more exactly like them. All around nice dude, though. Very clean. Possible starting point: Any compilation that has the songs mentioned above. Go for the original versions, not re-recordings — this guy is mostly treasurable as a part of history, and why would you want to own fake history?

 

☺B. B. King: Having reigned as active King of the blues-de-luxe style for more than half a century — grand, flaring brass, piano, and strings arrangements have been going hand-in-hand with the man's singing and playing ever since the late 1940s — B. B. leaves us with such a huge legacy that it is almost impossible to make recommendations. Possible starting points: Live At The Regal (1965) is frequently considered a landmark in live electric blues performance; Comp­letely Well (1969) may be King at the peak of his studio powers. Generally, though, a B. B. King album is as good as are the musicians, songwriters, and producers involved with it. And if you decide to simply stick with a best-of compilation, nobody is going to blame you, either.

 

○ Barbecue Bob: One of the earliest forefathers of «Piedmont Blues», whatever that means in a non-purely-geographical sense; cool voice, similar in seductive power to Blind Willie McTell (but also capable of growling), and an interesting, if notably limited, guitar playing technique in which dum-drum-dum-drum «flailing» freely alternates with slide passages. Like most of the an­cient bluesmen, this one, too, is mighty repetitive, but he only recorded for about three years be­fore kicking the bucket, making this more forgivable than in others. Possible starting point: Any compilation that has the major classics — 'Mississippi Heavy Water Blues', 'Motherless Child', and that ultimate Depression anthem, 'We Sure Got Hard Times'.

 

☺Bessie Smith: The Empress. Perhaps not the most versatile, nuanced, diverse, or seductive ur­ban blues performer of the 1920s, but assuredly the most «titanic» of them all, and the one who was the least afraid to pour pure gut feeling into the material, no matter how old-fashioned or ge­neric. Also, probably, the easiest blues queen of the decade to get into — not least because most of her records have been cleaned up and remastered so well by Columbia. Possible starting point: Any single compilation will do, as long as the early years are covered.

 

○ Big Bill Broonzy: The overall nice gentleman of ye olde country blues that afforded himself a solid place in history through three things: (a) recording like crazy over three decades of a gene­rally very monotonous career; (b) being one of the first American bluesmen to heavily tour over­seas in the 1950s, thus procuring front row seats in the hearts of blues-thirsty European audien­ces; (c) overall nice gentlemanship and all. Hugely overrated, but still good enough for half a CD worth of solid guitar technique and occasionally adequate songwriting.

 

☺Big Joe Turner: A figure of tremendous historical importance and a potential source of kick-ass entertainment even today, but proceed with care: the Big Joe formula is as drastically limited as all of pop music's pre-1960's formulae. The bare necessities of life include finding a decent compilation of Joe's 1930s/1940s material, when he and his piano pal Pete Johnson ruled over jump blues and boogie-woogie; and then, of course, a compilation of his 1950s Atlantic hits, when, almost coincidentally, an already aging Big Joe became one of the co-founders of rock­'n'roll. In-depth analysis of Turner's career should be left to pros and nuts.

 

○ Big Joe Williams: The direct ancestor to the much better known Muddy Waters — burly, smel­­ly, scary blues music directly from the Delta. Big Joe's distnctive features involve a slightly special type of sound produced by his unique nine-string guitar; authorship or, at least, appropria­tion of such classics as 'Highway 51' and 'Baby Please Don't Go'; and particular recording longe­vity — throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was one of the most successfully and prolongedly marketed guardians of classic Delta blues.

 

☺Big Mama Thornton: One of blues' and R&B's greatest leading ladies — who, unfortunately, had the unluck to be Texas-based for most of her career, and ended up getting far fewer chances to prove her greatness than many of the more prominent figures of her age. As it is, she is mostly known for having recorded the original 'Hound Dog' and also providing fellow Texan Janis Jop­lin with one of her biggest hits ('Ball And Chain') — but there are plenty of other burly, brawny, incendiary gems in her catalog, and, although her «golden age» in terms of 45s were the 1950s, she managed to keep a respectable artistic profile until at least the mid-1970s.

 

☺Bill Haley: The father of 'Rock Around The Clock' does not need to strive for immortality: cheap (or expensive) compilations of the Comets' couple dozen major successes from the mid- to late-Fifties are always available, and they faithfully represent the cream of his rock'n'roll legacy. Beyond that, fans might explore his slow rise to fame through a career in country-western and early white R'n'B, or his quick fall from fame through a career as the Twist King of Mexico, but, honestly, there is no pressing need. It is important, however, to hear as much from his Decca pe­riod as possible — not just the hits, but the mini-«concept» albums as well.

 

☺Billie Holiday: The most idiosyncratic and deeply personal jazz singer of the pre-rock'n'roll era; while I normally refrain from reviewing jazz artists, her influence on all spheres of popular music, including pop, folk, soft-rock, etc., has been tremendous – having written only a handful of original compositions in her lifetime, she is still the fairy godmother of a huge number of fe­male (and some male) singer-songwriters. What Bessie Smith started, she brought to completion — a shift from «mannered» singing, in which emotionality was veiled with conventional theatri­cal moves and tactics, to a style where the singer is no longer afraid to show the singer's own per­sonality. Surely the only person who could almost make even a song like ʽCheek To Cheekʼ come to life (well, not quite, but she tried) deserves a page of her own.

 

☺Blind Blake: Either Georgia's, or Virginia's, or Florida's pride and glory (seems to be more different states vying for the right to his birthplace than Greek cities for Homer's). The father of «ragtime guitar», one of the first genuine, «provable» (through his recordings) virtuosos of the in­strument, and, seemingly, an overall nice guy, despite loads of personal problems, typical of early pre-War bluesmen. Unfortunately, most of his recordings were done for Paramount in pre-De­pression times, which means awful sound quality. Still, there are some compilations out there that try to do their best cleaning up the sound — so it might be better to hunt for these 1-CD best-of recor­dings rather than the complete 4-CD Document series, especially since these also include a lot of filler (much of the slow blues pieces that B.B. played were fairly generic).

 

○ Blind Boy Fuller: One of the most prolific, commercially successful, and predictably forgot­ten ragtime / Piedmont blues players of the pre-war era. The man had it all: a nice singing voice, a steady, unerring, professional playing technique, close-to-ideal studio conditions, and a profitable recording contract. The problem is, he only played about ten to twelve songs throughout his ca­reer, each one of which was re-recorded about the same number of times (sometimes even with­out changing the lyrics, just the title). Still, everybody needs to at least hear ʽRag Mama Ragʼ and ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ — classics of the genre. And the man that gave a title to the best Rolling Stones live album cannot be altogether forgettable.

 

☺Blind Lemon Jefferson: Nobody played guitar in the 1920s like this guy, and few people, until Hendrix came along thirty-five years later, allowed their instrument that much freedom, especial­ly when working from within a form as initially restricted as the blues. One of the few completely indispensable acoustic-blues artists for any aspiring musician, and particularly recommendable for «generic blues» haters as a possible remedy for the anti-blues attitude. But keep in mind that his work is rather uneven; it is advisable to concentrate on the early material from 1926-27 (ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ and the classic ʽMatch Box Bluesʼ, in particular, are undying classics).

 

☺Blind Willie Johnson: This guy only recorded about an hour and a half total of music during his brief late 1920s / early 1930s career, but what an hour and a half. Rough, dark, scary gospel-blues, sung by Captain Beefheart's grandfather and Tom Waits' great-grandfather and played with unparalleled slide guitar technique. Hugely influential on the entire blues and roots-rock scene, but still in a class of his own — essential listening for the ages.

 

☺Blind Willie McTell: With his cheery, youthful tenor and energetic style of 12-string guitar play­ing, Blind Willie McTell was one of the most «optimistic-sounding» bluesmen of the pre-war era, and he never lost that taste for life even after his recording sessions virtually ground to a halt. That is not quite the impression one gets from Bob Dylan's take on the man (McTell was a huge spiritual influence on Bob, but in a strictly Bob-controlled environment), but it might be even bet­ter, because loud, lively 12-string country blues was never the commonest commodity.

 

○ Bo Carter: This country bump... er, gentleman cut an immense number of sides in the 1930s, despite never having had more than a simply competent country-blues singing style and a profes­sional, but never all that individualistic manner of string-picking. The main reason for his success were his lyrics, which pushed the sexual innuendo level of generic 12-bar blues to an absolute, some might say almost surreal peak — honestly, AC/DC at their dirtiest have nothing on this guy, and the «give-the-people-what-they-want» public slurped and salivated accordingly. Collecting all his works has been easy ever since they have all been assembled in the Document series, but it is also the textbook definition of overkill: the regular listener only needs, at most, a representative single-disc compilation (actually, five or six songs in total will do the trick — make sure ʽPlease Warm My Wienerʼ is one of the selections).

 

☺Bo Diddley: No rock'n'roll collection will ever be complete or representative without a solid collection of Bo's early singles — the tribal «Bo Diddley beat» alone is one of the foundation stones of rock music, but Bo actually pioneered much more than that, and did it all with such verve that those early singles still sound totally fresh today (especially with a good remastering job). His innovative streak, like that of most «early rockers», was quite brief — already by the early Sixties, he was mostly coming up with re-combinations of previous successes — but the same cannot be said of the energy level of his performances, which never sagged one bit even in the direst of times. And he did make a brief exciting comeback in the early Seventies, reinventing himself as a heavy funkster at a time when most of his contemporaries were quite content with the status of «generic oldies act».

 

☺Bobby "Blue" Bland: Despite his not-particularly-attractive family name, Bobby has stuck far more often in the «True Blue» rather than the «Bland» department throughout his career. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he managed to stay aloof, resonant, competent, and commercially successful (on a modest level) for three decades — giving a good name to soul-blues in the 1950s, 1960s, and even the 1970s, when his style and production became predictably glossier, but still retained that classy spark. His major weakness is over-productivity: even as late as the 1990s, he was still steadily releasing a new LP every two years or so, most of which were and still are sur­prisingly listenable, but not altogether necessary. But a good, comprehensive overview of his Duke Records years (1950s-1960s) belongs in everybody's collection.

 

☺Brenda Lee: «Little Miss Dynamite» started out in the mid-Fifties as one of only two ladies who could successfully compete with the emerging male rockers on their territory (the other one being Wanda Jackson) — some of her early singles energized the listener with near-genuine El­vis-type energy, rendered all the more fascinating when you realized she had developed that ener­gy while still in her early teens. Unfortunately, in a matter of several years, the initial punch had dissipated, and she was soon marketed by her Nashville supervisors as a fluffy, run-of-the-mill balladeer and uninventive second-rate interpreter of «golden oldies and silver youngies»; with but a tiny handful of exceptions, nothing beyond 1961's All The Way is really recommendable, and the best way to get to know Brenda is through a compilation that focuses on her Fifties' material.

 

○ Brownie McGhee: The most, actually, that could be said about Brownie McGhee is that he was a cool, easy-going black dude who professionally played some very nice acoustic blues in many different styles (mainly Delta and Piedmont, though) — for the most part, though, he made his name by simply outlasting everybody else and managing to maintain a public profile in the 1950s and the 1960s, when most of his «authentic» pre-war contemporaries had already gone down the drain. Brownie is simply Brownie — he does not have much of an individual style, but he is never less than listenable, and often more than charming. Thus, any of his recordings, be it the early 1940s singles, the numerous 1950s duets with Sonny Terry on harmonica, or the later, more fully arranged band albums, are just about equally recommendable. But be careful, he's got a veritable boatload of them.

 

☺Buddy Holly: One of the few rock'n'rollers from the pre-Beatles era to go «against the grain» of the generally brutal / rebellious image associated with the movement — Buddy's image was notoriously non-flashy, «nerdy» even in comparison, but it was really his excellent gift for crea­tive songwriting that makes him one of the most important giants of the era, and a huge influence on the entire pop scene of the Sixties and beyond. The average modern listener might not be too impressed with the original recordings, suffering as they are from mediocre production values and a general lack of flashiness in Buddy's singing or playing, but nothing can hide the man's lovable charisma, or the genius of his best melodies — too bad he didn't have at least a couple extra years to leave behind a bigger bunch. A representative collection of Buddy's singles should be part of everybody's collection, but it is probably wise to avoid all the numerous rip-offs that his manager and producer, Norman Petty, released in overdubbed versions after his demise: with just a few exceptions, they are comprised of scrapped outtakes that never sounded too good to begin with, much less when they got «spiced up» with additional instrumentation that never be­longed there in the first place.

 

○ Buddy Moss: A legendary, but seriously underrated, country blues player from Atlanta, largely obscured by flashier competition from Blind Blake to Blind Willie McTell to Blind Boy Fuller (sort of a pattern there — perhaps if he'd been Blind Buddy Moss, things would have turned out differently). Unlike all those guys, Buddy was not much of an «entertainer», playing only a mini­mum of dance-oriented ragtime blues stuff; his specialty was the rigid 12-bar form, which he enlivened and enlightened with a marvelously fluent, inventive style of rhythm and lead playing. However, such an approach made his unique personality much harder to discern, and he never had that entrancing, mystical, «demonic» aura that later made white boys so attracted to the likes of Robert Johnson or Charlie Patton. In addition, he seems to have been relatively humble and shy — and then there was this weird accident of his being jailed for murdering his wife in 1935, something that seems to have never been properly proven, yet it cut his career short at the time and he never recovered. Most of his stuff sounds «the same», but still, every blues fan should at least own a representative compilation with ʽOh Lawdy Mamaʼ on it.

 

☺Bukka White: One of the most revered country blues players of the 1930s, the man actually only made a small handful of extremely influential recordings in that decade. It is hard to claim that he had an instantly recognizable / completely distinct identity, being influenced by just about everybody from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Blind Willie Johnson to Charley Patton, but it might just be that versatility, and general ability to impose his own rough, slightly bear-like, but lovable personality on all these styles, that makes his classic recordings (ʽPo' Boyʼ, ʽShake 'Em On Downʼ, ʽSic 'Em Dogs Onʼ, etc.) into such a treat. Like many other survivors, he made a come­back in the 1960s, but most of his late-period recordings are either faithful recreations of the old stuff or somewhat misguided attempts to step into the shoes of the new generation of Chicago bluesmen — it is recommendable to simply stick to the old pre-war stuff, particularly since all of it fits in quite niftily on a single-CD compilation.

 

1960-1966

 

☺13th Floor Elevators: Coming out of Texas, no less, these guys were the original lords of hard­core psychedelia, fanatically understood as a musical/lyrical phi­lo­sophy of genuine soul libe­ra­tion, rather than merely a bunch of trippy circus sonic effects. This allowed the band to succes­fully blow the minds of everyone who was not afraid of them (and, in 1966-67, such people were still rather scarce in numbers) — over the course of a whole two albums. Then, predictably, band­leader Roky Erickson blew his own mind, and the band ground to a halt by the end of the 1960s, leaving behind a confused, but still exciting legacy (although Roky himself still managed to have a hit-and-miss solo career for the next forty years). Pos­sible starting point: The Psychedelic Sounds Of... (1966).

 

☺Action, The: Their way of combining R'n'B with Brit-pop was original and nice; too bad they ne­ver even had a chance to record a proper album. Possible starting point: The Ultimate Action collects in one package most of their reasons for existence.

 

☺Alan Price: Outside of the UK, this man is arguably known mostly for his role in The Animals — his organ playing on ʽThe House Of The Rising Sunʼ has always been his primary (if not only) visit card. However, upon leaving The Animals over creative disagreements with Eric Burdon, Alan embarked on a solo career that, for a while, made him one of the most quintessentially British solo artists of his time. Beginning with somewhat unremarkable sets of R&B covers and then falling under serious Randy Newman influence, Price honed and perfected his songwriting skills to the extent of producing at least 2-3 conceptual albums of melodically pleasing and catchy, lyrically intelligent, and atmospherically moving tunes. His artistry has always been conservative (although he did embrace some funk and disco in the late 1970s), but his views on life were any­thing but, and his sincerity, humility, and overall sense of taste usually manage to show through even when he is running out of inspiration — actually, when he is running out of inspiration, he prefers not to record at all: the majority of his solo output is concentrated in the 1970s, after which recording output becomes more rare and generally less satisfactory. Possible starting point: O Lucky Man! (1973), the soundtrack to Lindsay Anderson's movie, is usually acknowledged as his highest points, but the two non-soundtrack LPs that follow it are quite the little masterpieces in their own right as well.

 

○ Albert Collins: One of the most easily recognizable electric blues players, with a tone so sharp, crisp, and crunchy that his bizarre fixation on all things cold and cool (see his album titles) be­comes less and less bizarre, the more you listen to him. The down side (not uncommon for blues players, one might say) is a certain, ahem, similarity to most of his work, but even in that respect he is better than many others, dabbling in novel sonic experimentation and always displaying a strong sense of humor that could not even be quenched by terminal cancer, from which he died in 1993. Possible starting point: The Cool Sound Of Albert Collins, a compilation of his first, trail blazing singles; Ice Pickin' (1978) is, for good reason, is considered the peak of his LP period.

 

☺Alex Harvey: His work with The Sensational Band is Scottish glam-rock theater at its flashi­est and bizarrest, but without guitarist Zal Cleminson he's like a fish out of water. Pos­sible star­ting point: Framed (1972) or Next! (1973). Avoid (for the first time, at least) all of the pre-Sen­sational Band stuff.

 

☺Animals, The: Early British R'n'B (1964-65) at its finest — Eric Burdon's brawn and Alan Price's electric organ make an explosive combo. Later Animals are, however, mostly a vehicle for Burdon's ego — an acquired taste at best. Pos­sible starting point: The Animals On Tour (1965).

 

☺Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul will forever remain the Queen, even though her active reign lasted only approximately 1/10th the length of her entire career. The universal consensus to which I completely subscribe is that the classic period lasted from 1967 to 1972 (maybe 1973) during her stay at Atlantic Records. Everything else is merely a footnote, or a lengthy series of hi­storical illustrations about how bad songwriting and worse conceptions of mainstream musical evolution consistently ruined a great artist. Possible starting point: Young, Gifted And Black (1972) ­— Aretha at her maturest — or, for a simpler, fresher perspective, Lady Soul (1967).

 

☺Arthur Alexander: Mostly known for having both the Beatles ('Anna', 'Soldier Of Love') and the Stones ('You Better Move On') cover his songs, Alexander was, in effect, a seriously underra­ted pioneer of heartbreak country-soul, with a relatively small catalog, most of which has been a commercial failure regardless of the time period or label, but is surprisingly consistent, enjoyable, and faithful to his artistic spirit. Well worth getting to know. Possible starting point: The Grea­test (1989) is the most detailed and easily available compilation on the market.

 

☺Association, The: Once loud and proud, now unjustly forgotten heroes of West Coast «sun­shine pop» — inoffensive, sweet music that still somehow managed to be cool due to the band just as willingly embracing psychedelia and electric guitar riffage as they were willing to embrace barbershop quartet values. Some fine singles ('Along Comes Mary', etc.) are their primary claim to non-oblivion, but their best albums tend to grow on you, too. Possible starting point: Insight Out (1967).

 

○ Barbara Lewis: A minor talent on the Atlantic R&B market, Barbara Lewis had the mis­fortune of being just a wee bit too timid and old-fashioned to make much of a difference — but she did have a nice, deep and silky singing voice, and she even had her own songwriting talent, writing all the songs for her debut album (no mean feat for a black lady in the early Sixties). Un­fortunately, after just one smash hit (ʽHello Strangerʼ), her commercial status quickly waned, and very soon she was barred from songwriting and saddled with subpar material, only very rarely alternating with an occasional new hit (ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ). A cautious shift to «groovier» songs in the late Sixties did not help, and by 1970, Barbara Lewis was little more than a one-hit or two-hit memory, immortalized in that capacity on various Atlantic R&B compilations. Possible starting point: Hello Stranger (1963) for all those interested in how an early Atlantic album where the performer herself did all the songwriting could sound (spoiler: not too hot) — provided you can find it in the first place. Otherwise, just stick to compilations.

 

○ Barbarians, The: Minor garage «wonder» from Massachusets, whose main claim to fame was their hook-armed drummer and his novelty signature tune, 'Moulty'. Their lonely LP (Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl, 1966) is no better and no worse than the average garage album — three or four fun, inspired tunes drowned in a sea of pointless filler. We will never even know if they really had potential or if they hadn't.

 

☺Beach Boys, The: One of the greatest American bands of the century, the Beach Boys never had the luck of the Beatles — their personal growth from melodically impeccable, but «spiritual­ly lightweight» entertainment to some of the greatest musical innovators of their generation (mostly courtesy of gifted brother Brian Wilson) has somehow eluded the general mainstream public, and continues to be generally confined to the «musically oriented» sphere of people. This is partially due to unpleasant American marketing strategies, and partially to the tension within the band it­self (where the «Mike Love Fraction» had always remained content with being viewed as «The Fun Fun Fun band» rather than «The Heroes And Villains Band»), but, fortunately, all stereo­types can be easily overcome with the most minor of efforts — just follow these recommenda­ti­ons: Possible starting point: Pet Sounds (1966) — if you are new to the Beach Boys, it is best to start with their artistic peak before risking to fall victim to the stereotypes. «Fun Fun Fun» people will probably prefer All Summer Long (1964) or Today! (1965), whereas those who are looking for challenges should investigate Friends (1968); and the recently issued SMiLe Sessions (2011) are an obligatory musical lesson history for everyone who is willing to take such lessons.

 

☺Beatles, The: Four insignificant hoodlums from one of Britain's most God-forsaken locations who somehow managed to dupe a large part of the world into considering them the most impor­tant musical phenomenon of the XXth century. In all honesty, I can only hope that you avoid the fate of all the brainless sheep zombified by industry bosses and PR agents, including yours truly. But if you, too, are prepared to lay your brain on the altar... possible starting point: Please Please Me (1963) and onwards from there, not missing one beat. Must avoid: Most of the compilations, except for those that contain non-LP and archival material. Those brainless sheep who only know their Beatles through ʽYesterdayʼ and ʽHey Judeʼ are on the really low end of the food chain.

 

○ Beau Brummels, The: Although this bunch of cute San Franciscan folkies is mostly remem­bered for ʽLaugh, Laughʼ, a classic early folk-pop single included on the Nuggets compilation, for a very brief period, they were one of the major hopes of the US folk-pop scene, before being completely eclipsed by the more daring and adventurous Byrds. Still, they made it as far as the psychedelic era (1967) and even the post-psychedelic era (1968), with a bunch of nice, if relative­ly feeble, albums — and, today, remain a subtle hidden delicacy for the «true connoisseur». Pos­sible starting point: Introducing The Beau Brummels (1965) has all the classic and semi-classic early hits; Triangle (1967) is sometimes hailed as a lost master­piece, but is less typical of the band's «regular» sound.

 

○ Billy Fury: Great Britain's pride and joy for a brief period of about one or two years — in the pre-Beatles era, this guy was the most commercially successful and «authentic» of all the young British admirers of the rock'n'roll sounds coming from overseas. Billy could do a mean Elvis im­personation, wrote his own songs, highly derivative of rockabilly and R&B but with a hint at ori­ginality nevertheless, and struck a cool pose with the babes. Unfortunately, his decision to tie his own fate to that of American rock'n'roll inevitably ensured that he «burned out», that is, switched to soft pop and balladry, even before the Beatles came along and put the last nail in the coffin. These days, Billy Fury is little more than a historical relic, but a sympathetic one if you attempt to concentrate on his rockabilly stuff. Possible starting point: The Sound Of Fury (1960) is his on­ly LP that is really worth having — everything else of merit can be easily gotten through a com­pilation (or not gotten at all, big deal).

 

○ Billy Preston: Most people only know Billy through his short-term association with the Beatles, and it is hard to blame them — even if the guy actually had a long and prolific solo career where the Beatles were only a transient ingredient. Starting out as an organ instrumentalist, advancing into gospel and gospel-pop, proceeding from there into the realm of fun 'n' fluffy dance-pop, Billy never wrote or played anything genuinely «great» — his chief weapon is charisma, which makes it very hard to criticize him, because how can one say anything explicitly bad about such a char­ming person? All of his output up to the 1980s, when generic adult contemporary and soulless electro-pop got the better of him, is perfectly listenable, and still works as fun, positive-vibration-loaded background muzak. Possible starting point: That's The Way God Planned It (1969), his first vocal album, has one of his biggest hits, cool guest star contributions, and is actually avai­lable on CD as part of the old Apple catalog — start from there and go in both directions if you feel a bit peckish for more.

 

☺Birds, The: Not to be confused with their far luckier Y-shaped American competitors, this is just a very short-lived, garage-oriented early British R&B outfit, most notable for introducing Ron Wood to the world — the 17-year old guitar-playing, song-writing (but, fortunately, not yet singing) prodigy. In their brief lifetime, they only managed a small bunch of singles, all of which would be quite worthwhile for fans of the Invasion — and now they have all been niftily collec­ted on a single, well-packaged compilation (The Collectors' Guide To Rare British Birds).

 

○ Blues Incorporated: An early London-based «revolving doors» blues/jazz/R&B outfit whose chief claim to fame was in launching the early careers of at least 50% of everyone who ever mat­tered on the British blues/jazz/R&B scene, from Mick Jagger to Jimmy Page. Bandleader Alexis Korner had a good taste in music and a good eye for talented people — unfortunately, he did not have a tremendous amount of talent himself, and few, if any, of B.I.'s original records offer any­thing other than historical interest. Possible starting point: R&B From The Marquee (1962) is arguably the first serious R&B LP to have been recorded and released on British shores, but At The Cavern (1964) gives an overall better impression of Blues Incorporated at their wildest live (which was never all that wild, granted). (Almost) never awful and (almost) always competent, but (almost) completely losing out to the less purist and more aggressive competition of the time, from the Animals to the Yardbirds.

 

○ Blues Magoos: One of those strictly B-level psycho/garage outfits — captured in their prime and glory on Nuggets with two classic singles, ʽ(We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yetʼ and ʽTobacco Roadʼ, but quite spotty, inconsistent, and derivative otherwise. Of specific interest is the fact that there were really two completely different stages of this band — the original psychedelic incarnation, led by Bronx-based Emil Thielhelm (a.k.a. «Peppy Castro») and Ralph Scala, and the late-1960s incarnation, with Peppy as the only original member leading the band in an entirely new direction, based on jazz-rock and R&B rather than pop. This latter incarnation, despite never having had anything resembling a good singer, almost came close to working out an exciting sound, before also falling apart due to lack of commercial success — but their two albums may be worth check­ing out of sheer curiosity. Possible starting point: Psychedelic Lollipop (1966) has all the great songs, but even that one has plenty of filler.

 

○ Blues Project, The: Today, this band is mostly remembered for two things: (a) giving a proper start to Al Kooper's long and illustrious career in show biz; (b) ʽFlute Thingʼ, an accidentally brilliant piece of «psycho-roots» fusion that rightfully counts among the finest instrumentals of the mid-1960s. As for the rest of it — the intentions and aspirations of The Blues Project were as noble and intelligent as those of your average team of five Jewish kids from Brooklyn, but some­how they just didn't happen to have the proper means of carrying out their idea of blues / jazz / folk / psychedelia synthesis, certainly not in the era of Cream and Hendrix. Detailed acquaintance with their career should probably be reserved for the historically inclined. Possible starting point: Projections (1966) has approximately 99% of their best stuff, and is the only album that does (after a while) belong in everybody's collection.

 

☺Bob Dylan: This guy deserves no special introduction, other than simply stating the obvious — his is the single greatest mind in the history of «pop culture» in the second half of the 20th century, and if you do not agree, you stand no chance of a successful mind-meld with the owner of Only Solitaire. If you happen to be a newcomer to the world of His Bobness, there is no way you could do with a single point of entry. A decent starting selection would be The Freewheelin' (1963) for the early acoustic period, Highway 61 Revisited (1965) for the early electric period, and Blood On The Tracks (1975) for the «torturedly introspective» period of the mid-1970s; follow it up with the subtler, a bit less accessible pleasures of Blonde On Blonde (1966), John Wesley Harding (1967), Desire (1976), and the startling late-period comeback of Time Out Of Mind (1997); no fewer than these six albums would be enough for a fair initial assessment, and if you still remain unconverted, too bad.

 

○ Bobby Fuller: Best known for his rendition of The Crickets' ʽI Fought The Lawʼ, which he turned into a major hit that was later expropriated by The Clash, Bobby Fuller was not really as much of a «rebel» (which the song might falsely suggest) as a nice American lad who liked Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, The Beach Boys, and (trans-Atlantically) The Beatles, and innocently wanted to be a little bit of each as late as 1965-66, even after Dylan had gone electric and shit. Other than ʽI Fought The Lawʼ, he had a small bunch of nice — thoroughly derivative, but well-hooked — pop singles, and could perhaps have gone on to bigger things if not for his mysterious death in mid-1966 at the age of 24, which also contributed to his «legend». A footnote, really, but worth a quick retro-glance. Possible starting point: Since his band, The Bobby Fuller Four, only had one-and-a-half proper LPs out, and both freely mixed mini-gems with mini-turds, any com­pilation that has ʽI Fought The Lawʼ, ʽAnother Sad And Lonely Nightʼ, and ʽLet Her Danceʼ on it will probably suffice for a representative introduction.

 

☺Booker T & The MGs: Perhaps Booker T. Jones and his pals will generally be remem­bered as the greatest backing band in the classic age of R&B — but that does not mean that their own career should be negligible, or mercilessly reduced to ʽGreen Onionsʼ (one of the most in­fluential simplistic-genius grooves of the Sixties) and maybe ʽHip Hug-Herʼ. Expectedly, a lot of their instrumentals was just filler — novel and/or forgettable covers of contemporary and older hits — yet every once in a while they came out with interesting, thoughtful compositions, or at least bold, arrogant moves (like covering Abbey Road in its entirety). Additionally, how likely are you to become convinced that Booker T. & The MG's were indeed the finest R&B combo of their era if they are always obscured by some lead singer? It is only on their solo records that you can easily and leisurely appreciate the holy goodness created by the interplay of these four little giants of simple, but tasteful Afro-American (actually, mixed) entertainment — a goodness they managed to carry all the way into the early Seventies, before fading away right when smooth funk and disco began ruining the lives of R&B veterans. Possible starting point: Well, ʽGreen Onionsʼ is on Green Onions, so it sort of makes sense to start at the very start — and then see if you really only need a good compilation from these guys (the most common and sensible choice) or if your taste for R&B runs towards the subtle and minuscule.

 

☺Brenda Holloway: A one-hit wonder from Motown, chiefly remembered for ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ, that actually deserves much more — deeply talented as a singer and modestly as a song­writer, she resisted being groomed, schooled, and pigeonholed to such an extent that the majority of recordings she made for Motown in the 1960s remained shelved for decades, and came to light only recently, re-establishing her as a top star of the era. To be sure, there's a lot of filler, but she had her own brand of grace, elegance, and subtlety that very few of Motown's female superstars could top. Although her typical pigeonholed image is that of weepy torch ballad singer, she could do upbeat R&B, loud soul, and even a little jazz — as rarely as she was offered a chance to do so. Anyway, now that the vaults have been opened, any lover of classic Motown owns it to himself to have a copy of 2005's Motown Anthology, which includes both of the albums she recorded for the label (one released and one shelved) as well as lots of fun rarities.

 

☺Brian Wilson [← Beach Boys]: Brian Wilson's solo career began at a relatively late date — although his dominance in The Beach Boys came to a crash in mid-1967, it was not until the late Eighties that he was able to begin to cope with his psychological and physiological problems, and that, among other things, meant launching a solo career where he could finally express his artistic muse without having to bow down to commercial pressure or come to terms with Mike Love. By all means, that solo career has been miles above anything that «The Beach Boys» put out since the late 1970s, and yet, buyer/listener beware: even though Brian's songwriting genius had never truly left him, and even if his naïve idealism can still be endearing in an «old man child» way, he still tends to depend on his collaborators — songwriters and producers who know their way around the man but who do not have the tenth part of his genius and often do not understand how he should be handled. As a result, Brian's solo output is very hit and miss: unfortunately, great songs tend to be mixed with filler and embarrassments on almost every album, so there's just no way around it. Possible starting point: the eponymous Brian Wilson (1988), despite lame late Eighties production, is still arguably the closest he ever got to recapturing the «teen symphony» spirit of Pet Sounds and Smile. After that, it's all up to you.

 

☺Buddy Guy: One of the longest and toughest survivors of the classic Chicago school of elec­tric blues, although, curiously, his true rise to fame only took place in the 1990s, when, after a rather sketchy four decades of a hit-and-miss solo career mostly spent in the shadow of other guitar greats, he unexpectedly emerged as the principal flag-bearer for the Old Blues Guard. Frankly speaking, Buddy is really not that great — for all his undeniable prowess with the axe, he was never much of a songwriter, and his singing and showmanship were always too derivative of others (be it Muddy, James Brown, or Hendrix) to deserve anything more than casual respect. Additionally, his disproportionally huge post-1990 discography constantly fluctuates between flashes of energized inspiration and generic commercialized blandness — and he spends way too much time cultivating his «blues patriarch» image. For all those flaws, he can be a tremendous axeman, one of the few who really succeeded in reflecting Hendrix's influence and bringing it back home to Chicago; and everybody needs at least a little Buddy in the collection (though it is quite telling of people if you see their «blues shelf» stocked with Buddy Guy and nothing else). Possible starting point: You might skip the early stuff and head directly to Sweet Tea (2001), one of the man's most inspired and sonically unusual records from the revival period; from there on, it's your bet, but be prepared for lots of inconsistency.

 

☺Buffalo Springfield: This band lasted way too little, and was arguably more important for launching the careers of Stephen Stills and Neil Young than for building up a significant amount of autonomous legacy — even its best preserved classics, like ʽFor What It's Worthʼ and ʽI Am A Childʼ, are rather associated with individual members of the band than with a collective spirit. Nevertheless, the three short records that they left behind are stuffed with excellent songwriting and performing — they really did take «folk-rock», allegedly invented by the Byrds, to a whole new level, much emphasizing the «rock» aspect because of Stills' and Young's love of the distor­ted electric guitar sound, and you can almost watch them mature as songwriters in real time from the first to the second and third albums. Possible starting point: Since they only had three albums, why should one choose a starting point in the first place? Well, if you insist, the first two records are the obvious choices, but do not underestimate Last Time Around (1968) either — even as a contractual obligation, the album is still highly consistent and entertaining.

 

☺Butterfield Blues Band, The: One of America's first and best white boy blues-rock bands, led by the Chicago-bred harp wiz Paul Butterfield and featuring Mike Bloomfield, arguably the first American electric guitar hero to emerge in the wake of the British invasion. The band began with a huge promise, playing an exciting mix of rocking covers and inventive originals; unfortunately, Bloomfield quit very early on, and from 1967 onwards, the band had been steadily deteriorating, drifting into genericity and rather flaccid jazz-rock. Possible starting point: East-West (1966) is the acclaimed masterpiece, and it does feature the combined talents of Butterfield and Bloomfield applied to a variety of genres — their most serious and exciting attempt to get out of the restricted blues-rock mold and get into something bigger. The eponymous debut album, though less ori­ginal, kicks some serious ass, too — but be wary about everything they recorded after Bloom­field's departure.

 

☺Byrds, The: While The Byrds have never been my favorite American band from the Sixties — I suppose they have always had too strict a limit on pop hooks for my taste, and not quite enough sense of humor for the time — they would certainly be in my Top Five, and should probably be in anybody's, as befits a band that pretty much invented the «folk rock» formula (being the first to bring Dylan to mass audiences outside Greenwich Village), worked at the crossroads of pop, folk, country, jazz, and psychedelia, sheltered at least three or four quality songwriters, and produced supersongs as diverse as ʻEight Miles Highʼ and ʻTurn! Turn! Turn!ʼ. Even their deeply troubled history of personal relations, with lineup changes occurring between almost every single record, was somehow in keeping with their endless need for change, progress, and self-improvement, and even their blunders could be as fascinating as their achievements. So even if you fail to fall in love with the band (and they can sound a little bland and dated in the modern era), the very jour­ney through their catalog is practically guaranteed to be one intriguing ride. Possible starting point: With a band like this, I'd definitely recommend starting from the very beginning, with Mr. Tambourine Man (1965), even if it may not necessarily be their most consistent set of songs; my personal preference lies with Fourth Dimension (1966), but you'll get there soon enough anyway if you just follow the chronostream.

 

1967-1970

 

○ 5th Dimension, The: Jury still out.

 

☺Affinity: Very minor British art-rock band from 1969-70 that only managed to put out one self-titled album in its lifetime and record enough stuff for another to be released archivally a qua­rter century later. Nothing particularly unique — just pleasant, solid art-rock with two of the most underused, if not exactly underrated, lady talents in British music of that era (Linda Hoyle and Vivienne McAuliffe, consequently). Possible starting point: Affinity (1970).

 

☺Al Green: The most consistent, not to mention sexiest, dude in 1970s soul, before he switched from working part time for the Lord to a 24-hour-a-day job; he's never really recovered. To fall in love with him would be predictable and corny; to ignore him — criminal. Pos­sible starting point: I'm Still In Love With You (1972).

 

☺Al Kooper: The man who is, at best, known as the organ player behind 'Like A Rolling Stone' and the founder of Blood, Sweat & Tears, has actually had a much more intelligent, soulful, and diverse solo career than that of quite a few of his much better known Sixties peers — impeded only by intentionally staying out of the limelight and avoiding serious publicity. Possible starting point: I Stand Alone (1968) and then proceed from there — the man never made a truly bad re­cord, and just about everything in his 1968-73 run of LPs is brilliant.

 

☺Al Stewart: Frequently mistaken for a one-hit wonder (1976's 'Year Of The Cat'), Al has, in fact, had one of the longest, most consistent, and most intelligent careers in British folk-rock, go­ing for simple, steady hooks and simple, understandable lyrics (many of which directly relate to various historical topics) that never annoy or distract. If he doesn't blow your mind, he may still have a good chance at stealing your heart. Possible starting point: Past, Present & Future (1973).

 

☺Alice Cooper: The undisputed master of titillating cheap thrills, but much more witty and mu­sically talented than those who are only familiar with the image will tell you. Pos­sible starting point: Killer (1971) for Alice Cooper the more musically-oriented band, Welcome To My Night­mare (1975) for Alice Cooper the more show-oriented solo artist.

 

☺Allman Brothers Band, The: The one and only band that suffices to save the reputation of «Southern Rock» — or maybe not, because at their best, the Allmans always transcended the cli­chéd franework of SR (unlike, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd). The only band to have, during various sta­ges of their history, hosted four of the greatest guitar players of all time (not even the Yardbirds could boast that much), not to mention grouping and regrouping and pulling it all together five times in history, each of them a success (in 1969, 1973, 1979, 1990, and 2003 respectively) — a legend that has no equals, which you gotta admit even if you hate blues-rock, country-rock, and long psychedelic jams with a vengeance. Possible starting point: At Fillmore East (1971) — the Bros. reputation primarily rests upon their live shows. My personal studio favorite is Brothers And Sisters (1973), but it is also easily the most directly «Southern» album they ever made, and post-dates the Duane Allman era, so buyer beware.

 

○ Amboy Dukes, The: These guys started out around the Summer of Love as a curious, if not tremendously exciting, mix of Detroit garage rock and typically American psychedelia. Then Steve Farmer left, taking most of the American psychedelia with him, and eventually, after a few transitional-experimental period pieces, the Dukes simply became the backing band for the early stages of America's enfant terrible, Ted Nugent. Possible starting point: Journey To The Center Of The Mind (1968) is the obvious bet for classic early Dukes, but if you are more interested in the wild heart of Uncle Ted, Call Of The Wild (1973) is inexpendable for the jaded hard rocker.

 

☻Amon Düül: This loosely connected «commune» of several bohemian-artistic souls in South­ern Germany is mainly credited with serving as the launchpad of their far more musically gifted and inventive younger brethren, Amon Düül II, and for a good reason: most of their own musical output revolves around one mastodontic jam session in 1969, curious for a peep at its ritualistic atmosphere, but for little else. One brief listen to Psychedelic Underground (1969) should suf­fice for anyone.

 

☺Amon Düül II: The luckier offshoot of the original Amon Düül, these guys invented a direc­tion of «Krautrock» that was perhaps the closest in sound to «progressive rock» tendencies of the early 1970s, but still exclusively their own – a wild, elegantly brutal jungle-rock sound, dense and atmospheric to the point of literally, rather than formally, blowing your mind away. Possible star­t­ing point: Yeti (1970), then proceeding all the way to 1975's Made In Germany (with a much lighter, poppier, song-based rather than jam-based sound, but still exceptional).

 

○ Amon Düül (UK): This is another split-off, this time from Amon Düül II, led by that band's former guitarist Jon Weinzierl. Relocating to England, they released four albums in the 1980s un­der the name of «Amon Düül»; these days, to avoid confusion, they are always mentioned with the «UK» suffix. First two records are quite recommendable for art-rock and art-pop lovers; last two, recorded as a collaboration with Hawkwind's poetic guru Bob Calvert, are skippable. Pos­sible starting point: Hawk Meets Penguin (1982).

 

☺Andrew Lloyd Webber: Starting out as a (perhaps accidental, but nobody realized it at the time) grand musical hero of the rock generation, with what is, in my opinion, unquestionably the most stunning «rock opera» ever written by mortal man, Sir Andrew rather quickly evolved into a generic fluff writer for the stage; but even at his fluffiest and most derivative, his talent for wiring himself into the listener's brain rarely left him, and most of his musicals still rise quite highly above the average «generic Broadway show». Possible starting point: Either the original cast ver­sion (1970) or the movie soundtrack version (1973) of Jesus Christ Superstar, depending on personal preferences — essential listening for every Homo sapiens on the planet.

 

☺Aphrodite's Child: Before Vangelis Papathanassiou firmly embraced the world of electronics as his best chance to leave an artistic mark on humanity, he spent three years as the creative back­bone of a young, idealistic, heavily bearded Greek art-pop band — which, believe it or not, also jump-started the career of Demis Roussos, «The Singing Kaftan» and subsequent bane of East Eu­­ropean pop. Together, they made music that was occasionally corny, sometimes unintentional­ly derivative and hilarious, but still much, much better than one would prematurely guess. Melo­dic, memorable, and at the same time daring and experimental: these guys only managed to have three albums out in their lifetime, but all are well worth getting to know. Possible starting point: 666 (1972) is their most well-known concept album about you-know-what, but the other two, more immediately accessible and single-oriented, are no slouches either.

 

☺Argent: Rod Argent's switch from the idealistic baroque-pop of the Zombies to no less idealis­tic «symphonic rock» of the early 1970s has, for the most part, been ignored by contemporaries and subsequent generations alike — mostly because he never succeeded in carving out a unique identity on that particular stage, so that even the best stuff of Argent always comes across as a «se­cond-hand» project. On the other hand, the songwriting team of Rod Argent / Chris White / Russ Ballard was a strong competitor on that scene; they may have retained a bit of popularity only through their singalong anthems like ʽHold Your Head Upʼ and ʽGod Gave Rock'n'Roll To Youʼ, but there is a lot more to enjoy in the catalog, including far more tasteful, complex, and sti­mulating entries. Possible starting point: Argent (1970) is still very close in style to late-era Zom­bies (a must-have for any fan of Odessey And Oracle) — from there, it is best to simply proceed in chronological order and stop wherever you feel like stopping.

 

☺Arthur Brown: Unlike most other «crazy geniuses» of the Golden Age of Psychedelia, this guy, having made his name with outrageous antics and proto-glam theatrics in 1967-68, went on to have a long, varied, unpredictable, and confusing career: the only two things that most of his albums have in common are his semi-operatic, highly expressive and quite unique vocals, and the complete lack of ability to sell more than three copies of each. Nevertheless, he is well worth ex­ploring — his sidekicks (Vince Crane, Andy Dalby, etc.) often provided him with first-rate musi­cal backing, and his complete dedication to the ideals of peace, love, wild sex, and schizophrenia is always admirable. Possible starting point: The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown (1968), his introduction to the general public, is still his only LP that people usually remember, for a good reason; but I also heartily recommend Requiem (1982), one of the least stereotypical electronic albums of the decade and one of the most curious «post-apocalyptic symphonies» ever written.

 

☺Band, The: If you want to learn all about «Americana»... you got a long road ahead of you, but if you want to know how it is possible for a company of Canadian rock'n'roll intellectuals (yes, the two words do not agree well with each other, but The Band have always been a walking contradiction anyway) to swallow «Americana» as a whole and spit it out with a modern man twist, The Band are there for you — in the 1960s, they may not have been the first to present an updated take on tradition, dubbed «roots-rock» for lack of a better term, but they were the ones to do it in the most encyclopaedic, ambitious, and technically elaborate way ever seen (enough to deal an ultimately mortal blow to the artistic career of Eric Clapton, who pretty much rejected his Cream legacy upon hearing their first album). Setting aside pretentiousness and occasional bore­dom (even the best «roots-rock» is occasionally boring), The Band did produce some of the most beautiful and deep music of their generation — although it might require reaching a certain age, or state of mind, to truly appreciate it. Possible starting point: Music From Big Pink (1968) for those who want their music more «artsy», or The Band (1969) for all the hardcore bearded folkies who want it as «rootsy» as pos­sible.

 

☺Bee Gees, The: Opinions on The Bee Gees run the entire gamut from «heartless commercial leeches, unleashed upon humanity as punishment for its loss of cultural orientation» to «immacu­late craftsmen and experienced connoisseurs of the human heart in all of its aspects». The fact that they are forever inscribed in the history of music is indisputable — no other act has managed to embody so much of the pop spirit of both the Sixties and the Seventies, and the journey from ʽHolidayʼ and ʽMassachusetsʼ to ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ and ʽStayin' Aliveʼ is one of the bi­zarrest journeys in art history. Personally, I think that the most natural — not to mention the most psychologically interesting — relationship with the Bee Gees should be one of love-and-hate, and hope to have reflected it somewhat in the reviews. Possible starting point: The Bee Gees 1st (1967) — their teenage Australian output aside, the proper way to deal with the Bee Gees is to start at the beginning and then stop wherever one feels like stopping, be it at the first split of the band in 1970, or at the move to the States in 1973, or at the transition to disco gloss in 1975-76, or at the dreary slide into bland adult contemporary in the 1980s.

 

☺Black Sabbath: The fathers of Heavy Metal as we know and love, tolerate, or abhor it — re­gardless of any particular attitude, metal is here to stay, and we have Tony Iommi to thank for its crushing riffs, Geezer Butler to thank for its not-give-a-damn attitude about using primitive, well-battered clichés for the lyrics, and Ozzy Osbourne to thank for daring to deliver these lyrics in one of rock's most classic examples of substituting mental illness for vocal technique. Most of all, of course, we have to thank the industrial aura of Birmingham and its factories, leaving a per­manent trace in Tony Iommi's «iron fingers» and their interaction with the electric guitar. One of the silliest and most seductive combinations of individual talents ever seen in music, Black Sabbath in their prime produced a lengthy string of the heaviest and catchiest songs in the business; once Ozzy left and was replaced by a series of ever-worsening singers, things got much patchier, and Black Sabbath became very much of a «niche» band — but that don't have no back­wards effect, and even after all these years, everybody still likes ʽParanoidʼ and ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ without having to swear the metalhead oath of loyalty. Possible starting point: Paranoid (1970) for the big classic rock radio hits or Master Of Reality (1971) for the single heaviest experience in musical history will do nicely, but nobody is through with Sabbath before going through the entire «big six» from 1970's self-titled debut to 1975's Sabotage (the latter being arguably the single greatest «art-metal» album ever released).

 

☺Blind Faith: This super-brief project of building a new band and a new musical synthesis from the building components of Cream and Traffic could have a future, but didn't — mostly due to serious technical/structural mistakes committed at the very beginning. It did yield a few classic songs, though, all of which are to be found on the band's only eponymous album (1969): filler notwithstanding, it does belong in every classic rock lover's collection.

 

○ Blodwyn Pig: A strictly second-rate «prog-roots» band from the early 1970s, led by former Jethro Tull guitarist Mick Abrahams and modestly visionary brass / woodwinds wiz Jack Lancas­ter. Due to a conflict of interests (Lancaster was pushing the band in a BS&T / Chicago-type jazz rock direction, whereas Abrahams was more interested in heavy blues rock), the ensemble only released two original albums, although there would be occasional reunions, or an occasional re­vival of the Blodwyn Pig moniker for some of Mick's solo albums. Possible starting point: Ahead Rings Out (1969) is their most critically acclaimed LP, although I think they actually got a little bit more «interesting» on the second album ­— anyway, if you are already acquainted with one, there is no reason not to hear the other.

 

○ Blood, Sweat & Tears: A great beginning marred with an ensuing career that ran for too long without any sense of purpose. Formed out of the ashes of Blues Project, these guys stood at the source of the whole «jazz-rock» genre, merging blues, rock, and pop with a «big band» style that could also somehow be sensitive and intimate. Then they ditched sensitive and intimate guy Al Kooper, replaced him with Tom Jones-influenced David Clayton-Thomas, and went steadily downhill for the next decade. That said, unlike their primary competition in the genre (Chicago), Blood, Sweat & Tears never once betrayed their roots — they did lightly flirt with prog, glam, funk, and disco, but never allowed themselves to descend into thoroughly cheesy «adult contem­porary» muzak or place gloss and slickness above professional musicianship. Few of their albums beyond the first two or three are worth owning, but very few are ideologically disgusting, either. Possible starting point: Child Is Father To The Man (1968) is a golden classic and the band's only masterpiece, but for a more «representative» introduction to their post-Kooper image, Blood, Sweat & Tears (1969) is also recommendable.

 

○ Bloodrock: Doom-rock, Texan style! Well... not really. Maybe think of it more as a slightly B-movie-oriented local variant of Grand Funk Railroad. This band, let by grizzly-voiced Jim Rutledge and local guitar god Lee Pickens, combined rowdy American rock and roll with a tinge of overseas artsiness and psychedelia, and threw in a bit of trashy titillation (ʽD.O.A.ʼ, their most famous song, is one of the lyrically goriest creations of the early 1970s). They weren't great, but they were solid — certainly less devoid of talent than so many other hard rock acts at the time who could never understand the value of a good riff. Unfortunately, the fun only lasted for about three years, upon which both of the band's most interesting members departed and left it in the hands of the keyboard player — who teamed up with a future Christian rock singer and tried to turn the band into a third-rate prog-rock act, so please ignore those last two albums. Possible starting point: Bloodrock (1970) is the natural place to start, I guess, although the big hit single was from the second album. Actually, they were pretty consistent before the big plunge.

 

○ Blossom Toes: This outfit is mainly noticeable for releasing two albums in the late 1960s that sound like two entirely different bands. The debut, from 1967, is a swirling kaleidoscope of authentically British psychedelia — nothing produced by a genius, just an amazing whirlwind of musical ideas that replace each other like fireworks: not a lot of substance, but so much flash that your head will spin anyway. The second album, from 1969, substitutes psychedelia for heavy rock brutality and social consciousness a-plenty — nothing works on its own, but playing the two LPs back-to-back can be fun. Trivia note: guitarist and one of the two chief songwriters, Jim Cregan, would go on to become a Rod Stewart sidekick, and bears his share of responsibility for some of Rod's most horrendous records. Possible starting point: We Are Ever So Clean (1967), naturally, has a slightly higher share of endurable songs than its hard-rock follow-up.

 

○ Blue Cheer: Kings of the marginal «brutal, but friendly» psycho-metal West Coast movement, these guys are responsible for some of the wildest, noisiest, dumbest music made in the late 1960s — and indirectly responsible for, or at least presaging the later blossoming of a whole slew of «heavy-and-silly» subgenres, from KISS to Hawkwind, not to mention «stoner rock», «sludge metal», etc. Not surprisingly, much of what they did sounds seriously dated and, worse, seriously boring these days, but still, at their best, Blue Cheer were like nobody else and had their own brand of twisted-sick, but ultimately safe charm. Unfortunately, their heyday lasted for only about a year — followed by the band turning into a revolving-door experiment, struggling to find new directions (usually without much success), falling apart, then reconvening in the mid-Eighties to spend two more decades as a third-rate heavy metal outfit. Possible starting point: Vincebus Eruptum (1968) is their only LP to actually deserve recognition as an album, or even as a minor classic; start there, then proceed at your own risk.

 

○ Bobby Womack: Mostly known to the world as the author of the Rolling Stones' ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ (well, okay, so he was to me, for a long time), this one-time member of The Valentinos and a near-legitimate successor of Sam Cooke, who took him under his wing at one time, actually had a very interesting, varied, and unpredictable solo career. In the early days, he played a mean gui­tar, sang in a mean voice, and had a knack both for original songwriting and turning other peo­ple's songs on their heads, producing quite a few respectable outings in the R&B and funk genres. Eventually, he kind of fizzled out, lowered his defenses to disco and electro-funk, lost interest in music altogether, only to re-emerge in 2012 as a bizarre ghost of the past, croaking out confessi­onal tunes to Damon Albarn's electronic experiments (!). All in all, while there are relatively few unforgettable Bobby Womack tunes, Bobby Womack himself as a musical character is quite un­forgettable. Possible starting point: Communication (1971) and Understanding (1972) tend to be regarded as the high points of his funky period, but really, just about everything prior to the late 1970s, when he got sucked up by the disco bog, could qualify as a good start.

 

☺Bonzo Dog (Doo-Dah) Band: The musical equivalent of Monty Python, this merry troop led by jazz-influenced pop pranksters Viv Stanshall and Neil Innes actually had more intelligent in­sights into the roots, side effects, and limitations of the mid-to-late 1960s pop scene than anybody else — no wonder they were like the court jesters by the side of then-current royalty (the Beatles, who contributed quite a bit to the Bonzos' notability). The Bonzos' appeal is primarily comedic, but they had serious melodic potential, too, as well as a strong experimental side. Although they were very much a «product of 1967», and, like the Beatles, were forced to split by the merciless hand of time as the Sixties closed up, the music has survived, and songs like ʽThe Equestrian Statueʼ or ʽUrban Spacemanʼ will be just as welcome in the 21st century as they were at the height of flower power. Possible starting point: The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse (1968) is their peak in terms of seriousness and complexity, but Gorilla (1967) and Tadpoles (1969) have most of the catchy funny songs.

 

○ Box Tops, The: Alex Chilton's first band — one that took the world by surprise with ʽThe Letterʼ, when the 17-year old sung it with all the determination and desperation of a grizzled soulster smack dab in the middle of the Summer of Love. For several years, they were listed among the royalty of Memphis soul («blue-eyed soul», that is), churning out catchy, likeable, darkly romantic singles and albums that showed comparable amounts of love for black R&B and white baroque art-pop. However, they never functioned all that well as an actual band, whether it came to playing skills or songwriting abilities, and ultimately floundered in an era that called for bigger ambitions and broader horizons even on commercial pop singles. The mega-success of ʽThe Letterʼ, which was later covered by everybody and their grandmother, ensured that the band was not completely forgotten, but only registered admirers of mid-Sixties art-pop and blue-eyed soul need bother seeking out their entire catalog. Possible starting point: Well, if you're game, it still makes sense to begin with the big ones — The Letter/Neon Rainbow (1967) has the main claim to fame, as well as lots of pleasant, inoffensive pastiches to go along with it.

 

○ Brinsley Schwarz: This band, named after its uncannily named guitar player, was largely the brainchild of Nick Lowe, the principal songwriter and singer, and is usually extolled as the visiting card for the British «pub rock» scene of the early 1970s — honest, down-to-earth music that tried to stay away from both the progressive and the glam excesses of the day. Truth be told, they are no great shakes, though: Lowe and his pals had a good sense of taste, but neither the songwriting nor the playing stand serious competition with the leading acts of the day, and they let themselves be way too seriosly influenced by their betters, so that many of the songs explicitly sound like «Van Morrison-lite», «The Band-lite», even «Flying Burrito Brothers-lite», and the Burritos weren't exactly a lead zeppelin themselves! A few good songs here and there, a nice at­titude on the whole, but it is not difficult to understand why the band was ultimately forgotten and now only lives on in the memories of serious connoisseurs. Possible starting point: Nervous On The Road (1973) is arguably their most fully realised effort, but if you want slower, subtler, more ambitious material, just go about them chronologically.

 

1971-1976

 

☺10cc: Smart, inventive, sarcastic, complex, catchy, British pop music for hip people — yes, the thing was not invented in the 2000s or even the 1990s, it all starts here as early as 1972 (still in Manchester, though). So, what's not to like? Well — nearly everything, except for the first four or five albums, since the departure of two crucial band members in 1976 left 10cc without a proper creative backbone, and they quickly degenerated into a routine, embarrassing mainstream pop act. But their first four years in the business — the word «stellar» should definitely be in there somewhere. Pos­sible starting point: Sheet Music (1974).

 

☺ABBA: To admire these Swedes' «values» in pop music doesn't begin to define bad taste. But if you make even a mild attempt to deny their melodic genius, count yourself blacklisted. Pos­sible starting point: Arrival (1976) or The Album (1978).

 

☺AC/DC: You probably have to be Scottish-born Australian to take rock'n'roll to the highest peaks of head­banging absur­dity. If so, thank God for giving us Scotland and Australia. Pos­sible star­ting point: Let There Be Rock (1977) or Back In Black (1980).

 

☺Aerosmith: These guys had one of the most befuddling careers in history: from the world's dirtiest, snappiest, sleaziest band in the 1970s («the American Stones»), in a desperate attempt to stay hip, they mutated into the world's biggest sellout act by kowtowing to hair metal values and helping establish the MTV brand of teen rock. They HAVE been quite young at heart even in the worst of days, though. Possible starting point: Toys In The Attic (1975).

 

☺Alan Parsons Project, The / Alan Parsons: «Prog-rock lite» for those who love their Pink Floyd for the dreaminess and the catchy choruses rather than the sharp edges. Still, the duo of Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons can come up with these choruses like few others in the business, and their deep, icy dreaminess is theirs and theirs only. At their best, the Project were interesting, intelligent, and involving, and their music still lingers. Possible starting point: Tales Of Mystery And Imagination (1976) and then all the way to the mid-Eighties, when they started to falter.

 

☺Alan Stivell: In the 1970s, this guy almost singlehandedly defined «Celtic Rock», not merely recreating traditional Breton music with the help of the traditional Celtic harp (as reconstructed by his father), but synthesizing it with the achievements of progressive rock as well. Complex, but quite accessible, and at times emotionally devastating music. Possible starting point: Renais­sance De La Harpe Celtique (1972) is his international artistic breakthrough, but Symphonie Cel­tique (1979) is the magnum opus that puts his Celtic soul in the proper context of world mu­sic, and he really hasn't been as good ever since.

 

☺Amazing Blondel: One of the most delightful hoaxes in pop music history, these guys, at their early 1970s peak, created a masterful illusion of being serious progressive rockers, interested in creating a modern day version of Elizabethan court music. What they really did was play sissy folk-pop on archaic instruments, but they still ended up doing it with such elegance and friendli­ness that who the heck could care about «authenticity»? Just ignore their unfortunate post-1973 slide into ge­neric soft-rock, after the departure of their chief songwriter. Possible starting point: Evensong (1970), and the following two records are also classic.

 

☺Armageddon: An extremely short-lived, one-album «hard-prog» band consisting of former me­m­bers of Renaissance and Steamhammer with Keith Relf on lead vocals. Kind of like a cross between Yes and the Yardbirds — well worth checking out, even though I probably wouldn't go as far as to call it a «lost masterpiece». The album is Armageddon (1975).

 

☺Ash Ra Tempel / Ashra: A «Krautrock» band that essentially represents the vision of German guitar prodigy Manuel Göttsching (although, in the earliest incarnation, the vision was shared by future electroniz wizard Klaus Schulze as well). The «Ash Ra Tempel» phase covers the first half of the 1970s, with the music, a unique brand of atmospheric «cosmic rock», evenly split between electronics and guitars; the «Ashra» phase, beginning in 1976, places a heavier emphasis on elec­tronic arrangements and ambience, although many albums are still well worth checking out. Gött­sching is not God, but he is a fantastic player and a visionary, not to mention a grand influence on the whole electronic genre — there is no escape from getting to know these guys. Possible starting point: Ash Ra Tempel (1971).

 

☺Atomic Rooster: The project of former Arthur Brown sideman, organist Vincent Crane, and (during its peak years) rough-minded guitar player John Du Cann. Most people only know of the band because future ELP drum god Carl Palmer played on its first album (technically justifying the «supergroup» tag for ELP), which is a shame, because, at its best, Rooster played excellent, gritty, and slightly disturbing hard-art-rock, tinged with Crane's schizophrenia and fed by Du Cann's fine riff-creating skills. Too bad they got lost on the back shelf of the early 1970s prog movement — high time to dig 'em up again. Possible starting point: Death Walks Behind You (1970).

 

○ Average White Band, The: Best proof in the world, indeed, that «average white people» can play «average black R'n'B» as authentically as «average black people» — a bunch of dedicated Scotsmen who decided that, unlike most of their colleagues in the early 1970s, who were quite happy to play Scottish-flavored pub rock, they would instead try to compete with the likes of To­wer Of Power and Earth, Wind & Fire. Their first few albums are quite up to those standards, ac­tually, and worth seeking out if you are a heavy aficionado of 1970's R&B. However, like most of their competition, they overstayed their welcome, running the formula into the ground, eaten up by disco and 1980's electronics. Overall, more of a historical curio, although some of the early grooves, spliced together, would make for about 40 minutes of mini-greatness. Possible starting point: AWB (1974) — their American debut has most of the classics, including ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ, although the first album, Show Your Hand (1973), might be more consistent.

 

○ Bad Company: In the mid-1970s, these guys set out on the brave task of making hard rock cuddly, safe, and palatable for truckers and housewives alike, ensuring their immortal presence on what would become «classic rock radio». In their defense, for a brief while they had a decent sound, passable riffs and vocal hooks, and one of rock music's proverbially sexiest singers. But there is also no denying that they played a serious part in the trivialization and «boring-ification» of rock music as such — far from being the main or only culprits, they do have a hot corner in Hell reserved for the lot of them for at least several hundred thousand years. Possible starting point: Bad Company (1974) — their only record that is really worth listening to all the way, and it's far more than just my opinion. Start from there and stop whenever you've had enough, and de­finitely stay away from everything post-1979.

 

☺Badfinger: The best quasi-scientific proof that Luck exists is that Badfinger never got any of it. Sometimes labeled as a two-three-hit-wonder of an early 1970s Beatles clone, this band was real­ly more of a spiritual than formal descendant of the Beatles — they tried to transplant Beatlesque sunny, poppy idealism into the 1970s, while at the same time working strictly within a traditional «rock band» format. In the end, they involuntarily ended up among the pioneers of power-pop, which didn't help them one bit. Poor management, wrong marketing, personal problems, psychic disturbances, suicides — everything that could go wrong, did go wrong at one time or other. Fas­cinating story, and not half-bad music, either (just do not try to judge it by proper Beatlesque standards — take it in the context of James Taylor instead, and everything will be fine). Possible starting point: No Dice (1970) or Straight Up (1971) have most of the major hits and lots of de­licious non-filler, but Wish You Were Here (1974) might be Badfinger at their most accom­plished.

 

○ Baker Gurvitz Army: Ginger Baker served in more bands than he's got fingers and toes (and his drummer abilities may lead to suggest that he's got more than most): this one, formed in the mid-1970s with brothers Paul and Adrian Gurvitz, formerly of Gun, was the closest he ever came to embracing «progressive» rock, and the results are... well, whatever one could expect from hy­bridizing a professional, but mediocre prog band with the gingerest drummer in the world. Yes, it actually worked, even if only for a brief while. Possible starting point: Elysian Encounter (1975), but they really only have three records out, and the third one goes way too far in the di­rec­­tion of funky dance beats (guess even Ginger Baker-led prog bands need to earn a living).

 

☺Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso: One of the two great long-named «symph-prog» gifts from Italy to the progressive rock movement (the other one was Premiata Forneria Marconi), this band used to have a unique sound, shaped out of a merger between British progressive rock, the American jazz scene, and the Italian folk / pop tradition, and masterminded by two highly talented brother keyboardists (Gianni and Vittorio Nocenzi) and a gifted, if occasionally corny, vocalist (Fran­cesco DiGiacomo). Their overall story is typical of the average progressive band — a brief formative period, a series of stunning masterpieces of the genre, a confused period of experiment and adjustment, an embarrassingly awful «pop sellout» catastrophe, and a semi-successful «repu­tation revival» — but the quality of their finest albums is anything but average. A must-hear for everyone who is serious about 1970s music. Possible starting point: Darwin! (1972) is the usual critical favorite, mainly because of the innovative concept, but melody-wise, the follow-up Io Sono Nato Libero (1973) is arguably even better.

 

○ Barclay James Harvest: When they started out, they were an idealistic, mildly charismatic, undoubtedly talented bunch of second-tier art-rockers. They loved the Beatles, the Bee Gees, the Moody Blues, Procol Ha­rum, Pink Floyd, and Gustav Mahler. They wrote catchy and impressive, if seriously derivative, songs. They could get better or they could get worse. They chose the latter, and, somewhere around 1974, started a slow, steady, step-by-step descent into mediocrity, plati­tudes, oceans of cheese, and, finally, an atrociously icky adult contemporary sound — an exem­plary journey into the depths of bad taste. Quite a sad story, really, but worth checking out for the very intrigue of it. Possible starting point: Barclay James Harvest (1970) — just start out with the very first record they did, and stop whenever you feel like stopping: the overall curve has its little ups from time to time, but the overall direction is steady downwards.

 

☺Be-Bop Deluxe: Unfortunately, the image of these guys (this guy, to be more precise: Be-Bop Deluxe were never much more than a rotating set of backing players to support the songwriting, singing, and guitar playing of multi-talent kid Bill Nelson) was not distinctive enough to carve them out a perennial niche in the public conscience. But at his best, Nelson combined the oddity and experimentalism of David Bowie with the theatricality of Peter Hammill, and played a far meaner guitar than either of those, or most of those who worked with them. Early Be-Bop Deluxe records are mainly glam-influenced guitar extravaganzas, with little attention to hooks but lots of attention to going wherever one's fingers wish to take you to; later Be-Bop Deluxe cuts down im­provisation in favor of a more disciplined approach to songwriting, although the band never ma­naged to make the proper transition to New Wave stylistics (before doing that, Nelson simply split them, and then continued operating as a solo artist). Anyway, a band that is well worth getting to know for all fans of «intellectually oriented kick-ass rock'n'roll», or whatever. Possible starting point: Sunburst Finish (1976) may be Nelson's perfect balance between memorable songwriting and guitar heroics — earlier albums swing too much towards the latter, later albums droop too much towards the former.

 

☺Betty Davis: A veritable «monster» of a woman, surprisingly little remembered these days despite not only having been married to Miles Davis for several years, but also releasing three of the fiercest, wildest, badass-est funk albums of the mid-1970s. Compared to other performers on the funk/R&B scene, Betty was not much of a singer, but she compensated for this with a pre­sence that pretty much melted all living matter for miles around as long as she was getting it on. The three albums she cut were not all that musically innovative, but her backing band was always able to put on just the right groove for the «nasty gal» — the shock value that those records had back then has, of course, become seriously depreciated with the passing of time (now that we got Britney and Miley, who cares?), but, fortunately, the music still remains quite invigorating. Pos­sible starting point: Betty Davis (1973) is her first and arguably best shot, but, really, what's a measly-short three-album pack to anyone those days? Just get 'em all.

 

☺Big Star: The most critically acclaimed outfit of the «Power Pop Big Three» of the early 1970s (along with Badfinger and the Raspberries). Like Badfinger, Alex Chilton and Chris Bell spent most of their lives either hopping on fast-moving bandwagons and breaking their legs in the pro­cess, or going against the tide and getting drowned — which did not prevent them from achieving cult status in due time, and influencing a whole lot of more successful, but quite frequently less talented people in their wake. At his best, Bell was an almost McCartney-level hookmeister and craftsman, while Chilton could display his inner demons with a Lennon-level force of expressi­vity, although neither of the two could be said to have always been at his respective best. But their collected output, patchy as it is, is so scarce that it is well worth ignoring the petty flaws and just grabbing all of it, particularly if you are a fan of either intelligent guitar-based pop music or deranged/disturbed artistic personalities (or both). Possible starting point: #1 Record (1972) is where it all begins and, in my opinion, it really does not get any better than this, although by the time of Third (1975) it gets very, very, very different.

 

☺Bill Withers: There are two songs in the popular conscience that are tightly associated with Bill Withers: ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ and ʽLean On Meʼ, of which only the former gives a proper glimpse of the psychological depths to which this unusual fellow could penetrate in his prime. Although classified as an R&B performer, in reality Bill's early albums merged elements of «black» R&B and «white» singer-songwriting, achieving a brilliant, insightful, and sometimes downright creepy synthesis that was completely unique even for its time. Later on, unfortunately, as commercial pressure towards mediocrity gradually got the better of the artist, he did make a transition to rather ordinary, run-of-the-mill, accentuate-the-positive R&B — probably the best thing about late Bill Withers is that he had the good sense of completely cutting down his solo career before it was too late. But those early albums, ooh boy. Possible starting point: Just As I Am (1971). The second LP is just as strong; from there, proceed chronologically and stop at will.

 

○ Billy Joel: Few people in the pop music business polarize the simple folk more than Mr. Joel. For some, he is an absolute melodic genius, a sincere chameleon who managed to crack the core of just about every popular style one can think of, and still remained himself in the process, while providing a whole generation (maybe two) with an unbeatable backlog of some of the catchiest tunes in the world. For others, Billy «Attila» Joel is an annoying professional hack, pandering to the lowest common denominator with diluted, de-intellectualized, cornified distortions of pop and especially rock music, putting his vile stamp on everything he can lay his hands on and preten­ding to be «Mr. Rock & Roll» when he is really a second-rate music hall entertainer. In short, Billy Joel is a fascinating, colorful figure, and a real gas to either love or hate with every fiber of your soul. For obvious reasons, I tend to side with the haters' camp, but even I do have to admit that sometimes, I hate the concept of a Billy Joel far more than the actual music — and that, for all his sins against good taste, the man never made even a single truly «awful» album. Possible starting point: The Stranger (1977), beginning his long romance with master producer Phil Ramone, is classic Billy that even some of the haters have to like — start from there and work your way in both directions, to the early L.A. days or the later New York triumphs.

 

☺Blue Öyster Cult: Do not mistake this band for just another crude, lumpy hard rock act of the 1970s — in reality, at their best the Cult merged «cheap» arena-rock trappings with a post-mo­der­nist / bohemian / New York-ish sensibility in a way that makes them likable for truck drivers and intellectuals alike; come to think of it, you could say they were the musical equivalent of an intellectual truck driver, or something of the sort. Managed and lyrically aided by such rock cri­tics and pop visionaries as Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer, and being perfectly accom­plished musicians and songwriters in their own right, they released a set of truly classic albums that please the body and stimulate the mind, before the Eighties chewed them up and spat them out with no particular place to go. Possible starting point: the self-titled debut album (1972) re­mains my personal favorite due to its particularly sinister sound that they later traded for a less enigmatic approach — the most reasonable way to go is to start from there and work your way up to that particular point where they do not interest you any more (which may significantly differ, because they went through several creative metamorphoses in the late 1970s, in the early 1980s, and then again in the mid-1980s).

 

○ Bo Hansson: Anyone in the mood for some classic-era Scandinavian progressive rock? Check out this guy — a lonesome, moody, imaginative multi-instrumentalist (keyboards preferred over guitars, but everything is possible) with a penchant for getting inspirations from fantasy novels: his 1970 Swedish debut, later translated into English as Music Inspired By The Lord Of The Rings, is the first LP in history completely dedicated to J.R.R. The music itself is usually a mix of folk, pop, and jazz motives, moody, occasionally to the point of «haunting», but more generally, inobtrusive and not particularly energetic or dynamic — «elevator prog», so to speak, but done with enough taste and imagination to warm a solitary autumnal evening or two. Possible starting point: Lord Of The Rings (1970) is Hansson's only record to have ever enjoyed any commercial success, but the three other instrumental titles that followed do not really fall behind in quality. However, if the debut feels a little limp and saggy to you, it's probably not worth it to bother with the rest of Bo's catalog.

 

☺Bob Marley: Bob Marley is not the be-all-end-all of reggae music, if you really want to im­merse yourself in the genre — better to say that Bob Marley was an «event in itself», a guy who used his Jamaican reggae background as a foundation for a major merger of reggae, rock, pop, and Rastafari proselytism. I have a very hard time getting sentimental to his message (hard as it is to separate the good ol' goodness-and-kindness from all the Haile Selassie fluff), but, much to his honor, Bob never forgot the musicality behind the message — The Wailers, both in the classic Peter Tosh era and in the «glossier» era that followed, were always mega-masters of the groove, the hook, and the drive. Possible starting point: In terms of general accessibility, Catch A Fire (1973) is where The Wailers first shifted from a more «hardcore» reggae groove to a more open, eclectic range of influences. In terms of breathtaking scope, Exodus (1977) is still Marley's magnum opus — ol' Moses himself would be proud of this homage.

 

○ Bonnie Raitt: The Queen of Inoffensively Middle-of-the-Road Blues Rock, Bonnie Raitt is hardly a great proposition when you want music that is at least a little rough around the edges and shakes you up rather than cools you down. Her most interesting period of artistic existence, I think, was in the very early days, when her biggest influence was Sippie Wallace and when each of her records offered a modern-day-updated take on the female urban blues stylistics of the 1920s — an approach that allowed her to retain some individuality even in an age when blues-rock albums came and went for a dime a dozen. Pretty soon, however, she got streamlined and became rather poorly distinguishable in the crowds, apart from her easily recognizable raspy voice (still not that unique) and impressive slide guitar playing skills (still not that exceptional). If it weren't for the cheesy marketing strategy that miraculously put her on top in 1989 with one of her most boring, adult-contemporary-oriented albums, nobody from the statistic majority would probably remember the lady now — but that's the way life goes. Possible starting point: in most such cases, it is best to start at the beginning and stop whenever the going gets too rough (or, in this situation, too smooth), so Bonnie Raitt (1971) is certainly a much better bet than the com­mercially successful Nick Of Time (1989) or even Sweet Forgiveness (1977), when she was still drinking and partying and being properly impolite.

 

☺Brand X: One of the more interesting fusion bands of the late 1970s, these guys, when they were ate their best, thrived much more on group interplay and meaningful melodic themes than showcasing their flashiness — the usual bane of so many bands introducing «jazz models» into a rock setting. The core of the band consisted of John Goodsall on guitar and Percy Jones on bass, with none other than Phil Collins himself supplying the drum work when free from his other in­numerable obligations (in fact, a listen to at least the band's first album is a must for everybody who wants to put together an objective picture of the man before the effigy-burning ritual), and most of their stuff ranges from comfortably listenable to emotionally impressive — in fact, even some (not all) of the later reunion albums are worth checking out. Possible starting point: by all means, begin with the beginning — Unorthodox Behaviour (1976) should provide the best reason for this band's existence, and then you can see for yourself if you need any more.

 

☺Brian Eno: Arguably one of the most significant figures in 20th century music — not just be­cause of his solo career, but also because of his innumerable collaborations with other artists, in­cluding production work and general artistic guidance. Simply put, Eno is a rare example of a three-in-one package: he has an insdisputable pop genius, capable of coming up with first-rate, unforgettable melodies (at least, in his prime); he is one of the first and most successful wizards of electronic technology; and he is a master of «intellectual spirituality», constantly working at the intersection of science and magic so that the former does not extinguish the latter, and the latter is intensified by the former. That said, one should probably exercise caution when getting into Eno — most of his output since the late Seventies has been in the «ambient» genre, and if you just throw on Music For Airports without a prior understanding of where its author is co­ming from, consequences can be dire. The best way is probably to start out with his «holy four­some» futuristic pop masterpieces from 1973-77, then slowly progress into more demanding ter­ritory (there's a lot of «intermediate» releases in his catalog, halfway between pop and pure am­bient that can ease the transition). Possible starting point: All four of those albums are required listening, so Here Come The Warm Jets (1973) is a natural start, whereas Before And After Science (1977) is a perfectly constructed «musical contrast shower» that starts in pop territory and ends in proto-New Age. From there, you can proceed into the vast oceans of ambience and minimalism if you dare.

 

☺Bruce Springsteen: Years of listening to The Boss and thinking about the relative merits of his output have solidified and clarified my love/hate relationship with the man who made some significant trade-offs between talent, vision, and mass popularity in his lifetime. Of all the «im­portant» artists to ever achieve that mass popularity, Springsteen is arguably the most problematic: the more his fame and fortune increased, the simpler his melodies and the less interesting his lyrics became, although, fair enough, they were still often surprisingly efficient. I admire the guy as the ultimate showman with the ultimate in showman teams (the legendary E Street Band, with­out whose help, let's face it, the man is almost nothing), and I feel emotionally overwhelmed by a large part of his output, old or new, yet I have always had and continue to have reservations — there is simply something not quite right with the 50-ton spiritual pressure that he exerts on you night and day, regardless of whether it's an actual soulful epic or his bulldozer take on rock'n'roll like ʽCadillac Ranchʼ. In other words, I prefer to stay on this side of the fence and let the man stay on his side — reserving my unrestricted love for those who do not have to fight so hard to wrench it from me (like Dylan, for instance). But apart from that, has there ever been anyone to channel and re-distribute that blue-collar energy with more power and efficiency than Springsteen? Probably not. That formula may seem so simple, even a child with some muscle could master it, and yet, just look at, oh I dunno, John Mellencamp to see how hard it is to properly deliver some­thing so simple. Possible starting point: It is impossible to hear just one Springsteen album if you have decided to make a first acquaintance with the character. The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle (1974) is a young Boss still making music of surprising melodic and lyrical com­plexity and experimenting with his musical language. Born To Run (1975) sets the Springsteen formula in action, sacrificing experiment and musicality for the sake of sheer, unbridled power. However, my personal favorite is Darkness On The Edge Of Town (1978) — a near-perfect combination of those hooks, that power, and, yes, the darkness, such an important component of those great songs of his where he sets aside the populism and confronts his demons for a while.

 

☺Budgie: With so many first-rate innovative heavy rock bands in the late Sixties and early Seventies, these guys arrived just a bit too late on the scene to make much of an impact or even develop a fully independent style — at their best, they usually sounded like a slightly more «in­telligent» Black Sabbath with slightly weaker (but still awesome) riffs. Also presaging early Rush, perhaps, what with their bass player sounding like a roughcut first model of Geddy Lee and all. Nevertheless, this Welsh trio is fairly respectable as far as songwriting and playing goes, and if you are thirsty for more high quality Seventies' heaviness without running the risk of finding yourself face to face with a bunch of bland, unmemorable, third-rate clones, by all means feel free to explore those records — Tony Bourge was the most diligent and gifted of the first batch of Iommi's disciples, and there's always a chance that one might find Burke Shelley's vocal tone less irritating than Ozzy's (although both are really an acquired taste). Possible starting point: Never Turn Your Back On A Friend (1973) is typically mentioned as the one where it all gelled per­fectly for Budgie, but, really, just about anything from 1970 to 1975 is comparable in (usually high) quality. Like most of their ilk, they began faltering as the New Wave age dawned on them, and never truly recovered, despite some frantic attempts and ill-fated lineup changes — but for about five years, they were the real thing.

 

1976-1989

 

○ 10,000 Maniacs: Liberal-guilt-ridden college-folk-rock, intelligent (rather than intellectual) al­most to the point of suffocation, but nice and harmless enough to forgive for an almost complete lack of hooks. Think a female-driven version of R.E.M. with all the technical skill but almost none of the talent. Still, Natalie Merchant is an undeniable presence, and Robert Buck's guitar sound is a tasty sort of juice to steep oneself in from time to time. Possible starting point: MTV Unplugged (1993): functions as a solid best-of collection. Proceed from there only if you happen to be totally mad about it.

 

○ ABC: What do you get when you cross generic, but catchy synth-pop with the troubled sensi­bility of a decadent singer-songwriter whose idol is Bryan Ferry? That's right — Martin Fry and his interchangeable gang of sometimes eccentric, sometimes simply professional buddies. Some­times considered a purely one-album wonder of the early New Wave era in the UK, they actually have an interesting, if very uneven and never all that breathtaking, back catalog. Possible starting point: unquestionably The Lexicon Of Love (1982), but they do have other records.

 

☺Accept: German metal's pride and joy. Udo Dierkschneider's voice + Wolf Hoffmann's riffs = headbanging in­carnate, as long as you disregard the inane lyrics (at least they're socially con­scious). Pos­sible starting point: Restless & Wild (1982).

 

☺Adam And The Ants/Adam Ant: The glam rock spectacle à la Bowie/Bolan, updated for the post-punk audience. Adam Ant has no deep message to convey to the public — he is merely a fascinating exhibitionist, for whom dressing up as a pirate was no less important than providing a catchy hook. But he did both things with verve, and that verve makes many of his former hits still fresh and enjoyable for those who want to bother. Pos­sible starting point: Kings Of The Wild Fro­ntier (1980) for the band, or Friend Or Foe (1982) for the solo artist — there is not that much difference.

 

☺Adolescents: Pioneering Orange County hardcore punk since 1980. Like every hardcore band with a bit of self-respect, staked their entire reputation on the explosive debut record, a hardcore classic if there ever was one, and spent the rest of their lives experimenting (miserably), bickering (wildly), falling apart (permanently), reuniting (occasionally), and saving most of the ass-kicking for live shows well into the 21st century. Possible starting point: Adolescents (1980) — nothing else they did even comes close, really.

 

☺Adrian Belew: King Crimson's (Frank Zappa's, David Bowie's, Talking Heads' etc.) lead gui­tarist makes music that is equal part weird bizarre shit and traditional melodic pop, perfectly satisfying the world's most blessed minority of middle-roaders. Pos­sible starting point: Young Lions (1990) for more pop, Desire Caught By The Tail (1986) for more weirdness.

 

☺Adverts, The: One of Britain's finest punk-rock outfits — actually, at their best these guys were more like heavy, crunchy, but melodic pop-rock, yet viciously infected with the punk spirit of 1977. Faded into obscurity after releasing one classic, timeless album and one respectable, but misunderstood attempt to move on, although band leader T.V. Smith's solo career is worth che­cking out as well. If none of this is enough to convert you, then maybe the fact of having the hot­test female bass player in the entire history of punk will. Possible starting point: Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts (1978).

 

☺Agent Orange: These guys' identity is usually defined as that of the «fathers of surf-punk», al­though, in reality, surf-rock influences only constituted a minor part of their sound (yeah, they covered 'Misirlou' and 'Pipeline' all right). What sometimes gets lost behind the label is the fact that Mike Palm's band was responsible for creating some of the catchiest melodies in hardcore punk, period, oxymoronous as that may sound — too bad they only release something like one al­bum per decade. Possible starting point: Living In Darkness (1981).

 

○ Agnostic Front: Although this band has not had any single album out for me to like, their posi­tion as that of a leading force in New York hardcore in the early 1980s cannot be denied. As far away from «poppy» or «catchy» as it ever gets, closer in attitude to «grindcore» than to any of their forefathers in the punk movement, they used to be the meanest badasses around. They also had a pretty turbulent history, with constant lineup changes (vocalist Roger Miret and guitarist Vinnie Stigma have, however, stuck together through thick and thin), and an odd, never-ending, procedure of switching between «genuine hardcore» and «crossover metalcore». Pretty interes­ting from an overall cultural stance. The «songs», however, are mostly garbage. Possible starting point: Victim In Pain (1984) is the legendary debut — just proceed from there if you're seduced, and stop whenever and wherever you like.

 

○ A-Ha: Norway's ambiguous contribution to the world of pop excellence. They had the mistake of having their biggest hits (which were not necessarily their best songs) in the «synth pop» genre in the mid-Eighties, but it may be worth a journey through the sea of cheese if you have run out of solid pop melodies, powerful romantic singing, and semi-successful attempts of mutating from teen idols to «mature artists». Pos­sible starting point: Scoundrel Days (1986).

 

☻Alcatrazz: Utterly flat «soul-metal» from the mid-Eighties, sort of like Gary Moore without all the cool guiar riffs, but with twice as much testosterone. Mainly notorious for jump-starting the solo career of Yngwie Malmsteen and earning music industry points for Steve Vai. A couple good songs on their last and least popular album do not help matters much. Pos­sible star­ting point: Stay away altogether. There are better things in life.

 

☺Angry Samoans: At the forefront of the LA hardcore scene, these guys were way too intellec­tual to create intellectual music, coming up instead with some of the harshest, most offensive and demented tunes to grace the punk movement — most of them tuneful and professional at the same time. They were only really good for one album and a few singles, but that is sort of essen­tial for a hardcore band, too. Possible starting point: Back From Samoa (1982).

 

○ Anthrax: Third-run heroes of the thrash metal kingdom, behind Metallica and Slayer (fourth-run to some, actually, if you add Megadeth to the list). Distinguished from their brethren by a specific, comic-book-fueled sense of humour, aptly displayed in the mid-1980s; less fortunate ever since they became more serious, though. Pos­sible starting point: Among The Living (1987).

 

☺Art Of Noise, The: Not just pioneers of sampling techniques, but actually one of the best bands that tried to take the silliest excesses of the 1980s and reinterpret them as the beginning of a new musical era and mentality. It did not really work out in the end, but it left behind a bunch of albums that really sound like nothing else. Pos­sible starting point: Who's Afraid Of The Art Of Noise? (1984).

 

○ Arthur Russell: One of the oddest and hippest «forgotten heroes» of the modernist era of pop. An omnivorous multi-instrumentalist and an effective songwriter in all sorts of genres, Russell preferred two styles throughout his life: avantgarde cello-driven sonic landscapes and wildly ex­peri­mental dance-pop grooves with complex, unpredictable arrangements. If that already sounds bizarre to you, there is more: collaboration with about a million side projects that no one outside the so-called «No Wave» scene has heard about, reluctance to put out records due to a bad case of perfectionalism, and dying from AIDS less than a year after Freddie Mercury. Bottomline: run, don't walk — but do not necessarily expect «genius», as today's hipsters will be instructing you. Possible starting point: The World Of Arthur Russell (2004).

 

○ Asia: Where the 1970s had Boston, Styx, and Journey, the 1980s had Asia: «progressive rock» stripped of its complexity and innovation, beefed up with repetitive pop hooks, and retaining all of its pretentiousness and pomp. If we further emphasize the «Eighties» aspect of it, with all the pop metal and corny electronic overtones, this sounds like a recipé for something genuinely awful, and in many ways it is. Asia's saving grace, however, is that the band was originally dominated by «serious» veteran proggers — a team assembled from the ashes of ELP, King Crimson, and Yes — adding a touch of class that is nearly always there, even on the most wretched of songs. Eventually, they lost most of the founding fathers and went in the direction of near-total garbage, but in recent years the founding fathers patched it up, so today, the old boys are still touring the world and writing «prog-lite» for the undemanding consumer.

 

○ Associates, The: A Scottish band, led by operatically gifted doom-and-gloomsman Billy Mc­Kenzie and inventive non-virtuoso guitarist Alan Rankine — the first album is sort of a «Roxy Music meets The Cars» kind of thing, from then on it's more like «Roxy Music meets Depeche Mode», with the band steadily going from guitar-oriented New Wave rock to artsy synth-pop wi­thin two years. With Rankine quitting, McKenzie descended into cheap emptiness over the rest of the decade, then, unable to re-ascend properly, committed suicide. Not an «essential» band for getting to know the era, but one worth getting to know in the end. Possible starting point: The Affectionate Punch (1979), as the band's only genuinely «rocking» album, but, overall, every­thing up to and including Perhaps (1985) is recommendable — stay away from McKenzie's late Eighties stuff, though, it's mostly just generic dance pop with very little creativity.

 

☺Aztec Camera: A one-man band led by yet another Scottish wonderchild, Roddy Frame; of­ten lumped in with the late New Wave movement on the strength of its debut record, but really more of a «troubled singer-songwriter» project, going through lots of vastly different stages (ranging from Dire Straits-ish philosophic blues to formulaic dance-pop to shiny guitar-led pop-rock etc.) in which Roddy’s artistic persona is the only permanent link — smart, romantic, complex, ideali­stic, stimulating, but sometimes a little overbearing through the denseness of the lyrics. Rarely re­membered today because they could never solidly occupy one particular niche of the market, not overtly consistent, but well worth checking out — a full CD’s worth of the best Aztec Camera tunes would qualify as one of the finest pop collections of the 1980s/1990s. Possible starting point: Either High Land, Hard Rain (1983) — New Wave pop was never done better on a bed­rock of acoustic guitars, or Stray (1990) — Roddy’s attempt at building his own White Album is predictably not all that it could be, but still a big success.

 

○ B-52's, The: Greatest «intellectual party band» of all time — these guys were arguably one of the most lightweight New Wave acts in existence, but they managed to capitalize on that fact, and turn their very shallowness into an amazingly seductive musical philosophy. Neither depressive nor mentorial, the B-52's at their best offer speedy dance rhythms, unforgettable hooks, terrific harmonies contrasting with hilarious / annoying nerdy guy recitals, boundless lyrical references, and a surprisingly consistent discography over the years (although their mainstream commercial success in the late 1980s did come at certain expenses). If somehow the kitschy, reckless antics of Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson, and Cindy Wilson leave you cold or, worse, indignant, try readjus­ting your wavelengths — I cannot imagine anybody but the most hardcore puritan unmoved by the likes of ʽRock Lobsterʼ. Possible starting point: The B-52's (1979) is the one that started it all, and it has by far their most classic numbers — proceed from there and just stop at will.

 

○ Bad Brains: On paper (and upon first sight and sound) these guys seem unique — a 1970s black band that started out in a jazz-fusion vein, then quickly switched to punk and became the pioneering force in the speedy hardcore movement, then added an aggressive reggae side to its pedigree. Unfortunately, the novelty of it all only lasted for a few years, after which the «amazing madness» waned, a more generic and boring metallic component replaced the fun of old, and the band switched to a draggy, utterly mediocre existence for the rest of its career. Possible starting point: Black Dots (recorded in 1979, released only in 1996) is a set of early demos that captures the band at their freshest and least forgettable; of the official «numeric» releases, Rock For Light (1983) probably has the best songs from both their hardcore and their reggae stocks.

 

○ Bad Religion: Obviously, many bands can lay claim to being «the AC/DC of hard­core punk» — con­sidering how formally limited the style is in the first place. But Bad Religion may have laid the most tenacious of these claims, releasing a steady, unbroken stream of exactly same-sounding «three-chord-based» albums over the years. Their saving grace is total, 100% commit­ment, fueled by frontman Greg Graffin's fanatical leftist faith and main guitarist Brett Gurewitz's ongoing mission to keep the gap between speedy punk rock and colorful power pop bridged as securely as possible. Possible starting point: Suffer (1988), after half a decade of swaying to and fro, finalizes and stabilizes the Bad Religion formula forever (later albums tend to slow down the tempos of some of the songs, not always to the band's advantage) — for non-fans, this might be all the Bad Religion they really need; fans, however, will need to assemble the complete catalog, since not even the worst Bad Religion album is that much worse than the best one. And as of 2013, they show no signs of stopping.

 

☺Bangles: They may have sold out the «Paisley Underground» to corporate greed back in the mid-1980s, but they were still one of the most charming, intelligent, and tasteful girl bands in an era when «commercially oriented pop music» had all but officially gained the status of lethal bio­logical weapon. Corporate machinery, unfortunately aided by an untimely alliance with Prince, destroyed the band fairly quickly, but for a few years out there, simple pop music did not get much better than that. Possible starting point: All Over The Place (1984) is unquestionably their best — a proper mix of jangly folk rock, old-school garage aggressiveness, and modernistic re­levance that, unfortunately, they would never quite recapture the same way again.

 

○ Bathory: One of the quirkiest Scandinavian metal bands out there — Bathory was es­sentially a one-man project, with all of its material written, and fairly often, though not always, played and recorded by the reclusive loner Quorthon (because of this, live appearances by Batho­ry were few and far in between, something highly atypical for a metal band). As if that weren't enough, Quor­thon himself went through several distinct stages in his career, starting out as the quintessential, Satan-owned, prophet of speedy black metal with fabulous verve and horrendously lo-fi pro­duc­tion, then gradually inventing «epic Viking metal», matching medieval pomp with efficiently brutal riffs and vicious attitudes, then descending into mediocre thrash territory, then returning back to his Viking roots with such a vengeance that his heart finally gave out in 2004. Even if your heart is thoroughly immune towards extreme forms of heavy metal, you will still have to admit that the Bathory journey is in a class of its own, and that Quorthon's personality deserves all the curiosity it can get. Possible starting point: Hammerheart (1990) is often listed among the pioneering releases of «Viking metal», and, at the very least, deserves an educational listen, although I do share the opinion that it also contains Quorthon's most inspired musical passages. Black metal fans would need to go back in time from there, while epic metal fans would have to go forward (but disregard the mediocre-to-awful thrash homages from the mid-1990s).

 

○ Bats, The: More like «New Zealand's Favorite Fruit Bats». Led by the indomitable Robert Scott, these guys came up with a vastly unoriginal, but mildly individualistic and pleasant for­mula in the late 1980s — «folk-pop-rock» with jangly guitars, weak, but persistent hooks, and humble, but tasteful attitudes. Not too smart, not too stupid, not too loud, not too quiet, not too minimalistic, not too overdone. The formula works OK for about two or three records (not neces­sarily in chronological order), but then, of course, gets a little wearisome. Possible starting point: with this type of bands, the debut often remains their best offering, and, indeed, Daddy's High­way (1987) has probably never been topped by these guys, even though they have remained con­sistently listenable through the years.

 

☺Bauhaus: These guys have penetrated all the textbooks as the fathers of «Goth rock», a tag­line that is sure to discredit them in the eyes of subculture-haters before they have a chance to hear even one note played/sung by the two-headed beast that is Peter Murphy and Daniel Ash. In rea­lity, although the band's visual image and artistic philosophy are inextricably tied to the early Eighties and seem to have dated rather badly, their brand of «New Wave rock theater» still sounds unique and exciting to this very day, and the early albums are chock-full of unforgettable tunes — more like a darker, more abrasive update of early Roxy Music than a generic poseur celebration of suicidal depression. Those hairstyles and outfits may be worth just a chuckle now, but Murphy's potential of hypnotizing the listener, and Ash's potential to send the listener into a par­oxysmal state with his guitar escapades, remains steadfast well into the 21st century. Possible starting point: Advisable to start off from where it starts — In The Flat Field (1980) kicks more ass and generates more hook-filled excitement than later, somewhat more contemplative releases, but given the shortness of the band's career, you won't have far to go anyway.

 

○ Beat Happening: Led by three professional non-players and non-players from Olympia, Washington, this para-holy trinity quickly rose to the ranks of Great Gods of Lo-Fi by figuring out a truly great gimmick — how to impersonate a bunch of talented, trying, but rough-cut and untrained 12-year olds aspiring for pop greatness. Their «classic» records will spook off just about anybody who has perfect pitch, but for the rest of us there's quite a bit of sweet, innocent, seductive charm in their best songs, which combine quasi-naive twee-pop attitudes with subtle sarcasm and occasional dark humor. Unfortunately, the gimmick got old pretty quickly, and it was not until their very last album that they made a serious effort to bring their image and style up to speed, by which time it was too late. Possible starting point: Beat Happening (1985) is where it's at — if the album charms you rather than horrifies you with its minimalistic riffs, tinny sound, and intentionally off-key singing, proceed further at your own risk.

 

○ Big Black: Basically just a vehicle for the sick, but highly artistic fantasies of sonic wizard Steve Albini, Big Black lasted only about half a decade, which allowed them to fully explore the formula — crooked tales of human ugliness, perversity, and idiocy set to mechanical, intentional­ly «soulless» drum machine beats and some of the most vicious and aurally uncomfortable guitar tones in music history. As far removed from yer average «hardcore» sound as possible for a band with its roots firmly rooted in hardcore, this music is definitely not for the feeble-minded, but Albini goes far beyond simplistic «shock value»: he is really one of the most vivid painters of the «dark under­belly» of the Eighties. Possible starting point: Atomizer (1986) is the band's most finely printed calling card, but do not miss the early EPs, either — no Big Black song delivers as strong and basic a punch as ʽCablesʼ.

 

☺Billy Bragg: I am always cautious about hardcore leftists, and even more cautious about hard­core leftists in music, but Billy Bragg builds up a pretty good case — over thirty years, he has displayed much more intelligence in both his melodies and his words than the average hardcore leftist, and he has usually managed to integrate his politics and his personal issues in such a way as not to irritate the listener too much by either of the two. Beginning as an «electrobusker» (playing his songs to the sound of nothing but an amplified six-string), he then gradually learned to make good use of backing bands, merging punk, pop, and folk in a traditionalist manner while always singing of current issues. He is not a great songwriter, but over the years he has refined both his sense of melody and his personal charisma to the extent that his music actually grows more endearing as he grows older — a rare enough thing for rockers. Possible starting point: Don't Try This At Home (1991) probably has the largest concentration of cool songs from the man, although it tells you nothing about his electro-busking, or about his interpretations of Woo­dy Guthrie with Wilco, or about his finding a perfect melancholic serenity in his later years, so the catalog is well worth exploring beyond this one point.

 

☺Birthday Party, The: Nick Cave cut his teeth — and sank them pretty deep in the flesh of stagnant bourgeois morality, too — while providing lead vocals and violent stage behavior for this classic Australian band of the post-punk era. With the equally maniacal guitarist Rowland S. Howard as second principal member, The Birthday Party fused hardcore punk, avantgarde jazz, Goth, and several other influences to create a sound that was truly one of a kind, even for the late 1970s / early 1980s and their overwhelming explosion of new talents. There may have been in­nu­merable cases of «madmen» of rock history, but very few were able to raise to the same heights as this band did — maybe only The Stooges, whose «modernized» descendants Cave and Howard would appear to be. Possible starting point: For those who want a «gentler» introduction to the Party, Prayers On Fire (1981) is probably the optimal point of entry. For those who are not af­raid to go all the way right away, Junkyard (1982) would be this band's insaniest masterpiece.

 

☺Black Flag: Invention of hardcore punk — should that even count as an achievement, conside­ring how many crappy bands followed in its wake? (Besides, hardcore was really invented by Bad Brains, but let's not fight about this, boys and girls). What should count as an achievement is that band leader Greg Ginn managed to come up with a fairly unique guitar playing style — he really married punk to avantgarde jazz in a way few other players could, or cared to — and that, at the band's peak, the showmanship of Henry Rollins complemented Ginn's guitar fireworks to perfection. Their discography is quite varied, which is both a blessing (few things are more irri­tating than a lengthy discography from a generic hardcore band) and a curse, because some of Ginn's experimentation sounds downright stupid these days, but at least there's something in there for everyone. Possible starting point: Damaged (1981) is the acknowledged classic and one of the most revered punk albums of the decade, so there is no question about where to start. From there on, you're on your own — read the reviews, and trust your instincts.

 

☺Blind Guardian: These German purveyors of speed, power, and fantasy metal have been so relentless in honing their skills at Bombast-A-Rama that even those who hate pomp and pretense in pop music with all their might will have to admit a certain level of respect for the hard-to-beat lionine roar of Hansi Kürsch or the melodic gift of lead guitarist André Olbrich. Those who love their pop music grand, arrogant, and exciting will have a never ending aural feast with these guys, though — especially those who also have a soft spot for Tolkien, Stephen King, and Dungeons and Dragons. Their basic goals have remained pretty much unchanged since the very beginning, but the style has evolved from a more speed-oriented and brutal-metallic onslaught in the early days to a more symphonic, «melodic» sound as the years went by; depending on this, most fans will probably have their hearts yearning for the former or the latter. Possible starting point: Imaginations From The Other Side (1995) represents fair middle ground between earlier, har­sher B. G. and later, «orchestral» B. G.; start here, perhaps, and then move away backwards or forwards depending on which aspects you find more to your liking, if any.

 

☺Blondie: The greatest «pop-rock» band of the New Wave era that ever lived — although the very name of the band and its image, with frontvixen Debbie Harry always at the center of atten­tion and the rest of the members always intentionally lurking in the shadows, often leads to mis­guided interpretations: general audiences think of Blondie in the same category as Donna Sum­mer and Chic (due to the disco attractiveness of ʽHeart Of Glassʼ), and «intellectual» audiences sometimes dismiss them for the same reason. DON'T! These guys were smart, sharp, tasteful, diverse, and dynamic: their classic albums belong on the shelf of everybody who has no aversion towards pop music in general, and likes one's own pop music with a grain of salt and a touch of spice. Even when they crossed over into the 1980s, got a bit darker and more depressed, they did not begin to suck — it's just that they were so tightly associated with liveliness and springliness that nobody wanted to take any of that gloomy crap from their favorite band. Even when the band regrouped in the late 1990s, this was done under the condition that they would not become a nos­talgia act, but would bravely try to saddle and harness the ongoing processes in pop music — to mixed effect, unfortunately, given the overall awful state of pop music in the 2000s, but still, at least theoretically admirable in spirit. Possible starting point: Parallel Lines (1978) is an indis­putable classic and an acknowledged milestone in the history of pop, yet this is a band that de­serves to be studied through and through, so I'd personally recommend to start right from the self-titled Blondie (1976) and work your way from there.

 

☻Bon Jovi: There may be no single better example in the history of music to prove that «long-term popularity» and «accessibility» are not always a good thing. From the very beginning, Jon Bon Jovi and his pals made it clear that first and foremost, they were after mass popularity — mega-mass popularity — and that the best way to ensure that popularity was the KISSS formula: «Keep It Simple, Stupid, and Serious». After all, you cannot deny that the one major difference that separates ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ from something like ʽRock And Roll All Nightʼ is in that additional S: headbanging to ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ makes you imagine that you are not just head­banging — you are headbanging for a spiritual cause. For almost thirty years now, Bon Jovi, equipped with just a few drops of talent, have been bottling cheap spirituality for the masses, and doing fairly well for themselves in the process. Which, in this reviewer's eyes at least, makes them one of the most fascinatingly disgusting acts in the entire pop/rock business. Possible starting point: With a band like this, it only makes sense to start with the officially acknowledged cornerstone of their legacy — Slippery When Wet (1986), whose key track at least features the most creative gimmick in their history of music-making (the talkbox grunt, of course).

 

○ Boomtown Rats, The: Although the only song by these guys that has solidly entered public conscience is arguably ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ, they used to be commercially successful, regularly putting hit singles on the charts in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Ironically, even though they are usually listed as a «punk/New Wave» act, The Boomtown Rats were really at their best when doing straightforward, ballsy rock'n'roll, delivered with plenty of guts, spittle, and humor by their pair of guitarists and potentially mesmerizing frontman Bob Geldof. The more they strayed away from rock'n'roll and into the risky waters of synth-pop, though, the more they tended to look like copycats of their betters — and then there's the matter of Geldof's own trans­formation from ruffled street-rock hero into the closest thing the world has ever seen to a real planet-saving Superman: the more wonderful he became as a sensitive, self-sacrificing human being, the more boring he got as a musician. Alas, this inevitably happens to the best of us. Possible starting point: A Tonic For The Troops (1978) — the perfect transition album from «classic rock» to «New Wave», with just the right combination of brawns and brain from these guys and probably their best song ever (ʽRat Trapʼ).

 

○ Boston: Tom Scholz may have been a genius of technology, a wizard of guitar tone, and a self-standing self-made cultural hero, but none of that mattered when it came to taste and intelligence, of which he could only muster enough for one classic album, which most classic rock radio listeners know by heart without ever having bought a copy. Give the man his due — he pretty much invented the default understanding of «arena rock»... in a basement, and that's gotta count for something. But do not give the man more than his due, and unless you are a mad completist, do not bother with anything Boston-related past the 1970s. Whoever you are, your ears deserve better than rote, formulaic, monotonous, grossly overproduced and overdramatized pomp. Pos­sible starting point: Boston (1976) is and will always be one of the all-time classics — love or hate that style, the mastership cannot be denied. Beyond there lies nothing, even if there are occasional enthusiasts who also root for the band's second album.

 

○ Bruford: In between the 1973-1974 and the 1981-1984 marks of King Crimson, prog drummer extraordinaire Bill Bruford happened to lead his own band, producing three albums that, in a bet­ter world, might have been of certain interest to fans of groundbreaking progressive rock, but as it happens, can be only of limited interest to fans of that rather self-sufficient, off-the-cuff genre called «jazz-rock fusion». For the most part, this is professional, but bland and uninventive fusion with no particular place to go — the only exception being the band's first album, Feels Good To Me (1977), which had an actual «symphonic» strain to it and featured a dazzling assortment of guests to provide both spice and substance, including the enigmatic and underrated singer-song­writer Annette Peacock.

 

☺Buggles: Not only did Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes announce the coming of the «Video Age» with a conveniently concocted title to their biggest hit, but they pretty much laid down the basic rules for intelligent commercial synth-pop — songs that could be maddeningly catchy, im­possibly modern, and yet also composed with care and inspiration. Of course, even if one percei­ves the irony of the lyrics and the whole approach (using the latest trendiest technologies to de­plore the fate of a world overwhelmed with technology), some of the music may seem off-putting because of the overall «cheesiness» of the arrangements, hooks, and vocals; but the Buggles were one of the very few bands who seem to have been perfectly aware of this from the very beginning, and took themselves firmly tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately, they only stuck around for one pop master­piece before participating in one of the weirdest musical mergers in history (with Yes, no less, proving that you can marry any two musical genres on the map with at least some success), and when they came back for a second, much less satisfactory album, it was already too late to carry on the Buggles program. Forget ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ, though — ʽJohnny On The Monorailʼ is really where it's at. Possible starting point: The Age Of Plastic (1980) is, by all means, the one and only place to start with these guys.

 

☺Butthole Surfers: The good old American underground has churned out plenty of weird bands in its lifetime — so much, in fact, that it is almost impossible in this here 21st century to under­stand what really constitutes «weird» any more — but Butthole Surfers were definitely one of the leading brands of «weird» for about a decade, from their early messy noise-punk days in the early Eighties to the more organized, glossy, yet still deliciously wild sound of the early Nineties, when for a very brief time they almost seemed poised for overground popularity, even despite retaining the word «butthole» in their group name. The common association is with Gibby Haynes, the band's crazy frontman who looked and sounded like a post-modern take on Iggy Pop or a less seriously self-centered take on Birthday Party-era Nick Cave — however, the band's musical at­tractions stay mostly with Paul Leary, a terrific guitar player who seemed to be much more inspired by Hendrix and Syd Barrett than by the contemporary heavy metal or alt-rock crowds, and was equally gifted with the ability to churn out cool retro-riffs and make deliciously fuzzy psychedelic noise. The band kind of lost direction by the end of the millennium, losing a large part of its youthful energy and hooliganry, but those early albums still hold up in all their hilari­ousness and recklessness. And yes, they're a musical band first and foremost — like Zappa, they consider intentionally «offensive» content as their legitimate shield from idiots and amateurs, but behind that shield, they can rock your heart out, though for what it's worth, I probably wouldn't ever call them «master tunesmiths» (they seem far more skilled at running rings around other people's ideas than generating their own, but that, too, is an art that requires major skill). Possible starting point: Locust Abortion Technician (1987) is arguably their most (dis)cohesive state­ment, but if you want to dip your foot into something easier first, Independent Worm Saloon (1993) is probably their best compromise between «madness» and «accessibility».

 

☺Buzzcocks: The most direct British equivalent of the Ramones — this is punk rock, yes, but with a personal rather than social orientation, and with more emphasis on catchy vocal and instru­mental hooks than anger, loudness, and abrasiveness. Over a short span of no more than three years, the Buzzcocks left behind an impressive legacy of punchy, pointy songs that are all but impossible to get out of your head — and they weren't above experimenting with various adjacent genres, either, though they never truly made the transition into «New Wave» (perhaps, for the better). Fortunately, they had the good sense to disband before the Eighties caught up with them and imposed their absurd standards; unfortunately, Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle decided it appropriate to bring the band back into existence once the grunge wave hit both shores of the Atlantic, feeding us a steady stream of mediocre-to-poor releases for more than ten years. Most informed people will probably tell you to embrace as much classic-era Buzzcocks as possible, and stay away from the reunion era — and, surprise surprise, I am one of these people, too (al­though their latest, The Way, wasn't too bad, honestly). Possible starting point: There's no get­ting around it — the Buzzcocks were the late Seventies' greatest «singles band», and the Singles Going Steady (1979) compilation has been, and always will be, the most resplendent monument to their greatness. However, all of the three early LPs are worth getting as well — without them, you will never know the full potential and scope of these guys at their peak.

 

1989-1998

 

○ 808 State: These imaginative Mancunians used to be one of the hottest things in the entire elec­tronic movement; today, they are mostly mentioned as «a primary influence on Aphex Twin» (not that one day Richard D. James will not suffer the same fate — fame and fortune are fairly fleeting flimsies when we're talking digital art). Still, if you are into «intelligent dance music» at all, 808 State are an indispensable component of the genre, and much more human (and «humanistic») than so many others. Possible starting point: Newbuild (1988).

 

○ Aaliyah: Her sweetness and «innocence» make her R'n'B listenable, and her collaboration with Timbaland make some of it interesting. But, at the end of it all, her tragedy will not make her the Aretha of 1990s. Pos­sible starting point: One In A Million (1996).

 

○ Afghan Whigs, The: These Cincinnati kids originally relocated to Seattle just in time to be jumped on the grunge bandwagon, but they made their critical reputation not so much by maste­ring the official grunge textbook as by interbreeding grunge with singer-songwriter introspection and soul/R'n'B influences, mainly courtesy of the artistic soul of frontman Greg Dulli. Songwri­ting was always a big problem, though. Possible starting point: Gentlemen (1993) has the best combination of «Whig essence» and interesting melodies, but the much more deviating 1965 (1998) is arguably their most original contribution to the world of rock'n'roll.

 

☺Aimee Mann: Just my idea of a perfect female singer-songwriter: melodicity, beautiful voice, non-overbearing, but meaningful lyrics, consistency, humor — all in limited, but sufficient doses. Pos­sible starting point: Bachelor No. 2 (2000).

 

○ AIR: Kings of French elevator music. One exemplary record of the genre plus an endless se­ries of attempts to improve upon it, always leaving you pleased and dissatisfied at the same time. Pos­sible starting point: Moon Safari (1998).

 

☻Alanis Morissette: Mediocre talent, overall nice girl, inadequate success, confused heritage, awful horse grin (especially when she was in her prime), good set of pipes, too few good songs, made history, currently unmaking it. Pos­sible starting point: Jagged Little Pill (1995).

 

☺Alice In Chains: Seattle has seen plenty of grunge bands, but not one has combined metallic chops, pop catchiness, and the suicidal horror of drug addiction in a more intelligent and exciting manner than the late Layne Staley and the not-too-late Jerry Cantrell. Easily the most terrifying band of the 1990s, and thus, probably not for everybody's ears. Pos­sible starting point: Dirt (1992).

 

○ Amon Tobin: One of the most tirelessly experimental electronic wizards of our time, the Bra­zilian-born Amon Adonai Santos de Araujo Tobin (or just Cujo for short) made his name as an awesome mediator between the arts of drum'n'bass and old-school jazz, creating a sound so uni­que, it's a total wonder it managed to be accessible at the same time. Since then, he's branched out in a variety of sonic directions, but, to the best of my predictive power, it is the «Miles Davis meets Squarepusher» vibe that he is going to be remembered for. Possible starting point: Super­modified (2000).

 

○ Amorphis: Even in the middle of the overproductive Scandinavian / Finnish death metal scene, in the mid-1990s Amorphis stood out loud and proud — starting out as a competent, but generic death metal band, then morphing (sorry!) into a largely unpredictable, archi-creative prog-metal unit, concocting a melting pot of folk, jazz, and symphonic influences, bonud by fresh metal riffs and a great sense of taste. Unfortunately, ever since the late 1990s they have been moving into duller directions, corrupting themselves with alt-rock sludge and evolving into formula. Be, there­fore, very wary with what you pick. Possible starting point: Elegy (1996), then proceed in both directions from there, stopping at will.

 

○ Anathema: The life story of this Liverpudlian outfit is, in some ways, no less amazing than the life story of that other little band from Liverpool — starting out as a fairly generic and conven­tional «dead-brides-and-dark-despair» doom metal band, they gradually evolved into art-metal and then into a mix of Porcupine Tree-style neo-prog and Radiohead-style neo-mope-rock, taking two decades to make the transition from Darkness to Light and ultimately emerging as a sort of born-again harbinger of post-mortem transcendence with their latest batch of albums. Unfortuna­tely, the Cavanagh brothers, forming the core of the band, are as good at being pretentious, ambi­tious, and ecstatic about their beliefs as they are bad at writing great music — even at their best, they have an «ambient-atmospheric» approach to songwriting that can very quickly get annoying and boring; most of their tricks are fairly predictable, and most of their influences, from Pink Floyd to Radiohead to Coldplay, are too easily identifiable, making them a «poor man's» version of all these bands at best. So, proceed at your own risk. Possible starting point: Alternative 4 (1998) is where they really started to break out of the original narrow formula, and it probably has their best song ever (ʽFragile Dreamsʼ), but even that one is hardly a masterpiece.

 

○ Änglågård: Motivated, inspired, but hugely derivative Swedish revivalists of the classic 1970's prog rock of Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, you name it. Their flaws are obvious and evident, but with a brief legacy encompassing two studio and one live albums, they simply didn't have time to make them overwhelm the positives. Possible starting point: Hybris (1992).

 

○ Angra: Brazilian gods of power metal, who started off well enough in the mid-Nineties by try­ing to merge the genre with all sorts of outside influences, from symphonic to Brazilian folk. Then they lost their best member and became... just a regular power metal band, of potential in­terest to power metal fans. Possible starting point: Holy Land (1996).

 

☻Ani DiFranco: This Earth-dwelling Valkyrie of Civil Liberties is an inexhaustible source of flaming spirits. In compensation, her progenitors forgot to endow her with a proper songwriting ta­lent, but she has solved the problem by writing so much that it is actually possible to make a full length CD of quality stuff culled from over 15 hour-long records. She used to be a great guitar player, too, but coincidentally abandoned her unique style at the same time that she gave up on trying to write decent music. Most transparent argument ever that music and political / social agenda should be eating from different tables. Possible starting point: Dilate (1996).

 

☺ Aphex Twin: As often as one gets depictions of Richard D. James as the intangible Zeus of the Electronic Olympus, he might still rather be its Hermes, the trickster clown: he has mastered the craft so well that, instead of bowing down to his equipment, he condescends to it, and you ne­ver really know how serious the guy is. Also, he may or may not be a genius, but he is definitely one of the most creative-idea-packed people of the turn of the century era, so it is essential to at least try him out even if electronic music generally leaves you cold. Possible starting point: Ri­ch­ard D. James Album (1996).

 

○ Apoptygma Berzerk: The brainchild of pale-faced Norwegian lunatic Stephan Groth; the band (essentially, one-man band with various session hands coming and going) has slowly evolved from a mix of industrial, Goth, and synth-pop to a relatively unsophisticated brand of art-techno to a somewhat more interesting style of electropop, and is still evolving. Groth has some sort of tricky proto-emo appeal and an odd knack of improving upon bad or passable Eighties' hits, for which he deserves my respect; he also has a serious fan base among worshippers of «electronic body music», but this detail is of little interest to me. Possible starting point: You And Me Aga­inst The World (2005), but for more «typical» A. B., Soli Deo Gloria (1993) is a much more informative introduction.

 

☺ Apples In Stereo, The: These guys' long strange trip began under the banner of resurrecting the cheerful pop-psychedelic spirit of the Sixties (in a modernized indie format) and ended up as a never ending, mathematically grounded tribute to a whole series of Rob Schneider's musical heroes (Jeff Lynne is the latest in line). One has to appreciate the dedication: they took it so seri­ously that, somewhere along the way, they even learned to write good songs. Possible starting point: The Discovery Of A World Inside The Moone (2000).

 

○ Arab Strap: Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton were a Scottish duo that based an entire career on writing long, dark, monotonous, impressionistic electro-folk tales based around drin­king and fucking as the top two activities for modern day young people. Eventually, they grew up, realized there's more to life than this and ended their partnership on a somewhat more optimistic note. Their career is fun to trace, but not so much fun to enjoy, unless you are really ready to em­pathise. They do somewhat sound like no one else, though. Possible starting point: Mad For Sad­­ness (1999).

 

○ Arch Enemy: The product of creative brothers Michael and Christopher Amott, Arch Enemy are a «melodic death metal» band from Sweden, originally notable simply for a quick progress from completely generic act to one of the genre's most reliable dazzling riff providers. Then they changed their lead growler for Angela Gossow and became notable as «that band with the hot chick who claims direct descent from Lucifer». Eventually, they sort of degenerated to the level of a very limited formula, like almost all metal bands do, but at the height of their powers, they did deliver a small bunch of classic records that might be of interest to everyone who can stand a little heavy music with growling vocals. Possible starting point: Burning Bridges (1999) proba­bly has the best songs, but for those who, like me, much prefer to be charmed by Gossow, Wages Of Sin (2001) would be preferable.

 

○ Archers Of Loaf: For a brief moment in the mid-Nineties, these guys were quite a hot thing on college rock radio stations; but ever since they fell apart, they have been generally relegated to «connoisseur delight» status. But this is not because their brand of grunge-based indie rock stemmed from the East Coast (Chapel Hill) rather than the obligatory Northwest. Rather, it is be­cause they placed more emphasis on «ambiguity», «intelligence», and «artsiness» than on in-yer-face hooks and on sentiments with which the average teen could connect on an easy and regular basis. That said, I could not say that any of the band members had any tremendous musical gifts; at best, they could develop a curious «guitar-weaving» technique that made them stand out from the pack, but that is not always enough to make an appropriately great song. Still, a band well worth getting to know if you're a young romantic intellectual with a spiteful nature. Possible star­ting point: Icky Mettle (1994) is their acclaimed debut, but it is not my fav — anyway, they only have four studio albums out in toto, and each has its moments.

 

○ Ash: Ireland's biggest gift to «alternative rock». The leader, Tim Wheeler, seems like a talented guy, hopelessly chained down by the «rock» conventions — most Ash records are very frustra­ting, because they always sound like they could have been so much better without the compressed, stiffening production, and the forced emphasis on loudness, distortion, and power chords, when, at heart, Wheeler is really just an old-school roots-rock and guitar-pop fan with a big old heart. Possible starting point: A-Z Series (2010) – I think the band actually got much better as the years went by, and their decision to switch from LP format to an ongoing series of single releases was a great move, allowing to reduce the amounts of filler. But if you demand an LP as the starting point, then Free All Angels (2001) is the poppiest and bestest of 'em all.

 

○ At The Drive-In: Legendary heroes of Texan «post-hardcore», these progenitors of the far more interesting Mars Volta made their mark on rock history with a small batch of highly chal­len­ging albums, and I am still not sure if the challenge was all that justified. Energy, passion, in­telligence, and loud distorted guitars are all there, but songwriting has always been these guys' biggest problem. Possible starting point: Relationship Of Command (2000) is their most diverse and «accessible» album — if it hits you, work your way backwards from there, if it doesn't, it is probably recommendable to stay away from the earlier, even more sparse records.

 

○ Atheist: «Tech death metal» from Florida, these guys made three albums in the late 1980s / early 1990s that made a small, but stern group of admirers and critics very happy — with a syn­thesis of thrash / death metal clichés (speed, heaviness, apocalyptic vibe, growling vocals, the works) and elements of modern jazz / Latin melodicity and unpredictability. This «intellectuali­zed» version of moshpit fury is, at worst, curious, and at best, fascinating. Recently reformed, but no longer all that fresh or interesting, stick to the early days. Possible starting point: Unquestio­nable Presence (1991) is usually selected as the high watermark, although, personally, it wearies me out quicker than the slightly more subdued and diverse Elements (1993).

 

○ Autechre: The electronic pride of Manchester — Autechre consists of Rob Brown and Sean Booth, who have made it their life's work to combine the essence of ambient, industrial, and free-form avantgarde music inside the small brain of a microchip and conjure the illusion that it is the microchip itself that is operating the brain. If listening to early Autechre is like walking through the robot-operated factories of the Snow Queen, then «mature» Autechre is the soundtrack to the busy life of veteran nanites hurrying for the nanorobot race. Unfortunately, since most of this mu­sic operates on the intellectual rather than emotional level, and is best enjoyed in the company of a Stephen Hawking bestseller, there is quite a bit of redundancy in the Autechre catalog, to say the least. Possible starting point: Tri Repetae (1995) is probably the best summary of early Au­techre; Confield (2001) is for the truly adventurous hero who likes his Modern Art with serious French fries and bacon on the side.

 

☺Auteurs, The: Really only just one auteur: well-educated, misanthropic, highly ambitious Brit kid Luke Haines, feigning an actual «band» with a little help from his friends. Sometimes hailed as being among the first — and unjustly unsung — heroes of Britpop, The Auteurs are not so much about breaking musical barriers (although the music is always careful enough to avoid the boring clichés of «alt-rock») as they are about being a launchpad for Haines' «auteur vision»: if you feel partial to his confused / confusing mix of snobbery, world-hatred, and nostalgia for the blessed times when art seemed to be changing the world, you will love all of The Auteurs' cata­log (not to mention Luke's subsequent projects). If you are only in it for the chord changes, well... this is passable, not unpleasant Nineties' electric pop with cello overtones. Possible starting point: New Wave (1993) is The Auteurs at their freshest, and then just proceed from there until you get enough — four albums ain't that much of a catalog, anyway.

 

○ Ayreon: Sometimes mistaken for an actual «band», Ayreon is really the artistic moniker of Ar­jen Lucassen, an eccentric Dutch guy specializing in prog-metal fantasies. What sets him apart from hundreds of similar acts is ambition: Lucassen's goal is to become the Wagner of rock music, and for almost two decades he has been steadily hammering out his «Ring» — huge, sprawling prog-metal operas, each one stretched over 2 CDs and featuring guest vocalists from every symph- or power-metal band to have ever walked the Earth. Accusing this guy of cheesiness is like accusing cheese of cheesiness — whether you will be able to see his good sides behind the cheese is a different, much more complex, matter. Possible starting point: Universal Migrator (2000) is probably his peak, particularly the progressive-oriented Pt. 1, not so much the metal-oriented Pt. 2 — but when each following album so very consciously tries to «outpeak» its pre­decessor, it is hard to speak in terms of highs and lows.

 

○ Babes In Toyland: Along with Hole, this other pack of «kinderwhores», led by Kat Bjelland, heavily added to the overall glory of Minneapolis in the early 1990s. Without any particular in­strumental or songwriting talent to their name, they mostly depended on sheer energy and Kat's sometimes genuinely scary ability to rise to ever new levels of heavy rock hysteria — at their best, they were like the perfect 1990s band to vent one's frustration to, particularly if you were a girl, and in some way, some of their stuff (usually the fast, chuggy ones without delving too deep into the mystery of one's sexual nature) still sounds fresh today. For a band that only released three pro­per LPs they do have quite a bit of filler, though. Possible starting point: Spanking Machine (1990), released just before the grunge craze hit and made them «sludgify» their sound, has most of the best songs, even though Fontanelle (1992) was a bigger critical and commercial hit.

 

○ Bardo Pond: Roll shoegaze, stoner rock, and ambient into one lump, soak it in psychedelic sauce, and what you have is Bardo Pond, Philadelphia's musical gift to the world of dangerous chemical substances. For the most part, these guys specialize in lengthy, sprawling sonic scapes that allegedly represent direct musical equivalents of tripping — meaning that most of their al­bums are generally interchangeable, although the early ones are still more recommendable due to the freshness of approach. Possible starting point: Amanita (1996) is arguably their most critical­ly recognized effort, so why not go along?

 

○ Barenaked Ladies: This occasionally delightful, but just as frequently annoying Canadian nerd-rock outfit elicits decidedly mixed feelings. At their best, Steve Page and Ed Robertson, the band's driving force, could crank out smart, funny, educated, and fairly catchy folk-pop and po­wer-pop tunes on par with the best singer-songwriters of the 1990s. However, already at a very early stage in the band's career, they became so afraid of getting pigeonholed into the «pop joker» category, along with They Might Be Giants and the rest of them, that they launched a «matu­ra­tion» process — learning how to write deadly serious and deadly boring alt-rock and adult con­temporary material (still loaded with thoughtful and creative lyrics so that the critical press could be properly sucked up to). This essentially means that, for every great Barenaked Ladies power pop anthem, there is a comparably awful Barenaked Ladies «roots-rocker» — listener beware, unless said listener, like so many high school and college kids in the early 1990s, grew up with the Ladies as a fashion icon; for everybody else, I am afraid, most of their stuff will be anything but timeless. Possible starting point: Gordon (1992) illustrates their «quirky» side best of all — start there and proceed with caution; I would advise focusing on subsequent «quirky» albums, like Stunt and Maroon, rather than the «serious» stuff, and definitely recommend forgetting about the band altogether upon the departure of Page after Snacktime! (2008).

 

○ Bark Psychosis: A strange combo, essentially a one-man band (with a bunch of rotating col­laborators) represented by enigmatic British visionary Graham Sutton who, if you like to stick to critical exaggerations, singlehandedly invented «post-rock» circa 1994. Well, not really: what he really did was take the grand vision of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis and scale it down to a somewhat more humbly, more homely state, making music that may easily sound deadly boring one minute and deeply penetrating the next one. On the whole, I would assess anybody's chances at enjoying or abhorring this shapeless synthesis of soft rock, smooth jazz, dark folk, and electronica around 50/50, but give it a try anyway — they only have had two complete albums out in three decades, anyway, which is a rather respectable feat: with this kind of formula, less demanding artists could have slapped out a new boring record every six months or so. Possible starting point: Hex (1994) has, indeed, been the album to have caused the appearance of the term «post-rock», so it's well worth getting to know at least for historical purposes.

 

☺Beck: This guy is honestly amazing — one of the best songwr... er, visionaries of his genera­tion, I'd say. Few people have been more successful in meaningfully synthesizing «old school» musical directions, from pre-war blues and folk to Sixties' pop and psychedelia, with the hip 'n' cool urban culture of the 1990s and beyond. It is all the more fascinating that the man's individual strengths are almost negligible (he is a mediocre instrumentalist, a technically poor singer, and a copycat melody writer), yet in the end, his creativity and gift for self-expression know no limits, especially when he teams up with helpful producers like the Dust Brothers (to create head-spin­ning party grooves) or Nigel Godrich (to wallow in self-pity and bring on the end of the world). Possible starting point: I'd advise to bypass the early «anti-folk» rehearsal crap and start right off with Mellow Gold (1994) and then go all the way to the end — most of the man's albums do not repeat themselves, although it is not highly likely you will love all of them equally.

 

☺Belle And Sebastian: Another bunch of melancholic, but friendly Scottish people, led by the mildly autistic, isolationist musical persona of Steve Murdoch and featuring an assortment of chamber pop players with great taste in arrangements. Over the years, Murdoch has gradually grown from «that little kid sitting doodling in the back of the class while the big bullies run the world around him» to «that grown-up little kid who is now waging his war with the bullies from a position of increased self-confidence», as the music of Belle & Sebastian made a jump from moody chamber-folk to a more upbeat and ironic style of power-pop, and chances are that you might easily get to like «early B&S» but not «late B&S», or vice versa. Possible starting point: for the early period, the universally acclaimed masterpiece is If You're Feeling Sinister (1996), but if you are in the mood for additional diversity and ringing electric guitar melodies, I'd recom­mend beginning with Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2004) instead.

 

☺Ben Folds (Five): Ben Folds is a nice little guy from North Carolina who has managed to in­vent a pretty nifty format for himself in the 1990s — his band, The Ben Folds Five, was actually a «power trio» with a piano-playing rather than guitar-tooting frontman, that-a-way, combining the piano pop legacy of Elton John and Billy Joel with the versatility of Cream. In their prime, the Five were unstoppable — Ben Folds churned out mighty pop hooks and imbued them with modern irony, whereas the rhythm section supplied some of the most monstruous energy ever heard in «sissy pop» music. Things went downhill when the trio split up: Ben was able to carry on as a «mature» solo artist for some time, but gradually, his hooks became mushy, and his intro­spective lyrics and atmospheres became repetitive. By the time the band decided to reunite (circa 2012), it seems to have been too late to start all over again, but while they're still at it, some hope does remain. Possible starting point: Whatever & Ever Amen (1997) probably showcases the original band's strengths more concisely than any other album, although, to be honest, all three of their original albums are minor classics in their own rights.

 

○ Beth Orton: This British singer-songwriter, a little too refined for her own good, started out strong as one of the chief figures in the «folktronica» movement — not exactly the female Beck, but, with the help of a few good friends (like William Orbit), she was able to combine folk-based singer-songwriting craft with creative digital arrangements, merging past and future in an enjoy­able and respectable fashion. Then pride and purism got the better of her, and throughout the 21st century she has been reinventing herself as a quintessential folk-based songwriter. Unfortunately, her composing, playing, and singing talents are not exceptional, and unless her later records were to be your very first acquaintance with folk-rock as such, chances are that you will be bored stiff rather than deeply moved with them. Possible starting point: Perversely enough, my favorite re­cord of hers is SuperPinkyMandy (1993), the most electronic-sounding album she'd ever put out and later on, disowned and thrown out of print by Beth herself; if you are afraid to go along with such an iconoclastic preference, Trailerpark (1996) is the obvious choice to start before the strong sides of the lady start dwindling away and the weak sides begin taking over.

 

○ Bettie Serveert: Critically acclaimed, but forever-underground Dutch indie rock band. Smart, preten­tious, sometimes annoyingly hip leading lady Carol van Dijk serves as its main attraction, along with not-too-original, but extremely competent, diverse, and tasteful lead guitar player Peter Visser. The band's discography suffers from a tendency to produce underwritten material, distinguished by a «look at us, we're so Neil Young» or «look at us, we're so Lou Reed» or «look at us, we're so Joni Mitchell» feel — but in between all the second-hand imitations, there lurks a genuine spirit, and every now and then, they show they can master the form-to-substance match as good as anyone. Possible starting point: With a band of this kind, it makes sense to start at the very beginning, which is Palomine (1992). From there on, it really depends on whether you manage to establish an emotional link with Carol's vibe. If you do not, leave them be, but before you do, do check out Oh, Mayhem (2013) — the band at its poppiest and least pretentious.

 

○ Beulah: Loosely tied up with the «Elephant 6» collective in form and strongly in spirit, this band was the brainchild of San Franciscans Mike Kurosky (who provided most of the writing and ideological marrow) and Bill Swan (who... uh... played most of the trumpet parts) and its purpose was to take over the world by restoring its musical preferences to the Beatles, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, Love, and just a little Pink Floyd, while at the same time making the music more artistically palatable to the cool tastes of cool contemporary audiences. The result was a string of albums that boast some of the lushest and tastiest sound in late 1990s / early 2000s art-pop. Un­fortunately, Kurosky's songwriting genius never quite managed to match the undeniable strength of his love for his musical idols, and ultimately, Beulah failed at finding their own face and letting the people understand what it was exactly that they added to that old legacy — at least, such is my conception of these guys, loosely supported by the fact that they spent most of their time struggling to capture their market, and finally dissolved when it became clear that no one was buying their stuff. Great form — questionable substance. Possible starting point: I think they came closest to «meaningful» music with their third album, The Coast Is Never Clear (2001), which might be the most rational place to start with them. If you find it too pretentious or too phoney, though, don't even try bothering with the rest. 

 

○ Bikini Kill: Leaders of the «riot grrrrl» movement, these girls (and one guy!) pretty much em­bodied the whole «feminist punk» idea in the first half of the 1990s, being so aggressive and ideo­logically supercharged that they even had the balls to denounce Courtney Love as a phoney (well, she was, wasn't she?). Rudimentary musicianship implied that the band positioned them­selves as socially conscious rabble-rousers rather than «artists», but that did not prevent them from evolving — where the first songs are loud, noisy, hysterical, and amateurish, eventually they would start moving into more melodic territory. Unfortunately, that evolution also made them implode already after their second LP, just as they were getting ready to expand their ideo­logical palette to include a bit of music, just for a change. Possible starting point: Anywhere, given that their discography is so short. The second LP should be more «listenable» from the average music lover's viewpoint, but Pussy Whipped (1993) is certainly far more «quintessen­tial» as far as letting one hear what these gals were really all about.

 

☺Björk: One of the greatest and most unique talents of the 1990s, Björk's transition into the 21st century has been rather lackluster in comparison — but this is only because anything will seem lackluster next to the string of spectacular masterpieces that this curious Icelandic sprite had created at her peak. Like so many other idiosyncratic great ones, from Bob Dylan to Kate Bush, her music and image usually provoke extreme forms of adoration or extreme syndromes of irri­tation, but there is no denying that she brought a hitherto unknown style of artistic expression to the decade, taking full advantage of her genetic oddities (the voice and the mind) to amaze us at a time when we'd thought we'd seen and heard it all, mostly. Her ideas on songwriting, arranging, and mixing that odd voice in with the acoustic and electronic textures have all entered the golden textbook, but above all that, there is also a seductive human component — the feel of the idealis­tic, uncorrupted human being reveling in the wonders of the world — that converts all the bizarre­ness and uniqueness into genius. Sadly, this has somehow deteriorated in the last decades as her fame seems to have gotten the better of her, but who really judges a genius on the basis of his/her failures? Possible starting point: From Debut (1993) and right up to Vespertine (2001), Björk is unstoppable, and each album has its own face; later on, proceed at your own risk.

 

☺Black Box Recorder: One out of several «same basic idea, widely different execution» pro­jects of Bitter Brit Luke Haines, this one lasted for about five years and involved the cooperation of former Jesus and Mary Chain member John Moore and ice-cold, lovely and deadly Sarah Nixey as the principal vocal channel through which Haines and Moore poured their misanthropic and claustrophobic sentiments, as well as their love-and-hate relationship with the United King­dom. Their legacy is relatively small — three original LPs and one more of leftovers — but most of it is priceless: catchy, shivery, beautiful, and creepy art-pop songs, with imaginative acoustic, electric, and electronic arrangements and an unforgettable vocal tone that seeps under your skin like refrigerant from a deliberately out-of-order air cooler. Rarely has steaming bile been delivered with such seductive grace; unfortunately, for that very reason this is one of those bands which, although perfectly accessible, will never be too popular among the general crowds. But then, I guess you're not from the general crowd anyway, are you, Mr. Reader? Possible starting point: England Made Me (1998) is their first and arguably their best, but there is no sense what­soever in not getting acquainted with the rest of their catalog, since each following album has a musical character of its own.

 

○ Black Crowes: In the late 1980s, these guys emerged to cleverly occupy an empty niche — old school blues-rock and roots-rock, played with plenty of old-school dirt, sleaze, distortion, and irreverence: the «bad retro boys» of rock'n'roll music, quite a sight for the sore eyes of the baby boomer musical press. On the surface, the Robinson brothers and their team certainly qualify, but their main problem is not even in lacking proper musical genius (as songwriters, I would never place them within a mile of Aerosmith or Lynyrd Skynyrd, let alone the Stones or Led Zep): their main problem is the extremely conscious «revivalist» attitude, as they have always seemed to revere and sanctify the past, much like the Greenwich Village purists did with folk music in the pre-Dylan era. Subsequently, I can't help it if I have always found their stuff excruciatingly boring on the average — they have a handful of accidental successes, all right, but on the whole, they seem like perfect proof of the statement that you can admire the past, but you cannot truly bring it back. Possible starting point: The first two or three albums are usually extolled as «cer­tified classics», but the single largest amount of good songs they wrote, I think, is contained on By Your Side (1999) — a controversial decision on my part, yet it wouldn't hurt to check out this overlooked album in addition to acquainting yourself with the Rolling Stone recommendations.

 

○ Blackmore's Night: His Deep Purple and Rainbow days behind him, Ritchie Blackmore final­ly discovered his one and only true self: playing Renaissance-inspired folk-pop behind the back (and ample bosom) of lady Candice Night, a former Long Island resident who went from Black­more fan to Blackmore partner to Blackmore spouse over a period of twenty years. Together, they have already released close to a dozen records, all of them very similar in style, covering old and contemporary material as well as writing quasi-original tunes with the sole purpose of using them as entertainment for the dinner guests of King Henry VIII. As a rule, it's all very corny-sounding, and should never be taken for the real thing — Blackmore's Night strive for fantasy amusement, not for «authenticity»; keeping that in mind, the early albums do have some catchy tunes on them, and Candice Night is always mildly pleasant in her delivery, though never truly outstanding. Pos­sible starting point: Fires At Midnight (2001) arguably has the largest percentage of catchy and / or inventive numbers; you might want to define the number of further BN albums you want to hear relative to the excitement level generated by the title track, or ʽHome Againʼ.

 

☺Blur: One of the flashiest symbols of «Britpop» in the 1990s, Blur wrote some of the best songs of the decade without being particularly innovative — from Madchester influences to shoe­gaze influences to early Britpoppers like Suede to American indie-rock heroes like Sonic Youth, they thrived on swallowing other people's ideas and reworking them in a more accessible, enjoy­able, and meaningful way (much like the Beatles, don't you think?). With Damon «Mick Jagger» Albarn serving as their primary billboardish, hipper-than-hip attraction, and Graham «Keith Richards» Coxon generally supplying the no-bull melodic basis for the songs, they were virtually unstoppable in both their «British» phase and their «Americanized» one — that is, before Coxon quit and the band dragged on through one more album on flash power alone, no substance. In the late 2000s, they got back together, but looks like that glorious decade won't be recaptured in any way any time soon. Possible starting point: Parklife (1994) usually holds the maximum amount of votes for the most quintessential Blur album, but really, this is one of those bands where it wouldn't hurt to check out the entire catalog, even including their weakest albums that bookmark their career from both ends (Leisure and Think Tank).

 

○ Boards Of Canada: Scotland's national banner of electronic pride — two guys with plenty of circuits who made themselves look really big in the 1990s by integrating club beats, fuzzy ambi­ent soundscapes, and a flashy modern art philosophy that somehow linked it all to memories of childhood, campfires, and other «natural» stuff. Personally, I find them tremendously overrated, their artistic synthesis mostly inefficient, and their music more often boring than not («elevator electronics»), yet somehow, they actually managed to push the appropriate buttons at the time, ensuring themselves a solid place in the electronic pantheon of the 1990s — go figure, I will probably never understand the tricky laws of functioning that apply in this electronic business. Possible starting point: Music Has The Right To Children (1998) is «generally acknowledged» to be their masterpiece, but their only record to which I found myself warming up at least partial­ly was The Campfire Headphase (2005), where they found a quirky, novel way of marrying their electronics to acoustic and electric guitars — naturally, they never expanded on that syn­thesis and soon returned to their old boring ways.

 

☺Boo Radleys, The: These Brits originally appeared on the intersection of the shoegazing wave and the Madchester wave, combining dreamy-fuzzy atmospherics with metronomic funky dance­beats, but never managing to override the success or vision of My Bloody Valentine. Eventually, under the guidance of chief songwriter Martin Carr and his ghostly-crooner-style vocally en­dowed partner Sice, they ended up casting off the dark cloak and revealing their secret — namely, that, like so many other people, they wanted to be The Beatles of the 1990s. Whether they actually had the balls to carry out the promise is debatable (critical and popular opinion are vastly divided), but the scope of their musical searching and the quality of their songwriting steadily improved up to the very end, when, disillusioned with relative lack of popular success, the Boos finally called it a day. Not a «great» group by any means, but a significant chapter in the history of UK music in the 1990s nonetheless. Possible starting point: somewhat contrary to the general consensus, I consider Kingsize (1998), their last record, to be their most fully, diversely, and in­telligently realized offering — one could easily start from there and work one's way backwards.

 

☻Boris: This experimental (and extremely productive) Japanese trio is a perfect example of why I do not think much of «Japanese rock» in general, even if it is not nice to generalize from one example. They started out as an extremist noise combo, churning out albums that threatened to out-Merzbow Merzbow itself, and commanded attention if only for the arrogance of their extre­mism. Later on, they moved to all sorts of different formats, playing a variety of hard rock styles, being heavily influenced by atmospheric post-rock, even toying with the J-pop format on occa­sion, and making quite a name for themselves in the hipster underground with the unpredictability of their music and the diversity of their album sleeves. However, on the whole, I find them utterly derivative, quite devoid of creative genius (the best thing they can claim for themselves is the thick, crushing tone of their guitarist, a sultry lady who calls herself Wata), way overproductive, and, with just a few exceptions, unable to come up with any good reasons for the existence of their music. Possible starting point: Flood (2000), an early exercise in heavy atmospherics, is arguably one of their easiest-tolerated albums and their one single most successful stab at an ori­ginal vision. Should you, by chance, be totally «flooded» with it, feel free to expand back and forward into their catalog — then you will be «flooded» quite literally.

 

☺Brainiac: This short-lived alt-rock band from the mid-Nineties, whose creative anabasis was tragically cut short by the accidental death of key member Tim Taylor, will be of at least passable interest to all fans of the «quirky» and «crazy» segments of the post-punk scene. Heavily influen­ced by both the Pixies and the grunge scene that came after the Pixies, but leaving out most of the angst and anger and replacing them with loud, abrasive, but inoffensive weirdness, these guys combined elements of punk, avantgarde, and electronica to push out a really distinctive sound: rather monotonous in impression and largely centered around just one mood, but cool enough to keep the listener happy for most of the average thirty minutes that each of their albums lasts. Not the best music of the Nineties, for sure, but not to be completely forgotten, either. Possible star­ting point: Bonsai Superstar (1994) is arguably Brainiac at their most «mature» and «balanced», but the other two records are well worth checking out as well.

 

☺Breeders, The: An autonomous offshoot off the venerable stem of the Pixies, the Breeders began life as a vehicle for the songwriting, singing, and playing talents of their eccentric, mother­ly lady bass player Kim Deal; later on, with the addition of her much less talented, but spiritually similar sister Kelley, they became a somewhat haunting, «femme-fatale-and-her-shadow» pre­sence on the indie scene. More often than that, they were a haunting absence on the indie scene, only releasing an album every half-decade or so. Nowhere near as essential listening as the actual Pixies, they still might easily become the pet favorite of anybody susceptible to Kim Deal's cha­risma-enigma aura: she has a one-of-a-kind knack for tiny, but deep-sinking vocal and instrumen­tal hooks, to which the production of Steve Albini (a lifelong pal of theirs) usually adds extra sharpness. Possible starting point: The first one, Pod (1990), has the label of being their most «legendary» offering, especially after its endorsement by Kurt Cobain, but my own favourite is the second one — Last Splash (1993) is indie-rock at its most befuddling and catchy.

 

○ Brian Jonestown Massacre, The: This is essentially just a cool, flashy, and appropriately hoo­liganish brand name for the production of one Anton Newcombe, a hazy, lazy, and dangerous Californian who has allegedly competed with all the original Stones not only in matters of music, but also in matters of hard drug consumption — and, unlike the Stones, he seems to actually be composing much, if not most, of his music while on drugs. So, if you want to know what real «music on drugs» sounds like, know that it sounds as if you took one riff from some 1960s psy­chedelic rock tune, turned it into a groove/vamp, looped it for five/seven/ten minutes at a slow speed or, at best, mid-tempo, spiced it up with various sonic effects, and repeated the same pro­cess for dozens of songs and then dozens of albums in a row — yes, this is basically the formula behind most of The BJM's music, and it is quite amazing that sometimes it actually works. Pos­sible starting point: Take It From The Man! (1996) is probably Anton's first fully fleshed out record, on which he renounces most of the hip underground trends of the late 1980s / early 1990s and concentrates on answering the question, «what would the Rolling Stones' music sound like in 1968 if they let Brian Jones do all the work?» It must be noted, though, that subsequently the BJM go into a real creative slump, out of which Newcombe only emerged, for a brief period, with My Bloody Underground (2008), a noticeably darker, angrier, more hard rocking reinvention of the same formula, in full accordance with his plan «to keep music evil». Hopefully he'll just keep himself alive long enough to restore music to its proper levels of evilness.

 

○ Built To Spill: One of the pillars of Nineties' indie rock, the brainchild of guitar wizard and strict musical philosopher Doug Martsch, this band has a very dedicated fanbase, but one has to come to terms with the fact that it is really all about Doug Martsch and his guitar — which he plays fairly well, but most of all he is fond of overdubbing multiple guitar parts to create «poly­melodies» that can be psychedelically overwhelming, but can also be confusing and seemingly meaningless. In other words, this is a band that is very easy to respect, but not so easy to love: one of those «much too smart for their own good» cases. Also, most of their albums sound the same, with minor nuances distinguishing one from the other, and it is not clear to me that for the past fifteen years Doug Martsch has actually managed to get a really new word in, instead of just re-chewing the same old truisms. He does consistently play a real mean guitar, though, and maybe that's all there should be to it, after all. Possible starting point: Perfect From Now On (1997) is usually acknowledged as their first «great» offering, and it's certainly not bad, so why not start here?

 

1998-2017

 

☺Adebisi Shank: Funny Irish math-rockers who supplement their passion for calculated riffs, complex tapping techniques, and polygonal song structures with old-school garage-rock energy and plenty of both kick-ass attitude and humor. Real fun stuff, and the bass guitarist plays with a bag over his head — if that does not bawl you over, you're probably a Justin Bieber fan or some­thing. Possible starting point: This Is The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank (2008) — fascinating title, isn't it? And the second one is even better.

 

☺Adele: Big girl with big... vocals, suffering from the biggest problem of our fin-de-siecle's arti­ficial intellectualism: premature maturity — why so serious???? — but at least her maturity seems somewhat genuine, in the face of so many repugnant fakers. Pos­sible starting point: 21 (2011), then proceed backwards in time to 19 (2008).

 

○ Agalloch: A rare case of a critically successful «black/folk metal» band of purely American origin. Based on, for the most part, the Scandinavian metal scene, these guys have managed to in­vent an eternal winter world all their own. Memorable melody does not count for much in it, but atmos­phere certainly does, and if snow-covered pine trees against grey, sunless skies are the thing to trigger your deepest emotions, Agalloch offer an excellent soundtrack to this triggering. Pos­sible starting point: The Mantle (2002).

 

○ Agnes Obel: Jury still out.

 

○ Akron/Family: Professional weirdos from Oregon. Initial purpose: integrate meditative rootsy folk with whatever comes along. Along came electronic hooliganry, free-form jazz, psychedelia, and absurdism. At their best, they have developed a lovable ultra-modern take on Sixties idealism for people who only smoke their mushrooms picked fresh from Derrida's backyard. At their worst, they are simply a huge, smelly, frustrating musical question mark. Possible starting point: Love Is Simple (2007).

 

○ Alabama Shakes: Judgement postponed until they follow their debut album up with some­thing else. Read the review.

 

○ Alcest: One of the projects of a lonesome French musician who calls himself ʽNeigeʼ. At his best, the guy creates repetitive, but highly atmospheric, somewhat otherworldly soundscapes by com­bining elements shoegaze, black metal, New Age, and traditional French pop. At his worst, he does exactly the same, but bores instead of mesmerizing. A curious phenomenon, although I am afraid that, as in so many other similar situations, his first album will forever remain his best one. Possible starting point: Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde (2007).

 

☻Alicia Keys: Epic fail. First two albums have some good songs, but if she continues to slide down the predictable chute of Tough Girl With Melisma, I prefer Nazism. Pos­sible starting point: The Diary Of Alicia Keys (2003).

 

☺Allo Darlin': So far, a charming twee pop outfit with a romantically intelligent and intelligent­ly romantic Elizabeth Morris and a bunch of instrumental backers churning out feather-light, but frequently pretty and well-written music. So far with but two albums to stake their reputation on, and the second one is disappointing, but be sure to check out the debut: Allo Darlin' (2010).

 

○ Alt-J: Jury still out.

 

○ Amy Winehouse: Her personal problems overshadow her talent as far as the press goes, but I am certain she can be trusted with modernizing jazz music; it is up to the future to change that can to must. 2011 update: Well, the future is upon us — heck, of all the people to trust with mo­der­nizing jazz music we had to trust this incorrigible junkie. RIP Amy, we can only hope that at least these two albums will be remembered fondly. Pos­sible starting point: Back To Black (2007).

 

○ And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead: Their desire to be bigger than everything else sometimes pays off, and that's the best thing I can say about them. Overrated, but a cultural phenomenon for sure. Pos­sible starting point: Source Tags & Codes (2000).

 

☺Andrew Bird: Violin music for intellectual snobs. More precisely, music from a well-educa­ted guy significantly endowed with creative forces; erroneously pigeonholed as a «neo-swing» ar­tist at first, Bird has merged folk, jazz, chamber pop, psychedelia, and whatever else comes his way into a literate melancholic-romantic brew all his own. The only downside is that now he has a ste­a­dy formula, and it can eventually get on one's nerves. Possible starting point: The Swim­ming Hour (2001).

 

○ Angel Olsen: This lady may not be alone in her intense desire to adapt traditional values of singer-songwriting to the modern age (her inspirations are all over the place, from Roy Orbison to Joni Mitchell and from Leonard Cohen to Stevie Nicks), but she has a stronger personality than most of the competition, including a cool vocal range, the ability to go from crooning and moa­ning to wailing and screaming if the situation demands it, and impressive lyrical skills that do not allow to easily laugh off her ongoing exploration of the woman spirit. That said, her melodic skills are tremendously derivative, her atmospheric fixations monotonous, and her musicianship deeply secondary to her Artistry — which might suffice, perhaps, for putting her in the pantheon of the 2010s, but hardly elevates her over her many influences. Possible starting point: My Woman (2016), her third album, is the one that will probably be less boring for the general listener than the previous two.

 

○ Animal Collective: Called the biggest thing of the 00's by the smallest army of fans of the 00's, which, sadly, means that, unless you're Klaatu's cousin twice removed, you probably won't enjoy them. I don't, but I'm certainly intrigued by these Beach Boys from a not so parallel world. Pos­sible starting point: Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009).

 

○ Antlers, The: Led by Brooklyn-based Peter Silberman (for the first two records, actually, just a solo project for the man), this indie outfit has big, idealistic ambitions which are at times hard to balance with the somewhat modest talent — but the man does have a beautiful, if occasionally arch-whiny, voice, and a knack for hammering out angelic atmosphere and (more rarely) strong melodies. Possible starting point: In The Attic Of The Universe (2007); 2009's Hospice is the band's critically acclaimed breakthrough, but, IMHO, is actually their weakest offering, seducing people through its ambitiousness rather than real quality.

 

○ Antony And The Johnsons: With his early 19th century vocals, masochistic tendencies, and­ro­­gynous image, and swirling mystical arrangements, Antony Hegarty is perfect (un)easy listen­ing for one album, maybe two. It becomes harder to take his spiritualistic theater seriously when you understand that he has nothing else whatsoever up his sleeve, though. Possible starting point: I Am A Bird Now (2005).

 

☺ Arcade Fire: Now this is really one of the biggest — both literally and figuratively — bands of the 00's. Big polyphonic sound, catchy tunes, sensitive and smart mindsets, they have not be­come critical darlings for nothing. Spread the word, brother. Pos­sible starting point: Funeral (2004).

 

☻Architecture In Helsinki: The most intriguing thing about this Australian octet is their band name — considering that their music has nothing whatsoever to do with Finland — and also the baffling way in which they crash-dumped their initially promising career into total disaster. The first two albums were a questionable, but at least somewhat idiosyncratic and thought-provoking mixture of twee-pop, electronica, and surrealism. Then, for some reason, they replaced the psy­chedelia and atmospherics with a strong dance-pop component, without a good idea of how to handle the latter; and, since the overall level of songwriting was never impressive to begin with, their later creations range mostly from «bland and forgettable» to «unintentionally awful». Pos­sible starting point: Fans of absurdist indie-pop might want to briefly check out In Case We Die (2005), then think carefully about whether they are interested in anything else.

 

○ Arctic Monkeys: Intelligent British lads with great taste in influences — way too great to de­velop an interesting enough style of their own. They have mastered their instruments, but they still have to learn to write good melodies to go along with them. Pos­sible starting point: Wha­t­ever People Say I Am... (2006).

 

○ Art Brut: These «neo-punk»-rockers of the Noughties don't write great melodies (haven't all great punk rock melodies already been written?) but compensate for it by being one of the smart­est acts around to play it so utterly dumb, intelligently updating Ramonaesthetics for the next mil­lennium. Hardly essential, but loads of fun for the thinking punker. Pos­sible starting point: Bang Bang Rock & Roll (2005).

 

☺Austra: Essentially a solo electronic project of the Canadian talent Katie Stelmanis, Austra has added a fresh and inspiring touch to the old synth-pop formula that's almost surprising for the 2010s — at least on her first album, Stelmanis made a serious effort to write lots of interesting and relatively complex (but still catchy) melodies, as well as make good use of her classically trained vocals to create a somewhat unique atmosphere, combining Gothic and twee elements at the same time. Think of this as the illegitimate little daughter of Depeche Mode, raised on Belle & Sebastian, or something like that. Unfortunately, as it happens so often, voice and image got stronger over time as melodies grew weaker, but so far, there's still hope for a brighter future. Possible starting point: Feel It Break (2011) is, for now, the uncontested classic.

 

○ Avalanches, The: A «plunderphonics» outfit from Australia that takes its plundering duties so seriously, they only managed to have one LP out over more than ten years of existence. Since I Left You (2001) has been hailed by many as a classic of the genre — and there is probably no harm in checking it out: at best, you will be enthralled by its loud, burly journey through the world of 1970s R&B samples and noise screens, and at worst, you will own some certifiable fod­der for the average intellectual dance party.

 

☺Avett Brothers, The: Originally a «neo-bluegrass» band from North Carolina led by two real brothers, Seth and Scott, these guys have since evolved into a more wide-reaching roots-music-extravaganza. Limited vocalists and instrumentalists, they mainly get by on the strength and in­ventiveness of their songwriting and an unabashedly naïve sentimentality (for which, as it turns out, many people are quite starving in the 2000s). If you can stand the lame banjo playing, their rich catalog does have folksy treasures a-plenty. Possible starting point: A Carolina Jubilee (2003), their first long player, and proceed from there — the lads are fairly consistent.

 

○ Avril Lavigne: The proverbially manufactured «bad girl» of the '00s, Canada's hottest gift to the world of MTV since Alanis Morissette. Her big advantage over most competition is not that she co-writes her own songs (these days, you never know anyway), but that the songs are, for the most part, harmless, fun, and sometimes interestingly written bubblegum pop trash. As long as she keeps those Serious Artistic Ambitions down, she is one of America's relatively more pa­latable mainstream turds, if one ever feels the need to flagellate one's elitist nature. Possible start­ing point: The Best Damn Thing (2007).

 

○ Badly Drawn Boy: Damon Gough is a visually unattractive, painfully intellectual, deeply in­tro­vert virgin (okay, not really true — apparently, he's married with children) who comes from different parts of England, we­ars a furry hat as his trademark and, for over a decade, has been trying to become a new Nick Drake and Brian Wilson for his generation, with degrees of success usually ranging from «deadly boring» to «wait a moment, there just might be something there». General critical consensus, which I am somewhat in agreement with, is that he started out at his highest peak and has been steadily going downhill ever since, but hey, he's only 42 years old as of now. Maybe his children will eventually teach him greatness. Oh wait, he's a virgin. Possible star­ting point: The Hour Of Bewilderbeast (2000).

 

☺ Band Of Horses: More indie-roots-rock from the heartland (Arizona or something), with Ben "Big Beard" Bridwell handling most of the songwriting, singing, and ideological duties. Fortuna­tely, he doth have a serious gift for lovely melody, and even if that does not automatically qualify him as the 21st century Neil Young, it means that each of the band's albums so far has been bet­ter than the previous one. So may we yet live to see Keith Richards induce Bridwell into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Possible starting point: Infinite Arms (2010).

 

☺Baroness: Heavy metal dudes from Savannah, Georgia. Actually, «heavy metal dudes» is a bit impolite, as they set their minds on musical evolution from the very beginning — starting out in quirky math-rock mode, then opting for a more accessible, brawny, anthemic «battle sound», then adding a surprisingly efficient introspective / melancholic side to the experience. No «genius» as such, perhaps, but the band is really among the most interesting and intelligent «heavyweights» out there, at the moment. Possible starting point: Probably Red Album (2007) — their first full LP, arguably the brawniest and ballsiest one; start out there for fun reasons and work your way up as the band attempts to woo you over with more and more seriousness.

 

○ Bat For Lashes: A pseudonym for Natasha Khan (as if anyone with such a name really nee­ded one), a one-woman band who, at her best, combines trash mysticism with interesting musical ide­as culled from various alleys of art-rock and post-rock, and, at her worst — way more often than necessary — combines trash mysticism with nothing else. Possible starting point: Fur And Gold (2006), but I would recommend avoiding the (so far, only) follow-up.

 

○ BATS: «Math-rock» combined with a punk attitude — like a Discipline-era King Crimson out of the slums; all too befitting for a bunch of wild Dubliners who decided to vent their frustration in polygonal shapes rather than chaotic waves of feedback. Just two albums so far, but highly pro­mi­sing ones, even if their odd combination of street attitudes with refined intellectualism is not likely to win the band too many fans. Possible starting point: Red In Tooth & Claw (2009).

 

○ Battles: Another «math-rock» outfit from the depths of New York City, this one managed to become more noticeable than other such units for its strange mix of avantgardist art-rock with electronica, going as far as to produce the rock-instrumentation equivalent of what used to be synthesized with computers. Slight, but fun and thought-provoking. Possible starting point: Mir­rored (2007).

 

○ Beach House: Dream-pop male/female duo from Baltimore who devote most of their time to writing the soundtrack to an imaginary Carlos Castaneda rewrite of Alice In Wonderland. But this is not as bad as it may sound: their friendly guitar-and-organ sound represents one of those cases where the soundtrack can make the content completely irrelevant. Pos­sible starting point: Devo­tion (2008).

 

○ Beachwood Sparks: A Californian band that offer a pleasant, but not altogether substantial, mix of soft country-rock and psychedelia — 21st century «space cowboy-ism» as it is, taking its major cues from late period Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers, but pushing ever and ever further into «dreamland» and even ambient territory. Unfortunately, the band members are neither awe­some instrumentalists nor talented songwriters, and usually try to compensate with predictable atmosphere-generating technologies (droning, echo, multi-tracked harmonies, etc.). Possible star­ting point: Beachwood Sparks (2000) is the band at its least lethargic — with each subsequent release, they only dive deeper and deeper into somnambulant territory, so proceed with caution, and remember about Dorothy and the poppy field.

 

☺Bees, The: Two light-hearted guys and a bunch of sidemen from the Isle of Wight. Although their first album came out in 2002, their knowledge of music and willingness to be influenced by it seems to have stopped around 1975; they have mastered the basic techniques of sunshine pop, garage proto-punk, modest art-rock, various «black» genres of the early 1970s (from funk to Ca­rib­bean), and nothing else. Fortunately, they also have a good ear for melody: an absolute must-hear for all lovers of intelligent retro-pop. Possible starting point: Sunshine Hit Me (2002).

 

○ Beirut: Essentially a one-man band dominated by Zachary Condon, a one-of-a-kind project that could be subtitled «Reflections of a young New Mexican on the wide outside world of Eu­rope». The young New Mexican loves ukuleles, heavy brass, and accordeons, does not know or care about how to write memorable songs, and flaunts around his innocent charisma; depending on your immunity level, you will probably love or hate this. Possible starting point: Gulag Or­kestar (2006).

 

☺Beta Band, The: Critically acclaimed Scottish genre-hoppers who managed to accompany the turn of the millennium by marrying Sixties' folk-rock and psychedelia to all the trappings of the modern age (electronica, hip-hop, trip-hop, etc.) before deciding that, in the end, they only wan­ted to be a bunch of melancholic space-rockers. Decoding their creations is an elegant intellectual pleasure, but falling in love with them is a much more difficult proposition. Pos­sible starting point: The Three EPs (1998).

 

☻Beyoncé: Even more so after starting her own solo career, free from the format limitations of Destiny's Child, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter seems to have become one of the musical fashion sym­bols of the 2000s. Strong, healthy, beautiful, on the cutting edge of production / technology, she is no less than this decade's symbol of glossy perfection. Like every such symbol, she is not at all devoid of talent — good voice, self-assured personality, and even a limited amount of composing skills all present. Nevertheless, on the large scale it all comes back to the same perversion of the «give the people what they want» principle, surreptitiously transmutated into «give the people what we will make them want». Clichéd lyrics, plastic, soulless musical arrangements, prevalence of image over substance, in short, all the usual things that have, for a long time now, separated «new school R&B» from «old school R&B». This is not to say that there isn't at least a small bunch of impressive grooves to be found on Beyoncé records, but overall, her «sexy black lady» persona comes across every bit as artificial as, say, Britney's «slutty white tramp» image. Pos­sible starting point: B'Day (2007) arguably shows the dame at her most «experimental» — if you find nothing to like about that one, you shouldn't probably even bother with the rest.

 

○ Black Dice: This electronic outfit from Brooklyn started out on a tremendously promising note — their first two albums are not so much proper «electronic music» as they are a sort of «electro­nic jungle», painting bizarre and intriguing landscapes that, unlike most of the electronics I have heard, transport you to forests, mountains, and beaches rather than the usually expected «outer space» environment. Unfortunately, just two albums into their exploration, they switched to a much less interesting direction — more danceable, more noisy, more abrasive, but also more generic and offering much less food for the imagination. Possible starting point: Creature Com­forts (2004) is my unquestionable favorite, although critical opinion tends to praise the previous album, Beaches And Canyons, even more highly.

 

☺Black Keys, The: A guitar-drums duo (no bass!) from Akron, Ohio, these guys have done some impressively serious work convincing their native country, if not the world, that they might just be the single best «rock and roll» act of the new millennium. Initially drawing upon such in­fluences as «dark» boogie-blues, garage-punk, and proto-metal, they have since expanded into all sorts of new directions. Songwriting may be hit-and-miss, but their sense of style is nearly always impeccable. Not to be missed! Possible starting point: The Big Come Up (2002) — or, if mini­malism pisses you off, there is no going wrong with the band's latest, El Camino (2011).

 

○ Black Lips: A «flower punk» band from Georgia, originally famous not so much for their mu­sic as for their provocative public behaviour, partially built on idolizing the likes of crazy man G. G. Allin; all the while, though, they were slowly forging their craft, eventually emerging as smart and professional synthesizers of the modern spirit with 1960's garage-rock and adjacent genres. They have lots of drawbacks: they can't sing, can't play, can't write memorable songs, and have lots of fond feelings for this awful thing called «lo-fi», but at least points 1 and 2 are neglectable for a punk band, and they compensate point 3 with intelligence, diversity, and an overall fun at­mosphere that, on a good day, may be quite contagious. Possible starting point: Good Bad Not Evil (2007) — some of their most successful songs here, and mostly free from the evils of lo-fi for a change. Disturbed fans of lo-fi punk will prefer the earlier stuff from the hooligan days.

 

○ Black Mountain: Neo-hippies from Canada — bearded, smelly, 5-to-1 male-to-female ratio, the works — that make fun music (apocalyptic / sci-fi psychedelia) which alternately evokes 1967, 1970, and 1973. No great shakes, but they write nice songs, they mean well, and they can serve as a strong ladder that leads both into the future and the past. Provided they have a future, of course; the band is quite a fresh one. Pos­sible starting point: In The Future (2008).

 

○ Blitzen Trapper: A retro-oriented band from Portland, Oregon, led by young intellectual visio­nary Eric Earley, whose vision is, at worst, always sufficient to turn Blitzen Trapper albums into pleasant listening and, at best, could almost hint at an entirely new, exciting way to integrate the good old «Americana» into the 21st century. Unfortunately, the band's several latest albums have been too heavy on modesty, humility, and style, and rather too light on genuinely interesting me­lodies. But they're not done yet! Possible starting point: Blitzen Trapper (2003), still unsurpas­sed, I think, even by such later-period critical breakthroughs as Wild Mountain Nation (2007).

 

○ Bloc Party: Overhyped UK indie sensation. First album showed terrific musicianship and ene­rgy; second album mostly just showed energy; third album showed crap electronic dance shit. The steady downward curve probably has to do with band leader Kele Okereke's hyperinflation; I am secretly hoping that one of these days he'll just fly off in space and the rest of the band will simply return to playing their instruments. Pos­sible starting point: Silent Alarm (2005).

 

○ Blood Brothers, The: This bunch of musical extremists from Seattle managed to build them­selves up quite a solid reputation during their decade together, and it is not difficult to see why: not many «post-hardcore» acts can combine their level of technicality, complexity, intricate verbosity, and barbarous intensity. Unfortunately, their vocals (ranging from all-out screamo on the early records to nastily insane screechy whine on the late ones) can be a major put-off, and their intentional condescension towards hooks (typical of most «post-hardcore» acts, I'd say) makes the individual compositions way too often indistinguishable from one another. I can tacit­ly acknowledge the artistry, but find no pleasure or enlightenment in the music. Possible starting point: Burn, Piano Island, Burn! (2003) is usually listed as their masterpiece; later records con­tain more elements of subtlety, but I actually think that, if these guys are ever at their best, they are more likely to be so on the early, all-out-frontal-assault albums.

 

○ Blood Ceremony: A highly retro-oriented Canadian band, led by songwriter/guitarist Sean Kennedy and flute-wielding frontwoman Alia O'Brien, these guys never make the slightest at­tempt to mask their influences — they play as if they were a modern day Black Sabbath with Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson on flute and the Doors' Ray Manzarek on the organ. Except they also pretend to be taking Sabbath's occult and satanic motives seriously: with endless references to witches, wizards, dark magic, and pagan practices, they clearly enjoy getting into character so much that the Church should have already been at their heels, if it weren't so busy these days fighting abortions, gay marriages, and evolution theory. The songs are not very good (they are way too busy mimicking their predecessors to develop as songwriters), and the playing is rather primitive even by the standards of 1970 (think Uriah Heep level or something like that), but every now and then they still fall upon a good riff, and somehow their costume dramaticism ends up on the fun side of things rather than on the pretentiously irritating one. Nothing special, but worth checking out if you're one of those «where has all the good music faded away to since 1975?» types, and particularly if you prefer Black Sabbath's 13 over any other album released in the 21st century by anyone under 50.

 

☻Bon Iver: Unfortunately, Justin Vernon of Wisconsin is prepared to enter the musical annals — if I were responsible for those annals, though, it would only have been under the subtitle of «the guy who drove the last spike in the credibility of indie-folk». Hailed by the «independent musical press» as one of the greatest things to happen to music in the late 2000s, «Bon Iver» ac­tually gets by almost exclusively on the power of the heart-on-the-sleeve attitude, which he un­derstands as lots of minimalistic acoustic guitar, lots of falsetto, and (on his latest record) lots of atmospheric chimes, electronic noises, and lazy slide guitar sliding. For the most part, this is aw­fully derivative, awfully clumsy, awfully pretentious, and awfully boring. If ever the indie scene needed its own equivalent of Justin Bieber, this is it. (And they're both Justins, too!).

 

☻Books, The: A creative duo from the depths of New York City: this already sounds dangerous, and it is – although one of the members is a talented guitarist, and the other one a professional cellist, their main passion is collecting samples and setting them to bits and scraps of folksy me­lodies. Supposedly this type of art form is to be deciphered as «a symbolic depiction of life in all of its numerous apparitions», but whether the actual «music» stirs up amazement, emotional tur­moil, or intellectual awakening is up to you to decide. Personally, I admit that this stuff can be oc­casionally funny and occasionally smart, but 90% of the time it is just irritating, pointless, and needlessly provocative (seriously stimulating the «Contemporary Art Must Die» movement). Fortunately, as of 2012, the project  seems to be finally dead. Pos­sible starting point: The Way Out (2010) is the most «musical» of their albums; if, perchance, you happen to be overwhelmed, feel free to subject your brain to the early stuff as well.

 

○ Botch: A short-lived «metalcore» band from Tacoma, Washington, these guys left behind a very brief, but allegedly influential legacy of just two albums, and are now acknowledged as early pioneers of «math rock» — with their angular, bizarrely twisted guitar melodies in sharp contrast with the usual styles of thrash, pop, or fantasy metal, not to mention the grunge scene, dominant in the Northwest at the time and reputedly alergic and hostile to Botch, which explains (partially) why the band was so short-lived. To enjoy, or even respect them, you unfortunately have to get past the annoying formulaic scream-shit-vocals of their lead shit-vocalist, but if you do manage the effort, some of the songs are really quite smart, and go a long way in dragging the metal genre out of its generic conventions (not that you'd notice that if you mainly concentrated on the vocals, though). Possible starting point: Of the two albums, We Are The Romans (1999) is unquestio­nably the most ambitious and the least predictable. But if you have the faintest interest in this kind of music in the first place, you'll probably end up checking out both anyway.

 

○ Brand New: This band is sometimes called one of the few «emo» bands that are really worth listening to... but I don't know about that, really. Their creative curve shows some progress, as they went from your typical teenage-issue breakup-focused shit-rock combo to worrying about deeper, subtler, grander issues (human suffering, end of the world, whatever), but outside of a few occasional flashes of atmospheric brilliance, their hooks still tend to be flat, and their singing still relies way too heavily on formulaic screeching to be truly resonant. If this is truly the best that «emo» has to offer, I am scared to even begin thinking about the worst. Possible starting point: If The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me (2006) does not already seduce you with its title, let me just remark that this is the album that has the largest amount of well-written songs on it, hands down. Which is still not that much, but... you wanted the best, hell, you got it.

 

☻Bright Eyes: Look no further than this «band» (actually, a shapeless, constantly shifting con­glomeration of Nebraskan musicians under the leadership of adolescent guru Conor Oberst) to understand why so many people file «indie» in the cuss word register. With but a microscopic spoonful of songwriting talent, skyscraper-high pretense coupled with a complete lack of any sense of humor and self-irony, and a singing style specially developed to make milk curdle, Co­nor Oberst somehow managed to earn lots of respect from the critical community, based, it seems, mainly on the criterion of «sincerity» — and semi-decent poetic skills. On the personal scale, he may be an admirable fellow, but the music of Bright Eyes is mainly based on rehashing primitive folk, country, and, sometimes, «alt-rock» patterns; sometimes it boasts highly elaborate, atmos­pheric arrangements, making it the equivalent of a rotting corpse, immaculately dressed up to the latest fashion. Possible starting point: there isn't one, really, but if you are genuinely curious, at least stay away from Conor's earliest, bedroom-quality-recorded albums — hi-fi Bright Eyes is bad enough, but lo-fi Bright Eyes generates hatred vibes at a thousand per second.

 

○ British Sea Power: Guess where these guys come from. Yes, you got it almost right: Brighton rather than Dover, but the margin of error is minimal on the overall scale of the Universe, which also happens to be the scale against which these guys measure most of their music. Huge, over­whelming, sprawling waves of sound that are, indeed, «oceanic» in atmosphere, but their ambi­tion goes way over the limited — and, historically speaking, mostly obsolete — pretense of the actual British sea power. Accordingly, the band positions itself at the «sincere / romantic / heart-wrenching» flank of the indie army rather than its «cynical / po-mo» flank, and often comes ac­ross as the British equivalent of Arcade Fire. Their biggest problem — not an unusual develop­ment for the indie crowds — is writing memorable melodies: the average B.S.P. hook is kinda blunt and dumb, but it is so well concealed by all the guitars / keyboards / strings / drums / background vocals that you might be forever overwhelmed and seduced way before your con­science strips away all the shrink wraps. Then again, maybe not. Possible starting point: Open Season (2005) — the one that seems to have the densest accumulation of guitar hooks.

 

☻Britney Spears: Want it or not, here is an icon of the turn of the millennium, and, unlike cer­tain other artificially crafted mainstream icons (most «boy bands» included, for instance), her ca­reer is actually worth an explorative peek — from a certain point of view, Britney has had a fas­cinating journey of ups-and-downs, perfectly illustrating everything that's wrong (and a few tiny things that are right) with today's corporate industry. Awful, yes, but not «boring» in the sense of album after album of monotonous primitive pap that all sounds the same — Britney's primitive pap, masterminded by some of the most deliciously hideous pervs in the business, flew from Lo­lita bubblegum teen-pop to modern R&B to sex goddess trance to robotic electropop to «Lady Gaga for those with a limited sense of humor». At the very least, she provokes thought, and that is more than I could say about Taylor Swift (now there is your quintessential boredom). Possible starting point: Just look at all the album covers and you'll know where to start.

 

☺Broadcast: Just another electronic indie outfit from Birmingham? Well, not quite, because the charming duo of James Cargill and Trish Keenan (constituting the core of the band) is actually responsible for some of the loveliest, if a bit too icy, art-pop melodies to come from the UK in a decade that was, technically, stuffed with high quality art-pop melodies — but it took the instru­mental and production skills of Cargill and the vocal talent of Keenan to spice them up with ac­tual magic. The band's «electrono-psychedelic barrel organ» approach was not very diverse and quite derivative (after all, they inherited a whoppin' huge tradition all the way from Cocteau Twins and up to Stereolab), but they managed adding their own individual touch, which makes it all the more sad that, with Trish Keenan's tragic demise in 2011, Broadcast are gone from our sight way too early. Possible starting point: They only had time for three proper LPs, so just start with The Noise Made By People (2000) and go all the way to Tender Buttons (2005), which I consider to be their best.

 

○ Broken Social Scene: A huge pack of idealistic Canadians with genuine artistic credentials, tolerable, if not amazing musicianship, and a taste for huge, sprawling musical landscapes. Sounds like yet another huge pack of idealistic Canadians we know, but the problem is that the songwriters in Arcade Fire have elements of genius and bleeding hearts to match, whereas Bren­dan Canning and Kevin Drew, the leaders of BSS, may simply be too smart for their own good. If your vibes are on the same wavelength as mine, a tasteful, but ultimately forgettable listen is gua­ranteed. Possible starting point: You Forgot It In People (2002) is usually quoted as the band's high point, and who am I to argue when it comes to this «humbly megalomaniac» indie crap?

 

○ Burial: This UK-based loner (known to the authorities under the less colorful name of William Bevan) specializes in electronic synthesis that is often formally classified as a form of dubstep, but in reality is the musical equivalent of the world slowly rebuilding itself after the nuclear apo­calypse. At least, this is the kind of visual interpretation that helps me get interested in whatever the gentleman has to offer; yours may be different, but the undeniable fact is that Burial's odd aproach to combining dubstep rhythmics, ambient instrumentation, and ironically deconstructed R&B samples is evocative, regardless of what it is that it actually evokes. Possible starting point: Burial (2006) is where it all begins in earnest, although the follow-up, Untrue (2007), got more critical and com­mercial success — but I do think that the best way to tackle this guy is in strict chronological order.

 

 

Part 1. Before The Rock'n'Roll Band Era (1920-1960)

ALBERT KING

THE BIG BLUES (1962)

1) Let's Have A Natural Ball; 2) What Can I Do To Change Your Mind?; 3) I Get Evil; 4) Had You Told It Like It Was (It Wouldn't Be Like It Is); 5) This Morning; 6) I Walked All Night Long; 7) Don't Throw Your Love On Me Too Strong; 8) Travelin' To California; 9) I've Made Nights By Myself; 10) This Funny Feeling; 11) Ooh-Ee Baby; 12) Dyna Flow.

Albert King had actually been cutting records since 1953, but they were few and far between; he did not properly emerge on the blues scene until the early Sixties, and thus, missed the chance to be inscribed into the «premier league» of Chicago's electric blues pioneers that unleashed Mick Jagger into this world. However, that was not a big problem: apparently, unlike other players who had it fast, cool, and then burnt out early, the man needed a long gestation period for himself.

King's first LP is one of those — quite numerous — records that, today, will not make a big impression on anyone but the finest blues connoisseur (or, vice versa, some poor fellow who has never heard a blues record before). Twelve sides, rather evenly divided into slow blues and fast blues, with a minor touch of rumba here and there to spice up the proceedings, all wedged deeply into the existing formulae of the day. The «fatness» of the sound, achieved by throwing in brass sections, sax solos, and female back-up vocalists, certainly contrasts with, for instance, the more restricted approach of Muddy Waters, but still, by 1962 this kind of «blues-soul» sound was the word of the day, with everyone from Otis Rush to Ray Charles to Freddie and, of course, B. B. King contributing to it with as much as they had to say.

Considering that, as a singer or blueswailer, Albert King is just about as competent as they are (and I would timidly suggest that he has got a lot less vocal versatility than his king-brother Freddie), just about the only thing of interest on the album is his guitar playing. But even here you will have to judge it by the standards of 1962 rather than those of today, when these licks are, like, all printed out on the first page of every beginner's blues course. Back then, however, King's playing was sharp, clean, and precise, much more polished than the classic Fifties sound of guys like Elmore James or Otis Rush. To some people, this sort of blues-de-luxe, with clean, unerring licks and bends backed up with slick production and horns, might have been anticlimactic — exactly the same way that some people today continue to find B. «B. for Burger» King anti­climactic. But then, it's all just different angles of show-biz, right?

The commonly mentioned highlight is the successful single 'Don't Throw Your Love On Me Too Strong': three minutes of utterly generic slow blues played by an utterly awesome master of the trade. The opening licks slice the speakers nice and sharp, but, other than that, the only thing that makes it more notable than the other three-minute pieces on here is that it happened to be released as a single — and the others did not. (Tough luck.)

Eye-catching tunes include the nifty fast opener 'Let's Have A Natural Ball', a brass-driven piece of jump blues where Albert makes a respctable attempt at turning into Big Joe Turner circa 1940, but still ends up wooing you with his guitar playing rather than singing ability; the morose retro lounge-spirit-infested 'Had You Told It Like It Was', somewhat flattened by the supporting girl singers who don't seem to have a real clue as to who that big guy with the guitar really is; and 'I Get Evil', lyrics-wise, the same song as Chuck Berry's 'Don't Lie To Me', but music-wise, an­ti­ci­pa­ting the notorious shuffle of 'Cross-Cut Saw' five years later.

Anticlimactic moments are few (the happy pop song 'This Funny Feeling', all vocal harmonies and no guitar at all, should rather have been done by the likes of The Shirelles, I would think), but if you jumped at this with high expectations, the whole experience can be anticlimactic, and if you did not, you might as well tolerate Albert King imitating a Motown girl group — trust me, you won't ever get a second chance.

From the intellect's point of view, one could appeal to historic importance and respect for pure pro­fes­sionalism, but the gut feeling is a bit too suppressed with the monotonousness of it all, trumping any intellectual cards that might show up, and turns this into a thumbs down — professional respect alone is sometimes not enough.

BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN (1967)

1) Born Under A Bad Sign; 2) Crosscut Saw; 3) Kansas City; 4) Oh, Pretty Woman; 5) Down Don't Bother Me; 6) The Hunter; 7) I Almost Lost My Mind; 8) Personal Manager; 9) Laundromat Blues; 10) As The Years Go Passing By; 11) The Very Thought Of You.

The only serious difference between this classic album and King's previous recordings is that Born Under A Bad Sign — technically, just a singles' collection from his early years on Stax — has Booker T. and the MGs on all or most of the tracks. But what a difference. For instance, Donald «Duck» Dunn is one of those few session players who have, early on, realized that if a bass guitar can sound menacing and dangerous, then it should sound menacing and dangerous. There's also The Memphis Horns, one of the tightest ever brass sections, to add extra sharpness to the proceedings. And King himself must have understood that he had to rise to the challenge, if he was not to get lost against such a monstruously professional background.

So the title track is, arguably, one of the most famous blues tunes ever recorded — a brilliant com­bination of a simple, but devastatingly memorable riff that just exemplifies the word «threa­tening», and a lyrical twist that deserves to be carved in stone on the tombs of miriads of losers around the world: "If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all". A year later, Cream did the song justice, but they never beat it — not least because they just could not identify so well with the feeling as the performer. At least they had the good taste of omitting the verse about how "I can't read, I don't know how to write, my whole life has been one big fight".

These fat, blistering, arrogant tunes that, for a short time at least, breathed new life into generic blues, recapturing the old fire and brimstone of Muddy and Wolf but setting it within an entirely modern (for 1967) context, just keep coming: 'Crosscut Saw' (whose guitar licks Clapton shame­lessly, but skillfully, appropriated for 'Strange Brew'), 'Oh Pretty Woman' (where the bass borders on early metal), 'The Hunter', 'Personal Manager' — forget about the countless imitators who have not a single excuse for putting their product on the market, this is the real thing.

In between, Albert sandwiches a few tender blues ballads that are also inventive — the tender flute on 'I Almost Lost My Mind', the brass-piano interplay on the longing, complaintive 'As The Years Go Passing By', the light jazz tinge of 'The Very Thought Of You' (which, for personal reasons, reminds me of all those lounge-style Keith Richards' album closers on late period Stones' albums), it all makes up for a diverse experience. Nothing better confirms King's profound inspiration at the time than the fact that each of these songs has its own personal identity — quite unlike The Big Blues, where half of the songs at least sounded like carbon copies of each other. (Of course, a large percentage of the thanks goes to the Stax army.)

Arguably, Born Under A Bad Sign is the last great — and I mean great, in terms of both defining its epoch and influencing the epochs to come — blues album recorded by a pre-rock'n'roll era artist, and at the same time beautiful proof that Fifties' artists, with a little extra wit and a little outside help, had every chance of not only surviving in the changing times, but even ruling them. It belongs in every music lover's collection, and if you are that particular music lover who idolizes and fetishizes hate for «generic blues», my advice is to simply forget that generic blues exists and just treasure this one record.

To commemorate this event, heart and brain shake hands (do brains have hands?) in this debate, and both hurry to the podium at the same rate to provide a mighty thumbs up. Even despite the rather useless inclusion of 'Kansas City', a tune better left to Little Richard.

LIVE WIRE/BLUES POWER (1968)

1) Watermelon Man; 2) Blues Power; 3) Night Stomp; 4) Blues At Sunrise; 5) Please Love Me; 6) Look Out.

"A permanent member of the Fillmore family, a great guitarist — this is Mr. Albert King!" His­tory buffs should pay particular attention to the word 'permanent' on behalf of the announcer: it shows that flower power kids, contrary to rumours, were not bred with the specific purpose of being compatible with trippy jams of the Jefferson Airplane and the like, but, on the contrary, were quite susceptible to all kinds of music, including grandfather-oriented stuff like Albert King, who could be electric for all he liked, but who, after all, just played straightforward old blues.

 

On the other hand, maybe it is simply all due to King's personal charisma which he lays down on the audience much thicker than the actual licks he plays. If anything, Live Wire gives a great image of him as a showman, never forgetting that interacting with the audience is the most vital part of his show. All through the songs, particularly 'Blues Power', he keeps talking to the people, telling them little bits of stories, asking them questions, getting them on their feet, teasing them with bits of silence followed by musical explosions, and despite the fact that his arsenal of guitar tricks is limited and they start repeating themselves heavily after a while, he makes the audience love this game so much that the applause is just as heavy on the last numbers as on the first ones — even though, to tell the truth, there isn't all that much, musically, to distinguish the last numbers from the first.

 

It is also obvious just how intent he is on keeping his cool. Big man, big guitar, big sound, standing calm and collected, playing it slow and meticulous, every now and then letting out a lightning bolt of notes, but also every now and then just keeping it down, self-assured and content about just knowing that he can do whatever he wants on that instrument — he just won't, if he doesn't want to. He is no flamboyant eccentric like Jimi Hendrix, way above playing with his teeth; but every once in a while he just lets out this bit of insane laughter — "ha ha!" — translated into layman speak as: «yes brother, pretty simple for me, could be pretty simple for you, too, but no dice, brother, it's me on that stage, and you in that audience». Then he lets rip, and everyone is plugged back in his seat, mouth open, ears ringing.

 

Of course, «letting rip» is as relative as you would expect. Predictably, while playing live, King goes for lengthier solos, and he is neither as inventive nor as technically efficient as the white Bri­tish guy with the slow hand that spent a lot of time ripping him off. There are two types of solos here: the fast one and the slow one, and that is all you need to know. But it is not the solos themselves that are important: it's the Pre­sence. They should be taken together with the stage patter, with the ha-ha's, with the aahs and oohs, and particularly with the long rant at the start of 'Blues Power': "Everybody understands the blues...". Is that really true? Perhaps the whole essence of the blues is also in the Presence. And, boring or not in purely musical terms, this album con­veys blues Presence better than any other recording from 1968.

 

Not that the heart has managed to convince the brain of it — the latter is not supposed to rationally understand things like «presence» — but at least it has managed to let the brain stay out of the way for a bit, allowing Live Wire to receive a solid thumbs up for capturing a great showman at the top of his show powers.

 

YEARS GONE BY (1969)

 

1) Wrapped Up In Love Again; 2) You Don't Love Me; 3) Cockroach; 4) Killing Floor; 5) Lonely Man; 6) If The Washing Don't Get You The Rinsing Will; 7) Drowning On Dry Land; 8) Drowning On Dry Land (Instrumental); 9) Heart Fixing Business; 10) You Threw Your Love On Me Too Strong; 11) The Sky Is Crying.

 

Obviously, you do not change a winning formula; and, like almost every formulaic follow-up to an epochal album, Years Gone By is less interesting and exciting than Born Under A Bad Sign, but still a great romp for the freshly converted fan.

 

I do not hear any new techniques, tones, or licks on Years, but that is to be expected. What is ac­tually a bit more sad is that Booker T. and the MGs, still faithfully backing King, have stepped back into the shade, putting almost all the emphasis on King's guitar and personality; and no mat­ter how adorable his guitar and his personality are, they are exactly the same as before. 'Cock­roach' is the highlight because of King's playful attitude — come on, isn't it old-fashioned fun to hear a big old blues guy complain about cockroaches crawling down his arms and legs because he'd been thrown out of his house by his baby? — but on the lyrically amusing 'Heart Fixing Business' and 'If The Wa­shing Don't Get You' he doesn't really do much except for just sing and play, and so these tunes are no better and no worse than the ordinary everyday mid-tempo/slow blues from Albert.

 

No surprise that the best track is the one on which he gets the most interplay between himself and the backing band, particularly the horns — an instrumental rendition of the blues standard 'You Don't Love Me' (which the average listener probably knows through the entirely different Allman Bros. version), with the horns carrying the main theme. This is unusual, smooth, and impressive; blues-de-luxe at its grandest. Apart from that, it's all just decent blues. Thumbs up out of general practice and politeness, but prepare to be gallantly bored if you are not deep into the electric 12-bar enter­prise. Still, even this «generic» level is miles above the «generic» level of his upcoming career on Tomato.

 

BLUES FOR ELVIS: KING DOES THE KING'S THINGS (1970)

 

1) Hound Dog; 2) That's All Right; 3) All Shook Up; 4) Jailhouse Rock; 5) Heartbreak Hotel; 6) Don't Be Cruel; 7) One Night; 8) Blue Suede Shoes; 9) Love Me Tender.

 

A fun idea — a tribute from one King to another; and quite novel at the time, since having jaded bluesmen systematically covering jaded rock'n'rollers was a pretty rare occasion. The album may have been triggered by Elvis' recent comeback, but the songs are all old — completely in line with all the cool people, Albert King did not think that any of Elvis' post-Army stuff merited his serious attention. (And I, personally, would not be happy at the prospect of hearing Albert's pas­sionate take on 'Are You Lonesome Tonight'!)

 

Unfortunately, it is not nearly as exciting as one might suppose it could have been. King and the Stax people do their best to rearrange the old standards in ways that would, at the same time, preserve the basic melody and structure, but also be true to Albert's own style, and it doesn't always work. Or, rather, it mostly works, but the resulting sound is surprisingly ordinary. Same licks as on Bad Sign, but the horns and the rhythm section lack the latter album's inspiration. Also, listening to Albert sing Elvis is somewhat disconcerting; I'd rather the entire record were instrumental, like his take on 'One Night', where he does «the King's thing» with his guitar much better than with his voice.

 

The best numbers are those where he gets a chance to stretch out and jam a bit, like the slow, ominous take on 'That's All Right Mama' (you'd think he could have reverted to the style of Ar­thur Crudup's original, but he does it in a much darker fashion), or the jazzified, «loungified» six minute reworking of 'Heartbreak Hotel'. These are classic, if not too outstanding, King material. The rest may take a hike in the thumbs down direction — but, out of mere historical and stylistic curiosity, it is recom­mendable to listen to this at least once.

 

LOVEJOY (1971)

 

1) Honky Tonk Women; 2) Bay Area Blues; 3) Corrina, Corrina; 4) She Caught The Katy (And Left Me A Mule To Ride); 5) For The Love Of A Woman; 6) Lovejoy, Ill.; 7) Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven; 8) Going Back To Iuka; 9) Like A Road Leading Home.

 

Is it interesting to hear Albert King's take on the Rolling Stones? I have my doubts. Earlier, the Rolling Stones took the blues and turned it into sweaty rock'n'roll; now King is taking their sweaty rock'n'roll back from them and turning it back into the blues. His fluid, tasteful solo is definitely superior to Keith Richards' in terms of technical skill, but Keith Richards' solo on 'Honky Tonk Women' is the heart and soul of the Rolling Stones, and Albert King's solo on his cover version is — well, just another Albert King solo.

 

On the other hand, at least this cover version is curious enough to merit a special review parag­raph: most of the other tunes here are impossible to describe in any terms that are different from the ones used previously. That does not mean that the playing is bad or boring — on the contrary, Lovejoy is simply another excellent King record from his peak years. Rocking and occasionally ironic: 'Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven' is certainly remarkable not for using the exact same melody as 'Have You Ever Loved A Woman', but for following the title up with the sly remark — '...but nobody wants to die'.

 

The only big surprise comes at the end, with a «neo-gospel» ballad ('Like A Road Leading Home') where Albert tries something that he had never done before — singing and playing with a «tender soul» approach, more common on country-rock records by idealistic young whitebread snappers than on old burnt-out blues guys' contributions. However, atypical as this approach is for Albert, he pulls the deal off splendidly, and non-jaded listeners may even shed a tear or two over his plea of 'turn around, turn around, turn around and I'll be there', or over the closing passionate guitar solo, or even over the female backing vocals.

 

Other than that, just dig in. There are some cool, light-headed, loose funky jams worth any music lover's time — heck, almost anything with Booker T. & The MGs on it is worth any music lover's time. Thumbs up, although this is becoming a routine thing.

 

I'LL PLAY THE BLUES FOR YOU (1972)

 

1) I'll Play The Blues For You; 2) Little Brother; 3) Breaking Up Somebody's Home; 4) High Cost Of Loving; 5) I'll Be Doggone; 6) Answer To The Laundromat Blues; 7) Don't Burn Down The Bridge; 8) Angel Of Mercy.

 

A most important change of scenery. This time around, instead of Booker T. & The MG's, Albert teams up with the Bar-Kays for an overall sound that is more funk-flavoured R'n'B than traditional blues, and it works — his old licks, stewed in this new setting, suddenly acquire a new freshness. It turns out that they are fully com­patible with syncopated bass and wah-wah rhythms, and can easily carry on a leng­thy funk jam the same way they'd carried on all the lengthy blues jams.

 

Obviously, like all the older generation bluesmen who had the luck to become or go on being commercial and critical stars in the 1960s, King was reluctant to see his name drop off the charts or get dirtied with the tag of «irrelevance», so some sort of modernization was in order; and, for­tunately for humanity, this was still early Seventies, when funk was young and fresh and totally progres­sive in essence, and the Bar-Kays could play it as well as anyone. One thing most funk people did not have, though, was a great traditional guitarist to back them up — and this means that there is every reason in the world to listen to I'll Play The Blues For You even after you have heard all the George Clinton and James Brown and Sly Stone classics from this era.

 

There could only be one way in which the results would have turned out catastrophic: that is, if Albert started reinventing himself as some sort of funk superstar to show off rather than just play and sing. This is more or less how things are on the album's unluckiest track, a syncopated groove reworking of Marvin Gaye's pop standard 'I'll Be Doggone'. Recorded live, it incorporates some fairly forced audience interaction where Albert admits to wanting to play a James Brown before the fans ('can I go to the bridge?' and all that), and this is just not him — he sounds nowhere near as self-assured as when asking his San Francisco albums if they 'can dig it' on the live albums from 1968. Wanting to funk it up is one thing, but playing with James Brown at James' own game is quite another.

 

However, this is just an exception. Everywhere else King is being quite moderate, wisely leaving the «renovation» to his backing band, himself satisfied with pouring the same old wine into new winebags. The hit title track, a pompous piece of blues-soul in the vein of B. B. King, is deeply emotional; 'Breaking Up Somebody's Home' rocks harder than anything on his last two albums; and 'Don't Burn Down The Bridge' has as much soul-wrenching blues power as it has knee-jerking funk power.

 

I would not go as far as to call these songs «masterpieces», but if ever there was a reason for Albert King to go on recording new music, this bit of restyling is that reason — in fact, it is hard to think of any other way in which he could have successfully freshened up his approach. In terms of actual influence, I'll Play The Blues For You does not even begin to compare with Born Under A Bad Sign, but in terms of self-contained musical progress, it is King's most clever and inspired album ever since, and it deserves all the thumbs up it can get from both the mind and the heart.

 

I WANNA GET FUNKY (1974)

 

1) I Wanna Get Funky; 2) Playing On Me; 3) Walking The Back Streets And Crying; 4) 'Til My Back Ain't Got No Bone; 5) Flat Tire; 6) I Can't Hear Nothing But The Blues; 7) Travelin' Man; 8) Crosscut Saw; 9) That's What The Blues Is All About.

 

Second time around, the Bar-Kays seem even more confident about knowing how to present King in a modernized neon light. Due to certain star configurations, it could no longer happen that King be commercially successful, or that the critics continue paying him the proper attention; but with time leveling out the inequalities, more and more people should be returning to this period in Albert's career as containing some of his most underrated records.

 

The official statement is right here at the beginning: "I wanna get funky, I wanna get down", the man proclaims, but, fortunately, not in a hyped-up, rhythm-heavy James Brown kind of way, which does not fit in with King's stateliness one iota. It is a slow-moving, «lumbering» even, grum­bling and growling R'n'B number, bolsterous and braggy on the surface but conscious­ly sad and tired deep within. The catch is, he really wants to get funky, but without ceasing to be bluesy — because it would be unimaginable for Albert King to sacrifice the blues.

 

The Bar-Kays understand that wish and respect it. 'Playing On Me' is certainly quite funky, and 'Flat Tire' even more so — 'Flat Tire', in fact, borders on disco, and has all the wah-wah stuff and all the chicken scratch guitar playing you need, but King brazenly keeps on playing his old licks, just adapting them a little bit for the new rhythmic structures. Both are fun, danceable, and emoti­onal numbers played with verve, as hot as anything that the Seventies' funk scene was capable of yielding. Somewhat less satisfactory is the funky reworking of 'Crosscut Saw' — perhaps King himself realized that, since midway through the song he reverts the band back to the original rhythmics and finishes the song in a much more traditional manner.

 

Interwoven between the dance material are more classic-style slow blues numbers, not particular­ly exceptional but not throwaways either; 'Walking The Back Streets And Crying' is aiming for a very high level of desperation, highlighted by shrill-pitched brass blasts from the Memphis Horns, and he also delivers one of the most piercing solos of his career on 'I Can't Hear Nothing But The Blues', effectively putting a stop to claims that he had not produced a single new guitar lick since 1967 (provided such claims were ever voiced).

 

Fresh, invigorated, modernized, but not desecrated — I Wanna Get Funky is a blueprint model for how all of the old blues heroes should have steered their careers past their prime, and the way I hear it, Albert is still in his prime. The brain is amazed at how intelligent this is, the heart just keeps singing along to the grooves, and a thumbs up is guaranteed from both.

 

ALBERT (1976)

 

1) Guitar Man; 2) I'm Ready; 3) Ain't Nothing You Can Do; 4) I Don't Care What My Baby Do; 5) Change Of Pace; 6) My Babe; 7) Running Out Of Steam; 8) Rub My Back; 9) (Ain't It) A Real Good Sign.

 

Albert King himself is like a big bulging rock: he may lose a bit from weathering every now and then, but you cannot really tell unless you reconstruct the original size a million years back. The purity of the waters around him, though, is quite heavily dependent on how many oil tankers got sunk in them recently. And if the stench gets too unbearable, will you still be able to admire the rock? You will probably be too busy searching for your gas mask.

 

At the height of his funky Bar-Kays period, King left Stax — the most unfortunate move of his career — and joined the small label Utopia. Not that he had much choice: Stax had been suffering from major financial problems for a few years, and by the end of 1975, was forced into bank­ruptcy. But regardless of whether he did have a choice or not, the effect was predictably tragic. All of a sudden, despite the voice, guitar licks, and tunefulness still being there, nothing else is.

 

Purists will want to hate Albert with all their strength, since it pushes King further down the com­mercial track, with the addition of poppy female choruses and disco basslines; it may even seem that the guitar itself is frequently pushed back, letting the typically Seventies party atmos­phere take centerstage. I do not think this should necessarily be a problem; King hadn't been a rigid blues purist since at least 1966, and there was no reason why he should suddenly become one in 1976, and besides, «black party music» in 1976 was not necessarily a bad thing: if you can stand Chic, you can stand Albert King with a disco beat.

 

The problem is that the backing band — and there is a whole army of backup musicians listed in the credits, none of whom I've ever heard about previously — is fairly rote. These are generic session hacks, doing their job faithfully but without any sort of inspiration. The opening track, 'Guitar Man', had every chance to become an outstanding rousing funky brawl, but the way they do it — it's just okay. The drummer just drums, the bass player just lays down a stiff rhythm, the backup singers chant "guitar man, guitar man, let's get it on, guitar man, guitar man" as if some­one wound them up for a five-minute period, and even King himself, distraught by this stiffness, plays in a perfunctory manner, hiding deep down in the mix in an ashamed manner.

 

The same is true of everything on the album — there are no serious lapses of taste, but neither the slow blues numbers ('Ain't Nothing You Can Do', 'Rub My Back'), nor the more upbeat ones ('My Babe') register as «having that extra special something». It is always better understood in comparison — for instance, one is advised to play King's version of 'I'm Ready' along with Muddy Wa­ters' original. The latter made you want to run and hide; the former makes you wonder just how bored one should have really been to record this tripe.

 

It is all moderately pleasant, but there were millions of records like this, no better or worse, made in 1976, and it is a pity to see giants compete with mediocrity. Thumbs down; I cannot even re­com­­mend one deserving song off the album. Maybe 'I Don't Care What My Baby Do' — it has a curious flute part. More interesting than most guitar parts on here.

 

TRUCKLOAD OF LOVIN' (1976)

 

1) Cold Women With Warm Hearts; 2) Gonna Make It Somehow; 3) Sensation, Communication Together; 4) I'm Your Mate; 5) Truck Load Of Lovin'; 6) Hold Hands With One Another; 7) Cadillac Assembly Line; 8) Nobody Wants A Loser.

 

The expected sequel to Albert, every bit as forgettable for the exact same reasons. Its only diffe­rence is that King is trying even harder to reinvent himself as a cheesy party-poppin' funkster, but his «funk» is becoming blander with each passing minute. The guitar, on these numbers, sounds like a limp accessory to simplistic dance rhythms and loud-as-hell female backup vocalists, all of them probably sporting huge Afros, colorful dresses, and cocaine-heavy handbags — the usual Seven­ties drill. At least, this is the picture that immediately springs to mind once you hear them go "why don't you hold hands with one another, love all your sisters and brothers" ('Hold Hands With One Another', a slightly better-than-awful disco number that might have been appropriate for KC & The Sunshine Band, but as for King, I would rather hear him doing Chopin).

 

As usual, «reinvention» continues to go hand in hand with the traditional style; purists will be more thoroughly pleased with the seven-minute jam on 'Sensation, Communication Together', but I think the only track on the album that even vaguely reminds of the old glories is 'Cadillac As­sembly Line', whose dark strings arrangement in the background adds at least a pinch of depth to the proceedings. Everything else is starkly lite, and gets as sure a thumbs down as I have ever witnessed. Must-avoid, unless nothing gives you a bigger boner than sterile 1970s R'n'B (and even then, I'm sure there's literally thousands of albums to take precedence).

 

KING ALBERT (1977)

 

1) Love Shock; 2) You Upset Me Baby; 3) Chump Chance; 4) Let Me Rock You Easy; 5) Boot Lace; 6) Love Mechanic; 7) Call My Job; 8) Good Time Charlie.

 

May actually be a slight improvement over the last two efforts. At least this time around there are no outward embarrassments: the pure blues quotient is raised in comparison to the funk/disco component, and even for the funk/disco component, they make a half-hearted, ultimately unsuc­cessful, but nevertheless honest attempt to bring it closer to the steamy-smoky sound of King's mid-Seventies Stax releases — with a little less gloss and a little less coke-soaked happiness.

 

Even so, it is hard to find a single song worth including on any representative retrospective com­pi­­la­tion. Maybe 'Good Time Charlie', a soul-blues number that finishes the album on a slightly more elevated note than everything else. It only has a brief guitar solo, with the rest of the song dedicated to Albert's impersonating a little emotional drama, and although by his highest stan­dards this is absolutely forgettable, it sounds tremendously humane next to all these mechanical creations like 'Chump Chance' or 'Love Mechanic'.

 

The really sad thing is that there is no feeling of the guitar as the album-driving instrument — and what, may I ask, is the point of listening to a non-guitar-centered Albert King record? Obviously, he soloes on every track, but either the solos are short, or they are drowned out in the mix; and even when they are not, they are so pro forma that you just can tell exactly how much King actually cared for this material. Not one bit. Thumbs down.

 

LIVE BLUES (1977)

 

1) Watermelon Man; 2) Don't Burn Down The Bridge; 3) Blues At Sunrise; 4) That's What The Blues Is All About; 5) Stormy Monday; 6) Kansas City; 7) I'm Gonna Call You As Soon As The Sun Goes Down; 8) Matchbox Holds My Clothes; 9) Jam In A Flat; 10) As The Years Go Passing By; 11) Overall Junction; 12) I'll Play The Blues For You.

 

Also available as simply Live, and — I believe — as Blues From The Road, with the latter spread over 2 CDs and featuring the entire performance, whereas current, and most widespread, editions of Live Blues truncate some of the lengthier numbers ('Jam In A Flat').

 

According to most sources, the tracks here were recorded at Montreux in 1975, but the exact date does not matter as long as it is clearly understood that the album reflects the "Tomato King", wi­thout any backing from Stax. Also, on some of the songs you might be surprised by a very non-King style of playing, particularly 'As The Years Go Passing By'; this is because Albert is backed by Irish guitar hero Rory Gallagher, and sometimes even condescends to duelling with him — which makes for just about the most exciting moments on this otherwise standard fare disc.

 

By 1975, King didn't have anything left to prove, and it was one thing to play before an unex­pe­rienced, but demanding audience of Frisco hippies whom you had to convert to your own faith, and quite another to present yourself to a jaded Mont­reux audience of professional jazz and blues junkies who knew exactly what they were going to get and who weren't at all ready to take no bull from the man. So he played it straight, predictable, and devoid of surprises. The backing band is slack and lazy. Gallagher does not overplay. The selections are the same old chestnuts. The licks are known by heart. Good album. Nice album. Let's move on.

 

THE PINCH (1977)

 

1) The Blues Don't Change; 2) I'm Doing Fine; 3) Nice To Be Nice (Ain't That Nice); 4) Oh, Pretty Woman; 5) King Of Kings; 6) Feel The Need; 7) Firing Line (I Don't Play With Your Woman, You Don't Play With Mine); 8) The Pinch Paid Off, Pt. 1; 9) The Pinch Paid Off, Pt. 2; 10) I Can't Stand The Rain; 11) Ain't It Beautiful.

 

Taking the «1977» date at face value, one might be astonished at a sudden leap in quality — all of a sudden, King can be interesting once again without going onstage. But we are still in Kansas, and miracles do not happen as frequently here as we would like them to: The Pinch is, in reality, a collection of outtakes from 1973-74 sessions, released by Fantasy Records (who had by then acquired control over the entire Stax backlog) to compete commercially with King's Tomato output — frankly speaking, though, there is no competition whatsoever, as this record is well worth all of King's «tomatoes» put together.

 

The first track opens the session on such a chivalrous note, in fact, that the album was later reis­sued under the name The Blues Don't Change (or perhaps the company just decided to withdraw the original suggestive album cover, depicting that part of the female form with which the word 'pinch' is quite commonly associated). Hymns to blues power are King's forte, since few artists of his stature are more tightly connected to the 12-bar form than Albert, and, thus, few are entitled to getting pompous and religious on the subject better than the man. You just know you have to trust him when he tells you 'I know the blues don't change', never mind the fact that this song was rol­ling in the stores on a parallel chronological basis with doodoo like 'Love Mechanic'.

 

On everything else, you know the Stax people will be there with their chuggy rhythms, and the Memphis Horns will be all funky and sweaty and cooking. Perhaps the remake of 'Oh, Pretty Wo­man' was not necessary (they decide to plcuk most of the anger out of the song), but the hot funk jam 'King Of Kings' (J. C. just got to be shaking his booty to that one), the long, complex R'n'B saga of 'The Pinch Paid Off', the quiet spookiness of 'I'm Doing Fine' — masterpieces or not, these are fine, well-played, driving tunes with all members of the team obviously interested in delivering quality entertainment rather than making some quick bucks on King's coattails.

 

A massive thumbs up, then, and I will put in a few superfluous exclamation marks as well — !!!!!!!!!!! there !!!!!!!! — so that the reader does not miss them and takes the trouble to single this record out of Albert's pool of late 1970's «tomato mediocrity» and have it round out the trilo­gy of his precious funk period offerings, together with I'll Play The Blues For You and I Wanna Get Funky.

 

NEW ORLEANS HEAT (1978)

1) Get Out Of My Life Woman; 2) Born Under A Bad Sign; 3) The Feeling; 4) We All Wanna Boogie; 5) The Very Thought Of You; 6) I Got The Blues; 7) I Get Evil; 8) Angel Of Mercy; 9) Flat Tire.

At the same time that The Pinch floated adrift in space, attracting only the most dedicated King fans where it should have attracted everybody, King's new "original" release, New Orleans Heat, was actively promoted by Tomato Records — for a moot purpose; it is neither better nor worse than King's average Tomato album, and that's not a compliment.

 

They did try a new move on him, teaming him up with famous R'n'B producer Allen Toussaint, responsible for long strings of 1960's and 1970's hits by a long stream of artists. But they miscal­culated: Toussaint is an excellent composer and arranger, yet he knows fairly little about how to integrate these talents with a first-rate has-been blues guitar legend.

 

Albert was getting old, and he could be excused for not mastering any new licks or techniques at this stage; this meant gene­rally just re-recording old standards ('Born Under A Bad Sign', 'I Get Evil', 'Angel Of Mercy', 'The Very Thought Of You' — it's always depressing to see these endless lists of remakes on old giants' records), with a lengthy generic blues jam thrown in for good measure ('I Got The Blues' — not the Rolling Stones song, unfortunately) and Toussaint's own 'Get Out Of My Life, Woman' completing the picture.

 

None of this is enlightening. Production values are high, as should be expected of Toussaint, but the backing band is clearly not interested in working with King; they hack all the backing out professionally and with very little spark. Some oldies are just plain ruined — the formerly snappy 'Born Under A Bad Sign' collapses under the weight of cheesy female choruses, for instance — and by the time 'I Got The Blues', with its totally robotic background, passes the five-minute mark (out of its nine minutes), I'm screaming for mercy.

 

King's own spirits do not seem all that high to me; he plays it safe and simple, with his guitar very much in the background much of the time. It all gets so bad that, in the end, the only number that sticks with me is the record's corniest — the lame funk workout 'We All Wanna Boogie', just because a corny Albert King at least raises more interest than a boring, by-the-book Albert King. Too bad. Totally thumbs down.

 

CROSSCUT SAW: ALBERT KING IN SAN FRANCISCO (1983)

 

1) Honey Bee; 2) Ask Me No Questions; 3) I'm Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town; 4) They Made The Queen Welcome; 5) Floodin' In California; 6) I Found Love In The Food Stamp Line; 7) Match Box Blues; 8) Crosscut Saw; 9) Why You So Mean To Me.

 

After a lengthy break from recording, King reemerged for a two-album stunt in the Eighties, on Fantasy Records — the same label that had earlier bought out the Stax catalog, which does not, however, mean that it also bought out Stax's creativity and inspiration. The best I can say about this "comeback" is that, technically, this is a comeback: first time in years, King releases a pure blues album. No frills. Strictly 12-bar, strictly guitar-bass-drums, and some piano to boot.

 

Since the man's playing and singing have not deteriorated one bit, regardless of all the perturba­tions during the Tomato years, Crosscut Saw is definitely a must for fans. However, evaluating it in its historical context means recalling that we already know all these licks by heart, and that each new solo will be painfully predictable. This could have been compensated by dazzling ef­forts on the part of the rhythm section, but this new band of Albert's just seems to have no indivi­duality whatsoever. Even when they pick up the tempo and start to boogie a little bit ('They Made The Queen Welcome'), I do not feel any genuine rock'n'roll excitement. These are paid people who do their job and little else.

 

In short, a huge disappointment. Having fully reembraced his blues roots, King has unvolunta­rily joined the Eighties-up-to-present "blues revival" — a movement beautifully fit for mid-level bar­rooms and restaurants, but little else. I would bet anything that "Larry Burton" on rhythm guitar, "Michael Llorens" on drums, "Tony Llorens" on piano, whoever they are — actually, Larry Bur­ton at least is a slightly well-known solo blues artist nowadays — were totally overjoyed to have the honor of backing a giant like King, but the sad truth is, they just don't do this giant any justice, steering him in the safest, most uninteresting direction possible. And a particular ugh goes for Tony Llorens' cheap piano tone.

 

To add insult to injury, the record is crowned by a remake of a remake (!!): a new recording of 'Crosscut Saw' which, with its two parts, imitates the re-recording of 'Crosscut Saw' on I Wanna Get Funky. Thumbs down, no doubt about it; instead of wasting your money, if you really need another Albert King record, trace down some old archive or live release from the early Seventies.

 

I'M IN A PHONE BOOTH, BABY (1984)

1) Phone Booth; 2) Dust My Broom; 3) The Sky Is Crying; 4) Brother, Go Ahead And Take Her; 5) Your Bread Ain't Done; 6) Firing Line (I Don't Play With Your Woman, You Don't Play With Mine); 7) The Game Goes On; 8) Truck Load Of Lovin'; 9) You Gotta Sacrifice.

King's final studio album — not just for Fantasy, but altogether — is a slight improvement over the total lifelessness of Crosscut Saw, but not by much. You know things cannot be particularly good if he starts remaking his own Tomato-era material ('Truck Load Of Lovin'), or if the best tracks on the album turn out to be million-year old Elmore James standards like 'Dust My Broom' and 'The Sky Is Crying'.

 

Alas, by this time it is evident that the problem lies with Albert as much as it lies with his side­men. He is given more opportunity to show off, the backing band does not get in the way so ob­no­xiously, and they even bring back the horn players to try and valiantly recreate, as genuinely as possible, a classic Stax environment. But it does not work; King clearly cannot be driven into ac­tion. He just keeps playing the same tired old licks over and over again. Every doggone second of the album is more predictable than the next United Nations session, and what could be more safe and predictable than that?..

 

Following Phone Booth, King retired for good, and that was the wisest decision he could have made; after all, no one could, or should, have banned him from recreating his past glories live as often as he wanted, and there was quite obviously no chance left at shaping some future ones. He spent eight more years occasionally resting and occasionally touring, before passing away in 1992; some live releases may be available from these years, but they are strictly for fans, particu­larly those who had the bad luck of never seeing the man live in action himself.

 

It should, nevertheless, be stressed that the man never "sold out" completely, despite the occasio­nally lame trend-following on some of the Tomato records; he just slowly faded out. Pretty much all the interesting material he released from 1976 to 1984 could be stored on half an audio CD, yet none of these records tarnish his reputation the way, say, Rod Stewart's last thirty years have pretty much annihilated his. Ignore them if you do not worship the man like the celestial bulldo­zer some think he is, and concentrate on his Stax legacy, which will remain forever as some of the most passionate and inventive electric blues music captured on record.

 

ADDENDA:

 

WEDNESDAY NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO (1968/1990)

 

1) Watermelon Man; 2) Why You Mean To Me; 3) I Get Evil; 4) Got To Be Some Changes; 5) Personal Manager; 6) Born Under A Bad Sign; 7) Don't Throw Your Love On Me So Strong.

 

Twenty years after Live Wire established Albert's reputation as the ultimate live bluesman once and for all, someone had the great idea to go ahead and release a set of additional performances from the same Fillmore dates that produced the original album. For Albert King fans, this is not less than a Godsend. For everyone else, it should be perfectly clear why Live Wire, upon initial release, was not made into a double album: back in 1968, people sort of looked ascance at releasing the same album twice, much less at the same time.

 

There is nothing new whatsoever — the songs have different titles, but they're still the same two numbers: fast blues and slow blues. Even the improvisational solos are more or less the same, because, obviously, it's hard to expect Albert learning a bunch of new tricks in a matter of 24 hours. And, alas, such classic numbers as 'Born Under A Bad Sign' and 'Personal Manager', freed from the tight guidance of the Memphis Horns, pale in respect to their studio counterparts.

 

King gets somewhat more prominent backing from James Washington on the organ, but that's about the only difference I feel. Everything else is the same. Rating this thing is useless — either you love Albert and you get it, or you respect and like Albert and you have no need for it what­soever, or you hate Albert and you have one more excuse for accusing the music industry of overproduction.

 

THURSDAY NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO (1968/1990)

 

1) San-Ho-Zay; 2) You Upset Me Baby; 3) Call It Stormy Monday; 4) Every Day I Have The Blues; 5) Drifting Blues; 6) I've Made Nights By Myself; 7) Crosscut Saw; 8) I'm Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town; 9) Ooh-Ee-Baby.

 

It is not very hard to guess that this album does not deserve an independent review. All I can say is that, perhaps, it is quite a rational decision to market King's performances as a set of three in­dependent records, rather than lump them all together into a deluxe 3-CD set to be sold at exorbi­tant prices. I seriously doubt that even a dedicated fan will be able to sit through all three discs in a row without developing a chronic syndrome of déjà vu. Even if they are so very careful to pick all the right tracks so there's no overlap with the preceding two records, all the licks are still the same — after a short while, you can start predicting the near-exact phrase Albert is gonna pick out after a particular verse.

 

But it is worth a little bit of money, at least, to hear the King say a touching goodbye to his Fill­more audiences at the end of 'Ooh-Ee-Baby' — "it'll be October before I can get back, got to go back East, I wish I could take everybody from San Francisco with me, mighty mighty groovy people". It's easy to get tired of the repetitive guitar playing, perhaps, but it is impossible to get tired of the charisma. Nice guy all around.

 

LIVE '69 (1969; 2003)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Why Are You So Mean To Me; 3) As The Years Go Passing By; 4) Please Come Back To Me; 5) Crosscut Saw; 6) Personal Manager.

 

For those who just can't get enough of «prime-time era» King, this relatively recent archival release from Tomato's vaults will temporarily quench their thirst. Unlike the Fillmore sets, this show was recorded on May 29, 1969 at a small club in Wisconsin, offering a chance to assess Albert in a somewhat more intimate and informal setting rather than Bill Graham's «kingly» envi­ronment. The sound and mix quality is not perfect, but decent enough not to pay it a lot of atten­tion — at least, the guitar was properly miked, and whenever the big guy gets to solo (which, predictably, occupies about 80% of the running time), his wailing rises high and above everything else, including the horns section (which he'd only added recently — not that it matters a lot, since the horns are actually quite poorly miked, and never add much to the overall sound).

 

The setlist is short and far from perfect: at the center of the album sits ʽPlease Come Back To Meʼ, a completely generic piece of 12-bar blues stretched out to a 17-minute running time. Albert puts in as much fire as he can, but even he cannot help repeating all of his trademark licks and bends for at least several times over those seventeen minutes, and if you already know them by heart from the Fillmore days, you won't be particularly happy having to go through them all over again. On the other hand, this is at least partially compensated by the only (I think) officially released live version of ʽAs The Years Go Passing Byʼ from the Sixties — sung and played beautifully, with a couple soul-probing solos where «every note counts», and with the guitar so high in the mix and the club acoustics so pressing in on you that the experience can be quite mind-blowing.

 

For serious fans, I think, the inclusion of that song alone is well worth the price; most of the others would probably be happier if some of the jamming were cut to make way for a ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ or, at least, for more contemporary material (from Years Gone By, for instance) — represented here only by a brief instrumental snippet of ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ in the introduction. On the other hand, Live '69 is as good a first introduction into the live blues power of Albert King as anything else. Also, the basic guitar tone is thicker and lower here than the thin, shrill tone we hear on the Fillmore records — probably a different set of amps, since the man seems to be playing the same Flying-V model as usual. So if you like your King «plumper» rather than «leaner», this record might even have a small edge on the classic Fillmore stuff, from that aspect at least.

 

THE LOST SESSION (1971; 1986)

 

1) She Won't Gimme No Lovin'; 2) Cold In Hand; 3) Stop Lying; 4) All The Way Down; 5) Tell Me What True Love Is; 6) Down The Road I Go; 7) Money Lovin' Women; 8) Sun Gone Down (take 1); 9) Brand New Razor; 10) Sun Gone Down (take 2).

 

When you're climbing up the rugged heights of that awesome garbage heap called popular music, remember this: not everything that is lost obligatorily deserves to be found. In fact, more often than not there is a pretty good reason for The Thing to have gotten lost. Of course, if you're a sci­entist, this golden rule does not apply in the least — but this is why it would be nice if quite a few of these CDs, instead of silly rating stickers, bore something more informative, like, «FOR HIS­TORICAL RESEARCH AND SEXUAL GRATIFICATION PURPOSES ONLY».

 

The Lost Session is not even well-qualified for the former. It is simply ten chunks of a lengthy jam that Albert took part in at Wolfman Jack Studios in L. A. in August 1971, in collaboration with British blues guru John Mayall. The liner notes, written by Lee Hildebrand in a very clear and intelligent manner, make the best justification possible for this collaboration, explaining that the gentlemen wanted to do something radically different from Albert's usual Stax style, and that they achieved it by fusing together "Delta blues, British blues, and Los Angeles jazz".

 

This is a great way of putting it, but I, for one, do not so easily understand the charms of a synthe­sis between "Delta blues" and "British blues", given that the latter is essentially a derived function of the former (so there's something vaguely incestuous about that picture). And as for 'Los Ange­les jazz', it is essentially represented by a couple of sax and trumpet solos on a couple of the jams; they do sound different from the instrumental passages on King's regular albums, but they're hardly more eyebrow-raising than, say, AC/DC's one and only use of bagpipes on one and only one of their songs — and you hardly bought the album for that moment.

 

So, if the very idea of a partnership between a giant of American and a giant of British blues is enough to get you shaking, feel free to get lost in The Session. But if, overwhelmed by the flood of electric blues albums, you feel more like getting your kicks out of the 'real special' ones, I doubt this archive release passes the test. I cannot even name one particular highlight. Musician­ship is fine, sound is clean, but the thumbs are down all the same. Give me the Stax sound over this unexperimental experiment any time of day.

 

BLUES AT SUNRISE (1973; 1988)

 

1) Don't Burn Down The Bridge ('Cause You Might Wanna Come Back Across); 2) I Believe To My Soul; 3) For The Love Of A Woman; 4) Blues At Sunrise; 5) I'll Play The Blues For You; 6) Little Brother (Make A Way); 7) Roadhouse Blues.

 

This is a pretty good example of Albert's early 1970s live sound, well worth owning if only be­cause he somehow missed releasing a live album back then, in its own time, which would make Blues At Sunrise a significant addition to the blues addict's collection. Recorded in July 1973 at the famous Montreux Festival, it catches King at the early stage of his "funkier" period, so the setlist is predictably heavy on songs from I'll Play The Blues For You with a few respectable oldies, like the title track, thrown on for balance.

 

The affair is certainly less stripped than the Fillmore concerts: King is backed by a full brass sec­tion — understandable, since his records from that period depend even more on the horns than Born Under A Bad Sign — and also his second guitarist, Donald Kinsey, is given quite a bit of prominence, even "dueling" with the King on the lengthier jams. He's quite competent, but it's also quite likely that Albert let him take center stage only to emphasize his own brilliance (a mo­rally questionable trick that Eric Clapton so loves to reproduce during his own shows).

 

Another reason to own this is that King is exploring heavier, more "electrified" guitar tones in this live setting, than the thin, shrill tone he is usually known for on his studio and earlier live records. Listening to these performances in their chronological place, one can get the impression that he was just given this new guitar two days ago and wanted to test its abilities — there's plenty of new licks here that aren't usually associated with King, and his reliance on the power of vibrato is entirely unprecedented; he ends up sounding like Hendrix from time to time. You only have to go back once to the studio version of 'Don't Burn Down The Bridge' to understand that this Montreux version blows it away completely — provided you respect "heavy blues", of course, and do not hold the conviction that extra heaviness kills off the delicate subtleties and is much better suited for emotionally deaf nitwits.

 

For fact lovers, 'I Believe To My Soul' is the original Ray Charles tune (somewhat sad to hear it without the trademark piano chords, though), and King even preserves the old lyrics ('...when you know my name is Ray' — do we?); 'Roadhouse Blues', however, is not the Doors song, but rather just another generic ten-minute jam that sounds exactly like the other generic ten-minute jam ('Blues At Sunrise'). But it's Albert King, and it's a cool sound, especially when after the so-so solo of Kinsey comes the shotgun blast of Albert. Also, 'For The Love Of A Woman' is set to the exact rhythm pattern of 'Crossroads' as arranged by Cream during their live performances, so for all it's worth, you might think of this performance as King's tribute to Cream. Oh, and thumbs are up, of course. This is quite definitely treasurable.

 

FUNKY LONDON (1972-1974?; 1994)

 

1) Cold Sweat; 2) Can't You See What You're Doing To Me; 3) Funky London; 4) Lonesome; 5) Bad Luck; 6) Sweet Fingers; 7) Finger On The Trigger; 8) Driving Wheel; 9) Lovingest Woman In Town..

 

A bunch of outtakes from some of King's Stax sessions from the early Seventies (possibly earlier as well, I'm not informed of the recording dates). The review will be brief: there is only one track here that guarantees the purchase, which is the instrumental cover of James Brown's 'Cold Sweat' — King's worship of Brown could be out of place when he tried to imitate Brown's audience teasing manners on stage, but it worked all right when he simply did funky James Brown num­bers with his faithful rhythm section, embellishing them with his blues licks. This here 'Cold Sweat' chugs along almost as fine as the original, and will also please those who dislike Brown's neglect for melody, because that's exactly what King's guitar adds to the proceedings.

 

Everything else is stuff we have heard a million times in better or equal quality. Most of it is by the numbers blues that, to me, gives the impression of rehearsal material, performed in warm-up pur­poses before the recording of King's truly serious contributions to his official albums. It's all tight and solid, but strictly sparkless. The title track, another funky instrumental, stands out a little sim­ply by being funkier than the rest, but 'Cold Sweat' displays more energy and enthusiasm.

 

I have this on a CD that's paired with the earlier semi-official Live At Wattstax album, recorded at about the same time as Blues At Sunrise, and in terms of basic passion, it is much better, ex­cept all of its songs ('Killing Floor', 'I'll Play The Blues For You', etc.) have already been played live with the same fire on other releases. Bottomline: all of this is heavily expendable, although not for the dedicated fan.

 

IN SESSION WITH STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN (1983; 1999)

 

1) Call It Stormy Monday; 2) Old Times; 3) Pride And Joy; 4) Ask Me No Questions; 5) Pep Talk; 6) Blues At Sunrise; 7) Turn It Over; 8) Overall Junction; 9) Match Box Blues; 10) Who Is Stevie; 11) Don't Lie To Me.

 

A recording that pits one of the greatest blues stars of the «old school» against one of the bright­est blues legends of the «new school» should be predictably boring and boringly predictable, and In Session does not dissapoint — it is so by-the-bookishly great that I could not tolerate its pre­sence in the foreground for even five seconds before my attention would slip away to something different. Which, of course, does not in the least prohibit this recording, and also the accompany­ing video program, from enduring and enjoying a legendary status.

 

Although both the album and the video obviously belong in the discographies of both artists, the field here largely belongs to King — he is, after all, the older one, and does his best to appear in the role of the wise master teacher (on ʽPep Talkʼ, he is hilariously pushing Stevie towards per­fectionism: "the better you get, the harder you work, you can't say, ʽI've got it madeʼ... you're already pretty good, but you're gonna get better" — "that's the whole point", the Texas kid replies humbly and politely, instead of "fuck you dad" which he was probably thinking at the moment). It is said that, when he was approached about recording a session with Vaughan, he initially declined, not knowing who Vaughan was — then realized it was the «little Stevie» he'd allowed to sit in with himself during some of his earlier Texas shows, and once it became clear that the session could be conducted in this «father-son» manner, things started getting easier.

 

Anyway, what we have here is a selection of blues classics, mostly from the standard repertoire of Albert's, with one Stevie number (ʽPride And Joyʼ) graciously accepted for balance (the video and audio releases have significantly differing tracklists, by the way, so any fan should consider owning both), and interrupted by bits of studio banter, mostly from King reminiscing about the old times (such as playing ʽBlues At Sunriseʼ at the Fillmore with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at the same time). Stevie, on the verge of his big breakthrough, is in good form, and Albert was never in bad form as long as the material was adequate. The obvious question is — how are they up for teamwork, and does that teamwork offer any extra revelations?

 

One thing I must confess is that, throughout the endless blues jamming, I was not always able to tell who of the two was taking the lead (referring to the audio soundtrack only, of course). As dif­ferent as King's and Vaughan's blues playing styles generally are, when seated together and fo­cused on the same thing, the two players seem to have drifted almost uncomfortably close to each other, with Stevie in particular wanting to impress Albert by feeding him back trademark Albert licks (or, when asked for it, as on ʽBlues At Sunriseʼ, some trademark Hendrix licks: "this is where you gotta play Jimi's part", King says, and the disciple obeys). Albert himself also rises to the occasion and plays the whole show as fluent, loud, screechy, and well-rounded as possible: no flubs or retro-style minimalist passages that would date him as somebody out of the 1950s.

 

The result is a curious «merger» that, paradoxically, seems to lower the sheer entertainment value of the experience — with two blues greats trading solos played in similar styles, what's the major use of having them engage in these lengthy jams at all? In the end, it all looks more like a text­book of possible blues licks, created by the two with the aim of educating their audiences about the blues rather than having themselves some fun. As a textbook, it is beyond reproach: you could hardly wish for a more awesome combination of stellar players if you are in the mood for some star-powered blues-rock. But I do not think that either Stevie or Albert are at their most «natural» here — to achieve that proverbial «chemistry», they play it too safe around each other.

 

Most of the reviews I've encountered for In Session were glowing, but I really wonder how many of them weren't already following a pre-set bias (if you get Vaughan and King together on one record, and if they find a way to gel together, then this has to be good because there is no way it could ever be bad). Well, actually, there are relatively few of these «super-sessions» that would eclipse the individual highlights of the superstars, and this is no exception — to truly appreciate these people, you need to look at them separately, not together. Did they make history on that night? Would be hard to deny that. Isn't it great to have a whole hour of high-quality footage of Albert King's playing (so rare to come across in general)? Sure is. Did I have a right to expect more than what I got? Yes, I did. No, I did not. Why should this super-session be different from any other super-session?..

 

 

ALBERTA HUNTER

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1921-1923)

 

1) He's A Darn Good Man (To Have Hanging 'Round); 2) How Long, Sweet Daddy, How Long; 3) Bring Back The Joys; 4) Some Day Sweetheart; 5) Down Hearted Blues; 6) Why Did You Pick Me Up When I Was Down; 7) Gonna Have You — Ain't Gonna Leave You Alone; 8) Daddy Blues; 9) Don't Pan Me; 10) After All These Years; 11) I'm Going Away Just To Wear You Off My Mind (take 1); 12) I'm Going Away Just To Wear You Off My Mind (take 2); 13) Jazzin' Baby Blues (take 1); 14) Jazzin' Baby Blues (take 2); 15) You Can't Have It All; 16) Lonesome Monday Morning Blues; 17) Come On Home; 18) You Shall Reap Just What You Sow; 19) T'Ain't Nobody's Biz-ness; 20) If You Want To Keep Your Daddy Home; 21) Bleeding Hearted Blues; 22) Chirping The Blues.

 

Blues queens of the 1920s generally fall into three categories. There are the Power Gals, whose trick is to overwhelm the listener with superhuman strength and passion — could be just brute force, like Ma Rainey, or mixed with subtlety, as in the case of Empress Bessie, but power and aggression are the key in all cases. Then there are the Hooligans, like Mamie Smith or Lucille Hegamin, who sound like screechy, sexy, mischievous schoolgirls that are out there to have a very naughty time, above everything else. These ones sound more dated today, but are a terrific reflection of the swingin' era none the less.

 

Then there's the third, initially least noticeable, but eventually recognizable category: the stately, no-bull "Ladies of the Blues", those that generally avoid the more salacious, wang-wangy side of the blues, and try to push it closer to the white crooners of the day. Among these, Alberta Hunter was arguably the leader. The approach did not pay off well: history generally prefers those who like to take a little risk, and it is possible that Hunter's name would have been wiped off the slate entirely — and unjustly — had she not had the luck of getting a "comeback" chance in her late years, the only blues queen of younger days to actually record and perform live for a bewildered generation five or six decades removed from her golden age.

 

As it is, she has a slightly better chance to appear on the pages of musical encyclopaedias than, say, Ethel Waters, and this is good news, since these early tunes are quite enjoyable. The first volume of Complete Recorded Works collects all of the records cut for, first, the Black Swan label and then Paramount, who lured her over with a better contract after the initial two singles, in 1921-1923, along with a couple well-preserved alternate takes. Sound quality is tolerable — you get to hear not only the voice, but the musical accompaniment as well, generally provided on the piano by the notorious Fletcher Henderson. (The Complete Recorded Works series never bother much about removing any hiss-and-scratch, though, so do not expect Fletcher Henderson to be the only accompaniment).

 

Connoisseurs of Bessie Smith will undoubtedly recognize some of her own later standards — 'Down Hearted Blues', 'T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness', and 'Bleeding Hearted Blues' are all here, and as much as Bessie makes them her own, Alberta's renditions, although more "croony" and generic in tone and arrangement, are quite worth hearing as well (not to mention the trifling fact that 'Down Hearted Blues' was actually written by her). Adhering closely to the respectable stan­dards of ladies' conduct, she allows but tiny drops of overt sentiment; you have to get past the con­ven­tionalities of the genre to get at the "heart" behind it, and if you do not succeed, you are not to be blamed — I myself find the superficial trappings more enticing than the essence, and have a hard time rethinking that.

Still, in between her lovely and rather idiosyncratic voice, Henderson's tasteful and inventive piano playing, and generally well-chosen blues (or, rather, "vaudeville-blues") standards, these early records are fine party-poppers, with only the cracks and hisses threatening to turn them into party-poopers. Thumbs up.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1923-1924)

 

1) Someone Else Will Take Your Place; 2) Vamping Brown; 3) You Can Have My Man If He Comes To See You Too; 4) Aggravatin' Papa; 5) I'm Going Away To Wear You Off My Mind; 6) Loveless Love; 7) You Can Take My Man But You Can't Keep Him Long; 8) Bring It With You When You Come; 9) Mistreated Blues; 10) Michigan Water Blues (take 2); 11) Down South Blues; 12) Michigan Water Blues (take 4); 13) Stingaree Blues; 14) You Can't Do What My Last Man Did; 15) Experience Blues; 16) Sad 'n' Lonely Blues; 17) Miss Anna Brown; 18) Maybe Some­day (take 1); 19) Maybe Someday (take 2); 20) Old Fashioned Love; 21) If The Rest Of The World Don't Want You; 22) It's Gonna Be A Cold, Cold Winter; 23) Parlor Social De Luxe.

 

The second volume is somewhat less exciting than the first (if the term «exciting» is at all appli­cable to these discs); it has a notably lower proportion of «classic» numbers — 'Aggravatin' Papa', perhaps, and 'Down South Blues', it has a notably higher proportion of awfully sounding tracks, especially at the beginning — hold on to your ears, it does get better as it goes along; and it cer­tainly does not contain any unexpected surprises. Peculiarities that catch the ear a little firmer in­clude the unusually strongly delivered 'Bring It With You When You Come' and a silly comic dialog with jazz drummer Sonny Greer on the last track.

 

Covered material is also generally quite light here: even a song like 'Sad 'n' Lonely Blues' is de­livered with enough gaiety to make you forget about its title and return to its deep-hidden mea­ning only when the hangover sets in. But then, with all due respect, Alberta ain't no Bessie, and these early tracks ain't nothing but gallant, high-class entertainment.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 3 (1924-1927)

 

1) Everybody Loves My Baby; 2) Texas Moaner Blues; 3) Nobody Knows The Way I Feel 'Dis Morning; 4) Early Every Morn; 5) Cake Walking Babies (From Home); 6) Your Jelly Roll Is Good; 7) Take That Thing Away; 8) Eve­rybody Does It Now; 9) A Master Man With A Master Mind; 10) Don't Want It All; 11) I'm Hard To Satisfy; 12) Em­pty Cellar Blues; 13) Double Crossin' Papa; 14) You For Me, Me For You; 15) I'm Tired Blues; 16) Wasn't It Nice?; 17) Everybody Mess Around; 18) Don't Forget To Mess Around; 19) Heebie Jeebies; 20) I'll Forgive You 'Cause I Love You; 21) I'm Gonna Lose Myself Way Down In Louisville; 22) My Old Daddy's Got A Brand New Way To Love; 23) I'm Down Right Now But I Won't Be Down Always.

 

The third volume in the series is arguably the best. First, there is a dramatic increase in sound qua­lity: for all the hype around Paramount, its records were known for horrendously low fidelity, and even if that was not the main reason for Alberta's jump to Gennett in 1924 and then to Okeh in 1925, it is still mighty fine for the fans that she did make that jump. The Gennett records, in particular, sound unusually crisp and sharp; alas, the songs on them are not among Alberta's best material. The cracks and pops come back on Okeh, but in a moderate manner.

 

With such an increase in quality, one can finally start noticing all the subtle nuances in Hunter's singing: she was, quite clearly, maturing as a singer, perhaps striving to bring out all her hitherto undisclosed sides under the pressures of competition; by the end of 1923, the "Blues Queens" era had mobilized a veritable swarm of mighty singers, and it was certainly harder to compete with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith than with Lucille Hegamin and Mamie Smith. But Alberta almost rises to the challenge, toughening up her act, yet still sounding "lady-like". 'You For Me, Me For You', for instance, where she is only accompanied by a modest piano backing, is a great example: strong and protective, but gentle in overtones.

 

She even engages in singing more provocative stuff, rich on double-entendres — on one record at least (Okeh 8268), where the A-side is 'Take That Thing Away' (what thing?) and the B-side is 'Your Jelly Roll Is Good' (no comment necessary). And she lets her hair down on faster, merrier, speakeasy-friendly numbers more frequently than before (the classic chestnut 'Cake Walking Babies (From Home)'; 'Heebie Jeebies', etc.). All in all, fans of the Roaring Decade will probably get a kick out of at least half of these performances. There's also supposed to be some Louis Arm­strong backup on a few of them, but I do not know where exactly.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 4 (1927-c. 1946)

 

1) Sugar; 2) Beale Street Blues; 3) I'm Going To See My Ma; 4) Gimme All The Love You Got; 5) My Particular Man; 6) Driftin' Tide; 7) You Can't Tell The Difference After Dark; 8) Second Hand Man; 9) Send Me A Man; 10) Chirpin' The Blues; 11) Downhearted Blues; 12) I'll See You Go; 13) Fine And Mellow; 14) Yelping Blues; 15) Some­day, Sweetheart; 16) The Love I Have For You; 17) My Castle's Rockin'; 18) Boogie-Woogie Swing; 19) I Won't Let You Down; 20) Take Your Big Hands Off; 21) He's Got A Punch Like Joe Louis.

 

Unlike so many other blues queens, Alberta Hunter did not have her career seriously cut down by the Depression, because even in her prime she would not have too many recordings, and by 1927, sessions had all but ended, with the lady embarking on a lengthy revue trip to Europe and, then, eventually and gradually, shifting to other lines of duty (such as troop entertaining) and, after the war, going to nursing school and engaging in healthcare.

 

Paradoxically, it is exactly this career fluctuation that makes Vol. 4 into the most intri­guing and diverse unit in the series. It has no big hits or classics and represents a patchwork of scattered ses­sions, with much of the material even remaining unreleased for half a century and some of it with uncertain recording dates. But, with improving recording technologies, her singing has never be­en clearer and cleaner, and her vaudeville repertoire never as variegated.

 

The real gem here are the first three songs, from a 1927 session where Alberta is backed by Fats Waller on organ — a pretty exotic arrangement for the time, and she rises to the task admirably, particularly on 'Sugar', where she faithfully tries to sound like sugar herself, and her sucrosey notes, meshing with Waller's virtuoso playing and creaky old production, yield a truly phantas­magoric effect. (Especially knockout-like if you hear it after playing the previous three volumes one after the other with no breaks.)

 

The second gem is a long-lost New York session from 1935, on which she is backed by piano and very prominent acoustic guitar, resulting in a Lonnie Johnson kind of sound; the highlight is 'Driftin' Tide', more of a crooner than anything blues-like in form, but with Hunter's blues sensi­tivity replacing the croon. Different, but likable.

 

Later sessions, from 1939 and the early 1940s, are even more of a hodge-podge: traditional blues, whitebread ballads, early boogie-woogie, whatever works. Complete is not quite the right word for it, seeing as how no material from her European sessions is present, but it is debatable whe­ther the latter holds any importance (she used to record straightforward pop material with Jack Jackson's orchestra). As for these late numbers, none of them were hits, but who cares? From 1921 to 1946, there's really only two types of Alberta Hunter records: the good ones are those that you can hear and the bad ones are those that you cannot, and — technological progress be blessed — on this volume, there are no bad ones.

 

AMTRAK BLUES (1980)

 

1) The Darktown Strutters Ball; 2) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out; 3) I'm Having A Good Time; 4) Always; 5) My Handy Man Ain't Handy No More; 6) Amtrak Blues; 7) Old Fashioned Love; 8) Sweet Georgia Brown; 9) A Good Man Is Hard To Find; 10) I've Got A Mind To Ramble.

 

In 1954, Alberta Hunter quit show business for good — or so it seemed — and embarked on a nursing career instead, for a bunch of personal reasons (such as shock from her mother's death) and some objective ones — such as not really being needed in the business any longer. For more than twenty years, she did nothing but nursing, with just a couple spontaneous guest appearances on recordings by «old artists», e. g. the somewhat uncomfortably titled Songs We Taught Your Mother project from 1961, where she sang together with Lucille Hegamin and Victoria Spivey, being unquestionably the biggest star of the three.

 

In 1977 her hospital promptly gave Alberta her walking papers, probably expecting the lady to dine with Bessie Smith any day now — ironically, this turned out to be one of the most conveni­ent firing events in history, as it prompted Hunter to try out the stage once more. Too old to nurse, too young to die, just the right age to perform, she thought, so she started trying out various pla­ces in the Village — wisest choice of all possible ones — and ended up with a triumphant come­back, first on stage, then on film (in Robert Altman's Remember My Name), finally on record, signed to Columbia and releasing four albums before finally kicking it in 1984.

 

The only one that is still easy to find today is Amtrak Blues from 1980, ten songs from Alberta's deep-reaching back catalog (odd enough, though, only 'Old Fashioned Love' overlaps with her 1920s recordings) that Columbia wisely let her record with the Gerald Cook quartet (a band of pros almost as seasoned as Alberta herself) rather than any unexperienced young whippersnap­pers: as a result, the sound is fully authentic and never «retro».

 

On its own, Amtrak Blues is a pretty little jazz-blues collection that makes up for excellent back­ground music. But it goes without saying that it is not the kind of album that should really be ap­preciated «on its own». The point is that it is an album from 1980, recorded by an artist whose date of birth is usually given as 1895 — if, «on its own», it were barely listenable, it would still have been a priceless historical document, but if, «on its own», it is enjoyable, it is nothing less than a historical masterpiece.

 

Of course, Hunter's voice now sounds like an old woman's voice is supposed to sound: deep, cro­aking, gruff, a far cry from the gallant silkiness of her old records (at least, what frequencies of that gallant silkiness one can still make out from behind the wall of hiss). But then she is not sin­ging opera, she is groaning the blues, and this age-bound change gives her the same kind of grit that, in the 1920s, actually defined her competition — like Ma Rainey or Memphis Minnie. Now, in the Reagan era, it makes her the last remaning spokesperson for all these ladies; she is more than Alberta Hunter, she is Blues Queen Incarnate.

 

And she does sing well — not just «well for someone over 80», but «well for anyone who sings the blues». She charms you with her slyness, such as, for instance, starting out slow and cool on the first verse of 'The Darktown Strutters' Ball' before charging up the tempo and inviting every­one to bop along as if 'old age' were a purely psychological concept (which it is). Even on the si­nuous double entendre numbers — such as 'My Handy Man Ain't Handy No More' — there is no trace of the ridiculous. Certainly, no one can stop the skepticist from complaining about lines like 'he churns my butter' coming from the lips of an octogenarian. But I would pity the skepticist, unable to feel the still young spirit behind the old body.

 

For most people, including myself, the evident highlight would be 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out', simply because it is the most outstanding and well-known composition on here, and because Hunter does it full justice (from Bessie's classic repertoire, she also sings 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find'; being the last of the great old divas still alive and kicking, she did a great job promoting and preserving the memory of her generation). Yet, of course, Amtrak Blues is not about individual songs — it is about the pleasures of survival against all odds, and it is so wildly successful on the intellectual level that it seriously influences the emotional level as well, and gets a decisive thumbs up from both.

 

THE GLORY OF ALBERTA HUNTER (1982)

 

1) Ezequiel Saw The Wheel; 2) I've Had Enough; 3) Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams; 4) Some Of These Days; 5) The Glory Of Love; 6) You Can't Tell The Difference After Dark; 7) I Love You Much Too Much; 8) I Cried For You; 9) The Love I Have For You; 10) Sometimes I'm Happy; 11) Give Me That Old Time Religion.

 

Amtrak Blues is the best known (and the only easily available) album from Alberta's later days, but, in fact, she really hits her second stride with The Glory, released but two years before her death. The difference may not be too crucial, but I believe I smell it — here is a singer that no lon­ger feels even the least bit uncomfortable about being over 80, boosted by a new wave of pub­lic and critical success, re-accustomed once more to entertaining audiences and singing «into the can», as they used to say.

 

The Glory has a little bit of everything: blues, jazz, cabaret, schmaltz, even two gospel numbers that bookmark the record's two ends. The worst numbers — ballads whose sentimentalism obscu­res their melodic value — are still entertaining as retrothings, respectable if only for the perfor­mer's tenacity; and the best numbers are fun on their very own.

 

Unsurprisingly, the two major highlights are the ones on which Ms. Hunter gets real down and dirty: a re-recording of 'You Can't Tell The Difference After Dark', and 'I've Had Enough' which, to the best of my knowledge, was not a part of her previous studio repertoire. The former has, of course, acquired a triple entendre by now: 'I may not be so appealin', but I've got that certain fee­lin', she tells us with a little mix of pride and embarrassment, 'and you can't tell the difference after dark'. You bet your life we can't.

 

'I've Had Enough (Alberta's Blues)', in the meantime, gives us the toughest incarnation of Alberta Hunter ever found on any record of her career — you'd generally expect this kind of material from the likes of Big Mama Thornton. But she pulls it off splendidly, wrapping things up with an unforgettable coda of bye-byes to her brutal lover: 'goodbye, sayonara, au revoir, kalimera, auf Wiedersehen, bonne nuit... ah yeah — hasta la vista!.. ouch... get lost!' A little forced, perhaps, and she mispronounces kalimera as kalismera, but the main intention was to get us hooked and charmed, and she got us hooked and charmed.

 

That intention is so strong, in fact, that she even sings in Yiddish on one track ('I Love You Much Too Much'), and saves the album's most upbeat performances, the catchy vaudeville of 'Someti­mes I'm Happy' and the breakneck gospel trance of 'Give Me That Old Time Religion', for last. Perhaps these songs will not linger too long in anybody's memory, but the point is, as long as the re­cord is playing, you sense a feeling of ecstasy, a "wow, now here is someone who really enjoys living and gets a true kick out of it!" reaction. Then you realize that «someone» is 87 years old, and that you have just been shown a standard of living that you yourself will never ever be able to reach — but at least you have some sort of ideal to aspire to.

 

For this ray of optimism and bout of enthusiasm, the perfectly titled Glory Of Alberta Hunter gets a glorious thumbs up. She had the time to record one more LP — Look For The Silver Li­ning (1983), unfortunately, almost impossible to find — before finally kicking it in 1984, but I am pretty sure that, whatever her current occupation in Paradise is, it has little to do with nursing. Bet my own salvation that God can't tell much difference after dark, either.

AMOS MILBURN

BLUES, BARRELHOUSE & BOOGIE WOOGIE (1946-1955; 1996)

 

CD I: 1) After Midnite; 2) My Baby's Boogying; 3) Down The Road Apiece; 4) Amos' Blues; 5) Amos' Boogie; 6) Operation Blues; 7) Cinch Blues; 8) Everything I Do Is Wrong; 9) Blues At Sundown; 10) Money Hustlin' Woman; 11) Sad And Blue; 12) Mean Woman; 13) Aladdin Boogie; 14) Nickel Plated Baby; 15) Real Gone; 16) Rainy Wea­ther Blues; 17) Train Whistle Blues; 18) Train Time Blues; 19) Bye Bye Boogie; 20) Pot Luck Boogie; 21) It's A Mar­ried Woman; 22) My Tortured Mind; CD II: 1) Hold Me Baby; 2) Chicken Shack Boogie; 3) Hard Driving Blues; 4) I'm Gonna Leave You; 5) Pool-Playing Blues; 6) Rocky Road Blues (take 1); 7) Rocky Road Blues (take 2); 8) Lonesome For The Blues; 9) Slow Down Blues; 10) Anybody's Blues; 11) It Took A Long, Long Time; 12) Wolf On The River; 13) Frank's Blues; 14) Empty Arms Blues; 15) A&M Blues; 16) Won't You Kinda Think It Over; 17) Jitterbug Fashion Parade; 18) My Luck Is Bound To Change; 19) Roomin' House Boogie; 20) Walkin' Blues; 21) Blue And Lonesome; 22) Let's Make Christmas Merry, Baby; CD III: 1) Drifting Blues; 2) Untitled Boogie; 3) Melting Blues; 4) Boogie Woogie; 5) Atomic Baby; 6) Sax Shack Boogie; 7) Birmingham Bounce; 8) Let's Rock A While; 9) Hard Luck Blues; 10) Two Years Of Torture; 11) Bad Bad Whiskey; 12) Tears, Tears, Tears; 13) Put Something In My Hand; 14) Trouble In Mind; 15) Flying Home; 16) Let Me Go Home, Whiskey; 17) Please Mr. Johnson; 18) Let's Have A Party; 19) One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer; 20) Good, Good Whiskey; 21) After Awhile; 22) I Guess I'll Go.

 

Jump blues is an all but completely forgotten genre these days, having miserably fallen through the cracks — too primitive and formulaic for jazz fans, too wimpy for rock'n'rollers; the fact that the best of the «jumpers» managed to create a unique vibe of sorts, partially borrowed, but also partially wiped out by rock'n'roll, is not enough to make people remember names like Big Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris — only the fact that Elvis covered both the former ('Shake, Rattle & Roll') and the latter ('Good Rockin' Tonight') is.

 

Unfortunately, Elvis did not cover Amos Milburn (Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker did, but their reputation, even pooled, is still no match for the King), and his current popularity amounts to little more than a footnote. Injustice a-plenty: unlike Big Joe and Wynonie, great powerhouse belters whose talents, nevertheless, can be fully assessed by sampling three or four of their best recordings, Milburn was one of the very few jump blues performers whose main talent lay in the playing — simply put, he was one of the most accomplished pianists of his epoch. Naturally, it makes no sense to compare him to the likes of demi-gods like Art Tatum, as he was way more li­mited in scope and technique by the very nature of the popular entertainment genre. But as far as that genre went, Milburn can honestly be said to have explored every nook and cranny.

 

For those totally unfamiliar with the man, let's just say that his sound was a direct influence on Fats Domino, as well as Chuck Berry's Johnnie Johnson — some of the piano runs on 'Down The Road Apiece' made it directly on to Chuck's version, and from there, became distributed between Keith Richards and Ian Stewart on the Stones' version — and on Jerry Lee Lewis. The latter, cer­tainly, banged on his keys with way more reckless abandon than Amos could ever allow himself, but lagged far behind in terms of technique and inventiveness. In all, Milburn probably was to the piano, during the late 1940s, much the same as T-Bone Walker was to the electric guitar: the in­ventor of a new language, one that would take firm hold a decade later, and then go on living without a good memory of its own forefather.

 

The completest way to get acknowledged with Milburn's legacy is through the five- or six-vo­lume Chronological Classics series that attempts to collect all of his recordings for the Aladdin label from 1946 to 1957, although I believe the label only got as far as 1953 before going bank­rupt, and some of these volumes are already notoriously hard to get at a normal price. There was also a limited-time-issue boxset of 7 CDs, The Complete Aladdin Recordings, which, last time I checked it out, went for $425 on Amazon, and sky's the limit. But, of course, these buys are for the nutty ones; regular guys like us can find perfect satisfaction in smaller collections, since, like every respectable performer from that time period, Amos was never above recording the exact same tune over and over and over again.

 

Blues, Barrelhouse & Boogie-Woogie is a currently out-of-print, but still findable, 3-CD compi­lation of what somebody thought to be the best and most representative tracks of Milburn's top recording years. It does not have all the big hits — like the dusky ballad 'Bewildered', for ins­tance, which can be found on additional smaller compilations — but it does have around 95% of them, along with lots of lesser B-sides and, so I gather, a bunch of stuff from the vaults as well. The tracks are more or less arranged in chronological order of recording, and the sound quality is as fine as one could demand from the era; no need to turn on the «Forced Ignorance of Cracks and Hisses» switch in the back of your mind.

 

Listening to these recordings on a track-by-track basis clearly establishes that Milburn's best stuff was recorded around 1946-48, when the major attraction was Amos himself: his unexceptional, but nice singing voice, and his exceptional, if formula-limited, piano playing. As time went by, he started relying more on his backing bands: a lot of electric guitar and brass soloing eventually pu­shes the piano out of focus, which is too bad, since the electric guitar is not T-Bone Walker level and the brass ain't no Tympany Five. Also, the rate of boogie-woogie to slow blues gradually de­creases throughout the years, especially after Milburn fell upon the winning formula of the «drin­king shuf­fle» with 'Bad, Bad Whiskey' in 1950 — a formula that subdued and charmed black drinkers all across the States, but did not obligatorily surmise fast rhythms or flashy playing.

 

In those early years, though, Milburn was magic, as evidenced already on 'After Midnite' that opens the album. Generic slow-moving 12-bar blues? Sure. For that matter, Chuck Berry's 'In The Wee Wee Ho­urs' is the exact same song. But Johnnie Johnson was just a supporting player on that tune, his ivories buried deep in the background; Milburn, who came earlier, pushes them up front, and accompanies each of the generic sung bars with a different improvised run. He is a good master of «sonic painting» — listen to how the line "the blues is falling, just like drops of rain" is immediately followed by piano-generated drops of rain ('Rainy Weather Blues') — and an even better mathematician-as-musician: the long instrumental workout on 'Down The Road Api­ece' is a prime example of melodic calculation, with amazingly elegant, symmetric constructions materializing from under his fingers in an endless sequence (as I already hinted at, this «engine­ering» approach was well understood and respected by both Berry and Richards on their respec­tive versions — actually, listening to all three versions in a row makes it clear that Keith must have been inspired by the original as well).

 

Stuff like 'Amos' Boogie' is «rock'n'roll in all but name», as they say, and a lot more ass-kicking than much of the stuff that bears that name just because it happened to come out later. Even if Milburn was not the only accomplished boogie player around town at the time, there are still few, if any, other places where you can hear such a distilled sound. Meade Lux Lewis, perhaps, or Pete Johnson, but the former did not record all that much, and the latter always got overshadowed by whoever he was accompanying. This here is pristine stuff.

 

The material on the two later-period discs is not as consistently exciting, yet there are still clas­sic R'n'B hits out there that are well worth getting to know: the humorous 'Chicken Shack Boogie', its equally humorous remake as 'Sax Shack Boogie', and, of course, out of all the innumerable drin­king songs — 'One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer', which most people know as that John Lee Hooker classic, but the song was just as relevant to Milburn.

 

Still, it is worth repeating that it is possible to play the sixty-six tracks on here in a row without going mad, which is much more than could be said about most of Milburn's competition during those years. Like everybody else, he was churning these recordings out like newspapers, without giving any serious thought to «individuality» or «innovation» — it's just the old 45s going out of print and the new ones replacing them. But, being stuck in the role of a commercial entertainer, he could still have the mindset of a freedom-riding improviser, and as similar as all these tunes are, only a very select few repeat each other note-for-note. (Granted, this may not hold for his en­tire output — we probably owe a big thank you to those responsible for the selection). If that is not enough to freeze the man in whatever Hall of Fame is willing to contain him, I don't know what is. Thumbs up, of course.

 

THE MOTOWN SESSIONS (1962-1964; 1996)

 

1) My Daily Prayer; 2) My Baby Gave Me Another Chance; 3) I'm In My Wine; 4) I'll Make It Up To You Some­how; 5) Don't Be No Fool; 6) In The Middle Of The Night; 7) Chicken Shack Boogie; 8) Bad Bad Whiskey; 9) One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer; 10) It's A Long, Long Time; 11) I'm Gonna Tell My Mama; 12) Bewildered; 13) Darling How Long; 14) Hold Me Baby; 15) Baby You Thrill Me; 16) I Wanna Go Home; 17) Mama's Boy; 18) I'll Leave You In His Care.

 

So jump blues could never hold its own against the onslaught of rock'n'roll, with Little Richard and Chuck Berry whisking away its black audiences and then the white rockers sealing its fate completely. Not that Milburn's last years with Aladdin records really passed under the glowing sign of the boogie — he was clearly drifting more and more towards the «blues» side of his per­sonality, but even there he was clearly losing out to electric Chicago stuff.

 

No big surprise that in 1957 Aladdin finally went down, and brought Amos down with it. Being less lucky than Big Joe Turner, who succeeded in finding a safe 1950s haven on Atlantic (and was probably the only big star of jump blues to make a profitable transition to R'n'B), Milburn hung around several different labels without too many results (I could not easily locate the re­cordings he made for Ace, King, or others) — resurfacing one last time on Motown records in the early Sixties, with Berry Gordy probably just taking pity on the guy.

 

For Motown, Milburn settled on simply re-recording the old classics. He cut a bunch of singles and even an entire — his first and only — LP, confusingly entitled Return Of The Blues Boss (even though, to the best of my knowledge, no one ever knew him under such a nick name, not even in his best days). Nothing sold or charted, and not even Gordy could hold the guy on the la­bel for more than two years, whereupon Milburn went into complete oblivion, had a stroke in 1972, a leg amputated in 1975, and died five years later.

 

Frankly speaking, though, these Motown recordings are solid evidence that either Amos really was washed up by 1962, or, more likely, that there was not a single person around him that knew the way to make his talents serve the new decade. All of these eighteen tracks sound well enough, but Milburn's greatest strength — the fantastic piano playing — is criminally understated; on half of the tracks, he is not given the proper chance to shine at all, and on the other half, the piano is criminally buried in the mix. This may be in accordance with Motown's general emphasis on en­semble playing, with the vocalist(s) being the only element of the sound that is allowed to stick out, but in this case, why sign the guy at all? He certainly has always had a nice singing voice, but in the world of the early 1960s, with Ben E. King, Clyde McPhatter, Smokey Robinson, and Ja­mes Brown ru­ling the waves, what chance could the faux-titled «blues boss» ever have?

 

In the end, The Motown Sessions may be of minor interest not so much to fans of the old boogie woogie sound, but rather to... Stevie Wonder completists, since «Little Stevie» is credited for contributing harmonica parts on some of the tracks. All that's left is to issue a warning — do not mistake these re-recordings of 'Chicken Shack Boogie', 'One Bourbon', 'Bad Bad Whiskey' and other classics for the originals. Remember, an Amos Milburn original must have the piano in the role of lead vocalist — and the vocals accompanying it. Not vice versa. Thumbs down.

 

 

ARTHUR CRUDUP

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1941-1946)

 

1) Black Pony Blues; 2) Death Valley Blues; 3) Kind Lover Blues; 4) If I Get Lucky; 5) Standing At My Window; 6) Gonna Follow My Baby; 7) Give Me A 32-20; 8) My Mama Don't Allow Me; 9) Mean Old 'Frisco Blues; 10) Raised To My Hand; 11) Cool Disposition; 12) Who's Been Foolin' You; 13) Rock Me Mama; 14) Keep Your Arms Around Me; 15) Dirt Road Blues; 16) I'm In The Mood; 17) She's Gone; 18) Ethel Mae; 19) So Glad You're Mine; 20) Boy Friend Blues; 21) No More Lovers; 22) You Got To Reap; 23) Chicago Blues; 24) That's Your Red Wagon.

 

Arthur «Big Boy» Crudup — the respectable layman will know this name only with the blessing of Elvis, and even then, only if the respectable layman cares to look at the songwriting credits. Who knows, perhaps without Arthur Crudup there would have been no Elvis as such; it is the reworking of 'That's All Right Mama', after all, that truly caught the ear of Sam Philips and jump­started the King's career.

 

The respectable layman also knows that at least one more big Elvis hit, 'My Baby Left Me', is also credited to Crudup. The respectable would, perhaps, want to ask how come they are the exact same song with different sets of lyrics — and be surprised in learning that, throughout his entire recording career, Arthur Crudup only wrote two songs, which, for lack of a better terminology, we shall hereby call The Slow One and The Fast One. From 1941 to 1954, he cut around a hund­red sides that, at best, constituted minor variations on these two pillars of his career, and, at worst, only differed as to the lyrics. (Although even the lyrics get recycled. E. g., the song 'That's All Right Mama' is not even present on this first volume, but the immortal lines ­— 'that's all right, mama, any way you do' — can already be found on two or three other cuts).

 

The fact that Crudup's records actually found reasonable commercial success in the 1940s will seem all the more mind-boggling once you realize just how simple the formula is. Arthur never was a great singer, whining and wheezing his way through the songs as certainly does not befit a true «Big Boy», and his guitar playing, particularly compared to such blues greats of the day as Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, or Lonnie Johnson, is at best rudimentary. Historically speaking, he was one of the pioneers of the electric guitar — along with the similarly minimalistic John Lee Hooker and the far more technical T-Bone Walker — but his sound was really just amplified acoustic, sometimes hard to tell from true unplugged; certainly this could not be a determining factor.

 

We would hit closer to home if we suggested that «Big Boy», in the world of popular blues-based entertainment, was one of the earliest propagators of the Keep It Simple Stupid approach; his di­rect heir was Jimmy Reed, and from then on — innumerable swarms of rockabilly pioneers, who were all too happy to blow on the coals of rock and roll excitement that lie at the heart of Crudup's Fast One, and sometimes on the coals of straightahead macho minimalism that make up the bulk of Crudup's Slow One.

 

Back in 1941, listeners were happy to have this non-sophis­tication — yearning for a simple, ac­cessible groove with a little bit of raw animalism (too much raw animalism, as displayed by Mississippi gurus like Charley Patton and  Son House, would be way too scary for the respectable layman). Today, we may want to listen to this for altogether different reasons, combining historic curiosity with strange spiritual/intellectual urges — such as the urge to judge Arthur's grooves as turning non-sophi­stication into art, intentionally sacrificing complexity and progress in favor of something utterly free and natural, even though he himself certainly never saw it that way: he just kind of sort of liked to play guitar, to the best of his ability, and must have been deeply and pro­foundly shocked to find these records selling.

 

On a minor side note, he does sound a little bit like Robert Johnson from time to time — similar «whining» style, similar simplistic guitar accompaniment (although, in Johnson's case, it was de­ceptively simplistic) — and it may be so that people bought his records through some odd asso­ciation. Perhaps, somehow, he symbolized that creepy Delta magnetism better than anybody else in some listeners' eyes and ears. Perhaps not.

 

Discussing the actual titles would be completely useless. 'Rock Me Mama' is the best known one ('rock me mama — one time — before I go' is, after all, a classic line), and 'So Glad You're Mine' is another Slow One that Elvis put his mark on a decade later. Only about five or six of these 24 num­bers are Fast Ones; in the early 1940s, that kind of «blues-boogie» was still a novelty com­pared to the more traditional slow 12-bar form, so if you are more interested in Crudup as the pio­neer of rock and roll, skip to the next volume.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1946-1949)

 

1) Crudup's After Hours; 2) I Want My Lovin'; 3) That's All Right; 4) I Don't Know It; 5) Cry Your Blues Away; 6) Crudup's Vicksburg Blues; 7) Gonna Be Some Changes Made; 8) Train Fare Blues; 9) Katie Mae; 10) Hey Mama, Everything's All Right; 11) Hoodoo Lady Blues; 12) Lonesome World To Me; 13) Roberta Blues; 14) Just Like A Spider; 15) Some Day; 16) That's Why I'm Lonesome; 17) Tired Of Worry; 18) Dust My Broom; 19) Hand Me Down My Walking Cane; 20) Shout Sister Shout; 21) Come Back Baby; 22) You Know That I Love You.

 

If there is one change from «Big Boy»'s early 1940s to late 1940s style, it is a drastic shift of the proportional rate of the Slow One to the Fast One. Crudup's soul may have been more in the Slow One, but the real money was coming in on the Fast One; thus, out of the 22 songs on this album, 10 are the Fast One and 12 are the Slow One, whereas on the first volume the Fast One first ap­peared in the guise of 'Mean Old Frisco Blues' and only gained its positions very gradually.

 

This is the period during which 'That's All Right (Mama)' was recorded — but in the context of the album, it is not even the most energetic incarnation of the Fast One; personally, I would rather vote for 'I Want My Lovin', the exact same tune, but with some very nifty jazz drumming driving Arthur to play and sing it with a tad more wildness. Of course, these are truly microscopical dif­ferences we are speaking about, but what else is there to speak about when you deal with an artist who is not above re-recording the same 12-bar blues as 'Ethel Mae' the first time and then 'Katie Mae' the second time around?

 

Pretty much the only Fast One here that is not 'That's All Right' is 'Shout Sister Shout', a fun piece of Big Joe Turner-ish jump blues; and pretty much the only Slow Ones of particular notice are his interpretations of 'Dust My Broom' and 'Hand Me Down My Walking Cane', since it is most like­ly his simplistic style of trilling that served as the inspiration for Elmore James. (Do not quote me on that, though). The rest is the rest: 'Gonna Be Some Changes Made' is as deceiving a song title as I have ever come across.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 3 (1949-1952)

 

1) Mercy Blues; 2) She's Just Like Caldonia; 3) Mean Old Santa Fe; 4) Behind Closed Doors; 5) She Ain't Nothin' But Trouble; 6) Oo-Wee Darling; 7) Anytime Is The Right Time; 8) My Baby Left Me; 9) Nobody Wants Me; 10) Star Bootlegger; 11) Too Much Competition; 12) Second Man Blues; 13) Pearly Lee; 14) Love Me Mama; 15) Never No More; 16) Where Did You Stay Last Night?; 17) I'm Gonna Dig Myself A Hole; 18) I'm Gonna Dig Myself A Hole (alt. take); 19) Goin' Back To Georgia; 20) Mr. So And So; 21) Do It If You Want To; 22) Keep On Drinkin'.

 

As the 1950s drew near, Big Boy finally decided to vary the formula — if only a little bit. He got himself a new guitar sound, explicitly more electrified and thick than before, learned a few extra chords (or so it would seem), and even dared to tread on the previously untrodden turf of a few giants. 'Anytime Is The Right Time', for instance, is a soft and sweet blues ballad in the vein of Lonnie Johnson; and for 'Nobody Wants Me', he assumes a plaintive lyrical tone that evokes the blues queens of the 1920s.

 

This is pretty much it, though. Except for those two songs and tiny signs of evolution as a player (and the generally much improved sound quality, but, what with the passing of time, this is to be expected), everything else is still The Slow One and The Fast One; and The Fast One is, once again, giving up its positions (the ratio on this volume is 13 : 8 in favor of The Slow One, not counting one alternate take), while The Slow One, if that is even possible, becomes even more generic than before — out of the 13, at least seven or eight start out with the exact same ringing chords. Alas, no «Guess That Melody» game for Arthur Crudup, I'm afraid.

 

Of course, this is also the volume that has 'My Baby Left Me' on it, and it has pretty much the same atmospheric spirit — a little dark, a little depressed, yet all very playful — that Elvis mana­ged to preserve with his cover. Which should not detract from realizing that it is the exact same song as 'That's All Right (Mama)', or even that pretty much all of its lyrics had already appeared on previous recordings of The Fast One, usually in sizable chunks.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 4 (1952-1954)

 

1) Worried About You Baby; 2) Late In The Evening; 3) Lookin' For My Baby; 4) Nelvina; 5) My Baby Boogies All The Time; 6) I Wonder; 7) Baby I've Been Mistreated; 8) You Didn't Mean A Word; 9) Open Your Book; 10) Tears In My Eyes; 11) Tears In My Eyes (alternate take); 12) Gonna Find My Baby; 13) Make A Little Love; 14) I Love My Baby; 15) My Wife And Women; 16) The War Is Over; 17) Fall On Your Knees And Pray; 18) If You Ever Been To Georgia; 19) Help Me To Bear This Heavy Load; 20) I Love You; 21) She's Got No Hair; 22) Looka There, She's Got No Hair; 23) I Love Her Just The Same.

 

The last Crudup volume in the Document series covers two and a half more years in his career before he went into semi-retirement, supposedly out of disgust with the record labels cheating him out of hard-earned cash (frankly speaking, it is possible to understand the record labels — how many times over and over again can you pay an artist for recording the exact same song?). The catalyst might have actually been Elvis' recording of 'That's Alright (Mama)', for which Big Boy never got any royalties — but then he didn't really write it, either.

 

Anyway, this is probably the most «full-sounding» Crudup album out there, as he essays to diver­sify his act by trying on different melodies and instrumentation. The sessions that cover the stretch from 'My Baby Boogies All The Time' to 'Make A Little Love' add an aggressive harmo­nica player, and the whole shenanigan occasionally resembles a weaker version of Son House's voodoo ritual. Then, starting with 'I Love My Baby', the harmonica is either replaced or supported by sax, and some of the tracks start sounding as if they want to capture the light groove of Atlantic R'n'B — including perhaps the oddest song in the Crudup catalog, the comic romp of 'Looka There, She's Got No Hair' (present here in two versions, one light, with brass and harmo­nica and whiny clownish singing, one dark, with grittier electric guitar, no brass, and a much more growly performance).

 

None of this helped make Arthur a big star once again — in the blues world, people were hungry for edgier atmosphere (Muddy) or blistering guitar playing (Elmore), and in the world of flashy entertainment, early rock'n'roll was replacing jump blues, and «Big Boy», unfortunately, was not nearly as big as to be able to recast himself in any of these moulds. Little innocent tricks, like put­ting out a song called 'The War Is Over' as a present to Korean veterans, did not help either. So it is no big surprise that the Document series stops at 1954 — there was no place for Arthur Crudup in the musical world of 1955. And, despite all the attempts at change, this is probably the least es­sential chapter in the man's history.

 

MEAN OL' FRISCO (1962)

 

1) Mean Ol' Frisco; 2) I'm In The Mood; 3) That's All Right; 4) Standin' At My Window; 5) Angel Child; 6) Katie Mae; 7) Look On Yonder Wall; 8) Dig Myself A Hole; 9) If I Get Lucky; 10) Death Valley Blues; 11) I Love Her Just The Same; 12) Angel Child; 13) Rock Me Mama; 14) Ethel Mae; 15) My Mama Don't Allow Me.

 

Fire Records was a small independent black-owned label, set up in 1959 with the purpose of hol­ding up black artists — either old, struggling ones, or new, inexperienced ones — against the seas of troubles. Among the old, struggling ones, they happened to pick up Arthur, and Arthur respon­ded to the pickup by faithfully re-recording a bunch of avatars of the Slow One and a bunch of avatars of the Fast One.

 

The only reason to listen to Mean Ol' Frisco is, for those who really like «Big Boy» for his art rather than historic importance, the fact that he sounds pretty much the same as usual, but the pro­duction values are, naturally, much higher and the cracks and hisses are eliminated, so that one can assess and enjoy his blatantly poor guitar playing with no obstacles in sight. To be fair, it is a little different; in fact, he seems to have picked up a few more chords during the first decade of re­tirement — but certainly not enough to catch up on his superiors, nor even enough to make the Slow One and the Fast One significantly different from what they used to be.

 

LOOK ON YONDER'S WALL (1969)

 

1) Look On Yonder's Wall; 2) Questionnaire Blues; 3) Keep Your Hands Off That Woman; 4) That's All Right; 5) Rock Me Mama; 6) Katie Mae; 7) Dust My Broom; 8) Landlord Blues; 9) Coal Black Mare; 10) Life Is Just A Gamble; 11) Walk Out On My Road; 12) I'm All Alone; 13) You'll Be Old Before Your Time; 14) Ramblin' Blues; 15) When I Lost My Baby.

 

Finally, for those who would want to check out the utterly modernized, up-to-date Big Boy, there is this disc, assembled from Arthur's late Sixties — I'm guessing around 1967-69 — sessions for Del­mark Records. Willie Dixon, who did accompany Arthur on at least some of his late Sixties sessions, is apparently not present — two different bass players, one of which I do not know, and the other one of which is Ransom Knowling, Arthur's original bass player for 'That's All Right', are listed among the credits — and there is also regularly a second guitarist, assuming all the «melodic» duties as Big Boy simply slices up the growling rhythm chords. This is a nice change, but the se­cond guitarist is no Elmore James or Albert King, so it does not affect the situation much.

 

The only bit of variety is that some of the songs are accompanied by a little studio banter, letting you know that Big Boy's singing style did not vary all that much from his talking one. Otherwise, it just makes up for the finest sounding, but least intriguing version of the Crudup Groove for those who do not like the vibe of the late 1940s hollow-body electric (or, more properly, «electri­fied») guitar. Nothing else. Soon afterwards, he would once again stop recording, and soon after that, he would die, as that was pretty much the last productive option to choose. But he lived a good life, and left behind two good records — The Slow One and The Fast One. That is, after all, two good records more than most artists in this world have ever produced.

 

 

B. B. KING

SINGIN' THE BLUES (1956)

 

1) Please Love Me; 2) You Upset Me Baby; 3) Everyday (I Have The Blues); 4) Bad Luck; 5) Three O'Clock Blues; 6) Blind Love; 7) Woke Up This Morning; 8) You Know I Love You; 9) Sweet Little Angel; 10) Ten Long Years; 11) Did You Ever Love A Woman; 12) Crying Won't Help You.

 

B. B. King's singles on RPM records started flowing as early as 1949, but most of his career was LP-oriented, and so it makes sense to choose, as our point of departure, this 1956 collection that puts together the majority of his best singles from 1951 to 1955 (a more comprehensive overview of the early years can probably be found on some later anthologies, but, as far as I am able to tell, there is no single collection that puts together all of his early material).

 

Many of these songs were huge hits on the blues and R&B charts — but, for some reason, missed attracting white audiences, far more enthralled with the likes of Muddy Waters and Elmore James at the time. Look up the biographies of blues/R&B-enthralled British Invaders, for instance, and you will rarely see B. B. mentioned as an influence, except, perhaps, by just a few oddjobs like Eric Clapton, and only in retrospect. Reason? Too clean.

 

Already from the get-go, B. B. positioned himself as the king of «Blues-de-Luxe»: respectable playing for respectable gentlemen. Take a look at the album cover: with his big fat Gibson, pin-striped suit and tie, he looks like the black equi­valent of Bill Haley. The same applies to music: smooth, mid-tempo, backed by professional jazz musicians with big brassy arrangements. And, to make matters worse, the guy puts as much emphasis on his singing as he does on his playing — the most tasteless thing in blues, ever! But then, what do you really want from a guy one of who­se primary idols in life has been Frank Sinatra?

 

All of this easily explains why B. B. did not become a household name among white audiences until the late Sixties and particularly the early Seventies. It also explains why these early singles are not really the «milestones» they are sometimes pronounced to be. For blues lovers, 'Every Day I Have The Blues' is one of the cornerstones of the genre, but definitely not because of this original version of King's, a whopping 2:49 in length and only featuring a brief, minimalistic solo — he had to popularize it, and a dozen other big hits, in a live context to achieve this result, and he had to wait at least ten more years for it.

 

Singin' The Blues is no more of a milestone in the evolution of electric blues than contemporary records by the other King (Albert) — or, for that matter, earlier records by T-Bone Walker. Most of the time, B. B. plays relatively standard, predictable licks that do not differ all that much from the regular techniques of the epoch; more importantly, the compact form of the 45"-tailored ditty does not allow him the slightest opportunity to stretch out, improvise, or develop a theme.

 

If there is one reason to listen to these singles at all, it is the singing. Unquestionably, at this point B. B. King was the most vocally-endowed blues performer in the business (and would remain so until the emergence of a strong competitor in Freddie King), and his manner of phrasing and vo­calizing owes much more to urban semi-crooners like Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson, not to mention white lounge performers (to whom the man must have lent quite a serious ear), than to hoarse growlers from the Delta. This makes it hard to associate his music with the devil, who, as I have heard, is gravely allergic to falsetto, and prefers to make serious deals with the likes of John Lee Hooker. But, when dealing with B. B. King, it is wise to remember that blues had been alter­nately serving as a genre of lounge entertainment since the day it was born, and to try and appro­ach him from the same way one would approach Sinatra or Neil Diamond: prima facie a respec­table entertainer who will try to stir up — gracefully and cautiously to some, blandly and boringly to others — the human parts of your soul, not the animal parts.

 

In fact, I think I «got» this record — and B. B.'s studio style in general — when I thought of it as sort of a Clyde McPhatter album with the doo-wop harmonies and strings replaced by searing electric guitar. Many people, I think, share this dream with me: to hear Clyde McPhatter with an atmosphere of grit inside of sap. Well, you need not look further than the original versions of 'Three O'Clock Blues' or 'Did You Ever Love A Woman' to get what you want. Thumbs up; this may be «seminal» material indeed — but not for the reasons it is usually proclaimed as such.

 

THE BLUES (1958)

 

1) Why Does Everything Happen To Me; 2) Ruby Lee; 3) When My Heart Beats Like A Hammer; 4) Past Day; 5) Boogie Woogie Woman; 6) Early Every Morning; 7) I Want To Get Married; 8) That Ain't The Way To Do It; 9) Troubles, Troubles, Troubles; 10) Don't You Want A Man Like Me; 11) You Know I Go For You; 12) What Can I Do?.

 

Singin' The Blues is at least historically important in that it collects B. B.'s hit singles from an entire half-decade; by the time it became necessary to issue a follow-up, with LPs slowly, but ste­adily taking on as a medium at least as important as the 45", the golden vaults were exhausted, and so, this and the following several LPs are extremely uneven on the commercial scale.

 

On the other hand, The Blues is where King truly begins to demonstrate traces of stylistic ver­satility and show how easily he can adapt himself to different times. If the debut LP was mostly li­mited to «hardcore blues» and «blues ballads», here we have ourselves some bossa nova ('Ruby Lee', 'Don't You Want A Man Like Me'), some stompin' boogie ('Boogie Woogie Woman', 'That Ain't The Way To Do It'), and even a timid attempt at a rawer rockabilly sound ('Early Every Morning').

 

It is quite transparent that B. B. is trying to toughen up his image: there are practically no at­tempts at crooning, and most of the «soul» attitude is sacrificed in order to make space for more rock'n'roll. However, just like before, the songs are simply way too short, and have been cut way too quickly, for any of this material to acquire some individuality, and, from the first track to the last, it merely plays as acceptable background music with stylish (for their time) guitar licks.

 

The only «classic» hit here was 'When My Heart Beats Like A Hammer', which, in its studio ver­sion, is simply one more indistinguishable example of blues-de-luxe (slow tempo, brass section, soulful vocals, recognizable soloing, B. B. had like a million of these songs out back in those days); seek out various live versions to explore its true potential. The «sleeper» is 'Early Every Morning', which does have one of the best examples of King's fast playing on record (much more fluent and complex than Chuck Berry's, but also, predictably, less ass-kicking).

 

B. B. KING WAILS (1959)

 

1) Sweet Thing; 2) I've Got Papers On You, Baby; 3) Tomorrow Is Another Day; 4) Come By Here; 5) The Fool; 6) I Love You So; 7) The Woman I Love; 8) We Can't Make It; 9) Treat Me Right; 10) Time To Say Goodbye.

 

He wails all right, but he does not play all that much. Credited to «B. B. King And His Or­che­s­tra», the record is an even more clearly pronounced effort to promote B. B. as a lounge enter­tai­ner, downplaying his guitar skills and concentrating on the power of his voice. There are, in fact, several tracks on here where he doesn't produce a single lick — such as the ridiculous 'Come By Here', a «family arrangement» of 'Kumbaya' with new (and even sillier) lyrics, or the generic doo-wop of 'I Love You So'.

 

This cannot work, and it does not work. No one should doubt the powers of B. B. King as a blues singer — always was one of the absolute best out there — but his voice only works to its fullest when he gives it the proper competition from the guitar. Competing with crooners like Clyde Mc­Phatter, or even comparably bulky R'n'B-ers like Big Joe Turner, is, however, an entirely useless thing, and whoever took the decision of drowning King's guitar in orchestral arrangements must have had only recently switched to working in the music industry from an earplug factory.

 

About half of this surprisingly short album (ten tracks only) is still vintage B. B., with some fiery playing on tracks like 'The Woman I Love' and 'Treat Me Right', but, on the other hand, these are tracks that add little, if anything, to the stylistics already displayed on the previous two albums. 'The Fool' and 'Time To Say Goodbye' were the singles, but neither is a classic; 'The Fool' is also one of those guitarless tracks that should have been left to crooners.

 

The recent CD reissue of the album is arguably a better proposition than the original, due to the inclusion of a few bonus tracks that have B. B. playing not with his own orchestra, but with Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey instead; the Count Basie version of 'Everyday I Have The Blues', in particular, is probably a must-hear for fans of both artists. Which does not save the record itself from a disappointed thumbs down, regardless.

 

B. B. KING SINGS SPIRITUALS (1959)

 

1) Precious Lord; 2) Save A Seat For Me; 3) Ole Time Religion; 4) Swing Low Sweet Chariot; 5) Servant's Prayer; 6) Jesus Gave Me Water; 7) I Never Heard A Man; 8) Army Of The Lord; 9) I Am Willing To Run All The Way; 10) I'm Working On The Building.

 

Far be it from us to say that B. B. King is a poor singer — he has a nice, endearing, sometimes al­most silky tone that never grates or annoys.

 

Further be it from us to say that B. B. King is not a spiritually sensible man — regardless of how much money he has made and how much of it he has not given away to the poor, there is little reason to doubt his sincere faith in the Lord (who has, among other things, provided him with all that money).

 

Still further be it from us to say that B. B. King has no right, or reason, or business recording an entire album of gospel tunes if he feels like it — especially considering that, every once in a while, everyone deserves at least a brief change from the 12-bar mold, and going into gospel is nowhere near as cringeworthy as, say, going into crooning.

 

And be it as furthest of the furthest from us as possible to say that B. B. King Sings Spirituals is a proverbially bad album. If you have not suffered priest abuse, be it Catholic or Protestant; if you have no 19th century-style racial prejudices; and if you can stand a little musical take on «ol' time religion» propel­led by good singing and good organ playing, the record cannot be put down on its own merits.

 

None of which, however, prevents me from stating the obvious: I cannot think of a reason why any­one would want to hear, much less own, a B. B. King album with no guitar on it whatsoever. B. B. King is a guitar player, period. If he does not want to play his guitar, let him not play his guitar in front of his parents, his children, his close friends, or his mirror. In this life, B. B. King has one and only one social purpose (that matters, anyway), and that is playing his guitar. I can understand that he did not want to be pigeonholed. I can do nothing about it — I want to pigeon­hole him, and I will pigeonhole him. Call me Dubyah if you will — but this is a thumbs down.

 

THE GREAT B. B. KING (1960)

 

1) Sweet Sixteen; 2) (I'm Gonna) Quit You Baby; 3) I Was Blind; 4) What Can I Do; 5) Someday Baby; 6) Sneakin' Around; 7) I Had A Woman; 8) Be Careful With A Fool; 9) Whole Lot Of Lovin'; 10) Days Of Old.

 

Back to the blues at least, even if, like most other albums from that period, this is another mish-mash of all kinds of different tracks from all kinds of different years. The selection had been made around exactly one new hit: B. B.'s rendition of 'Sweet Sixteen', originally made popular by Big Joe Turner on Atlantic Records.

 

Back in 1960, B. B. was no Big Joe when it came to solid body mass (he would catch up pretty soon, though), but, after singing all these spirituals, he was in greater vocal shape than ever, and for this little bit of soap drama, he gives Big Joe quite a run for his money. The only solo on this blues rant takes place at the beginning, and the whole piece runs for over six minutes, covering both sides of the single — but the emphasis is really on the interplay between B. B.'s vocals and the weep and wail of the guitar. Arguably, 'Sweet Sixteen' is the first truly classic B. B. studio re­cording — live, like most other tunes, it would simply become a foundation for passionate instrumental blueswailing, but the studio original has its own modest charm.

 

The rest of the tracks are mostly blues, although diluted by occasional shades of doo-wop-tinged gospel ('I Was Blind'), doo-wop-tinged lounge entertainment ('Sneakin' Around'), and boogie-wo­ogie ('Days Of Old'). The blues, too, is diversified: on 'Whole Lot Of Lovin', for instance, B. B. tries out some Elmore James (i. e. goes for the 'Dust My Broom' riff), and slow and mid-tempos alternate frequently enough to make one at least notice the in-between song breaks. Plus, as intu­itive as it may sound, he seems to go for sharper, crisper tones, rougher cut-offs and shriller notes, toughening it up for a more demanding audience, perhaps? (Not that I have any idea of the abso­lute chronology of any of those recordings).

 

If Singin' The Blues was important for being his first, then The Great B. B. King is important for bringing the man back from the mischievous temptation of becoming a crooner or a gospel performer, kicking back into the blues idiom with a vengeance. Thumbs up.

 

 

MY KIND OF BLUES (1960)

 

1) You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now; 2) Mr. Pawn Broker; 3) Understand; 4) Someday Baby; 5) Driving Wheel; 6) Walking Dr. Bill; 7) My Own Fault, Darling; 8) Cat Fish Blues; 9) Hold That Train; 10) Please Set A Date.

 

Somewhat of a turning point on B. B.'s personal highway; according to his own memory (which has little choice but to be trusted, given an utter lack of independent sources), this was his first al­bum recorded as a proper album — over one single recording session with one single small back­ing band — and in full accordance with his own vision of the blues. My Kind Of Blues indeed: the title is far more meaningful in this instance than all the Great B. B. Kings in the world.

 

It is not hard to believe the story. If you want to hear a fresh, young, not-yet-overweight B. B. King sing and play stark blues — no lounge entertainment, no spirituals, no experimentation with teenage music styles etc. — My Kind Of Blues is the obvious choice. There is no single particu­lar standout; technically, the «heavy» bit is the opening number, 'You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now', which takes five minutes of intense build-up to deliver its point, but it is hardly any more jaw-dropping than the rest of the record.

 

Which is hardly jaw-dropping at all, to tell the truth, but merely one of those basic delights which make the enlightened blues fan happy. All 12-bar, all formula-worshipping, but with B. B. acting in the role of B. B. to fill in the function variable, My Kind Of Blues is unassailable as long as we agree that B. B.'s guitar playing style itself is unassailable. Because, finally, he is given plenty of room to express himself, unconfined to the limitations of the 2:30 single and unhampered by any fat brass section.

 

Come to think of it, the first thirty seconds of 'You Done Lost...' may almost be announcing the start of a new era for the electric guitar — that of the loud, pompous, soulful blues guitar intro­duction, abused by millions since then but, arguably, never truly surpassed. And although none of the solos that King plays on this album are as flashy as the ones he would soon be throwing aro­und on stage, most of them deserve to be listened to with special attention. Sometimes he starts playing against the melody. Sometimes he toys around with the volume, puncturing the value of short bits of silence within long bits of loudness. All of the time he is being flawless — not a sin­gle mistake, not a single clumsy transition, and all this within lengthy series of relatively complex licks that explore all the possibilities offered to them by the limited time frame.

 

All of this has been replicated and surpassed many times since 1960, so that today My Kind Of Blues can be revered only for its historical importance. But enjoyed it can be purely for itself. Unquestionably a thumbs up.

 

KING OF THE BLUES (1960)

 

1) I've Got A Right To Love My Baby; 2) What Way To Go; 3) Long Nights; 4) Feel Like A Million; 5) I'll Survive; 6) Good Man Gone Bad; 7) If I Lost You; 8) You're On The Top; 9) Partin' Time; 10) I'm King.

 

It is almost impossible to determine whether King Of The Blues was released before or after My Kind Of Blues, but, in the long run, it does not make much difference: all through the decade, «real» albums like the latter continued to be released side by side with pseudo-albums that con­tinued to combine new tracks, old tracks, hardcore blues, and usually lame excursions into other genres. At least King Of The Blues mostly sticks to hardcore; but the big brass sound is back, and the level of inspiration falls down once again.

 

Like The Great B. B. King, this is a single-supporting LP, except the hit single is nowhere near as epochal as 'Sweet Sixteen': it is 'Got A Right To Love My Baby', announced by thick pompous fanfares and placing B. B. in some remote corner so that his voice echoes all over the studio — a regular gimmick on this record, supposed to add explicit stateliness — perhaps, even Godliness — to a personality that'd be much better off radiating them implicitly. Truthfully, the song is no better and no worse than the other nine cuts of this blues-de-luxe, most of which are structured around a big brass riff, although B. B. faithfully soloes on every track.

 

One could speculate that the whole idea was to press down the «king, king, king» image on the audiences, given the diminishing popularity of blues artists, and that the album title, the ever-in­creasing pompousness of the delivery, and the inclusion of a track specifically called 'I'm King' all intended to reinstate the people's belief in B. B. But with the emergence of another King — Freddie — that same year, with the big smash of 'Have You Ever Loved A Woman', far more searing, brutal, and immediate than all of King Of The Blues put together, the idea was doomed. «Mainstreamers» went for totally safe white crooners, and «alternativers» rather went for Freddie, Mud­dy, and Elmore. Efforts like these could only plop through the cracks.

 

Of course, in retrospect, all of this is nice and perfectly listenable as tasteful background music (muzak). But in its context, King Of The Blues kinda sucks — like most albums that contain the word 'King' and actually intend to mean it. To paraphrase a semi-fictional Roman, "Listen, king of the blues — where is your kingdom?.."

 

BLUES FOR ME (1961)

 

1) Bad Case Of Love; 2) Get Out Of Here; 3) Bad Luck Soul; 4) Shut Your Mouth; 5) Baby, Look At You; 6) You're Breaking My Heart; 7) My Reward; 8) Don't Cry Anymore; 9) Blues For Me; 10) Just Like A Woman.

 

B. B. King goes... twisting, at least on the opening number, 'Bad Case Of Love'; for any similar artist with a similar gesture today, we'd call this yet another exercise in self-prostituting, but for B. B. King, this was, no doubt, just another brave attempt to break down the walls between genres. He twists pretty damn good, too; I guess his moves are a little rustier than Chubby Checker's, but he can sure play the guitar a whole lot better.

 

But seriously, Blues For Me is just another by-the-book record that only distinguishes itself in two ways from its predecessor. The bad way is that it brings back the syrupy orchestrated ballads ('My Reward'). The good way is that there are quite a few fast numbers, and 'Bad Case Of Love' — the lead single — is actually the least surprising of them, because B. B. also tries out grittier, Chuck Berry-style rock'n'roll, replete with true Berry-style licks and rollicking Johnny Johnson-style piano ('Just Like A Woman'), and even — dare I say it? — Ventures-style surf-rock (the totally mismatchingly named title track).

 

As for pure guitar power, the real highlight is probably 'You're Breaking My Heart', if only be­cause it is graciously given a weighty four minutes to properly unwind. Not that it makes a lot of difference or anything. Overall, just another enjoyable, but completely predictable page in the man's conservative almanac.

 

BLUES IN MY HEART (1962)

 

1) You're Gonna Miss Me; 2) Got 'Em Bad; 3) Troubles Don't Last; 4) Your Letter; 5) I Can't Explain; 6) The Wrong Road; 7) I Need You Baby; 8) So Many Roads; 9) Down Hearted; 10) Strange Things.

 

How do you tell a corporate profanation of the art of B. B. King from a shackle-free celebration of the art of B. B. King? Simple. If all the ballads, rumbas, and twists make you miss the blues, you're in for the whoring. If, on the contrary, all the blues makes you miss the rumbas and twists, you know you're in for the real stuff.

 

At this particular session, there really was quite a big deal of blues in B. B.'s heart. In fact, there is so much blues in his heart, it ends up sharing the fate of too much fat in the broth of the pro­verbial greedy inn­keeper who was promised to be paid by the spot. Meaning, of course, that all of the songs sound so much the same, it takes a significant attention span to notice the breaks.

 

It must have been a fun session, but with the exact same mid-tempo 12-bar structure all over the place, there is hardly an album that can make a worse case against the limitations of the blues. 'Down Hearted', a.k.a. 'How Blue Can You Get', is taken at a wee bit slower tempo and sounds a little bit more personal ('I gave you seven children, and now you wanna give 'em back' is as clas­sic as a blues line can get), which is probably why it got a single release, but, as far as I know, it was not a big hit anyway. The rest are all interchangeable.

 

On the positive side, if you survive one intent listen to this, King's ensuing output will look like the epitome of diversity in comparison — and so, by the way, will almost every other electric blues album released ever since. This is, like, the utmost in hardcore 12-bar; and I used to think Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac could be boring. You live, you learn.  

 

EASY LISTENING BLUES (1962)

 

1) Easy Listening Blues; 2) Blues For Me; 3) Night Long; 4) Confessin'; 5) Don't Touch; 6) Slow Walk; 7) Walking; 8) Hully Gully; 9) Shoutin' The Blues; 10) Rambler.

 

Very easy listening blues. So easy, in fact, that you do not even have to stress out your aural ner­ves responsible for picking up and transmitting the human voice — there is none. After a whole album of non-playing B. B. King (Spirituals), Crown Records have invented yet another way to mar­ket the hypermarketable: a whole album of non-singing B. B. King.

 

It does, however, serve one important purpose: make one understand how integral King's vocals are to his sound. When we pay for the man, we pay for the pair; anything less than that and you are ripped off mercilessly. The playing on these ten tracks is no better and no worse than else­where — perhaps even a wee bit better than last time around, since, once again, you get diversity: regular mid-tempo 12-bar stuff interspersed with a little boogie, a little rumba, and a little twist. But without the vocals, none of the songs have any actual sense.

 

Of course, Easy Listening is supposed to mean «stuff you put on while doing housework, so that all the bypassers learn you have real good taste». But here is the shameful secret: I thought pretty much all of B. B. King's albums from the Crown era (and quite a few from later periods) are «ea­sy listening», and I never expected the stakes were only waiting to be lowered. Am I wrong? Are we supposed to listen to the previous ten albums as if they had lots of deep, penetrating stuff to tell us? I do not really buy it. B. B. King's primary function is entertainment, and this album is low-quality entertainment because it deprives us of a deserved half of it. Thumbs down.

 

B. B. KING (1963)

 

1) Going Home; 2) The Letter; 3) You Never Know; 4) Please Remember Me; 5) Come Back Baby; 6) You Won't Listen; 7) Sundown; 8) You Shouldn't Have Left; 9) House Rocker/Boogie Rock; 10) Shake Yours.

 

Sometime in late 1962 or early 1963, B. B. King switched record labels, relocating from RPM to ABC; in the long run, this turned out to be a crucial move for his career, but at the moment it just seemed like exchanging three decent letters of the alphabet for three other ones (although symbo­lically placed at the top of the alphabet). Consequently, some sources claim that B. B. King, ano­ther in a series of album titles so absolutely stunning in their inexhaustible creativity, was relea­sed on the RPM label already after the man's departure, consisting of a mish-mash of tracks re­corded at various sessions spanning from 1957 to 1963.

 

On the surface, this does not make that much difference considering that most B. B. King albums for RPM were just like that. But with these ten songs, the mix-up is arguably felt sharper than ever, because the sound quality wobbles quite drastically from track to track, indicating that the studio was really scraping out the bottom of the bottom. Surprisingly, if we disregard the lack of technical coherence, B. B. King has a pretty good pacing and diversity to it: fast blues, slow blues, and ballads alternate quite intelligently, and King's playing is no less incendiary than we already know it, so, despite the understandable lack of hits, the album gives you a pretty good overview of B. B.'s strong sides, and cleverly hides most of the weak ones.

 

The highlight is 'Going Home', an early example of tight, biting blues-rock, in fact, one of the first signs that B. B. King might be capable of adapting to the rougher, brutal times lying straight ahead (although the brass backing still manages to Vegasify the proceedings). As the album ope­ner, it gives an impression of looking into the future, which then slowly mutates into the impres­sion of not forgetting the past: at the end of the album, 'Shake Yours' is a completely traditional jump blues number, a little bit of shy guitar drowned in a sea of shouting and ear-bursting trom­bone and trumpet explosions in Wynonie Harris style.

 

Of course, one should not overestimate the diversity of an album where four slow blues tracks (three of them — in a row) start off with the exact same chord sequence, but, still, in the context of King's over­all output for RPM/Crown, B. B. King is as good a way to say good-bye as it was possible. And, just to keep up the good old tradition, note that later on it was occasionally re-released under the much more memorable title The Soul Of B. B. King.

 

MR. BLUES (1963)

 

1) Young Dreamers; 2) By Myself; 3) Chains Of Love; 4) A Mother's Love; 5) Blues At Midnight; 6) Sneakin' Around; 7) On My Road Of Honor; 8) Tomorrow Night; 9) My Baby's Comin' Home; 10) Guess Who; 11) You Ask Me; 12) I'm Gonna Sit In 'Til You Give In.

 

Six of one, half dozen of another; what is the deep sense of changing labels if you keep doing the same old shit? On most of his first album for ABC Records, «Mr. Blues» does not even pick up the guitar; instead, once again they try to market him as a soulful crooner, meaning that the fans will be forced to sit through the orchestrated garbage of 'Young Dreamers' and 'A Mother's Love' in order to get to the scraps of 'Blues At Midnight', the only real blues number on the record with a strong guitar solo (and, ironically, also King's best vocal performance).

 

If there is some sort of saving grace, it is a feeling of diversity which, for the most part, had been lacking on the Crown albums. One hardcore blues number, three or four rotten ballads, a couple slow-paced R'n'B shouters, some boogie — for B. B.'s usual range this is quite a kaleidoscope. And when he is not pulling an (already sold out) Lonnie Johnson on 'Tomorrow Night', trying to outsweeten the sweetness of the strings, he is pulling a much more effective Big Joe Turner on 'Chains Of Love' (a conscious attempt at repeating the success of the near-identical 'Sweet Six­teen'), or rocking his socks off on 'My Baby's Comin' Home', where the Maxwell Davis Orchestra blends in with his guitar playing to near-perfection.

 

These are the good points — but it is evident that they do not outweigh the bad ones, at the very least, there is nothing whatsoever on Mr. Blues to suggest that King's future career would be so radically different from his first decade of hits and misses. At the very least, Mr. Blues shows quite clearly that his creative growth would owe much more to changing expectations and shif­ting public tastes than to any particularities in his record contract. In short, God bless the Sixties (which, to make this point clear, had not yet begun in 1963).

 

LIVE AT THE REGAL (1965)

 

1) Every Day I Have The Blues; 2) Sweet Little Angel; 3) It's My Own Fault; 4) How Blue Can You Get?; 5) Please Love Me; 6) You Upset Me Baby; 7) Worry, Worry; 8) Woke Up This Morning; 9) You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now; 10) Help The Poor.

 

Eventually, someone got it right: even if the live album format was not nearly as obligatory a companion for a performing artist in 1965 as it would be in just a few years, few people deserved a switch to that format any more than the B. B. of the Kings. Unfortunately, Live At The Regal's huge reputa­tion has been causing an almost equally huge backlash in recent years — what with most people falling for the «wanna know what B. B. King sounds like? Try out Live At The Regal» trap, or, even worse, the «wanna know what the blues is all about? How about getting Live At The Regal?» travesty.

 

But it does not work that way. According to hearsay, King himself never considered the final product to be all that great, which is telling, coming from someone who quite obviously is his own biggest fan. Listening to the Regal performance out of context is entirely useless; for most people, it will merely sound like an adequate blues concert. And reading all the rave-ups about how this is one of the most «fiery», «incendiary», «exciting», «involving» etc. performances of its time — come on now, who do these guys think they're kidding? Jerry Lee Lewis' Live At The Star Club — now that's excitement. Live At The Regal is polite entertainment.

 

Still, even today, with those early days of electric blues magic long concealed from us by the trash heaps of generic 12-bar hacks, all it takes to give Regal the appreciation it deserves is to listen to the twelve or so studio LPs that B. B. had to put out in order to gain the precious right to include a recording mike on stage. There, he was cornered; on stage, he is unleashed, and as cli­chéd as this phrase may sound, there is no better context in which to insert it. Playing whatever he wants, however he wants to play it, and for as long as he wants to play it (well, all right, in 1965 he still had himself some time constraints), the man finally gets to show that there is so much mo­re behind the polished surface of his hit singles — enough to convince even fans of the grimmer blues of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker of his worthiness.

 

Some of the songs are played as several-movements «blues suites», where all it takes is a slight change of key in between bars to move from one type of wail to another; this may actually be bet­ter than inserting all the usual breaks, because there is no pretense of playing different songs, and the breaks, where they are present, generally indicate the transition into a general sub-style, of which B. B. has developed many: jump blues ('Every Day I Have The Blues'), boogie blues ('Ple­ase Love Me'), rumba blues ('Woke Up This Morning'), and soul blues ('Help The Poor').

 

Like every self-respecting entertainer, King likes to address the crowds — most often, over a mu­sical background from his backing band — and his ad-libbed bits diversify the atmosphere, ser­ving either as thematic links in between numbers (e. g. the seamless transition from 'Sweet Little Angel' to 'It's My Own Fault') or as justifications of the song's existence (for 'How Blue Can You Get?', he says, "...I would like you to pay attention to the lyrics, not so much to my singing or the band" — right on the money, because the song is lyrically arresting).

 

The unquestionable centerpiece of the album lies in the six and a half minutes of 'Worry, Worry', for the first time ever giving us an extended blues solo — two minutes of subtle blueswailing that sets the benchmark for so many things to come: this is not just generic improvisation, but an at­tempt to «play human» with the guitar, alternating bends, wobbles, stops, and starts in completely unpredictable and yet completely melodic ways. (Not to mention one of B. B.'s most impressive falsetto parts on record).

 

Understandably, Live At The Regal's historical importance — this is, after all, one of the few albums that are directly responsible for the birth of blues-rock as such — has forever oversha­dow­ed its hands-down value (much like, I must add, that of James Brown's Live At The Apollo, if it's all about barbecuing sacred cows). But then there is also no better spot to locate, assess, di­gest, and enjoy a young, rough-spirited, easy-going, eager to please, and, at the same time, not yet corporally or spiritually overweight king of the blues than Live At The Regal; even if it is no independent masterpiece, it is still a unique piece of history and identity. A sacred cow, after all, does not become sacred for nothing. Thumbs up.

 

BLUES IS KING (1967)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Waitin' On You; 3) Introduction; 4) Gambler's Blues; 5) Tired Of Your Jive; 6) Night Life; 7) Buzz Me; 8) Don't Answer The Door; 9) Blind Love; 10) I Know What You're Puttin' Down; 11) Baby Get Lost; 12) Gonna Keep On Loving You.

 

Quite a few fans consider this rough follow-up to Live At The Regal as the superior experience, and they might just as well be right. The only problem is, despite being a fully official album, Blues Is King plays all the way through at solid bootleg quality — the sound is awfully thin and sparse. You do get to hear all of the instruments, but you hardly get to be overwhelmed by any­thing close to a coherent wall-of-sound.

 

Still, this is quite definitely a marking-time record; where Live At The Regal finally showed us the proper way to enjoy B. B. King's music, Blues Is King is the first firm proof of his ability to make the transition from one musical era into another without losing any of his relevancy or pub­lic appeal. Recorded in late 1966, at a time when white guitar heroes like Beck and Clapton had already started to revolutionize the role of their instrument in the world of pop music, and when the world was one step away from Jimi's stage appearance, Blues Is King shows that B. B. was firmly hip to the times, willing to get louder, shriller, and even a little dirtier to keep up with all the young British whippersnappers.

 

The singing is as solid as always, but the spotlight is 100% on «Lucille», which even gets its own introduction in the spoken credits section; most of the tracks feature mid-size extended solos that keep getting more and more complex and inventive and intense and «talkative». No single track stands out — curiously, the set list does not include any of his bigger hits — and there are no po­mpous blues medleys to underscore the «regal» status of the man, but everything is as sweaty/gri­tty as it could possibly get at the time, and the saxophone/organ backing is no slouch, either (es­pecially awesome are the sax/guitar duets such as during the coda to 'Buzz Me').

 

Actually, the set list is somewhat more monotonous than on Regal: slow blues and fast blues is all you get to hear, so, coupled with the tinny sound, this may not register at the top range of King's live albums. But for the diehard fan, this may be the one particular B. B. King experience to trump all the others: stark, staunch, uncompromising, loud, and who cares about the sound quality? the dirtier it is, the higher the chance it'll be your own personal love affair with the LP and no-fuckin'-body other's. Thumbs up, in support of this elitist idea.

 

BLUES ON TOP OF BLUES (1968)

 

1) Heartbreaker; 2) Losing Faith In You; 3) Dance With Me; 4) That's Wrong Little Mama; 5) Having My Say; 6) I'm Not Wanted Anymore; 7) Worried Dream; 8) Paying The Cost To Be The Boss; 9) Until I Found You; 10) I'm Gonna Do What They Do To Me; 11) Raining In My Heart; 12) Now That You've Lost Me.

 

At first, this seems decent; at the very least, much better than King's unhappy debut for ABC five years earlier (and, odd as it is, only his third studio album in five years altogether; Confessin' The Blues from 1967 was the second one, but it is almost impossible to find these days, and not very relevant either, since it was one of those lame attempts to get B. B. by on the strength of his voice alone, replacing Lucille with horns and strings).

 

The problem is, without particularly serious concentration on the numbers, I caught myself reali­zing that I did not notice that much guitar on this record, either. All the songs feature big band arrangements, led by Johnny Pate, and for each of these numbers that rarely go over three minu­tes, King gets lots of singing, but only a few bars of soloing. When you do get to hear the notes, they are as crisp as it gets, showcasing his polished and improved sound from the late Sixties, but you will not get the chance too often.

 

The material, as expected, veers between straightforward 12-bar and explorations in closely con­nected territory, e. g. Lonnie Johnson-style balladry ('Losing Faith In You') and danceable blues-rock ('That's Wrong Little Mama', guessable as a response to 'That's Alright Mama'). The lead single was 'Paying The Cost To Be The Boss', probably the correct choice since it hits the harsh­est (without adding much that we did not know about the man, of course). The second single was 'I'm Gonna Do What They Do To Me', probably the correct choice since it hits the second harsh­est (without adding much that we did not know about 'Paying The Cost To Be The Boss').

 

In its historical context, however, the album sounds hopelessly dated even by the standards of 1968. The record is made in strict accordance with the same old rules: short songs, big horns, mo­dest solos, a complete lack of exploration. Its only saving grace is the clean, modern-sounding production, but if you listen to blues for clarity of sound rather than force of expression, you'd better stick to the likes of Robert Cray.

 

LUCILLE (1968)

 

1) Lucille; 2) You Move Me So; 3) Country Girl; 4) No Money, No Luck; 5) I Need Your Love; 6) Rainin' All The Time; 7) I'm With You; 8) Stop Putting The Hurt On Me; 9) Watch Yourself.

 

Somehow, in between all the mediocre releases and excessive concentration on the live spirit and the fact that, in one short year, the man would make the final mighty crossover with 'The Thrill Is Gone', we all missed the simple truth: Lucille, from (late?) 1968, is the first consistently great studio album to bear B. B. King's name on it. And his guitar's, too, for that matter.

 

It may not become your favourite, or mine, or the average blues lover's, but it is the first album on which the King is truly, straightforwardly, unequivocally doing the King's thing: not just playing the blues, but also loving it, near-physically, without having to experience coitus interruptus eve­ry two minutes. It's all blues, no venturing into strange territories, and the tunes take as much time as they need to build up, develop, and crash down.

 

Which, in the case of the title track, is ten minutes — King's first, and fully successful, attempt at bringing down barriers. Of course, his lengthy public declaration of love for his guitar is pom­pous, pretentious, and overblown, but with two decades of hit-making, blues-wailing, and belly-growing behind his back, he has every right to this atmosphere. The little monolog he delivers over the course of the song — as clumsy and clichéd as parts of it are, it's all sincere, and when, after yet another «response» from the guitar, he says "I doubt if you can feel it like I do", there is no reason to think he is just being haughty.

 

"Lucille don't wanna play nothing but the blues", he says, "if I could sing pop tunes like Frank Si­natra or Sammy Davis Jr., I don't think I still could do it". Sounds pretty blunt, when you start thinking of all those times when the man was forced to sing all those pop tunes — in a way, this is King's declaration of independence. "But I can get a little Frank, a little Sammy, a little Ray Charles in there, in fact, all the people with soul in this", he then adds, so as not to offend the mighty colleagues in show-business — plus, he's kind of right about it, too.

 

On the other side of the record, King bookmarks the proceedings with six minutes of 'Watch Yourself' (it is mighty faster, though, so the overall number of bars must be pretty much the same as on 'Lucille') — again, the first time we see him truly stretch out in the studio, never letting the ac­companying sax overshadow the playing, going bar over bar inventing new guitar figures on the spot; nothing particularly dazzling in the technical sense, but gives you a great rundown on the man's improvising style.

 

In between these two peaks of freedom, there's seven lesser, shorter songs that need no individual commenting (and not all of them are equally satisfactory — for instance, Peter Green clearly took 'I Need Your Love So Bad' closer to heart than B. B., who gives it a far more perfunctory rendi­tion), but all of them benefit greatly from this spiritual uplifting that seems to have taken place sometime in mid-1968.

 

In short, even if, technically, Lucille is just another slab of generic big-band blues, it is still one of the best generic big-band blues albums of 1968, and, no matter how many changes King would later go through, it is here that he is in peak form; 'Lucille' and 'Watch Yourself', at the very least, are required listening for every blue note lover. Thumbs up.

 

LIVE & WELL (1969)

 

1) Don't Answer The Door; 2) Just A Little Love; 3) My Mood; 4) Sweet Little Angel; 5) Please Accept My Love; 6) I Want You So Bad; 7) Friends; 8) Get Off My Back Woman; 9) Let's Get Down To Business; 10) Why I Sing The Blues.

 

The title is a bit misleading in the logical department. Only the first half of it is Live — recorded at the Village Gate in NYC — which would presume that only the second half of it is Well; but, in fact, this is a damn fine record all the way through, with B. B.'s studio output finally catching up with the rawness and intensity of his live playing.

 

Although the playing, singing, and recording quality here are solid throughout, two particular tracks stand out, and, hardly by coincidence, they also bookmark the beginning and the end. As «the king» is announced on stage, he launches into 'Don't Answer The Door' with a lengthy, stun­ning solo, making great use of volume levels, stops-and-starts, and even prolonged vibratos that is, arguably, his first seriously «experimental» bit of playing captured on record. As good as the rest of the show may be, somehow it never lives up to King pulling all the stops on those first few bars — but then, perhaps, just a little is enough.

 

On the studio half, the respective opus magnum is, of course, the eight-minute sprawl of 'Why I Sing The Blues', King's first — I think — major social statement, on which he is not so much speaking for himself as basically answering, in poetic form, the question that we most often see answered in sociological form: yep, you guessed it, he is singing the blues because that is simply the most natu­ral thing to sing for the likes of his people. The simplicity of the idea, however, be­comes grandeur as B. B. comes up with a suitable arrangement (deep, rumbly, gotta love that monster distorted bass line that the band probably copped from Sly & The Family Stone) and lets it roll for as long as him and «Lucille» can take it.

 

One more argument, by the way, why longer B. B. King is better B. B. King: most of the other tunes are too short in their genericity to make any sort of lasting impression, but the ones that roll over five minutes are endowed with serious staying power. This rule of thumb does not apply too well to 'Friends', I admit, but that is because 'Friends' is merely an instrumental blues jam with B. B. trading licks with his jazzy counterpart Hugh McCracken, while both are accompanied in the background by Al Kooper's piano playing. Somehow, though, McCracken and Kooper come out wasted on the record — perhaps a little intimidated by the bulk of The King hanging over them to show their best chops? Still a nice document of three greats having it out in public.

 

As a tiny bonus, some of the jokes on the live part are not bad — e. g., B. B.'s merry "we got a brand new tune for you here tonight, it's so new the band don't know it, you don't know it — and I don't know it... but we're gonna try". Humour — where would true blues be without a sense of one? Thumbs up.

 

COMPLETELY WELL (1969)

 

1) So Excited; 2) No Good; 3) You're Losin' Me; 4) What Happened; 5) Confessin' The Blues; 6) Key To My King­dom; 7) Crying Won't Help You; 8) You're Mean; 9) The Thrill Is Gone.

 

Produced by Bill Szymczyk (who is usually known as the guiding hand behind The James Gang and, more notably, the Eagles, but is a good guy all the same, neh), just like its predecessor and essentially more of the same — same band, same swagger, same style, same acute desire to modernize and assimilate that new funky sound the kids dig so much.

 

The big hit, however, had nothing to do with the new funky sound; it was 'The Thrill Is Gone', a song that more or less set the template for how to merge 12-bar blues with «adult contemporary». Not that the term itself existed in 1969, but you know what I mean: without this song, there'd be no Gary Moore, and both Eric Clapton's and Stevie Ray Vaughan's careers would miss at least one of their facets. Not the best one, of course, but I am merely trying to point out how influential the song turned out to be — no judgement passed.

 

The judgement on the song itself would, of course, be unequivocally positive. No matter how ma­ny recordings B. B. had cut in the past, he'd never really tried out the «dark soul» approach along the lines of, say, Ray Charles' 'Unchain My Heart'. In fact, the whole thing sort of evaded the at­tention of prime time blues players, with maybe one or two notable exceptions like those pionee­ring mid-Fifties singles from Otis Rush. 'Thrill Is Gone' glaringly exploits that gap, and gives us, first time ever — at least, in the eyes of this particular white-man reviewer — a B. B. King that rises high above the idea of «entertainment».

 

People frequently talk about Szymczyk's strings arrangement as almost the cornerstone of the en­tire composition, even though the strings were an afterthought, a late addition after the number had already been cut and everyone understood this was something different. Minimalistic, but ex­pressive guitar, singing on the verge of tears (for once, without a trace of showman-like manner­isms), and deeply reaching, deadly serious bass lines and electric piano flourishes — solid busi­ness for sure. If you want, you may even search for still deeper interpretations: for instance, the louder, the more frantically B. B. is yelling that "I'm free now baby, I'm free from your spell", the clearer you understand that he is anything but free, and that the song, in his interpretation, is, above all else, about self-deception, and that the gloomy arrangement is supposed to underscore how tragically chained the protagonist is to his destiny...

 

...but enough of this. It's a swell performance that made B. B. King the big hero of white audien­ces looking for deep emotions from black men, and all the better. The rest of the album, mind you, is fairly different; so much so that one could even think of 'Thrill' as a special last minute add-on to ring the soul bells for the likes of Eric Clapton. There are the usual rip-roaring blues-rock bra­vados, of which the opening number 'So Excited' is particularly notable, highlighted — no, not by the usual wailing monologs from Lucille, but rather from Hugh McCracken's gruff, rhythmic wah­­-wah solo, with a combination of tone and melody quite unheard of in 1969, similar to Jimi's workout on 'Voodoo Chile', but more humble and somewhat more «swampy» in attitude, how­ever you decide to interpret that epithet.

 

Other notable tracks include a very upbeat, very determined frontal assault on 'Confessin' The Blues'; a cool funky collective workout on 'You're Losin' Me'; and a sprawling sixteen-minute jam ('Crying Won't Help You/You're Mean') for which one just got to have patience — the true fire does not ignite until B. B. and McCracken start trading licks between each other, pretty soon erupting into a red-hot guitar battle with sparks flying off everywhere. (They sort of run it in the ground, eventually — "whach'all trying to do, kill me?" B. B. complains in the last seconds, jo­kingly, of course, because he knows real well, himself, that this killer band is only there to bring out the best in himself).

 

Thus, as much as the whole experience is overshadowed by the grand — and fully deserved — success of 'Thrill', Completely Well is a perfectly apt title for the album, and should probably be among everybody's first B. B. King purchases: late Sixties blues-rock at its finest. Thumbs up.

 

INDIANOLA MISSISSIPPI SEEDS (1970)

 

1) Nobody Loves Me But My Mother; 2) You're Still My Woman; 3) Ask Me No Questions; 4) Until I'm Dead And Cold; 5) King's Special; 6) Ain't Gonna Worry My Life Anymore; 7) Chains And Things; 8) Go Underground; 9) Hummingbird.

 

Going on in the right direction — the album may seem like either a carbon copy of Completely Well or a masterful expansion on its strong sides, depending on one's overall attitude towards B. B. King's «crossover era», but it's enjoyable in either case. This time around, Szymczyk teamed the man with an even huger throng of pop people, not the least of them Carole King herself, who does not contribute to the songwriting, but plays a steady R'n'B-ish piano on more than half of the tracks; second and third on the bill are Joe Walsh and Leon Russell, and you are well encouraged to do more research on the credits yourself — there's a ton of different people here.

 

Everything works, right from the start, as B. B. in person plays some mighty fine Delta blues chords on the electric piano, singing "nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too" — for one minute and twenty seconds, before the whole band crashes into a rocking perfor­mance of 'You're Still My Woman'. An unsubtle way to remind us that the King still remembers his roots, but necessary, perhaps, since the rest of the album takes us pretty far away from the De­lta in form, and it may require a little refreshening to make us well aware that it is still firmly rooted in the Delta in spirit.

 

Szymczyk may be overdoing the strings thing at times — now that the gimmick worked so well on 'Thrill Is Gone', he keeps the small orchestra in tow on a constant basis, ready to jump out and contribute each time B. B. switches into ballad mode, and sometimes even beyond that. That said, Jimmie Haskell's arrangements are modest and never get in the way of more important things — on 'You're Still My Woman', they not only do not overshadow the star of the show, but they even leave plenty of space for Carole King to show that she could always earn her living playing the hon­ky-tonk thing in blues bars in the unlikely situation that the royalties were to run out.

 

The jamming is kept under stricter control this time: there is a five-minute instrumental, 'King's Special', with a brilliant guitar-piano duel between B. B. and Leon Russell, and a short bit of fooling around opens 'Ain't Gonna Worry My Life Anymore', but, overall, meandering improvs are eskewed in favor of lengthier solo bits on regular songs, which keeps the general customer better sa­tisfied with­out alienating the artistically demanding audience either.

 

The only downside is that a couple of tracks, most notably 'Chains And Things', are an obvious at­tempt to recreate the success of 'Thrill Is Gone' — but, obviously, you cannot artificially recre­ate divine inspiration, and so the album remains without that ultimate megaton-kicker to push it over the threshold that separates «best-of-the-best» from «better-than-the-best». Leon Russell of­fers another chance with his own 'Hummingbird', a song that goes from darkly romantic blues ballad to all-out gospel choir anthem, and everything is splendid except that King has no guitar so­los on the number, which prevents it from falling into the category of «B. B. King songs one cannot do without» — in my eyes at least, you can easily do without any B. B. King song on which Lucille gets a square treatment.

 

Yet these are minor quibbles. King himself, on occasion, has stated that Indianola might have be­en his biggest artistic statement, and, without being petty about all the details, it is easy to un­derstand that opinion. The man was clearly on a roll: surrounded by great musicians and songwri­ters, a producer who understood how to update his old sound for the new age without compromi­sing it, and enough creative freedom to revel in, he was clearly having the greatest time of his life, much like his namesake Albert, whose career was also peaking around the same years — a great time for the rejuvenation of classic electric blues. Thumbs up, of course.

 

LIVE IN COOK COUNTY JAIL (1970)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Everyday I Have The Blues; 3) How Blue Can You Get; 4) Worry, Worry, Worry; 5) 3 O'Clock Blues; 6) Sweet Sixteen; 7) The Thrill Is Gone; 8) Please Accept My Love.

 

The «live prison album» genre, jump-started by Johnny Cash with his Folsom Prison record in 1968, is not a very large one — not everybody has the guts to win over this particular slice of the audience, let alone all the technical difficulties. Nevertheless, putting out a live prison album al­most certainly guarantees critical respect, because, after all, what in the world can be truer to the spirit of rock'n'roll than working up a sweat before a bunch of Cool Hand Lukes, the true heroes of rock'n'roll?

 

Thus, even though Live In Cook County Jail is by no means King's best live album, it has gar­nered comparable acclaim; yet that acclaim is, I believe, triggered more by the unforgettable rounds of booing with which the inmates welcome the announcement of the presence of the local sheriff and the chief justice at the start of the show, making up for a classic live moment that real­ly threatens to blow B. B. himself off the stage. Could, in fact, be argued that there is more genu­ine blues to be heard in those boos than in whatever follows. (Actually, there is a complex back story to the making of the album — apparently, a series of live shows by well-known stars at that jail was part of the new warden's plan to win over the inmates' trust in his ongoing battle with the «barn bosses», even though none of that is reflected in the performance in any way).

 

What follows is, actually, a very solid performance, but a very straightforward, as well: King under­sta­nds that these two thousand guys in front of him won't take bullshit for an answer, and so he just runs through his big­gest hits, without forcing himself to condense them but without too many improvisational or jam­ming bits, either. He spans his entire career, from '3 O'Clock Blues' right up to 'Thrill Is Gone', and shows us that the old magic works fine on the current criminals by launching into his usual «man — woman» monolog on 'Worry, Worry' — the audience's response makes it clearly seen that this is the kind of sermon they are quite ready to listen to.

 

The only other thing I can say is that 'The Thrill Is Gone', like I predicted, works beautifully even without the cellos (but to name it the ultimate live rendition of this song, like some have done, is a bit of a stretch); but overall, there is just too few songs here to merit individual comments — which brings us to the vital question of why the heck has the entire performance not been relea­sed on CD as of yet? Surely they do not mean that the whole show lasted for just over half an hour? What is their problem? What are they hiding?

 

B. B. KING IN LONDON (1971)

 

1) Caldonia; 2) Blue Shadows; 3) Alexis' Boogie; 4) We Can't Agree; 5) Ghetto Woman; 6) Wet Hayshark; 7) Part Time Love; 8) Power Of The Blues; 9) Ain't Nobody Home.

 

A solid recording betrayed by high expectations. Following the early 1970s trend of teaming up vintage old bluesmen with the new generation of British blues-rockers (Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and a few other veterans joined the fray as well), B. B. goes to London, gets chain-linked with pretty much everyone the recording people could catch unawares, and records a friendly jam session that is... merely decent.

 

It is better for us all not to know, or radically forget who exactly plays what on which track (the credits list no fewer than twenty eight backers for Lucille and her man). Instead, major blues fans may just agree in between themselves that 'Caldonia' rocks pretty well for a mid-size party to be entertained in between all the skinny-dipping; that 'Blue Shadows' and 'Ghetto Woman', with mo­derate success, recreate the smoky gloom of 'Thrill', especially the latter with its inventive strings arrangement; that 'Alexis' Boogie' gives you a rare chance to hear the King churn it out on the acoustic (unless, of course, that is not the King at all, but then why would it be on a King record?); that 'Power Of The Blues' is no 'Blues Power' (hands up for Clapton); and that the organ playing lends a nice extra shade to 'Ain't Nobody Home'.

 

But if one starts winding up, as in "Peter Green is here and I can't even tell where! Are all these guys just wetting their pants in the presence of the Lord?", etc., then, of course, In London is a mighty failure and all that money it took to transport B. B. across the Atlantic should have rather gone to the poor (not to mention that there are so many people playing on here, everyone's share of royalties could hardly have covered even bathroom expenses).

 

In any case, with a set-up like this, at worst, you get «mediocre» results; a blues session recorded in 1971 between B. B. and British rock royalty could lack the proper spark of inspiration, but it couldn't be anything less than professional and tasteful — the production- and age-induced rut into which rootsy music would sink by the middle of the decade had not set in yet. So, if not par­ticularly exciting, this is all adequately listenable; thumbs up.

 

L. A. MIDNIGHT (1972)

 

1) I Got Some Help I Don't Need; 2) Help The Poor; 3) Can't You Hear Me Talking; 4) Midnight; 5) Sweet Sixteen; 6) I've Been Blue Too Long; 7) Lucille's Granny.

 

If you happen to be big fans of Jesse Ed Davis and Joe Walsh, this one's for you: for about six­teen minutes, the album is nothing but a big show-off during which the White, Red (Jesse was fully Native American), and Black race compete for supremacy on fully friendly terms. It is fair­ly solid, easy-going, fluid jamming, but depends a lot on what you expect from a jam session — if you have heard plenty of them, this one probably isn't going to blow your mind or change your life. Some critics accused the guitar heroes of too much meandering and not meshing well; they may be right, because each of them plays in a different style, but, uh, what's wrong with that?

 

Apart from the jams, much of the album is formally expendable. There is a re-recording of 'Sweet Sixteen', for instance, with updated lyrics about Vietnam, but it adds no extra dimensions to the original; a fierce fully instrumental take on 'Help The Poor'; and a couple more mid-tempo blues de luxe numbers that are... okay.

 

Nevertheless, the fact that the album has not been released on CD is a doggone shame — any mi­ddle-of-the-road recording from King's peak years is still miles ahead of the overproduced crap from his later years that is constantly choking the bargain bins. For blues fans at least, this is a must-have: three blues-rock giants breathing the same studio air, imagine that! Thumbs up, mo­destly and humbly.

 

GUESS WHO (1972)

 

1) Summer In The City; 2) Just Can't Please You; 3) Any Other Way; 4) You Don't Know Nothin' About Love; 5) Found What I Need; 6) Neighborhood Affair; 7) It Takes A Young Girl; 8) Better Lovin' Man; 9) Guess Who; 10) Shouldn't Have Left Me; 11) Five Long Years.

 

Not that dumb a title, considering that the proceedings open with a Lovin' Spoonful cover — then again, B. B. has always been omnivorous, open to bluesy reworkings of everything from Beet­hoven to the Beatles. Overall, though, it is way too easy to guess who, especially since way too many songs on here dishearteningly hearken back to King's overproduced, underperformed balla­d­e­ering style of the early Sixties.

 

Somehow, upon returning from London, B. B. managed to lose all the great musicians that bac­ked him up on the 1968-1970 albums, and the result is mere languid competence. Dropping the jams, restraining the guitar in favour of ensemble playing dominated by keyboards and horns, se­lecting formulaic material — all of this is a very sharp drop in quality, for no apparent reason other than unlucky circumstances.

 

The major highlight should have been 'Five Long Years', perfectly tailored to suit B. B.'s blues-de-luxe formula, but it does not work too well, I'm afraid: Lucille has a tough time out there, pin­ned down by all the horns and, for some reason, opting for a smooth, tender tone rather than «bla­zing sharp» which is really what is needed. Even so, it is the most outstanding track on the entire album bar the unexpected, not-unpleasant but not-highly-rewarding surprise of B. B. playing out the gentle melancholy of 'Summer In The City'.

 

Some people care for the title track — I do not. It's as if King decided to mix in a little bit of that Champs-Elysées style with his blues pattern, and the cheesy sentimentality, swimming in pools of orchestral and keyboard sap, kills off all the healthy antibodies. Thumbs down.

 

TO KNOW YOU IS TO LOVE YOU (1973)

 

1) I Like To Live The Love; 2) Respect Yourself; 3) Who Are You; 4) Love; 5) I Can't Leave; 6) To Know You Is To Love You; 7) Oh To Me; 8) Thank You For Loving The Blues.

 

Little known, little appreciated, To Know You is still B. B. King's juiciest attempt at an almost proper R'n'B album, with an absolute minimum of 12-bar and lots of rhythm. Recorded with the Memphis horns and the Philly rhythm section, this was done at the exactly right time, with B. B.'s competitor Albert King riding a similar brand of sound with albums like I'll Play The Blues For You and I Wanna Get Funky. Well, B. B. ended up wanting to get funky, too.

 

For the first time in a long, long while, if not ever, even those tracks on which King plays very little, if any, guitar, are perfectly enjoyable — just for the simple joy of listening to all these mu­sicians gelling so perfectly, the bass, drums, rhythm guitars, keyboards, and horns whirling like freshly-oiled cogs in one of the world's smoothest-running musical machines. And when the big man starts to play, Lucille's sound is giving a smoother, slicker coating than usual, which is per­fectly all right with this kind of ambience (although it would probably not work at all on some­thing like Completely Well).

 

The obvious hit, highlight, and constant presence in the Church of the Latter Day Compilations, is the title track, written for King by Stevie Wonder himself (and, once you know that, you will realize that B. B.'s singing, too, is tentatively following Stevie's usual vocal modulations — per­haps it would have worked even better as a duet between the two). It is soulful, passionate, reli­gious, and quite long, allowing it to work both as a moving love song and as a hot, pristine jam instead of failing at both; every single player shines like the sun.

 

It may be impossible to outdo the Staple Singers at their cut-out job, but the King still does his best at bringing a comparable amount of sincerity and conviction into his singing, and carves out a suitable weeping set of riffs for Lucille. 'I Like To Live The Love', the record's other hit, has no lead guitar at all and is happy enough to function within the generic dance-pop formula of the first half of the decade — could, perhaps, benefit from an Al Green at the helm rather than the relatively rugged delivery of old man B. B., but it is still a charming song, and not entirely grit­less, either, if only for the iron groove that has it locked in its grip from first to last second.

 

'I Can't Leave' is the only song that reverts us fully to the standard 12-bar blues-de-luxe formula, but in the overall context it blends in well (what other B. B. King album could be said to contain one generic blues song for the sake of diversity?), and then there is also a traditional spoken blues piece at the end that thanks us for loving the blues and slowly melts away in a hushed, minimalis­tic jam with some of the most subtle passages in B. B.'s career.

 

It all works, and once again goes to show just how greatly a super-professional R'n'B band and a brilliant blues guitarist can complement each other. Now if only somebody had, at least once, thought to finish off the picture by bringing in a genius songwriter and a mindblowing singer... but, possibly, so many cooks would have killed off the broth. Let us be happy with what we have and hope that the album, only recently restored in print, will eventually solidify in its classic sta­tus. Thumbs up and a must-have for any fan of Seventies' R&B (not so sure about hardcore blues lovers, though — but let us not forget that B. B. King as such is hardly music for blues purists).

 

KING SIZE (1977)

 

1) Don't You Lie To Me; 2) I Wonder Why; 3) I Just Wanna Make Love To You; 4) Your Lovin' Turned Me On; 5) Slow And Easy; 6) Got My Mojo Working; 7) Walking In The Sun; 8) Mother For Ya; 9) The Same Love That Made Me Laugh; 10) It's Just A Matter Of Time.

 

In between 1973 and 1977, King somehow cut down on studio material, releasing a couple live albums in tandem with blueswailer Bobby Bland (who, contrary to one's instinctive predilection for puns, is not really as bland as one would expect him to be) and a couple compilations. When he finally returned with King Size in 1977, nobody really needed him any more; his music had completely gone off the cutting edge, and since then, most of his hits have been superstar duets (of which the cunning old fox has had plenty, but at least it is a less generally questionable way of making money than advertising with Burger King).

 

This, however, does not mean that no post-1973 album from Old King B. B. merits listening. This particular recording, assembled from several sessions with mostly unknown players, is, for instance, pretty swell. Why? Well, it's probably got the longest version of 'Don't You Lie To Me' ever recorded — were Chuck Berry to duckwalk all the way through it, the results would have laid to rest every single «if I walked this way...» joke in the world — and it's got a modern take on the dirty old blues 'Mother Fuyer' (from the same old stock of thinly veiled, but technically unsuable rhythm'n'blues classics as Bull Moose Jackson/Aerosmith's 'Big Ten Inch Record') — and, hearken to this, it's got the only disco rearrangement of 'Got My Mojo Working' that I know of. Surely that would mean something, to hear one king of the blues paying tribute to another king of the blues with a dorky disco bassline behind his back.

 

Anyway, most of the material is pretty old, and King does not play a whole lot of blistering guitar, but the arrangements work, and the emphasis is very much on real, live, interactive playing. At the height of the disco era, one could have expected far worse. It's all smooth and slick, but the grooves are non-boring; in comparison, B. B.'s colleague Albert King's albums from the same pe­riod are far more depressing, recorded by people who clearly only did this for the money. King Size, at its worst, is steadily professional, and at its best — e. g. the little bit of jamming that fol­lows 'I Just Wanna Make Love To You' — is as incendiary as a B. B. King track can ever be.

 

MIDNIGHT BELIEVER (1978)

 

1) When It All Comes Down (I'll Still Be Around); 2) Midnight Believer; 3) I Just Can't Leave Your Love Alone; 4) Hold On (I Feel Our Love Is Changing); 5) Never Make A Move Too Soon; 6) A World Full Of Strangers; 7) Let Me Make You Cry A Little Longer.

 

Another excellent idea — match B. B. King, the tumbleweed connection of the blues world, with The Crusaders, one of the longest living jazz-pop bands that never had any reason to live that long. Together, they make good music: the band offers the old blues guru guy fat and tight mu­sical backing, and the old blues guru guy pays them back with his regular lyrical spark that, for a moment, adds sense and purpose to their interplay. (Coincidentally or not, they released their big­gest commercial success, Street Life, the following year, but I have never been able to get my mind focused on even one track on that album from beginning to end.)

 

Most of the material is original, written by The Crusaders themselves or in collaboration with Will Jennings, and follows the regular R'n'B patterns of the epoch (without any serious con­ces­sions to disco), but is very clearly geared towards King: all the blues and ballad pieces fit his style of singing, and there is also surprisingly more guitar playing from him on all the songs than even on some of his pure blues albums (where «pure», much more often than wanted, means «letting the horns guys do all the work while I satisfy my inner crooner»).

 

The two regular blues-rock numbers ('When It All Comes Down', 'Never Make A Move Too So­on') are fun due to all the extra touches — such as the gospel choir on the former and the loose party attitude on the latter; the sentimental ballad ('Hold On') is respectably arranged, with Lucille always louder than the soft lethargic Seventies piano sound; the funk comes properly equipped with clenched teeth and gripped fists ('A World Full Of Strangers'); and the retro-swing number 'I Just Can't Leave Your Love Alone' simply comes out of nowhere, suddenly replacing the disco bar with a speakeasy for four happy minutes.

 

It wouldn't make sense to rave and rant in detail about any of these songs, but the participants are clearly delighted to work with each other — and, even if unbeatable clinchers like 'Thrill Is Gone' could not be produced any longer, this is still the next best thing: a B. B. King album whose pro­duction and entertainment values are so consistently high, I could never sustain a case against even one of these songs. It is albums like Midnight Believer that should encourage you, the lis­tener, to defy the odds and dig around in interminable discographies of «has-beens»: critics may eventually lose interest in the old dogs and leave them forever locked in the one-star collar, but that's just because they always go after the cutting-edge thing. Midnight Believer cuts no edges; it is simply a charming album that shows old man King going both with the grain and against it at the same time. Thumbs up.

 

TAKE IT HOME (1979)

 

1) Better Not Look Down; 2) Same Old Story (Same Old Song); 3) Happy Birthday Blues; 4) I've Always Been Lo­ne­ly; 5) Second-Hand Woman; 6) Tonight I'm Gonna Make You A Star; 7) The Beginning Of The End; 8) A Story Everybody Knows; 9) Take It Home.

 

It's not bad, but something did not click this second time around. Simply put, there is a bit too much Crusaders on the album, and not enough King for me. Midnight Believer was a good mix of styles that gave us casual, non-hardcore listeners the best possible formula: B. B.'s blues es­sence interspersed with various catchy distractions. On Take It Home, the distractions have all but dissolved the essence.

 

King sings passionately enough, but Lucille, once again, finds itself playing second, if not twen­ty second, fiddle to all of the Crusaders' diddle; on most, perhaps all, of these numbers it's as if no­body had the patience to let the old man find a good, meaningful groove for these songs, and just went along with the second take before he even began getting into the spirit. Who cares anyway, if you're gonna mix that guitar below all the saxes and keyboards and gospel backing vocals?

 

Which is a pity, because the songs, generally credited to Will Jennings and Joe Sam­ple, are de­cent: nothing too original, mostly just slight modifications of old blues rock and R'n'B warhorses, but nevertheless modified and rearranged to the point of justifying that generic late Seventies fun­ky soul sound (and, once again, not a single swig of disco, although 'A Story Everybody Knows', the cheesiest number on the record, comes somewhat close). The title track is a particularly uplif­ting anthem, the kind of totally by-the-numbers, but still sweet and charming, R'n'B number that today's R'n'B artists have completely lost the knack of churning out — and King is able to let his singing go with the flow, but the guitar playing, alas, seriously lags behind.

 

The only number here that I find deserving of truly classic status is the short, almost inconspicu­ous 'Beginning Of The End', distinguished by its subtle buildup: first verse rhythmless — second with the rhythm section joining in — third with the brass backup really pushing it, all the way to King's ecstatic final. Up to the point, heavy on the good old guitar sound, and admirably modest. Of course, there is something ominous in the fact that the best song on a 1979 B. B. King album bears such a title, but, after all, the end has to begin somewhere. I cannot bring myself to issuing a thumbs down — I honestly enjoyed most of this platter — but it is still disappointing, consider­ing how lucky King turned out to be in the late seventies, evading the disco temptation and stay­ing firmly routed in the «true sound», and how he failed to make good use of that luck.

 

THERE MUST BE A BETTER WORLD SOMEWHERE (1981)

 

1) Life Ain't Nothing But A Party; 2) Born Again Human; 3) There Must Be A Better World Somewhere; 4) The Victim; 5) More, More, More; 6) You're Going With Me.

 

There must be a... strange atypical sound to this album that I cannot quite put my finger on, ma­king it at least a good candidate for King's most «subtly curious» pieces of the new decade. With only six songs, most of which intentionally — and intentionally absurdly — crash the three/four minute barrier for no logical reason, and the same meandering, wobbly, slow tempo on four out of six, it's almost as if King saw to it that everyone was properly stoned for the sessions, or, at least, stripped of focus. Including himself.

 

This is probably why, every now and then, the songs not just cease to be showcases for Lucille — after all, King is well known for his modest handling of the spotlight — but become sprawling brass battles between saxes, trumpets, and trombones; sometimes the purple elephants take over, and the band suddenly thinks they are The Glenn Miller Orchestra. It happens at the end of the first song, then is immediately repeated at the beginning of the second, and on we go. Then it sort of dawns on the big old guy that he is here to play his guitar, and the blues is back, but the Glenn Miller guys aren't giving up too soon, resulting in something midway from polyphony to caco­pho­ny, all of it over a stumbling drum pattern whose bearer is just as drunk as everyone else.

 

Okay, I may be inventing things here. Actually, the playing is quite collected — it was simply a not too successful effort to explain that King never used to sound quite like this, good and bad judgements aside. And I have a pretty good idea of who might be the major disturber of the peace: Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr., commonly known as Dr. John, credited here both as a piano player and one of the chief songwriters, as well as producer. If anyone can drag B. B. out of his re­spectable, but sleazy world of night clubs and bow ties into the disreputable universe of alligators on marijuana, it must be the man. He hasn't done his best, but he did try.

 

After all, who else would contribute a song entitled 'Life Ain't Nothing But A Party' to the B. B. King canon? And sit behind his back, taking good care that B. B. really gets in the spirit of it and all? This is a fine collaboration between two veterans who have something in common — namely, the ability to just lay back and enjoy life while it ain't over yet — and if only, in between all the enjoyment, they wouldn't be forgetting to play their instruments from time to time, There Must Be... could have become a minor classic of the urban blues genre for both. As it is, their spirits come off as way too seriously diluted by disturbing factors. Still a thumbs up; hard times would be lurking around the corner, but for now, King scored yet another success in evading them — in the light of his collaboration with The Crusaders going sort of sour, exchanging them, even brief­ly, for Dr. John was the smartest move he could have gone for in 1981, and he did go for it.

 

LOVE ME TENDER (1982)

 

1) One Of Those Nights; 2) Love Me Tender; 3) Don't Change On Me; 4) (I'd Be) A Legend In My Time; 5) You've Always Got The Blues; 6) Nightlife/Please Send Me Someone To Love; 7) You And Me, Me And You; 8) Since I Met You Baby; 9) Time Is A Thief; 10) A World I Never Made.

 

As skippable as this particular album is, one certainly cannot accuse B. B. of stalling. One year prior to Love Me Tender he was munching on gumbo in the company of Dr. John, before that, tried to save funky soul from disco clutches in the company of the appropriately named Crusaders, and now we discover him in Nashville, with the local playing and singing pros steering him thro­ugh a series of country-pop, country-R'n'B, and occasional country-blues standards.

 

Admittedly, the man himself had high hopes for the record, and, in his own liner notes, described it as one of the best albums in his career. But, in all fairness, this has to do with the uncomfortable fact that King always thought of himself as at least as good a singer as a guitar player, if not bet­ter (hence all the Sings Spirituals records and other crap), and Love Me Tender is, again, for those who love their guru when he opens his mouth, not when he jerks his fingers.

 

The big question, of course, is whether you want to hear another version of 'Love Me Tender' in the first place, let alone from the cavities of somebody whose pet dream of becoming a black Si­natra you might not necessarily endorse. And also, whether you want to hear it played à la Eigh­ties Nashville, in which the professionalism and versatility of country music had by then become as corrupted by laziness and the big bucks as classic R'n'B had deteriorated at Atlantic Studios. For every bit of slide guitar plucked with the utmost indifference, you get cheap synth orchestra­tion, cheap chiming keyboards, and a rhythm section that seems to have confused minimalism with obligatory hack-work.

 

The irony of it all is that B. B. King really tries hard: apart from the meaningless covers of the title track and 'Since I Met You Baby', and a strange, unneccessary decision to segue 'Nightlife' into 'Please Send Me Someone To Love', he sings most of these songs in a heartfelt, confessional mode as if it all really mattered. But the complete lack of any serious effort other than pure «pro forma» on the part of his musicians kills the spirit over and over again — to the effect that the only track that made me take notice was 'You And Me, Me And You', one that dumped all inti­macy and concentrated on a funky dance groove. Light, expendable, but at least fun, which is more than could be said about the rest of this boredom. Thumbs down.

 

BLUES 'N' JAZZ (1983)

 

1) Inflation Blues; 2) Broken Heart; 3) Sell My Monkey; 4) Heed My Warning; 5) Teardrops From My Eyes; 6) Rain­bow Riot; 7) Darlin' You Know I Love You; 8) Make Love To Me; 9) I Can't Let You Go.

 

The perfect antidote to the «plastic country» of Love Me Tender — a much-needed return to the kind of generic blues-de-luxe that has always been owned by the man. Unfortunately, this also means that you get no surprises, and that the resulting LP really works best if, together with me, you are on this chronological journey through the man's career. Otherwise, there is really no rea­son whatsoever to prefer it to similar records from the previous three decades — except for, per­haps, reasonably clearer production.

 

The whole thing is very strictly Chicago blues, with a couple retro forays into jump blues ('Sell My Monkey', although, strictly speaking, this is still not far from Chicago, considering, e. g., El­more James' love for the style), a couple re-recordings of older tunes, etc. The sole exception is King's unexpected cover of the early Atlantic R'n'B classic, 'Teardrops From My Eyes'. B. B. is certainly no Ruth Brown (he does attempt to give the lyrics a more «genuine» reading than the former Miss Rhythm, shaky voice and all, but I still vote for the lady's exalted, sexy-as-hell deli­very instead), but he gives the song an exquisite guitar backing instead of the original brass ac­companiment, and there is an extended vibraphone solo, of all things — did you think the «jazz» in the title was just an empty flourish? — that makes it a pretty unique track for Mr. King.

 

But even 'Teardrops' is an old song, and, altogether, the King has not been so straightforwardly nostalgic since... well, since the times when sounding this-a way was anything but nostalgic. (Leaving aside, that is, the fact that the lyrics to the old number 'Inflation Blues' must have sounded fairly relevant back in the day — come to think of it, here is one song that may never want to go out of style). Re­listening to this living relic must have been an aftershock to the man himself — the only explana­tion for why he had to go out and produce one of his worst ever albums immediately afterward. Why? Because nothing gets people, particularly bluesmen, in the mood for brutal crap as much as the acute feeling of sounding outdated.

 

SIX SILVER STRINGS (1985)

 

1) Six Silver Strings; 2) Big Boss Man; 3) In The Midnight Hour; 4) Into The Night; 5) My Lucille; 6) Memory Lane; 7) My Guitar Sings The Blues; 8) Double Trouble.

 

Not many kind words can be applied to this album, but one thing definitely makes it worth check­ing out. If you glance at the track list, you will naturally expect track two, 'Big Boss Man', to be B. B. King's professional, but most likely uninspiring rendition of Jimmy Reed's old blues classic. Few things in this world can be more confusing, then, than getting around to it and hearing the easily recognizable dance beats and piano rhythms of... Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean'. Trust me, there is something transcendental about the experience. Absurdist to the core, and yet completely unintentional at the same time. One of those classic moments in the history of human ridiculous­ness that almost ends up justifying it.

 

Unfortunately, only if most of this album matched the silliness standard of 'Big Boss Jean', would there be some decent reason to talk about it. As it is, King's 50th album, as it so gloriously states on the golden seal of the front cover, is a pretty gloomy affair. After the stark retro approach of Blues'n'Jazz, B. B. moves into the opposite direction: the Eighties bug finally caught up with the man, and, with a couple of exceptions that might have been outtakes from earlier sessions ('My Guitar Sings The Blues'), all of this suffers from typical overproduction — plastic electronic drums, synthesizers, etc., and an almost complete dehumanization of the playing: King's vocals and guitar are your only friends throughout, and do they ever feel lonely.

 

It is quite ironic that the material itself is not half-bad: old standards like Wilson Pickett's 'In The Midnight Hour', under normal conditions, would agree with King's style perfectly, and there are some fine new songs, too — the title track and 'Memory Lane' are touching nostalgic ballads; 'My Lucille' is one of those honest anthems to B. B.'s primary working tool that can do no wrong; and even cor­ny arena rock like 'Into The Night', given the proper treatment, could have given King a serious chance to tame the genre (the song was written and recorded specially for the soundtrack of John Landis' flop movie of the same name, and it's probably the best thing about the movie, even if that's hardly saying much).

 

But, over the years, it has emerged fairly clearly that, unless one indiscriminately finds all B. B. King albums equ­ally exchangeable in terms of general goodness, a B. B. King album is really on­ly as good as the individual talents whose songwriting, producing, and playing matches King's own; and Six Silver Strings, instead of The Crusaders or Dr. John or Joe Walsh at least, has the man surrounded by faceless, if friendly, hacks. Certainly, he has to be commended for succum­bing to crap values so late in his career — his namesake Albert, in comparison, had been over­whelmed and overpowered since at least 1976 — but that is hardly relevant to the overall thumbs down that Six Silver Strings deserves on its own.

 

SPOTLIGHT ON LUCILLE (1986)

 

1) Slidin' And Glidin'; 2) Blues With B. B.; 3) King Of Guitar; 4) Jump With B. B.; 5) 38th Street Blues; 6) Feedin' The Rock; 7) Just Like A Woman; 8) Step It Up; 9) Calypso Jazz; 10) Easy Listening Blues; 11) Shoutin' The Blues; 12) Powerhouse.

 

It should be mentioned here that, for at least a few decades since B. B.'s original departure from RPM Records in 1962, that label, along with its legal inheritors, had been steadily pumping out further product, carefully measuring out small chunks of whatever Lucille's old fiancée happened to leave behind in the vaults before the move. The result is something like five or seven or ten or twelve (nobody really knows except for the most well-educated of B. B.'s discographers, and they are all dangerous people) LPs that nobody has any real reason to hear, let alone write about; his original official RPM output was always inconsistent, so what's to be said about outtakes?

 

Spotlight On Lucille may be deemed a valuable exception, though. Released in 1986, it decep­tively sported a quite contemporary photo of the man, possibly duping quite a few fans into thin­king they were paying money for B. B.'s latest greatest. Well, they weren't, and what a good thing that was: instead of getting another patchy bunch of crappy Eighties product, they were in for a real treat — with the spotlight on Lucille, indeed, this is a collection of instrumentals, mostly re­corded around 1960-61. Only a few of them had been previously released.

 

If something like Easy Listening Blues, King's earliest completely instrumental album, was on­ly so-so because the master sessions failed to extract the proper effort from the man, Spotlight has the compilation benefit. It seems to have been assembled with enough love for the man's talent to include not just any instrumentals with Lucille on top, but those where the playing really mattered. The surprising highlight, for instance, is a ten-minute long jam ('Blues With B. B.') that proves, once and for all, that King did go for long improvisatory jams in those days; he just could not dream of being able to put them on record, what with the 12 songs/3 minutes each reservations that kept American popular music stalled for so long.

Of course, these were still the early days; B. B. had not yet significantly increased his number of guitar tones, had not fully mastered the art of vibrato, had not learned to flash his minimalistic style at the listener. But he was already well-versed in many kinds of playing styles, and Spot­light takes good care reminding us of the fact that he was not merely an expressive 12-bar stylist ('Slidin' And Glidin', 'King Of Guitar'), but that he loved to boogie ('38th Street Blues'), shuffle ('Feedin' The Rock'), bop ('Just Like A Woman'), rhumba ('Calypso Jazz'), and do big-band jazz with the boys ('Powerhouse').

 

A few of the instrumentals feature brass solos from the band as well, which is not a problem — the balance is near-ideal, with the brass offering occasionally necessary relief from Lucille's ne­ver changing high-pitched tone, but never ever letting us forget who is really the man in charge. And B. B. is truly in charge throughout, contributing remarkably similar, but never quite identi­cal solos. The ten-minute long jam is not a masterpiece, but it may really be one of the few, if not the only, historical trace of the man taking as much time as he wanted to develop a musical idea back in the early Sixties, and officially released lengthy blues jams from 1960 may be counted on the fingers of one hand — for all we know, one might think blues jamming as such was invented in the UK of 1965 and 1966 rather than where you'd actually expect it to happen.

 

In short, this, rather than the miserably modernized Six Silver Strings, should have been B. B.'s proper 50th album — these days, it sounds far more fresh and far less dated than everything the man was recording in 1986 in person. Thumbs up.

 

KING OF BLUES (1989)

 

1) (You've Become A) Habit To Me; 2) Drowning In The Sea Of Love; 3) Can't Get Enough; 4) Standing On The Edge; 5) Go On; 6) Let's Straighten It Out; 7) Change In Your Lovin'; 8) Undercover Man; 9) Lay Another Log On The Fire; 10) Business With My Baby; 11) Take Off Your Shoes.

 

Not to be confused with the old King Of The Blues LP, nor with various compilations of the same name that, truth be told, generally bear it with much more confidence than this overprodu­ced curio piece. Overproduced, but not nearly as worthless as its predecessor. King teamed up with moderately better corporate songwriters this time, and at least there is some real music co­ming out of the speakers here, rather than the dehumanized electronic dribble into which ye olde classic R'n'B was rapidly deteriorating.

 

In other words, the record had a slight chance of becoming B. B.'s Midnight Believer for the 1980s. He does not come across as totally uninspired, his sidemen write some tolerable pop dit­ties and funk rockers, do not make the mistake of saddling him with power ballads, and bring in little-known, but tolerable pros on bass and sax. Alas, they go on to forget two things. First, the man they're dealing with is the king of the blues — that is, after all, what the title says — and, in that respect, there is surprisingly little blues on the album. Second, behind all the keyboards and saxes they forget that the king is here to play his guitar. Not through any evil intent, I'm sure: they just forget. And when they remember, it is sometimes better if they didn't, because on several tracks it clearly looks like Lucille is being run through some yucky synth effect, completely lo­sing the King thing to it.

 

One excellent number is 'Lay Another Log On The Fire', a hot'n'heavy soul screamer in B. B.'s best traditions, with Lucille clean and crisp, breaking through the sax-and-background-vocals of the blues-de-luxe arrangement as confidently as if she had not just been sterilized with syn­the­sizer treatment at all. A few other tracks at the end, such as 'Business With My Baby Tonight', al­so have a relatively clean sound — perhaps they were recorded in a different session — but re­member that in order to get around to them, you have to pass through the mind-numbing chorus of 'Standing On The Edge' (repeated something like a million times), the drum machines of 'Dro­wning In The Sea Of Love', the corporate hit-writing machinery of 'Undercover Man', and other things too morally corrupt to mention.

 

I freely admit to being a little thrilled with '(You've Become A) Habit To Me', though. Despite the cheesy synths, and the treated Lucille sound, the song rides a lean, mean bass line, and establi­shes a cool atmosphere through the cooperation between that bass and King's vocals. Just one of those several thousand Eighties-recorded songs that had the bad luck to be generated in the mainstream strongholds of that decade, and deserve a rebirth under proper conditions. Couldn't exactly con­firm the same for the rest of the material, though, so thumbs down — just in case.

 

LIVE AT SAN QUENTIN (1990)

 

1) Intro; 2) Let The Good Times Roll; 3) Every Day I Have The Blues; 4) A Whole Lot Of Lovin'; 5) Sweet Little Angel; 6) Never Make A Move Too Soon; 7) Into The Night; 8) Ain't Nobody's Business; 9) The Thrill Is Gone; 10) Peace To The World; 11) Nobody Loves Me But My Mother; 12) Sweet Sixteen; 13) Rock Me Baby.

 

Another album — another live album — another live prison album. Apparently, San Quen­tin's metal detectors filtered out most of the synthesizers and electronic drums, meaning that it is just another regular B. B. King live album, not any better than the average B. B. King live album, but hardly worse, either, which is respectable given the man's age at the time (sixty-five). But enough of me for now, let us hear what Michael G. from the All Music Guide has to say about the record:

 

«B. B. King's pleas to the literally captive audience for a round of applause for the guards wat­ch­ing over the prisoners on his first live album in nearly a decade is almost laughable. Unlike John­ny Cash's smirking irony on his album recorded at the same facility in 1969, where you can sense Cash's disdain for the captors is just as strong as the inmates', King seems to be totally oblivious to the fact that these are prisoners being held against their will. And that's the problem with this competent, if unremarkable, record: King is merely going through the motions. He could just as well be playing to a blue-blooded audience under the stars at some shed in the Midwest.»

 

I do not want to make a habit of quoting other people's reviews, but in this particular case, I spent quite some time wondering whether to laugh or cry, so apparently this particular judgement is worth a quote. For some reason, I'd always thought that normally entertainers entertain — that's their day job — and when they perform before a bunch of inmates, they normally go on entertai­ning, particularly since inmates may be in more need of entertainment than us free (for now) ci­tizens. And, just like the much older Cooks County album, King's San Quentin gives the inma­tes their fair share of solid entertainment. His worst «crime» may be in trying to get a few cheers for the warden from the audience (resulting in a healthy, voluminous BOOO!), but hey, the war­den gave him a medal out there, he was only trying to return the kindness.

 

Comparing this well-meaning, good-natured — and obviously quite well enjoyed by the audie­nce — performance with Cash's album, just because both happened to be recorded at the same place, does not even begin to miss the point, because there is no point to be missed. (Of course, B. B. should have known better when he was selecting the location; comparisons would be absolutely inevitable). Cash, most of his life, played «the thinking man's country», and his small set of pri­son albums did not so much intend to entertain as to stimulate (and reducing his approach to «smirking irony» and «disdain for the captors» is almost demeaning, as if the reviewer wanted to make some sort of Angela Davis out of the man). King is an entertainer all the way through, but an honest, passionate, and talented one.

 

So yes, the first song is 'Let The Good Times Roll', and those who have not heard the album can be understood with their reservations. For those who have, all that matters is that the band plays it well, the ol' man hollers like he's twenty years old, and when he calls in for audience participation, the entire hall explodes with a "let the good times roll!" as if they were all sitting "under the stars at some shed in the Midwest". And that's the biggest asset of this record: King may be going thro­ugh the motions for all I know, but the people out there are genuinely happy.

 

If there is something to complain about on a serious rather than socially pseudo-concerned basis, it's that the band is a little rough, almost as if some of the inmates were actually sitting in, and this takes its toll on classics like 'Thrill Is Gone' (rushed and perfunctory — for a comparably dazzling performance from the same era, check out the live version from Montreux 1993). Also, although the only «new» live number, 'Into The Night', stripped from its Eighties production, somehow fits in with the oldies, there was hardly any need to insert the studio recording of the cheerful, but dumb 'Peace To The World' in the middle and covering it in fake applause. (And I am ready to concede a point to Mr. M. G. of the All-Music Guide here: "Let's all get together and bring peace to the world" are obvious lines for that obligatory audience participation bit, but in San Quentin? Not even the Soviet Union went that far in its correction policies. And not everyone is smart eno­ugh to understand that it was, in fact, a studio track).

 

Other than all that, just another good B. B. King live album — well, any B. B. King live album is a good one unless the sound quality is crappy, and San Quentin got fabulous acoustics. Johnny Cash already figured that out. Thumbs up.

 

LIVE AT THE APOLLO (1991)

 

1) When Love Comes To Town; 2) Sweet Sixteen; 3) The Thrill Is Gone; 4) Ain't Nobody's Bizness; 5) Paying The Cost To Be The Boss; 6) All Over Again; 7) Nightlife; 8) Since I Met You Baby; 9) Guess Who; 10) Peace To The World.

 

Not content with filling in the shoes of Johnny Cash, less than a year later B. B. went out again and, this time, tried on those of James Brown. (Live At Leeds, Live At Budokan, and Live In Red Square are all titles that we expect to see in the next two or three centuries, regardless of whether Mr. King already got there or is still biding his time). It is not entirely clear if the folks at the Apollo wanted the man that much more than the inmates at San Quentin, but it is entirely cle­ar that King, at least, seems to feel more at home over here than over there (then again, come to think of it, who wouldn't? Leadbelly, perhaps?). This is reflected not just in the generally cooler swagger of the actual performances, but also in the decrease of the amount of stage banter — with no need to soothe or sway the appreciative crowd, B. B. just buries himself in the singing and playing, reducing audience participation to a bare minimum.

 

There is a huge backing band here, the Philip Morris Super Band led by piano great Gene Harris, ensuring the ideal blues-de-luxe accompaniment, although some have complained that the band's talents have pretty much been wasted: King does not provide a lot of breathing space, nor does he budge away from his typical material into jazzier territory. On the other hand, this is a B. B. King live album, and he had let other people overshadow his playing and singing so many times in his life that, sometimes, a great professional band may suffer becoming a great professional backing band — and it does that with plenty of verve and understanding. (Gene Harris does have a few juicy piano solos, if you are wondering).

 

The setlist is almost completely predictable; the only drop of fresh blood is U2's contribution to the ca­talog, the perfectly B.-B.-Kingish blues-pop-rocker 'When Love Comes To Town' (which here al­most ends up sounding like one of his 1950s hits, rather than the modern, Bonified version on U2's Rattle & Hum). On the other hand, he resuscitates some long-time oldies, e. g. 'All Over Again', sort of King's personal equivalent of the tragic theater of 'St. James Infirmary', lyrically diluted for the public at large, and Ivory Joe Hunter's 'Since I Met You Baby', a song that also fits his easy-going, nice-mannered persona to a tee.

 

The good news is that the man is in top form, the band is well-oiled, and most of the songs are classic; of the latter day live albums from King, Apollo is one of the most obvious choices. The bad news is that it may all be a little too slick — the setlist is too choked with crowdpleasers, and King is playing it all too safe, never soloing for too long and not taking any chances. 'The Thrill Is Gone', for instance, fades out before it even crosses the four-minute mark, despite the fact that, normally, it is one of King's usual improvisation launchpads. He only gets to truly stretch out on 'All Over Again', much less so on 'Sweet Sixteen'.

 

Yes, he can certainly be excused for wanting to go out there and make a «proper» live album for all the nice ladies and gentlemen who have been so good to him over the years — but that is no excuse for not releasing that real live album that the fans would really want from him. It is amazing to realize how many times people have wit­nessed the man ripping Live At The Regal to shreds while onstage — yet, for some bizarre reason, he still has not authorized the release of an official live album to prove that to non-concert-goers.

 

THERE IS ALWAYS ONE MORE TIME (1991)

 

1) I'm Moving On; 2) Back In L.A.; 3) The Blues Come Over Me; 4) Fool Me Once; 5) The Lowdown; 6) Mean And Evil; 7) Something Up My Sleeve; 8) Roll, Roll, Roll; 9) There Is Always One More Time.

 

A modest return to form after two of the man's worst studio albums in a row. With the Eighties over, it became possible to return to nicer production values — the poison-synths and drum ma­chines are gone, replaced by more normal playing. To B. B.'s credit, he would, from now on, be for the most part free of the technophilia bug, meaning that one does not run a serious risk of sti­cking with something atrocious even when picking up any of his latest albums at random.

 

The bad news is that King's backing band here is just as faceless as the robots on those Eighties records. Jim Keltner is a solid drummer with an immaculate pedigree, but he is a great addition to an already solid team, not some amazing percussion wizard who can make sticks and stones come alive; the bass player, whoever he is, just plays bass; and the keyboard players, instead of playing decent instruments, rely on those dead-sounding electronic pianos that seemed to have been all the rage in blues-rock around the time (they're still around, of course, but their sound range seems to have at least slightly improved with the passing years). No brass backing whatsoever, for un­known reasons (hard times?). Lucille seems to have been the only living soul on the album, but King uses her sparingly, and even when he does, we have the usual problem — her voice is way too thin to properly arrive at us from behind the keyboard muck.

 

It's all a pity, because there are some good songs here: most of the album had been written thro­ugh the collaborative effort of Will Jennings and Joe Sample — the same team that gave him his good stuff during the 1978-79 stint with The Crusaders — and, just like before, their contributi­ons are spotty, but enjoyable. Most importantly, the melodies return that gritty, aggressive feel that King's records from the last decade generally missed. 'I'm Moving On' opens the album on a note of such triumphant decision that, with a better arrangement, the song should have been a tri­umphant comeback for the old boy, but with those keyboards... eh.

 

Some of the tracks are fine mood pieces: 'Back In L. A.' is one of those laid back «city of good and evil» anthems that can be either cheap cliché mixes or inspired new takes on the old thing, and I'd vote for the latter; 'The Blues Come Over Me' certifiedly does have the blues come over him (and somebody gives him a bit of proper piano backing, for once!); and 'Mean And Evil' is simply fun — the big man is always at his best when putting the blame on his woman. That's what all big men manage to do best of all, anyway.

 

But clearly, the magnum opus here is the title track, written by and dedicated to the late Doc Po­mus, the second-rate genius (well, not all great somgwriters can be first-rate) behind lots of clas­sic R&B hits and drunken Dr. John rave-ups. Although King tends to sing well throughout the whole album, this particular performance is obviously and understandably his most emotional, and it's got what the rest of the album don't got — a grand rippin' guitar solo at the end, with Jim Keltner finally latching on to something of value and showing why they made a good choice in inviting him to the sessions.

 

Most people will probably shrug their shoulders upon reading King's "This is the best album I've recor­ded in my career" in the liner notes, and start looking around for invisible ink traces of "...sin­ce the previous one". Perhaps, though, it was not merely a trivial marketing move: the cool thing about King is, he's always lived for the moment, and it may simply mean that, while recor­ding One More Time, he'd simply forgotten about — or, perhaps, intentionally stripped himself of — all memories of past experiences. Who knows, maybe that's the sort of thing that allows him to live up to 80+ years and not feel worried about it. Fact is, he doesn't really feel like he's 66 years old on here. And I feel fine, too, about giving this a thumbs up, despite the undeniable blandness of the sound — and the simple truth that this is, of course, not the best album he's re­corded in his career. Come to think of it, what's he ever done to tell his listeners what is best and what is worst? Who does he think he is — Stephen Thomas Erlewine?

 

BLUES SUMMIT (1993)

 

1) Playin’ With My Friends; 2) Since I Met You Baby; 3) I Pity The Fool; 4) You Shook Me; 5) Something You Got; 6) There’s Something On Your Mind; 7) Little By Little; 8) Stormy Monday; 9) You’re The Boss; 10) We’re Gonna Make It; 11) I Gotta Move Out Of This Neighborhood/Nobody Loves Me But My Mother; 12) Everybody’s Had The Blues.

 

You know for sure that something is not right when, all of a sudden, the king does not show up any more without laying his head on the shoulders of his courtiers. B. B. had enjoyed an occasio­nal duet or two in the past, but starting in the early Nineties, he switched to duet mode on an al­most full-time basis. It might not even have been for money reasons, more for the psychological factor: all of these stars, young and old, getting together and paying homage to the one and only would automatically mean that the one and only was still the one and only.

 

From a purely technical point of view, Blues Summit is unbeatable. King sings, Lucille wails, and the guests range from forgotten, but still venerable has-beens (Ruth Brown, Irma Thomas) to grizzly old veterans who only get better with age (Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker) to newer stars with plenty of potential (Robert Cray). The songs are diverse enough — from pure 12-bar to boo­gie blues to R’n’B — and some of the numbers bravely go over five, six, seven minutes to let the agents show their full force.

 

From a more feelings-based point of view, Blues Summit is excruciatingly stiff, lifeless, and bo­ring. All of these guests know perfectly well what they are there for — to tip their hat to the big man — and the matters of courtesy and politeness consistently take over matters of excitement and emotionality. This album is not another stop on B. B.’s own journey, it’s a set of five-minute detours on everybody else’s journeys to take a look at the old curio man. A fun project, but essen­tially meaningless: glitzy blues free of true soul, but full of gross mannerisms, best illustrated by the forced «sobbing» on the re-recording of ‘Nobody Loves Me But My Mother’.

 

There are some excellent bits of guitar interplay, though, particularly on the Albert Collins duet (‘Stormy Monday’) and the Joe Louis Walker one (‘Everybody’s Had The Blues’); on the other hand, the numbers with Buddy Guy (a clumsily choreographed ‘I Pity The Fool’) and John Lee Hooker (‘You Shook Me’, with annoyingly overacted stuttering from Hooker) are almost com­pletely wasted. Lots of ladies add generically powerful urban blues vocals to five of the tracks, with disastrous effect — they all try to match King’s singing style so closely that it is almost impossible to distinguish Katie Webster from Koko Taylor, or Etta James from Irma Thomas, even though in real life they all have significantly different personalities.

 

If this review read like a typical blurb out of the All-Music Guide, it is because Blues Summit is exactly the kind of album for which the All-Music Guide has been invented: a huge credits list from which to draw on trivia, and zero artistic significance that makes it a great target for the «You’d think that... but then again, no» formula. And an AMG-style review deserves an AMG-style closing line — how about this: «As far as we can tell, B. B. King has regained his regalia, at the expense of relinquishing his relevance».

 

DEUCES WILD (1997)

 

1) If You Love Me; 2) The Thrill Is Gone; 3) Rock Me Baby; 4) Please Send Me Someone To Love; 5) Baby I Love You; 6) Ain't Nobody Home; 7) Pauly's Birthday Boogie; 8) There Must Be A Better World Somewhere; 9) Confes­sin' The Blues; 10) Hummingbird; 11) Bring It On Home To Me; 12) Paying The Cost To Be The Boss; 13) Let The Good Times Roll; 14) Dangerous Mood; 15) Crying Won't Help You; 16) Night Life.

 

King's second duets album in a row — third, actually, if one counts Lucille & Friends from 1995, which looks like a compilation of previously released and unreleased tracks from multiple sessions — would seem to confirm the suspicion that he had completely relegated himself to «el­der sideman» status, forever satisfied with selling his records on the strength of other people's names. But at least he is getting better at it: Deuces Wild is a far more interesting record than Blues Summit, for a number of reasons.

 

First, the guest list is more diverse and, in places, unpredictable. It is no surprise, and hardly a gua­rantee of success, to see Eric Clapton or the entirety of the Rolling Stones sucking up to the King — but what about Van Morrison or Willie Nelson? Dave Gilmour on second guitar? Jools Holland and his honky-tonk? Ex-Roxy Music guy Paul Carrack? Let's face it, there ain't a single professional musician in this world that would seriously mind having a go at it with the King him­self, and this time around, the King took notice and expanded his formerly tight list of generic blues friends so much that at least a few interesting things were bound to happen. And, of course, a few boring or ugly ones, but when you're being random like that, it's heads or tails all over again with each new track.

 

Highlights: 'If You Love Me', a Van Morrison song written and sung by Van Morrison while B. B. produces moody background in the background. Sweet. Tracy Chapman's weirdly wobbly vocals on 'The Thrill Is Gone', offering yet another spirited reinvention of the song. Bizarre. 'Pauly's Bir­thday Boogie' with Jools Holland — instrumental jump-blues from days long gone by, the King rocking us back to the innocent days of the 1950s. Nostalgic. 'Hummingbird' — nobody needs to be a huge fan of Dionne Warwick, but the song had always called for a female performance, and she is more than adequate on supporting her man out here. Romantic. 'Night Life' — Willie Nel­son makes this clichéd old standard sound nicely personal again: you can't go wrong, anyway, with the most intelligent-sounding voice in country music lending it extra credence. Smart.

 

Lowlights: neither Clapton nor Jagger are at their best, the former taking all due precautions not to outplay the master and ending up sounding bland (the same problem that also marred the duo's full-fledged collaboration, Riding With The King), and the latter not really having sounded all that impressive on any 12-bar blues numbers since at least 1966 or so (I mean, the Stones' rendi­tion of 'Stop Breaking Down' is astoundingly great, but purely because of its guitar sound, not due to the vocals). There is also a silly rap number with Heavy D somewhere out there that does not justify its existence — you don't do rap when you're 72 years old; trust me, there are much better ways to show the young 'uns you're in real great shape.

 

The rest fluctuates somewhere in the middle (Bonnie Raitt is good, Joe Cocker not so good, Mar­ty Stuart and Zucchero make me yawn, Mick Hucknall nearly outsings the man, etc.), still enough to keep things slightly above average and, in general, justify this duet format. It does not seem so much a question of gelling — they all get in the swing easy enough — as it is a question of re­freshing: for every guest that honestly brings stuff to the table, there is another one that only takes from it. Still a thumbs up — after the stiffness of Blues Summit, this one is the epitome of live­liness in comparison. Particular thanks should probably go to veteran producer John Porter — either for doing things right, or for staying out of the way long enough to make them come right, I don't exactly know which.

 

BLUES ON THE BAYOU (1998)

 

1) Blues Boys Tune; 2) Bad Case Of Love; 3) I'll Survive; 4) Mean Ole' World; 5) Blues Man; 6) Broken Promise; 7) Darlin' What Happened; 8) Shake It Up And Go; 9) Blues We Like; 10) Good Man Gone Bad; 11) If I Lost You; 12) Tell Me Baby; 13) I Got Some Outside Help I Don't Need; 14) Blues In G; 15) If That Ain't It I Quit.

 

This recording, as close to really good as it is far from really great, is perhaps the closest King ever got, in his later years, to recapturing the vibe of his early years. The liner notes emphasize this return to basics, but nothing emphasizes it as well as the music itself. Straightahead generic 12-bar, no bull attached. No duets, no super-guest-stars, no fancy-wancy hi-tech production tricks, no particular concept, no hit single, and, best of all, no forced attempts at «proving» something. Just a basic blues session for a basic blues guy, working his stuff and loving it.

 

The predictable down side is that there is nothing to cling to. The setlist is a mix of old standards with a few new, spur-of-the-moment compositions; the backing is fabulously professional and fabulously devoted to staying in the back (it is, after all, rather rude to compete with The King, especially considering he's about as old as all of his players put together); and there is not a single lick here we haven't already heard on earlier records.

 

Individually, I could perhaps recommend the opening instrumental 'Blues Boys Tune', one of the few, if not the only, pure soul-blues entry here, giving the man ampler possibilities of stretching out; the boogie number 'Shake It Up And Go', an unfrequent occasion of the man cheating on Lu­cille in favour of an acoustic; and the barroom shakedown of 'If That Ain't It I Quit', with the title constituting the song's only lyrical line.

 

Collectively, it all adds up to yet another nice disc to put up during partytime or to encourage your grandparents in the «see here, Grandaddy, that's how old folks are supposed to exorcise their boredom» manner. Big additional question mark about the album title — there is nothing even va­guely bayou-like on the record, cleanest-style Chicago blues imaginable. But in all other res­pects, it's an honest down-to-earth offering, so thumbs up. Bring back the duets now, maybe?

 

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL (1999)

 

1) Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens; 2) Is You Is, Or Is You Ain't (My Baby); 3) Beware, Brother, Beware; 4) Somebody Done Changed The Lock On My Door; 5) Ain't That Just Like A Woman; 6) Cho Choo Ch'Boogie; 7) Buzz Me; 8) Early In The Mornin'; 9) I'm Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town; 10) Jack, You're Dead!; 11) Knock Me A Kiss; 12) Let The Good Times Roll; 13) Caldonia; 14) It's A Great, Great Pleasure; 15) Rusty Dusty Blues; 16) Sure Had A Wonderful Time Last Night; 17) Saturday Night Fish Fry; 18) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out.

 

Ten years on, this album has obviously lost any relevance it might have ever possessed, but in 1999 it may have done a decent job of introducing a handful of young B. B. King fans (yes, the brand name does indeed attract young fans on a continuous basis) to the legacy of Louis Jordan, a whoppin' eighteen cuts from which are faithfully covered here by King, assisted on piano — and, once, on vocals — by none other than Dr. John.

 

Naturally, Louis Jordan was as much of a seasoned pro and underrated genius at his schtick — jump blues and swing — as B. B. King was at his; naturally, it is just as unlikely for B. B. King to excel at Jordan-style jazz as it would have been unlikely for Jordan to excel at King-style blues. That B. B. was a devout fan of Jordan is beyond doubt: he'd already covered 'Let The Good Ti­mes Roll' on many an occasion, and his entertainment style borrowed lots of its easy-going ele­ments from Jordan's. But to do an entire album of Jordan tunes, including prime Louis cuts whose musical table tennis between Jordan and his band is supposed to take one's breath away like no­thing else, that takes quite a bit of gall. How the man came up with the idea in the first place, we'll never know. The big questions are — (a) does he pull it off? and (b) what's the payoff?

 

Surprisingly, it all works. Had B. B. concentrated on Jordan's slow blues stuff, such as 'I'm Gon­na Move To The Outskirts Of Town' or the album-closing 'Nobody Knows You' (which Jordan ne­ver «owned» as such but, apparently, covered), he would have turned it into just another blues al­bum — a regularly good blues album, perhaps, well suited to King's style and persona, but it would be rather silly to call it a Louis Jordan tribute album. On the contrary, most of the album is devoted to Jordan's fast, rollickin' numbers that give B. B. a chance to flash his boogie licks — a chance that he doesn't use nearly as often as he should, usually ceding the spotlight to Dr. John and the brass section and concentrating on the singing.

 

This is where he is bound to lose: no matter how easy-going and inspired his backing band is, no­body can beat the original Tympany Five, and no matter how convincing and authentic B. B. is in his phrasing, he wasn't born with it the way Jordan always seemed to be. B. B.'s guitar and Dr. John's piano are the two edges that they have over the original, but the original was all about sin­ging and brass interplay — it's a little like trying to improve on Chuck Berry by adding a master church organ player to 'Brown Eyed Handsome Man'.

 

It is admirable that the end result is as much fun as it really is, but, honestly, at best Let The Good Times Roll is a one-time listen to admire the man's lively spirit: let us not forget that the man was a whoppin' seventy-four years old while boppin' and groovin' to the merry sounds of 'Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chi­ckens' (in comparison, Jordan was sixty-seven when he died, and pretty much stopped boppin' and groovin' upon reaching the age of fifty). For that alone, it defini­tely deserves a thumbs up, and now go do yourself a favour — pick up one of those cheap Jor­dan compilations available everywhere, and 'Let The Good Times Roll'!

 

MAKIN' LOVE IS GOOD FOR YOU (2000)

 

1) I Got To Leave This Woman; 2) Since I Fell For You; 3) I Know; 4) Peace Of Mind; 5) Monday Woman; 6) Ain't Nobody Like My Baby; 7) Makin' Love Is Good For You; 8) Don't Go No Farther; 9) Actions Speak Louder Than Words; 10) What You Bet; 11) You're On Top; 12) Too Good To You Baby; 13) I'm In The Wrong Business; 14) She's My Baby.

 

"Makin' love is good for you", King tells us with the complacency of a man who really knows what he's talking about — implying that, perhaps, makin' love is still good for him, too, regard­less of the discrepancy between the year 2000 and his own birthdate, usually given as 1925. Ad­mittedly, it is great to know that the guy is still doing well in the life-enjoying department. Unfor­tunately, it is the only great thing about this album.

 

(Well, perhaps, other than letting us know that all of these years he's been "in the wrong business": "Should've been like Michael Jackson when I was the age of five / But I chose this guitar, now I'm broke and can't survive" — ha ha. Then again, considering the man's embarrassing stunt for Burger King two years later, perhaps he was being serious. No one can contest, after all, that the King of Pop did make a hell of a lot more dough than the King of Blues — on the other hand, whose life has been the longer and happier one?).

 

Anyway, Makin' Love is simply one more Blues On The Bayou: exact same band, exact same production, exact same styles and exact same evenness bordering on the boring, or maybe just plain boring — the «bordering» explained by the fact that it takes some guts to call a B. B. King album «boring». However, having already digested most of the man's discography, we now know what kind of things the man is really capable of, and few, if any, of these heights are scaled on Makin' Love's relatively timid and tepid workouts.

 

I wish I could recommend an outstanding solo or vocal part, but I cannot. 'I'm In The Wrong Bu­siness' is, indeed, a fun curio and a potential laugh riot for the jaded B. B. fan, just because the lyrics are so outrageous. As for the guitar licks — each one of these you've heard a million times by now, and, at the very least, owning Blues On The Bayou automatically makes owning Ma­kin' Love a complete waste of your money. Choose one and leave the other for your enemy.

 

REFLECTIONS (2003)

 

1) Exactly Like You; 2) On My Word Of Honor; 3) I Want A Little Girl; 4) I'll String Along With You; 5) I Need You; 6) A Mother's Love; 7) (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons; 8) Neighborhood Affair; 9) Tomorrow Night; 10) There I've Said It Again; 11) Always On My Mind; 12) Cross My Heart; 13) What A Wonderful World.

 

It's been quite some time since B. B. concentrated exclusively on his sentimental side, so he can certainly be excused for spending a well-tucked evening with The Great American Cornbook on his lap. More than that, he can be excused for triggering a predictable series of associations: «Old time balladry» + «78 years of age» + «an album called Reflections» → «nostalgia» / «looking back on that long long road» / «that old, tired noble heart» → RESPECT.

 

None of which surmises that anyone will ever be interested in hearing this album more than once — the usual fate for about 70% of King's output, for sure, but Reflections doesn't even make for decent party music this time, unless you're talking about your grandparents' high school reunion party, and even in that case it is not clear why they would want to hear B. B. King impersonating Nat King Cole, Armstrong, and Dionne Warwick instead of the real thing.

 

Factual data are scarce and uninteresting. The arrangements are loud and bombastic, with lots of brass and strings and very little guitar, although, to be honest, when B. B. is in the mood for a soulful solo, he does it admirably well, e. g. 'On My Word Of Honor'. There is a strangely large amount of steel and slide guitar, too, which may be puzzling for those who are well aware of the man's monogamy, but, apparently, most, if not all, of those parts are played by wiz kid Doyle Bramhall II. It gives the proceedings a slightly Nashvillified whiff, too, which is OK by me — anything to take the emphasis off that high school ballroom spirit is welcome.

 

Maybe — a very uncertain maybe — but still, maybe the album could have been turned into so­mething vaguely more interesting had its production not been entrusted to Simon Climie, the man almost single-handedly responsible for strangling Eric Clapton's mid-1990s comeback in the cra­dle and, consequently, for making the Clapton/King collaboration (Riding With The King) ten times less the experience that it could have been. The man has an unparalleled gift for sucking life, energy, and brawn out of anything — he could probably make Manowar sound like Bread without them noticing. On the other hand, it is not clear how exactly would it be possible to brea­the new life into those dusty old standards, especially if the artist behind them is a dusty old relic himself (no offense). Thumbs down — avoid unless you're on a really acute sentimental kick.

 

80 (2005)

 

1) Early In The Morning; 2) Tired Of Your Jive; 3) The Thrill Is Gone; 4) Need Your Love So Bad; 5) Ain't Nobody Home; 6) Hummingbird; 7) All Over Again; 8) Drivin' Wheel; 9) There Must Be A Better World Somewhere; 10) Never Make Your Move Too Soon; 11) Funny How Time Slips Away; 12) Rock This House.

 

Another jubilee, another batch of boring, uncomfortable duets. But there is an extra kick here, as compared to King's earlier gueststar-studded records: it is rather fun to hear the 80-year old gran­grandaddy outsing (nearly always) and outplay (occasionally) most of his guests, including those who had not yet been born when the man was already cutting sides, and who, at this point, are as much «elder statesmen» of popular music as he is, and sometimes more.

 

I mean, it must have been a pretty cruel joke on King's part to drag Roger Daltrey in the studio: the poor guy sounds completely out of voice, breath, and life-supporting devices trying to outdo his 19-year-older partner on the rough blues verses of 'Never Make Your Move Too Soon', whe­re­as B. B. still delivers those lines almost exactly the same way as he did thirty years earlier. Dit­to for Elton John on 'Rock This House', the album's only uptempo number that closes the procee­dings on a good-timey retro-Fifties note — but perhaps bringing in Doctor John instead of Elton would have spiced things up in a more amusing manner.

 

The rest of the duets are not exactly pitiful, but there is nothing on here that would, somehow, confirm that this particular person placed his/her stamp on this particular song for any respectable reason. Most of the people are just wasted — either because, as is often the case, they were only too happy to hide behind the wall of B. B.'s years (if so, why the hell did they join him in the stu­dio at all?), or because, perhaps out of a lack of experience of working with the King, they didn't quite understand what to do and how to do it.

 

Van Morrison: sings a 12-bar blues tune without any passion at all, perhaps because 12-bar blues is simply not his forté. Billy Gibbons: there is no place for classic ZZ Top irony on a B. B. King song. Eric Clapton: hollow, manneristic soloing on 'Thrill Is Gone', possibly because he is trying to do it King-style — isn't it a little odd, considering that King is playing on the very same track? Sheryl Crow: she can write a good song or two, but crooning the blues? Might as well bring in Madonna. John Mayer: the Big Boring Guitar Hero of our time, adding absolutely nothing to 'Hu­mmingbird' and I am still not sure subtracting how much. Etc. etc.

 

The only track that might be worth tracking down is the duet with Bobby Bland on 'Funny How Time Slips Away' — unlike most other pairings, the Bland/King collaboration goes back to the mid-Seventies, and the two have a good way of understanding and complementing each other; their «conversation» is simultaneously amusing and touching, justifiedly nostalgic in tone, and does not feel one bit strained.

 

Everything else does. If it qualifies as a birthday present, it must be one of those «Official Im­portant» presents that so often spoil all the fun at jubilees — you know, getting something very solemn-looking, very expensive, and completely useless. Anybody celebrating his 80th jubilee and still having a recording and performing career is OK in my book at least out of sheer respect (and, while we're at it, King still occasionally smokes and blazes in concert, even if he has to sit rather than stand throughout the whole show); but in this case, it is the man that we want to hear, not his (lack of) interaction with his deliberately or coincidentally wooden partners. I'm sorry, Mr King, but the duets just have to go. Thumbs down.

 

ONE KIND FAVOR (2008)

 

1) See That My Grave Is Kept Clean; 2) I Get So Weary; 3) Get These Blues Off Me; 4) How Many More Years; 5) Waiting For Your Call; 6) My Love Is Down; 7) The World Is Gone Wrong; 8) Blues Before Sunrise; 9) Midnight Blues; 10) Backwater Blues; 11) Sitting On Top Of The World; 12) Tomorrow Night.

 

There is definitely an attempt to find some sort of different edge here; unfortunately, in the long run One Kind Favor still ends up being «just another B. B. King album». Of course, one should never forget that it is «just another B. B. King album recorded at the age of 83» — at this point, each new release from the man is a must-hear, if only as a source of inspiration for all of us low-down quitters like Mick Jagger and Angus Young.

 

Good news involve producer T-Bone Burnett, who has dedicated much of his life to finding a perfect balance betwe­en progressive technology and archaistic atmosphere; one more return of Dr. John, whose piano playing is often enough to make even a turd burst into flowers; and a number of golden oldies that had never before received the B. B. King touch. Bad news are that T-Bone's production style and King's standard idiom do not mesh well together; that most of the extra studio musicians are little more than paid professionals; and that most of the golden oldies are standard 12-bar fare — and do we really need another version of 'Tomorrow Night', what with Reflections released a mere five years earlier?

 

Granted, the album starts out tremendously well. Blind Lemon's 'See That My Grave Is Kept Clean', whose lyrics also lend the album its title, obviously has a lot of relevance for King these days, and even though there is no reason to think that he meant it as a final musical gesture, he clearly sings it testament-style, in a wearier voice than usual. Meanwhile, Burnett surrounds his delivery with dark, swampy atmosphere, with a muffling effect on Jim Keltner's drums and a thin organ membrane that is more felt than heard. Nothing of the kind can be found on any other B. B. King album — this is the finest intro-bait we've had from the man in maybe thirty years or so.

 

Alas, already on the second track, even though the production values mostly remain the same, the magic starts to dissipate. Had they concentrated on darker, deeper material throughout, One Kind Favor would truly be different. But this is where B. B.'s self-imposed limitations step in: he is such a big-hearted optimist that he can never stay steeped in doom and gloom for too long. Enter­tainment has been his motto all these years, and what kind of an entertainer would want to spend an entire hour depressing his audiences?

 

Throughout all of the remaining eleven tracks, Burnett is pretty much helpless. He still puts that echo on the drums, brings the bass high up in the mix to make things run in a jazzier vein, buries Lucille under waves of brass and keyboards — no dice. There is a physical limit to what you can do with the 12-bar form delivered by an 83-year old whose style of playing and guitar tones have not changed all that much ever since they learned how to run electricity through a six-string.

 

Also, it worries me to say this, but it does seem like King is honestly sounding a little tired and worn down here: the singing is quieter, shakier, and, overall, somewhat less expressive than it had been even three years earlier on the 80th jubilee album. This may be one of the reasons why 'See That My Grave Is Kept Clean' works so well on the senses — and why all the other songs do not. In this situation, he could perhaps concentrate more on the playing than on the singing, and on the slow mood pieces rather than aggressive mid-tempo blues-rock ('Backwater Blues' and 'Wai­ting For Your Call', both of them seriously overlong, still work better than something like 'How Many More Years' in this setting). On the other hand, the last time it happened, his idea of a slow mood piece was the sweet lounge sound of Reflections, and that's no salvation either.

 

What to do, then? Retire? Apparently, that is not going to happen as long as the man is physically capable of doing something to that guitar. All that is left us is sit back and endure: as long as the King refrains from embarrassments (say, a duet with Eminem or a production deal with the Bama Boyz), everything that he records until his demise (currently scheduled for the aftermath of World War III from a bad cold caught on Keith Richards' funeral) is going to be listened to with the pro­per reverence. As for One Kind Favor, I'd like to give it a thumbs down, but it does have one ter­rific performance, and in any case, we are way, way past the thumbs stage on here.

BARBECUE BOB

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1927-1928)

 

1) Barbecue Blues; 2) Cloudy Sky Blues; 3) Mississippi Heavy Water Blues; 4) Mamma You Don't Suit Me; 5) Brown-Skin Gal; 6) Honey You Don't Know My Mind; 7) Poor Boy A Long Ways From Home; 8) When The Saints Go Marching In; 9) Jesus' Blood Can Make Me Whole; 10) Easy Rider Don't You Deny My Name; 11) Thinkin' Fun­ny Blues; 12) My Mistake Blues; 13) Motherless Child Blues; 14) How Long Pretty Mama; 15) It Won't Be Long Now Pt. 1; 16) It Won't Be Long Now Pt. 2; 17) Crooked Woman Blues; 18) 'Fo Day Creep; 19) Blind Pig Blues; 20) Waycross Georgia Blues; 21) Goin' Up The Country; 22) Chocolate To The Bone; 23) Hurry And Bring It Back Home.

 

Barbecue Bob broiled barbecues, boiled bouillons, and... uh... brewed bouillabaisse? In between that and other culinary delights, he played guitar and, in stark contrast to Barbecue Bill, Barbecue Tom, Dick, and Harry, got put in history when, through Columbia Records talent scout man Dan Hornsby, he was offered the chance to record some of his playing and singing for the rapidly growing acoustic blues market. Actually, his real name was Robert Hicks, and he wasn't half bad, but it is highly likely that most people bought his records all based on the «singing cook» gimmick. One of the only two photos of the man that we know has him wearing an apron — even though, upon starting to make some real money in the record business, the apron must have been making its reappearance for promo reasons only.

 

Barbecue Bob is usually lumped in together with the «Piedmont Blues» style, because of his Geo­rgian origins. He wasn't, however, one of the true Piedmont innovators: compared to real fabu­lous greats who almost seemed to come from nowhere, like Blind Blake, his «flailing» style of play­ing was much simpler and more traditional. He mostly played the 12-string, and wasn't half bad at sliding (sometimes he manages to «flail» and slide at the same time), but overall, it is no crime to state that he was not a great player, not according to these here ears. But as a repre­sen­ta­tive of one long gone generic kind of sound, he's all right. For all we know, that's just about the way them old Negroes would play this thing in 1897, or even before that, once they got acquain­ted with the guitar and started playing them like the white folks would play the banjo. So that's gotta count for something.

 

Bob was much better at singing, though, sounding like a slightly less versatile, but somewhat griz­zlier, less explicitly «effeminate» early version of Blind Willie McTell; after a while, his tim­bre becomes unmistakable, and his feel for the blues easily equates that of the greats of that era. Furthermore, as much as the limited formula did allow, he tried to somehow diversify his played and sung parts — echoes of old folk songs, newer country sounds, and spirituals (a nice pre-Arm­strong take on 'When The Saints' included), all ran through his friendly tone that mixes friendli­ness and pain in just the right proportion.

 

Two of Bob's better known songs are on this first volume, covering his 1927-28 years: 'Mississi­ppi Heavy Water Blues', commemorating a series of floods so close to everyone's hearts that the song made him into a hitmaker almost overnight, and 'Motherless Child', best known today, per­haps, through Clapton's cover on From The Cradle — for which Eric humbly reproduced, al­most note for note, Bob's «simplistic» rolling-droning rhythm, and did a good job at it, but only improved on the original in terms of sound quality. Many of the other titles are recognizable as well, but it is these two that constitute the cornerstone of the barbecue man's legacy, and it will sure harm none to get to know them in their 1927 incarnations.

 

Especially since the sound quality is quite remarkable; although Paramount was the leading force on the country/Delta blues market during the pre-Depression years, Columbia had the better en­gineering department, and all of Bob's sides are consistently listenable — whereas, for instance, trying to listen to all of Blind Lemon Jefferson's output in a row is a very serious challenge.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1928-1929)

 

1) Mississippi Low-Levee Blues; 2) Ease It To Me Blues; 3) She's Gone Blues; 4) Cold Wave Blues; 5) Beggin' For Love; 6) Bad Time Blues; 7) Meat Man Pete; 8) Dollar Down Blues; 9) It Just Won't Hay; 10) It's Just Too Bad; 11) Good Time Rounder; 12) Honey You're Going Too Fast; 13) Red Hot Mama Papa's Going To Cool You Down; 14) California Blues; 15) It's A Funny Little Thing; 16) Black Skunk Blues; 17) Yo Yo Blues; 18) Trouble Done Bore Me Down; 19) Freeze To Me Mama; 20) Me And My Whiskey; 21) Unnamed Blues.

 

Bob's second year at Columbia clearly showed that the man wasn't going anywhere special, but it's not as if anyone expected progress. On the contrary, everyone expected, and demanded, no­thing but remakes of the old hits; symbolically, the album opens with 'Mississippi Low-Levee Blues', which is simply 'Mississippi Heavy Water Blues' with a new set of lyrics. There are also a couple rewrites of 'Motherless Child' here, and lots of fast dance-blues numbers all set to the same pattern ('It Just Won't Hay' and its clones).

 

Dirty song of the day: 'Meat Man Pete', of course, in which Bob is all excited to tell us all about "Peter's meat" which is "always fresh" (for some reason, he doesn't do the popular verse which mentions his "boneless ham"). However, it must also be mentioned that Hicks' songs are not all that heavy on dirty double entendres — the barbecue man preferred a cleaner approach.

 

On the positive side, it seems that the more time Hicks spent in the studio, the more he was get­ting into his instrument. The simple «flailing» technique is still there all over the place, but gene­rally there is more emphasis on his slide playing, and almost every number, no matter how primi­tive, has plenty of little flourishes and, sometimes, even counter-melodic lines that show how honestly the cooking bluesman was trying to hold his own territory against giants like Blind Le­mon. It is hardly a crime that he never got around to matching Jefferson's creativity. He did beat him in the vocal department, though, in a «technical» manner at least — easily going from growl to falsetto and then to his regular tenor whenever the situation called for it. But not in the «perso­nality» department — his drinking songs, such as 'Me And My Whiskey', do not really betray the soul of a goddamn drinking man.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 3 (1929-1930)

 

1) She Moves It Just Right; 2) Tellin' It To You; 3) Yo-Yo Blues No. 2; 4) She Shook Her Gin; 5) We Sure Got Hard Times; 6) Twistin' That Stuff; 7) Monkey And The Baboon; 8) Spider And The Fly; 9) Darktown Gambling Pt. 1; 10) Darktown Gambling Pt. 2; 11) Jambooger Blues; 12) It Just Won't Quit; 13) Atlanta Moan; 14) New Mojo Blues; 15) Doin' The Scraunch; 16) I'm On My Way Down Home; 17) Diddle-Da-Diddle; 18) She Looks So Good; 19) She's Coming Back Some Cold Rainy Day.

 

Like most country bluesmen with only their guitar to keep them company, at first Barbecue Bob did not suffer from Depression effects nearly as much as the urban blues queens — apparently, his rate of recording just wobbled a bit, rather than crumble. But he certainly was no Hollywood million­naire, either, and his 'We Sure Got Hard Times' is one of those symbolic tunes of the era whose names are so prone to becoming clichéd in our minds without remembering where it all comes from. He must have taken some inspiration from Blind Blake, probably, the first country blues­man not afraid to inject some political bite in his lyrics — "Just before election, you was talking about how you was going to vote / And after election was over, your head's down like a billy­goat" (ironically, he did not live long enough to see FDR in power).

 

Other than this landmark, Vol. 3 boasts a couple curious novelty tunes ('Monkey And The Ba­boon') and a few darker-than-usual numbers like 'Spider And The Fly', as well as a silly two-part «skit» called 'Darktown Gambling', in which Bob plays and sings a tiny bit and then spends some­thing like five minutes quarrelling with his brother Charley Lincoln over a crap game. (Peri­od historians and etnographers ahoy!). In terms of guitar technique or recording quality, there are no changes whatsoever.

 

Perhaps the biggest individual attraction of Vol. 3, though, are the last four tracks, credited to «The Georgia Cotton Pickers» — a one-time band assembled from Bob, Curley Weaver on se­cond guitar, and newcomer Buddy Moss on harmonica; Buddy would go on to become one of the most important East Coast bluesmen, but here he is just an aspiring sideman learning his craft from the masters of action — Bob and Curley — quite happy to even be allowed to blow his harp quietly in the background. They do Blind Blake ('Diddle-Da-Diddle', an easily recognizable re­tit­ling of 'Diddie Wah Diddie'), 'Sittin' On Top Of The World' renamed as 'I'm On My Way Down Home', and a couple other generic blues pieces. If I am correct in my reckoning, it is Curley who plays lead, mostly, and does it far more elegantly than Bob ever could — on the other hand, it is Bob who is responsible for all the vocals, and performs with far more expression than Curley could ever muster on his records. Quid pro quo all over the place.

 

Sadly, these few recordings by the Pickers in December 1930 were the last for Bob. Hard times caught up with him pretty soon: for the following several months, he was out of work, and then, at the peak of unluckiness, got car­ried away with influenza, pneumonia, and tuberculosis on October 21, 1931. It is highly unlikely that he would have gone on to bigger and better things had he stayed alive, so, from a completist-reviewer's cynical-pragmatic point of view, he did good, but from the humanist point of view — well, the best we can do is go on ensuring that the world remembers his best creations, such as 'Motherless Child' etc., for at least a little while longer.

 

 

BESSIE SMITH

THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 1 (1923-1924)

 

CD I: 1) Downhearted Blues; 2) Gulf Coast Blues; 3) Aggravatin' Papa; 4) Beale Street Mama; 5) Baby Won't You Please Come Home; 6) Oh! Daddy Blues; 7) 'Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do; 8) Keeps On A-Rainin' (Papa, He Can't Make No Time); 9) Mama's Got The Blues; 10) Outside Of That; 11) Bleeding Hearted Blues; 12) Lady Luck Blues; 13) Yodling Blues; 14) Midnight Blues; 15) If You Don't, I Know Who Will; 16) Nobody In Town Can Bake A Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine; 17) Jailhouse Blues; 18) St. Louis Gal; 19) Sam Jones Blues; CD II: 1) Graveyard Dream Blues; 2) Cemetery Blues; 3) Far Away Blues; 4) I'm Going Back To My Used To Be; 5) Whoa, Tillie, Take Your Time; 6) My Sweetie Went Away; 7) Any Woman's Blues; 8) Chicago Bound Blues; 9) Mistreatin' Daddy; 10) Frosty Morning Blues; 11) Haunted House Blues; 12) Eavesdropper's Blues; 13) Easy Come, Easy Go Blues; 14) Sorrowful Blues; 15) Pinchbacks — Take 'Em Away!; 16) Rocking Chair Blues; 17) Ticket Agent, Ease Your Win­dow Down; 18) Bo Weavil Blues; 19) Hateful Blues.

 

Typically, one's acquaintance with the «urban blues» of the roaring decade begins with Bessie Smith — and, also typically, ends there, because it takes the modern listener a long time to get settled into that creaky, hissy, monotonous, faraway groove, and not everyone can make it at all, much less become interested in exploring that groove even further. Still, it is not very difficult to understand what exactly was it that charmed audiences back then in this kind of music — and what it is that makes the retro-fan share the same sentiments almost a century later.

 

It is much harder to understand and explain what it is, exactly, that sets Bessie Smith so far apart from all the other innumerable «blues queens» of the day: Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, Clara Smith, Alberta Hunter, Lucille He­gamin, Ida Cox, Sippie Wallace... the list is really endless, and all of them were first-rate entertainers in their own right. And yet, it is not just some arbitrary histori­an's choice that randomly picked Bessie from this crowd and set her on a particularly impressive pedestal. The fact is that the blues boom of the 1920s did not properly set in until the arrival of Bessie, and, even though she was far from the first blues queen to appear on record (Mamie Smith had her beat by three years at least), it was she that, almost overnight, turned the blues re­cording business from a modest kingdom into a huge empire — rightfully earning the title of «Em­press Of The Blues», under which she was billed throughout most of the decade.

 

The reason certainly does not lie in the music, or the arrangements. Song-wise, Bessie was recor­ding more or less the same compositions as everyone else — sometimes borrowing songs that had already become hits with her competition, sometimes giving them away, according to the co­mmon rules of the trade. As for the accompaniment, it is certainly hard to complain: almost from the beginning, after a brief stint with pianist and (rather ruthless) promo man Clarence Williams, her main partner was Fletcher Henderson, one of the biggest piano men of the decade, whose tire­less «flourishing» graces a lot of these tracks and seriously raises the stakes in the beauty depart­ment. But still, there is no denying that many blues queens back then got prime backing from dex­terous jazz and blues musicians.

 

Obviously, the public was buying not because it wanted to hear more of Fletcher Henderson, but because it needed all the magic it could get from Bessie herself. So, what was that magic, and can we still perceive it, being so far removed from its time?

 

The way I see it, Bessie represented the first step on a long emotional journey whose purpose is to free performing art from its performing conventions and to imbue it with realistic emotion. When you listen to the other «queens» of the time, what you get is essentially show-biz. Now do not get me wrong: when you listen to Bessie, what you get is also show-biz. But the first show-biz is show-biz presented as show-biz, whereas Bessie's show-biz is awesomely more life-like. Roughly speaking, she sings it like she means it, while such performers as Mamie Smith or Alberta Hunter would sing it like they were expected to sing it.

 

This point will become very simple and obvious if, for instance, one listens to Alberta Hunter's 'Downhearted Blues' and Bessie's rendition of the same song — her very first recorded side — in a row. Hunter is cute, elegant, and pleasant; she hits all the right notes, but, essentially, sounds like she is mostly doing it just for the applause. Her 'gee, but it's hard to love someone, when that someone don't love you' certainly does not sound like it is really coming from someone in painful love with someone else. Bessie, ditching the lightweight vaudeville horns, with nothing but Cla­rence Williams' minimalistic piano behind her back, takes it to a whole different level. It is not just that her voice is deeper and stronger; it is that she really modulates it to fit the lyrics and the general mood, actually putting the blues back into the blues where the blues belong.

 

Formally, much of this is still «vaudeville» rather than true blues, but emotionally, this is troubled music, and even though Bessie's own troubled times, aside from some tumultu­ous personal rela­tions, ended pretty soon after she began her recording career, this never impacted her ability to deliver music that people could properly relate to, rather than just use it for parties. Can people still relate to it? Well, take my own case: while I have learned to enjoy female urban blues as such, almost none of it has managed to seriously stick in my mind — and yet, at the same time, 'Downhearted Blues', 'Gulf Coast Blues', 'Baby Won't You Please Come Home', the absolutely powerhouse 'Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do' (a classic that nearly every bluesman has performed since and not a single one has performed better), 'Lady Luck Blues' — these are just some of the tunes from this first volume of recordings that have struck a deep chord with me.

 

Keep in mind that I mentioned «first step»: in 1923, «emotional» blues singing was too young yet to include screaming one's head off, going from shrill to hushed in a matter of seconds, or ad-lib­bing whatever impulse came into your head like crazy. The inexperienced listener should not be ex­pecting a Janis Joplin here, or an Aretha Franklin, or even a Billie Holiday, even though all three were clearly indebted to Bessie, directly or indirectly (and Billie, in particular, used to sing quite a bit of Bessie's material). In essence, this is traditional, gimmick-free singing — but very human, very approachable, and, while we're at it, quite powerful: most of the «strong, indepen­dent» women of the more recent eras of pop music really sound like vague, insecure bimbos next to the strength and confidence that Smith exudes on almost every performance.

 

Obviously, the Complete Recordings series, even for giants like Bessie, are overkill, and she does not always sing with the same level of intensity, not to mention that much of the material just does not have any pre-written hooks to latch on to. There is also a horrendous recording that, for some stupid marketing reason, pairs Bessie with Clara Smith, a decent performer in her own rights — but together they form The Hungry Cat Duo, singing so drastically off-key that the only purpose of it must have been to imply that they should never be put on the same record again.

 

But this is obligatory nitpicking — when you strive for completism, you should know beforehand that not everything is going to be great. On the positive side, these cannot even be called the for­mative years: Bessie was just as fantastic on her first records as she was on her last — fresher, in fact, and with an overall higher proportion of truly timeless classics. Only historians need access to all the 38 tracks on here, but regular music lovers who do not have access to at least a dozen have missed a good friend. Thumbs up.

 

THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 2 (1924-1925)

 

CD I: 1) Frankie Blues; 2) Moonshine Blues; 3) Louisiana Low Down Blues; 4) Mountain Top Blues; 5) Work Hou­se Blues; 6) House Rent Blues; 7) Salt Water Blues; 8) Rainy Weather Blues; 9) Weeping Willow Blues; 10) The Bye Bye Blues; 11) Sing Sing Prison Blues; 12) Follow The Deal On Down; 13) Sinful Blues; 14) Woman's Trouble Blues; 15) Love Me Daddy Blues; 16) Dying Gambler's Blues; 17) The St. Louis Blues; 18) Reckless Blues; 19) So­b­bin' Hearted Blues; CD II: 1) Cold In Hand Blues; 2) You've Been A Good Ole Wagon; 3) Cake Walkin' Babies (From Home); 4) The Yellow Dog Blues; 5) Soft Pedal Blues; 6) Dixie Flyer Blues; 7) Nashville Women's Blues; 8) Careless Love Blues; 9) J. C. Holmes Blues; 10) I Ain't Goin' To Play Second Fiddle; 11) He's Gone Blues; 12) No­body's Blues But Mine; 13) I Ain't Got Nobody; 14) My Man Blues; 15) New Gulf Coast Blues; 16) Florida Bound Blues; 17) At The Christmas Ball; 18) I've Been Mistreated (And I Don't Like It).

 

The second volume is just as indispensable as the first. It was during this particular period that Smith crashed the last barriers, conquering Detroit and Chicago, teaming up with the hottest play­ers around, gaining the title of «Empress of the Blues» and becoming the most highly paid black performer of her time. If none of this shows on the actual recordings, well, blame it on genre re­quirements: Bessie was paid, first and foremost, for being unhappy on record, and she honestly earned every cent of that pay. Her backing musicians may not have always been taking this idea of unhappiness too seriously — as evidenced by their occasional cheesy insertion of phrases from Chopin's 'Funeral March' into the playing — but she herself was dedicated to it at every session, no matter what her own private circumstances were at the time.

 

Two major piece of news are in order. First, starting from the third track of the second disc, Bes­sie enters the advanced age of electrical recording; some of her contemporaries had to adjust their style in order to sing into the microphone, but Bessie seemed to latch on to the new technique im­mediately — in fact, celebrating it with her biggest band and her liveliest song so far: 'Cake Wal­kin' Babies (From Home)'. This is pretty much the only example of Bessie's cakewalk that you can hear, but a prime one; her «rocking» numbers, few as they were, shook the floor with more power than any other kind of music at the time, and it is great to hear her singing captured so ma­gnificently with the new recording technology.

 

Second, the collection includes the several sides Bessie recorded in January 1925 with Louis Ar­mstrong, including the famous 'St. Louis Blues' and the less famous, but, in my opinion, far more subtle and touching 'You've Been A Good Ole Wagon'. The latter is an old vaudeville tune on the unhappy consequences of impotence, but Bessie insists on turning it from an overtly comic num­ber into a tale of personal grief. (Then again, surely it is no laughing matter when the man «done broke down» — if you're going to dump him for that reason, a little sympathy may not hurt).

 

That said, it has generally been recogni­zed, and I subscribe to the recognition, that Armstrong's backing did not gel ideally with Bessie's singing, or, at least, that these particular tracks are not all that «cornet-important» when compa­red to songs recorded with Joe Smith, Bessie's regular player (no personal relation, though). Louis is technically perfect as usual, but he may be just a tad too happy with his instrument where Bessie would need a more somber manner of playing. Had they spent more time together, he would pro­bably have adjusted better to her style — but even as it is, we got ourselves a one-of-a-kind memento of two giants together at their respective peaks.

 

Other than that, there are no big surprises, and, as usual, 37 songs in chronological order make it hard to see the inspired masterpieces from simply solid workmanship, but time has ensured that, eighty years from then, not a single one of them comes across as crappy or tasteless. And it was a good idea to make the final break with 'I've Been Mistreated (And I Don't Like It)', the most open­ly aggressive and threatening tune out of the bunch — if the last half-dozen tracks made the mistake of lulling you, the last one will punch you in the guts and leave you aching for more.

 

THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 3 (1925-1928)

 

CD I: 1) Red Mountain Blues; 2) Golden Rule Blues; 3) Lonesome Desert Blues; 4) Them Has Been Blues; 5) Squeeze Me; 6) What's The Matter Now; 7) I Want Every Bit Of It; 8) Jazzbo Brown From Memphis Town; 9) The Gin House Blues; 10) Money Blues; 11) Baby Doll; 12) Hard Driving Papa; 13) Lost Your Head Blues; 14) Hard Time Blues; 15) Honey Man Blues; 16) One And Two Blues; 17) Young Woman's Blues; 18) Preachin' The Blues; 19) Backwater Blues; 20) After You've Gone; 21) Alexander's Ragtime Band; CD II: 1) Muddy Water (A Mis­sis­sip­pi Moan); 2) There'll Be A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight; 3) Trombone Cholly; 4) Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair; 5) Them's Graveyard Words; 6) Hot Spring Blues; 7) Sweet Mistreater; 8) Lock And Key; 9) Mean Old Bed Bug Blues; 10) Homeless Blues; 11) Looking For My Man Blues; 12) Dyin' By The Hour; 13) Foolish Man Blues; 14) Thinking Blues; 15) Pickpocket Blues; 16) I Used To Be Your Sweet Mama; 17) I'd Rather Be Dead And Buried In My Grave; 18) I'd Rather Be Dead And Buried In My Grave (alt. take).

 

Heard from the perspective of our utterly spoiled modern-day ears that quickly get tired of repe­tition, Vol. 3, covering Bessie's years of prime glam and luxury, is somewhat of an intuitive let­down; but from the perspective of contemporary audiences, there is hardly even one small sign here that Ms. Smith might somehow be «losing it». After all, her voice and emotional force are going as strong as ever, and her backing players are still the top of the crop — when you have Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, and James P. Johnson all delighted to back the lady, you know her fortunes have not changed much.

 

But in terms of classic individual performances, Vol. 3 does not add much to what we already know. The first disc is livened up by occasional dance numbers, such as 'Jazzbo Brown From Memphis Town' and the energetic performance of the classic 'Alexander's Ragtime Band', where Hawkins, Joe Smith, and Henderson fight it out in the background while Bessie shouts it out as if her own salary drastically depended upon her being able to draw as many neighbours as possible to the vir­tues of Alexander's Rag­time Band (well, in a way, it was). But the second half is much more subdued, and, to a large extent, dominated by second- and third-rate songs that do not de­serve special mention (except for such trivia bits as Bessie being, once in a while, backed by gui­tar rather than piano, e. g., 'Mean Old Bed Bug Blues' — but, unfortunately, the player is no Lon­nie Johnson and no Blind Lemon).

 

Well-recognized classics would likely include 'The Gin House Blues', the first of Bessie's auto­biographical relays of her troubled relations with alcohol; 'After You've Gone', with a big band arrangement and an intentionally epic feel, as Bessie fulfills the relatively easy task of oblitera­ting Marion Harris' original by injecting realism and power into the recording; and the even more anthemic 'Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan)' — no realism here to speak of, because the «Chattanooga gal» hardly ever set foot in the Delta (then again, neither did John Fogerty, and that is no reason to turn down 'Proud Mary' or 'Green River'), however, her goal is not to recreate any kind of swampy atmosphere, but rather to use the lyrics as a general metaphor for the idea of being proud of one's home and homeland, wherever and whatever that is, and she makes it into one of the stateliest performances of her entire career. The final outburst — 'My heart cries out for muddy water!' — is unforgettable.

 

A minor half-funny, half-sad oddity that also deserves to be singled out is 'Send Me To The 'Lec­tric Chair', departing from the general blues structure and featuring one of the most repetitive choruses in history, with Bessie repeating 'judge, judge, please Mr. Judge' in the same robotic manner for about thirty times or so, weirdly contrasting with the far more expressive verse melody where she explains that 'I had my knife and went insane, and the rest you ought to know'. Hardly a classic, but definitely a bizarre stand-out in a collection that, for the modern listener at least, threatens to render one of the most impressive blues performers in history less and less im­pressive with each following track.

 

THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 4 (1928-1930)

 

CD I: 1) He's Got Me Goin'; 2) It Won't Be You; 3) Spider Man Blues; 4) Empty Bed Blues (part 1); 5) Empty Bed Blues (part 2); 6) Put It Right Here (Or Keep It Out There); 7) Yes Indeed He Do!; 8) Devil's Gonna Git You; 9) You Ought To Be Ashamed; 10) Washwoman's Blues; 11) Slow And Easy Man; 12) Poor Man's Blues; 13) Please Help Me Get Him Out Of My Mind; 14) Me And My Gin; 15) I'm Wild About That Thing; 16) You've Got To Give Me Some; 17) Kitchen Man; 18) I've Got What It Takes (But It Breaks My Heart To Give It Away); 19) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out; 20) Take It Right Back ('Cause I Don't Want It Here); CD II: 1) Standin' In The Rain Blues; 2) It Makes My Love Come Down; 3) Wasted Life Blues; 4) Dirty No-Gooder's Blues; 5) Blue Spirit Blues; 6) Worn Out Papa Blues; 7) You Don't Understand; 8) Don't Cry Baby; 9) Keep It To Yourself; 10) New Or­leans Hop Scop Blues; 11) See If I'll Care; 12) Baby Have Pity On Me; 13) On Revival Day; 14) Moan, You Moa­ners; 15) Hustlin' Dan; 16) Black Mountain Blues; 17) In The House Blues; 18) Long Old Road; 19) Blue Blues; 20) Shipwreck.

 

It is amusing to learn that 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out' — a song original­ly written by Bessie's minor competition Ida Cox, but eventually immortalized by the Empress — was recorded in 1929, immediately bringing on associations with the Wall Street crash and sub­sequent demise of the blues industry on the whole, and Bessie's in particular. How painfully auto­biographical, one might say.

 

Yet it is twice as amusing to know that the actual recording took place on May 15 of that year — more than five actual months before the beginning of the Depression. As prophetic as the song now sounds, when Bessie put it in the can, it was just another unhappy blues anthem with Ms. Smith, at that moment — not exactly a millionnaire, but certainly pretty well-off, singing "Once I lived the life of a millionnaire..." as if that past tense were spoken in all sincerity. Atmosphere? Unhappy, for sure, but nowhere near miserable: the emphasis is on frustration — Bessie makes herself sound mighty pissed off at having so stupidly squandered her fortunes, with a whiff of threat that echoes Timon of Athens.

 

I guess she brought it on herself, though — obviously God could not refuse such a fervent plea for bitter misery, and had little choice but to bring down the stock market. The economic history of the States is well observed by the statistics: Bessie cut 18 sides in 1928, 18 sides in 1929, but only 8 in 1930 (and only two in 1931!). Some of these eight sides were real strange, too, like 'On Revival Day' and 'Moan, You Moaners', the first and last pure gospel tracks that Bessie (whose relations with the Lord were, in general, not very amicable) ever did, and she did them well, even though I would not welcome the idea of a whole collection of such tunes; Bessie's powerhouse assault works well in a gospel context, but if, for some reason, one should want a longer, more de­tailed exposure to the genre, it requires such levels of subtlety as Bessie never possessed (un­like, for instance, Mahalia Jackson).

 

Nevertheless, let us not forget that all of 1928 and most of 1929 were still part of the roaring years, and there are quite a few tracks here that stand out fairly well, satisfying quite a few different tastes. Hungry for sleazy and salacious? The sprawling, two-part 'Empty Bed Blues', replete with Charlie Green's sexy trombone grunts, features lyrics that would make AC/DC and KISS members nervously blush in the distance ('He boiled my first cabbage and he made it awful hot / When he put in the bacon, it overflowed the pot' — I wonder what Tip­per Gore would have to say about that. Then again, with her level of understanding, she'd proba­bly suggest it as the soundtrack for Ready Steady Cook). If that is not enough, how about 'Kitchen Man'? Eddie Lang's Lonnie Johnson-style guitar, sinuously sliding along, is the perfect accompaniment for lines like 'Oh how that boy can open clam, no one else can touch my ham', and she likes his sausage meat, too, if you know what I mean.

 

If you want serious and troubled, there is 'Me And My Gin', simply an undispu­table classic ma­s­terpiece; Bessie's 'Stay away from me, 'cause I'm in my sin' transparently shows how the blues is, in fact, true Devil's music a whole decade before the advent of Robert Johnson. And if it does not, certainly 'Blue Spirit Blues' does, as she unfurls a panorama of hellish visions straight from Bald Mountain; a song even more ominously prophetic than 'Nobody...', recorded on October 11 — less than two weeks before the whole world truly went to hell.

 

If you want strong-willed quasi-feminist anthems, you can go no further than 'Put It Right Here (Or Keep It Out There)', where she explicitly states that no man can, or will, use her up financial­ly — and the even more scorching 'I've Got What It Takes (But It Breaks My Heart To Give It Away)', in which the lady protagonist refuses to bail out her good-for-nothing guy because 'I've been saving it up for a long long time, to give it away would be more than a crime'. One may que­stion the judgement, but not the determination.

 

To sum it up, Vol. 4 seems to pick up the pace that was somewhat slowed down on Vol. 3, and if it does not have the highest ratio of classic-to-filler, it certainly does have the most diverse port­folio. People occasionally complain that, by the time 1930 rolls along, her voice had started show­ing signs of wearing down, e. g. on such numbers as 'Hustlin' Dan' and 'Black Mountain Blues', but, first of all, I simply do not hear it, and second, even if this is true, it is still impossible: Bessie's voice is of the particular kind that usually stays immune to any troubles, be they smoke, drug, or age-related. The worst she could do was flub a note or two if she came in the studio drunk, but we are not exactly talking opera singers here. She was always in great form.

 

THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS, VOL. 5 (1931-1933)

 

CD I: 1) Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl; 2) Safety Mama; 3) Do Your Duty; 4) Gimme A Pigfoot; 5) Take Me For A Buggy Ride; 6) I'm Down In The Dumps; 7) The Yellow Dog Blues; 8) Soft Pedal Blues; 9) Nashville Women's Blues; 10) Careless Love Blues; 11) Muddy Water; 12) St. Louis Blue Soundtrack — Band Intro; 13) Crap Game; 14) St. Louis Blues; CD II: Ruby Smith interviews.

 

Yes, it would have certainly been an unforgivable mistake on the part of Columbia Records not to end this series of excellent quality catalog repackagings with at least one total rip-off. The last installment in the Bessie Smith saga, just as all the previous ones, is a fully priced 2-CD package, out of which the non-historian really needs a grand total of six songs. Of course, it would have been fairly easy to squeeze those six onto the remaining disc space of Vol. 4 — but would that count as the true raffinated sparkle of Columbia's marketing genius?

 

Let us see what else we have here. First, a bunch of crappy-sounding outtakes from a 1925 ses­sion: five crackling cuts, all of which we have already heard in superior versions on Vol. 2. Just what we need to hear in order to truly comprehend the giant stature of the Empress. Second, three tracks that reproduce, in complete form, the soundtrack to the short film St. Louis Blues, shot in 1929 and featuring Bessie's only preserved live appearance. The footage (which you can, and should, see on Youtube) is obviously priceless, and the semi-live rendition of 'St. Louis Blues' it­self, on which Bessie is backed not by Armstrong, but a huge black choir instead, is nice to have on CD, but the six-minute dialog sequence ('Crap Game') is a complete waste of space unless you want to have a crash course in African American Vernacular as spoken in the 1920s (except the sound quality is so awful you would still need subtitles).

 

Finally, the entire second disc is only indirectly related to Bessie; it is an interview CD, where Bessie's niece-by-marriage, Ruby Smith, recounts her memories of Bessie in a grueling seventy-minute session. Which is fine and dandy, but you might just as well read a book about Bessie rather than spend all this time trying to sort the wheat from the chaff and separate objective fact from biased personal feeling — never for one moment able to understand why exactly does this need to co-exist in one package with Bessie's actual music.

 

Unfortunately, what with all the ripping-off, the six real songs that make this «Final Chapter» worth owning are all classics, unexpendable for even the casual Bessie lover. Two date from a lonesome super-short session in 1931, four more from a similarly brief stunt in 1933; this is all that Bessie had the opportunity to produce in her last decade, before a complete goodbye to the recording industry and, eventually, a tragic death in a car accident in 1937.

 

The songs are pure vaudeville, no blues — urban blues was not something the people took to as lightly in the hungry 1930s as they did in the booming 1920s (it is, after all, one thing to listen about someone being miserable when you yourself are reasonably content, but a whole different story when your own misery is comparable). 'Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl' is arguably the dirtiest song Bessie ever did (she also needs a hot dog between her rolls, and other delights too scandalous to mention), yet somehow she manages to transform this pure anthem of lust into a song of soulful mourning, almost as if all the sugar and hot dog references had some further spiri­tual connotations attached. Accustomed as we are to all the cock rock hits on classic rock radio, it is hardly surprising to see words of love used as a metaphor for sex — but using culinary words as metaphors for sex and meta-metaphors for love, that is something else totally.

 

The last four songs from 1933 almost play as a mini-musical: Bessie demands of her man that he 'Do Your Duty' (same one as above, apparently), lets it all hang out on 'Gimme A Pigfoot' (and a bottle of beer, even though Prohibition was still in action), after the hangover, gets unusually sen­ti­mental ('Take Me For A Buggy Ride'), and, finally, gets dumped by both the guy and whoever else she could possibly be dumped by ('I'm Down In The Dumps'). Everything Bessie ever had is in these four tunes: arrogance, recklessness, sweetness, misery, determination, humour, sadness, the whole palette. Obviously, she had no idea this was going to be her musical testament, but that's how it turned out, and these four tunes are as perfect a swan song for the lady as Abbey Road would be for the Beatles.

BIG BILL BROONZY

ALL THE CLASSIC SIDES 1928-1937 (2004)

 

Writing on Big Bill from a record-based standpoint is pretty hard: out of all the pre-war / post-war country bluesmen, he was one of the most prolific, and, predictably, this translates into tons and tons and tons of nearly identical performances, differentiated only through their lyrical con­tent (and even then, that lyrical content rarely advances beyond a reshuffling of standard blues clichés, a process that could as well have been machine-generated).

 

Thus, attempting to review all of Big Bill's output through, say, the Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order series would be quite detrimental to one's health. We are therefore go­ing to speed up that process by relying, instead, on the JSP Records series, which have conveni­en­tly packaged everything that the man recorded in between 1928 and 1951 into three cozy box­sets, neatly equipped with minimal, but informative detail on the dates, locations, and participants of Broonzy's sessions.

 

Immediate warning: unless you are a true old-time blues aficionado, you really do not need any of these boxsets. The first one, in particular, includes a grand total of 129 tracks (and I am not even going to bother reproducing them all here) that, in between themselves, probably contain not more than 20 different melodies (and I am afraid I am being rather generous). Worse, JSP is one of those «honest» completist-targeted labels that only performs the most minimal remastering job on the tracks; and since during his earliest years Big Bill mostly recorded for Paramount, a label notorious for its piss-poor recording equipment (in a similar way and with far more criminal con­se­quences, they butchered most of Blind Lemon Jefferson's recordings), only about a third of these recordings is technically «enjoyable» — the rest crackles way too much even for my non-audiophile ears. For any purposes other than history immersion, you will do better with a compi­lation that concentrates on the highlights and cleans them up, e. g. Living Era's These Blues Are Doggin' Me (my first experience with Big Bill) or Yazoo's The Young Big Bill Broonzy.

 

What are these highlights, though? Tough to say. When William Lee Conley Broonzy first got around to recording, the two big markets for the blues — piano-based urban stuff and guitar-ba­sed country/Delta stuff — had already been well established, and it took him quite a while to make any impact on either; but when he finally did, he made an impact on both. In a cer­tain way, he synthesized them: even on this first boxset, there are as many connections to Leroy Carr in his performances as there are to Memphis Minnie.

 

Already his first recordings for Paramount in the late 1920s show an accomplished guitarist with an individual style. But Big Bill's force was not in the jaw-dropping technicality of the playing (typical of Lonnie Johnson and others), nor in the unpredictability of the chords he'd be producing (typical of Blind Lemon): from a layman's point of view, I would describe it as a meticulous ap­proach to the construction of his melodies. If his rags are derivative of Blind Blake's, they are «cleaner» and almost mathematically smoother — 'Guitar Rag' and 'Saturday Night Rub' are clas­sic tracks that drive the form to its utter perfection, and everything that comes afterwards is just a show-off (the way Steve Howe does it with 'The Clap'). And replicating his country-blues shuf­fles must be one hell of a satisfactory exercise for all scale-practicing guitarists out there — the sonic symmetry of tracks like 'I Can't Be Satisfied' is orgasmic.

 

There is also the matter of speed and precision: be sure that you get to hear the 1932 Vocalion release of 'How You Want It Done' and not the later re-recordings that simplify the guitar lines. On this particular performance, Big Bill simply machine-guns the song, an approach that I have not heard from any white blues-rocker with the possible exception of AC/DC's rhythm track to 'Baby Please Don't Go', and even there they never tried to work around that particular groove, based around a super-cool flat-picking technique. (Maybe to «refined» white bluesmen like Eric the technique seemed primitive, but one thing's for sure — it kicks far more ass than a whole ton of much more exquisite playing styles).

 

Most of Big Bill's best stuff from his first decade of recording is found on the first two out of five CDs — generally, Chicago-based recordings with a friend or two sitting in on second guitar and/or bass. As time went by, he became more comfortable with small combos that included a piano player or a little bit of brass backing, and, perversely, the more his recordings sold, the less genuinely interesting they became — much of this stuff is pure lounge entertainment, a bit of rag­time, a bit of swing, all delivered in Big Bill's nice, but utterly non-special, voice and with his guitar technique often sacrificed, melted away in the overall band sound. Depression-era audien­ces liked that — we don't have to, ever so spoiled by the strange idea that one has always got to emphasize one's strengths rather than humbly shoving them behind one's back. Fortunately, as later recordings would show, the mid-Thirties might have kept down Big Bill's real talents, but they certainly didn't extinguish them.

 

VOL. 2: 1937-1940 (2005)

 

There is a damn good reason why JSP hesitated to go on slapping the name All The Classic Sides on Big Bill's second chronological boxset, covering the immediately pre-war years, going with the rather dry academic subtitle Annotated Discography instead — because none of these sides are, in any way, truly classic. Of the three huge sets, the middle one is easily the worst, and it looks like it ain't just my opinion: out of Vol. 2's grand total of 101 tracks, only one ('Just A Dream') made it onto the 26-track career retrospective These Blues Are Doggin' Me. One!

 

Why? Simple. By 1937, Bill had firmly sunk into a winning formula: playing smooth, steady, a little bit «mannered» mid-tempo blues and some modestly polite boogie-woogie, accompanied with small combos in which he was merely one of the guys. The formula worked, and the records sold, as steadily as they could during all the hard times. People liked the sound, and at one point, legendary promoter John Hammond even got the man to play Carnegie Hall as part of his From Spirituals To Swing shows that introduced America's white elites to black devil music.

 

But success and recognition somehow came at the expense of sacrificing identity. Listen hard and you will understand that Big Bill is still as accomplished a player as he used to be on these ses­sions — but listen really hard, or else the guitar will be completely lost behind the other instru­ments. He almost never solos, frequently sticks to the simplest boogie patterns, and even on those few tracks where his guitar is amplified, it is exceedingly hard to get impressed.

 

Some time during these years, Broonzy started trying to compensate by writing more original ma­terial; but «original material» at the time basically meant writing new lyrics to pre-existing melo­dies, and in 1940, the man hadn't yet found a proper way to insert little melodic twists that would prompt later generations to re-record and reinterpret his songs. On the contrary, the highlights of this volume are generally songs previously made into hits by other people — such as 'Louise Lou­ise Blues', a 1936 success for Johnny Temple (later expropriated by John Lee Hooker). But some of the lyrics are interesting, like the imaginary alpha-dog contest between Big Bill and his competitor Blind Boy Fuller on 'Jivin' Mr. Fuller Blues'.

 

Anyway, each one of these 101 tracks is pleasantly listenable, but overall, these are the sagging mid-period years in between Big Bill Broonzy the Dashing, Innovative Guitar Player and Big Bill Broonzy the Grand Maître of the Blues, preparing the grounds for Chicago's electric blues revolu­tion and at the same time immortalizing acoustic blues for European audiences. Refined lovers of the pre-war small blues combo sound will need this (especially since Bill's piano and trumpet-playing pals almost always have their own cool grooves going on), but I agree to stand by those compilers who normally skip this period in their retrospectives.

 

VOL. 3: THE WAR AND POSTWAR YEARS 1940-1951 (2007)

 

The last of the three big bulging boxsets is unquestionably the best in overall sound quality, for purely chronological reasons, but also questionably the best overall, or, at least, a great emotional improvement over the steady, unnerving sounds of Vol. 2. Two reasons are at play here.

 

First, some time around 1941, as if somehow fueled by the dark wartime premonitions, Big Bill became a classic hit songwriter. He certainly never overcame the formula, but somehow he mana­ged to give it a few unique twists that immortalized some of its representatives. That single year yielded such legendary stuff as 'All By Myself', an exceptionally lively, self-confident piece of boogie (with, finally, a well-expressed acoustic solo from the man himself) later appropriated by Fats Domino; 'I Feel So Good', an even more optimistic statement of utter satisfaction, whose macho potential would eventually be fully realized by Muddy Waters; and, of course, 'Key To The Highway', Bill's existentialist masterpiece No. 1, today far more tightly associated with De­rek & The Claptonos — but defenders of the faith would almost certainly claim that Bill is way more suited to feeling the lonesome-wanderer message of the song than some clean white middle class boy from Surrey.

 

These classics still have to be plucked out from a bed of same-sounding, not particularly invol­ving musical rocks. But then along comes war, and from 1942 to 1945 Big Bill, just like everybo­dy else, had serious trouble recording anything, what with the shellac deficit and all. Then, in the immediate post-war years, people needed to be happy, and much of his late 1940s material con­sists of rough, tough, foot-stomping boogie, occasionally spilling into «jump blues» as such ('Big Bill's Boogie', etc.) — unfortunately, this kind of music was much better done by burly shouters (Big Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris etc.) or much more seriously instrumentally endowed artists (Amos Milburn, Louis Jordan etc.).

 

However, it all ends January 4, 1949, on the date of Bill's recording session, credited to «Big Bill Broonzy & His Fat Four». That day, he was still doing the same small-combo boogie that made his fortunes so well-established, but his image so little-distinguishable (although a little bit of change was in the air, with his guitar parts clearly much more prominent than the backing band). Then, exactly one month later, the combo is dropped, and for the rest of his studio recording time in the States, Bill makes a decisive move back into the realm of acoustic-based music — with a heavy injection of traditional folk music into his blues structures, ranging from bluegrass motives to, you know, the Pete Seeger kind of stuff.

 

That stretch has sometimes been decried as risky (in fact, the liner notes themselves suggest that the move was «foolhardy»), but I cannot think of any other word than «refreshing» after nearly two decades of samey stuff that only yielded one truly impressive pre-war year of successful and influential songwriting. Not only does the man's moving away from boogie give him a chance to come up with some original, quirky chord changes ('Hey, Hey' so impressed Clapton that he would start off his Unplugged concert with the song forty-five years later — played in the exact same manner as Bill does it, no better, no worse), he even allows himself to revisit that style of rapid-fire flat-picking that had once made 'How You Want It Done' so unforgettable, this time, on the old folk standard 'John Henry'.

 

In all, Vol. 3 runs an impressive gamut — all the way from Bill's songwriting maturation of 1941 to the transformation into the elder statesman of the grassroots commune by 1951, with the slow wisened-up sound of 'Trouble In Mind' wrapping things up. It could, and perhaps should, be said that Broonzy's place in the blues is somewhat overrated simply because he'd managed to swamp his much more talented competition with the sheer size of his output; altogether, these three sets amount to over three hundred sides, out of which I'd be hard-pressed to choose more than a dozen real favourites. (Then there's another, more serious, reason, which will be discussed in the next review). But you could also say the same about B. B. King — and, unlike the latter, Big Bill ne­ver recorded anything cringeworthy; never even «sold out» the way that, for instance, Lonnie Johnson did when he switched from technically amazing blues and jazz guitar pieces to smooth, lazy balladeering. There is never a point at which these unending samey-sounding blues and boo­gie pieces become «insufferable», and for a bundle of three hundred cuts, that's saying something.

 

SINGS FOLK SONGS (1956)

 

1) Backwater Blues; 2) This Train; 3) I Don't Want No Woman; 4) Martha; 5) Tell Me Who; 6) Bill Bailey; 7) Big Bill Blues; 8) Goin' Down This Road; 9) Tell Me What Kind Of Man Jesus Is; 10) Alberta; 11) Glory Of Love; 12) Careless Love.

 

In 1951, the best thing possible happened to Big Bill: as part of a folk music revue, he got signed on a tour to Europe — and thus, almost unintentionally, became the Old World's chief gateway into the world of American blues and folk right until his death in 1958, upon which the crown passed to Muddy Waters. Not the best blues singer, far from the best blues player, not much of a unique innovator, yet with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to impress and inspire thousands of col­lege kids across the Atlantic.

 

For a period of about five or six years, Big Bill toured back and forth quite extensively, leaving behind lots of recordings, mostly live, that would be useless to review separately, since he never troubled himself to vary his sets all that much. Sings Folk Songs, recorded for Moses Asch' Folk­ways (later Smithsonian) Records in 1956, is a very typical representative. (It is also the cleanest sounding Broonzy album you'll ever hear). The set mostly consists of various Appalachian-style stuff, mixed with gospel dance music, ballads, and just one or two straightahead blues numbers, and, as nice as it sounds, its chief value is historical — the best way to get your kicks out of it is imagine yourself as a young British student in the early Fifties, sitting in a small audience listen­ing to this strange black dude singing music from the «deep heart» of a strange new world.

 

Every reviewer and biographer will always point out the obvious fact that Big Bill only played acoustic guitar on those tours, even though his studio recordings from the past decade did not shy away from amplified instrumentation. (All the more reason for European audiences to be stunned when Muddy abruptly took over with the Chicago style). Nor does he ever try to launch into boo­gie or «hokum blues»; it is well possible that he understood what the audience really wanted — an aura of «rustic holiness» around that music — and that's exactly what he gave, even if his im­passioned renditions of folk-spirituals, to him, were just another style of popular entertainment that he fed the «intelligent» public. To each his own.

 

For some reason, my version of the album omits 'John Henry' (always the high point of the show, allowing him to really stretch out on one of the few «gimmicky» styles of acoustic playing that was available to him), but most regular versions have it, so if you feel like holding this historical document close to your heart, make sure that 'John Henry' is part of the proceedings. I'd also say that he plays one of the tightest and most expressive versions of 'Goin' Down This Road Feelin' Bad' I've ever heard — beats Woody Guthrie and the Grateful Dead all to hell. Overall, though, I do not feel empowered enough to rave on about how effectively this music transmits all the pain, suffering, hopes, and dreams accumulated in the souls of the Negro people over three hundred years of slavery, but I'll admit that good old Bill sure knew how to make a name — and some de­cent wages — for himself on the base of that legacy. And he certainly wasn't bad at what he was doing — just a bit overrated by way of lucky promotion breaks.

BIG JOE TURNER

SHOUT, RATTLE & ROLL (1938-1954; 2005)

 

Big Joe Turner's firm place in history is that of «The Man They Stole Rock'n'Roll Away From», «they», of course, surmising Bill Haley and then Elvis Presley, both of whom made a bigger hit out of 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' than Big Joe could ever aspire to. Only with creepy black guy music gra­dually assuming its honored and hallowed place in mainstream musical press, Big Joe's R'n'B hits for Atlantic, in retrospect, eventually garnered the proper accolades.

 

What remains sometimes unclear to the average eye is that Bog Joe certainly did not start kicking major ass with 'Honey Hush' and 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' in boring 1954 — an impression one could get, subconsciously, if introduced to Big Joe through the retrospective Atlantic boxset, on which he appears around 1951, singing slow, languid, but burly ballads before, all of a sudden, launching into crazyass boogie three years later. In fact, he was already kicking that ass when El­vis was all of a mighty three years old — way back in exciting 1938, when him and his partner, boogie-woogie pianist hellraiser Pete Johnson, were spotted by John Hammond, brought to New York to perform at Carnegie Hall, and soon afterwards signed with Vocalion.

 

This is where the story begins for this 4-CD Proper Records compilation, sadly, out of print now, but one of the finest retrospectives of Big Joe's pre-Atlantic years; these days, an easier buy is JSP Records' All The Classic Hits 1938-1952, which has a little more material (5 CDs instead of 4) but does not, however, incorporate all of Proper's tracks either. My review will be of more con­cern for the overall pre-Atlantic period, anyway, rather than specifically targeted at any particular CD edition.

 

It should be noted that, for some reason, Big Joe, as of now, still has not received the «complete-in-chronological-order» treat­ment from any of the collectors' labels that have nevertheless given that honor to many much lesser artists — go figure — and complete discographies, with little chance of total success, have to be scrambled together from various compilations. Shout, Rattle & Roll, however, contains more than enough material to build up a proper picture of the man, and its omi­ssions will trouble the obstinate fan and the historian far more than the casual listener.

 

Anyway, the story begins in 1938, and oh boy, what a fine beginning, these early boogie-woogie tracks with just Big Joe belting it out over Pete Johnson's rapid-fire proto-rock'n'roll. The lyrics don't matter — most of the time, they just seem improvised on the spot, extracted and mixed out of a mass-produced set of formulae ("I got a gal, she lives upon the hill..." etc.); what matters is the generated heat, and these two guys could generate plenty of it without even a rhythm session, let alone a big band. 'Roll 'Em Pete' is, of course, one of those pre-war tunes that one must neces­sarily hear before one dies, and fully deserves the status of «one of the earliest rock'n'roll songs»; but 'Cafe Society Rag', on which Pete is joined by not one, but two other piano giants of the times — Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis — is no less deserving of your attention, even if it's not really rock'n'roll. But who ever proved ragtime cannot rock?

 

As time went by, Big Joe began preferring to be recorded with bigger bands, and develop a soul­ful approach in addition to hellraising. To me, he never ever sounds equally convincing in that emploi: I love the big burly guy when he is being the big burly guy, not when he gives us the big burly guy's best impression of a sentimental oaf. But, to his great honor, he never ever mutated into the sentimental oaf completely, not even during the wartime and postwar years when the de­mand for soul-soothing sap and sentimentality increased so much that crooners and balladeers al­most threatened to exterminate the world of popular music altogether.

 

In addition to cutting one single after another of similar-sounding, but always exciting jump blues, Big Joe had a solid knack of teaming up with all sorts of mega-players — or, rather, the mega-players always liked it when Big Joe came around, because what better stimulus can there be to tighten up one's playing than have it matched with one of the greatest blues shouters in the area? Credits here range from the already mentioned Meade Lux Lewis to Coleman Hawkins (a cheer­ful version of 'Shake It And Break It', originally made important by the grim Charley Patton); the incomparable Art Tatum (Big Joe dropped by Art's band in 1941 to sing 'Rock Me Mama'); Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew (some cuts from the early 1950s, right before his move to Atlan­tic), and plenty of others.

 

Even so, after cavorting with all that jazz nobility, Big Joe still took the time to get together with ol' Pete Johnson occasionally; their two-part tour-de-force on 'Around The Clock' from 1947 is one of the compilation's major highlights, and was later appropriated by Chuck Berry to form the basis of 'Reelin' And Rockin'. Right next to is the slightly cornily staged, but still entertaining 'Battle Of The Blues' between two of the epoch's biggest belters — Big Joe and Wynonie Harris, and as much as I respect Mr. Harris, my sympathies are clearly on Big Joe's side.

 

Of course, as a singer, Big Joe does not have the required versatility to easily last one through one hundred tracks of material — were it not for the constant rotation of musical whizz kids, at some point the monotonousness would be unbearable. He pretty much sings everything in the same key, tone, and manner, be it blues, ballad, or boogie-woogie: subtlety and modulation be damned. If the public did not clearly catch on to his style in the very beginning, there is little wonder that he couldn't locate the proper market for fifteen years after the fact, not before Ahmet Ertegun started having all the right ideas about correlating him with proper material.

 

Still, it should be stated very clearly that those fifteen years were not merely a preliminary foot­note to the Atlantic period, and that stuff on the level of 'Roll 'Em Pete', 'Around The Clock', and 'Café Society Rag' is every bit as much a cornerstone of XXth century American pop music lega­cy as 'Shake, Rattle & Roll'. In the light of which, thumbs up despite all the filler; as for the At­lantic period, this will be taken up in the next review, since the Proper Records boxset stops dead in its tracks around 1954, right in the middle of that period.

 

JOE TURNER/ROCKIN' THE BLUES (1951-1956; 2000)

 

1) Shake, Rattle & Roll; 2) Flip, Flop & Fly; 3) Feeling Happy; 4) Well, All Right; 5) The Chicken And The Hawk; 6) Boogie Woogie Country Girl; 7) Honey Hush; 8) Corrine, Corrina; 9) Midnight Special; 10) Hide And Seek; 11) Oke-She-Moke-She-Pop; 12) Crawdad Hole; 13) Sweet Sixteen; 14) Chains Of Love; 15) (We're Gonna) Jump For Joy; 16) Teen Age Letter; 17) Love Roller Coaster; 18) Lipstick, Powder And Paint; 19) Morning, Noon And Night; 20) I Need A Girl; 21) Red Sails In The Sunset; 22) Blues In The Night; 23) After A While; 24) World Of Trouble; 25) Trouble In Mind; 26) TV Mama; 27) You Know I Love You; 28) Still In Love.

 

Again, this album, or, rather, couple of albums on one CD, is a non-album, or, rather a couple of non-albums. Joe Turner is a compilation of Joe's biggest hits from the Atlantic years; Rockin' The Blues, coming out a little bit later, is a compilation of Joe's medium-size hits from the Atlan­tic years. Together, this 28-song package contains all of Joe Turner from 1951 to 1956 that one really needs to hear — and no one who has not heard it can ever claim to have properly under­stood the genesis of rock'n'roll.

 

Fortunately, Big Joe's Atlantic career seems to have easily withstood the test of time, and all of these recordings sound just as spick and span today as they did half a century ago. Pre-war purists may show off all they want, but R'n'B does affect one's nerve centers mighty more effectively when it's driven by a well-oiled boogie-woogie rhythm section with a big and clean drum sound, not to mention ever-improving standards of sound capture that finally allow backing bands to sound just as tight on record as they do in nightclubs.

 

Funny enough, the man who made his first big impact on the musical world with the proto-rock'n' roll of 'Roll 'Em Pete' started off on Ahmet Ertegun's label at a slow pace: the first two years were mostly dedicated to slow loungey blues and ballads. 'Chains Of Love', 'Sweet Sixteen', 'Still In Love', that sort of thing; well in line with Atlantic's general standards, professionally and cleanly recorded, sung with Big Joe's usual soulful brawn (even his sappiest tunes have a bit of the Nean­derthal spirit to them, which makes it so much easier to stomach than Bing Crosby).

 

The big break comes in 1953 with 'Honey Hush': "Let it roll like a big wheel, in the Georgia cot­ton fields!". It ain't nothing Big Joe hadn't really done before, including the famous opening line which must have already figured in at least several of his 1940s recordings. All it takes is a few subtle production twists, and a wonderful «Zeitgeist» to carry it along to a success among young audiences, much huger than anything Big Joe could have hoped for in the previous decade.

 

'Honey Hush', 'Shake, Rattle & Roll', 'Flip, Flop & Fly', 'The Chicken And The Hawk' — they're all the same song, really, also in line with the general style of work of all pre-war artists, but al­ready the sprouts of the new age of popular music are beginning to show, because each of the numbers has a tiny individual angle of its own: a different hook in the chorus, a variation on a brass riff, an unexpected bit of vocalizing (like the famous "Hi-ho Silver!" on 'Honey Hush'). R'n'B changed the face of jump blues, and this means that there will always be a reason to put on a jump blues record (simply because it gives you a different kind of feeling); but the primary goal of jump blues was to let people have a good time, and in terms of good-time-giving, jump blues is to R'n'B what Intel 8088 is to a Pentium.

 

It must also be said that Big Joe's hit records on Atlantic, after 'Honey Hush', were much less di­verse than the material in general. The man did not always rock out to the exact same formula: 'Boogie Woogie Country Girl' and 'Teen Age Letter', for instance, follow entirely different recipés. Then, towards the end of that hit run, he started experimenting with speeding up old folk blues standards: the boogie version of 'Corrine Corrina' came first, the dance avatar of 'Midnight Special' came next, and both just completely chucked away the pain and anguish of the working class and replaced them with mindless good-time party atmosphere. Karl Marx must have been turning over in his grave, but the face of popular music didn't much care for that.

 

There always remains the issue of whiteys «stealing» this music from Big Joe and his brethren: I think that time will slowly heal this wound, and eventually those billions of miles that separate Big Joe's popularity from Elvis' will accelerate their shrinking, even if they will be doing this for the wrong reason (instead of more people learning about Big Joe, more people will start forget­ting about Elvis). Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that Elvis' version of 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' is wilder and crazier than Big Joe's: deeper, louder, speedier, and, above all, the kids really loved it when the stingy aggressiveness of the electric guitar solo ushered out the jazzy smoothness of the saxophone, which, in the 1950s, was still more of an outdated leftover from the swinging 1930s and 1940s than a «progressive» instrument (it took the birth of jazz-rock to redeem it). And, per­sonally, I'll always take the awesome distorted sound of the Burnette brothers' version of 'Honey Hush' over the original...

 

...which is not to say that the original ain't pretty awesome in its own right. "Come over here, woman, stop all that yakety-yak, don't make me nervous, I'm holding a baseball bat", despite the poor rhyming scheme, still has to rank as one of the most delightfully provocative lines of all time (a duet with Aretha Franklin would probably shorten all the circuits). This is golden stuff, very much of its time and still timeless, and also a perfect introduction to the world of «older» R'n'B for those who are heavily spoiled by modern values and attitudes and need a safe and steady passageway to the vaults. Thumbs up.

 

THE BOSS OF THE BLUES (1956)

 

1) Cherry Red; 2) Roll 'Em Pete; 3) I Want A Little Girl; 4) Low Down Dog; 5) Wee Baby Blues; 6) You're Driving Me Crazy; 7) How Long Blues; 8) Morning Glories; 9) St. Louis Blues; 10) Piney Brown Blues.

 

One of the most easily available original LPs from Big Joe's career, it also explains fairly well why the popularity of the Boss, miraculously surviving into the 1950s, never made it past that de­cade. His signing up with Atlantic was an accident. It could have been Wynonie Harris, or any out of a dozen other jump blues shouters of the previous decade, all of which had their own cha­risma, too. Granted, Big Joe was a bit brawnier than most, but it doesn't matter that much: For­tune smiled upon the man by crossing his paths with Ahmet Ertegun, who modernized his sound in a way that the kids could dig. But did he like that modernization, he himself? Possibly, but I see no way he could have loved it. Playing with big jazz bands for fifteen years, then having to dump it all in favour of all these tiny combos with (comparatively) primitive musicianship, I don't really see how he could honestly dig stuff like 'The Chicken And The Hawk' etc. Some of the feelings, at least, must have been akin to grizzled old blues-rockers of the 1960s and 1970s having to adjust their sound to the abysmal ele­ctronic values of the 1980s so they could still have record contracts.

 

It should come as no surprise, then, that, once re-established as a hitmaker, Big Joe would quick­ly want to profit from it by going all retro. The Boss Of The Blues is only part of the album's title: the subtitle, in honestly equally large letters, reads Joe Turner Sings Kansas City Jazz, and that is exactly what he does. Reunited with old piano pal Pete Johnson and attracting a large crew of professional jazzmen, many of them with Count Basie service time records, Big Joe records a bunch of old standards, all or most of which he'd already cut for Vocalion in the pre-war years. This time, of course, recording quality is much higher, and song lengths have been pumped up — just like before, this isn't Big Joe's show all the time, but unlike before, musicians really get to stretch out like they are supposed to be on a respectable jazz record, not on a boogie single.

 

The result is a technically excellent, spiritually satisfactory, but, in the end, somewhat hollow piece of lounge jazz nostalgia. Hollow, because 'Roll 'Em Pete', for instance, is given a full arran­gement instead of the original piano-only recording, and this allows the real Pete to take it just a bit — just a tiny bit! — easier than before, and no amount of rhythm swing or brass wailing can compensate for the ferocious boogie soul of the original. Clearly, Big Joe is pining for them old times, and if you forget the context, you can almost see the good old times, but if at the height of his new-found success he was still pining for the good old times, clearly, something was not quite right at the time. Yet still a thumbs up for all those who love good old jazz and blues played by respectable masters of the trade. Some of the sax and trumpet solos are mighty damn good.

 

TEXAS STYLE (1971)

 

1) Money First; 2) Hide And Seek; 3) I've Got A Pocket Full Of Pencils; 4) Rock Me Baby; 5) Cherry Red; 6) Texas Style; 7) T.V. Mama; 8) T'Ain't Nobody's Business; 9) Morning Glory; 10*) Rock Me Baby (take 1).

 

Big Joe kept on making records all the way into the 1960s and 1970s; his last LP on Pablo Re­cords came out in 1984, approximately a year before his demise. Most of these albums, however, are tremendously hard to find, and once you do find them, it is tremendously hard to understand what in the world made you look for them in the first place. They weren't popular, they weren't re­vered, and the only real differences between all of them concern who, where, and when is ac­companying Big Joe on this particular date. Because you can always count on Big Joe to sound exactly the same. The guy never lets you down, but after a very short while, it becomes extremely boring to be standing so high up all of the time.

 

Reviewing the couple dozen or so albums that the man recorded in between 1956 and 1985 would be even more excruciating than an attempt to collect all of them; so here is just one example, the result of an inspired, but hardly phenomenal blues & jazz session in 1971, recently re-released with bonus tracks and all. All of the songs, of course, are old standards; recording quality is not altogether good, with Joe himself kept oddly down in the mix as if the entire band were gathered around one mike except for Joe in a faraway corner.

 

The players, however, are distinctive. On piano we have Milt Buckner, famous for having once popularized the Hammond organ as well as allegedly inventing «block chords» (although that particular credit goes to at least half a dozen different people depending on one's biases); he takes a few magnificent solos, particularly on 'Nobody's Business', way beyond anything Pete Johnson ever had to offer (although, to be fair, on the speedier numbers Buckner never manages to let his hair down as convincingly as Pete). And on bass, we have Slam Stewart, a guy with a unique style of bowing his instrument and humming along at the same time. Granted, most of the time the resulting sound is indistinguishable from creative farting in your tuba, but the trick is that the guy has no tuba and does not ac­tually fart. For the first couple of times, Slam's gimmick has some fun novelty value — later on, it becomes unbearable (which is probably why not a lot of jazzmen have copied the technique), but, fortunately, he does not do it on every track.

 

Needless to say that, for 1971, all of this is as abysmally retro as could be; and also, I will proba­bly not be mistaken by much if I say that, for all of those nearly thirty years, Big Joe has not come up with even one semi-original idea. (A couple of songs here are technically «new», but in reality they are just old melodies set to reshuffled lyrics). Still, there is some deeply felt satisfac­tion that in 1971, he could still sound as reckless and brawny as he did in 1938. All the sadder it is too realize that all of that tenaciousness and energy was essentially wasted on lots of self-repe­tition and subpar by-the-book recordings. At least this one has Milt Buckner.

BIG JOE WILLIAMS

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1935-1941; 1991)

 

1) Little Leg Woman; 2) Somebody's Been Borrowing That Stuff; 3) Providence Help The Poor People; 4) 49 High­way Blues; 5) My Grey Pony; 6) Stepfather Blues; 7) Baby Please Don't Go; 8) Stack O' Dollars; 9) Wild Cow Blues; 10) Worried Man Blues; 11) I Know You Gonna Miss Me; 12) Rootin' Ground Hog; 13) Brother James; 14) I Won't Be In Hard Luck No More; 15) Crawlin' King Snake; 16) I'm Getting Wild About Her; 17) Peach Orchard Mama; 18) Meet Me Around The Corner; 19) Throw A Boogie Woogie; 20) North Wind Blues; 21) Please Don't Go; 22) High­way 49; 23) Someday Baby; 24) Break 'Em On Down.

 

What is Big Joe Williams' personal claim to fame? Supposedly there's two of them. First, he was the most notorious bluesman ever to use a one-of-a-kind nine-string guitar, making his sound im­possible to replicate for those with impaired craftsman skills. Second, he was allegedly the first artist to record 'Baby Please Don't Go' and 'Crawlin' King Snake' — golden standards of the blues and blues-rock repertoire, especially the former, although, granted, it's a long path of evolution between Big Joe's version and AC/DC's.

 

Both of these claims to fame may and, perhaps, should be witnessed on this album, which faith­fully collects everything the man recorded for the Bluebird label as the man's country was mar­ching through Depression and on to war. Ironically, once you do hear the album, you begin to understand that neither of the claims translates to a musical revelation. The original 'Baby Please Don't Go', backed with a homebrewed fiddle part and wobbly hands-and-feet percussive rhythms, turns out to have been merely one of the innumerable variations on a traditional folk dance tune (the "baby please don't go" verse may have been authored by Joe, but immediately afterwards he launches into the much older "turn your lights down low" sequence), as is 'Crawlin' King Snake', which, as the track listing shows, began its life as 'Rootin' Ground Hog' — if it makes you won­der what in the world made the former popular and the latter unknown, just try imagine Jim Mor­rison, thirty-five years later, singing "I'm a rootin' ground hog, and I'm a-rootin' both night and day" instead of "I'm the crawlin' king snake, and I rule my den" (actually, Jim used John Lee Ho­oker's version, which rewrote the original lines completely).

 

Same thing with the nine string guitar: the extra strings may be making the sound a bit different, but not to the extent of making it completely stand out from the rest, at least, not for the common ear. There are conflicting accounts as to whatever made him do it — such as breaking a peg on a guitar he was unable to replace and modifying it with an additional flange with four pegs; or, even more probable, intentionally tampering with the instrument so that nobody would be temp­ted to steal it, in the good old cash-hungry Depression days. In any case, it was a curious gimmick that influenced the sound without revolutionizing it.

 

So what's the big deal at all? The big deal is that Big Joe Williams is probably the most natural predecessor to the dark-devil-blues of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, both of which have covered his songs and, overall, must have been seriously inspired by his attitudes. His playing is not «virtuoso», but he uses his guitar in many ways, never giving a damn about clean melodic lines: his own inspiration must have been Blind Lemon Jefferson, with his well-known disdain for following restrictions. His guitar «rings» and «wails» not any more often than it pounds and prances, going from blues to boogie and back in a jiffy, derailing and confusing the senses.

 

Lyrically and thematically, Big Joe's songs are a «menace»: not somber-apocalyptic à la Charley Patton or ecstatically-apocalyptic à la Son House, no, Big Joe was way too grounded for that kind of stuff, but he was a dangerous man, and usually sang songs from that point of view. No light en­tertainment here; this is not music to get cuddly and comfortable to (and, contrary to occasional popular beliefs, far from all original acoustic Delta blues is creepy as hell), although Big Joe's voice is high and clean enough to contribute to the lack of comfort — on that scale, he could ne­ver compete with Patton, or with John Lee Hooker, for that matter.

 

This combination of factors is enough to respect Big Joe for being a separate link in his own rights in the blues chain rather than an insubstantial imitator of somebody else's greatness. Plus, the quality of these Bluebird recordings is pretty strong, and on some of the tracks he is accompa­nied by the harmonica playing of his biggest competitor on the label, Sonny Boy Williamson (I), which is also a good boost for conaisseurs.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1945-1949; 1991)

 

1) Drop Down Blues; 2) Somebody's Been Worryin'; 3) Wanita; 4) Vitamin A; 5) His Spirit Lives On; 6) Baby Ple­a­se Don't Go; 7) Stack Of Dol­lars; 8) Mellow Apples; 9) Wild Cow Moan; 10) P Vine Blues; 11) Bad And Weak­hear­ted Blues; 12) King Biscuit Stomp; 13) I'm A Highway Man; 14) Banta Rooster Blues; 15) Mean Step Father Blues; 16) House Lady Blues; 17) Don't You Leave Me Here; 18) Jivin' Woman; 19) She's A Married Woman; 20) Walking Blues; 21) Atlanta Town.

 

The second half of the 1940s was a very unstable time for Big Joe: most of these tracks stem from but three sessions, one final piece of work for the Bluebird label in 1945, a large session for Co­lumbia in 1947, and a very small one for Bullet Records in Nashville in 1949. (The last two seg­ments on the album, defying the «complete recorded works in chronological order» ideology, are actually said to date back to 1935 — the first, and sonically very creaky, examples of Big Joe's presence on record).

 

Putting aside the usual criticisms (lack of diversity etc.), the first two sessions are invaluable in that they give us some of the best recorded examples of Big Joe and Sonny Boy Williamson play­ing together — in fact, Sonny Boy is always the real star on here, exploring harmonica potential as best as he can. In many ways, these tracks may be said to represent the equivalent of the Mud­dy Waters / Little Walter team a decade later — Big Joe is the big, burly, dangerous presence, and Sonny Boy is his subtler squire that does not seem to be posing as big a «threat», but in reali­ty may exercise an even higher influence on your subconscious than the Big Guy.

 

Quite a few of these songs follow a boogie pattern, too ('King Biscuit Stomp', etc.), with a strong, modestly thunderous rhythm session; naturally, these numbers could not hope to outdo the jump blues heroes of the time in terms of ass-kicking (what with the lack of equally strong vocalists or a big brass section), but Sonny Boy does all he can to compensate for the lack of oompah — on most of the fast-moving, rabble-rousing tracks his harp parts rock out quite strong.

 

In the interim, one cute historical curio is 'His Spirit Lives On', a little semi-original blues number with a bit of a gospel flair to it, dedi­cated to the memory of the freshly passed FDR; unlike the majority of mainstream «patriotic» numbers of the era, these made-on-order tributes from con­current Delta musicians are always interesting, if only because of a complete lack of pathos — Big Joe delivers lines like "he's gone, but his spirit lives on" with more or less the same attitude that he adopts for "sail on, my little honey bee, sail on", and even if that begs for the question — did he or didn't he actually give a damn about FDR? — in the end, the question is totally irrele­vant, because, regardless of the answer, it is still a much cooler way to see FDR off than any pa­thetic patriotic anthem one might have come up with instead.

 

The two songs from 1949 are interesting in that, for the first time, we expressly notice Big Joe's endorsement of electricity; by the mid-1950's, he would always play amplified — apparently, it suited his personality and emphasized the subtle uniqueness of his nine-string sound. He did not, however, have a lot of opportunities to record during those years: outshone by Muddy and the Chicago school, and deprived of a strong record label to back him up, from 1949 and up to 1958 his only recordings were for obscure or semi-legal labels that had no impact whatsoever, and are almost impossible to find nowadays. Even Complete Recorded Works have refrained from sea­rching — the series stops right here in 1949, ignoring the «dark years» between Big Joe's heyday as a presence on the 78 rpm market and his re-emergence as a blues veteran on the LP market ten years later.

 

PINEY WOODS BLUES (1958)

 

1) Baby, Please Don't Go; 2) Drop Down Mama; 3) Mellow Peaches; 4) No More Whiskey; 5) Tailor Made Babe; 6) Big Joe Talking; 7) Some Day Baby; 8) Good Morning Little Schoolgirl; 9) Peach Orchard Mama; 10) Juanita; 11) Shetland Pony Blues; 12) Omaha Blues.

 

In 1958, Big Joe re-emerged as one of the proud bearers of pre-war Americana on the newly for­med Delmark Records: Piney Woods Blues was the label's second LP (for the record, The Dirty Dozens by Speckled Red was the first, and boy, were those dozens ever dirty). The trick worked out fine: not aiming at capturing any major markets, Delmark introduced Big Joe, along with lots of other artists, to new generations that could hardly be bothered tracking down old sizzling 78s. If they couldn't have Robert Johnson, and if they couldn't get Muddy Waters to switch back to acoustic, Big Joe was their guy.

 

Captured in St. Louis, mostly solo, but on some tracks, also backed by J. D. Short on harmonica and guitar, Big Joe runs through eleven numbers from his standard repertoire here (the twelfth track, 'Big Joe Talking', is true to its title; supposedly he is telling exciting tales about meeting Leadbelly in prison and stuff, but the only word group that my ears were able to distinguish was "corn whiskey"). All the playing is strictly acoustic; my guess is that, as it often happened, nice-meaning guys wanted to let Big Joe go for that «authentic» sound, when he, most likely, would not have minded adding a lit­tle amplification to the proceedings. But if there was a target audi­ence for this stuff in the first place, it'd mostly consist of college intellectuals, and in 1958, most col­lege intellectuals still thought of amplification as murdering the art spirit.

 

Anyway, the sound is clean, so Big Joe's playing style can be enjoyed here with more general ease than on the original recordings. On the down side, J. D. Short cannot replace Sonny Boy, and Big Joe's taking on some of Sonny Boy's own trademark material (e. g. 'Good Morning Little Schoolgirl') is interesting, but generally useless. On the up side, old acoustic bluesmen on their late period records sometimes tend to stretch out, diversifying and embellishing the old melodies with all sorts of extra flourishes (Skip James is a classic example — his uniqueness is easier ap­preciated on stuff he recorded in the 1960s than in his «heyday»). So, 'Baby Please Don't Go' is changed almost beyond recognition, from a simple threatening shuffle into a freedom-oriented performance where almost no two bars sound the same. This is probably the first time that post-war listeners were able to really appreciate the art of alternating tough, grumbly boogie lines flow­ing in and out of lyrical country-blues passages, all coming from the same guitar — in crystal clear sound quality. That's got to count for something.

 

As boring as acoustic blues may be some­times, Big Joe definitely commits himself to proving the opposite here; in a way, this style of playing is more interesting than the impressive, but repetitive phrasing of a Robert Johnson. So, thumbs up, of course.

 

BLUES ON HIGHWAY 49 (1961)

 

1) Highway 49; 2) Overhaul Your Machine; 3) Blues Left Texas; 4) No. 13 Highway; 5) Down In The Bottoms; 6) Poor Beggar; 7) That Thing's In Town; 8) Walk On, Little Girl; 9) Tiajuana Blues; 10) 45 Blues; 11) Arkansas Wo­man; 12) Four Corners Of The World.

 

This particular Delmark recording was made in July, 1961, in Chicago. This time Big Joe is ac­companied throughout by his old associate Ransom Knowling on bass — and nothing else; play­ing, predictably, his old nine-string acoustic without amplification. None of the songs overlap with Piney Woods Blues — in fact, few of the songs, bar the title track, overlap with any of Big Joe's previous recordings, which is nice to know theoretically but, in the long run, does not make that much of a difference. A new Big Joe Williams song, after all, is just an old B.J.W. song with new lyrics, not much more.

 

There is a little bit more boogie on here than on Piney Woods Blues ('Down In The Bottoms', 'That Thing's In Town'), and it is played with a little more verve — Knowling's help on these num­bers is particularly important, reasserting the toe-tapping factor, and Joe's ability to play rhythm and lead at the same time seems to be improving with age: it is ironic to think that Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup made himself a whole living out of recording endless clones of the same song as 'That Thing's In Town', and yet he was never able to play it as well as Big Joe does here.

 

Out of the proper blues numbers, though, the only one worth saving is 'Four Corners Of The World'. There is a reason why it closes the album — upon hearing it, there is really no need to hear anything else. It's longer than all the other slow blues numbers; it's got the loudest bass part of them all; it has Big Joe hollering at the top of his powers; and it's got him playing all of the tricks he knows. The only thing here that even begins to approach «essential» status.

 

WALKING BLUES (1961)

 

1) Levee Camp Blues; 2) Low Down Dirty Shame; 3) Gambling Man; 4) Ain’t Gonna Rain No More; 5) Feel So Good; 6) Prowling Ground Hog; 7) Back Home Again; 8) Sugar Babe; 9) Tell Me Mama; 10) Studio Blues; 11) I’m A Fool About My Baby; 12) 38 Pistol Blues; 13) Pearly Mae; 14) Walking Blues; 15) Highway 45; 16) Meet Me At The Bottom; 17) Skinny Mama; 18) Jockey Ride Blues; 19) Coal And Iceman Blues; 20) Army Man Blues; 21) Black Gal; 22) Pallet On The Floor.

 

For precision sake, it should be mentioned that this collection originally came out as two LPs: Blues For 9 Strings in 1961 (the last 12 songs) and Studio Blues in 1966 (the first 10). Both were, however, recorded during the same session in 1961, with a small combo involving Larry Johnson on harmonica and the great Willie Dixon himself on bass (usually, with Big Joe around, one hardly gets to hear anybody else properly anyway, but Big Willie was the bass player to rip at the strings with the kind of thick ferocity that agreed with Big Joe’s style better than any other playing style).

 

By now, it was relatively clear what Delmark, Folkways and the others were trying to do: short of «authentic» pre-war blues artists, yet faced with the ever-increasing demand for genuine Delta blues on the part of the younger generation, they expected of a happy find like Big Joe the com­plete recreation of the entire Delta repertoire, no less. Of the 24 songs recorded during these ses­sions, only a very minor portion overlaps with previous recordings. Instead, Joe covers songs made famous by Son House (‘Levee Camp Blues’), Big Bill Broonzy (‘I Feel So Good’), and probably others (many of the titles I simply do not recognize, but, clearly, there is no talk of ori­ginal com­posing here).

 

It goes without saying that the substitute is not ideal: Big Joe has his own middle-of-the-road style, and taking on the entire Delta legacy is a bit like the Grateful Dead taking on the entire le­gacy of American popular music: formally, they pull it off, but who will remember Jerry Garcia for playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ or ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ instead of ‘Dark Star’ when no one has so far taken care to burn all of Chuck Berry’s and Rev. Gary Davis’ records?

 

But I have to admit that Big Joe’s take on ‘Feel So Good’ is still pretty amusing, with the song slightly sped up and boogified. Joe even tries out some quasi-rockabilly licks in the solo: some of these all but demand being accompanied by duckwalking, and I am pretty sure that the man, un­like many of his peers, did not turn a deaf ear to those hot new sounds on 1950s radio.

 

Overall, this is probably the best choice for post-war Big Joe: the session is long, well-recorded, diverse (covering all of Big Joe’s proper bases and touching upon many others), and, like I said, Big Joe’s gruff and gritty playing style is a perfect match with Dixon’s amazing blues bass skills. Some of the tracks, especially fast ones like ‘Tell Me Mama’, are worth it just for Willie’s fat, but smooth runs alone. Thumbs up.

 

BACK TO THE COUNTRY (1964)

 

1) Ain't Gonna Be Your Lowdown Dog; 2) Annie Mae; 3) You Can Stay Out; 4) Mean Backstabber; 5) Worry You Off My Mind; 6) Miss Ida B; 7) Put On Your Nightcap; 8) Woody Woodpecker; 9) I Got My Ticket; 10) Shake Your Boogie; 11) See See Rider; 12) Blues Everywhere I Go; 13) Worried And Lonesome; 14) My Black Woman; 15) The Moon Is Rising; 16) Down The Line; 17) My Baby Left Me A Mule To Ride; 18) Desert Blues; 19) Breakdown.

 

The distinguishing factor here is the constant accompaniment of Willie Lee Harris on harmonica and Jimmy Brown on fiddle (he also takes lead vocals quite a few times). This gives you a laid-back, front porch atmosphere. Blue moon rising, 'gators in the swamp, jambalaya on the bayou, that sort of thing (I'm too lazy to go hunting for additional Delta / Louisiana clichés). Unfortuna­tely, it sort of leaves open the question of whether anyone would give a damn if, surreptitiously, they snatched Big Joe from under our noses and replaced him with Average Joe.

 

The trio gets a fairly authentic sound, to be sure, but the collective powers of Brown and Harris cannot replace the solitary power of Willie Dixon's bass, and Big Joe does not seem to be particu­larly trying. He is doing what he is expected to be doing — recreating the atmosphere of a friend­ly get-together — and if that is what you want to hear, an honest 1964 recreation of an amicable musical encounter between three amicable black country-blues musicians around 1934, that is exactly what you are going to get. But at his best, Big Joe is an exciting entertainer, energetic and unpredictable, and in the settings of a friendly get-together, there is no need to be an exciting en­tertainer, since there's no one to entertain anyway.

 

Meaning that these twenty tracks (many of which are not repeated from earlier recordings, but it never really matters) are mildly interesting for one listen unless you are a Delta dweller all by yourself, but, overall, it is not going to displace Walking Blues as the one late period Big Joe al­bum to own if you really have to own one.

 

CLASSIC DELTA BLUES (1964)

 

1) Rollin' And Tumblin'; 2) Hellhound On My Trail; 3) Bird's Nest Bound; 4) Crossroads Blues; 5) Special Rider; 6) Pony Blues; 7) Pea Vine Special; 8) Walking Blues; 9) Dirt Road Blues; 10) Banty Rooster Blues; 11) Terraplane Blues; 12) Jinx Blues.

 

Far from the last «original» Big Joe Williams album (the man went on recording all through the 1970s, although the average pace was certainly less prolific), Classic Delta Blues will, neverthe­less, be his last record to get a brief individual mention here. The ones that came after are way too hard to find these days, and the payoff cannot be imagined as substantial anyway.

 

The pleasure of Classic Delta Blues is mainly in that, after several years of being set up as part of a small blues combo, this time around Big Joe gets completely solo billing. He also switches to 6-string rather than his usual 9-string guitar, which might, in theory, look like he's downplaying his own special thing, but believe me, he is not. On the contrary, out of all of his post-war LPs, this one is the most authentically Big-Joe-ish record of them all.

 

Back in Chicago, Big Joe is consigned to the cares of engineer Norman Dayton and producer Pete Welding, who do the best thing possible in this situation: leave Big Joe completely alone and me­rely ensure that the captured sound be provided with some depth and a small echo layer, to get the proper «playing from inside a deep well» atmosphere. Combined with the fact that, for this ses­sion, Big Joe has selected to play almost exclusively the tunes of Charley Patton and Robert John­­son — blues' «tormented loners» par excellence — this makes up for cool results.

 

Fact is, Big Joe is overall a better blues singer (at least, certainly a scarier blues singer, at times, sounding like the direct predecessor to Howlin' Wolf) than both Johnson and Patton — as good as Robert's original 'Hellhound On My Trail' and 'Crossroads Blues' are, I can certainly see how some could think that the song deserves a deeper, more «hellish» vocal reading than Johnson's almost effeminate whine, and Big Joe's interpretation here suits the bill perfectly. And how wise of him, too, to have held off these recordings right until being left all alone in the studio, with no se­cond fiddle to spoil the «just me and the devil» effect.

 

Simply put, some musicians are born for bands and some are born for nobody but themselves, and Classic Delta Blues explicitly shows that Big Joe is at his very best when no one is there to bug him about setting up a «party atmosphere». As classic as his recordings with such giants as Sonny Boy Williamson or Willie Dixon could be, he tends to wither up next to these guys. But give him some echo, a dark, personal-apocalyptic tune or two, and suddenly he turns into Mr. Deep Blues Incarnate. This is an exceptional LP — highly recommended. Thumbs up.

BIG MAMA THORNTON

THEY CALLED ME BIG MAMA (1950-1954; 2005)

 

1) All Right Baby; 2) Bad Luck Got My Man; 3) Partnership Blues; 4) Mischievous Boogie; 5) I'm All Fed Up; 6) Cotton Picking Blues; 7) Everytime I Think Of You; 8) No Jody For Me; 9) Let Your Tears Fall Baby; 10) They Call Me Big Mama; 11) Walking Blues; 12) Hound Dog; 13) Just Can't Help Myself; 14) Nightmare; 15) Rockabye Baby; 16) Hard Times; 17) I've Searched The World Over; 18) I Ain't No Fool Either; 19) The Big Change; 20) I Smell A Rat; 21) Yes Baby; 22) Willie Mae's Blues; 23) Stop Hoppin' On Me.

 

Houston-based Peacock Records was never the hottest place in the musical business, lasting just a little over twenty years before merging with ABC and then later with MCA. This, most likely, ex­plains why they never managed to make a real big star out of Big Mama Thornton. Had she the chance to be picked up by someone like Atlantic, she would unquestionably have been the bulgiest, brawniest, bulliest boss mama out there — Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker would have never stood the field.

 

As it happened, her records never got enough promotion, and, in fact, there weren't all that many records either — all through the Fifties, she only managed to cut less than two dozen 45s and not a single LP (available discographies do not even list any compilations). The musical arrange­ments were professional, but somewhat outdated — most of her slow ballad numbers are done with a lounge jazz tinge, and the fast rockers are seriously on the 1940s jump blues side — and, although on most of these recordings she is backed by a fairly serious outfit (the Johnny Otis Band, with Johnny himself manning the vibraphones), I simply do not believe that Johnny's big band style could ever be the perfect environment for Willie Mae Thornton.

 

This compilation, released by Proper Records, is definitely the ideal guide through Mama's early years; it seems to omit very little, presents all the recordings in chronological order, and features excellent liner notes for each track. If anyone knows anything at all, he/she is bound to have at least heard of one song here — the original recording of Leiber-Stoller's 'Hound Dog' (which, ac­cording to the liner notes, Mama tried to pass for her own composition, but nobody messes aro­und with two smart Jewish kids, not even a big fat Afro-American woman) which, in my humble opinion, is way superior to the Elvis version, if only for the fact that it does not repeat the exact same two verses over and over again. (Now if only Mama could have gotten ahold of Scotty Moore in time...).

 

There is more to that, however: Big Mama was a great actor, an exciting character impersonation, and, coming from an old tradition of strong woman singers castigating their wimpy men for not living up to their standards, she now adds post-war spunk and fury to Bessie Smith's pre-war re­straint on numbers such as 'I Ain't No Fool Either' and 'I Smell A Rat' (the latter, also from Leiber and Stoller, is as worthy a companion to 'Hound Dog' as could have ever been desired). But her talents do not stop at aggressive belting: she is also fantastic at loud, prayerish blues howling ('Cot­ton Picking Blues', 'Walking Blues', 'Hard Times', 'I've Searched The World Over', etc.).

 

One style that does not fit her at all is romantic jazz: 'Just Can't Help Myself', a sort of crippled, easily recognizable reworking of 'Blue Moon', goes absolutely nowhere — you'd get more pro­mising results out of Ozzy Osbourne singing Wagner arias: Big Mama just wasn't all that know­ledgeable about subtle and tender aspects of romance, I'm afraid. Fortunately, there's only about one or two tracks like this altogether on the album, and it's a good thing 'Just Can't Help Myself' is immediately followed by 'Nightmare' (Leiber-Stoller strike again!), a mildly creepy duet be­tween Big Mama and Johnny Otis' vibraphone that sets things straight again — Big Mama's man finally dumped her (hell, anybody would after hearing her express her romantic feelings on 'Just Can't Help Myself'), and she is hurting as hell, and it works.

 

If you can live with the fact that all of these twenty three songs are really just five or six (remem­ber, this is still the pre-rock'n'roll era, and even Leiber and Stoller, who did so much to diversify the world of primitive pop music, were still in their teens when writing 'Hound Dog'), They Called Me Big Mama (named, by the way, after Willie Mae's bit of brave self-irony: "they call me Big Mama, cuz I weigh three hundred pounds") is a tight ball of energy and fun, and you will even discern the apparent influence on a fellow Texan — Janis, whose debt to Big Mama would not be paid off until more than a decade later. Of all Fifties' artists, Etta James was probably the only one comparable — and even Etta never had Leiber and Stoller working for her.

 

THE ORIGINAL HOUND DOG (1950-1957; 1990)

 

1) Hound Dog; 2) Walking Blues; 3) My Man Called Me; 4) Cotton Picking Blues; 5) Willie Mae's Trouble; 6) The Big Change; 7) I Smell A Rat; 8) I Just Can't Help Myself; 9) They Call Me Big Mama; 10) Hard Times; 11) I Ain't No Fool Either; 12) You Don't Move Me No More; 13) Let Your Tears Fall Baby; 14) I've Searched The World Over; 15) Rock A Bye Baby; 16) How Come; 17) Nightmare; 18) Stop A-Hoppin' On Me; 19) Laugh, Laugh, Laugh; 20) Just Like A Dog (Barking Up The Wrong Tree); 21) The Fish; 22) Mischievous Boogie.

 

Unfortunately, for the time being nobody has bothered collecting all of Mama's output during the Peacock years in one package — even if all of it could have easily fit on two CDs. They Called Me Big Mama is beautiful in its dedication to completeness and chronological order, but it only covers stuff up to 1954 (due to the 50-year copyright limit, as it goes with all of Proper Records). To understand what went on with B. M. for the next three years, one has to resort to additional, «authorized» compilations, most of which are nowhere near as good: they sacrilegiously mess up chronology, add and omit stuff at will, and, like all normal compilations, tend to give the listener a general feel and idea rather than systematic knowledge.

 

The original and still easiest-to-get of these, on CD, is The Original Hound Dog, whose very title reveals its mission — generous education for the layman: «You thought the world began with Elvis? Think again, son!» Most of the material predictably overlaps with They Called Me, but at least there are six songs on here that date from after 1954, a small bunch of singles that Big Mama still had in store for Peacock before parting ways in 1957.

 

It may not be worth spending your money on both collections unless you are a true fan of this meaty 'n' sweaty brand of R&B, but the extra cuts are good, and show a bit of development — 'You Don't Move Me No More', in particular, shows that they'd finally started noticing the achi­e­vements of rock'n'roll down there in Texas by the middle of the decade, and there is some admi­rably gruff, deliciously primitive, proto-garage one-note soloing on that track. Another great slab of early rock'n'roll is 'Just Like A Dog' — turns out that, during the instrumental breaks, Big Mama's vocal teasings and urgings mesh much better with electric guitar playing than the more traditional saxophone solos.

 

On the down side, 'The Fish' is way too retro for Big Mama (the kind of hokey material that only works well with humorous people like Louis Jordan), and the other three songs are nothing parti­cularly special. Also, if you cannot find this disc, there is a shorter alternative called Hound Dog: The Peacock Recordings, which has only 18 tracks in total, but still includes all the six necessa­ry tracks ('My Man Called Me', 'You Don't Move Me No More', 'How Come', 'Laugh Laugh Laugh', 'Just Like A Dog', 'The Fish'). May be worth it if going real cheap.

 

IN EUROPE (1966)

 

1) Swing It On Home; 2) Sweet Little Angel; 3) Little Red Rooster; 4) Unlucky Girl; 5) Hound Dog; 6) My Heavy Load; 7) School Boy; 8) Down-Home Shakedown; 9) Your Love Is Where It Ought To Be; 10) Session Blues.

 

The «American Folk Blues Festival», regularly held in various European locations from 1962 to 1966, was a fine thing not just for European audiences, most of which had never seen «authentic blues in action» before, but for the performers themselves as well — lots of people who'd never catch the proper opportunity to get together and work on something collective in their native home­land now, all of a sudden, had the chance to pool their talents overseas.

 

Big Mama's first ever LP release is one of the finest manifestations of that opportunity. In betwe­en the Peacock years and this mid-Sixties «European revival», she'd lost none of the power or the spirit, but now, instead of the Johnny Otis band, which was never really a proper match for her, she is backed by such giants of the trade as slide guitar master Mississippi Fred McDowell, piano wiz Eddie Boyd, Little Walter's drummer Fred Below, harmonica king Big Walter Horton, and a young and fiery Buddy Guy on electric guitar.

 

Obviously, this mixed backing is not very much a unified «team» (having Big Walter and Buddy Guy play on the same tracks is somewhat of a novelty thing), but it still makes for exciting listen­ing, and the players take good care not to overshadow Big Mama — this is a Willie Mae album first and foremost. She also throws in some of her extra talents, never evident in the Fifties, such as occasional drumming and harmonica playing: 'Down-Home Shakedown' is a cool duet betwe­en herself and Big Walter, on which she more than stands up to the contest.

 

Vocals still take precedence, naturally, and, with reverential support from Buddy, Mama gives us a fairly sexy 'Little Red Rooster' (punctuated by naturalistic imitations of all the animals menti­oned in the lyrics, no less); an inspired 'Sweet Little Angel' which she models after the B. B. King version and, IMHO, sings with more expression than B. B. himself; and a fine-rocking remake of 'Hound Dog' that trades in guitar solos for harmonica ones, yet still holds together more tightly than the original.

 

Of special note are several tracks recorded away from the band, with only Fred McDowell back­ing Willie Mae on slide guitar; 'My Heavy Load' is the particular highlight, five centuries of toil and trouble converted into five minutes of deep Delta blues. This is the kind of material that Big Mama never got to record at the peak of her popularity, being marketed as, above all, a rowdy-bawdy entertainer with a big-band style — unsurprisingly, she is just as good at it as she is at barking off male losers in her classic hits.

 

In Europe is available in many different editions, including tons of bonus tracks (I am listing the shortest original one), sometimes also paired with select tracks (or even the entirety of?) the ses­sions recorded with the Muddy Waters Band; whichever one you happen to track down will work. This is an absolute must for anyone with at least a modest interest in blues history or rootsy music in general — mind you, this is not just some old has-been re-recording his/her former classics with better sound quality and worse authenticity, this is a strong, diverse record showing a still flourishing talent from several different sides, only a few of which we had previous access to. A strong, excited thumbs up here.

 

WITH THE MUDDY WATERS BAND (1966)

 

1) I'm Feeling Alright; 2) Sometimes I Have A Heartache; 3) Black Rat; 4) Life Goes On; 5) Everything Gonna Be Alright; 6) Big Mama's Bumble Bee Blues; 7) Gimme A Penny; 8) Looking The World Over; 9) I Feel The Way I Feel; 10) Guide Me Home; 11) Black Rat; 12) Wrapped Tight; 13) Gimme A Penny; 14) Big Mama's Shuffle; 15) Since I Fell For You; 16) I'm Feeling Alright; 17) Big Mama's Blues.

 

Chris Strachwitz, president of Texas-based Arhoolie Records, was, in 1966, best known for secu­ring the publishing rights to Country Joe & The Fish's 'Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die', a song that millions of draft dodgers were only too happy to pay good money for if it helped them better ar­ticulate their arguments. Not being too sure about where and how to spend all that money, Strach­witz, a good person at heart, considered caring about Texan dispossessed, and, as fate would have it, fell upon Big Mama's freshly issued In Europe.

 

Like every good American patriot should, the Silesian-born Christian Alexander Maria, Graf Strachwitz von Groß-Zauche und Camminetz was a wee bit annoyed about blossoming American talent only able to secure a market in Europe. Thereupon, he personally got hold of Big Mama, flew her to San Francisco, and there, on April 25, 1966, teamed her up with the-then current back­ing band for Muddy Waters: Sammy Lawhorn on guitar, the fabulous James Cotton on har­monica, the magnificent Otis Spann on piano, a less-known but no-less-fluent Luther Johnson on bass, and Francis Clay on drums. Muddy himself adds some guitar on a few of the tracks, but ne­ver sings one note, leaving all the juicy bits to the lady.

 

The session was originally released in 1967, possibly (it is hard to find concise information) under the presumptuous name The Queen At Monterey (presumptuous and misleading — any album like that in 1967 would have given the impression that Big Mama performed at the famous Monterey Pop festival, when, in fact, the whole thing was not at all up her alley; but, considering that Janis Joplin did perform her 'Ball And Chain' at the venue, the misleading may have been in­tentional) and containing ten tracks; today, it is widely available under the quoted name as a 17-song CD edition, although three are just alternate takes. And, naturally, every serious blues lover should take advantage of that availability while it lasts.

 

The big difference from In Europe is that, this time around, there is no mighty fine aspiring young guitar superstar to outshine the rest of the performers: in fact, Muddy and Sammy are all the time kept relatively low in the mix, rarely, if ever, get to solo, and the emphasis the whole time is on collective playing, with the guitars, Spann's jazz-influenced pianos, and Cotton's relent­less harmonica blowing all going on together at the same time — and still, over all that din, Big Mama has them all beat whenever she opens her mouth.

 

The proceedings are also much more sternly blueslike, with no 'Hound Dog' in sight, just lotsa 12-bar and straightforward blues-rock and blues-balladry. We do get to evaluate Willie Mae's harmonica-blowing skills once more, on 'Big Mama's Shuffle', but overall, this is not a highly di­verse affair, and individual songs are not particularly discussable. Not that it matters. What mat­ters is that you should download yourself the first twenty seconds of 'I'm Feelin' Alright', and then decide for yourself if the connection between shuffling piano, blues harmonica, heavy as hell bass guitar, and Mama's tough brawn is as unique and rousing as it seems to me.

 

Because, in a way, Big Mama was the female blues performer to correlate almost directly with Muddy Waters as the male blues performer, and the decision to team her up with Muddy's perfect backing was a stroke of German genius on the part of Graf Strachwitz. Alas, the teaming up was performed a decade too late for the whole venture to succeed commercially — in 1967, few peo­ple had retained an active interest for Muddy himself, let alone a former one-hit wonder appro­priating Muddy's band — but today, now that time has flattened out past decades, the proud blues connoisseur can boast of this little jewel as the best pure blues album of 1966-67, if he so wishes, and even maintain that this was Willie Mae's finest hour, even despite the lack of Leiber-Stoller pre­sence. Thumbs up.

 

STRONGER THAN DIRT (1969)

 

1) Born Under A Bad Sign; 2) Hound Dog; 3) Ball And Chain; 4) Summertime; 5) Rollin' Stone; 6) Let's Go Get Stoned; 7) Funky Broadway; 8) That Lucky Old Sun; 9) Ain't Nothin' You Can Do; 10) I Shall Be Released.

 

As far as I was able to dig it out, Big Mama recorded her original version of 'Ball 'n' Chain', with Edward «Bee» Houston on electric guitar in vintage Chicago-style, as late as January 1968 — curious, considering that, as we all know, fellow Texan and big Willie Mae fan Janis Joplin was already singing the song live as early as 1967 (Monterey Pop, etc.). Unless I'm missing some cru­cial facts, Janis must have caught Big Mama in a live performance. Regardless, Janis' megastar­dom in 1967, in the usual manner, brought its bit of recognition to those artists that were at least partially responsible for that stardom, and that meant new opportunities for Willie Mae, too.

 

Stronger Than Dirt, released by Arhoolie in 1969, is a fun, but not very successful, attempt to make use of these opportunities. A hodge-podge of oldies and contemporary songs set to a «mo­dernistic big band sound», the album is just as eclectic as the late Sixties usually required — a little blues, a little boogie, a little R'n'B, a little soul, and the song selection is calculated so meti­culously you'd think they hired a professional astronomer to do that. 'Ball And Chain' is re-recor­ded for the session, since Janis had already showed how to make it into a selling hit; and since Ja­nis had the power, it was only too natural to pass the ball back and, in Janis' own steps this time, cover 'Summertime'.

 

'Born Under A Bad Sign' — a hit for Albert King, then popularized among white audiences by Cream. 'Funky Broadway' — Wilson Pickett had been really hot with that one not more than one year ago. 'Let's Go Get Stoned'... odd choice for a straight working black gal from the heart of Texas, but who cares? She even tries on a little Bob Dylan, because, well, you weren't really supposed to be a solid commercial proposition in those days unless you tried on a little Bob Dylan. (Of course, you could be exempt if your name sounded anything like Paul Mc­Cartney or Mick Jagger, but that was obviously not the case here).

 

The results are mixed and, overall, sort of pathetic. In 1969, Willie Mae was as powerful a singer as she'd been twenty years earlier, but she was every bit as unsuited to varying the original for­mu­la. Case in point — the nightmare-awful rendition of 'I Shall Be Released', a song that dies on the spot and slowly decays in a cloud of heavy stinking once it is deprived of subtlety; Big Mama, as is her custom, charges through the tune like a brave cavalry regiment, and one in which every sin­gle soldier and every single horse have just had ample access to the local pub as well. 'Born Un­der A Bad Sign' is brawny, but also thoroughly flushed of its doom-laden atmosphere — with the elimination of the song's original monster riff (that Cream, by the way, took great care to preserve and build upon), it retains plenty of volume but loses most of the «presence». For 'Summertime', Willie Mae tries to preserve the atmosphere of poorly hidden depression and sarcasm that Janis gave the song, but, again, lacks the appropriate finesse. And so on. Finally, why in the world would we need yet another re-recording of 'Hound Dog'?

 

It is quite telling that not a single one of these numbers (except for 'Hound Dog' and 'Ball And Chain', of course) became a live staple for Big Mama, as the next year's live album would soon demonstrate — unlike the awesome repertoire displayed on her 1966 recordings. It is still interes­ting to listen through it at least once, for instructive purposes: to understand what an artist's artis­tic limitations may look like, in the flesh (since, under normal conditions, artists tend to hide these limitations rather than flaunt them in our face) — and, perhaps, to gain a better appreciation for the original songs, in a comparative perspective. But other than that, it's a flip-floppy thumbs down all the way.

 

THE WAY IT IS (1970)

 

1) Little Red Rooster; 2) One Black Rat; 3) Rock Me Baby; 4) Wade In The Water; 5) Sweet Little Angel; 6) Baby Please / Mojo Workin'; 7) Watermelon Man; 8) Don't Need No Doctor.

 

Now here is an album title that actually matches the contents. Recorded at some L.A. club with Big Mama's then-current touring band (including Eddie "Bee" Houston on guitar, George "Har­monica" Smith on, oddly enough, harmonica, Flip "They Forgot To Stroke My Ego With A Nick" Graham on bass, and J. D. "Not Jack" Nicholson on piano), it actually had the luck to be remas­tered and put out on CD, just so that everybody could see it as #153,288 on the Amazon Music Bestsellers List, just a tiny bit below Kidz Bop Vol. 20 in Big Mama's amazing post-mortem comeback to rule the musical world.

 

Other than Big Mama's, or the record label's, strange fascination with either clipping song names ('Baby Please' is 'Baby Please Don't Go', of course) or completely changing them ('Don't Need No Doctor' is really 'Goin' Down Slow') — probably for cash reasons, so that «Willie Mae Thornton» could appear on the songwriting credits without too much of a hassle — The Way It Is is really an excellent screenshot of the lady's state of affairs in 1970. And the lady was certainly in much better shape than her best student: around the same time that the teacher was belting it out like there was no tomorrow among enthusiastic L.A. clubgoing crowds, just a few miles away the Pierce Brothers West­wood Village Mortuary was busy flame-consuming the drug-soaked body of the student. Ironic, isn't it.

 

Anyway, this whole thing is mostly in the slow blues vein, only 'One Black Rat' breaks up the mood with a fast, classic R&B-ish beat and wild harmonica solos to remind the listener of what it used to be like on Peacock Records. But Big Mama always does slow blues the Big Mama way — the tempos may be slow, but the adrenaline level never drops below the one required for the craziest boogie. For the sakes of diversity, she includes a gospel number ('Wade In The Water') and a jazz standard (the lyricized version of Herbie Hancock's 'Watermelon Man', replete with a semi-improvised «street brawn» with the watermelon man in question), both of which are done fine — she's got enough sense not to butcher the original killer melody of 'Watermelon Man' like she did with some stuff on Stronger Than Dirt — but that's just diversity of source material for you, not diversity of approach. If there's one person in this world who'd always be talking to God in the same tone she'd be addressing a watermelon man, that's Willie Mae.

 

The medley of 'Baby Please Don't Go' and 'Got My Mojo Workin' is interesting in that the former is taken at a super-slow, creeping tempo (in stark contrast to the then-popular rock version), slow­er even than the original Big Joe Williams version — then, midway through, blam, we launch in­to the tribal jungle dance of 'Mojo', almost in consolatory compensation for the lull. As for longer out­standing moments, well, "Bee" Houston has a couple of fine, fluent, very «contemporary» blues solos on 'Little Red Rooster' and 'Sweet Little Angel': he was clearly the most up-to-date player in Big Mama's band, and not only is his playing here every bit as good as the notes one hears on concurrent B. B. King records, some of the climactic trills actually go well over King's technical threshold. Where is this guy's solo career?

 

A fun record, in general, not at all let down even by Big Mama's pompous bits of Vegas-y banter, typical side effects as they are of an overtly proud to be overtly polite black performer before an overtly proud to be overtly receptive white audience (well, that's more or less how it used to be in those still somewhat racially tense old times). Thumbs up.

 

JAIL (1975)

 

1) Little Red Rooster; 2) Ball 'n' Chain; 3) Jail; 4) Hound Dog; 5) Rock Me Baby; 6) Sheriff O. E. & Me; 7) Oh Hap­py Day.

 

Information on Big Mama's whereabouts during the first half of the 1970s is sketchy at best. There seems to have been at least one album of gospel tunes (Saved, dated in different sources to either 1971 and 1973; all I know for sure is that the release was on Pentagram Records, and yes, she does cover 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot', so do not expect huge massive surprises), and there may have been occasional guest appearances here and there.

 

But the «essential Big Mama» truly resurfaces only in five years time, and with another live al­bum — and a classic one. Released on Vanguard, Jail is culled from two different performances at Monroe State Prison in Monroe, Washington and Oregon State Reformatory in Eugene, Ore­gon (I am, of course, listing this detailed information just in case you ever turn up there and get a chance to chat with an eighty-year old inmate). And even if one could say that Big Mama was merely following a trend here, already well established by Johnny Cash and B. B. King and oth­ers, who's to deny that Willie Mae, with her brusque and rowdy ways, wouldn't be the perfect rhythm & blues advertiser in that kind of environment?

 

The emphasis here is not merely on giving the people a good time, but, as it is with the best of prison albums, on giving them a realistically good time. Two of the songs — the slow blues of the title track and the happy shuffle of 'Sheriff O. E. & Me' — relate directly to prison time issues, and then there's 'Ball 'n' Chain', whose title, in a setting like this, would be very easy to take lite­rally. 'Jail' is, of course, the album's centerpiece, with the darkest guitar solos and the grinniest grin on Mama's face, no doubt, as she introduces herself: "Well, here I am again — sitting down in this old rotten jail..." much to the inmates' delirious delight.

 

The album's got minor surprises — 'Little Red Rooster', for instance, is not what you'd think, but rather an entirely different, much faster boogie number, quite a kickass opener; 'Hound Dog' is probably the second best, maybe even the first best rendition in Mama's catalog, with a chuggy, funky rhythm guitar part supplanting the original accompaniment; and 'Oh, Happy Day' (which, I believe, was also recorded for the Saved album) is a rare occasion to hear Willie Mae sing gospel pop — in a reasonably restrained and fun way, with the band heartedly accelerating towards the end (too bad the record fades out for some reason).

 

For the record, the band includes George "Harmonica" Smith on Turkish komuz (nah, just joking), J. D. Nichols on piano, Bill Potter dominating much of the overall sound on tenor sax, and the trusty Eddie Huston on stinging guitar, augmented by Steve Wachsman on second guitar (maybe it's Steve who plays the cool funky part on 'Hound Dog', I don't really know). The album itself is generally available these days on the 3-CD long Complete Vanguard Recordings collection, a very welcome addition to your collection if you dig «Americana» at all. We'll get around to the rest of it soon enough; in the meantime — thumbs up, no questions asked.

 

SASSY MAMA! (1975)

 

1) Rolling Stone; 2) Lost City; 3) Mr. Cool; 4) Big Mama's New Love; 5) Private Number; 6) Sassy Mama; 7) Eve­rybody's Happy (But Me).

 

Nearly forgotten, two decades past her alleged «prime», and having seriously lost weight, which all but forfeited the claim to the honorary «Big» prefix, Willie Mae Thornton just so happened to record the best album of her entire career. The only album, might I say — the only other time she went into the studio to cut a brand new set of tunes specially for the occasion was on Stronger Than Dirt, and, like I mentioned earlier, there were all sorts of problems with that LP.

 

There are only seven songs, the session players are mostly unknown, and the sales must have been so low that the recorded sequel, Big Mama Swings, was shelved upon completion, not to see the light of day before the Complete Vanguard Recordings compilation actually showed us that the sequel was not half bad, either. But it is the best possible album Big Mama could have done in the 1970s, and boy, should we ever be glad that she did do it.

 

How it happened, we do not know, but, apparently, Big Mama found herself uncontrolled and un­marketed by anyone — not a soul on her record label must have given a damn about what the kind of sound she should be associated with, so she just went ahead and did it all on her own. "I, I, uh... I'll do it like this", she introduces 'Private Number', singing the first bars a cappella, with the band gradually catching up with her, and that's symbolic of the entire album.

 

But the band is very much involved, too. The songs roll on for six, seven, eight minutes easily, not as jam sessions — as lengthy blues confessions that unroll as dialogs, trialogs, and quadrilogs between Willie Mae and her piano, guitar, and sax soloists. There's a general atmosphere of total free­dom, hearty fun, and, at the core of it, somber seriousness. 'Mr. Cool', the centerpiece, clocks in at 7:45, but there is hardly any problem with that, since Big Mama needs her bit players to warm her up gradually, until the ecstatic, climactic conclusion.

 

Obviously, there was no hope of the album making any kind of impression in 1975, when most of the interest in «black music» was focused on its dance aspects, but so much more the reason to clear up this mistake and recognize Sassy Mama! as one of the finest things black music had to offer in the year of 'Love To Love You Baby'. And do not make the mistake of getting it on its own, because, like I already said, the long-lost companion piece, Big Mama Swings, offers more of the same — exactly the same, which is why I refrain from giving it a separate review, but exac­tly the same level of awesomeness, culminating in 'Happy Me', which should be recognized as one of Big Mama's finest, on the same level with 'Ball & Chain' at least. Suffice it to say that it is probably the darkest, grimmest soul-blues piece ever to feature that kind of title, bizarre and in­triguing in its paradoxal nature. And if the first album already is an unquestionable thumbs up, the two together request getting your big toes up as well.

 

Alas, just as Mama hit that kind of peak, something happened — either her health finally gave out altogether, or the label stripped her of studio time, but, anyway, all of her post-1975 recordings are extremely scarce, hard to find, and even controversial. Discographies list an LP called Ma­ma's Pride, released in 1978, but hardly ever with a track listing, so it is not even clear if it was a new recording in the first place. There are also some archival live recordings from around 1977, said to be quite good (which I can believe) but also difficult to find. Then there was a car accident, but she still managed to perform at Newport in 1983. Then, like so many other heroes of the past, Big Mama passed away quietly somewhere in L.A. in 1984.

 

 

 

BILL HALEY

THE EARLY YEARS (1947-1954; 2008)

 

CD I: 1) Too Many Parties, Too Many Pals; 2) Four Leave Clover Blues; 3) Candy Kisses; 4) Tennessee Border; 5) The Covered Wagon Rolled Right Along; 6) Yodel Your Blues Away; 7) Behind The Eight Ball; 8) Foolish Ques­tions; 9) Deal Me A Hand; 10) Ten Gallon Stetson; 11) Susan Van Dusen; 12) I'm Not To Blame; 13) Loveless Blues; 14) Stand Up And Be Counted; 15) I'm Gonna Dry Every Tear With A Kiss; 16) Why Do I Cry Over You; 17) My Sweet Little Girl From Nevada; 18) My Palomino And I; 19) Rocket '88; 20) Tearstains On My Heart; 21) Down Deep In My Heart; 22) Green Tree Boogie; 23) I'm Crying; 24) Pretty Baby; 25) Ten Gallon Stetson; 26) Why Do I Cry Over You.

CD II: 1) A Year Ago This Christmas; 2) I Don't Want To Be Alone This Christmas; 3) Juke Box Cannonball; 4) Sun­down Boogie; 5) Rock The Joint; 6) Icy Heart; 7) Dance With A Dolly; 8) Rocking Chair On The Moon; 9) I'm Lonesome; 10) A Sweet Bunch Of Roses; 11) Please Make Up Your Fickle Mind; 12) My Heart Tells Me (I'm In Love With You); 13) Stop Beatin' Around The Mulberry Bush; 14) Real Rock Drive; 15) Crazy Man, Crazy; 16) Whatcha Gonna Do; 17) Pat-A-Cake; 18) Fractured; 19) Live It Up; 20) Farewell, So Long, Goodbye; 21) I'll Be True; 22) Ten Little Indians; 23) Yes Indeed; 24) Chatanooga Choo Choo; 25) Straight Jacket; 26) Jukebox Can­non­ball; 27) Within This Broken Heart Of Mine.

 

As iconic as the image of Bill Haley opening the floodgates for rock music with 'Rock Around The Clock' became more than fifty years ago, it has always been noticeable that, unlike the abso­lute majority of rockabilly's teenage idols of the mid-Fifties, Haley was the only one to stem from the previous generation. This, and nothing else, is what makes him unique, sort of the white equi­valent to Big Joe Turner — no small coincidence that both performers initiated their runs of rock / rhythm & blues fame with the same song ('Shake, Rattle, & Roll').

 

Unlike Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Buddy, etc., Haley was active on the pop music scene since at least 1947, working in the most down-to-earth genre for white performers — country-western. And his transition to rockabilly was not sudden and unpredictable, but gradual, with a slow and careful drift towards «rowdier» forms of music; which does not for a moment diminish the impor­tance of this evolution — because just how many other country-western acts, cramming the 1940s / 1950s market, could boast such a successful and innovative crossover? The answer, I believe, is straightforward: not one.

 

A short while ago, though, it was relatively hard to lay one's hands on any of Bill's pre-'Rock Around The Clock', or, at least, pre-'Crazy Man Crazy' recordings. The classic hit singles got re­issue after reissue, of course, but if you wanted to see the roots, you had to hunt down old 45s (even the LP treatment would only be provided to Bill once he had solidified his position as that of a national hitmaker). In recent years, with CD markets hungry for rarities, this has fortunately changed. First and foremost, for the real man there is the German Bear Family 5-CD boxset (The Real Birth Of Rock'n'Roll 1946-1954) which pretty much contains everything the man has put on record during those years with all of his bands, including side projects backing Curly Herdman, Lou Graham etc., right down to acetates, special radio versions and even ad jingles.

 

But for wimps like me and you, the more easily available, not-so-exhaustive (and not-so-exhaus­ting!) 2-CD JSP Records release The Early Years might just do the trick. It omits most of the al­ternative versions, acetate rarities, side projects etc., but still manages to faithfully put together all of the «proper» recordings that Haley did for several major labels, culminating in a long-term par­tnership with Essex in the early 1950s, but before the move to Decca — stopping right at the arrival of the 'Rock Around The Clock' period. Everything else is either for the academician or the crazy man crazy (the two categories also frequently overlap).

 

We begin with the so-called «Four Aces Of Western Swing» and Haley's first singles for the ap­propriately titled Cowboy Records. This is just regular country-western pap ('Tennessee Border' etc.), although 'Yodel Your Blues Away' is noticeable for a huge slap-bass sound, and you also get to acknowledge Bill's professional yodelling technique (as in, «you try doing that...»). In 1949, «Four Aces» are replaced with «Bill Haley & The Saddlemen», but otherwise, relatively little changes — for two more years, the boys go on doing generic country-western. A teeny-weeny bit of proto-boogie can be seen on such tunes as 'Ten Gallon Stetson', but, frankly, the only occasio­nal point of interest here is steel guitar playing from Billy Williamson, one of Haley's oldest and bestest colleagues, whose melodic and, occasionally, experimental soundmaking sometimes saves these numbers from mind-numbing mediocrity.

 

The first true step up arrives during the band's brief stint with Holiday Records — Haley's take on Jackie Brenston's 'Rocket '88', which, according to some, comes much closer to claiming the title of the «earliest rock'n'roll song» than the original. Really hard to say, though. Haley's take got the slap-bass rockabilly thing going on, and stinging guitar solos instead of R'n'B-ish saxes, but Ike Turner did provide the distorted rhythm guitar on the original. So... who cares? The real impor­tant news is that, having heard 'Rocket '88' breaking the waves, Haley clearly smelled a change in the weather, and, unlike 99% of his peers, made the brave — and risky — decision to go along with it. Risky, because in 1951, this whole «crossover» business was more or less unheard of. If you'd already saddled up the palomino, they'd be expected to pry you out of the saddle on your ultimately last go-round.

 

For a while, Haley's band continued recording in the western style, but after the initial modest suc­cess of 'Rocket '88', they would regularly include boogie numbers into the set. On this collec­tion, watch out particularly for 'Green Tree Boogie' (think Sun years-style Elvis with a steel guitar accompaniment!), 'Jukebox Cannon Ball' (still much more country than rockabilly, but with a hard-and-fast-driving rhythm that might not have-a-been-to-a-likin' of the regular cowboy crowd), 'Sundown Boogie', and, particularly, 'Rock This Joint', a rearrangement of an old jump blues stan­dard that is, for all purposes, simply a slightly earlier and wimpier, but equally fun-spirited ver­sion of 'Rock Around The Clock' (from 1952).

 

It was around that time that the «Saddlemen» took the right decision of changing their name to «The Comets» — none too soon, considering how much the sound was toughened and sped up in those early years. For 'Rock This Joint', the band moved over to the Essex label, and hired their first drummer, although his presence is not really felt well enough until the first of the Comets 45s on which both sides rocked out — 'Stop Beating Around The Mulberry Bush' and the fantas­tic 'Real Rock Drive' (with the piano guy trying on a delightfully minimalistic, Duke Ellington-ish air and two lead guitars weaving around each other with great tact and delicacy).

 

Then there is 'Crazy Man, Crazy', which is not the first rockabilly number put out by Haley, but which was the first one to make any serious impact on the charts — and its "go, everybody, go, go, go!" still holds up as inflammable fun after all these years, no matter how burdened it has be­come with its historical symbolism. And with the song's success, the band's country-western in­clinations fizzle out altogether. The ten final tracks on this compilation, covering late 1953 and early 1954, are all uptempo, upbeat, starkly rocking numbers that rank right there together with Haley's classic Decca recordings. Yes, it is worth it to wade through all the yawn-inducing gene­ric cow­boy crap (becoming the next Hank Williams was never an option, anyway) to reach these little gems — 'Fractured', 'What'cha Gonna Do', 'I'll Be True', even the gospel-done-as-boogie 'Yes Indeed!' (a clear precursor to the much more popular Decca-era reinvention of 'The Saints'), and the sax-driven instrumental 'Straight Jacket' all represent 1950s pop music at its best.

 

In fact, I am being totally serious about listening to both CDs in their chronological sequence, in­stead of immediately skipping ahead to the tasty stuff — because what they show us here is one of the, if not the single most interesting and exciting evolution stories on the pre-Beatles pop scene (post Beatles, of course, artistic evolution became the norm of day, and it was not even al­ways a good thing). It was a real long way from 'Candy Kisses' to 'Crazy Man, Crazy', and, by the standards of the time, six years was not that large a period to cover it. And hence, an unquestio­nable thumbs up for the achievement, even if I will probably never want to listen to anything pre-'Rocket '88' again.

 

ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK (1955)

 

1) Rock Around The Clock; 2) Shake, Rattle & Roll; 3) A.B.C. Boogie; 4) Thirteen Women; 5) Razzle Dazzle; 6) Two Hound Dogs; 7) Dim, Dim The Lights; 8) Happy Baby; 9) Birth Of The Boogie; 10) Mambo Rock; 11) Burn That Candle; 12) Rock A-Beatin' Boogie.

 

Bill's first bunch of rock'n'roll singles was so groundbreaking that, after a brief while, people star­ted saying stuff like «well, yeah, it's groundbreaking, but it isn't really all that good — now where did we put that Sun Sessions CD, or that Chuck Berry Chess years boxset?» Today, though, it is high time to re-evaluate this stuff, along with Douglas Sirk movies and other 1950's memorabilia that, in some people's views, should be assessed as much more than packages of nostalgia for our grand- and grand-grand-parents.

 

Rock Around The Clock is an early Decca compilation that collects six consecutive A- and B-sides for Bill and his Comets, beginning with 'Rock Around The Clock' itself and all the way to 'Rock A-Beatin' Boogie'. Although 'Clock' was indeed, chronologically, the first single on here, it did not become a big hit until someone got the bright idea to include it in the soundtrack to Black­board Jungle. Actually, Haley's first major «rock and roll era» hit was the lyrically sanitized ver­sion of Big Joe Turner's 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' — an earlier Decca compilation placed huger em­phasis on that song, naming the LP after it, but I am not dedicating a separate review to Shake, Rattle & Roll because it's an 8-song mini-LP, and all of its material would eventually be incor­porated into Rock Around The Clock, once the song started getting popular.

 

So what's the deal with these six 45s? Clearly, this is the finest «small» set of Bill Haley & the Comets in existence — the birth of a new type of music, and a 100%-motivated band that's only too happy to serve as the midwife. It is clean-sounding and sanitized. Haley was, above all, a pro­fessional entertainer, certainly not interested in coming across as «rebellious», «aggressive», etc. Now that you think about it, wild stories about teen riots across the States and the UK during the initial run of Rock Around The Clock (the second, not the first movie to feature the song) just seem so tremendously inadequate, considering the utterly peaceful and friendly message of the tune. How did it all come to this? Surely, when The Comets recorded the song, they were simply thinking that they were doing some good old jump blues, in just a slightly crazier and speedier way than it used to be. The last thing on their mind was to awake the sleeping dragon in the Ame­rican (let alone Western, or worldwide) teenager.

 

Not that they felt too terrified or unhappy when they did realize what they'd done — because, as soon as 'Shake, Rattle & Roll' and 'Rock Around The Clock' hit the big time, Haley's country-wes­tern past was all but forgotten. And this is why this album rules: what you get is 12 tracks of non-stop, no-holds-barred boogie, with great danceable grooves from the first to the last number. It may be «softer» than whatever came after it — not musically, but mood-wise — and some of it may be dumber than one would like to (Al Russel's 'ABC Boogie' comes to mind as a really path­etic and unconvincing juxtaposition of school and rock'n'roll values, next to Chuck Berry's 'Ring Ring Goes The Bell'), but each single song is FUN.

 

Of course, we might as well mention the technical aspects of these guys. Simplistic rock'n'roll depends, tooth and claw, upon the individual prowess of the players, and the Comets had one of the hottest rhythm sections around (simple double-bass lines and drum fills, but each note and each hit is delivered with the motivation of a bulldozer), and a great lead guitarist in the newly-arrived Franny Beecher (check out the fantastically melodic solo on 'Happy Baby'). (Beecher replaced the prematurely deceased Danny Cedrone, who was no quack himself, responsible for the whacky wobbly soloing on 'Rock Around The Clock'). And even if Bill himself could never, by a long stretch, called a «great» vocalist, these days his decidedly non-rock'n'rollish vocals not only seem perfectly suited for the Comets' sound, they can also be a nice change from the «rougher» performers — well, sometimes one can be expected to want one­self some rock'n'roll as lightweight entertainment, and these singles cut it like nothing else.

 

From time to time, there might be a relatively more «daring» number — for instance, not only does 'Thirteen Women' implicitly convey every man's wish to get it on with several lovely ladies at once, but it also mentions the H-Bomb as one possible way to get that wish accomplished, all set to an ominous, if not exactly apocalyptic, combination of sax riff and lead guitar siren. It was the B-side to 'Rock Around The Clock', and, in some ways, it is almost the better song out of the two, if you can believe that.

 

But overall, all of this stuff is completely innocent and toothless, perfect not only for the «middle ground-oriented» teens from 1950s happy American families, but, most of the time, even for their parents, if they'd only be willing to loosen up just for a moment (actually, it is hard to understand how any American parent at the time who had, at least once in his/her life, somersaulted to a wild performance by a big jazz band or a jump blues combo — and there must have been many of the­se — could, even in theory, object to the Comets even at their very wildest). And yet, at the same time, even fifty years after the fact, you can still feel the freshness and inspiration of these re­cor­dings. Perhaps this is not the proverbial spirit of rock'n'roll that you find here, but then it is the proverbial spirit of rock'n'roll's elder, slightly less rebellion-prone, brother. Thumbs up.

 

ROCK'N'ROLL STAGE SHOW (1956)

 

1) Calling All Comets; 2) Rockin' Thru The Rye; 3) A Rockin' Little Tune; 4) Hide And Seek; 5) Hey Then, There Now; 6) Goofin' Around; 7) Hook, Line And Sinker; 8) Rudy's Rock; 9) Choo Choo Ch'Boogie; 10) Blue Comet Blues; 11) Hot Dog Buddy Buddy; 12) Tonight's The Night.

 

This one puts together a few more singles, but also adds some LP-only tracks, a first for Bill. In addition, to reflect the burgeoning democratic spirit, the emphasis is more on The Comets than on Bill Haley. A few of the numbers are complete instrumentals, and plenty of lead vocal time is gi­ven to guitarists Franny Beecher and Billy Williamson, so that Bill himself only handles the lead on four numbers in toto.

 

Of these, 'Rockin' Thru The Rye' is the obvious highlight, not least because it is the first attempt to adapt a classic old bit of poetry to the newly emerged rockabilly genre — Robert Burns' 'Co­min' Thro' The Rye' is given an unexpected twist, but, since the latter had originally been written in the style of a party folk tune, it would make perfect sense to adapt it to contemporary folk va­lues, and the band does fine, placing another early rockabilly classic under their belt.

 

Some of the new tunes sound a little silly and hoedown-ish (even in 1956, it would be a little dis­tasteful to start a song called 'A Rockin' Little Tune' with the sound of an accordeon, no matter how well played). But in general, the instrumentals are fine. Rudy Pompilli's sax has rarely ven­tured on a wilder spree than on 'Calling All Comets', and it sounds particularly delicious when punctuated by wild-west-style twang-twangs from Beecher's guitar. Beecher himself gets to rip it up on 'Goofin' Around', playing sped-up jazzy licks like a maniac schoolboy (presaging a similar, if much more progressive, attitude from Ten Years After's Alvin Lee), and on 'Blue Comet Blues', one of those compositions that lies at the foundations of «blues rock» as a genre, even if no one would probably remember this, what with «blues rock» always being associated with the likes of John Mayall and Canned Heat.

 

Overall, this LP does not pack nearly as much punch as its predecessor — mostly due to the fact of already incorporating bits of the «early LP spirit», which presupposed and demanded a certain amount of filler — but the material shows that the band was still moving forward, all excited about these new sonic perspectives and dying to try out different approaches, even if not all of them seemed to work. Still an essential listen for anyone who takes 1950s pop music seriously — thumbs up without a single doubt.

 

ROCKIN' THE OLDIES (1957)

 

1) The Dipsy Doodle; 2) You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming; 3) Apple Blossom Time; 4) Moon Over Miami; 5) Is It True What They Say About Dixie?; 6) Carolina In The Morning; 7) Miss You; 8) Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone; 9) Ain't Misbehavin'; 10) One Sweet Letter From You; 11) I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter; 12) Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.

 

Conceptual! This might not have been the very first time that The Comets tried to mine the gol­den oldies territory for inspiration, but it certainly was the very first time they — or, for that mat­ter, anybody, gaining the band an extra point for innovation — attempted to «rock the oldies» over the course of an entire LP. Twelve rusty old standarts from the Songbook here, dusted off and polished late Fifties style, for your pleasure and mine.

 

Overall, it is not the finest moment in Bill Haley's story. The album yielded no hits (although 'The Dipsy Doodle' was released as a single): teen fans must not have been particularly happy about dancing to all these titles they knew (and abhorred) from their parents' records, and the parents, predictably, would not be thrilled to hear their old favorites transformed into the Devil's music. If the original idea was to offer some sort of a compromise, it was doomed from the start. But now, in retrospect, when titles like 'Apple Blossom Time' and 'Carolina In The Morning' no longer pro­voke the kind of allergies that they used to, and Bill Haley's brand of rock'n'roll is, in itself, an an­tique as quaint as the swing movement that it was meant to replace, Rockin' The Oldies is, once again, a fun, and instructive, thing to behold.

 

With The Comets in top instrumental form, and all the standards revved up properly, these songs are hardly that much worse than the band's original hits. It is true that most of them get very simi­lar arrangements, the original melodies are drastically simplified, and the overall atmosphere is too lightweight even for Haley's standards. The one true rocking number on the record is not even 'Dipsy Doodle', it is the even faster 'You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming', depending for its life on Beecher's one-note guitar «shots» and boogie solos. All the other oldies do seem to be «rocked» indeed, but that doesn't really make them rock, if you know what I mean. Some of this is quite si­milar in tone and mood to Carl Perkins' early brand of country-bop, except that The Comets are far more fluent and professional than Carl's backing band. Forgettable overall, but, like I said, a fairly interesting, non-trivial move at the time.

 

ROCKIN' AROUND THE WORLD (1958)

 

1) Pretty Alouette; 2) Me Rock-A-Hula; 3) Wooden Shoe Rock; 4) Vive La Rock And Roll; 5) Come Rock With Me; 6) Jamaica D.J.; 7) Piccadilly Rock; 8) Rockin' Matilda; 9) Rockin' Rollin' Schnitzelbank; 10) Rockin' Rita; 11) Oriental Rock; 12) El Rocko.

 

The birth of worldbeat! Forget Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon — this is where it all begins. Well, from one possible perspective at least. Although it would be tough to suspect Mr. Haley of a par­ticularly high level of sophistication, Rockin' Around The World shows that his knowledge and love of pop music was hardly limited to contemporary American forms. On this second «concep­tual» album, the point (gimmick) is to take bits and pieces of traditional folk tunes and generic «ethnic» melodies and mold them in a rock'n'roll-ish form, along the same lines they did it with the old swing and lounge tunes on their previous record.

 

Overall, it's a fairly silly idea, and it results in a fairly silly sound. But a hilariously silly sound all the same — and it is, at the very least, interesting and amusing to see how much effort the band, and Bill in person, had put into creating these odd concoctions: rewriting the lyrics, to insert all sorts of «rocking» references, speeding up the tempos, sometimes recycling old vocal lines and riffs to make the final effect more convincing, and so on.

 

For instance, all of us are well used to Elvis' transformation of 'O Sole Mio' into 'It's Now Or Ne­ver', which basically amounts to a new set of English lyrics and the addition of a steady pop rhy­thmic base. Few of us know that two years before the fact, Haley took the same tune, did all those things, but also sped up the tempo, set up a boogie bass line, threw out the sap (while still leaving the romance), and ended up with 'Come Rock With Me'. Who'd be the winner? Elvis — just be­cause he happened to have a so much grander singing voice? Or Bill — who did a far more suc­cessful job of showing how much unrealized potential that melody had in the first place?

 

Purists and PC types these days would probably castigate Haley for almost completely identify­ing «The World» with «The Western World»: other than a brief incorporation of some unspecifi­ed Middle Eastern motives into 'Oriental Rock', and steel guitarist Billy Williamson's imitation of the Caribbean accent on 'Jamaica D. J.' (which the aforementioned PC types these days would, no doubt, dub racist), all of the source material essentially stems from Europe (France, Germany, England, Holland) or, at best, Latin America. No attempts to put Australian aboriginal music to a good old rock beat. But one has to remember that the record was not motivated by deeply thought out «artistry», or by any Sixties-triggered feel of liberal guilt: most likely, Haley and his record label (Decca) simply thought that this would be a good way to bring the new sound of rock'n'roll closer to the ears of as many immigrant minorities in the US as possible. (Still no Chinese Rock, though. We'd have to wait until the Ramones for that).

 

It is not likely that the Comets would have any more success at that than they had at wooing tee­nagers' mothers with the sweet-and-rocking sounds of Rockin' The Oldies. Would a conserva­tive citizen of French origin be able to admire the re-write of 'Frère Jacques' as 'Vive La Rock And Roll'? And would a not so conservative citizen of French origin, already sick to death of 'Frère Jacques', find new respect for the song if he found out he could dance all night to it at the local ballroom? As a marketing move, I fail to see the smartness in this thing, and, once again, the album garnered not one single hit or classic.

 

But as a curious pop experiment that would be fun for younger generations to dig out fifty years after the fact, Rockin' Around The World is, I believe, a total gas. The only way one can truly enjoy all these proverbial ditties these days (for the record, Haley's range also covers 'London Bridge Is Falling Down', 'Hawaiian War Chant', and 'La Cucaracha' in one go — I feel silly even typing out all these names) is from a deconstructivist point of view, and, without knowing it, Ha­ley went on record as their first, or one of the first, post-modern interpreters. Too bad there was nobody to see it from that point of view back in 1958 — had the record made more of an impact on musical minds, who knows, maybe rock music could have turned into an art form several years earlier. Or maybe I'm exaggerating. Anyway, well worth a listen: thumbs up.

 

ROCKIN' THE JOINT (1958)

 

1) Rock The Joint; 2) Move It On Over; 3) How Many; 4) See You Later Alligator; 5) The Beak Speaks; 6) Forty Cups Of Coffee; 7) The Saints Rock And Roll; 8) Sway With Me; 9) It's A Sin; 10) Burn That Candle; 11) Rock Lomond; 12) Rip It Up.

 

Experiments, innovation, and conceptual LPs aside, what we really love the Comets for are their hit singles — and Rockin' The Joint, released in late 1958, did a relatively legit job of scooping up Haley's non-LP singles from the previous two years. Unlike the LPs, the singles never messed around with the basic formula, but in 1956-58 the band was still fresh, the rock'n'roll spirit was still young and ambitious, and there were plenty of cozy little twists and hooks one could deco­rate one's rockabilly output with.

 

'See You Later Alligator' and 'The Saints Rock And Roll' alone suffice to procure this record the title of second-most-important Bill Haley release out of the «original» bunch. Actually, it suffices to hear the original version of the tune by Bobby Charles to understand Haley's genius — how he took a funny, catchy, but unexceptional novelty number and transformed it into one of the quint­essential rock'n'roll anthems of its era. Likewise, his cover version of 'The Saints' is one of the ve­ry few that is still listenable after all these years — its boogie drive works every single time, and it acts much stronger on the brain than the awful realization that you are, in fact, listening to a version of 'The Saints', in a sane state of mind and completely of your own free will.

 

As subjective as the impression might be, it seems to me that the general kick-ass energy level actually rose during these years, mainly because of the instrumentalists getting deeper and deeper into the groove. Check out the instrumental break on 'Alligator' — Rudy and Franny taking it out on each other with shrill, frantic sax blasts and sharp guitar «shots» — or the tremendous climax of 'Saints', with the sax shooting see-through holes in your speakers. It is these moments that al­most make you forget how Bill Haley got into the rock'n'roll business almost by accident; as close as the Comets get to actually sounding «dangerous» rather than just providing lighthearted entertainment for the young 'uns at the top of the era's technological power.

 

Of course, we still reserve the rights to place a few complaints. 'Rock The Joint' rocks the joint alright, but is a fairly close-imitating rewrite of 'Rock Around The Clock'; 'Move It On Over' can­not hope to improve on Hank Williams' original, since Hank not only had a shar­per and more seductive personality than Bill could ever aspire to, but was himself as close to real rock'n'roll with that particular song as one ever got to rock'n'roll in the Fourties; 'It's A Sin' is a rather draggy half-hearted return to country-western; 'Rock Lomond' should have rather been pla­ced on Ro­ckin' The Oldies; and 'Burn That Candle' was already released on an earlier LP.

 

This is all not mentioning that some of Bill's finest singles of the period, for some reason, did not make the grade. I am primarily speaking of 'Teenager's Mother', a surprisingly grim indictment of the stubborn parents of today, "'cause the same thing that's worrying you is the same thing you used to do yourself"; 'Rockin' Rollin' Rover', one of the happiest tunes about a dog ever written; and 'Don't Knock The Rock', the title track to the movie of the same name which was basically a follow-up to Rock Around The Clock, but failed to replicate its success.

 

Still, these complaints are all anachronistic — Rockin' The Joint has long since been retired from the catalog, and today you will most likely find all these songs on compilations: the best ones on best-of, the complete ones on Decca's boxsets. So, essentially, the point of this review was merely to alert you to the power of 'See You Later Alligator', especially if your notion of «rock'n'roll oldie» does not extend far beyond Led Zep and Grand Funk Railroad. To that aim, a big thumbs up for the record.

 

BILL HALEY'S CHICKS (1959)

 

1) Whoa Mabel!; 2) Ida, Sweet As Apple Cider; 3) Eloise; 4) Dinah; 5) Skinny Minnie; 6) Mary, Mary Lou; 7) Sweet Sue, Just You; 8) B. B. Betty; 9) Charmaine; 10) Corrine, Corrina; 11) Marie; 12) Lean Jean.

 

Had more artists adopted that practice after Bill Haley — namely, building a concept LP aro­und successful hit singles — art-rock would have been born, baptized, graduated, become the basic laughing stock currency of the Ad­di­son DeWitts of pop music, and buried six feet under way be­fore the hippie movement even started. So thank you, artists. Which does not, however, mean that all of these «concepts» were equally laughable on their own terms.

 

Since the concept of Bill Haley's Chicks is, this time around, restricted to song titles and choru­ses, rather than actual music themes, this suggests that the man's penultimate LP for Decca would sound less «odd» to the common ear, but might have the potential to beat all those other experi­mental records in terms of sheer entertainment. Which is exactly what it is. The success of 'Skin­ny Minnie' brings on the idea of an entire suite of songs that namedrop Bill Haley's «chicks» — some of them original ones, some on loan from much older artists.

 

The bad news is that, whenever Haley went fishing for covers, he'd be delving into the Songbook — so that there is still a lot of overlap here with the spirit of Rockin' The Oldies, not necessarily a good thing, no matter how much rockabilly makeup is slapped on the faces of these old swing numbers and crooner tunes. I mean, 'Charmaine'? The most popular version of that song was re­corded in 1951 by The Mantovani Orchestra; need I say anything more?

 

The good news is that there are many sides to this story. For instance, it gave Bill a pretext to co­ver Big Joe Turner one more time: his 'Corrine, Corrina' relates to Turner's version the exact same way as 'Shake, Rattle, & Roll', that is, transforms the black teen's R&B into the white teen's rock­abilly with the purest of intentions — let 'em shake hands in genuine interracial friendship, espe­cially considering that all four songs were recorded by artists who were, themselves, way out of their teenage years. It also has a spotlight reserved for Billy Williamson, providing a funny, sli­ght­­ly asthmatic-paranoid-sounding lead vocal on the original composition 'B. B. Betty' (but, un­fortunately, no solo steel guitar part). And the chorus of 'Whoa Mabel!' may have provided the inspiration for Procol Harum's Keith Reed ten years later.

 

'Skinny Minnie' is still the key track — Bill's last «gold» classic for Decca, or, in fact, last gold classic ever, since the Warner years would not yield any more proverbial standards for the rock'n'roll hall of fame. Concept-wise, it was probably Bill's attempt to one-up Larry Williams and his 'Bony Moronie', but musically, it's quite original, and its charmingly dated hilariousness is all its own, along with its unforgettable trill-based melody.

 

Fans of Franny Beecher will have to be disappointed, though: he only gets to shine thoroughly on Irving Berlin's 'Marie' — most of the other songs either do not have solos at all, or all the soloing goes to Rudy on the sax. Whether this, in any way, reflected a rift between Bill and Franny that led to their parting ways in 1960, or was simply an incidental matter, I have no current way of knowing, but that's just the way it is. Almost prevents me from giving the record a thumbs up, but, after all, the bright world of rockabilly does not begin and end with guitar solos. Give it up for brass, too, unless we're talking modern jazz festivals.

 

STRICTLY INSTRUMENTAL (1959)

 

1) Joey's Song; 2) Music, Music, Music; 3) Mack The Knife; 4) In A Little Spanish Town; 5) Two Shadows; 6) Sha­ky; 7) Strictly Instrumental; 8) Skokiaan; 9) Puerto Rican Peddlar; 10) Drowsy Waters; 11) Chiquita Linda; 12) The Cat Walk.

 

Well, perhaps not really strictly — there are, after all, several bits of vocal harmonies scattered here and there, and, last time I heard, the Comets were still belting out CHIQUITA LINDA! CHI­QUITA LINDA! like crazy on track no. 11. But that should not detract from the fact that Bill Ha­ley ended his love affair with Decca in the usual consistent manner, with another «proto-concep­tual» record, this time one on which he himself was nothing more than the least well heard bit player in the midst of seasoned instrumental professionals. (He is out there, though; there seems to be some documental proof — although, frankly, who'd care?).

 

If simple instrumental music for lightweight entertainment purposes, from those good old days when this meant having real bands set up a groove, rather than one DJ and a set of cables, means anything to you at all, Strictly Instrumental is as good a Comets album as any other one. How can any album that opens with such a deliciously unforgettable rendition of Joe Reisman's 'Joey's Song' not be good? If, after but one concentrated listen, you can easily get the theme out of your head, I'd be afraid to inherit your central nervous system. (Of course, for some people that might be a negative — way too annoyingly catchy! — but for me, that'd only be a problem if we had scientific proof for the jaded old theory that catchy pop music was invented by sneaky capitalists turning people away from the pressing issues of class struggle. Last time I heard, Chomsky was still working on that).

 

Anyway, 'Joey's Song' is a classic, as is the Comets' rendition of 'Skokiaan', which takes the Zim­babwean original and gives it, first time ever, a supertight foundation and a glossy modern sheen. The only problem with most of these covers is that none of them really pass for genuine rock and roll: I mean, 'Mack The Knife'? Beecher totally smokes with his little fills and whoops all over the place, but in between all the Kurt Weill and all the Mabel Wayne, we tend to get lost in Ro­ckin' The Oldies territory all over again, and this time, the oldies aren't even «rocked» all that much. There's some sub-standard country ('Drowsy Blues'), some toothless cha-cha-cha ('Puerto Rican Peddlar'), and some tap dancing ('Music! Music! Music!') — all of them sounding inoffen­sively retro, but not representing the Comets at their best.

 

Thus, apart from 'Joey's Song' and 'Skokiaan', I would only advise paying closer attention to two Beecher/Williamson originals: 'Shaky', a proto-blues-rock groove that does, indeed, utilize «sha­ky» guitar tones throughout (about as far out as the original Comets ever ventured with experi­mental sonic textures), and 'The Catwalk', the grumbliest and «blackest»-sounding shuffle out here, the only song on which, perhaps, an Elmore James would not refuse to jam along. Other than that, it was an interesting, but rather modest, way to terminate the most important phase of the band's career.

 

PS. Actually, add 'Chiquita Linda' to that list — not because of the silly main theme, but because of the fabulous boogie solo that Beecher plays from 1:13 to 1:41. Say what you will, but that guy could really hit it when in the proper mood, no matter how inappropriate the setting.

 

BILL HALEY AND HIS COMETS (1960)

 

1) Rock Around The Clock; 2) I Almost Lost My Mind; 3) Blue Suede Shoes; 4) Blueberry Hill; 5) My Special An­gel; 6) Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On; 7) Crazy Man Crazy; 8) Kansas City; 9) Love Letters In Again; 10) I'm In Love Again; 11) Shake, Rattle And Roll; 12) Stagger Lee.

 

If you want to know why rock'n'roll almost died a miserable death around 1960, take a listen to this album — in context, of course. The Comets' move to Warner Bros. was supposed (I assume) to give the band's career a shot in the arm, but no one expected the needle to contain morphine. In fact, the band was still quite intact, the leader well-groomed and smiling as usual, and the music was still unquestionably categorized as rock'n'roll. But on December 25, 1959, Father Christmas told the world to start waiting around for the Beatles, and the world followed his orders.

 

The fact that Haley's first album for Warners begins with an almost note-for-note loyal re-recor­ding of 'Rock Around The Clock' is actually the least worriesome aspect of the album. Sure, it's got a little bit less of the youthful energy that fed the original, and there was no need for anyone who cared about his old 45s to waste time on comparing the two versions. But at least it's solid Haley-style rhythm & blues material which Haley always did best.

 

Much more problematic is that Warners saddled the Comets — or, perhaps, the Comets saddled themselves, I am not entirely sure of the situation — with rock'n'roll hit material from the past few years that even innocent teens of the late 1950s would have never guessed to associate with Bill, let alone all of us today. Let's face it: «Bill Haley Rock» is, more or less, a thing in itself. 'Rock Around The Clock', 'See You Later Alligator', 'Razzle Dazzle', 'Rockin' Through The Rye' — there's a reason we mostly know Bill through all these songs that seemed so tailormade for The Comets, very few artists of note (or solid reputation) have dared cover them in the ensuing decades. Everyone wanted to sing Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Gene Vincent; nobody wan­ted to sing Bill Haley & The Comets, and not just because The Comets were slicker, older, and «more confor­mist» than the truly wild guys of rock'n'roll (which they were, of course) — also be­cause The Comets had their own brand of sound which, for quite a few young American and Bri­tish whippersnappers, was pretty tough to reproduce.

 

But here, what we encounter is exactly the downside of it. As the band switches to covering Carl Perkins ('Blue Suede Shoes'), Fats Domino ('Blueberry Hill' and 'I'm In Love Again'), Jerry Lee Lewis ('Whole Lotta Shaking Going On'), and Little Richard ('Kansas City'), it's not just us won­dering why the hell they'd want to do it — it seems like they themselves are not quite sure of why they are doing it, either. This is the only explanation I have for the fact that not once over this en­tire record was I actually motivated to stop whatever it was I was doing at the time, and marvel at the sharpness and inventiveness of a Franny Beecher solo. It's not as if there were no Franny Bee­cher solos here — there are quite a few, they just seem... superfluous, as does most of the record.

 

The only number here that does show invention is a brand new rearrangement of 'Shake, Rattle And Roll'. But since «invention», in this case, simply means doing it with more swing and less aggression than the original, who cares? We all know which version is going to make it to God's personal hall of fame. 'Crazy Man Crazy' is actually much better, sticking both to the letter and the spirit of the original.

 

It isn't ugly or anything (except for the sappy tearjerker ballads), because the Comets were still ke­eping hot, and if you have never heard another version of 'Blue Suede Shoes' or 'Whole Lotta Sha­king', these ones might at least do as temporary substitutes without spoiling your taste. But it is the first Bill Haley album that has no reason to exist — whatsoever, not even in the shape of a single two-minute-long «lost gem» or anything. It is for situations like these that the term «jum­ping the shark» was invented; this was certainly not the complete end for Haley as a pleasure-pro­viding artist, but the obvious career-breaking point at which the man completely lost his «rele­vance», once and for all. And who knows — it might all have been triggered by just one errone­ous marketing decision.

 

HALEY'S JUKE BOX (1960)

 

1) Singing The Blues; 2) Candy Kisses; 3) No Letter Today; 4) This Is The Thanks I Get; 5) Bouquet Of Roses; 6) There's A New Moon Over My Shoulder; 7) Cold Cold Heart; 8) The Wild Side Of Life; 9) Anytime; 10) Afraid; 11) I Don't Hurt Anymore; 12) Detour.

 

Perhaps they thought the move would be fresh — go back to the old country roots, but still ma­king use of their rockabilly experience, not to mention advances in recording and producing tech­nology. But the country-western market, although far from «dead» in 1960 (the day the market for country-western dies is when they cut off electricity support for everything south of the Ma­son-Dixon line), had closed for Haley five years earlier, and since he never was that big a fixture on it in the first place, the commercial strategy behind this venture remains fuzzy. Perhaps — who knows? — it was simply a nostalgia fit on Bill's part. After all, the man loved country-wes­tern, as hard as it is to believe for us slick city dwellers who might think that, once you have turn­ed your back on cowboy music, you can only return to it at gunpoint.

 

Anyway, there are two good points about this record. First, not all of these tunes suck. Some are taken at fast tempos, reminding the forgetful that country-western does indeed lie at the heart of rockabilly; and some have been chosen from the limited tasteful sectors of the pool, e. g. 'Cold Cold Heart', which is, after all, Hank Williams, and thus somewhat exempt from contempt. Se­cond, the Comets are still a well-oiled band that has not lost its brawny energy behind all the sea­soned professionalism, and they give these tunes all they've got. Predictably, the show is very much stolen away by Billy Williamson, the steel guitarist, but on the uptempo numbers they also find plenty of space for Beecher and Pompilli's solos.

 

However, the only song that I could see making it onto a best-of collection is Paul Westmore­land's 'Detour': fast, singalong-ish, distinguished by a great soloing duet between Williamson and Beecher, where the first one plays an almost psychedelic pedal steel part, and the latter swiftly undercuts it with sharp boogie-woogie licks. A fabulous performance, unfortunately, buried at the end of an album that, overall, made no impression on anyone — and, unsurprisingly, heralded the end of Haley's short and sweet relationship with Warner Bros., and, subsequently, a swift drift towards total oblivion.

 

TWISTIN' KNIGHTS AT THE ROUND TABLE (1962)

 

1) Lullaby Of Birdland Twist; 2) Twist Marie; 3) One-Two-Three Twist; 4) Down By The Riverside Twist; 5) Queen Of The Twisters; 6) Caravan Twist; 7) I Want A Little Girl; 8) Whistlin' And Walkin' Twist; 9) Florida Twist; 10) Eight More Miles To Louisville.

 

From around 1961 — upon Haley's departure from Warners — the Comets' discography becomes a nightmare. Although Bill honestly and faithfully recorded material throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the absolute majority of these albums have forever been out of print, and for understan­dable reasons: this absolute majority consists of innumerable re-recordings of older classics, oc­ca­sionally varied by attempts to place the Haley stamp on contemporary hits, of interest only because of the novelty value (who knew Haley actually covered CCR's 'Who'll Stop The Rain'? Certainly not me, until I started digging a bit. Was I intrigued? Probably. Did it make me happy? Not even unexpectedly so.).

 

Since I have no plans — and no easy opportunities, either — to become an obsessed vinyl collec­tor, I have little choice but to save myself the troubles of untangling the intricacies of Bill's late period discography, and merely run through a couple of the more easily available titles. First and foremost, it may be of use to know that, in the early Sixties, after all the setbacks, Bill and his band finally found themselves a profitable niche — reimagining themselves as «Kings of the Twist» and, since in the States that crown could not be contested from Chubby Checker, reloca­ting to Mexico, where Bill could freely and fluently sing in Spanish, well enough to earn the res­pect of all the local caballeros, and, who knows, maybe even a few señoritas (although one would be hard pressed to find someone less close to the stereotype of a Latin lover than Mr. Haley).

 

A bunch of twist-related albums were released on the Mexican Dimsa label in the process, none of them easily available, and most of them, I'm pretty sure, sounding like carbon copies of each other. However, the Comets' skill at twist-a-gaining can be conveniently appreciated through a rare enough twist session recorded in the States — a live album, recorded during a couple of nights in March 1962 at some NYC joint called «Round Table» (hence the oh-so-funny name). Among other places, all of these tracks have resurfaced on the 6-CD The Warner Brothers And More boxset — «more» apparently meaning «extra recordings made in some respectable places in the early 1960s, rather than in some shitty Mexican dump».

 

Anyway, if you care for twist at all — and there is no reason not to care about twist, unless, as it used to be in Soviet times, you were force-fed it instead of rock'n'roll, just as it happened with disco ten years later — The Comets actually managed to make a strong pro-twist argument here. This is still the «classic» version of the band: only Franny Beecher had left in the middle of their twistin' career, but for this particular live session he actually rejoined his old pals, so you do get to hear his take on the twist thing. As for Billy Williamson, Rudy Pompilli, and, of course, Bill himself — they honestly seem to enjoy what they're doing.

 

The band's biggest and catchiest hit in that vein ('Florida Twist') is played here, and it is all but im­possible to not get involved even if you detest the campy atmosphere. But every now and then they remember to throw in a snappy bite out of the past: as innocent as the title of 'Silbando Y Caminando' ('Whistling And Walking') is, the song is graced by a great pop-rock melody, with a thicker guitar tone, and also more improvisatory and chaotic playing from Beecher than was ever heard in the 1950s. The band also twistifies 'Caravan', which does not lose much from the rear­rangement, and, in fact, manages to sound heavier and gruffer than the original.

 

In short, the only two not-too-fun numbers on here are the slow ones: '1-2-3 Twist' is a theo­retically amusing, but not too exciting attempt at marrying twist with slow waltz, and the lounge balladry intermission with 'I Want A Little Girl' fails because it's a vocal-oriented number, the likes of which Haley could never pull off next to his idol Big Joe Turner. Everything else, twist or not, is happy fun rock-a-twist that actually deserves to be heard more these days, instead of being confined to Tarantino-style movie soundtracks. Come to think of it, the tastes of Mexican audi­ences weren't that bad in 1962. Minor thumbs up.

 

ROCK-A-ROUND THE CLOCK KING (1964)

 

1) See You Later Alligator; 2) ABC Boogie; 3) Panic; 4) I've Got News For Hugh; 5) Don't Mess Around; 6) The Wobble; 7) This Is Goodbye, Goodbye; 8) Train Of Sin; 9) Altar Of Love; 10) Helena; 11*) Yakety Sax.

 

Okay... apparently, in 1964 Haley's career still mostly revolved around Mexico and the Orfeon la­bel, for which he was churning out new records faster than the Mexican government could im­port vinyl. Some of them might be good, too, judging by the high quality of the Round Table album; however, these days it is easier to have access to this lonely session that Bill and the boys cut in January '64 (in Las Vegas?) for the US Guest Star record label.

 

With Johnny Kay on lead guitar and the rest of the band still sweating it out like they did in the old days, this ten-song record, extracted from the depths of the large Bear Family 6-CD set (and I am taking the liberty of augmenting it with an enthusiastic run through 'Yakety Sax', taken from the same session), shows that, yes indeed, in 1964 the Comets still sounded swell, even if they were utterly and hopelessly irrelevant. Not entirely behind the times, though: the production is fuller and richer than usual, and Kay was clearly a guitar player of the next generation, not as in­ventive or aggressive as Beecher, but in full control of new, fuller tones. Listen to the solo on 'See You Later, Alligator': it is not as sharp as the original, but it is definitely power-poppier. That there guitar is just smiling at you, with a rich, juicy tone.

 

The record is not all just re-recordings of older standards, either: after the couple of obligatory opening «reminders» of why we were all into Haley in the first place, the band goes on to play various dance numbers that may have all been minor hits in their day, but most of which I do not recognize at all. That is not the problem, though; the problem is, the album is way too slow — too many mid-tempo shuffles, not enough boogie. (Odd enough, one of the most boogie-oriented num­bers here is the gospel-tinged 'Train Of Sin'!).

 

Decent listen, but no, no lost gems here or anything. And as for 'Yakety Sax', well, they really shouldn't have covered it — apparently, not every sax player can play the yakety-sax, and Rudy Pompilli, well, he's one of the best, but on this version at least, he does not give it his best, and any performance of 'Yakety Sax' that is not absolutely top-yakety will sound just stupid. The same applies to most of the other songs here. Still, Johnny Kay was a decent guitarist, and fans of early Sixties electric pop guitar might need to look into this.

 

SCRAPBOOK / LIVE IN NEW YORK (1969)

 

1) Shake, Rattle & Roll; 2) Dance Around The Clock; 3) Rip It Up; 4) Night Train; 5) Guitar Boogie; 6) Razzle Dazzle; 7) You Are My Sunshine; 8) Rock-A-Beatin' Boogie; 9) Skinnie Minnie; 10) Johnny B Goode; 11) Kansas City; 12) Rock Around The Clock; 13) When The Saints Go Marching In; 14) Rudy's Rock; 15) Rock The Joint; 16) Fingers On Fire; 17) See You Later Alligator; 18) Wipe Out; 19) There Goes My Everything; 20) Alabama Bound; 21) Whole Lot Of Shakin' Going On; 22) Rock Around The Clock.

 

Haley's mid- to late-1960s recordings still remain a mish-mash of hard-to-find stuff, mostly on Mexican labels or semi-important American ones that preferred to release occasional compila­tions of older stuff than take any new sessions from Bill — understandably so, because even the new sessions would mostly consist of re-recordings of the old stuff.

 

Consequently, I do not think that we are missing much if there still has not been made a meticu­lous attempt to scoop all the results of those sessions in one comprehensive package. By 1965-66, the Comets were a fixed «oldies act» – in fact, they could have easily become one three years ear­lier, if not for Bill's brilliant decision to occupy the vacant throne of the Mexican King of Twist ­– and the only thing that could have rejuvenated that act would be to get Jimmy Page to play lead guitar in the band. Instead, they settled on a Nick Masters, who was okay, but lacked the fresh­ness of Franny Beecher anyway.

 

One well-illustrative slice of this late-period version of the Comets can be scraped off of the al­ready mentioned 6-CD Bear Family set — a full recording of the band's live performance in 1969 at the Bitter End in New York, following up on the heels of their performance at MSG, organized by promoter Richard Nader as part of his «Rock'n'Roll Revival» program. Part of the show was originally released in 1970 (on the Kama Sutra label, I believe) as Bill Haley's Scrapbook; other parts were subsequently released under various titles, including Live In New York in the early 1980s, but, as far as I can tell, this CD edition is the first one to properly arrange and reproduce the entire show, including announcements, stage banter, and an encore performance of 'Rock Around The Clock', done twice over the course of the show.

 

It's a fairly decent and enjoyable concert – even if most of Haley's banter is of a decidedly nostal­gic character, so much so that you can easily sense the genuine sadness behind the invoked chee­riness: even though Haley himself was only 44 at the time, it is clear that the people in the audi­ence were looking at the man as a curious relic, and the eight-minute standing ovation, described in the liner notes, that he was «honored with» at the MSG show, only proves that – whoever heard of an eight-minute standing ovation for Jimi Hendrix, for instance?

 

Nevertheless, the performances themselves are anything but nostalgic. There is no attempt to re­create any «genuine Fifties atmosphere»: the sound is full, the amplification quite modern, the guitar tones thick and solid. The setlist is not solely composed of golden Haley classics (although most of the major hits are played), but intersperses them with a good helping of classics by other early rock masters ('Johnny B Goode', 'Kansas City', 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On', all wisely sung by Nick Masters because the style is unsuitable for Haley's voice); a few excursions in good old country-western; and some solo showcases for individual band members – including a brief, economic drum solo on 'Wipe Out', Masters' flashy jazz guitar runs on 'Fingers On Fire', and, of course, 'Rudy's Rock' – Rudy Pompilli, at the time, was the only original Comet besides Bill him­self, and accordingly gets the second biggest applause from all present.

 

Although there are no particular standouts here, and no real reason for anybody (except for really kind-hearted people) to hunt for this performance, it is still a thumbs up. The «Rock'n'Roll Revi­val» franchise itself was an event of some historical significance – one of the first intentional at­tempts to somehow «enshrine» the living history of rock'n'roll – and Haley managed to supply just the right vibe for it: nostalgic, slightly elegiac, but dignified and entertaining enough to show the somewhat illiterate youngsters that the forefathers of rock'n'roll did not earn their bread, and their accolades, for nothing.

 

ROCK AROUND THE COUNTRY (1971)

 

1) Dance Around The Clock; 2) Games People Play; 3) A Little Piece At A Time; 4) I Wouldn't Have Missed It For The World; 5) Bony Moronie; 6) There's A New Moon Over My Shoulder; 7) Me And Bobby McGee; 8) How Ma­ny; 9) Who'll Stop The Rain; 10) Pink Eyed Pussycat; 11) Travelin' Band; 12) No Letter Today.

 

In late 1970, Bill and the band turned up in Nashville, where they went in the studio for a couple of days to cut the very last record that you can actually find talked about in even the most detailed account of Bill's career. Even so, Rock Around The Country, the last Haley album to have ever mattered in some way, has never been released on CD, aside from a few separate cuts that ended up on obscure collections; I am reviewing a shabby vinyl rip here, reveling around in the crack­ling and hissing like a vintage master.

 

Should it be released on CD? Well, it's not like Bill Haley, in 1970, could spearhead a revolution in country-rock. But it does indicate an intelligent change of sound that the band was able to un­dergo. With a solid mix of oldies (some of them well-seasoned chestnuts, like 'How Many' and 'There's A New Moon', some never tried be­fore, like 'Bony Moronie') and contemporary material, and a thicker, denser sound that makes good use of most of Nashville's arsenal, Rock Around The Country shows that, had Haley been able to overcome his personal problems, the Comets might have become a more respectable institution, say, touring in support of Willie Nelson or something like that.

 

Not that I really like Haley's interpretation of 'Who'll Stop The Rain', which, just as it used to be fifteen years before, suffers from the usual problem: significant reduction of heat level compared to the original. Where Fogerty sang the song with an «optimistic-apocalyptic» fire in his throat, Bill sings it as if he were taking a pleasant stroll in the park. But then again, who knows, perhaps there's a time and a place for this mild take on the source material as well. (The other CCR num­ber, 'Travelin' Band', is much weirder — taken at the fast tempo of the original, it is sung by Nick Masters in a hoarse, trebly voice that sounds not unlike Lemmy from Mötörhead. For a few se­conds out there, I was afraid it was Mötörhead!).

 

On the other hand, Kristofferson's 'Me & Bobby McGee' is given a delicious treat, with Bill cap­turing the heart and soul of the tune to a tee. (Not that there's much to capture, but it's a good song all the same). And even if he takes the straightforward pain out of his rendition of Joe South's 'Games People Play', replacing it with frolicky catchiness, at least the thoughtful lyrics are left alone — and, when you take it all together, it turns out that the Comets were actually quite picky about the kind of contemporary material to take over. (Okay, so was Dolly Parton, who also co­vered 'Games People Play' the previous year — but it's not like anybody ever cared about what exactly Dolly Parton was singing, right?).

 

Considering that 'Bony Moronie' is still the same friendly pub-rocker Larry Williams wanted it to be, and that 'Pink Eyed Pussycat' features the gimmick of band members howling and whining like actual cats, and that there is only one generic country ballad on the entire album — I certain­ly vote for having it on CD, sooner or later. At the very least, it is unquestionably better than any studio album that Elvis released in the 1970s — very rooty-tooty and down-to-earth, with none of the overblown, out-distant Vegasy schmaltz from the King.

 

Unfortunately, it was also more or less the end of the road for Bill. Everything else that he'd cut until his untimely death from a brain tumor in 1981 was mostly rehashings and re-recordings, so much so that I cannot even find solid evidence for at least one more album that could, like Rock Around The Country, be thought of as a real LP. So this is probably the most fitting place for us to say goodbye, and go rip it up in other places. Thumbs up.

BILLIE HOLIDAY

LADY DAY: THE MASTER TAKES AND SINGLES (1933-1944; 2007)

 

CD I: 1) I Wished On The Moon; 2) What A Little Moonlight Can Do; 3) Miss Brown To You; 4) If You Were Mine; 5) These 'N' That 'N' Those; 6) You Let Me Down; 7) Spreadin' Rhythm Around; 8) Life Begins When You're In Love; 9) It's Like Reaching For The Moon; 10) These Foolish Things; 11) I Cried For You; 12) Did I Remember?; 13) No Re­grets; 14) Summertime; 15) Billie's Blues; 16) A Fine Romance; 17) One, Two, Button Your Shoe; 18) Easy To Love; 19) The Way You Look Tonight; 20) Pennies From Heaven; CD II: 1) That's Life I Guess; 2) I Can't Give You Anything But Love; 3) I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm; 4) He Ain't Got Rhythm; 5) This Year's Kisses; 6) Why Was I Born?; 7) I Must Have That Man; 8) The Mood That I'm In; 9) You Showed Me The Way; 10) My Last Affair; 11) Moanin' Low; 12) Where Is The Sun?; 13) Let's Call The Whole Thing Off; 14) They Can't Take That Away From Me; 15) Don't Know If I'm Comin' Or Goin'; 16) I'll Get By; 17) Mean To Me; 18) Foolin' Myself; 19) Easy Living; 20) I'll Never Be The Same; CD III: 1) Me, Myself And I; 2) A Sailboat In The Moonlight; 3) Without Your Love; 4) Trav'lin' All Alone; 5) He's Funny That Way; 6) Nice Work If You Can Get It; 7) Things Are Looking Up; 8) My Man; 9) Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man; 10) When You're Smiling; 11) On The Sentimental Side; 12) When A Woman Loves A Man; 13) You Go To My Head; 14) I'm Gonna Lock My Heart (And Throw Away The Key); 15) The Very Thought Of You; 16) I Can't Get Started; 17) More Than You Know; 18) Sugar; 19) Long Gone Blues; 20) Some Other Spring; CD IV: 1) Them There Eyes; 2) Swing, Brother, Swing; 3) Night And Day; 4) The Man I Love; 5) Body And Soul; 6) Falling In Love Again; 7) Laughing At Life; 8) Time On My Hands; 9) St. Louis Blues; 10) Loveless Love; 11) Let's Do It; 12) Georgia On My Mind; 13) All Of Me; 14) God Bless The Child; 15) Am I Blue?; 16) I Cover The Waterfront; 17) Love Me Or Leave Me; 18) Gloomy Sunday; 19) It's A Sin To Tell A Lie; 20) Until The Real Thing Comes Along.

 

The Real Man, starting off his exploration of Lady Day's career, will, of course, want to own the expansive edition of The Complete Billie Holiday On Columbia: 10CDs that flush the archives out completely, with all the preserved alternate takes that allow The Real Man to explore every nook and notch in the Lady's deliveries. However, for the humble purposes of humble reviewing, this abbreviated 4-CD version will do nicely. Coming out something like six years after the com­plete edition (because, otherwise, how many people would be saving their money?), it simply contains what it says it contains — the master takes, originally released on the Brunswick and Vo­calion subdivisions of Columbia. And, unless you are a committed jazz historian, these 4 CDs are exactly what you are going to be listening to anyway.

 

How does one review Billie Holiday? Well, how does one write about vocal jazz in general? For the most part, one either doesn't, or does it in a somewhat condescending manner: jazz reviews are rarely satisfying for the «average customer», since most jazz reviewers tend to write from the «inside» perspective: either you «get it» and «are with us», in which case describing the music will be superfluous, or you «don't get it» and «are an outsider», in which case describing the mu­sic will be futile. Jazz people rarely bother with seductive advertising (to my big surprise, even more rarely than classical people — probably because jazz audiences are still a little bit more numerous. But don't worry, a few more years of Taylor Swift and that'll pass, too).

 

Anyway, while I have no plans of ever turning systematically to jazz reviews, Billie Holiday is one of those cherished exceptions, and I certainly have no intention to review her as a «jazz ar­tist», even though, technically, she sure wasn't a Delta blueswoman or a Nashville country prima­donna. On these 80 recordings that span the first decade of her career, she is frequently backed by some of the hottest players on the scene (Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, etc.), but each of the recordings still belongs to her and her only. In the definition of Billie as «vocal jazz» it is almost exclusively the «vocal» part that matters, and this is why she managed to serve as a role model for so many people, a lot of them having very little or nothing to do with «jazz» as a matter of fact.

 

Same goes for the material. All of her life, and never as faithfully as on these early Columbia sin­gles, Billie sang very little outside of the regular Tin Pan Alley stuff. And, as I have done this in many other places, I must repeat that «The Great American Songbook», per se, does very little for me. Safe, cuddly, monotonous, predictable, easy-going, overtly commercial stuff, you know how it goes — not denying the melodic talents of Irving Berlin or anything, but there has always been way too much yawn-inducing formula in that business. Not that I'm stating anything more revealing than a trivial fact here; however, another trivial fact is that most of these a-dollar-a-do­zen compositions were primarily intended as basic vehicles for interpreters. And of all the inter­preters, few could be bigger originals than Billie.

 

Because, really, leave it to Lady Day to take these mechanical constructions and treat them as hu­man product. Start off from the beginning: the 1935 recording of 'I Wished On The Moon'. Com­pare it with Bing Crosby's version from The Big Broadcast (same year). Now, who really needs to be told about the difference in attitudes? First time around, I hear a human being; second time around, I hear a trained mechanical songbird (no disrespect to Crosby — it takes lotsa time and skill to train a mechanical songbird, yet...). These days, we are accustomed to singers sounding as human beings, which is why the impact has worn off and may not be noticeable to those who only compare Billie with post-Billie. The simple fact is that, without Billie, there would be no post-Billie. The world needed a Billie, and it was so fantastic that along came Billie.

 

Although the liner notes to the album try to painstakingly differentiate between the «great», the «good», and the «so-so» on these 4 CDs, I am in no position to do that. I certainly feel the differ­ence when it comes to those few cases in which Billie also comes forward as a songwriter. On 'Billie's Blues', her first official credit, she does not really do a lot of writing: the song is a generic piece of «urban blues», however, what makes it special is the fact that it is, indeed, the only true piece of blues on the record, and, while it does not immediately make Billie into Bessie's heir, it pushes her personality into the stale urban blues formula, revitalizing it for the future. Later on, she repeats the same formula (but in a slower, more languid manner) on 'Long Gone Blues' (from 1939). And then, her third and last credit on the album is 'God Bless The Child' from 1941, which, even on its own, has far more credibility than all the other songs on here — and, in the hands of the author, becomes a moody, bitter masterpiece for eternity.

 

As for the rest... highlights, lowlights, who cares? Some songs are catchier and more playful than others, some moodier, some more romantic, some have pleasant trumpet solos or piano intros, some do not. Since this is only the first decade, Billie's voice is represented here in its freshest and purest form, without the crackling, hissing, and «white noise» it would be saddled with later on, as her health quickly faded. Not everyone finds this an advantage — since Billie never was a «master technician» in the first place, having next to no range and a rather limited set of moods to sing in, some people actually prefer her «struggling» with the singing, believing that it adds even more «humanity» to the overall effect. That may be so, but, on the other hand, the neophyte will certainly find more pleasure in listening to a healthy young woman than a raspy wreck, and on no other collection will you find Billie's voice in as great a condition as here.

 

And that voice? Take another comparison: Annette Hanshaw's 'I Must Have That Man' from 1928 with Billie's version that came almost a decade later. Both are fine takes, but Hanshaw's is clearly following the lyrics: the tone is delicate, but firm and stern, closely matching the message of the title. Billie sings the same words, but she is not going for any sort of explicit «toughness». Liste­ners could be foolish enough to suggest that she simply does not pay attention to the lyrics, sing­ing everything in the only way her limited possibilities allow her to sing — and they may be right about the limited possibilities, but that is exactly what is so clever about the whole thing: try, somehow, to wiggle it out — to play the tough girl with all the frailty that you can muster. The ef­fect is intriguing, paradoxical, and, most importantly, it works. I don't know how or why, but that is what's usually being referred to as «magic», and, for the moment at least, I am quite con­tent with that explanation.

 

«Reviewing» the individual songs one by one is an obvious waste of time and space: just get this whole thing, in toto. Nobody is forcing you to sit through all the 80 tracks in one sitting, but even if this ever happens, there is nothing painful in the experience — as monotonous as the atmos­phere is, I cannot imagine Lady Day's singing become annoying: somehow, she's got this perfect vocal setting that does not «overdo» or «underdo» one single parameter. Getting tired of Janis Joplin's screaming, of Joan Baez' shredding, of Ella Fitzgerald's rough-and-toughness, of Nancy Sinatra's «look-at-me-I'm-so-hip-to-the-Sixties-ness» — that I understand. But tired of Billie Ho­liday? That's, like, tired of living. Thumbs up.

 

THE COMMODORE MASTER TAKES (1939-1944; 2000)

 

1) Strange Fruit; 2) Yesterdays; 3) Fine And Mellow; 4) I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues; 5) How Am I To Know?; 6) My Old Flame; 7) I'll Get By; 8) I Cover The Waterfront; 9) I'll Be Seeing You; 10) I'm Yours; 11) Embraceable You; 12) As Time Goes By; 13) He's Funny That Way; 14) Lover, Come Back To Me; 15) Billie's Blues; 16) On The Sunny Side Of The Street.

 

It almost goes without saying that this here is the most important batch of tunes in Billie history (and a fantastic choice for a first-time introduction), and that the importance is mainly due to the presence of 'Strange Fruit'. It goes without further saying that, in order to fully appreciate the im­pact of the song, one would have to stick around in 1939, a time when it took real guts to perform this kind of material (and, indeed, Billie was genuinely afraid of singing it at first). But if the tune's direct shock impact has — thank God! — gradually dissipated over the years, this original recording has lost none of its original smoky mystique.

 

In fact, on a gut level I do not even associate it with the specific issue of Southern lynching (how could I, without ever learning the peculiarities of rural life racism?); all I know is that Billie is im­personating a sibyl here, drawing out the clumsy syllables in a state of trance, in a semi-dazed, se­mi-stoned manner, but still realizing, somewhere deep in the subconscious, that something impor­tant and devastating is coming out of her throat. Then, that final "bitter... crop!" escapes like the last agonizing wail of a brought down animal — a far cry from the pretty, but «conventional» coda flourishes she'd previously given the world within Columbia's walls.

 

It was indeed a song like no other, and, whatever one might say, it is a standout in her catalog that has no equals — not just because of a rare case of real social turbulence reflected in the lyrics, but also because she rose so admirably to the occasion. However, the brilliance of the song and the particular performance should not, by any means, obscure the brilliance — and importance — of the other 15 tunes on here: three recorded on the same session of April 20, 1939, and twelve more cut at several dates in March/April, 1944. Billie's collaboration with Commodore Records did not take long — first time simply because Columbia refused to accept 'Strange Fruit', second time in a brief interim between the lady's time on Columbia and Decca — but it turned over quite an im­portant page in her life.

 

Essentially, Columbia Records had Billie play a «significant bit part» in upbeat, stompy big-band entertainment, with loud brass, rousing tempos, and lots of soloing, in between which she would barely have time to throw in a verse or two. It was good, because the bands were good, but it cer­tainly did not offer the proper support for the talent. The tunes on Commodore, on the other hand, even if they did not always feature a significantly smaller number of players, are overall more quiet, relaxed, and give Billie more room to sing, meditate, and shine. Already on the first session, 'Strange Fruit' is augmented with 'Fine And Mellow', another one of Billie's «originals» — in ac­tu­ality, a generic urban blues set to new lyrics, but, considering how rarely Columbia let Billie en­gage in competition with Bessie Smith, it is telling that Commodore gave her this very chance on her very first outing with the label.

 

It is fun to engage in comparison here. For instance, the original Columbia recording of 'I'll Get By', with more than a minute of trumpet solos before Billie comes in — and an almost immediate entrance on the Commodore version, with very brief guitar and piano solos in the middle. The nearly rhythmless (next to the Columbia version), bass-less 'I Cover The Waterfront'. 'He's Funny That Way' recast as a dark, melancholic late-night piano ballad instead of a jolly, careless swing like it used to be. And so on — although at least half of the selections on this disc were all new, never recorded by Billie on any of her Columbia dates. ('How Am I To Know?', with its spine-tin­gling "Ohhh..." rhyming with the title, is a particular highlight).

 

What makes this short Commodore collection so uniquely valuable is that it represents this per­fect sort of crossroads that is likely to satisfy everyone. The Columbia recordings may seem too «gay», drowning Billie out in a swarm of swing entertainers. The Decca recordings may seem too sappy because of all the strings. The Verve period is where the lady started going hoarse. All of these «defects» may be easily overlooked, and, in fact, many people do not consider them defects at all. But these sixteen tracks, spearheaded by 'Strange Fruit', are pure, blameless perfection. Ku­dos to Milt Gabler for producing the stuff and showing Billie in the most suitable light anyone could ever suit to her. Thumbs up without further questions.

 

(PS: the review is based on the single-disc edition, but there is also The Complete Commodore Recordings, with multiple additional alternate takes spread over two CDs. Inescapable for the completist, but, given my acquaintance with The Complete Billie Holiday On Verve, must be a bit of an unnecessary overkill for the layman).

 

THE COMPLETE DECCA RECORDINGS (1944-1950; 1991)

 

CD I: 1) Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?); 2) No More; 3) No More (Alternate); 4) That Ole Devil Called Love; 5) Don't Explain (First Version); 6) Big Stuff (First Version); 7) Don't Explain; 8) Big Stuff (Second Version); 9) You Better Go Now; 10) What Is This Thing Called Love; 11) Good Morning Heartache; 12) No Good Man (Previously Unissued Alternate); 13) No Good Man; 14) Big Stuff (Previously Unissued Breakdown and Chatter); 15) Big Stuff (Previously Unissued Third Version); 16) Big Stuff; 17) Baby, I Don't Cry Over You (Previously Unissued Alternate); 18) Baby, I Don't Cry Over You; 19) I'll Look Around (Previously Unissued Alternate); 20) I'll Look Around; 21) The Blues Are Brewin'; 22) Guilty (Previously Unissued Alternate); 23) Guilty (Previously Unissued Breakdown and Chatter); 24) Guilty; 25) Deep Song; 26) There Is No Greater Love;

CD II: 1) Easy Living; 2) Solitude (Previously Unissued Alternate); 3) Solitude; 4) Weep No More; 5) Girls Were Made To Take Care Of Boys; 6) I Loves You Porgy; 7) My Man (Mon Homme) (Previously Unissued Alternate); 8) My Man (Mon Homme); 9) 'Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do (Previously Unissued Alternate); 10) 'Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do; 11) Baby Get Lost; 12) Keeps On A-Rainin'; 13) Them There Eyes; 14) Do Your Duty; 15) Gimme A Pigfoot (And A Bottle Of Beer); 16) You Can't Lose A Broken Heart; 17) My Sweet Hunk O' Trash; 18) Now Or Never; 19) You're My Thrill; 20) Crazy He Calls Me; 21) Please Tell Me Now; 22) Somebody's On My Mind; 23) God Bless The Child; 24) This Is Heaven to Me.

 

It was Milt Gabler who arranged for Billie's transfer to Decca, where she could hope for at least as efficient a degree of promotion as on Columbia. True enough, it was only during the Decca years that she became a commercial superstar (and a heroin wreck as a side effect), starting with 'Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be)', one of the biggest hits of 1944 and, from then on, one of the lady's signature tunes — even if it has no more than a hundredth part of the snap-and-bite of 'Strange Fruit' (but let us not forget to be realistic: there was no way that 'Strange Fruit' could have been a commercial hit back in its time).

 

Strange enough, during her six years at Decca, Billie did not record all that much. Where Colum­bia's and Verve's Complete boxsets each include around 10 CDs, the Complete Decca boxset — alternate outtakes and all — only includes two. One of the reasons must have been drug trouble (she spent most of 1947 and early 1948 in court / prison), but even in her «law-free» years, rela­tively few sessions were held. Of these, the earliest bunch is the most historically important, be­cause it introduces a new element in Billie's world: orchestration.

 

Frankly, I cannot allow myself to «like» these string arrangements. They are generic, Hollywood­ish, Broadway musical-ish, whatever. According to legend, Billie requested strings herself for 'Lover Man', and was extremely pleased to finally get them. Perhaps she felt she was crossing some sort of line there — the line that separated a local mini-celebrity from a big national star. If the presence of strings boosted her confidence, so be it, especially since her vocal work on these mid-Fourties recordings is impeccable. But in retrospect, it almost looks like her very essence is giving battle to these strings — the very unusualness of her vocal approach clashes so vehement­ly against the formulaic nature of the orchestral arrangements, it is almost as if her brain wanted to do it, but her soul was all against it.

 

Leave it to Billie, though — for all I know, she could have been backed by trivial synth-pop ar­rangements and still sound like nothing else. On all of these recordings, her vocals still show no serious signs of wear and tear, and the humane depth of expression that peaked during her Com­modore sessions remains so much intact that individual highlights are unselectable: all of these songs are just about equally great, regardless of the intrinsic melodic potential of each individual tune (which, honestly, much of the time I still cannot tell apart).

 

Special reference must only be made to a few «unusual» stunts pulled off by Lady Day in the late 1940s. First, there is a whole bunch of Bessie Smith covers here, and they are the only true dis­ap­pointment of the set for me: for some reason, she chose to perform some of the Empress of the Blues' most «aggressive» numbers — 'Do Your Duty' and 'Gimme A Pigfoot', in particular, are no match for Bessie's temper and brawn, and cannot be easily recast in Billie's mold; she seems to be stuck somewhere in between a radical reinvention and a faithful tribute, failing at both. 'T'Ain't Nobody's Business' goes along better, since the song's message is «brawny» only on the surface — at the bottom of it, it is a wife's declaration of her right to be beaten by her husband, and Billie rightfully gives it the same vibe she gives her classic number 'My Man'. (Any feminist extolling Miss Holiday as an icon should take a close listen here).

 

Far more successful are the two duets with Louis Armstrong — 'My Sweet Hunk O' Trash', in particular, with its bittersweet dialog between the two legends, is awesome beyond belief (Billie and Satchmo would also work together in New Orleans, Billie's only movie — in general, a di­sas­ter, but with one unforgettable scene at least). There are also a few tracks on which Billie is back­ed by The Stardusters, a proto-doo-wop vocal group, but this approach does not work at all. Lady Day is incompatible with extraneous harmonies. A duet with Louis — by all means, but any at­tempt at «glamorizing» her sound belies its essence.

 

Overall, the Decca recordings will be most valuable to those who treasure the lady in fine voice: by 1952 (the beginning of her Verve LP-dominated period), it was already crack(l)ing. The abun­dance of alternate versions is a bonus for completists and fine specialists only, since the alternate takes do not usually differ all that much from the officially released versions. That said, the Arm­strong/Holiday duets are priceless; 'Lover Man' is a historical watermark that should be familiar to everyone; and even the strings, provided they annoy you in the first place, eventually go away, replaced by steady small jazz combo arrangements like it used to be. Thus, thumbs up without any further doubts on the subject.

 

BILLIE HOLIDAY SINGS (1952)

 

1) East Of The Sun; 2) Blue Moon; 3) You Go To My Head; 4) You Turned The Tables On Me; 5) Easy To Love; 6) These Foolish Things; 7) I Only Have Eyes For You; 8) Solitude; 9) Everything I Have Is Yours; 10) Love For Sale; 11) Moonglow; 12) Tenderly.

 

This and almost all of the following LPs that were released for Billie in the 1950s (with the ex­cep­tion of the final small bunch for Columbia) are all available in one package on the monumen­tal Complete Billie Holiday On Verve package. However, I would not dare write about it in one single sweep. It covers an evolutionary period that is way too long for one single review: starting off with Billie still in perfect form, at the top of her vocal and emotional powers, and ending with a wreck of a woman, although still perversely fascinating. I would also not recommend forking a hundred bucks over for the package unless you are a history buff — there are too many alternate takes, too many crappy lo-fi session recordings and pure banter.

 

Another reason for splitting this monolith monster is that, in the 1950s, the concept of an LP was already fully fleshed out, and much, if not most, of Billie's recording output was originally put out by Clef Records (later to be absorbed in Verve) as LPs. Not that there was anything «concep­tual» about it, except in a couple of cases, but, for the most part, the records did correlate with specific mini-sessions and a certain chronology of events. This first one, for instance, was recor­ded in its entirety on March 26, 1952, and released as Billie Holiday Sings with eight tracks, then, four years later, re-released under the title Solitude, with four additional tracks from the same sessions. And, with none other than the legendary Oscar Peterson himself manning the piano, the results were bound to be quite individualistic.

 

Neither this, nor any of the following reviews could be long. Most of the material that Billie re­corded with Clef (Verve) was either re-recordings of earlier stuff, or similar compositions from the Songbook: all that matters is Billie's own state at the time and degree of dedication to the ma­terial, and, sometimes, the accompaniment. Here, with Peterson at the helm, we get a moody, quiet, nocturnal set for a half hour of melancholic relaxation: sometimes with a lighter punch ('Blue Moon'), sometimes with a darker one ('Love For Sale'). The production is unexpectedly echoey, almost as if you were listening to Billie standing in a vast hallway — a little strange, con­sidering that the voice, in early 1952, is still as impeccable as ever.

 

The obvious highlight for me is 'Solitude', particularly when compared with the earlier Decca ver­sion — overloaded with strings that obscured the singer. Here, even despite the confusing echo, the song finally matches its title (although it might have worked even better as a minimalistic du­et between Billie and Oscar, without the accompanying trumpet). But, as is almost always the case, there are really no lowlights — here be a must-have for all lovers of «penthouse jazz». Plus, arguably, the best version of 'These Foolish Things' she ever did.

 

AN EVENING WITH BILLIE HOLIDAY (1953)

 

1) Stormy Weather; 2) Lover Come Back To Me; 3) My Man; 4) He's Funny That Way; 5) Yesterdays; 6) Tenderly; 7) I Can't Face The Music; 8) Remember.

 

Billie's second LP for Clef/Verve contains the results of two further sessions from 1952; one from April 1, with more or less the same backing band as on Billie Holiday Sings, one from July 27, with several changes (different brass section, and Freddie Green replacing Barney Kessel on gui­tar), but still musically dominated by Oscar Peterson's piano, so that only serious jazz connois­seurs will be able to tell the difference.

 

The material is once again evenly spread between re-recordings of older numbers and introduc­tion of new ones. Of the new songs, 'Stormy Weather' is the acknowledged highlight; it is one of the very few Billie tunes that she opens herself, with a few accappella notes, immedi­ately placing the emphasis on vocals and nothing but vocals, transforming Ethel Waters' original croon-fest in­to something ten times as intimate, genuine, and artistically unconventional — not that there'd be anything surprising about the procedure as late as 1952.

 

Of the re-recordings, 'Lover, Come Back To Me' is taken at about twice the tempo of the original Commodore recording, but keeping the brass in the background and Peterson's piano in the fore­ground still avoids turning the song into an entertaining rave-up à la Columbia years — the al­bum was supposed to be as stylistically uniform and mood-setting as its predecessor, so the fast tempo adds diversity without breaking up the vibe. 'Yesterdays' is a stylistic improvement over the Commodore version, with Peterson switching to electric organ (probably the first time ever on a Billie record), and the fast swinging section of the second half sharper and more pronounced.

 

On the other hand, re-recordings of 'My Man' and 'He's Funny That Way' are somewhat super­fluous. But that's the way it goes with The Songbook — every time you switch to a different re­cord label, you are supposed to redo it all over again (provided you are an accomplished, well-selling artist). After all, why should Columbia and Commodore profit from a 'He's Funny That Way' by B. Holiday, when her current contract is with Verve? Come to think of it, it is a miracle that the lady still managed to sound so convincing and authentic on each of these re-recordings, geared primarily towards cash flow. That's some really great love out there for material which, per se, was mostly mediocre to begin with.

 

BILLIE HOLIDAY (1954)

 

1) Love For Sale; 2) Moonglow; 3) Everything I Have Is Yours; 4) If The Moon Turns Green; 5) Autumn In New York; 6) How Deep Is The Ocean; 7) What A Little Moonlight Can Do; 8) I Cried For You.

 

This unconspicuously titled album from 1954 is mainly notable for containing tracks from two recording sessions that were quite distant chronologically. The first five songs were recorded in April 1952 (the same one that yielded much of the material for An Evening); the last three — ex­actly two years later. The backing band is very much the same: Oscar Peterson mans the piano in both cases, Ray Brown is on bass and Charlie Shavers on trumpet. (Herb Ellis replaces Barney Kessel on guitar, but neither is particularly noticeable).

 

What is, however, unmistakably different is Billie herself. The 1952 sessions have already been talked about before; here, of particular note is the exquisite lonesome-melancholic rendition of 'Autumn In New York' (comparing this to the syrupy lounge version of Sarah Vaughan, among others, reveals the utter triumph of simple intelligence and humane vulnerability over gloss and operatic technique), al­though, as usual, all the other performances are first-rate as well.

 

The last three songs, however, feature Billie's voice in the initial phases of decline – losing some of her frequencies (never all that abundant to begin with) and beginning to acquire that unmista­kable «old lady rasp» that she managed to be saddled with without actually turning into an old la­dy, due to substance abuse. It is only the beginning, though; here, the main effect is simply that the singing gets lower and «deeper». It is unclear if they put Shavers' trumpet on top of every­thing in order to «mask» that weakness — probably just a coincidence. But that's how it is.

 

In any case, the fast, playful versions of 'What A Little Moonlight Can Do' and 'I Cried For You' are still excellent, and the album as a whole has no lowlights, despite the incoherence of its two parts. Recommendable, if only for the beautiful 'Autumn In New York'.

 

AT JAZZ AT THE PHILHARMONIC (1954)

 

1) Body And Soul; 2) Strange Fruit; 3) Trav'lin' Light; 4) He's Funny That Way; 5) The Man I Love; 6) Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You; 7) All Of Me; 8) Billie's Blues.

 

Although this album was not released until 1954, the actual recordings date from 1945 and 1946, when Billie was an active participator in Norman Granz's «Jazz At The Philharmonic» touring program (and, since Granz was also the founder of Clef Records, to which Billie was signed in the 1950s, it was only a matter of time before he would make these recordings public on his own label). The actual dates are February 12, 1945 (first two songs) and October 3, 1946 (second two songs) at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles; and June 3, 1946 at Carnegie Hall for the last four songs. All of the material has now been included on the Complete Verve boxset, including a couple more live tracks of very scratchy quality from 1946, and four more live performances of far better quality from 1947.

 

Considering that there are very few live-not-in-the-studio recordings from Billie at all, this is a record of historical importance; considering that these are the earliest available live recordings from Billie, it is a record of tremendous historical importance. Considering that the second track on here is 'Strange Fruit', it is also a record of tense curiosity: how does it go with the audience? are there any traces of nervousness in Billie's voice (other than a couple of precautionary coughs during the piano intro)? Not to worry: the applause is as strong as ever, and the singing matches the original studio recording fairly closely.

 

The setlist, as we can see, is completely standard; the only «new» tune, 'Trav'lin' Light', was ori­ginally recorded by Billie for Paul Whiteman's big band in 1942, and re-arranged here as a mini­malistic lounge ballad, with no one but Ken Kersey at the piano — another case of a «jazz stan­dard» on which Lady Day was but a bit player transformed into a vulnerable confession, spotlight on the frail human soul and all that.

 

Unfortunately, live recording was still new and inexperienced in the 1940s, so there is no getting away from the «thin» quality of the vocals; hopefully, this will be nobody's introduction to Billie, or one might subconsciously develop an impression of the lady as a «whiner». Naturally, JATP is for the seasoned admirer rather than the novice. But, as the only complete live album to capture her in full control of her powers, it is at least a unique technical phenomenon, if not necessarily a unique emotional experience.

 

STAY WITH ME (1955)

 

1) I Wished On The Moon; 2) Ain't Misbehavin' (I'm Savin' My Love For You); 3) Everything Happens To Me; 4) Say It Isn't So; 5) I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm; 6) Always; 7) Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me.

 

Apparently, the date of release is somewhat off: various sources conflict in placing Stay With Me either in 1958 or in 1959. But chronologically, this is where it belongs: all of the songs were recorded during one session, held by Billie on February 14, 1955, backed by Tony Scott and his Orchestra. On that particular date, the «Orchestra» happened to contain trumpeter Charlie Sha­vers, already a Billie regular; drummer Cozy Cole, whose talents and personality would later in­fluence a certain Colin Flooks to change his name to Cozy Powell; guitar player Billy Bauer, no­table for influential avantgarde work with sax player Lee Konitz; and other important musicians with important pedigrees. Not counting Tony Scott himself and his near-unique way of playing the clarinet (to post-electronic ears, it may sound like he's using a MIDI interface!).

 

In short, lots of second-tier talent assembled to record a fairly mediocre record. All of the tunes are generic oldies, most of them already covered by Billie up to several times, and she herself certainly was not in a good enough form to match the lighthearted gaiety of all this Broadway glitz. Her voice keeps cracking, sometimes even in important spots, and its worn-off character gives the whole affair a nostalgic sheen — from now on, you can feel that Billie is getting «out of time». Not that there wasn't still a huge audience out there for soft lounge vocal jazz, but this was, after all, the beginning of the rock'n'roll era, and Billie's ever-worsening health problems could hardly benefit her in these times of tough competition.

 

Still, taken entirely on its own, the session is not at all worthless. In a way, it is a return to the good old Columbia days: Billie is just playing the role of «yet another instrument» in a band set­ting. On most of the tracks, she takes the lead at the beginning, then cedes her spot to the soloists, then returns at the end — this is why the tracks start getting bulkier, up to nearly seven minutes on 'I Wished On The Moon'. And, given her condition (and also the fact that nobody at this point would give a fig about hearing those actual songs one more time), this is just the right way to go about it. There's plenty of tasteful guitar soloing from Bauer, and fine, exquisite parts from Sha­vers, and, as I already said, those odd, atmospheric, in a way, almost «psychedelic» clarinet exer­cises from Tony Scott himself. Check out 'I Wished On The Moon' and, particularly, 'Everything Happens To Me' — the playing is as diverse and soulful as it gets on such things.

 

It may sound sad that, for the first time ever, Billie's backing band may be pulling the attention away from her, but, technically speaking, they save the record, wrestling it out a thumbs up at the last moment, so to speak. That said, the faster-paced numbers, such as 'Always' and 'I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm', are still unsatisfactory — at this time, Billie is already unable to convincingly communicate lighthearted joy as she was in the 1930s. As far as I'm concerned, she should have stuck exclusively to darker stuff — but then again, they might think too much mo­roseness would damage sales, since, anyway, most record-buyers couldn't tell genuine joy from si­mulated joy even if each record bore a sticker saying "WARNING: ALL HAPPINESS ON THIS ALBUM MANUFACTURED FROM ARTIFICIAL MATERIALS. NO GUARANTEES."

 

MUSIC FOR TORCHING (1955)

 

1) It Had To Be You; 2) Come Rain Or Come Shine; 3) I Don't Want To Cry Anymore; 4) I Don't Stand A Ghost Of A Chance With You; 5) A Fine Romance; 6) Gone With The Wind; 7) I Get A Kick Out Of You; 8) Isn't This A Lovely Day.

 

Groping blindly in the dark, perhaps, but this session from August 1955 seems to me to find Bil­lie in a slightly better state than her previous one, and the entire record is a highlight of her last years on Clef/Verve. All of the material, with the exception of 'A Fine Romance' that she did ear­lier for Columbia, is recorded for the first time, even if The Songbook is still the only available source. Of the session players, only Benny Carter stands out on alto saxophone; the rest provide solid backing rather than counterpoints. But that's fine: on this record, Billie had no desperate need of any counterpoints. She carries it all with bravery and finesse.

 

We get as far into the past here as 'It Had To Be You', which was originally recorded in 1924 by several people, including Marion Harris; but in order to appreciate Billie's version, it is, of course, advisable to select something glitzy in contrast – the Barbra Streisand take, perhaps? Or, if this seems unjust and skewed, we could do with respectable earlier interpretations, such as Betty Hut­ton's. But they are all normal in their emotional impact. Billie, on the other hand, with each pas­sing year seems to have been descending into an emotional world all her own — so much so that some might fall for the trap and declare this here singing cold, perfunctory, and passionless.

 

That would be a wrong move — if anything, her purely technical tricks over the years became more diverse and subtle. The ever-slowing tempos give her plenty of space to stretch out the syl­lables, practice that little vibrato, and control her «creaky» and «breathy» levels with the same precision that a Jimi Hendrix might control his whammy bar. And it may be that I am writing about it in this particular review simply because she is so perfectly captured on this album, too: for once, her voice looms large and heavy over all the instruments without any distracting echo effects. Then again, I may be just imagining things to fill up space.

 

Anyway, as usual, there are no high- or lowlights, and the album is quite aptly titled, even if, up­on second thought, something like 80% of all of Billie's recordings are certified «torch songs». (May also be the reason why 'A Fine Romance', with its slightly cheerier attitude and faster tem­po, sits here somewhat uncomfortably among all the gloom – but it's still a first-rate recording). Hence, another thumbs up, and, in addition to it all, finally a version of 'Come Rain Or Come Shine' that one can always throw on without a hint of embarrassment. Too bad Billie didn't have the time to record all the popular songs of the first half of the XXth century – that would be a great excuse for burning up so much schlocky vinyl.

 

VELVET MOOD (1956)

 

1) Prelude To A Kiss; 2) When Your Lover Has Gone; 3) Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone; 4) Nice Work If You Can Get It; 5) I Got A Right To Sing The Blues; 6) What's New?; 7) I Hadn't Anyone Till You; 8) Everything I Have Is Yours.

 

Not a lot to say here, since, apparently, all of the songs date from the same session as Music For Torching — same players, same type of repertoire, same level of inspiration. So much the same that, apparently, the album has not been re-released since its original market venture, even if, all things considered, it could have constituted a tremendously strong double-LP package on one CD. But, in any case, all of the tracks are out there on Complete Verve.

 

Re-recordings here include 'Nice Work If You Can Get It' — another of the lady's old Columbia upbeat rocking horses, and, consequently, another odd choice on an album dominated by smoky melancholy blues; 'Everything I Have Is Yours', which she'd already cut for Verve two years ago, but essays here once again in a slightly higher register; and the Commodore years classic 'I Got A Right To Sing The Blues', taken here at a slower pace, ornated with a pompous trumpet backing and featuring a long guitar solo from Barney Kessel — in other words, treated as «blues-de-luxe» rather than a brief aggressive outburst. Not very convincing, but passable.

 

Although, as usual, the record is very even, and its predictability is only disrupted in the subtlest of ways (e. g. Jimmy Rowles playing celeste on 'I Hadn't Anyone Till You'), my own tastes choose the 1931 standart 'When Your Lover Has Gone' as the outstanding high­light (a choice in which, surprisingly, I happen to coincide with the late James Dean, who declared it his favorite song). There is just something utterly mysterious about her phrasing on the title line — Billie may not be the master of complex technique, but she is the master of tone and pitch. The 4:32-4:58 segment of the song is, like, the ultimate benchmark in high quality choice of wavelength, if you know what I mean. More thumbs coming up.

 

LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1956)

 

1) Lady Sings The Blues; 2) Trav'lin' Light; 3) I Must Have That Man; 4) Some Other Spring; 5) Strange Fruit; 6) No Good Man; 7) God Bless The Child; 8) Good Morning Heartache; 9) Love Me Or Leave Me; 10) Too Marvelous For Words; 11) Willow Weep For Me; 12) I Thought About You.

 

This is not a very important release for those who savor Billie's career in chronological order; ne­vertheless, it is still one of her best-known late period albums, since it is somewhat conceptual – released as a «companion piece» to her famous autobiography of the same name: ghost­written, actually, by William Dufty from Billie's recollections, but still historically important for a number of reasons (a black artist candidly writing about the intricacies of childhood abuse and heroin ad­diction was still quite a novel thing in 1956). The franchise then culminated in a couple shows at Carnegie Hall in December, where Billie's performances were accompanied by readouts from the book (a large chunk of the show is available on the Complete Verve boxset as well).

 

Thus, Lady Sings The Blues is somewhat of a retrospective album – all re-recordings, except for the title track, specially written by Billie herself for the occasion, and, today, one of her visit cards, along with 'Strange Fruit' and 'God Bless The Child', which, not coincidentally, are also re­recorded for this session of June 1956. (Four of the songs are, however, taken from an earlier ses­sion in September 1954, again, creating a slightly uncomfortable dissonance between two diffe­rent stages of the lady's voice).

 

The backing tracks on the session are nothing outstanding to write home about (where have you gone, Mr. Peterson?), and the old classics are not exactly reinvented, either: the best I can say about this performance of 'Strange Fruit' is that the subtle horror is still there, neither grown nor diminished. In a way, one could say that, as Billie got older, her voice was compensating for extra hoarseness and creakiness with an additional thin thread of wisdom-and-experience, so I could understand someone preferring this version of 'God Bless The Child', burdened with twenty-five additional years of ups and downs, to the original Columbia recording.

 

But then it may just be better to take this record as one large whole — lady does not so much sing the blues here as she sings her past, alternating darker and lighter numbers to come up with an ad­equate representation of her own importance. And 1956 was an important year for her: on the he­els of clever (and totally justifiable, in this case) marketing, she at least had the pleasure of recei­ving widespread acclaim and acceptance — crowned with the Carnegie Hall performances — during her lifetime, even if she did not get to enjoy it too long.

 

BODY AND SOUL (1957)

 

1) Body And Soul; 2) They Can't Take That Away From Me; 3) Darn That Dream; 4) Let's Call The Whole Thing Off; 5) Comes Love; 6) Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You?; 7) Embraceable You; 8) Moonlight In Vermont.

 

Billie's last recording sessions for Verve, former Clef, were held in January 1957 and yielded enough new material for three albums, but, unfortunately, not enough for even one properly auto­nomous review. They simply continue the trend of Music For Torching and Velvet Mood, with another batch of re-recordings of old Columbia and Commodore day cuts, mixed with barrel-scra­ping as the lady and her backing crew keep searching for Tin Pan Alley material that has, so far, managed to avoid the Holiday touch.

 

And, just as before, the effect of these songs depends on whether Billie and the band decide to cast them in their original «playful» mood, or reinterpret them in a darker and more personal-intimate vein. Thus, 'Let's Call The Whole Thing Off' with its dialectal humor works poorly; 'Gee Baby, Ain't I Good To You?', with its slower tempo and bluesy atmosphere, works better, but is still cast in a «light entertainment for gentlemen with big purses» manner. But 'Comes Love', pin­ned to an ominous opening electric guitar riff from Barney Kessel and punctuated by Harry Edi­son's equally ominous trumpet lines, works achingly well — they almost manage to turn it into some sort of somber German cabaret-style vaudeville number à la Marlene Dietrich (only with a less mannequinnish singer), a style not entirely familiar to Billie up to this point.

 

Other highlights include the title track and 'Embraceable You', both expanded to twice the run­ning length of the original versions, not so much by the instrumental interludes (Barney Kessel does get a nice moody guitar solo in addition to all the trumpets and saxes), as they are by drastic slowing down of tempos — the slower it gets, the more thin nuances can be squeezed in­side the vocalization of each single syllable.

 

That said, it does seem a little nagging that, as late as 1957, Billie was so stubbornly clinging to the same formula. No one would ask her to sing Chuck Berry, of course, but jazz and pop sen­si­bi­li­ties, by the late 1950s, had evolved way beyond pre-War Tin Pan Alley. Her early recordings for Verve could, from a certain point of view, still be considered mildly «hip», but these ones al­most could be accused of «lazy conservatism» — now that the lady's status as a living legend was codified, she could be covering the entire works of Ira Gershwin and Rodgers & Hammerstein in chronological (or alphabetical) order and there would still be a market for this.

 

On the other hand, let's face it — Billie Holiday is one of the very few reasons that the entire works of Rodgers & Hammerstein still have to be remembered fondly; and in 1957, there could be no better frontperson for the Tin Pan Alley mindset than Billie. Which makes this strong igno­rance of the changing times all the more intriguing — «unyielding old guard», etc. (In reality, though, it would be stupid to expect Billie to «modernize» her setlists: the idea that an artist must constantly «progress» in order to retain credibility did not yet exist in the 1950s).

 

SONGS FOR DISTINGUE LOVERS (1957)

 

1) Day In, Day Out; 2) A Foggy Day; 3) Stars Fell On Alabama; 4) One For My Baby; 5) Just One Of Those Things; 6) I Don't Know What Time It Was.

 

The second album released from the same sessions as Body And Soul, Songs For Distingué Lovers commands even fewer words than its predecessor. It also has fewer songs (just six titles), not to mention the exact same backing musicians, general attitude, and chronological set of songs — not a single one going back to anything later than 1943.

 

One single difference is that, on this particular batch, not a single track is a re-recording — all six were selected as brand new «expe­rimental» puppies for the lady to sink her (rottin') teeth in. But that only makes the album harder to assess on its own, since there is nothing to compare it to — unless we start seriously discussing what it is exactly that the lady brings to 'One For My Baby' that is so different from Sinatra's classic version. Well, just about the same thing that distingui­shes any other tune tackled by both Holiday and Sinatra — she's her, and he's him.

 

For some reason, when re-released forty years later on CD, it was Songs For Distingué Lovers rather than the two albums around it that got the first privilege — with six more songs from Body And Soul and All Or Nothing At All tacked on as bonuses. Perhaps the Verve people thought the exquisite French epithet «classy», unlike the others; the fact that they even used it at all back in 1957 means that they were consciously trying to market Billie as «penthouse» music for rich romantic couples... which, to me, seems like cheapening the issue.

 

The arrangements — yes, all of them typically «penthouse» arrangements; but the idea of «spiritually enjoying» Billie sing with half-drawn shades, a glass of Bordeaux, and a «that special someone» in an evening dress seems rather cheap and, in any case, much too stereotypical for a singer as dismissive of stereotypes as Billie. Above all else, all of these songs reflect pain, and it is rather hard to enjoy pain, let alone with a glass of Bordeaux (although, come to think of it, a big enough glass could make it easy to enjoy anything). Even though there is nothing even remotely close in spirit to a 'God Bless The Child' on Songs For Distingué Lovers, all of these songs — never mind the syrupy or corny lyrics — are delivered in Billie's usual late-period ragged tones, and these tones are not «enjoyable»: they are «experienceable», and, as such, do not really re­quire any additional settings, substances, or seductions.

 

ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL (1958)

 

1) Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me; 2) Cheek To Cheek; 3) Ill Wind; 4) Speak Low; 5) We'll Be Together Again; 6) All Or Nothing At All; 7) Sophisticated Lady; 8) April In Paris; 9) I Wished On The Moon; 10) But Not For Me; 11) Say It Isn't So; 12) Our Love Is Here To Stay.

 

Last of the three albums from the January 1957 sessions, and, consequently, Billie's last album for Verve. Once again, a mixed bag here, combining songs that were almost tailor-made for the lady; songs which she is able to permanently mark with her seal of approval; and a few annoying missteps that should have never been tried at all — yes, I am talking about ʽCheek To Cheekʼ, a song that was genuinely corny from the beginning even for Irving Berlin's standards, and one that could not ever be successfully «holidayed» even with a change in tonality. For that matter, ʽI Wished On The Moonʼ, reprised here from its original 1935 incarnation, also sounds like a bit of sorry nostalgia — at this point in her career, conveying pure, naïve joy was an impossibility.

 

Conversely, the highlights would probably include Duke Ellington's ʽDo Nothing Till You Hear From Meʼ — slow, lazy, subversive, and with just a tiny pinch of sarcasm in the "...and you never will" resolution of each chorus; Harold Arlen's ʽIll Windʼ, with a mini-epic bluesy arrangement and excellent guitar-vocal dueting between Billie and Barney Kessel; and the cute rumba-jazz of ʽSpeak Lowʼ, which, if I am not mistaken, must be the only time Billie ever took on Kurt Weill in her entire career. I wish I could say the same about the title track (e. g. about how Billie destroys Sinatra's version or something like that), but it sounds fairly hookless to me.

 

With Ellington, Weill, and the «early blue-eyed soul» representative Frankie Laine (ʽWe'll Be Together Againʼ) sharing the same album with the obligatory G.A.S. representatives, All Or No­thing At All is, technically, one of Billie's most «diverse» LPs; but, of course, all of the songs are processed more or less in the same way, reducing surprise effects and novelty factors. Still, bar­ring ʽCheek To Cheekʼ which, for me, is one of the few true moments of displeasure in Billie's late career period, it proves that the 1957 sessions, as always, were consistent throughout, and I would give all three albums one collective thumbs up — put all the songs together, fish out the «too happy» ones, and Billie's going out of Verve with plenty of verve.

 

LADY IN SATIN (1958)

 

1) I'm A Fool To Want You; 2) For Heaven's Sake; 3) You Don't Know What Love Is; 4) I Get Along Without You Very Well; 5) For All We Know; 6) Violets For Your Furs; 7) You've Changed; 8) It's Easy To Remember; 9) But Beautiful; 10) Glad To Be Unhappy; 11) I'll Be Around; 12) The End Of A Love Affair.

 

It is a little ironic that Billie's final completed record was recorded for the very same label that hosted her original recordings — by early 1958, she was out of Verve and back on Columbia. Of course, by that time it was already impossible for Columbia to present her the same way they did in the 1930s, that is, lightweight jazz entertainment with a pinch of intelligence and a shot of indi­viduality — Billie was so frail already that trying to rev her up would, at worst, have killed her, at best, have made her sound utterly ridiculous.

 

Instead, to celebrate this new re-beginning and try out something different, the entire album was recorded with strings — a full orchestra conducted by Ray Ellis. This was not the first time Bil­lie was being backed that way: most of her Decca sessions included lush strings. But, odd enough, this seems to be her most well-known recording on which she has orchestral support — either be­cause it happened to be her last record, or, maybe, because her voice was so thin and crackling, it's almost as if the orchestra were shining through it all the time. On her Decca records, the vio­lins tend to stay in the background; here, Ray Ellis dominates the proceedings at least as much as the lady herself, perhaps more.

 

Lush orchestral backing was quite en vogue at the time for jazz singers and crooners (e. g. on El­la's Songbooks), and Billie herself never specifically preferred small combos to big bands — in fact, she seems to have had the time, before her death, to acknowledge Lady In Satin as her per­sonal favorite. The arrangements themselves will probably fail to please those who are allergic to syrup: going very heavy on strings and very light on brass, adding a moody (if not to say «ghost­ly») background choir for most of the songs, conventional, predictable, and completely indistinguishable from each other. So will the songs — just a bunch of additional stuff from the Song­book, all of them new for Billie but still feeling as if she'd already sung them all before. Nothing too bluesy, nothing too jazzy, nothing too fast, almost everything lethargically slow. No high­lights, no lowlights. In fact, why bother at all?

 

Well, for one thing, the whole album sounds like a testament. She was not explicitly dying yet (still had more than a year to go), but it is clear that all of the systems were failing, and this phy­sical deterioration and pain somehow got... not «reflected» in the performance, but rather «con­verted» into the performance, if you can follow the difference. Her voice occasionally quivers as if in silent tears, but these are neither «real» tears nor «fake» tears, rather like a slightly mannered, theatrical take on suffering delivered by a genuinely suffering person. If this does not suffice to describe her performance, let me just state that the performance is simply unique — except it has to be listened to very closely (one or two songs at a time may be enough; there is no need to sit through the entire session if you do not feel like it), and your mind has to set the orchestra back a few feet to suck in all the pain. Pain, pain, pain. The Songbook was never really intended for that kind of pain — it's a wonder the whole thing worked in the end.

 

Note, though, that weak or strong, Billie never ever lost her knack at phrasing, her ability to place her own accents within each performance. This is why her voice, even at its crackliest and feeb­lest, still stands the test; complaints about her lack of singing power in these late years are useless, since, at this point, it was her weakness itself that gave her extra power, the kind of which she could never have twenty years earlier. It is a power to conjure pity, but «pity» as some sort of noble emotion, rather than just the gut feeling you get when bypassing a legless hobo. If it were the latter, we would just «pity» the lady — «oh God, she must have been in some real deep shit back then» — and forget Lady In Satin in favor of her earlier records (even the late-period Verve sessions sound like Ode To Joy in comparison to this). But there is this deep, weird attrac­tive force here that elevates the record to genuine tragic status; and this, in a sense, almost makes Lady In Satin the most important album in her career — despite its numerous flaws, or, rather, due to these flaws.

 

Never make the mistake of making this your introduction to Billie (some of the «best-of» jazz lists I have seen were stupid enough to make it «the obligatory B. H. inclusion» instead of the much more diagnostic Commodore sessions), but never make the mistake of bypassing it, either, if you care at all about the reflection of pain in art. At a certain point, if you get into it pretty deep, Lady In Satin is almost terrifying. But there is probably no need to wind it up to that effect; Bil­lie herself, always the icon of restraint and elegance, would probably not want us to judge it that way. She probably wouldn't say no to a simple thumbs up, though.

 

LAST RECORDING (1959)

 

1) All Of You; 2) Sometimes I'm Happy; 3) You Took Advantage Of Me; 4) When It's Sleepy Time Down South; 5) There'll Be Some Changes Made; 6) 'Deed I Do; 7) Don't Worry 'bout Me; 8) All The Way; 9) Just One More Chance; 10) It's Not For Me To Say; 11) I'll Never Smile Again; 12) Baby, Won't You Please Come Back.

 

It might actually be a good idea to forget about this album entirely, and let history record that it was Lady In Satin that served as Billie's swan song; well, technically it did, since this «follow-up», originally titled just Billie Holiday, was not released until a few days (or weeks) after the lady's death in July 1959 (for the record, from complications brought about by liver cirrhosis, rather than the stereotypical «overdosing» — not that she never overdosed, of course).

 

The sessions, held in March 1959, were again directed by Ray Ellis, although this time, the or­chestra took a few steps back, letting a jazz band in. As much as we could all be skeptical about Ray's orchestral sentimentality clashing with Billie's style, I almost sort of miss it on this album. Clearly, the idea was to record something a little lighter, poppier, more upbeat and perhaps even optimistic. And maybe — maybe — Billie was even up for it: at the very least, her voice notice­ably crackles less and sounds a little more vibrant and ringing throughout the sessions, somehow almost free of the «old woman rasp» so frequently catching up with her on the last Verve albums and on Lady In Satin.

 

But it does not sound very natural or believable, this attempt at previewing the sound and style of Nancy Wilson. At least, not in the overall context. Billie's voice and strength may have been fail­ing in the Fifties, yet she and her producers countered this with finding the right mood for those levels — all that quiet nocturnal melancholy for penthouse clients etc. Now, just as she was enter­ing the last months of her career, even if nobody knew it (but many still sensed it), Columbia tried to get her to cheer up again, right to the levels of twenty years ago. Even without all this knowledge, the fakeness of the effort shines through; with this knowledge, the album stirs up all sorts of unpleasant feelings, starting with pity and ending with disgust (or, rather, vice versa, be­cause the album opener, ʽAll Of Youʼ, beats all the other tracks in terms of upbeatness and happi­ness and sounds particularly skewed).

 

Of course, from a certain historical point of view, these sessions could have been a sort of «musi­cal therapy», and if they made Billie happy for three days in the midst of the misery, that is just good. And it would be ridiculous to say that these performances are «wooden» or «emotionless»: Billie never ever recorded if she didn't feel like recording, as all the huge archive boxsets prove to us these days. But for the «listener», not the «biographer», this Last Recording is useless. If you want a genuinely happy Billie, go for the early Columbia years; if you want a genuinely mise­rable Billie, go for Lady In Satin; if you live in a penthouse, go for the Verve collection. This record is just a collector's memento, little more, and, although it is not «awful» by any means, I still give it a thumbs down — the only explicit one in Lady Day's entire discography.

 

This pretty much completes the discography runthrough. In addition to the material collected on these LPs and later-issued boxsets, the archives contain numerous alternate takes, demos, etc., most of which you can find on even bigger boxsets, but I do not recommend going for «Complete Verve», etc., unless Billie is your life or unless you are attracted to the coolness of having these bulky objects gathering dust (and, perhaps, accumulating collectible value) on your shelves. It is a very good thing that they are available, though: they serve to emphasize Billie's legendary status and ensure a modest, but stable, level of popularity among future generations of listeners. At the expense of other, unjustly forgotten, legends, perhaps — yet why should we complain that, if there must be only one female jazz vocalist remembered from the pre-rock'n'roll era, it should be Bil­lie? She was not simply following the rules of the formula, nor was she setting them; all her life, she worked against the current, and the fact that for the most part she did so without out­stepping the limits of The Songbook only makes it more admirable. Like the Beatles in their pro­fessional sphere, or like Shakespeare in his, this is one hell of a legend to deserve «unforgettable» status, no matter how trite that may sound to hard-working connoisseurs of the genre.


BLIND BLAKE

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1926-1927)

 

1) Dying Blues; 2) Ashley St. Blues; 3) Early Morning Blues; 4) West Coast Blues; 5) Early Morning Blues; 6) Too Tight; 7) Blake's Worried Blues; 8) Come On Boys Let's Do That Messin' Around; 9) Tampa Bound; 10) Skeedle Loo Doo Blues (take 1); 11) Skeedle Loo Doo Blues (take 2); 12) Stonewall Street Blues; 13) State Street Blues; 14) Down The Country; 15) Black Biting Bee Blues; 16) Wilson Dam; 17) Buck-Town Blues; 18) Black Dog Blues; 19) One Time Blues; 20) Bad Feelings Blues; 21) Dry Bone Shuffle (take 3); 22) That Will Never Happen No More; 23) Brownskin Mama Blues (take 2); 24) Hard Road Blues; 25) Hey Hey Daddy Blues; 26) Sea Board Stomp.

 

Arthur Phelps, a.k.a. Arthur Blake, a.k.a. «Blind» Blake (because, back in the day, what was a blind black boy to do but to play blindingly blisterous blues guitar?), only recorded for Para­mount for eight years (1926-1932), before the Depression drove him out on the road, where he either drank himself to death or got run over by a streetcar (accounts differ). I would be lying like a dirty dog, or a surprisingly exalted fanboy, if I told you that everything he recorded during those years deserves to be heard. Yet Blind Blake is still a tremendously important figure in the early growth of country blues; anyone interested in this type of music at all is obliged to have at least a one-disc collection (the 23-track long Best Of Blind Blake will do nicely).

 

The Document series did a good job of collecting all of the man's known output on four discs, though (with the usual reservation about sound quality: everything here is quite crackly-hissy, not as awful, perhaps, as on Charley Patton records, but still, reflecting the usual lack of quality con­trol for Paramount). The first volume goes heavy on filler, since on several of the tracks Blake is simply heard as a backing player for urban blues performer Leola Wilson — a Bessie Smith wan­nabe with a smaller set of lungs and an annoying nasal twang. And, honoring the contract, per­haps, Blake honestly does nothing but back up the singer — his playing on these slow numbers is utterly by the book, in fact, it almost seems as if he did not have any major liking for this type of music, simply playing for cash while he had the chance.

 

The first glimpse of Blake's greatness comes with ʽWest Coast Bluesʼ, jammed in between two takes of the much more straightforward 12-bar ʽEarly Morning Bluesʼ. It is the first example of his «ragtime blues», essentially a transferral of the genre's piano chord sequences to a guitar-based setting, which gives the music a decidedly rustic, rather than urban, flavor, but preserves all the toe-tappiness and playfulness. A «throwaway» instrumental dance number with a number of Blake's own spoken «directions» to the dancers, it shows a level of technicality that was quite rare even from jazz players at the time.

 

Then come the fully worded tunes — ʽCome On Boys, Let's Do That Messin' Aroundʼ, which, true to its name, already shows Blake «messin' around» with the chords as they go (showing his famous ability to «scatter» a musical line and then quickly pick it up together from the pieces for the next bar); and ʽSkeddle Loo Doo Bluesʼ, which does the same, but with an increase in tempo. With more and more confidence gained in the process, the man even starts to show off on others' records — ʽWilson Damʼ, on which he backs Leola Wilson again, already has the player eclip­sing the singer, as he changes keys in between verse lines and plays arrogant little flourishes even as Leola is singing, pulling away the attention.

 

Instrumental diversity is not the key here — one of the tracks features a lonesome kazoo accom­panying the guitar, and there are a couple of instances of «rattlebone» percussion — but every time Blake picks up speed, that ceases to be an issue. It all culminates in the last track on the disc, ʽSea Board Stompʼ, where the man pulls all the stops: sometimes slipping into one-bar long waltz tempos, sometimes spinning sentimental folksy phrasing, then effortlessly going back into rag­time mode, then showing a bit of sliding technique, then going into a brief bluesy interlude, then «scattering» the melody and picking it up again — basically, this is everything you need to know about Blind Blake rolled into one.

 

ʽSea Board Stompʼ alone would have earned this early collection a thumbs up; the fact that it is loaded with about a dozen not-too-interesting slow blues numbers (and even these tend to be «de­corated» by the end of the disc) should certainly be disregarded, since Blind Blake was a man of his times, and recorded what the people of his times wanted to hear — and the demand for gene­ric 12-bar blues was greater back then than it has been ever since. Well, maybe not «greater», but «holier» or something, if you get my drift.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1927-1928)

 

1) You Gonna Quit Me Blues; 2) Steel Mill Blues; 3) Southern Rag; 4) He's In The Jailhouse Now; 5) Wabash Rag; 6) Doggin' Me Mama Blues; 7) C. C. Pill Blues; 8) Hot Potatoes; 9) Southbound Rag; 10) Pay Day Daddy Blues; 11)   Elzadie's Policy Blues; 12) Goodbye Mama Moan; 13) Tootie Blues; 14) That Lovin' I Crave; 15) That Lonesome Rave; 16) Terrible Murder Blues; 17) Leavin' Gal Blues; 18) No Dough Blues; 19) Lead Hearted Blues; 20) Let Your Love Come Down; 21) Rumblin' And Ramblin' Boa Constrictor Blues; 22) Bootlig Rum Dum Blues; 23) Detroit Bound Blues; 24) Beulah Land; 25) Panther Squall Blues.

 

The ratio of mediocre to great on this second volume is more or less the same (as is the ratio of crackle to cleanliness). Early highlights of late 1927 include ʽSouthern Ragʼ, which features some of the most complex guitar runs recorded at that time — people amazed at the ability of Robert Johnson to play rhythm and melody simultaneously should take a listen to this, where at times it sounds like there are three guitars playing at once, where there is only one (and somehow he also manages to rap out brief accounts of Southern life as well); and a solid version of ʽHe's In The Jailhouse Nowʼ with the original, political lyrics ("Remember last election / Everybody was in ac­tion") rather than the depoliticized tale of crime and punishment, popularized by Jimmie Rod­gers and then, further on down the line, in Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Particularly of note is Blake's suddenly-turned-gravelly voice as he changes the refrain from "He's in the jailhouse now" to "He's in the graveyard now" — a classic moment in country blues history, I'd say.

 

Further on down the line, we get some diversity: on ʽDoggin' Me Mama Bluesʼ, Jimmy Bertrand all but steals away the spotlight with a funny xylophone part, while Blake is content with provi­ding rather ordinary accompaniment; and on ʽC. C. Pill Bluesʼ, he is paired with Johnny Dodds on clarinet — incidentally, this happens to be one of Ry Cooder's favourite pre-war recordings, due to the sheer added value of all the talent involved (apparently, Dodds is considered to be one of the pre-Benny Goodman era clarinet greats). Bertrand, meanwhile, switches to slide whistle, an instrument rarely heard in principle and almost never as a counterpart to acoustic blues perfor­mances in particular.

 

Later on, Blake is again accompanying singers, such as Elzadie Robinson and Bertha Henderson; however, neither of the two is tremendously interesting, and neither seems to have had any inte­rest in supporting Blake's interest in ragtime guitar, preferring to stick to generically slow urban blues. We do get to see the man in some exciting piano action, though, on ʽLet Your Love Come Downʼ,  which proves that he was just as adept on the ivory keys as he was on the strings (hardly sur­prising, though: you'd have to learn your ragtime on the piano first, before transposing it to guitar). But overall, for most of early 1928 Blind Blake was generally engaged in playing so-so urban blues, even when playing solo, exactly the way that, say, a Leroy Carr would perform it on piano. The worst thing about these performances is not even the lack of a proper territory to show off his technique, but rather the very fact that urban blues sifted through an old-time Delta atti­tude is almost a contradiction in terms. «Urban blues» is generally middle-class entertainment, whereas Delta blues grows on much lower depths, and both require different skills and attitudes to be successful.

 

«Smooth» players like Lonnie Johnson could get away with it — Lonnie was quite «urbanized» in his soul and sound; Blind Blake, on the other hand, was a figure cut out for dance frenzy, de­bauchery, and drinking (which is why the former lived to a ripe old age, and the latter only left us one single photograph). So give me ʽSouthern Ragʼ and ʽHe's In The Jailhouse Nowʼ over boring material like ʽDetroit Bound Bluesʼ any day. For these songs alone, the second volume earns ano­ther certified thumbs up; but filler will always be filler, no matter how many thin-grained subtle­ties a jaded listener's ear can locate in the blueness of the man's blue notes.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1928-1929)

 

1) Elzadie's Policy Blues; 2) Pay Day Daddy Blues; 3) Walkin' Across The Country; 4) Search Warrant Blues; 5) Ramblin' Mama Blues; 6) New Style Of Loving; 7) Back Door Slam Blues; 8) Notoriety Woman Blues; 9) Cold Hearted Mama Blues; 10) Low Down Loving Gal; 11) Sweet Papa Low Down; 12) Poker Woman Blues; 13) Doing A Stretch; 14) Fightin' The Jug; 15) Hookworm Blues; 16) Slippery Rag; 17) Hastings Street; 18) Diddie Wah Did­die; 19) Too Tight Blues No. 2; 20) Chump Man Blues; 21) Ice Man Blues; 22) Police Dog Blues; 23) I Was Afraid Of That Pt. 2; 24) Georgia Bound; 25) Keep It Home.

 

Vol. 3 of Blind Blake's starts out rather inauspiciously, with a couple of fairly bland Elzadie Ro­binson urban blues tunes which are then followed with lotsa lotsa slow blues, most of them with hi­deous sound quality that prevents from discerning any tricks and flourishes even if Blake actu­ally had them on these tracks — and I am quite unsure of that. (He gets particularly lazy on tracks like ʽSearch Warrant Bluesʼ, whose recording session must have caught him in an utterly un­in­spired state, or an utterly inebriated one). These six or seven slow blues laments are really only noticeable for the lyrics, which have been occasionally accused of excessive (even for the times) misogyny ("to keep her quiet, I knocked her teeth out her mouth" etc.). But since Blake hardly ever comes across as a pathological character, we should still ascribe these bleak feelings to then-current conventions. Good old happy times, when «bitch-slapping» was the norm and nobody  wanted to be left out of the fun.

 

The real fun — musical fun — starts only on the eleventh number (ʽSweet Papa Low Downʼ), the first feel-good number on the CD, and Blind Blake's fingers only really worked wonders when they were feeling good: here be a nifty little Charleston with some cornet and xylophone accom­paniment, and Blake himself happily mumbling and dee-daa-daaing under his nose as he spins his tricky ragtime chords.

 

From there, as we move on to 1929 and the last months of nationwide happiness, it is all steadily uphill once again: ʽHookworm Bluesʼ, with a funny guitar/piano soloing duet; ʽSlippery Ragʼ, which is anything but slippery — in fact, it features some of Blake's most complex soloing; and, most importantly, ʽDiddie Wah Diddieʼ, one of his signature tunes (nothing to do with the much later Bo Diddley song of the same name) that introduced the line "I wish somebody could tell me what diddie wah diddie means" into popular culture.

 

Best of the lot is concealed at the end: ʽGeorgia Boundʼ, also done in a ragtime tuning, recorded with a rare degree of cleanness, sung with an unexpected sweet natural tenderness, and bursting into diverse, but always optimistic solo melodies after each verse. The melody may be well known from a million other performances (it is exactly the same as Robert Johnson's ʽFrom Four Until Lateʼ), but, with Blake at the helm, a good melody will always bear individual traces, re­gardless of how well we know it. If you do not play guitar, these sounds may well taunt you into trying — and if you do, you might as well quit, because you'll never beat this kind of sound, no matter how technically simple it might seem to the modern player. Thumbs up.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 4 (1929-1932)

 

1) Sweet Jivin' Mama; 2) Lonesome Christmas Blues; 3) Third Degree Blues; 4) Guitar Chimes; 5) Blind Arthur's Breakdown; 6) Baby Lou Blues; 7) Cold Love Blues; 8) Papa Charlie Jackson And Blind Blake Talk About It, pt. 1; 9) Papa Charlie Jackson And Blind Blake Talk About It, pt. 2; 10) Stingaree Man Blues; 11) Itching Heel; 12) You've Got What I Want; 13) Cherry Hill Blues; 14) Diddie Wah Diddie No. 2; 15) Hard Pushing Papa; 16) What A Low Down Place The Jailhouse Is; 17) Ain't Gonna Do That No More; 18) Playing Policy Blues; 19) Righteous Blues; 20) Rope Stretching Blues, pt. 2; 21) Rope Stretching Blues, pt. 1; 22) Champagne Charlie Is My Name; 23) Depression's Gone From Me Blues.

 

The last volume in the series is, unfortunately, quite far from great — not an atypical situation for the old bluesmen, decimated by life on the road, heavy drinking, and Depression depression no less harder than the rock generation youngsters would be decimated by their problems. Two ex­cellent pre-Depression sides may be found early on: ʽGuitar Chimesʼ, a slow blues shuffle that does indeed begin with some nifty «chiming», and the faster ragtime guitar showcase ʽBlind Arthur's Breakdownʼ — probably the last time you can hear the man relatively unburdened with atrocious hiss and crackle, doing his fabulously inimitable stuff.

 

The two-part «dialog» between Blake and Papa Charlie Jackson on the banjo, done in the form of a traveling minstrel show, is an excellent historical document, but the awful sound quality makes it all but impossible to understand the dialog as such, and they do concentrate on verbal exchange quite a bit more than on instrumental exchange. Then there are several more numbers on which Blake backs Irene Scruggs (tracks 10-13) — her vocals are a bit more distinctive and playful than those of the man's previous female partners, but the only well-audible highlight is ʽItching Heelʼ, where Blake plays it slow and cautious, but occasionally breaks into ragtime frenzy, changing the mood from passive-aggressive to comical.

 

By 1930, Blind Blake predictably had his studio time cut severely — and, according to most ac­counts, packed it with extra drinking instead, so that most of these late-period recordings were hardly up to the standards set in earlier years. The two-part ʽRope Stretchin' Bluesʼ is among his grimmest offerings, sung and played with tragic intonations that seem more heartfelt than ever be­fore (hard times taking their toll?). ʽChampagne Charlie Is My Nameʼ is an old Victorian music hall number that is so different in mood and style from Blake's usual repertoire that people have even expressed doubts about whether it is Blind Blake at all — one of those little mysteries that drives obsessive people crazy. No reason, though, why Blind Blake shouldn't have tried to make a different recording, especially considering that his standard blues repertoire was selling poorly. He could have been experimenting with his image a bit, deliberately choosing something upbeat and «jolly» to cheer people up — no wonder that the last track on here, a cover of the well-known standart ʽSittin' On Top Of The Worldʼ, is re-titled ʽDepression's Gone From Me Bluesʼ.

 

Depression would really be gone from Blind Blake several years later, when, unemployed and penniless, he would die from pulmonary tuberculosis (according to a recently discovered death certificate for one Arthur Blake in Milwaukee, provided, of course, that there is no coincidence involved). Had he lived, he would, of course, be eventually rediscovered and dragged out by an Alan Lomax, but, as it is, all we have left is just one photo, cleverly spread in four different di­mensions on four different album sleeves for the Document series — gradually zooming away from us as the years roll by. Technically, this last volume is the weakest of the lot and, according­ly, gets a thumbs down, but if you are hunting for the whole package rather than a best-of, there is no sense in bypassing it: with just four CDs worth of material from one of the era's most re­nowned and innovative guitar players, who'd want to intentionally ignore even his twilight years?

BLIND BOY FULLER

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1935-1936)

 

1) Baby, I Don't Have To Worry; 2) I'm A Rattlesnakin' Daddy; 3) I'm Climbin' On Top Of The Hill; 4) Ain't It A Cryin' Shame; 5) Looking For My Woman; 6) Rag Mama Rag (take 1); 7) Rag Mama Rag (take 2); 8) Baby, You Gotta Change Your Mind; 9) Evil Hearted Woman; 10) My Brownskin Sugar Plum; 11) Somebody's Been Playing With That Thing; 12) Log Cabin Blues (take 1); 13) Log Cabin Blues (take 2); 14) Homesick And Lonesome Blues; 15) Walkin' My Troubles Away (take 1); 16) Walkin' My Troubles Away (take 2); 17) Black And Tan; 18) Keep Away From My Woman (take 1); 19) Keep Away From My Woman (take 2); 20) Babe, You Got To Do Better; 21) Big Bed Blues; 22) Truckin' My Blues Away; 23) She's Funny That Way; 24) Cat Man Blues (take 1).

 

Unless you are an obsessed-dedicated pre-War blues aficionado, you really do not need any Blind Boy Fuller in your collection. The man did not have a unique singing ability, did not innovate any particular guitar playing techniques, did not write up any classic tunes (although a small handful of titles still have a strong historic connection to his name), and, overall, would wind up on most people's personal accounts as one blind boy too many.

 

Still, there must have been a reason why Fulton Allen, a.k.a. Blind Boy Fuller, was one of the hot­test things on the black music market back in his day — «his day» lasting for all of five years, from Blind Boy's first recordings for ARC in 1935 and up to his death of drink-related causes in 1941. Truth is, while there is nothing particularly outstanding or mind-blowing on these records, they sound very, very nice. Building on the already several decades old «Piedmont» tradition, Fuller had himself a clean, professional, entertaining sound which he must have masterminded himself: all of these recordings are as clean and «sharp» as possible for the recording standards of the mid-Thirties. From the modern listener's point of view, switching to this music from Blind Blake or Blind Lemon Jefferson, both of them several times as inventive and unpredictable in their playing as Fuller, will be refreshing if only for the fact that his sound was captured several times as successfully on disc as that of his predecessors.

 

Although most of the melodies from these early sessions will be instantly recognizable to all lo­vers of bluesy/raggy varieties of Americana, only the title of ʽRag Mama Ragʼ is probably ack­nowledged as a «classic title», since this bit of fast-tempo ragtime blues has been covered many times since (and even become a point of departure for The Band's own ʽRag Mama Ragʼ in 1969, even if musically, their song had nothing whatsoever to do with the original title). Everything about the tune is subtly infectious, particularly Fuller's accomplished, if never spectacular, scat singing, and the only thing that dampens the excitement is that he went on to re-record the exact same thing under several extra titles (in fact, it is repeated immediately after the original couple of takes, at a slightly slower tempo, as ʽBaby You Gotta Change Your Mindʼ).

 

Another highlight is ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ, which the average listener usually knows as Robert Johnson's ʽThey're Red Hotʼ (ʽHot Tamalesʼ), recorded a couple years later (but it does not really matter — it's not as if it was Fuller who wrote this melody). It gives us a good chance to enjoy Fuller's playing technique, which was quite accomplished: no eye-popping tricks, but not a single mistake, either, and perfect self-control while singing scat, holding down the rhythm, and playing fast ragtime chords at the same time.

 

He was also a fairly pleasant slow blues player as well: where a Blind Blake could, for instance, easily «laze» his way through a 12-bar blues, playing minimalistic trivial accompaniment just for the sake of asserting his weight («I'm the greatest anyway, do I really need to prove it one more time?»), Fuller fills even the most generic songs like ʽBaby, I Don't Have To Worryʼ with simple, but effective little flourishes that cleverly mask the tunes' paucity of basic ideas.

 

But in general slow, pensive blues is not this guy's main line of work: most of his music is suppo­sed to be danced to (ʽTruckin' My Blues Awayʼ, ʽShe's Funny That Wayʼ, etc.), and sounds fairly happy on the surface at least. It is this combination of upbeat friendliness, lightness, professio­nalism, and good recording quality that, in the end, mattered on the market back in its day. And those few people who, these days, keep a well-oiled time machine to pre-war America in their backyard, will probably get to know and like these tunes much more than the rest of us, who, at best, only have a passing historic interest in those days when you didn't have anywhere to plug yourself in while playing the blues. Me, I don't care much for time machines if they take me away from my PC interface, but thumbs up anyway.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1936-1937)

 

1) Cat Man Blues (take 2); 2) When Your Gal Packs Up And Leaves; 3) Mama, Let Me Lay It On You; 4) If You Don't Give Me What I Want; 5) Boots And Shoes; 6) Truckin' My Blues Away No. 2 (take 1); 7) Truckin' My Blues Away No. 2 (take 2); 8) Sweet Honey Hole; 9) Untrue Blues; 10) Tom Cat Blues; 11) My Baby Don't Mean Me No Good; 12) Been Your Dog; 13) My Best Gal Gonna Leave Me; 14) Wires All Down; 15) Let Me Squeeze Your Le­mon; 16) Death Alley; 17) Mamie (take 1); 18) Mamie (take 2); 19) New Oh Red!; 20) If You See My Pigmeat; 21) Stingy Mama; 22) Why Don't My Baby Write To Me; 23) Some Day You're Gonna Be Sorry; 24) You Never Can Tell.

 

Fulton Allen was so thoroughly consistent in his lifetime that it is a fairly hard task finding even one «standout» track among the output he recorded in between April 29, 1936 and July 12, 1937. Well, actually there is ʽMama, Let Me Lay It On Youʼ, which, if I am not mistaken (and it is very easy to make a mistake in this slippery who-made-who business), is either the first or one of the very first recordings of what would later become ʽBaby Let Me Follow You Downʼ and be popu­larized for all the white guys by Dylan and the Animals. In all honesty, it is essentially but a slow­ed down, mildly sentimentalized variant of Blind Boy's ragtime blues — but at least it's a slightly different melody, which is more than can usually be expected.

 

Other than that, Fuller is recording even more versions of ʽTruckin' My Blues Awayʼ; continuing to revel in double entendres with titles like ʽLet Me Squeeze Your Lemonʼ and, particularly, ʽIf You See My Pigmeatʼ (yes, «pigmeat» is an endearing term reserved by the author for his sweet­heart — what a life, eh?); and, for some reason, concentrates almost exclusively on slow or mid-tempo blues — upbeat dance tunes are limited to just ʽIf You Don't Give Me What I Wantʼ and the new revision of ʽTruckinʼ: hilarious scat singing on both of them, but just two upbeat tunes over one year? Were the times too hard, or was re-recording the exact same melody more than three times in a row a bit unnerving even for the artist himself?

 

In the end, the most interesting song of the lot is probably ʽNew Oh Red!ʼ: the «old» one was re­corded in the same year by the Harlem Hamfats, but it is even more fun to see Blind Boy Fuller try to take on this jazz-pop number, considering that this playing style had not been his personal cup of tea at all. He rises to the challenge admirably, coming up with one of the most «rocking» numbers in his catalog. Strange enough, he did not go on to re-record it under fifteen different titles — maybe the Hamfats bribed him to stay away from their material. Instead, he just went on to play more 12-bar blues: the last three or four tracks here are melodically indistinguishable from contemporary Robert Johnson material (even if the playing styles are, of course, wildly different). However, his technique is still complex, diverse, fluent, and self-assured enough to make sitting through bits and pie­ces of this stuff easy and pleasant — something I couldn't exactly say about, say, Arthur Crudup (who, however, had the advantage of a creakier, whinier, otherworldlier voice than Blind Boy Fuller's amicably ordinary one).

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1937)

 

1) Put You Back In The Jail; 2) Walking And Looking Blues; 3) Bulldog Blues; 4) Where My Woman Usta Lay; 5) Working Man Blues; 6) Weeping Willow; 7) Corrine, What Make You Treat Me So; 8) Stealing Bo-Hog; 9) Worried And Evil Man Blues; 10) Bulldog Blues; 11) Break Of Day Blues; 12) Oh Zee Zas Rag; 13) Throw Your Ya Yas Back In Jail; 14) Snake Woman Blues; 15) Mojo Hidin' Woman; 16) Steel Hearted Woman; 17) Ain't No Gettin' Along; 18) Careless Love; 19) New Louise, Louise Blues; 20) Mistreater, You're Going To Be Sorry; 21) Bye Bye Baby Blues; 22) Looking For My Woman No. 2.

 

Man, was Blind Boy Fuller ever in demand in 1937! This third disc in the series only barely ma­nages to cover his output recorded from July 12 and ending on December 15 that year — starting just as the infamous recession of 1937 began rolling in and cutting down jobs, so that the title of the first song on here, ʽPut You Back In The Jailʼ, looks a little too close for comfort. And yet, ap­parently Fuller's singles were still selling like hotcakes, despite sounding not a wee bit different from what he'd already put out. (ʽPut You Back In The Jailʼ, while we're on the subject, was al­most immediately re-recorded as ʽThrow Your Ya Yas Back In Jailʼ).

 

The only peculiarity of these sessions is that the three last tracks were recorded with legendary harmonica player Sonny Terry (who had already played with Fuller earlier in a blues trio), giving the man a chance to «reinvent» three older tunes in a flashier way than usual. Unfortunately, Ter­ry is given very little space to shine – two very brief solos and some rhythm-accompanying lead lines that are rather poorly captured by the mikes. Apparently, it had to be demonstrated very cle­arly just who was the boss in the studio.

 

Other than that, minor ear-catching highlights include ʽOh Zee Zas Ragʼ (a new bit of fast rag­time, and it does not seem to have the exact same melody as ʽRag Mama Ragʼ!); and the dirgey mood of ʽWeeping Willowʼ, for which he also seems to have mastered a new chord or two (and then, just a few months later, duly re-recorded it as ʽAin't No Gettin' Alongʼ — and Blind Boy Fuller was actually so lazy, unlike most other re-recorders, he didn't even bother writing new ly­rics for the songs he re-recorded: he just took out a different line to use as the new title). There is also a very good take on the traditional standard ʽCareless Loveʼ, one of the «bluesiest» ones du­ring that era (Lonnie Johnson, despite being a far superior player to Fuller, did that one almost in crooner mode; and Bessie is beyond competition in any case); and I suppose that Big Bill Broon­zy recorded ʽLouise, Louise Bluesʼ somewhat earlier than Blind Boy (otherwise, why slap on a ʽNewʼ subtitle?), but I like Blind Boy's purely acoustic version much better than Big Bill's, who recorded it over one of his «hide-behind-the-piano» periods. Crisp, clean, sharp, as perfect as simple, unassuming 12-bar blues ever gets. Well, supposedly 1937 was a good year for somebody other than Uncle Joe over in Soviet Russia.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 4 (1937-1938)

 

1) Shaggy Like A Bear; 2) Ten O'Clock Peeper; 3) Hungry Calf Blues; 4) Too Many Women Blues; 5) Oozin' You Off My Mind; 6) Shake That Shimmy; 7) Heart Ease Blues; 8) I'm Going To Move (To The Edge Of Town); 9) Pis­tol Slapper Blues; 10) Mean And No Good Woman; 11) Georgia Ham Mama; 12) Piccolo Rag; 13) Funny Feeling Blues; 14) Painful Hearted Man; 15) You've Got To Move It Out; 16) Mama, Let Me Lay It On You No. 2; 17) Meat Shakin' Woman; 18) I'm A Good Stem Winder; 19) What's That Smells Like Fish; 20) She's A Truckin' Little Baby; 21) Jivin' Woman Blues; 22) You're Laughing Now.

 

Man, was Blind Boy Fuller ever in demand in 1938!... sorry. Right until the unfortunate moment when he shot his wife in the leg — apparently, the «Meat Shakin' Woman» refused to believe that he was really such «A Good Stem Winder» and maliciously avoided a direct answer to the ques­tion «What's That Smells Like Fish». Which meant that Blind Boy eventually had to «Move (To The Edge Of Town)» and halt his recording activities until 1940. But not before recording a cou­p­le dozen more unique, unrepeatable examples of his songwriting craft.

 

Vol. 4 has lots more songs that Fuller recorded with Sonny Terry, as well as accompanied by a se­cond guitarist (Dipper Boy Council), which predictably gives us a fuller, but not necessarily better sound. Occasional progress is seen in that two subsequent takes on the exact same melody may now feature different sets of lyrics — for instance, ʽShake That Shimmyʼ and ʽHeart Ease Bluesʼ are still the same song, but you couldn't genuinely tell that by simply looking at the lyrics sheet. (Not that there's any available — not that it's a big problem, either).

 

Only one song on the whole volume deserves special mention, especially because, for some rea­son, not every single-CD Blind Boy Fuller compilation includes it, even though they all should. This is ʽJivin' Woman Bluesʼ, a very different example of ragtime guitar playing than everything Fuller had played up to that point, with a slower tempo, a more bluegrassy feel, and a complex, but catchy picking pattern, echoes of which you could eventually hear on Fleetwood Mac's ʽNe­ver Going Back Againʼ (with plenty of buffers along the way, of course).

 

Minor «experiments» can also be heard on ʽMeat Shakin' Womanʼ and maybe one or two other numbers that passed me by, but you'd really need an aural magnifying glass to concentrate on that. Which makes the time scale of Vol. 4 Blind Boy's most skippable period so far. It does, however, seem to feature an exceedingly large number of double entendres — if you ever thought it was up to rockers to invent the «popularity booster through excessive profanity», here's living proof that «sleazing up» your music was a well-oiled technique before the war. Question: How do you sell more copies of your song called ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ? Answer: Re-record it under the title ʽWhat's That Smells Like Fishʼ. Do not overestimate the decency of the average record buyer.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 5 (1938-1940)

 

1) Stop Jivin' Me, Mama; 2) Long Time Trucker; 3) Big House Bound; 4) Flyin' Airplane Blues; 5) Get Your Ya Yas Out; 6) Jitterbug Rag; 7) Screaming And Crying Blues; 8) Blacksnakin' Jiver; 9) I Don't Care How Long; 10) You've Got Something There; 11) Baby, Quit Your Low Down Ways (take 1); 12) Baby, Quit Your Low Down Ways (take 2); 13) It Doesn't Matter, Baby; 14) Black Bottom Blues; 15) I Crave My Pig Meat; 16) Big Leg Woman Gets My Pay; 17) I'm A Stranger Here; 18) Red's Got The Piccolo Blues; 19) I Want Some Of Your Pie; 20) Jivin' Big Bill Blues; 21) Woman, You Better Wake Up; 22) Step It Up And Go; 23) Worn Out Engine Blues.

 

This one is going to be very short: although the fifth volume covers a longer time period than the fourth, it yields even fewer pretexts to write anything meaningful. Oh yes: this late 1938 session gave us the title of the best live album by the Rolling Stones — ʽGet Your Ya-Ya's Outʼ may be just another rewrite of ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ, but it was well worth it in the end.

 

At the other end of the album, ʽStep It Up And Goʼ is probably the first recording of this song that actually uses this title, under which it would later be recorded by plenty of other people (Bob Dy­lan's version is what comes to mind first). But we cannot even give Fuller complete credit, since the merry little jug band dance tune dates back to at least 1932, when it was still called ʽBottle It Up And Goʼ. Fuller's variant is competent, but that's about it.

 

So, instead of trying desperately to write something about the music on here, let me just throw in a fun fact — apparently, it turns out that, due to his short prison term for the wife-shooting «acci­dent», Blind Boy Fuller never made it to the From Spirituals To Swing show that John Hammond presented in Carnegie Hall. Big Bill Broonzy did, though, and who knows if that event, which in­troduced jazz and blues music in an «academic» manner to «respectable» white audiences, was not partially responsible for future developments of popular tastes? Imagine music lovers not taking after Big Bill Broonzy (who flowed straight into Muddy Waters, who flowed straight into every­thing else), but after Blind Boy Fuller? The guy missed his little chance at world domination here: one drunken shot in the leg, and Piedmont blues was never the same after that...

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 6 (1940)

 

1) Blue And Worried Man; 2) Passenger Train Woman; 3) Shake It, Baby; 4) Somebody's Been Talkin'; 5) Three Ball Blues; 6) Little Woman, You're So Sweet; 7) Harmonica Stomp; 8) Good Feeling Blues; 9) You Can't Hide From The Lord; 10) Twelve Gates To The City; 11) Crooked Woman Blues; 12) I Don't Want No Skinny Woman; 13) Bus Rider Blues; 14) You Got To Have Your Dollar; 15) Lost Lover Blues; 16) Thousand Woman Blues; 17) Bye Bye, Baby; 18) When You Are Gone; 19) No Stranger Now; 20) Must Have Been My Jesus; 21) Jesus Is A Holy Man; 22) Precious Lord; 23) Night Rambling Woman.

 

Fuller's last two sessions date from March and June 1940, both of them in the company of Sonny Terry on harmonica and Bull City Red on washboard. The three of them gel best under conditions of complete democracy — ʽHarmonica Stompʼ is a lot of fun, with Fuller adding bits of semi-scat falsetto for rowdiness' sakes — unfortunately, these conditions are rarely met, and most of the time we just get more rehashes of the same old blues and ragtime stereotypes.

 

The only notable change is that both times, Fuller adds gospel to the repertoire: starting with ʽTwelve Gates To The Cityʼ, originally popularized by the Rev. Gary Davis, and ending with the spiritual rave-up of ʽJesus Is A Holy Manʼ. This comes off as a bit of surprise, since appeals to the Lord were not a known part of the man's repertoire — in fact, he usually preferred sin to re­pen­tance. It is possible, that with his steadily failing health and all, he was trying to get a last mi­nute ticket. None of these gospel covers, however, would fare all too well in restoring his position at the Lord's knees: Fuller's voice is too weak to stir up religious enthusiasm, and his guitar tricks are much better suited for fun-oriented songs than serious praise-the-lord material.

 

He does develop a tired, worn out, «authentic» rasp towards the end of the last session, sugges­ting total exhaustion — but maybe he was just tired on that particular evening. Overall, the ses­sion was quite Robert Johnson-ish in nature, all dark, depressing blues with nary a single good time rag stomp to be found. Blind Boy Fuller's death date is usually cited as February 13, 1941, but it is also known that he underwent a serious surgical operation in July 1940, which probably explains all this descent into bleakness and preachiness. Alas, I cannot honestly say that either of these translates into great music — they just add a few logical final touches to the portrait.

 

Altogether, as is already evident by now, the six CDs that are needed to cover all of Blind Boy Fuller's legacy are murderous overkill: my intuitive best-guess estimate is that he recorded every single melody in his repertoire at least three or four times, and some of them as much as ten or twelve. Yet the very fact that he actually got the chance to record so much — a chance that was never available for quite a few of his superior colleagues — is quite telling: he was treasured for sheer reliability. Most of his major achievements may already be found on the first two volumes of this set — but each and every volume is fully listenable; even in his last year, Fuller never showed any decline in professionalism. For six steady years, his blues machine rolled on without a hitch, and it might have rolled on for decades longer, had not God suddenly felt an acute desire to hear ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ live. Must have worn out his stack of 45s.

BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1925-1926)

 

1) I Want To Be Like Jesus In My Heart; 2) All I Want Is That Pure Religion; 3) Got The Blues; 4) Long Lonesome Blues; 5) Booster Blues; 6) Dry Southern Blues; 7) Black Horse Blues; 8) Corinna Blues; 9) Got The Blues; 10) Long Lonesome Blues; 11) Jack O' Diamond Blues (take 1); 12) Jack O' Diamond Blues (take 2); 13) Chock House Blues; 14) Beggin' Back; 15) Old Rounder Blues; 16) Stocking Feet Blues; 17) That Black Snake Moan; 18) Wartime Blues; 19) Broke And Hungry; 20) Shuckin' Sugar Blues; 21) Booger Rooger Blues; 22) Rabbit Foot Blues; 23) Bad Luck Blues.

 

The cool thing about Blind Lemon Jefferson is not that he was the first country blues «superstar», the person to make the «tough black guy with acoustic guitar wailing into the mike» image mar­ketable and profitable, opening the doors for dozens of followers. Many of these followers could get the job done on their own. The truly cool thing about Blind Lemon is that, at his best, he play­ed that country blues like no one else, with a level of creative freedom, inventiveness, and unpre­dictability that was never matched by any of these followers. Forget Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy: they have nothing on this guy when it comes to taking the basic blues idiom and strip­ping it free of boredom. In all honesty, I think Blind Lemon's stature among his pre-war acoustic blues colleagues should be deemed equal to that of Hendrix in the 1960s.

 

Unfortunately, Blind Lemon made all of his recordings on the shittiest of all major labels in the 1920s: Paramount. Had he hit it big with the likes of Columbia, it would have been much easier to appreciate his works today, as they would not be covered by almost unbreachable walls of hiss and crackle, from under which the thin, subtle, suffocated guitar lines feebly call out for your at­tention. Note: if you are new to Blind Lemon, do not, at all costs, begin right off the bat with the Complete series on the Document label — the songs here have not been properly cleaned up or remastered.  Go with Yazoo's The Best Of instead: it has most of the highlights, and the people out there did a laudable job of removing much of the original tape hiss, even though it still sounds like crap. But in this business of studying in pre-war music, you have to commit yourself to distinguishing between different sorts and flavors of crap.

 

I am still reviewing the Document series simply because of completism, although it should be stated that, like everyone else at the time, Blind Lemon was never about «originality». He was, however, about «inspiration», and he could easily record the same song in a routine, boring, per­functory man­ner when he was not in the spirit, or as a jaw-dropping exploration of the limits of sound when he was. And in his earliest years, fortunately, he happened to be in the spirit way more often than out of it.

 

For some reason, the man's first two recordings, from December 1925, Chicago, are in the gospel genre (they were even credited to a pseudonym — «Deacon L. J. Bates»). But even the first track already gives a brief glimpse of the man's love for flourishes, with mandolin-style trills disrupting the steady choppy flow of the melody and adding an almost sentimental touch. It also introduces his unique voice, an odd combination of «whiny» and «earthy»: Blind Lemon was the first of the great blues «wailers», oozing loneliness and soul torment a whole decade prior to Robert John­son. Of course, ʽI Want To Be Like Jesus In My Heartʼ actually oozes humility and friendship rather than loneliness, but that's just the beginning.

 

Most of the songs that follow are played in the standard 12-bar blues pattern and are generally interchangeable in terms of basic structure. But that's not the gist of it: real excitement comes from watching Blind Lemon fuck that structure from each possible point of entry, if you pardon the rudeness of the metaphor. The early sessions actually let you see the evolution. For instance, on ʽDry Sou­thern Bluesʼ, one of the man's earliest hits, the choppy ragtime-influenced pattern is technically accomplished and almost «danceable», but stays more or less the same throughout. (Sidenote: it also marks the first appearance of the "when the train left the station, it had two lights on behind" line, later to become the lyrical cornerstone of Johnson's ʽLove In Vainʼ). ʽLong Lonesome Bluesʼ is also strictly disciplined, although the melodic potential is already much wi­der, with little high-pitched country flourishes played at top speed in between the choppy rhythm work, and an occasional trill or two woven into the mesh.

 

But then at the end of Vol. 1, you already get stuff like ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ, which just might be the single greatest «fight the structural limits!» statement of the entire decade. On that track, almost every single bar comes out different — slowed down, sped up, played choppy, played lyrical, syncopated, trilled, aggressive, super-calm, whatever, but never losing track of the root notes, so that nobody could accuse the man of just fooling around. The effect is utterly confusing: the song has no general mood or «aura» per se, just a whirring flash of different feelings. It cannot be qua­lified as straightahead entertainment, because it's hard for the listener to even follow it rhythmi­cally, but it isn't an intimate emotional lament, either. What is it? I have no idea, really. An avant­garde experiment, at least in the context of its usual genre.

 

Most of the other tracks are less outrageous, with one or two chord patterns dominating over the rest, but even so, each side chooses its own pattern, and the only thing that prevents us from en­joying this diversity to its fullest is the ugly crackle wall. The one track that stands out the most is ʽJack O' Diamond Bluesʼ, presented here in two takes: a spirited wail set to a threatening slide guitar part (a relatively rare occasion: Blind Lemon did not employ slide techniques too often). That despairing yell of "jack o' diaaaaaamond's a hard card to play!" must have raised plenty of hairs back in 1926 — time, and shellac rot, have dimmed its impact, but with a little time-travel­ling effort on the part of your mind, it is still possible to recreate that feeling.

 

Since these early sessions capture Blind Lemon at his youngest and freshest, unspoiled by com­mercial success, booze, or boredom, Vol. 1 is simply one of the greatest blues «albums» of the pre-war era, period. The horrendous sound quality poisons the effect, for sure, but in compensa­tion, just put on ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ in the highest quality you can find and ask yourself: who ever afterwards played acoustic (or electric) guitar just like that? ... That's right. Most of the time, people are trapped by the blues, and show no strength of will to spring the trap. Hilarious, then, that the very first person who made authentic country blues into a household name had already shown how to spring it way back in 1925. Unfortunately, very few people understood the lesson, and most of them just got it wrong. Thumbs up for something so way ahead of its time — or, more precisely, so out of any sort of timeline.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1927)

 

1) Black Snake Moan; 2) Match Box Blues; 3) Easy Rider Blues; 4) Match Box Blues; 5) Match Box Blues; 6) Rising High Water Blues; 7) Weary Dog Blues; 8) Right Of Way Blues; 9) Teddy Bear Blues; 10) Black Snake Dream Blues; 11) Hot Dogs; 12) He Arose From The Dead; 13) Stuck Sorrow Blues; 14) Rambler Blues; 15) Chinch Bug Blues; 16) Deceitful Brownskin Blues; 17) Sunshine Special; 18) Gone Dead On You Blues; 19) Where Shall I Be?; 20) See That My Grave's Kept Clean; 21) One Dime Blues; 22) Lonesome House Blues.

 

The obvious towering highlight of Blind Lemon's output in 1927 is ʽMatch Box Bluesʼ — not be­cause it has anything to do with matchboxes, and not even because it was later covered by Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and eventually the Beatles (the lyrics only have one verse that overlaps anyway, and the melody... 12-bar blues is only whatever your inspiration makes out of 12-bar blues, in any case). It's just that it happens to be the best sounding Blind Lemon song: during a brief stint at O'Keh records rather than Paramount, he cut one single (with ʽBlack Snake Moanʼ as the B-side) that, today, allows us to appreciate his guitar magic unhindered by crackle (well, there is still a little bit left, but it only helps the atmosphere).

 

I still feel that ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ is the man's one true classic on which he pulled all the stops, but ʽMatch Boxʼ does not linger far behind — chops, flourishes, trills, rhythmic traps and coun­terpoints, and then an out-of-nowhere boogie line for the last verse. The technique is impressive for its time, but it is not the technique that counts (for sheer speed and complexity, Lonnie John­son had Blind Lemon beat all the way), it is this amazing freedom of form: normally, you'd ex­pect the flourishes and key changes to happen after the man sings his line — Jefferson does that while singing, so that it is his voice, occasionally, that becomes the rhythm instrument, while the guitar just goes wherever it wants to.

 

The demand for the record was actually so big that, as soon as Blind Lemon returned to Para­mount, he was pressed into cutting two more takes — both of them in Paramount's standardly aw­ful quality, yet it is still curious to compare all three recordings, since no two out of the lot are completely identical. The boogie line may come in earlier, the intro may play an entirely different chord sequence, and, in general, it seems as if the man had no set plan when launching into the performance at all. Pure free flight.

 

This does not apply to all of Blind Lemon's material, of course. Some of the songs are quite tight and disciplined, such as ʽRight Of Way Bluesʼ, which is all based around one dark, menacing line winding its way upwards after each vocal turn — but it is such a creepy line, way over any gene­ric 12-bar standards of the day, that the song is still a minor masterpiece. To compensate for the eeriness, there is ʽHot Dogsʼ, a fast little dance number credited to «Blind Lemon Jefferson and His Feet» (the latter are indeed well audible), and then ʽHe Arose From The Deadʼ, sung in Blind Lemon's most sentimental croon to a very similar melody. (And why shouldn't one be merrily tapping one's foot to the story of the Resurrection? Happy end and all).

 

Somewhat more questionable is the inclusion of several numbers on which Jefferson switches guitar for a piano accompaniment: I am not sure if he played the instrument himself (he did know how, according to reports) or if Paramount brought in a session musician, but the playing on ʽTed­dy Bear Bluesʼ and other piano-led tunes is nothing special, and Blind Lemon is not that mi­raculous a singer to just fall for his voice and nothing else (well, Eric Clapton never learned his lesson, either). It's not bad, but, as a guitar player, Blind Lemon is worth looking into even at his laziest and tiredest — as a singer, he's just one of the many greats of his era.

 

Besides, his finest vocal performance on Vol. 2 is on a guitar-led track anyway: ʽSee That My Grave Is Kept Cleanʼ, which Bob Dylan would later record trying to emulate some of Lemon's actual modulations — to very good effect, for that matter, even if the fact remains that one is the original and the other one is a tribute act. Musical testaments like this were still a rarity in 1927, even among blues singers, and Jefferson's howling, while not particularly «shivery» per se, still feels a little uncomfortable. The guy was a commercially successful, near-prosperous, respectable bluesman-entertainer, yet here he is wailing about impending death and diminished returns in the afterlife. He only had two more years to live.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1928)

 

1) Blind Lemon's Pentitentiary Blues; 2) 'Lectric Chair Blues; 3) See That My Grave Is Kept Clean; 4) Lemon's Worried Blues; 5) Mean Jumper Blues; 6) Balky Mule Blues; 7) Change My Luck Blues; 8) Prison Cell Blues; 9) Lemon's Cannon Ball Moan; 10) Long Lastin' Lovin'; 11) Piney Woods Money Mama; 12) Low Down Mojo Blues; 13) Competition Bed Blues; 14) Lock Step Blues; 15) Hangman's Blues; 16) Sad News Blues; 17) How Long How Long; 18) Christmas Eve Blues; 19) Happy New Years Blues; 20) Maltese Cat Blues; 21) D B Blues.

 

Strange as it is, Blind Lemon's output got steadily less interesting as the years went by. None of the sides that he cut over 1928-29 even begin to match the inventiveness and freedom of ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ or ʽMatch Box Bluesʼ. And, considering the fact that it takes a lot to make anybody's jaw drop over a bunch of crackling, poorly recorded pre-war acoustic blues, the effect is in­evitable: dis-ap-point-ment a-plenty.

 

This third volume does contain an alternate version of ʽSee That My Grave Is Kept Cleanʼ that actually improves upon the original: do not miss Blind Lemon following up on the line "have you ever heard the church bell toll?" with an actual imitation of the church bell (no such thing in the first take from 1927), along with other little tricks. But then his blues style shifts to a subtler, more countrified style, with fewer unpredictable tempo or key changes — it is almost as if he were willing to downplay his guitar prowess a little bit in order to concentrate more on the sing­ing. One could almost argue in terms of a «sellout» — the average record buyer certainly paid more attention to the voice than the guitar, and somebody had to pay for the fuel for his brand new Ford, after all (and don't forget the chauffeur).

 

Nobody can argue that Blind Lemon did not have a cool singing voice — he reaches a particular high with his singing on ʽPrison Cell Bluesʼ, dragging out the end of each line in an alternating series of high-pitched wails or low growls quite effectively, even if his authenticity on the subject cannot be compared with Leadbelly's, for obvious reasons. But most of the time, that singing is just normal, and the songs could benefit from a little more guitar punch.

 

That Blind Lemon strived for commerciality is made particularly obvious by his covering ʽHow Long How Long Bluesʼ, a big 1928 hit for Leroy Carr — with Blind Lemon's piano player a weak shadow of Carr himself, and Blind Lemon's vocals shamelessly copping Carr's intonations and phrasing. Other than pure envy, there was no reason for him to play such a copycat. By late 1928, the man's playing degenerates almost completely: tracks like ʽHappy New Year Bluesʼ are built on the simplest of rhythms, and betray an amazing superstar-style laziness — «they'll buy anything I put out, anyway, as long as I wish them a happy new year and all».

 

And it's not as if something heavy fell on his head, making him forget how to play: some of the steam would be eventually picked up once again next year. No, it was a deliberate stylistic reori­entation, an attempt to «urbanize» himself by hitting it big as a singer, not as a player. Yet it did not help improve his career, and proved particularly disastrous in the long run: today, there is eve­ry reason to admire the man for ʽRabbit Footʼ, but if it is passionate blues singing from the pre-war era that you are after, even the aforementioned Leroy Carr will be a better bet.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 4 (1929)

 

1) Eagle Eyed Mama; 2) Dynamite Blues; 3) Disgusted Blues                ; 4) Competition Bed Blues; 5) Sad News Blues; 6) Peach Orchard Blues; 7) Oil Well Blues; 8) Tin Cup Blues; 9) Big Night Blues; 10) Empty House Blues; 11) Sa­tur­day Night Spender Blues; 12) That Black Snake Moan No. 2; 13) Bed Springs Blues; 14) Yo Yo Blues; 15) Mos­qui­to Moan; 16) Southern Woman Blues; 17) Bakershop Blues; 18) Pneumonia Blues; 19) Long Distance Moan; 20) That Crawlin' Baby Blues; 21) Fence Breakin' Yellin' Blues; 22) Cat Man Blues; 23) The Cheaters Spell; 24) Bootin' Me 'Bout.

 

It would be nice to be able to say that Blind Lemon managed to «rebound» in the last year of his life, but he didn't. Most of these recordings are slow, steady, relatively formulaic blues pieces that focus on the man's singing rather than playing. Only once, towards the very very end, does he all of a sudden remember the way it used to be — ʽThat Crawlin' Baby Bluesʼ is a merry-rollickin' series of guitar fireworks, almost up to the standarts of ʽRabbit Foot Bluesʼ, played with plenty of fire and abandon. Which makes the context look even more strange, proving that the man did not «forget» how to be amazing, but really, truly, consciously chose not to.

 

The rest of the recordings range from very simple and feeble-sounding performances (ʽEagle Eyed Mamaʼ) to slightly more inventive, but monotonous (ʽDynamite Bluesʼ, built on a series of pretty flourishes that all sound the same, gruesomely discrediting the title), to occasional slow-growers (ʽBed Spring Bluesʼ, strummed quietly and lazily, but in reality with lots of interesting chord changes that require pressing your ear close to the speaker). On the lyrical side, there is a clear tendency to emphasize «dirty» subjects and double entendres — a tendency that, oddly enough, is frequently noticeable among pre-war blues-rockers as they grow in fame and fortune... somebody should probably inform Mick Jagger.

 

Blind Lemon's last session was held on September 24, 1929 – exactly one month prior to «Black Thursday»; Blind Lemon's death date is usually listed as December 19, 1929. No, he didn't die of a heart attack because his stocks were lost; the most likely version is that he froze to death, being lost in a snowstorm – drunk, presumably? In any case, it is somewhat telling that he never sur­vived into the Depression era, missing the chance to become one of its great bards, like Charlie Patton. These recordings from 1928-29 clearly see him veering further and further into «urban­ized» territory, a safer and quieter harbor, moderately attractive for conservatively minded black and white audiences alike.

 

And there is nothing wrong with that — except that this move to «higher ground» almost cost the man his integrity. Chances are, had he survived into the 1930s or even later, his early records would be regarded as somewhat of a «crazy anomaly», created in his younger, reckless, wildest days. (Actually, something similar would happen to Big Bill Broonzy, whose earliest records are also his most interesting from a technical standpoint). As it is, we have a fifty-fifty type of pro­portion, and it is not surprising that most of the compilations prefer to focus on the first fifty: Ya­zoo's The Best Of features 17 selections from 1925-27, 4 dated 1928, and only 2 dated 1929. I totally agree with that ratio.

BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON

THE COMPLETE BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON (1927-1931; 1993)

 

1) I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole; 2) Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed; 3) It's Nobody's Fault But Mine; 4) Mother's Children Have A Hard Time; 5) Dark Was The Night - Cold Was The Ground; 6) If I Had My Way I'd Tear The Building Down; 7) I'm Gonna Run To The City Of Refuge; 8) Jesus Is Coming Soon; 9) Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying; 10) Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning; 11) Let Your Light Shine On Me; 12) God Don't Never Change; 13) Bye And Bye I'm Goin' To See The King; 14) Sweeter As The Years Roll By; 15) You'll Need Some­body On Your Bond; 16) When The War Was On; 17) Praise God I'm Satisfied; 18) Take Your Burden To The Lord And Leave It There; 19) Take Your Stand; 20) God Moves On The Water; 21) Can't Nobody Hide From God; 22) If It Had Not Been For Jesus; 23) Go To Me With That Land; 24) The Rain Don't Fall On Me; 25) Trouble Will Soon Be Over; 26) The Soul Of A Man; 27) Everybody Ought To Treat A Stranger Right; 28) Church, I'm Fully Saved To-Day; 29) John The Revelator; 30) You're Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond.

 

I do not generally insist on pushing pre-war blues on people. It takes a long time and a lot of ef­fort to get paid off. Poor sound quality, monotonous sequences of interchangeable compositions, ascetic arrangements — we'll just have to accept that this stuff is «not for everybody», and that most listeners will simply be paying their respects by throwing on a Charlie Patton or a Leadbelly record. We all suspect that Leadbelly «felt» ʽMidnight Specialʼ much more intensely than John Fogerty (if only because the latter never did actual time, unlike the former), but Leadbelly's ori­ginal gathers 200,000 views on Youtube while CCR's versions count millions, and that's the way it's going to stay, and nothing's gonna change that fact.

 

But there are certain moments when the general rule has to be forfeited, and this is one of them. Everybody with even a passing interest in XXth century popular music must know about Blind Willie Johnson, one of the most unique — and mysterious — musical figures of that century. And everyone must own at least one single-CD collection of his greatest songs (such as Dark Was The Night), although, considering that his entire legacy consists of just thirty sides recorded over a three-year period, it might be more productive to go straight away for Columbia's 2-CD Com­plete package. Yes, some of these thirty songs do sound the same. No, this is not supposed to tire out the listener. Yes, this is terrifying genius on the prowl. No, I'm being serious.

 

If you know your «classic rock» well enough, you will probably recognize a good third of the titles straight away — Blind Willie was covered quite extensively. Bob Dylan liked him for his grizzled earthiness. Eric Clapton admired him for his delicate soulfulness. Led Zeppelin respected him for his desperate madness. Nick Cave fancied him for his apocalyptic attitude. Ry Coo­der worshipped him for his transcendental mysticism. And Peter, Paul and Mary just dug him beca­use the songs were catchy and all.

 

So what is the secret of Blind Willie's popularity? In his short lifetime, he was never a massive commercial presence, and post-mortem, he never succeeded in becoming a «legend» of Robert Johnson's caliber, having steadily remained «the musician's musician». Most probably, this is just because the man was too weird for his own time, too far ahead of it for the average listener to overcome the confusion and understand what it is really all about.

 

The first thing people will tell you is that Blind Willie was a masterful slide player. According to legend, he preferred playing with a knife on the strings rather than the proverbial «bottleneck», but this is hard to verify by simply listening to the records. He did play a lot of slide guitar, much more so than the average picking bluesman from the same time — and it was hardly a coincide­nce that most of his material was thematically in the «gospel blues» sub-genre: of all the nume­rous particular proofs that properly played slide guitar is the champion of Soul in Sound, few ma­nage to be as convincing as Blind Willie Johnson's.

 

The second thing is, of course, Blind Willie's voice. He had a natural tenor, which can be heard on a handful of these songs, but most of the time he would intentionally lower it to a gravelly «false bass», which sounded as if the guitar strings were not the only thing across which he was sliding that knife. Simply put, the man was there before Tom Waits, before Captain Beefheart, before Howlin' Wolf, even before Charlie Patton — the first well-known example of an artist playing hell with his voice for a nice little horrorshow effect.

 

Of course, Blind Willie did not invent that effect. It all goes back to apocalyptically minded old black preachers invoking the Old Testamental spirits of Moses and the Prophets. But he was one of the first, if not the first, performer to put it on record, singlehandedly responsible for creating the «dark gospel blues» style. And, as far as I know, he still remains the single best representative of that style, because gospel and blues soon went their own ways, with blues inheriting most of the darkness and gospel turning to a more optimistic outlook on things, for good reason — if all they sang in church was Blind Willie Johnson material, Satanists would eventually start joining the Church instead of trying to burn it down.

 

However, Johnson's most popular song is ʽDark Was The Night, Cold Was The Groundʼ, where there is very little singing as such — mostly just a series of wordless sighs and moans. Techni­cally, it's an impressionistic illustration of the sufferings of Jesus, but in retrospect, it is probably the first «mood piece» ever put on record in popular music history: call it «proto-ambient», if you like, created with just a series of isolated slide licks that never come together in a rhythmic whole. Sure can't tap your feet to that stuff. Just feel lonely and lost in space.

 

His second most popular song is probably ʽNobody's Fault But Mineʼ, built upon a magnificent swirling slide riff, later burnt down to the ground and reconstructed from the ashes by Led Zep­pelin on Presence. Without the slide guitar, it would simply be one more preachy message: "If I don't read it my soul be lost, nobody's fault but mine". With the slide, you don't even pay much attention to the lyrics — in fact, Blind Willie was also one of the first people to introduce the pra­ctice of leaving certain vocal lines unfinished and letting the guitar finish the message instead. Of course, the gravelly voice, shredding your ear nerves, and the thin wail of the slide sound nothing like each other. He's the man, and the slide is his woman, and they're both unhappy in their own way, and... (this should be followed by one of those key Marxist-tinged phrases about the music reflecting the hundreds of years of poor underdogs and black slaves suffering, but this review al­ready looks stupid enough without having to run even more stuff into the ground).

 

Speaking of women, on about a third of these numbers Willie is accompanied by his wife, Willie B. Harris, who normally stands a little farther away from the mike and provides «echoing» vocals (ʽJohn The Revelatorʼ, etc.). This could be seen as a softening, «commercializing» factor, but in reality, the contrast between her «normal» backup and Johnson's earthy growl is sometimes even weirder than his solo numbers — on ʽChurch, I'm Fully Saved To-Dayʼ it seems as if their parts were overdubbed from two different performances, so dissimilar are the attitudes: the quiet, calm, moderately pretty delivery of the wife against the animal growling of the husband.

 

On the other hand, Willie was capable of tenderness — on ʽLet Your Light Shine On Meʼ, he al­ternates tense growling with a delicate croon, and the self-imposed laryngitis is not in evidence on ʽBye And Bye I'm Goin' To See The Kingʼ, which, incidentally, also features some of his most technically complex slide runs. This does not have any philosophical implications — it only goes to show that the sequence of thirty seconds is not as stubbornly monotonous as it could be. There are different tempos, different keys, different vocal modulations, a little bit of ambience, Willie Harris' support or lack thereof, songs you know from later covers, songs you don't know from later covers, in short, you won't be bored unless you really want to.

 

The only thing that the progressive listener has to bear with is that all of the songs, indeed, are of a gospel nature. Blind Willie meant it seriously and never succumbed to the pleasures of singing about black snakes, log cabins, and ya-yas instead of doing «the right thing». But who cares? In a way, this collection is the acoustic blues equivalent of Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality: Chris­tian songs delivered in a manner that is decidedly frightening and unsettling for most good Chris­tians. Whoever claimed that Robert Johnson's music sounded «dangerous»? There is hardly a moment more dangerous-sounding in Depression-era music than Blind Willie going "We done told you, God done warned you, Jesus comin' soon". This here guy doesn't joke around with his Apocalypse, he's earnestly waiting for it to spring out from behind the corner.

 

Total thumbs up — and repeat: this is one of the three or four most important pre-war compila­tions that your collection might be missing. In a way, it even sounds surprisingly modern: as I said, Blind Willie was so far ahead of his time that, had they frozen him up before his death from malaria in 1945, he'd have fit in very well inside today's lo-fi movement. Any lo-fi aficionados out there? You don't know what you're missing.

BLIND WILLIE McTELL

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1927-1931)

 

1) Writin' Paper Blues; 2) Stole Rider Blues; 3) Mama, 'Tain't Long Fo' Day; 4) Mr. McTell Got The Blues (take 1); 5) Mr. McTell Got The Blues (take 2); 6) Three Women Blues; 7) Dark Night Blues; 8) Statesboro Blues; 9) Loving Talking Blues; 10) Atlanta Strut; 11) Travelin' Blues; 12) Come On Around To My House Mama; 13) Kind Mama; 14) Teasing Brown; 15) Drive Away Blues; 16) This Is Not The Stove To Brown Your Bread; 17) Love Changing Blues; 18) Talkin' To Myself; 19) Razor Ball; 20) Southern Can Is Mine; 21) Broke Down Engine Blues; 22) Stomp Down Rider; 23) Scarey Day Blues.

 

The usual way, these days, to learn about Blind Willie McTell is through Bob Dylan — you have to become enough of a fan to get around to The Bootleg Series, hear how "no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell", and form yourself the image of an old, weary, troubled, Old Tes­tament-style blueswailer, lambasting the evils of society with his art as nobody listens and the hopelessly corrupt world crumbles all around his blind eyes and rusty guitar.

 

Then you finally develop the incentive to go check out the real Blind Willie McTell, and if you only came to him after the Dylan song (like I did, although the two experiences weren't directly connected), you are in for quite a shock. The real Willie McTell, not the one invented by Dylan, but the one who was actually born in Thomson, Georgia, on May 5, 1898, was nothing like that image. Yes, he could occasionally sing slow, moderately depressed blues, but in general, the mu­sic he played was light, ragtime-influenced Piedmont blues, sung in a sweet, almost «romantic» tenor that could even be mistaken for a white singer's voice.

 

(To get off the Dylan topic — if you really want my opinion, I think that the protagonist of ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ is not only a «collective-allegorical» figure, but is really much closer in attitude to Blind Willie Johnson, who was just as big an influence on Dylan as McTell and probably even more than that, in the early days at least. It's simply that "no one can sing the blues like Blind Wil­lie Johnson" does not fit into the song's rhythm-and-rhyme structure, and trivia like that never bothered Bob for one second. He did cover McTell's repertoire with ʽBroke Down Engineʼ and ʽDeliaʼ, but only ten years after the original recording of ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ).

 

Anyway, Willie McTell was twenty-nine years old when he first entered Victor Records' studio in Atlanta, and, unlike many, many other bluesmen of the time who were more or less the same age when they started out, Willie sounds exactly his age: in a blues world of raspers, howlers, grow­lers, and grumblers he comes across as almost a crooner, except that there is a light, pleasant nasal twang to his voice that prevents it from becoming overtly sweet and sappy.

 

Arguably, the voice helps Willie to establish an even sharper identity than his playing — which is perfectly adequate for a Piedmont-style picker, but its only truly outstanding aspect is that McTell mostly uses a 12-string guitar, so the overall sound is «fuller» and «busier», yet also more «fus­sy» than, say, Blind Boy Fuller's; to each his own choice of favorite. Every now and then, though, Willie is practicing his inventiveness — nowhere more so than on ʽAtlanta Strutʼ, a total classic of the ragtime blues genre where Willie's guitar gradually builds up a complete picture of life bustling on the streets of Atlanta, from crowing roosters to slide-pickin' passers by.

 

Sympathetic, danceable, bouncy ragtime entertainment stuff is certainly Willie's major trade du­ring these early years: ʽCome On Around To My Houseʼ, ʽKind Mamaʼ, ʽRazor Bluesʼ, and ʽSou­thern Can Is Mineʼ are all highlights of the genre, even if all are essentially interchangeable and never venture far away from standard formula. But compare Blind Boy Fuller's ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ with McTell's ʽCome On Around To My Houseʼ (essentially the same song) and McTell clearly emerges as the more lyrical, «frail» type. It's hard to imagine ladies swooning over Fuller, but Willie must have been quite a charmer.

 

Of the more straightforward blues numbers, ʽStatesboro Bluesʼ is quite well known for its popu­la­rization by the Allman Brothers, but, as you can probably tell, the original has almost nothing to do with the cover — McTell turns it into a mandolin-like ringfest, where Duane Allman would later turn it into a launchpad for some mighty slide riff exploration. It is rather ʽBroke Down En­gineʼ that already sounds like a highlight here, decades before receiving the Dylan treatment — one of the most acutely «stressed» numbers in Willie's repertoire. And again, even though the song is built on a memorable guitar line, regularly interrupted by gloomy bass notes, it is the vo­ice that takes the cake: Willie cannot make it rumble, but he can make it tremble, and when he is not conveying lightheartedness and happiness, he can sure as heck convey «little man» insecurity and paranoia. In such moments, he sometimes ends up reminding me of Ray Davies circa Mus­well Hillbillies, regardless of how appropriate the comparison really is.

 

Overall, it's fairly hard to talk about individual songs, as usual, but, unlike similar collections by Blind Boy Fuller, McTell's recordings, assembled in chronological order, are easier to listen to without skipping track after track. It might have something to do with his vocal versatility, or, perhaps, with the relatively high amount of playing freedom he allowed himself — paying less attention to total precision and more to expressivity. In any case, the presence of ʽAtlanta Strutʼ alone is sufficient ground for a thumbs up, and when you have it on the same disc with ʽBroke Down Engineʼ and ʽStatesboro Bluesʼ, not even a whole bunch of languid filler could pull them back down.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1931-1933)

 

1) Rough Alley Blues; 2) Experience Blues; 3) Painful Blues; 4) Low Rider's Blues; 5) Georgia Rag; 6) Low Down Blues; 7) Rollin' Mama Blues; 8) Lonesome Day Blues; 9) Mama, Let Me Scoop For You; 10) Searching The Desert For The Blues; 11) Warm It Up To Me; 12) It's Your Time To Worry; 13) It's A Good Little Thing; 14) You Was Born To Die; 15) Lord Have Mercy If You Please; 16) Don't You See How This World Made A Change; 17) Savan­nah Mama; 18) Broke Down Engine; 19) Broke Down Engine No. 2; 20) My Baby's Gone; 21) Love-Makin' Mama; 22) Death Room Blues; 23) Death Cell Blues; 24) Lord, Send Me An Angel.

 

The second volume here is every bit as good as the first; together they form the main bulk of Wil­lie's legacy, and it would all be going down from there. Still from 1931, here comes ʽGeorgia Ragʼ, a rewritten take on what used to be ʽWabash Ragʼ in the hands of Blind Blake — now it is faster, fussier, and Willie's trembling tenor gives it an extra whiff of tenseness, even madness, that makes his performance less formulaic and more personal; an interesting feeling, that, consi­dering that the song is essentially just another harmless dance tune.

 

Both on this session and on the ones that are dated to 1933, McTell is regularly accompanied by female singers — Mary Willis, Ruth Day, or his own wife, Kate Williams (also known as «Ruby Glaze», unless that was really a different gal, which is still a matter of debate). The result is a batch of appropriately salacious slow-tempo blues (ʽRollin' Mama Bluesʼ, etc.) on which the pair exchanges politically incorrect double entendres; elsewhere, the lady singer just supplies occasio­nal one-liners as sarcastic «counterpoints» to McTell's lyrical outpouring (ʽSearching The Desert For The Bluesʼ) or sings backup on ragtime choruses (ʽWarm It Up To Meʼ). If there is any gene­ral effect from this, it is only a gradual dissipation of McTell's «loner» image — this way, he co­mes across as a cheery guy who likes himself some female company. For comparison, somebody like Blind Lemon Jefferson comes across as a morose guy who only sings about getting himself some female company... but is a bit too scary to ever get any. (Which wasn't true in real life, of course, but we are talking about artistic personae here, not about real people of flesh and blood).

 

Other points of note involve two sides of blues-gospel material recorded in tandem with Curley Weaver (ʽLord Have Mercyʼ, in particular, has some nice, stinging slide guitar); ʽSavannah Ma­maʼ, arguably featuring Willie's best slide licks on record — that honey-smooth intro, in particu­lar, has entered the repertoire of just about every active slide player on the blues-rock scene; and two more takes on the never-out-of-fashion ʽBroke Down Engineʼ (at least the recording quality has somewhat improved).

 

But the most famous piece is probably ʽDeath Cell Bluesʼ — for easily understandable social rea­sons. The funny thing is, Blind Willie radiated so much optimism at his peak that even this bleak tale of an innocent fella hanging around death row conveys no feeling of panic, depression, or de­spair. Then again, that might just be the point — where else do you have that one perfect spot to stay cool, calm, and collected other than in your little death cell? A double-sided record with ʽBroke Down Engineʼ on Side A and ʽDeath Cell Bluesʼ on Side B could aspire to the status of «the most depressed pre-war single, bar none», but Willie wouldn't have it.

 

If there is depression, it is hidden so deep that you'll have to wait for Your Official Guide To The Blues to reassure you that Blind Willie McTell does personify the social troubles and personal humiliation of the Little (Black) Man. It's simply that it is hard for us to discern without the help of the Official Guide. But with or without external aid, Vol. 2 is a thumbs up — a pleasant, up­beat, merry little collection that implies sadness rather than conveys it, a clever artistic trick that many a present day indie kid could seriously benefit from.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1933-1935)

 

1) B & O Blues, No. 2 (take 1); 2) B & O Blues, No. 2 (take 2); 3) Weary Hearted Blues; 4) Bell Street Lightnin'; 5) Southern Can Mama; 6) Runnin' Me Crazy; 7) East St. Louis Blues; 8) Ain't It Grand To Be A Christian; 9) We Got To Meet Death One Day (take 1); 10) We Got To Meet Death One Day (take 2); 11) Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around; 12) I Got Religion, I'm So Glad; 13) Dying Gambler; 14) God Don't Like It; 15) Bell Street Blues; 16) Let Me Play With Yo' Yo-Yo; 17) Lay Some Flowers On My Grave; 18) Ticket Agent Blues; 19) Cold Winter Day; 20) Your Time To Worry; 21) Cooling Board Blues; 22) Hillbilly Willie's Blues.

 

Hardly essential, but still somewhat worth the while: there is nothing of importance or specific in­terest that Willie could heap on top of his legacy from late 1933 to 1935 — but he was still versa­tile, young-sounding, and occasionally inspired with his instrument and his pipes. So even if a large chunk of these tunes consists of re-recordings under slightly transfigured titles (ʽSouthern Can Mamaʼ, ʽYour Time To Wor­ryʼ, etc.), they are still modestly amusing if the original versions happen not to be available.

 

On the other hand, if you do play the earlier ʽSouthern Can Is Mineʼ back-to-back with the new­er ʽSouthern Can Mamaʼ, the difference is striking — the 1935 recording is somewhat slower, a bit lazier, and there are signs of deterioration in Wil­lie's voice: it is obviously lower, the diction is a little slurred, and there is a nasty quiver in there somewhere which, unfortunately, betrays a pre­occupation with the bottle that might have been far stronger than preoccupation with his music. In the light of this suspicion, tunes like ʽBell Street Bluesʼ ("I live down in Bell Street Alley, just as drunk as I can be") take on an autobiographic sheen — not that the whole thing were somewhat unpredictable among pre-war bluesmen (or post-war, for that matter).

 

Quite a large section here, most of it dating from a single session in 1935, consists of gospel ma­terial, where Willie is joined by his wife Kate — their duet sounding like an intentional imitation of the style developed by Blind Willie Johnson and Willie Harris, but far less successful: neither McTell's guitar runs, even when he switches to slide, nor his whiskey-addled vocals, nor the pha­ryngeal singing style of Kate can stand competition with the veritable master of the genre. For­tunately, none of these Lord-addressed blues sermons would stop Willie from asking his gal to ʽLet Me Play With Yo' Yo-Yoʼ ("I will let you play with mine") in between professing his glad­ness about getting religion and asking us to ʽLay Some Flowers On My Graveʼ. That's what we call a real dedication to the cause.

 

Possibly out of being desperate for a hit, McTell even turns to country — ʽHillbilly Willie's Bluesʼ not only sounds like something out of Fiddlin' John Carson's repertoire, but Willie even attempts to fake a white Southern accent, maybe relying on the fact that his normal voice always sounded relatively «non-black». It's... an odd oddity, or something, and it may not be coincidental that it was also his last recording to be made in about five years.

 

In the end, the only «classic» performance on the entire Vol. 3 that deserves to be heard is ʽEast St. Louis Bluesʼ, recorded with Curley Weaver and featuring a particularly sensitive-delicate de­livery — even the lyrics here are quite complex for a generic old blues song: "she tried to make me bleed by the rattlings of her tongue" is one hell of a line, and the whole thing is tender, bitter­sweet and intimate on some hard-to-understand level. Alas, it was recorded in 1933, and exactly one year on from that, Blind Willie McTell was pretty much done as a «force to be reckoned with» — any album that begins with the likes of ʽEast St. Louis Bluesʼ and ends with the likes of ʽHillbilly Willieʼ would suggest that even to a reviewer utterly unfamiliar with the facts.

 

THE COMPLETE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS RECORDS (1940)

 

1) Just As Well Get Ready; 2) Monologue On Accidents; 3) Boll Weevil; 4) Delia; 5) Dying Crapshooters Blues; 6) Will Fox; 7) I Got To Cross The River Jordan; 8) Monologue On Old Songs; 9) Amazing Grace; 10) Monologue On The History Of The Blues; 11) King Edward Blues; 12) Murderer's Home Blues; 13) Kill-It-Kid Rag; 14) I Got To Cross De River O' Jordan.

 

There is an extremely interesting moment here, at the very beginning of the record, when John Lo­max, armed with vintage recording equipment, is trying to press Blind Willie into remember­ing «complaining songs», specifically, complaining about «colored people mistreated by whites». Then it sort of turns out that Blind Willie doesn’t know any. Lomax, audibly stupefied, keeps on pushing — “you don’t know any complaining songs? Something like ʽAin’t It Hard To Be A Nig­gerʼ?” Nope. The only «complaining» songs, says Willie, “have them all together, they have references to everybody”.

 

Which is totally true, actually, not just in Willie’s case, but almost everybody’s ­— the racial is­sue on these pre-war records is practically non-existent, and 99% of the “complaining songs” mostly complain about being down on one’s luck — women problems, job problems, sometimes even political problems, but never skin color problems; and this allows people like Blind Willie McTell and, say, Jimmie Rodgers easily develop a certain spiritual unity, the white man’s prob­lems being essentially the same as the black man’s. And it’s not even a question of tabooing the issue for fear of retribution — it’s simply a fact of accepting segregation as an unshakable norm, something that is now hard to imagine even in those «wild» places where Blind Willie spent his childhood, but was fairly common in 1940.

 

What was still not all that common in 1940 were travelling ethnographers and musicologists, seeking out «local talent» to help them preserve musical folklore; Lomax had already made his own reputation at the time, but few people followed in his footsteps, since few people were aware that, already back then, «folk wisdom» was on its way out — in a matter of two more decades, it would complete its migration from cotton fields and steel mills to college campuses and Village coffeehouses. It does seem like Blind Willie, who hadn’t been able to get a new record deal for five years already, was aware, and eagerly took the chance. On this relatively short collection he winds his way through a rather diverse selection (none of these songs show up on his official re­cords from 1927 to 1935), occasionally going off into monologues or brief interviews on the history of the blues movement in general and his own role in it in particular.

 

Nothing on here is essential, but the whole thing could have been much worse. Lomax doesn’t get into Willie’s way all that much, especially after the «complaining songs» fiasco; the mo­nologues are not particularly informative, certainly not for the modern Wikipedianist, but are fortunately short and few (besides, McTell's vision and arrangement of the chronology of the blues is an in­teres­ting bit to listen to); and the songs, as I already said, are fairly diverse — ʽDying Crapshoo­ters Bluesʼ is a Jimmie Rodgers «jailhouse-blues» type number, ʽWill Foxʼ is old Appalachean folk dance style or something, ʽKill-It-Kidʼ is Willie's trademark reggae style, ʽI Got To Cross The River Jordanʼ is, understandably, in the gospel vein, and there is even a little original number that Willie dedicated to the honorable King Edward after the abdication crisis of 1936 (nice of Lomax to come along just in time to record it). The man even plays a brief slide guitar version of ʽAmazing Graceʼ, sounding not unlike Blind Willie Johnson (just add some deep moaning and it will be almost like ʽDark Was The Nightʼ).

 

In the end, it might not be quite a «genuine Blind Willie McTell album» — rather, it's McTell giving his own account on the music he grew up with, kinda like Paul McCartney playing Buddy Holly songs on an acoustic guitar before the camera: useful for kids who ain't never heard of Bud­dy Holly, but not all that worthy on its own. But, of course, McTell has the clear advantage, since many of these numbers simply weren't recorded in his childhood — and he works all these styles with soul, competence, and humor. Thumbs up.

 

ATLANTA TWELVE STRING (1949; 1972)

 

1) Kill It Kid; 2)   The Razor Ball; 3) Little Delia; 4) Broke Down Engine Blues; 5) Dying Crapshooter's Blues; 6) Pinetop's Boogie Woogie; 7) Blues Around Midnight; 8) Last Dime Blues; 9) On The Cooling Board; 10) Motherless Children Have A Hard Time; 11) I Got To Cross The River Jordan; 12) You Got To Die; 13) Ain't It Grand To Live A Christian; 14) Pearly Gates; 15) Soon This Morning.

 

Willie's post-war recordings, typically for most acoustic blues performers who peaked in the 1930s, were few; only two session periods are generally known, one of which, from 1949, is well represented on this album (as a single LP, it was released already in 1972), all of the songs having been recorded for the newly-formed Atlantic label, but only a couple of them released at the ori­ginal time of recording.

 

The good news: since the label was Atlantic and the year was 1949, this is the cleanest, sharpest-sounding McTell album of them all. If you cannot stand hiss or crackle, Atlanta Twelve String is your safest bet for assessing McTell's playing style — particularly convenient since he remem­bers to re-record some of his biggest hits (ʽBroke Down Engineʼ, ʽRazor Ballʼ) before heading off into the barroom / gospel blues directions that he already tried to popularize in 1940.

 

The bad news is that his voice continues to show signs of serious weathering. Still expressive, but seriously lower than it used to be, it no longer has that unique youthfulness of old, yet at the same time is not gruff and rough enough to compete with the Ruffled Old Bluesman image of his peers. As for the playing, it is still precise and technical, but after the rousing opener (ʽKill-It-Kidʼ), he does not do any more ragtime numbers, and some of his tricks are not represented here at all — you will still have to search for the likes of ʽGeorgia Ragʼ to appreciate the man's full potential.

 

Still, at least one of the tracks here is utterly wonderful — ʽPinetop's Boogie Woodieʼ, a musical / vocal guide to a traditional dance; not because it is particularly complex or emotional, it just got the spirit, sounding like a little time capsule back to the age where you could be taught your dance moves by an old black guy with a guitar. But yeah, that old black guy does do a beautiful sprinkly-chimy guitar move at the end of each round.

 

There are a couple extra Blind Willie Johnson tributes here (ʽMotherless Childrenʼ), and some stately solemn gospel anthems (ʽPearly Gatesʼ), but they are not as successful. For all the diversi­ty of his interests, McTell was a playful performer, and whenever his performance lacks playful­ness, it inevitably loses out to competition. In a way, he was doomed by his own age — as he got more and more «mature», he was drifting into all these «serious» genres where he did not have as much competence. "She's a real kind mama, lookin' for another man" is, and will always be, as great as Willie McTell ever gets, and these 1949 sessions, unfortunately, have very few such songs. Not that there are any downright bad performances, though — and, like I said, the very fact that this is the only «clean» recording from the man that one is ever going to get automatical­ly makes it eligible for a modest thumbs up.

 

LAST SESSION (1956; 1961)

 

1) Baby, It Must Be Love; 2) The Dying Crapshooter's Blues; 3) Don't Forget It; 4) Kill It Kid; 5) That Will Never Happen No More; 6) Goodbye Blues; 7) Salty Dog; 8) Early Life; 9) Beedle Um Bum; 10) A Married Man's A Fool; 11) A To Z Blues; 12) Wabash Cannonball; 13) Pal Of Mine.

 

Blind Willie died of a stroke in 1959, after having served a couple years as preacher in one of Atlanta's churches; so we are rather lucky to have this disc, the results of a homebrewed session re­corded in the home of an Atlanta record store manager in 1956. Long out of favor with record studios, Willie seems to have been simply playing on street corners, when he got this last chance to leave another trace of himself for mankind — captured on a simple tape recorder, but in surpri­singly good quality (the store manager must have been a good technician). Even more surprising is that Willie himself was in pretty good quality on that day: there is hardly a moment during these thirty minutes where you'd get the impression of wallowing in unsurmountable misery.

 

In fact, I'd even go as far as notice that even his voice is in slightly better shape than it is on the 1949 recordings: it reflects the expected age-caused deepening / lowering, but there are no shades of hoarseness whatsoever — and he definitely does not sound like a fifty-eight year old here, bent with age, worries, alcoholism, and public rejection.

 

This might be the only reason why one would want to take a listen to this Last Session: most of the songs are either re-recordings of earlier stuff, or sound close enough to the early stuff to be in­terpreted as re-recordings. Interestingly, he concentrates here mostly on uptempo dance or «joke» numbers — except for ʽDyin' Crapshooter Bluesʼ, preceded by a long story about how the writing of the song was based on real life events, and the melancholic blues sermon of ʽA Married Man's A Foolʼ, almost everything else is in the jiggly-funny way of things, and that's good — we have concentrated on old bluesmen singing about their troubles way too much to properly notice the other side of the mirror.

 

So, overall, this album does not make much sense or bring on much enjoyment outside the con­text, but it is an extremely important last chapter in the story of the life of one William Samuel McTier, who did not quite live such a life of bluesy mystery as Bob Dylan would have one be­lieve, but whose real life and achievements, once you contrast them with the life and achieve­ments of his peers, might actually seem all the more intriguing by their relative lack of intrigue. The man led a decent, quiet life with a well-balanced ratio of joy and sadness where joy would always be coming out on top in the end. Hell of a healthy attitude, I'd say.

BO CARTER

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 1 (1927-1931)

 

1) Good Old Turnip Greens; 2) Bungalow Blues; 3) Mary Blues; 4) Electrocuted Blues (Electric Chair Blues); 5) Cor­rine Corrina; 6) East Jackson Blues; 7) I'm An Old Bumble Bee; 8) Mean Feeling Blues; 9) I've Got The Whole World In My Hand; 10) She's Your Cook But She Burns My Bread Sometimes; 11) Same Thing That The Cats Fight About; 12) Time Is Tight Like That; 13) My Pencil Won't Write No More; 14) Banana In Your Fruit Basket; 15) Pin In Your Cushion; 16) Pussy Cat Blues; 17) Ram Rod Daddy; 18) Loveless Love; 19) I Love That Thing; 20) Back­ache Blues; 21) Sorry Feeling Blues; 22) Baby, When You Marry; 23) Boot It; 24) Twist It, Baby.

 

Armenter Chatmon, better known as Bo Carter, was hardly what you could call a great blues sin­ger. He had a typical blueswailer's voice, standard professional phrasing, and an undisputed feel­ing for the music, but no individuality whatsoever — where a Charlie Patton or a Blind Willie McTell, or maybe even a Leroy Carr are always recognizable through their unique tones, modes, and tricks, Bo Carter is just a «generic» singing bluesman.

 

Moreover, Armenter Chatmon was hardly what you could call a great blues player. He certainly knew his fair share of chords, and he could play lead lines well enough over rhythm chords for the listener not to get too annoyed, but he mostly played slow and steady, and when he played fast, he was no match for the likes of Blind Blake, Lonnie Johnson, or even Blind Willie McTell. He did know how to play it closer to the blues ideal (for black audiences), or to the country stan­dards (for white ones), but his limits in both directions seem pretty obvious.

 

Furthermore, Armenter Chatmon did relatively little to advance any of the genres that he perused. Of the 24 songs on this first volume, for instance, maybe only about four or five follow distinctly different melodies, and not a single one goes one step beyond simple formulaic entertainment. Try as you might, you will not find the «pain and anguish and suffering of the oppressed black minorities» in this man's music: most of his recording life, he just worked for his money and seemed to be quite happy and content when he could get some. (Major exception on his earliest recordings: ʽGood Old Turnip Greensʼ is an old folk song that deals precisely with the issue of se­gregation and social injustice. But it is funny how quickly he went from that to... er...).

 

So why did he get it? How come did Bo Carter become one of his era's most famous, most pro­lific (over 100 sides cut in about 10 years), most publicly beloved performers? The answer is sim­ple: Bo Carter was a really dirty, salacious, innuendo-scattering son-of-a-bitch. As popular as all those double entendres were on the blues market, Bo Carter had everybody else eating from the palm of his hand in that department. From "let me put my banana in your fruit basket, then I'll be satis­fied" to "let me stick my pin in your cushion, 'cause your cushion's so soft and warm" to the less joyous "the lead's all gone, this pen­cil won't write no more", this Man (with a big M) meant so much business that buying his records must have been the next best thing for those who couldn't lay their hands on a smuggled copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

 

Okay, so other than that, Bo had his merits. He played with the Mississippi Sheiks, for black and white audiences alike, which earned him extra popularity. He recorded the original ʽCorrine, Cor­rinaʼ, accompanied by Papa Charlie McCoy on fiddle and vocals, back in 1928 (although he cer­tainly did not write the song — just copyrighted it). And he was capable of authentic melancholy blues as well (ʽSorry Feeling Bluesʼ). And he could even yodel in a credible fashion (ʽBaby, When You Marryʼ).

 

So there may be occasional reasons other than «historic snicker» to listen to this stuff. But not a lot of them. The main reason are the words — you'll have to search high and low to find that many sexual innuendos crammed on one disc. It is hard to tell just how many of them were inven­ted by Bo in person (I think he started out with the traditional stuff, then took off on an individual flight with all the references to pencils, pins, and ram rods), but this was definitely an area where he could be both an avid collector and an ardent inventor at the same time.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 2 (1931-1934)

 

1) So Long, Baby, So Long; 2) The Law Gonna Step On You; 3) Pig Meat Is What I Crave; 4) Howling Tom Cat Blues; 5) Ants In My Pants; 6) Blue Runner Blues; 7) I've Got A Case Of Mashin' It; 8) You Don't Love Me No More; 9) What Kind Of Scent Is This; 10) Pretty Baby; 11) I Want You To Know; 12) Last Go Round; 13) I Keep On Spending My Change; 14) Baby, How Can It Be?; 15) Bo Carter Special; 16) Beans; 17) Nobody's Business; 18)  Queen Bee; 19) Tellin' You 'Bout It; 20) Please Don't Drive Me From Your Door; 21) Pin In Your Cushion; 22) Banana In The Fruit Basket.

 

This and the following reviews are going to be quite short, because, frankly, once you've heard one Bo Carter song — okay, two — all right, three — you've heard three Bo Carter songs, and you'd have to be a seriously obsessed person to crave for more Bo Carter material with the same force that he keeps craving for more pig meat (and we all know the deep metaphor underlying «pig meat»... unless this is really subtle anti-Semitic propaganda, hiding under a veil of sexual urges. Makes one want to check out if Bo ever was on Henry Ford's payroll. Alternatively, ʽPig Meat Is What I Craveʼ would be a great title for a hardcore punk album).

 

One couldn't accuse Bo of a complete lack of creativity: for instance, it takes a wicked sense of humor to take ʽSittin' On Top Of The Worldʼ and transform it into a song called ʽAnts In My Pantsʼ. And once you get around to his remake of the ragtime classic ʽLog Cabin Bluesʼ, here re­titled as ʽBeansʼ and featuring such lyrics as "I don't want no more navy beans / Boys I don't want no more / I don't want no more navy beans / They're 'bout to make my stomach sore / I ate them last night / And the night before / When I got through, I couldn't shut my door", Mr. Bo Carter suddenly emerges as the Weird Al Yankovic of his generation — except that, unlike Weird Al, Bo is rarely mentioned as a «parodist» in blues histories.

 

But that is really what he is, and this is why his lyrical, plaintive, serious side (ʽSo Long, Baby, So Longʼ; ʽYou Don't Love Me No Moreʼ) is never as interesting as his goofy, risqué side, which lets you in on a wholly different meaning for the word «broadcast» (ʽBo Carter Specialʼ – "Bo Carter is a man, he broadcasts all over this land... when I get to use my broadcaster, it goes all round and round, and the women receiving are sure to put their men down"), or sets you a-thin­kin' on the intricacies of female anatomy (ʽWhat Kind Of Scent Is Thisʼ) less explicitly, but ar­guably more productively, than any given textbook on the subject.

 

From a pure musical standpoint, the best numbers here are guitar-fiddle duets with Papa Charlie: ʽTellin' You 'Bout Itʼ, ʽQueen Beeʼ, and a couple others — I would say that Bo was a better team player than solo artist, and hearing his simple, but steady 12-bar picking serving as base for Char­lie's inventive runs and flourishes is a mini-delight. Unfortunately, most of the 1931-1934 tracks are solo efforts, and are generally only as good as the lyrics are (and by «good» I, of course, mean «salacious»). A couple of them are also in awful sound quality (ʽI Want You To Knowʼ is played at about twice less the volume than the other songs, for instance), although that is not the general rule. Overall, Vol. 2 is a notch below Vol. 1 — simply not enough elegant fiddle duets or dirty macho jokes to properly stand the competition.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 3 (1934-1936)

 

1) Howlin' Tom Cat Blues; 2) Don't Cross Lay Your Daddy; 3) Who Broke The Latch?; 4) Don't Do It No More; 5) Skin Ball Blues; 6) Shoe Blues; 7) Please Warm My Wiener; 8) She's Gonna Crawl Back Home To You; 9) Let Me Roll Your Lemon; 10) Mashing That Thing; 11) Blue Runner Blues; 12) Fifty-Fifty With Me; 13) To Her Burying Ground; 14) When Your Left Eye Go To Jumping; 15) Ride My Mule; 16) T Baby Blues; 17) I Get The Blues; 18) Spotted Sow Blues; 19) Rolling Blues; 20) All Around Man; 21) Fat Mouth Blues; 22) You Better Know Your Business.

 

"Won't you please warm my wiener, 'cause it really don't feel right cold". This just might be Bo's badassest refrain of all time; in the «gross» department, the tune certainly beats ʽLet Me Roll Your Lemonʼ, recorded around the same time — we all know the endless references to rolling and squeezing lemons from the blues-rock explosion of the 1960s / 1970s, but not even Robert Plant seemed to mention anything about «warming wieners» either during studio hours or over the course of endless live improvisations. But wait, what are we talking about? Surely that was just an innocent tune, penned by Bo for a hot dog stand publicity campaign. Every good wiener needs some advertising, after all.

 

The bad news — the very bad news — is, however, that in 1935 Bo significantly cut down on sug­gestive in­nuendos and re-oriented his lyrics towards more «family-friendly», traditional blues clichés, even going as far as to re-write some of his softporn classics: thus, ʽPin In Your Cushionʼ becomes ʽI Get The Bluesʼ, and «your cushion is so soft and warm» becomes «your loving is so soft and warm» — now ain't that a shame? Self-censorship in action.

 

In a flash, this removes the only good reason why anyone should ever give a damn about Bo Car­ter in the first place. Everything else remains — the decent level of playing, the pleasant vocal style — but is hardly enough to perk up any blues connoisseur's specific interest. The overall for­mula varies only once, on ʽTo Her Burying Groundʼ and the next track, where Bo is accompanied, for the first time ever, by a honky tonk piano, trying on the shoes of an urban blues performer à la Leroy Carr. But who really cares?

 

Okay, so at some point he does ask his baby to ʽride my muleʼ, and there is a ʽSpotted Sow Bluesʼ which is somewhat of a variation on ʽLittle Red Roosterʼ, except it does seem to correctly refer to female rather than male anatomy. But honestly, neither of these seems half as exploratory and inventive as the masterful fleshy allegories produced by the man in his early years. Hence, the 1935-36 period for Bo Carter can be characterized as a «slump». I mean, Frank Zappa, when he was not pouring forth obscenities, could at least shut up 'n' play his guitar. But what's a Bo Car­ter to do if he runs out of dirty jokes? It's amazing that he could actually keep up the same steady flow of recordings.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 4 (1936-1938)

 

1) It's Too Wet; 2) Dinner Blues; 3) Ain't Nobody Got It; 4) Cigarette Blues; 5) Pussy Cat Blues; 6) The Ins And Outs Of My Girl; 7) All Around Man (part 2); 8) Bo Carter's Advice; 9) Doubled Up In A Knot; 10) Worried G Blues; 11) Your Biscuits Are Big Enough For Me; 12) Don't Mash My Digger So Deep; 13) Flea On Me; 14) Got To Work Somewhere; 15) Sue Cow; 16) Shake 'Em On Down; 17) A Girl For Every Day Of The Week; 18) Trouble In Blues; 19) World In A Jug; 20) Who's Been Here; 21) Whiskey Blues; 22) Shoo That Chicken.

 

Vol. 4 is clearly an improvement over Vol. 3 — simple statistics shows that Bo is actively back to the world of innuendos and double entendres: even one lone title like ʽThe Ins And Outs Of My Girlʼ is enough to regain the honors, and that's not even mentioning the actual lyrics ("She got something that I really do love / It ain't in her sto­cking, and you know it's just above").

 

Musically, the 1936-38 sessions are very sparse: no harmonica or piano accompaniment, and Bo's own guitar skills were not exactly improving (although everything is perfectly listenable as usual). But lyrically, he was on such a roll that it only makes sense to turn this review into a set of mini-quotes. Say, from ʽCigarette Bluesʼ: "Just draw on my cigarette baby / Until you make my good ashes come". Or from ʽYour Biscuits Are Good Enough For Meʼ: "Some men don't care for bis­cuits / They like the doggone fat bun". From ʽAll Around Manʼ: "Now I ain't no milkman / I ain't no milkman's son / I can pull your titties till the milkman comes". Want some more? Well, think of this as the «free tour introduction».

 

Only a tiny handful of songs veer away from the carnal subject this time — of which only one number, ʽGot To Work Somewhereʼ, deserves special mention: it is Bo's first (I think) and most straightforward number that directly addresses Depression issues, and although he performs it the same «humble» way as he sings and plays everything else, it shouldn't pass by unnoticed: without an occasional excourse into tragedy of this kind, Bo's image of a «sexual clown» could have pas­sed for genuine identity rather than an entertaining act. But this here song gives us a guy in the same tur­moil and distress like everybody else at the time — "beneath this mask I am wearing a frown" indeed.

 

Of course, one frown is just enough: half a dozen more sides like this and the ef­fect would have been washed out with boredom. So it's a good thing that ʽGot To Workʼ is stuck here somewhere in the middle, and that the collection starts off with ʽIt's Too Wetʼ (what is too wet? Why, Bo's shirt is too wet — what did you think of?..) and ends with the equally playful ʽShoo That Chi­ckenʼ (because he interferes with "my loving at night"). Welcome back to the state of predictable reliability, Mr. Carter. The 1930s wouldn't have been what they were without you.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS, VOL. 5 (1938-1940)

 

1) Let's Get Drunk Again; 2) Some Day; 3) Old Devil; 4) Country Fool; 5) Santa Claus; 6) Be My Salty Dog; 7) Five Dollar Bill; 8) Ways Like A Crawfish; 9) Brown-Skin Woman; 10) Lucille, Lucille; 11) The Country Farm Blues; 12) Border Of New Mexico Blues; 13) Arrangement For Me Blues; 14) Lock The Lock; 15) Trouble, Oh Trouble; 16) Baby Ruth; 17) My Baby; 18) Policy Blues; 19) Tush Hog Blues; 20) My Little Mind; 21) Honey; 22) What You Want Your Daddy To Do.

 

At some time in the mid- or late 1930s, Bo Carter is reported to have become Blind Bo Carter; and, although the blindness factor never prevented many of his competitors to find and hold on to success, for Bo it was one of the factors that contributed to the decline of his career — probably coupled with other reasons, of course, such as obligatory alcohol abuse and the general decline in popularity of acoustic blues. As late as 1940, he was still recording at his usual rate for the Blue­bird label, but then the recordings stop abruptly, and for the next twenty-four years right until his death in 1964, there is no information on any subsequent recording activities.

 

Whether it was the blindness or other personal troubles haunting him at the time, recordings from these two last years are not much fun: once again, Bo reverts to «generic» blues, leaving behind most of his colorful double entendres. Many of these tunes are, in fact, recorded in the Robert Johnson vein: it wouldn't be surprising to learn that Bo caught wind of Robert's death, and tried to recast himself as Johnson's successor — at the very least, some of these tracks so deliberately try to copy Johnson's melodies and moods (e. g. ʽBorder Of New Mexico Bluesʼ rewrites ʽSweet Home Chicagoʼ) that a coincidence is unthinkable.

 

Not that this works as anything other than a curio: Bo's vocals do not have the faintest trace of Johnson's insecurity / vulnerability, and his playing, although, perhaps, at this point not any less complex per se than Johnson's, is nowhere near his choppy, aggressive style. Robert Johnson was, as far as we can tell, a possessed man; Bo Carter was just an agreeable country sleazeball.

 

Anyway, the only track on this last volume that stands out at least a little is ʽLet's Get Drunk Againʼ, because Bo did relatively few «drinking songs» in his career, and for this one, adopted his best «crooner / yodeller» pose and even thought of an original guitar flourish. Another track that could have been a standout is ʽOld Devil Bluesʼ, quite an ancient folk standard with some impressive finger-flashing picking — except it also fits in the «why can't I be like Robert?» cate­gory and inevitably loses out in the competition due to lackluster singing.

 

All in all, once you take all the five volumes into consideration, the final verdict is obvious — pick ten to twelve of the man's riskiest songs about wieners, cushions, biscuits, and pig meat, throw in two or three «serious» exercises for good measure, and you got yourself more of The Bo Carter Experience than you'll ever need. Maybe if the old man actually knew his records would be collected, remastered, and reissued long past his glory days, he would bother assigning them a little more individuality. Then again, he probably wouldn't give a damn anyway, as long as the public kept buying the stuff.

BO DIDDLEY

BO DIDDLEY (1958)

 

1) Bo Diddley; 2) I'm A Man; 3) Bring It To Jerome; 4) Before You Accuse Me; 5) Hey Bo Diddley; 6) Dearest Darling; 7) Hush Your Mouth; 8) Say Boss Man; 9) Diddley Daddy; 10) Diddy Wah Diddy; 11) Who Do You Love; 12) Pretty Thing.

 

I must  say that I have never been a huge fan of the «Bo Diddley beat». When it comes to rocking the very foundations of my existence, Chuck Berry's riffs, Jerry Lee Lewis' piano assassinations, and Scottie Moore's rockabilly backing of Elvis' legend have always taken precedence over this somewhat rigid formula — essentially just an electrified rendering of a traditional Juba dance. At first, of course, it was a magnificent invention: ʽBo Diddleyʼ (the song), recorded in 1955, soun­ded like nothing else at the time. The numerous variations that followed, though, rarely, if ever, improved upon the original impression — so that even most of the British fans of Bo Diddley were usually quite content with covering just one of them (the Stones only did ʽMonaʼ; the Ani­mals only did ʽPretty Thingʼ, and then wrote ʽThe Story Of Bo Diddleyʼ as a joke response).

 

What is much harder to realize — not until you decide to seriously immerse yourself in the man's creativity — is that there is much, much more to Bo Diddley than the proverbial, and occasional­ly tiresome «Diddley beat». For instance, this here «debut album», which is not really a proper al­bum but rather just a collection of several of his A- and B-sides from 1955 to 1958, only has three out of twelve tunes following the D.b.: ʽBo Diddleyʼ, ʽHush Your Mouthʼ, and ʽPretty Thingʼ. Of the others, some could have had the D.b. (ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ, for instance, predictably sung to the same vocal melody as ʽBo Diddleyʼ), but don't. Others are altogether quite removed from the for­mula, and follow different paths of inspiration — many of them, in my own view, far more inspi­rational than the D.b.

 

Like Chuck Berry, Bo was somewhat of an anomaly for Chicago's Chess Records, specializing in less explicitly dance-oriented electric bluesmen, from Muddy to Wolf to Little Walter to Buddy Guy. But they hooked onto him pretty hard all the same: rock'n'roll was becoming a household name, and these astute Chicago businessmen needed their own rock stars to stand the competition. Not that Bo couldn't or wouldn't do straightahead blues. There is at least one example on this re­cord — ʽBefore You Accuse Meʼ, although even here Bo could not resist speeding up the tempo so that the final result looks like a cross between old-fashioned blues and new-fashioned boogie. (The 1970 cover version by Creedence is appropriately more sharp and polished, but the song still firmly belongs in 1957).

 

But Bo's biggest blues-based hit was anything but straightahead — ʽI'm A Manʼ takes Muddy's ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ and basically just deconstructs it; it's as if Bo heard the song and said, "that first bar, man, that's the shit, do we really need anything else here?" As dumb as the deci­sion sounds, in its own context it's a fine example of brutal genius, right out there vying for first place with ʽLouie Louieʼ and the like. The Who were the perfect band to cover this symbol of mythic-status virility; the Yardbirds, slight less so; too bad it was too slow for Mötörhead. Muddy actually retorted with his own ʽMannish Boyʼ, which was essentially the same song with slightly different lyrics — and maybe Muddy made a finer job with that one, because his singing captured the spirit better than Bo's, but Bo was there first — «The Originator» strikes again.

 

What else is there? Well, the idea of stringing the entire song on one chord, for instance, which, since we already mentioned Mötörhead, is the genuine precursor to the «jackhammer» method of headbanging. ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ is done that way, but the more fabulous instance is ʽWho Do You Loveʼ, with its aggressive lead lines scattered along the road — and those beautiful lyrics: "I walk 47 miles of barbed wire, I use a cobra snake for a necktie... I got a brand new chimney made on top, made out of human skull..." Not a lot of black lyricists used that sort of voodooistic ima­gery as lightly as old Bo. But the gamble paid off — even The Doors covered the song during their live shows. (How does one get Jim Morrison inside a telephone booth? Write "cobra snake" and "human skull" on the walls).

 

And that still ain't all. There's ʽDiddley Daddyʼ, opening with one of the simplest, yet most ele­gant guitar figures of the decade — one which Billy Boy Arnold, present at the session, nixed from Bo and quickly inserted in his own ʽI Wish You Wouldʼ, and that is how all of us British Invasion fans know it (from the Yardbirds cover; ʽDiddley Daddyʼ itself evaded hit status in the UK, although the Stones and others did play it live). There's ʽDiddy Wah Diddyʼ, which takes a «dance-blues» pattern of Muddy's, adds a playful, poppy melody resolution, and makes for a great single that's bluesy, funny, catchy, and weird at the same time — an ideal fit for a young, teeth-cutting Captain Beefheart in 1966. And there is ʽSay Boss Manʼ, a lesser known tune that shows Bo perfectly at home with ʽJim Dandyʼ-style danceable R'n'B.

 

In short, Bo Diddley, like Jimmy Reed, was a sacrilegious blues renegade, which is why we love them both — except that Jimmy Reed was perfectly happy to find one basic formula and stick to it like glue until his last teeth fell out, whereas Bo, as this album shows, was a restless seeker: and in three years' time, he had found more than many bluesmen of the highest caliber had found in several decades. The Diddley beat was just one of these finds, and, as the first one and the one that made him a star, it was bound to become a repetitive trademark; but there is very little that is repetitive, monotonous, or just plain boring about Bo Diddley, an album where I myself knew most of the songs before hearing it. Thumbs up, totally.

 

GO BO DIDDLEY (1959)

 

1) Crackin' Up; 2) I'm Sorry; 3) Bo's Guitar; 4) Willie And Lillie; 5) You Don't Love Me (You Don't Care); 6) Say Man; 7) The Great Grandfather; 8) Oh Yeah; 9) Don't Let It Go; 10) Little Girl; 11) Dearest Darling; 12) The Clock Strikes Twelve.

 

There was literally no way that any second, or third, or fourth LP of Bo's could have the same impact or be as consistent as the first. Go Bo Diddley isn't exactly «scraping the barrels»: its bulk consists of new singles that the man released in late 1958 / 1959, and it actually shows him trying out some new styles and directions. But not all of these new ones should have been tried, and some of the old ones should have been left on the shelf as well.

 

Bad news first. ʽI'm Sorryʼ transparently proves that doo-wop, of all things, is completely incom­patible with Bo's style of doing stuff — awfully produced, with almost parodic back vocals rising out of coal pits, and Bo himself sounding completely out of his pattern. Elvis, perhaps, could be slick enough to sing doo-wop; Bo Diddley trying to be «The Cardinals» is more like the Sex Pis­tols trying to be «Van Der Graaf Generator». ʽLittle Girlʼ seems to intrude on the turf of New Orleanian barroom bluesmen like Professor Longhair, and Bo doesn't quite master the sort of nonchalant drunken swagger that it takes to make these things loveable (just go for the real thing instead — the Professor has a great knack for getting you all sauced up without a single physical drop of the stuff). Then there's the rehashing: ʽOh Yeahʼ is a response to Muddy's ʽMannish Boyʼ which was a response to Bo's ʽI'm A Manʼ which was a response to Muddy's ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ... well, you get the point.

 

The most oddball selection is ʽThe Clock Strikes Twelveʼ, which starts out as one more variation on the same subject, completely instrumental this time, with Bo playing the violin — original as hell, but it's safe to say that Jascha Heifetz probably wouldn't be impressed. Still, for a few mo­ments out there, I am ashamed — or thrilled? — to say, I couldn't actually understand if it really was a violin, or if it was a particularly inventive part blown by Little Walter on his harmonica. I am not sure if this counts as a positive recommendation, it's just the way it is.

 

But in between the clear-cut failures and the odd, controversial moments there are still plenty of unassailable highlights. ʽCrackin' Upʼ, later «informally» covered by the Stones and formally by Paul McCartney in 1988, is the man's finest Latin-groove-based number, with an incredibly cat­chy guitar loop firmly ensuring that misogyny will live forever (actually, the lyrics aren't strictly misogynist — «frustrated husband»-ist would be more accurate). ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ is the ever-on-the-watchout Bo stealing the carpet from under the feet of Slim Harpo — it's a variation on ʽGot Love If You Want Itʼ that, in terms of sharpness, energy, and professionalism, destroys the original completely, although it did not help Bo expropriate the original: British bands like the Kinks and the Yardbirds still got stuck covering Slim Harpo. And ʽSay Manʼ, with Bo and his maracas shaker Jerome Green trading off stupid jokes and friendly mutual insults to a samba beat, is yet another first — a mixture of time-honored «Afro-American comedy» and new-fangled R&B that all the white kids around the world must have been really thrilled to hear. (That said, the jokes themselves are really, really dumb. They probably should have hired some of Louis Jordan's songwriters instead).

 

Much less known — and lacking on most of the short compilations — are such clever little nug­gets as the instrumental ʽBo's Guitarʼ, which combines a distant variation on the «Diddley beat» with shards of surfing-style melodies (Bo the Omnivorous must have been intensely listening to Duane Eddy's earliest recordings), and ʽThe Great Grandfatherʼ, Bo's take on something really archaic — ye olde Negro working song, a style he tackles with much more convincing force and spirit than doo-wop. Maybe his moans and groans that bookend the verses aren't nearly as authen­tic as, say, Leadbelly's, but «authentic» is a relative term; for a hard-working black guy on the 1950s Chicago scene, you couldn't expect any better.

 

For some reason, they also reissued ʽDearest Darlingʼ from Bo Diddley — by mistake, perhaps — but in the end, Go Bo Diddley does not have even a single clear example of the «Diddley beat», even if ʽBo's Guitarʼ and ʽSay Manʼ come somewhat close. Instead, we get a smatter of diversity that, in sheer objective terms, might even beat the debut, with the subjective exception that not everything works so well this time. Most things do, though, confirming Diddley's reputa­tion as «the man who wanted to do everything» and somehow got pigeonholed into one single, simple formula anyway. Well, that is why we are here to try and remedy this with a single, simple thumbs up.

 

 

HAVE GUITAR WILL TRAVEL (1960)

 

1) She's Alright; 2) Cops And Robbers; 3) Run Diddley Daddy; 4) Mumblin' Guitar; 5) I Need You Baby (Mona); 6) Say Man, Back Again; 7) Nursery Rhyme; 8) I Love You So; 9) Spanish Guitar; 10) Dancing Girl; 11) Come On Baby.

 

This is where things start getting a little stale. To flesh out Bo's third LP, they had to reach as deep down as 1956 — and what they brought out was ʽCops And Robbersʼ, a wannabe-hilarious blues shuffle with mostly talking vocals that tell a story about... well, look at the title. Perhaps in 1956 it was still a novelty, but in between 1956 and 1960 we had ourselves The Coasters, who, with the aid of Leiber & Stoller, took that whole «comedy / R&B» fusion to a level against which Bo Diddley could not hold up. Uninteresting musically and not very funny, the song is one of Bo's ultimately failed experiments, and the fact that they had to resuscitate it in order to complete the album is quite telling.

 

The other «oldie» is the much better known ʽI Need You (Mona)ʼ, mostly due to having been covered on the Stones' first album (as well as Britain's sexiest, but completely forgotten, band of the early Sixties, The Li­verbirds, who seem to have covered almost all of Bo's catalog in their microscopically short heyday) — which is, of course, merely a variation on the classic Diddley beat, and was covered mainly due to its lyrics, since UK bands narrating the peculiarities of Bo's biography (had they stuck to the original ʽBo Diddleyʼ) naturally felt a little odd.

 

Another relatively recent single, from 1959, is even less exciting: a straightforward follow-up to ʽSay Manʼ (ʽSay Man, Back Againʼ) with another bunch of crude jokes exchanged between Bo and Jerome, and its B-side, ʽShe's Alrightʼ, a loud R&B rave-up along the lines of Ray Charles or The Isley Bro­thers — except that neither Bo himself, nor his backing band really had the vocal qualifications; the crudeness of the execution may not be quite as embarrassing as his struggles with doo-wop (after all, this is at least a rousing number, and one wouldn't expect Bo Diddley to completely miss the boat on anything «rousing»), but it is still a relative failure.

 

Stuff gets a bit better when Mr. Otha Ellas Bates struts into the studio in a focused state of mind and starts recording a chunk of new material tailor-made for the LP itself. ʽMumblin' Guitarʼ is an instrumental built around one sole gimmick — make the guitar «mumble», as you guessed — and the result is a dirty, sludgy piece of controlled chaos that could seriously compete with Link Wray on a certain level. The other instrumental is ʽSpanish Guitarʼ: here, the Bo Diddley beat is indeed combined with an amusingly amateurish «Spanish guitar» part, although he still slips into blues and rock'n'roll modes every now and then. Not a masterpiece, but at least hearing Bo try out un­familiar musical styles on his guitar is more exciting than hearing him sing in unfamiliar music styles; I'd rather listen to him «ineptly» incorporating flamenco elements than lending his voice to doo-wop and soul interpretations.

 

Good stuff also includes ʽRun Diddley Daddyʼ, a fun pop-rocker that is not a musical sequel to ʽDiddley Daddyʼ, and ʽCome On Babyʼ, another fun pop-rocker that makes the best possible use of about five piano notes and three bass notes, or something like that. But there is also ʽDancing Girlʼ, with a much-too-easily recognizable variation on the Diddley beat (actually, it sounds like the exact mathematical average of ʽBo Diddleyʼ and ʽDiddley Daddyʼ), and a couple more re-writes... overall, the sessions did help to save face a bit, but not a lot. Two decent instrumentals, a bunch of scraps, re-writes, and variations does not a good album make, and it is little wonder that this particular one is rather hard to find on CD — and that the only song off it to regularly appear on compilations is ʽMonaʼ — and that we probably have Mick Jagger to thank for that — so thank you, Mick Jagger, but the album overall still gets a thumbs down.

 

IN THE SPOTLIGHT (1960)

 

1) Road Runner; 2) Story Of Bo Diddley; 3) Scuttle Bug; 4) Signifying Blues; 5) Let Me In; 6) Limber; 7) Love Me; 8) Craw-Dad; 9) Walkin' And Talkin'; 10) Travelin' West; 11) Deed And Deed I Do; 12) Live My Life.

 

Frankly speaking, only one song on this album is in an undeniable spotlight — a grim contrast with Bo's fabulous run of highlights two years ago. ʽRoad Runnerʼ not only features one of the most famous special effects in guitar world history (how many guitar strings have been killed by ardent teenagers trying to master it?), it is also quite a serious milestone in the development of the hard rock sound — just listen to that low bass grumble; whoever had a sound like that in the 1950s? No wonder all the Brit bands loved the song like crazy, particularly the Animals, who were among the lucky few to actually understand how Bo does the «speeding up» trick, and the Who — Pete Townshend loved to capitalize on the heaviness of that riff in his live shows (and you can even see him doing a silly duck walk to it in The Kids Are Alright as late as 1975).

 

ʽRoad Runnerʼ is probably the last one of Bo's «seminal» classics, and the best of all of his «mas­culinity-asserting» tunes (ʽI'm A Manʼ is, after all, a bit too blunt, too slow, and certainly not as inventive). Unfortunately, the rest of In A Spotlight never even begins to come close. For in­stance, the only other track here that was a single is ʽWalkin' And Talkinʼ, which begins like an uninspired, slow­ed-down rip-off of The Coasters' ʽAlong Came Jonesʼ, with comparable melodies, waa-oohs, and even lyrics — before going into a rather boring chorus that Leiber and Stoller would probably find way below their level of acceptability.

 

And most of the album tracks either go on to show the formulae digging in, or represent half-hearted, usually failed experiments. The main charm of ʽThe Story Of Bo Diddleyʼ is in its bright, tinkly, adventurous piano part. ʽSignifying Bluesʼ is basically just ʽSay Man Vol. 3ʼ. ʽCraw-Dadʼ is a local variation on the Diddley beat, completely forgettable. ʽLive My Lifeʼ is a bastard bro­ther of ʽBefore You Accuse Meʼ... you get my drift.

 

The «experiments» are at least occasionally intriguing: ʽScuttle Bugʼ, for instance, is mostly a piano-dri­ven instrumental shuffle, a little New Orleanian in spirit, as if Fats Domino decided to move to the colder climate of Chicago all of a sudden. ʽLimberʼ shows a sudden interest in the ʽBanana Boat Songʼ, but Bo Diddley and the Caribbean do not mesh well together — the man is just too fussy by nature to achieve the proper level of relaxation. And ʽLove Meʼ is Bo's first excourse in­to the world of «deep soul»... if only he weren't so vocally challenged for the purpose. (Sam Cooke would probably throw up on the spot).

 

Of course, it is still fun to see him try, and Bo Diddley's failures can sometimes be more exciting and involving than other people's successes. But it is the album's structure that deals it the worst blow of all — like I said, few things can withstand the force of ʽRoad Runnerʼ, and even fewer when they catch our hero in a general state of creative confusion. The only other song here to feature an original melody, a sense of completeness, and an aura of freshness, is ʽDeed And Deed I Doʼ, a nice mix of folk-pop and twangy surf, but it is (almost literally) child's play next to the opening monster. No album with ʽRoad Runnerʼ on it deserves being humiliated with a thumbs down, but know that you are more or less safe if you just own it on a compilation. Well, on se­cond thought, get ʽScuttle Bugʼ, too, for all the nice piano work.

 

BO DIDDLEY IS A GUNSLINGER (1960)

 

1) Gun Slinger; 2) Ride On Josephine; 3) Doing The Crawdaddy; 4) Cadillac; 5) Somewhere; 6) Cheyenne; 7) Six­teen Tons; 8) Whoa Mule; 9) No More Lovin'; 10) Diddling; 11*) Working Man; 12*) Do What I Say; 13*) Prisoner Of Love; 14*) Googlia Moo; 15*) Better Watch Yourself.

 

The first of several «Bo Diddley is a...» type of records, starting out in an almost «conceptual» manner and then proceeding in whatever non-conceptual directions the original concept might have pushed the music. In other words — a nice pretext here for Mr. Bo to show off in some nice Western gear on the front cover. But whaddaya want, The Magnificent Seven came out that year, after all, and why shouldn't Afro-American rock'n'rollers have loved it, too?

 

The good news is: Ennio Morricone was not yet working with Sergio Leone, so there is no dan­ger of hearing Bo try out his own interpretation of ʽThe Good, The Bad, And The Uglyʼ. The bad news is that the proposed scenario might have been — who knows? — more exciting than hear Bo slap on a lyrical, attitud-inal, and, sometimes, musical country-western sheen on everything we'd already heard before. The ugly news, then, to dispense with the trio, is that this album con­tains what might be the worst cover of ʽSomewhere Over The Rainbowʼ ever recorded by a hu­man being. (At least, in the pre-1980s era.)

 

But cheer up: in the end, Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger is a pretty funny concept, and a fairly ex­citing musical ride. What I mean is, anybody who appreciates, say, Weird Al Yankovic's bag of parody tricks, has no reason to cringe at the idea of Bo Diddley expropriating other people's ideas, adapting them to his own playing style, and coming out with something that is a shameless rip-off and a hilarious parody at the same time. The most important thing, though, is the humor and the playfulness of it all. If you have something against playing with Uncle Bo, stay away. If you're willing to accept the Gunslinger's rules, though... excitement awaits, crude as it may be.

 

The title track ever so slightly modifies the Bo Diddley beat (actually, the drums play without syncopation, whereas the guitars still syncopate, and this creates a slightly irritating, but clever  aural effect) to give us another episode of ʽThe Story Of Bo Diddleyʼ, this time set at the «O-K Corral». After that, Western references float away, only to resurface on ʽCheyenneʼ, which is ba­sically a synthesis — literally! — of the Coasters' ʽAlong Came Jonesʼ (again!) and LaVern Ba­ker's ʽJim Dandyʼ, taking the "and then?"s from the former and the "waaah-oooh"s from the latter. Both are classics of the comedy-R'n'B substyle, and the synthesis works much better than a sepa­rate cover of each would have had — and what is that «bubbling» percussion? Sounds just like certain patterns of electronic drums circa early 1980s. Later on, it reappears on ʽWhoa Mule (Shine)ʼ, a stop-and-start blues-pop account of a Southern mule, where its clippity-clop does re­semble a mule's slow, steady pace, instead of the light horsey gallop on ʽCheyenneʼ. Clever!

 

The most often covered songs on the record would probably be ʽRide On Josephineʼ (George Thorogood had a version) — a Diddley-style rewrite of Chuck Berry's ʽMaybelleneʼ, with a dif­ferent chorus but essentially the same verses; and ʽCadillacʼ, done by the Kinks on their debut al­bum — here, with a saxophone-adorned arrangement, which Gene Barge contributes in well-imi­tated King Curtis style. Again, though, it is not the saxophone itself that matters (we can all just go listen to the real King instead), but its interplay with the distorted lumps, shards, and splinters of sound spluttered by Bo and his second guitarist (Peggy Jones) in all directions. And then there is ʽSixteen Tonsʼ by Merle Travis, a track that Ed Sullivan, for some reason, once expected Bo to perform on his show, and got pretty upset when the man played ʽBo Diddleyʼ instead. Don't wor­ry, Mr. Sullivan — Bo Diddley takes his responsibilities seriously. A five-year wait period is ac­tually quite a sign of respect. And it's a nice cover, too.

 

Overall, the only true misfires are the ballads — once again, Bo proves that he's no ladies' man when it comes to wearing your heart on your sleeve: ʽNo More Lovinʼ is clumsy, rotten doo-wop, and ʽSomewhere...ʼ ... oh my God. (Then again, I never even liked that song in the movie — and I never really liked the movie — and I never ever liked a single cover of that song — and for some reason, Eric Clapton performed it live during my only live Eric Clapton experience — okay, I'm probably not the right person to pronounce judgement in this case).

 

But apart from that, Gunslinger is an oddball of an album in that it is not all that different in scope or freshness from the two that precede it, but somehow, is still hammered together in a more concise, exciting, and intriguing manner. Not surprisingly, unlike those two, Gunslinger has been remastered and issued on CD, with a bunch of bonus tracks (of which the wannabe-ancient road workin' song ʽWorking Manʼ is the finest), and is well worth locating. Thumbs up.

 

BO DIDDLEY IS A LOVER (1961)

 

1) Not Guilty; 2) Hong Kong Mississippi; 3) You're Looking Good; 4) Bo's Vacation; 5) Congo; 6) Bo's Blues; 7) Bo Diddley Is A Lover; 8) Aztec; 9) Back Home; 10) Bo Diddley Is Loose; 11) Love Is A Secret; 12) Quick Draw.

 

This one finds Bo slipping further and further into «comic» mood — with no fewer than four songs directly referring to him in their title, and no fewer than just about everything else being a veiled or unveiled account of Bo Diddley's adventures, either, with jokes, gags, puns, and musical slapstick all over the place. Not surprisingly, the more this man talks about himself, the less he somehow seems to be able to say. And no matter how irresistible the LP title might have been for the ladies — at least those well-versed in the art of mirror-reading — this was the first of Bo's LPs not to yield even one single radio classic or fan favorite.

 

But this does not necessarily mean that the record is a complete failure. First, there are some top notch instrumentals. On ʽCongoʼ, Bo recycles the string-scratching trick of ʽRoadrunnerʼ, this time imitating a jet plane engine rather than a Harley Davidson, then engages in some playful surf soloing à la Duane Eddy, all the while strutting his stuff and shaking his shimmy in classic Bo fashion. And on ʽAztecʼ, he leads the listener into Spanish territory — again, not really trying to emulate any of the masters of Latin art (which would have been an obvious embarrassment), but rather with the purpose of doing a little bit of deconstruction, randomly swapping the predictably simplified chords with squeaks, squirts, scratches, and rumbles. This is not «parody» — just good old Bo trying to place his personal mark on yet another style.

 

Elsewhere, it looks like all he is doing is recycling, re-recycling, and re-re-recycling ideas that have already been in heavy use for about five years. But repeated listens show that, even at this time, each song has just a little bit of individuality, that one little «shift» in texture that prevents it from completely repeating its predecessors. It might be a slight change in the beat, one extra note in the riff, one transposed chord, some prominently placed backup vocals from the man's loyal female staff... something,  and it all rocks fairly hard (which is also a plus, considering the general softening of US «mainstream» rock'n'roll standards in the early 1960s — besides, Bo was the only one of the major black rockers left at that time, with Little Richard going to church and Chuck Berry going to jail).

 

For instance, ʽNot Guiltyʼ is a nursery-rhyme-style dialog between Bo and his backups, with a Chuck Berry-influenced lead guitar part, suitable for a steady 4/4 beat, set against the syncopated Bo Diddley beat — a good example of Bo's «sonic illusion» technique where your ear is slightly thrown off course by the dissonance. Another Chuckified number is ʽBo Diddley Is Looseʼ, where the lead guitar carries on a sharp, but merry dialog with Bo in the vein of ʽCarolʼ and ʽLittle Queenieʼ: the licks may be borrowed, but the party atmosphere is all Bo anyway. And ʽYou're Looking Goodʼ is among his most convincing speedy R'n'B numbers — for once, the wobbly guitar patterns and the Isley Brothers attitude are combined to fine effect.

 

Open missteps and blunders are arguably limited to the generic 12-bar ʽBo's Bluesʼ, which does sound like an unintended parody — controversial as that might sound, Bo has less feeling for the slow 12-bar form than Mick Jagger, and is unable to do anything interesting for it; and to the happy R'n'B ballad ʽLove Is A Secretʼ, which, on top of it all, is rendered physically unlistenable by the never-ending backup crooning (three minutes of high-pitched ooh-wee-oohs that only pause to catch a breath from time to time is straightahead torture for the ears — forget waterboar­ding, this is the real deal).

 

Everything else ranges from «curiously nice» to «pleasantly mediocre»: a clear-cut step down from the weirdness / fun level of Gunslinger, but the man is still willing to combine brains, brawn, soul, and ego to good effect — the main problem is that, this time around, there has been just a little too much ego thrown in the pot, overshadowing the rest of the ingredients. Still, a modest thumbs up here for one of the few «real rock'n'roll» albums of 1961.

 

BO DIDDLEY (1962)

 

1) I Can Tell; 2) Mr. Khrushchev; 3) Diddling; 4) Give Me A Break (Man); 5) Who May Your Lover Be; 6) Bo's Bounce; 7) You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover; 8) Babes In The Woods; 9) Sad Sack; 10) Mama Don't Allow No Twistin'; 11) You All Green; 12) Bo's Twist.

 

In early 1962, Bo Diddley finished up the «roleplaying trilogy» with Bo Diddley Is A Twister, an album that has never been released on CD and which I have not been able to locate — and I assume that there must have been a good reason, because Bo Diddley might certainly be a lover, or even a gunslinger, by nature, but a twister only by temporary trade. (Actually, the few tracks I have heard are anything but generic twist — for Bo to sound like Chubby Checker, he should have had brain surgery).

 

Anyway, that record is probably best left forgotten, but he did rebound later on in the year, with a second self-titled album that housed his last single of any major importance — Willie Dixon's ʽYou Can't Judge A Book By The Coverʼ, maybe the catchiest song in the entire history of bo­did­dley­ism, hiding a macho substance ("I look like a farmer, but I'm a lover" — agriculturalists all over the world, take arms) behind an innocently happy blues-pop melody. So happy, in fact, that even the Monkees ended up co­vering it — there is a hilarious version on Live 1967 that does a good job of linking their «commercial act» to the «authentic rock'n'roll» legacy.

 

The other memorable highlight was ʽI Can Tellʼ, just as catchy and surprisingly «moody» for Bo — normally, his slow-moving numbers are dismissable, but the sexy build-up to the chorus bark ("grrr-I know you don't lorrrve me no more!") is so diligently crafted this time that even Muddy could use a hint. Covered that same year in an unnecessarily sped up and vastly inferior version by Johnny Kidd, and God knows who else.

 

Sandwiched in between the two classics, as usual, is a bunch of total filler mixed with some tasty, if rather under-realized ideas. ʽMr. Khrushchevʼ is at least priceless for substituting the ubiquitous "Hey, Bo Diddley!" with the much fresher — and highly relevant for 1962 — "Hey, Khrush­chev!" (unfortunately, Nikita Sergeyevich's personal reaction to the summons remains strictly hid­den by his biographers). ʽBabes In The Woodsʼ has a stupid title and even sillier backup vo­cals, but the muttering-stuttering gimmick in the chorus still sticks with you, love it or hate it.

 

Overall, there is lots of purely instrumental stuff on the record, which is good — even if, at this point, new rhythms almost completely cease to appear, each such track is still a good chance to say something individual without resorting to lyrical and vocal silliness. ʽGive Me A Break (Man)ʼ is like a condensed two-minute instrumen­tal variation on ʽYou Can't Judge A Bookʼ — faster, louder, and I bet Jimi himself must have learned a lot from that guitar rumble (his typical arrangement of ʽKilling Floorʼ at least is cer­tainly based on those patterns). The new ʽDiddlingʼ (not the same as on Gunslinger) is surprisingly mean and lean for the usually happy Bo, and ʽSad Sackʼ continues Bo's experiments with different sorts of scraping, scratching, and sliding guitar noi­ses —another small step on the way to turn the guitar into a talking ap­paratus.

 

Thus, one more modest thumbs up here: two highlights and next to no lowlights is just enough for a Bo Diddley record circa 1962 to be recommendable. (Of course, you can also just get the highlights on compilations, but some of these have the nerve to omit ʽI Can Tellʼ, so be wary).

 

BO DIDDLEY & COMPANY (1963)

 

1) (Extra Read All About) Ben; 2) Help Out; 3) Diana; 4) Bo's A Lumber Jack; 5) Lazy Women; 6) Mama Mia; 7) Rock­'n'Roll; 8) Gimme Gimme; 9) Put The Shoes On Willie; 10) Pretty Girl; 11) Same Old Thing; 12) Met You On Saturday; 13) Little Girl; 14) Cookie Headed Diddley.

 

In the footsteps of Peggy Jones, we welcome Norma-Jean Wofford, a.k.a. «The Duchess», a.k.a. «The Sister», as Bo used to present her on tour, even though she was in reality more like a god­daughter; apparently, Bo taught her his playing style himself when she was still underage. The two cut a fine, dashing pair for the European market — the cover photo alone does the job nicely, and even The Animals were so impressed that they included a Duchess reference in their tribute (ʽThe Story Of Bo Diddleyʼ — they, apparently, did fall for the «sister» story). And yes, indeed, few things on Earth were hotter than watching Norma-Jean swing that axe next to her mentor, in some provocative outfit or other, on a mid-1960s TV show.

 

In the studio, though, it did not work out that well: The Duchess was about as good as Peggy Jo­nes, offering steady choppy support whenever it seemed appropriate to Bo to go off on a wild tangent, but she never had any ambitions (or, perhaps, any ability) to go beyond whatever she was taught by the main man. Their interplay on such numbers as ʽHelp Outʼ sounds fabulous, but not exactly fresh, and the same goes for the overall judgement on the record.

 

The only song here that really swung over some of the British fans was ʽPretty Girlʼ, later co­vered by the Yardbirds on Five Live — good choice, one of the fastest and catchiest ditties here, completely guitar-driven, rather than, for instance, ʽLazy Womenʼ, which gives the piano a more prominent function. Bad news is, Bo seems to finally be running out even of variations on the old chord progressions; and his overseas fans were hardly ready to fall under the charm of songs that emphasize the lyrics and the comic vibe over the music.

 

Modest successes and surprises would include ʽDianaʼ, sort of a wild, over-the-top revival of ʽMonaʼ (actually, more of a vocal / instrumental cross between ʽMonaʼ and ʽBo Diddleyʼ); ʽBo's A Lumber Jackʼ, a swaggery, swampy rap punctuated by atmospheric tricks — evil laughter, per­cussive imitation of falling trees, wild screams of "TIMBER!" and other stuff that was sort of far out for the likes of 1963; and ʽRock'n'Rollʼ, which honors its title by limiting itself to just one line ("I love myself some rock'n'roll") — then, at some point, Bo launches into scat singing and gets himself rudely interrupted ("hey baby, that's not rock'n'roll, that's JAZZ!..") Diddley humor. No, I mean, it was funny back in its day, honest. With some reservations, it's even funny today.

 

Other than that and minus a couple lowlights (such as the rote balladry of ʽMet You On Satur­dayʼ), this is just another reliable, but less and less memorable Bo Diddley album. Which is a little sad, because if only the man's rambunctious spirit could still be tied to inventive songwriting in 1963, he could easily have become that one particular rocker to survive the transition into the early 1960s — virtually no one in the States rocked as hard at the time (admittedly, that was the reason why he preferred Europe). But somehow, «the originator» must have thought that he had totally paid his dues in «originating» — or, perhaps, that bringing in such a hot figure as The Du­chess could count as «originating» in itself. Well, who knows.

 

SURFIN' WITH BO DIDDLEY (1963)

 

1) What Did I Say; 2) White Silver Sands; 3) Surfboard Cha Cha; 4) Surf Sink Or Swim; 5) Piggy Back Surfers; 6) Surfer's Love Call; 7) Twisting Waves; 8) Wishy Washy; 9) Hucklebuck; 10) Old Man River; 11) Oops He Slipped; 12) Low Tide.

 

Allegedly, this is as much of an oddity in Bo's catalog as Bo Diddley Is A Twister, except that this time around I actually got to hear a crackly LP rip of these twelve tunes — recorded by Bo at the height of the surf-rock craze, in a strange, transparently misguided attempt to fool the young fans of Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys. After all, somebody must have thought, Bo is not on the album photo, and them kids these days will spring for anything with a tidal wave on the sleeve — you gotta be real dumb, after all, to listen to surf muzak in the first place.

 

Now the image of a «Surfin' Bo Diddley» would not be all that far removed from the image of Disney's dan­cing hippos, or that of King Arthur on ice, but, surprisingly, that is not what is wrong with this album. As a matter of fact, very few of its tunes, despite the misleading surf-related tit­les, have anything to do with surf-rock at all: the whole thing is basically an R&B album, almost completely instrumental and mostly drawing upon Ray Charles, Booker T. & The MGs, and a little bit of old-fashioned Chicago blues for inspiration.

 

The real bad news is that it does not sound much like a Bo Diddley album. Maybe that was the point — make a Bo Diddley album that does not sound like one. But when the artist already has an established style, such experiments more often fail than succeed, and Surfin' is no exception. For the first time ever, the guitar as such — at least, audible, significant guitar — does not enter in the picture until the third track: ʽWhat Did I Sayʼ is a sax-and-keyboards-dominated rearrange­ment of Ray's ʽWhat'd I Sayʼ, and ʽWhite Silver Sandsʼ is a merry, upbeat, brass-based instru­mental that seems to have been recorded while Bo and The Duchess were enjoying a snack in the cafeteria around the corner. Only on ʽSurfboard Cha Chaʼ does the six-string make its first appea­rance, playing a melody that is more... um, Del Shannon than Bo Diddley.

 

The biggest surprise of the album is that numbers with titles like ʽSurf Sink Or Swimʼ, which you would expect to sound like The Ventures, sound instead like ʽGreen Onionsʼ — crisp, aggressive, deceptively simplistic early blues-boogie-rock. The biggest disappointment is that there is hardly any need to hear them if you can simply go for the real thing instead. Likewise, ʽPiggy Back Surfersʼ is real­ly the old blues of ʽMe And My Chauffeurʼ, wrapped up in a little twang. And ʽSurfer's Love Callʼ, one of the LP's few vocal tunes, is nowhere near a ʽSurfer Girlʼ in style — it is more like a drunken, good-time Mardi Gras number, with Bo occasionally breaking into yodel­ling instead of bellowing. Some fine surfing out there on 'em pretty Alpine meadows.

 

The album's most radical rearrangement is that of ʽOl' Man Riverʼ, the one tune that Bo really tries to turn into a surf-pop song (and, perhaps, having a vocal part on top would have made the effort more noticeable). If that were the overall pattern — try to «surf-ify» various non-surf-re­lated stuff — the album could have had some value as a novelty piece. Instead, the overall pattern seems to be just duping the listener by putting false titles on formulaic R&B and blues-rock stan­dards. In a way, that is novel, too, and you could almost say that this is Bo's subtle send-up of the whole «jump on somebody else's bandwagon» movement, but that don't necessarily make it a rewarding listen. Thumbs down, in all honesty.

 

BO DIDDLEY'S BEACH PARTY (1963)

 

1) Memphis; 2) Gunslinger; 3) Hey Bo Diddley; 4) Old Smokey; 5) Bo Diddley's Dog; 6) I'm All Right; 7) Mr. Custer; 8) Bo's Waltz; 9) What's Buggin' You; 10) Road Runner.

 

Few of the great rockers of the 1950s lived long enough, to put out a great live rock'n'roll record. Not surprisingly, Bo Diddley's first live album was recorded almost at the same time as Jerry Lee Lewis' — with about a year's difference — and both were lucky enough to capture them still in their performing prime, even if no longer a vital critical and commercial presence. Bo Diddley's Beach Party certainly sounds like a crap name for a great rock'n'roll record, but what can you do if it was, actually, like, recorded at the Beach Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina? (At least it wasn't really recorded directly on the beach, as one could suggest from looking at the cover). The important thing is, it is actually Bo Diddley's finest album of the decade — worth every ounce of praise that has slowly, but steadily accumulated over it through the efforts of historically-oriented critics, like Ritchie Unterberger, Bruce Eder, and that annoying hipster next door.

 

Anyway, the sound is shitty (come to think of it, if this were recorded on a beach, right after a volleyball party, I wouldn't actually be surprised, but then again, this was 1963), the songs are nothing new, and neither Bo nor The Duchess have bothered to learn any dazzling new moves for the show, but that doesn't matter one little bit. What does matter is that this is the most «triba­l­istic»-sounding LP released up to that date — James Brown, fine as he is in so many other re­spects, does not even begin to come close. This is Mr. Bo doing his thang, leading the audience in a cult dance around the bonfire, never minding the melody as long as the groove is enough to keep the spirit (and the spirits) properly agitated. In fact, he doesn't even mind the lyrics — half of the songs have no words other than scattered howls, yells, and hollers, and even those that are supposed to have had some words, forget all about them (ʽRoadrunnerʼ). And who cares? We all know Bo Diddley can't sing anyway. That's not exactly why he was born into this world.

 

The setlist has practically nothing to do with Bo as a hitmaker — other than ʽRoadrunnerʼ, depri­ved of its lyrics (but featuring a funny little intro tidbit on the origins of the song), and ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ, which is certainly not included here because it was a hit, most of the songs are not too well known, and, in fact, most of them just function as excuses for setting up a twin-guitar groove where, typically, The Duchess keeps up the grinding rhythm, and Bo either sends down his cas­cades of machine-gun fire against it or joins his «sister» in perfect, or intentionally non-perfect, sync. The approach does not differ much regardless of whether he is working on well-rehearsed chestnuts like ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ or ʽGunslingerʼ, leading a «diddlified» take on fellow Chuck Berry's ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ, or choosing a less distinctly African, but equally raucous power level on the rearrangement of ʽOld Smokeyʼ.

 

One tune that most people probably know off here is ʽI'm Alrightʼ, since the Stones got that one from Bo early on in their act, and turned it into one of their own live highlights throughout 1964-65. The difference is amusing, although, unfortunately, not exactly in Bo's balance: Bo does in­deed sound like «he's alright», simply giving himself and his listeners one more feel-good kick, whereas Jagger would often turn the song into something overtly psychotic, sometimes bordering on desperate — maybe not intentionally, but that's the way it turned out. Still, there is no getting away from the fact that the riff is pure Bo, and also that Jagger couldn't credibly «parrot» the way Bo does all that amicable hollering; in any way, it is more fun to just compare and spot the dif­ferences than to draw subjective judgements.

 

Bo is, first and foremost, an entertainer, and he does everything in his power to entertain — how­ling (quite authentically) on ʽBo Diddley's Dogʼ, luring the audiences into silly, «slumbery» wal­tzing before unexpectedly crashing back into the Diddley groove (ʽBo's Waltzʼ), slipping in jokes and anecdotes, making whatever funny guitar noises he can think of in 1963, etc. etc. But enter­tainment comes in different flavors, and this one is wilder, more reckless, and far more targeted at the «beast within» than just about anything there was at the time. Come to think of it, the natu­ralistic lo-fi sound is actually on Bo's side here — clean, clear sound separation would only help reveal the technical weaknesses; when it all sticks together, the guitars, bass, drums, and even Jerome Green's maracas become a testosteronic monster.

 

It is too bad that practically none of this was captured on film — Bo's TV appearances from the late 1950s / early 1960s are scarcer than hen's teeth, and he was notoriously «tamer» inside the TV studio than when hidden from the camera's eye. This particular show, on the contrary, is rumored to have been broken up by the cops when tension got too high (with Jerome Green all but stagediving into the crowds), and that certainly seems believable, as the whole show is no­thing but one large, crude, effective audience provocation. Total thumbs up to this little glimpse of the «rock'n'roll underground» in the pre-garage rock era (which it definitely influenced).

 

TWO GREAT GUITARS (1964)

 

1) Liverpool Drive; 2) Chuck's Beat; 3) When The Saints Go Marching In; 4) Bo's Beat; 5*) Fireball; 6*) Stay Sharp; 7*) Chuckwalk; 8*) Stinkey.

 

More of an historical curiosity here than an actual good album — but a terrific historical curiosity all the same. This was the first of several «star power» projects that Chess Records briefly toyed with in the Sixties, before realizing their commercial uselessness: getting Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry to play on the same record. Recorded in March 1964 at Tel Mar Studios, released later that year, the album is never remembered as a particular highlight for any of those guys; however, in some ways it is a rather unique artefact of the era. Even if you find it horrible, you won't ever for­get how you found it horrible, that is for sure.

 

The original LP consisted of just four tracks: two short instrumentals, each provided by one of the two guitar heroes in their own trademark styles, and two long ones, symmetrically titled ʽChuck's Beatʼ and ʽBo's Beatʼ (since the latter is four minutes longer than the former, I used that as a feeble, but valid pretext to review the album under the Bo Diddley section). The long ones are fairly accurate with their titles — although both guitarists are quite active on both of them, tra­ding solos between each other in a friendly competition, ʽChuck's Beatʼ has Bo «guesting» on a Chuck-led recording, set to the beat of ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ, and ʽBo's Beatʼ sees Chuck retur­ning the favor and trying to adapt his style to a typical Diddley beat number.

 

Both of the long jams sort of settle the long-standing debate of who was there first with a pop number running over ten minutes — Love, with their ʽRevelationʼ, or the Rolling Stones, with their ʽGo­in' Homeʼ. Two years prior to that, here we have two already-veteran rockers, licking each other first for ten, then for fourteen minutes in a row — and their record company being perfectly hap­py to release the results commercially, in an age of two-minute pop songs.

 

The very fact is fasci­nating, even if the jams themselves are nothing to write home about: twenty-four minutes of Bo and Chuck emptying their bags of tricks, most of which we have already known for about five years. There might not have been even a single newly invented chord sequence over all this endless jamming and soloing. The whole experience makes it very easy to understand why, in their everyday life, these guys preferred to stick to short outbursts rather than lengthy jam pieces. Nevertheless, the experience is perversely fascinating — seeing them stretch out so bravely in those early, pre-jam band times. And it's kinda funny to try and imagine the stuff played out in their heads, too. Like when, at 7:24 into ʽChuck's Beatʼ, Berry breaks into his «goose-quacking» solo mode, and then... «oh shit, ain't that the third time already?.. better drop this, quickly, before they take notice...» Then, twenty-five seconds later: «Aw heck, I can't play anything else anyway, so why bother looking? A solo is a solo». And he restarts the goose-quack mode again, fourth time over.

 

In «compact» mode, the instrumentals make more sense: ʽLiverpool Driveʼ, with its three mi­nutes, is just the right size for Chuck to deliver a short and sweet set of riffs and solos, and Bo's take on ʽWhen The Saints Go Marching Inʼ is a fine sample of «diddlifying» the classic New Orleanian atmosphere — putting the tribal beat back where it was originated. On the other hand, they lack the novelty factor of the jams: neither of the two is likely to ever take the place of ʽLittle Quee­nieʼ or ʽDiddley Daddyʼ in anyone's hearts, whereas the jams — these jams you will definitely be remembering years from now on, at least on a purely factual basis.

 

The CD release of the album threw on a few bonus tracks, probably released during the same ses­sion, and, judged on their own, they might actually be the best there is: ʽFireballʼ, as behooves any song called ʽFireballʼ (see Deep Purple), is fast and tense, based on a speedy boogie pickin' pattern, probably copped from the likes of Big Bill Broonzy; and ʽStinkeyʼ experiments with pha­sing a bit, creating a lively noisy environment against which sharper, more focused licks are played — the result is a great swampy feel, with well-bred, goal-oriented bullfrogs croaking out of the generally mucky, oozy depths.

 

Overall, a strange project indeed, but one that adds a somewhat interesting page in both histories of the «two great guitars». Supposedly, any prominent people in the jazz world, listening to this stuff back for some random reason back in 1964, would have scoffed at the poorness of the tech­niques and sparseness of ideas. They would be absolutely right, too. But everybody has to have a start somewhere — so, in a way, these simplistic sessions were paving the road to all the great achievements of rock-oriented jam bands, some of which were only a couple of years away from these humble beginnings. So, sort of a thumbs up for historical importance and general weird­ness, but otherwise, only recommended for hardcore rockabilly collectors.

 

HEY! GOOD LOOKIN' (1965)

 

1) Hey! Good Lookin'; 2) Mush Mouth Millie; 3) Bo Diddley's Hoot Nanny; 4) London Stomp; 5) Let's Walk A While; 6) Rooster Stew; 7) La La La; 8) Yeah Yeah Yeah; 9) Rain Man; 10) I Wonder Why People Don't Like Me; 11) Brother Bear; 12) Mummy Walk.

 

Two Great Guitars might have been an oddity, but at least it left a stronger impression than Bo's regular studio albums from the same era. This one belongs in about the same class as Bo Diddley & Company — as solidly masterminded and produced as anything the man could knock off in his sleep. But with the musical world growing more and more demanding by early 1965, and slow­ly awakening to the idea that «progress» could and should not only come «naturally», but could also be permanently stimulated, the idea of making a 1965 record that sounded so firmly like 1957 was getting colder and colder by the minute. This one didn't sell at all, and I don't blame anyone — were I alive and buying LPs in 1965, I probably wouldn't buy it either.

 

The only track here that suggests a certain awareness of one's surroundings is ʽLondon Stompʼ, a dance-blues number that crudely parodies a bunch of English accents, all based on Bo's recent experiences in the trans-Atlantic cradle of the English language. Just a novelty number, but one well worth a listen — after all, surely all that tolerance towards the legions of white British boys imitating the walks and talks of grizzled black bluesmen entitles us to hearing the grizzled black bluesman returning the favor. Then again, a parody is only a parody, however funny it may be (and this one ain't particularly funny).

 

Everything else is just standard Bo fare. The title track is no Hank Williams cover, but simply another pomp-and-stomp opening number to exploit the Diddley beat, even if it opens with a couple of deceptive licks that Bo might have learned from the Chuck Berry sessions — then in­tegrates them into the old beat to the point of disintegration. ʽI Wonder Why People Don't Like Meʼ is a decent Motown stylization — and the lyrics, with their tongue-in-cheek rags-to-riches story, might actually be a subtle jab at the typical «Motown star» of the time (especially appro­priate for Bo, who was struggling for survival at the time and must have been fairly envious of all the young, smooth, soulful whippersnappers like Marvin Gaye).

 

The rest? For the most part, just variations upon variations, with semi-catchy recycled vocal grooves at best and no particularly curious guitar parts whatsoever. The best Bo Diddley song of the epoch was not even included on the original LP for some reason — this is the grim, parent-scaring ʽMama, Keep Your Big Mouth Shutʼ, in which the man gallantly asks the matron of the family to refrain from interfering in his romantic relations with her daughter. (And the guy was worrying about why nobody was buying his records!). It does seem to crop up on some editions, though, so do try to hear Hey! Good Lookin' in its company — the only way to ensure that Bo actually did have some bite left in late '64 / early '65.

 

Oh yes, ʽMummy Walkʼ is rather amusing as well ("hey little girl, I mean a-you in yellow, I don't wanna see you do the mummy walk with the other fellow" is one of the classic lines of the pre-Patti Smith era, in any case). But on the other hand, you should also suspect that something is wrong when two songs in a row are called ʽLa La Laʼ and "Yeah Yeah Yeahʼ; and when you ac­tually hear them, you will most likely go from suspicion to somewhere else, much less pleasant. Overall, a thumbs down — lack of diversity or originality is one thing, but simply remaking your own history, going round and round in circles, is another thing. An annoying thing.

 

500% MORE MAN (1965)

 

1) 500% More Man; 2) Let Me Pass; 3) Stop My Monkey; 4) Greasy Spoon; 5) Tonight Is Ours; 6) Root Hoot; 7) Hey Red Riding Hood; 8) Let The Kids Dance; 9) He's So Mad; 10) Soul Food; 11) Corn Bread; 12) Somebody Beat Me.

 

«500% more self-plagiarizing», to be more precise. Even if nobody was buying Bo's records any longer, that still did not stop the man from putting out two whole LPs in 1965 — and, to be fair, seemingly enjoying every minute of it, although by now he seems to be making his fourth or fifth circle around the same old tree.

 

The title track, as can be easily guessed, is yet another remake of ʽI'm A Manʼ, out here to reas­sert our hero's reliable virility in an age of quickly changing trends and fads. Other than the reas­suring lyrics ("more man than you ever seen", "I'm still round here, baby, and I let the good time roll", etc.), the only reasons to ever listen to this track had only been there in 1965; today, with the man finally gone for good, listening to ʽ500% More Manʼ instead of the original would be a strange occupation indeed.

 

The other tracks are... well, two things of note: first, The Cookies — Bo's backing band of high-pitched cat-girls — are present on almost every number, which seems more likely to give us a headache than a feeling of awe and wonder, particularly since most of the backing vocals are so goddamn repetitive (I mean, how could a man not go mad if every goddamn bar on ʽHe's So Madʼ is stuffed with the robotic chant of "oh yeaaah... he's so mad... oh yeaaah... he's so mad"?). It only gets completely intolerable once, when they follow Bo up on a sweet ballad (ʽTonight Is Oursʼ), delivered with the usual clumsiness, but overall, the girls definitely overstate their value on this album, which should have been called 500% More Cookies — with a special disclaimer for those with cholesterol troubles.

 

On the other hand, there are some really good guitar parts on the record, too. ʽLet Me Passʼ, once the old school ʽDiddley Daddyʼ introduction is over, sees an attempt to merge the gap between Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, by having Bo play more Berry licks than on Two Guitars (where each player was more like an «intruder» in the other one's groove). A whole series of other tunes, conceived in the standard blues idiom, features variegated bluesy lead lines and solos, which could perhaps be appreciated better if not for the Cookies — who finally shut up on ʽCorn Breadʼ, one of the finest blues shuffles in Bo's repertoire, even though that is not saying very much: Bo will probably never be counted among the blues giants, not only because of limited playing technique, but chiefly because of the lightweight joking attitude. Yet in many ways, lightweight joking blues shuffles may be preferable to those that take themselves too seriously — a properly executed «guitar fart» disrupting a generic chord progression can go a long way.

 

For the record, that trademark Bo Diddley humor, ambiguous as it is, is very much alive: you get Bo retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood (he makes for quite a credible big bad wolf), drawing on the spirit of The Coasters in a tragic story of fucking it up in Las Vegas (ʽSomebody Beat Meʼ), complaining about being jinxed by his woman (ʽRoot Hootʼ), in short — pretending to still live life to its fullest. Somehow, it all manages to wind me up a little stronger than Hey! Good Lookin', but only by a brief margin — unless I do a good job convincing myself that, at this point, I am mostly listening to Bo Diddley for the comedy routine, the endless rewrites drag my attention down anyway. Well, it does have this surge in 12-bar blues and Chuck Berry influ­ence, so I guess it at least enables us to move on without a proper thumbs down ritual.

 

THE ORIGINATOR (1966)

 

1) Pills; 2) Jo-Ann; 3) Two Flies; 4) Yakky Doodle; 5) What Do You Know About Love; 6) Do The Frog; 7) Back To School; 8) You Ain't Bad; 9) Love You Baby; 10) Limbo; 11) Background To A Music; 12) Puttentang (Nursery Rhyme); 13) Africa Speaks; 14) We're Gonna Get Married.

 

This hodgey-podgey mess would be Bo's last self-sustained album of the 1960s: other than two «supersessions» with Muddy and Howlin' Wolf, he would be refraining from recording new ma­terial over the «psychedelic years» — finally realizing, perhaps, that one of the last things the world was truly interested in at the time was yet another helping of the good old Bo Diddley beat. Thus, The Originator, coming out in early 1966, became Bo's goodbye to his decimated pack of fans — for the next four years, he would sink in the shadows, biding his time and thinking about building himself a brand new image from scratch.

 

In the meantime, this album throws together a bunch of widely varying, chronologically scattered stuff — ʽPillsʼ, for instance, was a minor hit going back all the way to 1961; ʽJo Annʼ was a single from the less commercially fruitful year of 1964; ʽLimboʼ is a re-recording of ʽLimberʼ from In The Spotlight (faster, cooler, and spiced up with a snazzy dose of «yakety sax»); and I have no idea how much of the rest was specially recorded for these sessions, but the very fact that «The Originator» had to stretch out so far back in time shows that even the mighty Bo, with his seemingly unending supply of optimistic energy, was feeling disoriented.

 

Of course, in some subtle way drawing attention to an old song called ʽPillsʼ in 1966 was a novel move — "she went through my head, through my head, while I was layin' in the hospital bed" sounds highly relevant, and «edgy», for the circumstances. Plus, it does feature one of Bo's catch­iest melodies, even if he almost certainly nicked it off some Cuban dance or something. The bad news is, you still get this song on most of Bo's compilations, so its presence alone does not justify finding out how well The Originator matches its title in toto.

 

What else is there? Well, actually, a few of the tracks are funny blurbs with individualistic twists. ʽTwo Fliesʼ acts out a dialog between... two flies (how did you know?), set to a generic shuffle beat, but kinda funny (Bo has always been a better actor than singer anyway). ʽBackground To A Musicʼ has Bo speaking in the name of the «background» itself, demonstrating several of his well known rhythmic techniques at a staged «job interview». Most unusual and eccentric of all is ʽAfrica Speaksʼ, which is a natural round-the-fire tribal chant with, indeed, authentic Africans in­volved in the chanting — a bit of realistic «world beat» way, way before these things became na­tural in pop music, and hence, doing a bit of justice to «The Originator».

 

On the other hand, there are still predictable lows — rough, rote ballads (ʽWhat Do You Know About Loveʼ), perfunctory rehashes of the Diddley beat (ʽYakky Doodleʼ almost reads like a Bo Diddley cover of the Rolling Stones' cover of Bo Diddley's ʽI Need Youʼ), unsuccessful attempts at inventing pseudo-new dance moves (ʽDo The Frogʼ), and a strange pro-school sermon (ʽBack To Schoolʼ) dominated by an electric organ so poorly tuned that the result is almost completely unlistenable (or maybe the engineer accidentally wiped his ass with the tapes before starting work on the final masters).

 

Overall, it's all in the same ballpark as Bo's albums from the three previous years — a bit less monotonous than 500% More Man, perhaps, but certainly unfit for a proper «goodbye record»: not that Bo ever planned turning it into a goodbye record, of course — however, the one most wise decision he could have done in 1966 was take a long, well-deserved break, and turn into a careful «listener» for a while, instead of persisting in the mostly discredited emploi of «the origi­nator». That he did, and we are all grateful.

 

NB: do not confuse the LP The Originator with a much later 2-CD compilation also called the same. It is definitely true that a collection of Bo's bestest deserves being called The Originator far more than a third-hand-derivative LP which originates insect dialogs and spoken confessions of musical patterns, but rules are rules: the original Originator originated first, and even if the origination of the unoriginal Originator originally originated prior to the original Originator, this originates no originality for the unoriginal Originator as such. Is this an original statement or what?..

 

THE BLACK GLADIATOR (1970)

 

1) Elephant Man; 2) You, Bo Diddley; 3) Black Soul; 4) Power House; 5) If The Bible's Right; 6) I've Got A Feeling; 7) Shut Up, Woman; 8) Hot Buttered Blues; 9) Funky Fly; 10) I Don't Like You.

 

For an «early rocker» from the 1950s to do something worthwhile in the age of Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, and Amon Düül II, he would really have to divide himself by zero — children of the «un-accelerated era» as they were, in most cases, their mentalities just could not cope with the idea of having to modify and adapt their styles every two years or so. By 1967, Bo's engine had stalled completely, and he wisely retired from the business, biding his time, rethinking his attitu­des, and waiting for a suitable opportunity.

 

The opportunity eventually came in the emergence of the funk scene — with James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, etc. establishing a whole brand new, powerhouse market for black music, Bo Diddley sensed that there just might be a small corner in that market for himself as well. After all, wasn't Bo Diddley the original «funkster»? Single-chord groove-based African dance music and all? So he didn't exactly invent syncopation or the «chicken-scratch», but these are just tiny technical details — of course, The Originator had a right to stake his claim here, and that is just what he is doing on The Black Gladiator (a title that James Brown must have envied).

 

Few people know about this record, and a small handful of those that do has predictably dis­missed it — «Bo Diddley having nothing better to do than to jump on the funk bandwagon, with expectedly laughable results etc.». Hold on, brothers and sisters. Maybe this is just a chronology effect: after so many same-sounding, self-plagiarizing, openly mediocre albums from Bo in the mid-Sixties, The Black Gladiator simply comes through as a stunning ray of light by sheer con­trast. But it is also an objective fact, I suppose, that as the first hole-burning electric laser beams of ʽElephant Manʼ cut through the speakers, everyone will just have to realize that, at the very least, Bo has managed to turn over a heavy page here — the likes of which most of his original colleagues were never able to deal with.

 

The trick is that The Black Gladiator is not really an attempt to make a «generic funk album with Bo Diddley's name on it»; it is an attempt to make a Bo Diddley album with a strong funky undercurrent. ʽElephant Manʼ, ʽBlack Soulʼ, ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ (nothing to do with the Beatles song), and ʽFunky Flyʼ — all of these «jams with vocal support» are really quite close in melodic structure to the «old» Bo Diddley. But the guitar tones are tougher, snappier, occasionally even acid-drenched; the old pianos are replaced with loud, jerky, stuttering organ passages; and the overall level of volume, «dirt», and grittiness is completely in keeping with the standards of 1970, even if one good listen is enough to understand that the man in charge must have had his basic schtick worked out at least a decade earlier.

 

Nor is the album particularly monotonous. The four titles listed above do sound very close, but there is also a mad, ear-piercing  «dance-gospel» celebration (ʽIf The Bible's Rightʼ); several old-fashioned 12-bar blues numbers, either just modernized for the psychedelic blues-rock era (ʽHot Buttered Bluesʼ — a somewhat misguided retort to Isaac Hayes' ʽHot Buttered Soulʼ), or milking the «Bo Diddley persona» for exaggerated comical misogyny (ʽShut Up, Womanʼ); an update of the «hey, Bo Diddley» routine (ʽYou, Bo Diddleyʼ — "who's the greatest man in town"?) with a well-engineered funkified variant of the Diddley beat.

 

Oddball-est of all is the next installment in the ʽSay Manʼ series: ʽI Don't Like Youʼ is a joke dialog between Bo and another of his female sidekicks (possibly Cookie Vee) which is not only set to a funky groove as well, but also unexpectedly shows Bo's operatic side, as he occasionally breaks out in mock-Spanish serenading — taken out of context, this would simply look dumb, but in the context of this totally freaked out, hyperbolic extravagance makes for a grand flashy finale to the album, fifty percent silly pomp and fifty percent hilarious self-irony.

 

All in all, this is an exhilarating experience. It ain't much in the way of new melodies, but it is a near-perfect update on Bo's personality — somehow, The Black Gladiator manages to sound completely different from the old stuff and yet, at the same time, preserve each and every element that is necessary to make a Bo Diddley out of an Ellas McDaniel. But remember — this record must be played loud from the very first notes, because if you are not sucked in by the first beats of ʽElephant Manʼ, you might miss the train altogether. Thumbs up.

 

ANOTHER DIMENSION (1971)

 

1) The Shape I'm In; 2) I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) Pollution; 4) Bad Moon Rising; 5) Down On The Corner; 6) I Said Shut Up, Woman; 7) Bad Side Of The Moon; 8) Lodi; 9) Go For Broke.

 

We might quibble all we want about the money-talks attitudes of record industry bosses, but from a certain angle the behavior of the guys at Chess was beyond reproach: despite Bo Diddley being an utterly miserable seller for almost a decade now, somebody was still out there thinking and thinking — trying to come up with ideas that would at least justify continuing to grant him studio time, let alone help him raise a profit. Dressing the man up as The Black Gladiator did not work — the funk audiences of James and Sly were not amused. So the next move was planned — saddle the man with some contemporary material. «Bo Diddley Sings All The Great American Hits» and the like.

 

Would that work? With Muddy and his psychedelically tinged Electric Mud two years earlier, it did not. There was hardly one chance in a thousand that it would turn out for the better with Bo. Then again, occasionally it did work — Ike & Tina Turner did manage to appropriate CCR's ʽProud Maryʼ, and then there always were Ray and Aretha, capable of turning other people's gold into their own platinum, or at least vice versa. And ol' Bo Diddley — well, at the very least, he always seemed kinda smart: who knows, he just might have that magic touch.

 

Allegedly, Bo himself had no intent of doing a cover album, but had to play along in order to ap­pease the bosses. If that was the way it was, though, he certainly went to the limits of his loyalty for Chess: there are very few, if any, signs of disinterest here. On the other hand — Another Di­mension is a success of a curiosity rather than a failure. Not only do you get to hear melodies and arrangements on a Bo Diddley record that you would never have gotten otherwise, but he does his best to get into the spirit of each covered song, and shows an impressive emotional range that goes way beyond the usual clowning.

 

For instance, I would never in a million years have bet that he'd be able to pull off Al Kooper's ʽMore Than You'll Ever Knowʼ — this is so much not a Bo Diddley song at all, he might have had better luck with Beethoven's 9th, right? But he offers a soulful, respectable delivery that hits all the right chords anyway: rougher and grittier than the original, perhaps, which was all dren­ched in romantic tragedy, and thus nowhere near as chillin' to the bone — but the fact is, most people in the world could not do justice to that song (including most of the lead vocalists for Blood, Sweat & Tears themselves), and Bo almost does. It is at least worth it just to hear him do it from beginning to end, rather than just switch the stereo off in horror.

 

Much the same applies to much of the rest. Three CCR covers might seem like overkill (unless it was all done in a «I'm The Man, I'm not going for just one wimpy cover like that Turner couple»), but other than the glammy female backup vocals, they are all done good. ʽThe Shape I'm Inʼ, se­lected for single release, might seem like a particularly bizarre choice — but Bo nails down the unhappy insecurity in Richard Manuel's voice very well, and the replacement of Hudson's mo­dernistic synth soloing with a more traditional R&B-ish brass section is not a bad idea either. Much weirder, probably, is the cover of Elton John's ʽBad Side Of The Moonʼ — not only be­cause it is the only overseas cover on here, and the only one selected from a fresh new arrival (Elton was barely just a year or so into his stardom), but also because Taupin's cryptic lyrics are a particularly tough nut for poor old Bo to crack. Still, the band gets a good groove.

 

The other three selections are relatively original — relatively, because ʽI Said Shut Up Womanʼ is, as expected, a direct sequel to ʽShut Up Womanʼ, building on the same one chord sequence, albeit in a more distorted, noisy manner this time. ʽPollutionʼ is an original funk-rocker that finds Bo worrying about the environment (move over, Marvin Gaye), but, more importantly, puts up a hot load of sharp guitar tones — again, something that is fairly atypical for Bo, generally used to far «sloppier» playing, but delivered with pure kick-ass honesty. And then there is some more lite-acid funk on the instrumental ʽGo For Brokeʼ, with complex beats, jazzy piano, brass fills, acoustic funky rhythms, and psychedelic guitar soloing — so much of it happening at the same time that the piece definitely warrants extra listens.

 

The worst thing one can say about Another Dimension is that it is not really a Bo Diddley album. ʽShut Up Womanʼ and maybe some vocal fills on ʽPollutionʼ are classic Bo; the rest is chame­leon attitude. That is a pretty bad thing. But for anybody interested in Bo Diddley «as a whole», with the smallest bit of curi­osity as to how the man's «up» and «down» periods hold on to each other, Another Dimension is a must-hear. On its own, it is, at best, just a moderately pleasant listen; in the overall context of Bo's career, it reveals some important things about the man that may seri­ously correct one's perspective on «The Originator». In fact, sometimes, every once in a while, it helps if «The Originator» briefly becomes «The Copycat» — I believe that Bo's take on ʽMore Than You'll Ever Knowʼ, in particular, says much more about the man here than would yet ano­ther remake of ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ or ʽI'm A Manʼ. Thumbs up.

 

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN (1972)

 

1) I've Had It Hard; 2) Woman; 3) Look At Grandma; 4) A Good Thing; 5) Bad Trip; 6) Hey Jerome; 7) Infatuation; 8) Take It All Off; 9) Bo Diddley-itis.

 

Well, we have just very narrowly escaped from making the review for Britney Spears' ...Baby One More Time conclude the reviewing season of 2012 — a fairly creepy omen would that be. Instead, we are concluding it with something much more solid, if about three hundred times less known — the finest record that Bo Diddley got to cut in the studio over the third, and most un­der­ra­ted, decade of his artistic career.

 

By all means, Another Dimension was not a bad album, but neither was it really true to the Bo Diddley spirit, and after it predictably failed to sell, the people at Chess showed enough glimpses of intellect to let Bo go on and do his own thang once again — and that he did. Where It All Be­gan is really a misleading title: usually, we expect them to be reserved for archival albums of early outtakes, or at least for straightforward nostalgic throwbacks. However, if there is a nos­talgic throw­back here, it is not too stretched out — the album returns to the steam-funk of Black Gladiator, and builds up from there. If anything, the title is rather an indirect hint that Bo Did­dley, in 1972, if he really puts his back to it, can be just as kick-ass as he used to be fifteen years earlier. And you know what? I'm almost convinced.

 

The record is a little more polished and a little less noisy than Black Gladiator, and we see the classic old Bo Diddley beat return on a couple of numbers, so overall, Bo is taking fewer risks here. But the overall sound of Gladiator — heavy, deep, echoey, and quite modern — remains stable, and now it is being supported by cleaner, sharper production; guest appearances by drum­mer Johnny Otis on one track and guitarist Shuggie Otis on another; and fabulous backup vocal arrangements, with Connie Redmond at the head of the team, and she is good enough to even take the lead on ʽA Good Thingʼ — and bury poor little Bo deep in the ground in the process. (The man was careful enough not to let his backup singers take the spotlight most of the time — but every once in a while, still let down his guard).

 

Each side of the LP is dominated by a lengthy jam: ʽBad Tripʼ, true to its name, is a devoted exer­cise in acid funk, whereas ʽBo Diddley-itisʼ is somewhat more traditional — faster, sloppier, and tribalistic. Both, however, are excellent by their own standards. ʽBad Tripʼ features six minutes of aggressive and surprisingly complex guitar pyrotechnics (courtesy of Bo himself and second gui­tarist Tom Thompson) — if played sufficiently loud, the track compares quite favorably to con­temporary Funkadelic workouts. And ʽBo Diddley-itisʼ is just a wild party freakout — now, in 1972, Bo can finally allow himself to stretch out without any serious limits in the studio, in a man­ner that, in the 1950s and 1960s, had to be reserved for local club gigs.

 

In between, we have lots of shorter, catchier, sunnier «funk-pop» numbers, often with interesting guitar themes — so interesting, in fact, that one cannot help but wonder how in the world did Bo manage to stay away so completely from exploring new note sequences throughout most of the 1960s. Yes, so ʽI've Had It Hardʼ starts things out on a more than familiar note of «chug, chu-chu-chug-chug, CHUG CHUG», but even there the second guitar plays something more melodic and curious over Bo's basic rhythm, while the girls in the back invent a new way of chanting "di­ddley bo diddley bo diddley bo diddley bo diddley".

 

Then there is ʽWomanʼ, pinned to a wobbly «post-bluesy» riff that would not be out of place on a Television record (yes, they did something quite similar for ʽMarquee Moonʼ); the fantastically catchy, hilarious ʽLook At Grandmaʼ, again dominated by the girls' harmonies; the gritty twin-guitar jam on ʽHey Jeromeʼ; a not-half-bad take on the sunny soul side with ʽInfatuationʼ; and Bo strutting his macho stuff with ʽTake It All Offʼ — again, a song not at all memorable for its «dirty» vocalization, but rather for the excellent guitar/bass/back vocals interplay.

 

In fact, amazing as it seems, there is not a single weak cut on the record. Perhaps it cannot really compete in flimsy terms of «relevance» with the big black music of the day — perhaps it is no­here near as far out as Funkadelic, really, and perhaps the rhythms and the riffs are mostly «old-school», because, well, one cannot demand of a Fifties idol that he completely re-learn his craft with every new decade. But on its own terms, Where It All Began shows no signs of weariness — every note is punched out with religious enthusiasm, and the entire team shows wonders of group coordination. A heavily underrated groovy jam masterpiece here — dig it out and learn how to surprise your local hipster parties. Thumbs up.

 

THE LONDON BO DIDDLEY SESSIONS (1973)

 

1) Don't Want No Lyin' Woman; 2) Bo Diddley; 3) Going Down; 4) Make A Hit Record; 5) Bo-Jam; 6) Husband-In-Law; 7) Do The Robot; 8) Sneakers On A Rooster; 9) Get Out Of My Life.

 

And the story goes on: no sooner does Bo find himself a comfortable, modern-sounding, tradi­tion-respecting groove to slip in, than his record label, anxious to make just a few cents more on the name, steers him into a «fashionable» direction. This time, «fashion» involves teeming up with a bunch of British blues-rock players, following in the sagging footsteps of Howlin' Wolf (who had the misfortune to actually make his record a stable seller, ensuring trouble for all of his colleagues), Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and (from a different label) B. B. King. The logic re­mains the same — with UK blues-rockers conquering the original turf of old Chicago bluesmen, both critically and commercially, old Chicago bluesmen are now in need of the big names in the business to sell their records. And, of course, the big names in the business could get all snub-nosed and haughty — but why should they? These are their idols, after all, and no Eric Clapton or Rory Gallagher could ever get arrogant enough to claim that they have already advanced to the point where no B. B. King or Muddy could catch up with them. Be it the truth or not.

 

Problem is, once they finally decided to repeat the trick with Bo Diddley, all the good guys had already been taken, or, perhaps, had decided that they'd already paid their dues in full. In fact, it turns out that much, if not most, of the recordings here were really made in Chicago, and only a few of the songs really stem from London studios — just enough to barely justify the name of the album. Most of the players are little-known American session men; the only UK credit that I feebly recognize is guitar player Ray Fenwick, famous for the immortal nugget ʽCrawdaddy Si­moneʼ recorded during his brief stay with the Syndicats, but it is not clear which of the tracks feature his playing, and, in any case, there is nothing here that would even remotely approach the primordial wildness of ʽCrawdaddy Simoneʼ.

 

Basically, this is just another set of rather restrained, unexceptional blues-rock and funk-rock, no­where near the level of excitement and unpredictability of either Black Gladiator or Where It All Began. To see that point, try playing ʽBad Tripʼ and ʽDo The Robotʼ back-to-back: the for­mer is an evil monster of acid funk, the latter — merely a professional workout, with plenty of people in the studio but not a single one daring to take any chances: six minutes go by in vain expectation that something will finally break out of this, but what exactly can break out when everybody just keeps politely saying «after you, Mr. Second Guitarist!» or «no, no, Mr. Organist, I insist!...» or «don't mind me, ladies and gentlemen of the rhythm section, I'm just sitting in the corner here, adding some high-pitched funky salt licks to this nice soup you got cooking».

 

Many of the songs are spoiled off the bat with a «de-luxe» big brass section — such as the boo­gie-blues of ʽDon't Want No Lyin' Womanʼ, where the only thing of note is Connie Redmond's powerhouse vocalizing; Bo, on the other hand, cannot truly break through the wall of guitars, or­gans, and brass that not only cancel out each other's effectiveness, but also cancel out the validity of the leading artist. The same disappointment concerns some of the funkier numbers as well, e.g. ʽHusband-In-Lawʼ and ʽGoing Downʼ.

 

Overall, like most of the London Sessions series, the chemistry here is quite weak, and the re­cord very rarely rises above «listenable». The re-recording of ʽBo Diddleyʼ with new lyrics is smooth and mildly catchy (mainly due to the amusing invention of the "oooooh... ouch!" harmo­ny trick); ʽMake A Hit Recordʼ, with Bo trying out the «stuttering» technique of delivery, is fun­ny for the first minute (and utterly annoying for the remaining four); and only the album closer ʽGet Out Of My Lifeʼ is in any way reminiscent of the scary bite of Bo at his funky best — all of a sud­den, it's like both the rhythm and lead guitars have received clearance for extra aggression, and, for all of our patience, we are rewarded with ass-kicking crunch. Maybe it was an outtake from the previous year — I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised.

 

By that time, however, The London Sessions have already lost whatever credibility the title could offer — the album as a whole can only serve as further evidence of the ineptness of the old labels to take the fates of their old artists into their own hands. Hence, worth a listen or two, but nothing helps to rescue The London Sessions from the good old thumbs down, unless you just love the «old school» so much that you have no desire to distinguish between the exceptional and the run-of-the-mill sorts of material.

 

BIG BAD BO (1974)

 

1) Bite You; 2) He's Got All The Whiskey; 3) Hit Or Miss; 4) You've Got A Lot Of Nerve; 5) Stop The Pusher; 6) Evelee; 7) I've Been Workin'.

 

This one is sometimes called Bo's «jazz album», mainly because some of the session players here were relatively big names on the jazz market, and a very strong brass presence is felt on most of the tracks. However, there are no «jazz» compositions on here as such — most of it is the same old funk that Bo had practiced all over the early Seventies, with a bit of B. B. King-ish «blues-de-luxe» thrown in for good (actually, bad) measure. And there is no need to feel disappointed: Bo Diddley feels at home with funky grooves, yet whether he would feel equally at home trying to make his Bitches Brew remains questionable. Fortunately, perhaps, we shall never know.

 

There are only seven tracks this time, and it does not help the album that the longest one, ʽEveleeʼ, is a slow 12-bar blues that we really do not need from Bo — the vocals are powerful, but blunt, the harmonica player, walking in the footsteps of Little Walter, seems to be too small to take a peek out of the footprint, and the rest of the arrangement is nothing that B. B. King's backing band could not do just as well or much better. The fact that it takes its time so leisurely is strongly indicative of filler — and bizarre, since danceable funky grooves that take their time are not only more understandable and enjoyable, but are right up Bo's alley as well.

 

Because, other than ʽEveleeʼ, the other six tracks are all welcome additions to the catalog — par­ticularly ʽBite Youʼ, which could arguably be called Bo's last genuine Chess classic. Playing the big bad (horny) wolf to a snappy funky bassline as the brass machine works it out like a newbuilt factory — this may not be as delightfully psycho-chaotic as the best stuff on Black Gladiator, but it still totally ranks in overall body temperature with whatever James Brown was doing at the time (although, presumably, Bo's backing band is a little less fluent).

 

There is also a noble, and surprisingly gritty, anti-drug diatribe (ʽStop The Pusherʼ) that sounds totally believable — Bo's "don't buy, and the pusher will die" is probably as straightforward and anthemic as he ever advanced with instructive social statements, and it is tied to a harsh and lean, «we-really-mean-business» bass/guitar interplay that helps drive the point home. Remember this, kids: if you wanna make a musical social statement that bites, make sure it's really a musical so­cial statement, and an interesting one, not just a variation on «Just Say No» set to the melody of ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ or something like that.

 

Bobby Charles' ʽHe's Got All The Whiskeyʼ is saved from monotonousness by nice guitar and bass flourishes all over the place (in terms of whatever the bass guitar is doing here, it is probably the jazziest number on here); ʽYou've Got A Lot Of Nerveʼ is optimistic R&B with a bit of a pub flavor — just the kind of music that Ray Davies was pushing for so hard in his Everybody's In Show-Biz period, except that Bo rules it far more masterfully; and ʽI've Been Workin'ʼ finishes the album with a little «bleak soul», on a more ominous and desperate note than everything else — for the most part, Big Bad Bo is either uplifting, or humorous, or both, but this last number lays on some brassy and bass-y darkness; and there is something ironic, I guess, that the last track on Bo's last album for Chess bears the title of ʽI've Been Workin'ʼ and a slight aura of depression — seeing as how it has been more than a decade since he had his last bit of commercial success with the label. On the other hand, it makes no sense to read too much sense in any single Bo Did­dley track: the man was not exactly known for being a master of subtle nuances.

 

Anyway, thumbs up for Big Bad Bo — a winner both in terms of spirit and impressive, if not ut­terly jaw-dropping, musicianship, and not a bad way to say goodbye to the label that had been Bo's home for twenty years. It is a little sad that, after all, this «funky renaissance» period, so healthy to Bo's own persona and sounding so doggone underrated from the point of view of the 21st century, never caught on with the public back in its own time — but, apparently, playing good music was not enough: you had to build yourself up the appropriate image to go with that, something that James Brown was still capable of doing, but not ol' Bo, whose rectangular guitar and sexy female sidekicks were just about as far as he was willing to go in the visual entertain­ment department. Maybe a boa constrictor around the neck would have helped — unfortunately, no snake could properly withstand being shook up by the Diddley beat.

 

THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF ROCK'N'ROLL (1976)

 

1) Ride The Water (part 1); 2) Not Fade Away; 3) Kill My Body; 4) Drag On; 5) Ride The Water (part 2); 6) I'm A Man; 7) Hey! Bo Diddley; 8) Who Do You Love; 9) Bo Diddley's A Gunslinger; 10) I'm A Man.

 

A very strange record. Apparently, upon leaving Chess, Bo Diddley went into complete commer­cial retirement, as far as any toying with major labels was concerned. Yet, in 1976, he was still «invited» by a guy called Ron Terry to guest-star on a special RCA release — according to the title, supposed to celebrate «the 20th anniversary of rock'n'roll», but even if, out of general nice­ness, we decide to agree that rock'n'roll was indeed invented in 1956 and not one year earlier (or later), it is still not clear why (a) of all the early rock'n'rollers, the 20th anniversary of rock'n'roll should be primarily and exclusively associated with Bo Diddley; (b) why, instead of letting Bo Diddley himself mastermind the project, they made him sing a bunch of Ron Terry songs on Side A — and then let a bunch of other guys cover his material on Side B.

 

Never mind, we should probably blame it on the overall craziness of the mid-1970s — any time period that produces the likes of Lisztomania is bound to contain ten times as many «odd» pro­jects as it contains «insane» ones. This is one of the curious oddities, and it is not even particular­ly bad: it is merely inadequate to its purpose, and it is the first album in Bo Diddley's discography which really, genuinely loses Bo Diddley as a bit player among the general ambience.

 

Speaking of ambience, you would be pressed real hard to find a better application for the «too many cooks» line than this album. The roster includes, among others, such names as Leslie West, Elvin Bishop, Joe Cocker, Roger McGuinn, Keith Moon, Albert Lee, and even Billy Joel (!). But instead of bringing them out, one by one, and making this into some sort of studio-based Last Waltz celebration, Ron Terry goes for broke and crams them all together — at least, that is how it is on the 16-minute jam that occupies all of Side B (supposedly, they are not all there at the same time on Side A).

 

The results are predictable: the jam is extravagantly overproduced, so much so that it is impos­sible to latch on to anything in particular. There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm and energy, but you can never really tell if it is really like that or if it is just because there are so many players and singers out there at the same time. And in the end, it's all just the same old Bo Diddley stuff — maybe Albert Lee's guitar makes it flow more smoothly and with many more flourishes than the original versions, but the question is whether these versions need this smooth flow. As far as I understand it, turning Bo Diddley songs into «academic-style blues-rock», even with superb play­ers at the helm, kinda drop-kicks the initial purpose of these songs.

 

As for Ron Terry's songs on the first side, they are odd, too. He must have written them with Bo in mind, and particularly, with Bo's predilection for the sexy funky sounds of the decade. But these here are not so much straightahead funk grooves as creepily suggestive «swamp blues» with a funky undercurrent. ʽRide The Waterʼ, opening and closing Side A, would probably be better suited for the likes of a Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who could have, perhaps, given an appropriately spooky, joker-ish performance against these slow tempos, repetitive wah-wah chords, and mini­malistic bass punches. Mr. Bo Diddley just ain't evil enough for the swamp — let alone for an attempt to take Buddy Holly's lightweight, amicable ʽNot Fade Awayʼ and infect it with the devilish swamp blues virus as well.

 

There is no reason to hunt for this curio, unless obsession has already gotten the better of you — but if you do come across it, a spin or two won't hurt. The «Bo Diddley jam» might actually work if you play it real loud without stopping, all the way through — who knows, at some point all the innumerable instruments and voices might eventually fall together, blow a hole in your soul and make you see the light. And the first side, well... this is the last time you get to hear a still rela­tively young Bo Diddley sing some original material — the next twenty years would be spent in occasional touring, serious relaxation, and some home studio recording sessions, but no official releases. So that might be reason enough to regard this disc as a little «farewell gift from the boys», and get acquainted with it as a little piece of history.

 

LIVE AT THE RITZ (1988)

 

1) Road Runner; 2) I'm A Man; 3) Crackin' Up; 4) Hey! Bo Diddley; 5) Plynth (Water Down The Drain); 6) Ooh La La; 7) They Don't Make Outlaws Like They Used To; 8) Honky Tonk Women; 9) Money To Ronnie; 10) Who Do You Love.

 

Bo's recording activity throughout the late Seventies and the Eighties was about as high as any activity you'd expect from a bear in prolonged hibernation. He did record and distribute several cassette-only albums, produced in his own home studio in Archer, Florida, and fairly hard to locate these days (al­though they are sometimes offered as digital downloads): Ain't It Good To Be Free («...ain't it a bummer that nobody really cares?») in 1983, and Breaking Through The B.S. («...because Ol' Man Bo can still do better than goddamn Pump!») in 1989. I have not heard them, know next to nothing about them, and have a deep suspicion that neither is a masterpiece — but that suspicion don't amount to no fact, so you might wanna be on the lookout if you think an Eighties' album from Bo Diddley looks like a sufficiently kinky proposition.

 

The only Eighties' record with Bo's active participation that is readily available today is this concert album, recorded in New York in November 1987 by the short-lived «Gunslingers» pro­ject, involving Bo Diddley and Ronnie Wood. Considering that 1987-88 was the only period in the history of mankind during which The Rolling Stones had «ceased to be», the project actually had a theoretical chance at longevity — purely theoretical, that is, because already the first expe­riment showed that the matching was far from perfect.

 

Technically, Live At The Ritz may, and should, be included into both artists' discographies, but I prefer to review it under the Bo Diddley section, because (a) Bo's the older one, (b) the ratio of Bo to Ron songs here is approximately 3/2 (and only if we formally count ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ as a Ronnie Wood song; ʽMoney To Ronnieʼ, despite the title, is a semi-improvised blues jam with Bo taking control), (c) Bo starts off the show as well as closes it, (d) the event was clearly of more importance to Bo than to Ronnie — it's one thing to simply fool around on the stage with one of your idols, and another thing to get your first major label record out in twelve years, even if you have to share it with some grinning clown from England who prefers to jump around the stage rather than actually play guitar (okay, so it wasn't nearly as bad in 1988 as it is now).

 

The problem is that a good live Bo Diddley show needs a good live Bo Diddley backing band — and the people assembled on that stage had fairly little to do with that. The rhythm section, con­sisting of Debby Hastings on bass and Mike Fink on drums, is fairly flat-footed (they can't even set up a proper Diddley beat on ʽHey! Bo Diddleyʼ); the keyboard player (Hal Goldstein) occa­sionally switches from regular old piano — the only keyboard instrument suitable for this kind of event — to state-of-the-art synthesizers, killing most of the joy on ʽCrackin' Upʼ; and as much as the presence of two of the Temptations (David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, the latter also play­ing harmonica and occasional keyboards) could adorn the show... it didn't.

 

Above all else, the mix is quite poor: Bo's own rhythm playing is rarely elevated from anything other than background din, and Ronnie's leads (some, if not many, if not most of them actually supplied by third guitarist Jim Satten) are sometimes barely audible against the huge drum sound (remember, the late Eighties were a drummer's paradise — everybody used to think that ampli­fying the drum sound gives you complete, absolute power over the listener). All in all, the ambi­ence just isn't that great for a real sweaty rock'n'roll show.

 

The other side of the business is, of course, that Ronnie has no business taking part in Bo's stuff, and Bo has no business whatsoever to strut along on Ronnie's material. As good as all that mate­rial is on its own, I fail to see where it is that the two actually help out each other — unless we begin to count harmony singing, and I'd rather we don't (everybody knows that Ronnie is the only person in the world who sings even worse than Keith Richards, and using Bo Diddley as the re­sident «Auto-Tuner» is hardly a good solution to the problem). Ronnie gets a few of his trade­mark bluesy slide leads, e. g. on ʽI'm A Manʼ, but Bo Diddley songs are not solo guitar vehicles, and the leads aren't stunning enough to justify turning them into such vehicles. And whether Bo is actually doing anything on Ronnie's numbers, I have not been able to find out.

 

The Ronnie-led chunk part of the album is actually better than the Bo-led majority part, if only because the backing band is so clearly geared towards more «modern» numbers than the oldies. The performance of Ronnie's ʽOutlawsʼ, for instance, approaches first-rate barroom-boogie rock­'n'­roll, and he gets in a rough, but expressive slide-fest on ʽPlynth (Water Down The Drain)ʼ, which also incorporates contrasting bits of ʽAmazing Graceʼ and ʽProdigal Sonʼ. (The decision to also include ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ was either due to audience pressure — or, perhaps, Ronnie always had that secret craving to finally wrestle the classic solo away from Keith. Spoiler bit: Keith is still the winner).

 

Still, this is never really «bad» — it is saddled with too many problems to reach «classic lost gig» status, but both of the gig's protagonists clearly had themselves some fun; it simply failed to be perfectly captured on the recording. Historically, it was important for the effort to drag Bo, a little bit at least, back into the spotlight and show that, at the age of sixty, he personally had not lost it at all: guitar chops intact, powerhouse voice still well-powered. A little more sad is the realization that he was actually dragged out of a deep freeze — having him play on that stage with all those people is like watching some resuscitated pre-historical mammal put in a cage with its modern descendants. But, on the other hand, he doesn't seem to mind, bother, or show any serious dis­comfort about this — so let us not look at this from pessimistic angles, either.

 

A MAN AMONGST MEN (1996)

 

1) Bo Diddley Is Crazy; 2) Can I Walk You Home; 3) Hey Baby; 4) I Can't Stand It; 5) He's Got A Key; 6) A Man Amongst Men; 7) Coatimundi; 8) That Mule; 9) Kids Don't Do It; 10) Oops! Bo Diddley.

 

This is Bo's one and only «proper» studio LP in the last thirty years of his career — «proper» meaning «distributed on an official commercial basis» (through Atlantic Records), but also «properly recorded», meaning a professional studio instead of Bo's bedroom, and also «properly available» (meaning it's still out of print, but at least you can ruffle through used CD bins on a regular basis with high chances of success).

 

It ain't no great shakes, and it might even be a bit below certain expectations (and a bit above other certain expectations), but in any case, it is a respectable career bookmark. A Bo Diddley al­bum from a nearly 70-year old Bo Diddley has only one point to prove — namely, that the rock'n'roll spirit can, and should, be still alive in 70-year olds — and it does that in the form of a test: can you guess that the album was recorded by a 70-year old, or does it sound ageless? Natu­rally, for everybody who has the faintest idea of who Bo Diddley is, the test is rigged from the beginning, but my own guess is that I probably couldn't guess.

 

As Bo was drawn in more and more into the Stones' circle of contacts — first the Ron Wood al­liance, followed by a joint public appearance in 1994, singing ʽWho Do You Loveʼ — it is no wonder that much of the playing and production here is masterminded by Ronnie and Keith, and that fact alone ensures a certain level of gritty quality. Other pieces of the puzzle include Stevie Ray's brother Jimmie Vaughan, lending a proper Texan flavour to the proceedings; Johnny "Gui­tar" Watson, deepening and nearly-monopolizing that Texan flavour; and such old vets of the business as Billy Boy Arnold on harp and Johnnie Johnson on piano. Throw in «The Shirelles» on back vocals (quotation marks reflect my lack of knowledge as to how many of the original «Shirelles» are actually involved — one? two?), and that is altogether more guest star presence than Bo ever had to back him up at any single moment in his career, including even the primor­dial soup of 20th Anniversary Of Rock'n'Roll.

 

This actually creates a problem — the end result looks too much like a glitzy all-star jam, with Bo merely guesting on his own record, something of which you could never accuse any of his origi­nal albums right up to 1974. Worse, even though most of the songs are credited to Bo (they must have all agreed that the old man needed the royalties more than anybody else), they don't really always sound like Bo Diddley songs. There is too little syncopation, too little funk, too little «tri­bal jamming» involved — in fact, about a third of this stuff sounds like typical Ronnie Wood boogie, another third is «Texan roots rock» à la Stevie Ray, and the final third is «modernized Bo Diddley for today's kids» material: glossy, even, and way too loud due to a whole army of cooks stirring the broth at the same time.

 

That said, it is still a fun record, and a fun «Bo Diddley-blessed» record, at that. ʽBo Diddley Is Crazyʼ is rigidly based on ʽWho Do You Loveʼ, and even if Bo's own rhythm guitar nearly gets lost under all the overdubs, his singing does not — and that deep caveman rumble is certainly far from an old man's croak. And he certainly ain't lost his wits, either: verses like "All I wanna do is play my music and make people happy / I don't wanna be an old drunk like my pappy" pretty much summarize the man's lifelong credo like nothing else. So even if the backing track is not very imaginative, the whole thing is still a fun-filled fast-paced romp — as is ʽOops! Bo Diddleyʼ that bookmarks the album from the other side (although the latter is seriously overlong, with the band fooling around for over seven minutes repeating the same licks over and over again).

 

In between, we have some slow boring 12-bar blues (ʽThat Muleʼ, mainly for fans of Billy Boy's harp blowing); Texan blues-rock shuffle (ʽCan I Walk You Homeʼ), occasionally used as a new bag for old wine (ʽA Man Amongst Menʼ, which is basically like a sped-up ʽI'm A Manʼ); one obligatory tribute to the «Diddley beat», adorned with harmonica vs. slide guitar conversations (ʽHey Babyʼ); one slow swampy funk groove (ʽI Can't Stand Itʼ); one reggae tribute to ʽCrackin' Upʼ (ʽCoatimundiʼ, definitely running overtime); and even one exercise in funkified hip-hop, targeted at the young ones, with Bo's own grandson joining in on the messaging (ʽKids Don't Do Itʼ) — «stay in school and get your Ph.D!» hints fairly well at the scope of Bo's goal-setting. (Problem is, I wouldn't mind the corniness if I knew for certain there'd be even one kid in the world, black or white, who could ever claim that his or her life was irrevocably changed by a thorough listen to this song. As it is, I suppose it was mostly the grandfathers who heard it).

 

So, at the very least, even if not all of this is typical Bo Diddley material, it's still a diverse set of moods and styles, which makes for a fitting conclusion to Bo's career — reminding of the good old days when the man was ready to try out nearly everything. Add it up to the perfect vocal form throughout (Bo even makes a fairly good rapper, much as I tend to snuff that form), and the fact that, whatever be the faults and flaws of the production, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, and Jimmie Vaughan are far more exciting guitar players than... (well, they could have gotten him Lenny Kravitz, or a stiff academician like Robert Cray — there's millions of them out there) — and altogether, it's almost awesome that Bo did get a chance to give us a proper musical goodbye with this record. And it is not bad, either, that although he still had twelve years left to try and repeat it, he either chose not to or did not get a second chance — one was perfectly enough for a solid thumbs up, two might have been excessive: A Man Amongst Men as a «goodbye» is far more effective than as a «welcome back».

BOBBY "BLUE" BLAND

THE "3B" BLUES BOY – THE EARLY YEARS: 1952-1959 (1991)

 

1) No Blow, No Show; 2) Wise Man's Blues; 3) Army Blues; 4) Lost Lover Blues; 5) It's My Life Baby; 6) Honey Bee; 7) Time Out; 8) A Million Miles From Nowhere; 9) Woke Up Screaming; 10) You've Got Bad Intentions; 11) I Can't Put You Down Baby; 12) I Don't Believe; 13) I Learned My Lesson; 14) I Smell Trouble; 15) Don't Want No Woman; 16) Further Up The Road; 17) Teach Me; 18) Bobby's Blues; 19) You Got Me; 20) Loan A Helping Hand; 21) Last Night; 22) Little Boy Blue; 23) You Did Me Wrong; 24) I Lost Sight Of The World; 25) Wishing Well.

 

Other than the kinda dumb subtitle, this collection is a pretty damn good way to get a good picture of Robert Calvin Bland, a.k.a. Bobby "Blue" Bland, in his formative years, when his steady coming sets of singles were not yet reworked into LPs on a consistent basis. There are other compilations on the market as well, and some might be a little (but not a lot) more com­prehensive, but the 25 recordings collected here capture all of his sides and sub-periods, except for a few of the earliest recordings that were made for Chess rather than Duke records — so that the rest is essentially for completists.

 

The biggest turn-off in Bobby Bland's career is probably Bobby Bland's own name — whatever sort of singer would want to be associated with «bland», anyway? — but that bias is pretty easy to overcome once Mr. Bland gets his anything-but-bland vocal cords operating. Granted, through­out the 1950s, he wasn't that much of a «genre innovator»: in fact, the earliest stuff consists of rather generic jump blues, in the tradition of Wynonie Harris and Big Joe Turner, and then starts drifting towards slow, moody «blues-de-luxe» with a little bit of soul to it, kind of like a Big Mama Thornton (in pants), nothing particularly extraordinary in terms of composition or arrangement — the blues is just the blues, after all.

 

Two things drag these recordings out of potential mediocrity. First, the arrangements are sharp and punchy. The first few songs rely on saxophones and vibraphones for most of the mood, but after Bobby returns from the Army (an unhappy predicament of his lamented over in ʽArmy Bluesʼ), the emphasis shifts on to the guitar, and there is some damn fine guitar playing on these songs — as far as I can tell, B. B. King is not here (despite being tightly associated with Bobby as one of Memphis' original «Beale Streeters» circa 1951-52), but Clarence Hollimon, Roy Gaines, and, occasionally, Pat Hare, all of them fine 1950s players in their own rights, are just as good, and kick far more ass than is usually expected of a singing frontman's backers. Already ʽHoney Beeʼ, from around 1955, has a terrifically tight, concentrated rock'n'roll solo, and it hardly ever stops from there — Bobby's guitarists play within and around his phrasing all the time, and he is wise enough to let the recordings transform into duets rather than have the spotlight permanently occupied by his own persona.

 

But the main thing, of course, is the singing. Bobby Bland may be «bland» indeed in that he's no Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf — no big-time voodoo practitioner, just a full-time popular en­tertainer, like his good friend B. B. In that category, however, the man was essentially peerless already back then. The first great example is ʽLost Lover's Bluesʼ, where he gets to modulate his voice at top range, doing the best thing about a 12-bar blues delivery that can be done — build it up to a climax instead of delivering three interchangeable verses in a row. Later on, the same psychotic falsetto appears in a couple dozen more numbers, but he is being careful about not overdoing it, and there are numerous other emplois tested out — rougher, softer, barkier, croonier, higher, lower, whatever: the guy was testing out approach after approach, obsessed with working out his own style, and it is fun to watch him doing that. (Certainly more fun than sitting through twenty Jimmy Reed songs in a row, no matter how «cooler» Jimmy's «anti-mainstream» style might seem to British boys at the time).

 

Pat Hare, the wonder guitarist of James Cotton's ʽCotton Crop Bluesʼ fare (hyperbolically called the «first heavy metal song» by those out on a mission to return the stolen back to its owners, but still a damn fine track, by the way), is present only on a few songs here — but he does contribute aggressive, nasty lead guitar to ʽFarther Up The Roadʼ, a number that we usually know as ʽFur­ther On Up The Roadʼ, in a sped-up version or batch of versions performed by Clapton, but yes, Bobby Bland recorded it first, and here it is in all its primal awesomeness. It was a hit, too, as was ʽLittle Boy Blueʼ, a slow R&B dance number that eventually whips itself into total vocal frenzy (a James Brown influence is in the works here), but the rest of the singles mostly didn't manage to chart anywhere high, which is sort of strange — this is all definitely Top-10 material for any sorts of blues or R&B charts — and a little unfortunate, because many of these songs show a rough and tough side to the guy that would be seriously downplayed in his commercially gold period.

 

Random subjective highlights, for me, would also include ʽI Woke Up Screamingʼ (imper­so­nating lovestruck paranoia is a particularly successful venture for Bobby), ʽI Smell Troubleʼ, ʽYou've Got Bad Intentionsʼ... well, just about anything where he gets to unwind that fabulous waaah-waaah of his. Too bad there are so few fast tunes — just ʽHoney Beeʼ and ʽLoan Me A Helping Handʼ — but there are also no hyper-sappy ballads (ʽLast Nightʼ is sort of an exception, but it's not like it's got any strings or anything), and at the end, there is at least one excellent «world-at-an-end»-style lament — ʽI Lost Sight Of The Worldʼ, on which Bobby is accompanied by a frantic flute part rather than guitar. In the end, it is all probably much more diverse than one could ever hope from a popular entertainer in the 1950s, and there is not a single reason not to give the collection a firm thumbs up. It is not yet the Bobby Bland of ʽI Pity The Foolʼ's fame, but in some respects, it's actually better.

 

TWO STEPS FROM THE BLUES (1961)

 

1) Two Steps From The Blues; 2) Cry, Cry, Cry; 3) I'm Not Ashamed; 4) Don't Cry No More; 5) Lead Me On; 6) I Pity The Fool; 7) I've Got To Forget You; 8) Little Boy Blue; 9) St. James Infirmary; 10) I'll Take Care Of You; 11) Don't Want No Woman; 12) I've Been Wrong So Long.

 

Like most «LPs» from the era, this is not a real «album», but rather a collection of singles scat­tered over five years of recording — the earliest tunes here, like ʽLittle Boy Blueʼ, go all the way back to 1957. However, this streak certainly has a more coherent flavor to it than 1952-1959 (ac­tually, the bulk of the material was recorded over just two sessions in late 1960 with the same band), and for all it is worth, could be considered a wholesome set. Particularly seeing as how it is often seen as the ultimate best set in Bobby's career.

 

Most of the songs, as on Bobby's earlier singles for Duke Records, are credited to «Deadric Ma­lone», formally a pseudonym for Don Robey, who was the owner of the label and had a reputa­tion of a violent thug, forcing anonymous songwriters to yield him all the credit — so that, in the end, nobody knows who really wrote ʽCry, Cry, Cryʼ or ʽI Pity The Foolʼ and whether they really had their fingernails pulled in the basement by Don Robey or if it was just a matter of an extra bottle or two and a drunken signature on a white sheet of paper. But who cares if it's just music that we have to be concerned about? The shady aspects of the music industry are supposed to come and go — the music is here to stay.

 

ʽTwo Steps From The Bluesʼ — the song — is a masterful piece of work that belongs to no genre in particular. Part time blues, part time vocal jazz, part time doo-wop, part time New Orleanian funeral music, it is a giant step forward for Bobby and Duke Records in general in terms of pro­duction. No longer do the boys sound like Wynonie Harris with extra electric guitar — the sound is fully fleshed out and rehearsed, with guitars, pianos, horns, and vocals sharing near-equal parts of the cut, and each partner bringing on a little something from a different area.

 

It actually helps that Bobby is not associated with any particular instrument other than his voice — not being a guitar hero like B. B. King or a piano whiz like Ray Charles — and that, at the same time, his backing band is given a fairly free hand to do whatever it chooses to do, so they all do whatever they do best, particularly Wayne Bennett on guitar and Teddy Reynolds on piano (the brass section is too large to type them all in). Behind the vocals, there is always some sort of battle going on, usually between the guitar and the brass, and most of this stuff would be brilliant even without Bobby Bland — the sheer dynamics of ʽCry, Cry, Cryʼ and ʽI Pity The Foolʼ put them way above the average R&B level of the times.

 

Still, the immediate memorability is all due to the vocal hooks and «temperatures». Along with the improved production values, we have an extra level of smoothness and steadiness achieved here — Bobby rolls into 1960 as one of the most technically accomplished vocalists of his gene­ration; in fact, if we eliminate the «over-affected» people like Clyde McPhatter from the starting line, his only real competition back then is Sam Cooke, and Sam was too much into his emploi of «sweet ladies' man» to try on gritty «screamers» like ʽCry, Cry, Cryʼ (although he had his own advantages and know-hows, obviously). Actually, come to think of it, Bobby himself must have influenced subsequent developments of Sam's career — I hear definite echos of ʽLead Me Onʼ in ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ, for instance.

 

There is plenty of soul throughout and not the slightest ounce of cheap sentimentality. Orchestral arrangements appear only once, on ʽLead Me Onʼ, and they are heavier on flutes and cellos than on violins — together with the backing vocals, this gives the song an anthemic gospel flavor ra­ther than a balladeering one. The lush «I-will-always-love-you» ballads often have an oddly dark undercurrent (ʽI'll Take Care Of Youʼ, colored with a rather ominous organ part; ʽI've Been Wrong So Longʼ, a chivalrous love confession led by an equally ominous guitar line that could be counted as a pre­decessor to Albert King's ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ), and to top it all, there is a fine take on ʽSt. James Infirmaryʼ (with heavily euphemized lyrics, but still...) — overall, the album matches its name fairly well.

 

Two Steps From The Blues ain't «scary» or «evil» — it's all in the line of respectable adult en­ter­tainment — but it is highly intelligent, innovative, and deep-reaching adult entertain­ment, and then there is that voice. Two steps from the blues? One step from a masterpiece, and only because some of the basic melodies still sound like minor variations on all-too familiar themes (which shouldn't be surprising considering all the «anonymous authorship»), and some of the songs break away from the stylistics (like the uptempo, atypically misogynistic, flashy electric-guitar-driven, ʽDon't Want No Womanʼ — although I do like the song a lot), reminding us that this is, after all, a mixed-up bag in the end. Still, thumbs up without the slightest doubt.

 

HERE'S THE MAN!!! (1962)

 

1) 36-22-36; 2) You're The One (That I Adore); 3) Turn On Your Love Light; 4) Who Will The Next Fool Be; 5) You're Worth It All; 6) Blues In The Night; 7) Your Friends; 8) Ain't That Lovin' You; 9) Jelly Jelly Jelly; 10) Twis­tin' Up The Road; 11) Stormy Monday Blues.

 

This quick follow-up to Two Steps is not as universally lauded or included in any «golden fund» anthologies — in fact, it is not even available as such on CD, and has to be re-cobbled together from larger Duke Records collections — however, quality-wise, it is maybe only half a notch be­low Two Steps, and only because the instrumental focus is slightly shifted from individual ins­truments to «big band flavor», with a Vegasy touch to some of the numbers that wasn't there be­fore. Also, there was really no need to remake ʽFurther On Up The Roadʼ as ʽTwistin' Up The Roadʼ — as if there was no other way to let us know the chronological setting of the record. You can hardly twist to the re-make anyway: it gets stuck somewhere midway between gritty blues-rock and dance entertainment.

 

But this is the one that has ʽTurn On Your Lovelightʼ on it, a number we usually know from Pig­pen's classic 20-minute workouts on Grateful Dead concerts — and no matter how much we re­spect the Grateful Dead, the two-and-a-half minute original cannot be beat: Pigpen is no Bobby Bland when it comes to winding yourself up in a gospel-soul frenzy, and the song's big selling point is Joe Scott's original brass arrangement, combining boogie discipline with New Orleanian excitement (there is an echo of ʽSaintsʼ in there somewhere).

 

This is also the one that has the definitive version of ʽStormy Mondayʼ on it — well, possibly the second definitive after T-Bone Walker's original recording, but it was this one that must have in­spired everybody from the Allman Brothers to Clapton: Bobby gets in character with such verve and authenticity as T-Bone never could (not being much of a great singer), and Wayne Bennett's lead guitar playing is every bit as good, and probably several bits better, than Walker's — he gives the song a laid-back, jazzy vibe with just the faintest, subtlest traces of anxiety and paranoia, and in between the two of them, a classic soulful update on a pioneering electric blues classic is produced. If you are sick and tired of the recent ten millionth cover of ʽStormy Mondayʼ recorded by yet another generic blues outfit, put yourself in the context of 1962 and it may be easier to un­derstand why the song has inspired such an annoyingly massive legacy.

 

Other recognizable tunes include Billy Eckstine's ʽJelly, Jellyʼ (later also appropriated by the All­mans for Brothers And Sisters), done in a somewhat «loungey» fashion; Charlie Rich's ʽWho Will The Next Fool Be?ʼ; and a version of ʽBlues In The Nightʼ that is no better or worse than the legions of versions of ʽBlues In The Nightʼ recorded over the years. However, none of these are as much fun as is ʽ36-22-36ʼ, where Bobby's backers yell out the measurements with such force, you'd think the sincerity of his love confessions depended on it in a direct proportion. (Not that there'd be anything surprising about it).

 

The album only has 11 tracks: as you re-cobble the sequencing from various compilations, it would make sense to expand it to 12 by not forgetting ʽHow Does A Cheatin' Woman Feelʼ, a great, but forgotten B-side from the same year with yet another fine vocal/guitar duet from Bobby and Wayne — denser and moodier than on ʽStormy Mondayʼ, and adding the much needed extra darkness and de­pression to a record whose only flaw is a small excess of sentimentalism for a supposedly «blues» album. Oh sure, it inherits the «urban blues» tradition rather than the «Delta blues» one, but still, there has to be a good balance between the happy Bobby and the unhappy Bobby. Restore this balance with ʽCheatin' Womanʼ, and that's a surefire thumbs up for you.

 

CALL ON ME / THAT'S THE WAY LOVE IS (1963)

 

1) Call On Me; 2) The Feeling Is Gone; 3) Honky Tonk; 4) Cry, Lover, Cry; 5) Wishing Well; 6) Share Your Love With Me; 7) That's The Way Love Is; 8) Care For Me; 9) No Sweeter Girl; 10) Bobby's Blues; 11) Ain't It A Good Thing; 12) Queen For A Day.

 

Going down a little bit here, as the hits start to slowly merge with the filler and the arrangements start getting a bit samier and the moods get mushier — ʽWishing Wellʼ and ʽBobby's Bluesʼ are the toughest numbers on here, but also the oldest, going all the way back to the 1950s and, con­sequently, quite out of tune with newer, better produced material. On most of that material, how­ever, Bobby now has to compete with Clyde McPhatter and Ben E. King — ʽCall On Meʼ is basically his ʽStand By Meʼ, although the song is a bit too cuddly and playful to rank among the great soul masterpieces of the era. The horns have a nice run, though.

 

At least two of the songs here are in some way associated with The Band. ʽShare Your Love With Meʼ was covered on Moondog Matinee — in a version that rivaled the soulful original quite well (Richard Manuel certainly had just the right amount of soul in his voice to match Bobby's, if not quite the right amount of technique); and ʽHonky Tonkʼ they used to do in their early days as «Levon & The Hawks». However, this time around that's about it: most of the songs failed to be­come household names, including ʽThat's The Way Love Isʼ which, unfortunately, faded out of sight as the Whitfield/Strong by the same name far eclipsed its fame in 1967.

 

Bobby's singing is beyond reproach — at this point, he would be beyond reproach even singing phone numbers from his notebook — but the vibe throughout is centered around mellow, «inno­cent» twisting and shuffling and mainly provided by horns. When there is at least some guitar and keyboard involvement, as on ʽAin't It A Good Thingʼ, it works very well; at other times, it gets monotonous, or even soporific.

 

Especially because there just seems to be too many blues ballads, not enough «blues blues». «Dar­ker» numbers include ʽThe Feeling Is Goneʼ, with the album's grimmest bassline and gloo­miest vocals — and the two old outtakes from the 1950s, possibly thrown on at the last moment to add just a pinch of grit to all the sweetness, but to no avail: Call On Me clearly states that Bobby made his choice — possibly in the overall context of the «mellowing» moods of 1963, not yet shaken by the Invasion — and the choice is «family-friendly». That said, if we have to have «family-friendly» from 1963, I'd rather take it from Bobby Bland than any random teen idol from the same epoch — this guy, at least, manages to stay well-grounded even on the most syrupy numbers.

 

AIN'T NOTHING YOU CAN DO (1964)

 

1) Ain't Nothing You Can Do; 2) If I Hadn't Called You Back; 3) Today; 4) Steal Away; 5) After It's Too Late; 6) I'm Gonna Cry; 7) Loneliness Hurts; 8) When You Put Me Down; 9) If You Could Read My Mind; 10) Reconsider Baby; 11) Black Night; 12) Blind Man.

 

The title track here was Bobby's highest entry into the pop charts — hitting No. 20 at just about the same time The Beatles finally broke through in the States, ensuring that nothing else by Bob­by Bland would ever hit No. 19 from now on. It is a fairly successful attempt to cast Bobby as an upbeat romantic R&B troubadour in the vein of Arthur Alexander (and Bobby sure can make use of all those extra decibels), and a good example of a careful build-up strategy — with not only the voice, but the repetitive brass backing as well gaining in pitch and volume as time goes by. Van Morrison, at least, was impressed enough to cover the song a decade later.

 

Nevertheless, the whole thing in general is rather standard Bobby fare for the times, with almost no big surprises, no saddening letdowns, and nothing all that much to distinguish Bobby "Blue" Bland circa 1964 from Bobby "Blue" Bland circa 1963. The one real highlight, to me, is not even the title track, but Bobby's rendition of Charles Brown's ʽBlack Nightʼ — arguably better than the original, or any other version of the song that exists: Arthur Alexander's sped-up recording, for instance, accidentally drained it of all the dread and desperation — whereas Bobby's version, with tense 'n' subtle guitar 'n' piano backing, really puts the «black» in the «night», if you know what I mean. It is just such a goddamn pity how Bobby was primarily concentrating on «happier» mate­rial at the time, because it is stuff like ʽBlack Nightʼ, really, that brings out the finest qualities in his voice — including just a tinge of genuine spookiness, one that separates him lock stock and barrel from the crowds of crass lounge lizards.

 

The B-side of ʽBlack Nightʼ was ʽBlind Manʼ, which closes the album on a relatively «rocking» note, dark bassline, screeching guitar, hysterical vocals and all — incidentally, that way the re­cord ends in a much darker, «harder» vein than it began, however, the main bulk of the songs still consists of pleasant, light-spirited, quickly forgettable R&B, destined for rapid consumption and moving on, helping to promote that fairly stereotypical picture of pre-British Invasion mainstream American pop en­ter­tainment that we are fed by our musical history books. The more accurate truth, of course, is that it is simply more difficult to go fishing for pearls in that age — the payoff is still there, as evidenced by ʽAin't Nothing You Can Doʼ and ʽBlack Nightʼ, but nobody really has to endure all the «pleasant mediocrity» in between.

 

THE SOUL OF THE MAN (1966)

 

1) I Can't Stop; 2) Back In The Same Old Bag; 3) Deep In My Soul; 4) Reach Right Out; 5) Ain't Nobody's Business; 6) Fever; 7) Too Late For Tears; 8) Let's Get Together; 9) Soul Stretch; 10) Dear Bobby; 11) Playgirl.

 

We are now launching into the third double CD of Bobby's Duke recordings — That Did It!, co­vering the man's career from 1966 to 1972, and including, among other things, the near-complete Soul Of The Man LP from 1966 (every song except for ʽSoul Stretchʼ, a Stax-ish instrumental with some nicely wailing electric guitar licks, but instrumentals on a Bobby Bland album? That's like heavy metal on a Beach Boys album!).

 

And looks like it has been well worth the wait. Now that American pop music, black and white alike, had scraped off some of the excessive sentimentality and «comfort» of the early 1960s, it was high time to get back to business — with Atlantic, Motown, King, and other labels flashing hot new R&B sounds, now influenced «in reverse» by the rock'n'roll scene, even Bobby Bland could be expected to deliver something grittier than his last two records, and he did.

 

ʽI Can't Stopʼ starts us off somewhat deceptively, as one of those typical I-vi-IV-V numbers all of us have heard one hundred too many of, but eventually, with an abrupt key change, we have a transformation from sen­timental ballad to ecstatic gospel for the bridge — somewhat reminiscent of the move from verse to chorus in Clapton's ʽPresence Of The Lordʼ three years later, and may­be not totally coincidental, either.

 

However, that is nothing compared with ʽBack In The Same Old Bagʼ, which opens directly with a «biting» rhythm guitar pattern and has Bobby roaring and bawling over a wall of serious-min­ded guitar and brass parts — the word ʽBagʼ in the title may hint at a tad of jealousy towards the recent hero of ʽBrand New Bagʼ, but the song actually invades the territory of Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding rather than the Godfather of Soul, and does it with lots of verve, although I sure wish those guitar licks eventually came together in some memorable riff.

 

From then on, the ballads are kept to the level of «bare necessities» — and mostly take on the form of deep soul (ʽDeep In My Soulʼ — DUH!) or, for once, a passionate soul dialog between Bobby and Vi Campbell. Everything else is rigidly, or, rather, non-rigidly groovy, with the ex­cep­tion of a blues-de-luxe take on ʽAin't Nobody's Businessʼ (a good one, but the song has been covered by way too many people for me to value any of those versions much over Bessie Smith's original) — even ʽFeverʼ is set to a full-band arrangement, with the guitar guy trying to remem­ber how to play ʽSmokestack Lightningʼ, for some reason. Other than the first two notes, he fails, but it still makes the arrangement fun.

 

Of all the originals, ʽLet's Get Togetherʼ is probably the best, a breezy sunny ditty with seductive girl harmonies — almost like a blueprint for all of Al Green's early career before he learned to make his own, one and only use of his one and only voice. Or it may be the Ray Charles-reminis­cent ʽToo Late For Tearsʼ. Or it may be anything else — no, these are not «great», unforgettable songs, they all follow a particular formula, but it is good to see it tested on Bobby with all the right, tasteful, state-of-the-art ingredients of classic mid-Sixties soul. Thumbs up.

 

PS. One of the more interesting non-LP songs from the period, worth looking for, is ʽGood Time Charlie, Pt. 1ʼ (never heard ʽPt. 2ʼ, but it might be an instrumental coda) — this is Bobby's straight answer to ʽPapa's Got A Brand New Bagʼ and ʽI Feel Goodʼ at the same time, and even if it is (naturally) nowhere near as innovative in the musical department, at least Bobby got Mr. Brown sorely beat in the vocal department.

 

TOUCH OF THE BLUES (1967)

 

1) A Touch Of The Blues; 2) Set Me Free; 3) That Did It; 4) Road Of Broken Hearted Men; 5) Sweet Loving; 6) Driftin' Blues; 7) Sweet Lips Of Joy; 8) Sad Feeling; 9) Shoes; 10) One Horse Town.

 

Since there was no reason to change the formula of Soul Of The Man — unless Bobby wanted to go psychedelic or baroque-pop, which he most certainly did not — this is a rather faithful follow-up, without any noticeable innovations and, therefore, a little less exciting from a reviewer's point of view. Two of the songs are from «outside» sources — ʽThat Did Itʼ, a leisurely blues shuffle contributed by Dave Clark, and a cover of the old standard ʽDriftin' Bluesʼ; everything else is cre­dited to our old acquaintance «Deadric Malone», and whether or not Don Robey was using ano­nymous out­side contractors this time, the songs are not particularly interesting or memorable.

 

ʽShoesʼ is kind of a strange number, as it echoes ʽSunnyʼ in its vocal arrangements and no less than Procol Harum's ʽConquistadorʼ in one of its bass lines. However, it is clumsily written, and the brass and chimes overdubs produce a confused, chaotic feeling — almost as if some deadbeat took the near-perfect structure of ʽSunnyʼ, twisted it far enough to avoid a plagiarism suit, and ended up producing an only semi-functional entity. Not even Bobby can do a lot with it, because this sort of soul-pop approach is not in his style.

 

The real highlights, therefore, are probably the title track, a moody chunk of dark blues-soul where Bobby's pleading / growling, whooping female harmonies, and some tasteful jazzy guitar licks yield an excellent combination; ʽSad Feelingʼ, which builds up towards a frenzied James Brown-ian chorus through thick brass swagger and slow funky guitar; and ʽOne Horse Townʼ, which is essentially more of the same, but a little more upbeat.

 

Overall, repeated listenings are rewarding — in actuality, almost each track has some nifty lead guitar work, even if the guitar almost never gets the spotlight to itself, and in terms of production, the dialog between guitar and brass may really be enhanced here, compared to the standard of the previous year. Add to this the complete lack of sappy ballads (most of the sentimentality here is expressed in upbeat, danceable pop form, as on ʽSweet Lips Of Joyʼ), and it all makes for thirty more swell minutes of a Bobby "Blue" Bland experience that you will never ever forget... while it keeps playing in your player, that is. Thumbs up.

 

SPOTLIGHTING THE MAN (1969)

 

1) Chains Of Love; 2) Georgia On My Mind; 3) Since I Fell For You; 4) Who Can I Turn To; 5) Wouldn't You Ra­ther Have Me; 6) Rockin' In The Same Old Boat; 7) I'm On My Way; 8) Ask Me About Nothin'; 9) You Ought To Be Ashamed; 10) Gotta Get To Know You.

 

Bobby's last complete LP for Duke Records is a fitting goodbye, even if it was never intended as such (Bobby went on to produce an additional bunch of singles in 1970-71, before the label fol­ded and he eventually became free of the Don Robey servitude). Nothing is fundamentally diffe­rent from the Soul Of The Man formula, but the songs seem just a tad better written (or selected from early sources) and just a teensy bit more rock-oriented.

 

Actually, there is at least one fabulous masterpiece on here: ʽRockin' In The Same Old Boatʼ should unquestionably be in Bobby's Top 10, a hot, dark, sweaty, swampy, psycho-jazzy, almost «acid-rockish» monster of a soul blues rant, with some of the moodiest brass and guitar lines crossing each other in the history of the genre — and the vocal delivery ain't no slouch either, featuring Bobby at his most tense and strung out, eventually whipping himself up into a paranoid frenzy. This is some real shit out there, and all I can say is, way too bad that Bobby only tried this darker, scarier approach every once in a while — so as not to creep out the sentimentally minded segment of his audience, I guess.

 

Those latter will by far prefer the lush one-two punch opening sequence of ʽChains Of Loveʼ (appropriately orchestrated and romanticized, but wonderfully sung all the same) and ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ, for which Bobby does everything in his power to outperform Uncle Ray, but ine­vitably fails due to genetic inhibitions (on a strictly technical level, Uncle Ray may have limited powers compared to Bobby's, but it is his rasp and wheeze that give his ʽGeorgiaʼ the edge — Bobby is just too perfect to make the results as comparably interesting). Furthermore, we simply happen to know these songs all too well to complain about one more competent rendition. How­ever, as far as I am concerned, neither of them holds a candle not only to ʽSame Old Boatʼ, but also to ʽI'm On My Wayʼ, marked by another bring-the-house-down vocal performance and top notch brass / electric guitar backing — tense is the key: Bobby the heart-breaker always takes a step back to Bobby the broken-hearted.

 

Overall, it may simply be so that the ratio of «dark» to «light» on this record is more heavily tilted towards the dark side, with minor-key moods and plaintive atmospheres ruling the day. ʽAsk Me About Nothin'ʼ, ʽYou Ought To Be Ashamedʼ — these titles speak for themselves, and the arrangements are appropriately funereal and depressed, and the effect is predictably classy. Perhaps Don Robey was a shameless con man ripping off the R&B scene and using the spoils to dress up his protegé, but even if it were really so, he sure did it with style — everything here is perfectly on the level, and sometimes on a higher level than concurrent Atlantic and Motown pro­ductions. (In fact, by 1969 both labels were already on the verge of slipping into the smooth or­chestrated banality of the Diana-Ross-Roberta-Flack 1970s — nothing of the sort here).

 

It all ends up with a brief unexpected triumph of exuberance — ʽGotta Get To Know Youʼ, with its anthemic brass, chimes, pianos, strings, and backing harmonies is a fab conclusion, a large-scale R&B dance number that should have, by all means, opened rather than closed the album, giving it a tremen­dous kick-start. But as it is, it winds up the proceedings on a surprising and promising rather than predictably sentimental note, and I applaud the sequencing. Altogether, this is all as good as it ever gets with this relatively limited, but classy formula — thumbs up.

 

HIS CALIFORNIA ALBUM (1973)

 

1) This Time I'm Gone For Good; 2) Up And Down World; 3) It's Not The Spotlight; 4) (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want To Be Right; 5) Goin' Down Slow; 6) The Right Place At The Right Time; 7) Help Me Through The Day; 8) Where My Baby Went; 9) Friday The 13th Child; 10) I've Got To Use My Imagination.

 

The start of an entirely new life for Bobby — a new label (Dunhill); a new producer (Steve Barri, famous for having produced at least a little something by at least half of the major American hit­makers of the day); and, overall, a thoroughly new style, as we move into yet another decade, Bobby's third one, where he would feel right at home. No wonder he would soon be teaming up with B. B. King in a triumphant swell of pride: they were pretty much the only veterans of the pre-rock'n'roll era astute enough to move with the tide, not against it.

 

His California Album was not a huge hit, but it sold steadily, and the lead-off single, ʽThis Time I'm Done For Goodʼ, a leftover from his ex-boss «Deadric Malone», even hit the Top 50 on the pop charts for the first time since 1964. For a good reason, too: the production style is distinctly «contemporary», with a thick orchestral layer (piano / organ / strings) and wailing electric guitar and a big fat post-funk-revolution bassline — but Bobby's soul hollering remains on exactly the same wavelength as it was twenty years earlier, and that is the best news of all: after all, we don't want the guy competing with the likes of Barry White, do we?

 

Actually, there is nothing wrong whatsoever with stereotypical 1970s production when the band shows a good balance between muscle and flex; and although the names of these session musici­ans do not immediately ring a bell, there are actually a few unsung heroes here — Max Bennett on bass, who had played with everyone from Peggy Lee to Frank Zappa; Larry Carlton on guitar (and a few other people who would eventually become members of The Crusaders); Ernie Watts on sax; and others too numerous to mention, but, for the most part, veterans of the jazz / blues scene, more interested in simply keeping up with the changing times rather than with the drop­ping tastes. And in terms of taste, California Album is just about perfect: all soul, no sap.

 

On a couple of the tracks, the band even gets fairly heavy, nowhere more so than on the album closer, a cover of Gladys Knight's ʽI've Got To Use My Imaginationʼ that buries the original — transforming it from a relatively lightweight dance number into a slowed down, fang-baring, grumbly blues-rock stomp. But this is, of course, not very typical: usually, the band is content enough wallowing in light-hearted grooves itself, just not dance-oriented.

 

And everything works. ʽIt's Not The Spotlightʼ is a Gerry Goffin song that we usually know in soft takes — Rod Stewart's, or Barry Goldberg's, or Beth Orton's, whatever; here, the song is gi­ven the royal production treatment, with an almost gospel backing, several guitar and «snowy or­gan» overdubs, and one of those thunderous «oh Lowwrrrd!» roars from Bobby every now and then for an extra thrill — the end result is uplifting and exciting without losing the subtlety of the original version.

 

ʽ(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want To Be Rightʼ was a major hit for Lu­ther Ingram, spurred on to notability for the controversial lyrics (openly romanticizing and glori­fying adultery was a bit over the top even for «The Me Decade») — and although Ingram's per­formance was quite credible and respectable, the instrumental backing on Bobby's record far surpasses the compa­rably thin ar­rangement on his single from 1972. ʽHelp Me Through The Dayʼ is a Leon Russell song, and Leon Russell songs are always done better by somebody who is not Leon Russell, be they black singers, white singers, or little pink blobs from Aldebaran. ʽGoin' Down Slowʼ has been done by just about everybody in the rootsy business, but even here the band is able to find a moderately original, aggressive brass/bass groove and stick to it steadily for five minutes (with some fairly nifty jamming taking up a large chunk of the time).

 

In short, this is nothing short of a «modest masterpiece» of early 1970's soul — coming from a 1950's survivor, no less — and a thorough must-hear for all lovers of the genre who like their in­strumentation to be polyphonic, tasteful, yet somewhat restrained instead of going all the way à la Funkadelic. If anything, the lack of saccharine ballads alone makes this a real gem in its niche, for the standards of 1973. Thumbs up all the way: for some reason, the average reviews of the album generally tend to be lukewarm, but I prefer to ascribe this to historical accidence, or maybe just the general reluctance to highly back-rate any album that has the word California in the title ever since the Eagles set us on the road of no return.

 

DREAMER (1974)

 

1) Ain't No Love In The Heart Of City; 2) I Wouldn't Treat A Dog (The Way You Treat Me); 3) Lovin' On Borrowed Time; 4) When You Come To The End Of Your Road; 5) I Ain't Gonna Be The First To Cry; 6) Dreamer; 7) Yolan­da; 8) Twenty-Four Hour Blues; 9) Cold Day In Hell; 10) Who's Foolin' Who.

 

I do not know most of these guys who supplied Bobby with the material for Dreamer, but they sure did a fine job in ensuring its coherence. The dark, smoky soul atmospherics of California Al­bum has been expanded to full length — one peep at the lengthy song titles is more or less enough to understand what this is all going to be about. This time, there isn't even any ʽIt's Not The Spotlightʼ-type material: just about every song here comes from the point of view of a none-too-happy blues guy, and he makes the best of his backing band to let you know it. Consequently, this is one of the gloomiest albums of 1974, and even if, formally, at this point Bobby was sup­posed to plough the same field with the likes of Donny Hathaway, in spirit Dreamer is much closer to the tense, paranoid funk masters of its era.

 

The album pretty much picks up from where ʽI've Got To Use My Imaginationʼ left us last time around: ʽAin't No Love In The Heart Of The Cityʼ also has a threatening heavy riff, although it comes and goes rather than stay with you all the time, while ringing funky syncopes and strings keep a more constant presence. It is the perfect urban blues anthem of 1974 — the verses may seem to simply deal with yet another broken heart story, but the refrain ("ain't no love in the heart of the city... ain't no love, ain't no pity") has a more universalist spirit, and the fact that the song became a big hit is quite telling: the whole experience is so loaded with mid-1970s decadent melancholia, everybody with subconscious expectations of the end of the world must have bought a copy for oneself, and one more for each of one's best friends.

 

The second single, ʽI Wouldn't Treat A Dog (The Way You Treated Me)ʼ, is a bit more intimate, but the title and the related vocal hook were harsh enough to pick the public's attention all the same, and it still works — the song is assigned a proto-disco beat, but this is more for experimen­tation's sake than commercial reasons: nothing else here invites you to dance, least of all Bob­by's vocals, as he is still capable of giving the old «she done me wrong» yarn a fresh tonal spin. One funky guitar in the right speaker, one bluesy guitar in the left speaker, quiet organ in the back, ominous brass riffs in front — perfectly tasteful and meaningful combination.

 

There is not much to say about the following tracks: they all probe the same moods in much the same tasteful ways. There is only one song I actively dislike: ʽYolandaʼ has the brass section in Vegasy mode, and Bobby's chorus of "oh Yolanda, why you forsake me?" shows an irritatingly cheesy «Tom Jones»-style spirit that clashes quite uncomfortably with the rest of the album — I am sure that this came about by accident rather than intention, but I would be much happier any­way to have this over-acted piece replaced by something more substantial. The other mildly mer­ry tune here, the album closer ʽWho's Foolin' Whoʼ, could theoretically be spoiled by excessive emphasis on backing vocals from Bobby's girls, but at least it is a formal blues-rock number with screeching solos and aggressive singing — no «Vegas effect» whatsoever.

 

As much as I struggle to write about individual songs, I am still quite glad about this consistent monotonousness — at this point, the more gloomy funk-blues, predictably arranged and perfor­med, this guy gets to sing, the more good it does for his reputation. No syrup, no sap, and only a tiny slice of cheese: Dreamer is one of the few islands of taste and even «class» (and I don't like to abuse that word) in a sea of mainstream sludge on the «unadventurous mainstream» pop market of 1974. Thumbs up.

 

TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME... LIVE (1975)

 

1) 3 O'Clock Blues; 2) It's My Own Fault; 3) Driftin' Blues; 4) That's The Way Love Is; 5) I'm Sorry; 6) I'll Take Care Of You; 7) Don't Cry No More; 8) Don't Answer The Door; 9) Medley; 10) Why I Sing The Blues; 11) Goin' Down Slow; 12) I Like To Live The Love.

 

Technically, this record should have probably been filed under «B. B. King»: B. B. is officially given first billing on the set, and besides, he plays and sings, whereas Bobby, unfortunately, ne­ver took the time to properly master an instrument — not even a tambourine. But since B. B.'s discography is so much more vast anyway, we will bring in some balance and give Bobby extra credit. He sure needs more credit from us than B. B. does, anyway.

 

This is a beautiful little sprawling double LP, recorded in one take in some cheap sleazy L. A. bar (correction: actually, at Western Recorders, Studio 1, but, allegedly, the audience was real, and rowdy enough to suggest that they did mask the studio as a cheap sleazy bar) — much of it im­provised and almost all of it without any serious pre-planning or rehearsal. It got panned by Rolling Stone upon release and continues, out of subconscious respect for tradition, to garner cool reprimands from mainstream-os: the All-Music Guide review mumbles something about the at­mosphere being «too relaxed» and a lack of flying sparks — as if they were expecting the Dead Kennedys or something. For Christ's sake, these guys are public entertainers: their job has always been to entertain, and, having gotten together, this is what they do at twice the effort and twice the effect. Despite the critics, the album sold real well, and in this particular case, I am complete­ly on the side of the buying public.

 

On the technical side, nothing is new. The setlist is comprised mainly of those songs that were already big hits or personal favorites of B. B.'s or Bobby's — it is rather symbolic that they open with ʽ3 O'Clock Bluesʼ, which was the very first commercially successful recording for King in 1952. The singing and playing are exactly what you would expect from both gentlemen circa 1975 (you may set your expectations pretty high, but no particular surprises). And the «novelty» of the «together for the first time» announcement will, of course, be dampened for everybody who knows that B. B. and Bobby spent an awful lot of time together in the 1950s as the «Beale Street Boys» in Memphis. They may be recording for the first time together, but they gel like old pals — because they are old pals.

 

And this is, of course, the cornerstone of the album's charm. Even if it is a commercial project, it has all the trappings of a loose, free-flowing, informal party — just two guys showing off before each other and a bunch of friends, cocky but amicable. Almost every track has them shooting off insider jokes at each other, trading funny (or not so funny) one-liners and offside remarks, and, overall, having a great time — or at least simulating a great time so well that I honestly couldn't tell it for the real thing.

 

True enough, there is very little «blues» here if what you want is serious heart tension rather than a friendly party environment. The atmosphere only gets bleak and smoky maybe just a couple of times — for instance, when they put a temporary stop to the banter as Bobby launches into a heartbroken rendition of ʽI'll Take Care Of Youʼ: then, almost as if they simultaneously realized that things are getting too «heavy», just as the last note of the song is sprung, they launch into the uptempo, uplifting ʽDon't Cry No Moreʼ to compensate. The other track where they try to go over the head of the «party mood» is ʽGoin' Down Slowʼ, with a mighty build-up towards the end — but the show is still brought to a final stop with ʽI Like To Live The Loveʼ, a recent hit for B. B. that has nothing for you but one hundred percent positive vibrations.

 

And there is nothing wrong with that. "Some people say that the kind of blues we're getting into now are ʽslick bluesʼ", B. B. remarks as they wind up ʽI'm Sorryʼ, "and I don't think so, I think they're just telling it like it is", and there certainly is a serious slice of truth to that remark. In 1975, both of these guys were respectable stars (if not superstars), with plenty of reputation, pub­lic acclaim, and money to spare — so would a tense, tragically-flavored performance, floating in misery and anger, be «telling it like it is»? What they do here, in addition to being professionally performed and recorded, is all perfectly natural, a fine document of their time that, even today, will make for terrific evening party accompaniment. Thumbs up, totally.

 

GET ON DOWN WITH BOBBY BLAND (1975)

 

1) I Take It On Home; 2) Today I Started Loving You Again; 3) You've Always Got The Blues; 4) I Hate You; 5) You've Never Been This Far Before; 6) If Fingerprints Showed Up On Skin; 7) Someone To Give My Love To; 8) Too Far Gone; 9) You're Gonna Love Yourself (In The Morning).

 

More like «Let It Down With Bobby Bland», actually. After the success of the California Al­bum / Dreamer formula, yet another modest reinvention could not hurt, and heading in a coun­try­-blues direction was not necessarily a bad thing... well, come to think of it, in 1975 it probably was — the next bad thing to going disco. Nashville people come into the picture and while they do not exactly steal it from our hero, they sort of tug the rug from under his feet.

 

The only excuse for «sterilizing» production values and opting for a smoother, slicker sound in the post-Duke era was that the resulting smoke, darkness, and desperation were an excellent com­pensation. Now, however, sterile production values remain, but the depth is gone — Bobby is covering newer and older country classics that were never written with himself in mind, and, for the most part, are so melodically faceless that only a strong — and appropriately selected — per­sonality could make them work. Bobby's personality is a strong one, by all means, but whether it has really been appropriately selected for these songs is questionable.

 

Technically, it all works if you have sufficient respect for Merle Haggard, Freddie Hart, Charlie Rich, and Kris Kristofferson: the arrangements are deep and lush, the backing vocals sensual and sexy, and Bobby gets into the whole thing like a pro, whether or not it was his own idea. But emo­tionally, the whole thing wallows in syrup rather than anything else — so much so that even a song called ʽI Hate Youʼ really spells ʽI Love Youʼ (and is about as musically intriguing or spi­ritually involving as either of these titles).

 

And most importantly, there is simply no room for Bobby to show off what he's got: these songs do not imply build-ups, contrasts, growls, snorts, hysterics, or gospel undertones. They may work — occasionally — when sung by lazy, offensive, unshaved, whiskey-soaked white guys, but not when sung by a hard-working, amicable, clean-cut, and (presumably) sober Bobby «Blue» Bland. At least when Ray Charles did this kind of thing more than a decade earlier, it was novel and benefitted from the overall freshness of approach, the overall healthier climate of 1960s pop, and the overall genius of Ray; this piece, however, uncomfortably reminds of the subtly evil sides of that legacy. Thumbs down.

 

TOGETHER AGAIN... LIVE (1976)

 

1) Let The Good Times Roll; 2) Stormy Monday Blues / Strange Things Happen; 3) Feel So Bad; 4) Mother-In-Law Blues / Mean Old World; 5) Everyday (I Have The Blues); 6) The Thrill Is Gone / I Ain't Gonna Be The First One To Cry.

 

With the unexpected commercial success of Bobby and B.B.'s benefit, it was only a matter of time before we would see the formula repeated, and here we are: recorded at the Coconut Grove in L.A. on an unspecified date in 1976, this time, before a larger audience, in a less intimate fa­shion, and in a shortened format: only a single LP that focuses on lengthy, semi-improvised work­outs and medleys rather than a representative selection from the catalog.

 

The problem is that the setting has irrevocably changed. First Time was, indeed, the first time, an unpredictable attempt at getting themselves captured in a natural, loose, relaxed environment. Two years later, what we have is a firmly established, commercially-footed «star duet» that be­haves appropriately: the friendly stage banter is cut short and, where it is still preserved, feels more theatrical and forced, the performed songs include big hits (they did not see it fit to perform ʽThe Thrill Is Goneʼ on their first record, but they almost feel obliged to do it now), and, worst of all, both the playing and the singing (particularly the playing) feel even lazier than before — as if the stars were confident now that the people in the audience are there to just look at them sharing the stage together. Well, they do make an impressive pair, sight-wise, that has to be admitted.

 

Arguably, the major highlight is Chuck Willis' ʽFeel So Badʼ, derailing the proceedings from the restrictive blues patterns in favor of a little spirited syncopation and allowing Bobby to whip him­self up into his trademark frenzy — because, frankly speaking, stuff like ʽLet The Good Times Rollʼ is far better suited to B.B.'s self-contented, round-bellied mode of bellowing than Bobby's subtler-soulful style. This is eight minutes of first-rate hot groovin', and I sure wish the entire re­cord would be like that instead of giving us yet another version of ʽStormy Monday Bluesʼ (what could they possibly do with it that we do not know by heart already?) or ʽEveryday I Have The Bluesʼ, which usually works well as a brief show opener to give the audience a quick initial work­over, but here is made into a completely autonomous and overlong performance.

 

Admittedly, ʽThe Thrill Is Goneʼ gets an inventive bit of reworking: first, they play out a «shy­ness» scene, with B. B. expressing «doubts» about whether they should be cutting the song, then, once the band is in full swing, Bobby starts wooing the audience, getting a «Viola Jackson» lady to take over the lead on one verse — talk about a master class in simulating spontaneity. But in any case, the song never works well with a host of cooks minding the broth — it is essentially a very intimate chamber piece, and switching vocals between B. B., Bobby, and an out-of-the-blue guest vocalist, no matter how gifted, is a corny idea in the first place.

 

Little surprise, in the end, that the record generally gets much more of a critical thrashing than its predecessor, and, as far as I know, did not at all sell comparably well — bringing an understan­dable halt to the franchise. It may still be worth a listen (I do not see how a well-recorded live album by B. B. and Bobby could even theoretically be a «total catastrophe» — unless they per­manently switch to hip-hop duets or something), but, er, well, «the thrill is gone», I guess.

 

REFLECTIONS IN BLUE (1977)

 

1) The Soul Of A Man; 2) I'll Be Your Fool Once More; 3) Sittin' On A Poor Man's Throne; 4) I Intend To Take Your Place; 5) It Ain't The Real Thing; 6) It's All Over; 7) If I Weren't A Gambler; 8) Five Long Years; 9) I Got The Same Old Blues.

 

Back to normal. Good title, good album sleeve, good song selection, good backing band. No at­tempt to repeat the country debacle. No dabbling in trashy disco or other styles that are not hard­wired to Bobby's stem cells. Just the usual — a little blues, a little soul, a little urban atmosphere, a little smoky darkness, and we are completely back to the style of Dreamer.

 

Supposedly, that should complete the review, but I will try to add just a few specifics. ʽI Got The Same Old Bluesʼ was already one of J. J. Cale's most frequently covered numbers, but this is the first time it was done in style by an accomplished soul vocalist, and the original vibe is right up Bobby's alley — and, by the way, whoever is out there trying to match his vocal tension with loosely flowing blues-rock guitar pirouettes is no slouch either.

 

Conversely, one could say that the blues classic ʽFive Long Yearsʼ is butchered with extra strings, slower-than-necessary tempos, butter-soft guitar soloing, and too much tenderness in some of the verses — but this is really a thorough «soul reinvention» of a blues number, not just a sissied-up cover, and the new look at least makes it feel more novel and curious than if we just had our­selves one more generic cover of ʽFive Long Yearsʼ.

 

The best songs, however, are probably Bobby's own ʽSoul Of A Manʼ, taken at a jumpier tempo and molded somewhat in the «anthemic» vein characteristic of blaxploitation movie soundtracks of the time; and the funky ʽSittin' On A Poor Man's Throneʼ (swampy wah-wah croaks over R&B strings à la 1970s are always welcome). But in reality, the album is simply very even: no great victories, not a single serious misstep. A good listen on a tired old evening, and very little to write about — thumbs up, and be done with it.

 

COME FLY WITH ME (1978)

 

1) Come Fly With Me; 2) Lady Lonely; 3) Night Games; 4) To Be Friends; 5) I'm Just Your Man; 6) Love To See You Smile; 7) You Can Count On Me; 8) This Bitter Earth; 9) Ain't God Something.

 

Well, apparently, someone thought that Bobby «Bland» was getting a bit too «acid» for a time that called for more and more mindless entertainment loaded with positive emotions. So ABC Re­cords called in a bunch of corporate songwriters, most of whom are a complete mystery to me (R&B stalwart Tyrone Davis is the only name I recognize on one of the credits), and saddled Bobby with a set that put his lonely, depressed, soulful persona in the trash bin — calling on the «ladies' man» persona. Oh well. At least it ain't disco, and at least nobody is forcing him to switch to the falsetto register.

 

The record is professional enough not to sound awful, and Bobby certainly has enough qualifica­tions to play the ladies' man convincingly — in fact, I'd go farther than that and say that the title track does have an uplifting funk-pop hook, and that its guitar / brass / flute / chimes / strings ar­rangement (no effort spared, so it seems) is very well done. Nor can I deny the relative catchiness and even occasional seductiveness of several other songs on here — for instance, the sexy purr of "if you feel the need, go ahead and cry" of the female backup on ʽLady Lonelyʼ, or the anthemic chorus of ʽLove To See You Smileʼ, which could almost pass for sincerity, if only it weren't so utterly dated by its late-1970s formalities.

 

And yet, no matter how slick, overproduced, or interchangeable one might have found Bobby's major efforts of the decade, when the man was in «tragic» mode, he was really on — demanding nothing but the smokiest from his backing band and playing the broken-hearted card for all it could be worth. In this here happy-sappy mode, though, no matter how much professionalism he keeps demanding from his backers, the songs just don't hit hard enough to merit a comeback — just one more of those albums that is okay while it lasts, then forgotten in a flash. Maybe the title track and ʽLove To See You Smileʼ are worth salvaging for anthology packages. But as for the rest, even the one lonesome gospel number, saved for last (with a somewhat sacrilegious title — doesn't ʽAin't God Somethingʼ sound just a bit... inappropriate?), feels more like a local newsreel (he was nailed to the cross and all that) than a moment of inspiration. In other words, the balance between «soul» and «craft» is completely upset in favour of the latter. No wonder, then, that the album has never been released on CD — from this point on, Bobby's records are becoming in­creasingly hard to find anywhere except for Ebay and used vinyl bins, and there is nothing co­incidental in this period being marked off by Come Fly With Me.

 

I FEEL GOOD, I FEEL FINE (1979)

 

1) I Feel Good, I Feel Fine; 2) I Can't Take No Mo'; 3) Little Mama; 4) Tit For Tat; 5) Someone To Belong To; 6) Soon As The Weather Breaks; 7) In His Eyes; 8) Red Sails In The Sunset.

 

All right, this one does not even deserve three paragraphs. Apparently, two ladies approached Bobby on the corner, each planting a kiss on one of his aging cheeks, and convinced him to go disco. And even if the anti-disco backlash had already started by that time, how can you just say no, with two lovely ladies planting kisses on your cheeks? The only thing to do is to hop it up and go — with the six-minute title track announcing that trouble is finally over, and now you are lis­tening to a Bobby Bland album for the hip dance grooves, none of that depressing «deep soul» stuff that might lead you to dark thoughts of... never mind. In fact, it would even be best for him not to sing at all — and he doesn't (on the title track, that is).

 

The most hideous realisation of all, though, is that the silly hop-along title track, with the ladies chanting "I feel good, I feel fine, it's alright" as if they were advertising Prozac, is the best thing on the album — once Bobby cuts in on the second track, the tempos start slowing down (without losing the disco skeleton), and things start getting less fun and more serious without any adequate compositional, instrumental, or vocal merit to justify the change in style. Strings and brass almost completely drown out guitars and even keyboards; gospel (ʽIn His Eyesʼ), blues (ʽI Can't Take No Mo'), balladry, and pop are sifted through the same sieve; the lyrics accordingly suck (I swear I remember something along the lines of "you are my magnet, I am your dragnet"), as do some of the song titles (ʽTit For Tatʼ? — yep, very 1979-ish indeed); and although Bobby dutifully attacks all these monsters like a pro, he can do nothing worthwhile, saddled with this kind of material. Thumbs down for the sleeve alone, although we'd only seen the beginning of the slide.

 

FIRST CLASS BLUES (1987)

 

1) Two Steps From The Blues; 2) St. James Infirmary; 3) Members Only; 4) Sunday Morning Love; 5) In The Ghetto; 6) Sweet Woman's Love; 7) Angel; 8) I've Just Got To Know; 9) Can We Make Love Tonight?; 10) After All; 11) I Hear You Thinkin'; 12) Straight From The Shoulder; 13) Love Me Or Leave Me; 14) Second Hand Heart; 15) Wal­kin' & Talkin' & Singin' The Blues; 16) Heart, Open Up Again.

 

Bobby's records of the first half of the 1980s, caught in the short, but sadly prolific period be­tween his nasty fall from artistic grace and the start of the CD era, are fairly hard to come by these days — an Ebay enthusiast would probably have few problems getting his hands on most of them, but why? Hint # 1: Sweet Vibrations (1980), Try Me, I'm Real (1981), and Here We Go Again (1982) each feature a hot young lady on the album sleeve — and only Tell Mr. Bland (1983) features a hot young lady next to Mr. Bland in person. Hint # 2: the first song on Sweet Vibrations actually bears the name of ʽSweet Vibratorʼ, which must be the lowest point in Mr. Bland's career, ever, even if the song were to have a melody of the highest caliber.

 

Anyway, judging by the few snippets of some of the songs that I did manage to hear, not all of this stuff is utterly awful — in fact, one of the reasons these albums may have disappeared without a trace is that, after the disco embarrassment, Bobby made no effort whatsoever to adapt to the electro-pop standards of the new decade. Just the same old story all over again — perfectly evident on his first CD, First Class Blues, which combined the «best» selections off his previous two albums, Members Only (1985) and After All (1986) with two re-recordings of old classics (ʽTwo Steps From The Bluesʼ and ʽSt. James' Infirmaryʼ).

 

Quotation marks around «best» are necessary for the simple reason that, at this point, there is really no best or worst, no good or bad, no ups or downs in Bobby's suitcase — slow blues, blues-rock, and balladry are all on the same level of technicality and inspiration. The backing musicians are real enough, but sound like they're mostly in it for the money (the joke is on them, of course, since all the money to be made on Bobby Bland was made at least a decade ago). The drums and keyboards have the predictable electronic sheen; the guitars are professional and modestly taste­ful (no pop-metal influence detected), worthy of a Robert Cray on an effortless day («formally better than shit, but less impressive than shit», that is).

 

Probably the biggest piece of news is that Bobby's voice has not lost a single frequency in five years — only the grunting / snorting habit has become more irritating, what with the tendency to succumb to it on just about every song that builds up a tense atmosphere. Consequently, those who just love Bobby B. for being Bobby B. will love First Class Blues as usual — as long as Bobby's vocal cords are in order and the arrangements follow traditional patterns, who's to claim that anything here is actually second class?

 

However, those who are willing to discriminate will probably yawn and cringe at the routineness (not awfulness, but routineness) of the arrangements, and at the fact that pretty much the same emotional load is spread over Vegasy ballads like ʽMembers Onlyʼ, Vegasy blues like ʽSunday Morning Loveʼ, and old-time «socially relevant» songs like ʽIn The Ghettoʼ (personally, I've ne­ver been much of a fan of the Elvis version, but at least it used to convey something special — here, the song does not even begin to stand out against the background). It's all listenable, for sure, but generic mid-1980s blues arrangements are a couple notches below generic mid-1970s blues arrangements (yes, the grass was greener and all that), and in the absence of any compensating factors of «surprise», this is altogether a thumbs down type of album, even if, probably, not the same kind of a thumbs down album as the one that has ʽSweet Vibratorʼ on it.

 

BLUES YOU CAN USE (1987)

 

1) Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time; 2) Spending My Life With You; 3) Our First Blues Song; 4) Restless Feelin's; 5) 24 Hours A Day; 6) I've Got A Problem; 7) Let's Part As Friends; 8) For The Last Time; 9) There's No Easy Way To Say Goodbye.

 

It should probably be mentioned that, since 1985, Bobby Bland had been signed to Malaco Re­cords, probably the largest and most fashion-independent Southern label that saw its mission in preserving the old ways — and that, although the move did not bring him a lot of financial stabi­lity, it certainly helped him recover and keep his integrity after all those strange MCA records with stiff models on the sleeves had nearly destroyed it. Thus, even if the Malaco house band is not the best there is, or could be (although, in 1987, who can really tell?), it is a house band, and these late Eighties' records of Bobby's sound as respectable as they could at the time. The electro­nic keyboards are dull, the horns are mechanistic, and the rhythm section uninventive, but this is blues, soul, and R&B music done the good old way, in styles that feel natural for Bobby. That is no big reason to ever use this kind of blues, but it is reason enough not to feel ashamed or sorry for the guy. Except when he keeps snorting, that is.

 

The variety is not too bad here, from the old upbeat, fast-tempo 12-bar blues-rock formula (ʽ24 Hours A Dayʼ) to funky R&B with rambling guitars and horns (ʽGet Your Moneyʼ) to old-style soul with a touch of flute (ʽRestless Feelin'sʼ) to slow blues-de-luxe (ʽI've Got A Problemʼ) — and, of course, plenty of torchy bluesy balladry for the old lady fans, culminating in ʽThere's No Easy Way To Say Goodbyeʼ, a song that clearly hints at the inescapable: this guy is not going away any time soon. Alas, as usual, there are no curious insights to be gained from the songs; the best that they can amount to is to simply sound decent.

 

The problem is somehow connected, I suppose, to the fact that most of Bobby's songwriters here are completely unknown — this is all derivative, clichéd hack material, without any sense of humor or attempts at individual melodic twists. Ted Jarrett, the songwriter star of «Nashville R&B», is the only guy to have at least a bit of information available on him (he contributes the bouncy ʽ24 Hours A Dayʼ, the album's most fun, but still completely generic number), but who is Larry Addison? Who is Robert A. Johnson? (Thank God for the «A.», or one could have thought the unthinkable). Who are all these people and why do they have careers in songwriting? At this point, it would have been far more pleasant if Bobby just stuck to old chestnuts — heck, even an album of Sinatra covers would be preferable.

 

MIDNIGHT RUN (1989)

 

1) You've Got To Hurt Before You Heal; 2) Lay Love Aside; 3) Kiss Me To The Music; 4) Keep It A Secret; 5) Take Off Your Shoes; 6) Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone; 7) If I Don't Get Involved; 8) I'm Not Ashamed To Sing The Blues; 9) Midnight Run; 10) Starting All Over Again.

 

No surprises, although, fortunately, the classic covers are back — there is no way Bobby could go wrong with his (predictable, but wonderful all the same) interpretation of ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ, or with the old Mel & Tim ballad ʽStarting All Over Againʼ, which makes here for a somewhat more optimistic and uplifting conclusion than last time's ʽThere's No Easy Way To Say Good­byeʼ, and the funny thing is that one doesn't even have to listen to either in order to understand that.

 

Still, two oldies' covers on a late period Bobby Bland album is too few, because the remaining songs are again provided by his sidemen, and are not in the least memorable. Just like last time, there is exactly one «fun» 12-bar blues (ʽTake Off Your Shoesʼ), nice while it's on; and then, like every self-respecting old bluesman, Bobby commands himself a song that explains why exactly he is still hanging around after so many years (ʽI'm Not Ashamed To Sing The Bluesʼ — actually, a song like that did make sense in 1989, when the popularity of the blues was only just beginning to recover after a decade-long snooze; that said, it's not as if the song smells of any particular heroism or self-sacrifice).

 

Additionally, ʽYou've Got To Hurtʼ opens the album on a powerful epic-ballad note; ʽLay Love Asideʼ tries to echo Bobby's dance-oriented R&B grooves of the mid-1970s; and the title track straightens out a reggae groove as the band does indeed search a little bit to expand its horizons. Neither the epic thing, nor the dance thing, nor the reggae schtick feature any outstanding musi­cianship or musical ideas, but at least there seems to be a bit more emphasis on guitars and strings rather than synthesizers, and a bit more diversity, which would altogether indicate an upward movement of the curve. If anyone still cared, that is. Anyway, expressing the same idea in com­mercial terms — better grab Midnight Run for a quarter than Blues You Can Use for a nickel.

 

PORTRAIT OF THE BLUES (1991)

 

1) Ain't No Love For Sale; 2) Hurtin' Love; 3) These Are The Things That A Woman Needs; 4) I Can Take You To Heaven Tonight; 5) The Last One To Know; 6) Just Take My Love; 7) I Just Won't Be Your Fool Anymore; 8) She's Puttin' Something In My Food; 9) When Hearts Grow Cold; 10) Let Love Have Its Way.

 

Just as I was winding myself up into the brain-wrecking procedure of writing something «origi­nal» on Bobby's fifth or sixth Malaco album, news came in that Bobby passed away on June 23rd, 2013 — nothing to be particularly sorry about, since the man seems to have lived a long and gene­rally satisfying, well-deserved life that most of us could only envy. It would seem natural to dedicate this review to his memory, but then, like all of his late period records, this isn't a parti­cularly outstanding album to deserve a «specially dedicated» review. Rather, let us just hope this entire set of Bobby Bland reviews somehow helps to keep that memory alive.

 

Anyway, Portrait Of The Blues sounds almost completely the same way as Midnight Run. There are two relative highlights, placed at the very start. ʽAin't No Love For Saleʼ is a moody throwback to the days of ʽAin't No Love In The Heart Of The Cityʼ (the title of the latter is even chanted in the background, just in case somebody happened to miss the stylistic link), with a bit more tension than usual, generated not only by Bobby's vocals, but also by some pretty exquisite Clapton-esque guitar work (not sure who exactly is responsible — the liner notes list about four or five different guitarists, none of whom are all that familiar). Then ʽHurtin' Loveʼ completely switches the mood from desperate to optimistic, and the lead instrument switches to organ from guitar — an equally dexterous part. No melodic inventions whatsoever, just good vibes.

 

From there on, the album slows down a bit, loosens up, and becomes the usual always-nice, never-grabby sequence of blues ballads and lite funk, only shifting gears once on ʽShe's Puttin' Something In My Foodʼ (slow blues-de-luxe that sounds like every other blues-de-luxe number ever recorded, but the song title and the misogynist sentiments do look funny wedged in between all the romantic libations elsewhere).

 

As usual, most of the titles are «written» by Bobby's Malaco sidemen (quotation marks indicate that the actual writing has mostly been confined to the lyrics, and even these mainly consist of rearranging pre-available sets of blues idioms, in the good old folk tradition), and once again they decide to cut down on the covers — in every other respect, arrangements and production do not differ from Midnight Run one iota.

 

YEARS OF TEARS (1993)

 

1) Somewhere Between Right & Wrong; 2) There's A Stranger In My House; 3) Hole In The Wall; 4) Years Of Tears To Go; 5) Hurtin' Time Again; 6) I Just Tripped On A Piece Of Your Broken Heart; 7) Sweet Lady Love; 8) Love Of Mine; 9) I've Got To Have Your Love Tonight; 10) You Put The Hurt On A Hurtin' Man.

 

It takes serious experience, and a large pot of desire to waste your time and strength on something as strange as that, to track and mark down all the tiny mood fluctuations from one late period Bobby Bland album to another (and with a little less politeness, you could scratch «late period»). Being neither experienced nor desirous, I can only say that I vaguely suspect a relative fall back into the somber and the tragic on the appropriately named Years Of Tears. Whether it is simply an astute artistic move or the whole thing was triggered by something personal, I do not know. The important thing is, there's a lot of hurting to go through on this album, and, as usual, it is not being gone through all that convincingly.

 

Changes to the old formula involve... nothing — the most «different» thing on the entire album is the little old-school echoey arpeggio that introduces ʽSomewhere Between Right & Wrongʼ, im­mediately to become a nice, but totally ordinary Fifties-progression-based soul number. ʽYears Of Tears To Goʼ and ʽI Just Tripped On A Piece Of Your Broken Heartʼ (gotta love those titles that Bobby's sidemen seem to be generating for him on an algorithmic basis) are two more long, deluxe shows of the spirit, and the rest is more or less evenly split between sentimental ballads and angry 12-bar stuff (of which ʽHole In The Wallʼ, about Bobby's party-loving partner, is pro­bably the tightest and the most lyrically suggestive, but, as usual, that ain't saying much). ʽYou Put The Hurt On A Hurtin' Manʼ has a poppier and, therefore, more memorable chorus but not much of a hurtin' atmosphere, despite repeating the word twice in the same title.

 

Other than that, the only thing there is to say is that Bobby cuts down on the snorting a little bit — I may be off, not having done the proper calculations and all, but it seems as if, on the whole, those animal noises have been somewhat subdued. Whether this is a sign of increased modesty, or just advanced age, I have no idea.

 

SAD STREET (1995)

 

1) Double Trouble; 2) Sad Street; 3) God Bless The Child; 4) Tonight's The Night; 5) My Heart's Been Broken Again; 6) I've Got A Twenty Room House; 7) Mind Your Own Business; 8) I Wanna Tell You About The Blues; 9) I Had A Dream Last Night; 10) Let's Have Some Fun.

 

And here is the news. First, Bobby covers ʽGod Bless The Childʼ. The song is capable of yielding to the man, yet I wonder just how adequately he could get into it at the moment — Billie Holiday had written it just as she was getting out (tentatively) of financial straits, whereas Bobby's well-being had not generally been called into problem for about thirty years or so. As good as the song is, this reading is completely perfunctory, and I'd rather see Bobby do perfunctory readings of less personal numbers.

 

For that matter, his other cover choice — of Rod Stewart's bedroom anthem ʽTonight's The Nightʼ — is far more appropriate, even if the old man does feel the need to change the "let me come inside" line to something less provocative ("let your lovelight shine" or something like that, I already forgot), and even if the song is just as gauche here and now as it used to be when Rod The No Longer Mod used it to help solve the demographic problem. But that's Bobby, all right.

 

Next, it is really all about Bobby Bland and his odd team of late-period songwriters to take the name of an old blues classic about poverty and rejection (ʽDouble Troubleʼ) and apply it to some­thing more morally ambiguous: "I've got double trouble between my woman and my wife / My wife runs my pocketbook and my woman is running my life". It's a decent enough, slow-running, nostalgically recorded piece of blues-de-luxe, but somehow these new-fangled attempts at taking century-old lyrical clichés and reinventing them seem a little corny these days, don't they?

 

Maybe not quite as corny as the title track, though — the album's attempt at a Significant Social Statement: seven minutes of somewhat uncertain complaining about how "the streets used to be filled with love, but all you hear about now is blood". Considering that Bobby Bland, the trouba­dour of broken hearts and carnal passions, had very rarely taken to heart the problems of society at large, this particular stab at a «grass-was-greener» sermon is a failure, despite some impressive ingredients (such as a grim wah-wah lead line crawling along those sad streets, sometimes threa­tening to erupt in a poisonous solo but never capitalizing on the promise). Somehow I doubt that the streets of Bobby's childhood were filled with that much more love than wherever he was spending his advanced years in 1995 — but then again, who knows. Maybe it's just his way of expressing dissatisfaction on the illegal immigration issue.

 

Finally, the really odd one out on this album is ʽI Had A Dream Last Nightʼ — from the title, one would never guess that the song is a thoroughly nostalgic disco number, replete with disco strings and disco back vocals à la 1977. The band seems so happy with being able to establish such a perfect facsimile, they forget to switch off the tape when the song is over and just keep on groo­ving for an extra two or three minutes. Nowhere near a great number, of course, but enough to give the reviewer an opportunity to add one more paragraph.

 

All of which, in the end, amounts to no less than five songs that merit a special mention — making Sad Street a record-breaking album in Bobby Bland's post-1970s career, but still not enough to guide it over the «great for fans, useless for everybody else» threshold.

 

LIVE ON BEALE STREET (1998)

 

1) Intro; 2) When Your Love Is Not Around; 3) That's The Way Love Is; 4) Love Of Mine; 5) As Soon As The Weather Breaks; 6) Farther On Up The Road; 7) I Pity The Fool; 8) Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone; 9) St. James Infirmary; 10) I'll Take Care Of You; 11) Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time; 12) You've Got To Hurt Before You Heal; 13) Sunday Morning Love; 14) If You're Gonna Walk On My Love; 15) Bobby Rush / John­nie Taylor Introduction; 16) Stormy Monday; 17) Double Trouble / She's Puttin' Somethin' In My Food; 18) Mem­bers Only; 19) 24 Hours A Day.

 

Yes, it does look as if this was recorded live on Beale Street — at the New Daisy Theater, to be more precise; a symbolic gesture, easily interpreted by anyone who has not yet forgotten the humble beginnings of Bobby Bland's career. Additionally, it is the first (and only) proper live album in Bobby's discography (not counting the joint Bobby Bland / B. B. King albums), so it is only natural that the elderly gentleman should choose the city that gave birth to his career for this particular recording.

 

Considering that, by the mid-1990s, Bobby's Malaco backing band had left behind most of the electronic excesses and seemed happy to just play old-fashioned blues behind Bobby's back, Live On Beale Street does not seem particularly far removed from something like Sad Street or Years Of Tears — let alone the fact that Bobby himself, apparently, considered these late period albums authentic and respectable enough to include a lot of that new material into his setlists. So, at least half — more than half, come to think of it — of the album is dedicated to the post-1984 Malaco stuff, lightly peppered and salted with some predictable old hits from the Duke days. So lightly, in fact, that both ʽI Pity The Foolʼ and ʽFarther On Up The Roadʼ are reduced to medley-status items, trimmed and tamed in sheer disproportion to their dignity.

 

Consequently, the bad news is that this is not a live career retrospective, and the album does not make much sense if you have already heard all those studio albums. On the other hand, the good news is that Live On Beale Street offers a great opportunity to just dump all the studio albums, and remain perfectly contented with this impressive sampler — all of the samples being played live, without the excessive production gloss of the studio, before a homely, receptive audience where Bobby feels right at home.

 

Notable curios, as far as I can remember, include: (a) an audience participation bit on ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ, roughly interrupted by Bobby when they get it wrong ("now wait a minute, I'd like for you to help me, but somebody got too many ʽI knowsʼ out there..."); (b) a rather messy medley for which Bobby drags out fellow soul-bluesman Johnnie Taylor and fellow «folk-funkster» Bobby Rush for aid, whereupon they merrily deconstruct and bury ʽStormy Monday Bluesʼ; and for (c), I'd like to be able to let you know that Bobby keeps the snorts to a minimum, but I am not exactly sure if 5 or 6 times in 60 minutes counts as a «minimum», and even these calculations are very crude. Anyway, he does snort, including on songs where he never snorted before (ʽSt. James In­firmaryʼ — almost a sacrilege, that one).

 

But overall, the man and his band are in fine form throughout, and clearly enjoying what they're doing here. Also, to the pleasure of all blues-loving people, the show has been released on DVD, and watching the whole thing definitely makes more sense than just listening — Bobby's facial expressions and idiosyncratic love affair with the mike add a lot for entertainment value. Ultima­tely, a decisive thumbs up here for something not particularly great, but pleasantly outstanding on a conveyer belt of smooth «neo-retro-blues» LPs.

 

MEMPHIS MONDAY MORNING (1998)

 

1) I'm Bobby B; 2) I Don't Want No Kickin' In My Stall; 3) There's A Rat Loose In My House; 4) The Truth Will Set You Free; 5) Memphis Monday Morning; 6) I'm Glad; 7) My Baby Is The Only One; 8) I Hate Missin' You; 9) You Left Me With The Blues; 10) Lookin' For Some Tush.

 

Very little unpredictable stuff here, either. The punch is in Bobby's age — he cut this at the age of 69, and he still snorts it out the same way he did thirty years ago. In fact, at this point he even allows himself a bit of straightforward swagger, opening the album with the uptempo cut ʽI'm Bobby Bʼ, written and performed in the been-there-done-that-licked-'em-all manner that is so ty­pical of old school R&B artists, but, let us admit that honestly, had rarely, if ever, appeared pre­viously on a Bobby B record. So if, at 69, he finally yields to the temptation of calling himself the greatest, let him. Anybody who does not turn to liquid shit at that age deserves a little self-flattery, and Memphis Monday Morning has the man going as strong as ever.

 

The songs do tend to drag — particularly the title track, creeping at a snail's pace for almost nine minutes, not to mention that its late evening vibe, lounge piano and sunset trumpet romanticism included, does not particularly well agree with the word «morning» in the title. Some of the gene­ric blues-de-luxe numbers, like ʽThere's A Rat Loose In My Houseʼ, also go on for absurdly long time periods, although it could be said that Bobby's band, after all these years, simply gels toge­ther so well that it makes them reluctant to stop.

 

But on the positive side, the whole album has but one blues ballad (ʽTruth Will Set You Freeʼ), and it is a good one, with sparse, but clever brass arrangements and an atmosphere that seems totally lifted off from some early Solomon Burke torch song. In fact, if possible, the entirety of Memphis Monday Morning sounds more retro and oblivious to «modern blues standards» than any previously released Malaco recording — which is great news for Bobby, even if it does sur­mise surreptitiously rewriting old classics: ʽMy Baby Is The Only Oneʼ, for instance, lifts its main vocal / instrumental melody directly from Sam Cooke's ʽTwistin' The Night Awayʼ. But there is no way we could use this a pretext for incrimination: at this point, Bobby B. has nothing left to prove, nor do his resident songwriters.

 

That said, the last two tracks of the album seem like last-minute additions that do try to prove something new. ʽYou Left Me With The Bluesʼ switches the mood from «old school R&B» to «new school R&B», with programmed beats, looped funky leads, synthesizers (which were pre­viously dormant), and even a few forced «ughs!» from the man. It isn't nauseatingly bad, but it does spoil the overall feeling a bit. But the real surprise is the short and surprisingly kick-ass (hard rock riffage and all) cover of ZZ Top's ʽTushʼ — a style that Bobby B. had never before approached in his whole life, and for a 69-year old guy, he tackles it with more gusto than could be expected. So why didn't this guy try on some authentic rock'n'roll shoes decades ago? Or, at the very least, offered his services as lead vocalist for Grand Funk Railroad?..

 

BLUES AT MIDNIGHT (2003)

 

1) Where Do I Go From Here; 2) I Caught The Blues From Someone Else; 3) You Hit The Nail On The Head; 4) I've Got The Blues At Midnight; 5) Baby What's Wrong With You; 6) What A Wonderful World; 7) My Sunday's Co­min' Soon; 8) This Man-Woman Thing; 9) The Only Thing Missing Is You; 10) I'm A Blues Man; 11) Ghetto Nights.

 

Old age finally caught up with Mr. Bland at the turn of the millennium: Blues At Midnight was his first new album in five years rather than two (the usual interval for his entire life at Malaco), and, as fate would have it, his last album altogether — it was certainly not intended to be a swan song, but the next ten years of Bobby's life were spent without further ventures to the recording studio. Kind of ominously ironic, then, that the first song on his last album just had to be titled ʽWhere Do I Go From Hereʼ — verily and indeed ever so.

 

In fact, the shadow of the nearing end does loom over the entire record, and, when seen from that angle, Blues At Midnight may end up looking like the most interesting, touching, and thought-provoking record of Bobby's entire post-1970s career. As long as he was still relatively hale and hardy, and set up with a low-budget, but solid 'n' steady recording contract, he had little to care about other than recording whatever came his way, as long as it had that beat and gave him plenty of room to insert an explosive snort or two. Now that he has bypassed that 70-year-old mark be­yond which even Mick Jagger starts having problems, it almost feels, subconsciously, as if his next record were an attempt at summarizing something — and even though all the songs, as usual, are credited to his corporate songwriting team, they must have caught that hint, and made sure that Blues At Midnight, in many ways, sounded like some sort of a last confession.

 

Formally, ʽWhere Do I Go From Hereʼ is just another blues lament on lost love topics, but Bobby delivers it with just a little more tension than usual, and the brass / organ / guitar / backing vocals combo seems ready to assist him as best they can. Later on, three of the tracks feature the word «blues» in the title — a record-breaking streak for Bobby — and they are all meaningful: ʽI Caught The Blues From Someone Elseʼ is a bitter rocker that examines the roots of getting into the business (well, not really, but could be...); ʽI've Got The Blues At Midnightʼ is a passable, but 100%-Bobby interpretation of what the blues is all about (12:00 A.M., and you're still not getting any); and ʽI'm A Blues Manʼ, starting off with slide guitar, harmonica, our favorite snort, and "I was raised up on Jimmy Reed" (what? you were a contemporary of Jimmy Reed, Bobby!), is a kind of tune that Bobby never really tried before — this sort of semi-authentic swamp-blues was almost as far removed from his brand of blues-de-luxe as, say, heavy metal. All the more curious to see him try and assert this legacy thus late in his career — with a direct invocation of the spirits of Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and the rest.

 

The «magnum opus» of the album, however, is its last track. ʽGhetto Nightsʼ is a slow, moody shuffle, very much in the vein of Bobby's mid-1970s «blacksploitation» period, with similar pro­duction and socially-oriented sentimentalism, and suitably loaded with atmospheric overdubs (such as the superimposition of a police radio transcript to simulate an actual ghetto environment). There is no attempt at a universalist statement here, such as on ʽSad Streetʼ, and, in fact, the lyrics do not even directly deal with issues of poverty / crime / etc., but this only helps the track gain in subtlety — it may not be a masterpiece, but it is one of the moodiest, bleakest-sounding things Bobby had the luck to record ever since his image-makers in the late 1970s decided that «dark» and «shivery» are unsuitable epithets for suave ladies' man Bobby B.

 

I guess I should stress that none of these songs are genuine masterpieces (as usual, they are too generic and middle-of-the-road for that), and that there is plenty of completely routine filler as well, let alone the irritating detail that Bobby really takes his time while stretching out on the coda to almost every one of these songs: only a (rather shaky) cover of ʽWhat A Wonderful Worldʼ sticks to a three-minute length — everything else, for some reason, must have from one to two or three extra minutes of Bobby trading signal calls with his female backing vocalists across the studio hall, even such dumb 12-bar exercises as ʽYou Hit The Nail On The Headʼ (and you did it so many times, Bobby, that little remains of the hammer, much less the nail).

 

Still, I would like to end this with a thumbs up — not merely out of general respect for the recently deceased Bobby B., but continuing to insist that Blues At Midnight is moving and mea­ningful (in spots), not to mention that Bobby's vocal abilities remain almost completely un­im­paired to the very end. Whether there is some sort of uncomfortably intriguing premonition here or not, is up to you to decide — but, as far as my own sixth sense is concerned, the record rises just one small inch above mere routine professionalism, and that is enough to recommend it.

BRENDA LEE

GRANDMA WHAT GREAT SONGS YOU SANG! (1959)

 

1) Some Of These Days; 2) Pennies From Heaven; 3) Baby Face; 4) A Good Man Is Hard To Find; 5) Just Because; 6) Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye; 7) Ballin' The Jack; 8) Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody; 9) Pretty Baby; 10) Side By Side; 11) Back In Your Own Back Yard; 12) St. Louis Blues.

 

When Brenda Lee set out to record her first LP in early 1959, she had already been a big star for three years, ever since stunning the nation with her red-hot ʽJambalayaʼ back in 1956 at the tender age of 11 (of course, Decca Records couldn't resist the temptation to label her as «Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old)» — the old adagio of «where there's publicity, there's cheating» strikes again). More than that, she was already known as «Little Miss Dynamite», having recorded her deadliest rock'n'roll explosion in 1957 — and thus, choosing a selection of pre-war (pre-Depression, in fact, which is accurately reflected in the album title) ditties for her first LP must have been somewhat anti-climactic for the fans.

 

Of course, by 1959 the initial wave of rock'n'roll enthusiasm was already breaking, with well-combed «teen idols» gradually replacing the rebels for a while, and it may have been judged a prudent career move for the girl to switch from the «aggressiveness» of ʽDynamiteʼ and ʽRockin' Around The Christmas Treeʼ to something more tame and traditional. Ironically — perhaps by some sort of subconscious inertia — it is Grandma... that turned out to be one of the rockiest and brawniest albums in Brenda's huge catalog.

 

Recorded in two sessions at a Nashville studio, the album has no «ballads» as such — it is com­prised of old popular dance, vaudeville, and white blues songs, not surprisingly, some of which had previously already entered the rock'n'roll repertoire (for instance, Little Richard did ʽBaby Faceʼ, and Elvis, of course, covered ʽJust Becauseʼ, with both of Brenda's interpretations rather doing homage to their versions than the originals). The arrangements, despite a plethora of studio musicians, are generally sparse and homely, with at least as much emphasis on rockabilly guitar as there is on brass — and then, of course, there are the vocals.

 

There is not much subtlety, thoughtfulness, depth, or flexibility in these vocals — and neither could one rigorously demand all of that from a 14-year old who had the nerve to take on Sophie Tucker and Bessie Smith at the same time (kicking off the album with the former and closing with the latter). But there is power, intensity, and plenty of swagger — rustic, unrefined swagger of the rock'n'roll era, that is, not the subtle emancipated swagger of the days of old. Other than one (not particularly tragic) misstep — she does a rather wooden take on ʽPennies From Heavenʼ, especially compared with the Billie Holiday version — it all works.

 

Brenda's trademark «roar» that she already flashed with gusto on her earliest records is only briefly heard here on ʽJust Becauseʼ (which might, vocally, be even more impressive than the Elvis version) — but even without roaring, she is pretty good at overpowering the listener on all those songs where the listener (a hopeless male) has to be overpowered (by a strong female). It does help to remember that the girl was 14: for a fully grown-up performer, these takes on the «classics» can seem a little strained, or a little shaky, or, on the contrary, a little over-the-top, as if the performer really felt herself in need of «proving» something — which she, of course, was, as would be every 14-year old taking on the burden of recording ʽSt. Louis Bluesʼ for commercial release.

 

Me certainly not being a big fan of the pre-war popular song, I do recognize that it is not the sheetnotes that matter in most such cases — it is the attitude; and there is a tiny bit of punkish arrogance in the attitude that Brenda adopts for these performances, meaning that, crazy as it might seem to some, I'd rather listen to this than to, say, Bing Crosby singing the same songs. Yet even Bing Crosby fans will probably find the album to their liking. Also, just for the record, early guitar hero Hank Garland (whom most people will probably recognize from Presley's ʽLittle Sisterʼ) is responsible for most of the lead playing on the album — one more reason for a merry little thumbs up.

 

BRENDA LEE (1960)

 

1) Dynamite; 2) Weep No More My Baby; 3) Jambalaya (On The Bayou); 4) (If I'm Dreaming) Just Let Me Dream; 5) Be My Love Again; 6) My Baby Likes Western Guys; 7) Sweet Nothin's; 8) I'm Sorry; 9) That's All You Gotta Do; 10) Heading Home; 11) Wee Wee Willies; 12) Let's Jump The Broomstick.

 

Unlike later albums, this self-titled release was actually recorded over several different sessions that took place between 1958 and 1960 — which is a good thing, since rock'n'roll was still a hot thing on the charts and in people's minds when the sessions began, and, consequently, Brenda Lee is the rockiest, liveliest set of songs in the lady's career. Hard as it is to believe for those who have some idea of a faint outline of Brenda's career, only one of these twelve songs is a sentimen­tal ballad — and it happens to be her signature tune at that. The rest is either rockabilly or dance-oriented country-western, with a little bit of twisting and New Orleans for extra diversity.

 

Several of the tracks had been earlier released as singles, and are presented here in remade ver­sions: ʽJambalayaʼ, for instance, which was Brenda's first nationwide success at the age of 11, is slightly sped up and nourished with some King Curtis-style sax, while ʽDynamiteʼ, the single that got her the famous nickname, is embellished with extra strings and backing vocals. Needless to say, the originals are a bit rougher and tougher, but these versions are still quite wholesome, and hold up well on their own: Brenda's pirate snarl on the "jambalaya, cold fish pie and filet gumbo" line used to literally send shivers down my spine, and still does — it probably does take a 13-year old to produce that kind of effect.

 

But it is really ʽDynamiteʼ that exemplifies early Brenda Lee — way down in history, way before there ever was a ʽBaby Hit Me One More Timeʼ, there was this little girl, much younger than Britney, who bellowed "If I might do all the things / I'd love to do tonight / Then I would love you dear / With all my might... I just explode like dynamite!" and you were almost ready to com­mit a capital crime by actually believing what she sang. Of course, the arrangement is very inno­cent, done in gentle Nashville style, and the kid-rock melody is vaudeville-turned-rockabilly, but the song is still a significant milestone — no other white girl, not even Wanda Jackson, who was Brenda's chief (and only?) competitor at the time, could afford to let herself that loose back in the late Fifties. And there is nothing in the song that would diminish its freshness and excitement today — this is not simply some sort of «American Idol» thing, it is a daring, bravura per­for­mance that could not have been the result of merely memorizing a set formula.

 

Unfortunately, ʽDynamiteʼ did not do as well on the charts as ʽI'm Sorryʼ, which first gained po­pularity as a B-side, then rose to #1 as an A-side, and eventually became the song to be forever associated with Brenda. It is a decent ballad that she honestly pushes towards greatness — where her earliest songs, for understandable reasons of age, valued adrenaline over depth and subtlety, this lost love confession prompted her to add dynamics and flexibility, and I guess it does mark the transition from child phenomenon to mature artist. But the fact that ʽI'm Sorryʼ became the first song to make her a household name also resulted in the inevitable — a tendency to drift far­ther and farther into syrupy ballad territory, and away from the rockabilly turf that gave her birth and nurtured her to this maturity.

 

But we are running ahead here, because, like I said, most of Brenda Lee is still deep in kick-ass territory, or, adjusting to the circumstances, in «pat-ass» territory. Most of the songs are contribu­ted by outside songwriters and are derivative to the core, but that does not matter as long as the source inspiration was fun in the first place, and it was: ʽLet's Jump The Broomstickʼ clearly owes a lot to Little Richard's ʽSlippin' And Slidin'ʼ, and it is nice to hear Brenda pay this kind of tribute, even if the cumulative effect is (predictably) a little less overwhelming. (The song was covered a decade later by Sandy Denny, who managed to make it bluesy and ominous instead of whirlygig-funny — a curious feat).

 

Other highlights include ʽMy Baby Likes Western Guysʼ, where the protagonist complains about her lover's Western TV show obsession impeding the lovemaking process (it is a funny song, be­lieve me, though not quite on the Coasters level); ʽSweet Nothin'sʼ, credited to Ronnie Self, the author of ʽI'm Sorryʼ, and giving Brenda the opportunity to sound a little foxy; and ʽThat's All You Gotta Doʼ, the former A-side of ʽI'm Sorryʼ, which is just a sweet fast pop-rocker — sort of Motown-lite that the early Beatles would have loved. As for lowlights... well, some of the tunes are less memorable than others — that is to be expected — but there is hardly a single song on here that wouldn't be fun at all, or would have Ms. Lee try and perform something way beyond her reach or understanding.

 

I would go as far as suggest that, for 1960, Brenda Lee constitutes an essential listen. Even if we want to believe that the teen phenomenon was completely «manufactured», there is nothing on the record itself to suggest that. The music is nowhere near groundbreaking, but it is consistently fun, and to have an underage female rocker shake your world in an age when most of the male «veteran» rockers were giving up their positions must have been awesome: yes, the arrangements are wimpy, but they are not completely smooth and sterile — and that voice is anything but wimpy. Thumbs up without further questions: for those who prefer to deal in original LPs rather than compilations, Brenda Lee is the real deal about this girl.

 

THIS IS... BRENDA (1960)

 

1) When My Dreamboat Comes Home; 2) I Want To Be Wanted; 3) Just A Little; 4) Pretend; 5) Love And Learn; 6) Teach Me Tonight; 7) Hallelujah I Love Him So; 8) Walkin' To New Orleans; 9) Blueberry Hill; 10) We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, And Me); 11) Build A Big Fence; 12) If I Didn't Care.

 

Brenda's second LP from 1960 was already a much tighter affair: recorded in about six months' time (as opposed to two years), although still in six separate sessions, showcasing the obsessive perfectionism of her Nashville team. In keeping up with the times — and the times were signifi­cantly influenced by whatever Elvis was doing ever since his return from the army — the record moves farther away from the rockabilly spirit: this time, nearly half of the songs are ballads, and the rest drift between soft, careful, politely danceable Brill Building pop and Southern rhythm and blues. There is still a thin rebellious streak running through the record, but it gets harder to discern it behind the layers of conventionalism, particularly in the songwriting.

 

The album's big hit, in fact, one of Brenda's biggest, was ʽI Want To Be Wantedʼ, an English translation of an Italian pop song — but, fair enough, Brenda did manage to almost completely strip the tune of its theatrical Italian flavor and imbue it with some Nashville tough-girl stuffing instead: where its Italian versions (Tony Dallara, etc.) were troubadourish (wimpy, that is), the new English words ("I wanna be wanted right now, not tomorrow, but right now!") are sung by Brenda with such power that it's pretty easy to see how the song was destined for red-hot number-oneness in an era of sexual build-up — you could almost see the Beatles as a response to this desperate plea for release. The song itself is a trifle, but the interpretation is pure gold.

 

There is more to that story: the choice of cover tunes also includes ʽTeach Me Tonightʼ (again, sung with such determination that one wonders who'd be teaching whom), and Betty Chotas' ʽJust A Littleʼ with a decidedly hooliganish drawl in the chorus. I am not implying that the whole album goes like that, or even that these particular songs have a notably stronger erotic effect than so much competition at the time — but I am implying that some of this stuff must have sounded fairly risqué for a 16-year old (even if the exact age still remains undetectable on the record), and that thinking of This Is... Brenda in these terms adds some much-needed thrill.

 

Particularly since she is still too young to bring in any sophisticated nuance: the purely romantic ballads, such as ʽPretendʼ and ʽIf I Didn't Careʼ, suffer from too much formula, and when it comes to covers of well-known songs, there is not much she is able to add to the legacy of ʽBlue­berry Hillʼ (the speeding up and the playful hiccup are not much help), or to Ray Charles' ʽHalle­lujah I Love Her Soʼ (except to change the «her» to «him»). They're fun (good songs that are very hard to spoil in the first place), but never essential.

 

Musically, we are offered the same expert Nashville backing here as usual, with more strings and less guitar work than I'd like to hear and only one truly inventive, «muffled» sax solo from Boots Randolph on the ʽLove & Learnʼ shuffle. Still, this is all generally within the pop-rock formula of the time, with tight limits set on sentimentality quotas — it is only the lack of one or two outstan­ding displays of fast-paced joyful aggressiveness, like ʽDynamiteʼ, that are indicative of the curve having narrowly passed its peak; and even without a ʽDynamiteʼ to its name, This Is... Brenda is one of the girl's best and naturally deserves a thumbs up.

 

EMOTIONS (1961)

 

1) Emotions; 2) Just Another Lie; 3) If You Love Me (Really Love Me); 4) Crazy Talk; 5) When I Fall In Love; 6) Around The World; 7) Swanee River Rock; 8) Will You Love Me Tomorrow; 9) I'm Learning About Love; 10) Georgia On My Mind; 11) Cry; 12) I'm In The Mood For Love.

 

Same stylistics, same production team, same relentless perfectionism (seven different recording sessions now, after the six of This Is... Brenda), same balanced mix of bearded oldies, recent oldies, and freshly written corporate material. The only difference: out of 12 songs, two-thirds are ballads, fair and square, bringing that train still farther and farther away from the girl's rockabilly past — and, considering that the title track predictably made it into the Top 10, this line of deve­lopment only seemed more and more viable as the months and years went by and the «little Miss Dynamite» was all set to grow into a «mature» Nashville queen.

 

Fortunately, the Nashville production team still keeps a firm grip on the limits of good taste, so that the strings are rarely overbearing, and sometimes actually border on delicious — ʽJust Ano­ther Lieʼ, a new number loosely based on some of Chuck Willis' tunes, instead of formulaic or­chestration, has a haunting solo violin part that comes in through an imaginary archway midway through, and gives the tune a little bit of a Stephane Grappelli feel.

 

The title track does have such a powerhouse delivery that its choice for a single was understan­dable: the musical backing is non-descript, but this is the first time in Brenda's career when she seems to perfectly understand the power of dynamic modulation, and, true to the song's title, tries to convey not one, but several different types of emotions over those three minutes — listen to the big kick of "EMOTIONS, please set me free!..." after the first few quiet bars of the chorus, and you'll see what I mean.

 

Elsewhere, she takes on Edith Piaf (ʽIf You Love Meʼ), understandably, with little success, but then again, one shouldn't necessarily be aware that the song is originally a French tune; the Shi­relles and Carole King (ʽWill You Love Me Tomorrowʼ), with far more success, even though I do believe nobody ever invested as much personal feeling into that song as its original author; and Ray Charles (we won't be saying «Hoagy Carmichael», really), with ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ — a competent version, but only weathered old men can really do justice to that song (or, at least, those who successfully pretend to be weathered old men, like Richard Manuel from The Band).

 

Of the four upbeat tunes, ʽCrazy Talkʼ is a fun little wannabe-classic, where guitar, sax, and vo­cals do indeed come together in a bit of «crazy talk»; and the B-side ʽI'm Learning About Loveʼ, despite the suspicious title, is in fact a jumpy pop-rocker, with the most vivacious tone on the album and a welcome return of the old «pirate growl» from Little Miss Dynamite.

 

So, on the whole, one might subtract one or two of the more faceless ballads (like ʽWhen I Fall In Loveʼ), or smirk a bit about such childish cover material as the theme tune from Around The World In 80 Days, but Emotions still delivers... well, emotions. feeling glossy, but lively and cheery, and for that, gets its duly thumbs up.

 

ALL THE WAY (1961)

 

1) Lover Come Back To Me; 2) All The Way; 3) Dum Dum; 4) On The Sunny Side Of The Street; 5) Talkin' 'Bout You; 6) Someone To Love Me; 7) Do I Worry; 8) Tragedy; 9) Kansas City; 10) Eventually; 11) Speak To Me Pretty; 12) The Big Chance.

 

Definitely a step back up from Emotions — in fact, this one LP should probably rank as one of Brenda's most well-balanced, stylish, and intelligent records, as far as her pop formula could carry all these things. The ballad-to-rocker ratio is normalized to about fifty-fifty; the actual bal­lads and rockers are diverse, once again with a clever mix of ancient oldies, recent oldies, and newly penned material — and somehow, most of this stuff happens to be designed or re-designed with flashy vocal and / or instrumental twists, well suited to Brenda's vocal abilities and the mu­sical skills of her Nashville backers — and every once in a while, the music rises well above the usual easy-listening pablum levels and becomes almost endearing.

 

Thus, ʽLover Come Back To Meʼ is updated here to match the demands of early 1960s dance-pop («rock'n'roll» would be too tough a term), but it's almost odd to hear Brenda sing the chorus line in such an obviously commanding tone ("LOVER! come back TO ME!") where most of the jazz greats who sang it before her used a more pleading or generally neutral approach — and she sang it at a far earlier age, too, but then again, maybe «teenage rebellion» is where it's at. Then, right off the bat, she goes for another song that is at least partly associated with Billie Holiday (the title track), and does it equally full justice — the «grand finale» puts a pretty heavy tax on her vocal skills, but it all pays off.

 

Some of the newly written ballads are genuinely interesting — ʽTragedyʼ, stuck somewhere in between country-western and doo-wop, is brilliantly modulated, nicely hooked, and should be every bit as respectable as the best known Elvis ballads from the same period; ʽEventuallyʼ, writ­ten by Ronnie Self of ʽI'm Sorryʼ's fame, is a juicy moody bit with a subtle threat and an unusual and unpredictable dissection of the word "eventually" that may sound forced and uncouth at first, but will get intriguing later as you try to deduce its phonetic symbolism. (Nice and tasty echoing of the vocals by the violins, too).

 

ʽEventuallyʼ eventually emerged as the B-side to the album's single, Jackie DeShannon's ʽDum Dumʼ, which rose to No. 4 on the charts and is considerably (though not unimaginably) tougher and sexier than its title would have one believe — especially with Brenda adopting her «pirate» tone for most of the song's duration, except for the chorus resolution, where, for a brief titillating flash, the pirate is revealed as a vixen before putting the mask back on again. The expectable Ray Charles impersonation (ʽTalkin' 'Bout Youʼ) is too restrained to be of much interest, but her ʽKansas Cityʼ is fun and defiant enough ("they got some crazy little men there, I'm gonna get me one") to rank up there with all the other ʽKansas Citiesʼ in the world, including the Beatles.

 

The rest of the tracks may not deserve special mention or discussion, but the bottomline is that it's all consistently entertaining and rarely, if ever, «tacky»: it was not in Brenda's style to take on material that she was unable to handle, and, additionally, this time around, it just so happened that her outside contributors were on a roll, providing her with catchy stuff. It's all fluffy, but when you're barely pushing 18, there is nothing wrong in singing fluff if you do it adequately, and All The Way is perfectly adequate — let's face it, forcing Brenda Lee to sing ʽStrange Fruitʼ at this juncture would not have been a particularly wise move. Thumbs up.

 

SINCERELY, BRENDA LEE (1962)

 

1) You Always Hurt The One You Love; 2) Lazy River; 3) You've Got Me Crying Again; 4) It's The Talk Of The Town; 5) Send Me Some Lovin'; 6) How Deep Is The Ocean; 7) I'll Always Be In Love With You; 8) I Miss You So; 9) Fools Rush In; 10) Only You (And You Alone); 11) Hold Me; 12) I'll Be Seeing You.

 

The first big misstep in Brenda's career — and it's not even as if the times themselves were pres­sing her into taking it. The musical climate, in early 1962, was much the same as in late 1961, and Brenda's team of musicians, arrangers, and corporate songwriters had not changed much, either, but all the same, someone came up with this ridiculous idea of recording an album consisting of nothing but old Tin Pan Alley stuff, increasing the old quota of about 20-30% to a baffling 100%. Most likely, in an age where people still regarded rockabilly and dance-pop as passable kiddie stuff (not entirely without reason), this move was to signalize «maturation» — and if it was im­possible to market Brenda as the next Peggy Lee, well, then she'd at least have to be the next Doris Day. Not Doris Day? Okay, how about the next Connie Francis?

 

If you like Brenda Lee in general (like I do), and if you honestly cherish pre-rock'n'roll era pop standards in general (like I don't), Sincerely will be right up your alley. From a general point of view on how these songs should be sung and played for maximum effect, Brenda and her band do a competent job — nothing but sheer professionalism from everybody. But the girl did not make the original grade with ʽFools Rush Inʼ: she made it by taking a rowdy Hank Williams song and rowdying it up even further, and this is why she stood out in the first place. When, on the other hand, she tries to convince us that ʽYou Always Hurt The One You Loveʼ, she is doing no better (and no worse) a job than a whole army of her good-looking colleagues in the same business.

 

The only song on the entire album that is still sung with faint echoes of her «pirate voice» is Hoagy Carmichael's ʽLazy Riverʼ — unquestionably the album's highest point, especially since Brenda's delivery stays happily ignorant of the sentimentalism that one should naturally expect to be packed together with these lyrics: she mouths those "rub away your troubles, dream a dream with me" in such a commanding tone, you'd be all the wiser to quickly take that advice, or else you'll get your ass whupped with that trombone solo — it means real business.

 

The lack of sugary sentimentalism is the only saving grace that lets one live through the other eleven ballads — but even so, it gets so monotonous so early on that it might be hard discerning where one song stops and the next one begins: that refreshing diversity that made All The Way so easily digestible no longer exists in the confines of this particular formula. Fortunately for us all today, the general public back in 1962 was not particularly impressed, either, and the album seriously dipped in the charts as compared to its predecessor — or, perhaps, this was simply the result of the decision not to put out any accompanying singles. I mean, even in the «saggy» little period between Chuck Berry and the Beatles, a cover of Doris Fisher or Hoagy Carmichael was probably not anybody's best bet for a jukebox attraction. Not a «bad» record altogether (at this time in history, Brenda and her band were physically incapable of putting down a proverbially «bad» record), but a relative thumbs down all the same.

 

BRENDA, THAT'S ALL (1962)

 

1) I'm Sitting On Top Of The World; 2) Fool #1; 3) White Silver Sands; 4) Just Out Of Reach; 5) Sweethearts On Parade; 6) It's A Lonesome Old Town; 7) Organ Grinder's Swing; 8) Gonna Find Me A Bluebird; 9) Why Me?; 10) Valley Of Tears; 11) Someday You'll Want Me To Want You; 12) You Can Depend On Me.

 

Fortunately for all of us who like a good friendly beat for our pop ditties, this album rectifies the mistake of Sincerely and returns to the tried and true: a balanced mix of «adult» and «teen» pop, without any one side trumping any of the others (although, as is always the case, my internal teen keeps gaining the upper hand over my external adult). Technically, perhaps, this is not altogether true, as the ballads numerically dominate over the bop stuff — 8 to 4, to be precise — but only the last three songs present a genuinely noticeable uninterrupted romantic stretch. Elsewhere, the sound is moderately and acceptably diverse, even if the songs themselves still tend to come from the pre-war era: notably, not a single recent teen pop standard is getting covered.

 

Predictably, both of the singles were ballads: ʽYou Can Depend On Meʼ is a bluesy one, previously tackled by Armstrong and Nat King Cole, and ʽFool #1ʼ is a freshly written country waltz, first tried on by Loretta Lynn before hitting the charts in Brenda's version. Nothing of particular inte­rest can be said about either one — the melodies are thoroughly generic, the arrangements fairly trite, and the singer certainly does not seem too interested in adding any subtle nuances, because, really, there is only so much one can do with this sort of material.

 

Things get much more interesting, in relative comparison, on the upbeat stuff, particularly on two songs. The organ-led speedy blues-pop of ʽWhite Silver Sandsʼ puts more of a rock'n'roll spirit in the song than the Don Rondo original from 1957 — leave it to the pirate girl to teach the suave baritone how to get that blood boiling. And ʽOrgan Grinder's Swingʼ is even more «piratish» in nature, putting a hooligan twist on a song that had been in need of rejuvenating ever since Ella Fitzgerald cut it with the Savoy Eight back in 1936, and, true to the song title, featuring cool organ swing a-plenty.

 

Other than that, there is not much to say, unless one is ready to take a crash course in writing about minor emotional inflections in stereotypically patterned country ballads. The worst thing about all of them is that they prevent Brenda's backing band from showing their chops — guitars, organs, saxes, the works, all of it only really comes out when the strings lose their monopoly, and this only happens during the anti-romantic breaks. But this was late 1962, after all, back when some people were beginning to think they'd finally done away with the rock'n'roll craze...

 

ALL ALONE AM I (1963)

 

1) All Alone Am I; 2) By Myself; 3) (I Left My Heart) In San Francisco; 4) It's All Right With Me; 5) My Colouring Book; 6) My Prayer; 7) Lover; 8) All By Myself; 9) What Kind Of Fool Am I; 10) Come Rain Or Come Shine; 11) I Hadn't Anyone Till You; 12) Fly Me To The Moon.

 

Recorded in late 1962, released in February 1963, forgotten, I suppose, as soon as its lead single fell off the charts. And this time even the lead single, although it did rise to No. 3 on the charts, does not help out the situation — a sentimental adult pop waltz, sung with plenty of power but no subtlety whatsoever. The harpsichord adds a nice touch of anti-mediocrity, but there is only so long a distance I am willing to go as far as my admiration for Brenda Lee is concerned: a corny mainstream standart is a corny mainstream standart, period.

 

The subject of loneliness seems to have been raised to conceptual heights here — apart from the title track, one finds both ʽBy Myselfʼ and ʽAll By Myselfʼ (yes, they are two different songs: the latter from Irving Berlin's songbook, the former a recent composition), and then there is the sleeve photo on which the girl does seem sort of lonely. In fact, that purple-dress-on-black style would suggest some musical «doom and gloom» to go along, but the arrangements make no ef­fort to genuinely convey any dark emotions. Everything's glossed up again, with strings, pianos, and, occasionally, harps and harmonicas (as on the impossibly, almost Sesame Street-like «ange­li­fied» rendition of ʽMy Coloring Bookʼ) providing all the perks.

 

Most of the toughness that can be elicited from the performer here comes on fast-paced jazz-pop numbers, both new (ʽBy Myselfʼ) and old (a funny cover of the old Rodgers & Hart chestnut ʽLoverʼ, with Brenda's trademark «stern» approach), but even these are limited to two or three tracks. As for the rest — well, ʽMy Prayerʼ is probably as solemn and anthemic as she ever got to that point, but that does not mean this «regal» approach really suits her. Altogether, the whole thing is another disaster on par with Sincerely, and a good example of Decca's utmost stupidity in the early Sixties when it came to making the best use of their artists. But we all know that — «guitar bands are on their way out» and all the rest. Thumbs down.

 

LET ME SING (1963)

 

1) Night And Day; 2) The End Of The World; 3) Our Day Will Come; 4) You're The Reason I'm Living; 5) Break It To Me Gently; 6) Where Are You; 7) When Your Lover Has Gone; 8) Losing You; 9) I Wanna Be Around; 10) Out In The Cold Again; 11) At Last; 12) There Goes My Heart.

 

No conceptual foundation this time, but no significant difference, either, except for a minor tac­tical twist: other than the opening ʽNight And Dayʼ and maybe just one or two other oldies, the majority of the songs come from recent success stories — Bobby Darin, Skeeter Davis, those kinds of people. If anything, though, it only means that polite, Disney-ish ballads occupy the space that could have been dedicated to fun retro jazz romps: if Brenda Lee is prohibited to sing rock'n'roll, she could have at least been warming our hearts with some of that old swing. But Let Me Sing is targeted exclusively at «respectable parents» circa 1963, and no one else.

 

Already sickening strings are now joined, on at least a third of the songs, by the greatest evil of all — croony backup vocals that successfully recreate the atmosphere of Bambi: nineteen forty-two all over again (ʽYou're The Reason I'm Livingʼ, ʽThere Goes My Heartʼ, etc.). Brenda herself sounds strong and confident in the midst of all this sugarland, but strength and confidence are wasted on this kind of material with these kinds of arrangements. Besides, many of these songs are not even intended to be sung with strength and confidence — if there is a substantial point to a song like ʽBreak It To Me Gentlyʼ, it is pretty much lost on the singer. If somebody asked me in that particular way to «break it to me gently», I'd rather run and hide.

 

Anyway, the two oldies that open the two sides of the LP (ʽNight And Dayʼ, ʽWhen Your Lover Has Goneʼ) preserve some of the playful fun, and are altogether acceptable, if dispensable. The rest is mainly just awful songs in awful arrangements, sung by a singer who was not born to sing this kind of material, period. Another thumbs down, of course — don't let anyone fool you into suggesting that «time has been kind to this stuff...».

 

BY REQUEST (1964)

 

1) More; 2) Days Of Wine And Roses; 3) Danke Schoen; 4) Tammy; 5) Why Don't You Believe Me; 6) I Love You Because; 7) As Usual; 8) Blue Velvet; 9) My Whole World Is Falling Down; 10) I Wonder; 11) I'm Confessin'; 12) The Grass Is Greener.

 

By May 5, 1964, when this album was officially released on Decca, the States had already been wrig­gling in the clutch of Beatlemania for several months — but, naturally, you wouldn't even begin to whiff it on By Request. By whose request? Certainly not by request of those rebellious teens who could have embraced stuff like ʽDynamiteʼ eight years ago — more likely, by request of their parents who were secretly hoping that this new trans-Atlantic craze might pass them by even faster than the older, homebrewed rockabilly madness.

 

In retrospect, this album is even more awful than its predecessor. The only song that barely es­capes the sacchariney quicksand of lush ballads is ʽMy Whole World Is Falling Downʼ, a jovial mix of pop and R&B that would have felt right at home on a Manfred Mann album — the jovi­ality being particular­ly neat in the light of the song's tragic lyrics. On a record like All The Way, the track would have been a nice, energetic, forgettable bit of filler — here, it is a giant among songs that... well, in retrospect, some people have developed a nostalgic kick for this sort of mush, but I wonder just how many of them can honestly stand a song like ʽTammyʼ, which arguably embodies all of the very worst aspects of «mainstream pop» in the early 1960s. "Does my darling feel what I feel when he comes here?.." Oh, please!

 

«Highlights» include an unnecessary attempt at appropriating ʽBlue Velvetʼ (the song is hardly any good on its own, but at least The Clovers gave it some color); Wayne Newton's ʽDanke Schoenʼ, sung with the same Yiddish accent ("danke shaayne!..") and preserving all the neo-cabaret corniness of the original; and a lushly orchestrated ʽDays Of Wine & Rosesʼ — I must say that I am a sucker for ʽMoon Riverʼ when it comes to Henry Mancini (probably due to the obligatory childhood crush on Audrey Hepburn), but not this one. Why not ʽMoon Riverʼ? Who­ever chooses ʽDays Of Wine & Rosesʼ over ʽMoon Riverʼ deserves a wicked thumbs down for that reason alone. Better still, why can't she just cover the Pink Panther Theme? At her best, she certainly used to be more of a «pink panther» than a «Tammy's in love (woo woo woo woo)».

 

SINGS TOP TEEN HITS (1965)

 

1) Dancing In The Streets; 2) The Crying Game; 3) Thanks A Lot; 4) Let It Be Me; 5) He Loves You; 6) Snap Your Fingers; 7) Wishin' & Hopin'; 8) Funny How Time Slips Away; 9) Is It True; 10) Can't Buy Me Love; 11) Always Something There To Remind Me; 12) When You Loved Me.

 

The most insulting thing about this album is its title. Granted, in February 1965 the world was still a few months away from ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ and ʽSatisfactionʼ, so Decca Records could still be somewhat justified in «wishin' & hopin'» that this new wave of rock'n'roll craziness would be over them as soon as this next bunch of teenagers starts getting serious about life. But the title is still condescending — as in, well, you know, our little lady usually sings mature, responsible material that treats human relationships from a healthy, adult perspective ("Tammy, Tammy, Tammy's in love!"), but sure, we understand the need to cater to this newfangled teen market as well, and we don't really want to let those silly kids feel too left out, so here, as an experiment, is Ms. Brenda Lee doing a couple of those weird «Beetles» songs for our dear, if a little misguided, offspring. Now run along, little boys and girls, and make way for some serious musicians that your parents endorse — like Tony Bennett.

 

Actually, both of the Beatles covers are among the highlights here — Brenda had not yet com­pletely forgotten what the rock'n'roll spirit was all about, and she nails the vocals on both with the good old abandon. Funny tidbit: even though the song is officially listed as ʽHe Loves Youʼ, Brenda sings the original lyrics without changing the pronoun — and understandably so, because the idiots at Decca failed to realize that the song involves three rather than two characters, and that turning it into ʽhe loves youʼ could have easily made the song into a gay rights anthem. Oh well, at least they bothered to preserve the electric guitar solo on ʽCan't Buy Me Loveʼ.

 

Most of the other songs, though... well, they were certainly hits, but it is somewhat questionable whether all of them were truly «teen» hits. ʽLet It Be Meʼ was covered by the Everleys, it is true, and there is plenty of Brill Building and Motown material on here, but the accent is very rarely on rock'n'roll even in its lightest form — most of the covers are lush ballads, soft-pop, or country with «crossover» appeal, and there is a nasty tendency to butcher some of the songs (for instance, ʽThe Crying Gameʼ was a very interesting song when recorded by Dave Berry, mainly due to Big Jim Sullivan's pioneering use of the wah-wah — here it is all replaced by the usual mushy strings). The Beatles covers are fun to hear, as is ʽDancing In The Streetsʼ — a song ideally sui­ted for all the raunch and fire that Brenda's voice can generate — and, at the very least, the con­cept allows her to devote some space to fluffy, but upbeat material like ʽSnap Your Fingersʼ and ʽThanks A Lotʼ: these aren't great songs, but in between all of them, they make Brenda Lee Sings Some Decca Executives Favorites They're Too Ashamed To Admit, So They Pose As Teens vastly preferable to Brenda Lee, By Request Of Some Other Decca Executives Who Do Not Pose As Teens But It's Not As If We Have To Respect Them For That.

 

The corniest moment on the record is saved for last: a teen idol-type candy piece called ʽWhen You Loved Meʼ, whose first verse goes "When you loved me / You took the stars / Down from the skies / Then you put them in my eyes" — I don't know about you, but my first reaction was "Oh man, that must have really hurt!" But this is actually a good sign, a crystal clear message from the industry that nothing has changed in a profound manner: the Beatles will come and go just the same way as Martha & The Vandellas or Dave Berry or Dusty Springfield, but Serious Good Taste by Responsible Adults will always prevail in the end. And it's always useful to be in the know, regardless of whether the news is pleasant or disappointing.

 

THE VERSATILE BRENDA LEE (1965)

 

1) Yesterday's Gone; 2) Dear Heart; 3) I Still Miss Someone; 4) How Glad I Am; 5) Almost There; 6) Don't Blame Me; 7) Willow Weep For Me; 8) Truly Truly True; 9) Love Letters; 10) The Birds And The Bees; 11) La Vie En Rose; 12) Maybe.

 

And by «versatile», I presume, they mean «one that can perform everything, from lightweight pre-war popu­lar songs to profound contemporary material by our illustrious songwriters, like ʽThe Birds And The Beesʼ, for example». Well, truth be told, they may be right, if they are going not with the third meaning of the word in Webster's dictionary («turning with ease from one thing to another»), but with the first one — «capable of being turned round». It must have took quite a bit of turning round, I'd say, to end up with a cover of ʽLa Vie En Roseʼ on one's hands in the middle of 1965.

 

The album doth add insult to injury by opening in a dishonestly deceitful manner — ʽYesterday's Goneʼ, a fluke hit for the wimpy UK folk-rock duo Chad & Jeremy, is unexpectedly arranged in a rock'n'roll manner, with gruff electric guitars and a King Curtis-style saxophone solo. Not exactly «hard», but probably the toughest sound on a Brenda Lee album in about two years, making the listener salivate for more. But already track number two is ʽDear Heartʼ, a thick syrup concocted by Henry Mancini for Andy Williams, with backing vocals that you thought you'd heard the last of in Disney classics from the previous decade. And off we go...

 

In all honesty, the interpretation of ʽWillow Weep For Meʼ is extremely «versatile», not to men­tion powerful, and ʽHow Glad I Amʼ is quite competitive when it comes to comparison with the Nancy Wilson original — where Nancy has the upper hand in subtle modulation, Brenda fights back with sheer volume and determination. It is also interesting that her version of ʽLove Lettersʼ managed to predate Elvis' hit rendition by about a year — not that either of them matters all that much in the grand scheme of things.

 

But a thumbs down all the same, since everything else is (by now) traditionally rotten, including ʽThe Birds And The Beesʼ, which must be one of the worst love songs ever written in an upbeat pop manner (no wonder Jewel Akens never had another hit in his whole life). Bad songs, worse arrangements, formally impeccable, but fully predictable vocals, and, worst of all, the realization that this was all made in the summer of '65... well, couldn't they at least let her cover ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ? Maybe we'd have no need for Cher then.

 

TOO MANY RIVERS (1965)

 

1) It's Not Unusual; 2) Call Me Irresponsible; 3) Too Many Rivers; 4) Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me); 5) Whispering; 6) Stormy Weather; 7) Hello Dolly; 8) Unforgettable; 9) Everybody Loves Somebody; 10) No One; 11) Truer Than True; 12) Think.

 

Country songwriter Harlan Howard provided Brenda with the hit for this album — the title track rose to No. 13 on the charts, her highest achievement since ʽAs Usualʼ two years before. As far as generic country balladry goes, ʽToo Many Riversʼ is hardly the worst kind: if only they'd thought of a better set of clothes for the song than the usual lush strings and cloudy aah-oohs... but the days of curiosities in guitar, sax, and keyboard arrangements were long gone by then. Still, a rockin'-horse country song for a hit is always better than a glob of syrup.

 

Other than that, let's see: Tom Jones... Judy Garland... Shirley Bassey... Nat King Cole... Dean Martin... Hello Dolly... a couple pre-war standards... well, you get the gist. And you do know that you are in general trouble listening to Brenda's mid-1960s albums, and in double trouble when ʽHello Dollyʼ turns out to be one of the highlights — but somehow, done in a fast tempo, rock-and-roll style, oddly enough, it is (at least, I'd certainly take it over Streisand, but then again, I'd take almost anything over Streisand, so forget it).

 

But altogether, if the previous two albums might seem like the last twists and twitches of agony, curious to watch from a sadistic perspective, this one is rigor mortis setting in — Vegas stuff, regurgitation of the «Songbook», schmaltz and glitz all the way. No doubt, somewhere in the world there may hide a genuinely devoted fan or two, or three, that could secretly wish for a complete set of Songbooks from Brenda Lee the way we got them from Ella — then again, there might also be some people out there who'd like their refrigerators to play their CDs, and their CD players to press their pants. What Brenda does on this, and many other, records, is not fundamen­tally different, and deserves nothing other than yet another thumbs down — although stealing the title track and ʽHello Dollyʼ for your playlist would be a merciful gesture.

 

BYE BYE BLUES (1966)

 

1) A Taste Of Honey; 2) Good Life; 3) Flowers On The Wall; 4) Shadow Of Your Smile; 5) Remember Me When; 6) Softly As I Leave You; 7) Bye Bye Blues; 8) Make The World Go Away; 9) September In The Rain; 10) Rusty Bells; 11) What A Difference A Day Made; 12) Yesterday.

 

The funniest part about observing this stage of Brenda's career is the emergence of this «alternate music universe», reflected in her (or, rather, her producers') selection of contemporary material. In this alternate universe, the Beatles were masters of torch balladeering, competing with San­remo Festival pros over the amount of tears they could wring out of the eyes of the audience (so who's the winner, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: ʽYesterdayʼ or ʽSoftly As I Leave Youʼ?); the «teen pop» singles market was most effectively represented by The Statler Brothers (ʽFlowers On The Wallʼ — who needs Bob Dylan when you can just as effectively cover all the serious prob­lems of the world by "smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo"?); and the latest, trendiest, most cutting-edge achievement in the world of Western music was recognized as the Love Theme from The Sandpiper (ʽThe Shadow Of Your Smileʼ).

 

As much as we'd like to snicker on the issue, though, the era is not so remote yet as to become completely shrouded in myth — and yes, it is important to remember that there were many people in early 1966 who did live in that alternate universe; in fact, most people over 30, and plenty of those under, probably did. The problem with Brenda Lee was that most of those people, if they really needed the love theme from The Sandpiper, could just stick with the original, and usually did; there was little that Ms. Lee or her faceless, string-dependent backing band could add.

 

Amusingly, the only single from the album (which, formally, preceded it in late '65) was ʽRusty Bellsʼ, a lush ballad with a «message»: "Rusty bells, rusty bells, pity those who've gone astray, ring again and help them find the way" — nothing less than a socially conscious statement, so the people behind the lady must have felt some sort of tinkle, that, perhaps, in the era of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ and ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ, something is required from time to time even from the high priests of the schmaltz variety. It didn't work; the single stalled at No. 33 and mar­ked the next-to-last time any of Brenda's singles would get in the Top 40.

 

Other than that, the only salvageable tracks are: (a) an interesting jazzy take on ʽA Taste Of Honeyʼ, with powerful brass backing overriding the strings for once, and (b) a few decent takes on oldies — the title track and ʽWhat A Difference A Day Madeʼ show a bit of pensive depth that the saccharine-riddled «contemporary material» covers replace with shallow romantic glitz. In other words, this is where the superiority of the pre-war Songbook over the post-war Songbook is established quite transparently. Well, there must be some meaning to the process of relistening to these records more than fifty years on.

 

COMING ON STRONG (1966)

 

1) Coming On Strong; 2) You Don't Have To Say You Love Me; 3) Summer Wind; 4) Kiss Away; 5) Call Me; 6) What Now My Love; 7) Uptight; 8) Crying Time; 9) Strangers In The Night; 10) Sweet Dreams; 11) You Got Your Troubles; 12) Somewhere.

 

I count a grand total of three impressively produced, Motown-aping tracks on this album, re­leased just in time for the opening of the Christmas market of 1966. The best known of the lot is, of course, the title track — which, despite its brash, brass-'n'-harmony-stuffed production, was actually written by «Little David Wilkins» of Nashville, launching his own career in the process. In an age where people hungered for more and more red-hot Supremes and Marvelettes material, ʽComing On Strongʼ nailed that vibe, and miraculously skyrocketed Brenda all the way to No. 11 on the charts — it is only the utmost stupidity of the music industry people that they did not ma­nage to capitalize on this success, and reinvent Ms. Lee as a fun, groovy, but strong-willed dance-pop personality. A little grooming, a little coaching, a little extra makeup, and she could have been fashioned as a white Diana Ross; they were even born in the same year.

 

Or maybe a white Stevie Wonder, because another bona fide Motown simulation captured here is ʽUptightʼ, where she gets caught up in the fun so much, there is even a brief remembrance of her old school «pirate» voice — nothing to make you forget the original hit, but, again, the flame is successfully carried over. Then it gets a little less invigorating on the third «upbeat» number of the album, a cover of ʽYou Got Your Troublesʼ, which was a hit for The Fortunes the year before, but they try out the same combination with the brass fanfares, and even if it is a little slower and feels a little less suited for Brenda's singing style than ʽComing On Strongʼ, it's still a winner.

 

Unfortunately, what we have lodged in between is the same old shit — ʽYou Don't Have To Say You Love Meʼ (she was covering Dusty Springfield, but the bitter irony is that once again, Bren­da's version would be soon competing with Elvis, and guess who'd win), ʽStrangers In The Nightʼ (yeah right), ʽSomewhereʼ... well, you get the drift. Still, having even three songs here that con­stitute an attempt to remold the image was a grand achievement for Brenda, in the context of pretty much everything she did before — and this tiny Motownish step was, at the very least, more convincing and much less forced than the «sings teen hits» embarrassment.

 

REFLECTIONS IN BLUE (1967)

 

1) Here's That Rainy Day; 2) You'll Never Know; 3) Baby Won't You Please Come Home; 4) Can't Help Falling In Love; 5) I'll Only Miss Him When I Think Of Him; 6) Am I Blue; 7) If I Had You; 8) Close To You; 9) Little Girl Blue; 10) I Will Wait For You.

 

This one's sort of a cult favorite — all of a sudden, Brenda's producers decided to add an unex­pected twist to her balladeering image, and recast her in the image of a moody vocal jazz perfor­mer, sort of like a Rosemary Cloonie or a Blossom Dearie. Normally, that's a smart move: you can allow yourself to remain sweet, sappy, and sentimental, but at the same time pretend to true emotional depth and gain points with the critics. But does it really work with Brenda Lee?

 

I mean, we all have to ask ourselves that question at least twice — if only to beat the common prejudice against «turf-shifting»: naturally, Brenda Lee is not a well-trained or deeply experien­ced jazz singer, and one either has to be completely ignorant of that field, or allow a certain de­gree of tolerance for the «amateur intruder», in order to judge the whole thing impartially. It also makes matters twice as bad when, like your humble servant, one has fairly little tolerance for «vocal jazz», particularly orchestrated sentimental vocal jazz, in the first place, and requires a performer of outstandingly unique quality (such as Ms. Billie) to override the intolerance.

 

That said, it's not as if the problems of Reflections In Blue were all that different from all of Brenda's problems in the post-1962 era. There are no technical flaws to her voice, but the delivery on all these songs — regardless of whether they deal with loss of love or discovery — is always the same: loud, powerful, professional, monotonous, predictable, and perfunctory. Okay, so she respects the melody and the lyrics sheet, but that works fine for an evening's entertainment in a local jazz club, not for a record with supposed replay value. Okay, so some of the songs are ack­nowledged clas­sics of the genre, but the overriding lush strings reduce them all to the lowest common denominator. And whoever came up with the sequencing that places the old aching classic Bessie Smith tune ʽBaby Won't You Please Come Homeʼ right next to ʽCan't Help Falling In Loveʼ should be hung, drawn, and quartered.

 

In any case, all credibility goes out the window when an album like this finishes on such a patho-bombastic note as ʽI Will Wait For Youʼ: nothing against Umbrellas of Cherbourg in general, but they fit in with Bessie Smith about as well as milk with pickles. I am not saying that Brenda was completely «out of it» — I mean, let's face it, 1967 was as much the year of Barbra Streisand as it was the year of Jimi Hendrix — I do mean, however, that Reflections In Blue crudely and cruel­ly nipped the «para-Motown transformation», attempted with ʽComing On Strongʼ, in the bud, and that, in the end, it won her nothing. Yes, in terms of song selection and overall image, it is a step forward from the totally empty balladeering of yesterday, but one that still would not allow the girl to properly compete with the big names. A historical curio, worth getting to know for reasons of perspective, but for little else. Oh well, at least it somehow stands out from all those other faceless albums, so indistinguishable from one another.

 

FOR THE FIRST TIME (1968)

 

1) Cabaret; 2) There's A Kind Of Hush; 3) Basin Street Blues; 4) Windy; 5) Night And Day; 6) One Of Those Songs; 7) Mood Indigo; 8) Can't Take My Eyes Off You; 9) 59th Street Bridge Song; 10) Anything Goes; 11) I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues.

 

But wait, here is another late-Sixties Brenda Lee album that somehow stands out, and this time, in a more refined or, at least, more fun manner than Reflections In Blue. The twist here is a col­laboration with famed Dixieland clarinetist Pete Fountain — which is what the title refers to, of course, and what did you think it might refer to?.. — and since the overall quality of Brenda's albums had always depended on what sort of musicians were given the green light on them, and given Fountain's hitherto impeccable jazz credentials, one could finally expect something more-than-just-pitiful even before putting on the record.

 

These expectations are fulfilled only partially, because, in general, the arrangements are still based on glitz and glamour, the vibe is one of fluffy cabaret entertainment (it suffices only to look at what particular number has been chosen as the introduction to the LP), and the year may only be guessed as 1968 if you look long enough at the song titles — pre-war standards like ʽAnything Goesʼ are in the minority next to contemporary hits from 1966 and 1967, but whoever produced the album must not have thought much of Sgt. Pepper, let alone the Monterey Pop Festival.

 

On the other hand, though, the songs are generally lively and Dixieland-ish a-plenty, which at the very least means there is little danger of falling asleep; and the addition of Fountain as a working partner works fine, just as expected — the man has a swell tone (or, rather, variety of tones) and a seductive old-timey playfulness that perfectly matches the same in Brenda's voice. So yes, they take Simon & Garfunkel's ʽ59th Street Bridge Songʼ and spoil its cozy little vibe with orchestra­tion, but if you filter the superfluous strings past your ears, what remains is a cutesy-friendly dia­log between the voice and the clarinet — one that understands that vibe and cherishes it. Then they also take Jimmy Durante's joke number ʽOne Of Those Songsʼ, crack its vibe, speed it up, and come out with something that, musically at least, beats the original (well, music-wise, any­body could beat Jimmy Durante — the man was about comedy, not about hitting notes — but they do retain the humor punch as well).

 

This dialog works within any setting — modern, ancient, folksy, jazzy, bluesy, with or without a huge brass backing, with or without gushing / pouring strings, it's as if this «vicinity of the tal­king clarinet» were giving a new sense of existence to Brenda's singing, and even if it does not help her override her usual limitations (on the whole, the clarinet shows a much higher degree of sub­tlety than the voice), it is still that one missing ingredient that makes For The First Time her best album by far since the very early 1960s, which isn't saying all that much, but at least it does deserve a thumbs up — too bad it was all just a one-night stand.

 

JOHNNY ONE TIME (1969)

 

1) Johnny One Time; 2) Traces; 3) If You Go Away; 4) Bring Me Sunshine; 5) Help Yourself; 6) Let It Be Me; 7) For Once In My Life; 8) This Girl's In Love With You; 9) Matelot; 10) The Letter; 11) Walk Away.

 

No Pete Fountain — no extra ray of light to illuminate the dullness. Brenda's last album of the de­cade is at least not nearly as lethargic as Reflections In Blue, and surprisingly diverse in com­parison to most of her mid-Sixties stuff; but the diversity is not propped up by any interesting musicianship — everything is simply drenched in the usual strings, brass, and big orchestral pomp of her Vegas style arrangements. And (big surprise) she is not maturing much as a singer, either. Her take on Brel's ʽIf You Go Awayʼ is just plain terrible.

 

The title track was actually a small hit, her commercially strongest showing in about two years — as far as lush country ballads go, this one is far from the worst and features a strong vocal build­up: not highly likely an advanced musical listener will be ready to shed tears for the poor girl swin­dled by the protagonist, but he might want to tip that hat to the dynamic punch as we slowly ride the indignation wave all the way to the top. It is fairly well crafted, at least, and deserved a much more tasteful arrangement.

 

There are some upbeat pop covers here that are perfectly listenable (ʽHelp Yourselfʼ), some honest and respectable, but unnecessary R&B covers (ʽFor Once In My Lifeʼ is a very good early Stevie Wonder song, but if you substitute Stevie Wonder for Brenda Lee, you are not going to get a mind-opening perspective on the limitless potential of the melody), an obligatory take on ʽThe Letterʼ (everybody who ever did covers at the time just had to cover ʽThe Letterʼ — too bad the song was not actually written by Alex Chilton, or his financial troubles would be non-existent), and... well, all that other stuff. Diverse? Yes. Memorable? Well, if the title of the album is John­ny One Time, what would you expect?

 

And on this note, we are going to finally cut the umbilical cord. The following year, Brenda Lee would release Memphis Portrait, an album that would announce a full turn towards country — and stay there for most of the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. These records are relatively hard to get (even as vinyl rips), even less rewarding to listen to, and besides, I have little interest in review­ing country music, particularly of that order. All I can say is that it was probably a wise decision — as a generic Nashville singer, Brenda could cut it quite convincingly, and it was probably simpler and humbler for her to go that way than go on hanging on the lower fringes of the charts with one faceless, embarrassing pop record after another.

 

She pretty much dropped out of the recording business after 1991, but last we heard, she did put out a record of gospel duets in 2007, with Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, and Emmylou Harris among the participants — and she still looked quite attractive on the cover (yes, even the hair stays pretty much in the same configuration as always). We can only hope that her life has been happy and healthy, that it will continue in the same way for years to come, and that, God help us, she won't ever get any ideas about staging a «rock'n'roll comeback» («Last Woman Standing» or something of that kind).


BROWNIE McGHEE

THE COMPLETE BROWNIE McGHEE (1940-1941; 1994)

 

CD I: 1) Picking My Tomatoes; 2) Me And My Dog Blues; 3) Born For Bad Luck; 4) I'm Callin' Daisy; 5) Step It Up And Go; 6) My Barkin' Bulldog Blues; 7) Let Me Tell You 'Bout My Baby; 8) Prison Woman Blues; 9) Back Door Stranger; 10) Be Good To Me; 11) Not Guilty Blues; 12) Coal Miner Blues; 13) Step It Up And Go No. 2; 14) Money Spending Woman; 15) Death Of Blind Boy Fuller #1; 16) Death Of Blind Boy Fuller #2; 17) Got To Find My Little Woman; 18) I'm A Black Woman's Man #1; 19) I'm A Black Woman's Man #2; 20) Dealing With The Devil; 21) Double Trouble #1; 22) Double Trouble #2; 23) Woman, I'm Done.

CD II: 1) Key To My Door; 2) Million Lonesome Women; 3) Ain't No Tellin'; 4) Try Me One More Time; 5) I Want To See Jesus; 6) Done What My Lord Said; 7) I Want King Jesus; 8) What Will I Do (Without The Lord); 9) Key To The Highway 70 #1; 10) Key To The Highway 70 #2; 11) I Don't Believe In Love; 12) So Much Trouble; 13) Good-Bye Now; 14) Jealous Of My Woman; 15) Unfair Blues; 16) Barbecue Any Old Time; 17) Workingman's Blues; 18) Sinful Disposition Woman; 19) Back Home Blues; 20) Deep Sea Diver; 21) It Must Be Love; 22) Studio Chatter; 23) Swing, Soldier, Swing #1; 24) Swing, Soldier, Swing #2.

 

Any album that says Complete is rarely so, and, of course, this one is nowhere near a true «com­plete», not even close — but it does contain all or most of the recordings that Walter Brown McGhee, a.k.a. «Brownie», made for Okeh and Columbia Records in 1940-41. Apparently, the labels hired him because of growing demand on what would later be known as «Piedmont blues»: their chief star in that genre, Blind Boy Fuller, was selling reasonably well, but was not altoge­ther reliable (certainly not in the wake of a brief prison term in 1938, and especially after having died in 1941), so they thought it wouldn't hurt to hire one more guitar-playing kid.

 

Brownie, who was self-taught and also used to sing with a local harmony group in Kingsport, Tennessee, must have been one of the smoothest, steadiest, «normal-est» country blues people in existence. He cherished his rural roughness, never going for a «slick» urbanized attitude, but he never imposed that roughness on people, either — everything he plays here is supposed to enter­tain, not scare people or induce any sort of religious or just plain soulful haze. Granted, in today's world it would have hardly counted as entertainment, either, because Brownie's motto may be decoded as «nothing out of the ordinary, just 12-bar blues guitar playing and by-the-book blues singing». Disregarding slight alternations in tempos (to some of these tunes you sit and tap your foot, to some of them you jiggle and wiggle), the absolute majority of these 47 tracks are com­pletely interchangeable.

 

Even when Brownie pays tribute to his deceased mentor, Blind Boy Fuller, captured here in two subsequent takes, there is not a shred of extra emotion in his voice and not a single alternation in the regular chord sequences. Some might attribute this to lack of talent, others, on the contrary, will praise the man for keeping a steady footing and not allowing to sacrifice his «realistic» man­ner of performing for empty ritualistic purposes. Who really knows? But, naturally, it is best not to judge ʽDeath Of Blind Boy Fullerʼ on its own, and, instead, try to get a general feel for Brow­nie's unassuming playing over the course of those 2 CDs (although, unless you are using this for background purposes, I certainly wouldn't recommend forcing yourself to sit through all the 47 tracks at once — pretty soon you will be getting the obligatory Groundhog Day feeling).

 

On most of the tracks, Blind Boy is not completely alone, but fairly often he is being backed only by a washboard percussion player (Bull City Red or Washboard Slim) and/or a harmonica part­ner (Jordan Webb; later on, Sonny Terry joins in for a couple of tracks, but the real partnership be­tween Brownie and Sonny would not truly begin until after the war). The washboard adds a little extra liveliness and, considering Brownie's almost «pedantic» approach to guitar playing, some­times sounds like the actual lead instrument — but still, this is mostly a solo endeavour, and it is only because McGhee's playing technique is so similar on most of the tracks that one's attention might eventually shift to the scraping, grating, clicking, and clanging of percussion.

 

Most of the songs happened to be captured in pristine clarity (at least, for 1940), so there is at least one serious advantage to this package: if you want a solid, «no-nonsense», comprehensive, perfectly listenable sample of pre-war country blues, this just might be the package to get. Unless you happen to be a seriously refined blues scholar, there is nothing particularly distinctive about it, but this is also what makes these songs such a perfect primer for getting into the spirit of what it was all about — without getting carried too far away by Charlie Patton's subhuman growling, Bo Carter's obscene innuendos, Lonnie Johnson's virtuoso soloing, Blind Willie McTell's «wo­man voice», etc. etc. In addition, Brownie puts his «generic stamp» on a variety of styles — rag­time, jug band, gospel — enough to assess the general range of popular black entertainment.

 

So it's all quite instructive, and those who have the patience to sit through it all will be rewarded at the end with a double-take bouncy guitar duet between Brownie and Buddy Moss from October 1941, back when Buddy was freshly released from jail and eager to reclaim his status of one of the hottest players on the East Coast. However, flashy guitar sparring is simply not what this is all about — more like it's all about a handy, well-illustrated manual for every aspiring acoustic blues player. Great sound, perfect self-assurance, total lack of individual personality: the hard-to-catch «folk spirit» speaking directly to the listener. Thumbs up, if only for this strange feeling of «total impersonality» that emanates from every pore of the record.

 

THE FOLKWAYS YEARS (1945-1959; 1991)

 

1) Daisy; 2) Rising Sun; 3) Careless Love; 4) Cholly Blues; 5) Just A Dream; 6) Pawn Shop Blues; 7) Hangman's Blues; 8) Livin' With The Blues; 9) 'Fore Day Creep; 10) Me And Sonny; 11) Raise A Ruckus Tonight; 12) Betty And Dupree; 13) Long Gone; 14) Grievin' Hearted Blues; 15) I'm Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me; 16) Can't Help Myself; 17) Pallet On The Floor.

 

In between 1945 and 1959, Brownie recorded at least six different albums of acoustic blues and «para-blues» material for Folkways records, all of them still preserved in the Smithsonian ar­chives and available if one looks really hard... but on the whole, they have been long since out of print, and the most common (and the only recommendable) way to get yourself acknowledged with Brownie's musical life throughout that period is through this generous 17-song sampler that claims to collect most of the highlights.

 

It is interesting, but perhaps expectable, that, unlike so many of his pals from pre-war times, McGhee never really «faded away»: he continued to release small quantities of 45s throughout the late 1940s, and then, by the early 1950s, tied a steady knot with Folkways, performing either solo (on the majority of these tracks) or as part of a guitar / harmonica duo with Sonny Terry (on a minority of the tracks, although the two went on to cut quite a few LPs together). He was, to a certain extent, marketed as a «survivor» already in the 1950s, and, along with Big Bill Broonzy and a couple other people, played the part of a wond'rous living fossil, to be admired by Village scholars and schoolboys — played it fairly well, as this collection demonstrates, because first and foremost it sounds like an honest, meticulously planned and executed «blues manual».

 

Unlike his earlier recordings for Columbia, where Brownie seemed too hard pressed into a single «Piedmont» formula, this Folkways stuff is, well, not exactly «all over the place», but still fairly diverse by comparison. Already the third track is a take on the old vaudeville number ʽCareless Loveʼ (which Brownie possibly picked up from Blind Boy Fuller, but which really used to be a staple for the urban blues queens in the 1920s). ʽHangman's Bluesʼ is an almost haunting shuffle, a «dark ballad» that adds intimacy, personality, and depth to Brownie's hitherto rather faceless character. ʽRaise A Ruckus Tonightʼ stems from some old minstrel show and attempts to do exac­tly what the doctor prescribed. ʽLong Goneʼ experiments a little bit with the vocals, as Brownie clones himself by echoing each of his lines, and with the guitar playing (a rather strange, hard to describe, picking style here). ʽI'm Gonna Tell God...ʼ speaks for itself — actually, it could be de­scribed as danceable «country-gospel blues», if only to pick your interest for a bit.

 

Some of Brownie's soloing here is quite admirable, too, particularly on extended tunes like ʽCholly Bluesʼ where you can hear proto-rockabilly chord sequences that would later be all the rage on Carl Perkins (and, subsequently, Beatles) albums; and on the comic blues number ʽDaisyʼ, he tries to transplant his subtle sense of humor into his instrument, with partial success. But, where possible, he leaves the solo spotlight to Sonny Terry (ʽLiving With The Bluesʼ), unques­tionably the more virtuoso player of the two — their friendship touchingly acknowledged in ʽMe And Sonnyʼ, which Brownie actually performs solo, perhaps as a surprise present to his friend.

 

Basically, if you only want a primer of Brownie's work, Folkways Years is a better bet than the pre-war recordings — better quality, not enough running time to start getting way too redundant, and both Brownie and Sonny are still well in their prime and «raisin' a ruckus» wherever possible. Neither the war nor a steady record contract were enough to transform McGhee into a jaw-drop­ping, inimitable master guitarist or a unique singer, of course, but at least this emergence as a «living blues icon» has prompted him to put down on record a more diverse and representative portfolio than ever before — so the according thumbs up go not just to him, but to Moses Asch as well, the founding father of Folkways Records, directly responsible for hours upon hours of quasi-religious joy for authentic blues aficionados.

 

BLUES IS TRUTH (1976)

 

1) The Blues Had A Baby; 2) I'm Going To Keep On Loving; 3) Walk On; 4) Rainy Day; 5) Christina; 6) Don't Dog Your Woman; 7) Mean And Evil; 8) Wine Sporty Orty; 9) Blues Is Truth; 10) Bunkhouse; 11) Key To The Highway; 12) Blues On Parade.

 

Formally speaking, Brownie McGhee had a veritable shitload of albums released for the listening pleasures of Greenwich Village crusaders in the last four decades of his life, but most of them were released as part of the «Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee» duo act, where Sonny was usu­ally billed first and Brownie humbly came second (although there were multiple exceptions, too). In any case, we will use this as a loophole to postpone reviews of some of these albums (talking separately about each of them would be cruel and unwarranted punishment, considering that, as ru­mor has it, almost every show that the two played together in any club or cafeteria had been captured on tape, not to mention studio sessions).

 

As for Brownie solo, he had considerably few sessions in comparison, and most of those are not altogether easy to find or not particularly worth finding. I will limit myself to this one album, recor­ded in May 1976 with a bunch of friends at Minot Sound Studios in White Plains, NY; friends included Bobby Foster and Louisiana Red on guitars, Sugar Blue on harmonica, Sammy Price on piano, Alex Blake on bass, and Brian Brake on drums — actually, one hell of a band, when you start researching all of these guys' pedigrees, and, since Brownie himself only plays acoustic guitar and sings, his presence here is more of a «guiding hand» than of a legendary do­minator — he conducts, gives orders on soloing, but his personal role in this friendly get-together is limited; then again, when you got such a great band playing for you, keeping a low profile might just be the most sensible thing to do anyway.

 

As easily as I usually get bored with generic electric blues albums, these twelve songs keep the fun quotient high and the friendly atmosphere dense throughout. There is a sensible level of di­versity as they pay tribute to multiple blues styles (Chicago, Delta, New Orleans; even jump blues is covered with a version of Stick McGhee's ʽDrinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Deeʼ, here retitled as ʽWine Sporty Ortyʼ), and almost everybody gets to shine one way or another — Louisiana Red and his slinky slide leads are the obvious number one pretender, but the real musical superhero of the album is Alex Blake, whose bass parts are completely individual and independent, and often have much more to say than the guitars of his colleagues.

 

Curiously, the album kicks off with a newly written tune, ʽThe Blues Had A Babyʼ ("and they named it rock­'n'roll"), which would fairly soon be appropriated by Muddy Waters for his come­back LP, Hard Again — considering that there is fairly little rock'n'roll on this record, but I guess that this was just a subtle reminder of sorts, Brownie's message to the kids about how there is more to life than rock'n'roll, and Blues Is Truth in general is not a bad way to prove that.

 

It is interesting, however, that there are no signs here whatsoever of Brownie's original vibe, the entertainment-oriented, bluesman-meets-hillbilly-style «Piedmont blues»; above everything else, Brownie knew very well who the buying clientele would be — white college kids — and what the clientele would want to hear (Chicago teachers of white electric bluesmen). I am not going as far as to suggest that ʽKey To The Highwayʼ was included due to the song's popularization by Eric Clapton, but this could have been one of the factors, too. Not that this is a complaint or any­thing — with Blake's basslines and Red's guitar playing, the album goes down easily and plea­santly, and anybody who'd try to put down a 1915-born popular entertainer for «giving the people exactly what they want» would have to have no sensibility whatsoever. In any case, for an album of this kind, Blues Is Truth is seriously above average level, and clearly deserves a thumbs up.

BUDDY HOLLY

THE «CHIRPING» CRICKETS (1957)

 

1) Oh Boy; 2) Not Fade Away; 3) You've Got Love; 4) Maybe Baby; 5) It's Too Late; 6) Tell Me How; 7) That'll Be The Day; 8) I'm Lookin' For Someone To Love; 9) An Empty Cup (And A Broken Date); 10) Send Me Some Lovin'; 11) Last Night; 12) Rock Me My Baby.

 

If you listen to all of the Beatles' officially released recordings in chronological order, the very first song you are going to hear will be ʽThat'll Be The Dayʼ, pressed by the Quarrymen in 1958, approximately one year after the song had appeared on the Brunswick label as the first official single by The Crickets. Naturally, this is no matter of coincidence since, by all accounts, Buddy Holly was the single greatest influence (out of many) on the Beatles, at least up until the band's «musical globalization» in 1965.

 

At first, it might even seem a little bizarre. When Buddy made the world aware of his ex­istence, in mid-1957, «rock and roll» had already been firmly established — Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Elvis, even Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis were all recognized stars, with a bunch of hit singles safely tucked under their belts; Buddy was a relative latecomer to this parade of flashy, rebellious personalities. Compared to each of them separately, he did not seem to stand much of a competitive chance. Never a technically great singer; never a particularly gifted or fluent instrumental player; definitely nowhere near an «onstage volcano» in terms of performance — just a normal, quiet Texas kid, happy enough to wear a neatly pressed tuxedo and bowtie, with a proper haircut and with those silly thick glasses that really made him look more like an aspiring Ivy League freshman than a rock'n'roller.

 

So what exactly did Buddy Holly bring to the table that was not already on it? Hope, I'd say. For all those thousands of kids who were not blessed with the vocal cords of an Elvis, or the natural dynamism of a Jerry Lee, or the cool looks of a Gene Vincent, it was Buddy who conveyed the message — what matters is not the flashiness of style, what matters is substance. Buddy's major achievements all lie in the field of songwriting. Had he mostly stuck to covering other people's material, he would have remained but a small footnote in the history of popular music, as his first LP proves without a doubt: out of the 12 numbers on Chirping Crickets, the ones that stay with you are almost always those where Buddy is credited as chief songwriter.

 

I will not shy away from saying that I almost always prefer other people's covers of Buddy's material to the originals. Even that early Quarrymen cover of ʽThat'll Be The Dayʼ sounds almost as good as Buddy's (and would have sounded even better had the lads had access to better studio equipment). ʽNot Fade Awayʼ would eventually be expropriated, toughened up, and set for early anthemic status by the Stones. And when John Lennon later covered Buddy's interpretation of ʽSend Me Some Lovin'ʼ on his Rock And Roll album, he raised the bar tenfold in the vocal de­partment, adding explicit emotional torment where Holly only hinted at it.

 

But none of that mattered back in 1957 — and even though it matters today, it is also a pretext to try and figure out why, in the long run, these early songs have survived and are still listenable to­day. Sure enough, there is some stuff on this Crickets debut that is not all that listenable. In par­ticular, «The Picks», a New Mexican family vocal outfit, provide a rather awful doo-wop-style backing, spoiling much of the ballad component of the album (ʽLast Nightʼ, etc.) — not that Buddy Holly himself was ever made for doo-wop, of course, but it also has to be kept in mind that, like everything else at the time, The Chirping Crickets was really just a bunch of cool singles surrounded by obligatory filler.

 

We will disregard the filler, then, and focus all the attention on the classics: ʽThat'll Be The Dayʼ and ʽNot Fade Awayʼ as the best known; ʽMaybe Babyʼ, ʽTell Me Howʼ, ʽI'm Looking For Someone To Loveʼ as their lesser worthy brethren. First and foremost, this is not «threatening» music: Buddy was not a «rebel», he had a thoroughly «pop» conscience through and through, and the music avoids dark bass lines, distortion, aggression, etc., as much as possible (just look at how the «spooky», «tribal» Bo Diddley beat is niftily transformed into a happy celebration of love and fidelity on ʽNot Fade Awayʼ). At the same time, it is not «cheesy» pop — it is jangly, guitar-based pop, no strings, pianos, or production slickness attached, something that even the rough'n'tough garage-rock crowds of the early 1960s would find easy to appreciate. Most importantly, it all just sounds natural and realistic. Where Ricky Nelson (whose public image appeared the same year as Buddy) gave the impression of «glossy manufacture» from the start, Buddy simply is as buddy does.

 

What I really mean to say is that Holly compensates for his technical flaws with evident charisma — present everywhere, not just in his looks (always clean, never glossy), but also in his sweet, shaky, naturally-stuttery vocals, and in his guitar playing, with delicate, memorable phrasing that sometimes mimicks Carl Perkins or Scotty Moore, but just as frequently consists of original lines (unfortunately, «The Picks» too often overshadow them — ʽMaybe Babyʼ could have been so much better without all the waah-waahs and the pa-da-dams). The songwriting ideas might have been replicated and enhanced, but the personality could not: Buddy Holly offers that perfect compro­mise between the «gruff rocker» and the «teen idol» that is actually much harder to attain than it might look upon first sight.

 

As for the rating, The Chirping Crickets has way too much filler on it for a regular thumbs up, but if we introduce «The Fifties' Correction» and only rate it in accordance with the quality of the singles, which we should, things will obviously change. That said, unlike the self-titled follow-up, Chirping Crickets is hardly worth hunting for if you already have all the best stuff on a com­pilation — filler is filler, and nobody should be obliged to associate Buddy with doo-wop ballads (or hear him sing songs written by Roy Orbison, for that matter).

 

BUDDY HOLLY (1958)

 

1) I'm Gonna Love You Too; 2) Peggy Sue; 3) Look At Me; 4) Listen To Me; 5) Valley Of Tears; 6) Ready Teddy; 7) Every Day; 8) Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues; 9) Words Of Love; 10) (You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care; 11) Rave On; 12) Little Baby.

 

It so happened that, as little time as he had on this Earth, Buddy had enough of it for two formal careers — as the semi-anonymous leader of «The Crickets» and as a solo artist. The only real dif­ference, however, was that «The Crickets» worked together with «The Picks» and had this rather dippy tendency to drift off into doo-wop territory. Consequently, of the two full-fledged LPs re­leased by Buddy in his lifetime, the self-titled Buddy Holly is, on the whole, a better showcase for his songwriting talents and personal charisma — even if, as all pop LPs of the time, it neither succeeds in being totally filler-free, nor even tries to.

 

To be more precise, the inclusion of ʽReady Teddyʼ and ʽBaby I Don't Careʼ, two songs typically associated with Elvis (and Little Richard), has more of a symbolic nature to it — Buddy openly aligning himself with the «rockers» — than actual entertainment value: Buddy is not capable of outplaying the king and his backing band on the toughness-and-tightness field, nor is he trying to open up some new dimension in these songs (one could argue that they are way too proverbially one-dimensional to be openable up to anything else, but that is not true — Lennon, for instance, would later reinvent ʽReady Teddyʼ quite radically, if not, some would say, for the better). Same goes for Fats Domino's ʽValley Of Tearsʼ, which should really have been left to Fats; Buddy Holly and New Orleans were not meant for each other.

 

But I will take rock'n'roll filler over doo-wop filler any day, particularly if the filler in question is interspersed with the single largest number of indisputable original classics on a Buddy album. ʽPeggy Sueʼ, ʽI'm Gonna Love You Tooʼ, ʽWords Of Loveʼ, ʽRave Onʼ, ʽEvery Dayʼ — each of these is practically an instution in itself, at least if we judge objectively, on the basis of received accolades and tributary covers. As simple and natural as these melodies sound, most of them were actually written by Buddy — on a pre-existing basis of blues, folk, and country chord sequences, but with his own unique input that increased the catchiness value several dozen per cent.

 

ʽPeggy Sueʼ, in particular, had a strange kind of magic to it that won the hearts of both Lennon and McCartney — and it would be sad to think that it only had to do with the insane paradiddles of Jerry Allison, because the song works fine even without its percussive thunderstorm (look for a charming McCartney solo acoustic performance from 1975); actually, the vocal melody, replete with all the hiccups, pretty much sets the standard for «not-one-note-wasted catchy pop formula», and must have served as the guiding star for the Beatles throughout their career, and I am not tal­king solely about the early days, either. The lyrics, the subject, the mood — trivial to quasi-em­barrassment; the vocal movement is all that matters. (There is even a bit of playfully fake «dark­ness» as the bridge cuts in with an almost threatening «pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue...» before the sun comes out again — a musical red herring if there ever was one, within a two-minute pop song, that is).

 

Instrumental-wise, ʽWords Of Loveʼ is the winner, although I must sternly state that the song was brought to sonic perfection by the Beatles and George Martin — they saw the amazing potential of that sweetly-stinging guitar ring, only hinted at in Petty's original production, and realized all of it; I am almost sure that Buddy himself, had he had the chance, would have acknowledged the superiority of Harrison's playing and Martin's production. Nevertheless, this here is the original, and even if the vocal melody may seem too sappy, the guitar lines provide the very foundation of the «jangle-pop» skyscraper, to be erected by millions of Buddy's followers. This here was a man who was taking the art of sweet sentimental balladry away from professional hacks, armed with orchestras and crooning vocalists, and giving it to legions of kids with guitars, almost singlehan­dedly. Some of those kids would do it better; few, if any, would do it before.

 

Next to these two, Buddy's more rock'n'roll-oriented originals look a bit more pale, but still, ʽRave Onʼ and ʽI'm Gonna Love You Tooʼ combine the pop catchiness with a fast rock beat so well that both (especially the latter) could be considered as the blueprint for the Ramones' entirely career (well, almost) — dumb, catchy, unbeatable, unforgettable. In chronological terms, though, they represent no major improvements over ʽOh Boyʼ or ʽMaybe Babyʼ, and, generally, it was quite clear from this second album that crude «rock'n'roll» was not something that Buddy would be looking to in the future, saving his best songwriting ideas for calmer, less rowdy stuff. And, of course, as long as those would be smart ideas, there was nothing wrong with that. Filler or no fil­ler, Buddy Holly is an unquestionable thumbs up — and plus, if you get the original album, you get to see the man without the glasses for a change, and whaddaya know, he does not look any less pretty nor any less intelligent, even though he could probably hardly see the camera when they were clicking that shutter...

 

THAT'LL BE THE DAY (1958)

 

1) You Are My One Desire; 2) Blue Days, Black Nights; 3) Modern Don Juan; 4) Rock Around With Ollie Vee; 5) Ting A Ling; 6) Girl On My Mind; 7) That'll Be The Day; 8) Love Me; 9) Changing All Those Changes; 10) Don't Come Back Knockin'; 11) Midnight Shift.

 

Technically, this album should have been listed as Buddy's first: all of the songs here are taken from his first recording sessions for Decca, held at various dates throughout 1956, approximately one year prior to finding success with Brunswick. The story goes that, since Buddy's first singles with Decca flopped and the label was not quite sure what to make of him, they simply did not re­new his contract — but as time went by and he eventually started treading the road to stardom, all these early tunes, including all the flop singles as well as a number of outtakes, were hastily cob­bled together for an LP; easily done since Decca still held the rights to all of them.

 

In retrospect, the Decca decision was just another silly Decca decision, for which the label is so well-known — but, to be perfectly honest, these earliest recordings are rather suspicious. First and foremost, Side A is almost entirely devoid of originals. Three of the songs are credited to Don Guess, Buddy's buddy and original bass fiddle player, and are little more than average doo-wop (ʽGirl On My Mindʼ) or second-hand rockabilly (ʽModern Don Juanʼ). Much better and gut­sier is ʽRock Around With Ollie Veeʼ, credited to Buddy's original lead guitarist Sonny Curtis — the players get into this one with an almost unexpected ferocity, although flat production and Buddy's vocal limitations remain inescapable curses in this style.

 

Following Elvis' love for old and recent Atlantic hits, Buddy, too, tried to follow suit by choosing The Clovers' ʽTing-A-Lingʼ, one of the greatest odes to teenage libido of its time, and this time, he even managed well enough to slip into character, with a suitably hysterical vocal tone, but here as well, the attempt to transform professionally synthesized R&B into snappy rockabilly is alto­gether half-hearted — neither the musicians nor the technicians were quite up to the task.

 

The second half of the album is dominated by the title track, which is the original recording of ʽThat'll Be The Dayʼ — slower, looser, without vocal harmonies, operating at about half the po­tential of the re-recorded version and very well illustrating the difference between early tentative Buddy and later, more self-assured and goal-oriented Buddy. The originals that surround it are decent (the B-side ʽLove Meʼ and ʽChanging All Those Changesʼ in particular), but still do not advance far beyond standard rockabilly or sped-up country-western.

 

In other words, one would have to be really mean to blame Decca for not spotting the future genius of ʽPeggy Sueʼ or ʽWords Of Loveʼ in these cautious first moves at playing with one's own artistic identity — and, considering that Buddy got his new contract with Brunswick, which was legally under Decca anyway, the industry bosses cannot be said to have treated the boy too cruelly. It does, however, show that Buddy's beginnings were humble; he seems to have had limi­ted aspirations as a songwriter, being quite content with sharing songwriting duties with his fellow bandmates, and only gradually came to realise where his major strength resided. To that end, That'll Be The Day is more of a historical document than a «success» or «failure», and it is also an early precursor to the dark tendency of stuffing way more Buddy Holly down our throats than it would be useful for his posthumous reputation — but, on the other hand, at least these are authentic studio recordings that properly bear the artist's signature: since the album was released while Buddy was still alive, nobody had the nerve to tamper with the tracks.

 

THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY VOL. 1-2 (1959/1960)

 

Vol. I: 1) Raining In My Heart; 2) Early In The Morning; 3) Peggy Sue; 4) Maybe Baby; 5) Everyday; 6) Rave On; 7) That'll Be The Day; 8) Heartbeat; 9) Think It Over; 10) Oh Boy; 11) It's So Easy; 12) It Doesn't Matter Any­more.

Vol. II: 1) Peggy Sue Got Married; 2) Well... All Right; 3) What To Do; 4) That Makes It Tough; 5) Now We're One; 6) Take Your Time; 7) Crying, Waiting, Hoping; 8) True Love Ways; 9) Learning The Game; 10) Little Baby; 11) Moondreams; 12) That's What They Say.

 

As every respectable conspirologist is aware of, or should be aware of, if he is in need of respec­ta­bility, what happened on February 3, 1959, was that Roger Arthur Peterson, piloting the Beech­craft Bonanza N3794N, was discreetly bribed by one Paul McCartney, a suspicious (but hand­some)-looking British teenager seriously envious of the songwriting abilities and competing good looks of Buddy Holly, to crashland the Bonanza in some swamp, ravine, or cornfield, an opera­tion carried out successfully, although, to this very day, no one knows why the pilot never thought of his own survival, or where Paul McCartney got the money. But at least this is a more fun conspiracy to think of than blaming the FBI / CIA, as usual. (Those, of course, were too busy anyway setting Chuck Berry up with an underage waitress at the moment).

 

Whatever the circumstances, the bad news were that Buddy (along with Ritchie Valens of ʽLa Bambaʼ's fame and J. P. Richardson of ʽChantilly Laceʼ's fame) was, indeed, dead, and that we were therefore deprived of satisfying our curiosity as to where his talent would have led him in the golden decade of rock music. The partially consolatory news were that, prior to dying, he left behind an impressive stockpile of unfinished recordings — one that would keep the small market satisfied for years and years to come, even though most of the recordings had to be tampered with in order to acquire «commercially viable» form, and the tamperings were not always up to par (a rather unpleasant side of the music business here, with the same story to be repeated a decade later for the prematurely departed Jimi Hendrix).

 

The vaults were opened less than a month after the funeral, although the first installation was modest: The Buddy Holly Story consisted almost entirely of A- and B-sides released during the artist's lifetime, with only one exception (ʽIt Doesn't Matter Anymoreʼ / ʽRaining In My Heartʼ only came out at about the same time as the LP). Less than a year later, in response to the high chart performance of the album, Vol. 2 followed — an entirely different story altogether, consis­ting mainly out of «from-the-vaults» stuff, much of it coming from Buddy's last acoustic session on December 8, 1958, where he was laying down demos, armed with nothing but his voice and guitar. Naturally, it was deemed that the sound had to be brought up to standards, and... well, at least those results were significantly better than some of the sacrileges to follow.

 

Since the two LPs have this fundamental difference, it is a bit of a cheat to write about the first and second volumes in the same review, but, actually, an entire half of the songs on The Buddy Holly Story proper were already present on LPs released in Buddy's lifetime, and mentioned in earlier reviews, which would make a separate entry a little superfluous. Out of the other six, the cover of Bobby Darin's ʽEarly In The Morningʼ is fun, but not particularly interesting, being es­sentially a re-write-lite of Ray Charles' ʽI Got A Womanʼ; ʽThink It Overʼ is a bit of 12-bar blues redone in a pop format, cute, catchy, but achieving pop perfection only a little bit later, in 1961, when Ernie Maresca and Dion recast it as ʽThe Wandererʼ; and ʽHeartbeatʼ shows some Cuban influence in its melody, even though Buddy's vocals remain quite steadfast in «folk-pop» territory, making for a fun contrast.

 

The veritable masterpiece here is arguably ʽIt's So Easyʼ, which very much sets the standard for the «inventive upbeat guitar-based pop song» of the next decade: catchy (and multi-part) chorus, multi-part verse, highly melodic solo, and a certain vocal/guitar unity, working towards making the listener feel alright. Not to mention the Crickets' usual roughness-round-the-edges to put a dense checkmark in the «for rebellious teenagers» rather than «for respectable middle class audi­ences» square — those ragged guitar licks are definitely for kids, not their parents.

 

By the time of his final official sessions, however, Buddy was showing some disturbing signs of agreeing to «water down» his sound: not only was ʽIt Doesn't Matter Anymoreʼ written by Paul Anka (not particularly frightening, since the song is very much in the folk-pop idiom and could just as well be sung by, say, the Everly Brothers), but it also featured the orchestral overdubs of Dick Jacobs, while ʽRaining In My Heartʼ, with the same orchestration, was credited to the song­writing team of F. and B. Bryant, resident hitwriters for the same Everlys. Jacobs' arrangements are careful and moderately tasteful, with interesting and memorable parts written for the harp, but Buddy's vocals are too weak to properly handle the demands of either song — he does his best, yet he still has to strain and stretch on all the complicated bits — and it only goes to show that, songwriting being his greatest gift, he has very little business integrating his own persona into songs written by other people.

 

This is why Vol. 2, almost entirely consisting of Buddy originals (with the exception of Bobby Darin's rather inane ʽNow We're Oneʼ and Norman Petty's overtly sentimental ballad ʽMoon­dreamsʼ, exacerbated with a wannabe-Heifetz salon violin solo), is, in a way, more con­sistent than the hit-laden original, and perhaps even more indicative of those artistic roads that Buddy might have followed. Granted, ʽPeggy Sue Got Marriedʼ was a rather silly idea for a follow-up to ʽPeggy Sueʼ proper (although back in 1958-59, the habit of releasing an inferior «sequel» that had the same melody as the major hit was still an absolute commonality). But its follow-up on the re­cord is ʽWell... All Rightʼ, a song so ahead of its own time that it would sound perfectly in its right place a whole decade later when Blind Faith integrated it on their own self-titled album — a successful attempt on Buddy's part to add a «thoughtfully mature» component to the usual «teen­agers in love» subject. Not only is the melodic structure here highly unusual even for the folk-pop standards of the era, but there is also an attractive philosophical ring to the way Buddy mumbles "we'll live and love with all our might... our lifetime of love will be all right", indicating that "those foolish kids" might actually be far more ready than their own parents.

 

Another well-known highlight here is ʽCrying, Waiting, Hopingʼ, a song particularly famous for its clever overdubbing by the rest of the Crickets, who had to work with Buddy's demo and fill in the «echo» vocals for the title, one of the few «post-Buddy» creative decisions on his work that has become universally accepted even after the original demo had surfaced — probably because without the echo vocals the little ladder that Buddy has constructed in the place of the vocal me­lody seems to be naturally lacking several steps, which his co-workers are only too happy to be able to fill in. This particular tune the Beatles did not improve on, when they played it live on the BBC — maybe because they highlighted the wrong George on it (Harrison, whose vocal perfor­mance was quite flat compared to Buddy's, instead of Martin, who may have given them a few clues on how to gloss it up properly).

 

A deeper dig will, however, also uncover less familiar highlights — such as ʽLearning The Gameʼ, with its melancholy-meditative flair, ʽTake Your Timeʼ, with an inventive organ backing (probably posthumous as well), and ʽThat Makes It Toughʼ, with another strained vocal delivery, but curious in how it borrows the basic structure from generic country and tries to fuse it with the grandiose flair of anthemic pop balladry.

 

In between all of these, the two volumes of Story do an excellent job of showing just about all of the man's strong and weak points alike — where the man comes from, where he's been to, and where he would be a-headin' if fate had been kinder. Speculating on the issue is useless; there is no evidence that, out of all the early heroes of the rock'n'roll era, Buddy could have been the one to overcome the «Fifties' Curse», but it is also true that, of all his contemporaries, he showed the least interest in clinging to an established formula, experimenting with words, chords, and moods to the bitter end, and not letting success go to his head. Would that have helped him retain vitality and relevance in the British Invasion era? I guess only Paul McCartney can tell.

 

REMINISCING (1963)

 

1) Reminiscing; 2) Slippin' And Slidin'; 3) Bo Diddley; 4) Wait Till The Sun Shines, Nellie; 5) Baby, Won't You Come Out Tonight; 6) Brown Eyed Handsome Man; 7) Because I Love You; 8) It's Not My Fault; 9) I'm Gonna Set My Foot Down; 10) Changing All Those Changes; 11) Rock-A-Bye-Rock.

 

I do not know why it took Norman Petty almost three years to realize the benefits that could be gained from continuing to milk Buddy's archives. However, since Reminiscing came out in Feb­ruary '63, it certainly was not tied in to the British Invasion, which had not yet begun, and could not have caused additional interest in the dead man behind it all. More likely, it was caused by a growing deficit in Petty's own pockets.

 

In any case, neither this particular record, nor any of its three or four follow-ups, released through the 1960s, have any reason to exist these days, what with all of Buddy's undubbed demos, out­takes, rehearsals etc. now legally available on various boxsets and rarities collections. But just for the sake of history, and also for the sake of letting you know that these overdubbed recordings were never quite as terrible as devoted fans often proclaim them to be, I suppose that a word or two is in order at least about the first few of these mutants.

 

So, the story as it stands: Reminiscing is a set of eleven Holly / Crickets tunes, originally re­corded from 1956 to 1958, then left in the can until 1962, when Petty hired the Fireballs, a now-forgotten but then-modestly-popular rockabilly band, to bring the tapes to completion. Unlike «The Apartment Tapes», which were just Buddy and his acoustic, these songs, however, ranged from acoustic demos to semi-completed tracks that already had the Crickets playing on them, so Petty basically had one band play on top of the other every now and then — no wonder the sound is, mildly speaking, a bit messy in places.

 

That said, the Fireballs were a bona fide rock band like any other, and, at the very least, these overdubs make sense. The main problem of Reminiscing is not the tampering — it is the lack of high quality material. For sure, Buddy was a prolific recorder, but he wasn't that good of a song­writer to strike out a new great tune every day. After the «Apartment Tunes» had all made their appearance, in one form or another, on Story, the majority of what was left in the vaults turned out to be covers of other people's stuff — and given that Buddy's covers of other people on his regular LPs were rarely the focus of attention, what could one expect to find at the bottom of the barrel? I wouldn't go as far as to say that Petty was doing Buddy a huge reputational disservice, but there is not a single song here that could count as a lost gem (okay, maybe one).

 

About half of the tracks are well-known standards by Buddy's rock'n'roller competitors or imita­tions of these competitors (ʽI'm Gonna Set My Foot Downʼ is a transparent copy of Roy Orbi­son's ʽOoby Doobyʼ with a little bit of ʽEverybody's Trying To Be My Baby / Blue Suede Shoesʼ thrown in for good measure). Sometimes the arrangements are drastically experimental, but not to a reasonable effect — the attempt to reinvent Little Richard's ʽSlippin' And Slidin'ʼ as a slow «shuffle», with heavy emphasis on voice modulation, is sort of weird for weirdness sake, and was, I believe, rightfully abandoned by the artist because the song ceased to make sense. Elsewhere, we have Buddy trying on the shoes of Bo Diddley (ʽBo Diddleyʼ) and Chuck Berry (ʽBrown Eyed Handsome Manʼ) — decent homages, but completely unnecessary.

 

That one song which could qualify for posterity gave the album itself its title: a leftover from a session where Buddy was backed by sax master King Curtis. Although ʽReminiscingʼ is formally credited to the sax guy, it is reported that Buddy was the author, and that he handed the credit over to Curtis in acknowledgement of the man agreeing to play for him. Not that the composition is particularly original, but the Buddy/Curtis combination is, and it kind of makes one sad that the same combination was not tried out on some of Buddy's better songs.

 

Of the other originals, ʽBecause I Love Youʼ is a bit too draggy, monotonous, and simplistic to influence me with its tenderness, and the rest is rather generic rockabilly that might or might not date back to Buddy's earliest, not particularly adventurous sessions — all in all, if you were truly «reminiscing» about the man back in 1963, just hearing his voice on yet another bunch of tunes must have been an extraordinary experience, but now that it's all one for the newer generations, Reminiscing is understandably easier associated with Petty's pettiness than with Holly's holiness, if you get my drift. Therefore, a thumbs down here, even if the title track is well worth a spin or two in the playlist of your choice.

 

SHOWCASE (1964)

 

1) Shake, Rattle And Roll; 2) Rock Around With Ollie Vee; 3) Honky Tonk; 4) I Guess I Was Just A Fool; 5) Umm, Oh Yeah; 6) You're The One; 7) Blue Suede Shoes; 8) Come Back Baby; 9) Rip It Up; 10) Love's Made A Fool Of You; 11) Gone; 12) Girl On My Mind.

 

Just one more of these and we're done. Showcase followed fairly quickly after Reminiscing, since the latter sold poorly, but steadily, and was even more of a pathetic cash-in — this time, the buying public had learned its lesson and remained completely unimpressed, not to mention that, by May 1964, Beatlemania was on in full force, and the kids had plenty of stuff to worry about other than a bunch of decade-old outtakes, crudely overdubbed and revealing nothing particularly new about the artist. Not even a King Curtis duet this time around.

 

Instead, what we get is mostly songs from the same early 1956 Nashville sessions that yielded the relatively lackluster That'll Be The Day LP (in fact, two of the songs, ʽRock Around With Ollie Veeʼ and ʽGirl On My Mindʼ, seem to have simply been carried over from that album, maybe in slightly remixed form). As usual, half-finished outtakes and demos rule the day, and, as usual, my beef is not so much with the «sacrilegious» overdubs as it is with most of the songs being just plain uninteresting.

 

There is quite a fair share of Holly originals here, to be sure, but they reflect the earliest and most derivative period of Buddy as a songwriter, and, for the most part, we either hear pedes­trian country-western (ʽI Guess I Was Just A Foolʼ), or half-developed predecessors of better songs: ʽLove's Made A Fool Of Youʼ already tries to spice up the country-western flavor by borrowing the Bo Diddley beat, soon to take full shape in the form of ʽNot Fade Awayʼ, and ʽYou're The Oneʼ, left here in its original acoustic demo incarnation, sows the seeds of ʽPeggy Sueʼ and seve­ral other classics. Consequently, they do have historical value, but if we are talking historical value rather than pure entertainment, why all the overdubs?

 

As for the covers, there is even less to add to what has been said before: no matter how many Buddy versions of classic non-Buddy rock'n'roll hits get added to the catalog, there is simply no way they can add anything to the originals. In some difficult, incomprehensible way it may be «fun» to hear how Buddy does ʽShake, Rattle & Rollʼ or ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ, just to rest assured how deeply integrated he always was with the fearless rockabilly crowd, but that's about it.

 

The finalized album predictably gets another thumbs down. Throughout the 1960s, Petty would then continue squeezing out «bastardized» releases (such as Holly In The Hills from 1965 and Giant from as late as 1969), but they get progressively more difficult to find on CD and, in any case, have become formally obsolete now that most of the original, undubbed, tapes have been officially released on various compilations of rarities, so we shall spare ourselves the hassle of promoting Petty's questionable understanding of musical ethics and just move on.

 

DOWN THE LINE (1948-1959/2009)

 

CD I: 1) My Two-Timin' Woman; 2) Footprints In The Snow; 3) Flower Of My Heart; 4) Door To My Heart; 5) Soft Place In My Heart; 6) Gotta Get You Near Me Blues; 7) I Gambled My Heart; 8) You And I Are Through; 9) Down The Line; 10) Baby, Let's Play House; 11) Moonlight Baby (Baby, Won't You Come Out Tonight); 12) I Guess I Was Just A Fool; 13) Don't Come Back Knockin'; 14) Love Me; 15) Gone; 16) Gone [alternate take]; 17) Have You Ever Been Lonely [alternate take]; 18) Have You Ever Been Lonely; 19) Brown-Eyed Handsome Man; 20) Good Rockin' Tonight; 21) Rip It Up; 22) Blue Monday; 23) Honky Tonk; 24) Blue Suede Shoes; 25) Shake Rattle and Roll [partial]; 26) Bo Diddley; 27) Ain't Got No Home; 28) Holly Hop.

CD II: 1) Last Night [undubbed]; 2) Not Fade Away [partial alternate overdub]; 3) Peggy Sue [alternate take]; 4) Oh Boy! [undubbed]; 5) That's My Desire; 6) Take Your Time; 7) Fool's Paradise [alternate take]; 8) Fool's Paradise [undubbed master]; 9) Fool's Paradise [alternate #2 undubbed]; 10) Think It Over [take 1]; 11) Think It Over [take 2]; 12) Think It Over [take 3]; 13) Love's Made A Fool Of You [undubbed]; 14) That'll Be The Day (Greetings To Bob Thiele); 15) That'll Be The Day (Greetings To Murray Deutsch); 16) That's What They Say (With Fragment); 17) What To Do; 18) Peggy Sue Got Married; 19) That Makes It Tough; 20) Crying, Waiting, Hoping; 21) Learning The Game; 22) Wait Till The Sun Shines Nellie; 23) Slippin' And Slidin' [slow version #1]; 24) Slippin' And Slidin' [slow version #2]; 25) Slippin' And Slidin' [fast version]; 26) Buddy & Maria Elena Talking In Apartment (Dia­logue); 27) Dearest [fragment]; 28) Dearest; 29) Untitled Instrumental; 30) Love Is Strange; 31) Smokey Joe's Café.

 

While this package is not completely-thoroughly exhaustive, as any serious Holly fan will tell you, it contains everything and much more than the «average Joe», interested in taking a serious glance at Buddy's underwater part of the iceberg, would ever want to hear. In fact, everybody's best bet at a comprehensive Buddy-shrine would probably be to own one of the larger, multi-disc collections of «official» stuff, and this double-CD package of rarities (many of them officially released for the first time here) as a supporting companion.

 

All the tracks are arranged here in strict chronological order — to such an extent that Disc 1 is properly «The Formative Years» and Disc 2 is «The Blossom Years» (just two of them, really, from early 1957 to early 1959). Sound quality ranges from unlistenable, especially on the earliest recordings, to decent on the later ones, but most importantly, everything is undubbed — inclu­ding «The Apartment Demos», which, up until 2009, could only be heard in their original form with the aid of your local friendly bootlegger. Not that a song like ʽCrying, Waiting, Hopingʼ is really supposed to be so very much better in its demo form than in the studio-completed Crickets arrangement (with «echo» vocals and everything) — but it goes without saying that one should have free access to the original artist version as well.

 

The first disc is interesting mostly in «journey» terms. The first track is a home recording of a 12-year old Buddy playing guitar and singing Hank Snow's ʽMy Two-Timin' Womanʼ — the voice not yet broken, a delightful kiddie soprano that duly disappears five years later on the second track, ʽFootprints In The Snowʼ. Recording quality for these home tapes is abysmal, but it's a mi­racle they exist at all — apparently, Buddy borrowed a wire recorder from a friend who worked in a music shop for the Hank Snow cover, and the results managed to survive.

 

Later on, several tracks document the «Buddy & Bob» duo — a bunch of country and bluegrass tunes that, as a rule, are rather facelessly played, sung, and recorded, but hardly «bad» for high school entertainment level (it seems that most of them were self-penned as well, scoring them additional points for derivative creativity). The transition occurs by the time they reach the last of these: ʽDown The Lineʼ, which gives the name to the entire compilation, is where they make the definitive move from country-western to rockabilly aesthetics (odd as it is, the song has nothing to do with Roy Orbison's own ʽDown The Lineʼ, which would only be released one year later, in 1956 rather than June 1955). No wonder — Elvis had just left the building.

 

From there onwards, the rest of Disc 1 mostly consists of Buddy hitting on everyone: Elvis, Chuck, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, etc., gradually groping for his own style, but certainly not finding it all at once — he even goes as far as to cover Clarence "Frogman" Henry's ʽAin't Got No Homeʼ, despite having no qualification whatsoever to match the Frogman's vocal «talents», but it's actually a good thing, since no one would probably want to see Holly stuck in the role of a voice clown, mimicking little girls and lonely frogs all his life.

 

As Disc 2 rolls along, we finally emerge from the stage of «intriguing historical document» and get rewarded by demos, alternate versions, and rehearsal takes of the real classic stuff. Some of these are a bit of an overkill, e. g. three consecutive versions of ʽThink It Overʼ — a classic num­ber all right, but not exactly a ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ for us to be so much interested in the slowly unfurling story of its creation. But the acoustic «Apartment Demos», without any echo effects on Buddy's voice or electric rhythm parts obscuring the man's original melodies, are quite a treasure — the only thing I am not sure about is the inclusion of three and a half minutes of conversation between Buddy and his wife in the same apartment, which I tend to skip because it makes you feel uneasy, like spying on the man's underwear. Studio chatter during work hours is one thing, but this here is kinda personal. (Besides, Maria Elena's croaky Puerto Rican laughter is only marginally more irritating than Buddy's Texan guffaw, if you'll excuse me for these slurry particularities). Additionally, there is a fast version of ʽSlippin' and Slidin'ʼ here, showing that Buddy probably gave up on the bad idea of slowing down the song before forgetting about it al­together; an undubbed ʽLove Is Strangeʼ, notorious for having once served as Buddy's last «ori­ginal» minor chart entry as late as 1969; and even a cover of ʽSmokey Joe's Caféʼ, showcasing the man's interest in the comical (Robins/Coasters) side of Atlantic R&B — or maybe just in the songwriting talents of Leiber & Stoller.

 

All in all, for «historical and cultural significance», this package gets a natural thumbs up, but do keep in mind that its «entertainment value» is limited — I seriously doubt that anybody would want to listen to the first disc more than once, and the «golden core» of the second disc altogether takes up about twenty minutes, not more: the rest is all alternate takes, false starts, jingles, and oddities. On the other hand, considering that Buddy's artistic evolution was arguably one of the most interesting musical stories of the early rock'n'roll movement, there is hardly another Fifties' rock'n'roller of the same caliber that would be more deserving of such an intelligently assembled package. And, come to think of it, was there another Fifties' rock'n'roller that had the luck to be captured on tape at the tender age of twelve?

BUDDY MOSS

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1933)

 

1) Bye Bye Mama; 2) Daddy Don't Care; 3) Red River Blues; 4) Cold Country Blues; 5) Prowling Woman; 6) TB's Killing Me; 7) When I'm Dead And Gone; 8) Hard Time Blues; 9) Prowlin' Gambler Blues; 10) Hard Road Blues; 11) Jealous Hearted Man; 12) Midnight Rambler; 13) Best Gal; 14) Restless Night Blues; 15) Married Man Blues; 16) Somebody Keeps Calling Me; 17) Back To My Used To Be; 18) Back To My Used To Be No. 2; 19) Can't Use You No More; 20) Can't Use You No More No. 2; 21) Travelin' Blues; 22) Bachelor's Blues; 23) Broke Down Engine.

 

Wherever Buddy Moss is not falling through the cracks of history, sources tend to present him as a sort of «missing link» between Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller — the inelegant part of this view being that Buddy Moss wasn't blind, and the elegant part of it being that his peak career period did fall on those exact years when Blind Blake was already gone, and Blind Boy Fuller did not yet start recording, namely, 1933-34. On the other hand, Buddy himself vehemently denied being influenced by anybody (liar liar), and his own influence on Fuller is debatable. Best stra­tegy would simply be to take the man on his own terms.

 

Actually, judging at least by Buddy's earliest recordings, his playing style, temperament, and musical attitude were quite different from both of these visually challenged gentlemen. In parti­cu­lar, he played very little of that «Piedmont», ragtime-oriented blues — Blind Blake's style was fast, jerky, entertaining, bodily-provocative, but Buddy strictly sticks to the slow 12-bar form, very canonical, very clean, mostly devoid of individualistic twists, yet with an extremely profes­sional and dexterously flowing sound. Modern listeners will find nothing particularly revealing about this form, but it seems to have been relatively rare on the streets of Atlanta in 1933, domi­nated as they were by Blind Willie McTell's ʽGeorgia Ragʼ and stuff.

 

On the whole, Buddy's sound should probably be considered as one of the closest predecessors of Chicago blues — even more so than Robert Johnson, who usually worked alone, whereas Buddy, on many, if not most, of his recordings is accompanied by a second guitarist (usually Curley Wea­ver), giving them a fuller, «band-like» sound: if you just added some electricity, you'd have yourself a 1953 as early as 1933. On the technical side, Buddy is a much more skilled lead player than Johnson: be it straight or slide, the best part of all these blues is invariably the solo, where he plays varied, fluent, expressive runs, very precise, very well put together, less imaginative and unpredictable than, say, Blind Lemon Jefferson's, but pretty much unmatched by any other for­malistic 12-bar guru in the business at the time. And if there was one guitarist from whom Elmore James was likely to cop his famous ʽDust My Broomʼ lick, Buddy is as good a candidate as any (ʽTB's Killing Meʼ, ʽWhen I'm Dead And Goneʼ).

 

The downside is obvious, too: of the 23 tracks on this first volume of his legacy that captures most of the 1933 experience, just about every single one is completely interchangeable with every other one. Occasionally, he switches from regular acoustic to slide, and from one backing guita­rist to another, but the tempos and basic structures stay consistently the same, and unless you are a maniacal 12-bar fanatic, there is no reason whatsoever why you should listen to more than two or three songs at a time (sound quality, by the way, shifts quite significantly from tune to tune, but about half of the songs have a very tolerable level of crackling — which is nice to know, con­sidering Columbia's typically less-than-royal quality treatment of its country blues artists).

 

On a trivia note, it is funny that one of the tracks here is called ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ — nothing to do with the Stones classic, but giving a rather precise indication as to how the bad boys came up with that title; Buddy's tune, in comparison, is quite harmless and inoffensive, infused with the regular blues yearning and moaning, but without any traces of psychopathology. In fact, as far as we know, Buddy himself was a fairly easy-going, friendly fellow, thoroughly uninterested in cul­tivating any mystical or «spiritually driven» image of himself — his singing is pleasant, but per­functory, his antics / gimmicks / special sonic tricks are non-existent, and his only real love / in­terest lies in making that guitar sing the blues. A completely one-trick pony here, but give the pony a break — it takes a little genius to perform that trick so well.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 2 (1933-1934)

 

1) Broke Down Engine No. 2 (take 1); 2) Broke Down Engine No. 2 (take 2); 3) B & O Blues No. 2; 4) Some Lone­some Day (take 1); 5) Some Lone­some Day (take 2); 6) New Lovin' Blues; 7) Unkind Woman; 8) When The Hearse Roll Me From My Door; 9) Insane Blues; 10) Tricks Ain't Walking No More; 11) Stinging Bull Nettle; 12) Oh Lordy Mama; 13) Dough Rolling Papa; 14) Some Lonesome Day; 15) Misery Man Blues; 16) Jinx Man Blues; 17) Evil Hearted Woman; 18) Too Dog Gone Jealous; 19) Someday Baby (I'll Have Mine); 20) Love Me, Baby, Love Me; 21) Sleepless Night; 22) Shake It All Night Long.

 

The second volume of Buddy's complete oeuvres (to be precise, complete pre-war oeuvres) co­vers a one-year period from September 1933 to August 1934 and runs pretty much in a straight, unbroken line together with the first one, so it is not highly likely you will find any serious dif­ferences from the first volume, other than perhaps a larger percentage of completely solo (single guitar) tracks, and just a few scattered attempts to introduce syncopated «dance blues» patterns in the repertoire (ʽTricks Ain't Walking No Moreʼ) that broaden the range, but do not add extra in­sights that hadn't already been there with Blind Blake.

 

One song from these sessions that has managed to make a little history is ʽOh Lordy Mamaʼ, later known as ʽHey Lawdy Mamaʼ and remade by countless artists from Count Basie and Louis Arm­strong to Freddie King and even Cream (who played the song for the BBC and later merged it with Albert King's ʽCrosscut Sawʼ to make a ʽStrange Brewʼ indeed). Musically, it sounds exact­ly the same way as about a dozen other songs in Buddy's catalog (country-blues with a boogie bass line to it), but it goes to show how much fuss just a teensy-weensy bit of variety in the 12-bar world can make — here, inserting the «hookline» of "oh lordy mama..." after each first line of the verse, which gives a funny illusion of extra complexity and «progressiveness» compared to the more rigid three-line-verse formula. Just an illusion, really, but sometimes an illusion is all it takes to gain additional popularity.

 

On the other hand, Buddy is just too good a guitarist to be continuously recycling exactly the same ideas, and serious blues fans with a good ear for nuance will most certainly be able to single out unusual takes — for instance, ʽDough Rolling Papaʼ makes some interesting stop-and-starts between the regular bars, and the melody is played as if the bass strings and the higher strings were holding a busy dialog with each other rather than working in tandem; the opening notes of ʽSomeday Baby (I'll Have Mine)ʼ are quite pretty-poetic; and the final track from the 1934 ses­sions (ʽShake It All Night Longʼ) ends the period on a musically/lyrically joyful rather than me­lancholic note. If only half of the other songs did not begin with the exact same note sequence (the pre-proto-ʽDust My Broomʼ pattern), I'm sure Buddy's legacy would have enjoyed more at­tention today; as it is, admiring all of these twenty-two tracks in straight sequence is more of a business for fanatical connoisseurs or students of acoustic blues playing techniques.

 

COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 3 (1935-1941)

 

1) Gravy Server; 2) Going To Your Funeral In A V8 Ford; 3) My Baby Won't Pay Me No Mind; 4) Undertaker Blues; 5) Oh Lordy Mama No. 2; 6) Worrysome Woman; 7) Your Hard Head Will Bring You Sorrow Some Day; 8) Can't Use You No More; 9) See What You Done Done; 10) Stop Hanging Around; 11) On My Way; 12) How About You; 13) Talking About My Time; 14) You Got To Give Me Some Of It; 15) Mistreated Boy; 16) You Need A Woman; 17) Joy Rag; 18) Little Angel Blues; 19) Struggle Buggie; 20) I'm Sittin' Here Tonight; 21) Baby You're The One For Me; 22) Unfinished Business.

 

By mid-1935, it sort of seemed that nothing could seriously threaten or derail Buddy's career — Depression factors were not harming modest, but steady sales, and in an attempt to revitalize the formula, Buddy got himself a new partner: the "Singing Christian" Josh White (also known as Pinewood Tom), who was actually more of a guitar player than singer before gangrene ate up his left hand in 1936. The bulk of the tracks on this third volume consists of material that Buddy and Josh recorded together: usually, White merely supplies second guitar, but some of the tracks are sympathetic gospel duets, well in the tradition of Blind Willie Johnson (ʽHow About Youʼ), or folksy dance numbers (ʽYou Got To Give Me Some Of Itʼ), and this gives Buddy an opportunity to try his hand at something other than straightforward 12-bar blues. The best of these numbers, however, is ʽOn My Wayʼ, on which Buddy wrings a juicy slide tone out of his guitar; unfortu­nately, the only solo is in the brief introduction.

 

Unfortunately, in 1936 Buddy Moss happened to shoot and kill his wife — or, at least, so said the jury, leading to a life sentence in prison; knowledgeable people sometimes insist that guilt was never proven beyond reasonable doubt and that the sentence was racially biased, but whatever be the case, the sentence broke up a promising career that was almost on the verge of becoming minimally diverse. Josh White went his own way, and Buddy lingered in prison for five years be­fore his old record labels finally secured parole for their former star (hard to believe, yes, but there was a time when people at Columbia would be willing to bribe parole boards in order to help out their has-beens whose further commercial viability was quite under question).

 

The newly released Buddy, however, arrived back in the studio right on the brink of war, and with restrictions on shellac use coming into effect, only had time for one more session — held in October 1941 with such illustrious friends as Brownie McGhee on guitar and piano, and Sonny Terry on har­monica. With a small and well-qualified band behind his back, this last seven-song section is the liveliest part of the record, and Buddy is in great spirit, whether churning out energetic «proto-rock'n'roll» (ʽJoy Ragʼ, ʽStruggle Buggieʼ), more old-fashioned ragtime dance blues (ʽI'm Sittin' Here Tonightʼ) or the old 12-bar material (ʽYou Need A Womanʼ).

 

And then it was all over in a flash: shellac restrictions, loss of contract, waning of interest in country blues, oblivion, the whole package, for more than twenty years. To be perfectly frank, Buddy never really stood a chance like, say, Big Bill Broonzy — his style was much more rigid, «academic» (crude, but working, epithet), and not particularly appealing to mass audiences. Big Bill usually sounded like he cared, first and foremost, about giving the listener a good time: Bud­dy was more about expressing his love for country blues, which was far more abundant in his own heart than in the hearts of his listeners (myself included, frankly speaking), and seems to have had relatively little concern for showmanship — never a useful thing in a competitive en­vironment, regardless of all the honesty/integrity that goes along with it. Anyway, bottomline is: these three volumes of Buddy's recordings from the 1930s are actually well worth sitting through, one by one, if you feel a deep affinity for this sort of music — and even if you do not, they work totally fine as a classy background tapestry of fine acoustic blues playing.

 

ATLANTA BLUES LEGEND (1967)

 

1) Hurry Home; 2) Red River; 3) Pushin' It; 4) Comin' Back; 5) How I Feel Today; 6) That'll Never Happen No More; 7) Oh Lawdy Mama; 8) I'm Sitting On Top Of The World; 9) Kansas City; 10) It Was The Weary Hour Night; 11) Chesterfield; 12) I've Got To Keep To The Highway; 13) Come On Around To My House; 14) Step It Up And Go; 15) Everyday Seems Like Sunday; 16) I Got A Woman, Don't Mean Me No Good; 17) Betty And Dupree; 18) Every Day, Every Day.

 

Like many other fellow bluesmen, Buddy Moss was rediscovered and dragged out into the lime­light in the 1960s, in the middle of the new «blues boom» that hit both sides of the Atlantic. Due to his natural humility and shyness, though, he was never able to capitalize on the rediscovery — never made it over to England, where he could have easily claimed hero status; his live ap­pea­rances at festivals were few and far in between; and his new recorded output was quite slim com­pared to, say, Big Bill Broonzy or the commercially successful duo of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. But he probably didn't mind — according to some sources, he seems to have been drawn into the whole revival thing entirely by accident (upon having been seen by some blues fans backstage after a Josh White show).

 

This record was originally released in 1967 and contained a large portion of Buddy's live appea­rance at a Washington, D. C. concert in June 1966; the CD issue expanded it with a bunch of ex­tra tracks that Moss recorded for Columbia in Nashville around the same time — those, however, remained unreleased for about thirty years. On the studio tracks, Buddy plays and sings almost entirely by himself, with only Jeff Espina on harmonica to accompany the guitar; for the Washin­gton show, they are further joined by John Jackson on second guitar.

 

As it usually happens with these revivals, there is some overlap with the old stuff, but not a huge lot: audiences were expecting to hear «popular» blues songs rather than obscurities, so that Buddy adds stuff like ʽStep It Up And Goʼ to his repertoire which he never got around to recording in the pre-war era (but Blind Boy Fuller and Brownie McGhee both did), or even ʽEvery Day (I Have The Blues)ʼ, a song that was first recorded by Pinetop Sparks in 1935, but which most people in the 1950s and 1960s probably associated with B. B. King. However, this is no reason to complain — on the contrary, it is very good to hear the old guy «forced» to expand his horizons, combining revised versions of his old classics (ʽLawdy Mamaʼ etc.) with stuff that he heard from others, or maybe even played in the old days, but never got around to record.

 

I will not comment on the individual tracks, since doing so requires a much deeper understanding of the basics of acoustic blues than I have, but the overall gut feeling is that thirty years of un­involvement in the musical business had a negative influence on the man's fingers (the playing is just a wee bit «sloppier» and less focused than its used to be), but a positive influence on the man's mind — instead of relying largely on stock phrasing, he takes plenty of opportunities to explore, find additional tricks, make the guitar chirp, squeak, and chime whenever possible. Even on the studio outtakes, the tracks sometimes run over four minutes, and several of the concert numbers run over five — meaning that the man had found freedom from the technical require­ments of the three-minute single and that he intended to use it. His singing, unfortunately, had declined due to aging, but that is not a big problem: Buddy was always a competent, never an outstanding vocalist, and «competent» ones get extra bonuses as they age.

 

Given that, out of everything that Buddy recorded and released in his «comeback» era (not much altogether), this is the most easily available package, it is highly recommendable — sound quality is very decent (the Washington concert is almost entirely free from audience noises, with every­one sitting very quietly, just an occasional snicker or two at Buddy's occasional in-between-lines jokes), relative diversity (12-bar blues, ragtime blues, jump blues, folk, etc.) is guaranteed, «blues authenticity» is indisputable; thumbs up without question. But, of course, if you want to properly «relive history», without relying exclusively on nostalgic product, check out the crackling oldies as well — Atlanta Blues Legend lays a heavy emphasis on the «legend» bit, and it will always be only a substitute for «the real thing».

BUKKA WHITE

ABERDEEN MISSISSIPPI BLUES (1930-1940; 2003)

 

1) The New Frisco Train; 2) The Panama Limited; 3) I Am In The Heavenly Way; 4) Promise True And Grand; 5) Pinebluff Arkansas; 6) Shake 'Em On Down; 7) Sic 'Em Dogs On; 8) Po' Boy; 9) Black Train Blues; 10) Strange Place Blues; 11) When Can I Change My Clothes; 12) Sleepy Man Blues; 13) Parchman Farm Blues; 14) Good Gin Blues; 15) High Fever Blues; 16) District Attorney; 17) Fixin' To Die Blues; 18) Aberdeen Mississippi Blues; 19) Bukka's Jitterbug Swing; 20) Special Stream Line.

 

One standard problem with reviewing thoroughly assembled collections of pre-war blues material is their expectable monotonousness — successful artists cutting dozens and dozens and dozens of sides that sounded all the same, simply because it was sometimes simpler and cheaper to cut a new side in the studio than re-release an old one. In that respect, Aberdeen Mississippi Blues, a near-exhaustive archive collection issued on the Document Records label, is a heart-warming and fairly unique exception. It manages to collect almost everything that Bukka White managed to re­cord in a whole decade, between 1930 and 1940, and in widely varying, and sometimes quite in­triguing, conditions at that. Since he was so notoriously un-prolific, this makes the collection read like a thrilling life story, quickly moving from chapter to chapter with a complex plotline.

 

Chapter 1: May 1930. A young and aspiring Washington White on vocal and guitar, backed by Napoleon Harrison on second guitar, cuts two sides for Victor Records in Memphis — both re­flecting his life-long preference for trains, not just in the lyrics, but also in the music: that steel-bodied National guitar chugs along at top volume like a good old-fashioned choo-choo, speeding up, slowing down, pistons puffing, whistles blowing. He talks more than sings on both tracks, but that's perfectly suitable for these two little travelogs that immediately set the man up as a fairly unique talent, and rather align him with Leadbelly than, say, the ragtime blues school that was all the rage in the late 1920s / early 1930s. Just as you have finished pigeonholing him, though, he unexpectedly turns around and cuts two more, completely different tracks — dark, gruff gospel blues in the style of Blind Willie Johnson, backed by an unidentified «Miss Minnie», usually spe­culated to have been Memphis Minnie, but without definite proof.

 

Chapter 2: September 1937. A slightly older, but no less aspiring Bukka White on vocal and gui­tar, backed by an unknown second guitarist, cuts two sides for Vocalion in Chicago. Chicago! — and what we now hear is gruff, tense, slightly paranoid 12-bar blues on ʽPinebluff Arkansasʼ and ʽShake 'Em On Downʼ; the latter would eventually become one of the most celebrated blues pieces of its era, not the least because an untrained ear could easily confuse Bukka's hollering and playing on this track with Robert Johnson's. Already he sounds like a man possessed — for the moment, though, possessed primarily by libidinous urges.

 

Chapter 3: May 1939. A slightly less aspiring Bukka White, locked up in Parchman Farm in Mississippi for shooting a man in the leg, records two tracks for John Lomax on his portable equipment. This recording, ʽSic 'Em Dogs Onʼ and ʽPo' Boyʼ, soon acquires legendary status as well — not only for the rather specific conditions in which it was produced, but also because it unleashes the full spectrum of Bukka's talents: the combination of his deep, rumbling vocal vib­rato and his aggressive playing (few people would dare to be as brutal when playing slide) really sounds like nothing else at the time. The closest comparison would probably be Charley Patton now, although nobody could accuse Bukka of the same levels of insanity.

 

Chapter 4: March 1940. Not the most legendary, but the largest, cleanest, and most informative chapter of 'em all. Back in Chicago, with only Washboard Sam to keep him company (three gues­ses as to Washboard Sam's preferred instrument of choice). Trains, alcohol, prison, sickness, madness, death, cemetery — not necessarily in that order, but you could easily program the results of that session to read like a short, comprehensive biography. ʽParchman Farm Bluesʼ, recalling personal experience; ʽGood Gin Bluesʼ, dealing with personal conditions; and particu­larly ʽFixin' To Die Bluesʼ, dealing with morose presentiments but in a surprisingly lively fashion (Dylan would later redo the song in a grim, desperate style, more easily understandable for the average white ear) — these are some of the highlights, although the entire session was quite even (must be the washboard effect).

 

It should be remembered that, although many of the songs sound similar, they never truly repeat each other. Booker T.'s playing style, much like that of Big Joe Williams, relied on brute force and raw feeling more than exquisite technique, but he knew all he cared to about nuances and flourishes, and on the general pre-war scale of «folk artistry vs. popular entertainment» his own little black dot goes almost all the way to the left. Every bit as essential as Johnson, Patton, and Lead­belly, and every bit as enjoyable for that long gone earthy vibe, these four chapters and their sixty minutes are not to be missed by anybody — thumbs up a-plenty.

 

Technical P.S.: In between this CD and the confusingly titled Complete Bukka White from a decade back, be sure to give your preference to the Document release: Complete really only covers the 1937 and 1940 Chicago sessions, and it is nowhere near as fun or instructive to have Bukka without the early train / gospel records or the quintessential prison session with Lomax.

 

MISSISSIPPI BLUES (1964)

 

1) Aberdeen Mississippi Blues; 2) Parchman Farm Blues; 3) Shake 'Em On Down; 4) I Am The Heavenly Way; 5) Atlanta Special; 6) Drunk Man Blues; 7) Army Blues; 8) Remembrance Of Charlie Patton; 9) New Orleans Stream­line; 10) Poor Boy Long Ways From Home; 11) Baby Please Don't Go.

 

Like so many of his blues pals, Booker T. «Bukka» White was rediscovered in 1963 (by John Fahey, a notorious musician in his own right), and with the acoustic blues boom revival in full swing, almost immediately landed a small contract with Fahey's Takoma Records, who got him a recor­ding session in Memphis and released the results under the laconic title of Mississippi Blues (on CD, this record usually goes under the title of The Sonet Blues Story, since, apparently, the European distribution rights were handed over to the Swedish Sonet label).

 

Bukka is completely alone for this session — no second guitarist, no harmonica, no backup sin­gers, not even a washboard — which is probably the main reason to hear and own it if you alrea­dy have his pre-war recordings (a secondary reason is the expectedly improved sound quality, but the old stuff really wasn't that bad, compared to some of Blind Lemon Jefferson's or Charley Pat­ton's records, for instance). The songs, with but a few exceptions, also cover the same repertoire, although some of the titles are new: ʽThe New 'Frisco Trainʼ becomes ʽThe Atlanta Specialʼ, and ʽPo' Boyʼ becomes a lengthier ʽPoor Boy, Long Ways From Homeʼ. Weirdest of all, ʽParchman Farm Bluesʼ is not really ʽParchman Farm Bluesʼ, but rather ʽWhen Can I Change My Clothesʼ — a blatant mistake that has, nevertheless, steadily persisted on all subsequent releases (just goes to show you how much people actually listen to these things).

 

It is hard to tell whether the man was in top form while making these recordings (some have suggested a bit of a tired strain to at least some of the tracks), but he does make an effort to pass this off as an evening of public entertainment — regularly interspersing sung parts with snippets of talkin' blues to cheer up the audience, and creating the illusion of a band by sometimes ad lib­bing stuff like "play it while I get me a cigarette!" before launching into a solo passage, even though there really ain't nobody but us chickens in the studio. One of the tracks is completely non-musical: four minutes of small anecdotes about Charley Patton, Bukka's personal idol and greatest influence (although there has been some speculation that he was merely thinking these stories all up to please Fahey, who was a big fan of Patton).

 

Other than that, the session does not open up a lot of previously unknown sides to Mr. White. He plays piano instead of guitar on one track (ʽDrunk Man Bluesʼ), not particularly well or anything, and covers Big Joe Williams' ʽBaby Please Don't Goʼ — credibly, but not embettering the origi­nal or, for that matter, the Muddy Waters Chicago version. His old standards show that twenty five years outside the studio have not diminished his guitar skills in the slightest, nor has there been any strain on the vocals, but neither has he thought of any additional ways to reinvent or embellish those tunes. Still, the album is well worth a thumbs up at least for the tastes of those who worry too much about the rusty quality of pre-war blues recordings. For Bukka, these songs still remained his lifeblood in 1963 — this is much more than a nostalgic facsimile — and from a technical point, his rough, but effective playing style should be much easier to study based on this session than on anything from the early days.

 

MEMPHIS HOT SHOTS (1968)

 

1) Bed Spring Blues; 2) Aberdeen Mississippi Blues; 3) Drifting Blues; 4) (Brand New) Decoration Blues; 5) Baby Please Don't Go; 6) Give Me An Old, Old Lady; 7) Got Sick And Tired; 8) World Boogie; 9) School Learning; 10) Old Man Tom; 11) Gibson Town.

 

A major misstep here. As the 1960s wore on and Bukka made more and more public appearances, he saw that the «proper» way to go for most folks was with a backing band, and opted for one of his own. The results, released on Mike Vernon's blues-oriented Blue Horizon label, were not too good — nowhere near as ridiculous as the album cover (we do not even know if it is Bukka him­self in the space suit, but who cares? would it cease to be ridiculous if we knew for sure it ain't him?), but fairly dull all the same.

 

I do not know any of the players — no big surprise, considering that some of them are hiding behind pseudonyms, such as «Anchor» on bass and «Harmonica Boy» on guess-what, and that the actual level of musicianship is utterly pedestrian, slightly above high school level, perhaps, but not even on the level of a third-rate British Invasion R&B band. Apparently, the intent is to try and recreate some sort of Chicago blues atmosphere, with a suitably swampy studio attitude, to match the achievements of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, but the only person who'd want to seriously compare «Harmonica Boy» with Little Walter would be a person who never heard one note played by Little Walter.

 

Worse still, Bukka himself is trying to get into the same pattern — howling, screaming, and roar­ing in prime Chicago fashion instead of retaining his trademark cotton field mumble that he inhe­rited from Charley Patton. It's okay, but it just ain't him: it's a rather pale copy of the Howlin' Wolf approach. It's as if John Lennon suddenly decided to become Bruce Springsteen, or Mick Jagger suddenly decided to become Sting, just because they happened to sell more at the time. The plus side here is that this also brings about a huge change of the repertoire: other than a couple perennial oldies, most of the songs here are new, with titles that I do not recognize (were they actually made up on the spot?) and melodies mostly taken from classic Chicago blues re­cordings. The minus side is — why exactly do I need to hear this?

 

The best material here is strictly solo: the band takes a break on ʽDrifting Bluesʼ and several other tunes, leaving Bukka alone (or, at most, with a second acoustic guitarist) to exorcise his demons. The vocals are still somewhat inadequate, with too much forced Wolf-style gargling, but at least the lack of inferior musical backing is refreshing, and it becomes easier to assess the amount of sincerity and genuine passion in the man's presence. And, honestly, he just does not seem to be in the right state of mind doing this thang — I count this as a misguided experiment from top to bot­tom and give it a thumbs down, although blues historians will probably want to own Memphis Hot Shots all the same, if only as an example of a curious, one-of-a-kind configuration. Not that old bluesmen didn't have their fair share of embarrassing misses, but they were all embarrassing in their own idiosyncratic embarrassing ways. At the very least, I don't recall Mississippi John Hurt or Skip James dressing in space suits, that's for sure.

 

BIG DADDY (1974)

 

1) Black Cat Bone Blues; 2) 1936 Triggertoe; 3) Crying Holy Unto The Lord; 4) Shake My Hand Blues; 5) Sic 'Em Dogs On; 6) Gibson Hill; 7) Mama Don' 'Low; 8) Hot Springs Arkansas; 9) Jelly Roll Morton Man; 10) Black Crepe Blues; 11) Glory Bound Train; 12) Aberdeen Mississippi Blues; 13) Hobo Blues.

 

While this album, recorded just three years prior to Bukka's demise from cancer, corrects the blunder of Memphis Hot Shots, no longer trying to recast the artist in a wholly unsuitable image, I cannot honestly say that Big Daddy generates much inspiration. Unless you have pre-generated yourself the mindset of "big old blues legend with acoustic guitar = I'm loving it!", I am not sure that these recordings could serve as a good introduction to the world of archaic country blues in general, or Bukka White as its particular representative.

 

Here he is, all on his own with nothing but the guitar to provide company, running through a se­lection of the usual classics, mixed in with a few obscurities or rearrangements (ʽJelly Roll Mor­ton Manʼ is the same as ʽGibson Hillʼ, with a new set of lyrics — and, come to think of it, ʽHobo Bluesʼ is also the exact same song). As the man gets ever older, his voice gets ever gruffer and closer to that Howlin' Wolf standard, but that's just the problem: it doesn't quite rise up to the same standard, but it does reduce all of the songs to just about the same emotional state, roughly translated as «don't mess around with the man», which is not how it used to be in pre-war years.

 

Likewise, Bukka's guitar playing is not what it used to be. «Deteriorating» is not the right word for it, since he can still send off those slide runs like he used to, and slap those strings with the same brute force when necessary. But something seems missing — I'm not exactly sure what, but maybe that would simply be the will to come up with free-flowing guitar phrasing on the spur of the moment, rather than relying on «fossilized», thoroughly predictable stock lines. Naturally, this cannot be construed as an accusation — nobody really expects an inventive, energetic pulse from a 65-year old bluesman — but it also means that, whatever the popular stereotype might be, a young bluesman with a guitar is still generally preferable to an old bluesman with a guitar. Es­pecially when the old bluesman's guitar starts getting rather dangerously out of tune towards the end of the session...

 

Anyway, the bottomline is simply that there is nothing «wrong» with Big Daddy, but forty mi­nutes of it will most likely get you bored, and it will add nothing to your understanding of the man and his history, except formal proof that the man did retain enough vocal and instrumental competence right up to his final years. But you probably could guess that as it is, couldn't you?

 

ADDENDA:

 

1963 ISN'T 1962 (1963/1994)

 

1) Streamline Special; 2) Drunken Leroy Blues; 3) Fixin' To Die; 4) Midnight Twister; 5) Aberdeen Blues; 6) Vase­line Head Woman; 7) Jump; 8) Jack O'Diamonds; 9) Chi Chi Boogie; 10) 1963 Isn't 1962; 11) Boogie 'Til Dubuque; 12) Driftin' And Driftin'; 13) Corinna Corinna.

 

Not released officially until 1994, this little-known recording might actually be the best post-war slice of Booker T. to be found on the digital circuit. The reason why it took so long to see the light of day is technical — this is a relatively poor quality tape recording, with a lot of distrac­ting hiss running through it, that John Fahey and Ed Denson took of Bukka in the process of «redis­covering» him in November 1963, exactly one year after Dylan had covered ʽFixin' To Dieʼ and brought the name back to public attention.

 

But poor quality aside, this is the only post-war document to capture Bukka «unprepared», in a homely environment, without any special new strategy of studio behavior, and, consequently, without the man trying to be like somebody else (Chicago bluesmen, for instance). Mississippi Blues, recorded soon afterwards, would still be relatively fresh and come close to matching this attitude — yet even there, the man was already set on «giving the people what they want», that is, well-recorded recreations of his classic pre-war hits. Here, as you can see from the setlist, those hits are almost nowhere to be found — no ʽShake 'Em On Downʼ, no ʽSic 'Em Dogs Onʼ, no ʽParchman Farmʼ, just whatever Bukka felt like playing at that particular moment.

 

And he felt like playing lots of different things in free format, be it an almost epic-length version of one of his train tales (ʽStreamline Specialʼ), interspersed with streaks of rapped quasi-auto­biographic dialog, or short stretches of boogie improvisation (ʽJumpʼ, ʽBoogie 'Til Dubuqueʼ) that, interestingly, would not reappear on his post-1963 studio recordings, since, apparently, dance-oriented boogie-blues was not what Bukka's main target audience was expecting from the man. All in all, the main distinguishing feature of 1963 Isn't 1962 is the apparent lack of reve­rence for this business — Bukka was not yet fully aware of how «sacred» the new blues fans were finding that kind of music, and his laid-back mode here might really not have been all too appropriate for market demands circa 1963. But it's all right now, half a century later.

 

Of particular interest here is the brief cover of ʽJack O' Diamondsʼ, a song usually associated with Blind Lemon Jefferson — Bukka gives us a rougher, faster, more rambunctious version, but still punctuated with plenty of weeping outbursts from the slide guitar to preserve the song's tragic outlook (but his own "Jack o' diamonds is a hard card to play!" sounds pissed-off and frustrated next to Jefferson's almost-sobbing delivery). Great slide moments abound on the album in gene­ral, for that matter — weird as it is, this homemade tape gives the impression of the man really trying to prove his best on the instrument, much more so than on his soon-to-come streak of compara­tively inferior studio recordings. And his will to improvise and create is most amply illustrated by the title of the title track, even if the tune itself is generic 12-bar stuff.

 

So, if you can stand a little hiss and crackle, 1963 Isn't 1962 might be your best bet for a post-war companion to Bukka's pre-war recordings. The general rule holds here: as long as all those old faded «stars» of a goneby era were content with staying what they were, their recordings were full of genuine spirit — when, on the other hand, they were trying to «match the expectations of the times» or anything like that, things immediately began going sour. This one is quite sweet, by that standard, and gets a respectable thumbs up.

 

 

Part 2. The Early Rock'n'Roll Bands Era (1960-1966)

13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS

THE PSYCHEDELIC SOUNDS OF THE 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS (1966)

 

1) You're Gonna Miss Me; 2) Roller Coaster; 3) Splash 1 (Now I'm Home); 4) Reverberation; 5) Don't Fall Down; 6) Fire Engine; 7) Thru The Rhythm; 8) You Don't Know; 9) Kingdom Of Heaven; 10) Monkey Island; 11) Tried To Hide.

 

Pseudo-cool people like to hunt for insanity on record (as if there weren't already enough insanity in life — sometimes in the life of the pseudo-cool people themselves). So all the pseudo-cool people should be tremendously pseudo-happy at the news that here, certified and approved, is one of the first completely insane records ever made. Obscure, for a long time well-studied only by rock connoisseurs, for a long time only available on CD in a truly horrendous, glutinous mix where one could not decide where exactly it was that the electric guitar ended and the electric jug started, today it emerges as one of the top «revolutionary» albums of 1966 — no mean feat for the year of Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde On Blonde, and Freak Out!.

 

When Roky Erickson and his Texan pals went into the studio, «psychedelia» as an established style or attitude did not yet exist. People were already getting influenced by LSD and Indian music and esoteric teachings and nose rubbings, but the inclinations were still somewhat spon­ta­ne­ous, lacking proper structure and pretense. The 13th Floor Elevators, despite spending most of their time in mush­room-like states, were among the first psychedelic pop bands to simply exude this pretense — there was a band that knew exactly what they were doing, and believed they knew exactly why they were doing it.

 

One need not go further than the original liner notes: "Recently, it has become possible for man to chemically alter his mental state and thus alter his point of view... he can then restructure his thinking and change his language so that his thoughts bear more relation to his life and his problems, therefore approaching them more sanely...". Think hard about what they are saying here. You, the consumer, are only sane once you have chemically altered your inborn mental state. It is before that alteration that you are insane, not after. Don't you miss the Sixties?

 

We have no true way of knowing if the actual songs had been written or recorded while the band members were «chemically altering their mental states». Personally, I doubt it. After all, it still remains to be scientifically proven that listenable music can emerge out of a «stoned», rather than just «stone-oriented», human mind. What is, however, undeniable is that this music, even for its time, is, uh, kind of kinky (and certainly not in a Davies brothers way). Two ringing / stinging gui­tars (Roky Erikson and Stacy Sutherland) combine elements of folk, blues, and boogie. A gimmicky «electric jug» is reserved for a separate band member (Tommy Hall), and it keeps buz­zing around every single melody, like an obstinate bumble-bee that just will not go away be­cause it has no other purpose in its life than to make your life a living nightmare.

And, fresh out of a paleolithic cavern, a wild young lead vocalist — also Roky Erikson — whose style ranges from nasty incomprehensible babbling to wild Indian witchdoctor screaming, so high-pitched and piercing that the superstitious conquistadors would not have stood a chance with it. Naturally, nothing ever grows on bare soil, and one can easily see both the Stones' and the Byrds' influence on these guys — but in no way are they consciously trying to sound like either. They are merely the sons of their times, trying to be fathers to the times to come.

 

The big original highlight is the single 'You're Gonna Miss Me', compatible enough with the band's garage-rock roots to have been included on the original Nuggets, but perhaps not truly repre­sentative of their quintessential style. It is a little more simple and blunt than the rest of it, a little faster, a little more accessible, but also proverbially wild. The main attraction is Roky's subtle build­up towards the «wild cat in heat»-style chorus — he may be singing about how it is the girl that is going to miss him, but we all understand that it is the protagonist who is thrashing around, tortured by prolonged sexual abstinence and whatever emotional demons might be haras­sing him along the way. Even the electric jug is in its perfect place here, emphasizing the obses­sive paranoia and overall wriggly-wiggliness. A red-hot classic.

 

However, nothing else on the record rocks with the same power, or is even supposed to rock with the same power. As the band makes the transition from singles realm into the world of conceptual LP-ism, the overall emphasis shifts from «head banging» to the above-mentioned «mind altering». One ominous, mysterious (and, occasionally, genuinely creepy) mantra/dirge follows another, as Roky and Co. try to firmly keep one foot in the territory of «marketable pop rock», and the other one in the land of spiritual enlightenment. For us, the former means that we can at least hope for catchy choruses, and the latter translates to a happy mariage between acid propaganda and the wonders of the electric jug. (Speaking of the electric jug, that thing gets seriously annoying much faster than acid propaganda, since acid can at least be propagated in a variety of curious ways, whereas the only thing that the electric jug can provide is a silly bubbling noise that does little beyond getting on one's nerves. For that matter, can you even tune an electric jug, and how? Does one boil water in it to achieve a sharper tone?)

 

Nevertheless, this mixture of crummy novelty with memorable pop choruses works admirably, once you get used to the jug. Among other highlights, 'Splash 1 (Now I'm Home)' is a very pretty, melancholic Byrds-style ballad (although, if Roger McGuinn wrote and recorded it, it would have been even better, because the guitars are really played in a very rudimentary manner); I rank the chorus of "and now I'm home to stay" along with the tenderest refrains the Byrds themselves ever created. In stark contrast, the immediately following 'Reverberation' is sharp, echoey, and mean; its buildup evokes visions of an acid-fuelled apocalypse that sounds as grand and breathtaking on record as it would, no doubt, have been in real life, had Roky Erickson somehow managed to magically draw the rest of the world into his own shattered reality. But it is the music that really counts — the song's nasty, jagged blues riff is far more impressive than its deranged lyrics.

 

The record does not offer much in the way of stylistic diversity, mainly because all the different influences are synthesized into the same admirable, if monotonous type of sound, and sometimes, once you are almost ready to tell one song from another, the crucial moment is spoiled by the electric jug that permeates everything like sodium glutamate. Hence, as tremendously important (in historical terms) as this record is, it would probably help if one sits through it with a little help from one's friends, if you know what Ringo means here. Me being a strict no-sayer, I always end up praising the album more for its «revolutionary» status than a desire to sit through it over and over again — although the gut feeling does occasionally remind (especially when stuff like 'Re­ver­beration' and 'Fire Engine' is on) that it is quite possible to dig this music with a completely unaltered mind, even if, I am sure, Roky Erikson himself would disagree. Hence, thumbs up from both the intellectual and the emotional sides of the living organism.

 

PS. As I said, the original CD release sounded very murky, but the album was finally remastered in fine quality, so that the electric jug now goes its own way and Roky's decibels go their own way. Additionally, new releases usually have from 4 up to something like 10 bonus tracks, most of them culled from the band's live performances at The Avalon Ballroom. These have the advan­tage of being real live tracks, unlike the fake Live entry in the band's discography – but accom­panied with the disadvantage of a truly evil sound quality that even the best remastering cannot remaster. Which is a pity, since the band was quite diverse and experimental on stage – running six-minute long aggressive covers of 'You Really Got Me', 'Gloria', etc.

 

EASTER EVERYWHERE (1967)

 

1) Slip Inside This House; 2) Slide Machine; 3) She Lives (In A Time Of Her Own); 4) Nobody To Love; 5) Baby Blue; 6) Earthquake; 7) Dust; 8) I've Got Levitation; 9) I Had To Tell You; 10) Postures (Leave Your Body Behind).

 

Where can you go from the blues-folk-garage-psycho insanity of the Elevators' debut? The choi­ces aren't particularly overwhelming, but there is still some room left for manoeuvring, enough so that the band's fans seem to be almost equally split in two over preferring this or that as their favourite first choice for the band.

 

On Easter Everywhere, the Elevators are no longer a garage band. Nothing on here even tries to recapture the primal punk power of 'You're Gonna Miss Me', and only a few songs go for the psy­chedelic fury of 'Reverberation' and the like: most notably, the faster-moving 'Earthquake' and 'I've Got Levitation', two tracks that break up the druggy monotonousness of the album and fully justify their titles — 'Earthquake' is as threatening as a real earthquake should be (well, at least around five points on the Richter scale), and 'I've Got Levitation' for a brief moment could con­vince you that you have got it indeed.

 

Elsewhere, this is strictly slow to mid-tempo psycho-folk, more Byrds and Jefferson Airplane in nature than Sonics, with the incessant electric jug providing first extra trippiness and then extra aggravation. The good news is that almost each of the songs — and they're as much songs as they're sermons, replete with Roky's acid admonitions — has a hook; the bad news is that too many of them drive this hook home merely by repeating it over and over, as is particularly the case with the album opener, the "epic" 'Slip Inside This House'. "Epic" because of its eight-minute length more than anything else.

 

One forgotten, completely overlooked little gem on here is guitarist Stacy Sutherland's 'Nobody To Love', a beautiful pop rocker very much in the vein of the Byrds (even with similar dreamy vocal arrangements), but also based on a scorching lead guitar line that is at once hard-rocking and, shall we say, impressionistic? Visionary? Since it does not have Roky's demented stamp on it, people usually pass it by, but here's hoping history will slowly recognize that Sutherland was as important to this band as Roky was, and sometimes more so.

 

Enigmatic remains the issue of why the band also decided to include a cover of Dylan's 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue'. It is given a haunting, beautiful arrangement, with echo-laden electric guitar notes dripping all over you like stalactites in a cave, but that doesn't solve the question. Maybe Roky saw something in the lyrics that fit in particularly well with his inner chaos. Or may­be they just thought they could do it better than the Byrds.

 

Easter Everywhere is certainly not recommendable for those who mostly dug the debut for its sheer rocking power. But for those who'd rather prefer a solid helping of mushrooms along with the musical experience, it delivers the goods with even more efficiency. Me being more of a ro­cker at heart than a lunatic, I prefer the brain to get the upper hand and condescendingly offer this a thumbs up for a few really good songs, general innovative value and historical importance. The heart, however, prefers to keep silent unless it is pumped into action by 'I've Got Levitation' or driven to tears by 'Nobody To Love'.

 

LIVE (1968)

 

1) Before You Accuse Me; 2) She Lives In A Time Of Her Own; 3) Tried To Hide; 4) You Gotta Take That Girl; 5) I'm Gonna Love You Too; 6) Everybody Needs Somebody To Love; 7) I've Got Levitation; 8) You Can't Hurt Me Anymore; 9) Roller Coaster; 10) You're Gonna Miss Me.

 

The ultimate sham: a fake live album, consisting of a bunch of studio outtakes with overdubbed crowd noises. The Elevators were certainly notorious for their wild live shows, which explains the record company's desire to put out a live album for the fans — problem is, as some actual live recordings that have since surfaced as bonus tracks or bootlegs clearly show, they either did not have the funds to buy proper recording equipment or maybe the band just couldn't be bothered to bother. So why bother, in fact, when you can simply take some studio recordings, throw on some applause, and leave the fans sorting it out with each other over whether this is really live or a fake? (Obviously, the real serious fans would figure out the real state of affairs in no time, but "real se­rious fans" do not usually constitute the majority of the buyers, even if we're talking obscure cult figures like the Elevators).

 

Hardliners have since disowned the record, and it's immoral to criticize their decision; softliners, however, have rightly pointed out that, if one manages to abstract oneself from the crowd noises, one is at least left with extra studio material from the band — material that was so scarce in the first place that even a sham like this can be tolerated. Maybe someday, when the business of reissuing old classic material finally falls into the hands of a new age King Solomon, someone will wash out the "audience" and simply release these outtakes as they really were; until then, it's all up to our power of imagination.

 

Not that there are any revelations. Alternate versions of classic tunes from the band's two albums are extremely similar to the standard versions — in fact, I am quite positive that 'You're Gonna Miss Me' is simply the standard version as is, and probably one or two others are, too. The real meat, therefore, is quite lean: two originals and three covers from some of the band's earliest ses­sions, back when they weren't so much psychedelic but more R'n'B and garage-oriented. Their takes on Bo Diddley's 'Before You Accuse Me', Buddy Holly's 'I'm Gonna Love You Too' and Solomon Burke's 'Everybody Needs Somebody To Love' are saved by Roky's proverbial ferocio­usness (musically, you'd be much better off with the originals or covers by Creedence, Blondie, and the Stones, to name a few); 'You Gotta Take That Girl' is an attempt to write an actual Buddy Holly-style song, and a good one; and 'You Can't Hurt Me Anymore' is arguably the only song that would reasonably fit in on The Psychedelic Sounds, but it would probably not be a highlight.

 

Naturally, the brain is left with no choice but to insist upon a thumbs down — a sham is a sham, and there is nothing ethical about not recognizing it. However, if you are even a semi-completist, your doom is to succumb. The most honourable way to succumb, of course, would be to come into possession of the 3-CD box The Psychedelic World Of The 13th Floor Elevators (unfor­tunately, out of print, but not undiscoverable altogether), where Live is but a small chunk of ad­denda among the three original studio albums — and a bunch of real live performances from '66 and '67, although, predictably, in far worse quality. The electric jug does come through very clear­ly, though, wherever it is present.

 

BULL OF THE WOODS (1969)

 

1) Livin' On; 2) Barnyard Blues; 3) Til Then; 4) Never Another; 5) Rose And The Thorn; 6) Down By The River; 7) Scarlet And Gold; 8) Street Song; 9) Dear Dr Doom; 10) With You; 11) May The Circle Remain Unbroken.

 

With Roky Erickson gone disfunctional and Stacy Sutherland assuming main responsibility for the band's artistic future, what do you think could have happened? It wouldn't take a genius to predict that the music would become more accessible, more "cultured", more melodic (after all, Sutherland's contributions on the previous albums were all that way), but also much less distinc­tive and with much fewer reasons to exist.

 

All these predictions are fulfilled to a tee: with Bull Of The Woods, the Elevators showed that they no longer had any particularly beautiful place to go, and gracefully ceased to exist as a band soon afterwards, saving the world a ton of precious vinyl (to be spent on Chicago and Foreigner records instead). But also, with Bull Of The Woods they delivered a record that goes down nice on the ears and has its fair share of excellent melodies for those who treasure and stockpile music based on the emotional meaning of its chord sequences rather than its historical importance.

 

And the best thing of all: NO MORE ELECTRIC JUG!

 

Highlights that every Sixties fan will like include 'Till Then', another Byrds-like folk-rocker with 'airy' guitars that make 'Eight Miles High' sound more like 'Half A Mile High' (not that 'Eight Miles High' isn't a better song in the long run, but for all their airiness, the Byrds never really sounded that high up in the air); the mystical 'Rose And The Thorn', very much like the Stones circa Their Satanic Majesties' Request; the kiddie Monkees-like 'Dr. Doom' with its tin soldier martial trumpets and wispy vocal harmonies; and the closing gorgeous atonality of 'May The Circle Remain Unbroken', which is more of a mantra than a song but, in that capacity, forms a suitably unusual conclusion to the record. (Twenty-five years later, Neil Young took those guitar cascades, lowered the tone and made the entire soundtrack to Dead Man on that model).

 

In fact, on second thought, maybe it's not even the relative absence of Roky and his madness that lets down the record, but rather its late-coming in the face of the rapidly changing music scene and values. Bull Of The Woods is like a slightly commercialized and sanitized Easter Every­where, but in 1968-69 there was already no place for another Easter Everywhere: technically, spiritually, and even rationally musical values had already overstepped it. Neither Pink Floyd nor the Byrds nor even the Jefferson Airplane themselves were doing that kind of trippiness any lon­ger. So, as odd as it is to say it, this album, recorded in 1968, was dated stone dead... by one year.

 

That's what my gruff brain keeps telling me, at any rate, while the heart is grooving to the record's mellow sounds and quietly awarding it a thumbs up. Which, unfortunately, does not commit too many of its melodies to said heart for any respectable amount of time.

 

ACTION, THE

THE ULTIMATE ACTION (1965-1968; 1980)

 

1) I'll Keep On Holding On; 2) Harlem Shuffle; 3) Never Ever; 4) Twenty Fourth Hour; 5) Since I Lost My Baby; 6) In My Lonely Room; 7) Hey Sha-Lo-Ney; 8) Shadows And Reflections; 9) Something Has Hit Me; 10) The Place; 11) The Cissy; 12) Baby You've Got It; 13) I Love You (Yeah!); 14) Land Of A Thousand Dances.

 

The Action should probably hold the official title of "Best 60s Band To Never Release An Al­bum". However, an LP-worth of a few great singles and a ton of filler — which is almost certain­ly what an Action album would have looked like, judging by the value of Rolled Gold — can't really measure again such a solid collection of excellent singles as placed on this CD.

 

The Action were a band doomed for early death, because they couldn't properly establish them­selves as a songwriting act at an age when you either were a songwriter or you went back to your local manufacturing plant. Not that they were awful at songwriting: the few originals contained here, such as the funny kiddie song 'Never Ever' and the cheery singalong 'Twenty Forth Hour', are lovable and fit in well with the rest. But apparently, they just couldn't establish an individual style that they'd be better at than their cover art.

 

Because one would be hard pressed to find a better British interpreter of the melodic school of American R'n'B than The Action around 1966-67. Maybe the Beatles — and it's hardly a coinci­dence that The Action were signed to work with George Martin, of all people — but by 1966, the Beatles had already distanced themselves from other people's works, and thus missed the chance of applying the technical and musical innovations of the period to the same old rock'n'roll and Motown pop numbers they showed so much respect for from 1963 to 1965.

 

Not the Action, though. Taking these trusty Motown and Atlantic numbers, they would carefully extract the essence, discard the production excesses, clean up the flaws, rearrange them for strict power-pop, guitar-bass-drums consumption, and make songs that combined the melodicity and soulfulness of the originals with the straightforwardness and determined energy of Britpop. And, in all fairness, they made this material rock out far better than the Beatles.

 

For some reason, the public didn't appreciate that — maybe because in Britain, Motown was run­ning out of fashion, or else folks just wanted the original thing (can't blame them). The band's highest charting single, a cover of the Marvelettes' 'I'll Keep On Holding On', only reached some­thing like No. 47 on the charts, even though it blows the original away — the guitars never shim­mered that way on Motown records, and the bass was never so determined to have its own way, and the harmonies were never that well produced.

 

Likewise, they manage to put to shame Martha and the Vandellas ('In My Lonely Room'), Bob & Earl ('The Harlem Shuffle'), and even Chris Kenner (the best cover of 'Land Of 1000 Dances' I've ever heard). Sometimes the gloss that cover artists try to put over the originals squeezes all soul out of them, but believe me, this is not the case with the Action: they understand well just where the hook lies, and give it their all — it's only up to George Martin to brush off all remaining dust. Of course, if they wanted to do James Brown, that'd be a whole different thing, but they never did, because their schtick was melody, not rhythm.

 

Out of the 14 cuts on this collection, there is not one bad choice (I do think that Carole King's 'Just Once In My Life' is one of her schmaltzier and more overwrought tunes, but when you hear it without strings, it's actually good!). It's pretty predictable from the onset, and contains no great breakthroughs, but it's still a unique type of sound that no one except this band had in 1966 and that no one will almost certainly have ever after. Which is why, mentally and cordially, I have no doubts about keeping my thumbs up for this as long as I live.

 

ROLLED GOLD (1967-1968; 2002)

 

1) Come Around; 2) Something To Say; 3) Love Is All; 4) Icarus; 5) Strange Roads; 6) Things You Cannot See; 7) Brain; 8) Look At The View; 9) Climbing Up The Wall; 10) Really Doesn't Matter; 11) I'm A Stranger; 12) Little Boy; 13) Follow Me; 14) In My Dream; 15) In My Dream (demo).

 

This is one of those few records that factually deserve the title "lost" — a collection of demos as well as quite fully shaped recordings that the Action produced during their final years of exis­tence but never got around to release officially. After rotting in the vaults for decades, they were eventually released in the 1990s, first under the title Brain, then the somewhat flashier Rolled Gold. Those who love the Sixties, but also like their music polished and tend to shy away from raw archive releases, need not worry: Rolled Gold plays very much like a real, completed album, albeit one with slightly lower production values than expected.

 

This was an important time for The Action — on one hand, they were on the verge of breaking up, but at the same time, they were also trying to throw off the cover-band image and try their hand at original artistry: most or all of these tunes are self-penned and show a certain determination to develop an identity of their own. Unfortunately, they were a bit too late at it. Most of these tracks sound like they belong in late 1966/early 1967, but by late 1967/early 1968 all the Major Artists of the time were already moving away from the good old values of psychedelic Brit-pop, usually making the transgression to symphonic art-rock — or "regressing" towards bluesier or folkier values. So, Rolled Gold ended just a wee bit out of its time.

 

Today, of course, the dark wide year-long gap between 1966 and 1968 doesn't appear all that dark and all that wide to us any longer, and we have little problem judging the Action's late-period releases on the same scale as, e. g., the Who in their Quick One period. Thus, most responses one is likely to find to Rolled Gold follow the "great lost masterpiece" pattern — since few people other than dedicated Sixties aficionados are liable to be listening to it in the first place.

 

That may be an exaggeration. First, in terms of "uniqueness of sound", I'd say that the Action's R'n'B covers were fresher and more individualistic. On Rolled Gold, the band basically just jumps on the well-worn psychedelic bandwagon; before that, they had a gimmick of their own that no one else could replicate. Another thing is that, once faced with the task of developing their own songwriting style, they seem to subconsciously transfer their older R'n'B values on it, in that all the songs still share that hyperactive, 'get-up-and-dance' style: everything is loud, ringing guitars, massive drumming, heavy bass, non-stop power-pop, which is great for those who love the style but may be a little tiring for those who prefer some variety (uh, a ballad or two, perhaps?) Third, not all the songs are really well-written, and hooks are frequently sacrificed in favour of adrenaline — nothing unusual about it, of course.

 

But even so, Rolled Gold is absolutely indispensable for those who love all these things clumped together. Ringing guitars and rushing idealism — how can you beat this? My favourite tracks come right at the end, with 'Follow Me', built on a spiralling, distorted electric riff and rushing off at a much faster tempo than most of the other tracks, faithfully reflecting the invocation in its title; and two versions of 'In My Dream', a delightful combination of the pastoral and the psychedelic, truly worthy of holding its own against all the great acid anthems of its time. But your favourite tracks may be different — when everything sounds so similar, that's where the battle of tastes will always rage the fiercest.

 

Once it's time for decision-taking, the brain, flattered as it might be that the record's original title alluded to none other than itself, prefers to slight Rolled Gold as a formally successful, but intel­lectually unchallenging response to the times. The heart, however, being a sucker for guitar-driven power pop, overrules the brain with a thumbs up. Masterpiece or no masterpiece, The Action never recorded bad music, and not liking them is the listener's loss, not the authors'.

ALAN PRICE

THE PRICE TO PLAY (1966)

 

1) Barefooting; 2) Just Once In My Life; 3) Going Down Slow; 4) Getting Mighty Crowded; 5) Honky Tonk; 6) Move On Drifter; 7) Mercy Mercy; 8) Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever; 9) Ain't That Peculiar; 10) I Can't Turn You Loose; 11) Critic's Choice; 12) Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo; 13*) Any Day Now; 14*) Never Be Sick On Sunday; 15*) I Put A Spell On You; 16*) Iechyd-Da; 17*) Take Me Home; 18*) Willow Weep For Me; 19*) Yours Until Tomorrow; 20*) Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear; 21*) Who Cares; 22*) Shame.

 

After Alan Price parted way with The Animals, it took him quite a bit of time to find the proper footing, and at the moment when it came to recording his first album, that time had not yet arrived. As an organ player, Price formed an essential part of the band's R&B sound — as a leader of his own band, The Alan Price Set, and being responsible for the material, the arrange­ments, and the singing, he was nowhere near as effective as Burdon as long as he made the mis­take of standing on the same R&B turf.

 

Indeed, The Price To Play, which came out in the same year as The Animals' first «priceless» (sorry for even more inevitable puns) album, Animalisms, could have most of its songs recorded by the actual Animals, and nobody would feel the difference — there's quite a comparable selec­tion of rock'n'roll, blues, soul, pop, and R&B, maybe with a slightly less hard edge than Burdon would give it all, but that could have easily been remedied. There ain't a single original compo­sition in sight, and although there is no question about Alan actually loving all this stuff, «loving» a song is hardly the only requirement necessary to make your version of it outstanding.

 

As an R&B singer, Price hits the right notes, but he is not too powerful, nor is he endowed with some stunningly idiosyncratic vocal timbre — you'd probably have a much harder time trying to memorize his identity on this album than you'd have with, say, Manfred Mann's Paul Jones. As for his keyboard playing, The Price To Play is very definitively a band album, not a solo show­case, democratically allowing all members of The Alan Price Set to flaunt their talents: not a good idea, I'd say, seeing as how Alan is the most gifted musician of the lot, and how so much time is taken away from him and donated to the brass players. (On the trivia side, the drummer for this lot is none other than Alan White, whom we would all come to really know later as Bill Bruford's replacement in Yes. No Tales From Topographic Oceans preview here, though).

 

Not surprisingly, the organ-led instrumentals, such as ʻHonky Tonkʼ and ʻCritic's Choiceʼ, are the most exciting tracks in this lot — on the former, Alan gets to spread his playing wings wider than he could ever allow himself in The Animals. Otherwise, all you really have to do is admire his good taste in R&B covers, but really, you are not missing all that much in life if you do not hear him running through a British-disciplined ʻI Can't Turn You Looseʼ or a smooth, poppy variant of Don Covay's ʻMercy, Mercyʼ, which only one year before was covered by the Stones in a far snappier, edgier manner. And if you want a real corny, catchy version of ʻHi-Lili, Hi-Loʼ, you do not have to go farther than the Manfred Mann version, also from 1965. Ultimately, for most of these tunes, Alan came a little too late and a little too senselessly.

 

The CD reissue of the album does somehow pump up its value, by throwing on ten additional tracks from contemporary singles and EPs. This includes Alan's first significant solo commercial success in the UK, an organ-led version of ʻI Put A Spell On Youʼ — slyly and subtly re-written and re-arranged so that musically and atmospherically, it brings on associations with ʻHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ (even the solo in the instrumental break begins with precisely the same chords as the ʻHouseʼ solo); and, more importantly, ʻSimon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bearʼ, an early song by Randy Newman that introduced Alan to music-hall values and pretty much turned his entire subsequent career around. Both tunes are quite nice, even if, as of then, neither of them still suggested that Price would ever become a successful songwriter in his own rights.

 

Anyway, criticisms aside, it all feels good, friendly, and professional — listening to the record is guaranteed to not cause any harm whatsoever. But clearly, if this were to become Price's regular output, then leaving The Animals would have been the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. Fortunately, he was quick enough to realize that himself.

 

A PRICE ON HIS HEAD (1967)

 

1) The House That Jack Built; 2) She's Got Another Pair Of Shoes; 3) Come And Dance With Me; 4) On This Side Of Goodbye; 5) So Long Dad; 6) No One Ever Hurt So Bad; 7) Don't Do That Again; 8) Tickle Me; 9) Grim Fairy Tale; 10) Living Without You; 11) Happy Land; 12) To Ramona; 13*) Biggest Night Of Her Life; 14*) Don't Stop The Carnival; 15*) The Time Has Come; 16*) When I Was A Cowboy; 17*) Tappy Tortoise; 18*) Love Story; 19*) My Old Kentucky Home; 20*) Trimdon Grange Explosion; 21*) Falling In Love Again; 22*) Sunshine And Rain; 23*) Is There Anybody Out There; 24*) Not Born To Follow.

 

Apparently, ʻSimon Smithʼ worked so well that, for a brief while at least, Alan Price decided to become for Randy Newman what The Byrds used to be for Bob Dylan — there's a whoppin' seven Newman covers on this album itself, and a few more among the 11 bonus tracks that were kindly added by the Repertoire label when the album was released on CD, all culled from con­temporary singles and whatnot. Throw in an extra Dylan cover and a Goffin/King one, and you will almost be missing out on the fact that there are also four Alan Price originals, which is about four more than on the previous record — a major step in the direction of artistic independence and the establishment of the man's personal identity.

 

Of the four songs, ʻShe's Got Another Pair Of Shoesʼ is a meatily arranged R&B number, not particularly original or exciting — sort of like a calmed-down James Brown tune, only distin­guished with a fluent, but weirdly out-of-tune piano solo. The other three, however, are firmly in the then-current Brit-pop vein, with vaudeville and music hall influences all over, but no traces of that «English haughtiness» that sometimes turns people away from (and, more rarely, on to) this kind of material — in other words, there's no danger of Alan Price ever developing the airs of a David Bowie or a Robert Fripp (come to think of it, his Newcastle-Durham background would probably be incompatible with such attitudes).

 

ʻThe House That Jack Builtʼ, in particular, is a catchy piece of lyrical absurdity, stuck somewhere between Dylan and Monty Python and oozing abstract sarcasm over its rise-up-and-shine arran­gement, all pianos and woodwinds and morning breeze. ʻDon't Do That Againʼ is more slight in nature, but is actually even more catchy, a half-comical number on personal relationship issues that shows an actual talent for vocal hooks — not an ability you'd suspect Mr. Price of owning based on his earlier career; and ʻGrim Fairy Taleʼ, a song that calls out loud for a tuxedo and top hat, is quite a serious compositional stake, with several distinct parts seamlessly merged together in a mini-suite that niftily shifts between ironically-happy and melancholic moods.

 

Of course, these are only his first efforts, and as far as meaningful-emotional compositions go, most of the covered Randy Newman tunes here are superior — in fact, Newman is an obvious influence on Price himself as songwriter; but at least Alan's interpretations of Randy's material do the material perfect justice — and, if you have a hard time warming up to Randy's creaky voice and raw, rambling arrangements (you shouldn't, but it would be understandable), then Price's smooth, pleasant deliveries and the tight control that he has over his brass section will be just right for a first impression. (Same as the Byrds/Dylan relationship, yes). At the same time, I can­not say that he really goes all the way to make the songs more interesting: in the case of ʻLiving Without Youʼ, for instance, I'd rather either go for the creaky-croaky original, or for the complete blazing power-pop reinvention of Manfred Mann — Price's version is middle of the road, retai­ning the minimal, demo-style piano arrangement, but not adding anything particularly outstan­ding in the vocal department. Just nice. (Admittedly, ʻNo One Ever Hurt This Badʼ is given an excellent coating of brass, guitar, and keyboards).

 

The bonus tracks generally add more of the same (for instance, ʻNot Born To Followʼ is yet another Goffin/King cover), but also shows Alan dabbling around in various strands of folk — American (ʻMy Old Kentucky Homeʼ) as well as British (ʻTrimdon Grange Explosionʼ, taking you all the way back to an unfortunate event in 1882). The selection is so comprehensive, though, that it covers all of Price's subsequent output all the way to 1970, meaning that you get his ex­cellent self-penned single ʻSunshine And Rainʼ, a piece of shiny funk-pop with an outstanding kaleidoscopic arrangement of brass, mandolins, psycho-keyboards that never overshadows the classy vocal hook. Overall, in between the original album and the bonus tracks, if you filter out a dozen or so throwaways, you are still left with a good LP's worth of very solid material, so unlike the debut, this one gets a well-deserved thumbs up. Hardly essential listening, but a must-own for all lovers of intelligent late-Sixties Brit-pop (and, come to think of it, there wasn't really that much of it in the late Sixties).

 

O LUCKY MAN! (1973)

 

1) O Lucky Man!; 2) Poor People; 3) Sell Sell; 4) Pastoral; 5) Arrival; 6) Look Over Your Shoulder; 7) Justice; 8) My Home Town; 9) Changes; 10) O Lucky Man! (reprise).

 

I am not a big fan of Malcolm McDowell movies, regardless of whether it's Kubrick, Lindsay Anderson, or, God help us, Tinto Brass at the steering wheel — there's just something about the guy and the kinds of scripts he is involved in, some sort of off-putting mix of hipness, ugliness, pretentious­ness, and shock value that I just cannot bring myself to enjoy. So it is hardly a surprise that as of now, I have not even seen O Lucky Man! (I have seen If..., and have no big wish to spend three more hours of my life on an Anderson/McDowell collaboration) — however, I am happy to say that you do not at all need to see the movie in order to be delighted by the sound­track, which constitutes a perfectly autonomous and self-sufficient Alan Price album on its own (actually, mini-album: the whole thing, unlike the movie, is over in a measly 25 minutes, because Alan, unlike most soundtrack composers, seems to have written precisely as much music as he knew could make it onto the final cut. Ever thought about how it must feel to write a 9-minute instrumental with only thirty seconds of it making it to the actual movie? Well, apparently Price managed to circumvent that problem).

 

Anyway, the reason why this thing works is because Alan wrote it as a sort of abstract conceptual suite on matters of everyday existence in contemporary England — ideologically, it reads like a Ray Davies album in the tradition of Arthur and Lola, and, for that matter, is far more impres­sive, musically and lyrically, than Davies' own rock opera Preservation from that same year. Most importantly, it is the album that truly announced the arrival of Alan Price, intelligent and talented songwriter with his own tale to tell. It did not sell much and yielded no hit singles (at least, not until 1987, when ʻChangesʼ was used to advertise Volkswagen Golf), but it nicely set the stage for his biggest commercial success with Between Today And Yesterday, and it still sounds fresh and exciting after all these years.

 

The music, as usual, is a somewhat conservative mix of British music hall and American R&B (more of the former than of the latter), almost completely ignoring the hottest trends of 1973: the only number here that does not sound like it could have been recorded in 1968 is the funk rocker ʻSell Sellʼ, which cleverly takes the aggression and frustration inherent in funk rhythms and wah-wah solos and channels it into a spiked-tongue condemnation of commercialism. At four minutes, it is the longest song on the album, as Price allows himself to stretch out a bit on an extended organ solo, but the groove is sharp and quite involving, even if the vocal hook owes quite a bit to ʻHarlem Shuffleʼ — then again, Price's composing skills should probably be described, in general, as «an ability to create interesting variations on other people's melodies», be it in the rhythm & blues paradigm or in the traditional pop one.

 

At least on ʻSell Sellʼ cynical words are matched by cynical-sounding music; on the whole, though, the album makes its living by contrasting bitter lyrics with pretty melodies — ʻLook Over Your Shoulderʼ, for instance, is a catchy vaudeville tune, replete with falsetto la-la's and stuff, whose ultimate message is "without that dream you are nothing... you have to find out for yourself that dream is dead". (La la la la and all that). ʻJusticeʼ, floating on a raft of quasi-Mexi­can acoustic guitar, states that "we all want justice but you got to have money to buy it" in the slyest possible tone and with the friendliest of atmospheres. ʻPoor Peopleʼ sounds a little like Billy Joel, but the good sort of Billy Joel when he is not being too full of himself and banality, but actually manages to combine humility with catchiness. And ʻChangesʼ, which is, in fact, based on ʻWhat A Friend We Have In Jesusʼ, states that "love must always change to sorrow, and everyone must play the game", declared with as much enthusiasm as a proclamation of faith in salvation and life everlasting.

 

And it all works fine, including a bunch of pretty instrumentals (the lyrical piano bit on ʻPastoralʼ; the quasi-progressive piano/organ interplay on ʻArrivalʼ) and two versions of the title track that rock harder than everything else and are a little reminiscent of poppier material by The Who like ʻLong Live Rockʼ. And best of all, you really do not need any movies to enjoy it — although, admittedly, it may be worth seeing the movie if only because Price is featured in it himself, playing the role of a Greek chorus providing commentary on the action. I'm happy enough to just have the commentary without the action, and give it a self-standing thumbs up.

 

BETWEEN TODAY AND YESTERDAY (1974)

 

1) Left Over People; 2) Away, Away; 3) Between Today And Yesterday; 4) In Times Like These; 5) Under The Sun; 6) Jarrow Song; 7) City Lights; 8) Look At My Face; 9) Angel Eyes; 10) You're Telling Me; 11) Dream Of Delight; 12) Between Today And Yesterday.

 

The success of O Lucky Man! must have popped the cork off Alan's little bottle of hitherto hidden ambitions, because he very quickly followed it up with the most «serious» album in his career so far, and maybe ever — Between Today And Yesterday is a full-fledged conceptual piece about everyday life (today and yesterday) in Northern England, a sort of epic «Ode to Geor­die» that will clearly strike the biggest chord of all with Tyneside people, but might just as well appeal to everyone concerned with the struggle and strife of ordinary people living in small, de­pressed towns all over the world — the "left over people" of the album's introductory song.

 

It is not some sort of breathtaking masterpiece, no; Price is neither the master of the heart-tugging musical hook, nor is he some fabulous unique singer who'd be capable of making his shopping notes come alive under vocal pressure. But he's got style, taste, basic songwriting capacities, and, above all else, he knows what he's doing and what he's singing about — this is a tactful, honest record, and with repeated listens, it gets under your skin through sheer humility and understate­ment alone, never mind the melodicity and the pleasant arrangements. If there's any reason why it could hardly hope to become a major international hit like some Kinks album, it's because it is even more «British» musically than any given Kinks album — with but a small handful of bluesy ex­ceptions, it's all vaudeville and music hall (although the Randy Newman influence is also very keenly felt throughout).

 

In the UK, he did (rather unsurprisingly) achieve his biggest commercial success with the record, which rose to #9 on the charts; and the single ʻJarrow Songʼ reached #6, which would be the last time ever he'd crack the top 10 on the single charts — an excellent song, too, commemorating the Jarrow March of 1936 with a slightly-merrily-drunk anthemic chorus and a cool structure, where the old-school music hall verse-chorus segments are written from the point of view of the origi­nal participants of the March and the more modern, rockier bridge section is written from the author's point of view ("I can see them, I can feel them, I can hear them / As if they were here today"), until the author finally merges the past with the present ("My name is little Alan Price..."). It's cool, creative, sensitive, complex — precisely the way one should be writing songs of social protest if one does not want them to be here today and forgotten tomorrow — and arguably one of the finest glorifications of the "Geordie boys" ever written, though probably too convoluted and too personal to be adopted as a high school anthem anywhere in Tyneside.

 

The album as a whole is conceptually divided into the "Yesterday" and "Today" parts, corres­ponding to its two sides — and the "Yesterday" part, I'd say, is somewhat superior, since that is where he most fully unleashes his arrangement skills, with colorful use of brass, keyboards, and orchestration. ʻLeft Over Peopleʼ and ʻIn Times Like Theseʼ continue the good old tradition of sarcastic social criticism under the sauce of cheerful, catchy vaudeville; and ʻAway, Awayʼ is a touching, but not overtly sentimental account of wives seeing their husbands off to work in the morning. Probably the most underrated of all these is ʻUnder The Sunʼ, a lush orchestrated ballad where, for once, the weakness of Alan's voice works strongly in his favor — the strain, the shaky intonations, the occasional slip-ups make it all far more human than if Engelbert Humperdinck ever wanted to have a go at the stuff.

 

The "today" side, which was probably intended to sound more «modern», is slightly patchier for that reason — this is where we meet the somewhat corny synthesizers of ʻAngel Eyesʼ and the substandard «modern R&B» number ʻCity Lightsʼ; however, I am quite partial to the slow, bitter-burning blues of ʻYou're Telling Meʼ, with some good old Animals-style organ soloing and quiet­ly understated guitar runs, and I cannot quite decide if ʻDream Of Delightʼ sounds more like Crosby, Stills & Nash or like James Taylor, but on the whole, it's a decent acoustic ballad, al­though it remains in sore need of a decent hook to rise above pure «atmosphere».

 

The link that ties both sides together is the title track, first presented in a stripped down piano arrangement and then expanded to a full wall-of-sound arrangement, with tempestuous strings, a loud rhythm section, and a gradual vocal crescendo. The basic melody is a bit generic (remember Badfinger's ʻMidnight Callerʼ?), but this does not prevent the song from reaching an epic climax. The point of the song, so it seems, is to tell us that nothing ever changes, and "draw the shades" and "let me drink black wine" — sort of a resigned conclusion, not particularly alleviated by the fact that most of these songs have either a tender or a humorous nature to them, because once again, like Roger wrote, "quiet desperation is the English way", and it's as if Price made this entire record to prove him right.

 

Anyway, do not expect any grand melodic breakthroughs here; the record is to be enjoyed some­where at the crossroads of an intelligent concept, a charismatic personality, and deep musical ex­perience rather than because of outstanding songwriting genius or illuminating social philosophy. Its purpose is to entertain your tired ears while at the same time making you feel some compas­sion for the underdog — the kind of thing that we normally expect from people like Billy Bragg, yet, as it turns out, Price had the whole punk movement beat here for about two or three years, and he didn't even have to resort to chainsaw buzz or «electro-busking» here. Patchy in places, yes, but unquestionably a high point of his career, well worth another thumbs up.  

 

METROPOLITAN MAN (1975)

 

1) Papers; 2) Fools Gold; 3) Nobody Can; 4) A Little Inch; 5) Changing Partners; 6) Mama Divine; 7) Too Many People; 8) Keep On Rollin'; 9) It's Not Easy; 10) Sweet P; 11) The Drinker's Curse.

 

The relative success of Between Today & Yesterday made Alan invest in an attempt to repeat the same approach, but on a slightly humbler scale — this, too, is largely a conceptual, and this time an even more personal album about the past and the present, but lacking the elements of grandeur that may have appealed to the «progressively trained» buyers in 1974. Actually, it is this low-key attitude that may explain why its predecessor sold reasonably well, whereas Metropoli­tan Man seems to have bombed, and even in retrospect remains totally obscure (not even a measly review at the All-Music Guide!) When in reality it is every bit as good as its predecessor and maybe even better — at least in terms of consistency.

 

The fact that there are no grand, stately compositions here in the vein of ʽJarrow Songʼ or ʽBe­tween Today And Yesterdayʼ might even be positive, because Mr. Price, with his passion for homely pubs, quiet provincial life, and cozy vaudeville, is far from your poster boy for Grand Statements — he has neither the compositional nor the vocal talent for that. But he'd honed his compositional and vocal talents well enough to ensure that Metropolitan Man has not a single bad, or, more precisely, not a single unattractive song on it. It's a wonderful combination of diverse melodies, stretching across several distinct genres, tasteful arrangements, clever lyrics, and a rainbow of joyful sadness and optimistic melancholy that arches all the way from Tyneside to Randy Newman's Brooklyn.

 

Song-by-song, it might easily be his single best set. Even if the man never succeeded in inventing his own sub-genre or anything, here he excels at practically every genre. On the dynamic side, ʽPapersʼ is a brilliantly multi-layered power-pop piece, with an ecstatic slide guitar lead part ruling over a bedrock of pianos, synthesizers, and brass as the man himself launches into a biting condemnation of the yellow press; ʽNobody Canʼ is somewhat of a musical and lyrical answer to Elton's ʽCrocodile Rockʼ, every bit as catchy as the latter but not as superficially corny; and ʽChanging Partnersʼ is a hilariously loving parody on Fifties' rock'n'roll, with Alan going all Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano, mock-stadium applause mixed in for «authenticity», and the guitar man going expectedly batshit crazy on the solo.

 

Things are subtler and much more moving on the ballad side — ʽFool's Goldʼ, at the least, should have been a classic, with a really choking chord change introduced in the long solo organ intro and then reprised in the vocal melody; this is, once again, Price taking a lesson from the sad side of Paul McCartney and Badfinger, and matching it to his own memories and experiences accu­mulated during his musical career. For ʽA Little Inchʼ, his lead guitarist, whoever he is, borrows the «weeping slide» style of George Harrison and uses it admirably in combination with Alan's own weepy tale of an unsuccessful love affair. Even the orchestrated schmaltz-pop of ʽIt's Not Easyʼ creeps under your skin, by means of Price's weak, gently trembling voice.

 

In addition to all that, you get a fun calypso romp with a supercatchy chorus (ʽMama Divineʼ), a tight, slightly Exile On Main Street-ish R&B/gospel groove riding a cooler-than-hell bassline (ʽToo Many Peopleʼ), a dark New Orleanian blues shuffle with swampy harmonica (ʽKeep On Rollin'ʼ), a 100% Randy Newman rip-off that should by all means be reserved for some future Pixar movie (ʽSweet Pʼ), and a plaintive «me and my piano» coda that should, of course, be played by the pianist late at night when the only clients left at the bar are those unable to leave the place on all fours (ʽThe Drinker's Curseʼ). Lascivious, spiritual, ominous, empathetic, depressed but unyielding — there's your emotional variety contained in this little bunch alone, and there's more: the album brings a whole new dimension to the understanding of what it is to be a true «metropolitan man».

 

Why this whole thing is not considered a timeless classic is understandable — a low-key perso­nality like Price, without a lot of brazenly original ideas, is not going to attract a lot of attention. Why the album is so completely neglected is a different question — even though it has been re­leased on CD, I don't exactly see lost treasure hunters flocking towards it in sufficient numbers. In such situations, even a measly, but strong thumbs up on a «maverick review blog» can be of a little help, and we here at Only Solitaire are happy to provide, particularly since most of us, I'm sure, will find an easy way to relate to at least parts of this record.

 

PERFORMING PRICE (1975)

 

1) Arrival; 2) O Lucky Man!; 3) Left Over People; 4) Away Away; 5) Under The Sun; 6) In Times Like These; 7) Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear; 8) Poor People; 9) Sell Sell; 10) Justice; 11) Look Over Your Shoulder; 12) Too Many People; 13) Nobody Can; 14) Keep On Rollin'; 15) City Lights; 16) You're Telling Me / Is There Anybody Out There; 17) Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo; 18) Sweet P; 19) I Put A Spell On You; 20) It Takes Me Back; 21) Between Today And Yesterday; 22) Changes; 23) O Lucky Man! (reprise).

 

Another year, another pun. Actually, the price was right on the money here, because it's a double live album which now comes for the price of a single CD (provided you can find it at all) — and it captures the man at the absolute peak of his solo career, so much so that he plays pretty much the entire Lucky Man! soundtrack, and a huge huge chunk of stuff from Between Today & Yes­terday. Indeed, the setlist is the highlight of the show — 90% is from his last three records (apparently, Metropolitan Man was still in the works, so there's only four songs from that one as a preview of things to come), with three hit singles from the 1960s thrown in as golden oldie bonuses, and not a single Animals song in sight (I'm not sure he ever dared to do ʽRising Sunʼ on his own, no matter how much the public would probably love to hear him have a go).

 

The principal problem is predictable: all the songs are played relatively safe, sticking close to studio arrangements, and Alan is so busy trying to get the best out of his weak voice that he al­most completely concentrates on «getting it right». Which he does, most of the time, but as good as it must have been for the paying audience, I don't exactly see the performance opening any new dimensions for these tunes. I absolutely do not mind hearing the songs once again — they're all great, and getting them all assembled in one place is nice, and you can use it as extra confir­mation of the fact that at least for a three-year period, Alan Price somehow emerged as one of Britain's top-level songwriters, but that's about it.

 

Stage-wise, Alan is as humble as ever, usually cutting the banter down to regular thank you's and occasional brief explanations of what the next song is about; there's a little bit of audience inter­action for the chorus of ʽIn Times Like Theseʼ, but that's about it. There are no soloing or jam­ming detours whatsoever — the band obviously follows strict instructions to stick to the rules, and the rules are so strict that they even brought an orchestra along to reproduce all the lush string parts. (By the way, the concert was apparently held in January 1975 somewhere in London and parts of it were also transmitted for a TV show — you can easily catch a few glimpses on You­Tube these days). Eventually, it just leaves you in a situation where the only thing left to do is wonder, «what is he going to leave out anyway?» And he leaves out most of the weak stuff, yes, but for some reason they also don't do ʽThe Jarrow Songʼ — considering that it was one of his biggest hits, that's a tough one to explain.

 

On the whole, a nice, polite, gentlemanly, feel-good experience, but not really worth a thumbs up, unless one wants to specially elevate Mr. Price just for the sake of his overall nice vibe. On the plus side, the man loyally did his 1970s duty and left us with a double live LP, even despite never claiming to be a progressive rock or a heavy metal artist. (Actually, that should have been a triple live LP to satisfy all the conditions, but for somebody who never engaged in twenty-minute long symph-rock suites, that'd have been one real tough challenge).

 

SHOUTS ACROSS THE STREET (1976)

 

1) Glass Mountain; 2) The Waste Land; 3) Leave It All To Me; 4) Hungry For Love; 5) I Know When I've Had Enough; 6) Shouts Across The Street; 7) I Just Got Love; 8) Don't Stop; 9) The World's Going Down On Me; 10) Cherie; 11) Don't Try; 12) Farewell Goodbye.

 

This next record from Alan seems almost deliberately «low key» and even plain regressive, com­pared to the vivid panoramas of provincial British life that he set up on his last three. I mean, being serious about your native country is fine and dandy, right? But you can't do it forever; a man needs a break every now and then, and so Shouts Across The Street is a much lighter and a much less inventive affair. Here, we see Mr. Price falling back on some good old blues-rock and R&B grooves, as well as retaining his passion for vaudeville, but throwing out most of the social realism and replacing it with simpler tales of love, lust, misery, and happiness.

 

Not that it's bad or anything — «low key» is fine by me if the grooves are strong and the front­man is attractive, and as long as Alan is not impersonating Billy Joel or Barry White, he's doing okay. Unfortunately, he does impersonate Billy (ʽLeave It All To Meʼ) and Barry (ʽDon't Stopʼ) at least a couple of times, and these songs just sound like uncomfortable attempts at sounding «modern» for 1976; ʽDon't Stopʼ is a particularly corny flop, with embarrassing falsetto "baby, baby, baby"s and a soft-romantic piano-embellished funk groove that would at least require the presence of a uniquely sexy vocalist (like Al Greene) before it could even begin fulfilling its pragmatic purpose (bedding hot chicks). All that's missing here is a gold medallion on a hairy chest, but we don't even know if Alan had enough hair for the purpose — and in any case, he always had it better with a bowtie on.

 

On the other hand, all of the tunes here that have a more «retro» sound to them work better: even silly-named tracks like ʽHungry For Loveʼ, with a fun blues-based pop-rock melody and a memo­rable guitar line (played on something that sounds very close to 10cc's "Gizmo" guitar), are ac­ceptable, not to mention happy barroom shuffles like ʽI Know When I've Had Enoughʼ or lusty romps like ʽThe Waste Landʼ. On most of these tracks, Alan plays a careless clown, but his vocal and musical charisma have sure grown since his mid-Sixties singles, and he is now much less shy and reserved when getting into character, which makes him fairly convincing when imper­sonating either the chauvinist gigolo on ʽI Knowʼ or the midnight stalker on ʽWaste Landʼ (okay, so neither of these set positive social examples, but it's tough to stay clean all the time).

 

For something more serious, keep your eyes and ears on ʽThe World's Going Down On Meʼ, starting out with a chord sequence not unlike Harrison's ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ (so you can slap the «epic» label on it without reservation), but never really diving into the depths of misery: instead, it tries for an optimistic-sounding chorus that contrasts lyrical lamentation ("I think the world's going down on me / You can't imagine what I've seen") with beautiful falsetto resolutions of the chorus melody and a wall of sound with soaring organs and guitars — works beautifully when you want to aggrandize your misery and raise it to the status of Universal Tragedy, thus offering yourself some consolation in the process.

 

Still, by the time you get to the end, those final lines of "Farewell, goodbye / I hope I didn't make you cry" might seem self-ironic — to fans eager for more musical tales of Geordie life and social allegories, Shouts Across The Street may well have been a solid disappointment, and, of course, it did absolutely nothing to revive the man's briefly successful commercial career. Granted, it may well have been a conscious move away from being stereotyped as a new «working class hero», but in any case, the deed was done: the album ended his flirt with fame and fortune once and for all, and from then on, nothing would help — not even the brief reunion with his former band a year later, which took place right in the middle of the «punk revolution» and was doomed from the start anyway. And yet, now that we've left those times far behind and feel ourselves free to judge musical records based just on their feel-good quotient rather than their throbbing relevance at the time, Shouts Across The Street does come across as a fun listening experience on the whole (ʽDon't Stopʼ and an occasional «cock-rock» misfire like ʽI Just Got Loveʼ aside), and I could hardly deny it a thumbs up — after all, it's only rock'n'roll and all that.

 

ALAN PRICE (1977)

 

1) Rainbow's End; 2) I've Been Hurt; 3) I Wanna Dance; 4) Let Yourself Go; 5) Just For You; 6) I'm A Gambler; 7) Poor Boy; 8) The Same Love; 9) Is It Right; 10) Life Is Good; 11) The Thrill.

 

I am not quite sure if this was recorded and released before or immediately after the first attempt at the original Animals' reunion... but who cares? It's not as if you can see any faint echoes of «Animalisms» in this album, which seems to be continuing in the same direction as its prede­cessor — glossing Alan's image as that of a clean-cut entertainer with equal respect to vintage and modern forms of said entertainment. For sure, this «between today and yesterday» angle makes for a mildly interesting listen, but in fact the album's only saving grace is Price's humble charisma that even a bowtie cannot totally melt away.

 

The record is a stylistic hodge-podge — there's gospel soul (ʽRainbow's Endʼ), discofied pop rock (ʽI've Been Hurtʼ), sugary folk pop (ʽI Wanna Danceʼ), funk-pop (ʽLet Yourself Goʼ), Billy Joel-esque balladry (ʽJust For Youʼ), glossed-over rock'n'roll (ʽI'm A Gamblerʼ), and later on, there'll be some blues, some country, some vaudeville... no two songs really sound alike, which would have probably made the album a masterpiece if all the tunes had something new and stunning to say in their respective genres. Which they do not; but Price sings them all in his usual lovable voice, and oversees arrangements that avoid contemporary gimmicks and concentrate on quite traditional and well-constructed guitar and organ solos. (The screechy guitar solo on ʽLife Is Goodʼ is particularly well rounded — I have no idea who Rod Hendry, the officially credited guitar player, is, but if he's alive and well, please tell him that somebody still cares).

 

Most importantly, the «new» elements, such as the very well noticeable disco bassline on ʽI've Been Hurtʼ, are quite harmlessly integrated with old stylistics — really, that song sounds just like good old time barroom entertainment, just with an extra «hop quotient» thrown in for the sake of modernity. And I suppose that on ʽI'm A Gamblerʼ, Alan delivers a solo on the newly manufac­tured Polymoog synth, because you just don't get that sound from him or anybody else prior to those times, but it just adds a slightly «technophile» aspect to take away the generic flavor of this otherwise completely run-of-the-mill boogie number.

 

The only real standout on the album is ʽRainbow's Endʼ, which could have easily fit on any of Alan's conceptual records — a soulful, self-questioning epic with great interaction between the almost operatic lead vocal part (terrific falsetto flourishes at the end of each line) and the gospel-style backing vocals. Unfortunately, it sets the wrong tone for the record: had it been placed at the end, it might have mildly stunned us as a sort of ʽDay In The Lifeʼ conclusion to the overall «whimsy» of the album — as it is, it serves as an inadequately grand introduction to lots of plea­sant, but simplistic entertainment (although ʽLife Is Goodʼ, near the end of the record, tries to somewhat remedy the situation and bring back the epic vibe — especially with that guitar solo — but it is not as originally written as ʽRainbow's Endʼ).

 

Still a thumbs up, though: the overall combination of diversity, modest energy, occasional hooks, and personal charisma ensure that this is one of those «high-mediocre» albums where nothing specifically stands out, but the collective humor, emotionality, and taste produces a positive vibe all the same. Generic entertainment, yes, and, again, a far cry from the man's lucky streak of 1973-75, but «if all generic entertainment were like this»... and you can finish this one up in any way you personally prefer.

 

ENGLAND MY ENGLAND (1978)

 

1) England My England; 2) This Ain't Your Lucky Day; 3) Mama Don't Go Home; 4) Groovy Times; 5) Baby Of Mine; 6) I Love You Too; 7) Those Tender Lips; 8) Citizens Of The World Unite; 9) Help From You; 10) Pity The Poor Boy.

 

Odd how, when you listen to these records by «second rate» artists peaking in the early-to-mid Seventies, you get this sharp feeling of «gradually winding down» — each next album being ever so slightly inferior compared to its predecessor, but slightly, slightly, so that the contrast is felt particularly between extremes rather than neighbors. Compared to Alan Price, England My Eng­land is merely suffering from a tiny extra touch of disco and a tiny extra touch of Billy Joel-itis (Joel-light-is, I mean), but then if you play it next to Lucky Man!, well...

 

Again, hardly a single song here sounds really embarrassing, but this is only because the author relies too much on the tried and true: vaudeville, R&B clichés, soft funky grooves, conventional ballad structures — and his usual humble charisma, which is by far the only thing that has not deteriorated, because, well, that's just a fact of nature. Again, the songs are divided between love ballads, love-sex grooves, and a few sociopolitical declarations thrown in for old times' sake — such as the title track, which starts out sounding more like a Russian folk song than a patriotic English anthem, somehow redeems itself in the chorus ("we are your children, oh England, don't cry!"), and still leaves behind a confused impression, particularly when Alan begins to scat-sing to these Russian cossack dance moves. There's also ʽCitizens Of The World Uniteʼ, which only lacks a proper Barry Gibb falsetto to have been a big hit at Studio 54, which — no doubt about it — was the place for citizens of the world to unite at the time.

 

I struggle to single out any highlights, but arguably ʽGroovy Timesʼ is Price's finest moment here, starting out as one of those unremarkable soft funk grooves only to have him launch into an extended, warm, gentle, and classy jazz piano solo that sounds absolutely fabulous even on top of the most generic and glossy arrangement imaginable. Another track that stands out after a few listens is ʽHelp From Youʼ, a slow piece of soul with an impressive vocal buildup — and it is quite strategically placed near the end of the album, so that after a series of quiet, unassuming, humble grooves you get this one particular spiritual statement where the man gives it his all, suddenly becoming a vocal powerhouse for six minutes and not losing an ounce of his usual sincerity at that.

 

Overall, this is by no means a bad record; it merely confirms the man's complete resignation from any truly «creative» angle, let alone the more demanding «experimental», but the mix of ancient and modern stylistic influences is still intelligent (it is not often, after all, that you find Phil Spector-style vocal harmonies, Ray Charles-style keyboards and disco basslines on the same album), the man's aura is still pleasant, and as far as generic entertainment from 1978 is concer­ned, this is a far better proposition than a great percentage of chart-hitting disco burners.

 

RISING SUN (1980)

 

1) The House Of The Rising Sun; 2) I'm Coming Back; 3) Mr. Sunbeam; 4) Love You True; 5) Perfect Lady; 6) Wake Up; 7) The Love That I Needed; 8) I Have Tried; 9) Don't Make Me Suffer; 10) Music In The City.

 

Well, you knew it would happen some day, and that day would be the beginning of the end — the day that Alan Price finally resorts to re-recording ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ. Looking at how he trimmed the song title for the album title, and at all the stereotypical Japanese paraphernalia on the album sleeve, I sort of hoped that he'd at least go for a pseudo-Japanese arrangement, for amusement's sake — but no, the arrangement is fairly uninventive, with a slightly funkified beat and a wailing saxophone part replacing the original guitar melody (the organ solo is, of course, preserved, though it's nowhere near as tense as it used to be). Surprisingly, Alan sings the thing really well, almost on Burdon's level, which just goes to show how much confidence he had gained as a singer over the past decade — but still, was that really necessary?..

 

Because the rest of the record is just completely incompatible with the re-recording: it's almost as if the latter was forced on the man by his record label or something, as they were worrying about the impending lack of sales and all. (People are stupid, see, and they have this uncontrollable urge to buy everything that has ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ stamped on it — 100% success if it is also accompanied by a picture of a bikini-clad geisha). All the songs are very lightweight, unpreten­tious, lyrically simplistic (but with a few fun Newman-style twists woven in here and there) and reflecting Alan's by now traditional integration of old school vaudeville and new school dance-pop. No social observations or philosophical undercurrents whatsoever.

 

Actually, that's nothing to be ashamed of, because the record is fun — harmless, fluffy fun. Even when he takes a merry country jig (ʽPerfect Ladyʼ), replaces the banjo part with bubbly-funky, synthetically treated guitar and the fiddle part with a really stupid-sounding synth, it still works, because the whole thing is a musical joke, and this time the joke's on the instrumentation. It's maddeningly catchy, too, even if (like so many other songs of his) the man probably pilfered it from some country record that I've never heard. The same applies to the majority of the material: these songs sound more like lighthearted parodies of various musical genres than sincere exer­cises in any of them, which is probably what makes the album ultimately enjoyable rather than embarrassing.

 

Anyway, here is a quick run through the «highlights»: ʽI'm Coming Backʼ sounds like a send-up of Cheap Trick-ish power pop, everything very ecstatic, but with an ironic smile behind all the hystrionic guitar soloing and vocal roaring; ʽWake Upʼ borrows the opening piano line of ʽMess Aroundʼ for its own purposes — a comedic send-up of the "get up and work" idea; ʽThe Love That I Neededʼ and ʽDon't Make Me Sufferʼ are old school pop rock, with female vocal harmo­nies, pleasant chorus resolutions and no ambition whatsoever; and ʽMusic In The Cityʼ caps things off with the album's only straightforward disco number that, once again, sounds pretty tongue-in-cheek to me, although — I admit — this might simply be due to the overall strange­ness of the idea of the Animals' keyboardist and Malcolm McDowell's soul mate doing disco.

 

I really really like one song here — the straightforward cabaret number ʽMr. Sunbeamʼ. Of all the tunes here, this one seems to be the only one to capture some of Alan's patented Englishness, in­cluding some awesomely quirky lyrical lines ("It's tough at the top, but rougher at the bottom / And positively boring in between") and a properly sunny attitude for those of us who feel down and out. Simple as it is, this is the one that could have easily fit in on any of his mid-Seventies masterpieces. But one song, of course, is not enough to salvage the record from the misde­meanor of «fluffiness», and the re-recording of ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ (which, by the way, on this record is directly credited to Alan Price, not even listed as «traditional, arr. by Alan Price» as it used to be — did they think nobody would notice?), decent or not, is still an unforgivable artistic gaffe, so no thumbs up here.

 

LIBERTY (1989)

 

1) Fool's In Love; 2) Everything But Love; 3) Days Like These; 4) Bad Dream; 5) Double Love; 6) Changes; 7) Mania Ureania; 8) Liberty; 9) Say It Isn't True; 10) Free With Me; 11) Man Overboard.

 

In the 1980s, Alan's musical activity abruptly decreased, which now seems kind of a good thing, given the general inauspiciousness of that decade for veteran rockers. Discographies of that peri­od are vague and contradictory, which probably has to do with the fact that, once his contract with Jet Records had expired, he found himself without a permanent record label, and whenever he did choose to record something, it could only be picked up by some minor team for a very limited release. As far as I can tell, he did manage to put out an album of old folk cover tunes (but also including Dylan's ʽGirl Of (sic!) The North Countryʼ), called Geordie Roots And Branches, in 1982 on a local Newcastle label; and then there's Travellin' Man from 1986, for some reason released on the Jamaica-based Trojan Records and largely consisting of covers of New Orleanian music from Snooks Eaglin to Fats Domino. Good luck finding these in any form — nobody ever thought of properly digitalizing either — but something tells me that you won't miss too much if you never hear Mr. Price digging all the way down to his Geordie roots or confessing his burning love for Louisiana bayous.

 

The first and only Eighties' album that is available on CD (because that was the way it was ori­ginally released) is Liberty. It consists largely of original material (although a re-recording of ʽChangesʼ was still thrown in, probably in the same vain hope of boosting sales a little bit that had already made Alan cheapen his act with the new-and-not-improved ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ at the beginning of the decade), but most of the songs were co-written by Price with guitar player Steve Grant, formerly of the band Top Secret that was managed by Chas Chandler. The band itself only had one LP out in 1981, but apparently, Steve and his brother Pete Grant (on bass) got acquainted with Alan through Chas, and eventually got together as almost equal partners to try and help Alan get back in show business.

 

The result is pretty much what you'd expect from Price at this point. There seems to be no force in the world that would tear him from his beloved vaudeville and Randy Newmanisms, but just as he was always okay about combining them with contemporary trends in the Seventies (disco etc.), so is he willing to try out some Eighties' clichés here. So get ready for some really plastic and corny electronic keyboards, even cornier electronic echo on the drums, and at least one or two very, very bad songs on the fringe of arena-rock, synth-pop, and hair metal (ʽFree With Meʼ, where Mr. Price confesses that "I really want a woman with me tonight" as if he were Bryan Adams to really awful synths and testosteronic guitar solos).

 

On the other hand, ten years of relative inactivity have not completely extinguished his song­writing talents, and there's still a nice stack of good taste that cannot be totally hidden from view by corny arrangements. The record is bookmarked by two catchy, fun pop rockers — ʽFool's In Loveʼ is harmless danceable vaudeville, and ʽMan Overboardʼ, despite the grim title, is an upbeat, ʽDon't Stopʼ-like power pop number whose charm largely consists of making you sing "throw me down another line, this man's overboard" as if you were celebrating rather than panicking. In be­tween, there's decent New Orleanian R&B (ʽEverything But Loveʼ), a surprisingly gripping funk rocker with a "girl we gotta get out of this place" message (ʽBad Dreamʼ), and a completely un­expected baroque-pop number about the illusion of liberty (title track) with orchestration straight out of 1967 — probably the only song here that would feel well at home on any of the records from his classic period.

 

That does not mean that the record should have included boring adult contemporary balladry like ʽDouble Loveʼ, or a completely unnecessary eight-minute long Epic Cover of Jackson Browne's ʽSay It Isn't Trueʼ, or the energy-wasting New Wave rocker ʽMania Ureaniaʼ; nor does it mean that it is, in any way, an improvement over his middle-of-the-road albums from 1976 to 1980, although it does seem to have a higher percentage of «socially conscious» tunes than any of those. But this is by-the-book social consciousness, not really supported by equal feeling within the music, and, as I said, only the title track truly gives away the same sensitive, emotional Alan Price who used to be such an enchanting spokesman for the North. Overall, quite listenable and suffering much less from Eighties' overproduction than it could, and Steve Grant makes a decent songwriting (if not necessarily guitar-playing) partner for the man, but certainly not the kind of «big comeback» that could be hoped for after ten years of near-silence.

 

A GIGSTER'S LIFE FOR ME (1995)

 

1) Boom Boom; 2) Rockin' Pneumonia And The Boogie-Woogie Flu; 3) Rollin' Like A Pebble In The Sand; 4) I Put A Spell On You; 5) Good Times / Bad Woman; 6) Some Change; 7) Enough Is Enough; 8) Whatcha Gonna Do; 9) A Gigster's Life For Me; 10) (I Got) Business With The Blues; 11) How You've Changed; 12) Old Love; 13) What Am I Living For; 14) Say It Isn't True.

 

Liberty was pretty much the last of Alan Price's attempts to record a more or less complete LP of new material. Either he ran out of inspiration, or he just got tired of all his records selling poorly (he probably makes more royalties off ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ these days than he does off his entire solo career anyway), or both, but anyway, the fact remains that Alan Price as a productive songwriter entered a period of decline in the 1980s and kicked the bucket in the 1990s.

 

Playing and touring was another matter, though, and for those purposes, sometime around 1994 Alan formed a «supergroup» of sorts, called The Electric Blues Company and featuring some of his old friends and colleagues — Peter Grant, who already played with him in the 1980s, on bass; Bobby Tench (formerly a sideman with Van Morrison, Freddie King, Jeff Beck, Ginger Baker, and many other far more famous people than himself) on guitar; and Zoot Money, one of Britain's most renowned sidemen, on guitar and keyboards. (Drummer Martin Wilde is the only dark horse, and I can sort of see why).

 

For the most part, these guys just played together, soending a lot of time on the road; in between touring, they did, however, venture into the studio as well, recording the dull-titled Covers in 1994 (haven't heard that one and would be very reluctant to try it out — not another version of ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ, dear Lord!), and the slightly more colorful Gigster's Life For Me in 1995, which was picked up by Sanctuary's «Masters Of Blues» series and for that reason remains the somewhat easier available album of the two. And, clearly, the more interesting, because it focuses on slightly more obscure material than Covers, as well as offers at least a couple Price originals for those few admirers who are always waiting.

 

Unfortunately, unlike the surprisingly enthusiastic Thom Jurek from the All-Music Guide who even resorted to the word "terrific" to describe the album, I can only confess to having been deeply and profoundly bored all through Gigster's Life's inadequate hour-plus running length. Unless you just got to have yourself some retro-oriented, uninventive, run-of-the-mill blues-rock from 1995, the record has very little to recommend it, and, most importantly, it does not sound like a proper Alan Price record — true to its name and nature, it sounds like the results of a session on which Alan Price is a bit player. He does not even sing lead vocals on most of the tracks (Bobby Tench and Zoot Money handle them, and both sound like your average rockabilly singer in the local bar on a Saturday night), although on the rare occasion when he does, the level of excitement sweeps up considerably: for instance, Rudy Toombes' ʽRollin' Like A Pebble In The Sandʼ is a nice jazzy ballad — nothing special, just nice.

 

But there is nothing nice whatsoever about limp versions of old classics like ʽBoom Boomʼ or ʽRockin' Pneumoniaʼ, played with some pretense to rock'n'roll energy but sounding totally un­inspired and pro forma. There is nothing nice about yet another version of ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ — even the old rendition from the late Sixties was nowhere near the true capacities of Alan Price, and how could he ever hope to compete with the likes of Screaming Jay Hawkins or John Fogerty thirty years later? There's nothing nice about a long, lazy, unfocused rendition of ʽWhat Am I Living Forʼ, a three-minute R&B song at best that has been slowed down to five. There's totally nothing nice about yet another version of Jackson Browne's ʽSay It Isn't Trueʼ — eleven minutes? you must be joking. Most ridiculous of all, there is nothing nice about the band selec­ting, out of all of Eric Clapton's catalog, ʽOld Loveʼ from the Journeyman album: I have actually always thought that this blues ballad has potential, but it was not properly realized with the ori­ginal arrangement and neither was it properly performed here (Eric can sometimes make the song come to life in concert, and maybe these guys could, too — who really knows? — but in the studio, it only shows a brief sign of pulse in the transition from verse to chorus).

 

The only thing I can say in favor of the record is that Bobby Tench is a damn good guitar player when he really puts his heart to it — based on some of his solos (most notably on the Boz Scaggs cover ʽSome Changeʼ and on the Peter Green cover ʽWhatcha Gonna Doʼ), I wouldn't really mind seeing him live. Sharp, crispy tone, great control over sustained notes, kick-ass punchy licks, the works. But even that is only present on just a few songs. As for Alan's originals, the title track, co-written with Bobby, is an unconvincing stab at pop-reggae, and only ʽHow You've Changedʼ features him in his trademark Randy Newmanesque mode, but the song is too slow and the vocal hook is too lazy to make much of a difference.

 

Bottomline is: if the guys actually had a good time recording this memento of themselves in the studio, we should all be happy for their veteran egos, God bless 'em and all. But as for everybody else, the record deserves, at best, a cursory listen, just so you could make sure that Alan Price was indeed alive and well in the 1990s (we know that, as of 2016, he is still alive, but I know next to nothing of any touring or recording activities of his in the past ten years), and a thumbs down just because I'm pretty sure these guys could do better if they wanted to do better, but they probably just didn't want to.

 

 

ALBERT COLLINS

THE COOL SOUND OF ALBERT COLLINS (1958-1965)

 

1) Frosty; 2) Hot 'n' Cold; 3) Frost Bite; 4) Tremble; 5) Thaw Out; 6) Dyin' Flu; 7) Don't Lose Your Cool; 8) Back­stroke; 9) Cool Aide; 10) Shiver And Shake; 11) Icy Blue; 12) Snow Cone Pt. 1; 13) Snow Cone Pt. 2; 14*) Defrost; 15*) I Don't Know; 16*) Cookin' Catfish; 17*) Takin' My Time; 18*) Freeze; 19*) Soul Road; 20*) Homesick; 21*) Sippin' Soda; 22*) Albert's Alley; 23*) Collins' Shuffle.

 

It is fairly well possible to like electric blues without even having heard of Albert Collins — the man had, more or less, formed a clique within himself. During his lifetime, he could occasionally be found guest-starring at an Eric Clapton performance or duetting with B. B. King, but his records were nearly always released through minor labels, and he hadn't had much commercial success ever since his first, most profitable, batch of singles established him as a presence back in the late Fifties. And yet, no serious history of electric blues can do without Albert Collins.

 

It took this gritty guy from Texas a long, long time to firmly settle down in the studio. His first band was assembled in 1952, but he didn't get a contract until 1958, first with Kangaroo Records and then with Hall-Way — labels that no one outside of Texas probably knows these days. The first singles, like 'Freeze', sold reasonably well, but either they didn't sell well enough for a major label to take proper interest in yet another blues axeman, or the axeman himself wasn't interested in getting any attention from the biggies. So, unlike B. B. King, whose LPs, baked at astonishing speed and almost completely indistinguishable from each other, rained on the market all through the 1960s, Collins did not have an actual LP release until 1968.

 

He did cut singles at a regular rate, though, and fortunately for all of us, many of these were col­lected and released as The Cool Sound Of Albert Collins in 1965, then re-released as Truckin' With Albert Collins in 1969. The twelve songs included on that album were far from a compre­hensive overview of the man's formative years, though, and it is advisable to seek out an extended version of the album with 23 tracks, on an obscure (bootleg-running?) label called Blue City Re­cords — granted, the bonus tracks on my copy sound transferred from crackly vinyl, but the sound quality on the songs them­selves is clear and enjoyable.

 

So what's the deal with the «cool» guy Albert Collins? Let's start off with a provocative hyper­bole: Albert Collins single-handedly invented the heavy blues-rock of the 1960s before the 1960s even began, and without Albert Collins, there would never have been a Jimi Hendrix, a Cream, or a Led Zeppelin. Getting fairly interesting there, isn't it?

 

One of the man's nicknames was «The Razor Blade» — a brilliant metaphor, since this is exactly what his sound feels like on at least half of these tracks. He himself, however, was much more a fan of «snowy» and «icy» metaphors — just cast a brief look at the titles of his instrumental per­formances. His ice and snow are, however, not the Gothic-style snow-covered forests with howl­ing winds and prowling wolves attached; rather, they are the crunch and crackle of crystallized substances under the heavy blows of the alpinist's icepick on an energetic, sun-filled day of moun­taineering, if you pardon so much emphasis on metaphors.

 

Part of Albert's freshness and uniqueness at the time was his use of non-standard tunings, partly responsible for his having a fat, robust tone, contrasting with the generally thin, wimpy sound of most competition. But the major thing about him was that he was not afraid to throw overboard the well-known bag of guitar clichés and, in a way, invent his own guitar language — one that was not afraid of its technical simplicity, betting it all on pure expression. Some of the better gui­tarists of that age, like Otis Rush and Freddie King, were teaching their guitars to feel and to ache; Collins taught his to speak and to act.

 

Take 'Freeze', his breakthrough: the whole tune is essentially based around a repetitive three-note sequence — Albert does not even bother taking a solo, leaving these embellishing matters to the sax player. But the sound of these three notes is great — steadily going down from a high screa­ming pitch, in a way that no one made their guitar scream in 1958, to a low distorted grumble, the way only Link Wray would allow himself to grumble, and Link Wray played an entirely different style of music anyway. Daringly minimalistic, so much so that the whole thing could have easily been misunderstood as unprofessional, but leaving an impression like nothing else.

 

Albert's rhythmic basis, contrastingly, is rather generic for its era: yer basic boogies, shuffles, rhumbas, even an uncomfortable attempt at surf-rock on 'Icy Blue' — virtually no mid-tempo or slow 12-bar blues, though, which is quite fitting for his personality: none of that «soul» thing, which quite a few others can, and will, do much better than he can and even more others can, and will, do much worse. The Cool Sound is cool indeed, in that it rocks your world all the way. Vo­cal numbers are at a minimum: 'Dyin' Flu' shows that the man can sing, but also shows that sin­ging is not one of his strong sides. And when he does, almost reluctantly, feel like slowing down for a bit of pure blues, he still makes his guitar whine, choke, sputter, and even go cluck-cluck in­stead of doing it «the regular way» ('Cookin' Catfish'). What a guy.

 

It may have been almost criminally underappreciated at the time, but the man is really intent on avoiding end­less self-repetition on the solos, putting all his trust into these minimalistic hooks. His brass and keyboard buddies generally handle the improvising duties, professionally, but with­out any major spark, as if the whole thing were a manifesto — down with the solo, long live the well-va­riated riff. Or, sometimes, the riff's awesome interaction with the funky bassline — 'Thaw Out', later appropriated by Hendrix himself and remade as 'Driving South'. This impression alone is enough to guarantee a thumbs up — and then there is all this reverent dedication to one parti­cular semantic field, way before these things started to become naturally regulated by segregating market demands.

 

LOVE CAN BE FOUND ANYWHERE (EVEN IN A GUITAR) (1968)

 

1) Do The Sissy; 2) Collins' Mix; 3) Let's Get It Together; 4) Got A Good Thing Goin'; 5) All About My Girl; 6) Doin' My Thing; 7) Let's Get It Together Again; 8) Ain't Got Time; 9) Turnin' On; 10) Whatcha Say; 11) Pushin'; 12) Stump Poker.

 

This and the following couple of albums are most readily available today in the form of a 2-CD package called The Complete Imperial Recordings, which makes sense: all three are in a simi­lar style and none of the three would pretend to be a thematically coherent «album» in any sense: Albert Collins may have, through sheer lack of luck (and, perhaps, stinging interest as well), only arrived on the LP market in the era when pop music became to be regarded as art — but he him­self was a traditional type of entertainer above everything else. He had an entertaining formula, and he wasn't proud enough to try and transcend it. As for luck — sooner or later, it was bound to change, and in this case, we have to be grateful to Canned Heat, some of the members of which were as kind as to grab the man by the collar and get him to a proper recording studio and a pro­per contract that would, at last, allow him to switch to larger chunks of vinyl.

 

Mind you, though, that Collins' formula is not at all thoroughly rooted in the era of his first sin­gles. On the contrary, Love Can Be Found Anywhere has a decidedly modern sound for 1968, as can be seen already from the opening track: 'Do The Sissy' is a jerky funk instrumental that is, in my opinion, as wildly driving as any good number on any James Brown record — with the acknowledged defect of having no James Brown on it (Albert's own 'uh!'s are clearly influen­ced by Mr. Brown, but it takes a little more than just saying 'uh!' to conjure the same spirit), but with the acknowledged advantage of having a fine, expressive lead guitar player that Brown's funk records of the period are in such sore need of. Too bad the two never had a chance to get to­gether (at least, not to my limited knowledge).

 

When Albert is not being funky all over our asses, he sticks to more old-school R'n'B, e. g. on 'Doin' My Thing', thematically close to the classic 'Green Onions', or the celebratory 'Turnin' On'. Rhythmic patterns may have changed a bit, but not his style: the fav thing to do is still to play short, stinging note clusters that remind one of brief telephone-transmitted replies — conciseness and laconicity incarnate. 12-bar blues is kept to a minimum: the lonely vocal number 'Got A Good Thing Goin' is the only representative (a good one, but nothing spectacular).

 

The finest guitar work on the album is arguably on 'Pushin', a cool piece of boogie with 1:25 mi­nutes of precise, passionate soloing, after which, for the remaining minute, the baton is passed on to the organ and brass players. The whole thing, due in part to Albert's minimalism, is very much a band affair, and Collins' Texan colleagues are perfectly qualified — bass, organ, brass, every­thing quite professional and well on the level of even Stax-Volt, I'd say. So Love Can Be Found Any­where is a decent find not just for fans of guitar wanking (a thing that Collins never really stooped to, come to think of it), but for any admirer of the good old R'n'B groove of 1968, which, in my humble opinion, no other groove in popular black music has ever managed to outdo since then. Thumbs up.

 

TRASH TALKIN' (1969)

 

1) Harris County Line-Up; 2) Conversation With Collins; 3) Jawing; 4) Grapeland Gossip; 5) Chatterbox; 6) Trash Talkin'; 7) Baby What You Want Me To Do/Rock Me Baby; 8) Lip Service; 9) Things That I Used To Do; 10) Back Yard Back Talk; 11) Tongue Lashing; 12) And Then It Started Raining.

 

Another smooth release, predictably arse-kicking in the same old ways, but this time, without any­thing truly sticking out like 'Do The Sissy'. Albert certainly spreads out here: sequence-wise, the album is impeccable, with similar-sounding numbers stuck far apart from each other, so that even if there are now two slow generic 12-bar blues, by the time you get to the second one, you already have all the luck to forget about the first one. And even then, they're different: 'Conversa­tion With Collins' has full emphasis on Albert's guitar (and vocal) skills, whereas 'Things That I Used To Do' gets a full-on brass arrangement.

 

Other than that, there is some lively, upbeat Texan boogie ('Harris County Line-Up', 'Grapeland Gossip', title track); a couple more funk experiments, this time with somewhat deeper and darker moods ('Jawing', 'Lip Service'); a few patches of gritty blues-rock ('Chatterbox'; a cover of Jimmy Reed's 'Baby What You Want Me To Do' that sounds every bit as stoned as the original, except Albert clearly has more teeth than Reed has ever had, and I mean literally); some old school R'n'B on which Albert does battle with his brass section ('Back Yard Back Talk', 'Tongue Lash­ing'), and even some sort of spiritual-sentimental roots-rock thing that could have been recorded by the likes of The Band as a warm-up for something more serious ('And Then It Started Raining') — in any case, it's a nice moody finish, and Bob Dylan himself provides harmonica. Or, to be more accurate, someone who must have taken virtual lessons from Bob Dylan.

 

In all, just another OK album from an era that, honestly, had a larger percentage share of OK albums than any other one I know of. Not to be bought separately, but perfectly fitting in the middle of the 2-CD Imperial Recordings collection.

 

THE COMPLEAT ALBERT COLLINS (1970)

 

1) Soul Food; 2) Jam It Up; 3) Do What You Want To Do; 4) Black Bottom Bayou; 5) Junkey Monkey; 6) 69 Under­pass Roadside Inn; 7) I Need You So; 8) Bitsey; 9) Cool 'n' Collards; 10) Blend Down And Jam; 11) Sweet 'n' Sour; 12) Swamp Sauce.

 

Boy, what a seriously deceptive title. Unless it was, from the very beginning, designed not to make any sense at all, the only logical reaction is that, with this release, Albert Collins has seve­red all ties with his past and disowned all of his legacy. But this is clearly not the case, since he still went on to play the old stuff in concert! So no, make sense it does not.

 

Nevertheless, there are some stylistic changes at hand here; good ones, too. The album is, overall, more of a rocking affair, with less emphasis on brass instrumentation and more on fiery guitar and funky rhythms. With 'Jam It Up' and its progressive addition of instruments, Collins is openly moving into King Curtis' and Sly Stone's territory, and he holds his ground well: the Texan boys cook with verve, and Albert's usual mini-blasts of icicle-sharp notes are the perfect emotional stin­gers on top of the groove. He is also exploring the world of guitar effects, achieving a psycho wobbly one on 'Soul Food' (must be one of those «Leslie cabinets» or something) and various mi­nor, less noticeable, variations on the other tracks.

 

More questionable is the move into country territory on 'Black Bottom Bayou', which seems to be just an excuse to try and deliver one of his minimalistic solos over a waltz tempo — I am still not entirely sure why we needed to hear that, nor why it was necessary to end the overall jolly record on a silly yodeling note ('Swamp Sauce', which could have been a funny joke without the vocals but quickly turns into an annoying one with them).

 

But there are just too many hot funky grooves on here to make the odd country excourses too much of a problem. 'Soul Food', 'Jam It Up', 'Bitsey', 'Cool 'n' Collards' are all worthy additions to the Collins canon, no matter how little they differ from each other and how little description they all merit. It should be very clearly restated, though, that the rhythm section — especially the bass player, who lays on fast, variegated, complex lines along with the best of the Stax-Volt people — is as much responsible for the energy and pleasantness of the grooves as Albert himself. So kudos to the band leader for focusing our attention on his bit players as he introduces them, one by one, on 'Jam It Up'. Thumbs up, of course.

 

ALIVE & COOL (1971)

 

1) Introduction Instrumental; 2) How Blue Can You Get; 3) Thaw Out; 4) So Tired; 5) Funky; 6) Deep Freeze; 7) Baby What You Want Me To Do; 8) Mustang Sally; 9) Backstroke.

 

Recorded at the Fillmore in 1969, so the label says (not clear if it's East or West, or though), but possibly not intended for immediate live release: the sound quality is downright awful, maybe just half a step up from bootleg quality, and, in fact, I would not be surprised to learn that the ori­ginal LP was pressed from some bootleg tapes.

 

Which is actually very sad, because the only reason one would want to listen to Albert Collins in the first place are those little hard-to-capture, impossible-to-describe nuances in his tone and phra­sing that make him different from millions of similar blueswailers; but there is just no way you can get them properly in this setting, when the guitar reaches out to you from under a heavy set of muffling pillows.

 

All the more pity because the setlist is strong, intelligently combining past boogie hits ('Thaw Out', 'Deep Freeze') with contemporary funky material ('Funky' speaks for itself, and Collins' version of 'Mustang Sally' may be the least generic rendition of this old standard that you will ever hear, if only because he just employs the song's skeleton as a basis for some hot jamming) and only a couple formulaic 12-bar blues numbers ('How Blue Can You Get'; an almost ironically somnambulous version of 'Baby What You Want Me To Do', with Collins mimicking Jimmy Reed's manner of singing without resorting to serious use of the teeth or tongue even closer than he did in the studio).

 

Goddamn sound quality does not let you enjoy Al's backing band properly either, no matter how tight they get on both the funky and the bluesy stuff. There are some really wild organ solos, though; my favourite is on 'Deep Freeze', where the organist tortures the instrument in a manner almost reminiscent of Keith Emerson's behaviour, and begs for the question — did The Nice and Albert Collins ever share the billing?). But all in all, recommendable only for well-established fans; the ones unconvinced of Albert Collins' worthiness would do better to seek out the later, more technically polished live recordings first.

 

THERE'S GOTTA BE A CHANGE (1972)

 

1) There's Gotta Be A Change; 2) In Love Witcha; 3) Stickin'; 4) Today Ain't Like Yesterday; 5) Somethin' On My Mind; 6) Frog Jumpin'; 7) I Got A Mind To Travel; 8) Get Your Business Straight; 9) Fade Away.

 

Despite the promising title, the album never lives up to its title, but then, come to think of it, even the title track does not live up to its opening lines: right upon admitting that "There's got to be a change, things just can't stay the same", Albert concedes that "I've played the blues so long, ain't nothing left for me to do — I just can't give it up, if I do, my life will be through". Well... guess we'll just have to live with that.

 

Some slight change is perhaps visible in that the 12-bar form makes for a more vivid presence than usual (seven minutes of 'In Love Witcha'; the brass-heavy blues-de-luxe of 'Today Ain't Yes­terday' and 'I Got A Mind To Travel'), and that Albert's solos rely a bit more on technique and flourishes than usual, which is not nice, a betrayal of individual style, and there is no reason why anyone should choose these performances over, say, Canned Heat.

 

Much more interesting is the double assault of 'Somethin' On My Mind' and 'Frog Jumpin', espe­cially once the boppy first part jumps into the oddly kiddie-sounding half-ska, half-proto-disco headbanging craze of the second. Alas, all of this is less than four minutes of pure fun compared to the nearly twenty minutes of merely okay electric blues.

 

The only true highlight, and one definitive song to treasure off this record, is the album closer 'Fade Away', arguably Collins' moodiest number, with a fast-rocking and a slow-paced part, both of them equally well-endowed with apocalyptic overtones. Almost no guitar, but none is needed: emphasis is on the angst-filled vocal melody, danger-warning background female vocals and an overwhelmingly mighty «thunderstorm brass» arrangement. As unbelievable as it is that such a ge­neric album may finish off on such a blast — better believe it, or prepare to be deprived of a deeply buried little masterpiece.

 

ICE PICKIN' (1978)

 

1) Honey, Hush!; 2) When The Welfare Turns Its Back On You; 3) Ice Pick; 4) Cold, Cold Feeling; 5) Too Tired; 6) Master Charge; 7) Conversation With Collins; 8) Avalanche.

 

For technical reasons, in 1973 Albert once again found himself without a record label, but him being «The Ice Man» and all, he took it cool and made good use of the next five years just tight­ening up his act, writing new tunes, and waiting for Fortune's next big break to come and tap Albert Collins on the shoulder rather than Albert Collins hunting for that big break and wrecking his nervous system. The (un)expected break came in 1977, when he landed a contract with Alligator Re­cords in Chicago and staged his biggest comeback, ever.

 

Chronologically, this coincided with Muddy Waters' similar «comeback» with Hard Again; but Muddy's refreshening was very much the result of hard work on the part of Johnny Winter and a team of fresh young bluesmen from a new generation of roots-rockers, whereas Ice Pickin', as damn good as the backing musicians are, primarily depends on Albert's own songwriting, singing and, of course, ice-pickin', that is, string-bendin'.

 

The big difference between this and Albert's Imperial records is — to hell with modesty and hu­mility; this is Collins' own show all the way. When he doesn't play, he sings, when he doesn't sing he plays, and the sax and keyboard players are only there to add background juice. Pretentious, perhaps, but why should anyone sacrifice concrete quality for discrete equality? 'Avalanche' has two and a half minutes of the finest, scorchiest, sharpest boogie soloing you'll hear anywhere, and it's fairly inventive, too, alternating jazz, blues, and rock'n'roll phrasing, all recorded in a clean, shrill, fail-less tone; a rare case of perfect balance between intellectual mastery of the form and pure kickass energy.

 

This is just one of the highlights. 'Cold, Cold Feeling' drops the restraint as well, becoming one of Collins' most soulful blues ballads. 'Honey, Hush!' is an update of the Stax-Volt thing for the al­ready mentioned new and tighter generation of players, although primary emphasis is still on the adventures of Albert's stuttering guitar. The most memorable track, though, is a new, seriously updated and toughened version of 'Conversation With Collins' from Trash Talkin', a slow, pre­dictably generic, piece of talking blues on which family man Al plays out an imaginary family drama centered on nightlife adventures of his errant wife (amusingly, his real wife Gwen was a loving partner who actually wrote some of the material for him, including the funny banking satire 'Master Charge'): the little bit towards the end during which he impersonates a scowling husband's reaction with his guitar is priceless, and should belong in all the annals of the art of «emotion transfer».

 

Maybe it is not a coincidence that this is Albert's first album in many, many years to return to the topics of coldness and ice — things that almost seem to work as some sort of good luck charm for the man. If Ice Pickin' seems less varied and experimental than some of the 1969-72 albums, it is only for the greater good of humanity: Collins's true forté is his ability to make his own Lucille talk like no other Lucille in the world, not genre-hopping. On Ice Pickin', that ability is flashed brighter than ever before: only the early singles can compete, but even the early singles are too constrained by the minimalism. Thumbs up, of course.

 

FROSTBITE (1980)

 

1) If You Love Me Like You Say; 2) Blue Monday Hangover; 3) I Got A Problem; 4) The Highway Is Like A Wo­man; 5) Brick; 6) Don't Go Reaching Across My Plate; 7) Give Me My Blues; 8) Snowed In.

 

Very close to the successful formula of Ice Pickin' and, therefore, nowhere near as interesting, but with the same band, same style, and new waves of inspiration triggered by the sales of the previous album, Frostbite never really lets down if you do not expect too much. If anything, Al­bert gets even more revved up on some of the numbers, e. g. 'If You Love Me Like You Say' and especially the fast-paced 'Brick', on which he clearly shows, once and for all, that he only used to do minimalistic solos because he wanted to: there is a lot of fast, flashy, and clean playing here that could have easily inspired even a young Stevie Ray Vaughan.

 

There is also a slight feeling of ease all across the album, as the man relies less and less on tradi­tional recipés and injects more of his own personal ideas and sense of humour. 'The Highway Is Like A Woman' is a fairly original batch of metaphors, and, to my knowledge, contains the first creative use of the "slippery and/when wet" double entendre six years before Bon Jovi spoiled all the fun. 'Don't Go Reaching Across My Plate' is actually a moody, sax-driven lounge number de­crying ill table manners, for God's sake — in a fairly literal way, too.

 

Best of all, and a true classic in the «what this instrument is capable of», genre, is the nine-minute epic 'Snowed In', telling a harsh tale of getting about during a particularly harsh Chicago winter. Not only is Albert completely in his «frosty» element here, but he uses the time wisely, alterna­ting standard 12-bar soloing with lots of funny guitar noises, as he imitates the sound of snow crunching under one's feet, the sound of keys rattling against door locks, and, of course, sets of futile attempts to rev up the frosted engine. One serious listen to this track, and there is just no way that you won't be able to single Mr. Collins out of the endless line of generic blues players.

 

There is no way, either, that anyone could like Ice Pickin' and dislike Frostbite; with the front­man and the band in good form throughout, just another thumbs up for Mr. «Razor Blade».

 

FROZEN ALIVE! (1981)

 

1) Frosty; 2) Angel Of Mercy; 3) I Got That Feeling; 4) Caldonia; 5) Things I Used To Do; 6) Got A Mind To Travel; 7) Cold Cuts.

 

Clean, well-recorded, concise, diverse, up to the point, this just might be the ultimate Albert Col­lins live experience, recorded during a several-night stand at the Union Bar in Minneapolis, in a setting ideally suited for Albert Collins the small-club guy — one cannot see it, unfortunately, but during some of the songs he would stroll up to an occasional table or two and sit with the custo­mers while playing. Now that's what I call real «audience participation» — none of that «Houston are you ready to rock» crap.

 

The setlist is limited to seven numbers, but all of Albert's sides are duly represented. The kick-ass guitar monster is out there on the lead-in number, his old hit 'Frosty', and 'Got A Mind To Travel', by the end of which he has all but set fire to the instrument in one of blues-rock's classiest cases of «tension build-up». The slow-burning blues thing is dealt with on 'Angel Of Mercy'. The funk is taken care of on 'I Got That Feeling'. The retro boogie schtick is delivered on 'Caldonia'. Yer old-time R'n'B, horns and all, is served with 'Things I Used To Do'. And, finally, just so you'll al­ways remember that the man's backing band is no slouch, either, bass player Johnny B. Gayden is allowed a lengthy — and fairly awesome — bass solo on the album closer, 'Cold Cuts', during which he goes from funk to jazz to rumba to a few other places, truly entertaining the dazzled audience rather than just showing off his technical skills.

 

If this isn't an all-time classic, it is merely for the fact that Albert is not equally good at all those different things he does — only the last two numbers, with the insane soloing on 'Got A Mind' and the bassist's spot, are what I'd label «jaw-dropping». And you would probably have to be there to feel the full impact of the happening. But if you are considering a limited collection of Collins-related material, Frozen Alive! should still be one of the few first choices. At the very least, it is recorded in far superior quality to Alive & Cool, even despite the barroom ambience. Thus, thumbs up with no further questions asked.

 

DON'T LOSE YOUR COOL (1983)

 

1) Get To Gettin'; 2) My Mind Is Trying To Leave Me; 3) I'm Broke; 4) Don't Lose Your Cool; 5) When A Guitar Plays The Blues; 6) But I Was Cool!; 7) Melt Down; 8) Ego Trip; 9) Quicksand.

 

This is basically Ice Pickin', Vol. 3, deserving an ever-decreasing volume of innovative review­ing content. The title track, as you may remember, is an old old instrumental from almost three decades ago, and Albert's decision to re-record it is a bit disturbing, indicating a gradual shift into the «elder statesmen» category. Of course, it is twice as long, and the old riffs have lost none of their blockheaded charm, and now they are augmented by about two minutes of blazing solos that prove Albert's adeptness at both minimalism and grand flash, but...

 

...well, at the very least nobody can accuse the man of losing his cool. Later on, he turns the joke on himself with the novelty number 'But I Was Cool!', which continues the style of 'Don't Go Re­aching Across My Plate' from the last record. The novelty includes an "OH SHIIIIIT!" blasted at the top of Albert's lungs if you want a whiff of uniqueness, and the song is really not very funny, but at least it is something to discuss.

 

The rest is standard fare early-Eighties Collins: 'I'm Broke' is catchy R'n'B, 'When A Guitar Plays The Blues' is burning soul (although, ashamed as I am to admit, Albert's solos on these burning soul numbers never manage to burn up my soul), 'Ego Trip' is well-oiled funk, and 'My Mind Is Trying To Leave Me' is seven and a half minutes of professional, but undistinguished blues-de-luxe. The formula works well, but, unlike AC/DC, Albert never bothers much about coming up with memorable riffs, and his personal arsenal of solo licks, although replenished and repainted on Ice Pickin', has not un­dergone any further renovations since then.

 

In the end, 'I'm Broke' is really fun, and 'But I Was Cool!' is annoying, but weird, and it is also nice to see the man stubbornly stick to the old, but fresh and lively playing and arranging style, with none of the early Eighties' fancy-pants soul-killin' production excesses. Thumbs up, auto­matically, for any album that sounds like this — but recommended more for hardcore blues mu­sicians and technicians rather than anyone else.

 

LIVE IN JAPAN (1984)

 

1) Listen Here!; 2) Tired Man; 3) If Trouble Was Money; 4) Jealous Man; 5) Stormy Monday; 6) Skatin'; 7) All About My Girl.

 

Two live albums in four years is a bit of an overkill, but few can resist the temptation of adding a Live In Japan credit to their name at one time or another, since, after all, it is a scientifically pro­ven fact that the proximity of Mount Fuji significantly increases the precision of your playing, and that the close presence of the Imperial Family is sufficient to make the mikes pick up such ultra frequencies as normally remain undetected by the best equipment under standard conditions.

 

Other than that, there is not much that makes Live In Japan (recorded, actually, on December 21, 1982) deserving of a special review. Only the setlist is unusual, consisting mostly of numbers that cannot be found on any of Albert's studio recordings — with the sole exception of 'All About My Girl' from Love Can Be Found Anywhere, here extended to thrice its original length and turned into an exciting dialog between the guitar and the backing saxophone. But all of the substitu­tions are generally standard fare, concentrating on slow-tempo 12-bar and fast-paced boogie.

 

The idea was probably not to repeat too much from Frozen Alive!, but by concentrating on «rari­ties», Albert, or whoever else is behind the sequencing, loses the diversity part of the attraction: there is really nothing too thrilling about including two lengthy, same-sounding, draggy blues work­outs ('If Trouble Was Money' and 'Stormy Monday') on the same record. Thus, despite the fact that sound quality is indeed near-perfect, and the fact that Albert plays with all of his usual in­spiration (no surprise here), I could not recommend this to anybody but the direst fans of either Albert Collins or the Imperial Family.

 

COLD SNAP (1986)

 

1) Cash Talkin' (The Workingman's Blues); 2) Bending Like A Willow Tree; 3) A Good Fool Is Hard To Find; 4) Lights Are On But Nobody's Home; 5) I Ain't Drunk; 6) Hooked On You; 7) Too Many Dirty Dishes; 8) Snatchin' It Back; 9) Fake ID.

 

Albert's last album for Alligator is sometimes decried for finally falling prey to Eighties' produc­tion excesses, but, honestly, all it takes to hush down the detractors is play it back to back with Eric Clapton's August, released at about the same time. Yes, there seems to be some electronic echo effects forced on the drummer, but that's about the total extent — you can deduce the de­cade, but there are no significant attempts to «modernize» (i. e., «sterilize») neither the sound of Albert himself, nor that of his backing band.

 

The real problem is that it is simply more of the same: Ice Pickin' Vol. 4. (You kinda sorta begin to get the idea when you line up all four LPs and start looking at the album sleeves in succession). Only two of the tracks merit separate commenting. 'I Ain't Drunk (I'm Just Drinkin')' says it all in the title: as old as its Chuck Berry-spin-off-dance-blues groove may be, it is a fun tune to have lying around when you need justification for alcohol intake. And on the near-obligatory gimmick performance 'Too Ma­ny Dirty Dishes', the Master aptly coerces the Tele­caster into imitating the sounds of scrubbing pots, pans, and glasses, as he is mumbling stuff like "You wait 'til that woman get home, I'm scrap­pin' all these pots for her" under his nose. As usual, it is not so much hilarious as it is mildly amusing, but all the sound effects are cool, in a hard-to-understand way.

 

Of the other tunes, the best instrumental performances are on the rocking album opener 'Cash Talkin' and on the more rocking album closing instrumental 'Fake ID' — but it is nothing we have not heard before. The horns work well on the lengthy blues-de-luxe of 'Lights Are On' and not so well on the way-too-poppy 'Hooked On You'. Frankly, I cannot even begin to discern whether the band sounds tired or inspired — they've been at it so long now, it seems like in 1986 Albert was able to achieve this kind of level while sleepwalking. Which is admirable and terrifying at the same time.

 

ICEMAN (1991)

 

1) Mr. Collins, Mr. Collins; 2) Iceman; 3) Don’t Mistake Kindness For Weakness; 4) Travellin’ South; 5) Put The Shoe On The Other Foot; 6) I’m Beginning To Wonder; 7) Head Rag; 8) The Hawk; 9) Blues For Gabe; 10) Mr. Col­lins, Mr. Collins (faded version).

 

The gods were so angry with Collins for selling out to a major label (Virgin, or, more precisely, its subsidiary Pointblank), that they sent him to hell with liver cancer two years later. But appare­ntly none of the gods took the trouble of actually listening to the album, because there is nothing whatsoever that would seriously set it apart from his Alligator records. Its main flaw is recyclism, not sellout-ism. With Johnny Gayden still on bass, and Albert and his wife in tight control of the songwriting, performing, arranging, and production, no doctoring is involved — and I am not even sure this is so much of a plus.

 

The only thing about Iceman that’s memorable is the little funky guitar grumble that opens the album, and a worried female chorus that retorts: “Mr. Collins, Mr. Collins... please, Mr. Collins... DON’T PLAY SO LOUD!” And, in general, Mr. Collins obliges. There are almost no fiery out­bursts that could, in the end, save face even for the weakest of his Alligator albums: ‘Blues For Gabe’, for instance, an instrumental that closes the album and could be expected to blow away the roof, is unpleasantly tepid, and puts as much of a spotlight on the guitar as it does on the or­gan and trombone solos, a real crime when it comes to Collins.

 

Everything is professional, but there is truly nothing here that is not a rewrite of some earlier suc­cess (or misfire), and the only way to admire Iceman is for the man’s tenacity: true, he has firmly wedged the formula into the ground, but he managed to bravely carry it through the disco, New Wave, synth pop, hair metal, and grunge eras without even pretending to notice that any of these eras really took place. Not even Virgin record executives could make him admit this. From that angle, Iceman is deserving of deep respect (and how many 60-year old bluesmen can sustain that level of energy, anyway? Buddy Guy, perhaps) — but from any other, it is stunningly weak, with no strength left at all to come up with even modestly new ideas. At least ‘I Ain’t Drunk’ had the no­velty factor to it, and then there were all these tunes on which he used the guitar for cool spe­cial effects, but no such luck here: Iceman is the kind of album the man could easily produce at the rate of a dozen a day. Thumbs down.

 

LIVE '92-'93 (1995)

 

1) Iceman; 2) Lights Are On But Nobody's Home; 3) If You Love Me Like You Say; 4) Put The Shoe On The Other Foot; 5) Frosty; 6) Travelin' South; 7) Talkin' Woman; 8) My Woman Has A Black Cat Bone; 9) I Ain't Drunk; 10) T-Bone Shuffle.

 

One thing of note about this posthumous release is that there is no telling any significant diffe­rence between the tracks recorded in 1992 (at a couple US gigs) and in 1993 (at the Montreux Jazz Festival) — even though, while playing at Montreux, Albert was well aware that he had about three months left to live, having been diagnosed with lung and liver cancer a month prior to the gig. It helps a lot to keep that in mind while listening, because, otherwise, well, it's just ano­ther live Albert Collins album, right?

 

A pretty good one, actually, even if the setlist is a bit too heavy on material from his latest, and not particularly inspired, pair of albums. But, surprise surprise, the songs come alive: 'Iceman' is one minute shorter because it's taken at a slightly faster tempo, and the solos are crisper and more fierce than they were in the studio, where the production surreptitiously muffled and sanitized them. The funky 'Put The Shoe On The Other Foot', on the other hand, is extended, giving the bass player more chances to flaunt his chugging awesomeness, and putting Albert into «stinging» mode at least twice, which he never achieved on the song in the studio.

 

The lowlight is 'I Ain't Drunk', which loses much of its effect by paying little attention to the pre­cise, comic timing of the original — the band speeds it up, loosens its grip, and still insists on passing it off as a joke number, with Albert's «improvised» chat with the band members about whether he really is drunk or, well, just drinking. But that's just one notable misstep, and they im­mediately cover up for it by playing the harshest, bristliest rendition of 'T-Bone Shuffle' ever.

 

So maybe there really isn't one single lick on here that Albert hasn't played for your pleasure before, but I am a big context devotee, and the context here consists of two details: (a) this here is a nearly dead man, and he is still playing like all hellhounds were on his trail and the guitar was his equivalent of a big fat cudgel; (b) this here is a man who had battled all his life to maintain his integrity in the studio, and when the studio tried to take away the smallest part of his integrity, he put it all in his stage playing to show us that he certainly ain't «bending like a willow tree». He just passed away quietly in November 1993, untamed to the last. Thumbs up for having been the Master of the Telecaster for thirty-five years, unchallenged.

 

THE ICEMAN AT MOUNT FUJI (1992; 2005)

 

1) Iceman; 2) Put The Shoe On The Other Foot; 3) Lights Are On But Nobody's Home; 4) If You Love Me Like You Say; 5) Same Old Thing; 6) Travelin' South; 7) Iceman; 8) Put The Shoe On The Other Foot; 9) Lights Are On But No­body's Home; 10) Honey Hush; 11) Same Old Thing; 12) Frosty.

 

We say goodbye to «Master of the Telecaster» with this archive release, available both on CD and DVD, that captures a smokin' August 1992 performance at the Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival, on the sweet banks of Lake Yamanaka. (Another archival CD/DVD product from the same time is Live At Montreux, but, since bits of that performance had already been previously released on Live '92-'93, dedicating special space to it would be overkill).

 

Albert played two relatively brief sets that day, both of which are included on the CD and may be discomforting for the novice — to a large extent, they are identical, except for two songs (and even then, 'Travelin' South' and 'Frosty' are both fast boogies, and 'If You Love Me...' and 'Honey Hush' are both mid-tempo blues-rock) and a slightly extended and more aggressive 'Iceman' in the second set. Considering that all of this material had already been played for the '92-'93 shows, the album is clearly redundant.

 

I wish I could say that these performances blow the US live tracks away, but, frankly, they don't — they are equally good, no more, no less. It is unfair to say that Collins' playing style did not change over the years. Comparing these fast, complex, and quite modern-sounding bursts of licks to the much simpler, much less developed (but always inventive) style of his late 1950s / early 1960s playing, it is nothing short of amazing how easily he made the transgression from «Fifties electric blues player» to «rock era electric blues player», one of the very, very few veterans of his generation to be able to manage that (in a way, not even B. B. King, in all of his lifetime, had ma­naged to truly break the chains that tied him to his formative years).

 

But there is a limit to any kind of evolution, and where you can expect from, say, Eric Clapton to play at least something different every night — to add up an unpredictable twist or two on the spur of the particular moment (not that it always happens, mind you, but you are entitled to ex­pect it) — you cannot expect it from The Iceman, who simply goes out on tour and delivers what he is used to delivering. Not to mean that these solos are note-for-note identical with '92-'93, but what kind of an obsessed maniac would really want to compare them note-for-note?

 

In short, if you already have '92-'93, don't bother with the CD (the DVD might be fun, though). If you don't, and Mt. Fuji, being the more recent issue of the two, is lying close at hand, go for it, but keep in mind that you are really getting six songs (okay, eight at most) for the price of twelve.

 

 

 

ALEX HARVEY

ALEX HARVEY AND HIS SOUL BAND (1964)

 

1) Framed; 2) I Ain't Worrying Baby; 3) Backwater Blues; 4) Let The Good Times Roll; 5) Going Home; 6) I've Got My Mojo Working; 7) Teensville USA; 8) New Orleans; 9) Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger; 10) When I Grow Too Old To Rock; 11) Evil Hearted Man; 12) I Just Wanna Make Love To You; 13) The Blind Man; 14) Reeling And Rocking.

 

Out of those people whose musical career took years and years to get off the ground, Alex Har­vey must hold an indisputable record. Success and notability weren't his until the launching of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band in 1972 — yet The Alex Harvey Soul Band was active and kicking around the circuits of Scotland and lands to the south since at least 1959, when the Beat­les were still the Quarrymen and Elvis was still in the army.

 

But was there anything particularly worthwhile about the Soul Band? No, except for perhaps a damn fine good taste in selecting their cover material (the scarce information we have on this page from Harvey's past does not include anything on original songwriting). They performed quite a lot of diverse material, almost completely shutting out the more "commercialized" US and UK pop hits and concentrating instead on everything from rockabilly to R'n'B to electric blues to even digging out and rearranging old pre-war blues standards (Harvey's special predilection for these golden oldies would result in an entire album dedicated to them — see below). In all that, they arguably had little or no competition on the British/Scottish scene of the early Sixties.

 

This is where the praise comes to a dead end, though, because the band's only album, as far as I'm concerned, holds only meager historic interest. It was recorded on the heels of their (traditional for all British bands of the period) big break on the Hamburg club scene, and dressed up as a "live" album, with overdubbed audience noises, although the sound quality is way too good for anyone to be duped — it may have been, and probably was, live in the studio, but that's about as live as it gets. The fourteen songs faithfully run the gamut of whatever was listed above, and eve­rything is done with a proper amount of professionalism and, perhaps, even some excitement, yet there is nothing in these performances that somehow improves on the originals or, more impor­tant, changes them into something worth hearing on its own.

 

Harvey himself, although blessed with a powerful voice, was still light years away from capturing his tragic madman stage persona, and, although he is nowhere near as obnoxious on this record as he is on The Blues, simply makes no competition to the other guys in the business. His sidemen are competent, but competent the way your local barroom band would be competent after having played in the barroom each night for five years. The "edge" is missing, if you know what I mean. If you don't, see for yourself — try to compare the band's performance of Leiber & Stoller & The Coasters' 'Framed' with the song's radical reworking on the same-titled debut from The Sensatio­nal Alex Harvey Band eight years later. The latter is a demented rock theater masterpiece; the former is... a cover of Leiber & Stoller & The Coasters' 'Framed'.

 

In short, this is a pretty bland album if you take it in the context of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates (who rocked out better), the Beatles (who had better songs), the Beach Boys (who had better vocals), the Dave Clark 5 (who had a riskier and edgier sax player), the Animals (who had a cra­zier frontman), the Rolling Stones (who had a far more dangerous and provocative sound), the Americans (who wrote all these songs that Harvey covered), the Russians (who had just flown Gagarin into space three years ago), and the Romulans (each of whom looked more handsome than Alex Harvey could ever hope to get). If you manage to strip away the context, it all comes across in a far more positive light, but I guess Avril Lavigne could also be thought of as the epi­tome of punk if one didn't know anything about punk. Thumbs down from the heart that did not manage to get wound up, and likewise from the brain that tried to justify the album's existence but found it easier to justify Asian despotism.

 

THE BLUES (1964)

 

1) Trouble In Mind; 2) Honey Bee; 3) I Learned About Women; 4) Danger Zone; 5) The Riddle Song; 6) Waltzing Matilda; 7) TB Blues; 8) The Big Rock Candy Mountain; 9) The Michigan Massacre; 10) No Peace; 11) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out; 12) St. James Infirmary; 13) Strange Fruit; 14) Kisses Sweeter Than Wine; 15) Good God Almighty.

 

The Blues, an absolute discographic rarity these days, was recorded at the tail end of Alex Harvey & His Soul Band's career — in fact, by the time it was recorded the "band" consisted of just about Alex himself and his brother Leslie (later of Stone The Crows fame, still later of the "first noted guitarist to have himself electrocuted on stage" fame). Information on the circumstances and participants of this recording is very limited, of course, but since the only instruments on it are an acoustic guitar (presumably played by Alex) and an electric guitar (presumably played by Leslie), I imagine that's about all the information we're ever gonna get.

 

Do not worry about the record being practically unavailable — it is so for a good reason, because The Blues is simply not a very good album. It is fairly unique for its times, though. Back when everyone else in Britain was busy jumping on the R'n'B wagon, and the only blues style that got attention and respect was Chicago electric stuff, Alex Harvey was willing to dig deeper and go further than that. No 'Little Red Rooster' or 'Rollin' Stone' will be found here; he covers some really old and (at that time at least) obscure tunes that come from the pre-war era — although I have a weird feeling that his sources were mostly white players, old folk, country-blues and bluegrass stuff (e. g. Woody Guthrie or Jimmy Rogers, whose 'TB Blues' is covered), because I only recognize 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out' and, of course, 'Strange Fruit' as songs made popular by black performers. Certainly 'Waltzing Matilda' and 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain' have little to do with the blues as such — but they're pretty old tunes all the same, and some people do have this manner of calling everything released before the Fifties as 'blues' unless it's Bing Crosby.

 

Stylistically and manner-wise, The Blues is a bit similar to the atittude of the Holy Modal Roun­ders on the other side of the ocean: very irreverent, rather paranoid, relatively unpredictable. But not as funny or inventive. And quite likely to induce headaches, because Harvey, in his overri­ding desire to sound off-the-cuff and different, overscreams. A few tunes are pleasantly quiet and modest, but much, if not most of the time, they turn into screamfests where any hope of subtlety is lost. Take the same 'TB Blues', for instance: Rogers' original, sung in his usual sweet, lulling voice, worked so well exactly because of the gruesome dis-coherence between the death-wrapped lyrics and the sugary, nonchalant voice, but Harvey's take on it doesn't even sound authentic when he imitates an agonizing man's paranoia — it sounds drastically overplayed, not funny, not terrifying, just annoying.

 

Annoying is the word, which I have some time ago sworn not to abuse, but there's hardly a better chance to use it in all sincerity than in this review. Most of these songs are annoying. 'Trouble In Mind' — annoying. 'Danger Zone' — annoying. 'No Peace' — annoying. 'St. James Infirmary' — very annoying. Thank God at least 'Strange Fruit' isn't annoying, but even so it's only notable for historic reasons, because I cannot imagine any sort of spiritual or material need for anyone to listen to a 'Strange Fruit' that is not done by a Billie Holiday or, at least, a Nina Simone.

 

In short, it's not hard to understand why Harvey had no hopes of making it big at the time, or why this stage of his career has not gotten a better treatment in retrospect. For 1964, this was way too weird, for any decade later than that, this is way too boring and annoying. And although, from a purely brainy-intellectual point of view, I am sometimes tempted to thumbs-up the record, my heart always overrides this decision with a no-go thumbs down all the way.

 

ROMAN WALL BLUES (1969)

 

1) Midnight Moses; 2) Hello L.A., Bye Bye Birmingham; 3) Broken Hearted Fairytale; 4) Donna; 5) Roman Wall Blues; 6) Jumping Jack Flash; 7) Hammer Song; 8) Let My Bluebird Sing; 9) Maxine; 10) Down At Bart's Place; 11) Candy.

 

After several years of relative inactivity, during which Harvey's main bit of public visibility was working with the original team for Hair, Alex tried to revive his fortunes and assembled a full rock band to produce his first true "formal" album as a solo artist. Considering that these days, you're lucky if you even come upon it in an old pile of recycled vinyl, you can imagine just how successful it was. Thank God for the digital era.

 

Then again, maybe not. The more I listen to Roman Wall Blues, the better I understand just how much of a difference The Sensational A. H. Band really made. Roman Wall Blues has it all — Harvey's genius-madman image, the post-modernist lyrics, the inventive and deconstructive song­writing, the stylistic diversity — but it doesn't have the one ingredient that really matters: well-played music. Maybe if you make a serious effort and evaluate this on its own, forgetting all about the tremendous musicianship of the aptly titled Sensational Band, it will be easier to warm up to the tunes. But there is really no need to: in the light of Framed and all that followed, Roman Wall Blues is just a prelude, a rehearsal, a weak demo version of the delights to come.

 

Alex himself must have known that, because he took the trouble of re-recording some of the best songs on this collection — such as the blues-rock rave-up of 'Midnight Moses', or the dark quasi-folk of 'Hammer Song' — with the Sensational Band. This is very laudable, but in the meantime it does not excuse the limp blues-and-brass backing on this record, and I am not even mentioning cases when it ceases to be backing and starts to be fronting — as on the exquisitely boring four-minute jam 'Down At Bart's Place'.

 

The worst problem, though, is that with poor musical backing, Harvey continues to sound annoy­ing rather than exciting. Depending on your constituency, you can think of his take on 'Jumping Jack Flash', for instance, as a masterful exercise in deconstruction, or as a silly clownish parody whose aims and goals are uncertain and whose effects range from neutral to negative. I prefer 'neutral', but that means the track simply has no reason to exist. They even re-record one song from Hair ('Donna'), but it doesn't go anywhere serious either.

I certainly understand why the record bombed — it's one of those albums you don't really know what to do with. It doesn't rock hard enough, it isn't nearly as funny as it could be, the hooks aren't tremendous, and the mood is neither heartily sincere nor explicitly insincere. It sort of slips through your fingers and through your ears, and few of us like records that slip through, so it's a thumbs down, from both the heart that finds itself offended for not being offered any emotional food and the brain that does not feel intellectually satisfied, either.

 

THE JOKER IS WILD (1972)

 

1) The Joker Is Wild; 2) Penicillin Blues; 3) Make Love To You; 4) I'm Just A Man; 5) He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother; 6) Hare Krishna/Willie The Pimp; 7) Flying Saucer's Daughter.

 

Another failed effort, also relatively hard to locate for a good reason. It is unclear who exactly is backing Alex on the album; accounts are contradictory, but at least one point of view is that all the members of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band were already on board for this session. I find this unlikely to be true, and completely baffling if it is true, because in that case there is no ratio­nal explanation at all to the miraculous transition from the unfunny boredom of The Joker Is Wild into the hilarious hard-rocking dementia of Framed.

 

Basically, Harvey is dragging on his "humorous" deconstruction schtick, with almost uniformly disastrous results. His take on heavy blues-rock, illustrated by 'Penicillin Blues', is like some ear­ly Led Zeppelin or Jeff Beck exercise in 12-bardom, but without any of the amazing guitar pyro­technics; instead, we just get a bunch of self-consciously "dirty" lyrics that are neither primitive enough to be convincing nor subtle enough to be enjoyable. (Case in point: 'you got such bad blood baby, looks like you need a shot — but I want to have you turn around, 'cause I wanna see everything else that you've got'. What is this, high school?).

 

It is just as painful to listen to Harvey's interpretations of 'I Just Wanna Make Love To You' (too ugly to be sleazy), 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother' (the level of parody is about the same as if you and I got drunk in a downtown bar and started karaokeing), and Zappa's 'Willie The Pimp'; the latter is tied together in a medley with 'Hare Krishna' (!), and neither is funny or fun. Maybe this can be someone else's idea of humour, but I find myself completely unable to even raise a smile — and this is coming from the exact same man who, several months later, went on to make one of the most joyful records of the decade!

 

About the only thing that vaguely manages to entertain is the closing number, 'Flying Saucer's Daughter', a satire on heavy psychedelia where the music is marginally more complex and hea­vier on the sonic effects, and the lyrics marginally elevate beyond schoolboy pap. Even so, its fire and fury are pitiful next to the fire and fury of 'St. Anthony' (the album closer on Framed), and the tune has very little individual value. So, it goes without saying that this is a thumbs down in all respects — and the overall conclusion is that you just can skip the entire career of Mr. Harvey prior to the Sensational Band altogether. Apparently, though, sometime in mid-'72 the Flying Saucer's Daughter tweaked Mr. Harvey's brain a bit, and he's never been the same afterwards, to the great delight of all of us.

 

FRAMED (1972)

 

1) Framed; 2) Hammer Song; 3) Midnight Moses; 4) Isobel Goudie; 5) Buff's Bar Blues; 6) I Just Want To Make Love To You; 7) Hole In Her Stocking; 8) There's No Lights On The Christmas Tree, Mama; 9) St. Anthony.

 

By late 1972, Harvey had permanently teamed up with fellow Scotsmen band Tear Gas (from Glas­gow), led by guitar wiz Zal Cleminson, and the results were astounding. All of a sudden, in a matter of moments, the exact same musical approach which, on Harvey's first solo albums, soun­ded stupid and boring at the same time, turns out to be both intelligent and exciting.

 

It was up to Cleminson to transform Harvey's act from weak lounge-like parody into one of the toughest, raunchiest glam-acts of the decade. You get fat crunchy riffs à la Sweet, but more me­morable, wall-of-sound guitar overdubs that David Bowie never dreamed of, and, where the need arises for it, a brawny Glasgow barroom-rock atmosphere to rival the drunken-est escapades of Slade. But all over it Harvey's pre-post-modern persona still looms as large as ever, and now, when it has a solid musical backbone, it's no longer laughable, but rather hilarious — and, at ti­mes, sincerely intimidating.

 

Just for a laugh, it is advisable to play the old and the new versions of 'Midnight Moses' back to back. Unless you're a staunch hard-rock hater, I can't even visualize the perspective of someone willing to prefer the original, what with all the fury that Cleminson invests in this reworking. The brass section has been retained for 'I Just Want To Make Love To You', but now it's also being propped up by terrific guitar work, not to mention the tight rhythm section, and now the extended coda is involving, not excruciating.

 

Whether it is the old stuff or the new stuff, there is nary a weak spot on the entire album. Leiber and Stoller's 'Framed' is recast as a slow, plodding, mammoth Seventies' rocker; 'Isobel Goudie' is Harvey's tongue-in-cheek contribution to the progressive excesses of the age, replete with dark distorted organ chords and smooth transitions between quiet/hypnotic and loud/bedazzling (as would probably befit a song about a creepy Scottish witch!); we then get our feet firmly back on the ground with 'Buff's Bar Blues', Harvey's best-ever drinking song with a jaw-dropping guitar solo from Zal (but what sort of a drinking song would ever in­clude a verse like 'drinking up Spumanti, reading John McLain, his sister in the grubber and his brother was the same' — and who the heck is John McLain anyway, and how do you even spell him properly?); we get a wonderful retro vaudeville number ('There's No Lights On The Christ­mas Tree, Mother' — apparently because 'They're Burning Big Louie Tonight'); and we round things up with the sacrilegious naughtiness of 'St. Anthony', a track that not only throws a suspi­cious light on the nature of St. Anthony's temptation (and even his true ability to resist it), but also wraps the poor saint in a web of wah-wah and not so wah-wah guitars that raise some of the loudest ruckus and rumpus to come out of the British Isles in the early part of the decade.

 

In short, Framed is a fascinating musical journey, and double so when it is taken in the context of all the disasters of the previous limp decade of Harvey's career. Wholesale admirers of the man's talent and personality will argue that it took the arrival of the sarcastic spasms of the glam rock era to properly put Alex in his place, while in the Sixties he was simply steadily being ahead of his time, and they may be right, too, but the fact is, being ahead of one's time is not always a good thing — "ahead of the times" may be just as disastrous in terms of pure listenable power as "behind the times", and if it took Cleminson's hard-rock backing to make Harvey sound like an ironic versatile showman rather than silly irritating clown, no one is required to wreck one's brains trying to spot the future ironic versatile showman of 1972 in the silly irritating clown of 1969 or earlier. And this is certainly not downplaying Harvey's own achievements: I doubt that the work of Tear Gas could have easily stood the test of time without being linked to Harvey's personality, either. The Harvey/Cleminson match was — no second opinion about it — clearly made in Heaven, and if they had to wait ten or twelve years to find each other, well, who are we to judge Heaven's judgement? Thumbs up.

 

NEXT (1973)

 

1) Swampsnake; 2) Gang Bang; 3) The Faith Healer; 4) Giddy-Up-A-Ding-Dong; 5) Next; 6) Vambo Marble Eye; 7) The Last Of The Teenage Idols.

 

The loony carnival continues on Next, an album that stretches the capacities of the band to the limit — in fact, to the limit of becoming offensive, as not a few people even today express genu­ine indignation at a song whose chorus goes 'Ain't nothing like a gang bang to blow your blues away'. Well, what do you know: offensive for sure, but who could argue with the truth of it?

 

Next is not afraid to take risks, not only lyrical, but plenty of musical ones as well. There's only seven tracks, one of them multi-part, one — a lengthy, slow-developing art-rock romp, and the rest are an even wilder mish-mash of styles than Framed; but this is to be expected from the sort of meaningless, but exciting and titillating "rock cabaret" that Harvey and the gang are going for. The question is, does it excite enough? Under the musical leadership of Cleminson, it certainly does, enough for it to be completely unnecessary to make sense of it all.

 

Then, come to think of it, there is a general sensible thread running through the whole thing: sex, sex, sex, sleaze, and sex again. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that Bon Scott, in his stage and studio persona, must have been hugely influenced by the Harvey of Next, a fact rendered even more plausible by the brawny Scottish heritage of both gentlemen. But The Sensational Alex Har­vey Band was, of course, a more adventurous outfit than AC/DC, and in their everlasting quest for more raunchiness, they channel as many naughty spirits as they are able to find the proper seats for within the confines of one record. The spirit of barroom brawl on 'Gang Bang'; the spirit of Southern rock on 'Swampsnake'; the spirit of heavy metal on 'Faith Healer'; the spirit of rock­abilly on 'Giddy Up'; the spirit of doo-wop on the outro section of 'Last Of Teenage Idols'; and, wildest of all, the evil Voodoo spirit on 'Vambo Marble Eye', a veritable Ogoun Badagris of a rock tune, all covered in the fireclouds of Cleminson's wah-wah playing.

 

Once all these spirits have taken their places, I cannot see how an album like Next could fail to be one of glam-rock's quintessential statements, a record that perfectly holds its own alongside Elec­tric Warrior or even Ziggy Stardust. Speaking of the latter, one exact thing Bowie and Harvey had in common was an adoration for Jacques Brel; the title track is a tango arrangement of the latter's 'Au Suivant', with an excellent translation/reinterpretation of the lyrics and perfect place­ment — it cuts across the middle of the record, interrupting the schizophrenic spirit dance for a few minutes of intelligent pause, as if the tired actors, clowns, and mimes took their masks off to catch their breath. Allowed to wallow in their misery a little while. Then it's show time again, and Harvey's/Brel's promise — 'I'll do anything to get out of life, to survive, not ever to be next!' — is cut short as the masks are up to the ominous wah-wah intro to 'Vambo'.

 

Of course, Next, like all Harvey albums, is clownish, meaning that it will never be able to achieve the same level of critical respect as Ziggy. In the eyes of the thinking person, it's more like a spoof on Ziggy-type material than an independent thinking person's artistic statement. But every now and then, clowns come closer to the uncomfortable truth than thinking persons, and, besides, Harvey wisely alternates between the clown's clown and the tragic clown — the latter is mainly seen on 'Next', but also emerges later during the first part of 'Last Of The Teenage Idols', where the tragic clown seems to be making fun of the clown's clown. There's real substance here behind the cabaret, which is how things should indeed go with all high-class cabaret; it only takes a will­ingness to go beyond the smut of the twenty seven guys of 'Gang Bang' to realize that.

 

Last hurrah should go to Cleminson, who continues honing his musical skills — the guitar playing on 'Vambo Marble Eye' and 'Faith Healer' is exceptional, and his tango riffage in unison with the piano on 'Next' is a perfect desperate foil for Harvey's perfect desperate singing. There is a great video of a performance of 'Next' from the Old Grey Whistle Test with Zal, in his trade­mark Pierrot makeup that he always donned at the band's live performances, not only plays, but mimes along to Alex's singing: the two make quite a lovely couple. Thumbs up on all the tracks, unanimously agreed upon by the heart and brain departments alike.

 

THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM (1974)

 

1) The Hot City Symphony, Part 1: Vambo; 2) The Hot City Symphony, Part 2: Man In The Jar; 3) River Of Love; 4) Long Hair Music; 5) Sergeant Fury; 6) Weights Made Of Lead; 7) Money Honey/Impossible Dream; 8) Tomahawk Kid; 9) Anthem.

 

God loves a third: The Impossible Dream concludes the trilogy of Alex Harvey records that no honest rock music lover should live without. If there's a breach in this fortress, it's that by now we know what to expect, and the record offers no amazing new surprises. You'll have the crunchy hard rock, you'll have the vaudeville and music hall, you'll have the generic blues-rock made non-generic through sagacious arrangements, you'll have a little bit of sensitive soulfulness, and you'll have the usual puzzled feeling of not understanding how much on here comes from the heart and how much goes as an appendage to Zal Cleminson's clown makeup.

 

But then, this is probably expected, and the good news is, the Sensational Band's style is so tho­roughly and utterly demented that, once they're on a roll, nothing can be truly predicted. Take even the weakest tracks on here: 'Weights Made Of Lead' is standard 'Green Onions'-style 12-bar, but certainly Booker T. & the MGs would have never thought of spicing the song up with such a fun clavinet-imitating funky guitar part as Cleminson invents for the recording. 'Sergeant Fury', in theory, should bore to sleep everyone who shivers at the name of Fred Astaire, but it is hardly possible to resist the energy of the song, or the cheesy, but seductive gay overtones in Alex's cho­rus of 'I wanna be rich and famous, I wanna be just the same as the stars that shine on the Christ­mas tree...'. In short, even where it's "common", it's a ton of fun; and where it is less than a ton of fun, it is never common.

 

Yet in all seriousness, The Impossible Dream is centered around two major compositions. 'Hot City Symphony' features two parts, the first of which is a slower, but not any less overwhelming re­working of 'Vambo' (by now, 'Vambo' was Harvey's scenic alter ego), and the second a Zappa-in­fluenced mock-detective story about a 'Man In The Jar' (who 'wanna get out' and is 'smashing the glass', so be careful!). Running over thirteen minutes, it doesn't feel one second overlong sin­ce you should be too busy following the misfortunes of the man in the jar to care about anything else.

 

But the album's true piece de resistance is 'Anthem', a song that begs for usage of this word even if it already weren't its title. Here, after fooling around with us for the duration of almost another entire record, Harvey suddenly turns around 180 degrees and yields a song of tremendous perso­nal power, or, perhaps, even national power — he does not usually parade his Scottish heritage on record, preferring it to seep through unconsciously, but here he hauls out the bagpipes (in fact, he'd even regularly haul out the pipers onstage) and leads the band in a glorious spiritual chant à la "Hey Jude", but with a religious twist provided by the angelic vocals of Vicky Silva; unfortu­nately, I am unable to locate any extra info on who she was, but it is her inspired performance, by all means, that rips the song out of its classy, but traditionally-based Scottish music flowerbed and skyrockets it way up to seventh heaven.

 

To call the tune "pretentious" would be the equivalent of remarking, with a straight face, that the Grand Canyon — in case you didn't know — is pretty deep. The real question is whether you're overwhelmed or not, and I am overwhelmed. I am, in fact, saddened: Harvey's 'although it's true I'm worried now, I won't be worried long' may have been just a gospel cliché when he recorded the tune, but it proved only too true, and if you trace the live performance of the tune on Youtube you'll see how many people are offering their R.I.P.s: this is the anthem of Harvey's life, and it's also the ultimate funeral song if there ever was one. (And it's difficult for me to believe that it has not served as an inspiration for McCartney's 'Mull Of Kintyre', although, of course, all anthemic Scottish music does sound pretty much the same).

 

For 'Anthem' and 'Hot City Symphony' alone, the brain and heart would gladly unite in a joyful tandem and lift their thumbs up high, but honestly, I can't find one truly weak spot on the album. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll smash your head up against the wall — and yes, you'll be offered plenty of cheese, but haven't you heard? Scottish cheese is pretty damn good.

 

TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME (1975)

 

1) Action Strasse; 2) Snake Bite; 3) Soul In Chains; 4) The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater; 5) Ribs And Balls; 6) Give My Compliments To The Chef; 7) Sharks Teeth; 8) Shake That Thing; 9) Tomorrow Belongs To Me; 10) To Be Continued.

 

This is probably the most Zappa-like album ever recorded by the band — in light of the presence of unpredictable multi-part whacko stories like 'The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater' and the big fan favorite 'Give My Compliments To The Chef'. Thus it will have the most appeal to those who appreciate the zany theatricality of Harvey, but may cause a slight fall off for those (like me) who only appreciate it as long as it's propelled by the musical skills of Clemenson.

 

Not that the latter aren't evident on here, but the balance is clearly tipped in favor of Alex, with Zal stepping somewhat out of the way; he is felt throughout, but not always heard. The only Big Riff, for instance, that manages to be memorized after a bunch of listens is the one that drives 'Snake Bite' — and only because it's a clever variation on the riff of 'Whole Lotta Love'. But even on that track, as well as most others, the band is downplaying their hard rock component and con­centrating on a mixture of vaudeville, art-pop, and basic barroom brawl instead. ('Ribs And Balls' is the lone exception, but it's just a small interlude between the "epic" compositions).

Therefore, to truly love this album, you must truly love 'The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater'. It isn't catchy, its several sections aren't particularly wonderful in the melody department, and the whole "rock theater" schtick isn't even novel any more. But the band still manage to gather them­selves and give Harvey's over-the-top delivery of this harrowing tale of stone shortage and dying trees a properly over-the-top musical backing. The odd truth is, this should probably be seen ra­ther than heard, but no footage of any live performance has surfaced, nor can this be found on any live album — so I'm not even sure it was ever performed live. It's odd, and it requires a seriously acquired taste to be loved.

 

The other piece on here which clearly contains a chunk of Harvey's soul is 'Give My Compli­ments To The Chef'. It's more solid dynamically, slowly unwrapping from a quiet electric piano led dirge to all-out rock fury, stuffed with obscure, Dylan-style, lyrics ('Leo sits behind the desk, he wanna see the woman cooking gravy, nobody sent no argument and I gotta go and join the Royal Navy') and "progressive" synthesizer squeaks and bleeps. It's meaningless if you try to take it apart, but somehow works when strung together, like the last desperate rant of the seasoned madman, driven to the very brink of existence by our nice society.

 

And only a seasoned madman, I guess, would want to end the album with a completely straight­forward, dead-on serious rendition of 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me', a song which unsuspecting fans could mistake for an honest, heartfelt attempt to recreate the serenity and solemnity of 'Anthem', but also one which those who are aware of its true origins might be appalled at (if you happen to be in the first category, it's a great stimulus to check out the pleasures of Cabaret). It is rumored that Harvey allowed himself to appear on the German stage dressed up as Hitler, and this is just another bit of uncomfortable titillation that the man thrived upon. You'll find it either fascinating or disgusting, but, in all cases, thought-provoking.

 

My gut reaction is that Tomorrow Belongs To Me, with its heavier than usual emphasis on the Show rather than the Music, is a notable step down from the previous trilogy of albums; but it is still consistently interesting, and, given that my brain respects it more than my heart loves it, I'd like to give it an intellectually-motivated thumbs up with the possibility of further warming up to it in the future. But experience tells me there'll always be unusual individuals in all corners of the world that would be simply delighted to hum 'The Tale Of The Giant Stone Eater' in the shower, so, all you unusual individuals, this one's for you!

 

LIVE (1975)

 

1) Fanfare; 2) Faith Healer; 3) Tomahawk Kid; 4) Vambo; 5) Give My Compliments To The Chef; 6) Delilah; 7) Framed.

 

Strange that, in the era of triple live albums de luxe, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band decided to go along with just one LP's worth of material, giving the listener but a snippet of all the delights that constituted their live show. Where is the hard rock punch of 'Midnight Moses'? The tango tragicality of 'Next'? The film-noir satire of 'Man In The Jar'? The cathartic solemnity of 'Anthem'? The only explanation is that, perhaps, the band consciously did not want to give any pretext for being associated with the pomp of progressive rock; but in retrospect, they hardly needed to be afraid. It's a good thing that, at least, we now have a solid bunch of releases from the archives to remedy that early mistake.

 

Granted, Live only works well if you have no idea what a SAHB live show actually looked like (or, perhaps, on the contrary, it doesn't work well unless you have some sort of idea). At their peak, the band put out a theatrical show second to no one, with the possible exception of Alice Cooper if you're into all that decapitated dolls and live snakes stuff. Zal Cleminson's Pierrot makeup and proto-KISS stage antics were a big part of it, of course, but Alex provided the lion's share of entertainment, with each number sporting a different personality tailored after the song's "message", and his grimacing and miming alone were worth seeing the show; unfortunately, very few of them were captured on tape, but what there is is some of the funniest, most cleverly staged and most impossible to ignore video material from the decade.

 

Without the visuals, one could easily complain about a number like 'Framed' extended to a ten-minute running time, during much of which the band does not even play anything; in between, Alex is busy changing clothes (onstage), tearing through paper prison walls (I presume), stuffing a pair of freshly-licked stockings in his mouth (at least, that's what he does in most of the preser­ved filmed versions), and running through the entire emotional palette while trying to convince the audience of his innocence, asking if they believe him in between each phrase. It isn't particu­larly deep, of course, but it's great old-timey entertainment, and it has no way of being well trans­lated onto a picture-deprived recording.

 

On the good side, the band did deliver great overdriven music on stage; 'Vambo', in particular, shines during its extended instrumental break where Zal is given ample time to demonstrate his impressive chops (and no drum solo!), and the other songs are, expectedly, "dirtier" and more ag­gressive in their delivery than the better polished studio versions. By way of track listing, we're usually expecting some small surprise on every deserving live album; here, said surprise consists of Tom Jones' 'Delilah', which was actually a regular presence at the band's mid-Seventies show but somehow never made it onto a studio album. It's one of their best stabs at deconstruction, perfectly capturing the catchy melody of the original but, at the same time, wildly mocking its inescapable schmaltz (the very idea of Alex Harvey giving a Tom Jones impersonation is enough to tear the canopy off the altar).

 

Since this is, after all, a great band at their live peak, I cannot help but put my thumbs up in to­tal approval; but the track listing isn't entirely satisfactory (choosing 'Tomahawk Kid' over 'Midnight Moses' was simply wrong), and if someone somewhere out there, for once in someone's life, de­cided to do good, Live would have been re-packaged with a thoroughly expanded track list, and with an added bonus DVD containing whatever can be salvaged from the band's thin archival collection of live footage. Such a release would have been absolutely priceless, and recommen­dable above even the best SAHB studio records. Until then, we can't get no satisfaction.

 

THE PENTHOUSE TAPES (1975)

 

1) I Wanna Have You Back; 2) Jungle Jenny; 3) Runaway; 4) Love Story; 5) School's Out; 6) Goodnight Irene; 7) Say You're Mine (Every Cowboy Song); 8) Gamblin' Bar Room Blues; 9) Crazy Horses; 10) Cheek To Cheek.

 

Usually, the decision to record an all-covers album serves as a sharp separation marker between the artist's "classic years" and the "creative slump" — The Band and Todd Rundgren immediate­ly come to mind. This is not a God-enforced rule: David Bowie, for instance, somehow managed to form an exception to it. But the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, unfortunately, did not.

 

This is a strange collection: beginning with two original — and not half-bad — numbers, but then dedicating most of the rest of its space to Harvey's "deconstructions", which are, to put it mildly, hit-and-miss. It's almost as if they'd started recording a proper album, but then ran out of ideas midway through studio time and decided to fool around instead. Tomorrow Belongs To Me may have been avaricious in respect to catchy melodies, but it still bubbled with creativity; Penthouse Tapes is the band arrogantly coasting, and they're loving it.

 

The selection is very, very Harveyesque: today, post-modernist freaks have arguably tried out every combination and concoction that is mathematically possible, but in 1976, only on an Alex Harvey record — not even on a Frank Zappa one — could you discover Del Shannon shaking hands with Jethro Tull, Irving Berlin ride in tandem with Alice Cooper, and Leadbelly and Jimmy Rogers sharing the apartment with the Osmonds. The very idea to put prog, glam, and pre-war blues together was so novel it could sell the album on its own. Today, though, it's dated in the nasty sense of the word: it doesn't really matter how outlandish your idea is unless you have the chops, brains, and guts to get it to work properly.

 

And out of all these numbers, nothing manages to captivate me with one exception: 'Gamblin' Barroom Blues'. I don't even know why. But I'm guessing that Alex sensed some sort of special common bond between himself and Rogers — both had a penchant for giving themselves up to bouts of drunken loneliness, and despite all of Harvey's trademark wildness, nowhere ever in his live show does he come across as more believable than when he morphs into this miserable, piti­ful little guy. The swagger of 'School's Out' goes nowhere — it is impossible for him to surpass the dark fires of Alice — but the retro-sadness of 'Gamblin' Barroom Blues' hits hard, much har­der, at least, than all of his stiff pre-war blues workouts on The Blues.

 

As for the originals, 'I Wanna Have You Back' is competent barroom rock in the 'Gang Bang' vein, and 'Jungle Jenny' is a Tarzan tale that does get to be both hilarious and insinuating ('Jungle Jenny can't get any'). There's also, I believe, some sort of cowboy original midway through the record, but I probably forgot about it for a reason. So, a couple good ones, but not enough to pre­vent me from thumbs down-ing the album, as I absolutely fail to see the point of these covers, and I deeply resent the idea of Harvey dragging the band down to the level of his pre-Sensational days. Zal Cleminson does not deserve to be wasted that way.

 

SAHB STORIES (1976)

 

1) Dance To Your Daddy; 2) Amos Moses; 3) Jungle Rubout; 4) Sirocco; 5) Boston Tea Party; 6) Sultan's Choice; 7) $25 For A Massage; 8) Dogs Of War.

 

Recovering from the temporary bout of "all-coveritis", Harvey, Cleminson and Co. go back to relying upon their own forces, as they deliver yet another serving of the usual stylistic melange. SAHB Stories is not one of their most acclaimed albums (even though, surprisingly enough, it brought them their highest bit of commercial success with the single release of 'Boston Tea Par­ty') — it came out at a time when the Harvey formula was quickly becoming obsolete, and 'punk' values were replacing 'glam' at an alarming rate. But, ripped out of its historical context, it can proudly measure up to any other solid SAHB album of the decade.

 

It is dark, though. As you look back on the band's career, you can definitely see the early comic overtones gradually recede and give way to a much bleaker vision of the world. At some point, you no longer have any lightweight vaudeville, and even basic headbanging rock'n'roll is begin­ning to be presented with a strong touch of bitter lemon. Looking at the lyrics to some of these songs, it's relatively easy to crack the usual smile, but the music, per se, is not smile-inducing at all. 'Dance To Your Daddy', for instance, would seem like a title destined to accompany some cute pop-rock ditty, but why, then, is its main riff so reminiscent of Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song', and what do all the aethereal bursts of synth soloing and angel choirs have to do with it?

 

Indeed, most of the time the band is bent on one of two things: churning out grim, unfriendly riffage ('Amos Moses'; the unbearably catchy 'Sultan's Choice') or engaging in ominous, unsett­ling atmospherics (the never-ending, but somewhat hypnotic 'Sirocco'). Every once in a while they venture out into funky territory ('Jungle Rub Out' and especially '$25 For A Massage', also reminiscent of Zeppelin, but this time of their funk explorations on Physical Graffiti), yet im­pression-wise, these numbers do not stray too far from the overall darkness. Even 'Boston Tea Party' itself, no matter how much it seduces us with its superficially friendly singalong chorus of 'Are you going, are you going to the Boston Tea Party?' — the one whose superficial friendliness sold it so well to British audiences in 1976 — recalls the whole story of American independence in a bitter vein, and that chorus is oddly unengaging: it transfers neither joy nor sorrow, getting stuck in your head for a reason that is impossible to understand.

 

It may be so that the band was simply caught in a state of confusion and tiredness, and Harvey was already suffering from his spine problems. It may have been a conscious decision to 'morose up' their act. The bottomline is that the album is a downer, from the initial deception of 'Dance To Your Daddy' and right down to the openly sadistic, murderous conclusion of 'Dogs Of War', one of the most hateful tracks ever recorded by the band (and something tells me they really meant it). But downers can be masterpieces, and far be it from me to accuse these songs of slackness or to­tal 'genericness'; most are fabulous creations, with the utmost care paid to the smallest details — things like 'Sirocco' may be fairly simple in their basic execution, but what matters is the impres­sionistic sonic landscape painted by all sorts of unpredictable brushstrokes from the band's array of gui­tars and keyboards. (It doesn't exactly give out an impression of a real sirocco — rather a pre-feeling of one — but it hardly matters).

 

Since it is also quite consistent — not one track that feels completely out of place — the brain and heart department concur in their thumbs up, although it is still unclear which of the two is more instrumental in this decision. The heart rather goes after the basic charms of 'Sultan's Choice' (top-notch riff + catchy chorus + on-the-edge lyrics that could be about sex slave trade = first rate gut level pleasure), but the brain is most impressed with the likes of 'Dogs Of War', so we'll just leave them at that and move along.

 

ROCK DRILL (1977)

 

1) Rock Drill; 2) The Dolphins; 3) Rock'n'Roll; 4) King Kong; 5) Booids; 6) Who Murdered Sex; 7) Nightmare City; 8) Water Beastie; 9) Mrs. Blackhouse.

 

After SAHB Stories, Harvey and the Sensational Band temporarily parted ways, for reasons which are not easy to understand in retrospect. All I know is that Harvey needed some time off to tend to his ailing backbone, and he also engaged on a typically Harvey-style weird project: a spoken word album about the Loch Ness monster (!). In his absence, the remaining four recorded and re­leased a record of their own, suitably titled Fourplay, which bombed commercially and got lam­basted critically. I have not heard it; given Cleminson's presence on it, it may not have been all that bad. But apparently the split made everybody feel uncomfortable, and, in a year's time, Harvey and the boys were back together — although with one irreplaceable loss already: key­boar­dist Hugh McKenna, replaced by a weaker choice in Tommy Eyre (previously known as the guy who played the organ on Joe Cocker's 'With A Little Help From My Friends').

 

Still, none of them seemed happy. Harvey was still ailing (and also depressed about the recent death of his brother). The music scene was changing, making their sounds and styles less and less "relevant" with each passing month. And Cleminson, perhaps, was also thinking about a change of scenery: right after this record, he accepted the proposal to join Nazareth as a second guitarist. Things looked pretty dark, and this is a dark record. The very title, Rock Drill, does not seem to strive to make the listener happy, and its cover — a grim suit of armor against a shadowy back­ground — is the most eerie and depressing sleeve the band ever put out. To say nothing of the first impression once the music actually starts playing — the growling synthesizer tones that wel­come you out of the depths of hell are a far cry from the generally light and cheery intros on most other SAHB albums.

 

Yet it is not a bad album. It is pretty bad if one approaches it expecting another typical slab of flashy SAHB cabaret, alternating crazy headbanging with good biting humor and just an occasio­nal streak of darkness to make things more serious. Rock Drill thrives on the darkness: it cranks up SAHB's progressive, complex side to the max, with the only light number, an innocent country rocker called 'Mrs. Blackhouse', thrown on at the end in a totally who-the-heck-cares manner. Hence, the possibility of disappointment — unjust. What kind of music would you be writing under the circumstances listed above, anyway?

 

It may be true that the results downplay Harvey's main strength: theatricality. For instance, 'The Dolphins' is a solid six-minute mini-epic, but it is the kind of material that we'd rather associate with the likes of Rush, or just about any other seriously-minded second- or third-generation prog rock outfit. Its lengthy romantic guitar solos and solemn piano riffs leave Alex with very little to do — he is simply belting out the lyrics, without at all "getting into character". Yet this lack of uniqueness should not discredit the music, which is quite evocative by itself.

 

Also, Harvey is much more prominently featured on the second side, where it is his presence, after all, that adds the proper bite to the faceless boogie of 'Who Murdered Sex?', the faceful punkish boogie of 'Nightmare City', and the album's generally acknowledged highlight — 'Water Beastie', probably a leftover from Harvey's solo album on Loch Ness, forever memorable upon first listen due to the unbeatable chorus: 'Look at the monster, look at the monster, look at the monster in distress'. If these numbers are generally less flashy and more "dim" than we'd like them to be, this does not mean that they will not, in time, be able to speak to you the same way some of Harvey's more immediately impressive material can. Come to think of it, 'Who Murdered Sex' and 'The Dolphins' are, in a way, more intellectually rewarding than 'Framed', even if the latter is so much more basic fun.

 

All of this means that Rock Drill is unquestionably a thumbs up for me, particularly for the brain department, although the heart sometimes gets a mighty adrenaline rush as well — especial­ly mid-way through 'Dolphins', when Cleminson's solo breaks through the grayness and mud and soars up to heaven in a last desperate swan song for the original band. No great shakes, the record, but a fittingly, instructively grim (and thought-provoking) terminus.

 

THE MAFIA STOLE MY GUITAR (1979)

 

1) Don's Delight; 2) Back In The Depot; 3) Wait For Me Mama; 4) The Mafia Stole My Guitar; 5) Shakin' All Over; 6) The Whalers (Thar She Blows); 7) Oh Spartacus!; 8) Just A Gigolo / I Ain't Got Nobody.

 

Harvey's first true solo album in seven years, despite being recorded with an entirely different band, picks up exactly where Rock Drill left us off: less humor and goofiness, more torment and introspection. Perhaps sensing that almost no distance was left to run, Alex continues to concen­trate on long, semi-confessional epics, somewhat poor on musical ideas but very rich on lyrics (which you can't make out anyway, since the older he got, the more prominently he retreated back to his Scottish accent).

 

And it's a success. Over the years spent with the SAHB, Harvey gradually completed his trans­formation from funny clown to sad clown, but where the funny clown was hilariously sarcastic, the sad clown now reaches serious depths that the first decade of Harvey's career never even hin­ted at. The Mafia Stole My Guitar is an honest, personal, and gradually more and more captiva­ting piece of work; I miss Cleminson sorely — and so, apparently, did Harvey himself, given that he even inserted an indirect grudge on the subject into the very title of the record — and new gui­tarist Matthew Cang, although competent, merely supplies the riffs without being the determining force in the band; but the fact of the matter is that this particular record can live and not die with­out Zal's presence, when something like The Joker Is Wild never could.

 

Of course, Harvey wouldn't be Harvey if the record were wiped clear of its wildcards: Louis Pri­ma's 'Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Nobody' sternly reminds the listener that lounge entertainment still is, and will always be, Harvey's musical cradle, and the over-arranged, wildly futuristic arrangement of 'Shakin' All Over' may be one of the weirdest tracks Alex ever cut — but also effective, since, now that I think of it, the song's chuggin' riffage as originally practiced by Johnny Kidd and then the Who, just begs for a little "sci-fi treatment".

 

But the bulk of the record is occupied by the epics I mentioned — six minutes for 'Back In The Depot', five for the title track, seven each for 'Wait For Me Mama' and 'The Whalers'. Written as relatively simple, slow-to-mid-tempo "singer-songwriter" style panoramas, occasionally changing keys ('Back In The Depot' picks up speed at the end, 'The Whalers' turns into an aggressive rocker midway through before calming down again), occasionally built on ferocious hard riffage (title track), I can still see how many people would find them boring; they display neither the manic energy of a Springsteen nor the cool chops of a classic era prog-rock band.

 

In fact, they all depend on whether one has succeeded in getting Harvey's quintessential charisma under one's skin or not. Assessing the lyrics might help; 'The Whalers', for instance, uses the whaling process as a barely concealed metaphor for the vanity of fame and success ('I'll throw the carcass on the boil, sell my soul for bloody oil'). But one doesn't even need much English, I guess, to get the impression that this is a level of rock theater dangerously bordering on real life depres­sion and disillusionment. Throughout, Harvey sings without a single trace of the recklessness and invigoration of old — it's all painful, so much so that in places, the singing almost dissolves into laryngeal gulps and growls. But it's all meaningful, and I'm willing to buy into it.

 

So it's essentially that kind of a record where the brain cannot help you all that much — the only serious "musical creativity" goes into 'Shakin' All Over', everything else has to do with self-pity and world weariness and poor health and Nazareth. But I do feel for the man, and I understand self-pity and world weariness and poor health and even Nazareth, and 'The Whalers' at least is beautiful in its ugliness, enough to shed a tear or two and to warrant a thumbs up, with the brain gallantly ceasing the right of final decision to the emotional reaction. This might just be the most proverbial­ly "sincere" album from Harvey, and by the age of 44, everyone has a right to record a proverbially sincere album and expect some love and respect for it.

 

THE SOLDIER ON THE WALL (1983)

 

1) Mitzi; 2) Billy Bolero; 3) Snowshoes Thompson; 4) Roman Wall Blues; 5) The Poet And I; 6) Nervous; 7) Carry The Water; 8) Flowers Mr. Florist; 9) The Poet And I (Reprise).

 

Perhaps by the time the early Eighties rolled along, Alex was bracing himself to regain his star­dom: with his new band, "The Electric Cowboys", he resumed touring and entered once more into the recording studio. With his tragic, untimely death on February 4, 1982, from a massive heart attack, all hopes were extinguished.

 

All we have left from this stage in his career is Soldier On The Wall, a posthumous release that puts together semi-finished (or so I hope) tracks from those last sessions and credits them to solo Alex Harvey. And, as is the usual situation with such cases, it is rendered more interesting by the shadow of death that looms, unforeseen, but threatening, over it — most of the songs, whether we want it or not, will tend to associate with the man's demise and acquire an extra mystical aura from the depths of our own subconscious. Which, although gruesome, is still a good thing, be­cause otherwise Soldier On The Wall does not look much like a record that could have restored Harvey's stardom, much less add something truly important to his overall legacy.

 

In general terms of meaning and atmosphere, it's the same old Alex: a little clownish, a little sad, a little pompous, a little introspective. In terms of arrange­ment, it suffers from an acute case of synthesizer-itis: the ugly Eighties' keyboard sound is all over the record, and the yucky blobs of electronic poison that announce the album opener, 'Mitzi', backed by equally yucky electronic drums, spoil most of the song's pleasures. Zal! Where are you, Zal? 'Billy's Bolero' is an interes­ting attempt at combining martial rhythmics with country-western, but, again, its being domina­ted by that half-dead sound immediately dates it, in the bad sense of the word.

 

The keyboards temporarily leave the stage on a couple of real obscure covers — Buddy Ebsen and Tennessee Ernie Ford's 'Snowshoe Thompson', a cheerful folkie rave about California's most famous mailman ('mush man mush man mush man go!'), and 'The Poet And I', an instrumental composition by Frank Mills to which Harvey added his own lyrics, a mish-mash of folk imagery loosely based on the works of Robert Burns. Thus do Native America and Old Scotland shake hands over the album's A- and B-side, and the rowdy craziness of the former greatly comple­ments the bagpipe stateliness of the latter (which almost manages to ascend the same height as 'Anthem' one decade prior to it).

 

Some decently rocking tunes on the second side manage, in addition to these two highlights, to save the album from a complete disaster, but overall, its musical hide leaves a lot to be desired. It's so very sad, for instance, that Harvey never left behind a SAHB version of 'Roman Wall Blues' — a tense, personal, more-than-anti-war song that he first recorded in 1969, with a limp, boring band, and then waited until 1982 to re-record, when its impact was so much subdued by lifeless electronica. Sad, because even through the cheap sci-fi murk of these keyboards it is still possible to hear Alex Harvey the likeable loner, too smart for his own good. But a thumbs down all the same — this is simply not a kind of record to which one will turn frequently as long as all the SAHB catalog is at one's reach.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE AT THE BBC (1972-1977/2009)

CD I: 1) Midnight Moses; 2) St. Anthony; 3) Framed; 4) There's No Lights On The Christmas Tree, Mother; 5) Hole In Her Stocking; 6) Dance To The Music; 7) The Faith Healer; 8) Midnight Moses; 9) Gang Bang; 10) The Last Of The Teenage Idols; 11) Giddy Up A Ding Dong; CD II: 1) Next; 2) The Faith Healer; 3) Give My Compliments To The Chef; 4) Delilah; 5) Boston Tea Party; 6) Pick It Up And Kick It; 7) Smouldering.

Many, if not all, of these tracks had surfaced earlier on various smaller releases, but in 2009, fi­nally, someone did the job right and gathered everything that could be salvaged from SAHB's radio appearances in one place. The result is, of course, patchy, but just about everything apart from the last two tracks seriously rules.

 

The first disc contains full recordings of SAHB's two radio concerts from 1972 and 1973, respec­tively, with only one track ('Midnight Moses') duplicated — since the first show was promoting Framed and the second was promoting Next, what you get is a selection of highlights from both albums. I would not say they are necessarily better than the studio counterparts; since all the songs are still fresh, they mostly tend to stick to reproducing the originals ('Framed', for instance, does not yet get the extended audience participation workout), except Harvey is a little more loose and Zal is a little more ass-kicking, just what you'd expect from a live performance.

 

The only surprise in the tracklisting is a cover of Sly & The Family Stone's 'Dance To The Music', and it is understandable the band would soon drop it from the setlist: well-rehearsed and well-mea­­ning, but a bunch of mock-rocking Glasgow dudes doing one of the Sixties' most classic funk numbers, head-and-tails-oriented on Sly's "family style", can hardly be expected to work all that well (there is some ferocious bass work, though). My advice is to stick to Harvey originals.

 

The second disc traces the band's evolution through several other worthy recreations of their hits onstage (taken from the Old Grey Whistle Test and Top Of The Pops, no less), where the defini­tive highlight is Harvey's possessed rendition of 'Next' (it has also survived on video, and works much better in that form), although the other four tunes are at most one notch below. Unfortuna­tely, the album peters out quite badly, allocating unnecessary space for two performances of the SAHB without Harvey (recorded during Alex's leave of absence in between SAHB Stories and Rock Drill), with 'Smouldering', in particular, sounding like very, very bad Foreigner. But I sup­pose they had to use some of that material to fill out empty space (Disc 2 is pretty short as it is, compared to disc 1).

 

Regardless, this is a sure-fire thumbs up, even if it does support my thesis that "radio concerts" are not a very faithful representation of any band's live sound — most probably, recording "live in the studio" still triggers that part of the players' brain which is responsible for "studio" (clean, polished sound) rather than "live" (give 'em the show of their life), and it conveys the hypnotizing power of SAHB much less effectively than the Live album, or other archive releases that let you hear full shows from actual tours. But the pleasure is undeniable.

 

HOT CITY (1974/2009)

1) Vambo; 2) Man In The Jar; 3) Hey You; 4) Long Haired Music; 5) Sergeant Fury; 6) Tomahawk Kid; 7) Ace In The Hole; 8) Weights Made Of Lead; 9) Last Train.

The latest Harvey-related release "from the vaults" is only recommendable to serious fans with solid Scottish heritage. Hot City is the title of a shelved album that SAHB attempted to record in early 1974 — however, disappointed with the results, they abandoned the sessions and came back later in the year to re-record most of the tracks as The Impossible Dream. So, essentially, what you get is just an earlier version of that record, minus 'River Of Love' and 'The Impossible Dre­am' itself, plus just one previously unknown track — the vaudeville number 'Ace In The Hole'.

 

It is all quite perfectly listenable and enjoyable: these are not demo tapes, but full-fledged, expert­ly produced recordings (on part of the sessions, they worked with veteran Kinks and Who produ­cer Shel Talmy). Whether, however, they are better in any way than The Impossible Dream is debatable: obviously, Harvey did not think so, and me, I am somewhat reluctant to waste time over any sort of detailed comparison. Based on a few rag-taggy observations (for instance, the relative shortness of 'Man In The Jar'), I'd say Hot City is somewhat less theatrical than what it eventually became (this might have been the ultimate reason for Harvey not getting along with straightforward rock'n'roller Talmy). But that's really rag-taggy.

 

Also, 'Anthem' (here still bearing the original title 'Last Train') is much longer here, with the 'an­themic' part of it fully played twice, first as an intro and then as an outro. I agree with the band that it does not work; the "preview" of the majestic Scottish melody in the beginning sort of acts like a silly spoiler, and they were wise to remove it in the final version.

 

Bottomline: if The Impossible Dream figures on your list of 100 Greatest Albums Of All Time, Hot City is a must. At best, you will have the opportunity to enjoy your favourite record the way it has never been heard before, and at worst, you'll get some useful insights into its origins. But something tells me I am not addressing a heck of a lot of people in this paragraph.

 

THE ANIMALS

THE ANIMALS (1964)

 

1) The House Of The Rising Sun; 2) The Girl Can't Help It; 3) Blue Feeling; 4) Baby Let Me Take You Home; 5) The Right Time; 6) Talkin' 'Bout You; 7) Around And Around; 8) I'm In Love Again; 9) Gonna Send You Back To Walker; 10) Memphis Tennessee; 11) I'm Mad Again; 12) I've Been Around.

 

This and the following two albums are most easily acquired today on the 2-CD set entitled The Complete Animals — but "complete" only as far as their 1964-1965 Columbia recordings go, i. e. representing the "Alan Price" era in which the band had not yet turned into the custom-made vehicle for propagating Eric Burdon's limitless ego, but, rather, was simply one of the tightest, strak-raving-maddest British R'n'B combos that ever came out of Newcastle-on-Tyme. (Now that is a statement that'll be pretty hard to beat).

 

Eric Burdon, at this point, is merely the vocalist: an essential part of the band, the rough, rowdy, ballsy exterior, its bullroarer communicator. Alan Price is the organist, creating grim, moody at­mospheres derivative of Ray Charles but in a class of their own. Hilton Valentine is the guitar player — nothing particularly special but it was he who first put on record the arpeggios of 'Hou­se Of The Rising Sun', and that alone should suffice. And the rhythm section is... decent.

 

As with most British bands of the period, it is of no principal importance whether the reviews cen­ter around their US or UK discographies — none of the albums were intended as 'concept' pieces, and, in the case of the Animals, producer Mickie Most could care less about proper track sequencing regardless of the side of the Atlantic ocean that sequencing was delivered to. US dis­cographies are cozier in that respect, since the albums tend to be more numerous at the expense of including material that, in the UK, was only issued on 45s, but it really makes no difference.

 

Anyway, The Animals — the American version, which, for some reason, happened to come out about a month earlier than the UK counterpart — does faithfully include the band's two first sin­gles, plus seven LP tracks that would also be on the UK album and 'Blue Feeling', which would later be used as the B-side to 'Boom Boom'. The sequencing is a mess indeed, but, more impor­tantly, there is not a single Animals original: all of the tunes are blues / R'n'B / rockabilly covers, with 'House Of The Rising Sun' thrown in for good measure. So, how does it measure up today?

 

Still great. At the intersection of Burdon's vocals and Price's organ playing, the Animals had de­veloped a unique sound that made these songs their own and make even such universal chestnuts as Chuck Berry's 'Around And Around' or Ray Charles' 'The Right Time' well worth hearing in these versions. Price, in particular, almost singlehandedly turns the electric organ into a rock weapon as powerful as the electric guitar; his playing may be simpler and more "rootsy" and traditional than that of his main concurrent on the instrument — Rod Argent of the Zombies — but, before his successful quest of conquering the organ, no one had ever explored its potential so thoroughly. On the fast numbers, Price-led instrumental passages create an atmosphere of proto-psychedelia that must have driven rock'n'roll dancers punch-drunk in 1964 ('Talkin' 'Bout You'); and the slow ones, through his subtle uses of various effects and volume levels, are transformed from generic blues into artsy explorations of human emotion ('I'm Mad Again').

 

As for Eric, it is tremendously hard to understand and describe the secret of his singing. He ne­ver had much range, and his "powerhouse" delivery, shocking and stunning in 1964, has long since been beaten by far throatier powerhouse vocalists like Noddy Holder of Slade. But perhaps it is exactly the combination of the powerhouse approach with a certain amount of refined finesse and intelligence — something Noddy could never have been suspected of — that does the trick. Bur­don knows how to play with his voice and intrigue the listener with this play; he knows the value of silence and quiet just as he knows the value of all-out screaming, and he, perhaps best of all the early British R'n'B-ers, had mastered the voodoo art of classic bluesmen and R'n'B-ers who could easily lure the audience into a trance through simple repetition of the simplest phrases. You will know what I mean if, just like me, you will not feel that 'Talkin' 'Bout You' has lasted all of seven minutes, a record-breaker in 1964.

 

In between these two masters of the trade, even thoroughly lightweight tracks like 'Baby Let Me Take You Home' (copped by the band from Dylan's earlier 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down') are delightful, although I personally lean towards the darker stuff, like 'I'm Mad Again', arguably the most believable impersonation of a nervous breakdown in British pop music up to that time. The only catch is that the darker stuff is in the minority here — in their earliest days, the band liked to rave and rock their audience more than it liked to hypnotize it. But can we blame them?

 

Then again, of course, few things could be darker than 'The House Of The Rising Sun', which has not lost one ounce of its terrifying power ever since. Its historical influence can hardly be over­rated — it may not have singlehandedly invented 'folk-rock', but it certainly was one of the earli­est indications that pop music made by young rebellious people could have brains and soul in ad­dition to brawn and lust. It also served as an important watermark in the evolution of rock lyrics: apparently, Burdon did not feel as comfortable as Dylan about singing 'it's been the ruin of many a poor girl, and me, o God, I'm one', and changed 'girl' to 'boy' — immediately and, probably, un­intentionally, transforming it from a tragic, but generic, folk lament of a brothel-locked girl with family troubles into an equally tragic, but far more mysterious — mystical, in fact — plight of The Disspirited Young Man, with no common idea whatsoever of what "The House Of The Ri­sing Sun" really is or should represent.

 

The historical side should then be reinforced by mentioning the record-breaking length of 4:29 for a single release (kudos to Mickie Most for greenlighting the idea), and the emotional side — by mentioning the fantastic crescendo, as the song slowly and steadily gains in volume, beginning with little other than Valentine's arpeggios and then gradually becoming a bloody battlefield be­tween Burdon's epic vocal stand and Price's keyboard-generated tempest. For all its purposes, for all its simplicity, it is most certainly "art rock" at its earliest and freshest, and that organ solo should be canonized; is there anything like an "organ solo Hall of Fame"?

 

So the album should be getting a thumbs up even if it had nothing but 'House' on it — in terms of historical importance, that's probably just the way it goes — but its overall sound is such a de­light that I am even happy about relistening to the band being proverbially mega-repetitive and ultra-monotonous on 'Memphis Tennessee'. Classic.

 

THE ANIMALS ON TOUR (1965)

 

1) Boom Boom; 2) How You've Changed; 3) Mess Around; 4) Bright Lights Big City; 5) I Believe To My Soul; 6) Worried Life Blues; 7) Let The Good Times Roll; 8) I Ain't Got You; 9) Hallelujah I Love Her So; 10) I'm Crying; 11) Dimples; 12) She Said Yeah.

 

This is not a live album (for some reason, American companies had a predilection for slapping the On Tour moniker onto British band releases — the Who had a similar trick played on them — as if these words might have had some magical influences on record buyers), but rather a mishmash of studio tracks partially carried over from the British LP Animals and partially previewing the Bri­tish LP Animal Tracks, not to be confused with the later American LP Animal Tracks (yes, the two sides of the Atlantic are different worlds and people on one side do not have to know any­thing about the other. And if they want to know, they have to do serious research on it).

 

There is no single classic track on here that could hold up to the grandeur of 'House Of The Ri­sing Sun' — few songs could — but, overall, it is a definite stylistic improvement over the debut. We can still hear ferocious rock'n'roll — Ray Charles' 'Mess Around' and Larry Williams' 'She Said Yeah' are perfect for the rave crowd, as is the band's first post-'House' single, the Burdon / Price-penned 'I'm Crying' — but it is also much heavier on slow, moody blues and soul numbers, which the band shapes more and more in its own image.

 

John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, in particular, are unrecognizable. When Hooker recor­ded 'Boom Boom' and 'Dimples' in the early Sixties, they were quiet, grim, gloomy, scary tracks: one could just see the hellbound old Negro sitting on the street, creeping out little girls by mumb­ling 'I like the way you walk, I like the way you talk' under his breath. Under Burdon's heavy hand, both become loud, brawny, and quite unsubtle expressions of drunken lust — there are no nuan­ces or suggestions, it's all hanging out in the open, but there is a place for that, too, especially when he unfurls the battle cry of 'Come on, let's shake it!' and the rest of the band start imperso­nating a gang of hoodlums sweeping through town.

 

Jimmy Reed's 'Bright Lights, Big City', on the other hand, which used to be just another one of an innumerable series of totally sound-alike Jimmy Reed songs, is transformed from something plain and unsubtle into a little symphony, with a new quiet mid-section and ad-libbed lyrics in which Eric names all the city perils that conspire to turn his girl loose — 'long Cadillacs... Rolls Royce... men with money... cigarettes... flamenco... scotch... bourbon...'; an exciting rearrange­ment that further confirms my suspicions about Jimmy Reed as mostly a "songwriting vehicle" for other people to expand on his ideas (or, rather, idea, I'm not sure Jimmy ever had more than one) and build flowery gardens on top of them.

 

The slower numbers — blues and soul things like 'How You've Changed', 'I Believe To My Soul', and 'Worried Life Blues' — take more time to sink in (and also require inborn tolerance for the 12-bar form), but the Price vs. Burdon contests that are at the center of each are well worth the price of admission. Eric always lets his brawn do most of the talking, but there is always a bit of soul behind it, and his sense of theatricality, as he unfurls the broken-hearted drama before the li­stener, is unparalleled for 1965, whereas Price is Price, showing himself completely worthy of imitating and expanding on Ray Charles' piano style.

 

So, while this is not a "true" album in any way, its consistency level is higher than on any other collection of the band's early output. Nevertheless, a thumbs up judgement applied to it individu­ally will be of little practical use, since today it is only available as a scattered sub-set on The Complete Animals; and it does not even have a proper chronological sense, since, in terms of dates of recording, On Tour is all over the place.

 

ANIMAL TRACKS (1965)

 

1) We've Gotta Get Out Of This Place; 2) Take It Easy; 3) Bring It On Home To Me; 4) The Story Of Bo Diddley; 5) Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood; 6) I Can't Believe It; 7) Club-A-Gogo; 8) Roberta; 9) Bury My Body; 10) For Miss Caulker.

 

Again, this American release, this time following the same-titled UK album after a four month de­lay, has virtually nothing to do with it — only two tracks intersect ('Roberta' and 'For Miss Cau­lker'), whereas most of the other numbers on the British Tracks are really the same as the ones on the American Tour. On the other hand, the title when applied to the American record ac­tually makes more sense: these are indeed 'tracks', a.k.a. 'leftovers' — an even more than usually discoherent mess of tracks, some cut as early as 1964, some as late as summer 1965, by which time Price had already left the band, replaced by Dave Rowberry. (Rowberry is a fine organist in his own right, but prefers to stay in the shadows — listen to how subtly hidden he keeps himself in the mix on 'We've Gotta Get Out Of This Place', for the most part — so this means trans­forming the band into a guitar-driven powerhorse, under Eric's undisputed rule.)

 

The result is weird. It would be an exaggeration to say that, over two years, the Animals' sound had covered a distance of any number of light years, but, let's face it, songs like the straight up raver 'Club-A-Gogo' are very different from songs like 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' — imagine a record that is half Please Please Me and half Help! and you'll know what I mean. This is not to say that any of the songs are bad; on the contrary, Animal Tracks is as consistent in pure quality as its predeces­sors and maybe more. But it's a decidedly odd mix.

 

Its two superheroes bookmark Side A: 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood', Price and Burdon's last triumph together as they borrow a tune from Nina Simone and show no intention of giving it back, and 'We've Gotta Get Out Of This Place', the classic Mann-Weill escapist anthem that showed the world the Animals could hold their ground even without Price — for a little while, at least. It is Bur­don who leads the band on both numbers, showing that his gruff wildman persona can be sha­ped into a painful, personal, sensitive mold just as easily as it can be employed for the needs of acute social statements. His 'I'm just a soul whose intentions are good... oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood' and 'we gotta get out of this place, girl, there's a better life for me and you' are delivered almost in the same tone — and yet they mean two entirely different things.

 

He also gives a decent, if very unfaithful, Sam Cooke impression ('Bring It On Home'), shows himself capable of handling old folk blues ('Bury My Body', which these jokers manage to turn into a sweaty R'n'B workout at the end anyway), and jokes at his own ineptitude in impersonating Bo Diddley ('The Story Of Bo Diddley'). The latter, by the way, although it is chronologically one of the earliest recordings here, already presages Burdon's future overstated love for pompous verbosity and 'propheteering' as he extends 'The Story' way beyond Bo Diddley and turns it into a lengthy narrative of rock'n'roll history up to the present day. Later experiments in this style would for the most part be awful, but this particular bit of narration — no doubt, due to its extremely tongue-in-cheek character — is still a laugh riot, especially when Eric starts imitating Bobby Vee ('take good care of my baby...').

 

The review would be incomplete if I did not mention the band's last single for Columbia, which does not form part of this LP but rightfully concludes the 2-CD package of The Complete Ani­mals. Roger Atkins' 'It's My Life' follows the winning formula of 'We've Gotta Get Out...' — same cool, swaggery melody, same bravado in the singing, same self-assertive atmosphere, plus a great, epoch-defining guitar riff to go along with it, making it perhaps the quintessential Animals song (no Price, though).

 

For some reason, I have always admired its B-side, a Burdon "original" called 'I'm Going To Change The World', even more, despite the obvious fact that Eric simply re­cycles the exact same riff and comes up with just one melodic part instead of three different ones — but what a part! As if in honest compensation, he winds his mechanisms up to the limit and over the limit, on the verge of pushing his larynx all the way down his trachea, even if that's what it takes him to change the world. If 'It's My Life' is, after all, a proper pop culture creation, then 'I'm Going To Change The World', stripping it of all embellishments, is the punkiest statement from these guys, right up there in terms of sheer power with 'My Generation' from the same year.

 

But, of course, as an album Animal Tracks has no significance whatsoever, and the predictable thumbs up only refer to the songs, not the meaningless non-principle of their collocation. It does give you all the odds and ends on one plate, though, and this is, in a way, convenient. And if, like me, you also hold the opinion that there was no finer moment for the Animals than the ever-so-brief 1964-65 period, well, there is really no sense in bickering as long as you have all that first rate material to consume.

 

ANIMALISMS (1966)

 

1) One Monkey Don't Stop No Show; 2) Maudie; 3) Outcast; 4) Sweet Little Sixteen; 5) You're On My Mind; 6) Clapping; 7) Gin House Blues; 8) Squeeze Her Tease Her; 9) What Am I Living For; 10) I Put A Spell On You; 11) That's All I Am To You; 12) She'll Return It; 13*) Inside Looking Out; 14*) Don't Bring Me Down; 15*) Cheating; 16*) Help Me Girl; 17*) See See Rider; 18*) I Just Wanna Make Love To You; 19*) Boom Boom; 20*) Big Boss Man; 21*) Pretty Thing; 22*) Don't Bring Me Down (stereo); 23*) See See Rider (stereo); 24*) Help Me Girl (stereo); 25*) Cheating (stereo).

 

The original Animals' last album is conveniently available today as a monumentally expanded col­lection, twice the size of the original, also including all of their 45s from around 1966, out­takes, stereo mixes, and even, as a very special bonus, the band's earliest EP from way back in 1963, so that the commonest layman may easily assess the length of the road traveled.

 

Animalisms is, in fact, a transitional record. After 'It's My Life', boosted by commercial success but also fed up with the dependency on producer Mickie Most's material, the Animals — by now, entirely in Burdon's hands — switched from EMI to Decca in an attempt to toughen and roughen up their original sound, on the verge of leaking and collapsing under commercial pressures (or so they thought; back in 1966, everything was so mixed up that «commercial» and «artsy» pressures were frequently impossible to separate from one another).

 

They still have not learned to write original material, though, and, for the most part, still exploit the same old vaults of blues, R'n'B, and rockabilly. Without Price, and in light of the changing times, they sound different: louder, brawnier, darker even than before: Chas Chandler's bass rises high up in the mix, as is evident already on the opening seconds of 'One Monkey Don't Stop No Show', and Valentine's guitar says goodbye to the shrill squeaking of yesterday and fully embra­ces garage noise as its ideal (although he still goes light on the feedback). Yet it cannot really be said that all of this manages to improve on the previous two years.

 

The album's two greatest numbers are, in fact, not on the album — they are the hit singles 'Don't Bring Me Down' (a Goffin-King original, and nothing whatsoever to do with the ELO disco hit) and 'Inside Looking Out' (in a rare glimpse of happiness, credited to the band members themsel­ves, although most people probably know it through the Grand Funk version). These rank high up there with the very best. Eric is on fire, the boys supply him with cool guitar and organ riffs, and an A+ in the tension-building department is guaranteed for both. 'Inside Looking Out', in particu­lar, is one of those simple, but unforgettable hard rock classics that serve as the perfect illustra­tion to the 'Spirit Of '66'. The Yardbirds have some of those, too.

 

Sometimes you can't help but wonder — what was it, exactly, that prevented the original lineup from simply sitting down and writing a bunch more of these numbers to put up on the next LP, instead of filling it to the brim with cover material of such widely ranging quality? Was it mode­sty, or even self-humiliation? Wild, unbridled love for trans-Atlantic music dictating their hand in the studio? Elementary laziness? Or real true inability? The latter choice is the most dubious: lack of talent has never prevented «The Artist» to clog the world with his refuse. I go for a combina­tion of the other three.

 

That said, 'Maudie' is a great dirty piece of talking blues arranged as proto-punk rock (the band never fails with John Lee Hooker — he's like their closet songwriter!); Bessie Smith's 'Gin House Blues' is a little too overtly theat­rical, but Eric's sincerity is not to be doubted; and Chuck Willis' 'What Am I Living For?' is given a lush, deep arrangement that makes the ori­ginal sound like a hastily pre-recorded demo. On the other hand, tunes they should not have touched include Screamin' Jay Hawkins' 'I Put A Spell On You' — Burdon singing Hawkins? might just as well hunt elephant with a baseball bat — and 'Sweet Little Sixteen' (who the hell needs another cover of it, and in 1966 at that?).

 

The rest of the tracks can be further split down the same line, and in the end, Animalisms is a severe disappointment — a generally good record that only gives tiny hints at how excel­lent this band could have become with a bit more verve. At that moment, the world needed lots and lots of songs of the caliber of 'Inside Looking Out'. Instead, it got one more 'Sweet Little Sixteen' — and, worst of all, by the end of the year Burdon was so strung out that he'd simply confused his lazi­ness for writing good conventional songs with The Artist's disdain for writing good conventional songs. This led to near-catastrophic results, not the least of which was the dissolution of the origi­nal band; and we have, I guess, to be glad that they still left behind even such scraps as they did leave behind.

 

For these scraps, they still win — with much difficulty — a thumbs up from the department of the heart, but from a rational point of view, Eric Burdon should be strapped to a time machine, transferred back into 1966 and forced to remain there until coming out with a whole album of songs like 'Inside Looking Out'. Sweet, sweet punishment!

 

WINDS OF CHANGE (1967)

 

1) Winds Of Change; 2) Poem By The Sea; 3) Paint It Black; 4) The Black Plague; 5) Yes I Am Experienced; 6) San Franciscan Nights; 7) Man-Woman; 8) Hotel Hell; 9) Good Times; 10) Anything; 11) It's All Meat.

 

By the end of 1966, Burdon's ego got the best of him. Disbanding what remained of the original lineup, he assembled an entirely new team — people who only knew him as Eric The Great and would, therefore, kowtow before his will — and re-christened it «Eric Burdon & The Animals»: first part for honesty's sake, second part so that people would go on buying the records. People were not that easily duped: Winds Of Change only got as high as No. 42 on the Billboard, and each of the three following records only sank lower and lower.

 

No one is to blame but Eric. As the scene of pop music was exploding from the cumulative ta­lents, invading «high art» territory and splitting into dozens of distinct genres, all of this bliss went to his head — and caused irreversible reactions. Suddenly, Burdon began to think of himself as a prophet of the new movement, that one individual whose responsibility included not only summarizing the achievements of his contemporaries — in an artistic form, of course — but also creating an entirely new synthetic form of art itself, where the lines between music, poetry, thea­ter, and social philosophy would no longer exist. The idea took complete hold of him, and his new band of talented, but submissive musical companions (slaves?) was to help him realize it.

 

It is not to be denied that Eric Burdon, in 1967, before he became old and ugly and began to re-record 'The House Of The Rising Sun' for peanuts, was still young, fresh, powerful, and talented. But even so, there was hardly any other artist at the time, both in Britain and overseas, who would be less suited for this grandiose venture than the Animals frontman. Drastically inexperienced as a songwriter, not playing any actual instrument, his best talent was lending his voice to rearrangements of classic blues and R'n'B. Prophet? Guru? You must be joking.

 

Winds Of Change is — in my opinion, has always been — one of those proverbial records that give the late Sixties their bad name. We sometimes tend to forget that, for each true artistic break­through, there were ten silly, badly dated «experiments», and few have dated worse than Burdon's original declaration of creative freedom. Out of the record's 11 tracks, more than half are not «songs» at all, but Statements with a capital S-.

 

The title track States Change, recounting the his­tory of popular music for the past half century. 'Poem By The Sea' States Romance, presenting Burdon as the tormented loner. 'Paint It Black' States Stream-Of-Conscience, taking a compact pop number from the hands of the Rolling Stones and showing how much farther you can go with it (but why should you?). 'The Black Plague' States Serious Art — where would we be without a little medieval influence, to link The Now with The Then? 'Yes I Am Experienced' States Dialog — because if Jimi Hendrix asks 'Are You Experienced?', someone has to answer. Guess who that someone is. And so on.

 

Basically, the first side of the album is so explicitly weak that, for a long time, it was painting my overall impression of the whole thing — black, black, black. With minimalistic musical backing, it is a one man show all the way, and the show combines peak-level naïveness and idealism with unbridled pomp so clumsily and unattractively that it must take a very special mind to fall under its charm. Besides, it is pretty doggone hard to fall under the charm of 'Winds Of Change' when that wretched sitar and John Weider's violin keep blasting at your ears all at the same time.

 

The flipside, however, does have several traditionally-oriented songs, mostly rhythmic mid-tem­po ballads with pleasant arrangement touches (cute baroque guitar flourishes on 'San Francisco Nights', Morricone-style brass flashes on 'Hotel Hell', strings gushing on 'Anything', etc.), as well as one heavy rocker ('It's All Meat') that also preaches ('When Erkel Darbies walks, when Eric Clapton talks... it's all meat on the same bone!'), but, at least, does rock.

 

These songs, credited to the entire band — much to Burdon's honor, although that gives very little indication as to who was the driving force behind the melodies — are well-written and touching, much more so than all the impressionism and preachiness on the first side. (The worst bit, by the way, a long percussion-backed rambling, in a flash of brilliant provocativeness entitled 'Man — Woman', has surreptitiously made it onto Side Two, fucking things up even in this relatively safe haven). 'San Francisco Nights' and 'Good Times' have, over the years, held up so as to even be occasionally covered by other artists. Alas, back in sunny 1967 Burdon probably thought that it would be 'Poem By The Sea' and 'The Black Plague' that truly represented the spirit of the times.

 

Certainly, Winds Of Change is unique enough for its age, and, intellectually, it would be unjust not to notice that uniqueness. But it is poor, shrivelled uniqueness, like the swimming pool scene in The Graduate, one that withers and dies with time, and it would be equally unjust not to notice that. I once used to think that Winds Of Change was the worst thing ever to come out of the de­cade. Clearly, that was an exaggeration, triggered by the staggering discrepancy between the clas­sic material of the early Animals and this incomprehensible, unforgivable change. At least it is mildly interesting, and the ballads are fine. But my overall negative judgement — thumbs down, down, down! — stays the same.

 

THE TWAIN SHALL MEET (1968)

 

1) Monterey; 2) Just The Thought; 3) Closer To The Truth; 4) No Self Pity; 5) Orange And Red Beams; 6) Sky Pilot; 7) We Love You Lil; 8) All Is One.

 

No matter how dated or downright silly we may find Burdon's output from this period in general, the sheer amount of creative passion is astonishing: no less than three albums — one of them a double LP! — had been released by the band in 1968, which would, perhaps, be normal for the likes of Frank Zappa, but certainly not for the rowdy Brit who, only a couple years ago, had seri­ous problems about coming up with any kind of original material.

 

It would be highly irreverent to disrespect the enthusiasm, much less doubt its sincerity. And, beyond that, parts of The Twain Shall Meet work as fascinating period pieces, absolutely un­imaginable to­day. It is easy to smile at the ongoing naïveness such as seen in 'Monterey', Bur­don's fanboy report on The Festival where, once again, he succumbs to the historiographic temp­tations of listing all the greats ('The Grateful Dead blew everybody's mind... Jimi Hendrix, baby, believe me, set the world on fire...'). It may be hard for us today not to judge Monterey from the point of view of such pompous, but safe and cozy events like Woodstock '99 or Live 8, but back in 1968, standards were different.

 

Plus, from a different point of view, 'Monterey' is just a cool sitar-driven psychedelic rocker with an impassioned vocal performance — nothing wrong about that. Melody, drive, and real senti­ment, a definite improvement over 'Winds Of Change'. The other highlight for the ages is 'Sky Pilot', Burdon's anti-war anthem replete with blazing guitar solos and air battle overdubs and, more importantly, one of the catchiest choruses ever recorded: 'Sky pilot, sky pilot, how high can you fly? — you'll never, never, never reach the sky!' Most importantly, though, it gives us an ul­tra-­serious Eric in an «epic» mood, which we have not properly — that is, within the context of a real song rather than merely a musical sermon — experienced ever since the recor­ding of 'House Of The Rising Sun'. The effect, predictably, is magnificent.

 

The rest of the material is far more experimental, and, therefore, hit-and-miss. In the good news, there is not a lot of preaching, as the boys concentrate more on revolutionizing the world of music than on giving us a good metaphysical grounding for it; so, no unlistenable trash like 'Winds Of Change' or 'Man — Woman'. In the bad news, «revolutionizing» still, quite frequently, means «vandalizing». Side 2, after the opening punch of 'Sky Pilot', does not deserve more than one his­torical lis­ten, consisting of a lengthy, powerful, but extremely monotonous guitar freakout ('We Love You Lil') and a drunken psychedelic jam ('All Is One') where the idea is to cram as many different instruments as possible into the framework and make us believe that they are all one — nice try, but one need not go further than Gustav Mahler to find that out, and the Animals do not qualify as serious competition.

 

The first side is marred by a couple non-Burdon sung tunes ('Orange And Red Beams', in parti­cular, is a pretty weak Danny McCulloch original, and his voice is a very ugly counterpoint to Burdon's, sounding as if Eric, out of pure misery, brought in a weak old semi-demented relative to give him his last chance), as well as silly production ideas (as Mark Prindle best put it, "Why does half of 'Closer To The Truth' sound like it was recorded on an empty aluminum can jammed into a tape recorder, and the other half sound like a drunken guitarist wobbling back and forth across a room?"). Nevertheless, 'Closer To The Truth' does rock, and a couple other psychedelic tunes are real psychedelic tunes rather than sad psychedelic nonsense.

 

There definitely is progress here, and the new band is beginning to find solid middle ground be­tween unbridled experiment and conservatism; but whoever hates Winds Of Change will most li­kely not be bawled over by The Twain Shall Meet, either, if only because the twain shall meet, but, at this point, they have not met yet. Still, no record that has 'Sky Pilot' and 'Monterey' on it deserves anything less than a thumbs up, because the heart cannot be denied.

 

EVERY ONE OF US (1968)

 

1) White Houses; 2) Uppers And Downers; 3) Serenade To A Sweet Lady; 4) The Immigrant Lad; 5) Year Of The Guru; 6) St. James Infirmary; 7) New York 1963 - America 1968.

 

Like many other artists in 1968, Burdon must have also, at one point, sensed the uncomfortable feeling of having lost firm ground under his feet. Tangerine trees and marmalade skies are all right for a day, but dwell in their neighbourhood too long and you'll end up like Syd Barrett or Skip Spence. Even if you decide to move house, sometimes only a radical antidote will suffice — such as, for instance, a grim-faced, illusion-free, grit-filled record dealing with the fates of the working class. Such as Every One Of Us by Eric Burdon & The Animals.

 

Change is apparent from looking at the album cover — a black-and-white (no coloured rainbows!) photo of the band members, staring morosely into space while Eric, in a ragged overcoat and a worker's cap, is drilling you with subtle scorn, as if asking «What have YOU done to improve the conditions of the working man, you sad refuse of our oppressive society?» Thus, it is with an uneasy, troubled heart that we begin our listen, expecting the worst to come.

 

Surprisingly, this shift in direction has been helpful. The tone of the album is just as preachy as that of its two predecessors, but it would seem a bit strange to preach about such down-to-earth matters in the form of rambling sonic collages or mantras, so the band, this time quite firmly, re­treats back to the song format. And there are good songs — and most of them originals! Even the lengthy folksy drones, like 'The Immigrant Lad', or the first six minutes of 'New York 1963...', where Eric recounts his impressions of his first trans-Atlantic visit ('And when I got to 'Mer-r-r-r-ica, I say, it blew my mind!'), are touching, and the opener, 'White Houses', is one of the sweetest little shuffles to have ever come from the man.

 

At the core of the album, however, is a fully successful updating of the blazing hard sounds of yore. Eric had not given us fresh performances of traditional R'n'B since at least 1966, but here he returns with a vengeance to put his stamp on 'St. James' Infirmary', arranged as the musical equi­valent of a haunting movie thriller — starts out slow, deep, and dark, then gradually unfurls into a sonic nightmare. Eerie backing vocals, wailing guitar solos, Eric in the further stages of posses­sion, a little honesty plus a little theater goes a long, long way.

 

In terms of importance and unusualness, however, it is still trumped by Eric's original 'Year Of The Guru'. Not only is this the first — to the best of my knowledge — straightforward indictment of «professio­nal spiritual leadership» on a pop record ('Sexy Sadie' was not only more oblique, but also came out later in the year), it is also one of the first examples of «white rap» on such a record, and fairly well grounded, too, because there would be no better way to convey Burdon's anger than with such a rapid-fire delivery on the perils of guru-trusting. But not even the lyrics themselves are as hilarious and aggressive at the same time as the song's chaotic coda and Eric's demented cries of 'Gotta get a guru, gotta get a guru, a groovy groovy guru!' — a coda that sum­marizes the epoch's disillusionment in crash courses in spiritual enlightenment better than any lengthy treatise on the subject.

 

Alas, the flaws of Every One Of Us are just as obvious as its successes. If the staged conversa­tion between two silly cockneys on Side A and the black fighter pilot confession on Side B some­how fail to annoy you (they are not that long, after all), then the ten-minute 'I wanna be free — you can never be free!' jam that concludes 'New York 1963 — America 1968' most certainly will. Usually, such things happen when bands run out of things to say, but if this ten-minute raving was their thing to say, this is even worse. It is not psychedelia and it is not even «modern art», but it is more dull to listen to than the third LP of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, and that was pretty dull. Must have been dull even back in 1968; who the heck would want to take this for one's ideal of a «lengthy composition» when one could choose between 'Sister Ray' and 'In Held Twas In I' at the same time?

 

Still, chop off the last ten minutes and you still come out with about thirty-five of good music, which is at least longer than the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari, and that was an LP as well, and still continues to sell for a full price. Therefore, a definite thumbs up for the rest of it, coming mostly from the heart department — believe it or not, but that Burdon guy somehow manages to awaken the dormant working man in me. Roight, guvnah, off to the docks, 'en. See ye round.

 

LOVE IS (1968)

 

1) River Deep, Mountain High; 2) I'm An Animal; 3) I'm Dying, Or Am I; 4) Ring Of Fire; 5) Coloured Rain; 6) To Love Somebody; 7) As The Years Go Passing By; 8) Gemini; 9) Madman (Running Through The Fields).

 

The Animals' 1969 Christmas gift to their already well-loaded fans was this double LP — nine songs stretched to the breaking point and still hardly pushing over sixty minutes. With a little mo­dest trimming, the band might have easily fit everything on two sides of vinyl. But in 1968, dou­ble albums were coming in as the latest obligatory ingredient for the serious artist: if you lacked the capacity to splatter your Vision over four sides, you ran the risk of being deemed closed-min­ded. Big times required big statements, said the Beatles, and came out with The Beatles.

 

Eric Burdon, too, was already well used to big statements, and Love Is was one of his biggest. No original material here at all; instead, the band runs through a selection of covers whose only thing in common is that they have nothing, or almost nothing, in common. Having sung so many times about the diversification of popular music, Burdon now illustrates that diversification on himself. Beginning relatively straightforwardly with the R'n'B genre (Ike & Tina Turner's 'River Deep, Mountain High', Sly & The Family Stone's 'I'm An Animal', no doubt, selected because of the fit­ting title), he rips through country ('Ring Of Fire'), Brit-tinged roots-rock ('Coloured Rain'), lush balladry ('To Love Somebody'), 12-bar blues ('As The Years Go Passing By'), and, finally, psy­chedelic rock (side four).

 

And I stand by my word: with about fifteen or twenty minutes of this stuff trimmed, the album would have stood up better today. Case in point: the rocking rendition of 'River Deep' ranks among Eric's best covers, as he yields one of those stirring predator-begging-for-mercy perfor­mances that combine the primal ferocious scream with rough tender feeling in a uniquely Burdon way. But midway through, the song transforms into a silly tweet-tweet chant praising the charms of Tina Turner (culminating in a mock-psychedelic 'Tina-Tina-Tina-Tina!' that must have embar­rassed the poor woman deeply even back then). Original? Certainly. Does it add much to the song, does it go down well today? All I can say is that I far prefer the edited single version which, nice­ly enough, can be found as a bonus track on the CD edition of Every One Of Us.

 

Pretty much the same applies to every other song on here that goes over five minutes — with the possible exception of 'As The Years Go Passing By', which is prolonged at the expense of an ex­cellent blues-rock guitar solo rather than silly psychedelic noises, and the slightly less possible exception of 'Coloured Rain', where the guitarist improvises in a Clapton-like manner, backed by a tired brass section. 'To Love Somebody' just repeats the chorus too many times; and 'Gemini' of­fers a freakout break that is stuck somewhere in between the astral plains of the Moody Blues and the upcoming minimalistic chinks of King Crimson's 'Moonchild'.

 

All these flourishes will probably inspire only the most «open-minded» of human beings, those that accept just about any flash of creativity as long as there is a minimal chance of proclaiming the thing in question «a flash of creativity». Yet all it really takes is to flip the mindset switch on the back of your head into the '1960s' position, and then the «flashes» will not be a serious bother — at the very least, they will not prevent one from enjoying the individual stamp that Burdon is putting on all those covers. He is loving this — or else he would not have done it — and he still roars the blues out like crazy, and he does not spoil 'Ring Of Fire' by giving it an operatic flavor, and, in my opinion, he sings 'To Love Somebody' better than the Bee Gees.

 

And a special big thanks to new band member Andy Summers — later of the Cops' fame — for bringing along the beautiful song 'Madman (Running Through The Fields)', taken from the vaults of his previous outfit, Dantalion's Chariot. I would not say it is better than the original, but this probably made a lot of people hear it for the first time. Such a cute marriage between uptempo Brit-pop and «pastoral psychedelia» — a gorgeous way to close the record.

 

Analytically, Love Is does not quite make the grade: its «meat» is unoriginal, and its «fat» deci­dedly oversaturated; the brain is not happy. But the heart clearly states that, as long as Eric Bur­don sticks to singing the stuff that he is covering rather than fucking with this stuff, it will never have a problem with this particular artist. Assessing the rate of singing to fucking to be appro­ximately 7 : 3 on this album, thumbs up are guaranteed.

 

BEFORE WE WERE SO RUDELY INTERRUPTED (1977)

 

1) Brother Bill (The Last Clean Shirt); 2) It's All Over Now Baby Blue; 3) Fire On The Sun; 4) As The Crow Flies; 5) Please Send Me Someone To Love; 6) Many Rivers To Cross; 7) Just A Little Bit; 8) Riverside Country; 9) Lonely Avenue; 10) The Fool.

 

Burdon dismissed the band soon after Love Is failed to make the big time, and for the next de­cade, there was no sign of the Animals, as Eric gravitated in and out of various projects, first with WAR, then on an entirely solo basis (not that the period did not have an excitement of its own, but this will be duly covered under the «Eric Burdon» section).

 

Eventually, nostalgia — or, perhaps, some earthlier feelings, such as cash pressure? — took over, and in 1977 Burdon and Price ended up reassembling the entire original line-up from 1965. Old time fans were rejoicing, but for the original five Animals, the studio hours must have been really hard, because what exactly were they to record? Obviously, there was no question about Burdon dominating the proceedings like he did on each record since 1967 — getting back the primordial line-up meant also going back to a more democratic kind of arrangement. On the other hand, what would be the point, in 1977, to return to the same brand of, by now, way obsolete R'n'B that used to be their main occupation?

 

These are tough questions, and, unfortunately, the resulting album does not manage to find the right answers. Like in the old days, they mostly revert to doing covers, and some of the covers are respectable oldies, like Ray Charles' 'Lonely Avenue', but they also do Curtis Mayfield and Jim­my Cliff and, most importantly, they try their best to not make it sound like an exercise in retro­spection. They do steer clear of all new trends — disco, punk, New Wave etc. — but neither do they sound like they are hopelessly stuck in the Sixties.

 

And it does not click. It goes down uneasy. The most transparent proof would be to compare their original recording of 'Just A Little Bit' (back then, called 'Don't Want Much' and easily available on the two-disc Columbia set) with the 1977 reworking. The aggression is toned down, Burdon trades his rock'n'roll growl for a moodier, «sexier» approach, Price mostly uses the organ for oc­casional flourishes, and I never manage to get the point.

 

Nor do they seem to recapture their blues glories all that well, either: 'As The Crow Flies' is com­pletely pro forma — where, in the past, Burdon and Price would be ripping each other's throats, competing for whoever was able to generate the higher excitement level, here they seem to com­pete for whoever is able to exercise the most restraint. It is odd to hear Burdon sing like Lou Reed, and it is even odder to hear Price trade in his organ for a tasteful, but minimalistic electric piano backing. Alan Price is really a phenomenal keyboard player; why do we have to hear him play like some anonymous backer in a late Eighties' Eric Clapton stage band?

 

This does not mean the record is unlistenable, or even boring. Eric does plenty of good screaming work on 'Lonely Avenue', reaches his highest «confessional» standards on 'Many Rivers To Cross', rocks out on 'Fire On The Sun', and does not let Bob down with 'It's All Over Now Baby Blue' (the latter is given a particularly minimalist arrangement, with Price not so much playing the piano as marking the time with it, so that we can give Eric our full attention. It is worth it, ac­tually). Plus, while evading the trends, it never once sounds like «generic Seventies soft rock» or something like that; play it without knowing and you will not be able to guess the year correctly, or even the decade — «retro-bands» or, simply, bands that laugh at trends are still recording simi­lar-sounding albums even today, except that not all of them are this good.

 

In the end, it is a moderate thumbs up and an enjoyable listen, but it did not prove the most im­portant point — namely, that The Original Animals had a solid reason to reconvene, much less waste time, money, and efforts on trying to hit the market again. Consequently, they went their own ways once again, and stayed that way for six more years.

 

ARK (1983)

 

1) Loose Change; 2) Love Is For All Time; 3) My Favorite Enemy; 4) Prisoner Of The Light; 5) Being There; 6) Hard Times; 7) The Night; 8) Trying To Get To You; 9) Just Can't Get Enough; 10) Melt Down; 11) Gotta Get Back To You; 12) Crystal Nights; 13*) No John No.

 

«Third verse, different from the first», as Joey would say. For the Animals' last attempt at a mea­ningful and productive reunion, they finally decided to shift their sound. Unfortunately, the deci­sion happened to be taken at a time when geometry-defying hairstyles were only the second worst thing after the current trends in music-making, and it is not a pretty sight witnessing one of the world's former champions in white R&B go all synth-pop on their audiences.

 

Frankly speaking, it is not even clear how much of a true «reunion» this is. In addition to all the regular band members, there are at least four additional people, two of which — Zoot Money on keyboards and Steve Grant on guitar — seem to have a much stronger hand in the playing and ar­rangement departments than the «true» Animals. The songwriting, this time around, is mostly ori­ginal, with the exception of the old blues number 'Trying To Get To You', but Burdon is the only Animal that gets any credits; the rest go to corporate songwriters. In short, it is more like a solo Burdon album with nice surprise cameos from his old pals (and no one would guess that anyway without looking closely at the liner notes).

 

Furthermore, it looks like Eric had finally gulped down the last drops of the old «creativity and experimen­tation» elixir. Before We Were... could at least be understood as the result of a simple desire to take it easy and go back, for a sec, to being the old careless rambunctious boys of the days of yore, playing simple, but fun, entertainment for the crowd. Ark, on the contrary, is an al­bum filled with new songs and melodies, looking as if it had something new to say — but, when you get down to the bottom of it, it hardly says anything worth paying close attention to.

 

It is not a bad album. It could have been much worse. They could have gone to Diane Warren, who had just made a name for herself in 1983. They could have tried to sound like Rod Stewart. Instead, Burdon most definitely sounds like Burdon — his voice is still in great shape — and the outside songwriters at least take enough care so as not to ruin the classic Animals legacy entirely: no power ballads, no disco, no hair metal.

 

In fact, guitarist Steve Grant can write a mean tune: his two numbers, 'Loose Change' and 'My Fa­vorite Enemy', are the liveliest, catchiest, and least troublesome tunes on the album, and both have clearly been designed with Eric as the preferred vocalist in mind, especially the latter, which lights up rather slowly, but eventually does go up in smoke and propels Burdon back into all-out screaming mode as the rest of the band rally around him and clearly enjoy all the fun.

 

Less convincing, in my opinion, is the overtly MTV-oriented stuff like 'The Night', the album's lead single, molded into a sci-fi-ish New Wave pop tune. It's not even the silly keyboards — silly keyboards per se cannot spoil anything — it's that Burdon is simply uncomfortable when trying to adapt to this new style, about the same way that someone who has never worn a suit and tie would be uncomfortable when having to don them for an official reception. You know he'd rather sing 'Boom Boom' than shake his bum to these synthesized rhythms.

 

Naturally, there are missteps all the way: 'Love Is For All Time' puts the band into reggae mode, a first and, fortunately, last for them; 'Being There' seems to be a song about the movie Being There — great movie, piss-poor song; and, although 'Trying To Get You' is given a much more dramatic, desperate sheen than it used to have in the Presley era, it could certainly benefit from more blues guitar and less post-Kraftwerk keyboards. Etc. etc.

 

As an attempt to put the Animals back on the chessboard in the MTV era, Ark is a predetermined failure; at least the Rolling Stones had played back to back for the entire preceding decade, and were somewhat ready to face the upcoming challenge — these guys, on the contrary, had no re­gular bonding for more than fifteen years, and it would have been a marvel had they succeeded in «re-gelling» altogether, let alone in an Eighties fashion. But as a slight memento of the era, and as a record that features a bit of decent songwriting crossed with a bit of superior singing, it works, and, at the very least, 'My Favorite Enemy' has never left my best-of-all-time playlist ever since it got there, a long time ago. Therefore, although the brain keeps trying to plant a vicious thumbs down rating here, the heart still crosses it out with a thumbs up, if only moderately so.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE ANIMALS WITH SONNY BOY WILLIAMSON (1963/19...)

 

1) Sonny's Slow Walk; 2) Pontiac Blues; 3) My Babe; 4) I Don't Care No More; 5) Baby Don't You Worry; 6) Night Time Is The Right Time; 7) I'm Gonna Put You Down; 8) Fattening Frogs For Snakes; 9) Nobody But You; 10) Bye Bye, Sonny, Bye Bye; 11) Coda; 12) Let It Rock; 13) Gotta Find My Baby; 14) Bo Diddley; 15) Almost Grown; 16) Dimples; 17) Boom Boom; 18) C Jam Blues.

 

This record exists in many forms and varieties — the negative flipside of the lack of proper copy­right — but the 18-track one is probably the most comfortable, even if also the least true, since the last seven tracks, in fact, have nothing to do with Sonny Boy Williamson. But what all of this stuff does have in common is that everything was recorded sometime in late 1963, live at the Club A Go-Go in Newcastle, the Animals' principal stronghold at the time. Fairly surprisingly, the sound quality is very good — all the instruments are well discernible, and, since the audience probably consists of rowdy, but self-preserved coal miners instead of orgasming teenage girls, Eric's singing is not impeded by extraneous noises to the point that he cannot hear himself.

 

As for Sonny Boy Williamson II, he was an excellent and even innovative bluesman in his own right, and his touring in the UK, along the same lines as that of Muddy or Big Bill Broonzy, did a lot to popularize black music and, eventually, replace it with black-sounding white music. But it must be duly noted that, while performing, he had this nasty habit of jamming the whole length of his harmonica way deep down his throat, making it possible for him to punctuate the right notes with his uvula. This gave him a unique, inimitable sound — the only drawback was that, most of the time, he did not have the time to push it back whenever it was necessary to sing. Therefore, if you lack access to Sonny's records, but are nevertheless interested in his manner of performing, it is advisable to stuff a big chunk of wood or rock in your mouth and try to sing some generic 12-bar material in this condition. For additional authenticity, it is also recommended to knock appro­ximately half of your teeth out before proceeding.

 

If this sounds a little exaggerated and offensive, my only excuse is that it at least makes the pro­position seem somewhat interesting. Because otherwise, there is no point whatsoever in being in­terested in this kind of collaboration. Sonny Boy sounds better on the original studio recordings anyway, and the Animals, when backing him, sound exactly like your average backing band, with Price alone occasionally trying out some extra organ flourishes and Burdon probably sleeping it out backstage. Things get a little hotter on the duets, such as the lengthy rave-up of 'Nobody But You' (same as 'Talkin' 'Bout You', actually), but only because Sonny Boy is mostly absent from there, only coming in for a few seconds to trade some lines with Burdon — who, in his turn, is very busy ad-libbing stuff about Sonny Boy being the king of the blues and all.

 

As for the band's own set (sometimes found separately under the title In The Beginning), it is pretty well smoking hot. The vocal harmonies aren't worth shit (particularly on those songs that really really need them, e. g. Chuck Berry's 'Almost Grown'), but there is plenty of energy and good will throughout, and I am especially struck by how big Hilton Valentine's presence is on here — he is playing lots of sharp, hard-rocking solos in a very fluent and «mature» manner that somewhat reminds me of Keith Richards' typical stage playing about six or seven years later on. Very raw, dirty, with plenty of rock'n'roll feeling: the Berry numbers rock harder than anything the studio Animals produced in their original years.

 

The album's primary value is historical, of course, but it does give one a somewhat different facet of the Animals than the ones we are used to, and no fan of early British R'n'B should stay away from it. As a first acquaintance with Sonny Boy, it does not work at all — please do not let it dis­courage you from exploring his classic Chess singles — but as a farewell glance at the original Animals, it provides a convincing last-time ass-kicking. Thumbs up.

 

ARETHA FRANKLIN

SONGS OF FAITH (1956)

 

1) There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood; 2) Precious Lord (part 1); 3) Precious Lord (part 2); 4) You Grow Closer; 5) Never Grow Old; 6) The Day Is Past And Gone; 7) He Will Wash You White As Snow; 8) While The Blood Runs Warm; 9) Yield Not To Temptation.

 

Upon release, Aretha Franklin's groundbreaking debut caused a serious stir among the musical elites of the day, what with its innovative concept of a mini-musical built around Bram Stoker's Dracula. Starting with the ominous introduction of 'There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood', it is vividly remembered for Aretha as Lucy Westenra's stirring aria ('You Grow Closer', as the Count grows clo­ser), the creepy seduction monolog of guest star Christopher Lee ('Never Grow Old', in­deed), the terrifying chorus of vampiric henchmen ('He Will Wash You White As Snow'), the triumphant evil of 'While The Blood Runs Warm' that puts Wagner to shame, and the sudden, deus-ex-machina, but still heartwarming happy ending of 'Yield Not To Temptation', as the forces of Light manage to rally around the victim and drive off the Terror... you wish!

 

Okay, so who could actually resist imagining this bit of Cooper-meets-Coppola fantasy upon gla­n­cing at the track listing for the first time? And is it really our fault if so many subjects and titles of gospel hymns involve the good old blood-'n'-guts imagery? In any case, it certainly is a little disappointing when you put on the record, and, instead of this promising model, it turns out to be a bunch of crappily recorded gospel hymns, performed by Aretha and a choir of highly pro­fe­s­sional church­goers and highly amateurish singers during a service held by her father, the Rev. C. L. Franklin, in his own little parish in Detroit.

 

The Reverend was a very active promoter; not only did he put his daughter in the Lord's service at the earliest age that the Lord would admit servants, he went so far as to put her under contract with Checker Records, to use every possible opportunity to spread the Lord's word in as many ways as possible. (For that matter, the Reverend was one of the first Reverends to record his own sermons and distribute them through the LP medium; God can only wish he had more PR agents like this).

 

It is somewhat pitiful that he did not strive for a better ambience — the recording is really, really poor. The piano, played by Aretha herself, wobbles and floats, the chorus is mostly unfocused, and the ad-libs of 'yes, yes', 'praise the Lord' and suchlike sometimes sound as if they were overdubbed at random, or as if it never mattered to anyone in the audience at the time that the ad-libs should punctuate specific moments in the singing rather than just be there. On the other hand, there is probably something to be said for authenticity; we do not have that much solid sonic evidence for gospel conventions in the 1950s, and Songs Of Faith is at least a decent example.

 

Now for the main point. The album was recorded when Aretha Franklin was fourteen years old, and it already gives us her voice and fiery personality as fully established. In fact, she is far more inspired — and inspirational — on here than on any of her records from the next ten years on Columbia. She does not go for subtlety, and she does not try to capture any of the possible nuances of these hymns like, say, Mahalia Jackson; at 14, she is much more intent on simply set­ting the house on fire, and does she ever do it! The Reverend had the good sense of thrusting the only good mike in the church into close proximity with his daughter's oral tract, and Aretha's singing rules supreme over every other sound; but something tells me she'd do almost as good if the mike were at the other end of the building. The power buildup is amazing — you do have to keep in mind that it comes from a 14-year-old all the time, but that is the only condition necessary to accumulate a ton of respectable admiration.

 

Admiration does not necessarily mean enjoyment: straightforward gospel is a tough genre to en­joy unless you are a Jesus freak, and wall-rattling power alone is not sufficient to redeem its weak sides. But I cannot deny the basic thrill of accessing this experience, nor, of course, the tremen­dous historical importance; the brainy side demands that the album receive a thumbs up based on these considerations. For the record, Songs Of Faith can also be found under a million other titles, such as The Gospel Soul Of Aretha Franklin, Aretha's Gospel, You Grow Closer, Ne­ver Grow Old, and, of course, Dracula: A Gospel Mini-Musical.

 

ARETHA (1961)

 

1) Won't Be Long; 2) Over The Rainbow; 3) Love Is The Only Thing; 4) Sweet Lover; 5) All Night Long; 6) Who Needs You?; 7) Right Now; 8) Are You Sure; 9) Maybe I'm A Fool; 10) It Ain't Necessarily So; 11) (Blue) By My­self; 12) Today I Sing The Blues.

 

Columbia's legendary talent scout John Hammond discovered the yet-to-be legendary Aretha in 1960. He made the right decision to put her under contract, but whether he made the right deci­sion in giving her the kind of material he gave her remains debatable. That said, what kind of ma­terial was there in 1960? He could have made her a legitimate gospel star along the lines of Mahalia Jackson, but she did not really want to be a gospel star. He could have made her a legi­timate blues queen along the lines of Big Mama Thornton, but Columbia was not the kind of label to have had much experience with blues queens. He could have made her a great sweeping R'n'B shouter — the problem is, great sweeping R'n'B did not yet exist at the time.

 

In the end, she just sings a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Show tunes, ballads, Gershwin arias, a little gospel, a little urban blues, and a couple new compositions by J. Leslie McFarland (the guy who wrote 'Stuck On You' — the fun song that almost single-handedly ruined Elvis' re­putation as a rocker after his homecoming). In the process, she is being backed by the Ray Bryant combo, a big band with a big style, but no memorable face of its own.

 

Still, whenever the songs are at least semi-decent on their own, Aretha's fresh, full, and finally well-recorded 19-year old voice injects them with power-a-plenty. McFarland's modest pop ro­cker 'Won't Be Long', opening the record on a particularly energetic note, is easily the best of the bunch, but her take on 'It Ain't Necessarily So' is not far behind, and I must say that this is the first time ever I have not cringed at somebody singing 'Over The Rainbow', simply because Are­tha never knew the meaning of cheap sentimentality, and, although there is a down side to her shrillness and tenseness — if you breathe it long enough, it may start drilling your skull from the inner side — fairly often, it takes the corn right out of the cornball, replacing it with ass-kicking.

 

There is a frequent tendency to put down Aretha's entire Columbia period; for many, the real Franklin does not even begin until she makes the switch to Atlantic in 1967. But, in a way, this is akin to saying that the Beatles do not begin until Rubber Soul or Revolver; the true fan will al­ways find a way to work around the obvious shortcomings — generic nature of the material, lack of interesting musical backing, etc. — and highlight the high points. As to what concerns Aretha, I have little memory of the individual songs, but I have plenty of memory of youthful exuberance and excitement. At this point, Hammond could have given her a bluegrass arrangement of 'Little Jack Horner', and she would still sing it with the inspiration fit for an 'Amazing Grace' — so ob­viously thrilled is she to find herself in a recording studio. For this matter, no less than a definite thumbs up is in order.

 

For the record, the album is, in general, more easily found as The Great Aretha Franklin: The First 12 Sides, under which title it was re-released by Columbia a decade later. The message of the new title is quite transparent: you, the listener, cannot really understand the great Aretha Fran­klin of Atlantic fame to perfection without peeling off a dozen bucks for her first dozen of sides, recorded on our label. Laughable? Pre­sumptuous? Stupid? But who really knows these guys at Columbia? In some way, they might even have been right.

 

THE ELECTRIFYING ARETHA FRANKLIN (1962)

 

1) You Made Me Love You; 2) I Told You So; 3) Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody; 4) Nobody Like You; 5) Exactly Like You; 6) It's So Heartbreakin'; 7) Rough Lover; 8) Blue Holiday; 9) Just For You; 10) That Lucky Old Sun; 11) I Surrender, Dear; 12) Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive.

 

By the time of Aretha's second album on Columbia, it was pretty obvious that Columbia was ste­ering her in all the wrong directions. There are people who can work wonders with glitzy show tunes — Ray Charles, for instance — and there are people who can't. That Aretha, per se and by default, is an electrifying kind of person is undeniable, but most of these songs are like rubber, completely incapable of conducting her electricity.

 

Again, John McFarland comes to the rescue, contributing several original compositions, of which 'I Told You So' is a likeable pop shuffle and 'Rough Lover' the closest thing to a forgotten classic, swinging with fervor and perfectly tailored for the young queen's aggressive stride. Clearly, Mc­Farland was «getting» Aretha better than anyone else in the management, and, even though he was hardly above writing sappy ballads for her as well, his eventual removal from the pro­cee­dings was just another in an endless series of marketing mistakes on Columbia's part.

 

So, 'Rough Lover' rocks hard; the rest is a test — a test to see if Aretha's determination and exu­berance will prevail over the shadow of Hoagy Carmichael and Bing Crosby. I do not find that it does, but if you happen to love show tunes regardless of the way they are done, this can be a nice experience. After all, as Harold Arlen tells us towards the end, we gotta 'accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, but don't mess with Mr. In-Between'. I do feel tempted to say that messing with Mr. In-Between is exactly the kind of thing that's going on this record, because otherwise I just can't bring myself to eliminate the negative, no matter how hard I try.

 

Thumbs down, not even because I cannot stomach Bing Crosby (that happens to be my personal problem), but be­cau­se I cannot see any rational reason behind Aretha Franklin doing Bing Crosby. At least Pat Boone singing heavy metal had a bizarre novelty ring to it. This one just sucks in the good old plainly boring way.

 

THE TENDER, THE MOVING, THE SWINGING (1962)

 

1) Don't Cry, Baby; 2) Try A Little Tenderness; 3) I Apologize; 4) Without The One You Love; 5) Look For The Silver Lining; 6) I'm Sitting On Top Of The World; 7) Just For A Thrill; 8) God Bless The Child; 9) I'm Wandering; 10) How Deep Is The Ocean; 11) I Don't Know You Anymore; 12) Lover Come Back To Me.

 

More fuel from the Great American Songbook. If you love Irving Berlin, Al Hoffman, Ray Hen­derson and their co-workers, you will love this, because, after all, Aretha truly worked her ass off on these numbers, and Columbia's session musicians were no sissy amateurs either. But, as far as I can tell, this time around she is not even covering the cream of the cream — and it had to take Otis Redding to bring out the hidden potential of 'Try A Little Tenderness'.

 

Side one, for me, does not even begin until the last song, when Aretha kicks up a cute little rum­pus on 'I'm Sitting On Top Of The World'. Side two is significantly better, with two Billie Holi­day classics ('God Bless The Child' and 'Lover Come Back To Me') performed quite convincing­ly and Lil Armstrong/Ray Charles' 'Just For A Thrill' that does not compare so well to Ray's smoky version, but does not spoil it with extra syrup at least.

 

Still, while the album pushes dangerously close to representing her nadir stage on Columbia, no record featuring a young, fresh, enthusiastic (let alone tender, moving, swinging) Aretha Franklin can be truly bad; when she unleashes the full power of her range and phrasing ('I'm Wandering'), she can take one's breath away even by means of the Songbook — an ability that the manneris­tic, overbearing «soul divas» of today have either lost or caused to mutate in quite a sacrilegious way. Thumbs down, but only because better days were soon to come.

 

LAUGHING ON THE OUTSIDE (1963)

 

1) Skylark; 2) For All We Know; 3) Make Someone Happy; 4) I Wonder; 5) Solitude; 6) Laughing On The Outside; 7) Say It Isn't So; 8) It Will Have To Do Until The Real Thing Comes Along; 9) If Ever I Would Leave You; 10) Where Are You; 11) Mr. Ugly; 12) I Wanna Be Around.

 

Actually, this may be the nadir. This time around, there is not even a single lick of fire; each single tune is slow, genteel, and dominated by Mantovani-style strings. Duke Ellington's 'Soli­tude' could have been a minor standout, but its lonely trumpet is unable to beat the corniness that oozes from every pore.

 

It is even hard to say whether the singer herself cared as much about these songs as she did when she first crossed the threshold of Columbia's studios. She does, indeed, begin with a mini-blast of passion ('Skylark', where she spends the first two minutes winding herself up and then letting it go with a vengeance), but everything that follows is restrained and uninvolving. Oddly, this is the first album to feature an original composition — 'I Wonder (Where Are You Tonight)'; it is, how­ever, completely indistinguishable from the rest.

 

Albums like these need to be heard today, if only for people to understand that «generic pablum» is not a recent invention of the last twenty years or so, but was fairly persistent throughout the whole history of pop music; still, it is very painful to realize what a great talent was actually be­ing was­ted on that pablum — and at the exact time when pop music was undergoing revolutiona­ry changes. Thumbs down.

 

UNFORGETTABLE: A TRIBUTE TO DINAH WASHINGTON (1964)

 

1) Unforgettable; 2) Cold, Cold Heart; 3) What A Diff'rence A Day Made; 4) Drinking Again; 5) Nobody Knows The Way I Feel This Morning; 6) Evil Gal Blues; 7) Don't Say You're Sorry Again; 8) This Bitter Earth; 9) If I Should Lose You; 10) Soulville; 11*) Lee Cross.

 

Dinah Washington is one of those legends that is, in my opinion, much better off as a legend than as an ongoing presence on one's turntable: the Whitney Houston of her generation, classier than Whitney Houston only inasmuch as her entire generation was classier than Whitney Houston's ge­neration. She did occasionally perform fine, diverse material, but, at a time when Ruth Brown and La­Vern Baker were redefining the very idea of what a mainstream-oriented female performer could be up to, mostly got stuck with «torch songs» that come a dime a dozen: trashy, easily re­placeable fluff entertainment, with a talented, charismatic personality wasted on it.

 

Considering that Columbia was trying to market Aretha as the new queen of fluff entertainment, it is only natural that, upon Dinah's demise from a sleeping pills overdose in 1963, she was offer­ed to record a tribute album. Normally, when the new queen of fluff pays tribute to the old queen of fluff, you would expect to have the fluff squared. Surprisingly, Unforgettable is not as bad as it could be — in fact, it is far more genuinely entertaining than the preceding two albums. Rea­sons are coming up.

 

First, good song selection. Sentimental ballads are predictable, but only occupy about half of the space; the rest is dedicated to R'n'B and jazz numbers that kicked up a few extra sparks already in Dinah's days — such as her breakthrough single, 'Evil Gal Blues', or her very last record that had some proper swing in it ('Soulville').

 

Second, to my liking at least, Aretha does most of these songs better justice than Ms. Washington. When a tune demands saccharine and sentimentality ('Unforgettable') as its focal point, there is no big difference — both the original and the copy will seem equally classy to some and equally corny to others. But when it comes to reflecting inner torment ('Drinking Again', 'Nobody Knows The Way I Feel This Morning') or outer frustration ('This Bitter Earth'), Aretha does them Aretha-wise = shouting her head off, and since she always shouts on-key, this gives her the edge over the far more restrained, far calmer delivery of Dinah.

 

Oh, there is always something to be said for modesty and restraint, of course — but Dinah Wash­ington did not sing these songs calmly because that style suited her own calm personality; she sang them calmly simply because back in those days you did not shout, not even when the mate­rial begged for shouting. Compare the timid original of 'Evil Gal Blues' with Franklin's fiery re­working: this is the way this hot jazz number implores to be done, and, in a way, it is comparable with all the fine work that the early Beatles and Rolling Stones did on those shy R'n'B / rock'n'roll / pop numbers by their predecessors.

 

Best of the bunch is a track that did not even appear on the original release and, in fact, has no­thing to do with Dinah Washington: 'Lee Cross', a rough, bawdy blues-rocker with shades of gos­pel, one of those songs that must have originally given the people at Atlantic the right idea about how to deliver Aretha's goods to the people in the proper way. This and 'Evil Gal Blues' are the obvious highlights and a must-have for any decent compilation illustrating Franklin's early years. The rest is a matter of taste, but my taste says there is enough power and spice here to guarantee at least a moderate thumbs up.   

 

RUNNIN' OUT OF FOOLS (1964)

 

1) Mockingbird; 2) How Glad I Am; 3) Walk On By; 4) Every Little Bit Hurts; 5) The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss); 6) You'll Lose A Good Thing; 7) I Can't Wait Until I See My Baby's Face; 8) It's Just A Matter Of Time; 9) Runnin' Out Of Fools; 10) My Guy; 11) Two Sides Of Love; 12) One Room Paradise.

 

Now this is fun. See, all it took was to shift the emphasis from old, rusty pop tunes to new, shinier pop tunes. When the rhythms are livelier, the strings not so overwhelming, the melodies catchier, and the singer is not struggling with the material in order to understand it, but assimilates it in an easy-going, natural way — that is when real life starts to flow.

 

There is nothing particularly unpredictable about these song selections: Nancy Wilson, Burt Ba­ch­arach, Smokey Robinson, Dionne Warwick, Brenda Holloway, Mary Wells, Betty Everett — Columbia made a thorough study of the big names in the last two years of the music business and unleashed all of them on Aretha, finally realizing that to waste her talents on retro-pop in a clear­ly changing world is spiritually and financially unhealthy. From a possible point of view, Run­ning Out Of Fools is a turning point in Franklin's career — the album where she first emerges as a modern artist, regardless of the rather slight way she does it.

 

Slight, but not slothful: she understands and likes this new Motown and «para-Motown» brand of semi-pop, semi-R&B, and her interpretations of the classics are well worth judging on their own terms. Of course, she does it the Aretha way. 'Every Little Bit Hurts' used to mix tenderness, vul­nerability and desperation — the way she sings 'Come back to me, I'll make you see..' turns this into a command rather than a plea. 'My Guy', when done by Mary Wells, was a sexy purr that must have made the majority of its male listeners consider competing for the guy's position;  Are­tha's interpretation discards the sex kitten associations and becomes a feminist stance — her "no­thing in the world can keep me away from my guy" is not an oath of loyalty, it just means that the poor guy has little choice, and woe to him if he does try out any alternatives.

 

The choices could have been better; there is still too much emphasis on similar-sounding ballads, especially on the second side (the first one is at least redeemed with such colourful pop tunes as 'Mock­ingbird', 'Walk On By', and 'The Shoop Shoop Song'). But in general, the album is no better and no worse than any normal Motownish album of the era by any of Motown's great performers. Never mind that this is not at all the kind of sound with which we associate Aretha Franklin today; there is no harm in hearing her — for once, at least — applying her talents to the sounds of light­weight pop entertainers of the day, in a way, making it more heavyweight. Thumbs up.

 

YEAH!!! IN PERSON (1965)

 

1) This Could Be The Start Of Something; 2) Once In A Lifetime; 3) Misty; 4) More; 5) There Is No Greater Love; 6) Muddy Water; 7) If I Had A Hammer; 8) Impossible; 9) Today I Love Ev'rybody; 10) Without The One You Love; 11) Trouble In Mind; 12) Love For Sale.

 

Well worth locating. One thing you cannot say about Columbia Records is that they never tried finding the right groove for Aretha — or that Aretha herself did not latch onto each of their initi­atives with respectful enthusiasm. Thus, after the attempt to market her as a teen idol lady did not work (or, rather, did not succeed in making her into the next Mary Wells), out comes another di­rection: straightforward small-combo jazz! If not Dinah Washington, and not Mary Wells, then why not Ella Fitzgerald? Something, at some time, is bound to work after all.

 

The album is claimed to be «live», which is both true and false. True, in that the performances were indeed recorded live — in the studio — with no overdubs and very few different takes, the way it befits a tight jazz band. False, in that there was no live audience present, but, following the perverted spirit of the times, it was felt that a «live ambience» was necessary, so the engineers added scattered bunches of applause and audience noises, as if this were all happening in a posh restaurant: you can hear the clinking of the silverware and lots of conversation going on — obvi­ously, no one has any real business in listening to Aretha belt her soul out, except for a little po­lite clapping at the end of the song.

 

Which immediately translates to «fake», because I have serious doubts that most people would go on chatting about their own affairs the minute Aretha opened her mouth on any of these tunes. As I already said, she is no jazz singer, or, at least, no great jazz singer; she knows little about vocal modulation, nor does she have any desire to scat or vocalize. She is a powerhouse gospel machine that found itself in the situation of having to work in a jazz framework. But that's exactly what makes the experience particularly interesting. Jazz music + gospel engine almost equal rock'n'roll; if only the backing band, who are tight but play in the standard jazz idiom, understood the special qualities of Aretha and played accordingly, Yeah!!! would have justified its title and, who knows, could even become a landmark jazz record. As it is, they find it hard to catch up, but it is still ex­citing just to see them try.

 

The track list mostly consists of standards, a few ('Without The One You Love') re-recorded from former sessions, with maybe one or two surprises, such as the jazz arrangement of 'If I Had A Hammer'. Overall, it is not always possible, nor is it absolutely necessary, to discern breaks be­tween songs, except when a fast shuffle is replaced by a slow ballad; instead, just concentrate on the energy and conviction that flows from young Aretha, and think about how less kick-ass all of it might have sounded in the hands of other singers. This is a record that begs you to headbang to it, and closes its eyes on all the subtle nuances of the genre. Well, why not? Thumbs up.

 

SOUL SISTER (1966)

 

1) Until You Were Gone; 2) You Made Me Love You; 3) Follow Your Heart; 4) Ol' Man River; 5) Sweet Bitter Love; 6) A Mother's Love; 7) Swanee; 8) (No, No) I'm Losing You; 9) Take A Look; 10) Can't You Just See Me; 11) Cry Like A Baby.

 

Not to be confused with the same-titled compilation of some of Aretha's biggest non-hits from the Columbia years, which, out of the two Soul Sisters, is the more widely available. This Soul Sis­ter is a fully original release, one that finally sets Aretha on the right track — except that Colum­bia lacked the manpower and the creativity to put the track on the same level with the train.

 

Most of the numbers, once again, return us to the Great American Songbook, but the sound is not as thoroughly retro, and the arrangements not as thoroughly traditional / nostalgic. Furthermore, slow sappy ballads occupy less than half of the album; someone finally realized that if Aretha's general style is most perfectly suited to belting it out, she should stick to belting it out on the «bel­ters» instead of belting it out on the «crooners». Songs like the midly rocking 'Can't You Just See Me' already give us an early glimpse of the classic Atlantic Aretha, except that the backing band obviously cannot compete with the classic Atlantic backing. Unquestionably the biggest surprise, however, is '(No, No) I'm Losing You', a little-known tune written by little-known song­writer Joy Byers which, however, could proudly stand its own on par with all those other songs about losing you (e. g. the Temptations or John Lennon). It is the first time Aretha tries to invoke a mood of sincere desperation, and it works — why the song never became a hit can only be ex­plained by a ridiculous marketing policy.

 

Most of the other stuff is perfectly well listenable; the more upbeat, the more listenable, vividly demonstrated by the bouncy reworkings of 'Swanee' and 'Ol' Man River', and even the glitzy lounge entertainment of 'You Made Me Love You' is fun. Overlook silly excesses like the pathos of 'A Mother's Love' (pretty much every Aretha record, including the best ones, has dissatisfying moments like that), and Soul Sister truly qualifies as an album that needed very little to push the singer over the edge. Very little. Just a better backing band, a better set of backup vocalists, a bet­ter arranger, a better producer, a better sequencing, a better level of songwriting, and better choi­ces for the lead singles. Other than that, Soul Sister rules.

 

TAKE IT LIKE YOU GIVE IT (1967)

 

1) Why Was I Born; 2) I May Never Get To Heaven; 3) Tighten Up Your Tie, Button Up Your Jacket; 4) Her Little Heart Went To Loveland; 5) Lee Cross; 6) Take It Like You Give It; 7) Only The One You Love; 8) Deeper; 9) Re­member Me; 10) Land Of Dreams; 11) A Little Bit Of Soul.

 

Aretha's last album for Columbia is a terminally dark horse that cannot even be found in some of her discographies, and even the info on its year of release is contradictory — some say '66, some say early '67. Considering that it only runs for a bare twenty-five minutes, and that at least some of the tracks date from much earlier sessions — e. g., 'Lee Cross', recorded in 1964 (which is why we find it as a bonus track on Unforgettable), but not released officially until three years later — it is not difficult to understand the slightness with which it had been treated.

 

A pity, because it is easily one of the best LPs Aretha ever cut (or, rather, had herself cut) for her original label. There are as many as five upbeat, uptempo numbers that give Aretha ample room to unleash her temper, of which the already discussed 'Lee Cross' is only one highlight; the other one is 'Tighten Up Your Tie', where she tells her man to beat it like only she can, and the nicely moralizing title track where she tells her man to balance his gives and takes more convincingly than any non-musical spokesperson for women's lib.

 

Both 'Lee Cross' and 'Take It', by the way, are credited to Ted White, her manager and first hus­band, and he also contributes the successful slow-burner 'Land Of Dreams', a lush ballad that somehow transcends the standard clichés with its unusual piano parts and moody backup vocals. If not a classic, it is still a far more interesting and sincerely moving track than, uh, 'Her Little Heart Went To Loveland' — the inclusion of which shows that, even at their most intelligent, the people on Columbia were still unable to properly distinguish material that emphasized all of Are­tha's talent from material that did nothing except extinguish that talent.

 

It is a little ironic that the last track on the album and, thus, the last track from Aretha to be issued on Columbia, bears the title 'A Little Bit Of Soul' — she spent half of the Sixties on that label im­plicitly begging for exactly that, and the «Columbians» spent the same time by understanding her way too literally, giving her a tiny bit of soul every now and then to whet our appetites, and not a crumb more. Perhaps 'Much Too Little Bit Of Soul' would be a more understandable title. Re­gardless of the irony, though, Take It Like You Give It, recently released on CD together with Soul Sister, is well worth keeping an eye on, and is a perfect «pre-shadower» of what would very soon put Ms. Franklin on and over the top; so a moderate thumbs up.

 

I NEVER LOVED A MAN THE WAY I LOVE YOU (1967)

 

1) Respect; 2) Drown In My Own Tears; 3) I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You); 4) Soul Serenade; 5) Don't Let Me Lose This Dream; 6) Baby, Baby, Baby; 7) Dr. Feelgood (Love Is A Serious Business); 8) Good Ti­mes; 9) Do Right Woman, Do Right Man; 10) Save Me; 11) A Change Is Gonna Come.

 

One does not need to go much further than the three funky guitar notes that open 'Respect', against a background of big brawny brass, to understand that things have changed. The first two things that the new deal with Atlantic gave Aretha was fine musicianship and strong material; re­acting to the third, long-present, ingredient — her power — they formed an explosive, and the re­action was immediate. At times, one hears faint echoes of a critical backlash against I Never Lo­ved A Man, which has its uses — it goads people into giving more attuned listens to the rest of the lady's catalog — but there is simply no way the album can be budged from its pedestal with­out the side effect of toppling Aretha altogether, and do we want to do that?

 

The original hit, the one that clearly indicated how well Aretha and Atlantic can do business to­gether, was 'I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)'. The Muscle Shoals supply the rhythm; Aretha herself supplies the piano; and little-known songwriter Ronnie Shannon supplies the song, written specially for Aretha. This is simple, but deep soul, the likes of which she could never ac­cess on Columbia, and, predictably, the public was captured by the awesome contrast of the fiery, ecstatic screaming on the verses and the hot, breathy, animalesque hush of the chorus.

 

About 'Respect', Otis Redding, while performing the song in concert during the last year of his life, would always mention the «little girl who took it away from me», although in quite a friend­ly manner. He was right, too: singing it from the feminine perspective, Aretha turned it into the women's-rights anthem for her epoch, not to mention the fact that, for Otis, it was simply one more memorable, but hardly outstanding, hit in a long series of classics, whereas for Aretha it was really the song that made her, and even today, when you listen to it, it is easy to understand how she must have known this would be the song that would make her — and how everyone as­sisted her so well in that knowledge, starting from her sisters with their brilliant vocal echoes and ending with King Curtis' sax break. Oh, and the newly added bridge, and the vaguely obscene "sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me" — is this the first time the phrase appears in a pop song? If not the first, it is easily the best.

 

There is the usual complaint to be applied: Aretha does not stand up much for diversity, and all of the material, no matter how different in melody or mood, gets the standard Franklin treatment. On the other hand, this is a sport of its own: isn't it exciting to take songs as diverse as 'Drown In My Own Tears', Ray Charles' celebration of desperation, and 'Good Times', Sam Cooke's glorifica­tion of party life, and try to find a common invariant? Aretha's, of course, reads «power». When she sings the former, she is not really desperate — she uses fake images of desperation to exer­cise mind control over her deceitful lover; and when she sings the latter, she does not invite you to "get in the groove and let the good times roll", she commands you. Lady says to get in the gro­ove — what are you, deaf or something?

 

Understandably, though, material like 'Drown In My Own Tears' works better as a curio than as a soul classic; but when the songs actually do deal with the issue of power, they are immortal. 'Res­pect' and 'I Never Loved A Man' are clear highlights, but so is Aretha's self-penned 'Dr. Feelgood', where she finds the love she needs to be OK with her (poor, poor Dr. Feelgood, whoever he is), and Cooke's 'A Change Is Gonna Come' — no questions asked about that one.

 

The album contains no obvious filler; some cuts are stronger, some weaker, but the album was designed as a solid blast, and Aretha jumps in it with the same fervor she demonstrated on her first Columbia record, except that, this time, the fervor is not wasted or dissipated on syrupy strings and corny oldies. Even the composition of the record — wisely kicking off with the soul aggression of 'Respect' and closing things with the epic conclusion of 'Change' — deserves an unequivocal thumbs up from the brain department, and as for the heart, well, if Aretha Franklin is OK with you as a source of inspiration, there is no way the heart could feel disappointed with this particular record.

 

ARETHA ARRIVES (1967)

 

1) Satisfaction; 2) You Are My Sunshine; 3) Never Let Me Go; 4) 96 Tears; 5) Prove It; 6) Night Life; 7) That's Life; 8) I Wonder; 9) Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around); 10) Going Down Slow; 11) Baby, I Love You.

 

Just because this record happened to yield only one major hit ('Baby, I Love You'), instead of the usual two or three or four, it is occasionally dismissed or slighted as a rushed follow-up to the brilliancy of I Never Loved A Man. But if we start thinking of Aretha Franklin as a «singles ar­tist» — quite a possible way of life — we can skip all of her albums altogether, since even the best ones are very strictly divided into the attention-grabbing part and everything else. And, so­me­times, it makes good good sense to come back to the everything else.

 

There is also the strange album title factor: Aretha Arrives? The Present Perfect tense would have made far better sense, because, with several hit singles and a hit album and a perfectly es­tablished style and image, this is sort of a retarded announcement. Now if they had thought of this title for the previous record, that would have been a ballsy decision. But then, there is really no reason to think of the people at Atlantic Records as some sort of artistic superheroes compared to the marketing department of Columbia. People are always silly.

 

This is a terrific record. 'Baby, I Love You' is Ronnie Shannon's second great contribution to the catalog — a swaggering, self-assured, and hyper-catchy piece of R'n'B on which Aretha's playful interaction with her vocalizing sisters totally matches the intensity and fun of 'Respect'. How could this not be a hit? More surprisingly, how could Aretha's equally powerful delivery of the garage rock classic '96 Tears' not be released as a single? And, even more surprisingly, how did the world miss the excellent songwriting abilities of sister Carolyn Franklin, who contributes the album's second best tune: 'Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)', a strong, muscular feminist anthem in which the greatest hook is actually delivered by the backup singers ('nobody, nobo­dy!...') — well, we all have to make a living somehow, even if it involves hanging on to the coat­tails of Big Sister.

 

Aretha's takes on 'Satisfaction' and 'You Are My Sunshine' do not owe so much to Jagger/Rich­ards and The Pine Ridge Boys as they do to Otis Redding and Ray Charles, whose nearly unre­cognizable «deconstructions» she appropriates, and, once again, she beats or near-beats Otis, ma­naging to extract his slightly clownish manner and replace it with pure fire and brimstone, but fails to unsaddle Ray because of her inability to enact vulnerability — still, it is quite thrilling to watch her try, and fun to hear the kickass R'n'B punch of 'Sunshine' emerge after the lengthy non-rhythmic intro that gives no clue to whatever is going to happen.

 

For those who always search beyond pop hooks (and meticulously log their results so as not to appear empty-handed at the Last Judgement), the album's greatest achievement will most likely be 'Going Down Slow', which used to be a blues number, but now is a profound slab of gospel. I am not a fan; Aretha is not great at the tragic confession genre, and I cannot imagine her actually asking someone to forgive her for her sins, nor can I imagine her asking for a doctor. But it is still the usual powerhouse of a performance, that's for sure.

 

Altogether, with the exception of a couple semi-lame blunders like a Sinatra number, the record goes down very well. This is formula; it is now obvious that Aretha has found her groove and is going to stick to it at least until the changing times demand otherwise. But from an artist like Are­tha, we do not expect anything but a formula, and as long as the formula makes the world go round, so be it. A totally heartfelt, if not a thoroughly brainy, thumbs up.

 

LADY SOUL (1968)

 

1) Chain Of Fools; 2) Money Won't Change You; 3) People Get Ready; 4) Niki Hoeky; 5) (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman; 6) Since You've Been Gone; 7) Good To Me As I Am To You; 8) Come Back Baby; 9) Groovin'; 10) Ain't No Way.

 

Nobody remembers 'Niki Hoeky'. For a reason. Written by Jim Ford, better known as the author of 'Harry Hippie', it is a very silly tune that, in its original conception, only serves to introduce the most exciting linguistic excesses of Southern speech to Northern — and, in a longer run, world­wide — audiences. When simply sung by Aretha Franklin, it is marginally listenable, like every­thing else by A. F. But throw in some ultra-loud, monster bass playing from Tom Cobgill, ballsy brass playing, and the overwhelming strength of The Sweet Impressions on backing vocals, and a minor corny throwaway becomes two and a half minutes of powerful, intoxicating jamming that is impossible to stop. I want the full version, goddammit; with this kind of drive, they must have ploughed on for another ten minutes at least.

 

This is the major reason why all these albums from that particular period are so highly valued — the golden touch of Atlantic's session players. The actual songs are not all that good. Lady Soul is often quoted as Franklin's finest hour, but throughout that finest hour, I only find one piece of brilliant, original melodicity: Carole King's (of course — who else's?) '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman'. And, odd as it may seem, it is also a song that, perhaps, works better in King's own hands; with its decidedly non-feminist, maybe even anti-feminist message ("if I make you happy, I don't need to do more"), it is pretty hard to reconcile it with Aretha's usual aggressive style. She certainly tries, and does a great job anyway — not easy to botch a fantastic tune, one of the most impressive, cathartic build-ups in pop history, with a fantastic singer, even if they are both fantastic in such incompatible ways. But, in my opinion, 'Natural Woman' only showed its true face three years later, when recorded by Carole herself.

 

The true face of Lady Soul is the other big hit, 'Chain Of Fools' — Don Covay's R'n'B stomper is far more primitive from a melodic standpoint, but at least this is a song that is forever bound to be associated with Franklin and Franklin only. And the Muscle Shoals: a very important ingredient here is the swampy guitar playing, which, together with the 'chain chain chain' backing vocals, adds a creepy voodooistic tinge to the song — we are told that, in light of the five years of torture that the protagonist gets from her man, "one of these mornings the chain is gonna break", but we can only guess how. I smell bonfires and fresh rooster and goat blood, personally.

 

Like all great R'n'B, Lady Soul does not stuff your brain cells with magic combinations of com­plex chords, but provides dazzling, fiery, and diverse entertainment. Aretha throws herself at a little bit of everything. There is more Ray Charles, this time the rowdy Ray Charles turf where she can almost beat the genius ('Come Back Baby'); there is more getting hip to the sounds of the times (a cover of the Young Rascals' 'Groovin'); there is the daring to challenge the unchallenge­able — James Brown, with a smoking version of 'Money Won't Change You'; the beginning of Aretha's lengthy love affair with Curtis Mayfield ('People Get Ready', which she rips out of the silk cocoon of The Impressions and adapts to her own rough 'n' rowdy gospel style); and even a heartily welcome guest appearance by Eric Clapton, who makes the slow-passing four minutes of 'Good To Me As I Am To You' twice as exciting.

 

For the grand finale, sister Carolyn comes up with the epic winner 'Ain't No Way', again, not exa­ctly a pillar of songwriting but a song that allows Aretha to show softness and vulnerability with­out self-humiliation — trust a sister to truly understand the nature of your soul, rather than an out­side songwriter, no matter how brilliant. Supposedly, that is also Carolyn and Erma wailing out the­re in the background, in a manner rather uncharacteristic of standard R'n'B vocalizing, almost close to bel canto at certain moments.

 

The immense reputation of Lady Soul, to a large extent, rests on the success of the hit singles, but there is no question that, at this point, Aretha and her following were still in full control of the formula and able to keep it fresh by constantly adding new minor ingredients. So it gets the same type of a thumbs up as the less revered, but equally satisfactory Aretha Arrives. And, for the record, try to find an issue that has the unedited version of 'Chain Of Fools', with an extra minute of introductory vocalizing over rhythmless swamp guitar. Makes the voodoo brew quite a bit den­ser and juicier.

 

ARETHA NOW (1968)

 

1) Think; 2) I Say A Little Prayer; 3) See Saw; 4) Night Time Is The Right Time; 5) You Send Me; 6) You're A Sweet Sweet Man; 7) I Take What I Want; 8) Hello Sunshine; 9) A Change; 10) I Can't See Myself Leaving You.

 

Working at the rate of two first-rate LPs per year might not seem that difficult when you do not have to write (most of) the songs you record — but, on the other hand, for a «cover-based» R'n'B artist to have released four excellent records in two years is a feat you just can't beat, and I do not even mean today, when even major R'n'B stars lazily condescend to record one album every two or three years and most of it is bland crap anyway; I mean back in the 1960s, when even the grit­tiest stars of Atlantic Records still gave their all to the singles market.

 

So if, as usual, there are still two or three tracks on Aretha Now that don't do much except pad out the length, this should not detract from the overall consistency. Same band, same songwriters, same formula, and, fourth time in a row, it still works, as long as the pool of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke songs is still open to reinterpretation. The Cooke tribute here is 'You Send Me', a rare case of Aretha doing fine on one of Sam's more sentimental numbers — because this particular one does not require any vulnerability on her part; and the Charles tribute is 'Night Time', on which she celebrates the joys of lovemaking from the feminine side just as vigorously as Ray used to do it from the male one. (Strange they never tried a duet, missing the chance of recording the sexiest performance of all time).

 

The album is most vividly remembered, however, through 'Think', a rare case of a self-penned song that is also a classic; Aretha attempts to one-up Otis by writing her own version of 'Respect', and she very nearly succeeds, putting another big-time feminist hit under her belt, and one that rocks the shoes off right from the very first beats, too. (Twelve years later, she was smart enough to refresh the song for the general public in The Blues Brothers). I may be wrong here, too, but I think it might be the first pop song ever to feature, if not the word "freedom" itself, but an anthe­mic exclamation of "Freedom!" in the chorus, and even today it is still one of the most powerful "Freedoms!" ever — even if, in its context, it refers to family freedom rather than social freedom (not that we haven't been told that all society starts with family).

 

The other big hit was Aretha's reinterpretation of Burt Bacharach — Dionne Warwick's 'I Say A Little Prayer', a song whose pomp may be overbearing for some and whose tenacious presence in pop culture may be off-putting for others, but an icon is an icon, and this is the second-most ico­nic recreation of it, and it's right here on this album. For the record, Aretha's version completely dissolves the candy gloss of Warwick's original (tender strings, silky percussion, «cutesy» vocals etc.), so, in my eyes, it is definitely superior.

 

And, of course, the hits are still interspersed with minor, but heavily rocking R'n'B cuts each of which is delightful in its own minuscule way — Don Covay's 'See Saw', Isaac Hayes' 'I Take What I Want', and Clyde Otis' 'Change' are all worthy renditions. No man ever did 'I Take What I Want' better than Allan Clarke of the Hollies, but no woman ever did 'I Take What I Want', peri­od — that is, not before Aretha, who, as it seems, was constantly on the look out for strong self-assertive male songs from the past decade(s) and turning them upside down. Good for her, and another major thumbs up; when you know for sure that it's formula, but it doesn't feel one bit like formula, that's real talent for you, and sometimes, even genius.

 

ARETHA IN PARIS (1968)

 

1) Satisfaction; 2) Don't Let Me Lose This Dream; 3) Soul Serenade; 4) Night Life; 5) Baby, I Love You; 6) Groo­vin'; 7) (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman; 8) Come Back Baby; 9) Dr. Feelgood; 10) Since You've Been Gone; 11) I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You); 12) Chain Of Fools; 13) Respect.

 

Franklin ended her second big year at Atlantic with this live album, unfortunately, completely overshadowed two years later with Fillmore West. Producer Jerry Wexler hated its guts, and probably did not sleep well at night until his «mistake» was finally corrected at the Fillmore — by whisking off Aretha's regular live backing band and replacing it with King Curtis'. Consequ­e­ntly, In Paris mostly got bad publicity from the very start, and mostly continues doing so.

 

True enough, the musicians that accompanied Aretha on tour were hardly a match for the much more seasoned pros at Atlantic Studios. The term «well-oiled» does not work too well in applica­tion to this outfit; no single musician can hold his own against Aretha's power, and you can hear that perfectly exemplified during the very, very lame sax break in 'Respect' which is there only because the structure of the tune requires it, not because it ever struck the sax player that this might be a strong counterpoint to the vocals. And, considering that for the most part they stick to the original arrangements and running lengths — with the exception of several faster tunes which they rush through at a ridiculously accelerated rate — this makes most of the tunes sound like no­tably or slightly inferior copies of their studio correlates.

 

Nevertheless, Aretha herself is in excellent form, ready as hell to show them Parisian sybarites what that sweaty R'n'B sound is all about. It's all about the singing, first and foremost; if you do not make out much distinction between the complex, fluid bass playing of Jerry Jemmott and the less advanced, «merely competent» playing of Rodderick Hicks, you might not even notice the big difference until you start seriously focusing on it, or ascribe it to the extra demands of playing in a live environment. But the lady herself is wound up to the max, and shifts effortlessly between tough R'n'B, slow moody blues, and sweet sweet ballads.

 

Most of the big hits are here — 'Baby, I Love You', 'Chain Of Fools', 'Natural Woman', 'Respect' etc. — along with minor, but decent tracks, making this both a good overview of her first and best years at Atlantic and an important — in fact, the only important — historical document of a «pre-Seventies» Aretha, still fresh and somewhat innocent and not yet spoiled by any excesses that normally accompany fame and fortune. Obviously not essential, but nothing to avoid, either.

 

SOUL '69 (1969)

 

1) Ramblin'; 2) Today I Sing The Blues; 3) River's Invitation; 4) Pitiful; 5) Crazy He Calls Me; 6) Bring It On Home To Me; 7) Tracks Of My Tears; 8) If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody; 9) Gentle On My Mind; 10) So Long; 11) I'll Never Be Free; 12) Elusive Butterfly.

 

What a great piece of bait for professional pessimists and optimists alike. The former will say: «She had to exchange the bland confines of Columbia for the juicy pleasures of Atlantic and still end up with this?» The latter will retort: «Wow, if only she had this kind of dedicated support and personal maturity on Columbia! Finally, a dream come true!» And, in between them, they will en­sure the presence of an electromagnetic field that will only fall apart once the whole world has switched from Aretha Franklin to Beyoncé, by which time nothing will matter any more.

 

Soul '69 is not entirely retro; approximately a third of the tunes brings us back into the hands of The Great American Songbook, but the rest of the covers are more modern, ranging from early Sixties' Sam Cooke and Smokey Robinson to very freshly written stuff (John Hartford's 'Gentle On My Mind', Bob Lind's 'Elusive Butterfly' etc.). What unites them all is the style: Aretha's re­gular studio backing band is joined — and, more often than not, drowned out — by a swarm of big band players, going for an intentionally old-style sound, but one that is still in good accor­dance with modern production values.

 

I daresay that most people who, in 1967, were overjoyed to see Aretha switch from the light­weight lounge entertainment style of Columbia to the rougher style of Atlantic, must have been shocked to see her come back to jazz-pop — after four terrific hit-filled albums of R'n'B? Hardly a surprise that the album was her first studio LP for Atlantic not to make it into the Top 10, al­though this also has something to do with the intentional lack of a hit single. And, of course, it must have burdened many a skeptical mind with the uncomfortable thought — maybe she does not like her 1967-68 sound, if it not only did not make her forget the fluff of the Columbia years, but, in fact, prompted her to return to it?

 

Certainly, that would be exaggerating things. No one can truly hate a sound that puts you on top of things, even if it happens to be provided by pop culture Antichrists like Diane Warren. But, for one thing, sti­cking to the same formula for ages and ages is a tiresome business, and, for another, digging R&B is hardly incompatible with digging lounge jazz. We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the effort that went into Soul '69 any more than we could doubt the honest verve be­hind Lady Soul. What we can doubt is the artistic merit of that effort.

 

First, the orchestral arrangements truly nullify the effect of the regular Atlantic players. Most of the time one cannot even hear the bass, and when it does come through, it's just... some bass. Se­cond, a few of the tracks are downright misguided, such as the glitz-style reinvention of 'Bring It On Home To Me' which completely loses the «humble devotion» aspect of Cooke's original. Third, she tries to compete with the sentimental aspect of Billie Holiday — why?.. Fourth, quite a few of these songs were never all that good to begin with.

 

Summing it all up, I must agree with the general consensus that Soul '69 is the least significant record from Aretha's «golden years» at Atlantic. As a risky experiment — cross Muscle Shoals with Las Vegas and see which one comes out on top — it was, perhaps, worth carrying out. The gamble failed, though, and all we have to do is optimistically thank the artist for not attempting to repeat it. Not bad, overall, but decidedly useless. Thumbs down.

 

THIS GIRL'S IN LOVE WITH YOU (1970)

 

1) Son Of A Preacher Man; 2) Share Your Love With Me; 3) Dark End Of The Street; 4) Let It Be; 5) Eleanor Rigby; 6) This Girl's In Love With You; 7) It Ain't Fair; 8) The Weight; 9) Call Me; 10) Sit Down And Cry.

 

The first of Aretha's 1970s albums — and the one that, from a certain point of view, ushered in the Seventies as such. You know what I'm talking about. The watery pianos. The silky cymbals. The romantic strings. The gospel back vocals. The total subjugation of «melody» and «hook» to «atmosphere» and «elegance». The gradual crash of the classic school of R'n'B under the joint pressure of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway (or, rather, the shadowy forces of evil that stood behind their heavily burdened backs). The age in which mainstream entertainment music, after a short, wobbly period of assimilating the best influences from a host of creative artists, once again detached itself from good taste etc. etc.

 

All this and more is best illustrated by 'Call Me', a song that Aretha wrote herself, allegedly after overhearing a young couple in the park parting company with the words "call me, I love you" (or was that "I love you, call me"?). As heartbreaking/heartwarming as the story may sound, the song is sappy, the melody is lazy and unmemorable, and to call the lyrics clichéd would be a serious understatement: one can always object that it is the simplest, crudest words of love that are the most honest and effective, but, in this case, shouldn't we take the Ramones' 'I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend' over this pompous piece any time of day?

 

In fact, the crudeness of 'Call Me' may be enough to give one a new appreciation for the talents of Burt Bacharach — the title track, far more pompous in its use of orchestration, girl choruses, and just about everything, is far more involving and features enough tonal changes to carry one's at­tention throughout. But, of course, the balladeering highlight is 'Let It Be', a song that would have been a crime for Franklin not to record (in fact, she was sent a demo already in 1969, and her ver­sion of the tune appeared on the market before the Beatles) — after all, she was pretty much sent on this planet to put her stamp on every brilliant gospel-pop idea to be patented by anyone. Turns out that 'Let It Be' does work in grand style when you get the proper artist to do it, and King Cur­tis' passionate sax solo holds its own against Harrison's guitar versions fairly well.

 

All the more puzzling is the question of what in the world made Aretha go and nearly botch the impression by immediately following 'Let It Be' with her infamously misguided reinvention of 'Eleanor Rigby'. Granted, the song gets a nice frantic R'n'B groove to it, but there is nothing ex­cept the lyrics to link it to the original, so why establish this link in the first place? To let audien­ces worldwide realize how she understands absolutely nothing about the song? Why was this a single? To compete with Ray Charles (whose version also sucks, but at least has something in common with the spirit of the original)? Why does she sing "I'm Eleanor Rigby, I pick up the rice in a church where a wedding has been"? She is, quite clearly, not Eleanor Rigby, never has been, never will be (hopefully). On the other hand, she does engage in a piece of glorious idiocy, and glorious idiocy tends to attract more attention than ordinary genius; negative publicity makes for great publicity, and who wouldn't want to hear Aretha Franklin's openly awful take on a Beatles masterpiece, be it in 1970 or today?

 

The rest of the hit covers work much better. Dusty Springfield, apparently, loved Aretha's take on her own 'Son Of A Preacher Man' so much that she would rearrange all her live performances to fit that style, and while I certainly do not agree (nothing compares with the perfection of the ori­ginal), Aretha's version is worthy in its own way. Far less sexy, though: with Dusty, it is always clear what exactly she was being taught by the preacher's son, but with Aretha's spiritually en­hanced take, I am not that sure — the basics of Trinitarian theology, perhaps?

 

Jerry Wexler later regretted cutting the Band's 'The Weight' with Aretha, saying that the song was unsuitable for and incomprehensible to her black audiences — but come now, Mr. Wexler, I se­riously doubt that white audiences have a seriously better understanding of what Robbie Robert­son was trying to convey with the song (actually, there is fairly little evidence of Robbie under­standing his creation himself), and as for the black and white ties, how about The Staple Singers perfectly complementing The Band on The Last Waltz's famous performance? This is just silly. Maybe Aretha does not «get» the song (nor do I), but she sets herself on fire all the same; in my eyes, this is a total success, and the only real complaint is that the song all but wastes the talents of Duane Allman, accompanying the band on guitar but, for the most part, buried in the mix. Su­rely a short solo couldn't have hurt?

 

Overall, the record, with its mix of styles comfortably old and dangerously new, bravely explorative and ridiculously skewed, is fairly intriguing in its lack of balance, and for its very un­predictability and occasional craziness, gets a thumbs up. I agree with those who see it as the be­ginning of Aretha's decline, but, for the moment, it was merely a side effect of the beginning of decline of the public taste, and there were still several years of exciting struggle to go through.

 

SPIRIT IN THE DARK (1970)

 

1) Don't Play That Song (You Lied); 2) The Thrill Is Gone; 3) Pullin'; 4) You And Me; 5) Honest I Do; 6) Spirit In The Dark; 7) When The Battle Is Over; 8) One Way Ticket; 9) Try Matty's; 10) That's All I Want From You; 11) Oh No Not My Baby; 12) Why I Sing The Blues.

 

Aretha's second LP from 1970 has eventually emerged as a major critical favorite, despite contai­ning only one hit. What a hit, though. When it was first released by Ben E. King, 'Don't Play That Song (You Lied)' was just a modest attempt at keeping up his chart presence — its lack of pre­tense to anything greater exemplified by the fact that it borrowed the rhythm track off his biggest hit, 'Stand By Me', but left behind that song's loyal intensity. In Aretha's hands (quite literally, by the way: she plays her own piano lines, and plays them in quite a confident and memorable way), it acquires a pop­pier, toe-tappier bounce that, melodically, still hearkens to the careless old days of 1962-63, and so gives us a good idea of what Ms. Franklin's early career might have been had she been for­tu­nate to sign up with Ahmet Ertegün from the very beginning, instead of wasting six fruitless years on a completely alien label.

 

Normally, though, a «classic» Aretha LP was supposed to contain at least two or three big chart hits with monster hooks, and Spirit In The Dark clearly did not set out for those goals. Instead, here was a conscious attempt to get closer in touch with the lady's blues and gospel roots, as well as give her more room to stretch out as a songwriter. The songs have been, as usual, recorded at several different sessions with several different bands, but there is almost as high an amount of cohesion here as on Soul '69 — and the final results are much stronger, since the songs are way more in touch with Aretha's own spirit, be it in the dark or in the light.

 

She is responsible for writing four out of twelve tunes — a personal record, or a family record if you add a fifth one contributed by sister Carolyn. Instead of Burt Bacharach, she covers Jessie Hill, B. B. King (twice!), and, least predictable choice ever — Jimmy Reed; you'd think that Jim­my's one-two-note-based, toothless-rambling vocalizations would be unadaptable for the Atlantic treatment, but apparently, nothing is unadaptable. The Rolling Stones may have shown more ima­gination in regard to the song while applying their own instrumental flourishes back in 1964, but in the vocal department, Mick Jagger is hardly the king to Aretha's queen.

 

In a more risky battle, Franklin takes on B. B. King and wins hands down on 'The Thrill Is Gone', giving the song a far grimmer reading, if only because straight-faced darkness is a mood that King always has to simulate, but to Aretha it comes quite freely when necessary. For some reason, Aretha and B. B. failed to team up, live or in the studio, to produce what would surely have been the definitive version — her singing, him playing — but perhaps, in the future, someone will find a way to overdub King's soloing on this here rendition? Actually, no less a talent than Duane Allman himself is listed in the credits as playing guitar on this number; but his presence is felt far sharper on 'When The Battle Is Over', as he duly gets into «battle mood» for this gospel number and adds crispness and «jaggedness» to this already spark­ling performance.

 

Aretha's own creations are surprisingly diverse: orchestrated balladry ('You And Me'), gospel R'n'B that tries to compete with Wilson Pickett (title track), Ray Charlesian soul ('One Way Ti­cket'), and even a fun throwaway mid-tempo boogie number advertising the comforts of a local restaurant ('Try Matty's'). None of these goes far enough to convince us of the lady's composing genius, but she never needed one — it's quite sufficient that they establish competent grooves over which she can spread her sincere emotions.

 

The bottomline is that nothing here can be counted as an individual masterpiece, but there are no slip-ups or catastrophes — it's solid rootsy-bluesy grit all the way through, and, consequently, one of the few Franklin albums (heck, perhaps the only Franklin album) that can be considered a coherent forty-minute piece of honest art rather than a chance bag. It is not quite clear to me how, after such clear signs of slipping into the worst vices of the Seventies on This Girl, she ma­naged to reemerge in such a rejuvenated, cheese-free manner, but miracles sometimes happen even in the world of mainstream pop. A spiritually endowed thumbs up, of course.

 

LIVE AT FILLMORE WEST (1971)

 

CD I: 1) Respect; 2) Love The One You're With; 3) Bridge Over Troubled Water; 4) Eleanor Rigby; 5) Make It With You; 6) Don't Play That Song (You Lied); 7) Dr. Feelgood; 8) Spirit In The Dark; 9) Spirit In The Dark (reprise); 10) Reach Out And Touch (Somebody's Hand); CD II: 1) Respect; 2) Call Me; 3) Mixed-Up Girl; 4) Love The One You're With; 5) Bridge Over Troubled Water; 6) Share Your Love With Me; 7) Eleanor Rigby; 8) Make It With You; 9) You're All I Need To Get By; 10) Don't Play That Song (You Lied); 11) Dr. Feelgood; 12) Spirit In The Dark; 13) Spirit In The Dark (reprise).

 

Aretha's big, bulky, flashy show at the Fillmore West has become a love-hate affair amid critics and fans alike. Defenders and propagators never tire of repeating how terrific it was of Jerry We­x­ler to convince Aretha to drop her usual backing band (the one we heard on Aretha In Paris) for these shows and rely on King Curtis and the Kingpins instead — not to mention the addition of Billy Preston and the Memphis Horns, and Ray Charles himself for the encore! Skepticists, ho­wever, object with a smirk that the entire show was a humiliating sellout to white audiences, what with at least half of the setlist dedicated to Aretha's reinterpretations — sometimes forced and clumsy — of the Big White Hits of the day, and remark that to pass it for Aretha's greatest live album would be betraying the essence of soul.

 

On a factual basis, the skeptics are probably right. Wexler was constantly steering Aretha into that direction, and commercial considerations must have played a serious part in this. Then again, there is always the «bridging the racial gap» justification, and no one can ever state with certainty whether it was greed or gallantry lying at the bottom of it all. And once we get down to it, the real question, of course, is not whether Aretha had any real business covering these songs, but whe­ther or not she managed to make a good job out of it.

 

Not quite, I'd say. Of the four «white hits» covered during the show, 'Eleanor Rigby' remains as perfectly misinterpreted as it ever was, and (Bland) Bread's 'Make It With You' is no less awful in Aretha's version as it was in the original. I have mixed feelings over the famous cover of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'; again, it is probably a reinterpretation that works much better if you have never heard the original — Franklinization of the song leads to a complete loss of the tender, ca­ring atmosphere provided by Garfunkel, and when the lady belts out "Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down", I'd suggest to steer clear: no one wants to be buried under three hun­dred pounds... oh, never mind.

 

In the end, what remains is Stephen Stills' 'Love The One You're With', a song that lends itself very well to the Aretha treatment, not to mention the great interplay between the horns and Pres­ton's jumpy organ. That is one great cover — friendly, rocking, and sincere-sounding — and it honestly makes one wonder just how much of the lady's own judgement went into those selec­ti­ons and what the hell prevented all these people from making all the right choices; it's not like there was any sort of limit to the material. Anything from 'Whole Lotta Love' to 'Long As I Can See The Light' would easily do, but no, they had to pick a Bread hit? Ridiculous.

 

No complaints can be voiced about the rest of the material. One of the most frantic 'Respects' in existence to open the show; 'Don't Play That Song' turned into a dazzling screamfest; eight minu­tes of a slow, steamy 'Dr. Feelgood' that challenge Tina Turner herself on the sexiness issue; and, best of all, a huge, sprawling, never-ending, but never-boring twenty-minute jam to conclude 'Spirit In The Dark', first with Ray Charles trading voiceovers with our heroine, then just letting the tape roll as the Kingpins and the Memphis Horns battle it out with each other. On formal gro­unds, this may be condemned as overkill, but these are some of the finest, if not the finest, R'n'B players of their era, and not for one second do I get the feeling that they are merely carrying on on autopilot because somebody forgot to tell them when to stop — they're going on strictly as long as the spirit is there (or until Aretha does tell them to "break it up!").

 

Regardless of the flaws, Live At Fillmore West is essential Aretha, a fact commemorated by several different releases of the album: mine is the 2-CD edition where the second disc adds alter­nate versions from other shows, plus some additional material like 'Call Me', but there is also a li­mited 4-CD edition that adds the King Curtis part of the show and may actually be a better buy if you're generous enough (note, however, that Curtis was not above lame white artist covers either — his 'Whiter Shade Of Pale' will not make the world forget Procol Harum any time soon). My thumbs up relate to any of these editions.

 

YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK (1972)

 

1) Oh Me Oh My; 2) Day Dreaming; 3) Rock Steady; 4) Young, Gifted And Black; 5) All The King's Horses; 6) A Brand New Me; 7) April Fools; 8) I've Been Loving You Too Long; 9) First Snow In Kokomo; 10) The Long And Winding Road; 11) Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time); 12) Border Song (Holy Moses).

 

Seriously amazing. In a certain sense, this is Franklin's Abbey Road: one last colossal punch of an effort with a 100% payoff, before the inevitable disintegration. Of course, like the Beatles' so­lo careers, Franklin would still keep on shining, sometimes brighter, sometimes dimmer, but ex­plode in such a dazzle of fireworks — never again. If you stop at this point and go no further, the Almighty will surely not count this against you (especially since it is my firm belief the Almighty himself would rather shake his booty to 'Rock Steady' all day long than remain bored stiff with fifteen minutes of 'Amazing Grace').

 

I have no idea why, but absolutely everything one could ever love and respect about A. F. is right here in this forty-minute package. For one thing, there is no filler. Each song has its purpose and no two sound exactly alike. The arrangements are fabulous. The rate of cover tunes to original compositions is respectable, and the original compositions steadily outshine the covers. The pro­duction only occasionally gets bogged in soft-rockish values of the period. The balance between diversity and stylistic coherence is ideal. In short — perfection.

 

Let's see — where do we start with the songs? Okay, 'Rock Steady'. Aretha gets a little lost here among all the other sounds, but this is so damn right. In a terrific funk groove like this, she has to be a bit player, important, but not overwhelming, and that is exactly what she is. No other Frank­lin song rocks like this, as the bass, the chicken-scratch guitars, the sleazy brass bridge, and the voodooistic background vocals take you right in the middle of the jungle. This is not typical for Aretha, but I certainly wish it were, since she is perfectly capable of tackling hardcore funk head-on along with the best of 'em. She wrote it herself, too.

 

She also wrote 'Day Dreaming', a soft ballad more in the vein of Roberta Flack than her own, but one whose melody and atmosphere, with its cloudy electric pianos and flute swirls, perfectly match the title. She also wrote 'All The King's Horses', whose main hook — merging Humpty-Du­m­pty with a tragic tale of lost love — is as ingenious as it is genius. And even if 'First Snow In Kokomo' is not so much a song as it is a hummable piece of artistic memoirs set to gospel piano and weeping guitar, it is still a beautiful experience worthy of most jazz greats.

 

Once again, she intentionally misinterprets Otis Redding by turning 'I've Been Loving You Too Long' upside down: Otis wrote it as a near-suicidal tune, in a Tristan-like manner, presenting love as a destructive, lethal drug habit — Aretha discards any allusions to self-destruction and states her point very clearly: since she's been loving him too long to stop now, it is he who has no cho­ice but to stay... or suffer the odds, whatever they might be. And who can tell whose interpretati­on is the more artistic one? Probably Otis', since the high tragedy and the elegant subtlety of the original are lost on Aretha; but that does not mean her take on this is not deserving, either.

 

The title track, a complete reworking of Nina Simone's original hit, puts us in celebratory mood and in a far more intelligent way, of course, than straightforward sloganing of the "Say it loud" type. More joyful celebration, but without a serious social background this time, is to be found on 'Oh Me Oh My' and the cover of the Delfonics' 'Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time?)' — to which the only possible answer is one hundred percent positive, of course.

 

As for 'Border Song', there was probably no way Franklin could not have covered it; in fact, I have a creeping suspicion that Elton and Bernie intentionally designed the tune in a way that would entice every single black soul artist to cover it (thus ensuring their financial future in case the boots and glasses failed to do their job). But you gotta give it to her: she fights through Tau­pin's meaningless lyrics with the same reckless abandon that she fought through Robertson's equ­ally meaningless lyrics on 'The Weight', and somehow makes them meaningful in the (or, per­haps, through the) process — and, besides, the song works fine as a wrapping-up coda to the whole al­bum. I wouldn't have refused a fifteen-minute jam-style reprise of 'Rock Steady' in its place, of course, but that's just me.

 

For more and more fans over the years, this is Aretha Franklin at her best, and I tend to agree. Only 'Rock Steady' would have made my personal Top 5; but where else will you find a Franklin LP that is (a) so consistent, (b) so variegated, (c) so well-crafted and intelligently arranged, (d) heavy on hits and hooks? Thumbs up on all these counts and more.

 

AMAZING GRACE (1972)

 

CD I: 1) Organ Introduction; 2) Opening Remarks; 3) On Our Way; 4) Aretha's Introduction; 5) Wholy Holy; 6) You'll Never Walk Alone; 7) What A Friend We Have In Jesus; 8) Precious Memories; 9) How I Got Over; 10) Pre­cious Lord, Take My Hand / You've Got A Friend; 11) Climbing Higher Mountains; 12) Amazing Grace; 13) My Sweet Lord (instrumental); 14) Give Yourself To Jesus; CD II: 1) Organ Introduction; 2) On Our Way; 3) Aretha's Introduction; 4) What A Friend We Have In Jesus; 5) Wholy Holy; 6) Climbing Higher Mountains; 7) God Will Take Care Of You; 8) Old Landmark; 9) Mary, Don't You Weep; 10) Never Grow Old; 11) Remarks by Reverend C. L. Franklin; 12) Precious Memories; 13) My Sweet Lord (instrumental).

 

Amazing Grace is, as you might know, the best-selling gospel album of all time. There is little else that needs to be said about it, because, once you take it from here, it all depends on how you feel about gospel. Predictably, most responses fall into one of three categories:

 

«The Lord giveth and the lord taketh away, and with this album, the Lord giveth thus a-plenty, I wouldn't mind spend the rest of my sinner's life having him take away. As a matter of fact, I am divorcing my heathen wife (var.: husband) right now because she (he) dared suggest that the Rev. James Cleveland is in need of a good dentist.»

 

«Gospel music? Baloney. My interests are rooted in the propagation of scientific atheism (var.: I'm a docu­men­tally proven Viking descendant in the n-th generation), so excuse me if I don't have time to discuss that howling crap, I have a lecture on the evil ways of the Old Testament to de­liver in thirty minutes (var.: a couple of Christian churches to burn before the day is out)».

 

«Well, uh, I'm not that much of a believer, er, uhm, as a matter of fact, I only go to church to ad­mire the stained glass (var.: the bodily proportions of young Catholic girls), but, er, Aretha Frank­lin, she, like, has a mighty fine voice, and plus, she is sort of passionate about this, don't you see? And, like, we have to respect sincerity and passion in art, plus, it's, like, tradition, so in the inte­rests of tolerance and world peace, I, uh, give this a B+. Hey, that's what Robert Christgau gave it, and he says there's passion there, too!».

 

A few facts. This live album was recorded on two successive nights (January 13-14, 1972) as a church session, with the Rev. James Cleveland («King of Gospel») presiding, the Rev. C. L. Fra­nklin stepping up to the mike once or twice to drive home the point about how Aretha never ever really left the Church, and the resulting double album going radioactive platinum. Today, with the new CD release containing the near-complete material from both nights, it is a quadruple album, with more gospel on it than even the most fervent Christian (or Voodoo) practitioner could chew off in one bite. But a good bargain for one's money.

 

If still another opinion is really called for, I'd say there is actually not that much difference be­tween Amazing Grace and those early sessions when she had the added benefit of super-young age to add to the jaw-dropping effect. Except, of course, that the sound quality is much better, and that the proceedings are expectedly grander now that this is no longer «the little Aretha», but «the Living Queen of Soul». As for the Grace — well, if there were dedicated followers of Aretha from childhood that night at the church, I don't think they would have dared say that the Grace was particularly high upon her during those particular hours. This is just your usual, regular, awe­some Ms. Aretha Franklin — but specifically pandering to Mr. and Mrs. Churchgoer. Me, I'm more of a Mr. Stayhomer, and thus, not really qualified to position my thumbs in this matter.

 

HEY NOW HEY (THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY) (1973)

 

1) Hey Now Hey (The Other Side Of The Sky); 2) Somewhere; 3) So Swell When You're Well; 4) Angel; 5) Sister From Texas; 6) Mister Spain; 7) That's The Way I Feel About Cha; 8) Moody's Mood; 9) Just Right Tonight; 10*) Master Of Eyes.

 

This record initiated Aretha's critical and commercial decline — but for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps inspired by recent examples of artistic liberation such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, Franklin dared to put forward a record that took more chances than usual, aspiring to some­thing larger than just another hit package — and was duly castigated. Duly, in the sense that she could never hope to ascend the heights of Stevie's musical genius (she is, after all, primarily a singer and interpreter), nor did she choose the infallible path of putting forward such a Mother of all Socially Conscious Albums as was Gaye's What's Going On (whose purely musical aspects, in my opinion, frankly, leave much to be desired in the wake of its reputation).

 

Instead, Hey Now Hey, co-produced by Aretha herself with the already legendary Quincy Jones, simply opts for a more experimental, more serious approach. The album is quite intentionally non-hit-oriented; the closest thing to a potential hit is Carolyn Franklin's pleasant, conservative ballad 'Angel', and, true enough, as a single it sold better than the LP itself. But the rest of it has Aretha doing all sorts of unpredictable things — like engaging in multi-part suites with alterna­ting soft and hard bits (title track); singing consoling odes to miserable junkies ('Mr. Spain'); put­ting on Ella Fitzgerald's shoes as a scat singer ('Moody's Mood'); and simply writing — a lot: more than half of the songs here are either credited to Aretha all by herself or co-written with Quincy. Quite a precedent, neh?

 

As I said, the gamble did not pay off; critics were mostly underwhelmed, and fans bewildered. But I dare say Hey Now Hey belongs to those not-of-their-time stacks of albums that simply wait to be rediscovered, taking as much time as they need to; in the future, it may yet be seen as a ma­jor highlight for the lady. Perversely, it is exactly the two most frequently lauded tracks that, I think, are the album's corniest: 'Angel' shows that Carolyn Franklin was much better at writing pop songs than ballads, and should have been better left to Roberta Flack; and the lush orchestra­ted cover of 'Some­where' cannot hope to beat the original (and Bernstein or no Bernstein, the ori­ginal is still little more than a sappy Broadway number).

 

The rest mostly rules, though. The title song throws you off the track in a great way, wobbling between the Friscoish psychedelic bridges and the Funkadelic-style verses; if Aretha truly wrote this, it is the most complex and rewarding thing she ever did. 'Sister From Texas' is oddly dark and mysterious, and, for my money, spreads God's message more effectively than all of Amazing Grace put together. 'Mister Spain', on the outside, employs much the same arrangement techni­ques as 'Angel', but touches upon rougher and darker subjects and is completely devoid of whiffs of cheese so prominent on 'Angel'. 'So Swell When You're Well' pulsates with fun, in the good old steady blues-rock way, and so does 'Moody's Mood', in the jazz way.

 

Some of the tracks are overlong, and there is little feel of consistency; if anything, it reeks of a job well conceived, but sort of executed mid-way through, which may explain the critical resista­nce: intellectuals like their concept albums smoothly oiled and well polished. Clearly, the lady was trying to bite off a bit more than could be chewed; clearly, with more than a decade of show-biz behind her back and six years of superstardom assured with a winning formula, it would be hopeless to try and, all of a sudden, apply for the position of «The Brains of Black Music». But anything of the sort is still miles better than simply giving in to mainstream trends of the time and eroding your reputation with the general flow...

 

...which, unfortunately, is exactly what happened; perhaps, had the album been even a little more successful and critical reply more positive, the rest of Franklin's career in the Seventies (at least in the Seventies; no hope for the Eighties, ever) would not have dragged so miserably. Thumbs up, then, for a flawed, but extremely interesting and, in parts, highly inspiring record that is so ab­so­lutely unique in her catalog.

 

LET ME IN YOUR LIFE (1974)

 

1) Let Me In Your Life; 2) Every Natural Thing; 3) Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing; 4) I'm In Love; 5) Until You Come Back To Me; 6) The Masquerade Is Over; 7) With Pen In Hand; 8) Oh Baby; 9) Eight Days On The Road; 10) If You Don't Think; 11) A Song For You.

 

A flat-out bore. So the experimental approach of the last record did not really pay off with the audiences. Big deal — you'd think she could simply go back to the unassuming, but fiery R'n'B of the Young, Gifted & Black caliber. Why, then, do we get this inane collection of generic Seven­ties sappy-pappy instead? Where is the music?

 

As the grooving bassline, the chuckling organ, and the chicken-scratchy guitars introduce the title track, one is immediately misled into the impression that this is going to be another high-spirited romp. Then, one minute into the song, all of it is gone, replaced by a soft, sleepy beat, equally soporific strings, and wedding march brass puffing — and from then on, the song never really awakens back to life, despite switching from bridge to verse melody several times.

 

The only other songs that rock out a wee bit are Eddie Hinton's 'Every Natural Thing' and Jerry Ragovoy's 'Eight Days On The Road' — neither one an enticing pot of honey by Aretha's usual standards, but, verily and truly, the only songs on here that save me from feeling comatose. Just about everything else is good for you only if you are a really big fan of the American Soft Ballad, 1970s style, where clichéd atmosphere always prevails over melody-writing and the Diva aspect always dominates over real emotional content.

 

Not that there aren't any — previously — good songs on the album; but material as diverse as 'Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing' (formerly a big, deserving hit for Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell) and 'I'm In Love' (formerly a big, deserving hit for Wilson Pickett) is run through the same grinder, chopped up and mixed with the same pompous strings and wobbly keyboards, and there is nothing unpredictable about Aretha's interpretation, either. And on the other side of the business, the big hit, a cover of Stevie Wonder's then-unreleased 'Until You Come Back To Me', is a sweet, catchy little pop number, but not really suitable for Aretha's general style, plus, it's sort of shallow — Stevie wrote it in 1967, for Christ's sake, while still in his early and fully conven­tional years; for the Queen of Soul to make a big hit out of it as late as 1974 would be akin to the Beatles going out with a bang in 1969 by putting out 'Besame Mucho' as their last single.

 

Aretha's own compositions have dwindled back to two, and they are written in the exact same vein as everything else on here, i. e. completely forgettable. And then, for the final number, we get a cover of Leon Russell's 'A Song For You', which, by that point, everyone, from the Carpen­ters to Cher, had already covered. It is almost like a symbolic sign of submission, surpassed only by the cheap-glam look of the sleeve photo, fit, perhaps, for a Donna Summer album, but quite degrading for the likes of the Queen. The album might have — very temporarily — put Aretha back on the charts, and reinstated Atlantic's faith in her, but this is truly the turning point, beyond which the «Franklin phenomenon» finally mutates into the «Franklin legacy». Thumbs down.

 

WITH EVERYTHING I FEEL IN ME (1974)

 

1) Without Love; 2) Don't Go Breaking My Heart; 3) When You Get Right Down To It; 4) You'll Never Get To Heaven; 5) With Everything I Feel In Me; 6) I Love Every Little Thing About You; 7) Sing It Again, Say It Again; 8) All Of These Things; 9) You Move Me.

 

The most remarkable thing about this album is, arguably, its sleeve picture, on which Aretha, first time ever, resorts to a bit of sexploitation — quite a long distance from the prudish cover on Ama­­zing Grace. It did not help; the record was a commercial disaster, and initiated a series of flops that only subsided when Luther Vandross took care of the lady, but that would not be co­ming up until almost a decade later. Worse, it is the first in a series of Aretha albums that, as of now, still have to see a legitimate CD release (my version is a fan-made LP rip with all the re­quired hissing and crackling in place — sweet memories of days gone by).

 

Understandably, the record is indeed mediocre. But it does not follow exactly the silky-boredom formula of Let Me In Your Life; the artist, the band, and the producers make a serious effort to restore the balance between upbeat and fluffy, and, even though by that time the classic aura of hot late Sixties R'n'B had all but blown away, with strings leading an assault on guitars, glossy, pasteurized production sucking the breath of life out of the rough edges of yesterday, and smooth disco rhythms pummeling out the unpredictable improv aspect of funk, some of these tunes still rock out nicely to shades and memories of ye olde Atlantic R'n'B.

 

The best song is almost unquestionably sister Carolyn's 'Say It Again', a cool funky sermon with an imaginative wah-wah / brass / organ arrangement, in which Aretha becomes a bit player on the verge of getting forever engulfed in the forest, but who cares if the musicians are so obviously on fire? 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' (nothing to do with the Elton John hit, which had not even be­en written yet) is faster and closer to the nascent disco style in terms of beat and strings use, but is still harmless danceable fun. And the self-penned title track should be allowed to grow on you; it is one of the hottest numbers she ever wrote, or, at least, the backing band has done everything in its power to make it so by adding strange subtle touches (like, for instance, using what sounds like an orchestra of slide guitars — sic! — instead of the actual strings).

 

Against this background, perfunctory ballads such as 'You Move Me' cannot do too much harm; and, as an added bonus, those behind the wheels suddenly remember that they are actually recor­ding one of the most phenomenal voices in popular music, and let the lady blossom on cool codas to such otherwise simply okayish songs as 'When You Get Right Down To It' (the echo effort on her belting at the last minute works really great with the bass strings) and 'You'll Never Get To Heaven' (wonderful acappella finish as the instruments fade away).

 

The somewhat successful single was the opening ballad 'Without Love': a moderately memorable pop ballad whose organ introduction happens to be more emotional, however, than Franklin's own singing — hardly the best choice, I'd say; if the idea behind the album was to toughen up her flabbified sound, 'Without Love' is one of the least convincing tunes behind that concept (even the Stevie Wonder cover, in my opinion, one of the weakest things on here overall, sounds tougher than 'Without Love'). Regard­less, the entire record is well worth getting to know, and, at the very least, it is hardly any worse than contemporary (female) R'n'B from 1974. If anything, Aretha was deteriorating together with the times, not against them. Thumbs up.

 

YOU (1975)

 

1) Mr. DJ (5 For The DJ); 2) It Only Happens (When I Look At You); 3) I'm Not Strong Enough To Love You Aga­in; 4) Walk Softly; 5) You Make My Life; 6) Without You; 7) The Sha-La Bandit; 8) You; 9) You Got All The Aces; 10) As Long As You Are There.

 

Aretha hit the first of her several commercial nadirs here, although it is not easy to understand why: surely much of this stuff is at least on par with those huge Barry Manilow hits of the decade in terms of attention-grabbing, and most of it is far less comatose. But considering the popular suc­cess of the ballad-choked Let Me In Your Life and the relative failure of her next two LPs, it is likely that «comatose» is just what the public wanted from the Queen of Soul.

 

Instead, she gave them her liveliest, most recklessly party-oriented get-it-up single in years — 'Mr. DJ', wobbling on a classy, irresistible funky groove — and was thanked by seeing it stall somewhere in the middle of the Top 100. It is certainly no 'Rock Steady'; totally devoid of the seductive dark aspect of the latter, it is, like the lyrics honestly state, a simple paean to all the disc jockeys out there who gotta "shake their funky soul", but it's brilliantly executed dance fun that should have been vastly popular, but wasn't — perhaps because the smoother, glossier disco atti­tudes were already crawling in.

 

A few other tracks are likeable pop-R'n'B hybrids ('It Only Happens', 'You Make My Life'), but the major other highlight is 'Without You', another slice of superb Atlantic funk with a bumble-bee bass line to die for. Together with 'Mr. DJ', these two tracks are enough to constitute a strong argument for getting the album back in print, no matter how much a handful of the usual tepid ballads would call for the opposite.

 

Aretha's brief flirt with reggae on 'You Got All The Aces' is, however, not at all successful; dres­sing reggae rhythms with gentle background vocals, R'n'B brass, and an overall sweet pop atti­tude will almost inevitably produce a pointless, lifeless hybrid — in fact, most attempts to adapt the Jamaican spirit of reggae to generic mainstream entertainment values of the 1970s are about as lame as an attempt by, say, Neil Diamond to sing the blues.

 

Overall, You's weakest side is that the ratio is again somewhat skewed in favour of lighter mate­rial; count but two «hardcore» R'n'B numbers, four fluffy dance-pop numbers (including the un­lucky reggae bit), and four rosy-cloudy ballads, none of which rises above generic. Where are all those gospel roots? Did she get so sick of them after the Amazing Grace experience, or was the­re somehow a general industry consensus that, with disco on the rise, God must have embarked on a three-year picnic? Unclear. What is clear is that You fits in beautifully into the fluff-head, hedo­nistic atmosphere of «The Me Decade», but does not engage in the filthiest of its excesses, and at least the excellent musicianship, moderately acceptable songwriting level, and Aretha's usual professionalism make it still worth an occasional listen.

 

SPARKLE (1976)

 

1) Sparkle; 2) Something He Can Feel; 3) Hooked On Your Love; 4) Look Into Your Heart; 5) I Get High; 6) Jump; 7) Loving You Baby; 8) Rock With Me.

 

Technically, this is not really the soundtrack to the movie Sparkle, even though all of the songs were indeed performed in the movie. They were, however, performed by different actors rather than Aretha — but as the movie took off among black audiences, and so did the songs that were, after all, mostly penned by Curtis Mayfield himself, it was decided (don't ask me by whom) that a wiser commercial decision would be to let the Queen of Soul sing all the material, instead of all the inferior human material. The original vocals were therefore wiped out, and Aretha's singing pasted on top of the instrumental tracks — the dehumanizing potential of technology at work.

 

Nevertheless, the move was smart, temporarily restoring Aretha's commercially shattered career and giving her a last bright moment with Atlantic. In reality, the success of Sparkle must have mostly had to do with the success of the movie — frankly speaking, the songs are not that good, and there is no reason for them to be: Mayfield was recording so much at the time that it was only natural for him to keep his best stuff to himself and relegate all the mediocre dregs to outside me­ndicants. The overall sound is generic, but pleasant: dense orchestration, multiple layers of brass, keyboards, guitars, harps, and whatever other instruments were lying around. Yet behind all the layers, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of essence or memorability.

 

Ms. Franklin does attempt to lay into these songs as if she'd played all the roles in the movie, but it does little good: as gritty as Sparkle the movie was (dealing with the rise and fall of an all-girl band loosely based on the Supremes), most of the grit takes place off stage, and within the sound­track is reflected only in 'I Get High', a dark, chaotic aria on the effects of drug usage, which real­ly reads more like a moody instrumental composition, with someone rashly deciding to slap on a bunch of deranged vocals as a last-minute thought.

 

The rest is generally just soft-rock, or, rather, soft-R'n'B sentimental fluff, with 'Something He Can Feel' as the biggest hit — deservedly, since the song builds up all the way to the strongest cho­rus on the album, except that it is perhaps more suitable for a tighter, poppier delivery than Aretha's usual and totally unavoidable free-form vocal flow. 'Rock With Me' is also pretty cheer­ful, upbeat, and catchy, and 'Hooked On Your Love' gets quite a few unexpected chord changes in the chorus for a run-of-the-mill ballad.

 

The bottomline really depends on whether one trusts the sales record. To me, even such a relative commercial failure as You seems livelier, energetic, and less calculated. But there is nothing tre­mendously wrong with Sparkle, either — in fact, it stands up to repeated listening, if only for the high amount of creativity that went into the arrangements. Calculated, yes, but they took the time to work it out, so thumbs up out of basic respect at least.

 

SWEET PASSION (1977)

 

1) Break It To Me Gently; 2) When I Think About You; 3) What I Did For Love; 4) No One Could Ever Love You More; 5) A Tender Touch; 6) Touch Me Up; 7) Sunshine Will Never Be The Same; 8) Meadows Of Springtime; 9) Mumbles/I've Got The Music In Me; 10) Sweet Passion.

 

This and the next two albums put Aretha back in a commercial slump, leading to her finally brea­king her ties with Atlantic to seek better fortune with Arista. It is true that, somewhere around the mid-Seventies, Atlantic lost that «golden touch» that used to allow it to be innovative and com­mercially successful at the same time. But, in retrospect, it was not so much the fault of the label's bosses as it was due to the dumbing down of public taste. The label made a relatively late switch to disco, for instance, and when it did, it did not success in realigning its old guard in the new formation. What worked for Chic did not work for Aretha, and vice versa.

 

Sweet Passion is typical of these struggles — it is forgettable, but hardly awful. Its lone minor hit, 'Break It To Me Gently', launches an elegant attempt to combine orchestrated balladry with grum­pier funk rhythms, but the hybridization may leave you cold because the individual parts are cold themselves, cold and formulaic, as if the idea never got all that far beyond just being laid out on paper, and then executed completely without enthusiasm. The same goes for most other tracks: in­teresting melodic ideas pop out from time to time, but never translate into genius.

 

Still, three tracks at least are salvageable and well worth getting to know. 'Touch Me Up' is Are­tha's first true venture into disco territory, elaborated by Motown veteran Lamont Dozier, and it is a cheesy, colorful multi-layered romp (not unlike Al Green's similarly tinged 'I Feel Good') who­se fun quotient suffices to overcome any formulaic banalities. But the album's true surprises await at the end. First, 'Mumbles / I've Got The Music In Me' is a retro-jazz number that features the best scat singing in Aretha's entire career (how deeply ironic that such a quirky little gem is to be found at the start of the lady's disco period, rather than well back in time when she used to do whole LPs of mediocre jazz material).

 

And then there is the anthemic seven-minute title track, completely self-penned and structured as a semi-free-form piece of R'n'B that moves from soft to hard and from tight chorus to loose im­prov without warning. It may not be a great, wond'rous composition, but it is, at the least, an inte­r­­esting attempt at something unconventionally soulful, all the more surprising to turn up on a re­cord whose primary goal is commercial success and whose primary failure is the impossibility to reach commercial success. 'Sweet Passion' never cares about any of these things, becoming, argu­ably, the last track in quite a long while where Aretha is actually trying to say something. This should at least be a good argument for saving it up for all the career retrospectives. The album as a whole cannot help but deserve a thumbs down — but it is not without its merits. And it is downright wrong to claim that Aretha and disco are two incompatible things, either. Too bad she never could bring herself to becoming the lead singer in Chic or something.

 

ALMIGHTY FIRE (1978)

 

1) Almighty Fire (Woman Of The Future); 2) Lady, Lady; 3) More Than Just A Joy; 4) Keep On Loving You; 5) I Needed You Baby; 6) Close To You; 7) No Matter Who You Love; 8) This You Can Believe; 9) I'm Your Speed.

 

For Almighty Fire, Aretha once again turned to Curtis Mayfield for guidance. And once again, things got off to a good start — the title track here is a classic, burning-up funk groove on which Curtis and Aretha succeed in pointing the clavinet, horns, and strings in the rightfully «disturb­ing» direction, and once they do, Ms. Franklin belts the lyrics out as if she were on fire herself: there is some absolutely head-spinning vocalizing here, even if the melody per se leaves some­thing to be desired.

 

Unfortunately, Mayfield never gave the rest of the songs the same attention, and the next seven songs never ever amount above pleasant background muzak. Danceable and professional as al­ways, they do not offer anything special. Like with Sweet Passion, there have been complaints that the whole thing was too heavily disco-fied, but such opinions are misguided: 'Keep On Lov­ing You' and 'I Needed You Baby' are the only fast dance numbers on the record, and even those two are not straightforward disco in the rhythmic sense. Not that they're special or anything, but at least they kick one inch more ass than everything else.

 

As if to give final proof that, for the most part, Mayfield's waning talents were all but wasted on the LP, Aretha finishes the dusky proceedings with her own piano solo ballad, 'I'm Your Speed', which feels more heartfelt and meaningful than all of those seven preceding tunes put together. Everything gets its proper taste in context, of course: on a record like Young, Gifted And Black such a song would come across as a cute throwaway or minor highlight to be enjoyed after every­thing else, but in the environment of Almighty Fire listening to it is like witnessing your loved one come back to senses after a period of heavy sedation.

 

Which is why 'I'm Your Speed', with all its surprising soulfulness, would not do good on a best-of compilation or retrospective, for which, in the proper way, only the title track could be salvage­able. A big thumbs down — mostly to Mayfield, who had all but betrayed the Queen's faith in him, so much so that the two would never work together again.

 

LA DIVA (1979)

 

1) Ladies Only; 2) It's Gonna Get A Bit Better Now; 3) What If I Should Ever Need You; 4) Honey I Need Your Love; 5) I Was Made For You; 6) Only Star; 7) Reasons Why; 8) You Brought Me Back To Life; 9) Half A Love; 10) The Feeling.

 

Totally worthless crap — one of those few fortunate spots where critical sense, bad taste instincts, and public opinion all come together in a rare moment of unity. The sleeve photo was probably suf­ficient in itself to repulse most of the old fans and bore stiff all the potential new ones: the Lady reclining on a red sofa in a Donna Summeresque position, sexy slit dress, cowboy boots, cheesy coiffure, and album title spelled out in bright shiny stars all present. A closer look at the Lady's face, how­ever, reveals that the Lady has absolutely no idea what exactly she is doing on that sofa; the idea of marketing Aretha Franklin off as a sexy disco chick is comparable in its idiocy to a heavy metal image for Pat Boone.

 

To be perfectly fair, again, there is not all that much disco stuff on the album, but what there is is truly disgusting, including arguably the worst song ever recorded by the Queen, 'Only Star', which truly has to be heard to be disbelieved — or, better, to remind ourselves why disco (a genre that has, since its downfall, been partially rehabilitated because its few successes have lingered in memory where its many gross-out horrors have faded away) truly deserved all the public hate; with atrocious, bimbo-style delivered, lines like "I'm gonna be the only star tonight at the disco", Ms. Franklin has introduced her own small contribution to the shift in standards, and thank her very much for that. The one thing I totally cannot understand is that 'Only Star' is credited, of all people, to Are­tha Franklin: she wrote this garbage herself? Why?..

 

The lead single, 'Ladies Only', was also self-penned — and almost as awful. It thinks it's clever — it's a trick song, see: one minute it's a slow-moving syrupy ballad, then whoosh, off go the veils, and there goes the brandest new disco tune from that piece of real hot stuff, the sexy Aretha «Burst-Yer-Pants» Franklin. It might have been funny, had it not all been so sad.

 

La Diva was produced by somewhat legendary hitmaster Van McCoy, who died of a heart attack a few months before the album was even released (that should probably give you an extra hint on the quality); out of all the disco songs on it, his 'The Feeling' is probably the best one (some cool Saturday Night Feveresque orchestration, at least), which is not saying much. The best song ov­erall is probably Lalome Washburn's 'It's Gonna Get A Bit Better', whose muscular funky arran­gement kicks tons of shit from all the inane disco on here, not to mention Aretha being overall far better used to this style — any normal record executive, upon listening even once to the final product, would have immediately thrown out half and make the lady record more songs like this Washburn number, but hey, we all knew that disco would last forever back then, didn't we?

 

Thumbs down without question, and chalk that album up as one of the top 10 reasons why disco had to die — it all but destroyed Franklin's artistic reputation without even compensating her on the material level (La Diva was one of the poorest selling albums in her career), and finally seve­red her ties with the Atlantic motherlode as well. Not that anybody really cared by then: Atlantic's golden days were over, and, with R'n'B standards moving steadily into the «faceless automaton» department, with hits that might as well be performed by machines rather than people, there was hardly any chance that the label would strike that gold one more time.

 

ARETHA (1980)

 

1) Come To Me; 2) Can't Turn You Loose; 3) United Together; 4) Take Me With You; 5) Whatever It Is; 6) What A Fool Believes; 7) Together Again; 8) Love Me Forever; 9) School Days.

 

Aretha's debut with Arista Records is definitely an improvement over the self-parody of La Diva, but not by much. The fact that it restored her, albeit temporarily, on the charts, probably had more to do with promotion on the part of the Blues Brothers, who'd arranged for her fun cameo in the movie as the hot-tempered boss lady singing 'Think', and thus endeared her to an entire new generation of Saturday Night Live alumni. Don't think they were all that happy, though, upon rushing to the stores to scoop up her new album.

 

Aretha — at the time, the title could hardly have been confused with that of the long out of print 1961 album, although, today, a retitling to Aretha Reloaded might be welcome — is certainly a more reasonable proposition for the Queen than her last bunch of Atlantic albums. The giggly di­sco crap is gone, the arrangements do not rely so much on strings-based pop clichés of the 1970s, and the general atmosphere is slightly more relaxed, so that one does not fall under the impres­sion that the lady is permanently trying to prove something. Even the photo on the album cover gives us arguably the most realistic Aretha expression we've seen since 1970.

 

Which means this could have been a fairly good record, if only the songs didn't suck. Unfortuna­tely, the music is pretty much all rotten. The idea to modernize Otis Redding's classic 'Can't Turn You Loose' through robotic funk riffs and electronic drums may be questionable, but the main groove is still preserved, and this means that every single other groove-based dance number on here pales miserably next to this frail shadow of Otis' greatness. The only other track that is ho­nestly fun is Aretha's own 'School Days', a charming deception — starts out as if it were going to be a soft, nostalgic, miserably boring ballad-o-mush, then, in good old fashion, transforms into a fast, exciting, modern jazz performance.

 

If only Aretha bothered to let her hair down on tracks other than 'School Days' and the Redding number... but throughout the rest of the record she plays it safe, more often hiding behind the big, but meaningless boom of drums and keyboards than not. The big anthemic ballad 'United Toge­ther', a typically bland Diva-style number that made it all the way to a whopping No. 56 on the charts (for all its Bigness and Pomp!), tries way too hard to communicate with the Lord's an­gels to convince me that it was indeed graced by an angelic presence. Sill, it is at least noticeable; the rest of the songs just roll by like ordinary clouds, instantly forgotten. For the record, the cover of the Doobie Brothers' 'What A Fool Believes' almost improves on the original, with a more com­plex arrangement and a vocal delivery that conveys deeper understanding of the lyrics (the sub­ject matter of strenuous male-female relationship is, after all, right up Aretha's alley) — but me­lodically, this piece of primitive crap totally stunk with Kenny Loggins, totally stunk worse with the Doobies, and was objectively proven to have been skunk-raped upon birth with Aretha.

 

Thumbs down are in the order of things, although without a whole lot of cringing in addition; the tunes are really not so much puke-worthy as bland and expendable. At the same time, 'School Days' just might be Aretha's best overall creation of the entire decade — which, of course, does not bear good tidings for the rest of the decade.

 

LOVE ALL THE HURT AWAY (1981)

 

1) Love All The Hurt Away; 2) Hold On! I'm Comin'; 3) Living In The Streets; 4) There's A Star For Everyone; 5) You Can't Always Get What You Want; 6) It's My Turn; 7) Truth And Honesty; 8) Search On; 9) Whole Lot Of Me; 10) Kind Of Man.

 

The only good thing that can, overall, characterize these early Eighties Aretha albums is that the Ari­sta people did try not only to modernize her, but to «maturate» her as well. That photo on the front sleeve, for instance — she hadn't looked that stylish or genuine since at least 1970. And the music is always deeper, denser, and darker than on her last Atlantic albums, dropping the giggly disco crap in favour of bombastic adult contemporary... crap.

 

Half of this album is devoted to instantly forgettable «diva ballads», which, by then, she could probably sing under deep narcosis without any difference, and the other half is primitive electro-pop that would disgust Michael Jackson, let alone Prince. The title track is a duet with George Benson, a first for Aretha — never before did anyone dare to market her singles on a double bill, and, fortunately, this one sold so miserably that she never went on the «Duet Circuit for Pop Di­no­saurs» that made many a good artist into a marketing curio. But the fact that it is a duet at least makes it a standout number.

 

Well, actually, another standout number is the dance version of 'You Can't Always Get What You Want', a good candidate for the «Top 100 Butchered Classics» of all time list, but also a shocking distraction from the interminable boredom of it all. How I wish to have been able to get inside the mind of the person who came up with the idea of re-recording the song on a foundation of slap bass and cheap synths... then maybe I don't. At least the similar rearrangement of Sam & Dave's 'Hold On! I'm Comin' has this classy brass melody arrangement, putting it closer to the likable rearrangement of 'Can't Turn You Loose' than the Stones' killer job.

 

None of the other songs are even worth talking about. If you do not have a specific alergy to all that dance crap and deep-soul-by-the-pound as they used to make them in the Eighties, it's all lis­tenable, but nobody gave a damn when writing these songs and Aretha probably didn't give a damn when she sang them, although, her being a professional and all, I couldn't say that she is slacking: the vocals are as powerful as ever, throughout. But great singing from Franklin is a gi­ven, so I just give it a thumbs down for all the evil people who had the nerve to spit on it. (For the record, evil people included several members of Toto — throw on a couple hundred thousand years on the frying-pan, please. Just for justice sake: they probably won't even notice, what with the already accumulated several billion centuries for mass spiritual genocide; I'd rather listen to Love All The Hurt Away over and over again than having to repair my ears from 'Rosanna' just one more time).

 

JUMP TO IT (1982)

 

1) Jump To It; 2) Love Me Right; 3) If She Don't Want Your Lovin'; 4) This Is For Real; 5) (It's Just) Your Love; 6) I Wanna Make It Up To You; 7) It's Your Thing; 8) Just My Daydream.

 

Dragged out of the commercial slump once again — this time, by contemporary hero Luther Van­dross. The late Luther, as we mostly remember him, was the king of the suave, the chic, the po­lish, the gloss, leading his voluntary listeners straight into the spasms of orgasm and his involun­tary ones straight into the spasms of forceful expulsion of the contents of one's stomach through the mouth, to avoid nasty words. Nevertheless, even the most professional and experienced haters of Mr. Vangloss will probably acknowledge that the man was a talented craftsman, a sort of anti-Prince, always playing it cool and safe where Mr. Nelson would take every chance — and getting immaculately good at playing safe.

 

The idea, I believe, was to bring Aretha fully up-to-date with the modern world — to restore her to the status of Diva, both of dance music and of power balladry, which La Diva actually flunked and Arista's early albums didn't exactly succeed in, either. So, if anything, Jump To It sounds even more Eighties than the two records before it. Sterile and calculated to the very last note, and totally fo­cused on mind-numbing repetition of its hooks: when you have "jump, jump, jump to it!" blasted in your ear four times in a row before any of the instruments start to come in, you know it's gonna make the Top 40 at least.

 

Trying to come up with theoretical ideas on Jump To It is a bit like coming up with a seductive description on an Ikea piece of furniture. It's smooth, it's functional, it's gonna do its thang for a few years, but it's unlikely to figure in your memories and memoirs. Oh, and it's probably going to have at least one really ugly, really annoying aspect that is going to bug you for all of its pre­sence in your house. On Jump To It, it may be the power ballads, starting with the Archangel™-appro­ved m-m-melisma (also known as the 'wo-wu-wa-we-wi' mode of singing) of 'This Is For Real' and ending with almost seven minutes of 'I Wanna Make It Up To You', Aretha's self-pen­ned apology for all the bad things she gone done to her man over the past two decades — even as it starts to finally fade away, Vandross pushes the volume levels back up to make her apologize one more time; quite embarrassing, really.

 

The generic dance stuff is more tolerable, but not because of any decent amount of songwriting (there isn't any) and not because of Aretha's enthusiasm in getting in the groove (I do not feel she is at her vocal best here; this whole artificial re-imaging of her image is really stifling). The good news is the slap bass playing from the ultra-talented Marcus Miller, which really gets the fingers moving — even when he is restricted to disco patterns ('Love Me Right'), he can still play around with them, giving his bass more freedom and expressivity than everything else on this album combined, including Franklin's singing. Unfortunately, for some reason, the minimalistic, bass-only karaoke version of Jump To It is still unavailable in stores, so you'll have to do your own digital editing if you want to appreciate the album's artistry without the cheese.

 

'Jump To It' is the only song from the record that is regularly met on compilations, but a correct compilation that wants to reflect the spirit of Aretha Franklin rather than the peak levels of her revenue should replace it with Smokey Robinson's 'Just My Daydream' — stuck at the very end, it is the perfect retro remedy against the lifeless robo-funk and corporate balladeering of the pre­vious seven numbers, the one number on which we get to hear Aretha's real voice, as the narcosis wears off a little earlier than anticipated. A pleasant piece of filler on any of her classic LPs, a soul-soothing highlight on this one — coming too late and too briefly to save it from the unavoi­dable thumbs down. 

 

GET IT RIGHT (1983)

 

1) Get It Right; 2) Pretender; 3) Every Girl (Wants My Guy); 4) When You Love Me Like That; 5) I Wish It Would Rain; 6) Better Friends Than Lovers; 7) I Got Your Love; 8) Giving In.

 

Believe it or not, this second Franklin-Vandross collaboration is a wee bit better than the first — and, of course, in strict accordance with Murphy's law, it sold far less, making this the duo's last collaboration. Too bad — they were just starting to get accustomed to each other.

 

Not that there is a huge difference or anything, but Get It Right gets one thing right: it cuts down, quite seriously, on overblown power ballads, concentrating almost completely on the dance pop aspect; even the more sentimental tracks are mostly set to bouncy rhythms, giving Marcus Miller plenty of chances to practice his slap playing. Certainly, this is not the kind of style at all that would ever truly fit Franklin's breeding, but... anything but this Eighties style of boom-boom bal­ladry. Even the bubbly Casio sound.

 

The title track, when released as a single, was obviously targeted at the same people who gobbled up 'Jump To It'. However, 'Get It Right' cuts down a little bit on the flashy (fleshy) sexiness of its predecessor, its hooks are less explicit, and setting up a counting-out rhyme as the main chorus me­lody may be considered a dumb move even by people who are not usually bothered by that kind of thing. Anyway, it takes time to appreciate it, and even then it's hardly a timeless dance classic that will not make one regret that time. So it sort of flopped.

 

The one recording that may eventually survive as an interesting timepiece is the reworking of The Temptations' 'I Wish It Would Rain'. This is where Aretha steps into her element, and one can only regret that she did not try out the song ten years earlier; Miller gives it his best, but the robo­-drums and synthesized strings neutralize his effort. Yet, what would sound as a passable Eighties curio on an Aretha retrospective becomes an obvious, outstanding highlight here, in the midst of all the routine dance-pop.

 

More bad news include Aretha's first, very tentative, and, as a result, very pitiful-sounding at­tempt at rapping (the coda to 'Pretender'); and plenty of repetitive, mind-numbing choruses that drag each song out to about twice its expected length, which is why, like Jump To It, this album also has but eight tracks. Did people really make use of that? were American discos hopping and bopping to the extended grooves of Get It Right back in 1983? I seriously doubt it. And, to make matters worse, the album cover flashes the cheesiest photo for the lady since La Diva tried pictu­ring her as a disco whore. So this is still a thumbs down, despite the best efforts of the bass play­er and the semi-successful Temptations cover.

 

WHO'S ZOOMIN' WHO? (1985)

 

1) Freeway Of Love; 2) Another Night; 3) Sweet Bitter Love; 4) Who's Zooming Who?; 5) Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves; 6) Until You Say You Love Me; 7) Ain't Nobody Ever Loved You; 8) Push; 9) Integrity.

 

From the hands of Luther Vandross, Aretha was transferred to Narada Michael Walden, yet ano­ther glossy production guru, fresh from making the newest star out of Whitney Houston. The only thing these two had in common was living during the same crappy musical age, which means no way of getting rid of the electronic drums and generic synths. As for the rest, where Vandross tri­ed to treat Aretha all «lady-like», smooth and slick and solemn even when jumping to it or getting it right, Walden makes her simply let her hair down and get in the groove. Who the hell would want to buy «cold dance music» in 1985? Word of the day is «hot», baby.

 

Given Aretha's usual luck with steamy dance hits, Who's Zoomin' Who? could have easily been another disaster on par with La Diva. Surprisingly, it's not that bad — actually, all the predictable corniness aside, it might be the most fun album of her Arista days. The power ballads ('Sweet Bit­ter Love', 'Until You Say You Love Me') are incorrigible, but the dance grooves, even without Marcus Miller's slap bass over them, are louder, rougher, more brutal and down-to-earth than the sterilized production on the Vandross LPs. In particular, the big hit 'Freeway Of Love' is surpri­singly catchy, and, in another age, could have been a true rocking classic for the dame — in this age, the synth bass still ends up ruining it.

 

On the other hand, there are even traces of diversity: we have big bombastic arena-rock ('Another Night'), big bombastic hard rock riffage ('Push'), a strange leftover from the disco days (Aretha's own 'Integrity' with classic Seventies' strings that probably sounded quite nostalgic back in those days already), and ridiculously dumb pop (title track) with a chorus that will stick all the same. Not a single one of these songs manages to make the very best out of the miscalculated machine­ry of 1980s production, but, in between themselves, they succeed in drawing attention — solving the biggest problem one usually experiences with mainstream commercial records.

 

Over it all, like a local Mount Everest of sorts, hovers 'Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves' — a song that, strictly speaking, does not belong here at all, a «donation» from Eurythmics for the me­re reason that Aretha happened to be invited to duet with Annie Lennox on the song. (Ironically, in the context of the band's own Be Here Tonight, released the same year, the number was just one of its moderately decent attractions rather than the absolute pinnacle). With its dark riff (alle­gedly copped from Talking Heads' 'Great Curve', but who cares), lonesome cool guitar solo, and the Annie-Aretha duet blowing it all to high heaven, here is one great example of how main­stream music from 1985 still can sound overwhelming, even today.

 

And although nothing can be easier than poking fun at the simplistic feminist charge of the song (laugh of the day: midway through explaining how proud they are to be «coming out of the kitchen», the ladies are seized with sudden fear at being mistaken for a couple of modern day Lysistratas, and rush out to assure us that «a man still loves a woman, and a woman still loves a man» — no shit!), there is still no denying the basic brawny power of the anthem, or the fact that it actually feels nice to hear Aretha back in her cherished element, one that Vandross tried so hard to erase but, ultimately, and fortunately, failed.

 

Obviously, I cannot give the album a thumbs up — for the non-historian and non-diehard, it must be as skippable as the rest of Aretha's Eighties catalog — but the way I see it, out of all the mis­guided attempts to steer the Queen in all sorts of alien directions, Who's Zoomin' Who? is pro­bably the most successful, and deserves to be heard at least once — if only out of curiosity — in its entirety, not just the big hit singles.

 

ARETHA (1986)

 

1) Jimmy Lee; 2) I Knew You Were Waiting; 3) Do You Still Remember; 4) Jumpin' Jack Flash; 5) Rock-A-Lott; 6) An Angel Cries; 7) He'll Come Along; 8) If You Need My Love Tonight; 9) Look To The Rainbow.

 

A second chance for Narada Michael Walden, but nowhere near as well exploited as the first. Un­questionably the fruitfull-est thing about this album is its sleeve painting, and only because it hap­pened to be Andy Warhol's final work (and I am not even one of Andy's major fans). The rest ranges from the usual cringe-worthy to the usual hilariously ridiculous.

 

Three songs on the whole deserve to be heard. The unknown sleeper is 'He'll Come Along', a very friendly and, thank God, easy-on-the-electronics pop gospel number that Aretha wrote herself — reflecting her renewed interest in direct conversation with the Lord after all these years, and a di­rect precursor to next year's One Lord, One Faith; notable if only for the fact that it was her first decent song written since 'School Days' at least.

 

Of the four singles, 'Jimmy Lee', as much as it is spoiled by the big drum sound, still works as a conscious, and successful, throwback to the good old days, although its pop rhythms, girlie har­monies, and even its title (reminiscent of Martha & The Vandellas' 'Jimmy Mack') indicate a Mo­town connection rather than an Atlantic one; Aretha even borrows a few vocal moves that are ge­nerally more characteristic of Diana Ross! Certainly an awkward impersonation for those who are familiar with both ladies' styles — but certainly nowhere near as awkward as the Queen's take on 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'!

 

Fortunately, Keith Richards produced the track himself, and provided guitar accompani­ment along with Ronnie Wood, ensuring the kind of quality that N. M. Walden could never dream of: the guitars clash over Franklin's howl-in-the-pouring-rain in true Stonesy manner. The problem is, it's just not the kind of song that is likely to find a suitable interpretation from Aretha — the Queen was never meant to be that hard. She tries approaching it from some sort of Moses-on-Si­nai angle, all awe, thunder, and lightning, but in the process, loses the sarcasm and irony of the thing, not to mention the «playfulness». It is still a spirited, well-meaning, sweaty performance, but she'd probably have a finer day covering 'Shine A Light' or something.

 

But at least these songs qualify as exciting curios, rather unpredictable if seen from the perspec­tive of all the badly dated musical mutants that haunt the rest of the LP. The lead single, 'I Knew You Were Waiting', is a duet with George Michael, which sounds just like George Michael; if you enjoy the George Michael vibe, you will love its blunt catchy Eighties pathos, but I beg to pass. As for the fourth single, its very title — 'Rock-a-Lott' — may be enough to make sensitive souls shiver in despair, but it gets far worse: the werewolf growls of «Rock, rock, rock» that pun­ctuate the chorus beats may be the single most embarrassing moment in Aretha history, rivaled only by "I'm gonna be the biggest star at the disco".

 

The rest of the songs just continue to betray the cheesy fun dance vibe of Who's Zoomin' Who — most are power ballads that never go beyond generic, although, frankly speaking, if energizing the album meant bringing in more numbers that sound like 'Rock-a-Lott', I'd rather opt for Phil Collins collaborations instead. Still, Aretha's third album to be titled Aretha is at least curious — with moderately tasteful numbers like 'Jimmy Lee' going hand in hand with plastic garbage, it is yet another of those records that really make you wonder on the issues of «good taste» and its limits. Thumbs down, then, but with a pinch of amazement.

 

ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM (1987)

 

1) Walk In The Light; 2) Prayer Invocation By Rev. Cecil Franklin; 3) Introduction Of Aretha And The Franklin Sisters By Rev. Jesse Jackson; 4) Jesus Hears Every Prayer; 5) Surely God Is Able; 6) The Lord's Prayer; 7) Intro­duction Of Aretha And Mavis Staples By Rev. Jesse Jackson; 8) Oh Happy Day; 9) We Need Power; 10) Speech By Rev. Jesse Jackson; 11) Ave Maria; 12) Introduction To Higher Ground By Rev. Jaspar Williams; 13) Higher Gro­und; 14) Prayer Invocation By Rev. Donald Parsons; 15) I've Been In The Storm Too Long; 16) Packing Up, Getting Ready To Go; 17*) Be Grateful; 18*) Beams Of Heaven (Some Day); 19*) Father I Stretch My Hands To Thee; 20*) Packing Up, Getting Ready To Go (alt. version).

 

Back to church again. In all fairness, the sincerity of Aretha's religious fervor cannot be doubted. So many people turn to church as a last resort when all else has failed — Aretha's church records, on the other hand, tend to come out when all is well, as a respectful thank you rather than a des­perate help me please. Amazing Grace captured the world at the ultimate peak of her Atlantic powers; and One Lord came out no sooner than her tattered commercial status had been succes­fully restored with the hit singles from the 1985-86 period.

 

Unfortunately, in terms of quality One Lord relates to those hit singles in direct proportion to the relation between Amazing Grace and the Atlantic hit singles — in simpler terms, the 1985-86 material was mostly formulaic pop dreck, and One Lord, correspondingly, is formulaic gospel dreck. Where Amazing Grace may be liable to draw a few vacillating souls to the congregation, One Lord is the perfect tool to drive them out of it, once and for all.

 

For one thing: to hell with Rev. Donald Parsons. To hell with Rev. Jesse Jackson. To hell with Rev. Cecil Franklin. When we put on an Aretha album, no matter which genre it is in, we want to hear Aretha; do we really want our living room to transform into the Christian Broadcasting Net­work for about forty minutes? (Yes, this is approximately the amount of time devoted to bare bones preaching — an entirety of two LP sides, with only two more featuring Aretha). The way I see it, gospel music can only qualify as «fundamental art» if it is able to appeal even to non-be­lievers, those free of slavish adherence to superficial trappings of the Christian faith but neverthe­less capable of being moved by the spirituality of Mahalia Jackson. How, then, does a ten-minute speech by Jesse Jackson appeal at all to non-believers?

 

For another thing, the duets do not work well. On Amazing Grace, Aretha faced no competition, being completely free to express herself with both passion and restraint depending on the situa­tion. Here, she is constantly teamed up with iron-throated professionals, and way too often the proceedings simply degenerate into a shouting match — nowhere worse than on 'I've Been In The Storm Too Long', a duet with Joe Ligan which begins decently enough, but eventually morphs into an ugly shouting match. Is Jesus supposed to be that hard of hearing, or did he ever say that your chances of admission to the Kingdom of Heaven depend on your amplitude? Certainly, this is the way it's always being done in traditional Afro-American churches, but, again, it brings us into the realm of generic worshipping, rather than individual artistic expression. And you do not really need the Queen of Soul hanging around if your goal is to join in unison with the flock ra­ther than enjoy the soul of the queen.

 

Finally, she is simply getting old; the fire still burns hot enough, but the fuel has deteriorated, and one possible reason for diluting the album with so many speeches and duets may simply be the fact that the Queen is no longer able to carry on a ninety-minute-long session on the strength of her cords alone. 'Jesus Hears Every Prayer' and 'Surely God Is Able' go off fine enough, but she stutters a few times on 'Ave Maria', and chanting her way through The Lord's Prayer seems like a sly manoeuvre to lure the listener away from more demanding stuff. In the end, it is the fast-pa­ced harmony numbers like 'We Need Power' and 'Packing Up' that are supposed to wow the lis­tener, not the solo performances, and, frankly speaking, there is quie a bit of solid competition on the gospel market to challenge these harmony numbers.

 

In short, One Lord cannot ever hope to become one small bit the «classic pillar of the genre» that Amazing Grace purports to be, and cannot be recommended to anyone except Aretha's, or ritua­listic gospel's, staunchest fans. And, for the record, Rev. Cecil Franklin (Aretha's brother) does not hold a candle to Rev. C. L. Franklin, either — the latter's calm, informative, and slightly hu­morous speech on Amazing Grace is far more ear-pleasing than Cecil's predictably boring prayer invocation. Thumbs down.

 

THROUGH THE STORM (1989)

 

1) Gimme Your Love; 2) Mercy; 3) He's The Boy; 4) It Isn't, It Wasn't, It Ain't Never Gonna Be; 5) Through The Storm; 6) Think (1989); 7) Come To Me; 8) If Ever A Love There Was.

 

This is pretty darn bad, and occasionally gets presented as Aretha's lowest point of the decade, but for the most part, Through The Storm sucks through theory, less through actual realization. At the least, it is nowhere near as mind-numbingly boring as the Vandross-era records. Yet, gran­ted, once you become acquainted with the complete list of people involved in the making of this album — a list that includes Alanis Morissette's sidekick Glen Ballard; a late-period washed-up Elton John; Aretha's own disciple, Whitney Houston, famous for copying the Queen's manner­isms much more successfully than her soul; Diane Warren, the wicked witch of corporate song­writing; and (drumroll!) KENNY G!! — once you see all these credits, it is easily understood how one might hate Through The Storm before even putting it on.

 

Three things are worth noting, though. First, there is one good composition on the album, and it is a Franklin original in the Franklin style, indicating that the lady still got soul, no matter how ma­ny layers of corporate garbage she was buried in. 'He's The Boy' is just a simple, unassuming, cu­tesy jazz-pop number with normal drums, normal pianos, normal electric guitars, and no attempts at any unnatural hipness — almost like a dramatic highlight.

 

Second, the electronic funk duet with James Brown that opens the record is contrived and forced — few people are less compatible in the world of R'n'B than Aretha and James, and she has rare­ly sounded sillier than every time she goes "Hit me!" and "Give it to me right here!"; what may be good for Tina Turner is ruinous for Franklin. ("You don't mess with the Queen of Soul", she warns the man sternly, as if forgetting that they screened out the crown and the sceptre before letting her into the studio). But even despite the thoroughly fake atmosphere of 'Gimme Your Love', it is still interesting to see two giants working together, just for the sake of the experiment. Like conducting a reaction that results in large amounts of hydrogen sulfide — drastic results, curious process.

 

Third, it is hard to accuse the producers of at least not trying out different approaches. Through The Storm sucks in quite an eyebrow-raising number of ways. Bad electro-funk, bad dance-pop, bad power balladry, even bad rearrangements of former successes — 'Think' mostly just recalls how terrific the original was, and 'Come To Me' is just a similar-sounding re-recording of the 1980 ballad — and lots of duets, which never really click but always sound different. Some do not work because Aretha is either too scared or just plain incapable of letting her hair down ('It Isn't, It Wasn't' sounds like she and Houston are almost terrified of each other rather than excited about working together), some just because the songs are that poorly written (the title track was­tes both her and Elton's time), some because it's all about loungey adult contemporary atmosphere ('If Ever A Love There Was' — the Four Tops on vocals and Kenny G on sax, what a brilliant cocktail).

 

But they are all different! If ever you wanted to make a solid case for the vicious side effects of diversity, Through The Storm is your ace card. If you didn't, it's worth taking a peek just to see what strange paths life can follow sometimes. Thumbs down, with a whiff of amusement.

 

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU SWEAT (1991)

 

1) Everyday People; 2) Ever Changing Times; 3) What You See Is What You Sweat; 4) Mary Goes Round; 5) I Dreamed A Dream; 6) Someone Else's Eyes; 7) Doctor's Orders; 8) You Can't Take Me For Granted; 9) What Did You Give.

 

All right, this is nowhere near «pretty darn bad» — this is downright terrible, easily Aretha's big­gest artistic flop since La Diva, if not bigger than that. Apparently, at some point an entire army of producers, corporate songwriters, and their idiot assistants, tired of half-hearted attempts at modernization, conspired, there and then, to return Aretha to perfect glory by making her, once again, the reigning queen of hot, fashionable R'n'B.

 

Any single intelligent person in the lady's entourage could have, of course, remembered that Are­tha never reigned over hot R'n'B; she reigned over soulful R'n'B, and dressing her up in a pimp hat, teaming her with fashionable rappers, and teaching her to open songs with a hearty "Yo gang!" ranks up there with Pavarotti dueting with Clapton on 'Holy Mother' for sheer ridiculous­ness. It's even worse that completely innocent songs like Sly Stone's old classic 'Everyday People' had to be destroyed in the process.

 

The album is equally divided between dance numbers and ballads, with a few guests, as usual, lend­ing a cold shoulder — old pal Luther Vandross and Michael McDonald of the Doobie Bro­thers — but mostly this is Franklin's show throughout, and a consistently disappointing one. The dance numbers are rote and generic ('Mary Goes Round' is probably the mildest offender, due to some pretty sax playing and a catchy chorus), and so are the ballads, where the memorability is all but limited to the rhyme between «locket» and «pocket» on Aretha's own 'You Can't Take Me For Granted'; everything else is just power stuff without any true power.

 

It is hard to imagine even the lady's biggest fans getting a kick out of this crap; perhaps Babyface admirers would consider it a better deal, but why the heck would a Babyface fan want to include a fifty-year old has-been, completely «out of it», in his/her sphere of interests? And, of course, they didn't: after Through The Storm's #55 on the charts, What You Sweat stopped dead at #153. The fact that none of the twelve producers involved in the making of the record succeeded in predicting this and preventing disaster is quite telling. Thumbs down, obviously; things have rarely been any gloomier for Ms. Franklin than at that particular point in her (non-)career.

 

A ROSE IS STILL A ROSE (1998)

 

1) A Rose Is Still A Rose; 2) Never Leave You Again; 3) In Case You Forgot; 4) Here We Go Again; 5) Every Little Bit Hurts; 6) In The Morning; 7) I'll Dip; 8) How Many Times; 9) Watch My Back; 10) Love Pang; 11) The Woman.

 

Give the Queen some credit: it took her but seven years of layoff to firmly re-upgrade the music from «thoroughly awful» to «competently dead boring». No more inadequate, contrived attempts to rock out on the level of the young ones: A Rose is a demonstrative return to a slow, stately, soulful sound that, decades ago, provided her with some of her greatest hits. Miriads of people are found on the credits list, all charged with the task of making Aretha Franklin sound once again like Aretha Franklin, rather than Whitney Houston's jealous old aunt.

 

Now if only they'd written some good songs for the lady, we could honestly call it a comeback. They didn't. And there is nothing surprising about that: the record strictly adheres to the format of «Contemporary R&B» (whose main difference from «classic R&B» is in that it is ruled by people who figured out that record buyers will still buy R&B records even if you cut down on such su­per­fluous bud­get articles as «complex / intelligent songwriting» and «skilful playing»). All of the grooves are constructed so that they fit Aretha's vocal style, but none of them really help the sin­ger out — everything is stiff, plastic, and utterly hookless.

 

For the lead single, Lauryn Hill of the Fugees (still months away from her solo breakthrough with Miseducation) was recruited, and she did a modestly better job on the track than everyone else — it has a bit more lyrical bite, the chorus lingers a bit more in your head, and the quiet wah-wah guitars and orchestration are arguably the finest arrangement touches on the album. Only en­joy­able if you have a high tolerance level for the varnished gloss of modernized R&B, and ready to accept a song on which Aretha's vocals are almost buried, at times, under the backing ones.

 

The only other track of minor note is 'The Woman', Aretha's only songwriting contribution, on which she succumbs both to self-referencing (the lyrics keep sending us back to 'I Never Loved A Man') and retroish jazz vocalizing — the latter almost a pleasant surprise that almost justifies the 7:41 running length of the song, but then you start remembering that this hardly adds anything of note to the legacy that extends all the way from 1965's Yeah! to 1973's Hey Now Hey, except for being able to say «Hey, this girl's 56 years old and she still has it!»

 

It should, of course, be understood that none of this is strictly Aretha's fault. After all, the world of R&B is generally very conservative: the performer isn't supposed to fight the times in order to maintain his/her individuality, the performer is expected to move on with the times. All of these albums are as good or bad as the times were, and in that respect, Aretha Franklin isn't that much different from, say, Aaliyah. (And by 1998, the vocal capacities of the «old queen» and the «new princess» were quite comparable, except for the unmatchable advantage of Aretha's experience — no matter how pointless a song may be, she still slides and glides across its smoothly unremar­kable surface with admirable professionalism). And considering that nothing on here qualifies as a stupid personal embarrassment, the inevitable thumbs down are not so much for the lady as for the deterioration of mainstream values as such (used copies of the record go for as high as $0.01 on Amazon, despite its being out of print - a good indication of what it's really worth). But Aretha — she really tried her best on this one.

 

SO DAMN HAPPY (2003)

 

1) The Only Thing Missin'; 2) Wonderful; 3) Holdin' On; 4) No Matter What; 5) Everybody Is Somebody's Fool; 6) So Damn Happy; 7) You Are My Joy; 8) Falling Out Of Love; 9) Ain't No Way; 10) Good News.

 

Damn happy, indeed. With seven years separating Aretha's absolute career nadir from a return to simple-boring-forgettable, and only five years more — from an album with occasional hints of genuine pleasure-giving, at this rate, one might hope for a «total fuckin' comeback» some time around, let's say, 2050. Too bad few of us will live long enough to enjoy it.

 

Some of the critics, who had been waiting since at least the punk revolution for an opportunity to praise Ms. Franklin for something other than just the voice, were so touched by the retro elements on this record that they dubbed it «a return to roots» and were almost set to start comparing it with her 1970's recordings for Atlantic, except what still remained of their conscience didn't real­ly let them do it. Because, despite the superficial similarity, So Damn Happy is still essentially a fully modern R&B record, the only difference being that it does not seriously toy with hip-hop and/or electronic elements, thus avoiding the unintentional ugliness of What You Sweat.

 

The low points are two tracks co-written and co-performed by Mary J. Blige — they sound just like any typical number by Mary J. Blige, with Aretha's parts reduced to whiny cackling fading in and out of the steel-iron carcass of Blige's repetitive vocalization arrangements. It isn't tough street music, and Aretha is not forced into picturing something that is so totally not herself, but it is still Mary J. Blige music with novelty-value has-been guest participation; who needs this?

 

Another sad matter is that this conscious attempt to make the music a little retro tempts one into going back and relistening to the old records — this is where you notice how seriously her voice has really changed over the years, so much so that even really bland past efforts like Let Me In Your Life, whose cheaply exquisite furs-and-champagne style So Damn Happy brings to mind, sound like Callas in comparison. It is interesting that, as time went by, Aretha's cords seem to have been losing their lower rather than upper range — most of the time, she sings here in some exuberant semi-falsetto, which may eventually get on one's nerves, and that earthy, breathy tone of hers that used to convey so much depth and «grit», is nowhere to be found. Age is nothing to joke about, of course, and all of us could see that coming — but, unfortunately, this means that the good fairy is no longer sporting her magic wand, one that could help her out in the direst of situations, even on La Diva.

 

Aretha's two self-penned compositions are in the listenable-but-forgettable category (the title track tries to convey ten thousand pounds of joy, but lacks any distinct melody or interesting build-ups; its only hook is a loud, annoying "Hey boy!" that's good enough to cut down a pick­pocket, but hardly for anything else), and so are, for the most part, contributions by outside song­writers of which there is about a billion and a half. In the oldies department, Burt Bacharach gets plundered for 'Falling Out Of Love', lots of sugar, sweet harp playing, and a thoroughly unimaginative reading — but at least it's four and a half minutes of genuine feeling, and as much as I hate to admit that a Burt Bacharach song can be a highlight on an Aretha Franklin record, this is exactly that kind of situation.

 

Overall, So Damn Happy is nothing to get real damn happy about, but it is easily the lady's first album in a long, long time that tries to remember what Aretha Franklin was all about in the first place. IF they only hadn't brought in so many outside songwriters... IF they'd kept Mary J. Blige ten miles away... IF the rhythm section had more swing to it... IF the Queen took better care of her pipes... IF all of these conditions could avoid being classified under the Irrealis label... As it is, So Damn Happy is still the closest that Aretha could ever approached a proverbial come­back, but that is still no reason to own the album unless you really love her like your long-lost, aberrant mother... and perhaps all of us should?

 

[PS: As a sidenote, one could seriously question the rationale behind releasing an album cal­led So Damn Happy in the midst of the Iraq War — but let us be gentle and not hold this against the completely apolitical Queen of Soul. She did sing at Obama's inauguration as penitence, after all, even if her hat that day produced much more of an impact than her voice.]

 

THIS CHRISTMAS (2008)

 

1) Angels We Have Heard On High; 2) This Christmas; 3) My Grown Up Christmas List; 4) The Lord Will Make A Way; 5) Silent Night; 6) Ave Maria; 7) Christmas Ain't Christmas (Without The One You Love); 8) Angels; 9) One Night With The King; 10) Hark! The Herald Angels Sing; 11) 'Twas The Night Before Christmas.

 

For a moment out there, it might have seemed like the Queen was holding serious plans to clean up her act. Upon the release of So Damn Happy, she severed her ties with Arista — giving the album title a whole new meaning — a thing she should have done a long, long time ago; twenty three years on that rotten label gave her barely enough good songs to fill up one side of an LP. She then opened up her own label and announced a new title, A Woman Falling Out Of Love, for which some sessions were held but nothing eventually materialized.

 

And then we get this: a Christmas album (!) with the lady not only showing us her full girth (!!), first time ever, but also wearing the tackiest red dress ever made (!!!) and, furthermore, making it Borders-exclusive (!!!!; since then, re-released on DMI records and made available for Santa Cla­us fans all over the world, not just those who do their Christmas shopping at Borders). After three decades of piss-poor records, there is no way whatsoever that a Borders-exclusive Christmas al­bum from the Great-grandmother of soul could make us happy. It sold something like thirty thou­sand copies, and earned her some of her worst reviews to date, especially from obligation-free fans who have earned their inalienable right to despise red dresses, Borders, and Christmas al­bums through a properly regulated diet of multicultural / intellectual values.

 

It is hard to believe any of them took a proper listen to the album, though, because if anyone did, surely at least one voice in the crowd could have stated the obvious: this is the best-sounding Are­tha Franklin album since at least 1975-76. Not in regard to singing, no. But the arrangements, af­ter so many years of technological fluff, are very pleasant. Aretha herself plays a lot of piano (the most, I think, she'd ever played since the Atlantic heyday); the rhythm section adheres to the old values of classic R'n'B and occasionally even manages to kick some funky ass ('The Lord Will Make A Way'); lots of nostalgic Hamoond organ and real strings arrangements; and not one sin­gle half-hearted, corny attempt at sounding «modern». The idea is to make a Christmas album, and make it in a way that the real Aretha Franklin would have made it — say, around 1970. The presence of Mary J. Blige is not required.

 

If you judge any Aretha Franklin record by one and the same parameter — the shape her voice is in — then, of course, even What You See Is What You Sweat (a.k.a. What You Hear Is What You Puke) is a far superior record. The lady is getting old; the lady is relying ever and ever more on that raspy «dying-dog» falsetto that should not be concentrated upon, for fear of provoking condescending or embarrassed emotions. Some of the higher notes are blown, and certainly such a demanding benchmark as 'Ave Maria' should have been left off. Furthermore, the duet with her son on 'This Christmas' suffers from overt cuteness and could have done without the struggling-to-be-funny bit of «telephone monologue».

 

But let us face it — it makes no sense to expect a 66-year old belt it out with the power, range, and precision of a 30-year old. At this point, the only reason to keep on listening to new Franklin records, other than irrational stubborness, is a faint hope to hear traces of deep soul attitude, and This Christmas offers more of these traces than all of her Arista records put together — because this is her first record in a long, long time where she is not trying to prove anything, but is simply being herself. And the music, correspondingly, is being itself.

 

As much as I am skeptical of Chris­­­tmas albums (see the Aimee Mann Christmas album review for more details on that), this one, being taken in its chronological context, is much more than just a Christmas album for Aretha. It is unlikely to be followed by anything as good any time soon — but even if it is her very last album of «original» material, it forms a nice redeeming conclusion to thirty years of shame and horror. As a bonus, you get one of the most original, if not necessarily the most artistically successful, personal readings of 'Twas The Night Before Christmas' ever put on record. Thumbs up — modestly, but firmly.

 

A WOMAN FALLING OUT OF LOVE (2011)

 

1) How Long I've Been Waiting; 2) Sweet Sixteen; 3) This You Should Know; 4) U Can't See Me; 5) A Summer Place; 6) The Way We Were; 7) New Day; 8) Put It Back Together Again; 9) Faithful; 10) His Eyes Are On The Sparrow; 11) When 2 Become One; 12) My Country 'Tis Of Thee.

 

Almost ended up missing this one. Apparently, Aretha's first album of «original» material in eight years only got an exclusive release through Walmart — this should give us a few hints at the ave­rage audience of Aretha Franklin these days — and, although it did get some press coverage, this time around there was not even the faintest trace about any «comeback» hullabaloo. In fact, I do believe that Aretha's choice of hat for President Obama's inauguration made far more of a social wave than this album. Even if it does include her performance of ʽMy Countryʼ as a bonus gift for those who missed turning on the TV set on January 20, 2009, preferring a leisurely, relaxed stroll down the Walmart aisles two years later.

 

Not that the lack of interest was in any way unfair, since — mildly speaking — this is not a very good album. There are, in fact, only two merits to it. One, Aretha's voice got a little better: natu­rally, it is still an old lady's voice and will always remain that way, but either she does not try so hard to reach the highest notes or merely manages to cut down a bit on the breathiness — in any case, the age issue does not stay on my mind as constantly here as it does when listening to her Christmas records. Two, she is very much «acting her age» — there is no «music for the body» here whatsoever, just ballads, gospel tunes, and a few light-jazz / blues-de-luxe cuts for good measure: a fine decision, actually, since it relieves us of the impolite temptation to poke nasty fun at the lady. An icon is an icon, after all.

 

And yet, this time I am also quite sure that I would rather want to hear the lady go completely retro, pushing out a slew of inferior copies of past successes, than listen to this bland, thoroughly faceless collection of so-called «songs», all of them written and produced according to the legis­lation of «modern R&B» — which means sitting through oceans of synthesized wishy-washiness as Aretha weaves predictable tapestries of melismas over them. Of all these tunes (most of them contributed by outside corporate songwriters), only three stand out at once, and none of them for a particularly good reason:

 

— ʽSweet Sixteenʼ, announced as a tribute to B. B. King, is soaked in a strongly traditionalist sauce, and may be Aretha's most retro-sounding track she's done in years; however, the choice is fairly strange, since this is very much a male song in lyrics and spirit, and there are no attempts here to remedy the ridiculousness of the situation (although whoever is playing that guitar adds at least a few minutes of fresh musical breath to the overall turgid experience);

 

— ʽFaithfulʼ, a gospel duet with Karen Clark-Sheard, is a six-minute monster that becomes com­pletely unbearable as it reaches the two-minute mark; sheer aural torture for seasoned masochists by the four-minute mark; and a good cause for a «I-have-lived-through-this» medal if you survive all six. If this stuff is, in any way, typical for modern gospel, I will stick with my Mahalia Jack­son (or, actually, with my Amazing Grace, for that matter) until the end of time — instead of visions of angels, what I see is two unfortunate women forced to dance barefoot on a bed of red-hot rocks, and I am no sadist to enjoy that;

 

— ʽHis Eye Is On The Sparrowʼ is not Aretha at all: it is a promotional spot for her son Eddie, who has turned into an accomplished, professional, sincere gospel singer with a strong set of pipes, and he ain't afraid to use them, drawing out those notes as best he can to challenge Morten Harket. That said, I have no idea who could actually be interested in listening to him other than out of sheer curiosity — there is no subtlety in his delivery, just a mechanical pump-iron drive. Maybe he believes that the longer your notes are, the higher your chances of God hearing them. Provided God operates at the speed of sound, of course.

 

The rest is divided into one hi-tech lounge jazz number (ʽU Can't See Meʼ), one clap-your-hands light-mode R&B dance number (ʽNew Dayʼ, the closest the album comes to «body music», but still not quite), and ballads, ballads, ballads, all of them freely interchangeable within the confines of the waste basket. If you ask me, the album should have never hit even the counters of Walmart, let alone anybody's personal collection. If it makes Ms. Franklin happy, let it be — it is not easy to settle into hopeless retirement after half a century in the music business. In fact, let her release as many more of these as it takes to sweeten the latter part of her life. But what's up with the title? A Woman Falling Out Of Love with whom? Her family? Her fans? President Obama? The world at large? If anything, the title should have been Falling Out Of Fashion — as is also sug­gested by the awful hairstyle and cheeky red dress — and she should have known better: compe­ting with Beyonce and Rihanna is a hard time even for the former Queen of Soul, when you are pushing seventy. Even without intentionally trying to sound sexy and young. Nothing personal here, but an inevitable thumbs down.

 

SINGS THE GREAT DIVA CLASSICS (2014)

 

1) At Last; 2) Rolling In The Deep; 3) Midnight Train To Georgia; 4) I Will Survive; 5) People; 6) No One; 7) I'm Every Woman / Respect; 8) Teach Me Tonight; 9) You Keep Me Hangin' On; 10) Nothing Compares 2 U.

 

The less said about this abomination, the more honor we pay to what used to be the greatest soul singer in the world. Quoth Clive Davis, executive producer of the album: «She's on fire and vocally in ab­solutely peak form. What a thrill to see this peerless artist still showing the way, still sending shivers up your spine...» In defense of Mr. Davis' questionable marketing strategy, I will admit that, every now and then, listening to this album did send shivers up my spine, but probably not quite the kind of shivers that Mr. Davis would surmise; and the peerless artist did occasio­nally show me the way — to the bathroom. I am almost not exaggerating here, mind you.

 

What is so utmostly horrible about albums like these is not merely discovering that a formerly great artist has lost all greatness. Yes, Ms. Franklin is well over 70, and her voice has become a shadow of what it once used to be, and she probably should retire, but if she really really wants to still linger in the studio, if it helps her get along in life to do these sessions every once in a while, then okay, and besides, that Christmas album wasn't that bad, on the whole. As long as we all, and the lady herself in the first place, come to terms with the fact that there will not be another Spirit In The Dark anytime soon, who are we not to let her have her fun?

 

No, what is really atrocious is the utmost fakeness of it all. Starting from the sickeningly made up (and probably Photoshopped, too) old dollface on the album sleeve (is she trying to compete with Nicki Minaj or what?), going on to the album title that once again brings up the horrifyingly per­verted word «diva», and ending with this whole idea — to remind humanity of her Supreme Rule as the Supreme Ruler of All Things Soul, the incomparable Ms. Aretha Franklin will offer, for everyone to see and kowtow, a brief run through old school and contemporary soul classics in order to show that ʽNothing Compares 2 Herʼ. Move along, Beyoncé, Adele, and Alicia Keys — Mama's in the kitchen now, and she's gonna show y'all how to cook those ribs.

 

Pull the wool from Clive Davis' eyes, though, and it is pretty clear that the production on all these songs ranges from unimaginatively retro to tastelessly modern (technobeats on ʽYou Keep Me Hangin' Onʼ? Ooh, now we're talking!), that the musicianship is non-existent, that the song choices are either all too predictable or completely baffling, and that Aretha walks through this entire session in a totally somnambulant state. Her voice, at this point, is incapable of rendering proper emotionality; still capable of technically smooth modulation, yes, but all the songs are de­livered in the same mode — «generally poetic», let's call it — and the delivery is so robotic that the question «why?», appearing in our minds in bloody huge red letters as the lady takes the first note, will most probably turn into such an irritating headache by the middle of the album that, hopefully, you will not have the strength to endure the lady butchering her own ʽRespectʼ, let alone becoming Prince's involuntary comical sidekick on ʽNothing Compares 2 Uʼ.

 

The cream of the crop is ʽRolling In The Deepʼ, the lyrics of which she delivers with all the neo­phyte fervor of someone so proud to have learned them phonetically — and later on down the line, the backing singers intersperse them with the chorus of ʽAin't No Mountain High Enoughʼ, even if the two songs are virtually antonymous in meaning (perhaps that was the original plan, but if so, they never went far enough to convince us that it was a good plan in the first place). I am sure that Adele herself would be happy to know that The Queen Mother of Soul herself sends her that much of a blessing, but why should we, the befuddled listeners, be involved in their royalty games? And you know something is wrong when there is an Alicia Keys tune in the setlist, and even wronger when the best thing about it are the backing vocals (the "o-wo-wo-oh-oh" bits on ʽNo Oneʼ are done expertly — well, they were the best thing on the original, too — and provide a bit of relief from listening to Aretha's caterwauling).

 

It could take well over a fortnight to think of all the exciting ways of poking mean fun at this al­bum, but let me just pretend to be sure that Aretha Franklin herself was only a tool here. The lady is old, weak-willed, maybe a little weak-minded, the lady can be excused for wanting to relive her stardom, Sunset Boulevard complex and all. The real criminal here, the one who bears full res­ponsibility for making laughing stock out of a formerly great artist, is Mr. Clive Davis — I have no interest in how many great artists he had signed to Columbia in the 1960s; whatever he is doing these days generally counts as severe crimes against music as an art form, whether it be producing Santana's Supernatural or signing fishy deals at RCA. This whole venture is his idea, a big stinking musical lie that should be wiped from memory or, at least, condemned to the sewer parts of it. Thumbs down with a vengeance — sorry, Ms. Franklin.

 

ADDENDA:

 

RARE AND UNRELEASED RECORDINGS (1967-1974/2007)

 

CD I: 1) I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) (demo); 2) Dr. Feelgood (demo); 3) Sweet Bitter Love; 4) It Was You; 5) The Letter; 6) So Soon; 7) Mr. Big; 8) Talk To Me, Talk To Me; 9) The Fool On The Hill; 10) Pledging My Love/The Clock; 11) You're Taking Up Another Man's Place; 12) You Keep Me Hangin' On; 13) I'm Try­ing To Overcome; 14) My Way; 15) My Cup Runneth Over; 16) You're All I Need To Get By (take 1); 17) You're All I Need To Get By (take 2); 18) Lean On Me; CD II: 1) Rock Steady; 2) I Need A Strong Man (The To-To Song); 3) Heavenly Father; 4) Sweetest Smile And The Funkiest Style; 5) This Is; 6) Tree Of Life; 7) Do You Know; 8) Can You Love Again; 9) I Want To Be With You; 10) Suzanne; 11) That's The Way I Feel About Cha; 12) Ain't But The One; 13) The Happy Blues; 14) At Last; 15) Love Letters; 16) I'm In Love; 17) Are You Leaving Me (de­mo).

 

There is no serious need to hunt for «lost gems» from all over Aretha’s career — certainly not now, when Rhino has done such a decent job of summarizing, if not exhausting, the vaults of the Queen’s peak period (the full title is Rare And Unreleased Recordings From The Golden Re­ign Of The Queen Of Soul, and who could contest that?). Although this double CD is consisten­tly listenable, there are (almost) no lost masterpieces or anything; in the accompanying notes, Jer­ry Wexler ardently defends the tracks, but, after all, it was he himself who prevented them from riding the original trains, and he must have had his reason.

 

Nevertheless, it goes without saying that Rare And Unreleased Recordings belongs much more securely in your collection than all of Aretha’s post-1974 records put together in one large pile. Returning to those sweet sounds — songs written by people understanding the essence of music, arrangements played and produced by people in love with the sonic capacities of musical instru­ments, the Queen herself at the peak of her pipes — is such a breath of fresh air after going thro­ugh the lady’s dance-pop and hip-hop years that the relative lack of hooks on the outtakes and the rawness of the sound on the demos can easily be overlooked.

 

For starters, the early demo versions of ‘I Never Loved A Man’ and ‘Dr. Feelgood’ — stripped to just Aretha and her piano — are almost superior to the final polished product, because the lady does not hold back at all, belting it out at such decibels that it seems like a mortal combat betwe­en her and the piano (guess who loses). It is during moments like these that one understands how much the packaging of Aretha as a «Gift To You From Atlantic Records» (let alone Columbia or Arista who could not even produce a fine piece of wrapping paper) actually contained and const­rained her — either out of modesty, so as to leave plenty of space for the players, or out of some irrational fear on the part of the producers, too afraid to uphold, nurture, and encourage that streak of wildness she had in her younger days. Then, of course, they ended up doing it for so long that she lost it completely, beyond hope of repair, sometime in the mid-Seventies.

 

Of the songs one usually knows from other artists, ‘Fool On The Hill’ fares about as well as the average Beatles song covered in an R’n’B manner — quite badly, in other words — but it is not as emotionally queer as ‘Eleanor Rigby’, anyway, and should have certainly been used instead of it for This Girl’s In Love With You; ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’ is as essential for fans of Du­ane Allman as their recording of ‘The Weight’, even though his slide backing is mixed somewhere in the seventh channel and is rather sensed on a psychic level than directly; ‘My Way’, if you can stomach the song’s overplayed sentimentality at all, is at least tried out with more honesty and personality than Presley’s rendition; and the big big surprise is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’, spa­ringly and colourfully adorned with simple electric piano chords and sung with so much passion that it is possible to be convinced that she actually understands what the song is about.

 

Not coincidentally, ‘Suzanne’ is an outtake from the sessions for Hey Now Hey — Aretha’s most daring and experimental album, whose bombing pretty much ruined her self-credibility as an ar­tist, with disastrous results for anybody who’d want to review her ensuing career (anyone you know, by any chance?) — and there is plenty more on the second CD here from the same sessions, including a second-nearing-first-rate funk-rocker (‘Sweetest Smile’) and at least one near-fabu­lo­us ballad (‘Tree Of Life’) that is probably the closest thing to an unjustly forgotten epic piece on the whole album (or maybe not).

 

It is a very good gesture on the part of Rhino that they knew where to draw the line, and did not dare explore the vaults of Atlantic for «rare masterpieces» from the Queen’s disco days — the onset of deep autumn is heard well enough on the last few tracks (from the Let Me In Your Life sessions), and it is quite permissible to stop at the hot gospel duet with Ray Charles (‘Ain’t But The One’). This way, no matter how much these outtakes deserved being outtakes, every single one of them has more than just historical value; and in the relative absence of new Aretha albums in the 21st century, it’s nice to know that at least the vaults can still please her fans. Thumbs up.

ARTHUR ALEXANDER

THE GREATEST (1961-1965; 1989)

 

1) Anna (Go To Him); 2) You're The Reason; 3) Soldier Of Love; 4) I Hang My Head And Cry; 5) You Don't Care; 6) Dream Girl; 7) Call Me Lonesome; 8) After You; 9) Where Have You Been; 10) A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues; 11) Don't You Know It; 12) You Better Move On; 13) All I Need Is You; 14) Detroit City; 15) Keep Her Guessing; 16) Go Home Girl; 17) In The Middle Of It All; 18) Whole Lot Of Trouble; 19) Without A Song; 20) I Wonder Whe­re You Are Tonight; 21) Black Night.

 

There is little need to explain why this compilation, bypassing the actual chronological order in which Arthur Alexander recorded all these singles, starts with 'Anna (Go To Him)': nowadays, this is pretty much the only song in existence that may make the average listener aware of the man's former presence on Earth in the first place — due to the Beatles covering it for Please Ple­ase Me. The slightly more informed part of the population will also recognize 'Soldier Of Love' and 'A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues' — the Fab Four used to play them live quite a bit in the early days, with recorded versions surfacing on BBC Sessions — and 'You Better Move On', recorded by the Rolling Stones for one of their early EPs.

 

In the dark forests of pretentious mystery, closed and barred to regular mortal men, dwell occasi­onal supernatural beings that swear by Arthur Alexander's name and consider him to be a soul great on the level of Ray Charles and Otis Redding, unjustly overlooked by the PR industry. I do not know that I would go that far. But Arthur certainly was a sincere, dedicated, talented artist who lived, worked and died all in the line of duty, and there is no question that he deserves a page all his own in the big book of XXth century music soldiers.

 

To begin with, he actually wrote both 'Anna' and 'You Better Move On', and the former's rolling piano hook, stuck somewhere in between melancholic and hipster-cool, is one of the finest pop hooks to come out of the American industry in the early 1960s. (Them Liverpudlians had good ta­ste, after all — and their guitar-based recreation of that hook took good care to carry over the same atmosphere). 'You Better Move On', in comparison, does not exactly beg for the question «where did that come from?» — its debt to generic country is obvious — but it still creates a sta­tely-romantic formula of its own, and its hit record prompted Alexander to record a couple other «sequels», none of them anywhere near as successful.

 

Whether he was a fabulously great singer — that is debatable. Technically efficient, melodically sweet, but not saccharine, a fine, but not outstanding or completely unmistakeable tenor, in which department he could compete with Ben E. King and the like. It is probably the lack of «that parti­cular extra something» that stalled his commercial success: the songs had to be extra catchy to compensate for the non-uniqueness, and few of them were. It takes a little time and effort to un­derstand, though, that his personal life was a rather troubled one, and to discern the subtle smell of real-world paranoia and insecurity that runs through his shakey deliveries. Once you under­stand that, great or not great, Arthur was «the real thing», it gets easier.

 

For the most part, Alexander seems to have been taking his cues from the «country-soul» style pioneered by Ray Charles (although it must be noted that 'You Better Move On' came out almost a year before Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music — although it must be noted that Charles started experimenting with mixing country and soul way before Modern Sounds — although enough already). Some of the songs on this compilation are straightahead country, play­ed and sung by non-country musicians; some offer a good mix, like 'Detroit City', which starts out all Motown-esque, then quickly takes a country turn. Most importantly, all of them sound really, really fine, adding a certain «earthiness» to the soul elements and removing the redneck whiff from the country ones.

 

Arthur could also rock out a little bit, but, apparently, was not a big fan of these wild teenager sounds: 'A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues' was not appropriated by Johnny Kidd and the Beatles for nothing, it's a fun, catchy party-rocker in its own right, yet there is nothing else here that would even remotely approach it in terms of energy. There are a few delicious pop-rockers, though: 'Whole Lot Of Trouble', with its ska-derived punch, barroom boogie piano, and wicked strings flourishes at the end of each chorus, is a total classic — and it actually remained in the vaults un­til the release of this compilation in the late Eighties!

 

The Greatest compiles most of Arthur's singles, released on the Dot Records label in the first half of the Sixties, before he switched to Sound Stage 7; missing is his debut single, 'Sally Sue Brown', for Judd Records, as well as the bulk of his first, and only LP, on Dot, recorded as a has­ty follow-up to the commercial success of 'You Better Move On', predictably given the same title and consisting, so they say, mostly of throwaways. None of these were as successful as 'You Bet­ter Move On', and most of the tracks from 1963-65 didn't chart at all, but still, the whole compila­tion is consistently listenable if the idea of «country soul» appeals to you in the first place. Obvi­ously, a thumbs up from the hidden country depths of the soul.

 

THE MONUMENT YEARS (1965-1972; 2001)

 

1) (Baby) For You; 2) The Other Woman (In My Life); 3) Stay By Me; 4) Me And Mine; 5) Show Me The Road; 6) Turn Around (And Try Me); 7) Baby This, Baby That; 8) Baby I Love You; 9) In My Sorrow; 10) I Want To Marry You; 11) In My Baby's Eyes; 12) Love's Where Life Begins; 13) Miles & Miles From Nowhere; 14) You Don't Love Me (You Don't Care); 15) I Need You Baby; 16) We're Gonna Hate Ourselves (In The Morning); 17) Spanish Har­lem; 18) Concrete Jungle; 19) Taking Care Of A Woman; 20) Set Me Free; 21) Bye Bye Love; 22) Another Place, Another Time; 23) Cry Like A Baby; 24) Glory Road; 25) Call Me Honey; 26) The Migrant; 27) Lover Please; 28) In The Middle Of It All.

 

Arthur Alexander did not manage even one single hit since at least 1964, and switching labels did not help out any — it's a wonder that Sound Stage 7 and, later, Monument even bothered keeping him throughout the rest of the decade (granted, they did not bother a lot: he was never even offer­ed one chance to record a full album during all that time). Lack of promotion and overall misma­nagement were a key factor, but, it must be said, most of these twenty-eight tracks (about half re­present actual 45s released in between 1965 and 1972, the other half is taken from the vaults) are certainly devoid of hit potential.

 

One reason is that, having found the kind of sound that pleased him most — the modestly orches­trated, moderately sentimental country-soul of 'You Better Move On' and its heirs — Alexander, regardless of the circumstances, refused to budge one inch away from it. Perhaps he simply felt that this was his niche in which he was, if not king, then at least an established master of the art, and that further experimenting would be the death of him (he may have been right, too). But he took it way too far by paying virtually no attention to anything. All across The Monument Years, musical genres and directions came and went in bunches, yet you certainly couldn't tell by this compilation — in the early Seventies, Alexander sounded exactly the same way as he did in the early Sixties. In a time period dominated by the likes of the Beatles, how could that ever be a re­cipé for critical success and commercial recognition?

 

Today, though, when grand-scale experimentation has pretty much expired in favour of little niches with musical ant-workers doing their little schtick over and over again, it is perhaps high time we all grabbed this compilation and evaluated it on its own terms. Because most of this is lo­vely, enjoyable pop music, with pretty, if not tremendously catchy, hooks and Arthur's personal seal of quality all over them. Very few tracks approach such peaks as 'Anna' and 'You Better Move On', but the arrangements are tight, the singing is always on the level, and the soul is al­ways on the line. It doesn't really seem for a moment as if the man were trying real hard to come up with a crowd-pleaser — he just enjoys singing and, occasionally, writing this kind of material, and, in the long term, it does him a great service.

 

The discerning eye will quickly discover that he is doing 'Spanish Harlem', but you'd be wrong to focus on his interpretations of classic hits — they add little, if anything, to the originals. Much more juicy are his own songs, such as 'We're Gonna Hate Ourselves (In The Morning)', a catchy, toe-tapping pop tune on a rather risky subject (adultery, on the matter of which, so it seems, Ar­thur was quite an expert). 'Turn Around (And Try Me)' is totally infectious with its inventive vocal harmonies and mad trombone blasts; 'I Want To Marry You' strolls on for five minutes in a rarely witnessed humorous mood; 'You Don't Love Me' is a beautiful example of how to combine anger and pleading in a desperate love song; and there's quite a few more little observations like these in my backpack that, combined, make sitting through these twenty-eight selections a sincere pleasure rather than just a reviewer's chore.

 

Perhaps the best way to immediately ascertain that Arthur Alexander was more than a coinciden­tal one-hit wonder, and to get yourself to sympathize with his plight, is to move straight over to the last track. The re-recorded version of 'In The Middle Of It All' borrows its major transition from verse to chorus from 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother', and the rest of the song is no world wonder of songwriting, but Alexander's vocals, almost from the first notes, stimulate that sensory receptor that is responsible for our «epic-tragic» mode — beautiful, gracious bit of acting.

 

Considering how fine an impression it all gives — the Ace label people have done a great job not just finding this long-lost material, but remastering it in near-perfect sound quality — I definitely recommend this for any serious soul music collection, and it still makes both good party music and a useful soundtrack for one's lonely evening. Thumbs up.

 

RAINBOW ROAD: THE WARNER BROS. RECORDINGS (1972-1973; 2001)

 

1) Rainbow Road; 2) Down The Backroads; 3) I'm Comin' Home; 4) In The Middle Of It All; 5) Call Me Honey; 6) Lover Please; 7) You Got Me Knockin'; 8) It Hurts To Want It So Bad; 9) Love's Where Life Begins; 10) Come Along With Me; 11) Burning Love; 12) Go Home Girl; 13) They'll Do It Everytime; 14) Mr. John; 15) Thank God He Came.

 

This disc collects most of the stuff that Arthur recorded during his brief stint with Warner Bros. in the early 1970s — although, what with all the commercial non-success he'd had in the previous six or seven years, it is amazing they even let him into a studio: Muscle Shoals, no less. The re­sults were a couple of singles and a self-titled LP, all of which except for one song is reproduced here. It all sold about as much as usual — i. e. from very little to none — and Alexander soon found himself on the streets again.

 

Way too bad, because the Muscle Shoals stint gave the man the best backing he ever had, while at the same time the quality of his songs continuously remained the same: another bunch of modest, likeable country-soul that does not aspire to much except sounding friendly, touching, and very human. Not a single misfire all around; perhaps trying to promote 'Burning Love' as a single was a rash decision — no one messes with the King even in his Vegas-y state of mind — but no one can accuse Arthur of botching this hot pop-rocker, either (after all, 'A Shot Of Rhythm And Blu­es' had already secured his potential as a rock'n'roller).

 

The third re-recording of 'In The Middle Of It All' is a bit limper, less stately than the original version, and there is also an updated version of 'Go Home Girl' that is equally unnecessary, but, apparently, Arthur was struggling for material. Still, the album is worth locating for two tracks at least: 'Rainbow Road' is a humbly beautiful prayer that could have been a blue-eyed soul hit for Van Morrison (it was eventually picked up by Percy Sledge instead), and 'Mr. John' simply revels in darkness and paranoia, accentuated by wah-wah guitars and chain gang backing vocals.

 

These two stand out a bit over everything else, but not by much: regardless of personal fortunes, at all times in his career Arthur Alexander was nothing less than the perfect working man, never demanding genius from the songs he sang, but always demanding melody and emotional force. Even the little country-gospel number at the end is moving in its own gentle way, despite the fact that technically, you could hardly find a less qualified singer for gospel than Mr. Alexander. Then again, if we do not consider the ability to break glass and cover everyone within a half-mile ra­dius in one's spit the necessary prerequisites of singing good gospel, I suspect that's subjective.

 

Arthur's last, faintest smudge of success came two years later on Buddah Records, for whom he recorded a minor hit version of 'Every Day I Have To Cry Some', but even that did not help his career to recover, and eventually he just switched to bus driving — all for the better, perhaps, be­cause even with all that perfectionism, who knows what degrees of lameness could he have been driven to in the disco and synth-pop eras? This way, I can simply award him another respectful thumbs up, and then we can move right on to the very last chapter of his career, and life.

 

LONELY JUST LIKE ME (1993)

 

1) If It's Really Got To Be This Way; 2) Go Home Girl; 3) Sally Sue Brown; 4) All The Time; 5) Lonely Just Like Me; 6) Every Day I Have To Cry; 7) In The Middle Of It All; 8) Genie In The Jug; 9) Mr. John; 10) Johnny Heart­break; 11) There Is A Road; 12) I Believe In Miracles.

 

It is not quite clear what exactly drew Alexander out of bus-driving retirement: some people men­tion a «renewed interest in his legacy», but surely such an interest could only have very limited distribution anyway. Perhaps it took him fifteen years to understand that, by now, it was perfectly all right for people to record music the way they would like to record it without an obligation to seek mass commercial appeal. Or, more probably, it just took him fifteen years to find a record label that would want him in the first place.

 

The label was Nonesuch (not yet under the roof of Warner Bros.), and the album — one of the most delightful small-scale comebacks of the 1990s. Apparently, Alexander took the bus-driving business quite seriously: only half of the album is comprised of new material, written God knows when, with the other half (as befits most of the blues, jazz, and R&B comebacks from the «real old days») consisting of re-recordings of old hit material — and it is, of course, debatable whe­ther we really need a fourth version of 'In The Middle Of It All'. But in the end, it doesn't matter at all. What matters is how classy it all sounds.

 

First, it is almost impossible to date these recordings to 1993. The drums have a slightly «proces­sed» feel to them, and the electronic piano sound and synthesized strings constitute another mil­dly unpleasant giveaway, but, other than that, the record seems to have been made exactly the way Arthur would have it. The man drove his bus through the Eighties without noticing a single thing going around, and thank God for that — Lonely Just Like Me sounds like good old school R'n'B / country-soul. Melodies, guitars, catchy choruses, human feeling, the works.

 

Actually, some of the new material is terrific. 'If It's Really Got To Be This Way' is gorgeously written and sung, with some nice slide playing attenuating the pain and grace in Arthur's voice, a lost classic totally on the level of 'Anna' and 'You Better Move On'. 'Genie In The Jug' bounces, delights, and saddens all at the same time; the "doo-doodley-doo"s of 'All The Time' are unusual­ly deeply felt for a doo-doodley-doo; 'There Is A Road' is built upon an overwhelming vocal cre­scendo — one that could have been performed in a much more technical manner by the likes of a Neil Diamond, but benefits far more from Arthur's trembling sincereness; and 'I Believe In Mira­cles' is a tender, lovingly naïve conclusion.

 

Moreover, I don't feel one bit of a difference between Arthur's early singing and his vocal powers on here — perhaps the voice got just a trifle deeper with age, but you'd really have to use serious acous­tic equipment to prove your point. The important thing is that his simple magic has not gone anywhere: Lonely Just Like Me fully justifies its title — few people could ever sing about bro­ken hearts with the kind of simplicity and adequacy that Alexander introduced back in the early 1960s, and, strange as it is, it still holds true in 1993.

 

I mean, people like Al Green came along and took the whole thing to an entirely new level of depth — making songs that mixed joy with pain directly, playing psychological torment with quasi-Shakesperian standards — but there is something to be said for holy simplicity as well, and especially for being able to move a heart without overplaying it. Most of these twelve cuts focus on that ability, making Lonely the only Arthur Alexander LP that is truly, to some extent, con­cep­tual in its nature.

 

It is nothing short of a mini-miracle, either, that Alexander had just enough time to put out this sole LP before, a few months later, succumbing to a fatal heart attack that finally put him out of his loneliness. Without it, I would still be tempted to classify him as a two-hit wonder; with it, his career got a suitably humble and elegant finale that confirmed it as, well, an actual career. And it seems that the record label people understood that as well: fourteen years later, the album was re-released on CD as Lonely Just Like Me: The Final Chapter, adding several guitar-only and ac­capella demos recorded for the album and, more importantly, a small live promotional perfor­mance played be­fore a well-receptive audience. They do not add much artistic or historical im­portance, but they do a good job of bringing out the vulnerable human side of Arthur to an even bigger extent.

 

A very natural thumbs up here, and a big thank you to the man for having stayed exactly the same through all these years, and also to producer Ben Vaughn who gave him a chance to show that to us before it was too late. Trust me, this is not a trifle here; this is soul food as essential as any of the man's greatest hits compilations, even if it may take a while to understand that.

 

THE ASSOCIATION

AND THEN ALONG COMES... THE ASSOCIATION (1966)

 

1) Enter The Young; 2) Your Own Love; 3) Don't Blame It On Me; 4) Blistered; 5) I'll Be Your Man; 6) Along Co­mes Mary; 7) Cherish; 8) Standing Still; 9) Message Of Our Love; 10) Round Again; 11) Remember; 12) Changes.

 

Just because someone generated the questionable idea of dressing The Association up in match­ing Beatlesque suits and thrusting electric instruments in their hands does not mean that, at any time during their existence, The Association would turn into something seriously different from a modern-day / Sixties-style barbershop quartet (actually, sextet). Arriving way too late on the ra­pidly shifting and fading sweet-folk-pop scene, they somehow managed to endure on a commer­cial high all through 1967 and early 1968 — then inevitably faded away together with their bar­ber shop. Unlike the Beach Boys or the Zombies, their output has not survived the popularity time test, for understandable reasons. Nevertheless, like all good barbers, they, too, have certain advantages; at the very least, in the golden canon of the Sixties they deserve their own thick foot­note, rather than just a brief comma-circled niche in a long list of complete good-for-nothings.

 

The Association's first album was released in mid-1966, produced by such a semi-legendary fi­gure as Curt Boettcher, one of America's top sonic wizards in the «lush baroque pop» department (he used to work in close tandem with Gary Usher, one of the Beach Boys' original collaborators, and was also responsible for the sound behind such nice, unjustly underrated late-Sixties art-rock projects as The Millennium and Sagittarius). Considering that the band's two leaders, Terry Kirk­man and Jules Alexander, tended either to write their own material or to rely on non-trivial songs written by outside composers, and had at least a few shreds of individual musical vision, there was, from the very outset, a strong chance of The Association forever changing the face of Cali­fornian pop music... or was there?

 

Certainly 'Along Comes Mary', the band's third single (the first, by the way, was 'Babe I'm Gon­na Leave You', a version nowhere near as innovative as Led Zeppelin's, but fully holding its own ground in terms of soulfulness), is a damn fine tune. Most people dug it for the lyrics, one of the ear­liest examples of non-Dylan-derived complete incomprehensibility (so much so that it was, and still is, a common assumption that 'Mary' stands for 'Juana'), except for Leonard Bernstein, who actually raved about the tune's melodic structure — I wouldn't know about the technical stuff, of course, but the song is pretty complex, and has a little bit of everything: a propelling dance rhythm, a nicely dated fuzz guitar riff, vocals that go from angry pop to hazy psychedelic and back again, and even an unforeseen instrumental flute break, at a time when flute popularization by the likes of the Moody Blues or Jethro Tull was still quite low. Catchy, too.

 

This was almost immediately followed by the band's first No. 1, Kirkman's 'Cherish' — a song that actually conveys The Association's essence better than 'Mary' by ditching anything even re­motely close to a «rock» sensibility and just playing along as a lush folk-pop ballad. Way too or­nate and saccharine for my personal tastes, but impeccable as a fine piece of craftsmanship all the same, due to production values that could rival George Martin himself.

 

The remainder of the LP sort of grew around these two songs, perhaps a little faster than neces­sary, but then, in pure terms of quality, the band never really managed to beat this level anyway. If you are new to the band, but not to Sixties' West Coast sound altogether, you will have a great field day sorting out the influences: lots of Beach Boys and other vocal harmony groups, lots of Byrds and other folksy jangle bands, a little bit Lovin' Spoonful, a pinch of early Jefferson Air­plane, etc. etc. For the most part, The Association plays it «soft» — 'Along Comes Mary' and Bil­ly Ed Wheeler's harmonica-driven pop-rocker 'Blistered' is as heavy as it gets, which wouldn't even cover the mass of Hendrix's left toe — but it is the «soft» that emanates from merging teen dance music with intelligent folk influences, not Barbara Streisand-style «soft», meaning that the actual schmaltz quota is relatively low.

 

What is much worse is that neither Kirkman nor Alexander qualified as great songwriters — as nice and professional as the songs sound, they do not leave a lasting impression. 'Along Comes Mary', the one song that does, was actually written by one-song-composer Tandyn Almer, and the rest... uh. 'Enter The Young' opens the album on a funny anthemic note and with a good modicum of fuzzy punch, but it's no 'My Generation'; 'Your Own Love' sounds like something they could have stolen from under Roger McGuinn's pillow without paying attention to "P.S.: NOT TO BE USED BEFORE COMPLETION"; and even the album's dreamiest, psychedelic-est number, 'Re­member', is based on just one melodic line repeated over and over again — a modestly haunting line, but one that should rather serve as a taste of better lines to come than be self-containing.

 

That said, Along Comes... The Association is still a fine record — like most of the records that were released in 1966 and made a point out of exploring new grounds and sounds. I do not see how it could be possible to fall in sincere love with its substance, but at least the form, this odd mix of San Francisco-style song-crafting with Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys production values, is definitely unique for its time. If you don't feel like listening to it, at least frame it — it's that good. Thumbs up, with respect. (And no, if you were wondering, not all albums made in 1966 auto­ma­tically get their thumbs up. Wait until we hit all that vinyl wasted on garage LPs).

 

RENAISSANCE (1967)

 

1) I'm The One; 2) Memories Of You; 3) All Is Mine; 4) Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies; 5) Angeline; 6) Songs In The Wind; 7) You May Think; 8) Looking Glass; 9) Come To Me; 10) No Fair At All; 11) You Hear Me Call Your Name.

 

A small drop-off in quality here, since, in a haze of rashly taken decisions, the band has lost two advantages: the exquisite perfectionist production of Curt Boettcher and the presence of even a single truly outstanding single of 'Mary's quality. New producer Jerry Yester, soon-to-work with Tim Buckley, does a decent job at preserving the band's face value, but it is way above him to bring out the hidden magic in their songs that Boettcher occasionally perceived.

 

The choice of lead single was quite surprising: the most «notable» aspect of 'Pandora's Golden Heebie Jeebies' is probably its mock-psychedelic title, as well as the use of Japanese koto — un­fortunately, the latter could hardly be on the same level as Harrison's sitar on 'Norwegian Wood': Alexander simply plucks a few notes, occasionally, for atmospheric reasons, instead of contribu­ting anything even remotely resembling a memorable riff. If they thought this gimmick could be enough to make it chart... well, it did chart, but got no higher than No. 35. Lesson learned — for their next attempt at a hit single, they'd actually write a real melody rather than simply riding the psychedelic wagon without a ticket.

 

Other things that do not work include going for a tender/stern Scott Walker-ish approach on the ballad 'Angeline' and attempting to do something Byrds-style, shards of guitar jangle and vocal harmonies included, in shakey waltz tempo ('All Is Mine'). Neither is really bad, but the level of competition is simply way too high.

 

Still, some of the faster pop-rock numbers are quite delightful: 'You Hear Me Call Your Name' is just as derivative of the Birds as 'All Is Mine', of course, but since the Byrds were just as wimpy at the art of rock'n'roll themselves as the Association, the song does not immediately click as lame plagiarism, and, with time, reveals a really nice, inspiring build-up from start to finish, end­ing almost as an anthem. The harmonies are near-perfect on 'Come To Me' (think Hollies this time), and nothing beats the simple, but intriguing bassline of 'You May Think', especially when the whole band starts harmonizing to it — in falsetto!

 

Thus, if you orgasm easily at the very mention of «sunshine pop», Renaissance is one of those records that may, given time, reveal itself to you as an unjustly overlooked masterpiece of the genre (a great starting point for building up your own identity on Amazon or RateYourMusic). I can, however, only reiterate the rather common opinion that the album is Association-by-the-nu­m­bers, which is never disgusting — I do not regret one minute of the five or six times I sat thro­ugh it, waiting for lightning to strike — but, given the fact that even top-notch Association ra­rely displays any genius, is certainly enough to make this No. One-Hundred-and-smth. on your pur­chase list for the great year of 1967.

 

INSIGHT OUT (1967)

 

1) Wasn't It A Bit Like Now; 2) On A Quiet Night; 3) We Love Us; 4) When Love Comes To Me; 5) Windy; 6) Re­pu­tation; 7) Never My Love; 8) Happiness; 9) Sometime; 10) Wantin' Ain't Gettin'; 11) Requiem For The Masses.

 

By the time the band advanced to a major label contract with Warner Bros. and got around to raising their stakes for 1967, Jules Alexander was out — temporarily, at least, «to study medita­tion in India», as some sources claim, and was there ever a trendier moment to study meditation in India than in 1967? The bad news is, this left the band with but one semi-accomplished song­writer. The good news is — the band has always been at its best performing material from fully accomplished outside songwriters. So the loss was quite relative. Plus, they got assigned to the Mamas & Papas' producer, a fairly good match, one must agree.

 

Not that Terry Kirkman does not try to rise to the challenge. In a way, he even succeeds: 'Wasn't It A Bit Like Now' opens the record on an ambitious note, jamming a somewhat chaotic, rough-edged music-hall ditty inside a deceptive blues-rock framework. You can turn it on, admire the gall of the band for switching to fuzz-drenched heavy riffage, move the needle/cursor to the last seconds, and leave in the same confidence — without ever knowing that the bulk of the song is hanging on a drunken electric piano melody, visions of homemade top hats floating around. In a way, it's a very specific kind of fun.

 

On the other end of the deep blue sea, Kirkman's 'Requiem For The Masses' may be a bit more than he is able to chew: it does start off with a little bit of requiem music, eventually turning into a «martial folk» memorial tune to the fallen. An anti-war song from someone as nicely «main­stream» as The Association must have been perceived as a brave gesture — one could even sug­gest that it might have served a key role in the band's getting invited to Monterey Pop, had In­sight Out not been released two months after the festival. But for all of the tune's complexity and ambition, it is not very inspiring: the band can pull off the basic structure, but it cannot imbue it with convincing human rights' idealism, certainly not in the context of the previous ten numbers, all considerably wimpy in comparison.

 

It is the wimpy numbers, however, that have grown and matured quite notably in their wimpiness. P. F. Sloan's 'On A Quiet Night' features gorgeous vocal harmonies, well backed by harpsichord,  chimes, and woodwinds, rather than spoilt by strings; the second biggest hit 'Never My Love' is even sappier, but even more tastefully arranged — the vocals enter a subdued, barely audi­ble dia­log with brief electric organ runs, all in an atmosphere of humble intimacy rather than overacting pathos. And these are just the slow-paced ballads!

 

The album's most recognizable number is, of course, 'Windy', donated to the band by little known folk songwriter Ruth Friedmann. Like 99% of Association-related music, it is pure fluff, but of the highest quality — an ultra-catchy kiddie tune the likes of which they just don't do any more, certainly not with this kind of hard-hitting bassline. Tim Hardin's 'Reputation' is the album's «rock» number, although only the drums seem to be do­ing any «rocking», but it's still a fun version. And what's a 1967 album without at least a little bit of psychedelia? 'Wantin' Ain't Gettin' offers us some sitar, some sarod, choppy guitar rhythms straight outta the Revolver textbook, and droning harmonies a-plenty.

 

Insight Out may have firmly and finally dispensed with any idea of The Association becoming an «independent» band — both formally, as they complete the sale of their future to the corporate monster, and figuratively, as they lose the incentive to become self-reliant — but for a short time, they would still be out there among the best jumpers on bandwagons; and jumping on bandwa­gons rarely gets any more involving and amusing as it is on the band's third album. Thumbs up.

 

BIRTHDAY (1968)

 

1) Come On In; 2) Rose Petals, Incense And A Kitten; 3) Like Always; 4) Everything That Touches You; 5) Toy­maker; 6) Barefoot Gentleman; 7) Time For Livin'; 8) Hear In Here; 9) The Time It Is Today; 10) The Bus Song; 11) Birthday Morning.

 

In retrospect, Birthday is hailed today by a small cult following as The Association's starkest at­tempt at putting forth something serious, a record that would impress on the musical level, bite on the lyrical one, and, overall, increase the public's confidence in the band at a time when, for once, the fluffy people had to share the chart spotlights with the fair people. Inspired, perhaps, by sha­ring the Monterey Pop Festival stage with such giants of the mind as Country Joe & The Fish and Hugh Masekela (not to mention various forgettable rag-tag entertainment like Jimi Hendrix or the Who), the six-man-band toughened up their act, brushed up on the songwriting, came up with ly­rics that honestly tried, in simple ways, to answer some questions on life and death — and ex­pected the record-buying public to like it.

 

The public did like it, by inertia, but nowhere near as much as it liked Insight Out, halting it at #23 compared to its predecessor's #8. Can't really blame them — I do not like it as much as I like Insight Out, either. The band's biggest problem was that they tried to get more pensive and com­plex, indeed, but without any accompanying stylistic changes. If Insight Out was mostly light­weight, easy-roaming pap, Birthday is pap that asks to be paid attention to. That's fine by me, but where's the payoff? Attention is not something you should simply give away without expecting an adequate reward, and Birthday's reward, I am afraid, is inadequate.

 

The band does try hard. Saccharine level is soaring only on the ballad 'Rose Petals, Incense And A Kitten', and even that song, with its loud jazz-poppy bassline and somewhat strange lyrics (and in 1968, where there are strange lyrics, one always begins to suspect trippiness, even if the song is firmly rooted in Streisand territory) could work bizarro magic on a generation that was, after all, open-minded enough to accept even Astrud Gilberto as a sample of «cool». The only other straight­for­ward love song is — technically, at least — a first-rate lush-pop creation ('Everything That Touches You', the album's top ten hit), even though its lushness sort of masks the lack of a firmly clinging hook.

 

The rest ranges from meaty-beaty, friendly power-pop ('Come On In') to Manfred-Mann-ish qui­rky, rhythmically tricky pop (Larry Ramos' 'Like Always' that never seems to know whether it wants to waltz or shuffle along; 'Hear In Here') to magical-mystical Femme Fatale anthems ('Toy­maker') to odd attempts to cram a mini-suite into three minutes à la Brian Wilson ('The Bus Song') — all of this topped with the calculated audience seduction 'Time For Livin', a song that drips jo­vial, starry-eyed optimism from each single note as it strolls along.

 

Somehow, someway, you expect it all to morph together into the band's big, self-assured answer to Sgt. Pepper, but it never does. Never mind that by 1968, the art of answering to Sgt. Pepper could be considered obsolete and, as conventional wisdom goes, audiences were expecting «tou­gher» stuff. The first six months of 1968 on the Billboard charts were dominated by Magical My­stery Tour, Simon & Garfunkel's soundtrack to The Graduate and Paul Mauriat — quite a de­cent setting in which Birthday could easily fit in.

 

None of the songs — not a single one — can qualify as a masterpiece, and an approach like this begs for at least one masterpiece around which the lesser, supportive material could freely cluster and «atmospherize». Insight Out did not set the stakes that high, and worked almost ideally well on its own level: moderately complex, unassuming pop for the rocking man to put on before bed­time. Birthday begs for acceptance on the part of a more raffinated social sphere, and is rightly rejected that acceptance; if one is happy enough with one's Beatles, Kinks, Beach Boys, and Pret­ty Things, this album will not add much to the perspective.

 

Of course, there is always the possibility of clearing one's brain of all these considerations and just liking the album for its individual songs, not for its failed «statement». All of the songs are at least pleasant — and 'Time For Livin' deserves a steady place on any sunshine pop retrospective — and God forbid you from denying a thumbs up to a record just because it did not quite live up to elevated expectations. Whatever be the case, it is undeniably one of The Association's stron­gest offerings. Who knows, one might even build up a successful case on the basis of the band holding its very own against an onslaught of new trends, fighting off psycho-rockers and house­wives with the exact same verve.

 

THE ASSOCIATION (1969)

 

1) Look At Me, Look At You; 2) Yes, I Will; 3) Love Affair; 4) The Nest; 5) What Were The Words; 6) Are You Ready; 7) Dubuque Blues; 8) Under Branches; 9) I Am Up For Europe; 10) Broccoli; 11) Goodbye Forever; 12) Boy On The Mountain.

 

As much as Birthday can be over... appreciated by the connaisseur, not quite up to the mini-art rock masterpiece status it is assigned, so is the band's fifth, oddly eponymous, album somewhat overlooked in the annals. With the return of one-time lead talent Jules Alexander back to the fold, the band makes a fresh, concentrated attempt at refreshing and updating its pop sound, incorpora­ting new influences and at the same time tempering any inadequate ambitions it could have nurtu­red on earlier records.

 

Eleven out of twelve songs are self-penned here (the twelfth is provided by producer John Boy­lan), with almost all of the band members turning in contributions, although Alexander gets the lion's share (five credits / co-credits), with Kirkman closing in second with three. Biggest news is that the band must have been in close touch with the evolution of the Byrds' sound: lots of banjos and pedal steel guitars are brought in to inject an element of «country-rock» (or, rather, «country-pop») — although the melodic structures generally still follow the old sunshine pop formula, and this offers The Association a nice chance at a synthesis all their own.

 

Travel no further than 'Look At Me, Look At You'. The opening oink-oinking of the banjo at first tricks you into visions of cowboys chasing turkeys, but pretty soon it is transformed into a sensi­tive, wonderously arranged nostalgic ode — how come Bernstein never got around to praising the intricate harmonies on this song? vocal-wise, it smashes 'Along Comes Mary' to tiny bits; the low / high exchange of "look at me — I'll look at you" alone is worth gold. Up it goes into The Asso­ciation's very own Top 5, little doubt about that.

 

Actually, «nostalgia» — lyrics and sentiments-wise, not in the melody department — is the ticket for quite a few numbers on here, and it's one of those few sentiments that the band has really got a terrific knack for. Jim Yester's chivalrous folk ballad 'What Were The Words' and Alexander's baroque-pop ode 'Dubuque Blues' are quite different melodically, and rely on different atmos­phere-setting instruments (steel guitar for the first, piano for the second), but both weave the same tender mood, feeding it with memorable vocal lines and tasteful arrangements.

 

Twice and twice only does the band try to go for something bigger: first, on the grand-sounding 'The Nest', envisioned as an anthem based on thickly overdubbed vocal harmonies, and then on the album closer 'Boy On The Mountain', envisioned as a four-minute mini-suite (buildups, cre­scendos, choral harmonies, weirdly processed guitar solos, pathos, the works). Predictably, just like on Birthday, it doesn't quite work like it's supposed to, because way more meat would be ne­eded on the instrumentation to make it work. The harmonies, however, are still tops on both tunes — way better designed, I'd say, than their predecessors on Birthday.

 

In between, as usual, they throw on some lighter material — Russ Giguere's cute joke song 'Broc­coli' (inspired by the Beach Boys' 'Vegetables', perhaps?), Larry Ramos' quirky dance number 'Are You Ready?', Boylan's upbeat pop throwaway 'Yes I Will' (nothing to do with the much bet­ter known Hollies song), etc., all nice tunes that do not linger long but always leave a good after­taste. In fact, The Association flashes even less sap than 'Birthday': compared with 'Rose Petals, Incense And A Kitten', Alexander's 'Love Affair', this album's sugariest number, comes across as a tender-hearted, sincere hippie ballad with psychedelic overtones rather than a formulaic orgas­matron for depressed housewives.

 

Alas, the album only continued The Association's downward commercial slide — ironically so, since this soft, inoffensive style is still done with way, way more taste than a whole legion of Se­venties' soft-rock albums that would very soon start cesspooling the charts. Apparently, in 1969, when «soft rock» could still be done well, the world was not yet ready for it. What it really nee­ded, so it looks like, was the real high standard of The Bay City Rollers. Well, we all have to pay our dues sooner or later, and hopefully, my thumbs up can contribute, in their own tiniest of ways, to The Association being assigned the better fate of the two at the Last Judgement. (Unless God is gay, of course.)

 

THE ASSOCIATION LIVE (1970)

 

1) Dream Girl; 2) One Too Many Mornings; 3) Along Comes Mary; 4) I'll Be Your Man; 5) Goodbye Columbus; 6) Let's Get Together; 7) Wasn't It A Bit Like Now; 8) Never My Love; 9) Goodbye Forever; 10) Just About The Same; 11) Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You; 12) Seven Man Band; 13) The Time It Is Today; 14) Dubuque Blues; 15) Blistered; 16) What Were The Words; 17) Remember; 18) Are You Ready; 19) Cherish; 20) Requiem For The Masses; 21) Windy; 22) Enter The Young.

 

Behind all the gloss, fuss, and bliss of The Association's studio recordings, one almost forgets that, throughout their existence, they toured quite extensively — so much, in fact, that in a very short while they would mutate into a traveling oldies act. In 1970, however, they were still a crea­tive force, and this live album captures the band at a stage when it still had something to offer to the world, not that the world was all that willing to take it.

 

Recorded at the University of Utah, no less, and featuring the revamped seven-man line up (as re­flected in the sly title upgrading of their non-LP hit 'Six Man Band'), the album has mostly been panned: first, by those who castigated The Association for not matching the perfection of their studio output, and then by those who castigated The Association for overdubbing some parts in the studio so as to satisfy the first group. In reality, of course, it is simply that they came out a bit too late with this double LP — in 1970, this sort of music was even less cool than the Beach Boys, and the harder you could throw the dirt, the more self-confidence it would get you.

 

Truth is, The Association Live is terrific. It is true that few of the songs live up one hundred per­cent to their studio equivalents. But the band members did know how to play their instruments and not reduce the songs to their basic, raw components, including thoughtful reproduction of all the important flourishes and modulations (something that, for instance, The Monkees never really learned to do well). As for the vocal harmonies, even keeping in mind that some of them may have been doctored in the studio (is that the real reason why the word Live is in quotation marks on the sleeve?), the seven-man band is in complete control — simply check out the intro to 'Just About The Same' for proof.

 

Another key thing is that, had the live album been released in the year of Monterey, when the world was much more curious about The Association, it could never have boasted this sort of rich­ness. With five studio albums and a bunch of non-LP singles behind their belt, the band can allow itself to forget about the weak and concentrate almost exclusively on the strong — the track selection is impressive as hell. We get to hear a whole six songs off the debut — confirming its Boetcher-masterminded greatness; no songs at all from Renaissance — confirming that the band themselves considered it rushed and dated; four from Insight Out — all hail rejuvenation; only one from Birthday — strange, but, perhaps, understandable, since they might have felt it was a more coherent «art-pop» LP where the songs belonged all together; and four from the self-titled record, which they were, after all, supposed to promote (all good ones, although I personally miss the inclusion of 'Look At Me, Look At You').

 

Among other things, those who do not want to bother with Best Of packages get to hear the band's first two singles — brave and efficient covers of Dylan's 'One Too Many Mornings' and Anne Bredon's 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You' (of course, by 1970 the song was practically owned by Led Zeppelin, but this here way is what it used to be before the metallization), as well as the already mentioned 'Seven Man Band' and the title track from the Goodbye Columbus soundtrack (which, technically, could count as an additional Association LP from 1969, but it had like only four new songs on it, and only 'Goodbye Columbus' itself was any good, which is why I did not review it separately). There is also a version of 'Let's Get Together', a song that seems to have al­most been written with a band like The Association in mind — a wonder it never appeared on any of their earlier records.

 

One thing that is entirely a matter of taste is the band's stage banter: little bits of obviously pre-re­hearsed theatricality that even I may find ranging from the hilarious to the obnoxious, sometimes both at the same time. There is definitely a level of sophistication here that far surpasses the poor Monkees or, God help us, Mike Love — the little rant on attitude comparison between old and new times before 'Wasn't It A Bit Like Now' is probably the smartest bit of all — but on the whole, humorous stage banter is a thing that pop bands rarely do well, unless they secretly get Len­ny Bruce or Woody Allen to script it for them. On the other hand, it's a better way to fill in the pauses between songs than just tuning up (and they had to fill it in, or else they wouldn't have enough space for a double album, and in 1970, a live album had to be double, because how else in 1973 could a live album be triple?).

 

Summing up, I just cannot imagine how a live album from The Association could be any better than this. Let's see: leave out the banter... polish a few tiny mistakes on the harmonies... tighten up the musicianship... you're ending up with their studio recordings. Obviously, a series of live albums from this band would be useless, but to experience them once, at the very top of their game, with humor, confidence, and professionalism, is perfectly all right by me. Thumbs up.

 

STOP YOUR MOTOR (1971)

 

1) Bring Yourself Home; 2) Funny Kind Of Song; 3) That's Racin'; 4) P. F. Sloan; 5) Silver Morning; 6) It's Gotta Be Real; 7) The First Sound; 8) Along The Way; 9) Travellers Guide; 10) Seven Virgins.

 

Growing extra facial hair and finally changing from suits and ties into somewhat more loose and leisurely Californi­an outfits was a telling sign — the band was ready and willing to update their sunshine pop values of the 1960s to the bland MOR values of the 1970s; they weren't above com­peting on the same market with Bread, James Taylor, and the Carpenters, contrary to strange opi­nions that «the Association sounded completely out of step in the 1970s» — for Led Zep fans, perhaps, but it's not like the Association targeted their Sixties' music at garage rock lovers either. Listen to 'Along The Way' and have the nerve to state that it is not a perfectly generic early Se­venties ballad — Stop Your Motor belongs in 1971 as sure as America belongs in it.

 

If there's a problem here, it's in the strange manner in which the album's material is divided into a rougher hewn country-rock part and a tenderly crafted ballad part. The latter is, for the most part, proverbially gorgeous and is about as good as anything the band ever produced. The former is, for the most part, either boring or atrocious garbage, replete with clichés and silly hillbilly accents that make the songs dumb without making them hilarious. One of these, 'That's Racin', probably the most ridiculous song the world has ever known from Terry Kirkman, they even tried to re­lease as a single — thankfully, the public didn't get the joke, and it flopped just as assuredly as the good singles from this record (or else Warner Bros. could have extended their contracts on the condition that they release even more of that hicky stuff).

 

Jimmy Webb's 'P. F. Sloan', a friendly-catchy pop rocker about the ups and downs of being a cor­porate songwriter (or any songwriter, for that matter), is just about the only upbeat tune on the al­bum that goes someplace good, but even this generally harmless ditty suffers from an obvious flaw — the endlessly repeated chorus ("Don't sing this song — it belongs to P. F. Sloan!") can be deemed way too cutesy, if not corny. (Although I have no idea why this single, too, did not chart: the na-na-na-na's get ingrained in the brain so firmly after one or two listens that the only reason I can think of is forgetting to put it on the radio in the first place).

 

But on the positive side, 'Bring Yourself Home' is a swooping, fanfare-attractive type of ballad that succeeds marvelously; then there is 'Silver Morning', an almost «progressive» five-minute suite with several movements that is, at worst, a meticulous and complex piece of work, and, at best, a little bit of wandering genius (the fact that Kirkman is credited for writing both this num­ber and the near-cretinous 'That's Racin' almost boggles the mind); and 'It's Gotta Be Real' and 'Along The Way' are just decent, solid ballads.

 

These highlights show that the band was not on such a desperate downward slide as it might have seemed. If anything, they were simply deteriorating at the same rate as mainstream pop music — or, perhaps, much to their credit, they were trying to resist the deterioration of the mainstream while at the same time trying to remain in the mainstream, an absolutely impossible task. They make the necessary concessions — grow beards, reject much of the instrumental experimentation from the freshly deceased «psychedelic era» (no sitars or kotos in sight), put more emphasize on syrupy strings, but still try to remain on the intelligent side of the street.

 

Which, perhaps, explains why they were eventually pushed into the gutter — this kind of soft rock was a bit too demanding for those who like their rock butter-soft. As time goes by, though, I hope that more and more people will want to experience the gorgeous harmonies of 'Bring Your-self Home' without any silly genrist prejudices — and as flawed and disconcerted as this record is, it honestly fulfills its historic function as The Association's swan song (had they known it them­selves at the time, they might have refrained from ending the record on the mock-rock disaster of 'Seven Virgins'). Thumbs up, with lotsa reservations.

 

WATERBEDS IN TRINIDAD! (1972)

 

1) Silent Song Thru The Land; 2) Darling Be Home Soon; 3) Midnight Wind; 4) Come The Fall; 5) Kicking The Gong Around; 6) Rainbows Bent; 7) Snow Queen; 8) Indian Wells Woman; 9) Please Don't Go; 10) Little Road And A Stone To Roll.

 

I have no idea what the title is supposed to mean, nor its possible connection with the snow-co­vered photo on the front cover. Probably just an absurdist gimmick to give the buying public at least one pretext for owning the record — some people may find it cool to nail something like that to the wall. In any case, the band's first, and only, release for Columbia sufficed to show that the problem was not with the recording label, but with the band itself. The soil was no longer fer­tile, the creativity dissipated, and the band hopelessly lost among generic acts of the day.

 

The decision to release a stripped down acoustic rendition of John Sebastian's 'Darling Be Home Soon' as a single is quite telling — and pitiful. There is nothing they can do to improve on the original: Sebastian's sugary-folksy vibe works well only when he does it, being such a charming, lovable chap and all, and they don't even begin trying to reinvent the song (and how could it be reinvented anyway?). And yet it is still a songwriting highlight on this album of limp, languid, lethargic soft-rock, next to which America and Bread hit songs take on the status of masterpieces.

 

In a way, The Association used to have crunch — not the hard-rocking kind of crunch, of course, but they could streamline their harmonies and heavy use of diverse and loud instrumentation to raise the plank of sunshine pop really high. Now, as they try to get more and more in touch with the main­stream pop values of the early 1970s, they have lost that crunch completely. Patches of spiritual inspiration still blink here and there ('Silent Song Thru The Land' and 'Come The Fall' have their moments of glory), but overall, they just lock the lazily strummed acoustic guitars and sleepily delivered vocal harmonies in a mind-numbing murmur, song after song — and, unlike David Crosby, they do not intentionally try to deliver this as trance-inducing sonics, but seem to sort of think that this is the way one is supposed to do good pop music these days. But it isn't!

 

The album's attempts to provide a little diversity are just as half-hearted: 'Kicking The Gong Aro­und' totally wastes its cool opening bass line (could have been a gritty hard rocker, but becomes a silly jazz-pop number instead), and the ska thing on 'Please Don't Go' is as ridiculous as you'd probably expect a take on ska to sound in the hands of a band like The Association — no surpri­ses there. Splat after splat after splat.

 

For better or worse, it is fairer simply to forget about the album. Really, The Association were the real Association as long as they were associated (har har) with Warner Bros. Columbia only had them for one record anyway: later in 1972, their bass player Brian Cole overdosed on heroin (yes, nice guys do drugs, too), and this initiated a wave of lineup changes that the band did not survive. Other than a few scattered singles, they had no more original albums. Later on, after a million lineup changes, they re-recorded some old tracks for Vintage (CBS, 1983), and then, one decade later, for The Association '95: A Little Bit More (Track Records, 1995) — both releases were heavily panned by those three people who heard them, and, honestly, I do not think it will make any sense to waste any time on their detailed discussion.

 

The funniest thing of all is that The Association still exists — in fact, it's not even as if there ever was a period in which it would be officially disbanded. And it is not even an entirely different band from what used to be, with Russ Giguere, Larry Ramos, and Jim Yester still in the band. And I suppose it should be OK by all of us as long as they do not try to record once again: a res­pectable oldies act that (a rare thing among active oldies acts) actually understands that their time has really passed, and that there is absolutely no reason to try and reignite your creativity if you know for sure there is no creative spark left.

BARBARA LEWIS

HELLO STRANGER (1963)

 

1) Hello Stranger; 2) Puppy Love; 3) On Bended Knees; 4) My Heart Went Do Dat Da; 5) My Mama Told Me; 6) Gonna Love You Till The End Of Time; 7) Would You Love Me; 8) Longest Night Of The Year; 9) Does Anyone Want A Lover; 10) We're Too Young To Marry; 11) Love Is A Castle; 12) Think A Little Sugar.

 

In the early 1960s, mainstream R&B was going through much the same crisis as mainstream rock'n'roll, caught up in the drive to make teen-oriented music sweeter and softer — and so, if you ever wondered, like me, how could Atlantic Records switch its focus from the harsher, cooler, more ass-kicking sound of Ruth Brown to the tender, fragile, bubblegummier sound of Carla Thomas and Barbara Lewis, well, do not forget that it was essentially the same relation as be­tween Gene Vincent and Ricky Nelson. Despite being marketed as an R&B artist, there was really very little R&B about Barbara Lewis and quite a bit of pop. But, now that we are long out of that time loop and no longer feel any pressure to choose one over the other, who cares?..

 

Even though Barbara's debut album is quite a rarity nowadays (it did get an official CD release, but has probably been out of print for years now), there is one outstanding thing about it: it was completely self-written — yes, that's right, not just the hit singles, but every single track here is credited exclusively to Barbara Lewis and nobody else. How she got Atlantic to trust her on that is not entirely clear, but it most probably had to do with the big commercial success of ʽHello Strangerʼ — a song with a strange, subtle charm, emanating from John Young's organ riffs, backing vocals from the Dells, and Barbara's own croon, half-sexy, half-sad, and, lyrically and attitude-wise, probably more aligned with Sinatra than with Ray Charles. The song does not even have an explicit vocal hook (unless "shoo-bop, shoo-bop, my baby" counts), essentially becoming a hit based on atmosphere more than melody.

 

The funniest thing is that both of the other two single A-sides included on this record, ʽMy Heart Went Do Dat Daʼ and ʽPuppy Loveʼ, are far catchier — the former is a lushly orchestrated twist number that tries to express the same kind of first-time excitement that is found on ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ, the latter a piece of hard-to-resist bubblegum that shows Barbara is as good at describing situations of emotional disappointment as she is with sudden teenage crushes. Cool, cuddly numbers with decent musicianship, yes, but neither of them captured the national heart as strongly as ʽHello Strangerʼ — perhaps because the nation felt some sort of intangible intrigue in Lewis' performance, as opposed to complete clarity and one-dimensionality of the other two.

 

On the whole, her songwriting is surprisingly diverse: the songs include straightforward doo-wop numbers (ʽOn Bended Kneesʼ), Brill Building-style teen-pop (ʽMy Mama Told Meʼ), a bit of very light R&B (ʽGonna Love You Till The End Of Timeʼ is pretty much a cuddlier re-write of ʽMoney (That's What I Want)ʼ — well, nobody claimed Barbara Lewis was a completely original songwriter), some jazz-pop (ʽWould You Love Meʼ), and slow orchestrated balladry (ʽLove Is A Castleʼ). «Great» is not a word I'd associate with any of this, though, for some strange reason, the otherwise bland pop ditty ʽWe're Too Young To Marryʼ is distinguished by a highly melodic, inventive, and energetic string passage that is resolved with an amusingly Beethoven-esque flourish. But it's all pretty, listenable, tasteful, and the diversity helps you form the impression that you are actually listening to some sort of artistic statement, rather than a simple bunch of filler quickly produced as packing material for the hit single. As far as I'm concerned, that's sufficient grounds to give the record a thumbs up — it is not every day, admit it, that you run across a pop album from 1963 where all the songs have been written by the artist (even if, admit­tedly, some of these songs did not involve that much songwriting); in fact, as far as labels such as Atlantic and Motown are concerned, I am not sure that (barring professional songwriters who also had their own bands, like Smokey Robinson) there was even a real precedent.

 

SNAP YOUR FINGERS (1964)

 

1) Snap Your Fingers; 2) Please, Please, Please; 3) Frisco Blues; 4) I'll Bring It Back Home To You; 5) Just A Matter Of Time; 6) Twist And Shout; 7) I Don't Want To Cry; 8) Turn On Your Love Light; 9) Stand By Me; 10) If You Need Me; 11) What'd I Say; 12) Baby, Workout; 13) Shame, Shame, Shame.

 

So much for «original songwriting». With a short string of self-penned singles (ʽStraighten Up Your Heartʼ, ʽPuppy Loveʼ) that charted quite modestly, unable to repeat the success of ʽHello Strangerʼ, Atlantic Records probably decided that it was, after all, a mistake to be so permissive towards the lady — and, in stark contrast, made sure that her second LP did not contain even a single original. Instead, they came up with the plain-as-day, dumb-as-death concept of «Barbara Lewis Sings The Great Soul Tunes». This means that Barbara Lewis has to demonstrate to the world that she knows how to put a special twist on James Brown, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Solo­mon Burke, the Isley Brothers, Bobby Bland, and make it all the way to Jimmy Reed.

 

Needless to say, that is a really tough challenge for a nice, quiet, collected lady like Barbara who would much rather write her tender little ballads and pop ditties. She bravely braces herself for the ungrateful task and does what she can — yet even if the results are perfectly listenable, there is hardly any reason for us to get too excited about these takes on ʽTwist And Shoutʼ and ʽWhat'd I Sayʼ, with their energy level well suited to the ambience of a contemporary teen-oriented TV show, but never reaching the requirements of a truly sweaty, gritty R&B workout. In other words, ʽTwist And Shoutʼ here is far more about twisting than shouting, and the infamous moaning sex bits on ʽWhat'd I Sayʼ would probably satisfy the most conservative parents, so far removed they are from, you know... the real thing.

 

I have absolutely no idea how Atlantic, a label that was generally known for its good marketing sense, could have thrown away money on such a hopeless project — making the star of ʽHello Strangerʼ cover Jimmy Reed's ʽShame, Shame, Shameʼ was pretty much the equivalent of some genius marketologist telling Simon & Garfunkel, "hey boys, that ʽSound Of Silenceʼ thing was so cool, now how about you covering some of those British Invasion hits for us, like ʽYou Really Got Meʼ and ʽMy Generationʼ?" The only way for Barbara Lewis to succeed was with original material suited to her quietly reserved personality; instead, she is challenged with the impossible task of having to stand up to the belting of James Brown and to the gospel-pop vibes of Sam Cooke. She is a good girl, and she had a good backing band, but this has got to go down in his­tory as one of the most ridiculous gaffes in Atlantic's history in the Sixties. Thumbs down.

 

BABY I'M YOURS (1965)

 

1) Baby, I'm Yours; 2) My Heart Went Do Da Dat; 3) Come Home; 4) Think A Little Sugar; 5) If You Love Her; 6) Stop That Girl; 7) Puppy Love; 8) Hello Stranger; 9) Someday We're Gonna Love Again; 10) Snap Your Fingers; 11) How Can I Say Goodbye; 12) Straighten Up Your Heart.

 

Today, this looks like a textbook rip-off if there ever was one: six new songs, chaotically mixed with six older songs that had already been released both as singles and as part of the Hello Stranger and Snap Your Fingers LPs. But back in 1965, this probably looked like a reasonable marketing solution, well acceptable for both the artist and the customer. As Barbara's career had pretty much stalled by 1963, and then got jump-started again with the smash success of ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ in early 1965, the managers of Atlantic probably decided to «reboot» her, reasonably thinking that nobody would remember those early songs in the first place, and that most of the people who might want to buy the LP based on the power of the single had never bought the first two LPs — or, if they did, had already forgotten about them.

 

What's a retro-reviewer got to do, though? There's only six new songs here to take care of, none of them written by the artist herself, and probably only two deserving special attention. The title track is, of course, an Atlantic classic, another lush ballad written by Van McCoy especially for Barbara and distinguishable for its non-standard hook, where the first three lines, smoothly and tenderly spiralling upwards, are then suddenly (but gently) brought down to earth with a deeper "in other words..." counterpoint. Like ʽHello Strangerʼ, it is more of a traditional pop ballad than a real R&B groove, and Barbara is probably sounding even «whiter» here than on ʽHello Stran­gerʼ, but that should not detract from the intrinsic qualities of the song. Unfortunately, none of the other ballads here match that hook — ʽIf You Love Herʼ and ʽHow Can I Say Goodbyeʼ are pleasant Roy Orbison imitations that would need a real Roy Orbison to make them come to life: Barbara's vocal parts are too fragile and quiet to make the transition from soothing background to rousing foreground.

 

A second, more minor, classic is ʽSomeday We're Gonna Love Againʼ, from the pen of Sharon McMahan — the song was originally released as a B-side on one of Barbara's singles from 1964 and had already been covered by the Searchers as well, but in this case, I'll definitely take Barbara's version over the Searchers: Atlantic rewards her with a tougher, tighter rhythm section, good support from background vocalists and brass players, and the tension is seemingly higher here than on the Searchers' relatively frail version. Basically, with Lewis it's an uplifting anthem (she sings "someday we're gonna love again" like she really means it), with the Searchers it's a bit of an uncertain mush.

 

That's about it, though: even Jackie DeShannon's ʽStop That Girlʼ sounds like generic movie fodder from circa 1964-65, though by no means unpleasant. Overall, there's just nothing to dis­cuss, as the entire album could be represented in terms of a single single, with ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ as the A-side and ʽSomeday We're Gonna Love Againʼ as the B-side. But no representative collection of mid-Sixties pop music could do without either.

 

IT'S MAGIC (1966)

 

1) It's Magic; 2) The Shadow Of Your Smile; 3) Let It Be Me; 4) Quiet Nights; 5) Since I Fell For You; 6) Don't Forget About Me; 7) I Only Miss Him When I Think Of Him; 8) Yesterday; 9) He's So Bad; 10) A Taste Of Honey; 11) Sorrow; 12) Who Can I Turn To.

 

You gotta love those old style liner notes — "Each cut weaves a different spell, and one is made heady with the potion that is the liquid voice of Barbara Lewis — here curving around a note, wavering just a hairbreadth, there full and round one moment, trailing off the next, now breathy, now misty, now pleading, now desiring, now sad, now exciting, but all musical", writes New York-based disc jockey Enoch Gregory, alias "The Dixie Drifter", in his desperate bid to help Atlantic sell a few more copies of Barbara Lewis' fourth (third?) LP. But even that kind of sweet-talking did not help — fact is, in mid-1966 pop and R&B audiences were not nearly as entranced about curving around notes and misty-pleading-desiring vocals, certainly not if they were so totally old-fashioned in style as Barbara's singing is on this album.

 

For It's Magic, the label commands Barbara Lewis to morph into Doris Day — starting with the title track — and then turn everything into Doris Day, whether it be Antonio Carlos Jobim, Carole King, or the Beatles in the beginning. She's not too bad as Doris Day, but compared to these sugar-sweet arrangements and performances, even Doris Day comes across as Madonna — so completely purged they are of any humor, irony, sexiness, and, well, everything that we usually appreciate in classic R&B. It's like Atlantic were going totally anti-Atlantic here, marketing a singer for the tastes of a respectable white middle class family circa 1952 instead of... well, it's not as if respectable white middle class families had completely vanished off the surface of the Earth by 1966, but they sure as hell weren't likely to go hunting for Barbara Lewis, either.

 

It is not clear to understand the logic of this LP, especially considering that it came right off the heels of Barbara's last truly big hit, ʽMake Me Your Babyʼ, a grand Phil Spector-like lush soul number with towering strings, angelic vocal harmonies, and a vocal performance that at least showed genuine yearning and passion, even if the song itself, written by Helen Miller and Roger Atkins, was little more than a third-rate Shirelles / Ronettes pastiche. But compared to what we got here on the LP... well, enough with the comparisons. If you want a schmaltz version of ʽYes­terdayʼ, Matt Monro is probably the way to go (at least he was there first). As far as my earbuds are concerned, there's absolutely nothing on these songs bar raw timbre and technique, so I'll just have to stack my thumbs down against Encoh Gregory's verdict, and let time choose the winner. Oh, wait, I do believe it already has.

 

WORKIN' ON A GROOVY THING (1968)

 

1) I'll Keep Believin'; 2) Workin' On A Groovy Thing; 3) Make Me Your Baby; 4) Girls Need Loving Care; 5) I Remember The Feeling; 6) Baby What Do You Want Me To Do; 7) Make Me Belong To You; 8) Love Makes The World Go Round; 9) I'll Make Him Love Me; 10) Only All The Time; 11) Sho-Nuff (It's Got To Be Your Love); 12) Thankful For What I Got.

 

Well, one thing is for sure: Barbara's last LP for Atlantic sounds like a mix of industrial avant­garde and grindcore metal... next to It's Magic, that is. At the very least, they had the sense to tone down some of the sugary sweetness and give her a wee bit more of an R'n'B groove and a merry pop swing. They even allowed her to include one of her own songs at the end of the album (ʽThankfulʼ) — a nice gesture, considering that she'd been precluded from that since 1963; given that her own songwriting talents have always been comparable to those of the songwriters she had to cover, this discrimination was really uncomfortable.

 

That said, the record is still anything but great. Essentially, it is assembled from various singles stretching all the way back to 1965; the earliest inclusion is Helen Miller's ʽMake Me Your Babyʼ (already discussed in the previous review), and the next one, from 1966, is Billy Vera's ʽMake Me Belong To Youʼ, originally recorded by Helen Shapiro — as usual, Barbara's fragile and delicate voice puts the emphasis on vulnerability and pleading, where Shapiro's version was more of a power strike. ʽBaby What Do You Want Me To Doʼ is not the Jimmy Reed song, but a lush folk-pop tune written by Grant Higgins and featuring nothing but atmosphere (Barbara's voice, strings, and a quiet brass section should be enough for perfection, right?). Probably the catchiest number is the upbeat, jokey ʽOnly All The Timeʼ, with an unusually carnivalesque arrangement for Barbara, including ukulele, honky tonk piano, and trombone; and probably the best number is ʽSho-Nuffʼ, because it finally adds some real «bottom» to the music, with a strong bassline and an authentic R'n'B feel (unfortunately, one that also calls for a more powerful singer).

 

Anyway, the good news is that we are not emulating Doris Day any more; the bad news is that all of this is still quite formulaic, and the songs are almost never memorable. It remains unclear if we should thank Atlantic for loyally protecting Barbara throughout all that decade, or if we should accuse them of underplaying her talents, saddling her with inferior material, and not letting her develop as an original songwriter — regardless, the fact is that they finally let her go after this record, which, honestly, sounded about as «modern» even by the contemporary standards of mainstream R&B in 1968 as would a blues record by, say, Alberta Hunter. Surprisingly, though, the story does not end then and there, as there was one last chapter to it.

 

THE MANY GROOVES OF BARBARA LEWIS (1970)

 

1) Baby, That's A No-No; 2) Windmills Of Your Mind; 3) Slip Away; 4) How Can I Tell; 5) Break Away; 6) Oh, Be My Love; 7) Just The Way You Are Today; 8) Anyway; 9) But You Know I Love You; 10) You Made Me A Woman; 11) The Stars; 12) Do I Deserve It Baby.

 

Before fading out completely, Barbara Lewis got one last chance at parading her muse with this record, released on the Enterprise label — a subsidiary of Stax, founded largely to accommodate the early production of Isaac Hayes, even though Barbara was never much of a Hayes protege (at least, I am not aware of any of his songs that she'd covered). Once again, for some reason, the emphasis is on the «groove» side of Lewis, an artist whose smooth balladry had always been as far removed from «grooving» as possible — but if you understand «groovy» in the sense of "life, I love you, all is groovy", then you just might have something there.

 

The record continues well in the vein of its predecessor: pure ballads aside, there's quite a few rhythmic tracks with some energy and «bottom» to them, enough to compete at least formally with classic Motown material, if never in terms of catchiness or originality — not surprisingly, since, once again, most of the writers here are professional pop (and sometimes blues) experts, in touch with formulas but largely out of touch with the spirit. Once again, despite the label change, Lewis gets no chance at advancing her own songwriting techniques — and, who knows, perhaps she simply did not care by this time.

 

A few of the songs seem to want to feature a refreshed, revitalized Barbara Lewis singing in a deeper, more powerful voice — ʽBaby, That's A No-Noʼ opens the album on precisely this note, and Morris Dollison's ʽBreak Awayʼ (alas, nothing to do with the classic Beach Boys song of the same name) is a relative highlight in the same vein, although the former song has Barbara stan­ding her ground against The Guy, while ʽBreak Awayʼ has her standing her ground against her­self, because she can't break away from The Guy. Funky, soulful, lightly tragic, well framed by ghostly backing vocals, this is, I guess, every bit as good as any contemporary Diana Ross song, but there's a problem — Barbara Lewis as a strong-tempered character just does not come across as perfectly convincing; you can still tell that suave, sentimental numbers like ʽOh Be My Loveʼ and ʽAnywayʼ represent her natural turf. Therefore, on one hand, it is a relief to see a record that has more funky guitar, well-syncopated bass, and toe-tappy rhythms than all of Barbara's pre­vious career put together — on the other hand, it is sad to see how unfit she is, in general, for feeling at home with this music.

 

It works fairly well as a finale to a mediocre, but inoffensive and mildly charming career: after this record, nothing whatsoever would be heard from Barbara in the music world, apart from an occasional nostalgic emergence (as of the 2010s, she can still be seen performing). Nevertheless, despite the mediocrity, there is still a certain small market for albums like these — clean, taste­ful, thoroughly derivative, but full of tiny individual nuances that will not go unnoticed by serious fans of «soft R'n'B» — and while most of the world will probably only remember Barbara Lewis for ʽHello Strangerʼ and ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ, a tiny smidgen of the world still might want to remem­ber her for her many grooves, and there'd be nothing wrong with that.

 

THE BARBARIANS

ARE YOU A BOY OR ARE YOU A GIRL (1965)

 

1) Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl; 2) Mr. Tambourine Man; 3) House Of The Rising Sun; 4) Marie Elena; 5) Bo Diddley; 6) Memphis, Tennessee; 7) What The New Breed Say; 8) Take It Or Leave It; 9) I'll Keep On Seeing You; 10) Linguica; 11) Susy Q; 12) I've Got A Woman; 13*) Moulty; 14*) Hey Little Bird; 15*) You've Got To Un­der­stand.

 

The Barbarians are only remembered these days because of two songs on the Nuggets boxset — and the vivid, idiosyncratic image that goes along with them: long-haired, sandal-wearing ruf­fians with a drummer (Victor Moulton) who happened to have a hook for his right hand. (You can see the hook all right on their only well-filmed appearance at the T.A.M.I. show, but not the sandals — for some reason, the camera just would not focus on the feet, as if sandal-wearing were even a worse public offense than Elvis' girating hips).

 

I would not exactly say that this select memory of the band is unjustified. The two songs are fine and memorable indeed. 'Moulty', their tongue-in-cheek ode to the drummer's calamity (on which only the drummer himself actually played — ironically, backed by none other than The Hawks, later to be The Band), I used to detest as a cheap gimmick, but at least it showed a certain level of creativity, and the unpredictable transition from the soft, «cooing» atmosphere of the verses into the bass-heavy screamfest of the chorus is, today, in all the rock'n'roll textbooks anyway. And 'Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl', the only time the band ever got close to a national hit, is lu­cky enough to strike a public nerve while being poppy and catchy as hell.

 

Other than that, the band's only LP, wisely named after the hit title track, has next to nothing of interest. Producer Doug Morris was the only semi-competent songwriter in sight, contributing to both of the above mentioned tracks as well as 'What The New Breed Say', another sign-o'-the-ti­mes pop-rocker built on unoriginal guitar lines and modestly catchy vocals. Most of the rest are simply cover versions of tunes from all over the place, ranging from competent, but unnecessary (a surf-rock rearrangement of 'Susie Q') to barely competent and annoying ('Mr. Tambourine Man', which they steal from the Birds without even matching its quality, let alone improving on it or adding a single new twist) to downright awful ('House Of The Rising Sun' — Mr. Lead Singer, if you have just shown a complete inability to be Roger McGuinn, what is it exactly that makes you think you can be Eric Burdon?). Nobody in the band simply had the right chops to do these things properly, or the right head to do them uniquely.

 

Clearly, the Barbarians were strictly a singles band: the only thing one will ever need from them are the A-sides of their 45s: 'Moulty', 'Are You...', 'What The New Breed Say', and possibly their first and best one — 'Hey Little Bird', with a ferocious proto-hard rock riff, monumental fuzz bass and a great swaggery vocal tone (sort of like a more street-wise, slum-evil twin brother of Mick Jagger's). Unluckily, neither 'Breed' nor 'Bird' are to be found on Nuggets, even though, in my opinion, both belong there more firmly than 'Moulty'. But it's also true that neither of them tells any horrifying thrills about one-armed drummers.

 

Not that the Barbarians could not have become an LP-oriented band: after all, we know plenty of examples of Sixties' artists whose first albums were derivative suckfests. But some guys have all the luck and some don't even get the scraps. Like so many others, the Barbarians did not manage to fit in, got lost in between bad publicity and personal conflict, and disbanded around 1967. Se­veral of the members later founded another band, Black Pearl, which got the chance to release a couple bad psychedelic rock albums in 1969-70 before vanishing into thin air — I've heard a few of the tracks and, perhaps, after all, the Barbarians really could not have made the transition into the LP era. But thanks for leaving us with an unforgettable image.

THE BEACH BOYS

SURFIN' SAFARI (1962)

 

1) Surfin' Safari; 2) County Fair; 3) Ten Little Indians; 4) Chug-A-Lug; 5) Little Girl (You're My Miss America); 6) 409; 7) Surfin'; 8) Heads You Win – Tails I Lose; 9) Summertime Blues; 10) Cuckoo Clock; 11) Moon Dawg; 12) The Shift.

 

Listening back on 'Surfin', the Beach Boys' first single and a song that, in a way, opened up a new page in the history of American popular music (without knowing it at the time, of course), one could probably build up a solid case for a complete lack of progress in mainstream pop in fifty years time — the period it takes to span the distance from 'Surfin' to thoroughly «modern» «plea­sures» like Miley Cyrus' 'Party In The USA'.

 

Yet there is a difference. From the very start, the Beach Boys — the three Wilson brothers, their cousin Mike Love, and their friend Al Jardine — were truly committed to music. With their sim­ple blue-collar origins, it was all very much homebrewed at first, but the boys practiced hard and, most importantly, amalgamated tons of influences. It is true that their first two singles and the accompanying LP could not yet let anyone see the true greatness to come, but perhaps, buoyed by the freshness of the idea to write a vocal song about surfing, they were simply pushed into the studio too soon: compare the Beatles, whose serious studio career only truly took off after a gru­e­ling five year schedule of playing and honing their act.

 

Even so, the simplistic-hedonistic vibe of 'Surfin' still sounds cute and seductive today, if only for its utter innocence and, I'll say it again, freshness — basically, it was one of the first situations in which a bunch of normal, clean, non-threatening kids, raised on proper suburban values, would pick up their electric guitars and take their inspiration from the «right» people in the business, na­mely, rock'n'rollers, surfers, and folksters.

 

19-year old Brian Wilson contributed a whoppin' nine originals here, with lyrics contributed ei­ther by cousin Mike Love or pal Gary Usher. His growth as composer and arranger is evident already during the transition from first to second single: 'Surfin', behind the lively ba-ba-dippity's (courtesy of Mike, not Brian), is almost non-existent on the musical plane, whereas 'Surfin' Safari' already has a steadier beat, a guitar solo, and Mike Love, although still suffering from too much nasal whining, hits a few more notes here and there. Fairly big progress, actually, achieved in less than half a year, at a time when the very idea of «progress» in a pop musical career was not yet formulated explicitly.

 

But overall, there is not much diversity: at this point, Brian's originals are mostly fast-paced surf pop variations on pre-existing rockabilly / surf-rock compositions. The arrangements are fleshed out only inasmuch as they can distinguish «songs» from «early demos» (guitar-bass-drums and very thin, insecure vocal harmonies; kudos for playing all the instruments on their own, but this is actually a case where outside professional help couldn't hurt). And, although his services in the future would occasionally be of more significant use, Gary Usher is essentially a crap lyricist — after all, you needn't go further than Chuck Berry to learn that it is possible to write smart, funny, and provocative lyrics about cars, girls, and other simple pleasures of life, yet, apparently, Usher was not a fast learner, what with his idea of a provocative chorus amounting to "Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug, give me some root beer". ROOT BEER? Cute little darlings, are we?

 

Some of the more interesting failures, the likes of which one can only encounter on this debut, involve: (a) 'Sum­mertime Blues' — the only time the Beach Boys dared to put a bona fide rock'n'roll classic on a studio album before the even bigger failure of 'Rock'n'Roll Music' in 1976; I guess they just weren't made for this style; (b) 'Ten Little Indians', an «original» experiment in kiddie-folk that the record label embarrassingly selected as the follow-up single to 'Surfin'; (c) 'County Fair', «enlivened» by pseudo-carnival atmosphere overdubs that only further emphasize its silly amateur entertainment status.

 

Yet, when all is said and done, 'Surfin' Safari' is arguably their best straightforward surfing an­them (as opposed to «best song that has the word 'surf' in the title», an honor that goes to the much later 'Surf's Up' which, frankly speaking, had nothing to do with surfing whatsoever); and '409' firmly establishes their «car song» format, even if the lively chorus of "giddy up giddy up four-oh-nine" sounds dangerously close to "idiot idiot four-o-nine" (intentionally, perhaps?). A minor sensation upon release, almost immediately forgotten in the wake of a wave of much gran­der successes, these days Surfin' Safari is simply an exciting case study in «a day in the life» of fresh-faced, innocent teenage America before the filthy British Invasion came and perverted the land of the free and the brave beyond repair. Thumbs down, of course (I could not win the argu­ment that this is objectively better than Miley Cyrus had I really wanted to), but with reservations concerning its instructive, period-piece-ish, value.

 

SURFIN' USA (1963)

 

1) Surfin' USA; 2) Farmer's Daughter; 3) Misirlou; 4) Stoked; 5) Lonely Sea; 6) Shut Down; 7) Noble Surfer; 8) Hon­ky Tonk; 9) Lana; 10) Surf Jam; 11) Let's Go Trippin'; 12) Finders Keepers.

 

Professional growth a-plenty. From the toddler infancy of 'Surfin', through the humble teenage­hood of 'Surfin' Safari', the Beach Boys grow into adulthood with 'Surfin' USA', a true anthem to surfing as the ultimate embodiment of F-U-N — even if they just happened to take the melody from Chuck Berry's 'Sweet Sixteen', a fact that was so utterly obvious that loving dad / ruthless tyrant manager Murry Wilson was so afraid of, he immediately ceded complete copyright to an eager-to-complain Chuck Berry, even though the lyrics most certainly weren't his.

 

Nor was the arrangement, which seriously «surfed up» Chuck's original rock'n'roll mood, and, most importantly, introduced the Beach Boys to the technique of double tracking. Now that there were eight Beach Boys singing harmony to the world, instead of four, all of a sudden, this no lon­ger sounded like silly homebrewed product: Brian Wilson still had plenty to learn in the studio, but here you finally had material produced according to modern standards, songs that still sound re­spectably enough when placed on compilations of highlights from different periods.

 

'Surfin' USA' was a well-deserved monster hit for the Boys, the first one in a series of nuggets that would last all the way unto 1966; and it wasn't merely the vocal overdubbing technique that it introduced — it is also performed much more steadily and self-assuredly than anything on Sur­fin' Safari, showing that the kids were fairly well dedicated to improving as musicians. Brian plays a little electric organ, Carl plays a livelier and more fluent solo than ever before, and Dennis can actually both keep the rhythm and throw in precise fills — nothing extraordinary, but for a guy who was frequently accused of being kept in the band for his good looks (and wild reputation) rather than his musicianship, he acquits himself fine already on this first track of their second al­bum. The grooves are fine.

 

The bad news is, of course, that Surfin' USA (the album) was rushed — let alone the fact that, like all the US pop albums of the early Sixties, it only contains twelve songs that do not altoge­ther amount to even twenty-five minutes' worth of music, more than half of them are transparent filler. The Beach Boys trained themselves as respectable musicians, to be sure, but with Dick Dale, Duane Eddy, and the Ventures around, who would, honestly, want to hear a bunch of surf instrumentals played by a bunch of teenage sweeties? Clearly, it is not the Beach Boys' version of 'Misirlou' that is going to go down in history, even if they pull off the basic structure; and even if I have nothing displeasing to say about 'Surf Jam' or 'Honky Tonk', the best thing there is to say is — if these recordings played their part in helping the Beach Boys gain a necessary level of self-confidence as bona fide musicians, so be it, and let us move on.

 

As the dust settles, 'Surfin' USA' finds itself in the company of, at best, four additional treasurable songs. 'Farmer's Daughter' introduces us to the flourishing of Brian Wilson's falsetto vocals (an event that must have produced so great an impression on the 14-year old Lindsey Buckingham, he had to cover the song for Fleetwood Mac's Live album seventeen years later), and also to one of the most hilariously unintentional double entendres in lyrical history — "Glad to help you plow your fields, farmer's daughter". So that's what they call it now.

 

'Shut Down' is a little bit of a vehicular improvement on '409' ("tach it up, tach it up, buddy gonna shut you down" is certainly a step up from "giddy up giddy up four-o-nine"), but the real major progress is the entrance of ballads: fast ones ('Farmer's Daughter', 'Lana') and, most notably, the slow «downer» 'Lonely Sea', also sung by Brian. The harmonies here are still a bit crude, not hit­ting the heights they would be hitting in just a few months, but the spirit is already there, that par­ticular one which pushes the band's output outside the realm of teenage muzak and doo-wop cli­chés into higher places (if you want to believe it, of course).

 

All of which makes Surfin' USA a historical marvel — so many steps up (double-tracking, full fledged production, improved musicianship, strengthened songwriting, introduction of balladry, etc.) and so little material to prop the steps. Even as a two-for-one CD offer, with Surfin' Safari getting top billing, there is still not enough classic material to fill up twenty minutes of music. Fortunately, this is the very last time the band allowed itself such a high filler quota — at least, until so much later, when the band's very existence came to define the idea of filler.

 

SURFER GIRL (1963)

 

1) Surfer Girl; 2) Catch A Wave; 3) The Surfer Moon; 4) South Bay Surfer; 5) The Rocking Surfer; 6) Little Deuce Coupe; 7) In My Room; 8) Hawaii; 9) Surfers Rule; 10) Our Car Club; 11) Your Summer Dream; 12) Boogie Woo­die.

 

There may be a slight overload of surf-related song titles here, but the problem ceases to be a pro­blem with the first notes of 'Surfer Girl' — a song whose shallow, insignificant lyrics (unless you happen to be one of the lucky few who really did encounter the love of your life on a surfing trip) contrast so much with the beauty of the melody and vocal arrangements, it's not even amusing. How many people have shunned and avoided the Beach Boys for their image, one that is so easi­ly detachable from their substance with but a little effort and goodwill? Much more than the Beatles — and only because the Beatles, during their early years, happened to be just a tiny bit more «ma­ture-looking» in terms of lyrics and general image.

 

Huge changes here, much more so than the difference between the titles Surfin' USA and Sur­fer Girl would really have one believe. For one thing, Brian Wilson asserts his role as sole producer: he is now unquestionably the heart and soul of this band, credited as full writer or co-writer (in the latter case, usually responsible for everything but the lyrics) on ten of the tracks and «arran­ger» on the other two. For another thing, this is where the band starts employing professional ses­sion musicians — at the time, mainly limited to Hal Blaine on drums, replacing Dennis' power­house, but, according to Brian, erratic drumming (Maureen Love, Mike's sister, is also credited for harp playing on 'Catch A Wave', but that could hardly be called «professional support»); in the future, ses­sion players would replace the band almost entirely. Good? Bad? For the purposes of Surfer Girl, somewhat irrelevant, I'd say; for the future — well, like it or not, Pet Sounds would not have been the way we all know it without session musicians.

 

Finally, Surfer Girl shows strong signs of hope that someday, in some way the Beach Boys would be overcoming the filler problem. Both sides of the album muster enough awesomeness to begin with not one, but two phenomenal songs in a row (that's already 4 out of 12, more classics than on their previous two records put together). The title track and 'In My Room' are a wee bit simplistic compared to the really flourishing period of Brian's balladry writing, but the boys had fully learned how to transform their collective vocal acoustic powers into mind-blowing angeli­city — strangest thing ever, here was a kind of sweet beauty created from the simplest ingredients by a bunch of teen idols, and it wasn't banal or cringe-worthy.

 

Comparisons between 'In My Room', Brian's and Gary Usher's first attempt to cover a little more serious lyrical ground, and the Beatles' 'There's A Place' crop up all the time, just because both happened to be recorded in the same year and dedicated to the same subject (a little introverted escapism), but in terms of reaching for heights, there is really no comparison: John's is basically a happy pop-rocker that has the overwhelmed guy retreating to his personal corner to think over a girl's love confession, whereas Brian's is really a prayer to solitude, with the lyrics and the slow, lullaby-like, melody perfectly molded together.

 

The sequencing is such that you are supposed to be shaken out of both of these dreamy beauties by the two far more dynamic surf anthems — 'Catch A Wave' and 'Hawaii' respectively — which, in their own turn, represent the pinnacle of the surf genre for these guys. Surfboard sales must have skyrocketed with these songs occupying the airwaves, since both create a totally paradisiac atmosphere — on 'Catch A Wave', Maureen Love imitates the breaking of the wave in question with such a lovely harp flourish you'd think the wave were a cuddly little friend (instead of the huge salty monster it actually is — has any surf musician ever tried writing of the dangers of sur­fing, if only just for a change?). And, of course, Brian's falsetto on 'Hawaii' is legendary, even if the song is basically just a flat commercial to touristic Polynesia.

 

The attractions of Surfer Girl do not begin and end with these four songs — there's also 'Little Deuce Coupe', the band's most elegantly composed and least stupid-sounding car anthem so far; 'Your Summer Dream', another of Brian's prayer songs that is really no worse than 'In My Room', just a little more predictable in terms of lyrics; and a couple more surf-rockers like 'Surfers Rule' that may be a bit annoying next to the classics, but are still heads and tails above what the boys were writing less than one year before. Clear-cut filler is essentially restricted to a couple instru­mentals ('Boogie Woodie') and occasional bits of teenage stupidity ('South Bay Surfer' — early Beach Boys are almost always at their worst when they try to take a direct aim at humor, which is no surprise considering that the band's biggest humorist was also its biggest asshole).

 

The silliest thing about the album, really, is the cover — that photo must have been taken from the same session that yielded the shot for Surfin' Safari, and, if anything, begs for two questions: (a) how on Earth can it take someone one whole year to unload a surfboard? and (b) what on Earth are five guys going to do with one surfboard? (The correct answer, of course, is: Give it to Dennis, since he was the only one in the band who knew how to surf in the first place). Bar that circumstance, a thumbs up most of the way.

 

LITTLE DEUCE COUPE (1963)

 

1) Little Deuce Coupe; 2) Ballad Of Ole' Betsy; 3) Be True To Your School; 4) Car Crazy Cutie; 5) Cherry, Cherry Coupe; 6) 409; 7) Shut Down; 8) Spirit Of America; 9) Our Car Club; 10) No-Go Showboat; 11) A Young Man Is Gone; 12) Custom Machine.

 

Capitol Records and the Beach Boys have a long, complex story of Money vs. Art relationship, and this is where it all begins. Some people have jokingly called Little Deuce Coupe the first concept album, since all of its songs are about cars — but then you could take every second blues album ever recorded before white people started appropriating the genre and claim that all of them were concept albums about getting laid (or not getting laid). Besides, one usually expects that the person behind the concept album should be the artist, not the record label.

 

Anyway, seeing as how Brian's «car songs» were getting the band as much fame and the label as much money as his «surf songs», the idea to put out a «car album» was probably inevitable. Un­fortunately, due to the mad rush (I mean, what if Jan and Dean should get there first?), Brian was not given time to write enough material, meaning that four of the songs had to be recycled from the band's previous albums — and, of the rest, not everything could boast proper quality control on the level of Brian's finest contributions for Surfer Girl.

 

With disc jockey and big car fan Roger Christian and cousin Mike handling most of the lyrics, it is hardly surprising that Little Deuce Coupe is one of the silliest-sounding Beach Boys records ever — from the primitive teenage-jingoistic 'Be True To Your School', as flat-foot as any cheer­leader anthem, to a whole series of girls/cars analogies that are sometimes unaware of their own double entendres ("A-ridin' the clutch", eh? "She likes to take 'em clean and gap the plugs" — that one's for you, Dennis).

 

This does not mean that the entire stock is worthless: 'Cherry, Cherry Coupe' and 'No-Go Show­boat' are both a great showcase for the band's ever-solidifying harmonies; the late James Dean tribute 'A Young Man Is Gone' is its first serious try at going a cappella, and, although the lyrics are utterly lame, the sentiment is quite genuine; and Brian's vocals on the sentimental 'Ballad Of Ole' Betsy' are so gorgeously done that the feelings are almost believable — except, of course, that the historical Brian Wilson, in comparison with the lyrics, was produced ten years after «Betsy», but that's exactly how a great artist is born: fakin' it and loving every minute.

 

Since I am not more of a car fan than I am a surf one, there is little else to say. The record came out barely one month after Surfer Girl, still managed to sell plenty, gave the guys their third Top 10 hit (the cheerleading nonsense, of course, rather than the much more tasteful 'Cherry, Cherry Coupe', for instance), and satisfied Capitol Records for long enough to be able to come up with a proper follow-up to Surfer Girl in due time. That's all, folks.

 

SHUT DOWN VOLUME 2 (1964)

 

1) Fun, Fun, Fun; 2) Don't Worry Baby; 3) In The Parkin' Lot; 4) Cassius Love Vs. Sonny Wilson; 5) The Warmth Of The Sun; 6) This Car Of Mine; 7) Why Do Fools Fall In Love; 8) Pom Pom Play Girl; 9) Keep An Eye On Sum­mer; 10) Shut Down, Part II; 11) Louie Louie; 12) Denny's Drums.

 

WARNING: As a sincerely committed, responsible father, I feel professionally obliged to state that the song 'Fun, Fun, Fun' by the popular American band that surreptitiously calls itself "The Beach Boys" (a highly suspicious fact, considering how few witnesses ever noticed members of this band near an actual beach) is one of the most morally endangering, spiritually corruptive by-products of the pop music industry, intentionally designed to lead the young people of America and the world into the temptation of easy-going pleasures, debauchery, and degradation.

 

Doubt my words? Armed with concrete evidence, I will prove to you that the song 'Fun, Fun, Fun' was created by the Devil in person — promoting, in one way or another, all of the seven deadly sins AT ONCE. Just look here. First, the protagonist is openly stated as having pilfered her daddy's car — GREED, logically leading to illegal thieving activity. Second, what is her first selected destination? "Cruising through the hamburger stand" — GLUTTONY, bright and clear as the morning sun. Then, of course, "the girls can't stand her 'cause she walks, looks and drives like an ace now" — ENVY, ladies and gentlemen, promoted and stimulated by the young girl's rash, irresponsible activity, poetized by this suspicious band. And on the girl's side? Why, PRIDE, of course: "She makes the Indy 500 look like a Roman chariot race now".

 

Yet the worst is still ahead. With her thoughtless behaviour, she has provoked her formerly in­telligent and rational parents into the deadly sin of WRATH — "Your dad was gettin' wise to you now, you shouldn't have lied now" is but an indirect hint at the ensuing family scandal that, no doubt, included elements of heavy verbal abuse and, who knows, perhaps even corporeal punishment. Does that, however, stop the unrepenting teenager? Not at all! As she is slowly sin­king into the subtle, but firm sin of ACEDIA — "You've been thinking that your fun is all through now", sing these false prophets, implying that there is little more to life than mindless, shameful hedonism — the final blow is delivered: "You can come along with me 'cause we got a lot of things to do now", says a certain Mr. Michael Edward Love (or should we call him "Mr. Michael Edward Lust?"), clearly implying that the doomed teen is just about to be led into the deadliest sin of them all — FORNICATION.

 

In the light of this thoroughly irrefutable evidence, I have no choice but to recommend black­listing the song on all family-oriented radio stations and adopting radical measures to prevent mu­sic created by this so-called «pop band» from ever reaching the ears of the young generation of today, whose still developing spirit should instead benefit from the much better pronounced tra­ditional Christian values of such inspired artists as Ms. Taylor Swift, Ms. Selena Gomez,  Ms. Anna Margaret, and, of course, Ms. Rebecca Black, whose own attitude on the questionable ac­tivity of «having fun» is far more restrained, healthy, and reflects reasonable, caring, God-loving upbringing on the part of her esteemed parents.

 

As a sidenote, I would also like to remark that, with the above-mentioned so-called «pop song» 'Fun, Fun, Fun', the alleged «Beach Boys» themselves have demonstrated recidivist criminal be­haviour: less than a year after having been caught red-handed while shamelessly stealing a melo­dy written and copyrighted by Mr. Chuck Berry, they have now gone on record doing it once again, considering that the opening guitar solo on 'Fun, Fun, Fun' is an almost note-for-note re­production of the guitar solo that opens Mr. Chuck Berry's own 'Roll Over Beethoven'. In fact, once I suffered through the misfortune of putting on this record, I first thought that I was going to be treated to a faithful cover of Mr. Chuck Berry's song (a fine piece of work, that, affirming the strong, healthy values of traditional American music over the effeminate sissy-pissy excesses of decadent European composers). One can only imagine my profound disappointment and sense of shock fifteen seconds into the song — of course, I still had to sing along and tap my foot right down to the very last note, but it's the Devil made me do it, swear to God.

 

As a postscriptum, here is some extra info on this album I've found, written by some Russian guy with an unpronounceable name. I'm not responsible for his opinions, mind you — it's just that I cannot bring myself to providing any further information on this band that is so clearly aiming for a kind of Herostratean fame.

 

«...another quick cash-in with a small bunch of classics and a large bunch of filler. Approximately half of the album is really good, with 'Fun, Fun, Fun' illustrating the band's rapid progress in wri­ting catchy fast classics (although Carl's ripping off Chuck Berry in the intro is somewhat too ob­vious), and 'Don't Worry Baby' being Brian's first successful attempt at getting a genuine Phil Spec­tor-ish sound with just a few clever vocal overdubs and some nice echo effects — basically, a terrific illusion of a wall of sound without any actual «walling».

 

These are the two perennial classics, plus you have two gorgeous, but self-derivative ballads in the old style ('The Warmth Of The Sun' and 'Keep An Eye On Summer', written in the same vein as 'Your Summer Dream' etc.), and there is another beautiful cover, that of Frankie Lymon's 'Why Do Fools Fall In Love?' (a song that now seems to have been written almost specially for Brian and the boys' harmonies, despite coming out six years earlier).

 

Other than that, Shut Down Vol. 2 seems to be the album in the Beach Boys catalog that is just proverbially riddled with stupidities. Stupid is the name itself, sending unsuspecting fans (par­ti­cularly unfortunate for later-day fans) in search of Vol. 1 (which did indeed come out in 1963, but was an all-star hot rod compilation, with only 'Shut Down' and '409' from the Boys themselves).

 

Stupid are filler tracks like 'In The Parkin' Lot' and 'This Car Of Mine', retrograde Mike Love-fests that would have been alright on Surfin' USA but, by now, were already obsolete in the light of Bri­an's progress (granted, Mike didn't have anything to do with the writing of 'In The Parkin' Lot', but he did sing it, and in singing it, he owned it). Stupid is the decision to cover 'Louie Lo­uie' — the Beach Boys are no Kingsmen, and their inability to carry over the caveman menace of the original leaves them with just the simple dumbness of it all.

 

Most stupid is the decision to include a separately recorded drum solo from Dennis ('Denny's Drums'), considering the young Wilson's lack of technicality; and stupidest of 'em all is 'Cassius Love Vs. Sonny Wilson', a specially staged piece of «verbal sparring» between Mike and Brian — although, funny enough, in retrospect it does not seem nearly as stupid, sounding now as a slightly ominous preview of the real «pop success vs. artistic integrity» conflict between the two of them that would start taking place in two years' time. At the time, though, it sounded really brainless. (A learner of English could at least hope to teach oneself a thing or two about archaic Californian slang, but "at least I don't sound like my nose is on the critical list" doesn't sound quite like real-life Californian slang, or does it?).

 

Altogether, a shut down, uh, thumbs down, with salvation guaranteed only for five of the songs and classic status guaranteed only for two. Fortunately, Shut Down also shuts down the «purely singles-oriented» period of the Beach Boys' career — with the British Invasion and its anti-vinyl waste policy around the corner, the Wilsons would be among the first American performers to adopt that policy, and even set an example for others.»

 

ALL SUMMER LONG (1964)

 

1) I Get Around; 2) All Summer Long; 3) Hushabye; 4) Little Honda; 5) We'll Run Away; 6) Carl's Big Chance; 7) Wendy; 8) Do You Remember?; 9) Girls On The Beach; 10) Drive-In; 11) Our Favorite Recording Sessions; 12) Don't Back Down.

 

All comparisons between the Beach Boys' All Summer Long and the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, even if the two sound very little like each other, are still fully justified. Not simply beca­use the two LPs were released on the market literally within days from each other, in July 1964, but also because they represent the two finest pop bands of the early «teenage Sixties» at the ab­solute peaks of their «pre-serious» days. Both records take the «innocent» teen pop song genre — in its Brit-pop and California-pop incarnation, respectively — as high as it could ever be taken. From here on, there are but two directions: (a) conservation and gradual stagnation or (b) self-upgrading to an advanced level. Fortunately for us, both bands took option (b).

 

In the field of consistency, All Summer Long still loses out to Hard Day's Night, being much further from perfection on a song-by-song basis. For one thing, the issue of explicit filler has not been overcome. There is another piece of useless studio chit-chat, and another equally useless gui­tar instrumental — made to look ever more embarrassing by being given such «honorary» titles as 'Our Favourite Recording Sessions' (just in case you ever had the stupidity to think that the band's favourite recording sessions actually were the ones where they got the recordings right, instead of sounding like a bunch of five-year old goofballs); and 'Carl's Big Chance' (this one in­vites about a million bad jokes, so I'll just leave it up to you).

 

For another, there is no denying that there is a gradual drop in quality as the record moves along — much of Side B (and let us not forget that the entire album is over in 25 minutes' time) is do­mi­nated by Mike Love, whose lyrical skills seem to become more and more annoying with each new album, so much so that even Brian only sees it fit to put them to inferior re-written melodies. (It remains to be ascertained how much the local drive-in theater owners' union surreptitiously paid Mr. Love for the line "don't sneak your buddies in the trunk 'cause they might get caught by the drive in" — in any case, he'd have to be pretty dumb not to try to cash in on that).

 

'Do You Remember?', a song twice unnecessary because of the melodically similar, but far su­pe­rior 'Little Honda', becomes thrice unnecessary also due to lyrics that, in an inane manner, try to glorify the early pioneers of rock (let alone the fact that we still don't know what is "the all-time greatest song" that Chuck Berry is supposed to have written — 'Rock'n'Roll Music'? 'Johnny B. Goode'? 'Roll Over Beethoven'? Come on, Mike, you of all people should know that Chuck Ber­ry's all-time greatest song, 'My Ding-A-Ling', had not even been conceived yet. And why are the boys upholding this with harmonies of "diddy-wah diddy-wah"? That's, uh, actually, like a Bo Diddley song, really).

 

Finally, as beautiful as 'Girls On The Beach' is on its own, there is no denying that it is merely a variation on 'Surfer Girl', with the exact same verse melody getting a different resolution. The fact that Brian, who is very rarely known for plagiarizing himself, still gave it the green light, can only mean that, once again, the potential perfection of All Summer Long was ruined by external circumstances — record company demands, touring, promotion, and Brian's conflict with his fa­ther, which culminated somewhere around that time as the growing artist finally mustered enough courage to fire the parent from his manager position. (Too bad he was never strong enough to try the same stuff on Mike — although in 1964, Mike was still a positive force within the band, and by 1967, when he became its sinking stone, it was too late to chip the stone away).

 

Still, even today, as you put on the record, and all these classic numbers on the first side swish by, one by one — you can't help being impressed. 'I Get Around', the big hit single and one of the greatest songs of its era, is the record's visiting card, of course. The band's first No. 1 hit on the charts (and, contrary to what we'd all think, the Beach Boys only scored a measly three No. 1's during their good days — the fourth one was 'Kokomo'... nice weather today, isn't it?), and the finest vocal-harmony present to the art of cruising around that there ever was, as all the "round round round round I get around"s interweaved with Brian's gradually rising and falling falsetto really create a head-spinning atmosphere — almost proto-psychedelic in its way.

 

But all the other highlights lag only slightly behind, by being less concentrated on breaking new ground and more concentrated on pure emotion. The title track is like a joyful sequel to the ro­mantic preview of 'Keep An Eye On Summer'. 'Little Honda', turning from cars to bikes now, puts on lots of echo and overdubbing — maybe its basic melody is not that far removed from '409' or 'Shut Down', but now Brian has this whole thing quasi-symphonized, and suddenly even Mike's lead vocal sounds heroic/anthemic instead of simply coming across as a teenage wimpy nasal whine. 'Hushabye' features the most complex vocal harmonies on the album and is, in some ways, a fine preview of the many vocal wonders the band would give us in the 1966-71 period.

 

And then there's the fabulous opening bars of 'Wendy' — let's face it, for the first ten seconds, what with the gruff, ominous bass notes and the lonely, intriguing drum fill we do not even know what the heck we are listening to. Is it going to be a surf instrumental? An attempt at blues-pop? A Gregorian chant? Then the vocal harmonies kick in, but the mist never clears com­pletely, as the song balances between a generally fun atmosphere and grief-stricken lyrics (and a pretty mo­rose organ solo).

 

Finally, a brief plugin needs to be inserted for 'We'll Run Away', with proverbially naïve lyrics from Gary Usher — but leave it up to Brian to take all these Romeo-and-Juliet clichés and make them utterly believable through an incredibly gorgeous vocal delivery. Just the right tone, just the right modulation, just the right notes. So right, in fact, you can almost picture Mr. Wilson finish­ing the recording, taking off his headphones, leaving the studio, picking up the 15- or 16-year-old love of his life, eloping to the airport, and spending the rest of his life in total and utter happiness on a quiet, remote dairy farm somewhere in North Dakota. Who cares if he eventually wound up as a disillusioned, overweight, thoroughly unhappy nervous wreck? Actually, the song did reflect reality at the time — Brian would marry the 17-year old Marilyn Rutherford in December that same year, and they even managed to have a fifteen-year long family relationship, quite a long stretch for a rock star, by any accounts. So — fluffy idealism or gritty autobiography?

 

Overall, for a non-completist it would make terrific sense to combine the strong parts of All Sum­mer Long with the bunch of classic numbers on Shut Down Vol. 2 — my dream album for the Beach Boys circa the first half of 1964 would look something like this: Side A: 1) I Get Around; 2) All Summer Long; 3) Hushabye; 4) Little Honda; 5) Don't Worry Baby; 6) Keep An Eye On Sum­mer; Side B: 7) Fun, Fun, Fun; 8) Why Do Fools Fall In Love; 9) The Warmth Of The Sun; 10) We'll Run Away; 11) Don't Back Down; 12) Wendy. This sort of record would, IMHO, be capable of knocking the ground even from under Hard Day's Night's feet. As it is, just thank the inane people at Capitol records for being in the secret pay of Brian Epstein. Nevertheless, even with all the filler and haste, All Summer Long is as vertical a thumbs up as they come.

 

CONCERT (1964)

 

1) Fun, Fun, Fun; 2) The Little Old Lady From Pasadena; 3) Little Deuce Coupe; 4) Long Tall Texan; 5) In My Room; 6) Monster Mash; 7) Let's Go Trippin'; 8) Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow; 9) The Wanderer; 10) Hawaii; 11) Gradu­ation Day; 12) I Get Around; 13) Johnny B. Goode; 14*) Don't Worry Baby.

 

Even though Capitol's exploitation policies may be detestable per se, one should admit that the marketing guys inadvertently pioneered quite a few creative ideas in the process. First came the mock-concept of Little Deuce Coupe, and now comes what must have been the first live album — not first live ever, of course, but the first one to capture a new-look Sixties band at the start of the era of sexual liberation, replete with screaming girls all over the place. EMI never had the heart to do this with the Beatles: the recording technology was still too feeble to capture the live sound properly in that kind of sonic environment, let alone the fact that no band could withstand the screaming and retain the proper sound tightness. Capitol had no scruples about «tarnishing» their Californian darlings' reputation that way — and came out with a first.

 

One thing Concert is definitely not is a hundred percent authentic document of the times. Many of the vocals had been overdubbed later, and even some of the instrumental tracks are substitutes — for instance, 'Fun, Fun, Fun' is just a sped-up version of the original. On the positive side, this is not simply a live-in-the-studio experience with shamelessly overdubbed audience sounds (this approach would also be pioneered by Capitol soon enough, with the release of Party!). Hardcore Beach Boys fans will undoubtedly be able to disentangle the truth from the lies.

 

But the album can still be seen as the next best thing — a trustworthy facsimile of the way it used to be, way back when Brian was still performing live with the band; when the band itself came across as a real bizarro act, half silly teen-pop, half gorgeous adolescent-art (no two songs in a row on an album from 1964 present a starker contrast than 'In My Room' and 'Monster Mash'); and, of course, when the audience was so happy just to see these shining young lads with guitars they'd be bursting out screaming at the first notes of anything — had Brian Wilson suddenly come up with 'Vegetables' back then, little girls would probably go orgasming at the sound of any given Beach Boy chomping on a carrot.

 

The setlist is historically precious in that it does give us a good slice of the popular teen standards of the day. Not many people today remember anything much about Jan & Dean, or Dion, or even the Four Freshmen, let alone Bobby «Boris» Pickett, and, although these rough live renditions do not really do full justice to either the originals or the Beach Boys' ability to interpret them, they are still fun. At the very least, it is curious to hear Dennis sing Dion's 'Wanderer' from behind the drumkit, to the best of his abilities, or to witness Mike «Boris» Love engage in a little comedy horror fun ('Graduation Day', though, most of us could probably live without — way too corny even for the innocent early Sixties).

 

Best of the bunch is the Rivingtons' 'Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow', a novelty tune that does not scale the same walls of absurdity as its much more famous derivative ('Surfin' Bird'), but is still one of the few non-embarrassing pure gigglefests that its age produced. No idea how much of the har­monies was overdubbed, of course, but does it really matter? It is still one of the few songs on here that makes the whole album a must for even the non-hardcore fan.

 

Another good thing is that, at this point, Mike Love was not the undisputed conductor on stage — it took him growing a whole beard to earn that privilege — and, for the most part, the listener is deprived of the torture of having to assess the man's dubious sense of humor. It only hurts during the pathetic intro to 'Graduation Day' (in which Mr. Love feels it is his duty to remember and list all types of schools whose graduates could be the potential addressees of the song), but you might as well skip the whole thing altogether and go straight to 'I Get Around' — a song so good that no introduction by Mr. Love could ever spoil it (a thing he obviously understands, so he offers none).

 

All it takes is try and overlook the abysmal sound quality (Al Jardine's guitar, for instance, seems to have magically vanished from the mix — particularly noticeable on 'Little Deuce Coupe', where Mike introduces the players with their instruments one by one), and Concert may sound like harmless fun even today. But it goes without saying that, being released three months past All Summer Long, its picture of the Beach Boys was slightly anachronistic even for that time. 'In My Room' and 'I Get Around' are, in fact, the only indicators here that what we are listening to is really a major happening on the American scene rather than well-crafted, but seriously fluffy teen entertainment.

 

CHRISTMAS ALBUM (1964)

 

1) Little Saint Nick; 2) The Man With All The Toys; 3) Santa's Beard; 4) Merry Christmas, Baby; 5) Christmas Day; 6) Frosty The Snowman; 7) We Three Kings Of Orient Are; 8) Blue Christmas; 9) Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town; 10) White Christmas; 11) I'll Be Home For Christmas; 12) Auld Lang Syne.

 

The Beach Boys' only fruitful attempt at a Christmas album (there would be another try as late as 1977, rejected by the record label) is exactly the kind of thing that a Beach Boys Christmas album circa 1964-65 would be expected to be. You'd expect them to cover some oldies (because what's a Christmas album without recognizable standards?), and they do. You'd expect them to offer some originals (because what's a Beach Boys album without a few Brian Wilson songwriting credits?), and they do. You'd expect them to not pour too much heart and soul into it (because why the heck should anybody, let alone one of America's most creative bands, give two fucks about a Christ­mas album?), and they don't.

 

No better proof for that last statement than one of the bonus tracks included on the first CD reis­sue — an early version of the album's main track and single, 'Little Saint Nick', which is nothing other than All Summer's Long 'Drive-In' with a different set of Christmas-related lyrics. Appare­ntly, they eventually thought the idea too crude and self-plagiarizing, because the final version ended up... sounding like 'Little Deuce Coupe'. All right, a little different when it comes to the cho­rus vocals, but certainly not enough to convince anybody this was not a mere hash job to satis­fy the record company's fifty five thousandth stupid request.

 

Beach Boys fans hungry for more Beach Boys material will not want to bypass the album. Its good side is that it is totally and completely drowning in floodwaves of vocal harmonies, and in this respect, it may even have been a little bit of a progression — there wouldn't be that huge an amount of proverbially gorgeous vocalization even on Today!; only Pet Sounds would explore the power of angelic vocalizing to a higher degree. Its drawback, however, is that, since it is after all a Christmas album, there is way too much syrupy orchestration, done the corniest way pos­sible — yes, a first for the Beach Boys, but a regrettable one.

 

There are also some particular questionable decisions. For one thing, covering 'White Christmas' is a useless job even for the Beach Boys, after Clyde McPhatter had taken the song to the highest level it could ever be taken to. For another thing, there was no single good reason on Earth to va­riegate 'Santa Claus Is Coming To Town' with a completely non-belonging quotation from 'Entry Of The Gladiators'. (Unless, of course, this is a veiled hint at the stupidity of Christmas, implying the thoroughly clownish nature of Santa as a character). And they certainly could have at least sung 'Auld Lang Syne' to the end, with that trademark a cappella delivery of theirs, instead of ha­ving Dennis (why Dennis?) deliver the seasonal greetings to the fans.

 

But other than that, hey, it's a Christmas album; and if I had a choice between, say, the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, and Metallica, I'd probably always take the middle ground and go along with Brian Wilson than with either the overtly predictable or the downright weird choice. Besides, want it or not, there is a certain level of «maturity» shown here in the boys' brave tackling of «se­rious» material such as 'We Three Kings Of Orient Are' — and, clearly, choral hymns like that were also one of the major influences on Brian's creativity in the following years.

 

As an utter novelty, it would also be well worth checking out one of the bonus tracks — a comp­lete a cappella take on The Lord's Prayer, done Beach Boys-style, of course. (If you belong to the rare breed of devoted Christian teens, it will be an overwhelming beauty. If you are a grim atheist, you can still think of it as an innocent, naïve, but still utterly sincere beauty.) There is also a new reissue of the album called Ultimate Christmas, which joins the album with the results of ses­sions for the aborted 1977 album, and a couple songs there may be worthwhile, but... too much Christmas talk already, and I'm writing this on a hot day in August — let's just move on.

 

TODAY! (1965)

 

1) Do You Wanna Dance?; 2) Good To My Baby; 3) Don't Hurt My Little Sister; 4) When I Grow Up; 5) Help Me, Ron­da; 6) Dance, Dance, Dance; 7) Please Let Me Wonder; 8) I'm So Young; 9) Kiss Me, Baby; 10) She Knows Me Too Well; 11) In The Back Of My Mind; 12) Bull Session With "Big Daddy".

 

Let me put in a few kind words for Mike Love. Whatever he did for the Beach Boys' reputation starting in the mid-Seventies and onwards — we'll get to it eventually — is inexcusable. But as for his infamous clashes with Brian over the band's direction in the «classic» era of 1965-67... well, it would be one thing if the Beach Boys wrote and recorded their surf/cars/girls songs like any generic teen pop band. But by 1964, Brian had already learned to keep such gems as 'I Get Around' coming on a regular basis — songs that were, at the exact same time, artistically inno­vative and commercial. So... if you can write music that is loved both by the critics and the pub­lic, what's your problem?

 

No wonder Mike got so infuriated when he saw Brian concentrating, first and foremost, on com­plex, not-so-easily-accessible ballads. He might not have been railing so much against innovation and progress as he was upon what he perceived as an incomprehensible haughtiness, an out-of-nowhere desire to go and lock oneself up in an ivory tower. And, to a certain extent, I get that feeling. By concentrating exclusively on his «pet sounds», which could, medically, be interpreted as giving in to the call of autism, Brian, want it or not, would lose some of the versatility and fle­xibility that he showed off so well in the early years. In a way, paradoxical as it may sound, his music, with Pet Sounds and whatever ensued, became more predictable — more complex, more profound, more spiritual, but less diverse and adventurous.

 

Which is why The Beach Boys Today! has eventually become my favourite Beach Boys record. For a very simple reason — it contains everything one should know and understand about the Beach Boys, a perfect demonstration of all of their capabilities and almost none of their flaws. On Side A, it has songs tailor-made to send Mike Love into waves of ecstatic frenzy, and yet, at the same time, impenetrable to criticism unless one just hates pop altogether. And on Side B, you have a bunch of ballads whose lyrical subjects may not reach the depths of thought that Tony Asher or Van Dyke Parks would soon bring in... who knows, perhaps that's a good thing... but whose musical layers and heavenly vocal arrangements would never truly be surpassed; I am, in fact, arguing, that, even if Brian would be still writing music every bit as beautiful in the follow­ing years, Today! already finds him at his accomplished peak.

 

Four words: 'Please Let Me Wonder'. The most perfect synthesis of romanticism and realism that the band had created up to that moment — and when you think that Mike Love is actually credi­ted for the lyrics, it also becomes an acutely band-like thing, more so than Pet Sounds and Smile that were more like «Brian Wilson solo albums with invited guests supplying vocal harmonies». Not that the lyrics are great, but they're okay, a nice rendition of a perfectly believable situation. The poor protagonist guy is smitten, but hasn't really got the nerve and/or courage to come out with it, so he is just content with asking to "please let me wonder if I've been the one you love, please let me wonder if I'm who you're dreaming of" — ah, what the hell, most of us have, at one time or another, asked this question, no matter how macho some of us may try to seem in every­day life. (If you haven't, you must at least be Che Guevara or something).

 

The music, owing quite a bit to Phil Spector's wall-of-sound, is not stunning on its own (but then I have also never been a big fan of the instrumentals on Pet Sounds, either), but it acquires stun­ning power in conjunction with the vocals — even before the chorus comes in, with Brian's lead line "Now here we are together..." as the most gorgeous verse melody the man ever wrote and sung. There's such a delicate mix of loving tenderness (his inner voice is addressing the invisible heroine as if she were made of china), fearful insecurity, and down-to-earth realism — not one single note is overcooked — that I can only express pity at the fact that so few ballad-makers took serious notice. This is how these things ought to be done, period.

 

The magic of 'Please Let Me Wonder' has always obscured the solid qualities of the other ballads for me — perhaps they should have placed the song last rather than first — but there is no getting away from the fact that musically, 'She Knows Me Too Well' and 'In The Back Of My Mind' are  more thoroughly developed, and presage the psychedelic/baroque qualities of Pet Sounds. 'In The Back Of My Mind', furthermore, has been donated to Dennis — a questionable decision, see­ing as how he was always the least technically accomplished singer of the whole bunch, but, on the other hand, his «painful» delivery is also a quirky precursor to his later career; you can easily trace a straight line from the experience of singing it on this album to the aching confessions on Pacific Ocean Blue twelve years later.

 

Then there is no forgetting the first side, either. 'Do You Wanna Dance' does away with Bobby Freeman's silly bongo sound, cranks up the speed dial, and becomes a rip-roaring anthem to the powers of dancing, with yet another lead vocal from Denny, this time far more confident and col­lected. The original creation 'Dance, Dance, Dance' that bookmarks Side A on the other edge, has all that and terrific vocal harmonies, rising and going in circles according to a pattern that has its direct precursor in 'I Get Around', but may be even more tricky this time. For 'When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)', Brian hauls out the harpsichord — still a fairly rare instrument in late 1964/early 1965 — and trades a set of commonplace, but always relevant teen-philosophy questions with Mike ("will I love my wife for the rest of my life?" — nice question to ask, Brian, I'm sure Mari­lyn was only too happy to hear that one). Only the early, rushed, version of 'Help Me Rhonda' sounds underdeveloped, a mistake the band would soon correct on their next LP. Elsewhere, no trouble with anything whatsoever.

 

Oh yes, a brief reminder of the fact that the LP medium is not allowed to exist without filler is still there in the form of the last track: 'Bull Session with Big Daddy', which tries to pass for abo­ut two minutes of civilized interviewing, but is constantly getting derailed with complaints about stepping on one's French fries — and that one immortal quote: "Of all of Europe the only thing that stuck out in my mind is the bread" (I don't quite understand who exactly said that, and I don't think I want to know) — granted, American bread does suck, but just how patriotic is it to rub that fact of life in our faces? Anyway, two minutes of humiliation for us all here to remind that listening to perfection may be dangerous, since it makes us forget that we are still living in the real world, where people not only write and perform beautiful music, but also behave like silly clowns and eat cheese sandwiches.

 

As a beautiful, well-balanced, and (for a bunch of young kids in early 1965) intelligent album, Today! has few peers — in fact, even a «Beatles person» like myself must admit this was the on­ly time when Brian Wilson clearly was in the lead; and I do not mean the formal richness of the sonic texture, which Brian, ever the trustworthy disciple of Phil Spector, would always excel in, but simply the realization — the conscious realization — that his mission here on the planet was to create something bigger than just «pop music». The Beatles would slowly gravitate towards this realization over the course of 1965; Brian must have been thriving on that mindset as early as late 1964, and maybe even earlier than that. Sensitive soul, that Brian. Thumbs up.

 

SUMMER DAYS (AND SUMMER NIGHTS) (1965)

 

1) The Girl From New York City; 2) Amusements Park USA; 3) Then I Kissed Her; 4) Salt Lake City; 5) Girl Don't Tell Me; 6) Help Me, Rhonda; 7) California Girls; 8) Let Him Run Wild; 9) You're So Good To Me; 10) Summer Means New Love; 11) I'm Bugged At My Old Man; 12) And Your Dream Comes True.

 

History has marked Summer Days as a slight fall-off from Brian's unprecedented mountain­eer­ing record — an involuntary concession to pressure on the part of both Capitol Records and Mr. Mike Love, so that the band's loyal fan guard suffer not the painful deprivation of the good old surf / girls / cars saccharose intake. And nothing is going to change that history, because it seems to have been objectively true: Summer Days was rather hastily put together by Brian to assuage his worried pals, just as Pet Sounds were already flooding his brains.

 

That said, for a «marking-time album» this one is remarkably filler-free — so much so that, in a way, it would be possible to imagine Summer Days/Pet Sounds as a joint double LP, twice the length of Today! but sharing the same structure: one half dynamic, upbeat, and commercial, one half slow, introspective, and experimental, yet in such a way that both halves are clearly the pro­duct of a single mastermind conscience. (Even bearing in mind that the former half still showed some signs of collective output, whereas Pet Sounds is 100% Brian).

 

Yes, there are a few saddening throwbacks. For instance, the instrumental composition 'Summer Means New Love' is technically pleasant, but essentially sounds like generic early Sixties soundtrack muzak (à la 'Ringo's Theme' off Hard Day's Night, except the melody is nowhere near as captivating as 'This Boy'). Worst of the lot, a serious blemish on the album's re­putation, is 'Amusement Parks USA', a carnivalesque romp dominated by artificially cheery lyrics and vocals from Mike, festival barkers and what-not, a tune whose closest match in style would be some­thing like 'County Fair' off Surfin' Safari — and that was three years ago, when the band was just starting out and its lack of expertise, professionalism, and taste could still be excused. In mid-1965, there was no more excuse. Every time I hear that frantic laughter in the background, I have to turn the volume down — if anybody catches me listening to this over the Brandenburg Concertos, my reputation is gone forever.

 

The expertise, however, breaks through on 'Salt Lake City', which must have been intended as yet another silly-sounding, life-asserting anthem to the pleasures of American life (through a Mor­mon perspective, no less, although, judging by the lyrics, Mike Love might have been totally un­aware of that obvious association, being far more interested in the sensual pleasures that the lo­cation offered). But midway through, an entirely different sax-and-keyboards section cuts in, with complex interweaving patterns, and becomes the focal point of the song — so good that the melo­dy would stick in the band's subconscious and eventually be rewritten as 'Do It Again'.

 

And when the collective spirit is not that strongly dominated by the «surf-o-rama» (meant figu­ratively, of course; technically, there are no surf songs here at all, in spite of the tempting album sleeve), we simply get pop classic after pop classic. 'Help Me, Rhonda' is here again, in a heavily revised version that adds more melodic overdubs, more complex vocal layers, and a more inven­tive build-up in the solo section. Phil Spector and the Crystals' 'Then He Kissed Me', with the gen­der roles wisely reversed, is not a huge improvement over the original, but is exactly what one would expect of a Beach Boys' reversal of a fabulous girl group hit song.

 

The magnum opus of the record has always been recognized as 'California Girls': easy-going cat­chy pop lovers adore it because, well, it would be fairly hard to find a catchier pop song in exis­tence, while artsy-minded types love to concentrate on the song's small «symphonic» opening, simple in melody but, sound-wise, completely identical to the instrumental style of Pet Sounds ('Wouldn't It Be Nice' would soon be introduced in a very similar way). Me, I like the tempo of the song — before that, somehow, the band would generally favor either fast pop-rockers or slow ballads, but here we roll along on a steady midtempo that somehow gives the song a statelier cha­racter than all those other early anthems to the Californian lifestyle. It is really a perfect culmina­tion, and a fitting conclusion, to the band's career as troubadours of teen-centered West Coast va­lues, which they would never again return to in a fully convincing, «authentic» manner.

 

On the other hand, the magnificence of 'California Girls' sometimes obscures the fact that its im­mediate follow-up on the album, 'Let Him Run Wild', is also one of the greatest achievements of Brian Wilson's career. It isn't just a ballad, it's a little bit of an über-romantic thunderstorm that, for the first time on a Beach Boys album, almost threatens to break out from under control and turn into emotional chaos — even if it's only an illusion, since, at that time, Brian was still in full control of his senses and instincts. And that nervous beginning, when Brian's high-pitched vocals break the wall of the near-psychedelic keyboards, is every bit as good as the famous start to 'Good Vibrations'. Don't you go forgetting this little masterpiece.

 

Almost everything else on the album also ranges from interesting to excellent. Beatlesque influ­ences crop up on 'Girl Don't Tell Me', one of Carl Wilson's first lead vocals over a refrain that, admittedly, was influenced by 'Ticket To Ride' (although the lyrics treat their female subject with far less reverence than John Lennon reserved for his female protagonist); overall, however, the two songs are entirely different. And 'You're So Good To Me', with a non-falsetto lead from Bri­an, also sounds a little Mersey-beat-ish to my ears, or, perhaps, even reminiscent of the style of the Hollies — in any case, more British in stylistics than American.

 

Of note is the near-complete lack of transparent filler, and the complete lack of goofy material ('Our Favorite Recording Sessions' etc.), unless one wants to count 'I'm Bugged At My Ol' Man' as a bit of goofiness. The tune, a sort of mock-comical musical swipe that Brian took at his father (hyperbolically exaggerated enough so that a «c'mon, Dad, it's not really about you» would al­ways be in order), is made to sound like a rough demo, with just Brian at the piano and the rest of the band surrounding him like a barbershop quartet — in a way, presaging similar rough-cut mu­sical skeletons that he would accumulate twelve years later for Love You. It is so completely out of place here, though, that, for the first time ever, we get to sense Brian's own bits of mental in­sta­bility: a person more or less at peace with himself could hardly be expected to put this kind of stuff on the same album with 'California Girls'.

 

To summarize, Summer Days is, in general, a bit of a retread indeed, but, taking one big step backwards, the band still manages to make a few intriguing short steps forward at the same time. And it is the last we will ever see of these early, smiling, still beardless, still having-fun-in-the-sun Beach Boys — before the towering ambitions of their leading genius, the relentless marching on of time, the personal troubles and turmoils, drugs, disfunctions, depressions, derision, Charles Manson, and whatever other avatar of chaos came along, took over and wiped that smile off the band's collective face, never to return again, unless in a very forced and unnatural state. Thumbs up, album — thumbs down, loss of youthful innocence.

 

PARTY! (1965)

 

1) Hully Gully; 2) I Should Have Known Better; 3) Tell Me Why; 4) Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow; 5) Mountain Of Love; 6) You've Got To Hide Your Love Away; 7) Devoted To You; 8) Alley Oop; 9) There's No Other (Like My Baby); 10) I Get Around/Little Deuce Coupe; 11) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 12) Barbara Ann.

 

Another odd experiment from the depths of Capitol Records. Another album was required from the band by Christmas time, in order to fulfill the regular three-LPs-per-year quota — but with Brian's reluctance to speed things up with standard studio production, it was clear that yet another bastard release would be in the works. Still, it would have to at least match the band's ten­dency for unpredictability and diversity. Since the «conceptual compilation» (Little Deuce Cou­pe), the live album (Concert), and the Christmas album slots were already occupied, some bright soul came up with the idea of The Beach Boys' Party!:

 

— everyone knows, of course, that if a bunch of musicians gives a party, what always happens is, at some point they inevitably end up dragging out the acoustic guitars and the maracas and the tambourines, and start goofing around covering their own and other people's materials, and the nonplussed guests simply continue chatting and laughing at top volume of their own voices, be­cause who the heck would want to stop and listen, provided the booze is still flowing freely? This is known, or should be known, as authentic party atmosphere, and this is exactly what Capitol Records has offered its clients on this Beach Boys album.

 

Of course, considering that such authentic party atmosphere does not actually exist, and even if it exis­ted, could hardly have been captured on record in 1965, one had to remain contended with a careful simulation. The Beach Boys did drag out their acoustic guitars, run through a rag-taggy set of songs, upon which the results were spliced together with «party sounds» — and the final product ends up being completely bizarre. Since the liner notes never stated explicitly that the «party» was a fake, many people probably wondered back in the day — how come all these laugh­ing idiots treat the band with such blatant irreverence, and what on earth prompted the boys to invite them to their party in the first place?

 

Upon disregarding all the giggles and the clinking glass, Party! remains a let-your-hair-down style curio, worth an occasional listen. It is interesting to see how much the Beach Boys were fascinated by the Beatles — covering a whoppin' three tunes, the last one featuring Dennis on vo­cals (a fourth one, 'Ticket To Ride', is said to have been left in the can) — and gets one to thinkin' wouldn't it be nice to see them actually contributing backing vocals to any real Beatles songs. An even bigger surprise is to hear Al Jardine passionately, if not very convincingly, battling his way through 'The Times They Are A-Changin', needlessly «deflated» by clownish exclamations like "RIGHT!" that sometimes punctuate the pauses between vocal lines. Although, if rumors be be­lie­ved, Al was a major folkie, back in those days at least, and fell under the Dylan charm easier than the rest of the guys. (Probably also had something to do with his vocal limitations — it is much harder to fall under the Dylan charm if you yourself are used to singing like an angel).

 

Everything else is more predictable: goofy novelty numbers for Mike's tummy ('Alley Oop'; ano­ther take on 'Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow'), pompous Phil Spector chorales for Brian's dummy ('There's No Other Like My Baby'), and tepid, but catchy pop oldies for your Mommy ('Mountain Of Love', 'Devoted To You'). The only bit of self-written material is a parodic medley take on 'I Get Aro­und' and 'Little Deuce Coupe', the latter bit recast as a moron's interpretation of an Elvis Presley bossanova recording. And the biggest technical surprise is that the closing number, 'Barbara Ann', with Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean guest starring on lead vocals, unexpectedly became one of the band's biggest hits — particularly in the UK, where, ironically, its commercial success became the lube that helped Pet Sounds effortlessly slide up the charts next year, despite the two having virtually nothing in common.

 

Maybe some day Capitol will come to its senses and release a Beach Boys Party Pooper! or something like that, with the moronic noises removed and extra acoustic tracks from the vaults thrown in — because, as an early representative of the «unplugged» genre, it is a nice enough, sometimes genuinely touching record. At this point, its importance is mostly historical: it shows clearly that the Beach Boys were not developing in a vacuum, and that, in 1965 at least, some of them were quite hip to the times, even if each such demonstration is consistently set back with a performance of a silly kiddie piece of fluff.

 

But 'Barbara Ann', which indeed sounds like one of the happiest, catchiest, lightest numbers ever recorded (no wonder even Keith Moon was a major fan), does serve as the perfect watermark to separate the pre-pubescent (figuratively speaking) Beach Boys from a musical ensemble that has made the transition to another plane of existence. You'll definitely know it when you put all their material into one continuous playlist — and then experience 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' a few seconds after the final applause and laughter of 'Barbara Ann' have died down.

 

PET SOUNDS (1966)

 

1) Wouldn't It Be Nice; 2) You Still Believe In Me; 3) That's Not Me; 4) Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoul­der); 5) I'm Waiting For The Day; 6) Let's Go Away For Awhile; 7) Sloop John B; 8) God Only Knows; 9) I Know There's An Answer; 10) Here Today; 11) I Just Wasn't Made For These Times; 12) Pet Sounds; 13) Caroline No.

 

Could it actually happen so that someone lands on this review without having previously heard, if not Pet Sounds itself, then at least of Pet Sounds and its influence? In the unlikely event of a yes, here are three basic facts and one popular opinion you need to know: (1) Pet Sounds is the only album in the Beach Boys catalog that can be objectively described as a Brian Wilson solo album with guest vocal harmonies provided by the Beach Boys; (2) Pet Sounds is the album that singlehandedly initiated the destruction of The Beach Boys as America's juiciest commercial pro­position; (3) Pet Sounds is the album that forever cemented the reputation of The Beach Boys as America's finest pop-art institution. And that opinion? Simply that Pet Sounds is the greatest al­bum ever recorded, bar none.

 

Trying to expand on this condensed information in an original way, offering fresh insights and unique analysis, is probably futile. The mass impact of Pet Sounds in 1966 was incomparable to that of the Beatles, and could seem to be dissipating in the ensuing years, what with the band's overall reputation going to tatters. But ever since the great and magnificent Pet Sounds revival around the early 1990s, in large part due to its huge influence on all sorts of alternative and un­der­ground musical genres that were infiltrating the mainstream, so much has been written on the subject from all points of view that... well, prepare to be bored.

 

Clearly, Pet Sounds is a watermark — the single highest point that Brian's creativity managed to reach, an ambitious project that had the luck of having each of its ambitions fulfilled, a complex work of art on which the principal artist managed to be in total control and get everything to work exactly, or, at least, nearly-exactly, as he'd envisioned it. Sort of a Citizen Kane for pop music, a fabulous surprise success after which the original artist would inevitably run out of luck, because there's only so much luck you are entitled to in your lifetime.

 

Just as clearly, the endless comparisons between Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper (or Revolver, or whatever other Beatles album there is) are pointless, because the principal players differed in qua­ntity and purposes. Brian was mostly alone (not counting fellow lyricist Tony Asher), busy wri­ting a concise, conceptual, monolithic «teenage symphony to God» (he invented the term in re­la­tion to Smile, but, personally, I think it works much better when applied to Pet Sounds). The Beatles consisted of at least two (at the time — almost three) distinct and multi-tasking creative personalities whose spirituality, primary influences, and manner of work had nothing in common with Brian and his approach. Rumor, partially spread by Van Dyke Parks, has it that hearing Sgt. Pepper was one of the reasons be­hind Brian's creative collapse in mid-1967 — I find it extremely hard to believe, because there is just no way Brian would ever have wanted to record an album similar to Sgt. Pepper in the first place.

 

Less clear to spell out are the actual reasons for which this music remains so timeless. As I return to these songs, which I had not properly listened to for several years, with a fresher ear, and hap­pily understand that every single one of them has been firmly remaining in my head for all this time, I become more and more convinced — what is truly and uniquely fabulous about Pet So­unds is not the reckless experimentation, not the tons of backing musicians, not the use of empty Coca-Cola cans for percussion, not the exquisite baroque flourishes, not the complex engi­neering techniques, not even the over-the-top arrangements of backing vocals. All of these things have their functions and are always in their proper place, but Pet Sounds could still be Pet Sounds without them, just wouldn't present so many happy excuses for critics to shoot off their mouths.

 

What really makes Pet Sounds so special, in my view, are the main vocal melodies. There are, indeed, some of the most fabulous singing parts ever recorded in pop music out here. Rhythmic, symmetric, elegantly organized, catchy — and dripping with raw, unfaked emotion — and dis­play­ing a brand new advanced level of intelligence and complexity. In 1965, there was still no talking about this kind of depth. In 1967, there would already be no talking about this kind of dis­cipline

 

After all these years, 'Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)' still remains one of my favorites — an amazing feat, considering that slow, lethargically paced, dreamy ballads are almost never my thing. And in a different setting, a different performer could very easily miss the life in these vocals. But it is the vocal modulation that carries the main content — most of all, the subtle transition from verse to chorus, the former delivered with romantic solemnity ('I can hear so much in your sighs / And I can see so much in your eyes...') which culminates in high-pitched near-ecstasy ('...there are words we both could say...'), the latter then briskly undercutting the pa­thos and wiping off all traces of sappiness: 'don't talk...', he sings with a no-bull attitude that al­most borders on irony, 'put your head on my shoulder...' with an added bit of very natural cares­sing, no overplaying involved — the vocals only move up again on the finishing '...let me hear your heart beat', as the chosen method of communication starts to work its charm. Miss any one of these components and you miss out on a great new way to tell an old story.

 

Little wonder that Brian sings lead on seven out of eleven vocal numbers — leaving Mike Love with a fairly pitiful presence on the album, which was probably a much stronger reason for Mike shunning Pet Sounds in subsequent decades than any purely ideological disagreements. (He does a damn fine job on 'That's Not Me' and 'Here Today', though — but apparently the former was too personal, and the latter too complex, to be properly reproduced on the stage. And, by the way, con­cerning the story of how Mike was pressing Brian into changing some of the more obscure lyrics — I find that the new, «simplistic» lyrics to 'I Know There's An Answer' actually sound far less contrived and unduly pretentious than the original 'Hang On To Your Ego', one of the silliest refrains of the year). Brian could have easi­ly done the lead vocals on 'God Only Knows' as well, but preferred to donate the song to Carl, a move that pretty much singlehandedly shaped his image as that of a smooth, irresistable romantic loner. But overall, this is Brian's album, and it was only fair that he, and no one else, should voca­lize his own emotions, all of which he did admirably.

 

At the same time, in 1966 Brian was still keeping a fairly rational head on his shoulders. Under­standing that an album filled from head to toe with slow-moving confessional tear-jerkers would hardly go down easy with audiences previously used to 'Help Me, Rhonda's and 'Fun Fun Fun's, he commences both of the album's sides with a deceptively upbeat start. The hushed mandolin sound that opens 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' rips into a danceable tempo in a manner somewhat similar to that of 'California Girls', and although the song descends into choral chanting a couple times along the way, in general it is still very much compatible with the girls-and-sunshine image of the Beach Boys of old. Same with 'Sloop John B', a folk-reworked-as-pop tune originally brought in by Al Jardine and recorded as early as mid-1965. Unsurprisingly, these were the two songs that remained in the live setlists for the longest time (along with 'God Only Knows' as a special show­case for Carl while Mike Love would listen to his beard grow).

 

Where I'm getting at is this: the crucial, perhaps, difference between the ultimately successful Pet Sounds and the ultimately not-as-convincing Smile was that Pet Sounds shows the steady hand of an unusual, but generally sane artist, whereas Smile, by all accounts, would be the documen­ted history of the artist's gradual — in fact, rather fast — descent into madness: a thing that easily happens to the best of us when we attempt to bite off far more than our jaw-stretching capacity al­lows us physically. Among other things, it is a lot of fun to look at Brian's photos from 1966, like the ones included in the original artwork of the album or the endless CD reissues: note how deeply involved, how self-assured, and how Europeanishly-cool he always looks with that haircut and those dark frames. (Actually, it all makes him look like Roy Orbison, but that does not con­tra­dict the generalization). Already in 1967, that coolness starts to dissipate, frequently replaced by vacant or frightened stares into open space. Creepy — but somewhat expectable.

 

So is this «the best» Beach Boys album? Or «the best» album of all time? Or, at least, a one-of-a-kind achievement that gave America its own Great God of Pop Music, to show all these British ruffians where they truly belonged? I don't think one can answer this question directly without getting po­liticized and ostracized. It already gave and continues to give plenty of happy fodder for all the «Beatles vs. Beach Boys», «UK vs. US» etc. discussions that are never conclusive be­cause it is never clear what exactly is the object, or what exactly are the criteria for the discus­sions. It's a great way for normal people to turn into obsessive trolls overnight.

 

I would just say this: On its own terms, Pet Sounds is perfection. All of the songs make sense, all of the songs have grappling power, all of the songs fit together and give a high resolution mirror image of the sensitive, dynamic mind of their creator, in which optimism and melancholia dwell on adjacent floors and frequently visit each other for a friendly drink. In the historical context, Pet Sounds is one of the major achievements of 1966, hardly a slouch year for great music. And in the context of California boy Brian Wilson's artistic growth — it captures that perfect moment when the teen soul suddenly finds itself capable of thinking like an adult, all the while retaining its teen character.

 

But in order to get the most sensual pleasure out of listening to the album, one does have to have a high tolerance level for similar-sounding, occasionally «mushy» music in which strings, chi­mes, and organs are always more important than electric guitars, and steady kick-snare drum patterns and head-bob-inducing basslines are sidestepped in favor of, uh, far more gentle sounds. And I can understand people who would irately claim that an album like that simply isn't qualified for the title of «best ever», and that they'd sooner give the title to a Mötörhead record (at one point in time, I actually shared something close to that position).

 

In other words, the formula of Pet Sounds is a formula: after the first side is over, the second side sounds fairly predictable — we already know most of the places to which Brian Wilson has been, even if there is no problem whatsoever about freely and happily revisiting them once again on the next six tracks. But I must say that I openly envy those whose idea of total, limitless beauty hap­pens to coincide with Brian Wilson's: for these people, Pet Sounds will be the soundtrack to their life, an endless source of support and inspiration. (Just for the record, for myself such a sound­track, ever since childhood, has been George Harrison's All Things Must Pass — another soul outbreak from a tormented loner tempered by impeccable production values, but one that has al­ways hit closer to home in my particular case). And, want it or not, even if my own wavelength never quite coincided with Brian's on this album — shouldn't a song like 'I Just Wasn't Made For These Times' be the collective frickin' anthem for all of us, the few pathetic souls in this world who have actually heard Pet Sounds? Aw, thumbs up.

 

SMILEY SMILE (1967)

 

1) Heroes And Villains; 2) Vegetables; 3) Fall Breaks And Back To Winter; 4) She's Goin' Bald; 5) Little Pad; 6) Good Vibrations; 7) With Me Tonight; 8) Wind Chimes; 9) Gettin' Hungry; 10) Wonderful; 11) Whistle In.

 

The story that surrounds the release of Smiley Smile is one of the weirdest stories to have ever taken place in the music record industry. The basics are well known, and have been accounted for over and over in countless sources (so I will not bother retelling The Most Excellent And La­men­table Tragedy Of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks And How The Both Have Been Per­fidi­ously Betray'd By One Michael Love, An Eater Of Broken Meats If There Ev'r Hath Been One), but that does not help them make any sense.

 

Put it this way. When your original idea was to produce a groundbreaking, inspirational, more- free-than-a-bird piece of musical art, and, in response to this, you have been tied hands and feet by your friends, relatives, and record company; when you have just made a brave attempt at open­ing your mind to all sorts of sounds, images, influences, and substances, and your own musi­cal colleagues have openly stated that they are in no shape to stomach it; when, under tremendous pressure from what looks like the entire world around you, you are finally forced to step on your ambitions and shelve your dreams — what is the natural thing for you to do?

 

Nothing could be simpler. You take a bunch of the craziest songs from your project; you re-re­cord them as raw, demo-quality versions, ten miles away from the general quality of production you are usually known for; and, as a subtle mockery, you bookmark them with two brilliantly produced, multi-layered, visionary mini-suites that provide a brief glimpse into what that project could have sounded like. Then you submit this to your record company. And the record company, naturally, releases the results. Why? I have no answer other than the basic intuition suggests — because people who work in the record industry are fucking idiots, that's why.

 

Perversely, over the years Smiley Smile has achieved a cult status among a sub-section of the in­die crowd, although that could hardly have been predicted by any of the eggheads at Capitol Re­cords. People who tend to get a huge kick from any kind of music that is raw, mad, and daring, often point to Smiley Smile as somewhat of a milestone, noting its uniqueness not just in the ca­talog of the Beach Boys (who, until 1967, were the last group one could ever suspect of produ­cing something that insane), but among any records released throughout that era.

 

What they for­get, or conveniently omit, is that this insane «masterpiece» was produced almost by accident, and that, when it was released on the market, not a single Beach Boy, least of all Brian Wilson, could probably provide a coherent — or an incoherent — explanation of what the hell it was doing on that market in the first place. (Charts comparison: Pet Sounds – #8, Smiley Smile – #41, most li­kely because the promoting DJs were smart enough to push 'Heroes And Villains' and 'Good Vi­brations' on to the top of their playlists).

 

It goes without saying that 'Good Vibrations', which had already been released as a single in Oc­tober of 1966, while the aspirations for Smile were still running high, is a timeless classic, the «Ode to Joy» for its generation; and that 'Heroes And Villains', slightly less known because of its non-anthemic quality, is hardly any worse, going from one of the band's most upbeat, catchiest pop grooves (so sorely missed on Pet Sounds!) to a veritable whirlpool of vocal harmonies that completely redefine our notions of vocal harmonies. In a pop context, that is. The coolest thing about both these songs, though, is that no matter how anthemic, upbeat, or band-oriented they may be, there is still a misunderstood, romantic, tormented loner deep within each of them.

 

But the rest? Oh, that rest. Now that most of us have a better understanding of what the original Smile project should have sounded like — first, through individual songs scattered on latter era records, then through bootlegs, then through Brian's thorough solo re-recording in 2004, now from an upcoming official archive release, coming out forty-five years too late — I am not going to pretend that the scraps, thrown together on Smiley Smile, were in any way intended to be a «da­ring» reinvention of the original project. Scraps they were, and scraps they are still.

 

As in, 'Fall Breaks And Back To Winter' is a meaningless, repetitive, rocking-chair-style, meat­less spine of a melody that used to be the psychotic 'Mrs. O'Leary's Cow'. 'Wind Chimes' is but a hushed shadow of a grand, stately, completely self-sufficient composition. 'Wonderful' has one of Carl Wilson's loveliest vocal parts ever, but next to no music backing it at all: appreciation is en­couraged, enjoyment is futile.

 

To make matters even more complicated, at least one brand new number had been included — 'Gettin' Hungry', a barely-comical novelty composition, hanging upon a primitive Farfisa organ (or some other organ) line and choral vocals, somewhat akin in spirit to Brian's «adult child peri­od» output in the mid-1970s. It certainly fits in well with all the other raw deals on the album, but there is still no explanation as to why the band decided to release it as a single — and, further­more, one formally credited to Brian and Mike rather than the Beach Boys. That Mike Love, he ain't as simple as he'd like us to think.

 

If the album accidentally invents lo-fi, as some defenders have claimed, there is no more reason to love it for the fact than it is to sanctify Little Deuce Coupe for accidentally inventing the con­cept album. Of all these lo-fi recordings, the only one that does not sound like a hastily concocted demo is 'Vegetables' (former 'Vega-Tables'), an experimental ode to carrots and beets that's sort of sweet, if rather slight. (The ori­ginal per­cus­sion part, in the form of a chomped-on celery, or carrot, was provided by guest star Paul Mc­Cartney, but I am not sure if they retained the original track on this re-recording).

 

To say that Smiley Smile singlehandedly destroyed the Beach Boys' reputation would be an over­statement. Even Smile itself, had it been originally released the way it was meant to be released, might not have stood critical and commercial competition in the face of straightforwardly psy­chedelic and/or heavy rock. Nevertheless, riding on the heels of Pet Sounds and the 'Good Vibra­tions' single, expectations were really strong, and Smiley Smile was predictably understood as a mockery of these expectations. Basically, Brian went all-in with that project — including his per­sonal sanity — and lost it all. The vehicle crashed down from overload; the next several years would be spent selling the debris for spare parts.

 

Thumbs down, of course, for an album that never had any proper reason to exist, and has done way more harm than good — although, from a purely historical standpoint, it is somewhat of a fascinating listen (and, of course, the two big singles are priceless, although they can always be obtained separately on any semi-respectable collection), especially for S&M devotees.

 

WILD HONEY (1967)

 

1) Wild Honey; 2) Aren't You Glad; 3) I Was Made To Love Her; 4) Country Air; 5) A Thing Or Two; 6) Darlin'; 7) I'd Love Just Once To See You; 8) Here Comes The Night; 9) Let The Wind Blow; 10) How She Boogalooed It; 11) Mama Says.

 

Wild Honey inaugurates what was probably the most bizarre and, from a historical point of view at least, the most fascinating period in Beach Boys history. Over an impressive seven years, from 1967 to 1973, the band was engulfed in a near-constant state of chaos, scandals, drugs, rushing from one half-baked idea to another, lack of leadership, lack of purpose, clashes of ambitions and interests — the only thing that might explain their staying together is brotherly ties, or, more like­ly, the insecurity of each individual member as to whether a solo career in music would be reali­zable. (In the end, Dennis and Carl only went solo after the band solidified its commercial positi­ons in 1976).

 

The seven studio albums they put out over that period illustrate that lack of coherence perfectly. In stark contrast to every Beach Boys record up to Pet Sounds, they do not even provide the im­pression of well-rounded collections of songs «from A to Z». None of them beat the rag-tagginess of Smiley Smile, but it is one thing to forgive one hastily concocted, rushed-out contractual obli­gation consisting of briskly re-recorded demo versions, and quite another one to sit through al­bum after album after album, completely devoid of any sense of purpose or quality control.

 

Fortunately for all of us, Smiley Smile had used up most of the hyper-experimental ideas that Brian came up with for the SMiLe project, and all of the subsequent records would be generally more melodic and better produced. In fact, Wild Honey does sound, from time to time, like an honest-to-goodness attempt at returning to the standard practice of recording pop music LPs. Not bizarre avantgarde experimentation; not «teenage symphonies to God»; not intentional attempts at beating the Beatles — just a stab at another good old regular pop music record, the way Mike Love had always preferred it the best. It is somewhat symbolic that the album's biggest hit, 'Darlin', was partly written as early as 1963 (the verse melody is taken from an early tune called 'Thinkin' 'Bout You Baby', donated by Brian to Sharon Marie in 1964; the chorus, however, is brand new): Wild Honey was calling us back to basics, in feeble hopes that a Sgt. Pepper and Are You Experienced-fed public could heed the call. Naturally, it didn't.

 

But it didn't not simply because, by late 1967, there was no more demand for shiny, optimistic surf-pop. No; it didn't because, after the SMiLe fiasco, Brian's workmanship was irrepairably da­maged. He did not lose any of his genius — what he did lose was the ability to «flesh out» that genius, the will to take his brilliant ideas and polish them up to the same degree of perfection that characterized his work from 1964 to 1966. Imagine a fabulous painter, with each of his new works causing a shockwave of sensation, who suddenly abandons the canvas and starts dealing exclusively in half-finished sketches on paper — how would his fans react to that?

 

Of the eleven songs on Wild Honey, nine, in good old fashion, are credited to «Brian Wilson / Mike Love». But, as Robert Christgau, in his original review, correctly (surprise surprise) stated, «each of the 11 tunes ends before you wish it would». Indeed, most of the fade-outs arrive just as you start feeling that the song has finally picked up some steam — almost as if some deranged in­ner voice was telling Brian, Mike, and the others, «okay guys, time to wind it up, you know a pop song is not supposed to last more than 2:20», forgetting that the year was 1967, not 1963, and that even the conservative American standard had already been revolutionized.

 

The craziest thing about it, however, is that the songs themselves do not sound very nineteen-six­ty-three themselves. I mean, 'Darlin' might have been all that old, but its re-recording, with a very much «post-Beatles» rhythmic base, a steady brass accompaniment that shows serious influence on the part of mid-1960s Atlantic/Motown sound, and a raw, creaky, shaky (and, because of that, quite beautiful) vocal delivery from Carl, was quite modern for 1967, nothing specifically «retro» about it except for the melodic moves, which are, indeed, quite typical of early Phil Spector.

 

Then there is all the sexuality. Pre-Pet Sounds, Brian's songs were innocence exemplified (so much so that even certain salacious hints inside the lyrics could easily pass unnoticed), and on Pet Sounds itself, not much difference was made between boy-girl and man-God relations (in all fairness, it is Pet Sounds that the Christian fundamentalists should have been a-goin' after in 1966, not Beatles records because of John's silly throwaway remark). Wild Honey, first time ever in Beach Boys history, explicitly puts the body next to spirit.

 

Obviously, Mike Love can spend the rest of his life explaining how the title of the album was due to the «health food craze» going on around town at the time, but there's no way anyone in his right mind could interpret a line like "My love's coming down since I got a taste of wild honey" as an expression of the protagonist's sincere gratitude to his partner because of her dedication to wholesome eating practices. It's a classy white-boy R'n'B number, for sure, but Carl's ecstatic vo­cal delivery transparently spells out orgiastic, as do the siren-imitating theremin blasts. Clearly, from the moment that the first copy of Carl Wilson screaming out "gonna take my life eating up her wild honey!" descended on the open market, his fate was sealed. On that fateful day, the man had no choice left but to start growing himself... a beard.

 

And that is just the beginning. We also have 'A Thing Or Two', which starts out as a lightweight enough bop-de-pop music hall number... then, with a series of "do it right baby"-s and suggestive moans and wails, lets all of us know that the days of not talking, putting your hands on my shoul­der and listening to my heart beat are long gone — today it takes something more, uh, active than that to get life a-goin'. And, uh, 'I'd Love Just Once To See You'? It takes an endless one minute and fifty seconds for us to get to the real end of that statement, but we do get to see the boys overcome the «shyness» and make their true point. And 'Here Comes The Night'? Can you ima­gine that one next to, say, 'Surfer Girl'? The "Oooohh..." at the end of each chorus is about as close as the band ever came to creating a porn movie soundtrack.

 

Much of this heavy-breathing raunchiness seems «forced» — by now, we all know that the Beach Boys were no prudes when it came to relations with the opposite sex (with Dennis at the progres­sive forefront of the sexual revolution), but on Wild Honey, it is almost as if they were fulfilling some sort of contractual obligation, one that openly urged them to place «more flesh, less spirit» on their subsequent albums. Fortunately, it is more often funny than annoying, more frequently «silly» than «stupid», and as much as I'd like to dub this the band's «cock pop» album, the fact is that, after all, it took me several years of listening to it to get that idea, so it cannot be blatantly and obviously correct.

 

Besides, all this sexuality merely adds extra spice to the already bizarre, confused atmos­phere of the album. We have not yet mentioned the Stevie Wonder cover — why? no particular reason — or 'Mama Says', a one-minute accappella ode to the art of teethbrushing that was cut out of the ori­ginal 'Vega-Tables' to close the album — why? because, mama, we're still crazy after all these years. Each subsequent song on Wild Honey is utterly unpredictable: it can end up «normal», like the tender balladry of 'Aren't You Glad' or 'Let The Wind Blow', or it can fall apart into free form atmospherics, like 'A Thing Or Two' or 'Country Air'.

 

However, where the tunes that fell apart on Smiley Smile would just fall apart, because nobody gave a damn about how they would hold together, the free-form approach on Wild Honey is, on the whole, more motivated. This «sketch-style» approach to recording seems more thought out and intentional, and, from that point of view, far more similar to the «lo-fi» movement in indie pop/rock than the hazy daze of Smiley Smile. The songs share the same the craziness and artistic despe­ration, but the final result is more easily enjoyable — making Wild Honey, in fact, the real starting point of the last and most mysterious stage of the Beach Boys' greatness. So, clearly, a thumbs up — for God only knows what.

 

FRIENDS (1968)

 

1) Meant For You; 2) Friends; 3) Wake The World; 4) Be Here In The Morning; 5) When A Man Needs A Woman; 6) Passing By; 7) Anna Lee, The Healer; 8) Little Bird; 9) Be Still; 10) Busy Doin' Nothin'; 11) Diamond Head; 12) Transcendental Meditation.

 

I have now reached that point in life at which I am almost ready to accept Friends as the Beach Boys' finest hour — or, to be more precise, their finest 25 minutes, since even at the dawn of the era of sprawling conceptual double LPs, these buttheaded retrogrades still stubbornly stuck to Ca­pitol's old idea of «who needs to spend resources on recording a 40-minute LP when you can sell a 20-minute LP for the same money?» These days, though, it almost smells cool. «A 25-minute long record? In 1968? CLASSY, man!»

 

It is not just 25 minutes long, though. It is also quiet, meditative, boring, and beautiful: the most low-key they ever got. Even Smiley Smile had its double dose of epics, and Wild Honey had the upbeat pop singles. When it came to releasing a single from this album, though, all they could come up with was the title track — a... waltz? Little surprise that they immediately plopped down on the charts from #19 ('Darlin') to #47; I am much more baffled by the fact that they managed to get even that high.

 

In a way, Friends destroyed the band's credibility among the «hip» crowds of the day with even more success than Smiley Smile did a year earlier. That album, at least, could interest people due to its (often unintentional) psychedelic and avantgarde qualities — Friends was just a low-key collection of unassuming, unsubstantial quasi-pastoral sketches. In a similar vein, on the other side of the ocean, at the very same time, another band, The Kinks, would be lambasted by popular indifference to their magnum opus of a pastoral idilly, The Village Green Preservation Society. But next to Friends, Village Green can pass off for a War And Peace of its category, a much lon­ger, much more thought out recording, none of the songs on which sound like snippets, demos, and flash-in-the-pan ideas that Brian Wilson could come up with one nice evening singing made on the spot lullabies to his newborn daughter, then rush to the studio the very next day to turn them into commercial songs offered for millions of fans.

 

Still, it was a troubled time, but a good time. For starters, Mike Love was mostly absent from the sessions, delayed on a trip to India to study transcendental meditation. It took a Mike Love to ac­tually profit from the teachings of the Maharishi — apparently, he returned so inspired and full of love that he not only acquiesced in having a low-profile presence on the album, but also contribu­ted one of his most gorgeous vocal parts ever (on the opening forty second-snippet 'Meant For You') and co-wrote one of the album's catchiest numbers, a teensy-weensy kiddie tune called 'Anna Lee, The Healer', presumably written, if you can only believe it, about a healer named An­na Lee. It is a bit unfortunate that the song, with its lyrics going "She cures people with her hands / I'm just one of her many fans" was released in the same year as The Who's 'Mary Ann With The Shaky Hand', raising unhealthy associations. Rest assured: freshly reformed from the Himalaya mountain side, Mike Love was not referring to any, er, «unhygienic» practices. It's all about the spirit — and about beard extension.

 

It was also a time during which Brian was progressively losing control of himself, which meant that the others either had to disband and die, or start developing musical egos of their own. On Friends, Brian is still in the lead, but, for the first time, brother Dennis comes out with two brief stabs at composing — and these two numbers already establish his creative persona, because their «aura» is more or less the same as that of his creative peak on Pacific Ocean Blue a decade later. Taking his brother's approach to instrumentation and harmonies, he mixed it with his own odd feeling of world-weariness and melancholia (what else could be expected of the band's biggest womanizer and alcoholic?). The two songs are stacked together — as in, «and now, a big round of applause for Little Dennis, here to entertain you with two songs, and then he'll be back to play­ing with his toy horses» — but, really, both are very good, although the rhythmic, R'n'B-ish, al­most proto-J. J. Cale-style (if you discard the harmonies, that is) 'Little Bird' works on the senses much faster than the slow, prayer-like 'Be Still'. But be still and, eventually, its dark lightness and dreary gladness will creep up on you.

 

Not that Brian's own sensibility had in any way become diminished. 'Passing By' and 'Diamond Head', in particular, are fabulous instrumentals that hold their own against the wordless musical bits of Pet Sounds, even despite the comparably minimalistic arrangements. Actually, 'Passing By' began by having lyrics, which were eventually drop­ped in favor of chanted harmonies — a decision that, perhaps, the Beach Boys should have been taking more often. As to 'Diamond Head' — here is a tune that should qualify for the Hawaiian National Anthem (or, at least, one could consider adapting the lyrics of Hawai‘i Pono‘ī to this perky little melody).

 

'Busy Doin' No­thin' relates so well to Brian's state at the time, it almost is the perfect song to reflect that particu­lar state — it also seems to reflect Brian's interest in bossa nova, which is fine, because most of bossa nova is targeted at people who are busy doin' nothin' most of the time. 'Wake The World' and 'Be Here In The Morning' are tremendously underdeveloped... and sound fabulous that way, exactly as if Brian just got up in the morning, wrote them on the spot, recorded them in the afternoon, and started collecting royalties in the evening (you wish).

 

And so on — like I said, these days, I cannot find a single flaw in these songs, with the possible exception of the silly anthem to 'Transcendental Meditation' that closes the record (well, some sort of fuckup should have stemmed from Mike Love, eventually), but even that one is mostly at­rocious in terms of lyrics ("transcendental meditation can emancipate the man", we are told, "and get you feeling grand" — no shit, Mike!), and, anyway, is over faster than you can actually bind the sounds into meaningful (or meaningless) words.

 

Low-key, pastoral, homey, underdeveloped, minimalistic, and all that, but none of it should be interpreted as a criticism. This is what Smiley Smile could have been if the bits and snippets on there had been composed and arranged specially for the album, not hastily re-recorded in a throw­away manner. Completely unfit for the grand ambitions of 1968, Friends is a record that, to me,  sounds far more relevant today, rather than at the time when it was supposed to really make a dif­ference. Thumbs up ahoy.

 

STACK-O-TRACKS (1968)

 

1) Darlin'; 2) Salt Lake City; 3) Sloop John B; 4) In My Room; 5) Catch A Wave; 6) Wild Honey; 7) Little Saint Nick; 8) Do It Again; 9) Wouldn't It Be Nice; 10) God Only Knows; 11) Surfer Girl; 12) Little Honda; 13) Here To­day; 14) You're So Good To Me; 15) Let Him Run Wild; 16*) Help Me, Rhonda; 17*) California Girls; 18*) Our Car Club.

 

It's almost hard to believe that as late as 1968, with the «album» well established as a pop art form and all, Capitol Records would still be willing to fuck with its (formerly) favorite pets' LP releases — but there you have it. Things looked pretty back, and the record people decided to make them better by making them worse: reminding the world that, no matter how perturbed, stressed, and worn out this band was on itself, this was utterly nothing next to the ridiculous deci­sions that their promoters were still entitled to taking.

 

There is, however, an entire different side to it. You sing the words and play with the original in­strumental backgrounds to 15 of their biggest hits, Capitol writes on the front sleeve — at least three years before the invention of the karaoke machine, and quite a few years more before the machine started actively drawing blood in revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Come to think of it, it was a problem: these pesky Beach Boys used to mix their vocals way high in the mix, so even if you did want to sing along to 'Catch A Wave' or 'Sloop John B', you simply couldn't hear your own angel tone next to the lackluster hum of these arrogant Californian teens. Now Capitol's engineers, working overtime, and at a significant risk to their mental health, took on the task of wiping these annoying vocals, and you can catch your own wave — and listen, without any obstacles, to the fabulous virtuoso work of underrated guitar genius David Marks in the process.

 

A fabulous idea, but, for some reason, one that failed to ignite a lot of interest. Apparently, people were not out there falling over each other in line to get vocal-less versions of songs by one of the world's greatest vocal bands. Silly of them, perhaps, but at least it saved us from other record companies latching on to the idea (e. g. Layla And Other Assorted Guitarless Songs: You play all the guitar parts of Eric Clapton to 14 of the finest blues-rock songs ever recorded! Double fun guaranteed with extra friend invited! Includes booklet with printed tabs and a mini-model of Du­ane Allman's motorcycle etc.). Anyway, Stack-o-Tracks deservedly failed to chart and, if that was at all possible, sunk the band's reputation even further.

 

It is good for one listen, though, provided you reprogram the tracks in chronological order: since they are more or less evenly distributed from 1963 to 1967 (and even include the backing track for 'Do It Again', the band's latest summer-of-'68 single that had yet to see album release), it ser­ves as a nice reminder of how great the musical progression had been from those early days — from the bare simplicity of 'Surfer Girl' and 'Catch A Wave', which are really nothing special wi­thout the vocals, to the complexity, inventiveness, and multiple layers of the Pet Sounds tracks. 'Here Today', in particular, is a major standout here — one of the few numbers that does acquire a separate flair without the vocals: listen to what Carol Kaye is doing on that bass, clearly outper­forming Mr. McCartney without going all flashy and virtuoso on our ears. Bet you never really heard that with the vocals on, certainly not on your first listen, at least.

 

Perhaps it would have been a better idea if Capitol simply decided to put out the backing tracks for Pet Sounds (which they eventually did), maybe mixing them with a couple instrumental left­overs from Smile. But that would have required the presence of somebody willing to market the band as artists rather than has-been teen audience attractors, and that would have required the pre­sence of somebody to convince somebody to be willing to market the band as artists, and that... never mind. The stupidest thing of all is that, on some of the early mixes, they actually had to wipe out the vocals, and they didn't do a very good job on it. So you'll have a nasty feeling when singing along — like they're eavesdropping on you from a faraway corner. Thumbs down.

 

20/20 (1969)

 

1) Do It Again; 2) I Can Hear Music; 3) Bluebirds Over The Mountain; 4) Be With Me; 5) All I Want To Do; 6) The Nearest Faraway Place; 7) Cotton Fields; 8) I Went To Sleep; 9) Time To Get Alone; 10) Never Learn Not To Love; 11) Our Prayer; 12) Cabinessence; 13*) Break Away; 14*) Celebrate The News; 15*) We're Together Again; 16*) Walk On By; 17*) Old Folks At Home/Ol' Man River.

 

It took the Beach Boys almost ten years, almost twenty albums (granted, some of them were actu­ally compilations), one musical revolution, one nervous breakdown, one full-grown beard, and Charles Manson — all that and more, but on February 10, 1969, they finally released their first true album recorded as a band, in which every single member had the right to think of himself as an active musical contributor. Ironically, it was also their first album of original material to have been recorded mostly as a contractual obligation, to get them out of the ridiculously outdated deal with Capitol. We all understand, of course — any label that rewards its trustiest artist of the de­cade with Stack-o-Tracks deserves to be fed to the sharks.

 

Anyway, it could have been much worse. Democracies in rock music can be a complete disaster, especially if they are installed artificially (talking to you, John Fogerty). But by the end of 1968, it was a case of do or die: Brian Wilson had almost completely lost functionality, and his pals either had to prove that the man did teach them something vital over the past few years, or to mu­tate into an irrelevant «oldies act», singing 'California Girls' to fat old ladies for the rest of their lives. Eventually, they would do just that, but in 1969, they flat-out refused. For a brief five year period, the flame kept burning.

 

Despite being quasi-mysteriously absent on the front sleeve (he is hiding inside the gatefold, the gist of which is, alas, all but lost on the CD generation, not to mention the Children of Napster), Brian's presence is still felt quite strongly on the album — even if the only original work he did for it consists of a brief, genuinely lethargic waltz suitably called 'I Went To Sleep' (sounds seri­ously like a Friends-style leftover to me) and one «complete» song, 'Time To Get Alone' — also a waltz, with chimes, accordeons, strings, electric pianos, you name it; even on its own, it feels deeper, denser, and tastier than most of the other stuff on here.

 

The rest of the album is a bizarre, but phenomenally enticing melting pot. Dennis continues his strange odyssey with 'Be With Me', further developing and deepening the 'Little Bird' vibe — these tired, world-weary, ominous-brass-filled bluesy grooves that skedaddle along like a pack of ugly hobos, only to burst into huge magic flames midway through; but this time, he also justifies his status of the band's professional hooligan with 'All I Want To Do', a number that rocks mean­er and harder than anything the band ever did before (or after, for that matter) and culminates in a bunch of sex noises. (How he got Mike Love to sing it is beyond me — considering how grizzled up the man actually sounds here, must have been a tough night out).

 

Creepiest of the bunch is 'Never Learn Not To Love', formerly called 'Cease To Exist'. Co-written by Dennis with his one-time accidental acquaintance and protégé Charles Milles Manson, it is easily the least interesting of his three tunes on here — just a bunch of flowery harmonies with very little personal involvement — but what is actually creepy is how it begins with twenty-five seconds of ominous-sounding grumbling industrial noise: a fade-in that is decidedly out of sync with the tune, yet so neatly presages the Manson disaster, even if it would only take place in the summer of 1969. I wonder if poor Dennis ever had it in him to relisten to the track afterwards.

 

Brother Carl was still not quite up to the task of competing with the other two; but his contribu­tion to the album has forever been one of my favourite late-period Beach Boys tracks — a take on Phil Spector's 'I Can Hear Music' that, production-wise and vocal-wise, is every bit the equal and, in some ways, surpasses the proverbial Brian Wilson gorgeousness. Even though he was the best singer of the bunch, Carl only very rarely put his voice to proper use, and even 'God Only Knows', at least technically, does not begin to compare with the things he does on this track — loud, in­tense, and at the same time, so subtle and caressing. The vocals are so immaculate here that never ever in concert would they be able to do the track perfect justice.

 

Then there's the delightfully hickey-hockey part. First, Al Jardine rises as the band's major folk­ster-in-residence. Naturally, in between the two grand renditions of 'Cotton Fields' released that year, I will always go with Creedence, but as little as the Beach Boys might ever be associated with Texarkana, this version is really no slouch either. It would probably take a synth-pop arran­gement or something to kill off the power of 'Cotton Fields' anyway.

 

Second, Bruce Johnston tries to finally justify his presence in the band by simulating Brian's instrumental genius with 'The Nearest Faraway Place'. Instead, he ends up with something that could be mistaken as an excerpt from an Ali McGraw-starring movie soundtrack — but there's a certain embarrassing charm in seeing him fall so flat on his face. Much better is the cover of Ed Hicksel's 'Bluebirds Over The Mountains', a catchy pop single recorded at Johnston's initiative. Better, that is, until midway through guest star Ed Carter starts contributing a flashy, «furious», and utterly tasteless — not to mention completely out-of-place and irrelevant on a Beach Boys record — hard rock guitar solo, clearly proving that «stupid guitar pyrotechnics» was invented long before the hair metal movement. Still, in this context it's hilarious rather than disgusting.

 

Third, the record opens with 'Do It Again'. The idea of Mike Love harrassing Brian in mid-1968, urging him to go surf-popping once more, may look fairly corny on paper, and the song is, tech­nically, the very first time that the Beach Boys have so openly embraced nostalgia, but, amazing­ly, they did it so well that «corny» is the last word to be associated with the song. The spiralling vocal melody is sunny-cool, the da-doo-ron-rons are reprised in a novel manner (so much so that, even twelve years later, they still inspired ABBA to come up with 'On And On And On'), and the transition between the band's near-desperate "...been so long!" and the ensuing shrill guitar solo is fabulously climactic. As silly as it is, and as obvious as it is that not a single Beach Boy really truly «did it again», the old magic is still there, for 2:26, at least.

 

Finally, the Beach Boys also learn how to make a living peddling little bits and pieces of Smile on the corner — current lesson involving dragging out the a cappella 'Our Prayer' and the natura­listic 'Cabinessence', a song that must have inspired the entire career of Animal Collective, with its unpredictable alternations of homey on-the-porch folk chanting (to the soft strum of an in­nocent bouzouki), kaleidoscopic psycho patterns, and merry-go-round vocal chants. Putting it at the end of the album was a smart move, because, clearly, as good or as «unusual» everything else here might be, nothing compares with a slice of peak-era Brian. A certified resident fan might even be motivated to forgive the band Ed Carter and Charles Manson.

 

As rag-taggy as 20/20 is, the rag-tagginess is authentic, and the high points shine with an even more peculiar glow when pressed against the low points. It may have been their goodbye to Capi­tol and the sunny Sixties, but, due to so much active participation from so many band members, it actually opened a whole window of opportunities — most of which ended up wasted, but no one could say they weren't there for at least a little while. Thumbs up, of course.

 

And do not forget to have this on its proper twofer CD with Friends: that way, you also get access to the magnificent bonus single 'Break Away' (co-written by Brian with his father, no less) — which might just be the last classic hit single in the classic Beach Boys style written by classic Beach Boy Brian Wil­son. ('Add Some Music To Your Day' opens a new, and rather ambiguous, page in that legacy, but... later).

 

LIVE IN LONDON (1970)

 

1) Darlin'; 2) Wouldn't It Be Nice; 3) Sloop John B; 4) California Girls; 5) Do It Again; 6) Wake The World; 7) Aren't You Glad; 8) Bluebirds Over The Mountain; 9) Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring; 10) Good Vibrations; 11) God Only Knows; 12) Barbara Ann.

 

This last contract-fulfilling record was released by Capitol as a last goodbye — an almost despe­rate gesture, considering that the actual recording was drawn from a performance in December 1968. But it has 'Do It Again' and 'Bluebirds Over The Mountain' on it, so that innocent bystand­ers could almost safely assume it post-dates 20/20 rather than precedes it. One thing's for certain: Mike Love's beard on the front sleeve is at least thrice as long as on the sleeve of 20/20, and that makes for a naïve, but wholesome chronological order.

 

For some reason, there seems to have still been a lot of wild girl screaming for the Beach Boys at the time — each announcement or song start is obligatorily accompanied by howls that make short work of the band's harmonies. On the whole, though, things had obviously calmed down a bit since 1964's Concert, and this presents us with a much better opportunity to enjoy these har­monies in a live setting, not to mention the much improved track listing, on which teen fluff like 'Monster Mash' has given way to... well, just look at those titles. The question is: do we want to enjoy these harmonies in a live setting?

 

Well, sometimes we actually do. 'Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring', performed a cappella ("nude", as remarked by the all-witty Mike Love), is taken without a single glitch and almost trumps the studio original, because all the notes are conquered with the recording «breathing» at the same time, no polish or airbrushing. That's a mean, mean feat. But most of the other songs are marred by minor imperfections — Dennis' messing with the rhythm (sometimes), one or two of the band members stepping away from the mike at the wrong moment, etc., etc.; with a band of lesser stature, this would have never been a problem, but now that you actually get to hear what the Beach Boys sound like live, every time a single note is flubbed away from perfection, Live In London loses a point.

 

I must say that I also miss Brian: somehow, it just doesn't feel right without the mastermind. One is especially sharply reminded of that when his high-pitched vocals on the harmonies of 'Do It Again' are replaced with an equally high-pitched brass arrangement — a suitable substitute, but a little sad all the same. In here, it's Mr. Love who is running the entire show, spewing out bad jokes and clichés — I think he says "lost my head again" at least thrice during the tracks that made it onto the album, and «God Only Knows» how many more times he said it during the entire show — and managing to goof off even during 'Good Vibrations' (his idea of taking sweet revenge on Brian is to mumble "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today..." as the organ starts off the «solemn» part of the song).

 

Still, what can you do about an album with not a single bad, hell no, not a single less-than- fabulous track about it? For the same reason that no live album by, say, Paul McCartney could ever «suck», Live In London also makes the grade. (Actually, 'Bluebirds Over The Mountains', with a far more restrained and subdued guitar solo second time around, beats the studio version on that kind, so make that two tracks worth owning). The band would sound better oiled and gea­red up on its subsequent live album, three years later, but this one, available today on a 2-fer CD with Concert, is well worth collecting for fans of the band. Thumbs up — in a mechanical, per­functory manner, perhaps, but we should at least mark that Live In London still presents the band as a living, breathing entity, not a fossilized oldies act.

 

SUNFLOWER (1970)

 

1) Slip On Through; 2) This Whole World; 3) Add Some Music To Your Day; 4) Got To Know The Woman; 5) Deirdre; 6) It's About Time; 7) Tears In The Morning; 8) All I Wanna Do; 9) Forever; 10) Our Sweet Love; 11) At My Window; 12) Cool, Cool Water.

 

Well, now we know who was the de-facto leader of the Beach Boys circa late '69 / early '70 — brother Dennis! It is his song, and a typically his song, that opens the album; and altogether, he gets four of them, a feat never to be repeated. That is almost as much as Brian contributes to this record (in fact, exactly as much if we exclude Brian's material left over from older sessions). In between the two of them, the brothers dominate Sunflower, making it a somewhat less collective effort than the overtly democratic 20/20; and that actually helped with the critics, who (justifiedly) saw this as an attempt to return to the naïvely romantic, but still profound art-pop of the old days. It didn't help with the public, though. Even the singles mostly bombed.

 

Why didn't the population at large like Sunflower? Answering that question could be a culturolo­gist's wet dream. Not being one, I could still risk suggesting that, by the end of the Sixties, the one big pop market, having become way too large for the people to assimilate in one go, had al­ready begun splintering into multiple small ones — and the Beach Boys simply fell through the cracks. Although Brian was still not well, and the rest of the band had their multiple problems, too, 20/20 at least sounded like the band had finally remembered how to put out records (because, let's admit it, Smiley Smile was a joke; Wild Honey was way too rough-hewn; and Friends was way too minimalistic), and Sunflower solidified a «formal return to form». All of its twelve tracks are songs — including even those whose length does not exceed two minutes — and all of the songs are taken good care of — including even the bad ones, of which, fortunately, there are few. So what happened?..

 

Actually, what may have happened is that Sunflower avoided genre definition. It is an odd me­lange of influences both old (some of it sounds very Sixties) and new (some of it sounds very Seventies), but it does not have any sort of central running theme that would hit a loose nerve in the common listener around 1970. These days, such things are normal — and that is why, with time, people learned to appreciate Sunflower more than they used to — but in the age of the con­cept album, armadillo tank and all, I can sort of understand why record-buying people would be shunning Sunflower. As a «rock» album, it was nothing next to Led Zep, and as a «pop» album, it was far too disjointed and subtle next to the concentrated charm of Karen Carpenter.

 

But, as it happens, it just contains lots of good songs. Dennis' trademark style is all over 'Slip On Through' — which just bursts in without knocking, a simple, bawdy, rough melody, a slightly off-kilter rhythm, vocal harmonies that seem to come from an entirely different song, brass back­ing that seems to come from still another song, a climactic chorus, and it's all over before you can actually put a tag on it. He also submits a fairly creepy «dark rocker» ('It's About Time'), which is about as close as the Beach Boys ever got around to being «apocalyptic»; unfortunately, his other rock'n'roll number ('Got To Know The Woman'), written in a cocky vein, is all but incompatible with Beach Boys aesthetics, and sounds out of place here (I'd rather listen to Alex Harvey if I wanted that particular kind of sound). Yet this small blunder is easily forgiven for 'Forever', his most anthemic song so far — and, arguably, containing his sweetest vocal delivery on any record (by the time Pacific Ocean Blue came along, his voice was already way too alcohol-shot to suc­cessfully mus­ter sweetness).

 

At the same time, there is some serious revitalization on Brian's part. 'This Whole World' is lively, loud, and optimistic; no one could easily imagine that the man to write it would be spending most of his days as a lost recluse. 'All I Wanna Do' is not just tender, but a bit otherworldly: apparently, they are experimenting with voice effects there, because the modernistic psycho-wobbling makes it impossible to discern who is taking the lead vocal (Mike?). The lead single 'Add Some Music To Your Day' is, indeed, the most «commercial» song on the album, and a far cry from the com­plexities of 'Good Vibrations' or even 'Break Away', but as a nice, harmless little pop song whose only purpose is to ask you to add some music to your day, it works. (Although, chances are that if you are listening to it in the first place, you already have added some music to your day. Whether it may actually make a real music hater change his mind is something that no one probably has tested yet. Hey there, music haters round the world, this one's for you!).

 

Continuing the trend of saving the best-from-the-past for last, Sunflower says goodbye to you with 'Cool Cool Water', another five-minute suite rescued from the rubble of Smile and brought to relative completion, with Mike Love adding new «comprehensible» lyrics that actually fit the suite's «watery» mood — it does flow on smoothly, gently rocking the listener on its waves of never-faltering harmonies, quite different from the violent Sturm-und-Drang of some of the other tracks on Smile. Really beautiful, «becalming» stuff.

 

All in all, despite a few blunders here and there — chief among them Bruce Johnston's two origi­nals, which sound positively lame and out-of-style next to everything else; at least 'Deirdre' could pass for cuddly Harry Nilsson-ian fun, but the attempt at pain-in-my-heart blue-eyed soul ('Tears In The Morning') is a blatantly corny fake — anyway, despite a few blunders, Sunflower is yet another of these fabulously strong late-period albums: formerly overlooked by the masses, today given its due by the cool minorities among the masses. Even if, «brain-wise», it could have been done «smarter» to pass the acceptance threshold in 1970, «heart-wise», it is one of Brian and Dennis' finest hours. Thumbs up.

 

SURF'S UP (1971)

 

1) Don't Go Near The Water; 2) Long Promised Road; 3) Take A Load Off Your Feet; 4) Disney Girls (1957); 5) Student Demonstration Time; 6) Feel Flows; 7) Lookin' At Tomorrow (A Welfare Song); 8) A Day In The Life Of A Tree; 9) 'Til I Die; 10) Surf's Up.

 

This and the following two albums are inextricably linked to the Beach Boys' new management. After the commercial crash of Sunflower, Jack Rieley, a former radio DJ, was hired to try and do the impossible — return the band to «respectability». Apparently, Rieley had good musical taste and a decent understanding of the laws of the times, so it was assumed he could steer the band in the right-est direction. The talent was still there, but you had to process it the right way.

 

Even if Rieley had been a genius of planning and organization (of which there is little indication), he still had to fight against really tough odds. The Beach Boys, at the time, were basically divided in two camps – the Wilson brothers and the rest (Mike/Al/Bruce). The Wilson brothers were the artistically gifted ones, but, as it often happens with artistic gift, also the chaotic, erratic, and rela­tively weak-willed ones. The other part of the gang could care less about serious artistic ambition, but were fairly active, and, in a large part, responsible for the overall image of the band. They might have yearned for respectability, but they didn't have the faintest clue as to the actual ways of earning it. But to step aside and leave all credit to the Wilsons? No way! The «democracy» of 20/20 had given them a taste of power, and they weren't about it to let it go.

 

Thus, Surf's Up is split fifty-fifty: the «surfers» dominate Side A, while the «artists» emerge from the shadows on Side B (with but one exception on each side). The «surfers» mostly retain the proportions of 20/20, whereas in the «artists»' camp, there are some changes made. For vari­ous unpleasant reasons, not a single song by Dennis made it onto the final cut of the LP, although at least three had been recorded. Instead, Carl finally emerges as a composer in his own right, with two originals sitting next to two new Brian tunes — and, of course, the crowning master­piece of the album, the old Smile nugget 'Surf's Up' itself.

 

The discrepancy between the quality of the LP's two sides is HARSH, and I mean it. The only song by the «surfers» that, in my opinion, stands the test of time — and, apparently, Brian is with me on that one — is Johnston's 'Disney Girls (1957)', which is quite unmistakably written from the bottom of the heart (leave it to a guy like Johnston to gush out heartfelt nostalgia for the Dou­glas Sirk era — then again, my teenage years fell on the late Eighties, which was a nightmare of a cultural epoch next to the late Fifties, so maybe I shouldn't be the one to judge. Plus, I dig a Dou­glas Sirk movie every now and then, and Patti Page is a marvel to look at, as long as looking is not supplemented by listening). Anyway, it's a very touching slice of nostalgia, beautifully arran­ged in the twin cloak of falsetto harmonies and watery wah-wah effects, and the vocal part is ar­guably Bruce's finest ever — soft, but not syrupy.

 

The rest of the «surfers»' songs may take a hike. Rieley's biggest mistake was to demand that the guys at least write «socially conscious» lyrics — resulting in such ridiculous misfires as Mike Love going all rebellious on our heads ('Student Demonstration Time', a re-write of Leiber and Stoller's 'Riot In Cell Block 9' with new, more «relevant» lyrics — somehow it escaped Mike that the original was, first and foremost, a comic song), Al Jardine lamenting the fate of the underdog ('Lookin' At Tomorrow', subtitled 'A Welfare Song' for those too lazy to extract the message from the lyrics; a generic folk ballad, almost impressive with its echo effects and harmonies, but who are they kidding?), and both of them instructing our five-year olds — I cannot imagine the typical audi­ence of this song being even one year older — on the disastrous consequences of installing cheap plumbing ('Don't Go Near The Water'). If Rieley was actually happy with lyrics like "Don't go near the water / Ain't it sad / What's happened to the water / It's going bad", I will have to take back everything I said about good taste. My bet is he just saw that it was hopeless, and gave up. Not that the melody is much better — sounds like a nursery rhyme as well.

 

Taken from this point of view, Surf's Up is a complete disaster. Fortunately, the «artists» come to the rescue — and the biggest surprise is Carl, who contributes two magnificent ballads, not one little bit weaker than any selection of Brian's classics. 'Long Promised Road', with its shades of gospel, features a perfect build-up technique, although it is one of those rare occasions where the verse melody might actually be superior to the bridge and the climactic chorus — just because Carl is always at his vocal best in quiet, pensive mode rather than in all-out screaming mode. And 'Feel Flows' is even better — the lyrics are stream-of-conscious nonsense, but this is exactly what such a title requires: just some poorly strung together, optimistic, idealistic, Jon-Anderson-ish bullshit that still makes you feel good if you do not think too much of it. What matters is how the song really «feel flows» around you, totally psychedelic without embracing any superficial psy­chedelic effects — although the instrumental mid-section, contrasting distorted electric guitar with Moody Blues-ish flute, is quite in line with the light-psycho stylings of its time (still sounds fairly unique with that combination).

 

Last, but not least, comes Brian, with his three songs again intentionally or accidentally squished toge­ther at the end of the album. Not being the biggest fan of 'A Day In The Life Of A Tree' (sung by Jack Rieley himself in a voice that creepily reminds one of Brian's own cracked voice circa Love You), a song that does not seem to be able to decide whether it wants to take itself as a kiddie joke or as a tearful metaphor, I, however, have to say that both 'Til I Die' and 'Surf's Up' should be in the man's, let's say, Top 15 (I'm stretching the number a bit so as to leave room for 'I'm Bugged At My Ol' Man', of course). The former was infamously called a «downer» by Mike Love, but the song's atmosphere, strange enough, is not at all depressing — deeply romantic, ra­ther, in a vein that is very similar to solo McCartney, so that, as the band chants "I'm a cork on the ocean, Floating over the raging sea", you almost get the feeling that it's sort of nice to feel yourself like a cork on the ocean.

 

Then there's 'Surf's Up', somewhat altered here from its original version by being merged with 'Child Is Father Of The Man'. I have always been puzzled by the title — it certainly makes its ap­pearance in the actual lyrics ("Surf's up aboard a tidal wave"), but only in brief passing, im­me­di­ately giving way to Van Dyke Parks' usual incoherent and poorly strung, ungrammatical nonsense ("Come about hard and join the young and often spring you gave"). In this context, the words al­most sound like a self-ironic deconstruction of the band's former image. But, on the other hand, there is nothing truly ironic about 'Surf's Up' — it is a stern, solemn, religious suite that, during any live performance of Smile, would be the perfect spot to stand up and then land on one knee or something, never mind the lyrics which any well-read person could rival in ten minutes (and even surpass, since Parks was clearly experiencing a violent fit of agrammatism while putting the words together — try conducing a syntactic analysis and you'll end up having a friendly barbecue with Mike Love).

 

'Surf's Up' is a cold song, though. With incomprehensible lyrics, perfect, unwavering singing (both on Brian's original demo and the new version, where Carl takes most of the lead vocals), and an odd, echoey production that tries to weave a Gothic cathedral around you, it approaches «classical» standards of beauty rather than «pop» ones, and not even «romantic classical», there is something very 18th (if not 17th) century about it. It is as «serious» as Brian ever got in his art, and I am not sure that an utterly serious Brian is my favorite kind of Brian. But to deny the great­ness of the composition is ridiculous, and would get the denier nowhere. Better get over it, take the hat off, and place your knees on the prayer rug.

 

Thumb's up aboard a tidal wave — one that washes away the silliness of Side A and plunges you into the magnificence of Side B. One thing that remains unexplained, though, is why the al­bum sleeve, the band's first since Wild Honey not to feature all the members, reproduces James Earle Fraser's End Of The Trail. Were they afraid they wouldn't live long enough to release one more record? Or was it just supposed to represent a peculiar type of good luck charm?..

 

CARL AND THE PASSIONS: SO TOUGH (1972)

 

1) You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone; 2) Here She Comes; 3) He Come Down; 4) Marcella; 5) Hold On Dear Brother; 6) Make It Good; 7) All This Is That; 8) Cuddle Up.

 

Here we have a bizarre, but intriguing page in Beach Boy history. At Jack Rieley's instigation, the band fired Bruce Johnston (allegedly for being rude and condescending to Brian, but in reality, as part of a wicked plan to purge itself from excessively «commercial» elements, in order to... sell more albums). At the same time, the official lineup was expanded by the addition of two guys from South Africa: Blondie Chaplin on bass, guitar, and vocals, and Ricky Fataar on drums and vocals. At the same time, Brian once again moved back in the shadows, barely contributing any­thing to the album. Result: the least «Beach Boy»-sounding album so far.

 

Basically, So Tough is an eclectic roots-rock experience. With Carl now sporting a full beard whose length openly challenged Mike's, and Al getting close up there, the whole image was now closer to The Band than ever before. So Tough has it all: barroom boogie, swampy blues rock, blue-eyed soul, even gospel. The only thing it does not have is even a faintest trace of the good old sunshine pop band that used to do 'California Girls'.

 

Even Brian, on those few contributions of his that actually made the grade, is moving here to­wards an earthier, rhythm-and-bluesier sound. 'Marcella' (an ode to Brian's masseuse, no less!) at least features the band's trademark harmonies; musically, however, it not only recycles a few moves from 'Wild Honey', but is also completely built around a chugging blues-boogie line of the «pub rock» variety (Brian himself admitted that he was taking the Stones as an inspiration, even if it is sort of tough to picture the song stuck in the middle of, say, Exile On Main St.).

 

But if 'Marcella' is sort of a blues-rock/lush-pop hybrid, then 'You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone', opening the album with a rough, bristly combination of tack piano, hard-rocking electric guitar, and relatively «street-tough» vocals from Carl, is almost pure pub-rock (again, with the exception of some intricately mixed harmonies in the bridge section). In the hands of the Beach Boys, it almost produces a kitsch effect — if not for the song's catchiness and Carl's sud­den miraculous ability to make his «gruff» manner of singing quite convincing, it could have been a gross failure; as it is, it is more of a gross surprise.

 

The real weak links on the album are those songs on which the new band members dominate. 'Here She Comes' has nothing to do with the Beach Boys proper; it's a Chaplin/Fataar collabora­tion, a semi-decent blues-soul number, very generically early Seventies, could just as well have been written by the likes of America (although I kinda like the swampy slide solo). The soul an­them 'Hold On Dear Brother' depends on how much credibility we issue to Blondie Chaplin's impersonation of Van Morrison (never mind that it is the former guy who is black, and not the lat­ter). Personally, I wouldn't contribute any. It's all kinda boring.

 

In the meantime, the «original» Beach Boys, under the influence of all this back-to-basics stuff, retort with contributing their first and, fortunately, last straightahead gospel number. Formally, 'He Come Down' is successful, but «celebratory» gospel is such a miserable art form in general that not even Beach Boy harmonies can save the tune from looking... «cooky». To make matters worse, Mike Love contributes some ridiculously «eclectic» lyrics à la George Harrison that throw in references to Krishna, Zarathustra, and the Maharishi, violating the sanctity of the genre and probably making the Rev. Jesse Jackson quite displeased.

 

Overall, this whole roots-oriented approach ended up something like 20% failure, 30% success, 50% stupefaction. The band itself was fully aware of how much change they were introducing, hence the album's convoluted title — the Beach Boys turning into «Carl And The Passions» (an actual name for Carl's earliest schoolday band) and complaining how it is «So Tough» to make this kind of record. To add to the stupefaction, the album was originally released as part of a 2-LP set with Pet Sounds, syndicated from Capitol, as the second LP — a tremendously silly mar­keting move that, naturally, did not work. Not to mention the side effect of this decision — every­body would be inclined to compare the two albums on their own merits. It was like, «That's the way we were then, this is how we are now» — make your choice?

 

But, in the end, So Tough is saved by the bell. Wobbling between the strange and the ridiculous on its first five tracks, it is finally directed to God's territory on the last three. Carl's 'All This Is That' is basically a twin brother to 'Feel Flows'; more annoying Krishna references in the lyrics aside, it is an elegant piece of «lush pop». The major hero, however, is brother Dennis, who re­turns triumphantly with two more compositions in his by-now trademark «rough beauty» style. Of these, the sprawling, aching, expressionist 'Cuddle Up' is the magnum opus, although it may require some time to work its subtle charm on the listener. Daryl Dragon (of the «Captain and Tennille» fame) is responsible for the orchestration, which, on its own, would be sappy-Hollywo­odish, but, in conjunction with Dennis' grizzly-soul delivery, which it echoes directly, produces an astonishingly cathartic effect.

 

So Tough was a commercial flop next to the relative success of Surf's Up, and it's easy to see why: the market was already oversaturated with roots-rock product, and the last thing anyone nee­ded was to see a band least associated with roots-rock go roots-rock as well. In the end, Rieley simply pushed the Beach Boys too far: his failure to procure any serious respect for this new dire­ction was the first step that eventually led to his parting ways with the band, and, to extrapolate this even further, a major reason for the band's eventual capitulation to the nostalgic Mike Love vibe. It is one thing to demand «seriousness» and «keeping up with the times» — but an entirely different thing to set up alien role models, competition with whom does not come out naturally. Maybe they should have looked up to the Moody Blues instead?..

 

On the other hand, time has certainly been kinder to So Tough than to any of the Love-reign-era records. At the very least, this album is a serious attempt to break the ice, and if we ma­nage to forget that this is the same band that gave us Pet Sounds — as much as the stupid execu­tives at Warners tried to prevent us from doing that — it is all at least fairly competent by the sta­ndards of 1972. And then Dennis and Carl come along and push it firmly into thumbs up territo­ry.

 

HOLLAND (1973)

 

1) Sail On Sailor; 2) Steamboat; 3) California Saga: Big Sur; 4) California Saga: The Beaks Of Eagles; 5) California Saga: California; 6) The Trader; 7) Leaving This Town; 8) Only With You; 9) Funky Pretty; 10) Mt. Vernon And Fair­way - Theme; 2) I'm The Pied Piper; 3)  Better Get Back In Bed; 4) Magic Transistor Radio; 5) I'm The Pied Pi­per; 6) Radio King Dom.

 

The title implies that the album was mostly written and recorded in sunny Afghanistan, where the Beach Boys had to migrate after Dennis Wilson had bedded the last virgin in the States. (That in­ci­dent is, of course, transparently described in 'Sail On Sailor' with the simplest of metaphors: "I work the seaways / Past shipwrecked daughters of wicked waters"). Unfortunately, history has concealed from us what exactly happened out there, but supposedly the last King of Afghanistan's removal from power in 1973 was somehow connected. How else would you react if, without a warning, Mike Love invaded your country?

 

Seriously, though, Holland is a watermark. It represents the end of the short-lived «Beach Boy Renaissance» period; their last album under the supervision of Jack Rieley; and the last time ever that the band would at least pretend to some sort of artistic importance (Love You would be more of an accidental aberration than a strong, concentrated effort to be reborn). The album failed to go gold, but was not a commercial disaster, either, and gained some critical support as well — im­plying that, perhaps, more of the same would follow — but, with Carl and Dennis following their genius brother on the roads to self-destruction, this was not to be.

 

Like every other post-Pet Sounds album, Holland is a mixed affair. It is clearly a very careful and thoughtful record; I would even go as far as to say that it is the band's most intelligently con­strued and performed work since 1966. There is not a single sheer embarrassment here à la 'Stu­dent Demonstration Time'; not a single half-finished snippet to leave the listeners grinding their teeth in frustration; not a single reckless experiment for experiment's (and insanity's) sake. It is also the only album in the band's catalog on which they show themselves capable of handling «mature» issues with adequate maturity (e. g. on Carl's 'The Trader', a convincing ode against the evils of colonialism and racism).

 

On the down side, Holland may be a bit too «heavyweight» for the Beach Boys. It's not even the fact that almost all of the tracks are emotional downers (yes, even 'California Saga'; we'll get to that in a moment) — what with the band's then-current state, that would be expected. It is the overall sound of the record, heavily dominated by various sorts of keyboards and highly dense baroque harmonies, that gives the impression of clear-cut melodic hooks sacrificed in favour of soulful atmosphere. And that impression does not go away with additional listens: unfortunately, at this point it simply seems to me that most of the songs here are not too well-written.

 

In-frickin'-fact, as much as I hate to admit it, the best creation on Holland, the way I currently see it, is the nostalgic 'California Saga', written by none other than our good friends Al Jardine and Mike Love, the «normal working guys» of the band. Pretty soon they would be having this band standing on its hind paws and jumping through burning hoops, but at the moment, being stationed in one of the artsiest places in Europe, they felt obliged to come up with something suitable, and developed this three-part suite that, for once, sounds like a genuine love confession, rather than a well-calculated commercial bait (its very format would prevent it from being released as a single, and it never was).

 

From the gentle opening waltz of 'Big Sur', through the pathos-imbibed, but far from cheap-soun­ding, «grand» piano-backed poetic recital of Robinson Jeffers' poem "The Beaks Of Eagles", to 'California' proper, the sunniest-sounding bit on the record that evokes distant memories of 'Ca­li­fornia Girls', this ten-minute Love/Jardine piece is, by all means, the highest point they ever sca­led — perfect proof for the idea that «commercial accessibility» and «artistic impulse» can go hand in hand, even when these are the same hands that have so often found their resting place on Brian Wilson's throat. 'California', in particular, mixes the brightness and bounce of surf-pop with a country-rock flavor, not forgetting to draw on the band's entire vocal harmony experience.

 

On the other hand, Dennis' contributions are a little disappointing, not the least because, for some reason, Dennis does not take the lead vocal on them — and his manner of composing and arran­ging material has always seemed to me compatible only with his own manner of singing: it was all about the contrast between the gruffness of the voice cutting across the lushness of the music. Here, however, Carl takes over the microphone, and the overt sweetness of his delivery, combi­ned with the overt sappiness of the music, completely ruins 'Only With You' for me — it ends up sounding like generic early 1970s soft balladry, even if it honestly does not deserve to sound that way. 'Steamboat', structured melodically to resemble the steady clang and roll of the engine, is a bit more interesting, but also a bit more sleep-inducing. In short, these are Dennis songs without the Dennis essence — no visible signs of ache, paranoia, or disturbance of any kind that used to constitute the marrow of his artistry (and would soon continue to do that in his solo career).

 

Carl's own 'Trader', as I already said, is one of the band's most successful attempts at a little social bite, but even as it succeeds as a serious statement, it is not a masterpiece of songwriting — lots of emphasis on the lyrics which roll along in a monotonous manner, and, although some of the lines are delivered beautifully, even the beauty gets tedious after a while if the artist does not stray from the exact same «beauty line» every once in a while. And it does not help that, at over five minutes in length, this second-lengthiest song on the album is immediately followed by the first-lengthiest one — and also the weakest link: the unhappy duo's (Chaplin and Fataar's) 'Lea­ving This Town', a languid, near-comatose piano ballad that, of all things on Earth, seems to have been inspired by Elton John's 'Rocket Man' (as well as by ELP's 'Lucky Man' when it comes to the tedious synthesizer solo). Not only does this song have nothing to do on a Beach Boys album, it is simply not a very good song, period. Maybe if Elton played and sung it, and Keith Emerson took charge of that synth solo... but let us turn our thoughts to merrier matters.

 

Chaplin and Fataar's second contribution, 'We Got Love', was eventually replaced by Brian's 'Sail On, Sailor' (the former would later resurface on the ensuing live album); a wise move, but, alas, 'Sail On, Sailor' is not one of Brian's masterpieces, either. Its mixed folk/R'n'B-ish flavour is not the man's proper specialty, and even if the lyrics could be said to capture the band's, and Brian's own, turbulent state at the time, the capture is rather perfunctory. Plus, why the hell is Blondie Chaplin singing it and not Brian himself? Even if, by 1973, he'd already mostly lost his old voice, a «cracked» Brian Wilson delivery of these troubled lyrics would sound far more authentic. Much better is 'Funky Pretty', the real «lost gem» from this album — a gloomy, moody chunk of piano-based art-pop, also with R'n'B overtones, but far more complex and less easy to crack.

 

On the other hand, it is also telling that Brian's real major «project» of 1973, included as a bonus EP together with the original Holland, was a musical «adult fairy tale»: 'Mount Vernon And Fair­way', a sort of allegorical tale about an unhappy prince discovering «The Pied Piper» in a magic radio. (Yes, children, «the prince» is Brian Wilson, «The Piper» is his musical genius, and the brothers who re-discover «The Piper» after it conceals itself from the prince are... well, take a guess). The project is anything you want it to be — intriguing, sad, disturbing, etc. — but it cer­tainly ain't no precious mini-symphony. The music is actually quite minimalistic and, by Brian's usual measures, totally predictable. There is some fieldwork here for Freud's and Jung's disciples, but for the average music lover? Nope.

 

All in all, Holland is decidedly a mixed bag, and it is better to treat it as a whole — a respectable stab at respectability — than concentrate on its individual aspects one by one. Still, even with all its flaws, it managed to sound relatively modern, and keep the band's head above the water for a bit more time. Besides, any album on which Mike Love manages to own ten minutes worth' of artistic integrity automatically warrants a thumbs up.

 

IN CONCERT (1973)

 

1) Sail On Sailor; 2) Sloop John B; 3) The Trader; 4) You Still Believe In Me; 5) California Girls; 6) Darlin'; 7) Marcella; 8) Caroline No; 9) Leaving This Town; 10) Heroes And Villains; 11) Funky Pretty; 12) Let The Wind Blow; 13) Help Me, Rhonda; 14) Surfer Girl; 15) Wouldn't It Be Nice?; 16) We Got Love; 17) Don't Worry Baby; 18) Surfin' U.S.A.; 19) Good Vibrations; 20) Fun, Fun, Fun.

 

I've said it once, twice, and thrice, and I'll say it again: I do not fancy the idea of a Beach Boys live show, much less a live album. At their best (and even at their so-so), the Beach Boys were the perfect studio band, and such things as «spontaneity», «rock drive», «getting in the groove», etc., could only hurt them rather than help. No matter how hard they tried, they could not get the same kind of perfection on stage — nor could they re-cast their stuff in a significantly different way for live audiences, different enough to be justified. They could come close to perfection — but that only makes the whole experience even more frustrating, because who the heck needs close-to-perfection if you can get complete perfection instead?

 

And if anything in the Beach Boys' live catalog ever comes close to perfection, it is, without a doubt, the double In Concert album from 1973. The shows were recorded in 1972 and 1973, at the height of the band's artistic and «reputational» comeback. Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, as questionable as their songwriting contributions were to the band's catalog, added plenty of ex­tra power on stage: good harmony singers and good extra musicians (especially Fataar, who real­ly helped the band out at a time when Dennis had lost his drumming capacities through a hand in­jury. Not that Dennis felt good enough at the time to drum with as much passion as he did in the innocent Six­ties — even if there were nothing wrong with his hands).

 

Then there is the amazing setlist, of course. The double LP allows to cover plenty of ground, run­ning the gamut from the classic surf-era hits to the mid-Sixties artistic peaks and, finally, to the band's more recent experimental period — a whole four pieces from Holland are present (five, if we include 'We Got Love', another Chaplin/Fataar number originally intended for that record, but pulled off at the last moment to make room for the «hit single» 'Sail On, Sailor'). Anyone shrug­ging their shoulders and saying «so what?» should be reminded that, in a matter of months within the release of this album, The Beach Boys would drop the bulk of «serious» material from their setlists, and just go back to being the Beach Boys, concentrating on the old sunny day hits — sure it looked a bit quirky, what with all the band members sporting big bushy beards, but hey, as long as they keep paying for the tickets...

 

And if that wasn't enough, how about the big fabulous surprise of the show? NO MIKE LOVE BANTER WHATSOEVER. Repeat: MIKE. LOVE. SHUTS. THE. FUCK. UP. Not a single god­damn "Lost my head again!" anywhere in sight. It is almost like he existed only to take lead vocals on the old surfin' classics, for which he continued to remain the best choice. It is almost like paradise. No wonder this couldn't be kept up for much longer.

 

However, feelings become a little more mixed when we come to consider the subtle changes in­troduced in the live versions. 'Sloop John B' gets something like a million extra instruments, in­cluding countrified electric guitar, banjo (I think? I may be wrong here), and other stuff, clut­tering the perfectly constructed musical card house of the original. It's not exactly 'Sloppy John B' in the end, but the bits of chaos annoy me. 'Help Me, Rhonda' gets a distorted hard-rock boogie line for its spine, which is fairly inadequate for the song's feather-light character — hell, why not a Tony Iommi tone if you are all for «toughening it up»? 'Funky Pretty', as if to justify its title, gets a genuine «funky» introduction that has nothing to do with the song itself, and the seams cer­tainly show as they switch into the pop piano melody without a warning. 'You Still Believe In Me', in the place of the opening harpsichord/deep echoey vocal duo, gets an electric keyboard /Theremin intro­duction — nice, but, again, a rather poor substitute for the baroque beauty of the original. (And hearing Al Jardine do it instead of Brian is also saddening).

 

This list could go on a bit, but the illustration is sufficient: changes are few, and in most cases, they detract from the originals rather than re-open them in a new light. Exceptions would include 'Leaving This Town', slightly improved with an electric organ solo instead of the silly Emerson-style Moog solo on the original (but the song is still as un-Beach Boys as ever), and 'Marcella', one single case where the «toughening» works, since, according to Brian, the song was originally envisioned as sort of a Stones tribute, and the crunchier rhythm guitars and sharper slide solo gui­tars on here do convey some sort of an Exile On Main St. vibe, for a moment.

 

The same complaints go for every instance of a flubbed or «swallowed» vocal note — of which, granted, there are very few exam­ples, but each one stabs through the heart. With Concert at least, you could ascribe these flubs to the band not being able to hear itself behind the yelling, but here they have no excuse — other than, admittedly, it is hard for the likes of Carl Wilson to play rhythm guitar and hold up a perfect voice melody at the same time, and it is utterly admirable that he is still able to do that, say, 90% of the time. But for those of us who expect nothing less than perfection from the way a Beach Boys album is delivered (technically, I mean — we cannot always expect ideal songwriting), this is still a serious letdown.

 

In Concert must be heard — throughout the 1970s, the Beach Boys remained a significant live at­traction (in fact, as their studio reputation plummeted, their live one kept going up), and this album very well explains why. And yet I do not think that it is ever going to remain highly ranked on anyone's playlist. Thumbs up, because the record is unimpeachable on formal grounds, is still a major pleasure to listen to on its own, and a satisfying swan song for The Beach Boys, soon to be disbanded, reshuffled, restructured, and renamed «The Al And Mike Love Show».

 

15 BIG ONES (1976)

 

1) Rock And Roll Music; 2) It's OK; 3) Had To Phone Ya; 4) Chapel Of Love; 5) Everyone's In Love With You; 6) Talk To Me; 7) That Same Song; 8) TM Song; 9) Palisades Park; 10) Susie Cincinnati; 11) Casual Look; 12) Blue­berry Hill; 13) Back Home; 14) In The Still Of The Night; 15) Just Once In My Life.

 

Strange, controversial times did not automatically end for the Beach Boys with their separation from Jack Rieley. The story that one usually hears goes like this: after Capitol, in 1974, released the double-LP compilation Endless Summer, lightly packed (five songs per one LP side — typi­cal miserliness on the part of said record label) with old Beach Boy hits, it suddenly took off, hit­ting #1 and spending lots of time on the charts. This prompted Mike Love and Al Jardine to take control in their hands and recast the band as an «oldies act», dumping most of the experimental material from the past six years and concentrating on the likes of 'Surfin' USA'.

 

Then, out of the blue, it was decided that the band would get a big boost by «officially» returning Brian Wilson to the forefront. Considering that, by 1975, Brian had turned into a complete moral and physical wreck — bed-ridden, depressed, drugged, overweight, with a beard to rival Mike Love's hairiest days — this might have been a semi-decent idea; at the very least, it put extra pressure on the man to return to a relatively normal life. Unfortunately, the pressure also hap­pened to be prema­ture and inadequate. Due to psychological «instability», Brian's songwriting in­stincts had mutated into something utterly weird, sort of an eerie mix of old-time baroque influ­ences, mental ward improvisation, and Sesame Street. Furthermore, his voice was totally shot, transformed into an old man's hoarse rasp, never again to even remind one of its former Pet Sounds beauty. And he hadn't done any serious production work — one that would be as techni­cally complex as what he did in 1966 — for almost a decade.

 

In fact, it was Brian's, not anybody else's, idea that a good thing for the band would be to release an album of «golden oldies»: which just goes to show how deranged he was at the time, because, according to common consensus and my own opinion as well, the «oldies» part of 15 Big Ones is easily its worst segment. The idea to open the proceedings with 'Rock And Roll Music' is one of the worst reputational moves in Beach Boy history, period. Even in the early surf age, the band probably could not have handled the Berry anthem properly; this typically mid-Seventies version, with its slowed-down tempo, falsetto harmonies, Bay City Roller-style guitar tones, jazz-pop brass backing, and, ultimately, a carnival-style rather than rock-rave-style atmosphere, is an abo­mination — an insult to rock'n'roll as a genre and the Beach Boys as a band.

 

The «poppier» oldies that the band chose to perform are not nearly as offensive as the opener, but generally match it in blandness and uselessness. Sappy-happy, trivially arranged (for the most part, relying on a very ugly keyboard sound), nobody needs to hear the Beach Boys sing 'Chapel Of Love', or 'A Casual Look', or 'Palisades Park', etc. Even as a light distraction — nobody needs to be serious all the time — they end up annoying rather than entertaining, and, if the originals were good in the first place, spoiling them rather than improving upon their hidden potential.

 

On the other hand, the mediocre-to-abysmal quality of the covers has obscured the quality of a small bunch of originals. A malfunctional Brian Wilson is still better than a dysfunctional Brian Wilson, and, with a whole five «big ones» co-credited to the man in person, he still managed to sow a few more good seeds — in fact, they quite transparently presage his style on Love You. He returns to the «snippet» style of old: ultra-short, concise chunks of melody, sliced out on the pia­no and disappearing into nothing almost as soon as they emerge. The paranoid plea of 'Had To Phone Ya' (he delivers the line "come on, come on, come on and answer the phone" almost as if he believed he really had a phone in his hand); the madman music hall of 'That Same Song'; the rough amateur stomp of 'Back Home' — all of this gives us the same Brian Wilson that would, next year, attract far more attention, because none of this attention would be dissipated by cheesy covers of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and, God help us, Joe Seneca (although I must admit that Carl's angel-voice on 'Talk To Me' is one of Side A's modest highlights).

 

Overall, the poor reputation of 15 Big Ones is unquestionably deserved — but it could have been much better, if not for Brian's sudden and odd penchant for cover material, or Mike and Al's pres­sure on him to put out a new album as soon as possible. It is very fortunate that the standard CD edition has paired the album with Love You: that way, all of the suspicious covers can simply be edited out, so that one simply gets a bigger Love You, expanded by a short bunch of same-style precursors. Also, all of the band members desperately need a shave, but do I really have to tell that to anyone?

 

LOVE YOU (1977)

 

1) Let Us Go On This Way; 2) Roller Skating Child; 3) Mona; 4) Johnny Carson; 5) Good Time; 6) Honkin' Down The Highway; 7) Ding Dang; 8) Solar System; 9) The Night Was So Young; 10) I'll Bet He's Nice; 11) Let's Put Our Hearts Together; 12) I Wanna Pick You Up; 13) Airplane; 14) Love Is A Woman.

 

This is what 15 Big Ones would have sounded like, had all of its songs been originals: the real culmination of the «Brian Is Back!» movement, for which we have to thank Brian's infamous the­rapist Eugene Landy — it was his strictest demand that Brian's return to regular composing work be part of the therapeutic treatment. The result was The Beach Boys Love You — the first album since Pet Sounds, on which all of the material was credited to Brian Wilson.

 

Curiously, Love You has been splitting Beach Boy fans for more than thirty years. The admirers point out that the album was the last artistically-oriented «non-product» offering from the band, the last one to truly and genuinely feature Brian in creative control, and simply the last one to con­sistently offer quality material. The detesters point out that most of the songs are too overtly child­ish (sometimes, downright stupid); the arrangements are a far cry from Pet Sounds, ranging from too primitive to too ugly; and Brian's handling of the lead vocals on most of the tunes is unbearable — with the previous four years of drugs and booze taking a heavy toll on his vocal cords, the former messenger of heaven has pretty much mutated into a hoarse hobo.

 

Both sides have their reasons. Love You is plagued by mostly inavoidable problems, and could have been much better. But it is also a record that really sounds like nothing else, and, although I cannot speak for everybody, I definitely vouch that there is a nerve channel to guide this music in­side one's subconscious — all you need to do is unlock it. Love You is, truly and verily, an al­bum by a madman undergoing therapy (as opposed to, for instance, Dennis Wilson's Pacific Oce­an Blue, released the same year, an album by a patient slipping into madness and desperation). Many of the songs almost give you the impression of an ailing genius «re-unlocking» his talent, as if slowly recuperating after a long-term physical and mental paralysis. So it is clumsy, naïve, childish, silly — and, at the same time, touching, inspiring, and quite optimistic.

 

The format of a typical Love You song is quite uniform. Dominated by Brian's piano or organ, built upon one or two repetitive hooks, featuring simple, but often grappling melodic hooks, and generally downplaying the band's vocal harmonies in favour of a rougher delivery. Lyrics still concentrate on love themes, but fairly often it is not even clear what is the object of love — 'I Wanna Pick You Up', sung by Dennis (who is, by now, closely competing with his brother for the «Booziest Downgrade in Beach Boy History» title), begins with the lines "I'd love pick you up / 'Cause you're still a baby to me", and ends with the risky suggestion of "pat, pat, pat her on the butt", hardly a preferable approach to one's girlfriend, but that is just the way Brian's strange mind happened to work at the time.

 

There is plenty of admirable weirdness on the album. 'Johnny Carson' is an anthem of admiration for the host of The Tonight Show that any normal person would consider to be tongue-in-cheek ("Who's the man that we admire? / Johnny Carson's a real live wire!"), but which, in Brian's con­science, most probably wasn't. 'Ding Dang' is a one-minute outtake from a «kiddie session» with Roger McGuinn as official guest, sounding like a «parody on parody» — all those early 1960s comic numbers processed through a sick mind's perspective. 'Mona', two minutes of Dennis how­ling out a repetitive vocal melody with an emphasis on repeating the first word of each line four times in a row. Some of the songs remind of the quiet pastoralism of Friends ('The Night Was So Young'); one or two, in an exceptional manner, come close to recapturing some of the complexi­ties and psychedelic nature of Smile ('Solar System'). There is even one very old outtake ('Good Time') that still features Brian's original voice — a jarring contrast, to be sure, but quite well ag­reeing with the overall confused nature of the album.

 

At the very least, Love You is utterly fascinating — that's for sure. As to whether it is enjoyable, well, I do not like either Brian's singing (the most soulful song on the album, 'Love Is A Woman', could certainly use a better vocalist) or his playing (that organ tone which, for reasons unknown, he fell in utter love with since 1976, is quite bland and ugly), but I find his ability to string notes toge­ther unimpaired, and what he may have lost in the «perfectionism» department, he had gai­ned in straightforwardness. Where a single Pet Sounds song probably took weeks and months to reach the desired state, a single song on Love You sounds, at least, as if it were composed, arran­ged, recorded, and mixed in about ten minutes, but with a certified supernatural being taking over the important parts of Brian's brain and directing him in just the right direction.

 

In other words, there is a certain odd streak of magic associated with Love You, and, apparently, I share the posi­tion of R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck on this one — he has gone on record claiming Love You to be his favorite Beach Boy album. Me, I am just a poor guy who would never dream of going that far, but I do refuse to let the shortcomings of the record overshadow its unique quality. Thumbs up from the proverbial bottom of the proverbial heart; no matter how much the brain is tempted to appeal the decision, it's way too much of a drag to prepare the proper papers.

 

M.I.U. ALBUM (1978)

 

1) She's Got Rhythm; 2) Come Go With Me; 3) Hey Little Tomboy; 4) Kona Coast; 5) Peggy Sue; 6) Wontcha Come Out Tonight; 7) Sweet Sunday Kinda Love; 8) Belles Of Paris; 9) Pitter Patter; 10) My Diane; 11) Match Point Of Our Love; 12) Winds Of Change.

 

Although I completely understand the regular fan disdain for M.I.U. Album, I have never really shared it. Yet on the surface, there seems to be every reason for hating it. With Love You failing to repeat the commercial success of 15 Big Ones, it was hardly surprising when Reprise Records, with which the band was now affiliated, refused to release Brian's subsequent project in the same vein, the much-bootlegged Adult / Child. This sent the band into further chaos, exacerbated by Brian once again retreating into drug asylum. Consequently, Mike and Al dragged Brian to Ma­harishi International University in Iowa, force-fed him some meditation, and, in between the three of them — Dennis and Carl are present only marginally, adding vocals on a couple of the tracks — quickly concocted this certified «piece of product» instead.

 

With Al Jardine as producer and Mike once again writing most of the lyrics to Brian's melodies (and thus, gaining access to the general «mood» of the songs), M.I.U. Album is a bizarre mix of retro light pop (which mostly dominates Side A) and contemporary light pop (Side B, with a lit­tle bit of contamination). This safeguards the record from being derided as either an «unabashed transformation into an oldies act» or a «cheesy attempt at trendy commercialization» — because it is both at the same time!

 

That said, at least the retro stuff, per se, is okay. Brian's 'She's Got Rhythm' and the cover of the Del-Vikings' old hit 'Come Go With Me', in particular, open the album with a solid 1-2 punch. Brian even somehow manages to resurrect the good old falsetto for 'She's Got Rhythm' (that's him, right?), and, as simple as the song really is, its melodic structure and vocal arrangements could easily land it into the «second-tier» group out of the band's pre-Pet Sounds years. Basically, so what if they are all fifteen years older and bearded? When the Beatles climbed out on the roof in 1969 and played the six-year old 'One After 909', it's not as if anybody complained.

 

Further in the band's favor, the arrangements on the retro-oriented stuff are much better here than they were on 15 Big Ones, with less emphasis on carnivalesque pump organ and glitzy brass and more on guitars, pianos, and group harmonies. Hence, a «generic» cover like Buddy Holly's 'Peg­gy Sue', no matter how superfluous, still sounds much more genuine than the butchered 'Rock & Roll Music'. And Brian's «sole survivor» from Adult/Child, 'Hey Little Tomboy', fares much bet­ter with Brian and Mike sharing the lead vocals and its thick instrumental arrangement than simi­lar songs fared on Love You, even if the melody is more nursery-like.

 

On the down side, every now and then the retro spirit gets officially unbearable — most openly so on 'Kona Coast', which goes as far as to snatch the old vocal hook off 'Hawaii': a direct sequel to a fifteen-year old song that was originally geared towards fifteen-year olds is, on any rational planet of ours, considered «corny», and its «corniness» tends to be infectuous here — the more battered old tricks Mike, Al, and Brian pull out of the dusty hat, the more they embarrass their grown-up audiences.

 

But this downside does not even begin to compare with the downside of songs like 'Belles Of Pa­ris', 'Match Point Of Our Love', and 'Winds Of Change'. The latter two, in particular, sound like they had been freshly extracted from some musty Top of the Pops show, surmising blue eyes, cowboy moustaches, modestly hairy chests, acoustic guitars, and so much «soul» your brain  could easily drown in it. This is the first time the Beach Boys actually start paying attention to «pop fashion» in the 1970s, and I don't like it (big surprise) — I'd much rather hear a hundred new variations on 'Surfin' USA', no matter how hopelessly out of touch with said fashion.

 

In the big picture, M.I.U. Album was the final blow that destroyed the Beach Boys' reputation, and one from which the band never recovered. Brian could still materialize good melodies, but he was no longer responsible for shaping them out; and, although this record still manages to keep the nostalgic and the trendy tendencies somewhat apart, subsequent ones would squish them to­gether, resulting in all sorts of horrendously tasteless mutations. Yet, on a song-by-song basis, M.I.U. Album probably has more good songs than bad ones, and a «simply good» Beach Boys song, even from their late period, is still worth hearing, liking, and owning. So I would recom­mend a little bit of sympathy for the record.

 

L.A. (LIGHT ALBUM) (1979)

 

1) Good Timin'; 2) Lady Lynda; 3) Full Sail; 4) Angel Come Home; 5) Love Surrounds Me; 6) Sumahama; 7) Here Comes The Night; 8) Baby Blue; 9) Goin' South; 10) Shortenin' Bread.

 

The follow-up to M.I.U. Album is a somewhat more collective effort — we now have writing and arranging contributions from all five members, and, in addition, Bruce Johnston is back from exile, taking the producer's seat and setting the stage up for the band's final descent into Reputa­ti­onal Hell. But that wouldn't truly occur until next year; in 1979, the band was still floundering, and L.A. at least saw a couple risks taken, a couple opportunities made use of, and a few embar­rassments that were at least surprising in all of their embarrassing boldness. It is the last Beach Boys album I could claim to «like», if hardly respect.

 

More collectivism means more eclectic choices, and a sense of creative chaos and commotion that, one could say, rivals 20/20 — just like ten years ago, the album involves everybody vying for attention and no creative control whatsoever, à la «anything goes». In 1969, this worked fine; in 1979, it could hardly be the same way. With Brian's mind still in a haze and Brian's backlog of solid material mostly exhausted; with Dennis focusing what drugs and booze condescended to save of his talent on his solo career; with Carl's passion for «angelic arrangements» gradually tur­ning into an embrace of «adult contemporary» values; and with Mike's and Al's ever-increasing penchant for cor­ny gimmicks — clearly, L.A. promised to be a mess, and it was.

 

The main anti-hero of L.A. still turned out to be Bruce Johnston, whose main claim to fame here is the rearrangement of 1967's 'Here Comes The Night' as a hot eleven-minute disco number. The only time the band ever dabbled in disco, it was a critical disaster, but still managed to snatch its approximately five seconds of fame (given that 1979 was disco's last year of prominence) among club-goers. All I can say is — if you manage to forget that this is the Beach Boys (or think about it as some trendy joker's remix of a Beach Boys number, without the band themselves being in­volved), it's a fair enough disco attraction for the likes of John Travolta. Nothing more. But it does waste eleven minutes of running time...

 

...which, given the quality of some of the material, could have certainly been put to better use. As far as I am concerned, this is Dennis' last big hurray: 'Love Surrounds Me', an outtake from the sessions for his second solo album Bamboo, which never came to pass in his own lifetime, is a typical D.W. confessional number (grizzled vocals + tender string and keyboard arrangements = Dennis heaven), and 'Baby Blue' is a nearly-ambient atmospheric piece that may not be too me­morable, but is grand and lush in classic Beach Boys tradition.

 

Brian's contributions, both of them outtakes from older epochs, bookmark the album: 'Good Ti­min' is a retro ballad, with harmonies straight out of 'Surfer Girl', but mixed with... some might say, maturity, others would call it mid-age soft-rock boredom (heading straight into mid-age and finding more tolerance for soft-rock each day, I still give it a plus); and 'Shortenin' Bread' is just a goofy, dumb old coda that would not be out of place on Love You. His presence is thus drastical­ly reduced from M.I.U. times — but, in those troubled days, would anyone notice?

 

Al's 'Lady Lynda', a fast-paced ballad tribute to his wife loosely based on a Bach piece (! — guest musician Sterling Smith plays the actual melody of 'Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring' on the harp­si­chord), is not great, but modestly catchy and humble enough to be pleasant; Mike Love, in the meantime, sets his sight on the Far East and delivers 'Sumahama', the first song in the Beach Boys catalog to have been written exclusively by him (if we count 'Big Sur' as only part of the collective 'California Saga') — and a fairly decent Japanese-stylized trinket it is, even if every­thing about it, each single chord and each single lyric, sound clichéd. Somehow, when all the clichés fall into place, I still find myself liking it every single time. At the very least, everyone simply has to admit that, in choosing between 'Sumahama' and 'Kokomo'... that is, if one is ever forced to choose between... never mind.

 

Curiously enough, my conscience selects Carl Wilson as the largest failure of L.A. His three num­bers presage the soft, sweet, and utterly hookless adult contemporary he would sink into in his own solo career, and even sharing lead vocals with Dennis on 'Angel Come Home' does not help matters much (even if that's just the right way Dennis could always save one of his hookless numbers from failure — by singing it like a TB-stricken street bum with a big heart). His brief artistic rise in 1971-73 and his vocal presence on some of Brian's best numbers had always ob­scured the fact that, to a large part, he simply missed the opportunity of rescuing the band late in its career — abandoning invention and creativity and relying entirely on the dubious power of «beautiful» synth tones and formally «beautiful» singing.

 

But even so, the production on these C.W. numbers is still miles ahead of what we would be see­ing very, very soon. As it is, L.A. is the last Beach Boys album I would — with a fair warning — recommend to anyone. At the very least, it is diverse. There's your adult contemporary balladry, your Saturday Night Fever, some Bach, a Mikado tribute, Dennis' bully-eyed soul, you name it. Even if you happen to think it all sucks — a respectable opinion — the think is well worth happe­ning. A gullible thumbs up it is.

 

KEEPIN' THE SUMMER ALIVE (1980)

 

1) Keepin' The Summer Alive; 2) Oh Darlin'; 3) Some Of Your Love; 4) Livin' With A Heartache; 5) School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes The Bell); 6) Goin' On; 7) Sunshine; 8) When Girls Get Together; 9) Santa Ana Winds; 10) Endless Harmony.

 

This is where it ends, and salvation is no longer even a remote option. The late 1970s saw the band wobbling between the crass, the silly, the occasional flash of experimentation or creativity, and the very sporadic outburst of genius. In other words, the band was down on its luck, but still somewhat alive and struggling; it was, at the very least, curious to watch that struggle.

 

With the new decade on the horizon, Mike Love was all set to clench his teeth, tighten his grip, and achieve sanity and stability. A noble goal, but at what cost? The much-discussed image on the front sleeve gives us the answer. They may be «keepin' the summer alive», yes – but a com­pletely fake, artificial summer at that, kept on technological life support. As corny as their come­back was announced on 15 Big Ones, it is to Keepin' The Summer Alive that we ought to award the title of «First Ever Genuinely Awful Beach Boys Album». And by «genuinely awful», I mean exactly what I say — I'd rather have an album on which every second song was a variation on 'Bull Session With Big Daddy' than this one.

 

However, it is not the worst produced Beach Boys album, nor is it the least melodic. Its awfulness lies in its «aura». The motto is simple: «Whatever we are in real life, let us be infectiously happy and merry in the studio», a fairly strange attitude for a band in a state of complete moral wreck, twice as strange considering that «infectiously happy and merry» was certainly not even the pre­vailing mainstream musical vibe in 1980, not even in California, and thrice as strange considering that the market for surf pop was even smaller in 1980 than it had been in 1976.

 

As a result, Keepin' The Summer Alive sounds... well, imagine yourself having to do a stand-up comedy routine before a non-English speaking audience the next day after one of your parents' death, and you might get the general idea. Already the title track combines a grossly exaggerated «bar­room growl» delivery from Carl, electronically processed backing vocals that robotically chant the melody of 'Louie Louie' (??!!), and a dead-sounding keyboard backup, supposed to bring stuff «up to date» (visions of frizzed-hair leotard-clad girl dancers included). It hardly gets worse from there — but it very, very rarely gets better.

 

Most of the songs are catchy: that one aspect, at least, Mike is always committed to wrangling from Brian, Carl, or whoever else is involved in the writing. You will remember how to sing along with "some, some, some of your love" or "don't leave me alone, living with a heartache" (for a brief period of time, at least). But this catchiness does not match any of its surroundings — neither the arrangements, nor the age and mental state of the band members, nor the very times to which they try to stick it. Where some of these melodies may have qualified for passable pleasant filler, had they been written and transferred to vinyl circa 1962-63, they sound utterly dumb and kitschy in 1980. And this applies both to the worst offenders (title track; the hideously tropical 'Sunshine'; the clumsy vaudeville sentimentality of 'When Girls Get Together') and songs that were most likely quite innocent and positively oriented upon writing, but were still engulfed and destroyed by the same vibe (e. g. Carl's ballad 'Oh Darlin', not only muffled by pedestrian produc­tion and arrangement values, but also by being stuck in between 'Keepin' The Summer Alive' and 'Some Of Your Love').

 

Brian's own fetish for covering oldies, still ongoing from 1976, was generally suppressed by the rest of the band, but, as a compromise, they still include a cover of Chuck Berry's 'Schooldays', which only goes to show that compromises were never good for this band; the result seems just as sanitized as everything else on here.

 

In short, you know things are going really, really bad when the best track on the album is a long-time reject that dates all the way back to 1972, and was written by Bruce Johnston, of all people; now that he is in full technical control of the band as its producer, it is only natural that the track he never got around to donate to the band eight years earlier (having been fired by Jack Rieley) finally makes a triumphant return. (Subsequently, it is the only track on the album to feature ba­cking vocals from Dennis — who reportedly hated the sessions so much that he walked out after just a couple of them, and I fully empathize). 'Endless Harmony' is an attempt on Johnston's part to emulate the «deep» sonic landscapes of Brian, and, compared with the likes of 'Our Prayer' or 'Surf's Up', it is a very cheap facsimile; but compared with the average crap that constitutes the bulk of Summer, it is an obvious highlight — at least it gives us a tasty bit of collective band harmonies circa 1972, reminding the forgetful that it didn't always used to be like this.

 

At this particular point, it is reasonable for the non-historian to cut off access to everything that bears the «Beach Boys» tag on it (except for archive releases): 1980 sealed the band's doom, even if they still had a few decent years left as a respectable touring act (mainly due to Carl's active presence and Brian's spirit on the stage serving as a mascot, even if the man himself hardly con­tributed at all to the stage show). With the endless harmony warped into the state of an endless thumbs down, one might as well just assume the harmonies on 'Endless Harmony' to represent a swan song coda — and move on to Brian's solo career instead. But the reviewer's honest duty is to back up nasty generalizations with album-specific bawdry, so on we go.

 

BEACH BOYS (1985)

 

1) Getcha Back; 2) It's Gettin' Late; 3) Crack At Your Love; 4) Maybe I Don't Know; 5) She Believes In Love Again; 6) California Calling; 7) Passing Friend; 8) I'm So Lonely; 9) Where I Belong; 10) I Do Love You; 11) It's Just A Matter Of Time; 12) Male Ego.

 

Although, on the whole, this next attempt at «self-rebooting» (what with the eponymous title and all) belongs to the same category as Keepin' The Summer Alive (i. e. the «Facepalm» category), I have always thought of it as just a bit of a tiny improvement over the miserable cardboard facsi­mile of that 1980 disaster. Not too many people agree, though, and I get their point.

 

First, no Dennis. His contributions to Summer Alive were already non-existent, but they still had him pictured on the front sleeve, and, somehow, the very fact of his being alive and still compo­sing always left hope that, one day, he'd be back out there with another 'Forever', or 'Cuddle Up', or, at least, a 'Love Surrounds Me'. With Poseidon's daughters putting a final stop to that hope on December 28, 1983, expectations for the band's next album were a priori lower than ever before.

 

Second, Culture Club. One might love Culture Club or hate Culture Club, but one thing is for certain: «Culture-Clubbing» the Beach Boys' style is simply one more of those «acts of senility» in which clueless old veterans turn to the «young 'uns» for directions, and, more often than not, come out looking utterly silly and even more clueless. Not only do Culture Club members guest on the songs and even contribute one original number, they also provide the band with their own producer, Steve Levine, and this means a sterile Eighties sound that may have been good enough for Culture Club, but is completely useless for the Beach Boys. Electronic drums, generic plastic-sounding synthesizers, the works.

 

Third, more of that trashy Mike Love-dominated nostalgia. The lead-in track, 'Getcha Back', co-written by Love with long-term Beach Boy partner Terry Melcher, sounds spliced together from a million old Beach Boy tricks (some of the high-pitched harmonies almost seem sampled from the likes of 'Hushabye'), then set to a booming electronic rhythm that is supposed to prove you how seamlessly and self-assuredly these lads have effected the transition into the modern age. Yes, this did work once — sixteen years earlier, when they first started tapping into the nostalgic vibe with 'Do It Again'. But let us not compare mainstream production (and songwriting!) values of 1969 with those of 1985. It is hard to do so and stay within diplomatic range. Besides, there is al­so 'California Calling', which shamelessly steals its intro from 'Surfin' USA' without listing Chuck Berry in the credits — disgusting, ain't it?

 

Fourth, a rather unhappy collaboration with Stevie Wonder on the horizon — a thing that, if ever it was bound to happen, should rather have happened around 1976, when Stevie was at his peak, than in 1985, when he had already lost too many of his teeth and was rapidly downgrading him­self to the status of saccharine-addled middle-of-the-road housewife entertainer, with 'I Just Cal­led To Say I Love You' already riding the charts for a year (sorry, Stevie). 'I Do Love You' be­longs in the same dropbox: an inoffensive, unremarkable, watery composition, immediately re­cognizable due to Stevie's unmistakable piano and harmonica playing, and just as immediately disposable because it's little more than formula.

 

Fifth, lots of Carl Wilson's and Bruce Johnston's adult contemporary on here. Stuff like 'Maybe I Don't Know' and 'She Believes In Love Again' has its vocal hooks, but the instrumental sound is utterly rote (guitar soloing on 'Maybe I Don't Know' is even more tasteless than on 'Bluebirds Over The Mountains'), and Johnston's pathos on the latter number is unbearable.

 

So what could be the saving grace? Only a genuine comeback from Brian — and there are some tiny signs of it. The funny thing is, although he'd been steadily contributing scattered contributi­ons for all the time since Love You, it was not until the Beach Boys had deteriorated into this pitiful «clueless old beard» act that he started recovering as a motivated songwriter. Although the Al Jardine-cowritten 'Crack At Your Love' is hideous (probably wrestled by force on the part of the «sunshine party», desperate for a new Brian Wilson upbeat love song), 'It's Just A Matter Of Time', 'Male Ego', and especially the heartbroken 'I'm So Lonely' are all songs that may not be very good, as such, but which reflect some genuine care — and point the way to highlights of Brian's upcoming solo career.

 

These tracks are few and in between, but, in my eyes at least, they save The Beach Boys from the impression of be­ing that monumental Tower of Evil (Pretending to be Good) that Keepin' The Summer Alive turned out to be. It is formally the last album with notable involvement on Brian's part, and deserves at least to be mentioned as a historical footnote, with 'I'm So Lonely' and, per­haps, 'Male Ego' saved for future consumption on detailed anthologies. The inevitable thumbs down are, therefore, not quite as irate as last time around — and if you think Boy George and Stevie Wonder were rather poor choices to hang around in 1985, just wait and see what we have coming on subsequent «albums».

 

STILL CRUISIN' (1989)

 

1) Still Cruisin'; 2) Somewhere Near Japan; 3) Island Girl; 4) In My Car; 5) Kokomo; 6) Wipe Out; 7) Make It Big; 8) I Get Around; 9) Wouldn't It Be Nice; 10) California Girls.

 

This and the next album were the only ones not to be re-released on CD during the recent major Beach Boy reissue campaign — which is quite telling, all by itself; even Mike Love, deep down in his soul, must be embarrassed about these records, provided he is an organic human being and not a side effect of the evolution process. Still, there they are — no matter how much I'd like to get in my car and wipe out this abomination somewhere near Japan.

 

That said, let us not put all the blame on the shoulders of one person. First, this record would pro­bably never have seen the light of day if it wasn't for 'Kokomo', an unlucky collaboration between Mike, Terry Melcher, and two aging hippie veterans (Scott McKenzie of 'If You're Going To San Francisco' fame, and John Phillips of the Mamas & Papas) that had the misfortune to go all the way to No. 1 and become the Beach Boys' first mega-hit since 'Good Vibrations' last struck gold twenty-three years back.

 

The odd thing about 'Kokomo' is that, with its relaxed sunshine-happy atmosphere, cheap Carib­bean flavor, and hedonistic implications, it really belonged somewhere in the mid-Seventies ra­ther than in 1988-89, with dance pop and hair metal as the leading fads. But, on the other hand, there is always a place for bikini-clad beauties in the human heart, an association towards which 'Kokomo' is targeted first and foremost, music and lyrics and all, and as for Mike Love pushing fifty, well, «dirty old men» were all the rage in 1989 (Steven Tyler! well, he wasn't that old in 1989, but still a bit overreaching for his age when it came to pussy-chasing).

 

Anyway, 'Kokomo' has some nice vocal lines ("that's where we wanna go" is Carl's finest bit of high-pitched delivery on the entire record), but the general aura of the song is downright humilia­ting — in the good old days, we were ready to accept that atmosphere when it was dominated by Brian Wilson catching heavenly melodic moves right out of the sky, but there is nothing about the melody of 'Kokomo' to remind of Heaven, and that's not even mentioning slick Eighties pro­duction (at least it isn't synth-driven, but the electronic drums combined with echo-laden vocals give it a completely plastic face all the same).

 

Worst of all, 'Kokomo' was the final nail in the coffin — as it started climbing up the charts, boo­s­ted by inclusion in a thirty-third-rate Tom Cruise movie (HOT!), Mike must have become fully convinced that this overproduced sunshine-nostalgic crap was exactly that the public wanted to hear from the Beach Boys, and the entire album was built around that attitude. Brian couldn't care less: in contrast to Beach Boys, his involvement here was minimal — he contributed but one song ('In My Car', an upbeat pop-rocker consciously written to emulate the 'I Get Around' spirit, but killed off by inade­quate lyrics, dreadful overproduction, and, let's face it, a none-too-over­whelming melody), and sang on a couple others.

 

Curiously, Carl seemed disinterested as well, since he is completely missing from the songwriters, only contributing lead and backup vocals on other people's tunes. Bruce Johnston was also mini­mally involved, writing but one tune ('Somewhere Near Japan', another of his pedestrian romantic odes, but at least its romanticism does not seem as utterly forced as all the other emotions on this record, making the song a relative highlight). Al makes his sole mark with the dreadful 'Island Girl', an attempt to stake his own claim to Caribbean territory that sounds dumber and cornier than a dozen 'Kokomos' rolled together. And as for Dennis, well, he'd rather drown than be in any way associated with a record like that.

 

Further atrocities include (1) the title track, stupid enough to paraphrase Paul Simon ("still cruisin' after all these years"), ask a girl, on Mike Love's behalf, to "hop on my hot rod", er, "in", I mean, and dress it all in an arrangement on which big booming electronic drums are just about the only discernible instrument; (2) 'Wipe Out', a song that used to be a delightful surf classic by the Surfaris, and is here rearranged as an embarrassing «rap-rock» collaboration between the band and The Fat Boys (unfortunately, Brian also bears part of the responsibility); and (3) in full accordance with the «terrible food, and such small portions» logic, the band did not even scrape together enough new material to fill up respectable space — so they had to include three golden oldies at the end, under the pretext of their having been used in recent movie soundtracks.

 

That last decision was actually a benchmark in stupidity. Just in case if, having listened to the seven originals, someone would still be left thinking whether they are «soft shit» or «real hard shit» — here is a nice comparison base for you. Would you rather hear 'I Get Around' or 'In My Car'? 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' or 'Somewhere Near Japan'? 'California Girls' or 'Kokomo'? And now you, the listener, do not even have to choose — here they are in the same package. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to it — still awful after all these years; much as I'd like to go against the grain and promote, say, 'Make It Big' as a forgotten mini-masterpiece, I'd have to strip myself of all credentials to do that. Thumbs down.

 

SUMMER IN PARADISE (1992)

 

1) Hot Fun In The Summertime; 2) Surfin'; 3) Summer Of Love; 4) Island Fever; 5) Still Surfin'; 6) Slow Summer Dancin' (One Summer Night); 7) Strange Things Happen; 8) Remember (Walking In The Sand); 9) Lahaina Aloha; 10) Under The Boardwalk; 11) Summer In Paradise; 12) Forever.

 

Since this album, like its predecessor, is now out of print, and even the few surviving copies are going on Ebay for suspiciously low cash figures, it is clear that even Mike Love, not to mention the few other surviving Beach Boys, would prefer to forget about it like one forgets about a parti­cularly nasty bad dream (to each his own). But history is history: in the digital age, it no longer forgets anything. Besides, the fifty years of penance required for a crime like this are far from over — so take it like a man, Mr. Love.

 

The most awful realization one can make about Summer In Paradise is that — yes, I know it is very hard to believe, but here goes: The Beach Boys (at this point, consisting of Mike, Carl, and Bruce) were not consciously trying to make the worst pop album ever recorded. On the contrary, they were trying to make an album that would garner commercial success by combining healthy nostalgia, modern production va­lues, and a soulful punch. Had this been intended as a corny self-parody, we would all just laugh and go home.

 

Granted, time has healed the wounds, and what, in 1992, could only seem the utmost horror to all purveyors of good taste, now comes across as a bizarre curiosity — and by now I mean «when Baywatch is no longer the regular benchmark for trash culture». But it is still worth one and only one listen, exclusively for educational purposes. For starters, the album was almost entirely com­puter-generated (Pro Tools!), with all the rhythm sections pre-programmed. The only Beach Boy to actually play an instrument on these tracks was Bruce Johnston. The only Beach Boy to actual­ly write songs on this album was Mike Love, and even then he mostly supplied lyrics to Terry Melcher's «compositions». The only other Beach Boy to take an active part whatsoever was Carl Wilson, taking lead vocals on a couple tracks, overseeing the vocal harmony recording process, and adding pathetic «credibility» to the product as a «Beach Boys» creation.

 

As for the album's general purpose, one look at the tracklist is quite sufficient to understand what was going on. Unfortunately, the titles alone do not let one see the true scope of disaster. To do that, arm yourself with forgiveness and listen to the new «re-recording» of 'Surfing', replete with crashing electronic percussion and muscular Def Leppard-influenced RIFFAGE: a new look for surf-rock, targeted at the recent generation of morons, which, fortunately, was far less huge than could be expected (alas, a whoppin' 10,000 people still bought this re­cord back in the day, heed­less of everything). If you need more, a couple blocks down the line comes 'Still Surfing', a nos­talgic toss-off that steals vocal harmony lines from several genuine Beach Boys classics and tries to make them serve the idea that nothing much has changed in thirty years. No dice.

 

Amazing, unbelievably effective lowlights on the album include 'Summer Of Love', on which Mike is impersonating a cocky beach-goer with a little rap chant (the most offensive thing about it is, of course, not the «sexism» of the lyrics, as critics frequently complain, but the utter fake­ness of the sexism — at least a guy like Steven Tyler, with all his flaws, still knew how to invite a lady to his «love vacation» in 1992 sounding like he really means it); the title track, which begins like a corny nostalgia trip and then quickly, and for no apparent cause, transforms into an even cornier eco-anthem; and the «reinvention» of 'Remember (Walkin' In The Sand)', which genuine­ly should rank among the top three or so worst covers ever attempted by anybody — the idea of doing the kind of deed they did to the word "remember" could only come from a mind so perver­ted that I wouldn't trust the person in question with a baseball, let alone a baseball bat.

 

As for the not-so-impressive tracks, they are simply forgettable — boring adult contemporary crap, for the most part. The fact that this whole thing was recorded in 1992, at least one year after the grunge revolution, in an age when the long-burgeoning underground scene was finally co­ming out to meet the masses, just shows how utterly, thoroughly clueless the «Beach Boys» were about the musical scene of the time, judging it exclusively by MTV standards. But that's only half of the crime — then comes the pathetic part, because even by those standards they could not come up with a glossy enough, convincing enough, commercial enough piece of product. What more can be said about an album that hypocritically ends with a cover of Dennis Wilson's 'Fore­ver' — with the lead vocals given to John fuckin' Stamos, the star of Full House? If that ain't reason enough for Dennis to stage a vengeful comeback from the grave, nothing is, and the dead will stay in the ground until the end of time — coincidentally, just like Summer In Paradise. The only consolation is that at least Brian had nothing whatsoever to do with this senseless self-humiliation. Thumbs down — all the way right to the toes this time.

 

STARS AND STRIPES, VOL. 1 (1996)

 

1) Don't Worry Baby; 2) Little Deuce Coupe; 3) 409; 4) Long Tall Texan; 5) I Get Around; 6) Be True To Your School; 7) Fun, Fun, Fun; 8) Help Me Rhonda; 9) The Warmth Of The Sun; 10) Sloop John B.; 11) I Can Hear Music; 12) Caroline, No.

 

All I can say is that, in «desert island» mode, Stars And Stripes would be a more tolerable choice than Summer In Paradise. Which does not mean that the entirety of this album does not spell out «M-I-S-E-R-Y» at the rate of two songs per each letter of the word. Listed as a «Beach Boys» album; featuring all five Beach Boys – including Brian! – on vocal harmonies; but consis­ting exclusively of Nashville musicians playing and Nashville singers singing on old Beach Boy covers — the idea was rotten from the start, and the lack of intelligent execution fails to compen­sate for the rot in any imaginable way.

 

These are not even properly done «country» rearrangements: at best, it is all made to sound like «1990s country-pop», which was at least before the Taylor Swift era, but was already no more «authentic country» than John Mayer is «genuine blues». Everybody just seems to be playing for cash, with no interest whatsoever in anything else — learn the chords (and, since most of the co­vered songs are from the 1963-64 period, that certainly would not take too long), practice for half an hour, churn it out, and off you go. A pure instance of rigid professionalism that makes the idea of «art» almost ridiculously superfluous.

 

Much the same applies to the singers, almost none of which are either capable of reproducing the fun spirit of the originals or of supplying a new cool twist to the old stuff. The only exceptions are – big frickin' surprise – the two old-schoolers. Timothy B. Schmit, of Eagles/Poco/solo fame, does a good job of recreating the worried mood of 'Caroline, No' (which is, by the way, the only «serious» song on the entire album, and its being tacked onto the end, like a lame dog bonus track, clearly demonstrates that, at this point, Executive Producer Mike Love was still certain that the true Beach Boys expired thirty years ago upon disembarking from the yacht on the front sleeve of Summer Days). It adds nothing to the original, but it doesn't spoil it, which produces quite a nice psychological effect after the preceding eleven tracks.

 

Second, another old-schooler and everybody's favorite, Willie Nelson, unexpectedly pops out on 'The Warmth Of The Sun' — a song that normally commands a very complex vocal performance and a particularly sweet vocal tone. Of course, it could be expected that the old trickster would try and do something like that — deconstruct a vocal classic with a deliberately minimalistic perfor­mance. But, unfortunately, that is just the way it works: as an experimental deconstruction. It is odd and unusual to hear Nelson's sympathetic «non-singing» backed by angelic harmonies, but it certainly is not the right way a good Beach Boys cover can be done. (Come to think of it, I do not even know what is the right way — the Beach Boys defy personal interpretation, which is why we do not see too many respectable Beach Boy covers floating around, unlike the Beatles).

 

And, in any case, two decent/interesting performances out of twelve isn't exactly hot stuff — es­pecially when, in order to get through to them, one has to suffer the humiliation of Toby Keith singing about being true to your school; of 'Help Me, Rhonda' rearranged as a fast-tempo shit-rock number; of grown-up people rather than fresh kids still wallowing in the cheap silliness of 'Long Tall Texan'; of Lorrie Morgan going through 'Don't Worry Baby' with all the passion of a young idealistic mom giving it her all at the local school benefit show, etc. etc.

 

Predictably, the planned Stars And Stripes Vol. 2 never came to pass (although some material was actually recorded, like a not-half bad Tammy Winette take on 'In My Room'), and the origi­nal record went out of print fairly soon — and with it, any incentive on the part of the «Beach Boys» to record any new material, particularly since, soon afterwards, the rift between Brian and Mike Love became permanent, and because Carl passed away in 1998: although Mike and Bruce still shamefully continued touring as «Beach Boys», it is one thing to please nostalgic crowds with shaky-hand renditions of 'Surfin' USA', and quite another one to record new material under the same name (not that, in between the two of them, they had any).

 

Thumbs down without a question (sorry, Willie), both to this album and its funny permutation that occasionally circulates around in bootleg form — one with all the lead vocal tracks wiped out and amusing liner notes that explain that, since this is probably the last ever Beach Boys album to bear that name on it, one must have the right to hear it as a Beach Boys album, focusing on auth­entic Beach Boy harmonies, rather than a trashy country star tribute record with the band guesting on its own album. Now that, in 2012, a reunion is finally expected, the excuse may no longer be an excuse, and then the last ever reason for even remembering that someone ever had such a fit of bad taste will dissipate forever.

 

THAT'S WHY GOD MADE THE RADIO (2012)

 

1) Think About The Days; 2) That's Why God Made The Radio; 3) Isn't It Time; 4) Spring Vacation; 5) The Private Life Of Bill And Sue; 6) Shelter; 7) Daybreak Over The Ocean; 8) Beaches In Mind; 9) Strange World; 10) From There To Back Again; 11) Pacific Coast Highway; 12) Summer's Gone.

 

I do not know why this album was made. I do know that the word «money» explicitly showed up in some of Brian's interviews, and, although I am not sure that Brian was exactly starving in the early 2010s, he is one of the few people in the world who actually deserves all the money he can get, so that would be one reasonable reason. Another reasonable reason would be the fact that the «band» was still in need of a bona fide swan song, after all: with Mike trampling the Beach Boys brand in the dust throughout the 1990s, the biographic curve had a maddeningly pathetic form.

 

Thus, once Brian and Mike temporarily settled their problems and got all the remaining Beach Boys they could lay their hands on together (Al, Bruce, and somebody even dug up «oldboy» David Marks to strum the guitar; 1962 all over again!), they wisely agreed on the following work pattern: the album would be mostly sunny, happy, and nostalgic, just the way Mike would like it to be, but Brian would otherwise be given complete freedom in the writing, throwing in teenage-symphonic compositions à la ʽSurf's Upʼ if he will. Considering that Brian's solo activity in the 2000s showed him as almost completely «cured», busier with his musical projects than anytime since the 1960s, this pattern simply could not fail. Or could it?

 

The critical world invented a brilliantly polite tag for the final product: «their best since 1977's Love You». Given that very few people would even remember Love You itself, much less any­thing that came later, the tag sounds impressive — wow, thirty-five years past their last artistic success and still going strong! But take the time to relisten to all these albums: honestly, beating all of them put together in one punch is no feat of heroism. The question should be put differently: have The Beach Grandpappies actually managed, this time, to put out an album that would make sense to people outside the small circle of hardcore fanatics?

 

As one select representative of these people, I'd very much like to say yes, but the more I listen to it, the more I'm forced to say no. That's Why God Made The Radio is by no means an «awful» album in the spirit of the Brianless garbage of the 1990s, and it manages — most of the time — to avoid being «cheesy» in the spirit of the band's late 1970s / early 1980s products. But it is an empty shell of an album, Beach Boys-ish to the core in form only, never in spirit. In fact, I'd say that it doesn't even have any spirit, Beach Boys or otherwise.

 

In comparison, I try to remember how amazed I was at hearing Paul McCartney's Chaos And Creation several years ago. There it was, a record by an aged, out-of-time dinosaur that made crystal clear sense: slow, pensive, atmospheric, still carrying traces of melodic genius but also re­flecting a shift of values, moods, attitudes so totally in line with both the modern world and the artist's own age. Not a proverbial «masterpiece», not anything to be remembered by on an order of first importance, just an album that quietly stated, «yes, my creator is old and gray, and that gives him a special edge that he is willing to take advantage of». Similar impressions can also be received from some (far from all) of Brian's solo work — even the re-recording of SMiLE, one could say, carried some whiffs of this «wisened old man» attitude.

 

That's Why God Made The Radio has none of that. It sounds as if the only question the band put to itself was, «can we just make one more ʽDo It Againʼ type of album?» (As a promo move, they did re-record ʽDo It Againʼ, but it is not included on the final LP). To be more precise, «can we still work out those harmonies? can we avoid synthesizers and electronic dance beats? can we still come up with credible lyrics on Californian topics?» etc. And — yes, for dessert: "can we still make a proverbially beautiful multi-part epic suite like we did in the old days, when Mike didn't like epic suites and we still didn't give a damn?»

 

The title track, released as a taster several months prior to the complete thing, epitomizes its es­sence quite faithfully. After a few listens... maybe even after a single listen, you can memorize the chorus and forgetfully toe-tap along with its lazy, shuffly rhythms. But from the first to the last note, it feels utterly fake. Or, perhaps, «fake» is not the right word — what is truly awful is that it might feel like a sincere outburst of emotion to Brian himself. Can you imagine the Beatles, had they all remained alive, finally reuniting... with every single Paul song written in the spirit of ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ and every John song written in the spirit of ʽLittle Childʼ?

 

At least if there had been new tricks, new solutions, new discoveries. No dice. Every single chord, every single harmony seems to have a direct ancestor in one Beach Boys classic or another. So­me­times in several at once: ʽShelterʼ is the most glaring example, where the chorus ("I'll give you shelter from the storm...") is the offspring of ʽDon't Worry Babyʼ while the backing harmonies are mostly variations on ʽBreak Awayʼ. I do not doubt for a second that Brian is still capable of inventing new textures, but for this album — it's like he didn't even try. Instead, he reprogram­med his brain computer-wise, activated all the old melodies, shuffled them around, and gave out a credible «Beach Boys™» record. Give musicologists, biologists, and programmers another fifty years, and you might not even need a Brian Wilson to receive another album of this caliber.

 

We cannot even blame Mike Love this time. For the most part, he wisely stays away from the writing process, although you can always be sure that if you encounter a particularly cringewor­thy lyric, you know who to blame. "Singing our songs is enough reason / Harmony boys is what we believe in" from ʽSpring Vacationʼ (the most overtly awful song on the entire album — few things in life are more disgusting than forcefully faking happiness) is bad enough, but "we got beaches in mind, man it's been too much time" is a close contender (unless you start singing "we got bitches in mind", which immediately gives the whole thing a fresh new angle). He is also re­sponsible for ʽDaybreak Over The Oceanʼ, which seems to be a crude vivisection of ʽBluebirds Over The Mountainʼ with a transplant from ʽMy Bonnieʼ or something else like that.

 

Most of the rest is honestly credited to Brian and producer Joe Thomas, who had been a close asso­ciate of Brian's since the recording of Imagination more than a decade earlier. And from all of this «rest», critical attention, for obvious reasons, has preferred to focus on the last three songs, which finally dispense with all the phoney summer happiness and give us pianos, flutes, strings, kind melancholia, and solemn vibrations. Does this make me happy? No. I don't like the idea of Brian sitting down at the piano and telling himself, «okay, concentrate, focus, God, make me capa­ble of writing another ʽSurf's Upʼ here and now» — and for all of these nine minutes, I can­not get rid of the idea. And again, all I hear is faint echoes and shadows of past greatness.

 

To sum up, if this is really why God made the radio, it's totally awesome how God made me stay away from the radio for most of my life. If this album really replenished Brian's, or even Mike's, pockets in a time of need, I am fine with that. If it was made just so that the official Beach Boys discography did not end with Stars And Stripes, I am so totally fine with that, too. But in the general context of the Beach Boys history, this is not a good record, I'm afraid to say. In fact, it is a bad record, I'm afraid to say — a nostalgic trip that feels forced and stuffy, as if you've just successfully taken a time machine back to 1967, but cannot open the doors. In fact, I'm not even sure I really agree that «this is their best since Love You»: even L.A., in those parts of it that weren't totally wretched, sounded more natural.

 

The only reason I'm chickening out on giving it a thumbs down is that such a decision would look like some sort of «gesture» — as if I wanted to «punish» the band for committing some sort of sacrilege, or was intentionally going «against the grain» (since most of the official reviews were uniformly positive). After all, they are all just big (and, as of now, senile) children, and at least by now they have learned their lesson: don't pay too much attention to big wicked grown-ups co­ming at you with «modern musical values». Better some sheer, unadulterated nostalgia, than ʽSummer Of Loveʼ. And any nine-minute epic written and recorded by Brian Wilson will always respect the Beach Boys' textbook definition of beauty. The album sounds great — like an imma­culately produced facsimile. It feels phoney. But sounds, as we know, are waves that penetrate us all in the same way, and feelings — who knows, yours might be better than mine.

 

P.S. And I'd like also to explicitly mention that I do not buy the «well, what more would you ex­pect from these guys in 2012?» argument at all. One of the «real» Beach Boys' biggest advanta­ges in the past was the ability to surprise — after the failure of Smiley Smile, they could come up with a winner like Wild Honey, and after the glitzy cheese of 15 Big Ones they could rebound with the raw bizarredom of Love You. Like I said, I could totally see Brian taking charge and leading the band in yet another direction. Instead, they gave us this fucking paper house. Nosiree, we had the rightful right to expect more, and got much less.

 

ADDENDA:

 

RARITIES (1983)

 

1) With A Little Help From My Friends; 2) The Letter; 3) I Was Made To Love Her; 4) You're Welcome; 5) The Lord's Prayer; 6) Bluebirds Over The Mountain; 7) Celebrate The News; 8) Good Vibrations; 9) Land Ahoy; 10) In My Room; 11) Cotton Fields; 12) All I Want To Do (live); 13) Auld Lang Syne.

 

Although most of this album, out of print for a long time and never even released on CD, was scat­tered around as bonus tracks on subsequent CD re-issues, and most of what was not is no big loss for anyone, Rarities is still worth at least a brief mention — as the first archival package in the band's career, con­sisting entirely of previously unreleased material.

 

The fact that Capitol waited for more than ten years to release this is telling in itself: the Beach Boys' vaults are not quite as opulent as popular instinct would have us believe. The fact that Capi­tol had to slap a bikini-clad «tropical beauty» on the front sleeve is even more telling — back in 1983, I bet more people bought this record for the album cover than the actual content. Besides, what could be kinkier than an intense jack-off to the sounds of 'The Lord's Prayer'?

 

Anyway, both back in the day and today the only curio-reason to own this were/are the first two tracks. Proceedings begin with a nice enough cover of 'With A Little Help From My Friends' that is surprisingly tight and well-rehearsed, almost on the level of the original: I have no idea if the band really had any intentions to include it on the likes of Wild Honey, but I would not be sur­prised if they did. (And, who knows, someone might even prefer Mike Love's lead vocal to Rin­go's, for reasons that do not require explaining.) Then there is a shorter, rawer, lo-fi-er take on 'The Letter' (originally made famous by The Box Tops) — perhaps considered too dark and dis­turbing for official release.

 

As for the rest, alternate versions of 'I Was Made To Love Her', 'Bluebirds Over The Mountains', and 'Cotton Fields' do not differ too much from the originals; the working version of 'Good Vib­ra­tions' is just one of the million working versions of 'Good Vibrations' circulating around since times immemorial, first on bootlegs, then on boxsets; the German version of 'In My Room' will make sense if you are one of those few Germans who does not understand one word of English; 'Land Ahoy' must date back to something like 1961, with all the inevitable consequences (see my review of Surfin' Safari for details); and accappella versions of 'The Lord's Prayer' and 'Auld Lang Syne' are predictably flawless — but also predictably trite.

 

Still, all of the tracks are developed enough to ensure thirty minutes of pleasant listening — for me, only spoiled by having to experience them as a poor quality vinyl rip. Of course, it is always possible to substitute those tracks that have been released on CD for the remastered versions, but that sort of alienates the listener from the wonderous tangerine mood of that album cover. The on­ly question is: did they really have to add the ugly leering guy with the awful hair? Just goes to show the difference between tropical life in 1963 and 1983.

 

ENDLESS HARMONY SOUNDTRACK (1998)

 

1) Soulful Old Man Sunshine (writing session excerpt); 2) Soulful Old Man Sunshine; 3) Radio Concert Promo; 4) Medley: Surfin' Safari / Fun, Fun, Fun / Shut Down / Little Deuce Coupe / Surfin' U.S.A. (live 1966); 5) Surfer Girl (binaural mix); 6) Help Me, Rhonda (alternate single version); 7) Kiss Me, Baby (stereo remix); 8) California Girls (stereo remix); 9) Good Vibrations (live 1968); 10) Heroes And Villains (demo); 11) Heroes And Villains (live 1972); 12) God Only Knows (live 1967); 13) Radio Concert Promo; 14) Darlin' (live 1980); 15) Wonderful / Don't Worry Bill (live 1972); 16) Do It Again (early version); 17) Break Away (demo); 18) Sail Plane Song; 19) Loop De Loop (Flip Flop Flyin' In An Aeroplane); 20) Barbara; 21) 'Til I Die (alternate mix); 22) Long Promised Road (live 1972); 23) All Alone; 24) Brian's Back; 25) Endless Harmony.

 

It must have been quite risqué to select ʽEndless Harmonyʼ, out of everything there was, as the Beach Boy song title to serve as the title for a documentary on the band's history — in 1998, as Carl finally succumbed to cancer and the rest of the band drifted apart, with only Mike and Bruce going on as «The Beach Boys», selling out barrooms and spas either to people too old to remem­ber whoever was in the band anyway, or to people who didn't give much of a damn about whether they were being entertained by «The Beach Boys» or «The Backstreet Boys». Maybe ʽYou Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Aloneʼ would have been a better title.

 

In any case, the documentary provided Capitol with a respectable opportunity to unload some more of those archival dustbins, and the fans genuinely got over seventy minutes of new Beach Boy material. Granted, the word «new» can have lots of nuances, and in this particular case, way too often «new» simply means:

 

— new stereo remixes of well-known songs, e. g. ʽSurfer Girlʼ, ʽKiss Me, Babyʼ, and ʽCalifornia Girlsʼ (a thing that should have been done on a far more thorough level, e. g. have all the early al­bums remastered in two modes, the way they eventually did with the Beatles);

 

— underarranged demo versions that can only have historical interest (ʽDo It Againʼ, ʽBreak Awayʼ, etc.); everything listenable and in fine quality, but no unexpected twists. Well, you do get to hear Mike sing "let's get together and surf again", which was eventually deleted, for fear that somebody might actually start harassing the band into fulfilling that exhortation;

 

— «radio concert promo» bits written for the band by people who probably thought that such a dumb band deserved the dumbest of writing ("Hi! This is Al Jardine, and I am a Beach Boy"; "Hi, this is the greatest drummer on Earth, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys").

 

Fortunately, that is only about a third of the album. The other third features an assortment of live rarities that range from the curiously fun (a five-hit medley from 1966 crammed into three and a half minutes) to the brilliant (ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ from 1967) to the unexpected (two highlights from the 1972 Carnegie Hall Concert: an inspired take on ʽLong Promised Roadʼ from Carl, and a ʽWonderfulʼ that is, for some reason, merged with a Chaplin/Fataar blues-rocker called ʽDon't Worry Billʼ — see, back in the old days this band did include surprising its audiences among its top priorities) to the so-so (ʽDarlinʼ should probably have been taken from some show prior to 1980's Knebworth concert).

 

Finally, there are six new songs that had only been previously available through bootlegs, al­though only one of them may count up there with the classics — consequently, it is also the one that opens the album: ʽSoulful Old Man Sunshineʼ, an outtake from the 1969 sessions, is a prime time Brian Wilson classic with all the works — multi-layered harmonies, varied instrumentation, catchy verse/chorus, and a lush, optimistic, anthemic atmosphere that was hardly a cherished guest on Brian's post-breakdown compositions. Why they ended up leaving it in the can is any­body's guess — maybe they thought it was too Motown-ish in sound (it does bounce around the room in the same way that a light, fast-tempo Supremes number can), although this never stopped them from covering Stevie Wonder on Wild Honey.

 

Five minutes are given to two different incarnations of the same song — ʽSail Plane Song' from 1968 began as a dark swirling piano number, then gradually mutated into 1969's 'Loop De Loop', a carouselambra-extravaganza of brass, chimes, harmonies, and circus spirit, before finally getting to be killed off by Jack Rieley, who thought the Beach Boys should not waste their pre­cious time working on such mindless fluff, and dedicate their efforts to things far more serious in nature and scope — such as ʽStudent Demonstration Timeʼ. Actually, though, ʽLoop De Loopʼ in its semi-finished shape is still a nice piece of Cali-psychedelia... but it certainly used to be cre­epier when it used to be ʽSail Plane Songʼ.

 

There is also a previously unreleased Dennis ballad (ʽBarbaraʼ), and at least one misguided in­clusion — ʽBrian's Backʼ, a song written in 1976 to celebrate the prodigal brother's artificial «comeback», sewn together from a miriad nostalgic leaves and, fortunately, shelved for the time being. Now that Brian had finally severed his ties with the remaining «Beach Boys» for good, the song's resurfacing on this anthology might have seemed even more comic.

 

It would have been better if they had let the album run its course on the «full» version of 'Til I Die' — the only song on here that has it in itself to compete with the original, lengthened by two completely instrumental minutes that allow the melody to be explored in all of its potential; if you ever wondered how all these late Sixties / early Seventies Beach Boy classics would sound with proper build-ups and fade-outs, well, here is your answer: this alternate mix, created by engineer Steve Desper, makes the song twice the epic that it is. (In fact, Brian himself liked it so much that he eventually started working around the extended version in live performances).

 

The end result is, naturally, a thumbs up, and a big overall improvement compared to Rarities: longer, cleaner, better sequenced, and with three or four genuinely awesome discoveries. Unfor­tunately, it also confirmed that, even in the CD age, as well as an age in which interest in the Beach Boys as «forefathers of cool» was perking up, the archives would not yield Holy Grails. However, the fact that it was still possible to brush the dust off an occasional ʽSoulful Old Man Sunshineʼ still left ground for suspicions that the people at Capitol were playing out their time-honoured strategy — never let go of everything at the same time, or you might make people way too happy for them to remember to make you way too rich.

 

HAWTHORNE, CA (2001)

 

CD I: 1) Mike Love Introduces "Surfin'"; 2) 3701 West 119th Street, Hawthorne, California: The Surfin' Rehearsal; 3) Happy Birthday Four Freshmen; 4) Mike On Brian's Harmonies; 5) Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring (live rehearsal); 6) Surfin' USA (demo); 7) Surfin' USA (backing track); 8) Carl Wilson Radio Promo; 9) Shut Down (live); 10) Little Deuce Coupe (demo); 11) Murry Wilson Directs A Radio Promo; 12) Fun, Fun, Fun (backing track); 13) Brian's Message To "Rog" (take 22); 14) Dance, Dance, Dance (stereo remix); 15) Kiss Me Baby (a cappella mix); 16) Good To My Baby (backing track); 17) Chuck Britz On Brian In The Studio; 18) Salt Lake City (session highlights); 19) Salt Lake City (stereo remix); 20) Wish That He Could Stay (session excerpt); 21) And Your Dream Comes True (stereo remix); 22) Carol K Session Highlights; 23) The Little Girl I Once Knew (alternate version); 24) Alan And Dennis Introduce "Barbara Ann"; 25) Barbara Ann (session excerpt); 26) Barbara Ann (master take without party over­dubs); 27) Mike On The Everly Brothers; 28) Devoted To You (master take without party overdubs); 29) Dennis Thanks Everybody / In The Back Of My Mind; CD II: 1) Can't Wait Too Long (a cappella mix); 2) Dennis In­tro­du­ces Carl; 3) Good Vibrations (stereo track sections); 4) Good Vibrations (concert rehearsal); 5) Heroes And Villains (stereo single version); 6) Vegetables Promo (instrumental section); 7) Vegetables (stereo extended mix); 8) You're With Me Tonight; 9) Lonely Days; 10) Bruce On "Wild Honey"; 11) Let The Wind Blow (stereo remix); 12) I Went To Sleep (a cappella mix); 13) Time To Get Alone (alternate version); 14) Alan And Brian Talk About Dennis; 15) A Time To Live In Dreams; 16) Be With Me (backing track); 17) Dennis Introduces "Cotton Fields"; 18) Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song) (stereo single version); 19) Alan and Carl on "Break Away"; 20) Break Away (alternate version); 21) Add Some Music To Your Day (a cappella mix); 22) Dennis Wilson; 23) Forever (a cappella mix); 24) Sail On, Sailor (backing track); 25) Old Man River (vocal section); 26) Carl Wilson; 27) The Lord's Prayer (stereo remix); 28) Carl Wilson - Coda.

 

Do not be fooled by the endless tracklist on this ridiculous piece of crap – a tracklist long enough and descriptive enough to serve as its own review – and, by all means, skip this unless your com­pletism and/or religious adoration knows no limits. Inspired by the success of Endless Harmony, and also, perhaps, by that of the Beatles' Anthology, Capitol ushered out this 2-CD «anthology» of «previously unreleased material», in the finest tradition of screwing with the Beach Boys' stu­dio output, stretching all the way back to 1962.

 

Beyond the pretty packaging and the nice «historic» run of the recordings, generally arranged in chronological order from 1960 to 1972 (and thus, acknowledging that the Beach Boys as a histo­rically relevant entity virtually ended with «Brian's comeback»), most of the tracks here fall in five different categories, listed in the order of (slowly) decreasing stupidity:

 

(a) bits of retro-banter à la Beatles' Anthology I (usually consisting of one Beach Boy praising the spiritual gift of another Beach Boy, or, failing that, of the Everly Brothers): could be tolerable if these introductions actually led into anything worthwhile, but the compilers should have rather taken the hint from the Beatles' Anthology II, on which, not coincidentally, all the bits of banter had magically disappeared;

 

(b) instrumental «backing tracks» for original studio recordings, i. e. more Stack-o-Tracks fun for those who hadn't already had enough; including such really odd choices as Dennis' ʽBe With Meʼ and even ʽSurfin' USAʼ (what's to admire on that one? the stop-and-starts?);

 

(c) vocal «a cappella mixes» for other original studio recordings, probably for aspiring boy bands to have something to practice their craft to;

 

(d) even more of those «stereo remixes» that made our day on Endless Harmony, instead of do­ing it like a man and just remastering all the albums in stereo;

 

(e) work-in-progress versions. This is probably the most interesting of the five groups, but it is also fairly small and pretty much entirely oriented at historiographers and musicologists, e. g. the 1960 home recording of ʽSurfin' Safariʼ, with just one weak acoustic guitar track accompanying the already well-structured vocal harmonies; Brian (Brian?) teaching the horns to come one after the other on ʽSalt Lake Cityʼ; and the band having silly fun during the recording of ʽVegetablesʼ. The funniest moment is on ʽWith Me Tonightʼ, where, after the introductory harmonies, one of the Boys says, "hey, I've got an idea, let's sing this with a smile" — probably a much-needed in­vocation during the sessions for Wild Honey. But that's just one tiny bit, and you'd have to strain your attention so as not to miss it.

 

In the end, what remains is a couple of highlights from Party! stripped from their phony-raucous ambience (including ʽBarbara-Annʼ); a one-minute snippet of an abandoned melancholic ballad called ʽLonely Daysʼ; and a two-minute piano and organ demo of Dennis' ʽA Time To Live In Dreamsʼ from 1968, an era in which his individual songwriting style had only just begun to terra­form: pretty, but not as deep and moving as his genuinely accomplished compositions. Slim pick­ings to say the least, and certainly not at all worthy of any sort of hype.

 

Perhaps Capitol would have made a more understandable and respectable move, had it simply promoted The Beach Boys as «Unquestionably The American Band Of All Time», and, under that pretext, emptied its vaults completely, systematically, and thoroughly, e. g. by having a 4-CD boxset of The Wild Honey Sessions next to the already released Pet Sounds Sessions. That way, it would have been perfectly clear who the intended recipients of this stuff might be – professio­nal Beach-Boy-o-logists, who are numerous enough in the world to justify the commercial side of it – and everything would have made perfect sense. As it is, nothing here makes much sense at all; Beach Boys or no Beach Boys, this is a pathetic thumbs down of a release.

 

GOOD TIMIN': LIVE AT KNEBWORTH 1980 (2002)

 

1) Intro; 2) California Girls; 3) Sloop John B; 4) Darlin'; 5) School Days; 6) God Only Knows; 7) Be True To Your School; 8) Do It Again; 9) Little Deuce Coupe; 10) Cotton Fields/Heroes And Villains; 11) Happy Birthday Brian; 12) Keepin' The Summer Alive; 13) Lady Lynda; 14) Surfer Girl; 15) Help Me, Rhonda; 16) Rock And Roll Music; 17) I Get Around; 18) Surfin' USA; 19) You're So Beautiful; 20) Good Vibrations; 21) Barbara Ann; 22) Fun, Fun, Fun.

 

Twenty years after the fact, it was decided to finally let the Beach Boys' 1980 performance from Knebworth reach the hearts and minds of fans through official financial channels, and it was rele­ased both on CD and DVD, for the world to enjoy the middle-aged band in all of its heavily bear­ded glory. By all means, though, this is a historical performance, with all the original six mem­bers of the band for the last time standing together on a British stage. (They would do some more US shows, though, in between this one and Dennis' drowning three years later).

 

Of all the officially released Beach Boy live albums this one is predictably and expectedly the worst; but even at their worst, the Beach Boys never failed reminding the world what a spectacu­lar backlog they possessed, and what sort of a superhuman craft they had developed to deliver it live — even at a time when, deep down inside, even Mike Love must have already understood that the world was regarding them as little more than a cute nostalgic plaything. Not that you'd tell it from the audience's reactions — the cheering is quite heartfelt and spontaneous, to the ex­tent that everybody seems quite content to join in a happy birthday wish for Brian. But chalk it up to the magic of the songs, whose power had outlived the personal charm and sex appeal of the band. (Well, I'm pretty sure there were still some people falling for Mike's Hawaiian shirts even as late as 1980, but they probably do not read my reviews, so I'm quite safe insulting them).

 

By 1980, the band's setlist mainly consisted of evergreens from 1963-67, with a few «highlights» from their most recent albums thrown in, to try and lure the listeners into raising sales. Conside­ring, however, just how «terrific» recent efforts like ʽKeepin' The Summer Aliveʼ and even the much less annoying ʽLady Lyndaʼ sound when they are wedged in between ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ and ʽSurfer Girlʼ, I do not think they had all that much of a chance here (at least they do not get booed after three minutes of retro-moronic duh-duh-duh-ing on ʽSummerʼ, which is the best they could possibly expect).

 

But the evergreens are delivered well enough: even Dennis, with all his troubles and wreckings, seems to be in hot search of energy, and smashes and crashes all over the place just as he used to in the good old days, with a limited sense of rhythm, perhaps, but a sincere desire to pump as much energy into brother Brian's melodies as possible. Brother Brian himself mostly serves as a mascot here, sitting well-hidden behind a keyboard that he hardly really plays, and each time he takes a lead vocal part is considered so special that Mike feels it his chivalrous obligation to draw our attention — "Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Wilson!" Throw in the happy birthday chant, and a special thank-you-thank-you-Brian delivered once or twice for the «man who wrote all this beau­tiful music», and the feeling of a mummified deity installed in the temple is complete.

 

That said, there is no evidence to suggest that Brian himself did not feel positive emotions from what was going on — playing live, for him, was supposed to be part of the healing process, even if he was being used in the process. And the actual leads that he takes on ʽSloop John Bʼ and the bridge section of ʽSurfer Girlʼ are sung at his broken-voice-best; I think he actually flubs fewer notes during this show than Al Jardine, who has developed a strange penchant for straying away from the melody (most notable on ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ) — not quite in the Mick Jagger manner, of course, but still rather unpleasant for a band where tightness is always the key.

 

Curious odds-and-ends would involve a drastically and solemnly slowed down take on the «sym­phonic» introduction to ʽCalifornia Girlsʼ; the unearthing of ʽBe True To Your Schoolʼ sung with the good old teen verve — very strange-sounding, coming from a bunch of guys who should, by then, be teachers rather than students; a barroom-oriented rearrangement of ʽDo It Againʼ that does not work very well with the accent shifted from vocal harmonies to hard-rock overtones; ʽHe­roes And Villainsʼ squashed into a medley with ʽCotton Fieldsʼ, even if the only thing that joins them together is that ephemeral «Americana» feeling; and a Dennis solo spotlight with ʽYou Are So Beautifulʼ, a song he originally co-wrote with Billy Preston and then performed frequent­ly until his death — easily one of the most spontaneous and heartfelt bits of the show.

 

Other than that, Good Timin' is strictly for the collector — although it does its best to fill in a certain gap in Beach Boy history, since the «Brian is back» period was, until 2002, the only peri­od left unrepresented by an official live recording. And, from a certain point of view, it is now the best of all the «Brian is back» period albums, by definition: the only reason why the Beach Boys were able to carry on and preserve a shred of respect at that time were their live performances. A bit rusty over here, a bit wobbly out there, but still saving the day. Thumbs up.

 

THE SMILE SESSIONS (2011)

 

CD I: 1) Our Prayer; 2) Gee; 3) Heroes And Villains; 4) Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock); 5) I'm In Great Shape; 6) Barnyard; 7) My Only Sunshine; 8) Cabin Essence; 9) Wonderful; 10) Look (Song For Children); 11) Child Is Father Of The Man; 12) Surf's Up; 13) I Wanna Be Around / Workshop; 14) Vega-Tables; 15) Holidays; 16) Wind Chimes; 17) The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O'Leary's Cow); 18) Love To Say Dada; 19) Good Vibrations; 20) You're Welcome; 21) Heroes And Villains (stereo mix); 22) Heroes And Villains Sections (stereo mix); 23) Vega-Tables Demo; 24) He Gives Speeches; 25) Smile Backing Vocals Montage; 26) Surf's Up (1967 solo version); 27) Psycodelic Sounds: Brian Falls Into A Piano; 28) Capitol SMiLE Promo;

CD II: 1) Our Prayer "Dialog"; 2) Heroes And Villains: Part 1; 3) Heroes And Villains: Part 2; 4) Heroes And Villains: Children Were Raised; 5) Heroes And Villains: Prelude To Fade; 6) My Only Sunshine; 7) Cabin Essence; 8) Surf's Up: 1st Movement; 9) Surf's Up: Piano Demo; 10) Vega-Tables: Fade; 11) The Elements: Fire Session; 12) Cool, Cool Water (version 2); 13) Good Vibrations Session Highlights; 14) Psycodelic Sounds: Brian Falls Into A Microphone.

 

Sooner or later, this was bound to happen. After several years of «teasingly» slapping re-recorded and re-arranged shards and slices on incoherent LPs, somewhere in between Carl Wilson's soft rock ballads and Mike Love's pseudo-experimental oddities; after several decades of heavy reck­less bootlegging, filling a Beach Boy fan's life with sense and emptying a Capitol executive's po­cket of moolah; after Brian Wilson's brave and critically respected 2004 attempt to resurrect and mate­rialize the original concept in its entirety, unfortunately, marred by the hoarseness and seni­lity of his vocals, as well as the lack of original Beach Boy harmonies for pleasant authenticity; in brief, after more than forty years of this strange fantom life lived by the original SMiLe, here we are — finally presented, under an official seal of approval and in shiny optimistic packaging, with what we should have been presented with in 1967. Back when it actually mattered, that is.

 

We are supposed to understand, however, that the nineteen tracks on the first CD of this archival release are not the «real» SMiLe. The «real» SMiLe, throughout 1966 and early 1967, was well organised within Brian's head, but not within any particular set of tapes. Brian's 2004 version is actually closer to «reality», although it should also be obvious that, over thirty seven years, that «reality» could not help but become slightly altered. Still, do we really care all that much? At the bottom of it, both the 2004 version and this «reconstruction» are fine additions to our catalog, and neither of the two could be explicitly called «disjointed», «messy», or «lacking artistic vision». For all I know, these forty-eight minutes of music are SMiLe — that planned conceptual fol­low-up to Pet Sounds, that «teenage symphony to God» that Brian had announced before falling victim to his own unbridled ambitiousness and inability to adapt it to the actual surroundings. Smiley Smile, in comparison, was not SMiLe — not even close. This one, regardless of any de­ficiencies that Beach Boy historians and Brian Wilson's spiritual twins may detect, could just as well be SMiLe. Why the hell not?

 

From a «basic acquaintance» point of view, even if you have never heard any bootlegs and are a strictly «official release» kind of person, there will not be any major new-song surprises here if you already know Smiley Smile, the Beach Boys' entire catalog of 1967-1971, the anthological archive releases, and, of course, Brian's 2004 reconstruction. What matters is the coherence of it all: from the very fact that yes, a reconstruction from the original tapes is possible, to the joy of discovering the original, fully inspired recordings, and multiplied by the lovingly executed remas­tering — each single vocal part here, in particular, sounds clearer, cleaner, closer to home than could ever be achieved in the old days. (One way to relive your Sixties experience anew).

 

So — always the tempting question — could the album, as it is now presented, be the supposed equivalent of Sgt. Pepper? Clearly, it would have been less accessible. There is simply too much going on here: with most of the songs consisting of several parts, plus additional instrumental links tying them together, the kaleidoscopic ambitiousness would have been too much for most people — at times, it seems as if Brian were competing not so much with Lennon/McCartney as he was with Frank Zappa (Absolutely Free is comparable in terms of the sheer number of unpre­dictable leaps and twists, even if it leans far closer towards the avantgarde side of things and, thus, could not hope for commercial success at all). Sgt. Pepper cleverly knew where to stop; SMiLe knows no limits, which is why it will always be adored much more by eccentric «poetic souls» and relentless musical omnivores than «normal people».

 

On the other hand, SMiLe does correct what I have always thought of as the biggest mistake of Pet Sounds — it is much more dynamic, with the melancholic, introspective mood, slow tempos, and gentle musical flow replaced by head-spinning psychedelia, turbulence, and jarring stops-and-starts a-plenty. It is not «rock» at all (the electric guitar barely registers at all as an instru­ment among all the carnivalesque trappings), but it is energetic for much of its duration, and, some­times, even becomes aggressive (ʽMrs. O'Leary's Cowʼ, Brian's musical equivalent of a raging fire destroying everything in its path). Ever yawned at the languid­ness of Pet Sounds? Once or twice, at least? SMiLe gives you no time for yawning: open your mouth and something attention-drawing will happen before you close it.

 

But it is no coincidence that ʽGood Vibrationsʼ became the only SMiLe song to enter each and every household — it is the Beach Boys' equivalent of ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ: behind all of its fabulous complexity lies a very simple, very basic, and very easily understandable message. Mu­sically, it belongs fully to Brian's «mature» period, but spirit-wise, it is like a perfect link between the early fun-in-the-sun days and the later transition into the realm of strangeness and charm. Be­yond ʽGood Vibrationsʼ lies the strange and charming, too strange and charming, perhaps, for the average musical listener to swallow. Personally, I think that the people at large would not be rea­dy for SMiLe in 1967, just as they are not all that ready for it now.

 

Which should not prevent critics, fans, and musical omnivores, of course, from holding their ground — SMiLe is, indeed, one of the finest achievements of pop music in the XXth century, and now we have the near-perfect package to prove it without having to do all that extra work for ourselves. In the long run, it is a more rewarding listening experience than Sgt. Pepper: the pay­off is smaller at first, with all the different links and overdubs and stops and starts and reprises and modulations and special effects dazzling and confusing the listener, but larger on subsequent listens, when all the flourishes start sinking in and you start to realize how well they all belong to­gether. It does not have its own ʽDay In The Lifeʼ — a sort of ultimate, mind-blowing, cathartic peak with a cleverly engineered mix of comic and tragic overtones that forces you to realize how small you are in relation to the universe — although the magnificent ʽSurf's Upʼ comes close, its solemnly mannered baroque flow, ungrammatical lyrics (I still think that Van Dyke Parks was one of the weakest links in the chain), and intentional coldness still stir up a very different kind of emotions. But apart from that, it still reflects a grand vision, dressed up in some of the most in­ventive clothes ever designed by a pop musician.

 

Regarding the package, I have only heard the «standard» 2-CD version, which includes about twenty extra tracks from the sessions, all of which are well worth listening to — SMiLe was such a fascinating project that even the demos and interrupted studio takes are exciting on their own, as you watch these songs unfurl before your eyes. Even the eight minute-long «montage» of acca­pella backing vocals for the project is jaw-dropping — these are, after all, some of the most un­usual and non-trivial harmonies the band had ever designed, and some of them do get lost in the background when you are listening to the completed takes. Heck, even the «silly bits» — such as the little staged comic-absurdist scene in which ʽBrian Falls Into A Pianoʼ are charmingly hila­rious this time. Why couldn't they think of something like that in the times of ʽBull Session With Big Daddyʼ?...

 

There is, however, an enlarged 5-CD boxset version as well, with a whole disc given over to the story of the development of ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ and another one given over to ʽGood Vibra­tionsʼ. For me, this is technical overkill, but I am fairly sure all of that is worth listening to at least once — if only to understand how much time, work, energy, and spirit had been invested in these creations. If you can afford the big boxset, by all means, do so: even a self-proclaimed ha­ter of SMiLe could be objectively convinced, I believe, that this is one of the few albums that does merit a whole boxset of such length all to itself. Thumbs up to all of the versions out there — and especially to the amazing fact that, now that the enigma has finally disclosed itself as fully as possible, it has not become the tiniest bit less enigmatic than it was before.

THE BEATLES

PLEASE PLEASE ME (1963)

 

1) I Saw Her Standing There; 2) Misery; 3) Anna (Go To Him); 4) Chains; 5) Boys; 6) Ask Me Why; 7) Please Please Me; 8) Love Me Do; 9) P.S. I Love You; 10) Baby It's You; 11) Do You Want To Know A Secret; 12) A Taste Of Honey; 13) There's A Place; 14) Twist And Shout.

 

We deserve a little bit of a preface here. This is, after all, the third time that I am writing about the same Beatles albums — the first one was from a generally fanboyish perspective, poorly wor­ded and quite uninformative, and the second one was written in a text-generating frenzy that pro­bably went over the top. Third time, hopefully, be the charm, or else it just was not meant to be.

 

It is amusing to look back on the old days — not even the early reviewing days, but the good old Iron Curtain days when music was scarce to come by, and each album received approximately the same span of attention that is today reserved to a large shelf crammed with CDs — and realize how the Beatles could be «everything and more» to somebody who had so little context to place them into. Many people knew the Beatles, but not their sources and influences — not Motown, not a lot of early rock'n'roll (Elvis, perhaps, but Buddy Holly? Carl Perkins?), certainly not skiffle or the late 1950s / early 1960s British pop music scene. Of their contemporaries, with whom they constantly traded ideas back and forth, also only select figures were known to the average Soviet listener — and, I dare say, many of the average non-Soviet listeners as well. No surprise, then, that many of the musically knowledgeable people like to think of — or, at least, talk of — the Beatles as phantom-like figureheads, a band whose achievements are vastly overrated just beca­use they happened to market stuff better than the people who actually invented it.

 

It would seem, then, that as we pick up more and more «context», the Beatles are more and more probable to turn into «just another band», a good one, maybe a great one, but hardly the ultimate benchmark for every musical adventure of the 1960s. Who would dare judge Frank Zappa by ap­plying the same criteria as one's mind sets out for the Beatles? Or The Grateful Dead? Or Carlos Santana? Surely the idea is laughable.

 

And yet... every time I have the occasion to put on a Beatles record (which I do not actually need to put on — after all these years, each single note on each single Beatles record is inextri­cably ingrai­n­ed in my head),  I cannot help wondering how different it sounds. If the primary goal of music, after all, is to incite vibration in our emotional nerves, then different artists, throughout the history of music, have displayed various levels of skill in inciting this vibration — and the diffe­rence of the Beatles is that, in almost everything they did, no matter how «derivative», «imita­tive», or «tentative» it was, they seemed to work as if not making these nerves ring out at top vo­lume was not even an option. Where others would string together «nice-sounding» or «catchy» chords, the Beatles consistently — and I stress, consistently — strung together chord sequences that went somewhere goddamn deeper than they were supposed to. (The infamous discovery of «Aeolian cadences» by William Mann in Lennon's early ditty ʽNot A Second Timeʼ may sound funny, but there is a grain of seriousness beyond each such bit of fun: whatever there was, it must have hit The Times' resident musicologist real hard — unless, of course, he was bribed by Parlophone executives or Brian Epstein in person).

 

Let us take Please Please Me as our first test case. There can hardly be any disagreements here — it is literally the «weakest» Beatles album, if only because it was recorded in such a rush: 9 hours and 45 minutes of studio time altogether, from a young band with very little studio expe­rience. Already guided by George Martin as the wise studio guru, for sure, but, by February 1963, the band and their producer had not yet even gotten to know each other all that well. The band's original compositions were still few and far between: John Lennon still struggling as a songwriter, Paul McCartney feeling a little bit more self-confident, but stuck hands and feet in a simplistic teenage mindset, George Harrison not even beginning to look up to his «elders», and then there's always Ringo — or, rather, there was beginning to always be Ringo, having quite freshly repla­ced Pete Best and not yet «proven» as an integral part of the band.

 

In short, there is no need to prove to anyone that Please Please Me represents the tender infancy of the Beatles. For most bands, such «tender infancy» is, at best, giggly-cute, at worst, confusing and ugly, but in both cases, normally, there is no good reason to listen to this music for a second time other than research purposes. But Please Please Me still stands up — despite all the flaws, the silliness, the rampant naïveness, and ʽAsk Me Whyʼ, which may be the worst Beatles original ever composed (and is definitely the worst original Beatles song composed by John Lennon).

 

It all begins with ʽLove Me Doʼ. "Love, love me do / You know I love you". When the Ramones wrote lyrics like that twelve years later, they were taken as smart, ironic, streetwise minimalism. When the Beatles wrote them, they were dead serious, or, rather, they did not give a damn — the words never mattered anyway, except for the stipulated convention that it had to be something about «love». As an «artistic statement», ʽLove Me Doʼ has even fewer credentials than a Sesame Street composition (the latter ones have educational value at least). Big question, then: why does it stick so sorely in the head, much more so than the average Dave Clark Five or Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas song? Melodically, it has very little going for it other than the main harmonica part, and the repetitive vocal melody that partially replicates it.

 

But there is this little matter of the Beatle-specific hook: the resolution of that melody during the extended "so plea-ee-ee-eeese..." bit — I'd bet my head on it that a hypothetical Billy J. Kramer would have been able to come up with everything in this melody but that particular resolution, which so admirably breaks up the monotonousness of the main part of the verse. Simply put, we start out «simple, stupid», then add a tense «longing» effect with the "please", then bring it all to a natural conclusion with an accappella moment of half-comic «spookiness». It might seem stu­pid, but there is a touch of suspense, maybe even some primitive mystique, in the song — which makes it stand out among dozens of technically similar compositions of 1962, and explains its ra­pid chart success (No. 17 on the UK charts at the time), achieved, by the way, without any serious marketing / promotional campaign.

 

There is no such element of mystique in the follow-up single, ʽPlease Please Meʼ, which, instead, concentrates on overwhelming joy, conveying it with as much effect as a standard four-piece band in 1963 could be capable of. Lennon's harmonica is triumphant rather than menacing this time, the joint vocal harmonies sound as if George Martin was pushing them in a «Beethoven for teens» direction, and, again, the Beatle-specific hook: the "come on come on..." crescendo that nobody else could think of delivering at the time. The Dave Clark Five would later shamelessly steal that technique for ʽAny Way You Want Itʼ — but even if they had enough talent to more or less convincingly replicate the mood, they still did not come up with the better song.

 

It is interesting that, for all of the band's Hamburg- and Cavern Club-acquired reputation as rough and tough onstage performers of genuine rock'n'roll, Please Please Me features only one genuine self-penned «rocker». I have always thought that, perhaps, had the Beatles started their recording career one or two years later, when mainstream fears towards «aggressive music» had already slightly diminished, they may not have had to endure the reputation of «softies» compared to the Stones' «tough guys» image; but then, on the other hand, had they started out later, they would not be so much in the lead — plus, there is no use in all these ifs and buts.

 

In any case — what a rocker. Paul's "one, two, three, FOUR!" countdown that opens the song was specially glued on to the final master tape from another take — a genius decision, giving the al­bum an energetic blast-off start, again, sounding like nothing before it. The idea behind the LP was to give the audiences a slight approximation of a Beatles live show; clearly, this was incom­patible with George Martin's perennial quest for sonic perfection, but the few «live» elements that they did incorporate still gave the record a huge advantage. To me, the main hero of ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ, however, is the other George: it is his lead work, both in between the verse lines and on the solo, that gives the song its genuine tough edge. The vocals, harmonies, lyrics are all «teen fluff», but George's echo-laden licks, some of which seem to be imitating 1950s guitar gods such as Scottie Moore, are the true grit of the song. The transition into the instrumental section is one of the ass-kickiest moments in Beatle history.

 

Of the other originals, I have always thought of ʽMiseryʼ as tremendously underrated — not only does it have a fabulously catchy melody, but there is something deeply disturbing as well about how the bitter-tragic lyrics of the song clash with its overall merry mood: how is it possible to sing lines like "without her I will be in misery" when the singer is clearly having a hard time pre­venting himself from toppling over in spasms of laughter? (The truly disturbing realization about it is that the song might easily have reflected John's genuine feelings about his affairs). The rest is fluff, ranging from passable (ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ — Paul in his songwriting infancy stage) to quite awkward (the already mentioned ʽAsk Me Whyʼ: the most fake song John ever wrote, trying to convey an atmosphere of care and tenderness of which he quite obviously knew nothing at the time — the whole song is a mess of poorly strung together clichés that are really grating).

 

ʽThe­re's A Placeʼ is frequently found in comparisons with the Beach Boys' ʽIn My Roomʼ due to both of them exploring the topic of «loneliness» in the lyrics, but if we dig from there, there is no question that the Brian Wilson song is the better of the two — its slow, melancholic musical ba­cking fully matches the word, whereas the Lennon song is upbeat and optimistic (but not devoid of subtlety: its harmonica blasts are notably sterner and sadder than the ones on ʽPlease Please Meʼ). Still, the vocal modulations are beyond reproach.

 

Of the six covers, Arthur Alexander's ʽAnnaʼ is a fantastic achievement — on the instrumental plane, the band extracts and amplifies its main melodic hook in the form of a finely shaped, mys­teriously resonating guitar riff; and in the vocal department, John finds a good way to let go of the self-restraining «mannerisms» of traditional black R'n'B and actually convey a believable tragic atmosphere in the bridge section. Goffin and King's ʽChainsʼ is given to George, who does a fine job of transposing his natural slight tongue-tiedness onto the song's message of love confusion; and the Shirelles' ʽBaby It's Youʼ, like so many other songs the Beatles did, simply converts the original's excessive «roundedness» into sharper angles.

 

It is useless to speculate on whether Please Please Me already «sows the seeds» of the grand suc­cesses to come. The Beatles certainly do not come across as «enthusiastic revolutionaries» when you listen to Paul telling us how he'll be coming home again to you love, or even when John is screaming his head off throughout ʽTwist And Shoutʼ, trying to beat the Isley Brothers at their own game (and I think he did — except, of course, the Isley Brothers probably did not need to go home and nurse their voices with cough drops after the recording session). But it also never real­ly seems as if they «just» went into the studio to record some songs, knock off an LP and be done with it. All of the little things I have mentioned show ambition, and lots of it: a strong desire, right from the start, to be the very best at what they are doing, otherwise there's no point in doing it in the first place. And there is a clear understanding of the long-playing record as the proper medium to do it — a realization that it is a bit humiliating when your fourteen song-long col­lec­tion consists of two well-written hit singles surrounded by a sea of useless filler.

 

Which is why Please Please Me, after all these years, holds together quite fine as an album, un­like 99% of pop-oriented LPs from 1963. (Too bad for the Wilson brothers, who did not start pro­perly understanding the LP's potential until All Summer Long). It is slight, occasionally clumsy, lyrically trivial, not devoid of very strange decisions (such as saddling Ringo with ʽBoysʼ, a tune that was perfectly fine when the Shirelles did it, but predictably earned him a gay image with cer­tain audiences), yet it is unmistakably Beatles, and everything that is unmistakably Beatles deser­ves a thumbs up without any need for meditation on the subject. And anyone who tries to slight it too much should just try to remember the names of at least ten other pop LPs from 1963 with­out calling on the Internet for help. Might be a chore even for some of those who had already struck their teens back in the day.

 

WITH THE BEATLES (1963)

 

1) It Won't Be Long; 2) All I've Got To Do; 3) All My Loving; 4) Don't Bother Me; 5) Little Child; 6) Till There Was You; 7) Please Mister Postman; 8) Roll Over Beethoven; 9) Hold Me Tight; 10) You Really Got A Hold On Me; 11) I Wanna Be Your Man; 12) Devil In Her Heart; 13) Not A Second Time; 14) Money (That's What I Want).

 

By the time With The Beatles came out in late 1963, the Beatles were already superheroes all over Europe, with the «super-» bit neatly provided by the success of ʽShe Loves Youʼ. But at this point, they did not yet need to «prove» anything — what they did was still seen simply as pop music, and there was no conscious, openly perceivable drive on their part to «push boundaries» or whatever. They were simply writing more songs the way they felt these songs, and that is what is so exciting about those early records, one hundred percent pure and free of any intellectual pre­tense: natural innocent genius, not at all burdened with reasoning and calculation. (Well, they we­re happy enough to have George Martin do the calculations for them).

 

Reviews of the album often (almost always, in fact) start with expressing admiration for the front sleeve. Ooh, black and white. Wow, standing in the shadows. Dark! Disturbing! What a far cry from the silly smiling faces on Please Please Me. Progressive and intelligent. Look at what Ger­ry and the Pacemakers, or Freddie and The Dreamers were putting on their album covers at the time. No comparison whatsoever.

 

Frankly, I am not all that sure that the album cover (although it does look cool) is really such a tremendous achievement. What is much more interesting is that With The Beatles manages to sound fairly «dark» without any actual help from the blackness of the album sleeve. Well, maybe not «dark» as such, if by «darkness» we mean Jim Morrison or Led Zeppelin. But I have always felt that there was a very significant line separating With The Beatles from Please Please Me, per­haps even one of the most significant lines in Beatle history (and Beatle history knew plenty of lines). It is the line that separates «lightweight» from «heavyweight»; and it is no coincidence that it was only With The Beatles that the first «serious» musical critics started suspecting there might be something of use for them in that air.

 

One thing that need not confuse us are the lyrics. At this point, neither John nor Paul (nor George, who makes his songwriting debut on here) showed any care for the words; the epitome of «wordy cleverness» to them was finding a line like "it won't be long 'til I belong to you", and the rest ge­nerally just rearranges all the love song clichés extracted from God knows where. (That's what you get for sticking to crude rock'n'roll values and ignoring The Songbook — at least the Tin Pan Alley people knew their English). But I do not think that, before Bob Dylan got the guys interes­ted in the magic powers of language, either John or Paul invested a lot of time and work into the words, or had any high thoughts of those words. Later on, John would make it a personal hobby to look upon the Beatles' legacy with a critical laser-eye, and demolish the stupidity of the lyrics in particular (Paul's, preferably, but his own were not exempt from self-criticism either). But in 1963, none of them were teenagers any more, and they certainly understood how silly it all soun­ded to the average «grown-up» person, and they did not give a damn about it.

 

And neither should we. The lyrics just followed the conventions of the times, which certainly does not apply to the music. Take ʽIt Won't Be Longʼ, for instance. On the surface, it is just an upbeat tune about... well, find the quote in the previous paragraph. But, for some reason, I have never thought of that song as «happy». The main melody rather shows a clear Shadows influence, and Shadows mostly wrote «shadowy» music — that British variant of surf-rock with a spy mo­vie atmosphere. Now there is no spy movie atmosphere in ʽIt Won't Be Longʼ, but its meat and bones are tough, and its colors disturbingly grayish.

 

And then there are the vocals. Any other vo­calist would probably sing the lines "Since you left me, I'm so alone, now you're coming, you're coming on home" with all the proper «tenderness» and «sympathy» that they require. Not John, who never in his life stooped to simulating emotions on his songs. But instead of just being all out wooden about it, he sings it, well, probably in the same way he'd be greeting his wife Cynthia after a hard day's night: pretending to care, but in rea­lity not giving much of a damn. As a result, both ʽIt Won't Be Longʼ and the immediate followup, ʽAll I've Got To Doʼ, have a surprisingly emotionally hollow sound — but it still works. (A good way to understand this would be to play ʽAll I've Got To Doʼ back-to-back with one of those Yoko-period Lennon ballads on which he really cared, like ʽJuliaʼ).

 

So genuine sugary sentimentality is left in the care of Paul, right? Not quite. It certainly rears its head on the record's only «sappy» number, a cover of ʽTill There Was Youʼ from The Music Man, but nowhere else. Even there, the sentimentality is tempered with class: Paul learned the tune from Peggy Lee, who already performed it in a poppier, more rhythmic, slightly Latinized ar­ran­ge­ment when compared to the orchestral sludge of the original — and still the Beatles al­most completely reinvented the music, coming up with a complex melody played on twin nylon-stringed acoustic guitars (and featuring one of George's first brilliant solos).

 

But a song like ʽAll My Lovingʼ is anything but sentimental; or, rather, sentimentality is merely one of its side effects rather than the main attraction. It started out as a country-western tune, ac­tually (traces of that history can still be found in George's Nashville-style solo), but ended up becoming a fast pop-rocker; and any lesser band would have simply settled for placing the em­pha­sis on the catchy vocal melody, but what really pushes ʽAll My Lovingʼ over the threshold is the rhythm guitar work from John: the rapidly strummed triplets that drive the verses are techni­cally unnecessary, but, being there, they give the illusion that the song is played thrice as fast as it would be otherwise, and shift the focus away from Paul's vocalization, closer to what almost looks like a bit of subconscious paranoia.

 

Finally, in comes George with his first original offering, and while ʽDon't Bother Meʼ is simply a preliminary stage in his songwriting maturation, it is decidedly dark, not to mention how much the title really reflects George's persona: "please go away, leave me alone, don't bother me", I be­lieve, should have eventually been etched on his tombstone. A big hooray to whoever had the idea to double-track the vocals: the trick magically transformed the stuttering, insecure delivery on ʽChainsʼ and ʽDo You Want To Know A Secretʼ into a thick, threatening rumble-grumble. One step further in that direction — no more teen pussy for George! (Or, rather, he'd have to start borrowing from the special Mick Jagger/Keith Richards brand).

 

Part of why With The Beatles has this «darker» aura around it lies in it being almost totally do­minated by John, which was not the case on Please Please Me: he is the main composer and/or «spiritual presence» on more than half of the songs, whereas Paul bears primary responsibility for only three of the tracks — and the third one, which I still have not mentioned, is ʽHold Me Tightʼ which I have always perceived as one of his weakest ever tunes, if only because the vocal melo­dy resolution (the "it's you — you, you, you-ooo-ooo" bit) comes across as exceedingly silly.

 

John, on the other hand, further extends his reputation by throwing in three excellent interpreta­tions of Motown material, turning the Marvelettes' cutesy-flimsy ʽPlease Mister Postmanʼ into a rip-roaring personal tragedy, the Miracles' soulful ʽYou Really Got A Hold On Meʼ into the same tongue-in-cheek, slightly sarcastic stab as ʽIt Won't Be Longʼ, and delivering Barrett Strong's ʽMoneyʼ with enough evil glee to make us all believe that that is what he wants, indeed — not that hard to do once he has already established his lack of a proper tender heart on the previous tracks. Real nasty guy, that Lennon, without any attempts to hide it.

 

From a sheerly musical point of view, it would take too much time to list all the new tricks that the band introduces here (besides, it has all been written about a million times already), so I will just mention one obvious thing — the complexity and creativity of vocal harmonies on With The Beatles completely dwarfs Please Please Me. That this is going to be a seriously voice-oriented record is obvious from the very start: in the place of the energetic, but not particularly surprising "one two three four" of ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ we have the multi-flanked assault of "it won't be long yeah – YEAH – yeah – YEAH" which, to the best of my knowledge, comes from no­where at all. There is no «beauty» as such in these harmonies that get ever more trickier as the album progresses (no comparison with the Beach Boys, who had a strictly Heaven-oriented ap­proach), but there is a wonderful dynamics, the major goal of which is your undivided attention.

 

In effect, With The Beatles might be said to introduce the unspoken motto of «leave no spot un­filled». Not only is there supposed to be no filler, the idea is that there should be no «filler within non-filler», that is, the songs are not supposed to have any wasted moments. Gaps between verse lines? Fill them in with counterpoint backing vocals. Instrumental passages? Make them either reproduce the verse melody or construct an economic solo that makes perfect sense and is easily memorable, rather than merely respects the convention that there be an obligatory instrumental passage. And so on.

 

It does not always work. The curse of pop repetitiveness strikes hard on the overlong chorus to ʽHold Me Tightʼ, and even harder on ʽI Wanna Be Your Manʼ, a song that John and Paul origi­nally wrote for The Rolling Stones, and, honestly, I think they should have left it at that: the Sto­nes arranged and performed it as an eerie sexual menace, with a supertight, take-no-prisoners at­titude, next to which The Beatles' comparatively «relaxed» performance and, especially, Ringo's near-comical vocals (as opposed to Jagger's evil gloating!) lose hands down. (It did give Ringo a more assured and natural live solo spot than ʽBoysʼ, though). Personally, I have never been a big fan of John's ʽLittle Childʼ, either, a somewhat sub-par R&B composition, only lifted out of me­diocrity by an over-pumped tour-de-force on harmonica, which John must have been trying to literally «blow to bits» during the session — even Sonny Boy Williamson II could have appreci­ated that.

 

But none of this really matters, because the major goal of With The Beatles was to stabilize the band's position as accomplished artists, and that goal is clearly fulfilled. In addition, the record just might feature the best ever balance in Beatle history between covers and originals: the covers, although ranging from Motown to Chuck Berry to musicals, are all strong, inventively rear­ranged, and sit fairly well next to the originals. (On Beatles For Sale, the band would be falling back on covers for lack of free time to come up with more originals rather than out of free will, and that had its negative effect on the final results). Hence, a very special thumbs up here: With The Bea­tles often gets a little bit overlooked next to the «great big breakthrough» of A Hard Day's Night and its all-original cast, but in the story of the Beatles' evolution it may actually have play­ed a much more important role.

 

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT (1964)

 

1) A Hard Day's Night; 2) I Should Have Known Better; 3) If I Fell; 4) I'm Happy Just To Dance With You; 5) And I Love Her; 6) Tell Me Why; 7) Can't Buy Me Love; 8) Any Time At All; 9) I'll Cry Instead; 10) Things We Said To­day; 11) When I Get Home; 12) You Can't Do That; 13) I'll Be Back.

 

Time has solidified the status of A Hard's Day Night as the one «early Beatles» album you have to get if you are only going to get one (although what sort of a silly person would settle for only one early Beatles album?) — if only for the objective reason that this is the only «early Beatles» album that consists entirely of originals; the next one like that would only be Rubber Soul, whe­re the band was already stepping into «maturity».

 

It is true that, in the UK at least, A Hard Day's Night sort of turned the whole idea of a «sound­track» on its head. In the States, which the Beatles had only just finished conquering in early '64, with the success of ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ, it was released as a «proper» soundtrack — seven songs on Side A and a bunch of movie-related instrumental versions of Side B (including, by the way, a very stylish, Duane Eddy-style, reworking of ʽThis Boyʼ as ʽRingo's Themeʼ — the one that is played in the movie as Ringo takes his solitary strolls upon «leaving» the band). But at home, the second side was completely unrelated to the first: six more songs, all of them originals, that had nothing to do with the movie. Yet the album was still, in some way, a «soundtrack», provoking the layman into thinking that, from now on, every recording with the Beatles name on it would be worth buying, even a collection of toothpaste commercials.

 

As for artistic growth, I would think that the strength of A Hard Day's Night lies in the details. At this point, «experimentation» was not yet an integral part of the Beatles' career: they did try out new ideas and approaches, but nobody seemed obsessed with them. John and Paul were burs­ting with melodies, not «concepts», and the only global thing that A Hard Day's Night proves us is that they do not really need those covers any more.

 

For one thing, up until now, the Beatles had a hard time coming up with original gritty rockers: other than ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ and, to a lesser extent, ʽShe Loves Youʼ (which was rather just «loud» than truly «rocking»), they preferred to rock out on their cover versions (ʽTwist And Shoutʼ, ʽRoll Over Beethovenʼ, ʽMoneyʼ etc.). Now, with ʽCan't Buy Me Loveʼ they show that they can easily create a fast, kick-ass pop-rocker along with the best of them; and with ʽYou Can't Do Thatʼ, show that they can rock out in a mean, nasty, mid-tempo manner, holding their own on the same field with contemporary R'n'B-ers and blues-rockers (I have always thought that ʽYou Can't Do Thatʼ was John intentionally pulling a Mick).

 

On the other side of the field, ʽAnd I Love Herʼ establishes Paul as an independent, self-confident sweet balladeer for his generation — placed at approximately the same strategic juncture on the LP as ʽTill There Was Youʼ was on the previous album, and showing that the band no longer requires the services of Meredith Willson to feed its fans with wonderful roses and sweet, frag­rant meadows. Granted, Paul still cannot write a decent lyric to save his life, but does he need to? There is a certain minimalistic charm, this time around, in "I give her all my love / That's all I do / And if you saw my love / You'd love her too" that sits perfectly at home with the equally mini­malistic riff that drives the song. And there is a bit of self-confident tease at the end of the song as that minimalistic riff is «driven home» with four more bars. «Yes, I am so simple and silly, but you will never forget this coda anyway».

 

That said, at this time John is still the dominant presence in the band. Most songs were still writ­ten collectively, to be sure, yet the «Paul stamp» is strongly felt only on ʽAnd I Love Herʼ, ʽCan't Buy Me Loveʼ, and ʽThings We Said Todayʼ — a «miserable» three out of thirteen! (This might actually explain some of the exquisite fan worship towards the album). And by now, his song­wri­ting had reached that level of perfection from which it would never fall back again (except when he was derailed by avantgarde temptations or politics).

 

Of course, not all of his songs here are equally de­serving. On Side B, the unfortunate ʽWhen I Get Homeʼ frequently gets the flack for being somewhat cruder and less coherent in its melody than the rest (although the chief culprit is usually the lyrics: word-wise, it is like the little imbecile bro­ther of ʽA Hard Day's Nightʼ, and the line "I'm gonna love you till the cows come home", for some reason, has always irritated me). ʽI'll Cry Insteadʼ suffers notably from the lack of a guitar solo: it is quite a respectable little pseudo-rockabilly number as such, but way too repetitive as a result. Most importantly, they just don't look too good against the background of everything else.

 

Although John is overrepresented on the album and Paul is underrepresented, now that I think of it, the starkest contrast on the record is between the best songs of each one of them — and that contrast, funny enough, is just the opposite of the public's general opinion on their artistic and personal natures, because it is John who is primarily responsible for the brightest song on the al­bum and Paul who is behind the creation of the darkest one. Coincidence? Or just one of those «stereotypes suck» kind of moments?..

 

The «brightest» song is, of course, ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ. It is utterly artificial, and yet it is probably the most successful attempt they ever made at capturing that «first love feeling» mood that made them into such invincible teenage deities. Three ingredients combine to make it a into such a mind-blower: John's massive harmonica runs, overwhelming all the other instruments for miles around; George's minimalistic, but brilliant solo that, once again, makes the right choice in mimicking John's already perfect vocal melody rather than trying futilely to invent something different; and the singing, of course — all the prolonged notes that bookmark the verses from both ends, all the "whoah-whoahs", all the sexy "oh-oh"s and dips into falsetto in the bridge sec­tion, so many individual snares within so short a track. And no croony sentimentality in sight. This is yer Good Youth incarnate; people unable to feel pure joy at the sound of this song are, at best, «stuck-up», and, at worst... oh, never mind.

 

The «darkest» song is, of course, ʽThings We Said Todayʼ. The lyrics are actually stronger here than on ʽAnd I Love Youʼ, but whether they really fit the doom and gloom of the tune is questio­nable. There is a little bit of irony in the words, but, overall, the theme of separation is much bet­ter indicated by the music: although the tempo is relatively fast and the rhythm is quite toe-tap-provoking, the minor mode of the song provokes an entirely different reaction. And as the whole thing eventually fades away on the same melody that opened it, it becomes the first in a relatively short line of «wholesale tragic» Beatle songs.

 

Actually, I would say that in general, there is a certain drift in A Hard Day's Night from Side A to Side B: the movie-related songs are, perhaps predictably, lighter, brighter, and fluffier, where­as, as we get to the second side, the mood darkens and solidifies a bit. John allows himself to be a nas­ty jealous guy on ʽYou Can't Do Thatʼ, Paul goes all melancholic on ʽThings You Said Todayʼ, and even the opening drum crack on ʽAnytime At Allʼ would probably seem a bit out of place, had they wanted to put that song in the movie as well. Then it all ends with ʽI'll Be Backʼ, a song that vies with ʽThingsʼ for the title of «saddest»  — only barely losing out because the vocals do not quite manage to show that ominous tingle of "you say you will love me...".

 

It's just these little things, really, that elevate Hard Day's Night above the general «good pop al­bum» status. It may be all about trivial sentiments dressed in simple musical forms, but never in simple musical clichés. The slamming chord that opens the title track; the falsetto peaks on ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ; the deletion of the verse/chorus opposition on ʽIf I Fellʼ; and so on and on and on, from the «light» of Side A to the relative «dark» of Side B.

 

There is nothing genu­inely «revolutionary» about Hard Day's Night, because the songwriting and the artistic personae of John and Paul had already become fully formed on With The Beatles. There is simply a sense of some sort of completeness: this is the ultimate «light-pop» experience of its epoch, and an experience that could not even theoretically be reproduced once pop-rock had gotten out of its infancy stage. It is, at the same time, utterly naïve / formulaic and hunting for genius musical decisions. Genius musical decisions would, of course, be quite plentiful in years to come, but the «virginity» would be lost forever. Look at all the «twee-pop» bands of today — many of them are quite fine, but nobody in his right mind strives to close up that hymen, under­standing well enough that it is impossible. Today, naïveness and innocence in attitude is reserved for the likes of Taylor Swift — mainstream puppets that are almost always the laughing stock of «advanced» music listeners. The miracle of Hard Day's Night is in that, even today, «advanced» music listeners may easily listen to it without laughing, and join me in my thumbs up.

 

P.S. A few words about the movie are probably in order as well. Time has been a little less kind to the movie than the accompanying album, I think. In 1964, it was seen as an even more colossal breakthrough: Richard Lester showed the world that a «pop artist movie» could actually be seen as an individual work of art, not just a dumb vehicle for the current teen idol to show off his cha­risma. That alone was a staggering discovery, rendering insignificant the fact that most of the Beatles could barely act (fortunately, Lester had the good sense not to ask them to act, so most of the time they were just being themselves — good news for John, worse for the rest of them), or that most of the jokes, puns, and gags, now that you look at them with a fresh eye, aren't really all that funny. (One exception is the cut-in scene between George and the advertising executive — some truly wicked dialog out there, as relevant for us today as it was fifty years ago, if not more so). Nevertheless, even if the movie is not as hot on its own as it is sometimes proclaimed to be, it is still one of the most fascinating — and, in a way, «authentic» — documents of its era. For best effect, watch it on a double bill with Viva Las Vegas.

 

BEATLES FOR SALE (1964)

 

1) No Reply; 2) I'm A Loser; 3) Baby's In Black; 4) Rock And Roll Music; 5) I'll Follow The Sun; 6) Mr. Moonlight; 7) Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey; 8) Eight Days A Week; 9) Words Of Love; 10) Honey Don't; 11) Every Little Thing; 12) I Don't Want To Spoil The Party; 13) What You're Doing; 14) Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby.

 

Tradition dictates that Beatles For Sale should always be docked half a point, one star, or the + sign next to A Hard Day's Night, its luckier elder brother from the same year. It is one of the few Beatles albums that makes no giant steps forwards; it is objectively the only Beatles album that makes one small step backwards by re-introducing the six obligatory cover tunes, where the previous record had seemed to so effectively obliterate this custom; and the four lads are standing in a clearly «autumnal» mood on the front cover, all of them «babies in black», worn and torn by heavy touring, annoying socializing, and life-sucking demands from the music industry.

 

It is true enough that the boys were getting tired, particularly of having too many other people make the decisions for them, and it does seem to be true that they simply did not have the time to come up with enough original material to fill a complete LP. It is unquestionably true that, on the whole, the sound of Beatles For Sale is less «happy» than that of Hard Day's Night — the al­bum does, after all, begin with three «downers», and John is no longer contributing teenage odes to joy à la ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ.

 

And, speaking of the covers, I still share the opinion that ʽMr. Moonlightʼ is one of the unluckiest choices the band ever made. The Dr. Feelgood version, which they copied with very little imagi­nation, had it registered as a soul ballad with an almost crooner-ish atmosphere, quite incompa­tible with John's usual singing voice; and where his frenzied screaming worked so well on ʽAnnaʼ because the song had a tragic heart, it feels silly and wasted on the bridge sections of this parti­cular tune. The only clever touch was to replace the original rudimentary guitar solo with an eerie Hammond organ passage — but no Beatles song in which the instrumental, rather than vocal, part is the best one can really count as successful.

 

However, apart from that minor misstep, Beatles For Sale is anything but a «step backwards» in the story of the Beatles' development. Any detailed song-by-song analysis would immediately show just how many of these itty-bitty-beatly «trifles» make a first appearance here — whenever these guys were locked in the studio with George the Fifth at the helm, tired or not tired, they just weren't interested in repeating the same old formulae. «Beatle-quality» had to mean «creative», even if it meant being «creative» on an old piece of Carl Perkins boogie.

 

So, just a few things off the top of my head. Buddy Holly wrote ʽWords Of Loveʼ in 1957, and he must have been so proud to have come up with that melody that he did not bother giving it all the studio care it required. Play the original and the cover back to back, and the first thing you notice is how much «juicier» the main guitar line is sounding. Where Buddy is satisfied with just occa­sionally letting out that high-pitched piercing tone, George uses it on every note, getting a warm, jangly effect — tender and cordial, but without a trace of cheap sentimentality. With John out there behind him, partially doubling his work on a second, barely audible guitar, the effect is otherworldly, and even though the solo break, faithfully following Holly's original, is no more than two different phrases played over and over again, I would not mind a longer version.

 

Laying on echo effects was one of the band's favorite tricks ever since With The Beatles at least, but it was a cool touch when they threw them on 'Rock And Roll Music' and 'Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby', giving the old rock'n'roll chestnuts an «arena» feel instead of the «chamber» feel of the originals. In fact, the feel of 'Rock And Roll Music' has completely shifted: Chuck did this song just like he did all the rest — with a friendly smile, inviting all the young ladies and gentlemen out there to try out this brand new hot dance called rock and roll. This rendition de­mands that you scream your head off, instead of dancing your legs off: because of the echo ef­fects, John's brawny delivery, and Paul's somber bass, it is far more aggressive than Chuck ever intended it to be. Ditto with Carl Perkins, when they start laying the echo on Harrison's vocals (but they couldn't do anything of the kind with ʽHoney Don'tʼ, so they just... gave it to Ringo. Who did a hilarious job with it, anyway).

 

Now, about the originals. First, we are all taught that it is here, and nowhere else, that John star­ted to fall under the Dylan spell, and take a healthier attitude towards the lyrics — hence, ʽI'm A Loserʼ, a feeble first attempt to climb out of the mire of clichés. The famous "Although I laugh and I act like a clown / Beneath this mask I am fearing a frown" would hardly count as «signifi­cant lyrics» today, but for the Beatles in 1964, it was a milestone. It is debatable if we can take ʽI'm A Loserʼas the beginning of John's «no-bullshit-allowed» phase, where everything had to be either strictly tongue-in-cheek or strictly heart-on-the-sleeve, but, in any case, there is increased «character complexity» here, and that be good.

 

Second, McCartney is quickly learning how to put «genius» and «corn» in the same package, co­ming up with his first genuinely great «softie». Curiously, ʽI'll Follow The Sunʼ is usually said to have been written around 1960, which might explain the man's dragging it out of the storeroom for lack of time to write something new; but maybe it is a good thing that it was given four years of fermentation. Now it sounds a bit Searchers-style, what with the folksy melody and the harmo­nic layering and all, but more homely and sincere, due to the production and the clever alternation between group singing and Paul's solo lines. Just a year and a half separating this from the thema­tically similar ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ, but that song screamed NAÏVE all over the place, and this one spells WISENED — big reason why Paul still performs ʽI'll Follow The Sunʼ in concert, on occa­sion, but never the other one (not that anyone would mind, I suppose).

 

Third, shortly after discovering feedback on the single ʽI Feel Fineʼ, they discover the fade-in — on ʽEight Days A Weekʼ. Much of the band's experimentation was done «randomly», «just for fun», etc., but one big difference of the Beatles' approach to experimentation is that they rarely kept their experimental results if they weren't sure that they had come out somewhat meaningful and were appropriate for the song in question. So, before we go «A fade-in on ʽEight Days A We­ekʼ? Big deal! Who the heck cares?», let us listen to the fade-in and, perhaps, understand that it works here as the equivalent of a crescendo, which the band had no special means of producing at that time (they'd need an orchestra at least). ʽEight Days A Weekʼ is another one of those ode-to-joy songs, cruder and simpler than ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ, and never one of my favorites in that genre (for one thing, too repetitive — a solo break couldn't have hurt, and the "hold me, love me, hold me, love me" refrain also seems too roughly hewn), but the fade-in suits it perfect­ly — it is the first ten seconds of the song, from the first faraway notes to the breakout of "ooh I need your love babe..." that do it for me.

 

Fourth, the Beatles discover the value of... silence. While the more famous songs of Side B have always been ʽEight Days A Weekʼ and ʽEvery Little Thingʼ, I have always held a soft spot for ʽWhat You're Doingʼ, because of the important role with which they entrusted Ringo — hold the melody for the first few bars on his little old drummer's own, before introducing the looped elec­tric riff (very similar in texture, by the way, to the one that would soon make the Byrds famous with ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ). Then, once the song is done, they repeat the same trick once again before fading out — as if saying, «hey, it was quite cool in the beginning, surely you want us to do it one more time? heavier on the bass this time, right?»... and it works.

 

So, in the end, it's just the little things that make Beatles For Sale as essential a Beatles album in your catalog as everything that surrounds it. It takes its cue from the second half of Hard Day's Night, not the first one, and overcomes it in terms of diversity, jangliness, and, in a way, «dark­ness». Artistically, it is still dominated by John, which is a good thing, because Paul as a «domi­nator» would only be acceptable once the band entered its wild-experimental-frenzy phase; but overall, it is still very much a group effort, and, ultimately, another success, if not necessarily ano­ther «triumph». Predictable thumbs up here.

 

HELP! (1965)

 

1) Help!; 2) The Night Before; 3) You've Got To Hide Your Love Away; 4) I Need You; 5) Another Girl; 6) You're Going To Lose That Girl; 7) Ticket To Ride; 8) Act Naturally; 9) It's Only Love; 10) You Like Me Too Much; 11) Tell Me What You See; 12) I've Just Seen A Face; 13) Yesterday; 14) Dizzy Miss Lizzie.

 

Sometimes I can't help!... but think that it is this album, rather than Beatles For Sale, where the Beatles went for a bit of a sag. In fact, the band spent most of the first half of 1965 sort of procra­stinating, giving others plenty of time to catch up — the Stones were coming into their rights as masterful songwriters and creators of a new rock'n'roll sound; the Beach Boys finally learned how to make real musical albums rather than filler; the Byrds were pressing from behind the lines; Bob Dylan had gone electric, etc. etc. With a whole exciting new world waking up, Help!, as fine a Beatles album as it is per se, sounded like it needed a little... help?

 

You could sense a bit of trouble brewing even by simply watching the movie. Where Lester's first experience with the boys bordered on the «biographical» and, in places, read like a smart jab on the crisis of the older generation next to the young ones, Help! was, clearly, just a comical excuse for some Beatle-acted gags and lots of Beatle-mimed songs. It was still miles ahead of the ave­rage contemporary Elvis movie, but only because the gags were funnier and the songs were pret­ty much incomparable. Oddly, when you look at it in retrospect, Hard Day's Night, to me, seems to shrink a little bit in stature, where Help! seems to grow — not because Help! is actually «deeper» than it looks, rather because Hard Day's Night is somewhat shallower. But, clearly, it is always the former that will be the critical darling, never the latter.

 

Of course, on an individual song level, Help! contains at least as many tactical breakthroughs as Beatles For Sale, if not more. The presence alone of the title track, ʽTicket To Rideʼ, and That Song Most Frequently Covered By Crap Artists, places it well beyond the reaches of dirty jealous criticism. But it is probably no coincidence that it also contains the first song in the Beatles cata­log whose author himself went on record to state his acute despisal for it: ʽIt's Only Loveʼ, writ­ten mostly by John, was later lambasted to bits by his own persona. Why ʽIt's Only Loveʼ? Why not ʽAsk Me Whyʼ or ʽWhen I Get Homeʼ — songs that were comparably inane from a lyrical stand­point, and much less elaborate from a musical one? (Want it or not, the main guitar line that dri­ves ʽIt's Only Loveʼ is terrific, and its liaison with the final falsetto flourish is even more so). I think it's all because of the context — writing a song like that in 1963 would be more fitting in with the still slowly changing times than in 1965, when creative juices were flowing on all sides and lines like "it's only love and that is all, why should I feel the way I do" just didn't cut it any more. (And yes, the lyrics are atrocious, even if one could argue that "I get high when I see you go by, butterfly" may be interpreted in a psychedelic manner).

 

Anyway, what it all boils down to is that Help! is really a curious melange of startling discoveries, obsolete attitudes, lightheadedness that borders on annoyance, and hidden depth that borders on catharsis. The album is structured in the exact same way as Hard Day's Night (one side has the movie soundtrack and the other one doesn't), but this time, there is no feeling that the movie songs are somehow «lighter» and the non-movie ones are «darker». If anything, it would rather be the other way round — simply compare the initial Side A mood set by ʽHelp!ʼ and the initial Side B mood set by ʽAct Naturallyʼ (Ringo to the rescue!).

 

The movie soundtrack may produce a rougher, rockier, and a pinch more somber impression be­cause the movie was rougher — an action-packed comical thriller, with the Beatles chased around the world by a cartoonish cult aiming to chop off Ringo's finger (which, of course, symbolizes the Beatles' creative genius, and the cult is a personification of EMI/Capitol record bosses... okay, pushing too far ahead here). But it also genuinely reflects the growth of John's aggravation: of the three songs on Side A that are definitively his (ʽYou're Going To Lose That Girlʼ seems like a fifty-fifty job), one is playfully melancholic (ʽTicket To Rideʼ) and two are downright tragic, with John playing the sad little broken-down chap on ʽYou've Got To Hide Your Love Awayʼ and a snarling hunted beast on the title track.

 

ʽHelp!ʼ (the song) is, in fact, so perfectly arrow-shaped, it always gave me the impression of being played on one single breath throughout — the verses flash by like a speed rocket, with just a few brief moments in between chorus and verse to give the senses a quick rest. Played slow (the way Deep Purple would attempt it a few years later), it would be an emotional folk ballad; played at this sort of breakneck speed (well, «breakneck» for the times), it was proto-punkier, in a way, than quite a few garage classics of the time, if only because it was born out of a genuine feeling of desperation and crisis, rather than out of a generic penchant for «teenage rebellion». But never forget about the professionalism — as in, «with what else can we decorate this tune so that it will stick out more?» — there are some head-spinning harmony arrangements on the verses that in­tensify the arrow-like feeling of the song, with a non-stop vocal bombardment throughout.

 

ʽYou've Got To Hide Your Love Awayʼ has always been attributed to the Dylan influence — slow acoustic shuffle, «draggy», tired vocals that almost seem to imitate Bob himself, a clumsy, not-yet-quite-successful attempt to make the words matter — but the vocal melody is rather too poppy for Bob, and so is the pastoral flute solo at the end, although it adds a great touch. And ʽTicket To Rideʼ is sometimes hailed as one of the first «proto-metal» tunes, but I wouldn't go that far — just acknowledge that the level of «roughness» is severely increased from the likes of ʽYou Can't Do Thatʼ, mostly by devising a very complex, innovative drum-bashing part for Ringo and bringing the bass a bit higher in the mix than usual.

 

Next to these songs, Paul's competing material is tremendously slight — not that ʽThe Night Be­foreʼ and ʽAnother Girlʼ aren't great, energy-filled, instantly memorable pop-rock, but they do not advance us much further: ʽAnother Girlʼ, in particular, sounds like an attempt to capitalize on the formula of ʽCan't Buy Me Loveʼ, but the Beatles never fared all that well when they tried to write a song that sounded exactly like, or seriously in the vein of, a previous song, and there's a reason why ʽCan't Buy Me Loveʼ is on all the best-of packages and ʽAnother Girlʼ isn't. (Again, hardly a coincidence that the song illustrates the «cheapest» bit in the movie — the band engaged in gene­ric teenage fun with girls in the Bahamas). For some reason, I have always valued George's ʽI Need Youʼ over its neighbour on the record — his second attempt at songwriting that made the grade in the other ones' eyes has a certain minimalistic sternness and solemnity to it that makes it cross over from the slight and flimsy into the strange realm of the chivalrous. (Well, it was chi­val­rous, of course — a proper serenade to Patti Boyd, whom George would marry in less than a year's time. Good idea that there is no guitar solo; who knows what would have happened, had Eric Clapton turned up at the studio on that day?).

 

Most of the «high-quality filler», however, is concentrated on the second side — this is the batch of songs that looks like it has been relatively quickly thrown together to fulfill the obligations. For one thing, the two covers that bookmark it are either painfully slight (ʽAct Naturallyʼ, tongue-in-cheekily given to Ringo as an inside joke on his celebrated acting abilities; its cutesy country-pop mode would later be reworked in a much more interesting and original manner for ʽWhat Goes Onʼ) or questionably minimalistic (Larry Williams' ʽDizzy Miss Lizzieʼ is saved by John's trademark rock'n'roll roar, but the song is built on one single melodic phrase, and even if George's guitar tone is fatter, shriller, and hard-rockier than Larry's original incarnation, it is a bit too repetitive for a band that always thrived on build-ups, dynamics, and unpredictable twists).

 

For another thing, there are only two genuinely great creations on all of Side B, and both happen to be Paul's. ʽI've Just Seen A Faceʼ may actually be the greatest of the two (yes, we are all entit­led to a bit of controversy) — Paul's first venture into the realms of bluegrass, but infused with the usual pop spirit; had anyone up to that point, in the UK at least, even tried playing the acous­tic guitar in rapid-fire banjo mode? Spiritually, a trifle, perhaps ("falling yes I'm falling, and she keeps calling me back again" is as serious as the song gets), but musically, this is a rather unique entry in the Beatles catalog, which would never again see such an enthusiastic triple acoustic gui­tar-fest. As for ʽYesterdayʼ... well, who needs to hear another opinion on ʽYesterdayʼ? Surely the sixteen hundred popular artists who have covered it since cannot be wrong, even if fifteen hun­d­red of them probably suck as artists.

 

All that remains is to voice the speculative conclusion: If there ever was a moment in Beatles his­tory where they could have been thrown off the «train of relevance», it was in the first half of 1965. Plenty of early 1960s bands never survived the transition into the psychedelic and the art-rock era, and, theoretically, even the Beatles could have forever remained stuck in «teen-pop» mode — as Help!, with its somewhat unsettling conservatism, is enough to show. Again, this disappointment is quite relative and, in a way, fantom-like, because back in 1965, any new Beat­les product was greeted with tremendous hoopla, regardless of whether it did or did not push boundaries; and today, with all the boundaries pushed to death a long time ago and «innovation» no longer being a defining trait of one's creativity, we can simply enjoy Help! as another col­lec­ti­on of fabulous pop songs, no better and no worse than the ones that surround it.

 

But then, it is also fun to look at it as a tricky, deceitful bit of «calm before the storm»: the more innocent and unassuming an air these Help! tunes put upon themselves, the more of a shock one must have gotten by the end of the year, with Rubber Soul announcing that the Beatles were finally agreeing not only to participate in the ongoing musical revolution, but even to take upon themselves the role of one of the leaders. And, finally, no theoretical criticisms could ever con­ceal the fact that, innovative or not, formally Help! is just as filler-free and enjoyable all the way through (yes, even ʽDizzy Miss Lizzieʼ) as any other Beatles album — you didn't think I would dare deprive it of its upcoming thumbs up, did you?

 

RUBBER SOUL (1965)

 

1) Drive My Car; 2) Norwegian Wood; 3) You Won't See Me; 4) Nowhere Man; 5) Think For Yourself; 6) The Word; 7) Michelle; 8) What Goes On; 9) Girl; 10) I'm Looking Through You; 11) In My Life; 12) Wait; 13) If I Nee­ded Someone; 14) Run For Your Life.

 

As everybody knows, this is where the switch is flipped, without any possibility of going back. With The Beatles saw the band adopt an unbreakable «no-filler» policy (even the filler must, in one way or other, be treasurable); Rubber Soul sees it transform into a «no-routine» policy. Star­ting here, it is no longer sufficient for everything to be «good» — it has to be «expansive», with a permanent, non-stop coverage of new territory. I wonder just how exactly conscious that decision must have been — and am fairly certain that it was conscious, that an explicit goal was set, and, furthermore, that whatever aided its fulfillment the most was healthy (sometimes unhealthy) com­petition between John, Paul, and, to a lesser degree, George (but even George had decidedly join­ed the game by the end of 1965).

 

By the fall of 1965, the band was relatively free of heavy touring commitments, and everyone had more time to poke around and take a good look at whatever was a-happenin'. There are tons of acknowledged outside influences on Rubber Soul: from Dylan and the Byrds to Otis Redding, but, as usual, the Beatles never allow these influences to overshadow their own inspiration and craftsmanship. A lesser band would have resulted in a bandwagon-jumping mishmash; Rubber Soul, following the guidelines laid out by the era's most innovative acts, turns the trick right on them and, through sheer magic, somehow becomes the leader.

 

The most important quality in a leader is that the leader should be impossible to pigeonhole, and Rubber Soul is properly uncategorizable. Try to play all the seven tracks on Side A in your head at the same time (yes, it is possible if you listen to them long enough), and they will be seven dif­ferent worlds, peacefully coinhabiting the same vinyl environment. This is the highest level of di­versity on a Beatles side so far, and, as far as I'm concerned, even the White Album would have a difficult time beating it on these terms. But even the White Album, for all of its unpredictabili­ty, did not make such bold strides in all these different styles as Rubber Soul does. Think about it some more, and you will begin to understand why musicians, critics, and fans alike were flab­bergasted — including Brian Wilson, who was reportedly spurred on to the success of Pet So­unds by listening to the album. Not that anything on Pet Sounds has any similarity to anything on Rubber Soul — it's simply that, for quite a few people, Rubber Soul unavoidably acted as a catalyst. «Go on out there, we dare you to be as creative as we are». (It also ruined many a lesser band's career — with this new type of benchmark established, the old policy of developing a set formula and sticking to it for the rest of one's life was done for. Not everyone survived the transi­tion — Gerry Marsden and Dave Clark will tell you the rest of it).

 

Out of sheer controversy, my consciously selected favourite on Side A, for quite some time, was Paul's ʽYou Won't See Meʼ — just because so much praise was already heaved on everything else, and this was a nifty «dark sheep» to ride. But, in all honesty, even this relatively «conservative» pop tune still has an entirely different sound, mood, and feel to it than anything done previously. It reflects a real situation in Paul's life (a temporary estrangement from Jane Asher, to be reme­died later before they'd eventually break up for good), and almost everything about it — the ma­ture, if still a bit simplistic, lyrics; the vocal intonations; the darker production overtones — qua­lifies for a «singer-songwriter» style, rather than just another exciting, but formulaic pop hit. In addition, it features what I consider to be one of the Beatles' greatest vocal arrangements (it is al­ready a joy just to listen to them gain in complexity and intensity throughout the song), and pro­bably the most successful ever attempt at creating a special mood with just one single note: for the last verse of the song, trusty roadie Mal Evans is holding down the A note on a Hammond or­gan, creating this barely noticeable low hum that somehow gives the song an extra depth level. (Before the Internet came along, I'd wondered about that hum for years, actually).

 

But this is really just to reaffirm my faith in how amazingly consistent the whole construction is. Indeed, Rubber Soul finally sees the emergence of Paul McCartney as not only as a great melo­dy writer, but as an artist no longer afraid of taking risks, and, indeed, reveling in risk-taking. ʽYou Won't See Meʼ is, after all, fairly conservative next to ʽDrive My Carʼ and ʽMichelleʼ. The former is Paul's first non-love song, as is obvious not only from the lyrics (that are more about humorous character assassination than about anything else), but also from the melody — gritty, R'n'B-ish, and quite bass-heavy (George claimed to have laid down both the basic bass part and the accom­panying bass-doubling rhythm guitar, but I doubt it: why the heck would Paul not want to play the crucial bass part on one of his own songs?). And the latter? Chet Atkins + stereotypical Parisian atmos­phere (in live performances, Paul likes to augment the sound with an accordeon, which I find way too obvious) + sweetest bass solo ever put to tape. As corny as your average French pop song, but still genius.

 

Compared to this, John's breakthroughs on Rubber Soul are not as huge, but that's because he'd already covered much of that distance before. ʽNorwegian Woodʼ builds upon the foundation of ʽYou've Got To Hide Your Love Awayʼ, but this time adding a distinct, instantly hard-hitting melody to the bare accompaniment, not to mention the lyrics and their vocal delivery being far more true to the John character — this time around, the bitch actually gets it. (Whoever said the Rolling Stones were more «dangerous» than the Beatles? Mick Jagger only warned the girl about the dangers of playing with fire; John Lennon is not afraid to light the fire in person). Of course, the song is mostly famous for George's sitar part, which was, at that time, added somewhat spon­taneously, on a momentary whim, but ended up predicting his future career.

 

[Side note: I actually agree with Alan Pollack that the sitar in ʽNorwegian Woodʼ is rather «clun­ky sounding», and that the song could have been just as strong without it, as existing early takes de­monstrate. In fact, both the Yardbirds' ʽHeart Full Of Soulʼ and the Kinks' ʽSee My Friendsʼ, although the songs only imitate the sitar rather than use it — the Yardbirds actually did record a sitar version, but abandoned it because it did not resonate with enough power for a single release — both these songs are far more adept at setting an «Indian» mood. Which does not deny the ac­tual pioneer move, since ʽNorwegian Woodʼ was the first original pop song to use a sitar; nor does it mean that there is anything «wrong» with the move — George's «clunky», minimalistic playing quite matches the basic melody and feeling.]

 

ʽNowhere Manʼ must have appeared out of nowhere indeed: nobody saw it coming, and the sight of the Beatles performing the song live during their last international tours in 1966 is extremely confusing, because, if there ever was one song in their pre-Revolver catalog not to be addressed to seas of screaming girls, it is this one. Okay, so I stand corrected: this is a real milestone for John, his first pronounced attempt at carrying himself away into a parallel world; and he would forever retain this penchant for parallel worlds, regardless of all the disillusionments and the con­fessionals and the politics and Yoko and whatever else — there is a straight line from ʽNowhere Manʼ not only to ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ, but to ʽDream No. 9ʼ as well, and maybe even right down to ʽ(Just Like) Starting Overʼ, in a way. The coolest thing about John's parallel worlds, of course, is that he wastes no time on building them — they just descend upon him all by themselves, while he is doing nothing: "Nowhere man, don't worry, take your time, don't hurry, leave it all till somebody else lends you a hand" — get it? That's the way to go about it. Greatest single moment about the song: the high ringing E at 1:03 that concludes George's guitar solo like a sudden burst of inspiration / revelation. It didn't necessarily need to be there, but that's what makes a Beatles classic a Beatles classic.

 

Speaking of George, his Side A contribution, ʽThink For Yourselfʼ, is a major leap forward as well — also his first non-love song, more like a simple socio-philosophical rumination on the pe­rils of brainwashing (but, mind you, still not tainted by Indian motives, which would only begin rearing their head on Revolver). No bridge, no solo, three verses of straightahead preaching, a grumbly, fuzzy bassline carrying the main melody — decidedly a claim to something special. But I think that what really makes the song are the effortless tempo transitions from verse to chorus: the verses, frankly speaking, are a little bit boring, and we all know it is the easiest thing in the world for George to write a boring, mid-tempo, preachy song, so each time the tune transforms into an aggressive faster-paced pop-rocker, it's cheer time. The result is probably not a true mas­terpiece on the level of George's later songs, but the whole thing is still quite intriguing — in fact, it is well nigh impossible to even understand the exact genre of the song, which takes a little bit of melodic stuffing from almost everywhere.

 

Finally, there is no forgetting ʽThe Wordʼ as the first ever «anthemic» song to be recorded by the guys — a direct predecessor to ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ, stating the same message in cruder terms, but, actually, with more of that crude-rocking energy (and it has the best Ringo fills on the entire album, too). It's not the most inventive track on the album (twelve-bar blues form, mostly?), per se, but it is the first time in the Beatles catalog where they deliver an explicit message to the world, and the bluntness of the melody is appropriate, because that's what most anthems are. And again, it never prevents them from scattering little tricks all over the place — such as George Martin's harmonium solo, giving the whole thing a bit of a religious feel (for lack of a church or­gan, that is), or my favourite bit, when the repetitive "Say the wooooord..." chorus is pushed up to ecstatic falsetto levels on 1:39. That's right: if you're gonna be repetitive about it, at least don't be monotonously repetitive. Give the people a little bit of hysteria.

 

The second side of the album is a tiny bit of a letdown in comparison, but not even the Beatles could handle fourteen individual breakthroughs in a row. Of course, there are no bad songs, but certain facts speak for themselves. I have never cared all that much for ʽWaitʼ, a sort of slightly updated take on ʽWhen I Get Homeʼ but with way, way too little happening to the song once the first solid verse/chorus pair is over; it was hardly a surprise to discover that it was, in fact, an out­take from the Help! sessions, carried over at the last moment to plug a gap (so, «filler» from an objective perspective). John himself would harbor and occasionally express hatred for ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ — well, he probably was ashamed of the misogynistic lyrics, I just think that, while the song itself is sorta okay as an aggressive pop-rocker, they did miss a spectacular chance to close a spectacular album with a spectacular song (a mistake that would never ever be repeated again — beginning with Revolver, the Beatles always took good care of their codas).

 

There is also ʽWhat Goes Onʼ, an excellent piece of country-pop that is a sheer improvement over ʽAct Naturallyʼ (and Ringo sings it just as well as he did on the latter), but, again, it feels kinda slight; and so does Paul's ʽI'm Looking Through Youʼ, which is set a little in the vein of ʽTell Me What You Seeʼ, but has a distinctly more aggressive edge, having also been written about his turbulent relations with Jane Asher. Good songs, all of them, yet with hardly any pizzazz next to the first side monsters. George's ʽIf I Needed Someoneʼ also has an excellent melody, but this is the only time on Rubber Soul where the influences show up a bit too much — the whole thing ends up sounding like a respectful homage to Roger McGuinn, belittling the album's pretense at flagmanship. (Not that there's anything wrong with a little self-belittling!)

 

In the end, Side B is semi-rescued by John — ʽGirlʼ and, particularly, ʽIn My Lifeʼ are the two giants that push it closer to Side A's standards, and, if it were up to me, I would certainly have set ʽIn My Lifeʼ as the album closer; it is exceptionally strange that the idea did not come up origi­nally, unless, of course, it did come up and everyone thought of it as too «obvious», so they deci­ded to humbly end the record on one of the lesser tunes instead. (Another possibility is that they just wanted to cut things off on a rock'n'roll punch — like they used to on all of their previous al­bums, with the exception of A Hard Day's Night. Too bad, since, at this point, the Beatles were no longer a genuine «proverbial» rock'n'roll band).

 

Still, as it goes, Side B is a «failure» only as far as it fails to comply with the «no-routine!» mot­to: its only flaw is that there are a few songs on it that either aspire to something grander than they really are, or even a few songs that do not aspire to anything at all, and that goes against the cur­rent policy. For the standards of 1964, ʽWaitʼ would have been as good as anything, but it just feels small and defenseless sitting next to the downright orgasmic ʽIn My Lifeʼ. But who cares, really? Things were going great in late 1965, and everybody knew that this was not going to be the last we hear from the Beatles.

 

Let's just conclude this by stating one further dislike and one further like. I have never cared much for the album sleeve. It was quite telling at the time — not just an «artsy» perspective, but a distinctly psychedelic one — but it sort of makes the Beatles look like four scrawny Indians in the jungle, and that is definitely not the mood on any of Rubber Soul's music. What I have always cared about, conversely, is the marvelous stereo split that George Martin conducted for this al­bum — over the years, it has been a regular delight to listen to all the tracks in one channel and then in the other one. With the mix separation, it's like you are getting a couple Stack-o-Tracks-like bonus records with your original purchase. Considering, among other things, that Rubber Soul marks the beginning of Paul's most creative period as a bass player, it is not just recom­men­dable, but actually obligatory that everyone listen at least once to the bass / drums channel on its own — it gives an entirely different perspective on the album, and an extra reason to admire Paul as a technically limited, but wildly imaginative musician. And, as that last drop / straw / whatever, it takes away the wish to reward it with a rating — giving a «thumbs up» to Rubber Soul or to any subsequent Beatles album is as ridiculous as giving it to a da Vinci painting. It's the Beatles in their prime, for Chrissake. Why waste good red ink?

 

REVOLVER (1966)

 

1) Taxman; 2) Eleanor Rigby; 3) I'm Only Sleeping; 4) Love You To; 5) Here, There And Everywhere; 6) Yellow Sub­marine; 7) She Said She Said; 8) Good Day Sunshine; 9) And Your Bird Can Sing; 10) For No One; 11) Dr. Ro­bert; 12) I Want To Tell You; 13) Got To Get You Into My Life; 14) Tomorrow Never Knows.

 

In 1966, the Beatles were cool. Of course, in certain ways, they were cool ever since the world learned enough of them to treat them as such, and in still other ways, they remain cool even today. But I am not just talking about the usual «cool» here; I'm talking about «cool cool», that particu­lar kind of it that sows respect even in the hardened hearts of young cynical intellectuals. For the Beatles, 1966 was that very brief period where they were, like, one of the coolest things ever — so much so that, despite their pop orientation, they could be competing with the likes of Ornette Coleman. After Rubber Soul, nobody could properly predict where they would go next, and, al­though in retrospect their creative development seems quite logical and consistent, back in those days each new record was seen as a revelation.

 

They even looked cool — still wearing the suits, but exchanging the cutesy ties for rougher look­ing sweaters, adopting «continental intellectual» sunglasses, letting their hair down to barely ac­ceptable length, but still quite a long distance away from the Frisco hippie look (and still untain­ted by the Maharishi aura). Still very much in the public eye, too, keeping touring activities on a limited, but ac­tive scale: the band's last concert, in Candlestick Park, San Francisco, would be held twenty four days after the release of Revolver (without featuring even a single one of the new tracks). This was the year of John's «more popular than Jesus» scandal — adding as much to the «coolness» image as could be sucked up by the world's growing share of cultural rebels. The Beatles, though, were no rebels. They were just cool. Nothing else.

 

Consequently, Revolver may not be the Beatles' «best ever» album (what is?), or their most «re­volutionary» album (one could write a thesis on that issue and still be left standing in the middle of the road), but the way it seems to me, it is their «coolest» album — in mid-'66, all of the condi­tions for that were met, no difficulties encountered. The reason why so many «hip» people prefer it to Sgt. Pepper are crystal clear — Sgt. Pepper is saturated with idealistic ambition, a genuine desire (at least, on McCartney's part) to make a «grand» statement from a «rock guru» standpoint, which can easily piss off some people, especially if they feel that the actual music is not quite up to the task (and that feeling is not that difficult to feel for an album that has ʽWhen I'm 64ʼ on it). On Revolver, however, the idea of a «conceptual» approach had not yet burgeoned — the songs are perfectly free to flow, without having to work for any common noble purpose. And yet, at the same time, Revolver washes away the last traces of «simplistic teen pop» that could still be evi­dent on bits of Rubber Soul (ʽWaitʼ, ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ, etc.).

 

It is also a «transitional» album, in the best sense of the word that there is: Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison are now fully established as individual creative forces with separate, coherent crea­tive ideologies (George gets a grand total of three songs to celebrate that, his largest share ratio per one vinyl disc on a Beatles album ever), and yet the group spirit is still completely intact — as evidenced not only by the jointly written ʽYellow Submarineʼ, which works primarily as a char­ming buddy an­them, sealed off by having Ringo sing on it, but simply by the fact that every­thing is perfectly coherent, with no visible attempts to pull the blanket in opposite directions, and plenty of emotionally involved and fruitful collaboration, too, on each other's songs.

 

And, above all else, perhaps, it's a LOUD album! Revolver is often proclaimed as the record on which the Beatles finally embrace the psychedelic vibe without reservations — but, truth be told, there is relatively little «hardcore psychedelia» out there, apart from Klaus Voormann's sleeve painting and ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ. On the other hand, there is a lot of loud, thick, bulging electric guitar-driven rock music, usually provided by John (ʽShe Said She Saidʼ, ʽAnd Your Bird Can Singʼ, ʽDoctor Robertʼ), but also by George (ʽTaxmanʼ, ʽI Want To Tell Youʼ), whereas Paul, assisted by the «rock saboteur» George Martin, is channelling the loudness into the realm of art songs (ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ) or brass band stylistics (ʽGot To Get You Into My Lifeʼ) — adding heap big lot of aural diversity without disrupting the overall flow.

 

And finally — it is the first Beatles album where not even a single song can be said to «owe a heavier-than-it-should-be debt» to anybody else in particular. I have scrutinized every piece in my mind several times, and not a single one qualifies as «okay, here they are being a bit too much somebody else (Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bob Dylan, Burt Bacharach, the Byrds, etc.) and not quite enough themselves». Like everybody else, I have my favorite tracks here and ones that I could, more or less, live without (ʽDoctor Robertʼ, even after all these years, strikes me as a rather minor novelty number, notable for its drug-related lyrics rather than much of anything else; melo­dically, it seems like a miscalculated attempt on John's part to upstage Paul with ʽPaperback Wri­terʼ), but all of them exclusively represent the vision of the Beatles and no one else.

 

A possible exception is ʽLove You Toʼ — the band's (more precisely, George's, since the only other band member to be involved here is Ringo on tambourine) first serious attempt to incorpo­rate real Indian motives in its music, rather than just plunk out a simple (but effective) folk melo­dy on the sitar in ʽNorwegian Woodʼ. It is still a point of debate whether he is responsible for all the sitar playing on the track himself or there are uncredited Indian musicians supporting him at least on the soloing parts — most musicologists are inclined to believe the latter, claiming that it would have hardly been possible for George to master the necessary skills in less than one year of training, not to mention that, for some reason, those «magic skills» would somehow never re-ap­pear on subsequent tracks (and by the time they got around to recording ʽThe Inner Lightʼ in 1968, the Indian session musicians were already given proper credit, even as George was ta­king extra lessons from Ravi Shankar himself).

 

But this should not detract from the fact that ʽLove You Toʼ is not only the first full-fledged mer­ger of Indian and Western motives in pop music, as opposed to tiny flourishes in the past, but also one of the best such mergers — unlike future, expectedly more meditative, ventures, this one ac­tually rocks, and combines the «spirit of the drone» with the memorability of a pop hook in a way that somehow seems completely inoffensive for both cultural approaches. Nine times out of ten, the whole «East meets West» thing in pop, be it Western-produced or Eastern-produced, is either dead boring or hideously laughable. With ʽLove You Toʼ, I used to be a little bored, for sure, but now I am convinced that its basic melody is no worse than the average melody of a George Har­rison song, and that the sitar carries it in a natural and unforced manner. Indian music aficionados will cringe at its lack of «authenticity», of course, but for those who actually look forward to get­ting into Indian music from a completely Western background, ʽLove You Toʼ and the likes of it would be a respectable initial compromise. At least it was good enough for Shankar.

 

Besides, ʽLove You Toʼ is as true to George's ego as anything else he'd written. On Revolver, ʽTaxmanʼ introduces us to his mundane side — never a proper hermit, George liked his money just as everyone else does — and on ʽI Want To Tell Youʼ, he plays that kid in The Who's ʽI Can't Explainʼ who finally grew up and learned to articulate more properly: now at least he reali­zes that it's no big deal to be confused, because "I could wait forever, I've got time". Funny buddy thing: both of the songs owe a huge part of their effect to Paul — first contributing the exquisite angry guitar solo on ʽTaxmanʼ (raga-style! mind the irony!), then enhancing the somber mood of ʽI Want To Tell Youʼ with the finger-tapping piano bits.

 

Speaking of Paul, Revolver marks that particular point in the race where he fully catches up with John, the both of them speeding ahead neck-to-neck (another good point to hold up the reputation of the album). Five out of fourteen songs constitute his private domain (as opposed to the average four or even less on preceding albums), and even though all of them are expectedly «wimpy» and sentimental next to John's «grittier» material, at least two out of five transcend generic sentimen­talism by delving deep into human tragedy — ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ is often seen as the ultimate heart-breaking anthem to loneliness, but ʽFor No Oneʼ, written and arranged on a slightly less epic / an­themic scale, is actually its more reclusive, but not any less beautiful cousin. (Quite closely mat­ched in spirit by Paul's solo classic ʽAnother Dayʼ four years later — although ʽAnother Dayʼ was quite «upbeat» in comparison, not as much of a straightahead downer; not to mention lacking the exquisite extra flourish of Alan Civil's French horn solo).

 

Come to think of it, the emotional depth of these two — Paul's suddenly emerging ability to in­vent two fictitious, but realistic characters and then get so deeply under their skins — pretty much transcends the depth of anything even John had written up to that point. I cannot even exclude the thought that this is the starting point from which we have to unwind the story of the Beatles' breakup (which, in my opinion, has always been the story of John Winston Lennon being pissed off at one James Paul McCartney stealing his, John Winston Lennon's, band from under John Winston Lennon's nose — and not being able to do anything about it, because all the stealing happened through fair competition. But that's putting it too roughly, of course). In any case, Re­volver sees Paul firmly and finally taming his «sappy» instincts and taking them in the only right direction that can turn one's genius sentimentalism into lyrical tragism.

 

On the other hand, you could argue that sometimes genius sentimentalism can place a truly great song on a top spot without adding huge psychological depth, and that such feats are arguably har­der to achieve. That is what's being done on ʽHere, There And Everywhereʼ, though, a «sappy», «sugary» song if there ever was one, but you would have to be a hardcore balloon-shooting Pu­ri­tan to remain unmoved by it. Suffice it to say that I have always felt that the line about "running my hands through her hair", regardless of the quality of the lyric itself, actually sounds like the vocal equivalent of «running one's hands through her hair»: this is truly one of the most magical double-tracked vocal recordings ever made (and this is also why the song never produced the same effect in concert, whenever Paul would sing it live later on — heck, there actually was a real reason why the Beatles quit live performing, and it goes much deeper than «how the heck are we supposed to play our backward-recorded guitars onstage!»).

 

So what about John? At this point, he does not yet fully realize that Paul is tugging on the rug, and Revolver is the last Beatles album to feature him in a completely coherent, workmanlike state, rather than thrown off balance by a miriad extra things. We learn that he is quite preoccu­pied with the LSD issue — but, funny enough, on both of the tracks that deal with it directly his is the view of a curious outsider: it's either "She said I know what it's like to be dead" or "My friend works for the national health, Dr. Robert". ʽShe Said She Saidʼ went on to become a clas­sic drug culture anthem, but even though its lead guitar line is a little reminiscent of the San Francis­co / Grateful Dead jamming style, it is still firmly rooted in the Beatles' usual brand of pop rock; and apart from the thinly veiled lyrics, there is nothing particularly psychedelic about ʽDr. Robertʼ, either. Still, both songs were quite daring for their time, what with The Beatles having the disadvantage of falling under far more closer public scrutiny than, say, The 13th Floor Eleva­tors. «More popular than Jesus» + «Take a drink from his special cup, Dr. Robert» = did I hear somebody calling for trouble? On the other hand, ʽShe Said She Saidʼ could only be interpreted as a vow of abstinence ("I know that I'm ready to leave"), so it's not all that bad.

 

In reality, there are only two genuine bits of psychedelia on the entire record. The one that people rarely talk about is ʽI'm Only Sleepingʼ, which, formally, is just a semi-autobiographical sketch of a lazy guy who sees no reason to get out of bed, and has nothing to do with drugs — on a lyri­cal basis: the general aura of the song is, of course, extremely trippy, and it would still remain trippy even without the backward guitar solo. Then again, dreaming, or even «waiting for a slee­py feeling» can sometimes be quite a psychedelic experience without any drugs — and there was nobody who could transmit that yawny, sleepy, fuzzy-conscience atmosphere like John could. I used to picture him actually installing a bed in the Abbey Road Studios and recording directly from under the sheets, and it looked very realistic in my mind. (A similar, but slightly different ex­perience would be captured on that same imaginary bed two years later with ʽI'm So Tiredʼ). Listen to how all the instruments are made to sound as if the person playing them had not had any sleep for at least 48 hours — even Ringo's drums seem to be «dragging their feet». And, to boot, a great muffled yawn at 2:01, during Paul's quiet bass break before the second bridge.

 

The one that people always talk about is ʽTibetan Book Of The Dead In C Majorʼ, a.k.a. ʽIf You Have No Idea On How To Name Your Song, Ask Ringoʼ. Now this one, of course, would be im­possible to dismiss as «non-psychedelic»: there is hardly a more flamboyant way of giving your­self away than "turn off your mind, relax and float downstream". Serious adepts like to point out that the tune is a mere trifle compared to «hardcore» London psychedelia of the time, such as Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd. Yet even on an objective basis, there is really far more complexity and au­da­city involved in the meticulous construction of ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ from its multiple tape loops than in any of Floyd's astral jamming. And on a subjective basis, well... don't you just love that unnerving Ringo beat?

 

Seriously, what I love most about ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ is how well it ties in with the album cover. (That link alone would suffice to earn the overall non-psychedelic Revolver its overall ve­ry-much-psychedelic reputation). The song places you, the listener, in a capsule, sends you «floa­ting downstream», and has all sorts of impressions flash by in ragged, broken, mysterious tape segments. There has to be an active sender, of course, responsible for the capsule-making and the button-pushing — and there he is, four of them, to be precise, on the album cover, with everyone and everything wedged in between the four Mount-Rushmorian faces. Somebody feeling a bit too God-like, perhaps? Well, the Beatles had been humble enough for too long for their own good; by late 1966, they thought they were entitled to a little more than usual. Besides, feeling God-like is an obligatory ingredient of «coolness» — at least, it used to be like that in the mid-Sixties, when idealistic hopes for the breeding of a new, super-progressive kind of conscience were at their peak, and «coolness» was not yet thought of as incompatible with «mass popularity».

 

Then again, as great as ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ is in its album-closing role, there are some days on which I think that ʽYellow Submarineʼ might have worked even more effectively — as a simpler, friendlier, homelier gesture to say goodbye with. One for the kids — in fact, it is ironic that it took the Beatles most «adult» album up-to-date to contain the first song targeted primari­ly at their pre-teen audiences. (Unless you, too, believe that the whole thing is a metaphor for an acid trip, and that John and Paul were taking it out on their simpleton drummer by constantly sup­plying him with drug innuendos: ʽYellow Submarineʼ, ʽWith A Little Help From My Friendsʼ... throw in the line about "what goes on in your mind", and the picture's complete). For some rea­son, it never satisfied me in its silly position as track No. 6 on Side 1 — couldn't they have at least switched it places with ʽShe Said She Saidʼ? It's a side-closer if there ever was one! Or, at least, a side-opener, for which function it had to wait until the movie soundtrack.

 

As far as I am concerned, though, that little mix-up with the sequencing is just about the only flaw I can see about the whole record. Almost fifty years later, it continues to sound just as fresh and relevant as it was back in its time, without losing a single drop of its «coolness», despite not even having an overall conceptual backbone (or, perhaps, because of that?), and yet, still being somewhat larger than the sum of its individual parts. Just like Rubber Soul, it pushes its nose in a dozen different stylistic, emotional, and thematic directions — only this time, nobody does the pushing but the Beatles themselves. If Rubber Soul is the album on which they successfully at­tempt to turn into the greatest band in the world, then Revolver is the album on which they know of their superpowers as the greatest band in the world, and not afraid to use them. Ambitious­ness? Vanity? Pretense? A double helping for me, please, with some meaning of within on top.

 

SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1967)

 

1) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; 2) With A Little Help From My Friends; 3) Lucy In The Sky With Dia­monds; 4) Getting Better; 5) Fixing A Hole; 6) She's Leaving Home; 7) Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!; 8) Within You Without You; 9) When I'm Sixty-Four; 10) Lovely Rita; 11) Good Morning Good Morning; 12) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise); 13) A Day In The Life.

 

There are currently two major, equally controversial, schools of thought on Sgt. Pepper, and I do not think I need to explicitly remind anyone of what they are. Both are entitled to prolonged ex­istence, both can be respectable from one angle and laughable from the opposite one. And, unlike certain other situations, the Beat­les bear direct responsibility for this one. In early 1967, they vo­luntarily and conciously undertook an attempt to make an album that would be the best album ever made — or, at least, would take the world places it has never ever seen before, opening a new age in popular music. Did they succeed? Did they fail? Begin trench warfare!

 

Part of the Sgt. Pepper problem is that, to a large extent, the whole thing was the brainchild of Paul rather than John. With the touring period over and all the band members suddenly finding themselves with lots of extra free time on their hands, they used it not only to grow additional fa­cial hair (adding the «wisened look», so obligatory for generation spokesmen), but also to evol­ve on individual levels, with the drive towards collective work gradually beginning to dissipate. As it turned out, Paul remained the most active defender of the teamwork approach — that is, as long as the others were ready to accept him as the unofficial coach. When it turned out they weren't, things got nasty. Fortunately, in 1967, they still were.

 

Fortunately and unfortunately, because Paul's increased role in the creation of Sgt. Pepper meant that the first side effect of the Beatles' new-found grandiosity and universalism would also be a balance shift towards the «whimsier» side. The «band within a band» concept that Paul introdu­ced is okay as such, but the «meta-band» in question is a retro-oriented military outfit, and many of the songs they sing are infested with influences of «granny music», as John would say. Many people complained that the record just didn't rock hard enough — with one or two exceptions, the loud electric guitar music of Revolver is nowhere in sight. (Of course, many of the same people also praise the completely non-rocking Pet Sounds as one of the greatest albums ever made, but that's what expectations are for: nobody expects kick-ass electric guitar rock from Brian Wilson.) Furthermore, the album sees George getting ever deeper in his love affair with Indian music, and John entering his most «nonsensical» period — two more grounds for discomfort.

 

Thus, whoever believes that good pop music should always keep both of its feet placed firmly on the ground will always have a nice ideological justification to dismiss Sgt. Pepper as the enfant terrible of the epoch — an unlucky bastard of combining too much acid, too much childish love for newly-developed studio technologies, and way too much adoration for corny pre-war music standards. And yet I think that the script authors for Yellow Submarine got it best of all: Once upon a time or maybe twice, there was an unearthly paradise called Pepperland...

 

Clearly, like many other people, I may be biased here, since it was Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour that originally acqua­inted me with the Beatles as such, and, in fact, served as my point of entry into the wide world of rock and pop. But certain childhood memories and impres­sions wither and fade with age, whereas others remain incurable. What I clearly remember — in fact, I am able to relive that feeling each time I replay those records, even if only in my head — is the awesome, incomparable sense of magic and intrigue. Now that I think of it, even though the Beatles are in no way a «kid-oriented» band in general, the rightest age to get yourself exposed to these records is when you are ten to twelve years old — about the same age that works best for stuff like Alice In Wonderland. If, somehow, you only get to hear it later, when puberty and gruel­ing social pressure have already cured you of childhood innocence and idealism, the effect simply cannot be the same. But if you have let the magic permeate you at that tender age, you'd have to be way too corrupted by the outside world to ever let it dissipate and vanish.

 

It has been frequently stated that Sgt. Pepper is a «concept album» only from a formal point of view. You have the lush album sleeve, the Beatles in uniforms, the title song that introduces «the concert», and the reprise of the title song at the end. Nothing else ties in with the concept, and any of the other songs could have appeared on any other album, so that the whole «first conceptual al­bum ever» appraisal is just a fraudulent myth — records like Pet Sounds or Zappa's Freak Out! were ten times more «conceptual». True and false. Take the «concept» thing way too literally and there will, quite naturally, be nothing to tie together the «setlist» of the Lonely Hearts Club Band. But why the heck should you take it too literally? Should one also insist that ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ is a song written about a girl called Lucy which John's son Julian had a crush on in nursery school? Or about LSD, for that matter?

 

Of course, Sgt. Pepper is a concept album, and if not the first, then at least definitely one of the best concept albums ever made. But it is not a concept album about a military band. It is a con­cept album about a parallel universe, a «Pepperland» of its own, in which things sometimes re­semble earthly reality but, in the end, are always different. Essentially, it is an escapist album — not the first one, because Pet Sounds was also quite escapist; but Pet Sounds was an «introvert escapist» album, seeking salvation from life's problems deep inside one's own mind, whereas Sgt. Pepper is much more «extravert», at least formally: at the bottom of it, it's all in the mind, as George's character from Yellow Submarine would say, but, want it or not, Sgt. Pepper creates a vivid, dynamic world, in which girls are leaving their parents, meter maids may be invited to tea, Mr. Kite flies through the ring, people run around at five o'clock, and, yes, tangerine trees and marmalade skies a-plenty. Brian Wilson may have not been born for these times, but he didn't really have a strong penchant for tangerine trees, either.

 

So, how does Paul's «granny-oriented» whimsy tie into this? What's a song like ʽWhen I'm Sixty-Fourʼ, which Paul allegedly wrote when he was sixteen, got to do with parallel universes and es­capism? LOTS, as it turns out. For one thing, its placement on record, right after the last echoes of George's cosmic-level sitar on ʽWithin You And Without Youʼ have faded away, forms one of the most awesome contrasts in history —forming the perfect light-hearted retro-oriented reme­dy for those who sat somewhat uncomfortably through five whole minutes of Harrison's deadly seri­ous Indian introspection. For another thing, what is ʽWhen I'm Sixty-Fourʼ if not an extra bit of idealistic escapism? Its happy, undisturbed, end-of-a-Dickens-novel-style lyrical dreamery, lo­vi­n­g­ly wrapped up in the bass clarinet arrangement, always seemed to me to be emanating from the exact same character who was also busy with «fixing a hole where the rain gets in». And its refe­rences to the Isle of Wight never had anything to do with the real Isle of Wight in my mind — this is not a Ray Davies type of song, tied hand and foot to British Empire realities. It is a drea­mer's dream, maybe even dreamier than the sitar meditation it cuts across. Had they recorded it in 1959, without the clarinets and the slightly sped-up tapes and whatever else, it would not produce this impression, of course — but they didn't, so the discussion is irrelevant.

 

The bottomline is that all of the songs here, whether they really want it or not, serve this en­tran­cing pur­pose; written, recorded, and produced in different times under different circumstances, they could easily lack the magic aura, but on Sgt. Pepper, they are all graced. ʽFixing A Holeʼ could be just a simple pop song based on routine mundane observations. But with its harpsichord intro, with its «ticking-clock» percussion, with its mystical-flavoured rise-to-falsetto ("where it will go..." — as if indicating the actual direction), with its funny alternations between the intro­spective-meditative verses and the near-hysterical bridge, with its echoey fuzzy guitar solo, with its overall Zen-like contrast between the protagonist and the «silly people» — it's a fuckin' epic. Come to think of it, with this song and ʽFool On The Hillʼ, 1967 was the peak year of McCartney driving a wedge between The Artist and Boring Outsiders, an elitist trick that he, even with all his «accessibility» and «popularity», could easily pull off even better than John. (And I have always preferred Paul's melancholic-loner side to Paul the anthem-writer).

 

If ʽFixing A Holeʼ is an escapist fantasy that borders on the psychedelic and ʽLovely Ritaʼ is an­other fantasy bordering on the comical, then, supposedly, ʽGetting Betterʼ, with its realistic (or maybe not very realistic) tale of exchanging violence for self-improvement, and ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ, loosely based on a real story, should violate the «no-feet-on-the-ground» rule of Sgt. Pep­per. But do they? ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ does not see the band play any actual instruments, relying exclusively on a large string section in the good old European Lieder tradition. The result is — no «grit», just a sad, poignant fairy-tale in which Paul accounts for the facts and John deli­vers the «Greek chorus» moral ("fun is the one thing that money can't buy"). I never bought it as «realism»: ʽFor No Oneʼ and even ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ, with their sterner, «mini-chamber» mood, as opposed to the blossoming «maxi-chamber» sounds of ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ, belonged to this earthly world much more visibly than the Sgt. Pepper ballad.

 

Turning to John, the funny thing is that, years from then, he would be skeptical about the whole Pepper enterprise, and, on bad days, condemn it as a silly, insubstantial divertissement, blaming the whole thing on Paul. Yet in 1967, even despite being «trumped» by his pal in the leadership game, he was more than ready to take part in it, contributing songs that did not clash with Paul's, but instead agreed with them in general atmosphere and attitude. ʽLucy In The Sky With Dia­mondsʼ may not necessarily be a «drug» song — it is just a part of human nature to be attracted to the potentially scandalous side of things — but it is a Fantasy, big F and all, one of the most sur­realistic pieces in the band's career. Just one remark is enough: what the hell is the instrument that is playing the opening melodic lines? A Hammond organ with a special stop, it is sometimes said, that produced a celeste-like sound. Any proof of that? Did anyone ever try to recreate it? It genu­inely sounds like nothing else I have ever heard before or after, and, clearly, "tangerine trees and marmalade skies" are quite the perfect words to go along with it.

 

If the words for ʽBeing For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!ʼ were really borrowed by John from a circus poster, we would still be hard pressed to find the music emanating from any «earthly» circus. Its instrumental sections, both the «waltz» in the middle and the musical carousel of the outro, would rather be a perfect soundtrack to our being strapped in a chair and fed images of a slowly rotating night sky picture during a meteor shower. It is almost mind-boggling when you realize that the sound effects on that final outro were essentially assembled at random from a scissor-chopped tape (and I cannot help thinking that George Martin was really pulling our leg here when he nar­rated the process — this kind of work attitude is fairly incompatible with his usual style). What­ever be, ʽMr. Kiteʼ far transcends the «carnivalesque atmosphere» John wanted for it, taking us out of the circus pavillion into open space very quickly.

 

More than one opinion I heard draws a very thick line between ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ and every­thing else on the record: in fact, most of the self-proclaimed Sgt. Pepper haters generally admit that «if not for that one song...» etc., while many of the Sgt. Pepper admirers go as far as to pro­claim ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ the best song ever written, a musical/spiritual revelation etc. I do not think, however, that ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ would have ever had nearly the same impact, had it be­en released separately, say, on a 45" like ʽStrawberry Fieldsʼ. It is a climactic moment, not only in the context of the album, but in the context of the Beatles' career as a whole, yet it belongs on Sgt. Pepper, where it fulfills its function just like everything else does.

 

The one big difference of ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ is that it is essentially a tragic song, performed in a «high register». The rest of the album has its share of sadness and melancholy, but it is either light and meditative (ʽFixing A Holeʼ), or contrastive (ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ — tragic for one party, bright and optimistic for the other). ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ structurally comes on as an «en­core» from the Lonely Hearts Club Band — but it is almost as if an entirely different band appe­ars on the stage here, or, rather, this is the spot where the band justifies the «Lonely Hearts Club» moniker. It's not as if, on a formal, objective basis ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ made far more musical and lyrical «sense» than the other songs. It doesn't. It just makes a sudden dash at the foun­dations of your soul; a dash that you can hardly expect after thirty four minutes of music that guided you through the multicolored fields and forests of «Pepperland» — and now, suddenly, out of no­where, you are led to the shrine. And the shrine is a downer. 

 

Everyone knows and quotes the famous "I'd love to turn you on" line as if it were, at least, merely a hooli­ganry («let's throw this one and get some extra press coverage»), and at most, a sincere exhortation («let's get them to comply»). What I have always been hearing in that line is the dee­pest sorrow — it's like, «I'd love to turn you on, but it's completely hopeless». And the orchestral crescendo, to me, does not represent the process of «turning you on»; it is an energy outburst that serves to release all the hidden emotional tension in the verses. What is that tension, why it is the­re, what it all means, is another question. Why give an album as phantasmagorically radiant as Sgt. Pepper such a conscience-shattering conclusion?

 

One possible answer is that the bulk of Sgt. Pepper is utopian in nature. The ten main songs con­spire to show you what could have been in a perfect world — not «perfect perfect», as in comple­tely free of problems and issues, which would be very boring, but «perfectly interesting», as in full of surprises, revelations, inspirations, artistry, and absurd happenings. Then the illusionism is over, and ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ, alternating between John's mini-sketches of life's stupidity and senselessness and Paul's mini-sketch of life's routine, sweeps the whole circus show away. In other words, Sgt. Pepper builds itself up, slowly and expertly, only to self-implode in its last track. The final grand piano chord, all of its fifty seconds or so, solemnly accompanies the wind blowing away the debris.

 

Unsurprisingly, when I was just a kid, I hated ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ — loved it for its melodicity, catchiness, and depth, of course, but subconsciously hated it because, for a whole five minutes, it was telling me that the fun is over, and that Hollywood forgot to supply a happy ending. In a way, I still hate it, as much as that childhood feeling is still with me, feeling as sorry for Lucy In The Sky, Lovely Rita, and Mr. Kite as one may feel about one's favorite characters killed off at the end of a Shakesperian tragedy. But what is it, really, if not the firmest proof of the ultimate great­ness of Sgt. Pepper? Without this particular direction of the flow, the album on the whole could be no different, in attitude and atmosphere, from, say, a Moody Blues record. With it, it is simply one of the greatest «musical oratorios» ever made. To hell with the pretentious naysayers.

 

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (1967)

 

1) Magical Mystery Tour; 2) The Fool On The Hill; 3) Flying; 4) Blue Jay Way; 5) Your Mother Should Know; 6) I Am The Walrus; 7) Hello Goodbye; 8) Strawberry Fields Forever; 9) Penny Lane; 10) Baby You're A Rich Man; 11) All You Need Is Love.

 

This is a «fake» LP, originally assembled for US release by combining the British EP, containing six songs from the movie Magical Mystery Tour, with a bunch of non-LP A- and B-sides from 1967, including even the famous ʽStrawberry Fieldsʼ / ʽPenny Laneʼ single that chronologically preceded Sgt. Pep­­per. In other words, a blatant mish-mash with a vaguely conceptual first side and a totally incoherent second side. A non-album as such — but still one of the best albums of 1967. In fact, quite a few people even happen to prefer it to Sgt. Pepper, for reasons that include «anti-hype», but are not confined to it. But let us not jump to conclusions.

 

The movie, as we all know, was just one more in a series of Paul's «let's try anything» ideas that his brain was spitting out from 1967 to 1969 in a frenzy that most of his bandmates generally found irrita­ting. Why they decided to go along with his suggestion to hire one bus, one filming crew, several sets of dorky costumes, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and hop around the coun­try in search of filming inspiration, is anybody's guess. (Maybe some of them were too stoned to resist). The results could be predictable: some parts of the movie turned out interesting and chal­lenging, some did not, nobody could agree on which ones were and which ones weren't — by the Beatles' usual standards, this was startling enough to be branded as the band's first unequivocal failure. Imagine the critical relief — waiting four years for a chance to say the Beatles suck at something, with comparatively little risk of a rotten tomato in the back.

 

In retrospect, Magical Mystery Tour (the movie) absorbed a little more credit. Most people these days agree that the «music video» segments match the songs fairly well, despite the band's rather lacklustre dance moves on ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ and rather cheesy-looking smoke over­cloaking George on ʽBlue Jay Wayʼ. John manages to remain cool for most of his onscreen time (which isn't all that much), Ringo is always Ringo, the Bonzo Dog Band «live» clip is mostly worth it for the stripper touch (great incentive to get your twelve-year old to watch the movie), and some of the «proto-Monty Python» gags/sketches, like the car race scene, are... provocative? Suggestive? Pre-post-modernistic? Whatever. Bottomline is, the movie does not make much sen­se, but few things in 1967 made much sense, and in that respect, it is a fairly diagnostic document of its time — and you get to see the Beatles in it. Back in 1967, it was just a Christmas special with the Beatles in it; nowadays, how much Beatles video footage from 1967 do we have?

 

As for the music, Magical Mystery Tour was as much of a straightforward sequel to Sgt. Pep­per as it was a departure from the formula. Sequel — because it is another trip to a fantasy world, even more crazy and surreal in some ways than Pepper's. Departure — because this time, there is frankly no concept whatsoever, other than the title track, whose purpose it is to announce, with bombast and fanfares this time, that what you are about to hear and feel is... different. As if any­body had any doubts about that. Just look at the album sleeve.

 

The thinly-conceptual framework once again belongs to Paul, who also dominates Magical Mys­tery Tour in sheer statistical terms (three out of six songs are his, and I have no idea who wrote the main theme for ʽFlyingʼ — intuitively, seems more Lennon-like to me, and it is John behind the dominating Mellotron, but no final word here). But the funny thing is, it is Paul's material that is the «sanest» on the soundtrack. The title track may announce a journey into the depths of the surreal, but it is just a statement — it could just as well announce a trip to the Taj Mahal. ʽThe Fool On The Hillʼ is existentialist-sentimental Brit-pop balladry. And ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ is Paul's most retro-oriented music-hall send-up so far. Clouds? Wizards? LSD? Absurd­ism? Not for Paul, really, who provokes the whole band into conjuring mushroom imagery and then quietly backs out while there's still time.

 

Which does not imply these aren't great songs — on the contrary! All right, so the title track pro­bably does not qualify as «great», because its aim is modest; but within the scopes of that aim, it is as perfect a PR statement for the trip as there ever could be. The greatest bus commercial in the history of mankind for sure. As for the other two, both of which start out with solo Paul at the piano, and then evolve into something bigger, these may be even more poignant than anything «solo Paul» wrote for Sgt. Pepper.

 

It makes little sense to add my two cents on ʽFool On The Hillʼ, the finest Taoist anthem in Wes­tern pop music history, but I would like to specifically stand up for ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ, which I frequently see condemned as «soft pap», «presaging the worst fluff of McCartney's solo career», etc. Anyone who perceives it that way should play it back to back with the Fred Astaire-dedicated ʽYou Gave Me The Answerʼ on Venus And Mars — and see what it is that separates major genius from minor. Because the latter is also melodic, memorable, and modestly charming, but in a «fluffy», «shallow» way, resulting in a sugary-sentimental mood (which is one of the major moods of The Songbook, though, so it's not as if the goal weren't reached).

 

Yet ʽMotherʼ is not just a «tribute» to any particular one of Paul's pre-war idols. Its A minor in­tro and thoroughly sad intonations throughout are really a lament — light tragic intonations here, just like on ʽFool On The Hillʼ, only even less noticeable because the minimalistic words do not re­flect any tragedy by themselves. But "though she was born a long long time ago..." — doesn't that sound sad? One of Sir Paul's greatest talents, as we know, is making us all feel for the lonely and the rejected, from ʽFor No Oneʼ and ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ through ʽJunkʼ and then all the way to ʽLo­nely Old Peopleʼ (also on Venus And Mars), and, although this one is much less obvious, it ac­tu­ally fits well in the same category. It's a «happy-sad» funeral march to days long gone by, and I do not care in the least if Paul's original intention was merely to toss off a trifle — trifles do not trigger tear-shedding mechanisms.

 

That said, ʽMotherʼ is not the least bit «psychedelic», either. The honours are delegated to the rougher Beatles — Mr. George «Please Don't Be Long» Harrison and Mr. John «GOO GOO GOO JOOB» Lennon. The former comes up with an unusually lightweight number: nothing to do with religion, philosophy, or the meaning of life in general, just an impressionistic account of get­ting lost in L. A. fog. Of course, nobody forces you to take the lines "There's a fog upon L.A. / And my friends have lost their way" literally — it is much more fun to take them figuratively, as an unveiled indictment of the hippie drug culture (which George genuinely disliked). But even if we pay no attention to the accounted details of the genesis of the song (presumably written while waiting for Derek Taylor to locate Blue Jay Way), it is still hardly possible to see the music as anything but a sonic impression of thick, dense fog that paralyzes normal activity. Drone, phasing, backward tapes, cold Hammond organ, uncredited cello — the whole song is one big, aggressive manipulation of the senses, the best example of this approach during George's very brief  «expe­rimental» period of late 1967 / early 1968 (others include ʽOnly A Northern Songʼ and a few bits of the Wonderwall Music soundtrack, all recorded during more or less the same period).

 

As for ʽI Am The Walrusʼ... well, the song probably deserves writing a whole novel about it some day (and not just because it was the song that originally introduced me to the band in all se­ri­ous­ness). For John, it was first and foremost a lyrical breakthrough: after "elementary penguin sin­ging Hare Krishna" and "crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess", there were no more limits. But there is so much more. If ʽLucy In The Skyʼ was the man's tribute to «idealistic psychedelia», a kaleidoscopic paradise of surreal beauty, ʽI Am The Walrusʼ shifts to aggressive psychedelia, if not donwright militaristic. It is, to some degree, sarcastic and cynical, but mostly it just kicks ass, right from the gloomy intro and especially from the moment when Ringo butts in at 0:14. This is when you know that you are going to be ripped to pieces.

 

Meaning, really, that the true breakthrough may not be «textual», but «personal»: the words mean nothing in particular, but when taken all together, they form a string of brutal, ugly, gross ima­gery ("pigs in the sky", "let your knickers down", "yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye", "semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower", etc.), all of it delivered in John's most sneering, sharpest tone, as if he'd just finally come out with an official, government-sealed permis­sion to spit as much venom as he is capable of. And the music? The string arrangements on the song alone inspired Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne to form Electric Light Orchestra — pop music, up to that point, had never seen cellos and violins swoop up and down like hungry vultures or hack away at the listener like razors and knives. And the climactic moments? Whoever said that the chorus of "GOO GOO GOO JOOB" was meaningless? It's all in the modulation — the way I've always felt it, in «walrus-speech» this means "FUCK YOU VERY MUCH", and I've always preferred the exquisite way it is expressed in walrus-speech over the way it is normally done in Standard Literary English.

 

In the movie, ʽI Am The Walrusʼ comes in the middle of things, whereas the forced ballroom dan­cing scene of ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ rounds them up; and in the movie, this is logical, but the eventual sequencing of the American release, which shifted the running order, is more delicious these days — the soft sentimental sadness of the simple piano on ʽMotherʼ giving way to the ominous electric piano of ʽWalrusʼ is a fine transition, and the whole «magical mystery tour» now ends with a chaotic, unresolved fade-out that leaves no questions answered, rather than a strange suggestion that a trip to the world of the surreal should end on a «retro note». On the other hand, it also ensures that there really is no specific framework to this whole enterprise. Paul does Paul's thing, John does John's thing, and George's friends are lost in L.A. fog.

 

Then there is the second side, gathering most of the odds and ends from the rich harvest of 1967. ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ and ʽPenny Laneʼ need no introduction: arguably the greatest «dou­ble A-side» in history, if only because there is no other example in the chronology of the Beatles' 45"s where one side would contain a «seminal» John classic and the other one an equally «semi­nal» Paul classic. (One could argue for ʽPaperback Writerʼ / ʽRainʼ or ʽHey Judeʼ / ʽRevolutionʼ, but in each of these cases it is Paul's song that wins over in terms of popularity — no matter if it's «right» or «wrong»). It's also a particularly great example in that the two songs are expectedly and admirably different in terms of personalities — John's psychedelic experimental introspection vs. Paul's illusionist ultra-melodic whimsy — but both songs are also somehow coherent themati­cally, taking their cues from both writers' childhood memories. It's as if they were both given a «homework task» for their late 1966 break, and each performed it in his own style. And who won? From the historical significance point of view, obviously, John, what with the bizarre multi-part structure and all. From the point of view of «catchiness» — Paul, hands down. But why should we really care? Both songs still blow our minds today the same way they did in early 1967.

 

ʽHello Goodbyeʼ works as a fine intro to Side B — Paul at his carnivalesque best, impossible to resist even for grouchy old people who never kids — and ʽBaby You're A Rich Manʼ is a bit of «filler» mostly worth it for the lyrics: when you stop to think about it, it works best as an earthy drop of antidote to the pathos of ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ, and it might have been more fun if the silly American people actually put it where it belongs: after ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ, not before, deflating the idealism in properly cynical fashion. Which is not to say that ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ is not a great song, or that there is something wrong or harmful about its idealism. (The verses of the song actually run deeper than simplistic propaganda — "there's nothing you can do that can't be done" is slyly reminiscent of the much more straightforward "there's nothing that can't be done by you", but bears quite the opposite meaning; so Brian Epstein's comment that «the song cannot be misinterpreted; it is a clear message saying that love is everything» may really need a little bit of refinement).

 

In the end, if you give Magical Mystery Tour in its LP incarnation to an unsuspecting friend and ask him, «Is this a concept album or what?», he might well respond that it is — starting off with an invitation to explore the unknown, taking the listener to distant hills with fools, clouds spew­ing forth L. A. fog, eggmen and walruses, nostalgia mixed with fantasy, and finally culminating in the most bombastic anthem to L-O-V-E ever written. He might even remark that it is a concept album that is better grounded in reality than Sgt. Pepper, yet also more optimistic in its conclu­sions, with a happy grand finale as opposed to the mind-shattering explosion of ʽDay In The Lifeʼ. Then again, he may be more astute than that and guess the truth — that there is no concept here whatsoever — but I can only judge for myself, and I myself have always regarded the album as coherent, even if the Beatles themselves never intended such a coherence (and how could they, if the songs had been recorded all through the year?).

 

The album may be dominated by its colorful sleeve imagery — resplendent «yellow, orange and green», shooting stars, and the band in grotesque animal costumes (and we still have no true idea of who really was the walrus, no matter what John says) — and that, in turn, sometimes leads to the impression that they are now engaging in «psychedelia for kids», where Pepper was «psy­chedelia for adults». An impression that is not entirely untrue: from Paul's «fluffy» bits to John's ever increasingly demonstrated love for Lewis Carroll, there may be even more of those indivi­dual bits here that would make the album delightful for the little ones (and I never denied that it was the eye-and-ear-candy of MMT that led me to the Beatles as well). But, as it happens with every Beatles record, we have layers here — all sorts of. Musical, lyrical, ideological, personal, whatever. It's just another mini-world where leaping from tree to tree may be a goal in itself. And it is all the more admirable considering the hard, turbulent times when most of it was recorded — following up on Brian Epstein's death and all. With the father gone, you'd expect the kids to start growing up. Instead, they are making one of their kiddiest albums ever. Fascinating, right?

 

THE BEATLES (1968)

 

1) Back In The U.S.S.R.; 2) Dear Prudence; 3)  Glass Onion; 4) Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da; 5) Wild Honey Pie; 6) The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill; 7) While My Guitar Gently Weeps; 8) Happiness Is A Warm Gun; 9) Martha My Dear; 10) I'm So Tired; 11) Blackbird; 12) Piggies; 13) Rocky Raccoon; 14) Don't Pass Me By; 15) Why Don't We Do It In The Road?; 16) I Will; 17) Julia; 18) Birthday; 19) Yer Blues; 20) Mother Nature's Son; 21) Every­bo­dy's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey; 22) Sexy Sadie; 23) Helter Skelter; 24) Long, Long, Long; 25) Revolution 1; 26) Honey Pie; 27) Savoy Truffle; 28) Cry Baby Cry; 29) Revolution 9; 30) Good Night.

 

By and large, the Beatles had no big reason to exist after Sgt. Pepper. Regardless of how much new ground it broke or didn't break in the world of actual music, it definitely broke a huge, huge lot of ground in the public conscience — definitely more so than any subsequent Beatles release. In 1967, the band pushed its creativity so far that the obvious question, «what next?», could seem unanswerable. I mean, really, where is one supposed to go after ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ?..

 

That the Beatles only had two years of toil and turmoil left after Sgt. Pepper is hardly surprising; the real miracle is that they had these two years, and that their legacy, these days, continues to be loved and respected as much as everything else (and even more, by some people at least) — de­spite the fact that the band's days as major innovators were already over. For one thing, having explored the experimental possibilities of the studio as thoroughly as they could, they couldn't help but simply fall back on their main strength — melodicity, and melodicity alone doesn't earn you many points on the pedantic scales of knowledgeable, but tonedeaf critics. For another thing, the musical scene in 1968 was far more diverse and competitive than it was two years earlier. It is one thing to compete with the Byrds and the Beach Boys — but compete with Hendrix? Cream? Procol Harum? The Nice? The Grateful Dead? Frank Zappa? Dozens of classy, innovative, in­spired acts, frequently including far more technically accomplished musicians? A hard task for sure, but an inevitable one: having set their plank that high in 1966, the Beatles had no right to lose face in 1968. In terms of pure creativity, it must have been an intensely tough period.

 

But The White Album offers a brilliant solution to the problem. What can you do if you have hit your ceiling and «up» is no longer an alternative? Simple as heck: instead of going high, you can allow yourself to go wide. You do not have to prove that you are the best in the world: instead, it is much more fun to show that you are the world. Everyone who ever complained that the 2 LPs of The White Album were overkill, and that the whole thing might have benefited from throw­ing out some filler, completely missed the point. If there are songs on here that you don't like, feel free to edit them out of your playlist — just like it is hardly a sin to skip over a few hundred unin­spiring pages of War And Peace when you set out to re-read it — but do not deny them their rightful place as an integral part of the whole composition.

 

Legend has it that there was no original idea to turn The Beatles into a humorous, insightful, Beatle-approved genre anthology. The band members just had a lot of free time on their hands while staying in India with the Maharishi, and they happened to make much better use of it than simply wasting it on transcendental meditation (this is why, after all, John is John, Paul is Paul, and Mike Love is, and will always be, Mike Love). They never were enemies of genre-hopping in the first place, and they were always open to influences, so what's up with a little «parroting»? But as the actual sessions started, and the final result started getting fleshed out, the project took on a life of its own. The Beatles turned into a small autonomous universe, no less.

 

As I try to recollect some of the oldest, possibly silliest, but also most intriguing impressions of the record, one thing that keeps surfacing is the contrast of the utter whiteness of the album sleeve with the sheer number of songs printed in small type on the back cover. That long, long stretch for Side B in particular — the whole «MarthaMyDearI'mSoTiredBlackbirdPiggiesRocky Rac­co­on­Don't Pass Me ByWhy Don't We Do It In The RoadIWillJulia» thing had something freaky to it. You knew it wasn't a de-jure concept album, but somehow even the way all these titles were condensed in one small area of the cover suggested some sort of happy family unity. Then you threw on the album, and there were all these little links like ʽWild Honey Pieʼ, and seamless tran­sitions from one song to another, and ultra-short pauses between songs that did not have actual transitions, and the songs were all so different, yet somehow seemed to belong together.

 

Relistening to The Beatles now only reaffirms that old feeling. The sequencing of the songs, and the manner in which they flow into one another, is almost as important an ingredient as the songs themselves. The Beatles is, indeed, a smorgasbord of musical styles, but, more importantly, it is a smorgasboard of moods, and the different ways in which those moods replace one another over the album's ninety minutes work magic on one's psychics.

 

Right off the bat, we have the reckless, joyful (but also notably tongue-in-cheek) rock'n'roll party mood of ʽBack In The USSRʼ contrasted back-to-back with — «pacified with», I'd say — the soft, na­tural, acoustic tenderness of ʽDear Prudenceʼ. The tense, nervous flow and the dark psychedelic string coda of ʽGlass Onionʼ replaced, in a flash, by the upbeat bounce of the merry ska piano of ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ. The unexpected transformation of the mysterious, but clearly ironic ʽBun­galow Billʼ into the dead-serious cosmic despair of ʽWhile My Guitar Gently Weepsʼ. Once we get over to the second side, the songs get generally shorter and are so densely packed that, with just a little bit more effort, the whole thing would have turned into a never-ending medley, some­thing that the band would actually realize on their last album. ʽI Willʼ and ʽJuliaʼ, the album's most openly romantic numbers, complete the side in a competing manner — no better compari­son in the Beatles catalog of the difference in John and Paul's approach to saying «I love you».

 

The second half of the album raises the bar on harshness, with ʽHelter Skelterʼ serving as the ral­lying point for Side C and ʽRevolution 9ʼ looming far and wide over everything else on Side D. This is probably the reason why I never felt the same warmth for the second LP when I was a kid: after the colorful Brothers-Grimm panorama of the first seventeen tracks, the songs got longer, the moods got sourer, and the lone lightweight, humorous protest of the vaudeville of ʽHoney Pieʼ, a tiny island of sunshine lost in a sea of relative darkness, was never enough to counteract the huge sonic nightmares built up by Paul (I remember literally being afraid of the diabolical buzz coda of ʽHelter Skelterʼ) or by John (and Yoko, since ʽRevolution 9ʼ should clearly be cre­dited to the two of them, breaking up the happy Beatles home). The chaos brought on by ʽRevo­lution 9ʼ is so brutal that the necessary and inevitable «pacification» — the Ringo-sung romantic lullaby of ʽGood Nightʼ — does not feel like a happy ending. More like a slightly relieving calm before the upcoming storm, wherever it may come from. (For that reason, the evil of ʽHelter Skel­terʼ also needs quick remedying with a soft, caressing George number — and, likewise, ʽLong Long Longʼ calms down the nerves, but does not completely relax them).

 

Thus, The Beatles may be imagined as a sort of musical Odyssey, a gradual descent from the light into darkness — starting off innocently and colorfully, with all sorts of gags and tricks and fluffiness, and ending with raucous, aggressive, sometimes apocalyptic sounds. The transition is gradual (there are «previews» and «fallbacks» on both LPs), but quite notable, and even though it may simply be my personal impression, or just a coincidence, for me it is at least a direct answer to the question «wouldn't it be better if The Beatles had been a single album?» Sure it would. For those who just want to see the Beatles as reliable «hitmakers».

 

The album is frequently checked as the first true «non-collective» Beatles project, on which not only were most songs written completely individually (despite preserving the traditional «Lennon / McCartney» crediting), but sometimes even recorded individually, with Paul working in one studio, John in the other, and Ringo leaving the band because, with Paul surreptitiously re-recor­ding his drum parts and all, he reasonably felt himself superfluous. (It would be cool to assert that he only returned under the condition that the rest would finally include one of his compositions on the album, but, apparently, ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ was recorded several months before the row took place). Does this bear any direct reflection on the album as such? I don't think so. The indi­vidual members' individual styles had already been well defined by 1965-66, and the only thing that could have mattered was a potential loss of «quality control», where egos would triumph over common sense.

 

ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ is clearly the best example: McCartney was originally dead set against its in­clusion, and I am not exactly sure what made him change his mind. It represents the biggest and most obvious influence of Yoko Ono on the band, but calling it a «totally non-Beatles kind of thing» is difficult, because it raises the natural question of what exactly are the defining aspects of a «Beatles kind of thing». If the answer is «melody and harmony», then yes, ʽRevolution 9ʼ is an alien inclusion; if it is «breaking boundaries and searching for new forms of expression», then it definitely is not. I have never had any love for ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ, and often used to sacrilegious­ly skip it, going straight from "can you take me back" to ʽGood Nightʼ. But I cannot deny that the «song», with all of its much-too-obvious adoration of musique concrète, has a purpose — a sonic description of utter social chaos — which is essentially fulfilled; at any rate, it is a much more complex, well thought out, and properly executed sound collage than the trivial «experimental hooliganry» that clogs up John and Yoko's early solo albums. Nor can I deny that ʽGood Nightʼ right after ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ has a soothing, calming effect, whereas on its own it may seem too overtly sentimental, or even boring.

 

But ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ is far from the only artistic «advance» that John demonstrates on the al­bum. With the flower power / psychedelia cloud no longer hanging over the band, this gives eve­ryone a good chance to delve into the personal vaults, and John comes out with ʽSexy Sadieʼ (a thinly veiled attack on the Maharishi and one of the deadliest character assassination songs in pop history), ʽI'm So Tiredʼ (the coolest ever song written about... being tired?), and particularly ʽJu­liaʼ — a truly transcendental ballad, betraying his «mother complex» (the song is «formally» ad­dressed to his mother, but in reality blends her in one with Yoko) and standing several feet above every pure «love song» he'd written up to that point. Probably because that was the first time he had really fallen in love, a fact that professional Yoko haters have to bear in mind: without Yoko, there might never have been a ʽJuliaʼ.

 

That said, it is once again Paul who is in general charge of the process. At this point, John is cle­ar­ly tired of the competition: his role is essentially reduced to simply writing a bunch of great songs and donating them to the band's collective fund. Paul, on the other hand, is the one respon­sible for the «Beatles sound» and the general structure of the album (which is also why he has al­ways been the staunchest defender of its 2-LP volume). The amount of «silly fluff» that he con­tributes dangerously grows at an exponential rate — most of the «parody» numbers on the album are his, be it the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys on ʽBack In The U.S.S.R.ʼ, country-pop on ʽRocky Raccoonʼ, old-school vaudeville on ʽHoney Pieʼ, or bubblegummy ska on ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ. But all these numbers fit in very well inside the slots of the band's musical voyage: Paul is not just «playing the fool» throughout because his inner fool (on the hill) got the best of him, but because a completely serious take on these genres would place the Beatles at a disadvantage — surely they could never hope to compete with the best masters of ska, or country, or proto-hea­vy metal, etc., on a «serious» level. Their saving grace could only be a superior sense of melody and harmony — and humor. Both are present.

 

Speaking of humor, there is humor a-plenty, and it's working. The lyrics to ʽU.S.S.R.ʼ are slyly parodic of Chuck Berry's ʽBack In The USAʼ (substituting Russia for North Korea would have been even more poignant, but the theme is not as popular), and probably contain the first signifi­cant pun on the toponymic ambivalence of «Georgia» in the history of mankind. The «life is won­derful» atmosphere of ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ is exaggerated to the point of total absurdity — ap­parently, the names of «Desmond» and «Molly» were switched accidentally in the last verse as compared to the one before last, but they kept it that way because "Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face" sounded more fun. ʽRocky Raccoonʼ sends the whole «country-western» thing up like nothing else, with the honky piano breaks a particularly brilliant idea. And I may be wrong here, but isn't ʽBirthdayʼ a smart-as-heck ridiculization of «party atmosphere»? In a way, it presages the Ramones with their «lobotomized» perspective on life's rituals and conventions: big, energetic, straightforward, and making a sharp point by being utterly pointless.

 

On the other hand, there is no way a serious analysis could simply brush away Paul as the «fun guy» of the album, leaving all of its «soul» to John's isolated contributions. ʽMartha My Dearʼ may be named after the man's sheepdog, but the naming will fool no one: unless there is some­thing we do not know (and do not want to know) about Paul's relations with his animals, the song moves from optimistic love-and-tenderness ("Martha my dear...") to highly concerned sorrow ("hold your head up...") to an almost threatening attitude ("take a good look around you...") and then back again, in reverse order, in a perfectly realistic manner. ʽBlackbirdʼ and ʽMother Natu­re's Sonʼ conceal great depth behind their humble folksy acoustic surfaces — the former being the sharpest, most intelligent anthem to personal freedom ever written by the man, the latter cele­brating the simple joys of life so convincingly that even a stone cold dedicated city dweller, un­less he is completely tonedeaf, will get a moment's urge to move to the country. (Have the Maha­rishi to thank for that — the song required some Indian inspiration).

 

Furthermore, although the «battle» between ʽI Willʼ and ʽJuliaʼ is clearly unwinnable by the for­mer (which never even begins to seek for the same epic heights), on its own ʽI Willʼ is still an ab­solute triumph along the lines of ʽHere, There And Everywhereʼ: sweet, sugary sentimentality fleshed out in the shape of heavenly beauty. Actually, the main influence here seems to be Buddy Holly, as the atmosphere is clearly reminiscent of ʽWords Of Loveʼ (even the guitar tones are comparable), but Paul pushes it up one more notch with a perfect vocal (which required 67 takes to get properly) and a particularly brilliant melodic resolution in the end. Then it's three more gentle bongo taps, and the mike is thrown over to John.

 

Additionally, there are four good-to-great George songs on here: ʽPiggiesʼ is an odd harpsichord-driven bit of social critique, ʽLong Long Longʼ is very atmospheric (but so subtle that it is barely even possible to hear what's going on behind the bass lines), ʽSavoy Truffleʼ is disciplined R'n'B that reads like a parody on moralizing, but, naturally, you'll have to have them all pulled out after ʽWhile My Guitar Gently Weepsʼ, which is simply one of the greatest songs ever written, period. Everybody who prefers the original, stripped-down acoustic demo version now available on An­thology 3 should be banned from procreation — the demo version is fine, but what is the sense in writing a song about a guitar that weeps at the turning world that doesn't have a weeping guitar? Kudos to George for recognizing the best candidate for the job, as well: everybody knows that Eric Clapton is responsible for the solo, but few ever mention that it was really the very first time in Eric's career that he played his instrument that way. Before ʽWhile My Guitarʼ, Eric was all about rock'n'roll flash, angry blueswailing, or Cream-style psycho-jamming. After ʽGuitarʼ, there were Derek & The Dominos, ʽLaylaʼ, etc. — get the drift? We do not simply have Clapton to thank for adding a cosmic dimension to a George Harrison song — we have Harrison to thank for bringing out the best in Clapton.

 

Finally, let us not forget about poor Ringo. ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ was an old ditty that he'd worked on since 1964, and chances are it would have never seen the light of day on a Beatles album if it weren't the White Album. As it is, the smorgasbord is large enough to accommodate everybody, even the friendly, but compositionally-challenged drummer boy. And it's a fun, catchy tune that gets a tongue-in-cheek wall-of-sound arrangement, pianos and violins and all, which it probably would have never gotten in 1964. (Also, without this boost of confidence there may never have been an ʽOctopus' Gardenʼ).

 

One popular assessment of The Beatles is that, for the Beatles, it signalled a «return-to-roots»: the band's contribution to the emergent roots-rock movement that stepped away from the excesses of psychedelia and made a point of reintegrating back in the world of «earthly» values. For one thing, it marks a return of guitar-oriented rock tunes — ʽBack In The U.S.S.R.ʼ announces this shift fairly loudly. For another, the «absurdist» segments of the album either place most of their absurd in the lyrics (ʽHappiness Is A Warm Gunʼ), or veer away towards more «intellectualized» musical directions (ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ).

 

This is all true, and is also well reflected in the evolution of superficial features (plain white cover instead of the rainbow colors of 1967, «homely» photos of the band members, etc.), but no one should be misled into thinking that The Beatles was, in any way, a «step back» in the direction of Revolver (which did place much of its trust into loud electric rock) or Rubber Soul (which did have an intentionally «rootsy» sound most of the time). There certainly was an understanding that the big masquerade of 1967 had been pushed a bit too far, but the difference is that in 1966, the Beatles were a leading force in popular music; in 1968, the Beatles were «elder statesmen», car­rying the weight of the world on their shoulders. The greatest single wonder of The Beatles is that somehow, in some way, despite all the odds, evading all the glaring traps and pitfalls, these 2 LPs managed to convince the public at large — your humble servant included — that the weight has been lifted.

 

I mean, what other album, single or double, recorded in 1968 (and the year was fairly rife with great albums), could produce an equally imposing impression? With all the breakthroughs and the discoveries and the technical achievements and philosophic backgrounds, there was only one niche open — that of the «wise encyclopaedist» — and the Beatles were only too happy to occu­py it. Accidentally, or intentionally, coming up with the finest encyclopaedic album in history. (Don't even let me hear of Todd Rundgren in this context).

 

If you are waiting for critical remarks, I have none. Barring the disputable case of ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ, The White Album, through its devilishly clever structuring and «ideology», is unassailable. You think the melody of ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ is silly and pedestrian? It's supposed to be that way — it is a friendly laugh at the excessive optimism that dominates some people's lives. You think ʽYer Bluesʼ is generic and draggy? It's supposed to drag — it's a musical projection of pis­sed-off misery (or, rather, self-miseration). You think ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ should never have seen the light of day? Have pity on poor Ringo — the song is not half-bad, and there is no reason why he should be excluded from this special feast of life. And so on.

 

The Beatles deserves its title and its minimalistic cover — both imply that it is only the music that matters, not the PR-friendly environment. On the other hand, I sometimes wish the front sleeve were more colorful, because that would arguably be a better reflection of the new gallery of wonderful characters that have been introduced here to us. From Dear Prudence to Sexy Sadie, from Rocky Raccoon to Mother Nature's Son, from Bungalow Bill to Martha, from piggies living piggy lives to me and my mon­key, The Beatles are really not less «rainbow-y» than the pictures painted in 1967. They are sim­ply less cloudy and live in closer proximity to us mortals — but at the same time, The Beatles ne­ver really ceases to be a wonderous fairy tale, intriguing, exciting, yet also with a fairly ambiguous and unsettling ending. How great it is that they had it in them to complete this project before personal problems finally took over.

 

YELLOW SUBMARINE (1969)

 

1) Yellow Submarine; 2) Only A Northern Song; 3) All Together Now; 4) Hey Bulldog; 5) It's All Too Much; 6) All You Need Is Love; 7) Pepperland; 8) Sea Of Time; 9) Sea Of Holes; 10) Sea Of Monsters; 11) March Of The Mea­nies; 12) Pepperland Laid Waste; 13) Yellow Submarine In Pepperland.

 

There is no pressing need to decry and deplore Yellow Submarine as a «failure», since the album was never truly geared for any sort of success, and everyone knew it at the time: it never even managed to hit the top of the charts in either the UK or the US. Perhaps, had it been marketed along the lines of Magical Mystery Tour — for instance, packed with contemporary singles like ʽLady Madonnaʼ and ʽHey Judeʼ on Side B — it might have seen a warmer reception. But, on the other hand, unlike Magical Mystery Tour, this particular project was somewhat anachronistic from the very beginning, so even that might not have helped.

 

The thing is, Yellow Submarine (the movie), together with its soundtrack, genuinely belongs in 1967, with all of its humorous surrealism and young-and-innocent flower power vibe. Most of the basic work on the movie was done in late 1967, and the Beatles themselves filmed their brief cameo at the end of the cartoon in January 1968, before the Indian trip that can truly be seen as the last important watermark separating the band's «mid-period» (psychedelia, rabid innovation, friendly cohesion) from its «late period» (back-to-basics, Elder Statesmen, dissent and dissoluti­on). Much had changed in the world, and for the band, by July 1968, when the movie was premi­ered; and even much more had changed by January 17, 1969, when the soundtrack was finally re­leased (apparently, the delay had a lot to do with George Martin recording the symphonic score for the second side).

 

Thus, it is almost ironic that the soundtrack to one of the friendliest «buddy» cartoons in the his­tory of animation, celebrating peace and love and bright colors and substances, came out at the same time that the band, on the brink of total collapse, was trying to patch up its recent fallout with George Harrison, only briefly delaying the inevitable. And hence, one more reason for a subconscious lack of respect for Yellow Submarine: when placed in the chronological context of late 1968 / early 1969, it feels fake, or, rather, just uncomfortably anachronistic — the first «new» Beat­les release that reeks of nostalgia, rather than points to the future, or, at least, gives the ex­haustive low­down on the current situation.

 

The other reason for «despisal» is, of course, the fact that even the first side of the album, with only four out of six «new» songs on it, is mainly comprised from outtakes. Only John's ʽHey Bulldogʼ, recorded during the same session as ʽLady Madonnaʼ, was donated to the movie right away, and, naturally, it is the best of the lot. Incidentally, the contrast between the energetic, but harmless-friendly boogie piano melody of ʽLady Madonnaʼ and the melodically simpler, but de­finitely more «evil», «barking» piano riff of ʽHey Bulldogʼ, recorded almost back-to-back, is another glaring textbook example of the John/Paul dichothomy. Watch how John can be friendly, funny, mentoresque, and downright nasty at the same time: "if you're lonely, you can talk to me" is sung with such primal ferocity that I'd rather not be lonely, given the actual choice. On the other hand, the final bit of dialog — "I said woof" etc. — is one of the most lovingly silliest mo­ments in the Beatles' entire career. The song is a worthy companion to ʽI Am The Walrusʼ in sheer terms of «what the heck is going on?», even though it lacks the latter's intentional «epic» vibe. A ʽWalrusʼ for the kids?

 

The other three songs were all written or even recorded in 1967: George's two contributions are both outtakes from the Sgt. Pepper era (but they do make Yellow Submarine the only original Beatles album on which George is the main contributor), and Paul's ʽAll Together Nowʼ was con­ceived in the Magical Mystery Tour period. The Paul song clearly did not make the grade be­cause of its explicit kiddie orientation (it is even based on a basic counting-out rhyme structure), and George's songs are both somewhat questionable. ʽOnly A Northern Songʼ shows no serious at­tempt at creating a vocal melody, playing out rather like an absent-minded psychedelic jam — it is rather obvious that, in the wake of ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ and ʽMr. Kiteʼ, the decision not to let it compete with these songs in 1967 was correct.

 

ʽIt's All Too Muchʼ is far, far better, one of George's most underrated love anthems, in my opi­nion — not to mention the kick-off, a wall-crumbling fifteen-second Hendrix tribute if there ever was one (and, although much of the song is dominated by keyboards and trumpets, the guitar throughout is 1967-distorted-psychedelia at its wickedest). The song is somewhat marred by the extra-long coda, though, which is actually funny, considering how the also-anthemic, also-uplif­ting, also-coda-focused ʽHey Judeʼ would be even longer — but, of course, the choral singing on ʽHey Judeʼ is supposed to entice and draw in the listener, making him one with the band, whereas the coda to ʽIt's All Too Muchʼ is primarily instrumental, and is probably best appreciated during a chemical holiday in Pepperland.

 

Of course, two great songs and two passable outtakes do not make up for a credible album, and, in order to pad out the results, George Martin was commissionned a full instrumental score for the second side. Which is usually the biggest complaint: that Side B has nothing to do with the Bea­tles in the first place, making the record a rip-off. This is not entirely true, of course. At least one of the pieces (ʽYellow Submarine In Pepperlandʼ) is built on the theme of a Beatles song (guess which), and besides, whatever happened to the «fifth Beatle» tag? Personally, I've always loved the ʽMarch Of The Meaniesʼ theme, and still consider it fairly «Beatlesque» in spirit (with just a pinch of Wagner thrown in for good measure).

 

Naturally, the instrumental orchestral themes work better within the context of the movie for which they were commissionned — except that in the movie, you almost never get to hear them in their entirety, logically developed from beginning to end. In any case, my firm position has always been that the original Yellow Submarine made and continues to make much better sense than the 1999 Yellow Submarine Soundtrack, a total commercial rip-off which threw out the orchestral score and replaced it with songs that were already available on regular LPs. (One could easily make oneself that kind of mix without having to buy the album). On the other hand, some­thing like a dou­ble LP mix with all the songs and all the instrumentals properly sequenced could also have been useful.

 

Which brings us to the obvious conclusion: unlike A Hard Day's Night and Help! (in their UK versions), Yellow Submarine is the Beatles' first and only true «soundtrack album», and it makes little sense to rate, judge, criticize, or enjoy it beyond the context of the animated movie which it represents. Which would have been bad news if the movie were «Beatleproof» — but, fortunate­ly, «nothing is Beatleproof», and no one is Beatleproof, including the animator George Dunning (whom laymen only know for his work on this particular cartoon), and the bunch of script writers who managed to fill a silly, simplistic fairy-tale storyline with enough subtle wit, humor, and in­telligent puns to last a lifetime.

 

The situation is simple: it makes no sense to get the Yellow Submarine LP before watching the movie, it makes no sense to not watch the movie if you care about the Beatles in the first place, and it makes no sense to crap on Yellow Submarine after watching the movie, unless the Blue Meanies actually got to you in the process. With the musical and cultural world galloping at full speed in the late Sixties, it almost feels like a last-moment soulful gift, a final memento of the era in which the Beatles were the chief symbol of the whole «make love not war» ideology. So it does have its place in the catalog — sort of like a paragraph break before the final act of the tra­gedy. Judge it on its own terms.

 

LET IT BE (1969-1970)

 

1) Two Of Us; 2) Dig A Pony; 3) Across The Universe; 4) I Me Mine; 5) Dig It; 6) Let It Be; 7) Maggie Mae; 8) I've Got A Feeling; 9) One After 909; 10) The Long And Winding Road; 11) For You Blue; 12) Get Back.

 

I am going to go for a little change of protocol here. Technically, Let It Be was the last original Beatles album, since it was released on May 8, 1970, exactly one month after the infamous McCartney press release about his leaving the band. It was also the last album on which three out of four Beatles (no Lennon) recorded a new version of an older song (George's ʽI Me Mineʼ, with the final sessions dated to January 1970), and most of the mixing was done in March/April 1970 by Phil Spector. Naturally, most discographies and review sets place it at the end of the line. Be­sides, it's called Let It Be. The title track is called ʽLet It Beʼ. How could there be a more perfect title and a more perfect title track for the Beatles' swan song?

 

But, ironically, the first rehearsal of ʽLet It Beʼ took place on January 3, 1969, at a time when tension was already running high, but there was no thought yet of an actual break-up — and the song was never intended as a musical testament, as it is quite easy to see from the lyrics. On the contrary, it is a pacifying piece, maybe even a subconscious plea for everybody to just take it easy. Which no one did, unfortunately, because by early 1969, Paul's «take it easy» was unequivocally under­stood by everyone as «take it easy and just do as I say», whether he really meant it or not.

 

The «finished» album may have come out in 1970, but in 99% of all possible ways and manners, it belongs in early 1969; and props must be given to Spector for preserving much of the attitude of early 1969. Upon release, Let It Be was heavily criticized for sounding ragged and unfinished, but that is exactly what the Beatles' musical grip was at the time — ragged and unfinished. If you ever saw the movie, you might even get the feeling that the Beatles themselves were quite ragged, although much of this has to do with the cold London climate and the necessity of getting up ear­ly in the morning to participate in the filming.

 

I have no reason to doubt that Paul's complex plan to revitalize the band was undertaken with the best of all possible intentions. Unfortunately, it just proved what many might have felt all along: namely, that being a genius composer does not automatically make you eligible for «smart poli­tician». Probably the most correct strategy at the time, if one really wanted to preserve the band as a single entity, was to take a break — let everybody's nerves cool down after the already hea­ted White Album sessions, invent alternate outlets for everybody's individuality, maybe even settle on part-time solo, part-time collective careers. Instead, less than two months after The Bea­tles was finally launched, Paul was pressing the band back in the studio, and how.

 

The idea of getting «back to the roots», playing much of the material «live in the studio», like they did in 1963, without giving in to studio trickery where each band member would sit in his own cubicle, turned out to be disastrous. For one thing, it'd been a long, long, long time since they ever did anything like that — two or three years at least. Listening to the early takes of Let It Be material, or watching the Twickenham footage in the movie, shows just how painfully rusty, and, at times, quite sloppy the results came to sound. For another, it actually involved spending more time in the presence of each other, and an increased necessity of compromising — some­thing that was much more easily done in 1963 than in 1969.

 

And finally, it was just plain wrong. It is one thing to abandon an idea that did not work, and re­trace one's steps back to the previous level when things were going all right. But the concept of «getting back to the roots» from a level that you have perfectly mastered is nothing short of ridi­culous. (Four years later, a similar change of mind would forever destroy the «hipness» of Eric Clapton). Simply put, Paul's plan was completely doomed from the start, and it also laid to rest whatever hopes there might have been of the Beatles eventually sorting out their mutual problems. In a way, Paul did kill the Beatles with the «Get Back» project — injecting a lethal dose of cama­raderie instead of a careful, step-by-step treatment.

 

Still, the Beatles could be fairly great even at their collective worst, and for demonstrating that, we have to say a big thank you to Phil Spector. These days, mostly due to active counter-pro­paganda on Paul's part, his role in the album is usually remembered as that of «the guy who put those corny strings on ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ, but I am completely on John's side of the debate: strings or no strings, Spector took the chaotic, confusing, incoherent mass of tapes from the January 1969 sessions and made the best of them. And, furthermore, he did not merely select the «cream of the crop» — he somehow managed to convey the dishevelled, tense spirit of the sessions, while at the same time avoiding showing us all of their blandness. In other words, Let It Be manages to be a glorious mess, as compared to the depressing mess that we can now officially observe in the outtakes included on Anthology 3.

 

Paul's original idea was to record the final version live, and Spector actually respected that intent: although only four songs were included from the «Rooftop Concert» — the culmination of the whole enterprise — there is certainly a live feel to the entire album, conveyed by the inclusion of snippets of dialog, pseudo-announcements ("I Dig A Pygmy, by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids! Phase One, in which Doris gets her oats!"), and little odd bits like the band launching into an accappella comic rendition of ʽDanny Boyʼ at the end of one of the rooftop numbers. Throw in such snippets as ʽMaggie Maeʼ and a little slice from the large ʽDig Itʼ jam that introduces ʽLet It Beʼ, and the informal, messy feeling is complete.

 

It does not necessarily help, because the ʽDig Itʼ jam is pointless, ʽMaggie Maeʼ is just a moment of occasional silliness, and the jokes and adlibs are only funny for the first time. But it provides some authenticity. There is no way that Let It Be could ever demand to be included into a Beatles  «Top 3» or something like that, anyway — so, if this is going to be a relatively minor release, one might as well throw on something special that would indirectly hint at why it is a minor release. Sure, the best explanation would probably have to be the heated McCartney / Harrison studio ex­change, captured in the movie, but that's carrying it a bit too far. We're happy enough with Len­non's self-ironic "thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audi­tion" at the end of the album. Would there ever have been a reason for asking that question on any previous record?

 

Still, there are at least three fully accomplished, well-produced, «completed» Beatles classics on the record — one of John's (ʽAcross The Universeʼ) and two of Paul's (the title track and ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ), which is already more great stuff than there is on... er, Yellow Sub­marine. John's song is intentionally «transcendental», and probably the quintessential «trans­cen­dental» Beatles song altogether — again, not without irony, considering how this stately, grace­fully flowing, humbly meditative anthem was written and recorded at the height of the Beatles' personal quibbles and quabbles. Discussing the religious ecstasy of ʽLet It Beʼ is hardly necessa­ry, although I must mention that this particular version is my personal favorite, compared to the sin­gle release and the movie take — because of Harrison's decision to make the solo a little more dynamic and «screechy» by going all the way up before elegantly coming down again.

 

As for ʽRoadʼ, well... frankly speaking, the song is not one of my favorite McCartney ballads anyway, so it is hard for me to say whether it works better or worse with Spector's strings or with­out them. It's got plenty of romantic pathos in its original incarnation anyway, so if it is the «cor­niness» that annoys the listener, it's right there from the beginning. If, however, it is the amaze­ment at yet another impeccable piano/vocal combination from Macca's heart that you're after, the strings arrangement hides neither part of it from you.

 

Of the «rooftop» numbers, ʽGet Backʼ is the only one that approaches the same level of accom­plishment, and for good reason: the band must have spent plenty of time working on the song in the studio, to get locked in such a tight, ideally directed groove, with Billy Preston on electric piano as the star of the show. Arguably McCartney's greatest contribution to the restrictive world of the boogie — that stomping, cavalry-charging rhythm seems so simple when you come to think of it, but somehow, nobody ever did it just like that before. Had all of their new songs come out sounding thus easy-going and inspired, the message of "get back to where you once belon­ged" might not have been wasted on the band.

 

The bad news is, instead of going on another creative rampage, a lot of studio time was wasted on remembering, rehearsing, and re-recording old standards — from ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ to ʽBesame Muchoʼ — none of which had any reason to appear on the final album, and none of which, for­tunately, did. The only exception was made for the Beatles' own ʽOne After 909ʼ, a song they'd originally tried to record at least in 1963, and now replayed it «rootsy-style» on the rooftop. It's funny, and they had lots of fun playing it, and it features an original Billy Preston piano part with a cool «electronic» ring to it... but for some reason, I've always enjoyed the original version more: the slower, more relaxed, laid back original matched the sarcastic lyrics better than the rooftop version, which tries to kick more ass in a rowdier way. Besides, John and Paul's voices do not mix up all that well on the live performance.

 

On the other hand ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ is, to me, the forgotten gem on the album. It makes for a classy, fresh, inspiring start of Side Two; it's got one of the band's best ever «looping» riffs; it's really two songs alternating with each other and then locked onto one another; it has George Har­rison playing the nastiest licks of his career at 1:25 into the song (and it's hilarious how he never managed to get them quite right in the Twickenham Studios part of the footage — and then got it so perfectly once the band was finally on the roof) — and even the lyrics make sense, because it is... well, it's probably the world's finest ode to human ability to feel. In that respect, it's funny how, in this battle, it is Paul who is the herky-jerky one, whereas John is all but playing the Dalai-lama on the "Everybody had a hard year..." part. Down with stereotypes!

 

Sure, the album feels incomplete. Some of the songs are objectively underworked — George's ʽI Me Mineʼ, fantastic as it is, lasted all of 1:34, and Spector had to replay the same section twice to bring it to a more logical completion (with brass overdubs on the second verse so it wouldn't feel too obvious). John's ʽDig A Ponyʼ gives the feeling of leaving too many melodic lines unresolved, as if he wasn't given enough time to complete all the sections. ʽFor You Blueʼ feels a little naked, too, although I love the song dearly because of its odd combination of sounds — John playing lap steel and Paul getting it on with an electric piano that seems to have been dragged out into tropi­cal sunlight and left out to dry for twelve hours straight (I almost physically feel dehydrated my­self each time after the performance).

 

But let us also remember that, much to the Beatles honor, they realized it full well themselves: this is why the final album was indefinitely shelved, as the band regrouped itself for the final ef­fort of Abbey Road, and this is why it was only released after it became clear to everybody that a brand new studio album from the Beatles was not forthcoming. Let It Be is a self-acknowledged failure, with a few moments of utter brilliance and some moments that are not quite up there (but, goes without saying, still better than 99% of the... well, you know). It should not be passed off as «just another Beatles album» — it is in equal parts a Beatles album and a historical document, and should be taken as such.

 

Which brings me to my last point: the recent re-invention of Let It Be as Let It Be... Naked is little more than a postmortem curio (I'm not saying «cash bait», because the process of messing around with the tapes again may have meant much more to Paul than simply an extra sour­ce of revenue). By discarding the Spector «innovations», taking out the «live» bits and snippets, and reshuffling the tracks, the Naked version tries to pass it off for «another Beatles album» — but it doesn't work that way. That Beatles album never existed in the first place. And I have no interest whatsoever in hearing ʽTwo Of Usʼ without the "I dig a pygmy...!" introduction, or ʽOne After 909ʼ without the ʽDanny Boyʼ bit.

 

Particularly the latter. Watch the Let It Be movie and you'll have to agree with the obvious: through­out that cold and miserable January of 1969, the happiest moment in the Beatles' col­lective life happened during those forty minutes of playing on the roof — fueled by the genuine excitement of it all and the impending danger of getting their heads smashed in by the police. The more of those minutes we have included on our copy of Let It Be, the better it makes us feel — realizing that the whole venture was not a complete waste, after all. At the very last mo­ment of his crazy plan, Paul finally had it going right. Too bad that forty minutes of playing live in the cold never got around to compensate for twenty days of misery that preceded it. Not even Billy Preston helped in the long run.

 

I can only hope that future re-editions of the Beatles' catalog will never succumb to the mistake of replacing the original Let It Be with the Naked version — although, perhaps, both have a reason to exist. To me, the Beatles are interesting not only as masters of the pop hook, but also as live human beings with a juicier feel for the universe than my own, and I sense their presence as such much better on the original album than on the sterilized «remake». Not that it's a matter of life and death or anything — screwing around with a Beatles album is nowhere near as dangerous as screwing around with the multiplication table — but on that little grading scale of life's tiny nit­picks it at least feels more important to me than the Greedo controversy. Am I wrong in thinking that Paul McCartney is more precious for humanity than George Lucas? You tell me.

 

ABBEY ROAD (1969)

 

1) Come Together; 2) Something; 3) Maxwell's Silver Hammer; 4) Oh! Darling; 5) Octopus' Garden; 6) I Want You (She's So Heavy); 7) Here Comes The Sun; 8) Because; 9) You Never Give Me Your Money; 10) Sun King; 11) Mean Mr. Mustard; 12) Polythene Pam; 13) She Came In Through The Bathroom Window; 14) Golden Slumbers; 15) Carry That Weight; 16) The End; 17) Her Majesty.

 

To say that Abbey Road sounds like no other album ever recorded is to say nothing. What is real­ly important is that Abbey Road sounds like no other Beatles album ever recorded. Within the confines of the large world that is the Beatles, Abbey Road is a sub-world in itself; a musical mystery that was supposed to put a full stop to the Beatles career — then subtly replaced it with an ellipsis. It's an open-invitation album: «Terribly sorry, guys, for having to leave you so soon, but, in compensation, we'll just give you this cool idea you could perhaps expand upon some time in the future... and this one... and one more... and another bunch... and this... and this...»

 

It so happened that I came into first contact with Abbey Road at a somewhat later date, after I'd already heard and properly assimilated the rest of the Beatles' regular catalog. I remember that first feeling — what I heard that day struck me as the product of an entirely different band. It was the Beatles for sure, and at the same time, it was a different Beatles. I wasn't even sure I «loved» those Beatles to the same extent I «loved» the normal Beatles. It didn't feel like a musical piece that was supposed to be «loved». It had a mythological aura around it. It was part-time scary, part-time disorienting, part-time religiously beautiful. You couldn't make friends with that record like you could make friends with The White Album. You couldn't understand how in the world did they manage something like that. Years later, I still cannot put it into context. There is not a single thing about Abbey Road that would scream out 1969.

 

I understand now that it certainly had to take the traumatic effects of January 1969 to bring out this side of the band. The individual Beatles generally acknowledge that they went into the Abbey Road studios one last time in the summer of 1969 feeling, or even knowing, without saying it, that this was going to be their «swan song», and this could not help but add extra solemnity and seri­ousness — that last chance had to be taken. But there's more to that. Compare the band's material on Abbey Road with the songs on their first — and generally best — solo albums, released with­in a year or so. These are great albums, but they are understandable: John's bleeding confessions, Paul's homespun absurdism and/or romance, George's straightforward search for the meaning of life (and, er, Ringo's «songs to keep Grandma happy»). Abbey Road, compared to these, opens the «doors of perception» to something entirely different, and I am not sure how to call it.

 

Let us take off from the obvious. First of all, Abbey Road is grim. The only song here that can be called relatively sunny and optimistic is ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ, and even that one works like a momentary consolation rather than an all-out idealistic anthem. Even Paul is bleak: his trademark studio silliness evolves into black humor on ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ (which some even find repulsive), and his sentimentalism into unhealthy hysteria on ʽOh! Darlingʼ. George's ʽSome­thingʼ, the album's one and only hardcore love ballad, alternates between devotion and paranoid fear. And John's songs... the beast was having a field day within him that summer.

 

Second, Abbey Road is distant. Most Beatles albums had their intimate or uniting moments, sucking in the individual guest or the collective host. Paul sweetly cooing along with an acoustic guitar. John letting you in on how he's so tired, he hasn't slept a wink. Friendly, inviting vaude­ville. Singalong choruses for family audiences. We all live in a yellow submarine, naaaah naaaah na-na-na-n-na and so on. There is nothing of the sort on Abbey Road. These songs are not made for «us»; they seem to be talking to somebody else out there, and you have no idea who. With a different band, this approach could infuriate; with the Beatles, it intrigues. There's an odd channel here that leads somewhere — I am still trying to figure it out.

 

This «distance» is perhaps best illustrated by one of my absolute favorite moments on the album — one that, for some reason, nobody ever talks about: the last minute of ʽYou Never Give Me Your Moneyʼ, that section where the repetitive "one two three four five six seven, all good chil­d­ren go to heaven" mantra kicks in. Before that section, the song is a mix of short, excellent musical ideas and understandable lyrical content; but once it begins, the combination of majestic arpeggiated riff, heavy wailing leads, and Paul's fear­some bass, gradually, softly giving way to a field of wind chimes and cicadas is simply some­thing else. It seems simple when disentangled and put on paper, but the real effect is undescri­bable. It's psychedelic, I guess, but it isn't your average psychedelia. There's some sort of loneli­ness here, a weird feeling of being stranded some­where in a whirl of alien happenings — nothing particularly threatening, more like a combination of «thoroughly uncongenial» with a sense of deep intelligence. Like you're encoun­te­ring new life forms that you really know nothing about, but still get a feeling they must be smarter than yourself.

 

Still, the words «dark» and «distant» do not suffice to properly describe the atmosphere of Abbey Road. If you just asked me to name the first «dark» and «distant» band that comes to mind, I'd probably go along with The Cure instead, and Abbey Road is nothing like The Cure. Thus, here is a third defining feature — well, you probably saw it coming — Abbey Road is cathartic. Its songs are either big and sprawling, or tense to the point of snapping, or calm and serene to the utmost, and it all comes together in a total emotional spectrum. The only one missing is hatred, but that is to be expected. Who'd expect to see hatred on the Beatles' last album?

 

Each of these songs — including even most of the little pieces in the large medley — deserves several pages of text, but overkill never helped anybody, so, instead, I will just jot down some random observations on stuff, beginning from the beginning and then proceeding in no particular order. Here goes...

 

The opening seconds. Chuck Berry could sue John for all he wanted to: ʽCome Togetherʼ may be loosely built around the chords of ʽYou Can't Catch Meʼ and even retweet the line about «old flattop», but otherwise, it's one of those cases where a borrowing of a bit of «form» adds a com­pletely new «spirit». John's «shooing» (allegedly he is supposed to say «shoot!», but I never get to hear anything except the first consonant), Paul's jumping bass pattern, and Ringo's soft, but stern «crescendo rolls» on the drums — weird combination, right? Every single Beatles album up to then would start out with a bang — a crashing power chord, a loud guitar riff, a snappy, ener­getic vocal lead, or some other musical sledgehammer. Abbey Road is the only one that starts out with an atmosphere of deep mystery instead. A sign of «maturity»?

 

ʽI Want Youʼ — too heavy, too scary, too bizarre to gain mass popularity, but is there another moment in the Beatles catalog where John's voice would match so closely the wobbling modula­tion of John's guitar? Some of these "I want you, I want you so bad" actually remind of his Yoko-fueled solo experiments (Two Virgins, Life With The Lions etc.), but, since this is a Beatles al­bum, the irrational primal energy here is properly harnessed and integrated into a «normal» musi­cal structure — which only adds memorability and further emotional impact. And even if, on the surface, the song is about going love-crazy (the Japanese curse strikes again!), it is also John's only truly ambiguous composition on the subject: the «horrific» "she's so heavy" part paints a picture of strolling through a barren wintery wasteland, knee-deep in the snow, with Abbey Road Studios' brand new synthesizers adding heavy white-noise wind support. I'm not exactly sure Yoko would harbor the same feelings for this song as she did for ʽOh My Loveʼ.

 

Probably the greatest mood transition between a Side A / Side B contrast on a Beatles album ever — especially today, when you no longer have to turn the record over manually. Just as the wind howling that winds around the doom-laden chords of ʽShe's So Heavyʼ reaches its peak, the tape is unexpectedly cut off — and replaced by the lightest, prettiest, folksiest acoustic pattern on the album. For me, this is the single greatest «musical relief» in LP history, as George comes along and literally tears the listener out of the dark wings of depression, Galadriel-fashion. As I already said, ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ is not a lot of relief: it is short, quiet, humble, and already ʽBecauseʼ returns us to slightly more troubled waters, but sometimes «a gleam of hope» on an album works more intensely, with a more profound and lasting effect, than a whole side of it.

 

People like to condemn ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ as just another silly piece of fluffy Paul crap. It is music-hall-ish enough, yes, and the lyrics are silly (and rather clumsy), but it fits the album's tenseness — hey, silly or not, Paul just wrote a song about a juvenile serial killer! — and it intro­duces the Moog synth into the Beatles' array of instruments just at the right moment. Old-time vaudeville performed on hyper-modern electronic gadgets? Count me in. It also adds up to the overall mystery feel of the album.

 

John sometimes used to say that ʽOh! Darlingʼ was a song on which Paul should have traded the lead vocal rights over to him — he may have been right, having honed the art of «passionate screaming» ever since the recording of ʽAnnaʼ way back in 1963, but Paul's lungs in 1969 were no slouch, either. The song may own a serious debt to classic R'n'B and Louisiana swamp pop, but the bridge section — Paul screaming it out like a psycho over George's razor-sharp electric chords — strictly follows the «Abbey Road spirit». Dangerous, brooding, distant. It is hardly a coincidence that both John's and Paul's love statements on Side A dump sentimentality, replacing it with madness and aggression.

 

That sort of leaves George to do the honors, but ʽSomethingʼ isn't really a «love song» per se, no matter what Frank S. might have to say about it (well, he used to introduce it as a «Lennon-Mc­Cartney» song, too). George himself never admitted personally that it was about Pattie, and some­thing tells me that his personal feelings for his wife in 1969 weren't really that deep to serve as chief inspiration. It's really a religious hymn, close in form and spirit to All Things Must Pass. And it isn't just sentimentally sweet: it swings from deep admiration ("something in the way she moves...") to nervous jealousy ("don't want to leave her now...") to almost aggressive insecurity (bridge section) — with what is probably George's best ever guitar solo going through all three of these states, one by one.

 

«Okay», says you, «but what about Ringo? Surely Ringo at least will be the one cheerful spirit in this morose bunch! He's singing about octopi — how can a song about octopi be dark and depres­sing?» Well, to each his own, but there must be a good reason why ʽOctopus's Gardenʼ is often considered the drummer's finest addition to the Beatles catalog — and to me, that reason has al­ways been the subtly sad emotional state it generates. The band helped Ringo shape the simple little kiddie tune into a sonic masterpiece — the harmonies, Lennon's jangly rhythm in the back, the «synth bubbles», everything combines to really make it sound like a trip through an imaginary underwater paradise — but the lyrics clearly state that "I'd like to be...", and Ringo, perhaps sub­consciously, sings it in such a longing manner that it is perfectly clear: the song is about some­thing positively unreachable. (Okay, so we all know that none of us has a chance to see a real Octopus's Garden any more than the stage set of ʽLucy In The Skyʼ, but that's the difference: ʽLu­cyʼ and other songs like it were psychedelic, implying that all these wonder-locations were per­fectly reachable inside your mind — maybe with a little help from your «friends» — but ʽGar­denʼ is a «fantasy» song, utterly non-psychedelic in spirit).

 

And where does that sadness reach its climax? In George's brief leads during the final chorus refrain. At 2:34-2:36 you get an outburst of anger, at 2:39-2:41 — an anguished wail. I have al­ways thought of these brief moments as the perfect way to blend the «lightness» of ʽOctopus's Gardenʼ into the immediately following «heaviness» of ʽI Want Youʼ (and, for that matter, the whole Side A has an amazing continuity and coherence to it, despite not being organized as a medley, but that would take too much space and time to explain).

 

And — about the medley. The opinion one usually gets on the medley is: «The Beatles had a lot of leftover fragments from past sessions, none of which worked well in and out of itself, so they threw them all together to prop up each other and came out with a masterpiece». This is probably correct, but it still requires understanding how the heck can a bunch of assorted odds and ends make up a masterpiece.

 

I think the medley should be thought of in terms of a «last gift». If the band subconsciously knew they were going out with this thing, it would have been natural for them to try and give it all they got — in particular, to somehow implement, at least briefly, every good idea they had stacked in the vaults (one reason, by the way, why ransacking the Abbey Road archives over the years has resulted in so few previously unreleased songs of any worth). It might have been possible to work all those little segments into three-minute long songs and sacrifice a few of the weaker ones — but it wouldn't have given the people so much. It also looks like a last-minute frantic competition be­tween John and Paul: in the main body of the medley, three bits are John's, followed by three of Paul's, followed by ʽThe Endʼ which is generally Paul's but could be viewed as a collective thing, since most of it is occupied by jamming.

 

And it is true that many of the links are not particularly special «per se». ʽMean Mr. Mustardʼ sounds fairly pedestrian. ʽShe Came In Through The Bathroom Windowʼ has a vocal melody that is almost primitive by Paul's usual standards of the time. ʽCarry That Weightʼ is just a mildly catchy anthemic refrain — it had to be fattened up by a reprise of ʽYou Never Give Me Your Moneyʼ to save face. But linked all together, they work so well through contrast more than any­thing else. The peaceful, religious serenity of ʽSun Kingʼ shattered to bits with the onset of John's «Brit-character assassination» (first the brother, then the sister Pam). The way John's sarcastic «oh, look out!» at the end of ʽPamʼ segues straight into ʽBathroom Windowʼ. How McCartney's quiet lullaby, addressed to a little baby, magically transforms into «boy, you're gonna carry that weight...», presumably addressed to an already grown-up baby.

 

And, of course, how ʽThe Endʼ winds it all up by giving all the band members a chance to have their say — with the only three-part guitar jam and the only drum solo in official Beatles history — and bringing it down with just the sort of lyrical testament that the fans would expect from the Beatles. Of course, "and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make" is a slightly naïve way to formulate the human equivalent of the energy conservation law. But the Beatles' notes always speak far more effectively than their words — and the guitar phrase that brings down the curtain is a gorgeous finale... except that the Beatles wouldn't be the Beatles if they didn't succumb to the tendency to deflate the pathos a little bit — thence came ʽHer Majestyʼ, the first «hidden track» in LP history (the «song» was originally intended to be part of the medley, then excluded and tacked on to the end almost by mistake — but not really by mistake). Some humorless people actually resent its presence — well, it's a hidden track, guys, just pretend it's not there. (CD editions actually list it now, which, I think, is not right.)

 

Yes, it is true that, by the time the band went into the studio that summer, they already had the first steps of their solo careers projected in their heads. It is also true that they spent less time col­labo­rating on each other's material (Paul himself admitted that Abbey Road suffered from having too few Lennon/McCartney vocal harmonies). But there is also no denying that Abbey Road is a collective album nevertheless. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band did not have, and could not hope to have, a song like ʽCome Togetherʼ on it. All Things Must Pass, great as it was, did not have a ʽSomethingʼ (ʽI'd Have You Anytimeʼ comes close, mood-wise, but is a bit more impassioned and a little less majestic). And even within Paul, something died that allowed him to make stuff like ʽYou Never Give Me Your Moneyʼ – so complex, diverse, and emotionally non-trivial.

 

Could there have been another Abbey Road in these guys, had they not parted on such abysmal terms? I cannot exclude that. If you simply take the best solo Lennon, McCartney and Harrison from 1970-71 and slap them together, you won't be getting a Beatles album; but when they got together, the Beatles always brought out the... well, not necessarily the banal «best» in each other, more like a desire to be «unusual», to transcend their own personalities and be somebody else for a bit. John could be the walrus, or, at least, get walrus gumboot; Paul could sing about serial kil­lers; George could at least pretend to dedicate his songs to women; even Ringo could wander around in octopus's gardens instead of singing the ʽNo No Songʼ. Therefore, there is no knowing how a Beatles album from, say, 1973 or 1979 would have sounded like. No knowing at all.

 

But on the other hand, there is no way more perfect than Abbey Road to bring a band's career to completion. The record does not have everything — it has a little less sunshine, humor, and light­ly colored vibes than you usually expect from the Beatles. All of these things are replaced with extra weight, wisdom, «maturity». But everything other than that, it's got plenty. And once it's all done, ʽThe Endʼ locks and bolts the door, then throws away the key in the direction of ʽHer Ma­jestyʼ. Do we really need more from the Beatles? Just our natural greed calling out. One thing is for sure: Abbey Road would have lost some of its tremendous impact, had its importance and influence been diluted by further releases. And for all those genuinely hungry for more — well, there's always the solo records. No dark, distant, cathartic magic in them, though.

 

ADDENDA:

 

PAST MASTERS, VOL. 1 (1962-1965; 1988)

 

1) Love Me Do; 2) From Me To You; 3) Thank You Girl; 4) She Loves You; 5) I'll Get You; 6) I Want To Hold Your Hand; 7) This Boy; 8) Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand; 9) Sie Liebt Dich; 10) Long Tall Sally; 11) I Call Your Name; 12) Slow Down; 13) Matchbox; 14) I Feel Fine; 15) She's A Woman; 16) Bad Boy; 17) Yes It Is; 18) I'm Down.

 

In the CD age, one way to treat the Beatles' extensive singles catalog could have been to scatter it as bonus tracks tacked on to contemporary LP releases. On a certain level, that would have wor­ked well, because the singles frequently shared the same spirit as the LPs. Clearly, ʽWe Can Work It Outʼ is very much a Rubber Soul-type song, ʽPaperback Writerʼ embraces Revolver, and ʽHey Judeʼ is every bit as 1968-ish as The White Album.

 

Since the Beatles had, from the very beginning, enacted a very strict «no-filler» policy, they never shared the «save the best stuff for the singles, use the worst stuff to pad out the LPs» ideology that plagued the record industry all the way up to the «concept album» revolution. Instead, the singles were tasty trailers — in­sightful previews of things to come that were every bit as good as the things to come themselves, only shorter. ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ left your head spinning, but it also left you craving for more, and somehow, you knew more was coming.

 

On the other hand, bonus tracks are all right, but a proper chronological sequencing of all the of­ficially released non-LP material may be even more right. The release of Past Masters way back in 1988 was probably the first time in history when a major band's «odds and ends» were treated with equal respect to the band itself and its fans: for comparison, no such comfortable collection has so far been made available for The Rolling Stones. And it gives you one more chance to wit­ness, this time in a brief, condensed, but equally «legitimate» version, the band's amazing deve­lopment from teen pop fakirs to seasoned magicians. These songs are every bit as good as LP ma­terial, and in quite a few cases, better; fossilizing them as «bonus» additions would be a psycho­logical disservice to the listener.

 

Vol. 1 is, expectedly, slightly less revered than Vol. 2, since it only manages to cover the band's early period — right up to Help!, stopping short at the breakpoint after which the Beatles would begin to regard themselves as superheroes and, consequently, act like ones. But that should not imply that the songs are in any way inferior to LP material from 1963-65. ʽFrom Me To Youʼ, ʽShe Loves Youʼ, ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ and, a bit apart chronologically and stylistically, ʽI Feel Fineʼ rank among the greatest A-sides ever released in the era when rock'n'roll was young, innocent, stylish, and British. Do I need to write about them? Probably not.

 

Ah, but what about ʽI Feel Fineʼ and its allegedly pioneering use of feedback on record? Pete Townshend used to scoff at that, claiming that The Who had already become good friends with manually controlled feedback by then — unfortunately, The Who never got around to recording their first feedback-containing singles until 1965, so, as far as I know, Liverpool still holds the trophy here. What is more important from a non-historical standpoint is that the single feedback note gives the song an odd shade of «rough mystery». Let's face it, it is somewhat monotonous, what with that cool, but repetitive riff dominating the entire song, and there's nothing like a sharp twaaaaang of feedback to set up an intriguing start.

 

But enough about the big ones. Most of the rest of the tracks are B-sides and EP material that was previously available on the old Rarities LP, which the regular average fan never bought — de­priving himself of a wealth of beautiful material. Well, not all of it is equally beautiful. The Ger­man versions of ʽShe Loves Youʼ and ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ are sheer novelties that do not even let you properly ridicule the boys' accents due to harmony singing and echo. That the Beatles, too, had to undergo the humiliating ritual of recording in a poorly mastered foreign lan­guage «to capture an overseas market», like so many of their peers, says a lot about the record in­dustry, but does not add much to one's respect for the band.

 

The EP Long Tall Sally from mid-1964 is hardly a major conquest in Beatles history either, but it does feature some of their most inventive cover versions. The title track is such a stone cold Little Richard classic that I cannot bring myself to asserting that the Beatles did it better: it is a milestone in the «McCartney Screams» saga (supposedly, it was John who goaded Paul into gi­ving it his all, convincing him that he could yell it out along with the best of 'em), but still, Paul McCartney is no Richard Penniman when it comes to revving up the larynx.

 

But all three covers (Little Richard's ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ, Carl Perkins' ʽMatchboxʼ, and Larry Williams' ʽSlow Downʼ) share the same advantage: they take basic rock'n'roll numbers that used to be pure entertainment, albeit with a naughty subtext, and add an odd pinch of desperation, at times descending into sheer madness. When Larry Williams sang ʽSlow Downʼ, it was fun. When Lennon took the lead, it turned into an open-text anthem of acute sexual hunger. ʽLong Tall Sal­lyʼ is screamed out by Paul at the top of his screaming range — yes, it is shakier and shallower than Little Richard's version, but way more hysterical. Coupled with George's equally hysterical guitar leads, it turns the band's take on the song into their wildest bit of «outside» rock'n'roll ever. Even ʽMatchboxʼ, given over to Ringo whose «range» is non-existent in principle, gets a slightly apocalyptic gloss with its echo effects over everything and double-tracked vocals. Funny, only the sole original on the EP, John's ʽI Call Your Nameʼ, remains completely hysteria-free — it is set in John's «chivalrous» mode (compare ʽAll I've Gotta Doʼ or ʽAnytime At Allʼ), even if the lyrics are about separation and longing, and is of a completely Hard Day's Night caliber.

 

Then there are the B-sides. Personal favs here would include ʽI'll Get Youʼ, one of their best ear­ly «kiddie love songs» (I've always loved the way its vocal melody unfurls without a single glitch from the opening "oh yeahs" to the chorus), and, naturally, ʽThis Boyʼ, arguably the greatest B-side from the band's early period — if only for its mid-section, where the intensity of John's vocal performance would not be truly matched again until... well, for quite some time.

 

I have to admit that ʽYes It Isʼ has always been too slow moving for me to enjoy it fully — even though I also admit that the song, solemnly dirge-like as it is, would not really work at any other tempo, and that in terms of depth of sentiment, it beats ʽBaby's In Blackʼ all to hell. It's also in­triguing: is it just about trying to pull oneself together after a breakup, or is she dead? Is it a song about a dead loved one? Could it be?...

 

I also have to admit that ʽI'm Downʼ has always seemed way too much of a self-penned Little Richard imitation/tribute for me to enjoy it fully — even if, technically, it is one of those classic McCartney rock'n'roll numbers. In reality, though, it is a hybrid. Behind all the rock'n'roll screa­ming and Harrison's stinging leads lies a classic pop chorus, seeking its strength in vocal harmo­nies. I mean, the song is bluesy and all, but the chorus really belongs in the ʽPlease Please Meʼ ballpark, doesn't it? Not even sure if Paul ever wrote one wholesome «non-pop» rocker in his life. Not that it's a big problem or anything. But in between ʽI'm Downʼ and John's cover of Larry Williams' ʽBad Boyʼ — two of their loudest tracks from early 1965 — I always found myself veering towards the latter if there was any frustration to be vented.

 

Actually, it is kind of a funny thing: with the Stones on their heels, the Beatles never laid a claim to the title of «bad boys of rock'n'roll», yet there still is a very small handful of titles in their catalog where John's mean, aggressive side comes out with a vengeance — you know that at moments like these, he'd be beating poor little Mick to a pulp in his corner. I sometimes think that when he was recording ʽBad Boyʼ, he simply let that nasty 15-year old Liverpudlian hooligan re­inhabit his body once again — that, despite the lack of personal authorship and the essentially comic lyrics, he felt some sort of intimate bond here, almost to the point of making a pledge to turn this humorous number into something much more dark and troublesome. Maybe it is not a complete success (it is very hard to intensify and terror-ify songs that were originally conceived as comic parodies), but the very fact that, for instance, the cover version omits kooky backing vocals ("he's a... bad boy") that accompany each line of the original, supports my point.

 

Anyway, altogether I would say that the ratio of good-to-great titles on Vol. 1 is more or less con­sistent with the band's normal LP ratios from 1963-64; omit the German versions and the in­teresting, but rather useless alternate single version of ʽLove Me Doʼ (with session drummer An­dy White replacing Ringo on a rather pointless whim from George Martin), and you just got your­self another high-level early Beatles album. Congratulations.

 

PAST MASTERS, VOL. 2 (1965-1970; 1988)

 

1) Day Tripper; 2) We Can Work It Out; 3) Paperback Writer; 4) Rain; 5) Lady Madonna; 6) The Inner Light; 7) Hey Jude; 8) Revolution; 9) Get Back; 10) Don't Let Me Down; 11) The Ballad Of John And Yoko; 12) Old Brown Shoe; 13) Across The Universe; 14) Let It Be; 15) You Know My Name (Look Up The Number).

 

The second volume of the singles oversees the band enter adulthood, and, consequently, will be of more interest to those who like to see these guys chasing the meaning of life instead of you-know-what. Of course, I respect the opinions of people who assert that you-know-what and the meaning of life are the exact same thing, and that the Beatles did the world a major disfavour when they stopped thinking of happiness as the art of «just to dance with you» and began thin­king of it as a «warm gun». I get their point, but I'm not one of them — and, therefore, Vol. 2 by definition is going to show up more frequently on my playlists than Vol. 1.

 

One tiny element of displeasure is that Vol. 2, for sheer technical reasons, lacks the smooth con­tinuity of Vol. 1. Since all of the band's A- and B-sides from 1967 already constitute the second side of the Magical Mystery Tour LP, they are not included in this collection; thus, we have a straight jump from ʽRainʼ to ʽLady Madonnaʼ, as if the band went on hiatus at the height of the Flower Power era, and neither ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ nor ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ ever exis­ted. In a more perfect world, a well-rounded Beatles CD catalog could perhaps consist of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour proper (the movie soundtrack) on one disc, and the ac­companying singles properly distributed among the two volumes of Past Masters. But, obvious­ly, that is not going to happen — and, anyway, with the little plastic discs on their way out, it's all up to you to program your sequencing the way you like it.

 

For a bit of fun, let us talk about the weaker or less famous stuff on this release, and then we'll see if I have anything revolutionary to say about the likes of ʽHey Judeʼ or ʽGet Backʼ. So here we go — random observations on an incidental compilation.

 

ʽThe Ballad Of John And Yokoʼ. Apparently, the only thing that puts the «Beatles» tag on this song is that Paul happened to be hanging around in the studio when John got the urge to record it (and a well-trained ear with seasoned knowledge of Paul's solo career will probably recognize his own, rather straightforward, drumming style). Otherwise, not only do the never-ending lyrics vio­late the Beatles' autonomy, but they seem to be far ahead of the melody as well. I've always en­joyed it for a laugh, but it is odd that Paul vetoed ʽCold Turkeyʼ (which, with a little doctoring, could have been turned into a proper Beatles song), but okayed this rather pedestrian travelogue. John must have caught him in a good mood.

 

ʽLet It Beʼ. I do not like George's solo on the single version. The Leslie speaker effects are fine, but the effect is subdued and humble, compared to the far more dynamic and passionate solo on the album track. Some people might say that this repetitive stateliness is exactly what the song needs, but I always saw ʽLet It Beʼ as a song that goes up and comes down — not a stern church hymn or anything: Paul McCartney ain't no Handel. But in the end, it's good to have both ver­sions so that we can happily waste away hours of our lives arguing about these things.

 

ʽThe Inner Lightʼ. Probably the weakest of all of George's «Indian» songs (but, in true eclectic fashion, the lyrics actually paraphrase the Tao Te Ching) — but in terms of effect, not structure: structurally, it is often described as particularly complex, unusual, and the closest in tone and ar­rangement to true Indian music. Which might just be exactly why it never struck me as all that amazing: a personal achievement for George, perhaps, but if I want something fairly close to In­dian music, I'll probably just go straight ahead for some real Indian music. The «galloping» sarod rhythms are funny (by the way, there is no sitar on this song — just sarod and Indian wind instru­ments), but not convincing enough for me to see George himself — he's kinda lost in the conse­quences of the novel idea to set basic Chinese philosophy to an Indian melody.

 

ʽAcross The Universeʼ. Uh... nice birdies. No limits to the happiness of The World Wildlife Fund, for whose purposes the song was originally recorded. Teenage girls singing backup instead of Phil Spector strings. Your choice or mine? Funny enough, every time I replay the song in my head, I only remember Lennon and his guitar anyway — meaning, honestly, that I don't care.

 

ʽYou Know My Name (Look Up The Number)ʼ. A frickin' LOST MASTERPIECE. Probably the only more or less «genuine», if utterly tongue-in-cheek, «jazz» number the Beatles ever recorded, an almost vicious send-up of its lounge variety, and with a brief and dashing sax solo at the end contributed by no other than the Rolling Stones' own Brian Jones. The only time in Beatles histo­ry that a sheer musical joke dared to make it to a B-side — and, although one time is quite eno­ugh, wouldn't we feel a little poorer without at least one?

 

ʽOld Brown Shoeʼ. This one is surprisingly rough rock'n'roll for George's «late Beatles» period, when his Carl Perkins fandom phase was already long overcome: he would never again play in such fast tempos for a long long time. In fact, this «aggressive love song» style is usually John's, not George's. It was not included on Abbey Road, and for good reason — it is too brutal to up­hold George's ʽSomething / Here Comes The Sunʼ image on that album. But I dare say that, this once at least, the band could have given him the honor of having the song as an A-side, since it is in every way superior to ʽThe Ballad Of John And Yokoʼ.

 

And then come the «biggies» that require no extra publicity. ʽRainʼ, originally hidden on the B-side of ʽPaperback Writerʼ, these days finally gets its deserved dues as one of the greatest classics of the psychedelic era. And while, spirit-wise, it is a John show all the way — «birth of the cool», Lennon-style — its finest asset is still the rhythm section; the more I listen to it, the more I am inclined to think that Paul and Ringo were trying to work a bit in the style of The Who, where Paul would play faster, more complex runs (fitting in plenty of bass expressivity, considering the song's slow motion), and Ringo would be working in energetic «drum leads» that keep threate­ning to take the listener's attention away from the guitars. But since Paul is no Entwistle, and Rin­go is no Keith Moon, the end result is still different.

 

Lastly, the rocker in me is always a little sad that ʽRevolutionʼ always gets such a reserved wel­come compared to its A-side, because on the sheer musical side of things, the rock sound that the band gets on that thing is, again, something utterly without precedent. The whole track just sizzles with electricity — every time I listen to it, I get the feeling of standing near a high voltage power trnasmission line. There's been lots of people known to professionally handle distortion, but this particular way goes beyond Hendrix. I'm pretty sure George must have played his part with rub­ber gloves on his hands, for safety reasons.

 

And the best song of the lot? I am going to play the game of «being special» here — and, instead of the predictable ʽHey Judeʼ, nominate ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ. It is curious that, where in the next few years John's «Yokosongs» would mostly be of a purely romantic nature (ʽOh My Loveʼ and suchlike), in 1969 he must have really been scared of his own feelings — ʽI Want Youʼ is where he almost goes over the top with that fear, but ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ is a little more restrained. The verses are like a sledgehammer, driving that feeling of eternal, unbreakable love into the ground — the final «she done me good» borders on animalism — and then comes the fear that this love might be breakable, after all. It's one of the greatest «this-moment-is-so-good-please-God-don't-let-it-end» songs in pop history, and the energy that John lets out with this perfor­mance is unprecedented. When they played it on the roof, they didn't require plugging in.

 

Overall, Vol. 2 covers lots more ground than Vol. 1 — from the still relatively early days of ʽDay Tripperʼ, which announced the beginning of the «maturation» process, through the «psycho» and «elder statesmen» years, you have here the folksy Beatles, the psycho-cool Beatles, the back-to-roots Beatles, the let's-get-personal-Beatles, and the don't-give-a-damn-Beatles. What you do not get at any of these stages is let-the-standards-fall-Beatles — even the «worst» songs I mentioned are still memorable and engaging. Everything is a must hear, even ʽThe Ballad Of John And Yo­koʼ. Admit it, it's more fun to learn about their daily activities when John sings it to you than when you read about it in some sloppy biography.

 

AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL (1964-1965; 1977)

 

1) Twist And Shout; 2) She's A Woman; 3) Dizzy Miss Lizzie; 4) Ticket To Ride; 5) Can't Buy Me Love; 6) Things We Said Today; 7) Roll Over Beethoven; 8) Boys; 9) A Hard Day's Night; 10) Help!; 11) All My Loving; 12) She Loves You; 13) Long Tall Sally.

 

For some reason, this album still has not seen a properly authorized CD release; maybe they are just waiting to lay George Martin peacefully in his grave before that happens, considering how re­luctant he was to put it on the market back in 1977 — when the release was triggered by the concurrent propagation of the horrible Live At The Star-Club, Hamburg tapes from 1962. Be­cause there was no way Capitol could stop these recordings from going public, they quickly nee­ded their own reply, and ended up holding George at the allegorical gunpoint. Various factual sources will let you know how much of a challenge it was to handle and process the old tapes; the whole thing was anything but a love affair, and so, the only officially released Beatles' live album still remains sort of a bastard, despisable child.

 

Ironically, though, as the years go by, its importance increases, if only because there are so many young fans now who do not know the proper answer to the question: «So why exactly did they stop touring?» One good listen to Hollywood Bowl will provide that answer. Although the tracks are taken from two different periods, more or less equally divided between August 23, 1964, and August 29-30, 1965, little had changed in the interim: the banshee wailing flying over the amphi­theater never loses a single decibel of intensity. You, the listener of At The Hollywood Bowl in its LP form, have the magnificent benefit of actually hearing the band. The girls in the audience did not have that benefit — not that they had any need of it. And the band itself did have need of it, but couldn't have gotten it unless somebody built a soundproof glass wall around them. Like the blue bubble around Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in Yellow Submarine.

 

That said, the Beatles did play well under the circumstances. Occasional flubbed notes in Harri­son's solos or a few tripped beats here and there could happen at any Beatles show, screamfest or no screamfest, and John's major stage curse — that of constantly forgetting the lyrics and having to mumble, improvise, or fall back on older verses — was, I am fairly sure, aggravated by his nonchalant personality rather than teenage howling getting him off the right track. They were ne­ver «great» stage performers, but they did what they could do: rev up the energy level of their studio recordings and play them faster, crazier, more aggressively, the way any good rock show should assert its advantages over the «calculated perfection» of the studio.

 

The problem was not that they «couldn't play»; the problem was that they couldn't improve. In the studio, every new batch of recording sessions brought on new discoveries and challenges. Live, there was no way they could profit from these discoveries. It is quite telling that, although the per­formances from 1964 and 1965 are shuffled, there is hardly any way to distinguish earlier and later stuff — even if, in August 1965, less than two months separated the Beatles from the break­throughs of Rubber Soul. (Well, clearly, other than the numbers performed — in 1964, they couldn't have been singing ʽHelp!ʼ or ʽTicket To Rideʼ, but I'm not talking about that).

 

The oddest moments, I think, are the ones where either John or Paul strike up some clumsy, «hu­morous» stage banter — banter that, under normal circumstances, could either be ignored or pro­duce a laughing reaction, but under Beatlemania rule, triggered something much simpler: «A Beatle is talking — time to scream louder!» They genuinely seem lost on that sea, talking and joking to no one in particular, and playing well enough to not lose confidence in themselves, but who really cared? A few headshakes, a few falsetto whoo-whoos, and that's all they need to send the audience to heaven. Led Zeppelin sure hope they could get away that easily.

 

Today, there is no pressing need to hunt down Hollywood Bowl as long as you already have a general idea of what a Beatles live show used to be like — for which purposes, the Anthology CDs and videos would be perfectly sufficient. Maybe someday the tapes will get the benefit of proper remastering, and the setlists will be expanded to make this document more coherent and comprehensive (at the very least, there is something disrespectful about the almost random shuf­fling of the running order). But clearly, none of these performances will ever replace the studio originals in your heart — although I do admit that, Ringo yells his head off quite effectively on ʽBoysʼ, going at it far more ferociously than when locked in the comfort of Abbey Road Studios. On the other hand, the decision to strip ʽThings We Said Todayʼ of a part of its subtlety, and in­troduce the bridge with a rock'n'rollish "yeh!" on Paul's part, was a mistake. They should have rather included more Carl Perkins in the program.

 

Of course, the only official live Beatles album (bar The BBC Sessions, which isn't really «pro­perly» live before a real audience) cannot and will not get a thumbs down. What might get a thumbs down is the band's uncompromising decision to quit touring, once and for all. Had they endured just one more year (and even then, when you look at their touring schedule for 1966, you will see that they already spent an absolute minimum of time on the road many months prior to abandoning the practice altogether), the screaming would have died down on its own, and then, finally... remember that the best touring years for the Stones and the Who, two of the Beatles' finest competitors, only began around 1968-69; before that, live bootlegs and scraps of official recordings show that they had relatively limited advantages over the Beatles on the stage. But, as they tell us, history knows no ifs, so let us just bear with the fact that Paul Is Dead, after all.

 

LIVE AT THE BBC (1962-1965; 1994)

 

CD I: 1) Beatle Greetings; 2) From Us To You; 3) Riding On A Bus; 4) I Got A Woman; 5) Too Much Monkey Business; 6) Keep Your Hands Off My Baby; 7) I'll Be On My Way; 8) Young Blood; 9) A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues; 10) Sure To Fall (In Love With You); 11) Some Other Guy; 12) Thank You Girl; 13) Sha La La La La; 14) Baby It's You; 15) That's All Right (Mama); 16) Carol; 17) Soldier Of Love; 18) A Little Rhyme; 19) Clarabella; 20) I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry; 21) Crying Waiting Hoping; 22) Dear Wack; 23) You Really Got A Hold On Me; 24) To Know Her Is To Love Her; 25) A Taste Of Honey; 26) Long Tall Sally; 27) I Saw Her Standing There; 28) The Honeymoon Song; 29) Johnny B. Goode; 30) Memphis Tennessee; 31) Lucille; 32) Can't Buy Me Love; 33) From Fluff To You; 34) Till There Was You.

CD II: 1) Crinsk Dee Night; 2) A Hard Day's Night; 3) Have A Banana; 4) I Wanna Be Your Man; 5) Just A Rumour; 6) Roll Over Beethoven; 7) All My Loving; 8) Things We Said Today; 9) She's A Woman; 10) Sweet Little Sixteen; 11) 1822; 12) Lonesome Tears In My Eyes; 13) Nothin' Shakin'; 14) The Hippy Hippy Shake; 15) Glad All Over; 16) I Just Don't Understand; 17) Top So How Come (No One Loves Me); 18) I Feel Fine; 19) I'm A Loser; 20) Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby; 21) Rock And Roll Music; 22) Ticket To Ride; 23) Dizzy Miss Lizzie; 24) Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey; 25) Set Fire To That Lot; 26) Matchbox; 27) I Forgot To Remember To Forget; 28) Love These Goon Shows; 29) I Got To Find My Baby; 30) Ooh! My Soul; 31) Ooh! My Arms; 32) Don't Ever Change; 33) Slow Down; 34) Honey Don't; 35) Love Me Do.

 

Although the BBC has really gone on a limb to empty its vaults in the past couple of decades — by now, there must already be hundreds of official releases of sessions recorded by different ar­tists — it is interesting that not a single one of these archival albums ever went «legendary». Some of the packages are, on the whole, rather disappointing (Cream, the Who, etc.), others are consistently listenable and highly enjoyable (Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, etc.), but not a single one ever managed to add something very, very important to what we already knew of the artist in question. (Of the several dozen that I have heard, at least — cannot pretend to completeness of info, or else I'd have to be «swamped in the beeb»).

 

Of course, one shouldn't really expect too much of archive releases; but the whole «recorded live in the studio» experience is not a completely trivial thing, either — basically, it's a live album re­corded with good quality and without external noise, something that can, at least theoretically, be more than worth our while. Somehow, it is never more than that. As it turns out, a real live album needs external noise — for most bands (unless we're talking of those that have stage fright), an active audience, be it a club, theater, or arena crowd, unlocks some other dimension in the mind, so that they can «lose themselves» in the playing. The BBC studios, on the other hand, never un­locked anything — sometimes, quite the opposite happened instead. Maybe some sort of claustro­phobia, maybe subconscious pressure to exercise restrain and calmness in your playing since no­body is really watching (some of these performances actually were played before small audien­ces, but that usually wasn't enough), maybe a feeling that this is not really a live show, but rather a si­mulation of one — anyway, once they are inside the BBC studio, musicians tend to stick close to the notes and chords, and just provide a half hour of simple fun for those fans who don't have enough money to buy the records (but, perhaps, have enough money to buy blank tapes).

 

The Beatles, who were among the first of the Beeb's clients to get a deluxe 2-CD official treat­ment of their BBC history — extracted from over 9 CDs worth of material, as can be found on the bootlegged Complete BBC Sessions — are no exception to this general rule. On one hand, it is nice to get over two hours of vintage live Beatles material where you can actually hear the gui­tars and vocals, not just Ringo's drums trying to rise over the girlie din. On the other hand, where would the real live Beatles be without the girlie din? There's something about the whole atmos­phere of this thing that makes them feel naked — no access to either the perfection screen of George Martin or the mighty scream curtain of the fans.

 

Formally, Live At The BBC is a treasurehouse. It does wisely by focusing on the early shows from 1963, because this way, we now have access to clean recordings of lots and lots of covers that the band performed in their early days — everything from American rock'n'roll (ʽCarolʼ, ʽJohnny B. Goodeʼ, ʽI Got A Womanʼ, ʽToo Much Monkey Businessʼ) to American R&B (even more of that sympathetic Arthur Alexander fellow!) to songs the band must have learned from the repertoire of Billy Fury (ʽNothin' Shakinʼ) to one or two really crappy «Europop» numbers (ʽThe Honeymoon Songʼ, next to which ʽA Taste Of Honeyʼ and ʽTill There Was Youʼ have the anti-establishment potential of a Patti Smith). And, just so you do remember that these are the Beatles you are listening to, a nice, thick selection of originals that also cluster around 1963 and early 1964, but extend a little bit into 1965 as well (ʽTicket To Rideʼ, etc.).

 

The actual playing, I must say, is almost uniformly bad, and I do mean B-A-D bad. Ringo seems either asleep or dozing half of the time, George is simplifying or flubbing his lines, and Paul is captured in his early-bass stage, when he still had relatively little interest in improving the repu­tation of that instrument. It is especially painful when it comes to straightforward rock'n'roll num­bers: the band is positively sagging on ʽCarolʼ (which the Stones covered in a far sharper and focused manner), ʽI Got A Womanʼ is a total failure next to the Elvis version, etc. Again, it does not really prove that the Beatles completely sucked at playing live — there are plenty of first-rate takes on both originals and covers in the Anthology series, but, somehow, the BBC studios never got them properly attuned. They just don't seem to be trying too hard.

 

In fact, once the original pleasure of «more Beatles! more Beatles!» had faded away for me, I found that my fondest memories of the album are all related to the silly, but charming bits of ban­ter. John is the undisputed King of Banter here, opening the album with the unbeatable "I'm John, and I play guitar... sometimes, I play the fool", poking fun at silly schoolboy fan poetry with an exaggerated accent (ʽA Little Rhymeʼ), noisily promoting his book (ʽFrom Fluff To Youʼ), gues­sing the name of the band's latest movie in Portuguese (ʽCrinsk Dee Nightʼ... right), and recor­ding what was probably the first little swipe at bandmate Paul while reading a fan letter (ʽDear Wack!ʼ), even if it is just a short interjection, but such delicious tonality! Next to that outpouring, Paul, George, and Ringo all come through as sissies, but everybody is given a few brief moments to shine anyway, and somehow, when the band is talking, they often come across livelier and mer­rier than when they are playing.

 

Still, even without the banter, the record is still worth owning for at least the following tracks: (a) ʽSoldier Of Loveʼ — John had the perfect voice to offer interpretations of Arthur Alexander's ballads, and this one is a worthy companion to ʽAnnaʼ; (b) ʽSome Other Guyʼ — a rocking high­light from the Cavern days, available here in good sound quality; (c) ʽThe Hippy Hippy Shakeʼ, done a little slower and lumpier than either Chan Romero's original or the Swinging Blue Jeans' hit version from 1963, but saved by Paul's ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ-style hysterical vocals and the over­all heaviness of the rhythm section; (d) the dark slow waltz of ʽI Just Don't Understandʼ — just because anything sung by John Lennon is always better than anything sung by Ann-Margret; (e) Little Richard's ʽOoh! My Soulʼ — if you actually loved Paul doing ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ, you'll love this, because there's really very little difference.

 

Only one previously unissued original surfaces here: ʽI'll Be On My Wayʼ, a song very much in Buddy Holly's style that the Beatles originally donated to Billy J. Kramer, then rearranged it in a slightly less Crickets-derived manner and tried playing with themselves. It doesn't take a lot of in­tellect to understand why it never ended up on a proper Beatles album, but it's nice to have it all the same — every once in a while, you need to reassure yourself that the Beatles were human, af­ter all, and did actually learn and improve by trial and error rather than have God establish a bee­line from heaven right around the time Ringo joined the band.

 

In short, this is far from the «great lost live Beatles album» — something that may yet surface on the market one day if somebody really puts his mind to the idea. But it is a modestly good package all the same: at the very least, kudos to the BBC for focusing on the little-known stuff rather than on a dozen versions of ʽFrom Me To Youʼ or ʽI Feel Fineʼ, and for including just the right amount of banter with merry announcer Brian Matthews — just enough to make the whole thing homely, and compensate for the bits of clumsiness and occasional discomfort in the playing. The only real disappointment is that I never get the feeling that the Beatles really enjoyed play­ing at the Beeb — even at the Hollywood Bowl, you could sense more inspiration fighting its way through the deafening screaming than in these studios. At the Beeb, there was really nothing to fight against. Maybe that's why the enthusiasm is so low.

 

ANTHOLOGY 1 (1962-1965; 1994)

 

CD I: 1) Free As A Bird; 2) Speech by John Lennon; 3) That'll Be The Day; 4) In Spite Of All The Danger; 5) Speech by Paul McCartney; 6) Hallelujah I Love Her So; 7) You'll Be Mine; 8) Cayenne; 9) Speech by Paul Mc­Cartney; 10) My Bonnie; 11) Ain't She Sweet; 12) Cry For A Shadow; 13) Speech by John Lennon; 14) Speech by Brian Epstein; 15) Searchin'; 16) Three Cool Cats; 17) The Sheik Of Araby; 18) Like Dreamers Do; 19) Hello Little Girl; 20) Speech by Brian Epstein; 21) Besame Mucho; 22) Love Me Do; 23) How Do You Do It; 24) Please Please Me; 25) One After 909 (Sequence); 26) One After 909; 27) Lend Me Your Comb; 28) I'll Get You; 29) Speech by John Lennon; 30) I Saw Her Standing There; 31) From Me To You; 32) Money (That's What I Want); 33) You Really Got A Hold On Me; 34) Roll Over Beethoven.

CD II: 1) She Loves You; 2) Till There Was You; 3) Twist And Shout; 4) This Boy; 5) I Want To Hold Your Hand; 6) Speech by Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise; 7) Moonlight Bay; 8) Can't Buy Me Love; 9) All My Loving; 10) You Can't Do That; 11) And I Love Her; 12) A Hard Day's Night; 13) I Wanna Be Your Man; 14) Long Tall Sally; 15) Boys; 16) Shout; 17) I'll Be Back (Take 2); 18) I'll Be Back (Take 3); 19) You Know What To Do; 20) No Reply (Demo); 21) Mr Moonlight; 22) Leave My Kitten Alone; 23) No Reply; 24) Eight Days A Week (Sequence); 25) Eight Days A Week; 26) Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey Hey.

 

There is no better way to understand the real meaning of «quality control» than to give a good lis­ten to any of the three Anthology volumes. When the Beatles saw the light, and knew that it was good, they let it out. When they were not sure, they left it in the can. It is really as simple as that. Despite the sometimes inadequately warm reception that the Anthologies got upon release — for the most part, from Beatle-hungry fans with an anti-bootleg disposition — I insist that there is not even a single track on any of these six CDs that would in any way be «better» than its original counterpart. The demos are demos, the work-in-progress mixes are in progress, the abandoned arrangements were abandoned for a good reason, and the outtakes remained outtakes for an even better one. Take together even the most polished of these versions, and they will still suck next to what we have always known.

 

On the other hand, the sheer historical value of the Anthologies is certainly priceless — with one important drawback: as a «history package», this set is drastically incomplete, and will never tru­ly satisfy the dedicated Beatles scholar. Clearly, the Beatles scholar will want to hear all of the preserved takes, so as to assess each song over the natural course of its development; and the Bea­tles scholar might, in fact, be offended at the idea of creating new tracks by splicing together parts of different takes — this is like tampering with history, man. It's one thing when you are making your original ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ out of two entirely different visions for the song; it's quite another thing when somebody is twiddling and reshuffling your stuff thirty years after the fact — be it even under your own supervision.

 

Still, we have to admit that «history lite» is a necessity as well; the difference between Antholo­gies and a complete package of everything that remained on the cutting floor is like the difference between a school textbook of history and a multi-volume edition for high-level scholars, each of which has its audience. And from that point of view, the amount, selection, and sequencing of the material processed for the collection seem to be just about right. We get to see the Beatles as ini­tially lousy students of American rock'n'roll, as constantly improving energetic live performers, as generators of all sorts of musical ideas, good and bad, as perfectionists and innovators, and, above all, as human beings made of flesh, blood, testosterone, good humor, and bile — a fact that is occasionally forgotten behind the immaculate appearance of their official recordings.

 

Anthology 1 is often called the weakest of the three volumes, for an objective and easy-to-under­stand reason: it covers their early «formative» years, halting right at the end of 1964, and a large chunk dates back to the pre-Please Please Me era, where the tracks frequently involve horren­dous sound quality and, sometimes, a shot of embarrassment. To me, however, it has always been and still remains the most interesting and intriguing of the three sets — not only does it feature the largest amount of songs (most of them non-originals, but still...) not featured on regular Beat­les albums, but it is here that we actually witness the biggest transformation of all: the amazing maturation of a sincere, vivacious, but still somewhat clueless and clumsy pop-rock band, into the greatest pop outfit of its generation.

 

It is not even entirely clear how far do we have to extend that «maturation period». All of the pre-1962 era material is either grossly amateurish (early Quarrymen records) or atrocious (the 1960 recordings at Paul's house in Liverpool; even when the sound quality is relatively acceptable, as on the instrumental Shadows knock-off ʽCayenneʼ, there is nothing here to suggest that these guys would go on to something bigger than art school, or working in a local garage). The Ham­burg recordings from 1961 are already a major step forward: while backing Tony Sheridan, «The Silver Beetles» finally became professionals, and John and George's ʽCry For A Shadowʼ is a fine, driving, catchy instrumental that is every bit as good as the Shadows' best hits, and maybe even better — because the entire band is getting into it with less restraint and a more «primal» attitude than Hank Marvin ever allowed his boys.

 

Then there are selections from the January 1962 Decca tapes — all covers, with the exception of two early Lennon/McCartney originals (ʽHello Little Girlʼ, later turned into a minor hit by The Fourmost, and ʽLike Dreamers Doʼ, later covered by The Applejacks). If you need my opinion, I might have turned these guys down, too, based on this stuff, were I a Decca decision taker back in 1962. The covers almost slavishly follow the originals — and the Beatles, even at their best, would never out-humor such masters of the «fun rock» genre as the Coasters; let alone the fact that handing the lead vocal part on a Coasters cover (ʽThree Cool Catsʼ) to George Harrison, at that time the «clumsiest» singer of them all, could never be a good idea. And that early Len­non / McCartney stuff... don't get me started. Saccharine teen-pop, imitating radio fluff of the day — next to ʽHello Little Girlʼ, even ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ sounds like Brahms.

 

Basically, the wonder of it all is that the Beatles only turned into professional, original song­writers upon signing the EMI contract — which brings George Martin into the picture, and soli­difies his «fifth Beatle» status to a previously unsuspected degree. As ʽPlease Please Meʼ and even the early incarnation of ʽOne After 909ʼ emerge from the sad shadows of ʽHello Little Girlʼ, we get an altogether unexpected leap in quality, and then — there is no turning back.

 

Yet there are fascinating and intriguing slips and trial-and-error bits all over the place. On the se­cond disc, for instance, there is a barely listenable take on ʽAnd I Love Herʼ with Paul «bleating» over the top of his range and the main guitar hook of the song still nowhere in sight; an early de­mo for ʽI'll Be Backʼ as a slow waltz, crumbling to pieces by the time the band gets to the bridge; a thoroughly lame early Harrison composition (ʽYou Know What To Doʼ) that was originally intended to be the 14th track on A Hard Day's Night, but was allegedly — and jus­t­ly — ri­di­cu­led by the rest of the band and turned George off songwriting for almost a year; and an early take on ʽEight Days A Weekʼ that starts off as a Beach Boys vocal harmony tribute — a rather inse­cure and out-of-place "oooooooohhh..." that works far less effectively than the eventual fade-in of the guitar melody upon which they would settle later.

 

In the end, the only studio material that could probably make it onto «real» (non-historical) an­thologies, is a finished 1963 take on ʽOne After 909ʼ — the original also sounds like another tri­bute to the Shadows, but I have always loved its detached, cool, ironic hide better than the more bluntly aggressive rooftop delivery from 1969 — and ʽLeave My Kitten Aloneʼ, a rather vicious Lennon-dominated cover tune that probably should have made it onto Beatles For Sale instead of ʽMr. Moonlightʼ. But maybe they thought it sounded too hateful or something (John would later summon much the same mood for ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ).

 

But there is also some prime-time live stuff here: carefully selected performances from mid-size venues, mostly, where the Beatles could still hear themselves above all the din and, most impor­tantly, were dedicated to giving the fans all they had to give. The crown jewel consists of five tracks from a Sweden performance on October 24, 1963: here you will find the tightest, most fo­cused and compact ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ that you are ever going to find, a ʽRoll Over Beet­hovenʼ on which George manages not to mess up any of the trademark Berry-licks, and a ʽYou Really Got A Hold On Meʼ on which John, as was usual for him, mixes up the lyrics and still gets away with it — showing all of us how little the words really mean on all these tunes.

 

Of all the three volumes, Anthology 1 is the one that is most fully equipped with monologuish bits from the accompanying movie (all of them on Disc 1, for some reason), but this is not a big bother since all the bits are very short; and Disc 2 also captures the full version of a brief comedy sketch with Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, culminating in a joke performance of ʽMoonlight Bayʼ — the jokes are mostly awful, and the performance is below-the-belt clownish, but the Beatles really did a lot of that on TV in the early days, and, once again, we do need to be re­minded from time to time that these guys were only human.

 

Of that, Antho­logy 1 keeps reminding us every step of the way indeed. But can that be a cause for unhappiness? Not if you get over 20-30 minutes of excellent live performing, over 20-30 mi­nutes of previously unknown / unexperienced cover tunes and Lennon / McCartney / Harrison originals, not if you really want to know how, sometimes, a fabulous melody does not arrive to the songwriter right on the spot, but is steadily built up along the way, sometimes, with great hardship and toil — you try and deduce for yourself the ratio of inspiration to perspiration. And here is one final hint for you: the difference between the common songwriter and the really great one is that common songwriters — and approximately ninety-five percent of the world's song­writers are «common», I'd say — never succeed in rising above the level of Anthology 1. The truly great songwriter, however, will at least try to make it over to Please Please Me.

 

PS. No review of Anthology 1 can, of course, get along without a mention of ʽFree As A Birdʼ — the first «new» Beatles song in twenty-five years, consisting of a Lennon piano demo, a Mc­Cartney bridge section, a Harrison guitar solo, and a Jeff Lynne production. (Ringo is in there somewhere, too, but the drum sound is 100% Lynne anyway). Who knows, maybe the Beatles would end up sounding like that in 1995, had things turned out differently, although something tells me John probably wouldn't be too happy of Lynne imposing his sonic attitude on the band (somehow, George, who had already fallen under the Lynne charm during the recording of Cloud 9 in 1987, ended up convincing Paul that this was the right thing to do). In any case, it's a good song that still carries a bit of John's spirit from the late 1970s — and the video row that accom­panied it in the movie was fairly epic as well.

 

ANTHOLOGY 2 (1965-1967; 1995)

 

CD I: 1) 1) Real Love; 2) Yes It Is; 3) I'm Down; 4) You've Got To Hide Your Love Away; 5) If You've Got Trouble; 6) That Means A Lot; 7) Yesterday; 8) It's Only Love; 9) I Feel Fine; 10) Ticket To Ride; 11) Yesterday; 12) Help!; 13) Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby; 14) Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown); 15) I'm Looking Through You; 16) 12-Bar Original; 17) Tomorrow Never Knows; 18) Got To Get You Into My Life; 19) And Your Bird Can Sing; 20) Taxman; 21) Eleanor Rigby (strings only); 22) I'm Only Sleeping (Rehearsal); 23) I'm Only Sleeping (Take 1); 24) Rock And Roll Music; 25) She's A Woman.

CD II: 1) Strawberry Fields Forever (demo); 2) Strawberry Fields Forever (take 1); 3) Strawberry Fields Forever (take 7 and edit piece); 4) Penny Lane; 5) A Day In The Life; 6) Good Morning Good Morning; 7) Only A Northern Song; 8) Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite-1; 9) Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite-2; 10) Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds; 11) Within You Without You (instrumental); 12) Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise); 13) You Know My Name (Look Up The Number); 14) I Am The Walrus; 15) The Fool On The Hill (demo); 16) Your Mother Should Know; 17) The Fool On The Hill (take 4); 18) Hello Goodbye; 19) Lady Madonna; 20) Across The Universe.

 

I am not much of a bootleg guy, but it did so happen, accidentally, that I heard John's early demo for ʽReal Loveʼ (not for ʽFree As A Birdʼ, though) way before the remaining Beatles started wor­king on it, and I distinctly remember thinking — «that melody is quite gorgeous, really, I wonder how it would sound on a Beatles record». Well, as it turns out, it does not sound way better than the barebones original on a Beatles record — mainly because the Beatles record is really a Jeff Lynne / John Lennon record with accidental Beatles participation (George throws in one of his tasty slide solos).

 

But because there is no McCartney bridge; because John's vocals and, most im­portantly, John's words come through more clearly than on ʽFree As A Birdʼ; finally, because the song was not quite as heavily advertised as «New Beatles material in twenty-five years!» — be­cause of all these things, ʽReal Loveʼ comes through as just a caring tribute to John's memory, and, unlike ʽFree As A Birdʼ, it never fails to bring a sentimental tear to my eye while playing. And, in fact, as a final post-scriptum to the Beatles' legacy, it works better than ʽFree As A Birdʼ — where they turned ʽFree As A Birdʼ into a sort of metaphorical meditation on the band's fate and legacy itself, ʽReal Loveʼ, on the contrary, is not self-centered, but is instead a message to the world, the simple, but effective kind, the Beatles kind — "no need to be afraid, it's just real love" hits with the same intonations as "don't carry the world upon your shoulders", despite coming from John rather than Paul. Well, after all, the love for Love was one thing that united both.

 

It's all too bad that ʽReal Loveʼ has to introduce what I still view as the weakest, «sagging-est» of the three Anthology packages. Spanning the «magical metamorphosis» years of 1965-67, these 2 CDs neither give the listener an impressive number of previously unheard titles (no matter whe­ther good or bad), nor reward him with enough fleshed-out alternate takes to start thinking about «an alternate White Album» or something. Instead, in order to fill out space, we have to sit thro­ugh some really superfluous tracks, such as the Stack-o-Tracks-influenced strings-only arran­gement of ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ or, even worse, the voiceless arrangement of ʽWithin You Without Youʼ (why? why? all of these sitars and sarods were quite perfectly audible with George's voice, thank you very much).

 

These are just the extremes; more often are the situations where you just end up with «non-final mixes», genuinely painful to listen to «for pleasure». It gets particularly unbearable on Disc 2, where, for instance, we are offered to sit through an ʽI Am The Walrusʼ without the strings and the noise overdubs — had Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne heard that mix, there would have been no Electric Light Orchestra for sure. Or a ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ without the keyboards. Or an ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ without the orchestral crescendos. Uh... yeah, there was a time — a short time — when these songs really were that naked. Are we supposed to understand that the general public should think of these early takes and demos as «alternate approaches»? They just sound like naked demos, nothing more. They're still great, but who would be interested in tasting a chocolate cake without the chocolate? Only the baker, perhaps.

 

Altogether, we get three songs that we never knew before from the Beatles (not counting ʽReal Loveʼ), and one of them isn't even a song: "12-Bar Original", recorded in late 1965, is the Beatles trying to be Booker T & The MGs for a few minutes (the unedited take on bootleg records actual­ly goes over six of them) — long enough for us to understand why the Beatles so quickly decided to leave the 12-bar blues business to the Rolling Stones. (Not that there weren't a lot of 12-bar blues bands back then who were quite happy with this kind of technical and imaginative levels, but that's why the Beatles are number one and most of those bands are forgotten). ʽIf You've Got Troubleʼ is a Lennon/McCartney composition that they gave to Ringo, but were so horrified with the results that they quickly retired the silly number and replaced it with ʽAct Naturallyʼ. Only ʽThat Means A Lotʼ, later donated to P. J. Proby, has a fine, Beatles-worthy middle eight, but otherwise, as Ian McDonald rightly pointed out, is (possibly a subconscious) melodic re-write of ʽTicket To Rideʼ — and whoever heard of the Beatles humiliating themselves with remaking ear­lier material?

 

The live performances on the first disc continue Anthology 1's trend of convincing the listener that the Beatles were, in fact, a very good live band when they could hear themselves — tracks 9-12, recorded at the relatively small ABC Theatre in Blackpool, are excellent, including a histori­cal moment: the introduction of ʽYesterdayʼ to the general public. (In the movie, the look upon Paul's face as John presents him with a large bouquet of flowers during the applause is absolutely priceless, as is George's sneery introductory remark of "...and so, for Paul McCartney of Liver­pool, opportunity knocks!"). But, of course, the perfunctory performances of ʽRock And Roll Musicʼ and ʽShe's A Womanʼ from the June 30, 1966 Tokyo concert, coming straight off the Revolver sessions, clearly show how far ahead the band was in its studio flight — and why they decided to cancel further live appearances.

 

But ahead or not, Anthology 2 does a good job of showing just how many bad ideas the Beatles could go through before settling on the good ones. Notice how awful the sitar sounds during the bridge sections of ʽNorwegian Woodʼ? Good lads, they took it out. Doesn't the sharp «rocking» guitar sound out of place in the chorus of the otherwise mild-folksy ʽI'm Looking Through Youʼ? You'll find it gone for good in the final version. Doesn't this take on ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ, with its straightforward, de-funkified drumming, seem like lazy stoner rock? By the time of the final takes and overdubs, it would turn into a psychedelic ocean. Don't the woodwind / brass solos on ʽPenny Laneʼ sound chaotic and extraneous compared to the rest of the piece? How marvelous it was for them to finally settle on that little sad/triumphant note mix of the piccolo trumpet. Isn't that acoustic guitar rhythm on take 4 of ʽFool On The Hillʼ unable to convey the required atmos­phere of sadness that Paul's original piano melody provides so well? And so on, and on, and on...

 

One might get a kick, perhaps, from the full (extended) version of ʽYou Know My Nameʼ (I am not sure; six minutes of silliness seem a bit too long), but everything else on the second disc only has this «positive through negative» effect — I definitely urge every aspiring songwriter to study the evolution of these songs, because, really, there is nothing wrong with perfectionism, no mat­ter how much the simplistic perception of «indie culture» tries to convince the aspiring songwriter otherwise. As a historical piece, Anthology 2 is priceless (except that it will only whet any cre­dible historian's appetite for more), but do not make the mistake of trying to «enjoy» it. If the Beatles never released their original songs this way, they obviously never wanted you to «enjoy» them this way. Well, at least, not until three of them got old, mellow, and generously forgiving of their own mistakes and blueprints.

 

PS. One track I do like a lot is the «Giggle Version» of ʽAnd Your Bird Can Singʼ, if only be­cause it is a mean mean feat to see the band able to carry the tune so well when they are literally falling over their feet with laughter from the very beginning. Be careful, it's infectious.

 

ANTHOLOGY 3 (1968-1969; 1995)

 

CD I: 1) A Beginning; 2) Happiness Is A Warm Gun; 3) Helter Skelter; 4) Mean Mr Mustard; 5) Polythene Pam; 6) Glass Onion; 7) Junk; 8) Piggies; 9) Honey Pie; 10) Don't Pass Me By; 11) Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da; 12) Good Night; 13) Cry Baby Cry; 14) Blackbird; 15) Sexy Sadie; 16) While My Guitar Gently Weeps; 17) Hey Jude; 18) Not Guilty; 19) Mother Nature's Son; 20) Glass Onion; 21) Rocky Raccoon; 22) What's The New Mary-Jane; 23) Step Inside Love/Los Paranoias; 24) I'm So Tired; 25) I Will; 26) Why Don't We Do It In The Road; 27) Julia.

CD II: 1) I've Got A Feeling; 2) She Came In Through The Bathroom Window; 3) Dig A Pony; 4) Two Of Us; 5) For You Blue; 6) Teddy Boy; 7) Rip It Up/Shake Rattle And Roll/Blue Suede Shoes; 8) The Long And Winding Road; 9) Oh Darling; 10) All Things Must Pass; 11) Mailman Bring Me No More Blues; 12) Get Back; 13) Old Brown Shoe; 14) Octopus's Garden; 15) Maxwell's Silver Hammer; 16) Something; 17) Come Together; 18) Come And Get It; 19) Ain't She Sweet (Rehearsal); 20) Because; 21) Let It Be; 22) I Me Mine; 23) The End.

 

The journey ends here, much the same way as it started. No matter if we are dealing with the ten­se, but cooperative sessions for the White Album, or with the angry madhouse at Twickenham in early 1969, or with the final solemn ritual of completing the circle with Abbey Road, what we have here are nearly always bad — relatively bad, of course — work-in-progress versions of what would, in the end, become timeless masterpieces, regardless of the emotional states of their crea­tors at the time. Be it 1963 or 1969, the Beatles always chose the best take for the official record; no exceptions that I could be aware of.

 

However, one of the major bonuses of Anthology 3 is that it offers much more «new» stuff to the casual listener than the second volume — apparently, the 1968-69 sessions resulted in a larger number of canned outtakes than sessions for the previous years. Quite possibly, this had to do with the band members now working much more on their individual own than before — and con­sequently running far stronger risks of having their contributions vetoed by other members be­cause of not being «Beatlesworthy» enough.

 

So it is up to us to decide now whether John's ʽWhat's The New Mary Janeʼ, George's ʽNot Guil­tyʼ, or Paul's ʽStep Inside Love / Los Paranoiasʼ were rightly excluded from the official canon or cruelly wronged by being shelved for almost thirty long years. I would say that, all things consi­dered, the wait time should have been shorter, but also that I mostly agree with the vetoes.

 

ʽNot Guiltyʼ is often highlighted as a first-rate Harrison song that was abandoned much too easily, and should not have waited until 1979, when George finally decided to rework and release it on his eponymous album. But the vocal melody of the song is so seriously underwritten that «first-rate», as far as I can tell, is out of the question — it is hardly a coincidence that, when it came to emptying George's stunning backlog on All Things Must Pass, ʽNot Guiltyʼ was not seen fit for inclusion even without the vetoing block of his former colleagues. It's got a fine riff, some terrific guitar pyrotechnics in the largely instrumental coda, and primetime Harrison lyrics, but it defini­te­ly lacks that certain «something» — be it the transcendence of ʽWhile My Guitarʼ, the catchy humor of ʽPigsʼ, the subtle minimalism of ʽLong Long Longʼ, or even the outright whackiness of ʽSa­voy Truffleʼ. Good song, but if they gave all 5 to me and told me to exclude one, I'd have made the same choice as John and Paul. Did Ringo have a vote at all?..

 

Another «lost classic» is John's ʽWhat's The New Mary Janeʼ, one of his «nutty» numbers that indulges in the pleasure of going from simple absurdist piano-led music hall ditty (almost like a parody on something Paul could have done) to an alien world of spooky sound collages, like a blueprint for much of Amon Düül II's work on Tanz Der Lemminge three years later (or may­be not, but somehow that association did spring into my mind). When the final version of The Beatles was being assembled, the track was pulled in favor of ʽRevolution #9ʼ — a much longer piece that did not have any musical basis at all. Should ʽMary Janeʼ had taken its place? Years earlier, I would definitely have said yes; now I am not at all sure — no matter how absurdist and silly some of John's stuff might sound, ʽMary Janeʼ lacks «killer guts» where even ʽCry Baby Cryʼ has some. It's more of a musical joke fit for something like the second LP of John's own Sometime In New York City, where he was fooling around with the «Elephant Memory Band». A darn fine musical joke, though, and it's good to know that it has not been lost.

 

1968 and, most prominently, 1969 introduced plenty of tunes that later surfaced on the Beatles' solo albums — here, in particular, we have an attempt to record ʽTeddy Boyʼ (later included on McCartney) and George's ʽAll Things Must Passʼ (later included on, naturally, All Things Must Pass). The former was and remains kinda fluffy, if cute — and no, that's not «Paul in a nutshell», if you want to know — and the latter's potential remained half-hidden until Phil Spector came and laid a wall of ten million instruments on it. But the 1969 sessions also yielded lots of uninspired waste — there is no better way to understand the futility of the band's attempt at «getting back to its roots» than to listen to their perfunctory run through a medley of old rock'n'roll hits, performed with none of the enthusiasm or motivation that they had in the early Cavern days. And ʽMailman, Bring Me No More Blues?ʼ Really, that could have been done by anyone. The only small piece of true joy on Disc 2 is Paul's original demo of ʽCome And Get Itʼ — a nice song, generously dona­ted to Badfinger... who actually improved on it, since Badfinger were one of the very few bands to carry on the «original spirit» of the Beatles, whatever it was.

 

Elsewhere, it's the same old story. Vocal harmonies for ʽBecauseʼ without the instrumental track. Nice, but they were fairly well discernible with the instruments already. A raw take on ʽOctopus' Gardenʼ with George still fumbling and fussing around with the guitar solo, quite far from per­fection. ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ with Paul trying out a spoken rather than sung version of the bridge — what is this, Elvis time? An ʽOh! Darlingʼ tried out in an all-out comic mode — here, the bridge is crooned in a hilarious falsetto rather than screamed out at the top of one's lungs. Wind your way back to The White Album and everything stays mostly the same...

 

...probably with the exception of the original acoustic demo for ʽWhile My Guitar Gently Weepsʼ, which sounds like an entirely different song from what it eventually became — a meditative con­fessional, rather than a grand lament for the fate of mankind. Although its evolution was a bless­ing, it is still very pleasing to have the starting point as well: the major highlight of Anthology 3, with ʽMary Janeʼ, ʽNot Guiltyʼ, and ʽCome And Get Itʼ all coming in for the second spot in a tier that lags significantly behind.

 

It goes without saying that the historical value of all this stuff, as usual, is priceless. It is useful to know, after all, that the original line in ʽPiggiesʼ went "...clutching forks and knives to cut their pork chops" rather than the final "eat their bacon" — "bacon" fits the verbal flow better than "pork chops", even if it may make less sense (people do tend to eat pork chops rather than bacon for dinner, I guess). Or that the original version of ʽHappiness Is A Warm Gunʼ contained a direct lyri­cal reference to Yoko — who, as it seems, provided some inspiration for the song, a fact all Yoko-haters should keep in mind. Or a million or so similar observations that each of us can make by thoroughly studying these documents. One thing surely cannot be denied — studying the development of Beatles songs can actually be far more enjoyable than enjoying the final takes of  thousands of other bands. Think of the Anthology project from that angle, and it might take its proper respectable place in the band's regular discography some day.

THE BEAU BRUMMELS

INTRODUCING THE BEAU BRUMMELS (1965)

 

1) Laugh Laugh; 2) Still In Love With You Baby; 3) Just A Little; 4) Just Wait And See; 5) Oh! Lonesome Me; 6) Ain't That Loving You Baby; 7) Stick Like Glue; 8) They'll Make You Cry; 9) That's If You Want Me To; 10) I Want More Loving; 11) I Would Be Happy; 12) Not Too Long Ago; 13*) Good Time Music; 14*) Gentle Wanderin' Ways; 15*) Fine With Me.

 

It has been said that the Beau Brummels chose their name deliberately — so that their records could be placed right next to the Beatles in record stores. The band members themselves denied it quite vehemently, of course, but then again, who on earth would publicly admit to such trickery? The situation is even less in the band's favor when you realize that nobody in 1965 sounded as close to classic British Merseybeat on the other side of the Atlantic than those five guys from San Francisco. They had their own peculiarities, for sure, but where the Byrds only borrowed super­ficial traits of British Invasion bands, these guys went much further in idolizing their heroes from the overseas. Only The Sir Douglas Quintet could probably compare, and they have always seem­ed more of a novelty act to me.

 

The Beau Brummels made their first — and, as it turned out, biggest — mark on musical history with ʽLaugh, Laughʼ, a song that was actually one of their less obvious Beatles rip-offs, because none of the Fab Four ever played harmonica in such a mournful way, or sang in such a melancho­lic, plaintive, trembling manner, which would soon become one of the trademarks of the folksy San Franciscan sound. It wasn't aggressive garage rock, and it wasn't mainstream pop, it was a special kind of folk-pop sound where the «folk» and the «pop» elements were mixed in equal proportions. The gentleness and vulnerability of the tune, in fact, suggests that The Searchers were a much bigger influence here than the Beatles.

 

Like most of the other songs on this record, ʽLaugh, Laughʼ was penned by the band's lead guitar­ist Ron Elliott, and that was yet another defining trait in the Brummels' portrait: they had their own resident songwriter, who could hammer out well-crafted hooks all by himself, and their very first long-playing album only had two covers — an incredible feat for an American band circa early 1965. If there is a problem here, it is rooted in the band's wimpiness: Introducing The Beau Brum­mels does not feature any good old rock'n'roll, which is a bit regrettable for a band wih two elec­tric guitars and a swinging rhythm section.

 

However, that isn't really the way one should be trying to get into this album. This one is for the sensitive, delicate souls — or at least for the sensitive, delicate corner of one's soul, provided there is one that can be found — souls that do not want to be delved way too deep, but wouldn't mind a bit of emotional complexity dressed up in formal simplicity. Basically, if you really like songs like ʽAsk Me Whyʼ or ʽP.S. I Love Youʼ, but are ashamed to admit it because everything about them is exceedingly childish, from the chord sequences to the arrangements to the lyrics — The Beau Brummels are here to offer you a slightly more advanced version of the sentimental ballad, just as frail and genteel, but with a bigger emphasis on craft and, well, «intelligence».

 

By «craft» I do not mean technicality, since the band's hold on their instruments was rather limi­ted; but they had a really good knack for getting the most out of these limits — listen to ʽJust A Littleʼ, for instance, and see how well the mix of rhythm guitar, minimalistic acoustic lead fills, and vocal harmonies, create a believable atmosphere of «noble melancholia» with only a few chords and «trivial» overdubs. (The song became their biggest commercial hit, by the way, yet it did not acquire such a monumental status as ʽLaugh, Laughʼ — perhaps because of the lack of harmonica, or because, in retrospect, it looks like a very conscious attempt to capitalize on the success of its predecessor).

 

Other mini-delicacies in the melancholic vein include ʽThey'll Make You Cryʼ, where the harmo­nica does make a triumphant return, and participates in a pretty-sad duet with a three-note acous­tic guitar solo (to great effect!); the more traditionally arranged ʽI Would Be Happyʼ, sounding like a subconscious tribute to Roy Orbison; and ʽNot Too Long Agoʼ, sounding like a conscious tribute to the Searchers and ʽNeedles And Pinsʼ in particular.

 

The rest of the album is more upbeat, but, like I said, the upbeat side of the Brummels is less con­vincing than their cry-in-my-pillow side. They do show their country heart fine enough on a re­spectable cover of Don Gibson's ʽOh Lonesome Meʼ which they somehow manage to play even faster than the original, but the other cover (ʽAin't That Loving You Babyʼ) is totally forgettable, and fast-paced originals like ʽJust Wait And Seeʼ, fun as it always is to listen to a fast-paced pop rock song from 1964-65, sort of make them sacrifice their identity — not sure why exactly one should be enjoying this if the Hollies have better vocals, the Animals kick more ass, the Yard­birds have a far more gifted guitar player, and anyway, Carl Perkins did all that earlier. Still, most of this is at least semi-original material, so at least they tried.

 

Overall, there are occasional signs of a «rush job» on Introducing, as you'd expect from any pop LP (particularly American) of the era, but considering that the Beau Brummels never really vied for a VIP lounge among the rock crowds of the day, in a relative way, this is a tremendously suc­cessful debut. Do not miss the current CD edition, which throws on some nice demos and B-sides, among them a cover of John Sebastian's ʽGood Time Musicʼ (generic R'n'B melody + one of John's patented «love music!» set of lyrics = forgettable, but hilarious) and ʽGentle Wanderin' Waysʼ, which simply happens to be one of the best Beau Brummels songs ever: apparently, the addition of a little menace-laden fuzz guitar can work wonders on an inspired day. Thumbs up for one of the most underrated US records from 1965.

 

THE BEAU BRUMMELS, VOL. 2 (1965)

 

1) You Tell Me Why; 2) I Want You; 3) Doesn't Matter; 4) That's Alright; 5) Sometime At Night; 6) Can It Be; 7) Sad Little Girl; 8) Woman; 9) Don't Talk To Strangers; 10) I've Never Known; 11) When It Comes To Your Love; 12) In Good Time.

 

Ouch, bad mistake. Instead of trying to capitalize on their personal strengths — the mournful vibe of ʽLaugh Laughʼ, for instance — The Beau Brummels, completely seduced by and envious of the success of the Byrds, decided to adjust their sound to the standards set by McGuinn and Co. The results were not so much «bad» as they were disastrous. Perhaps in simple terms of «hooks», Ron Elliott could stand some competition with Gene Clark (although even here the bands were at a serious disadvantage — the Byrds had at least three accomplished songwriters, the Brum­mels only had one). But in terms of everything else — instrumentation, technicality, arrangements, un­expected sources of inspiration, etc. — the band did not stand a chance; and if there ever was a moment in their career when the term «poor man's Byrds» could be appropriate, it was right here.

 

The two lead singles, ʽYou Tell Me Whyʼ and ʽDon't Talk To Strangersʼ, are two lovely little folk-pop creations that both succeeded in hitting the charts, but both — particularly the latter, with its jangly melody and the lead singer's (subconscious?) imitation of Roger McGuinn's phrasing — are only enjoyable to a full extent if your experience has not been previously tampered with Mr. Tambourine Man (and Turn! Turn! Turn!, although the latter, to be fair, was only released after the Brummels' second album). The vocal harmonies are lovely, but the guitar sound is so thin and wimpy that the songs just don't seem capable of being hammered into your brain with the proper energy (unlike the Byrds, where every final pluck of McGuinn's and Crosby's guitars was always delivered with perfect self-assu­rance — at least that's what my intuitive feelings are whispering at the moment).

 

Tracks that are less obviously «byrdsey» turn out to be more impressive at the end of the day. The real major highlight is probably ʽSad Little Girlʼ, a melancholic mid-tempo ballad with a highly repetitive structure whose main point of attraction is a subtly arranged crescendo: considering the band's relatively low instrumental skills and relatively poor instrumental inventory, they do a great job adding layer after layer of guitars, percussion, harmonicas, and vocal harmonies, and eventually transform the song into a mini-anthem.

 

Another unexpected highlight, for me, is ʽWomanʼ, a fast R'n'B number that they first recorded in a fully vocalized arrangement (the «lyrical» version can be found as a bonus track on the CD edi­tion), but then decided instead to include in an instrumental version, with acoustic and electric guitars taking turns to mimic the vocal melody. The results are cute, funny, and somewhat atypi­cal for the era (not a lot of people were interested in working out acoustic leads for electric rock­ers) — atypical for the Brummels themselves, in fact, but that might be all for the better, conside­ring that «typical Brummels» for this album means «let's do it like the Byrds do, as best we can».

 

There are no real in-yer-face embarrassments on the album — most of these folk-poppers and «soft-garage-rockers» have their moments, but they hardly deserve individual descriptions. It does not help, either, that the subject matters of the songs remain slight and formulaic — it's all in the traditional love-my-girl ballpark, with the exception of ʽDon't Talk To Strangersʼ, which tries to deliver a message ("follow your own beaten path, wander where you can't be grabbed"), but not very convincingly or effectively.

 

All in all, it's a nice little album, but the train was running speedy in late '65, and Vol. 2 failed to catch it, forever grounding the Brummels in the losers' lounge: while their story was far from over, and the stock of creative energy would still be enough to carry them through the psychede­lic years, this sophomore semi-success (certainly not a «sophomore slump» — the album de­ser­ves a friendly thumbs up in any case) forever buried any hopes of the band joining the big league, which may not seem like a big deal in our indie-soaked days, but certainly was a big deal back in the old days, and explains the oblivion into which the Brummels had sunk before being dragged out by the ears by the likes of Richie Unterberger, along with their many pals and competitors.

 

BEAU BRUMMELS '66 (1966)

 

1) You've Got To Hide Your Love Away; 2) Mr. Tambourine Man; 3) Louie Louie; 4) Homeward Bound; 5) These Boots Are Made For Walkin'; 6) Yesterday; 7) Monday Monday; 8) Bang Bang; 9) Hang On Sloopy; 10) Play With Fire; 11) Woman; 12) Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter.

 

In a blazingly inane move of complete incompetence, Warner Bros., under whose wing the Brum­mels found themselves with their old record label, Autumn, in early 1966, demanded that the band stop producing original material and release an entire album of covers instead. Apparently, the thinking process behind it went like this: «This band is not producing any big hits — maybe they suck at writing songs — but they have a lovely style of playing — maybe they can fare bet­ter covering other people's material — after all, some of our biggest hits are covers». That the is­sue was essentially out of the band's hands is made evident by the fact that they were recording original material — some of it resurfaced later on archival compilations — but had to put it down in order to make way for...

 

...you know, one curious thing that I realize from time to time is that, even though ʽYesterdayʼ is supposed to be the most frequently covered pop song of all time, I don't seem to have any covers of it in my not-too-small collection, except for maybe the Ray Charles version. Of course, this does not say so much about the song as it does about the average type of artist covering it. But this already does not bode well for the Beau Brummels. You're risking quite a lot if you decide to cover ʽYesterdayʼ — simply because the very act may land you in a category to which you wouldn't really want to belong.

 

Anyway, if there is one thing that Beau Brummels '66 proves to us, it is that they had a pretty good reason to stay away from covers on their first two LPs: as a cover band, the Beau Brummels are a completely, utterly incompetent bunch. Half of these songs are incompetently chosen, and the other half incompetently performed — to the point of sounding like clumsy high school paro­dies on the artists. It could have been better if the band tried faithfully sticking to the original ar­rangements; in keeping with the times, they decided to «brummelize» them, and the results are almost uniformly disastrous.

 

Chief culprit here is Sal Valentino, who thought it would benefit the recordings if he kept stray­ing away from the melody, changing notes in mid-air, adding extra vocalization, and throwing in all sorts of annoying mannerisms. What's up with all the "eveyyy-wheey people stayyyy" and "yes, and I hear them say" stuff on ʽYou've Got To Hide Your Love Awayʼ? With the "why don't you play a song for me" and the "I'd like to go far, far from the twisted reach..." on ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ? Why is Simon's ʽHomeward Boundʼ, a song that should really be performed at barely-audible level to reveal its full potential, sung with the flamboyance of a Tom Jones? Why do they think that the last verse of the Stones' ʽPlay With Fireʼ should rise from the quiet menace of "now you've got some diamonds..." to the ugly barking threat of "...or start living with your mother?" There was a good reason why Mick Jagger never did that, even though the thought might have visited him — there is no good reason to dump the subtlety here.

 

But the band's musical decisions are not that far advanced, either. Extending the Beatles' songs with extra repeated verses and additional solos — including a solo on ʽYesterdayʼ — seems cheap (for that matter, completely instrumental versions of these songs might have been a better move). The decision to do ʽLouie Louieʼ, a lonesome garage rocker among a sea of folk-pop, is extremely strange — the Brummels were never a rock'n'roll band, unless, of course, they actually wanted to prove this by covering the song. They fare a little better with their moody R'n'B arran­gement of Nancy Sinatra's ʽBootsʼ — the combo of melancholic jangly guitar, fuzz bass, oddly placed chimes, and sneering kill-it-kid vocal delivery adds some serious spice, but it's also quite telling that the only song in this batch that somehow stands competition with the original is a co­ver of Nancy Sinatra.

 

«Embarrassing» choices, other than the Beatles songs and ʽLouie Louieʼ, include ʽMr. Tam­bou­rine Manʼ (which can only remind us of the time when the Byrds came into existence and blew the Brummels off the stage), and ʽMonday Mondayʼ — actually, a decent arrangement, but the choice, all by itself, pla­ces the Brummels on the «oldies» shelf, since The Mamas & Papas themselves pretty much owed their existence to the BBs, and now here they are basically ack­now­ledging that somebody already outdid them at their own game.

 

All in all, this is one of the most inane cover albums of the decade — worth a curious peek, per­haps, as a reminder that even a bunch of absolutely great tunes may be easily spoiled with wrong attitudes and poor translation from one artist's language to another's. And although the Brummels would recoil from this artistic disaster, and get their act together the following year, the damage was done: it struck one further blow at their reputation, tougher and meaner than all the previous ones. Completely justified at the time, alas. Thumbs down.

 

TRIANGLE (1967)

 

1) Are You Happy; 2) Only Dreaming Now; 3) The Painter Of Women; 4) The Keeper Of Time; 5) It Won't Get Bet­ter; 6) Nine Pound Hammer; 7) Magic Hollow; 8) And I've Seen Her; 9) Triangle; 10) The Wolf Of Velvet Fortune; 11) Old Kentucky Home.

 

The title obviously refers to the band's being reduced to a trio — upon the departure of guitarist Don Irving and drummer John Petersen, following the embarrassment of '66. (And if that ain't enough, take an extra look at the album cover). Of course, one could always try to uncover additi­onal meanings — for instance, attempt to define Triangle as a trendy concoction, consisting of one-third American country-/folk-rock, one-third British Kinks-style pop, and one-third world-wide psychedelia. That could probably work.

 

Anyway, the very fact that, having just recorded the most superfluous album in their history and gone through critical disinterest, fanbase decay, and loss of several members, The Beau Brum­mels found it in them to regroup, start anew, and present themselves as artists with interesting stuff to say in 1967, deserves merit. Triangle did not sell at all well, for understandable reasons: the Brummels were effectively kicked off the train by the end of 1965, and it would have taken a miracle to catch up with it in the whirlwind atmosphere of 1967. Besides, most people preferred their psychedelia with a harder edge at the time, and Triangle is totally music for sissies. How­ever, some reviews were positive, and since then, the record earned itself a stable place on all sorts of «great albums from the past that you have never heard about» lists.

 

The most notable song is ʽMagic Hollowʼ — the band correctly realized that it was the most ac­complished creation on the album and put it out as a single, unfortunately, forgetting that «most ac­complished creations» do not always qualify for single releases: the sleepy, hypnotic attitude of the song is quite far removed from the dynamic punch that the record buyer usually expects when he puts down the cash for about three minutes worth of A-side music. But the fact that it flopped commercially does not diminish the accomplishment — mainly in terms of arrangement, which weaves a dense and unique sonic web of harpsichords (played by Brian Wilson's SMiLe partner, Van Dyke Parks), guitars, accordeons, chimes, and strings. It is, indeed, one of the finest repre­sentatives of the baroque pop era — and, as far as my own perception can tell, it does paint a musical picture of a «magic hollow» without the aid of any particularly «trippy» effects or studio trickery, other than a bit of toying around with the delay effect on the vocals at the end.

 

However, the same perception also suggests to me that, in general, Triangle is not much of a «lost masterpiece». Unlike so many true masterpieces of the psychedelic era, its songs do not have a lot of staying power. The band seems hung up in mid-air, somewhere in between their folk roots and «art-rock»... but that is not the real problem — many wonderful things were generated over time in such a hung-up state — the real problem is that the songs, with but a few exceptions, never seem to know how to build up to full stature.

 

Take something like ʽOnly Dreaming Nowʼ, for instance. There is an attractive cello riff that drives it, but it does not mesh at all well with the accordion melody — the song seems torn between its baroque fundament and some sort of gay Parisian attitude: an unusual marriage, per­haps, but not a particularly meaningful one. Much worse, however, is the fact that its ominous introduction never develops into anything «stronger» — the climax of the song involves nothing other than Valentino rising high to bleat out the chorus. Likewise, ʽThe Painter Of Womenʼ is basically just an acoustic guitar / brass-led mantra; its chorus is a little louder than its verses, but that's about it.

 

The album's magnum opus is the five-minute long ʽWolf Of Velvet Fortuneʼ, an attempt to write a mystical-magical mini-epic, influenced by mid-Eastern music, Tolkienish fantasy, and just a pinch of acid. Again, the premise is nice enough — the little creepy echoey guitar flourishes, the ominous notes in the singing — but the eventual resolution (the chorus of "Delight! Delight!"...) is not quite enough a pay-off for the monotonousness of the verses. It's a good song, but it never crosses borders — there is a good reason why everybody knows and loves Led Zep's ʽBattle Of Evermoreʼ, but not this Beau Brummels tale of happenings in a parallel world (and I was never even a big fan of ʽBattle Of Evermoreʼ in the first place).

 

Then there are some things that are just strange. For instance, what was the point of ending the album with a Randy Newman song? Just so as to please the album's producer Lenny Waronker, a good pal of Randy's? ʽOld Kentucky Homeʼ is indeed a hilarious send-up of red­neck attitudes, but it doesn't exactly have a lot to do with psychedelia — and even though it's one of the best tunes on the album (since it belongs to Randy), its positioning right after "delight, delight, the wolf of velvet fortune is upon his merry flight" is befuddling.

 

So, to be honest, Triangle is a mixed bag, really. The Beau Brummels were a decent folk-rock band, and the only kind of hooks Ron Elliott knew how to manufacture were folk-rock hooks. When pressed with the necessity of living up to the times, they accidentally fell upon a unique kind of sound — that one thing I am quite ready to admit: Triangle sounds lovely and intriguing — but the substance did not have enough time to catch up with the form. So no, I do not think Triangle really could belong in the same category with Pet Sounds, Forever Changes, or even The Left Banke's killer singles.

 

But on the other hand, it could have been much worse. Most bands of The Beau Brummels' cali­ber were simply blown away for good by the psychedelic revolution, or, at best, tried to squeeze out miserably laughable simulations of «the real stuff». (Bands like The Hollies were actually the opposite of the Brummels — they continued to write better songs, but nothing that they did in 1967 was as individually inventive as ʽMagic Hollowʼ in terms of pure sound). From that point of view, Triangle is an artistic miracle that, regardless of any criticism, absolutely belongs in the collection of every art-pop lover, let alone the abstract «musical annals». You may fall under its spell or resist it if you wish, but there seems to be no reason to disagree with a thumbs up, parti­cularly if all things are taken in the context of the Brummels' own career, rather than in the con­text of 1967 as the year of Sgt. Pepper, Are You Experienced, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, or Days Of Future Passed.

 

BRADLEY'S BARN (1968)

 

1) Turn Around; 2) An Added Attraction (Come And See Me); 3) Deep Water; 4) Long Walking Down To Misery; 5) Little Bird; 6) Cherokee Girl; 7) I'm A Sleeper; 8) Loneliest Man In Town; 9) Love Can Fall A Long Way Down; 10) Jessica; 11) Bless You California.

 

Somewhere out there is a model that convincingly predicts a Beau Brummels album recorded in 1968 would be more effective and natural than a Beau Brummels album recorded in 1967. May­be this idea has biased me from the start, but I do really feel that Bradley's Barn — titled after the Wilson County studio where the remaining Brummels, Valentino and Elliott, teamed up with some Nashville pros — seriously improves on Triangle. It may have nothing on the uniqueness of the sound of ʽMagic Hollowʼ, but it sounds like a record that these guys really had a lot of fun making, putting off most of the pressure of the preceding years.

 

Obviously, by 1968 the subtle «roots-rock revolution» was in an active phase, and, as The Byrds, The Band, and Bob Dylan were cleansing their organisms from psychedelic «excesses», the Brummels and their original folk-pop vibe suddenly got one more chance. The result is a record that may be even more underrated than Triangle — eleven lovely exercises in country-rock, with Elliott taking care of the music and Valentino of the words (usually): not generic country-rock, mind you (a.k.a. «Singing Cowboy rewrites with hippie lyrics»), but interesting attempts at mer­ging the spirit of country-rock with the band's experience in baroque pop flourishes.

 

Unfortunately, neither the album itself nor any of the singles released on its basis charted at all. ʽLift Meʼ, an experimental, but catchy patchwork that housed too many different beasts (rock­abilly rhythmics, psychedelic woo-hoos, folk vocal melody, Britpop bridge, etc.), was the first failure that was not even included on the LP (you can find it as a bonus track on today's CD ver­sions). ʽLong Walking Down To Miseryʼ was much more straightforward, with a very strong, if also quite delicate and lyrical, delivery from Valentino, but its hooks (including an oddly fussy set of blues-rock acoustic flourishes during each chorus, disrupting the steady, lazy country flow of the melody) were probably too subtle for anyone to notice at the time.

 

Finally, there was ʽCherokee Girlʼ — a 3:30 «epic» tale of the troubled allegoric relations betwe­en the «Cherokee Girl» in question and her friend The Coyote (an influence on Joni Mitchell's subsequent ʽCoyoteʼ, perhaps? lyrically, at least, there may be some unpaid debt here), with an intelligent, subtly grand strings arrangement; but, again, probably a bit less focused and more «wimpy» than necessary for significant chart success in 1968.

 

Neither these nor any of the other songs hit as hard as ʽLaugh, Laughʼ, and in 1968, competition was so tough that you either had to land your hardest punch in one go, or refrain from hitting at all; and the delicate, intelligent charm of Bradley's Barn only emerges with a little bit of time. The biggest surprise is Valentino — at this point, he is a masterful crooner, not busy butchering great songs with crudely experimental vocalizing techniques, as he did on '66, or trying out vari­ous «unusual» styles of singing to match the magic-expecting wishes of the public in 1967, but simply delivering the message with plenty of power, a good sense of pitch, and elegant phrasing and modulation; honestly, Bradley's Barn could simply be one of the best «sung» records of the year. (Especially since the Hollies only released an album of Dylan covers that year — Allan Clarke would usually be Valentino's biggest direct competitor).

 

But many of these songs are quite interestingly written, in addition. ʽTurn Aroundʼ, for instance, through its «dark folk chords» adds a bit of menace, a faint devilish grin even, perhaps, to what could otherwise be just an inno­cent love story. ʽDeep Waterʼ is a country-rocker that really does rock, despite always staying in acoustic territory. ʽI'm A Sleeperʼ is an incidental response to the Beatles' ʽI'm Only Sleepingʼ as presented from the perspective of a talented hillbilly with a strange pen­chant for cello overdubs. Okay, really, none of these songs are all that great — what really matters is that they all sound nice, easy-going, natural, and with an underlying streak of good humor and irony.

 

Overall, Bradley's Barn is a very nice artefact for us to dig up after all these years — traditio­nalist as it is, the Brummels were still able to make it ring out with its own voice: rootsy, yes, but keeping its feet just a few inches above the ground, with echoey traces of fantasyland psychedelia still contained in its keyboards and strings arrangements. That the band (duo) finally disintegrated soon after the album flopped on the charts, even worse than Triangle, was probably inevitable, and, anyway, I am not sure that they would have been able to replicate Barn's subtle charms even one more time without going completely limp and lifeless on us. But speculation is one thing, and facts are another: Bradley's Barn is what we have, and it remains a solid «B-level» album from a rare era whose «solid B-level» offerings are well worth seeking out. Thumbs up.

 

THE BEAU BRUMMELS (1975)

 

1) You Tell Me Why; 2) First In Line; 3) Wolf; 4) Down To The Bottom; 5) Tennessee Walker; 6) Singing Cowboy; 7) Goldrush; 8) The Lonely Side; 9) Gate Of Hearts; 10) Today By Day.

 

If there is a real reason why the Beau Brummels decided to make a comeback in 1974, I am al­most afraid to spell it out. They should have taken their clue from the original Byrds, who had already performed the trick one year earlier and, much to their surprise, discovered that most people couldn't care less about whether Crosby and McGuinn were generating their vibes toge­ther or separately. If the mighty Byrds couldn't do it, how could the not-so-mighty Beau Brum­mels stand a ghost of a chance?

 

They couldn't, but, for some reason, they still thought they could — had they reformed just for the fun of being together once again, they probably wouldn't have scattered in different directions as soon as the reunion album predictably flopped. Predictably, because in 1975, the Brummels' folk-/country-pop sound was either concentrated in the hands of «seriously charismatic» singer-songwriters, or mixed with a generic rock bottom to generate hits à la America. Elliott and Va­len­tino refused to go either way — and gave us an album that basically picked up exactly from where Bradley's Barn left off. No matter how experienced the experience, you could never re­liably tell that these songs were recorded in 1975.

 

The songs do not only sound timeless — they sound quite lovely. The entire atmosphere of Bradley's Barn, its mix of country-pop arrangements and folk melodicity, is carefully preserved, and Valentino has not lost one ounce of the confidence he so admirably gained in 1968. The over­all mood is a little heavier, and there is a higher percentage of dark, depressed numbers (ʽDown To The Bottomʼ, ʽWolfʼ, ʽGoldrushʼ, etc.), but that's one thing to be expected from the post-hip­pie era, and a little extra darkness never hurt anyone anyway — and, besides, the Brummels were well adapted to darkness ever since the lamenting intonations of ʽLaugh, Laughʼ.

 

The main problem, however, remains the same — most of these songs are eminently forgettable. Seven years of better-things-to-do had not produced any miracles: Elliott's songwriting skills are still mediocre, the band's playing has not improved, and the whole experience never for a single moment pushes anywhere beyond «nice». Perhaps they felt it too — or else why would they feel the need to re-record ʽYou Tell Me Whyʼ, a ten-year old single? (It's a fine re-recording, by the way, preserving all the hooks of the original and piling some new guitar flourishes on top — but it only makes the rest pale further by comparison).

 

ʽDown To The Bottomʼ was released as the lead single — a good choice, since the song's grim­ness, pessimism, and accompanying high-pitched, shrill electric guitar solos (courtesy of guest star Ronnie Montrose) do make it a stand­out of sorts. But this isn't Pink Floyd, and few people would want to be lectured on the misery issue by a band as lightweight as the Beau Brummels. Nor would anyone feel the urge to sit up and lis­ten as the feeble, delicate chords of ʽWolfʼ ring out in soft-rock mode, no matter how much they try to transform the "...crying wolf!" chorus into a catchpoint.

 

Every other song only seems to reinforce my point — the Beau Brummels' principal flaw is that you never know when their subtlety slides into weakness. Yes, these songs have potential, but the energy level is comparable to that of an activist two weeks into a hunger strike: even the frickin' drums sound like someone was much too afraid of breaking a drumstick. I mean, Joni Mitchell playing solo acoustic — at her best, that is — could produce more damn energy than this whole supposedly «rock» band.

 

For all of its niceties, I give the record a shaky thumbs up, but inten­ti­onally hunting for it is a waste of time unless your hobby is to build up a complete collection of 1970s country rock — an occupation that I'd find about as exciting as collecting matchboxes or bumper stickers, but hey, that's just an opinion.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE BEAU BRUMMELS LIVE! (1974; 2000)

 

1) Nine Pound Hammer; 2) You Tell Me Why; 3) Turn Around / Singing Cowboy; 4) Gate Of Hearts; 5) Lonely People; 6) Music Speaks Louder; 7) Lisa; 8) Tennessee Walker; 9) Don't Talk To Strangers; 10) Laugh, Laugh; 11) Lonesome Town; 12) Free; 13) Man And Woman Kind; 14) Restless Soul; 15) Her Dream Alley; 16) City Girl; 17) Paper Plane; 18) Just A Little; 19) Love Can Fall.

 

For a band as «historically insignificant» as the Beau Brummels, they do seem to have a rather disproportionate amount of archival releases honoring their legacy — including a monumental 3-CD collection of demos, outtakes and rarities (San Fran Sessions) that is not easily available, and, anyway, the perspective of sitting through 60 samples of «second-rate» material by one of America's classic «second-rate» band may not look all that appealing even to an obsessive com­pletist: a gross excess of the allocated quota if there ever was one.

 

In its place, it is more useful and pleasant to mention this, much shorter, archival release of a live show that the reunited Brummels played in February '74 in some little-known pub near Sacra­mento. For some reason, the show happened to be professionally recorded — with no less than excellent sound quality — only to surface officially twenty-five years later, licensed by the small Dig Music label based in Sacramento.

 

There are two reasons to be happy about it. First, this is the only Beau Brummels live album in existence, and what is a rock band without a live album, even a bad one? Second, the time of the show caught the Brummels in a highly creative mode — Ron Elliott was writing like crazy for the 1975 reunion album, and most of that writing went through a live testing period; 13 out of 19 songs are newly-penned, and, what is most interesting, only three of them actually ended up on The Beau Brummels, so there is a swarm of previously unavailable material here, and not in «raw demo» form, either: these are fully fleshed out compositions that the reformed band was not afraid to offer for their limited, but rowdy audience.

 

As a live unit, the reformed Brummels sounded predictably professional and predictably not all that exciting compared to the studio recordings. The vocal harmonies are not too good, particular­ly when it comes to stretching out on the high notes — the "babe, babe, babe" chorus on ʽDon't Talk To Strangersʼ goes painfully on the ears, and Sal's «macho bleating» (I'm all out of words, goddammit) on ʽMan And Woman Kindʼ is another seriously stressful moment. But in general, when they are not trying too hard, the outcome matches the quality of the original recordings just fine — ʽNine Pound Hammerʼ and ʽTurn Aroundʼ are the major highlights, and the melancholic harmonica of ʽLaugh, Laughʼ has not lost a drop of the original melancholia.

 

But generally, the album is really worth it for several of the new songs that did not make it onto the 1975 record (they might, perhaps, have made it onto subsequent recordings, had the reformed band persevered for a couple extra seasons). ʽMusic Speaks Louderʼ is a lively, friendly pub romp very much in the spirit of the Lovin' Spoonful, and it's funny how its wah-wah-driven guitar parts unexpec­tedly contrast with the overall soft folksy melody. Bassist Declan Mulligan's ʽLisaʼ is a moderately heavy rocker with idiot lyrics, but a nice muscular drive that would be so sorely lack­ing on The Beau Brummels. So is Elliott's ʽRestless Soulʼ; and ʽFreeʼ is one of the band's pretti­est anthemic ballads (although, once again, it loses momentum whenever Valentino starts stretch­ing out — alas, Frank Sinatra this guy is not).

 

Overall, it is very good that the show does not go too heavy on the «classics» and leaves such a huge space for new material, even if this prevents it from becoming a well-rounded, conclusive «live retrospective». Altogether, there is more energy, passion, and interest here than the band demonstrated in the studio — maybe because by the time they did get around to the studio, dis­illusionment had already started seeping in. As it is, Beau Brummels Live! may not deserve its exclamation point, but it may at least be a better example of the reformed band at its brief inspirational peak, so one more final thumbs up is not out of the question.

BILLY FURY

THE SOUND OF FURY (1960)

 

1) That's Love; 2) My Advice; 3) Phone Call; 4) You Don't Know; 5) Turn My Back On You; 6) Don't Say It's Over; 7) Since You've Been Gone; 8) It's You I Need; 9) Alright, Goodbye; 10) Don't Leave Me This Way.

 

Billy Fury. Was this guy just a cheap plastic imitation of American rock'n'roll, temporarily acting as a local substitute on UK soil before «the real thing», like the Beatles and the Stones, came along? Or was he the real thing all along? It's a tough question, not unlike the one that is often asked about the Monkees on the other side of the ocean. Furthermore, is there a single solitary reason, real thing or not, to listen to his recordings today?

 

I think the key factor here is that — unlike quite a few of the supposedly more «authentic» Bri­tish Invasion acts that came in the guy's wake — Ronald Wycherley, a.k.a. Billy Fury, wrote all of his material himself. Yes, he idolized American pop music and rockabilly, and had no idea whatso­ever about going out there and making something different; but he crafted his own melodies and constructed his own lyrics, and when you are doing this in the genre of light entertainment, you either fall flat on your face or you come up with something interesting. Given Billy's tremendous popularity from 1960 to 1963, he must have come up with something interesting, you'd think. And when you take a listen to The Sound Of Fury, his first and best record, just a quick couple of listens might convince you that he really did.

 

Yes, he likes all of them whitebread rockers, and alternately writes and sings in the style of Bud­dy Holly, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, the Burnette brothers, and/or Elvis — all of whom he had to be at once for the hungry British crowds. But the simplest thing to do would be to simply ap­propriate their melodies and add new lyrics, and I do not recognize direct rip-offs. Each time a song starts off exactly like some other classic, it quickly shifts into its own territory — like ʽIt's You I Needʼ, for instance, starts off just like ʽThat's Alright (Mama)ʼ, then gets its own brief poppy chorus. A trifle, of course, and one might seriously argue that all these cosmetic changes were mainly designed as safe guarantee against lawsuits while all the royalties could be kept for the artist. But I hope there was more to it than just financial reasons — that Billy Fury really liked writing songs in the manner of his idols.

 

Of course, The Sound Of Fury is quite a misleading title, and anyone looking for the album in hopes of uncovering a long-lost classic of kick-ass early rock'n'roll must immediately lower the pulsating expectations. Even something like ʽShakin' All Overʼ, also recorded in the UK that same year by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, blows Fury's «fury» out of the water — not to mention most of the major American rock stars of the 1950s. The «wildest» track on here is ʽTurn My Back On Youʼ, an echoey, suggestive, bass-heavy rockabilly romp in the vein of Gene Vincent and Johnny Burnette, but altogether about four years late to seem in any way «dangerous» to any­body but the most killingly conservative grandparents (not that there weren't still quite a lot of them in 1960, of course). Everything else is even more tame, with a poppy or a country under­lining to it. Heck, even such a little-known wussy band as The Silver Beetles, who once refused to be­come a backing band for Billy because he wanted them to fire their bass player (Stuart Sutcliffe at the time, not Paul McCartney, so I sort of understand), was «heavier» than Fury's ensemble. So take the album title with a grain of salt.

 

On the other hand, Billy did have himself a nice playing outfit — including a young and ambi­tious guitarist called Joe Brown (yes, the Joe Brown who went on to many different things, including befriending George Harrison, becoming the father of Sam Brown, and writing some good music in between), helping him out with original riffs (he doesn't solo all that much), and Reg Guest on piano, playing much in the style of such American greats as Amos Milburn and Johnny Johnson (meaning that he mostly favors the boogie pattern).

 

If anything, The Sound Of Fury does sound like a perfectly professional endeavor — it just seems a little bit out of date for 1960, what with all the echo and reverb and bass slapping and a near-total lack of drums (at least loud ones; extra bit of trivia — Andy White, later to play on the Beatles' recording of ʽLove Me Doʼ, is the drummer here). You'd almost think the radio didn't work and it took these guys four years for a steam­ship to deliver The Sun Sessions to their doorstep. (The story also goes that, while doing the bass slapping, they had to have two bassists — one to pick the notes and one to actually do the slap­ping. Hey, but it works!).

 

But they made their own Sun Sessions, and they do sound somewhat like the real thing. As a singer, Billy ne­ver had a unique voice, but it was capable of many things: he can have it all glottalic and hiccupy and rockabillish on ʽTurn My Backʼ, or he can have it slyly sweet with a hillbilly whiff à la Bud­dy Holly on ʽThat's Loveʼ, or he can do tender sentimental pleading on ʽAlright, Goodbyeʼ (al­though the from-the-bottom-of-my-heart crooning style on ʽYou Don't Knowʼ is one time where he seems to severely overcook it: his frail lungs simply cannot handle the ambition). So, looking back on this stuff from more than a half-century distance, I wouldn't call this «empty posing». The guy really dug whatever he was doing here. Thumbs up.

 

That said, the best track on the current CD issue is to be found not on the album itself, but on one of the accompanying bonusy B-sides: ʽDon't Jumpʼ is a terrific pop-rock exercise in the style of post-army Elvis (think something like ʽLittle Sisterʼ), but with heavy emphasis on Duane Eddy-ish twangy guitar and an independently invented «heartbreaking» story of a teenage suicide set to Billy's own lyrics. Just a juicy, seductive example of one of those «light somber moods», set to a stea­dy pop rhythms, that were produced so frequently in the early Sixties and then vanished al­most completely, replaced by genuinely depressing heavy somberness.

 

BILLY FURY (1960)

 

1) Maybe Tomorrow; 2) Gonna Type A Letter; 3) Margo; 4) Don't Knock Upon My Door; 5) Time Has Come; 6) Collette; 7) Baby How I Cried; 8) Angel Face; 9) Last Kiss; 10) Wondrous Place.

 

Billy's second LP seems to have been mainly a «recent singles scoop-up», which is why, unlike most of his early 1960s records, it never got a CD release, and I had to do a little reconstruction from a variety of sources (including some extremely poor quality recordings). It is relatively im­portant, though, since it contains both the A- and B-sides to his first two singles from 1959, the stuff that made him a star in the first place.

 

Interestingly, both of the A-sides are sweet ballads, with the rocking material relegated to the B-sides: apparently, British marketeers were not willing to take chances and counted on Billy's po­tential lady fans to be a more stable source of income than the masculine, rowdy rock'n'roll riff-raff rabble. The ballads are syrupy enough, but not hopeless: ʽMaybe Tomorrowʼ is an attempt to write something in the Everleys' style, with a vocal part that finds a good balance between pathos and humility (it also helps that no strings are involved), and the somewhat denser ʽMargoʼ, re­plete with echoey female backups and woodwind flourishes, is more in the Roy Orbison vein (it also features the wonderful lyrical line "Oh please be mine / Most of the time" — I'm sure the author never noticed the ambiguity, but I wonder what the BBC radio services must have thought of it). Anyway, could have been worse.

 

Of the rockers, ʽDon't Knock Upon My Doorʼ is the more important one — one of Billy's fastest and raunchiest tunes, a straightforward Elvis homage in the spirit of ʽHard Headed Womanʼ, but a little less «dangerous»-sounding due to all the have-a-good-time cheerleader harmonies (you'll be getting those sexy visions of early 1960's girls in tights in a jiffy) and the lack of any sharp lead guitar work (even the solo is handed over to the bass edge of the piano). Still, it's as fun as any second-tier rockabilly number, and so is ʽGonna Type A Letterʼ, although the latter is, unfortu­nately, marred by a rather inept brass backing (whatever these wind blowers were doing in the studio on that day, they surely weren't prepared for a rock'n'roll number).

 

Most of the other tracks are ballads, ballads, ballads, ranging from the easily tolerable (the bluesy waltz ʽBaby How I Criedʼ) to the questionable (ʽColletteʼ, way too hard trying to become the Everleys here, even double-tracking the vocals so as to sound like Phil and Don at the same time) to the awful (an overtly-sickeningly sweet attitude on ʽAngel Faceʼ, sadly, presaging many of the disappointments to come). But the album does get a modestly-excellent conclusion with ʽWond­rous Placeʼ, a moody Latin/Western hybrid with a melancholic flair that Billy pulls off real well, even if, once again, it is just one of several of Elvis' incarnations that he is modelling here.

 

Overall, the album does sound significantly different from The Sound Of Fury — more echo, more atmosphere, less rockabilly, more balladry — which is curious, considering that most of this stuff was recorded at approximately the same time. Recommending it is beyond my abilities (not to mention that this would require setting up an Ebay search), but putting it down due to cheesiness is not something I'd like to do, either: most of the ballads are well within the adequacy limits, and some even have original hooks. It is pathetic, though, just how few rockers they let him place on the LP, despite his obvious attraction to the bawdy side of the business.

 

HALFWAY TO PARADISE (1961)

 

1) Halfway To Paradise; 2) Don't Worry; 3) You're Having The Last Dance With Me; 4) Push Push; 5) Fury's Tune; 6) Talkin' In My Sleep; 7) Stick Around; 8) A Thousand Stars; 9) Cross My Heart; 10) Comin' Up In The World; 11) He Will Break Your Heart; 12) Would You Stand By Me.

 

This marks the end of Fury's transition from «wannabe-rocker» into the «lite entertainment» ca­tegory: the cover of Goffin & King's ʽHalfway To Paradiseʼ, originally recorded by Tony Orlan­do, sent him to the top of the charts, lost him a squadron of devoted hardcore fans but gained an army of newly evolved softcore ones. But was he really to blame? The British Elvis, after all, had to follow in the footsteps of the American one, and now that the real Elvis, back from the army, was softening up his act, the UK shadow had to follow suit — no serious alternatives. «Guitar bands are on their way out», after all.

 

Even worse, Billy is no longer willing to (or allowed to) write his own songs — apart from a little semi-nostalgic, semi-comic number (ʽFury's Tuneʼ), a folk-poppy ditty where he amuses himself by quoting as many titles of his own past hits as possible. Everything else is just stuff by contem­porary US and UK professional songwriters, writing for the lite-pop scene: I mostly do not recog­nize the titles, other than ʽYou're Having The Last Dance With Meʼ, which, for some reason, in­vents new lyrics for the recent Ben E. King classic ʽSave The Last Dance For Meʼ.

 

Still, if you have nothing against early 1960s «soft-rock» per se, Halfway To Paradise is as nice and elegant a ride back into the epoch as anything. There is only one syrupy, orchestrated ballad, floating along at a slow waltz tempo (ʽA Thousand Starsʼ); most of the rest is upbeat, catchy pop with occasional echoes of blues and R'n'B, and if only the arrangements were relying a little less on keyboards, strings, and girlie harmonies, than on a well-recorded guitar sound, the whole thing could have been a cool, tasteful example of pre-Beatles pop.

 

For starters, ʽHalfway To Paradiseʼ, want it or not, is a Carole King classic (perfect melody reso­lution and all), and Billy, with his Elvis-like style, does a grittier, less manneristic job with it than Tony Orlando. Then there's some piano-led country-pop stuff like ʽDon't Worryʼ and ʽTalkin' In My Sleepʼ (imagine Elvis guest singing lead on a Jerry Lee Lewis album from his «country» pe­riod, but do remember to dim the lights a little — this is Billy, after all, not Elvis or Jerry), some bossa nova influences (ʽHe Will Break Your Heartʼ), some further cuddlifying of the sentimental approach of Buddy Holly (ʽStick Aroundʼ)... nothing jaw-dropping, that is, but still a respectably diverse bag of styles, created with a modicum of intelligence, arranged with a big nod to catchiness, and, for the most part, delivered without any signs of overt «sweetening» or theatrical exaggeration.

 

Of course, all of it is way too smooth — the addition of even a single track that would have a faint hint at going a little deeper (such as ʽWondrous Placeʼ) would have helped a lot, but no dice. Still, this is just the kind of album that would get one of those «slanted» thumbs up — mildly plea­sant, «average» with a positive-rather-than-negative shade, etc. Historically, it helped make Billy a national star while at the same time forever burying his hopes of artistic growth — but the same could, indeed, be said about Elvis' early 1960s records, and we do still enjoy them from time to time. Seems like there is more to life than artistic growth, after all.

 

BILLY (1963)

 

1) We Were Meant For Each Other; 2) How Many Nights, How Many Days; 3) Willow Weep For Me; 4) Bumble Bee; 5) She Cried; 6) Let Me Know; 7) The Chapel On The Hill; 8) Like I've Never Been Gone; 9) A Million Miles From Nowhere; 10) I'll Show You; 11) Our Day Will Come; 12) All My Hopes; 13) One Step From Heaven; 14) One Kiss; 15) Hard Times; 16) (Here Am I) Broken Hearted.

 

Unsurprisingly for 1963, Billy's best-selling LP was his artistic nadir — and with the Beatles on the near horizon, ironically, it would also be his last proper LP. Nothing here is self-written; most of the songwriters involved in the project are hack-like professionals, long since forgotten; and the emphasis is rapidly shifting from light, cutesy pop-rock to saccharine balladry.

 

The voice is still there, and, actually, Billy's range and art of imitation are the only things that seem to have been improving with time. For instance, Ray Charles' ʽHard Timesʼ will never make anyone forget the original, but it is not a bad cover: sung with the proper feeling, without su­per­fluous over-emoting, and it's hardly probable that the record industry people forced this cover on Billy — why not just another hack tune from a local craftsmanship instead? Even at this point he might have been allowed the liberty to make a small bunch of «artistic choices», and this one's not bad, and neither is the LaVern Baker nursery-R'n'B of ʽBumble Beeʼ (with Billy's British audiences, most likely, wondering their heads off about the title, because instead of the expected "you hurt me like a bee, an evil bee, an evil bumble bee", Billy prefers to sing "oo-wee, my life is misery, get out of here and don't come back to me". Was «bumble bee» a slang term for some­thing offensive at the time in Britain? Who knows?).

 

But the rest of the songs leave rather faint traces, to put it mildly — even a bare glance at song titles like ʽThe Chapel On The Hillʼ is quite enough to get a preliminary idea of the content and the style: strings, strings, more strings, superstrings (okay, not really), and epic romantic vocali­zing over passable, ten-for-a-dime melodies, of which old Tin Pan Alley standards like ʽWillow Weep For Meʼ are actually the «highlights». The upbeat, but still heavily orchestrated, ʽHow Many Nightsʼ and especially ʽLet Me Knowʼ are the only tracks on here that could even barely suggest that four years earlier, this here gentleman was the unofficial head of Britain's rockabilly scene — on ʽLet Me Knowʼ, the familiar Elvis «snap» reaches out from under the softcore arran­gement — but barely suggest is the key phrase here.

 

Overall, this is just for those who can't get enough out of their Paul Anka records; but, perhaps, Beatles fans also deserve a listen — it would be interesting to try and imagine the Fab Four's re­action to this act of «musical betrayal» (and appreciate their own force of resistance: as we all re­member, even George Martin almost fell into the trap of «taming» and «teenifying» their act by trying to saddle them with silly soft crap like ʽHow Do You Do Itʼ at the beginning). An utterly ignoble thumbs down.

 

WE WANT BILLY! (1963)

 

1) Sweet Little Sixteen; 2) Baby Come On; 3) That's All Right; 4) Wedding Bells; 5) Sticks And Stones; 6) Unchain My Heart; 7) I'm Moving On; 8) Just Because; 9) Halfway To Paradise; 10) I'd Never Find Another You; 11) Once Upon A Dream; 12) Last Night Was Made For Love; 13) Like I've Never Been Gone; 14) When Will You Say I Love You.

 

Well, this is a semi-interesting project at least — in that it allows Mr. Fury one last chance to showcase whatever little of the «fury» was still left. It may not sound exactly like a real live al­bum from real early 1960s, but it is, in a way: recorded live at Decca Studio No. 3, in front of a small (but still annoyingly loud) audience — hence, We Want Billy! may be counted as the first live album by a UK pop-rock act of any importance. (As distinguished from «the first important live album by a UK pop-rock act», which may or may not be Five Live Yardbirds a year later — produced in worse quality, but in an actual club environment).

 

Backed by the semi-professional Tornadoes, whose skills at playing guitar and organ leads seem a little better developed than the skills of the rhythm sections, Billy cuts here through a long chains of rockabilly and R&B standards — then, two-thirds into the album, switches gears and gives us a long medley of his «sweeter» hits. The screaming girls are nowhere near as overwhel­ming as if this were Shea Stadium or Madison Square Garden, but it is not quite clear which si­tuation is better: an evenly spread screaming background of tens of thousands, or singular howls and yelps of dozens that come and go. (The funniest of all is ʽWedding Bellsʼ, where all the ma­jor screaming fits are triggered by the chorus of "wedding bells are ringing in my ears..." — sup­posedly, were polygamy to be allowed, Billy could have walked right out of that studio prouder than a Turkish sultan).

 

Anyway, the rock'n'roll part is passable and sometimes even a little inventive: for instance, ʽThat's All Right (Mama)ʼ starts out as slow country, spiced up with organ flourishes, then gra­dually accelerates, turning only about halfway into the classic Elvis version: a somewhat banal way for us today, perhaps, to show the roots and sources of the rockabilly craze, but not quite so trivial back in 1963. ʽJust Becauseʼ develops, with a key change, out of a short «clap your hands» R&B baby-jam (curious, but unnecessary — Billy can do a passable Elvis, but he's no single-han­ded match for the Isley Brothers). The two Ray Charles tributes (ʽSticks And Stonesʼ and ʽUn­chain My Heartʼ) are, as usual, emotionally charged and further prove that Mr. Fury was a big fan and promoter of Ray's, but, alas, you'd have to have an ego (and a throat) the size of an Eric Bur­don or a Joe Cocker to do Ray any sort of true justice.

 

The balladeering part, unfortunately, is quite skippable: the only reason to listen to these songs in the first place is a willingness to take them in as «pop confections» — the strings, the harmonies, the meticulously rehearsed notes and modulations. In this «live» context, though, even a really good song like ʽHalfway To Paradiseʼ becomes limp and unconvincing (and the idea of recreating the five-note string motif with pseudo-martial drumming does not work), not to mention all the lesser ones, whose titles all speak for themselves.

 

Still, in the overall context of Billy's post-Sound Of Fury career, We Want Billy! is a relatively high point, and it can easily be understood how these tepid (especially to the modern ear), but sin­cerely delivered performances were, indeed, «the next best thing» for UK teenagers who could only dream of meeting their real idols in person. Even regardless of the disappointing ballad med­ley (disappointing for me, of course, not for the orgiastic girls in the audience), the whole impres­sion is that of a modest — okay, condescending — thumbs up. It also helps that the only CD re­lease of the record that I know of pairs it with Billy, which makes for a very seductive contrast.

 

CLASSICS AND COLLECTIBLES (1960-1965; 2008)

 

CD I: 1) Halfway To Paradise; 2) Cross My Heart; 3) I'd Never Find Another You; 4) A King For Tonight; 5) You're Having The Last Dance With Me; 6) Turn My Back On You; 7) Maybe Tomorrow; 8) Wondrous Place; 9) Like I've Never Been Gone; 10) Baby Come On; 11) Do You Really Love Me Too; 12) I'm Lost Without You; 13) Letter Full Of Tears; 14) Turn Your Lamp Down Low; 15) In Thoughts Of You; 16) What Am I Living For?; 17) Somebody Else's Girl; 18) Jealousy; 19) Push Push; 20) Last Night Was Made For Love; 21) Nothin' Shakin' (But The Leaves On The Trees); 22) A Thousand Stars; 23) It's Only Make Believe; 24) Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I); 25) Once Upon A Dream; 26) This Diamond Ring; 27) I Will; 28) A Million Miles From Nowhere; 29) Run To My Lovin' Arms; 30) You're Swell; 31) Forget Him;

CD II: 1) Break Up; 2) Nothin' Shakin' (But The Leaves On The Trees); 3) The Hippy Hippy Shake; 4) Glad All Over; 5) I Can Feel It; 6) You Got Me Dizzy; 7) Saved; 8) You Better Believe It Baby; 9) She's So Far Out She's In; 10) Straight To Your Arms; 11) Away From You; 12) Am I Blue; 13) That's Enough; 14) Kansas City; 15) From The Bottom Of My Heart; 16) I'll Be So Glad (When Your Heart Is Mine); 17) Lovesick Blues; 18) Keep Away; 19) What Did I Do; 20) Cheat With Love; 21) I Can't Help Loving You; 22) Candy Kisses; 23) I'm Hurting All Over; 24) Nobody's Child; 25) Wedding Bells; 26) Stick Around; 27) Time Has Come; 28) Let's Paint The Town; 29) Begin The Beguine; 30) I'll Never Fall In Love Again; 31) I Will Always Be With You.

 

Billy's discography after 1963 quickly becomes a poorly-studied mess. He did have at least one movie soundtrack in 1965 (I've Got A Horse, with some new material), but other than that, most, if not all, of his releases for Decca, and then, later, for Parlophone (from 1967 to 1970) were singles — none of them hits, and few of them even gaining the honor of reappearing on later com­pilations. For obvious reasons: with Beatlemania hitting the decks, by the end of 1963 nobo­dy needed Billy Fury, shorn of his «rock'n'roll» reputation, any more, and he just withered away like the «poor man's UK Elvis» he was (and his withering was correspondingly more pitiful — at least Elvis still sold records a-plenty all the way up to 1977).

 

Anyway, as a brief post-scriptum, here is one of the most readily available comprehensive com­pilations — more than 60 songs in all — that goes way beyond Billy's LP material and includes lots (but far from all) of the single A- and B-sides from 1960 to 1966, that is, his Decca years. In between The Sound Of Fury, which is seriously underrepresented here, and this huge collection, honestly, nobody needs any more of Billy in one's life (well, throw in We Want Billy!, perhaps, just for all the girlie fun). And it is also not very surprising that the Collectibles part, emphasi­zing B-sides and rarities, is generally more enjoyable than the Classics part, mostly dedicated to sentimental and syrupy pop.

 

«Enjoyable», of course, does not mean «outstanding» or «original» — in fact, the best songs are usually covers of contemporary rock'n'roll and R&B hits, with some surprising choices (LaVern Baker's ʽSavedʼ, for instance, or Hank Williams' ʽLovesick Bluesʼ with some credible yodeling, or ʽYou Got Me Dizzyʼ from the repertoire of Jimmy Reed, the world's greatest toothless home­less bluesman getting the blues-de-luxe treatment with pompous brass and all) and some predictable ones (ʽKansas Cityʼ, ʽNothin' Shakin'ʼ, ʽThe Hippy Hippy Shakeʼ, which every British rock'n'roller knew by heart). Interestingly, Billy almost completely refrained from covering the big pop hits of the British Invasion era, the only exception here re­presented by the Dave Clark 5's ʽGlad All Overʼ — he might have been quite bitter at all those whippersnappers outshining him in droves. But what can you do: with the Beatles and the Stones at the front of the movement, professional singers were pushed back by singer-songwriters, and since Billy no longer writes his own material here, or, when he does, strictly adheres to the reci­pés of corporate crooners, sulking ain't gonna help matters none.

 

Still, there is no denying that Billy was a fairly decent chameleon. Elvis was his main, but not on­ly role model. He could have his way with smooth vocal jazz (ʽBegin The Beguineʼ), could inject the required subtle slyness into a Jerry Lee Lewis song (ʽBreak Upʼ), could stir up the soul on an R&B classic (ʽWhat Am I Living For?ʼ). He just never really took it to the very top — and this is where he fails, because in the long run, nobody needs one guy scoring a bunch of B's when one can have instead several different guys, each one scoring one A.

 

Anyway, as long as this whole compilation stretches out, there are no unjustly forgotten classics here, but fans of strong, reliable British vocal cords set to family-entertainment-level arrange­ments will find a lot to heartily nostalgize to. And oh yes, the first disc actually ends with Billy's last recorded track — ʽForget Himʼ, recorded in the early 1980s (yes, synthesizers and elec­tronic drums are included) and released already after his death in January 1983, at the awfully young age of 42. For the record, the song shows that Billy's music remained loyal to cheesy atmosphere until the very end, but also that his vocal power stayed with him for all that time (although the singing does seem a little thinner, probably due to health problems).

BILLY PRESTON

16 YR. OLD SOUL (1963)

 

1) Greazee (Pts. 1 & 2); 2) Lost And A'Lookin'; 3) I Can't Stop Loving You; 4) Born To Lose; 5) Ain't That Love; 6) Bring It On Home; 7) God Bless The Child; 8) Pretty Little Girl; 9) In The Spring; 10) Good News.

 

Most people in the world — certainly, almost all of the people outside the U.S., myself included — have only heard of Billy Preston due to his involvement in the last period of the Beatles' acti­vity in 1969, including participation in the Rooftop Concert, and, perhaps, due to his later friend­ship with George Harrison, stretching all the way from the Bangla Desh Concert period and right down to the posthumous «Concert For George» thirty years later. Not everyone knows, though, that Billy was not just a random figure picked out for no good reason: he'd known the Beatles from their Hamburg days, where, in 1962, they crossed paths with Little Richard and his touring band. But most importantly, even though messing 'round with the Beatles certainly gave Preston's career and notoriety a shot in the arm, he was already a noted presence on the R&B scene.

 

In fact, he was noted as early as 1957, when the young prodigy did a ʽBlueberry Hillʼ duet with Nat ʽKingʼ Cole on TV (check it out here — in case of difficulty, the young prodigy can always be recognized by the large funny gap in his front teeth: that, and the fluent organ-playing tech­ni­que, have forever remained two of his permanent trademarks). Then came supporting gigs with everyone who mattered, from Mahalia Jackson to Little Richard to Sam Cooke, and eventually, in 1963, came the solo debut on the small Derby label — an LP of fully instrumental tunes, focusing exclusively on Billy's organ and piano playing. (Technical note: 16 Yr. Old Soul is frequently ignored in the discographies, due either to the limited nature of the original release, or chronolo­gical confusion — it was re-released in the UK in 1969 under the title Greazee Soul — but this is definitely where it all begins).

 

Now, actually, from a technical point of view the record was somewhat groundbreaking: instru­mental albums with a keyboard fetish were nothing new for the jazz world in the early 1960s, but in the — still quite young and fresh — world of R&B, recording a whole set of vocal-less num­bers was practically unheard of, and the very fact that little Billy got such a proposition would suggest that there was something really special in his keyboard playing. Or, perhaps, that he was just too shy to sing in the studio, and would rather have his trusty organ do all the singing. Other­wise, one would rather expect somebody of Ray Charles' caliber to be the first in line.

 

In any case, 16 Yr. Old Soul is not exactly a masterpiece, but it is also much, much better than one would think, just by looking at the song titles and learning the basic facts. The thing with Bil­ly was not that he was a top-of-his-class «virtuoso», or that he'd mastered everything there was to piano and organ playing, but that he had his own way of making the keys sing. Listen closely to his inspired take on ʽGod Bless The Childʼ, for instance, and you will notice that he has Billy Ho­liday's original in his head all the way, trying to capture the nuances, the shadows, the echoes, varying the tones, the pitches, the force, everything — basically, doing the sort of thing that every instrumental jazz performer would do, of course, but with as much invention and feeling as the best of 'em, if not necessarily with the same technicality.

 

The one major highlight is the instrumental ʽGreazeeʼ, four minutes of moody blues-waltzing spent exploring the world of threatening riffs and flashy solos, showing Billy's easily recogni­zable «whirlwind» playing style already fully established: at his most revved-up, he does it all, from creaky Morse code passages to tricky bends and glissandos... well, maybe not that tricky, but they do rock in an openly aggressive manner — in the world of the electric organ, ʽGreazeeʼ is quite the equivalent of Link Wray in the world of the electric guitar, and it lets you know, from the very start, that the young Billy would be mingling more and more with the rock crowds.

 

Some of the tracks are too dependent on Billy's jazz piano mentors, whoever they might have been (ʽLost And A'Lookinʼ), but whenever the band hits a fast / tight groove, he always ends up shedding superfluous academicity and just plugs along — ʽAin't That Loveʼ and ʽGood Newsʼ, in particular, are great showcase for Billy's «abandon». And second best are those tunes where the point is to capture the spirit of the former vocal part in the keys — like the already mentioned ʽGod Bless The Childʼ or Sam Cooke's ʽBring It On Home To Meʼ. Plus, I have no idea what ʽIn The Springʼ, credited to Lowell Johnson, was originally supposed to be, but here it's a lovely, up­lifting, optimistic piano anthem to start a day with.

 

Despite all the originality, 16 Yr. Old Soul did not make much of a splash, being targeted to­wards the pop rather than jazz market — and the pop market was relatively indifferent to instru­mental albums, unless we're talking real hot white teen dance music like The Ventures. But it is still an absolute must for those who appreciate Billy's talents, because it already shows an accom­plished master of his trade: Billy would never go on to learn to be a first-rate songwriter or unpre­dictable innovator — all he had for himself was sincerity, passion, technique, and a great ability to channel other people's feelings through his own soul, and in one way or another, it's all here al­ready. Not a jaw-dropping masterpiece, just a highly pleasant musical show that fully deserves its honorary thumbs up.

 

THE MOST EXCITING ORGAN EVER (1965)

 

1) If I Had A Hammer; 2) Lowdown; 3) Slippin' And Slidin'; 4) Drown In My Own Tears; 5) I Am Coming Through; 6) The Octopus; 7) Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying; 8) Soul Meetin'; 9) Let Me Know; 10) Billy's Bag; 11) The Masquerade Is Over; 12) Steady Gettin' It.

 

It is quite likely that each of us has an individual opinion on what exactly is the most exciting organ ever and to whom in particular it happens to belong... but hang on there, this is a Billy Pres­ton review and we are actually supposed to talk about his contributions to the world of key­board-based music, or are we not. The album, with one of the most provocative titles ever, was released a few days prior to Billy's 19th birthday on the VJ Records label (notorious for being the first overseas label to gain rights to Beatles' recordings, before EMI got around to their senses), and is often considered his first «proper» album, even though it really is the second.

 

And there is relatively little substantial difference between Billy at 16 and Billy at 19, except that now, almost half of the tunes are original instrumental compositions for the organ (ʽI Am Coming Throughʼ gets to have its title chanted in group harmony form, but that's about as far as it goes with vocal presence). None of them are particularly memorable or interesting per se — the themes are fairly basic — but even the most rhythmically and tonally generic, like the basic blues shuffle of ʽLowdownʼ, are all quite pleasant for those who like Preston's style in general.

 

Of course, his «conversing organ» style is best appreciated where he is emulating classic melo­dies: my favorite bit is the attempt to emulate Little Richard's singing intonations on ʽSlippin' And Slidin'ʼ — not a lot of rock'n'roll excitement here, but the comic-seductive vibe is carried over very well, by heavily taxing the organ keys instead of the vocal cords. ʽIf I Had A Hammerʼ is somewhat less recognizable, but even more inventive in exploring the organ's capability to beat the human voice as primary message-carrier.

 

Overall, though, the whole thing is surprisingly less exciting than 16 Yr. Old Soul. Maybe it is because of the backing band, which seems sort of slack and disinterested, acting like a mere dummy (at least on 16 Yr. Old Soul there were actual guitar solos, competing with the organ). Maybe it is because the choice of covers is a bit off (I mean, who the heck is interested in Don Covay's ʽSoul Meetingʼ?), and the originals aren't quite up to par. Or maybe it is because, in the end, the whole thing sort of comes across as just a blunt publicity campaign for the Hammond.

 

On the other hand, there is no need to be condescending. Billy's level may be incomparable with that of, say, Jimmy Smith (it is always tough to compare the levels of «pop» and «jazz» musici­ans, even though so few people actually listen to the latter), but this is his vision, and there was nobody else around with a vision like that in 1965. The Hammond, with its thick sound and extra elec­tronic capacities, could do lots of tricks for the rock and pop world that an ordinary piano could never reproduce, and Billy, both here and elsewhere, is quite keen on discovering as many of these as possible — pitch, tone, strength, modulation, whatever. What the hell, in a way, this could be the most exciting organ ever. I mean, I like Rick Wakeman and all, but maybe whatever he brought into this world should be described by some other word than «exciting». A thumbs up here, for reasons that go beyond «historical», even if not too far beyond.

 

EARLY HITS OF '65 (1965)

 

1) You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'; 2) Eight Days A Week; 3) Downtown; 4) Goldfinger; 5) My Girl; 6) Go Now; 7) Ferry Across The Mersey; 8) Shotgun; 9) Stop! In The Name Of Love; 10) King Of The Road; 11) The Birds And The Bees; 12) Can't You Hear My Heartbeat.

 

Not much to say here: as far as I can tell, most or all of these songs were recorded during the same session that yielded Exciting Organ, so this is a same-style companion album that is often called a «compilation» — a strange definition, considering that only a few of these titles seem to have been released as singles. In any case, it was an original Vee-Jay LP, re-released on CD thirty years later, and it functions as part of Billy's legacy, so here you are.

 

The «hits», of course, are not Billy's, but other people's — he runs a relatively short gamut here, mostly contemporary Motown material (ʽMy Girlʼ; Junior Walker's ʽShotgunʼ, etc.), interspersed with a few oddities, such as a Beatles cover and the latest Bond song. Since Billy's own composi­tions are rather slack as far as thematic hooks are concerned, this is not a big problem, and in terms of capturing the «spirits» of the originals, he consistently does a very good job — that or­gan captures everything, be it the warm romance of Smokey Robinson, the classy seductiveness of Diana Ross, or the desperate praying of Denny Laine.

 

Even ʽEight Days A Weekʼ works a fine charm — in subtle ways, finer than the original, since Billy, being careful to preserve each vocal note, embellishes them with quirky little flourishes on the sides, coming out with something more complex and less predictable than Lennon / Mc­Cart­ney's original creation (which was great, but lacked development — once you had your verse, chorus, and middle-eight, the rest of the song was exactly the same; for Billy, a bare transposition to organ would have been too boring).

 

The biggest problem is with the choice of material — about half of these songs weren't too great in the first place (I mean, ʽThe Birds And The Bees?ʼ, really?), and I don't quite manage to see the «fun» in producing all these arrangements. Maybe an entire record's worth of Beatles covers (they did have enough popular hits by late 1964 to stuff a 12-song LP, didn't they?) could have been a better idea: in any case, ʽEight Days A Weekʼ sitting next to ʽGoldfingerʼ does give a fair­ly accurate snapshot of the era, which wasn't exactly overpopulated with pop-rock masterpie­ces, but doesn't function so well by way of general enjoyment. (Unless you really dig Hammond or­gan encoding of Dame Shirley Bassey's acoustics).

 

WILDEST ORGAN IN TOWN (1966)

 

1) Midnight Hour; 2) Uptight (Everything's Alright); 3) A Hard Day's Night; 4) Ain't Got No Time To Play; 5) Love Makes Me Do Foolish Things; 6) The Duck; 7) Advice; 8) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction; 9) I Got You (I Feel Good); 10) It's Got To Happen; 11) Free Funk; 12) The In Crowd.

 

The ever more swinging years find Billy Preston still too shy and afraid to try something that de­viates from the established formula. He does continue to acknowledge the arrival of new trends, styles, and fashions — covering contemporary pop hits by the dozen — but he does not dare to sing, still limits his own songwriting to just a small handful of half-assed instrumentals, and, most importantly, still shows little interest in playing with a daring, competitive backing band.

 

In fact, most of the backing players were not even listed in the credits here — with the exception of Sly Stone, not yet a man of «The Family», but already a player on the scene, who is also credi­ted for arranging most of the tracks and co-writing two of Billy's three numbers. Curious trivia bit: ʽAdviceʼ is probably the first recorded song on which you get to hear Sly's trademark "I wanna take you higher" bit, even if the excitement and enthusiasm on this track is on kindergarten level compared with later Family Stone developments. For some reason, the two artists find it funny to interweave the riff of ʽLouie Louieʼ into the melody — in a certain sense, ʽLouie Louieʼ does take you higher, but I wonder if my sense is the same as theirs.

 

Anyway, the only real difference is that, the farther they go, the less these organ rearrangements closely resemble and mimic the originals — ʽSatisfactionʼ, for instance, is practically unrecogni­zable until the brass section starts playing the main riff, at which point you understand that Billy was actually translating Jagger's vocals to an organ setting all along. But he really transforms it into a loose, festive R&B number (somewhat similar to Otis Redding's take), completely chan­ging the spirit of the Stones to something more celebratory and less spiteful. (Which is not neces­sarily a good thing, but a fairly common one with R&B adaptations of British Invasion tunes, so we might just as well make our peace with the procedure).

 

Many of the covers are R&B standards in the first place, though, and cannot be transformed too deeply — ʽIn The Midnight Hourʼ, ʽI Feel Goodʼ — so, in the end, it is still more intriguing and curious to look at Billy handle the other stuff. If ʽSatisfactionʼ rolls along like a merry dance groove, then ʽA Hard Day's Nightʼ, on the other hand, gets slowed down and played in almost dirge-like fashion, which is only logical, if you ask me: this is the kind of rhythm that would be more appropriate for someone who has just had «a hard day's night», «working like a dog». Yes, it's sort of sad that the song loses energy, spirit, catchiness, memorability, and every other reason to exist in the process — but nice, logical, reasonable try anyway.

 

On a final note, beware of ʽFree Funkʼ: despite the title, this is really a slow soul ballad, «freely» quoting from ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ and something else that I do not recognize. Not that the word «funk» had a straight, unambiguous musical meaning in early 1966, of course, but even back then, it would probably be associated with something carnal and sexy rather than a slow moving, spiritually-oriented soul groove. Maybe the record people accidentally switched the title with ʽIt's Got To Happenʼ — since both are original non-hit compositions, who would be giving a damn anyway?

 

Overall, if you only want to have one album of Billy Preston instrumentals, this might just as well be it, or just about any other one would do (I would still lean towards 16 Yr. Old Soul — back then, at least, this formula was still fresh and far away from being run into the ground). A year later, Billy would follow it with Club Meeting, another similar «experiment» that hardly merits its own review (the two LPs have been reissued on a single CD in recent years), except for a brief mention that it does have a few vocal parts, the first real Billy Preston singing on a Billy Preston album. He also does ʽSunnyʼ and ʽSummertimeʼ. (I bet you're already as thrilled as I am).

 

It is a little sad, actually, that in the end, Billy had to spend most of the century's greatest musical decade in such a state of skepticism over his own abilities — the years to come would prove that he had much more to offer the world than credible, mildly imaginative organ reworkings of other people's ideas. Who knows, maybe if he had spent those «magic years» honing his individuality and creativity in more aspects than one, he could have grown into a major star of the business. Then again, idle speculation on the subject is none of our business, either. Simple fact is — early Billy Preston is best enjoyed in a minimal dosage. One LP only, or, better still, a self-made com­pilation. Preferably without ʽGoldfingerʼ on it.

 

THAT'S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT (1969)

 

1) Do What You Want; 2) I Want To Thank You; 3) Everything's All Right; 4) She Belongs To Me; 5) It Doesn't Matter; 6) Morning Star; 7) Hey Brother; 8) What About You; 9) Let Us All Get Together; 10) This Is It; 11) Keep It To Yourself; 12) That's The Way God Planned It; 13*) Through All Times; 14*) As I Get Older; 15*) That's The Way God Planned It (alt. version); 16*) Something's Got To Change.

 

The royal gift to Billy for joining the Beatles on «The Rooftop», and for generally keeping their spirits up a bit throughout early 1969, was a contract with Apple, and probably an unwritten pledge on George Harrison's part to fi­nal­ly promote him as a «real artist» instead of merely «the wildest organ in town». For that matter, That's The Way God Planned It might be considered the first «genuine» Preston album — one on which he finally composes and sings most of his own material the way he wants to, much like Where I'm Coming From would be the «comeout» album for Stevie Wonder one year later (although the analogy is far from perfect, since Stevie had already been singing a long time by then, and his emergence as a serious artist was far more gradual than Billy's — and that's not even beginning to compare the overall qualities).

 

Anyway, this is one of Billy's best albums indeed, but it still isn't particularly great or anything, recommendable mostly for the enthusiasm and out of curiosity. The major problem, of course, is that Billy just wasn't a particularly good songwriter or a particularly awe-inspiring singer. His vocals, now that they are put up front, are those of an honest, hard-working soul / R'n'B guy, but they do not exactly dethrone Otis Redding, and only capture a tiny percentage of the shades of a Marvin Gaye. And his writing is very much hit-and-miss: as fluent as he always remains on the organ, there is hardly a single melodic line on the entire record that forms a memorable picture — and the vocal hooks come sort of unnaturally: already on the first track, the call-and-response trick of "do what you want to!" — "I will love you anyway!" sounds like its two parts actually be­long in different songs, and were spliced together in a sincere, but unsuccessful fit of experimen­tation. In short, do not look to Billy for compositional genius. Not everyone got an epiphany from being close to the Beatles for a short period of time.

 

Even then, That's The Way God Planned It is a lot of fun. Not just because Preston was obvi­ously very glad to be making this record, and, if anything, his sense of joy is fairly infectious, but also because he got to record it with a star-studded cast — George Harrison, Eric Clapton, even Keith Richards (on bass!) and Ginger Baker make guest appearances throughout. Since the pri­mary emphasis always honestly stays on Billy and his keys, it doesn't matter all that much that they all left traces (I am sure nobody will be able to track down a «definitive Keith Richards streak» in the basslines), but it may be felt indirectly in the overall atmosphere: for instance, I am fairly sure it is George adding the subtle weeping licks to ʽThis Is Itʼ, contributing to making it one of the most morose-sounding proto-disco numbers ever recorded.

 

The big breakthrough, and the only track worth hearing again and again, is, of course, the lengthy title track. Nowadays, most people (like me) are probably only familiar with the live version that Billy got to perform on George's Concert For Bangladesh — that was a good performance in­deed, but it failed, or did not even try to, reproduce the multi-layered grandeur of the original. Here, it is not even the main part of it that matters (although it certainly is Billy's finest attempt at conquering the gospel genre), but the long coda where Billy battles it out with Clapton — the two trade rapid-fire guitar and organ punches between each other that are far more breathtaking than the chorus mantra. Herein I move to have the track renamed ʽThat's The Way «God» Planned Itʼ, considering that it features some of the best licks that «God» laid down that year, getting in fine shape before the glorious experiences of 1970.

 

Out of the rest, I could, with a little effort, single out: ʽThis Is Itʼ for the Harrison-related moodi­ness already mentioned; ʽEverything's All Rightʼ with its little comic debt to ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ (the happy-boppy mood always works well for «silly Billy»); and ʽIt Doesn't Matterʼ, which sets a fairly gritty groove (and if that's still Ginger behind the drums, no wonder the massive drum sound plays a strong hand in it). This is, however, negatively compensated by several covers that mostly fall flat — Dylan's ʽShe Belongs To Meʼ, where the jerky, aggressive attitude makes no sense; and an exaggeratedly sentimental delivery of W. C. Handy's ʽMorning Starʼ that shares all the irritating clichés of early 1970s «mainstream family entertainment» of American roots-a-pop. Also, ʽHey Brotherʼ is really ʽHey Joeʼ without the Hendrix — I suppose the «tri­bute» must have been intentional, but it doesn't work anyway.

 

Still, on the whole, this is a thumbs up, and not only because of the title track, but also because of Preston's general charisma. Some people are more than just the sum of mediocre songwriting, merely competent singing, and professional mastery of an instrument — see the Grateful Dead for further reference — and with Billy, you will just have to add a mix of simplicity, sincerity, and sympathy. You might not remember these songs on an individual level, but unless you are completely immune to the basic charms of gospel-flavoured R&B (and I could understand that), That's The Way God Planned It will still aromatize the air around you with some old-fashioned joyful niceness that is not in the least «fake» or «synthetic». And, to quote Mr. Billy himself, from one of his joyfully nice, forgettable songs, "for this, I want to thank you".

 

ENCOURAGING WORDS (1970)

 

1) Right Now; 2) Little Girl; 3) Use What You Got; 4) My Sweet Lord; 5) Let The Music Play; 6) The Same Thing Again; 7) I've Got A Feeling; 8) Sing One For The Lord; 9) When You Are Mine; 10) I Don't Want To Pretend; 11) Encouraging Words; 12) All Things Must Pass; 13) You've Been Acting Strange; 14*) As Long As I Got My Baby; 15*) All That I've Got I'm Gonna Give It To You.

 

Billy's second and last album for Apple is frequently singled out as the highest point of his solo career — for which there certainly has to be some objective basis. Much of the team that would very soon be working on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass is already assembled here, in­cluding George himself, who not only oversaw the production, but also contributed material: in fact, both ʽMy Sweet Lordʼ and ʽAll Things Must Passʼ itself were first shown the world  through Billy Preston's interpretation, before George could think of them as tested enough to make the grade on his own solo record.

 

I do not think we should drift too far away towards that opposite shore, though: Encouraging Words is a very good album that has been as unjustly forgotten as everything else masterminded by «that funny black keyboard guy in the Rooftop Concert», but fanboyishly overrating it (like Bruce Eder did in his AMG review) is no solution, either. In particular, ʽMy Sweet Lordʼ is not better than George's own version, and not just because it lacks the not-yet-invented slide motif, but also because Billy's religious fervor, no doubt sincere but rather ordinary for a professional soul/gospel performer («clichéd» if you will), is no match for the comparatively quiet, restrained, and «earned», if you will, rather than «in-yer-blood» spirituality of Harrison. Here, it is just a high quality gospel number, nothing more.

 

Overall, as usual, the performances are not memorable in an individualistic manner, and get by on the strength of the grooves, the collective spirit, tastefulness of the arrangements, and Billy's per­sonal charisma — the latter is particularly important, because all too often, he assumes a mentor tone (title track; ʽUse What You Gotʼ), which could be annoying, but he is also incapable of plun­ging into a holier-than-thou attitude: "stop getting jealous of the other fellows" is a line delivered with perfect credibility, so that you somehow get to know Billy is just «one of the guys» who mentors you because he cares, not out of some inflated narcissistic reason.

 

And, as «one of the guys», Preston simply does whatever it is his select genre requires him to do. Be sentimental? You got your ʽLittle Girlʼ, with an exaggerated tearful delivery. Rave and rant over unrequited love? You got your ʽWhen You Are Mineʼ, with a funky backbone and a psycho­tic vocal. Praise the Lord? You got your ʽSing One For The Lordʼ — slow tempos, gospel choir, the works. Be transcendental? Here is a cover of George's ʽAll Things Must Passʼ — very dif­ferent from the final version, with heavy orchestration instead of the guitar-brass arrangement that we are all used to. Be socially conscious? The title track will teach you to "stay in school and don't you be no dropout" — a pretty reasonable call for the first post-Woodstock year, even if, for some, it might make Billy look too much like a square (an image he would soon be growing out of, what with that large head of Afro hair and touring with the Stones at their wildest and all).

 

The only truly unpredictable choice here is the brave stab at ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ: you'd think that if there had to be one song exported by Billy from the Let It Be sessions, it would rather be ʽLet It Beʼ itself, or a torch ballad like ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ — okay, if it necessarily had to be something from the Rooftop Concert, it could have been a soul-burner like ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ, but ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ? That one is almost psychedelic, and it was quite an achieve­ment for Billy to sense its true funky soul and turn it into a playful groove (although the conversion of Lennon's counter-melody into an alternate megaphone-processed nasal overdub does not work at all). Still, of course, it lacks the snappy bite of the original — and the strangest thing about it is that Billy's keyboard work on the Beatles' recording is actually more impressive than on his own interpretation, where, as the «master of his domain», he could be expected to turn in a much more flashy performance.

 

There is no flash whatsoever on Encouraging Words, though — not even a Billy/Eric duel like the one on the coda to ʽThat's The Way God Planned Itʼ — and that's the way Billy planned it,  to be just a friendly soul/R&B party with a bunch of friends. And what friends — Derek & The Do­minos in their entirety, plus Harrison, plus Ringo, plus Jim Price and Bobby Keyes on horns,  plus the Edwin Hawkins Singers on backing vocals. There is really no thinking of this record in terms of «hooks» and «pre-meditated melodies» — much of it must have been created right then and there on the spot, and almost everything sounds terrific as long as it's on; then, as the in­dividual moments quickly fade from memory, the overall warmth still remains for quite a bit of time. Not a great record, perhaps, but an encouraging one indeed — thumbs up.

 

I WROTE A SIMPLE SONG (1971)

 

1) Should've Known Better; 2) I Wrote A Simple Song; 3) John Henry; 4) Without A Song; 5) The Looner Tune; 6) The Bus; 7) Outa-Space; 8) You Done Got Older; 9) Swing Down Chariot; 10) God Is Great; 11) My Country 'Tis Of Thee.

 

Sporting a slightly tougher image here: still as deeply religious and idealistic as ever, yes, but is that a slightly threatening «street punk look» that I feel is directed at me from the sleeve photo? Nah... can't be, really. Then again, the funk hits pretty hard on this record — clearly, Billy feels a strong need to emphasize that he is cool with the rock crowds of the day, and that it is really the last thing on his mind to get pigeonholed as a «ladies' man» or a «spokesman for God», or both. He still doth speak for God on occasion (ʽGod Is Greatʼ, yeah, right), but note the complete ab­sence of sappy ballads — in fact, the title track is, in itself, an angered rant against sappy ballads: "They took my simple song / They changed the words and the melody / Made it all sound wrong / Now it sounds like a symphony", he complains. Who knows, this might even have been a direct jab at Phil Spector and his strings on ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ, or something.

 

In any case, the approach does work: there are no particularly stunning highlights on this album (no George Harrison covers, no mega-epic production triumphs like on ʽThat's The Way God Planned Itʼ, etc.), but no particular sentimental lowlights either, with the possible exception of the very last track — for some reason, at the last moment we are presented with a weepy anthemic outburst of patriotism (ʽMy Country 'Tis Of Theeʼ) that misses the mark. Basically, unless you are Jimi Hendrix or the Sex Pistols, you should probably avoid putting your mark on century-old anthems: singing them directly is a corny move, and trying to find your own unique, refreshing interpretation is a risky one — particularly for Billy, who ain't no performing genius, and, despite all his personal charisma, cannot hope to get by on sincerity and passion alone for too long; and adding strings and a gospel choir does not make life any easier.

 

But disregard the country and vouch for space instead — the instrumental ʽOuta-Spaceʼ was ini­tially released as the B-side to the title track, then gradually overtook it in popularity and became one of Billy's most classic numbers: a rather daring experiment in funky, wah-wah-treated, cla­vinet composing, with Billy hanging on a wobbly, scratchy groove and the rest of the band jam­ming rings around his simple, but infectious phrasing. The effect is somewhat close to the one achieved in ʽSuperstitionʼ — although the latter employed a more difficult chord sequence, and was overall «tighter» in the composition sense, this one not only comes earlier, but has much more of a «nasty party» atmosphere.

 

That said, even if the punchy, prickly clavinet does make ʽOuta-Spaceʼ into the most memorable event on the album, the overall strength of the grooves is not any less on such workouts as ʽThe Busʼ and ʽShould've Known Betterʼ (nope, not a Beatles cover here at all: most of the material is quite rigorously self-penned). The pop spirit comes out on the upbeat, jumpy ʽLooner Tuneʼ (which, for some reason, quotes from ʽEntry Of The Gladiatorsʼ on the chorus, adding some psychedelic gloss to the circus atmosphere), and most of the gospel is either disguised as mid-tempo funk once again (ʽGod Is Greatʼ) or gets a nice rootsy sheen (ʽSwing Down Chariotʼ).

 

The album marks the end of Billy's «star luck» period — all the fabulous guests, courtesy of the Beatles connection, that contributed heavily to the star power of That's The Way and Encoura­ging Words, have finally packed and gone home. However, Harrison still stays behind for a few guitar and dobro flourishes, and Quincy Jones is responsible for the strings and horns arrange­ments (which might be the reason why the strings never sound annoying); notorious Motown session player David T. Walker is responsible for most of the guitar work, but most of the time, assuredly sticks in the background (overall, there is very little genuine «soloing» going on here — emphasis is always on collective groove playing).

 

In short — this is just another good Billy Preston album, designed to heat up the party and cheer up the heart, not to blow the mind or any­thing (even if ʽOuta-Spaceʼ seems to set its sights a little bit higher), which corresponds to a modest, easy-going, quickly-passing thumbs up in my book.

 

MUSIC IS MY LIFE (1972)

 

1) We're Gonna Make It; 2) One Time Or Another; 3) Blackbird; 4) I Wonder; 5) Will It Go Round In Circles; 6) Ain't That Nothing; 7) God Loves You; 8) Make The Devil Mad; 9) Nigger Charlie; 10) Heart Full Of Sorrow; 11) Music Is My Life; 12*) Slaughter.

 

Heavier on the Afro hairstyle, but somewhat lighter on sharp funk, Music Is My Life is neither a very interesting title for an album, nor a very good album as such. It does, however, establish the basic formula of a «typical post-gospel Billy Preston hit single»: a cheery, colorful, brass-aided R&B dance number, impressive in form, lightweight in spirit. That is ʽWill It Go Round In Cir­clesʼ, heavily derivative of the early, nonchalant, happy days of Sly & The Family Stone, well-rounded and catchy, but not at all meaningful, as illustrated by the lyrics already: "I've got a story, ain't got no moral / Let the bad guy win every once in a while / Will it go round in circles? / Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?". Nice lines, good spinning groove, but the fact that it became one of only two of Billy's songs to hit No. 1 (and that the second one would be appropriately called ʽNothing From Nothingʼ) is rather telling.

 

It is the best song on the album, though — and the second best one is a little slower, a little more New Orleanian in style, and called... ʽAin't That Nothingʼ (go figure): almost as if some subcon­scious pressure was driving Billy to acknowledge that he has grown up to become a master of amicable, innocent, sometimes even charming «R&B-fluff» whose faint magic is hanging on little other than his amicable, innocent, charming personality. Well, that and a few memorable-through-quirkiness brass flourishes every now and then.

 

In comparison to this «fluff», attempts at getting somewhat more serious every now and then are not necessarily rotten, but generally fail to impress. The full-bodied funky arrangement of ʽBlack­birdʼ is creative, with a well-arranged mish-mash of guitars, organs, and harpsichords, but it also illustrates the «less is more» principle — the song hit far harder when it was just Paul and his quiet acoustic guitar, whereas here all the focus has been dissipated, with the noblest of aims, perhaps, but the feeblest of results. The funk-gospel numbers (ʽGod Loves Youʼ, ʽMake The De­vil Madʼ) are tepid, hard-to-scale grooves. The ballads (ʽI Wonderʼ) are sort of second-rate Al Green without a great vocalist to propel them upwards.

 

And then there is ʽNigger Charlieʼ, a song apparently written in «honor» of the then-current blaxploitation movie The Legend Of Nigger Charlie (two stars from Ebert, in case you're in­ter­ested) — six minutes of an «ominous» funk jam, with generic «black pride» lyrics alternating with some very boring piano / guitar interplay. I mean, either you are really into hot funk, and then you got to make that wah-wah guitar loud, screechy, drunk-off-its-head, or you are into mo­ralizing, and then you do not make a song like this run over six minutes. This is neither a good groove nor a successful message — what were you thinking, Billie?

 

Bottomline: other than the two friendly danceable numbers, the only other thing worth of minor interest on this album is the title track — not so much a proper «song» as a pseudo-improvised «musical credo». Just Billy at the piano (sometimes jumping over to the organ), playing snippets of various melodies in various genres and humming to himself about how music is... well, a gas and all that. Again, nothing phenomenal, but charismatic to boot (and the whole enterprise pro­bably inspired him to plan his next album, which, as an album, would be far more interesting than this here collection of a few mild successes and many languid misfires).

 

If you do insist on getting acquainted with Music Is My Life because music is your life, be sure to get the re-issue that adds the single-only ʽSlaughterʼ from 1972 as a bonus track — that one is a genuine «hard-funker», with a mad, outta-this-world bassline, a proto-industrial synth grind pat­tern terrorizing the listener, and an aggressive, tear-down-the-wall organ «slaughtering» from Billy. God only knows why he never managed to get that angry while recording the LP. Friendli­ness is all right and all that, but a rock'n'roll artist has just got to go angry-crazy every once in a while, even if he happens to be the famous Billy Preston, «The Positive Vibe That Delayed The Beatles' Split». Hence, a thumbs down for the album as a whole — but if Billy wants me to say that I really like him, no problem. I really like him. Swell guy.

 

EVERYBODY LIKES SOME KIND OF MUSIC (1973)

 

1) Everybody Likes Some Kind Of Music; 2) You Are So Unique; 3) How Long Has The Train Been Gone; 4) My Soul Is A Witness; 5) Sunday Morning; 6) You've Got Me For Company; 7) Listen To The Wind; 8) Everybody Likes Some Kind Of Music (reprise); 9) Space Race; 10) Do You Love Me; 11) I'm So Tired; 12) It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding; 13) Minuet For Me.

 

Billy Preston unofficially recommends: if you do not know how to write a good song, write a good concept, and you will have yourself a perfect excuse for each individual instance, because didn't your mother ever explain to you that the sum is always greater than the parts?

 

And the concept is good out here, because it is quite simple, unambiguous, and universally rele­vant. "Everybody likes some kind of music" is, after all, a nearly-true statement (especially if we include Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift into the «some kind of music» category), and every near­ly-true statement like that can easily do with a concept album built around it. In this particular case, Billy exerts himself in producing a set of songs — all but one written or co-written by him­self in person — that represent, one way or another, all the musical genres he had come in touch with over the previous two decades. Not all genres as such — you won't see any Indian ragas or heavy metal on here — but as much as one Billy Preston can handle in half an hour.

 

The challenge, as such, would be interesting in the hands of any professional artist — even if the ambitions are not supported by actual genius, the diversity of approaches, from the very outset, will stimulate curiosity. Technically, the idea is carried out well: there is never any feeling here that Billy is doing «something he shouldn't ought to», not even when he is pulling a Chopin on ʽMinuet For Meʼ, daring to close the record with a little traditionalist classical composition. But in substantial terms, of course, all of these songs are rather weak on their own.

 

Besides the «bold» advance into classical territory, tackled genres include: (a) light lounge jazz (ʽHow Long Has The Train Been Goneʼ, perhaps with a slight subtle reference to Duke Ellington); (b) gospel — Billy's mother milk (the fast-paced ʽMy Soul Is A Witnessʼ); (c) country-western — the somewhat deceptive ʽSunday Morningʼ, which starts out totally in ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ mode, but then quickly moves from ska to banjo-adorned cowboy territory; (d) lush pop balladry (ʽYou've Got Me For Companyʼ — as if we didn't realize that already); (e) gritty electronic funk — ʽSpace Raceʼ, a direct, but not as particularly interesting, sequel to ʽOuta Spaceʼ; (f) blues-de-luxe — ʽDo You Love Meʼ, which would eventually serve as the lazy basis for The Rolling Stones' ʽMelodyʼ on Black And Blue; (g) Bob Dylan — with an ominously orchestrated and slightly funkified take on ʽIt's Alright Maʼ which is... alright, I guess.

 

With the addition of a few «regular» R&B pieces like ʽListen To The Windʼ, this does broaden Billy's usual scope a lot — he'd never ventured into pure jazz or country territory before, let alone classical — and, combined with his ever-present charisma, makes for a fun listen. That said, what the album lacks in the process is one or two standout tracks: all of these exercises are predictably formulaic and, for the most part, exploit progressions that are so standard and so over-abused that it makes no sense whatsoever to discuss the numbers on their own.

 

As an experiment, the album «makes the grade», but is quite forgettable once the grade has been made — proving, unfortuna­tely, that not only is Billy Preston no John Lennon/Paul McCartney combined, but he ain't even no Todd Rundgren (much as I consider Todd Rundgren seriously overrated by the hipster crowd as an exemplary pop master). That said, Everybody Likes Some Kind Of Music got as much soul as any given Billy Preston album, and if you are not into Billy Preston for the soul, I have no idea what else is there that you might be into Billy Preston for. Oh, and the overall production and playing are at the usual high / tasteful level for the early 1970s, but if we are talking 1973, that is to be expected, on the whole.

 

LIVE EUROPEAN TOUR (1974)

 

1) Day Tripper; 2) The Bus; 3) Let It Be; 4) Will It Go Round In Circles; 5) Let's Go Get Stoned; 6) Space Race; 7) Amazing Grace; 8) That's The Way God Planned It; 9) Outa Space; 10*) Day Tripper; 11*) The Bus; 12*) Let It Be; 13*) Let's Go Get Stoned; 14*) Billy's Bag; 15*) Will It Go Round In Circles; 16*) Outa Space; 17*) Higher; 18*) Get Back.

 

Maybe this is it. Yep, if you are wholeheartedly determined to own a Billy Preston album because he has such a cute gap in his front teeth — but are stubbornly determined to own only one Billy Preston album because he only got one gap in his teeth, or for any other such reason — this live performance from the time when the man was at the peak of his powers (no matter how high one believes that peak to have been) might be a better choice than even the best studio records.

 

These recordings were made on the brief European tour where Billy supported the Rolling Stones — the same tour that did not yield the official release of the famous Brussels Affair show, but did yield a live album for Billy, and we do have the Stones to thank for that. First, because it is a real mean feat to be the opening act for the Stones, particularly around 1973: with all the people gathered to see a real hot rock'n'roll show, you have no choice but to work double hard on the atmosphere — leave behind most of the sentimentality and concentrate on the fire.

 

Second, because I have always felt that what was missing the most on Billy's albums was the pre­sence of a reliable guitar sidekick — somebody who could, on a steady basis, provide much-nee­ded sparring partnership, push the guy towards reaching new extremes, crunch-ify the procee­dings and add diversity. Somebody like Clapton, whose presence on the original ʽThat's The Way God Planned Itʼ made it so unforgettable.

 

Well — turns out that for most of the duration of Billy's set, none other than Mick Taylor himself, warming up for the main gig, would come out and play along. It goes without saying that, consequently, the album is an absolute must-have for all those who hold a special place in their hearts for Mick's guitar tones and fluent bluesy phrasing. In fact, one could argue that it is on Billy's songs where Taylor really gets to play his heart out: with the Stones, the guy was «con­trac­tually» held back both in the studio and (to a lesser extent) on the stage, but with Billy, there was no such obliga­tion — so that every time Mick launches into a solo on here, all the attention is immediately diverted to his playing... and Billy is such a nice guy that he doesn't mind too much: in fact, he does not fail to remember to thank «his friend Mick Taylor» at the end of the show.

 

The latest CD edition of the experience actually contains two versions of the album: one from the US and one from the UK market, which differ quite significantly — about half of the tracks ac­tually represent alternate versions, plus the UK album has ʽBilly's Bagʼ and ʽGet Backʼ on it, whereas the US ver­sion replaces them with a closer-to-home instrumental take on ʽAmazing Graceʼ. So, despite all the similarities, there is really very little duplication going on here, and we should be quite happy with eighty minutes of live Billy/Mick material instead of forty.

 

Billy winds himself up fairly quickly — after a brief two-minute warm-up with ʽDay Tripperʼ (yes, the Beatles crop up quite often on this record, but, given the particularities of Billy's biogra­phy, we could not expect otherwise), we get a ten-minute monster jam based around ʽThe Busʼ, which is as blisteringly raw and kick-ass as the album gets in general. With Preston hopping around from organ to Moog and back again, and Taylor having the permission to throw his hard blues chops in the spotlight anytime he feels like it, the ten minutes pass by in a flash — and at the jam's peak, with the two players «weaving» their lead lines around each other, they easily build up as much rock'n'roll excitement as the Stones themselves.

 

In a few tiny areas, the energy level might seem to sag a little — for instance, Billy's «comical» impersona­tion of Ray Charles on ʽLet's Go Get Stonedʼ is rather misguided, and ʽAmazing Graceʼ does not truly find its voice until Taylor joins in at the end — but for most of the time, the heat is totally on: if ʽThe Busʼ were to still leave any doubts, the monster run through ʽOuta Spaceʼ will dissipate the last of them. The final part of that jam features a particularly tense duel between Billy, getting a vile, poisonous tone out of the Moog, and Taylor, spurred on to new heights of slide-playing power (UK version only — the keyboard mix on the US version is not good enough, although Taylor's kick-ass licks are just as good).

 

Overall, this is an essential listen for all those who tend to think of Preston as somewhat of a lite-entertainment «sissy», all gospel anthems and sentimental ballads and fluffy pop songs about no­thing from nothing (speaking of fluffy pop songs, even ʽWill It Go Round In Circlesʼ sounds tough and threatening in this here context). Were it so, the Stones would hardly have entertained the idea to pick on him as a support act (not to mention playing keyboards on their own part of the set) — and while, on his own, he would probably never be in a position to steal the show, the subtle alliance with Mick Taylor almost threatens to do just that. At the very least, I'd bet there was never any clamoring of «we want the Stones!» during Billy's star time. Thumbs up.

 

THE KIDS & ME (1974)

 

1) Tell Me You Need My Loving; 2) Nothing From Nothing; 3) Struttin'; 4) Sister Sugar; 5) Sad Sad Song; 6) You Are So Beautiful; 7) Sometimes I Love You; 8) St. Elmo; 9) John The Baptist; 10) Little Black Boys And Girls; 11) Creature Feature.

 

A perfect title, actually — if there is one soul performer who might be said to have it special for the kids, it is unquestionably Billy: never going heavy on 16+ themes, always loaded with sunny charisma, yet very rarely lapsing into overt tastelessness. Formally, this is not a «kiddie» album, but it is very lightweight in attitude and atmosphere, almost intentionally targeted at those who like it easy-going, unburdened with too much pretense or complexity, but still retaining some basic rock'n'roll grittiness, for the sake of the reputation.

 

Billy's main inspiration in those days seems to have been Stevie Wonder — it is no coincidence that both of them used to be the opening acts for the Stones, Stevie in 1972, Billy in 1973, and there is nothing surprising that Stevie's own sunny-optimistic style, borrowing all the brightest sides from ye olde R&B, jazz, and pop traditions, must have inspired Preston to try going in the same direction. Thus, The Kids & Me is like a lite, much simplified version of Talking Book (Innervisions was chronologically closer, but had much more socially-conscious tenseness to it — not that Billy is never socially conscious, but that side of his is downplayed on The Kids & Me), with more emphasis on dance beats, but the same idea of merging the «catchy pop-hit»  with the «building up an R&B groove» approach, and dressing it all up in modernized production values with a buzzing synthesizer on top.

 

The inspiration proved worthwhile — the album gave Billy his second and last #1, ʽNothing From Nothingʼ, a song that is even fluffier and sillier than ʽWill It Go Round In Circlesʼ, but even more catchy, sort of a fast-tempo vaudeville number with layers of piano, banjo, and brass com­bining, respectively, the atmospheres of music hall, country-western, and New Orleanian party muzak. The song may be easily despised, but it is hardly worth wasting your despisal generator on such an innocent, cuddly trifle. Besides, it was the first musical number ever to be performed on Saturday Night Live, so it's already made history, want it or not.

 

Almost everything else here is just as short, sweet, (more often than not) catchy, and up to the point. The only exception is the slow anthemic love ballad ʽYou Are So Beautifulʼ, which Billy happened to co-write with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys — and which Beach Boys fans will consequently recognize from Dennis' own live performances (e. g. on Live At Knebworth). Of course, the fully worked out, elaborately arranged version here is the one that shows the song's true potential — a little cheesy, but passionately and honestly sung, with an odd, (no doubt) Stevie-influen­ced, synth tone smearing weird electronic honey on top.

 

Around this ballad, strategically placed in the middle, all the little ditties hop around, shifting their places in the blink of an eye — funky instrumentals (ʽStruttin'ʼ), proto-disco with a head-spin­ning strings-to-brass marriage (ʽSister Sugarʼ), almost-completely-disco with metronomic beats (ʽSometimes I Love Youʼ) and Bible-for-juniors adaptations (ʽJohn The Baptistʼ, possibly the most upbeat song ever dedicated to the poor martyr — and sort of a blueprint for nearly the entire career of The Average White Band), and, at the end of the day, a «mock-spooky» B-movie-paro­dy (ʽCreature Featureʼ, where Billy fools around with a talkbox, correctly using it as a tool for producing goofiness, rather than going the Peter Frampton route and trying to employ its po­tential with «serious» purposes).

 

On the whole, The Kids & Me is a surprisingly «adequate» record, one on which there is never any feeling that Billy — a «limited» artist, for sure — may be overstepping his limits, stretching out in directions that he really cannot handle. For a «deeper» Billy Preston — deep enough, that is, to talk to God and humanity in general, but not deep enough to say a lot of interesting and ori­ginal things to either — Encouraging Words or its predecessor still remain the basic standard, but the «fluffy» Billy Preston never got any more charming than on this record, where the fun almost literally drips through his fingers. Thumbs up.

 

IT'S MY PLEASURE (1975)

 

1) Fancy Lady; 2) Found The Love; 3) That's Life; 4) Do It While You Can; 5) It's My Pleasure; 6) Song Of Joy; 7) I Can't Stand It; 8) All Of My Life.

 

The balance is a little upset here: compared to The Kids & Me, Billy's follow-up only has eight compositions on it, and you can guess why that is — either out of a general lack of ideas, or be­cause the dance attitude of the age prevailed so heavily, many of the songs are cruelly stretched out, usually way past the point at which they have anything to say to anything but your limbs.

 

No, actually, scrape that from the record: ʽI Can't Stand Itʼ, one of the album's longest numbers, is not about dancing at all — it is a slow, moody, pensive instrumental that could have been brilliant if not for the fact that all of its brilliance is immediately unveiled in the first twenty-five seconds; from then on, it is all either an infinite number of repetitions or a few sidetracking, distracting solo passages. That is Billy Preston in a nutshell for you: one good idea makes the man so happy that he smears it all over the plate until it ends up looking... well, kinda thin for an idea.

 

There is also a more pronounced emphasis on synthesizers throughout, although Billy strictly ad­heres to the Stevie Wonder formula, preferring a guitar-like sound to his electronics rather than using them to emulate strings and organs, like many (if not most) of his contemporaries. This makes the album somewhat dated, but not in an ugly way — the instruments sound live enough and sufficiently emotional, much like Billy himself, whose optimism and energy was still pulsa­ting — perhaps boosted somewhat by the success of ʽNothing From Nothingʼ.

 

Other than ʽI Can't Stand Itʼ (which should have been compressed to three minutes), the main highlights here are: ʽFancy Ladyʼ, a bouncy-catchy duet with Syreeta Wright (marking the begin­ning of a long-term partnership: apparently, a fancy for synthesizers was not everything that Billy inherited from Stevie Wonder — his ex-wife and partner, too, had made the grade); ʽThat's Lifeʼ, the album's disco-est number that is simply infectiously enthusiastic; and the almost surprisingly moving solo piano ballad ʽSong Of Joyʼ, elevated from fodder level to something higher by the unexpected bass twist at the end of chorus — just as you become assured that this is just one of those «thank-you-for-all-the-happiness» songs, the melody swerves and enters darker territory, with a big question mark that might make you want to revisit it some other day.

 

Still, there are serious disappointments, such as the drastically overlong ʽDo It While You Canʼ, a rather pointless soft-funk jam that is not particularly salvaged by Stevie Wonder's harmonica parts, as the song never really decides what sort of mood it is aiming for. The rest of the tracks, too, are somewhat non-descript, and given how few of them there are overall, It's My Pleasure shows the curve going down again — not a bad record by all means, what with the creative synth sound and the esteemed guest stars (and I haven't even mentioned a certain «Hari Georgeson» adding guitar ornaments to ʽFound A Loveʼ), but where The Kids & Me had Billy in full ade­quate control of his element, this here is yet another pretext to showcase his limitations. And so I'd like to give it a thumbs down, but «officially» I won't do that — there is so much worse to come.

 

BILLY PRESTON (1976)

 

1) Do What You Want; 2) Girl; 3) Bells; 4) I've Got The Spirit; 5) Ecstasy; 6) Bad Case Of Ego; 7) Take Time To Figure It Out; 8) Let The Music Play; 9) Simplify Your Life; 10) Let's Make Love; 11) When You Are Mine.

 

A self-titled album that comes in the middle of an artist's career is usually taken to signify a «re­boot» of sorts — «please allow me to re-introduce myself», «now I'm twice the man I used to be», that sort of thing. And indeed, Billy is photographed on the cover in an introductory pose — in a new and, frankly speaking, rather disturbing light. With the huge Afro hair cut away to make room for the brand new top hat, the setup suggests Vegas glitz, and the chronological context suggests disco-rama. In this context, even the familiar tooth gap begins to look corny, rather than reassuring, as it always used to be.

 

Next, a brief glance at the track listing shows that at least three of the tracks are re-recordings — one number from That's The Way God Planned It (ʽDo What You Wantʼ), two more from Encouraging Words (ʽLet The Music Playʼ and ʽWhen You Are Mineʼ). More cause for worry­ing: since it would clearly be hard to improve on these songs' melodic genius, it is more likely that they were singled out for experimental treatment — restructure and polish the grooves to fit the spirit of contemporary dance pop. And what do you know — that is exactly what they were singled out for, as becomes evident from the very first seconds.

 

Essentially, Billy Preston is a lite-disco album, reducing most of Billy's traditional sides (social message-oriented soul, party/booty-oriented R&B, heaven-bound gospel, and a little bit of senti­mental balladry) to one single invariant. There are a couple exceptions, but for the most part, this is all just one non-stop crystal ball wave of entertainment. It doesn't sound awful at all — behind all the disco «smoothing» of the old funk grooves, Billy's backing band is still playing live and having fun, and it even sounds like Billy himself is having fun, even with the top hat on. But, as could be expected, there is next to nothing to distinguish it from its multiple brethren.

 

Guest stars are mostly wasted — supposedly, Merry Clayton (of ʽGimmie Shelterʼ fame) is some­where here adding hardly noticeable background vocals, and if you pay close attention, you will witness Jeff Beck playing a really mean, revved-up fusion solo at the end of ʽBad Case Of Egoʼ, almost completely buried under the horns and vocals. Horns, by the way, are provided by Tower Of Power, which usually means quality, but it's not as if anybody took real good care of the arran­gements here — everything is fluent enough, but completely passable.

 

There is but one instrumental this time around, and it's probably the best of the lot — the slow orchestrated «blues-waltz» of ʽEcstasyʼ, with tense, wailing synth and guitar solos, goes rather brusquely against the prevailing disco grain. Unfortunately, it has no autonomous, overriding theme to it, but it is still a serious piece of work, the only one here that I wouldn't mind «antholo­gizing» if Billy's post-1975 career is ever considered to qualify for selection. (Most people would probably slobber over ʽBad Case Of Egoʼ just because it has Jeff on it, but at least on ʽEcstasyʼ you can actually hear the guitar, even if it is only played by Steve Beckmeier).

 

That said, I will not denigrate the album even further with a thumbs down, not this time, either, because any record that has a cheery, lively feel like that, generated by one of the cheeriest guys in the business, is OK by me. Going disco may have killed off any serious aspirations that Billy's mid-1970s career could contain (what with all the Stevie Wonder collaborations, etc.), but it did not exactly kill off his spirit — just singed off some of his hair.

 

A WHOLE NEW THING (1977)

 

1) Whole New Thing; 2) Disco Dancin'; 3) Complicated Sayings; 4) Attitudes; 5) I'm Really Gonna Miss You; 6) Wide Stride; 7) You Got Me Buzzin'; 8) Sweet Marie; 9) Happy; 10) Touch Me Love; 11) You Don't Have To Go.

 

When Sly Stone, Billy's good friend and old-time mentor, titled his debut album A Whole New Thing back in 1967, this was sort of understandable — it might not have been the most innova­tive album of the year, given all the fierce competition, but at least it was a new thing, whole or partial. When, ten years later, Billy himself named his far-from-first album A Whole New Thing, it only served to exacerbate the differences between a rough, but active genius like Sly and a pleasant, but mediocre chap like Billy. Most likely, the title simply refers to the disco wave — even though this was already Billy's second album in that stylistics, and the disco movement it­self was far from a «whole new thing» in mid-1977 (although, granted, the album was released about half a year prior to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack).

 

Anyway, this is an even less impressive / memorable affair than Billy Preston, even though it is almost equally likeable while it's on, and for the same reason: no slick, stiffening overproduction. Even the cheesiest entry, conveniently named ʽDisco Dancin'ʼ, features perfectly normal organ backing, perfectly lively string countermelodies, and a perfectly hearty Latin percussion break — so the tune could only be «condemned» from a purely ethical point of view (as in, "it is morally pernicious to sing songs about the joys of disco dancin'... try to be properly spiritual and choose ʽBlitz­krieg Bopʼ instead"). And songs that are not at all «lyrically defiant» — title track; ʽYou Got Me Buzzin'ʼ, etc. — are unimpeachable whatsoever. Which is not to say that there is any­thing particularly insightful to be remarked about them.

 

There are two instrumentals, of which the briefer ʽAttitudesʼ features some nice two-piano spar­ring between Billy and another keyboard player, while the lengthier ʽWide Strideʼ indulges in lite fusion with some free-flowing synth improv. There are a couple of obligatory ballads, too, of which ʽI'm Really Gonna Miss Youʼ is the more soulful, but less engaging one, and ʽSweet Ma­rieʼ is the lushier-sexier one, and probably, by a tiny margin, the best song on the album.

 

The credit list, this time around, features next to no celebrities, unless one counts Marc Bolan's soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Gloria Jones on backing vocals, and... uh... percussionist Ollie Brown who appears on the Stones' Love You Live album as Charlie's aide-de-camp. Not surprisingly, not a single instrumental part ever stands out bar Billy's own — not that anything needs to stand out, because almost everything on here was designed as entertaining dance fodder, with no seri­ous ambitions whatsoever. (Actually, at the time Billy was saving his serious ambitions for a sepa­rate line of pure-gospel albums — the first one, Behold, would come out only a year later. However, the fact that this line is frequently omitted from published discographies is quite telling; supposedly, if you want late 1970s Billy, you will do better with Billy the disco dancer than Billy the Lord's man).

 

LATE AT NIGHT (1979)

 

1) Give It Up, Hot; 2) Late At Night; 3) All I Wanted Was You; 4) You; 5) I Come To Rest In You; 6) It Will Come In Time; 7) Lovely Lady; 8) With You I'm Born Again; 9) Sock-It Rocket.

 

Mediocrity notwithstanding, it has to be recognized that Billy never really made a truly «bad» disco album, despite becoming so deeply stuck in the genre and still sticking to it even at the height of the «disco sucks» backlash. In fact, his last disco-era album, and also his first for Mo­town after the expiration of his A&M contract, might be his finest — despite the utterly god­awful album sleeve (which would still be overwhelmed in godawfulness by the next album, but we do have to remember that the visual standards of mainstream cool do not always correlate with mu­sical quality... well, they tend to, but they don't always do it... well, they usually do, but there are exceptions... well, yeah, it's like about 95% to 5% exceptions, but still... well all right, probably more like 99.1% to 0.9%... well, we do have to be open-minded about it, don't we?).

 

Two ballads, one instrumental groove, and six disco-dance vocal numbers. The only song that made any sort of impact here is ʽWith You I'm Born Againʼ, the sentimental oh-so-adult con­tem­porary duet with Syreeta written for the forgotten comedy Fast Break. The song quickly over­shadowed the movie, became a big international hit, and allegedly raised the birth rate in several countries by a few percent — the last statement is a guess, but even professional haters of the sappy ballad style will have to admit that Syreeta's honey-purr, carefully wrapped in harps and violins, does have the properties of a sexual stimulant (not so sure about Billy's contribution — friendly charisma is one thing, but as a «ladies' man», he is no Al Green or Marvin Gaye, whereas Syreeta really has one of the sexiest voices of her generation). The melody, alas, is almost unbea­rably mushy, but this was the age of Xanadu, after all.

 

The album in general sounds nothing like the hit, though — it's packed with bubbling disco grooves that are not in the least offensive, as Billy's large backing band still plays it out like a real band rather than a set of sonic robots producing basic rhythms for aerobic purposes. Funky guitar and keyboard leads, brisk Latin percussion, hot live sax breaks, vocal hooks — nothing outstand­ing, as usual, but everything perfectly listenable. Actually, ʽGive It Up, Hotʼ that opens te album is almost close to being outstanding — the chorus, dominated by Gloria Jones and her backing girls, raises the playfulness bar much higher than the first forty-five seconds could suggest; at least, the girls push the limits a little further than Billy usually does by himself.

 

Of the other songs, the funniest ones are those where Billy still indulges in his «kids-and-I» spi­rit, adding ska-influenced choruses or breaks over the disco skeletons — particularly ʽIt Will Come In Timeʼ, which is not really any less deserving than ʽNothing From Nothingʼ. On the other hand, the instrumental ʽSock-It Rocketʼ is disappointing: it sounds no different from all the vocal num­bers where the biggest attraction is the vocal hook, but... no vocal hook, and Billy's synthesizer improvs are getting less and less imaginative with age.

 

Overall, this is one of those albums that can actually make one lament over the passing of the «classic» disco age — at least you can occasionally get yourself a human-driven rhythm section, and such ideas as «guitar / bass interplay» or «no pre-programmed keyboards» are still in the air. Basically, you can overcome the limitations of the disco beat if you still preserve the notion of good taste — but you just can't beat a MIDI protocol. Mild, but certain thumbs up.

 

BILLY PRESTON & SYREETA (1981)

 

1) Someone Special; 2) Searchin'; 3) Just For You; 4) It's So Easy; 5) A Long And Lasting Love; 6) Love; 7) One More Try; 8) Hey You; 9) A New Way To Say I Love You; 10) What We Did For Love.

 

It's almost tedious in its predictability — the Eighties are upon us, and with the first year of the new decade, comes the first genuinely awful album in Billy Preston's discography. And what a sad bit of un-luck, too, that it had to be a duet album with Syreeta Wright, whose sweet voice is the only redeemable feature of the record — and even then, only barely.

 

Apparently, Motown wished to exploit the success of ʽWith You I'm Born Againʼ to the utmost limit, and steered the two artists towards pooling their talents for a whole session, evenly split between contemporary teenage dance-pop and contemporary adult balladry. In 1979, that could have worked — the dance-pop, at least, given how ʽIt Will Come In Timeʼ still managed to be fun in Billy's usual «one for the kids» way. But now, with «electro-funk» sweeping the waves, synthesizer markets overstocked with brand new production waiting to be exploited, and Prince and Michael Jackson setting new creative standards for dance music that ruined everybody not fully up to the same levels of creativity, «the average mainstream» was going down the drain so fast, it could almost make you wanna cry for the passing of the disco era.

 

Like I said, this album is atrocious — first and foremost, it is not really a Billy Preston record: his playing here, if it can be called playing at all, is completely lost behind the walls of synthesized strings (if it's balladry) or the programmed drum beats and electronic bass (if it's the shake-yer-booty vibe), and his singing... well, Billy has never been that much of a singer, and when he is doing it face-to-face with Syreeta who, most definitely, is a singer, he hardly ever rises above to­tally generic vocal clichés.

 

Second, it would be one thing if it were only the syrupy power ballads that are atrocious (ʽA New Way To Say I Love Youʼ — nope, no dice, really; ʽLoveʼ — who do you think you are to get away with that title? John Lennon?; ʽA Long And Lasting Loveʼ — between you, me, and sweet Yamaha; ʽWhat We Did For Loveʼ — is it just me, or do I see some sort of tendency here?). Un­fortunately, the dance grooves, while nowhere near as embarrassing, are just plain boring — there is nothing behind these grooves to demand attention, and nothing in these grooves to suggest somebody here was looking for something other than a quick cash-in.

 

Actually, I stand corrected: every once in a while, the grooves do tend to become embarrassing, when the artists start exploring their «Hot, Sexy» sides (such as the bridge section of ʽSearchin'ʼ, or the clumsy, halfway-there Prince-isms of ʽJust For Youʼ). Now that dance-oriented artists were explicitly pushed towards «roughing it up» rather than keeping it smooth the way they used to, you either had to reinvent yourself or die trying. Billy and Syreeta died trying, and sometimes the smell gets a little bit too heavy.

 

Too bad, because, as I mentioned early, Syreeta Wright is a lovely singer, and her vocal talent should not have been wasted on this total tripe — maybe a duet album with Michael Jackson could have been a better proposition. Thumbs down, unless your honorable taste is really per­verse and you delicately feed on generic early Eighties' dance-pop like... (insert your favourite insulting line here: «green flies on horse poop» is a good candidate). The good news is, I think this record was never officially released on CD, and here's hoping it never will be.

 

THE WAY I AM (1982)

 

1) Hope; 2) Good Life Boogie; 3) Keep On Truckin'; 4) A Change Is Gonna Come; 5) Lay Your Feelings On Me; 6) I Won't Mistreat Your Love; 7) Baby I'm Yours; 8) Until Then; 9) The Way I Am.

 

Whew, that was close. Try to ignore Billy's subtle hint on the album sleeve photo (about having just bought a poultry farm in Texas or something like that), and The Way I Am will successfully correct and purify the aura that Motown blew in around their unfortunate duet batch with Syreeta. At the very least, this album is not downright awful. It is predictably generic, and boring, and un­inspired, but it rarely aspires to something else.

 

Basically, the mascot of this here album is the cover of Sam Cooke's ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ — a seriously belated tribute to one of Billy's major influences, done with competence, sincerity, and absolutely nothing else that would warrant its existence. The song is a great anthem for the ages, Billy Preston is a nice fifth Beatle, the keyboard inventory consists of a snowy organ in­stead of a Yamaha synthesizer — it's pretty hard to complain. It's probably the best cover of ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ that was done in 1982, but I couldn't be sure, considering that 90% of black artists and 45% of white artists probably did it at least once in their lifetime.

 

Elsewhere, what we have is: an electronic disco instrumental (ʽGood Life Boogieʼ) with a techno­phile synth solo, a couple dance rockers with either a pop (ʽHopeʼ) or a funk (ʽKeep On Truckin'ʼ) undercurrent, some heavily orchestrated tender-hearted disco numbers à la ʽMore Like A Wo­manʼ (ʽBaby I'm Yoursʼ), an oddly out-of-place slide-driven country blues ballad (ʽUntil Thenʼ), and a pompous, pathetic, tear-gushing, string-flowing «Life-Will-Never-Be-The-Same-Once-I-Finally-Lay-This­-Shit-Down» power ballad (title track), which is probably unsalvageable, like most of the songs that have the artist explicitly sobbing into the microphone, spoiling both the expensive equipment and whatever emotional effect he could have triggered otherwise.

 

There is nothing whatsoever here worth hearing — it is not quite a successful retreat to Billy's late-1970s disco era standards, when there was that certain light, fluffy charm emanating from his kiddie melodies and his band trying to turn them into genuinely hot grooves. Overproduction, bombastic strings arrangements, obvious disinterest on the part of the backing players — it's all there, not to mention the album's being out-of-print for years. But in all honesty, it could have been much worse — if anything, the album and song title do give an indication that Billy is trying to revert to whatever it is he is used to do, and wants to do, instead of having to tag along with the kids, strutting his stuff to those hip electrofunk waves. From that point of view, we could even convince ourselves to forget, if not forgive, the cowboy hat and the open chest.

 

PRESSIN' ON (1982)

 

1) Pressin' On; 2) I'd Like To Go Back Home Again; 3) Loving You Is So Easy; 4) Turn It Out; 5) I'm Never Gonna Say Goodbye; 6) Thanks But No Thanks; 7) Don't Try To Fight It; 8) I Love You So; 9) I Come To Rest In You.

 

Recorded unusually quickly after its predecessor, particularly given Billy's serious problems with alcohol, not to mention general re-adaptation into the hostile climate of early Eighties' main­st­re­am entertainment — quite predictably, this is a carbon copy of The Way I Am: listenable if se­rious need be, but ultimately forgettable under any imaginable circumstances.

 

The two new ballads are predictably rotten on the level of the Syreeta-duet album (a third bal­lad, ʽI Come To Rest In Youʼ, for some strange reason has been copied from Late At Night — not even a re-recording, which is why it is the best of the three, what with the pleasant harpsichord and all, but we already know what it sounds like). The dance numbers, however, continue to cut back on electronics, restore Billy some access to his piano, and slap on some genuinely funky bass and guitar lines — only the drumming is still marred by epoch-defining electronic effects.

 

The «highlight» is arguably ʽI'd Like To Go Back Home Againʼ, with its typically Stevie Won­der-ish rhythmics and harmonica (I am not sure if Stevie himself is actually involved, but that may well be the case) — a homely, catchy shuffle, even if it does sound totally like «post-genius era» Stevie, short on ideas, long on their repetition. On a sheer gut level, I am more pleased by ʽTurn It Outʼ, with a fine instrumental balance (heavy on the cowbell, too!) — with some real drumming and a slightly more loosened vibe, it could be up there with Billy's best dance numbers of the pre­ceding decade — and by ʽThanks But No Thanksʼ, a passable example of «silly Billy» in the ʽNothing From Nothingʼ vein.

 

Of course, when it came to selecting a song for a single release, none of the good choices made the grade — the only single from the album was ʽI'm Never Gonna Say Goodbyeʼ, a song whose quality is already made apparent by the title. For some reason, Motown kept stupidly promoting Billy as a balladeer-troubadour, neglecting the obvious — to stand out in the balladry line, you need to at least have the vocal skills of a Ray Charles, whereas in the dance-pop entertainment line, Billy had his own little lawn of charm, which even the sterile Eighties' production could not quite pave in asphalt.

 

So forget about the single, but if you ever get a chance to rescue an old vi­nyl copy from a used bin for fifteen cents... well, provided you also have shelf space to spare... then again, no, not really — keeping records with front sleeves like that is bad for one's karma. It might be enough to simply remember this: Billy Preston did not lose much of his reputation in 1982 — partly because there was not that much to lose in the first place, and partly because he was not willing to comple­tely give himself up without a fight. The only reason to like Billy Preston has always been because, well, he's a generally likable guy, and in 1982, he was still likable against all odds.

 

ON THE AIR (1984)

 

1) And Dance; 2) Kick-It; 3) Come To Me Little Darlin'; 4) Beatle Tribute; 5) If You Let Me Love You; 6) You Can't Hide From Love; 7) Oh Jamaica; 8) Here, There And Everywhere.

 

Speak o' the goddamn wolf. You might think, perhaps, that if an artist who has stood on the thre­shold of compromising his humble identity for years now has finally been dropped by his major label (Motown) and picked up by a small independent label (Megatone Records) — you'd think that, perhaps, this could be a good chance to focus on that goddamn identity, maybe even release that one particularly special record which, decades later, unearthed, cleaned up, and re-mastered, could be called the «lost gem» of his career, the «pleasant surprise» for fans and bypassers alike. You could think that, and you'd be damn wrong, because...

 

...On The Air is not just the worst ever Billy Preston album in existence — it is one of the worst albums I've ever heard, period, and I've heard some pretty bad ones from the mid-Eighties. The only excuse I can think of is that Billy went really, really heavy on the substances (according to some sources, this was somewhere around the peak of his cocaine addiction), and had no genuine control whatsoever over the compositions and arrangements, most of which fall in the range of utterly routine dance pop, heavy on primitive electronics and with occasional echoes of pop metal (whenever the synths are joined in with electric guitar — not that often, and never to any mutual benefit). The new style is best illustrated on the album opener ʽAnd Danceʼ, which is as far re­moved from anything Prestonian in nature as a Bach suite, only in the opposite direction.

 

On the other hand, presumably it is Billy and Billy alone who has to be held responsible for ʽBeatle Tributeʼ — I do not like abusing the word «moronic» these days, since its vibe should be reserved for really special cases, but I do feel this here is just the occasion. Not only does the «song» have no melody whatsoever to speak of (and whoever writes Beatle tributes without any melody?), but the lyrics, for the most part consisting of crudely intertwined titles of Beatle songs, are priceless: "John, Paul, George and Ringo too / They wrote some beautiful music for me and you". I especially like that «...and Ringo too» bit — such a friendly gesture, and generous, too; betcha thought the original line should have gone «...and Billy too», fifth Beatle and all, but the nice guy must have reconsidered at the last minute. Anyway, it must be so refreshing from time to time to put oneself into the shoes of a second-grader. And kudos to the passionate, high-pitched guitar lick after each of the Beatles' names — so INFLAMING!

 

Next to that, Billy's simply-boring cover of ʽHere, There And Everywhereʼ does not even look that bad — simply boring: unless you change a real Beatles song to unrecognizable levels, it can­not suck that seriously if you just play the main melody on synthesizers. But the rest of the origi­nal «compositions», be it the rotten electrofunk instrumental ʽKick-Itʼ (where there are more drum machine overdubs than actual musical phrases), or the dance-ballad ʽIf You Let Me Love Youʼ, or the electronic reggae «experiment» ʽOh Jamaicaʼ, are all parts of the same pseudo-mu­sical disgrace, and represent the absolute nadir of Billy's career. Essentially, a mediocre ar­tist is at an advantage — his stuff will almost always be judged by the same consistently mediocre stan­dard — but when a mediocre artist stoops to being bad, he is really, really bad.

 

But do not try to search these tunes out — they are not even «hilariously» bad, just «mind-numbingly» bad. Do not even go looking for ʽBeat­les Tributeʼ, or, God forbid, «The Beatles + Billy Preston» may become unintentionally associated with this crap rather than the Rooftop Con­cert or, at least, The Concert for Bangla Desh or some other classic moment like that. It is preferable to simply erase this memory with a collective thumbs down, and forget about this unhappy moment in the unhappiest decade for this man who generally preferred to be happy and spread that happiness around. You just can't always get what you want — apparently, not on Megatone Records anyway. How nice it is that this album was never released on CD, and hope­fully, it will forever stay that way.

 

YOU AND I (1997)

 

1) Hold Me; 2) Right Now; 3) Lonely No More; 4) Supernatural Thang; 5) You And I; 6) I'm In Love With You; 7) Getting It On; 8) Dream Lover; 9) Sweet Senseous Sensations; 10) You Are So Beautiful.

 

On The Air effectively cancelled Billy Preston's solo artistic career, and none too soon: another couple of records of comparable quality with even a bare minimum of promotion, and his good guy reputation would be squandered without hope. Actually, he did record more, and there is such a thing as a «1986 Billy Preston album»: the rather threateningly titled You Can't Keep A Good Man Down, released by D&K Records only in the Netherlands and in Spain and utterly unavailable since then — unless you are an Ebay hunter and God loves you so much that you want to spend seventy bucks on a 1986 Billy Preston album.

 

The remaining two decades of Billy's life were mostly spent on cleaning up, session work, and on­ly very occasional venturing into solo recording — for the most part, he kept to himself in a private manner, with his arguably biggest «public flash» being on the memorial Concert For George four years prior to his own death (ironically, his last glimpse of major fame ended up just as tight­ly connected to the Beatles as his first ones). His discography also becomes confused at this point, with various sources yielding controversial information. He did most certainly attempt a «comeback» in 1995, releasing Billy's Back on NuGroove records: since this already happened in the CD age, the record should be easier to locate, but I have not been able to, and the fact that it opens with a remake of ʽNothin' From Nothin'ʼ does not exactly thrill me into active searching.

 

He may also have recorded one or more gospel albums, but the only secular project of his that is relatively easily available is You And I, recorded in 1997 under odd conditions — in Italy, wor­king together with brothers Lino and Pino Nicolosi of the Italo disco / synth-pop / soft-rock band Novecento. The union sounds kinda scary, but also curious on paper — in theory, this could be something as utterly awful as On The Air and more, but could just as well present some curious surprises. Besides, if it really is the last complete (secular) LP that Billy ever released, it would make at least some reverential sense to get hold of it. So what is it?

 

Well, apparently, there is nothing particularly Italian about it, and, likewise, there is nothing parti­cularly awful or astounding about it. It is just a perfectly middle-of-the-road, not-too-irritating, smoothly even collection of R&B and ballads, ideologically very much belonging in the 1970s but production-wise, an unmistakable product of the 1990s. Which is good, actually — it means clear and sharp production for music recorded by a real band rather than a bunch of samplers. But it also means adding an adult contemporary edge, and it is a little sad to watch the «kiddie spirit» of Billy dissolving away in pools of «heavenly synthesizers». At their best, Billy's grooves were lightweight, upbeat, and giddy; these ones sound deadly serious and «mature», which may theo­retically be alright for a 50-year old, but really, some people need to stay forever young because there is simply no sense at all in their growing old. (And, for that matter, has Billy produced even one thing worthy of long-term memory storage after he turned 30?).

 

Some of the R&B grooves are decent enough to make for acceptable background listening: ʽHold Meʼ, ʽRight Nowʽ, ʽLonely No Moreʼ, and ʽGetting It Onʼ are impeccable from a technical point of view — strong, well-oiled rhythm section with adequately jumpy bass, tasteful jazzy guitar licks, synthesizers creating a moody background but not getting too much in the way, catchy re­petitive choruses, even an occasional attempt or two at entrancing (such as the acappella break in ʽGetting It Onʼ). ʽSupernatural Thangʼ adds a mariachi band vibe for a little extra diversity, and ʽI'm In Love With Youʼ heads towards neo-disco territory. It's all competent, but I am a bit puz­zled about why it was necessary to engage an Italian band (unless, of course, no one else was wil­ling to play with an old washed-up has-been, which might just be the reason) — worse, I am a bit puzzled about why it was necessary to engage Billy Preston, because neither his keyboard playing nor his rather non-descript singing are really at the center of this music.

 

The ballads (title track, a duet with Dora Nicolosi, brother Lino's wife; and the last three tracks that include a remake of ʽYou Are So Beautifulʼ, also as a duet with the same lady singer) fall into the category of «totally generic», although the lady does have a nice tone and all (and a re­markably good English pronunciation, with almost no traces of Italian accent, a relative rarity in the Mediterranean world) — rendering the last twelve minutes of the album pointless from just about any potential point of view. But yes, what's a Billy Preston record without a few heart­breakers? It's good enough they left the Lord out of it this time.

 

Moody, unnecessarily serious, redundant, ultimately dull — all of this could qualify for a cruel «thumbs down», but if taken in the general context of Billy's ups and downs, You And I is still a creative rebound, and it does seem as if he had a bit of fun making it: nothing left to prove, not the slightest chance of commercial success — just a relaxing session with some trendy European friends, themselves probably head-over-heels about working with a «living legend». As a final memento from the man that helped bring us ʽGet Backʼ, ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ, and ʽLet It Beʼ, it is at least an acceptable choice, even if I feel he could have done much better even at that point.

THE BIRDS

THE COLLECTORS' GUIDE TO RARE BRITISH BIRDS (1964-1967; 1999)

 

1) You're On My Mind; 2) You Don't Love Me; 3) Leaving Here; 4) Next In Line; 5) No Good Without You Baby; 6) How Can It Be?; 7) You're On My Mind [original demo]; 8) You Don't Love Me [original demo]; 9) Say Those Magic Words; 10) Daddy Daddy; 11) Run Run Run; 12) Good Times; 13) Say Those Magic Words [alternate ver­sion]; 14) Daddy Daddy [alternate version]; 15) La Poupée Qui Fait Non; 16) Run Run Run [alternate version]; 17) Daddy Daddy [backing track]; 18) Granny Rides Again.

 

When the Deram label put out this lovingly assembled package in 1999 (charmingly ungramma­tically subtitled «contents all their singles, the first demos, unreleased recordings, alternate ver­sions & backing tracks»), they also found it necessary to add «Featuring Ronnie Wood's first re­cordings» on the album sleeve — because, they must have reasoned, who on Earth could have fallen for it except for Stones fans?

 

But in a way, such advertising could have been an easy turn-off just as it could be a turn-on. Not all Stones fans are Ronnie Wood fans — the veterans tend to write him off as a vastly infe­rior figure to both Brian Jones and Mick Taylor (not entirely without reason), and even those who are totally unfamiliar with Stones history know for sure that Ronnie Wood (a) does not write songs (not for the Stones, at least), (b) cannot sing to save his life, and (c) with each passing year, spends more and more time jumping around the stage rather than playing his guitar, that is, when he is not in rehab or courting Ms. Katya Ivanova.

 

Yet it used to be different. In 1964, when The Birds formed in the Yiewsley borough of West London, determined to bring even more muscle to the British Invasion and reap themselves some well-deserved fame / dough / pussy, Ronnie Wood was a handsome, intelligent, and motivated 17-year old prodigy who knew well enough how to play guitar, how to write competent songs, and how to be clever enough so as not to open his mouth and let a more competent singer (Tony Munroe) do the job for him. Whether he was the de-facto leader of the band remains uncertain, but whatever original material they did record was written almost exclusively by himself, so at the very least he was the band's Pete Townshend — and, considering the band's Mod-influenced (although they never pledged explicit allegiance to the Mod culture) looks and sounds, the analo­gy seems even more appropriate.

 

One thing that evaded The Birds was pure luck. They stayed together for more than two years — from late 1964 to early 1967, the juiciest years of 'em all — but over that period, only got the chance to release a tiny handful of singles (four in all), due to poor management, lack of promo­tion and a rather unfortunate run-in with the American Byrds. Most people are naturally lazy to check whether «Byrds» is really a misprint for «Birds», so, naturally, anybody wandering into a local store in late 1965 and asking for the Birds would be handled a freshly imported copy of ʽMr. Tambou­rine Manʼ. Take a lesson from that, kids — next band you form, be sure to name it «The Three-Legged Gonzo Plum Tree Musketeers» or something.

 

Anyway, those four singles, two A-sides of which eventually made it onto Nuggets, are com­pletely on the level. The Birds were okay with covering other people, such as Bo Diddley (ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ), but their very first song, ʽYou're On My Mindʼ, was an interesting and even mildly innovative Wood original, a fierce garage-blues-rocker with several time signature and tempo changes, a wild vocal from Tony, and some ear-piercing soloing from Ronnie. The sea­soned listener will obviously discern a strong Clapton-era Yardbirds influence, but where the Birds lacked in technique, they more than made up in raw energy and crunch.

 

The second single was a cover of the Motown hit ʽLeaving Hereʼ, very popular in London at the time (The High Numbers, soon to be The Who, did it too, and the Birds were often on the same bill with them) — and, although not an original, it took the Birds as high as they ever got. Brutal, heavy riffage here, interspersed with shrill, hysterical solos — instrumentally, the Stones and the Animals had kid­die-level power compared with this, as the Birds went with more explicit bravery in the «caveman sound» direction, even if at the expense of subtlety and understatement. Then, in a gesture that was also quite typical at the time, the B-side, ʽNext In Lineʼ, was a Wood original written in the same style and key as ʽLeaving Hereʼ, an imitation rather than a direct rip-off, but almost as good (unfortunately, with a harmonica solo instead of a guitar-based one).

 

Later singles, the ones that did make it onto Nuggets, actually went a little easier on the blues-rock and added a pop sensibility. Written by outside songwriters, ʽNo Good Without You Babyʼ still compensates for its catchiness with guitar crunch and an ear-splitting crescendo at the end, but ʽSay Those Magic Wordsʼ, recorded in 1966, is already pure «power-pop», with a Doppler-effect-treated lead guitar part (psychedelia on the rise) and, overall, «happier» vocals from Tony — which only reflects the general evolution path of so many «wild» R&B outfits of the time, without any negative assessment: all of these are fine songs in their own different rights. The «sleeper» surprise might be Wood's B-side to ʽNo Goodʼ — the four-minute long ʽDaddy Daddyʼ, with even more experimentation with song structure and tempo changes, falling from upbeat pop to slow-crawling dirge and ending with a feedback-drenched noise section: hilarious and spooky at the same time, a perfect reflection of the contradictory spirit of the time.

 

Problem is, four singles ain't enough to make for a proper LP, let alone a CD-length one, so the archivists at Deram did a remarkable job, indeed, of gathering together everything that could be gathered to occupy more space. Alas, only one track is of significant interest — Ronnie's ʽGranny Rides Againʼ, recorded in the band's twilight days of 1967, a rather stereotypical marching-band-style Brit-pop nugget à la Kinks / Small Faces with an uplifting brass arrangement. The rest ran­ges from the competent, but unnecessary (a cover of The Who's ʽRun, Run, Runʼ which The Who naturally did better on their own) to the silly and unnecessary (ʽGood Timesʼ, a boring attempt at sentimental folk-pop for which they had no proper qualifications) to the just unnecessary (most of the demo versions that do not even have any historical importance — so they started out with a faster recording of ʽYou're On My Mindʼ than what they ended up with... so who cares?).

 

But we will not hold it against them — after all, it was hardly the band's fault that they never got a chance to prove themselves properly, and even if filler is filler, nobody is forced to sit through anything these days. The officially released handful of material is solid mid-Sixties garage / pop-rock stuff — about twenty-five minutes' worth of it — and yes, «Ronnie Wood's first recordings» are quite on the regular Ronnie Wood level: the guy was hardly ever «amazing» in the jaw-drop­ping sense of the word, but he was always sensible, sensitive, and fun. With the added weight of the liner notes, the colorful photos and packaging, I do acknowledge that this here Guide is in­deed a nice collectors' item — thumbs up without any questions.

BLUES INCORPORATED

R&B FROM THE MARQUEE (1962)

 

1) Gotta Move; 2) Rain Is Such A Lonesome Sound; 3) I Got My Brand On You; 4) Spooky But Nice; 5) Keep Your Hands Off; 6) I Wanna Put A Tiger In Your Tank; 7) I Got My Mojo Working; 8) Finkle's Cafe; 9) Hoochie Coochie Man; 10) Down Town; 11) How Long How Long Blues; 12) I Thought I Heard That Train Whistle Blow.

 

First things first: the absolute main reason why «Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated» get a men­tion on this site is historical. Mr. Korner may not have ever been a great visionary or even a par­ticularly gifted musician, yet it so happened that he became, more or less, the Godfather of British R&B — and, consequently, R&B From The Marquee, recorded in June 1962, may be consi­dered the first proper R&B album to appear in UK territory. And even if it wasn't — diligent re­search, which I do not have time to conduct, always shows that there was always a bunch of no-names before the first big name — it was certainly influential, opening the floodgates for the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals, and all of their younger brethren.

 

«Blues Incorporated» wasn't even a proper band — indeed, it was more like a flexible «cor­po­ration» of the blues, with people attracted to and repulsed from its only permanent member, guitar player Alexis Korner, in free-flow mode. (A similar model, albeit with a larger amount of discip­line, would later be adopted by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers). Occasional members of the conglo­meration in its early, «classic» days included just about every future member of the classic Stones line-up, as well as Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Paul Jones, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page... — Alexis had a fairly good eye for talent, in recompense for a lack of a good deal of his own.

 

Unfortunately, at the time when the ensemble finally got a chance to put its sound on record (the title, by the way, is somewhat misleading — the sound did indeed stem «from the Marquee», where B.I. functioned on a regular basis, but the actual recordings were produced in one of Lon­don's Decca studios), most of the future big stars were unavailable. The only «grand name» gi­ven credit here is sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, one of Britain's finest horn blowers of all time, who would later go on to play with the Graham Bond Organization, the Bluesbreakers, and Colo­s­seum; bass, drums, and keyboards are credited to relatively little known individuals (Teddy Wadmore, Gra­ham Burbidge, and Keith Scott, respectively; some of them at least were also parallel members of Chris Barber's Jazz Band).

 

Korner's major partner at the time was singer and harmonica player Cyril Davies, another impor­tant figure in the British R&B movement, but by mid-1962, the two were already drifting apart, and this would be the first and last B.I. record featuring Cyril's vocal talent (not particularly im­pressive anyway) — alternating, on a few tracks, with the throatier, croakier delivery of Long John Baldry (Davies would later go on to form the «Cyril Davies All-Stars» and then die two years later from either endocarditis or leukemia).

 

The setlist, as can easily be seen from the song titles, largely consists of Chicago blues numbers, mainly Muddy Waters, spiced up with a little Jimmy Witherspoon and Leroy Carr; about half of the songs, though, are «originals», i. e. variations on the same Chicago styles and patterns, credi­ted to Korner, Davies, or (in one case) Long John Baldry. The band had a «purist» attitude at the time, focusing exclusively on slow 12-bar blues or mid-tempo jump blues, no Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley allowed (one may amusedly remember how Mick Jagger, in the earliest days of the Stones, was appalled and abhorred at the prospect of the Stones being called a «rock'n'roll band»), an attitude that soon passed, but not before driving a wedge between the more conservative Davies and the more easily adapatable Korner — and not before they released their first album for all the world to marvel at their interpretations of ʽI Got My Mojo Workingʼ and ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ.

 

Frankly speaking, there is very little to marvel at. The lack of proper amplification (Korner con­fines himself to acoustic guitar) may be a minus, but not as big a minus as the very fact that this whole thing is, at best, merely «competent» — everybody does his best to imitate the respective player in Muddy's band, but that is just what it is: a faithful imitation, bound to pale against the original when the players intentionally withdraw from offering anything of their own. Even Dick Heck­stall-Smith, who would go on to much higher heights, is perfectly content here with the sta­tus of a bit player — his sax leads on ʽSpooky But Niceʼ, ʽDown Townʼ, and other instrumentals are fun, but do not stand any serious competition against America's «monster tradition».

 

If anything, it is quite instructive to take one listen to this stuff, if only to see how much of a jump forward the British R&B movement went through in two years' time, and gain an additional ap­preciation for something like the Rolling Stones' debut — everything is always better understood, and sometimes stronger liked, in its context. Nevertheless, no thumbs down here, and not only for the obvious historical reason, but also because, even with all of its blandness, R&B From The Marquee never feels «fake»: all of these people were clearly united by a genuine love for this sort of music, a basic understanding of how it works, and an honest desire to share this love with the listeners. In a way, it is not their fault that the impact of this album had been reduced to naught within a couple of years — every giant leap is naturally preceded by a small step, and this might just have been the small step without which there would be no giant leap. Without Blues Incorporated, there might truly have been no Rolling Stones — and that, to me, is already reason enough for a perfectly «rational», if not altogether «emotional», thumbs up.

 

AT THE CAVERN (1964)

 

1) Overdrive; 2) Whoa Babe; 3) Every Day I Have The Blues; 4) Hoochie Coochie Man; 5) Herbie's Tune; 6) Little Bitty Gal Blues; 7) OK You Win; 8) Kansas City.

 

With Beatlemania already in full swing and the British rhythm & blues scene already beginning to be populated by newcoming young ruffians, this record already has less historical significance than R&B At The Marquee — yet it is also an honestly much better album. First, unlike the «Marquee» sessions, this one was actually recorded live (February 23, 1964, at The Cavern in Liverpool, already made famous by the Beatles' residence): expectedly, it catches Korner's band in a more adventurous and riskier state of mind, where their purpose is not only to «introduce» their influences, but to actually do something with those influences as well.

 

Second, with several years of experience behind their backs, Blues Incorporated were almost beginning to develop some sort of personal identity — very important in an era of swiftly increa­sing competition, even though it was still never enough to make Korner into a superstar (not that he ever entertained any such ambitions). Clearly, they were listening not only to «mass appeal» records from the Chicago blues scene, but to various strands and strains of jazz as well, and intro­ducing «bizarre» elements into their own musical approach.

 

This particular line-up, other than Korner himself, included mostly new players: Dave Castle replacing Dick Heckstall-Smith on sax; Malcom Saul on organ; Vernon Bown on bass; Mike Scott on drums; and Herbie Goins on vocals, although Alexis himself takes the lead on several of the tracks (allegedly, he abhorred his own singing voice and only sang out of necessity — which is understandable, since he has a raspy croak that, at best, comes across as «funny»; still, in terms of mood, it agrees well with many of the arrangements, and it is still light years more «acces­sible» than, say, any random Jimmy Reed vocal).

 

Of all these people, Dave Castle is the loudest, and his sax frequently tends to outshout the voca­list (ʽEveryday I Have The Bluesʼ is a particularly illustrative example: no sooner does Alexis in­troduce Herbie Goins to the Cavern audiences as «someone who can sing» than the frenetic blurt­ing from Dave's pipe completely prevents us — and I am not even talking about the actual audi­ence at the club — from assessing that statement). Some find this a problem, but not me: the noisy ambience generated by Dave's ruckus is intermittently irritating... and curious — certainly B. B. King would never have dreamed of performing the song that way.

 

The lengthy instrumental ʽHerbie's Tuneʼ, ironically named after the band's only non-performing member, is quite solid — a carefully constructed workout in 12/4, with Castle and Saul taking time to improvise and Mike Scott turning in the obligatory drum solo, probably making this the earliest «jazz-style rock instrumental» in the history of British rhythm & blues, and a pretty good one: everything gels, even if the main theme, with its rather monotonous rise-and-fall pattern, is hardly on par with Charles Mingus.

 

Alexis throws in a few of his own compositions, introducing ʽWhoa Babeʼ as a «John Lee Hoo­ker type blues» (not that John Lee Hooker would care for such saxophone exuberance on his re­cords, but otherwise, a fairly good definition) and giving the other one the ambitious title of ʽOverdriveʼ — although, frankly, the only performer to remain in overdrive throughout the album is Dave Castle, so much so that they should have honestly credited this one to «Dave Castle's Blues Incorporated». He even manages to dominate ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ, no matter how much Alexis tries to revert attention to himself by playing a «stinging» slide guitar solo.

 

Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it amuses, but in the end, it is what gives At The Cavern its dis­tinct flavor: Britain had its fair share of competent sax blowers, yet, for the most part, they were either bit players of relatively little significance (e. g. Mike Vickers of Manfred Mann) or played in a strictly pop configuration (Mike Smith of the Dave Clark 5). Heckstall-Smith was among the few exceptions, but he had not yet latched on to his chance to shine — so Dave Castle takes the lead here and blows 'em all away, for bad or for good. Yes, and Herbie Goins does have a nice blueswailing tone, after all (check out ʽOK You Winʼ for proof).

 

Thumbs up, of course, and there is also an expanded reissue of the album that includes an addi­tional six tracks recorded live for the BBC that same year — including ʽTurn On Your Lovelightʼ and ʽPlease, Please, Pleaseʼ, showing how much Korner was really getting into soul-based R&B at that time, way beyond his passion for the Chicago blues scene.

 

 

 

RED HOT FROM ALEX (1964)

 

1) Woke Up This Morning; 2) Skipping; 3) Herbie's Tune; 4) Stormy Monday; 5) It's Happening; 6) Roberta; 7) Jones; 8) Cabbage Greens; 9) Chicken Shack; 10) Haitian Fight Song.

 

This studio album was recorded a month later than the Cavern show, but seems to have been offi­cially released earlier than the Cavern album — no big matter, since neither of the two was a prominent commercial or critical success. It is a good listen in its own right, but it has neither the energy nor the exuberant risk-taking of At The Cavern, consistent with the then-current practice of putting on a politely gallant face in the studio and leaving all the «stop-pulling» business for the live shows. This is the environment in which Alexis calls for tightness and discipline.

 

Unfortunately, a tightly disciplined Blues Incorporated, at best, comes across as a second-rate backing band for Louis Jordan — check ʽSkippingʼ, a professionally played jump-blues where Ron Edgeworth's organ, Alexis' own guitar, and three sax players form five near-ideal pieces of the puzzle, yet that «something special» still ends up missing, maybe because not one of the play­ers is ready to let the instincts take over, too afraid that something will fall out of place. It is this rational fear, I think, that prevented Alexis Korner from becoming Keith Richards, even if some of the licks he plays here are quite reminiscent of Keith's «anglicized Chuck Berry» style.

 

Likewise, the short version of ʽHerbie's Tuneʼ captured here is fairly academic and stiff compared to what they did to it on stage — where the saxophone screeched and whined like a demented pig under the knife, whereas here the pig just lazily grunts and snorts in its trough. Of course, the mix is better, the different instrumental parts are well defined, and Ron Edgeworth's organ adds an extra layer of depth that was all but unheard at The Cavern, but they are not even trying to cap­ture the same excitement.

 

Thematically, Korner, in addition to the old infatuation with 12-bar blues (ʽStormy Mondayʼ, with a stinging guitar solo, fairly decent for the pre-Clapton era) and jazz (ʽIt's Happeningʼ), seems to have also become a big fan of Booker T. & The MGs, ripping off ʽGreen Onionsʼ on his poorly masked ʽCabbage Greensʼ — he gets everything right except for the «evil» vibe that made ʽGreen Onionsʼ so devilish where ʽCabbage Greensʼ is so utterly inoffensive. ʽHaitian Fight Songʼ is a bit better, but still way too tame to match the promise of its title. At best, it sounds like a behind-the-stage preparation for an actual fight.

 

Still, even if Red Hot From Alex should rather read Stone Cold From Alex, there may well be people to whom this «perfectionist» take on rhythm & blues will be dearer than garage rock. The album does have the distinction of being the first well-produced, clear-sounding record to come out of Alexis Korner's camp, and now it sounds like Manfred Mann without the irritating nursery pop ditties — serious, but totally accessible mix of blues, jazz, and dance music whose only fault was in that nobody really needed this kind of music from Britain at the time. Even if he wanted to (which he didn't), Alexis Korner could never become part of the «British Invasion» — this whole thing was strictly for internal consumption, and even then, only as long as the US import market still remained relatively underdeveloped. Only in long-term retrospect is it possible to see that the guy was honestly trying to reinterpret his influences, not just copycat them — and that he just didn't quite have the talent to make these reinterpretations transparent for everybody. A modest thumbs up here, but teetering dangerously on the edge of «blank indifference».

 

ALEXIS KORNER'S BLUES INCORPORATED (1965)

 

1) Blue Mink; 2) Rainy Tuesday; 3) Yogi; 4) Sappho; 5) Navy Blue; 6) Royal Dooji; 7) Preachin' The Blues; 8) The Captain's Tiger; 9) A Little Bit Groovy; 10) Anything For Now; 11) Chris Trundle's Habit; 12) Trundlin'.

 

Introducing a new angle here — for the first time ever, Blues Incorporated operate on a comple­tely instrumental basis, with Herbie Goins quitting in order to front a new hot Mod band, The Nightimers. Not only that, but the focus is very clearly shifted in favor of a jazz approach: around a third of the numbers are completely in the jazz idiom, and the rest at least tend to stray away from the 12-bar blues form, in favor of jumpier time signatures and extra sax work.

 

Naturally, with so much «authentic» jazz work to digest and assimilate, it is futile to expect that people nowadays would have any incentive to dig Alexis' noble attempt to lead British R&B in a different direction. Compared to jazz stuff that was en vogue or, more politely, «on the cutting edge» in 1965, this bunch of tunes is more or less on a «Mother Goose level» — Korner is taking more cues from Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman than Miles Davis or Coltrane. This is un­derstandable, since he had no lofty goal of progressing from «intelligent entertainer» to «intellec­tual innovator». But this sort of music entertained relatively few people in 1965 — not to mention today — and its traces dissipated just as quickly as those of any other given B.I. album.

 

Which may be just a tad unfair, because Alexis and the band (Heckstall-Smith still manning the sax, along with Phil Seamen on drums, Mike Scott on string bass, and Johnny Parker on piano) are trying to achieve something. At least the opening number, ʽBlue Minkʼ, is unusual in its com­bination of a Chicago blues guitar style on Alexis' part with two fussy, dissonant sax parts blown in the background, kind of a Muddy-meets-Dolphy type of thing. Does it make sense? Is it inspi­rational? Mind-opening? Who knows? All I can say is — at least they make a creative effort, even if the resulting synthesis is not pleasing for either straightforward blues or jazz lovers.

 

The arrangement of Robert Johnson's ʽPreaching The Bluesʼ is likewise non-trivial, with a slight­ly discordant sax and tribal congas accompanying Korner's slide playing (which remains relative­ly faithful to Johnson's parts). The dissonance takes some time to get used to, but one could say that it only strengthens the hellish atmosphere of the track (remember, ʽUp Jumped The Devilʼ was the original subtitle). Again, an interesting, if not flabbergastingly exciting, take on an old classic, quite novel for its time.

 

The remaining tracks feature steadier tempos and less fussy arrangements, and also occasionally lapse into rewriting (ʽRoyal Doojiʼ is basically just ʽHerbie's Tuneʼ under a different name), but ʽSapphoʼ and ʽTrundlin'ʼ have charming dance potential, and Parker's ʽA Little Bit Groovyʼ fea­tures impressively dexterous piano playing for an allegedly «B-level» record. In brief, everything is totally listenable and undeniably professional, and if there are only one or two attempts at ex­panding existing boundaries, well... frankly speaking, quite a few highly applauded jazz albums do not really feature any such attempts, so let us not frown at poor Alexis Korner just because he dared to encroach upon such an alien turf. In a way, for some people, this might be the least predictable and most promi­sing record in his entire career.

 

 

 

SKY HIGH (1966)

 

1) Long Black Train; 2) Rock Me; 3) I'm So Glad; 4) Wednesday Night Prayer; 5) Honesty; 6) Yellow Dog Blues; 7) Let The Good Times Roll; 8) Ooo-Wee Baby; 9) River's Invitation; 10) Money Honey; 11) Big Road Blues; 12) Louise; 13) Floating; 14) Anchor 5 Miles; 15) Daph's Dance.

 

The last album to be credited to «Blues Inc.» (after this Korner just kept going on in his own name) was released in April 1966 — already at a time when everything that Alexis ever did, someone at that point was doing it better. The Graham Bond Organization stole away his jazz thunder, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers sneaked away his blues temper, Fresh Cream was just around the corner, Jimi was coming up around the bend, and that's just in the UK alone. Further­more, all of Korner's finest brass players had migrated to a better climate, and his new vocalist, Duffy Power, was just a competent, hoarse, blues-rock vocalist (previously noted for one of the first — and worst — covers of the Beatles' ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ, hardly saved even by an expert rhythm part from Graham Bond's organ).

 

This means that, for the most part, the band is back here to generic, unexciting 12-bar blues stuff and sparkless blues-rock that sounds hopelessly antiquated for its time. In retrospect, it probably gives an overall finer impression than it did in early swinging London days, but who would you rather want to listen to — Alexis Korner on guitar and Duffy Power on harmonica, or, say, Mud­dy Waters and Little Walter on the same instruments? (For the record, Duffy's harmonica is all over the place, and he blows it in just as perfunctory a manner as he sings — Mick Jagger was a titanic-level impressionist in comparison even in his earliest days).

 

If there is anything here of mild interest, it is a couple of jazzier numbers that sound like leftovers from the self-titled Blues Incorporated: Mingus' ʽWednesday Night Prayer Meetingʼ at least tries to be exuberant, and ʽHonestyʼ tries to be multi-part, experiment with time signatures, im­provise, and, overall, behave in a «look-at-me-I'm-so-Miles-Davis» kind of manner. Again, there is no reason why one shouldn't be listening to the real thing instead, but this material feels more natural for the band — like it or not, successful blues playing requires having a bit of the devil in the soul, and these guys just don't seem to be able to make contact.

 

A small, odd surprise is further provided by three short acoustic guitar instrumentals that close off the record: just Alexis and his six-string, playing three original folk-blues compositions. Not one of them displays any stunning technique or emotional breakthrough — it just sounds like a quick set of last-moment sketches that the man put together before cutting the record. But it is an inte­resting gesture all the same, and a rather cute way to say goodbye, even if Korner probably did not know at the time that he would soon be forever retiring the name of «Blues Incorporated».

 

Actually, Korner's solo career from 1967 and up to his death from lung cancer in 1984 was long and varied, and would have its ups, downs, and (most frequently) middle-o'-the-roads — but no matter how much fashionable revisionism we might want to cook up, it is hardly likely that he will remain in pop music history as anything more than a devoted Kulturträger of the early 1960s: a semi-legendary figure, worthy of respect, recognition, and memory for what he did as a promo­ter, but not as a musician, composer, or performer. Not that there's anything wrong with that — just don't bother hunting for these records, hardly worth even the time of the hunt, let alone the money (or the bandwidth).

BLUES MAGOOS

PSYCHEDELIC LOLLIPOP (1966)

 

1) (We Ain't Got) Nothin' Yet; 2) Love Seems Doomed; 3) Tobacco Road; 4) Queen Of My Nights; 5) I'll Go Crazy; 6) Gotta Get Away; 7) Sometimes I Think About; 8) One By One; 9) Worried Life Blues; 10) She's Coming Home.

 

One possible reason why the Blues Magoos' debut album made even less of an impression on the buying public than it could have is that the title is grossly misleading. A «psychedelic lollipop» would rather be something like a 1967 record from the Hollies or the Monkees — catchy pop strewn with trippy sound effects. These guys, however, were quite far removed even from «fake» psychedelia. What the Blues Magoos really loved was the blues (sorta evident), wimpy Byrds-style folk-rock, and garage vibes. This makes for a fairly diverse listen — yet there is nothing even remotely «psychedelic» about this album.

 

It was also kind of evident that the Blues Magoos wouldn't have a chance to go all that far. By the time Psychedelic Lollipop came out, they had already hung out around the Bronx and Greenwich Village for at least two years, without much success, and you can see why — there are no traces of «individuality» here, neither in the playing nor in the singing, neither in the attitude nor in  composition. Like gazillions of their contemporaries, the Blues Magoos sincerely loved their in­fluences, but lacked the talent, or the chutzpah, to build up on them.

 

The band's greatest moment of glory is here, of course, as the lead-in track. ʽWe Ain't Got Nothin' Yetʼ is based upon a riff that was nicked from Ricky Nelson's cover of ʽSummertimeʼ: famous session bassist Joe Osborn originally came up with it as early as 1962, but, frankly speaking, the idea of pairing it with the ʽSummertimeʼ vocals was fairly odd, and the Blues Magoos, singing in unison with its triumphant martiality, make much better use of the idea. (Naturally, such a great riff couldn't help but be re-pilfered later as well, most notably by Ritchie Blackmore on ʽBlack Nightʼ, but it plays a very different role out there). Not only that, of course, but the whole song is one of those perfect «youth-army-on-the-march» anthems of the mid-1960s that, spiritual-wise, puts it on the level of ʽMy Generationʼ — and the sharp guitar breaks, rising to ear-piercing heights after each verse, complete the tension.

 

However, already the second original, a bass-and-organ-dominated dark folk ballad (ʽLove Seems Doomedʼ), feels formulaic and clichéd, subscribing to a high school level (a.k.a. totally fumbled) understanding of a «broken heart» and how to translate the idea into music. And ʽSometimes I Think Aboutʼ, although also credited to the band, in reality owes its lyrics and basic structure to a traditional folk song, and its guitar / organ arrangement to ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ, of which it could be said to be a poor man's version. (The Blues Magoos did adore the Animals above most other British Invasion bands, so it seems: there is a cover of ʽWorried Life Bluesʼ here that tries to ape the Animals' older version as closely as possible).

 

One more song deservedly made it from here to the Nuggets anthology — the band's take on ʽTobacco Roadʼ. It is similar in structure and mood to the Nashville Teens' 1964 version, but its main charm is, of course, in its being extended by two of the fastest, noisiest, most pissed-off jam sections of the year, with Peppy Theilhelm and Mike Esposito giving their axes a full-scale thra­sh­ing that presages the Velvet Underground's ʽEuropean Sonʼ by a good year or so. (It may be so that they were trying to match some of the Yardbirds' stuff, but couldn't due to neither of them being Jeff Beck, so they invented minimalist avantgarde noise music instead. Okay, so they didn't exactly invent it, but they did contribute their two cents).

 

The other covers consist of more lacklustre folk ballads; a tolerable, but unexciting escapist R&B track (ʽGotta Get Awayʼ, not the same as the Stones' title of the same way, but just as much of a throwaway as the Stones' song); and a totally unconvincing cover of James Brown's ʽI'll Go Cra­zyʼ (even Roger Daltrey sounded more authentic, or, at least, more hooliganish on the Who's early Brown covers). In other words, two great tunes, surrounded by quick-grown patches of filler — not a good start for a band that had at least two years all to itself to come up with a more in­volving sound or a fuller batch of original material.

 

Nevertheless, considering that there are no genuine embarrassments here (upon second thought, even the James Brown cover is listenable provided you are not familiar with the original), any al­bum that has ʽWe Ain't Got Nothin' Yetʼ and ʽTobacco Roadʼ on it, deserves at least a modest thumbs up. And besides, unlike so many of their quickie-mart garage contemporaries, the Blues Magoos weren't done yet — for them, the battle had only just begun.

 

ELECTRIC COMIC BOOK (1967)

 

1) Pipe Dream; 2) There's A Chance We Can Make It; 3) Life Is Just A Cher O'Bowlies; 4) Gloria; 5) Intermission; 6) Albert Common Is Dead; 7) Summer Is The Man; 8) Baby, I Want You; 9) Let's Get Together; 10) Take My Love; 11) Rush Hour; 12) That's All Folks.

 

As bold and presumptuous as a title like ʽThere's A Chance We Can Make Itʼ might sound, the Blues Ma­goos' second album, taken in the context of its time, clearly shows that there is really no chance whatsoever of their making it. The band does find itself ready to conform to the usual re­quirements: compared to the six covers on Psychedelic Lollipop, this follow-up only has two, with every member of the band, even the drummer, joining the resident songwriters' guild — and its title and structure give it even more of a «mock-conceptual» flavor. Unfortunately, not only is this not a Sgt. Pepper, it isn't even quite on the level of second-rate 1967-style psychedelic apings by the likes of the Pretty Things or the Hollies.

 

The problems remain the same — lack of songwriting talent — and they are best illustrated on the opening number: ʽPipe Dreamʼ is fast, energetic, and psychedelic-tinged, but not a single in­strumental or vocal line is shaped into a decent hook. Ralph Scala's organ and Mike Esposito's «raga-blues» guitar, played Frisco-style, rub nicely against each other, but the same could be said about a million other songs from the same year. The song has neither the catchiness nor the ten­sion build-up of ʽWe Ain't Got Nothin' Yetʼ, and it is actually surprising that they managed to get as high as No. 60 on the charts with it — what with all the insane competition going around.

 

The other three songs that the band released as singles are even less impressive: ʽSummer Is The Manʼ is tender folk-pop in the vein of the Searchers, but without that band's competence and per­fectionism to compensate for the sappiness; ʽLife Is Just A Cher O'Bowliesʼ is a weird retro throwaway in the style of, say, Del Shannon — it probably has the catchiest vocal melody on the album, but it is not quite clear what particular business does a ballsy garage rock band cover by switching to such a «namby-pamby» style; and ʽThere's A Chanceʼ tries to melt your brain with continuous feedback and droning vocals, but since there is no hook attached, it is not clear what need there is of this song — surely, if we just want the feedback and the trippy atmosphere, we'd all rather listen to Jimi than to these guys.

 

Overall, the only original number here that shows potential is the very last song — ʽRush Hourʼ could have been a top-notch heavy rocker (in fact, its distorted guitar / organ duet niftily presages the classic Deep Purple pairing of Lord and Blackmore) if only the song had better... better every­thing: better production, better mix separation, better playing, better singing, better internal de­velopment, better coda... other than that, great job, really.

 

But there is no better proof than the band's totally successful, impressive cover of Them's ʽGloriaʼ to the statement that the lack of songwriting talent was their main problem — it is a very worthy successor to ʽTobacco Roadʼ as a psycho freakout, and one where the insane jamming section actually stays more in touch with the main sung part (on ʽTobacco Roadʼ, the basic melody and the crazy free-form section were, after all, sewn together rather crudely). This is arguably the first extended, six-minute long, interpretation of ʽGloriaʼ found on record (earlier Gants, Shadows Of Knight, and other covers ran for less than three minutes, respecting the original), and might just as well be one of the best.

 

Additionally, it is humorous to discover that a song called ʽLet's Get Togetherʼ, which, given the circumstances, you'd probably expect to be a Jefferson Airplane-type peace-and-love hippie an­them, is really a cover of a Jimmy Reed booze-blues number — together with a drunk, teetering-tottering imitation of Jimmy's «toothless» delivery. Nothing special, that is, but just the kind of material towards which the Blues Magoos clearly feel a more natural affection than towards all sorts of flower power stuff.

 

The «conceptual» nature of the record shows in the brief links — the ʽIntermissionʼ and the ele­ven second-long Looney Tunes finale (ʽThat's All Folksʼ); together with the album title, they pro­vide a «pulpy» spirit, amusing and self-ironic at the same time. But even here, the band only dips one small finger in the water — by the end of the year, The Who Sell Out would show every­body how far one can go in that direction without fear of drowning the good stuff in kitsch and parody. All in all, Electric Comic Book, listenable and modestly enjoyable as it is, still feels like a failed exam — reinforcing the feeling that ʽNothing Yetʼ was just an accidental fluke.

 

BASIC BLUES MAGOOS (1968)

 

1) Sybil Green (Of The In-Between); 2) All The Better To See You With; 3) I Can Hear The Grass Grow; 4) Yellow Rose; 5) I Wanna Be There; 6) I Can Move A Mountain; 7) President's Council On Psychedelic Fitness; 8) Scare­crow's Love Affair; 9) There She Goes; 10) Accidental Meditation; 11*) You're Getting Old; 12*) Subliminal Sonic Laxative; 13*) Chicken Wire Lady; 14*) Let Your Love Ride; 15*) Who Do You Love.

 

The band's third and final attempt to make themselves noticed in a world of gruesomely heavy competition. Some creative growth is evident: all of the songs but one are originals, and the one cover is that of a contemporary psycho-pop single — The Move's ʽI Can Hear The Grass Growʼ, very suitable for the Magoos' current interests and much more «relevant» than, say, another Jim­my Reed or Ray Charles tribute. However, this is where the growth starts and ends: in all other respects, this is just another Blues Magoos record, well on the level of Electric Comic Book, but still lacking anything even remotely close to the «bomb» of ʽNothin' Yetʼ.

 

The opening number, ʽSybil Greenʼ, is this album's ʽPipe Dreamʼ: a song that seems to have plenty of potential, but ultimately remains a failure — the descending organ riff, its main claim to individuality, is not given enough prominence to register itself deep in the emotional core, not against the wimpy vocals, the disappointing lack of hook in the chorus, or the simplistic power-pop rhythm guitar backing. It has all the ingredients of The Move, for sure, but none of that band's talent to make these ingredients matter.

 

It is all the more evident when you look at them actually covering The Move: on one hand, they honestly work to bring out to light some of the facets of ʽI Can Hear The Grass Growʼ that were underdeveloped in the original (such as the colorful guitar riff introducing the verses, somewhat smudged in Roy Wood's version, but quite resplendent here, despite worse production), but on the other hand, they completely undermine the song's psychedelic capacity by choosing a more aggressive, lower-pitched and barkier approach in the chorus: their "I can hear the grass grow, I can hear the grass grow, I see rainbows in the evening" is delivered almost like a call-to-arms, which is definitely not what this peaceful and, essentially, introspective song really needs.

 

Elsewhere, the Blues Magoos now come across as a slightly lighter version of Blue Cheer: on songs like ʽAll The Better To See You Withʼ and ʽThere She Goesʼ they mask the paucity of ideas with a thick, brutal sound that still lacks interesting chord sequences. ʽThere She Goesʼ has a curious solo section (some proto-electronic bleeps in the nascent style of United States of Ame­rica, battling over turf with freakout electric guitar), but that's about it. Maybe if they at least had hired an expressive singer... at this point, the lack of a good vocalist in the band really becomes a problem — their vocal melodies seem to be more thoughtfully constructed than instrumental ones, but neither Scala nor Tielhelm know how to do them justice.

 

ʽI Can Move A Mountainʼ aspires to become a touching epic, rooted as much in dark folk as it is in jangle-pop, but loses out just as well because (a) the production is tedious, with everything, from vocals to organ to rhythm section, glued together in tapeworm fashion; (b) the vocals, apart from the first bars of its «romantic» opening, are nasal and «wooden» at the same time; (c) the mid-section, with its twenty seconds of loud musical chaos instead of a normal solo, is pointless, because the «crashdown» comes from nowhere, is completely unexpected and out of place (un­like, just to quote the first analogy that crept up in my head, a similar «crashdown» in the middle of Bruce Springsteen's ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ, where it concludes a ripping solo and has a well identifiable purpose of its own).

 

And that is not to mention minor ridiculous excesses — ʽScarecrow's Love Affairʼ, for instance, which is not only a bad attempt to cross psychedelic trippings with a barroom rock vibe, but also ends in at least one whole minute of recordings of engine noises, a minute we should all have saved for something better to do. Or the generic psycho-folk conclusion of ʽAccidental Medita­tionʼ, which is neither really a meditation nor certainly accidental. (And I'm not saying anything about the one-minute «link» of ʽSubliminal Sonic Laxativeʼ, attached as a bonus track — except that it is hardly even worth checking out to learn what it is that is so embarrassing about it).

 

I suppose that, on some level, the album certainly justifies its «#435 for 1968» rank currently awarded to it by the reviewers at RateYourMusic — considering the greatness of the year, #435 isn't too bad — but the rank more or less correctly reflects the order in which I would recommend adding Basic Blues Magoos to anybody's collection, as well. Style-wise, I have no problems with the record — the band has proved capable of adapting to changing fashions, shifting to heavier grooves, modernized technologies, and a larger amalgam of different styles. But the playing, the sin­ging, and the songwriting departments are still understaffed, and now that there isn't really a single song here that I'd like to keep in memory, I have no choice but admit that the Blues Ma­goos' boat had sunk back then, even before the original band split up and became replaced with a «Peppy Castro Post-Blues Magoos Experience». Thumbs down.

 

NEVER GOIN' BACK TO GEORGIA (1969)

 

1) Heartbreak Hotel; 2) Heart Attack; 3) The Hunter; 4) Feelin' Time; 5) Gettin' Off; 6) Never Goin' Back To Geor­gia; 7) Brokedown Piece Of Man; 8) Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out; 9) Georgia Breakdown.

 

Oh yeah, as if these Bronx fellas had ever been to Georgia. This and the following album usually get a very bad rap compared to the earlier stuff — for the simple, objective, and respectable rea­son that this is a «phony» version of the Blues Magoos. The real Blues Magoos, fed up with lack of success, split in late '68: the only original member of the band to have renewed the contract with ABC Records is Peppy Castro, a.k.a. Emil Thielhelm, and the rest are all new — including keyboardist and songwriter Eric Kaz, who would later earn a living by getting his songs covered by the likes of Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. The others are even darker horses.

 

The «revamped» Blues Magoos, sniffin' the whiffin' of the times, were no longer a psychedelic or a garage rock band — they were «rootsy» artists now, dabbling in blues-rock, jazz-rock, and folk-rock with such a serious face on that the album is stuffed with five-, six-, and seven-minute-long explorations of this suddenly discovered «earthy» component of their spirits. The shift — if it is at all possible to speak in terms of «shifts», considering that what we have here is an entirely dif­ferent band — anyway, «the shift» is quite expectable, given the times, but the ability of Peppy Castro to make his new band rival The Byrds or The Band?..

 

Still, this is an interesting album. It does feature an unusual gimmick — in the keyboards depart­ment, huge emphasis is placed on chimes (xylophones?) as a lead instrument, which gives the record a nifty «cool jazz» flavor; and many of its pieces are either purely instrumental or feature lengthy instrumental sections, which is quite alright considering that the band still lacks a good singer — Thielhelm's voice is weak and stiff, completely beyond competition in an era of Van Morrisons, Joe Cockers, and Rod Stewarts (and these are only the white guys). On ʽGettin' Offʼ, they go as far as trying to play some dissonant jazz piano solo passages à la Thelonious, and you know what? I couldn't really state with certainty that they're «bad» solo passages.

 

The album really falls flat on its face on the «tough» numbers — ʽThe Hunterʼ, due to the weak singing and the unimaginative, harmonica-based arrangement, is virtually nothing compared to, for instance, the Free version from that very same year. ʽHeartbreak Hotelʼ is a brave choice, but a suicidal one: the chosen arrangement, with its waltz tempos and xylophone solos, could be quirky and fun if the base song were different, but as it is, they drain the tune from all of its origi­nal darkness, and end up looking like clowns. Many a critic must have shot the needle off his stereo system in disgust before that first track was over.

 

Which is too bad, since the instrumental tunes on Side B are fairly moody — particularly the title track, with its quasi-Santana Latin beat; ʽGeorgia Breakdownʼ, added later on as a counterpoint, is slower and breezier, with lots of woodwinds spilled over the rhythm section, and it brings the record to a smooth, quiet end. Again, both are certainly more worthwhile than a flat, pedestrian rendition of ʽNobody Knows Youʼ — at this time, the new-look Blues Magoos are actually better as a «voiceless» lite jazz combo than as a rock band, and this is the biggest surprise of the album, one that prevents me from rating it with a thumbs down. Who knows, maybe this kind of sound might even have had a bigger future, had these guys themselves managed to properly understand what it was they were really on to here.

 

GULF COAST BOUND (1970)

 

1) Gulf Coast Bound; 2) Slow Down Sundown; 3) Can't Get Enough Of You; 4) Magoos Blues; 5) Tonight The Skies About To Cry; 6) Sea Breeze Express.

 

The new-look Blues Magoos' second and last album, recorded in the wake of more lineup chan­ges and heavily relying on the use of session musicians, almost manages to hit the mark — hard as it may be to believe this, it is more coherent, focused, and overall adequate than Never Goin' Back To Georgia. It was commercially doomed, since it did not have a proper hit single to it, and, come to think of it, with a vocalist as «gifted» as Peppy (at this point, he already sounds like Eric Burdon's twin brother, however, unfortunately mutilated at birth), a hit single would be impossible in the­ory and practice.

 

They do try with the title track, which is a bouncy-friendly jazz-pop concoction in the vein of the post-Al Kooper Blood, Sweat & Tears, but could really use a more attractive vocalist to, well, attract the necessary positive attention on the part of the buying public. And then Peppy does even worse on the aggressive R&B workout ʽSlow Down Sundownʼ — this is where the vocals get genuinely awful, as the singer almost revels in his drawn out, torturously out-of-key vowels, probably believing that soul and sincerity will easily compensate for this. If Keith Richards can get away with this, why not Peppy Castro? Unfortunately, most of us, upon hearing the two, will probably figure out several easy «why nots» soon enough.

 

Surprisingly, though, the worse the vocals, the better the instruments. The band must have been inspired by the presence of sax player Pee Wee Ellis, who had previously worked with James Brown for five years and added an unexpected element of «authenticity» — it is not so much that his sax parts are great (although they sometimes might be) as it is that they subconsciously spur the band into trying something... well, something that used to be outside their reach, and now they are on the verge of nailing it, and sometimes they nail it pretty close.

 

What I mean is this: normally, the idea of a twelve-minute funky jam from a third-grade band like the Blues Magoos would seem preposterous. It is possible that ʽCan't Get Enough Of Youʼ was inspired by CCR's cover of ʽI Heard It Through The Grapevineʼ — it moves at a similar tempo, includes more or less the same amount of cowbell, and, without a warning, switches to jam mode midway through. But where CCR made the whole thing work by conceiving it as a spirited dia­log between Fogerty's pre-rehearsed theatrical guitar phrasing and Cosmo's pissed-off drum bash re­torts, the Blues Magoos pretty much just let the tapes roll without any preconceptions or, as it seems, any prior rehearsals. Amazingly, it still works — it isn't anywhere near as memorable as the CCR epic, but the band catches a good fire, and the sax, guitar, and vibraphone solos are quite lively and well on the level, even if they can't help but lack the inventiveness and technical dex­terity of serious competition from master jazzmen.

 

But the band's ballsiness goes beyond that — no sooner than the one lengthy instrumental jam is over, another one begins, and this time, there is no singing at all: ʽMagoos Bluesʼ is a long jazz-rock monster that echoes Bitches Brew in spirit (if not quite in form, since the band's rhythm section remains poorly equipped when it comes to tricky time signatures) but brings it closer to the average rock listener by retaining a bit of ye olde blues-rock aggression (mostly through the grim­ness of the bassline).

 

Lastly, ʽTonight The Skies About To Cryʼ (original orthography preserved) is a «monumental» soul ballad that would have worked well had they invited Van Morrison to guest star; and ʽSea Breeze Expressʼ is the album's most adventurous number, with elements of atonality and free-form improv gradually scrambling together to take the more concise shape of yet another short blues-rock jam.

 

Altogether, bad singing and a pervasive lack of personality do haunt the record, and there is no way I could argue about a «lost masterpiece» or anything. But neither does it deserve to be com­pletely forgotten, and, most importantly, there is nothing here to support a naturally biased judge­ment of the «yet another grrrrreat garage band turned to shit by deciding to go artsy-fartsy» vari­ety. Fact is, the Blues Magoos, other than one or two accidentally impressive singles, were never that great a garage band in the first place; and their turning to «artsy-fartsy», at the very least, fol­lowed a slightly unusual path compared to many of their peers — and produced generally lis­tenable and occasionally exciting results.

 

It is not a tragedy that, following the predictable flop of Gulf Coast Bound, the band came apart once again — it is not very likely that Eric Kaz would have firmly steered them onwards to fur­ther greatness. But it seems to me that the album may still be considered a rather respectable B-level en­try in the jazz-rock log — at the very least, it has far more integrity than anything Blood, Sweat & Tears or Chicago have ever done past their few initial prime years. Consequently — a modest thumbs up here, provided we can disregard Peppy's narcissistic feelings.

 

PSYCHEDELIC RESURRECTION (2014)

 

1) Psychedelic Resurrection; 2) There's A Chance We Can Make It; 3) We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet; 4) D'Stinko Me Tummy's On The Blinko; 5) There She Goes; 6) I'm Still Playing; 7) Pipe Dream; 8) Gotta Get Away; 9) I Just Got Off From Work; 10) Rush Hour; 11) Psyche-Delight; 12) Tobacco Road.

 

Apparently, history has judged that The Blues Magoos were a force to be reckoned with back in the old days — otherwise, even the band members themselves probably wouldn't come up with the idea of a reunion. But reunite they did, if only on a partial basis, with Ralph Scala, Peppy Castro, and drummer Geoff Daking formerly justifying the resurrection of the band's name, and two new members (Mike Ciliberto on guitar and Peter Stuart Kohman on bass) completing the picture as the band began a regular touring program... and in 2014, actually emerged with a new album, most arrogantly called Psychedelic Resurrection — because, as everybody (at least in the Bronx area) knows, real psychedelia died in 1968 with the passing of the original Blues Ma­goos, and could only be resurrected if the original Blues Magoos got together.

 

And you know what? They might be right about that — well, hyperboles aside, and also keeping in mind that the band was never really that big a symbol for psychedelia in the first place, Psy­che­delic Resurrection is surprisingly effective. Yes, it is true that 7 out of 12 songs are re-recor­dings of their classic hits and personal favorites — but, first of all, we would have already forgot­ten how most of them sounded like anyway, and, second, they are so cleverly interspersed with the new compositions that the record never for once gives the impression of a pitiful collection of remakes. Somehow, despite occasional embarrassing moments, Psychedelic Resurrection turns out to be one of those very, very rare cases when the word «resurrection» is actually justified.

 

I am not sure how they managed to do it, but this new material is real fun — apart from having very little to do with psychedelia, it's a solid collection of pop-rock songs with true hooks and plenty of kickass energy. You can certainly detect some age-related wear and tear, most notably on Scala's vocals (that sound almost pitiably feeble and whiny on the new recording of ʽWe Ain't Got Nothin' Yetʼ), but the new (and probably much younger) guitarist compensates for that by playing with verve and inspiration, all the while adhering to the sonic stylistics of the Blues Magoos' original era rather than «modern» guitar playing... well, maybe not in the opening bars of the title track, though, where he sets off a bunch of fireworks that would feel more suitable on a Van Halen album.

 

But do not worry, that's just a bit of initial excess, quickly forgiven by the overall weirdness of the track — technically, it is supposed to be an arena-rock anthem celebra­ting the band's comeback, yet the slow pace, the doom-laden keyboards, and the strangely soul­ful, almost mournful vocals give the impression of a pack of zombies rising from the grave, so, on one hand, it's cool to hear them intone "we're back again... like an old friend!", but on the other hand, there's that strange green tinge on the faces and the definite smell of freshly overturned earth that puts the "join us now!.." admonition in a somewhat different light. I wonder if that was intentional, or if it just came out that way? In either case, it adds a drop of much-needed genuine weirdness to the whole thing, immediately elevating it over the expected status of a «just another boring comeback» record.

 

The rest of the new material is equally striking in its diversity. There's ʽD'Stinko Me Tummy's On The Blinkoʼ, a verse-bridge-chorus anthem to various types of indigestion (hardly a very psyche­delic subject, although, admittedly, you never really know when problems with your food tract may lead to potentially psychedelic reactions) — lyrically crude, but the chorus has an almost vile degree of catchiness. ʽI'm Still Playingʼ borrows a big chunk of the riff to ʽAll Day And All Of The Nightʼ, but spices it up with fine lead guitar overdubs and a nice ecstatic build-up to the chorus (again, on the subject of the band's tenacity). ʽI Just Got Off From Workʼ is a perfectly unpretentious chunk of power-pop that never strays off too far away from expressing delight at what its title is all about. And ʽPsyche-Delightʼ, despite a whiff of corniness, is cast as one of those «proto-disco» numbers (like ʽFunʼ from Sly & The Family Stone's Life album), combining even more reminiscences about the good old Sixties with a hard rock tone from the mid-Seventies and a bit of discoish hedonism from about the same time — I don't know if I'm committing a crime against good taste by recommending it, but apart from the rather ugly vocals on the bridge section, it's gut-level fun, if not necessarily a «psyche-delight» as they advertise it.

 

As for the old stuff, particularly the extended workouts like ʽTobacco Roadʼ and ʽRush Hourʼ that were very much dependent on garage-psychedelic jamming, all I can say is — these boys still got it. They do it a little differently and without a fresh feel of amazement at the new possibilities, but the rocking bits, particularly on ʽTobacco Roadʼ, still rock harder than most of the new rock bands do — perhaps because they feel so unburdened with decades of intellectual pressure on the unfortunate rocker. In other words, there's lots of brawn here, and only a tiny modicum of brain, and that happens to be admirable. I mean, come to think of it, how many of your favourite artists would be brave enough to release a song about the simple pains of indigestion as late as 2014 — and considering, too, that indigestion as a problem has never really gone away in all that time? The overall slogan of the album is neatly summarized in the pseudo-reprise of the title track at the end of ʽRush Hourʼ: "Psychedelic resurrection / Gives me such a big erection". Really, this album is not about much more than that, and besides, if psychedelic resurrection can still give Ralph Scala a big erection in 2014 (he must be around 70, no?), there's just nothing to do except give the record an admiring thumbs up. If only every «Veterans' Ball» were like this, we might want to change that slogan to «don't trust anybody under 30», eventually.

 

THE BLUES PROJECT

LIVE AT THE CAFE AU GO GO (1966)

 

1) Goin' Down Louisiana; 2) You Go, I'll Go With You; 3) Catch The Wind; 4) I Want To Be Your Driver; 5) Al­berta; 6) The Way My Baby Walks; 7) Violets Of Dawn; 8) Back Door Man; 9) Jelly Jelly Blues; 10) Spoonful; 11) Who Do You Love.

 

Along with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Blues Project were one of the first American acts that consisted of young middle-to-low class white guys playing the black man's devil music, won­dering how the hell it could ever have happened that they had let British young middle-to-low class white guys take this sort of initiative a couple of years earlier. They were less successful than Paul Butterfield about landing a record contract, only managing to have their first album out in early '66. On the other hand, unlike Butterfield's, their debut was a live one, recorded in No­vember '65 at the Cafe Au Go Go in the Village — introducing the band at its rawest and wildest, and drawing inevitable analogies with the Yardbirds, who were also introduced to the world in full through a red-hot live session back in '64.

 

The original Blues Project line-up included Danny Kalb on lead guitar and vocals; Steve Katz on rhythm guitar; Andy Kulberg on bass; Roy Blumenfeld on drums; and latecomer Al Kooper on organ (Kooper originally played guitar, but ever since he first tried out the organ on the sessions for Dylan's ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, the instrument was promoted to his personal good luck charm — not that he had any particular knack for that particular instrument). Last, but not least, was vocalist Tommy Flanders, whose cultural and social background put him somewhat apart from the rest of the guys (well, the names speak for themselves) and may have been responsible for the tension that eventually drove them apart even before the album was released.

 

The record is not fully representative of the Blues Project onstage — like most of the other bands that tried out the live album schtick at the time, due to format demands, they had to cut down on the jamming and improvisation and concentrate on relatively short, compact song-based numbers. Nor did they yet have much audacity in trying out their own material: other than Andy Kulberg's instrumental ʽThe Way My Baby Walksʼ, all of the tunes are covers. And for the most part, the Blues Project predictably covers... the blues: Chicago stuff from Muddy and Howlin' Wolf, with a bit of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry thrown in for the extra energetics, and a Bobby Bland tune for a little extra bit of soulfulness.

 

On the other hand, seeing as how this is the Village, after all, it is only natural that the band's territory also extends in the direction of folk — with a somewhat surprisingly modernistic slant, as, instead of doing ʽIf I Had A Hammerʼ or at least ʽTurn Turn Turnʼ, they prefer to popularize imported fellow Donovan (ʽCatch The Windʼ) and the Village's own Eric Andersen (ʽViolets Of Dawnʼ), as well as redo the traditional folk-blues tune ʽAlbertaʼ ("...let your hair hang low..." and all that) in sentimental folk ballad mode (with a whiff of lounge jazz, perhaps). This certainly gives them their own twist, since even Paul Butterfield, not to mention the Yardbirds, preferred to stay away from the sissy vibes of folk balladry — but the Blues Project, from the very beginning, showed that it was not going to insist on taking its name too literally.

 

All fine and dandy, but how good are these guys, really? Well — they certainly have enough energy to rock the Café (although, judging by the rather limp applause, the house wasn't exactly jam-packed on those evenings), and they are smart enough to introduce their own tempo, time, and to­nality changes into the songs, so as to limit the comparison angle between the covers and the originals. The singing, more or less equally divided between Kalb and Flanders (Al also gets to sing on the Chuck Berry cover), is competent, and the playing is engaging as long as it is pos­sible to think of it in terms of «honor duels» between Al, trying to prove to Danny that his is the rocking-est organ in town, and Danny, trying to prove to Al that his is the flashiest and speediest style of playing on the other side of Eric Clapton.

 

The latter, in fact, is not that far removed from the truth: Kalb's parts are expressive, fun, and technically stunning for late '65, showing a clear interest in the jazz school of playing as well as the expectable Chicago blues lessons. The weak side is the thin, limp guitar tone, unfortunately, quite characteristic of all the pre-Hendrix era (and quite a few of the post-Hendrix era) American R&B-ers — of course, you had to be fairly careful with your feedback and distortion when play­ing in the folk-oriented Village, but in retrospect, there may simply be too little «power» here to properly capture the interest of the modern listener. Downplay that aspect, though, and Kalb's parts on such blues snarls as ʽJelly Jelly Bluesʼ and ʽSpoonfulʼ will indeed be second only to Mike Bloomfield (inasmuch as aggression-channeling young American six-stringers from 1965-66 are concerned).

 

And yet, this rarely feels like an album where everybody is doing whatever is the most suitable thing for them. The Rolling Stones (not always, but often) and, say, The Doors (remember their ʽBack Door Manʼ?) were able to capture and preserve the creepy-devilish atmosphere of these Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf tunes. These nice, bright kids from New York are not able to do that — they can host a friendly rock'n'roll party, and they can let off some steam, but there is no sense of allegoric «danger» coming from their renditions. In fact, the jazz-folk recreation of ʽAl­bertaʼ, in terms of soul and feeling, easily trumps almost everything else that they do here — pointing out the general route which Al Kooper would soon start to take.

 

So, if it weren't for the notoriously exciting bits of Kalb / Kooper interplay, and an overall good chance of assessing young Danny's talents from several different angles, Live At The Cafe Au Go Go would not be much more than a valuable historical document. In fact, even with Danny, it isn't much more than one — mainly a teaser, and certainly no match for Five Live Yardbirds, the album whose model it loosely follows. Fortunately, the Blues Project still had some time left to ripen and come into its own, before the whole mutual-tension and lack-of-perspective thing would start tearing it apart.

 

PROJECTIONS (1966)

 

1) I Can't Keep From Crying; 2) Steve's Song; 3) You Can't Catch Me; 4) Two Trains Running; 5) Wake Me, Shake Me; 6) Cheryl's Going Home; 7) Flute Thing; 8) Caress Me Baby; 9) Fly Away.

 

The band's first «proper» album, recorded without Flanders (everybody except for the rhythm section has his share of lead vocals), is the first proper LP-size imprint that Al Kooper made upon the world, and for that fact alone, is worth owning, admiring, and cherishing. However, like all Blues Project albums, it is inconsistent, and only occasionally starts scaling visionary heights — with Al as the band's resident visionary, and Katz and Kalb as a pair of disloyal henchmen, who, instead of supporting their clearly more gifted buddy, try in vain to steal the spotlight on every occasion. It is not that either of them is a poor musician: it is simply that, without Kooper, they seem unable to transcend the paradigm in which they had started out.

 

Take the cover of Muddy Waters' ʽTwo Trains Runningʼ, for instance. Even in late 1966, 11-minute tracks with long jam sections were still a relative novelty, and it took some guts to dedicate so much precious LP space to even one of them. But for the most part, it looks like the band itself is not quite sure about what to do with all that amount of time — mostly, they just waste it on a very slow tempo and a bunch of guitar and harmonica solos that sound a little... obsolete, perhaps, for an age where the Yardbirds and Cream were already setting new standards (and Jimi was just coming around the corner). They were probably thinking that, by expanding the composition, they could ensure some proper build-ups, climaxes, and finales for Muddy's «apocalyptic pin­nacle» of a song. But they do not.

 

Amusingly, it is actually the midsection of the much shorter ʽWake Me, Shake Meʼ that stands sonically close to the other well-known 11-minute monster from 1966 — the Stones' ʽGoin' Homeʼ, with freely ad-libbed vocals over a repetitive R&B groove. But although the song itself is among the most fun and rousing romps in Blues Project history, the groove section limps — too clean, too restrained, too laid-back to compete with the bite-and-snarl of classic Stones.

 

No surprise, then, that the most famous piece of the Blues Project's legacy, captured on the album, is neither a lengthy improvised blues-rock jam, nor a stark-ravin' rock'n'roll number: rather, it is Kooper's instrumental ʽFlute Thingʼ, a slightly dreamy number that rolls folk, jazz, and psyche­delia all into one, with Andy Kulberg's simple, but elegant and memorable flute part standing out as probably the first «serious» example of the flute as a lead instrument in a «pop-rock» context, a couple years before Ian Anderson made the situation casual. This is what the Blues Project should have done more often — an open-door synthesis of beauty and innovation. It isn't much of a «blues project», of course, but then again, ʽFlute Thingʼ does convey a blue feeling all the same, and whoever said that by «blues» we only mean the Chicago 12-bar stuff anyway?

 

This does not mean that the band is somehow pathologically unable to «rip it up». When Al is given the ideological lead, he knows how to make it work — his arrangement of the old blues tune ʽI Can't Keep From Cryingʼ as a hard-rocking stomper, with screechy distorted organ solos and accordingly screechy guitar counterparts from Danny, is first-rate, as it scales epic / anthemic heights, rather than attempting to delve into the devilish depths à la Muddy / Howlin' Wolf or to rapturously kick ass like the Stones. There isn't much credibility to the lyrics this way — the whole performance should rather be associated with punching fists through walls than with shed­ding an occasional tear over lost love, so something like "I can't keep from cursing" would have been a better idea for a title change — but this is not essential. What is essential is how the organ and the guitar meld together in ecstasy.

 

Other than those two obvious highlights, Projections is rather evenly divided between blues-rock escapades (including a fun, but superfluous cover of Chuck Berry's ʽYou Can't Catch Meʼ — again, the Stones did that one in a sparser arranged, but tighter and sharper fashion a couple years earlier), and friendly rootsy compositions like Kooper's ʽFly Awayʼ (fast country-pop with a light­ly psychedelic flavor) or a cover of Bob Lind's ʽCheryl's Going Homeʼ which sounds like... uhm, sounds a bit like the Monkees, I guess. Yes, I'm sure the Monkees would have loved to have that one on their debut album. Steve Katz also steps into the spotlight with ʽSteve's Songʼ, an in­teresting attempt at fusing a baroque-style menuet with gallant singer-songwriter folk-pop à la Donovan, although its consciously experimental and glaringly derivative nature still make it feel a bit artificial.

 

In conclusion, I think that anyone who would bother to seriously sit down with this record back in 1966 and listen to it several times in a row could have prognosticated the obvious — namely, that the conflicting forces within The Blues Project would not allow the band to last for long; that the only way it could have carried on would be by turning into Al Kooper's backing band (with Danny Kalb playing loyal second fiddle, as he does on ʽI Can't Keep From Cryingʼ), which was impossible; and that, most likely, The Blues Project would have remained in history as an im­portant, but brief page in the personal biography of Mr. Al. Nevertheless, Projections, even with all of its imminent flaws, does remain as Al's finest moment with the band, and fully deserves its thumbs up — ʽFlute Thingʼ alone is a steady guarantee, and individual flaws, after all, only ac­centuate the rich diversity of approach: other than modern classical and Eastern stuff, there is hardly a musical genre that does not get a nod on the record.

 

LIVE AT TOWN HALL (1967)

 

1) Flute Thing; 2) I Can't Keep From Cryin'; 3) Mean Old Southern; 4) No Time Like The Right Time; 5) Love Will Endure; 6) Where There's Smoke, There's Fire; 7) Wake Me, Shake Me.

 

A fake live album — the last thing that was needed to complete the fall from grace, just as Al Kooper finally decided that the others were tying him down and streamed out into space, in search of the next band that he could quit in less than a couple of years. Actually, it is not totally fake, but only about half of the tracks (admittedly, the longest half) are live, and, according to Kooper's own words, only one of them was truly recorded at Town Hall (NYC's, I presume). The rest are just masked with overdubbed applause, and it is not difficult to spot the masking.

 

The live tracks are all rather faithful, sometimes extended, versions of songs from Projections — most notably, ʽFlute Thingʼ in all its glory and then some, with extra seances of psychedelic painting, noise bits and dreamy static passages incorporated in the improvised section. Andy Kulberg actually plays an electric flute here, which allows for some extra sonic hooliganry every now and then. Even so, the result never strays in either form or spirit away from the original. Neither does ʽWake Me, Shake Meʼ, whose frenetic R&B crescendos were already a part of the studio design, or ʽI Can't Keep From Cryinʼ, which sounds almost like a note-for-note, punch-for-punch recreation.

 

At least Live At The Cafe Au Go Go was smart enough not to let itself be preceded by a studio album — that way, the public could not see that the band's stage presence did not seriously boost its chutz­pah; one could turn it the other way, of course, and insist that The Blues Project simply kicked as much ass in the studio as they did on stage, but that wasn't really the way it worked in 1966 — it just means that The Blues Project did not kick much ass, even despite Danny's sharp leads and Steve's ability to pump up the fuzz if the situation called for it.

 

Nevertheless, there is no reason to complain about the general level of the performances — the band does rock as hard as it is capable of, and the audience must have gotten what it came for, enough to spill over some «fake applause» for the studio additions. Of these, the most recommen­dable is Kooper's garage-art-pop single ʽNo Time Like The Right Timeʼ (which even made it onto the Nuggets collection, and for a good reason) — with a rather silly, but attention-grab­bing tonality change that transforms the romantic ecstasy of the verse into straightforward teenage lust of the chorus. ʽMean Old Southernʼ is a Butterfield Blues Band-style bass-'n'-harmonica-driven blues dance with what is probably Danny Kalb's best moment on the album — a fast, flashy, maddeningly precise country-blues solo. The other two tracks are rather syrupy folk-pop ballads that are rather quickly forgotten, I warrant.

 

In short, the album has all the signs of a contractual obligation — live tracks mixed in with what must have probably been studio outtakes from the previous sessions — and should be judged as such, rather than a gruesome artistic failure. Strangely, though, it did not close the book on The Blues Project, but merely turned over the most well-read pages of its history.

 

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE (1968)

 

1) If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody; 2) Calypso; 3) Frank'n'Curt Incensed; 4) Turtledove; 5) Mojo Hannah; 6) Niartaes Hornpipe; 7) Endless Sleep; 8) She Raised Her Hand; 9) Dakota Recollection; 10*) Gentle Dreams.

 

Bravely ironic title: not even the Beatles, assembled at Abbey Road Studios for what they all felt was to be their last collective recording session, dared to slap an ill-omened title like that on the final product. Of course, The Blues Project had a very good reason: by 1968, with Kooper, Katz, and Kalb out of the picture, the original lineup was reduced to Kulberg and Blumenfeld. Addition of such new members as Donald Kretmar on sax, John Gregory on guitar, and Richard Greene on violin, meant that the tables had turned completely — yet, on the other hand, the music that this entirely new configuration came up with seems strangely compatible, to a large degree, with The Blues Project of old.

 

Except that there is nothing seriously bluesy about this music now. The two main directions ac­tively pursued are now country/bluegrass (fueled by the violin of newcomer Greene) and serene folk balladry, with or without a pinch of psychedelia. As the roots-rock revolution was in full swing, so did the revamped Blues Project, too, decide that embracing the good old soil and its vegetative contents was the correct thing to do. As a team of musicians, they had all the proper skills and resources to do it — as composers and artists, they had predictable problems.

 

The major highlight of the album is probably its opening track, a cover of Rudy Clarke's ʽIf You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebodyʼ. It is not shorn of inventiveness — opening with a little bit of flamenco before settling into an R&B-with-fiddle groove, later to be complemented with chaotic flute solos and finally building up towards an explosive climax. The problem is that, as a «gro­ove», the track does not have enough power or sharpness, and as a «song», it does not have a memorable musical theme to go along with. And the multiple segments of which it is composed do not quite agree with each other. Why the bold Spanish introduction, if it gives way to a feeble violin lead line? Why the flute soup, if this is fiddle territory? Why the noisy climax and crash-boom-bang at the end if the song was never all that tense to begin with?

 

Which is all pretty illustrative of the album in general: a bunch of dudes with a bunch of incohe­rent ideas at a crossroads. A lot of stuff is tried out — almost none of it works. Worst of the lot is ʽDakota Recollectionʼ, a twelve-minute attempt to recapture the success of ʽFlute Thingʼ that immediately degenerates into a jazzy jam with competent, but boring flute, violin, fuzz guitar, and drum solos, the likes of which were generated in droves by dozens of artists at the time. Dif­ference from ʽFlute Thingʼ? Lack of a properly resonant main theme, of course: the theme as such is almost indistinguishable from the solos that follow, and everything is played with such a limp attitude that it's a wonder everybody managed to keep awake for all of the twelve minutes it took to draw the track to a complete stop. Then again, if the title makes any sense, what else could one expect from one's recollections of the merry states of Dakota?

 

Not all of the album is just fiddle-and-flute games. ʽFrank'n'Curt Incensedʼ, ʽMojo Hannahʼ, and ʽEndless Sleepʼ do try to rock out, fuzzy distorted guitars, screechy vocals (mostly courtesy of John Gregory) and all; but there are no cool riffs, and the energy level remains chained to the average pub-rock level expected from your local bar band. In this context, I rather prefer their softest, gentlest numbers, like ʽCalypsoʼ or ʽTurtledoveʼ, where Kulberg's pastoral flute exercises at least find full justification (the ridiculous backward-vocals bit at the end of ʽCalypsoʼ, however, does not, falling victim to the psychedelic atavisms of the time).

 

True to the title, Planned Obsolescence was the only album recorded by this lineup; out of its ashes, a year later, rose and briefly flourished the short-lived band of Seatrain, more focused and goal-oriented during its peak periods but, in general, also suffering from poor songwriting skills. That said, serious fans and scholars of late-Sixties roots-rock should not ignore the album — lack or presence of «genius» is, after all, a subjective concept, and in objective terms, there are enough unusual tricks and combinations displayed here to attract the attention of somebody who, for in­stance, is deeply curious about the different ways in which it is possible to combine pastoral flute, honky tonk fiddle, and psycho-fuzz guitar on one album. (Even if each and every one of these ways is ultimately boring and pointless — but this is no scholarly talk).

 

LAZARUS (1971)

 

1) It's Alright; 2) Personal Mercy; 3) Black Night; 4) Vision Of Flowers; 5) Yellow Cab; 6) Lazarus; 7) Brown Eyed Handsome Man; 8) Reachings; 9) Midnight Rain; 10) So Far So Near.

 

After Planned Obsolescence, we thought it was over, but apparently, something about the «Blues Project» moniker had a mesmerizing effect to it — and so, three years later, an out-of-work Danny Kalb resuscitated it once again. Reunited with Blumenfeld — so that, as in the case of Fleetwood Mac, the drummer turned out to be the sole link between all of the band's incarna­tions — and also scooping up Don Kretmar from the previous lineup (now on saxophone and bass), Kalb plunges back into battle.

 

Given that, of all the original members, Danny was usually considered to be the most «bluesy» in thought, the new record, so it seemed, could finally feel adequate to the name of the band — and in a way, it does, even if the band still feels an obligation to include at least one softie folk ballad (ʽVision Of Flowersʼ), and also dips its toes in the newly-nascent funk style. Unfortunately, where earlier they had to compete with the likes of Cream and Hendrix, now their heavy blues thing has to pander to the same market as Led Zeppelin, and we can all guess the consequences.

 

The highlight of the album — that one number which, as may be guessed, Danny really gave his everything — is the nine-minute brontosauric title track: a lumbering dark blues rumination on the fate of Lazarus, with Muddy, Wolf, and a little bit of Wheels Of Fire-era Cream as the easy-to-surmise chief sources of inspiration. What can I say? The groove is definitely heavier and growlier than anything previously generated by The Blues Project. But — once again, too little, too late: feelings wrought and tempered by ʽDazed And Confusedʼ may simply not find enough power here to get wound-up again. Danny even tries to break out of the formula by making the second solo less melodic and more «metallic», but he does not seem to have the proper experi­ence or foresight to make it really rumble.

 

With this major battle fought and ultimately lost, the rest of the songs are just local skirmishes, some of them more successful than others, some utterly embarrassing. For instance, the idea to slow down Chuck Berry's ʽBrown Eyed Handsome Manʼ and turn it into a stuttery pub rocker, honky tonk piano and drunken sax included, was equal to downright killing the song. (One might just as well play the Stones' ʽRip This Jointʼ to the tempo of an ʽI've Been Loving Youʼ and see what happens). Recording Bobby Bland's ʽBlack Nightʼ as a dark blues number made more sense, since the original version never really had the «blackness» promised in the title, but in reality the song also fails, due to predictable lead guitar and awful vocals (vocals on the album, by the way, seem to be mostly handled by Danny himself, and this alone makes it clear why he was so rarely awarded with lead spots on «proper» Blues Project albums).

 

In the end, once all the noses have finished twitching and all the mouths have ended cringing, what we are left with is ʽIt's Alrightʼ, a fun three-minute piece of sax-led boogie; the cute rhythm section dialog on the funky opening to ʽPersonal Mercyʼ to which the song never really lives up; and a surprisingly effective combination of guitar riff and groovy bassline on the final song, ʽSo Far So Nearʼ, unfortunately, almost killed off by vocals so wobbly and shaky you'd think the sin­ger was doing a tightrope balance trick at the same time. Clearly, this tiny pile of goodies is not enough to recommend the album — a thumbs down judgement is inevitable, albeit without any particular hatred, disgust, or condescension: everything is arranged professionally enough, there is some diversity, some sincerity, some fun. There just ain't too much sense of purpose, other than getting some sort of heroic pleasure from reviving the old moniker.

 

BLUES PROJECT (1972)

 

1) Back Door Man; 2) Danville Dame; 3) Railroad Boy; 4) Rainbow; 5) Easy Lady; 6) Plain And Fancy; 7) Little Rain; 8) Crazy Girl; 9) I'm Ready.

 

Little of what applied to Lazarus would not equally well apply to Blues Project, the reunited band's foolishly arrogant attempt at «re-booting» with a self-titled album. The major change is that the original vocalist Tommy Flanders is back for this particular show — not a big deal at all, since we now know that Danny Kalb's vocal powers do not lag far behind Tommy's. In fact, Flanders makes an immediate false start — this version of ʽBack Door Manʼ is one of the worst I have ever heard, in terms of lead singing: most of the time, Tommy alternates between «sloppy drunk» and «whiny schoolboy». No self-respecting lady would ever let this guy through her back door, if you know what I mean.

 

The sad thing is that Kretmar and Kalb have now managed to keep up a heavy groove, at least on the level of, say, soon-to-come Bad Company — the guitar / bass dialog on ʽI'm Readyʼ is grim and snappy enough to attract some interest. Then in come these ridiculous schoolboy vocals, once again, and the groove goes to hell: the Blues Project were incapable of properly covering Muddy and Wolf in the early days, and there is no reason why they should have gained that capacity in their twilight years. And then, when they do a regular, less criminal-minded, ultra-slow 12-bar blues (Jimmy Reed's ʽLittle Rainʼ), with «nice» vocals and «clean» sound, you start thinking that, perhaps, Jimi Hendrix did sacrifice himself for nought after all. Entertaining people at a late-night diner with this kind of stuff is boring enough, but actually book studio time for that? Waste the world's vinyl resources? Forget it.

 

There is one good original song on this album: Danny Kalb's ʽCrazy Girlʼ, a darkly romantic «jazz-folk» concoction that has much in its favour — a quirky «trilly» rhythm pattern for starters, catchy psycho-jazz guitar leads, and a slightly paranoid atmosphere that matches the title so well. Had they focused on exploring this jazzy route with its melodic twist further, instead of stubborn­ly sticking to limited formulae of the past that they could never properly sink their teeth in to be­gin with, there might be a real reason for this reunion.

 

On the other hand, original material contributed by Flanders is hardly much stronger than their blues cover material — he is now favouring anthemic soul balladry, to which his voice is indeed suited much better than to Chicago blues, but ʽPlain And Fancyʼ is rather plain than fancy, and ʽRainbowʼ, despite adding some lively sunny funk notes to the picture, does not have enough energy to turn its optimism into something infectious. So it makes no sense, either, to try and overrate the band's songwriting abilities.

 

The final verdict is pretty much the same as for Lazarus — a few real awful performances, a few minor highlights, but most of the time, simply run-of-the-mill early-1970s blues rock with no «hall-of-fame» ambitions whatsoever; unless you are a certified enthusiast of the style, just join me in my thumbs down and let us get a move on.

 

REUNION IN CENTRAL PARK (1973)

 

1) Louisiana Blues; 2) Steve's Song; 3) I Can't Keep From Cryin'; 4) You Can't Catch Me; 5) Fly Away; 6) Caress Me Baby; 7) Catch The Wind; 8) Wake Me, Shake Me; 9) Two Trains Running.

 

Believe it or not, but the original Blues Project did come back together in 1973 — if even the Byrds could have a reunion, why not the noble act that tried to carry on the relay? (It wasn't their fault, after all, that time was speeding up way too fast for them). Everybody except for Tommy Flanders is here, yet somehow, the inspiration just wasn't there to try for some creativity — instead, The Original Blues Project, as they call themselves on the sleeve, embarked on a brief American tour, culminating in a free show in New York's Central Park, almost a whole decade before Simon & Garfunkel popularized the idea on a wider scale.

 

Actually, according to Al's own memories, the LP continues the band's tradition of strange «semi-fakes»: only the audience reaction comes from Central Park, while most, if not all, of the per­for­mances come from earlier shows (in Washington), where the atmosphere, Al says, was more «spontaneous». Not that it would probably matter much — I'd bet anything that The Blues Pro­ject at their worst differed little from The Blues Project at their best: mediocre bands do have that slight benefit of consistency, you know.

 

The setlist is largely predictable: Projections done in almost all of their entirety, plus a couple additional live favorites from the early days — no attempts whatsoever at sinking their teeth into anything written in the post-Kooper epoch. The surprising glaring omission is ʽFlute Thingʼ, which made me double-check if Kulberg was present at the show at all, yet apparently, he was, and they did perform the song, but, for some reason, left it off the final album, even if, the album being a double one, there was most certainly enough space remaining for it. Maybe Andy forgot to oil the flute or something, or perhaps they consciously decided that it would be a cool gesture to leave their best-known and most-respected composition off the reunion album — you know, so it wouldn't go multi-platinum and turn them into commercial sluts.

 

Seriously, though, this is a decent performance, delivered with such confidence as if it were 1966 all over again — the band plunges into old-school dance-blues of Muddy's, rockabilly of Chuck's, and starry-eyed folk idealism of Donovan's with such vehemence you'd think the world still lived and breathed these tunes in 1973. However, once we get past this element of energetic surprise there is little else to say — except that the slow blues numbers (ʽCaress Me Babyʼ and particular­ly the excruciatingly tedious journey through the twelve minutes of ʽTwo Trains Runningʼ) are predictably uninteresting, and that, with their exclusion, the album could have been a far more elegant and economic single LP.

 

Since Kooper had already established himself as a solo artist by that point, it was obvious that the reunion would not last long — this was, in fact, the last time that The Blues Project blipped on the radar, although, rumor has it, in recent years Katz and Blumenfeld have brought the name back from the grave once again, touring as «The Blues Project» with a bunch of sidemen (hope­fully, we will be spared any new studio recordings). As a last goodbye, Reunion In Central Park plays its part with sufficient conviction — more credibly, at least, than the Kalb-dominated bland platters from 1971-72. But if you want a good live album by The Blues Project... then again, I am not even sure why you should want a live album by The Blues Project in the first place. Just get Al Kooper's Soul Of A Man instead.

BOB DYLAN

BOB DYLAN (1962)

 

1) You're No Good; 2) Talkin' New York; 3) In My Time Of Dyin'; 4) Man Of Constant Sorrow; 5) Fixin' To Die; 6) Pretty Peggy-O; 7) Highway 51; 8) Gospel Plow; 9) Baby, Let Me Follow You Down; 10) House Of The Risin' Sun; 11) Freight Train Blues; 12) Song To Woody; 13) See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.

 

There was never, ever a time, really, when Bob Dylan would be a «folk singer». Folk music has always provided him with base fuel, for sure, but such is Bob Dylan that one cannot even be one hundred percent certain that he likes what usually passes for folk music, much less «admires» or «respects» it. The Freewheelin', his first complete album of (formally) original compositions, had very quickly eclipsed his self-titled debut — but in a way, that debut is not any less original than Freewheelin', and remains an essential listen for even the casual listener.

 

For the most part, «folk music» around Greenwich Village in the early 1960s had a reverential nature. Rural tradition had to be respected, cherished, almost «sanctified» for its depth and purity, as opposed to commercial music. Robert Allen Zimmerman, a quiet, but troubled, and also slight­ly mischievous, Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, would have none of that. By the time he was spotted and signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond — the same John Hammond that, almost thirty years earlier, «made» Billie Holiday — Bob was already a pretty nifty guitar picker and harp blower, but his technical singing abilities left a lot to be desired. The answer? Quit singing? Nope — redefine singing.

 

Bob's guitar, harmonica, and vocals do immediately form a holy, interdependent trio, but it is naturally the voice that takes the gold. From a «natural» point of view, it is utterly unlistenable, except for when the singer is in «talking blues» mode, where it is just a blurry murmur, consci­ous­ly or subconsciously devoid of any particular shade of color; whenever the artist actually shifts his natural pitch, the results — by the standards of 1962 — are aurally hideous. And as if simply showing his style wasn't enough, Bob blows the top off the cauldron on ʽFreight Train Bluesʼ, where the vowel in the word "blues", prolonged for a staggering thirteen seconds, produ­ces an effect not unlike the «nails-on-chalkboard» or «fork-on-plate» variety.

 

If they pressed him into a corner and demanded nothing but the truth, Bob could probably say something about the «far-from-perfect» singing abilities and styles of many of his blues and folk predecessors, both black and white, and how it actually makes things more realistic and closer to the listener and such. But that would not be the entire story. Take a listen to Jesse Fuller's original recording of ʽYou're No Goodʼ, the song that Bob chose for his opening number — old man Ful­ler's set of pipes is nowhere near «angelic», but it does not go against the grain: in his hands, the song is just a gruff traditional folk-dance number. With Dylan, the guitar melody is insanely sped up and «fussified», the vocals are filtered through a nasal twang effect, the pitch sometimes rises to absurdly high levels that he cannot properly hold, and the «gulping» trick that he occasionally plays out certainly does not make him sound like a regular guy — more like someone suffering from a light case of cerebral palsy.

 

In all actuality, this is not just «folk»: this is some sort of early form of «folk-punk», and from that point of view, Bob Dylan is the natural predecessor (and potential inspiration) to such early and little-known «odd-folk» bands like The Holy Modal Rounders or The Fugs, who would, I think, be quite likely to rate Bob's then-inauspicious debut over the glorious Freewheelin'. The fact that such an album, not only thoroughly uncommercial in general but also extremely radical for the tastes of Bob's folk audience, could get an official release by a major record label in 1962 is nothing short of miraculous, and has everything to do with John Hammond's status and influ­ence — there is little doubt that Bob would have made it anyway, but who knows when, how, and what would the actual revenue have been...

 

So, anyway, what you get with Bob's exuberant, hyper-energetic renditions of traditional funereal standards like ʽIn My Time Of Dyin'ʼ and ʽFixin' To Dieʼ is neither reverential carbon copies (or would that be «cardboard copies»?) of exhortations done by scary bluesmen, nor reverential scho­larly interpretations, smoothly and politely dressed up for mid-level intellectual consumption. What you get is uniquely «uglified» interpretations of all that material, perhaps repelling at first, but then subtly drawing you in through all the sheer ugliness — think Elephant Man, if you wish, and the analogy is even stronger when you realize that behind this ugliness, as is the case with Elephant Man, there is sensitivity and intellect (if not necessarily kindness — Bob Dylan has been ascribed quite a few virtues over the years, but «kindness» and «niceness» were rarely spot­ted on the list).

 

The fact that almost the entire album is devoted to covers is, in a way, inevitable. Dylan himself acknowledged that he was «hesitant» to show all of himself from the get-go (even though he had already accumulated quite a backlog of original compositions by 1962) — and besides, all of these «original» compositions, in one way or other, were still derivative of earlier folk and blues songs, so it is instructive to look at those roots in an explicit fashion. Bob's mix of tragedy and comedy is astute — with the ratio of songs about death and suffering vs. songs about fornicating and playing the fool approximately equalling 3:1, Bob Dylan ends up grim, but humorous, per­fectly matching Bob's facial expression on the front cover: simultaneously a little sad and a little smiling, looking at us with... with... actually, I have no idea what the hell that guy is thinking when he is looking at us that way. At 21 years, he was already inscrutable.

 

Two of the covers should be of specific note. ʽBaby Let Me Follow You Downʼ, played in an arrangement «borrowed» from fellow folkster Eric von Schmidt ("I met him in the green pastures of... Harvard University!" Dylan jokes in the intro, poking even more fun at folkie clichés), is so simple, straightforward, and almost stupidly catchy that Bob would later, every once in while, re­vive it for his electric show. It also provided The Animals with their debut single (retitled ʽBaby Let Me Take You Homeʼ). The other one is Bob's take on ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ, which he boldly sings without changing the "many a poor girl" to "many a poor boy" — something that The Animals actually did, completely turning around the song's message: their version ends up abstract and symbolic, Bob's is quite concise and literal, but the fact that this is Bob singing, and not, say, Joan Baez, adds a familiar pinch of Bob-irony. (It was claimed by Eric Burdon that the band never heard Dylan's version before recording theirs, which is strange, since it is a bit too much of a coincidence that the Animals recorded a whole two songs in 1964, both of which were included on the earlier Bob Dylan: methinks somebody's withholding the whole truth here).

 

As for the originals, there are only two, both of them important ones: ʽTalkin' New Yorkʼ is a fic­tionalized, humorized tale of Bob's first acquaintance with NYC, so it both introduces the artist as the artist and initiates Bob's lengthy string of «talking blues» numbers that would provide comic relief throughout his early acoustic period. ("Man there said, come back some other day, you sound like a hillbilly, we want folk singers here" — if that's autobiographical, no wonder Bob has been taking his revenge out on folk singers ever since). And ʽSong To Woodyʼ, which borrows the melody from one of Guthrie's own songs, gives the impression of being this album's one small drop of sincerity, as Bob both acknowledges his debt to the great folkster and states that he is not going to go the same route: "The very last thing that I'd want to do / Is to say I'd been hittin' some hard travelin' too". I'm not sure how many people back then scrutinized those particular lyrics, but those that did could have predicted that this guy was certainly not going to go the Dave van Ronk / Eric von Schmidt route.

 

Keeping all that in mind, Bob Dylan is not just a skippable foreword. On the contrary, it is es­sen­tial listening for anybody with even a passing interest in the man, although, true enough, more from an informational point of view: all of these performances are innovative, curious, and thought-provoking, but they will probably not provide you with any important epiphanies or any­thing like that. Still, Bob's career in the 1960s is one of the most important plays in XXth century theater, and when you go watch an important play, you don't want to miss the setup, don't you? You certainly don't. Hence, thumbs up all the way.

 

THE FREEWHEELIN' (1963)

 

1) Blowin' In The Wind; 2) Girl From The North Country; 3) Masters Of War; 4) Down The Highway; 5) Bob Dy­lan's Blues; 6) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; 7) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right; 8) Bob Dylan's Dream; 9) Oxford Town; 10) Talking World War III Blues; 11) Corrina, Corrina; 12) Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance; 13) I Shall Be Free.

 

Common knowledge has it that The Freewheelin', released in May 1963, singlehandedly trans­formed pop music into a serious occupation. The album was loyally recorded in a folk paradigm (with one exception, all the songs strictly respect the Holy Trinity of Bob's voice, Bob's acoustic guitar, and Bob's harmonica), but inspired legions of rockers all the same, including the Beatles, who immediately turned Dylan into an object of worship and began writing songs like ʽI'm A Loserʼ, expanding their active stock of English words and idiomatics.

 

Common knowledge does not lie — not in this particular case, at least, since the enormous influ­ence of The Freewheelin' on so many things that came after it is well-documented in numerous sources. However, common knowledge may also do the album a disservice. Once it came out, it was mainly the words that caught everybody's attention. The melodies were well played, but they were familiar — just about all of these songs were based on traditional patterns, which Dylan simply expropriated for his own needs: typical behavior for old-school blues and folk troubadours, perhaps, but not something that was expected of the emerging modern-day singer-songwriter. The vocals were... well, you know: «atypical», to say the least. The words — this was stuff that mat­tered. And it did not even matter so much what exactly these words were, but the very fact that, somehow, they seemed sharp, deep, and acutely relevant for 1963 made The Freewheelin' into this cult classic, and then, into one of the most respectable LPs ever released.

 

But you probably know all that. The real question is — how does the album hold up after all these years? Hundreds, thousands perhaps, of colorful rock poets have emerged since then, some of them shamefully derivative, some, on the other hand, proudly standing up to Bob's verbal talents. The historical importance, once so evident and overwhelming, has receded inside text­books and critical best-of-ever lists. The melodies have been bested, the phrasing has found its rivals, and, for what it's worth, one can always find these songs performed by more skillful voca­lists in improved arrangements — starting with Peter, Paul and Mary's ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ and ending with Elvis' ʽDon't Think Twice, It's All Rightʼ...

 

...and this is where we have to make a serious comment. In general, the world of those who know something about Dylan in the first place is divided in two sections: the «Dylan For Dylan» sec­tion prefers Bob's own original versions, whereas the «Dylan For Others» section prefers liste­ning to Bob's oeuvres done by those artists who embellish them with intricate arrangements and, most importantly, «clean vocals». Dylan or Joan Baez? Dylan or The Byrds? Dylan or Manfred Mann? Dylan or The Hollies? Dylan or The Band? Dylan or Hendrix? Dylan or Rod Stewart? Dylan or Joe Cocker?... and the list goes on. And considering that Dylan's «composing genius» is questionable, to say the least (more on that later), and also con­sidering that we do not really listen to pop music for the words, no matter how fascinating their combinations might be, this adoption of his songs by other artists basically means that the «Dylan For Others» party can get along very well by drop-kicking Dylan altogether.

 

The stark-raving «Dylan For Dylan» section has some problems, too: much too often, its mem­bers regard Dylan covers as watered-down, dumbed-down for mass consumption, «prettied up» and losing their essence as a result. This is true in that, once a Dylan song becomes a Dylan cover, it usually ceases to be a Dylan song — I have never heard a single Dylan cover (at least, not by a major artist) that would honestly try to preserve the exact spirit of the original. But instead of complaining, it is much more healthy and pleasing to admire how much additional potential there is in all these songs — and how smoothly they yield to musical reinterpretation, be it the epic hard rock thunderstorm of Hendrix's ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ or the smooth reggae wobble of Clapton's ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ.

 

In other words, I not only refuse to join either party, but I would strongly admonish everyone else to merge the ranks as well, regardless of whether this means learning to enjoy and respect the simple, acces­sible pleasures of Dylan covers, or — something that is usually more difficult for people — learning to understand and soak in the uniqueness of Dylan originals. In which tasks we should all take our lessons from the musicians themselves. The Byrds loved ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ so much that they covered it, and Dylan loved their version in return (although his famous comment of "wow, you can dance to it!" may, of course, be interpreted ironically — but then, back in 1965 everything that came out of Dylan's mouth had to have an ironic twist).

 

But let us get back to business. ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ and ʽA Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fallʼ, the two major anthems of Freewheelin', are somewhat similar in structure — based on the old folk «listing» principle, the former keeps asking one meaningless question after the other, while the latter keeps piling up one loose impression and reminiscence after the other. There is a striking contrast here — the amount of briefly skimmed themes and topics is staggering, yet the manner in which they are skimmed (feeble acoustic picking and mumbled vocals) is almost humiliatingly unassuming: Dylan's lack of a strong singing voice is turned to his utter advantage, as he sings about these issues the same way an old hobo could be begging for a drop of whiskey.

 

On the other hand, he does sing, and the serious singing tone, devoid of hiccups, gulps, and other ways of overstating his purpose, that he had previously only shown on ʽSong To Woodyʼ, is well represented on both of the anthems. And in all honesty, the more I listen to them, the more I am becoming convinced that it is a marvelous singing tone for these kinds of songs. At this stage in his career, Bob prefers to leave his «eccentric» vocal tricks for his lightweight material — the heavyweight stuff, on the other hand, is given over to his world-weary, prophetic persona, which is at the same time skeptical and idealistic: "the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind" sounds hopeful and reassuring for one moment, then bitter and disillusioned for the next one. That is one damn fine nuance that Peter, Paul and Mary were not able to transfer to their inter­pretation — nor, for that matter, was anybody else.

 

ʽDon't Think Twice, It's All Rightʼ is an early example of Dylan's misogynistic persona — and, since he still had rather small means of overcoming his shyness, probably the least irritating and the most motivated for those who can be bothered by such things. The message is offensive ("you just kinda wasted my precious time" is, come to think of it, a far meaner thing to say than to just call her a fuckin' bitch), but it is delivered in such soothing packaging — the hyper-tender style of acoustic plucking, the soft murmuring that culminates in a most nonchalant, blurry recital of the last chorus line, the overall almost lullaby-style atmosphere of it all — Dylan's evil magic at work: you end up emotionally sympathizing with the protagonist despite understanding precisely well that he's really a doggone bastard.

 

His theatrical nature does show up a little bit — especially in the way that he so carefully articulates the final "-d" in the incorrect verbal form ("...the light I never know-eD"). Sure, he just wants to emphasize the formal rhyme with "road", but the trick has the effect of aligning the guy with the low-class language fuddlers: «uneducated, but experi­enced through trouble and toil, and endowed with natural wisdom». How do you condemn a guy like that? You don't — you have no choice left but to empathize.

 

The other two well-known highlights of the «grim» part of the album have not become household staples, for understandable reasons — ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ would soon be over­shadowed by Simon & Garfunkel's ʽParsley, Sage...ʼ, since it is really a courteous, troubadourish song that lended itself better to Paul and Art's formally beautiful, elegiac arrangement; and ʽMas­ters Of Warʼ was just too brutal and straightforward in its onslaught (Dylan himself occasionally expressed surprise at his being able to explicitly wish for somebody's death in a song — not that he would ever change the lyrics in concert, I think).

 

Which should not detract from their virtues: ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ has all the tenderness of ʽDon't Think Twiceʼ without the sarcasm and woman-bashing — not that Bob's intonations convey the slightest superficial trace of sadness or longing for the girl, it is the song of somebody who has long since accepted and made peace with his lonesome fate. And ʽMasters Of Warʼ, although it openly steals Jean Ritchie's arrangement of the traditional ʽNottamun Townʼ (even­tually costing Bob $5,000 in cash), does that for a good reason — its dirge-like repetitive struc­ture is perfect for a solemn curse, no matter how crudely leftist that curse may be (not that the actual lyrics necessarily have to have a leftist interpretation — a war is always a war, and the song does good by not naming specific names, preserving its relevancy).

 

A curious fact, rarely commented upon by reviewers, is that The Freewheelin' gradually lightens up as its unusually bulky fifty minutes roll by: starting off with the solemn and the serious, after ʽBob Dylan's Dreamʼ it takes a sharp turn into the lightweight and comical — the last five num­bers are a downright playful sequence, and the idea to put them all together was right there from the start, even before censorship forced Bob to drop some of the politically loaded songs (like ʽTalkin' John Birch Bluesʼ) and replace them with something less «actual». Of course, ʽOxford Townʼ is really about racism, and ʽTalking World War III Bluesʼ is quite apocalyptic in its basic dream message, but the former is still shaped as a humorous folk song, and the latter is a talking blues, where humor is an essential component. And the whole sequence ends with ʽI Shall Be Freeʼ, which already contains no social undercurrent whatsoever (well, almost: that verse about President Kennedy and what we need to make the country grow has always seemed to me as one of the smartest observations on 1960s society in general).

 

This gradual transition from the solemn to the sacrilegious is really the main thing that makes The Freewheelin' matter as an album — otherwise, it would simply be an early acoustic hit col­lec­tion. Not being too diverse in its melodies and certainly not being diverse in its arrangements (it is almost too easy to overlook the fact that ʽCorrine, Corrinaʼ was recorded with a full backing band, what with its overall quiet sound agreeing so smoothly with the rest of the album), The Freewheelin' has more emotional diversity in its overall 50-minute palette than Woody Guthrie (no offense meant) had in his entire career. Dylan the prophet, Dylan the accuser, Dylan the hardened loner, Dylan the visionary, Dylan the bluesman — and, at the same time, Dylan the social satirist, Dylan the snappy joker, Dylan the musical-slapstick clown. Too bad Dylan the surf-rocker and Dylan the smooth teen idol missed the boat, but there is a physical limit, I guess, on different types of personalities one can handle at the same time.

 

The album cover deserves a special mention, too — the photographer did a marvelous job of capturing Bob in a downright awkward pose, where he looks like an authentically autistic dude, used to spend most of his life in dark corners, whom his girlfriend just finally happened to drag out in the street to take a brief walk, clinging on to him so tightly not so much out of general pas­sion, but more out of fear that he'd run away at the first occasion (which he eventually did a year later, breaking up with the unfortunate Suze Rotolo out of general immaturity of character). On subsequent covers, he would usually stare at you with either contempt, condescension, or, at best, curiosity (at the general stupidity and backwardness of the human race, no doubt) — on The Freewheelin', he is much too shy to look you in the eye at all.

 

This shyness permeates the entire LP, as Bob never engages his listeners in bloody fights (even the vicious punch of ʽMasters Of Warʼ is directed somewhere in the open air, unless you are in a position to take it personally). There is, consequently, a thick demarcation line that separates The Freewheelin' from everything that came after it — the «certified genius» and «generation spokes­man» tags that were slapped on to Bob in the wake of the enormous success of the album had an irreversible effect on his persona, and so Freewheelin' remains the only fully original Dylan album to not bear the traces of this pressure. In a way, this is the only «pure» Dylan album out there, written and recorded by a shy, but talented little kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. Later on, the shy little kid was crowned king — and has behaved like a king ever since then. Young king, old king, active king, lazy king, acting king, king in (temporary) exile, whatever: he would al­ways be up there and you would always be down here, in some way. On The Freewheelin', he is not a king yet — he's out in the street with a girl on his arm. When would there be another time he'd allow himself to be photoed with a girl on his arm? Thumbs up for Suze Rotolo and her charming, if doomed, little smile.

 

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN' (1964)

 

1) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 2) Ballad Of Hollis Brown; 3) With God On Our Side; 4) One Too Many Mornings; 5) North Country Blues; 6) Only A Pawn In Their Game; 7) Boots Of Spanish Leather; 8) When The Ship Comes In; 9) The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll; 10) Restless Farewell.

 

One thing that most people have always felt about Dylan to the near-point of certainty is his ego­centric nature. Behaviorally haughty, instinctively condescending, and in addition to all that, to­tally closed to outsiders — where «outsiders» would begin with the closest friends and relatives and end with everybody else. This is more or less common knowledge, but I have to bring it up because ever so often, caught up in one or another side of Dylan's artistic personality, we forget that we can never be sure of when exactly we are dealing with the «true» Dylan.

 

It is probably safe to say that «Dylan the folk protest singer», much like «Dylan the newborn Christian» fifteen years later, was essentially a mask that he agreed to wear for a certain period of time, as long as it was helping him with his artistic career. «Mask» does not quite nearly equal «fake», mind you: there is no reason not to believe that, on some level, Bob did sympathize for people like Hollis Brown or Hattie Carroll — and there is every reason to believe the spite and contempt that the man had both for the powers-that-be, as brutally as he is lashing against them on ʽWith God On Our Sideʼ, and for the «mothers and fathers», as gleefully as he is condemning them to the trashbin of history on ʽThe Times They Are A-Changin'ʼ. But sympathizing is one thing, and pledging one's faith is another — The Times They Are A-Changin' is not an album made by a loyal soldier of the Pete Seeger regiment, even if the uninitiated did not understand it all that well back in early 1964.

 

The decision to release an «all-out» protest song album was quite conscious, and symbolically il­lustrated by the sleeve photo — quite far removed from the clumsy shyness of The Freewheelin', Bob is now trying to put on the look of somebody who has just emerged out of a sweatshop, or, at least, spent his entire childhood collecting Woody Guthrie photos and memorabilia. Again, though, the somber look on his face as he so explicitly looks down upon the evil exploiters (in­cluding everyone who sells and buys his own records) is not particularly «fake» — this is, after all, a great opportunity to indulge in his favorite passion: putting people down, whether it be for his own sake or for the greater good of the planet in general.

 

The only problem is that, having consciously narrowed down this scope and played out in favor of this particular image, Bob — almost predictably so — did not manage to come up with a sui­tably great bunch of songs. Many of them were, in fact, created already at the time of or even way before The Freewheelin', and some are downright simple rewrites: ʽBoots Of Spanish Leatherʼ, as it is very easy to notice, is essentially the same song as ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ. Like­wise, it is hardly a coincidence that the overall number of tunes here is smaller than on Free­wheelin', while the average length of a single composition has increased by almost a whole mi­nute — something quite typical for a situation of «creative blockage».

 

Three songs still stand out as major/minor classics. The title track sits here in the same place that was earlier occupied by ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ: its face is more stately, its voice is louder, and its message is far more blunt and unambiguous — blushy shyness being replaced by Biblical thunder as the prophet makes the transition from the liberal-minded salon into the open space of the town market square. It must have taken some gall to write and record a song like that, but someone had to do it, particularly if that someone had to live up to the «generation spokesman» tag (which Bob openly claims to have hated, but ʽThe Times They Are A-Changin'ʼ could only have been written with that specific tag in mind, whether he had already been assigned it or not). The song has nei­ther the depth nor the subtlety of his greatest creations — but it has certainly gone «beyond your command». The guitar may be raggedy and a little out of tune, the lyrics may borrow one too many clichés from the Prophets, and the message may seem less and less pleasant to baby boo­mers as they become grandfathers, but what can we do about it? It's a fucking symbol now, one of those near-ideal generational anthems.

 

Within the context of the album, though, I think that it is ʽWhen The Ship Comes Inʼ that makes the greater impact — the only song to break up the dirgey bleakness and monotonousness and to shower the curses on the heads of Bob's enemies in a faster, more playful (and, therefore, a little more sadistic) mode: inspired by Jenny's pirate tune in The Threepenny Opera and an accident where Bob was refused hotel admission for not being clean enough, it is the most gleefully dan­ceable of Bob's protest songs, and probably the one that his Jewish ancestors would be the most proud of, not just because it namedrops Goliath and the Pharaoh among those who will be crushed when the ship comes in, but also because, of all those early songs, it is the only one that gives the listener a clear vision of that happy end we're all hoping for. And it's catchy, too, but what wouldn't be catchy if it were inspired by Threepenny Opera?

 

The rest of the social / political songs on the album rarely reach these highs, not just because they are lyrically much more tied in with specific cases and particular situations, but also because they simply happen to be too drawn out and dreary. ʽWith God On Our Sideʼ gives you nine verses of irony when one could easily do with just three or four — the melody is boring, the energy level is low, and the lyrics are extremely questionable in the light of Bob's usual standards (I have always thought that the verse about the Germans was particularly poorly thought out — do the lines "though they murdered six millions... the Germans now, too, have God on their side" imply that the correct alternative would have been to wipe the Germans off the face of the Earth, once and for all? Probably not, but that is one of the easiest interpretations).

 

ʽThe Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carrollʼ has more direct involvement on Bob's part, and would have probably made a great impact had it been performed on the day of the William Zantzinger trial (August 28, 1963), but, at the risk of understating its importance for the history of anti-racist struggle in the US, I would dare say that the song is quite boring on the whole, and that its slow, stuttering, droning verses have nothing even close to the fist-clenching effect that a song like ʽHurricaneʼ would produce more than a decade later — even if, as a person, Hattie Carroll might be deserving more of our empathy than Ruben Carter (if anything, merely for the fact that Hattie Carroll is dead and Ruben Carter is not). The lyrical description of the woman's murder and of the rigged trial, and the acid condemnation of those who «philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears» is brilliant — the execution seems way too poorly thought out (although, of course, there are quite a few Dylanologists that would be happy to fight that idea).

 

In any case, the best song on The Times They Are A-Changin' happens to be one of the few that completely lack any sociopolitical undercurrent — it is also the shortest and, at first, least noticeable of these tunes, still completely in the vein of the «humble mumble» of Freewheelin'. ʽOne Too Many Morningsʼ (Steve Jobs' favorite song, no less!) has only three verses, a barely audible fingerpicking melody that rolls out far more smoothly from under Bob's fingers than the scrapy, wobbly strum of ʽThe Times They Are A-Changin'ʼ, and a beautiful melancholic aura — I like to think of it as a sequel to ʽDon't Think Twiceʼ, in which our hero contemplates the choices he has made and feels a little guilty and repentant about it, all the while being extra careful to not let us understand this directly. But even if not, it is still the most personal and deeply human tune on the whole album — even more so than the closing ʽRestless Farewellʼ, where Bob once again dons the travelin' minstrel cap and sings a well-meant, but formulaic dinner ballad for the king and his court.

 

On the whole, The Times They Are A-Changin' is a misstep — the only time in Bob's entire career, perhaps, when he went ahead and delivered an album that somebody expected him to de­liver: an artistic mistake he would never repeat again. But considering that he was still young, fresh, full of creative juices, energy, and invigorated with his success in «the right circles», it is also no wonder that the record is listenable, contains no major embarrassments (if one discounts the superfluous song lengths and a few lamentable lyrical slip-ups), and still has a bunch of clas­sic songs that rank all the way up there with his best. For these reasons, I would rather resist the temptation of giving it a thumbs down — even the worst Dylan record of the 1960s is still an es­sential listen for everybody who has a basic interest in the man. Besides, as a social stimulus — a musical protest statement — it certainly worked back in 1964, and might as well continue wor­king for a long time, as long as the English language doesn't change too much.

 

ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN (1964)

 

1) All I Really Want To Do; 2) Black Crow Blues; 3) Spanish Harlem Incident; 4) Chimes Of Freedom; 5) I Shall Be Free No. 10; 6) To Ramona; 7) Motorpsycho Nightmare; 8) My Back Pages; 9) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met); 10) Ballad In Plain D; 11) It Ain't Me Babe.

 

Whoever suggested that title for Bob's fourth album was smart enough to understand that the al­bum was different — naturally — but certainly not smart enough to understand just how different it was. Another Side Of..., linguistically, suggests something like: «You thought he could only do that — guess what, he can also do this, bet you didn't know that, did you?» But on the other hand, it is tough to think of how a more proper title might have sounded. The Real Bob Dylan? But nobody really knows what a «real» Bob Dylan would be. The Selfish Side Of Bob Dylan? Closer to the truth, perhaps, but a little too repelling for the potential buyer and a little too insul­ting for the artist. Bob Dylan Arrives? Too promotional. Bob Dylan Doesn't Really Give A...? Too avantgarde. Whatever, we will just have to live with that original title, issued in poor under­standing, but good faith.

 

Most sources call the record «transitional», which is objectively true in that the instrumentation and arrangements still mostly follow the old acoustic guitar-and-harmonica model (with the im­portant exception of the electric piano, soon-to-be one of Bob's favorite instruments, on ʽBlack Crow Bluesʼ), but the lyrics have almost completely shifted away from socio-political issues into the realms of the deeply personal, the deeply sarcastic, or the deeply absurd. However, from a general «ideological» point of view, Dylan's transformation is already quite complete; and this completion does not even have that much to do with abandoning the image of the «protest singer» — the process goes deeper than that.

 

To illustrate, let us begin from an unexpected point of reference: a superficial comparison of The Freewheelin's ʽI Shall Be Freeʼ with this album's «sequel», called ʽI Shall Be Free No. 10ʼ (why ʽNo. 10ʼ? because ʽNo. 2ʼ would be too boring, that's why). In 1963, this little comic number, a slapstick-ish talkin' blues with a few scattered moments of brilliance here and there, was deli­vered in a low, shy, murmured tone — presumably, by a humble guy lurking in some dark corner of the stage, not yet daring to come out and spill it all in-yer-face. In 1964, the harmonica blasts get more shrill and piercing, and the guy is no longer afraid to raise his voice — sometimes al­most to a shout, giving the tune an arrogant-defying feel that his talking blues used to lack previ­ously. Nor are the lyrics always inoffensive to his surrounders — at least once he sneaks in a snappy verse about them ("I got a friend who spends his life / Stabbing my picture with a bowie knife... I've got a million friends!"); and one should definitely pay attention to the last verse — "Now you're probably wondering by now / Just what this song is all about... / It's nothing / It's something I learned over in England!" — which, on its own, might be interpreted as a good-bye to his past that is at least as strong as the entire message of next year's ʽIt's All Over Now Baby Blueʼ. And, mind you, we are still only talking about one of the most «throwaway-ish» pieces on the entire record. And it goes on for fifty minutes (the record, that is, not the song, although I'm pretty sure that Bob could have easily thrown on a couple dozen extra verses).  

 

This is, perhaps, the most important breakthrough achieved in Another Side: the discovery of Bob's new voice, the one that would dominate his «golden age» over the next two years, the «ar­rogant bastard» voice that, no doubt, owed its existence to Bob's stabilized stardom — after all, a true king should behave as a true king, with none of that shying away in the dark corner. And, above all, a true king should be perfectly free to do whatever he wants to do, not whatever the people expect him to do — at least, such could have been Bob's reasoning when, instead of open­ing the album with an inspiring, visionary anthem like he had already done twice in a row, he preferred to open it with ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ instead of, say, ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ.

 

An interesting, and probably true, interpretation of ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ, previously sugges­ted by some people, is that the song was really a vehicle for lambasting feminist clichés — some­thing Bob must have swallowed his fair share of in his Village period. It is a fun, catchy song, an object convenient enough to have had both The Byrds and Sonny & Cher to use it as a weapon for chart domination, but one mustn't lose track of the condescending contempt, lurking behind the superficially innocent arrangement — the funnier it gets, as Bob intentionally bursts into «spontaneous» laughter towards the end of the song, the harder it snaps at the heels of all those girls who must have, many a time, actually accused Bob of wanting to «simplify them, classify them, deny, defy, or crucify them». Then again, to be fair, some of them may have deserved this rough treatment — let us refrain from demonizing the artist alone.

 

In any case, ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ is definitely more personal than it seems to be upon first sight, and it introduces a series of even more personal songs — be it in the form of surrealist love letters to surrealist female characters (ʽSpanish Harlem Incidentʼ, ʽTo Ramonaʼ), or in the form of nasty-but-honest confessions (ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ), or in the form of unpleasant reminiscences of a general (ʽMy Back Pagesʼ) or way-more-particular-than-we-really-need character (ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ). A pretty impressive bunch, especially considering that, of all the songs on the previous two albums, probably only ʽDon't Think Twice, It's Alrightʼ and ʽOne Too Many Morningsʼ could match them in the intimacy department. This, too, is yet another side of the another side —the artist is raising his voice, but he is also less afraid to dig into his own feelings, his own past and present, than he was just a year before. As inspiring and grandiose as those ʽHard Rainʼ pic­tures must have been, in a sense, ʽMy Back Pagesʼ is even more «Dylanish» in nature.

 

Not that being «Dylanish» is always a good thing. The existence of ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ mars this idyll in a most harmful manner — the song is a misguided creation both on the lyrical side, re­miniscing of Bob's rather shameful handling of his relationship with Suze Rotolo and her sister from a decidedly biased (to say the least) point of view, and on the musical side, as the languid, barely existing melody drags on for eight bleeding minutes at a snail's pace, so that the listener may fully savour and digest each little jab, sting, and kick addressed at «the parasite sister» whom the protagonist was allegedly able to «nail in the ruins of her pettiness» (allegedly, by getting booted out of her house for improper behaviour). As a document of human relations, ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ is a fine educational piece; as a work of art, it is... let's just say, «undeserving».

 

It is a little funny, though, that the song, in which Dylan presents himself and his former passion as innocent romantic victims of misguided social practices, is immediately followed by ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ, where the protagonist switches from self-victimizing to self-humiliating, almost as if to atone a little bit for the aggressiveness of the eight-minute rant. But the song is also a mirror companion to ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ — just like in that one, Bob is once again proclaiming his distance from all sorts of «masculine stereotypes». See, lady, he ain't gonna beat or cheat or mis­treat you, or disgrace you or displace you, but as a consequence of that, he also ain't the one who will die for you and more — so «go melt back into the night, babe»: a fairly convoluted way to tell somebody to fuck off, but works exactly the same way. Alas, it is also an extremely catchy song, the catchiness being provided mainly by the sneering, mocking refrain — the "no, no, no, it ain't me, babe" bit lashes out with cruel sarcasm and sarcastic cruelty in the nastiest way yet wit­nessed on any Dylan song. No wonder it had to be The Turtles to become the first artists to cover the song: for the Byrds, it must have seemed a little too prickly to fit in with their image.

 

Just about every song on Another Side merits detailed discussion, but I would rather com­press things a little bit by simply saying that the album is also quite musically diverse for something re­corded with such limited means. There is the quasi-baroque gallantry of ʽSpanish Harlem Inci­dentʼ, with Dylan in a courteous, serenadish mood; the Mexican waltzing of ʽTo Ramonaʼ, with Dylan in the grip of Latin romanticism (something that would not be properly revisited again until the age of Desire, I think); the primitive, but effective «blues-punk» piano punching of ʽBlack Crow Bluesʼ; the instantaneously memorable pop structure of ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ — a trifle in the grand scheme of things, but every bit as delightful to the ear as anything off A Hard Day's Night; and, of course, the two grand anthems — ʽMy Back Pagesʼ and ʽChimes Of Free­domʼ, with Bob's newly found «loud-and-proud» singing voice turning them into the stateliest epics of 1964... and, perhaps, the entire decade as well.

 

Had ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ been written a good forty years earlier and gotten a solid translation into Russian, it would have, no doubt, been readily adopted by some of the more progressively-oriented Bolsheviks — of all Dylan songs, this one has the most revolutionary spirit, and, in fact, somewhat sticks out in the context of all the smaller-scale, personally-oriented tunes on Another Side. Very very soon, this «grand vision» would be turned on its head and adapted to reflect sur­realist and near-psychotic values, as on ʽGates Of Edenʼ (which, in nature, is like ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ on a heavy acid trip). But for the moment, this one here still seems to be tailored to the likes of Bob's friends in the protest movement — and delivered with all the seriousness and ins­piration that could be mustered, even if immediately following it up with ʽI Shall Be Free No. 10ʼ might have been an intentional sequencing move.

 

Lyrical influence from Rimbaud, Blake, Shake­speare, etc. etc. has all been detected and described by a million authors and hardly needs any of my comments — as usual, though, the magic of the song goes far beyond the lyrics: it is rousing, yes, but at the same time also «lulling», with a regular rise-and-fall vocal drive throughout each verse, and a perfect «calm» resolution after the high-pitched lines that usually nail one or another social injustice. Despite the violent nature of the lyrics, the only thunder and lightning in the entire performance are in the man's voice — but it has by now gained so much in confidence that, at times, it does begin to seem that the guy is busy flinging out sonic lightning balls, a first example of the practice that would reach its peak on Highway 61 Revisited. And he does that without recurring to screaming, fist-clenching, or shirt-tearing — a tricky art mastered only by a select few.

 

To recapitulate, Another Side Of Bob Dylan really shows all of his sides — the romantic and sentimental, the nasty and offensive, the humorous and playful, the visionary and anthemic, the pretentious and the humble, the serious and the clownish (the latter as represented by ʽMotor­psycho Nightmareʼ, the one song that has not been mentioned because, hilarious lyrics aside, it should really be viewed as an early demo version of the vastly superior spectacle of ʽBob Dylan's 115th Dreamʼ on the next album). And somehow, depending on the angle you choose, it's all there in the man's facial expression on the album cover: not yet fully embracing the hip attitudes and attires of the «young intellectual elites» of the Sixties, but already far removed from the «working class hero» image of The Times — half-dreamy, half-grounded, staring somewhere right above your face, but not entirely into the sky.

 

A «transitional photo», perhaps, taken for an album that he himself knew would be «transitional» — not all of his friends and admirers might have guessed that, but ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ was already written at the time, and the only thing, really, that separates Another Side from Bringing It All Back Home is that, with the former, there still remained a slight technical chance of going back. «Another Side» — as in, «indulge a little bit in that beatnik stuff, show off your creativity, then go back to singing about coal miners and racial discrimination». Well — as it turned out, that side ended up being quite sticky. Thumbs up without a question: the album would have been a flawless masterpiece, had he decided at the last moment to replace the hatred of ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ with, say, the tenderness of ʽMama You've Been On My Mindʼ, but even geniuses are only human in the end, and have their reserved right to occasional lapses of judgement.

 

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME (1965)

 

1) Subterranean Homesick Blues; 2) She Belongs To Me; 3) Maggie's Farm; 4) Love Minus Zero/No Limit; 5) Out­law Blues; 6) On The Road Again; 7) Bob Dylan's 115th Dream; 8) Mr. Tambourine Man; 9) Gates Of Eden; 10) It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); 11) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.

 

So what else can really be said here, now that we have entered the kind of territory that has al­ready been swept clean with a toothbrush by armies of Dylanologists and amateur fans alike? As Dylan's music intrudes on the sacred, and vastly popular, grounds of rock'n'roll, and Dylan's lyrics plunge into the deep pool of surrealism, symbolism, expressionism, post-modernism, and goofy nonsense, who in the whole wide world could resist the temptation of offering an opinion, an interpretation, a critical analysis, a philosophical speculation? The overall amount of writing done on this period in Dylan's history, especially if you throw in all the Ph.D. theses, is probably larger than any other amount on any given topic in popular music. «Maggie comes fleet foot face full of black soot talking that the heat put plants in the bed but...» — come on, it's pretty hard not to want to express any sort of opinion on that one.

 

Let us begin by asking some questions. Who is the girl in the red dress on the album sleeve? That one's easy: all sources have her down as Sally Grossman, the wife of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman. Okay, trickier question: what is the wife of Dylan's manager doing on a Dylan album sleeve? The answer «because Dylan was probably porking her at the time» doesn't quite cut it, since, by all accounts, Albert Grossman simply wasn't the kind of man with whose wife you'd want to mess around, no matter how free-thinking and liberated you considered yourself to be. The answer «because she just happened to hang out there while Bob was photosessioned for the album sleeve» is a little better, but still doesn't really cut it. It would be much better, I think, if we started looking for the answer from a straightforward perspective — most of the things that Bob was doing at the time were being done with the intention of pissing some people off, and thus, the same intention can be deduced for this photo as well.

 

A ragged, somber, beetle-browed Dylan is sitting, half-buried in vinyl records, in what looks like a fairly well-off upper middle class house — with a glamorous lady in a red dress puffing away on the couch. The obvious issue is — what is this freedom-fighter, protest-brewer, Greenwich Village tenant, etc., doing in a place like this? Has he come here to surrender his attitude, begging mercy from the proud and rich, or is he playing a sort of trickster part, preaching his gospel to the bourgeoisie in order to make them see the light?.. The album cover intrigues — it is obviously «hip» in a very much early 1960s kind of way, pandering to fans of Godard and Antonioni, among other things, but what would be the actual meaning of it?.. and would there be an actual meaning, or are we just being nose-pulled by unpredictable tricks of the subconscious?

 

Now, here is another question. The first side of the LP is fully electric, recorded with a quickly assembled backing band, Bruce Langhorne presiding on lead guitar. The second side is almost completely acoustic, with little other than Langhorne's soft electric countermelody on ʽMr. Tam­bourine Manʼ to take the focus away from Bob's traditional ingredients. Would it matter if the sides were reversed? After all, that would be respectful to the chronology — Bob wrote ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ as early as February 1964, and ʽGates Of Edenʼ followed fairly quickly, way before he even got around to seriously thinking about going electric.

 

Imagine yourself buying a brand new Dylan album in early 1965, coming home, put­ting it on the turntable and hearing ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ. The effect is breathtaking — it is easily among the most beautiful acoustic tunes in Bob's repertoire. But then compare it with the effect of coming home, putting Dylan's new album on the turntable and hearing ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ. No actual comparison, right? even if, by all accounts, ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ is the better song of the two, musically, lyrically, attitud-ally, whatever.

 

ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ doesn't even have much of a melody — just a basic rhythm track, painted over with Langhorne's bluesy electric licks. Later on, Dylan himself admitted that the song was heavily influenced by Chuck Berry's ʽToo Much Monkey Businessʼ, mostly by way of Chuck's invention of the «machine-gun word attack» where a storyline would develop quickly and impressionistically, in rapid bursts of short phrases. Of course, Chuck's storyline was ultima­tely understandable, realistic, and relevant for the teen spirit — Bob wouldn't be Bob if he didn't try to capsize this approach. In his world, you have a happy marriage between Chuck Berry and Allen Ginsberg, and it is a little strange, in fact, that in the famous accompanying video you do see Ginsberg chatting with someone else, but not Chuck. Personally, I think Chuck should have been invited, too. But maybe Bob was too shy to try.

 

In any case, ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ is simply one of the greatest punk songs ever written — the whole Side A of this album is fairly punkish, but the opening blast may have been an even  bigger fuck-you statement for 1965 than ʽMy Generationʼ and ʽSatisfactionʼ put together, despite not saying anything «in the open». Bob's «rap» delivery, of course, has nothing to do with «rap» as we have generally come to know it — it is quite consistent with his overall singing style, just a little faster than usual, but it has a special dynamics to it that generic «rap» parts usually do not have: note how each verse is divided in two parts, the first one delivered on the wave of a single breath, overwhelming the listener, then the second part ("look out kid...") starts out slow, then turns into a second wave of even huger intensity. The lyrics don't make much literal sense — naturally — but it's no good to haughtily pretend that we do not understand what the song is about, or to whom it might be addressed. "The man in the coonskin cap wants eleven dollar bills, you only got ten" — Johnny Rotten never had it that good. Oh yes, there was a time when I re­membered all the words to the song and could sing along on time — I do consider that as some sort of personal feat, but, more importantly, there was something there to make me do it. Never happened with Lou Reed or Joni Mitchell, for some strange reason.

 

ʽMaggie's Farmʼ, to some extent, doubles the punch of ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ (remem­ber how many times you used to confuse the acoustic / electric openings of the two?), but puts things in a more personal frame — sung in the first person and initiating a series of vicious put-downs that could have gotten Bob into lotsa personal trouble... had anybody understood properly who it was that was getting the face-in-the-mud treatment. Since ʽMaggie's Farmʼ may be inter­preted as a pun on «McGee's Farm» where Bob performed his protest songs, Dylan studiosos usually understand the song as a big fig to the folk movement. But it could actually be a big fig to just about anyone — "I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them", and why should the "everybody" be confined to the Pete Seegers and the Joan Baezes?

 

On a sidenote, as «generic» as the blues-rock of ʽMaggie's Farmʼ actually gets, witness Bob's sharpness as each line of the "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more..." type gets its own intonation — decisively affirmative first time around; higher-pitched, more scandalous, more de­fensive and hysterical on its second round; a little calmer, but also a little tired worn at the end of the verse, as if the previously given explanation has cost the narrator too much effort. It's just a trifle, perhaps, but it is these subtle dynamic minutiae that need to be felt, in order to understand what separates a great Dylan song from a not-so-great Dylan song.

 

Not-so-great Dylan songs on Side A on the album do make an appearance — one doesn't often hear great praise for either ʽOutlaw Bluesʼ or ʽOn The Road Againʼ, and it's easy to see why: not only do they fail to match the righteous fury of ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ and ʽMaggie's Farmʼ, but they simply seem a little undercooked, and would soon be obliterated by better songs in the same vein, like ʽFrom A Buick 6ʼ or ʽMost Likely You Go Your Wayʼ. They do have a sort of minimalistic roughness which would be completely absent from the next two records (where the issue of overcooking stuff would replace that of undercooking), but both are clearly second-rate, tentative efforts that can easily be excused — they are short and funny, after all — yet their presence does bring the cumulative value of the album down a little bit: if anything, they are here to remind us that on Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan's new «electric image» was still sinking in, but he wasn't quite there yet.

 

None of that applies to the near-mystical celebration of the mysterious bohemian lady who was concocted from Joan Baez, Nico, and probably a pack of other women in Dylan's life (ʽShe Be­longs To Meʼ), nor to the courteous beauty of ʽLove Minus Zero/No Limitʼ, achieved not so much with the lyrics as with its three descending chords (that bear an eerie resemblance to ʽDo You Want To Know A Secretʼ — Beatles influence at work?), nor to ʽBob Dylan's 115th Dreamʼ where the lyrics are, indeed, the biggest attraction, considering that the words flow together to tell «the greatest story ever told» in a Dylan song. Or maybe it's the opening fit of hysterical laughter, prompted by Dylan's backing band missing its cue, that is actually the biggest attraction? Once the stage is set with those ten seconds of rolling over, you are already drawn deep into the experi­ence before the song has actually started.

 

However, even these songs generally pale in comparison to the acoustic side of the album: ironic, indeed, that Bob was reaching his absolute peak in the «acoustic folk» department just as he was all set to make the transition to «electric rock». The four songs on Side B are four different mu­sical worlds, a brief, but unforgettable journey through four types of mindsets that take you from the early morning through the day into the night and back to the light again — I have no idea just how conscious that particular sequencing might have been, but I could imagine these four songs in no other order.

 

First, ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ is, of course, the rising-sun kind of song, not just because "in the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you", but because the whole attitude is that of a piper at the gates of dawn, no more, no less. The lyrics are dazzling with imagery, Bruce Langhorne's subtle electric countervoice in one channel adds extra sweetness, and only ʽLove Minus Zeroʼ on the first side challenges this song's monopoly on a «benevolent mood».

 

Then ʽGates Of Edenʼ comes along like a prophetic follow-up to ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ — only where the latter made some attempt at making some sense, this one already doesn't. It is much more stern, with a lot more iron in Bob's voice, and it should offend Christians, because Dylan's «Gates of Eden» do not offer salvation: instead, they seem to offer indifference to everything that is either mentioned in the lyrics or left outside them. They're pretty Buddhist, in fact, his Gates of Eden — describing a state of nirvana rather than eternal bliss.

 

Then, with ʽIt's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)ʼ, darkness moves on — this is a 100% nighttime song — no wonder "darkness" is the first word spoken. In some ways, the tune invokes the image of creepy old-time bluesmen like Blind Willie Johnson, and Bob even tries to introduce various complex flourishes into his playing: this is one of the few of his acoustic songs where an instru­mental version (okay, not a seven-minute long one) would not be uninteresting to hear. Moreover, the song is quite religious in nature — most people remember it for the "even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked" bit, which is Dylan once again challenging the verbal skills of Old Testament prophets, but there is much more to it. I mean, Dylan actually complaining about how "it's easy to see... that nothing much is really sacred"? This is a little per­sonal, nighttime vision of one man's personal apocalypse, and if you keep thinking about it too long, it might eventually grow pretty creepy, so be warned.

 

Then, once the gruelling seven and a half minutes of the song are finally over, we are brought back to life from the nightmare with the bright guitar and harmonica of ʽIt's All Over Now, Baby Blueʼ — despite the categoricity of the title and, once again, the put-down nature of the lyrics, in this particular context it actually sounds like an optimistic awakening after the horror of ʽIt's Al­right Maʼ. Like ʽMaggie's Farmʼ, the song is usually understood as Bob's personal goodbye to the folk scene — or, perhaps, as his personal goodbye to some girl (Baez?) — or, better still, couldn't we just understand it as a goodbye song in general? Riding off into the sunset, or, to be more pre­cise, into the sunrise? A goodbye song as the last song on an album does make sense, doesn't it?

 

The thumbs up that this record gets should not, of course, obscure its overall place on the Dylan curve: a major move forward from the already greatly advanced Another Side, but still a little faltering and teetering in an environment that had not yet become fully «natural» for Bob. Most importantly, the electric side is essentially powered by his voice alone — excited and energized by these new developments, drawing its strength from the clear understanding that he is allowing himself to go against the grain and be strong enough to get away with it. Langhorne's skills at the electric are considerable, but he is still no match for Mike Bloomfield, nor is there any Al Kooper here to add organ depth to the sound. On the other hand, this does make Bringing It All Back Home into a record that brings Dylan closest of all to whatever could be called «punk aesthetics» — and for that reason, it might draw its own fanbase that an album like Highway 61, not to men­tion Blonde On Blonde, could possibly shoo away for being way too full of different superfluous ingredients. To each his own, I guess.

 

HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED (1965)

 

1) Like A Rolling Stone; 2) Tombstone Blues; 3) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 4) From A Buick 6; 5) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 6) Queen Jane Approximately; 7) Highway 61 Revisited; 8) Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues; 9) Desolation Row.

 

By this time in Dylan's career, it is already best for everybody to refrain from asking questions (if only out of fear of losing one's sanity), but I still find it hard to resist from at least this short one — why «revisited»? The song itself, duly mentioning a «highway 61» in each verse, makes no mention of revisiting anything; and although the title does, perhaps, allude to Bob's cover of the ʽHighway 51ʼ blues on his self-titled debut album, well, that was 51, not 61, so he is not exactly revisiting that old place. The word «revisited» is really out of place on this album, considering how bent it is on breaking new ground rather than revisiting old one — but maybe that's what we think, after all, and in reality Bob was using this faint hint to let us know how little has changed ever since he entered the recording business?..

 

On the other hand, who could really tell what this guy wants and what he does not want to let us know when he keeps staring at us like that from the album cover. And it is not even the stare that produces the best impression: it is the kingly pose that he adopts on that chair, as Bobby Neu­wirth, the loyal courtier, stands right behind the throne, ready to whop any potential dissenters over the head with that camera at the slightest notice. (And now we know that this impression wasn't that far from the truth, what with the Dylan/Neuwirth couple practicing intellectual assas­sination on the weak, meek, and humble with brutal social-darwinist fervor throughout that en­tire period — be it Joan Baez or Donovan, no one was safe from their verbal wrath).

 

It worked both ways: on one hand, Dylan's definitive breakup with the folksie movement earned him plenty of scorn, flack, and derision — but on the other hand, most of it only went further to fuel the well-lit fire, and pushed him to new creative heights, most of them mean, lean, and vici­ous in nature. Highway 61 Revisited, heralded by ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ and the non-LP single ʽPositively 4th Streetʼ, showed the world what it really meant to be pissed off when you're Bob Dylan: next to these two songs — as well as about half of the other ones on the LP — ʽMaggie's Farmʼ is Sesame Street-level material.

 

Fortunately for us, Dylan's vitriolics can always be pushed aside from the listener, or, even better, empathized with — in need, one can always side with the protagonist, and then you can giddily rail at all the mistreated disillusioned young girls of ʽRolling Stoneʼ and all the dazed and con­fused Mr. Joneses of ʽThin Manʼ, borrowing the appropriate machine gun from the Zimmerman Industries, Hibbing, Minnesota. And just as fortunately, the unbeatable, incomparable sneer of Highway 61 Revisited is only one of its major attractions — had it been its only attraction, the album probably would never come to be regarded as one of the finest products of Western civi­lization in the 1960s by so many people (myself included, to make things clear right away).

 

The other attraction, of course, is the overall sound of the album, which is where the gist of Bob's genius truly lies. The assembled musicians were neither renowned professionals (although many of them did have plenty of session experience behind them, like Paul Griffin on piano or Bobby Gregg on drums) nor immediate unmistakable geniuses (even though Mike Bloomfield did, on occasion, earn the «guitar genius» tag) — nor did Bob spend any serious amount of time training and disciplining them. Instead, what usually happened during the sessions was that everybody just hammered away, in various styles, moods, and combinations, and every once in a while Dy­lan would signal — keep it right there. Every single time, that is, when his bloodhound instinct picked up a hint that there was finally something happening out there. It is this instinct, and this instinct only, that explains why Bob, when he was in a proper hunting spirit, was able to get so much out of almost any musician, no matter how well-trained, experienced, or innately talented. And he was never in a more proper hunting spirit than during these summer sessions of 1965.

 

Even if we take a relative «lowlight» from the album — say, ʽFrom A Buick 6ʼ, a fast blues piece that is probably the least well-known track on here — it still got that sound. The guitar does not seem to be playing anything other than a standard ʽMilk Cow Bluesʼ-type pattern, but it does play it with an arrogant brutality and decisiveness that, for some reason, many a blues-rocker at the time was unable to achieve — and when you overlay it with Al Kooper's flashy, incessant organ swirls, the result is a thick, heavy sonic tempest. Most likely, the song title, which has nothing whatsoever to do with its lyrics (a beat-era-update of the traditional "praise for me woman" type of blues ode), could have been inspired by this drive — it is the sonic equivalent of landscape flashing past the windows of a speeding vehicle.

 

And that is just the lowlight, of course. In general, Dylan continues with the «proto-punk» aes­thetics here: once the band or a particular band member happens to fall upon a crude, simple, but working chord sequence, Bob locks it in place and makes him / them stick with it for three, four, six minutes — as long as it takes him to empty his lyrical inspiration pot. So is the deal with ʽTombstone Bluesʼ, for instance, which gallops at a crazy pace on the power of about three guitar notes and about as many organ ones — hello, Motörhead? (I could actually see Lemmy doing ʽTombstone Bluesʼ in a flash — as a matter of fact, ʽAce Of Spadesʼ does sound surprisingly similar) — and has Bob unfurling his acid dreams one by one until it all comes together in this hilariously sound conclusion: "I wish I could write you a melody so plain / That could hold you dear lady from going insane / That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain / Of your use­less and pointless knowledge". Off-top piece of advice: always try to pay the most attention to the last verse of Dylan's songs, it is that one that usually — but, of course, not always — holds the key to the whole story.

 

Or take the case of ʽIt Takes A Lot To Laughʼ. Is it the slow, almost lethargic tempo that makes the song? Is it the harmonica soloing? Is it the completely generic, thoroughly uncreative blues shuffle melody? Is it the lyrics? Well, I don't know about you, but the first thing I remember and cherish about the song is that ridiculously loud, «primitive», archaic-feel barrelhouse piano part from Paul Griffin. Most likely, had he been recording this stuff with a different artist, he would have played it differently: less flash, more technique, less power, more notes. Under Dylan, he is guided to «deconstruct» that part, dropping the complexity and emphasizing only the «key» moments, and goddammit if it doesn't work, even if, after all these years, I am still not able to verbally express how exactly it makes the song so unique. Leave it to me deathbed.

 

Or take ʽQueen Jane Approximatelyʼ, which I remember as the very last song on Highway 61 that I learned to love, but now I probably love it more than anything else on the album — perhaps because it is the only genuinely friendly and compassionate song on here, created in a rare fit of sympathy, I believe, for those few people whom Bob did not overtly dismiss as phonies upon first sight and who have been merged together in this single collective «Queen Jane» image. The ly­rics are great, the invitation to "come see me, Queen Jane" is delivered in a great tone that is fifty percent irony and fifty percent empathy, but none of that would work if it weren't for that four-note descending bass line and Bloomfield's conclusive arpeggiated chord before the final lines of the chorus — marking the transition from the critical "you're in one hell of a mess, girl" stage to the con­soling "but hey, no prob, I got the cure!" one. Like everywhere else, the non-stop crushing waves of the lyrical onslaught may initially prevent one from seeing this — but ʽQueen Jane Ap­proximatelyʼ could have worked almost as well in completely instrumental mode.

 

And, of course, there is always ʽBallad Of A Thin Manʼ to prove my point better than anything else. That somber four-note piano bit — it was not invented by Dylan, it was taken directly from Ray Charles' ʽI Believe To My Soulʼ, but it's almost as if Bob listened to the song and said, "hey, that's a great four-note piano bit! How come there's so much more piano playing on here — doesn't it only detract attention away from that great sequence? Why don't we just zoom in on that?" So they did — and somehow it acquired this additional meaning, one of a musical sword of doom hanging over the head of poor Mr. Jones, walking around and minding his business while the naked people, the geeks and the freaks, arming themselves with creepy horror movie organ parts and this relentless «piano bell toll», make fun of him. It must have took some balls to record something like that — of everyone I know, only Procol Harum tried that trick with similar suc­cess two years later on ʽA Christmas Camelʼ (funny enough, this here song does have the word ʽcamelʼ in its lyrics, too), although it was already nowhere near as effective.

 

Considering how much of a «garage» spirit there is here on Highway 61, it is not surprising that the chosen guitar player was Mike Bloomfield, probably the «dirtiest» blues guitar player on the American scene at the time, the one who might have had the best balance between blues-rock guitar technique and the overall «nastiness» of effect: his frantic leads on ʽTombstone Bluesʼ here must have inspired everyone from Lou Reed to Marc Bolan. What actually is surprising is that most of the time, this garage spirit is being enforced through decidedly unorthodox means for a garage album — usually, the electric guitar is actually subdued by the keyboards, providing a thick supportive sonic mat for their pounding and swirling. This kind of wall of sound, technical­ly speaking, was not at all typical for the far more minimalistic garage-rock bands of the day — and yet, at the same time, Highway 61 Revisited sounds much more raw, crude, visceral, in-yer-face, slam-dunk than almost any randomly picked garage single from 1965.

 

I guess, like George Harrison said, «it's all in the mind» — perhaps you could make garage rock with an unplugged mandolin if you really put your spirit to it. And Dylan, by getting additional musical help from his friends and gaining the right to direct and channel that help, was more than qualified in terms of spirit. If anything, though, Highway 61 Revisited transcends «garage rock» — «hangar rock» would be more like it, adding vast, sprawling musical space to the raw power, leanness and meanness of the message. The title track alone is like a bunch of warheads blasting into a thousand directions, each one guided by its personal Al Kooper whistle.

 

All the more interesting, then, how the album quietly settles down towards the end, gradually cooling its rockets instead of trying to pick up even more steam. First, ʽJust Like Tom Thumb's Bluesʼ, though still thick on sonic stuffing, gives us a sort of «post-acid» Dylan, in a somewhat stupefied and a little «transcendental» state — the only number on here that has quite an explicit­ly druggy atmosphere, particularly when it comes to Bob's vocal delivery: his "I cannot move, my fingers are all in a knot / I don't have the strength to get up and take another shot / And my best friend, my doctor, won't even say what it is I've got" sounds so totally authentic, I have this con­stant urge to get up and take his temperature every time I hear it. Where the first seven songs, with the partial exception of ʽTrainʼ, all show us a «Dylan on speed», this one is definitely «co­ming down», and it ain't too pretty, but it sure as hell is quite mesmerizing.

 

Then, of course, there is always ʽDesolation Rowʼ. Now my opinion on that song hasn't changed through the years: I still tend to think of it as a «preview», an early, not-100%-successful attempt at tapping into the visionary-transcendental style of Blonde On Blonde. Its lyrics drop just a tad too many name references to not come across as «show-off» stuff; its arrangement, despite the brilliant folky acoustic flourishes from Charlie McCoy, is a little too minimalistic to warrant 11 minutes of repetitiveness; and its overall atmosphere does not gel full well with the word ʽDeso­lationʼ in the title — plenty of surrealist stuff is happening out there, but very little of it has anything to do with «desolation». But an epic, towering album did need an epic, towering con­clusion, and ʽDesolation Rowʼ suits that function perfectly — here is Dylan as Unbiased Neutral Observer rather than the «character-assassin» on the bulk of the album, just to prevent any poten­tial outcry of «so, all that guy is able to do nowadays is sneer and jeer and criticize and complain» from the verbose critics. All that I really hold against this song is that it has always worked much better for me in its specific «Highway 61-closer» function, rather than on its own merits, Charlie McCoy be blessed and all.

 

And as much as I seem to be gushing here, no, I go with the minority that does not regard High­way 61 Revisited as the highest peak of the curve. For me, above all, Dylan is the world's great­est master of subtlety and understatement, for both of which Highway 61, in its raging garage fervor, has only limited space. Likewise, I certainly do not consider Dylan a «rock'n'roll artist», and this also helps to get detached from the majority that might simply prefer Highway 61 to Blonde On Blonde because the first one «kicks ass all the way through» where the second one can be «kinda boring, at least in some spots» — this may be true, but I genuinely do not need «my Dylan» to kick ass in order to achieve unparalleled greatness.

 

Nevertheless, there is no question whatsoever in my mind that an album like Highway 61 could only have been done by this one person at this particular time; that it captures and personifies the incomparable «Zeitgeist» of 1965 more intelligently and with more complexity than any other album; that all of its moods and sentiments are as vital and relevant today as they were half a century ago; and that quibbling over pizza toppings is a great way to take some pressure off one's brain, but hardly deserves even a single permanent byte of Internet space. Consequently, let's just top this one off with an enthusiastic thumbs up-de luxe — and move on up.

 

P.S. Curiously enough, already after signing off, I found out that I forgot to say even a single thing about the album's top song. But on second thought, let's keep it this way — it is sort of tempting to ensure the uniqueness of this here review through a thing it fails to mention, rather than the opposite. Besides, what else new can there be said about that opening snare shot that hasn't already been said by that eloquent preacher of post-industrial existentialism, Mr. Spruce Bringsteen? "He showed us that just because the music was innately physical, did not mean it was anti-intel­lect" — well, leave it to Mr. Bringsteen to once again dangerously toy with the balance in favor of extra «physicality» as his own time would arrive a decade from then on, but at least there is no questioning his judgement on this one.

 

BLONDE ON BLONDE (1966)

 

1) Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35; 2) Pledging My Time; 3) Visions Of Johanna; 4) One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later); 5) I Want You; 6) Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again; 7) Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat; 8) Just Like A Woman; 9) Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine); 10) Temporary Like Achilles; 11) Absolutely Sweet Marie; 12) 4th Time Around; 13) Obviously 5 Believers; 14) Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.

 

Usually, whenever I get the urge to fantasize about yet another version of a shortlist of the «Greatest Al­bums Ever Recorded», I tend to exclude albums from solitary singer-songwriters or «dictatorial bands» dominated by one towering figure (like Jethro Tull). As phenomenal as any one particular mind may be, two phenomenal minds, properly coordinated with each other, are unquestionably even better. Pet Sounds is a fantastic album, yet it is fundamentally the product of not simply one mind's (Brian Wilson's), but one vision's, one purpose's, one creative vector's: almost any random song off it already has the seeds of every other song's inside it. Not so with a truly great record from, say, a peak period of the Beatles or the Stones, where thoughts and aspi­rations ran in different directions, and the way they interlocked opened up a virtually limitless number of combinations. Perhaps this could come at a certain expense of coherence, or perhaps some of the ideas could get a wee bit dissipated or out of focus, but I never see this as a real pro­blem — a great idea that makes its point in two minutes rather than forty is still a great idea.

 

However, every rule knows its exceptions. «I get your point about Pet Sounds, but it speaks to me on such a fundamental level that I really don't care if all of its songs are essentially about the same thing. What really matters is that they are about THE THING, and nothing is greater in the whole world than THE THING». That is certainly a respectable position — and that, more or less, is the way I feel, and have always felt, about Blonde On Blonde. Except I could argue, perhaps, that, unlike Pet Sounds, it is not all about the same thing, but for the sake of simplicity, and equ­ality of argument, let us assume and agree that it is. For the moment.

 

One thing that Dylan shared with the Beatles around late 1965 / early 1966 was this uncanny, rationally inexplainable ability to progress in the face of all odds. The more they all became bur­dened with «public duties» — never-ending touring, ridiculous press conferences, excessive so­cializing, not to mention groupies, sycophants, girls, drugs, and whatever else might be coming that way — the more their creative juices seemed to overflow and pour out in a completely dif­ferent direction. Revolver had Paul's finest odes to loneliness and John's strongest hymns to the transcendental; Blonde On Blonde almost completely dispensed with the aggressive rock'n'roll spirit and dived into the introspective and the ephemeral. It would have been one thing if Re­volver were recorded after the band's decision to quit touring and retreat into their private worlds, or if Blonde On Blonde were created after the infamous motorcycle incident that temporarily cut off Dylan from the outside spheres. But history stubbornly insists on the reverse, «unnatural» or­der of these incidents, and this should, if anything, enhance our respect for — and our enjoyment of — both these sonic wonders of 1966.

 

Formally, the crucial difference between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde was due to Bob's decision to move to Nashville for the main sessions. He had made several attempts to record with his new touring band, The Hawks, in Columbia's New York studios, but nothing seemed to work the way he wanted — and it is relatively possible to follow Bob's train of thought on that one if one listens to a selection of outtakes from those sessions that have since been made available on the various Bootleg Sessions (ʽI Wanna Be Your Loverʼ, ʽShe's Your Lover Nowʼ, etc.): most are listenable, but sound like somewhat uneasy transition pieces from the blazing rock of Highway 61 to the moody sounds of Blonde. In the heat of the moment, the Hawks and Robert Zimmerman just wouldn't gel in the studio — it would take the motorcycle incident, a relaxed peri­od of Woodstock seclusion, and a name change to The Band to make them under­stand each other so much better.

 

Meanwhile, the move to Nashville in February '66 turned out to be a genius move. Dylan took only two musi­cians from his then-current retinue — Al Kooper on organ (a very wise choice, since the organ parts are essential ingredients in many of these songs) and Robbie Robertson on guitar (maybe not so wise a choice, since Robbie, with his still very «rock-oriented» style of playing, does not seem to always understand what is going on. "It's not hard rock", Bob would later say about ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ, "the only thing in it that's hard is Robbie", and I am not sure that the statement was not actually meant as a slight critique. On the other hand, some of the songs here do require small amounts of hard rock guitar, so the decision to bring the lead Hawk along was not entirely pointless, either).

 

The rest of the band was all picked up at Nashville, including the already well-known guitarist Charlie McCoy and the soon-to-be well-known artist Joe South on bass. None of them were bona fide «rock'n'roll» players, so, in a way, one could argue that Dylan's personal «roots revolution» had already begun well prior to John Wesley Harding, or, at the very least, that the seeds for those roots had already been planted in early 1966. But that would be a moot argument anyway, because Blonde On Blonde goes beyond these petty discrepancies — its world transcends the limits of «rock music», «roots music», whatever. Somehow, during those sessions, something, some sort of sound was captured, the likeness of which I have never, ever heard on any other re­cord. Out of a complex bunch of ingredients arose a once-in-a-lifetime combination that, for a brief moment, opened the doors to a completely befuddling dimension. The motorcycle crash slammed those doors back shut — but, in all honesty, I highly doubt that they would be kept open by themselves even without the crash: the moment was simply too good to last.

 

So what's up with that «thin, wild mercury sound», the way Bob himself described what was hap­penning here a decade later? In individual terms, the closest equivalent to a «thin mercury sound» that my ears tell me about here is probably Kooper's subtle organ lining for the basic melody of ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ — very thin indeed, and trickling down from your speakers like mercury, though, hopefully, with less lethal consequences. Not coincidentally, this is also the album's stand-out tune par excellence, a thoroughly «nighttime» song compared to the louder, brighter, generally more «active» or, sometimes, more «ceremonial» performances elsewhere, but still, in most of its ingredients, very typical of the general approach of Blonde On Blonde. The lyrics themselves subtly hint at nocturnal impressions — "ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?", "lights flicker from the opposite loft", etc. — and the whole song ultimately becomes a musical seance, and leave it to Al to come up with the perfect ghostly whistle of an organ tone to complete the picture (whereas Robbie's sharp, piercing licks, as I already said, rather detract from the atmosphere than add to it — fortunately, not a lot).

 

There was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, that even hinted at this kind of material earlier on in 1965. There is no anger here, no irony, no condescension, no pissed-off feelings, and it even looks like there ain't that much in terms of «shock value»: ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ is not set to stun, its only way of working is to gradually crawl under the skin, which partially explains its running time of seven and a half minutes. I have no intention of saying that this is «Dylan at his most sin­cere» or «as close to the real Dylan as it gets», because by early 1966, what with drugs, touring, pressure, and, above all, Bob's complete slide into the realm of self-mythologization, he himself may not have been entirely secure of what was real and what was, well, a «vision». But there is a very special kind of magic running through the air every time the chorus comes to a resolution.

 

"These visions... pause... of Johanna... pause..." ...note the ultra-short punch of the first i in "visions" and the first a in "Johanna", they are like two rhythmic hammer blows, sharply con­trasting with the generally drawn out stressed syllables in the verses — that obligatory conscience modulator, without which our senses might have simply been lulled to sleep. This type of careful, meaningful enunciation is something decidedly new: there just wasn't time, space, or opportunity for it on Highway 61. Nor were there any similar tricks, in fact, on any of Dylan's early acoustic albums. He'd learned to turn the weakness of his voice into a powerful communicative tool alrea­dy prior to entering the recording studio — but I think that it wasn't really until these Nashville sessions that the knife became truly jagged.

 

In fact, it is the Blonde On Blonde voice, I think, that usually falls victim to all sorts of «Dylan parodies», be it Adrian Belew on Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti or Weird Al Yankovic on his own ʽBobʼ (with an accompanying video that parodied Dylan's original clip for ʽSubterranean Home­sick Bluesʼ — which Bob certainly did not rap out with that kind of voice). On many, if not most, of the tracks, Bob sings here in a significantly lower register than he'd used to before; and since so many of the songs are taken at relatively slow tempos, this gives him the opportunity to draw out, twist, mutilate, and make otherwise suffer as many syllables as he wishes to — including that odd manner of adding a rising tone to everything that's stressed: "but you-OO said you knew-OO me and I too-OOk your wo-OOrd..." ...in fact, he even manages to push it over to the fast tracks, like ʽI Want Youʼ — "the gui-II-lty underta-AA-ker si-II-ghs...". Why the heck does he do it? What's to be gained, other than mockery and parody?

 

Perhaps — simple explanation — it all has to do with the side effect of mind-expanding sub­stances. Perhaps — slightly more complicated, but I actually like this more — it's all about scree­ning himself and his output from outsiders: by putting on this half-theatrical, half-mental guise Dylan instinctively protects the songs from being adopted, adapted, misconstrued, and desecra­ted by outsiders. Indeed, how many notorious covers of songs off Blonde On Blonde do we know of? Other than ʽJust Like A Womanʼ, which the ubiquitous Manfred Mann immediately latched on to (but even the Byrds, who only attempted to do it around 1970, dropped it from the official relea­ses of Untitled and Byrdmaniax) — almost nothing. Not that people didn't try to do it — they did, and usually failed, not «getting» the original spirit of the song and not succeeding in imbuing it with a different one, either. Of all Dylan collections, Blonde On Blonde is arguably the least pliant when it comes to the art of plundering — and there are good reasons for that: its strength is not in the «melodies» per se, but in the fortuitous combination of its sonic structures. The «mer­cury sound», the «Nashville orchestra» bent to carrying out the will of the Minnesota genius, the ridiculous — and ridiculously unforgettable — singing manner, and the endearingly nonchalant spontaneity of it all. How does one improve on such a cocktail?

 

At this point, it would probably make sense to talk in more details about the individual songs, which places the reviewer in an awful condition: brief blurbs would be redundant and uninfor­mative — thorough analyses would turn the review into a monograph, and for that we already have Clinton Heylin and a host of less prolific Dylanologists. Consequently, instead of going one way or the other, I will try the «random observation» route. If you have not yet had your required listen to Blonde On Blonde, stop reading this stuff already; if you have, and wish to compare impressions, you might want to think about the following:

 

— how is it possible, on the part of so many people, to rail against ʽRainy Day Women # 12 & 35ʼ? It is the perfectly expectable Dylanesque shocker: after the mindblowing explosions of ʽSub­terranean Homesick Bluesʼ and ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, to open up your next album with a super­ficially dumb, deranged, plodding carnival freakout. But if it sounds stupid, that does not neces­sarily mean that it is stupid — if anything, it might be the best ironic pun on the double mea­ning of the verb ʽto stoneʼ ever offered by anybody, and Bob's totally triumphant intonation on the verse-closing "everybody must get stoned!", as he turns the tables on his imaginary oppressors, reveals that he is perfectly aware of his own greatness in the matter;

 

— don't the rhythmically counterbalanced guitar and organ flourishes, framing Bob's vocals on the verses of ʽStuck Inside Of Mobileʼ, remind you of relentless, unchanging, unyielding cogs inside a machine, enhancing the «stuck inside» feeling? No conventional depression or despera­tion here, despite the lyrics' obvious debt to old-timey plaintive blues poems — but, somehow, the song still manages to pass for Blonde On Blonde's pinnacle of depression;

 

— what's up with all this odd passion for long-winded adverbs? ʽAbsolutely Sweet Marieʼ, ʽOb­viously 5 Believersʼ, "anybody can be just like me, obviously... but not too many can be like you, fortunately..." It's one thing to be head over heels in love with words, and another, much less comprehensible one, to be obsessed with complex derived adverbials. Maybe it was just a kind of intellectual mockery, especially considering how these adverbs usually seem to be employed in the «wrong» context. On the other hand, the longer any particular word is, the more fun you can have with it while mouthing its syllables — let us not forget that, at this point in time, phonetics was just as important to Bob's act as semantics;

 

— if there is a single «anti-sexiest» manner of pronouncing the words "I want you" than Dylan doing so on ʽI Want Youʼ, I have yet to hear it. Much has been said about how sweet and senti­mental the song is, but if so, it is being all that only by having all the sweetness and sentimenta­lism «purged» from its chorus, much like Robert Bresson preferred to purge all signs of «acting» from his actors before casting them in his movies;

 

— there is only one occasion on the whole album where I am truly grateful to Robbie Robertson for his presence: the maniacal garage-style solo during the instrumental break on ʽLeopard-Skin Pill-Box Hatʼ. Sure, the song, recorded while still in New York rather than Nashville, is formally a bit of filler, but it does feature one of the funniest sets of lyrics Bob ever wrote ("you might think he loves you for your money, but I know what he really loves you for — it's your brand new leopard skin pillbox hat!" remains one of my favorite cliché inversions in the world), and Robbie's break has him rising to the screechiest of heights, crazier and punkier than he'd ever get anywhere else, be it backing Bob, fronting The Band, or even flash-duelling with Clapton on The Last Waltz. This is just to note that these Dylan albums do not generally have filler per se: there are simply more and less ambitious tracks, that's all;

 

— regarding ʽJust Like A Womanʼ, my favorite part has always been the final instrumental verse, which I regard as the album's most beautiful moment: not coincidentally, perhaps, it is the only instrumental verse that does not count either as a «fade-out» (since it does not fade out) or as a «break» (since it terminates the song) — that way, it draws additional attention, and for a good reason, since the guitar / organ / harmonica trio is simply out of this world. Regardless of what the song's lyrics are supposed to mean, and whether they are «misogynistic» or merely «risqué», it is the music that truly counts here, not the words, and the music is a tender, dreamy serenade with just a tiny, but an important, bit of sarcastic sorrow (look for the meaningful harmonica note change at precisely 4:08, among other things) beneath the surface;

 

— ʽSad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ is basically an Eastern, Persian/Arabic/Jewish-type tapestry of verse, crossed with a streak of beatnik influence and set to the «mercury sound»: be­yond its obviously innovative surface there actually lies a grand archaic tradition, which is the exact reason it works so well, or else it would have been simply perceived as a spout of boring nonsense. Consequently, I think this is the only song on the whole album where his new singing style fits in perfectly — because this is not really even beginning to approach «singing», it is grand-style rhythmic poetry declamation set to a rich accompanying soundtrack, and the only things that are missing include a turban, a long beard, and a flying carpet, though it wouldn't take a whole lot of imagination to put them all together, because the music already supplies the re­quired magic fuel. My only complaint at this point: the song could have used an extra three or four verses, since 11:20 is kind of a pitiful length for an entire LP side, don't you think?

 

It's always been a little funny to me, to talk to people who don't «get» Blonde On Blonde (much as it has probably been equally funny for lots of people to talk to myself, not «getting» Miles Davis or, say, Radiohead, so this should not be taken as a snobby remark), an album that has always connected to my psychic radar like no other — yet, somehow, there still remain lots of those who wouldn't even agree with the thumbs up, much less with such pompous, but sincere appellations as «greatest Bob Dylan album ever» or «one of the greatest albums ever re­corded», etc. On the other hand, the very fact that, unlike, say, any given Tim Buckley or Scott Walker al­bum, Blonde On Blonde has never been awarded a «cult status», but has continued to enjoy an unbroken world-wide reputation ever since its release, should also speak volumes to at least those of the unconverted who do not suffer from acute bouts of conspirology and can be persuaded to think about the impact of this album outside of the «Great Dylan Hoax» theory.

 

At the very least, here is my own sincere testimony: at one time, these songs — heard around the age of 13-14, still in Soviet times, thoroughly disconnected from any potentially accompanying reviews, praise, hype, etc., and not even fully understood as far as the actual words were con­cerned — somehow managed, nevertheless, to rock some of the foundations of my personal world. And in a way, that old feeling still remains. This is one of those very few albums that occasionally reminds me — listening to music, after all, is not such a silly way to spend one's time as one's logical reasoning might suggest.

 

THE BASEMENT TAPES (1967; 1975)

 

1) Odds And Ends; 2) Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast); 3) Million Dollar Bash; 4) Yazoo Street Scandal; 5) Going To Acapulco; 6) Katie's Been Gone; 7) Lo And Behold; 8) Bessie Smith; 9) Clothes Line Saga; 10) Apple Suckling Tree; 11) Please, Mrs. Henry; 12) Tears Of Rage; 13) Too Much Of Nothing; 14) Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread; 15) Ain't No More Cane; 16) Crash On The Levee (Down On The Flood); 17) Ruben Remus; 18) Tiny Montgomery; 19) You Ain't Goin' Nowhere; 20) Don't Ya Tell Henry; 21) Nothing Was Delivered; 22) Open The Door, Homer; 23) Long Distance Operator; 24) This Wheel's On Fire.

 

Technically speaking, this album belongs in the «Addenda» section, together with all the Boot­leg Series volumes. As every Dylan fan with a spoonful of experience already knows, this rag-taggy collection of songs was never intended to see the light of day — not even after much of it was bootlegged as Great White Wonder in July 1969, initiating the worldwide bootleg craze, not even after many of its songs were officially covered by other artists, not even after Dylan and The Band went through a new extensive collaborative period in 1974. In the end, it saw the light of day as late as mid-1975, after the tremendous critical success of Blood On The Tracks — some suppose that this had something to do with Bob regaining confidence in himself, but since this is Bob, we will probably never know the truth anyway.

 

Nevertheless, these reviews are intended to provide some sort of chronological coherence, and from that point of view, The Basement Tapes is a vitally important transition piece for Bob — not a «great Bob Dylan album» by any means, but a notable evolutionary step that might, perhaps, somewhat soften the blow of sudden metamorphosis from the unique psycho-dreamy whackiness of Blonde On Blonde to the stern musical ascetism of John Wesley Harding. Anybody who is willing to learn his Dylan in chronological order should, I believe, put The Basement Tapes in its right place — which is right here, smack dab in the middle of the Summer of Love. Just as the hippies converged in Monterey to open up a new era of peace, love, and soiled underwear, Dylan and The Hawks holed up in the basement — at Woodstock, as ironic as that may sound — and showed 'em all how much they cared.

 

That infamous motorcycle accident on July 29, 1966... the funny thing is that, apparently, there are no reliable documentary confirmations that the accident even took place, or, at least, that it was really as serious as Dylan described it himself, with broken neck vertebrae and all. If the whole thing was not staged, then, at the very least, Bob clearly used it as a respectable pretext to trump the wheel of fortune and put it in reverse before it burned him up. So very much like Bob — right at the very moment where, in a matter of months, they could have finally crowned him king, to go in hiding, abandoning any possible claims.

 

The music he made with The Hawks, soon-to-be-the-band in that Big Pink basement over in Woodstock, was, for the most part, «non-music», or, rather, «anti-music», a perfect antidote to his 1965-66 period of creative overdrive. It is not clear to me how it would be possible to think of The Basement Tapes as a «lost and found masterpiece», as is it is often claimed to be, outside of the overall context. The sessions actually started out in full-on «recreation mode», as Bob, in or­der to kill time, began drawing upon his vast knowledge of «Americana», and playing the game of «teach The Hawks to be The Band in three months», which he actually did — Robbie Robert­son and his pals entered that basement in their garage shoes and came out of it wearing pioneer boots. There was no genuine intention to be creative. It just so happened that creativity sometimes comes to you, whether you want it or not.

 

The Basement Tapes were, indeed, much more important for The Band than for Dylan: they helped lay down the basics for the sound which, when carried over to a proper studio and given an «okay, now let's be serious here, folks» flavor, generated Music From Big Pink and every­thing that followed. What that sound was, exactly, is hard to define in one sentence. «The real folk rock» is as close as it gets — meaning music with a folk tradition basis, but played on rock instruments, without any unnecessary polish, but with lyrics and moods updated to fit the times. As odd as it seems, very few people had done that prior to the summer of '67 — hence all the alleged «roots-rock revolution», much of which ultimately came from «The Basement».

 

The funny thing is, Dylan himself did not care all that much. He helped The Band find their voice, but it is interesting that the two best known songs on the album (ʽTears Of Rageʼ and ʽThis Wheel's On Fireʼ), featuring Dylan-written lyrics and Band-written music (Richard Manuel is responsible for the former, and Rick Danko for the latter), are the most serious-sounding pieces on here, whereas most of the «solo» Dylan material is just plain comic stuff — ʽOdds And Endsʼ, ʽMillion Dollar Bashʼ, ʽLo And Beholdʼ... the guy was really not doing much out there, except for just plain goofing off, and this is not even ʽRainy Day Womenʼ-style goofing off, with a bit of a bite: nope, this is as straightforwardly «dumb» as Dylan ever allowed himself to get. At least ʽYou Ain't Goin' Nowhereʼ got itself that lazy, hammocky, nonchalant vibe that The Byrds caught on and exploited so well on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo — but hey, I'd like to hear them try and cover ʽYea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Breadʼ, with all that Roger McGuinn sagacity.

 

Is there any salt-of-the-earth-type «depth» behind all this fun? Not unless we count the overall raggedness of the session as a means to invoke ye spirits of olde — including Bob's personal tran­sition from the energetic and meticulously staged singing styles of 1965-66 to a deeper, lower, croakier, and somewhat less distinctive manner of delivering his lyrics, which could be just as much a result of a conscious image-shifting decision as it could be the result of physical injury. (One must, however, also remember that these songs were never intended for commercial release, and this is why Dylan is less mindful of steering his soundwaves than he would soon be on John Wesley Harding — whose genius is all about that particular steering). In other words, The Base­ment Tapes make sense as an overall cultural phenomenon, but certainly not as a collection of bigger-than-life songs, like most of the LPs that Bob put out prior to 1967.

 

Even the lyrics often sound like they were created on the spot... well, come to think of it, most of Dylan's lyrics took very little time to write, but in the end, they usually fit in very well with the mood of the song, and ended up making their point — not so with songs like ʽMillion Dollar Bashʼ and ʽLo And Beholdʼ, which, quite honestly, sound as if Bob was simply improvising to a freshly discovered groove: "What's the matter Molly dear / What's the matter with your mound? / What's it to you, Moby Dick? / This is chicken town!" and so on. It don't really matter much — if this counts as an easy-going, laid-back set, created in order to have fun and kill time. Of course, it helps that most of the songs are catchy, usually by means of their anthemic choruses, but even the choruses usually give the impression of yer friendly madhouse come to visit.

 

Curiously, or maybe not so curiously, it is the small handful of Band songs included on the album that tries to be more serious and thoughtful — as if all these little comic trifles from the mind of The Master somehow ended up inspiring Robbie and friends to come up with ʽKatie's Been Goneʼ and ʽBessie Smithʼ, as well as the utmost verbal nonsense of ʽYazoo Street Scandalʼ and ʽRuben Remusʼ that still has a «spiritual tinge» to it — the former is ominous and aggressive, the latter tragic and desperate. It should be noted that a few of the Band songs included here are ac­tually «fake Basement Tapes», recorded somewhere in between 1967 and 1975, which explains an overall higher degree of polish and sound quality: Robertson's explanations on the issue are confusing, suggesting either that they simply did not have access to some of the original recor­dings and so had to re-record them, or that they would automatically brand any of their post-1967 home­made re­cordings as a «basement tape» and throw it in the pile. But on the whole, there is no doubt that the Band material included here is stylistically close to what was going on in there, in those summer months — the birth of The Band, with Dylan as trusted godfather.

 

Because of the extra-crudeness of the demo recordings, this is the only album in Bob's career, I think, where all of the famous songs would be improved upon by future performers — most no­tably The Band themselves, of course, who took ʽTears Of Rageʼ and ʽThis Wheel's On Fireʼ with them for their debut album, but also by The Byrds and others. However, their appearance here, among all the lighthearted fun stuff, is still very important: these are the first Dylan songs in the genre of «Biblical dirge» — one that he never tried to seriously approach before the motorcycle accident, but which sounds so appropriate after. John Wesley Harding would soon put it on the map in all its gloomy splendor, but these are the first serious inklings — ʽTears Of Rageʼ wails and moans in desperation, while ʽWheel's On Fireʼ wails and moans with reproach and anger: "this wheel shall explode!" is Prophet Ezekiel speaking to you, not Woody Guthrie or Allen Gin­s­berg, and the speech sounds fairly convincing, if a bit shaky.

 

Altogether, I believe, it is high time the original Basement Tapes were reconfigured — the 1975 double album release could benefit both from some trimming (for instance, later Band tracks should probably be removed for integrity's sake) and from some expansion — the «seriousness» quota, in particular, could be improved by including ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ, still usually only available on compilations, even though it is arguably the most important Dylan song of the year 1967, and one that symbolizes the transition from a «young, spirited Dylan» to an «older, wiser Dylan» better than anything else, not to mention simply being one of the most beatiful songs about death ever written by mortal man. (Although, once again, Richard Manuel trumped the original Dylan-sung version on Music From Big Pink).

 

But even if such a reconfiguring never takes place, the album, inevitably flawed as it is, is still fascinating as a chronicle of the times — and works particularly well in contrast with the chro­nicle of the Monte­rey Pop Festival on the opposite coast. The only trick is that it has to be expe­rienced as one barely-cohesive whole: if you go inside, expecting individual sonic masterpieces (which was sort of my original expectation, and the reason why I was so sorely disappointed at one time), «nothing will be delivered». Perhaps, if you are a newcomer both to Dylan and The Band, it might even make sense to postpone the acquaintance until after you have become a convert to the magic of both Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding, not to mention Music From Big Pink. That way, it could be much easier to get those thumbs up.

 

JOHN WESLEY HARDING (1968)

 

1) John Wesley Harding; 2) As I Went Out One Morning; 3) I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine; 4) All Along The Watchtower; 5) Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest; 6) Drifter's Escape; 7) Dear Landlord; 8) I Am A Lonesome Hobo; 9) I Pity The Poor Immigrant; 10) Wicked Messenger; 11) Down Along The Cove; 12) I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.

 

Most of the ink, both analog and digital, spilt over John Wesley Harding since its appearance in late 1967 / early 1968, has been spilt with benevolence and admiration, with the few dissenters deservedly going to Hell. However, to my deep surprise, I have never yet encountered a review or general discussion of this record that would really hit me where it feels sharpest. Maybe that makes me a particularly special kind of «Dylan nutcase» — wouldn't that be flattering, actually? — and if so, feel free to ignore the strong sentiments below. But they are strong, and have been that way for about two decades, and this is nothing to laugh about.

 

The story itself is known fairly well: Dylan recuperates, goes back to business, returns to Nash­ville, enlists the minimal aid of Blonde On Blonde vets Charlie McCoy (now on bass) and Ken­ny Buttrey on drums, plus steel guitarist Pete Drake on two tracks, cuts a forty-minute, twelve-song LP in less than twelve hours (to the huge surprise of his backers), makes a Christmas release that stumps, then delights critics and fans alike: Dylan going back to his «roots»! and this time, with a noticeable «country» rather than «folk» flavor! and in the middle of the psychedelic craze and all! Then, next year, we have The Band, The Byrds, and even The Beatles following suit, and the «roots-rock revolution» is underway: yet another lever in the popular conscience pulled hard by the mysterious Mr. Zimmerman.

 

But, of course, as arrogant and self-centered as Mr. Zimmerman has always been, he was hardly likely to think of himself as the harbinger of yet another revolution when he entered that Nash­ville studio once more. What is much more likely is that, in his usual manner, he simply wanted to derail the public — there they are, all waiting for yet another rock'n'roll explosion à la High­way or the next whacky soul trip à la Blonde On Blonde, so, naturally, the right thing to give them is something that couldn't be farther removed from these expectations: who are all these people, daring to hope that The Artist will condescend to their predictable tastes? The day The Artist allows himself to be pigeonholed is the day he dies, and now that God himself has changed his mind and postponed that, all the more reason to become twice as confounding.

 

That must have been the planned intention, and it does not interest me all that much. What is far more bewildering is the side effect that John Wesley Harding has on some people — like my­self, who believes that the record, by far, transcends the formulaic limitations of «country-rock» and, together with Blonde On Blonde, taps into something much deeper, much less understandable and expressable. It is not just an album about going back to one's roots, nor is it a limited-issue album about some sort of nostalgia for the Old West, as some have proposed. But what is it, exactly — I am still not sure of it myself.

 

You put on the record, and it starts out with some unassuming, though lively, acoustic strumming and an equally unassuming "John Wesley Harding was a friend to the poor...". Now that looks pretty much like just a normal kind of folk stylization — Bob's take on the «friendly outlaw bal­lad» genre. Let alone the fact that the real John Wesley Hardin was more of a psychopathic killer than a «friend to the poor»: none of that matters, since most outlaw ballads idealize their prota­go­nists (what do we know about the real Robin Hood?), so Bob is just following tradition — be­sides, if pressed real hard against it, he could always reasonably retort that his John Wesley has an -ng rather than an -n in his family name, so "no charges against him could they prove".

 

But that is not the point — the point is that ʽJohn Wesley Hardingʼ, the song, is like one of those dazzling optical illusions, something that shifts from one opposite to the other before your very eyes without any noticeable conscious effort on the viewer's part. At one point in time, it is like a sincere, honest stylization. Then, with one carefully planted vocal twist or intentionally crude ly­ric, it seems to drift into parody and irony. Here it sounds like a respectable imitation; there it sounds like a sarcastic deconstruction. One bar of solo harmonica feels heroic — the next one rather gives a sense of the comical. You can sing along with a deadly serious expression, or you can do the same thing with a permanent grin on your face — it works both ways. At the end of the song, you might feel that the message has been delivered from the first to the last letter — or you might feel that there was no message in the first place.

 

Ridiculous as it might sound, I have even shed an occasional tear to this song — one of the most befuddling, incomprehensible tears in my life. Was it because the tune was so catchy, so well-rounded, so ideal in the simplicity and finiteness of its form? Was it because I had no idea of what I just heard, but felt strongly that I must have heard something, just couldn't put my finger on it? (and neither, perhaps, could the artist himself, even if pressed under torture to give out the truth?). Was it, in any way, related to the context of the times — this minimalistic, ascetic exer­cise in self-limitation, displayed in an age of sprawl and excess — or could it work the same way regardless of one's knowledge about said context? What are the extents and limits of this incom­prehensible mystique? Nope, I cannot answer any of that.

 

And that is all just about the first song, probably the least assuming / pretentious number on the entire first side of the LP. The following ones are not as tightly locked for comprehension, or, rather, you are simply allowed to make a few more steps down the corridor before you arrive at the same locked doors. This makes them into more usual candidates for discussion, debate, and hot-headed interpretations — but no final word has been pronounced on any of them either.

 

With ʽAs I Went Out One Morningʼ, the minimalistic approach begins to shows its potential for real — there is almost nothing to block the little zoops that Charlie McCoys plays on his bass, make the tune one of the few Dylan songs that are «owned» by the instrument. As usual, there has been plenty of debate over what exactly Tom Paine has got to do with stopping fair damsels running around in chains, but, frankly speaking, I have always regarded those lines ("as I went out one morning to breathe the air around Tom Payne's...") on the same level as "depart from me this moment, I told her with my voice", etc. — semi-improvised phrasing that helps organise and rhyme the lines, at the cost of some benevolently allowed linguistic and cultural crudeness which has always been an explicitly stated part of Dylan.

 

Anyway, once again, it is not really important what the man is singing — only how. Charlie's bass zoops, Bob's worried acoustic strum and the gravel in his voice, all of that has mystery and danger a-plenty, but you don't know where the danger is actually coming from. At the end of the song, you are somehow left in the middle of a Hitchcock movie — is it the «lovely girl» who is the bearer of the danger? is it Tom Paine? is it nobody in particular, and the whole thing is just a misunderstanding? or is it all about a general issue of fate? Whatever the answer be, here we have ourselves a pretty eerie slice of quiet darkness, and everyone can hang one's own name on it — it could be an allegory of the Vietnam War, for all I know. Or a prediction of 9/11. Do it yourself.

 

Joan Baez did not cover that one — too weird! — but she did do a good job on ʽI Dreamed I Saw St. Augustineʼ, a fairly accessible number in comparison. Bob didn't have to do much composing here — the melody and even the initial lyrics are rigorously based upon ʽI Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Nightʼ, and one could not even argue that he had much improved upon the original's pedestrian, but still well-chosen phrasing. However, Bob throws in one of those seductive Biblical components — the righteous loner against overwhelming odds — and gives the song an air of quiet, barely visible, but total killer desperation. Formally, it sounds nowhere near as bleak and misanthropic as... well, as about fifty percent of everything he'd done since Street Legal, but subtlety is always king, and ʽSt. Augustineʼ works on a much deeper level: above everything else, it does not whine, nor does it make a big point out of openly condemning anyone or anything, it is just unbelievably, devastatingly S-A-D in all of its elements.

 

The obvious question that occurs to everyone vaguely familiar with Christian history is — who are the mysterious «them» "that put him out to death", when it is well known that not only did St. Augustine die from natural causes in his own bed, but also that one cannot even take that figura­tively (since the guy still remains one of the Holy Fathers of the Church). The simple answer is that, just as in the case of John Wesley Hardin(g) and the travesties of his career, Dylan did not care — he just needed a trisyllabic name for a Holy Father, and «Augustine» worked quite well. The complex answer is that this is a «symbolic» St. Augustine, chosen out of many to represent the «righteous loner» image (which he did have in life), and, well, we all know that, as a rule of thumb, «righteous loners» don't last long and... well, you know. It is, however, curious, that for the first time in his life Dylan has the guts to align himself with the ignorant «them» rather than the rebellious «him» — and ask a little confessional pardon for it. Or maybe it's just another of the many clever ways for the dude to show off, I am not sure. But I am sure that every goddamn time I hear "...I put my fingers against the glass, and bowed my head and cried..." I am all but ready to do the exact same thing. The song just totally got me in its grip — like no Beatles song ever did or could hope to do.

 

Hendrix was the first among many to see the thunderstorming hard rock potential of ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ — and thank God he did, or it might have been picked up by Three Dog Night or Grand Funk Railroad instead. His is a grand and visionary interpretation, but do not let its loud­ness and technical dazzle overshadow the understated simplicity and sparseness of Bob's original. Dave van Ronk, Bob's old friend and mentor, used to openly criticize the song for its nonsense lyrics — which, as it happens, are nonsense if you string all of them together and try to look for cohesion, but work very well as a disjointed collection of phrasal sketches: lots of indi­vidual great lines ("businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth"), or at least appro­priately placed platitudes ("there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke").

 

But of course van Ronk missed the main point — ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ is the best known and the most covered song off this album because it provides a unified emotional reaction to the largest amount of people: few will dare to deny its creepy pre-apocalyptic feel, in which it is se­cond only to ʽGimme Shelterʼ (actually, ʽGimme Shelterʼ is the Apocalypse happening before one's very eyes, so they are in complementary distribution on the subject), and its emotional power runs highest in between the verses, as those shrill harmonica sirens pierce your ears to McCoy's doom-and-gloom basslines.

 

Bob himself had commented on how ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ challenges time conveniences, having the «events» unfurl in reverse order, with the setting of the scene verse coming after the dialog — a brilliant move, actually, as it always seemed to correlate with an imaginary movie in my mind: camera focus on the «thief/joker» duo, then slowly, gradually zoom out onto the sur­roundings — "all the women came and went..." "...two riders were approaching..." This is, in fact, the normal way of life for Dylan: talking from a «petty» perspective that logically flows into a «grand» scheme of things. So, on second thought, there may be some cohesion here after all.

 

That one-two-three-four punch which I just described, to me, is the single awesomest streak of four-in-a-row album openers on any Dylan album, period — which is why, in comparison, the rest of John Wesley Harding, in relative comparison, has always seemed a little underwhelming to me. Underwhelming not because the other songs are «bad» or «uninspired», but because not all of them manage to uphold the same style of eerie mysticism. Worse, they do drift a little bit too close to concrete particularities — ʽI Am A Lonesome Hoboʼ and ʽI Pity The Poor Immigrantʼ are just the kind of material that earned Harding its «oh, it's the one where he sings about Old West colonization» status, even if, yes, the lyrics of ʽImmigrantʼ are probably one of his deadliest and sharpest bites of all time: a bite that, among other people, would certainly hurt the inhabitants of Bobby Zimmerman's own dear beloved town of Hibbing.

 

This is, however, merely to note that these songs are less mind-stimulating than others — on the other hand, ʽI Am A Lonesome Hoboʼ is great in how its whole melody and vocal delivery con­vey the «warning» idea of "hold your judgment for yourself lest you wind up on this road" be­fore the words are even spoken; and ʽI Pity The Poor Immigrantʼ is amazing in how the lyrics are so devastating, yet the singer does deliver them with visible pity in his voice — the same singer who, but less than three years ago, mostly used that same voice to reduce the objects of his critique to dust, salt, and vinegar.

 

On the other hand, ʽBallad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priestʼ, occupying twice as much space as the average track on the album, sort of outpulls the blanket in the other direction — its melody carries no mystery, serving only as a backdrop for Bob's convoluted pseudo-allegory. To me, that song has always played the role of a «red herring» on the album, which I would be perfectly ready to forgive if it weren't for all the people who actually admit to liking the song, as in, really liking from the heart — about which I'm not sure: a put-on, I think, is always a put-on. If any­thing, Bob's own conclusion ("Don't go mistaking Paradise for that home across the road!") should serve as an easily decipherable warning to all.

 

The situation is more difficult with the last two songs on the album, where Bob's little band is joined by steel guitarist Pete Drake and the merry foursome get carried away into straightahead country territory, first in a danceable mode (ʽDown Along The Coveʼ) and then in nighttime bal­lad mode (ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ). Both songs are lyrically straightforward — way too straightforward, one might say, faced with "Down along the cove, I spied my little bundle of joy / She said Lord have mercy honey, I'm so glad you're my boy!" right after the head-bursting conundrum of ʽWi­cked Messengerʼ — and both, in their own way, act as a «preview» of the up­coming Nashville Skyline, although, of course, nobody knew that back in early 1968. Naturally, such an odd conclusion was intentional — the question is, does it work?

 

Well, I think nobody will ever want to put ʽDown Along The Coveʼ on one's list of Dylan favo­rites, but as a «gesture» of sorts, it does no harm sitting there next to the great stuff on John Wesley Harding. On the other hand, ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ, I think, is simply a perfect conclu­sion to the album — closing it off on a thoroughly serene, nonchalant, not-give-a-damn note after all the troubles and premonitions. It captures a bit of that lazy, arrogant, and utterly charming Hank Williams atmosphere with just the barest of Hank Williams trappings, and none of that distinct Southern accent, either, which may act as a turn-off for all them elitist Yankees. It's insanely catchy, it's probably got the most melodic and perfectly controlled harmonica breaks on the whole record, and it just washes your worries away with two and a half minutes of gentle soul medicine — when was the last time, or when, for that matter, would there be a next time where Bobby would get us all so relaxed with such a finale?..

 

It is not advisable to choose John Wesley Harding for your first acquaintance with Dylan, no matter how much I, or anybody else, choose to gush over this stuff. Its minimalist trappings can turn one off, I think, even quicker than his completely bare-bones early acoustic albums — where the instrumentation was ascetic, but the ambitions were grand. John Wesley Harding, in compa­rison, is a true musical «Hermit's Hollow»: if I learned, one day, that the songs were recorded in a cave in the middle of a wild forest, rather than a cozy Nashville studio, with all the band mem­bers wearing loincloths and drinking nothing but clear water from the nearest brook, I wouldn't be the least surprised. On its initial run, I think, the album works best as a deliberate contrast with the 1965-66 stuff, and should probably be listened to in the evening, on headphones, for the ultimate effect. But eventually, it gets its own life, and I am fairly sure that with certain psychological types of people, it can lock on so tightly that a «best Dylan album ever» option will not be out of the question. In any case, it is in my personal «top 5» for Bob, meaning one of the highest thumbs up an album might get. Too bad he never made anything even remotely close to it in style — but then again, a wonder is a wonder, and one thing that makes it a wonder is that you cannot deliberately repeat it, and if you try, you either end up with a different kind of wonder — if you are that good — or you simply fail.

 

NASHVILLE SKYLINE (1969)

 

1) Girl From The North Country; 2) Nashville Skyline Rag; 3) To Be Alone With You; 4) I Threw It All Away; 5) Peggy Day; 6) Lay Lady Lay; 7) One More Night; 8) Tell Me That It Isn't True; 9) Country Pie; 10) Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You.

 

If there ever was any intention behind John Wesley Harding to act as a potent «fan repellent» — and I am almost sure there must have been — it did not work. For a brief moment out there, the people may have been shocked and surprised — what, no rock'n'roll on a Dylan record? and what exactly do all these 19th century outlaws have to do with pushing boundaries and stuff?.. — but give them a few months, no, weeks, and they were back to swooning and praising and deciphering the writing on the wall and covering all those songs like there was no tomorrow. That Jimi Hend­rix swiftly took over ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ is no accident — far more amazing is the fact that he also tried to appropriate ʽDrifter's Escapeʼ, which, technically, was one of the «filler» tracks on JWH. Whatever tricky plan there was, it backfired.

 

Initiate phase two, then. By early 1969, Bob was back in Nashville, and the general idea must have been that he was all set to give out John Wesley Harding, Vol. 2. What he did instead was put together a much larger band, something like a crowd of about ten people, coming and going — and record an album that, for all it's worth, became probably the least expectable, least «Dylan­esque» listening experience to that point.

 

«Trouble» begins already with the album cover. This is only the second of Bob's album sleeves where we see him clutching a guitar — the first one, not coincidentally, was the self-titled debut from seven years ago. But this time, there is quite deliberately no subtle mystery on the photo: what we see is pretty much a regular country bumpkin, and what is he doing, really? Tipping his hat to us and smiling? Ever saw Bob Dylan smiling at us before? What is this guy saying — that he actually cares about his audience? Bummer, man. A Bob Dylan who cares about his audience is arguably even worse than Ted Nugent going Democrat. The signs are not good.

 

Trouble increases as we inspect the album's running length: ten songs, clocking in at less than a measly thirty minutes? What is this, Surfin' Safari? from a guy who used to have trouble restric­ting himself to less than fifty, earning curses from cassette tape owners all around the globe? And the very first song — a remake of ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ? Duetting with Johnny Cash? And then, as you actually put it on — what's up with that new voice of his? What's that supposed to mean — campaigning for grandpa's and grandma's attention?

 

Back in 1969, when people asked him about it, Bob used to joke that «this is my normal voice, you know», or mystically attribute it to his abandoning smoking. Both statements were gross put-ons (that some people surprisingly fell for) — of course, this new clean croon of his is anything but his normal voice, and every time that he is not paying strict attention, he tends to slip back into the old, well-familiar «sandpaper» style. He had actually explored that sort of singing back in early 1960, while still staying in Minneapolis, before understanding that his natural, «grating» intonations would suit his image of a grizzled folkster much more perfectly. Now it's back — for the purposes of perfecting that warm, friendly, sentimental country mode.

 

Nashville Skyline is not a great album, because it deliberately limits itself to a formula that pre­cludes greatness. There is no doubt that, with some serious effort put into it, a country album may be inspiring and meaningful, but the idea itself was the opposite — to produce something that, while not being a complete throwaway, would be purposefully devoid of too much meaning and inspiration. Bob Dylan did not want us to think of Nashville Skyline as «great», and we hardly have any choice but to respect that wish and «debase» our reactions appropriately. On the other hand, neither does it mean that we have to concentrate on the throwaway aspect and ridicule the album, as some people continue to do.

 

One hotly debated topic is whether Bob's unexpected friendliness, sentimentality, and personal charm that he sweats out on the album at an ever-accelerating speed, were «true» or «false» at the time — a topic where it is all too easy to forget that one never really knows, anytime, when Bob is being sincere with us and when he is putting on one of those interchangeable masks. The songs are mostly love songs, with surprisingly accessible and understandable lyrics, that usually express the desire to get next to his loved one (ʽLay Lady Layʼ, ʽTo Be Alone With Youʼ, ʽTonight I'll Be Staying Here With Youʼ), or, occasionally, worry over the possibility of a breakup (ʽTell Me That It Isn't Trueʼ), or lament over an actual breakup — with, get this, the protagonist blaming himself over what has happened (ʽI Threw It All Awayʼ). Bob Dylan accepting the blame for a breakup? Sure must have come a long, long way from the days of ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ... nah, couldn't be, really. Either they have some really good secret genetic engineering facilities out there in Nash­ville, or somebody's a really good actor.

 

Anyway, historical context aside, Nashville Skyline is what it is — a fun, cozy, likeable little country album, with moderately decent, unoriginal songwriting; a trifle lazy, loose, relaxed, but well thought out playing style; and, on the whole, still a unique atmosphere, because the country lifestyle was anywhere but in Dylan's blood and bones, and even those who hate this particular metamorphosis should be curious enough to see his individualistic take on it. Even the «croon» is still an official Dylan croon — it will drift towards whatever direction the current Dylan will want it to drift, rather than whatever the official Nashville textbook has to prescribe on the subject. Would a professional Nashvillian dare to switch from the cool-collected "she said she would always stay-aa-ee-eeey..." to the absurdly soaring, ridiculously-out-of-range pitch on the ensuing "but I was cruel, I treated her like a fool..."? He wouldn't, and neither, in fact, did any of the non-Nashvillians, from Cher to Yo La Tengo, who would go on to cover the song. So we shouldn't worry that much: behind all the covers, this is still very much a Dylan album.

 

Which, by the way, is exactly why the first song on here, although I used to like it in the past, has eventually dropped off the favorite list. The idea of a Bob Dylan / Johnny Cash collaboration sounds fantastic in theory, but it couldn't be well realized on practice — in fact, we now know that, having crossed their paths in Nashville, the two recorded a whole bunch of songs (extra­neous covers, Cash originals, and Dylan originals alike), but nothing was deemed suitable for official release. At the very last moment, they settled on ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ, and al­though both Bob's new take on it, in his «crooner» voice, and Johnny's earth-bowel-rumble deli­very both have their individual appeal, these are two entirely different visions — and they mesh together about as well if you tried to overdub, say, Bob's original take on ʽAll Along The Watch­towerʼ on top of the Hendrix tape, and see what happens.

 

It might have been a fun idea to do a «split» album, where, on Side A, Bob would sing Johnny's songs, and on Side B, Johnny would sing Bob's — coherence and comparison on one circle of vinyl. It is still mildly tolerable when they trade verses — but as soon as it's duet time, cognitive dissonance sets in, and I personally honestly want to strangle both, or, at least, whichever one gets selected through the coin flip. (Generally speaking, most of Bob's duets, be they with Johnny Cash, Phil Ochs, or even Joan Baez, are aurally confusing because he has this obnoxious manner of always taking the ground from under the feet of the «normal» singer at his side).

 

On the other hand, ʽNashville Skyline Ragʼ, which marks a first (the first completely instrumental number on a Dylan album), is extremely welcome — a fun rollicking tune that gives the major players in Bob's Nashville band a chance to shine, very well planned and executed (Bob Wilson's piano rolls are especially endearing). And all those little bits that seem «fillerish» have their right­ful purpose: ʽCountry Pieʼ has some sharp, almost Robbie Robertson-like lead guitar playing, and is really a snippet that shows quite a bit of that absurdist Basement Tapes spirit ("shake me up that old peach tree, Little Jack Horner's got nothin' on me"); the comically tinged ʽPeggy Dayʼ is so catchy that, in two years' time, it would be stolen by Ray Davies and re-written as ʽHolidayʼ for Muswell Hillbillies; and ʽOne More Nightʼ seems like a subtle, but intentional tribute to Hank Williams (at one point in 1967, there was actually talk of a possibility that Bob would re­cord a whole album of tunes set to lyrics left over from Hank — fortunately, the idea backfired, but Hank had always been a big inspiration to Bob anyway, and writing an original number in Hank's style seemed like the best way to pay the proper respects).

 

Then, of course, there are the best known songs — ʽI Threw It All Awayʼ, ʽLay Lady Layʼ, ʽTonight I'll Be Staying Here With Youʼ — that do not try to go all the way, but still lodge them­selves in various sensitive areas of the soul. Musically, ʽLay Lady Layʼ is the most lushly velvety of them all, courtesy of the organ / pedal steel combination, and is probably as close as Bob ever came to writing and recording a «sexy» song — of course, real lovers are always expected to be making out to the mystical sounds of ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ (preferably, in a cemetery, too), but for the average Joe, ʽLay Lady Layʼ may, in fact, wobble the same nerves as Al Green. However, on the whole I prefer ʽTonightʼ — as the album's most fully arranged song, and a counterpoint of sorts to John Wesley Harding's ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ: that one was lazy and nonchalant, placing the burden of action on the lady ("bring that bottle over here..."), but here, believe it or not, it is the gentleman who is willing and ready to make the effort — first, by throwing his ticket out the window, next, by throwing his suitcase out there, too.

 

Nashville Skyline is not John Wesley Harding. It does not crawl under the skin — to an extent, it is so shamelessly «normal» that one begins looking for hidden meanings almost instinctively, as if they are absolutely, inavoidably supposed to be there. But they aren't. If this weren't a Dylan album, if it were recorded in 1969 by some no-name from Nashville, it probably wouldn't have caused much of a stir — and it would be a pity, because, even though accepting all of the super­ficial trappings of contemporary country music, this is not a «generic» country album: first and foremost, it is a certain stage in the evolution of a singer-songwriter, be it an initial, middle, or final stage. And we are certainly under no obligation of believing that seemingly friendly smile on the album sleeve (by this time, we should be aware enough of Dylan so as not to put our sin­cere trust in anything he does), but that should not preclude us from allowing ourselves to be charmed by it, all the same. Thumbs up, by all means.

 

SELF PORTRAIT (1970)

 

1) All The Tired Horses; 2) Alberta #4; 3) I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know; 4) Days Of '49; 5) Early Mornin' Rain; 6) In Search Of Little Sadie; 7) Let It Be Me; 8) Little Sadie; 9) Woogie Boogie; 10) Belle Isle; 11) Living The Blues; 12) Like A Rolling Stone; 13) Copper Kettle; 14) Gotta Travel On; 15) Blue Moon; 16) The Boxer; 17) Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn); 18) Take Me As I Am; 19) Take A Message To Mary; 20) It Hurts Me Too; 21) Minstrel Boy; 22) She Belongs To Me; 23) Wigwam; 24) Alberta #2.

 

«All the tired horses in the sun, how'm I s'posed to get any writing done?» God bless you, Bob Dylan, for always finding a way to make good use of those uncomfortable phonetic mergers in the English language. He was joking, of course, but this time around, people were not amused. They would tolerate an electric Dylan, a psychedelic Dylan, a locked-up recuperating Dylan, a mystical rootsy Dylan, even Dylan the country gentleman — but their patience exploded when they got the evilest of 'em all: a singing, but not songwriting Dylan.

 

Years later, Bob himself would cautiously «disown» the record, saying that this was simply his most successful attempt at fan alienation — surely, if ʽJohn Wesley Hardingʼ could not stop people from regarding him as the Messiah, and if even ʽCountry Pieʼ was not enough, then at least ʽBlue Moonʼ and a Gordon Lightfoot tribute would do the trick. But this is not highly likely: Dylan was so well used to each of his unpredictable moves perceived as yet another display of his eccentric brilliance that he must have expected a warm reception for Self Portrait as well; other­wise, if he really got what he wanted with all that backlash, why all the fuss to remedy the situa­tion as quickly as possible by releasing the self-penned New Morning just a few months later, without letting all that disgust and disillusionment «sink in» more properly?

 

I was fortunate enough to sit through my first Self Portrait experience with the Iron Curtain still largely in place — open enough to let me hear the music, but filtering out its Western reputation, so I had absolutely no idea of how much the critical world, spearheaded by Greil Marcus, had set the people against it; and even though I was probably about thirteen years old at the time, I could detect nothing «fake» about it, even though, naturally, there seemed to be plenty of humor and light-heartedness, which was A-OK by me — and, actually, provided a bit of a relief after the «brain-heavy» stuff of the golden years. And now, I'm happy to say, after all those years of put­ting Self Portrait in its proper perspective, very little has changed. It is not a great Dylan album, but it... wait, who am I actually kidding? It is a fairly great Dylan album, albeit in an entirely dif­ferent way from the «classics».

 

Of course, Self Portrait is a mess: most good Dylan albums are. Recorded over a longer period than usual, and, on the whole of it, probably involving more session musicians than the entire number of all session musicians collected from all of Dylan's previous sessions, it features only a tiny handful of original songs (some of them formal «throwaways», like the one-line repetition of ʽAll The Tired Horsesʼ or the two instrumental numbers — first ever instrumentals to appear on a Dylan record), mixed with four tracks culled from the man's 1969 live appearance on the Isle of Wight and tons and tons of «Americana» covers: some folk, some blues, some country, some adult pop, some light jazz, and some Simon & Garfunkel. Bob's own Pin Ups, three years before Bowie came out with his idea of this kind of tribute album (and was also panned, though, as far as I remember, not nearly as badly).

 

Everything works: despite the 24-track sprawl, there is not a single misstep. Bob's vocal variety on the album is arguably larger than anywhere else: some of the songs are delivered in his new-fangled «croon», others give us back a more traditional Dylan, and, in a hilarious move, both are overdubbed on Bob's cover of ʽThe Boxerʼ — the «croon», I presume, homaging Art and the «rasp» correlated with Paul, in what becomes a touching tribute and a clever parody at the exact same time (well, depending on how well you know the original). His phrasing is under perfect control — listen to all the subtle out-of-tempo moves made on ʽDays Of '49ʼ that seem like mis­takes at first, but are eventually revealed as Bob's usual means of livelying up the effect. The arrangements may occasionally be thrown off balance with some excessive orchestration (e. g. the mock-Tchaikovsky grandeur on ʽBelle Isleʼ), but more often than not, they are tasteful and inventive. And the choice of covers?..

 

Just a few examples will suffice. ʽTake A Message To Maryʼ was never among my favorites from the Everly Brothers — too much pathos, too much inadequacy between the lyrics (which, after all, tell a rather gruesome tale of manslaughter and imprisonment) and the delivery (which is more of a moonlight serenade than a jail song). Dylan uses his croon, not his rasp, for the song, but even his croon is twenty times «earthier» and more believable than Phil and Don's cooing — and he also has the bright idea to spice the song up with a gritty electric blues-rock line: no doubt, every connoisseur of the original must have been a little bit shocked back in 1970, hearing that electric guitar grumble its way in after the predictable «sissy acoustic» intro at 0:15 into the song. Are the final results «great»? Well, as far as I am concerned, what the man did here was take a well-writ­ten, but inadequately performed, folk-pop tune and correct its errors — I find no flaws in this performance. But yes, it's no ʽBallad Of A Thin Manʼ, if that is what Greil Marcus wants to hear from me. It doesn't bother me, either.

 

Lightfoot's ʽEarly Mornin' Rainʼ, on the other hand, is deconstructed almost à la Leon Redbone (speaking of which, Bob later became a Redbone fan himself) — all the overt emotion and aching pathos taken out of the original and replaced with a quiet, untroubled acceptance of one's fate, making the title character more intriguing and thought-provoking: the song, in my opinion, works better in this interpretation than when one is openly wearing one's heart on one's sleeve.

 

The old folk standard ʽCopper Kettleʼ, which Bob used to sing with Joan Baez in his younger days at the Village, is remade here with a lush arrangement — strings, keyboards, backup vocals, the works — yet somehow, in the end, feels more intimate and ascetic than in Joan's version. Maybe it has something to do with the backups: Bob has the girls doing this little series of quick one-note "aah"s and "ooh"s, crystal clear to the point of sounding like water droplets plun­ging into little mountain pools — enhancing the «naturalistic» aura of the song. Throwaway? Exercise in alienation? Not with all this obvious care for detail, it isn't.

 

The Isle of Wight tracks were most likely the catalysts: «disinterested» versions of ʽLike A Rol­ling Stoneʼ and ʽShe Belongs To Meʼ, with even The Band, standing at Bob's side, unable to rec­tify the situation, must have pissed the fans off more than anything. And it is true: it takes a mon­ster effort to take this whiny, powerless, poor sound quality version of ʽStoneʼ seriously after either the studio original or any inspired performance from the «Judas» era of 1966. It is probable that Bob only sang some of his 1965-66 classics with reluctance at the event, being more interes­ted in his «rootsy» avatar at the time — but even so, the performance is notable for curiosity rea­sons (for instance, all the crazy phrasing decisions). And, in stark contrast, the band's perfor­mance of ʽQuinn The Eskimoʼ, sound quality issues aside, is ripping — this is where Bob totally launches into action, and Robbie lends him a good hand, too, with arguably the fiercest guitar solo he'd had a chance to play in 1969.

 

Fortunately, time has been kind to Self Portrait. As the «contextual» mist slowly dissipated, as, later on, Bob would start releasing albums that were occasionally blatantly worse than Self Portrait (Knocked Out Loaded, anyone?), as people's feelings towards new Dylan albums gra­dually became less sharp and demanding, the tide seems to have finally turned — these days, you can find more and more people digging into the past and taking the album for what it is: a sincere, diverse, light-heartedly charming experience at worst, and at best, a little infusion of classic Dy­lan magic into a set of simple songs. (For what it's worth, ʽLet It Be Meʼ and ʽBlue Moonʼ, the way they are captured here, are among my favorite versions of these songs — I'll give Billie Holiday the edge on ʽBlue Moonʼ for fear of being crucified for tastelessness, but that fiddle solo in the middle is totally awesome anyway).

 

I am not even appalled by the album's length — on the contrary, expanding the selection to 24 tracks, in a special way, makes Self Portrait reminiscent of The White Album as an unpredic­table journey through styles, forms, and moods, where no two tracks standing next to each other are truly alike. «Great» or not, they still show a unique brain shooting off miriads of impulses per second, a mind that shows not the least signs of staleness or tiredness. This is the work of a per­son who, still at the peak of his abilities, intentionally chose to limit these abilities to «atypical» and, admittedly, «inferior» material — but I'd always take a Dylan at the peak of his powers, fussing around with ʽBlue Moonʼ and old Skeeter Davis tunes, over 90% of other artists at the peak of their powers, trying to come out with something bloody original and world-shaking.

 

In short, this is clearly a thumbs up, and I insist that it belongs in the catalog of everybody with more than just a passing interest in the Bobster. These days, you actually have an alternative: Another Self Portrait, released as the 10th installation in «The Bootleg Series», offers us an al­ternate series of outtakes, demos, and early mixes from the 1969-70 sessions, often removing the orchestral and brass overdubs from the finished versions (think Let It Be Naked? but, of course, the analogy would not be complete because the original overdubs were all made under Bob's own supervision and reflect his original ideas). For that matter, did the critics pan it this time? Hate it? Spit on it? Nope — they gave the release glowing reviews and even dragged out old Greil Mar­cus' bones to offer a semi-apology for the original «What Is This Shit?...» review. Well, from a certain perspective, come to think of it, shit is good — helps plants grow and everything. Anyway, another thumbs up here for fair justice, sweet revenge, and the wonders of time, but more on that later, in the addenda section.

 

NEW MORNING (1970)

 

1) If Not For You; 2) Day Of The Locusts; 3) Time Passes Slowly; 4) Went To See The Gypsy; 5) Winterlude; 6) If Dogs Run Free; 7) New Morning; 8) Sign On The Window; 9) One More Weekend; 10) The Man In Me; 11) Three Angels; 12) Father Of Night.

 

The fact that New Morning came out just four months after Self Portrait is frequently brought up as an argument that the album was an «appeasement» for critics and fans alike — that Bob's huge ego simply could not stand the rotten-tomato treatment of his latest record, and so New Morning was rushed out, first and foremost, in order to wipe out the bad memories. As could be expected, Dylan himself denied this; and, likewise, there are strong counterarguments — for in­stance, the bulk of the album was recorded over the first five days of June 1970, whereas Self-Portrait itself was only released commercially on June 8.

 

But then again, it sure does seem that way. Is it a coincidence, after all, that 1970 was the only year, past-1965, in which Bob would release two albums rather than one? Is it a coincidence that Self-Portrait was all covers and this one was all originals? Is it a coincidence that there are al­most no signs of the «clean» crooning style of Nashville Skyline / Self-Portrait, as Bob is get­ting back to the tried and true? I don't think so. I think that there was an explicit goal here — to get that damn Rolling Stone to renege on its aggression, and wrench that precious «we've got Dylan back!» tag out of it. Although I'm not sure Bob himself would confess to that in the pre­sence of God Almighty, provided he does hold a ticket to Heaven after all.

 

For all I know, New Morning does not give us back «our» Dylan, since he was there all the way on Self-Portrait. But it does open him up from yet another, previously unknown side — that of a quiet, relatively unassuming, relatively undemanding family man, quite content to enjoy the little things and not force any diatribes, proclamations, predictions, sermons, or hallucinatory visions on the world at large. Well, maybe just a few, every once in a while. For old times' sake.

 

The fact is that, throughout the late Sixties and early Seventies, Dylan really was a family man. Like a good, traditional Jewish father, he already had four kids, and with the birth of Jakob in 1969, he found himself pleased to take a detour in the world of diapers (either that, or he knew how important it was for the frontman of The Wallflowers to be hugged and pampered on a 24-hour basis). Serenity was unstable from the beginning, and did not last for long, but a strong ray of it is evident all over New Morning — making it, as the title also suggests, the sunniest and homeliest of all Dylan records, so that it is probably best played on the porch of your country house, on a hot summer day when you have nothing else to do. Heck, I am writing this review right now — in my 7th floor apartment, on a cold autumn day when I have tons of stuff to do, and I can still put myself in that mood just by pushing play. That's how strong the mood is.

 

Stuck between Bob's own rendition of ʽIf Not For Youʼ and George Harrison's vision of it on All Things Must Pass, I will take George — who found the song a place in his awesome religious experience and turned it into a thing of, like, transcendental beauty. Dylan's original, in compari­son, is humble and homely, no wall of sound, no soaring slide passages, and even a tempo that seems a little too rushed, giving no time for the sentiments to complete the blow to one's head. But even so, there is a feeling that this might be the first thoroughly «sincere», unveiled, intentio­nally simplistic-sounding (both lyrically and musically) love song he'd ever put on record — not the cloudy, hip-o, intellectualistic tapestries on Blonde On Blonde, some of which may or may not be about love, but who can really tell; not the «look-at-me-I-sing-love-songs-like-a-country-pro» crooner stuff on Nashville Skyline; no, just an old-fashioned catchy love song, with the heart on the sleeve represented by the subtle vibraphone touch. Surely it wasn't by chance that, of all the new Dylan songs Harrison had heard while jamming with him in May 1970, it was ʽIf Not For Youʼ and no other that he latched on so quickly — only on very, very rare occasions does Bob come up with a great love song.

 

There is a lot of piano on the album: Bob himself places the ivory keys at the center of six of the songs, and, where extra sophistication is required, Al Kooper contributes his services — particu­larly impressive on ʽIf Dogs Run Freeʼ, a rare, if not only, Dylan incursion into the world of late night cool jazz, reciting beat poetry over Al's sprinkly arpeggios, Maeretha Stewart's scat vo­cals in the background, and an overall atmosphere that would seem more appropriate for 1955 than for 1970, but then, why refuse when you can indulge your «inner family man» by going retro and satisfy your «try anything once» life principle at the same time? The good news is, it all works out — once you realize that the key word is ʽfreeʼ, it all falls in place (or out of place, which is pretty much the same thing here).

 

The other Kooper-led song is ʽThe Man In Meʼ, which Al liked so much as to appropriate it for his own catalog (1972's Possible Projection Of The Future), but this is where it becomes ob­vious that Al Kooper is no George Harrison — his version dispensed with the piano and replaced it with solemn-sounding organ, needlessly serious-ifying the mood. It also cut out the "la-la-la"s which are totally essential to the song, giving it a little bit of healthy idiot flair to compensate for the metaphysical heaviness of the refrain ("takes a woman like you to get through to the man in me" — could an apology for one's male-chauvinistic excesses in the past be worded in a better way?). I think it was the "la-la-la"s and little else that prompted the Cohens to include the song in the Big Lebowski soundtrack — although, come to think of it, New Morning in its entirety is the most Lebowski-compatible album Dylan had ever recorded in his life.

 

Dividing the songs into «high-» and «lowlights» on New Morning is impossible due to the very conception of the album. On John Wesley Harding, there was a very clear demarcating line be­tween songs like ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ (epic!) and ʽDown Along The Coveʼ (whee, groovy!). As for New Morning, well, on one hand, it is true that some of the tunes explore gran­der themes than others. ʽThree Angelsʼ, with its gospel organ and allegoric story about the world failing to notice the angels with their horns, is one; ʽSign On The Windowʼ, exploring loneliness and escape from it in the possible joys of domestic bliss (sort of an «Eleanor Rigby Got Married» from a Dylan perspective), is another; ʽFather Of Nightʼ, concluding the album in brief snippet fashion, is a reworking of a Jewish prayer.

 

But on the other hand, none of these songs could have ever been properly reworked into blazing Jimi Hendrix anthems — they simply represent occasional dips into pensiveness and solemnity on a generally light-hearted, «simple man» type of daily schedule. Here we celebrate the arrival of yet another 24-hour cycle with the title track, sung deliciously out-of-tune (the only thing lack­ing is Keith Richards on background vocals), but with all the soul it takes. There we do a bit of barroom blues, pulled by the hair out of «generic» mode like only Dylan can — by re-defining the concept of «nag­ging» with the repetitive song title. Here we send up Princeton University, who had the nerve to present Dylan with an honorary degree when he least needed it (ʽDay Of The Locustsʼ, somehow still managing to piano-celebrate the innocence of nature in between all the sneering — and if it were up to me, I would probably rename some part of the Princeton campus to «The Black Hills Of Dakota», if only to take revenge on the songwriter). There we just rollick along to an unassuming, but utterly non-Nashvillian all the same, country waltz (ʽWinter­ludeʼ), and so on. All soft, all cozy, lazy, tender, and sarcastic at once.

 

New Morning essentially concludes the third phase in Dylan's career — the «country years», some might call it, although «the campfire years» or «the log cabin years» seem much more to my liking. Subsequently, his musical ascetism would reach its peak and culminate in abandoning music altogether for a couple of years, except for a few unproductive sessions and a rare gig for George's Bangla Desh concert — which he shared, surprisingly enough, with yet another recluse: Clapton, too, basically just locked himself up in 1971-72. Dylan's existence, fortunately, was less drug-dependent, but somehow I think that these pauses were not entirely coincidental: both Bob and Eric represented the «Sixties' survivor» stereotype — «The Guy Who Could Have Been The Next Jimi Hendrix / Jim Morrison / Brian Jones», etc. — and, probably, both of them needed to take some time off, if only to shake off the ghosts of the past and clean themselves up, spiritually even more than physically, for what the future had in store.

 

That said, I must note that, had New Morning turned out to be Dylan's swan song for any reason, it would have enjoyed an even stronger reputation than it does today — I mean, a record that starts out with one of the man's sincerest, tenderest, simplest, catchiest love songs, and ends with an equally light, but moving take on a Jewish prayer? That certainly qualifies as some sort of Let It Be, if you ask me. And just imagine everyone salivating at the idea of the man being taken away from us just as he finally got to admit that "this must be the day that all of my dreams come true..." — can you not feel the Faustian grandeur already? Not even John Lennon and Double Fantasy would have anything on this. Anyway, thumbs up all the same — for all we know, Bob Dylan's talents may extend to the ability of terminating and resuscitating his own life at will, so he is entitled to at least nine proper swan songs, or something like that.

 

PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (1973)

 

1) Main Title Theme (Billy); 2) Cantina Theme (Workin' For The Law); 3) Billy 1; 4) Bunkhouse Theme; 5) River Theme; 6) Turkey Chase; 7) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 8) Final Theme; 9) Billy 4; 10) Billy 7.

 

Intermission. Other than a brief three-day recording session in March 1971, which yielded ʽWat­ching The River Flowʼ and the «canonical» version of ʽWhen I Paint My Masterpieceʼ, there was little musical activity on Bob's part for almost four years. Somewhere in this gap, lost and gene­rally overlooked — well, as far as one can «overlook» anything associated with a giant of Bob's stature — was this soundtrack, which the man generated for the Sam Peckinpah movie of the same name, in which he also played a brief, but curious, supporting part.

 

Although few critics would probably list Pat Garrett as a Peckinpah masterpiece (nothing beats The Wild Bunch, right?), it still has to be one of the most dead-on collaborations between a ma­jor movie figure and a major musical figure in history. Peckinpah was pretty wasted by the time it came to realizing his next project; Dylan was in comparatively better shape, but still a long way from inner peace and comfort, insecure about his musical future and facing family trouble on the horizon. Peckinpah was making a movie about «the end of the Old West» as we know it, and Dylan had lightly scratched that issue, too, on John Wesley Harding, although the album wasn't about that topic in general. Peckinpah put Dylan in the movie, gave him the name «Alias», and pretty much nailed his essence by providing him with the most bizarre scene in the film (the one where «Alias» is forced to move behind the bar counter and read all the labels on cans of beans and tomatoes — am I the only one to see the hilarious parallels between this and this?). In return, Dylan gave Peckinpah some of the most broody, somber, unsettling, and, occasionally, cathartic music he'd ever written.

 

The obvious bane of the soundtrack album is that it is not only way too short, but also way too repetitive and «padded out» to count as a properly offered record of new original music. No less than four of the tracks are set to the same melody (the three different ʽBillysʼ and the instrumen­tal ʽTitle Themeʼ), and, in between them, cover about a half of the album's running length. Of the re­maining half, only ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ counts as a fully self-contained song, melody, lyrics, significance, and everything; the others are instrumentals, varying in purpose and quality. Essentially, the album is a movie soundtrack, never aspiring to anything more, and it wasn't even as if Bob had any incentive to write a lot of music for the movie — the first impression is that of a quick toss-off, with neither the acting part nor the writing part helping to make the man feel happy or satisfied.

 

That said, even a proverbial «toss-off» like that from Dylan still in his prime (or, more accurately speaking, on the threshold of his «Silver Age») may contain its fair share of gold nuggets. For one thing, the backing band assembled for the sessions was a mega-nugget on its own: Roger McGuinn and old pal Bruce Langhorne on guitars, Booker T. Jones on bass, Jim Keltner on drums, fiddler-extraordinaire Byron Berline, and brass/woodwinds-pro Gary Foster — Dylan's usual knack for getting varied, but amazingly well compatible teams working again. The combi­nation is so perfectly set that even the six-minute repetitive acoustic jam of ʽTitle Themeʼ is ulti­mately quite addictive — they just repeat the same instrumental folk-blues verse over and over and over, but with enough nuances to keep it interesting (and when you are tired of savoring the acoustic guitars, turn your attention to Booker T.'s bass parts: the man is actually being quite funky in places).

 

ʽCantina Themeʼ, ʽBunkhouse Themeʼ, and ʽRiver Themeʼ all seem to be centered on the general atmosphere of the dreamy, relaxed laziness in a hot New Mexican framework — their slow tem­pos and somewhat rambling guitar arrangements also diminish the album's initial impact, but with time, the laziness acquires its properly mystical character, a sort of «desert Taoism» that only the best directors of Westerns could capture — and only the best soundtrack composers. The ninety seconds of ʽRiver Themeʼ are especially captivating. Monotonous, yes, but so is the river.

 

The real «meat» of the soundtrack, I think, begins with ʽTurkey Chaseʼ and covers the next two songs as well. ʽTurkey Chaseʼ may have begun life as a realistic accompaniment to an actual turkey chase (fast tempo, aggressive style of playing, and the banjo does a good job of imperso­nating an actual turkey), but the frantic fiddle part from Byron Berline makes it more like a life-and-death chase (well, I guess it was, from the turkey's point of view), being, simply put, one of the most stunning country fiddle melodies I've ever heard in my life — seeing as how we are nor­mally accustomed to «friendly» or «funny» fiddle melodies in the genre, this one, by contrast, is a deeply tragic impersonation of a restless hunted soul, forced on the run for eternity. Possibly the greatest musical ode to a turkey ever written — never mind that the word «turkey» by itself pro­duces a funny effect, just have a listen for yourself.

 

Still, Berline's three minutes of glory on the album are easily outperformed by Gary Foster on ʽFinal Themeʼ — here featuring what is probably my favorite recorder part in all popular music. ʽFinal Themeʼ builds on the base chord sequence of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ — for the first thirty seconds, it seems as if this is simply going to be an instrumental version, but from the mo­ment Gary's recorder part comes in, it fully compels the listener's attention, and not just the lis­tener's: drummer Jim Keltner, for instance, seems totally hooked on the playing, following Foster's melody in all of its rises and falls, and so do the gospel-styled backing vocals. Little sur­prise about that: it uses a bare minimum of tone changes to cover the entire palette of human emotions — every several bars, the mood goes from sadness / depression / tragedy to joy / re­la­xa­tion / redemption, before, finally, the instrument gets stuck in a small coda loop of ultimate paci­fication and coming to terms with the world. Further words just fail me.

 

In the middle of this great battle between the master fiddler, who gets the silver, and the master woodwinder, who gets the gold, sits ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ, the first and unquestionably the best of Dylan's intrusions into the field of gospel music. Later recast by Clapton as a reggae number, with Bob picking up on the rearrangement and generally performing it that way in con­cert, it is still at its most impressive here, backed with all the proper, somber "ooh-oohs", funereal organs, and a slow, steady beat, rather than the reggae pulse that cannot help but transform the song into a dance number — which it probably shouldn't be. (Actually, I think one reason why Bob eventually switched to the reggae version was that he might have found the original too heavy and seri­ous for his cliché-free image). But it should also be noted that, for all of its sub­sequent fame, the song works par­ticularly well in the context of the original movie — this is when you really get to feel this somberness and heaviness as almost physical heaviness, pressing down on the protagonist: the "mama, put my guns in the ground / I can't shoot them anymore" bit is central to the general idea of Pat Garrett, and the song is not so much a generic anti-war / anti-violence song as a personal complaint against the wearisome side effects that complete freedom from everything, including law and morale, brings on to people.

 

So, as you can see, there is not one single reason on Earth to sidestep Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid while exploring the different faces of Bob Dylan. It may be debated to what extent the ins­trumental numbers are really «Dylan» (although, formally, he is credited as the only songwriter), but we should remember that «Dylan music» was never limited to «Dylan songwriting» and «Dy­lan singing» — time and time over again, it was also about getting all the right people in the right place at the right time, getting them in the right mood to produce great music, and knowing when to start, when to stop, and what to select for the final take. And from that point of view, this soundtrack is as quintessentially «Dylan» as everything else — and its thumbs up here means «even if this is to be your last Dylan acquisition, there is no reason why it should be the least».

 

DYLAN (1973)

 

1) Lily Of The West; 2) Can't Help Falling In Love; 3) Sarah Jane; 4) The Ballad Of Ira Hayes; 5) Mr. Bojangles; 6) Mary Ann; 7) Big Yellow Taxi; 8) A Fool Such As I; 9) Spanish Is The Loving Tongue.

 

The infamous «Columbia Revenge Album» — impossible not to mention, even though, for a long time, it held the status of being officially «deleted» from the label's catalog (at the time of writing of this review, it has been announced that the album is finally getting CD release). The backstory is well known: in 1973, upon the expiration of his contract, Dylan left Columbia to sign up with David Geffen's Asylum Records — leaving his former label free to capitalize on the old threat of flooding the market with «from-the-vault» Dylan releases (which the people at Columbia had al­ready voiced as early as 1967, when there was a failed attempt to sign up with Warner Bros.).

 

Curiously, though, the choice of action at Columbia was entrusted to idiots — who, instead of mining the gold vein of Bob's early recordings (the ones that, later on, became the Bootleg Se­ries), decided that the record-buying world would rather be thrilled with something relatively re­cent. To that end, Columbia's «sleuths» fell upon the abandoned cache of outtakes, recorded by Bob in the early stages of the sessions for New Morning (June 1970). At that time, the army of negative reviews for Self Portrait had not yet appeared on the horizon, and Bob with his band were still heavily mixing covers of ancient and recent material with original compositions — apparently, the basic idea was to release something like Self Portrait Vol. II, but the hostile re­ception of the first volume eventually led Bob to scraping all that and releasing nothing but ori­ginal compositions for New Morning.

 

Apparently, the people responsible for the assembly process of Dylan were not aware of any of those controversies — the only thing that mattered was that those were still steaming-hot outtakes from relatively recent sessions, and that would make them relevant competition for whatever new stuff Bob was going to put out on Asylum. Thus, wasting no time at all, Columbia put out this small bag of «surprises», consisting of seven outtakes from the New Morning sessions and, so as to bring the running time to a respectable length, two more earlier outtakes from the Self Portrait sessions. Critics-wise, the project was doomed from the start — and commercially, it did not fare all that bad, but, naturally, it did not manage to outsell Asylum's Planet Waves.

 

How do the songs fare in retrospect? Well, nothing that Bob tried out at the time can really count as «proverbially bad», and if we accept his temporary role as eccentric interpreter of other peo­ple's ideas in the first place, it makes little sense to praise Self Portrait while sternly castigating Dylan. However, there are still major differences between a piece of «finished product», which Self Portrait was, and raw, incomplete outtakes as captured here. For one thing, the songs are less imaginatively arranged — they do boast the presence of Al Kooper on keyboards, but other than that, it is usually just Bob and his acoustic/harmonica team, whereas much of the subtle ma­gic of Self Portrait was due to various overdubs (electric guitars, brass, strings, etc.).

 

For another thing, some of these tracks feature the ugliest female backup vocals you will ever hear on a Dylan album. On Self Portrait, they usually provided light, simple, folksy prettiness. Here, many of the backing parts sound like a swarm of drunk landladies, trying to sing way below their normal range and having a hard time hitting the right notes, especially on the traditional numbers (ʽMary Annʼ, ʽSarah Janeʼ, etc.). This lends an air of dull, unintentional stupidity to the songs — something that Dylan could never have been accused before.

 

Another flaw is that by June 1970 Bob had altogether abandoned his «croon» — which came so very much in handy when covering pop ballads like ʽLet It Be Meʼ. Now, when he decides to have a go at Elvis' ʽCan't Help Falling In Loveʼ, he delivers it in his usual rasp, and the final re­sult sounds like a bona fide parody, and a rather pitiful one, worth, perhaps, a chuckle and a dol­lar bill toss in a low-level comedy club, but little else. The take on Joni Mitchell's ʽBig Yellow Taxiʼ is less irritating, as the song is humorous and playful rather than deeply sentimental, but it is also disappointingly faithful to the original — «reinterpreting» Joni Mitchell would be one thing, but imitating Joni Mitchell is just kind of dumb.

 

Still, some of this stuff works. ʽThe Ballad Of Ira Hayesʼ, from Peter LaFarge's repertoire, is an unexpected and welcome echo of Bob's protest song period — even though he recites the verses rather than sings them, the ultimate effect is not any less resonant than on any of the songs from The Times They Are A-Changin'. Jerry Walker's ʽMr. Bojanglesʼ, likewise, turns into a melan­cholic character study, and Al adds beautiful organ parts that, for a while, almost succeed in brin­ging back the wintery atmosphere of ʽOne Of Us Must Knowʼ. And ʽLily Of The Westʼ, if only the annoying female backup vocals were taken out, with its sparse, but haunting old-timey sound, could have cozily fitted in on the original John Wesley Harding.

 

Of the two Self Portrait outtakes, ʽSpanish Is The Loving Tongueʼ is the better known and the more widely discussed — a throwaway on its own, but it might have been a welcome addition to the album as a whole, adding a little tongue-in-cheek Latin flavour to the rich choice of scents already present. At the very least, here we have the nice croon and the pretty harmonies. But it is also seriously out of place on this record — best solution would be to simply mix it in with some of the other Self Portrait tracks.

 

On the whole, this one is clearly for biographers and fanatics. Since most of the songs come from one specific session, it does have a reason to exist as a separate album, rather than be split into a bunch of bonus tracks — but the album reflects a rough, unlucky, transitional session that is not likely to cause you much listening pleasure, or influence your understanding of the Dylan pheno­menon in a positive way. For all of this, as well as for the formal reason of having been released without Bob's consent, Dylan should be a fairly clear-cut thumbs down case, but in the end, turnoffs like ʽCan't Help Falling In Loveʼ and the ridiculous caterwauling on ʽMary Annʼ are still outbalanced by turnons like the haunting harmonica parts of ʽLilyʼ or the honest world-weariness of ʽIra Hayesʼ — and, besides, the true era of musical stagnation for Bob was still years ahead, so I find «condemning» a record like this to be an unnecessary harshness. Now the weird guys at Columbia Records and their misguided choices — that is a different matter.

 

PLANET WAVES (1974)

 

1) On A Night Like This; 2) Going Going Gone; 3) Tough Mama; 4) Hazel; 5) Something There Is About You; 6) Forever Young; 7) Forever Young (v. 2); 8) Dirge; 9) You Angel You; 10) Never Say Goodbye; 11) Wedding Song.

 

Blood On The Tracks may be more «polished», generally accomplished and certainly better known, but Dylan's fourth phase — that of the «introverted / tortured / self-centered songwriter» — properly begins here, on this somewhat half-hearted collaboration with The Band. A three-year break from «proper» songwriting, or at least recording, can sometimes be detrimental, and, in fact, I have always tended to look at Planet Waves as the first official album in Dylan's career to be seriously plagued with meandering filler. But «temporary loss / slackening of songwriter skills» was not the only reason for this impression.

 

As Bob's family life was beginning to disintegrate in his most serious personal crisis to date, there was no way he could avoid letting his feelings on the matter spill out — in fact, this was probably the first time in his life when he found himself hurting so bad, it couldn't help but lend an air of deep tragedy to everything he was doing. There is a bunch of cheerful, happy songs on Planet Waves — in fact, it starts out with quite a merry romp — but they mostly sound forced, some­times almost hyperbolically so: the only reason I can see for the existence of the second, «upbeat» and rather corny version of ʽForever Youngʼ sequenced right after the first, slow and melancholy one, is to show how very, very, very hard it is for the man to stay optimistic.

 

ʽGoing Going Goneʼ, ʽDirgeʼ, ʽHazelʼ, and ʽWedding Songʼ all convey a sense of desperation, the likes of which Dylan fans had never yet experienced from the man. Before the crash, he was fierce, cocky, locked up tight, and most of the genuine feelings that seeped in through the walls were aggressive. After the crash, he'd softened up, got subtler and wiser, but everything generated in 1967-70 was still primarily an act of mystification — we never saw an inch of «the real Dylan» on either John Wesley Harding or Self Portrait (never mind the misleading title), or if we did, there was no surefire telling where exactly he would pop up.

 

Planet Waves, from that angle, is the first «mature» Dylan album, although «maturity» is by no means associated with higher quality — it simply means that the man gets more... well, more grounded in concrete personal situations, I'd say. The biggest shift is in the lyrics department, as the sophisticated wordplay starts making more literal sense. The love songs are good old-fashi­oned love songs, none of that "ceremonies of the horsemen" «bullshit», and the lost, or, rather, in-the-process-of-getting-lost love songs are all soaked with fear, anxiety, depression, even occasi­o­nal guilt and remorse (though mostly implied, particularly on ʽDirgeʼ, where the exaggerated hatred thrown at the female antagonist reveals hatred of oneself — he'd be much more careful about whitewashing his own spirit on Blood On The Tracks). And with ʽForever Youngʼ, he is really concerned about writing a song that could be sung as a meaningful lullaby to a three-year old — without having to worry about the three-year old asking unanswerable questions about Captain Arab and those one-eyed midgets.

 

All of this means that there is a transition taking place, and that the transition is rough. Neither, I am afraid, was his choice of The Band to back him up during the recording sessions here as good as all the previous choices. Robertson and Co. do not seem to have properly sensed that change in Bob, or, if they did, they weren't able to fully latch on to it. They could certainly sound somber and tragic if they'd worked themselves up for it, but it almost seems like they thought they were just going in for another round of Basement Tapes, and realized that they weren't when it was already much too late. The music tends to be a little relaxed, a little sloppy, generally sparse and spontaneous (none of the production intricacies of The Band's first two or three albums found their way on here — not that Bob would be interested, of course), more appropriate for a quiet campfire evening ("on a night like this!") without too much on your mind than for a soul-baring session. Just a big mistake on Dylan's part here — his first big one, I'd say.

 

That said, more than half of the songs still pass the grade. ʽForever Youngʼ is the only «golden classic», but it is, indeed, the first straightforwardly anthemic song that Bob wrote in about a de­cade, cleverly worded so as to appeal to his kids as well as a general audience — and as simple as the melody is, there is a touch of easily cracked genius here: the "forever young, forever young" chorus is sung with such a tragic inclination that the emptiness of the wish becomes felt. This is basically a prayer to reach the unreachable, and we have the whole bunch here — love, affection, sadness, desperation, acceptance of fate. Small wonder the chorus did not make it to the second, upbeat version: it has no place there whatsoever, as the vibe is completely different (and utterly anticlimactic; whoever would prefer the second part to the first would fit my personal under­standing of a proverbially «heartless» person).

 

My second favorite song would probably have to be ʽGoing Going Goneʼ — the one that must have played out like a shock to the listeners after the expectable little opening folk dance of ʽOn A Night Like Thisʼ. Luckily, Robbie got the vibe right on this one, adding some quietly dry, stingy electric lead lines — nasty pain impulses reflecting the protagonist's state of mind — and the lyrics do not mince words much: "I've just reached a place / Where the willow don't bend / There's not much more to be said / It's the top of the end". And on one hand, it is funny that the proverbial «top of the end» has been stretched out to about forty years now, with the total amount of everything that has been said (and written, and sung) far exceeding what had been done in the previous decade — and yet on the other hand, he is also absolutely correct: Planet Waves is the first, and far from the last, album in Bob's career on which he is not searching for anything new, he just says it all the way it is. ʽGoing Going Goneʼ is not the first time that he had sounded de­pressed, but it is the first time he sounds depressed about himself, rather than Hattie Carroll, St. Augustine, or the chronologically frozen inhabitants of Desolation Row.

 

ʽDirgeʼ and ʽWedding Songʼ raise the bar on tension even further — the music is stripped down to its basics (on ʽDirgeʼ it is just Bob on minimal piano and Robbie accompanying him on acoustic, on ʽWedding Songʼ Dylan goes completely solo) and the singer's voice is raised to a scandalous howl. Melodically, they are not too interesting, and the howling prevents subtlety, but it all essentially depends on whether you are willing to empathize or if you think that the songs exude too much self-pitying, and that their monotonousness makes them either too boring or just simply too unbearable. Difficult decision; I am not a big fan of either, but it seems like this kind of stuff was something Bob needed to do at the time (ʽWedding Songʼ was written and recor­ded at the very last moment, like a final attempt to get that particular stone off his back).

 

I cannot say anything positive about songs like ʽNever Say Goodbyeʼ or ʽTough Mamaʼ except that all my years of Dylan-listening experience come together to suggest that Bob's heart just wasn't in them. He may have felt that getting back to a little rock'n'roll with his old friends at his side would do him good, but this is limp, half-assed rock'n'roll, a far cry from the spirited per­formances of 1965-66. ʽOn A Night Like Thisʼ, where they turn down the volume and place their faith in Garth Hudson's accordeon, works much better than all those other numbers put together — perhaps because it is not so far removed from the soft country-rock sound that was fresher in Bob's memory than his «garage» days. Like a fussier, merrier take on ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ where the singer is at last ready for some active participation; Bob's "...and let it burn, burn, burn, burn on a night like this" is my second favorite bit of phrasing on the record after the ʽForever Youngʼ chorus.

 

All in all, this just doesn't properly fit the criteria for a «thumbs up» type of album. Like The Times They Are A-Changin', this is essential listening for everyone interested in Bob's thorny evolution path, but it only has two or three essential songs on it, as such: to the ones already listed one could, perhaps, add the New Morning-style soul ballad ʽHazelʼ, and that's just about it. (No wonder that most of these songs would not be revisited by Bob in subsequent concert perfor­mances — only ʽForever Youngʼ and, to a lesser extent, ʽHazelʼ seem to have survived his personal reassessment). What I see here is a temporarily derailed man, unable to properly pull it together, and a bunch of old friends who do not really understand how they can help. But even if it is a relative «disaster», its very disastrous nature makes it all the more intriguing for the non-casual Dylan fan, not to men­tion the Dylan historian.

 

BEFORE THE FLOOD (1974)

 

1) Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine); 2) Lay Lady Lay; 3) Rainy Day Women #12 & 35; 4) Kno­ckin' On Heaven's Door; 5) It Ain't Me, Babe; 6) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 7) Up On Cripple Creek; 8) I Shall Be Re­leased; 9) Endless Highway; 10) The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; 11) Stage Fright; 12) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right; 13) Just Like A Woman; 14) It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); 15) The Shape I'm In; 16) When You Awake; 17) The Weight; 18) All Along The Watchtower; 19) Highway 61 Revisited; 20) Like A Rolling Stone; 21) Blowin' In The Wind.

 

Nowadays, with the Bootleg Series out on a steady roll, we have easy access to the «Bob Dylan live experience» at all sorts of stages — early acoustic shows, mature acoustic shows, classic era electric shows, and even Bob's major post-crash live appearance with The Band at the Isle of Wight in 1969, previously known only through brief glimpses on Self Portrait, is now available officially for all those who are too honest, or too lazy, or both, to indulge in bootleg study. We have it all, for historical knowledge and personal enjoyment alike.

 

Back in the day, though, in 1974 there was not yet a single Dylan live album available, and Asy­lum Records decided to seize the occasion. Now that Bob was back in the saddle again, and em­barking on his first major American tour in eight years, and with The Band at his side once more, what was to prevent him from finally giving the fans what they wanted — not to mention, what was almost demanded by the Golden Era of the Double Live Album?

 

The tour only lasted around two months, and although plenty of recordings were made, most of the record is comprised of takes from the very last two shows, played on February 13 and 14 at the Los Angeles Forum in Inglewood, California — possibly these shows were thought to reflect the band at their most «well-flexed». The setlist is mixed, so that this is, in fact, «Bob Dylan & The Band» rather than «Bob Dylan, backed by The Band»: the first part is Dylan classics played by everybody, then there's a Band part without Dylan, then there's an acoustic solo Dylan part, then another chunk of Band stuff, and finally, back to big-band Dylan arrangements: a circular ABCBA structure, probably symbolic of something we'll never know for sure.

 

Time has not been very kind to the album. When it first came out, critical praise was nearly uni­versal, but in a couple of years, everybody seemed to forget that it ever existed, and later on, with live shows from 1964, 1966, 1975, etc. coming out as official releases, we began to understand the prophetic meaning of the title: Before The Flood was lucky enough to have been released, well-bought, well-reviewed, and orderly appraised... before the flood of archive performances came in and duly washed it away. Not completely, but, well, put it back in its proper context.

 

Do not be too afraid — every live Dylan album before the man completely lost his voice is worthy in at least some respects, and, for that matter, after he'd completely lost his voice he stopped releasing new live albums completely. But there are two major problems with Dylan & The Band as far as these shows, and recordings, are concerned. The first one is about Dylan — the second one, as you may have guessed, is about The Band.

 

The problem with Dylan is that he is just too goddang loud on this tour. It is almost as if some hypnotizer fed him two words — «ARENA RAWWK!» — or as if he'd been to a Led Zep show and it temporarily blinded him or something. Even while playing his acoustic on the solo spot in the middle of the show, he flails it like a madman — and then there is the singing: not a murmur, not a grumble, not a whine, not a croon, but a warrior-style scream through and through. And if it works fairly well on numbers like ʽMost Likely You Go Your Wayʼ, anthemic and inflammatory from the get-go, songs like ʽLay Lady Layʼ and ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ shift dangerously close to self-parody in the process. You try to invite your lady to lay across your big brass bed in that kind of voice, and she'll probably be off calling 911 in a second.

 

In less than two years, when the Rolling Thunder Revue came along, Dylan would learn to cope with that problem — adjusting his singing to the appropriate musical backing and once again di­versifying the moods and attitudes of the individual performances. But on Before The Flood, all of the thirteen numbers performed are reduced to the same common denominator: power, power, and still more power, subtlety and stealth be damned. Perhaps that was an experiment: the man had to see if he still had it in him to win over a huge crowd. Perhaps he just thought it a good way of re-establishing his grip on 'em, or perhaps it was sort of a «sweet revenge» thing after the mixed reactions to his risky concerts of 1965-66. Whatever be the answer, Before The Flood is very much of a «stadium rock» thing, and Dylan is not quite Dylan, I'd say, when he is donning that sort of attitude.

 

Then there is Robbie and the gang. When they do their own songs, they do them reasonably well, the way they are supposed to — although they never venture beyond the ordinary setlist, and most of these numbers can be found in equally good or better versions on the classic Rock Of Ages album. But when they back up Dylan, they become his trusty Hawks, and fully indulge his «arena fetish» by providing a loud, crunchy, yet somewhat rustic rock'n'roll foundation. Garth Hudson gets a chance to try his trendy synthesizers on extra material, but really it is the Robbie show all along, as he plays Phenomenal Guitar God on almost every song, making his guitar scream as loud as Dylan's set of pipes. It works — at first — then quickly becomes predictable and tiresome. By the time they get to ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ, you just know they are going to go the Hendrix route, and they are not going to succeed. Why keep on listening?..

 

Play it all off a different angle, though, and it might strike you — well, why not? This is a live reflection of an arena tour, it is supposed to replace subtlety with crunch, and all of these songs deserve a little crunch every once in a while: heck, even ʽJust Like A Womanʼ is interesting to get to know in a hysterical version, now that you have already known it for so long in its original pensive mode. And it is also not as overloaded with extra bit players as the 1975-76 recordings, not to mention the Vegasy production of the infamous Budokan album — what's better, anyway, a mean and lean rock'n'roll backing or a choir of stiff gospel back vocalists? And is it possible to deny the sheer raw energy, the intensity of the show? One thing is for sure, there is not a minute here that could be described as «lax» or «limp».

 

In the end, leave it up to yourself, and history, to decide. Dylan himself had no fond memories of the tour, and seemed to acknowledge that he'd overstepped the limits where «power» and «ener­gy» were concerned. But there is no need to agree with that opinion as long as you do not insist that this is exactly the way these songs always need to be done. At the very least, this is yet ano­ther curious page in Dylan history — and, for one thing, it is a very different «Dylan and The Band» from the «Dylan and The Band» that had just done Planet Waves not more than a few months ago. (For that matter, they did play some Planet Waves stuff at the beginning of the tour, but then ended up dropping most of it in favor of the golden oldies — this new personal shit was a little too hard for Bob to convert to arena-rock mode, and it probably didn't manage to get the crowds a-goin' in exactly the sort of way he'd like them to go). Still, you will probably be doing yourself a favor if you do not procure this as your introduction to the Live Dylan Experience — for which cause, Live 1966 or Live 1975 will be a much more beneficial choice.

 

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS (1975)

 

1) Tangled Up In Blue; 2) Simple Twist Of Fate; 3) You're A Big Girl Now; 4) Idiot Wind; 5) You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go; 6) Meet Me In The Morning; 7) Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts; 8) If You See Her, Say Hello; 9) Shelter From The Storm; 10) Buckets Of Rain.

 

I must say, I have never been much fond of the title of this album — seems altogether more sui­table for a Slayer than a Bob Dylan LP. Not only is ʽbloodʼ a fairly strong word for Bob, but the title also works towards a very straightforward understanding of the record, namely, that the tracks are indeed figuratively soaked in his blood, that is, convey his genuine spiritual pain like nothing has ever conveyed it before. The mask is dropped, the barriers removed, the cabbalistic verbal fog cleared, here is Robert Zimmerman, and here is a pint of his own blood that he offers you to drink up like some modern day Jesus. Real strong hemoglobin and all.

 

That Dylan's family problems and divorce case have provided inspiration for these songs seems quite obvious; much less obvious, when you really start thinking about it, is this idea of a Dylan freely opening his heart and mind to the general public, allowing to connect on a much more in­timate level than before. The greatest advantage of Blood On The Tracks is not so much its «sincerity», about which we can really only guess, as its «accessibility». Planet Waves had al­ready introduced a serious change to Dylan's lyrical style, and here it is carried even further — even if not all the lyrics begin to make sense, all of them at least give a feeling of making sense. The air is still clouded with thick metaphors and allegories, but they heartily invite interpretations: "beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine" does make one ponder its possible mea­ning much more effectively than "six white horses that you did promise were finally delivered down to the penitentiary", if you know what I mean.

 

Subsequently, there has always been, and will always be, two camps of Dylan fans: the Blonde On Blonde camp and the Blood On The Tracks camp (there is also a separate Highway 61 Revisited camp, but that is a different talk altogether — it is mostly populated by people who like an angrier, dirtier, kick-ass-er, rock'n'rollish Bob Dylan). The «BOB» camp appreciates Dylan for the enigma, the unexplainable magic; the «BOT» camp worships him for the revelation, the suf­fering humanism. The camps are not forever fixed in place — normally, the case is that every once in a while, somebody «achieves a higher degree of illumination» and defects from the BOT camp to the BOB camp, but I have also seen opposite cases, where haughty young people would snub BOT for its relative simplicity and triviality, then gradually, over the years, succumb to its charms and renounce their trendy elitism of old.

 

Amusingly, though, it's not as if there weren't anything in common between those two records. Listen closely to ʽIdiot Windʼ and you will see that it amply borrows from ʽOne Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)ʼ — not just the same organ tone, but even some of the same melodic moves: "I couldn't believe, after all these years..." is pretty much the same line as "I didn't realize, just what I could hear...". It is only when you see these little occasional shake-hands between songs that you understand — this whole «feud» is completely pointless, and rests entirely on flim­sy subjective impressions, liable to change with every next blow of the wind.

 

Overall, Blood On The Tracks happens to have a more «serious» tone, showing none of the sense of humor that could either attract or repel in the case of songs like ʽRainy Day Womenʼ or ʽLeopard-Skin Pill-Box Hatʼ; and it also happens to be a little more «stripped» in terms of arran­gements, with no traces of brass and, more importantly, very little electric guitar presence (ʽMeet Me In The Morningʼ is the only song here with a loud electric lead part). These factors create the impression of intimacy / personality / altogether confessional atmosphere, which charms the pants off the souls of so many people, but how close that impression is to the «truth», we will never know. All we know is that, for the first time since Blonde On Blonde, Bob has given us a col­lection of songs that punch hard and reach deep — a similar «soul transfusion» from one vessel to another (John Wesley Harding I judge on a different level — more like a meaning-of-life-style type of global mystery that is much bigger than the singer and the listener taken together).

 

It's a good thing, too, that he let go of The Band for those sessions, as they had turned out to be more of an encumbrance than a blessing on Planet Waves. Although the final credits list quite a lot of different people taking part in the recordings, they are all split in two different bands — one backing him up in New York, another providing local services in Minneapolis, where he re-recor­ded several of the tracks — and the only thing that technically separates Blood On The Tracks from the ascetic sounds of John Wesley Harding is a near-constant keyboard presence (some of those provided by Paul Griffin, who'd previously played with Bob on parts of the Blonde On Blonde sessions, for that matter).

 

Bob's own acoustic guitar playing is at the heart of every single song on here, and it looks as if he'd been taking lessons — just take a look at ʽBuckets Of Rainʼ, for instance, which could have easily worked as an instrumental (some of the chords sound like they came right off the Pat Gar­rett soundtrack, which, for that matter, was no slouch in playing terms either). The album is real­ly only marginally louder and denser than his early acoustic stuff, but it still produces a much «fuller» feeling, both because the guitar is treated more like a musical instrument than a «partner for comfort», and also because of the production — credited to Bob himself, by the way, which was a first for the man, and now we know how Bob wants his own records to sound: soft, deep, and with just a small touch of echo on the vocals so that it doesn't sound too homely and cozy. He's not exactly calling out to us from the lower depths, but he's distanced himself a bit so we no longer have to smell each other's socks or anything.

 

As for the songs themselves — these are not really «songs» as usual. These are magic incanta­ti­ons: mantras, whose repetitiveness is brought upfront and shoved in your face, take it or leave it. Notice how most of the song titles form sentences or at least complex phrases, and then inavoi­dably conclude or constitute each chorus, so that you have them memorized upon first listen: ʽTangled Up In Blueʼ, ʽSimple Twist Of Fateʼ, ʽYou're A Big Girl Nowʼ and so on. This can be no mere coincidence — it can only reflect a maniacal desire to hammer these statements inside our heads, and it could be seriously irritating if only these mantras, taken all together, did not form such an awesome kaleidoscope of their author's state of mind.

 

Side A: ʽTangled Up In Blueʼ opens the show with fuss / irritation / confusion, as the title would suggest. ʽSimple Twist Of Fateʼ is melancholic introspection — something that happens once the nerves calm down and one takes some time to reflect on all the damage done. ʽYou're A Big Girl Nowʼ is all sorrow and tears, held back as much as possible but still showing. ʽIdiot Windʼ brings on scorn, rage and curses (good thing for Bob he put in that last "we are idiots, babe" chorus, inclu­ding himself in the guilty party, or else this might have become his most misogynistic song ever). ʽYou're Gonna Make Me Lonesomeʼ brings on more sorrow, but now it is subtly hidden under a veil of bouncy retro-folk, just like them old jigsters did it in pre-war times.

 

Side B: ʽMeet Me In The Morningʼ throws in some acid intonations with a nod to the 12-bar blues form. ʽIf You See Her, Say Helloʼ is like an older, creakier, wrinklier brother to ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ: the girl has now moved to Tangier, but she can still look him up if she's got the time. ʽShelter From The Stormʼ, however, concludes the album on an almost unexpectedly optimistic note — consolation, redemption, basic human care, no need to commit suicide after all. ʽBuckets Of Rainʼ acts like an epilogue that pretty much summarises everything about the album: "Life is sad / Life is a bust / All ya can do / Is do what you must / You do what you must do and you do it well / I do it for you honey baby can't you tell?". Yes we can.

 

I have omitted ʽLily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Heartsʼ from the list, as you can see, because even after years and years and years of listening, I still cannot quite understand what this song is doing on an album like this, other than functioning as «that one song that shouldn't fit in because no Bob Dylan album can be that predictable». Its complicated, twisted story should have rather been saved for a Traveling Wilburys album or something like that — nor is it even melodically interesting or just plain funny (like a ʽBob Dylan's 115th Dreamʼ). But some people like it, and some even think it belongs — if only in its role of a thick question mark. Of course, it also has to be the longest song on the album, goes without saying.

 

As usual, the album thrives on Bob's little perks and twists — mantras are mantras, sure enough, but he never forgets to vary his intonation from chorus to chorus, so that no two tangled up in blues or simple twists of fate sound exactly the same way: within each of the specified moods there are further teensy-weensy mini-moods, and indeed, it all easily makes up for one of Bob's most realistic-looking performances. (Then again, reality as such is rarely that exciting). In addi­tion, ʽIdiot Windʼ is really the last time ever we would see such a fulminating, life-threatening Bob without a trace of elderly whine or lyrical banality — feel free to enjoy every second of its eight minutes, and particularly the haughty-snotty irony of the final protracted vowel in "sweet lady", which I personally enjoy in a masochistic way: it is Bob's equivalent of a condescending grin to his audience, and I, for one, humbly acknowledge his right to it. Besides, "we are idiots, babe, it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves" is a suitable conclusion to those eight minutes, and one that only gets stronger and stronger with each passing year.

 

As a sidenote, I would also like to commend Tony Brown, the little-known bass player on the New York ses­sions, for perfectly guessing the vibe of the album and providing a wonderfully re­strained, but meaningful, counterpoint for the man — particularly on ʽSimple Twist Of Fateʼ, whose pensive atmosphere is largely due to his laconic plucking, and on ʽShelter From The Stormʼ, whose repetitiveness might get a little wearisome if there weren't any extra meat added to Bob's strumming (the bass actually plays a more complicated melody, and it is almost joyfully danceable in places, again, well in touch with the redemptive mood of the song).

 

Winding down on this: if somebody wanted me to formally narrow my choice of «best Dylan album» to one, Blood On The Tracks would have to be left out for several reasons — the simplest of which would be that he was 34 years old at the time, and we should never trust anybody over 30, or, more accurately speaking, the «gold» layer of Dylan's talent was already depleted in the mid-Sixties. Blood On The Tracks is not particularly «unique» — it is well within the paradigm of introspective folk-based singer-songwriters, and there may be Neil Young or Joni Mitchell albums lying around that would be ready to give it battle in terms of depth, melodicity, and consistency. In fact, the follow-up to Blood On The Tracks would, surprisingly enough, superate it as far as sheer boldness and experimentalism are concerned.

 

But on the other hand, the album is unique — it is Bob Dylan's «great humanistic record», re­lating to his mid-Sixties stuff much the same way as Dark Side Of The Moon relates to Barrett-era Pink Floyd: more accessible, more compatible with «the flow», less mysterious and enigmatic, and if these aren't virtues by themselves, they sure as heck ain't flaws, either. Always nice to see a man explore so many different corners of the human soul in one well-focused sweep (and then blow it all away without giving a damn on ʽLily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Heartsʼ) — and too bad he never even came close to repeating this feat again: bleakness, depression, paranoia, and, occasionally, Jesus would soon enough get the better of him, and we would never again see the same ideal balance, where for every sob of ʽYou're A Big Girl Nowʼ there would be a snarl of ʽIdiot Windʼ, and for every confused and insecure ʽTangled Up In Blueʼ there would be an opti­mistic and consolatory ʽShelter From The Stormʼ. Thumbs up, of course — not forgetting the album sleeve, where our hero gets himself a Byron/Chopin-sort of early 19th century romantic profile (or should we say Mendelssohn for accuracy?). Suits the songs just fine, I'd say. 

 

DESIRE (1976)

 

1) Hurricane; 2) Isis; 3) Mozambique; 4) One More Cup Of Coffee; 5) Oh Sister; 6) Joey; 7) Romance In Durango; 8) Black Diamond Bay; 9) Sara.

 

If Blood On The Tracks were Dylan's «silver-age» Freewheelin', then Desire would be his sil­ver-age Blonde On Blonde. Recorded right before the first leg of the famous «Rolling Thunder Revue» tour and officially released in the short interim between it and the less warmly received second leg of the tour, Desire was seriously messy, a little crazy, vastly adventurous, experimen­tal, and, most importantly, inspired. If, ever since, it has been sentenced to the tortuous fate of forever living in the shadows of its much more lauded elder brother, this is still no excuse for ig­noring the younger brother. He may be a tad clownish, but he's an intelligent clown all the same.

 

In fact, Desire is that particular album where ʽLily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Heartsʼ could have been transplanted to perfect effect, let alone the fact that, even without it, Desire still runs over 50 minutes. It is very much «story-based», partly through the influence of the playwright Jacques Levy, whom Dylan had unexpectedly recruited to collaborate with him on the lyrics (!), but partly, I guess, because Bob was so invigorated by the success of Blood On The Tracks that he was all warmed up for adding a little extra dynamics to his output. Wait, a little? This whole album is like a spacetime-warping travelogue — taking the listener from Rubin Carter's jail cell to the pyramids of ʽIsisʼ, from the «sunny skies of Mozambique» to the valley bellow somewhere in the Promised Land, no doubt, from the gangster wars of NYC to the questionable asylum of Durango, Mexico, and even to some mysterious volcanic island about to be submerged in lava. And best of all, it's not just the words that take you to all those places — Desire is arguably the most musically diverse Dylan album of all time.

 

To be honest, besides Levy, two more people — both of them ladies, for a change — should re­ceive a heavy dose of the credit. One is the then-young country diva Emmylou Harris, who was only something like half a year into a promising career at the time (Pieces Of The Sky, her first major album, had only come out in February '75), but whose formally «background» vocals here really form part of several soaring duets with Bob: be it ʽOh Sisterʼ or ʽOne More Cup Of Cof­feeʼ or anything else, the two of them are a much stronger pair than Bob could ever be with Joan Baez (Harris' voice is a little more nasal and raspy compared to Joan's glass-shattering vibrato, so it fits in more naturally with Dylan's preferred way of singing).

 

Even more important, I think — in fact, it's perfectly well made clear ten seconds into the album — is one of those «genius spontaneity» decisions of Dylan's to enlist a girl who was carrying a violin case as he drove by in his limousine. It's a bizarre story, really: she could have had a shot­gun instead of an instrument there as far as we know, but she didn't, and, instead, produced what is probably the finest, sharpest, most emotionally impressive fiddle playing on a Dylan album ever. Nobody knows anything about Scarlet Rivera except that she played on Desire, but she did have a modest solo career afterwards, and some of the tracks from her late 1970s albums (Warner Bros. quickly grabbed her for a couple of LPs, then kicked her back out on the street since they weren't selling) that we can now get easy access to do show the same inventiveness, sharpness, and feel for music. How did the guy spot all that from the window of his limousine?..

 

Anyway, it is mostly the violin that transforms ʽHurricaneʼ from a spur-of-the-moment political song into a musical masterpiece. You may not give a damn about Rubin Carter and you may not even know two words of the English language, but as long as you know just one — ʽhurricaneʼ — you will be able to spot a subtle, ominous gathering of the clouds in the introduction, and Scar­let's lead violin parts, interspersed with Bob's verses, will be like lightning to the dark, grum­bling clobber of the rain played by Bob's guitar and the rhythm section. If you do know the story, well, this is the angriest that Bob ever got since The Times They Are A-Changin', and arguably even angrier: the song kicks, punches, snarls, bites, roars, and definitely calls to action here, not just to shedding tears for lonesome Hattie Caroll. Was Rubin Carter guilty? Was he innocent? Other than the actual people concerned, who really gives a damn these days? Change the names, change the places, change the motives, it has lost none of its basic, brutal force — like some of those politically charged Lennon songs, it's got magic enough to make one's fists clench them­selves without effort, as naïve and uninformed as some of the actual statements may be. And the way Bob and Scarlet play and sing off each other, trying to outperform the opposite party, still takes my breath away each time.

 

Of course, the usual consensus is that ʽHurricaneʼ rules and ʽJoeyʼ sucks, because Rubin Carter was an unjustly accused black sportsman and Joey Gallo was a justly murdered white gangster. (Also because the former runs for eight minutes at a brisk tempo, and the latter crawls on for eleven at a snail's pace, but that's just nitpicking). I do not know the backstory — it is not clear if Bob really had any reason to think of ʽJoeyʼ as a «noble gangster» or if this was just another one of his provocative moves. In any case, ʽJoeyʼ is certainly no ʽHurricaneʼ because the violin is not as prominent (its role here is to be more relaxed), but it isn't a bad song — it is a moving tribute to a «street hero», with a sensitively delivered dirge-chorus where Bob, Emmylou, and Scarlet come together in a beautiful three-part harmony (two parts human, one part nylon). It probably did not deserve the honor to be as long as ʽSad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ, but apart from that, I couldn't care less about the «real life» person it related to. Remember, he'd done that once be­fore — singing about John Wesley Hardin as if he were some sort of Robin Hood of the West — and if we let him off that time, there is no reason to incriminate him here. It is an abstract tribute song to an abstract criminal with a heart of gold. It could have been ʽAdolphʼ instead of ʽJoeyʼ, that would have made the experience even more hardcore but it wouldn't have made Dylan a Nazist any more than ʽJoeyʼ makes him a gangster lover, or might turn us, the listeners, into gang­ster lovers. It's just a pretty piece of music, albeit a little repetitive.

 

Fortunately, no such big debate about the non-political masterpieces on here. Nary a weak piece on the block, so it is really tough to choose, but ʽOne More Cup Of Coffeeʼ has long been a per­sonal favorite — Dylan bravely chooses quite an unusual genre to tackle here, a sort of mid-Eas­tern ballad that requires him to actually sing, modulating his voice in a melismatic manner, and gets away with it (although somehow I've always thought that it must have felt very much like taking a quick plunge in ice-cold water for him), while Emmylou on the chorus and Scarlet on the accompanying violin melody once again provide the perfect counterparts. It is one of the saddest songs in his vast repertoire — and in an epic manner at that: "one more cup of coffee 'fore I go to the valley below" sounds pretty much like the last word from a death row prisoner, awaiting to be beheaded in the morning. Prophetic in a way, too, whether there be any connection to his im­pending divorce — or to the impending creative decline.

 

But Desire is also the last ever Dylan album, or, at least, the last in a long, long time, on which he may sound forceful — energetic, wilful, even occasionally imposing and terrifying, though no­body could say exactly why or how. This is especially so on ʽIsisʼ, which, musically, could be described as Bob's impression of a tired caravan, slowly working its way through the desert — and lyrically does contain elements of a travelog, references to pyramids, and a little proto-Indi­ana Jones feel to it, everything delivered in such a loud, sparkling, indignant tone as if he were reproaching us, the poor listeners, for all of his personal unluck with ʽIsisʼ and the stupid guy who duped him into a tomb-raiding affair. On ʽBlack Diamond Bayʼ, singing from a third person perspective, he is being more detached, but still gives a theatrically engaging reading of the story — a story whose tempo and arrangement are fairly similar to ʽHurricaneʼ, but it really looks like the meditative, melancholic, philosophical brother of ʽHurricaneʼ. Lyrically, you can think of it as an allegory on the meaninglessness of life; musically, you can think of it... well, much in the same way, come to think of it.

 

ʽOh Sisterʼ and ʽSaraʼ are the most personal songs on here — the latter, in fact, is amazingly straightforward for Dylan, who'd never before dared to get that open on record, certainly not enough to publicly confess about having specifically written one of his songs for a particular per­son (not that the phonetic proximity between Sara Lownds and ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The Low­landsʼ had ever escaped the attention of keen-eyed Dylanologists, but still, being forced out of the closet is always different from taking the initiative). Both are deeply moving tunes, but ʽOh Sis­terʼ is certainly more «timeless», and has the added bonus of Emmylou and Scarlet playing the collective part of Bob's mysterious «sister» (no, the song is not about incest, or, at least, you'd never be able to prove that in court).

 

On a personal level, I have to confess that I am still more of a personal fan of Desire than of Blood On The Tracks. Maybe it is simply a case of being mysteriously attracted to the underdog (not that the album has not received its solid share of critical praise over the years), but more likely it is simply a case of being mysterious — there is so much on Desire that is intriguing and enigmatic: the whole album is like a wagonload of boxes that may or may not be empty, but you only have your own imagination and power of interpretation to reach that decision. And, of course, it also has the added bonus of being Dylan's last creative high peak — leaving aside the issue of the late-period «Time Out Of Mind Renaissance», which happened on an altogether dif­ferent scale in an altogether different world anyway, Desire really was the last moment where you saw that bird reeling in the sky with enough boldness, freedom, lust for life and adventure to blow your own mind. That was at the end of 1975. The following year would see an unsuccessful tour, the beginning of transition to a new musical age, the final disintegration of the family unit, a personal mid-life crisis, insecurity, depression, pessimism, all sorts of stuff that would take such a se­rious toll on the Zimmerman brain, he'd never fully recover from it again. Therefore, just join me in my thumbs up here — enjoy it while it lasted — and here comes «the valley below».

 

HARD RAIN (1976)

 

1) Maggie's Farm; 2) One Too Many Mornings; 3) Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again; 4) Oh Sister; 5) Lay Lady Lay; 6) Shelter From The Storm; 7) You're A Big Girl Now; 8) I Threw It All Away; 9) Idiot Wind.

 

Conventional legend has it that The Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan's last major outburst of extro­vert energy that left him all spent and exhausted and ready for a shot of Jesus, began with a migh­ty bang and ended with a pitiful whimper — and that the Hard Rain album, released as a meme­nto of the tour, inexplicably culled its material from the later, second leg rather than the far more inspired, energetic, and unpredictable first part of the tour. Back then, unless you were an active bootlegger or actually went to several shows yourself, it was hard to tell, but these days, with a careful selection of performances from the first round of shows finally released as Live 1975, even a young Justin Bieber fan can throw in an unbiased opinion.

 

My take on the situation would probably be as follows. Bob's whole venture — going out on a spontaneous cross-country «magical mystery tour», more like a crazyass traveling circus than a disciplined team of performers, enlisting everyone who'd agree to tag along and not giving a damn about what tomorrow might bring — was, on the whole, a fine jolt, aimed at getting him­self out of his depression; and, perhaps, somehow he hoped it might miraculously help him settle his family issues, too. But, like so many other spontaneous initiatives, generated on the spur of the moment, there is only a certain time that they will preserve the initial freshness before turning into petty routine — and it is quite likely that, by the time these May 1976 shows in Texas and Colorado rolled along, Rolling Thunder was showing signs of petty routine.

 

Upon first sight, both Live 1975 and Hard Rain are loud, bombastic, rip-roaring affairs, with Bob making full use of the little army assembled behind his back, and throwing in his own two cents in the form of ultra-loud, ultra-aggressive bellowing, sometimes outroaring even his already far-from-timid delivery level on Before The Flood. Still, looks like two different kinds of roar to me — the first one triggered by the sheer novelty of it all, and the second one by frustration and desperation at the sight of it all squandered and falling apart. Live 1975, behind its decibel-rat­tling facade, had subtlety and variety of approach; Hard Rain throws subtlety out of the window and just blasts, on and on and on. Compare the only song that overlaps between the two releases — ʽOh Sisterʼ, initially performed with Bob on acoustic guitar, carefully modulating his vocal tone, and then, on Hard Rain, switching to the same bloody electric and with the vocal perfor­mance «streamlined» to fit more in line with the bark-heavy attitude of everything else.

 

Not that this isn't, in its own way, fascinating to behold, or impressive on an emotional level. But in the end, the problem remains the same as on Before The Flood: not all of these songs deserve to be treated this-a-way. Certainly not ʽLay Lady Layʼ, once again taken up in a loud arrangement (though at a much slower tempo this time) with a brand new set of lyrics — and a fairly clumsy one, because how is it that one first asks the lady to lay on one's big brass bed, and then to forget this dance and come upstairs? Unless they happen to be dancing on beds, this is just another indi­cation of the man's rather confused state of mind at the time.

 

The three highlights of the album, I'd say, are the three songs from Blood On The Tracks — ʽYou're A Big Girl Nowʼ is the only performance here to break the mold, with acoustic guitar and piano and Scarlet Rivera's violin embellishments nicely fitting the slowed-down tempo; ʽShelter From The Stormʼ works tremendously well with an arena-rock electric arrangement — it already had plenty of anthemic potential in its original version, so the reinvention was perfectly asked for; and the best is saved for last — I am not at all sure that the band used to close any of their shows with ʽIdiot Windʼ, but it is clear that in the context of this album, it occupies the same space that is usually reserved for ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, which, in a way, it is now, updated for the 1970s. On ʽIdiot Windʼ, after fluctuating to and from for a while, it all comes together for a picture-per­fect thunderstormy finale, which was well worth the wait.

 

Together with Desire, Hard Rain puts the cap on what could conveniently be called «Dylan's Silver Age» — a strange, unexpected era in which the man once again became the focus of col­lective attention and the source of unpredictable happenings. It is not all that much to my liking: for kick-ass energy, Live 1966 and even Before The Flood are preferable, for a more compre­hensive overview of what the real Rolling Thunder Review was all about, Live 1975 is far better suitable, and for sheer bizarreness, I'd even take the Budokan album over this straightforward rock'n'roll show. But, like all of Dylan's live albums, it still does not sound exactly like anything else (for that matter, it is interesting to notice that, aisde from his joint deal with The Grateful Dead, Bob has not sanctified even a single live release ever since he embarked upon «The Never Ending Tour» in 1989 — possibly because he wouldn't have any more strength to drastically vary the moods and approaches of the shows), so I'm still happy to recommend it with a thumbs up — just remember, though, that it makes more sense when juxtaposed next to Live 1975.

 

Incidentally, Bowie fans should probably also care about picking it up — but if any of them ex­pects Dylan to be as kind as to let Mick Ronson seriously interfere with his glam guitar chops anywhere in the show, they'd better think again. (On Real Live, Bob would be far more tolerant towards Mick Taylor's lead playing, but I guess that the basic Rolling Thunder deal was always the same: «nobody gets to show off except the boss, or we're all going down»).

 

STREET LEGAL (1978)

 

1) Changing Of The Guards; 2) New Pony; 3) No Time To Think; 4) Baby Stop Crying; 5) Is Your Love In Vain; 6) Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power); 7) True Love Tends To Forget; 8) We Better Talk This Over; 9) Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat).

 

And so, goodbye extravagance and exotica — welcome to the Christian era!!

 

Yes, you heard me right. While it wasn't until later on tour that Dylan had his «epiphany», and it wasn't until Slow Train Coming that J. Christ, Esq., had formally paid three years rent in ad­vance, the honour falls to Street Legal as Dylan's first album to be soaked from top to bottom in religious feeling. Steve Douglas' saxophone, Alan Pasqua's omnipresent organ, background vo­cals from Jo Ann Harris, Helena Springs, and Carolyn Dennis (the latter of which would even­tually go on to become Bob's second wife) — they all give Street Legal a decidedly gospel feel. The lyrics... well, we all know that Bob had played around with Bible imagery since the early days, but not even John Wesley Harding, where he first tried on the mask of an Old Testament prophet several times, had such a serious tone when it came to references of Eden and Armaged­don. Never mind that, topically speaking, most of the songs are centered on love and relationships — even on ʽIs Your Love In Vainʼ, Bob still manages to play the part of a prophet, way too busy with his sacred mission to waste time on trivialities.

 

I used to get very easily bored with Street Legal, and part of it had to do with its «whiny» feel. Too much complaining and self-pitying in that increasingly nasal and elderly tone of his, pitted against too repetitive and simplistic melodies. The fire seems to have gone out, the energy spent; in its place is a crude, unconvincingly constructed, wall of sound and a bunch of gospel dames (and if you remember, last time Dylan used a bunch of gospel dames was on those unhappy outtakes from New Morning that formed Columbia's lame Dylan album). It sounded like a tem­porary stop-gap, crisis-period album in between the creative peak of Blood On The Tracks / Desire and the eventual born-again rejuvenation, questionable as it was, of Slow Train. In fact, what does it mean, «sounded like»? It was a crisis album, period.

 

But the more we have to deal with our own crises (and as of now, I am only two years younger myself than Bob was when he wrote those songs), the more chances, I guess, there are of Street Legal beginning to grow on you. Its slow / mid-tempo grooves may have been somewhat in­fluenced by Springsteen, whom Dylan holds in high esteem, especially in the way the keyboards and saxes continuously beef up the rootsy mix, but even if Bob was ever secretly envious of the success of Born To Run, he could never even begin to try and emulate that bombastic pathos — instead, he turns that wall-of-sound thing inside out, using it as a background for a very bleak, very disillusioned, very cynical view of the world. (From that angle, a comparison with Darkness On The Edge Of Town might have worked better, but that record was released just twelve days before Street Legal came out, so it would have no chance at being based in reality).

 

Eventually, Street Legal does work — in small bursts, perhaps, but the quality of a Dylan record depends proportionally on how many times the man succeeds in pricking the listener, and I count a sufficient number of pricks to admit that I originally underappreciated it. The first prick, actual­ly, arrives immediately. Street Legal is easily summarized by its first ten seconds — the organ as primary lead instrument; a muscular, soldier-of-the-Lord tempo; three lady angels on backing vocals; and a "sixteen years..." greeting that makes it clear — this is a tired man's summarization of whatever he has achieved in the past, and that summarization ain't going to be too pleasant. Don't believe me? Subtract 16 from 1978 and you get the year of Bob Dylan.

 

Much as I dislike being drawn in into the analysis of Bob's lyrics, they deserve attention here: "Gentlemen he said / I don't need your organization / I've shined your shoes / I've moved your mountains / And marked your cards / But Eden is burning / Either brace yourself for elimination / Or else your hearts must have the courage / For the changing of the guards". In a way, this is si­milar to the message of Slow Train, despite being stated in much more obscure terms, but the message here is personal as well as universal — the «changing of the guards» is an announce­ment that, from now on, things are going to be different, and they were: Street Legal, in a way, marks the final and most decisive period of wall-making that Dylan had entered. Except that this time, he wasn't pissed off at the establishment, or at stupid people outside of his immediate circle — he was clearly pissed off at everything and everybody. Divorce had a lot do with it, of course, but there are certain mid-age hormonal processes involved, too, not to mention a basic falling out with the times, the moment for which was quite ripe in the age of disco, punk, and early New Wave, to whose values Bob had no wish to subscribe in the slightest.

 

The «darkness on the edge of town» hits heaviest on ʽSeñorʼ, all apocalyptic piano chords and Bob's voice dropping down from nervous fuss to somber «ready-to-go-down» decisiveness. No wonder he was all ready-set-go to join the Lord's armies if "this place don't make sense to me no more" and if he "can smell the tail of the dragon". In 1978, it was the bleakest thing he'd written up to that point — past troubles either carried some revolutionary optimism along with them, or were at least just personal (wife troubles), but this here is the first time Bob states that we are all in deep doo-doo, and does so with shivery competence. And who is the mysterious «señor»? Well, you know, "it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but...".

 

He did not release that creepy piece as a single: the single, as a matter of fact, was rather decep­tive, because ʽBaby Stop Cryingʼ is the simplest, prettiest, folksiest tune on here, with Bob con­soling a lady by telling her that "you know, I know, the sun will always shine". Yeah right. Is there any truth in that, señor? People who heard the song and then went on and bought the album must have been pretty mad — including Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau, who were all too happy to latch on back to their Self Portrait "what-is-this-shit?" mode. As usual, this shit was an expectation-breaker, no more, no less. Just as ʽBaby Stop Cryingʼ and its almost saccharine (for Bob's standards) ten­derness evaporate, the next song is ʽIs Your Love In Vainʼ, whose rampant, raging sexism is so blatant, it is hard even to take it at face value (but the critics did anyway), es­pecially when it is arranged pompously enough to match any national anthem. (Come to think of it, any nation that chooses the lines "are you willing to risk it all / or is your love in vain?" for the refrain to its national anthem would be alright with me).

 

That said, Street Legal does drag in spots. One song that I have not been able to warm up to at all is ʽNo Time To Thinkʼ, whose main hook consists of, literally, a list — apparently, of all the things in which the protagonist has lost faith and which now float around in a meaningless, mo­no­tonous wordy mess, be it «China doll, alcohol» or «equality, liberty» or «socialism, hypno­tism». Yes, but eight minutes of this "I'm-so-bored-with-all-that" sermon actually gives one plenty of time to think — for instance, to think about how plenty of contemporary punk bands would deliver pretty much the same mesage at three times the speed and did not have to sound like a disgruntled old geezer backed by a half-drunk, half-incompetent New Orleanian marching band (well, that is my not-too-good impression of what Bob made his band sound like on that song). And it has to be like Dylan to take the album's least emotionally charged and silliest-soun­ding tune and stretch it to absurdist length (third time around — he pulled the same trick earlier with ʽJoeyʼ, and then still earlier with ʽLily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Heartsʼ, although both were better, ʽJoeyʼ because it at least had strange sentimentality, and ʽLilyʼ had a hot tempo).

 

Still, ʽChanging Of The Guardsʼ, ʽNew Ponyʼ ("her name was Lucifer" — hello there, padre!), ʽSeñorʼ, ʽLove In Vainʼ, these are all minor classics, and the album finds a nice way out with ʽWhere Are You Tonightʼ, which not only has a clever and tense build-up throughout the long verse and all the way up to the explosive chorus, but actually offers some hope — here is Mr. Zimmerman explaining to us that not all is lost as long as there is still a chance to get close to "a woman I long to touch". (The «woman» would soon turn out to be the son of God, but shh, don't tell). Take it all together, and Street Legal still won't be no masterpiece — I'd rank it about the same as Planet Waves, maybe a little more consistent but with no ʽForever Youngʼ to prop up its reputation. But it won't be a failure, either. If anything, it took an extra set of guts for Dylan to embrace this bombastic style at a time when nothing was as much out of favor with the critics as «bombast», and he didn't do it just to piss people off, either. Most of these arrangements carry a «happy funeral» mood, which must have been just the state of mind that Bob was in, anyway. And maybe I do not exactly «love» these songs now any more than I did ten years back, but I can sort of feel a connection with the spirit that wrote them. Just remember not to listen to Street Legal when you are feeling good about life — this is one album that should definitely bear one of those «parental advisories» — «Sulky / Grumpy People, 35+» or something like that.

 

AT BUDOKAN (1979)

 

1) Mr. Tambourine Man; 2) Shelter From The Storm; 3) Love Minus Zero/No Limit; 4) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 5) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right; 6) Maggie's Farm; 7) One More Cup Of Coffee; 8) Like A Rolling Stone; 9) I Shall Be Released; 10) Is Your Love In Vain?; 11) Going, Going, Gone; 12) Blowin' In The Wind; 13) Just Like A Woman; 14) Oh Sister; 15) Simple Twist Of Fate; 16) All Along The Watchtower; 17) I Want You; 18) All I Really Want To Do; 19) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 20) It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); 21) Forever Young; 22) The Times They Are A-Changin'.

 

Certainly not the best live album in Dylan's career, but just as certainly the most unusual — and, together with Before The Flood and Hard Rain, At Budokan completes a trinity that might be reasonably called «the most sensible live trilogy to be released over just five consecutive years of touring». Not a single one of these albums sounds close to its predecessor, but it is At Bu­dokan that confounds all possible expectations. A one-of-a-kind experiment here, so viciously trashed by the majority of the musical press that you just know it's gotta be good...

 

...but all in due time. Fact is, this is where Bob took his Street Legal band on the road — to­gether with the violins, the mandolins, the saxophones, and the gospel lady choir. In fact, the ac­tual performances here were recorded on February 28 and March 1, preceding the bulk of studio sessions for Street Legal rather than following them, and this means that Bob's «big band style» rearrangements of his classic hits were invented and rehearsed before the same style was applied to newer material, not after.

 

Essentially, the tour was an experiment, carried out in order to answer a simple question: what would happen if Bob Dylan were to pass himself for a «normal», «accessible» artist? Practise some singing in tone. Calculate, compose, rehearse, play in pre-planned mode. Eschew mini­malism for large, complex, bombastic arrangements with diverse, polyphonic instrumentation. Exchange rock'n'roll spontaneity for lush pop professionalism. In other words — go on a Dylan tour and make a Dylan album that would seem to go against everything that a Dylan tour / album is «supposed» to stand for. How does that sound?

 

Critics like Christgau fell for this lock, stock and barrel: some people were so stupid as to state that Dylan had gone the «Vegas route», comparing him to Neil Diamond or late-period Elvis. Gi­ven that this here was the age of «rock revitalization» by the punk movement, albums like Budo­kan must have sounded particularly cringeworthy — and to make matters worse, Cheap Trick had only just released their own Budokan experience, so, even if on an everyday basis you'd never imagine the possibility of comparing Bob Dylan with Cheap Trick, in this particular case such comparisons were inevitable. A power-pop guitar band making some of the loudest and fiercest rock'n'roll ruckus in recent years — and a washed-up, prematurely senile has-been tar­nishing his legacy with «gratuitous sax and senseless violins», to borrow a Sparks album title for an adequate description.

 

However, just as it happened with Self Portrait and not a few other Dylan albums that clashed with people's expectations, the reputation of the Budokan shows has seriously improved in recent decades. Looking back, and assessing it all in the proper context, it is perfectly clear that Dylan was not «pandering» or «selling out» to anybody or anything — it is just that there is a time for everything, and every once in a while the man felt a need to shed the «rock'n'roll rebel» image and settle for a more relaxed, easy-going attitude. Yes, the downside of Budokan is that, unlike almost anything else in the Dylan catalog, it lacks his trademark spontaneity. The music runs on a captured, bottled and canned spirit here, rather than inspiration generated on-the-spot as the band hits the stage. But there is also an upside to that downside — at the very least, it is curious, and I would say fun, and maybe even exciting, to hear a pre-planned, carefully rehearsed, so openly «music-oriented» Dylan show. If what they mean by «Vegas» is «enhancing the melodic com­ponent in both the musical instruments and the singing», I'm game.

 

And it isn't just the enhancement of the melody — what we have here is a near-total reinvention of the classic numbers, to an extent that Dylan, famous for his reinventions, would never ever replicate. The arrangements are so recklessly experimental that, most likely, nobody will like all of them, but an unbiased listen, free from the local superstitions of 1979, will most likely result in liking at least some of them, depending on the listener. Some of the rearrangements preserve the general message and emotional atmosphere of the originals; just as many of them do not, opening up dimensions that you'd never suspect to have previously existed in these numbers — and even if some of these dimensions sound silly, well, silly or not, they're all there, and the inventiveness and hard work that Bob put into them seriously belies the image of a broken down, depressed, mid-age-crisis-bound artist that had just been created by Street Legal. In other words, the frus­trating Dylan enigma strikes again.

 

For those in doubt, I will list and laud some of my favorites. First and foremost, a big thank you to Steve Douglas (who, by the way, used to be one of the session players on Pet Sounds)  when­ever he picks up the flute, particularly on ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ and ʽLove Minus Zero/No Li­mitʼ, both of which, big band style or small band style, had never sounded lovelier — the ar­range­ment of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ, in particular, turns it from a beautiful early morning sere­nade into an equally beautiful early morning symphony, a great, uplifting introduction to the whole album. And the transposition of the three descending chords of ʽLove Minus Zeroʼ to flute was an equally inspired choice (additional kudos to David Mansfield for the great violin solo, which sounds particularly life-asserting in tandem with the flute).

 

Many darts have been launched at ʽMaggie's Farmʼ for its evolution from an almost «proto-punk» statement into a mastodon of R&B bombast — what has been lost on the critics is that the rear­ranged melody, now sewn into a steady sequence of symmetrically ascending / descending lines, simultaneously played on sax, violin, and guitar, still bears an air of defiance and determination, and just as, back in 1965, one used to interpret the song as Dylan's refusal to conform to the ex­pectations of the «folkies», so here it could be interpreted as his refusal to conform to the expec­tations of the «rockies». As in, "it's my Neil Diamond interpretation and I'm ready to sock it to anyone!" And for those who used to complain that the «fire and brimstone» had gone out of Dylan, well, they probably did not have the patience to sit all the way through to the new avatar of ʽIt's Alright Maʼ — done big-band hard-rock style, with as much fire and brimstone as could be seen necessary in Bob's voice. Yes, the song used to work perfectly as a dark, creepy soli­loquoy, and it works all right as a brash, pre-apocalyptic dark gospel anthem, too.

 

Other rearrangements that I am quite fond of include: the «generic country-pop», but still lovable, take on ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ, with tasteful slide guitars and a completely redone chorus hook; ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ, redone as a piano pop ballad; ʽOh Sisterʼ, shorn of its melancholic tender­ness and now performed almost «cold turkey-style», with not just the singer, but the entire band behaving as if they were suffering from virtual (spiritual!) constipation; and ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ, redone as a cheery, bouncy, martial Brit-pop song, closer to Sonny & Cher's version than anything else but with even more rhythm and energy.

 

Speaking of Sonny & Cher, several other songs, too, are done closer to cover versions than ori­ginals — ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ traditionally incorporates scorching heavy rock guitar solos, in honor of Jimi, and ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ is done reggae-style à la Clapton ver­sion (not a particularly wise decision, but understandable). But applying the same reggae groove to ʽDon't Think Twiceʼ was, of course, unprecedented, and so was the reinvention of ʽI Want Youʼ as a slow, rhythmless, quasi-accappella number; I am still undecided about either of those.

 

Still, particular preferences and dislikes aside, on the whole I insist that the tour, commemorated with this Budokan album, was a triumphant success, and really the last time that a live Dylan experience «mattered» as an artistic experience, not just an excuse to go have a good time or go see that Zimmerman guy before he takes Highway 61. For those who dislike the «tunelessness» of Dylan as a singer or a guitar player, the album could even be a good introduction — in a way, it's a classic case of «Dylan for the anti-Dylanites», and one would have to be quite tonedeaf, I think, to continue to deny the man's gift for melody or mood after sitting through it. For those who condemn At Budokan for «betraying» some thing or other, dispensing with artistic integrity, etc. — just get a life. And for those who simply think that the whole experience is kinda boring and lifeless, even despite all the hard work that went into the rearrangements and rehearsals, well, I'd only say that, after sixteen years of seeing and hearing too much life and excitement from the artist, it is quite a lively and exciting experience to hear him sound so boring and lifeless. Give me the boredom of At Budokan over the liveliness of, say, 1984's Real Live any time of day — the album was a firm thumbs up when I first reviewed it about ten years before this, and my ad­miration of it has only grown since then.

 

SLOW TRAIN COMING (1979)

 

1) Gotta Serve Somebody; 2) Precious Angel; 3) I Believe In You; 4) Slow Train; 5) Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking; 6) Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others); 7) When You Gonna Wake Up; 8) Man Gave Names To All The Animals; 9) When He Returns.

 

Truly and verily the match between Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler must have been made in Hea­ven, even though Mark did find it somewhat embarrassing when he discovered that he had been recruited to play on a bona fide Christian rock album. So was Jerry Wexler, for that matter, who produced the album, all the while having to fight back Dylan's incessant proselytizing. According to Bob's own confession, he had seen the light after Jesus himself visited the old sinner in his sleep — and judging by objective evidence at least, Bob's conversion must have been quite sin­cere, since it involved schooling, training, and missionary activity. The fact that he dropped all of his secular material from the concert setlists is, in comparison, not such good evidence, since this could be ascribed primarily to the man's general fondness for controversy and prankishness; but on the whole, his entire life during those three strange years seems to have indeed been domina­ted by J. C. and his teachings.

 

As a rule, the term «Christian rock» does not stimulate too many positive emotions among people with «good taste», so to speak — which is really due not so much to the fact that a practising Christian may not have good taste (he certainly may) as to the fact that the term has largely been privatized by scores of dull, talentless artists who seem to think that any music is all right as long as it explicitly glorifies Jesus, the Church, and the Christian life. From which, of course, it does not logically follow that any music that glorifies Jesus is automatically bad — nor is the very fact of singing praise for the Christian lifestyle by itself worth condemnation, because, well, on the whole this is just another way of singing about the battle between good and evil, right?

 

Which means that I cannot side with John Lennon's famous fury when he heard ʽGotta Serve Somebodyʼ and it pissed him off so much that he could not resist the temptation of writing an unofficial response (the furious and melodically awful ʽServe Yourselfʼ; fortunately, he had the good commercial sense not to polish it for inclusion on Double Fantasy). If you take the song on its own value, out of the general Jesus context, its only message is a simple one — whatever you do, and no matter how complicated life seems to be, there will always be a black-and-white per­spective to it as well, and your very existence in this world will force you to choose one side over the other. Put it that way, and it's not too different from the naïve philosophies of John and Yoko themselves, the way they were practised and propagated in the era of «Bagism».

 

Indeed, of all the three albums of Bob's «Christian» period, Slow Train Coming is the least dri­ven by ritual and formula — only about half of the songs deal directly with Jesus and the «born again» thing — and, more importantly, much of it is about the music, not about the words. With Wexler in the producer's seat, the album has a strong Muscle Shoals atmosphere about it, repla­cing the «big band» sound of Street Legal with a tougher, more stripped and economic, but still dense 1970s R&B atmosphere, which Knopfler then personalizes with his shrill-and-somber Glasgow blues guitar tone. The atmosphere, however, is anything but celebratory: Dylan does not glorify or praise so much as condemn, and that's some mighty fine condemning, I must say.

 

Christian rock or not, ʽSlow Trainʼ is one of Bob's greatest songs of the 1970s, if not ever — an inspiring combination of critical lyrics, sincerely angered vocal delivery, viciously lashing licks from Knopfler, and perfectly placed backing vocals: each of the "...there's a slow... slow train coming... up around the bend" choruses really does create the illusion of an approaching train (okay, so it passes you by and fades away in the distance with each chorus, so that after a while it gets a little repetitive, but the arrangement compensates for that by gradually adding extra layers of brass and keyboards). Bob's way with words is quite impressive as well — the fire-and-brim­stone thing never gets old if you populate it with new imagery, such as backwards girls from Ala­bama, «masters of the bluff and masters of the proposition» (the last time we heard of «masters» was on ʽMasters Of Warʼ, and this might be the first time since then that the old preacher from Hibbing comes out with so much direct thrashing). Plus, as of 2013, the thrashing seems to be ever and ever more relevant than it was in 1979 ("they talk about a life of brotherly love, show me someone who knows how to live it") — although my favorite quote still comes from ʽWhen You Gonna Wake Upʼ ("they tell you ʽtime is moneyʼ as if your life was worth its weight in gold"). This sort of preaching is quite all right with me, you know.

 

On the whole, he may have broken up with his fanbase, but Slow Train Coming is a typical — and typically good — Dylan album all the way. Long, verbose songs, with repetitive, but hooky choruses: whatever one might say, the transition from slow shuffly tempo verse to sped-up boo­gie chorus on ʽWhen You Gonna Wake Upʼ gets me every time (a good word must be put in for Dire Straits drummer Pick Withers), and the brass groove of ʽGonna Change My Way Of Thin­kingʼ (which, come to think of it, borrows a part from ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ) is powerful and makes good use of its stop-and-start structure. Oh, and there is even some lightweight humor in the picture — ʽMan Gave Names To All The Animalsʼ is really one for the kiddos (you'd hardly expect a reasonable grown-up to feel happy about filling in that last line, which also gets you a-thinkin': what, suppose Adam did not notice the snake and give it its name, maybe things would have turned out quite different?..).

 

In any case, there may be no doubt about it: Slow Train Coming did rejuvenate Dylan and pull him out, if only temporarily, of the personal crisis so masochistically displayed on Street Legal. The solution may seem too crude, too simple, too undeserving of someone who used to take pride in out-of-the-ordinary sophistication, but it seems that, at the time, a crude, simple solution was exactly the kind of solution that the doctor ordered — and as long as it did not interfere with Dy­lan's strengths and values as a musician, there was no problem.

 

Well, come to think of it, there may have been signs of a problem: songs like ʽWhen He Returnsʼ really show Bob drifting towards formulaic spiritual mush, and on the whole, Slow Train succeeds much better when he is condemning violators of brotherly love than when he is trying to spread brotherly love as such. Want it or not, Dylan's most personal and beloved God is the God of Vengeance, not the God of Compassion, and this is why ʽGotta Serve Somebodyʼ and ʽSlow Trainʼ have a strong chance of being remembered when stuff like ʽPrecious Angelʼ and ʽI Believe In Youʼ is long forgotten. Fortunately, it is these songs that set the overall tone for the entire al­bum — along with Knopfler, still at the peak of his «inner punk flame» period — and guarantee it an assured thumbs up. Fun fact: Nick Cave himself has gone on record proclaiming Slow Train to be his favorite Dylan album (of all time, no less!), and even if it is hard to believe the sincerity of this statement, I can certainly understand his motivation. At the very least, this may have earned the album a bunch of extra listeners — pretty strong publicity.

 

SAVED (1980)

 

1) A Satisfied Mind; 2) Saved; 3) Covenant Woman; 4) What Can I Do For You?; 5) Solid Rock; 6) Pressing On; 7) In The Garden; 8) Saving Grace; 9) Are You Ready.

 

In the thrilling, hook-filled, popcorn-blockbuster-size Saga of Bob Dylan, Saved holds a special place. As an autonomous album of the gospel persuasion, I would not dare recommend it even to a diehard Christian (although, it is true, quite a few diehard Christians have used it as a pretext to show how even the greatest of the «youth rebels» eventually come to terms with God, suitably omitting the last thirty years of Mr. Zimmerman's career). As a separate chapter in the life of Bob Dylan, the self-experimenter, it has its fascinating points.

 

At some moment in time, Dylan must have understood, or perhaps some of his newly found re­ligious friends made him understand, that Slow Train Coming did not solve his problem — that it was a Christian album in name, but a Dylan album at heart. If the true Christian ideal be about «losing yourself in Christ», then Slow Train certainly showed none of that. ʽI Believe In Youʼ, yes, but that wasn't enough — too much of it still sounded like the same old angry Dylan, blasting off firecrackers in Old Testament rather than New Testament mode: too much bitterness and fury, not enough love, too much of an opposition between ʽmeʼ and ʽthemʼ, not enough unity between ʽmeʼ and ʽHimʼ. Basically, what the man really needed was to make an album that would be as non-Dylan as possible: only then would the initiation be complete.

 

From that point of view, Saved is a tremendous success. Bob retains Wexler and Barry Beckett as co-producers, but dismisses Knopfler (who probably would have even less interest playing on a full-scale gospel record than on Slow Train) and allows none of his backing players to show any signs of ardent individuality. No less than four ladies on backing vocals now form a strong gospel choir, present and active on most of the songs — and each and every song is about Jesus, usually from a personal (ʽme and Himʼ) rather than universal (ʽHim and the worldʼ) perspective, although ʽIn The Gardenʼ does stress the issue of a general lack of faith, be it then or now.

 

Consequently and inevitably, Saved is the «worst» Dylan album up to that point — because it simply does not strive to be a «Dylan album», quite intentionally so. One could wonder what it is that actually makes it so much worse than, say, Self Portrait, another quintessential «demolition of image» record — but, all reservations made, Self Portrait was very much a Dylan album, if only because it made so many unpredictable twists and took so many risky chances. Saved, how­ever, is built entirely upon the premise that one does not fool around with Him; one merely ack­nowledges one's own insignificance in His presence. "You have given everything to me / What can I do for You?... You have laid down your life for me / What can I do for You?"

 

«...well, how about it, Bob — I have laid down My life for you, and the natural thing for you to do in return is to record a generally boring, if sincere-sounding, album of generic gospel tunes, put it on the market and leave the rest to me; I can guarantee you that it will hit No. 3 on the UK charts, although I am not so sure about American sales — these suckers may worship me more ardently than UK people, but they are simply not used to buying Christian albums from Minnesotan Jews, you know, so I cannot guarantee anything higher than No. 24. Yet do not worry: between the two of us, our mutual brand will always be failproof. At least we have better taste than Jerry Falwell...»

 

Petty blasphemy aside, Dylan obviously did not do this album for the money, but, like most «Christian rock», it shares the same problems — too much formulaic preaching, too little artistic value. Of the «gospel rockers», there is not a single song that has even a single merit over the pre­dictable «well, they got a tight, professional band carrying the groove». Of the «gospel soulsters», I can only name the inspiring harmonica breaks in ʽWhat Can I Do For You?ʼ (first time in ages Bob blows his instrument with such tremendous verve, as if Jesus' very resurrection depended on the wave amplitude), and ʽIn The Gardenʼ actually has real tension and a suspenseful buildup, with some inventive bass work from Tim Drummond. These moments are rare, but important: they show that some creativity was involved and that, even when Dylan is consciously striving to make the blandest album ever recorded, he still tends to slip into experimental mode every now and then. Talent is hard to bury.

 

On the other hand, one must admit that he almost ends up blowing his cover with a song like ʽCovenant Womanʼ — if you are a responsible Christian, you will surely blush at the ambi­gu­ousness of such lyrics as "Covenant woman / Intimate little girl / Who knows those most secret things of me / That are hidden from the world". Is that what he means by the earlier line "way up yonder, great will be your reward"? I don't know — I'm a big Dylan admirer, and even I don't care much about knowing the most secret things of him that are hidden from the world, much less a «covenant woman», who seems to be forming a suspicious threesome here, dividing her atten­tion between the protagonist and the Lord. Altogether, a very confusing song — one on which Bob tried a different lyrical approach, and ended up with a whirlygig of sincerity, silliness, and parody, probably without meaning it.

 

But on the whole, there is no intrigue to Saved. Its objective was to erase personality, and for the most part, it succeeds. As a historical curio — a de-characterized album from one of the strongest characters in art history — it deserves to be heard once, but, unlike the beginning and the end of Bob's «Christian trilogy», it has never held any replay value for me. Rumor has it that Bob was seriously bent on proselytizing at the time (even trying to convert Jerry Wexler), but Slow Train Coming, with its anti-sinner agenda and Knopfler guitar, went way farther in converting me than this bland, boringly prescribed prostration before Jesus. I have no interest in doubting Bob's sin­cerity, or denying the «point» of Saved — I just do not see why this point had to be carried in music stores and bear a price tag. It may well be that Christianity helped pull Bob out of his cri­sis, restore him to sanity, save him from drugs / alcohol / suicide, etc., and that Saved was his honest «thank you». But even if it really was like that, truly, it's all between those two guys — one here on Earth, the other one there in singularity. I don't wanna be a part of it. Are you ready for the saving grace? Then press on to the solid rock. What can I do for you, Mr. Zimmerman? Only show my sincerity in giving Saved a thumbs down — first one in Dylan history. If it is not a failure, it is an insult. If it is not an insult, it is a failure.

 

SHOT OF LOVE (1981)

 

1) Shot Of Love; 2) Heart Of Mine; 3) Property Of Jesus; 4) Lenny Bruce; 5) Watered-Down Love; 6) The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar; 7) Dead Man, Dead Man; 8) In The Summertime; 9) Trouble; 10) Every Grain Of Sand.

 

Now this is more like it. Having gotten Saved out of his system, Bob must have felt redeemed enough to revert, partially at least, to his old fulminating self. Shot Of Love still has occasional gospel overtones, but for the most part, it does what the old man does best — bring down the haughty, send up the arrogant, snatch the ground from under the feet of the self-assured. Paradise may be beautiful, but it is not up to Bob Dylan to convey that kind of beauty; he is much better off pouring molten gold and lead down the poor sinners' throats.

 

Fed up with Dylan's in-yer-face Christianity, «progressive» musical press pretty much shredded the album — which, I think, had much more to do with it being yet another religious follow-up to Saved than to any sort of fair assessment. In fact, if you removed one or two of the most lyrically obvious numbers, the album wouldn't even present itself as a specifically «Christian» statement: religious, yes, moralizing, for sure, but none of that stopped the same progressive art critics from endorsing the folk revival scene twenty years back, which was as religious and moralizing as they come, by the very nature of its object. No, it just had to be the same gut level «oh no, not another piece of that what-can-I-do-for-you crap» reaction, I think.

 

Because, even though Shot Of Love is nowhere near a «great» album and lacks even the con­centrated, focused attack strength of Slow Train Coming, it is at least a properly «Dylanish» al­bum, written and recorded in a way that is consistent with the idea of Dylan as an artist rather than Dylan as a gospel preacher. Religious imagery is now interwoven in the songs rather than continuing to serve as a primary focus — modern day intellectuals will go on feeling uncomfor­table about all the references to "a perfect finished plan", of course, but that does not make ʽEvery Grain Of Sandʼ any less of an artistic rather than religious accomplishment.

 

A distinctive feature of Shot Of Love is its overall rugged-ragged feel: little-known producer Chuck Plotkin, who had formerly worked as recording engineer for Springsteen, replaces master sound man Jerry Wexler at the wheel, and does not much interfere with Bob's demand of spon­taneity and, sometimes, even a little musical chaos. On Slow Train Coming, the prophet of doom was sober, bitter, well-stocked up for battle; on Shot Of Love, the prophet sounds drunk, desperate, and rambling: what, a whole two albums into the prophet's Christian crusade, and the world only seems to have gotten even worse? No wonder somebody is so frustrated that he needs to cure his frustration with a "shot of love". Looking back at Bob's entire catalog, Shot Of Love stands out quite particularly — as a quintessential «panicky» album, with a stronger concentra­tion of nervous hysteria than just about anywhere else.

 

At the same time, the atmosphere of «religious panic» does not detract Bob from further expe­riments with form and substance: compared to the rest of the Christian trilogy, Shot Of Love is its most diverse representative. Genre-wise, there's some gospel, some pop, some blues-rock, some reggae, some folk balladry, and ʽTroubleʼ, with its jagged lead guitar and minimalist per­cussion, actually suggests that maybe Bob had been listening to some Tom Waits lately (Heart­attack And Vine had just come out, and if you replace Bob with Tom on ʽTroubleʼ, you get a song that fits on that particular record like a glove). Not everything works the way it should, but the important correction has been made — Bob has regained his interest in music, in addition to continuing, but already slightly diminishing, interest in Christ.

 

For most fans and critics, the main, if not only, highlight on the entire album was its last track, ʽEvery Grain Of Sandʼ, which certainly rides a train of high ambitions — longer, slower, statelier than the rest, a personal, anthemic poem with a haunting arrangement that almost seems to echo ʽSad-Eyed Ladyʼ in its stately cadences. The echo is but a faint one, though: the basic melody is but a variation on the 50s progression, the lyrics are marred by some clichéd application of Bibli­cal imagery where the man once used to be much more imaginative with it, and, worst of all, the major point — that of finding consolation in the Lord's «perfect plan» — does not come across with the sincerity of, say, a George Harrison (to whom I am quite often more than willing to for­give all the clichés since they are delivered with so much genuine devotion — and, fairly fre­quent­ly, melodic bliss). Nevertheless, this song alone, in its execution, is still more atmospheric, personal, and affecting than the entirety of Saved, if a bit too overwrought and undercooked (simultaneously, no less!) as a prayer-anthem.

 

The real kicker on the record, however, is the title track. Produced by Robert "Bumps" Blackwell instead of Plotkin, it has a distinctly different aura from the rest — a shadowy, echoey, ghostly song, where Dylan rails against nasty garage guitar barrages and gospel back vocals with the la­dies in «fury» rather than «angel» mode. Fleeting visions of ʽGimmie Shelterʼ come to mind, and even though ʽShot Of Loveʼ does not come close to the former's grandeur, there is no denying the atmospheric and thematic connection — here, too, we have a deeply troubled protagonist looking for salvation among a sea of troubles. There are some really vicious lyrics here, bordering on Morrison-esque darkness ("Why would I want to take your life? / You've only murdered my father, raped his wife / Tattooed my babies with a poison pen / Mocked my God, humiliated my friends"), which emphasizes the repetitive counter-plea of "I need a shot of love" even stronger — and the shot itself is never really delivered until ʽEvery Grain Of Sandʼ wraps the proceedings up nine tracks later.

 

In between, we have some lesser, but still acceptable, tracks, such as the funny, slightly funky ʽHeart Of Mineʼ (a rather ruffled version, selected by Bob only because it had both Ringo Starr and Ron Wood guesting on it, but I kinda like it); the weird, out-of-nowhere eulogy for Lenny Bruce, done in a minimalist arrangement but with the same sentimental affection as was earlier displayed for Joey Gallo; a bit of catchy apocalyptic reggae in ʽDead Man, Dead Manʼ; and ʽThe Groom Is Still Waiting At The Altarʼ, formerly a non-album B-side but eventually included by Bob as a regular constituent in the CD age — screechy 12-bar blues-rock that he hadn't done since God knows when... the only thing lacking is a mighty Robbie Robertson solo, but the song still works, maybe because the very fact of rhyming the song title with "the rock of Gibraltar" is one of those Dylan-only hooks that can make his silliest and/or most generic tracks memorable.

 

It is quite ironic, really, that Shot Of Love could be dismissed for its ongoing Christian preachi­ness when it was already clear that Dylan was done with, or would very soon be done with, for­mulaic Christianity. Much more important than being the last in his «born again trilogy», Shot Of Love would also turn out to be his last properly produced album in a long, long time, and the last album to consistently feature Dylan in a non-comatose state, where «mumbling» and «whining» would not be the only two switches on the vocal control board. It is an uneven album, it is not locked on greatness, but it lives, breathes, rambles, stutters, falls down, picks itself up again, and throws itself at ya. «Garage gospel» is more like it — from the cloudy chaos of the title track to the drunk Waitsian strut of ʽTroubleʼ, there is really nothing else like this in the entire Dylan ca­talog, so, despite occasional flaws, an unquestionable thumbs up here.

 

INFIDELS (1983)

 

1) Jokerman; 2) Sweetheart Like You; 3) Neighborhood Bully; 4) License To Kill; 5) Man Of Peace; 6) Union Sun­down; 7) I And I; 8) Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight.

 

And now, welcome to the Eighties — says the opening percussion roll by Sly Dunbar, resonating with an electronic echo that announces Dylan's first encounter with the wonderful world of hi-tech. It is actually a little ironic that, while gradually recovering from the Jesus haze and trying to reconnect with the modern world, Dylan ended up hiring Mark Knopfler as his producer: the one guy, out of all that crowd of new arrivals, that did not give a damn about all that «New Wave» crapola, sticking to the tried and true. And it remains unclear to me just how much Knopfler is actually responsible for the production, since he had to leave his post midway through in order to go on tour — then, when he came back, it turned out that Dylan himself had wrapped up produc­tion in his absence, too impatient about waiting.

 

In any case, Infidels is far from the most transparent case of bad production marring a Dylan re­cord (that «honor» would probably have to go to Empire Burlesque), but it does not have a par­ticularly vibrant vibe, either. As we know, except for those rare cases in his life where Dylan would come up with a genuinely wonderful melody, the musical success of his albums would al­ways depend on that vibrancy — in the 1960s and 1970s alike, the man had an acute sense of smell and always knew when and how the ball was rolling, but by 1983, he was either showing signs of getting too old for that stuff, or perhaps his brainwaves were seriously affected by too much zealous Christianity. Whatever be the cause, Infidels simply does not have a good sound; it is an album that might have been infinitely better, had all the songs been recorded at a different time, in different conditions.

 

First and foremost, the rhythm section of «Sly and Robbie» is a joke. Nothing against Jamaica, but there isn't even a trace of reggae on this album anyway, and the electronic coloring of the drums and non-descript character of the bass just gives the record a plastic backbone, nothing more. Over this rhythm, Bob invites not one, but two famous and fairly incompatible gui­tarists to back him up: Knopfler himself, and Mick Taylor, who would also back Bob on the subsequent tour. But neither of the two shows much interest — Knopfler's licks and leads show but half of the passion that he had earlier infused in his playing on Slow Train, and Mick Taylor seems so thrilled about simply sharing the honor of playing with Bob that, throughout the record, he plays nothing but the simplest and boringest of old stockpiled Stonesy and Chicago blues riffs, usually of a rather predictable and monotonous nature. Complete the picture with Dire Straits' keyboard­ist Alan Clark and his penchant for adult contemporary soundscapes, and in terms of liveliness of the music, Infidels is trumped by any previous Dylan record, Saved included.

 

Which is especially pitiful since, by all accounts, Bob was actually on a songwriting roll. «Lost gems» like ʽFoot Of Prideʼ and ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ, later to be fished out for the Bootleg Se­ries, all hail from this period, and, with just a few unfortunate exceptions, most of the songs here are potential masterpieces as well — strong lyrics, well-designed chorus hooks, intelligence and inspiration all present. But the rote, stagnant musical backing simply does not allow the hooks to properly blossom — and in addition, there is way too much echo on Bob's voice to preserve the «singer vs. listener intimacy» that was so important on his masterpieces.

 

ʽJokermanʼ, which opens the album, could very well apply for the ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ of the 1980s — same reference to a mysterious character, same barrages of sometimes nonsensical, sometimes epiphanic imagery, same impression of some visionary musical announcement that opens some sort of door to some sort of previously unseen destination, except that the celebratory spirit of ʽJokermanʼ is bitter and ironic, where ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ used to simmer with dreamy idea­lism. (Well, then again, it is fairly hard to write a song that is so much inspired by browsing through the Old Testament and have it dreamily idealistic). Could, yes, but the lyrics are easily the best thing about it — hearing them gently float atop a sanitized, chlorine-smelling seascape is one hell of a disappointment. Besides, couldn't he have found anything even slightly more impressive as the song's main hookline than "oh-oh, whoa-whoa, Jokerman!"? So many words for the verses — and such odd neglect for the chorus.

 

And so much for the best song on the album, even though ʽI And Iʼ comes spiritually close: the most Dire Straits-sounding track of the lot (Knopfler must have sensed the connection and saved his best world-weary licks for the proceedings), it is also curious in how Bob suddenly embraces the tenets of Judaism ("took a stranger to teach me, to look into justice's beautiful face / and to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth") — and makes it sound convincing, now finding his answer in the Father where it used to be the Son just a short while back. Then again, Bob him­self is as much of a walking contradiction as the Holy Trinity, and after Infidels, nobody would pro­bably be surprised to find the Book of Mormon, the Bhagavadgita, or the works of L. Ron Hub­bard among his sources of inspiration. And if it helped him to make good records — heck, I say, here's to switching churches every six months. Unfortunately, there is also this small matter of production... and playing... and singing...

 

...and exercising better quality control over the songwriting. One thing that pissed off many a critic at the time, and I somewhat concur, is that several songs here were too overtly and bluntly politicized. A prime example is ʽNeighborhood Bullyʼ, musically riding all the way on a primi­tive blues-rock riff that only serves to provide a rhythmic base to Bob's allegorical endorsement of the State of Israel in its military conflict. Now even in his early days as a protest singer, the man was too smart to allow himself to be boxed in one corner: he may have rallied against war and injustice, but he never aligned himself with the Communist party or anything like that — and here we have a song that was all but adopted by the Zionist camp as their personal anthem, which is pushing things a bit too far. Nothing against anybody's right to share or even promote a pro-Israeli / anti-Palestine agenda (or vice versa), but not in the form of art, please. This is crude, misguided, and has far less reason to exist than ʽJoeyʼ or even ʽI Believe In Youʼ; it might have been simpler for the man to simply shout "I'm with you guys" from the stage during his subse­quent short tour of Israel.

 

Another, less blatant, but fairly similar example is ʽUnion Sundownʼ, another political statement about the decline of U.S. industry and constantly growing dependance on foreign production. Well, first of all, the same subject had already been successfully (and with much more humor) tackled on John Entwistle's ʽMade In Japanʼ exactly one decade earlier, and that is just off the top of my head. Second, once again, the message is pinned to a deconstructed Chicago riff (Mick plays something that closely resembles a shortened version of the melody of ʽRollin' And Tum­blin'ʼ), the echo effects are unbearable, and nobody is even given a proper chance to solo. Who needs to listen to clichés about how "democracy don't rule the world" set to minimalistic, repeti­tive, deeply familiar melody? Okay, millions of Bad Religion fans around the world do that on a daily basis, but there used to be a fundamental qualitative difference between Bad Religion and Bob Dylan... not any more?

 

Likewise, ʽMan Of Peaceʼ is basically a re-write of ʽFrom A Buick 6ʼ for the next decade, but where there used to be organ-and-guitar fury a-plenty, we now have a mechanical backing and a vapid acoustic solo where it seems that the guitarist (be it Mark or Mick, I honestly don't know) was still figuring out the notes, quite surprised to find out that he has just performed on the mas­ter take. The electric solos (definitely Mick) are much better, but they do not do much to remedy the impression — and Bob's re-adoption of «the yell» for the sakes of denouncing Satan is unfor­tunate when compared to the much subtler ways of delivery of said message on Slow Train.

 

All of which goes to say that Infidels generally rides on the strength of its softer rather than ro­ckier numbers — ʽJokermanʼ, ʽI And Iʼ, possibly ʽSweetheart Like Youʼ which also sounds so eerily like a Knopfler composition, I think it might have worked better with Mark taking lead vo­cal and Dylan reduced to harmonica blowing for a change. The country-tinged ʽDon't Fall Apart On Me Tonightʼ seems to want to close the album on a John Wesley Harding / Nashville Sky­line note, but the electronic drums murder the slide guitars, and the vocals create no atmosphere whatsoever. It all sounds like he's trying to do something which he already did several times be­fore, and failing to be even as good as it used to, let alone being better.

 

So is this all reason enough for a thumbs down? I'd probably stop just a few degrees short of it. As «bad» as the record is, in terms of overall context, it was a creative step forward for Bob — surreptitiously and without warning, he broke out of his religious seclusion and showed that he still had something to say, even if he did not quite manage to figure out how to say it properly, and sometimes said it too bluntly and crudely. ʽJokermanʼ alone, as the opening track, screams "REVIVAL!" so loudly that it becomes one of his most important songs of the decade, and no man shall see the face of ʽI And Iʼ and live to claim that Infidels has no redeeming qualities. Of course, today we know that Infidels marked the start of a lengthy decline rather than revival — all of the problems evident here would come to fruition on Bob's subsequent series of releases. But the one really big difference between Infidels and all that followed is that on Infidels, Bob generally does not whine: he barks, growls, yells, does whatever he can to come across as his usual «strong», lively, provocative character. The music may be lifeless, yes, due to some unfor­tunate decisions, but the man behind the music is definitely alive, even if it now takes the Old rather than New Testament to provide the necessary life support.

 

REAL LIVE (1984)

 

1) Highway 61 Revisited; 2) Maggie's Farm; 3) I And I; 4) License To Kill; 5) It Ain't Me Babe; 6) Tangled Up In Blue; 7) Masters Of War; 8) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 9) Girl From The North Country; 10) Tombstone Blues.

 

Although Dylan's touring activity did not slow down from his usual 1970s rate — in fact, with the beginning of the «Never Ending Tour» in 1988 it only kept accelerating — the same cannot be said about the verve with which he would continue to release live albums. In fact, Real Live is, in a sense, his last «proper» live offer: Dylan & The Dead should rather count as a misguided me­mento of a star-crossed event, Unplugged was all but forced upon the man by MTV, and all other subsequent live releases would be culled from the archives for the «Bootleg Series».

 

As one of the many who actually had a chance to catch one of Bob's live acts (Albuquerque 2007, if my memory serves me right), I kind of understand this decision. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Dylan kept experimenting with the live format, switching from acoustic to electric, there and back again, sometimes leaning towards a harsher rock'n'roll sound (Before The Flood), sometimes trying out a «symphonic roots» approach (Rolling Thunder), even taking risks with a glitzy big band sound (Budokan) or, of course, adding gospel elements to his Christian-era tou­ring. However, once his «hardcore Christian» days were over, the live Dylan sound became, on the whole, more streamlined and typical. The backing bands (including the one I saw) are never anything less than pro­fessional, but most of the time they tend to gravitate towards well-estab­lished, predictable forms, with limited opportunities for spontaneity. Thus, Real Live may sound seriously differently from everything that came before it, but it does not radically differ from any­thing that came after it (granted, I am nowhere near an expert on the extensive field of Dylan bootleg studies, but those few dots that I know of are connected in a rather straight line).

 

Of course, sonic streamlining has never prevented Dylan from continuing to experiment with his songs, whose original incarnations he has always regarded as experimental material rather than sacred cows — all fans know that going to a Dylan show, be it 1984 or 2014, always presumes taking part in the «guess-what's-playing» game. But the downside has been the progressive dete­rioration of his voice, already well evident on Real Live, as it converts much of its former color into a high-pitched whine, and, more importantly, as Bob seems to be losing much of his control over it. It is almost as if his voice problems took him by surprise, and he never really learned to cope with them (unlike, say, Tom Waits, who gave us all a lesson in capitalizing on his guttural issues). Many people have learned to disregard the issue and keep insisting that Dylan continues to be a «vocal master» both in his «whiny» period and even later, when his frequencies took one more somersault and landed in «deep pharyngeal croak» territory — I cannot share this opinion and pretend that I have any love at all for Dylan's live vocal performance after his turning 40-45. (Studio records are a different matter, since he seems to be paying more attention to his limits and capacities there, and attunes his new songs respectively).

 

So that is what Real Live is: a tolerable, mediocre, middle-of-the-road live rock'n'roll album, with old hits and newer compositions alike all reduced to a single common invariant and «gra­ced» by a singer who seems a little lost and confused — he'd like to roar like a lion, perhaps, but all he can is yelp like a jackal. His backing band would like to help, perhaps, but they gel fairly mechanically, and although Mick Taylor is given plenty of opportunities to shine on lead guitar, he does so without letting his hair down, and comes across as competent, but boring (he really needs a Keith Richard around for both to profit from the contrastive effect — on his own, he's just another careful, politely groomed, not-too-inspiring blues-rock guitarist). You really get to know that there is a big problem, though, when the guest star on one of the tracks (ʽTombstone Bluesʼ) turns out to be Carlos Santana, and when his leads on that track turn out to be stylistically indistinguishable from Taylor's on all the others.

 

As usual, Bob has a little acoustic set in the middle, with ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ to have the entire audience subtly glorify their male chauvinism (I wonder if the girls, too, are always singing along to "it ain't me you're looking for, babe"?), and a newly revised version of ʽTangled Up In Blueʼ with alternate lyrics, a serious collectible for fans, but not something I'd like to pay attention to because the vocal delivery sucks anyway. Of the new songs, ʽI And Iʼ, as befits its Rastafari title, is slightly reggaeified as compared to the studio version, but the results are crude, and the song is simply stripped of its moody atmosphere; and why they preferred to perform / include ʽLicense To Killʼ instead of ʽJokermanʼ is beyond me.

 

In the end, the only «interesting» bit of the album is in how ʽMasters Of Warʼ became radically reinterpreted as an «ominous-apocalyptic» rock song, now closer in spirit to (and even partially bor­rowing the riff of) ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ than ʽNottamun Townʼ which it originally copied — and maybe Taylor was reminded of his past glories playing on ʽGimme Shelterʼ under those conditions, so there is a little extra heat and freedom of expression in the several solos he takes on that particular song (not to mention length). But one song is not enough to revert the trend, and the verdict should be a grim one: Real Live marks the breaking point at which Dylan's live legacy generally becomes expendable. It ain't bad, but it ain't something you should be loo­king for, babe. A thumbs down here, in loving memory of all those other live albums.

 

EMPIRE BURLESQUE (1985)

 

1) Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?); 2) Seeing The Real You At Last; 3) I'll Remem­ber You; 4) Clean Cut Kid; 5) Never Gonna Be The Same Again; 6) Trust Yourself; 7) Emotionally Yours; 8) When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky; 9) Something's Burning, Baby; 10) Dark Eyes.

 

So Infidels had some good songs and a troubled, inadequate sound — but if you really want to learn the meaning of the word «misproduced», look it up in an imaginary encyclopaedia and chances are, a 45-year old Bob Dylan with a puzzled look on his face will materialize in your imagination and say, «See this jacket that looks like I've just dragged it through a tub of lime paint? Actually, it fits me about as well as the production style on my twenty-first studio album matches the songs I have written for it. You don't happen to be a recording engineer, by any chance? I've been sitting in this bottle for ages...» ...oh, never mind.

 

One hypothetical version of «the truth» is as follows: Dylan never, not for once, truly «lost» his songwriting skills throughout the Eighties. The melodies on Empire Burlesque may not count among his most imaginative, but when we get down to it, they aren't all that inferior to anything he'd done in the previous decade, or even decades. The lyrics do range from cringeworthy (parti­cularly when he is in one of his «mass-moralizing» moods) to insightful, but consistently show Bob's usual dedication to his craft. And he even makes some effort to sing here, rather than just whine and mumble — age issues getting worse and worse with every new year, so that his high «wheezing» notes are now more painful than ever, but many of the songs still show strong will and power, which used to be his saving grace even under certain off-key circumstances.

 

All of this means that at the heart of Empire Burlesque lies a really strong, emotionally attrac­tive and intellectually useful collection of songs. It also boasts a fairly diverse and promising cast-of-thousands: unfortunately, «Sly and Robbie» from Infidels are retained on many of the songs, but several members of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers are there to rectify the deal, including the band's fabulous guitarist Mike Campbell, and even Ronnie Wood drops by to add his guitar parts to the basic rock'n'roll of ʽClean Cut Kidʼ. With all these ingredients, it could have been a really good record, with a healthy roots-rock / folk-rock sound that we hadn't really heard from Bob since the days of Rolling Thunder.

 

And now the bad news. Although the credits say «produced by Bob Dylan», there wasn't really any particular production job that Mr. Zimmerman could carry out here — being either para­no­i­dally afraid of, or, more likely, completely disinterested in technological progress. Instead, he just surreptitiously handed those duties over to his recording engineer, Arthur Baker, a guy who was mostly famous those days for producing «special dance remixes» for rock'n'roll artists, as well as collaborating with New Order on such songs as ʽThieves Like Usʼ. The results were not just «un­fortunate» — they were a real friggin' catastrophe.

 

It isn't just the all-pervasive electronic drums or the plastic, lifeless bass sound this time: it is virtually everything. Sterile keyboards, inspired guitar solos that get drowned in the mix, echo-drenched vocals that put the singer in an even deeper well than he occupied on Infidels — every­thing follows the great call of «modernization at all costs», resulting in an overall sound that has nothing to do with Dylan and who or what he really is. If you are willing to look past this produc­tion style, by all means, do so, and you may eventually find yourself rewarded. But if you are not one of those who need their daily dose of a Dylan epiphany, then why, you might ask yourself, should you ever want to listen to an «electropop Dylan» or an «adult contemporary Dylan», when there is plenty of quality Dylan lying around?

 

Arguably the worst nightmare of this record is ʽWhen The Night Comes Falling From The Skyʼ, a song that began its life as an uplifting polyphonic rocker with a Born In The USA kind of sound (the original version has since then been made available on Bootleg Series) and ended it as a heavily sanitized, depressing electronic dance track. Where «depressing» applies both to the change of mood from «angry / castigating / condescending» to «panicky / whiny / pathetic», and to the effect that the implosive electronic percussion casts on your nerves. It is particularly ironic that the final take was almost certainly influenced by ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ — the same «ominous» type of introduction, borrowing a part of those original chords — but if you are going to step in the same river twice, you might at least want to check for any recent dumps. This here is Bob Dylan, miscast as Kim Wilde; all that's missing is some of those hot dance moves to get the blood boiling. (Actually, he is trying to rock it just a little bit in the accompanying video, but I seriously doubt any of the kids were properly impressed. What's he got on Madonna?).

 

According to Ron Wood's memories, the man just didn't give a damn to whatever was happening around him — he wrote it the way he wanted, strummed his guitar and blew his harp the way he wanted, sang it the way he wanted, then left everything else, from overdubbing to mixing, to Fate. Maybe his idea was that Fate would, somehow, intervene and go on spreading her usual blessing, but this just wasn't going to be 1966 all over again, and much of what was going around was just plain crappy, to say the least. ʽTight Connection To My Heartʼ is one of his best contributions to the decade, a potentially gorgeous love anthem that could have been a masterpiece — but oh, those drums, oh, that robotic bass, oh, that awful echo! As if this wasn't enough, the credits list Mick Taylor as lead guitar player on that one, but where the hell is his better half? Who cut off something like half of the frequencies of his sound? Is that supposed to be «modern»?

 

It really becomes all the more painful when you start struggling to look past the «ragged glitz» and see these songs in their primary, imaginary incarnations. ʽEmotionally Yoursʼ is a beautiful ballad that should rank among Dylan's tenderest achievements (probably inspired by his romance with the backup singer, soon-to-be wife Carolyn Dennis) — and it certainly deserves a much more tasteful arrangement than the adult-contemporary keyboard soup it got here. ʽClean-Cut Kidʼ, with Wood on lead guitar, could have been a decent-sounding Stones-style rocker with a poignant, if a bit too banal, message on the evil influence of The System — instead, looks like The System's most evil influence has been on the recording and mixing process of the song it­self. ʽSomething's Burning, Babyʼ has a simplistic folk melody that could be taken in any direction — so why did the direction have to be this blend of simplistic New Age with equally simplistic New Wave, as if the listener is being shoved face down into a set of Casios and rhythmically dragged across all the switches and transistors?..

 

Small wonder that the only song that truly stood out back then and truly stands out up to this day is the coda of ʽDark Eyesʼ — credit must be given where it is due, as it was Arthur Baker's idea to finish the album on a minimalistic note: just Bob, his acoustic, and harmonica, like in the good old (oh so old) days. Dylan caught up on the idea, and came up with a song here that would not at all feel out of place on any of his early acoustic albums; you could very well swap it places with ʽRestless Farewellʼ, for instance, on the condition of getting a time machine to a 23-year old Dy­lan to sing it in a younger voice. He even falls back upon some of his old beatnik-style poetry here, but the overall subject, one of «total focus on beauty», remains clear and poignant. Too bad he was not able to focus on much of anything else, though.

 

When it comes to any sort of judgement, I am at a total loss here — it is one of those rare pesky situations where solid, appreciable substance violently clashes against abysmal form, and in ho­nor of its relative rarity, I would like to have a special honorary thumbs down for what might just be the worst production on a Dylan album ever (unless we live long enough to see Lady Gaga's Meat Dress produce him an electro-pop extravaganza), but to reserve a separate thumbs up for some of his most inspired and tightest songwriting of the entire decade. There! And now that it's done, I, too, want a lime paint jacket and a puzzled look on my face.

 

KNOCKED OUT LOADED (1986)

 

1) You Wanna Ramble; 2) They Killed Him; 3) Driftin' Too Far From Shore; 4) Precious Memories; 5) Maybe Someday; 6) Brownsville Girl; 7) Got My Mind Made Up; 8) Under Your Spell.

 

It would take more time to type up the names of all the musicians responsible for this record than to listen to all of its thirty-five minutes — two ominous signs for Dylan, whose best records have always tended to be recorded over brief periods, with minimal staff, and run for far longer than the usual 40-45 minutes; the «country-western» period of 1968-70 being a notable and perfectly intentional exception. But Knocked Out Loaded is not even a proper album, in a way. It con­sists of outtakes from previous sessions, throwaway pieces hastily and fuzzily knocked out (loaded) with members of Tom Petty's band during rehearsal breaks on the True Confessions tour, and a random selection of covers by various people, without any organizing principles or quality con­trol. Whatever in the world made Bob want to put this stuff out as his next LP is beyond me. Out-of-control drug and alcohol consumption on the tour seems to be out of the question, but so far, this sounds like the optimal explanation anyway.

 

Without Sly and Robbie at the wheel, the record sounds less electronic and «plastic» than Em­pire Burlesque, but its heavy reliance on synthesizers, echoes, and monotonous paid-by-the-book gospel background vocals, somehow ensures that everything is even more tired and boring than it used to be. The rock'n'roll numbers have no drive, the ballads have no feeling, and the melodic hooks are not even an active topic. You'd think that a Dylan/Petty collaboration, of all things, could have gone down real well (especially in the light of the Traveling Wilburys' revival just a couple years later), but ʽGot My Mind Made Upʼ turns out to be just a semi-improvised blues-rock jam without any redeeming qualities, other than maybe some nifty, but noisy acoustic slide playing, and even that is dissolved in the grayish production.

 

At least once the whole story borders on the ridiculous: Dylan covering Kris Kristofferson's fresh­ly written ʽThey Killed Himʼ, a young-adult retelling of the uneasy common fates of Mahat­ma Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus Christ Superstar. The song is trite from each and every point of view, melody and lyrics included; at least in the days of Self Portrait, Bob used to come up with interesting rearranging and artistic twists to justify inclusion of such material, but this is downright crazy — why take a bad song and cover it if you do absolutely nothing to compensate for the corny atmosphere? Then again, it was barely a year since Bob took part in the ʽWe Are The Worldʼ embarrassment (although that one at least made some sense in that some of the money went to charity; ʽThey Killed Himʼ will only begin making sense when Bob decides to throw in an extra verse on Kenny, but I don't know how well he gets along with South Park these days).

 

The one song that, in stark contrast with the rest of this «album», has usually gotten rave reviews was ʽBrownsville Girlʼ (formerly ʽNew Danville Girlʼ, as the tune dates back to the Empire Burlesque sessions). Its format is certainly unusual — not only does it return us to Dylan's «epic» length that we haven't really seen since the days of ʽJoeyʼ, but it also features alternating, «clashing» sets of lyrics that revolve around several sets of memories, one of which involves a movie starring Gregory Peck; ironically tinged «taunts» from Dylan's backup singers from time to time; and some sax solos that add some sort of muscular Springsteen grandeur to the procee­dings. In a different age, this could have worked. Unfortunately, the sound of the song is just as colorless and mucky as everything else on here — big stupid drums, meaningless guitar and key­board rhythms, echo and reverb all over the place, and a bombastic chorus whose bombast is only slightly louder than the bombast of everything else, so do not really hope for a grappling build-up effect. It is certainly an intriguing tune when compared to everything else around it, but truly that is not saying much.

 

Thumbs down, of course, although calling this «the worst Dylan album ever» or at least a wor­thy candidate and shooting fat fish in a tiny barrel would be acts of comparable importance — like I said, this isn't even a proper «album», more like an uninteresting drunk escapade of which Bob himself might not be retaining any particular memories. Had he ever stated that the songs were released by Columbia without his approval (again!), I think nobody would have a hard time believing him. Like that silly album from 1973, it is best to forget Knocked Out Loaded, as an object that adds nothing credibly positive or starkly negative to the man's legacy. Even the album sleeve is probably the silliest picture in Dylanology.

 

DOWN IN THE GROOVE (1988)

 

1) Let's Stick Together; 2) When Did You Leave Heaven; 3) Sally Sue Brown; 4) Death Is Not The End; 5) Had A Dream About You, Baby; 6) Ugliest Girl In The World; 7) Silvio; 8) Ninety Miles An Hour (Down A Dead End Street); 9) Shenandoah; 10) Rank Strangers To Me.

 

A slightly delayed twin brother to Knocked Out Loaded in almost everything, beginning with the somewhat ironically self-deprecating title, not to mention the approximately same short run­ning time, the surprisingly low ratio of originals to covers, and the rag-taggy origins: the album was scrapped together from at least six different sessions, and chronologically, the songs reach all the way back to the Infidels period. Small wonder, then, that it was received with even more hos­tility than its predecessor — and this time, there isn't even a single pretentious eleven-minute epic to feed as a juicy soup bone to the critical hounds.

 

On general terms, the record is certainly expendable: with such similar birth conditions, there is just no way one could condemn Knocked Out Loaded while at the same time patting its follow-up on the back. On a more particular note, Down In The Groove has always seemed ever so sli­ghtly more listenable to me, mainly because the production has improved a bit, and those rather pedestrian rockers that sounded all muddled and flaccid two years back now get a little extra bark by way of a sharper electric guitar sound and cleaner vocal mixing. Let's admit it, when the guitar and harmonica kick in at the start of ʽLet's Stick Togetherʼ, this does induce a bit of a jolt, doesn't it? Definitely a more intense and immediate sound here than on ʽYou Wanna Rambleʼ.

 

Furthermore, although ʽWhen Did You Leave Heavenʼ does greet you with a «plastic heaven» synthesizer onslaught, this is rather an exception: for the most part, Down In The Groove avoids soft adult-contemporary and concentrates on rock'n'roll — much of it simple, unassuming, and sometimes even humorous rock'n'roll, as if Bob was intentionally trying here to produce a solo match for his Traveling Wilburys image (or, rather, the reverse is more likely: early Wilburys material was being written and recorded at the same time as the first copies of Down In The Groove were finding their accursed way to the store shelves). In a different age, this wouldn't be such a bad choice, but for 1988, it was still a disaster.

 

As these rockers fly past you, one by one, there is nothing to distinguish them from one another — you get no idea of how «dear» they are to Bob himself, who sings them in the exact same monotonous tone, you sense nothing but bored professionalism from the backing bands, and at times, you start to suspect self-parody: I mean, what is something like ʽThe Ugliest Girl In The Worldʼ but self-parody? Play it back to back with ʽFrom A Buick 6ʼ and remind yourself of the difference — both songs poke fun at the singer's imaginary and slightly caricaturesque lover, but the former was all turbulence and garage rage, whereas this one is just a flat out dumb joke; too bad that the talents of Robert Hunter, the loyal / royal lyricist of the Grateful Dead, had to be wasted on this unfunny tripe.

 

Like its predecessor, Down In The Groove is usually let off the hook for just one song: ʽDeath Is Not The Endʼ, for which Bob is inexplainably joined by Full Force on backing vocals, is a quiet, suggestively «optimistic» outtake from the Infidels sessions, presented as a minimalistic gospel ballad, quietly mumbled and humbly arranged, in a very sharp contrast to the louder-than-good-taste-recommends-it sound of the rest of the album. It is repetitive and very sparse on musical ideas, but you can't go wrong with the nostalgic harmonica part, or the mesmerizing vocals, still connected through an invisible feeding tube to Bob's cauldron of Christian inspiration — Nick Cave, a big fan of Bob's Christianity, would later cover the song for his own spiritual purposes, and Nick's usually got a good taste in covers, so take his word for it.

 

Everything else is, at worst, ridiculous (ʽUgliest Girlʼ) or very boring (ʽWhen Did You Leave Heavenʼ), and, at best, mildly-pleasantly-listenable, like the acoustic rocker ʽSilvioʼ, punctuated for the pleasure of your attention by an extra ukulele part, but still coming across as a flimsy trifle for some reason. Maybe it would have sounded better on a Traveling Wilburys album. Even the attempt to cap off the record with something more subtle and sentimental, namely, the cover of Albert Burmley's gospel tune ʽRank Strangers To Meʼ, is only halfway credible: lazy guitar strum + echo-laden voice + dull backup singing = why should we bother? Thumbs down in the groove; much as I like disagreeing with mainstream criticism on Bob's low points, defending this album would be a disreputable affair. Funny enough, it does confirm the usual trend — the more time Bob Dylan spends on making a record, the worse it usually comes out. It's a good thing he never tried auditioning for Pink Floyd.

 

DYLAN & THE DEAD (1989)

 

1) Slow Train; 2) I Want You; 3) Gotta Serve Somebody; 4) Queen Jane Approximately; 5) Joey; 6) All Along The Watchtower; 7) Knockin' On Heaven's Door.

 

This album got such utterly vicious reviews when it came out that it seems to have forever turned Bob off further live albums — with the exception of Unplugged, where he was not really in con­trol of the situation, all subsequent stage experience would have to be experienced in front of the stage, or in the form of bootlegs that devoted fans would cherish anyway and critics would not take note of, unless they were professional dylanologists using those for research.

 

I cannot say that this decision makes me particularly sad, since listening and re-listening to Bob croak out his past glories with the voice of someone who's spent forty years too much in the desert is indeed an occupation for the truly faithful (who can afford the time and resources for a bootleg hunt). However, to stay on the objective side, Bob's voice still had some ring to it in 1989, and the negative reaction to the album was overplayed — no doubt, fueled way too much by the disappointing effects of his concurrent studio albums. With at least two, or maybe four, or maybe seven if you hated the Christian stuff, or maybe even eight if you also despised Street Legal, consecutive reputational flops, who would want to be positively attuned towards a live album, even if that live album was announced as a collaboration with one of the few bands everybody could expect to be a great match for Bob — the Grateful Dead?

 

Actually, critics and fans alike could consider themselves duped: where Before The Flood was truly «Dylan and The Band», the setlist being proportionally divided between the two, Dylan & The Dead is really just Dylan being backed by the Dead. The Dead, of course, did play their own set on that joint 1987 tour, and played it well enough for 1987 (the year of their «comeback» with In The Dark), but there were no plans to release a joint album, and a couple years later some­body must have thought it a great idea to put out Dylan's part on its own — surely being backed by the Dead must be like promoting the Dylan songs to the next plane of existence?

 

But whoever had that idea, be it Bob himself or some one-dimensional financial manager at Co­lumbia, never realized one thing: the Dead are not «Booker T & The MGs» — they are well worth it when they play their own material, but they are not at all guaranteed to instantaneously add a hundred points to the power of any random song they are given to play. On their own al­bums, they often struggle with covers, unless the covers in question are traditional folk or country songs, and on Dylan & The Dead, they have a hard enough time just keeping up with Bob's basic needs, let alone add any serious creativity or wild energy. Jerry Garcia does add some nice, fluent and expressive solos to ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ, and the band harmonizes well on key on the finale of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ (which they thankfully do in a non-reggae arrangement), and the rhythm section never really falls apart or anything, but that's about it.

 

Bob himself is still trying to sing from time to time, and it would be wrong to flat-out accuse him of being uninspired or somnambulant, particularly in retrospect when he's been sounding like that (only hoarser) through more than twenty years of the Never Ending Tour and doing fine. It is in­teresting that he is not giving up on the Christian stuff: with such a short running length, two songs from Slow Train Coming might seem like overkill, but they are the two best ones, and they are taken quite seriously, even if the repetitive codas to both seem hopelessly overextended. It is noteworthy that he insists on having ʽJoeyʼ in the set, as if provoking the critics (who had al­ways seen the song as the main flaw on Desire's multi-tissue body).

 

It is distressing that the once powerful, sneering, condescending aura of ʽQueen Jane Appro­ximatelyʼ has now turned into an old man's feeble whine, but it is also almost perversely funny — here is this guy who just spent twenty years waiting for Queen Jane to show up and finally see him, to the point of almost beg­ging her now, but no dice. Looks like the Queen still hasn't gotten sick of all this repetition, after all. And who is more «tired of yourself and all of your creations» now, in the end — Queen Jane or Robert Zimmerman? I cannot help but wonder if Bob himself felt the presence of this unintentional self-irony in his performance.

 

That said, it would not be correct of me to counteract critical opinion with a thumbs up, because there is certainly no way Dylan & The Dead would be anywhere close to the level of Bob's clas­sic live output — or, for that matter, any Bob Dylan live performance, including the one I've been to personally, dating from before the period when his voice first turned whiny, then wheezy, and then crackly like a bunch of dry firewood. It is particularly unbearable to hear him pull his usual vocal stunts with that voice — for instance, singing directly against the melody on the chorus of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ; it takes superior intellectual effort to understand that he is «expe­rimenting» as usual, rather than simply forgetting that somebody is playing in a certain key be­hind his back, and why should we waste our intellectual efforts on Dylan & The Dead? It's just a late period live album, good enough for one listen. If you have never been to a Dylan show and are considering whether or not to go, give it a try — this is the closest official sound to a 21st century Dylan show you can get, although his current backing bands are certainly better suited to his needs than the Dead were in 1987 (but the voice now takes even more getting used to).

 

OH MERCY (1989)

 

1) Political World; 2) Where Teardrops Fall; 3) Everything Is Broken; 4) Ring Them Bells; 5) Man In The Long Black Coat; 6) Most Of The Time; 7) What Good Am I; 8) Disease Of Conceit; 9) What Was It You Wanted; 10) Shooting Star.

 

This album shared pretty much the same fate as the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels, released the same year — when they came out, both seemed like such a breath of fresh air after several dis­appointments in a row that the critical world went a-droolin'. Later on, as time went by, the Eigh­ties started fading out of sight, and albums such as Voodoo Lounge and Time Out Of Mind be­gan (quite justifiedly) eclipsing their predecessors in terms of depth, melodicity, production, and general adequacy, the 1989 «comebacks» gradually came to be regarded as little more than tepid half-steps on the way to a genuine recovery. For Dylan especially, the shadow of Time, univer­sally hailed as his undisputed «late period masterpiece», has plunged Oh Mercy into nearly com­plete obscurity: at the very least, few people remember any individual songs as «classics».

 

But I feel kinda sorry about all this. First of all, Oh Mercy definitely was a comeback album, much more so than Steel Wheels — the latter was more of a «formal» comeback, announcing that the Stones have patched up their differences and got together after a two-year break, but it did not exactly show us a band that was getting back on the right track, since they'd never really left it. Oh Mercy, on the other hand, did give us back our Dylan — after six years of confusion, total uncertainty of where he actually belonged in this new world, occasional gross embarrass­ments the likes of which he'd never fallen prey to before (such as the disco production of ʽWhen The Night...ʼ), this was the first album where he at least seemed to be back in control, knowing what exactly he was doing and why he was doing it.

 

Clearly, this could not have happened without falling upon the proper producer — Daniel Lanois, who is responsible for the resuscitation of Bob's late-period career as much as Tom Wilson was res­ponsible for Bob's early sound. It was Lanois who truly introduced Dylan to the good possibi­lities of the new technological era, showing that the new production standards were not limited to a simple reliance on electronic drums and atmospheric synthesizer backdrops. Instead, you could take real musicians and mix their parts in such a way that would emphasize, colorize, and maybe even «mystify» them, without any dehumanization involved. All of a sudden, the music behind the words began to matter once again, and this, in turn, revitalized the words: after the «anything-goes» approach of Knocked Out Loaded and Down In The Groove, we are suddenly back to a world where words, chords, and moods form a meaningful unity. It's not an artistic paradise, but it is a meaningful unity.

 

Not a particularly uplifting or optimistic unity, mind you: Oh Mercy opens another period of utter bleakness for Bob, not nearly as deeply personalized as it was on Street Legal, but nowhere near as formulaically Christianized as on Slow Train Coming, either. Renewed interest in ma­king music here corresponds to a renewed feel of disgust for just about everything in sight, be it politics, social relations, personal relations, or even himself. Small wonder that the lead (and only) single from the album was ʽEverything Is Brokenʼ, a song whose lyrics probably did not take more than five minutes to write, as they mostly just list everything that is broken, but whose mood is quite typical of the album — and also reflects Lanois' deep understanding of what sort of sound goes best with these words, as he punctuates each bar with a «breaking» guitar chord. And it is not a deadly depressed song, either: it's got an angry, punkish overtone to it, not coinciden­tally opening with a rhythm pattern taken directly from ʽBrand New Cadillacʼ.

 

Grim acoustic riffs, steel guitar stings, and electric howls in the background actually welcome us from the very beginning — this ain't the Traveling Wilburys, folks: this is a ʽPolitical Worldʼ, where paranoid musical sounds are the norm and "you can travel anywhere and hang yourself there / You always got more than enough rope". Together with ʽEverything Is Brokenʼ, these two songs, clumsily and falsely separated by the less interesting country waltz ʽWhere Teardrops Fallʼ, set the basic tone and deliver the basic message of the whole record. Grim, morose, skeptical, but not up to suicidal heights or anything.

 

Most of the songs that follow are, however, slower, moodier, and folksier/bluesier in nature, mar­king the transition to a much more retro-oriented sound and reflecting an increased interest in pre-war music. A song like ʽMan In The Long Black Coatʼ, for instance, with the lyrics properly ad­justed to reflect the correct time period, could have come from many an old folk singer, except that Lanois also adjusts it for atmosphere (such as adding some cricket effects to go hand in hand with "crickets are chirpin', the water is high", etc.), and puts a tinge of dark mystery all over the place — if the lyrics themselves do not get you a-wonderin' who the "man in the long black coat" that whisked away the protagonist really is, the deep rumbling bass and the «crickets» just might. (Not that there's a lot of wondering to be involved, but still, this is a relatively new twist in Dy­lan's relations with the Devil, curious enough to have the song covered by an act as unlikely as the reunited Emerson, Lake & Palmer several years later).

 

It is true, I suppose, that the actual songwriting here is not phenomenal or anything. It'd been a long, long time since Dylan was able to come up with brand new melodic ideas, and his failing voice, now down to just a few miserable shades of color, can no longer grip the listener with odd tone changes — while he still watches his phrasing quite carefully (unlike his live shows), all the phrasing mostly consists of hoarse croaking. But Oh Mercy goes for atmosphere, not hooks. Yes, sometimes it feels like Bob is getting a bit out of focus, but not on stuff like ʽWhat Was It You Wantedʼ, bitter, direct, and featuring some really mean-blown harmonica, or ʽWhat Good Am Iʼ, one of the most self-critical songs he ever wrote.

 

When the time comes to prune and filter your collection, and weed out all the music that «does not really matter» and leave in music that does, even an album like Empire Burlesque, which has a lot of individual benefits going for it, might have to go eventually — because its individual parts are greater than its cohesive significance, misguided as the whole thing was. Oh Mercy, with its imaginative «deep dark forest»-style production and deeply personal nature, is the oppo­site: separately, most of the songs are lacking, but together, they form a realistic and credible picture of Bob the artist at the time. You may not want to keep coming back to it any time soon, but that would be no serious reason to deprive it of a thumbs up.

 

UNDER THE RED SKY (1990)

 

1) Wiggle Wiggle; 2) Under The Red Sky; 3) Unbelievable; 4) Born In Time; 5) T.V. Talkin' Song; 6) 10,000 Men; 7) 2 x 2; 8) God Knows; 9) Handy Dandy; 10) Cat's In The Well.

 

I think that most of the critics misunderstood this album when it came out. Most of the reviews were starkly negative — after the oh-so-obvious and oh-so-welcome comeback of Oh Mercy, here was a cold shower that threateningly hinted: Oh Mercy was just an accident, and now we are back to the washed-up state of its predecessors. Rote, stale, toothless, simplistic rock'n'roll. And the lyrics? "Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a gypsy queen, wiggle wiggle wiggle all dressed in green". "One by one, they followed the sun; two by two, to their lovers they flew". "Handy dandy, just like sugar and candy". "Cat's in the well, the wolf is looking down". This is Dylan? Sounds more like Dr. Seuss on a bad day.

 

The only exception from the crowd was Robert Christgau, who fabulously gave the record an A- and populated his brief review with phrases like: "aiming frankly for the evocative, the fabulistic, the biblical, Dylan exploits narrative metaphor as an adaptive mechanism that allows him to inhabit a ʽmatureʼ pessimism he knows isn't the meaning of life" — as much as we sometimes hate The Dean for a variety of aesthetic reasons, this is clearly just a provocative hoot: The Dean thinks he can claim as good a right to be bullshitting his audience as Bob Dylan has a right to be bullshitting his. Hence, the only real difference is that most critics thought Bob had produced an unintentionally bad record, whereas Christgau probably thought it was quite intentional.

 

What they missed was the dedication of the record — «to Gabby Gabby Goo», later revealed to be Bobby's little daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. The dedication explains it all: Under The Red Sky is nothing but Robert Zimmerman's idea of a «children's record», designed and executed through the vision frame of Bob Dylan. What would a four-year old kid do with Blonde On Blonde or Blood On The Tracks? A four-year old kid would much rather wiggle wiggle wiggle, or learn to count to ten, or hear about the cat and the wolf. And if most of the lyrics are absurdist and do not make any literal sense, the same can be said about quite a large percentage of children's literature as well.

 

Consequently, Under The Red Sky should not be put in the same league with Knocked Out Loa­ded. It is clearly Dylan's most «Traveling Wilburies-style» album, sharing the general light­weight atmosphere of that band, but then it goes further than that, stripping the melodies and the lyrical structures to their bare bones, and not even beginning to pretend to any depth, seriousness, or nuanced atmosphere. Unlike Knocked Out Loaded, Under The Red Sky knows exactly what it is doing, with one exception: as a «writer for kids», Dylan is not particularly well experienced, and the «fun» component of the album seems underdone.

 

That this is a specially concocted «Dylan lite» variety is most evident on ʽHandy Dandyʼ, I think, which opens with a bombastic organ riff, very similar to the one of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ — but the lyrics are sheer nonsense, their delivery is rather expressionless, and the backing band has no particular idea of what sort of feelings it should be trying to convey. Most of the other «rock» songs are based on well-known rock'n'roll patterns (ʽUnbelievableʼ opens like ʽHoney Don'tʼ; ʽCat's In The Wellʼ is really ʽLucilleʼ; ʽ10,000 Menʼ is ʽGood Morning Little Schoolgirlʼ, etc.) that Dylan explores with gusto, probably drawing his inspiration from those early high school days when playing in a rock'n'roll band was still the only life for him — in other words, he is not simply writing for children, he is sort of reliving his own childhood. I guess you're allowed to do that as you turn 50, no?

 

The backing band assembled for the purpose is quite impressive — with guest appearances from Al Kooper (I assume it is him responsible for the organ on ʽHandy Dandyʼ, for obvious reasons) to Elton John to Slash to Jimmie and even Stevie Ray Vaughan (on ʽGod Knowsʼ). George Har­rison makes a notable appearance on the title track (I can only assume the pretty slide solos there come from George's hand), Dave Crosby sings backing vocals, Bruce Hornsby contributes piano runs, and producer Don Was adds his own guitar skills. And all of this talent thrown together for a thirty-minute long kiddie album? Truly and verily, nobody but Dylan can pull off a stunt like that and get away with just a few negative reviews.

 

If we preserve that angle of view, Under The Red Sky has no highlights or lowlights. ʽGod Knowsʼ is actually a bit more serious than everything else, both lyrically and musically (due lar­ge­ly to Stevie Ray's participation), but it is lurking at the rear and does not add much coloring to the rest of the album. A deliberate throwaway, it would have fared much better had it been pro­perly advertised — but Dylan hates proper advertisement, and it is a hatred I can empathize with. As an experiment, you can leave it in storage for your own little «Gabby Gabby Goos» and see for yourself whether Robert's paternal instincts were functioning correctly. Or, if you are ever in the mood to play the fool, you can «wiggle like a big fat snake» yourself, provided you have no­thing better to do.

 

One last word about the album cover — I think the «Dylan in the desert» image, which, if you do not look at it hard enough, seems very much like a «Dylan in the dumps» image, generated more harm for the overall critical impression than the songs themselves. You listen to ʽWiggle Wig­gleʼ, you look back at the cover, you listen to the title track, your glance returns to the cover again, and you do get the impression of a completely washed-up intellectual tramp, with nothing but sheer pity or utter disgust to evoke from the consumer. The photo and the songs just do not go together, no matter how much you twist the angle. Then again, come to think of it, Desire was probably the last time when Bob actually gave a proper hoot about the shapes, colors, and facial expressions on the album sleeve. I do wonder, though, if «Gabby Gabby Goo» actually enjoyed all the ashen grey on that photo.

 

GOOD AS I BEEN TO YOU (1992)

 

1) Frankie & Albert; 2) Jim Jones; 3) Black Jack Davey; 4) Canadee-I-O; 5) Sitting On Top Of The World; 6) Little Maggie; 7) Hard Times; 8) Step It Up And Go; 9) Tomorrow Night; 10) Arthur McBride; 11) You're Gonna Quit Me; 12) Diamond Joe; 13) Froggie Went A-Courtin'.

 

«Going back to one's roots» is a trick that's tried and true, but, to be perfectly honest, Dylan never really strayed too far away from his roots in the first place — that solid foundation of folk, blues, and country styles had always remained at the core of every «original» song the man went on to write. From that point of view, the stylistic and emotional distance between the much reviled Under The Red Sky and the much lauded Good As I Been To You is not really that far. But yes indeed, on a formal basis, here we have Dylan going back to his roots in a way he'd never gone back before — thirty years on, revisiting the exact same territory he'd started out upon, with his self-titled debut of old blues and folk covers.

 

It does make sense to play those two albums back-to-back and see the difference. In 1962, Bob Dylan was an inexperienced Jewish kid from Minnesota, arrogantly challenging himself to rival old weathered black bluesmen. The only way he could rise to that challenge was by radically re­inventing the songs, recasting them in his own new image, with a little extra irony and an already strong beatnik flavor. Time goes by, and now, in the early 1990s, he goes back to that same well, digging in the archives and selecting even more tracks from the past for publication as part of The Bootleg Series — but by now, he is fairly weathered and battered himself, and a little washed up and low on ideas, and the solution presents itself: why not try it again, but this time in a perfectly «authentic» manner? Given that he really really loves those old melodies and all? Wouldn't thirty years be a sufficient learning period?

 

Totally stripped down and reduced once again to pure acoustic guitar and harmonica, dumping everything that could be dumped, Bob handpicks himself thirteen oldies from the depths of the folk and blues tradition — a few of which will be easily recognized even by amateurs (ʽSittin' On Top Of The Worldʼ, for instance, or the old jazz ballad ʽTomorrow Nightʼ, done by Lonnie John­son, LaVern Baker, Elvis, and probably a dozen other artists), but many of the rest are relatively obscure sea shanties or jug band dance numbers where the listener would have to do some serious digging to uncover the prototypes. This is quite easy in the Internet era, of course, but in 1992, access to golden oldies was still limited, so for many a Bob Dylan fan, Good As I Been To You must have contained plenty of revelations.

 

There is no serious point in discussing individual highlights or lowlights here. Any review of an album like this begs for an answer to just one question — does it or doesn't it? Most critics have agreed that it does, and I sort of agree as well. «Sort of», because nowadays we can all scrutinize these acoustic monuments of popular genius the way they were recorded by various artists in pre-war times — cleaned up, remastered, still a bit crackly, but preserving some of that old spirit for us all. Whether we really need them so faithfully redone by Bob Dylan is a complex question.

 

Naturally, it all sounds great. It's been a long time since Bob rode the old six-string with so much verve and passion — his technicality hasn't improved all that much since 1962, but it wasn't too bad to begin with, and most of the time he is being well in tune and throwing around inspired lead lines every now and then. His voice, having played such a mean trick with him around the time of Under The Red Sky, is now perfectly suited to these shanties and nursery rhymes — grandpa music, played round the fire for the grandchildren to frolick around to. And there is enough sty­listic and emotional diversity, from the unvarnished dark balladry of ʽFrankie & Albertʼ to the medieval kiddie folktale stuff of ʽFroggie Went A-Courtin'ʼ.

 

Whether it would have significant replay value, though, is a different matter. Like Bob's born-again stuff, this is something that had to be done, and it could be argued that without this album or its sequel, we would not have seen and enjoyed the true late period revival of Bob Dylan. It is also well worth studying for all those who only have a vague idea of where all those wonderful Bob Dylan songs are coming from — he even went all the way to include several prototypes of his own classics, e. g. ʽBlack Jack Daveyʼ is the true father of ʽBoots Of Spanish Leatherʼ, and ʽJim Jonesʼ would eventually become ʽDesolation Rowʼ. But the record is really more of a well-meaning lesson in folk musical history, now given by a seasoned pro, than an original musical creation in its own right.

 

No question about it — on the general curve, Good As I Been To You was a great improvement over the previous album, and in terms of its minimalistic production and intimacy, probably the best-sounding Dylan record since at least his Christian period. Yet I do not see myself coming back to it very often: its impact is really at its highest if it is taken in the strict context of Dylan's entire career. In that context, it gets an assured thumbs up; out of that context, it is merely a curiosity. But on a positive note, if you memorize all the verses to ʽFroggie Went A-Courtin'ʼ, that's at least one hell of a useful mental exercise.

 

WORLD GONE WRONG (1993)

 

1) World Gone Wrong; 2) Love Henry; 3) Ragged & Dirty; 4) Blood In My Eyes; 5) Broke Down Engine; 6) Delia; 7) Stack A Lee; 8) Two Soldiers; 9) Jack-A-Roe; 10) Lone Pilgrim.

 

Dylan has never been an enemy to sequels, and many of his finest records come in «pairs» or «trios», be they acoustic folk, electric rock'n'roll, or Jesusfests — and since Good As I Been To You got such good reviews, a quick follow-up along the same lines would appear quite natural. But it wouldn't be true Dylan, either, if the follow-up were observing exactly the same angle. One more page had to be turned, so, for World Gone Wrong, Dylan chose a «long black cloak» to wrap it in. Where the first record was essentially the soundtrack to an old, ragged traveling min­strel show, with women and children all equally welcome to sing along to ʽFroggie Went A-Cou­rtin'ʼ, World Gone Wrong takes a more serious, and usually, quite deadly view of the world.

 

Bob himself, clean-shaven now and well-trimmed, is posing on the front cover in the guise of an undertaker — sharing a quiet moment with a cup of coffee and a candle right after the services have been held. Sure enough, the title track, if taken literally, only documents a nasty breakup between the man and his gal, but there are so many other nasty things happening later on that no­body will want to take it literally: «world gone wrong» does refer to the whole world, not just the protagonist's own personal world.

 

Once again, all the songs are traditional oldies, some fairly well known (like Blind Willie Mc­Tell's ʽBroke Down Engineʼ), some excavated by Bob from fairly obscure sources, but given a thorough explanation in the liner notes, which he wrote himself, almost as if he really really wanted us to digest and enjoy these songs on their own exclusive terms, rather than in the form of «yet another Bob Dylan album». Of course, that would be impossible, and people still ended up writing about how Bob really managed to breathe new life into them old tunes, and you can't blame them: even if he truly wanted to perform ʽWorld Gone Wrongʼ and ʽBlood In My Eyesʼ the same way they were done by the Mississippi Sheiks sixty years earlier, he couldn't have done it. But then the Mississippi Sheiks, after all, were playing for popular entertainment, hiding the songs' grieving heart behind a wall of lively, upbeat fiddles and guitars. Bob Dylan, at best, is playing for popular education rather than popular entertainment — and he has no obligation, to his record label or to his audience, to whitewash any of the feelings.

 

Consequently, World Gone Wrong is one of Dylan's bleakest albums, full to the brim with murder ballads and depressed blues, and, in its own way, paving the road to Time Out Of Mind, whose artistic success was, beyond any doubt, at least partly the result of inspiration drawn from recording these covers. With one or two exceptions, there is hardly even any harmonica on here: harmonica is known to liven up the atmosphere, and Dylan does not need that for his current pur­pose. Instead, he invests it all in his guitar playing, choosing the saddest chord sequences in his repertoire to match the lyrics and vocal intonations. And if there might have been occasional que­stions as to whether his voice was really suitable to sing stuff like ʽTomorrow Nightʼ, no such problem is evident here.

 

With the themes and moods so consistent, highlights vs. lowlights are impossible to discuss, so we shall bypass any song-by-song comments and get out the general judgement: World Gone Wrong is a more important album than Good As I Been To You, since it is more conceptual, and the concept is carried out in the spirit of Bob Dylan, not in the spirit of those old folk guys, God bless 'em, who had preserved those songs for us, on tape and shellac, back when the spirit of Bob Dylan was not just non-existent, but pretty much unthinkable. It is tempting to compare it with Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, which came out three years later and were quite obviously inspired by this album (two of the songs, ʽStagger Leeʼ and ʽHenry Leeʼ, are the same as ʽStack A Leeʼ and ʽLove Henryʼ) — but Cave, when it comes to such matters, usually goes all the way, building up a heavy-hitting atmosphere of doom and gloom; Bob wouldn't have been able to do it if just for the reason of not having Nick's vocal capacities, and his delivery is far more under­stated, and takes more time to sink in if you are in the mood for acute depression.

 

The record ends on a spiritual note — ʽLone Pilgrimʼ, an anthem pulled out of The Sacred Harp, calms us down after all the tales of grief and woe, once again reminding, in a traditional way now, that «death is not the end», because all the good pilgrims simply go home when they die. Whether this could be any consolation to a non-religious person is unclear, but Dylan has constructed this whole album from an obviously religious point of view (and, for that matter, he had never offi­cially rebuked his Christianity), and if he wants this emotional flourish — the world may have gone wrong, but not Heaven — he's got every right to have it, and still get his thumbs up rating.

 

MTV UNPLUGGED (1995)

 

1) Tombstone Blues; 2) Shooting Star; 3) All Along The Watchtower; 4) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 5) John Brown; 6) Rainy Day Women #12 & 35; 7) Desolation Row; 8) Dignity; 9) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 10) Like A Rolling Stone; 11) With God On Your Side.

 

When MTV approached Dylan with their still-relatively-fresh «unplugged» franchise, the man eagerly accepted the invitation, hoping to use it as a pretext for playing some of the material from his last two acoustic albums. However, it soon became obvious that this was not at all what the MTV people had in mind, since MTV people were setting the whole thing up for MTV audiences, and what sort of MTV audience would want to sit through an entire show of acoustic murder bal­lads and ʽFroggie Went A-Courtin'ʼ? Eventually, Bob just had to give in and agree to play «the usual» — the only oddities on the setlist are ʽJohn Brownʼ, an old protest song from 1962 that Bob never got around to officially release, and ʽDignityʼ, an outtake from the Oh Mercy sessions (another Oh Mercy song, ʽShooting Starʼ, is also on the setlist, indicating that Bob still regarded Oh Mercy as his last «proper» studio album up to date).

 

Given this situation, one could suggest that, perhaps, Bob would end up sounding disinterested and distant as a result, but most such predictions usually underestimate Mr. Zimmerman. After all, good or bad, all the performances would go on tape, and he was not at all interested in letting his reputation go to waste in the eyes of young MTV viewers. Consequently, the performance has him totally involved — as best he can, with that ever-deteriorating voice of his and with a back­ing band that has no immediately recognizable names, but is probably threatened into working as hard as possible. Indeed, as they launch into ʽTombstone Bluesʼ, with Brendan O'Brien playing the Hammond in Al Kooper mode, and Bucky Baxter violating channel rules by adding electric slide guitar licks in the background (because what would ʽTombstone Bluesʼ be without at least a little electricity?), what we hear is a strong echo of the «real thing» — the old hipster Dylan from 1965 — as compared to say, the relatively lacklustre, bite-less version from Real Live a decade ago, where the slowed-down tempo and the time signature change simply ate it all up.

 

From there on, it is all at least pleasant, and at most, inspiring — ʽDesolation Rowʼ, reimagined as a country-tinged ballad from the era of Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, being one of the major highlights of the show; ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ shedding its poorly fitted reggae coat and returning to its stately gospel roots; and some nice steel guitar solos adding new spice to ʽThe Times They Are A-Changin'ʼ. ʽJohn Brownʼ will be enjoyable to everyone who liked the 1992-93 albums, and ʽDignityʼ is a rather pedestrian blues-rocker, but played with enough martial energy to keep it up for about six minutes.

 

Most importantly, the Unplugged album is the last record where Bob's voice, old and frail as it already is, is nevertheless free of the «gargling croak» that would already be in full swing two years later. This means that he can still boast some sort of technical and emotional range in his performances, and even hit some high notes every once in a while. On many of his contemporary live shows, he did not really care about this either way; but for those young MTV viewers, he does, and delivers credible — in fact, occasionally haunting — versions of ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ and ʽWith God On Your Sideʼ (the latter song requires a particularly versatile mode of singing, and the man actually hits all the right notes! Just filter out all the nasality and it's al­most as good as in the old days).

 

Keeping this in mind, please forgive the inexperienced audience for not recognizing ʽDesolation Rowʼ until Bob actually says "desolation row", and then they all start clapping like crazy. If these were more or less the same people that sat in during the Nirvana and Alice In Chains shows, this delayed reaction is understandable — but some people might have gone home that evening with a little revolution taking place in their minds, because the show was really damn good. The video version is well worth owning as well: not only does it feature the complete show (with an addi­tional ʽLove Minus Zero/No Limitʼ, otherwise only available on limited European editions of the CD), but Bob also cuts a pretty cool figure, sporting 1966-style dark shades and an overall «mys­tery look» that he'd cobbled together around the late 1980s and still carefully preserves up to this day (no more silly "thank yous" to the audience, for instance). All in all, a profitable thumbs up, even though, for obvious reasons, Unplugged will hardly have a chance to go down in history as one of his biggest live triumphs (unlike, say, Clapton's).

 

TIME OUT OF MIND (1997)

 

1) Love Sick; 2) Dirt Road Blues; 3) Standing In The Doorway; 4) Million Miles; 5) Trying To Get To Heaven; 6) 'Til I Fell In Love With You; 7) Not Dark Yet; 8) Cold Irons Bound; 9) Make You Feel My Love; 10) Can't Wait; 11) Highlands.

 

The first thing you will probably notice about the album is that its last track goes on for 16 and a half minutes — longer than ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ! — and, more than that, it is also called ʽHighlandsʼ, which is no more reminiscent of Robert Burns than echoing the afore­men­tioned title. Then there is another thing worth noting — that the running length of the album is 72 minutes, which may, of course, simply be a usual tribute to the growing capacities of the CD era, but, for that matter, this was also the exact running length of Blonde On Blonde. Coinci­dence? Most likely so, but who's to tell there wasn't something going on a subconscious level?

 

It is irrelevant whether critical opinion «overrated» or «underrated» Time Out Of Mind when it came out, hailing the record as that particular miraculous offering from the old man that every­body was secretly hoping for, but nobody dared to predict in the open. What matters is that most people felt a strong tug, felt that the record was speaking to them in deep, mysterious ways that had, for a long time, seemed completely blocked off and forgotten. In a way, it is the Dylan of Blonde On Blonde speaking here. The real Dylan, some might say — the one who got frozen in time after the motorcycle accident and was replaced by the Dylan of The Basement Tapes and the Dylan of Blood On The Tracks, a first-class replacement but not exactly the same thing. Now, thirty years later, the Dylan of 1966 has been let out of the fridge — and no, the refrigera­tion process did not stop him from growing older, but it did freeze the evolution of talent and the personal history. No Rolling Thunder, no born-again Christianism, no Eighties' crisis.

 

What we have is a man who fell asleep thirty years ago, and is now waking up — in a cold, dis­tant world that still feels like a dream (courtesy of Daniel Lanois' production devices). That is ʽLove Sickʼ, which, if anything, creates the atmosphere of a barren, collapsed environment, de­void of sentient life-forms: "I'm walking through the streets that are dead", backed with a drip-drip-dripping organ pattern (either Bob's own beating heart or the ominous tick of the last clock left alive on the planet) against which distant keyboards and slide guitars play a small army of haunting ghosts. Formally, the song is about a lost or unreachable love, but you'd never guess it without the lyrics — my first reaction would be «last survivor of a nuclear holocaust».

 

Although ʽLove Sickʼ does set the tone, and is probably the one song most responsible for the al­bum's reputation as «Dylan's depressive masterpiece», Time Out Of Mind in general is not really about depression. There are some formally optimistic numbers here as well (particularly romantic ballads like ʽMake You Feel My Loveʼ), and the famous refrain of one of the album's key songs ("it's not dark yet, but it's getting there"), when you stop to think about it, is not really delivered with the kind of ominous gloom you'd expect to accompany such a phrase, but rather with an attitude of «wise amusement». The Dylan of Blonde On Blonde, frozen in time and now resuscitated to right all the wrongs, refuses to get too angry, too sad, or too smitten by any sort of emotions. He has learned to be able to acknowledge all the problems without getting too fussy, too whiny, or too opinionated about it.

 

Which is, ultimately, the reason for all the hoopla — with Time Out Of Mind crackling out of your speakers, you might feel, first time in years, that once again, Dylan has an edge over you. For a long time, his albums posed no questions, or if they did, the first one was «why exactly did I just waste time on this when I could rather have given another spin to Highway 61?» But now, all of a sudden, there is this blast of deep alien wisdom, unfathomable and perplexing. A put-on, perhaps? A front? These are questions that one can only answer for oneself. My answer is simple — the purpose of Dylan's entire life was to blur the difference between back and front, between put-ons and sincere confessions. But the vibe I get from this album is just exactly the kind of vibe I would expect from a smart, seen-it-all 57-year old dude with artistic talent and a keen sense of taste. Except that its particular effect is impossible to describe in words.

 

Of course, Lanois has to take a lot of credit for the album; he is the reason why all of the follow-ups never quite received the same amount of acclaim. Although his production stamp is easily recognizable on any album, he knows how to be versatile, and makes lots of small, but important shifts from the approach used on Oh Mercy in order to accommodate Bob's current needs and, most particularly, Bob's vocal shift — over the eight years that separate their two collaborations, that voice has lost the last traces of color, and is now reduced to a hoarse, sandpapered state that needs special treatment. Lanois provides that treatment with gusto, matching most of the instru­ments to the voice — yes, they too, particularly the harmonicas and the organs, sound like they've been sandpapered a-plenty.

 

Most importantly, though, is the ghostly aspect of the album. It does not really have any particu­larly memorable multi-note riffs or complex lead lines; it's more as if it was all constructed from a perfectly engineered set of musical moans, wails, creaks, squeaks, squawks, blimps, and blurts. Listen to ʽCan't Waitʼ, for instance, which basically sounds like a series of squeaky doors opening and closing, as if their hinges got plenty of time to rust up while Bob was still waiting. Or ʽMil­lion Milesʼ, where Jim Dickinson's pump organ is walking a shaky, repetitive, never-ending walk against the other instruments, echoing Bob's refrain of "I try to get closer, but I'm still a million miles from you" — sure you are, if the world is running away from under your feet in the guise of half a dozen minimalist guitar and keyboard parts, scattered around the speakers.

 

Many, if not most, of the songs «scrap themselves together» — beginning as a disjointed series of sonic happenings, eventually falling together in a surprisingly tightly coordinated groove. The groove is sometimes completely democratic, but the best songs are probably the ones where there is a dominating force — such as the deep, hopping bassline of ʽCold Irons Boundʼ, appearing on the horizon at 0:14 into the song and completely determining its grim, gruff face. Dylan won the Grammy for Best Vocal Performance here, but, frankly speaking, his vocals are on the level through the entire album — the award should have gone to Lanois for Best Cold Storm Front Arrangement, with the bass, snappy guitars, and snowy organ tugging away at the listener like a bunch of really pissed-off North winds.

 

The Blonde On Blonde connection, upon which I sort of hung up this review, does not entirely rest on imaginary symmetries — for instance, if you listen to ʽStanding In The Doorwayʼ closely enough, you are bound to hear echoes of ʽJust Like A Womanʼ in the guitar lines; and the organ parts on ʽTrying To Get To Heavenʼ (among others) are almost certainly played with Al Kooper's work on ʽOne Of Us Must Knowʼ (among others) well fixed in the mind of the current organ player. This, too, is taken care of by Lanois, who does his best to reward us with nostalgic memo­ries of the «thin wild mercury sound» from time to time — not always, so as not to turn the whole deal into unabashed nostalgia, but frequently enough to keep our minds well set on the past.

 

ʽHighlandsʼ, of course, is really no ʽLowlandsʼ, nor does it even try to, apart from the superficial analogies. It's really more of a somber Dire Straits-style bluesy number (you could very easily visualize it as sung and played by Knopfler), and when taken on its own, it has no reason what­soever to drag on for sixteen minutes. In fact, you won't really lose track of the integrity of Time Out Of Mind if you turn it off at any time — be it three, six, or ten minutes into the song; lyrics excluded, that is, since the whole piece is supposed to be Bob's artistic testament — "my heart's in the highlands" may echo Scottish sentiments, but the «highlands» that Bob is really talking about ac­tually happen to be much higher than the peak of Ben Nevis. So it's a very important song, even if you are not swayed over with its monotonous, almost robotic groove — but at this point, Bob has no interest in swaying, converting, or mesmerizing you. He is being completely adequate to himself, and even the odd story about his encounter with a restaurant waitress that he throws in the middle comes across as perfectly natural, nothing to be amazed or irritated at. The man is really quite at peace with himself, despite all the seeming tension and worry.

 

Without going into boring discussions on whether the album really stands up to Bob's highest standards, is as good as or better than his «classic» stuff, etc., etc., let's just say that this is the perfect album for a 57-year old veteran with a lengthy career behind his back. When Dylan just started out, in the early 1960s, he was already fascinated by those strange blues tunes about death, redemption, and the Heavenly way — which he understood and interpreted from his perspective of a smart, reclusive, rebellious youngster. Thirty-five years later, that reclusiveness and rebel­liousness have been burned down, charred and transformed into clouds of black smoke, but the smoke is completely organic and natural.

 

Dylan himself has denied that the album was, in any way, connected to his near-death experience later that year, as he was struggling with histoplasmosis (the album's release was delayed until September, by which time Bob had recuperated) — which makes this an eerie coincidence, since Time Out Of Mind really does sound a lot like a typical album for somebody whose intention it is to make final peace with the world, and prepare himself for a better place somewhere out there. Regardless of the circumstances, though, it does belong in the small collection of all terminally ill people — what with that soothing mix of doom, gloom, tranquility, and self-assuredness. No mat­ter how many spooky ghosts Mr. Lanois has amassed for the occasion, Dylan's weather-proof singing brushes them all aside — he ain't afraid of no squeaky doors opening up into the void, and sets a terrific example for us all here, especially as we hit our later years (I'm just hoping that, thirty years from now, Adele will cover ʽLove Sickʼ or ʽTrying To Get To Heavenʼ with the same emotional precision she demonstrated when covering ʽMake You Feel My Loveʼ, the only song on here equally suitable for young and old mindset alike). And — thumbs up, of course.

 

LOVE AND THEFT (2001)

 

1) Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum; 2) Mississippi; 3) Summer Days; 4) Bye & Bye; 5) Lonesome Day Blues; 6) Floater; 7) High Water; 8) Moonlight; 9) Honest With Me; 10) Po' Boy; 11) Cry A While; 12) Sugar Baby.

 

He survived into the 21st century after all, but when you compare Love And Theft with Time Out Of Mind, it still feels as if he died, lingered out there for seven days and seven nights, and then came back as a different person. In all honesty, trying to repeat Time Out Of Mind would be like trying to rewrite one's own testament — not an auspicious thing to do. So what do you do if you have your testament laid out in perfect form, and somehow you're still not dead yet? You just take on a different personality, and pretend it's a separate kind of you.

 

It is a little humorous that, although the levels of critical praise for Love And Theft matched, or even exceeded, the praise for its predecessor, if you rewind the tape a little, the nearest closest album in spirit would probably be Under The Red Sky — the one that got the critics all riled up and declaring that the man was gone for good. But honestly, play them back to back and the basic concept is the same: get yourself a rootsy backing band, let it all hang out a bit, relax and have some old-fashioned fun with archaic musical structures. The one glaring difference is the lyrics, which were clearly downplayed and almost intentionally simplified on Red Sky, but are fully back to Dylan's highest standards of sophistication here — which, once again, only goes to show that for most critics, Dylan's art is only as good as Dylan's words are. To tell you the truth, though, I like Love And Theft just fine, yet I could not bring myself to pay deep attention to any of the lyrics. As I browse through the sheet, it is evident that the man is really trying — many of the phrasings and unpredictable twists hearken back to 1965-66 — but, honestly, by 2001 most of us must have hit that oversaturation point where even the most brilliant new Dylan lyrics are already perceived as... well, it's good to know his brain is still locating new combinations of metaphors and conundrums at top speed, but it's not as if it were still capable of surprising us.

 

Anyway, the big deal is that, where Time Out Of Mind, with its ghostly-swampy Lanois palette, was dark, unsettling, and psychologically uncomfortable, Love And Theft is light, playful, and almost completely given over to pre-rock'n'roll stylistics. The Bob Dylan band is having itself a «woodchopper's ball», to which we are all cordially invited — overseen and produced by none other than Jack Frost, giving you a sharp stare from the album cover and looking quite a bit frosty indeed (the album does really go along quite fine with a thin streak of fresh snow falling outside the window, particularly the romantic jazzy bits like ʽFloaterʼ and ʽMoon­lightʼ), although, when the time comes, he can shake off all that ice with a tight, fast beat in an instant.

 

It is interesting that Bob chose not to retreat once more into the world of dark acoustic folk songs, but instead settled somewhere else — emerging as a retro popular entertainer, stuck somewhere in between Louis Jordan, Lonnie Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, and Hank Williams. But then, when you start thinking about it, that was a kind of image he hadn't really tried on yet (although he did get somewhat close with the Traveling Wilburys and Red Sky stuff), and he obviously was not going to get any more pigeonholed in the 21st century than he was in the 20th. So here you go — some good old-fashioned jump blues, some Django Reinhardt-ish jazz balladry, a bit of swing, a touch of the electric 12-bar Chicago stuff, and one for the road: ʽMississippiʼ is the most «proverbially Dylan» song on here, but it was originally recorded during the Time sessions, later donated to Sheryl Crow, and finally reappropriated for Love And Theft — where it occu­pies the position of track no. 2, luring the listener into thinking there will be more songs like that on the album. But there won't.

 

So, how successful is the experiment? I'd say it works all right, but probably does not deserve the grand acclaim it got — to a large extent, from people who had simply forgotten about how good «rootsy» music can sound when one actually gives a damn. Funny as it seems, Bob's backing band here sounds tougher, tighter, more involving and more involved than gazillions of other bands from 2001, young and old — and yet they are only the backing band: never once is any of the players properly allowed to leave the shadows and outshine the frontman. Everything is kept down to the bare, well-familiar necessities: clock in, set the groove, kick in the groove, repeat at top energy level until the leader runs out of lyrics. The only question is, how much of your time are you, the listener, willing to give to these guys.

 

And Bob plays a mean game with you here, pushing his band into delivering one cheap, simple, healthy trill after another. ʽTweedle Dee & Tweedle Dumʼ, opening the album, is not really that more sophisticated than, say, ʽWiggle Wiggleʼ, but the guitar parts, screwed together from a few jazz, blues, and rockabilly chords, are much more fun and far better capable of winding up the spirit. Likewise, the song title also hints at the same level of childishness as ʽWiggle Wiggleʼ, but the words, this time, are fired from Bob's machine gun of surrealism and sarcasm, and in the end, «Tweedle Dee» and «Tweedle Dum», as abstract characters, will tend to look more like Frankie Lee and Judas Priest than their John Byrom, Lewis Carroll, or LaVern Baker predecessors. Yes, the song goes on for nearly five minutes. No, you are not getting anything in its last four minutes that you have not already gotten in the first. Yes, it's not as if this never happened before with Bob Dylan. No, you are not allowed to suggest any changes or throw in constructive criticism, because he is Bob Dylan and you are...?

 

There may be yet another reason why Love And Theft is so far removed from Time Out Of Mind. Over those four years, Dylan's voice has undergone yet another shift — now the croaking, gurgling, and wobbling in his throat can no longer be tamed, subdued, or mixed out, and this is really not the kind of voice that could inspire its owner for another round of ʽIdiot Windʼ. Even ʽLove Sickʼ, when sang with the Love And Theft voice, would have lost a large part of its mys­tery. So the best bet, indeed, would be to match the «decrepit» vocal strings to certain «decrepit» musical genres, in order to prove that they are not «decrepit» at all — check ʽHigh Waterʼ, sub­titled ʽFor Charley Pattonʼ, on which Bob certainly does not sound much like the real Charley Patton, but does sound like a desperate-desolate old hobo, lamenting the end of the world as we know it ("high water everywhere!"), much like the real Patton did in the 1930s. On the other hand, correction: the voice is not particularly desperate per se, but the colors that Bob has irrevocably lost in his singing, he is still able to elicit from the players — the atmosphere of trouble and con­fusion is brilliantly conveyed with the fussy banjo and acoustic guitar parts.

 

As far as I can tell, there are no highs or lows on Love And Theft whatsoever — be they retro-rockers or retro-ballads, all of these songs, no exceptions, satisfy their modest goals more or less equally. And I stress «modest»: not even ʽSugar Babyʼ, the nearly seven-minute long solemn outro, for which Bob is saving most of his (intentionally) clichéd grand maxims ("love is pleasing, love is teasing, love's not an evil thing"), could be said to truly aspire to something grandiose, it merely winds down the album with some pleasant atmospherics.

 

But I propose that we all try to find this an adorable solution. This is a perfect formula for a 60-year old who has said all the important things he had to say, and now he's only got three options — die from histoplasmosis (failed), retire into painting and memoir writing (done that, but still got free time to fill), or continue to make «middle-of-the-road» music that would be adequate to his age, pleasant to the ear (as far as possible, with that voice), tasteful, and, most importantly, full of that routine old-age wisdom that, fortunately enough, still prevents us from treating our elders in a Ballad of Narayama manner. Love And Theft satisfies all those conditions — and sets in motion an easily-repeated formula that Bob, with only minor variations, would employ for all of his ensuing output in the new millennium, even at the risk of getting too predictable and pigeonholeable. But then, here is a man who has certainly earned the right to predictability, after forty long years of rough seas and cerebral turmoil. Thumbs up.

 

MODERN TIMES (2006)

 

1) Thunder On The Mountain; 2) Spirit On The Water; 3) Rollin' And Tumblin'; 4) When The Deal Goes Down; 5) Someday Baby; 6) Workingman's Blues #2; 7) Beyond The Horizon; 8) Nettie Moore; 9) The Levee's Gonna Break; 10) Ain't Talkin'.

 

Nothing more or less than Love And Theft, Vol. 2, and by now, we should have already gotten the idea of what the title meant (for Dylan, that is): he loves those old blues tunes so much that he is only too happy to steal them, and not feel guilty about it. Then again, if Muddy Waters in the 1950s put his name on a song that he clearly did not write, why couldn't Bob Dylan do the same fifty years later? From that point of view, this album's title is a condescending joke — you sort of expect to turn the CD over and find the first part of the title on the back cover: This Is What I Think Of Your..., yes, and maybe the finger as well. Because these days, you're not expected to infringe on copyright. In the old days of folk tradition — now that's a different story. These days, «all copyrights reserved for that nameless old guy in the backwoods and his progeny».

 

Anyway, there we have it: ten more songs in Ye Olde Style, same topics, same cracked voice, same «Jack Frost» production style. The backing band has evolved (only Tony Garnier on bass re­mains over from the Love And Theft sessions), but the sonic essentials remain completely the same. In fact, much as I hate to admit it, the album as a whole is not even deserving of an indivi­dual review. On the whole, the songs roll along a little smoother this time, with fewer «rocking» moments and respectively more «soft blues-rock», but it takes a long time to figure out the subtle differences, and even if there are any, they seem accidental. It's not as if Bob finally lost his potential to rock out — he just happened to be in the mood for quieter guitars and drums.

 

And it's not as if I'm complaining, because the sound remains efficient. The upbeat, «soft-rock­ing» grooves now take on a J. J. Cale not-give-a-damn aura about them: ʽThunder On The Moun­tainʼ and ʽThe Levee's Gonna Breakʼ both make reference to natural disasters, but the attitude of the protagonist is like, «I'm 66 years old already, what do I care about the whole world going down in flames?», and the rest of the band sounds correspondingly hip and nonchalant, churning the groove out like a biorobot, only occasionally deviating for a muffled guitar solo. Naturally, once you hear "if it keeps on rainin', levee's gonna break", you will be remembering Led Zeppelin (rather than Memphis Minnie, unless you're a seasoned blues snob), and the apocalyptic hysterics of Page and Plant will look tremendously fussy and vain next to this cool-calm-collected view on the turbulent side of life.

 

Clearly, it is the «coolness» of it all, this effortless transition to a state in which basic emotion is completely suppressed, that attracted critics and fans alike to this «bronze age renaissance» in Dylan's career. On the more officially sentimental, jazzier numbers Bob seems to get accordingly more sentimental and tender (ʽSpirit On The Waterʼ), but exactly how «sincere» is that sentimen­tality? It might be just another tip of the hat to the trappings of a goneby era. ʽWorkingman's Blues #2ʼ, a stately piece of soul-blues, formally written from the point of view of a member of the «proletariat», whatever that word might mean today, is a piece of sad romance that a Bruce Springsteen could easily fill up with genuine affection — in Bob's current rendition it sounds a little hollow and formalistic. But that is the point — to deliver all these messages the way they are delivered, in a detached, introvert manner. It helps to play these songs interspersed with stuff from Highway 61 Revisited: where Bob once used to sound like he was hurling bolts of light­ning at his listeners, now he sounds as if he is directing all the singing right inside his own guts.

 

The last song on the album, ʽAin't Talkin'ʼ, seems to be a throwback to the vibe of Time Out Of Mind. It is long, dark, pessimistic, it has a naggingly depressing violin part crawling all over it, and its (and the whole album's) last words are, suitably, "the world's end". But even so, compare it with, let's say, ʽShot Of Loveʼ (a suitable comparison, actually, given the wealth of Biblical imagery in ʽAin't Talkin'ʼ), and see the difference — where we once saw the man near-lite­rally pulling out his hair and rolling in the ashes, here is a man completely resigned to his fate. Not at all happy about it, but accepting it as something inevitable. He ain't talkin', just walkin'. If Nick Cave were to sing this song, we'd already be scraping a major percentage of his internal organs off our clothes and faces. Bob and his band just put out the bare facts. No acting, no exaggerating, no self-whipping into frenzy, no trying to change the world through the music, no trying to do anything, in fact. A perfect album for a certified Taoist.

 

However, although there is no reason to deprive Modern Times of its thumbs up rating, I must say that it sounds overreaching, and that, in particular, I do find the running lengths of most of these songs inadequate — even understanding that Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan, takes orders from no one, and has every right to try my patience in asserting his rights to do whatever he wants. Love And Theft had 12 songs rather than 10, and still ran about five minutes shorter than Modern Times, and that was a good balance; here, unless you really, really, really crave for extra and extra modernist lyrical variations on ancient blues themes (for instance, think that namedropping Alicia Keyes in the context of ʽThunder On The Mountainʼ really works), almost each of these songs could be at least one or two verses shorter without any harm to the business, particularly since there is no development whatsoever happening on any of the songs.

 

Unless, of course, we are supposed to understand this philosophically — for Bob Dylan, such a silly thing as «time» no longer exists. The end of the world presupposes no need for time, so you cannot even physically complain of having «wasted time» on the extra verses of these songs, be­cause you wouldn't be making much sense. Which, of course, puts the album title in an even more ironic light. Modern times? There are no modern times. They say that Rolling Stone, a magazine that has long since lost touch with true reality, put this record up at No. 204 on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Silly people, not realizing how absurd it must feel for Modern Times to be on that list, when it so clearly belongs on The Divided By Zero Greatest Albums of No Time list instead.

 

TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE (2009)

 

1) Beyond Here Lies Nothin'; 2) Life Is Hard; 3) My Wife's Home Town; 4) If You Ever Go To Houston; 5) Forget­ful Heart; 6) Jolene; 7) This Dream Of You; 8) Shake Shake Mama; 9) I Feel A Change Comin' On; 10) It's All Good.

 

None of us should have anything against Los Lobos — they're a great band and all — but I am still not altogether sure whether it was such a good idea to use David Hidalgo as a key player on Dylan's third album of the new millennium, and relegate him to accordion at that. Together Through Life continues in the same general direction as its predecessors, but there is one major difference: this time around, it flat out refuses to rock. There's lots of blues, a little folk, some jugband dance stuff, but no rock. Polite old-timey muzak for dem old folks.

 

Naturally, the very fact itself that «Dylan refuses to rock» shouldn't be mentioned as an ac­cu­sa­tion. First, Dylan is Dylan, and he only rocks when he wants to. Second, Dylan is not a young boy no more, and an old boy can certainly be excused for wanting to sit on his porch and play a little rusty accordion instead of playing the Rolling Stones game. Third, the word «rock» itself sounds so passé circa 2009, no?

 

The problem is, this not-so-unexpected dropoff in energy cannot but focus our attention on the obvious: way too often, these new projects of Dylan's end up sounding like unimaginative tri­butes to the past, rather than an inventive singer-songwriter's upgrading of the past. As long as he kept a certain sharpness to the sound, this was forgivable — ʽTweedle Dee & Tweedle Dumʼ was so snappy and sneery that it remained a fun listen from first to last second. But now, with this transition to a more laid-back, relaxed, even «friendly» sound, Together Through Life runs a much higher risk of boring the average listener — and annoying the listener who is able to pick out all of its stolen parts.

 

Because this time around, the stealing issue really gets irritating. At least ʽRollin' And Tumblin'ʼ and ʽThe Levee's Gonna Breakʼ started out like covers, then veered off into a different lyrical world under the banner of «this belongs to no one man /or woman/, we all add and subtract what we like as the inexhaustible human spirit flows». But a song like ʽBeyond Here Lies Nothinʼ — well, all it does is simply appropriate the melody of Otis Rush's ʽAll Your Love (I Miss Loving)ʼ (a song that many of us know through the famous Clapton / Mayall cover on the Bluesbreakers' 1966 album), without a single hint that there might be an actual source. For what it's worth, though, the Otis Rush song was one of the most desperate soul-blues explosions of its time — the Dylan song is quite routine in comparison.

 

ʽIf You Ever Go To Houstonʼ is a transparent «deconstruction» of ʽThe Midnight Specialʼ, ex­tracting one of its lines, attaching it to a pervasive two-note accordion riff and dragging the re­sults through a lazy six minute rant, inspired by the lovely state of Texas. It's nice, in a way, yet I cannot get rid of the feeling that I am really listening here to the protagonist of ʽJust Like Tom Thumb's Bluesʼ, forty years older, flabbier, smellier, and, worst of all, not made particularly wiser by all the passing years. Just a little less attractive to the ladies, that's all.

 

Cutting it short, I am not in awe of this vibe. The lack of «darkness» does not bother me, because if Dylan does not feel the need to convey darkness, this probably means he is relatively happy, and a relatively happy Dylan can be a wonderful thing (remember New Morning?). In fact, the happiest song on the album, ʽI Feel A Change Comin' Onʼ, is easily my favorite on the album: it is one of the few that does not sound like a straightforward rip-off and has a personal, inspired ring to it. But what does bother me is that the music is so somnambulant — as if that goddamn accordion got everybody off the track. ʽMy Wife's Home Townʼ sounds like Muddy Waters on tranquilizers, for Christ's sake!

 

As Bob himself slyly remarks on the last track, "whatever's going down, it's all good". If you relax, put a smile on your face, and put your signature under that philosophy, Together Through Life with Bob Dylan at your side is simply going to be one more healthy, fun-filled joyride through the pleasures of old-timey music in a post-post-modern world. (A sparingly short ride, too, since the songs are cut down to reasonable length and the entire record runs for the good old 45 minutes). You might even be wooed over and swept off your feet by some of them charming old-fashioned ballads like ʽLife Is Hardʼ (not too hard, by the sound of it) or ʽThis Dream Of Youʼ. For some other people I know, Together Through Life was an unpleasant jolt, even leading them to re-evaluate their feelings towards the other two albums — on a sort of «looks like there ain't that much depth to this style, after all» platform.

 

I wouldn't go that far, of course, but I do agree that, third time around, the same formula does not work that well, and it isn't even the fault of the accordion — the accordion is just a side effect, as is the ever-increasing gurgle ratio of the voice. The real problem might be that, at this advanced age, Dylan has largely lost his gift for «genius spontaneity», and needs to spend more time working on his songs, and his sound, than he used to.

 

 

CHRISTMAS IN THE HEART (2009)

 

1) Here Comes Santa Claus; 2) Do You Hear What I Hear?; 3) Winter Wonderland; 4) Hark The Herald Angels Sing; 5) I'll Be Home For Christmas; 6) Little Drummer Boy; 7) The Chirstmas Blues; 8) O' Come All Ye Faithful; 9) Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas; 10) Must Be Santa; 11) Silver Bells; 12) The First Noel; 13) Christmas Island; 14) The Christmas Song; 15) O' Little Town Of Bethlehem.

 

In all honesty, I do not think that this album deserves more than one short paragraph of strictly musical commentary. Yes, this is a collection of fifteen Christmas carols, hymns, ballads, and kiddie ditties, recorded with Bob's regular band (still including Dave Hidalgo from the previous ses­sions, but minus Mike Campbell on guitar) and a small choir. Yes, the arrangements are kept quite close to the traditional form, but, for purposes of extra intimacy and better taste, do not in­clude any orchestration. No, there are no Dylan originals, nor are there any serious attempts at re­inventing the «classics»: even the singing, or what's left of it in the current state of Dylan's voice, is done as close to the prescribed vocal melody as possible.

 

Logically speaking, the target audience for this kind of album should not even exist. People who do celebrate Christmas, and listen to traditional Christmas songs while celebrating it, are not too likely to fall for a million year-old hoarse, cracked, gurgling voice delivering Christmas imagery into their living room (think old Santa Claus in one of his hard years: coat torn, gifts squandered, breath stinking of moonshine). People who could care less for Christmas, let alone Christmas mu­sic, will not be particularly pleased with Dylan forcing it upon them, either — at best, they could try and read some irony into the idea, but the fact is, there is no irony. Or if there is, you certainly cannot detect it based on the music as such.

 

Most reviewers, upon trying to answer the obvious question («why?»), concentrated on one of two answers: (a) «whaddaya know, he really likes Christmas music, and why shouldn't he?» and (b) «this is fuckin' Bob Dylan, he's always done exactly what he wants to do and there is no reason why he should be different now». Actually, I think most of them combined the two an­swers — Christmas In The Heart shows that old-timey Christmas music is Bob's not-so-guilty pleasure, and he is pleased as heck to use this as an opportunity to prove to the world that he can be just as unpredictable at 70 as he was at 25.

 

These answers, however, do not quite explain why the man chose Christmas carols, and not, say, a bunch of punk rock or Hebrew folk song covers instead. So a third factor must be considered — namely, the traditionalist / conservative aura that these songs embody. In doing them, Bob even goes as far as to sing the original Latin lyrics of ʽO Come All Ye Faithfulʼ (hearing him struggle through the complex morphology of Latin verbal and nominal forms might alone be worth the price of the record, for that matter). Without any straightforward statements this time, Bob has surreptitiously recorded his most openly Christian album since the 1979-81 trilogy — a fairly naughty gesture, I'd say, in the face of his largely «progressive» audience (not that I'm saying that every Dylan fan is an atheist or agnostic by definition, but I'm sure that «hardcore Christians» never constituted the bulk of his fanbase even in the «Christian period»).

 

He himself would probably never admit the «naughtiness» of it, especially since, in a way, it all ties in together: since the early 1990s, his chief sources of inspiration and creativity were the folk, country, and blues traditions of the American and the Anglo-Saxon world, and this is just one more corner of the same world. But instead of pouring new (lyrical) wine into old (musical) skins, this time around, he goes all-out archaic, against a young 21st century world that usually craves for innovation and futurism. From that point of view, and in the overall context of Dylan's exis­tence, this is more than a Christmas album — it's one more friendly fuck-you to the world at large, and it probably couldn't have come at a better time, too, than the Big Year of Lady Gaga, to stand for just about everything, good or bad, that Lady Gaga is not.

 

TEMPEST (2012)

 

1) Duquesne Whistle; 2) Soon After Midnight; 3) Narrow Way; 4) Long And Wasted Years; 5) Pay In Blood; 6) Scarlet Town; 7) Early Roman Kings; 8) Tin Angel; 9) Tempest; 10) Roll On John.

 

So, what does it take to put Dylan back in «grand» mode these days? Song lengths expanded — check. Deep folk roots revisited — check. Focus on lyrical intertextuality — check. Stern, Old Testament-worthy singing tones — check. What couldn't have hurt, perhaps, would be a little more emphasis on musical backing and production values, but since Bob himself is once again listed as producer (he even dropped the «Jack Frost» nickname for the occasion), it is perhaps better to be minimalistic. And he wouldn't want to, or be able to, pull a Daniel Lanois all by him­self anyway.

 

After the relative disappointment of Together Through Life, Tempest is clearly a return to... return to spirit, rather than form. If at all possible, Bob's voice seems to have taken another round of beating over those three years — and so has his chord-assembling, what with just about every song on the album riding the same mini-groove from top to bottom, and most of the mini-grooves «borrowed» from other people's songs at that. So anybody who claims that «Dylan is back in top form!» should probably rent a time machine and go back a few decades just to remind oneself what «top form» actually means. But the thing that got critics and fans alike heap up another heap of praise here is not «form» — it is attitude. The one thing that really has not changed one bit about Dylan in fifty years is that he is still a great manipulator. He may forget about it every once in a while, but on Tempest, he does not forget.

 

In fact, the first signs of manipulation are right there at the very beginning — ʽDuquesne Whistleʼ opens deceptively low-key-ish, like something your local jugband outfit would practice on your porch. Then, several bars later, the band suddenly kicks in with full force: the main melody does not undergo too much of a change, but the listener gets a jolt — «okay, thank God, the man is still rocking and I'd already started worrying that he'd given up on it...». Now you already feel a little predisposed towards the song, and the entire album with it. Even if there is really nothing about the melody of ʽDuquesne Whistleʼ that you haven't already heard a million times.

 

Next thing you discover is that the darkness is back. You kind of expected that when you saw the word Tempest, but you'd never believe this guy in advance, right? None of the songs are really «tempestuous», but then, musically, Dylan has always been more of a harbinger of tempest (ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ, etc.) than a master of tempest, and from that angle, Tempest, in spots, is even scarier than Time Out Of Mind — the latter was, after all, extremely personal and inti­mate, whereas Tempest pours it out rather than keeps it within.

 

Two dirge-like epics stand out in particular. ʽScarlet Townʼ flows on like a funeral procession, with a mournful lead violin part (vaguely reminiscent of Rivera's parts on Desire — and is it a pure coincidence that her name was «Scarlet»?) and the guitar, piano and banjo assembled in a drony three-part rhythm that is best associated with barren earth and scattered ashes. Lyrics-wise, there are numerous references to sickness, death, the end, and so forth, but, surprisingly enough, the words on the whole do not paint any properly «apocalyptic» picture; in fact, the protagonist clearly likes it in «Scarlet Town», whatever that be a metaphor for (life here on Earth, most pro­bably). We might suspect a thin streak of masochism here, but then, all of us who like ourselves some of that heavy-shit depressing music are already masochists, in more than one way.

 

For sheer unusualness, however, and the honor of hitting the heaviest upon first listen, I will probably single out ʽTin Angelʼ. Now that you think about it, it was a perfectly organic choice for Dylan to take a centuries-old murder ballad (ʽMatty Grovesʼ, which most people probably know through the unforgettable Fairport Convention version with Sandy Denny on vocals; topical simi­larity to ʽBlack Jack Daveyʼ detected, too, but is less self-evident) and turn it upside down — in the place of «husband kills lover and wife», we now have a more complex scheme of «lover kills husband, wife kills lover and herself» — it is even a little surprising how he got around to doing it so late in his career. (Maybe he holds the opinion that all murder ballads should not be written at an earlier age than seventy).

 

Anyway, there is exactly one melodic hook to the song — that deep, haunting «zooop» on Tony Garnier's bass part that you get to hear approximately forty times over the song's nine minutes, and one which you probably already heard far more times incorporated into one too many bass solo parts on classic and not so classic jazz records; but yes, minimalistic genius strikes again, as that little bit of bass twiddle becomes a key part in creating a working atmosphere of dread and doom. The tale takes nine minutes to unwind, but that bass part, it sort of lets you know from the very beginning that the Fates have already woven the stuff to completion, and everybody is going to be dead when we get to the end. You don't even have to know anything about ʽMatty Grovesʼ, or about the murder ballad tradition in general, to get that sense. And don't forget to throw in the grim banjo part as the bass's only lonely counterpart — the equivalent of a funeral church bell. My only problem is: what the hell is an «electric wire» doing in the context of this song? And «lowered himself down on a golden chain»? Were they making love in some sort of James Bond setting, or am I too dumb to even begin asking those sorts of questions?...

 

Strangely enough, the title track, in comparison to those two, does not sound «dark» at all — even if, or maybe because, it is an almost literal retelling of the story of the Titanic, cast in the form of a 14-minute long Irish ballad, accordion and fiddle at the ready. The primary asset of the tune is its surprise value. Fourteen minutes? Irish ballad? Fiddle? Titanic? Oh God, he couldn't have caught on to James Cameron now, could he? No, no, hope it's at least Roy Ward Baker (for that matter, Roy Ward Baker had just died in 2010; another coincidence?)... and so on. Outside of that, I am not sure what to feel or think — the song feels like a laborious stylistic exercise more than anything else, and even lyrically, its complete straightforwardness and evasion of any unex­pected twists or metaphors is in sharp contrast with the rest of the album. Where ʽTin Angelʼ was a stylistic transformation, a typically Dylanesque twist on a traditional form, ʽTempestʼ almost seems bent on explicitly purging out the Dylanesque. It is curious, but it is hardly likely to end up on anybody's top list of Bob favorites.

 

Individually, the rest of the songs range from almost intentionally annoying (ʽNarrow Wayʼ — seven minutes of a grumbly four-note blues riff on endless repeat is too much for me; ʽEarly Roman Kingsʼ — another post-modernist massacre of an old groove, the honor going to Muddy Waters' ʽMannish Boyʼ this time) to endearingly sentimental (ʽSoon After Midnightʼ; ʽLong And Wasted Yearsʼ — the kind of late-evening balladry that he'd introduced on Love & Theft), and in between you have at least one oddball musical hybrid, ʽPay In Bloodʼ, a menacing, but ultimately toothless roots-rocker whose melody actually changes — for a change! — from verse to bridge and then once again from bridge to chorus, yes, with actual chord changes that first put the song into «threatening» mode one minute (0:27) and then into «soothing» mode (0:48) not a minute too soon. In between those two extremes, the song sort of sounds like a rip-off of the Stones' ʽHand Of Fateʼ, though, and, (not) knowing Bob, I cannot guarantee that this is simple coin­ci­dence, either. The guy's memory is a bottomless well, there is no telling what is going to be fished out next — and he's exacerbated it by fighting Dylanologists all his life.

 

There is no simple logical explanation, either, of why he deemed it wise to end the album with a metaphor-drenched, but easily guessable tribute to John Lennon (ʽRoll On Johnʼ). I'd like to think that, perhaps, he thought the time had finally come to invoke his spirit — perhaps even to «sacrifice» to his spirit, yielding the album's coda to the memory of a dead hero — you know, in the good old «times are so shitty, we need a John Lennon here to set them right» kind of way... but I guess the truth is really that he probably just "heard the news today oh boy" on some John-related topic and suddenly realized he'd all but forgotten to write a John Lennon song in the past thirty years. Truth be told, ʽRoll On Johnʼ is far more flattering to John's memory than John's ʽServe Yourselfʼ was flattering to Bob back in 1979 — and there's not even a single denigrating reference to Yoko on the list!

 

On the whole, Tempest unquestionably deserves a thumbs up, but buyer beware: sixty-eight minutes of this stuff will be properly appreciated only by somebody who can at least partially put it in its proper context. If you know little of Bob Dylan, less of Muddy Waters, and nothing at all about Irish folk or murder ballads, this will be nothing more than a horrendously raspy old man gurgling out verbose stuff over simplistic, monotonous melodies — quite a relevant warning for 2012, a year when there are music-listening teenagers around who were born in the year of Dylan's third (fourth?) creative revival. And Tempest I wouldn't list as a fifth creative revival — it is more of a staying-afloat record, showing that the old guy still has some interesting things to say in some interesting way, which, really, is far more than we could feel ourselves justified to demand. For that matter, ʽRoll On Johnʼ could just as well be ʽRoll On Bobʼ. Heck, maybe it was ʽRoll On Bobʼ and he just felt a modesty attack at the last minute. Doesn't matter. Just keep on manipulating us, Mr. Zimmerman.

 

SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT (2015)

 

1) I'm A Fool To Want You; 2) The Night We Called It A Day; 3) Stay With Me; 4) Autumn Leaves; 5) Why Try To Change Me Now; 6) Some Enchanted Evening; 7) Full Moon And Empty Arms; 8) Where Are You?; 9) What'll I Do; 10) That Lucky Old Sun.

 

It's really been a long time — these days, the Bobster is nowhere near such an intense presence in people's minds as he was in 1970, when the appearance of Self-Portrait was a weird shock not just for Greil Marcus, but also for millions of followers of the Verbose Curly One. In 2015, many of these original followers are already dead, and those who are not rarely make their voices heard, not to mention that they have been patiently taught, through more than five decades, that you do not bother His Bobness with anything as trivially pitiable as «expectations» — each new album may be freely judged on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, but the man just will not be chained by your demands and predictions, so do not even try.

 

Since we are all well used to it, and since we also all know that you do not ignore a new Bob Dylan album like you can allow yourself to ignore, say, a new Kings Of Leon album, it is not par­ticularly surprising that Shadows In The Night shot high up in the charts (even all the way to No. 1 in the UK), nor is it particularly surprising that the response to it has been rather limp. A record like this in 1970 would have made people scream — a few renegades would be loving it, most of the others would be hating it even more viciously than Self-Portrait. Today, most of us will pro­bably find ourselves... mildly curious about it. Which is not the fault of us, or the fault of Bob Dylan, or the fault of the music industry, but is simply due to the changing ways of the world.

 

Objective facts, in brief: The record consists of 10 songs, whose overall running length barely exceeds half an hour. All the songs are covers from the Songbook, all had been, at one time or another, performed by Frank Sinatra, most had been encountered on a string of his «melancholic period» albums from the late Fifties and early Sixties. Everything has been recorded with a 12-piece band in the «midnight country» stylistics (echoey guitars, nocturnal pedal steel reverbera­tions, quietly subdued, almost unnoticeable horns), and, most interesting of all, everything has been sung — almost crooned — by Bob in the cleanest, smoothest voice we've heard from him in ages; in fact, not once ever since he'd clearly developed his trademark «old» rasp-and-gurgle.

 

This last point is important, since it clearly parallels Dylan's vocal reinvention of 1969 with Nash­ville Skyline (the alleged «non-smoking» voice that had nothing to do with smoking and everything with confounding expectations). This time, he is not that capable — some of that rasp and gurgle has definitely set up for good — but capable enough to make it clear that the near-evil death rattle of his last few albums was just another of his impersonating acts. He never was a Sinatra at 20, let alone at 75, but he understands well enough that you cannot sing ʽFull Moon And Empty Armsʼ with the same voice with which you sing ʽDuquesne Whistleʼ, unless you want your album to be a parody, and Bob Dylan ain't no cheap «parodist».

 

One thing I do not wish to discuss at all is how well Dylan «understands» these songs, or whether he is able to offer his own «artistic interpretations», capturing their lyricism, emotionality, con­veying the right feeling of loneliness and despair, etc. etc. Above and beyond everything else, this is just a gesture of freedom — never mind his age, never mind the current century number, never mind that fifty years ago, a young Dylan probably wouldn't want to be caught dead trying to co­ver a Sinatra song, never mind that even the «gloomy» aspect of these tunes still sounds exces­sively mannered and polite next to the much more genuine-looking gloom of the preceding Tempest. This is a gesture, and all I have to say is that, accompanying this gesture, Bob does manage to get a good sound from his band (with Donnie Heron's pedal steel guitar as the lead instrument through­out), and that I was kinda happy to hear him sing like that — after all, not everybody can boast the honor of adding yet another vocal style of one's own to an already large bank, at the ripe age of 75.

 

At the same time, I also can't help thinking that this «gesture of freedom» comes with its own irony — back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Dylan was severely out of the state of commer­cial grace, people were too busy digging the new musical sounds of those decades to pay much attention to an old fogey, regardless of whether his albums were really bad (like Down In The Groove) or really good (like Good As I Been To You). Now, in 2015, Dylan releases a short throwaway album of Sinatra covers — and not only does it not pass unnoticed, but it actually sells, charts, and gets positive reviews, when most of those people should really be busy doing other things. If you ask me, this is neither a good nor a bad sign — it just shows that these days, there are no expectations, not just from Dylan but from anyone, and in these conditions, an album of Dylan covering Sinatra is just as potentially welcome as an album of B. B. King covering Friedrich Nietzsche, and both of them are as potentially welcome as anything released by any­body in the last five years or so. Everything is so goddamn relative these days, with the sole ex­ception of "that lucky old sun — got nothin' to do but roll 'round heaven all day", which is sort of a slightly consolatory conclusion here, some stable point of reference to get us by.

 

As a stand-alone record, Shadows In The Night is too short, too slight, and too monotonous to deserve any recommendation. But as another quirky pit stop on this man's race to nowhere in particular, it should definitely earn its thumbs up — if only because it got me thinking again on all these odd issues of quality, relevance, artist-vs.-public, and the general and special theory of relativity as filtered through the incomprehensible mind of the Einstein of popular music.

 

FALLEN ANGELS (2016)

 

1) Young At Heart; 2) Maybe You'll Be There; 3) Polka Dots And Moonbeams; 4) All The Way; 5) Skylark; 6) Nevertheless; 7) All Or Nothing At All; 8) On A Little Street In Singapore; 9) It Had To Be You; 10) Melancholy Mood; 11) That Old Black Magic; 12) Come Rain Or Come Shine.

 

Bob is well known for doing the same thing twice or thrice if he got a good kick out of it first time around: so, just as Good As I've Been To You was quickly followed up by World Gone Wrong (because there's nothing like a satisfactory refill of the good stuff), one album of Sinatra covers was quickly followed by another — and no, from what I can tell, it's not as if all the mate­rial was recorded during the same session. There is even a slight stylistic difference: Fallen Angels features a smaller band, with no brass support whatsoever, so that the «wee small hours» atmosphere is generated to near-perfection.

 

That said, I am not even going to try to comment on any of the actual songs — it is totally and utterly irrelevant whether Bob «does justice» to the old versions, and I cannot take seriously any review of Fallen Angels that tries to make meaningful comparisons between Sinatra and Dylan. It seems as clear as daylight that the main, if not only, goal of Fallen Angels is to strengthen and solidify the statement of Shadows In The Night — namely, that you can never pigeonhole Robert Zimmerman, because Robert Zimmerman refuses to wear the yellow star of the pigeon. You gambled on the man putting out another Tempest in 2015? You lost, sucker. You gambled that, okay, he had this weird diversion, but next year he'd put out another Tempest? You lost again. See, the man's been collecting from you for over fifty years now, and so far, he's shown no signs of stop­ping.

 

Of course, it's a pretty wise gamble: with time mercilessly rolling by, as each new record's chances of becoming his last increase significantly, these quiet, introspective, melancholy-filled tributes to Sinatra all work like ideal swansongs. But it's also obvious (well, not obvious, really: nothing is ever truly obvious with Dylan) that he is not going to stop, and that his next move could be anything — from yet a third album of Sinatra covers (and why not? he had three Chris­tian albums out, didn't he?) to a bunch of acid house rearrangements of Dolly Parton. That's what we love him for, and that's what he is going to keep on doing. As for Fallen Angels, well... I did listen to it twice, and I'll probably never listen to it again. Don't try to make the mistake of taking it too seriously — although if you somehow happen to love the results, there's nothing criminal about that, either (I do love Self-Portrait, after all; but then Self-Portrait was far more diverse, inventive, and unpredictable than these albums, where all the songs follow the same formula — take Sinatra's orchestrated songbook and adapt it for small lite-jazz combo). Just remember that, behind all the seriousness and «depth» of these renditions, he is still putting you on, and you'll never know the truth, because, as Keith Moon once eloquently put it, «you couldn't afford me!»

 

TRIPLICATE (2017)

 

1) I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plans; 2) September Of My Years; 3) I Could Have Told You; 4) Once Upon A Time; 5) Stormy Weather; 6) This Nearly Was Mine; 7) That Old Feeling; 8) It Gets Lonely Early; 9) My One And Only Love; 10) Trade Winds; 11) Braggin'; 12) As Time Goes By; 13) Imagination; 14) How Deep Is The Ocean; 15) P.S. I Love You; 16) The Best Is Yet To Come; 17) But Beautiful; 18) Here's That Rainy Day; 19) Where Is The One; 20) There's A Flaw In My Flue; 21) Day In, Day Out; 22) I Couldn't Sleep A Wink Last Night; 23) Sentimental Journey; 24) Somewhere Along The Way; 25) When The World Was Young; 26) These Foolish Things; 27) You Go To My Head; 28) Stardust; 29) It's Funny To Everyone But Me; 30) Why Was I Born.

 

Because he can. In fact, I am not altogether sure why he decided to stop at three CDs, containing ten songs each. It could just as well have been five CDs with twenty songs each — clearly, the main shocking idea of this package is how much is being offered, and is there anyone out there who doubts that the old man could have filled five, ten, twenty, fifty discs with this kind of mate­rial, and in a matter of several months at that? He's got plenty of money to afford studio time, he's got a dedicated and professional band that would probably back him through the entirety of Dolly Parton's catalog, had he opted for that one, he's clearly enjoying it all so far, and I don't think he cares all that much about whether he is going to make or lose money on this. In fact, he can use his entire Nobel Prize to cover the deficit, if it becomes really necessary.

 

I did not waste time describing the individual peculiarities of the songs in the case of Fallen Angels, and the «triplication» of the number of recorded tunes does not make such a description any more necessary — as you can probably predict, the playing, the production, the general vibe remains precisely the same. He does seem to be running out of Sinatra-related tunes, but even so, I do believe that the absolute majority of these thirty had been recorded by Frank one way or another, even if we probably prefer to associate ʽAs Time Goes Byʼ with Casablanca and ʽStormy Weatherʼ with Billie Holiday. There seems to be no special mini-concept that would govern the distribution of songs across the three CDs, except that each tends to begin with some­thing a little bit more uptempo, upbeat, and cheerful (all three opening songs feature lively brass riffs, for instance), before quickly descending into the world of slow tempos, midnight brooding, and sentimental nostalgizing. And — goes without saying — sitting through the entire package in one go is hardly possible unless you use it for background purposes only. (It's not that long: since the songs are not dragged out — even if, in some cases, Bob claims to have reinstated original openings to the songs that were lost in most of the classic interpretations — the whole thing barely runs over an hour and a half and could, if necessary, fit on two discs easily).

 

The only comment worth making here is, perhaps, the realization that Bob is genuinely awed by this material. If anything, he may have recorded so much of this stuff in the effort to have us con­vinced — if not by the quality of it, then at least by sheer quantity — that he is acknowledging the sheer power of Tin Pan Alley, and that he has devised a way, for himself, to make these songs reveal their «Dylanesque» properties, ones that neither us nor him would probably suspect half a century ago. The trick is to sing them in a way that suggests neither cheerfulness (for the cheerful songs) nor sadness (for the sad ones): the trick is to create a combination of instruments and voice that makes them sound psychologically deep and emotionally realistic. Pretty much everything here is reduced to one single denominator — much like with Billie Holiday, who also used to bring everything down to earth with one and the same manner of delivery, except hers was a deli­cate, fragile, humble, deeply personal and moving delivery that made you want to give her a hug of friendly consolation in between each of the tracks; old man Zimmerman here is not asking for your empathy, he sounds more like he's giving you thirty similar pieces of life advice from the depths of his seventy years of experience. Even a relative trifle like ʽSentimental Journeyʼ is sung by him as if he were impairing some kind of deep-meaning parable to you, something that could have hardly been contained in the original song.

 

So, if there's any moral to this at all, kids, it is that previously unknown depth of feeling may be found anywhere — which, allegedly, paves the way to future albums, in which an 80-year old Dylan discovers the Taoist wisdom of songs from Teletubbies (Over The Hills And Far Away),  a 90-year old Dylan cracks the neurocognitive code of Coca-Cola jingles (Things Go Better), and a 100-year old Dylan explores the nirvana-related properties of the IBM 5150 PC speaker (Beep Beep Doo Doo). And if you think this is a bad joke, well, I'm not altogether sure that this is a joke at all. Unless the title of the last song here (ʽWhy Was I Bornʼ) is meant as an implicit reminder of his own mortality and a brief musical testament (and I do not think it is), there is still no telling what the man might have in store for us in the coming years. Oh, and I actually enjoyed the record, though, honestly, I have a faint hope that he's finally through with this project and that he is not going to pull an Ella Fitzgerald on us.

 

ADDENDA:

 

BIOGRAPH (1985)

 

CD I: 1) Lay Lady Lay; 2) Baby Let Me Follow You Down; 3) If Not For You; 4) I'll Be Your Baby Tonight; 5) I'll Keep It With Mine*; 6) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 7) Blowin' In The Wind; 8) Masters Of War; 9) Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll; 10) Percy's Song*; 11) Mixed-Up Confusion*; 12) Tombstone Blues; 13) Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar; 14) Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine; 15) Like A Rolling Stone; 16) Lay Down Your Weary Tune*; 17) Subterranean Homesick Blues; 18) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)*.

CD II: 1) Visions Of Johanna*; 2) Every Grain Of Sand; 3) Quinn The Eskimo*; 4) Mr. Tambourine Man; 5) Dear Landlord; 6) It Ain't Me Babe; 7) You Angel You; 8) Million Dollar Bash; 9) To Ramona; 10) You're A Big Girl Now*; 11) Abandoned Love*; 12) Tangled Up In Blue; 13) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; 14) Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?*; 15) Positively 4th Street*; 16) Isis*; 17) Jet Pilot*.

CD III: 1) Caribeean Wind*; 2) Up To Me*; 3) Baby, I'm In The Mood For You*; 4) I Wanna Be Your Lover*; 5) I Want You; 6) Heart Of Mine*; 7) On A Night Like This; 8) Just Like A Woman; 9) Romance In Durango*; 10) Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power); 11) Gotta Serve Somebody; 12) I Believe In You; 13) Time Passes Slowly; 14) I Shall Be Released*; 15) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 16) All Along The Watchtower; 17) Solid Rock; 18) Forever Young*.

 

Our long journey through The Amazing World of Dylan's Vaults begins here, as early as 1985, when the people at Columbia, possibly suspecting that Bobby has finally outlived his greatness, decided to summarize it like no other greatness had been summarized before — with a sprawling, pompously packaged, multi-disc package: five vinyl LPs, and then, a year later, three CDs in the then still brand-new and expensive format. Apparently, this was one of the first, if not the first, «boxset», starting off a trend that will never die until there is still at least a small army of diehard fans in the world to make the expenses pay off.

 

Usually, I begin every review of this kind by saying how much I dislike the idea of the «boxset both for the casual and the serious fan», and Biograph is no exception. It is certainly capable of giving you a very good idea of who is Bob Dylan, why he matters, and how much of an exciting artistic journey he has had in twenty years. Yet certainly, casual fans and neophytes have no rea­son to listen to most of the rarities included here — especially if the rarities are included at the ex­pense of such seminal tracks as ʽA Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fallʼ, ʽIt's Alright Maʼ, ʽDesolation Rowʼ, ʽHurricaneʼ, among but a few. And the serious fans — why in the world would they want to pay for three CDs' worth of music when they really only get one, at the very best?

 

Perhaps it would have made better sense if the album(s) were at least properly sequenced, to present a logical musical history (as it would later be done on The Bootleg Series). But the se­quencing is deliberately messy. Statistically, it does look like the first CD is a bit more on the early acoustic side, the second one concentrates a bit more on the mid- and late Sixties, and the third one has a bit more material from the 1970s and 1980s, but that is, at best, still just a limp tendency. Placing the studio version of ʽI Want Youʼ next to a live rendition of ʽHeart Of Mineʼ hardly seems like the right thing to do — perhaps it reflects somebody's personal philosophy of Dylan's music, but whose? And why?..

 

Probably for historical reasons, and also because no better alternative has been presented so far, Biograph has never gone out of print. But its main value today still remains in the approximately ninety minutes of music that are either unavailable elsewhere, or remain scattered on various compilations. The real bad news is that it ties together most of the pre-Bootleg Series rarities, but not all of them: the most glaring omission arguably being ʽWhen I Paint My Masterpieceʼ, the single version of which was originally released in 1971 and still remains openly available only on various greatest hits compilations. Meaning that Biograph won't even be able to solve the basic demands of the quintessential completist.

 

Still, none of this is arguably Dylan's fault (I am not sure of how much the man himself was in­volved in the project — most of the time, Columbia made all these decisions without him), and there is no question that most of these ninety minutes of single A-sides, outtakes, demos, alter­nate versions, and live performances are outstanding. Just a few highlights here to tickle the fancy:

 

— no Dylan portrait circa 1965 may be complete without access to ʽCan You Please Crawl Out Your Window?ʼ and especially ʽPositively 4th Streetʼ, which so belongs on Highway 61 Revisi­ted that it's not even funny: unquestionably the angriest, most vitriolic song ever written by the man, just a lengthy, monotonous, unstoppable, exhilarating spew of venom set to an unforgettable folk-rock organ riff that most resembles a triumphant, self-confident whistle — as the artist takes a step back and surveys with pleasure the hacked and mutilated limbs of his enemies' bodies. (Bob would, of course, later deny that ʽPositively 4th Streetʼ was about the folk purists who thought themselves betrayed by his going electric — but, as rare as it is for Dylan, the lyrics speak for themselves in a most straightforward manner: "you say I let you down...", "you say you lost your faith...", "I used to be among the crowd you're in with...", etc.).;

 

— ʽMixed-Up Confusionʼ is the man's first ever single, and it's... well, not electric, but it is re­corded with a complete rhythm section and at breakneck speed. Think any of the songs on Bob Dylan with added drums, bass, and piano and sped up to a decent rockabilly tempo. Fascinating? Perhaps not that much. Fun? Definitely. Remember, Bobby Zimmerman started out as a rock-and-roller in his early teens, and maybe his early folk career wouldn't have been nearly as exci­ting if it didn't have some of that «rock'n'roll rebel» essence left over in it;

 

— at least two electric-era outtakes, ʽI'll Keep It With Mineʼ and ʽI Wanna Be Your Loverʼ, are also classic 1965 songs in their own rights; the latter was probably shelved because of extreme variational dependency on the Beatles' ʽI Wanna Be Your Manʼ, although, of course, the Beatles' repetitive chorus is only taken here as a jump-off point (most likely, it just got stuck in Bob's mind one day and he decided to play ball). The musical arrangement, carried here by the Hawks, is a little less inventive than the usual standard of Highway 61, but I guess that, with a little more work, the song might have carved out its own strong identity;

 

— from the latter days, ʽAbandoned Loveʼ is a lively violin-carried tune from the Desire sessions that was hacked off to make way for ʽJoeyʼ (!) — a sacrilegious decision in the eyes of some of the fans, I guess, although I do admit that the song is a little too close melodically to ʽBlack Dia­mond Bayʼ to satisfy the diversity requirements that Bob set for himself on that album. And then there is one of those famed outtakes from the 1981 sessions, ʽCaribbean Windʼ, a six-minute epic that never made it onto Shot Of Love for unclear reasons; an inspired, anthemic performance, even if not particularly heavy on hooks (its most «memorable» element is the imitation of the wind in question through a series of inhaling and exhaling noises, which is either funny or irrita­ting, but hardly an inspirational find).

 

Lesser finds involve some decent live recordings, alternate versions of which from the same tours would eventually be released in a better context through the Bootleg Series (ʽVisions Of Johan­naʼ and ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ from the 1966 tour; ʽIsisʼ and ʽRomance In Durangoʼ from the 1975 tour); an alternate version of ʽShelter From The Stormʼ with completely different and, I'd say, better lyrics (ʽUp To Meʼ); an early, repetitive, almost trance-inducing folk epic from 1963 (ʽPercy's Songʼ); and some other stuff that would take too much time and space to discuss. In any case, what has been listed is already enough to call this first batch of «Dylan rarities» an essential listen — and with our current digital possibilities, it is easy to extract and re-sequence it in your favorite order, although I sure wish Columbia would do it on an official level someday.

 

As a final trivia, the liner notes here were written by Cameron Crowe, who knows his Dylan fairly well — the essay is a fun and informative read, for the neophyte at least — but as for the song info, it could certainly have used more actual information (such as, for instance, the names of the players) and a little less rambling. Much to Crowe's honor, he lets Dylan himself do most of the rambling (almost every track is accompanied by some of Bob's thoughts on the subject), but one must always remember that Dylan's words usually only reflect Dylan's current state-of-mind, and it is quite likely that his stories on these songs circa 2014 would be completely dif­ferent (even where facts, not opinions, are concerned) from the same stories circa 1985. After all, the man has never had any stabilized center of gravity, so what can you expect?

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 1: RARE & UNRELEASED (1961-1963; 1991)

 

1) Hard Times In New York Town; 2) He Was A Friend Of Mine; 3) Man On The Street; 4) No More Auction Block; 5) House Carpenter; 6) Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues; 7) Let Me Die In My Footsteps; 8) Rambling, Gambling Willie; 9) Talkin' Hava Negeilah Blues; 10) Quit Your Low Down Ways; 11) Worried Blues; 12) Kings­port Town; 13) Walkin' Down The Line; 14) Walls Of Red Wing; 15) Paths Of Victory; 16) Talkin' John Birch Para­noid Blues; 17) Who Killed Davey Moore?; 18) Only A Hobo; 19) Moonshiner; 20) When The Ship Comes In; 21) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 22) Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie.

 

With three CDs worth of material, recovered from the vaults in surprisingly pristine condition, The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 should arguably count as the best, quality- and quantity-wise, ar­chival release of all time, setting a standard that no artist, to the best of my knowledge, has mana­ged to beat so far, and is not too likely to beat in the visible future, especially since these days, artists tend to leave nothing in the vaults, piling all their goodies and crap on «deluxe» editions of their albums (and perhaps they're right — who the heck will want to bother with their leftovers twenty years from now?).

 

In the light of this, it makes sense to split the expected single review of this 3-CD compilation into three shorter reviews, one for each of the three volumes, particularly since all of them make good use of CD space, clocking in at just under 80 minutes each = the size of a respectable double LP. And if not double, perhaps, then at least each of these CDs potentially holds a single LP of a quality that would make it a worthwhile contender for anything that Dylan had officially re­leased in his first prime, second prime, and post-prime periods, respectively.

 

Vol. 1 represents the early years — Dylan's acoustic period, from his first assured recordings made in 1961 and right down to the sessions held for his last and most «formalistic» folk/protest-era album (technically, this also comprises the first three songs off Vol. 2, but they did have to make adjustments for the CD format). Most of the tracks are studio outtakes and demos, with a few live performances of songs that did not make it onto the studio LPs (for political reasons, mostly) thrown in for good measure. Some were quite well known previously, since Dylan never shyed away from displaying all of his work publicly — ʽWalls Of Red Wingʼ, for instance, was given away to Joan Baez, and there is also a brief taste here of the 1962-64 Witmark demos that he recorded for other artists to cover — but most were probably only known to avid bootleggers, whereas the «simple» record-buying public was in for a pleasant shock. As acceptable as Oh Mercy was for 1989, what could it really have on gems like ʽLet Me Die In My Footstepsʼ or ʽQuit Your Low Down Waysʼ?

 

On a song-by-song basis, Vol. 1 might not stand competition with The Freewheelin', but you could easily split it into an «old-fashioned» half that would be every bit the equal of Bob Dylan and an «anthemic / satirical» half that might, perhaps, even be stronger than The Times They Are A-Changin'. ʽHard Times In New York Townʼ thematically covers the same ground as ʽTalkin' New Yorkʼ, and, although its musical form is even more derivative than the latter's, has the same teen-folksy cockiness — the man's first impression of the big city, conveyed from the provintial point of view: "...it's hard times from the country, livin' down in New York town". ʽHe Was A Friend Of Mineʼ already shows how this rather manipulative and sometimes downright cruel little guy could stir up the most humane emotions with just his guitar and vocal — the song is even more touching in its humbleness and loneliness than the so much better known Byrds cover. And from there on, the highlights just keep coming, too numerous to discuss 'em all.

 

It is impressive how just about every facet of classic acoustic Bob Dylan that we know and love finds some sort of equivalent here, and how they all work so well despite more or less following the same formulae. Bob's humorous/satirical side is represented by ʽTalkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Bluesʼ, a true story of an excursion boat gone horrendously wrong, and ʽTalkin' John Birch Paranoid Bluesʼ, a funny account of Bob's hunting for commies whose gag may be a little over­done, but is still well worth a chuckle. Then there is Bob the protector of the underprivileged — ʽOnly A Hoboʼ and ʽMan On The Streetʼ are poignant little tales of no-name Joes whose quiet tragism matches the best stuff on Bob Dylan. And, of course, Bob the flag-carrier for the oppres­sed against the system — ʽWho Killed Davey Moore?ʼ — and Bob the anthemic optimist (ʽPaths Of Victoryʼ), and Bob the rover (ʽKingsport Townʼ, ʽWorried Bluesʼ), and Bob the visionary — ʽLet Me Die In My Footstepsʼ is as powerful an anti-war, pro-freedom tune as anything he wrote back then. There is even a bit of Bob the joker (ʽTalkin' Hava Negeilah Bluesʼ — "here's a fo­reign song I learned in U-tah!..."), and a long, long, long bit of Bob the graphomaniac (ʽLast Thoughts On Woody Guthrieʼ — a poem recited live that has very little to do with Woody Guth­rie but very much to do with us wondering how long that guy can keep it up).

 

Now, if you look at most of these songs long enough, you can probably figure out why most of them, for one reason or another, were left off the original official records. ʽTalkin' John Birch Paranoid Bluesʼ was said to have been left off for legal reasons (Columbia lawyers were afraid of libel suits from the John Birch Society), but, truth be told, it is less sparklingly funny than ʽTal­kin' World War III Bluesʼ that ended up taking its place. ʽLet Me Die In My Footstepsʼ is proud and grand, but still not nearly as monumental as ʽHard Rainʼ, which also ended up replacing it — and so on. Since most of these songs have their counterparts, they will not provide you with sig­nificant additional insight into Dylan, although you will learn lots of interesting new trivia (such as what was the John Birch Society and who really kived Davey Moore and where the hell really is Bear Mountain). But they will give you lots and lots of extra emotional punch if you are at all into early acoustic Dylan. Furthermore, of the three volumes this is the one to contain the largest number of previously unheard songs as opposed to alternate versions — thus, its artistic worth clearly outruns its historical value, and earns it a very natural thumbs up.

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 2: RARE & UNRELEASED (1963-1975; 1991)

 

1) Seven Curses; 2) Eternal Circle; 3) Suze (The Cough Song); 4) Mama, You Been On My Mind; 5) Farewell, Angelina; 6) Subterranean Homesick Blues; 7) If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got To Stay All Night); 8) Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence; 9) Like A Rolling Stone; 10) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 11) I'll Keep It With Mine; 12) She's Your Lover Now; 13) I Shall Be Released; 14) Santa-Fe; 15) If Not For You; 16) Wallflower; 17) Nobody 'Cept You; 18) Tangled Up In Blue; 19) Call Letter Blues; 20) Idiot Wind.

 

The first thing to notice about Vol. 2 if you treat it as a slightly autonomous entity is the stret­ching of time: where the first volume barely covered Dylan's first three years, the second volume extends all the way from the still acoustic 1963 to the electric period to the «country revival» and further on to the Blood On The Tracks era. Additionally, a much larger number of tracks is re­presented by alternate takes and demos of songs we already know. This can actually mean only one thing — namely, that Dylan's vaulted backlog is not nearly as huge as we consider it to be; most of the stuff he put down in the studio did end up on official albums (or, alternately, was so bad that it was destroyed on the spot or deemed completely unsuitable for release). One logical explanation is that by 1964, he was in total control both of his own creative urges and of his stu­dio production, so that ideas rarely ended up wasted, nor was there any post-production censor­ship, either (as there was with ʽTalkin' John Birch Paranoid Bluesʼ, for instance). But that's just one possible explanation — with a guy like Bob, you're always better off looking for at least two.

 

Anyway, even the early takes and demos on Vol. 2 give plenty of food for thought. Some are cu­rios, providing insight into roots of legends — like the acoustic demo of ʽSubterranean Home­sick Bluesʼ and that snippet of an early take on ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, with Bob banging out the skeleton of the song on electric piano, still somewhat absent-mindedly and in a waltz tempo at that — clearly, the night was still young. Some show an alternate vision of the song that, accor­ding to Bob, did not work out, and he's almost always right: ʽIt Takes A Lot To Laughʼ, when set to the melody of ʽSmokestack Lightningʼ at twice the regular speed, «rocks» technically, but has no true angry snap to it: once they recast the tune in its «lazy», sittin'-around-doin'-nothing incarnation, that's when it really got its nasty sneer.

 

There is a crowd of people out there, I know, ready to defend the acoustic version of ʽIdiot Windʼ as every bit the equal of the fully arranged final take — but the song is a «screamer» by definition; when you tell your counterpart that "you're an idiot, babe, it's a wonder that you still know how to breathe", you do not usually do it «subtly», in the tone of a soft, friendly reproach. Again, it is in­teresting to know how the song started out, but I am glad that Bob did not stop there and expan­ded it to cataclysmic (at least, for Blood On The Tracks) proportions. On the other hand, one alternate version that does pretend to outdo the original is ʽIf Not For Youʼ, done here in an arran­gement much closer to George Harrison's on All Things Must Pass: slower, more melodic, less hurried and fussy, more «caring». What probably happened is Bob thought, now that George did it so well on his own, there is no need doing the song the same way — and so he intentionally «fucked it up» for New Morning (where the sped-up, fussy version still worked well in the overall context of the album's «hangover» attitude).

 

Some of the other songs included here were ultimately reworked into slightly or significantly different entities. ʽCall Letter Bluesʼ, with just a slight lyrical shift, would become ʽMeet Me In The Morningʼ. Much more interesting was the fate of the lengthy epic ʽShe's Your Lover Nowʼ, dating back to the early 1966 bout of Blonde On Blonde sessions (pre-Nashville) with the Hawks — after several takes, it was ultimately dropped, but some of its chords and vocal moves eventually became ʽOne Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)ʼ. Its convoluted love triangle is intriguing, but I think I can see how Dylan could see that he could not quite see where it was all going, and besides, it was just a tad too fast for the deliberating, take-your-time spirit of Blonde On Blonde, so, once again, I do not quite share the widespread opinion of the song being a «lost classic» — in any case, he couldn't fit both songs on the same album, and the wintery epiphany of ʽOne Of Usʼ was much more profoundly and elaborately worked out anyway.

 

True «lost classics», in my personal recognition, are limited here to five tracks. Still from the early acoustic days, ʽSeven Cursesʼ is a haunting, somewhat creepy attempt at a pseudo-authentic «dark folk ballad» that would have fit like a glove one of Bob's later acoustic albums such as World Gone Wrong (but in 1963, it was probably deemed a bit too out of place on a «protest» album like The Times). ʽMama, You Been On My Mindʼ, which Bob used to do live in a rather awkward duet with Joan Baez and which is also one of my favorite Rod Stewart songs, is great to finally have in a clean-sounding, solo acoustic studio version — it is, after all, one of Bob's finest psychological digs, and should rank right up there with ʽDon't Think Twiceʼ and such. And ʽFare­well Angelinaʼ — okay, now there's a song that definitely should have made it onto Another Side Of Bob Dylan, at the obvious expense of ʽBallad In Plain Dʼ. Maybe Bob thought that it sounded too much like a traditional folk ballad (it does) and therefore did not fit in the overall concept of the album (where Bob was already playing the hip beatnik, even without the help of electric instruments). But it is such a beautiful «traditional folk ballad» that we'd hardly give a damn about the concept, right? Not to mention a great excuse for leaving poor Suze Rotolo and her protective sister out of the mess.

 

From the electric days, I'd single out the «test-stage» electric recording of ʽIf You Gotta Go, Go Nowʼ, a «comic» number formerly relegated to live acoustic performance and also one of those trademark Dylan hits for Manfred Mann — it is simply an excellent example of Bob's sarcastic skills, and, in a way, summarizes the still relatively new issue with groupies and rock stars to a tee (I don't actually see Dylan that much as a typical protagonist for the song's lyrics; now Keith Richards, that'd be a whole different story...). And much later on, ʽNobody 'Cept Youʼ, from the Planet Waves sessions, could have certainly livened up the spirit of that album a wee bit (what with ʽDirgeʼ and ʽWedding Songʼ and other tunes reflecting Dylan's failing human relationships at the time) — then again, maybe that is exactly why it was left off.

 

Regardless, though, of how many lost classics, found non-classics, or «songs that should have been there a long time ago» there are on Vol. 2, its structure naturally makes it one heck of a journey ­— acoustic folk, electric blues-rock, rambling roots-rock from the «Basement» era, and, finally, the somber singer-songwriting mood of the mid-1970s: Dylan's exclusive Odyssey given to you through a batch of hitherto unknown «subpar» material that still allows to witness all his transformations and evolutions as clearly as anything released in its own time. Thus, even though of all three volumes, this one has the smallest amount of «new songs», a thumbs up for it is still unavoidable, if only because it covers not one, but several of Dylan's «peak periods». Silver peaks, golden peaks, platinum peaks — they're all reflected here in shadow-mode.

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 3: RARE & UNRELEASED (1975-1989; 1991)

 

1) If You See Her Say Hello; 2) Golden Loom; 3) Catfish; 4) Seven Days; 5) Ye Shall Be Changed; 6) Every Grain Of Sand; 7) You Changed My Life; 8) Need A Woman; 9) Angelina; 10) Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart; 11) Tell Me; 12) Lord Protect My Child; 13) Foot Of Pride; 14) Blind Willie McTell; 15) When The Night Comes Fal­ling From The Sky; 16) Series Of Dreams.

 

I think it helps to be religious in order to fully appreciate Vol. 3. In just a few moments, after a couple of outtakes from the Desire sessions have rolled by, history plunges us right in the center of Dylan's existential crisis and, consequently, the two stages of his religious experience — first, the Christian exuberance of 1979-80, and then, the Judaeic prophet avatar of 1981-83. If you still had any doubts as to whether these feelings were just a professional put-on after listening to Bob's official output from those years, Vol. 3 will do a good job of dissipating these. Apparently, some of the songs recorded in that period turned out to be so deeply personal that Bob simply did not dare release them — either fearing they would be misunderstood and undervalued, or because, as he confessed about ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ, he simply couldn't get them to sound just right.

 

To me, the «key» song and the true dark horse of the album, however, is not ʽWillieʼ, but ʽSeven Daysʼ, the one true missing link between the gypsy violin days of Desire and the dark depressed brooding of Street Legal. Bob did try it out in the studio and eventually donated the song to Ron Wood, but, thankfully, he left behind a few live performances from the last leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and the one included here completely blows away Ronnie's version, as well as Joe Cocker's and whoever else's. In Bob's original interpretation, ʽSeven Daysʼ is essentially a howl — an explosion of despair, the likes of which we'd never heard, as of yet, from the man up to that point. The way he extends that vocal note on the first line of each verse — "seven day-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-es!..." — is an outburst that, for Bob, probably worked the same way that Janov's primal scream worked for Lennon (ironically, this is the one part that was never replicated on any of the cover versions: Ronnie obviously lacked the vocal capacities for this, and Cocker either took off from Ronnie's version or rightly thought that his take on this trick would result in a completely different emotional impression).

 

Besides, ʽSeven Daysʼ is simply a perfect song for the Rolling Thunder band, all these musicians piling up the loosely structured layers, sometimes bordering on chaos, but with the ominous, storm-gathering flute and violin lines always cutting through to convey the emotional panic. And whatever Dylan really meant by those lyrics, they do sound panicky: "...seven more days, all I gotta do is survive" sounds almost like he really believes it, or, rather, that he is not really sure whether he can survive for seven more days. The mysterious "beautiful comrade from the North" that, he hopes, will be able to come and relieve him, may, of course, be identified with ʽGirl From The North Countryʼ, but, more likely, this is just a vague, figurative allusion to the idea of «sal­vation» from a dreary existence, which may be hoped for but is never guaranteed. Anyway, the tension of the performance simply burns through the speakers; nowhere else on this album, and, in fact, very little else anywhere, can you find Bob Dylan sounding so psychotic.

 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the antidote to the psychosis may seem a little disappointing — the very next song is ʽYe Shall Be Changedʼ, signalling the beginning of Bob's Christian period and proselytizing in general. The problem was stunningly laid out; the cure, in comparison, looks simplistic and clichéd, particularly since the most Christian songs on here (ʽYe Shall Be Chan­gedʼ and ʽYou Changed My Lifeʼ) are all Saved-style rather than Slow Train-style stuff — up­beat, «boppy» anthems that hint at the achievement of happiness and content but seem more like a clumsily self-inflicted form of therapy («I will sing songs of finding happiness in the Lord! I have to! There is no other way!»), like homeopathy or something.

 

Fortunately, these happy anthems only form a minor slice of Vol. 3 (and, if the whole collection is to be taken as a brief history of Bob Dylan, you couldn't do without a couple of these for the sake of completeness, anyway). At the same time, he was also recording stuff like ʽAngelinaʼ, a lovely, tender ballad that also makes heavy use of Biblical imagery, but exclusively for the sake of lyrical mysticism — we never get to know who «Angelina» is any more than we knew about «Johanna» or «Queen Jane», but we do get to know that, even as he was still praising Jesus on the more explicit cuts of Shot Of Love, he was also doing this stuff at the same time: slow, piano-based, dreamy, subtly building up to a grandiose climax whose meaning still escapes you until the very end. Perhaps he thought that the song was way too obscure and esoteric for his Christian friends, and this is why we have ʽEvery Grain Of Sandʼ on Shot Of Love and not ʽAngelinaʼ, but in these days of borderless playlists, that technical compromise may be overlooked, right?

 

And then we finally get around to songs that were recorded in the days of Infidels, but then shelved to make way for ʽNeighborhoud Bullyʼ, ʽLicense To Killʼ, and all those other clearly in­ferior numbers. ʽFoot Of Prideʼ is one of the natural highlights here — like an even more advan­ced lyrical take on ʽSlow Trainʼ, Dylan machine-gunning subtly poisoned darts at sinners and hypocrites to an arrangement whose bassline almost borders on disco (and wouldn't it be fun to actually have a Dylan disco song condemning sinners to Hell?). Word-wise, it is really one of his most challenging oeuvres ("He looked straight into the sun and said revenge is mine / But he drinks, and drinks can be fixed" is one hell of a great passage, isn't it?), and it was a great choice for Lou Reed to pick up at the 30th anniversary concert (although, like most other guests at the celebration, he never bothered to memorize the lyrics and spent most of his time at the mike squinting like crazy at the rapidly moving teletext, tee hee hee).

 

As for ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ, the one thing that always «amused» me about the song was that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the real Blind Willie McTell, and if there actually was a Blind Willie to whom the Biblical flavor of the song could be connected, it was rather Blind Willie Johnson, the creepy howler of doom, death, and retribution — except «Willie Johnson» would never fit into the rhythmic-rhyming scheme of the song. It is not a great composition (the melody is completely unoriginal, dating back to the days of ʽSt. James Infirmaryʼ and probably way be­yond that), and its acoustic-and-piano arrangement is formally unexceptional, but there is no denying the visionary grandness: there is an attempt here of a panoramic perspective that digs deep into American history and beyond, and ties it with the modern world, and I do agree with Bob that, perhaps, he did not manage to find quite the musical setting that the words demanded, although I cannot decide if the song would have benefitted from a denser arrangement, with more overdubs, or, on the contrary, from a completely stripped-down arrangement, with just an acous­tic guitar. Come to think of it, it is also a song that might have benefitted from Bob's voice circa Tempest — all hoarse and rattled — so, as of 2014, it might not be too late to think of a re-recor­ding (he does perform it in concert, but the jazzy reinvention is not too suitable, either, I think, since it strips the song of much of its eeriness).

 

These are only the highlights; the rest of the songs on Vol. 3 may not necessarily deserve exten­sive comments, but none of the tracks are annoying or useless, and the alternate takes of ʽSome­one's Got A Hold On My Heartʼ and particularly the dancebeat-free ʽWhen The Nightʼ will be especially comforting for all those who thought the biggest problem with Empire Burlesque was its ridiculously «modern» production. Finally, ʽSeries Of Dreamsʼ, an outtake from Oh Mercy, is not a masterpiece, but works very well as a conclusion to the whole package — an introspective, slightly optimistic (against all the apocalyptic preaching) jangly rocker that at the same time serves as a wrap-up summary of the road travelled, and an intriguing prelude to those heights that still remain to be conquered. Considering that, in six years' time, the man would bring us Time Out Of Mind, and then go on to produce a whole queue of albums that, might I say it, are quite useful for the needs of the 21st century, the message — "I'd already gone the distance / Just thin­king of a series of dreams" — seems almost too modest for Mr. Zimmerman, but at least he'll probably accept this additional thumbs up for this particular «series of dreams».

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 4: THE «ROYAL ALBERT HALL» CONCERT (1966; 1998)

 

1) She Belongs To Me; 2) Fourth Time Around; 3) Visions Of Johanna; 4) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; 5) De­so­lation Row; 6) Just Like A Woman; 7) Mr. Tambourine Man; 8) Tell Me, Momma; 9) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met); 10) Baby, Let Me Follow You Down; 11) Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues; 12) Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat; 13) One Too Many Mornings; 14) Ballad Of A Thin Man; 15) Like A Rolling Stone.

 

It was only a matter of time before The Bootleg Series would turn into a chain of new releases — considering that Bob Dylan was one of the most heavily bootlegged artists of all time, and quite justly so. Perhaps the wait was intentional: in 1997, Time Out Of Mind proved to everyone that the old man still had plenty of incense left to burn, and it became safe to put out archival docu­ments without expecting the average review to carry on in a «yes, believe it or not, there was a time when there was a reason to listen to Bob Dylan...» manner. Or perhaps it wasn't. Whatever be the case, over a stretch of seven years The Bootleg Series managed to enrich us with three fantastic live albums in a row — each one featuring a Bob Dylan that was completely different from the other two, albeit not exactly in chronological order.

 

The first choice was perfectly natural, almost predictable: the «Royal Albert Hall» Concert boot­leg (quotation marks signify that the album was originally misattributed to a more famous loca­tion, even though the actual show was played at the Manchester Free Trade Hall) had been in heavy circulation since the early 1970s, and was traditionally held in awe by fans due to its con­taining the infamous «Judas!» episode. Fortunately, the official release went all the way to boot the boot out of competition — not only by including the complete show, together with the first acoustic half (the boot only contained the electric set), but also by cleaning up and remastering the original tapes, so that the final product is pretty much impeccable. (There are a couple spots on the acoustic part where Bob's voice suddenty turns distant and cavernous midway through the song, but that may have been due to some microphone problems or slight equipment malfunction, and it does not do much harm anyway).

 

Technically speaking, and also from the point of view of the continuously evolving setlist, there may have been better shows that were played by Bob on his British tour of mid-'66. But, of course, it is not really for performing quality that The «Royal Albert Hall» Concert has gained most of its fame — it is more for serving as a priceless historical document illustrating the end­less conflict between «The Artist» and «The People». Should The Artist, offering his Art to The People, pander to The People instead of following his individual muse? Should The People ex­pect to be given what they want from The Artist (especially if they're paying for it), or should The People respect the integrity and/or evolution of The Artist? Does The Artist have a right to force his actions on The People? Do The People have a right to force The Artist to amend his ways, even if they believe they are acting in Art's best interests? So many questions in that field, and they are all raised on Live 1966, even if not one of them is conclusively answered.

 

You probably know the backstory already, and what you don't know can easily be deduced from listening to the album itself. First part of the show — «traditional»: Dylan and his acoustic guitar alone on stage, lights dimmed, dreamy, mumbly voice, the audience holding their breath. Still weird, though, since the man has decided not to sing any of his old «protest» tunes, but is instead treating everyone to stripped-down acoustic versions of songs from his new, bizarre, modernist, «treasonable» electric albums. Only ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ dates back to 1964, and even that one refers to an imaginary, hallucinatory universe, rather than a world populated by Hollis Browns and Hattie Carrolls. The audience applauds politely, but nobody really knows what they feel —mesmerized? enchanted? confused? disappointed?

 

Second part of the show — «treason» starts in earnest: the Hawks appear onstage, set up their instruments, and Dylan leads them in an ear-piercingly loud electric set that includes not only re­cent songs, but also — treason! treason! — those old acoustic songs from the folk troubadour era, now reinvented as bombastic rockers. "This is called ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ. It used to be like that, and now it goes like this". 'Nuff said. The battle line is drawn.

 

Of course, like 99% of the stuff that eventually passes into legend, Dylan's clash with the «tradi­tionalists» was always overstated. The acoustic set goes on without a hitch, and the first two songs of the electric set also feature no ruckus. «Trouble» kicks in after ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ, when hecklers first start peppering the stage with insults, and then join together in a clap-hands demonstration whose purpose is rather to show disrespect than to boo the man offstage complete­ly. But listen closely to the album and it becomes clear that there is only one part of the audience, a representative, clearly audible group, maybe about a quarter or so of the hall, that is getting busy with heckling — and that Dylan actually gets more approving applause at the end of each «electric» performance than he gets «disruptive» applause from the hecklers. So picturing this as some sort of epochal «One Man Against The Whole Wide World» battle would be overdoing it: clearly, were it really like that, Bob would never have set foot on British soil, or removed it once and for all after the very first show.

 

Nevertheless, he does have to battle the hecklers, and the way he eventually wins over the majo­rity of them, to me, is far more priceless than the famous «Judas!» — «I don't believe you... you're a liar!» exchange. At one point, as the counter-applause really threatens to spread to an alarming level, the man begins mumbling some slurred, incomprehensible story into the micro­phone: eventually, the hecklers calm down, as curiosity to hear what is actually being told gets the better of them, and just as the rhythm of the clapping hands breaks down and dissipates, Bob finishes the «story» with a «...mumble mumble grumble grumble... if you only just wouldn't clap so hard». At that point, even some of the hecklers probably couldn't help breaking into a general laugh, and the atmosphere becomes significantly lighter from then on. Just one of those little things, I guess, but sometimes they illustrate the greatness of great minds with much more clarity than «big things», don't they?

 

That said, Live 1966 does tend to get its fair share of «tepid» assessments these days, usually accompanied with the formula: «historically great, no doubt, but rather so-so as an actual musical performance». Well, it is probably true that the atmosphere was a bit too tense for both Dylan and the Hawks to concentrate exclusively on the music. The electric part, in particular, sets out to overwhelm rather than intrigue the listener — the emphasis is on being loud, on getting every decibel possible out of every instrument, with the six players on stage doing everything they can to sound like a big band, if not like a symphonic orchestra, but only with reference to volume, bombast, and power, not to «tightness», which may be found missing. And on the acoustic part, Bob largely neglects the guitar, concentrating most of his expressiveness in the art of singing and playing harmonica (ʽDesolation Rowʼ suffers the most, as it may be hard to endure all of its 11 minutes without the ornate baroque guitar flourishes of the original).

 

But then this is, after all, a performance in the «garage» spirit of the times: substance, energy, and revolutionary ideals first, technical quality second. So the band teeters on the brink of chaos every now and then, but they never descend into chaos (and, actually, it would be fun even if they did), and the maniacal strength of the proceedings is still with us — as ʽTell Me, Mommaʼ (a song that was frequently performed, but never made it onto any of the studio albums) opens the electric set, the band plays the first bars quietly and tentatively, looking for the groove, then drummer Mickey Jones gives the signal, and off they go into complete electric madness. Robbie Robertson, in par­ticular, gets into the spirit brilliantly, and his sharp, gruff guitar leads, usually attested in brief splatches as they emerge from under the general rumble, are a worthy counterpart to Dylan's moaning, howling, and wailing (three preferred modes during the electric set).

 

I must say that, throughout both sets, Dylan does sound «trippy». Whether he was really on grass or acid, was just tired, or was just acting, is unclear, but if this manner of singing is typical of his 1966 tour (and, judging, by the real Royal Albert Hall performance of ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ on Biograph, it might have), it is seriously different from both the snappy, sneery performance style of Highway 61 and the more contemplative, peaceful manner on Blonde On Blonde. This here style is more «breathy», more «nasal», and, in moments of frenzy, more high-pitched than he usually goes. Later on, when the 1970s came along, he would resort more to shouting out the words, but here, he drags and drawls them out as if in an intoxicated haze. No mistakes, no slip-ups, but a sound that seems completely locked in on itself rather than targeted at the audience — an additional factor, perhaps, in enraging the hecklers, who must have gotten the feeling that the man is doing it all strictly for himself, and couldn't care less about whoever else was out there in the hall (a correct feeling, most likely). Unfortunately, in my case at least, it does not exactly make me want to listen to the album over and over again — even the great, fabulous conclusion of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ ("play fucking loud!") has the feeling of an imposing distant volcano, erupting over the heads of the unfortunate nearby villagers rather than over your own: I get the feeling of admiring the scene from afar rather than being directly involved. But that's also the same thing that makes it such a fascinating historical document.

 

On the other hand, it must also be stated that the stripped-down acoustic versions, especially ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ, raise the «intimacy» bar rather than lowering it — the mystical nighttime aura of ʽVisionsʼ is enhanced through this minimalism, even if I do miss Al Kooper's ghostly or­gan (but not Robertson's squeaky guitar runs, for that matter). And in general, I'd say that acous­tic reinventions of Bob's «beatnik-psychedelic» classics are more interesting, per se, than the electric reworkings of Bob's acoustic material, because most of the electric songs, mood-wise, sound the same in this setting, whereas the acoustic songs still preserve their individual faces. Plus, you get to hear Bob's harmonica better, and he behaves like a mean, evil beast with the instrument, parti­cularly on the opening ʽShe Belongs To Meʼ and on the closing ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ — some of the shrillest, wickedest blasts you'll ever hear.

 

All in all, this is probably not the «greatest live album of all time» from anything but a purely historical point of view, and this may not even necessarily be the greatest live Bob Dylan album of all time (at least the next two volumes in the series give it quite a bit of competition), but, re­gardless of that, you have much left to accomplish in your life if you have not yet heard a good sample of Bob Dylan live circa 1966, and no better sample exists than this. As for historical im­portance, my only quibble is that people who praise Live 1966 to high heaven for that importance should stop dissing Live At Budokan — which, for my money, quite matched Live 1966 in the overall «braveness» of approach, even though the Fan War of 1965-66 was ultimately won and the Critical War of 1978-79 was ultimately lost. Of course, nobody could call Dylan's reinvention of his back catalog in «mock-Vegas format» a «key moment in rock history». Yet I think that, to most people, Live 1966 is important not for holding a particular vital place in history — but for simply showing how one man can hold his obstinate ground against many and emerge victorious, sort of like a rock music equivalent of 12 Angry Men, and so, let us not forget that this was far from the only such battle in Dylan's lifestory, even if it's naturally the first one to be featured on the thumbs up list for such achievements.

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 5: THE ROLLING THUNDER REVIEW (1975; 2002)

 

1) Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You; 2) It Ain't Me Babe; 3) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; 4) The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll; 5) Romance In Durango; 6) Isis; 7) Mr. Tambourine Man; 8) Simple Twist Of Fate; 9) Blowin' In The Wind; 10) Mama You Been On My Mind; 11) I Shall Be Released; 12) It's All Over Now Baby Blue; 13) Love Minus Zero/No Limit; 14) Tangled Up In Blue; 15) The Water Is Wide; 16) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 17) Oh Sister; 18) Hurricane; 19) One More Cup Of Coffee (Valley Below); 20) Sara; 21) Just Like A Woman; 22) Knockin' On Heaven's Door.

 

With the predictably warm reception organised for Live 1966, it was only natural that the sub­sequent evolution of The Bootleg Series would focus on live Dylan some more. But what would be the right period? On stage, the man evolved and recreated himself in different images even more radically than in the studio, so it must have been a tough choice to make — yet the com­pilers of the series managed to make exactly the right one. An uplifted, hyper-energetic, crowd-defying Dylan in the 1960s could only be matched by an uplifted, hyper-energetic, crowd-defying Dylan in the 1970s, and no moment in time could be more right than the first leg of The Rolling Thunder Revue, played out in the last two months of 1975.

 

We already had us Hard Rain from the second leg of the tour — recorded and released in 1976, after Desire had already come out — and it was a live album that was nowhere near as bad as its original reputation goes, but for quite a long time, there was nothing to compare it to (unless you were there in the first place or collected bootlegs). Live 1975 set out to remedy that omission, putting together a coherent, but mixed set of 22 numbers from five different shows, played at various locations in New England and in Montreal.

 

Some people complained about the album being a mix rather than a single complete show, and it is true that multiple fadeouts are a turn-off for those who want to feel themselves as part of the audience — yet it is also true that the tour, due to its spontaneous and chaotic nature, was uneven, and the compilers obviously did not want us to sit through particularly sloppy stuff, choosing instead the best of the best. So yeah, there is a touch of «fakeness» to the album in its historical function, but then let us not forget that many «regular» live albums are sewn together just like that in the first place, and that most of the «regular» Dylan lovers have no need to hear inferior versions of Dylan classics when they can easily have superior versions.

 

Anyway, what's so special about Live 1975 and why have so many people hastened to declare it the greatest live Dylan album on Earth? (And I count myself among these people every now and then — although, since no two live Dylan albums sound the same way, making a choice here is only a good way to kill some time). In a way, The Rolling Thunder Revue was an attempt to fight time and fate itself. In an era that was beginning to be more and more dominated by corporate ventures, pre-planned, well-calculated commercial tours, meticulously worked out market strate­gies, etc., Bob suddenly felt tremendous nostalgia for the era of Woodstock and Festival Express — nostalgia all the more fueled by the fact that he himself had pretty much missed out on in its heyday — and decided to single-handedly «bring it all back home». Of course, in order to turn back time you had to be a Bob Dylan, and even then, you could reopen that door for only a few minutes, but, luckily, somebody had time to thrust a few mikes in the opening, and preserve that little time trip for posterity. At least in audio form. (Video footage was shot for Dylan's 4-hour experimental movie Renaldo And Clara, panned by the critics for its clumsy avantgarde preten­se and shelved for posterity, although a few bits have been mercifully released for viewers on a bonus DVD that came together with the first pressings of Live 1975).

 

The original atmosphere of the Revue is mostly felt in this music when you realize how many people there are onstage — approximately a dozen musicians playing together with Bob, inclu­ding not only understandable superstar choices like Roger McGuinn and Joan Baez (who, like in the old times, duets with Bob on four of the songs), but also completely out-of-the-blue characters like Mick Ronson: if you thought the former «Spider from Mars» would be the least likely choice for a Bob Dylan sideman, think again — there are no musicians who couldn't step into the shoes of a Bob Dylan sideman, period, because Bob Dylan is... well, adaptable. With a crowd like that, chaos is inevitable, and there is some, but not too much: Dylan's songs are so flexible, and so easily stretch in any direction, that messing them up is dang near impossible as long as Dylan himself is inspired and interested.

 

And he is clearly inspired. The choice of ʽTonight I'll Be Staying Here With Youʼ, formerly a pleasant, but minor country ditty on Nashville Skyline, as the album opener is perfect — not only do its lyrics perform a welcoming function in a most original manner, but the song itself is rein­vented as a loud, bombastic roots-rock anthem that promises a brand new start in life. The open­ing line — "throw my ticket in the wind!" — just cuts through the air like a samurai sword, prompting a cheerful response from the audience. Of course, Bob has completely rewritten the lyrics (more for fun than anything else — why the heck should "throw my suitcase out there too" become "throw my mattress out there too"?), restructured the melody, and turned the song from a settle-down decision into a ceremonial pledge of honor, but isn't that just what we mean by saying «the song lives on»? Let's hear it one more time for musical evolution.

 

Bob shouts a lot throughout the album, much like he did on his Before The Flood tour, but he does not do it all the time, so that the music is not reduced to a monotonous arena-rock buzz. The most questionable decision was probably to reinvent ʽHard Rainʼ as a martial rock stomper which is now more melodically similar to ʽHighway 61 Revisitedʼ than to its troubadourish origins — but it is still fun to hear it trod along that way. On the other hand, ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ works great in its sped up version, making Bob sound cooler than ever in his anti-heroic poise; and the resur­rected ʽLonesome Death Of Hattie Carrollʼ now laments the lonesome death in near-symphonic format without losing the mournful spirit of the song.

 

Most importantly, Live 1975 is probably the one live Dylan album on which his «human» side opens up to us better than anywhere else. Not only was he totally inspired by what he was doing, but he also happened to be going through some turbulent rough shit at the time (specifically with his marriage on the brink of collapsing), and while he is on that stage, it never feels like he is «playing a character», as he usually does. It may have been the one tour on which he was wearing a real physical mask (white clownish paint, probably to match the spirit of Children Of Paradise, a movie to which Renaldo And Clara paid heavy tribute), but, paradoxically, the singing seems to come straight from the heart this time around — and you can most clearly notice it on the acous­tic sub-set. Listen to this ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ: he sounds nervous, agitated, eager to let it all out without any stage mannerisms or specially conjured poetic trances. Listen to this ʽSimple Twist Of Fateʼ: it does not hold a candle to the studio original, but that is because in the studio original Bob played the part of a sympathetic wise onlooker, an experienced Buddhist master contemplating the young folks, whereas here he jumps right in the fray as if he were part of the story — losing subtlety, but gaining in urgence.

 

This intense combination — Dylan in his most disturbed and exuberant state, caught in a rare moment of opening up; and this huge band, fueled by the man's energy and buzzing around like a swarm of roots-rock-hungry bees with their slide guitars, dobros, mandolins, and violins — en­sures that the album never gets boring, not for a second. Echoes of the past pursue the performer in the guise of an occasional listener shouting «play a protest song!» («here's one for you», Bob replies as the band goes into ʽOh Sisterʼ), but then what else would you expect from an old fan who has just witnessed his idol crooning out ʽMama You Been On My Mindʼ with Joan Baez like it were 1964 all over again? And, actually, Bob does protest songs, old as well as new: ʽHurri­caneʼ, performed very close to the studio recording because the tune was brand new at the time, is presented together with a plea to the audience for help — "if you got any political pull at all, maybe you can help us get this man out of jail". So, in a way, we do go ten years back in the past here: never ever again would Bob sound so rejuvenated.

 

It does get darker towards the end, where there is a streak of four numbers in a row from Desire that culminate in a particularly sinister, bass-heavy rendition of ʽOne More Cup Of Coffeeʼ and a creepily personal rendition of ʽSaraʼ, a song that, as it turns out, Bob was not afraid to perform in front of a live audience. But the darkness is still chased away at the end, as all the band gathers round the campfire to sing a spirit-lifting rendition of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ (one verse is gracefully given over to McGuinn, whose angelic vocal tone suits the song so well) — and then ends the show with a little happy country jig as Bob announces, traveling-circus-style, that "we'll be in the area for a few days, maybe we'll see you tomorrow night!" Yes, tension and trouble aside, it was quite a merry-go-round.

 

It was also the last time that Bob would get so friendly: for the tour, he got together with many old friends, only to part ways with them completely once depression and disillusionment got the better of him by early 1976, and never again would a live Bob Dylan show have this sort of cama­raderie attitude (certainly this was the last tour on which the Dylan/Baez connection was still seen to work — on the 1984 tour, Joan was only used as an opening act, and quit midway through in protest). In short, this was a unique event from just so many sides — technical, emo­tional, historical, cultural — and Live 1975 captures and bottles its essence to perfection. «Le­gendary» baggage aside, it deserves to be soaked in every bit as much as Live 1966, and as I am giving it out the obligatory thumbs up, I seem to understand that I have actually listened to it quite a few times more than to Live 1966. It might be, of course, that I am at heart just a bigger fan of Mick Ronson than of Robbie Robertson, but who knows?

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 6: CONCERT AT PHILHARMONIC HALL (1964; 2004)

 

1) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 2) Spanish Harlem Incident; 3) Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues; 4) To Ramona; 5) Who Killed Davey Moore?; 6) Gates Of Eden; 7) If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Got To Stay All Night); 8) It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding); 9) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met); 10) Mr. Tambourine Man; 11) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; 12) Talkin' World War III Blues; 13) Don't Think Twice, It's Alright; 14) The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll; 15) Mama, You Been On My Mind; 16) Silver Dagger; 17) With God On Our Side; 18) It Ain't Me Babe; 19) All I Really Want To Do.

 

Or maybe this, too, could be «Dylan's best live album», despite not featuring a backing band at all and not having anything to do with «rock and roll» as such — just Bob, Bob's acoustic guitar, Bob's diatonic harmonica, and Bob's Joan Baez on four of the tracks. Actually, if you do have the physical copy of the album already, this review will be completely unnecessary, because the astute liner notes by Sean Wilentz (who did really attend the show in question) provide all the information and all the extra food for thought you'd need, and I have nothing of use to add to the man's insightful retro-analysis of everything that was going on that night. But provided you do not have access to those liner notes, here be a lowly substitute of recycled information and plagia­rized conclusions for y'all.

 

The show was played on October 31, 1964, at New York's Philharmonic Hall, in preparation for Halloween ("I'm wearing my Bob Dylan mask!"). Another Side Of Bob Dylan had come out less than three months prior to that, and in two months' time he would be trying out the electric schtick; ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ had not yet been officially released, but had already been exten­sively played out, and was clearly familiar to the audience. Basically, when the «Bootleg Series Team» decided that the next live album to be released would have to be for the acoustic period, the choice was between «classic acoustic phase» (Bob as Pete Seeger-approved hero of the protest movement) and «transitional acoustic phase» — and they settled on the tapes from the Philharmonic as a particularly well-played and well-preserved memento of the latter. What can I say? Awesome choice, probably (probably, because I don't have that much to compare it with).

 

Playing Live 1964 back to back with Live 1966 (especially its acoustic first half) will give you a good idea of just how much the man — and the times — had changed in less than two years. The Dylan of 1966 was a Dylan living in a cloud (and I don't even literally mean a cloud of dope, though that was relevant, too), separated from the audience by an invisible plexiglas layer. By contrast, the Dylan of 1964 is a lively, cheerful, charismatic fellow, already well aware of the great power that he can exercise over people and occasionally testing its limits — for instance, there is a moment there when he just absent-mindedly strums the chords to ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ for a couple of minutes before «admitting» that he does not remember the first verse, and having people in the front row explicitly remind him that yes, Bob, truly and verily we have faithfully memorized all the songs from your latest and greatest. (I do not buy it that he actually did forget the "I can't understand..." bit, although he does stumble once on a verse in the middle of ʽIt's Alright Maʼ, and then again, there's a hilarious stumble in the middle of ʽMama You Been On My Mindʼ where they have to trade some extra vocalising in between Bob and Joan).

 

He is also clearly a fellow that is way too tired of his «protest» image, as evidenced by the encore, where somebody jokingly requests ʽMary Had A Little Lambʼ and the man responds with "Did I write that?... Is that a protest song?" To that end, there are only three songs off The Times, his most symbolically «protest» album, and once he gives the impression of being about to launch into ʽBallad Of Hollis Brownʼ, but then switches gears and it becomes ʽHard Rainʼ. Even the early Freewheelin' material is downtrodden — no ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ in the setlist, no ʽMas­ters Of Warʼ, and as for ʽDon't Think Twiceʼ, it is executed in near-parodic mode ("well it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, BAAAAAAAAABE!") that sends the audience laughing rather than empathizing. Clearly, the time had come for something different, even if you had to slaughter some of your own sacred cows, or, at least, rudely de-sacralize them.

 

On the other end of the pole, we have previews of things to come — introductions of the as of yet brand new ʽGates Of Edenʼ and ʽIt's Alright, Maʼ ("it's a very funny song!" — yeah, right), which could have been known at best to a tiny handful of people in the audience; it is not clear how many people could get the words right, but it must be said that Bob plays both songs at slightly slower tempos than we are used to nowadays, and enunciates everything very clearly. For that matter, he also enunciates very clearly the comical sexual innuendos on ʽIf You Gotta Go, Go Nowʼ, sending the people up in roars of laughter after each verse — even a stren-faced folkie likes a good adulterous brawl every now and then.

 

The Joan Baez section is probably the weakest link of the show: she was a good foil for him in the «classic protest» days, but by late 1964 the vibe had died down, and their dueting on ʽWith God On Our Sideʼ feels a little «workmanlike» and not particularly inspiring. ʽMama You Been On My Mindʼ, envisioned here as a mental dialog between the two separated protagonists, works much better (when they do not forget the lyrics, that is), and Joan graciously gets a solo spot with the traditional song ʽSilver Daggerʼ (she is really very beautiful when she comes in small doses like this), but in the context of this show it is clearly seen that the Dylan/Baez partnership is over and out. "It ain't me you're looking for, babe". Was it intentional that he had her participate in this as the show's final duet? I think it was.

 

Anyway, even despite the fact that there is relatively little space to rearrange and reinvent your songs when you are only armed with the barest of equipment, Bob gives us plenty of quirks and tricks to make this experience every bit as valuable as the canonical studio recordings. (Might I add that aficionados of Bob's guitar playing might have something to treasure about this as well — for instance, the basic melody to ʽIt's Alright, Maʼ seems to be played in a more complex manner than ended up on the studio album, almost giving an illusion of two guitars played at the same time). Most importantly, even if he does admit to "wearing his Bob Dylan mask", he is still young and fresh here, and his self-constructed «wall» that would firmly separate him from the audience in the future only has the first few bricks laid in. In fact, dare I say it, you can actually hear the sound of the first brick plunged in position when the sixth song of the show is introduced as "a sacrilegious lullaby in D Minor", and then it becomes ʽGates Of Edenʼ, and many of the people sitting there in the hall probably sit around in a «what was that?..» sort of mood.

 

But historical importance aside, this is just a very good performance. Impeccable sound quality, good playing, and fabulous singing — on no other live album of his can you really feel this magnetic pull on the audience, this desire to work 'em for all they're worth. Soon enough, Bob would only be playing for himself. But before he started doing that, he had to build himself up plenty of credit, so as to make the people want him to be playing for himself. If you are a Dylan neophyte, or an accidental walk-in who has no idea why people are still flocking to his shows to hear an old codger mumble out seemingly toneless, incomprehensible blabber — rewind all the way to here and see the reverberations of 1964 still influencing the atmosphere of 2014, in a bi­zarre, but real chain of causes and consequences. Thumbs up.

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 7: NO DIRECTION HOME (1959-1966; 2005)

 

1) When I Got Troubles (home recording); 2) Rambler, Gambler; 3) This Land Is Your Land (live); 4) Dink's Song (home recording); 5) I Was Young When I Left Home (home recording); 6) Sally Gal; 7) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (demo); 8) Man Of Constant Sorrow; 9) Blowin' In The Wind (live); 10) Masters Of War (live); 11) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (live); 12) When The Ship Comes In (live); 13) Mr. Tambourine Man (alt. take); 14) Chimes Of Freedom (live); 15) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (alt. take); 16) She Belongs To Me (alt. take); 17) Maggie's Farm (live); 18) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry (alt. take); 19) Tombstone Blues (alt. take); 20) Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (alt. take); 21) Desolation Row (alt. take); 22) Highway 61 Revisited (alt. take); 23) Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (alt. take); 24) Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again (alt. take); 25) Visions Of Johanna (alt. take); 26) Ballad Of A Thin Man (live); 27) Like A Rolling Stone (live).

 

Nothing lasts forever, and even «The Golden Age of The Bootleg Series» had to pass sooner or later. The first 3-volume set could rival at least a good half of Bob's officially released LPs, and the next three packages, in between them, offered a phenomenal retrospective of live perfor­man­ces, each one covering a completely distinct and autonomous Face of Bob Dylan. Alas, Vol. 7, nice as it is to have it on its own merits, shows that... well, we are not exactly scraping the bottom of the barrel, seeing as how there is seemingly no end to The Bootleg Series in sight, but we have definitely lifted off all the real juicy, creamy layers. The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-6 were for every­body; here begins the hardcore stuff for the truly inquisitive fan.

 

Actually, this album did not even begin its proper life as part of The Bootleg Series. It just so happened that Bob's old admirer Martin Scorsese finally got around to shooting a documentary on the man's rise to fame and his early, glorious years, with special focus on the «acoustic to elec­tric» tran­sition. The documentary had to have a soundtrack, but since it was deemed too boring to simply reuse the already available recordings from the movie, it was decided that the soundtrack would be a «pseudo-soundtrack», offering alternate cuts to much, if not most, of the music that was actually used in the movie or previously released on audio. And if so — hey, why not count the soundtrack as one more part of The Bootleg Series? Happy coincidence.

 

No Direction Home is the first Dylan album to be very similar, in principle, to the Beatles' Anthology: a few outtakes of songs that we have not previously heard from the man at all, inter­spersed with a boatload of alternate takes and live versions of stuff we do know pretty well. And, just like the Anthologies, it shares the same problem — there are good reasons why none of these alternate takes made the final cut. Live performances aside, there is a huge deal of «work in pro­gress» here, and for myself at least, these takes hold only historical interest. They might be seri­ously different from the final version — but in most cases, «being different» means «does not really work all that well».

 

One myth that the availability of these outtakes does ruin, or, at least, shatter a little bit, is the myth of «total spontaneity», according to which the usual process was as follows: Bob just threw some lyrics together, got some guys together, gave them the key to play in, and then they'd record everything in one, at max two or three takes. Very rarely, it was like that indeed, but in reality most of the tunes did go through a gestation period, and the second disc here, covering the early elec­tric years (1965-66), proves that all too well. We already knew about ʽIt Takes A Lot To Laughʼ and how it started out fast and raunchy and then only started making real sense when they slowed it down (there is yet another fast version here, and it works no better than the one on Vol. 2). But we may not have known that there was a take on ʽDesolation Rowʼ with Al Kooper on electric rather than Charlie McCoy on acoustic guitar — it sure sounds different, with Al's raga-like, proto-Velvet Underground improvisation a far cry from Charlie's quasi-baroque flourishes, but fact is, Charlie knew what the song needs here much better than Al did, and thank you very much, Bob, for understanding that.

 

Or take the two early outtakes from the New York sessions for Blonde On Blonde, recorded without the aid of the Nashville session people. ʽLeopard-Skin Pill-Box Hatʼ is slower and lazier than the finalized Nashville take, and has more of that uncomfortable «white boys play the blues» aura to it than the almost punkish punch of the final version. But the worst offender is ʽVisions Of Johannaʼ, which is seriously the only song on this album that I cannot listen to without crin­ging — the only excuse I can find for The Hawks' complete lack of understanding of how to play that song is that Bob, at this point, does not seem to understand it himself, screaming out the lyrics in «battle cry mode» as if this were ʽTombstone Bluesʼ. Horrible. And fascinating — that he did work it out, and eventually turned the disaster into an atmospheric masterpiece.

 

Even in the acoustic era, some outtakes sucked: the version of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ, included here, for some reason features Ramblin' Jack Elliott on rather out-of-tune background vocals, adding a semi-drunk echo to Bob's main part. Worth one listen out of general amusement, I guess, but believe me, these harmonies sure ain't Byrds quality. (For that matter, the liner notes state that this might have been the version that was actually sent to the Byrds — if it was the «duet» that prompted them to try out group harmonies on the chorus, then, okay, this take has much more historical significance than I'd generally award it).

 

Curious, but inferior alternate takes aside, there is still about 70 minutes of excellent live perfor­mances here. Real early stuff like an honest-to-goodness, but somewhat bumblin' cover of ʽThis Land Is Your Landʼ, is not all that great, but then we get to hear some peak-level acoustic-era numbers from 1963, which already show him experimenting with the tempos and modulations, and a very spirited rip through ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ from the 1964 Newport Festival (so spiri­ted, in fact, that some might probably suggest he was quite high at the time). Of course, the cake is taken by that one bit from the 1965 Newport Festival — that very performance of ʽMaggie's Farmʼ, cleaned up and remastered here in pristine sound (now we can hear what was actually played!), that started off the entire «heroic Dylan goes electric in the face of overwhelming odds» legend. Legend aside, it is one hell of a punk rock performance indeed, where Mike Bloomfield and his crazy electric guitar hystrionics rule the day more than Bob Dylan himself — naturally, the one crown jewel of this collection that should be present on any Dylan anthology.

 

Boosted by a few biographical oddities, like the low quality home recordings from 1959-1961 (ʽI Was Young When I Left Homeʼ is kind of a fun song to hear from a 20-year old, don't you think?), No Direction Home: The Soundtrack will boost your understanding of Bob Dylan and give you a few pointers about the nature and functioning of his genius. But unless you have worn out your copies of the «regular» albums no less than three times, I doubt that you will have strong «affection» for the seventh issue in The Bootleg Series. And to uphold that doubt, and also to stress the significant drop in quality, no thumbs up for you this time. As great as these songs are, we cannot give away thumbs up to any album that has any version of ʽDesolation Rowʼ or ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ on it, can we? That'd be debasing the currency in too cruel a fashion.

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 8: TELL TALE SIGNS (1989-2006; 2008)

 

1) Mississippi (alt. version #1); 2) Most Of The Time (alt. version); 3) Dignity (piano demo); 4) Someday Baby (alt. version); 5) Red River Shore; 6) Tell Ol' Bill; 7) Born In Time; 8) Can't Wait (alt. version); 9) Everything Is Broken (alt. version); 10) Dreamin' Of You; 11) Huck's Tune; 12) Marchin' To The City; 13) High Water (For Charlie Patton) (live); 14) Mis­sisippi (alt. version #2); 15) 32-20 Blues; 16) Series Of Dreams; 17) God Knows; 18) Can't Escape From You; 19) Dignity; 20) Ring Them Bells (live); 21) Cocaine Blues (live); 22) Ain't Talkin' (alt. version); 23) The Girl On The Greenbriar Shore (live); 24) Lonesome Day Blues (live); 25) Miss The Mississippi; 26) The Lone­some River; 27) 'Cross The Green Mountain.

 

The next installment in The Bootleg Series returns us to the original format. Since the release of the original triple package, more than 15 years had elapsed, and in the interim Bob had managed to recapture the hearts of fans and critics alike one more time — clearly, the entire fruitful period in between the «pre-comeback» of Oh Mercy and the super-success of Time Out Of Mind, Love & Theft, and Modern Times needed some extra coverage, to bring collectors, completists, and cultists up-to-date with the latest developments. Sure the third disc of the original series had some duds on it, but that was the Eighties, you know — surely Bob's blistering comeback had to lead to its own precious leftovers in dust bins?

 

Well, to tell the truth, this one's been a little over-hyped. First, although two discs for 18 years of music making does not feel too disproportionate compared to three discs for the previous 28 years of music making — one should not forget that back in the 1960s, each year counted for five in comparison. Look at this track listing and you will see that approximately half of these songs are alternate versions of officially released counterparts (demos, rejected takes, live versions, the usual stuff), whereas much of the other half gathers leftovers that had been officially released — on various movie soundtracks (North Country, Gods And Generals, etc.). Altogether, you only get something like five or six completely new songs. This is still a treat, but one that gets diluted in a sea of all too familiar voices and melodies.

 

Second, Tell Tale Signs presents very little, if anything, in the way of actual big-time «surprises». Most of those years Dylan spent reconnecting with his heritage — the dark side of Americana, in so many different, but nearly always similar, ways — and these outtakes mostly just offer more of the same. Blues, folk, country-oriented tunes with predictable melodies and the usual hoarse singing: no wonder the liner notes are mostly busy discussing the wonders of the lyrics rather than anything else. This is not a jarring criticism, though — merely a warning that if you already have the original official LPs, Tell Tale Signs will not be opening your eyes in a manner of which the old Bootleg Series was sometimes capable.

 

That said, this is still Dylan's Bronze Age here, and the album is consistently listenable through­out, and there are even highlights a-plenty. Particularly treasurable are the Time Out Of Mind outtakes: ʽDreamin' Of Youʼ is an atmospheric guitar lover's paradise, with several haunting, weepy lines flowing in and out of each other, perfectly complementing the main lyrical message ("I'm dreamin' of you / That's all I do / And it's driving me insane"); ʽRed River Shoreʼ is a nos­talgic ballad with a Texmex flavor (the accordeon strikes again) that was, perhaps, deemed too happy-sounding for the album; and the two early versions of ʽMississippiʼ (one almost purely acoustic, one with a full backing band) are arguably better than the final take on Love & Theft, which seems a little overproduced in comparison.

 

Of the soundtrack tunes, ʽTell Ol' Billʼ is pretty good, even if the melody is basically just a rewrite of the verse melody for ʽMan Gave Names To All The Animalsʼ (well, we wouldn't ex­pect Bob to overtax himself for a goddamn soundtrack) — nice «dark boogie» atmosphere smelling of unexplored alleys and unseen dangers. But the real highlight is ʽ'Cross The Green Mountainʼ, a song commemorated to the Civil War (only too appropriate for a movie about the Civil War) that somehow manages to get a unique sound going, courtesy of Tony Garnier playing a minimalistic «doom-style» bassline and Larry Campbell contrasting it with a romantic violin part, while Bob is telling us a not-too-sophisticated moral tale on the evils of war. This is pro­bably the greatest song on the album, so, not coincidentally, it is also set at the very end — and it gives a deeper impression than any song from Love & Theft (both were recorded in 2002).

 

Honorable mention should also go to the live cuts — so far, Bob has not released a single com­plete live album from the Never Ending Tour, so this is the easiest way to check out his band on a good night (other than actually buying a ticket to the next show, of course). On Disc 1, there is a really gritty, nasty rendition of ʽHigh Waterʼ, with Bob's guitarists raising hell and, overall, turning the formerly moody-creepy song into a kick-ass blues-rocker (not necessarily a «good» thing per se, but a good example of how Bob can still radically reinvent his new songs even at this late date). ʽLonesome Day Bluesʼ on the second disc is closer to the studio version and also featured in surprisingly lo-fi quality, but the acoustic rendition of the old ʽCocaine Bluesʼ from 1997 is hard to beat, with Bob's «whining» voice perfectly fit for the whiny occasion.

 

Finally, there are just some extra nice touches here and there — the versions of ʽBorn In Timeʼ and ʽGod Knowsʼ, for instance, will be a drop (two drops) of pleasure to those who hated the keyboard-heavy production of these songs on Under A Red Sky (as it turns out, they sounded so much better under the original supervision of Lanois during the Oh Mercy sessions). A couple extra acoustic oldies, recorded in the 1992-93 «back-to-rootsiest-roots» period, would have made a good addition to the original Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong. And ʽDignityʼ has a more interesting and flashy arrangement than on the live Unplugged version. In short, some of these alternate versions can outshine the originals — the final list depends on the listener, but I guess you could say that is the privileged advantage of an album of outtakes from your not-so-revolutionary period.

 

Overall, this is a fine supporting companion to Dylan's latest creative renaissance, as long as you do not set your expectations unjustifiedly high or join the salivating crowds of worshippers, ready to overpraise each scrap as soon as it is found and laid out on the table. One thing that it proves is that it always makes sense to pry into the man's vaults, no matter from which epoch they date. But the quality of the vault in question is tightly correlated with the quality of its epoch — thus, if your favorite Dylan album is Love & Theft, for some reason, then run, don't walk, to get this stuff. Otherwise, just walk. A walking man's thumbs up here.

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 9: THE WITMARK DEMOS (1962-1964; 2010)

 

CD I: 1) Man On The Street (fragment); 2) Hard Times In New York Town; 3) Poor Boy Blues; 4) Ballad For A Friend; 5) Rambling, Gambling Willie; 6) Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues; 7) Standing On The Highway; 8) Man On The Street; 9) Blowin' In The Wind; 10) Long Ago, Far Away; 11) A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; 12) Tomorrow Is A Long Time; 13) The Death Of Emmett Till; 14) Let Me Die In My Footsteps; 15) Ballad Of Hollis Brown; 16) Quit Your Low Down Ways; 17) Baby, I'm In The Mood For You; 18) Bound To Lose, Bound To Win; 19) All Over You; 20) I'd Hate To Be You On That Dreadful Day; 21) Long Time Gone; 22) Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues; 23) Masters Of War; 24) Oxford Town; 25) Farewell;

CD II: 1) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right; 2) Walkin' Down The Line; 3) I Shall Be Free; 4) Bob Dylan's Blues; 5) Bob Dylan's Dream; 6) Boots Of Spanish Leather; 7) Girl From The North Country; 8) Seven Curses; 9) Hero Blues; 10) Whatcha Gonna Do?; 11) Gypsy Lou; 12) Ain't Gonna Grieve; 13) John Brown; 14) Only A Hobo; 15) When The Ship Comes In; 16) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 17) Paths Of Victory; 18) Guess I'm Doing Fine; 19) Baby Let Me Follow You Down; 20) Mama, You Been On My Mind; 21) Mr. Tambourine Man; 22) I'll Keep It With Mine.

 

So I suppose it was only a matter of time, after all, before the complete set of the Witmark demos (only a brief «teaser» glimpse of which was offered on the original Bootleg Series) made it onto the public market. But almost inevitably, here is where we pass completely into the realm of special interest; the potential audience of this package is probably even smaller than the one for No Direction Home, which at least had the advantage of covering both the acoustic and the early electric periods and thus, featured considerably more diversity.

 

These recordings are not rejected outtakes and were originally meant to be heard by other people, but not by any people — they were recorded by Bob for two publishing companies (Leeds, and later the more prestigious Witmark that bought out Bob's contract) that would offer Bob's raw demos for other artists to cover. So, on one hand, there is some incentive here to get the basic point of the song through to the listener — on the other hand, there is no pretending that these aren't essentially «scratch» versions, ranging from half-finished drafts to completed recordings that still lack the care and meticulousness of finished studio productions.

 

More than half of the songs that the Bobster recorded in those «childhood days» we already know well enough from the official studio albums, and the cream of the crop for the unknown ones was already made available on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1. ʽDon't Think Twice, It's Alrightʼ is the only version here that can fully compete with the official original — most of the others will have you cringe a bit in terms of occasional flubbed lines, bum notes, or wrong intonations. For some reason, his latest sessions for Witmark were mostly piano-based, yet I doubt that anybody will get more kicks out of piano-driven versions of ʽMama You Been On My Mindʼ or ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ, since Bob's piano skills were quite rudimentary.

 

As for previously unavailable or rare / bootlegged material, don't hold your breath: most of it consists of short, highly derivative snippets that may only disappoint when set next to classic material. Their main flaw is almost always the same — Bob is trying to sound like somebody else rather than himself. ʽStanding On The Highwayʼ, for instance, is an attempt at re-writing Robert Johnson's ʽCrossroadsʼ that fails because Bob is not Robert Johnson. A whole bunch sounds like Bob attempting to be Woody Guthrie (ʽGypsy Louʼ, ʽGuess I'm Doing Fineʼ, etc.). And it also features what might arguably be the man's worst ever attempt at a protest song: ʽThe Death Of Emmett Tillʼ. Which is really just ʽThe House Of The Rising Sunʼ with a new set of extremely crude lyrics that couldn't even be called «manipulative» because they're so ham-fisted. It did not take him too long to come up with better, sharper angles for Hollis Brown and Hattie Carroll, but poor Emmett Till, as tragic and disgusting as his story is, never really got his due here.

 

That said, there is hardly any sense in severely criticizing this album. For historiographers and «deep fans», this collection, grafted together in chronological order, is priceless anyway, because the lack of selectiveness shows, first and foremost, the learning process — the album lets us in, stage by stage, on the complicated job of becoming a successful singer-songwriter. In the process, we gradually see Dylan «coming into his own» — moving away from imitations and tributes and closer to finding his own voice. The big breakthrough, of course, comes with ʽBlowin' In The Windʼ and ʽHard Rainʼ — the great leap in quality that, amazingly enough, was yet nowhere near in sight when John Hammond signed Bob to Columbia — but it's not as if everything after that is a winner: inspiration still comes and goes, and it is only by the time of the second CD that Bob begins putting down masterpieces on a steady basis.

 

If seen from that point of view, The Witmark Demos is quite a unique archival release, because not even Anthology 1 included such a big share of early rejected or donated material, and it is quite bold of Bob to give the world easy access to his early jottings on such a large scale — al­though, at this point, it probably wouldn't have hurt his reputation if the next Bootleg Series were an entire album of Presley covers with his high school band. But the uniqueness comes with a price: I could only recommend this collection to people seriously obsessed with the question of «what is Bob Dylan's genius and where did it come from?». Additionally, young aspiring song­writers in need of some sort of «textbook» might certainly have an interest here. Not that Dylan himself had any «textbook» when learning to become a songwriter, but... well, let's just admit that «the waters around us have grown», and way too many aspiring songwriters seem to think that all it takes in this business is to write your own ʽDeath Of Emmett Tillʼ, without even bothering to upgrade it to the level of ʽBallad Of Hollis Brownʼ. So it doesn't hurt, every now and then, to refresh one's memory of what it is that separates «craft» from «awesomeness».

 

THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 10: ANOTHER SELF PORTRAIT (1969-1970; 2012)

 

CD I: 1) Went To See The Gypsy; 2) Little Sadie; 3) Pretty Saro; 4) Alberta #3; 5) Spanish Is The Loving Tongue; 6) Annie's Going To Sing Her Song; 7) Time Passes Slowly #1; 8) Only A Hobo; 9) Minstrel Boy; 10) I Threw It All Away; 11) Railroad Bill; 12) Thirsty Boots; 13) This Evening So Soon; 14) These Hands; 15) In Search Of Little Sadie; 16) House Carpenter; 17) All The Tired Horses;

CD II: 1) If Not For You; 2) Wallflower; 3) Wigwam; 4) Days Of '49; 5) Working On A Guru; 6) Country Pie; 7) I'll Be Your Baby Tonight; 8) Highway 61 Revisited; 9) Copper Kettle; 10) Bring Me A Little Water; 11) Sign On The Window; 12) Tattle O'Day; 13) If Dogs Run Free; 14) New Morning; 15) Went To See The Gypsy; 16) Belle Isle; 17) Time Passes Slowly #2; 18) When I Paint My Masterpiece.

 

The farther you go, the harder it gets to push out new incarnations of «The Bootleg Series» that would not merely be of historical interest, but actually worthy of Bob's general reputation and enjoyable to the average ear without having to be preceded by a three-hour lecture on how Bob Dylan changed the world in so many ways. The Witmark Demos was already something like the equivalent of Vol. 25 of Leo Tolstoy's Collected Oeuvres, located so far down the bookshelf that only professional philologists ever get there. But with Vol. 10, the Bootleg Series Team and their grumpy old endorser from Hibbing, Minnesota, have found an unpredictable and exciting twist that clearly shows — «Dylan still got it» even when it comes to digging around in forty-year old trash that most people would have probably recycled a long time ago.

 

This, in fact, is nothing less than «Dylan's revenge»: a double CD of demos, outtakes, and alter­nate cuts from his least critically respected era — the year of Self Portrait (which everybody hated) and New Morning (which everybody could have hated were it not for it being the follow-up to Self Portrait). Was the team crazy or something? Not in the least. Even as the original ter­minator-style reviews of Self Portrait pretty much secured the album's encyclopaedic status of «Dylan's lowest creative point», over the years, more and more people came to realize that the record was really «not all that bad» — meaning, of course, that it was pretty good, as long as you did not hold it up to the standards of a Highway 61 Revisited. All one had to do was wait — and Dylan waited just long enough. The timing could hardly be better: with his string of derivative, non-revolutionary, but still modestly brilliant artistic successes in the 1990s and 2000s he got fans and critics alike to recognize and respect that «Dylan cannot always be great, but he can be consistently good». And here comes a memo of the distant past — just admit it, guys, I've always been at least consistently good, even when you said I stunk. Just let it go. Drop a load. You've always liked Self Portrait, I'm sure, you were just too embarrassed to admit it.

 

To drive the final nail in the coffin of Self Portrait's musical-Frankenstein legend, none other than Greil Marcus, the author of the original famous «what is this shit?» review, is called in to repent and atone for his sins by writing a new set of liner notes. Honestly, I have not even opened them — I am just amused by the power that Bob Dylan has over people. Of course, he may have also reiterated what other reviewers have said: many of them, so as to save face, published glowing reviews along the lines of «Dylan was on such a creative roll in 1970, really, it is a pity and a shame that his outtakes were actually so much better than the official record. Yeah, truly and verily, the only thing that is better than ʽCopper Kettleʼ and ʽBelle Isleʼ without the orches­tral overdubs is ʽDays Of '49ʼ without the rhythm section!»

 

This is all rubbish, of course. Self Portrait was cool (including Bob's romantic takes on ʽBlue Moonʼ and ʽLet It Be Meʼ, rather than excluding them), and Another Self Portrait simply adds to that coolness. If there is one thing that it adds to our understanding of Dylan circa 1970, it is that the man was not merely driven by the desire to release something «humble» and «epochally irrelevant» to get the Messiah-seekers off his front porch — he really was exploring various musical avenues and corners, even if that exploration so often focused on material written and recorded by other people. It was all just a part of the general plan to «get back to the roots» (which he shared with the Beatles, the Byrds, and quite a few other people around the same time) and it worked far more often than it did not.

 

Of those songs that have previously been available only in real bootleg form, most would have fit in well on Self Portrait, although I do not feel like spending much spacetime discussing them — mostly a mix of blues, folk, and country oldies and a few originals, ranging from the stylishly romantic (ʽPretty Saroʼ) to the epic western (ʽRailroad Billʼ) to the working man's song (ʽThese Handsʼ) to even a satirical send-up of Jimmy Reed's classic style (ʽWorking On A Guruʼ); only the cover of Eric Andersen's ʽThirsty Bootsʼ, a stately song of consolation and repose, makes a humble swipe at «classic» status, but somehow remains in­complete. Still, it is kinda fun to imagine all of them, along with a few early versions that would later be reworked for New Morning, making it on to the regular Self Portrait and turning it into a triple album. What would Greil Marcus have said in 1970?

 

The most interesting stuff, actually, is not the «naked» versions of songs that did make it to Self Portrait (I personally do not mind the strings and backing harmonies on ʽCopper Kettleʼ at all), but those early versions of New Morning songs that are often completely dissimilar to their official equivalents. ʽIf Dogs Run Freeʼ, in particular, is an actual song here rather than just a recital, with a gospel chorus to boot; ʽNew Morningʼ itself is aggrandized with a horn section, giving it a flashy «Stax» feel; ʽTime Passes Slowlyʼ opens up in full-blast rocking mode, and ʽIf Not For Youʼ features a retro-romantic, if not too well polished, violin part from some wannabe Jascha Heifetz — I can see why Dylan ended up hating the idea, but it was funny while it lasted. Collectively, these songs are very different in aim and scope from the final «homebrewed», relati­vely minimalist product, and, as good as New Morning ended up anyway, it would have been interesting to see it as this far more ambitiously conceived project; the album would have no obvious equivalent in the rest of Bob's catalog.

 

Two of the songs also feature additional numbers from Bob's 1969 Isle of Wight gig with The Band, but if you're lucky, you might end up with the 3-CD deluxe edition whose bonus disc con­tains the show captured in full. Since it was Bob's first official gig after a three-year break (and would also be the last, an appearance at Harrison's Bangla Desh concert excepted, for another four or five), everything is as crude as it seemed on the official Self Portrait, but not without its own period charms — this is where Bob would sing (for about half of the show) in his «angelic» voice, putting a special spin on oldies like ʽIt Ain't Me Babeʼ and ʽTo Ramonaʼ, butchering ʽI Pity The Poor Immigrantʼ in the process, and, together with The Band, turning his old rockers into rambling, half-drunk traveling minstrel show ballads. Not a great show, but a fun experiment — and another live Dylan album that sounds nothing like any other live Dylan albums. Plus, that Robbie Robertson guitar solo on ʽQuinn The Eskimoʼ, cleaned up and remastered, has never sounded more fiery and inspirational.

 

Happy to say that I have no qualms whatsoever about giving this one a thumbs up — I, for one, have liked (and sometimes even loved) Self Portrait since the day I first heard it, and it is only natural to extend that liking to Another Self Portrait, since it sort of lets you in much deeper on Dylan's general state of mind at the time. 


BOBBY FULLER

KRLA KING OF THE WHEELS (1965)

 

1) Never To Be Forgotten; 2) Another Sad And Lonely Night; 3) She's My Girl; 4) Take My Word; 5) Fool Of Love; 6) Let Her Dance; 7) King Of The Wheels; 8) The Lonely Dragster; 9) Little Annie Lou; 10) The Phantom Dragster; 11) Saturday Night; 12) KRLA Top Eliminator.

 

Unless you were there and paid attention, chances are that the only association that the words «Bobby Fuller» could kick up from the depths of your conscience should be "...I fought the law, and the LAW WON!", delivered in a very British rather than American accent by Joe Strummer circa 1979. The song was a hit for Bobby Fuller, but it wasn't even written by Bobby (credits go to Sonny Curtis of the Crickets), and it may convey a very, very wrong idea of Bobby Fuller — namely, that the man was some sort of long-forgotten proto-punk, anti-establishment hero, some kind of a Marlon-Brando-meets-James-Dean-tags-Gene-Vincent phenomenon to which it was only natural that Britain's greatest working-class-hero-band of the punk movement pay tribute, or something like that. At least, it did convey that idea to me, originally.

 

But nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, Bobby Fuller was a nice, clean, well-meaning all-American lad from El Paso, Texas, who, like so many others, caught the rock'n'roll bug from Elvis in his early teens and then developed a passion for electric guitar-based pop-rock. Without any «working class hero» ambitions whatsoever, he merely wished to be the next Buddy Holly — and then, when The Beach Boys and then The Beatles appeared on the scene, he also wished to be a Beach Boy and then a Beatle, too. Is that too much for a simple Texan guy to ask God for — just to be a Beach Boy and a Beatle at the same time?

 

Bobby's first recordings were made independently as early as 1961, when he was only 19 years old. He recorded with a revolving-door cast of personages, commonly dubbed as «The Bobby Fuller Four» (even though there may have been periods with larger or smaller numbers), the only other constant presence among which was his brother Randy Fuller on bass, and eventually gained a little notoriety after teaming up with Bob Keane's Del-Fi (later Mustang) Records. His first LP was, however, only released in late 1965, after some of the singles began getting serious airplay and slowly ascending up the charts.

 

Although some of these songs actually date from earlier sessions (circa 1964), and some of the originals had been written even earlier, it is quite clear already from the title that KRLA King Of The Wheels was, for the standards of late 1965, a «nostalgic-conservative» record. Bobby hardly ever shies away from promoting his influences on his sleeve, and the themes of the album are strictly limited to the classic surf-era recipé — Girls and Cars, not necessarily in that order of preference. And not the Girls of ʽGirlʼ fame or the Cars of ʽDrive My Carʼ fame, either (to be accurate, Rubber Soul had not yet been released, but it would probably have made no difference if it were): the emotional / verbal content of the songs is all about those stereotypical «teen sensa­tions». The Beach Boys were no longer writing songs about their little 409 or Little Deuce Coupe by the end of 1965, but Bobby Fuller was, and he was not ashamed.

 

Whatever. If you are a fan of innocent early-to-mid Sixties pop, there is no way that you will not appreciate at least the first two songs on here — ʽNever To Be Forgottenʼ is an Orbison-worthy little gem (although Bobby's vocals are nowhere near as special), showing how well acquainted the man was with Phil Spector's wall-of-sound technique, and ʽAnother Sad And Lonely Nightʼ seems far more influenced by the Merseybeat scene: more Billy J. Kramer than the Beatles, in that the sound is not very sharp and the hooks are not as piercing, but still friendly and catchy enough for the "another sad and lonely night, another sad and lonely day" hookline to get stuck in your head for no apparent reason.

 

The band's biggest success from this era was with ʽLet Her Danceʼ, a reworked version of Bob­by's earlier ʽKeep On Dancingʼ (a 1961 Buddy Holly-style composition) that Keane obviously suggested redoing in the style of the Beach Boys' «grand dance» numbers, most notably their recently released upgrade of ʽDo You Want To Danceʼ. Echo on the guitars, echo on the vocals, a bottle-tapping gimmick, heavy use of back vocals — reportedly, Bobby hated the final version, yet it is ultimately more gripping than the original, if only for the non-trivial vocal arrangements (the repetitive "let her dance, let her dance, let her dance, dance, dance..." echoey response that seems to bounce off the instruments in all directions). Almost shamelessly «second-hand», but melodically distinct enough to act as a loving little brother to ʽDo You Want To Danceʼ rather than just a useless rip-off.

 

Other cute imitations include ʽShe's My Girlʼ (with a ʽHelp Me Rhondaʼ-like key change from verse to chorus), ʽTake My Wordʼ (with handclaps coming straight from the Beatles' ʽI'll Get Youʼ), and ʽFool Of Loveʼ (also sounds as if the Beatles wrote this circa 1959 and donated it to any­one hungry enough to eat it up). The second side of the LP, however, is almost completely dedicated to the «Cars» side of the business, and since «Cars» are generally inferior to «Girls» as a major source of melodic creativity, this is where Bobby falls way too often on direct borrowing (stealing) — ʽKing Of The Wheelsʼ is really little more than a slightly sped up version of ʽLittle Deuce Coupeʼ, and ʽThe Phantom Dragsterʼ is merely an attempt to apply the Bo Diddley beat to the same thematical subject, but can this really work? I mean, «car songs» are supposed to bring on musical associations with car racing, and if I ever had to car-race to a Bo Diddley beat, I'd probably be throwing up most of the way.

 

A few of the songs on that side are instrumentals in the classic vein of The Ventures (ʽThe Lonely Dragsterʼ, ʽKRLA Top Eliminatorʼ), which gives you the chance to assess Bobby's skills as a guitar player — not bad at all compared with his surf-rock competitors, fluent and expressive, but not enough to push him over into the «greatness» range: the same bluesy chops had already been brought over to a new level by the likes of Clapton, anyway.

 

Still, on the strength of the simple-and-innocent pop hooks on Side A, the album as a whole qualifies for a mild thumbs up, I think — though not high enough to recommend anybody to search for the entire contents of this LP rather than head straight for a best-of compilation: the fact is that Bobby Fuller simply did not live long enough to show us whether he had a real album brewing inside his head or not.

 

I FOUGHT THE LAW (1966)

 

1) Let Her Dance; 2) Julie; 3) A New Shade Of Blue; 4) Only When I Dream; 5) You Kiss Me; 6) Little Annie Lou; 7) I Fought The Law; 8) Another Sad And Lonely Night; 9) Saturday Night; 10) Take My Word; 11) Fool Of Love; 12) Never To Be Forgotten.

 

ʽI Fought The Lawʼ is quite a cool song, although it is a bit odd that the original version by the Crickets, with Sonny Curtis on lead vocals, never managed to have even one dozenth of the im­pact of the Bobby Fuller Four version, despite Bobby being quite reverential to the original: talk about the power of accidence! Or maybe there simply was something in the song that made it sound so much before its time in 1960, and so well in line with the garage spirit of 1966. Not that it formally sounds «garage-like»: the guitar sound is clean and jangly, reflecting the influence of the Crickets filtered through Merseybeat standards. The message — this is, after all, the unrepen­tant confession of a young derelict we're talking about — that's what mattered.

 

Honestly, I am not even sure if Bobby selected it for the message: this is pretty much the only song in his catalog that could be properly called «rebellious». Most likely, he just liked the vibe of the original and chose to cover it as one of those quirky, catchy, but little-known non-hits from the past that needed additional popularization. Who knew, back in 1966, that eventually The Clash would roll along a decade later to make it an integral, well-fitting part of their usual pedi­gree? Who could, in fact, have predicted that it would rise into the US Top Ten...? One of those amazing little mysteries of life that makes exploring musical history so worthwhile.

 

The record label decided to quickly capitalize on the success of the single by placing it on the band's second LP — the irony, of course, being that the band had almost no new material, and thus, about half of the record simply repeated the songs from the KRLA LP (I assume that the executives logically reasoned that, since nobody bought that LP in the first place, there'd be no harm in trying to introduce the population to those songs for a second time). Only four new songs have been recorded, of which ʽJulieʼ is another upbeat, friendly Buddy Holly imitation, while the others are rhythmic ballads more in the style of Roy Orbison — not awful or anything, but nothing to write home about.

 

Funny enough, the songs from KRLA that do get repeated are restricted to love-themed pop rockers and ballads — not a single car song is included, which, on the whole, makes I Fought The Law the ultimate Bobby Fuller LP: ʽAnother Sad And Lonely Nightʼ, ʽLet Her Danceʼ, and ʽI Fought The Lawʼ are all here, and those ridiculous variations on the theme of ʽLittle Deuce Coupeʼ are not. On the other hand, the selection does make ʽI Fought The Lawʼ stick out like a sore thumb — nothing even begins to come close to this song in terms of attitude, energy, «spi­ritual fire», if you will.

 

Since it would only take six months after the success of ʽI Fought The Lawʼ for Bobby Fuller to have been found asphyxiated in his mother's car (permanently cementing the legend, so to speak), we have no idea of what direction he would have chosen; something tells me that, most likely, he'd probably just fade away like so many others, but who needs guesswork? Other songs recorded around that time have been since then made available on various compilations, and none of the ones I have heard seem to yield any more clues.

 

Additionally, Bobby's legend has so uncomfortably outgrown his real importance that, among the faithful collectors, almost every shred of his recording legacy from the early days has been lovingly assembled and packaged on various archival releases (Bobby Fuller Tapes, El Paso Rock, etc.), with fans often claiming that his earliest work is rawer, grittier, and more «sincere» than his Mustang days. Perhaps so, but, judging by what little I have heard, there is no need to hope for a miracle: it's not as if Bobby Fuller was a genius songwriter or virtuoso guitar player in 1960. On the whole, his claim to fame can be measured out in two or three real good singles, a dozen or so reasonably clever facsimiles, and the most mysterious death of 1966. But then, it was all such a good time that even a minor footnote like this has its own bit of value. You just need to disentangle legend, hearsay, and false impression from facts — sometimes not easy at all, given the existence of scenes like this, where the Bobby Fuller Four were forced to lip-synch to a non-Bobby Fuller song next to Nancy Sinatra in a performance worthy of Austin Powers. Oh yes, no need to deny that the 1960s had their fair share of embarrassingly weird ways of earning a buck.

BOOKER T. & THE M.G.'s

GREEN ONIONS (1962)

 

1) Green Onions; 2) Rinky-Dink; 3) I Got A Woman; 4) Mo' Onions; 5) Twist And Shout; 6) Behave Yourself; 7) Stranger On The Shore; 8) Lonely Avenue; 9) One Who Really Loves You; 10) You Can't Sit Down; 11) A Woman, A Lover, A Friend; 12) Comin' Home Baby.

 

Back in those early days, fully instrumental albums were the norm for jazz performers — the much younger world of R&B was still predominantly oriented at the «popular» market, so most of Atlantic's classic hits in that style were driven by vocalists: a somewhat unfair deal, since many of the employed musicians were first-rate pros and deserved a good piece of the action themselves. No better way to prove this than by donating our full attention to Booker T. & The M.G.'s, the Stax house band behind Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and other Memphis greats that was seriously responsible for the appeal of their hits — except that the popular ear in all these cases always tends to be attracted to the singer first.

 

Like so many good things in the world, Green Onions came about by accident: the band was loosely jamming in the studio, warming up for an upcoming session, when they were overheard by Jim Stewart, president of Stax, who surreptitiously recorded the results (ʽBehave Yourselfʼ) and proposed to put it out as a single. For the B-side, the band wrote and recorded another instru­mental — upon hearing which, it was decided that the B-side should become the A-side, and on that day, a piece of history was made.

 

Most serious instrumentalists of the day could probably have laughed ʽGreen Onionsʼ off as a simplistic, repetitive, primitive groove, seductive only for aspiring teenage guitar players (indeed, most of the young British R'n'B-ers would cut their teeth learning how to play ʽGreen Onionsʼ, and you can still hear The Who, for instance, digging into it on some of their earliest bootlegs). Yes, but what a groove, though! If ʽLouie Louieʼ was the defining «simplistically rebellious» groove of its era, then ʽGreen Onionsʼ pretty much invented the «scary blues-rock groove» para­digm. The youngsters didn't just like it because it was simple — they loved it because it sounded so «dangerous» and so «cool» at the same time.

 

Booker T. himself, the 17-year old organ wiz Booker T. Jones, that is, is unquestionably the star of the show, a complete master of tone, timing, and «un-flashiness»: his lines seem fairly simple, but there is a deep understanding of each played note behind them, whether he is punching out the main rhythmic groove in perfect tandem with bassist Lewie Steinberg or engaging in economic, razor-sharp solos that make their point as coolly, leisurely, and deadly as Yul Brynner in one of his Westerns. However, he has a perfect partner in guitarist Steve Cropper, who shares the same aesthetics — «do not play too many notes, but make each one count», so that on ʽGreen Onionsʼ, each chord he picks produces the effect of a well-placed bullet. Complemented by the always reliable and metronomically steady Al Jackson, Jr., on drums, in less than three minutes of playing time Booker T. & The M.G.'s suddenly emerge as America's most badass bunch o' sons o' bitches — especially for 1962, a year not particularly well known for «badass» qualities, a year when instrumental recordings on the pop scene were more associated with The Ventures (a great group, by no means, but «harmless fun»-oriented next to these guys).

 

Knowing a little about the general context of the times, we could easily predict that the sudden (if totally deserved) commercial success of ʽGreen Onionsʼ, the single, would inevitably lead to the appearance of Green Onions, the LP, and that none of the tracks on that LP would come close to the greatness of the single because they were not even supposed to — the LP was just a matter of making more money, and would necessarily be rushed, and, indeed, most of it consists not of original instrumentals, but of instrumental covers of contemporary hits by Ray Charles, the Isley Brothers, Motown people, etc. Apparently, the band just did not have enough time to come up with melodies of their own — or, more likely, saw no need to come up with any additional melo­dies, viewing, like most other people, the LP format as filler-oriented by nature.

 

That said, the contemporary hits were good, and the band to play them was good, and it does make aesthetic sense to hear Booker T. use his Hammond M3 to substitute the vocal melodies of Uncle Ray or Mary Wells — particularly if you dislike generic R&B lyrics, but also if you just like a good hand and mind controlling a nicely tuned keyboard instrument. While a few of the choices are admittedly silly (ʽRinky-Dinkʼ, going neither for eeriness nor for excitement, more or less matches the seriousness of its title), already on the third track, ʽI Got A Womanʼ, they show that they can capture and put new sparkle on just about any classic — Booker T. surrounds the original vocal notes with quirky additional flourishes to compensate for the lack of human voice, Cropper adds a fussy, ecstatic guitar solo, and the rhythm section totally puts to shame the players on Ray's original version.

 

Stylistically, the album is quite diverse: they cover a highly representative territory, from fast Ray Charles to slow, soulful Ray Charles (ʽLonely Avenueʼ) to lively, life-asserting dance numbers (ʽTwist And Shoutʼ) to lush Motown balladry (ʽOne Who Really Loves Youʼ) to «easy listening» mood-setters (ʽStranger On The Shoreʼ). None of these covers rise up to the challenge of the dark mystery of ʽGreen Onionsʼ (not even their own «sequel», entitled ʽMo' Onionsʼ and sounding like a less creepy variation on its elder brother), but the album still has a very noble ending with their rendition of the Dave Bailey Quintet's ʽComin' Home Babyʼ — again, totally made by the har­mony between Steinberg's bass and Booker T.'s organ that seems to drag us down into some eerie sonic vortex at the end of each verse.

 

For those of us who can still appreciate «the oldies» by detaching ourselves from our contem­porary values, Green Onions, even as an LP, will be enjoyable throughout — if only because people simply do not play that way any more, and with the passing of that style, simple, direct, and deep, something was irretrievably lost, no matter how many other things were gained. For those who cannot, the record will sound boring and dated, but even then, at least the basic primal punch of ʽGreen Onionsʼ, the song, would be hard to deny. In any case, the album (and I do stress — the album, not just the single) gets a reliable thumbs up from me, and a secret wish that the band might have played on all the originals... then again, that would hardly be fair to the singers, wouldn't it? Uncle Ray and Aunt Aretha were probably these guys' only genuine competition that they wouldn't have blown off the stage with their presence.

 

SOUL DRESSING (1965)

 

1) Soul Dressing; 2) Tic-Tac-Toe; 3) Big Train; 4) Jellybread; 5) Aw' Mercy; 6) Outrage; 7) Night Owl Walk; 8) Chinese Checkers; 9) Home Grown; 10) Mercy Mercy; 11) Plum Nellie; 12) Can't Be Still.

 

Unlike Green Onions, this one does not seriously pretend to be a genuine, much less «concep­tual» LP — like so many others, it largely consists of a string of singles recorded by the band from 1963 to 1965, in the process of which they eventually lost original bass player Lewie Stein­berg and replaced him with Donald ʽDuckʼ Dunn, thus completing the «classic» Stax lineup, res­ponsible for so much of that mid-to-late 1960s Atlantic greatness. On the other hand, also unlike Green Onions, Soul Dressing largely consists of original compositions — with the exception of Don Covay's ʽMercy Mercyʼ, all the songs are now credited to the band members.

 

The question of originality does not exactly disappear, since many of the compositions sound like variations on all too familiar themes (ʽBig Trainʼ = Howlin' Wolf's ʽLittle Babyʼ, to name but one), including some of their own (ʽJellybreadʼ, for instance, re­cycles the main organ groove of ʽGreen Onionsʼ once too many), but in any case, this is not a very relevant issue for the boys, whose goal was never to push forward musical boundaries in  blinding flashes of inspiration, but to make professional, reliable, cool-sounding mini-sound­tracks to stimulate the body without insulting the mind. To that end, Soul Dressing is just the right kind of dressing, as would be many of its follow-ups.

 

And it's not as if there weren't lots of cute minor touches that keep reminding us — these guys had, on the average, one notch more of class than most competition. There's the tricky, confusing percussion groove on ʽTic-Tac-Toeʼ, for instance, stuck somewhere in between regular rock'n'roll and syncopated funk — and they also experiment with fade-outs, bringing the tune back for an extra thirty seconds out of nowhere even as you think it was over all too quickly. There's ʽChi­nese Checkersʼ, whose main organ/guitar riff builds on the already mentioned ʽMercy Mercyʼ, but competes for attention with Hugh Masekela-style horns, and plays on the title by having somebody cue Booker T. for his electric piano solo with a juicy "your move!"

 

And then there's ʽPlum Nellieʼ, where they finally succeed in coming up with something just as gritty and threa­tening as ʽGreen Onionsʼ, even if this time they have to abandon «minimalism» and add a brash brass part to the recording, as well as have Steve Cropper intersperse his concise riffage with more complex soloing techniques (trills, ʽMisirlouʼ-style surf guitar passages, etc. — no feedback, though: for all their experimentation, these guys were «clean» as a whistle). A track as sharp and crisp as that could not be forgotten, and, in fact, the Small Faces later covered it, probably out of reluctance to be good lads and play the usual ʽGreen Onionsʼ like everybody else. Now those guys threw in quite a bit of juicy feedback, though — throwing out the horns and probably wrecking a complete drum kit in the process. Not sure if Booker T. would have appre­ciated that. Too much ruckus and chaos.

 

Although some of the tracks could probably be labelled as «filler» if we were in the mood for labelling, the M.G.'s in their prime were always a delight to hear, and even if the basic grooves are often similar, neither Booker T. nor Steve Cropper ever play the same solo twice; also, pro­ceedings are kept at a certain level of diversity, alternating between strict blues, poppier blues, gospellier blues (by the way, on a random note — Ray Manzarek's organ solo on ʽLight My Fireʼ owes quite a bit to ʽSoul Dressingʼ, doesn't it?), and midnight jazz (ʽNight Owl Walkʼ, which is all soft and hushed and premonition-filled, but just as you succeed in getting lulled, they pull you out with a stop-and-start punchline — the classic sense-baiter). All the goals here being fairly humble, and all of them being met with the usual touch of class, I see no reason not to give Soul Dressing a proper thumbs up rating. At the very least, you simply won't be getting this kind of guitar and organ solos on the absolute majority of vocal R&B records of that time — reason enough to be interested in the M.G.'s on their own terms.

 

AND NOW! (1966)

 

1) My Sweet Potato; 2) Jericho; 3) No Matter What Shape; 4) One Mint Julep; 5) In The Midnight Hour; 6) Summer­time; 7) Working In The Coal Mine; 8) Don't Mess Up A Good Thing; 9) Think; 10) Taboo; 11) Soul Jam; 12) Sen­timental Journey.

 

The band's first complete LP with ʽDuckʼ Dunn handling bass duties, but in other respects, sort of a step backwards, since once again, most of the tunes are covers, with but two exceptions: ʽMy Sweet Potatoʼ, a showcase for Booker T.'s mastery of the electric piano, and ʽSoul Jamʼ, featuring some cool guitar/organ interplay taken at a reasonably fast tempo. Actually, ʽPotatoʼ is a pretty damn fine tune that somehow combines the «sentimental strut» of Atlantic's piano-based tunes (the opening bass melody is quite reminiscent of ʽUnder The Boardwalkʼ) with the grittier sounds of the British Invasion (some of the chords openly mimic ʽSatisfactionʼ), and should not be over­looked because of its inadequately silly title.

 

Covers or no covers, though, at this point in time, whenever the band gathered together in the studio they were «unstoppably listenable», so that everything here is at least as nice, tasteful, and professional as always. Every once in a while, though, there are some startling surprises — I count at least three. First, as if to poke self-conscious fun at their own self-plagiarizing, they take the old Clovers classic ʽOne Mint Julepʼ and turn it into ʽGreen Onionsʼ, with yet another small touch of ʽSatisfactionʼ serving as the mint leaf. Second, the old "walls came tumbling down" bit of ʽJerichoʼ is perfectly rendered on guitar and organ, whereupon the tune becomes an even more passionate «soul jam» than ʽSoul Jamʼ itself.

 

Third and most importantly, there is a really haunting, practically unique cover of ʽSummertimeʼ here, with Booker T.'s organ scaling psychedelic heights of tone, milking the tune's deep mystical potential for all its worth, while Cropper adds brief, ghostly, wailing electric licks. Of all the non-jazz, non-vocal-centered versions of this composition this one just might be the best, or at least one of the top candidates — not to mention that it is probably one of the best places to understand the totality of Booker T.'s symbiosis with his preferred instrument (at about 0:48 he almost flies away into the realm of ultra-sound with the melody).

 

That said, the problem remains that a lot of the tunes they cover are melodically insufficient with­out vocals: ʽIn The Midnight Hourʼ, for instance, was still fresh in everyone's memory as a major hit for Wilson Pickett, and without Pickett, they are unable to make it similarly exciting. Neither do they have the superb ability of an expert jazz band to take an old standard and use it as a launchpad for exploring uncharted territory — the short, concise tunes rarely stray off base, and honestly, I have little interest in hearing ʽSentimental Journeyʼ diligently played by-the-book, no matter how overall-good the Cropper/Jones sound may be.

 

Still, the presence of ʽJerichoʼ, ʽMy Sweet Potatoʼ, and ʽSummertimeʼ is the necessary catalyst to guarantee the record a modest thumbs up — these songs clearly indicate that the band is not «coasting», but simply suffers from preset limitations of their format, while at the same time re­taining creativity and inspiration. Which is hardly surprising, seeing how Stax and Atlantic in ge­neral were so nicely adapting to the musical changes of the mid-Sixties, and entering their second (third?) wave of artistic greatness, for which the skeletal team of Booker T. & The M.G.'s was so heavily responsible when it came to supporting vocal artists.

 

IN THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (1966)

 

1) Jingle Bells; 2) Santa Claus Is Coming To Town; 3) Winter Wonderland; 4) White Christmas; 5) The Christmas Song; 6) Silver Bells; 7) Merry Christmas Baby; 8) Blue Christmas; 9) Sweet Little Jesus; 10) Silent Night; 11) We Three Kings; 12) We Wish You A Merry Christmas.

 

Okey-dokey. This is an album by Booker T. & The M.G.'s, called In The Christmas Spirit and containing twelve songs whose titles you could probably guess even without looking at the track list. It was issued in time for the Christmas season of 1966 on the Stax label. What else needs to be said? I'm at a loss for words.

 

Actually, if you are on the lookout for a purely instrumental Christmas album, so that you could have thirty-four minutes of background accompaniment while you're doing your Christmas thang (not that thirty-four minutes is such a long time, particularly if your table is well set up), this would be a decent enough choice, I guess. At least we can tell that Booker T. Jones respects his traditional holidays, and is able to transmit feelings of joy, reverence, and even a bit of spiritual mysticism through his organ playing, such as would be required from an understanding musician during the Christmas season.

 

On second thought, we could also remark that once the main theme of ʽJingle Bellsʼ gives way to the improvisatory section, the song becomes a rather irreverent piece of Chuck Berry-stylized rock'n'roll, with Cropper taking over Booker T. for a while and ruminating on the possibilities of merging ʽJingle Bellsʼ with ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ. That's a good thing — a bit of experimental Christmas humour has never hurt anybody — but it is somewhat regrettable that they did not apply the same approach to everything else here. Pretty soon, it becomes obvious that Cropper's guitar will consistently be relegated to an auxiliary function: Santa Claus does not approve of too much rocking and rolling while being confined to sleigh duty, but he does enjoy some solemn church organ, or at least an electric simulation. One exception is a Chicago blues-style arrange­ment of ʽMerry Christmas Babyʼ, where Steve gets to be B. B. King for a little while, and which does not sound at all Christmasy, but then what's wrong with adding some classic electric blues to your Christmas experience?

 

That said, when it is Booker T.'s turn to have a track completely focused on a solo organ perfor­mance, this is as close as the album comes to emanating a bit of magic: ʽWe Three Kingsʼ, played completely straight and stern, at a low, ghostly volume, becomes almost as haunting as ʽSummer­timeʼ from their previous album. Booker T. may not have been a fantastic organ virtuoso, and his playing on the band's more dynamic-aggressive numbers may seem unnecessarily restrained and too overtly disciplined to generate top-level excitement, but he was a fine master of subtle atmo­sphere, and it is a pity that the band's R&B format prevented them from letting him explore that side of his personality more often. Here, though, ʽWe Three Kingsʼ, together with the preceding ʽSweet Little Jesus Boyʼ and ʽSilent Nightʼ, is like a concluding part of a special atmospheric tri­logy that, once you have had your fill of the turkey or the pumpkin pie, initiates you into the mys­tery spirit of the occasion. It's not amazingly amazing — reinventing these all-too familiar melo­dies in some radically new way is a feat of which The M.G.'s would hardly be capable — but it is touching and tasteful. Meaning that the record is not a complete waste of time, as much as the rational mind would suggest that it couldn't be anything but.

 

HIP HUG-HER (1967)

 

1) Hip Hug-Her; 2) Soul Sanction; 3) Get Ready; 4) More; 5) Double Or Nothing; 6) Carnaby St.; 7) Slim Jenkins' Joint; 8) Pigmy; 9) Groovin'; 10) Booker's Notion; 11) Sunny.

 

Okay, we all know how much the British Invasion affected the state of mind of young American people in the mid-Sixties and all, but this is almost ridiculous — the finest combo in the history of classic R&B, a quintessentially American genre, naming one of their tracks ʽCarnaby St.ʼ? Writing an anthem to hip huggers, such a quintessentially British (mod) thing? Putting out an album cover that screams "Eurofashion!" to everyone who dares lay an eye on it? Where be The Moral Police, claiming that only white people are supposed to be influenced by black people, shamelessly stealing their culture away from them? What's up with this reverse debauchery?..

 

Of course, now we remember that the influences went back and forth in a million different direc­tions, and (hopefully) understand that there was no logical, ethical, or aesthetic reason why they shouldn't have. In particular, the UK loved Booker T. & the MG's, and Booker T. & the MG's loved the UK — in no particular order. Not madly loved, mind you — not enough to have any songs by UK artists covered on this album, actually: The Temptations, The Young Rascals, and Bobby Hebb are all as American as you can get. But feeling sympathetic enough to borrow a whiff of «Euro-coolness» for their first album of the post-Revolver, circa-Sgt. Pepper era.

 

ʽHip Hug-Herʼ (the song) restored them to major commercial success for the first time since ʽGreen Onionsʼ — and the song didn't even at all sound like ʽGreen Onionsʼ: it was, indeed, the quintessential instrumental anthem of the young smarmy «hip-hugger», opening with a coolly non-chalant «whistling» organ theme and then transitioning into an expressive solo from Steve that managed to be nasty and arrogant without being overtly aggressive. Swinging, not giving a damn, full of life, self-consciously defying, oh, you can easily see how so many people back in 1967 could easily identify with these sentiments. Even the Doors later borrowed that swaggering rhythm track for their own ʽChangelingʼ.

 

Unfortunately, nothing else on the album comes close to matching that feeling. Even the brash title of ʽCarnaby St.ʼ does not help mask the fact that it is in sore need of some vocal accompa­niment — its simple organ theme does not manage to be interesting on its own, and Cropper's arpeggiated guitar lines show that he must have been interested in folk-rock playing techniques (quite Byrdsy, really, rather than British), but do not show him making any positive contribution to these techniques. They seem more confident on old-school Ray Charlesian numbers like ʽBoo­ker's Notionʼ (some mighty powerful piano playing there), or on the organ blues of ʽSoul Sanctionʼ, but neither of these compositions ranks among their finest anyway.

 

There are at least two excellent cover versions, though. Smokey Robinson's ʽGet Readyʼ has Booker T. wringing out a rather unique tone out of his organ (or is that an electric piano? it really sounds like something in between the two), so that the main theme acquires a mystical, other­worldly flavor. And ʽSunnyʼ takes the hook from Bobby Hebb's then-recent hit and cooks it up several different ways — guitar-based slow tempo first, organ-based faster tempo next, with mul­tiple variations, tonal angles, and several different mini-moods that realize the tragic potential of the tune perhaps even better than the original; quite possibly, this early instrumental «promotion» may have helped in popularising the song (at least for all those artists who'd be covering it in never-ending waves in decades to come).

 

In the end, it all makes up for an assured thumbs up — no bad tunes and a small handful of outstanding ones — but it does not make up for a big artistic statement. Not that Booker T. and his band had one in mind — with their services in constant demand, they were perfectly happy to be the perfect sidemen in R&B's golden hour, without any significant ambitions. ʽHip Hug-Herʼ is, after all, also really just a «trifle» — although I can't help wondering how many more of such stylistically perfect «trifles» these guys could have churned out if their goal-setting mechanisms got attuned to this kind of thing.

 

BACK TO BACK (1967)

 

1) Green Onions; 2) Red Beans And Rice; 3) Tic-Tac-Toe; 4) Hip Hug-Her; 5) Philly Dog; 6) Grab This Thing; 7) Last Night; 8) Gimme Some Lovin'; 9) Booker Loo; 10) Outrage.

 

The Stax-Volt Revue circa 1967 was a pretty hot affair, largely due to some of its megastars such as Otis Redding — popular enough for the label to graciously allow even the instrumental backing bands to leave behind some musical documentation. Technically, Back To Back is a split album between Booker T. & The M.G.'s and The Mar-Keys. However, The Mar-Keys are featured only on three numbers out of ten, and they are actually piled above the other band — being represented by the horn section of Andrew Love, Wayne Jackson, and Joe Arnold who just play on top of the Booker T. rhythm section, so essentially it's all Booker T., really.

 

As a document, it's okay: the bands play their biggest hits, a few obscure tracks, and a bit of con­temporary material (such as ʽGimme Some Lovin'ʼ by the Spencer Davis Group). As something to enjoy, it is certainly disappointing, particularly for the standards of 1967, by which time pop bands who knew how to stretch it out on stage were already beginning to be expected to stretch it out all right. Granted, the world was only just warming up to the sounds of Cream and Jimi Hen­drix in March 1967, but there is not even the tiniest hint here that a muscular R&B outfit could do something else on stage than just faithfully reproduce its studio sound.

 

They do extend ʽGreen Onionsʼ for about one minute, that is for sure, but merely to add a small, playful, quiet pre-coda movement — nice, but nothing special. Everything else is similar, but slightly inferior to the studio versions, as the band does not have the benefit of choosing the perfect take or canceling out unnecessary noise (although, to be fair, the sound quality is quite high, and the audiences at the Olympia Theater are politely listening to the players without ripping stuff up — ain't no hurly-burly Rolling Stones messing up the local morals here). The tempos are sped up just a very tiny bit, so that it is really hard to say if they did it to raise the excitement level or simply to cramp more tunes into the half-hour slot allocated to them. Possibly the latter, since the entire performance is also completely banter-free, bar a short introduction.

 

The three numbers where the M.G.'s and the Mar-Keys play together are arguably the most ex­citing part of the show, because the M.G.'s thrive on a «stern» attitude where the brass-crazy Mar-Keys are a little more wild and eccentric, and it is fun to watch the two different attitudes collide and collate for about ten minutes. Other than that, the release is completely inessential, although it would probably make much more sense as a brief instrumental interlude in a large multi-volume retrospective of the Stax-Volt Revue (and, as far as I understand, something of the sort is actually available, except all the individual performances have been cut short on the col­lective Stax-Volt CD releases).

 

DOIN' OUR THING (1968)

 

1) I Can Dig It; 2) Expressway (To Your Heart); 3) Doin' Our Thing; 4) You Don't Love Me; 5) Never My Love; 6) The Exodus Song; 7) The Beat Goes On; 8) Ode To Billie Joe; 9) Blue On Green; 10) You Keep Me Hanging On; 11) Let's Go Get Stoned.

 

Okay, try as I might, it is really hard to get excited about anything on here. For the first time, a Booker T. album does not accompany a hit single — or a non-hit single — actually, there were no singles whatsoever from this album, almost as if in recognition of the increased role of the LP in popular life and culture. Unfortunately, the recognition does not translate to the music-making: like before, the record consists of short instrumentals, either made on the spot by the M.G.'s or interpreting other people's achievements.

 

The covered material is kinda lame for 1968, ranging from The Soul Survivors (a very pedantic organ recreation of the melodic structure of ʽExpressway To Your Heartʼ) to Sonny & Cher (a very pedantic organ recreation of the melodic structure of ʽThe Beat Goes Onʼ). The major high­light is probably the tight, snappy, mean and lean cover of ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ, a blues-rock tune whose overall catchiness and conciseness was much appreciated at the time — of course, in a matter of a couple of years all other versions would be rendered obsolete with the Allman Bro­thers appropriating the tune, and Cropper's guitar solo here looking like a student work next to the flashing duels of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.

 

Of the originals, one would expect the opening track to be the most precious one, but in all actu­ality, ʽI Can Dig Itʼ just sounds like a merry warm-up for better things to come — the tempo is rousing, the organ and guitar solos are friendly, but hardly worth memorizing on their own. Too bad that the better things never really come: all over the place, it seems like the band is going through the motions, or perhaps just stupidly sticks to the old guns in defiance of all the wonder­ful musical progress going on in 1968.

 

In the end, the only positive effect the album had on me was to remind me that ʽLet's Go Get Stonedʼ, when you take Ray Charles and/or Joe Cocker out of it, is simply ʽNobody Loves You When You're Down And Outʼ — not such a big surprise, but you do keep forgetting how easy it is for a song to com­pletely change face with just a «motivation shift». Other than that, this is just Booker T. & the M.G.'s «doin' their thing» and not giving a damn about anything else. As usual, it all sounds cool, but already sort of «retro-cool» by the standards of 1968.

 

SOUL LIMBO (1968)

 

1) Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy; 2) La La Means I Love You; 3) Hang 'Em High; 4) Willow Weep For Me; 5) Over Easy; 6) Soul Limbo; 7) Eleanor Rigby; 8) Heads Or Tails; 9) (Sweet, Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone; 10) Born Under A Bad Sign; 11) Foxy Lady.

 

I have no idea if this was in any way connected with the separation of the Stax label from Atlantic Records, but Soul Limbo is the first record in ages on which Booker T. & The M.G.'s show at least a few signs of wanting to «keep up with the times», as they cover such «daring» material as ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ (already two years old at the time, but certainly more «relevant» than any song called ʽLa La Means I Love Youʼ) and Jimi's ʽFoxy Ladyʼ (supposedly, that's one out there on the front cover, as the four M.G.'s calculate various competitive scenarios while staring at her assets). Although Soul Limbo is still uneven and its existence not completely justified, there is some life here, and some justification for the continuing presence of Booker T. Jones in a world where the electric organ as a musical instrument would soon rather be associated with white progressive rock artists than black soulsters and R&B'ers.

 

First and foremost, I really like this ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ cover — at the very least, it makes much more sense than Aretha's version, which left little of the original and replaced it with something rather incomprehensible. Here, the strings are replaced with a steady beat, and the vocal part is being played on an organ heavily loaded with a tremolo effect, so that it sounds suitably psyche­delic and weepy at the same time, adding a pinch of deep dark mystery to what used to be a de­vastatingly sad, but ultimately «light» arrangement. Throw in some variations on the basic theme, a few technically challenging flourishes, and you get an adventurous and challenging homage to a great composition that re-channels, rather than loses, the spirit of the original.

 

It does not work nearly as well with ʽFoxy Ladyʼ, and on the whole, surprising as it may seem, Booker T. does a better job with the Beatles than with Jimi — most likely because the Beatles are not a band oriented at any single instrument, and while hearing Booker T.'s organ play the role of Paul McCartney's pipes is amusing, listening to him imitating Hendrix's guitar is rather a disap­pointment; even more of a disappointment is hearing Steve Cropper actually play a guitar on that track — with all due respect to Cropper, he ain't Jimi, nor does he have any non-Jimi musical vision that would be comparable in scope. Still, it is curious to see them try, and it may be in­struc­tive to see how close in texture their result is to the preceding ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ — just so we all remember how deeply himself Jimi was rooted in the blues.

 

There are a few other highlights here as well, equally unpredictable — for instance, the spaghetti-western theme from the Clint Eastwood movie ʽHang 'Em Highʼ where Booker T. does an admi­rable job transferring the theme's pseudo-Morricone-like «heroic» orchestral hook onto the organ, so much so that I think I like the band's version more; or Aretha's ʽSince You've Been Goneʼ, where the organ almost jumps out of its case to recreate or replace all the nuances and over­tones of the human (or, more correctly, the superhuman — we're talking Aretha here) voice. On the other hand, the band's originals suffer in comparison: the title track is a light-headed Caribbean romp with too much percussion and too little depth, and ʽOver Easyʼ is an overlong jazzy jam where our main hero fussily fumbles on the piano without much focus.

 

Ultimately I would probably select ʽHang 'Em Highʼ, ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ and possibly ʽSince You've Been Goneʼ as honorable mentions, well fit for inclusion on any representative anthology, and disregard the rest of the tracks — admitting, at the same time, that with Soul Limbo, our Silent Heroes of the Golden Age of R&B make a brave, if not wholly successful, attempt to prolong that Golden Age by intelligently adapting to changing fashions.

 

UP TIGHT (1969)

 

1) Johnny, I Love You; 2) Cleveland Now; 3) Children Don't Get Weary; 4) Tank's Lament; 5) Blues In The Gutter; 6) We've Got Johnny Wells; 7) Down At Ralph's Joint; 8) Deadwood Dick; 9) Run Tank Run; 10) Time Is Tight.

 

Jules Dassin was a great director, but Up Tight! is one of his movies that I have not yet seen; since it was essentially a remake of an earlier John Ford movie, transposed on Afro-American ter­ritory, it usually does not figure among his greatest successes — but one of the important things about it is that he hired Booker T. & The M.G.'s to provide the soundtrack, and that, in turn, led to the band doing something a little bit different from the usual schtick. Even if the soundtrack to Up Tight is not their best album (and what is?), at least it is a major departure from the estab­lished formula, and it helped the boys make the transition into the «artistically responsible» late 1960s and early 1970s much more efficiently than the half-hearted forays into «modern rock» on Soul Limbo the year before.

 

The ten tracks on the soundtrack are, on the average, a little bit longer than before, and much less oriented at simply providing a groovy soundtrack for your dancing day. The difference is felt immediately, as the opening track ʽJohnny, I Love Youʼ is a piano-led blues ballad with vocals: Booker T. himself performs the duties, and does it quite nicely — a pat on the back from Smokey Robinson would not be out of order, and you even get to wonder why the hell they never tried that earlier. The iron fist of Stax? Humility and shyness? The idea that, as a vocal band, they would be just «one of many», but as an instrumental band, they had their own niche to keep? Fun questions to mull over, even if, apart from the vocals, the song is nothing special.

 

Another vocal track that is very hard to associate with Booker T., is Frank Williams' gospel an­them ʽChildren Don't Get Wearyʼ, brilliantly done by 30-year old Judy Clay (I suppose getting Mahalia Jackson would have ruined the budget). Of note is the keyboard arrangement — the organ does not enter until midway through the song, then quickly rises to ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ heights, eventually stopping just short of completely overwhelming Clay's vocals right be­fore the fade-out. A strange thing about the track is its decidedly «lo-fi» feel compared to the rest; quite possibly, the band and the production team were aiming for a «retro», quasi-pre-war feel, which is probably not the wisest decision — the Judy Clay/Booker T. duet is so excellently put together that it deserved the grandest and highest in production value.

 

Other than that track, everything here is self-composed — and more often than not inspired. Plenty of interesting piano work all over the place, with even «minor» pieces like ʽTank's La­mentʼ and ʽRun Tank Runʼ («Tank» is the name of the protagonist in the movie, not a prophetic vision of Tarkus) featuring cute simplistic piano riffs and haunting organ solos. And the second part of the set is like a brief exploration of musical genres — lounge blues (ʽBlues In The Gutterʼ), hard rock (ʽWe've Got Johnny Wellsʼ, which takes the riff of ʽYou Really Got Meʼ as its base and builds up a set of organ variations from there), blues-based pop (the lively ʽDown At Ralph's Jointʼ), country/carnival waltz (ʽDeadwood Dickʼ), and, finally, the band's own — groove-based R&B: ʽTime Is Tightʼ, borrowing the merry theme from Otis Redding's ʽI Can't Turn You Looseʼ, became one of the band's biggest commercial successes since the days of ʽGreen Onionsʼ and ʽHip Hug-Herʼ (note: the album version is seriously extended, compared with the single, mainly because of moody organ intro and outro sections).

 

All in all, it's not as if there were any particularly breathtaking or cathartic moments on the re­cord, but it is unquestionably a serious attempt at «doing» something rather than just putting out one more album because that's what professional album-outputters put out. Cool-sounding, diverse, and mildly «progressive», it gets a thumbs up from me with no reservations whatsoever. Well, maybe just one: I'd like to hear a little more Steve Cropper — not because I'm a white suprema­cist or anything, but because it almost feels as if he was not being offered a fair chance here. Then again, if it really was Booker T. who wrote all these compositions, I guess it is only natural that he had this sort of advantage. Then again, we'll probably never know for sure.

 

THE BOOKER T. SET (1969)

 

1) Love Child; 2) The Horse; 3) Sing A Simple Song; 4) Lady Madonna; 5) This Guy's In Love With You; 6) Mrs. Robinson; 7) Michelle; 8) Light My Fire; 9) You're All I Need To Get By; 10) I've Never Found A Girl; 11) It's Your Thing.

 

Back to basics again — as if the creative shot-up of Up Tight was just a fluke, here we have the band reverting once more to the tried and true, with another mish-mash of covers, some of which were already fairly dust-covered by 1969 (ʽMichelleʼ? That's, like, so passé!), but most actually reflect a more representative-diagnostic approach to the charts than ever. We have American artists, British artists, funk, soul, R&B, Motown, folk-pop, even a little bit of musical darkness as they tackle The Doors — here is a band that seems to have finally got hip with the times, even if a spirited take on ʽDazed And Confusedʼ wouldn't have hurt to complete the picture.

 

Few, if any, of these covers raise much excitement, though, and the blame lies primarily with Booker: for some reason — my best guess is that he just didn't really want to do this schtick any more, and was simply obeying the wheel of fate — anyway, for one reason or another his organ playing is really «limp». He never loses the thread, but that's about all he does: the cover of ʽLight My Fireʼ only goes on for four minutes (much shorter than the original LP version), but it seems like an eternity, because the organ just drags and drags and drags, repeating the same verse-chorus melody of the song several times in a row with only minor variations, in a very mechanistic manner and at a very low volume level. One wonders why they have not actually retitled the song ʽFuneral Pyreʼ.

 

Pretty much the same impressions accompany everything else. Yes, the main melodies of ʽMrs. Robinsonʼ, ʽMichelleʼ, and ʽLady Madonnaʼ are catchy, emotional, nerve-hitting nuggets that make you experience sorrow, tenderness, and amusement even in these incarnations — never let it be said that Booker T. does not instinctively feel which chords are the most important in captu­ring a song's heart and soul. But everything is played so low-key, so «lethargically», that you have no idea what's going on, really. Is it just a sign that they don't really care? Is it an intellec­tual statement — «these songs are flashy, but we can make them meditative»? Is it just a technical failure? Or are the songs just so good that it is literally impossible for an instrumental R&B band to offer an engaging instrumental take on them, no matter how hard they try?

 

The best track is ʽThe Horseʼ, a cover of the solitary instrumental hit by Cliff Nobles & Co. in which the heraldic horns that originally made the song into what it was are substituted for the organ. With a much tighter rhythm section, a galloping tempo, and even a rare bass solo from Duck Dunn, it is one of the few tracks on the album that does not come across as soporific. But when they try to break into funk (Sly Stone's ʽSing A Simple Songʼ), the results are even less promising than with the white guy songs: Booker T. & The M.G.'s are not a funk band, they are a calm, calculating, oh-so-mid-tempo blues-rock / R&B team, and they never let excitement get too much to their heads. At best, they can milk the funk approach for a little musical humor (ʽIt's Your Thingʼ), but that's about it.

 

In the end, The Booker T. Set gets by simply because of its strong selection of source material: with all these classic songs and all these professional and deep-feeling musicians, and being re­corded in an era when actual playing chops still mattered, the record could not be downright «bad» even if they sleepwalked through it (which they more or less did). It's just that the perfor­mances instinctively remind me of the not-yet-born Average White Band, and it is a rather uncanny comparison when you have the Above-Average Black & White Band on the other end of the scale. And oh yes, once again Steve Cropper is dreadfully underused throughout. I mean, couldn't they have at least given him a solo spot on ʽLight My Fireʼ? Surely he could have shown Robby Krieger a trick or two of his own.

 

McLEMORE AVENUE (1970)

 

1) Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight / The End / Here Comes The Sun / Come Together; 2) Something; 3) Because / You Never Give Me Your Money; 4) Sun King / Mean Mr. Mustard / Polythene Pam / She Came In Through The Bathroom Window / I Want You (She's So Heavy).

 

There are good records and bad records, exciting records and boring records, «straight» records and «freakout» records, and then there's McLemore Avenue — a record whose only purpose is to stress the greatness of a different record. In a «where-did-that-idea-come-from?» fit of bizarre brain impulse attack, Booker T. puts together what must have been the first authentic case of musical cosplay in pop/rock history, and I do mean the visuals as well, because one look at the album cover shows that this is one album that couldn't have appeared on store shelves prior to 1970 (or, at least, very very late 1969).

 

It is cozy for me to know that, of all Beatles albums, it was Abbey Road that struck Booker T. as such an otherworldly experience that he fell into a «must cover Abbey Road!» sort of trance, because it is totally in line with my own perception of Abbey Road. However, it is also obvious that the man could hardly hold any false hopes of improving upon the tunes by covering them, or even of uncovering any hidden potential of the songs that was not already revealed (immediately or gradually) on the original LP. The only rational purpose of putting out a record like this would be to get people to say to each other: «Say, that Abbey Road must be really special, eh? I mean, did you ever hear of any American band covering any Brit band record in its entirety? Should be real good if people worship it that much!» Plus, there may be irrational purposes at work, but we're not gonna talk about those.

 

Recreation of the songs was not achieved in a «carbon copy» manner. First, as if to over-stress the importance of Abbey Road's «medley principle», almost all of the tunes here are arranged in medleys, with ʽI Want Youʼ stuck as a long spasmodic tail to the end of ʽShe Came In Through...ʼ and ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ glued with ʽCome Togetherʼ either because they both have the verb «come» in the title or because, for some reason, Booker thought that such a sequencing would be «natural» (I am not at all sure). Second, not all of the songs are covered — actually, Booker short­changes not only Ringo (with the lack of ʽOctopus' Gardenʼ, which is understandable, if not very forgivable), but also Paul, omitting both ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ (which he may have thought too juvenile) and ʽOh Darlingʼ (which is really hard to explain, considering that ʽOh Darlingʼ was easily the most R&B-ish song on the album, heavily influenced by the Louisiana sound — then again, maybe it was that very closeness that prompted Booker to reject it).

 

Nor are the remaining songs done all that close to the originals, either. Plenty of variations are introduced, what with ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ largely redone as a jazz number and with the instrumental break in ʽSomethingʼ replaced with a surprisingly aggressive blues-rock jam section as Cropper breaks out the deck of nasty swamp-blues slide licks. And, of course, as Booker T. loyally continues the tradition of imitating vocal melodies with his organ, you will note that some stuff works better than other — for instance, the opening religiously-solemn lead part on ʽGolden Slumbersʼ is fabulous, but as they make the transition into ʽCarry That Weightʼ, the same sub­dued tone fails to clearly mark the contrast between the «lullaby» and the «work chorus» parts of the medley. But then, is there any use in such dissection, when McLemore Avenue was never meant to be treated as a number of distinct parts in the first place?

 

It is quite probable that, provided you have not heard of this album before, you will be tempted into hearing it at least once, at least out of sheer curiosity — and that one listen it certainly de­serves, because, after all, there is no way that the leading instrumental R&B outfit of its time would be covering the leading rock band of its time without the results being at least somewhat entertaining. The problem is, it is impossible to judge McLemore Avenue on its own merits or by its own standards — and as much as I can respect all the solos that Booker T. and Steve Crop­per are playing here, every time they're on, I'm like «God, it's so cool the Beatles didn't use this chord sequence in 1969!» Even on ʽI Want Youʼ, where you'd think there'd be a good chance of Cropper blowing John Lennon's lead guitar out of the water... well, no, he doesn't. Why? Not his song. Not his idea. Not that kind of guy. It's just a Booker T. thing, you know. A hunch, and everybody had to follow up on it.

 

I'd like to give this one a thumbs up, just because of the awesome craziness of the idea, but I can­not. It's a curio — certainly more memorable because of the idea itself rather than its actual exe­cution. It certainly isn't executed any worse than any other Booker T. album: it's just that this time around, they set themselves an unbeatable standard, and, uh, they didn't beat it. Then again, I'd guess we'd rather have them select Abbey Road and be left beaten by it than have them select, say, The Archies, and beat it.

 

MELTING POT (1971)

 

1) Melting Pot; 2) Back Home; 3) Chicken Pox; 4) Fuquawi; 5) Kinda Easy Like; 6) Hi Ride; 7) L.A. Jazz Song; 8) Sunny Monday.

 

For those who doubted if Booker T. & The M.G.'s could make a credible and efficient transition to the sound of the Seventies — here is your answer. The issue is not whether Melting Pot is or is not the band's «best album», as is often claimed. The issue is that, with those new funky sounds on the rise, the Seventies gave us the last wave of great Afro-American instrumental music, be­fore electronics and sampling swooped it all away, and as it often happens in between waves, not everybody riding one could easily hop on to the next one. The M.G.'s could — even if one could say, in light of the consequences, that the leap ultimately broke their back.

 

Following McLemore Avenue, the band grew dissatisfied with the conservatism of Stax and relocated to New York City in order to record their next album — where, as Booker T. was convinced, things were really happening at the time. Keeping in mind that Soul Dressing was really a collection of scattered singles, and that Up Tight was really a movie soundtrack, Melting Pot may claim the distinction of being the really first M.G.'s album to be conceived as an album, with all original compositions — not to mention that two of the compositions go over eight minu­tes, which was perfectly alright for an autonomous, self-sufficient funk outfit, but certainly out of the ordinary for a band that used to make a living by covering hit singles of the day.

 

The difference is immediately felt in the title track, opening with a bona fide funk groove — syn­copated bass, scratch guitar, the works — and yet, at the heart of the track we still find the same old melodicity, characteristic of Booker T., as he and Cropper lay on several melodic solos. Steve's part is quite traditionally bluesy, Booker T.'s is traditionally jazzy, but the funky groove provokes them into action, so the playing is a little more «red hot» than usual. The usual «grim­ness» of the music that originally made them their name is still fully retained, though — this is a dark, brooding take on funk, a stimulus for «brain-dancing» rather than «body-dancing».

 

The second large track, ʽKinda Easy Likeʼ, is a little more gimmicky and a little less sensible. First, it starts off totally in ʽGreen Onionsʼ mode — not a good sign for a band whose purpose here is to clearly put some miles between this and their past. Second, several minutes into the track they add some semi-scat, semi-doo-wop vocalizing from «The Pepper Singers», a move whose purpose I fail to com­prehend. Imagine a ʽGreen Onionsʼ with some girls going "doo-dah-doo-dah-day!" all over the place. Kinda spoils the fun by trying to add up to it, doesn't it?

 

Fortunately, the short tracks more than compensate for one strange misgiving. The one that is probably going to stick forever is ʽFuquawiʼ, because the organ riff is of the ʽIron Manʼ variety — you'll be whistling it for days, cursing yourself for being so easily impressionable, but in reality just falling for a standard trick that your wired brain plays on you. The good news is that on top of that «nursery» riff, the band honestly builds up a good groove, and Cropper plays some mean, stinging guitar. It's the coolest, sweatiest strut they ever took since the days of ʽHip Hug-Herʼ, a mean mother-huggin' sound that manages to make them sound more «nasty» (in line with the general tendency) without using any specifically «nasty» effects.

 

In terms of funkiness, do not miss out on ʽChicken Poxʼ, with a monster bass riff from Dunn and an amusing guitar-organ dialog, and on ʽL. A. Jazz Songʼ, where the Pepper Singers' vocals sound much more natural, as the tune itself sort of follows the formula of the typical blacksploita­tion movie soundtrack — seriously rhythmic, moderately fast, extremely tense, and perhaps ever so slightly «apocalyptic», all of which is only natural if we want associations with strenuous life conditions of the underprivileged population on the streets of American big cities. The doubled guitar-organ riff of the tune is particularly effective in its «hit-and-run» delivery.

 

But the album still ends on a lighter note — I think that the title of ʽSunny Mondayʼ was delibe­rately chosen to contrast with the well-known ʽStormy Mondayʼ; it is probably the first song in the band's catalog to open with an acoustic guitar part (and the chord sequences, by the way, show a clear influence on the part of the recently covered ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ), and one of the very few to feature some romantic orchestration towards the end. Ultimately, everything's well, they tell us, even if this transition to a harsher, funkier sound may originally give the impression that life has become more gloomy, gritty, whatever. Hmm, guess the same could be said about Sticky Fingers, if you remember the opening and the closing tracks on that album. A scary thing, that associative power of the brain's.

 

Ironically, this album, so very different from the «classic» M.G.'s sound, was to become their last one before the original split, after which the band was never the same again — their own Abbey Road, in a hilarious twist of fate in which their «proper» Abbey Road (McLemore Avenue) was really their confused Let It Be, and this here was when they regrouped, cleared their heads, and pointed the way to the future. On the grand scale of things, Melting Pot ain't no masterpiece (not in the era of Bitches Brew it ain't), but by the self-imposed «humble» standards of these guys, it blows them right through the roof, and deserves a thumbs up like no other.

 

THE M.G.'s (1973)

 

1) Sugar Cane; 2) Neck Bone; 3) Spare Change; 4) Leaving The Past; 5) Left Overs (Bucaramanga); 6) Black Side; 7) One Of A Kind (Love Affair); 8) Frustration.

 

Yes, technically this album belongs in its own section or at least in the «special addenda» corner, but we will make a logistic exception and treat it as a regular part of the discography just for the sake of continuity. Not long after the release of Melting Pot, the two main creative guys in the band — Booker T. himself and Steve Cropper — ever more unhappy about being tied up by the new rules at Stax, decided to break the chain and move on to an uncertain, but seemingly more exciting (as it looked to them at the time) future.

 

The rhythm section, however, as is often the case with rhythm sections around the world, felt that the name of «M.G.'s» was everything they had left in this world, and ultimately they decided to stick to it. After a few tentative detours, Dunn and Jackson teamed up with Stax session guitarist Bobby Manuel and newly-emerged organ sensation Carson Whitsett — and now that once again there were four of them, they thought it sensible to just lop off the «Booker T.» part and bill themselves as «The M.G.'s» for their next record.

 

Now obviously, one's first basic instinct would be to dismiss the album without giving it a chance: after all, as reliable as the band's rhythm section had always been, most of the time we were really coming back to their tunes in order to hear some classic guitar/organ interplay. And indeed, when you listen to The M.G.'s right after Melting Pot, the initial feeling is almost guaranteed to be underwhelming. The funky backbone is all but gone, not a single song is as catchy as ʽFuquawiʼ, and the whole album seems to be very low-key, almost begging you to accept it as unremarkable background music while you're busy doing your typical 1973-style chores.

 

However, it is also immediately noticeable that the new band is trying — not merely coasting on the strength of their reputation. Most of the compositions are self-written (with just a couple taken from rather obscure sources), the arrangements and moods are relatively diverse, and there are some relatively long and complex tunes that show a mildly «progressive» spirit. This alone should guarantee a few extra listens, and eventually you might come to realize that the record is not all bad — its biggest disadvantage, perhaps, is that it is really so quiet. Unlike Booker T. and Cropper, the new guitarist and organist sometimes give the odd impression of competing in who of the two can «out-hush» the other one. Yet they are doing it in good taste.

 

Perhaps the single finest example of this competition comes on the seven-minute long ʽLeaving The Pastʼ, largely an acoustic number with several sections that smoothly flow from simple folk to more «baroque» textures, then eventually make the transition into jazzy and then bluesy terri­tory. Everything is done so quietly that your attention may easily drift away, and yet it is probably the single most complex composition up that was up to that point credited to the name of The M.G.'s. And it is quite likeable — the first half being elegantly romantic and the second more self-consciously «cool», as Manuel's acoustic guitar really roots all of these parts in the «past» (no clear signs of anybody «leaving» it, though). Nobody is going to remember it all that much, no, but accidentally falling upon it somewhere in your collection can trigger some good emotions every once in a while.

 

Most of the other tracks, while technically «louder», are just as inobtrusive. Typically, they will feature a soft, tasteful, friendly organ melody from Whitsett (ʽSugar Caneʼ, ʽOne Of A Kindʼ), set to a funky rhythm pattern that is so frail and delicate, hearing this kind of take on funk would be like watching Audrey Hepburn in a boxing ring — well, maybe not as gimmicky, but a pretty solid analogy all the same. Very rarely the music packs a bit more muscle, when Al Jackson agrees to pummel rather than caress his skins and Whitsett includes some bombastic honky-tonk piano playing (ʽSpare Changeʼ), or when Duck Dunn decides to play a «threatening» bass line (ʽLeft Oversʼ), but even a track called ʽFrustrationʼ, where you could theoretically expect them to auto-destruct their equipment in the studio or something, is really just one more low-key piece of clean, soft, smooth fusion with perhaps a tiny pinch of psychedelia, provided by the trebley guitar tone and a mind-manipulative overdub strategy.

 

But give this stuff time, and The M.G.'s might just turn out to be one of those barely noticeable, non-flashy, self-reserved albums that show how good music can be made without pulling rock'n'­roll faces — all the more amusing that it was released at the height of the glam era, when Keith Emerson and Mick Ronson ruled the day and hiding in the shadow to play your instrument was a surefire commercial suicide. And, of course, The M.G.'s was a commercial suicide — none of its singles charted, much less the album itself. It still got some good reviews, though, and continues to be warmly treated even today, but you do have to warm up to it. An outstanding non-triumph of being utterly non-outstanding, it deserves all the thumbs up it can get without getting your hands out of your trouser pockets.

 

UNION EXTENDED (1976)

 

1) Overton Park Sunrise; 2) Steve's Stroll; 3) Duck Walk; 4) Cotton Carnival; 5) Midnight On McLemore; 6) Union Extended; 7) Avalon; 8) Around Orange Mound; 9) National Jackson; 10) Beale Street Revival; 11) Saucy Pt. 2; 12) Booker's Theme.

 

Only nine days after Booker T. and the M.G.'s finally came together and agreed to give their romance one more chance, Al Jackson Jr. was murdered in his own home. Plans for a new album were temporarily scratched, but relationships between Booker T. and the remaining members of the band were somewhat remedied, and, as tribute to the dear departed, Stax put out this record of previously unreleased archive material — with a title that was thrice misleading: not only did Union Exten­ded contain no new recordings, but it wasn't even prophetic, since the extended union only lasted for less than two years, and the union had nothing to do with Stax.

 

Nevertheless, this here is a fine enough gathering of leftovers. It has never been issued on CD and is rather hard to come by in physical form these days, and the exact dates for the recordings are unknown, but judging by the overall stylistics and instrumentation, I'd probably put them around 1968-70. All the tracks are original instrumental compositions by the M.G.'s and are no better and no worse than their regular stuff — and commenting on them individually, for that reason, is tremendously hard, but here goes a feeble attempt.

 

ʽOverton Park Sunriseʼ is a fairly good title, since Jones and Cropper's playing on the track sounds «fresh», particularly Jones' «water-droplet» organ tone that sometimes throws on the hook from ʽSunnyʼ and Cropper's sunshine-poppy guitar riff — a dang good song to start off your day with if you're in need of a quick, painless shot of optimism. ʽCotton Carnivalʼ begins by sounding like ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ transposed to a major tonality, then, all of a sudden, shifts half of its riff to a quotation from ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ in the coda section — funny, and easy to miss, but it's there all right. ʽMidnight On McLemoreʼ may have been written and/or recorded around midnight in the studio, of course, but its musical skeleton is essentially a variation on ʽSummertimeʼ — then again, ʽSummertimeʼ has always had a nocturnal aura around it. Anyway, some nice, quietly haunting organ and guitar themes again.

 

The most haunting track, though, is arguably placed at the very end, where ʽBooker's Themeʼ, opening with the sound of sea waves and a romantic piano motif, quickly gets a string arrange­ment and becomes the perfect soundtrack for one of those ride-across-the-country, freedom-wind hippie movies of the late Sixties. Since the band almost never used the orchestra on its original tracks, this could have been a later overdub, but it works — in fact, it works in perfect contrast with the opening number: ʽOverton Park Sunriseʼ opened the day for us, and ʽBooker's Themeʼ is the ideal sundown-at-the-beach track, closing the day. Whoever assembled this stuff at Stax sure had a knack for conceptuality.

 

Anyway, a solid thumbs up here: it is certainly telling that an album of outtakes released in 1976 would be more satisfactory than the band's contemporary output — if anything, playing Union Extended in its little time machine pod back-to-back with the modernized Universal Language gives an ample demonstration of how much the ideology had changed in about six or seven years' time. Not for the better, of course — you knew I'd say that, didn't you?

 

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (1977)

 

1) Sticky Stuff; 2) Grab Bag; 3) Space Nuts; 4) Love Wheels; 5) Moto Cross; 6) Last Tango In Memphis; 7) M.G.'s Salsa; 8) Tie Stick; 9) Reincarnation.

 

As is known all too well, the death of your drummer is a bad, bad omen. Led Zeppelin understood that and wisely disbanded; the Who did not, and spent four years wallowing in mysery and de­gradation. Booker T. & the M.G.'s, however, preceded both of them, and they probably believed that, since they were not in the big leagues anyway, they could try it out safely. So, in the place of brutally murdered Al Jackson Jr., they hired Willie Hall, who formerly played with The Bar-Kays and Isaac Hayes, and ploughed ahead.

 

There were other big changes, too. First, a new label: Asylum Records, the first brainchild of David Geffen, notorious for offering a brief «asylum» from Columbia to Bob Dylan in 1974-75 and now providing the same for this bunch of Stax survivors. Second and more important, a new style: with Afro-American entertainment music now shifting almost completely to funk and disco, it was only natural that the M.G.'s, too, would have their own funk/disco album. After all, they showed the world that they could easily make the switch and tame those wild funky rhythms back in 1971, on Melting Pot — what could stop them from traveling further down that track?

 

Alas, Universal Language falls in the same trap as so many other albums by Sixties acts who tried to embrace the shifting production values, playing styles, and atmospheric ideologies of the Seventies. Word of the day is «smooth» — tightly disciplined and strictly repetitive guitars, «cos­mic» electronic keyboards painting pictures of seductive, but somewhat soulless technological future, and formulaic dance grooves that are not allowed to experiment with rhythm because, you know, who wants to be unexpectedly thrown off rhythm on the dance pad? The best performers of the day could compensate for this tight harness with wildness, sleaziness, or pop hooks, but Booker T. & The M.G.'s were never wild, always tended to avoid coming across as sleazy, and as for pop hooks — well, that could happen, but it was never a priority.

 

So, somewhat predictably, Universal Language ends up sounding professional, but dull and quite pointless — as a serious musical offering, it hardly adds anything to these guys' legend, and as entertainment, it is nowhere near as «hot» as, say, Chic, or many more of the new competitors. ʽSticky Stuffʼ opens the album with a nice cool groove, but it soon becomes obvious that the guys are not very much into it, or if they are, the point is not to let us know: everything is tight, but nothing ever gets out of hand. Total lack of passion, just professionalism — and the same verdict applies to each of the remaining eight tracks.

 

The record has its fair share of decent keyboard work from Booker, especially later on: there is a graceful, pensive, nostalgic organ solo on ʽLast Tango In Memphisʼ, an uplifting uptempo solo in ʽM.G.'s Salsaʼ, and a cocky, whistle-away-your-blues part on the closing ʽReincarnationʼ, which is probably the braggiest tune about reincarnation ever recorded. But even with these, it takes a long (and unnecessary) time to suck them in, because everything is so restrained and «under wraps» of the thoroughly unremarkable production.

 

All in all, just another passable experience. Actually, as far as real «disco» is concerned, there ain't too much of it here — not a single instance of a «proper» disco bassline detected — but that is hardly a consolation, because I'd rather take «hot» disco over «cool» funk and fusion like this. It is true that Booker T. & the M.G.'s had always thrived on restraint and cool-calm-collected discipline, but with Universal Language, this just translates into Dull-o-rama-a-plenty, and it is hardly a wonder that neither ʽSticky Stuffʼ as the lead single nor the album as a whole were noticed by anybody. Upon which, the M.G.'s did the wisest thing they could do — and split once again, with Cropper, Dunn, and White eventually offering their services to The Blues Brothers. And I'd probably take the kitsch of the Blues Brothers over the mind-numbing seriousness of this Universal Language any time of day. What sort of title is that for an album like this, anyway? Since when has limp, pedestrian funk like this represented «universal language»? ʽHotel Cali­forniaʼ — now that's «universal language» for you in 1977. Thumbs down.

 

THAT'S THE WAY IT SHOULD BE (1994)

 

1) Slip Slidin'; 2) Mo' Greens; 3) Gotta Serve Somebody; 4) Let's Wait Awhile; 5) That's The Way It Should Be; 6) Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me); 7) Camel Ride; 8) Have A Heart; 9) Cruisin'; 10) I Can't Stand The Rain; 11) Sarasota Sunset; 12) I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.

 

Hey, they're back. Oh, technically speaking, Booker T. & the M.G.'s never went away for too long: throughout the Eighties and early Nineties, they occasionally reuinted in various configura­tions for various purposes — they did, however, sit the whole Eighties out without attempting to record any new albums, which was probably as wise a decision as they could possibly take. And it was not until 1992, when Bob Dylan asked them to back him for his «thirty years in the biz» anniversary, that the thought of making new music came back into their minds — by which time the retro-vibe had already set in, and they were free to return to their «classic» sound if they so desired, without having to go through the electronic filter.

 

Enlisting Steve Jordan on drums, the band relies on the trusty old formula: instrumental rendi­tions of a few classic tunes, a few (relatively) contemporary hits, and a bunch of originals thrown in. You can see that the running lengths are slightly extended, as they take advantage of the new CD format to stretch out — hardly necessary, in my opinion, but not tragic or anything; and you do notice the new drummer, because Jordan has a ponderous, hard-hitting style, quite far removed from the original funky lightness of Al Jackson's kit, but, again, not tragic.

 

And I do like the record — I think they did a good job answering that question for us, «what would Booker T. sound like if he had all the benefits of modern production?» This is your answer: they work here exactly the same way as they used to, but from the opening notes of ʽSlip Slidin'ʼ you can discern the «cleanness» of the sound that could not have been achieved thirty years back. Not that it really matters, of course — the M.G.'s always had the best of best sounds even way back when. What is much more important is their selection of the material, and it's fun.

 

The oldest tracks here are from the early 1970s: a suitably tender, organ-dominated cover of the Temptations' ʽJust My Imaginationʼ, and a harsher, heavier, bluesier, more guitar-oriented cover of Ann Peebles' ʽI Can't Stand The Rainʼ. Then they do Dylan's ʽGotta Serve Somebodyʼ which they'd already performed at the anniversary show (Booker takes the lead, but Cropper also throws in a stinging blues solo); Bonnie Raitt's ʽHave A Heartʼ (why? why? what's so goddamn good about that song?); and probably the least predictable choice — finishing the album off with U2's ʽI Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking Forʼ. Maybe that was their way of telling us "I'll be back", but if so, they still haven't capitalized on that promise as of 2015.

 

Oh, wait, no, the least predictable inclusion is a cover of Janet Jackson's ʽLet's Wait Awhileʼ. Yes, right, if you cannot release a record during the crappiest musical decade of the century, you should at least cover one of its crappiest hits. And even the way it is done by these guys, you can still understand that you're dealing with a corny adult contemporary ballad — but it is interesting, actually, to play this one back to back with ʽJust My Imaginationʼ and try to understand just what it is that so profoundly separates the former from the latter. Is it the use of the more «obvious» chord sequences in the JJ song? Their nagging repetitiveness? It certainly isn't just a matter of arrangements, which in this particular case are quite similar.

 

Of the new tunes, ʽMo' Greensʼ is... well, you guessed. But it's actually got a different groove from the original — a little slower, grizzlier, more ominous, and with a weeping solo from Cropper that tries to inject a little soul-and-sentiment into a franchise that used to concentrate on just biting and snapping. ʽCamel Rideʼ is funny, funky, and more than a little reminiscent in its basic theme of Zappa's ʽWillie The Pimpʼ (I keep expecting Captain Beefheart to step in at any minute); ʽCruisin'ʼ is based on the ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ groove and is the most dansable number on the album; and ʽSarasota Sunsetʼ is a nice mid-tempo jam that could indeed go down well along with a well-earned sunset, though not much more.

 

Anyway, I have read a few disappointed reactions to the album and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why — I mean, who would ever want to expect any ambitions from a 30-year old instrumental R&B band that only, like, released one or two album's worth of ambitious material in its entire career? The organ tones are conservative and classy, Cropper's guitar solos only gain in depth and experience with the passage of time, and even though I have no idea why I should be enduring a Janet Jackson ballad from these guys, I'll take it as a man, in honor of all the good things they did for humanity (and it's not as if they haven't covered quite a few shitty tunes even way back when). Thumbs up, and thank God, actually, that this, rather than the unnatural-sound­ing Universal Language, is the (currently) last item in the band's discography. Yep, that's the way it should be, yes indeed sir.

 

 

BRENDA HOLLOWAY

EVERY LITTLE BIT HURTS (1964)

 

1) I've Been Good To You; 2) Sad Song; 3) Every Little Bit Hurts; 4) Too Proud To Cry; 5) Who's Loving You; 6) Land Of A Thousand Boys; 7) Suddenly; 8) Embraceable You; 9) Unchained Melody; 10) A Favor For A Girl (With A Love Sick Heart); 11) (You Can) Depend On Me; 12) Can I.

 

As much as this «torch ballad» style is generally not my cup of musical tea at all, I cannot deny that ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ is a great song, and that even with all these other versions around, nobody has done it more justice than its original performance. This Motown recording from 1964 was actually her second recorded version — the original was produced two years earlier for Del-Fi Records — but apparently the people at Motown, having just signed their first West Coast artist, knew what they were doing, and made Brenda re-do the tune with higher production values and, naturally, with a stronger promotion agenda.

 

Her own gift is in understanding that the song works primarily as an «aria», and depends crucially on mood interchange — the way it bounces back and forth from tragic weeping to determined screaming, breaking down, picking up, breaking down again, with unbelievably authentic dyna­mic tension: the bridge section, with its punchy, almost threatening "come back to me, darling you'll see..." beginning and then smoothly, fluently morphing into pleading — "I can give you all the things that you wanted before" still starting out determined and proud, but descending into submission and pleading tenderness by the time it's over. No wonder that Steve Winwood and a host of other performers were so enthralled: this is one hell of a vocal delivery, a three-minute spectacle of emotional bliss the likes of which are pretty dang hard to find in the rest of Motown's catalog — certainly not off the top of my head.

 

The downside of this, however, becomes obvious as we listen to the rest of Brenda's debut LP for the label — and realize that, in a more-than-stupid attempt to capitalize on the brilliance of the title track, Motown made her record eleven more songs that all sound the same. Okay, ten: ʽA Favor For A Girl (With A Love Sick Heart)ʼ is taken at a sprightlier tempo and groomed to sound a little more sly, sexy, and seductive, much in line with the leading brand of Smokey Robinson and The Miracles' style (although, ironically, although Smokey did contribute some songs for this album, ʽA Favor For A Girlʼ is credited to producer Clarence Paul instead).

 

Everything else, though, shares the same tempo, the same tragic-love mood, and even more or less the same basic chord progression as ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ. Everything! Ten completely interchangeable songs that all try to be ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ — and all fail, because none of these writers, intentionally striving to write something exactly like Ed Cobb's masterpiece, arrive at matching the original's perfect flow. The only good thing about them all is that Ms. Holloway honestly tries her best to make them come alive — and she did have one of Motown's best female voices: deeper and more «mature» than the average chirp of their teenage starlets (not that Brenda wasn't in her teens herself, but she sounded far more grown-up than anybody), capable of all sorts of modulation, combining «clean» tenderness with «raspy» excitement or irony within the same verse or chorus like a perfect natural.

 

The songs, alas, have about as much interesting going on about them here as does your average Celine Dion record — the only difference being that the generic Motown sound is always prefe­rable to the generic Celine Dion Columbia sound — but that is not really Brenda's fault: in 1964, she was nobody's top priority, and Motown's resident songwriters simply fed her with scraps and leftovers (besides, just how many great LPs did Motown artists record anyway in 1964, when the LP was a strictly hardcore-fan-oriented artefact?).

 

Basically, it all boils down to this: if you really happen to madly fall in love with the voice and the personality behind the voice, do track this album down (as far as I know, it was never issued on CD by itself, but all the songs have been included on the 2-CD Motown Anthology). If you value the song much more than the voice, though, and especially if you think the Spencer Davis Group with Stevie Winwood is better or something like that, you will be perfectly fine just owning the track on any reasonable sampler of Motown's greatness. As the future would show, there would be much more (well, not much, but maybe a little more — as much as the powers-that-be would mercifully allocate) to Brenda Holloway than ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ, but if you were to judge the artist on the strength of this one album, «fluke» and «one-hit wonder» would be the most appropriate associations.

 

HURTIN' AND CRYIN' (1967?)

 

1) When I'm Gone; 2) Just Look What You've Done; 3) You've Made Me So Very Happy; 4) I Don't Want Nobody's Gonna Make Me Cry; 5) Till Johnny Comes; 6) Hurt A Little Everyday; 7) Starting The Hurt All Over; 8) You Can Cry On My Shoulder; 9) A World Without You; 10) I'll Be Alright; 11) Everybody Knows; 12) Make Him Come To You.

 

Frankly speaking, Brenda Holloway's discography becomes a nightmare immediately after her first album. She was found to be less cooperative at Motown than her chief female competitors, beginning with Mary Wells and ending with the Supremes, and largely spent the next three or four years in their shadow, occasionally releasing singles, sometimes even minor hit ones, but as far as I can understand, not a single «original» LP by Brenda Holloway ever appeared on the la­bel. You will occasionally find two additional entries in the discographies, but both are deceptive: Hurtin' And Cryin' was (or, rather, «may have been», as I have learned not to trust anything in this business) an LP that was recorded, assembled, and then indefinitely shelved by the label, and The Artistry Of Brenda Holloway, released in 1968, was actually a UK-only compilation that included a bit of everything, from old singles to some newer, then-unreleased material.

 

Turning first to Hurtin' And Cryin', we find that the album was supposedly released — even­tually — as part of the sprawling, well put together Motown Anthology, a 2-CD collection from 2005 that seems to claim to contain everything that Brenda recorded for the label. That does not quite solve the enigma, though, because sources vary tremendously on when the album was origi­nally scheduled for release. I have found conflicting reports that said «rejected in 1964» (too early, it seems), «rejected in 1968» (too late, I'd say) and «rejected in 1967», which sounds just about right, but then the track list also includes ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ, a single which, to the best of my knowledge, did not come out until 1968. Clearly, a little confusion is in order here. This is what happens to underdogs, you know.

 

Anyway, regardless of technicalities, had it been given proper birth, Hurtin' And Cryin' would have been a large improvement over Brenda's debut. This time, the tracks are grouped around not just one hit single, but three hit singles — and none of them sound like each other, or like one more bunch of inferior rewrites of ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ! ʽWhen I'm Goneʼ, a song that Mo­town reassigned to Brenda from Mary Wells just as the latter made her exit from the label, shows that the lady can do sexy irony and sarcasm just as fine as she does loss and tragedy; besides, Brenda's version is far more loud, bombastic, and all-over-the-place than Mary's original, belying her «subtly sensitive» image and showing how thunderstormy she can be when put to the task. Then there's ʽJust Look What You've Doneʼ, where the rhythm and brass section put the melody into gallop mode — a far cry from the snail paces of 1964 — and although Holloway certainly pales in this respect compared to either Diana Ross' squeaky sexiness or Martha Reeves' street brawniness, she does not let the song down.

 

As to ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ, this song was actually written by Brenda herself, in collaboration with her sister Patrice and songwriter Frank Wilson — then, at the last moment, Berry Gordy Jr. himself, understanding they had a hit on their hands, «changed a few notes» as they say and became co-author of the tune. Later on, it made them all a ton of dough when the song became a major hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears — but I actually like the original better, or, at least, I do not think that BS&T, aside from smothering it in horns, managed to uncover some sort of hidden meaning that was not already revealed in Brenda's own performance. And who do you really think makes the tune more justice, David Clayton-Thomas or one of Motown's most legen­dary (if underrated) vocalists? It's actually quite joyful to hear Brenda take her mind off negative emotions for a while and sing a happy song for a change, and she does it with style; gotta love her «cloudy vibrato» in the chorus.

 

The other nine songs are mostly filler, sure enough, but since she was actually trying to expand in several subdirections of R&B, it is nowhere near as monotonous as on the 1964 album. There are a few more slow tempo «hurting songs» (ʽHurt A Little Everydayʼ, ʽEverybody Knowsʼ), but there's also a pretty effective «consolation song» (ʽYou Can Cry On My Shoulderʼ, with a heart-tugging couple of Roy Orbison-worthy chord changes in the chorus) and a few more of these rousing gallops, sometimes titled quite deceptively — ʽStarting The Hurt All Over Againʼ is far more playful and aggressive than I'd dare to derive from that name. At the very least, the way these tracks are sequenced never conveys the impression that we are only watching a mediocre artist and a bunch of obliging record executives fill up empty vinyl space.

 

On the whole, I'd like to give the record a thumbs up, but I am not even sure if it really ever existed the way it is presented here — and you'll never find it anyway except as an integral part of Motown Anthology. But it is logistically useful to keep it as a separate building block in Bren­da's discography, if only to stress that there was life after ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ, and not even just life, but actual evolution and development. At the very least, let this review be my little contri­bution towards the «International Movement To Declare Brenda Holloway Not A One-Hit Wonder, But A Two-Hit Wonder» and the «International Movement To Demote Blood, Sweat & Tears And Promote Brenda Holloway In The Name Of Justice, Equality, And Awesome Critical Ratings».

 

THE ARTISTRY OF BRENDA HOLLOWAY (1968)

 

1) Together 'Til The End Of Time; 2) Every Little Bit Hurts; 3) Where Were You; 4) I've Got To Find It; 5) Un­chained Melody; 6) Hurt A Little Every Day; 7) I'll Be Available; 8) You've Made Me So Very Happy; 9) I've Been Good To You; 10) Too Proud To Cry; 11) I'll Always Love You; 12) Operator; 13) When I'm Gone; 14) You Can Cry On My Shoulder; 15) Just Look What You've Done; 16) Starting The Hurt All Over Again; 17*) Mr Lifeguard (Come And Rescue Me); 18*) My Smile Is Just A Frown Turned Upside Down; 19*) After All That You've Done; 20*) The Love Line; 21*) Can't We Be Strangers Again; 22*) Just Another Lonely Night; 23*) Where There's A Will There's A Way; 24*) It's Love I Need.

 

As I said, Brenda Holloway's discography is so messy and confused that you will find quite a few sources repeating that The Artistry Of Brenda Holloway was her second and last «regular» LP on the Motown label. That is, however, only true to a certain degree. First, it seems to have had a very limited release — restricted to the UK, for some reason (apparently, somebody calculated that Brenda Holloway was more popular among the British; might that have anything to do with young Stevie Winwood covering ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ?). Second, in reality it was a compila­tion — singles, B-sides, album tracks, some stuff from the shelved Hurtin' And Cryin', and just three or four songs from the vaults. Not much to write home about.

 

Now, forty-five years later, the album unexpectedly gets remembered and re-released by Ace Records — with a whoppin' eight bonus tracks, also culled from the vaults and unavailable else­where, not even on the comprehensive 2-CD Motown Anthology from 2005. Any reason to be interested? Yes. For serious lovers of Motown, these extra tracks, combined with whatever news might be culled from the original album, will be a bit of a blessing. Why the label never cared about releasing or promoting this music in the Sixties is a big question mark — many of these songs are just as good as any brand of lush pop that they were peddling back then. Just one more of these silly «personal conflict issues», I guess, as history tells us.

 

Anyway, here are some highlights. First, the original album. In addition to the good stuff that was already mentioned in the previous two reviews, we have ʽWhere Were Youʼ, an upbeat, Supre­mes-style single with ecstatic strings, triumphant brass, handclaps, angelic backing vocals, and a party atmosphere that contrasts nicely with the usual lost-love lyrics. Even more fun are the two extra Smokey Robinson tracks — ʽOperatorʼ, where Brenda once again beats Mary Wells in terms of depth and subtlety; and ʽI'll Be Availableʼ, which is just super-catchy-friendly — you know, one of those tunes that should have been covered by the Beatles on the BBC sessions. "When the U.S. mail is no longer mailable, I'll be available" gets me every time.

 

Two more dang fine Smokey compositions are among the bonuses — ʽMy Smile Is Just A Frown Turned Upside Downʼ, known as a hit for Carolyn Crawford, is also done much more expressive­ly by Brenda, in fact, Smokey's «weeping» ballads are the perfect vehicle for Ms. «Hurtin'-and-Cryin'» to ride altogether; and ʽAfter All That You've Doneʼ, once again more upbeat and playful, castigates the lady's unfaithful friend in a bittersweet manner — finger-poppin', funky bassline, sly vocal hooks ("you had a girl over here, a girl over there"), the works. She also does a good job with Billy Eckstine's ʽLove Lineʼ, and fires all her cannons on ʽIt's Love I Needʼ, although, to be frank, «hystrionic» vocal delivery is not her strongest area — she could compete with Mary Wells in expressiveness, or she could offer an «aristocratic» alternative to the rowdiness of Martha Reeves and the seductive squeakiness of Diana Ross, but when it comes to wailing and howling and bellowing, she was no Aretha.

 

Anyway, while once again this is an odd, ragged release that should probably best be left without any «rating» as such, it is definitely a good thing that the vaults are being cleaned up this way — it does baffle the mind, though, just how many perfectly commercial and perfectly artistically attractive little nuggets Motown had Brenda record for them in the Sixties, only to let them gather shelf dust for decades. My only complaint is that there's way too much overlap with Motown Anthology — most people will probably go for just one or the other. Then again, these days it is becoming obsolete to think even in terms of «compilations», much less cohesive LPs, and the way they treated Brenda, she'd be like the perfect number one candidate to promote futuristic services like Spotify. Just hunt down the songs anyway.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE EARLY YEARS (1962-1964/2009)

 

1) Constant Love; 2) Suddenly; 3) The Game Of Love; 4) Hey Fool; 5) I Never Knew You Looked So Good Until I Quit You; 6) I Want A Boyfriend (Girlfriend); 7) I'll Give My Life; 8) I Ain't Gonna Take You Back; 9) Gonna Make You Mine; 10) Unless I Have You; 11) Candy; 12) Echo; 13) I Get A Feeling; 14) It's You; 15) He's Gone; 16) The Nursery; 17) Will You Be My Love; 18) I Told You Baby; 19) I'll Find Myself A Guy; 20) Do The Del Viking, Pt. 1; 21) You're My Only Love; 22) Every Little Bit Hurts (demo).

 

Few people know that Brenda Holloway actually had a recording career prior to her Motown engagement — and probably even fewer give a damn about that. Big frickin' mistake, as it turns out, now that we have this wonderful, carefully assembled collection of the various tracks that she recorded either as a solo artist, or as part of a duo or a vocal band from 1962 to early 1964. This compilation, as inauspicious as it is on the surface, is actually a fun-filled, representative slice of, let's say so, «Afro-American bubble-gum pop» in the pre-British Invasion era, and is not to be missed by any nostalgic fan of those young and innocent days.

 

First of all, it is interesting that very little here, if anything at all, actually sounds like ʽEvery Little Bit Hurtsʼ (for some strange reason, her original recording of it from 1962 is omitted here in favor of a new demo version from 1964, for Motown already — with strings instead of key­boards). Instead of being slow, regal, and tragic, she comes across as upbeat, energetic, loud, sometimes even abrasive — and occasionally screeching her head off with even more reckless­ness than Aretha in those same years. Of course, this is all basically «teen pop» without much pretense at depth of any sort, but it does raise the issue of pigeonholing: here, she is all over the place, and then, in one year's time, she'd become a prisoner of her biggest hit. Was that voluntary, or the result of Motown's forceful image-making? Just three or four of these songs, had they been included on her first LP, would have made it far less formulaic and far more exciting.

 

For instance, here is her first single, ʽHey Foolʼ, credited to Jesse James and released on the small Donna label — a gritty blues-rocker with a scorching electric guitar solo played by God knows who, but with a fierce, piercing tone that reminds one of Freddie King (and, subsequently, early Yardbirds-era Clapton). The rhythm section is a bit wobbly, but guitar and vocals are impeccable. And the B-side is ʽEchoʼ, co-credited to Brenda and her sister Patrice — a slow, waltzing ballad this time, but with an imaginative gimmick as Brenda and Patrice bounce their "there's an echo... echo... echo..." off each other in a unique combination (they have slightly different ranges whose interference produces an almost psychedelic effect). Both these songs are better than just about anything on her Motown debut, bar the big hit single, of course.

 

Several of the songs are exciting and hilarious duets with male singers: on ʽI Never Knew You Looked So Good Until I Quit Youʼ and ʽGonna Make You Mineʼ, she is downright nasty and raunchy, roughing up her vocal cords while Jess Harris is playing the part of the dumb, but weirdly seductive, baritone — and on ʽI Want A Boyfriendʼ, recorded with Robert Jackson, they put a sharp echo effect on her already hysterical "I want a, I want a, I want a boyfriend!" intro that is guaranteed to glue your attention: there was not a single song in her Motown catalog where she would sound that fiery and insistent. And in each and every one of these vocal battles, she always makes it clear who's on top and who's really in the background.

 

One has to be careful, though, because not every one of these tracks has Brenda as lead vocalist: for instance, the one single included here under the name of ʽThe Four J'sʼ (appropriately recor­ded for the 4J label) features two other ladies, while Holloway is dismissed to the position of background singer; and the joke number ʽDo The Del Viking, Pt. 1ʼ was released under the name of Patricia Holloway, so I suppose that once again, Brenda is just singing backup here. But that's not a big problem, because, like I said, the collection works as a «wholistic» package — sort of «the early life and times of Brenda Holloway», a little bit of a working Odyssey as she goes through label after label, team after team, style after style, carefully building up an original pedi­gree that would eventually assure her a place in the big leagues (and not a very respectable place at that — this compilation definitely shows that she deserved a lot better).

 

Discussing the other songs would not be very helpful, because composition and arrangements are predictably not the strongest elements here: most of the chord sequences, lyrics, and sentiments are totally in line with the formulae of the day. And this is the mistake which most people who have reviewed this package seem to have made — for some reason, they tended to focus on the songs, when in reality you have to focus on the delivery of the songs, on the character behind the songs, and on the difference between this character and Brenda's subsequent Motown image. Just put on ʽI Never Knew You Looked So Goodʼ and then go listen to some of her Motown dirges, and it's like two different singers, and it's, like, a transition that took place in between when she was fifteen years of age and seventeen years of age. Reason enough to be at least slightly amazed, not to mention seriously amused, and to issue a surefire thumbs up and a strong recommendation, provided the package is still circulating somewhere out there.

 

THE MOTOWN ANTHOLOGY (1963-1968/2005)

 

CD II: 1) Think It Over (Before You Break My Heart); 2) I'll Always Love You; 3) Operator; 4) I'll Be Available; 5) Together 'Til The End Of Time; 6) Where Were You; 7) I've Got To Find It; 8) How Many Times Did You Mean It; 9) You've Changed Me; 10) All I Do Is Think About You; 11) Who Could Ever Doubt My Love; 12) Come Into My Palace; 13) He's My Kind Of Fellow; 14) You Need Me; 15) Love Woke Me Up This Morning; 16) I Prayed For A Boy; 17) Don't Judge Me; 18) I'll Always Meet You Half Way; 19) You Are Very Much A Part Of Me; 20) I'm On The Right Track; 21) How Can You Call It Love When The Feeling's Gone; 22) I See A Rainbow; 23) Play It Cool, Stay In School; 24) Summertime.

 

In the end, there's probably got to be a special mention of this package, even if it's cropped up several times already — because, as of now, the first CD of this edition is where you get your most natural, most properly remastered, and, for that matter, your only official access to Brenda's first two LPs: the filler-stuffed Every Little Bit Hurts and the prematurely shelved Hurtin' And Cryin'. This is just the first disc, though. The second one, once you get past the first bunch of tracks that duplicate some of the songs on The Artistry Of Brenda Holloway, is stoked with even more oldies that were written, arranged, recorded, and mixed by Motown — then, once again, left unreleased, with the invisible hand of Ms. Holloway's mortal enemy always blocking their public availability at the last moment. Imagine that — dozens and dozens of well-polished, completely marketable songs left to rot. What a waste, eh? And, most likely, all because of some silly intrigues and under-the-carpet competition.

 

Anyway, it is true that there are no genuinely outstanding nuggets here: most of these previously unavailable tunes are relatively standard Motown fare (not that «relatively standard Motown fare» songs have never been hits — from a commercial standpoint, quite a few of these could be winners circa 1965-67). Interestingly, most of them are also upbeat, overturning Holloway's «hurtin' and cryin'» image: for instance, ʽCome Into My Palaceʼ, a duet with sister Patrice, sounds like a merry Shirelles serenade from the beginning of the decade, and the Ed Cobb-written ʽYou Are Very Much A Part Of Meʼ, set to the ʽYou Can't Hurry Loveʼ rhythm, is an upwinding, ecstatic celebration of joy that shows all those little bits can heal pretty quickly, depending on what it is that you go into the studio with.

 

And on ʽI'm On The Right Trackʼ and ʽI See A Rain­bowʼ, the drummer pounds so hard and the back vocalists sing so tightly — you'd think the lady could have won over the audience with sheer collective energy alone, like The Four Tops won over the audiences not necessarily with melody, but with their sheer capacity to transmit that «jubilation vibe». As in, you have no idea why they're being that joyous about something, but they sure as hell are infectious. Admittedly, though, as I already said, Brenda's voice is not that well suited to transmit joy as it is to transmit sorrow — Diana Ross had her beat for a reason.

 

The last two tracks are worth noting for special reasons. ʽPlay It Cool, Stay In Schoolʼ is a pro­paganda ditty that Brenda recorded for a socially oriented purpose — each time I hear a song like this, I tell myself that I wouldn't mind paying to learn, out of sheer sociological interest, whether any single person in America ever changed his/her mind about dropping out based on any such musical «stimulation»? It's hilarious how they try to mold all these clichés like "when you learn more, you're bound to earn more" into catchy hooks — yes, some poor kid will definitely fall for that, humming these lines each day on the way to school. But then again, is there any psycholo­gical difference between a message-carrying pop-radio-jingle and a straightforward commercial advertising? Maybe it worked after all.

 

Then, at the very end, there is a rather beautiful live version of ʽSummertimeʼ, recorded some­where in a club setting and, for the first and last time, giving us a glimpse of what could have been if Brenda had settled for a career in vocal jazz instead. She's no Billie or Ella, of course, and her ʽSummertimeʼ may be a bit too slowed down, but she sings strongly, fluently, and passionate­ly, and could probably have assured herself a good position in the «B league» of jazz divas. But that, of course, could never have happened under contract with Motown, and by the time the contract was terminated, it was already too late. All in all, the more you listen to these songs, the more you tend to start thinking not about these songs, and not even about Brenda Holloway in particular, but about the good old «slings and arrows».

 

Anyway, get The Motown Anthology. All of us music lovers owe the unfortunate lady at least this one — ensure that her legacy lives on way beyond that of Taylor Swift, if possible.

BRIAN WILSON

BRIAN WILSON (1988)

 

1) Love And Mercy; 2) Walkin' The Line; 3) Melt Away; 4) Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long; 5) Little Children; 6) One For The Boys; 7) There's So Many; 8) Night Time; 9) Let It Shine; 10) Meet Me In My Dreams Tonight; 11) Rio Grande.

 

It is no big secret that if one wants to go on savoring the real taste of the real Beach Boys past their eponymous 1985 album (which wasn't all that hot, but at least involved Brian Wilson in some ways), one has to forget about the «Beach Boys» moniker altogether and simply go along with Brian Wilson's solo career. It is somehow a rather little-known fact, though, that the begin­ning of that solo career — the eponymous Brian Wilson from 1988 — is the last new album ever recorded by a Beach Boy that could lay a semi-successful claim to «masterpiece» status.

 

Of course, all sorts of technical circumstances prevented it from being one. For one thing, even in his psychically weakest condition (or, perhaps, especially in his psychically weakest condition) Brian tends to be aware of the current state of mainstream production, and always feels comfor­table about embracing contemporary trends, even those that seriously clash with his own vision. Being an Eighties album, Brian Wilson is therefore full of electronic drums and dinky MIDI effects (there are at least four people here credited with «synthesizer programming», and that's never a good thing — imagine how much conflicting code there must have been?), which is positively embarrassing for one of the biggest «humanists» in popular music.

 

It also goes without saying — and this is the first and last time I'm gonna say it, since it applies equally to every album in Brian's solo career — that all these songs would have benefited from a better singer. Brian's prematurely aged and croaky voice (which, admittedly, first came as a shock to us as early as on 1977's Love You) has an undeniable charm of its own, but yes, there used to be a time when the mellow timbre of his cords was a perfect fit for his musical palette, and now there is this unavoidable discrepancy between voice and music. You can get used to it, of course, but still, every once in a while I like to imagine his old self forming a musical duo with some younger, more «angelic» singer... then again, he might have gone along with some innocent melismatic horror like Mariah Carey, so maybe not.

 

Additional, little-felt problems, included Brian's being manipulated — primarily by his cunning therapist Eugene Landy and his wife Alexandra Morgan, who may or may not have contributed to Brian's getting well over the decade, but one thing they sure did was infiltrate themselves in all his doings, including getting songwriter credits for about half of these songs (which, according to certain sources, usually consisted of Morgan changing one of Brian's lyrical lines to something different). Of course, it's not as if you were going to listen to this and your first reaction would be like, «Oh, this album would be so much better if it weren't so obvious that it was completely de­railed by a sleazy psychotherapist masquerading as an amateur musician!» But still, there is a general sense of a lack of total freedom for Brian here — at that point, he was still convalescing, and much too susceptible to all sorts of interference.

 

And yet, despite all this, Brian Wilson is a wonderful collection of art-pop songs, the closest thing to a proper development of the man's artistic vision that we saw ever since Smile was abor­ted and chunks of its bleeding flesh scattered all across five or six different LPs. At least one chunk, by the way, made it all across the decades and ended up here, in the mid-section of the ʽRio Grandeʼ suite which includes a brief excerpt from the ʽFireʼ part of Smile — and altogether, ʽRio Grandeʼ is commonly acknowledged as a deliberate imitation of the complex approach of Smile. On the whole, though, Brian Wilson is decidedly more conventional and poppy, with a lot of dance-oriented material mixed in with introspective romanticism à la Pet Sounds, so you could say it's got a backwards nod to a little bit of everything — the infectious dance hook of 1965, the lush baroque romanticism of 1966, the insane surrealist whimsy of 1967 — and had all these ideas had a chance to be born, nurtured, and realized at least fifteen years earlier, we'd have us yet another classic. But, like David B. once wisely remarked, "time may bitch-slap me, but I can't fuck with time". Or something to that end, anyway.

 

The best known song here, though it failed to become a commercial hit, is ʽLove And Mercyʼ, and it was actually the first time that Brian sat down and wrote a straightforward public sermon — which, I guess, is alright when you've lived long enough and earned yourself the right to a bit of idealistic preaching, no matter how naïve or «trivialized» the idea(l) might be. The descending chord pattern on which the song is based is simple, solemn, and moving, the only problem being that it deserves far more than those electronic keyboards and processed choral vocals: in fact, early piano demos of the song, as well as later live performances convey the message far more effectively. In any case, ʽLove And Mercyʼ is kind of like Brian Wilson's equivalent of ʽLet It Beʼ, written much later than needed but better late than never.

 

It must be noted, though, that ʽLove And Mercyʼ is not sung from a pleading, or despairing point of view — on the contrary, the song and the album in general are sunny, optimistic, and spiritual­ly strong. If The Beach Boys Love You sounded like a record made by a deeply confused, if not totally deranged, person, Brian Wilson gives us a fairly self-assured Brian. God only knows (pardon the pun) what was going on behind the scenes, but the final result only betrays a slight quiver in his aged voice from time to time; other than that, he's perfectly all right to sing straight­forward upbeat love songs, such as ʽWalkin' The Lineʼ (whose chorus of "gimme gimme gimme gimme lovin' tonight" sounds like he might just gonna make it without resorting to medication) and ʽMeet Me In My Dreams Tonightʼ, the most martial song ever written about dreaming (it is also somewhat funny that when he raises his pitch so high on the verses, he ends up sounding like Ozzy Osbourne — not that Ozzy couldn't hold his own on a love song, of course).

 

But even if you have something against too many upbeat songs, including cutesy-cuddly-catchy stuff like ʽLittle Childrenʼ (which you shouldn't — exercises in nursery rhyming have always been an integral part of Wilsonism), the bulk of Brian Wilson still consists of lush, deeply felt love ballads: ʽMelt Awayʼ, ʽBaby Let Your Hair Grow Longʼ, ʽThere's So Manyʼ, ʽLet It Shineʼ, all this stuff basically picks up where we were temporarily left off with the second side of Today! twenty-three years earlier. Apart from production issues, I couldn't really say that these songs are unworthy of Brian's highest standards in the serenade genre. And even the production issues fade away when you realize that his harmony-arranging instincts are as strong as ever — just listen to all the choral overdubs on ʽThere's So Manyʼ (there is also an accappella track called ʽOne For The Boysʼ, perhaps ironically so — because it has Brian and several backers ably reproduce the Beach Boys' choral harmonies without actually employing any of the other Beach Boys; so it's more like «that's it boys, I don't really need you anymore»).

 

The biggest success on the album, though, is the closing suite — ʽRio Grandeʼ shows that after all these years and troubles, Brian still knows how to write an experimental suite based on the Smile approach and make it sound fresh, involving, and funny. Of course, it helps that several Smile motives were actively exploited in the making of the track (see the reference to ʽFireʼ mentioned above, as well as all the country-western touches that recall ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ), but on the whole, it is a new composition that consists of fairly distinct parts, yet has a thematic unity. A few of these parts actually began life as separate entities (ʽNight Bloomin' Jasmineʼ, for instance, can be found as an autonomous demo version on the deluxe edition of the album), then found their place inside this little epic about some guy who has to cross the Rio Grande to find his true love or something — okay, maybe I'm a little exaggerating about «thematic unity» (it is not at all clear how the nocturnal, slightly creepy ʽNight Bloomin' Jasmineʼ fits in with the idea of rolling, rolling, rolling on, but I'm sure one can always find an answer if one tries), but then the same question can always come up with the Abbey Road medley, yet somehow most of us ins­tinctively feel that it works, so... whatever.

 

Anyway, this sure is one of those records where you just have to dig your way past the uncom­fortable surface (bad lyrics, cheesy production, failing voice) to locate that heart of gold, because there is not a single bad song here as such — ultimately, everything is melodic, memorable, and deeply heartfelt. It is quite logical that the album's legacy would be honored with a deluxe edition, too: in 2000, it was expanded with about thirty minutes of extra tracks, including another upbeat pop rocker, the slyly self-referential B-side ʽHe Couldn't Get His Poor Old Body To Moveʼ that Brian co-wrote with Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham, one of his biggest fans (too bad the collaboration took place around the Tango In The Night era, when the synth-pop boom was messing up Lindsey's mind, too). There's also a new collaboration with old pal Gary Usher on ʽLet's Go To Heaven In My Carʼ (silly) and lots of demos that often sound better than the final versions, for obvious decade-related reasons. Not that the expanded version is worth wasting your life strength on to seek out — but it's always nice to see the greatness of a particular record honored by thirty minutes of surrounding extras. Almost as nice as acknowledge it with an enthu­siastic thumbs up and be able to recommend it to everyone over a Mike Love solo album.

 

I JUST WASN'T MADE FOR THESE TIMES (1995)

 

1) Meant For You; 2) This Whole World; 3) Caroline, No; 4) Let The Wind Blow; 5) Love And Mercy; 6) Do It Again; 7) The Warmth Of The Sun; 8) Wonderful; 9) Still I Dream Of It; 10) Melt Away; 11) 'Til I Die.

 

This is certainly not an essential release, but it has a bit of historical importance. The last really rough period in Brian's wobbly life occurred on the brink of the Eighties and the Nineties, as his risky relationship with Eugene Landy was finally cracked, with a little help from brother Carl and other members of the family, and he finally found himself in a position where he was no longer manipulated or abused by anybody — probably for the first time in his life, or maybe for the second, if we count the brief period in between breaking up with his father and succumbing to insanity, during which he made Pet Sounds. Almost as if to celebrate that newly-found freedom, he teamed up with Don Was for a biodocumentary and a soundtrack album to the documentary, and I guess the only better song title for this than ʽI Just Wasn't Made For These Timesʼ would have been ʽHang On To Your Egoʼ, but nobody would get it except for the bootlegging crowd at the time, so they went ahead with the obvious.

 

Anyway, since (I guess) they probably could not use the original material without the consent of Capitol, they simply went ahead and re-recorded all the songs. Surprisingly, the re-recordings are not at all crappy! I guess all these guys were just so happy to work with the legendary Mr. Wilson that they honestly gave it their best, and since Brian, for the first time in ages, supervised all the production himself, the recordings sound warm and natural, and the extra touches are all reason­able — like, for instance, David McMurray's extended flute solo on ʽCaroline, Noʼ: there were lots of flutes on the original, but they were sort of «implied», buried in the mix, whereas here the instrument is finally given a chance to surge, and it does that quite nicely.

 

The songs, as you can imagine, are usually the personal-intimate ones, mostly from the Pet Sounds and Smile shelves, although the old boy does let himself be carried away on a sunny wave with ʽDo It Againʼ, and reaches as far back into his catalog as ʽThe Warmth Of The Sunʼ (although, frankly speaking, the harmonies on that song make it an early, but straightforward, precursor to the «teen symphony» era of the Beach Boys). The really good news, though, is that there are new versions of ʽLove And Mercyʼ and ʽMelt Awayʼ here, completely free of the stiff excesses of Eighties' production, and they are wonderfuller than wonderful — with normal drum­ming, acoustic guitars, pianos, unimpeded vocals, whatever. It might have been a good idea to just re-record the entire Brian Wilson instead, but that, I guess, would have been incompatible with the general idea of the movie.

 

Vocal-wise, Brian is in significantly better form here than he was in 1988. If you want yourself a good contrast, listen to the ninth track — an unearthed demo from 1976 (the Love You era), with just Brian at his piano, somewhat spontaneously singing about whatever was going on at the time: "Time for supper now / Day's been hard and I'm so tired, I feel like eating now..." It's actually an embryo of what could have been a pretty good song (a nine-year-late answer to "woke up, fell out of bed" that Brian couldn't come up with back in 1967), and you can feel all the lo-fi pain of a con­fused and meaningless existence flowing out of the speakers, but after three and a half minutes of the man's 1976 sandpaper vocals you will be physiologically glad to be back (forward) in 1995. Maybe the voice has aged, yes, and forever shifted its timbre to something less angelic, but at least this is no longer the voice of a «half-person». And yes, maybe good health and self-confidence are bad for artistic purposes, but we've already had so much bad health and lack of confidence from Brian over the years that it is actually heartwarming to see him back in shape.

 

It is, however, respectable that he ends the album with ʽ'Til I Dieʼ — no matter how happy and uplifting the majority of the selections are, he still finishes things by reminding us, and himself, of simple mortality, with one of the best songs ever written about death (I'm not joking — I'm pretty sure the song works as a great pice of therapy for anyone who happens to be afraid of dying). Starting off with love (ʽThis Whole Worldʼ) and ending with quiet acceptance of the in­evitable is the way to go, and Don Was, along with his little playing team (including guitarist Waddy Wachtel and James Hutchinson on bass), did a fine job of guiding Brian through his own backstory. Again — nothing essential, but a good short summary of the man's greatness, and at the same time a nice opening of the next, perhaps not the greatest, but quite possibly the happiest stage in his life.

 

ORANGE CRATE ART (1995)

 

1) Orange Crate Art; 2) Sail Away; 3) My Hobo Heart; 4) Wings Of A Dove; 5) Palm Tree And Moon; 6) Summer In Monterey; 7) San Francisco; 8) Hold Back Time; 9) My Jeanine; 10) Movies Is Magic; 11) This Town Goes Down At Sunset; 12) Lullaby.

 

Apparently, this album seems to have gone down in history as a catastrophic failure — critics and fans alike, at least in retrospect, never seem to have any kind words for it, and the only reason I can see is that formally, the record is a bit of a hoax: credited to «Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks», it actually consists almost exclusively of compositions by the latter. According to legend, a short while after the pair of old friends found themselves in the studio, Brian said: "Wait a minute, what am I doing here?" and Parks said "you're here because I can't stand the sound of my own voice" and Brian said "oh, okay then", and the tapes were rolling. To Parks' credit, he always insists that he did try to get Brian to collaborate more creatively, but he wouldn't — partly out of humility, partly because he was still recuperating from Landy's «therapy».

 

Well, color me crazy, but I not only like this record, but also think that it was conceived and exe­cuted strictly in the genuine Beach Boys spirit — maybe Van Dyke Parks is not a great composer, and maybe his lyrical skills leave something to be desired even from a slightly more sophisticated perspective than Mike Love's, but Van Dyke Parks did bring something to the table in 1967 when he worked with Brian on Smile, and, judging by these songs, he took even more off that table, because the themes, the vibes, the melodic moves, the harmonies that we hear on Orange Crate Art, all these things are a clear throwback to the happy innocent days of baroque pop teen sym­phonies and that warm California sun.

 

Actually, Parks' concept goes even beyond that — thematically, the songs picture an even younger, pre-war era California, idealistically unspoiled by surfers, hippies, drug dealers, racial riots, oil spills, and whatever else you might think of. The music is totally relaxed, happy, dreamy, full of orange crates, palm trees, dove wings, and Monterey summers. It may not be great music, but it is totally adequate to its purpose. According to St. Thomas Erlewine of the All-Music Guide, "instead of making his melodies catchy, Parks makes sure they are complex, which means they are rarely memorable" — but the good sir must have confused Van Dyke Parks with Brian himself, because I could see where such an accusation could be (misguidedly) directed against the author of Smile, but certainly not at the author of the perfectly accessible, never too complex, and frequently quite catchy vaudeville and pop rock numbers on Orange Crate Art.

 

On the contrary, if there is one serious flaw to this show, it is its lightweightness. The whole thing almost literally floats on air — song after song of giddy romantic innocence, too cute, perhaps, for its own good. When the entire album pulsates with just one emotion, this can easily result in oversaturation, and the music can come across as a bit cartoonish (which, perhaps, suited Brian just fine at the time — it is no coincidence that the man would later do a whole album of Disney covers himself — but may feel alienating for those of us who have always appreciated the emo­tional depth in the best songs he wrote for the Beach Boys).

 

There are some excellent musical ideas here, though. ʽWings Of A Doveʼ, for instance, is on the whole a bouncy pop rocker, but with a delicious «swooping» hook to resolve the chorus — very simple, Mr. Erlewine, and quite memorable, as we are getting carried away into the sky by an out-of-nowhere keyboard arpeggio. ʽPalm Tree And Moonʼ seems to have both South American and Far Eastern elements in its colorful arrangement — perhaps it is this kind of «complexity» that perplexed the critics, but the melody is perfectly catchy and unpredictable (and I guess Cali­fornia could be described as standing in between the Far East and South America, anyway). And the mix between country-western, cabaret vaudeville, and Smile-style harmonies on ʽSan Fran­ciscoʼ is probably the single weirdest (but still totally accessible) bit on the album to which you might find yourself inclined to return in the most unlikely moment of your life.

 

I guess there are some duds as well — for instance, the cheesily sentimental, accordeon-driven ʽMy Jeanineʼ (an attempt to crack the French pop market?) is way too silly, and ʽMovies Is Magicʼ lays on the orchestra too thick, threatening to become late Andrew Lloyd Webber at any time. It is also not clear if they really should have devoted six minutes to Gershwin's ʽLullabyʼ which you should probably rather hear somewhere else — even if we accept that conceptually, this little dreamy fantasy of George's does fit in well with Van Dyke Parks' vision. But really, there is no sense in nitpicking: Orange Crate Art is most likely either a record that you will like (or even love) as a whole, or dismiss altogether as corny fluff.

 

I would go with a thumbs up, though. Even if it is not Brian Wilson's music (but then again, who can really tell now, with no eyewitnesses around, how much he did or did not contribute to these arrangements?), it is the single closest thing to Brian Wilson's music that one could imagine, and it certainly has the Brian Wilson spirit in it a-plenty.

 

IMAGINATION (1998)

 

1) Your Imagination; 2) She Says She Needs Me; 3) South American; 4) Where Has Love Been; 5) Keep An Eye On Summer; 6) Dream Angel; 7) Cry; 8) Lay Down Burden; 9) Let Him Run Wild; 10) Sunshine; 11) Happy Days.

 

It looks like there is yet another manipulation story going on here, this time involving producer Joe Thomas, who teamed up with Brian under an obligation to «modernize» his sound — only to have Brian later come back at him with a lawsuit, seeking damage compensation and creative freedom. I know what you're about to ask: «Geez, with so many schmucks and leeches sucking up to the man over the years, couldn't he finally have learned a thing or two about making friends? Or could it be so that the blame actually lies — at least partly — on Brian himself, rather than on those who may have actually helped him get along all this time?..»

 

To answer these, though, you'd at least have to be a criminal inspector, or a judge, or a psycho­analysis freak. One thing is certain: Imagination, Brian's first truly new musical project in a decade, would have unquestionably sounded different with a different producer. We are not even talking here of «modernistic» production, the way Simon Climie produced Clapton's Pilgrim around the same time — Joe Thomas cut his producer's teeth in the late Eighties, and that is what much of Imagination sounds like, with dated synthesizer tones that are largely drawn from that period's adult contemporary data bank. He may be a Beach Boys fan, but he does not show much understanding of what it takes to make a Beach Boys album.

 

That said, harsh criticism of Imagination, which seems to be the default mode in review circles, is exaggerated. In reality, there are some very nice, and quite obviously inspired, Wilson compo­sitions here: the mere fact that many of them are credited to Wilson and Thomas should not be taken as an obligatory turn-off before you give them a proper chance. The record is noticeably short, and I guess that in some way, Brian was still suffering from writer's block, because no other reason exists for our having to listen to re-recordings of ʽKeep An Eye On Summerʼ and ʽLet Him Run Wildʼ: both songs fit in with the album's general mood, but so do at least several dozen other Beach Boys tunes, and it never helps when you juxtapose classics from your peak period with non-classics from your struggling old age period, even if you sing them in a strugg­ling old age voice and bring them down to mediocre level with poor production values.

 

Maybe they thought of remaking ʽLet Him Run Wildʼ by way of association, since the chorus of the title track goes "you know it's just your imagination running wild". The comparison would certainly not be in favor of ʽYour Imaginationʼ, which has a rather cloying verse melody and a much more simplistic and repetitive hook in the chorus — but it is still a good song, innocent and charming in a typically Brian sort of way, and with some space left for angelic harmonies (that's the second time in his life that he made the idea of «running wild» reflect heavenly beauty rather than the roar of a Harley Davidson). Not even the dinky keyboards can take its quality away, though one can only wonder how much better it would have sounded with, say, an authentic harpsichord. Or a grand piano.

 

Other highlights include ʽShe Says She Needs Meʼ, a re-write of the old Beach Boys outtake ʽSandy She Needs Meʼ from 1965 for which Thomas at least had the good sense to include an easily noticeable clarinet part, giving it a bit more of a «classical» feel than anything else on here; ʽLay Down Burdenʼ, which begins as a Spanish guitar-embellished adult contemporary bore, but redeems itself when it comes to the pacifying chorus (mellow out a bit and the summon to "lay down burden" might just make you do that); and ʽHappy Daysʼ, which also hearkens back to the old days (part of it being based on the «goofy-scary» outtake ʽMy Solutionʼ from 1970) and does a terrific job of contrasting the «doom» verses with the happy boppy chorus of "happy days are here again" (provided they really are, but whatever).

 

Other songs are more questionable — like, I am not sure what to think or feel about ʽCryʼ, a pop ballad with weepy Claptonesque blues guitar all over it (generic on the whole, but not without brief moments of unusually pointed emotionality), and I am even less sure if I like Brian's musi­cal advertisements for tropical resorts (the Jimmy Buffett collaboration ʽSouth Americanʼ, which goes as far as to feature the line "I'm hungry and I'm doing lunch with Cameron Diaz"; the all-too-happy cod reggae piece ʽSunshineʼ), but I am not altogether put off by them, either, because they still show the man in a creative phase, no matter how skewed or twisted.

 

In the end, a thumbs up here. Yes, plenty of technical handicaps and strange decisions, but really, bottomline is: either Brian Wilson creates or he coasts, and whenever he creates, nothing can stop him from channelling some of the pop fairy's most heartwarming vibes, even if the ability to attract them inescapably wanes over time and can be further harmed by (figuratively) tonedeaf collaborators. But at least he does not rap here, or perform duets with Missy Elliott or Jon Bon Jovi, or engage the Backstreet Boys to do the harmonies for him, so it could have been much, much worse. As it is, Imagination largely shows that some is still left, and that at least Brian's veteran fans have themselves a nice new musical companion to get old to.

 

LIVE AT THE ROXY THEATRE (2000)

 

1) Little Girl Intro; 2) The Little Girl I Once Knew; 3) This Whole World; 4) Don't Worry Baby; 5) Kiss Me Baby; 6) Do It Again; 7) California Girls; 8) I Get Around; 9) Back Home; 10) In My Room; 11) Surfer Girl; 12) The First Time; 13) This Isn't Love; 14) Add Some Music To Your Day; 15) Please Let Me Wonder; 16) Band Intro; 17) Brian Wilson; 18) 'Til I Die; 19) Darlin'; 20) Let's Go Away For Awhile; 21) Pet Sounds; 22) God Only Knows; 23) Lay Down Burden; 24) Be My Baby; 25) Good Vibrations; 26) Caroline No; 27) All Summer Long; 28) Love & Mercy; 29) Sloop John B; 30) Barbara Ann; 31) Interview With Brian.

 

This record has quite a bit of historical importance — as is well known, Brian had largely abhor­red live performing since 1965, and even after he reluctantly agreed to return to the stage in his «full beard» period in the mid-Seventies, that stage presence had largely been limited to absent-mindedly picking at a keyboard and singing occasional harmonies. A confident return to the stage was, therefore, an essential move in the quest to overcome his reclusiveness — and it actually worked: after the Imagination tour got off on the right foot, Brian apparently found his stage fright largely gone, at least, as long as the majority of the shows took place in relatively small venues with friendly and adoring audiences to establish some intimacy with.

 

It may have even gone too well: the most uncomfortable thing about Live At The Roxy is that Brian seems to feel himself a little too loose, taking on the role of nonchalant entertainer without a care in the world. As you listen to him making jokes (usually silly ones — that cigarette lighter bit is kind of kindergartenish, don't you think so?), winding up the audience like a jaded stadium rock hero ("you want some vibes? you want some good vibes? YOU WANT SOME GOOD VIBRATIONS?.."), or putting some forcefully concocted roar into the words "rock" and "rock and roll" ("we'll do some pretty songs... and then maybe later on we can ROCK OUT or some­thing!"), you can sort of see that this role is relatively new for him, and that — even worse! — he may be basing some of this new frontman image on memories of how Mike Love used to do it. That may be a little embarrassing at times. But certainly forgivable.

 

Besides, we are not here for the stage banter anyway: we are here to witness three good pieces of news. First, the man continues to be in good voice, nowhere near as angelic as it used to be or as brother Carl's (whose shoes in ʽPlease Let Me Wonderʼ and ʽGod Only Knowsʼ Brian has to step into) used to be, but perfectly in tune (sometimes in downtune, but still in tune) and perfectly in spirit. Second, the backing band is thoroughly respectful of the classic Beach Boys sound and, definitely unlike the backing band on Imagination, makes sure that the original playing styles, instrumentation, and harmonies are reproduced as fine as possible. (In order to showcase just how much the band can get in the old spirit, Brian has them run through both of the instrumentals from Pet Sounds — thus presaging the next live album).

 

Third, the playlist is almost too perfect: a well-balanced mix of radio hits, personal favorites, art-pop masterpieces, and rarities/oddities to fit the tastes of just about everybody. Well, clearly, everybody will also be miffed at some glaring omissions (like, gimme some ʽSurf's Upʼ or some ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ instead of ʽBack Homeʼ from 15 Big Ones!), but with a backlog the size of Brian's, he'd have to spend the whole night at the Roxy to satisfy all of us 100%, and he's not that strong yet. On the other hand, you have a couple surprises, such as a leftover from 1983 which, as Brian claims, he unexpectedly "found in his briefcase" (ʽThe First Timeʼ — a nice piano ballad, though slightly contaminated with that Eighties' adult contemporary vibe), and ʽThis Isn't Loveʼ, a somewhat ABBA-esque/Disney-esque collaboration with old lyrical pal Tony Asher that would later be featured in The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas — a crap movie, and, let's be honest, the tune is pretty saccharine and campy itself, but still, it bears the Wilson seal, doesn't it?

 

Concerning the classics, I wouldn't know where to begin with recommendations: like I said, most of them are performed very faithfully to the originals (including ʽGood Vibrationsʼ, which omits the audience interaction and clap-your-hands sections that the Beach Boys used to have in their performances, and returns the intimate prayer feel of the theremin-powered "gotta keep these lovin' good vibrations a-happenin' with her..." section) or to the way the originals used to be per­formed (ʽDo It Againʼ has a «rockier» feel here than it used to have on 20/20, but that's how it always went live). ʽCalifornia Girlsʼ, with its extended coda, may be the relative highlight — you can just feel how delighted Brian is to be ruling all over those life-asserting harmonies, feeling young again and all that. Against such a rich background, the new songs obviously cannot com­pete — so the only tune played from Imagination is ʽLay Down Burdenʼ, now dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased Carl Wilson and "all those here who had a loss in their family". Of course, it is a much gentler and subtler rendition than the overproduced original.

 

Funniest moment of the show is probably when Brian's band, and then Brian himself, launch into a brief snippet of the Barenaked Ladies' ʽBrian Wilsonʼ — a moment of either subtle irony or forgivable vanity, depending on your own subjective judgement. It is true that Brian holds a high opinion of himself, to which he is most certainly entitled — reminding the people here that he wrote ʽSurfer Girlʼ while riding in his car, "without a piano!", or that ʽGod Only Knowsʼ was the first song with the word "God" in its title. It's all within the range of politeness, though, and be­sides, he still has the mind of a small child in many respects, so whenever he «brags» like that, it comes across as sweet rather than annoying. God bless the old guy — and kudos for pulling off such a long and diverse setlist without a glitch. You probably will not be returning to it all that often, but as a one-time solid chunk of good vibrations, it is highly recommendable, so a solitary thumbs up is the way to go about it.

 

PET SOUNDS LIVE (2002)

 

1) Show Intro; 2) Wouldn't It Be Nice; 3) You Still Believe In Me; 4) That's Not Me; 5) Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder); 6) I'm Waiting For The Day; 7) Let's Go Away For Awhile; 8) Sloop John B; 9) God Only Knows; 10) I Know There's An Answer; 11) Here Today; 12) I Just Wasn't Made For These Times; 13) Pet Sounds; 14) Caroline No.

 

Every single review of this album inevitably asks the question «why?». Five of these tunes had only just recently been heard on the Live At The Roxy album. There was no question in the minds of anyone who cared that Brian's backing band was awesome and inspired enough to re­produce the musical magic of Pet Sounds on stage. The shows were warmly received, the people were thrilled. But Pet Sounds Live in their entirety, as a special separate CD? Is this an acute case of «hanging on to your ego» or what?

 

It is true that the band is excellent, yes. The album was played and recorded over three different nights at the Royal Festival Hall in London, with probably the best particular versions picked from the three shows, and the musicians do a fabulous job — I think that even a diehard Pet Sounds fanaticist who has every single frequency memorised to a tee will not find much to com­plain about or to cringe at. As for Brian, who now has the task of regularly stepping in not just for brother Carl, who at least had a somewhat similar vocal timbre, but also for cousin Mike, he does everything as best he can — changing the tonality where it has to be changed, but never getting off-key and never once sounding uninspired (well, after all, why should he? it's not as if anyone was forcing him to go through his own masterpiece).

 

The emphasis, however, is on reproducing the sacred original as closely as possible: the band has so meticulously dissected and thoroughly studied all the parts that I wouldn't be surprised to learn they also featured those empty Coke bottles for percussion right on stage. This can occasionally be instructive — for instance, some parts that were intentionally lowered deep in the mix, when played live, come out much louder (the trilling guitar parts on ʽDon't Talkʼ, for instance), so that the adoring fan of the album might pick on some nuances that he/she may have missed earlier. But if you are not that awed over Brian's original mastery of texture, you will be, like me, rather disappointed that not a single song gets any extra «twists» where we could see it open up to any new dimensions or perspectives. Only on the instrumentals, where the band is showcased per se, without the lead singer stealing away attention, do they occasionally stretch out beyond the ori­ginal limitations — like on the extended percussion jam on ʽPet Soundsʼ — but then it was exact­ly those instrumentals that we already had the pleasure of enjoying on Roxy just two years ago.

 

Additionally, there is something vaguely embarrassing about Brian's stage behaviour this time: we can hardly blame him for preserving that «innocent child» mentality, but it is somewhat dif­ferent when the entire audience gets mistaken for little kids as well. Here are some typical intro­ductions from the horse's mouth: "Track number TWO!" (ʽYou Still Believe In Meʼ — what is this, a foreign language audio course? fortunately, he drops this schtick very quickly, but still...); "You can close your eyes if you want to for this song!" (ʽDon't Talkʼ — thank you, Mr. Wilson, we can decide for ourselves); "Here's an instrumental with no voices, okay?" (ʽLet's Go Away For Awhileʼ — sure we know what an instrumental is, and did somebody warn you of potential audience disturbances at the perspective of hearing a song with «no voices»?); "This next song, my friend Paul McCartney told me it was his favorite song" (gee, this guy is friends with Paul McCartney himself? like, no shit!); "this next one sounds like a Bob Dylan lyrics' tune, I think you'll like it" (ʽI Know There's An Answerʼ — actually, no, it doesn't); "now we have another instrumental... NO VOICES JUST INSTRUMENTS!!!" (uhh... okaaaay...), and so on.

 

Honestly, that is annoying. I would advise anyone who does develop an odd taste for this perfor­mance to just cut those intros out in their digital versions (there is also a particularly ridiculous section where the old guy decides to have a shouting match with the audience, as if he were Bruce Dickinson or someone like that). Or, better still, just leave the record for what it is — a his­torical curio that may have had some personal importance for Brian at a particular juncture in his life. Or get the video (you can currently watch it on YouTube for free) — the band is quite hot to watch in many senses of the word, including sexist ones (ah, that Taylor Mills!). But if you miss out on this one altogether, that will hardly be a tragedy.

 

GETTIN' IN OVER MY HEAD (2004)

 

1) How Could We Still Be Dancin'; 2) Soul Searchin'; 3) You've Touched Me; 4) Gettin' In Over My Head; 5) City Blues; 6) Desert Drive; 7) A Friend Like You; 8) Make A Wish; 9) Rainbow Eyes; 10) Saturday Morning In The City; 11) Fairy Tale; 12) Don't Let Her Know She's An Angel; 13) The Waltz.

 

Cured as he was, it is notable that Brian did not actually engage in that much new songwriting ever since getting rid of the evil Dr. Landy: the majority of his new albums either revisited old territory, or were filled with covers and tributes, or, like this one, were a rather choppy-chompy mess. Here, at least four or five of the songs were re-recorded from Sweet Insanity, an aban­doned project from 1991 — and quite a few others were pulled from various older projects as well. And for the really new songs, Brian gets himself extra security with the presence of three giants as guest stars: Elton John, Eric Clapton, and Paul McCartney.

 

Knowing Brian, though, «messy» is not necessarily a bad word when it comes to assessing the albums of a man who had once made it his business to arrange genius in messy ways, and wren­ching beauty out of chaos. The songs written for Sweet Insanity were more or less on the same level as those written for his self-titled debut; the presence of such eminent guest stars on a Brian Wilson record could hardly hurt, and, most likely, many fans had waited an eternity to hear Brian and Paul on the same record (technically, they already did, but Paul's carrot chomping is not nearly as distinctive and recognizable as his singing). There's even the ghost of brother Carl making a cameo here on ʽSoul Searchin'ʼ, an old outtake from which brother Brian erased all the vocals but Carl's, then added his own touch. Possibilities ahoy!

 

Critics and fans alike destroyed the album, though — almost literally knocked it to the ground, in a rather vicious way at that — and I am somewhat at a loss as to why, because I kinda like it. Now it is certainly true that it is not at all ambitious: clearly, the idea was to make a simple pop album, without aspiring to scale Smile-type heights. It is also possible that true fans, who were already well acquainted with Sweet Insanity through bootlegs, were disappointed about not get­ting their money's worth (not that they paid that earlier money to anybody except bootleggers). And it is also true that the lyrics to most of the songs are kinda crappy, but then Brian's never been a great lyricist on his own anyway.

 

But on the whole as well as in parts, Gettin' In Over My Head still offers enough cute, harmless fun — enough to empathize for the old guy and brighten your day, particularly if you're an old guy too (this is very important: ever since his «revival», Brian has stayed completely out of touch with the young generation, while at the same time staying young at heart — this is a paradox that can either irritate or amuse, depending on your initial attitude). The songs are reasonably well (self-)produced, relatively catchy, completely amicable, and each one contains a small drop of the Brian Wilson essence — maybe that ain't enough to love it, but I sure do not see that many rea­sons to hate it, either.

 

Of the three superstar collaborations, ʽHow Could We Still Be Dancin'ʼ is probably the best one. You really can't go wrong with Elton banging the keys like crazy on this sort of «pub pop» (his vocals, unfortunately, are rather dusty), the harmonies are top-notch, and the optimistic vibe of this typical «old geezer anthem» feels totally sincere. (Also, kudos to the line about "how could we still make music after MTV?", which is delightfully ambiguous). ʽCity Bluesʼ, with Clapton, has an almost surprisingly harsh blues-rock lead guitar part all over it, and although the Clapton / Wilson link is far from the most natural thing on earth, it is not the least credible, either: Brian's sad, melancholic side ("the strange loud people made a mess of the world", he complains) is quite compatible with Eric's trademark blues licks.

 

Weakest of the three, unfortunately, is the Wilson/McCartney collaboration. ʽA Friend Like Youʼ is just a bit too obvious a title for such a collaboration, and things get even more confusing when you realize that the title is the only line in the song that Paul is allowed to sing solo — when his is clearly the stronger of the two voices at the time (in fact, Brian now sounds like Ozzy's younger brother at certain times, which is all the more eerie considering how much Ozzy is a fan of senti­mental piano ballads, too). Even so, denying the song's catchiness or sincerity would be an insult to both of the elder statesmen.

 

Occasionally, the retro vibe does get corny — ʽDesert Driveʼ is a flat-out re-write of ʽ409ʼ that does not even try to mask this fact, and we do not usually take lightly to self-plagiarism, even if it invites us to take it symbolically and realize that Mr. Wilson still feels a very tight connection to the old days of pre-Beatlemania. It is also hard for somebody like me who is almost alergic to make-merry musicals to harbor positive reactions on cheerful dreck like ʽSaturday Morning In The Cityʼ (sorry). But, if anything, this all contributes to the rather colorful diversity of the record: having its relative ups and downs is probably a better fate than staying permanently jammed in consistent mediocrity. Even if Brian is not pushing for greatness, he is at least continuing to ex­periment with format, and that's unequivocally a good thing.

 

Ultimately, a thumbs up here: missteps and dumb lyrics ("she had a body you'd kill for / you hoped that she'd take the pill for" would be moronically sexist if it weren't already so completely ungrammatical) aside, it's too much of a fun-fun-fun carousel ride to be dismissed with an intel­lectual or musicological blast of arguments. You'll probably have to wait to hit at least forty to make an objective assessment — a twenty-year old hipster who reveres Brian Wilson for Pet Sounds and/or The Beach Boys Love You will hardly be impressed at this stop.

 

BRIAN WILSON PRESENTS SMILE (2004)

 

1) Our Prayer/Gee; 2) Heroes And Villains; 3) Roll Plymouth Rock; 4) Barnyard; 5) Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine; 6) Cabin Essence; 7) Wonderful; 8) Song For Children; 9) Child Is The Father Of The Man; 10) Surf's Up; 11) I'm In Great Shape / I Wanna Be Around / Workshop; 12) Vega-Tables; 13) On A Holiday; 14) Wind Chimes; 15) Mrs. O'Leary's Cow; 16) In Blue Hawaii; 17) Good Vibrations.

 

Only the most battle-hardened Brian Wilson fan would state these days that this album has not completely outlived its purpose. In 2004, when Brian rattled the musical world by restoring the classic Smile project, this was not just an important personal step (a rather brave one, for some­one as mentally unstable as Brian to return to the project that had already once cost him much of his sanity), but it also gave the world its first «officially sanctioned» access to Smile in all of its glorious (in)coherence, rather than having people hunting for bootlegs or making clumsy playlists out of everything that got scattered on four years' worth of different LPs.

 

However, with the eventual release of The Smile Sessions half a decade later, the basic point of this version was gone — no offense, but who would really want to keep on listening to a 60-year old Brian Wilson faithfully reproducing the classic old recordings when you can now listen to the original young Beach Boys? More importantly, who would you want to have chewing on your carrots and celeries — some anonymous whippersnapper, or Sir Paul McCartney? (Not to offend percussionist Nelson Bragg, who sounds perfectly fine on the re-recordings, but he just isn't quite as convincing, melodic, or idiosyncratic with his munch).

 

Seriously now, the re-recording sounds wonderful, and Brian's backing band gets into the spirit of Smile as perfectly as they got into the spirit of Pet Sounds. But this is a very loyal recreation, and although there are minor differences from Smile Sessions, they are mostly of a structural nature — a couple brief links here and there are placed in different locations, and a couple tracks are brought to completion: ʽIn Blue Hawaiiʼ, in particular, which used to be the instrumental ʽLove To Say Dadaʼ, now features a brand new set of lyrics, commissioned from Van Dyke Parks, and sounds more like a real song than just a mood-setting «watery» instrumental. From that point of view, you could perhaps argue that this version of Smile is more «complete» than the old one, but the argument would be just a wee bit dorky.

 

Of course, the clinching argument is not the «sacrality» of the old recordings, but simply the fact that those songs were written with the original Beach Boys in mind — Carl, Mike, Al, and parti­cularly the young Brian; the old one, even downtuning stuff to accommodate it to his current singing voice, still runs into problems (see ʽSurf's Upʼ, where he relegates the highest parts to his backup singers). It's all smooth, and you wouldn't notice any major flaws if you weren't well aware of the original versions — but why settle for the less-than-perfect if you actually have access to perfection itself?

 

I may be missing some nuances here, but on the whole, these nuances should rather be explored by obsessive fans who live and breathe Smile and would rather spend valuable time dissecting all of its links and pondering over their musicological and philosophical interpretation than on some­thing of more use to themselves or society. It may be amusing and/or instructive to give the new version a spin or two — if only to see for yourself just how well Brian has managed to coach his new band and infect them with his original inspiration — but that's about it. On the other hand, he himself may still regard this as an important step in his life: after all, this is the only official completed Smile that there is, so perhaps there's this checkmark somewhere in his brain («must complete Smile! must complete Smile!») that was finally checked, and now the man is ready to look St. Peter straight in the eye, because once you've completed the entire journey from ʽHeroes And Villainsʼ to ʽGood Vibrationsʼ without missing a single stop, you got yourself an assured reservation in God's own little pops orchestra.

 

WHAT I REALLY WANT FOR CHRISTMAS (2005)

 

1) The Man With All The Toys; 2) What I Really Want For Christmas; 3) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 4) O Holy Night; 5) We Wish You A Merry Christmas; 6) Hark The Herald Angels Sing; 7) It Came Upon A Midnight Clear; 8) Christmasey; 9) The First Noel; 10) Little Saint Nick; 11) Deck The Halls; 12) Auld Lang Syne; 13) On Christmas Day; 14) Joy To The World; 15) Silent Night.

 

This one will be done with in brief. As you remember, the Beach Boys had already fulfilled their national obligation with a Christmas album as early as 1964. However, now that Brian has offi­cially reached the natural age of a Santa Claus, he might have felt the need to balance that early teenage offering with a well-aged, well-tempered reading of the classics — in fact, a couple of the songs here are reprised from Christmas Album, most noticeably the Wilson/Love co-written ʽLittle Saint Nickʼ and ʽThe Man With All The Toysʼ. And yes, one more ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ for the world to cherish and enjoy.

 

And what you get, in light of Brian's previous career, is probably what you'd expect. Sincerity a-plenty, wonderful harmonies from the Wondermints, pretty and tasteful arrangements played on a wide variety of instruments — and that dear old crackly voice. Newly written songs include the title track, with lyrics provided by Bernie Taupin (and if you're wondering what it is that Brian really wants for Christmas, well, he couldn't get it even if he were President), and ʽChristmaseyʼ, co-written with Jimmy Webb — melodically, both are indeed «Christmasey», nothing particular­ly special or irritating.

 

If you really love Beach Boy-style harmonies for what they're worth, though, they do a really really fine job on the choral numbers, such as ʽJoy To The Worldʼ and ʽSilent Nightʼ. This is, of course, perfectly rehearsed professionalism rather than sparkly youthful enthusiasm, but frankly, I am not sure which of the two I would prefer in 2005. And another thing is that back in 1964, it was never clear if the Beach Boys sang these Christmas carols because they really admired them, or because Capitol, or Papa Murry, told them to — here it is perfectly obvious that Brian is en­joying the process, and why shouldn't he? Come to think of it, of all veteran rockers it is Brian Wilson, with his wonderfully childlike mind, who is the most natural candidate for an old-fashio­ned Christmas release. Not that I'd truly recommend this album — I don't usually recommend Christmas albums unless they have ʽThe Night Santa Went Crazyʼ on them — but at least this one is not a total waste of time. Lovely harmonies.

 

THAT LUCKY OLD SUN (2008)

 

1) That Lucky Old Sun; 2) Morning Beat; 3) Room With A View; 4) Good Kind Of Love; 5) Forever My Surfer Girl; 6) Venice Beach; 7) Live Let Live; 8) Mexican Girl; 9) Cinco De Mayo; 10) California Role; 11) Between Pictures; 12) Oxygen To The Brain; 13) Been Too Long; 14) Midnight's Another Day; 15) Lucky Old Sun (reprise); 16) Going Home; 17) Southern California.

 

This one, I believe, is quite charming in the usual cuddly way, but only if you lower your expec­tations of it — something that most of the critics have not done, perhaps because they were so excited about the perspective of Brian and Van Dyke Parks working together once again on yet another conceptual album about the joys (and the occasional side effects) of that lazy old Califor­nia life. Odd, because Orange Crate Art already showed the world that the Wilson/Parks team is capable of pleasant pastiches that will never stand proper competition with the likes of Smile: and still, with every new Brian Wilson record that has an orange in the title or on the album sleeve, people hope and hope and hope for the return of the son of ʽGood Vibrationsʼ. Then again, the critical turnaround is so rapid these days, it is quite likely that most of the people that were disap­pointed by Lucky Old Sun never even heard Orange Crate Art.

 

This one may be just a tad more deceptive because it has a conceptual structure — one large suite that basically describes one day in the life of a veteran, but still impressionable Californian, from morning to midnight, with an intro, an outro, and a set of brief musical links where Brian recites, rather than sings, some of Parks' poetry. So, «suite» would automatically trigger the Smile con­nection, but the ambitions here are very humble — this is not a teenage symphony to God, this is just an old man's homage to his native place, and it is not always obligatory to invoke deep spiri­tuality under these conditions, even if the homage is idealized and about as «natural» as the eye-burning oranges on the front sleeve.

 

The songs here are generally very simple, highly derivative (of course) of Brian's past successes, but catchy and likeable all the same. (Many were co-written with Brian's band member Scott Bennett; I have no idea how much the latter was responsible for the words or melodies, but everything bears an easily recognizable Wilson stamp anyway). Production has occasionally been compared to the Beach Boys' work in the mid-1970s (15 Big Ones and whatever followed), but I do not believe that was intentional — most of the times when Brian goes retro (and he almost always goes retro), he ends up sounding like that just because it is easier these days to mimick that sound, with its loud drums and thick guitars, than something like ʽI Get Aroundʼ. And the biggest problem with 15 Big Ones  was not the production anyway, but rather Brian's general lack of involvement and interest — which is certainly not something you could suspect here, unless we eventually find out that his record company had him under strict contractual obligation to come out with a concept album about the state of California every ten years.

 

But yes, the songs are nothing special, very simple and casual for the «high» Brian standard. Most of the stuff here either observes the rules of early Sixties' rock'n'roll (ʽMorning Beatʼ and its ilk) or lightweight vaudeville (ʽGood Kind Of Loveʼ and its kin). The piano ballads are typically illustrated by ʽForever My Surfer Girlʼ, which borrows its title from you-know-what, but its hook from ʽDon't Worry Babyʼ for some reason, and simply does not exist outside of its nostalgic con­text — but inside this context, it's totally OK, just to verify that the old naïve romantic hasn't changed a bit in more than forty years. Actually, though, there are not too many ballads here: on the whole, the album is lively, filled with slow boogies and dance-oriented numbers, at least one of which is Latin (ʽMexican Girlʼ, which is so stereotypical in both its musical and lyrical ap­proaches that it probably would be unbearable if done by anybody else, but Brian is actually working on an album of stereotypes here, so let us forgive him the mariachi trumpets and the «bonita muchacha»'s — the man is happy to live in his dollhouse).

 

There is, however, at least one song here that — perhaps unintentionally — gives out a flash of greatness. ʽMidnight's Another Dayʼ begins inauspiciously enough, a quiet piano ballad whose hard-pumped chords are more Elton John than Brian, but eventually it is the only one of these tunes that transcends the «oh look at that, isn't it nice how much diversity we have in this state of California?» angle and delves into Brian's more personal and intimate emotions, because "all these people, they make me feel so alone": the crescendo on that line is this record's most defi­ning moment, and it makes your heart ache for the old guy who, at the end of the day, realises how most of his world has really passed away, and how what remains is confused and messed up, but then tries to reassure himself by softly purring in his own ears that "midnight's another day". The song may not be on the level of ʽ'Til I Dieʼ, but it's in the same territory, and if anything, it comes across as more personal because most of the vocals are not multi-tracked.

 

The two final tracks, particularly the brawny-braggardly ʽGoing Homeʼ (somewhat of a cross between the melodic side of ʽDo It Againʼ and the mood side of ʽBack Homeʼ), will probably seem anti-climactic after that, but somehow it feels right to me that the «deepest» song on the album should not conclude it, but rather be followed with some light silliness. We do not want to be left with the feeling that Brian is still beset by his old demons — it's important to know that the scars still hurt, and that deep down inside he still traps those fears without which most of the Beach Boys' masterpieces would never come to life, but a tragic conclusion for That Lucky Old Sun would have us worried, and we don't want another Dr. Landy in Brian's life. As it is, the record's status as a package of catchy, shallow entertainment with an unexpected (and slightly creepy) heart of gold is totally satisfactory, and calls for a routine thumbs up.

 

REIMAGINES GERSHWIN (2010)

 

1) Rhapsody In Blue (intro); 2) The Like In I Love You; 3) Summertime; 4) I Loves You Porgy; 5) I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'; 6) It Ain't Necessarily So; 7) 'S Wonderful; 8) They Can't Take That Away From Me; 9) Love Is Here To Stay; 10) I've Got A Crush On You; 11) I Got Rhythm; 12) Someone To Watch Over Me; 13) Nothing But Love; 14) Rhapsody In Blue (reprise).

 

It would be okay, I guess, except for the title. Why shouldn't Brian Wilson, an icon of American pop music from another age, find the time to pay tribute to George Gershwin, an icon of Ameri­can pop music from before another age? However, «paying tribute» is not quite the same thing as «reimagining» — the latter implies that you will somehow be able to look at the music in a com­pletely different light. For my money, Janis Joplin singing ʽSummertimeʼ is a textbook case of genuine «reimagining»; whether Brian would at all be capable of a comparable feat remains an open question, even upon multiple listens to this platter.

 

Naturally, this album here sounds nothing like Bing Crosby, or Ella Fitzgerald — as you can easi­ly predict, the arrangements are one hundred percent Beach Boys/Brian Wilson: instrumentation, harmonies, rhythms, you couldn't mistake this for not the author of Pet Sounds in a million years. This is the way Brian works, and this is his paradigm into which he will gently force everything that comes his way, Gershwin or Cannibal Corpse. From this point of view, this is certainly a «re­imagining» — sometimes a «mutation», even, as is the case with the introductory and outgoing bits of ʽRhapsody In Blueʼ over which Brian plasters a thick wall of Smile-style harmonies. But in all other respects, this is just an album of Gershwin covers, no more, no less.

 

Really, there are two reasons to justify an album like this. First, Gershwin songs are vocal pieces, so it makes sense to crave for a new rendering once a fresh new vocalist with a special twist comes along. I guess it is pretty obvious that a 68-year old Brian Wilson does not fall into this category: it is nice to see that his singing has not at all deteriorated in more than a decade, but he still has too much of a hard time trying to hit and hold all the notes so as to divert his brain to other tasks — such as special ways of vocal modulation or inflection that would depend on par­ticularities of the lyrics. Nice, but expendable.

 

Second, one could try to somehow load the original songs with additional layers of depth — truly «reimagine» the songs so that, for instance, ʽI've Got A Crush On Youʼ would not properly sound like he's really got a crush on you, but made it ironic, or melancholic, or stalker-ish, or something. These interpretations, however, are all pretty straightforward and, I must admit, fairly bland. ʽSummertimeʼ has a few nice things going for it (like the grim cello line and the little orchestral climax at the end, hinting at the song's implied darkness), but on the whole, never rises above «nice», a pleasantly loungey delivery. ʽIt Ain't Necessarily Soʼ sounds like a school professor explaining to the kids the meaning of metaphor, rather than a cynical drug dealer taking pot shots at religious faith, which is what it used to be. So, okay, you could perhaps object that «disney-fying» the songs (almost literally so, because the album was released on the Walt Disney label, in exchange for the courtesy of Brian covering Disney songs on his next record) is a sort of «re­imagining», but would that be an objection in favor of the record?

 

Ultimately, there are no two big reasons to subject yourself to this, but there may be two small ones. First, it is cute to hear how Beach Boy rhythms and melodies, sometimes directly reminis­cent of classics, make their way into Gershwin songs — for instance, once ʽThey Can't Take That Away From Meʼ blasts out of the speakers, most of us will probably want to hum "little deuce coupe, you don't know what I got" before the real lyrics even start; ʽSomeone To Watch Over Meʼ sounds like a Pet Sounds outtake that could have, with a few twists, become ʽI Just Wasn't Made For These Timesʼ; ʽI Got Rhythmʼ ends with harmonies directly transposed from ʽFarmer's Daughterʼ, etc. Again, I wouldn't call this «reimagining» (no more than a thick Russian accent out of the mouth of a native Russian speaker of English would be «reimagining English»), but it's charming and certainly unique.

 

Second, also on a technical note, there are two «new» songs here (the second and the next-to-last tracks, symmetrically), permission to use and finalize which were granted to Brian and his pal Scott Bennett by the Gershwin Estate — reason enough, I guess, for hardcore George fans to sit up and take notice, even if the original melodies were obviously «wilsonized», and, frankly spea­king, the songs are not all that special. Well, I guess ʽThe Like In I Love Youʼ, as you can already see from the title, offers another small collection of Ira Gershwin's trademark word games, so at least there's some linguistic interest. Other than that, I can't think of any more exciting associa­tions — clearly, it is at least more rewarding to listen to Brian sing Gershwin than to listen to him singing ʽCan You Feel The Love Tonightʼ (a coming-up experience), but maybe it would have been a better idea to have him record all these songs around, say, 1969, when he was mad, un­cool, and unclean, and the results may not have been so predictable.

 

IN THE KEY OF DISNEY (2011)

 

1) You've Got A Friend; 2) The Bare Necessities; 3) Baby Mine; 4) Kiss The Girl; 5) Colors Of The Wind; 6) Can You Feel The Love Tonight; 7) We Belong Together; 8) I Just Can't Wait To Be King; 9) Stay Awake; 10) Heigh-Ho/Whistle While You Work/Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life For Me); 11) When You Wish Upon A Star.

 

According to the Disney people, In The Key Of Disney was «the album that marries the vision of two men who shaped the image of modern California». That may be so, but it still does not exactly explain who on Earth came up with the romantic idea of having Brian Wilson record a bunch of Disney movie songs, and why on Earth had the decision been approved by Walt Disney Records. Were they that out of touch with reality? Did they think it could have any chance to be­come a strong seller? Or could it be true that somebody on top there was really enchanted by what it would be like to have Brian sing ʽCan You Feel The Love Tonightʼ — and damn the tor­pedoes and all? So many silly questions, so few answers.

 

Anyway, one thing and one thing only is for sure: in terms of musical arrangements, all these songs are better than their movie counterparts (well, maybe except the two Randy Newman ditties from Toy Story 1 and 3, because, well, Randy is Randy). Either Brian took the job seriously, or by now he and his band are just doing this automatically, but most of the songs are dutifully Wil­sonized to the same extent that Gershwin was — with harmonies, chimes, baroque atmospheres, indeed, it has to be stated that there is far more Wilson vision here than Disney vision. And yes, some of these songs were quite decent in the first place, but it is Brian that performs here the te­dious, but rewarding task of «de-cloying» them.

 

The selection, as you can see, leans heavily towards the «Disney Renaissance» era, probably be­cause it is these songs that 21st century listeners would seem to relate to rather than the old stuff, but then one shouldn't also forget that Brian himself grew to some of those cartoons, and it may be assumed that at least ʽBaby Mineʼ from Dumbo and ʽWhen You Wish Upon A Starʼ meant something to the man long before he became a star in his own right (in fact, ʽWhen You Wishʼ, according to Brian's own confession, had influenced ʽSurfer Girlʼ to some degree). And out of ʽBaby Mineʼ, at least, he managed to make a minor Wilson classic — now it is a lush, but totally non-sappy Beach Boyish waltz with perfect harmonies. If they ever remake Dumbo, I do hope this version will make it to the soundtrack, especially since there will probably be nothing else worth re­membering about such a remake anyway.

 

Another really pleasant surprise for me was the cover of ʽColors Of The Windʼ from Pocahontas, which probably has the single finest vocal delivery from Brian and puts the awfully and predic­tably overwrought vegasey version by Vanessa Williams to sleep — and the quiet organ, electric guitar, and flute arrangement is as much an epitome of good taste as the usual Disney arrange­ments are the epitome of cheese-a-rama. Brian's magical talents are not quite sufficient to salvage every wreck: ʽCan You Feel The Love Tonightʼ, unfortunately, retains its pompous power ballad core, and ʽWhen You Wishʼ... well, people don't like tampering with that song any more than they like tampering with ʽYesterdayʼ, and that makes the cover fairly useless.

 

But the major weakness of the album, and the one which makes it hard to recommend it to any­body except as a curio, is that there is really no point in having Brian sing all these songs. One or two could have been nice, but they are all character impersonations, and Brian was never much good at character impersonation. When he can really get into it just because he knows, deep in his heart, what that song's mood is all about (ʽBaby Mineʼ is definitely up his alley, and I guess the naïve environmentalism of ʽColors Of The Windʼ was also something he could heartily relate to), it works; but ʽI Just Can't Wait To Be Kingʼ? ʽKiss That Girlʼ? ʽHeigh-Ho, To Work We Goʼ? These are comical numbers that call for «getting into character», and it is predictable that Brian can't do it and won't do it, so why bother? And even if he might empathize with the message in ʽThe Bare Necessitiesʼ (not to mention that he does look a little Baloo-like these days), the bare necessity of that song is to deliver the message with comic precision and timing.

 

So, despite my sincere amazement at the intelligent and tasteful transformation of some of the songs, the idea on the whole does not work: there is just not enough of Disney's musical legacy for one Brian Wilson to absolve it all. It is not quite as absurd, pointless, or sacrilegious (the latter depending on whether you'd think Wilson desecrates Disney, or Disney desecrates Wilson) as it may seem, but it ain't no thirty-minute miracle, either. What could be a miracle would be a Dis­ney (or, preferably, Pixar) cartoon about Brian Wilson, with a Brian Wilson soundtrack — given that Brian, particularly at this point, somewhat resembles a cartoon character himself. Come to think of it, a cartoon about The Beach Boys could very well qualify as «family entertainment», especially if they remember to focus on drugs, wild sex, Charlie Manson, and Mike Love's wife-beating escapades all the way through.

 

NO PIER PRESSURE (2015)

 

1) This Beautiful Day; 2) Runaway Dancer; 3) Whatever Happened; 4) On The Island; 5) Half Moon Bay; 6) Our Special Love; 7) The Right Time; 8) Guess You Had To Be There; 9) Don't Worry; 10) Tell Me Why; 11) Sail Away; 12) Somewhere Quiet; 13) I'm Feeling Sad; 14) One Kind Of Love; 15) Saturday Night; 16) The Last Song.

 

I am sorry to say this, but here it comes: for the first time in his solo career, and, in fact, for the first time in his overall career — discounting those Beach Boys albums for which he was really not responsible — Brian Wilson has come out with a blatantly bad record. Not just «so-so», not «mediocre» — no, this here is something much worse: a dishonest album, which pretends to be a Brian Wilson piece of art in name, but has about as much real Brian Wilson in it as a surimi crab stick has real crab in it. Fake throughout, starting with the silly pun of the title: No Peer Pressure would imply that the album is 100% Brian, which it is not, and No Pier Pressure would imply... crap, I don't even know what it would imply. It's just a stupid pun.

 

Objective reason #1 for the miserability of this failure: Brian falls back on collaboration with Joe Thomas, the guy responsible for the bad production of Imagination, and, for some reason, also co-writes most of the songs with the guy. Additionally, joining the club of «old geezers embra­cing new faces», he brings in a swarm of musical guests — which wouldn't be much of a problem if it were the right kind of guests, like, say, Andrew Bird or the girl from Beach House, but Kacey Musgraves? Zooey Deschanel? Are you kidding me? Nate Ruess? I have no idea who that guy is, but I do know that he sounds like a boring version of Robin Gibb, and for that reason ʽSaturday Nightʼ sounds like bad late period Bee Gees. Rumor has it that Brian also wanted Lana del Rey, but that she backed out of the project at the last minute — not that her presence would have made this pile of shit any less artificial than it already is, but yeah, I'd like to have her here, just to drive in the last nail of proving my point.

 

There is not a single good song here, nowhere in sight. ʽThis Beautiful Dayʼ is a pretty enough piano-and-harmonies introduction, tastily adorned with cello and trombone, and it lures you in with a fake promise of the usual, if a little too predictable and derivative, baroque bliss. But that is it — everything that follows broadly falls into two categories: (a) crappy mush and (b) mushy crap (to make this judgement more precise, let us assume that mushy crap has steady danceable rhythm and crappy mush is more of the ballad variety).

 

Theoretically, I have nothing against Brian Wilson going techno — I have outlived that prejudice a long time ago, and if you genuinely believe your melody needs a good house beat, well, so be it. But ʽRunaway Dancerʼ is just a stupid sounding song — the singing guy has a stupid voice, the lyrics are stupid, the melody is stupid, and what exactly here is Brian Wilson, anyway? This is the kind of stuff you can get on any cheap contemporary dance music radio station. Is it merely to prove a point, that Grandpa can crank it up as good as the young 'uns? If so, it does not prove that point — please, Grandpa, could you return to your usual self, which is something the young 'uns actually cannot imitate, no matter how they try?

 

Or maybe not, because after that dreadful experiment, Grandpa does try to fall back on the old formula, and the results are comparably pathetic. ʽWhatever Happenedʼ is a good title — because whatever happened to Brian's ability to pen a decent melody? We are not asking for another Pet Sounds — I mean, another Lucky Old Sun would have been quite enough. But this is just mush after mush after mush. Pretty harmonies on autopilot; safe, basic, bland instrumentation; not a single challenging or unpredictable vocal move anywhere. When exactly did lush baroque pop degenerate into smooth background muzak? Lounge instrumentals like ʽHalf Moon Bayʼ, instant­ly forgettable country pop like ʽGuess You Had To Be Thereʼ, and, worst of all, would-be-Beach Boy pastiches like ʽSail Awayʼ, which surreptitiously quotes ʽSloop John Bʼ and nicks some of its instrumentation and vibe, too, but hardly offers a tenth part of its catchiness.

 

The presence of Al Jardine (and even David Marks) on a few of the tracks adds to the illusion of another Beach Boys reincarnation (indeed, at one time Brian thought this would be a new Beach Boys project), but other than Al's well recognizable voice, songs like ʽThe Right Timeʼ are just more of the same elevator muzak. However, the biggest disappointment is probably ʽThe Last Songʼ — what could at least be an epic, heartbreaking conclusion ends up being a limp, strugg­ling ballad that is one hundred percent atmosphere, sappy, sentimental, and completely free of spiritual depth. Once again, I have no problems about Brian being a big baby: I do have problems when his music sounds like it comes from a little baby, without any signs of the astute psycholo­gism that it once had (not that it doesn't happen to a lot of people as they age — Ray Davies, for instance, seems to have suffered from the same problem).

 

Overall, for an artist of lesser stature a record like this would have been just boring, but for Brian this is downright awful. One can only hope that his songwriting instincts have been temporarily derailed and buried under the layers of misguided production and ridiculous ambitions of «hip­ness», and that he still has time to dig himself out and at least return to Lucky Old Sun levels of quality. Then again, it is perfectly possible that Joe Thomas isn't quite as responsible as we'd like him to be, and that it is simply old age catching up — after all, not everybody can expect to pre­serve compositional genius for more than five decades. Whatever be, I am actually glad to see that the album has largely garnered negative (or «cautiously positive», so as to not seem offensive to the Elder Statesman) reviews, and I do hope that Brian reads at least some of them. Really, I mean, it is not that hard to understand that something went terribly wrong here. And if you want to help out, I suggest you begin bombarding Brian's mailbox with ideas of what sort of collabora­tors could actually help rather than hurt his legacy — let us insure, after all, that his next project does not involve Zooey Deschanel at least, because he might eventually end up with Katy Perry, and that would just totally blow Grandpa's integrity to pieces. Thumbs down.

BUDDY GUY

THE COMPLETE CHESS STUDIO RECORDINGS (1960-1967; 1992)

 

CD I: 1) First Time I Met The Blues; 2) Slop Around; 3) I Got My Eyes On You; 4) Broken Hearted Blues; 5) Let Me Love You Baby; 6) I Got A Strange Feeling; 7) Gully Hully; 8) Ten Years Ago; 9) Watch Yourself; 10) Stone Crazy; 11) Skippin'; 12) I Found True Love; 13) Hard But It's Fair; 14) Baby (Baby, Baby, Baby); 15) When My Left Eye Jumps; 16) That's It; 17) The Treasure Untold; 18) American Bandstand; 19)   No Lie; 20) $100 Bill; 21) My Love Is Real; 22) Buddy's Boogie.

CD II: 1) Worried Mind (aka Stick Around); 2) Untitled Instrumental; 3) Moanin'; 4) I Dig Your Wig; 5) My Time After Awhile; 6) Night Flight; 7) Crazy Love (Crazy Music); 8) Every Girl I See; 9) Too Many Ways; 10) Leave My Girl Alone; 11) Got To Use Your Head; 12) Keep It To Myself (aka Keep It To Yourself); 13) My Mother; 14) She Suits Me To A Tee; 15) Mother-In-Law Blues; 16) Buddy's Groove; 17) Going To School; 18) I Cry And Sing The Blues; 19) Goin' Home; 20) I Suffer With The Blues; 21) Lip Lap Louie; 22) My Time After Awhile (alternate vocals and mix); 23) Too Many Ways (alternate take); 24) Keep It To Myself (alternate take); 25) I Didn't Know My Mother Had A Son Like Me.

 

Like most of his colleagues at Chess, Buddy Guy had his output measured in singles, not LPs; unlike some of his luckier colleagues, though, he was not even allowed the privilege of putting together an LP from some of these singles until his very last year on Chess (where, according to most accounts, he was treated as sort of an underdog) — which made his early discography seri­ously confusing until MCA finally got around to putting it all together on this double disc package, as part of their general program to systematize and preserve their legacy. Even so, compared to so many other Complete Chess Studio Recordings series, two CDs seem fairly pitiful — indeed, the label saw little sense in maintaining Buddy Guy as an independent artist, preferring to use him for session work rather than individual stardom.

 

And indeed, discrimination accusations aside, those early «formative» years do not really give us the Buddy Guy that most of us are accustomed to — the consummate showman and guitar wizard with his own unmistakable, and highly eccentric, dialect of the blues language. His very first singles were actually released in 1958 for the smaller Cobra Records (and are pretty hard to lo­cate, as you'd have to go for an obstinately chronologically representative collection), where he worked close to Otis Rush and seems to have been highly influenced by that style — deep-echo, ominous soul-blues with vocal wailings and screechy guitar. A year later, he switched to Chess, where he continued to explore that Otis Rush vibe, but also put out «blues de-luxe» tracks in the glitzy style of B. B. King, dabbled in danceable R&B (in fact, danceable anything — one of the tracks here is not called ʽGully Hullyʼ for nothing), and basically was willing to try out any idea as long as it had some probability of selling.

 

The problem is, the one thing the world is most grateful to Buddy for is his guitar playing, and these early Chess singles do not paint a very good picture of it. First, although Buddy's playing was a big influence on everybody from British bluesmen to Hendrix even in the first half of the Sixties, his «classic» style of playing did not truly emerge until after he himself was «re-influen­ced» by the blues-rock explosion of the second half of the Sixties. And second, according to most accounts, Buddy was at his most influential when playing live — not an option here, with just one track (ʽStone Crazyʼ) giving him enough space to stretch out with some serious soloing, and most of the others molding him more as a singer and entertainer than a blues player. And he is a good singer, wailing and crooning along with the best of 'em, yet hardly doing anything here that would put him over the level of the aforementioned Otis Rush — or B. B. King and Bobby Bland, for that matter.

 

The collection does feature some of the songs that formed the foundation of the Buddy Guy legend. There's ʽLet Me Love You Babyʼ, his firmest affirmation of aggressive masculinity that would later be covered by Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, among others, as an early anthem of blues-based hard rock. And there's his blues-rock transformation of ʽMary Had A Little Lambʼ from 1967 (here entitled ʽGoing To Schoolʼ — copyright reasons?), which many people know from the Stevie Ray Vaughan version — although, to be fair, the importance of the recording is more in its general idea that «anything you want can be converted to kick-ass scorching blues» than anything else, because it is not outstanding in any other respect. And those early singles, ʽFirst Time I Met The Bluesʼ and ʽI Got My Eyes On Youʼ, they would also become regular live staples — and both introduce those signature «quivering» guitar licks that sound as if he were pulling on those strings like they were bowstrings, loosing an arrow at the listener (I think Keith Richards and/or Brian Jones did a good job copying these licks on the Stones' early records).

 

So yeah, there's plenty of fun and importance here, but, unfortunately, the completeness of the package also means that there will be a lot of crap — I mean, most of these upbeat R&B numbers that he did in the early Sixties, with female backing voices and cheery brass sections etc., are completely skippable (ʽBaby Baby Babyʼ, etc.): for better guitar work, you do not have to travel a long way from there, and for better entertainment value, you'd rather want to cross over to Smo­key Robinson or Wilson Pickett. Even as the Sixties were advancing, he was still saddled with novelty material like ʽLip Lap Louieʼ and ʽI Dig Your Wigʼ — compensating for this with occa­si­onal stabs at serious jazz (a cover of Art Blakey's ʽMoanin'ʼ is here, too) which show respectable technique, yet it was never highly likely that Buddy Guy would ever be respected as a jazz guitarist. Additionally, four tracks here actually feature guitarist Lacy Gibson instead of Buddy, and on one of them (ʽMy Love Is Realʼ) Lacy even takes lead vocals, leaving it unclear what Buddy's contribution to the track was in the first place.

 

Some of his better material from those years eventually made it to his first and last LP for Chess, Left My Blues In San Francisco (which we will tackle separately), but on the whole, these 47 tracks could easily be reduced to about 10-12, if you want to properly understand what all the hoopla about Buddy was in the pre-Hendrix era. To the ones already mentioned add some­thing like the scorching confessionalism of ʽMy Time After Awhileʼ... the weeping licks on ʽI Cry And Sing The Bluesʼ... the fast, fluent, fun playing on ʽBuddy's Boogieʼ... and yeah, that's about it for this one. Still, I guess the same criticisms apply to B. B. King as well, who spent the first two decades of his career stifled by the confines of his studio, his image, his technology, and his time, before really exploding in the mid-Sixties, so let us not hold his buddy Buddy to impossibly higher standards and still acknowledge these «beginning-of-the-legend» years with a modest thumbs up (especially since there is, at the very least, nothing openly bad here: even the novelty numbers and the hip-shaking dance fluff are really very innocent.)

 

LEFT MY BLUES IN SAN FRANCISCO (1967)

 

1) Keep It To Myself; 2) Crazy Love; 3) I Suffer With The Blues; 4) When My Left Eye Jumps; 5) Buddy's Groove; 6) Goin' Home; 7) She Suits Me To A Tee; 8) Leave My Girl Alone; 9) Too Many Ways; 10) Mother-In-Law; 11) Every Girl I See.

 

The only «original» LP that Buddy managed to get out of his stay at Chess is still not very «ori­ginal»: despite being released in 1967, at a time when even the most old-fashioned bluesmen were beginning to pay heed to the album-oriented mentality, it consists of eleven tracks recorded throughout the decade — although, fair enough, most of them were not previously released as singles, so most people probably did not hear any of this stuff prior to 1967. Today, all of these tunes are included in the Complete Chess package, so it makes no sense to hunt for the LP sepa­rately, but it might deserve a brief separate mention anyway.

 

For the Hendrix-owned standards of 1967, this stuff obviously does not seem very impressive; but Buddy holds his own ground fairly well against such competitors as B. B. King or Albert King, except that he seems constantly torn between his ambitions as a guitar player and a red-hot R&B entertainer — on the opening ʽKeep It To Myselfʼ, he wails and screams his way through the tune like a wannabe James Brown, and his backing band, laying it hard on the brass, wouldn't mind outperforming the Famous Flames, either (you wish). Predictably, this leads to the songs being stuck somewhere in between the two extremes, and satisfying neither the serious R&B lover nor the casual fan of expressive guitar playing — at least, not satisfying nearly as much as they could, had Buddy had a more focused understanding of what it is he is trying to be.

 

On the other hand, it helps that the selection is fairly diverse. We have regular 12-bar blues with stinging, albeit poorly mixed, guitar (ʽI Suffer With The Bluesʼ; the bass lines, left uncredited, are mixed really high, though, and are stunningly inventive, whoever it was that invented them); slow brass-drenched blues-de-luxe with wailing guitar (ʽWhen My Left Eye Jumpsʼ); a variation on the Chuck Willis/Elvis ʽI Feel So Badʼ groove with a playful jazzy solo (ʽCrazy Loveʼ); an early stab at proto-funk (ʽBuddy's Grooveʼ) with nice brass/guitar interplay and a lightly aggressive/omi­nous touch (once again, mainly due to the cool bassline); even a straightahead pop song that could have easily been handed over to some Motown girl group, despite being credited to the prolific Willie Dixon.

 

So it's all smooth and fine — just not very individualistic and not tremendously exciting. Not that his earliest efforts on the Vanguard label fully convey the uniqueness of his talent, either, but even so, you can immediately feel the difference as you jump from this LP to the follow-up, and we either have to ascribe this to stupid pressure from Chess, forcing the man into the three-mi­nute single format, or to the man's conscious decision to recast, upgrade, and modernize his image in the wake of the guitar rock revolution of 1966-67. Probably both, though.

 

A MAN AND THE BLUES (1968)

 

1) A Man And The Blues; 2) I Can't Quit The Blues; 3) Money (That's What I Want); 4) One Room Country Shack; 5) Mary Had A Little Lamb; 6) Just Playing With My Axe; 7) Sweet Little Angel; 8) Worry, Worry; 9) Jam On A Monday.

 

What a difference a label change made — Buddy didn't even have to move away from Chicago, because the New York-based Vanguard Records gave him studio time at Universal Studios in his own Chicago stronghold, where he was still able to play with some of the Chess veterans, inclu­ding, most prominently, pianist Otis Spann, who makes A Man And The Blues as much his own as Buddy's. Some people have claimed not to notice any big difference, but that is not true: the major difference is that, for the first time in more than ten years, Buddy got to make an album — no longer confined to the limitations of the single form — and this has not only allowed him to properly unfurl his talents, but also stimulated him to expand them.

 

If you think, though, that A Man And The Blues is going to be some ballsy, flashy, I-can-beat-that-Hendrix-sucker affair, think again — with a few minor exceptions, this is a very quiet, low-key recording, concentrating on slow blues guitar/piano interplay rather than cocky blues-rock riffage. One of the minor exceptions is ʽJust Playing With My Axeʼ, which borrows the basic riff of ʽSatisfactionʼ (or, more accurately, the basic guitar/brass riff of ʽSatisfactionʼ as done by Otis Redding) and uses it as a base for some rather chaotic, but clean-sounding jazzy improvisation on Buddy's part — not as if that axe were chopping a whole lot of wood.

 

Large numbers of generic slow 12-bar blues can be a heavy burden, of course, but the saving grace of the record is Otis — from the opening title track, where Spann and Guy duel with each other for about six minutes, and right down to ʽWorry Worryʼ, where... Spann and Guy also duel with each other for about six minutes, the record is loaded with this exciting piano/guitar dialog, where the possibilities for expression are near endless, and the two men captivate our senses like two genius actors in a never-ending Shakespeare dialog, alternating between lengthy expositions of individual arguments and quick, flashy call-and-response duels (check out especially those brief inter­changes in the coda to ʽA Man And The Bluesʼ).

 

The best of these tracks is probably the soulful cover of Mercy Dee Walton's ʽOne Room Coun­try Shackʼ, a song whose nearest relative in the blues idiom is the well-known ʽBall And Chainʼ (popularised by Janis, but actually brought to the public by Big Mama Thornton) — Otis plays it out like Ray Charles, moody and ominous, while Buddy does his best Bobby Bland impersona­tion and adds minimalistic jazzy leads (incidentaly, Wayne Bennett, Bobby Bland's guitar player, is also present on the album, but only as rhythm guitarist). It's not exceptional, but in between the two, they succeed in generating a haunting atmosphere of loneliness and depression, and the only problem is that more conventional numbers, such as B. B. King's ʽSweet Little Angelʼ and ʽWorry, Worryʼ, feel a little bland after it.

 

The «rockier» numbers are also done «gently»: ʽMoney (That's What I Want)ʼ is played with clean guitar and fluent, accurate piano (no Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano bashing allowed), and the re-recording of ʽMary Had A Little Lambʼ gives much of the melody to the brass section, while Buddy's soloing style is, once again, soft, smooth, and silky, to the extent that I probably couldn't tell it apart from B. B. King at this moment (well, no, actually, the two men's playing techniques are always different, but the guitar tone here is 100% Lucille). But that is no big deal — the big deal is that, for the first time in his life, Buddy here gets to play what he wants, how he wants, and (quite importantly) for as long as he wants (a couple of the songs have fade-outs that may have concealed even longer jamming bits, but how we will ever know?). And since it's all done with style and taste, let us just forget about the «identity-finding» issue (I mean, if you want to lay down a claim that Buddy never truly found his own identity until the 1990s, that's fine with me) and give this a well deserved thumbs up, and don't forget — this is as much thumbs up to Otis as it is to Buddy, if not more.

 

THIS IS BUDDY GUY! (1968)

 

1) I Got My Eyes On You; 2) The Things I Used To Do; 3) Fever; 4) Knock On Wood; 5) I Had A Dream Last Night; 6) 24 Hours Of The Day; 7) You Were Wrong; 8) I'm Not The Best.

 

Oh yes indeed, now this is Buddy Guy, with an exclamation mark, make no mistake about it. The man's first ever live album was recorded at the New Orleans House in Berkeley, California, and, true to the location, combines New Orleanian extravagance with the Californian sense of wild­ness and freedom. Vulnerable metaphors aside, this is simply a kick-ass performance that, for the very first time, gives us retro-listeners a taste of «Buddy unleashed» that was unthinkable on his Chess singles, and still very much subdued on his earliest studio recordings for Vanguard.

 

There is a problem, though. At the time, Buddy was clearly still on a major James Brown kick, and thought himself as much an R&B artist as a bluesman — which means that the selections are more or less equally divided between scorching blues / blues-rock performances and sweaty R&B rave-ups. And while the rave-ups are dutifully red-hot, and even Buddy's unknown brass section does a good job interacting with his ecstatic vocals, you just can't help the feeling that all of this is not playing to the man's greatest strengths. The best thing about them, really, is that they help to break up the monotonousness — one 12-bar blues tune after another can get tiresome even if the guitar work is always awesome — but while I heartily welcome the inclusion of ʽFeverʼ, which Buddy delivers with an almost comedic flair, ʽKnock On Woodʼ is mainly an excuse for pestering the audience about whether they feel all right, and the album-closing ʽI'm Not The Bestʼ is basically six minutes of "Good God!" screeching over a repetitive brass riff. Basically, there's too much of this wannabe-James-Brown posturing here to make me take this seriously.

 

The blues stuff, though — that is a different matter. From the opening licks of ʽI Got My Eyes On Youʼ, you understand that a new, daring, challenging presence on the blues scene has been made available: less wild and otherworldly than Hendrix, perhaps, and not as endowed with the gift of subtlety as B. B. King, but more fiery and eccentric than just about any other black gui­tarist alive at the time. It is not when he tries to imitate James Brown or Little Richard with his singing and showmanship that he is at his greatest — it is when he puts a little bit of James Brown or Little Richard into his guitar playing, giving the instrument a unique jerky, sputtering voice that ignites all sorts of passions when the man is really «on».

 

And here, he is totally on for all the duration of ʽI Got My Eyes On Youʼ, a militant mid-tempo boogie with gunfire soloing; for all of the slow-moving ʽI Had A Dream Last Nightʼ, whose scraggly, chaotic, stuttery guitar licks, sometimes building up to fabulous series of trills, are such a far cry from the carefully nuanced, economic, silky-soft sound of B. B. King; and for all of ʽYou Were Wrongʼ, with a slightly cleaner guitar tone that does not, however, in any way dimi­nish the rawness and roughness of delivery. This is the kind of sound that may, indeed, have cha­racterized his live playing for quite some time already — the kind of sound that inspired people like Clapton and Page, with whom we tend to associate it more than with Buddy, just because, well, Buddy Guy didn't get the chance to become a household name before the 1990s. But he was there all right, and This Is Buddy Guy! proves it.

 

And even if I'd only like to treasure one half of the album (honestly, I don't care at all if I never get to hear Buddy spit out "good God!" on the likes of ʽI'm Not The Bestʼ again in my life), that half is reason enough to award a thumbs up to the album in general. Of course, not every Buddy Guy live album is deserving a thumbs up by definition (in fact, some disgruntled fans state that no Buddy Guy live album so far has managed to truly capture the exuberance of his performance in all its glory), but here's to first-coming and introducing a new distinctive voice that could hold its own against all the big ones in the business — no mean feat for 1968 and its new, Hendrix-dependent standards of quality.

 

BUDDY AND THE JUNIORS (1970)

 

1) Talkin' 'Bout Women Obviously; 2) A Motif Is Just A Riff (Riffin'); 3) Buddy's Blues; 4) (I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man; 5) Five Long Years; 6) Rock Me Mama; 7) Ain't No Need.

 

This probably is not at all the sort of record one would normally associate with Buddy Guy, Hot Lover of Electric Blues Guitar — a minimalistic, all-acoustic session with Buddy on guitar, Junior Wells on harmonica and, sure enough, one more Junior (Mance) on piano joining the two better known legends on the third track and sticking with them to the end. The whole thing pretty much came about by accident (producer Michael Cuscuna «tricked» Vanguard Records into holding the session so that they could also back up a regular Buddy Guy album which he also produced), and you know how professional music critics love such accidents — the record gets nothing but rave reviews, even if few of the rave reviewers probably get the urge to listen to it again once they get all the admiration off their chests.

 

In all honesty, there is nothing particularly special about the session. As an «unplugged» player, Buddy is okay, but neither his technique nor his inventiveness on the instrument would put him on the level of those Delta veterans for whom the acoustic guitar was the instrument — much like Hendrix becomes «just okay» when you hear him play acoustic. When they get down to soloing or jamming, it is mostly Junior Wells' harmonica that occupies the spotlight, and even if the guy had superb technique and expressivity on the level of Little Walter or Sonny Boy Williamson, it could be a chore to sit through for 40 minutes; and he is actually slightly below these fellas when it comes to «blowpower» or musical phrasing, although sometimes he makes cool counterpoints to Buddy's vocal lines (the "black night... black night" section on ʽFive Long Yearsʼ, for instance, when the harmonica «fades in» and «whooshes» past you like a spirit in the night).

 

Mostly, the record is about attitude; the first track is a ten-minute 12-bar improvisation where the chuckling, the whispering, the occasionally quivering vocalizing, the minimalistic syncopation are much more important than the nearly non-existent melody or the totally irrelevant lyrics. On the second track, Buddy does indeed play the same acoustic riff over and over again, with Wells either picking it up on harmonica or veering off on a tangent — and despite the simplicity, they do manage to create the atmosphere of some important shamanistic ritual, as if nagging and nag­ging and nagging away at that riff were sure to eventually restore balance to the universe. It helps that the riff itself is mysteriously bass-heavy, and Buddy's occasional grunts give the illusion that playing it is about as difficult as lifting heavy weights, but no pain, no gain — it's not that easy to restore balance to the universe, you know.

 

The atmosphere actually dissipates a little bit when the piano player joins in and the trio begins playing more predictable classics like ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ and ʽFive Long Yearsʼ. Some critics praise Junior Mance's piano playing here to high heaven — I don't know, I think he's just keeping his end up fairly well, but comparisons with Otis Spann are unjustified, since this guy has neither the fluency nor the coolness and confidence of Otis (for actual comparison, refer to A Man And The Blues, where Otis made the record shine in all those places where Buddy was not able to — this piano playing, in comparison, does little for me except providing some extra rhyth­mic support and clogging up one recording track). Worst of all is when they decide to close the session with a boogie piece (ʽAin't No Needʼ), and Mance plays like two or three different notes throughout, with Wells as your only hope for some nitty-gritty stuff, and it's not even as if he were doing his best, either.

 

Ultimately, this is a disappointment — I admire Buddy, and Junior Wells can be a delightfully bad blues guy when he really gets into that spirit, but here they seem to be holding a «who of us can get more low-key?» competition, which starts out as subtly atmospheric but then rapidly pro­gresses into boringly non-atmospheric. Unless you believe that any acoustic session between two blues heroes automatically deserves a thumbs up, I see no big reason to bother here, although, as a historical document, Buddy And The Juniors probably has its place in the annals of Superstar Meetings. Decent acoustic blues, if nothing else.

 

HOLD THAT PLANE! (1972)

 

1) Watermelon Man; 2) Hold That Plane; 3) I'm Ready; 4) My Time After Awhile; 5) You Don't Love Me; 6) Come See About Me; 7) Hello San Francisco.

 

Honestly, Buddy's last album for Vanguard is no great shakes; in fact, although it seems to have been recorded as early as 1970, they only put it out two years later, probably as part of a shelf-cleaning process — and it happened to be Buddy's last album for almost a decade, and Buddy's last American-released album for almost two.

 

And you can sort of see why, because Hold That Plane!, while not being objectively bad, is a mess. It shows a lot of diversity — not every blues artist would think of covering Herbie Hancock and Muddy Waters on the same album — but not a lot of spirit or invention. Probably the silliest thing about it is that Buddy splits himself in two: Buddy Guy the guitar player is restricted here mainly to long instrumental jams like ʽCome See About Meʼ (no, no relation whatsoever to the Supremes' song — this here is just generic 12-bar blues), and Buddy Guy the singer/showman is featured on songs with very brief guitar solo passages or no such passages whatsoever. This al­most inevitably results in the instrumental jams becoming boring, and in the vocal numbers be­coming superfluous halfway before they are over.

 

Worse than that, it seems that at this point Buddy does not have his own muse — for instance, I cannot believe that it is mere coincidence that he chose to record ʽWatermelon Manʼ and ʽYou Don't Love Meʼ just a year or so after the world saw these tunes successfully assimilated by Albert King; and his stab at ʽI'm Readyʼ, one of the most deliciously rude, brawny, cocky blues numbers ever owned by Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters, shows one thing only — that, like it or not, he is not ready. There is no threat in his delivery, nor can there be: personality-wise, Buddy has always been closer to James Brown than to Muddy or John Lee Hooker, and his music has never been «evil» or «scary» in the least.

 

So what's the good news, if any? Well, I am sympathetic to this version of ʽWatermelon Manʼ: strong piano groove, good sax, and Buddy's «broken» style of soloing is at least so individually different from Albert King's that he gives the song much more jerky spazz. ʽCome See About Meʼ is sharp and crispy for about three minutes, after which it just starts repeating itself. And ʽHello San Franciscoʼ could work well as a rousing show opener... in San Francisco. And, uh, that's about it for this record; no offense to Buddy, but if this was his typical level of operation at Vanguard circa 1970, you can sort of easily see why he lost that contract, and had so much dif­ficulty finding another. (For that matter, one probably needn't lay all the blame on Buddy — his backing band here seems fairly mediocre as well; just compare this level of playing with B. B. King, who around the same time had probably assembled the best backing band of his career, on those Bill Szymczyk-produced albums). Unless you're a real blues fanatic, no need to bother with this uninspired, thumbs down-worthy stuff.

 

STONE CRAZY! (1979)

 

1) I Smell A Rat; 2) Are You Losing Your Mind?; 3) You've Been Gone Too Long; 4) She's Out There Somewhere; 5) Outskirts Of Town; 6) When I Left Home.

 

For most of the rest of the decade, Buddy found himself without a recording contract, suffering the same fate as quite a few old Chicago bluesmen, out of vogue and fighting, or refusing to fight, for survival. One reason may have been a stubborn refusal to adapt, like B. B. King did, but more important, I think, was the fact that unlike B. B. King, Buddy never truly achieved major stardom either in the 1950s or in the 1960s, and thus had no «starting capital» to begin with: not even the good word from Hendrix could make much of an impact.

 

Eventually, by 1979, as it sometimes happens, Buddy emerged on the far-from-home front — some people have to move to Japan to do this, but Stone Crazy!, as far as I can tell, was recorded in Toulouse, of all places (pretty big city, but who'd know there was a market for American elec­tric blues specifically in the far south end of France?), released on the small Isabel label, and only two years later picked up by the Alligator label in the States (which is why in most conventional discographies you'll find this record marked 1981, when it's really 1979), obviously, to very little fanfare and even less effect.

 

And you can see why, because Stone Crazy! does indeed show a man who is totally refusing to adapt, living in his own world of musical values and happy to ignore all the developments on all the musical fronts around him. Ten more years and the world would start admiring him for that, but in 1979-81 the progressive drive was still strong, and this retro-Chicago-stuff just didn't cut it. Too bad, because on a purely personal level, the album does show some progress — about half of the tracks feature Buddy Guy in such an overdriven mood as he'd never let us take part in pre­viously. Perhaps there was something in the Toulouse air that made him feel as if he were fighting the Saracens, or maybe it was just the lack of any pressure, but on ʽI Smell A Ratʼ (no relation to the Big Mama Thornton classic) and ʽYou've Been Gone Too Longʼ Buddy Guy is unleashed — good news for all lovers of electric blues guitar thunderstorms.

 

In fact, unless my gut feeling plays a trick on me, we'd probably have to pick ʽI Smell A Ratʼ as the first bona fide representative of the by-now-all-too-familiar Buddy Guy playing style — «blues against the rules», where conventional, party-approved blues solo licks may be offset at any time with a bit of dissonance, harmony break-up, discordant repetition of an appreciated chord instead of required moving up or down the scale, etc. etc., any time that the soul commands it from the player. Sometimes it's ugly, but even when it's ugly, you kind of feel that it's just be­cause the guitarist got so caught up in his feelings, he forgot all about his textbook. Of course, Buddy is not alone in this respect, but far from every respectable bluesman can allow himself to introduce that element of punkish hooliganry into the playing — Eric Clapton, for instance, while mastering quite a few of Buddy's old licks, never dared to follow him into that territory.

 

The downside of all this, unfortunately, is that Stone Crazy! is really only interesting when it comes to guitar solos — the song structures are as generically 12-bar as they come, and the only thing that varies are tempos and basic patterns (ʽShe's Out There Somewhereʼ is ʽDust My Broomʼ, ʽAre You Losing Your Mind?ʼ is B. B. King, and only ʽYou've Been Gone Too Longʼ constructs its vamp on the basis of Funkadelic's ʽHit It And Quit Itʼ, because, after all, Buddy does know his way around the basics of R&B, soul, and funk — it's just that the people of Toulouse expect him to play the blues, because it makes for a good rhyme).

 

Anyway, highlights: ʽI Smell A Ratʼ (plaintive, soulful, crazy aggressive guitar kicks in right away and almost never lets go); ʽYou've Been Gone Too Longʼ (instrumental, funkadelicious, kick-ass energy, the works); ʽWhen I Left Homeʼ (only partially — he makes a big case here out of the alternation of loud and quiet bits, but there's way too little of that scorching soloing when it comes to «loud», and it comes in way too late, and all the rest of the time is Buddy Guy doing his best Bobby Bland impersonation). The rest... ain't bad, really, just nothing to write about. But as a whole, the album does have enough importance and entertainment value to deserve a thumbs up: ʽI Smell A Ratʼ was probably the best blues song to come out of 1979, even if the world couldn't care less at the time.

 

BREAKING OUT (1980)

 

1) Have You Ever Been Lonesome; 2) You Can Make It If You Try; 3) Break Out All Over You; 4) She Winked Her Eye; 5) I Didn't Know My Mother Had A Son Like Me; 6) Boogie Family Style; 7) You Called Me In My Dream; 8) Me & My Guitar.

 

Apparently, this period in Buddy Guy's career is so ridiculously understudied and underapprecia­ted that not even the Internet, our most trustworthy and loyal counselor in all things (especially when it comes to the latest pop crap single that sold 100,000 copies in three digital minutes), can be relied upon for cohesive information. The (current) Wikipedia page for this album states, for instance, that it was issued in 1988, and it probably was (still other sources say 1996 and/or 2008), but it was actually a late reissue — the original date seems to be 1980 or 1981 at best. The All-Music Guide review of the album, other than listing some of the credits, gets away with one or two vague phrases that could be equally well applied to 99% of Buddy's output ("raw but applied talent and showmanship" — what the hell does "raw but applied" even mean?), and gives no clue as to whether the reviewer has even heard the songs. Who do you turn to for comfort?

 

Well, at least the good old Only Solitaire is here to tell you that Breaking Out sounds nothing like anything that Buddy had put out prior to that — and only partially like anything that he would put out after that. The oddity of the record is that, while remaining firmly grounded in standard blues territory, this time it's all about the tone. Yes, this is where Buddy falls upon a new, rich, not totally unique or innovative, but seriously idiosyncratic electric guitar tone — thick, trebly, distorted, echoey, crackling but melodic — and proceeds to explore it on every single song on the album. You might suspect it makes things monotonous and boring, but it does not: since there is enough formal diversity (slow 12-bar, fast 12-bar, boogie, ballad, R&B), all it does is make every single song kick major ass.

 

ʽHave You Ever Been Lonesomeʼ, presented here as an «original» number, is really just ʽFive Long Yearsʼ (var.: ʽHave You Ever Loved A Womanʼ) with new lyrics, but you could argue that the presence of this tone is really the thing that makes it original, particularly when the man shuts up and just plays his guitar — fast, passionate, thunderstormy, irreverent, and with the guitar assuming the language of a raging bull. I would still insist that when Clapton did the same thing on his From The Cradle fifteen years later (and seriously influenced by Buddy), he would be able to come up with more inventive phrasing... but he never had this kind of tone, and whatever be the case, Buddy got there first.

 

When he experiments with the same tone on softer numbers, such as ʽYou Can Make It If You Tryʼ, the results are tasteful but not quite as exciting — Breaking Out is really all about «brea­king out» on such rip-roaring tracks as the funky ʽI Didn't Know My Mother Had A Son Like Meʼ, or the breathlessly fast ʽBoogie Family Styleʼ, or the totally instrumental showcase ʽMe & My Guitarʼ that closes the album with five minutes of fretboard assassination that seems to be de­livered in one uninterrupted blast, as if the player's brain were operating on a single powerful charge/impulse that took that long to discharge: normally, these blues jams tend to run out of steam pretty fast, but this here is just one uninterrupted gulp, like watching somebody pick up a wine barrel and drain it off in one go. Listening to this in headphones could indeed make one dizzy and delirious, especially considering the potential psychedelic effects of that treated tone, so be careful about this.

 

Little can be said about the virtues of individual songs, melodies, or supporting instrumentation — and little needs to be said, since it is all about that tone and the power to use it. Buddy would go on using it in the future, but, strangely enough, never again would he make an album of such stubborn consistency: Breaking Out is indeed a stylistic oddity in his catalog, and a very wel­come one, I'd say. Definitely a thumbs up if you're in the mood for some serious whiplashing.

 

D.J. PLAY MY BLUES (1982)

 

1) Girl You're Nice And Clean; 2) Dedication To The Late T-Bone Walker; 3) Good News; 4) Blues At My Baby's House; 5) She Suits Me To A T; 6) D.J. Play My Blues; 7) Just Teasin'; 8) All Your Love; 9) The Garbage Man Blues; 10) Mellow Down.

 

The last of these semi-obscure Buddy Guy albums before he once again went into hiatus is usual­ly listed as having been recorded in Chicago in December 1981 and released on the JSP label in 1982; the 10-track edition is a 1987 CD reissue that originally went under the title of Complete DJ Play My Blues Sessions. Featuring Mike Morrison on bass, Ray Allison on drums, and se­cond guitarist Doug Williams, this is once again a stark, uncompromising affair that completely refuses to recognize or respect the progressive advancement of the musical world — in fact, if anything, it's a «regressive» album on Buddy's own terms, since it pretty much abandons the cool-tone-based personality of Breaking Out and returns to a far more standard, conservative electric blues paradigm.

 

The title track is a good indication of what's at stake — searching for a good pretext to enter one of his blue moods, Buddy finds a suitable one in the fact that blues went out of fashion, so the song, instead of pleading for baby to come home, as it normally should, pleads for Mr. D.J. to play some T-Bone Walker (instead of all that New Wave crap, one has to assume). Of course, the D.J. has no answer to that, so there's nothing left to do but to play some T-Bone Walker on one's own (ʽDedicationʼ, which is indeed played very much in classic T-Bone Walker style, even if Buddy never attaches as much importance to each individual note as the late T-Bone did — the speed curse hits the man even in slow mode).

 

A somewhat shadier side of said conservatism is the sheer amount of «mutated» songs by classic artists that Buddy includes here in only very slightly modified versions — most likely, so that he can get his own songwriting credits (on an album that wouldn't sell anyway, but I guess that when you're so down on your luck, every penny counts). For instance, Otis Rush' ʽAll Your Love (I Miss Loving)ʼ becomes simply ʽAll Your Loveʼ; Little Walter's ʽMellow Down Easyʼ becomes simply ʽMellow Downʼ; ʽShe Suits Me To A Tʼ is an Elmore James number with new lyrics; and ʽGood Newsʼ is a strange hybrid of ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ (melody), ʽGood Rockin' Tonightʼ (lyrics) and an ad-libbed mish-mash of old rock'n'roll clichés.

 

People interested in musical family ties should check out ʽThe Garbage Man Bluesʼ, a duet be­tween Buddy and his brother Phil Guy, who takes lead vocals and adds his own guitar leads — as a singer, his talents are quite comparable to Buddy's, but as a guitarist, this is just nepotism in action. Overall, there's nothing here to make the record stand out from the average pool of pro­fessional electric blues-rock, and while I fully concur with Buddy's pleading on the whole, he does not exactly build as much of a strong case for himself here as he provides a good pretext for brushing the dust off all those T-Bone, Elmore, Otis, and Little Walter records to which D.J. Play My Blues is nothing but a humble, uninventive tribute.

 

DAMN RIGHT, I'VE GOT THE BLUES (1991)

 

1) Damn Right, I've Got The Blues; 2) Where Is The Next One Coming From; 3) Five Long Years; 4) Mustang Sally; 5) There Is Something On Your Mind; 6) Early In The Morning; 7) Too Broke To Spend The Night; 8) Black Night; 9) Let Me Love You Baby; 10) Rememberin' Stevie; 11*) Doin' What I Like Best; 12*) Trouble Don't Last.

 

A quarter century later, it is a little hard to understand what all the hoopla was about, but back in 1991, Buddy Guy's «comeback» album (or «breakthrough» album, to be more accurate, since he didn't exactly have a ton of hit records to be eclipsed) caused quite a bit of excitement. The entire music industry was rolling backwards a bit, after the oversaturated futurism and technocracy of the previous decade, and in a way, Buddy here became one of the symbols, or maybe even the sym­bol for the revival of raw electric blues. After all, most of the pioneers were dead, and those that were still alive didn't give much of a damn, or were way too prone to selling out whenever their record labels dropped a hint (B. B. King, for instance, had quite a few smelly duds through­out the Eighties). And here was a guy of stark integrity, who'd rather record on a minor label with no promotion, or not record at all, than go for pop choruses and electronic drums.

 

That said, Damn Right, I've Got The Blues still had to come out in England, on the small Sil­vertone Records label, where Buddy got signed up after having luckily partnered up with Eric Clapton for the latter's 24 Nights engagement at the Albert Hall (and some of Eric's backup team, including backing vocalists Tessa Niles and Katie Kissoon, are also playing here). The album was produced by John Porter, who was before then mostly known for working with The Smiths — which really meant that nobody would be truly getting in Buddy's way. And, just so that the sales could be boosted a bit and proper respect be paid, the man procures guest appearances not only from Eric himself, but from Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler as well.

 

The result was... well, not exactly a smash hit, but the record did sell far more assuredly than any of Buddy's previous work, and attracted quite a bit of critical attention, going as far as to win the Grammy for best blues album. Finally, after all those years, the blues paid off, and the best thing about it was no need to compromise — well, maybe only a little bit, if «overproduction» counts as «compromise». Other than the backup girls and the guest stars, the sound is considerably beefed up by The Memphis Horns, and then there are two additional keyboardists and two more guitar players. But that is really not that different from the early records: Buddy always favored a big band sound, and he was always a «better with horns» kind of person. It's not his fault he was put on such a tight budget in the early Eighties.

 

Of course, the music here is not significantly better or worse than anything he recorded in the lean-hungry years. The songs are mostly old blues standards, occasionally interrupted by some contemporary writing (John Hiatt's ʽWhere Is The Next One Coming Fromʼ) or an old R&B cover or two (the inescapable ʽMustang Sallyʼ). The playing has plenty of energy and feeling, but not a lot of creativity — clearly, this here is not a man searching for new sounds, but a man un­loading his precious baggage, accumulated over the years, all in one place. Too many songs sound the same, and the arrangements never focus on outlining potential hooks: in just a few years, Clapton — who was quite likely motivated himself to do a straightahead blues album by Buddy's success — would really show the world how this thing can be done right with From The Cradle, where the inidividual touches on the songs and their sequencing made for an involving, surprise-filled journey. Damn Right, I've Got The Blues is not that kind of record.

 

And yet, it is a damn right good record all the same. It's as if this man here were given this one chance to do it right and succeed, and he totally throws himself in on that, throttling his guitar on every song and throwing a desperate vocal fit on the title track: "I can't win, cause I don't have a thing to lose" — just change that can't to a can and that's what it all is about. He is still being the hooligan of the blues, changing his tone from «clean» to «dirty» at will, embracing dissonance and off-rhythm playing when the heart calls for this, sending catcalls and wolf whistles from his six-string whenever his brain begins smouldering from too much excitement and complex, finger-flashing strings of notes become hard to concentrate upon. And he can be sentimental, throwing in a lengthy vocal-free serenade called ʽRememberin' Stevieʼ — of course, the best way to re­member Stevie is not through sheer sadness and melancholy, but through a mix of sadness with ferociously ass-kicking blueswailing of the ʽHave You Ever Loved A Womanʼ variety. (In fact, come to think of it, ʽRememberin' Stevieʼ is ʽHave You Ever Loved A Womanʼ with all the vo­cals safely stored over in the closet).

 

Although this is not the best album of Buddy's «comeback» period — more like a taste of even more exciting things to come — its sheer historic importance, in addition to general enjoyability, demands a thumbs up. I must say that I am somewhat dismayed by the guest star talents largely being wasted (unless you listen very hard, you won't even suspect that Knopfler, Clapton, and Beck are in the same building), but then it would certainly be impolite to subconsciously wish for them stealing the mat from under the guy's feet: they are quite expressly here to add to the mar­ket value, not to steal the black man's blues for the white man's gain one more time. Other than that, I couldn't complain of any unpredictable disappointments.

 

FEELS LIKE RAIN (1993)

 

1) She's A Superstar; 2) I Go Crazy; 3) Feels Like Rain; 4) She's Nineteen Years Old; 5) Some Kind Of Wonderful; 6) Sufferin' Mind; 7) Change In The Weather; 8) I Could Cry; 9) Mary Ann; 10) Trouble Man; 11) Country Man.

 

The success of Damn Right, I've Got The Blues gave birth to a prolific pattern to which Buddy has more or less conformed ever since, releasing a steady stream of records with one or two year intervals that are pretty much interchangeable, some being slightly more and some slightly less interesting, of course — essentially, though, lovers of Buddy will want to savor them all, while those who are largely indifferent to modern electric blues might just pay a little attention to those few tracks on which Buddy's guitar playing occasionally transcends the genre's limitations.

 

Feels Like Rain, unfortunately, has no such tracks. Like its predecessor, it is a mish-mash of some really old blues tunes, some comparably old R&B hits, and a few contemporary, but still retro-oriented compositions — all of them impeccably played and produced, and featuring some guest stars to boost up sales; this time, though, Buddy goes with some lesser profiles, the most notable of the lot probably being Bonnie Raitt and Paul Rodgers, and with John Mayall and Travis Tritt in tow. Accusations of «pandering to mainstream tastes», which sometimes accom­pany descriptions of this record, are a little misguided: with or without all these people, Feels Like Rain would still feel exactly like Buddy Guy — if he choked the arrangements up with solemn synthesizer parts, or started studying Madchester beats, that'd be a whole other story, but these guys are just following the boss' directions, 'sall.

 

What is actually much worse than abstract «pandering to the mainstream» is the inclusion of all those covers. What business does Buddy really have in trying to not just cover Muddy Waters' ʽShe's Nineteen Years Oldʼ, but to actually imitate Muddy, both in his vocals and his guitar play­ing? It's one thing to adapt the song to his own style, but have we all lost access to the old records or something? Is the intended target audience of the cover supposed to consist of people who'd never ever want to listen to a song from 1958 because it's, like, all mono and shit? It's not very likely that those same people would be interested in investing their money in a record by an old geezer who was 22 himself in 1958. Likewise, it is not very uplifting when he tries to appeal to the James Brown fanbase (ʽI Go Crazyʼ) or, God help us, the Grand Funk Railroad fanbase (ʽSome Kind Of Wonderfulʼ — which most people certainly associate with GFR rather than Soul Brothers Six) instead.

 

My own favorite tracks here are the two blues-rock rave-ups that bookmark the album and are credited to Buddy himself — ʽShe's A Superstarʼ and ʽCountry Manʼ (not that he had much to compose on either one, except for some new lyrical lines). Totally generic in basic form, they are simply used by Buddy as launchpads for some major master soloing, with heavy wah-wah sup­port and a speedy, guitar-throttling approach where his note sequences cover each other like rippling waves, rather than jagged, broken, dissonant patterns that he favors more often. The words of ʽCountry Manʼ, which he delivers like a passionate defense speech in court ("I'm a country man, baby, you know I ain't ashamed / That's why I'm crazy 'bout my guitar, that's why I surely will keep on playing"), ring a little strange, seeing as how Buddy was always professional­ly associated with «urban» Chicago blues — but then again, he did spend all of his childhood in Lettsworth, Louisiana, and if he means that it is precisely this rustic pedigree that gives him the strength and the stubborness to push on in his «conservatively innovative» manner, more power to the man, I say. He certainly plays the hell out of his guitar on that track as if each new verse he delivers on the subject provides him with extra strength to do it.

 

If you are in the mood to relax a little, the title track, written by John Hiatt and sung and played by Buddy in a duet with Bonnie Raitt, will do a reasonably good job as well. Nothing particularly special on the hook / riff / arrangement front, but Bonnie's slide playing is always welcome, and her raspy vocal support in the background feels... well, suffice it to say that there's a pleasantly optimistic vibe to all of this, and that Buddy's singing is almost unusually sensitive and vulne­rable, compared to his usual standards.

 

That said, three songs to salvage out of eleven is not a particularly awesome quota; and the rest, ranging from the puzzling (dueting with Paul Rodgers on ʽSome Kind Of Wonderfulʼ? How gauche!) to the unremarkable (dueting with John Mayall on ʽI Could Cryʼ? How... nostalgic...), are nothing to write home about. Of course, that did not stop the man from scooping up yet another Grammy here for «best contemporary blues album» — for almost total lack of competition, I suppose — but honestly, it does not seem as if the guy was trying too hard here. Fortunately, he would begin pinching himself way hard for the next release, just in the nick of time to escape being pegged down as a particularly smelly dinosaur.

 

SLIPPIN' IN (1994)

 

1) I Smell Trouble; 2) Please Don't Drive Me Away; 3) 7-11; 4) Shame, Shame, Shame; 5) Love Her With A Feeling; 6) Little Dab-A-Doo; 7) Someone Else Is Steppin' In; 8) Trouble Blues; 9) Man Of Many Words; 10) Don't Tell Me About The Blues; 11) Cities Need Help.

 

This is as straightahead as it ever gets: nothing but pure electric blues, eleven heads in a row, and not a single guest star in sight — an impeccable experiment in the «can I do it alone?» genre. Of course, this also makes it twice as hard to say anything uniquely meaningful about this album, un­less it is in the comparative genre... and it's not that difficult to slip into the comparative genre here, considering how few originals there are. The choice of covers is actually not all that trivial: for instance, there are two songs by Charles Brown, both of which were covered in 1963 by Sam Cooke on his Night Beat album. Coincidence, or the result of some fortuitous nighttime listen? There's Freddie King's ʽLove Her With The Feelingʼ redone in the style of ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ, because Buddy loves ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ, but he can't play ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ on all his albums, so a little strategic thought is in order here. There's Denise LaSalle, there's Fenton Robinson... all sorts of interesting blues people that rarely appear on the first pages of blues encyclopaedias. But, of course, it's still just the blues.

 

Points worth mentioning, in addition to Buddy's reliable vocals and guitar escapades, are: (a) a sweet appearance by legendary Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Berry's pianist of choice, contributing a feather-light (in the good sense of the word) solo on ʽ7-11ʼ; (b) a suitably comic arrangement of ʽSomeone Else Is Steppin' Inʼ, with ridiculous «party noises» in the background and a drunken choir joining in for the final line of the chorus — but thanks, Mr. Guy, for reminding me where the Stones stole their ʽBlack Limousineʼ from; (c) ʽTrouble Bluesʼ features a lo-fi production style, with plenty of hissing and crackling to artificially age the song — see Mr. Guy flirt around with indie aesthetics!; (d) ʽCities Need Helpʼ, one of the two originals, is Buddy adopting a soci­al­ly responsible posture — kind of like Bobby Bland on his moody, smoky early 1970s records. He still cannot resist from the temptation to turn it into a guitar pyrotechnics feast midway through, though, and I concur. Are we going to become more socially conscious if Buddy Guy tells us that our cities need help? No. But if he goes on beating the crap out of that guitar, who knows what changes that might eventually bring about in our social consciousness.

 

In terms of beating the crap out, I would probably single out ʽPlease Don't Drive Me Awayʼ, where the man brushes the dust off the wah-wah pedal for a speedy, destroy-everything-in-its-path type of solo, sometimes bordering on the psychedelic; and ʽSomeone Elseʼ, for such an essentially comic number, also boasts a fairly mean tone, with each note threatening to snap you in half. Beyond that, it's Buddy Guy and his predictably ecstatic blues guitar — lots of impro­vising, not a lot of artistic invention that could be correlated with words. Which means it is time to award this album its well-deserved, if unexceptional, thumbs up and move on.

 

LIVE: THE REAL DEAL (1996)

 

1) I've Got My Eyes On You; 2) Sweet Black Angel; 3) Talk To Me Baby; 4) My Time After Awhile; 5) I've Got News For You; 6) Damn Right I've Got The Blues; 7) First Time I Met The Blues; 8) Ain't That Lovin' You; 9) Let Me Love You Baby.

 

Buddy's first live album of the «comeback» era — recorded at Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago with, would you believe it, the Saturday Night Live band itself backing the man. That is no mock irony, though, since the SNL band at the time included George Edward Smith, a first-rate guita­rist with an impressive pedigree; additionally, Buddy is joined by Johnnie Johnson, who had al­ready stuck with him on the latest studio album. On the whole, the backing band is top notch, the audience is responding wildly, and good vibes are flying all around the place.

 

The most interesting part here is probably the setlist which, with the exception of the man's come­back anthem (ʽDamn Right I've Got The Bluesʼ), consists completely and entirely of old classics; not a single new tune from the last two records anywhere in sight. He even does ʽFirst Time I Met The Bluesʼ, his first single from way back — which shows that he is not particularly impressed by his own new material, or, more accurately, that he probably recognizes how it's mostly just variations on the old themes, and when we're in concert, why not just stick to the old themes in person? Instead of trying to create the illusion of coming up with something new, it works better for him when he is just pouring his heart into the old.

 

That said, this is a pretty awesome guitar battle between Buddy and Smith that they get going on ʽDamn Right I've Got The Bluesʼ, as the backing horns goad them into brutal action against each other — almost putting the original to shame. ʽLet Me Love You Babyʼ is also reprised in the Damn Right version, with horns and stuff and those guitar wails occasionally getting out of har­mony with the rhythm section for reasons of an ecstatic character. Much of the album, however, is given over to the slow and subtle — such as a 13-minute version of ʽI've Got News For Youʼ, with a lengthy Johnnie Johnson solo and other members of the band taking their turns as well (I'm assuming it's G. E. Smith responsible for the short, but classy slide guitar solo, since Buddy does not play the slide much — to which Buddy then answers with one of his sexiest vibratos). I do not know why he feels such a pressing need to steal ʽSweet Black Angelʼ from under B. B. King's nose — that's one of King's greatest trademarks, and even though Buddy does a very good job mimicking the man's silky-sweet Lucille tone, Buddy is Buddy, and B. B. is B. B.

 

Other than the purist attitude, I'd say the biggest advantage of The Real Deal is the party attitude: thankfully, Buddy does not go for a lot of audience interaction, but every once in a while, the people out there make sure to let us know they love him, and he makes sure to let us know that he loves them, and it's all cool. There's definitely more fun in the air than at an Eric Clapton concert, even if that does not necessarily mean that there's more going on than at an Eric Clapton concert, if you know what I mean.

 

HEAVY LOVE (1998)

 

1) Heavy Love; 2) Midnight Train; 3) I Got A Problem; 4) I Need You Tonight; 5) Saturday Night Fish Fry; 6) Had A Bad Night; 7) Are You Lonely For Me Baby; 8) I Just Want To Make Love To You; 9) Did Somebody Make A Fool Out Of You; 10) When The Time Is Right; 11) Let Me Show You.

 

In the never-ending series of the clinkers and clunkers triggered by more and more demand for Buddy Guy records, Heavy Love is more of a clunker. Not because it was produced by David Z. or because it featured a duet with rising star Jonny Lang (rising at the time, perhaps, but never truly arisen) — just because it's kinda lazy, and on none of these songs do I get the feeling that Mr. Guy is giving us the best he can.

 

Some of the covers are downright odd. Would you think it a good idea for Buddy Guy to cover Louis Jordan? I wouldn't, but he does anyway, throwing on a five-and-a-half minute long rendi­tion of ʽSaturday Night Fish Fryʼ (without even a single guitar solo!) that has none of the jivin' excitement of the original. Maybe might have worked on a tribute album to Louis, but as an inde­pendent artistic interpretation, that's one stinky fish fry. ZZ Top's ʽI Need You Tonightʼ? The whole point of that generic blues ballad was to do it Eliminator-style. Throw away the ZZ Top­pishness, and it reverts back to a generic blues ballad. ʽI Just Want To Make Love To Youʼ, remade as a modern funk number, becomes totally lifeless. ʽAre You Lonely For Me, Baby?ʼ makes a valiant effort to keep Buddy astride that Classic Soul branch, but he never ever held a position of honor on that branch, and this performance does not change much about it.

 

Neither these nor the rest of the tracks offer us any particularly stellar guitar parts, either. The title track, the ʽMidnight Trainʼ duet with Lang, and ʽHad A Bad Nightʼ are macho blues rockers that could kick ass if kicking ass were on anybody's scheduled list, but apparently it wasn't, so they don't: Buddy's playing is consistently restrained here. He does manage to throw in a head-spin­ning vibrato or one of his trademark "going somewhere completely different, but don't worry, I'll be back in time to save this from falling apart" lead phrases from time to time, but you really have to wait for it — on the whole, he seems fairly disinterested. He is still mildly interested in writing new lyrics for old tunes and re-crediting them to himself, though: ʽLet Me Show Youʼ, from head to toe, is really Jimmy Reed's ʽHonest I Doʼ (although, to be fair, this song probably contains the album's most interesting bit of guitar, with Buddy playing slightly out of tune with the rest of the instruments and sometimes «de-tuning» his licks in mid-air).

 

Basically, this isn't embarrassing enough to earn a proper thumbs down, but that is simply be­cause Buddy has a certain strictly observed quality standard that safeguards him almost 100% from total cringeworthy failure (well, used to have, at least, before he went completely out of his mind and started messin' with Kid Rock). As it is, I would not recommend this one to anybody but the starkest fans, mad-crazy about every lick the man ever played.

 

SWEET TEA (2001)

 

1) Done Got Old; 2) Baby Please Don't Leave Me; 3) Look What All You Got; 4) Stay All Night; 5) Tramp; 6) She Got The Devil In Her; 7) I Gotta Try You Girl; 8) Who's Been Fooling You; 9) It's A Jungle Out There.

 

I have no idea what the title is supposed to symbolize (was "sweet tea" the finest taste to be tasted by a young Buddy during his early Louisiana days?), but the album is indeed Buddy's finest in a long, long while. It continues the strange pattern of alternating a rougher-edged, more aggressive and inventive record with a softer, calmer, more commercial one — but there's something extra special here that was not seen either in Damn Right or in Slippin' In, the two real good 'uns. Perhaps it's his new band, now including Davey Faragher of Cracker on bass and Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers on second guitar, that gives Sweet Tea its edge — at the very least, I can definitely vouch for Faragher as far as the bass goes, because this is the first time we have such a deep, echoey, rumbling bass sound on a Buddy Guy album, and I love it.

 

More generally, though, Sweet Tea sounds like it's out there to say something, not just to show the world that Buddy Guy is still playing the blues. The first track is a consciously laid trap — an acoustic moanin' blues, courtesy of the then-recently deceased Junior Kimbrough, on which Buddy laments that he "done got old" and that he can't look, walk, or love "like I used to do", in the general fashion of an old Negro spiritual. Of course, that's a ruse — already the second track, the lengthy, slow, threatening ʽBaby Please Don't Leave Meʼ shows that getting old sure don't prevent Mr. Guy from playing God of Thunder if he sets his heart to it. That great psychedelic distorted tone is back, and coupled with Faragher's doom-laden bass sound, it gets the old mojo workin' — the entire seven minutes seem like a voodooistic ritual performed by the man to ensure that his baby don't leave him. And who could, after such a performance?

 

A few tracks down the line, he tries to repeat the exact same ritual with the even longer, but less effective ʽI Gotta Try You Girlʼ — same bass, same tempo, same style of vocal incantation, but a little less fury and a little more plodding with the solos; also, in this modern age endless repetition of the lines "I gotta try you girl, we gotta make love baby, no matter what you say girl" could get you arrested in some parts of the country, but I guess this could probably never stop a real man like Mr. Guy. Still, for about five or six minutes the ceremony can be just as breathtaking as its shorter and angrier predecessor.

 

I am not going to launch into a detailed explanation of the other tunes, of course — suffice it to say that there are many more covers of the late Junior Kimbrough here, as well as some other blues pals of Buddy's (CeDell Davis, Lowell Fulson, etc.), and only one «original» (ʽIt's A Jungle Out Thereʼ, yet another bit of socially-conscious preaching on Buddy's part that sounds like an imagination-less sequel to ʽCities Need Helpʼ). The important thing are not the individual tunes, but the overall sound of the album — that bass, that echo, that renewed ferociousness on those sharply tuned guitars, well, it's not exactly a revolution, but it is the hugest and brutal-est update of the Buddy Guy sound ever since the underrated Breaking Out experiment in 1980. And, funniest of all, it is a huge f*ck-you to all those new generations of blues players. Who would be the very first blues musician to come out with a solid update of the blues idiom in the 21st century? A 65-year old native of Lettsworth, Louisiana, that's who. Now let us see you top this, Mr. John Mayer. Thumbs up.

 

BLUES SINGER (2003)

 

1) Hard Time Killing Floor; 2) Crawlin' Kingsnake; 3) Lucy Mae Blues; 4) Can't See Baby; 5) I Love The Life I Live; 6) Louise McGhee; 7) Moanin' And Groanin'; 8) Black Cat Blues; 9) Bad Life Blues; 10) Sally Mae; 11) Anna Lee; 12) Lonesome Home Blues.

 

Okay, so apparently «Sweet Tea» is the name of the recording studio in Oxford, Mississippi, where Buddy made that album — and also its follow-up two years later: an «other-side-of-me» companion piece, all quiet and acoustic as opposed to Sweet Tea's ferociously electric thunder­storms. On paper, this sounds like a promising idea that could work: in fact, it does seem like a much better proposition to replace the older sequence of «one kick-ass hard-rocking album, one boring commercial album» with a more basic «one electric, one acoustic» approach. Reality, however, turns out to be disappointing.

 

The thing is, Buddy Guy is not a great acoustic guitar player — much like his late buddy Hendrix, his «native» sphere is the electric guitar, where he experiments with tones, effects, feedback, and dissonance. Switching to acoustic, he just plays it: plays the blues, that is, like any averagely com­petent blues guitarist does (okay, make it «more than average», but still, there's literally hun­dreds of guys who have the same kind of acoustic technique and versatility as Buddy). Granted, the album is named Blues Singer, not Blues Player; but that hardly resolves the problem, since as a singer, Mr. Guy is also competent and convincing, yet not exceptional.

 

And even that is not the worst problem here. No, the worst is that for this record, Buddy chooses a varied selection of old classics typically associated with specific idols of the past — Skip James (ʽHard Time Killing Floorʼ), John Lee Hooker (ʽCrawling King Snakeʼ), Frankie Lee Sims (ʽLucy Mae Bluesʼ), Muddy Waters (ʽI Love The Life I Liveʼ), Son House (ʽLouise McGheeʼ), Lightnin' Hopkins (ʽBlack Cat Bluesʼ), and a few other, somewhat lesser names; and instead of offering the «Buddy Guy perspective» on all these guys, he pretty much tries to emulate every one of them. Excuse me, but this is just stupid — as if he were some kind of Shang Tsung-like sorcerer, having devoured all of their souls and exploiting them one at a time. He'd committed such errors before, plenty of times, but never, as of yet, had any of his records sounded like One Huge Error, stretched across fifty minutes' worth of wasted time.

 

It almost goes without saying that outside of context — that is, if you are not familiar with any of the originals — Blues Singer sounds quite nice. It's not as if Buddy showed no understanding of these tunes, or wasn't able to get a good grip on the melodies. It's even got a few enticing bonuses, like both B. B. King and Clapton offering guest solos on ʽCrawling King Snakeʼ (and it's not every day that you get to hear B. B. play acoustic guitar, either, though you can probably under­stand why upon witnessing his performance here). But why on Earth should one settle for an imitation of the real thing rather than the real thing itself? Unless your ears are completely insen­sitive for old mono production, crackles and pops, or unless you have made a vow never to listen to music that is more than 10 years old (in which case, as of 2016, this album is already obsolete as well), Skip James still does a better ʽHard Time Killing Floorʼ, because Skip James singing like Skip James... well, I dunno, sounds a little more authentic, for some reason, than Buddy Guy singing like Skip James.

 

The only reason why I do not think the album deserves a «thumbs down» in the end is that, on the whole, it shows good vibes and good will. Propagating the old classics is always worthwhile, and properly crediting the songs to their creators (or, at least, their classic interpreters) is a sign of honesty. Besides, an album that is competently performed, well produced, and consists of mostly good songs should not be called «bad» just because it is so utterly superfluous; and, after all, Buddy is one of the last surviving «original carriers» of the tradition, so at least it makes much more sense than if somebody like John Mayer came out with a record like this. However, it is also a sign that «being an original carrier» never guarantees top quality; and that being an old black bluesman from Louisiana does not automatically place you on the same level of spirituality and sensitivity as any other old black (dead) bluesman from Louisiana.

 

BRING 'EM IN (2005)

 

1) Now You're Gone; 2) Ninety Nine And One Half; 3) What Kind Of Woman Is This; 4) Somebody's Sleeping In My Bed; 5) I Put A Spell On You; 6) On A Saturday Night; 7) Ain't No Sunshine; 8) I've Got Dreams To Remember; 9) Lay Lady Lay; 10) Cheaper To Keep Her/Blues In The Night; 11) Cut You Loose; 12) The Price You Gotta Pay; 13) Do Your Thing.

 

Despite the revealing title, not all of these songs, as could have been thought (and easily been done), feature outside guest stars; in fact, more than half of the album is just Buddy and his regu­lar band, whatever it was at the time. However, guest-studded sessions, no matter how much time is actually being spent with the guests, tend not to work too well for Buddy: there's too much emphasis on having collective fun and not enough emphasis on giving the listener a real good musical reason to buy the album. And in that respect, Bring 'Em In is no exception — once again, here is a «merely okay» record that never shows that one extra spark to bring it over the top, like Sweet Tea or even Slippin' In.

 

The collaborations themselves at least merit some discussion. ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ is set to a Latin, Santana-esque rhythm, and sure enough, Carlos is here in person, forming quite an incendi­ary duet with Mr. Guy; perhaps they could have chosen some less obvious material to cover, but they do bring out the best (or, perhaps, simply the most buoyant and arrogant) in each other, and there are a couple moments here when their thunder-and-lightning soloing styles cross paths and you seem caught up in a one-of-a-kind Chicago-Mexican blizzard. Next to this, a duet with John Mayer could seem a total disaster; fortunately, they avoid it, instead making Mayer add some relatively inoffensive and quiet lead lines to Buddy's cover of Otis Redding's ʽI've Got Dreams To Rememberʼ (which is like any other Buddy cover of any classic soul number: technically com­petent, but completely expendable in the long run).

 

Elsewhere, Robert Randolph adds a pleasant pedal steel part to ʽLay Lady Layʼ, but that song tends to always sound cheesy and sleazy in anybody's hands but its author's, and this version is no exception — Buddy's duet with Anthony Hamilton just ends up being generic soul fodder. Finally, there's a weakly advertised Keith Richards on Keb' Mo's ʽThe Price You Gotta Payʼ, but he neither sings nor plays lead guitar. Actually, both of these may be good things, but there ain't a Keith-worthy riff here, either, so ultimately, I guess, the point of having him here was merely for the most advanced of Stones fanatics to buy the record (I suppose that there are more people out there, anyway, vowing to own every recording Keef has ever played on, than there are people out there ready to go out and regularly buy up every new Buddy Guy release).

 

Of the other tracks, with a little effort, I'd single out Curtis Mayfield's ʽNow You're Goneʼ, which Buddy tries to sing like a true falsetto crooner (not too bad) and crowns with some cool wah-wah work; his own ʽWhat Kind Of Woman Is Thisʼ, a rare case of a riff-based Buddy original that's sharp and swaggerish at the same time; and the lengthy epic ʽCut You Looseʼ, musically based on the old ʽCatfish Blues / Rollin' Stoneʼ groove and gradually putting itself in guitar overdrive — along the lines of Hendrix's ʽVoodoo Chileʼ, which must have been Buddy's main inspiration for this stuff. None of these songs have the unique aura of a ʽBaby Please Don't Leave Meʼ, though: they are simply more powerful and decisive than everything else.

 

For the record, the reason why John Mayer is here is probably because the album was produced by Steve Jordan, who was at the time a member of the John Mayer Trio (and who earlier drum­med for Keith Richards' X-Pensive Winos, so here's anouther connection); the backing band in­cludes Danny Kortchmar on guitar and Bernie Worrell on keyboards, all well-known professional musicians, but without too much rapport between each other, if you know what I mean. All in all, a classic case of "let's make working conditions so cozy and polished for our superstar that he suffocates in them", sort of.

 

SKIN DEEP (2008)

 

1) Best Damn Fool; 2) Too Many Tears; 3) Lyin' Like A Dog; 4) Show Me The Money; 5) Every Time I Sing The Blues; 6) Out In The Woods; 7) Hammer And A Nail; 8) That's My Home; 9) Skin Deep; 10) Who's Gonna Fill Those Shoes; 11) Smell The Funk; 12) I Found Happiness.

 

Okay, this time, believe it or not, the guests make a good difference. There's Clapton on one of the tracks, singing and playing a little, but much more important is the presence of the Derek Trucks / Susan Tedeschi pair — not just because of the extra playing and singing, but because of a virtual «quality boost» that Derek's presence in the studio usually gives to his peers and even his elders. With a guy like that, you either have to give it your all, or step back — and since Derek's work aesthetics rejects «flash» and «showmanship» completely, your response has to be adequate. No monkeying around — just get to the point.

 

Maybe this is why the album opener, ʻBest Damn Foolʼ, despite not even featuring Derek, and despite being essentially based upon the age-old ʻBorn Under A Bad Signʼ groove, once again sounds sharper and livelier than anything on Buddy's last two records — not quite up to the level of Sweet Tea, because everything except Buddy's guitar is fairly routine, but up to Buddy's own personal highest standards, as he delivers barrages of shrill, simple, glass-cutting licks that have a whiff of «garage» attitude to them (and, in some ways, remind me of John Fogerty's classic soloing style — the way he could get the best out of the blues idiom with minimal means on stuff like ʻPenthouse Paperʼ or ʻNinety-Nine And A Halfʼ). Basically, the song just kicks ass.

 

Most of the material here is «original» (as usual, in Buddy's case this normally means setting old blues tunes to new lyrics), sometimes co-written with Tedeschi's producer Tom Hambridge (and occasionally just written by Hambridge on his own), but the topics remain the same — either bitchin' about the ten billionth woman in his imaginary life, or reminiscing about his real, but long gone life in the swamps of Louisiana (ʻOut In The Woodsʼ, ʻThat's My Homeʼ). At least once he hits upon a sensitive theme — ʻWho's Gonna Fill Those Shoesʼ namechecks a boatload of deceased bluesmen and leaves the question unanswered. Of course, it is hardly a coincidence that the song was contributed by Susan Tedeschi's associate, and that the young and promising Mr. Trucks was hovering somewhere in the neighborhood, but still there are no direct hints here that Mr. Trucks is in any way worthy of filling the shoes of Son House and Muddy Waters, so we might as well suppose that Buddy answers this to himself in the negative (Buddy himself, be­longing to the same old breed, does not count, of course — and he was a whoppin' 72 years old when this platter was recorded, for that matter; but then again, for a 72-year old he really swings that axe on the track, acknowledging his guitar as an equal partner in the righteous indignation over the fact that the shoes are not gonna be filled by just anyone).

 

Stuff like ʻToo Many Tearsʼ, on which the old man duets with Tedeschi, is the kind of unexciting contemporary smooth-blues-rock fodder that usually goes in one ear and out the other — and, honestly, Susan Tedeschi is a very nice lady and a respectable promoter of the blues, but she is very, very ordinary and unexciting (sort of like a sandpapered Bonnie Raitt). Her husband, how­ever, is a different matter, and his trademark slide wailings make a great counterpoint for Buddy's style — too bad that they don't really get to properly «spar» on any of these songs; in fact, every time Derek is in, Buddy slyly (coyly?) steps back as a player and concentrates on the singing.

 

It doesn't nearly manage to save the title track, though, which is just too preachy and weepy: yes, most of us know that "underneath we're all the same", and okay, some of us should probably be reminded of that from time to time, but just a little more complexity couldn't hurt, and besides, Buddy Guy is not a friggin' soul singer — he does not quite have the voice or the phrasing right for this. But fortunately, ʻSkin Deepʼ is just one such track here, probably designed to boost sales a little bit as middle-class sentimentalists battle racism by shedding tears over how we should "treat everybody just the way you want them to treat you" (Confucius™). The other songs do not exactly supercede ʻSkin Deepʼ in terms of non-banality, but they tend to kick ass, and you usually tend to forget about how banal something is when it kicks your ass on a relentless basis.

 

Anyway, more highlights: ʻOut In The Woodsʼ has a great swampy solo, with Buddy impersona­ting a hungry alligator from his childhood nightmares; ʻLyin' Like A Dogʼ is seven and a half minutes of slow angry ʻFive Long Yearsʼ-style blues, perfectly played and produced (not sure what else to say); ʻShow Me The Moneyʼ and ʻHammer And Nailʼ display Buddy's sense of humour, and ʻSmell The Funkʼ displays his, um, well... pretty strong vibe there for a 72-year old, maybe even a little too strong. Sure puts some of these youngsters to shame — ah, who's gonna fill those shoes?

 

Do not get me wrong: Skin Deep is fairly generic and conventional, there's not a single thread of exploration here as there seemed to be on Sweet Tea. But it is a good kind of generic, brought on by people who just want to make a little difference by throwing in a little bit of sheer spirit. This, at least according to my cherished gut feeling, is not just a record made out of the need to make another record — and for that, given that the key player is Buddy and the supporting force is Derek, it automatically deserves a thumbs up. Just sort of ignore the title track. There are much more efficient ways in which you can fight racism, believe me.

 

LIVING PROOF (2010)

 

1) 74 Years Young; 2) Thank Me Someday; 3) On The Road; 4) Stay Around A Little Longer; 5) Key Don't Fit; 6) Living Proof; 7) Where The Blues Begins; 8) Too Soon; 9) Everybody's Got To Go; 10) Let The Door Knob Hit Ya; 11) Guess What; 12) Skanky.

 

You can pretty much see from these titles — ʻ74 Years Youngʼ, ʻStay Around A Little Longerʼ, ʻEverybody's Got To Goʼ — that there is essentially one thing hanging heavy on Buddy Guy's mind these days, and it don't have much to do with his little red rooster, either (although a couple of the tunes here still raise that subject on an obligatory basis). Indeed, he has reached that crucial point where every new album, no matter how generic or predictable, is welcome as long as it serves as «living proof»: the man is still alive in body and in spirit. No other reasons are neces­sary: it is now a game of survival, of seeing just how long and how bright that old spirit, dating all the way back to what is like the Stone Age from a 2010 perspective, can still burn.

 

And yes, nothing particularly interesting can be said about these songs except for a general con­firmation — the man still got it. ʻ74 Years Youngʼ brings home the message once it's time for the guitar solo: as he takes a break from listing his achievements and memories ("drank wine with kings and the Rolling Stones", etc.), the man unleashes such a violent barrage of rapid-fire blues licks, punching the shit out of that poor guitar, that you almost get the urge to scream "enough already! we get the message, Mr. Guy, have pity on your 74-year young hands!"

 

But that "74 years young, gonna keep on having fun" bit is still braggadoccio, because later on we get either sentimental about it (ʻStay Around A Little Longerʼ is a duet with B. B. King where the two of them basically ask this of one another, confessing mutual admiration) or religious about it (ʻEverybody's Gotta Goʼ dips into gospel, as Buddy comes to personal terms with the Lord); the man understands everything about the power of hyperbole, and easily swaps songs that deny the possibility of a near end with songs that accept and make their peace with that possibility. And all three of these numbers are convincing and touching, each in its own way, even if their manipu­lative devices are in plain view — yet how could one not be moved at the sight of a friendly, emotional duet between two age-old patriarchs of the blues?

 

Next to that, the duet with Santana (ʻWhere The Blues Beginsʼ) can only sound like you'd ima­gine a duet with Santana should sound — pompous, pathetic, predictable, still theoretically cool like any duet between two guitar giants should be, but way too gloomy and serious. Apparently, whenever Santana crosses your threshold, you think you have to engage him in something Spiri­tual with a capital S, or else he'll think you unworthy or something; but Spiritual with a capital S can only be Successful with a capital S when it's Subtle with a capital S, and Buddy Guy has never been the master of subtle (unlike B. B. King, by the way, who could squeeze your soul out with his microtones). So they just blast away, and the pomp soon becomes overbearing.

 

The rest of the tracks are fun, but, as usual, rather non-descript, and too often fall upon the exact same groove (ʻSkankyʼ is essentially an instrumental re-run of the title track, and both just milk the ʻPride And Joyʼ groove until it runs completely dry). So, overall, you have to get in a some­what respectful or reverential mood to be able to say that Living Proof is better than average — although, to be fair, Buddy himself tries to avoid getting too serious about his age. He sure as hell ain't fearing no reaper — good for him.

 

LIVE AT LEGENDS (2012)

 

1) Intro; 2) Best Damn Fool; 3) Mannish Boy; 4) I Just Want To Make Love To You / Chicken Heads; 5) Skin Deep; 6) Damn Right I Got The Blues; 7) Boom Boom / Strange Brew; 8) Voodoo Chile / Sunshine Of Your Love / Keep On Truckin'; 9) Polka Dot Love; 10) Coming For You; 11) Country Boy.

 

A fairly typical live show from Buddy in his seventies, actually recorded in the same year as Living Proof and burning with the same aching desire to prove that the man still got it — like ʻ74 Years Youngʼ on the studio record, this one opens with a kill-'em-all version of ʻBest Damn Foolʼ that is supposed to whomp your ass once and for all, so that even if he gets mellower or sloppier later on, the initial impression lasts long enough to keep you going all the way. You've heard it all before, but it never hurts to get another set of those insane trills from the man.

 

The setlist is heavy on classic hits and oldies, some of which were picked from the classic rock repertoire to please the listeners — in one hilarious medley, Buddy gives his condensed readings of ʻVoodoo Chileʼ and ʻSunshine Of Your Loveʼ, and in another one, he juxtaposes John Lee Hooker's ʻBoom Boomʼ with Cream's ʻStrange Brewʼ as an illustration of what happened to the blues once it made the Transatlantic crossing (although, to be honest, his guitar on ʻStrange Brewʼ sounds far more like solo Clapton than Cream-era Clapton — for one thing, where's the woman tone? Bad illustration). In another creative fit, he merges Muddy Waters' ʻI Just Want To Make Love To Youʼ with the Bobby Rush tune ʻChicken Headsʼ, funkifying the former and bluesifying the latter in the process. "I'm gonna fuck up all these songs tonight", he admits with disarming honesty, much to the audience's delight.

 

It's too bad the one song he didn't dare "fuck up" was ʻSkin Deepʼ, the pathetic equality anthem from the 2008 album — the only redeeming thing about which used to be Derek Trucks' weeping slide, but Derek ain't here, so there's nothing redeeming about it any more, and it just doesn't fit among all the rip-roaring blues-rock, not even as a «breather». Unless you do care about Buddy Guy as a soul singer, feel free to just skip it and enjoy the flamethrower rendition of ʻDamn Rightʼ instead.

 

Note that the last three songs here are attached studio recordings: ʻPolka Dot Loveʼ is a rather boring piece of slow blues, and ʻCountry Boyʼ is an even slower cover of the Muddy Waters song with another annoying attempt by Buddy to closely mimick his predecessor's vocals, but at least ʻComing For Youʼ has some cool wah-wah funk guitar (the song itself is an attempt to write something in the style of Sam & Dave's ʻHold On I'm Comingʼ). Honestly, though, it would have been nicer to get more live material instead — it's not as if the man were now limiting himself to playing short 40-minute sets, right? He's just 76 years young, after all.

 

RHYTHM & BLUES (2013)

 

CD I: 1) Best In Town; 2) Justifyin'; 3) I Go By Feel; 4) Messin' With The Kid; 5) What's Up With That Woman; 6) One Day Away; 7) Well I Done Got Over It; 8) What You Gonna Do About Me; 9) The Devil's Daughter; 10) Whiskey Ghost; 11) Rhythm Inner Groove.

CD II: 1) Meet Me In Chicago; 2) Too Damn Bad; 3) Evil Twin; 4) I Could Die Happy; 5) Never Gonna Change; 6) All That Makes Me Happy Is The Blues; 7) My Mama Loved Me; 8) Blues Don't Care; 9) I Came Up Hard; 10) Poison Ivy.

 

Look, we all love Buddy Guy. He is one of the coolest blues players around — the coolest blues player still left alive from his generation, probably, and the world will never be the same when he's gone. But that doesn't mean that we just have to keep spending our time on every new album of his, and certainly not on a double album, unless that double album has anything specifically in­teresting to say. And the fact that this album is called Rhythm & Blues, and the first disc is supposed to be «rhythm» and the second is supposed to be «blues» is not a specifically interesting fact on its own. Not to mention that it's a fickle distinction anyway.

 

The worst news here is that the record, once again, is just too damn slick. On Living Proof, Guy at least sounded excited and eager to, well, prove that he can still outplay any new sucker in town. Here, that excitement seems largely dissipated, and the songs, most of them not-too-original ori­ginals co-written by Buddy with a pack of songwriting partners (Tom Hambridge, Richard Fle­ming, and others), are melodically boring and played by-the-book. You know something's not quite right when the record greets you with the opening riff and it's... uh... Miley Cyrus' ʻParty In The USAʼ. Well, okay, that one's probably a funny coincidence, but fact is, everything here is remade, sterile, safe, and dull.

 

It certainly does not help matters much that the new bunch of guest stars, in place of Derek Trucks or Santana, now includes bland singer-songwriters like Beth Hart, handsome sentimen­talists like Keith Urban, and evil scourges of humanity like Kid Rock, let alone three grizzled members of Aerosmith who really have no business on a Buddy Guy album. The only pleasant collaboration here is with rising blues star Gary Clark Jr., but his abilities seem wasted on an up­beat track like ʻBlues Don't Careʼ where he just gets a brief rip-it-up solo of speedy trills, choking on themselves (if you know nothing about him, he's usually much better on his own albums). I think these guests are quite indicative, really — and, with disgusting predictability, Kid Rock joins Buddy on nothing else than ʻMessin' With The Kidʼ. Dear Mr. American Bad Ass, could you please not pollute the production of your elders with your presence any more?

 

Not that the elimination of bad guest appearances would have saved the album anyway. Buddy plays okay throughout, but we know that he is capable of more than «okay», even at this old age, and the only reason why he is not rising to the occasion is that he is not trying to — the emphasis here is on crafting a slick, commercial piece of product. Every once in a while, there's a flash of raw greatness (ʻWhat's Up With That Womanʼ, on which he is backed by the Muscle Shoal Horns, is probably a good example), but for an album that runs well over eighty minutes, these flashes come all too rarely.

 

I understand that a thumbs down rating here may seem unnecessarily harsh, but see, at this time in history there is simply no need for Mr. Guy to come out with albums like this — I don't think he needs the money that bad, and if he wants to transmit his expertise to a younger generation of players, he can just do it in his basement and leave us out of it. (Not to mention that the only thing that needs to be transmitted to somebody like Kid Rock is a free one-way ticket to Saint Helena island). Basically, there's nothing good on this record that you haven't already heard a couple dozen times (usually better), and the bad stuff on this record is not something you ever need to hear, unless you really have the hots for a sexy hunk like Keith Urban.

 

BORN TO PLAY GUITAR (2015)

 

1) Born To Play Guitar; 2) Wear You Out; 3) Back Up Mama; 4) Too Late; 5) Whiskey, Beer & Wine; 6) Kiss Me Quick; 7) Crying Out Of One Eye; 8) (Baby) You Got What It Takes; 9) Turn Me Wild; 10) Crazy World; 11) Smarter Than I Was; 12) Thick Like Mississippi Mud; 13) Flesh & Bone; 14) Come Back Muddy.

 

I suppose that's Buddy playing his guitar with his teeth on the sleeve photo out there, but for what it's worth, one might also get the impression that he just keeled over his instrument and fell asleep in the middle of the session or concert. Perhaps it works both ways; in any case, I wouldn't call the photo particularly appropriate or inspiring, and the same judgement applies, more or less, to the entire album.

 

Here's how it starts: "I was bo-o-o-orn in Louisiana..." (how many times does he have to remind us?), followed by a standard introductory blues lick. The rest of the track explains how the very fact of his being born in Louisiana made it imminent and inavoidable that he would, in fact, be born to play guitar, along with some nice, quiet samples of said guitar playing. "A polka dot guitar will be resting (rusting?) on my grave". Sounds pretty convincing. The only problem is, how many of us still remain to be convinced? At least ʻLiving Proofʼ kicked ass, volume-wise; ʻBorn To Play Guitarʼ just says it, rather than screams it. And this applies to the album in gene­ral: there are very few, if any, outstanding guitar parts (one interesting exception are the wah-wah parts in ʻCrazy Worldʼ and ʻTurn Me Wildʼ, but they're kind of buried right in the middle of a long series of by-the-book 12 bar playing).

 

Later on down the line, you get ʻWear You Outʼ, a fun collaboration with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top — and indeed, the song does sound a little ZZ Top-ish; the partnership is quite natural, too, considering how Buddy likes to rough it up every once in a while (more natural, in fact, than the Santana duet on Living Proof). The other guest appearances are not as successful — Kim Wilson plays Sonny Boy Williamson-style harmonica on ʻToo Lateʼ and ʻKiss Me Quickʼ (Sonny Boy played it better anyway); Joss Stone shares lead vocals on ʻYou Got What It Takesʼ (could have invited, oh, I dunno, Sheryl Crow with the same results); and Van Morrison is drafted to sing ʻFlesh & Boneʼ, a soul number dedicated to the memory of B. B. King — inevitably touching, yes, but still way too perfunctory. Neither Van, nor Buddy's guitar, nor the gospel backups manage to rise to any ecstatic heights here... although, who knows, in a hundred years from now people might look back on this fusion of great vocal and instrumental talent in their waning years and melt away in admiration.

 

Overall, there are no real highlights here, although at least there are no serious lowlights, either: best of all, there's no sign of Keith Urban or Kid Rock, and this is why this album gets no thumbs down from me. The guest stars are respectable, the songs try to be a tiny bit original, and Buddy Guy has never stopped being good, and I will personally defend his right to come out with a new album every two years: if ʻBorn To Play Guitarʼ and ʻCome Back Muddyʼ will be followed by ʻGuitar Playing Is My Businessʼ and ʻI Said Come Back, Muddy!ʼ in 2017, to me this will only signify that Buddy is still alive and well, and it will be nice to know that in an age when heroes are dropping around like flies. So you might even buy this thing to let the man know we still love him. You don't really have to listen to it. Just admire the karma.

 

ADDENDA:

 

SOUTHSIDE REUNION (w. Memphis Slim) (1972)

 

1) When Buddy Comes To Town; 2) How Long Blues; 3) Good Time Charlie; 4) You Call Me At Last; 5) You're The One; 6) No; 7) Help Me Some; 8) Rolling And Tumbling; 9*) Jamming At The Castle; 10*) You're The One (alt. version).

 

Strictly speaking, this is more of a Memphis Slim record than a Buddy Guy one: he is listed first of the two, he sings most of the vocals, and he apparently dominates the track selection. But that does not formally prevent one from including it in Buddy Guy's discography, and besides, it's a nice record, so let us use Buddy's involvement in it as a pretext to give it a friendly mention that it totally deserves.

 

The session in question was recorded by Slim and Buddy when they happened to cross paths in Europe, when Buddy was touring with the Stones, and is marked as having taken place on Sep­tember 17-18, 1970. Subsequent information, as it always happens, in controversial: apparently, the album was released by Warner Bros. in 1972, but since then, there's been at least several official and unofficial re-releases, on different labels and with different track listings. My version is a 2004 CD reissue on the French specialized Maison de Blues label, with eight «main» and two «bonus» tracks, whatever that might mean in the present case. Yours might be different, and in time, we may hold an international symposium to sort it out and draw scientific conclusions.

 

In the meantime, what matters is that this is (predictably) not a very original or deeply inspired blues jam session, but (unpredictably) with a pretty high fun quotient. With Junior Wells joining the dynamic duo on harmonica, and a strong brass section in tow, much of the accent is placed on energetic boogie numbers, like the opening ʻWhen Buddy Comes To Townʼ, and there are few pianists in this world better suited to boogieing the hell out of their instrument than Memphis Slim, one of the few to not only perfectly feel the spirit of the pre-war jump blues of Pete Johnson and Amos Milburn, but to expand on it with more complex, but no less fun playing. On all these numbers, it is Slim, not Buddy, who is the real hero — but Buddy is also doing his best, playing "thin" jump blues guitar in the style of Chuck Berry or even T-Bone Walker rather than doing his Hendrix imitations.

 

Most of the songs here are credited to "Peter Chatman" — the name of Memphis Slim's (John Len Chatman's) father, to whom Slim respectfully credited all of his own compositions; but, also quite predictably, there is really not much here in terms of composition, since you can find all of these melodies on, say, a best-of compilation by T-Bone Walker or quite a few other old rhythm-and-bluesmen. Only ʻRolling And Tumblingʼ continues to be credited to Muddy Waters, even if that is actually the one song that has changed the most, being converted to a slow 12-bar blues and losing its distinctive melody — a rare case where old lyrics were transposed to a new arran­gement rather than vice versa.

 

I cannot insist that Memphis Slim and Buddy Guy are a perfect pair for each other, but I do know that two great players on a generic blues recording is always a better bet than one, and if you throw in Junior's harmonica, you get stuff like ʻJamming At The Castleʼ, three minutes of fast, intense blues-boogie that is well worth the price of the entire album. And it does include some of the best examples of Buddy's "traditional-restrained", but still mighty energetic guitar playing that would rarely, if ever, be heard in his late Seventies' / early Eighties' period, let alone the post-Damn Right revival — so a gentle thumbs up is perfectly justified.

 

LIVE AT THE CHECKERBOARD LOUNGE (1979/1988)

 

1) Buddy's Blues (part 1); 2) I've Got A Right To Love My Woman; 3) Tell Me What's Inside Of You; 4) Done Got Over You; 5) The Things I Used To Do; 6) You Don't Know How I Feel; 7) The Dollar Done Fell; 8) Buddy's Blues (part 2); 9) Don't Answer The Door; 10) Tell Me What's Inside Of You (version 2).

 

For somebody as prolific over the past twenty years as Buddy Guy, the amount of archival re­leases in his catalog is surprisingly small; apparently, he really spent most of his time in the six­ties, seventies, and eighties outside of the studio, and rarely had the opportunity or desire to bo­ther with professional recording equipment during his live shows at the time. Add to this the overall confusion with his pre-Damn Right discography — for this particular archival release, for instance, although all sources agree that it comes from a show at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago in 1979 (because that's essentially what the album cover tells you), different sources indicate different years of provenance, from 1979 itself to 1988 to 1995. I've also encountered no less than three different track sequencings, and I think my own copy has a fourth...

 

...anyway, let the specialists bother about trivia like these; my job is simply to tell people whether the music is any good. Overall, this seems to be typical fare for Buddy in that time period: he is not being too loud or cocky, he is not yet even close to building up his image of a «survivor» or a «blues saviour», he plays lots of «semi-originals» (i. e. generic 12-bar blues tunes with new lyrics made on the spot), and he sounds like a fun guy to hang around with, as he always does. Also, the sound quality, while not perfect, at least indicates a professional recording, although the engineer still deserves a good whipping for tampering too much with the controls; sometimes the rhythm section miraculously disappears, only to re-emerge a few seconds later as the control guy realises he must have overdone it with the volume level on Buddy's mike.

 

Minor points of interest include: (a) the main melody of Cream's ʻStrange Brewʼ remade into ʻTell Me What's Inside Of Youʼ (the man didn't even bother to change the phrase "inside of you"), which, for some reason, is featured here in two versions, indicating that there was probably more than one show taped after all; (b) Buddy's social conscience flashing in the form of ʻThe Dollar Done Fellʼ, a lengthy funky jam full of complaints against inflation and gasoline prices — essen­tially, though, it's just Buddy doing his clownish James Brown thing all over again; (c) the «ori­ginal» ʻDon't Answer The Doorʼ dropping all pretense and transforming back into ʻSweet Little Angelʼ, replete with loving how she spreads her little wings and all.

 

It is well possible that I missed a few particularly awesome guitar licks every now and then, but on the whole, this is just predictably solid all the way through — very straightforward blues solo­ing, all the note chains as familiar as your ten fingers. Very little stage banter, too, so maybe this is a better choice for those who love their Buddy as unpretentious and «un-patriarchal» as pos­sible. Otherwise, don't bother.

 

BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD

BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD (1966)

 

1) Go And Say Goodbye; 2) Sit Down I Think I Love You; 3) Leave; 4) Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing; 5) Hot Dusty Roads; 6) Everybody's Wrong; 7) Flying On The Ground Is Wrong; 8) Burned; 9) Do I Have To Come Right Out And Say It; 10) Baby Don't Scold Me; 11) Out Of My Mind; 12) Pay The Price; 13*) For What It's Worth.

 

Listening to Buffalo Springfield's debut in the context of everything that surrounded it in those bubbling fall days of 1966, one thing that might strike you is how decidedly non-psychedelic, perhaps even anti-psychedelic it is. It is possible that some people back then might have thought of Buffalo Springfield as «yet another second-rate Byrds imitator», but the Byrds themselves were strongly bitten by the psychedelic vibe that year, writing songs about spacemen and playing trippy Coltrane-influenced guitar solos — leaving their second-rate imitators to lay the strongest claim for «best roots-rock album» of the year, even if the term «roots-rock» did not exist back then («rock» being still way too young to feel the need for any «roots»).

 

Of course, it's not as if Stephen Stills, Neil Young, or Richie Furay had any ideological issues with psychedelia, and, um, «for what it's worth», Neil occasionally includes a bit of droning, and every once in a while, they fuss around with special effects on their guitar sounds, from simple fuzz to trickier tricks (Leslie speakers?); since the word «psychedelic» can be adapted to a very wide variety of meanings, you could try and make a good case for this record as well. But that would most likely be an exercise in sophism: Buffalo Springfield is, first and foremost, just an unassuming collection of well-written songs from a couple of young kids enthralled at the per­spective of merging together simple pop melodies, age-old folk tradition, and relevant-contem­porary verbal meaning. The Beatles, The Byrds, and Bob Dylan circa 1965 being their mentors in this exciting business.

 

A certain amount of record executive pressure is felt here — namely in the circumstance that most of Neil Young's songs are being sung by Richie Furay; the powers that be imperatively de­cided that Furay was incompetent as a songwriter (and it's not as if they were totally wrong on that one), but also that Young was way too weird as a singer (come to think of it, they were sort of right about that, too, except that «weird is good» in the artistic paradigm), and this is why you don't get to hear Neil's own take on ʽFlying On The Ground Is Wrongʼ until you get around to some of his solo live shows. But that ain't much of a problem — Furay is a lovely singer indeed, and since electric folk rock in 1966 was still largely associated with the earthy sweetness of Roger McGuinn and the other Byrds, it is understandable how Neil's high-pitched «womanly whine» would be deemed un-commercial.

 

The good news is that Stills and Young already come up to the table as competent songwriters. While there is a certain level of simplicity and innocence to these songs that would gradually be ushered out by professionalism, Buffalo Springfield does not feel like a generic Byrds rip-off. Some of the songs, especially Stills', do come across as sort of formulaic pop — but it is still an inventive formula. ʽGo And Say Goodbyeʼ plays out like a country dance tune, with three diffe­rently toned guitar parts that all try to sound like interlocking banjos — however, the verse and chorus vocal melodies are sheer Beatles (in fact, the verse melody is reminiscent of Harrison's ʽYou Like Me Too Muchʼ, and the first verse talks about "the night before" — subconscious on the rampage!), and even if that may not sound like much, the song immediately establishes a solid special case for the Buffalo Springfield — where the Byrds usually tended to have a fully integ­rated sound, these guys actually sound like they're competing against each other from the very beginning. A folk rock band with «feuding» members? Now we're talking!

 

Of the two songwriters, Young immediately comes across as the «deeper» one, an impression that would, of course, be maintained forever on — and an impression largely conditioned by the fact that the man was probably depressed and psychologically wounded already as an embryo in his mother's womb, which is why he is able to contribute a whole set of credible downers (ʽNow­adays Clancy...ʼ, ʽFlying On The Ground Is Wrongʼ, ʽBurnedʼ, ʽOut Of My Mindʼ — even the titles speak for themselves) at the tender age of 21. Even his solitary love song on the album, ʽDo I Have To Come Right Out And Say Itʼ, is an under-the-bed serenade from somebody who's way too insecure and afraid to tell anyone that he wants to hold her hand. Unfortunately, no Neil Young-sung version of the song seems to exist, which is a pity, because Furay sounds the refrain so tenderly and sweetly that it must have won the band quite a bit of female fans! (But they'd all be Furay's, of course. Damn that Neil and his "indecision").

 

Stills provides the perfect extravert counterpart to Young's introverted character — passionate and permutable as hell: one minute he asks you to ʽSit Down I Think I Love Youʼ, then the very next moment you already have to ʽLeaveʼ because all it took for the I-love-you obsession to turn into I-hate-you rage was one small record groove. He also pays a little more attention to song structure and hooks, where Neil seems more concerned with overtones and atmospherics, and the two of them strike a great balance so that the record neither threatens to drown in watery melan­cholia nor to float away on the fluffy pop hook breeze.

 

But the real value almost always lies in the potential of this band as a guitar outfit — not a lot of pop bands around that time had two lead guitarists in the group with two distinct styles: ʽSit Down I Think I Love Youʼ, if anything, is priceless already for its doubled guitar break, first with Neil playing a grungy ʽSatisfactionʼ-esque fuzz solo, then Stills cutting in with a soft, fluent, playful country guitar part representing the other side of the protagonist's split personality. They also have a sense of intertextual humor — right in the middle of the rocking ʽBaby Don't Scold Meʼ, for just one bar, the riff from the Beatles' ʽDay Tripperʼ makes a guest appearance out of the blue, in addition to the song featuring some raga-influenced guitar playing (which, I guess, makes it the most proverbially «psychedelic» number here, although that's not saying much). Why? Be­cause we can, that's why.

 

Actually, checking the dates, I see that most of the songs here were recorded already after the boys must have had heard Revolver — but they were almost certainly written when the band's freshest Beatles impressions were still from Help! and Rubber Soul, and it is amusing, in that respect, that Stills' ʽPay The Priceʼ, with its fast tempo and mildly threatening lyrics, closes the album in much the same fashion that ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ closed Rubber Soul. Which is to say, a somewhat underwhelming and totally non-conceptual coda, but at least we don't see Stills promoting womanslaughter (maybe he'd love to, but Atlantic Records wouldn't let him anyway). And which is also to say that Buffalo Springfield, as a whole, was not quite «on the cutting edge» when it came out in December 1966 — for that matter, were Buffalo Springfield ever «on the cutting edge»? — but who cares, when you've got these two interesting and so significantly different personalities pooling their talents, Lennon-Mc-Cartney-wise, on the same record?

 

Trivia time: in typical American fashion, the record was mutilated just three months later, as a new re-release took the band's newly successful single ʽFor What It's Worthʼ and inserted it as the lead-off track at the expense of ʽBaby Don't Scold Meʼ — as if there weren't enough free space on the frickin' LP to allow for 13 tracks instead of 12. Of course, ʽFor What It's Worthʼ is not just an insanely catchy song, but it also represents a certain «maturity stage» for Stills (he'd already tried the «serious approach» with ʽEverybody's Wrongʼ on the original LP, but it wasn't very memorable and sort of got lost in between all of his love songs and all of Neil's mopey mini-epics), and in a way, it feels a little out of place on the record (imagine the Beatles replacing ʽDrive My Carʼ with ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ, or starting Sgt. Pepper off with ʽRevolutionʼ), making the decision completely commercially motivated. That said, there's really no conceptual side to the structuring of the record anyway — and those mysterious ping... ping notes in the intro, followed by the most delicately phrased and intoned "there's something happening here..." in the history of world-changing pop music, still arguably remain Buffalo Springfield's greatest contri­bution to humanity, as boring and trivial as that judgement might seem to fans of Poco. Oh, and big thumbs up, of course.

 

BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD AGAIN (1967)

 

1) Mr. Soul; 2) A Child's Claim To Fame; 3) Everydays; 4) Expecting To Fly; 5) Bluebird; 6) Hung Upside Down; 7) Sad Memory; 8) Good Time Boy; 9) Rock & Roll Woman; 10) Broken Arrow.

 

Even though the title of this second album would seem to imply that this record is a logical heir to the first one, it really isn't. Three young lads cut their songwriting teeth in 1966 (although at least one of them — Furay — was denied dental help), helping each other out where necessary. By 1967, the three young lads in question were ready to understand how utterly different they were from each other, but professional and historical ties still bound them together, and so, in­stead of three solo albums, Fate got them to get together again and make a single one. So they kind of jumped from their Rubber Soul period into their Abbey Road stage in one blink — quite a dazzling case of acceleration, if you ask me.

 

The actual sessions for Again were stretched out across the entire first half of 1967, and did not always include all the band members assembled together: Young was frequently absent because he did not care all that much, bass player Bruce Palmer cared a lot but was also frequently absent because of his drug bust, and session players came and went at random whenever some of the re­gulars dropped out of the picture. In other words, the whole thing was rather messy, but then «messy» was sort of good in 1967, when great ideas sprang out of chaos and «work schedules» were considered detrimental to groundbreaking art anyway.

 

The one member of the band here who sounds as if he wouldn't mind working on a schedule is Furay, who finally gets a chance to contribute three of his own songs — and they are proto-Poco: nice, sweet, inoffensive country-pop/rock — melodic, derivative, sentimental, perfectly listenable but not all that exciting. ʽA Child's Claim To Fameʼ has some sweet dobro lines added by James Burton, but could have been written and recorded by just about any mediocre Nashville team. ʽSad Memoryʼ is an acoustic folk ballad, somewhere in between the Everleys and James Taylor, which Young tries to make more distinctive by playing some electric lines in the back­ground, muffled and disguised to sound like a soft jazzy sax solo — too quiet to draw attention, though. ʽGood Time Boyʼ is the most upbeat number of the three, and drummer Dewey Martin gets to sing on it, either because they didn't want him to feel left out, or because they thought he had a sufficiently rowdy voice to make it rougher. However, his attempts to generate a «good time» atmosphere and bring it closer to James Brown's R&B stylistics (with chaotic-ecstatic "sock it to me now!"s and "lay it on me now!"s) are laughable, to put it mildly, and the whole thing, at best, can qualify as a humorous / parodic number. (Another Beatles analogy here — they use up their drummer much like the Fab Four used up theirs. Drummers are funny, you know).

 

Stills gets the largest share of songs here, and they already establish his classic solo/CSN style: not too hard, not too soft folk- and country-rock with a creative/psychedelic twist. Arguably the oddest track of the four is ʽEverydaysʼ, where he combines a nightclub lounge-jazz atmosphere with harsh feedback hum that accompanies all the verses — assuming that the feedback is pro­vided by Neil, this marks the first Young experiment with guitar noise captured on record, and it is sort of ironic that it had to happen on a Stills-penned jazz number! The most ambitious number out of all four, though, is probably ʽBluebirdʼ, which really puts that «rock» in «folk-rock», with battling acoustic and electric guitars, falsetto harmonies in the bridge alternating with brashly-boldly delivered verse vocals, an instrumental section where psychedelic drone meets folk dance and even a little bit of drum'n'bass, and an unexpectedly soft coda where the distorted electric guitar is kicked out of the house by a banjo — you can read all sorts of symbolism into it, but we here will just accept this as an unpredictable randomized adventure.

 

The biggest artistic breakthrough, nevertheless, belongs to Young, whose three tunes here have all acquired classic status, and raised the Buffalo Springfield benchmark high enough to be able to compete with 1967's first-graders. ʽMr. Soulʼ rocks harder than anything else on the album, and not so much because its main riff represents but a minor variation on ʽSatisfactionʼ, but be­cause this is where we get to know the classic Neil Young style of guitar playing — the piercing distorted guitar tones, the jagged, slightly dissonant solos, the relentless ear-pummeling that forces the listener to take notice. It's a short song, with no sign yet of the earth-shattering guitar jams that Neil would soon be associated with, but it's a fairly truthful sign of things to come. And also, somehow I get the feeling that the song may have been at least a subconscious influence on ʽJumpin' Jack Flashʼ: couldn't we hear echoes of "I was raised by the praise of a fan who said I upset her", played to the riff of ʽSatisfactionʼ, in "I was raised by a toothless bearded hag", played to the near-equal riff of ʽJumpin' Jack Flashʼ? Just curious.

 

Neil's other two contributions are not rockers at all, but rather grand romantic epics, on a surpri­singly grand scale that was probably imposed on him by the overall romantic ambitiousness of the times, since his early solo records have almost nothing resembling ʽExpecting To Flyʼ and ʽBro­ken Arrowʼ (well, maybe the self-titled debut does, a little bit). You could, in fact, treat them as two separated movements of a single conceptual piece — «The Arrow That Expected To Fly But Couldn't Because It Was Broken» or something. The first movement is what they sometimes like to call a «Euroart song», one that the Moody Blues and the Zombies would probably appre­ciate; the second is multi-part in itself, playing out like a mini-spectacle (with a goofy self-quotation-mode reprisal of ʽMr. Soulʼ leading into "the lights turned on and the curtain fell down" introduction) with half-metaphorical, half-nonsensical lyrics that seem to be dealing with disillusionment, disenchant­ment, and depression. But really, I'm just writing this because 99% of Neil's songs deal with dis­illusionment, disenchantment, and depression, and remembering this always comes in handy when trying to decipher the cryptic verbal imagery of his early years.

 

I think that these songs still hold up after all these years, despite their youthful maximalism and rather naïve grandiosity — the vocal melodies are lovely and challenging, what with all those unpredictable time signature changes inside the verses of ʽBroken Arrowʼ; and those who have a problem with the sharpness and shrillness of Young's whiny voice on his stripped down solo al­bums will probably wonder why he would so rarely, if ever, resort to smoothing them out with the psychedelic echo effects on ʽExpecting To Flyʼ that retain all the tenderness of his voice while at the same time masking the «grating» overtones. On the other hand, neither of these songs is «typical» Neil Young — they're «Summer-of-Love Neil Young», recorded in that really strange year when you could extract a common musical invariant from John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Neil Young, and Ted Nugent, so it might be argued that these are just early experiments with different voices, and that the music is not endowed with true Young spirit, whatever that be.

 

On an amusing note, you could argue that the logical sequel to Buffalo Springfield Again is Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon — picking up exactly where the former left off. But apart from the odd link between the coda of ʽBroken Arrowʼ and the beginning of ʽSpeak To Meʼ, there would be little to further that analogy: Again has no concept, no big masterplan, and is really just an exercise in survival of three differently attuned songwriters in the newly discovered limitless waters of the post-Sgt. Pepper era. An inconsistent mix of pretty secure mediocrity with flawed, insecure greatness, it deserves its thumbs up a-plenty, but you can already see here who's aiming for the buffalo and who's pining for Springfield.

 

LAST TIME AROUND (1968)

 

1) On The Way Home; 2) It's So Hard To Wait; 3) Pretty Girl Why; 4) Four Days Gone; 5) Carefree Country Day; 6) Special Days; 7) The Hour Of Not Quite Rain; 8) Questions; 9) I Am A Child; 10) Merry-Go-Round; 11) Uno Mundo; 12) Kind Woman.

 

Of the three Buffalo Springfield records, this one always gets the cold shoulder — for objective reasons: like Cream's Goodbye a year later, it was released due to contractual obligations already a few months after the band had split, it consisted of various odds-and-ends recorded over a year-long period, and it did not even have a single track where all of the band members would be playing together. Clearly, this is an album that cannot be as strong as its predecessors — and this is the decision towards which most listeners are biased even before putting it on.

 

But if Last Time Around does not and cannot work as a «coherent» group album (and neither did Again, for that matter), it does not mean, either, that all these songs were not written and re­corded at a time when all the songwriters involved (even Richie Furay!) were maturing or even reaching their creative peaks. In just one more year, Stills would be a respectable and visionary member of Crosby, Stills & Nash; Young would be issuing the first of his numerous solo classics; and even those first Poco albums weren't all that bad, when you lower your expectations.

 

With maybe one or two questionable exceptions, all the songs here are at least good — hooky, meaningful, nicely produced — and at least a few are classics for the ages. And even if the prin­cipal songwriters are pulling on the blanket in different directions, it's not as if these directions are completely incompatible: had it been so, there'd be no way that Stills and Young would still regularly get together later, as parts of CSN&Y or of the Stills-Young band. Heck, even the sole contribution by the latecoming new member, Jim Messina, who briefly replaced Bruce Palmer on bass, is nonchalantly nice — not to mention that it would very soon be rewritten by Ray Davies as ʽHolidayʼ, although they both probably caught the tune from some pre-war vaudeville.

 

Anyway, speaking of individualities, Young is really underrepresented here, with just two solo songs to his name — of which ʽOn The Way Homeʼ is a fairly soft, innocent folk-pop ditty sung by Furay and dominated by falsetto group harmonies that sound more Beach Boys than Neil Young; and ʽI Am A Childʼ is an early Neil classic that would soon become a stage favorite, a very simple little ditty that probably earns our love by how well the chorus matches its basic cat­chiness and simplicity — a song written, indeed, from a child's point of view, but, in the grand tradition of «baffling the grown-up», ending up asking some unanswerable question or other (in this case, "what is the color when black is burned?", and no, the song was recorded two months prior to Martin Luther King's assassination, if you're looking for some political metaphor here). I mean, ol' Neil can be a very boring gentleman on acoustic guitar and harmonica when he plays those things for too long, but these two and a half minutes — so sweet, so charming, worth all of Harvest for me if you need a hyperbolical comment.

 

Of the five Stills numbers, I would want to single out ʽFour Days Goneʼ, which already gives you the perfectly accomplished Steve Stills of Crosby, Stills & Nash — a country waltz with nervous tension a-plenty and that fabulous desperation strain in Steve's voice that gets through to you even if he's singing so quietly, never having to strain his vocal chords; and ʽSpecial Daysʼ, with a great guitar tone that shows how much the man has matured as a psychedelic rock'n'roll player from the early days of romantic folk-rock. ʽUno Mundoʼ, bringing in a Latin beat and a rather hammy lyrical attempt to marry all the world's continents to each other, seems like a misfire to me, but an amusing one — as an anthem, it may not be nearly as immoral as ʽLove The One You're Withʼ, but the "uno mundo, uno mundo..." harmonies should probably have been left to somebody more authentic, like Santana.

 

Probably the weirdest number here, however, is ʽThe Hour Of Not Quite Rainʼ, an art-pop song with baroque orchestration written by Furay around a poem by Micki Callen as the result of a radio contest on a Los Angeles station («send us your words and Buffalo Springfield will write a song to them because that is absolutely what they're here for, folks»). Amazingly, it sounds real good, with an atmosphere of some deep autumnal mystery generated by the cello-and-brass-heavy orchestration and by Furay's slow, high-pitched, slightly somnambulant, if not altogether drugged-out, vocals. Despite being written «on order» and not featuring the input of any band member other than Furay, it somehow ends up in the same class as ʽExpecting To Flyʼ — melan­cholic light classical psychedelia with a bit of a shivery edge to it.

 

In short, I would recommend not to regard the record as an auxiliary odds-and-ends package, nor to see it as a less-than-perfect swan song — in reality, «Buffalo Springfield» were almost always more of a mixture of interests than a band united by a single purpose, and should be seen as the first chronological chapter of a long saga, or perhaps an important prologue to the continuing story of Stills, Young, and their buddies from the Byrds and the Hollies (now these were actually real bands, whose stories were vastly different from CSN&Y and did not end with Crosby's and Nash's departures). And in that context, Last Time Around is really more of a See You Soon, Folks thing — not the sound of something crashing and dying, but the sound of something better beginning. And, of course, it gets a thumbs up.

 

THE BUTTERFIELD BLUES BAND

THE PAUL BUTTERFIELD BLUES BAND (1965)

 

1) Born In Chicago; 2) Shake Your Money Maker; 3) Blues With A Feeling; 4) Thank You Mr. Poobah; 5) I Got My Mojo Working; 6) Mellow Down Easy; 7) Screamin'; 8) Our Love Is Drifting; 9) Mystery Train; 10) Last Night; 11) Look Over Yonders Wall.

 

Eric Clapton had said in interviews that when Cream crossed over to America and began looking around, they basically just thought all those new bands were shit — with the exception of the Butterfield Blues Band, which, he admitted, was the only real competition that the haughty Brits had over there. Whether he was exaggerating or not, and what this was really supposed to mean, is up to you to determine, but the curious fact is, when you come to think about it, there weren't really that many «blues-rock» type bands in the States circa 1964-66. Folk rock, yes, with the Byrds serving as godfathers of the genre; psychedelic jamming, yes; garage-pop, yes, plenty of it, but the blues were largely left over for the British invaders to take. Strange, isn't it, when you come to think about it? As if all these white kids were afraid that The King Gang (Albert, Freddie, and B. B.) would start smashing their windows at night and putting holes in their tires if they tried stepping on their local turf.

 

Thus, in a way Paul Butterfield (and, coming a wee bit later, The Blues Project, who were their principal and not very successful competition) was filling an empty niche in his own native country — of course, few people were more qualified to do it than Butterfield, who was so much born in Chicago that the first song on his first album was appropriately named ʽBorn In Chicagoʼ, the second song covered Elmore James, the third song covered Little Walter, and by the time the fourth song came along, you were pretty much all set. And having been born in Chicago, and having spent his younger years soaking in the blues atmosphere of the city, and having a good ear for music, there was no way that Paul Butterfield could not have matured into a solid blues singer who could also blow some real mean harp, perhaps a little less creatively than his mentor Little Walter, but not any less passionately.

 

However, the real reason people still continue to listen to these early Butterfield Blues Band re­cords certainly is not Paul, likeable as he is — it is young prodigy Mike Bloomfield, whom most people first hear on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and only few people bother to check up fur­ther, despite the fact that he may, indeed, have been the... let me phrase this carefully... single best white blues guitar player in mid-Sixties' America? yes, something like that. At the very least, Clapton did consider him his chief over-the-ocean competitor for a brief while.

 

The thing about Bloomfield, of course, was that he was really a young punk who somehow got stuck in the blues — a genre that, unlike so many other white kids, he was totally refusing to treat boringly-reverentially. He would play fast, loose, flashy, ecstatic. He could be the Jerry Lee Lewis of the guitar one moment, the Coltrane of the guitar the next moment, and swing in and out of the generic 12-bar mode at will. He clearly loved all these big Chicago dudes a lot, but he was not at all set to imitate them — well, maybe Buddy Guy could have taught him something spe­cial, but then there might also have been things Bloomfield could teach him back. In any case, the guy's crazy leads are the goddamn reason to own and enjoy this record, period.

 

Because outside of that, the album would mostly hold up as a historically important one — if not the first bona fide American blues-rock album, then certainly one of those that first comes to mind when you think about American blues-rock as a whole. Butterfield is a nice professional guy, but not much more than solid — he does not have that much of a distinctive personality, and he can't even pull off a perfect, Muddy-approved "got my brbrbrbrbrbrbr working" on ʽMojoʼ, which means that drummer Sam Lay gets to sing it instead (!). I certainly couldn't elevate Butter­field as a singer over, say, Mick Jagger (who may have been not as technical on the harmonica, but made a far better job of making your hair stand on end as a singer in those early bluesy days, for good or bad). And consequently, there's not much reason to prefer him over Elmore, Walter, and Muddy, or even think that he brought something extra to the table (he's not a particularly good songwriter, either, and he would never be able to acquire the same «lonesome schizophrenic genius» tag as his future British correlate, Peter Green).

 

With Bloomfield afoot and aloof, though, even the most straightforward Elmore James covers here, like ʽShake Your Moneymakerʼ and ʽLook Over Yonders Wallʼ, acquire an arrogant boyish fervor that makes them, I dunno, somewhat more rock'n'rollish in nature than the originals — not «dangerously» rock'n'rollish, like the Stones presented their blues, but «ecstatically» rock'n'rollish, just ripping through the stratosphere like there was no tomorrow. Likewise, he is capable of making the slow blues numbers interesting and exciting, sometimes even playing those scorching melodic lines simultaneously with the vocals, without caring whether they take your attention away from the singing or not (they usually do, for instance, on the «original» composition ʽOur Love Is Driftingʼ, which is really just one more 12-bar blues, but with more stinging on it than around a bear-attacked beehive). The two instrumentals, ʽThank You Mr. Poobahʼ and ʽScrea­min'ʼ, have Bloomfield and Butterfield competing, but as shamanistic as Paul sometimes gets on his instrument, he just can't match Bloomfield when he strikes real hard.

 

We should probably drop in a kind word for the rest of the band as well — Elvin Bishop on se­cond guitar (usually rhythm, but I guess he takes a few leads here and there), Mark Naftalin on organ, Jerome Arnold on bass, and Sam Lay on drums (the latter two were drawn over from Howlin' Wolf's own backing band) — but the best word that can be dropped in, I guess, is that they all manage to put enough swing in the music so that it don't sound too stiff and reverential. Lay, in particular, creates far more fuss with his drumset than your average Joe, and is also seri­ously responsible for the above-average energy quotient of the album; but the role of the drum­mer on a by-the-book blues-rock album is not too enviable by definition.

 

In any case, as far as «whiteboy blues» stuff from the Sixties goes, there are few records out there to beat out the charm of The Butterbloomfield Blues Band (as it should have been called) — Eric Clapton With The Bluesbreakers might be the only competition in terms of scorching fierce­ness (and certainly not those early pre-ʽAlbatrossʼ Fleetwood Mac albums with Peter Green that strange people tend to rave about). Even if the band would really find its own voice with the next album, this one is still very respec... no, wait, I meant to say «quite kick-ass, really», because, well, if your blues-rock doesn't kick at least some ass, you must be doing something wrong — like confusing it with a 17th century court dance, for instance. Thumbs up.

 

EAST-WEST (1966)

 

1) Walkin' Blues; 2) Get Out Of My Life, Woman; 3) I Got A Mind To Give Up Living; 4) All These Blues; 5) Work Song; 6) Mary, Mary; 7) Two Trains Running; 8) Never Say No; 9) East West.

 

Butterfield's second album is often regarded as the band's high point — not just because it would be Bloomfield's last as a band member, but because, due to his instigation, this is as close as the BBB come to breaking the generic blues-rock mold. Just like Cream, already mentioned in the previous review, started out with the aspiration of doing a «pure blues» thing (at least, Clapton had that intention — maybe Bruce wanted them to do a «pure jazz» thing), but almost immediate­ly got caught up in the winds of time and drifted towards heavy rock and psychedelia, so it was almost inevitable, with the BBB's pool of talent, that they wouldn't be settling cozily in their sta­tus of «Muddy/Elmore cover band». At least, not in 1966 they wouldn't.

 

There is still plenty of pure blues here, of course, but even here they are experimenting, no longer content with merely covering the songs the way they were, but trying to reinvent them in a diffe­rent idiom. The results aren't particularly awesome — more like «curious», like when they do Robert Johnson's ʽWalkin' Bluesʼ as some sort of blues tango, or when they take Muddy's former­ly slow, threatening ʽTwo Trains Runningʼ and transform it into a boogie: unfortunately, they did not have the idea to conduct a sparring guitar match between Bloomfield and Bishop, which would have fit right in with the song title. In the end, my favorite «pure blues» song on here emer­ges as ʽI Got A Mind To Give Up Livingʼ, Butterfield's first attempt at generating a deep soul atmosphere, with Bloomfield playing straight from the heart, making the guitar choke with tears of rage rather than just go all fussy and crazy. Sharp, poignant, convincingly tragic, this is America's answer to The Animals and in this case, it might even be better, since Butterfield, un­like Burdon, never comes across as a theatrical poseur (sorry Eric — you are more interesting and gifted as a singer, but not as a haunted human being).

 

A brief mention must be made of such an oddity here as ʽMary, Maryʼ, which most of us usually know from the Monkees' second album — indeed, Mike Nesmith originally gave the song away to But­terfield before making use of it for his own band. It would be curious to know what the demo looked like, because the Butterfields present it as a swampy blues jam, all ragged and torn, whereas the Monkees naturally made it into a tight, jaunty pop number; the respective cherry-on-top is a shrieking, frenetic Bloomfield solo in Butterfield's version, and Davy Jones' smooth vocal harmonies in the Monkees' version. Neither of the two is greatness incarnate, but I like both, and I'm not altogether sure if I'd even want to make a preference.

 

Still, that's just the potatoes: the meat of the album, as any critic will tell you, are the two exten­ded, jazz-influenced instrumental jams. Wait a minute, influenced? ʽWork Songʼ is jazz — a stretched cover of Nat Adderley's most famous composition — and ʽEast-Westʼ, following in the footsteps of the Byrds' ʽEight Miles Highʼ, is rock's attempt to incorporate free-form soloing and modal jazz elements into its very soul. Mike Bloomfield may have made his reputation as a fla­ming guitar punk in Bob Dylan's 1965 entourage, but he had an intellectual drive as well, and ʽEast-Westʼ is as intellectual as you ever get with these guys. And considering how repetitive, drone-heavy, free-flying, and energetic ʽEast-Westʼ is, it is arguably the most closest predecessor to the Velvet Underground and their jamming feats a year later.

 

What is even more interesting, though, is that ʽEast-Westʼ actually has a cool, well thought out structure — over its thirteen minutes, it gradually moves from swampy blues into a decidedly Eastern raga section, then into something more close to country-western, and ultimately culmi­nates in a set of pop-rock riffs, starting with a variation on ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ. This means that they took the name seriously, and consciously tried to integrate Eastern and Western traditions, to the best of their abilities, within the same composition. I have no intention of overrating ʽEast-Westʼ like so many American critics desperately hunting for proof that American bands were just as rigorously pushing boundaries in 1966 as their British counterparts, but this is a major mile­stone, and for what it's worth, as a lengthy jam, it makes a stronger point than Cream's jams, since its scope is wider and its ambitions are higher from the start.

 

Unfortunately, the happiness did not last long — apparently, this new direction and its conflict with the old one created too much tension in the band and finally split apart the Butterfield / Bloomfield partnership for good. In fact, it probably couldn't have been any other way — one more record like this and Bloomfield would be taking Butterfield's band away from him, despite not knowing how to sing or play harmonica. In a world that was less and less interested in retro Chicago blues, I guess, the only way you could still play retro Chicago blues would be to alienate yourself from fellow players who were only too happy to mix Chicago blues with Indian ragas. As it turned out, though, Bloomfield wouldn't be able to get too far on his own — all his attempts to create bands for himself (such as Electric Flag) failed, proving that he was far better off as a masterful sideman than a clumsy leader. Fortunately, East-West still proudly stands as a small, but exciting testa­ment to one of the finest talent pools in America and simply one of the best non-standard blues-rock albums of its era, so a thumbs up is inevitable.

 

THE RESURRECTION OF PIGBOY CRABSHAW (1967)

 

1) One More Heartache; 2) Driftin' And Driftin'; 3) Pity The Fool; 4) Born Under A Bad Sign; 5) Run Out Of Time; 6) Double Trouble; 7) Drivin' Wheel; 8) Droppin' Out; 9) Tollin' Bells.

 

If I ever had a nickname like «Pigboy Crabshaw», I'd probably have to join the Church in re­pentance, but Elvin Bishop seemed okay with it, and his pals in the band liked it so much that with the departure of Bloomfield they put it in their album title to commemorate the beginning of Bishop's brief rule as the Butterfield Blues Band's only guitar player. Brief and, may I add, some­what inessential. Elvin was neither the band's frontman nor its stuntman — he just played that guitar and never seemed to think all that much about leaving his mark on the world.

 

It would be cool as hell for me to say something important like «There was so much more to the original Butterfield Blues Band than Mike Bloomfield», and follow it up by saying «and this is effectively shown on the band's third album, where they effortlessly demonstrate how they can get by without Mike's talents», and then justify this further by pointing out that «Bloomfield was, after all, 50% talent and 50% showman flash — without him, Butterfield, Bishop, and Co. are finally able to concentrate directly on the music and sacrifice their egos for the benefit of the mu­sic». But hey, what can I do? All said and done, I'm a fan of egos. And the most successful sacri­ficers of egos are, in a way, the biggest egotists of them all — like J. J. Cale, for instance.

 

The Resurrection Of Pigboy Crabshaw is just a regular electric blues album now, abandoning all the genre-crossing, tradition-marrying pretense of East-West. To «compensate» for Bloom­field's departure, Paul brings in a whole new brass section — a good one, to be sure, including none other than the soon-to-be-legendary David Sanborn on alto sax; but the big band approach to their source material is neither new nor revelatory. Furthermore, the album title seems to sug­gest that previously, Bishop's talents were at the least undervalued and underused, and that now is his chance to shine; but the guitar parts are very subdued throughout the album, and when it is over, it will most likely be remembered as a sonic field dominated by Butterfield's harmonica and the brass section, never the guitar. And maybe it's logically cool, but most of the arrangements leave me cold, bored, and almost amazed that they would dare offer something like this in the middle of 1967 — what with Cream and Hendrix setting completely new standards.

 

The record consists almost entirely of covers, with just two short Butterfield originals for an ex­cuse: ʽRun Out Of Timeʼ, co-written with sax player Gene Dinwiddie, is a playful fast R&B groove ruled by nimble brass flourishes, but it fades out way before it could evolve into anything mind-blowing; and ʽDroppin' Outʼ, co-written with songwriter Tucker Zimmerman, is... a playful fast R&B groove ruled by nimble brass flourishes? Okay, it's soulful enough, but Butterfield is still unconvincing and unexceptional as a vocalist.

 

The covers are hardly any more exciting — particularly the unterminable, mindnumbingly slow ʽDriftin' And Driftin'ʼ, whose tortoise tempo and thick brass layers attempt to build up an atmos­phere of solemnity, but don't do much in that respect other than the fact of their existence. Butter­field and Bishop do deliver a couple of harmonica and guitar solos where it seems like they are really trying, but by the time they get around to them, the song has already long since outlived its usefulness. ʽDouble Troubleʼ is unworthy of both the shorter, far more focused and ten times as bleeding Otis Rush original and a later Dire Straits-style reinvention by Eric Clapton; ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ is totally expendable in between the Albert King original and the grizzly Cream cover; and the list may be continued.

 

Bottomline is that this record, while not stereotypically «bad», is just very, very boring. You have to have a really subtle appreciation for Butterfield, one that goes deep beyond the surface and maybe even adds an imaginary touch or two, or a very rigid, academic type of respect for electric blues to truly enjoy The Resurrection as something above background music; and I have neither, so I just have to rate it as a thumbs down. Especially in the overall context of 1967, when, you know, it was almost shameful to release a record of such profound mediocrity.

 

IN MY OWN DREAM (1968)

 

1) Last Hope's Gone; 2) Mine To Love; 3) Get Yourself Together; 4) Just To Be With You; 5) Mornin' Blues; 6) Drunk Again; 7) In My Own Dream.

 

By the time this album came out, nobody really cared any more, and only the most astute listeners and critics may have noticed how desperately The Butterfield Blues Band was trying to rebrand itself. Running on covers, it seems to have been agreed, was pretty much equivalent to suicide; but neither Butterfield nor Bishop had a lot of songwriting talent, and so it is up to new bass player Bugsy Maugh to fill in the glaring gap and steer the Butterfields away from interpretation and improvisation and into the treacherous waters of creativity.

 

The big problem with this is that Bugsy was apparently a major fan of contemporary R&B, and his songs basically sound like sincere, but never outstanding imitations of Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and whoever else was riding the Atlantic wave of success at the time. Jazzy rhythms, poppy choruses, lots of brass and vocal exuberance (and, what's more, the vocals were to be pro­vided by Bugsy himself — Paul either did not want to mess around with other band members' songs, or found them unsuitable to his own style). And yes, the problem is not that this does not at all sound like classic BBB (who'd really care?), but that the songs only barely stand competi­tion. ʽGet Yourself Togetherʼ, for instance, takes the old and well-worn ʽCan I Get A Witness?ʼ groove, but adds nothing particularly new to it — probably the most «novel» aspect is the way their brass section crosses paths with Butterfield's harmonica, but then I'd rather just see the whole thing turn into a fast, punchy, harmonica-driven instrumental (much like the Stones had originally done with this groove, turning it into the awesome — for 1964, at least — ʽNow I've Got A Witnessʼ). Actually, Bugsy is not a bad singer: he does quite alright on ʽMornin' Bluesʼ, a snappy chunk of whitebread soul, showing good range, fluent modulation, and respectable re­straint. And still, I cannot get rid of the feeling that something is just not there. Probably because they take all these familiar structures, refuse to populate them with extra hooks, yet do not have enough balls to make them sizzle and kick proper ass in performance.

 

There are altogether two songs on the album that rise above the likes of «nice» and «okay» and «wish I'd had an extra ninety years to my life». The opening number, ʽLast Hope's Goneʼ, is a moody, subtle piece of blues made special by a very unusual bass «zoop» at its core and a chao­tic mish-mash of brass and woodwinds at the edges; it is hardly a coincidence that the rising star of David Sanborn is credited here as one of the co-authors. And Bishop's only contribution to the record, ʽDrunk Againʼ, is a hilariously realistic example of how to make an authentically «drun­ken blues», with a large part of it taken over by a loosely coherent rant of the «protagonist walks into a bar...» variety. Not much to do with pure music (although Butterfield does a pretty good job on the harmonica in the background), but hits home all the same.

 

Butterfield's only solo composition here — the title track — is featured at the end and was pro­bably supposed to be the climactic finish, what with all those gospel harmony overtones, but it is stunningly weak: musically, just sort of a ghostly shuffle, limping along like a three-legged dog, and vocally, with nothing but the pure power of one man's soul to guide it to its conclusion (and it doesn't even have a conclusion — it just indecisively fades away after almost six minutes of try­ing to understand what it is supposed to do).

 

So yes, I respect that the fact that they at least tried to change, and even develop some sort of hybrid musical genre, wobbling between blues, jazz, and R&B, rather than just throwing in a few more mediocre Albert King covers. But there's really nothing here that couldn't be done better by either Traffic, or Grateful Dead, or Blood, Sweat & Tears in their prime — and there's no­thing but sheer curiosity, I think, that might make you want to check it out. Oh well, at least it's all over in just 36 minutes — very respectful of them, since it wouldn't have been too difficult to shove twenty more minutes of comparable mediocrity into the pot, and then I'd really have to hate 'em.

 

KEEP ON MOVING (1969)

 

1) Love March; 2) No Amount Of Loving; 3) Morning Sunrise; 4) Losing Hand; 5) Walking By Myself; 6) Except You; 7) Love Disease; 8) Where Did My Baby Go; 9) All In A Day; 10) So Far, So Good; 11) Buddy's Advice; 12) Keep On Moving.

 

God, how boring. By 1969, both Elvin Bishop and Mark Naftalin had left the band, feeling that the ship had sunk low enough — but, of course, «The Butterfield Blues Band» may function under that title as long as it has at least one Butterfield in it. Keep On Moving features at least ten different players in addition to Paul, and I am not even completely sure who of them was «of­ficially» a band member and who was not at the time. Most importantly, the quality of the music hardly stimulates me to find out.

 

Basically, at this point they are acting as a weak, dis-focused substitute for Blood, Sweat & Tears. Lots of brass, lots of swinging' and funky rhythms, lots of swagger and agitation, but practically nothing by way of memorable tunes. Somehow, they have gradually entered a «loungy» phase of existence, where vibe and atmosphere are created by the players' tones and personalities rather than compositional findings — and other than a few more nice bits of Paul's harmonica, there is nothing particularly fascinating about these particular tones and personalities. For me at least, the «three listen test» was failed here 100%: glancing back at the song titles, I have not the faintest memory of how any of them originally went, other than a general vague remembrance of how much noise the brass section made and how Paul Butterfield worked so very hard to pass for a natural «soul screamer» and it still didn't help.

 

Now, with the help of the «play» button, just a few quick remarks: ʽLove Marchʼ is undescribably dippy and silly — and its organ-led gospel bridge, culminating in a "I know... THERE'S GOTTA BE A CHANGE!", is the biggest embarrassment in Butterfield history up to that date, just about everything about it being a poorly executed cliché. ʽWalking By Myselfʼ is the only song that even remotely tries to rock, and new guitarist Buzz Feiten adds a decent lead part, but he's defini­tely no new Mike Bloomfield. His only songwriting contribution, ʽBuddy's Adviceʼ, probably has the best brass riffs on the album, but they fall on a totally empty stomach anyway.

 

For objectivity's sake, I should probably state that the album is very well produced (by Jerry Ragovoy, the author of ʽTime Is On My Sideʼ and ʽPiece Of My Heartʼ), that the brass, keyboard, and guitar players are tightly coordinated, that at least some thought is included in most of the arrangements, and that Robert Christgau gave the album an A, saying about Butterfield that "he just gets better and better". Well, this ain't the first and ain't gonna be the last time that we don't exactly see eye-to-eye with Mr. Dean, and just so that this fact can be properly reflected, I'm going all out here and awarding the album a decisive thumbs down. Okay, honestly, this deci­sion has nothing to do with Christgau — I just thought that you should be aware of alternate opinions, no matter how puzzling or irrational they are.

 

LIVE (1970)

 

1) Everything Going To Be Alright; 2) Love Disease; 3) The Boxer; 4) No Amount Of Loving; 5) Driftin' And Driftin'; 6) Intro To Musicians; 7) Number Nine; 8) I Want To Be With You; 9) Born Under A Bad Sign; 10) Get Together Again; 11) So Far, So Good.

 

The very idea of the Butterfield Blues Band releasing their first live album without Mike Bloom­field — or Elvin Bishop, for that matter, if we want to be chivalrous about it as well — seems so revolting to me that, you know, these guys would have to work real hard to compensate for the affront. And they did not work that hard. Live seems like a realistic picture of Paul Butterfield and his bluesy/jazzy friends at the time: a band that plays it tight, intelligent, and safe to the point of boring. The fact that the record came out the same year as Live At Leeds and Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, not to mention all the fresh blood like Led Zeppelin or Jethro Tull shaking down the walls, does not exactly speak much in its favor, either.

 

The main problem, however, is not that the Butterfield Blues Band does not sound «tough» when it gets out on stage — kicking ass and rockin' the roof are not, after all, obligatory requirements for a good show, not even in 1970. The main problem is that they give the impression of trying to sound «tough», without truly rising to the task. Case in point: ʽNumber Nineʼ, a lengthy, speedy funk-rock jam, with the brass section in full flight and Paul playing Aeolus, Lord of Winds, on the harmonica. You can literally feel the buckets of sweat coming off the players, but to no avail: Sly & The Family Stone or James Brown would have blown them off the stage in a minute. There is a certain level of tightness and coordination, but it does not feel natural, and eventually the brass section just begins going to hell, with the players falling out of sync with each other and almost hinting at free-form jazz — but then, neither is this too free-form to genuinely compete with, say, Eric Dolphy. It's all neither here nor there: a whoppin' big mess that becomes a real chore when you realize you have to endure ten minutes of it.

 

Naturally, most of the songs are taken from the band's latest albums: ʽEast-Westʼ is not an option, and there is not even a single fast, short, catchy blues-rocker from their past — mostly these ex­cursions into jazz-pop and funk territory, with a little gospel on the side (the awful singalong number ʽGet Together Againʼ, which, for some reason, strives to establish a black church atmos­phere in an L.A. club). ʽThe Boxerʼ, by the way, is not a Simon & Garfunkel cover (that would have been at least novel), but rather a new funky composition by Rod Hicks that provides the drummer with a soloing opportunity (the drummer is the boxer, see?), and the brass section with a chance to replicate the meticulous punctuality of The Family Stone (which they fail). The other tunes aren't even worth discussing.

 

What is worth discussing is the split that the public had with the critics — most of these latter day Butterfield albums, and this live one in particular, have always received a serious share of aca­demic admiration, yet sales were drastically slow, and if East-West still finds support among the connoisseurs these days, everything after 1966-67 seems to have completely fallen out, no matter how much the critics try to revive it (see Bruce Eder's truly glowing account of the Live album at the All-Music Guide, for instance). The reason, I guess, is that The Butterfield Blues Band play their program formally right. There are no serious lapses of taste here (other than in the ʽIntro To Musiciansʼ bit, which Paul delivers as if he were stoned, or dead drunk — maybe he was), there's energy, there's some originality, there's not a lot of pretense and quite a lot of humbleness. But there is never a sign that this is a band that's ready to «go all the way», you know. Ultimately, they just sound like any average blues-rock band with enough determination to go on practicing, no matter how much time it takes. And the decision to expand into jazz-rock and funk — genres that absolutely require that one «goes all the way» if one wants to make a difference — was pro­bably the single silliest decision of Butterfield's entire career. As a jazz musician, he's too sterile; as a funk player, too stiff. He was born in Chicago, and that is where he should have stayed.

 

SOMETIMES I JUST FEEL LIKE SMILIN' (1971)

 

1) Play On; 2) 1000 Ways; 3) Pretty Woman; 4) Little Piece Of Dying; 5) Song For Lee; 6) Trainman; 7) Night Child; 8) Drowned In My Own Tears; 9) Blind Leading The Blind.

 

Although by 1971 just about everybody completely lost interest, I actually think that The Butter­field Blues Band's last LP is a slight improvement, in terms of energy and focus at least, over Keep On Moving. Of course, it was much too late. The «roots» market was wide open at the time, but it was occupied by a variety of fresh new faces, and Butterfield neither had the intimate sentimentality of Californian folkers like James Taylor, nor the purported depth and wisdom of The Band; and even if he made a serious effort to gain any of these, it would probably make no difference — he was already kicked off that train.

 

So this Smilin' record has no historical significance other than representing a last farewell, pronounced with a certain amount of musical dignity. There's a little less jazz here, a little more blues, and a lot more gospel-soul, with «Brother Gene Dinwiddie» (as he was now known) pos­sibly responsible for pushing Mr. Butterfield further in that territory. Occasionally, they have ig­nition, like on the opening track ʽPlay Onʼ, where bass, guitar, and brass succeed in locking them­selves in a tight groove, and it is in fact possible to get caught up in the excitement — when the brass section emerges in grand mode at the end of the track and gets diffused across the lead and backing vocals, the band almost manages to cross that invisible border between musical perfor­mance and spiritual celebration. Not quite, but almost.

 

(Amusing note: for some reason, many Web sources list the song as «co-written» by Butterfield with Kerry Livgren and John Elefante of Kansas! Of course, it's just a mix-up because of the latter two having a song with the same title on the Vinyl Confessions album from 1982, but apparently the mistake has virally spread over to dozens of sites — nobody even bothered to check that John Elefante was 13 years old at the time and had nothing to do with Kansas. And I'd be sad to find out that Butterfield ever co-wrote any­thing with Mr. Livgren, although, of course, that wouldn't be totally out of the question).

 

A couple other funky pieces here are worth hearing at least once, too: ʽ1000 Waysʼ builds up a slower, moodier, but still perfectly danceable groove, and shows that Paul's harmonica skills could be well adapted to funk from their blues origins; ʽLittle Piece Of Dyingʼ is a bit flabbier, but continues in essentially the same style, and if only the groove had some development to it in­stead of simply serving as a background for Paul's apprentice attempt at spiritual exorcism, it could perhaps hold our interest a little longer.

 

The rest is fairly non-descript as usual: needless covers of Albert King's ʽPretty Womanʼ (as de­void of eerie voodoo magic as their earlier toothless take on ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ) and ʽDrowned In My Own Tearsʼ (Paul has never been a certified member of the «I have covered Ray Charles and lived» club), jazz-rockish instrumentals that hurry past you like particles of office plankton on their way to work (ʽSong For Leeʼ, ʽNight Childʼ — beware, this song, too, in the world of virtual irreality often features a credit by «Oscar Peterson», even though Oscar Peterson wouldn't issue his ʽNight Childʼ until 1979), and competent, but lackluster gospel singalongs like ʽTrainmanʼ (which begins with a really silly invocation to NYC: "New York, New York... the bi-i-i-i-i-g APPLE!..") and ʽBlind Leading The Blindʼ, which at least ends the album on an upbeat note, rather than dissolving it in a yawny puddle of slow wailing.

 

The best thing I can say about all this stuff is that Rod Hicks is a really good, interesting, under­rated bass player — even on the boring songs, I find my attention consistently privatised by his nimble, adventurous lines. If only the rest of the band followed his lead and took similar flight at least half of the time, things would have been different at least in terms of energy and musical freedom. As it is, he did his best to save the band's swan song from being an embarrassment, but he was not enough of a magician to turn all his bandmates into inspired virtuosos — leaving them with little choice other than to split for good, once the record had sold its predictable fifty copies; and that was the quiet, humble, barely noticed demise of The Butterfield Blues Band.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE ORIGINAL LOST ELEKTRA SESSIONS (1964/1995)

 

1) Good Morning Little Schoolgirl; 2) Just To Be With You; 3) Help Me; 4) Hate To See You Go; 5) Poor Boy; 6) Nut Popper #1; 7) Everything's Gonna Be Alright; 8) Lovin' Cup; 9) Rock Me; 10) It Hurts Me Too; 11) Our Love Is Driftin'; 12) Take Me Back Baby; 13) Mellow Down Easy; 14) Ain't No Need To Go No Further; 15) Love Her With A Feeling; 16) Piney Brown Blues; 17) Spoonful; 18) That's All Right; 19) Goin' Down Slow.

 

Although the posthumous legend of The Butterfield Blues Band mainly lingered on in circles of «aficio­nados» and «connaisseurs», it was strong enough to trigger a large series of archival re­leases in the mid-Nineties — and for understandable reasons: most of these releases, like Straw­berry Jam or East-West Live, were culled from live shows recorded while Bloomfield was still in the band, so as to satisfy the demand for Mike-era live material and have something to com­memorate the band's finest incarnation on stage, rather than its latter day version with the brass players replacing the original guitarists. Unfortunately, all of these releases are bootleg quality: for some reason, the original band did not care much about being recorded professionally while in live flight, and most of this stuff is barely listenable, let alone reviewable.

 

In the end, the only archival release by the original band that is worth owning and talking about is the very first one — their failed first attempt at recording an LP, which they made as early as De­cember 1964, immediately after signing up with Elektra. Not all of the 19 songs included here date from those very sessions, but most of them do, and since the band was already fully formed and included Bloomfield, and the recordings were made in a professional studio, this here is an indispensable acquirement for The True Fan.

 

The problem is, I can sort of see why the people at Elektra were not impressed. From a certain angle, these covers of classic blues and R&B numbers are not significantly different from the contents of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band — indeed, a few would later be re-recorded for that very album. The subtle difference is that in late 1964, this really was «The Paul Butterfield Blues Band», with Paul's vocals and harmonica always taking center stage and always being much higher in the mix than everything else. Basically, ladies and gentlemen, we come here to listen to the amazing Mr. Paul Butterfield do impersonations of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Elmore James, and particularly Little Walter — and there are a few sidemen playing, uh, on the sides, but they're quite dispensable.

 

There are only a few spots where Bloomfield is allowed to shine, and they're cool and important: instrumental rave-ups like ʽNut Popper #1ʼ and R&B dance numbers like ʽLovin' Cupʼ are pro­bably the earliest known examples of the classic Bloomfield style, and even a small handful is enough to say that for that brief moment in late 1964 / early 1965, Mike Bloomfield may have been the coolest axe player in the West, and the only real competition to Mr. Slowhand of the Yardbirds' fame as the finest (white, at least) blues-rock guitarist known to mankind. But it is a really, really small handful — and it betrays jealousy, since on ʽMellow Down Easyʼ, for instance, Butterfield does not even allow him a proper solo: all the lead parts are played in the background and convenietnly muffled by the much louder harmonica parts. (On the 1965 re-recording, that would change, and Mike would get to slip in something purely his own).

 

To serious admirers of Paul's harmonica-blowing talents, this should not be a disappointment; on the contrary, I'd say that not a single «proper» BBB album features as much harmonica playing as these early tapes — where Paul is simply all over the place. But honestly, unless you really, really take your time thinking about how to use your harp in various creative / expressive ways, depen­ding on the structures, tonalities, moods of the individual songs, a blues-rock «Listen To Me Blowing» type album is ultimately bound to sound boring, and I can suggest that the people at Elektra thought so, too. As competent as these covers are, Butterfield here is the all-pervasive imitator, and only Bloomfield is the occasional innovator — because at least several Chicago blueswailers played better harmonica than Paul (let alone singing), but no Chicago lead guitar players ever played a guitar solo the way Bloomfield does it here on that ʽNut Popperʼ thing.

 

For some reason, many accounts of the album try to increase its status by claiming that it was «one of the first blues-rock albums», which is supposed to boil up our admiration and at the same time to forgive the record its rawness, unevenness, and harmonica-heaviness. But the true ex­pression should be «one of the first white American blues-rock albums» — British invaders like The Yardbirds and The Animals, let alone lesser heroes like Alexis Korner, had already been doing this thing for at least a couple of years; and in basic terms of instrumentation, there's really no reason why one couldn't apply the term «blues-rock» to the Chicago sound — I mean, Howlin' Wolf's recordings from the late Fifties / early Sixties certainly «rock» just as hard, if not harder, than these ones. A thinner drum sound, perhaps, but that's about it.

 

Still, there are enough historical and other reasons to at least be happy that the tapes were not completely lost, and that it is possible to trace Butterfield's story way back into late 1964. And, heck, when they really speed up the tempo and Paul is blowing away and the rhythm section is rolling and grooving, like on ʽPiney Brown Bluesʼ, for instance, it takes a mighty (anti-)intellec­tual leap to not get caught up in the excitement — at least a little bit. 

 

THE BYRDS

MR. TAMBOURINE MAN (1965)

 

1) Mr. Tambourine Man; 2) I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better; 3) Spanish Harlem Incident; 4) You Won't Have To Cry; 5) Here Without You; 6) The Bells Of Rhymney; 7) All I Really Want To Do; 8) I Knew I'd Want You; 9) It's No Use; 10) Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe; 11) Chimes Of Freedom; 12) We'll Meet Again.

 

The historical importance of this record can only be denied by the same people who also deny the Holocaust, the Moon landing, and the Spaghetti Monster — but I suppose that it is also every re­viewer's and historian's responsibility to point out that the Byrds did not singlehandedly invent «folk rock» (even if the term was allegedly invented by American journalists upon listening to the Byrds). Folk music had already been successfully packaged together with pop/rock beats, band-style and all, throughout 1964 and even earlier, particularly in the UK (The Four Pennies and The Searchers are only the most easily memorable examples), and then you could actually trace it all the way back to the States with the Everly Brothers. And it is interesting that that kind of folk rock is really only represented by one single song on the Byrds' debut (ʽBells Of Rhymneyʼ).

 

What was really important here was the inclusion of no less than four Dylan covers — all of them reinvented as pop band numbers, bass, drums, electric guitars, and all. Before June 1965, people covered plenty of Dylan, but hardly ever moving away from the same stripped acoustic format, largely due to either lack of imagination, or lack of bravery required to bridge the silly artificial gap between «folksters» and «popsters» (or «rockers», whatever). The Byrds, from the very out­set, idolized the Beatles and wanted to appeal to pop audiences rather than Greenwich Village intellectuals — yet they also wanted to grab some of that intellectualism, admittedly believing that pop audi­ences wouldn't really mind listening a little bit about trips on magic swirling ships and cliffs of wildcat charms, in between wanting to hold your hand and needing your love eight days a week, you know.

 

In the end, the Byrds did not invent «folk-rock» any more than Bob Dylan could be said to in­vent «folk music» — what they invented was «Dylan-rock», a genre that was not only influenced by Bob Dylan, but also happened to influence Bob Dylan, who went on to adopt it soon enough and then quickly began pushing its boundaries into much harder rockin' territory (largely because Roger McGuinn was such a sweet, tender guy, and Bob Dylan was such a nasty asshole; isn't it odd how we love them both in the end?). The three main ingredients of the original brand of Dylan-rock, then, are: (a) the pop/rock band format providing a steady pop/rock beat with electric amplification; (b) the melodic component, largely carried over from the folk music tradition but also incorporating pop elements; (c) lyrics that are supposed to be listened to and perhaps even thought about, even when we still have boy/girl relationships at the core of everything.

 

In addition to that general formula which could be exported to other bands, The Byrds had their individual assets as well — three talented songwriters (although the debut album is still almost com­pletely dominated by one, Gene Clark), a lovely lead singer, a system of group harmony sin­ging that was quite novel at the time, and a unique 12-string electric guitar playing style that came to be known as «The Jangle» (or «The Jingle-Jangle» if you like complex sound-symbolic strings of sounds) and was a major sonic advance over previous similar styles, such as the Sear­chers (whose 12-string riffs sound seriously wussy compared to McGuinn's, both from a techno­logical standpoint and in terms of playing technique).

 

This strictly organized, immediately recog­nizable Byrds sound can have its drawbacks — the band has never managed to appeal to me all that much on a basic gut level, because the sound can get pretty monotonous, the songs rarely have much to applaud in terms of dynamics and development, and when you find out that for the fifth, sixth, and tenth time in a row you cannot describe those group harmonies with any other word than «lovely», a nasty subconscious strand of depression sets in. Another big problem is that the Byrds never had a proper sense of humor, which I think is essential for a truly great band. But then, most bands and artists have their natural limits, and it is only because the Byrds tend to get really overrated in certain critical circles that I find myself sometimes obliged to explain why I cannot bring myself to regard them in the same major league as the Beatles.

 

In my opinion, the Byrds were generally a better «singles band» than an «album band», despite the fact that Mr. Tambourine Man, even if it was named after their breakthrough single, was certainly not recorded according to the «one-two hit singles and a lot of filler» principle. It's just that the single does tower high above the other eleven songs here — the band's interpretation of Dylan's greatest merger of acoustic folk with psychedelic visions is one of the awesomest events from mid-1965, even if they only preserve one complete verse of the original due to the inevitable three-minute restriction on pop single length. There are these defining moments from that year — the fuzz blast of ʽSatisfactionʼ, the snare drum kick of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ, the stunning cry for aid of ʽHelp!ʼ — and the opening riff of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ is certainly one of them.

 

For me, there is no dilemma when it comes to the old, tired, and stupid question of "whose ver­sion do you prefer, Dylan's or the Byrds'?" — it is so much more exciting to simply look at the song from different angles than to put a dollar value on any of its avatars. The Byrds, it could be argued, have «tamed» and «dressed up» Dylan's roughly hewn masterpiece, converted it into a state of organized and disciplined beauty, carried it over from the Dionysian into the Apollonian field of existence. The musical arrangement, in fact, owes more to Phil Spector and the Beach Boys than to any folk musicians — and the vocal harmonies are more Smokey Robinson than even Peter, Paul, and Mary, if another folk analogy is required. But to say that this somehow «cheapens» the rough, direct, intimate, human, etc. atmosphere of the original would be just as ridiculously judgemental as stating the opposite ("oh, it sounds so much more melodic now, and Jim McGuinn has such a lovelier voice than Dylan's nasty rasp"). I just prefer to sit back and watch the sheer awesomeness of the power of intelligent conversion — the same way I can enjoy a really great Russian translation of a classic English novel, or vice versa.

 

As I said, my problem is with the rest of the album — that the Byrds offer a great, distinctive style, but stumble upon the problem of providing distinctiveness for its individual constituents (a.k.a. «songs»). At first, it seems like they have a great solution for the problem — namely, the songwriting skills of Gene Clark, and the decision to include ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot Betterʼ as the immediate follow-up to ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ was totally brilliant: there we have just stunned the world with the most imaginative and innovative reinvention of a great Dylan song yet, and here we have our own young aspiring songwriter who can write a «fuck off, unfaithful bitch» type song as if he himself were Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and a bunch of Everly Brothers all in one. Okay, he is a bit clumsy on the verses ("The reason why / Oh I can say / I have to let you go / And right away" isn't exactly a Joycian type of handling the English syntax), but he also says "I'll probably feel a whole lot better when you're gone" rather than just "I'll feel...", which, when you come to think of it, is actually a huge advance on the lyrical front. And that guitar solo — they're just playing one riff over and over, instead of copping Chuck Berry licks, but it weaves in so nicely with the rhythm, so fluently and melodically, it's like wow, you never really heard any of that on Searchers records. Two songs into the album, and you already begin to think that Bob is God, and Gene Clark is his Prophet, and we're entering a new era when the infidels from the British Invasion will finally be pushed out, and purity of faith restored.

 

The problem is that the band's bag of tricks seems exhausted with those first two songs: every­thing else ranges from «very pleasant» to «almost great», but essentially follows the established stylistic patterns. The insane success of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ meant that from now on, the Byrds would be expected to cover more Dylan — but already the second single, ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ, is less convincing and maybe even somewhat of a misstep, because they took a straightforward joke number and turned it into a catchy, but humorless jangle-pop number, and no matter how Apollonian it is made, ʽAll I Really Want To Doʼ really cannot survive without a strong sense of humor to go along with it. ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ, in comparison, is quite fantastic, but tailored so strictly in agreement with the recipe of ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ that the dreaded word «formula» cannot be avoided.

 

Clark, too, writes in accordance with a formula, but at least he has different subvariants of it: ʽYou Won't Have To Cryʼ is a tender song of consolation, ʽHere Without Youʼ is a sad song of loneliness, ʽI Knew I'd Want Youʼ is a chivalrous serenade, and ʽIt's No Useʼ is the fastest and hardest rocking tune on the entire album, with an almost garage-like lead part and such a harsh, decisive resolution of the vocal melody that the message is perfectly carried over — "it's no use saying you're gonna stay if you don't want our love to live", period. (So much for chivalrous sere­nades and tender songs of consolation). They are all catchy, pretty, and have enough lyrical quirks to be regarded as «progressive stuff» for mid-'65, but in the end, they seem to somewhat dissipate the enthusiasm generated by ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot Betterʼ than multiply it. With the possible exception of ʽIt's No Useʼ — I've always liked that one's sharp energy shot in compari­son with the rather limp overall flow of the record. (Should have invited Dave Davies over to play the guitar solo, though).

 

The choice of non-Dylan covers is cool: ʽBells Of Rhymneyʼ honestly confirms the band's link with Green­wich Village (although, shame on me, I've always found its three-and-a-half minute length somewhat overlong — they are left with nothing new to say after the first verse is over); Jackie DeShannon's ʽDon't Doubt Yourself, Babeʼ confirms the band's link with... the Searchers? (but how amusing it is, actually, to find out that the coda of the song has been lifted from the Stones' version of ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ!); and the decision to end the record with the age-old ʽWe'll Meet Againʼ is symbolic on so many levels — not only is this one of the first rock band arrangements of a non-folk pre-war song, and a suitable goodbye song to add a bit of conceptua­lity to the LP, but it's also a not-so-thinly-veiled signal to their British friends (and competitors) across the ocean. An encoded ironic hello to Lennon and McCartney? Who knows, really. But here's a fun coincidence: Vera Lynn was the first UK performer to top the American charts, and the Byrds were the first American band to top the British charts (not the first American artist in general, I believe, but still...). The 12-string guitar strikes back.

 

All said, the criticisms in this review should not be taken too harshly: yes, the Byrds had a for­mula, but it was a fabulous formula, and for what it's worth, musically Mr. Tambourine Man is heads and tails above, for instance, that whole indie college rock scene of the Eighties (yes, R.E.M. included, you Eighties nuts!) which was so heavily influenced by McGuinn and his pals. In 1965, there were two brands of pure organized beauty in America — the heavenly brand of the Beach Boys and the earthly brand of the Byrds — and even if organized beauty can seem boring when taken in mass quantities, a Byrds song a day still keeps the cynic away. So if you thought the final verdict was going to be anything other than a major thumbs up, you're as mistaken as anybody who has ever taken the phrase I HATE PINK FLOYD much too literally.

  

TURN! TURN! TURN! (1965)

 

1) Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season); 2) It Won't Be Wrong; 3) Set You Free This Time; 4) Lay Down Your Weary Tune; 5) He Was A Friend Of Mine; 6) The World Turns All Around Her; 7) Satisfied Mind; 8) If You're Gone; 9) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 10) Wait And See; 11) Oh! Susannah.

 

The Byrds' second album is a classic example of «the sophomore slump» — rushing somewhat prematurely back into the comforts of the recording studio to capitalize upon the success of Mr. Tambourine Man, they had not the time, strength, or will to think about «where do we go from here?», and ended up with what is essentially a weaker twin brother of the debut. More Dylan; more covers; older songs from the bottom of the barrel; no creative advances whatsoever — if this band were of a slightly lesser caliber, the album would have been a resounding suckjob. For­tunately, even a subpar Byrds album circa 1965 was still a Byrds album.

 

If there is one single defining difference, it is that this record is far more objectively «folk-rock» than its predecessor. There are only two Dylan covers this time (another one, ʽIt's All Over Now Baby Blueʼ, was also recorded, but ultimately rejected), and all the included covers are, one way or another, «traditional» (in fact, I almost forgot initially that ʽLay Down Your Weary Tuneʼ was also a Dylan song — considering how it was directly influenced by some Scottish ballad). This is not necessarily a good thing — it means that, for a while at least, The Byrds were only too happy to fit in the image created for them by the musical press, and conform to stereotypes where their major idol, Mr. Zimmerman, would be only too happy to break them. Then again, it is easy to forget that even Mr. Zimmerman had to play his cards with care in the early years, and that his post-breakthrough album (The Times They Are A-Changin') was even more stereotypical than Turn! Turn! Turn!; so who could blame these lads? It takes some financial and public image stability to grow some clout.

 

Anyway, the real problem is not that this is «too much folk rock», but that there are no obvious standouts — the album flows smoothly and steadily, consistently pretty and engaging to a degree, but hardly cathartic or mind-blowing. The title track is the only one that has endured as a radio classic, due to its high ambitiousness — a folk-rock anthem for peace with connections to Pete Seeger and Ecclesiastes is, after all, no laughing matter, and it became the band's second and last #1 hit on the charts, not to mention King Solomon's greatest moment of glory. But I have never liked it as much as ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ — the Byrds instinctively understood the seduction powers of the latter, and used their harmonic gift to bring them out in full, whereas ʽTurn! Turn! Turn!ʼ is a sermon that lacks intimacy, and though the verse melody ("a time to be born, a time to die...") is harmonious and formally beautiful, it does not connect on that deepest of deepest pos­sible levels. It's also overlong. Four minutes? Why wasn't ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ four minutes? They could have included a whole other verse!

 

It is, however, observable that Gene Clark is maturing as a songwriter. Not deviating from the folk rock formula, he contributes three tunes that all go a step or two beyond the still relatively simplistic pop numbers on Mr. Tambourine Man. ʽThe World Turns All Around Herʼ is melo­dically and lyrically more complex than ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot Betterʼ, to which it could be con­sidered a logical and ironic sequel (as the protagonist finds that, curious as it is, he is not feeling a whole lot better when she's gone). ʽSet You Free This Timeʼ seems simple and repetitive, but oh that vocal part — out of nowhere, you have this bittersweet, quivering-but-struggling vocal that has to be sustained through the long winding verse melody, and makes the song seem like the first truly serious «breakup song» of the young rock band era. My favorite is ʽIf You're Goneʼ, with another stunning vocal and... how the hell do they have that weird hum going on while Gene is singing? Sounds like vocal harmonies recorded from the bottom of a well or something. Do they have deep wells in Columbia Studios? In any case, I'm pretty damn sure that these effects on backing vocals had never been used previously, not by any major artist, at least.

 

(Two more Clark songs did not make it onto the LP, but are available as bonus tracks on the re­gular CD edition — ʽShe Don't Care About Timeʼ is another romantic classic, but ʽThe Day Walk (Never Before)ʼ seems largely to get by on the strength of copping the ʽSatisfactionʼ riff, and is noticeably inferior to the rest of Gene's songs, which is probably why it was left off; no need to suspect envy or sabotage on this particular occasion).

 

McGuinn still languishes far behind in comparison as a songwriter (his two originals here are fairly lackluster), but not as a visionary — the decision, for instance, to reinvent ʽHe Was A Friend Of Mineʼ as an obituary to JFK, though clearly naïve in retrospect, is one of those «why folk music still matters today» moves that kept the whole thing alive and vibrant at the time. And ʽOh! Susannahʼ, this time around, closes the album on a joke note, even if McGuinn couldn't really sing in joke mode to save his life, so there's a bizarre desperation to his vocals on the verses, you just want to lend him a helping hand or something.

 

In a way, it may be so that Turn! Turn! Turn! captures the essence of the early Byrds tighter than Mr. Tambourine Man — by purging away some of the more obvious Beatles influences, and focusing more sternly on the American side of business. But then, of course, you can always make the argument that by purging those influences they tipped the balance a bit too far in the «folk» direction of «folk rock», and this made the songs less memorable and the whole experi­ence less fun. (I know I could certainly have been made more happy with something like ʽIt's No Useʼ on this record). And ultimately, it's one of those mood swing things, I guess. The record clearly deserves a thumbs up and a solid place in the canon, but in the context of the times... well, just remember the distance between Help! and Rubber Soul, or between Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, and against that top level background, the Byrds weren't really doing all that great in late '65. Fortunately, they had the intuition to understand it.

 

FIFTH DIMENSION (1966)

 

1) 5D (Fifth Dimension); 2) Wild Mountain Thyme; 3) Mr. Spaceman; 4) I See You; 5) What's Happening; 6) I Come And Stand At Every Door; 7) Eight Miles High; 8) Hey Joe; 9) Captain Soul; 10) John Riley; 11) 2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song).

 

For some reason, the general critical consensus seems to have had a bone with the Byrds' third album from the very beginning, and even today it is usually described as an «uneven», «transi­tional» record that lacks both the freshness and inspiration of their first two efforts and the art-pop perfection of Younger Than Yesterday. I have never seen it that way myself — not only am I still enjoying the absolute majority of the tunes here, but in a way, Fifth Dimension is the Byrds album for me: that one collection of musical ideas where they really showed the world that they could not only invent a successful musical formula, but they could also transcend it, and par­ticipate in the «great progressive race» of the mid-Sixties along with the best of 'em. This is their Revolver, if you wish, and it actually came out before Revolver, so there.

 

The high quality of the music is all the more astounding considering that it was recorded in the wake of the band's first (but far from the last) great cataclysm — the departure of Gene Clark due, among other things, to his fear of flying (as a mocking parting gift, this is reflected in the band's decision to finish the record with ʽThe Lear Jet Songʼ). His only contribution, ironically, is yet another song about the strangeness of flying (ʽEight Miles Highʼ), with McGuinn and Crosby both taking additional credits, even if no one really knows how justified that was (well, I guess at least McGuinn deserves plenty of credit for the famous guitar solo). This explains the continuing high ratio of cover material — but the covers are mostly good, and beyond that, Clark's departure did stimulate McGuinn and Crosby to develop their own songwriting talents.

 

Most importantly, though, Fifth Dimension simultaneously takes The Byrds in more direc­tions (dimensions?) than any other of their albums. Word of the day is diversity, as if they themselves looked back in horror at the clonish nature of Turn! Turn! Turn! and said, «if we go on this way, we'll never catch up with them Beatles», and now they are firing all the cannons at once. There's still some of the old trusty jingle-jangle folk-rock vibe, of course (title track; ʽI Come And Stand At Every Doorʼ), but there's also lushly orchestrated art-pop (ʽWild Mountain Thymeʼ), psyche­delic rock with jazz and Indian influences (ʽEight Miles Highʼ, ʽI See Youʼ), speedy, catchy, quirky country-pop (ʽMr. Spacemanʼ), Booker T.-influenced R&B with jagged edges (ʽCaptain Soulʼ), and even a pre-Hendrix version of ʽHey Joeʼ so that they could always say that they were first, and pout their lips to the max.

 

You could join the chorus of disappointed grunts and point out individual problems with these songs — the sound is too thin, the grooves are too repetitive, Crosby overacts like an idiot while singing ʽHey Joeʼ — but instead of picking at minutiae, I recommend simply embracing this uni­verse as a whole, and getting the most of it. See Jim McGuinn invent the motif of the «space cowboy» with ʽMr. Spacemanʼ, a song that sounds as if it should have been a hit for Buck Owens, but is actually a ten-years-early theme for Close Encounters Of The Third Kind! Watch him set a poem by Nâzım Hikmet to a morbidly slow-waltzing theme and reimagine the lyrics as coming from the ghost mouth of a 7-year old victim of Hiroshima! Revel in the wind-gusty string swoops of ʽWild Mountain Thymeʼ as they smash into the guitar jingle-jangle that bravely withstands each new assault! And look, David Crosby can actually write a song that has a steady, fast rhythm and a catchy vocal melody to go along with the famous «lost in time and space, and loving it» Crosby vibe. Even Yes would admire it to the point of covering the song on their first album — something they'd probably never dream of doing over the likes of ʽAlmost Cut My Hairʼ.

 

It is probably the towering awesomeness of ʽEight Miles Highʼ — eight-mile towering, right? — that forms this impression that the entire album is centered around one song, and everything else is just filler in comparison. (Much the same way people like to dismiss Sgt. Pepper as an album that really only has one great song on it — you know which one). Naturally, ʽEight Miles Highʼ is a classic and a milestone: with its Indian raga and Coltrane influences, it invents The Velvet Underground before there was a proper Velvet Underground, and the combined effect of hard-rocking rhythm guitars, droning leads, and stratospheric lyrics unequivocally makes this one of the defining tracks of 1966, along with ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ (a song that seems to pursue much the same goals, albeit in a totally different manner). However, it is just because the song's innovative gamble is thrust straight in your face here — the tasks that are accomplished on the other songs are more subtle and humble, and may take a little time to appreciate.

 

I even hold a high opinion on ʽCaptain Soulʼ, a jammy blues-rock instrumental that should not normally be associated with the likes of The Byrds — but I've always admired the energy level on it, as two lead guitars and one wailing harmonica compete for attention like a trio of brawny, unrestrained kids. Were this a real Booker T. & The M.G.'s jam, they would only let one instru­ment solo at a time, and the solo would be all restrained and dignified and potentially quite boring. These guys, on the other hand, make it feel like a garage happening — all the more exciting coming from a bunch of «softies»... in a way, you can almost feel the seeds of the classic Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young live electric jams planted on this track, or at least understand why Stills and Young even bothered letting ol' Cros' in on their little games.

 

Of course, Crosby can be a weak link at times — the band's version of ʽHey Joeʼ is dramatically overwrought and rushed, never even hoping to be as doom-laden and imposing as the Hendrix cover; and ʽWhat's Happening?!?!ʼ already goes over the top with psychedelic «Indian» guitars, a process that would reach rather an ugly culmination on next year's ʽMind Gardensʼ. But even so, ʽWhat's Happening?!?!ʼ is hardly worse than, say, any random Love track from 1966-67, and at this point, Crosby is still conservatively writing structured songs rather than impressionist fantasies which would eventually become his primary, if not only, style of writing. Moreover, he had not yet grown his walrus moustache yet, so there's really no need to worry.

 

Maybe a few of the idealistic / psychedelic touches here have dated rather poorly — particularly the lyrics of the title track, with its clichéd references to "my two dimensional boundaries" and "scientific delirium madness" — but only a few, and they are no more than cute bookmarks of a time when child-like earnestness in popular music could be a source for inspiration rather than immediate derision. In their own way, The Byrds were doing here the same thing that The Beach Boys were doing with Pet Sounds (I mean, if I already mentioned Revolver, it was only a matter of time before a reference to Pet Sounds would show up, right?), although their vision was more expansionist and «macrocos­mic» at the time — even boy-girl relations are seen here as requiring the mediation of an extra dimension. After all, what kind of square loser would want to have sex in 1966 without the added benefit of certain chemical substances?..

 

Even the bonus tracks on the CD release are excellent — an early version of the dreamy pop rocker ʽWhy?ʼ, an electric pop reimagining of the traditional ʽI Know My Riderʼ with a riff that sounds sus­piciously similar to the Beatles' ʽDr. Robertʼ, and Crosby's talking psychedelic blues ʽPsychodrama Cityʼ with another bunch of those messy, chaotic, avant-jazz solos. But why is that final track dubbed as an «instrumental» version of ʽJohn Rileyʼ? It sounds nothing like ʽJohn Rileyʼ. Just a fast groove with even more jazzy guitar playing. (Could have been a nice move, though, if it were spliced with the actual ʽJohn Rileyʼ, speeding and jazzifying it up after three original minutes of electrofolk prettiness).

 

As far as I'm concerned, Fifth Dimension is the ultimate Byrds experience — not a «perfect» album (the Byrds don't have a perfect album), but one that gives you everything they could do well, shows you how much of a vision they had, and never ever creates the impression of this band as a one-trick pony. Diehard fans of the jingle-jangle, who think the band lost its strength as long as it stayed away from the jingle-jangle, will indeed prefer 1965 or 1967 to 1966; but those who really think that The Byrds are worthy of their own legend, and that in their prime they were able to rival the scope of The Beatles, at least in «mini-mode», will just have to agree that Fifth Dimension is really where it's at, and accept the significance of this particular thumbs up.

 

YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY (1967)

 

1) So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Star; 2) Have You Seen Her Face; 3) C.T.A.-102; 4) Renaissance Fair; 5) Time Between; 6) Everybody's Been Burned; 7) Thoughts And Words; 8) Mind Gardens; 9) My Back Pages; 10) The Girl With No Name; 11) Why.

 

Although this album (actually recorded at the end of 1966 — still in the «Revolver era» rather than the much-mutated «Sgt. Pepper era») is very frequently listed as the pinnacle of the Byrds' career, I have always belonged to the small minority that regards it as a tiny step down from the heights of Fifth Dimension — at least in terms of innovation and diversity, if not overall song quality. Where Fifth Dimension, with all its minor faults, broke The Byrds out of the eggshell of their early formula and opened them to the many ways of the world, on Younger Than Yester­day you can sort of see the beginnings (only the beginnings) of their retreading back to a slightly different, but still monolithic eggshell. At the very same time, you also see signs of serious ten­sion between band members that ultimately led to the band's enclosing itself in a rigid niche, and then simply disintegrating because nobody cared any more.

 

If these sound like undeservedly harsh words for an introduction to a great album, let me stress that the idea is not so much to defame Younger Than Yesterday as it is to restore justice for Fifth Dimension. My only concrete problem (as opposed to the abstract construction of an idea­listic «progress curve») with this record is one song and one song only, and yes, you guessed right: David Crosby strikes again! Last time around, it was the clumsy arrangement and the exag­gerated vocal antics on ʽHey Joeʼ — this time, it is ʽMind Gardensʼ, unquestionably the worst track ever that classic-era Byrds put on tape. In fact, it was one of those ʽRevolution #9ʼ-type moments, where everybody except the contributing artist hated the track, but did not have enough willpower to veto its inclusion.

 

Crosby himself later argued that the hatred was simply due to backwardness — that his band­mates were appalled about including something that did not have either rhyme or rhythm — but, of course, this is just a bunch of crapola; in fact, Crosby himself would later come up with plenty of far, far better compositions that had neither rhyme nor rhythm, but compensated for this with beautiful atmospherics. ʽMind Gardensʼ, however, sounds like something where the overriding itch was to compose, record, and release a track without rhyme or rhythm, period. (Actually, the underlying guitar melody does have plenty of rhythm, to be precise — it's just not a very interes­ting guitar melody, and David largely referred to the vocals, of course). The lyrics, which sound like they were largely influenced by Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant (yet still find a clichéd oppor­tunity to throw in a reference to "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune", just for kicks), are almost intentionally primitive in their psychedelic-moralistic imagery; the singing is annoyingly shamanistic and shows that Cros never properly finished his crash course in tribal incantations; and worst of all, very soon you find yourself surrounded by a swarm of discordant backward gui­tar solos that make the whole experience physically painful (there is an alternate version among the bonus tracks of the CD reissue that seriously tones down this hideous buzz, but still does not completely resolve the problem). Basically, the only kind words I have to say about this monstro­sity is that it makes the following ʽMy Back Pagesʼ sound twice as angelic by contrast.

 

All the more curious is the fact that, outside of ʽMind Gardensʼ, the remainder of Crosby's con­tributions for this record are fairly nice — ʽEverybody's Been Burnedʼ is a beautiful three-minute long introspection on the matter of broken relationships, with two somber minor key guitar parts weaving around each other and a perfectly melancholic vocal serenade from David himself. (The song is said to have been written as early as 1962, but I guess its «torch song» genre characteris­tics and the lack of a proper chorus could not help but delay its release); and ʽRenaissance Fairʼ, inspired by an actual trip to the original South Californian Renaissance Fair, is one of Crosby's catchiest compositions — based on a real riff, for once, if not a particularly inventive one; its starry-eyed refrain of "I think that maybe I'm dreaming..." should count as one of the most trend-defining, uh, starry-eyed magical moments of 1967, especially in its retro-futuristic perception of Elizabethan decor as suitable garb for the new psychedelic era.

 

At the same time with Crosby reaching his songwriting peak (even if it does result in a few exces­ses), we also have Chris Hillman emerging as a distinct songwriter in his own right — and pul­ling the band in a completely different direction: the country-rock style. ʽTime Betweenʼ and ʽThe Girl With No Nameʼ, with their steel guitars, banjo-imitating guitars, and perky tempos, are two prime examples of the Byrds' early venturing into hillbilly territory, and, honestly, sound like fairly generic country to me (I do actually prefer the Beatles doing ʽWhat Goes Onʼ — they have Ringo singing on it, and it's kinda funny). However, Hillman is able to do better than that: ʽHave You Seen Her Faceʼ is a fine slice of jangly pop (the intro alone sounds like a blueprint to a good half of Big Star's career), and the sleeping masterpiece here is ʽThoughts And Wordsʼ, which somehow manages to combine both the country-rock and the art-pop idioms, throwing in a moody psychedelic hum effect — it's like the Byrds' ʽThings We Said Todayʼ multiplied by the trippy production values of Revolver. On this song, the backward guitars actually work. See how they kick in as the second chorus starts up its "I knew what you wanted to do"... yep, you wanted to drive me nuts by jamming jagged shards of backward guitars in my ears. You don't spoil lovely melancholic music with brute ugliness unless you have a good reason, and Hillman at least pre­tends to have one — it's all about a lovely beginning and a rather brutal ending.

 

And we have not yet mentioned the McGuinn/Hillman lead-off ʽSo You Want To Be A Rock­'n'Roll Starʼ, one of the first and bitterest sarcastic takes on rock stardom by rock stars themselves; or the sci-fi noises on ʽC.T.A.-102ʼ, a more than respectable successor to ʽThe Lear Jet Songʼ; or the new re-recording of Crosby's ʽWhyʼ, released earlier as a single and now sounding very much like Martha & The Vandellas' ʽHeatwaveʼ because we can; or ʽMy Back Pagesʼ, which tends to get my vote as the band's second best Dylan cover (and this time, they actually have enough space to cover four out of six original verses) — McGuinn's vocals are not always capable of capturing, let alone expanding upon, the magic of the original, particularly when they cover hu­morous or battle-oriented songs, but «Dylan the transcendental visionary» always comes off fine, and rarely, if ever, finer than on these "crimson flames tied through my years"...

 

And it all happens within an almost embarrassing twenty-nine minutes — in 29 minutes here, these guys say more than most modern bands say in 10 years. Amazing how fast things were really moving back in 1967, isn't it? (The bonus tracks aren't particularly phenomenal this time, but they do include ʽLady Friendʼ, the last substantial Crosby-penned single they released, and a couple more early excursions into country-rock with Hillman). Although, supposedly, this still has something to do with the conservative peculiarities of the American LP market, which rarely thought its customers worth more than 30 minutes of music per vinyl chunk. (Unless your artist was Dylan, who just couldn't shut up — ironically, though also predictably, Bob would begin releasing his own under-30-minute albums exactly at a time when this restriction was finally and completely lifted).

 

So where, if you might ask, are those «retreading» signs that I mentioned earlier? Well, essential­ly you see two main trends sometimes peacefully co-existing, sometimes battling here — Cros­by's psychedelic vision and Hillman's «earthy» style, with McGuinn clearly more seduced about the latter than the former. Crosby would eventually lose, and for good reason — all these songs are really much more about solo Crosby than the Byrds as a band, far more so, in fact, than even John Lennon's latter-day Beatles material (more like as if Lennon were to offer songs like ʽMo­therʼ or ʽGodʼ for Beatles albums). Hillman would win — and complete the Byrds' transfor­mation into The Country Turf Preservation Society, which would still be a fairly pleasant society, to be sure, but quite far from the all-powerful eclectic deities of American rock that they were for a very brief period in 1966.

 

On a song-by-song basis, Younger Than Yesterday is as strong as anything else they did in their peak period — however, it does not have either a ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ or an ʽEight Miles Highʼ to symbolize a particular major breakthrough (ʽSo You Want To Be...ʼ comes somewhat close, with its send-up of the pop star image and Hugh Masekela on the trumpet, but does not exactly have the majesty of those two other singles), because there are no major breakthroughs here. Which, on a personal level, should not prevent anybody from simply enjoying the excellent music. Alternately, it may just be an intense hatred for ʽMind Gardensʼ that spoils and distorts my perception: honestly, I'd rather have Crosby re-recording ʽHey Joeʼ in a duet with Iggy Pop rather than having to listen to this atrocity, which I count among the same «1967 excesses» as the Ani­mals' Winds Of Change, even one more time. Regardless, thumbs up are still guaranteed all the way — on the already overloaded shelf of classic records from that wonder year, Younger Than Yesterday will always have a secure place of honor.

 

THE NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS (1968)

 

1) Artificial Energy; 2) Goin' Back; 3) Natural Harmony; 4) Draft Morning; 5) Wasn't Born To Follow; 6) Get To You; 7) Change Is Now; 8) Old John Robertson; 9) Tribal Gathering; 10) Dolphin's Smile; 11) Space Odyssey.

 

Although technically marked 1968, since it was released on January 15, the Byrds' fifth album still fully belongs in 1967 — on the whole, it is still far more «psychedelic», «baroque-poppy», and «experimental» than anything from the new back-to-roots era of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and beyond. It is also messy to the extreme, since the complete and irredeemable disintegration of the original Byrds took place right through the sessions — during which Crosby walked out, Michael Clarke walked in, Gene Clark came back, Michael Clarke walked out again, and Gene Clark walked out again, too. Not to mention dozens of sessions musicians walking in and out on a pay-per-hour basis. Or on just a good word.

 

Despite, or maybe thanks to all the turbulence, The Notorious Byrd Brothers has always fasci­nated the critical mind, and eventually turned into a «cult favorite» — people who think it too ob­vious to list Mr. Tambourine Man or Younger Than Yesterday as their favorite Byrds album often turn to this as an honorably elitist competitor. I am in no rush to join that chorus, though. It is true that this is really the last Byrds album where the band members are still trying to push their imagination to the limits, the last one where three different talents (McGuinn, Crosby, and Hillman) compete with each other and feed on each other at the same time, the last one that expli­citly rejects formula in favor of freedom. But it is not true that freedom is always preferable to formula — and The Notorious Byrd Brothers, in my opinion, could certainly benefit from a little more martial discipline than is on display.

 

It is somewhat telling that when it came to singles, the only track that was deemed qualifiable was a cover, and not even a Dylan cover, but their take on Goffin and King's ʽGoin' Backʼ, pre­viously known mostly in Dusty Springfield's arrangement. It is a classic number, to be sure, but other than replacing the «adult pop» version with keyboards and strings with a janglier and more percussion-heavy pop-rock arrangement, the band does not truly unlock anything here that Dusty had not already unlocked — the nostalgic pull towards the past coupled with gentle optimism for the future, as reflected in the elegant key changes of the melody. Even if we call this the «defini­tive version» of the song (to me, though, that would rather be Carole King's own take on her cre­ation on the Writer album), it is still a cover, and not a magically transformed one.

 

The band actually does much more with their second Goffin/King cover, ʽWasn't Born To Fol­lowʼ, which they saw as a fast-paced country-rock number (unlike Carole herself, who recorded it in a slow, gospel-tinged version in 1969, while still a member of «The City») — and it still did not prevent them from throwing in a few backward solos and put a heavy phasing effect on the instrumental passage, because, you know, playing straightforward country is kinda dull (an idea that had all but evaporated by the following year). However, even that song never truly goes be­yond «cute» — maybe it's all because of the vocals, so cuddly and fragile and monotonous.

 

The rest of the album is all left to original material, but next to the songs on Younger Than Yes­terday, these never seem to truly compete in terms of sharp, interesting ideas. Crosby, in parti­cular, is beginning to value social importance over musical integrity. His ʽDraft Morningʼ, an anti-Vietnam rumination on the fate of a nameless soldier, has no discernible musical theme, and although the vocals were completed by McGuinn and Hillman already after he'd been fired, the vocal melody is more enjoyable due to the pure beauty of their silky tones than to the actual lines they're singing — not to mention the totally pro forma, unconvincing and disruptive «war sound effects» in the instrumental part; as far as anti-war songs like these go, give me The Doors' ʽUn­known Soldierʼ over this one any day. ʽTribal Gatheringʼ, inspired by yet another hippie caucasus, is too short and simplistic to justify the «aura of deep mystery» intention of the author, sounding more like hippie lounge muzak than something to actively attune your brain to. And although I distinctly remember that ʽDolphin's Smileʼ sounded fresh and sparkly, a nice tune to wake up to on a bright summer morning when you want to start your life anew, the whole thing was just too hazy and hookless to ever find a proper place in my memory.

 

Ironically, Crosby's best song at the time was not only considered too risky to put on the album, but, in fact, seriously contributed to his decision to leave the band — and donate the song to Jefferson Airplane. As sung by Grace Slick, the version of ʽTriadʼ is still the definitive one, but the one that The Byrds did, eventually released on CD as a bonus track, holds up fairly well, too. And it isn't merely its controversial subject matter — "going on as three" is a fairly uncomfor­table notion even for 2015, although it is probably the next logical stage after gay rights — that makes it stand out, no; it has an excellent verse structure, with a double resolution of the vocal melody that, well, doubles the intrigue. There's a certain je ne sais quoi in that "...I don't really see why can't we go on as three" conclusion that almost makes you... you know... see the point and all. It's fairly disturbing and provocative on all fronts — no wonder that the nice country lads McGuinn and Hillman felt way too uncomfortable about something like that.

 

But what did they offer instead? Well, Hillman does write one of the album's best songs, ʽNatural Harmonyʼ, which goes against his country-rock reputation by actually sounding more like some­thing Crosby would write — jazzy, trippy, and featuring heavy use of the Moog synth, still very much a rarity in late 1967; however, his collaboration with McGuinn on ʽChange Is Nowʼ I can appreciate only a formal level. It does this novel trick of putting together folk, drone, psychedelia, and even a fast country-western part, but none of the parts are interesting on their own, and put­ting them together just feels like an empty experiment.

 

McGuinn does shine on his own on the opener, ʽArtificial Energyʼ, largely due to the powerful, anthemic brass section (famed session musician Richard Hyde on trombone); but his ʽSpace Ody­sseyʼ, concluding the album, is definitely an acquired taste. If the idea of a slow four-minute folk ballad from the highlands, overdubbed with all sorts of «deep space effects», instantaneously appeals to your cosmic cowboy psychology, you'll find it a masterpiece. Personally, I find it boring and tedious, a fairly dubious tribute to a fairly dubious piece of literature — and, for that matter, I also hold the opinion that of all Kubrick's movies, A Space Odyssey is also the one that has dated far more seriously than any other, let alone Arthur Clarke's prose.

 

All in all, maybe this entire album is very much an acquired taste, and one that I have lost all hope of acquiring. Nothing here is truly bad, with the exception of the last track, but the highs are lower than any previous highs, and other than the Goffin/King covers, there really isn't anything here that would unquestionably make it into my personal «best-of» collection. I still give the record a thumbs up out of respect — with the band in a state of near-collapse, it is amazing that they even had their minds set on experimentation and progress so much of the time — but let it also go on the official record that I continue not to share the hype, and generally like my Byrds when they are more polished and focused than when they are in a state of disarray.

 

SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO (1968)

 

1) You Ain't Going Nowhere; 2) I Am A Pilgrim; 3) The Christian Life; 4) You Don't Miss Your Water; 5) You're Still On My Mind; 6) Pretty Boy Floyd; 7) Hickory Wind; 8) One Hundred Years From Now; 9) Blue Canadian Rockies; 10) Life In Prison; 11) Nothing Was Delivered.

 

The sweetheart in question turned out to be male: Mr. Ingram Cecil Connor The Third of Winter Haven, Florida, better known as Gram Parsons, the father of country-rock and a respectable mem­ber of Club 27 (26, to be more precise). Although he was originally recruited by The Byrds as a keyboard player (to play jazz piano, no less!), he soon moved to guitar, then to songwriting, then to musical ideology, and, according to some sources, ended up nearly wrestling control over the band from McGuinn; when that failed, he quit in protest over the band's touring engagements in apartheid-rule South Africa — though some suspected it was largely just a pretext. You never know for sure with these things, anyway.

 

We all know the drill: McGuinn wanted the next Byrds album to be a sprawling overview of all the genres of American pop music, from the early days and well into the future, but abandoned the project — due partly to the lack of a proper budget and support from the rest of the band, and partly due to Parsons' insistence to turn specifically to country. Spilling tears over Roger's unrea­lized project is useless, since we do not even know whether he was properly qualified for this; but neither would I agree to succumb to waves of critical respect for this album. Released in August 1968, it marked a sharp commercial decline in the band's fortune. Rock audiences of the time were not prepared for any radical «country twists», and although The Byrds weren't really doing any­thing that their major idol, Mr. Zimmerman, hadn't already done with John Wesley Harding and those parts of the Basement Tapes that were already circulating among devotees, their whole­sale conversion to the Nashville spirit was not greeted with too much pleasure by record buyers, even if critical reviews seemed to be relatively benevolent.

 

The historical status of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo — the first LP release by a major established «pop/rock» artist to consistently, rather than sporadically, embrace the country idiom, and without any traces of irony at that — is indisputable, as is its social importance: a sincere attempt to bridge the gap between the rural and the urban, the conservative and the progressive, the hillbilly and the hippie. The Byrds may have gotten their fair share of flack for this gesture, from both the hillbilly and the hippie side, but this is the predictable fate of all fence-sitters, sacrificing them­selves while gambling on humanity's future. What matters far more is how well the record holds up after all these years — and this is where I continue to have my doubts.

 

Curiously, it does continue to have its fanbase among the rockers, usually along the lines of "well, I'm not much of a country fan, but I have nothing against country if it's done right, and this is one such case". Well, the thing is, I'm not sure how this here version of ʽLife In Prisonʼ is done more right than Merle Haggard's; or how this particular performance of ʽYou're Still On My Mindʼ carries more energy and excitement than George Jones' rendition of it. The Byrds pick a solid set of tunes — as far as country goes, these songs mostly have interesting vocal hooks, though the base melodies are predictably generic waltzes and shuffles. McGuinn, Hillman, and Parsons sing the tunes with enough conviction, guest guitarist Clarence White does the Nashville shtick with gusto, it's all fine and dandy, but... ultimately, it's just a cover album of country tunes.

 

Sure there are a few originals, mostly courtesy of Parsons, but I have never understood and still do not understand the adoration for ʽHickory Windʼ, a song whose compositional virtues amount to precisely zero (it is just a regular country waltz), lyrical virtues consist of clichés ("hickory wind keeps callin' me home" is not exactly a breakthrough in country lyricism), and musical ar­rangement is not fundamentally different from similar arrangements for hundreds of country songs (fiddles, slide guitars, honky tonk piano, you know the drill). The only thing standing for it is Parsons' presence, I guess — if you are enchanted by the man's lonesome-hero charisma — but it's not as if he had a totally unique singing voice or presence, either. For my money, his other original, ʽOne Hundred Years From Nowʼ, beats ʽHickory Windʼ on all counts — less obvious vocal melody (the verse melody actually pinches a bit from ʽGod Only Knowsʼ, don't you think?), psycho-folk harmonic singing from McGuinn and Hillman, and overall, a clever mixture of folk, country, pop, and psychedelic elements.

 

Ironically, the Byrds are still at their best when they rely on the tried and true — covering Dylan, that is. ʽYou Ain't Going Nowhereʼ, a perfect opener for the album, does the usual wonder of converting Bob's natural ugly beauty into smooth-glamorous pop perfection, with there being enough free space in the world to allow for both visions. Here, we have the most heartfelt and sensitive McGuinn vocal performance on the album, and a vivacious, elegantly woven steel guitar lead melody as his lovin' partner throughout the song, and those "ooh-wee, ride my high, tomor­row's the day my bride's gonna come" harmonies are a downright epitome of tenderness itself. Basically, they took a Dylan song that began life as an absurdist ode to nihilism and turned it into an optimistic love anthem, while still retaining some of that absurdism. And then, in a sudden fit of symmetry, they close out the album with a bitter reversal of these feelings — having started out with "get your mind on wintertime, you ain't going nowhere", they end the record on "the sooner you come up with it, the sooner you can leave" (ʽNothing Was Deliveredʼ) and a sort of disillusioned atmosphere (which, incidentally, is also how I feel about this record).

 

The problem is, they know how to reinvent Dylan, but they never had a good idea about how to reinvent Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard, or Cindy Walker — they just cover them, retaining the original spirits of these songs. The whole point of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo is to shock the audiences along the lines of "see, we're rockers, but we're doing country, how unusual is that?": this attitude was even incorporated into the promotional campaign, as you can see from the ori­ginal radio promotion bit, hidden at the end of the last bonus track on the CD reissue — as bits and pieces of songs flow out of the speaker, a girl and a guy argue with each other: "It is the Byrds! — That's not the Byrds... — Okay, listen to this one! See, it is the Byrds! They're playing Dylan! — It can't be the Byrds! Play another one... — It's the Byrds all right! — Nah, that ain't the Byrds..." I regret to say that sometimes it seems to me this radio bit carries more fun with it than the majority of the record itself.

 

Anyway, these are mostly decent tunes (though lyrically, ʽThe Christian Lifeʼ is atrocious, and McGuinn must have lost plenty of credibility with his friends for that one), and only people with a very strong anti-Nashville bias could hate Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. But shuffle these tunes around a bunch of top (or even middle) quality country albums, and if there's some way in which they will notably stand out, let me know. As far as I'm concerned, Sweetheart is an ideological gesture first, and a collection of musical pieces second — which doesn't do much for a record in the long run. Interesting and curious, yes, not without its few moments of Dylanesque glory, yes, but essentially the band just shot itself in the foot with this one, and ended up hobbling for the next three years of its existence.

 

DR. BYRDS & MR. HYDE (1969)

 

1) This Wheel's On Fire; 2) Old Blue; 3) Your Gentle Way Of Loving Me; 4) Child Of The Universe; 5) Nashville West; 6) Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man; 7) King Apathy III; 8) Candy; 9) Bad Night At The Whiskey; 10) Medley: My Back Pages / B. J. Blues / Baby What You Want Me To Do.

 

Finally, we move on to the very last chapter of the transformational history of The Byrds. With Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons departing to form The Flying Burrito Brothers, the only sur­viving member is Roger McGuinn, and his new team includes Gene Parsons (no relation to Gram) on drums, John Yorke on bass, and Clarence White on guitar (Clarence had previously sat in with the band on some of the 1968 sessions, and had already joined the band as a replacement for Gram Parsons in the brief interim when Hillman still remained an active member). But even though the new musicians are all quite decent, it took some time before the whole thing clicked, and Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde shows a certain lack of direction.

 

Actually, my biggest problem with this record is that there are way too many McGuinn originals, and most of them — nay, all of them — are deeply problematic. ʽChild Of The Universeʼ? Lots of lyrical pretentiousness, a touch of grand pathos provided by the booming percussion fills and Spanish guitar lead fills, but the melodic drone is just too monotonous and the transitions between verse and chorus too un-dynamic to make you go wow — and let's face it, if a song called ʽChild Of The Universeʼ does not make you go wow, too bad for the song, not the universe.

 

ʽKing Apathy IIIʼ is an even stranger and clumsier experiment that sews together a fast blues-rock verse with a slow country-western bridge — the song has a very clear lyrical message, in which Mc­Guinn renounces the "middle class suburban children" who "blindly follow recent pipers" and states that "I'm leavin' for the country, to try and rest my head", and it's his choice and all, but illustrating it with a poorly joined-at-the-hip mix of generic bluesy psychedelia with generic country waltz is at best boring symbolism, and at worst an embarrassment in both genres (let alone all the condescending remarks about "liberal reactionaries" who are busy "slowing down their B. B. King" — not quite on the level of Lennon's "fuckin' peasants" yet, but slowly getting there, although at least Lennon could sound real passionate about the issue).

 

Hilariously, McGuinn manages to offend both the progressive liberals and the hillbilly conserva­tives on the album: ʽKing Apathy IIIʼ is the immediate follow-up to ʽDrug Store Truck Drivin' Manʼ, a remainder of the McGuinn/Parsons collaboration that rhymed the song title with "the head of the Ku Klux Klan", was inspired by a clash with the obnoxious Nashville DJ Ralph Emery, and must have probably been a sweet, sweet joy to perform during the band's tour of the Bible Belt (just joking — actually, they preferred California, but whether they dared perform ʽKing Apathy IIIʼ there, I have no idea; then again, most of the hippies would probably be way too stoned to notice the words). Not that it's a particularly good song, either, but at least it sort of evens the odds for representatives of both parties. See, Roger McGuinn doesn't really like anyone, so what's the big surprise about the album selling more poorly than ever before?

 

In the light of these and other, not much better, failures at decent songwriting, the best thing about Dr. Byrds are its covers — starting with the hard rock of ʽThis Wheel's On Fireʼ, for which Clarence recorded a heavily distorted, brutally angry guitar part that suits the song's lightly apo­calyptic mood very well (the CD reissue adds an alternate take with a much lighter guitar arran­gement if you insist that hard rock and Byrds should never mix, but I don't think we need be so strictly prejudiced). Contextually, that track is pretty deceptive — the sequencing contrast be­tween its angry roar and the following sentimental country tweeting of ʽOld Blueʼ may be the single sharpest contrast in Byrds history — but I suppose it made some sense, to try and demolish the perception that from now on, the Byrds are a «country band», period. However, most of the other covers are country, with songs like ʽYour Gentle Way Of Loving Meʼ and the speedy in­strumental ʽNashville Westʼ totally belonging on Sweetheart and, in fact, being better than most of the stuff on Sweetheart (ʽNashville Westʼ has some pretty pleasing guitar interplay).

 

Still, by the time they get to the odd closing medley that puts Bob Dylan and Jimmy Reed on the same stage (how do ʽMy Back Pagesʼ, a song that the real Byrds already had recorded, belong together with ʽBaby What Do You Want Me To Doʼ? Nohow is the answer), by the time they do this, the overall impression of Dr. Byrds is that of a total mess. There are enough talented people here to guarantee that it works in bits and pieces, but they don't know where to go. They know where they don't want to go, all right — they don't want to engage in drugged-out hippie psyche­delia, and they don't want to fit in with the Nashville crowds, but they are unable to work out a true new musical genre that would take the best from both worlds, filter out the excesses, and still manage to sound intelligent and emotionally exciting. And although they'd have some time to sort it out later on, this is a problem that would haunt the McGuinn/White era of The Byrds for their entire three-year period of trying to fit in in a thoroughly changed musical world post-Woodstock and post-Abbey Road.

 

BALLAD OF EASY RIDER (1969)

 

1) Ballad Of Easy Rider; 2) Fido; 3) Oil In My Lamp; 4) Tulsa County; 5) Jack Tarr The Sailor; 6) Jesus Is Just Alright; 7) It's All Over Now, Baby Blue; 8) There Must Be Someone; 9) Gunga Din; 10) Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos); 11) Armstrong, Aldrin And Collins.

 

Almost everybody will tell you that Ballad Of Easy Rider was a huge advance over Dr. Byrds, even if, paradoxically, it is far less ambitious and creative. For starters, the heavy-rocking com­ponent has pretty much been chucked out the window — a few distorted guitar solos crop up every now and then, but nothing even remotely approaching the thunder of ʻWheel's On Fireʼ; here, the Byrds settle for a far calmer, softer roots-rock sound, somewhat of an amalgamation of the early folk-based sound and the Sweetheart country-soaked approach.

 

Second and more important, there is only one song here written by Roger McGuinn; everything else is either contributed by other members of the band or comes completely from outside. This is not meant to sound as an insult to his general songwriting skills, but the material written for Dr. Byrds, although experimental, was clearly weak, and getting rid of that whole «space cowboy» baggage was probably necessary to avoid further embarrassment. Actually, there is one track here that is more space-cowboyish than ever — ʻArmstrong, Aldrin And Collinsʼ merges NASA voiceovers with a little acoustic ditty about the latest American heroes, written by country guy Zeke Manners; but it is just a short amusing epilogue that does not aspire or amount to much.

 

At the heart of the record are tracks like the title one or ʻGunga Dinʼ — haste-less, regal, slightly transcendental in their unnerving acoustic bliss, well comparable to the Byrds' classic legacy and, for that matter, completely absent on Dr. Byrds. Dylan, who originally began work on the title track as the theme of Easy Rider, pretty much stopped after writing "the river flows, it flows to the sea" and telling the contractors to pass it on to McGuinn — and sure enough, McGuinn put it to a melody that would probably evoke visions of a river flowing to the sea without a single word. The idea to orchestrate the song belonged to producer Terry Melcher, who seeked to emulate the effect of Nilsson's ʻEverybody's Talkingʼ, and they do emulate that effect, except that ʻBallad Of Easy Riderʼ has no tragic overtones and is essentially a static, beautiful soundscape — perfect as the movie theme (it is, after all, about /the impossibility of/ finding paradise on Earth), perfect as a Byrds song, one of McGuinn's tenderest and sincerest vocal performances.

 

Interestingly, new drummer Gene Parsons almost has Roger beat, or at least, matched, by contri­buting ʻGunga Dinʼ, a song about personal tribulations and discriminations set to an equally becalming arpeggiated melody — no orchestration this time, and the multi-tracked vocals are not as moving as Roger's solo parts, but chorus harmonies are cute (it's quite endearing how in the final "I know that it's a sin... Gunga Din" the title is delivered almost with a «sigh» of some sorts, in the «life is tough, but we'll get over it» kind of sense). His is clearly the best contribution of all the new band members — John Yorke's ʻFidoʼ is amusing, but first, it is another song about a dog (as if ʻOld Blueʼ was not enough; and they would return yet again with ʻBuglerʼ), which is discriminating towards cat lovers, and second, its melody is pretty much a complete rip-off of Manfred Mann's cover of Dylan's ʻQuinn The Eskimoʼ, differing only by the inclusion of a rather gratuitous drum solo. Probably they should have just gone ahead and covered the song instead. With some certified Inuit drumming for an interlude.

 

The covers are largely selected from the traditional folk/blues/country pool, although Bob gets his share — finally, they come out with an official release of ʻIt's All Over Now Baby Blueʼ, recor­ded at an ultra-slow tempo with triple repetition of "it's all over now", which may not be such a good idea (does the message really need rubbing in?). There's an alternately funny and disturbing reinvention of ʻJesus Is Just Alrightʼ as a semi-progressive rocker with «alarmed» vocal harmo­nies, sounding as if the band were performing an exorcism or a general ward-off-evil ritual with the song; an empathetic cover of Woody Guthrie's ʻDeporteeʼ, which would have made a good in­clusion on Sweetheart at the expense of, say, ʻChristian Lifeʼ; and some gorgeous vocal harmo­nies on the old anthem ʻOil In My Lampʼ. None of these songs are masterpieces of the human spirit, but they're nice, listenable, and reliable, and the new Byrds do them full justice.

 

In all, the goodness of Ballad lies precisely in its new-found humility — it's short, quiet, friendly, and almost completely free of ambitions and presumptions. It's as if the Byrds are no longer in­terested at all in the big race, but just want to share with us their love for the weather-worn American spirit, and not even in a «defying» way, as it was with Sweetheart, without locking themselves into one single narrow formula to which some of us furthermore might be alergic. If Dr. Byrds showed the world that the band could no longer be «relevant» even if it tried, Easy Rider shows that they no longer care about being relevant — and, in the process, are rewarded by the good fairy with a record that, almost haf a century later, sounds timeless, rather than time-bound. Naturally, this deserves a thumbs up.

 

UNTITLED (1970)

 

1) Lover Of The Bayou; 2) Positively 4th Street; 3) Nashville West; 4) So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Star; 5) Mr. Tambourine Man; 6) Mr. Spaceman; 7) Eight Miles High; 8) Chestnut Mare; 9) Truck Stop Girl; 10) All The Things; 11) Yesterday's Train; 12) Hungry Planet; 13) Just A Season; 14) Take A Whiff On Me; 15) You All Look Alike; 16) Well Come Back Home.

 

This was the most ambitious project of the «McGuinn Experience» — a double album, half live, half studio, presenting a seemingly solidified line-up (now including the far older and more experienced Skip Battin on bass as a replacement for John Yorke) that would bravely take The Byrds into the Seventies as successful survivors, alongside The Stones, The Who, The Kinks... well, no dice, really.

 

Even though the album was very warmly received by critics, even though its sales were strong, and even though it still enjoys a rather stable general reputation, I would call it a serious step down from the level of Ballad Of Easy Rider, and the true beginning of the end. It is not parti­cularly embarrassing — it is confused, feeble, and it does not seriously stand the gruesome levels of competition that were around circa 1970. (The confusion even extends to the album title — which came about by accident, as Columbia pressed copies before they had time to think of a proper name, using a first-draft album cover that still had (Untitled) indicated on it in the spot where the real album title should have been).

 

For starters, people like to praise the live half, but I do not really get it. The first side, mixing a few classics with recent material, sounds way too sloppy and rough for my ears — in particular, I find Clarence White's style of weaving in his lead guitar phrasing downright irritating: ʻMr. Tam­bourine Manʼ is almost completely destroyed by that stupid lead guitar playing some sort of jiggly country dance around McGuinn's vocals on the verse melody, and that's not even mentio­ning that the vocal harmonies on the chorus sound like a cat choir next to the gorgeousness of the original. Neither are the guitars well in sync on ʻMr. Spacemanʼ or on ʻPositively 4th Streetʼ, and since the Byrds are not truly a «rock and roll» band, it is hard to bring up the argument that they are compensating for the sloppiness with kick-ass energy and overdrive (not because they should not do that, but because they do not do that). Only ʻNashville Westʼ stands competition with the studio version, but it is not clear why they must go ahead and try to make everything else sound like ʻNashville Westʼ — except for the darker and harsher ʻLover Of The Bayouʼ, where they go for a voodooistic swamp-rock attitude (a little hilarious how Roger makes his voice sound so deep and hoarse), not something they'd ever tried before and therefore feeling a little artificial, though definitely not bad.

 

The key point here is whether or not you will like their 16-minute improvisation around ʻEight Miles Highʼ. There's some nifty musicianship displayed, for sure, particularly a cool rhythmic bass solo from Battin, but overall I would say that these guys are no Cream and no Grateful Dead when it comes to, let's say, «visionary jamming». The guitarists seem to stick to more or less the same direction, never trying to take things into a different key and permanently falling back on the same phrasing, so unless you manage to reach the desired state of trance very quickly, after a brief while it just gets ultra-boring. And although I have heard praise for the interplay between White and McGuinn, most of the time I don't even hear the interplay — McGuinn's guitar is quietly buried well below White's, who gets most of the spotlight. And he's good, but he ain't no Clapton. And with the total amount of bands who were doing 16-minute jams in 1970, one would think that the Byrds, of all these people, would have done well to constitute an exception, no?

 

In short, the live part, to me, is a serious disappointment (although this does not mean that the Byrds could not put up a good show — the Fillmore tapes from 1969 show the band in a much more self-assured shape). Unfortunately, the new studio material is not significantly better. Much of it (including also ʻLover Of The Bayouʼ on the live half) comes from the abandoned Gene Trip, a country-rock musical reimagining the story of Peer Gynt (!), co-written by McGuinn with the lyricist Jacques Levy (who would later work with Dylan on Desire); this means that Roger makes a grand return here as songwriter, which is not a very good omen — and indeed, the songs are rarely among his best.

 

ʻChestnut Mareʼ has a pretty chorus melody, but suffers from rather boring spoken verses and also from being overlong — basically just five minutes of story-telling, occasionally interrupted by a couple of lovely vocal lines. ʻAll The Thingsʼ sounds pretty until you realize that it is really McGuinn's attempt to write his own ʻMy Back Pagesʼ — note the contrast between the main bulk of the verse and the conclusive refrain with vocal harmonies — and in contrast with that song, ʻAll The Thingsʼ is just pretty, not visionary. ʻJust A Seasonʼ is probably the catchiest and most intimately endearing piece of the lot, but it has to grow on you a bit. None of the other songs, ex­cept for the cute novelty bit of Leadbelly's ʻTake A Whiff On Meʼ, done with humor and passion (and it's always nice to hear a direct reference to cocaine, which, funny enough, must have pro­bably sounded more controversial in 1970 than it was at the time when Leadbelly sang it), any­way, none of the other songs ever made much of an impression on me. Just fluffy, inoffensive, forgettable country-rock.

 

It should be noted that ʻHungry Planetʼ and ʻYou All Look Alikeʼ mark the first appearance of the great rock'n'roll swindler, Kim Fowley, on a Byrds album — although for the moment, they are not particularly embarrassing, and Skip Battin, who was the one to bring Fowley along, pro­bably was responsible for the music anyway. The lyrics to ʻHungry Planetʼ are banal, but not stupid — it is far more problematic that the song tries to kick up some sort of syncopated funky groove, but the music just limps along (a few tasty acoustic licks on the solo, but nothing to hold your interest for more than three seconds in a row). Much worse: what's up with the drunk quasi-yodelling during the extended coda to ʻWell Come Back Homeʼ? Now that's just plain stupid. If they wanted a ʻHey Judeʼ vibe, they should have brought in Paul McCartney instead.

 

Consequently, I seem to belong to the minority that does not think much at all of this record, be it live or studio. Of course, formally, it is the band's bulkiest project — so bulky, in fact, that in the program of remastering and reissuing the original albums Untitled became the only one to get a 2-CD release, «renamed» to (Untitled)/(Unreleased). Predictably, the second disc is not better than the first one — some alternate takes, some unmemorable outtakes, a studio version of ʻLo­ver Of The Bayouʼ that hardly bests the live variant, and more live performances that are just as sloppy as the old ones: okay at best, inferior at worst (ʻThis Wheel's On Fireʼ meanders aimlessly without recapturing the heavy apocalyptic vibe of the Dr. Byrds version). On the whole, both the original and the new version fall in the «not too good, not too bad» category, and clearly demon­strate that The Byrds had turned into thoroughly second-rate players.

 

BYRDMANIAX (1971)

 

1) Glory, Glory; 2) Pale Blue; 3) I Trust; 4) Tunnel Of Love; 5) Citizen Kane; 6) I Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politician; 7) Absolute Happiness; 8) Green Apple Quick Step; 9) My Destiny; 10) Kathleen's Song; 11) Jamaica Say You Will.

 

Approximate critical consensus says thus: The Roger McGuinn Experience fell flat on its face with Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde, miraculously recovered with Ballad Of Easy Rider, miraculously climaxed with Untitled, then just as immediately fell flat on its face again with Byrdmaniax, in a series of rise-and-tumbles that are all too strange to understand considering that (a) the band, at this point, never went through major lineup changes, (b) pursued more or less the same sty­listic course, and (c) hardly aspired to getting back in the major league by adapting to the times (e. g. shifting over to hard rock or glam).

 

I cannot really subscribe to this point of view. Yes, some of the 1969-72 records may certainly be a little worse or a little better than others, depending on how many unfunny novelty numbers are included or on whether McGuinn wants to inject some symbolism in his song structures or not. But on the whole, this period is even — no major marvels or disasters, and I find myself shrug­ging my shoulders both at the loving appraisal of Untitled and at the exaggerated disgust for Byrdmaniax, the ill-fated follow-up.

 

Supposedly, the Achilles' heel of Byrdmaniax is an increased degree of Kim Fowley's involve­ment in the life of the Byrds — this time, the man has a whoppin' three co-credits with Skip Bat­tin, and two of them sound as far away from what we expect of the Byrds as anything: ʻTunnel Of Loveʼ is a useless five-minute recreation of Fats Domino's ʻBlueberry Hillʼ groove accompanying a rather macabre, Alice Cooper-worthy, lyrical fantasy; and ʻCitizen Kaneʼ is two minutes of vaudeville nostalgizing about pre-war Hollywood values (actually, despite being so very un-Byrd­sey, it's actually somewhat funny, and quite harmless with its 2:37 running time). ʻAbsolute Happinessʼ takes a more serious tone, but hardly registers as an actual song — it is so quiet and so lacking in melodic presence that you can never properly remember what is so absolute about it.

 

However, Fowley's presence alone is hardly sufficient to make the album a complete disaster. For one thing, it's got a really strong opener — the energetic cover of the ʻGlory, Gloryʼ spiritual, with what might be one of McGuinn's strongest ever vocal performances for the band; those high notes on "I wanna thank you Jesus" and on the hallelujahs, combined with Roger's timbre, sting all the right emotional centers, and although the arrangement has been criticized for the fast-moving piano part, I think it totally belongs in the song. For another thing, ʻPale Blueʼ and ʻKathleen's Songʼ, even if they are not masterpieces, are at least as good as any ballad on Untit­led, and I also do not think that Melcher's orchestration spoils either of them as long as it does not drown out the acoustic guitar, harmonica, and vocals (and it does not).

 

There's also ʻI Trustʼ, Roger's experiment in crossing R&B/gospel aesthetics with country-rock arrangements that is neither too inspiring nor too disappointing, but again, his singing on the track is to be heavily commended; decent covers of Helen Carter's ʻMy Destinyʼ (not that worse than anything on Sweetheart) and Jackson Browne's ʻJamaica Say You Willʼ; and Roger's own take on the vaudeville genre, ʻI Wanna Grow Up To Be A Politicianʼ, which is even more trivial than the Fowley song but is also even shorter. Finally, ʻGreen Apple Quick Stepʼ is basically ʻNashville West Vol. 2ʼ, arguably done in a more down-to-earth, rustic style than its predecessor, but there's nothing wrong with that.

 

Also, now that the album has been properly reissued on CD, you can also take the liberty of replacing any of its worst numbers with a nice cover of ʻJust Like A Womanʼ that was recorded during the sessions but not used for some reason. Okay, that would be a cheap cop-out, but the general assessment stands: Byrdmaniax is a problematic record that suffers from some erroneous decisions (including, most definitely, the decision to place a set of the band members' death masks on the front cover! what were they thinking?), but it is by no means an artistic embarrass­ment compared to its immediate predecessors. Same mix of nice, boring, and throwaway pieces as usual — most likely, it is primarily its total lack of ambitiousness that earned it its negative points in 1971, when not being ambitious counted as being worse than nothing.

 

FARTHER ALONG (1971)

 

1) Tiffany Queen; 2) Get Down Your Line; 3) Farther Along; 4) B. B. Class Road; 5) Bugler; 6) America's Great National Pastime; 7) Antique Sandy; 8) Precious Kate; 9) So Fine; 10) Lazy Waters; 11) Bristol Steam Convention Blues.

 

The last album by «The Roger McGuinn Experience» tends to be the band's most despised (con­tending for this position with Byrdmaniax). It signified the band's complete fall-off from the charts, the shame being exacerbated and perpetuated by the idiotic choice of releasing ʻAmerica's Great National Pastimeʼ as the lead (and only) single — a slightly funny, but also sort of obno­xious vaudeville number from the Battin/Fowley team, not to mention that its somewhat unjustly derogatory lyrics may have detracted listeners as well (I mean, the song satirizes a certain seg­ment of American population, but why American? "One of America's great national pastimes is cutting the grass / Grabbing some ass / Living too fast" — could be said about quite a few other countries as well, if it needed to be said in the first place).

 

Anyway, the truth is, Farther Along is certainly not worse than anything else produced by the White-era Byrds, and although it lacks serious ambition, I actually prefer this laid-back, simple atmosphere to the unsuccessful attempt at epicness that was Untitled. There, the band over­reached, going on a sprawl without having the proper means, vision, or talent pool to back it up. Here, the band is just having itself a good time. There is no «flash» whatsoever, and none of these songs probably had what it takes to catch the public eye in 1972 (although that still does not mean that prioritizing ʻNational Pastimeʼ was a wise choice by any means); but in retrospect, Farther Along just feels like a bunch of nice musicians... well, engaging in one of America's great national pastimes, I guess.

 

Ironically, of all the late-era Byrds catalog this album probably comes closest to fulfilling McGuinn's original dream for Sweetheart — the «musical encyclopaedia of Americana» — featuring excursions in straight country, blues-rock, folk, vaudeville, Fifties' rock, and R&B, all of it taken in the most straightforward manner. And as they so openly steal, beg, or borrow, it happens to mostly work. ʻTiffany Queenʼ is introduced with the classic ʻSatisfactionʼ / ʻMr. Soulʼ / ʻJumpin' Jack Flashʼ riff (all roads lead to Rome), but then almost immediately becomes Chuck Berry's ʻLet It Rockʼ, done McGuinn-style, and on some level it is hilarious to hear McGuinn do the Chuck Berry schtick (more hilarious, anyway, than listening to Gene Parsons sounding all rough-and-rocky on the pub boogie number ʻB. B. Class Roadʼ). The Johnny Otis cover ʻSo Fineʼ technically destroys the Fiestas' original from 1959 — as good as that one was, here the boys do a much stronger job smoothing out and sharpening the vocal har­monies (even with these new-look Byrds, nobody beats them at harmonies). And Larry Murray's ʻBuglerʼ, yet another dog-oriented song, is done very close to the original, but improves on it in many small, subtle details (though, of course, country lovers might want to prefer the «rougher», «rawer» original — fact is, I think Roger McGuinn loves dogs as much as Larry Murray does, if not more, so it is not a set fact here that the original songwriter necessarily must sing this with more feeling).

 

There's not a lot of original material here at all (another reason, supposedly, for the album feeling like such a letdown in 1972), but of the two McGuinn originals, ʻAntique Sandyʼ is very nice: basically just one folksy melodic line over and over, but a warm, tender, and catchy one, quite tolerable for two minutes and sounding particularly beautiful when taken over from the singer by a cozily sustained piano. (ʻTiffany Queenʼ is the other original, although I'm not sure exactly how original it is in the first place; a joint lawsuit from Chuck and Keith would not be out of order). Most importantly, there's very little about the record that I could call openly bad — ʻB. B. Class Roadʼ does sound a little phoney (not even the beards could make the Byrds get that rough-and-tough feel), and ʻNational Pastimeʼ is good for not more than one listen, but everything else ranges from pleasant to... very pleasant.

 

Cutting a long story short, Farther Along is slight, but fun, which, at that time, worked better for the Byrds than serious, but boring. It was probably inevitable that the White/Battin/Parsons line-up would crackle and dissipate after they became a commercial non-entity with no particular place to go (actually, the real reason was the perspective of a possible reunion for the original Byrds), but I'm pretty sure that there is still some demand for unambitious, unpretentious, run-of-the-mill nice quality music from the early Seventies, and this record is a good candidate, so a friendly, not too excited thumbs up here.

 

BYRDS (1973)

 

1) Full Circle; 2) Sweet Mary; 3) Changing Heart; 4) For Free; 5) Born To Rock & Roll; 6) Things Will Be Better; 7) Cowgirl In The Sand; 8) Long Live The King; 9) Borrowing Time; 10) Laughing; 11) (See The Sky) About To Rain.

 

If I am not too mistaken, this was the first ever «reunion / comeback experience» in the history of rock music, at least as far as major league players are concerned. The event happened largely by accident — by late 1972, it so chanced that all five original Byrds found themselves at the cross­roads, with their solo careers (including McGuinn's disaster with Farther Along) either commer­cially flopping or reaching a certain turning point (for instance, Crosby, Stills & Nash were on a lengthy hiatus). Had they been the Beatles, their egos would probably stay too huge and mutually repellent to succumb to attraction. But they weren't the Beatles, and five years after mutual dis­agreements tore them apart, the wounds healed well enough to initiate reunion talks. Throw in a nice financial proposition from Asylum's David Geffen, and the cat was in the bag.

 

One thing that was not in the bag, though, was nostalgia. The reunited band did have the exact same lineup as the Great Original Byrds of Mr. Tambourine Man — McGuinn, Crosby, Hill­man, Clark, and Clarke — but they immediately came to an agreement that they would do any­thing but consciously try to recreate the «harmonies-and-jangle» atmosphere of their early albums, partly because trying to cohesively work as a single unit was the thing that ended up driving them apart in the first place, and partly because they were, after all, still too young and too full of ideas to bow down to pure nostalgia. Consequently, the reunion album, as everybody seems to agree, is not really a true «Byrds» album — it is a bunch of solo tracks, collected from four out of five members: more precisely, McGuinn contributes 2 songs, Crosby contributes 3 (one of them a Joni Mitchell cover), Hillman and Clark also 2 each, and then there are two Neil Young covers, sug­gested by Clark and defended by Crosby (saying that the band was now covering Neil Young in­stead of Dylan because Neil was for the Seventies what Bob was for the Sixties).

 

It is actually quite curious how the original Byrds were pigeonholed — reviews at the time were scathing, with people complaining about the disunity and the lack of jingle-jangle much the same way that in 1969, somebody could easily complain about the lack of "yeah yeah yeah"s on Abbey Road. True, the record on the whole sounds more like a James Taylor album with group harmo­nies, but even James Taylor in his prime had some good songs, and if there is no unity, at least there is diversity. Let's face it, when you have three songs on your record that totally sound like solo David Crosby, it's still better than when your record consists entirely of songs by solo David Crosby. On the other hand, the downside is also that in a situation like this, band members may be tempted to offer their weakest material for the collective pot, consciously or subconsciously saving up the best stuff for true solo albums.

 

The bottomline is that Byrds sounds quite nice. Only Crosby's ʻLaughingʼ, one of those lengthy stoned rants of his set to a completely unmemorable melody, sticks out unpleasantly with its 5:40 running length (and, adding insult to injury, it was already released earlier on his first solo album, so there's hardly any other reason than pure laziness behind its inclusion). Everything else ranges from cute to sympathetic — even the Neil Young covers, with ʻCowgirl In The Sandʼ remade as a bouncy, almost cheerful country-pop number and ʻSee The Sky About To Rainʼ featuring a soul­ful Clark lead vocal and even, in the form of a small bonus for the fans, some genuine 12-string jangle in the coda section.

 

Clark's two originals, ʻFull Circleʼ (also brought from his solo career) and ʻChanging Heartʼ, arguably have the best vocal melodies on the album — nothing too breathtaking, but the «alar­med» intonations on the chorus of the latter agree very well with the song's message (warning about the fickleness of fame and all that), and although the semantics of the line "funny how the circle is a wheel" is a bit tautological, its delivery is inspiring, and so well punctuated by the added mandolin lead line. As for Hillman, he contributes the album's poppiest tune, ʻThings Will Be Betterʼ, with colorful power pop riffs and lively choruses that would not be out of place on a contemporary Big Star or Badfinger album.

 

This leaves McGuinn, and, surprisingly, he is probably the second weakest link on the album after Crosby — throwing in his filler bit ʻBorn To Rock & Rollʼ (which has very little to do with actual rock'n'roll, not to mention stealing the verse melody from Dylan's ʻI Shall Be Releasedʼ) and the Jacques Levy collaboration ʻSweet Maryʼ, where I guess Levy wrote the lyrics and Roger borrowed the melody from some traditional sea shanty. Not that it doesn't sound nice — it's al­ways nice to hear McGuinn sing traditional ballads, and the mandolin touch is again a gallant addition — but it does seem like, out of all the contributors, McGuinn contributed the smallest efforts to this reunion. It's basically like, "okay, guys, I've held up the Byrds name for four god­damn years on my own, now I'm just going to sit back and relax while you do your job". But I guess he may have thought he earned it, after all. Besides, less work — fewer reasons for arguing over artistic decisions with his former pals.

 

In retrospect, I think that the record does deserve a mild thumbs up, because of all the little pretty things and the essential lack of ugly bad things. Formally, it is sort of a belated Abbey Road for these guys — a «let's-come-together-and-be-friendly-for-the-last-time» type of album, except, of course, that there is not even a small attempt at the grandness of vision that charac­terizes Abbey Road; in the end, The Byrds never truly had a «grand vision», and they weren't about to try and develop one at the end of the road. It is not likely that anybody would want to revisit Byrds on a regular basis — however, it is still very comforting and satisfying to have it, witnessing the band coming «full circle» indeed. From Mr. Tambourine Man all the way to Byrds — such a long, strange, bizarre trip, beginning in one place and ending up in several com­pletely different ones. Very instructive, at the very least.

 

ADDENDA:

 

IN THE BEGINNING (1964/1988)

 

1) Tomorrow Is A Long Ways Away; 2) Boston; 3) The Only Girl I Adore; 4) You Won't Have To Cry; 5) I Knew I'd Want You; 6) The Airport Song; 7) The Reason Why; 8) Mr. Tambourine Man; 9) Please Let Me Love You; 10) You Movin'; 11) It Won't Be Wrong; 12) You Showed Me; 13) She Has A Way; 14) For Me Again; 15) It's No Use; 16) Here Without You; 17) Tomorrow Is A Long Ways Away (acoustic).

 

«The Great Lost Byrds Album». Well, maybe not that great, and not that lost, either, considering that the majority of these tracks (albeit in slightly alternate takes) were originally released in 1969 as Preflyte, an album that actually sold better than the contemporary Dr. Byrds & Mr Hyde, what with the public ready to show McGuinn what they thought of his Clark-less, Crosby-less, Hillman-less «Byrds». Still, in its expanded form, released on CD as In The Beginning in the late Eighties, this is a pretty nice little record, well worth owning to logically round out the catalog. In fact, nothing seriously prevents us from counting it as the first, «quintessentially early» Byrds album, their equivalent of a Please Please Me or a Bob Dylan, which simply hap­pened to be left on the shelf at the time.

 

Consisting of early recordings that the band made as The Beefeaters, The Jet Set, and, eventually, The Byrds, In The Beginning's first and biggest surprise is in how many of these early tunes (most of them, in fact) are originals: the Byrds may have been one of the few bands in history that started out cutting nothing but their own songs, only to end up doing Dylan and Pete Seeger be­cause somebody thought they were not worthy. But, actually, they were — these originals are fun, harmless, pleasant, often catchy, and occasionally innovative folk-pop.

 

From that very beginning, Gene Clark was the primary songwriter: seven songs are credited sole­ly to him, whereas most of McGuinn's songs are co-credited (to McGuinn/Clark or McGuinn/ Crosby). His strong debt to The Beatles and particularly The Searchers is clear, but he does his best to come up with original melodies, and sometimes makes bold decisions: ʻBostonʼ is the most striking of these, combining moody folk harmonies with the bass line of ʻMemphis Ten­nesseeʼ — pretty much an epitome of what «folk-rock» should be all about — but it's hardly the best song of the lot, just an example of what strange direction the mind of this promising young fellow could choose in the age of ʻHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ.

 

On the whole, the Byrds were working very strictly in the «pop» idiom, despite their fascination with Greenwich Village: all the songs are short, all the songs follow the verse/chorus/bridge structure, all the songs strive to have hooks, and the lyrical and emotional sides do not show much depth, let alone «vision». Little love songs, ranging from the way-too-cute (ʻThe Only Girl I Adoreʼ — hey, David Crosby co-wrote it! Hey, how come he never sings it live? It's so much better than ʻAlmost Cut My Hairʼ!) to the gallant serenade (ʻTomorrow Is A Long Ways Awayʼ, whose medievalistic romanticism borders on the laughable, but the harmonies are too gorgeous and elegant to laugh away). There's an early version of ʻMr. Tambourine Manʼ, all right, but no 12-string jangle yet — no chance for this particular version to change the face of the musical business. But the seeds are all there.

 

Some of the tunes would later end up on the band's first two albums or the accompanying B-sides, but really, with the exception of one or two really trite songs (ʻThe Only Girl I Adoreʼ even has the gall to end up with a «seductive» Beatlesque ʻoh-ohʼ flourish — ridiculous!), most of them could be tightened up to the status of semi-classics. ʻThe Airport Songʼ is actually giving us an almost mature David Crosby (at least, his starry-eyed singing style is already in place); ʻThe Reason Whyʼ and ʻFor Me Againʼ are as introspective as Clark would ever get, and so on. Per­haps the thing that we subconsciously miss the most on these songs is the Wrecking Crew — apparently, the band members are playing all their instruments here, and so the recordings lack the necessary polish. On the other hand, at least this shows that they could play their instruments as early as 1964 — not to mention write their own songs, which was not a typical ability for beginning pop bands circa 1964. And at most, this is a record that one can actually keep for en­joyment, rather than pure historical interest, so "it won't be wrong" to issue it a proper thumbs up and state that it is a definite must-own for any half-serious Byrds lover.

 

LIVE AT THE FILLMORE (1969/2000)

 

1) Nashville West; 2) You're Still On My Mind; 3) Pretty Boy Floyd; 4) Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man; 5) Medley: Turn! Turn! Turn! / Mr. Tambourine Man / Eight Miles High; 6) Close Up The Honky Tonks; 7) Buckaroo; 8) The Christian Life; 9) Time Between; 10) King Apathy III; 11) Bad Night At The Whiskey; 12) This Wheel's On Fire; 13) Sing Me Back Home; 14) So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Star; 15) He Was A Friend Of Mine; 16) Chimes Of Freedom.

 

In the case of The Byrds, the vault-emptying ritual has largely focused on the Clarence White era, particularly when it comes to live albums — the original Byrds were never appreciated much for their live playing, not to mention that they fell apart just prior to the era of the first quality recor­dings of live shows. However, the decision to open the vaults with this particular recording, taped at two shows from the Fillmore West on February 7-8, 1969, is still questionable. The new Byrds were just getting their stuff together: Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde had only been released one week before, and not only does this mean that you are going to have to sit through quite a few mediocre songs from that album, but it also means that everything else is happening in «test» stage.

 

For instance, ʻEight Miles Highʼ, although already a couple minutes longer than the original, has not yet been expanded to the mammoth psychedelic heights of the Untitled era — instead, it is included here as part of a frickin' medley, into which they have compressed three of their biggest hits. The trick is a well-known cop-out: "we have no interest in playing these songs any more, but out of a sense of loyalty, we're giving you a taste" — and, honestly, they'd do better to leave out ʻTurn! Turn! Turn!ʼ and ʻMr. Tambourine Manʼ of this altogether, because the harmonies on those songs just flat out suck. Admittedly, the instrumental passages on ʻEight Miles Highʼ are handled much better, with White already an accomplished sparring partner for McGuinn.

 

Overall, the setlist predictably concentrates on material from Dr. Byrds and from Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, with the addition of a few extra country covers (Red Simpson's ʻClose Up The Honky Tonksʼ, Merle Haggard's ʻSing Me Back Homeʼ, Buck Owens' ʻBuckarooʼ) and every­thing else basically just played «for the old fans». This is in stark contrast with the live material they'd soon record for Untitled, which included only one pure country number and observed a better balance between new and «classic» songs, so you have to be mentally prepared for the fact that these Fillmore Byrds are shining knights of the Country Rock Order through and through.

 

Arguably the one thing that is most typical and representative of the album is Clarence White's manner of playing country melodies — with a device called the Stringbender that he invented with Gene Parsons, enabling him to play a regular electric Telecaster similarly to a pedal steel guitar. This does bring a whole new twist to the idea of «country rock», and gives all these ins­trumentals like ʻNashville Westʼ and ʻBuckarooʼ a unique face — otherwise, we'd probably just ask "so why do we have to listen to the Byrds doing this stuff, when it would make so much more sense to just bring in the regular Nashville guard?" However, I would also insist that true pedal steel gives a much prettier sound than a regular electric guitar made to sound like a pedal steel; there's just something about this imitation that throws me off (actually, a lot of situations where instrument A is forced to sound closer to instrument B throw me off, but maybe it's just me).

 

Still, it is a fact that White's guitar playing is pretty much the only argument why you'd ever feel tempted to give this another spin — in no other respect do these performances even come close to matching the originals in clarity or emotional impact. Whenever he takes a seriously focused solo, even on so-so material like ʻBad Night At The Whiskeyʼ, the playing is clearly inspired (unfor­tunately, he does that on less than half of the tracks), and even if that country style of his may seem a bit monotonous, it also provides unity for all content — old classics, new originals, and cover material. Just forget about The Byrds as one of America's (formerly) greatest vocal har­mony bands, and you'll be fine for a while.

 

LIVE AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL (1971/2008)

 

1) Lover Of The Bayou; 2) You Ain't Going Nowhere; 3) Truck Stop Girl; 4) My Back Pages; 5) Baby, What You Want Me To Do; 6) Jamaica Say You Will; 7) Black Mountain Rag/Soldier's Joy; 8) Mr. Tambourine Man; 9) Pretty Boy Floyd; 10) Take A Whiff; 11) Chestnut Mare; 12) Jesus Is Just Alright; 13) Eight Miles High; 14) So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Star; 15) Mr. Spaceman; 16) I Trust; 17) Nashville West; 18) Roll Over Beethoven; 19) Amazing Grace.

 

Okay, this is no live masterpiece, either, but third time around, they finally got it close to right. This archival release, coming out of the vaults more than 35 years after the original recording was made, has some obvious advantages over both Untitled and Fillmore, to emerge as arguably the single best live document of the Clarence White era — if you still needed convincing that they were a fun live band, and the Albert Hall show still does not convince you, there's probably no hope left for the future.

 

First, it is much longer than both of these, which is a good thing because it allows them to con­centrate on pretty much every side of their legacy — folk, country, psychedelia, rock, «Ameri­cana» in general, whatever. It is well-structured, with a «breather» all-acoustic section in the middle and a couple proper encores. It does not rely too heavily on new material, with only a couple (good) songs from Byrdmaniax and only three (decent) songs from Untitled. And, most importantly, it reflects a three-year gestation period, meaning that the band had gained quite a bit of muscle since the somewhat insecure beginnings of the Fillmore days.

 

In particular, this 18-minute version of ʻEight Miles Highʼ (more accurately, ʻImprovisational Variations Around The Theme Of ʻEight Miles Highʼʼ, since the song itself is played for about two minutes only) is much tighter and, I would say, comprehensible than the jam captured on Untitled. If the early McGuinn/White interplay seemed to lack self-assurance and was more like "okay, everybody's doing it, let's try this too and see where it gets us", by 1971, having done it many times over, they sound like they already know the main directions and use the jam as a polygon for testing and expanding the individual players' skills — in particular, the bit where the guitarists go take a smoke and the Battin/Parsons rhythm section stays behind and experiments with key and tempo changes is really quite exciting, as Battin seems to go through every basic rhythm pattern in existence (jazz, blues, boogie, pop, you name it).

 

The originals still suffer from being too ragged and «earthy» compared to the ethereal studio versions, and McGuinn does not even begin to strive for the same fluidity, precision of phrasing, and tonal beauty that he seemed to so effortlessly achieve in the studio. But this is at least par­tially compensated for by the increased tightness and energy of the rhythm section and the ever more fluent guitar interplay, and besides, individual weaknesses and elements of sloppiness are not so painful when you look at the whole thing as one complex — there's so much collective goodness here that an occasional vocal flub in ʻMy Back Pagesʼ is negligible. And the decision to revert ʻMr. Tambourine Manʼ to its acoustic roots, playing it close to the way Dylan did in 1964, actually works well in concert, where the heavenly effect of the studio 12-string jangle multiplied by immaculate harmonies would have been irreproduceable anyway.

 

In this context, I do not find the strength to protest even again the inclusion of ʻRoll Over Beet­hovenʼ — a song that was clearly not made with The Byrds in mind, but is still forgivable given the mighty eclectic nature of the show. I mean, they stick it in between a hot-pants rendition of ʻNashville Westʼ and a devoted accappella walk through ʻAmazing Graceʼ, so it's goddamn symbolic — «we're gonna finish off this show for you as hillbillies, rockers, and soulmen». With a little more sense of humor, a little more polish, and a little more energy in the right places they could have turned the show into an unforgettable celebration of both the Byrds' individual legacy and American popular music in general. And, well, it doesn't get quite that high, but they were on the right track.

 

Who knows, maybe a couple more years of obsessive touring and they'd finally nail it down to perfection... then again, they still wouldn't be able to compete with The Band, who had the advantage of cutting their teeth on classic Dylan tours, fighting off Judasmongers and stuff. But in any case, these 77 minutes are impressive, except you really have to take it all in without a break and disregard the individual scars, seams, and pimples. Thumbs up without any future regrets, I hope.

Part 3. The Pop Art Era (1967-1970)

THE 5TH DIMENSION

UP, UP AND AWAY (1967)

 

1) Up, Up And Away; 2) Another Day, Another Heartache; 3) Which Way To Nowhere; 4) California My Way; 5) Misty Roses; 6) Go Where You Wanna Go; 7) Never Gonna Be The Same; 8) Pattern People; 9) Rosecrans Blvd.; 10) Learn How To Fly; 11) Poor Side Of Town.

 

Although The 5th Dimension never had a proper artistic agenda of their own, they weren't exactly an «artificially marketed» group like The Monkees, either: the five members found each other in the early Sixties and had been operating as a Motown-style vocal group some time before they were spotted by Motown man Marc Gordon and self-made man Johnny Rivers. They were not songwriters, and they were not musicians — just three guys and two girls who found it inspira­tional to pool their vocals together in the old barbershop tradition, but also perfectly ready to adapt to modern times and fashions.

 

Having secured a managerial contract with Gordon and a recording contract with Rivers' small-scale Soul City label, the group's true stroke of luck was getting a very young and still largely unknown — ʽMacArthur Parkʼ was more than a year away — Jimmy Webb to oversee the recor­ding sessions for their first album, including complete control of the arrangements and about half of the songs written by himself. The result, though ridiculed by many in the past and still ignored by many in the present, was unique: a psychedelic sunshine pop album from a group deeply rooted in soul, gospel, and R&B — basically, Afro-American music strained through a Mamas & Papas filter and re-converted back to Afro-American music.

 

In 1967, people with good taste scoffed at this stuff, and for a good reason: this «psychedelia-lite», totally timid and inoffensive and acceptable for parents and grandparents and housewives and hillbillies all over the country (they quickly became one of Ed Sullivan's famous bands, which is way more than you could say about the Stones or the Doors), sounded complacent, conformist, and corny even compared to the Mamas & Papas, let alone all the «sharper» outfits out there, from Hendrix to the Jefferson Airplane — nor did The 5th Dimension offer the loud and rowdy punch of genuine Motown. In fact, you could have hardly committed a worse crime in 1967 than borrow the superficial trademarks of newly emerging music and water them down to the level of «respectable family entertainment». Nevertheless, once again, time heals all wounds, and now that the revolutionary scent of the late Sixties has passed into the domain of ancient history, we can give the band a fair assessment based on certain, let's say, more «permanent» values of music-making.

 

As a matter of fact, Up, Up And Away, the band's debut, is a pretty good record. With a well-polished and perfectly coordinated bunch of male and female singers; a professional and tasteful backing of studio musicians, including many members of The Wrecking Crew such as Hal Blaine and Larry Knechtel; a talented young songwriter providing the bulk of the material; and a decent choice in covers for the rest of the record — really, the only thing that one could accuse The 5th Dimension of is an overdose of happiness and an aversion to risk-taking, and wouldn't these accusations sound sort of silly in the 21st century? Oh, and a few of these songs suck, too, but only a few of them — and it's not as if «filler-proof» were a defining feature of all the genuinely psychedelic masterpieces of the epoch, either (mumble mumble mumble Grateful Dead mumble mumble mumble...).

 

The band's first choice of a single wasn't particularly auspicious: a note-for-note perfect cover of the Mamas & Papas' ʽGo Where You Wanna Goʼ — a great song for sure, and one perfectly adapted for the purposes of The 5th Dimension, but somehow, the combined vocal powers of Florence LaRue and Marilyn McCoo were not enough to beat the combination of Michelle Phillips and Mama Cass for sheer power, and the only good that came out of this is that they actually did make a hit record out of the song, even as it attached the stigma of «Afro-American clones of the Mamas & Papas» to the band (not entirely unjustified). However, the second single corrected this obvious wrong, featuring an original P. F. Sloan composition, ʽAnother Day, Another Heartacheʼ — an equally perfect sunshine pop anthem with a cool male/female break­down of the vocals and a wonderfully polyphonic coda ride (Al Casey's sitar-ish «eastern sounds» are quite gratuituously placed, though).

 

Finally, Jimmy Webb himself steps in with the title track, providing The 5th Dimension with their first and one of their best known programmatic anthems. Reducing the escapist and psyche­delic ideals of the day to the so-innocent-I-could-just-puke allegory of riding "up, up and away in my beautiful balloon", it creates an atmosphere of almost Sesame Street-like cuddliness with all its strings, flutes, trumpets, and falsettos (heck, it was so cuddly that Bing Crosby himself would agree to cover it on his 1968 Thoroughly Modern album)... but whenever you're in the mood for some lukewarm cuddliness with a steady beat, few songs really beat this one for efficiency; I only wish fewer commercials would use it for their crass purposes, though I do admit it does sound like a ready-made commercial jingle from the start. Like that ʽI'd Like To Teach The World To Singʼ thing for Coca-Cola, you know.

 

Of the other four Webb songs here, ʽPattern Peopleʼ is a nice mash-up between a folk-rocker (verses) and doo-wop (chorus) with another complex, multi-layered vocal harmony arrangement that rivals The Mamas & Papas as well as The Beach Boys; ʽRosecrans Blvd.ʼ is basically a prequel to ʽMcArthur Parkʼ, with a similar multi-part structure and a similar sentimental message based on a toponym — only three times as short and not nearly as pompous; and ʽWhich Way To Nowhereʼ and ʽNever Gonna Be The Sameʼ are somewhat mediocre ballads, respectively male-led and fe­male-led, that are mainly recommendable for the excellent musicianship, but aren't particularly memorable otherwise. On the other hand, they also cover two songs by the somewhat underrated Willie Hutch — ʽCalifornia My Wayʼ is clearly inspired and influenced by ʽCalifornia Dreamingʼ (the line "California here I come" even has the exact same modulation on "California" as it has in the M&P song), but is really an autonomous composition in its own right, combining melancholia and sunshine where the M&P song was all about melancholia; and ʽLearn How To Flyʼ (more songs about flying! more songs about flying!) is simply infectious, catchy, fast-paced pop that is quite impossible to condemn.

 

As they end the album with a respectful nod to the man who gave them their contract, Johnny Rivers — this time, they go smart and release a near-accappella version of ʽPoor Side Of Townʼ that allows them to show their strongest side without sounding like superfluous clones of the artists they are covering — I have to admit that, as lollypop-ish and bubblegum-ish all these songs sound to a pair of ears weaned on so much stronger stuff, almost all of these songs have a lot to offer: great singing, strong musicianship, catchy hooks, and, yes, a jet of corny happiness that is perfectly acceptable if it goes along with all of these things. So what if they got themselves named after a Byrds album without any solid proof that they were capable of going beyond the second dimension, let alone the fifth one? As long as we do not make the mistake of ranking them as equals with the major psychedelic artists of the time (just as we probably wouldn't want to equate The Monkees with The Beatles, unless only as a defiant hooligan act in the face of the critical establishment), Up, Up And Away deserves its thumbs up as securely as any well-meaning, well-written, well-produced cash-in on current musical trends that compensates for lack of originality or individual artistic message with honest skill and craft. Oh, there was plenty of such imitative acts in 1967 that genuinely sucked — but The 5th Dimension sure weren't one of them, not by a long shot.

 

THE MAGIC GARDEN (1967)

 

1) Prologue; 2) The Magic Garden; 3) Summer's Daughter; 4) Dreams/Pax/Nepenthe; 5) Carpet Man; 6) Ticket To Ride; 7) Requiem: 820 Latham; 8) The Girl's Song; 9) The Worst That Could Happen; 10) Orange Air; 11) Paper Cup; 12) Epilogue.

 

Hey, it's a mini-rock opera! Or, uhm, more like a «mini-sunshine pop musical». The 5th Dimen­sion, as it turns out, were anything but unambitious — or, uhm, were made to seem anything but unambitious, since the one person whose ambitions really soar here is Jimmy Webb, writing all but one (guess which) song on the album and arranging them as a conceptual suite, where the first half is about a boy and a girl falling in love and the second half is about the boy and the girl falling out of love (so much for the overall «optimistic» image of the band — although, to be fair, even some of the formally saddest songs on here still happen to have a happy glow to them). Just so you do not ever forget this, the record is framed with the exact same motif in the ʽPrologueʼ and ʽEpilogueʼ, but if you attune yourself properly to the storyline, then the first lush vocalise of "have you tried love?" will seem enticing and seductive, and the second — formally exactly the same — will seem bitter and disillusioned. The magic of Jimmy Webb, ladies and gentlemen!

 

Musically, as is typical for Webb, the album is still a mish-mash of lushly orchestrated and richly harmonized ballads with bouncy-friendly, hook-filled pop songs. The ballads all sound like next door neighbors of ʽMacArthur Parkʼ, though shorter in stature and simpler in character — and not particularly memorable, except for the overall impression from the rich orchestral / vocal coating, be it more in the traditional standard way (ʽSummer's Daughterʼ) or in the baroque-meets-Indian way (ʽDreams / Pax / Nepentheʼ, with the obligatory, and slightly ridiculous, mix of harpsichords and sitars). ʽThe Worst That Could Happenʼ is the most notorious of these tunes, due to the smash hit version produced a little later by Johnny Maestro & The Brooklyn Bridge, but it is simply way too schmaltzy and pompous to be taken seriously (and I still cannot decide if the unexpected launch into Mendelssohn at the point where she's leaving him and marrying another is a smart musical decision or just a cheap corny move — possibly both); much better and more genuinely soulful is ʽRequiem: 820 Lathamʼ, with an appropriately requiem-like piano and organ arrangement and a passionate vocal performance from Billy Davis Jr. that is every bit as respec­table as any major soul anthem of the era.

 

But it is probably the bouncy pop stuff that will remain in your head once the album is over — some delicious nuggets to be found here, particularly the singles ʽCarpet Manʼ and ʽPaper Cupʼ: the former is a fast, toe-tappy folk-pop number with a complex and dazzling male / female har­mony arrangement (and quite an astute set of lyrics — sort of like a complete anti-thesis to the Stones' ʽUnder My Thumbʼ), and the latter is a slightly more plodding, McCartney-esque music hall number that offers to resolve the storyline with one of the most radiantly cheerful pledges of self-isolation and misanthropy ever: "and my life is looking up / from inside my paper cup" is sung with such a life-asserting Sesame Street intonation that you just got to know it's such a major relief that the damn bitch dumped the guy. (Not before he took his complete fill, mind you: re­wind all the way back to the title track and read these lyrics carefully — "There is a garden / Some­thing like the shadow of a butterfly... and darling, it belongs to me"... you do understand what is meant by «the magic garden», right? No? Then listen to this: "...the magic garden / Waits with all the gates wide open / And darlin', I'll be standin' just inside". Still not getting it? Okay, how about this: "It's so soft and warm / Behind those hedges / No hard edges". Now you'd probably have to be Tipper Gore to still not get it. Oh that Jimmy Webb, what a prankster.)

 

Oh, speaking of McCartney: everybody seems to hate the band's cover of ʽTicket To Rideʼ (ap­parently, a leftover from the Up, Up And Away sessions, but included here because it seemed to fit in with the album's theme) — I think, however, that it is as good as, say, Otis Redding's cover of ʽA Hard Day's Nightʼ or any such reinvention of a Beatles song as an upbeat R&B groove number. Sure, the exuberant brass, the ecstatic vocals on the bridge section, the revved-up har­monies, the whoo-whoo-whoos — little of this agrees with the melancholic nature of the lyrics, but then again, the Beatles' original wasn't exactly the epitome of doom and gloom, either, so I don't know what the deal is about, really. It's a tight, fun, rockin' cover — I'd at least take it over the slowed-down and genuinely gloomy (though also decent in its own way) version by The Carpenters. And besides, with all due respect to Jimmy Webb, it does feel nice to have his mono­poly broken at least once by a superior brand of songwriting.

 

On the whole, despite the expectable proportion of cheese, The Magic Garden is interesting and creative even at its worst, and sonically enchanting at its best: if anything, the harmonies here are even tighter, denser, more head-spinning in effect than on the first album, and at least technically superior to The Mamas & Papas (who have plenty of songs like ʽCarpet Manʼ in their catalog, but have never been able to reach that level of vocal complexity and polish, I think). This means ano­ther thumbs up — with all due reservations — and also the end of the band's first and probably best stage, considering that from now on, Webb's role in their future would be seriously dimi­nished due to his getting busy with his own career.

 

STONED SOUL PICNIC (1968)

 

1) Sweet Blindness; 2) It'll Never Be The Same Again; 3) The Sailboat Song; 4) It's A Great Life; 5) Stoned Soul Picnic; 6) California Soul; 7) Lovin' Stew; 8) Broken Wing Bird; 9) Good News; 10) Bobbie's Blues; 11) The Eleventh Song (What A Groovy Day!).

 

The worst thing that could happen to the 5th Dimension was Jimmy Webb beginning to pay more attention to his own career — or, for the time being, to the career of Richard Harris, whom he'd enriched with ʽMacArthur Parkʼ in early 1968, as well as all the other songs and production work on his first album, at the expense of his former pets. The only Webb composition on the band's third album is roughly tacked on at the end under the title of ʽThe Eleventh Songʼ (because, you know, nice sunshine pop albums are supposed to contain even numbers of songs, but we did need a Jimmy Webb seal of approval, if only at the very last moment), and it is an obvious quickie throwaway — "what a groovy day it turned out to be, doo-doo-doo" is its only line, and coming off a generally disappointing record, it has a strong whiff of self-parody, which is pretty bad for a band that often already comes across as parodic in its very nature.

 

The 5th Dimension are completely in the hands of Bones Howe now, the by-default sunshine pop producer of the era, already noted for his work with The Association and now working his tepid magic on these guys — but he is nowhere near as adventurous as Webb, so out go the sitars, for instance, and all that pseudo-Eastern crap, and in goes even more brass and strings than there used to be. Theoretically, this is no big deal: it's not like Webb was particularly innovative or subtle in his use of sitar, and it's not as if Howe's idiom for the band results in completely dif­ferent textures and atmospheres. What is worse, however, is the sore lack of good songwriting: with Webb largely out of the picture, Howe and the other industry people are forced to fall back on even more cuddly and safe brands of corporate songwriting.

 

Worst of the bunch is a guy called Jeffrey Comanor, contributing pompous Neil Diamond-ish crap (ʽIt'll Never Be The Same Againʼ) and hookless folksy mush that tries to mask melodic paucity with lush flute-and-chime panoramas (ʽThe Sailboat Songʼ); he is equally bad at upbeat pop-rock (ʽLovin' Stewʼ, which has nothing to its name except for the strong tempo) and dream balladry (ʽBobbie's Bluesʼ — pretty male-female vocal harmony arrangement, but hardly ever elevated above the level of background muzak). Bob Alcivar's and Denny McReynolds' contri­butions (ʽBroken Wing Birdʼ and ʽIt's A Great Lifeʼ) are equally boring.

 

The saving grace of the album are two songs by the still relatively little-known Laura Nyro — ʽSweet Blindnessʼ and the title track, both of which had already managed to come out on Laura's own Eli And The Thirteenth Confession by the time The 5th Dimension got around to releasing their interpretations. These should probably be found worthy even by major fans of Laura: ʽSweet Blindnessʼ capitalizes even deeper on the contrasts between the slow and fast parts of the song than Laura's original, and the vocal duo of Florence and Marilyn add extra (and quite welcome) muscle to the joyful Motown-ish punch of the original, bringing it closer in style to something like Martha & The Vandellas. Likewise, they add extra funkiness to ʽStoned Soul Picnicʼ while managing to preserve its fussy spirit, a mix of psychedelia and gospel that makes the song equally interesting to fans of the Lord and lovers of the Grass. The ridiculous thing about it is that some­how, Laura Nyro material here goes interspersed with Jeff Comanor material — imagine some honest-to-good interpreter covering a mix of Beatles and Monkees songs (and I like the Monkees, but that would be irrelevant in this case).

 

The third and last single from the record was ʽCalifornia Soulʼ by Ashford & Simpson, a song that is definitely better than any of the Comanor stuff, but I still do not like it too much: it's another tune that is clearly influenced by ʽCalifornia Dreamingʼ way too seriously, and didn't we already have ʽCalifornia My Way?ʼ Here, it's like half of the vocal lines were lifted directly off the Mamas & Papas masterpiece — rather pitiful.

 

All in all, a major disappointment, although I still won't turn the album down explicitly because of the excellent Nyro covers and the fact that the vocal performances and arrangements are still complex and at least «beautiful» on a perfunctory level. Nevertheless, you're much better off just picking out the individual highlights here, due to the total lack of consistency.

 

 

THE AGE OF AQUARIUS (1969)

 

1) Aquarius / Let The Sunshine In; 2) Blowing Away; 3) Skinny Man; 4) Wedding Bell Blues; 5) Don'tcha Hear Me Callin' To Ya; 6) The Hideaway; 7) Workin' On A Groovy Thing; 8) Let It Be Me; 9) Sunshine Of Your Love; 10) The Winds Of Heaven; 11) Those Were The Days; 12) Let The Sunshine In (reprise).

 

If there was at least one good influence that Hair made on the musical world (outside of its social impact — making parents finally shed a tear for their hippie kids and all), it came in the form of a serious improvement of The 5th Dimension's fourth album over their third one. Not that anybody really gives a damn in 2017, but, on the other hand, the band's cover of ʽAquarius / Let The Sun­shine Inʼ is pretty much the only thing that the average customer these days might remember about the band in general, so at least there's that. Obviously, Hair and The 5th Dimension were made for each other, and here, the band commits to the experience one hundred percent, with soaring vocal harmonies and brass fanfares blaring Ennio Morricone out of the sky, while Billy Davis Jr. pulls his finest son-of-a-preacher-man impression on the ad-libbed part of ʽLet The Sunshine Inʼ — with an energy level easily matching that of Otis Redding (in fact, it would not be impossible to mistake him for Otis on this one).

 

If it were just the single, though, we'd have to count it as a fluke; surprisingly, the entire album is significantly more consistent than Stoned Soul Picnic, which probably had to do with the band and Bones Howe retaining the best of their songwriters and firing the worst ones (yes, we're sort of looking at you, Jeff Comanor). The best remains the best: there are two more Laura Nyro songs here, brilliantly sung by the band's female vocalists — ʽBlowing Awayʼ is upbeat soul-pop at its catchiest, funnest, and most powerful, while ʽWedding Bell Bluesʼ mixes that upbeatness and melodic optimism with a streak of sadness and yearning (it is, after all, about a girl losing hope of ever getting married), and Marilyn McCoo's vocals on both songs do full justice to Laura's originals (Marilyn is clearly more powerful and disciplined than Nyro, but that does not mean these are just technical, soulless renditions — she clearly understands Laura's messages, and is as perfect and loyal an interpreter as Laura could ever get).

 

Predictably, they are less successful when tackling genres they don't really know what to do with: while Cream's ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ cannot lose all of its sexy menace as long as the main riff stays relatively intact, it is obvious that the only thing this band and this production team can do with it is water it down — which they do, with happy harmonies, more of those brass fanfares, and a silly conga-driven break in the place of Clapton's solo. It made even less sense to put it near a bombastic, Vegas-style arrangement of ʽLet It Be Meʼ (I wonder if Billy Davis Jr. had to wear a rhinestone suit in the studio to properly get into character?), though, perhaps, not as little sense as ending the album with a cover of a cover of a cover — it was not enough that Mary Hopkin got herself a hit with ʽThose Were The Daysʼ after Gene Raskin had converted it from an old Russian gypsy-themed romance, no, the song also had to get a 5th Dimension seal on it (then again, it's personal here, since I hate stereotypical Russian romances and drinking songs with the same pas­sion that is usually reserved for intellectual Yankees hating stereotypical country music).

 

Still, misfires aside, there's a surprisingly large number of cool tunes here even beyond the title track and the Nyro covers. Michael and Ginger Kollander's ʽSkinny Manʼ is a chunk of charming bubblegum pop with intricate call-and-answer vocals between the boys and the girls in the band. Rudy Stevenson's ʽDont'cha Hear Me Callin' To Yaʼ has a tense, resolute Latin groove (stylisti­cally similar to Santana's ʽEvil Waysʼ, even though that song had not yet been released at the time). The only (but obligatory) Jimmy Webb cover, ʽThe Hideawayʼ, is a Randy Newmanesque Tin Pan Alley-ish family pop number that avoids Jimmy's sentimental excesses, even if its vocal hooks leave something to be desired. And as much as I am supposed to despise Neil Sedaka, I cannot deny that ʽWorkin' On A Groovy Thingʼ is a really well-written pop song, even despite sharing the subliminal message of rejecting intercourse before marriage ("let's not rush it, we'll take it slow" — yeah right, how about singing this with special guest Grace Slick on parallel lead vocals for extra sincerity?).

 

Subsequently, even if there are no signs whatsoever here that the band was somehow aware of changing musical fashions circa 1969 (and maybe that's a good thing — imagine Bones Howe trying to pull a Jimi Hendrix or a Led Zeppelin on us!), at least The Age Of Aquarius could not help but get pulled into the overall mega-healthy vortex of whatever was going on, when even thoroughly commercial songwriters, about as rebellious in nature as the local tax inspector, some­times produced musically challenging and tasteful material. Oh well, just a very good year on the whole, and for The 5th Dimension in particular — thumbs up, with the usual minimal reserva­tions here and there.

 

PORTRAIT (1970)

 

1) Puppet Man; 2) One Less Bell To Answer; 3) Feelin' Alright?; 4) This Is Your Life; 5) A Love Like Ours; 6) Save The Country; 7) The Declaration / A Change Is Gonna Come / People Gotta Be Free; 8) Dimension 5ive.

 

Not a lot of departures here from the formula of Aquarius, but the ones that do get noticed are not particularly auspicious. But first, the good news: ʽPuppet Manʼ is not only the best opening song on a 5th Dimension album, period — it also beats the shit out of both Neil Sedaka's original and Tom Jones' Vegas-ized version. With a sharp-stinging electric guitar lead, the band's usual stunning multi-part harmonies, and particularly the girls' fiery, well-empowered lead vocals, the song definitely rocks here — which is kind of amusing, considering how the lyrics are all about personal submission. (Then again, there's nothing more powerful in the world than voluntary total and absolute submission, I guess — just look at ʽVenus In Fursʼ).

 

Alas, the song also gives you false hopes — that, perhaps, the rest of the album might, too, con­form to this «electric soul» idiom, not too far removed from classic Funkadelic in terms of juici­ness and intensity. Nope! Released as a single, ʽPuppet Manʼ only made it all the way up to No. 24; and when the band resorted to its usual weapon of choice and followed it up with a typically excellent Laura Nyro cover, ʽSave The Countryʼ, it fared even worse and stalled at No. 27, de­spite all the upbeat gospelishness, all the enticing organ swirls and brass fanfares, all the enthu­siasm poured into the "we could build the dream with love" chorus. Oh, you can never tell with the American public: first they raise you up with ʽWedding Bell Bluesʼ, then they bring you down — harshly — when you give them something equally catchy and tasty.

 

So what's a poor fifth dimension to do in a situation like this? Fall back on sappy, shapeless sen­timentality and release ʽOne Less Bell To Answerʼ, a slow Bacharach/David tear jerker of the «ultimate housewife» variety — technically, sung to absolute perfection by Marilyn McCoo, but substantially, containing absolutely nothing but atmosphere, an empty vessel for whoever is more or less able to imbue it with dramatic content (of the soap variety, mostly). Naturally, it was that song that had to become the biggest commercial success from the album, and pretty much set the basic development trends for the band in the next few years. (I admit to having never been a big fan of Burt Bacharach — the Johann Strauss Junior of the Great American Songbook, from a certain point of view — but he did write quite a few better songs than this piece of thoroughly unmemorable mush).

 

In between these commercially low / artistically high and commercially high / artistically low points, Portrait wobbles and vacillates, largely depending on source material. The obligatory Jimmy Webb song this time around is ʽThis Is Your Lifeʼ, unfortunately, also slow, mushy and way too pompous to be taken seriously. The cover of Traffic's ʽFeelin' Alrightʼ is decent, and Billy Davis Jr. gives a good Otis Redding-ish soul take on the original vocal part, but is nowhere near close to the «interestingly personal» Joe Cocker version. Then there's a guy called Bob Alcivar, apparently responsible for the orchestration and also saddling the band with two of his own compositions — the lush pop ballad ʽA Love Like Oursʼ (so-so) and the lite jazz / lite clas­sical mash-up ʽDimension 5iveʼ, somewhat ambitious but still way too corny for my tastes (I guess the idea was to produce something like the band's own take on the Pet Sounds instrumen­tals, but the results are much cuddlier and kiddish).

 

Worst of the lot, though, and deserving to be registered as a legendary embarrassment in the history of hippie muzak, is the idea to set to music nothing less than The Declaration Of Indepen­dence itself — in a three-part medley with Sam Cooke's ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ and The Young Rascals' ʽPeople Gotta Be Freeʼ. While the Cooke cover, like the Traffic cover, is decent (but adds nothing to the glorious original), the vocal performance of ʽThe Declarationʼ simply has to be heard to be disbelieved: they really do rip through a large part of the Preamble, alternating between male and female leads and trying their best to squeeze the dense prose of the text into soul music phrasing. The most horrible thing about it is that — who knows? — there might well be people out there inspired by this brand of starch-heavy, gluten-rich musical corn. But, I mean, yeah, who else but a band of superficially-minded, commercially-oriented, family-friendly pseudo-hippies to remind society of certain self-evident truths?..

 

All in all, here be a mixed bag if there ever was one — swinging all the way from the coolness of ʽPuppet Manʼ to the catastrophe of ʽThe Declarationʼ, from the upbeat, catchy inspiration of ʽSave The Countryʼ to the instantly forgettable mush of ʽOne Less Bell To Answerʼ, and so on; a classic case of up and down thumbs outcanceling each other, but this is precisely what compila­tions and self-made playlists are there for these days.

 

LOVE'S LINES, ANGLES AND RHYMES (1971)

 

1) Time And Love; 2) Love's Lines, Angles And Rhymes; 3) What Does It Take; 4) Guess Who; 5) Viva Tirado; 6) Light Sings; 7) The Rainmaker; 8) He's A Runner; 9) The Singer; 10) Every Night.

 

Umm... nice stripes, I guess. While the more progressively-minded part of the African-American community at the time was seriously getting funky (and this involved even major commercial stars like Aretha Franklin), The 5th Dimension, still ruled by the rose-perfumed fist of Bones Howe, continued to live in their own vision of 1967. The most important difference is probably the lack — first time ever! — of even a single Jimmy Webb song: not a very good sign, but if we agree that they swapped Webb for Paul McCartney, it might be OK. Actually, the cover of ʽEvery Nightʼ is one of the album's highlights: the band must have chosen the song because they felt McCartney's falsetto wooh-wooh harmonies on the track were right up their main alley, and they were quite right about it.

 

Other than that, it is almost too easy to predict which songs will be good and which ones will be bad just by scrutinizing the tracklist. Check: two more Laura Nyro songs, the wonderfully upbeat and catchy ʽTime And Loveʼ and the golden oldie ʽHe's A Runnerʼ that had already been covered by Mama Cass and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Check: Harry Nilsson's ʽThe Rainmakerʼ, for some reason, with Billy Davis' lead vocal reciting rather than singing the lyrics much of the time, but the girls' harmonies on the flute-supported chorus more than make up for it. Check: who are all these other guys writing songs for them? They probably all suck.

 

Indeed, almost everything else seems to be forgettable. Maybe with the exception of the title track, an effort to capitalize on the slow ballad success of ʽOne Less Bell To Answerʼ: once again sung by Marilyn McCoo, it is another of those torch songs, but I actually prefer it to the mush of Bacharach/David — there's more fire in this one, with a chorus rising to near-scream levels on brass fanfare waves and a dark and firm bassline supporting the verses. Originally written by Dorothea Joyce and recorded by Diana Ross, the song is even better suited for Marilyn's fuller, more powerful vocals, so it passes the quality test.

 

The rest is just generic soft-soul, inoffensive ear candy with weak hooks and mediocre levels of emotional power. ʽViva Tiradoʼ, with its annoying mixed-language chorus of "viva joy and viva peace", sounds like a serious misuse of Latin rhythms; the other four songs, including the minor hit single ʽLight Singsʼ, sound like they belong in the soundtrack of some generic hippie movie from the early 1970s. There's nothing tastelessly wrong with enjoying that sound (as long as the backing musicianship remains professional, which you can always expect of Bones Howe and the 5th Dimension), but nothing too exciting to relate to your grandchildren, either. The striped pants and suits certainly look far more exciting than the overall musical content.

 

INDIVIDUALLY & COLLECTIVELY (1972)

 

1) Leave A Little Room; 2) (Last Night) I Didn't Get To Sleep At All; 3) All Kinds Of People; 4) Sky & Sea; 5) Tomorrow Belongs To The Children; 6) If I Could Reach You; 7) Half Moon; 8) Band Of Gold; 9) Border Song; 10) Black Patch.

 

Honestly speaking, you can skip most of the individual and the collective songs on here and head straight for the last number — because, as you have already guessed, it is a Laura Nyro song; not one of her best, though, or, at least, not one of those to which they do proper justice. An upbeat, horn-filled anthem giving each of the band members a solo spotlight, it erases the happy-sad per­sonality that they had, up until then, managed to preserve so well, and becomes just another de­cent, but unexceptional sunshine pop statement.

 

Even so, it is the best track on this highly generic, thoroughly uninspired platter that finds The 5th Dimension largely unhooked from their energy sources — most of the songwriting seems to come from second- and third-rate people, with Jimmy Webb totally busy elsewhere. One major new songwriter whom they try to include on their roster is Elton John: the cover of ʽBorder Songʼ is halfway decent, but for all their gospel-soul authenticity, they are incapable of preserving the song's aura of loneliness and depression: Billy Davis Jr. is really such a happy, happy person by nature that he could probably inject warmth and cuddliness into Joy Division, so this is just a wrong choice here.

 

Both of the singles culled from the album, according to the formula established with ʽOne Less Bellʼ, are ballads sung by Marilyn McCoo — Tony Macaulay's ʽI Didn't Get To Sleep At Allʼ and Randall McNeil's ʽIf I Could Reach Youʼ, both of them making bets on the strength and expres­sivity of Marilyn's voice (no questions there) and little else, standard lush pop Broadway fodder without any special hooks. Both made it on the charts, but climbed highest on the adult contem­porary / easy listening registers, for obvious reasons, and I'd think that only a major fan of schlock aesthetics could easily memorize them.

 

Other than that, you have a surprisingly decent exercise in funk (ʽHalf Moonʼ, previously made famous by Janis Joplin) — excellent musicianship (watch out particularly for a mighty mighty bassline from session veteran Joe Osborne), but not such a great vocal performance; another of their generic pa-da-bam vocalize pieces (ʽSky & Seaʼ, from some obscure musical), good for lengthy elevator rides; and a few other non-descript soul pieces that seem to have been recorded completely in autopilot mode. When you put it all together, the result is devastating: there's not really even a single song that I could visualize making it to my ideal 5th Dimension compilation. Then again, there is absolutely nothing surprising in this: all they did was loyally follow the trends in American mainstream pop tastes, and as those tastes continued disentangling themselves from the pop-rock and psychedelic influences of the mid-to-late Sixties, so did these guys' music continue to evolve from fun-and-cuddly to bland-and-mushy. Thumbs down.

 

LIVING TOGETHER, GROWING TOGETHER (1973)

 

1) Open Your Window; 2) Ashes To Ashes; 3) Changed; 4) The Riverwitch; 5) Living Together Growing Together; 6) Day By Day; 7) There's Nothing Like Music; 8) What Do I Need To Be Me; 9) There Never Was A Day; 10) Let Me Be Lonely; 11) Woyaya.

 

Although the band's commercial luck began to seriously wane with Individually & Collectively, it was not until 1973 that the fifth dimension truly began caving in on them — the LP did not make it into the Top 100, and this time, not even the singles were of much help. The biggest of 'em all was the title track — immediately recognizable as a Burt Bacharach tune since it uses the exact same introduction as ʽClose To Youʼ, and sharing all the usual easy listening attributes of any generic Bacharach tune: sweet, slightly bouncy ear candy with about as much depth to it as the movie it was written for (the allegedly awful reinvention of Lost Horizon as one of those corny 1970s musicals). And even that one only got to No. 32.

 

By now you know that you can usually predict the average quality of a 5th Dimension album just by looking at the list of songwriters, and this time around, the list is particularly discouraging. Bacharach & David, represented by two songs (the second one is ʽLet Me Be Lonelyʼ, a solo spot for Florence that's nice if you... umm, like sentimental waltzes with lotsa strings and brass), are actually one of the top names on the list — the only other top name is Harry Nilsson, whose ʽOpen Your Windowʼ, deliciously and seductively crooned (cooed?) by Marilyn McCoo, is a nice enough opener, but very short and misleading.

 

Elsewhere, brace yourselves for the return of Jeff Comanor, with derivatively Sam Cookish gospel numbers like ʽThe Riverwitchʼ (Billy Davis Jr. gives a fairly impressive Cooke / Redding impression, as usual, but the melody has not a single original twist) and equally derivatively Wil­son Pickettish R&B rave-ups like ʽThere's Nothin' Like Musicʼ — well, not too bad, to be honest, but not particularly necessary if you can get the real thing. And then there's lush ballads, ballads, ballads a-plenty, all of them largely interchangeable, even if, technically, McCoo's vocals are unimpeachable as usual. Of course, the «easy listening» genre is not really my cup of tea, and maybe I simply cannot see the little things that make these particular performances stand out against the rest, but as far as I'm concerned, this is all just plastic soul-imbued pop crapola, dili­gently, but indifferently executed by the performers. At least all those Laura Nyro songs offered a good chance to get into some character, but now they've run out of these, too.

 

Out of good ideas, The 5th Dimension make a nice, but meaningless, gesture of fraternizing with their black brothers across the Atlantic — covering Osibisa's ʽWoyayaʼ from the latter's 1971 album of the same name. As you can guess, it is a loyal, professional, and probably well-meaning cover, but it is hard to expect that the professional, glossy, restrained approach of a bubblegum Californian band can make this mix of pop music and tribal chanting uncover hidden depths that it lacked in the original. Nice try, but next time, try moving to Ghana or something. Definitely a thumbs down — no Jimmy Webb, no Laura Nyro, no dice.

 

SOUL & INSPIRATION (1974)

 

1) Soul & Inspiration; 2) Harlem; 3) The Best Of My Love; 4) My Song; 5) Hard Core Poetry; 6) No Love In The Room; 7) House For Sale; 8) Somebody Warm Like Me; 9) Salty Tears; 10) I Don't Know How To Look For Love.

 

This album starts off just fine, with two of the band's finest performances from the meager mid-1970s — a solid, fiery rendition of The Righteous Brothers' ʽSoul & Inspirationʼ, with Billy and Marilyn trading lead vocal duties and bassist Joe Osborn providing the song with a tough, gritty skeleton underneath all the orchestral layers; and immediately afterwards, a cover of Bill Withers' ʽHarlemʼ that smartly capitalizes upon all the funky promise of the original — perhaps the band inevitably loses some of the song's irony and subtlety in the process, but with their harmonies, wild strings and wah-wah guitars all over the place, they make the song kick significantly more ass than it did while chained to Bill's vision.

 

Alas, that's about it: once the highlights are done with, the usual curse of the 5th Dimension — dependence on mediocre songwriting — kicks in, and the rest of the album consists of largely interchangeable ballads and R&B workouts that waste the vocal talents of the band and the ins­trumental professionalism of the Wrecking Crew behind them. You're covering the Eagles? Fine, but couldn't you at least have picked some of their better songs, like ʽWitchy Womanʼ or some­thing, rather than the generic MOR ballad ʽBest Of My Loveʼ? And of all those other tunes, the only one that still sticks in my head a bit is ʽNo Love In The Roomʼ, a dark dance number with a good vocal build-up, though still very run-of-the-mill in terms of arrangement (ominous strings, proto-disco bass, all the works).

 

In fact, the record is so heavy on softness and sentimentality that the only proper R&B number here, besides ʽHarlemʼ, is ʽMy Songʼ, a composition by Rich Cason written at the crossroads of Funkadelic/Parliament and Stevie Wonder, but without the mad energy of the former and the melodic genius of the latter. At least they try to get a groove going here, and Billy is sincerely trying to fire it up; on such easy listening numbers as ʽHard Core Poetryʼ (courtesy of the Lambert & Potter songwriting duo), ʽHouse For Saleʼ (courtesy of Larry Brown, a Motown hack),  ʽSomebody Warm Like Meʼ (courtesy of Tony Macaulay who'd given them ʽ(Last Night) I Didn't Get To Sleep At Allʼ in 1972), there's nothing happening at all, although, of course, all of these songs can be used as relaxing background muzak. But even considering how many people in the world treat all music as no more than relaxing background muzak, and how much this record follows the standard soft-pop formula of the mid-1970s, the fact is that Soul & Inspiration tanked just as miserably as its predecessor, missing its huge core audience by a mile. Again, not recommended for anybody except huge fans of Billy's and Marilyn's vocal talents — which, as usual, are formally on open display, but still do not prevent me from an overall thumbs down.

 

EARTHBOUND (1975)

 

1) Earthbound Prologue / Be Here Now; 2) Don't Stop For Nothing; 3) I've Got A Feeling; 4) Magic In My Life; 5) Walk Your Feet In The Sunshine; 6) When Did I Lose Your Love; 7) Lean On Me Always; 8) Speaking With My Heart; 9) Moonlight Mile; 10) Earthbound Epilogue.

 

See, sometimes it really helps to be patient. After a set of four nearly identical, nearly identically lackluster records dominated by subpar material, during which period the commercial relevance of The 5th Dimension steadily dropped down to near-zero level, one last attempt — caused, per­haps, by events beyond their control rather than a conscious change of image — nevertheless, one last attempt was made to return the band to their bubble-psycho-lite roots. It was made at the wrong time and in the wrong way, but it was made, so that succeeding generations of listeners like myself could at least partially redeem them for their sins.

 

Big changes here indeed: a new record label (ABC) — Bones Howe getting tired of his protegés and leaving them to concentrate on Tom Waits — and, most importantly, Jimmy Webb returning, not only to take his place as producer but also as dominant songwriter: as if in compensation for all the years he'd been missing, he now writes a whoppin' half of the album for them, just like in the good old days! And the rest of the songs? Still covers from outside songwriters, but no more of those mediocre hacks and Bacharach adepts: we have such highly unusual choices as the Beatles' ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ, the Stones' ʽMoonlight Mileʼ, and even such a classy underrated selection as George Harrison's ʽBe Here Nowʼ from the Living In The Material World album. Plus, as an additional oddity, they cover both the A-side and the B-side of the last single released by the obscure American prog rock band Gypsy: weird choice, sure, but I guess that Webb just thought, "well, we have to do something contemporary, but none of that sentimental crap they'd been regurgitating on those past albums... oh, I guess this will do nicely".

 

In addition, they have a completely new backing band: no more relying on the professionalism and good taste of the Wrecking Crew, but worth it, perhaps, for a brand new sound, significantly dependent on synthesizers (played well, with a «cosmic / acid» vibe rather than adult contempo­rary overtones) and talented individuals such as guitar wiz Fred Tackett, most commonly associa­ted with Little Feat, and jazz master Larry Coryell, hired to play acoustic guitar: his presence is immediately felt on the dazzling speedy runs he plays on ʽBe Here Nowʼ — the song itself rolls along at its original slow tempo, but Larry's fussy, funny fretwork gives it an original lively angle that shows this new incarnation of The 5th Dimension has finally remembered what it actually means to introduce a fifth dimension to the four of the original work.

 

Do not get me wrong: Earthbound is not some sort of unjustly forgotten masterpiece. It is a Jimmy Webb conceptual album, and Jimmy Webb is not a genius. But it is a genuinely interes­ting record that dares to take chances — such chances as this band had not taken for at least five years. The cover of ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ is excellent, because the Beatles' number was a ready-made energetic R&B workout, and Billy Davis Jr. does it full justice here, even if the ladies' talents are strangely underused (the perfect thing to do would be to have them sing the "every­body had a hard year" part, contrasting with Billy delivering the main verses). ʽMoonlight Mileʼ, unfortunately, loses all of its Stonesy magic in transition — it is so deeply rooted in its «redemp­tion from the sins of a rock'n'roll lifestyle» context that few people other than the Stones them­selves could ever appropriate it adequately — but the band's soulful rearrangement is amusing and pleasant, and the girls' dreamy harmonies slide along like perfect butter for Billy to cut with his own vocal knife, if you'll pardon the metaphor.

 

The Gypsy tracks seem to be fairly rare (I have not heard the originals), but ʽDon't Stop For Nothingʼ is one of the steamiest, funkiest grooves this band ever did, with a gritty bass / guitar lockdown and all the back vocalists in a high-charged bayou-voodoo mood; ʽMagic In My Lifeʼ is a comparatively inoffensive R&B ballad that one could easily imagine as one of those Diana Ross / Michael Jackson duets, but at least it's got a fun quotient in it. As for the Webb tracks, four of them form a near-continuous suite and are, perhaps not so surprisingly, the sappiest of the lot: ʽWhen Did I Lose Your Loveʼ and ʽSpeaking With My Heartʼ are just as expendable as anything on their previous four albums, but ʽWalk Your Feet In The Sunshineʼ, even if it shamelessly steals its riff from The Who's ʽSubstituteʼ and its piccolo trumpet fanfares from the likes of ʽPenny Laneʼ, is an enticing slice of classic sunshine pop (okay, I just looked back at the title and realized I'm being grossly redundant, but what the heck), and ʽLean On Me Alwaysʼ is saved by Billy Davis, who injects as much passionate gospel soul into this stereotypically generic number as he is inherently capable of.

 

All of this (not always, but usually) successful diversity is framed by a pseudo-progressive wrapping in the form of the title track — a lite-classical piece, Moody Blues-style, but with a lot of attention predictably given over to the band's harmonies; as pompous and ceremonial as the composition is, it is really atypical of the rest of the album, which might be just as well, because I'd rather have this band engage in funky grooves, gospel soul, and sunshine pop than try their hand at progressive rock (and as late as 1975 at that!). But it does call to my attention the strange fact that on the whole, the album goes very easy on female vocals — the majority of the leads are by Billy Davis, and the male-female harmony schtick is severely underplayed, which is fairly weird, since Webb had never shown any signs of male chauvinism up to then. Strange as it is, Marilyn only gets one single lead part on ʽWhen Did I Lose Your Loveʼ, which wasn't even made into a single, breaking with the questionable, but well-established tradition. Well — perhaps they just wanted to try something completely different.

 

For all of the album's inevitable flaws (we know all about how this band and its producer could never be perfect, anyway), I give it an enthusiastic thumbs up — it is not every day, after all, that you can witness a formerly decent band rise from the ashes after so many years of bland medio­crity, and at a time when nobody could even begin to expect something of the kind. As a matter of fact, nobody did begin to expect anything of the kind, and after four commercially oriented records that flopped, it would have been foolish of them to expect a non-commercial (or, at least, not-so-commercial) record not to flop. Whatever the circumstances, this was the straw that broke the camel's fifth-dimensional back — Billy and Marilyn quit the band soon after its release to continue their career as a musical duo (for a short while) and as a family couple (for quite a long while: as of 2017, they are still together, probably setting a record for the longest-lived family couple in the world of pop music or something, God bless 'em). At this moment, the logical thing for the rest of the band would have been to pack it in; due to circumstances beyond logical control, though, this is where the strangest chapter in the history of this band actually begins.

 

 

AFFINITY

AFFINITY (1970)

 

1) I Am And So Are You; 2) Night Flight; 3) I Wonder If I Care As Much; 4) Mr. Joy; 5) Three Sisters; 6) Coconut Grove; 7) All Along The Watchtower; 8*) Eli's Coming; 9*) United States Of Mind.

 

Here is a classic textbook case of a band that could be, but wasn't, for no particularly fatal reason. Things just didn't work out. But at its very best, during that brief moment when it almost was, the band had a perfectly good chance to grow into at least something like Renaissance or Curved Air, and there is some sense in how carefully its small cult following has amassed all the relics, start­ing from the only LP officially released during the band's existence and ending with all the out­takes, demos, and archival mementos both from before and from afterwards.

 

At the time when their self-titled album was released, Affinity were a five-person band from Brighton, most of them idealistic college students intent on making «serious» rock music. Their chief selling points: (a) intelligent humility, making them rely as prominently on cover versions of classic tunes as their own material — in an age when «serious» acts were supposed to camou­flage their influences rather than openly state them; (b) a heavy, «grinding» style of organ playing by keyboardist Lynton Naiff, whose sound is much more responsible for the band's hard rock style than Mike Jopp's guitar; (c) the iron lungs of vocalist Linda Hoyle, versatile enough to evo­ke the fury of Grace Slick on one track and then the tenderness of Joni Mitchell on another.

 

The result is an excellent album, and even in those demanding days of 1970, most critics had some kind words to say about it. Its only flaw is that it synthesizes too much without carving out a totally individualistic style — working fine in the 21st century, perhaps, where so many critical darlings are almost afraid to develop a-thing-all-their-own for fear of being dismissed as too nar­row-minded, but not in 1970, when every great band was expected to spearhead its own genre.

 

Which makes all the more sense for us to re-experience the taste of Affinity now that the 21st century is tenth-part over. If heavy, sweaty, and artsy rock music is your cup of tea, tracks like 'I Am And So Are You' and 'Three Sisters', driven by massive organ riffs and overlaid with thick brass arrangements more reminiscent of the jarring distorted grunts of Colosseum than the much more poppy approach of Blood, Sweat & Tears, are sure to make your day. If you like your art rock in a more quiet, nocturnal mode, then 'Night Flight' and 'Mr. Joy' (particularly the latter, with Linda Hoyle practicing all over the scale) are an equally good choice.

 

The band's knack for invention is most evident on their near-unrecognizable rearrangement of the Everly Brothers' 'I Wonder If I Care As Much' — with harpsichords, cellos, chimes, harps, stra­nge scra­ping percussion, choral vocal arrangements, and a big wailing Mellotron melody running through the fields (provided that really is a Mellotron); it's as if the song's purpose were to outdo Pet Sounds, clearly an impossible task since they are unable to match the beauty of the harmo­nies, but in terms of complexity of arrangements, the final result almost puts Brian to shame.

 

The band's self-evident Achilles' heel is rambling: most of Side B is dedicated to a long, long, long take on 'All Along The Watchtower', delivered by Linda with epic Biblical force, but mostly turned into a showcase for Naiff's organ doodling: he takes no fewer than three lengthy solos, without allowing Jopp even a single guitar break (and it's not as if he were not up to the task — his art-bluesy solo on 'Three Sisters' is quite fluent). The weird thing is, I like his doodling: each of the three solos is slightly different in texture and consists of carefully executed lines that must have been thought out and pre-rehearsed — building up to a great noisy climax at the end. (The style is mostly reminiscent of Jon Lord circa 1970, but Lord would actually improvise a lot more, playing whatever quotation from whatever classical piece would be roaming in his head at the moment — too much expertise can be just as bad as too little of it, in some contexts).

 

The bottomline is — there isn't really a single bad track on the record. But, epoch-wise, it may have come out just a little too late, at a time when «art rock» in its early stage, that is, blues, folk, and rock'n'roll tunes dressed up in exotic instruments and spiced with quotations from classical and jazz idioms, was giving way to the «prog» way of life, where these idioms themselves took on as much meaning as «rock». These guys could certainly compete with Donovan or Quicksilver Messenger Service, but not with King Crimson or Yes. It is only these days that, finally, they can be judged on their own. Affinity may not be one of those «forgotten masterpieces» on the level of Odessey And Oracle, but it's the perfect album to bitch about when all of those first-tier range forgotten masterpieces start sounding like old clichés to you. Come to think of it, who'd be able to prove that Lynton Naiff's keyboard playing isn't every bit as accomplished as Rod Argent's?

 

Thumbs up from the bottom of me heart; and do not bypass the bonus tracks on the CD release either — there is a stomping cover of Laura Nyro's 'Eli's Coming' out there that almost annihilates the original.

 

AFFINITY 1971-72 (1971-72; 2003)

 

1) Moira's Hand; 2) Grey Skies; 3) Cream On Your Face; 4) Sunshower; 5) All Along The Watchtower / It's About That Time; 6) Rio; 7) Poor Man's Son; 8*) Sarah's Wardrobe; 9*) Highgate.

 

When Linda Hoyle and Lynton Naiff simultaneously declared that they were parting ways with Affinity, in order to enjoy a more peaceful existence in Obscurity, hardly anyone familiar with the band's output could doubt its future as a Non-Entity. The good sides of the band, upon which a bright shining future could have been constructed, were the vocals and the keyboard passages, and now they were no more. (Incidentally, Linda Hoyle pretty much disappeared from the musi­cal scene after putting out one mediocre solo album, and Naiff disappeared altogether — so much for yielding to antisocial behaviour!).

 

Nevertheless, it turns out that the remaining members did decide to plow along, rebooting the whole thing from scratch. The place of Naiff was occupied by Dave Watts — yes, Dave Watts, who may have been head boy at the school and captain of his team (that's what Ray Davies tells us), but, for some reason, eventually switched to playing second-rate keyboards. Hoyle's spot was given to Vivienne McAuliffe, formerly of Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, a bizarre music-and-theater artistic commune specializing in crossing Shakespeare with the Grateful Dead. And then they tried to go on as if nothing happened.

 

The results are almost surprisingly decent. Although there is nothing particularly interesting go­ing on in terms of technique or complexity, the band spent some time improving their compositi­onal skills, and came up with quite a few win-quality art-pop songs — which McAuliffe gives a classy interpretation; her vocals do not have the ticklish «beastly» quality of Hoyle, belonging more to the «British female folk singer» breed, somewhere in between Annie Haslam and Sandy Denny, but she has more range, and is quite capable of adding real fire to all the right places.

 

So both 'Moira's Hand' and 'Cream On Your Face' are exciting «hard-folk»-rockers with catchy choruses and classy, if not really unique, sound; 'Rio' has an impressive build-up from subdued jangly folk-pop to its pompous art-rock refrain — watch how McAuliffe goes from twittery-fluffy chirping to all-out boisterous screaming; and 'Sunshower' and 'Poor Man's Son' (the latter contri­buted by friend Mike D'Abo, whose own recording of the song never extols the loveliness of the vocal melody as much as McAuliffe's performance) are both pretty ballads well worth revisiting from time to time.

 

Predictably, the band stutters when going for extended takes — without the required instrumental power on their hands, the «epic» 'Grey Skies' sounds underdeveloped in its vocal parts and exces­sive in the instrumental ones; and the re-recording of 'All Along The Watchtower' is a blunderous mistake — this is the kind of tune on which the subtler approach of McAuliffe could never com­pete with Linda Hoyle's blasts, and the solo parts are just a joke next to Naiff's cleverly mapped organ journeys; the original's eleven minutes seemed to go by much faster than the eight minutes of the new version.

 

We can only hope that this track was just a bit of studio rehearsal, not intended for inclusion on the band's second album — hope, but never know, since that album never came to pass: before the new-look band had the proper time to get a record deal, «good friend» Mike D'Abo simply whisked away the remaining original members to back him up as a solo performer, leaving Mc­Auliffe jobless and with no future hope of competing with Sonja Kristina or Maddy Prior.

 

The only reason that we are now aware that this second incarnation of Affinity left something behind in the first place is the nostalgic kindness of Angel Air Records, who, upon re-releasing the 1970 album in 2002, followed it up by making available to the public just about every little scrap of material related to the band the very next year. Of these archival deposits, only Affinity 1971-72 deserves a special review (note that the album also includes a couple bonus instrumen­tals that seem to have been recorded at a much later date); the rest date back to earlier times, with self-evident titles like Live Instrumentals 1969, Origins 1965-67, and even Origins: The Bas­ker­­villes 1965 (some live playing there, with easily imaginable sound quality). These are of mi­nor, if any, his­toric importance, but the seven tracks on Affinity 1971-72 really play out like an album, and a pretty coherent one at that — thumbs up, and yes, big pity about both girls fading out of sight and sound so early in their careers.

 

 

 

AL GREEN

BACK UP TRAIN (1967)

 

1) Back Up Train; 2) Hot Wire; 3) Stop And Check Myself; 4) Let Me Help You; 5) I'm Reachin' Out; 6) Don't Hurt Me No More; 7) Don't Leave Me; 8) I'll Be Good To You; 9) Guilty; 10) That's All It Takes (Lady); 11) Get Yourself Together; 12) What's It All About; 13) A Lover's Hideaway.

 

You would have to be quite exceptional at your homework to even know this record exists. It is cre­dited to Al Greene, with an extra «e» at the end that would be soon removed so as not to lead the buyers into orthographic confusion. It came out almost three years before Al's «proper» debut with Hi Records and Willie Mitchell. In all honesty, it bears only a remote resemblance to what came to be known as the «classic Al Green» style. At least these days, it is finally available on CD — with due respect to the Reverend's status and proper care for his purse.

 

But, unlike some «formative» debuts that we could name with a blush, Back Up Train is cer­tainly not a record to be ashamed of. In fact, in terms of sheer consistency and simple «en­joy­abi­lity», I would argue that it is more solid than the «proper debut» itself (Green Is Blues). It is simply different — much more suitable to the tastes of those who dig straightforward, catchy, dan­ceable, classic R&B, than of those who are in need of soft, silky, sexy sounds to make out to, and who, not unjustly, consider Al Green their guiding light in that department.

 

Being utterly unoriginal, Back Up Train may be best described as the sum of its influences: a little jerky hoppin'-and-boppin' from James Brown, a touch of soul from Otis Redding, plenty of clean-cut, white-suited, well-tailored spirituality from The Impressions, and Marvin Gaye, per­haps? I am sure he is hiding somewhere in here as well (for instance, it is his legacy that may be responsible for the actual «hooks» in these songs, rather than mere «grooves»). I wish I could claim that all these influences fall together into something completely idiosyncratic and one-of-a-kind, but I cannot. The only independent aspect here is Green(e)'s singing voice, already capable of seducing the audience — even if, at the moment, he is still sparing those trademark killer high notes of his for just a few spine-tingling choruses; in particular, do not miss his glorious croon of 'I've been cheated...' ('Don't Hurt Me No More'), an early, but quite impressive example of his abi­lity to mix smooth sexiness with spiritual desperation.

 

Still, as far as pure craftsmanship goes, the album is beyond criticism. The songwriting, mainly courtesy of Curtis Rodgers and Palmer James, Al's old musical buddies and co-founders of the independent Hot Line Music label on which the album was released, is honest and moderately creative. The musician­ship is either first-rate or, at worst, second-rate, which is still pretty damn good for 1967. The arrangements are tasteful and make the best use of mid-Sixties technology — particularly impressive is 'I'll Be Good To You', which, over its limited two minutes, manages to throw in choppy 'Taxman'-style rhythm guitar, a complex proto-funk rhythm section, a brash brass opening, echoey vocal harmonies, and an almost psychedelic strings section, with some weird violin/cello interplay (or was that a Mellotron instead of a violin?) that makes me suspect that someone in the studio must have been quite a big fan of 'Strawberry Fields Forever' — and, by the way, we would fairly soon explicitly witness Al's interest in the Beatles.

 

For the record, Green(e) himself is only credited for one song, 'Stop And Check Myself', which is, as one might expect, a little more personal and a little less lyrically trivial than the rest of the stuff, but not a particular highlight from a purely musical side. I must confess that I personally prefer Palmer James' 'Let Me Help You' and 'Don't Leave Me', if only for the cool hooks concealed in the backing vocals, for which Mr. James must have had quite a hidden fetish, if he was writing the best lines for Green's backing singers rather than for the man himself. Odd.

 

Predictably, cold rational analysis would demand to trash this record as a predictable product of its time, but in the end, it is so nice and friendly that a thumbs up is impossible to deny, es­pecially if we remember that it is not particularly easy to find great R&B with a solid hook-base, or talented R&B artists who could look for inspiration towards The Beatles as easily as they could towards James Brown or Ray Charles.

 

GREEN IS BLUES (1969)

 

1) One Woman; 2) Talk To Me; 3) My Girl; 4) The Letter; 5) I Stand Accused; 6) Gotta Find A New World; 7)  What Am I Gonna Do With Myself; 8) Tomorrow's Dream; 9) Get Back Baby; 10) Get Back; 11) Summertime; *12) I Want To Hold Your Hand.

 

The "proper" start of Al's career: a new producer (Willie Mitchell), a new label (Hi Records), a new backing band (the Hi Rhythm Section), and... well, no, on this album the new determination to finally find his own unique style is nowhere yet to be seen. Green Is Blues, for some reason, drops the "Rhythm" stem before the "Blues" one, but one listen is enough to understand that in 1969, Al was still trying to market himself (or, rather, Al's producer was trying to market Al) as a cool swingin' cat, whippin' his audiences into a groove that didn't include smoothness, suaveness, and silkiness into its list of ingredients.

 

For one thing, Green is still singing with a certain degree of harshness in his voice; the lush velvet of his phonation was still waiting for a chance to unravel. (We only get a very little glimpse here on the rather so-so composition 'What Am I Gonna Do With Myself'). For another, there are very few straightforward ballads on the album — in fact, maybe just the opener, 'One Woman', which cleverly grows from quiet/tender to all-out operatic, and a cover of 'My Girl', and that's that. All of the other songs will at least have you tap your foot — including Green's lone original, 'Get Back Baby', where he tries to ride James Brown's funky train by relying on chicken-scratch guitars and very Brown-like grunting. Unconvincingly.

 

The entire album smells of foot-in-the-water, as would probably any album that covers both 'Summertime' and 'Get Back', not to mention the already mentioned 'My Girl'. The take on 'Get Back' is at least curious, along the lines of Otis Redding's take on 'A Hard Day's Night' — it's always fun to see the black groove masters adapt the Beatles to their own sense of rhythm and musical vision — but whether we really need one more version of 'Summertime' is certainly up to discussion. Green's vocals are perhaps most impressive on his version of the Box Tops' 'The Letter', since he actually sings all the way through rather than grunt or recite, and essays almost every trick in his vocal repertoire.

 

A major highlight that few people usually mention is Doc Oliver and Carl Smith's 'Gotta Find A New World' — actually, one of Al's most passionate socially-tinged songs, a little 'Gimme Shel­ter'-ish in mood, with its tense bass line, female backup harmonies and Green driving himself into frenzied desperation. A song almost criminally underarranged, though: with a little more work it could have become a timeless epic rather than just a forgotten track on one of Green's lesser records.

 

A decent start overall, but for some reason, whenever I call upon my heart and brain for judge­ment, both happen to be out for lunch, no matter what time of day it is. Meaning that the judge­ment has to be suspended, and the music lover should proceed at his own risk. There is a CD edition with lots of bonus tracks, I hear, but the only one on mine is an early single version of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand', which is... well, it's not difficult to imagine what an Al Green version of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' could sound like.

 

AL GREEN GETS NEXT TO YOU (1971)

 

1) I Can't Get Next To You; 2) Are You Lonely For Me Baby; 3) God is Standing By; 4) Tired Of Being Alone; 5) I'm A Ram; 6) Driving Wheel; 7) Light My Fire; 8) You Say It; 9) Right Now, Right Now; 10) All Because; 11*) Ride, Sally, Ride; 12*) True Love; 13*) I'll Be Standing By.

 

Third time gets it right. Please own this Green album: there is nothing else like it in his catalog. Al's first really focused, really consistent effort still catches him in his transitional phase, when he hasn't yet decided whether it is more promising to keep on putting out harder, grittier grooves, or to completely reinterpret himself as The Ladies' Man. So he tries some of both, but with a serious bias towards the "grittier" side nevertheless — and if you've ever gotten tired of the exquisite, but tiring soft sound of his post-1971 records, Gets Next To You gives you an Al Green who can do it all: rock along with the best of 'em and croon like even the best ones of them can't.

 

The only thing he can't do is get next to you, as he shamefully confesses in the title track... but then you look at the album title and you know he's only pretending. Slowing down the original Temptations version, removing the funk and replacing it with a slow, longing, burning R'n'B melody, Al gives the song a whole new life, and the Memphis Horns a terrific playground for practicing their brassy geometry. Instead of playful and aggressive, the song is now dark and disturbing, and while Al's one-man potential is not enough to replace from four to six different individual Temptations, he has the advantage of personalizing the song and building up a persona: the same confused, chaotic, but mild and lovable persona he'd be regularly invocating from now on. Watch out for the two or so bars of grizzly psychedelic-Funkadelic-like guitar in the solo, too.

 

But 'I Can't Get Next To You' isn't the only half-cool, half-relaxed, sweaty, rhythmic workout on the album. 'I'm A Ram' is like a tightly wound coil of great brass, organ, and guitar riffs, over which Al asserts his superiority to the average Joe; Roosevelt Sykes' (yes!) 'Driving Wheel' is indeed given the musical shape of a rollin' wheel (more great riffage); and on 'You Say It', 'Right Now, Right Now', and 'All Because' they finally figure out how to make Al sound funky without emulating James Brown. It turns out that all you have to do is just... stop emulating James Brown!!! (Even though he still can't help giving out a few grunts and hiccups on 'All Because', but on that particular song they fit the ominous organ chords to a tee).

 

The album's biggest hit and best-known song was, however, one of the "softies" — 'Tired Of Being Alone'. For a good reason: this is the tune that has for the first time given us the new, silky-smooth Al Green, and the world certainly didn't forget it. But in the general context of the album, there's little that makes this tender little gem more worthy than the poppy, jumpy 'Are You Lone­ly For Me Baby', or the gospel number 'God Is Standing By'.

 

So we will forget the album's only clumsy misfire — a lumbering reconstruction of 'Light My Fire', in the vein of the failed experiments on Green Is Blues — and join the brain and the heart in a glorious thumbs up tandem. Perhaps this isn't the most sonically perfect album Al ever cut, but it's certainly one of his most consistent, and one that goes down the easiest with me.

 

LET'S STAY TOGETHER (1972)

 

1) Let's Stay Together; 2) La-La For You; 3) So You're Leaving; 4) What Is This Feeling; 5) Old Time Lovin'; 6) I've Never Found A Girl; 7) How Can You Mend A Broken Heart; 8) Judy; 9) It Ain't No Fun To Me; 10*) Eli's Game; 11) *Listen.

 

Early 1972 marks the arrival of the new, freshly-glossed Al Green. After half a decade of kicking around, he finally and ultimately falls into his new groove he'd be exploring for another half a decade, before making the transition into gospel. This is the period that has all the hits. It may or may not be one's favourite period in the man's career, but it's certainly his period, a time when everything came out all right and when no one else could make it came out the same way.

 

It is hardly a coincidence, either, that Let's Stay Together is Al's first album where the originals outnumber the covers — seven to two. Al didn't have much of a knack for conjuring tight funky grooves out of his own mind, but soft silky ones seemed to come to him naturally. The class of Al's act cannot be really esteemed without realizing that he really wrote songs with melodies, not just riding high on the strength of his newly-found unique voice and his tremendously gifted backing band. These melodies may not come through too quickly, and not all of the songs are of equal quality, but they, and nothing else, are the reason for owning all of these classic Al albums except of just one, for collection's sake.

 

The biggest hit — in fact, Green's biggest hit so far — was the title track, which is maybe just one tiny step away from a gross cliché of the idea of conjugal happiness, but it's exactly that one tiny step that makes me recommend it for all the happy couples in this world without the slightest bit of embarrassment. Some sappy strings in the background could spoil the picture if they were given free rein, but they never ever threaten to overshadow the song's main attraction: Green's voice, which had by then redefined the meaning of the word "soft" when applied to somebody's vocal cords. It's not just "soft", it's seducing to the breaking point, far beyond the realms of common decen­cy, I'd say. It has to be rated PG-13 at least, and X in extreme cases.

 

The new approach works so well that the grittier, funkier spirit of Gets Next To You is all but forgotten. Sterner rhythms only kick in on two tracks: the boppy album closer 'It Ain't No Fun To Me' and the paranoid 'So You're Leaving', which comes in two tracks after 'Let's Stay Together' and has the effect of a cold shower after the pleasant happy delicacy of the former: Green gives his best impersonation of a nervous, tired man on the edge of his seat (or sofa), tearing himself apart because he's being abandoned but never really able to decide what to do about it. (The man was always much too gallant to behave in a 'good riddance, bitch' manner).

 

Everything else is milk and honey, one hundred percent organic and fresh from the local farmer's market. Even the choice of covers is telling: the Bee Gees' recent lush ballad 'How Can You Mend A Broken Heart', one of their sugariest creations, which, in Al's treatment, manages to sound more natural and convincing.

 

Frankly speaking, there's a bit too much sugar, and the ba­lance would be somewhat corrected on Al's subsequent releases. The transition is too sudden and too total, and a few of the songs look like they're just there to mark this totality rather than to be minor masterpieces per se. But even the lesser songs still warrant further listening, and this means a sincere thumbs up from every piece of the organism, be it emotional or intellectual.

 

I'M STILL IN LOVE WITH YOU (1972)

 

1) I'm Still In Love With You; 2) I'm Glad You're Mine; 3) Love And Happiness; 4) What A Wonderful Thing Love Is; 5) Simply Beautiful; 6) Oh, Pretty Woman; 7) For The Good Times; 8) Look What You Done For Me; 9) One Of These Good Old Days.

 

I always knew there was one particularly magic moment on this record — the idea had been lingering in my head since the very first listen, but, for a long time, it seemed impossible to lay my finger on it, as if the whole album were shrouded in a stealth cloak. But then finally I knew the secret, even if it didn't become any less magical because of this.

 

It comes at 0:37 into 'I'm Glad You're Mine'. [If you own the album, go listen to it before you read on any further and see if you agree]. It's when the tender strings "swoop" arrives in response to Al's call. He makes the call three times, see — 'baby, I'm so glad you're here... baby, I've got something to say my dear... baby, I'm so glad you're mine...' — at exactly the third 'baby', no soo­ner, no later, the strings come in as if finally replying, finally giving in to Green's seductive, year­ning cooing. See, not even the instruments can resist this, much less his female audience!

 

On I'm Still In Love With You, Green's transformation into the Ladies' Man is complete. Even the album cover, with the man sporting a blinding white suit, slyly and contentedly, with a hint at decadence, perhaps, grinning at you from a blinding white wicker chair, exudes temptation (of course, some of the more cynical heads might probably think of it as advertising a dentist's office instead). And the songs are ALL about love, passion, devotion, and, to a small extent, suffering (from love, passion, and devotion). Simply put, Al now knows what kind of thing is best for him, and dedicates himself completely to doing that one thing.

 

Accusing the record of monotonousness would be like condemning a lion for carnivorous beha­viour. It may be wise to savour its genius slowly, one or two songs at a time, to get a better taste for all of its delicious little flourishes and vignettes — another well-propagated use for it is to employ it as the soundtrack to one's making out, if you're into that kind of thing (i. e. a generous threesome with Al Green). The approaches are numerous. But to treat this in an 'applied' matter without recognizing it as a major work of art would be criminal.

 

I'm Still In Love With You has arguably the finest combination of singing, melody, rhythm section work, organ, strings, and backup vocals on a soul record ever. It is a very well fleshed out record, with multiple sonic layers, a great level of understanding between all the players and the singer, and a respectable balance between groove and melody. A perfect example is 'Love And Happiness'; the strings flourish on 'I'm Glad You're Mine' may be the most magical moment on the record, but 'Love And Happiness' is simply my favourite song in the Green catalog, and actu­ally, the moment when the mysterious organ line presents the main section after the quiet intro­duction is only iotas below the 'baby'-substituting strings.

 

And it goes deeper than one might expect from a song called 'Love And Happiness'. It's a ner­vous, disturbing song, with the organ and the brass section working towards establishing a slightly pa­ranoid mood — so that Al's "warning" at the beginning of the song ('something that can make you do wrong, make you do right...') comes back to you with a vengeance, and so that you realize that the 'power of love' may, indeed, be a double-edged weapon. And all this time the rhythm section hacks away with a rhythmic power normally intended to make you dance — but here, the heavy, precise drumming and the pounding bass only remind you further of the danger of the whole thing. And then it just goes on and on for three minutes after there's no more verses, be­cause that's exactly how much time Al needs to implant his inner confusion and turmoil inside his listeners — those that actually listen, of course.

 

But that's about the grimmest thing on this unabashedly happy album. Shaking off the cobwebs, Al then proceeds straight into the honey-pouring 'What A Wonderful Thing Love Is', and his cover of Orbison's 'Pretty Woman' transforms a magnificent pop song into a magnificent celebra­tion of an idolized love object.

 

My only complaint is that I don't seem to possess the exact amount of soul to connect with Green on the same level as I am able to connect with, say, John Lennon. My mind finds too many man­nerisms and not enough straightforward directness in this stuff; all of these sonic layers are gor­geous, but just how many of them do you need to penetrate in order to get straight to the heart? And is that steel-melting, iceberg-thawing voice of his really the voice of his heart, or just a well calculated gimmick to give ladies their dose of physical pleasure? These questions will never cease to torment me, but in the meantime that does not prevent I'm Still In Love With You from becoming the most consistent, the most well-produced, the most symbolic album in Al Green's entire career, or from receiving an easy thumbs up from both the intellectual department (for some of the cleverest arrangements in soul history) and the emotional one (for successful idoliza­tion of love as the supreme emotion).

 

CALL ME (1973)

 

1) Call Me (Come Back Home); 2) Have You Been Making Out OK?; 3) Stand Up; 4) I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry; 5) Your Love Is Like The Morning Sun; 6) Here I Am (Come And Take Me); 7) Funny How Time Slips Away; 8) You Ought To Be With Me; 9) Jesus Is Waiting.

 

Robert Christgau gives Call Me an A+ rating, and so do many other critics, whether influenced by "The Dean" or not. I have not been able to understood what exactly is it that separates Call Me from the rest and so unequivocally turns it into the pinnacle of Green's career. But there is hardly any need to turn that into a pretext for not sleeping nights. It is obvious, anyway, that an Al Green fan without a copy of Call Me is like a Michael Jackson fan without a copy of Off The Wall, regardless of whether this or Thriller is his highest point — in other words, a ridiculous and bizarre entity that defies scientific explanation.

 

Innovation-wise, Call Me makes one bold step forward by taking two well-known country stan­dards — Hank Williams' 'I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry' and Willie Nelson's 'Funny How Time Slips Away' — and transforming them into classic Seventies' country-soul with Al Green's seal of approval. Having already shown that he could effortlessly (or with but a little effort) Greenify radical R'n'B, whitebread ballads, and even Brit-pop, he now takes his cue from Ray Charles and delves into country. 'I'm So Lonesome' is a particular stunner, a song whose mood and lyrics suit Al's general self-pitying style so well it must have been the obvious choice; he injects a little bit of different emotion into each syllable, and if you thought, like me, that Hank's original was intentionally some­what detached, containing its grief to just the lyrics, you wouldn't be able to think that about Green's version.

 

Another reason for the high critical opinion might be that, in fact, the whole album conveys a general atmosphere of sadness and moodiness, with the dial set to 'tragic' or 'lamentable' far more often than on I'm Still In Love With You — and don't we usually regard tragedy as the high genre, a priori set to exploring the innermost depths of one's soul? The very opening is telling — sad, sad, sad swoops from the strings and even the horns; those same horns that, in an Al Green tune, usually announce joy, but here morosely pronounce separation. And the echoey female backup vocals — 'call me', 'call me', 'call me', like a Eurydice might have been calling out to Orpheus from under the ground, if classical metaphors are allowed. A masterpiece of a song, but certainly not the proper tune to make out to, at least if you're even a little bit superstitious.

 

Only a couple songs sound more upbeat and R'n'B-ish, like 'Stand Up' or 'Here I Am', but in my mind they actually sound more timid than Green's first full-blown entry in the gospel genre, the almost six-minute sermon of 'Jesus Is Waiting'. Sermon, not song — there is a basic vocal theme here, but it does not matter one iota next to the amazing web of vocal overdubs that Green uses to draw you closer to his religious conscience. As goes with all of great gospel, though, you don't have to be a zealous Christian to appreciate it — for all I know, you could be a militant atheist. I'm an agnostic, but even I can't resist his 'thank you... thank you... thank you', or 'help me... help me... help me...', or especially 'you been good to me... you been good to me...'. Like all best ser­mons, this works well on the subconscious level, and it makes me feel good and inspired without making me yearn to be baptized.

 

It does go without saying that this is a highest quality Al Green record with enough soul to warm the heart and enough inventiveness to soothe the brain, so a thumbs up is guaranteed from both directions. As for the issue of "all-time best", I don't think Al himself ever gave a damn about it, and I don't do, either.

 

LIVIN' FOR YOU (1973)

 

1) Livin' For You; 2) Home Again; 3) Free At Last; 4) Let's Get Married; 5) So Good To Be Here; 6) Sweet Sixteen; 7) Un­chained Melody; 8) My God Is Real; 9) Beware.

 

I cannot think of anything substantial to say about this album. It is another transitional piece, ap­parently, before Green started venturing into more "danceable" territory with his next album, and as such, reflects the usual high standard of Green's records, but with next to no serious surprises and no minor breakthroughs into unexplored territory.

 

For some reason, the songs here just don't grapple as much as the best songs on his two previous records; maybe he was again temporarily running out of ideas, or maybe his musical partners were too busy trying out the latest in trendy chemicals, or maybe it's just that the recording ses­sions fell on an unlucky day. Case in point: the eight-minute jam of 'Beware' looks like it's there just to occupy all the empty space — with 'Jesus Is Waiting', at least Al had some sort of point to break through, but here he is just coasting; with class, but still coasting.

 

He also seems to be recycling ideas; for instance, the "rocking" section of 'Home Again' would have been far more effective in surprising the listener, who'd already settled into the soft groove of it, if it hadn't been lifted right off 'All Because'. Minor quibble, to be sure, but enforcing the general unhappy feeling that Livin' For You is, in fact, the first in a long string of albums where the man finally has nothing new left to say and is forced to repeat himself.

 

The big hit was 'Let's Get Married', and, regardless of what I say, deservedly so: it's first-class Al Green, tenderness and paranoia and tremendous R'n'B drive all in one. And realism, of course — no clichéd lovey-dovey nonsense or dumb sexual bravado for Mr. Green, he always looks like he's torn between the holi­ness of his feelings and the utmost horror of them — exactly because they're so holy, he's so scared of them; true love, after all, is a very, very scary thing, much more so than simple adultery. If 'Love And Happiness' didn't manage to get the message through, then 'Let's Get Married' certainly will; throughout all of it, you can never really guess if the protagonist offers the girl to get married because he happily means it or because he just wants to get over all of this as soon as possible.

 

However, the only track that truly points to the future is, odd enough, the album's most light­weight number — 'Sweet Sixteen', a straightahead dance number that could have been disco if it had been just a tad faster. It does take some lyrical and musical clues from 'Sweet Little Sixteen', but overall it's an unrecognizable re-working, with near-robotic funky guitars, "geometrically ar­ranged" string embellishments, strict drum patterns, and just tiny touches of looseness here and there to retain the connection to Green's classic style. One might call it a cheapening of the gene­ral approach, but I'd rather save this remark for the next album, where this "innovation" becomes a commodity; within the context of Livin' For You, it's weirdly refreshing.

 

In the long run, it's still a thumbs up, of course, but I dare say the album will very rarely show up on the Top-3 for any fans of the Reverend, unless it chances to be the first Al Green record ever heard by them. Incidentally, it also happens to feature the cheesiest album cover from that period: Al Green as a cartoonish towering giant! I'd rather see the man in a pimp hat than that.

 

AL GREEN EXPLORES YOUR MIND (1974)

 

1) Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy); 2) Take Me To The River; 3) God Blessed Our Love; 4) The City; 5) One Night Stand; 6) I'm Hooked On You; 7) Stay With Me Forever; 8) Hangin' On; 9) School Days.

 

Explores Your Mind? More like Explores Your Body! Keeping up with the times, Al and pro­ducer Willie Mitchell steer the ship in a more shallow direction, ending up with the first Al Green album in a long time that might be more suitable for club audiences than late night make-outs. The tempos are driven up, the strings swoop in precise funky grooves, Al introduces more catchy vocal choruses, and much of this borders on proto-disco.

 

Is it bad? Who knows? After all, it is quite slippery to try and accuse Al Green of "selling out"; his creed, from the very start to the very end, has always been Spirituality, Sentimentality, and Commerciality (or, if one wants to use a less derogatory term, Accessibility). So, Al Green Explo­res Your Mind may abuse the latter part, but it does so without sacrificing either Spiri­tuali­ty or Sentimentality — and, if anything, he is now even closer to merging the two, e. g. on 'God Blessed Our Love', the slowest and most gospel-oriented song on the album. Nothing can be more exciting than bringing together God and the lady you love, right?

 

But, of course, it can be relatively unsettling to learn that the big hit, this time around, bears the title of 'Sha-La-La'. It's not the Manfred Mann level of (anti-)intelligence, of course, yet there is decidedly less subtlety to this little album-opening hymn than to 'Call Me' or even 'Let's Get Mar­ried', and you can feel that decidedly less work went into it, as well. So history was right to de­cide that the true song number one on the album is Al's original version of 'Take Me To The Ri­ver', not fully appreciated by either black or white audiences until its popularization by Talking Heads several years later.

 

With the Heads, it was put by David Byrne through his well-oiled para­noia machine, but also lost the lyrical relevance — David Byrne isn't well-known for being (and could have never even tried on the guise of) a tortured lover, whereas for Al it's the primary occu­pation, and his use of a Christian metaphor — 'take me to the river, wash me down' — to reflect the yearning for getting rid of a love he doesn't feel right about is right on target. Once again, here's this idea of a super­natural fear outbalancing temptation, and it is perhaps no accident that 'God Blessed Our Love' is the very next track: in order to overcome this fear, Al has to make sure that this is not a demonic temptation, but rather a holy feeling validated by his superior. It's only natural, though, that 'Take Me To The River' is the masterpiece, and 'God Blessed Our Love' the trifling footnote.

 

None of the other songs have an intrigue as deep-cutting as 'Take Me To The River', but both the ballads and the dance grooves are uniformly tasteful, and one has to seriously, seriously com­mend the strings and horns arrangements: for instance, the first fifteen seconds of 'One Night Stand', with the two waves of these sounds meeting each other, are quite a glorious fifteen se­conds, and the clever use of the harp on 'Hangin' On' is a refreshing novelty. So let it be well understood that, even though the emphasis is on Entertainment, this is still first-class Entertain­ment and still one of the best soul/R'n'B albums of the year. And even though it begins with the feather-light 'Sha-La-La', it still ends with the pensive, introspective finale of 'School Days' — Al sweetly and gracefully reminiscing about his early days of romance. Or maybe reminiscing about your early days of romance? After all, it's Al Green Explores Your Mind, not His Mind. But a big thumbs up from the heart regardless of the answer, and a slightly lesser one from the mind, which still cannot completely shake off the not so pleasant feeling of being "explored" with the likes of 'Sha-La-La'.

 

AL GREEN IS LOVE (1975)

 

1) L-O-V-E (Love); 2) Rhymes; 3) The Love Sermon; 4) There Is Love; 5) Could I Be The One; 6) Love Ritual; 7) I Didn't Know; 8) Oh Me, Oh My (Dreams In My Arms); 9) I Gotta Be More (Take Me Higher); 10) I Wish You Were Here.

 

This isn't a bad album, but its message is forcefully overstated — just look at all the song titles. Besides, it's not like Al is letting us in on something we haven't been previously aware of. In re­ality, this may simply be a sign that the king (of Love) is faltering, and that this nothing more than a desperate gimmick to reassert his failing position. When the Rolling Stones, on their 1969 tour, billed themselves 'The Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World' whenever they went, audi­ences weren't really too sure of this prior to the show, meaning that the gesture was arrogant, but masterfully provocative. When Al Green, in 1975, claims that he "is Love", though, he is remin­ding this to people who were already quite positively certain of the fact since 1972 at the latest, and when exactly is it that you have to remind people of the obvious? That's right — when the obvious is either no longer obvious or, on the contrary, is so obvious it has become boring and forgettable. So, not a good sign.

 

There is exactly one song on Al Green Is Love that constitutes forward movement: the near-instru­mental 'Love Ritual' —a musical representation of said ritual through the art of funky jamming. It is pretty decent as far as proto-disco jamming goes, but, evidently, it cannot be any­thing but an oddity in Green's catalog, because who the hell wants to listen to Al Green not sin­ging? Its presence on the album is only justified within a larger context, since Al clearly designed the record as a semi-conceptual one, defining and describing the power of love in multiple ways, including even one way that does not involve his trademark vocals, except for a few woo-woos and hoola-hoolas.

 

The rest is basically just Explores Your Mind Vol. 2: respectable dance grooves graced with catchy vocal hooks, interchangeable but, as usual, all ranging from pretty to gorgeous. 'L-O-V-E' and 'Oh Me, Oh My' are probably the high points of the 'tighter' sector, especially the former, which is one of Al's most straightforward anthems, completely devoid of subtlety or ambivalence — but, of course, one cannot and should not always be ambivalent; there's always a time and place for letting yourself go, and few people can do it more gracefully than Al.

 

However, the further we progress, the more he seems to be slipping. The slower ballads aren't that captivating any more, maybe because he cannot think of any new ways to seduce us, and who wants to always be seduced in the very same way? that'd be missing the very point of seduction. The hugest misstep is on 'I Didn't Know', whose eight-minute length would indicate a soft R'n'B jam showered with inventive vocalization, like 'Jesus Is Waiting' or 'Beware', but instead it's just one more slow ballad with a relatively generic performance, and it functions as okay background music to make out to, but the greatness of Al was that, even if his previous output could always be technically defined as 'background music to make out to', it always went beyond that — 'I Didn't Know', on the other hand, belongs in a decent-quality softcore flick, never to be judged as containing some sort of value that trumps this level.

 

On shorter songs, hooks take more time to sink in — I still haven't been able to buy into the magic of 'Could I Be The One' or 'The Love Sermon', and only a super-effort on 'I Wish You Were Here', where Al really pulls all the stops with his falsetto, effectively grants a memorable and moving ending to the record and thus, a general favorable impression, with the best dance number opening it and the best ballad closing it.

 

It's interesting that the record scarcely ever bears the imprint of Al's great tragedy of the prece­ding year, when his then-current lover Mary Woodson scalded him with boiling grits and then committed suicide — an incident which, as it is often claimed, moved him one big step closer to fully converting to religious activities. Nor would I try to insinuate that his third-degree burns resulted in this slight drop of musical quality, a drop that was probably inevitable — you can't go on making great music forever, not if you lock oneself in one particular style. It does, however, seem reasonable to think that, the more messed up he became in personal life, the more idyllic he would be shaping his musical landscapes, which were his Wonderland refuge from the troubles of everyday existence. But there's only so far you can go with idyllic settings, and on Al Green Is Love, there is simply too much honey and not enough meat to balance the diet. Thumbs up any­way — there are no serious accusations I could have against the record — but if there ever was such a thing as a "beginning of the end" for Green, this was it. Or maybe it was the boiling grits.

 

FULL OF FIRE (1976)

 

1) Glory, Glory; 2) That's The Way It Is; 3) Always; 4) There's No Way; 5) I'd Fly Away; 6) Full Of Fire; 7) To­gether Again; 8) Soon As I Get Home; 9) Let It Shine.

 

Al made a whoppin' two albums in 1976 — both of them easy-going and eminently listenable, but completely surprise-less. Full Of Fire may be a bit more consistent than Have A Good Time, or it may be vice versa, however, that is not saying much.

 

Do not get me wrong, though: Al's last really big artistic transformation happened four years be­fore, and since then his main emphasis had steadily focused on creating new melodies rather than new ways of expression. Full Of Fire is more or less evenly divided between proto-disco dance numbers and slow ballads, and the dance numbers in particular never disappoint — regardless of whether they celebrate the celestial ('Glory Glory') or the carnal (title track), they're the usual mix of catchiness, fun, and tasteful arrangements.

 

The ballads are slightly weaker this time around, though, especially 'Together Again', which creeps along at a dehydrated snail's pace and is weirdly lazy even in the vocal department; maybe somebody loves the idea of stretching vocals, strings and saxes to the point of thinning out to a microscopic level, finding it mesmerizing, but if formerly the idea of an Al Green ballad was to assist your sleeping with a lovely lady, the idea of 'Together Again' just seems to be in assisting you to sleep — period. Arguably hooking people on ballads is a more subtle matter than hooking them on rockers, since Al is clearly losing the balance here on these two fronts.

 

Nevertheless, when the ballads run at a slightly more upbeat tempo, the results are more optimis­tic. In particular, 'Soon As I Get Home' is one of Al's simplest, but also tenderest and warmest creations — there's nothing here emotionally but a starry-eyed wish to be reunited with one's beloved, of course, but as long as it's expressed with so much passion, and as long as the strings con­tinue to play the part of the beloved to Al's part of the lover, who would want Al Green to drop this simple approach in favour of a more complicated "existentialist" one?

 

All in all, once we get around to the bragging title track, I'm all but ready to believe that, no mat­ter how many times he's going to do this all over again, he's still "full of fire", and will remain that way until the end of time. Therefore, here's another highly recommended Al Green album; thumbs up from the heart, which is still in love with the man, and from the brain, which is trying to calculate the exact number that it is possible to come up with a winner using the same formula — using the Al Green catalog as essential empiric data.

 

HAVE A GOOD TIME (1976)

 

1) Keep Me Crying; 2) Smile A Little Bit More; 3) I Tried To Tell Myself; 4) Something; 5) The Truth Marches On; 6) Have A Good Time; 7) Nothing Takes The Place Of You; 8) Happy; 9) Hold On Forever.

 

Or maybe it's Have A Good Time, after all, that is slightly more consistent than Full Of Fire — it's so easy to sway from one to another when one stops playing and the other begins. At least there is one major plus: no pure-atmosphere seven-minute track for the ultra-dedicated fan. The closest to a seven-minute track is a couple four-minute tracks, one of which ('Something') is really quite a moving ballad, with some exquisitely novel use of a sitar (if that really is a sitar) that someone is trying to play like a moody Nashville guitar. [The connection with George Har­rison, despite the sitar use, does not extend beyond the name of the song]. The other chunk of slow romance, 'Nothing Takes The Place Of You', is nothing special — but it is not a seven-mi­nute chunk, and so you are not forced to concentrate on how positively it demonstrates the depth of Al Green's decline.

 

Elsewhere, he is accelerating the drive towards disco, but there are no distinct disco basslines and the melody in all these dance send-ups almost comes first and foremost before the groove. The only track that misses competition with Chic and the Bee Gees by an inch is the opener 'Keep Me Cryin', yet it is so awash in complex strings patterns that it is hard to accuse it of extra cheesiness. If there is a flaw, it's that Al is working way, way too hard to wrap the listener in a friendly, lo­ving vibe: with tunes like 'Have A Good Time', 'Happy', and 'Smile A Little Bit More' — all on the same album! — he doesn't so much wrap you as he drowns you, and if he were just a wee bit less talented and charismatic, this would be the equivalent of overdosing on Prozac. All of the ambiguity and all of the subtle darkness that used to elevate his art to the level of A-R-T seem to have been burned away by just one pan of boiled grits, and I sincerely miss them...

 

...but only when I take a look back at his major efforts from the start of the decade, that is. As frustrating as it is to admit, there is not a single really weak tune on the record — well, 'The Truth Marches On' starts out suspiciously, as if we were about to witness some forced "gritty blues-rock", but then it turns out the blues-rock aspect of the song is secondary to its atmosphere and inspired religious message. And no matter how shallow and superficial I could find the exhorta­tion to 'have a good time', the note captured by Al comes across as so sincere and charming in its naïveness that spiritual depth and profound meaning can go fuck themselves for a good half hour — and I don't care.

 

THE BELLE ALBUM (1977)

 

1) Belle; 2) Loving You; 3) Feels Like Summer; 4) Georgia Boy; 5) I Feel Good; 6) All 'N' All; 7) Chariots Of Fire; 8) Dream.

 

In 1977, Al was but two years away from a full-fledged immersion into radical gospel; it's all the more amazing that the same year saw such a major oddity in his catalog as The Belle Album. He may have realized himself that the last three records, consistent as they were, were also pretty much interchangeable, and opted for a change of direction. Long-time pal and producer Willie Mitchell was cordially given the sack; new musicians were brought in the studio; Al wrote pretty much all of the material himself, and he even played his own guitar on most of the tracks. The results could have been terrible; instead, they are brilliant.

 

What's so fascinating about The Belle Album is that it goes in two opposite directions at the same time. No other Al Green record makes so well-pronounced a distinction between Dance and Dream; no two Al Green songs are more different from each other than 'I Feel Good', symboli­zing the Dance and 'Dream', symbolizing itself. And yet the two extremes are one in that both serve the same purpose — celebrating the beauty of Her and the goodness of Him in one package, the two inseparable from each other.

 

For the Dance, Al finally makes the crossing into disco (blessed are the polyester wearers, so the Lord says). But if all disco were like this, we could still be hailing disco as the best musical break­­through since the days of Handel. 'I Feel Good' — an original, nothing to do with the James Brown hit — boogies along to a clever web of acoustic rhythm, funky clavinet patterns, brass bursts, and even a little modernistic electronic percussion; it is disco, technically, but it feels like maniacal funk all the way, even despite lacking fiery funky guitar solos. 'Georgia Boy', also built around a disco bassline, is, however, its direct opposite: it's hushed and stripped down, with just a little acoustic backing track and some handclaps (and some delicate chiming in the background) strapped on top. The result is fairly weird, as if we were witnessing an old folk-blues performer adjusting to the modern times, but it's quite unique in a way.

 

Those who are more interested in the "serious" aspects of soul music, though, will certainly want to pay more attention to the Dream side of the story. That one is best illustrated by 'Belle' and 'Dream'. The former is a gorgeous ballad; the story is old — once again, Green is assuring his girl that he has little choice but to share her with the Lord, because 'I know you're all of these things, girl, but He's such a brighter joy' (yes, I know that's exactly the way I'd always talk to my wife were I a truly devoted believer) — but the way of delivery is new, with Green's acoustic and the shrill, but pleasant synthesizer gelling together in a manner that seriously raises the angelic feel of it all.

 

Yes, even though synthesized strings mostly replace real ones on this album, it never feels wrong because they're pushed a bit into the background to provide subtle atmosphere, while the loud part is mostly Al's acoustic rhythm. This is even more pronounced on 'Dream'; the latter formally belongs to the pile of Green's seven-minute mood-setters, but it's better than most — it is really set in the manner of a "musical lullaby", slowly rocking back and forth, rising and falling, soaring and swooping; if you play it loud, it'll be a never-ending series of mini-climactic moments, but you're probably supposed to play it soft, so that it gets a chance to really lull you — I've always felt that "music that puts you to sleep" is not necessarily a bad thing, and 'Dream' will put you to sleep in one of the best ways possible, just as 'I Feel Good' will put you up on your feet even if you were among the original jury that yielded the guilty as charged verdict against disco.

 

Set so near the end of his career, so unconspicuously nested among a string of "merely good" records, and so near to the usually (but not in this case) precarious influence of the disco spirits, The Belle Album rarely gets the same attention or respect as the early 1970s records that defined Green's career, but to me it is obvious that this is little more than the result of unfortunate circum­stances, and my own respect and love for the record prompt me to give it as solid a thumbs up as I'd give Call Me or I'm Still In Love With You, and here's hoping the album will eventually return to print and gain as much critical and fan appraisal as the older records.

 

TRUTH 'N' TIME (1978)

 

1) Blow Me Down; 2) Lo And Behold; 3) Wait Here; 4) To Sir With Love; 5) Truth N' Time; 6) King Of All; 7) I Say A Little Prayer; 8) Happy Days.

 

The point of this record, however, is not clear. No sooner had Al rejuvenated and reinvented him­self with The Belle Album than he'd completed his conversion, and Truth 'N' Time turned out to be his last record of secular music for quite a long time. But it isn't even a properly done  farewell to his classic image: coming off the success of Belle, it's a veritable cold shower, if not a straightforward fuck-you to this image. It's almost as if, at this point, he didn't care so much that he'd intentionally produced a total toss-off.

 

Truth 'N' Time completely adheres to the classic Woody Allen formula, introduced a year ear­lier — 'such terrible food, and such small portions'. With eight songs and not a single 'epic' among them, it runs for less than thirty minutes, and the amount of throwaway cuts rises over fifty percent. He didn't even write most of them, with gospel guru Bernard Staton contributing three cuts and two others being covers of Burt Bacharach that are usually associated with Lulu ('To Sir With Love') and Aretha Franklin ('I Say A Little Prayer').

 

Of course, Al's professionalism and work ethics prohibit him from releasing something utterly worthless, and the classic Green sound is still in vogue, with the ballads retaining the atmosphere and the dance numbers still kicking it up. But only moderately so. The title track and 'Happy Days' will only be bootylicious when not compared to the real maniacal punch of 'I Feel Good', which was like almost a meticulous study on all the possible reasons for shaking it up; and as for the ballads, the only thing that managed to register properly on my meter was the chorus to 'Blow Me Down', very idealistic and invigorating with its nice use of backing vocals. On the downside, the cover of 'I Say A Little Prayer' may be the closest Green has ever come to 'awful' — clumsy, rushed, and feeling completely superfluous; it's no use trying to do it if you're unwilling and un­able to compete with Aretha, and Al is neither able nor willing.

 

In short, I don't understand this record at all. Under different circumstances, I'd call this a typical effect of a "contractual obligation", but Al wasn't getting out of any contract — he was still asso­ciated with Hi Records, and he'd continue to be associated with them for much of his gospel peri­od. So, rather, Truth N' Time is just a semi-misguided album from a person who'd finally lost interest in secular pleasures, yet still could not force himself to make the complete conversion to the Lord's music; it took another couple of years and another stage accident in 1979 to finally convince Green that taking this career risk was the right thing for his soul. I am fairly sure that he himself, looking back, would give Truth N' Time a thumbs down as decisive as I am forced to award it, even if 'Blow Me Down' and the title track are salvageable in the long run.

 

And, as much as pure gospel music annoys me to no end — unless it is Mahalia Jackson taken in very small dosages — I guess that an inspired gospel album is still preferable over an uninspired secular pop one, regardless of whether it narrows your vision of things or widens it. Except I have about as much interest in reviewing gospel music as I have in writing about flamenco, so that you are free to explore Green's output in the 1980s on your own, without my judgements to refer to.

 

TOKYO... LIVE! (1981)

 

1) L-O-V-E (Love); 2) Tired Of Being Alone; 3) Let's Stay Together; 4) How Can You Mend A Broken Heart; 5) All'N'All; 6) Belle; 7) Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy); 8) Let's Get Married; 9) God Blessed Our Love; 10) You Ought To Be With Me; 11) For The Good Times; 12) Dream; 13) I Feel Good; 14) Love And Happiness.

 

This live album came out somewhat belatedly, but early enough to be considered a 'proper' rather than 'archival' release; Al himself is heard mentioning, during his stage banter, that they are re­cording the show for a live album. And here is the live album itself: most certainly, a God-sent gift for the fans who'd already given up hoping for any more secular material from the man.

 

The Al Green live show generally boasted a high reputation, but I am not so sure that their magic is properly captured here. It's a long, two-LP set, honestly hitting on huge radio hits as well as some rarities, well-recorded and quite "authentic", but Green's power to seduce and enchant, as far as I'm concerned, manifests itself much stronger and much quicker on studio records. For one thing, it's not just the voice that matters: an essential part of Green's success are the musical flou­rishes and inventive arranging details, and most, if not all, of them, get seriously flattened out in the context of this live performance.

 

Worse, the emphasis is way too heavy on getting the people up on their feet — some of the golden oldies are rearranged as fiery disco workouts, which is just w-r-o-n-g. It's one thing to wind up the happy Japs with a genuine recent disco smash like 'I Feel Good', but an entirely dif­ferent one to follow it up with a dance reworking of 'Love And Happiness', a song that's unima­ginable without its unhurried mid-tempo. Likewise, the hurried delivery and extended jamming turn 'Let's Get Married' into something totally unconnected with the original message of the song. It's not necessarily bad, but it's certainly not "Al Green-specific".

 

On the other hand, the rare occasions where Al does stick to his guns don't add anything new to what we already know: 'L-O-V-E', 'How Can You Mend A Broken Heart' (seriously shortened), 'Belle' and others go off smoothly and predictably. Accompanied with visuals, they might work better, but as it is, I don't see Green pouring any extra passion into them compared to the perfec­tion already achieved in the studio (unless added bits of annoying stage banter count). So from that point of view, maybe it is more fun, in a way, to hear 'Love And Happiness' rearranged as a disco jam, or to get a better chance to enter a dance trance during the extra five minutes of 'I Feel Good' that Al and the band spend hitting it.

 

Something tells me that, perhaps, a live album from some earlier tour might have worked better; but since I have no proof, I'll have to take it for granted that this is the average Al Green live show, and that there's no way to properly capture it on record without me giving it a moderate thumbs down, according to my general views on the value of live albums. On the other hand, this is, so far, the only official Al Green live album in existence, and, therefore, is a must-buy for fans who crave knowledge as much as they crave enjoyment.

 

DON'T LOOK BACK (1993)

 

1) Best Love; 2) Love Is A Beautiful Thing; 3) Waiting On You; 4) What Does It Take; 5) Keep On Pushing Love; 6) You Are My Everything; 7) One Love; 8) People In The World; 9) Give It Everything; 10) Your Love; 11) Fountain Of Love; 12) Don't Look Back; 13) Love In Motion.

 

[Technical note: this review was written after the reviews for I Can't Stop and subsequent «come­back» albums, so it omits certain factual information concerning Al's retirement from se­cular music and eventual return to the scene — that information is presented below in the I Can't Stop review. Some time later, I'll get around to normalizing the logical sequence.]

 

It only goes to show how much Al Green has derailed his critical audience with his abandoning the «secular» style — nobody takes good care of the man's official discographies any more. In the info section of Wikipedia, for instance, Don't Look Back (1993) is listed as the man's last «gospel album», whereas Your Heart's In Good Hands (1995) is listed as his first «later secular album». Accordingly, Your Heart's In Good Hands is an album that has been discussed and reviewed in quite a few sources, while Don't Look Back, at most, gets a brief mention and a title list, without any substantial discussion whatsoever.

 

What is bizarre about this situation is that even a brief glance at the track listings shows that Don't Look Back and Your Heart's In Good Hands are, in fact, almost the exact same album, except that Don't Look Back, which was from the very start released in CD format, runs longer, and Your Heart's In Good Hands has just one track that was not present on Don't Look Back — the title track, released as a single. However, since that title track was written by Diane War­ren, this gives me a legitimate excuse to forget about the existence of that album in the first place. Consequently, Al's «proper» comeback, one that somehow remained unnoticed by the critical society, is the 13-track Don't Look Back from 1993 — his first record in a decade and a half to consist throughout of «secular soul» material. Most likely, the confusion is due to the fact that the album was only released in Europe — and, as everybody knows, nothing released exclusively in Europe really counts in the US-centric universe.

 

The album owes much of its flavor to Al's collaboration with David Steele, former bass player in The Beat and Fine Young Cannibals — about a half of the songs are co-credited to Green and Steele, while the others are covers of contemporary (ʽLove Is A Beautiful Thingʼ) or old (title track, originally a big hit for The Temptations) R&B material. People have occasionally com­plained about the production of the album, but I do not see any serious difficulties: the producer here was Arthur Baker, a seasoned pro who'd previously worked with Afrika Bambaataa and New Order, and the worst accusation I could haul out against him is that too many drum parts are programmed rather than live — but far from all, and even those that are do not flaunt their elec­tronic gloss in any sort of ugly, arrogant manner. On the whole, I could not say that Baker's pro­duction is that much worse than Willie Mitchell's production on Al's subsequent releases: it's just that everybody went so crazy over the very idea of a Green/Mitchell reunion that they failed to notice that their chemistry no longer guaranteed immediate success.

 

Anyway, Don't Look Back sets the general tone for Al's two next albums — a collection of steady, honest soul grooves, most of which are tastefully enjoyable but feel sorta flat. Years of self-humiliating, individuality-effacing work for the Lord had paid off: the subtlety, vulnerability, sinfulness, inner torture, and occasional strive for redemption, all that dense psychological soup that made Green's soul classics so outstanding on a cruelly competitive market, no longer exist. Instead, song after song is simply dedicated to praising Love on a general level, which makes me happy for Al — clearly, such an album could only have come from somebody who had succeeded in finding internal peace — but rather quickly bored with the album in general. This is what hap­pens, I guess, when you have finally exorcised your demon and are left alone with the angel. Beauty, elegance, predictability, and boredom.

 

Which is a pity, because individually, some of the grooves are quite solid. ʽLove Is A Beautiful Thingʼ, for instance, has a tasty stereo mix of several overdubbed funky guitars capped with a catchy chorus ("soul to soul, fire to fire...") — the only problem being is that I know not what else to say about it. ʽWaiting On Youʼ might have even better guitar work — two more funky guitars engaged in a productive dialog (pentalog, actually, if you throw in organ, piano, and brass over­dubs: the mix is dense, but the production is so good that each instrument speaks with its own distinct voice). Then ʽWhat Does It Takeʼ takes over with...

 

...okay, I have little choice but to repeat the same unnecessary descriptions. Truth is, most songs here sound exactly the same. Funky guitars, brass, keyboards, backup vocals, repetitive codas, the works. For a 1993 album, everything sounds absolutely great and delicious — in an era when the word «R&B» was already heavily associated with the idea of technically challenging vocal gym­nastics over robotic pseudo-musical backgrounds, Don't Look Back redeems the genre with an old school vengeance. And from a strict, pedantic musical standpoint, I would even think that Don't Look Back is superior to the next two Mitchell-produced albums — I find the arrange­ments a bit more creative. But the overall problem is the same: most, if not all, of the songs are interchangeable, and their overall mood does not do perfect justice to the capabilities of Al's voice, which has not at all been ravaged by time, but is simply not offered the right material to shine in all its glory. On the other hand — if you are simply looking for a lot of love, Al's got a lot of love saved up from his fifteen years of ministering, and it's all spilled here. I mean, when 7 out of 13 songs have the word «love» in the title, that's gotta be a lot of love, right?..

 

I CAN'T STOP (2003)

 

1) I Can't Stop; 2) Play To Win; 3) Rainin' In My Heart; 4) I've Been Waitin' On You; 5) You; 6) Not Tonight; 7) Million To One; 8) My Problem Is You; 9) I'd Still Choose You; 10) I've Been Thinkin' 'Bout You; 11) I'd Write A Letter; 12) Too Many.

 

From 1980's The Lord Will Find A Way and up to 1987's Soul Survivor, the Reverend was unwaverend: with a handful of minor "ambiguous" exceptions, everything that he wrote, covered, and recorded served the sole purpose of proving, over and over again, that He could always count on the Reverend in case of need. Some time in the late Eighties, though, either the Reverend felt that he'd propped up his faith with plenty of supporting beams already, or perhaps He eventually let the Reverend know that if the Reverend were to continue in the exact same way, his paeans would eventually start being regurgitated back on Earth in the form of a severe pandemic of dia­betes, proportional to the amount of Heart and Soul contained therein.

 

Anyway, during the late Eighties and Nineties Al Green released several uneven albums, some­what confusedly hopping between pure gospel, gospel-tinged secular numbers, and secular-tinged gospel numbers. Some of these albums are supposedly worth a short visit, but it wasn't until the turn of the millennium that it became possible to speak of a true "secular comeback" — after all, the Apocalypse happily passed us by, and so one could allow oneself a little relaxation.

 

Since relaxing is always more fun in the company of old friends, Green chose to team up once more with his old producer pal, Willie Mitchell, and within the confines of his original Eldorado: Hi Studios, where many of the old session players were still abiding. Not only that, but the inten­tion was clearly to try and replicate the old sound — screw all modern technology advances and return to the original warm vibes of Seventies' R'n'B; who cares if it sounds "retro" and "outda­ted" as long as it's Green's signature sound, the thing that he obviously does best?

 

Indeed, I Can't Stop sounds marvelous. No matter how much I listen to it, I still can't find a single thing that would unmistakably tie it to 2003 from a technical point of view; it seems to pick up exactly from where we were left twenty-five years back with Truth 'N Time. One could imagine that, over twenty-five years, Green could have at least aged in the throat, but the Lord has amply repaid him by protecting his vocal charm — he hasn't lost a single step off his range, still doing both his grunts and his high-pitched squeals the same way he produced them in his youth. And when you hear them strewn over funky guitars, rhythmic brass figures, swirling or­gans, and swinging live percussion, you know for sure that the old joy is back.

 

There's only one thing that's wrong with this idyllic picture: this album completely, totally, and inescapably sucks. Beneath the shiny facade, there is no sign whatsoever of the old amazing spi­rituality, or of the composing genius that Al Green used to be. Each and every one of the twelve songs on this album are utterly lifeless, as if they were contributed by outside hacks — all the more horrible it is to realize that all of them are credited to Green and Mitchell. Obviously, I have no "objective proof"; I can only speak for myself, stating that, where Green's classic material from 1971 to 1977 made me cry, laugh, and feel like a sentient human being, I Can't Stop has not connected me with Al Green neither on the in-, nor on the outside.

 

I cannot put my finger on it; it's one of those most-hard-to-explain cases where everything should work but somehow nothing does. It's certainly not the "sterileness" of the production — perfect studio gloss has always been a sine qua non of Green's life. It's not a matter of "detached singing": I cannot accuse Green of not caring for this material, as he fully empties his bag of vocal modula­tions and tricks onto the listener. It's not even a matter of "lack of hooks": technically, there are some 'attention-demanding' brass riffs and catchy choruses, meaning that the songs were written, not improvised on the spot. So what is it?

 

Unfortunately, it seems to be a severe case of gospelitis. After two decades of squeezing himself into the rigid hymn format, of bravely (but, in the long run, needlessly) sacrificing his indivi­du­ality for the Greater Glory, Green is no longer able — or, to put it in more optimistic terms, for the moment unable — to bring back that most important component: emotional intelligence. These are all simplistic, superficial love numbers, some in dance format, some in ballad shape, but none of them displaying even a tenth part of the subtlety and depth of old. They're all inter­changeable and flat; the only feel they give out is that of gladness and satisfaction, but you can't even tell where the gladness and satisfaction are coming from, much less discern a single trace of something more complex behind them.

 

There are some tiny drops of potential, like on the sly, foxy-sounding 'I've Been Thinkin' 'Bout You', or on the anthemic title track, but even these numbers sound like their primary purpose was to reintroduce the old sound — at all costs — rather than say something important. It all prompts me to end this review with some spiteful remark (such as "see what years of singing gospel music does to good people"), but it's scientifically incorrect to make broad generalizations even on such a tempting subject as dedicated Christians, so, instead, I'll just give this a straight ahead thumbs down from the heart, reiterating, however, that the brain was at least pleased to see the man able to recreate the basics of his classic sound with such meticulousness — even if to no avail.

 

EVERYTHING'S OK (2005)

 

1) Everything's OK; 2) You Are So Beautiful; 3) Build Me Up; 4) Perfect To Me; 5) Nobody But You; 6) Real Love; 7) I Can Make Music; 8) Be My Baby; 9) Magic Road; 10) I Wanna Hold You; 11) Another Day; 12) All The Time.

 

Yes, everything's OK indeed. This is I Can't Stop Vol. 2 — same lush arrangements that tell you the last two decades never happened, same beautiful vocals, same dedication to original song­writing. How can I put down this album? It has everything that made Al Green a legend, in full shiny spades. A triumphant return to form.

 

Alas, for myself, I can only state that, just like its predecessor, it passed me by completely. It's one of these very, very bizarre situations where I honestly do not understand what is happening — I want to admire it as a successful comeback, and it seems to be fully equipped to qualify as such, but something essential is missing, and, once again, I can't put my finger on it.

 

In fact, when I manage to specially concentrate on some of the tracks, they are capable of giving the illusion of life. For instance, isn't 'You Are So Beautiful', well, beautiful? The strings, the fal­setto, the soaring choruses? Or doesn't the title track make you wanna get up and dance like it's supposed to? And isn't the warm, optimistic feeling on most of these songs a sincere feeling, so much in line with The Reverend's real nature? And isn't it spreading all over you, the listener?

 

Well... technically, yes. But the songs just don't have any staying power. The presence of form makes them seductive while they're playing — the lack of spirit makes them trifling when they're gone. And although I understand the host of critics who all but fell over themselves in praising Green's musical resurrection, I do not understand myself, because I cannot bring myself to fol­low­ing suit. It is funny that, statistically, about half of the opinions I've encountered rate this as superior to I Can't Stop, and the other half thinks vice versa — restoring the equilibrium.

 

I do heartily recommend Everything's OK to Green's serious fans, but I cannot even write about it, sorry. Thumbs down from all the sensitive organs of my mucho puzzled organism; I'd rate even Truth 'N Time higher than this — at least 'Blow Me Down', in my mind, is well worth all the twelve songs on here put together.

 

LAY IT DOWN (2008)

 

1) Lay It Down; 2) Just For Me; 3) You've Got The Love I Need; 4) No One Like You; 5) What More Do You Want From Me; 6) Take Your Time; 7) Too Much; 8) Stay With Me (By The Sea); 9) All I Need; 10) I'm Wild About You; 11) Standing In The Rain.

 

As if we needed one more proof that life is stranger than fiction. Two times in a row, Al Green had unsuccessfully attempted to recreate the Ol' Green magic by immersing himself in the pains­takingly recreated setting of the legendary Seventies. It did not work. What was the reason? No one knows for sure. Then, for causes unknown, Green switched producers: instead of old pal Willie Mitchell, Lay It Down was produced by Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson,  from the hip-hop out­fit of The Roots. And presto, third time's the charm: suddenly, everything works!

 

I can only explain this by admitting that people change, and that, at this particular point, there are people for whom it is easier to step into Willie Mitchell's old shoes than for Willie Mitchell him­self. The essential difference between Lay It Down and Green's previous two records is that Lay It Down sounds far less cluttered. At his best, Green worked in a subtle way — nothing, to me, exemplifies the beauty of his approach better than the gallant dialog between the man and the strings on 'I'm So Glad You're Mine', and these subtleties were thoroughly missed on both I Can't Stop and Everything's OK. Now they're back — maybe not in a real big way, but they're definitely back, and the magic is back with them.

 

If the former two records both opened with an energetic, punchy rocker (that, nevertheless, some­how missed the punch), Lay It Down opens with the soft, relaxed title track, meaning that the company set their aims real high — on attempting to recreate the el-paradiso-atmosphere of I'm Still In Love With You rather than the much more dance-oriented collections of the mid-Seven­ties. And even if 'Lay It Down', featuring R'n'B guest star Anthony Hamilton on additional vocals on the chorus, is no masterpiece, it is still a perfect conductor for Green's warmth and kindness. Revolving around a (finally!) good vocal hook in the chorus, it manages to reinstate my faith in Green's soul therapy, and who could ask for more?

 

But there is more. Additional magic can be found, for instance, on 'Take Your Time', where Green cedes a large part of the vocals to another guest singer, Corinne Bailey Rae, and their duet, aided but definitely not overshadowed by the usual silk screen of lounge instrumentation, is touchingly sincere. In fact, just about every ballad on here is good. The upbeat numbers are more hit-and-miss, perhaps running a bit too close on the heels of the generic product of yesteryear, but even so they manage to close the record perfectly — 'Standing In The Rain' is a great singalong number in the pure R'n'B tradition, with nary a sign of disco and sung in such an encouraging manner that somehow it leaves you certain that this isn't the last time you are heartily enjoying a slice of Al Green wizardry.

 

It may be so that all the «new blood» was brought in primarily with the aim of assuring chart suc­cess, an argument reasonably upheld by the fact that the album got an assured chart success, ri­sing to #9 on the Billboard where Everything's OK had previously stalled at #50. And we all know that Green is not the kind of ivory-tower artist that is most alergic to popularity: he is a prea­cher, after all, and regardless of whether you're preaching about heavenly or quite earthly love, you are a proverbially lousy preacher if you're not interested in attracting a large crowd. But if one's successful search for success even today, when even Google has trouble juxtaposing the words «good taste» and «Billboard», can, as it turns out, be compatible with a record as elegant, delicate, and well-crafted as Lay It Down — maybe there's still hope for our fellow earthlings. Thumbs up on the part of the grateful heart.

AL KOOPER

SUPER SESSION (1968)

 

1) Albert's Shuffle; 2) Stop; 3) Man's Temptation; 4) His Holy Modal Majesty; 5) Really; 6) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 7) Season Of The Witch; 8) You Don't Love Me; 9) Harvey's Tune.

 

Known generally as the only album credited to «Bloomfield / Kooper / Stills», but the title is tre­mendously misleading. The whole thing was supposed to be «Bloomfield / Kooper», a collabora­tive project to capitalize on the strengths of America's hottest keyboard player, freshly booted out of his own band (Blood, Sweat & Tears), and America's craziest guitarist, freshly booted out of his own band (Electric Flag). Had they managed to properly convert their accumulated hate and frustration into musical output, Super Session might have made them buddies for life and, who knows, America's superhero response to the freshly demised Cream, perhaps?

 

Unfortunately, this was not to be. Bloomfield, suffering from insomnia and whatever else it is that so many crazy musicians seem to suffer from, split on the second day of the planned session (so much for the supergroup), and Kooper had to bring in a quick replacement to finish the pro­ject (we should all sympathize with people who hate to leave things unfinished, and what a para­dise life will be). That turned out to be Stephen Stills, a somewhat less incendiary guitarist than Mike, but every bit as technically accomplished — know that if you want to make Stephen Stills rock out, all you have to say is «rock out, Steve!» and that'll do it. (Unless your name is David Crosby, in which case it won't work).

 

Anyway, the finished, but not perfected product sounds exactly the way it is supposed to sound: ass-kicking and inspired on Side A, just ass-kicking on Side B. The fact that there are very few songs as such should not be surprising: the idea was to get together and jam, making an essential­ly free-form record. The one song that Al and Mike did have time to cut together, a cover of Cur­tis Mayfield's 'Man's Temptation', is an excellent rendition, with great vocals and passionate play­ing from Al. But in order to enjoy it all, tolerance for typical Sixties' jamming is obligatory.

 

Although, frankly speaking, it is not clear to me how anyone who likes electric guitar at all could possibly dislike Mike Bloomfield's playing. Obviously, he is no Hendrix or Beck, and his play­ing was never meant to push boundaries, but he was one of the few players of his age who systemati­cally played 12-bar blues with the spirit of a punk-rocker — irreverentially, loudly, dirtily, ma­king the poor guitar scream like a tortured pig instead of sticking to the safe side. And when he did that on that happy day in May 1968, he clearly infected Kooper as well. 'Albert's Shuffle', 'Stop', and 'Really' are fabulous jams, generic on the surface, spiritually shredding on the inside; the gargantuan 'His Holy Modal Majesty' is more questio­nable, since this is where the two wade out in more adventurous, jazzy territory, and it is not quite clear if this is really a masterful rock answer to the likes of Coltrane and Miles Davis or a sorta lame attempt to mimic their far more accomplished and original achievements (although, perso­nally, I will take Bloomfield's guitar and Kooper's organ over Coltrane's sax any time of day, but these are just my personal sonic preferences).

 

The Stills side is more discussable; with the inspiration and chemistry sort of dissipated into thin air with Bloomfield's defection, it seems like Kooper decided to compensate with fancy reinven­tions of the popular repertoire. So they take Dylan's 'It Takes A Lot To Laugh' (which Kooper must have remembered from the days of his and Bloomfield's work on it during the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited) and record it in its original fast version; take Donovan's 'Season Of The Witch' and develop it into a creepy-funky eleven-minute brew; take the old blues standard 'You Don't Love Me' and mutate it into a phased-out bad psychedelic trip; take Harvey Brooks' jazz number 'Harvey's Tune' and... do nothing with it except fade it out by the second minute, the shor­test track on the album. (Brooks himself played bass on the album).

 

At the very least, it's all interesting — and Stills does chug it out nicely on 'Season Of The Witch', in a ragged, chopped style that would soon become the trademark of his live sparring with Young during CSNY live performances ('Down By The River' etc.). Some like to claim that the second side is a huge letdown, and that Bloomfield's departure killed off a burgeoning masterpiece who­se importance a nice guy like Stills could never really «get». But most of these people must be dead hero worshippers — the late great Bloomfield was great, but not that great; plus, three or four more jams in the same style would eventually become obnoxious (as the dynamic duo's en­suing live album would clearly demonstrate), so the Stills change of pace was welcome.

 

Overall, this can be safely counted as the album that finally, after years of session work and one bursting band experiment after another, established Kooper as a solo artist, capable of fully dri­ving his message home regardless of whoever else shared the yoke. And as much as it clearly be­longs in its own time, those still-happy spring days of 1968, Super Session is still super after all these years. Thumbs up.

 

THE LIVE ADVENTURES OF MIKE BLOOMFIELD & AL KOO­PER (1968)

 

CD I: 1) Opening Speech; 2) The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy); 3) I Wonder Who; 4) Her Holy Modal Highness; 5) The Weight; 6) Mary Ann; 7) Together 'Til The End Of Time; 8) That's All Right; 9) Green Onions; CD II: 1) Opening Speech; 2) Sonny Boy Williamson; 3) No More Lonely Nights; 4) Dear Mr. Fantasy; 5) Don't Throw Your Love On Me Too Strong; 6) Finale-Refugee.

 

Al must have really been fascinated by Mike, considering how quickly he forgave him for nearly ruining the «Super Session» — just a few months later the two were back again, and this time de­cided to push the spontaneous inspiration thing even further by recording their next project live, in front of the demanding, but respectful audience of the Fillmore West. They booked three nights and everything went fine for the first two. Then Bloomfield's insomnia struck again, and he fled the field on night three, once again leaving Kooper in dire need of a quick replacement (Butter­field Blues Band veteran Elvin Bishop and a young Latin unknown going by the cool-sounding name of Carlos Santana filled the spot).

 

Needless to say, that was the last time Bloomfield and Kooper worked together (at least, on any­thing significant): too bad, since the resulting double album is such a fascinatingly attractive-re­pulsive document of its era that there is no doubt in my mind the two could have had a promising future. The concert, indeed, is a spontaneous mess, almost certainly underrehearsed, crudely reco­rded, plagued with missed cues, flubbed vocal lines, and a setlist that all but seems made up on the spot by drawing lots from the audiences. But what a delight it is.

 

If there was any idea behind this, it was a big one: to bring together all the loose strands of Ame­ri­cana and run them through the efficient processing centers of Kooper's and Bloomfield's spirit to show how two guys with two big hearts can move the world. They cover blues, jazz, soul, folk, R'n'B, rockabilly, and recent-format roots-rock — all that is missing is a little bit of country, blue­grass, and gospel, and since we do not have the complete setlists here, it is not excluded that something from those categories could have been played, too.

 

With this ambitious diversity, no one is probably going to like everything on here, but the trick is to distance oneself from the source material. Simon & Garfunkel's '59th Street Bridge Song', for instance, is played about three times slower than the original ("slow down, you move too fast" ta­ken at face value) and is made about thirty times as grand and solemn, stripped completely of the light nerdy humor touch for which we all loved it in the first place. From this comparative point of view, the song is crudely butchered by a couple of dumb hacks. But in reality, what they did was simply borrow the lyrics to set them to something completely different, and quite inspiring in its own way, especially when Al hits those keys upon the final resolution of the chorus ("feelin' GROOVY!...") and plunges the world into soulful sonic mayhem, or when Mike takes advantage of the moment to deliver a solo of epic proportions.

 

Traffic's 'Dear Mr. Fantasy' sticks much closer to the original, but only until the free-form part, in which Bloomfield again explores mystical jazzy territory à la 'Her Holy Modal Highness' — and then, out of nowhere, the two start trading organ and guitar lines that mimic the hymn coda to 'Hey Jude'. There is nothing that 'Hey Jude' could have in common with 'Dear Mr. Fantasy'; the connection is completely ad hoc and uninterpretable, but hey, this is what artistic freedom is all about, and besides, 'Hey Jude' was so damn fresh back then — barely a month out, so, in all like­lihood, this is the first documental case of somebody quoting the song before the cliché got old and stale. It makes no sense, but it's a fun decision all the same.

 

Throughout the two discs Mike and Al really play off each other in a competitive spirit, although normally they take solo turns rather than drown each other out. «Song-y» highlights include a marvelous, soulful rendition of 'Together 'Til The End Of Time' (with Kooper managing an al­most tearful vocal performance, something he very rarely succeeds at in a live setting); «jammy» highlights consist of a kick-ass blast through Booker T. & The MG's 'Green Onions' and Elvin Bishop's guest spot — a painfully slow twelve-minute grind through a Sonny Boy Williamson number ('No More Lonely Nights') in which both Al and Elvin take proper advantage of the tor­toise speed, nurturing each lick and punch as if a note weren't worth playing without proper sus­tain... heck, they almost manage to convince me, and I'm quite a speed-lover. (In comparison, the Santana guest spot, a silly rendition of Jack Bruce's 12-bar eulogy 'Sonny Boy Williamson', is completely wasted — Kooper moonwalks through the tune, and Santana hardly plays anything that could be suspected of genius).

 

That said, this is one of those stupid records that detail-obsessed professionals will be tempted to dismiss and wholesale-swallowing live-for-the-moment free-spirit aficionados will kill for. Two music-loving guys jamming on the basis of whatever gets in their heads — only in 1968 or so could a record like that cause anyone to pay attention. But once you get the pure professionalism, the passion for playing, the desire to experiment, and the overall quality of the source material on one side of the scale, I think that it by far overweighs that other side which includes all the tech­nical deficiencies (and there are many, including brutal ones — why the heck do they have to fade out 'I Wonder Who' just as Bloomfield starts picking up steam? Did somebody throw up on the tapes in homage of the free spirit of the proceedings?). Unfortunately, it is the kind of genius at work here that you cannot lock up in a bottle and give a DNA analysis, like you could do with, say, something like a 'A Day In The Life'. Feel free to disagree with my thumbs up.

 

PS. Post-production trivia bits: (a) the album sleeve (for many people, its finest moment) was painted by Norman Rockwell; (b) Paul Simon himself volunteered to overdub some vocal harmo­nies on 'The 59th Street Bridge Song', allegedly fascinated with the results — talk about totally stoned, the lots of 'em; (c) apparently Bloomfield ended up in a hospital again, and you gotta ap­preciate the quality of playing from a guy who hadn't slept for several nights in a row — me, I can hardly find the proper keys on the keyboard without a good night's sleep.

 

I STAND ALONE (1968)

 

1) Overture; 2) I Stand Alone; 3) Camille; 4) One; 5) Coloured Rain; 6) Soft Landing On The Moon; 7) I Can Love A Woman; 8) Blue Moon Of Kentucky; 9) Toe Hold; 10) Right Now For You; 11) Hey, Western Union Man; 12) Song And Dance For The Un­born, Frightened Child.

 

To finally decide to stand alone was fairly sensible for Kooper, already a veteran of one failed outfit (The Blues Project), one band that kicked him out to ensure a brighter, Prozak-ier future for us all (BS&T), and one duet for which he just had to team up with a psycho insomniac. All that could prevent him from boldly slapping his own name on the front sleeve was lack of self-confi­dence, and by the end of 1968, he certainly lacked that no more.

 

Poorly promoted and scantily reviewed, I Stand Alone did not make Al a solo star in his own right, and set off a chain of albums that are now mostly regarded as cult favorites but still have not received, and probably will never receive the same retro-reverence as, say, the Zombies' Odessey And Oracle — a record that Kooper once singlehandedly saved from oblivion, so that most people who actually do know him, know him as «that guy who played the organ on 'Like A Rolling Stone' and pro­moted the Zombies in the US». Bruce Eder even had to write a glowing re­view in which he drew comparisons with Sgt. Pepper, implying that I Stand Alone was actually the better album. It didn't help, I think. A few people just bought the record expecting another Sgt. Pepper, and came away disappointed.

 

Basically, this is just like The Live Adventures Of Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper if you take away all the extended psycho jamming and replace it with a bunch of rag-tag studio effects. The general idea is the same: Eclecticism as a goal in itself, a musical celebration of life's various si­des on the part of an innocent, but creative bystander. A humble bystander, too — humble enough to realize, for instance, that his own brain is by no means capable of quickly and effectively cover­ing all the bases, so there is no problem about mixing his originals with lots of covers (some­thing you could easily be publicly castigated for in 1968 if you were aspiring to Art with a capital A, and which may actually explain some of the disinterest in the record).

 

Both the covers and the originals are consistently swell, though. It is true that the covers add little to the impact already done by the original: there are no really drastic reinventions, with Harry Nilsson's 'One' and Traffic's 'Coloured Rain' receiving more or less the same respectful treatment. 'Blue Moon Of Kentucky' throws on a bit too much reverb, overwhelming the fine backing racket that Al gets from a host of Nashville session players (did I mention that the whole thing was re­corded in Nashville? possibly the least likely album to be recorded in Nashville that year, yet it still happened — Kooper must have stolen Roger McGuinn's passport or something to dupe these guys), but still a fine brief piece of rockabilly done the Elvis way, not the Bill Monroe one. We also have spirits of Sam & Dave ('Toe Hold') and the Philly soul crowd ('Hey, Western Union Man') guesting around, with equally solid results.

 

But true fans of the Koop will most likely treasure the record for a few jazz-rock and art-pop num­bers that Al must have salvaged from the wrecks of the first lineup of BS&T. The title track is technically a love ballad, but in reality a pained, yet bold declaration of self-assertion: the "love" he is talking about is universal, of course. It's sweeping, stumbling, pretentious, badly sung (Al is no Van Morrison to do these things), but still wins over because of some goofy unlockable combination of freshness and sincerity. Or maybe it's the brass arrangements that help.

 

'I Can Love A Woman' will easily provoke a whirl of sardonic comments these days (like «Right-o!» or «Who could ever tell?» at the most innocent end of it), but the song has a fabulous soulful buildup from Al, the master of soulful buildups, and really plays out like a mini-classical spec­tacle of romantic self-discovery. The Blossoms, an early 1960's backing band, provide the perfect counterpart for Al's own vocals here, and the song stands loud and proud next to Kooper's soul-baring classics on Child Is Father To The Man.

 

And then there is the album closing chamber piece with the record's longest and most pretentious­ly titled number, which shows that Kooper could write a cool baroque melody for the strings every bit as flawlessly as Paul McCartney (hmm, perhaps that Sgt. Pepper comparison wasn't that way off, anyway). An art-pop masterpiece mixing melancholy and optimism in a 50/50 pro­portion — should be on every anthology of classical-influenced pop from the late 1960s.

 

So, any flaws? One — alas, a big one: frankly put, the album needs to be re-recorded, or, at least, remixed in a normal manner from the original tapes. In order to ensure Conceptual Coherence, Al thought it necessary to provide all the songs with large bunches of meaningless sound effects. Sirens, explosions, laughter, shrieks of horror, crowd noises, animal noises — by 1968, everybo­dy already knew that you could insert some dog barking into any song of your choice without be­ing evicted from the Songwriters' Guild, so the novel effect was no longer in action, and still the man plowed on. Sometimes these nasties creep up at the wrongest moment (e. g. the horrified shrieking on 'Unborn Child'), and sometimes they just fuck the song up, like the wobbly warped vocals on the otherwise pretty guitar ballad 'Right Now For You'.

 

In his review, Bruce Eder put forward the idea that the whole sound effect thing was effectively one large gag, a sort of parody on the abuse of sonic collages — he may have had some firsthand information on this, but it certainly does not come across that way from the music; this is not a Zappa album, and parody and humor do not tie in all that much with Kooper's image of a roman­tic idealist. They just come across as a bad distraction, an inevitable, perhaps, curse of the time, but something that you have to forgive the record for before giving it the deserved thumbs up. In all other respects, I Stand Alone still stands alone as a unique singer-songwriter-art-pop-philoso­pher effort — I can think of no other album from 1968-69 with this particular kind of eclectic, yet highly individual sound.

 

YOU NEVER KNOW WHO YOUR FRIENDS ARE (1969)

 

1) Magic In My Socks; 2) Lucille; 3) Too Busy Thinking About My Baby; 4) First Time Around; 5) Loretta; 6) Blues, Pt. 4; 7) You Never Know Who Your Friends Are; 8) Great American Marriage/Nothing; 9) Don't Know Why I Love You; 10) Mourning Glory Story; 11) Anna Lee; 12) I'm Never Gonna Let You Down.

 

Al Kooper may not be a «genius», either John Lennon-style or Paul McCartney-style — which is, really, just about the only explanation of why these late Sixties' records are not generally remem­bered as musical pinnacles of their time. But when three great doubly-defined qualities come together — ambiti­ousness/bravery, sincerity/honesty, balance/taste — you do not necessarily re­quire a superpower to craft simple and stunning hooks. It only remains to the listener to take his time, and eventually it'll all hang out.

 

There is no «development», as such, from I Stand Alone to You Never Know, because, after the titanic sprawl of Kooper's interests in 1968, there was really very little new territory for the man to penetrate, considering that neither trip-hop nor metalcore had yet been invented. Thus, all that was left to do was to try it again — which he did, with one major improvement: most of the sonic collage stuff was sent packing, to the delight of all those future generations who love the 1960's achievements but hate their excesses. Another difference is that there is more original material, but, given Kooper's interpretive talents, that may not necessarily be a plus.

 

The sessions were produced with the aid of «The Al Kooper Big Band» — a veritable swarm of musicians very few of which I am familiar with, because most seem to come from jazz rather than blues or rock backgrounds, be they guitarists, pianists, or brass players. Not that You Never Know is, in any big way, a jazz album. There is a huge R'n'B presence, lots of blues, some music hall, Motownish lush pop, and one or two songs recreate the style of the original Blood, Sweat & Tears, perhaps, but that's about it. That said, if you want to record a great pop album — better still, a great eclectic album — get some well-oiled jazz dudes to do it.

 

An almost frustrating feeling of evenness all but prevents me from talking about the tunes; each and every one defines worthiness. One possible choice for top of the pops would be 'Too Busy Thinking About My Baby', which just might be the most «authentic» Motown number recorded by a non-Motown artist (not inside a Motown studio). If Kooper cannot properly hit the high no­tes required of Eddie Kendricks, he still does a good, passionate job, and in all other respects he builds up on the song's potential, throwing on a brass, strings, and back vocals arrangement that is at once very Motown-ish and artsy — an arrogant, but subtle synthesis of tribute and reconstruc­tion, and a great euphoric feel to the whole thing.

 

The album starts out on such a rowdy note, actually ('Magic In My Socks' will rock those socks off you with its fast-moving brass riffs) that it is possible not to notice the wonders of the slow, moody numbers at once: the cover of Harry Nilsson's 'Mourning Glory Story' has a complex «an­ge­lic» harmony arrangement, and 'Nothing', opening with an interesting neo-classical in­tro­duc­tion, then turns into psychedelic Sinatra, riding from cello cloud to harp cloud to piano cloud in a frenzied fit of never-stopping imagination. Decidedly not my favourite style of music, but when it's done with that much enthusiasm, even the sappiest notes regain some freshness.

 

At this point in his career, with just a little bit of restraint on meaningless weird side effects and unjustified song length, Kooper could do no wrong. Even 'Blues, Pt. 4', essentially just an instru­mental blues jam, has five minutes of soulful organ and piano solos that soothe rather than bore. And if it really is so hard to pick out outstanding tracks, well, so much the better — think of this as one even-quality forty-three minute symphony with tons of ideas that trump quite a few forty-minute-symphony-structured progressive rock albums. Thumbs up.

 

EASY DOES IT (1970)

 

1) Brand New Day; 2) I Got A Woman; 3) Country Road; 4) I Bought You The Shoes; 5) Easy Does It; 6) Buckskin Boy; 7) Love Theme From "The Landlord"; 8) Sad, Sad Sunshine; 9) Let The Duchess No; 10) She Gets Me Where I Live; 11) A Rose And A Baby Ruth; 12) Baby Please Don't Go; 13) God Sheds His Grace On Thee.

 

Don't know much about easy, but third time clearly does it. Not one to hold back, still bursting with ideas, still probably dissatisfied about not being able to let it all out in one huge bundle to amaze everyone's eyes and ears, Al finally went for the gold: same approach as usual, but this time, on a double album, never ever to be outdone in the future, even by himself.

 

The surprise effect may have been gone, because by then everybody pretty much knew what to expect from the whizz kid, yet it is still amazing to realize just what an immense overload of ideas this guy had accumulated over the mid-Sixties to finally start depositing over this relatively brief period of hypercreativity. Once again, each and every song bursts with them — they may not all be tremendously memorable, but he did come up with all of them. How did he manage to do that? Some people have trouble coming up with one fresh idea over a consecutive run of five or more LPs; Al Kooper is the direct opposite.

 

In random order, let me just list some of the crazy stuff he does on here. Ray Charles once pro­duced a revolution when he took a generic spiritual and reworked it into 'I Got A Woman', crea­ting soul music in the process. Now Al, in an almost absurdist twist, pushes it one step further, taking Ray's creation, slowing it down, and reworking it into an orchestrated lounge jazz standard, piano and sax solos and a sort of Oscar Peterson Trio mood thing established. It reads like a de­construction, with Kooper's tenderness almost impossible to believe, but it's one of the most bi­zarre and totally unpredictable deconstructions ever — and it all sounds very smooth and natural, unlike the man's previous rough experiment with '59th Street Bridge Song'.

 

Another transformation awaits the old blues chestnut 'Baby Please Don't Go', which bands like the Amboy Dukes, and later still, Budgie and AC/DC, were speeding up and transforming into a balls-out hard rocker. The Koop, on the contrary, turns it into free-form jazz, a set of piano, bass, and something else («ondioline»?) improvs occasionally interrupted by slightly black-facened vocalization (whose whininess actually fits in well with the slightly psychedelic, slighty relaxed, slightly paranoidal mood). Ah yes, it clocks in at 13:20, and obviously invites one to thoughts of padding out one side of the double LP — truth is, it deserves every second of that running time, and I would like to see someone deny this and at the same time sing hosanna to all those Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus albums.

 

Of the originals, 'Sad, Sad Sunshine' is the classic highlight. Said to be written or, at least, con­ceived while coming off an acid trip, this may be the most harmonious, proverbially gorgeous conjoining of fully worked out sitar and orchestral parts in pop music that I have heard so far — must have been one hell of a trip if, upon the end of the journey, East and West managed to share such a truly historical meeting. And then there's 'Brand New Day', Kooper's most eagerly optimi­stic anthem so far. Recorded for the soundtrack to Hal Ashby's directorial debut, The Landlord, it has clearly outlived the movie and works far better as the kick-start opener to Easy Does It.

 

What else is there? Rootsy, friendly, catchy soft-rock ('Country Road'), more of the old Blood, Sweat & Tears-style jazz-rock with bold Morricone-like brass parts ('She Gets Me Where I Live'), blues-rocky concern for the abused native ('Buckskin Boy'), music-hall arrangement meets Nash­ville melody ('I Bought You The Shoes'), and an almost parodic attempt at big bulgy blues-de-luxe with the title track, performed so crudely you could easily mistake it for a lame attempt at self-promoting on the part of your local barroom ensemble. Don't worry, they're professionals, they're just faking it for a reason.

 

With all these treasures to reap, you'd think Easy Does It would be perennially hailed as yet ano­ther in an endless stream of masterpieces from 1970. Instead, it has sunk into almost complete oblivion, rarely appearing on CD (usually as a limited-edition import) and completely ignored on most critical lists (even among amateurs: on RateYourMusic, the album has not, as of yet, gar­nered a single review). Reader, take my word on it and do not believe this tombly silence. Even if you do not happen to be a big fan of Mr. Al's voice (I can understand) or tendency to slip into impro­vised rambling (I can understand), railing against Mr. Al's skills as composer and arranger would defy the purpose of music itself — and Easy Does It is Al Kooper's biggest, grandest, splurgiest declaration of love for music, one hundred percent honest and almost nearly as exciting. Thumbs up, of course; get this thing back in print now, you sluggards.

 

NEW YORK CITY (YOU'RE A WOMAN) (1971)

 

1) New York City (You're A Woman); 2) John The Baptist (Holy John); 3) Can You Hear It Now; 4) The Ballad Of The Hard Rock Kid; 5) Going Quietly Mad; 6) Medley: Oo Wee Baby I Love You / Love Is A Man's Best Friend; 7) Back On My Feet; 8) Come Down In Time; 9) Dearest Darling; 10) Nightmare #5; 11) The Warning (Someone's On The Cross Again).

 

Back to single LP format: many artists, after the kind of effort that it would take to produce a complex monster like Easy Does It, would be left somewhat exhausted (think Goat's Head Soup right on the heels of Exile On Main St.), but not Kooper, who, having finally hit his stride, was seemingly determined to set a new world record of continuous creativity.

 

Again, there is no single conceptual thread to this collection, and it's good, because it allows each single song to shine on its own: again, no filler within miles. Again, Al is working with lots of musicians, including an immense bunch of guests during a Los Angeles session, which yielded most of the tracks on here, and a smaller combo while guesting himself in England. One of his new influences is Elton John (yes, the true well-established professional will never be afraid to borrow from the young, and it doesn't always look as ugly as a Mick Jagger/Lenny Kravitz colla­boration): not only does Al cover the freshly issued 'Come Down In Time' (one of the gene­rally overlooked album tracks from Tumbleweed Connection), he even gets Caleb Quaye to play gui­tar on a couple of tracks – but not on 'Come Down In Time' itself, which was recorded in L.A. Always the perfect guy to confound expectations, Mr. Kooper.

 

With albums like these, it is sometimes easier to switch to a song-by-song manner than try to sum­marize impressions that simply cannot be summarized. Immensely beautiful, the title track: countless battalions of songwriters have tried to convince the people at large that their personal relationship with New York merits popularization — Al is one of the few who convinces me, not just because lines like "New York City, you're a woman / Cold hearted bitch ought to be your name / You ain't never loved nobody / Still I'm drawn to you like a moth to a flame" are a pheno­menally successful way of collating clichéd images into a fresh sequence, but musically, too, it's a grand aural celebration, with progressively soaring organs and Mellotrons and a coda that is stuck somewhere in between «anthem» and «prayer» (yes, it does remind of Elton John circa Madman Across The Water quite a bit — hey, that's a good thing).

 

'John The Baptist', on the other hand, sounds like The Band: not my fault if, in addition to the rootsy melody, Al whines his way through the lyrics like Rick Danko, but it's one of the best Band songs The Band never wrote. 'Can You Hear It Now' is a grand art-pop ballad, more Mello­trons and echoey soulful guitars and a gospel buildup at the end. Then it's boogie time with 'The Ballad Of The Hard Rock Kid', parodic in name but a guitar lover's paradise in nature (excellent slide parts played over a bluesy riff borrowed from Slim Harpo's 'Shake Your Hips', I believe). 'Going Quietly Mad' places us in psychedelic piano territory that is sometimes said to emulate the Beatles but mood-wise is really more reminiscent of that other Cooper with a C (think 'Ballad Of Dwight Fry'). The 'Oo Wee Baby' medley is Philly soul incarnate, a steady beat, a fat layer of in­struments, and hooks entrusted to female backing vocals...

 

...which, altogether, may finally answer the question of why these Kooper classics are not as uni­versally acclaimed as they should be: throughout the album, Al is clearly capable of emulating all those other people, but it is not so easy to see «the proper Al» in the songs. The complex answer is that Al Kooper is all of these things; he is being completely sincere and passionate regardless of whether it is Elton John, Robbie Robertson, Jackie Wilson, Bob Dylan, or Phil Spector whose creative manner he is appropriating at the time. But a detailed review of the album will inevitably be choked with comparisons — and not simply because all of those guys are the more better known ones, so it is them who will figure in Al Kooper reviews and not vice versa, but because that's the way it really goes with Al.

 

Simply put, the man got his own soul and his own talent, but not his own style; it's an almost ter­mi­nal case of «chameleonism», next to which David Bowie is behaviourally indistinguishable from Lemmy Kilmister. Which clearly translates into the problem of finding one's own steady fan base. Average fans tend to associate with distinct personalities, and this ain't no distinct persona­lity; and musical critics like to pigeonhole, and New York City cannot be pigeonholed even if one kills off all the pigeons.

 

If there is some sort of unifying aspect to all these songs, it is BIGness. Lots of musicians, lots of layers, grand ambitions, everything is driven as high up as possible. 'Nightmare # 5' strolls along cloaked in a stern organ melody and prophetic lyrics, and the title of 'Someone's On The Cross Again' speaks for itself. (Both songs are carried off splendidly, though.) But even in this aspect Al loses out, for instance, to George Harrison, whose All Things Must Pass (also quite possibly, one of the influences here) had established the unbeatable Standard Of Sounding Real Big a year earlier; next to Harrison's grizzly-size Al is just an ordinary black bear.

 

None of which should discourage any honest music lover from checking out this excellent LP; newcomers will find it a more accessible and easy-going introduction to Al's early 1970s great­ness than the excess-improvisation-loaded Easy Does It. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine «newcomers» looking for «accessible» stuff to be interested in Al Kooper in the first place, so disregard this and just go for the chronology. Thumbs up, of course.

 

A POSSIBLE PROJECTION OF THE FUTURE/CHILDHOOD'S END (1972)

 

1) A Possible Projection Of The Future; 2) The Man In Me; 3) Fly On; 4) Please Tell Me Why; 5) The Monkey Time; 6) Let Your Love Shine; 7) Swept For You Baby; 8) Bended Knees; 9) Love Trap; 10) Childhood's End.

 

Years later, Kooper himself acknowledged that this album came out as a «colder» experience than usual, ascribing it to heavy use of synthesizers. He may be partially right about it, too: there is quite a bit of freezing machine sound here, although, for the most part, Kooper is able to master the electronic beasts just as effectively as Pete Townshend and Stevie Wonder were doing at the time. The real problem, however, runs deeper than that.

 

Synthesizers or no synthesizers, there is simply a lot of gloom on this record. It started life as a conceptual thing, dedicated to issues of time and aging — hence Al's creepy «projection» on the front cover (fortunately, as of 2010, he looks much better than the plastic zombie on the sle­eve) — then lost track of the concept, but preserved its rather pessimistic spirit. 'A Possible Projection Of The Future' winds the record up on Al's most depressed note since 'I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know', but if Blood, Sweat & Tears managed to uphold a solid balance between pain and joy, this record is far more pain than joy. The above-mentioned synthesizers quickly set up a half-winterish, half-nightmarish setting, over which Al superimposes sad piano chords and almost tragically plaintive vocals: "You never know who your friends are / 'Til they don't come around no more".

 

Add to this a hearty "No one gives a fuck when I'm singing" and you're done – the cultured public was still reeling from John Lennon's use of the F-word on 'Working Class Hero'. On the other hand, given the generally low sales for most of Al's albums, no one really gave a fuck when he was singing, so that this should rather be judged as a sign of heavily getting into character than a smartly calculated public gesture. And it is nowhere near as memorable, per se, as the thunderous threatening piano/strings/synths coda to the song.

 

The rest of the tunes follow the usual pattern of mixing unpredictable covers with unpredictable originals, and it is generally the covers that alleviate the heavy mood: almost saccharine-sweetly done versions of Dylan's 'The Man In Me' and Smokey Robinson's 'Swept For You Baby', with Al trying out his falsetto range on both; since they are not altogether different from the sources, they cannot rank with his finest, but Al's ability to combine sweetness with taste does not betray him on either of the tracks. Jimmy Cliff's 'Please Tell Me Why' fits in better with the gloomy parts of the album — and fattens up the original with several layers of those chilly synths and strings that provide it with a useful extra dimension or two.

 

Meanwhile, the originals, one after another, keep dealing with the side effects of broken love af­fairs: after the anthemic, but seemingly not too self-certain 'Let Your Love Shine' (which, strange enough, borrows its main hook from 'Brainwashed' by the Kinks), 'Bended Knees' has the prota­gonist prostrate in a weeping prayer, and 'Love Trap' has him going unquietly mad, with what sounds like backward recorded sitars symbolizing his wrecked state of mind during the tumultous race-to-the-end. Each single moment is utterly believable — Kooper's ability to translate soul torture into sound is still his main attraction.

 

A Possible Projection is certainly not the proper place to start exploring Al: it is better to arrive at it chronologically, with the darkness and depression offering a sharp contrast to the brightness and joviality of what used to be. It is, no doubt, tempting to try to attach it to the «hippie disillu­sionment» of the time, but, truth is, that sort of crisis had already struck musicians at large two years earlier, and it is safer to assume that Al was going through some personal rough times — and even safer to assume that he wasn't. But it's certainly more exciting to assume that this is a troubled album made in troubled times by a troubled spirit, and its title track at least is perfect lis­tening for anyone in dire need of a good wallop of self-pity. Thumbs up as usual.

 

NAKED SONGS (1973)

 

1) (Be Yourself) Be Real; 2) As The Years Go Passing By; 3) Jolie; 4) Blind Baby; 5) Been And Gone; 6) Sam Stone; 7) Peacock Lady; 8) Touch The Hem Of His Garment; 9) Where Were You When I Needed You; 10) Unrequited.

 

Apparently this was released to fulfill Al's contractual obligation — a mish-mashed quickie to al­low for some breathing space and take a three-year break from recording. However, always a gen­tleman to the core, Al took the obligation seriously: Naked Songs may not be altogether more «naked» than anything else he's done (and, fairly speaking, the title would fit in much better with his next album, if you compare the front sleeves), but it's another good Al Kooper album, not stri­ving for much of anything except satisfying his usual goals and values. And whoever holds no love for Mr. Kooperschmidt's usual goals and values has no reason to be present at this part of the review sequence anyway.

 

'(Be Yourself) Be Real' has a clichéd hippie title and a slightly moralizing attitude (are we suppo­sed to cast out everyone who wants to be fake? Well, on second thought...), but it is one of his best three-minute outpourings of soul, two amazing piano and choir crescendos that crash down in a hoarse, near-suffocated "be rea... eaaa... eal" which let you know for a fact that, unless you solemnly pledge to be as real as real this very instant, the guy is going to expire right here and now, thrashing in agony on your blood-stained carpet.

 

Then, no sooner than the pledge has been given, he launches into the fiercest, broken-heartedest interpretation of Albert King's 'As The Years Go Passing By' that anyone has ever given (and co­ver versions abound, by the way, of which Jeff Healey's is the more recommendable one, Gary Moore's is the one to avoid for those who prefer subtlety over pathos, and Eric Burdon and the Animals' is the goofiest one). On here, Al enters his 'More Than You'll Ever Know' mode: Shake­sperian doom without disgusting mannerisms, every word weighted out carefully before being pronounced, and, in a rare fit of passion, he plays both of the scorching guitar solos himself, assa­s­sinating the instrument (occasionally, people mistake this for a Mike Bloomfield performance; Mike would have probably gone for more complexity, but I doubt he could have played with more feeling).

 

These two performances, I believe, are the best ones, but there is always space for more high­lights: the big band arrangement of the rainbow-coloured optimistic soul ballad 'Jolie', the hilari­ous country sendup of 'Blind Baby' (lovers of Paul McCartney's similarly upbeat country shuffles from the early 1970s will want to hear this at all costs), the wall-of-sound arrangement of John Prine's anti-drug classic 'Sam Stone', and the exotic lushness of 'Peacock Lady', which is like a mind-altering jungle of guitars, strings, tablas, and reeds (or reed-like synths). You can always count on good old Al for diversity.

 

A couple of relatively unfocused and underarranged, if still classy, piano tunes give the impres­sion of having been laid out too quickly to pad the sessions; and 'Touch The Hem Of His Gar­ment', unfortunately, is very hard to appreciate next to the Sam Cooke original, because there are almost no melody twists to distract from the vocals, and while I do not hold the orthodox opinion that it is theoretically impossible for anybody, let alone a blue-eyed soul singer with limited range like Al, to outperform Sam, this is one of Sam's best ever vocal performances — in fact, this may just be the single greatest straightforward gospel number ever written and performed by a solo ar­tist — and Al Kooper can move big hills, but not major mountains.

 

Other than that, if only all «contractual» albums were ever like this, the world would have a much higher opinion of the legal system as a whole and record industry lawyers in particular. More thumbs up for Al.

 

ACT LIKE NOTHING'S WRONG (1976)

 

1) Is We On The Downbeat?; 2) This Diamond Ring; 3) She Don't Ever Lose Her Groove; 4) I Forgot To Be Your Lover; 5) Mis­sing You; 6) Out Of Left Field; 7) (Please Not) One More Time; 8) In My Own Sweet Way; 9) Turn My Head Towards Home; 10) A Visit To The Rainbow Bar & Grill; 11) Hollywood Vampire.

 

Three years off and Al returns again — not in the best of all possible lights, even if, for some rea­son, Act Like Nothing's Wrong is among his personal favorites. Essentially, what this is is a re­cord conceived and executed as an almost formulaic Seventies' R'n'B album. All it takes is a little bit of detachment and you can see Al Green singing all the songs with Willie Mitchell standing behind the steering wheel.

 

Words of the day include smooth, silky, and sexy: even the lack of clothes on the front sleeve ag­rees fairly well with the overall spirit (three cheers, however, for the decision to cover up... no, not what you thought; I meant the hairy chest, of course, that particularly annoying trademark of the mainstream school of coke-and-sunshine pop of the decade). Typical elements of the sound involve well-disciplined, mechanistic brass riffs; funky Stevie Wonder-style clavinet melodies; pulsating rhythm sections whose business it is to keep you on your feet until you drop ('She Don't Ever Lose Her Groove' is quite a telling title); keyboards, strings, background choirs, etc. etc.

 

In short, superficially this is Kooper's most «commercial» album to date; but if there is one per­son on the planet who is physiologically incapable of «selling out», Al, at the very least, clearly passes the primaries — all of these songs place more emphasis on sincerity, melodic build-up, complexity of arrangements, and subtlety of expression than on brute head-hammering hooks, and even if these songs got any airplay at all back in the day, they would be immediately forgot­ten by the populace at large next to concurrent Bee Gees material. Play 'She Don't Ever Lose Her Groove' next to 'Night Fever' and you'll see what I mean.

 

The jerky glissando that opens 'Missing You' is just like the one that opens 'Dancing Queen' (co­in­cidence?), but no amount of proto-disco glitz that Al managed to pile up can distract from rea­lizing that it is, in fact, a very sad and heartfelt song, and that his falsetto climax in the chorus is a painful falsetto rather than the usual sugar sweet falsetto in the disco tradition. William Bell's 'I Forgot To Be Your Lover' is also given a glossy coating, which passes by almost unobserved, next to Al's so very human delivery. Maybe that is what the audiences did not like — the human element in all of these performances. Technically, Kooper isn't much of a vocalist, but over the years, he'd learned very well to put that to his advantage (he wasn't a student of Dylan's for no­thing, after all); the only trouble is that the more experienced he became about it, the less main­stream audiences would be willing to take it. Barry Manilow forever!

 

Still, no matter how heartfelt, there is a disturbing atmosphere of «sameness» about these songs that only dissipates with the final number — out of the blue, without warning, the bag is tied up with 'Hollywood Vampire', a loud art-rock epic that almost looks like a sardonic spit in the face of all the attitudes pandered to on the previous tracks. No straightforward Bee Gees fan could to­lerate this: a subtly-creepy send-up of an evil vamp that ditches sweetness for bitterness and omi­nousness, not to mention culminating in the most ferocious guitar solo on the entire record. Even if the ratio of musical ideas to song length is not ideal, it is still the only track on Act Like No­thing's Wrong that rattles my imagination even after the album is over, and ensures it a thumbs up where, otherwise, I might have been too lazy to make these thumbs defy the law of gravity.

 

CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING (1982)

 

1) I Wish You Would; 2) Two Sides (To Every Situation); 3) Wrestle With This; 4) Lost Control; 5) I'd Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheart (Than A Young Man's Fool); 6) The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter; 7) Bandstand; 8) Finders Keepers; 9) Snowblind.

 

After another lay-off period, much longer than usual this time (but, fortunately, depriving us from the experience of learning what «The Al Kooper Disco Album» would have sounded like), Koo­per teamed up with Jeff «Skunk» Baxter, of the original Steely Dan fame... to release possibly the strangest, and unluckiest, album of his career.

 

The creativity is still there, by all means, but way too many things about the album are simply not what they should be. Starting from the wrap-up concept: the silly title, the puns on the back cover (such as splitting the LP's two sides into «First Fall» and «Second Fall»), the ridiculous photo on the front sleeve, the «ring noises» that open the proceedings — almost as if someone had just wat­ched Raging Bull a couple times too much. The idea of letting Bill Szymczyk (the guy who started out real well, producing classic B. B. King and James Gang albums, and ended up as the prime minister at the Eagles' court) take care of the proceedings was also disturbing: previously, Al had produced all of his efforts on his own, and did a damn fine job at that. Why let the Eagles guy in on an already well-working formula?

 

But the most confusing thing here is that Championship Wrestling does not sound like an «al­bum» at all. Instead, it feels like a mix of four and a half single records of widely varying quality that someone put together for no reason at all. Part of this is because Al mostly takes a break from singing, contributing vocals only to two of the songs and letting in three different vocalists to bat­tle for the rest — but the vocalists bring their own atmospheres, and, for the most part, they turn out to be completely incompatible.

 

Al's personal «single» is the best of the lot: a crisp-fried version of 'I Wish You Would' that con­tinues the fine tradition of reinterpretations of old classics (The Yardbirds this time), with blazing leads from Baxter — and a moody original shuffle ('The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter'), with an eerie midnight spirit, that should have made it onto the previous album (that spirit ties in real well with that of 'Hollywood Vampire'). But beyond that...

 

...the two numbers with Mickey Thomas on vocals sound like a slightly improved take on Forei­gner: pompous arena-rock with too high a concentration of gall and pathos over melodicity. The two instrumentals are second-hand jazz-fusion, rather hollow exercises in technique and fluidity — why should anyone waste one's time on them instead of going for the real thing (Jeff Beck, Holdsworth-era Soft Machine etc.), I have no idea. The almost-retro R'n'B number 'Finders Kee­pers', with Ricky Washington on vocals, is a bit more memorable, but Kooper has already done everything he could with the clavinet anyway.

 

Strangest of all are the two songs with independent singer-songwriter Valerie Carter on vocals: 'Two Sides' brings on memories of Dusty Springfield (which is a really odd feeling coming on the heels of the hell-raising 'I Wish You Would'), and 'I'd Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheart' is an Atlantic-style R'n'B machine that brings on equally solid memories of Aretha Franklin in her hey­day (stylistically, not vocally, of course). Both tunes are pleasant pop, but somehow neither of them feels like it's got anything to do with Al Kooper.

 

You gotta give it to Al, though: even for what could easily be called his worst ever album he ma­naged to pull some surprises out of his sleeve, and compared to the real garbage that so many of his contemporaries were putting out in 1982 (It's Hard, eh?), Wrestling is one Empire State Bui­l­ding of a masterpiece. Had it not been so confused and misguided in its execution (and the prob­lem was exacerbated quite seriously with Baxter taking off and leaving in the middle of the ses­sions), it might have... well, it might have been just another great Al Kooper album. Instead, it's a not-great, but BIZARRE Al Kooper album! Go for it — that is, if you can find it anywhere.

 

REKOOPERATION (1994)

 

1) Downtime; 2) After The Lights Go Down Low; 3) When The Spell Is Broken; 4) How 'My Ever Gonna Get Over You; 5) Sneakin Round The Barnyard; 6) Soul Twist-ed; 7) Lookin For Clues; 8) Honky Tonk; 9) Clean Up Woman; 10) Don't Be Cruel; 11) Alvino Johnson's Shuffle; 12) Johnny B. Goode; 13) I Wanna Little Girl.

 

Kooper lay low through most of the Eighties — which only further confirms his sensibility; had most of the prominent artists of his generation followed his example, their present day reputations would only have been the better for it (just imagine — no Press To Play, no Dirty Work, no August, no Never Let Me Down, not even Camouflage... then again, an artist with a thoroughly unblemished reputation can be a real dangerous type, come to think of it).

 

Surviving this, his next notable musical move happened at the perfect time — in 1992, when, for a while, decent musical taste returned to «mainstream periphery» as the smoke screen dissipated and people began to realize just how ridiculous synth-pop and hair metal guitars have gotten. With Jimmy Vivino, originally the main guitar player and arranger for the Conan O'Brien Show, he formed «The Rekooperators», a professional no-nonsense, if not exactly innovative, team, and put them on the road, playing a smorgasboard of eclectic material in the proper Al Kooper way.

 

The band's only studio album was released two years later — and yes, after twelve years of si­lence one might have expected anything, but, most probably, Rekooperation is not at all what one would really expect. What it is is a collection of twelve instrumental and only one vocal num­bers, mixing inventive original compositions with covers of classic standards, mutated be­yond recognition. The very fact that, once again, Al is taking other people's ideas and submits them to genetic engineering, is not at all new — but the setting within which he is doing it cer­tain­ly is, and the near-total absence of vocals, coupled with the complexity of the arrangements, gives the whole thing a killer hip atmosphere. On Kooper's vocal albums, one could accuse the man of being bloated and pretentious — a hollow accusation, since all of the bloatedness was al­ways compensated by professionalism, and all of the pretentiousness, by sincerity, but an accusa­tion nevertheless. Rekooperation is not pompous, anthemic, or overtly cathartic. It is simply thrilling. And it kicks ass.

 

The assemblage of covers raises Al's eclecticism to unprecedented heights here. There's Elvis, with a 'Don't Be Cruel' that has been converted to a sort of lazy, non-chalant, New Orleanian Dr. John-style shuffle. There's Chuck, with 'Johnny B. Goode' slowed down, a little bit discoified (but definitely not the way Elton John killed it on Victim Of Love), and transformed into a comic stomp, what with the organ playing all of Chuck's vocal parts (not that it wasn't a comic stomp to begin with, but, if at all possible, Al makes it even less serious than it used to be).

 

There's Betty Wright, whose 'Clean Up Woman' fully preserves the sunny brightness of the up­beat original. On 'After The Lights Go Down Low', Kooper mimicks Al Hibbler's original vocal part so perfectly that it made me reevaluate the soulfulness of the song. A bit less interesting is the cover of Bill Doggett's 'Honky Tonk', if only because it sticks way too close to the already perfect original; and the only serious misstep is 'Soul Twist-ed' — Kooper is doing fine when he uses his keys to mimick voices, but when he tries to substitute them for King Curtis' sax, the out­come is sort of evident. You'll love this only if you haven't heard the original 'Soul Twist'.

 

Stepping out of the old school rock'n'roll/R'n'B template, there are two more surprises — a deep-cutting tribute to Richard Thompson ('When The Spell Is Broken'), with Al's organ at its most soulful, and an utterly grossly ridiculous and equally loveable reworking of Robert Palmer's 'Loo­king For Clues', with the original xylophone solo replaced by a bumblebee-style organ passage that features the speediest, most perfectly flowing playing from the guy we have heard up to that point — clearly, the twelve years were not passed away from the keyboard.

 

Throw on a couple of adequate (but not so interesting) original compositions, sum things up with a vocal rendition of the old lounge standard 'I Wanna Little Girl' (well, the man was not yet 50 when he recorded that, we shall not count that against him), and there you have it — a record that clearly demonstrates how awesome it is to still have Mr. Kooper with us in this post-revolutiona­ry musical period. Were he a major commercial star at this juncture, all of these people that he is covering, with the possible exception of Elvis and Chuck, should be paying royalties to him in­stead of vice versa; a classier way of introducing so much past talent to newer listeners can hard­ly be imagined. (Not that a lot of listeners would bother locating the originals, of course, but these days, with Youtube and stuff around, it is much easier; if you have heard the album, but are un­familiar with some of the ground it covers, here's your chance). Thumbs up, heartily.

 

SOUL OF A MAN (1995)

 

1) Somethin' Goin' On; 2) I Can't Keep From Cryin' Sometimes; 3) I Stand Alone/I Can Love A Woman/New York City; 4) Flute Thing; 5) Don't Tell Me (Repo Man); 6) Two Trains Runnin'; 7) Heartbeat; 8) Sleepwalk; 9) Just One Smile; 10) I Can't Quit Her; 11) I Want A Little Girl; 12) My Days Are Numbered; 13) I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know; 14) Spoken Intro; 15) Made In The Shade; 16) Downtime; 17) Violets Of Dawn; 18) Albert's Shuffle; 19) Closing Medley (You Can't Always Get What You Want/Season Of The Witch).

 

Is this a stupendous live album, or what? Imagine a double live CD led by, say, Eric Clapton, with three songs performed by the original Yardbirds, four by the original Cream, and an extra three by the original Derek & The Dominos (minus the dead guys, of course), plus a bunch of so­lo stuff plus a bunch of whatever else came along — old stuff, new stuff, you name it. Clearly, despite all of his allegedly easy-going nature, Clapton could not pull it off in one go, nor would he ever want to. Leave that kind of bewildering stuff to crazy schemers like Al Kooper.

 

For a series of three gigs, recorded in New York in February 1994, Al got together the original members (well, not all of them, but most) of both of his old bands —The Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears, as well as his new band, the Rekooperators, led by Jimmy Vivino. In addition, he got Johnnie Johnson (the Johnnie Johnson, of Chuck Berry fame) to play some piano, and John Sebastian (the John Sebastian, of the Lovin' Spoonful fame) to blow some harmonica — in fact, something tells me he could have gotten anybody, including President Clinton on tambourine, they just ran out of space listing all the guests on the album cover.

 

With such an eclectic presence spearheaded by one of the most eclectic artists the world has ever seen, one should be prepared for everything. Now, obviously, Al did not get the old bands back together to make them play post-rock: the old chestnuts are respectfully revisited en masse, from the Blues Project's 'Flute Thing' and 'I Can't Keep From Crying' to BS&T's 'My Days Are Num­bered' and 'I Can't Quit Her'. Apart from that, however, instead of concentrating on his solo care­er (mostly reduced to a brief three-song medley in the early part of the set and just two numbers from Rekooperation), Al concentrates on...

 

...oh boy, this is always my favourite part with this guy. Let's see now: there's Randy Newman ('Just One Smile'). The Rolling Stones (well, somehow, Al is justified in choosing 'You Can't Al­ways Get What You Want', considering that he played on the original; and this is the only live rendition of this classic song I've ever heard that emphasizes the initial choral part instead of just dropping it, as the Stones always do). Friggin' Lynyrd Skynyrd — 'Made In The Shade', not even one of their better-known tunes, but turned into a New Orleanian hedonistic delight with Johnnie Johnson's help. And, even less expected — Adrian Belew, with 'Heartbeat' ("I cannot even be­gin to tell you how difficult it is to play this song", Al complains before launching into it, "cause Ad­rian Belew is nuts!"). The band does a great job on the song, though.

 

Not everything is picture-perfect. The Blues Project, for instance, was a really early venture for Kooper, who did not really begin to bloom until 1968, and while the band was quite decent when covering contemporary psych-pop (e. g. Eric Andersen's 'Violets Of Dawn', one of the highlights here as well), their «blues» thing was rather generic, and little has changed since then — eleven minutes for Muddy Waters' 'Two Trains Runnin' is overkill. And on 'Albert's Shuffle', Jimmy Vi­vino does not particularly well match the shoes of the late great Mike Bloomfield (who, himself, must have had a great time watching the shows from Heaven through direct satellite trans­mis­sion). Also, one strange post-production defect concerns Steve Katz, the guitar hero behind both Blues Project and BS&T, who, for reasons beyond rational comprehension, did not give per­mis­sion to release his playing, so his parts had to be re-recorded in the studio by Vivino.

 

But none of this is truly significant next to the general feel of the record: once again, and once again from an entirely different angle, you get a potpourri of Americana (I sometimes forget Ad­rian Belew is American, too) played with just the right mix of professionalism, sincerity, and ac­cessibility. And Al is in perfect form as a singer, too — for instance, his rendition of 'I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know' almost matches the original in tension and passion, and this is a major feat; the original vocal performance was so perfectly modulated that each single live ver­sion by BS&T I've ever heard was always a letdown. Here, allowing himself some minor leeway during the coda, Kooper delivers the goods exactly the way I feel they should always be delivered if 'I Love You More' is destined to remain what it has always been (namely, one of the most soul-shattering, tear-jerking songs ever written). His grumbly sense of humor works well, too ("I hate playing this song...", he says about 'I Can't Quit You', "...except with these guys").

 

Soul Of A Man is a goddamn perfect title. It is not a «career summary» — it omits way too much from Al's career, and adds way too much from his non-career for that — it is merely a re­af­fir­mation of Al's original purpose in music, and shows him fully capable of pulling off everything he did thirty years earlier, and more. Look up «artistic integrity» in your local encyclopaedia — if you don't find a picture of Al Kooper next to it, I'll be very much surprised.

 

BLACK COFFEE (2005)

 

1) My Hands Are Tied; 2) Am I Wrong; 3) How 'My Ever Gonna Get Over You; 4) Going, Going, Gone; 5) Keep It To Yourself; 6) Get Ready; 7) Imaginary Lover; 8) Green Onions (live); 9) Another Man's Prize; 10) Childish Love; 11) Got My Ion Hue; 12) Just For A Thrill; 13) Comin' Back In A Cadillac (live); 15) (I Want You To) Tell Me The Truth.

 

In Al's own words, this album had been «thirty years in the making», and it certainly sounds like it, because no album (at least, no rock album — we aren't talking Wagner operas here) that had been thirty years in the making could ever aspire to turn out to be a jaw-dropping masterpiece in the end (what with spontaneity being a major component of it and all). Instead, it is simply the first «true Al Kooper» album of new material in 30 years, if, out of purism, we disregard the bi­zarre Baxter collaboration and the all-instrumental Rekooperation — and it is simply every bit as good as any other true Al Kooper album. No better, no worse.

 

Still, it is a somewhat special feeling to be listening to a brand new Al Kooper album in the 21st century and realize that the man has not really withered one little bit. Call it the old grumble gru­mble, but only grizzled Sixties veterans manage to preserve the proper amounts of energy and cre­ativity so as not to sound completely out of vogue in their, er, sixties. Of course, almost no­body no­ticed Black Coffee when it came out — and why should they, when they so rarely noti­ced the young Al Kooper? — but those few who did, all gave rave reviews (Al himself was asto­nished at one such review in the Mojo magazine, no less), and I can't blame them. They had no choice, if you ask me.

 

Seventy minutes worth of material here, with hardly a second idly wasted. Even the two live jams included from a gig with his new band, «The Funky Faculty» (apparently, consisting entirely of his fellow music professors at the Berkelee College in the Boston!) are terrific: Booker T. & the MG's 'Green Onions', fully respecting the cool grimness of the original (Al begins with a rather slavish imitation of the old organ solo), adds blazing rock solos and fades out just as the repetitiveness factor threatens to kick in. 'Comin' Back In A Cadillac' is a semi-original that begins with a brass riff borrowed from 'Bony Moronie', immediately becomes a part facetious, part bitter-ironic autobiographic rant ("Right now I don't have a dime / Most folks say the life I live is a crime"), and then unpredictab­ly turns into a «soul clapping» session with the audience. How Al Kooper-ish.

 

As for the studio recordings — «black coffee» is indeed the perfect way to describe their general style: somewhat on the dark side, with plenty of bitterness, and yet, at the same time, an overall pleasing, satisfactory, mind-clearing effect. The music is not quite as diverse as usual, generally well set within the classic R'n'B pattern, with occasional excourses into Dylan-ish singer-song­writing and the lounge style, but all of the songs are exceedingly well-written, starting from the anthemic brass riff that opens 'My Hands Are Tied' and all the way down.

 

Al's voice, which was never one of nature's treasures to begin with, has become even lower, crack­lier, and whinier than it used to be; but the genius of Al is that he always knew what kind of stuff this voice was best fit for, and Black Coffee is the final proof, because the songs are lower, cracklier, and whinier, while never losing the necessary soulfulness. 'Going, Going, Gone' is an old man's rant at the inevitably changing times (with a funny stab at hip-hop culture as opposed to «deep soul music» which I cannot help enjoying), but it is nowhere near as flat and close-minded­ly bitter as, for instance, Steve Stills' 'Seen Enough'. Songs like 'Keep It To Yourself' and 'Ano­ther Man's Prize' seem to be borrowing the vibe from Mark Knopfler — gloomy, introspective, nocturnal broodings, but also catchier and more interestingly arranged than the average Knopfler song (Dire Straits always sucked at spicing up their sound beyond just one awesome guitar).

 

As usual, there are some interesting covers — 'Get Ready', 'Just For A Thrill' — that almost seem to be there for comparison with how well Al can write his own songs in a similar style: 'Am I Wrong' is a cross between swamp blues and boogie that stands loud and proud against Smokey Robinson's fast-paced register, and 'How 'My Ever Gonna Get Over You' matches Lil' Arm­strong's mood and depth bit for bit, with Al's raspy vocal performance treasurable over the song's musical content (generic, but tastefully arranged lounge stuff).

 

Overall, Black Coffee is very much an old man's album, and that's a compliment: always true to himself, Kooper recognizes his age and is not ashamed to make nostalgia, retro-reflection, and slow-burning, bitter-esque emotion into the central themes. Which never completely suppresses the desire to rock out, either, as the 'Green Onions' cover successfully demonstrates. Charismatic then, charismatic now, he is aging just like a good wine should, settling so comfortably into the «el­der statesman» role that the hat-tipping reflex becomes unconditional, and so is, of course, the thumbs up motion.

 

WHITE CHOCOLATE (2008)

 

1) Love Time; 2) You Never Know Till You Get There; 3) Calling You; 4) I Love You More Than Words Can Say; 5) It Takes A Lot To Laugh (It Takes A Train To Cry); 6) I Cried So Hard; 7) Staxability; 8) You Make Me Feel So Good (All Over); 9) Susan; 10) Hold On; 11) Cast The First Stone; 12) No 1 2 Call Me Baby; 13) Candy Man; 14) I (Who Have Nothing); 15) (I Don't Know When But) I Know That I'll Be There Soon.

 

This aptly titled companion piece to Black Coffee is a little disappointing. Apparently, Al was on a limited budget, but that does not really explain why he needed to fall back on hollow synthesi­zers and obsolete-sounding drum machines on so many of these tracks — what is this, making up for lack of Eighties output? Stuff like 'You Make Me Feel So Good' sounds simply awful, especi­ally coming out of the hands of such an experienced soundmeister — and the rest of the tracks often come out pretty flat as well.

 

Out of reach of the major studios and, perhaps, compensating with homebrewed digital tech­nologies, Al is in real strong need of a master producer here, yet, if I understand it correctly, White Chocolate was his first album not to get any official distribution at all: physical CD co­pies could only be acquired from his own site. Well, that's still no reason to infect your atmo­sphere with sounds that never really belonged in it.

 

Musically, this is another batch of first-rate «white soul / R'n'B» compositions and interpretations that suffer from subpar production and, sometimes, so-so musicianship (Al is still playing with The Funky Faculty, and The Funky Faculty is still playing like a faculty rather than a well-groun­ded rock band), but certainly not from a lack of melodicity or, God forbid, sincerity. There is, in fact, so much R'n'B on here that by now we know: Al Kooper has lived all his life suffering from not having been born in Sam Cooke's, Otis Redding's, or Marvin Gaye's shoes, and even though he has a clear advantage on all three of them now (as in, they are all violently dead and he is peace­fully alive), I miss those early days, when the man was radiating all sorts of styles and gen­res. Now it is as if he just felt the need to resuscitate the old Atlantic Records spirit.

 

A song name like 'Staxability' says it all, even if the tune itself is a load of fun, and no one really has to concentrate on Al namedropping all of the Stax-Volt heroes (although it does not hurt to refresh one's memory, either — quick, name all of the M.G.s! and most of them, incidentally, are guesting on the actual song) instead of the funky brass riffs. It's an homage, but a good one, but still an homage, and the whole album is this unabashed trip down memory lane. Al covers Eddie Floyd ('I Love You More Than Words Can Say'), Ben E. King ('I Who Have Nothing'), and, in a moment of personal luck, gets to co-write a couple songs with Gerry Goffin himself. It's a bit of an overkill, really, even for Al's standards.

 

Interestingly, White Chocolate came out sunnier and shinier than Black Coffee: half of the songs are either loud, pompous, life-asserting anthems, pleasantly offset only by Al's ever-whini­fy­ing, but still highly resonant, old voice ('I Love You More...', 'You Make Me Feel So Good', 'Susan', 'No 1 2 Call Me Baby'; some of these I can easily imagine on post-Al Blood, Sweat & Tears albums — after all, how much emotional difference is there between 'You Make Me Feel So Good' and 'You've Made Me So Very Happy'?), or equally loud and anthemic tunes with just a slight touch of melancholy, but no tragedy ('Love Time'; the fast moving 'You Never Know 'Til You Get There', arguably the album's most introspective and personal number that begins with a subtle lyrical nod to Dylan's '115th Dream' and could have been really great if its main melodic hook weren't played on some cheap-sounding electronic keyboard — to my ears, it would need a couple of real cellos to truly come alive).

 

In a way, that's good, because the world has seen way too much whinying from old rock'n'roll  farts al­ready; and I have no idea if Kooper is so much internally at peace with himself as would seem from listening to the album (so much so that he wraps it up with the happiest, cheeriest «car­­nival gospel» performance about death ever put on record) — but even if he isn't, White Chocolate gives no sign of that. It may be somewhat monotonous, and it certainly is a disgrace to the classic «Al Kooper sound», but I do believe him when he writes how much fun he had ma­king it, and, after all, at the ripe age of 64 he should feel absolutely free to lock himself in that one particular groove that, throughout his whole life, he has loved the best. Thumbs up.

 

ADDENDA:

 

RARE AND WELL DONE (1964-2001; 2005)

 

CD I: 1) I Can't Quit Her; 2) Somethin' Goin' On (demo); 3) Autumn Song; 4) I Can't Stand The Rain; 5) Baby Please Don't Go (live); 6) I Let Love Slip Through My Fingers; 7) The Earthquake Of Your Love; 8) Bulgarya; 9) Nu­thin' I Wouldn't Do (For A Woman Like You); 10) New York's My Home (Razz-A-Ma-Tazz); 11) Making Plans For Nigel; 12) I Believe To My Soul; 13) Went To See The Gypsy; 14) Rachmaninoff's Birthday; 15) Hey Jude (re­hearsal tape); 16) Living In My Own Religion; 17) The Big Chase; 18) They Just Don't Make 'Em Like That Any­more; 19) A Drive Through The Old Neighborhood.

CD II: 1) I Can't Keep From Cryin' Sometimes (live); 2) I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) This Diamond Ring; 4) Albert's Shuffle; 5) Bury My Body; 6) Season Of The Witch; 7) New York City (You're A Woman); 8) I Can't Quit Her (live); 9) I Stand Alone; 10) Flute Thing; 11) You Never Know Who Your Friends Are; 12) I Got A Woman; 13) Brand New Day; 14) Love Theme From The Landlord.

 

Frankly speaking, I do not understand what in the world made Al decide to go ahead with this double CD package — most likely, he just wanted to make a fine present to his beloved self with this «totally killer package» (in his own words). It is one of those ridiculous «half greatest hits, half rarities» things that make fans and novices alike overpay and overcringe; all the more ridicu­lous coming from Al Kooper, the man whose last significant batch of «novices» was probably acquired the week that Child Is Father To The Man reached its chart peak at No. 47.

 

In addition, the second («well done») CD is odd as hell even for old fans' sakes: for instance, Al has insisted on cramming the entire seven minutes of 'Albert's Shuffle' and eleven minutes of 'Sea­son Of The Witch' from Supersession on it — yeah, these are fine jams all right, certainly well done and all, but coming at the expense of so much other great stuff (the resulting «retro­spective» pretty much stops dead in its tracks around 1971), the choice reeks too much of unpre­dictability for unpredictability's sake. For the Beatles to have a «Millennium Collection» that drops three or four textbook hits in favor of 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)', would be refreshingly cool; for Al Kooper, whose popularity does not even begin to approach Ringo Starr's solo career, it is unpleasantly haughty (but I still love the guy).

 

Now on to the real meat: the nineteen rarities on CD 1. There is one big catch here. On one hand, Al Kooper does not generally write or perform crappy filler, and most of this vault stuff could make fine, worthy additions to any of his classic albums. However, much of it is in the form of «fully-arranged demos», meaning synthesizers and programmed drums in the place of real com­petent musicians, and vocals that seem processed through a test tube. As soulful, sincere, and me­morable as 'I Can't Stand The Rain' and 'Living In My Own Religion' can be, I just cannot recom­mend them to anybody but the most hardcore fan — not until Mr. Kooper decides to re-record them with a normal band. Sorry, Mr. Al.

 

A few of the choices are, admittedly, just plain bad, and the worst one is chosen as the opening track — a 2001 remake of 'I Can't Quit Her' as a slow, draggy adult contemporary ballad, throw­ing out everything that was so great about the song's melody in the first place. There is also a bit of cheesy «senti-pop» ('The Earthquake Of Your Love' is like a collaboration between Neil Young, Billy Joel, and disco-era Bee Gees), a stupidly pathetic arena-rock theme with Titanic Gui­tar Solos™ ('Bulgarya') and an instrumental number that sounds like generic Eighties prog rock ('The Big Chase') — yuck.

 

On the positive side, the long stretch from track 11 to track 15 is almost worth the price of the en­tire package on its own. First, in a fantastically unpredictable manner, there is a cover of XTC's (!) 'Making Plans For Nigel' from Drums & Wires (!!), rearranged as a carnivalesque extravaganza with hopping violins and, the way it seems, accordeon-imitating keyboards (!!!). It is bizarre on its own and even more bizarre compared with the original, but, if possible, even catchier. Then there's a terrific take on Ray Charles' 'I Believe To My Soul' (from 1970, with Mick Taylor on guitar and Al at his deadliest) and a raving hard-rock/power-pop, whichever way you like it, re­invention of Dylan's formerly quiet and introspective 'Went To See The Gypsy'.

 

Then the next track is, again, spoiled by crappy arrangement, but it is fairly hard to forget a song whose chorus goes "Oh I just can't believe you left me on Rachmaninoff's birthday" (which, as a matter of fact, also happens to be April Fools' Day). And finally, the universally acknowledged highlight of the program is a 1969 big band instrumental arrangement of 'Hey Jude' — no, not the coda, but the song itself, in a fun, stompy, stormy manner that Benny Goodman himself might have envied.

 

In the end, such positives outweigh the negatives, making the collection a must-have for all those who have admitted Al into the circle of their personal greats, and justifying its thumbs up; and yet, at the same time, coupled with the general deterioration of the Al Kooper Sound on his 21st century albums, it makes me wonder a little bit whether the man hasn't really gone deaf in one ear or something. Then again, I guess when you hit sixty, it is natural of you to cut your own legacy more slack than you used to — or, in a more philosophical manner, it is easier to perceive the little specks of beauty in what you previously saw as monolithic turds.

  

 

 

AL STEWART

BEDSITTER IMAGES (1967)

 

1) Bedsitter Images; 2) Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres; 3) The Carmichaels; 4) Scandinavian Girl; 5) Pretty Gold Hair; 6) Denise At 16; 7) Samuel, Oh How You've Changed!; 8) Cleave To Me; 9) A Long Way Down From Stephanie; 10) Ivich; 11) Beleeka Doo­dle Day.

 

Alastair Ian Stewart narrowly missed the chance to become the leading voice in fantasy folk; his first single, released for Decca in 1966, was called 'The Elf' and is frequently quoted as one of the first, if not the very first, Tolkien-inspired song to get a commercial release. The song is fairly cute, but either Stewart was afraid of losing the field to Marc Bolan in the long run, or he simply percei­ved the silliness of it all, or perhaps he got ridiculed by either Dylan or Simon, the former of whom he revered and the latter was good friends with.

 

Whatever the reason, in 1967 he rebooted his career, signed up with CBS, and put up his own mo­dest claim, one that is at once completely transparent and yet, rather hard to put an untremb­ling finger on. Much of Bedsitter Images sounds like it belongs on Nuggets II — pop-style Brit-folk with a slight mystical-magical tinge — but we are most certainly not in the realm of the three minute single, even though only a few tunes violate that rule technically. Dissecting Bedsitter Images into the sum of its influences is useful, and defining it as an album that could only appear in 1967 is insightful, yet it has its own voice, too, and, although Stewart was still way far from being recognized as a solitary force in pop music, this is also an album that could only have been recorded by the likes of Al Stewart.

 

Since Stewart came from the folk scene, echoes of Dylan were unavoidable, but they are mostly felt in the decision to push ahead with a few long songs (most notably, the grand seven minutes of 'Beleeka Doodle Day'), and in the lyrical influence, although it should be noted that Stewart never followed Dylan in his beat escapades and weirdass linguistic experiments; clearly, it is the early acoustic Dylan, not yet free from the clutches of romanticism, that serves as Al's beacon.

 

Paul Si­mon, with whom Al had even shared living space a little while back, is also a large pre­sence, and almost directly responsible, I think, for the youthful enchanted prance of the title track, which is like a slightly more serious and responsible brother to 'The 59th Street Bridge Song' (al­though the steady, monotonous fall of the verse lyrics is more Dylan than Simon). On the other hand, both Simon and Stewart owe a common debt to the folkie scene in general — the age-ho­noured traditional melody elements, the gallantry/chivalry touch for the love songs, the general in­telligence and culture stamp on the singing voice etc.

 

But occasionally, Stewart also goes beyond that in trying to merge those medieval influences with the relevant Brit-poppiness of the day, and so it should be no surprise that right after 'Swiss Cottage Manoeu­vres', which is both lyrically and melodically reminiscent of Dylan's '4th Time Around', we segue into 'The Carmichaels', thematically much more of a Ray Davies song (and, coincidentally, with its subject matter of a bored cheating housewife, also presages 'Mrs. Ro­binson'). Here, he shows that he can be mean and sardonic, too, behind that innocent stare.

 

But not for long, of course. Overall, Bedsitter Images is hopelessly lost in romance, whether it be old-fashioned, theatrical romance ("Maid, truly I see now, it must be a long way down, and with love's burnt shore must all dalliance hither crumble and wither" — Sir Thomas Malory, eat your heart out!), or some typically Sixties' attempt at finding radically new ways of searching for the same old meaning of life ('Scandinavian Girl'). And, like a true folkie pro, he does not neglect the duty of showcasing his guitar playing skills, with two non-outstanding, but quite pretty instru­mentals ('Denise At 16', 'Ivich').

 

Now comes the odd part. Most people, including Stewart himself, have always thought that CBS pretty much ruined the record by drowning out Al's introspective sound with Alexander Faris' or­chestral ar­rangements. I disagree. Obviously, they were merely trying to follow the latest trend, the one stating that pop artists performing in romantic genres go down well with symphonic treat­ment (see the Moody Blues' Days Of Future Past for further examples), but most of the arrange­ments are in very good taste, and never really distract from the essence of the songs. It is not just a bunch of syrupy strings tacked on as an afterthought — strings, pianos, horns, flutes, chimes, harps, Al really got the works here, and no two arrangements really sound the same.

 

For instance, 'Samuel, Oh How You've Changed!' is not very original as far as such melodies go, and it is up to the cute harp plucking to push it up in the beauty department. The military fanfares add a whole new dimension to 'Swedish Cottage Manoeuvres'. And the piano arpeggios, rising hi­gher and higher all through the duration of the chorus of 'Bedsitter Images', are just about the best aspect of that song as a whole — a magnificent melodic touch which turns the song from a com­petent exercise in Simon-izing into something of near-epic proportions. Plus, it is all handled quite intelligently; the album's magnum opus, 'Beleeka Doodle Day', does not get any orchestral ba­cking, just acoustic guitars and a morose organ laying down a wintery pattern in the back­ground, because strings would not have added anything significant to this kind of sound.

 

The album is truly flawless. It simply does not aspire to all that much — like most of Al's records, its ambitions are limited, and it prefers to capitalize on breakthroughs made by other people ra­ther than try its own. It is also way «fluffier» than his subsequent efforts, but there is nothing wrong with having too many stars in your eyes if you generate them yourself instead of buying them wholesale like mass-produced contact lenses. Intelligent lyrics, beautiful voice, competent guitar playing, inventive arrangements — a classic example of «Snubbed First Effort», to be dus­ted off and reappraised once Father Time readjusts the necessary balance.

 

LOVE CHRONICLES (1969)

 

1) In Brooklyn; 2) Old Compton Street Blues; 3) The Ballad Of Mary Foster; 4) Life And Life Only; 5) You Should Have Lis­ten­ed To Al; 6) Love Chronicles.

 

No more orchestration — all the young folkies are made happy, now that the corporate wall of Mantovani strings no longer separates them from the Bare Truth. But the real good news is that, despite writing songs with strictly traditional, «rootsy» structures, Stewart always understood the power of exciting arrangements. After all, a bunch of long, repetitive songs with predictable vocal melo­dies and simple rhythmic backing satisfies no one but the staunchest fanatic. And from the very start, Stewart had an uncanny talent for attracting the best of the best to help him out.

 

On Love Chronicles, Al is assisted by no less than Ashley Hutchins, Simon Nicol, and Richard Thompson of Fairport Convention (all sporting various pseudonyms, most likely to avoid breach of contract), and, on the lengthy title track, by Jimmy Page himself, freshly free from Yardbirds duties but not yet having embarked on the Zep crusade. The formula works most of the time: Ste­wart starts off with a lengthy piece of narrative, sets it to an unpretentious, time-honoured chord progression, and then lets his pals roam all over it, adding plenty of (probably improvised) guitar flourishes in between his vocal lines, but never ever going off into solo territory.

 

From a formalistic point of view, all of this is a terrific potential recipé for boredom. But the com­bination of Stewart's intellectual charisma and the fresh talents of some of Britain's finest players generally overrides the boredom factor, at least on Side A of the album where the only song that significantly outlasts its usefulness is 'The Ballad Of Mary Foster', an eight-minute la­ment on the sad fate of a British housewife. For some strange reason, it is exactly this behemoth of a tune that Al had deemed unsuitable for any additional electric flourishes, and there are only two ways one can come to terms with that — either Al's very voice acts like an orgasmatron (not in my case, but I can understand how it could), or you can try to bring yourself to feel fairly deep­ly about Mary Foster, hard as it is to have deep feelings about such «stock characters». The song does have a certain novelty value in that it is divided into two «acts», giving us first an outside glimpse of the Fosters' family life, and then taking us inside as Stewart begins to impersonate the protagonist herself. But the novelty value wears off after a while.

 

Of course, 'The Ballad Of Mary Foster' is nothing compared to the famous excesses of 'Love Chronicles' themselves — eighteen minutes of musical-lyrical dialogue between Stewart and Pa­ge, as the former provides a detailed, if not necessarily sincere, account of the story of his love life from kindergarten to adulthood, and the latter attempts to project its various stages onto an improvised set of in-between lines mini-solos. The song's main claim to fame is not even the length (after 'Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands', nothing of the sort could be surprising to the ge­neral public); it is the first documented use of the F-word in a pop composition, and something tells me that, perhaps, the very idea of recording an eighteen-minute long song was intended by Al to be a ruse so that he could sneak the F-word in surreptitiously somewhere close to the end, in the hope that none of the record executives would have enough patience to hear it.

 

A great, promising idea, but, alas, it did not work; the executives did hear the word, and, conse­quently, the album's release was delayed by a year at least, as Al battled it out with the censors. And, of course, kudos to him for not having given in, especially since this is one rare case where the F-word really makes sense, in the context of the phrase "...it grew to be less like fucking and more like making love". But, even though it all makes for a great historical anecdote and a pivo­tal precedent, it hardly saves the song from a «mere curio» status. As much as we all respect Jimmy Page, he, too, eventually runs out of ideas, and somewhere around the ninth or tenth minute it all goes away except for the never-ending monolog. To be fair, it is a good monolog, very much of its time and owing much more to the hip European prose, poetry, and movie scene of the Sixties than to folk balladeering, but tolerable — but certainly not for repeated listenings.

 

So I would say that it is the shorter songs on Side A that make up the real meat of this record. 'In Brooklyn', a funny remembrance of one of Al's love encounters on the other side of the Atlantic, pretty much says in four minutes the exact same things that 'Love Chronicles' said in eighteen, and Thompson's and Nicol's electric guitar «weaving» is every bit as inspiring as Page's. 'Old Compton Street Blues' and 'Life And Life Only' share a slow stately beauty, particularly the latter in its cruel dissection of bourgeois family life, symbolized by a deep, desperate electric wail that renders it far superior to 'Mary Foster'. And, although slight by comparison, 'You Should Have Listened To Al' is one of the best tributes to the classic Byrds sound on this planet — especially opportune to come at the moment when the Byrds all but ceased to produce that classic sound.

 

The biggest difference, however, is not the length of the songs, or even the switch from orchest­ration to electric guitar backing; it is the generally more «down-to-earth» attitude, as Stewart mo­ves ever further away from the mannered medievalisms of Bedsitter Images and closer — some would say, dangerously closer — to the equally popular territory of socially-oriented Brit-pop subjects. Half of these songs, true to the album's title, tell us about Al's love life (which was, if we are to believe all this tripe, almost comparable to Gene Simmons'), and the other half is about bro­ken dreams and wasted lives of the middle class (or the lower class, for that matter, as in the prostitute tale of 'Compton Street Blues').

 

The stinging question is: can he do it better than, for example, Ray Davies? The obvious answer is: there is no need to compare the two if the purpose is to award first prize, because, roughly speaking, Ray sets average lyrics to colossal melodies, where­as Al clearly places more emphasis on the words — which, however, does not mean that Ray's lyrics and Al's melodies/arrangements do not matter, because they do; it's all a matter of accents, and both are quite meritorious in their own ways.

 

Despite the obvious shortcomings of the album — at least, from today's point of view — its gains over Bedsitter Images are as significant as its losses, which guarantees a thumbs up; but I will not argue with the commonly held opinion that, what some could see as eighteen minutes of spi­ritual revelation back in 1969, has mutated into eighteen minutes of wasted time forty years la­ter (actually, much earlier than that), and that Al still had a certain way to go to learn the true mea­ning of the word «timeless».

 

ZERO SHE FLIES (1970)

 

1) My Enemies Have Sweet Voices; 2) A Small Fruit Song; 3) Gethsemane, Again; 4) Burbling; 5) Electric Los Angeles Sunset; 6) Manuscript; 7) Black Hill; 8) Anna; 9) Room Of Roots; 10) Zero She Flies.

 

Not as much star presence this time around; the biggest names are arguably Louis Cennamo on bass (of Renaissance, Illusion, and Armageddon fame, if the word «fame» is applicable to these fairy tale bands at all), and Gerry Conway on drums (Fotheringay, Cat Stevens, Steeleye Span... get the picture?). But this is not a big problem, since Stewart has temporarily settled upon a for­mula that does not necessarily require such presence.

 

Cutting down on the excesses of Love Chronicles, he seems, for now, content to stick to two re­cipés: (a) instrumental or near-instrumental folk ditties with huge emphasis on his own acoustic playing; (b) short- or medium-sized folk-pop songs with decent, but never overwhelming, levels of catchiness and intelligence. In other words, nothing new, but the overall feeling of balance and self-assuredness is higher on Zero than both on Bedsitter Images, with its lack of a perfect sense of direction and contamination by outsider ideas (not that I ever complained), and on Chronicles, with its overloaded aura of pretense.

 

First, the instrumentals are excellent. If you are a fan of Led Zeppelin's 'Black Mountain Side' and similar things, Zero She Flies will be a solid source of pleasure, a tight package of beauty for all lovers of tricky acoustic soundscapes. I am not entirely sure of who is playing what — most of these compositions have at least two guitars weaving it out — but, obviously, it does not really matter as long as the melody takes you to the appropriate enchanted forest.

 

Second, the songs, no longer subjugated to Al's sudden fondness for Jean-Jacques Rousseau-style sexual confession, are no slouches either. He returns to the «anything goes» ideology of Bed­sit­ter Images: we have meaningless, but cool-sounding neo-hip punboxes with lyrics by outsiders ('My Enemies Have Sweet Voices'), not too cheap and not too expensive swipes at organized re­ligion ('Gethsemane, Again'), socially conscious anthems ('Electric Los Angeles Sunset', which must have served as an inspiration to the Stones' 'Heartbreaker' three years later), bizarre romance in which compliments are hard to distinguish from insults (title track), and solemn reminiscences of days long gone by in which the heroes of both World War II and World War I are named ex­plicitly ('Manuscript'). The latter track, in particular, must have struck such a strong chord in Al's heart that he's been playing the local history buff ever since. But this is where it started.

 

None of this is too complex, and none of it sacrifices catchiness in the chorus for the sake of put­ting on an elitist air. 'My Enemies Have Sweet Voices' does feature some pretty elaborate puns (as distasteful as the practice is considered these days, wordplay like "I was jumping to conclu­si­ons, and one of them jumped back" is impressive and — who knows? — perhaps not even devoid of a certain sense), but its main attraction lies in the jagged staccato playing and its dialog with the woozly-bamboozly harmonica. 'Los Angeles Sunset' is a little silly and lazy (surely the dis­tinguished scholar could have come up with a better chorus line than 'Hmmm, mmmm, hmmm, Electric Los Angeles sunset...'?), but it sounds unnaturally rough and stern in the context of the album. And the title track is a darn good merger of roots-rock with psychedelia, inspiring without being overbearing.

 

All of this means another thumbs up, no matter how obvious it may be that here is an artist who has not yet firmly settled into his saddle of choice. The brain department politely reminds that all of the things you hear on this record had already been done better by other individuals of the late Sixties' generation; but why should we take it out on poor Al Stewart, whose only fault lies in get­ting there a tad later than the rest of the crew? "My enemies have sweet voices", he sings about this nuisance, "their tones are soft and kind — when I hear, my heart rejoices, I do not seem to mind". Neither do I, while hearing Zero She Flies.

 

ORANGE (1972)

 

1) You Don't Even Know Me; 2) Amsterdam; 3) Songs Out Of Clay; 4) The News From Spain; 5) I Don't Believe You; 6) Once An Orange, Always An Orange; 7) I'm Falling; 8) Night Of The 4th Of May.

 

Every generalization you can make for Orange holds equally well for Zero She Flies, so let us keep this short. Key changes in personnel include a traveling Rick Wakeman — the maestro plays his perfect piano throughout, usually to good effect, as on 'The News From Spain', whose last few minutes he transforms into progressive grandiosity — and a here-to-stay Tim Renwick, whose solid, if not exactly individualistic, guitar style would go on to become a humble trade­mark of the Al Stewart style.

 

As usual, all of the songs are at least good, and some are downright great (the album is sometimes written off as «transitional», more proof that transitions are generally cooler than settled formu­lae). With all of the musical styles spelt out so clearly and all of the lyrical motives so thinly vei­led, it is tempting to label them as tightly connected pairs of a coherent array. Thus, 'You Don't Even Know Me' = «cheerful bouncy Brit-pop» + «memories of a turmoiled love affair»; 'Amster­dam' = «light rootsy boogie à la Flying Burrito Bros.» + «memories of (guess what) Amsterdam»; 'Songs Out Of Clay' = «stern folk ballad» + «lots of metaphors about searching for the meaning of life»; 'I'm Falling' = «intelligent multi-layered folk-rock anthem à la Nick Drake» + «desperate yearning for romance from someone who clearly misses it quite a bit», etc.

 

Throw in an obligato­ry instrumental that wobbles somewhere in between jig and menuet ('Once An Orange...') and a convincing, if not wholly necessary, Dylan cover ('I Don't Believe You', whose lyrics fit in per­fectly with the rest of the album, showing just how much of an influence Bob really was), and the picture of yet another successful, but not breathtaking, record is comp­lete. With the sprawling 'News From Spain' and 'Night Of The 4th Of May', both of them conti­nuing Stewart's series of semi-confessional, semi-show-off-like songs, he may have hoped for a stronger effect, but neither had hit potential, nor can they really qualify as stunning art-rock crea­tions of the era — in order to become anything like that, Stewart would have to learn to let go of his intelligent humility and add more flash, much more than letting Wakeman roam freely over the keyboards in the coda to 'News From Spain' (as wondrous as that roaming is — one of the most inspiring instrumental moments in Al's entire catalog).

 

Not that the lack of flash has any importance; by 1972, it was fairly clear that Al would be for­ever content with playing it low-key, his audience mainly confined to that particular sector of col­lege-goers who like their art «clever» and «humble», but get easily bored with lonely acoustic guitars or ten-minute saxophone solos — a pretty small sector indeed, but for those kinds of peo­ple, Orange should be as close to perfection as it can possibly get. Like everything else, it has aged pretty well, and somehow Al has this talent of befriending the listener over and over again with each new record; thumbs up, no doubts about it.

 

PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE (1973)

 

1) Old Admirals; 2) Warren Harding; 3) Soho (Needless To Say); 4) The Last Day Of June 1934; 5) Post World War Two Blues; 6) Roads To Moscow; 7) Terminal Eyes; 8) Nostradamus.

 

He certainly had it coming, even if no particular Nostradamus could precisely predict when it would actually happen: a massive concept album about History. The canvas had some flaws, in the form of several acutely ahistorical songs hanging around ('Soho' and 'Terminal Eyes'), which is why the copout is to pretend it's all about weaving the different ages of humanity together with its state of today and its distant prospects, but this is where it does not work. Clearly, Al just wan­ted to intelligently justify the co-existence of his old habit of writing introspective songs for lo­ners with the new habit of setting history textbooks to music, and the album title is a transparent deception that might formally clear him in court, but fail to make him invulnerable. Fortunately for him, no one really gives a damn.

 

Now when Al writes about history, he never hides behind allusions or allegories — you may be sure that if he sings about an old admiral lamenting his uselessness in the years of the Great War, or about a Russian soldier interned in a Siberian camp upon being freed from German captivity, or about President Harding's last and fatal journey to Alaska, that is exactly what he is singing about. For many admirers of Stewart's talent, this may seem boring, because Stewart is too esote­ric and obscure a performer to function as proper edutainment, and most people will usually be quite familiar with at least the protagonists and general settings of his little historical landscapes, if not necessarily with all the details. (Although if there is at least one person in the world who, upon hearing this record, will want to learn more about General Guderian, Lord Mountbatten, Ernst Röhm, or about how to pinpoint Smolensk or the Suez Canal on the map, Al may well con­sider his mission to humanity accomplished).

 

Nevertheless, as simple and unflinching as these lyrics are, they are decent; not much use as poe­try, but working well in conjunction with the music, not to mention quite well informed (well, there is nothing, really, in 'Roads To Moscow' that cannot be found in a standard beginner-level textbook on World War II in Russia, but just how many so-called «artists» bother to check their facts with even beginner-le­vel textbooks anyway?).

 

Surprisingly, it is the lengthy epic numbers that take the cake. 'Old Admirals' gets the properly stately, solemn backing you'd expect from a song about an old war hero — great use of the synthesizer on the closing bars of each chorus, and masterful slow buildup of keyboard, guitar, and orchestration layers. 'Roads To Moscow' has no Russian influences whatever in its music, and this is good: the man would have certainly failed had he tried to go for balalaikas and accor­deons and folk choruses — instead, when he sings "I'll never know, I'll never know why I was taken from the line and all the others / To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of holy Russia", I cannot help but picture a starry-eyed Al Stewart in person, for some reason fin­ding himself in the position of defending the outskirts of Moscow first and then later conveyed into the realm of the GULAG. Not the effect he hoped for himself, I suppose, but Fortune works in mysterious ways.

 

Most of the seriousness and solemnity was, however, saved for the last track, as 'Nostradamus' takes you on a ten-minute journey through Stewart's interpretations of the prophecies (this is the one time when he clearly fiddles with the sources, but then it is hard to resist fiddling with a guy like Michel if you are into him in the first place) set mostly to acoustic strumming heavily laden with echo and other effects (the instrumental section does not even bother to add much of any­thing else except for a phasing gimmick). Obviously, ten minutes is overkill, but the melody is catchy, and the general idea rather effective — at the very least, it is nowhere near as tedious as Al's sexual autobiography on 'Love Chronicles'.

 

Among the shorter songs, only 'Soho (Needless To Say)' has emerged as a minor classic (enough, at least, to go on to be played live for quite a long time), but I am a bigger fan of the hilarious folk-rocker 'Post World War Two Blues', which not only manages to set an infamous dialogue between Churchill and Mountbatten to a catchy, toe-tappy traditional melody, but is also — ar­guably? — the first song in history to properly ask the question "Which way did the Sixties go?", guaranteeing Al the title of The Honorable Mother Of All Retro-Mopers (including yours truly). And let us not forget 'Terminal Eyes', one of Al's most convincing and elegant creations in the «psychedelic Brit-pop» style of Nuggets II.

 

For the record, the LP, like its predecessor Orange, was produced by notable art-rock producer John Anthony (of Van der Graaf Generator, Genesis, and Queen fame); some fans and critics hold the opinion that Stewart never truly hit his stride until he finally teamed up with Alan Par­sons, but I beg to differ — Anthony's grand, imposing style of production may be less calculated than that of the mathematical genius behind Dark Side Of The Moon, but all the arrangements are done in great taste, and not for a single second does the record reveal the piss-stained side of the Seventies to the listener. A mildly intelligent, moderately heartfelt thumbs up (i. e. not the kind of album that begs you to jump for joy, but then Al is hardly the jumping kind, more like the squatting one).

 

MODERN TIMES (1975)

 

1) Carol; 2) Sirens Of Titan; 3) What's Going On?; 4) Not The One; 5) Next Time; 6) Apple Cider Re-Constitution; 7) The Dark And The Rolling Sea; 8) Modern Times.

 

Al Stewart could never take the place of Roger Waters. He lacks the prerequisite acid of evil, and he is too courteous to want to wash the listener with gallons of musically-processed bile. But eve­ry now and then, the need arises to consume some «Pink Floyd Lite» — music that would carry similar messages of fear, sadness, melancholia, betrayal, madness, etc., but without the overdri­ven intensity and spookiness of the classic Floyd sound. And since, deep down inside, Stewart's artistic and intellectual essence is not at all different from Waters', what a better way to get that «Pink Floyd Lite» sound than combining Al's usual schtick with Pink Floyd's lead engineer?

 

The coming of Alan Parsons on board means that things are going to get a bit denser and darker, and somewhat alarmingly in touch with what may loosely be termed as «the second wave of Se­venties' prog» — such bands as the Alan Parsons Project itself, for which the formal trappings and complexities frequently overshadowed the inadequate shallowness (or pompous absurdity) of content. But since at the heart of it all we still find Stewart's relatively simple, honest, clever, and essen­tially friendly folk rock, there is no need to worry. Modern Times may have survived with­out Parsons' production — in fact, I wouldn't say that Modern Times desperately need Parsons' production — but the man definitely adds an extra dimension to Al's sound that doesn't spoil any­thing; on the contrary, it sort of justifies the release of yet another album, even if the songs never tell us anything about Stewart that we didn't already know.

 

In fact, I do not have a good explanation for the fact that the album shot up to No. 30 on the Bill­board charts — up more than a hundred positions from the previous LP. We can hardly blame it on the Alan Parsons association: as solid as he made a name for himself with the engineering of Dark Side, people don't usually scoop up new albums because of their producers. Obviously, all the songs are good, and there are no pushing-it experiments like 'Roads To Moscow' or 'Nostra­damus' that can kill off a good idea midway through, but, the way I see it, this is just another col­lection of Stewart's usual caliber: repetitive folk-rockers and «folk-poppers» each of which con­tains a touching hook or two but each of which is also overlong and only saved by the fact that, like Dylan, he can come up with plenty of interesting lyrics to keep it up.

 

Nicest of the bunch are the fast ones — 'Carol' and 'Apple Cider Re-Constitution' — not just be­cause they have the toe-tappin' factor in their favor, but also because they are the best suited ones to Tim Renwick's fast, fluent and emotional playing style, even though the atmospheres are com­pletely different: moody and bitter on 'Carol', with Al sharpening his teeth on yet another female victim, sunny and romantic on 'Apple Cider', where the odd psychedelic lyrics do not suggest much in terms of finding a way out of this place ("You know London can make your brain stall") but the music is definitely escapist to the n-th degree.

 

The magnum opus, however, is the lumbering title track, on which Parsons unleashes all of his potential to create a kind of musical crescendo that echoes the best successes of Yes in the prog-rock genre, adding layer upon layer of guitars, keyboards, brass, and orchestration to elevate this initially humble tune about sharing a glass with an old friend to epic heights. Al himself hardly exists on the song's last two minutes at all, but he is definitely out there for the first six, and so the song reads like a dialog between Stewart, lazily melancholizing about the world that we have lost, and Parsons, who translates his melancholy into grand musical vision much the same way he would «translate» Edgar Allan Poe on his own album one year later.

 

Curiously, Modern Times lives up to its name in that none of the songs deal with historical sub­jects: perhaps Stewart thought that, for the time being, he'd exorcised his inner history demon and that it was time to deal with more actual matters. But he still deals with them in the same old fa­shioned ways, appealing primarily to old fashioned audiences, which is why the com­mercial suc­cess of the album is so puzzling in such a totally mid-Seventies manner. Is Modern Times really a giant step forward, as we sometimes read in musical guides? I don't believe so; the musical gui­des have simply been misled by too much chart statistics analysis. Is it yet another first-rate Al Stewart album? Unequivocally so; thumbs up.

 

YEAR OF THE CAT (1976)

 

1) Lord Grenville; 2) On The Border; 3) Midas Shadow; 4) Sand In Your Shoes; 5) If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It; 6) Fly­ing Sorcery; 7) Broadway Hotel; 8) One Stage Before; 9) Year Of The Cat.

 

By popular consensus, Year Of The Cat is not just the best Al Stewart album ever; it is, inas­much as we know, the only Al Stewart album, period. The man may have baked LPs like pan­cakes, both before and after, but no matter — popular conscience has logged 1976 as the Al Ste­wart year, and popular conscience is a bitch when it comes to dissenting opinions. The rest of the time, popular conscience tells us, was spent in the basement.

 

There is one nagging problem with this: frankly speaking, Year Of The Cat may be a master­piece and all that, but it is not really an Al Stewart album. It is Al Stewart providing his services of resident singer-songwriter to Alan Parsons, the true musical wizard behind this sound. Hardly a coincidence that Year Of The Cat was released about two months later than Parsons' own de­but (Tales Of Mystery And Imagination): by now, Alan had his own approach to art-rock fully fleshed out, and he was perfectly happy to impose it upon a good friend as well.

 

Not that there's any need to complain, mind you. Stewart's own musical palette was staying firm­ly the same: these here songs, even including the big fat hit single of the title track, are no better and no worse than his usual quality. So it was only natural for Parsons to try and see what he could do to make the material, based on the exact same folk rock chord progressions, sound not just up-to-date, but diverse and involving as well. The recipe is simple: cook it all up in the thick, echoey, mystically-pretentious overproduction of mid-Seventies art-rock.

 

As 'Lord Grenville' opens the proceedings, no holds are barred: big drums, rippling acoustic gui­tars, grim keyboards, and Spanish-tinged electric lead lines welcome you on the first bars, and the strings are not lagging far behind. And if you think that this sea of sound, in which Stewart him­self is merely a Robinson Crusoe latching onto a piece of timber, is perfectly suitable for the ope­ning number, be forewarned that it is going to be raging on every song on the album. («Raging», of course, is not the right word when you are dealing with a tin-can Alan Parsons production: eve­rything is raging only inasmuch as it is permitted to range by the Man In Control).

 

Those who hate the likes of Alan Parsons, thinking that the man represents everything that was rotten about «serious pop music» in the Seventies, should steer clear. But I, for one, cannot deny neither his imagination and creativity nor his ear for melody, and, when all is said and done, 'Lord Grenville' is a great cohesive work of art — if anything, listen to how marvelously the strings at the end of the song imitate the crashing of waves on the shore! Without his flourishes, the tune would be just another nice Al Stewart song; together, they molded it into a progressive epic that sounds extremely dated and completely fresh at the same time.

 

It is not hard to understand the immense popularity of the title track, either. Stewart happened to write a set of mysterious lyrics about a mysterious woman, with Humphrey Bogart references and a whole lot of appeal to all those looking for the meaning of life in extravagant romance. Parsons got the idea, and gave the song a perfectly radio-ready arrangement that had it all: head-bobbing rhythmics, acoustic guitar, electric guitar and lounge sax solos, and a combination of melancholia and elevated inspiration that grabbed everyone wanting to be grabbed. Is it really Stewart's «mas­terpiece»? I would never have thought that on my own. But that it was the perfect song to capture the minds of its generation on a summer day in 1976 — no question about that.

 

The rest of the album, sandwiched in between these two highlights, is generally of the same qua­lity, and occasionally suffers from monotonousness. I was quite happy to discover 'Sand In Your Shoes' and 'If It Doesn't Come Naturally' as two sunnier-than-the-rest Dylanesque inclusions, par­ticularly the former with its wintery Blonde On Blonde overtones and one of the most memorab­le chorus lines on the record — "and it's goodbye to my lady on the island...". But the other songs, be they the second big hit single 'On The Border', or 'Broadway Hotel' with its gypsy violin, or 'Midas Shadow' with its somnambulant electric piano, get sort of glued together in a never-ending celebration of the wedding between the modernistically morose and the canonically beautiful.

 

Do not make the mistake of equating Al Stewart with Year Of The Cat, even if it may still be the only record of his within easy reach of the bargain bins. To understand the man better, one would need to experience him outside the state of symbiosis with Parsons. But it is also true that that symbiosis never worked better than on the best songs on Year Of The Cat, and that the longer the title track will be followed by its army of sympathizers, the more hopes there are humanity will last a little longer. Could you love 'Year Of The Cat' and still be able to detonate a nuclear missile? Weird question, but, for some reason, it just popped into my head out of nowhere. Yes, and a big thumbs up both for the intelligent craftsmanship and for the good songs.

 

TIME PASSAGES (1978)

 

1) Time Passages; 2) Valentina Way; 3) Life In Dark Water; 4) A Man For All Seasons; 5) Almost Lucy; 6) Palace Of Versailles; 7) Timeless Skies; 8) Song On The Radio; 9) End Of The Day.

 

Before I start, here is a short message from a valued Internet partner of mine.

 

«Greetings from Amazon! We have recommendations for you. Viewing Al Stewart's Time Pas­sages? Frequently bought together with Year Of The Cat and Past, Present And Future — add all three to Cart! (No, we do not offer a discount; would not that be too predictable for a respec­table on-line service?) Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought: Year Of The Cat — Al Stewart; Past, Present And Future — Al Stewart; Modern Times — Al Stewart; Sparks Of Ancient Light — Al Stewart; 24 Carrots — Al Stewart; and whatever other Al Stewart is avai­lable as a mega-expensive import from the Land of the Rising Sun, the only country that is al­ways willing to pander to men of exquisite tastes as long as they are ready to sacrifice food, gas, and lodging to permanent spiritual growth.

 

What? Not «Dumbass All-Consuming Customer»? Signing out and logging in with your regular name? All right, Mr. Smartypants, here is some updated information for you. Still viewing Al Stewart's Time Passages? WHY???... Mind you, it is actually frequently bought together with Tales Of Mystery And Imagination and I Robot! Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought: Pyramid — The Alan Parsons Project; Eve — The Alan Parsons Project; Turn Of A Friendly Card — The Alan Parsons Project; and then, all down the line. Only one customer had the nerve to buy Breakfast In America — Supertramp, but we wiped out his bank account as a restricting measure, so hopefully he'll never try that one again.»

 

Now, back to the review. I would be lying through my teeth if I said that Al Stewart was all but strangled on this album. He is, after all, writing songs, lyrics included, and singing them. He is returning to his world of allegories, with, at the very least, Thomas More and heroes of the French Revolution roaming through the tracks to refresh your memories of history classes. But it is also true that, by this point, Parsons, now an established rock star in his own rights, probably viewed all of the records that he was still producing as his own private domain; consequently, he produces everything as if Al Stewart were not Al Stewart at all, but rather Eric Woolfson, his sin­ging and playing partner in The Project. As a result, Time Passages is, basically, an Alan Parsons record with special guest star Al Stewart invited to tell us about Thomas More.

 

At least two of the songs, 'Life In Dark Water' and 'Palace Of Versailles', with their grim, depres­sing synthesizer depths / heights, sound as if they come straight from Pyramid. If you hate gene­ric «soft-prog» of the mid-Seventies, that one style that was dumbed down even further in the next decade, becoming «adult contemporary», better program them right out at the very begin­ning. Personally, I think that 'Dark Water', with its spooky tale of submarine life, is atmospheri­cally successful, whereas 'Versailles' is too languid and boring to match its exciting lyrical subject, but these opinions could be turned round any day, for all I know.

 

The other tunes are a bit sunnier and cheerier, and the more the sun shines in on the music, the more we see of Al and the less of Alan. 'Valentina Way' is a solid, and surprisingly fast, pop-ro­cker with great melodic work from Renwick; 'Timeless Skies' is the only chance we get to enjoy the old folkie acoustic style; and both the title track and 'Song On The Radio' are two conscious attempts to pick off from where 'Year Of The Cat' left us yearning for more — big brawny an­thems with strings, synths, and saxes battling it out on your radio. Perfect cruising material for 1978, and still going strong.

 

But don't take this «more of Al, less for Alan» for a retracting of my earlier words: major or mi­or key, all of this is uniformly overproduced, overglossed, and poli­shed to near-ugly perfection. The best solution is try and not pay any attention to the production at all, but concentrate on the basic melody. I am not a Parsons-hater (in fact, I have lots of respect for The Project in its classic form), yet the best thing about Time Passages is still Stewart's persona whenever it emerges, plus Tim Renwick's guitar playing whenever it is he that gets the chance to solo and not any of the key­board or sax players. Most of the songs are still reasonably well written; unfortunately, Parsons seems to have spoiled Stewart into thinking that arrangement and production matter at least as much as the melody, if not more, and, furthermore, resulted in turning him into a heavy Parsons addict. Just one listen to his next record is sufficient to see how disastrous that addiction turned out eventually. Thumbs up through clenched teeth — and seriously not recommended for any­one with a significant alergy to typical 1970s production values.

 

24 CARROTS (1980)

 

1) Running Man; 2) Midnight Rocks; 3) Constantinople; 4) Merlin's Time; 5) Mondo Sinistro; 6) Murmansk Run/Ellis Island; 7) Rocks In The Ocean; 8) Paint By Numbers; 9) Optical Illusion.

 

How hard is it to produce an Alan Parsons album if you are only Al Stewart, and the real Alan Parsons is no longer there to assist you in sacrificing to that dangerous deity known as The Lord MOR? Answer: very, very hard. And in the Eighties — pretty much impossible even if you are Alan Parsons himself, rather than Al Stewart.

 

24 Carrots is not nearly as depressing as some of Al's later variations on the life support system, but, in terms of living/breathing instruments, it is almost non-existent. Not only Parsons, but Tim Renwick as well has vanished — in fact, pretty much the entire backing band is newly assembled, headed by professional, but way too technically-minded fusion guitarist Peter White, who also assists Al with much of the songwriting. The electronic currents have not yet gained the upper hand, but all of the riffs and even most of the solos have a decidedly programmatic aura around them; new producer Chris Desmond turns out to be twice the mathematician Alan Parsons used to be, but without the latter's understanding of the concept of beauty — as Pythagorean as it was with Parsons, at least he trusted the Muse to guide him. The guidance patterns of Chris Desmond are unknown to me, and I'd rather not guess.

 

Much of the material is catchy, as usual, but this is the first Stewart record which actively brings on the question — why do we have to listen to it? Who needs an impoverished, third-rate copy of Year Of The Cat? The only new ingredient is a brand of faster-paced, slightly crunchier, harder-rocking near-dance numbers that are, at best, indistinguishable from generic mid-to-late Seven­ties radio fodder ('Paint By Numbers', although I admit the guilt of really digging the ecstatic guitar solos — so predictable, but so brilliantly constructed!), and, at worst, designed as corny jokes but not immediately guessable as such ('Mondo Sinistro' — unless you have a very, very wide-reaching sense of hu­mor that allows you to openly enjoy Benny Hill with the same passion as Monty Python, you will probably deem this the worst Stewart song written up to that point).

 

Apart from this questionable innovation, what is there to tell? A few of the songs are relatively un­marred by the antiseptic production and bring on vague recollections of Stewart's pre-Parsons years: e. g. the mandolin-heavy waltz of 'Rocks In The Ocean' and the medievalistic 'Merlin's Time' (al­though the latter is awfully derivative of 'Jerusalem', I must say). The lead single 'Mid­night Rocks' comes with the obligatory sax solo, but is no 'Year Of The Cat' for sure. 'Constan­tinople' is the obligatory history listen to remind you of the fateful events of the year 1453 thro­ugh politically incorrect lines like "I see the hosts of Mohammed coming" and a permanently wailing, never erring guitar riff that periodically disintegrates into a flurry of permanently wailing, never erring guitar solo notes.

 

If you are younger than Christ and your blood is still boiling, do not come near the record — its vibes will most likely be atrocious, as befits the vibes on any essentially stillborn album. If, on the other hand, you have somewhat calmed down, you might understand my thumbs up: 'Mondo Sinistro' is the only true crime against good taste on here, and there is plenty of melodicity, in­telligence, and — not the least important — humility to keep a middle-aged person satisfied.

 

LIVE: INDIAN SUMMER (1981)

 

1) Here In Angola; 2) Indian Summer; 3) Pandora; 4) Delia's Gone; 5) Princess Olivia; 6) Running Man; 7) Time Passages; 8) Merlin's Time; 9) If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It; 10) Roads To Moscow; 11) Nostradamus/World Goes To Riyadh; 12) Soho (Needless To Say); 13) On The Border; 14) Valentina Way; 15) Clarence Frogman Henry; 16) Year Of The Cat.

 

The record is structured the same way as Genesis' Three Sides Live, raising the hens-and-eggs issue of whether there were too few new studio tracks, calling for live filler material, or whether it was the shows that were too short, calling out for some studio padding. Regardless, it all works fine. Consummate professionalism.

 

Al's live show, at this point, tended to faithfully concentrate on songs that his MOR-raised audi­ence knew and loved: reaching moderately into the days gone by, but firmly stopping at the bor­der of Past, Present & Future, beyond which there be dragons of his disavowed childhood ex­perience. With the exception of a new tune, wittily poking fun at the newly-increased prestige of the Arab countries ('World Goes To Riyadh'; no idea how it got stuck together in a medley with 'Nostradamus', though), and a brief spoken anecdote about an ill-fated meeting of the double of Clarence "Frogman" Henry with the double of Audrey Hepburn (sic!), the songs are performed as faithfully as possible. If it weren't for the addition of female background vocals on 'Time Passa­ges' (hardly an exciting touch), I could have easily mistaken this for the studio original with over­dubbed applause; and much the same goes for every other number.

 

Ergo, it is nice to know all of these tricky Alan Parsons arrangements can be reproduced on stage, and to ascertain that Stewart's fine, bright voice steadily holds up all the right notes upon first take, and to hear the receptive audience taking in and applauding all the history-as-art lecturing of 'Roads To Moscow', but other than that, the live show primarily functions as a best-of package. Which is not a bad deal, actually, given that you also get five new studio tracks that, as far as I'm concerned, beat the crap (or, more politely, the carotene) out of 24 Carrots.

 

The big difference is that most of them are unexpectedly light and happy, purging out the murky melancholia of the previous albums; normally, there is nothing wrong with murky melancholia, of course, but the more we got of it, the more it got the Parsons treatment, with all of the feelings simulated with minor chords played on routine synths, and there was no way to lift this de­pre­s­sing smog of generic arran­gements except by making the music a little happier.

 

'Here In Angola' is one of the most upbeat songs in the man's repertoire (and the only song in exi­stence to rhyme 'Angola' with not just 'Cola', but also 'Francis Ford Coppola') — simpler than a prokaryote, but also much catchier (ever tried to catch a prokaryote?), and, as the lyrics would suggest, perhaps taking a jab at Dylan and his «born again» debacle? 'Indian Summer' and 'Delia's Gone' are also simple, but poignant, tales that are melancholic, but not murky — and 'Delia's Gone' tries to go for a little Jethro Tullian style, with a flash of Celtic influence bursting through the soft-rock arrangement, later propped up with a flute melody saying hello to Ian. 'Princess Oli­via' adds non-irritating cuteness to simplicity; although I have no idea who 'Olivia' is (his wife? daughter? a historical character? no one in particular?), there's another fun rhyme in there ("I love Princess Olivia/Can't speak, I slip into trivia") and even the silly synthesizer reproduction of 'Ode to Joy' at the beginning cannot spoil the positive impression. The only weak point is 'Pandora', which does bring over some of the shades of gray from 24 Carrots, reminding us that the man is still firmly in the clutches of corporate production values. But it's not a bad song, either.

 

If you need any additional reasons to own this album, get it just for the front cover photo — the wide lapels on the suit are corny, but it's the last chance one has to spot a young-looking, long-haired Al Stewart, still looking like Eric Idle's concealed twin and loving it. One reason we old fogeys and retro-fans might dislike the Eighties is, perhaps, purely age-related, as they stole the facial freshness of most, if not all, our idols. Then again, it has been all but scientifically proven that just one listen to a mid-Eighties Phil Collins record takes away six months of life; how many months, then, must producing such a record take away? Thumbs up, before it's not too late.

 

RUSSIANS & AMERICANS (1984)

 

1) Lori, Don't Go Right Now; 2) Rumours Of War; 3) The Gypsy & The Rose; 4) Accident On 3rd Street; 5) Strange Girl; 6) Russians & Americans; 7) Cafe Society; 8) One, Two, Three; 9) The Candidate.

 

Like all singer-songwriters with a modicum of intelligence to their overall style, Stewart could hardly hope to steer his moderate commercial success straight into the Eighties. With Year Of The Cat and Time Passages, he'd found a way to clothe his music in the trappings of «prog-lite» for the masses; but now that times had changed once again, and unless you went straight pop, you had no more chance of making it. Maybe old friend Parsons, who was still going strong commer­cially, could have lent a hand, but fate did not let it happen.

 

As it is, Russians & Americans fell through the cracks. In retrospect, I find it unjust; there are some good songs here, and, frankly speaking, the taste lapses in production are not at all hor­ren­dous compared to the next record. Expectedly, the album is heavy on generic Eighties keyboard sound — a cheap-sounding synth riff greets you from the very first second — but only 'Rumours Of War' is completely synth-based, with acoustic guitar melodies still forming the backbone of most of the songs. And, in stark contrast to 24 Carrots, where at least half of the album gave the impression of having been written and recorded to prove Al's being hip with the times, Russians & Americans gives us only one such example — the skewed Cars-style New Wave pop-rocker 'Strange Girl', which could have become a minor radio hit were it ever released as a single. For some reason, it never was, even though its only understandable pragmatic use would have been the jukebox: dumb, but catchy — the best type of bait for Eighties' teenagers.

 

Only one other song intentionally tries to recapture the essence of the Stewart/Parsons collabora­tive years: 'Cafe Society', all baroque piano flourishes and wild guitar solos and even wilder sax blowing from Phil Kenzie. Among fans, it produced the opposite effect: where the sax solo on 'Year Of The Cat' has always been counted as the song's major asset, Kenzie's screeching, stark raving mad blowing into the instrument on this track never pleased anyone. Well... it's different. I like the song; it is the album's gloomiest, most desperate, and most lyrically obscure, and the sax solos might be grating to everyone expecting another smoothly flowing piece from Kenzie, but it suits the overall mood of the song perfectly.

 

The title of the album may scare some people into thinking it is, overall, a concept piece on the Cold War, but in reality only the title track, a somewhat naïve plea to the opposite sides to sort out their difficulties, has something to say on the subject; even 'Rumours Of War' should be taken figuratively rather than literally (the song is about relationships rather than hydrogen bombs). If there is a concept, it is the overall darkness of the record — everything is extremely bitter, sour, minor, and morose. Not a surprise for the likes of Al, of course, but he may have overdid his usu­al grim schtick on here, another reason for fans to scorn it.

 

In essence, though, it has much more in common with the man's good old folk-rock style than 24 Carrots. 'Lori Don't Go Right Now' and 'The Gypsy & The Rose' are pretty, modestly memo­rable, upbeat compositions. The title of 'Accident On 3rd Street' recalls Springsteen, but the song is really closer to all those dozens of forgettable, but harmless and quite listenable rambling Dy­lan «sociologues» from the mid-Seventies and onwards (besides, how can one resist being slyly baited with lines like "He reminded me of one of those Vikings with the long-handled swords / The kind of guy even Joan Baez would not feel non-violent towards"?).

 

If the album is approached without pre­judice, it has a good chance of taking its humble place next to Orange and Zero She Flies and all those other Stewart albums that just have him quietly do­ing his thing, without too much overproduction and too many grand ideas that sometimes hit the mark and sometimes miss it. Therefore, thumbs up.

 

LAST DAYS OF THE CENTURY (1988)

 

1) Last Days Of The Century; 2) Real And Unreal; 3) King Of Portugal; 4) Red Toupée; 5) Where Are They Now; 6) Bad Repu­tation; 7) Josephine Baker; 8) License To Steal; 9) Fields Of France; 10) Antarctica; 11) Ghostly Horses Of The Plain; 12*) Helen And Cassandra.

 

Way too clinical. It is not at all difficult to forgive Russians & Americans — sterile Eighties pro­duction was not only kept at bay on that record, but was also a somewhat new, exciting way to get things wrapped up. By 1988, however, it was mostly clear that, were good taste in music to prevail for the intelligent artists at least, the electronic drums and synthesizers and pop-metal gui­tar solos had to go. But apparently it was not clear to Stewart's new producer, Joe Chiccarelli, who, despite his near-sterling record of work with Frank Zappa and Oingo Boingo, here saddles Al with the worst kind of sound he'd ever received up to that point. (On the other hand, it is also the same Joe Chiccarelli that produced the abysmal Y Kant Tori Read album for Tori Amos that same year, making that guy's evil streak far more transparently pronounced).

 

The songs are mostly okay; no great revelations, but the usual folk-pop, modest-hook formula continues to work. The bizarre post-psychedelic chorus of 'Real And Unreal' is ra­ther ugly and poorly sewn on to the otherwise fine lounge jazz essence of the song, and 'King Of Portugal' is a lame attempt at capturing the essence of the late Eighties dance-pop hit, but otherwise, where the songwriting is concerned, we are still in business.

 

The sound of it all, however, is downright awful. It's all echo and robotic tick-tock synths and big booming drums — so much so that, whenever I hear a bit of Spanish guitar come in, I cannot help but cringe, because what once used to be one of Al's trademarks — he was a big fan of the fla­menco style from the earliest days — is now reduced to the kind of overproduced Latino muzak that haunts us in elevators and cheap eating places. Next to this kind of coating, Alan Parsons is unquestionably the Mozart of production.

 

It is funny, though, that Stewart, three years later, had been chained to the exact same sound as Bob Dylan was, three years earlier, with Empire Burlesque; in fact, 'License To Steal' half-bor­rows its title from Bob's 'License To Kill' and half-borrows its melody and sound from Bob's 'Clean-Cut Kid', and all of these tunes could have rocked had they been recorded ten years earlier or ten years later. As it stands, they are sorely in need of reinvention.

 

The second half of the album does seem to be a little more polite to good melodies and a bit less intent on all the New Age stuff. Once you're past all the synthesizer excesses of the first half and the horrendously cheesy backing vocals on 'Red Toupée' (contributed by Tori Amos, no less! of Y Kant Tori Read fame, no less!), you may relax with the aid of Al's cute, sentimental, and some­what touching ode to Josephine Baker (or, in a broader sense, to all the sensual delights of days gone by that we are unable to taste in person, at least not until the Holodeck becomes a reality), the pretty Tullian flute interludes on 'Fields Of France', and the happiest, catchiest anthem to the world's coldest, bitterest continent ever written.

 

Overall, though, it is very sad that the man was unable to resist the temptations of the «let's turn music to gross shit» decade, but at least he only released one single album in his entire career that sounded in such a horrendous manner. This does not save the album itself from an indignant thumbs down, but it does wipe out all grounds for comparison with Rod Stewart, much as the names would want to lead one into such a temptation.

 

RHYMES IN ROOMS (1992)

 

1) Flying Sorcery; 2) Soho (Needless To Say); 3) Time Passages; 4) Josephine Baker; 5) On The Border; 6) Nostradamus; 7) Fields Of France; 8) Clifton In The Rain / Small Fruit Song; 9) Broadway Hotel; 10) Leave It; 11) Year Of The Cat.

 

Nice, humble little album, strictly for the fans but real quality stuff for the fans. In the midst of a local industry crisis that left Al without a recording label, he and Peter White undertook a short inexpensive tour with just the two of them onstage, both playing acoustic guitars (with White oc­casionally switching to accordeon or piano). Come to think of it, it is actually strange how long it took Stewart to come up with an «unplugged» album — many fans must have been secretly ho­ping for one since 1967 at least, yet the man steadily refused to budge, on the contrary, pumping more and more layers of production onto his simple melodies until it all exploded with the stink­fest of Last Days Of The Century.

 

Not that Stewart is really to blame — without all the extra arrangements, reduced to bare-bones acoustic strum, the songs lose quite a bit of pizzazz; if Stewart's entire career sounded like Rhy­mes In Rooms, he'd be even more of a cult taste than he is today. But after the suffocation of Last Days, just about the only way to remedy it was to roll back all the way and give the depres­sed fans just the opposite of «overproduced», so the record really came in at the right time.

 

With the surprise exception of the 'Clifton In The Rain / Small Fruit Song' medley, hearkening back to the old days of obscurity, the tracklist is predictable: hits and classics ranging from Past, Present & Future to Time Passages. But it is interesting to learn whether all these Parsons-era classics still have anything to say with the Parsonage taken away from them — and yes, 'Time Passages' works well without the underwater keyboards, and 'Year Of The Cat' does not wither away and die without the saxophone solo, partly because of Peter White's highly technical, but pleasant solos (somehow complex solos played on an acoustic guitar tend to come across as soul­ful even when the same solos, played on an electric, would seem ugly — go figure), partly be­cause, yes, they were expertly written and heartfelt tunes from the very beginning; it only took Parsons to make the average layman notice that.

 

Needless to say — no, not Soho, but just that the two tunes off Last Days sound much better than the originals, particularly 'Fields Of France' (although I miss the flute solos, they did make the song way too reminiscent of late-period Jethro Tull). Overall, the acoustic duo worked so well that Stewart even went on to replicate the experience several times (most recently, with Dave Nachmanoff) — not really necessary, in my opinion, but certainly money-saving. Thumbs up as a one-time experience, but it is quite friendly on Al's part that he did not go on to abuse the acou­stic-only principle.

 

FAMOUS LAST WORDS (1993)

 

1) Feel Like; 2) Angel Of Mercy; 3) Don't Forget Me; 4) Peter On The White Sea; 5) Genie On A Table Top; 6) Trespasser; 7) Trains; 8) Necromancer; 9) Charlotte Corday; 10) Hipposong; 11) Night Rolls In.

 

Wonderful return to form. Fueled, perhaps, by all the joy that was synthesized on the acoustic duo tour, Stewart finds the strength to ditch most of the production excesses — and delivers a lively, strong, charismatic record, more consistent than anything he's done in years. Almost everything is strictly acoustic-based, with rhythm sections, electric guitar solos and keyboard backdrops swea­ring complete loyalty to wood, nylon, and human voice. This may add an unwanted whiff of mo­notonousness to the proceedings, but surely monotonousness is at least preferable to the dozen varieties of excremental sonic effects on Last Days.

 

Although the album is formally dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased keyboardist Peter Wood (Stewart's co-author on 'Year Of The Cat'), it contains two of the most joyous, life-asserting songs Al ever wrote, totally irresistible in their optimistic swirl: 'Feel Like' and 'Genie On A Table Top'. Coming up with hosts of lyrical metaphors to describe his elated spirits — replacing each other in a whirlwind so rapid it is almost impossible to separate the time-tested clichés from brilliant on-the-spot inventions — he infects the backing band with his cheerfulness, and each single musician, from the percussionist to organ and guitar guys taking solo spots, do their best to match him in this celebration of life. After all the chilly, morose panoramas of Last Days, it is the perfect antidote — even though there is no telling as to whatever it really was that made Al feel so wond'rous. The death of Peter Wood?..

 

These two I-feel-good anthems are the obvious highlights, but Al's sense of melody and taste seems to have picked up on quite a few other occasions as well. 'Angel Of Mercy' is eloquently vicious, staking it all on Al's duet with the ominous violin part (reminiscent somewhat of Dylan's mid-Seventies conversations with Scarlett Rivera's instrument). The inescapable history lesson of 'Charlotte Corday' is a collabora­tion with Tori Amos that most Tori Amos detractors will like — because she is not singing, merely playing piano, and because the lyrics are his rather than hers. The chorus of 'Trespasser' — "you see him in your dreams, but I seem to see him all the time" — is technically unforgettable, although the song may have used a bit less generic Spanish guitar (what can you do, Al loves the stuff).

 

Even the two-minute kiddie throwaway of 'Hippopotamus Song', which may turn off deadly se­rious listeners whose sense of humor had been gradually wiped off with a series of Rush concerts, is funny fun in its capriciousness; besides, who else but Al Stewart would flaunt the etymologi­cally correct plural form of the word 'hippopotamus' — and then make it rhyme?

 

Against all this surge of the spirit, the record's few flaws seem even fewer. The gracious, nostal­gic folk-rocker 'Trains' has no real reason to drag on for eight minutes; four would have been quite enough — it is certainly no 'Roads To Moscow'. And a couple of the tracks still carry ves­tiges of crappy Eighties' production — 'Don't Forget Me' still gets pigeonholed as glossy, suffo­cating adult contemporary, and 'Necromancer' abuses echo effects and electronic percussion in order to remind us that true evil does exist. Yet the tone of the album is still set by 'Feel Like', and a small amount of inertia-based blunders cannot misdirect it. Thumbs up for a record that may brighten up many a day if one so desires, or, perhaps, already has.

 

BETWEEN THE WARS (1995)

 

1) Night Train To Munich; 2) The Age Of Rhythm; 3) Sampan; 4) Lindy Comes To Town; 5) Three Mules; 6) A League Of Notions; 7) Life Between The Wars; 8) Betty Boop’s Birthday; 9) Marion The Chatelaine; 10) Joe The Georgian; 11) Always The Cause; 12) Laughing Into 1939; 13) The Black Danube.

 

Another minor gem, alas, too limited in ambition and too humble in execution to become any­thing higher than a cult classic (and, so far, it has not become even that). This time, in collabora­tion with guitarist Laurence Juber, and, apparently, feeling more free than a bird, Al fully gives in to his historical passion — dedicating an entire album to songs dealing with one and one only historical period, arguably his favourite one: remember “...I was born too late to see Josephine Baker dan­cing in a Paris cabaret"? Well, at least he was born not too late to be enthralled by the 1920s and the 1930s, enough to offer such a cute little recreation of those happy/awful times.

 

The recreation is not actually musical: apart from the first two fast-paced songs, Al does not of­fer a regular «retro» exercise, which might have been judged as too posh and fanciful, and heard as too fake and devoid of credibility (think Christina Aguilera). Most of the songs are written the way he usually writes them — not terribly inventive folk-pop melodies — but the spirit is clearly invigorated by the subject, which he explores from all sides, with humor, tragedy, melancholy, and excitement permeating all the motives.

 

The track names mostly speak for themselves — unless you come from a long line of village idi­ots, you will be able to understand at least fifty or more percent of Al’s sources from the titles, although there may be one or two you will have trouble with even if you’re a history buff your­self, since Mr. Stewart touches upon political, social, and cultural issues of the two decades, sti­cking references to just about everything that existed back in the day, from Dorothy Parker to Hedy Lamarr to Zinoviev and Kamenev.

 

To waste space on description of the individual songs would be downplaying the point. All are sparsely produced, completely acoustic with an occasional accordeon, piano, or quiet orchestral arrangement thrown in. Each de­livers a hummable chorus; some, in addition to that, offer the de­light of a flapper’s dance (‘The Age Of Rhythm’, ‘When Lindy Comes To Town’), while others prefer to delve the mines of doom and gloom (‘Laughing Into 1939’). Lyrically, some are hilarious (all the spy references in ‘Night Train To Munich’), some knowledgeably sarcastic (‘League Of Notions’), a few down­right silly (‘Joe The Georgian’, about how Stalin’s victims are impatiently waiting for him to join them in Hell). And some represent implicit edutainment — ‘Betty Boop’s Birthday’ may make one want to check out those old cartoons.

 

But the point is, of course, to weave a specific projection of the epoch out of these bits and pieces, and, from that point of view, the album is a success. Pedantically minded ones may complain about Stewart’s vision being too shallow and unprofessional, but he is no historian, after all, and Between The Wars is not a PhD thesis, merely a loving tribute from a talented, intelligent aficio­nado. If it does not charm you at least a little, you’re either hopelessly hung up, or a disgruntled victim of Are You Smarter Than A Third Grader. And what better excuse is needed to rewatch that old Carol Reed classic? Thumbs up, of course.

 

DOWN IN THE CELLAR (2000)

 

1) Waiting For Margaux; 2) Tasting History; 3) Down In The Cellars; 4) Turning It Into Water; 5) Soho; 6) The Night That The Band Got The Wine; 7) Millie Brown; 8) Stained Moon; 9) Franklin's Table; 10) House Of Clocks; 11) Sergio; 12) Toutes Les Etoiles; 13) The Shiraz Shuffle.

 

It is hard to imagine anybody other than al Stewart, in the whole wide world, recording an entire album of songs about wine — and, more or less, getting away with it. That Al is a seasoned con­naisseur, is no sin of his. That he is capable of writing a nice, friendly tune about taking a sip, there is hardly any doubt. But surely a whole concept album drawing on his love for wine would be overkill? Boring at best, kitschy novelty at worst?

 

Well... it is not the best Al Stewart album ever, that one is for sure. Some songs work well and some not quite so. He did overestimate the power of inspiration evaporating from that cellar; and, what's worse, there is a quaint, uncomfortable aroma of snobbery. There is no reason to doubt the man's noble and innocent intentions (heck, he just loves all sorts of wine, what's wrong with that? Not everyone is supposed to inherit the tastes of John Lee Hooker) — but somehow I, for one, feel it easier to fall under Al's enchantment when he is reminding me of Josephine Baker and Charles Lindbergh rather than extolling the virtues of Margaux and Shiraz.

 

So, as a sprawling, many-faced ode to wine, Down In The Cellar is ambiguous, not only because a rock LP praising wine is suspicious per se, but also because the songs themselves are not all that reminiscent of alcohol-related environment, if you know what I mean. A note from a listener I once fell upon read something like, "I hate wine, but I liked this record" — meaning that Al es­sen­tially failed in his task. If this were a good record about wine, it would have been hated by all strong wine-haters — or it would have converted the weak ones. Instead, this is just a good record. Forget about the wine.

 

Since there are no production excesses (everything is kept in strict accordance with Al's no-extra-ornaments folk-rock formula: acoustic essence, minimalistic rhythm section, occasional electric guitar, occasional pianos, occasional chamber strings arrangement), and since there are no excu­ses for genre-hopping and experimentation such as provided by the topical matters of Between The Wars, the melodies do not require description; as usual, they are, uh, melodic — simple, mo­ving, and memorable. Humble, too: only 'The Night That The Band Got The Wine', with its lengthy epic title, six-minute running length, and increased levels of loudness, pretends to epic status, but is actually underpinned by its pretense; I'd rather look for the meaning of life in the rococo strings of 'Franklin's Table' (apparently, Ben was a big fan of the spirits, too), the dense medieval drone of 'Soho', and the echo-laden lonesome howling-wolf electric solos of 'Stained Moon'. Beautiful tunes, these.

 

Unfortunately, Down In The Cellar suffered doubly because of lack of promotion (the Miramar label that was supposed to take care of the album in the States went bankrupt before it managed to release it), and because of being tagged as some sort of «special interest» item. Not to worry: it is a perfectly normal, regular Al Stewart album reflecting his normal, regular skills at writing, singing, and playing. And who really gives a damn about the wine? Thumbs up.

 

A BEACH FULL OF SHELLS (2005)

 

1) The Immelman Turn; 2) Mr. Lear; 3) Royal Courtship; 4) Rain Barrel; 5) Somewhere In England; 6) Katherine Of Oregon; 7) Mona Lisa Talking; 8) Class Of '58; 9) Out In The Snow; 10) My Egyptian Couch; 11) Gina In The Kings Road; 12) Beacon Street; 13) Anniversary.

 

Down In The Cellar gave us an Al Stewart that was cozily settling in. And for an artist that did not really make too many wild, unexpected, dangerously experimental moves even at his youthful peak, «settling in» means providing precious little food for us reviewers. Pleasant, but never over­whelming melodies, intelligent, but never unpredictable lyrical subjects and flourishes, good sense of taste so steady it's almost boring — what is there to say?

 

In Al's case, this means thirteen more folk-rock tunes that grow, although slowly, upon each en­suing listen, and more of his little stories, sometimes fantasies, sometimes nostalgia pieces. And, as usual, although the acoustic-based arrangements are generally similar, there is enough mood diversity to sit through the entire thing if not in an enthralled, then at least in a cutely satisfied manner. Every once in a while, Al's «modest perfection» may really get to you in all of its perfect modesty, and all of that accumulated NICENESS may make you want to throw up in disgust and reach out for your collection of hardcore classics — but in 2005, everyone who puts on a new Al Stewart album is either supposed to know what to expect, or is completely crazy and throws up on a regular basis all the same.

 

For the record, this particular issue of «Where In The World Is [W]Al[do] Stewart?» covers such topics as limerick father Edward Lear; David Lean's Brief Encounter; American barnstorm fliers of the 1920s; one of the wives of Henry VIII subtly transplanted into a personal fantasy; and far more obscure subjects that I am unable to decipher at all (what the hell is 'Rain Barrel' about, and who the hell is Mr. Williams? Perhaps Al should consider having his albums come packaged in news­paper clippings, à la Thick As A Brick?).

 

Also for the record, rumors state that the entire thing was originally thought to be centered around a thirteen-minute version of 'Class Of '58', with Al's inevitable nostalgic impulse targeted at gray-haired rock'n'roll grandaddies of his generation. The full version, it is said, has seen single release, but it is hard to see why this fun, but insignificant retro-rockabilly stomp should have been any longer than four, which it is here.

 

And for the final record, my personal favourite song is easily definable here as 'Mona Lisa Tal­king' — not because Al pretends to have found a simple, but most probably wrong decipherment of the most famous smile in history, but because he has actually found a gorgeous musical/vocal hook to go along with the decipherment: the "go home, pretty baby..." is one of those subtle heart-tugs that I so like to collect in relatively obscure locations and strongly recommend to all the other heart-tug connoisseurs out there.

 

Oh, and thumbs up, of course. These particular shells on the beach are hardly worth a million, but all are fairly solid, and it's not that easy these days to fall upon a solitary beach with thirteen solid shells. This one's definitely not for the tourists. Odd coincidence of the day: Why does the Middle Eastern-ish strings riff that introduces 'Rain Barrel' sound so much like the opening riff of ABBA's disco hit 'Voulez-Vous'? Either the two must have a common source, or Al Stewart has a really sick subconscious.

 

SPARKS OF ANCIENT LIGHT (2008)

 

1) Lord Salisbury; 2) (A Child's View Of) The Eisenhower Years; 3) The Ear Of The Night; 4) Hanno The Navigator; 5) Shah Of Shahs; 6) Angry Bird; 7) The Loneliest Place On The Map; 8) Sleepwalking; 9) Football Hero; 10) Elvis At The Wheel; 11) Sil­ver Kettle; 12) Like William McKinley.

 

And another modestly perfect album; they just keep comin'. At such a pace, with such a steady mindset, Stewart could probably go on like that for another twenty years or so. A major asset is his unyielding vocal power: realize that on Sparks, a 63-year old Al sounds exactly like the 22-year old Al sounded on Bedsitter Images, and I mean it — not a single note betrays the aging (come to think of it, he looks pretty great for his age, too, except for the hair).

 

Of course, he did not exactly start out with the most powerful or wide-ranged voice of them all, but that is the com­mon benefit — break out your superhuman voice in your twenties and you will be eating dust by the time you hit fifty; stay cool, calm, and collected when you're young and your singing life will be lengthy and healthy. The miracle of Al Stewart, then, is that the story of his voice is basically the same as the story of his songwriting. Here we sit listening to early peri­od albums like Love Chronicles, classic years' albums like Year Of The Cat, and recent offer­ings like this record — and, for the life of me, I cannot figure out which ones are the «highlights» and which ones the «lowlights».

 

Focus on Sparks Of Ancient Light. Topics covered include: the Islamic revolution in Iran ('Shah Of Shahs'), the golden days of British imperialism ('Lord Salisbury'), America in the Fifties ('The Eisenhower Years'), ancient Phoenician naval expeditions to Africa ('Hanno The Navigator'), glo­ries and pitfalls of professional sports ('Football Hero'), and a bizarre story about Elvis seeing the face of Stalin in the clouds on an Arizona trip in 1964 ('Elvis At The Wheel'). Plus a healthy dose of not-so-lyrically-specific tunes, of course, to ensure that the album will be likable by more than just history buffs.

 

Musically, Al's stern conservatism keeps up its rule: all the arrangements, by Al and long-term colleague Laurence Juber, follow the standard formulae. But, as usual, it is impossible to accuse the man of direct self-copying: as much as the melodies sound familiar, there are no obvious re­writes to be found. The expected hooks expectedly keep coming: catchy singalong choruses to 'Lord Salisbury' ("look away, look away, look away for our survival..."), 'Hanno' (with the char­ming line "when my sailing days are done, I'll see Poseidon's daughter"), 'Sleepwalking', and more. The expected acoustic instrumental is confined to the first half of 'Ear Of The Night', with Al giving us another of his simple, unassuming, but lovable folk interludes. The rock'n'roll, which Stewart never abandons, is represented by 'Angry Bird' and, to a lesser extent, by 'Eisenhower Years' — neither of the two «kicks ass», but Stewart is still one of the few veterans who can make a song «rock» while exercising restraint and cutting out dirty distorted guitar tones.

 

In short, it is exactly what is to be expected these days in the guise of the next Al Stewart album, and solid proof that the powers of melodic folk-rock, although drained, are still far from being completely spent. As I write this, Sparks is Stewart's last original studio album to-date, but there is truly not a shadow of doubt in my mind that he still has something like a dozen more records of the same quality in him, and that the longer he lasts, the more of an awesome example he can set for generations to come — doing for British folk-rock more or less the same that, say, a J. J. Cale does for American blues-rock. And he knows it well himself, the cunning old fox, or else he wouldn't end the album with the following refrain: "I'll sit on my porch like William McKinley / And I'll let the world come to me / And if it's too busy I really won't mind / And there's no place I want to be". Well, we can only hope that the world will continue to leave Al alone — not too dif­ficult — since it would benefit no one see him end like William McKinley. Thumbs up, even de­spite the ill-omened nature of that one simile.

 

UNCORKED (2009)

 

1) Last Days Of The Century / Constantinople; 2) Coldest Winter; 3) Warren Harding; 4) News From Spain; 5) Bedsitter Images; 6) Midas Shadow; 7) Running Man; 8) Palace Of Versailles; 9) Auctioning Dave (story); 10) Princess Olivia; 11) Life In Dark Water; 12) Carol; 13) Old Admirals.

 

Stewart's penchant for guitar-sparring as a major artistic incentive continues with a new twist: at the end of the first decade of the century, after Peter White and Lawrence Juber, his new partner is Dave Nachmanoff, a somewhat obscure, but critically respected folk musician / singer / song­writer with a PhD in philosophy and, most likely, numerous other fine qualities that remain hid­den from the general public.

 

The newly-formed duo's first joint appearance on record is with Uncorked (another transparent allusion to Al's wine cellars which, judging by all sorts of merry jokes the two engage in on this album, have been strongly tampered with) — an all-acoustic live album that repeats the ex­pe­ri­ence of Rhymes In Rooms, but to even better effect.

 

First and foremost, because, as fine as Pe­ter White was on guitar, Nachmanoff is an even stronger player. If you are afraid of or usually bored with «unplugged»-type concerts, Uncorked may change your attitude — Dave can shift from lan­guid and subtle to loud and brutal in the wink of an eye, and his technique seems sometimes to be specifically geared towards proving that there really are no things you can do with an electric guitar that cannot be reproduced, or at least ef­ficiently substituted on an acoustic. for instance, as they launch into 'News From Spain', Al re­marks that "Dave has the unenviable task of trying to cover Rick Wakeman's piano solos on the guitar", but actually, Dave rises to the challenge, and even if it is not really possible to completely reinstate the turbulent sea storm atmosphere that Stewart, Wakeman, and others created on the ori­ginal, they still come very, very close — with nothing but one acoustic rhythm guitar and one acoustic lead. And it's not merely «impressive» — it's overwhelming if you play it loud enough.

 

Second, the set list is anything but trivial; since the album is obviously geared towards a small group of hardcore fans — most of the outside world already has trouble remembering who wrote 'Year Of The Cat', let alone anything else — the track selection firmly excludes all of Al's «big­gies», with the arguable exception of (a much shortened version of) 'Old Admirals', and is almost completely unpredictable; and yet, most of the songs are so pretty that no neophyte, accidentally discovering Stewart through this concert, would ever want to think of the man as a «one-hit won­der» or «singles artist».

 

Personal favorites include 'Bedsitter Images', bringing us all the way back into 1967, with Nach­manoff perfectly nailing that admirable piano / strings ascending melody; 'Life In Dark Water', stripped down and consequently restored to the status of a melancholic Al Stewart ballad from that of an ice cold Alan Parsons prog-pop epic; the already mentioned 'News From Spain' (Al doing a number from Orange? Unbelievable!); and the happiness of 'Princess Olivia', with its 'Ode To Joy' quote at the beginning unforgotten.

 

But really, it's all good; even the two songs from Last Days Of The Century, which, come to think of it, really needed this sort of re-recording to redeem them from the production excesses of Al's worst period. And, despite the obligatory humbleness of it all, Uncorked may, all the same, be the most dynamic live album in Al's career, if only because it is so transparently clear that these two guys are simply going for the fun of it, not out of some troublesome «rock star obliga­tion» to the fans and managers, or out of financial reasons. Add to this that the clarity and youth­fulness of Al's voice in 'Bedsitter Images' makes it sound like it could have well been recorded in 1967, and Uncorked completes its transformation from a cute late-period curio from a folk rock veteran into a near-must-have recording not just for grizzled Al Stewart fans, but for everyone who appreciates clever songwriting, pretty singing, and masterful guitar playing as such. Thus — yet another thumbs up for the running man. The only bad news is that there is no accompanying DVD release.

 

ADDENDA:

 

SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME (1996)

 

1) Where Are They Now; 2) Fields Of France; 3) Soho (Needless To Say); 4) In Red Square; 5) A Sense Of Déjà Vu; 6) How Does It Happen; 7) Coolest Winter In Memory; 8) Candy Came Back; 9) Jackdaw; 10) The Bear Farmers Of Birnam; 11) In The Dark; 12) Blow Your Mansion Down; 13) Willie The King; 14) Merry Monks; 15) Ghostly Horses Of The Plain; 16) Mixed Blessing.

 

This collection of outtakes and rarities was only available for a limited period through a fan club distribution in the mid-1990s, and, for the most part, has been made obsolete since then by the re­cent CD re-releases of Al's catalog, through dismemberment and dispersal of most tracks as bo­nuses for the corresponding chronological periods.

 

Nevertheless, it still exists — in the form of a used item on Ebay, a low-quality download on the local torrent site, or a discography memento graced with a slightly corny photo. And it has its use as a one-time sixty-minute listen, too, being fully on the level. Not every artist can boast an out­take collection that is almost as entertaining as an original, semi-coherent LP; Al, in terms of qua­lity if not recognition, joins the league of Dylan and Nick Drake.

 

The time period covered spans pretty much all of Stewart's pre-1996 career, the earliest track be­ing 'Jackdaw' from the late Sixties, the latest — several tracks from the Between The Wars ses­sions; and most are just as melodic and moving as the typically best stuff from the guy, someti­mes even more. 'Jackdaw' gives us the early innocent Stewart with pastoral flutes and starry eyes, spoiled somewhat by cooky backing vocals; but already the tracks dating back to the Parsons ye­ars are magnificently serious folk-rock, particularly 'A Sense Of Déjà Vu', worthy of the stateli­ness of a George Harrison classic, and 'Willie The King', a bleak, depressing cross between a bar­room blues and a prog-rock epic.

 

Later numbers are a 'Mixed Blessing' indeed — some, like this particular song, are hopelessly overwhelmed by crap-Eighties production, but generally they match the standards of the corres­ponding LPs: 'In Red Square', for instance, would have made a decent addition to Russians & Ame­ricans, but was, perhaps, excised for way too many references to Russian history targeted at audiences who might not have too pleasant a time refreshing their memories on Khrushchev. The New Wave trimmings of 'Candy Came Back' will please fans of 24 Carrots; the synth-pop lea­nings of 'How Does It Happen' will probably please no one, though — lines like "An original thought can be such a rush, why do they feed you on a diet of man-made mush?" do not sound all that convincing when they are set to man-made mush. Then the mood will be set right with the light humor of 'The Bear Farmers Of Birnam' ("...oftentimes the girls reject you — a bear won't treat you so; you're satisfied to know, when he chews you up, he still respects you"), the cheery medievalism of 'Merry Monks', and what may be the grandest and gorgeous-est entry of 'em all, 'In The Dark', from not-exactly-sure-when with a beautiful piano melody played by not-exactly-sure-whom.

 

All in all, a great collection — thumbs up, and way too bad if some of the best tracks happen to get lost in the process of dismemberment — but the tormenting question is: who the hell thought it was a good idea to start things off with two tracks from Last Days Of The Century? Fanclub releases seem to have their own unexplicated bits of weirdness.

 

 

ALICE COOPER

PRETTIES FOR YOU (1969)

 

1) Titanic Overture; 2) 10 Minutes Before The Worm; 3) Sing Low Sweet Cheerio; 4) Today Mueller; 5) Living; 6) Fields Of Regret; 7) No Longer Umpire; 8) Levity Ball; 9) B.B. On Mars; 10) Reflected; 11) Apple Bush; 12) Earwigs To Eternity; 13) Changing Arranging.

 

Vincent «Alice Cooper» Furnier on vocals and harmonica, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, Michael Bruce on rhythm, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, Neal Smith on drums. A bunch of Detroit kids raised and reared on the rock'n'roll craze, mixed and mingled with the Detroit proto-punk scene and the likes of the Stooges and the MC5. Sharp, talented, and obviously poised for success as rock'n'roll's baddest boys.

 

What fun, then, to realize just how far derailed they were with their first two albums. Since their original record contract was with Frank Zappa, who signed them to his Straight Records label, it is usually assumed that Zappa was, in fact, responsible for the overall sound of Pretties For You. I do not think so; many, if not most, of these "songs" had already been a part of the band's act by the time they met Frank, and the general desire to twist simple, basic rock'n'roll into the weirdest psychedelic shapes possible was quite common among even the most caveman-like bands in the late 1960s (remember Ted Nugent's hallucinogenic past?).

 

That said, Zappa's style is a major in­fluence on the record, especially on all of its one-minute-long interludes; if, by "psychedelia", we want to mean something like the hippie-style West Coast approach, there is very little trace of that on the record — Alice Cooper, band and artist alike, have always treated hippies with more fiery hatred than the Establishment itself. Some of the guitar solos may remind the listener of Quicksilver Messenger Service-style drone-jamming, but I doubt that the decision could have been conscious: these sounds were all over the air in 1969, and Alice Cooper were all but forced to reproduce some of them, like it or not. Yet the main idea of the music is certainly not to flush out and evacuate your mind from prejudices — rather, it is to flush out and evacuate your neighbours from the premises.

 

This superficially ugly, unpredictable, devoid-of-meaning geometry-rock clearly falls under the jurisdiction of Captain Beefheart. The big difference is that Alice Cooper are in no position to play it the way Beefheart's Magic Band were able to. Alice Cooper, from the beginning, were a garage band, and they play geometry-rock like a garage band: loud, brutal, technically limited and artistically impoverished. If Trout Mask Replica, from its first note to its last one, is constructed like complex alien music, Pretties For You is basically a bunch of straightforward rockers, and the idea of "weirdness" here is essentially interpreted as cruelly forcing each to break down in the middle — or several times in a row — and imposing some out-of-the-blue ugly new signature or chord change upon the track. For no reason, just like that.

 

Given, however, the band's obvious songwriting talent, Pretties For You inspires very mixed emotions. On one hand, there may be an impression of it as an unnecessarily, stupidly decon­struc­ted and spoiled hard rock album that might have been much better. Proof? There is some stunning material on it: the epic 'Fields Of Regret', the melancholic pop gem 'Levity Ball' (a bit Pink Floydish in its "astral" sonic arrangement), the cheerful 'Reflected' (later, with all the weird­ness edited out, to become the well-known 'Elected' on Billion Dollar Babies), and even less coherent tunes like 'Sing Low Sweet Cherio' have their moments.

 

On the other hand, let us face it: we do not hear natural born garage rock bands trying their hand at complex avantgarde art each and every day of our life. The very fact of such an experience is pretty darn novel and intriguing: what we have here is an attempt to combine the uncombinable. (It tempts me very much to whine about how this kind of crazy daringness was only possible in that crazy epoch known as the late Sixties, but this is, of course, not true; what is probably true is that only in the late Sixties could a band come out with a jaw-dropping flop like Pretties For You and still have a long, successful commercial career ahead of them). Maybe the record is awful, but it's hard to deny that it is somewhat... brilliantly awful.

 

I would still give it a thumbs down, of course, since there is little practical use for geometry-rock when it is done well, and none at all when it is done poorly. Yet in doing so, I am also forced to register a serious complaint from the brain department, which insists that the record should at least be heard, if not necessarily liked — for educational purposes, if nothing else.

 

EASY ACTION (1970)

 

1) Mr. And Misdemeanor; 2) Shoe Salesman; 3) Still No Air; 4) Below Your Means; 5) Return Of The Spiders; 6) Laughing At Me; 7) Refrigerator Heaven; 8) Beautiful Flyaway; 9) Lay Down And Die, Goodbye.

 

A transitional record. You can already witness traces of the classic Alice Cooper sound here, but it is still trying to break through the wall — a wall that, in all fairness, need not ever have existed if the band had been originally brought into the studio by someone other than the original Mother of Invention. Still, history knows no subjunctive, and I dare say further Coop records wouldn't have been half as interesting if not for the Zappa influence.

 

Actually, Zappa was no longer involved at all during the sessions for Easy Action, an album pro­duced by Neil Young's producer David Briggs who, it has been said by Neal Smith, hated the band and their sound, but still gave it a much more polished, and also heavier, sheen than Zappa did not give Pretties For You. Technically, this is already "hard rock", although still bordering on noise and avantgarde most of the time. The only number that "rocks" in the conventional sense of the word is 'Return Of The Spiders' — the Spiders was one of the band's original names, so it's quite natural that a song thus entitled should plunge us into straightforward garage fervor — but it has no memorable melody to speak of, just kick-ass guitar 'n' drums.

 

Conventional "songs" include 'Mr. And Misdemeanor', a mid-tempo vaudeville number with dis­torted guitars replacing barroom pianos; 'Shoe Salesman', a slight nod to Brit-pop and its "little man" values, a particularly bizarre direction for the Coops that they never pursued again; and the Michael Bruce-sung piano ballad 'Beautiful Flyaway', a charming McCartney-style ditty that con­tains the album's most memorable moments.

 

In between we meet various uninteresting semi-musical links, as well as lengthier freakouts: 'Be­low Your Means' is a depressing guitar-and-organ blues jam, while 'Lay Down And Die, Good­bye' is essentially a long cluster of atonality that serves no serious purpose after we have already learned what atonality is with a little help on behalf of everybody from Stockhausen to Zappa. (And it is certainly far less evocative in terms of pure psychedelia than Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd).

 

It is always ego-pleasing to state, with authority, that you know better than popular opinion, but there really, really is no point in defending Alice Cooper's first two albums other than out of pure historical interest — for instance, some of the aimless jamming and noisemaking would, only a year later, be magically transformed into the visionary instrumental style on Killer, and to wit­ness this change is like observing accelerated cell mutation under a microscope, but whether it can also give one aesthetic pleasure is surely a question of much debate. 'Mr. And Misdemeanor' and 'Beautiful Flyaway' are two solid numbers that would have not been out of place on any of their classic records, and it is sad that the latter did not even make it onto the Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper retrospective; the rest may be heard once and then forever held in peace, so here is another assured thumbs down for all parties concerned.

 

LOVE IT TO DEATH (1971)

 

1) Caught In A Dream; 2) I'm Eighteen; 3) Long Way To Go; 4) Black Juju; 5) Is It My Body; 6) Hallowed Be My Name; 7) Second Coming; 8) Ballad Of Dwight Fry; 9) Sun Arise.

 

By 1971, Zappa's Straight Records came under the control of Warner Bros. — in a mighty ironic twist of fate — and so did Alice Cooper, who unexpectedly found themselves under contract with a major label and under the supervision of a new producer, Bob Ezrin. They also relocated back to their hometown of Detroit, saying goodbye to the detestable West Coast and once again brea­thing in the air of slums, garages, and dirty rock'n'roll.

 

Clearly, recording back in their natural habitat must have raised the stakes on the band's future, but it is highly unlikely that anyone might have expected the results to be so phenomenal. All of a sudden, the band not only knows precisely where to go and where to stop, but also delivers a bunch of songs that are gritty, threatening, relevant, and catchy. At this point, the "theater" aspect of their show was still relatively subdued, limited mainly to a little bit of spiderish makeup aro­und Furnier's eyes and, perhaps, a little bit of snakes and ropes here and there. More important was the rock'n'roll aspect, the brutal proto-punk onslaught that, in 1971, promised to make the Rolling Stones and the Who sound like old farts.

 

Five of the album's tracks are just like that: tough, compact riff-rockers, with a typical running length of three to two and a half minutes, each one a lyrical fuck-you to middle class values, each one geared so well towards the rebellious teenage mind that there is hardly a future point in time when they will become obsolete. The best known is the immortal single 'I'm Eighteen' (I'm eager­ly awaiting the moment Alice will have to rename it to 'I'm Eighty'), a song so blatantly commer­cial ("Hey Bob, do you think they'll buy into that 'lines form on my hands and face' stuff?") that the mind almost revolts against it, but so tremendously seducing at the same time that the heart buys it. Let us face it: 'I'm eighteen and I like it!' is, after all, a much more realistic slogan than 'Hope I die before I get old', even despite the odd-evening circumstance that, today, Alice looks just as ridiculous sing­ing his slogan onstage as Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend singing theirs.

 

'I'm Eighteen', however, is merely the most anthemic and presumptuous of the five rockers, not necessarily the best; the band are equally adept at capturing a wannabe-glam effect with 'Caught In A Dream', at sounding sexy and provoking with 'Is It My Body', at playing angry prophets with 'Hallowed Be My Name', and at playing the angry lonely young man routine with 'Long Way To Go' (my personal favourite, a totally smoking garage classic that let you vent your frustration like nothing else back in 1971). No other Alice Cooper album packs together a five-way punch like that, although Killer comes close.

 

The 'theater' aspect, however, is far from absent from the proceedings: it dominates two of the album's epics that also served as then-current visual centerpieces of the live show. Of these, one has endured: 'Ballad Of Dwight Fry', Cooper's morbid impersonation of an asylum-locked mental patient such as could have been played by Dwight Frye (the title is a bit misleading — Dwight Frye himself was a perfectly sane person, merely being known for playing a long line of deranged characters like Renfield in Dracula). As is the usual case with Cooper, the effects are a bit over­wrought, but not by much, and one could argue that the 'Dwight Fry' character is, in fact, far more effectively fleshed out than, for instance, 'Steven' (1975-1994).

 

The other lengthy showpiece is far more questionable — in most treatises written around the al­bum, 'Black Juju' is quoted as its low point, the one track that prevents Love It To Death from acquiring 'masterpiece' status. Curiously, it is credited not to Furnier (you'd think he would be responsible for all of the band's theatrics), but bassist Dennis Dunaway. Its main problem is the length and the extremely evident — way too evident — debt to the Doors' epics, particularly 'When The Music's Over'. But at least the Doors had Morrison's poetic gift and a better knack for dressing his spoken ramblings in a variegated array of musical effects; 'Black Juju', apart from its main imposing guitar-and-organ melodic line, has none of that, and if it simply petered out after the first three or four minutes, it would not be as problematic as it is with its lengthy mid-section, supposing to creep you out but, instead, probably just making you go to sleep. The 'rest... rest... rest... rest... WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP!' segment is so trite and predictable that 'Black Juju' does spoil the overall effect — just as you thought the Coops had magically attai­ned the status of the perfect rock'n'roll band, they slap this proof for the contrary right in your face. That's a bit humiliating.

 

Yet, once we come to terms with the fact that nobody's perfect, least of all Alice Cooper, Love It To Death proudly remains standing as one of the best examples of early Seventies' rock, and not to give it a total thumbs up is out of the question. As the solemn chorus of Rolf Harris' 'Sun Ari­se' slowly fades away into silence, we all know that the sun has, indeed, arisen over one of Ame­rica's finest acts of the decade.

 

KILLER (1971)

 

1) Under My Wheels; 2) Be My Lover; 3) Halo Of Flies; 4) Desperado; 5) You Drive Me Nervous; 6) Yeah, Yeah, Yeah; 7) Dead Babies; 8) Killer.

 

One can classify this as proto-punk, as hard-art-rock, as Goth theater, as power pop with a dark edge — Killer is one of those records that give the illusion of being easy to pigeonhole, but what­ever you pigeonhole it into, it will always be more diverse, experimental, and unpredictable than the basic rules of the genre demand it to be.

 

Essentially, Killer consolidates all the strengths of Love It To Death (its mean, scary sound and strong songwriting), dispatches with its weaknesses (an occasional tendency to ramble without a point), and throws in lots of additional touches, such as multi-part song structures and diverse in­strumentation. My only regret is that, due to the two lengthy "suites", there are only eight songs; surely, given the perfect shape the band was in, they could have made room for two or even four more mini-gems. (I hold the same opinion on the Stones' Let It Bleed, for that matter).

 

Classic rock radio, with its tightass conservatism that makes even the Catholic church pale in com­parison, has only managed to memorize 'Under My Wheels'. Certainly the song is a classic, a big ball of rollickin' fun with the band magically pumping up tension throughout (some of glam rock's greatest use of the horn section, for instance) — fun which you get so caught up in that you do not even realize you're singing about roadkill, and I don't mean squirrels or opossums. So it's a metaphor — big deal.

 

But Killer is much, much more than just the 'album that yielded that big hit single'. Its main em­phasis is not on pure rock'n'roll: even 'Under My Wheels', with the addition of these horns, starts to resemble David Bowie, so the honour of the most canonically "rock" number should go to 'You Drive Me Nervous', a two-minute explosion of teenage anger whose creaky riffage and wild wild screaming guarantee it a solid place in the Punk Hall of Fame. The rest is much more subdued: 'Be My Lover' and 'Yeah, Yeah, Yeah' are catchy guitar-driven pop songs with fun self-referential lyrics ('She asked me why the singer's name was Alice/I said listen, baby, you really wouldn't un­derstand') and pretty melodies.

 

'Desperado' has been called a tribute to Jim Morrison, but if so, a very veiled one, because on the surface, it's rather a tribute to a Western hero, building up on a little Spanish guitar and a bit of spaghetti atmosphere. But it could be about anyone: 'I'm a killer, I'm a clown, I'm a priest that's gone to town' — words that many people would be happy to sing about themselves. With the ex­ception, of course, that no one could sing it better than Cooper, his dark, deathly voice the perfect vehicle for both the subdued ominous verses and the paranoid chorus.

 

Opinions are divided about the longer pieces — 'Halo Of Flies' and 'Killer'. For the former, the band has gone on record saying that they wanted to record something à la King Crimson (!), to prove their skill in creating longer, more complex pieces. "Longer" all right, but in terms of musi­cal complexity, of course, 'Halo Of Flies' would never make Robert Fripp suffer from sleep depri­vation. Or would it? Each particular musical part that the band's guitarists create is pretty rudi­mentary by itself, but there's quite a few of them, and each works well on a gut level. Most of the time, non-virtuoso musicians trying to dabble in artsiness "drive me nervous", but 'Halo' manages to create an eerie, unsettling atmosphere and slowly build it up to a galloping, shattering, ecstatic climax — should be played very very loud, by the way — so much so that even the awful, absurd and unfunny lyrics that swing between James-Bondish and gibberish ('And while a Middle Asian lady she really came as no surprise, but I still did destroy her and I will smash halo of flies' — at least, make it grammatical!) are forgotten.

 

As for 'Killer', which works in a tandem with the preceding 'Dead Babies', these two should argu­ably be best experienced in the context of the live setting: 'Dead Babies' with the accompanying smashing and chopping of baby dolls onstage, and 'Killer', of course, culminating in the infamous hanging scene, when Alice, cursing and kicking, was led to the gallows to the accompaniment of the solemn funebral organ music. But even without the imagery, 'Dead Babies' is the perfect mar­riage of Cooper's gut-level shock theater and meaningful social statement; unlike the pure brain­less gorefest of 'I Love The Dead' two years later (ooh, necrophagia, yummy!), 'Dead Babies' is, after all, a lament on the so frequently tragic effects of parental neglect.

And then, of course, the title track: 'I came into this life, looked all around, I saw just what I liked and took what I found'. Musically, it is again a concoction of several effective riffs and tempos, not one pattern hanging around for too long and all of them together symbolizing the killer's final journey from arrest to gallows; lyrically, it gives the perfect impression of that typical guy we're all afraid of — you know, the one whom the world forgot to endow with any sort of moral code upon graduation; whether it was the world's fault or his own does not seriously matter here. It all leads to one of the scariest endings in musical history — you just have to remember that the or­gan music accompanies him to the noose, the dull noise that follows is the opening of the trap­door, and the evil, ear-bursting noise that follows is... well, you know. Creepy.

 

Killer is a relatively easy record to dismiss: its lyrics are generally either obvious or absurdly bad, its music simple and unassuming, its shock value very much in-yer-face and almost completely devoid of any subtlety. Next to Lou Reed or Bowie or even the Stones at their best, it's "dumb". But many things in life that many of us deeply love without any feeling of guilt are "dumb", from Casablanca to 'Oliver Twist' to Michelangelo's David (don't tell me the latter is a sculptor's feast of intelligence). Killer belongs in that company, a straightforward masterpiece of angst and bru­ta­lity and, at the same time, a big, big load of FUN. Even the brain, amazed at the effectiveness of this approach, opts for a thumbs up, and the heart enthusiastically proclaims this to be the undis­puted peak of the original Alice Cooper band.

 

SCHOOL'S OUT (1972)

 

1) School's Out; 2) Luney Tune; 3) Gutter Cat Vs The Jets; 4) Street Fight; 5) Blue Turk; 6) My Stars; 7) Public Animal #9; 8) Alma Mater; 9) Grande Finale.

 

Some puritan rock'n'rollers part company with Alice straight after Killer — «because of all that Broadway shit». Quite rightly so; School's Out drops a strict demarcating line on the band, be­yond which Mr. Furnier started pushing the rest of the guys in an openly theatrical, vaudevillian direction that not only placed more emphasis on the stage show than on the music, but actually sucked much of the grit from the music itself, replacing hard rock riffage with Broadway style, and then, still later, Vegas style flourishes.

 

Not that Furnier's bandmates objected all that much, not at first, at least. On School's Out, all of their four names still feature regularly on the list of songwriting credits ('Alma Mater' is even ex­clusively credited to drummer Neal Smith), and none of them are above adding these names to tracks that are so overtly derivative of West Side Story that they even had to list Bernstein and Sondheim as co-authors to avoid any copyright hassle.

 

Perhaps, though, at this point the band regarded School's Out as merely a one-time experiment: a glitzy "rock musical", loosely based around their own schoolday experiences, combining all sorts of influences and styles, but not necessarily determining, once and for all, their future progress. After all, Alice Cooper, as a band, were no AC/DC and had no desire to stick to one narrow for­mula, and if anything, Killer was solid proof, because it was anything but stylistically monoto­nous three-chord rock. Sure it didn't have any Bernstein bits, but was there anything that legally prevented it from having Bernstein bits? Hardly so. They just hadn't thought about it in 1971.

 

Rock theater starts already on the title track, one that has since been acknowledged as a hard rock classic and has become as firmly embedded in the world of classic rock programming as 'I'm Eighteen' and 'Under My Wheels'. And yes, its monstrous chugga-chug, chugga-chug, chugga-chug-chug riff embodies the hard rock spirit of the early Seventies on the same level of subcon­scious as, say, 'Smoke On The Water'. And Alice's delivery — 'well we got no choice, all the girls and boys' — is as punk as they come, sowing the seeds for Johnny Rotten's entire career.

 

But do not let it fool you: this is show business above all, perfectly illustrated by Alice introducing the song on stage in his top hat and tailcoat, and, on record, by the 'no more pencils, no more books' children's choir, as well as ridiculously over-the-top lyrics like 'school's been blown to pieces'. You'd need to boast a particularly disturbing level of intelligence to take this stuff seriously — as in, 'Alice is sending us school victims a message here' — and it's hardly co­incidental that the song's greatest accompanying visual row was provided not by the Alice Cooper Band themselves, but a few years later on The Muppet Show (a must-see for all concerned).

 

And from this perspective, the uncomfortable discoherence between the opening heavy rock of the title track and the generally more lightweight, big-band-jazzy sound of the rest of the album is not nearly as uncomfortable as it might seem. Besides, there is still plenty of musical diversity; the songs do not easily fall together into any one single style. Not everything works, and some of it may stink, but the band avoids falling into any predictable traps, and overall, School's Out is perfectly enjoyable if you set your expectations accordingly.

 

To test yourself, go straight to the two lengthy centerpieces — 'Blue Turk' and 'My Stars'; if you happen to appreciate both, then you are free to roam the future career of Alice Cooper (the band and the solo artist) at will. 'Blue Turk' is corny, but delicious music-hall, driven by a simplistic, but impressionistic bass riff and ripped in the middle by a lengthy and surprisingly professional jazz jam session, while Furnier is titillating our senses with lyrics that shift between sexual and, uh, necronomical (he'd be far more straightforward about it very soon, with 'I Love The Dead'). 'My Stars', co-written by Furnier with producer Bob Ezrin, is more complex and demanding, lea­ding us into a progressive direction with its unusual piano ostinatos, guitar heroics and undeci­pherable lyrics (a schoolboy's absurd fantasies of world domination? Whatever).

 

If these two are too much for your tastes, there's hardly any hope that you will enjoy the much more straightforward Broadway numbers, like 'Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets' or the instrumental 'Grand Finale', but perhaps you will still be able to dig the slightly rockier numbers, like the creepy 'Luney Tune' (for a long time, Alice muttering 'I'm swimming in blood, like a rat on a sewer floor' was my most disturbing memory of his early output), or the more relaxed barroom-rock stomp of 'Public Animal #9' (yes, I think the title is quite clever).

 

In any case, School's Out — the album — is, by all means, much more than merely eight tracks of fillerish show-music stuck onto one genuine rock'n'roll classic. The truth, as it usually happens, is much more complicated than that. I'd say the truth is that, within most Cooper show numbers, you'll always be able to find a solid grain of serious meaning wrapped in a commercially viable shell of glitz, corniness and spiced with irony and sarcasm. School's Out firmly establishes the man as a buffoon (not that Love It To Death and Killer lacked buffonade, but it was generally wrapped in a less transparent veil), but buffoons are, and have always been, a necessary and vital part of society. And, if you ask me, there is just as much depth and cleverness to the self-con­scious buffonade of Alice Cooper as there is to the grim seriousness of the Clash or to the overtly intellectual posing of the Talking Heads. At this particular moment, I'm perfectly happy to give a thumbs up to the buffoon and his buffonade.

 

BILLION DOLLAR BABIES (1973)

 

1) Hello Hooray; 2) Raped And Freezin'; 3) Elected; 4) Billion Dollar Babies; 5) Unfinished Sweet; 6) No More Mr. Nice Guy; 7) Generation Landslide; 8) Sick Things; 9) Mary Ann; 10) I Love The Dead.

 

Taken cut-for-cut, Billion Dollar Babies probably does not have the same number of truly high points as Killer; and it is certainly not a return to the "rocky" sound of 1971 after the Broadway excesses of School's Out, as some suggest — it is pure glitz and show-biz all the way. But this is not a record to be remembered through its individual songs; its sum is much bigger than its parts, big enough to make the entire album one of the most unforgettable symbols of its time.

 

The accompanying show, partially captured on the Good To See You, Alice Cooper video, was the band's biggest, flashiest, and goriest, culminating in the introduction of the guillotine, and, as usual, the studio record reflects it relatively faithfully; those wondering about what all these odd noises are during 'Unfinished Sweet', or about why we need the repetitive chorus of 'I Love The Dead' sung four times in a row should check out the stage versions for their answers. Again, on the level of individual songs these "soundtrack" elements may not work, but Billion Dollar Ba­bies is not about individual songs: it is a loosely strung concept album about the vices of the so­ciety we live in — some of them open and obvious, but most latent or concealed.

 

This makes Babies the quintessential "glam rock" album — if we want to understand "glam" as rock music's equivalent to the decadence of the late XIXth / early XXth century. Sceptical, cyni­cal, disillusioned as to any past ideals, diving into hedonistic excess and hating it at the same time, terrifyingly suicidal and loving it: 'I love the dead before they're cold/Their blueing flesh for me to hold' — any questions?

 

Mockery and sarcasm do not get more mocking and sarcastic than with the album's opening — if you have ever heard Judy Collins' original version of 'Hello Hooray' (credited to little-known Ca­nadian writer Rolf Kempf), you will know what I mean. The song, sounding like a sweet, roman­tic, slightly hippiesque hymn to the beauty of life, in the hands of the Coop becomes a flashy, tongue-in-cheek intro to the evils of life; his passionate wails of 'I feel so strong!' do not come from an innocent lover of life, they come from Mr. Mephisto in person. Fun stuff.

 

From then on, the songs may not be memorable throughout, but they are always interesting — we get tales of female-induced sexual molestation ('Raped And Freezin'), wannabe politicians with inflated egos ('Elected'), obsessed fetishists (title track), spoiled candy lovers with rotten teeth ('Unfinished Sweet'), outcasts who hate society as much as society hates them ('No More Mr. Nice Guy'), and, of course, Alice's pet themes — herpetophilia ('Sick Things') and the mother of 'em all, necrophilia ('I Love The Dead'). Not a single one of these themes is made to look truly scary, except for little kids, perhaps, but this is not Hitchcock or Carpenter, this is a variety show that just happens to be ever so slightly on the gory side of life. And what a show!

 

Musically, the high point, after all these years, is still 'No More Mr. Nice Guy', the major single from the album and a nagging rock radio classic along the same lines as 'I'm Eighteen', 'Under My Wheels', and 'School's Out'. The opening riff is basically copped from the Who's 'Substitute', but other than that, it is quite an independent Brit-pop number streamlined for catchiness and singalong, if a bit clumsy in the lyrics department; still, it is fun to see the classic optimistic, anthemic sound of Brit-pop "borrowed" for such a wicked anti-social statement.

 

The rest of the tracks may not be equally as solid, but all are loaded with little gimmicks to make them special. They get Donovan — Donovan the hippie symbol! — to trade vocals with Alice on the title track, singing lines like 'rotten little monster, baby I adore you' and sacrificing his angelic reputation in the process (not that his reputation mattered much around 1973). They get a little James Bond-style music in the dentist's office as enormous drills penetrate Alice's cavities on 'Un­finished Sweet'. Out of nowhere, a little 'Martha My Dear'-like music hall number emerges and gives us a fairly believable Alice McCartney ('Mary Ann') — that is, until we learn that Mary­-Ann might really have been a man, and that Alice's interest in her/him has not waned upon the latter's sad demise, if you know what I mean.

 

Fans' opinions are frequently divided as to the final track. 'I Love The Dead' raises the stakes on Alice Cooper's kitschy ugliness: the band's previous accounts of death and delirium were at least disguised as "social statements" (e. g. 'Dead Babies' was really about parental neglect, 'Killer' was about a lost soul etc.), but in 'I Love The Dead' there is nothing except pure, untampered shock value, making it possible to argue that this is the point of no return where Alice Cooper is forever trans­formed from the threatening rocker of Killer into the Mr. Showbiz of Welcome To My Night­mare. Perhaps; to my eyes and ears, though, this is way too fine a distinction, and, besides, impressions can vary.

 

After all, is there really any impenetrable distance between 'Dead Babies' and 'I Love The Dead'? Sure the former was about the amorality of the parents, but it was just as much about chopping baby dolls onstage. And sure the latter is about feeding on dead flesh, but it is just as much about the amorality of the band's audience — who pay real money to watch and listen about this. You could, in fact, argue, that as the song sweeps into its grand, anthemic chorus, 'the dead' to whom Alice refers are not the corpses he claims to be attracted to, but the very people in the concert hall for whose eyes and ears the show is intended. Who is, in fact, more dead — the guy about to have his head chopped off on the guillotine or the people intently watching the process from a safe distance, licking their lips in anticipation? And who loves the dead more — Alice, "sacrificing" himself for the public each night or the public itself? He's got you there, fans and lovers.

 

For dessert, treat yourself to the smartest lyrics on the album — off the unjustly forgotten 'Gene­ration Landslide': 'And I laugh to myself at the men and the ladies / Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies'. I am pretty sure it is songs like this that Bob Dylan referred to when, in one of his interviews, he called Cooper "an underrated songwriter". Thumbs up, of course, even if the album has lost some of its freshness — but none of its major points — today.

 

PS. The double-CD "deluxe edition" is highly recommendable: it adds a near-complete live show from the accompanying tour, recorded in high quality and played with enough variation on the studio album to make it worth your while, although an even better choice would be to get acquai­nted with the video equivalent of Good To See You. In addition, you get the cool Elvis-like rock­abilly B-side 'Slick Black Limousine' and a couple studio demos — and liner notes that trace comparisons between the glam excesses of the Alice Cooper Band circa '73 and the jazzbaby ex­cesses of Joan Crawford circa the Depression, among other things.

 

MUSCLE OF LOVE (1973)

 

1) Big Apple Dreamin'; 2) Never Been Sold Before; 3) Hard Hearted Alice; 4) Crazy Little Child; 5) Working Up A Sweat; 6) Muscle Of Love; 7) Man With The Golden Gun; 8) Teenage Lament '74; 9) Woman Machine.

 

The original Alice Cooper Band's last album is a strange, twisted creation, hard to categorize, explain, or understand. Conventional knowledge states that the main reason of the split between Furnier and his trusty bandmates was artistic: "Alice" was pushing the band further and further in­to theater / vaudeville territory, beyond the already broad-beyond-belief borders of the Billion Dollar Babies show, while Buxton, Bruce, Dunaway, and Smith, on the contrary, were tired of the theatrics and wanted to retreat to the more music-oriented sound and show of the Love It To Death era. But before they parted company, they made Muscle Of Love — an album that is, most definitely, neither here nor there.

 

On one hand, there is very little overt theatricality in this record: in fact, it is much easier to see a direct transition from Babies, with its shocking excesses, to Cooper's first solo album, with its shocking excesses. Muscle Of Love has no shocking excesses, unless one considers the presence of Liza Minnelli as back vocalist a shocking excess in itself. But on the other hand, it is just as hard to call Muscle a "rock" record: it has its share of rock riffs, for certain, yet try to compare the al­bum's heaviest, crunchiest number — the title track — with 'Long Way To Go' or 'You Drive Me Nervous' and then tell me which of them rocks the harder.

 

The inescapable impression is that Muscle Of Love represents a compromise — further confir­med by the removal of Furnier's pal, Bob Ezrin, as producer — that has satisfied no one and, in fact, made things worse than they were. So, Furnier removes the snake theme and the necrophilia theme and the giant toothbrushes and chopped dolls, but the band still goes for vaudeville-like and glam-style arrangements (and, moreover, notice that Alice is listed as co-writer on every track, first time ever). No ballsy rock and no breathtaking show? Not easy to understand why the album was a relative flop compared to its predecessor.

 

Even the lead-off single, 'Teen­age Lament '74', roughly broke the string of radio-ready classic hits: imagine the eternal teenager, who was once given the anthem of his life with 'I'm Eighteen' and then shown the right way to treat his bitch ('Under My Wheels'), his teachers ('School's Out') and society as a whole ('No More Mr. Nice Guy'), now getting a vicious lashing himself: 'What a drag it is, these gold lame jeans, is this the coolest way to get through your teens? Well, I cut my hair weird, I read that it was in — I looked like a rooster that was drowned and raised again.' And the worst blow — Alice is laughing at him with Liza Minnelli in tow!

 

But history seems to have been kind to Muscle Of Love. Shrugged off upon release as a clear sign of the band running out of steam, it has since seen a slow, but steady return of esteem. It is a sleeper and a grower: for the first time in Alice Cooper history, here is a record that tries to reach its core audience not through delightful cheap thrills, but by gradually sinking in. I would go as far, perhaps, as to name it the most intelligently designed record by the original band: nowhere near a masterpiece, but an album that makes plenty of smart musical and lyrical points all the same. The thinking man's Alice Cooper!

 

The pompous opener 'Big Apple Dreamin', the complex ballad 'Hard Hearted Alice' and the Ve­gasy flash of 'Teenage Lament '74' form three pieces of a scattered puzzle where the band kind of takes a step back and takes a sideways look at itself: ambitions, expectations, illusions, disappoin­t­ments. Neither of the three cuts through the senses, but all are at least interesting to follow, and the riffs on 'Big Apple' are actually terrific, although poorly produced. Lyrically, they go way be­yond their previous style, and no sane human being, upon intently listening to this material, could accuse the Cooper band of a lack of substance.

 

In between, we do get much lighter material — cock-rock swagger on 'Working Up A Sweat' and the title track, music hall melodrama on 'Crazy Little Child', B-movie soundtrack on 'The Man With The Golden Gun' (Alice claims that the song was written specially for the James Bond movie, but the produ­cers chickened out at the last minute), and weird, robotic, sci-fi rock on 'Woman Machine'. But nothing is wrong with these songs, either: they simply give us a show of smaller proportions than usual, and, if anything, Cooper's sneer and sarcasm only becomes stronger when he pushes the "external effects" and the titillating elements further in the background. For all I know, he would not again return to this level of irony until his early Eighties' "New Wavy" period.

 

Time has taught me to enjoy the Coop both when he is being gross and when he is being smart, so much so that I cannot imagine people honestly hating Alice in either of these states. Therefore, if the idea of an ugly guy confessing to having had sexual relations with the deceased as his own head gets mock-chopped off onstage does not appeal to you, try Muscle Of Love. Hear the ugly guy confess 'Hard hearted Alice is what we wanna be / Hard hearted Alice is what you wanna see' and, perhaps, gain extra insight inside the ugly guy. Thumbs up — brain-wise, mostly, but liking an Alice Cooper album for its intellectual value is no mean feat by itself.

 

WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE (1975)

 

1) Welcome To My Nightmare; 2) Devil's Food; 3) The Black Widow; 4) Some Folks; 5) Only Women Bleed; 6) Department Of Youth; 7) Cold Ethyl; 8) Years Ago; 9) Steven; 10) The Awakening; 11) Escape.

 

In 1975, it was not yet obvious that Alice Cooper as a band had already sung their swan song. The idea was to put the thing on hiatus, and let everyone do what they wish to do — a wise deci­sion, perhaps, seeing as how the compromise of Muscle never really satisfied anyone. Unfortu­nately, Alice Furnier just happened to love his newly-found freedom so much that he ditched the band altogether, sending them on their own merry way for good — but not forgetting to take the name for himself. From here onwards, Alice Cooper is a solo artist, not a band.

 

The change is visible, but not nearly as drastic as some people insist. For his next album, Alice procured the services of twin glam-guitar-gods, Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter (already well known for their work with Lou Reed and other things; they'd also contributed bits and pieces to the Alice Cooper Band's work as well), and also retea­med with Bob Ezrin, always happy to help out his former pal with another theatrical piece of pro­duction. Obviously, Welcome To My Nightmare, on which the Coop had complete creative free­dom, was to be his flashiest, most gro­tesque and image-heavy production yet, a rock-theater extravaganza of an unprecedented stature. Far from the goriest, by the way: the accompanying stage show did not even feature any of the trademark executions, being instead heavy on decora­tions, dancers, giant spiders, cyclops, smoke, and corny gimmicks a-plenty. (All of this can be easily discovered on the video of the live tour — not to be confused with the somewhat less impressive TV special version of the musical).

 

But what about the music? Alas, the Vegas nature of the ridiculous show has all but wiped out the songs themselves from the public conscience, which is a pity, because, despite all the heavy nods to show-business, and despite Alice's drink problems that were piling up ever higher, there is no way one could accuse the man of dropping quality control standards. Of course, Welcome To My Nightmare should not be approached with the wrong expectations. Back in 1975, people would cautiously ask from around the corner: 'Well... does he still ROCK?' And, upon understanding that he most certainly did not, disappointed, they would leave him to his drink problems. Some­how, someway, public amnesia reached a stage at which nobody remembered that, actually, the last time Alice Cooper was "rocking" was somewhere around 1971, after which the band had almost completely switched to "shocking".

 

In fact, if we initiate a direct comparison of the amount of heavy riffage, Welcome To My Night­mare "rocks" more than Billion Dollar Babies. 'Black Widow' is heavier than anything on that 1973 classic, and 'Devil's Food', 'Cold Ethyl', 'Department Of Youth', and 'Escape' are all upbeat, rhythmic, guitar-driven tunes that honestly pump out the required amount of adrenaline. It is not a rock'n'roll album per se, but neither were its predecessors. It is only the shock of seeing Alice Cooper prefer the company of Broadway dancers dressed in stupid spider costumes to the compa­ny of Baxter, Bruce, and Dunaway that is responsible for unwarranted claims of "Vincent Furnier betraying the ideals of garage rock and becoming a slick Vegas entertainer".

 

The spider costumes are stupid, for sure, but the music is not. Welcome To My Nightmare is a concept album about... nightmares. It introduces the character of 'Steven', a mentally un­stable boy (or, alternately, an Anthony Perkins-type character), possibly locked in a sanitarium (for the live show, Alice would incorporate 'The Ballad Of Dwight Frye' into the proceedings), constantly tormented by voices and visions. The first side of the album gives us the visions, the second in­troduces "Steven" in person; intersections provide different subjects, poorly or not at all connec­ted to the main "plotline", the way it usually is on concept albums.

 

Actually, we begin our journey with a series of B-movie clichés. The title track is all about Alice reveling in his impersonation of the lord of darkness — yes, rather a silly thing to do for a grown up person, but what if the person has simply forgotten to grow up? There is such a great, over­whelming delight in the man's intonations as he tries to spook you with lines like 'welcome to my breakdown, I hope I didn't scare you, that's just the way we are when we come down' that it is impossible not to participate. The song is so perfectly composed to, building up from quiet creepy acoustic guitar to all-out funky jamming, and the laser torch of the Vegasy brass section that cuts its way through guitar and keyboard concrete midway through the tune is the ideal icing. Creepy, but harmless, titillating, but sanitized, Horror-for-Housewives, it is delicious.

 

B-movie flavor hits with even more force on the 'Devil's Food/Black Widow' segment, where the obvious highlight is Vincent Price's lengthy monolog on the glory of Arachnida: 'this friendly little devil is the heptathelidae... unfortunately, harmless...', and where Alice almost matches his cartoon evil style by demanding that we all 'pledge allegiance to The Black Widow'. How can one resist this demand? I do not see how it is possible. Count me in, even though I hate spiders.

 

Still, if Nightmare were all just a lengthy sequence of gut-level pleasure flashes, we could suc­cessfully build up a case against it. But every now and then, Alice adds small vials of substance that have acted as superb preservatives over the years. 'Department Of Youth' continues the mean treatment of his teenage audience, initiated with 'Teenage Lament '74' and now reaching a new scale of grandiosity; watch out for the biggest, deadliest blow on the fade-out as a curious Alice asks his young friends where their power source comes from. 'Only Women Bleed' initiates the decidedly strange trend of sugary ballads as Cooper's main candidates for hit singles — and, al­though I personally do not at all find this newly-found sentimentality for the weaker sex con­vincing, it is still an interesting new page in the man's career.

 

Finally, there is the sprawling Steven Suite on the second side, which also threatens, every now and then, to free itself from the straightjacket clutches of "B-class" material and reach a higher le­vel of conscience. Unless you strongly believe that it is illegal to draw inspiration from pictures of deranged lunatics, it is a masterpiece of the genre — a little overdramatic in places, for sure, but not nearly enough to be officially relocated to the Five-and-Dime area. Plus, there are some beautiful piano passages somewhere out there.

 

So what is Welcome To My Nightmare? I cannot come up with an easy definition. Its serious­ness and irony, intelligence and stupidity, gritty rock and flashy schmaltz cling to each other so tightly that it is forever bound to be the subject of endless debates — and this is good, because debates ensure longevity, which it certainly deserves. I do not even understand which particular part of myself plays a decisive role in giving it a thumbs up, because neither the brain nor the heart have ever found the courage to confess, and yet here it is — a fairly certain thumbs up if there ever was one. A truly mistifying record, though perhaps not quite in the same way that Alice intended it to be.

 

ALICE COOPER GOES TO HELL (1976)

 

1) Go To Hell; 2) You Gotta Dance; 3) I'm The Coolest; 4) Didn't We Meet; 5) I Never Cry; 6) Give The Kid A Break; 7) Guilty; 8) Wake Me Gently; 9) Wish You Were Here; 10) I'm Always Chasing Rainbows; 11) Going Home.

 

As the 1970s slowly begin to usher in the age of punk and disco and retire the age of glam and shock rock, we find Alice flubbering and fidgeting. «Master of the Macabre», sure — but from 1976 and all the way to his questionable «comeback» a decade later, the man has not really relea­sed even one properly macabre record. Instead, he spent all that decade fighting: with himself, over his alcohol addiction and other personal problems, and with the musical scene, trying to re­invent and redefine himself in all sorts of new styles and genres, from Broadway to disco, from art-rock to New Wave.

 

This is the reason why critics, and plenty of fans, think of this period as the «lost years». What good is a man whose output is saddled by drink, and who cannot even decide properly what it is exactly that he wants to do? And what good is a man who used to make mind-blowing killer rock, only to have later flushed it down the toilet and replaced it with show tunes and cheesy humor? Awful times, awful songs, awful sell-out.

 

The title of Alice Cooper Goes To Hell suggests that it may be some sort of conceptual sequel to Welcome To My Nightmare. It is conceptual, for sure, but hardly a sequel. This time, Alice de­picts an imaginary voyage to the depths of Hades — probably also a dream, as indicated in the final track, but not on the part of «Steven», rather on the part of Alice himself. 'For criminal acts and violence on the stage... for all of the decent citizens you've enraged — You — Can Go — To — HELL!' And so he does. The rest is up to Dante.

 

A concept album about Alice Cooper traveling through the nine circles, with realistic musical il­lustrations — hot, hot sounds! — could have been just the thing that fans were waiting for. Asto­nishingly, there is nothing even remotely resembling such a concept. Instead, what you get is, es­sentially, a rock-tinged comic Broadway musical, with a very simple subject: Alice Cooper goes to Hell (depicted, more or less precisely and authentically, as a disco nightclub), meets up with the Devil, pleads for mercy and salvation, confesses his sins, and only manages to avoid eternal torment by... waking up.

 

No giant snakes or lizards, no sword-wielding demons, no pitch or tar or boiling blood, no Bosch level horrors, and even the Devil himself is just a big old bad boss who, so it seems, can be reaso­nable enough unless you flip out too early, which is the protagonist's biggest mistake. Plenty of irony and humor, but no titillation whatsoever: you do not really need to call yourself Alice Coo­per to stage this kind of show. You couldn't exactly be Frank Sinatra to do it, either, but there is nothing whatsoever to scare off the little kids. I bet even Elvis would appreciate.

 

Musically, the last traces of rock'n'roll have been washed away by the onslaught of orchestrated balladry, retro-vaudeville, and disco. We still get a couple crunchy riffs on the title track and 'Wish You Were Here', and Alice tries to mold 'I'm Guilty' in the old garage style, but neither of the three are very convincing as «rock»-style material — they just provide some instrumental di­versity and catchy themes, fist-clenching not included.

 

Topping it all is the album's hit single, 'I Never Cry' — another housewife-level ballad, second in a row. This turns a potential one-time blunder into an alarming tendency: Alice Cooper compe­ting with Barry Manilow? This either got to be the grandest put-on known to mortal man, or the grandest sell-out this side of Rod Stewart.

 

In short, it does not take a genius to understand why Alice Cooper Goes To Hell is usually pin­pointed as the start of the slide by the regular audience (purists, of course, point already to Night­mare or even Muscle Of Love). But there is also a small heretical group of semi-outsiders who confess to loving this record — and this is exactly the group to which your humble reviewer be­longs. According to him, this just happens to be one of Alice's best efforts.

 

Yes, the concept is not particularly smart, but it is FUN. Who but Alice could have thought of arranging the climactic dialog between himself and the Devil in the form of a 1950s doo-wop number ('Give The Kid A Break'), replete with second-rate Woody Allen-like dialog ('can't you give me a break? — Sure thing kid, when hell freezes over')? Who but Alice, when facing the need to pander to contemporary disco audiences, would have incorporated the obligatory dis­co number into his concept in a way that equals disco dancers with sinners confined to eternal torment ('You Gotta Dance')? Finally, who but Alice could have crossed the distance from sharp social irony to hilarious self-parody in two easy steps? Watch for yourself. Step 1: 'For gambling and drinking alcohol constantly... For choosing to be a living obscenity — you can go to Hell!' Step 2: 'You'd poison a blind man and steal his cane... You'd even force feed a diabetic a candy cane — you can go to Hell!'

 

And while the songs may not rock, they are good. 'Go To Hell' is massive and memorable. 'Wish You Were Here' is a complex mini-suite where Wagner and Hunter are eager to show what they have learned about the intricacies of funk. 'I'm The Coolest' is cute minimalistic vaudeville. The ballads suffer from overpompous arrangements, but show an ever-increasing skill; in particular, 'I Never Cry' owes as much to the school of Paul McCartney and Badfinger as 'Only Women Bleed' owes to the school of James Taylor and Carly Simon — feel the difference. It's also much more personal — in fact, probably the first openly confessional tune that Cooper ever wrote about his problems (which is why nobody noticed at the time) — and, hopefully, will stand the test of time better than its hit ballad competition in the face of 'Only Women Bleed' and 'You And Me', also good songs, but rather obviously «fake» in comparison.

 

Goes To Hell does have some structural similarities with Nightmare, in that both albums start off at a high level of tongue-in-cheekiness, and then, by the time the second side comes along, gradually turn into something more disturbing, sincere, and deep. Here, under the superficial «mush» of all the balladeering — 'I Never Cry', 'Wake Me Gently', 'Going Home' — Alice is exposing his sensitive and vulnerable side, not a pretty sight for the fans. I respect the effort in its entirety, and love parts of it. «Broadway» or not, it's an interesting, often exciting, diverse and thought-provoking effort that deserves a thumbs up from all points of view.

 

LACE AND WHISKEY (1977)

 

1) It's Hot Tonight; 2) Lace And Whiskey; 3) Road Rats; 4) Damned If You Do; 5) You And Me; 6) King Of The Silver Screen; 7) Ubangi Stomp; 8) (No More) Love At Your Convenience; 9) I Never Wrote Those Songs; 10) My God.

 

Lace And Whiskey initiates an entirely new period in Alice Cooper history, one that has been much maligned and misunderstood by the public at large. From 1977 to 1984, Alice «Monster» Cooper did not exist, except for the stage, and even there its presence was seriously limited. In its place, the world saw Alice «Human» Cooper, a simple, but smart, human being, tired of the old shock-rock image and looking for new ways to channel his creativity.

 

The world never succeeded in loving him that way. Experimentation was taken to represent loss of direction and paranoid confusion; innovation was seen as selling out; and sincerity and vulne­rability was seen as weakness and silliness. Alice himself looks back upon that period with cau­tion and mistrust, occasionally reviving a number or two, but generally preferring not to remind the fans about its existence. However, he has his own special reason: these years also marked the peak of his alcohol-related problems, and all the records he made back then are inesca­pably tied in with his personal nightmares.

 

But this is exactly what makes this period so fascinating — in my humble opinion, far more fascinating than his clever, but boring commercial «comeback» in the mid-Eighties. Lesser artists may stink when they struggle; artists of Furnier's caliber will shine. Lace And Whiskey has been frequently called the nadir of Alice Cooper's career, in deep stagnation until the final big rebound with 1986's Constrictor. I can only hope that, in time, more people will learn to recognize Con­strictor for what it is — a fun, but cheesy, shallow, dated, overtly calculated shell of a record — and come back to Lace And Whiskey as a serious, memorable, and exciting venture.

 

As usual, there is a concept behind the album, this time a very different one. Alice reinvents him­self as some sort of gangster movie / comic strip personage from the Roaring Twenties («detective Maurice Escargot», he used to introduce himself during shows), telling tales of glam, vice, and Hollywood, and, predictably, deviating into other directions like every good concept album is supposed to deviate. The music, however, is only occasionally «retro»; on the contrary, the LP is crammed with heavy riff tunes, pompous Seventies balladry, a little disco, and some art-rock to complete the picture. (Another reason why critics hated the stuff: in the new­ly nascent age of punk, you were not supposed to do any of that, and Alice fell right in with the other «dinosaurs» like the Stones and the Who).

 

If anything, though, already the opening trio of hard rockers should be enough to redeem the al­bum. 'It's Hot Tonight', propelled by a classic Dick Wagner riff, is Alice's only bit of Satanic fun on the record, his most perfect musical recreation of hellish fever before 1994's Last Temptation. The title track, mixing hard rock with vaudeville, exposes the Coop's own alcohol problems, even if on the surface he is playing an old-time character ('gimme lace and whiskey, mama's home re­medy, double indemnity...' — see?); it takes a few listens to get through to the real pain encoded in the chorus, but once you do, those desperate backing vocals will never sound the same.

 

Alcohol problems, however, never hindered Cooper, Ezrin, and Wagner from rewarding us with the musical masterpiece that is 'Road Rats', Alice's little ode to those faithful roadies without whom there would have been no pythons, chopped dolls, electric chairs, or guillotines: 'we work this band cause they make it rock, but we're the guys that make it roll'. I have no idea why the song is never hailed as a Coop classic; certainly its riffs are simple, but they are every bit as impressive and inspiring as something like 'No More Mr. Nice Guy'. Maybe a different set of lyrics would have worked better — not everyone wants to hear about «low-life scum». Whatever be the case, 'Road Rats' is wedged, quite firmly, in my personal A. C. top 10.

 

The record certainly gets more lightweight from there, bouncing from style to style in a drunk stupor, but how fascinating it all is! '(No More) Love At Your Convenience' is the one truly weak spot, an attempt at a soft dance-pop hit that sounds like a misguided take on a third-rate ABBA reject (and even then, it is sort of catchy). 'Damned If You Do' and the much-reviled cover of the old rockabilly ditty 'Ubangi Stomp' are simple, unpreten­tious, danceable fun; 'King Of The Silver Screen' is a mighty epic character assassination, with Alice blasting off his irony guns at the little man voicing his fantasies; 'I Never Wrote Those Songs' is a deeply personal, confessional ballad, still waiting for appreciation; and 'My God' is one of the weirdest album closers in Alice's career... a glam gospel number?

 

And out of all these crazy, mighty interesting genre experiments, the public at large has only managed to re­member Alice's third-in-a-row soft ballad hit single, 'You And Me', arguably the most cheaply sentimental of his creations (not coincidentally, it was 'You And Me' that Frank Si­natra decided to cover rather than the more personal 'I Never Cry' or the more biting 'Only Women Bleed'). Granted, the duet version with Miss Piggy was awesome in the Muppets context, but who can refrain from smiling upon hearing Alice Cooper, the God of Shock Rock, sing 'that's enough for a working man — what I am is what I am' as if that were correct?

 

Meet Lace And Whiskey, mama's home remedy, a fabulous blunder of a record, a fun journey through uncertainty, self-irony, pain, genre-hopping, and a bunch of excellent melodies. We all reach a certain point in our lives when we can cope with a little disco and a little sentimentality, and if that's what it takes to get songs like 'Road Rats', 'It's Hot Tonight', and 'I Never Wrote These Songs' in return, thumbs up without second thought. Oh, and he had chickens dancing with Tommy guns during live performances of the title track — how cool is that?

 

THE ALICE COOPER SHOW (1977)

 

1) Under My Wheels; 2) I'm Eighteen; 3) Only Women Bleed; 4) Sick Things; 5) Is It My Body; 6) I Never Cry; 7) Billion Dollar Babies; 8) Devil's Food/The Black Widow; 9) You And Me; 10) I Love The Dead/Go To Hell/Wish You Were Here; 11) School's Out.

 

A live album from Alice Cooper makes about as much sense as you guess it makes: without the accompanying «events», the music is still worthwhile — and it must be stated that, no matter how flashy the visual entertainment, Alice always cared highly about the musical component of the show — but what exactly can it add to the studio experience? Very little.

 

This does not mean that all the performed numbers were uniformly inferior quality carbon copies of the studio recordings. The original Alice Cooper band could extend some of them into gritty improvised jams, true to the requirements of the epoch, and so did Furnier's new band, dominated by the Wagner/Hunter duo. For instance, history has preserved for us a gorgeous moment of mu­si­cal masturbation in the guise of a lengthy, spirited «guitar battle» between Wagner and Hunter, as they attack each other — first, figuratively and then, literally! — before eventually launching into 'Black Widow' (this can be seen on the video of the Welcome To My Nightmare tour): Seven­ties' glammy excess at its most guilty-pleasuring.

 

Unfortunately, no such flourishes have been successfully stored on The Alice Cooper Show, a live album released without Alice's consent or knowledge, at a time when his personal and criti­cal problems were heavily multiplying, and overseen by a bunch of people who, apparently, were on­ly capable of appreciating the man from the Cashcow side.

 

Certainly the Lace And Whiskey tour show must have been more coherent than this unruly mess, which starts off as your homebrewed version of Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits Live and then crams «lesser» numbers into heavily edited medleys. Apart from 'No More Nice Guy' (which was probably not performed at all in 1977), all the hit singles are here — including all three ballads, which you encounter when you least expect them (I am particularly knocked out by the idea of hearing the Sinatra-esque sentimentalism of 'You And Me' in between 'The Black Widow' and 'I Love The Dead' — what a creative find!). Little portions of non-hit material are unwillingly al­lowed to seep through every now and then, but you do not get neither the meat of the Lace And Whiskey component of the show, nor the important «Steven»-related segments. What for? The respectable American citizen only wants to hear 'School's Out'. Making matters worse, everything is run through very quickly (limited budget, double LPs not allowed) — and then there is the utterly ridiculous medley that does not have 'Wish You Were Here', as promised (only a short instrumental coda) and abbreviates 'Go To Hell' to the point of non-existence.

 

Ultimately, what saves the album from deserved oblivion is the surprisingly high level of perfor­mance. For one thing, problems or no problems, Alice is in great vocal shape: he sings up a storm on the hard-rocking numbers and displays plenty of theatrical brilliance on the showier tunes; his performance on 'I Love The Dead', for instance, is sharper and creepier than on the live version from the 1973 tour (as heard on the bonus disc for Billion Dollar Babies). And as for the backing band — Wagner and Hunter are the kind of seasoned pros who will stupefy audiences from their wheelchairs, let alone mishandled live albums. Even here, they get their own moment of personal glory during the solo parts on 'I'm Eighteen'.

 

Alice himself has always hated this album, eventually squeezing it out of the public conscience by releasing a personally approved live recording twenty years later; for a long time, it has been out of print and has few chances of making it back there — especially now that we have official access to live stuff from 1973. Still, its reputation of representing Alice at his worst is just as ex­aggerated as the negative feelings for Lace And Whiskey itself. It just wasn't a good year for the man, but he could still put up a mean show. For all of its indirect flaws — lack of authorization, commercialism at the wheel, awful construction, hideous flow — I am tempted, brain-wise, to issue it a thumbs down, but every time I listen to it, I still dig every second of it, and, since the heart takes precedence, it is still a thumbs up. And a hint to those few good, thinking people that may someday own the rights to the Cooper catalog —remastering, restructuring, and expanding the record would only honor the man's legacy.  

 

FROM THE INSIDE (1978)

 

1) From The Inside; 2) Wish I Was Born In Beverly Hills; 3) The Quiet Room; 4) Nurse Rozetta; 5) Millie And Billie; 6) Serious; 7) How You Gonna See Me Now; 8) For Veronica's Sake; 9) Jackknife Johnny; 10) Inmates (We're All Crazy).

 

The album cover is pretty clever. We still see Alice «The Monster», painted eyes and mouth and all — but, instead of scaring us by way of the usual grotesquerie, he scares us by letting us know that the monster is, no doubt about it, on the verge of collapsing. Pale white face, eyes wide ope­ned with no emotion other than uncontrolled panic, mouth half-open in bewilderment, this is a very vulnerable, pitiable Alice Cooper staring at his own mortality.

 

As the Lace And Whiskey tour drew to a close, Alice made his first conscious attempt at kicking the alcohol addiction by checking himself into a New York mental hospital, no less. Unfortuna­tely, it did not work (not for long, at least), but, on the good side, it gave him plenty of shocking impressions — truly shocking impressions — to base his next album around it; a concept record, for the first time in Alice history based on something in the real world, even if the subject (insani­ty) would certainly fit in well with the Coop image; in fact, Alice had already tackled the issue seven years earlier, with 'The Ballad Of Dwight Frye'. Now he'd had some first-hand experience at it, and why let such great material go to waste?

 

The new approach apparently deserved a new musical setting, and From The Inside sees huge changes in the entourage. First, Alice teamed up with Bernie Taupin, Elton John's royal lyricist (who, as chance would have it, had just temporarily broken up with Elton), to give the lyrics a more serious, poetic twist. Second, along with Bernie, he enlisted part of Elton's own backing band, including Dee Murray on bass and Davey Johnstone on guitar. Dick Wagner still stays on to add an occasional sparkling solo or two, but Steve Hunter is gone, dissolving the duo. The legendary Jim Keltner plays drums, Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick guest stars on guitar, and Marcy Levy, the backing singer from Eric Clapton's band, duets with Alice on one number. Now how is that for a quintessential hodge-podge?

 

As for the songs, they actually do form a real concept — everything is either describing the gene­ral conditions in or impressions of the asylum, or tells little stories of people «hosted» within its walls. Credit usually goes to Cooper, Taupin, and Wagner, occasionally to new producer David Foster (who, for some reason, replaces Bob Ezrin, much as I think Ezrin would have been the perfect producer for this thing — but perhaps he was too busy working on The Wall at the same time), and, frankly, I am not even sure of how much actual musical content — beyond the general «spirit» of the thing — is owed here to Alice in person.

 

Because if there is something that From The Inside could be compared to, it is definitely not pre­vious Alice Cooper albums, but rather previous Elton John albums — good Elton John albums, that is. The glammy rockers sound like Elton John, MOR-oriented guitars and keyboards and all. The male-female duet between Alice and Marcy brings on memories of Elton and Kiki Dee. The strings arrangements remind one of Paul Buckmaster. And the ballads? Don't even let's start with the ballads. When I think of the ballads, I inevitably come to one of two conclusions: either the whole thing is a hoot and Elton John is the uncredited writer of these melodies, or the whole thing is a different hoot and Bernie Taupin really wrote all the music, while Elton was just sitting there flashing his glasses at the audience.

 

'How You Gonna See Me Now' is a magnificent ballad, but it is an Elton John ballad; Alice even sings like Elton, borrowing all of his typical moves. Listen to 'just to let you know...', to 'yes I'm worried honey...', to 'you know I've let you down in oh so many ways' — this belongs in the same category as 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight' or 'Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me'. Not that I mind. Alice or Elton, it is a song that expresses one's horror and shame at the perspective of going back to one's family «after the ordeal», and it is Alice's second shrillest personal confession after 'I Never Cry', only to be surpassed by 'Pass The Gun Around' five years later.

 

The rest of the album is a delightful — sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes creepy — mix of tongue-in-cheek and deathly seriousness, sometimes within the same song. The rockers have their share of humor, most prominent in 'Nurse Rozetta': we cannot expect an Alice Cooper album with no dirtiness in sight, so here, with salacious metaphors, he describes a patient's sexual fanta­sizing (well, let us face it, not exactly a forced subject for a hospital). The epic ballads are more painful, like 'The Quiet Room' ('I just can't get this wrist to bleed!') and the 'Millie And Bil­lie' duet, which starts off like a really generic Broadway number but then moves into uncomfor­table territory, as, to the ominous sounds of the string orchestra and a drill, the 'criminally insane' Billie is carried away (for lobotomizing?).

 

Best of all is the skilful conclusion: 'Inmates' is an expertly constructed anthem, alternating Wag­nerian orchestral swoops, stately Eltonian mid-tempo balladry, the traditional Coop school of vaudeville, and a 'Hey Jude'-style conclusion where everyone joins in a cheery chorus of 'we're all crazy, we're all crazy' as the strings dance around them, creating a mock-epic mood where you have no idea whether you are supposed to laugh, cry, or fall into a trance. A perfectly questio­nable ending for an album that gives no answers and passes no judgements. It is not exactly «rea­lism» — Alice's fantasy worlds are too demanding to let him ground himself completely — but it is very close, and, frankly, it might have simply been boring were it all purely realistic.

 

Not all the songs seem to be on the level — some, as expected, are too heavily focused on the conceptual side to be memorable (e. g. 'Jackknife Johnny') — but the record is in the «grower» category, and, in my case, it grew enough to deserve a thumbs up both from the heart, moved by Furnier's troubles, and the brain, delighted by all the inventiveness and creativity with which these trou­bles have been converted into art.

 

FLUSH THE FASHION (1980)

 

1) Talk Talk; 2) Clones (We're All); 3) Pain; 4) Leather Boots; 5) Aspirin Damage; 6) Nuclear Infected; 7) Grim Facts; 8) Model Citizen; 9) Dance Yourself To Death; 10) Headlines.

 

This time, the cover proudly flashes the inscription «ALICE COOPER '80», which makes it a little dubious that Alice is truly going to «flush the fashion». On the contrary, he embraces the fashion — not to the point of sacrificing his old self, but to the point of sacrificing his old sound. This is the sharpest, least expected shift in his solo history so far.

 

At each step in Alice's career, there was a small disgruntled group of old fans who would jump ship; Flush The Fashion must have caused a particularly large disturbance. Openly and shame­lessly, the album borrows the musical trappings of the likes of The Cars: old guitar-driven pop rock structures dressed in trendy modern electronic clothes — industrial synthesizers, ping pong percussion, even processed vocals (sometimes). Why should Alice Cooper, father of all things shock, innovator extraordinaire, now reinvent himself as a New Waver, imitating those who grew up on his own records, among other things?

 

It is sometimes easy to forget here that, musically speaking, Alice Cooper — neither the band nor the solo artist — never «invented» anything; their chief know-how was their image, not the music, which, despite generally being high quality, always looked up to somebody else. If the guy could look up to the Stones, or the Who, or Bowie, or Elton John, why can't he look up to The Cars?

 

Particularly since Flush The Fashion, looking at it from a particular point of view, is better than most Cars albums (and I like The Cars quite a bit). Surprisingly, there are no more ballads — breaking up with the well-estab­lished tradition, Alice chose the weird sci-fi rock of 'Clones' to forward his new image — and the ten pop-rock songs put such a heavy emphasis on irony and humor that it is all but impossible to get seriously offended or bored by the material, even if you find it uneven.

 

Among the good news is Alice's simultaneous decision to refresh and renew his rock'n'roll roots. The record opens with a gritty electronic reworking of The Music Machine's garage classic 'Talk Talk' (this was way before Nuggets, in the form of a bulky boxset, became an obligatory requirement for the refined music fan), includes a brief, but fun rockabilly snippet ('Leather Boots') and, despite all the keyboard-heavy production style, includes a fair share of seriously ass-kicking riffs ('Nuclear Infected', 'Grim Facts', etc.). 'Talk Talk' is, in fact, fairly symbolic of the album as a whole: Cooper drags out a retro obscurity, implying that rock'n'roll ain't and never was noise pol­lution, gives it a contemporary arrangement, implying that it makes no sense not to change, and comes out with a winner, implying that best results are always gotten when the old and the new go hand in hand, rather than taking pot shots at each other.

 

As for the humor, it is well on the level — no slapstick in sight, satire a-plenty: 'Clones (We're All)' is a nasty swipe at mass mentality; 'Aspirin Damage' exposes the addiction problem with the aid of an unforgettable — especially if you are a third-grader — chorus ('Sometimes I find myself shaking from the medication taken!'); 'Pain' is Alice in his native element, an anthem sung from Pain's point of view ('It's a compliment to me to feel you screaming through the night', he conclu­des in classic «Steven»-like fashion); and 'Model Citizen' continues the artist's crusade against the self-important bourgeois. For those who like their humor/grit ratio at around 1 : 4, there is 'Grim Facts', where Alice «slices through the vices» both with his angriest vocal performance on the re­cord and Davey Johnstone's fittingly «grim» guitat melody — and you can certainly see the seeds of born-again Christianity sown with the Coop's creepy tales of teenage moral decay.

 

It may be a little sad to realize that Furnier has, once again, completely disappeared behind the Alice Cooper mask; his true (or, at least, «true-looking») personality, having broken through thick crust on Goes To Hell and culminated with From The Inside, has now gone into hiding again — no doubt, due to the temporary alcohol-free relief after the sanitarium experience. But then, expecting to have regular glimpses of Alice Cooper's true face is about as justified as expec­ting the same from one of Shakespeare's clowns: their function is simply different, and Flush The Fashion is as typical of the typical Alice Cooper function as the typical Alice Cooper function typically gets, and this should be deemed good enough.

 

Flush The Fashion is almost criminally short (less than half an hour), and has a couple oddities-among-oddities whose effect, either expected or actual, is not well understood (e. g., the obscure purpose of the mix of mid-1970s Stones-style riffage and Dylan-style vocalization on 'Dance Yourself To Death'). But overall, this is a brilliant reinvention that allows Alice to stay in touch with the times while being true to his vision — and it opens wide the doors to one of his most interesting, if, unfortunately, most neglected musical periods that would last for three more years and three more albums. Thumbs up by all means.

 

SPECIAL FORCES (1981)

 

1) Who Do You Think We Are; 2) Seven & Seven Is; 3) Prettiest Cop On The Block; 4) Don't Talk Old To Me; 5) Generation Landslide; 6) Skeletons In The Closet; 7) You Want It, You Got It; 8) You Look Good In Rags; 9) You're A Movie; 10) Vicious Rumours.

 

When looked at in its proper context, there is only one thing that might be wrong with Flush The Fashion — it digests the sounds of the new age with care and intelligence, but perhaps a bit too obnoxiously. It's like: "I'm Alice Cooper and now I sound like all these new guys with funny hair­styles! Let me join the club, I'm worthy!"

 

Well, Alice did get a haircut around the time Special Forces came out, but, more importantly, he toned down the sci-fi keyboards a bit, retaining the New Wave elements that modernized his image but no longer putting them at the forefront of his melodies. And so, his new album is every bit as fun, catchy, and clever as the old one — and it sounds less dated today.

 

For the critics, it was another clear sign of how confused, out-of-touch and generally lost Alice Cooper became in the post-glam world. A «techno» reworking of Love's 'Seven & Seven Is'? A pseudo-live re-recording of 'Generation Landslide' that adds nothing (good) to the original? The idiot stutter on 'You Want It, You Got It'? Straightahead mockery of his old scary image in 'Ske­letons In The Closet'? Who needs all this in the wake of the Clash and U2?

 

For those who like their Alice Cooper confused and out-of-touch, though, most, if not all, of this record will be super-enjoyable. First, it contains at least two of his best written pop-rock melodies in 'Who Do You Think We Are?' (the question has two answers, the complex 'Special forces in an armored car!' and the more simple 'We don't care!') and 'You Look Good In Rags' — ter-riff-ic guitar line, hilarious anti-socialite lyrics and an outrageous coda. Maybe alcohol was affecting his creative vein — but, for all I know, in a positive way.

 

'You Want It, You Got It' is a crude, clown­ish, but doggone funny poke at superstardom's ex­cesses; 'You're A Movie' returns us to the issue previously tackled with 'King Of The Silver Screen', but in a campier, grinnier way; 'Prettiest Cop On The Block' is worth it for the title alone; and 'Skeletons In The Closet', with its harpsichord theme that transforms «creepy» into «kiddie-spooky», is just a masterful send-up of all the «va­lues» of Welcome To My Nightmare that I can only imagine how it could offend all those who used to take Alice Cooper way too seriously.

 

Not everything works, and the idea of reworking 'Generation Landslide' remains unclear — was Alice simply trying to say that everything the original band denounced in society back in 1973 was still actual in the society of 1981, or did he simply need to fill up some empty space on the LP? — but, overall, this is an inspired, well-crafted, and thoroughly funny piece of work. Yes, it is al­so the first piece of work for which Cooper has to take all of the credit: with Wagner, Hunter, Ezrin, and even the Elton John backing band gone, I have little idea of who the players on here are, apart from the names, and presume that most of the songwriting and arranging ideas came from the Coop himself.

 

In a certain way, although no one realized it at the time, Special Forces must have been a preci­ous drop of humor in a musical world that was taking itself way too seriously, what with all the new musical development and the renewal of the doomed struggle to heal the world's problems with the power of music. And, just as it was during the original band's peak years, here is Alice again, with satire and heavy grinning to show how fruitless this struggle can be. Maybe he over­does the «musical slapstick» bit a little, ensuring that Special Forces will never, ever be worship­ped on the level of Killer or Billion Dollar Babies, but it still proudly deserves its thumbs up.

 

ZIPPER CATCHES SKIN (1982)

 

1) Zorro's Ascent; 2) Make That Money (Scrooge's Song); 3) I Am The Future; 4) No Baloney Homosapiens; 5) Ada­p­table; 6) I Like Girls; 7) Remarkably Insincere; 8) Tag, You're It; 9) I Better Be Good; 10) I'm Alive.

 

By this time, the alcohol problem was seriously catching up with Alice once again — to the point that he subsequently stated he had no memories whatsoever of recording this and the next record. Too bad: they happened to be, respectively, his weirdest/funniest and his most honest/personal al­bums to date — yet neither of them had a tour behind it, and no material has, even later on, been in­corporated into an Alice live show.

 

For Zipper Catches Skin, Dick Wagner returns full-time, playing on many of the songs and even co-writing a couple. This means that the New Wave overtones are somewhat hushed down (good news for all the old-fashioned fans who hated the Cars-like synthesizers), but does not make the record rock any harder than its immediate predecessors. Oh, there is a decent rock sound through­out, sure, but the most important goal here is to raise the stakes in the humor department, and serious humor does not go hand in hand with too much headbanging.

 

Predictability has never been one of Alice's major sins, but Zipper, in all of its weird splendor, nearly returns us to those crazy days of the late 1960s when the original Alice Cooper band was trying so hard to apply their garage muscles to the construction of Zappa's bizarre panopticum. Of course, the songs are songs, not disconnected atonal snippets, and their non-trivial messages do make certain sense — but other than that, this is sheer madness that certainly goes way beyond spec­tacle, vaudeville, and parody. Who else but a seriously deranged person could have written a song called 'I'm Alive (That Was The Day My Dead Pet Returned To Save My Life)' whose lyrics actually justify the title?

 

No one will ever be able to explain, least of all the amnesia-suffering Alice himself, why he tho­ught it commercially and artistically viable to write a song about the death of Zorro, or how he happened to come across lyrics like 'Yeah, I'm a Sony, you're Panasonic, I'm heavy metal, you're philharmonic', or why most of Side 2 rushes past the listener as if each individual song had a very serious individual bladder problem. Some things have slightly better motivation: 'No Baloney Homosapiens', for instance, pokes slow, ponderous fun at the human race in general, which is ra­ther typical of Alice, while 'Tag, You're It', first time in years, brings back the «scary» Alice, al­beit in grossly overdone form — the song may drop a reference to Halloween, but it is a comic performance, not a thrilling one.

 

None of the songs are too memorable; the goal is, at the most simplest, to amuse, and, at the most complex, to stupefy, certainly not to make you hum such catchy lines as 'If I ain't cool, my daddy gonna send me to military school, if I ain't nice, my girlie gonna freeze me with cold shoulder ice'. This is probably why, despite Dick Wagner, there is not a single distinctive riff, and why Alice never actually sings anything, rapping out all the lyrics like Groucho Marx's lost twin. But this is also why, in spite of these shortcomings, the record works. All the schizophrenically shifting ideas, all the misguided creativity, like a firehose gone out of control — none of this is truly mea­ningful or instructive, but it sure gets your attention like nothing else. And better not concentrate on the fact that it was alcoholism that drove the man to such dubiously delirious artistic heights, because you just might want to try this at home, without being a professional.

 

To sum it up — both the brain and the heart department had firmly settled upon a thumbs up from the very first time they heard this record; but up to this day, they are still having a hard time explaining what the hell made them persist in this decision.

 

DADA (1983)

 

1) DaDa; 2) Enough's Enough; 3) Former Lee Warmer; 4) No Man's Land; 5) Dyslexia; 6) Scarlet And Sheba; 7) I Love America; 8) Fresh Blood; 9) Pass The Gun Around.

 

By a miraculous stroke of luck, Bob Ezrin, after a period of recuperation from all the stress cau­sed by The Wall, returned one last time to produce what is, today, very commonly recognized as the «lost gem» in Alice's catalog. Of course, all of his early Eighties' records are criminally un­der­rated. But the entire stretch from Flush The Fashion to Zipper Catches Skin, no matter how exciting from a general point of view, was certainly not very Cooperish: the theater vibe suppres­sed, the sci-fi New Wave elements replacing all the hard rock, and the entire balance tipped way too seriously towards the humor and irony end of things.

 

Dada is, of course, the name of an art movement, somewhat hinted at by the use of a modified Salvador Dali painting as the cover — even though Dali himself was never part of that movement. It is hard to tell whether DaDa the album was in any way stimulated by the Dada trend, though, because, if anything, it quenches most of the surrealistic trends that ran through Cooper's previous albums — even with all of its references to vampires, it is still quite brutally realistic. More likely, the primary use of the title referred to baby talk, and the art connotations, if any, came as an after­thought.

 

With DaDa, Alice manufactured the impossible: retaining all the best qualities of his later work — incessant experimentation, modernistic production, etc. — he once again gave the fans a quin­tessentially Alice Cooper album, but darker, deeper, creepier than Welcome To My Nightmare ever hoped to be. The biggest difference is that DaDa is not exactly show business. Created and recorded by an essentially dying man — Furnier's alcohol problem was at its absolute peak — it was not accompanied by any subsequent touring, and, in fact, the songs would not easily lend themselves to any reasonable stage treatment. The general atmosphere of the record, some would say, is closely reminiscent of Berlin-era Lou Reed and The Wall-era Pink Floyd: hardly surpri­sing, considering Ezrin's involvement in both of these projects. In fact, it would seem that Bob's goal was to create a little mini-Wall for Alice himself. The continuity is most glaringly observed in the «looping» structure of the album, beginning with the recording of a baby saying 'Dada!...' and ending with the same — but it also deals with pretty much the same subjects throughout: ali­e­nation, parents-children conflict, addiction, psychosis, and guilt.

 

And, just like Waters was trying to build on his own emotional experiences and traumas, so does Alice transform this into his most personal album. How do we know this, when nothing is made particularly explicit? Well, obviously Alice's father did not sell him out on the streets for cash upon the death of his mother ('Enough's Enough'). In fact, Alice's father was an ordained Elder and anything of the sort would have become the Sacrilege of the Century. But the song, a slow-moving hard-rocker with «light prog» overtones, is so bleak in its lyrics and its arrangement that, no matter how shocking the subject is, it goes way beyond ordinary shock-rock: there is no over­riding desire here to gross out the audience, there is a mad drive to take it out on someone's Dad — someway, somehow.

 

After the father comes the brother: 'Former Lee Warmer' returns us to the well-explored territory of 'Dwight Fry' and 'Steven', now re-invaded with re-kindled passion and increased experience. Then comes the misogyny, weirdly joined with schizophrenia, in 'No Man's Land'. 'Dyslexia' of­fers one little drop of pure humor ("Is dis love, or is dys-lexia?"), before we are thrust into the hellish Middle Eastern paradise of S&M with 'Scarlet And Sheba', subjected to a poisonously vicious lashing of the stereotypical redneck in 'I Love America', and, finally, immersed into the romantic, but boring and depressing life of a vam­pire stalking its prey on 'Fresh Blood'.

 

Had all these songs been recorded five or six years earlier, they would have born a Stamp of the Silly; in the context of DaDa, even the ode to vampires takes on a personal aspect; its tired mid-temp funk groove may not be exciting per se, but it fits in very well with the concept of a vampire who keeps on doing his bloodsucking routine out of pure necessity rather than out of some sort of evil excitement and a sense of romantic destiny calling. Same thing with 'Scarlet And Sheba': the exotic sexual pleasures are presented neither as exciting/titillating, nor as dangerous/perfidious — the nagging chorus "I just want your body, Sheba, I don't want your brain" sounds like the prota­gonist does not really care all that much for the body either. Just the same old routine. Same old story. Same old whips and chains. Overfed, overspoiled, disgusted with everything in sight.

 

No wonder, then, that the album ends on an appropriately suicidal note and arguably the most per­sonal song the Coop ever gave us. 'Pass The Gun Around' is one of his cleverest titles (as much as cultural history has discredited the concept of puns, one has to admit that, in this context, the line "give everyone a shot" is just brilliant), and Ezrin cloaks the song in a gorgeously despe­rate anthemic veil, while the trusty Dick Wagner contributes what I find to be his best guitar solo on an Alice Cooper record — taking a few easily noticeable hints from David Gilmour, but adjus­ting the catharsis mood to his own early-Seventies over-the-top glam style, with breathtaking re­sults. In the end, 'Pass The Gun Around' is a song of epic proportions, tragically overlooked by the music world because it happened to be produced by the wrong artist at the wrong time — or, perhaps, because its subject matter was just too uncomfortable to be hailed publicly.

 

If it is at all true that great artists tend to produce their greatest art when totally strung out at the end of their rope, there is no greater proof of that than DaDa. The only thing that can, and will, prevent people from hailing it as one of the decade's finest achievements is bias of the «how can an Alice Cooper album not by the original band be anything but a shallow candy wrapper?» kind. Yet even Alice Cooper is human, and, as such, theoretically capable of communicating with his audience through some individual mutation of an art form. If it took him a decade of hard drin­king to get to this point, there definitely is something to be said for hard drinking; at least we can state that not all of that «Stoli Vodka» had been consumed in vain.

 

Hopefully, when the dust settles and the finest and brightest of our children's children's children begin exploring the Alice Cooper backlog without using 'Poison' or even 'School's Out' as the star­ting point, DaDa will occupy its rightful place of honour. Until that day, I can only give it a major joint thumbs up as a record that does a great job of wiring up the brain and rocking the heart at the same time. Furthermore, it can be a terrific, utterly non-banal way of getting into Ali­ce Cooper in the first place. Start with DaDa — and you will never want to end up with Trash.

 

CONSTRICTOR (1986)

 

1) Teenage Frankenstein; 2) Give It Up; 3) Thrill My Gorilla; 4) Life And Death Of The Party; 5) Simple Dis­obe­dience; 6) The World Needs Guts; 7) Trick Bag; 8) Crawlin'; 9) The Great American Success Story; 10) He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask).

 

Freedom of choice or predetermination? In 1983, Alice had but two options: go down by losing all the vital organs, or make one last desperate attempt to break his dependency. He chose the lat­ter, and must be commended for it. But, having cleaned up his act and taken a two-year break from the music industry altogether, the only smart logical choice for the next step was to re-estab­lish his sunk career. And when 1986, the absolute worst year for music in XXth century, is on the threshold, how do you re-establish your sunk career? That's right: by putting out the inarguably most rotten record of your entire career.

 

It is not difficult to understand the driving force behind this. The Coop did not just want to go back to making records again; he was in acute need of something that would reinstate his confi­dence in himself and his power over the crowds — not to mention acute need of replenishing his bank account. He also probably experienced some nostalgia for the horror shows of old, which he hadn't produced for about a decade now. In short, the man needed to be back!

 

But the man was also smart enough to understand that, if he wanted to capture a new audience of Eighties' teens, he had to meet their contemporary expectations. Since synth-pop was obviously not a good choice, the only other one was hair metal. Accordingly, Alice hired a hair metal guita­rist by the name of Kane Roberts, who satisfied pretty much every single cliché of the genre: big, brutal, utterly stupid riffs and meaningless finger-flashing solos, played by a hairy dude with a Rambo complexion whose every stage move suggested having missed a successful career in porn flicks in favour of a misguided stunt at music-making. The rest of the band were mostly complete unmentionables. And Dick Wagner must have been begging on the streets.

 

The corny, mock-creepy arrangements would have probably ruined the album even if Alice made the mistake of populating it with well-written songs. Fortunately, he did not; with his superpower IQ, he calculated that dumb times called for dumb tunes, and every single one of these ten songs must have been conceived and hummed during a quick bathroom break. Lyrically, there are three subjects: (a) «rebellion» ('Simple Disobedience'; 'Give It Up') — generic verses about teenage unrest, which, in this context, are about as smart as the album gets; (b) «shagging» — Alice had long since be­come only very modestly and occasionally interested in picturing the basic elements of this pro­cess on record, but, since he now had to compete with Mötley Crüe, there was hardly any choice ('Crawlin'; 'Trick Bag'); (c) «gore» — now that the horror show was back, it needed fresh songs, and, since most Eighties' teens had a hard time understanding the concepts of «irony» and «metaphor», the images had to be slapped in their faces on a far more direct level ('Teenage Frankenstein'; 'The World Needs Guts' — the titles speak for themselves).

 

Cooper's expertise still shows through in that most of the tunes are mildly catchy: you take one or two listens, you look back at the song names, and you will get a devilish urge to hum them and make yourself look silly. (I still think it was a particularly dirty trick on Alice's part to make peo­ple sing along to the lines 'Where were you when the monkey hit the fan? Thrill my gorilla!'). The teens were impressed — to the point of putting Alice back on the charts (the record hit No. 59, his highest since Flush The Fashion). The new show was also successful, with Alice setting new records for the amount of blood'n'guts splattered around, getting into good old confrontations with local authorities, and, overall, having a mighty good time with it all. And he probably nee­ded this — who knows, maybe if he did not succeed in this corny comeback, his confidence would have been shattered forever and we would have been deprived of his later artistic succes­ses (not to mention that he could have easily gone back to drinking).

 

But to understand is one thing, and to forgive and enjoy is another. When your comeback single, presumptiously titled 'He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask)', is not even a bona fide rocker, but a goofy pop song propelled by the cheapest synthesizer patterns in existence, not to mention a legitimate part of the soundtrack to Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (!), you know for sure this is not a record that is going to go down in history as a classic. What you do know for sure is that it is just one more piece of evidence of how deep down the drain mainstream taste had gone in ten years. In 1973, the world wanted Alice Cooper to give it Billion Dollar Babies; in 1986, the world was fairly happy to have Constrictor. Play them back to back. Taste the difference. Times have sure changed, haven't they? Please join me in my thumbs down.

 

RAISE YOUR FIST AND YELL (1987)

 

1) Freedom; 2) Lock Me Up; 3) Give The Radio Back; 4) Step On You; 5) Not That Kind Of Love; 6) Prince Of Darkness; 7) Time To Kill; 8) Chop, Chop, Chop; 9) Gail; 10) Roses On White Lace.

 

It took a clearly rejuvenated Alice less than a year after the silliness of Constrictor to follow it up with an album even more silly. Raise Your Fist And Yell follows in the exact same vein, but ups the antes in every respect. The album cover (this time, Alice merges his made-up face with a fist rather than a snake) is campier. The lyrics are more primitive. The tunes emphasize the gore aspect far more strongly. And 'Chop, Chop, Chop' might just be the single most ridiculous song title on an Alice album to appear in ages.

 

Too bad, because the lead single at least shows promise. One need not, after all, think that all hair metal is meritless by definition. Its basic aesthetics and sound requirements have aged badly, but when they happened to be placed across a good melody and a decent message, sometimes the big elec­tronic drums and the guitar pyrotechnics could help carry it all off with extra power. This is what Alice demonstrates on 'Freedom', which seems to have been written in an inspired mood — it ta­kes off where 'Simple Disobedience' left off on the last album, a well-calculated rebellion anthem pandering to teenage tastes of the decade, but so was 'School's Out', and, while 'Freedom' is no 'School's Out', Alice's battle cry of "You better leave us, man, 'cuz you sure can't take us!" certa­inly rings the bell.

 

"We're a make-up metal degeneration", he also states, "we're not as stupid as you want to make us". 'Make-up metal degeneration' is, in fact, a great summary of most of this album; unfortunate­ly, it does look like Alice is quite consciously trying to make his audiences look as stupid as possible, interested in preciously little beyond slasher movies, reckless partying, and non-stan­dard sexual practices. The presence of irony in all these songs cannot be doubted, but it's an irony that has to be reconstructed, based on what we know about Alice, rather than heard or felt directly.

 

The cheese-o-meter needle keeps oscillating as we progress through this mess, throwing the lis­tener off his balance whenever he seems to have found some sort of hold. For instance, 'Time To Kill', as the signature song of a homicidal maniac, is not entirely awful — its brutal chorus works a certain brutal charm on you, and, on a particularly pissed-off evening, Alice's well-focused "I feel the fire in my eyes, I only got time to kill!" will help you vent your frustration as perfectly as any «intelligent» MC5 or Clash anthem. (Heck, many of us go through moments when we'd ra­ther like to be Freddy Krueger than Martin Luther King, Jr.). But when the next song is the afore­mentioned 'Chop Chop Chop', well, "...I only got time to kill" indeed.

 

As catchy as some of the choruses are ("give the radio back, to the maniac!"; "if you don't like it, you can lock me up, woah-oh-oh-oh!"; and it can take up to one week of recuperation to get rid of the cretinous line "chop chop chop, engine of destruction!" ringing in your head), the music behind them is uniformly atrocious — Kane Roberts is pathologically unable to write a memo­rable riff, or to play a solo passage that goes beyond mindless superficial copying of Eddie Van Halen's patterns. 'Freedom' is good, and 'Time To Kill' might be salvaged through transplantation on a different album, but everything else has been designed with 'stink' in mind, and so, predic­tably, it stinks. Thumbs down.

 

TRASH (1989)

 

1) Poison; 2) Spark In The Dark; 3) House Of Fire; 4) Why Trust You; 5) Only My Heart Talkin'; 6) Bed Of Nails; 7) This Maniac's In Love With You; 8) Trash; 9) Hell Is Living Without You; 10) I'm Your Gun.

 

Trash is a puzzle. At least, it is fun to think of it as a puzzle. First, it was Alice's startlingly unex­pected commercial breakthrough, his biggest critical and especially commercial success since God knows when. Second, it eventually became one of Alice's most despised albums — at least, on the part of both the old guard of The Monster's long-term fans, and the newer generation of picky eaters, free from the virus of the Eighties. Third and final, it is not really as painfully flat and obvious a re­cord as it may seem — it deserves some serious thinking.

 

That the primary idea behind Trash was to endear Alice to a whole new brand of young admirers and to solidify his commercial base is beyond doubt. Why else would he want to enlist corporate songwriter Desmond Child to help out with the writing and recording of most of the songs? Why else all the guest star appearances by Jon Bon Jovi and members of Van Halen and Aerosmith? Why else replace the perversely charismatic, but over-brutal figure of Kane Roberts with slicker, more self-controlled, but even more faceless guitarists? Why else have Diane Warren in person co-write one of the songs (thankfully, not one of the ballads)?

 

And yet, I do not think it is entirely correct to dub Trash a direct «sell out». Rather, it is a curious «experiment in selling out» — a little game that the Coop played on society for his own personal amusement. When people «sell out», this normally surmises a conscious (or, sometimes, subcon­scious) rejection of one's own artistic ambitions as you plainly enslave whatever talent you have — singing, playing, writing — to the industry people, who gain the right to fuck with it in any way they like, depen­ding on the current fashion. Most frequently, however, people are at least marginally ashamed of selling out, trying to somehow mask the cheapness of their product by in­cluding something «personal» or «complex» or trying to save at least a couple of their old trade­marks, so they can cling to some straw in case they get pummelled in interviews.

 

Trash, however, is different in at least two ways. First, Alice never made a single other album that sounds like it — Hey Stoopid did carry on with the glam-metal image, but, in effect, already began the «artistic healing» period for the man. Second, it is so overtly cheap, so blatantly com­mercial from top to bottom, so completely un-Alice-like, that, once you look at it sideways, it be­comes all but impossible to regard it as anything other than a vile joke played upon the old fans, or, come to think of it, upon the new ones as well — the mindless idiots who are bound to be zom­bified into sending the man's least relevant record high up the charts. After all, isn't the album title a dead giveaway? Couldn't the sole reason behind this record consist in Alice, and others, being able to say «Look at them kids today, digging all that trash!»

 

So what do we have here, anyway? Ten metallic tracks (eight pop rockers, two power ballads) that have switched their allegiance from W.A.S.P. to Bon Jovi. The guitar riffs and solos are still heavy, but have been thoroughly cleaned up, sanitized, and made catchier. The horror imagery and slasher movie references have been expurgated — but the dirty sex remains, multiplied ten-fold. Basically, Trash is an album about non-stop fucking, which was just about the hottest topic in mainstream America in 1989, Tipper Gore notwithstanding; predictably, it takes a couple ro­mantic breaks on the ballads that appeal to higher sentiments, but, since we all know that a real man is supposed to use higher sentiments as simply a required pretext for anal sex and golden showers, the romantic breaks never take too long. Sure, we know that it's 'only my heart talkin', but what it really says is 'I'll lay you down and when all else fails, I'll drive you like a hammer on a bed of nails'. Now that's some talking!

 

Are the songs any good? Well, it is certainly not the worst that Eighties' glam-metal had to offer. In terms of songwriting, actually, I would think of it as an improvement over the previous pair of records. There are some interesting riffing ideas — simplistic, but effective, as on 'Spark In The Dark', or slightly more complex, as on 'This Maniac's In Love With You'. The choruses are nearly always catchy, and some are fun to sing along with, unlike that 'chop chop chop' abomination. Really, if you manage to quench the theoretical fire of indignation — «Alice Cooper, the creative artist, recording something like this?» — Trash is an okay piece of Eighties' party muzak.

 

I have no idea, though, why the album's biggest hit (and, up to this day, still Cooper's best re­cognized tune, a situation unlikely to change until the cursed Eighties generation, myself included, has died out) was 'Poison'. 'Poison' is simply too slow and lumbering to offer much in the way of headbanging, yet too aggressive to qualify as a power ballad. These two extremes are much better represented by, respectively, the title track, whose dirty riffs and raspy vocals are «trash», and 'Only My Heart Talkin', on which Alice and Steve Tyler merrily compete over who gets to sing in a more «ugly beautiful» manner. But 'Trash' wasn't even a single, and 'Only My Heart Talkin' failed to become a significant hit. Go figure.

 

'Spark In The Dark', with its near-perfect pop structure, and 'Trash', which transcends ugliness, are, to me, the only true standouts on the record. Most of the other songs do their job well, adding to the general success of the experiment. But the only reason for the overall album to exist that I can think of is that Alice's experience as a veteran shock-rocker may matter, and that, from a certain point of view, a forty-year old guy can sing a bunch of songs about animal pleasures in a more convincing manner than twenty-five-year old whippersnappers. In other words, there is something about Trash that is viler, meaner, and dirtier than about any Mötley Crüe or Twisted Sister record. But is it a good thing? I have no idea. One thing is for certain: if you like catchy pop-metal tunes about sex sung by a decent family man pretending to be a dirty old pervert, Trash is your number one re­cord to satisfy that passion. Out of respect for this market niche, I re­frain from rating it.

 

HEY STOOPID (1991)

 

1) Hey Stoopid; 2) Love's A Loaded Gun; 3) Snakebite; 4) Burning Our Bed; 5) Dangerous Tonight; 6) Might As Well Be On Mars; 7) Feed My Frankenstein; 8) Hurricane Years; 9) Little By Little; 10) Die For You; 11) Dirty Dreams; 12) Wind-Up Toy.

 

From a rigidly formalistic point of view, Hey Stoopid is an utterly faithful sequel to Trash: one more batch of big fat glam-metal tunes that sacrifice the Cooperishness of Cooper for the sakes of mo­dern commercial values. From the economic point of view, Hey Stoopid was a financially un­satisfactory venture — not only did it fail to repeat the success of Trash, but it plummeted down so fast that people might have missed its appearance altogether, were it not for the lucky move of featuring one of the songs in Wayne's World. From my personal point of view, Hey Stoopid sim­ply kicks ass in a way that none of the three preceding albums could ever hope to.

 

Let me put it this way: Trash, for the most part, could have been recorded by any ballsy artist of its era, and nobody would have winked. It was Alice's conscious experiment in getting himself anally penetrated with corporate songwriting, from which he inarguably gained financial and ar­guably — sexual satisfaction. Hey Stoopid, on the other hand, shows the man still embracing the trappings of the genre, but it is an undeniably Alice album, one on which he has finally initiated the process of restoring his artistic integrity. And I do not even mean such superficial messages as the haunting wail of "Steven!.." at the album's end, bringing on a feeling of nostalgia for 1975. I mean that an Alice Cooper album is supposed to sting, and this one stings.

 

Let us begin with the worst. We still have a share of moronic cock-rockers and pompous power ballads. 'Snakebite' is not a very useful song, not much of an improvement over 'House Of Fire', except a little faster. 'Burning Our Bed' and 'Die For You', following tradition, dress cheap sen­ti­mentality in hymn form and fail, quite miserably so (me never having been a major worshipper of 'Only Women Bleed', I cannot help but wonder just how much «weightier» the average com­mer­cial­ly-oriented pop ballad of the 1970s used to be).

 

But overall, the standards have improved. For instance, 'Dirty Dreams' could have easily been the equal of 'Snakebite'. Instead, it is given this crunchy, catchy, hilarious riff that is more T. Rex or Cheap Trick than Mötley Crüe, and only the obligatory (but somewhat fun) finger-flashing guitar solo truly gives it away. And 'Might As Well Be On Mars' (which is not really about Mars, but about the inability to get together — apparently, even non-stop fucking eventually has to stop) could have easily been the equal of 'Die For You', but it is given an artsy, «spacy» arrangement that befits the title and a lengthy coda where guitars engage in a fierce battle with strings until both run out of steam and get swallowed up by 'Feed My Frankenstein'. Hardly a timeless classic, because the powerhouse chorus still sucks, but the classy touches certainly justify Dick Wagner's one-time involvement with the creation of this particular tune.

 

Wagner, however, only guests on one track. The rest are dominated by more trendy guitar heroes — no expense has been spared, as Alice enlists Vinnie Moore, Slash, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, sometimes several of them on the exact same song. (For pointless trivia lovers, Ozzie Osbourne also helps out with backing vocals on the title track, and Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe fame plays bass on 'Feed My Frankenstein'). Of course, this is overkill, and even those who claim to be fans will probably enjoy these guys more on their own records. Still, it is undeni­able that all of them have better technique than Kane Roberts, and more inventiveness than who­ever it was responsible for the guitar work on Trash. And if you are determined to make a glam metal album, why should you want anything less than the best? This is a very demanding genre — nothing but the best really works.

 

I sincerely believe that three of these songs at least deserve as much recognition as anything Alice ever did, before or after (with the fourth one — the title track, a spitting warning for the fans not to waste themselves away — closing in not too far behind). First, 'Love's A Loaded Gun'. This one should be in everybody's handbook on how to write a non-cringe-inducing power ballad, ex­cept it is not properly a ballad, because it is a threat song, not a love song. Tense, memorable, pa­ranoid, acid sharp in terms of both riffs and solos, it follows the outlines of Trash, but with much more wit and bite, and it has the second most exciting use of the "Pull the trigger!" exclamation in rock history (the first one, of course, is attested for AC/DC). Plus, it gives you something to think about when you consider Alice's ironic tribute to Robert Johnson: where the latter used the image of 'her suitcase in her hand' as a starting point for unraveling his own misery, Alice uses it as the starting point for revenge — no time for sissying around for this guy.

 

Second — yes, you guessed — 'Feed My Frankenstein'. Vai and Satriani battle it out in the solo section, but that is actually the least interesting section for those who already know a little about either of them. The most interesting thing is how, torn between the necessity of writing about dirty sex and horror shows, Alice manages to come up with a song that deals with both at the same time, using healthy, decent cannibalism as a metaphor for sick, indecent you-know-what, and combining it with great riffs and (finally!) his old sense of humour for good measure. "Feed my Frankenstein, meet my libido!" is certainly silly, but it makes you laugh, and yet, at the same time, this is nowhere near the comfy safety of sex-oriented material on Trash — I can hardly imagine the respectable bourgeois headbanging to "I'm a hungry man but I don't want pizza..."

 

Third and most important — do not miss on that one! — is 'Wind-Up Toy'. Refreshing! Alice returns here to what he does best: impersonating the mentally deficient. (Leave it to guys with a seriously higher-than-average IQ to be the most efficient spokesmen for the retarded ones). Appa­rently, what we have here is the reappearance of Steven, shut up in an asylum and shut out from the outside world; but to hell with "Steven" — this thing need have no name. One big mistake that people commit with this song is calling it «spooky», or expecting it to be so: the actual music is not one bit spooky, nor is Alice's performance; this is not 'Black Juju', this is a realistic song that tries to pick at the deepest inner feelings of the Down's syndrome guy, and it really does not hit its full stride until the coda, when Alice's piercing wail ('I'm just a wind-up toy, a wind-up, wind-up, wind-up toy!') cuts through the wall of sound. That is the scariest moment — «scariest», not «spookiest» — much more so than the Steven King-ish voiceovers at the end, and it is one of those rare instances where the Coop succeeds in getting across real pain, suffering, and desperati­on rather than their exciting, but cartoonish projections.

 

All of this translates as «mixed bag, but with a well-discernible positive trend for the whole fac­tory», and, consequently, as a hearty thumbs up — with only three or four songs out of twelve ranking below expectations. To this I should probably add that Hey Stoopid was released just a few months before the grunge ex­plosion, which possibly explains its inability to find the same market as Trash, but something tells me that, had the hair metal rule managed to last for another decade, Cooper's next record in the same genre might have completely overcome the genre's weak­nesses. Fortunately, with the hair metal empire collapsing around him, for his next offering he already didn't have to.

 

THE LAST TEMPTATION (1994)

 

1) Sideshow; 2) Nothing's Free; 3) Lost In America; 4) Bad Place Alone; 5) You're My Temptation; 6) Stolen Prayer; 7) Unholy War; 8) Lullaby; 9) It's Me; 10) Cleansed By Fire.

 

To paraphrase the Kinks, "God save Kurt Cobain and all the different varieties". The Last Temp­tation, completing Alice Cooper's comeback, is not a grunge album — but it is an album saved by grunge, whose triumphant march in the early 1990s prompted Alice to finally drop the hair metal trappings and realize that the hard rockers of the late Sixties/early Seventies did it just ab­out right — so why mess with perfection?

 

We are given the message almost immediately: as the short, intriguing acoustic introduction fades away, out sweeps a bunch of chords reminiscent of the Who's 'Substitute' — and, for that matter, Alice's own 'No More Mr. Nice Guy' — played on a normal, fat, crunchy electric guitar the way Pete Townshend himself might have played it around 1971. The song then explodes into a gritty power pop number, rousing, inspiring, and with a further touch of brass waiting around the corner to remind us of who wrote 'Under My Wheels'. Yes, here is a sound that Alice hasn't touched for two decades — welcome back.

 

But, at the same time, be wary. Since Alice has officially given up on sounding cool and commer­cial (the album peaked at #68, more than twenty points below Hey Stoopid), nothing prevents him from finally sounding like an old man; and, in Alice's case, «sounding like an old man» means shifting, or at least extending, his ire from criticizing stupid old people who make the rules to attackig stupid young people who break them. The Last Temptation is a conceptual piece with a transparent Christian message — mess around with your morals and there'll be hell to pay, in this particular case, quite literally so. (Not that I disagree, mind you, and I am no believer).

 

There is some vague storyline followed here. The protagonist, apparently, is a grown-up Steven from Welcome To My Nightmare, al­though the name is never spoken on the album — we learn this from Neil Gaiman's comic book that accompanies it. The guy is bored with conforming to so­ciety's standards and seeks escape from the antagonist, a traveling showman who is really Satan in disguise, who is really Alice Cooper in disguise (or is that the other way around?). They hit it off for a bit, but then the guy comes to his senses, renounces Evil before it is too late and lives happily ever after selling door-to-door insurance and watching talk shows (or maybe not, but if you have been branded by Satan, you do not really have a lot of choices left).

 

Were the album recorded by the Rev. Billy Graham, I would probably not have recommended it. But the genius of Alice Cooper is such that he can even make a genre as hollow as Christian rock sound exciting. The Last Temptation's cornerstones are the songs where Satan's presence is at its strongest — two of them, 'Nothing's Free' and 'You're My Temptation', rank up there with the most vivid of Alice's past material, and credit goes not only to Alice himself, but also to the guys who matched his demonic inventions bit-by-bit, particularly guitarist Stef Burns who, on 'Temp­tation', gives the absolutely most exact impression of hellish flames that I have ever had the honor of hearing. Amazing, what a little wah-wah and a little reverb can do to the senses.

 

The most «messageous» of all the songs on here, however, is 'Nothing's Free' — quite an interes­ting tune to compare with 1987's 'Freedom'. In his hair metal days, the Coop titillated his younger fans by inviting them to "raise your fist and yell"; now he reminds them that, come to think of it, "nothing's free from the rules and laws of morality", and that, if you really want to be free in the absolute sense of the word ("free, free, free, I wanna be free!" go the backing vocals all around the place), the payback is simple: "When the trumpets sound and his light is all around... we'll be going way downtown". But it is not the words that matter; the message is useless without the mu­sic, as the song, a steady mid-tempo hard rocker, slowly accumulates more and more power and, finally, becomes a nightmarish Death Dance with Burns' guitar leading you through the nine cir­cles right into the final pit. A lesson to all the Christian rockers out there: your words don't really mean jack shit — take your cue from Bach, Stevie Wonder and... Alice Cooper!

 

The Last Temptation has no weak ground; the Coop has covered all exits. Obviously, there should still be space for a lighter, catchier rocker to be promoted as the lead single; thus, we get 'Lost In America', a lyrically hilarious and riffaliciously engaging song loaded with Alice's usual maliciousness: a frustrated teen anthem that viciously ridicules frustrated teens ("I can't go to school 'cause I ain't got a gun, I ain't got a gun 'cause I ain't got a job, I ain't got a job 'cause I can't go to school — so I'm looking for a girl with a gun and a job and a house"... pause... "with cable"). If you think 'Nothing's Free' and 'You're My Temptation' are both a little too carnivalesque, take 'Unholy War', a dark, twisted rocker with no theater involved — just a disturbing tale of one guy's lifelong struggle with his own inner corruption, or the equally nasty 'Bad Place Alone'.

 

If you think no Alice Cooper album is complete without the obligatory sentimental ballad, there's 'It's Me', hardly one of his best, but recorded with pretty acoustic guitars, mandolins, and no Steve Tyler on backing vocals — which is already a huge improvement on the likes of 'Only My Heart Talking'. And, finally, even the «plot-advancing» songs such as 'Lullaby' and 'Cleansed By Fire' all have plenty of musical thought injected — the latter alone has, like, three or four different vo­cal melodies.

 

As we can see, it took Alice ten years to overcome his drinking problem, and it took him a further ten years to make all good people remember what was so fascinating about him in the first place. His conversion to Christianity certainly must have come as a shock to many people, but that is exactly the point — Alice is a professional shocker, and shocking his audience with Christian mo­rality is far more effective than shocking them with the same old images of blood and gore. Be­sides, this sudden embracing of Jesus is probably responsible for his abandoning the pursuit of commercial success: ever since Temptation, his records have sold quite poorly, yet each one made far more sense than the empty commercial splash of Trash. Thank the Lord for that — and for this record in particular, which gets an equal thumbs up from the heart (kick-ass!) and the brain (perfect construction, perfect sound quality, perfect sequencing, you name it).

 

A FISTFUL OF ALICE (1997)

 

1) School's Out; 2) Under My Wheels; 3) I'm Eighteen; 4) Desperado; 5) Lost In America; 6) Teenage Lament '74; 7) I Never Cry; 8) Poison; 9) No More Mr. Nice Guy; 10) Welcome To My Nightmare; 11) Only Women Bleed; 12) Feed My Frankenstein; 13) Elected; 14) Is Anyone Home?

 

The idea behind Cooper's second live album was to remedy the flaws of the first one. Since The Alice Cooper Live Show had been released in 1977 without the artist's consent and, according to his opinion, did not offer a proper audio representation of what the show was really about, it was only a matter of time before a real, officially endorsed, live album would see the lights of day — strange that it took a sobered-up, activity-bursting Cooper a whole decade to get around to it, but it is pretty fortunate that it did, because otherwise we would have ended up with a bunch of Kane Roberts machine gun solos on some of Alice's worst songs.

 

The irony is, of course, that A Fistful Of Alice, fine-sounding as it is, does not capture the «true» Alice Cooper show any more than the 1977 album did. Specially recorded at the Cabo Wabo club in San Lucas, Mexico, and fattened up by guest appearances from Slash, Rob Zombie, and even Sammy Hagar  (fortunately, on guitar only!), it reads as a Greatest Hits Live. Only 'Desperado' had not been previously released as a single — and, vice versa, pretty much all of the hit singles Alice ever had in his career are represented, including even a livened up version of 'Teenage La­ment '74' and (only on the expanded Japanese version) 'Clones', songs that were not at all part of the regular show at the time. On the other hand, the album that he was promoting at the time — The Last Temptation — is only represented by 'Lost In America', the «hit song», ripping out any hopes of conceptuality or coherence ('Nothing's Free' and 'Cleansed By Fire' were regular parts of the setlist).

 

So the purpose of the album is somewhat obscure; loyal fans would likely have preferred a more authentic document, and casual fans, by 1997, would hardly be interested in anything other than regular «greatest hits» packages, not bothering to see them re-recorded in a live setting. Never­theless, on its very own, A Fistful Of Alice is still fun. What is there to dislike about the Coop's hit singles, with the possible exception of 'Poison'? Nothing. The man is in top vocal form, the backing band is in good taste (Fistful marks the first appearance of soon-to-be Alice's regular sidekick Ryan Roxie on guitar), the sound quality is crisp, the volume levels awesome.

 

Here is just a bunch of off-the-cuff remarks on minor special details that may or may not entice you into hearing this: (a) 'Teenage Lament '74', losing Lisa Minelli, gets a crunchy power-pop coating that almost wipes out its vaudeville spirit; (b) 'Welcome To My Nightmare' has a brief 'Steven' introduction, and keyboard player Paul Taylor manages to simulate the powerful brass section so that the results are almost credible; (c) Rob Zombie's growling on 'Feed My Franken­stein' adds nothing to the song, but Slash definitely spices up the sound on 'Lost In America'; (d) 'Elected' serves as a pretty good Grand Finale to the whole show.

 

As a tempting bonus, the fans get one new studio track, the acoustic-and-slide-led pop rocker 'Is Anyone Home', similar in tone and message to 'Wind-Up Toy', nowhere near as desperate, but much more instantly likeable in terms of arrangement, because the guitars follow the sonic pat­terns of The Last Temptation rather than Hey Stoopid. Should it be tempting enough to make A Fistful Of Alice into an obligatory part of the fan's collection, or will the album forever remain in the status of an obsolete curio? Depends on how much you are into black leather. But thumbs up regardless of the answer.

 

BRUTAL PLANET (2000)

 

1) Brutal Planet; 2) Wicked Young Man; 3) Sanctuary; 4) Blow Me A Kiss; 5) Eat Some More; 6) Pick Up The Bones; 7) Pessi-Mystic; 8) Gimme; 9) It's The Little Things; 10) Take It Like A Woman; 11) Cold Machines.

 

For the first time since the weirdness attacks of Zipper Catches Skin and Dada, Alice puts out a decidedly non-commercial album, one that not only ignores current marketing trends, but goes as far as not yielding even a potential hit single, not to mention being released on a tiny indie label (Spitfire) with little or no marketing potential whatsoever. No one can call Brutal Planet a com­mercial flop: with its subject matters, its sound, and its intentional lack of promotion, it was never supposed to be «huge». This is hardcore Cooper for hardcore fans.

 

How would an artist like Alice Cooper prefer to greet the new millennium? Quite likely, by cas­ting a wicked glance at the then-and-now and, in his own individual style, telling us the obvious: want it or not, this world pretty much sucked in the past two millennia, goes on sucking today like there was no tomorrow, and is more or less doomed to go soon if things continue the way we continue doing them. Come to think of it, quite a predictable thing to be preached by an old, griz­zled, spiteful, born-again Christian. It all hangs on the manner of preaching.

 

Brutal Planet is Cooper's heaviest album to date, and possibly ever, and «heavy» here refers both to the music, cast in the questionable, but potentially killer genre of Industrial Metal, and the subject matter, since Alice has apparently decided to address all seven deadly sins and more. Let's see: I clearly perceive wrath ('Wicked Young Man'), greed ('Gimme'), gluttony ('Eat Some More'), uh... well, the rest does not work out so well, but at least you get the basic idea.

 

Mind you: this is not an intellectual celebration. The lyrics are rarely ambiguous, and the riffs are rarely complex. In a way, this is a retread even from the level of The Last Temptation. But we can buy this regardless of the fact that the number of employed chords is not overwhelming, be­cause Brutal Planet was clearly designed with this idea in mind — someone, thinks Alice, needs to brutally bash the concept of a «brutal planet» into the heads of the current generation. To hell with obscurity and complexity; let us have a simplistic metal ball before we get all blown to the same hell, and who knows, perhaps this simplicity might get at least a few of us to stop and con­sider not being blown to hell after all.

 

The incessantly ironish guitar tones should not really be hard to bear. Behind them lie standard Alice Cooper pop hooks, much like the ones on Trash, except they have been better fleshed out and their metal encasing is sharp, crisp, and hot, much unlike the commercial gloss of the days of yore. (There have been complaints that, in reality, Alice is simply jumping the freshest band­wagon of nu-metal, but frankly, I do not hear any Korn or Limp Bizkit in these songs, way too truly evil to be compared to these youngsters). The riffs frequently come in pairs — a low, scary one that carries the rhythm, and a higher, whiny one that highlights the pop melody, as you can immediately hear on the title track. The so­los usually come in short, garage-style outbursts: professional, but humble blasts of ass-kicking courtesy of Ryan Roxie, I believe. And the singing... well, that is one area where we should never bother; Alice Cooper is, by all means, guaranteed for life.

 

As simple as it all sounds, much of it is genius simplicity, plus there are unpredictable touches all the way through. The title track, on which Alice trashes humanity as a whole (admitting, however, that it is really the Biblical serpent who is behind all the shit), introduces, out of nowhere, a drea­my female chorus of rose-colored glasses-wearing angels, which is then contrasted with Cooper's devilish shouting. 'Wicked Young Man', possibly the most hateful send-up of hatred ever put on record ("I read Mein Kampf daily just to keep my hatred fed" transcends simple kitsch and dives head first into Monty Python territory, but that's cool), borrows an alert siren as its second riff. 'It's The Little Things', fastest song on here but also serving as a bit of comic relief, falls back on the legacy by namedropping some of Alice's previous hit titles, etc.

 

There is also the predictable, although this time decidedly non-hit, ballad ('Take It Like A Wo­man') that is essentially 'Only Women Bleed Part Two'; but it is the only time when the metallic punching fades away, only to come back once more and predict the rise of 'Cold Machines' (yes, what's up with us forgetting about that? thank you for reminding us, Alice!). As monotonous as it all feels together, each hook is different, and although the basic anger behind this is simply Anger, it is exciting to be able to feel Anger at so many different things: the original sinners, the skin­heads, the consumerists, the genocide instigators, the social-darwinists, and all those other inha­bitants of the brutal planet — and it is fairly certain that, in one song at least, you, the reader, will be able to spot yourself, because the Coop spares no one.

 

Lumping and leaden, impressive and memorable, funny and scary, it is an album that cemented Cooper's status as that of the old guy who made it artistically intact into the new millennium, along with just a bare handful of his colleagues from the old days such as Lou Reed or David Bowie. Heartily recommended for metal fans in general and Alice fans in particular, the heart gives it a thumbs up, and the brain is still trying to figure out how it is possible to squeeze that much sense out of a handful of primitive metal riffs.

 

DRAGONTOWN (2001)

 

1) Triggerman; 2) Deeper; 3) Dragontown; 4) Sex Death And Money; 5) Fantasy Man; 6) Somewhere In The Jungle; 7) Disgraceland; 8) Sister Sarah; 9) Every Woman Has A Name; 10) Just Wanna Be God; 11) It's Much Too Late; 12) I Am The Sentinel.

 

For the direct sequel to Brutal Planet, Alice reteams with old friend Bob Ezrin; the impact is hard to measure, since, out of all his Ezrin-produced records, this one sounds the least like Ezrin. Possibly because Cooper was still in his «doom metal» phase, and the mystical Ezrin touch is not as transparent behind the dark waves of deep distorted guitars as it usually is behind the pianos, strings, special effects, and echoes.

 

Still, at least several songs are immediately distinguished by the new presence — such as the title track, whose Middle Eastern keyboard patterns on the verses immediately bring to mind similar arrangements on DaDa. And this ties in well with Alice's decision to vary the stylistics a bit: Dragontown is not simply one titanic metal onslaught following another, but rather a more diver­sified journey through the pleasures and horrors of our times, liable to be set to grinding gnashing me­tal just as easy as it can be set to light balladry or even rockabilly.

 

Strangely, the record does not start off on an epic note: 'Brutal Planet' announced its goals from the first minute, but Dragontown takes things more slowly, conducting the listener to its own brand of hell in several steps. First, there is the introduction of 'Triggerman', a fast, churning ro­cker that introduces your own personal Virgil who's going to be your guide for the rest of the al­bum: "I'm pure non-entity, don't even watch for me, I watch you when you sleep". Who is that? Subconscience? Some sort of inner voice? Nah, probably just Satan once more.

 

Then the real metal starts, plunged in a felt-more-than-heard swamp of Ezrin's Gothic effects — 'Deeper' is the descent: "The elevator broke, it went right through the floor...". Corny, B-movie level, but catchy and exciting as always, and, more importantly, evocative; here is a man who understands what these deep guitar tones are there for. And, finally, the gates burst open on Track Three — the magnificent 'Dragontown', unfurling slowly and almost unwillingly through a maze of swirling keyboards and basses into the gritty singalong chorus. If 'Brutal Planet' was all a big ball of disgust and hate, 'Dragontown' is more personal and frightening, as if the Coop were stret­ching out his gnarled set of claws to you right out of the speakers: "Come on, I've got something to show you — come on, you're really gonna love this!"

 

I have caught myself plenty of times on the realization that, at some point, despite all the obvious­ness and simplicity, the Coop's cartoonish vibe transcends these flaws, making even prepared lis­teners of the «been-there, heard-that, no surprises» caliber experience an unfaked internal shiver. Dragontown has plenty of moments like this. On the previous album, the evil of genocide was vividly described within 'Pick Up The Bones', inspired by events in Bosnia; here, the subject continues with 'Somewhere In The Jungle', reminding Western audiences of even bloodier events in Rwanda (granted, most people won't even pay attention to the lyrics, and those that will may not know what the thing is specifically about; it does not help matters much that the reference to the Serengeti is somewhat misguided — that's, uh, in Tanzania, Alice, on the other side of Lake Victoria. Might as well say the Kalahari). Nevertheless, it's quite scary as well.

 

On the lighter side, the humor is back, and most of the heaviest songs are imbued with sarcasm so as not to sustain the same homicidal level of depression throughout. 'Sex, Death And Money' in­troduces the deadliest, zombiest guitar tone you will ever hear on a Cooper album, but the song's message ("sex, death, and money, sonny, that is why we all are gonna fry") is delivered with iro­ny: for all of Cooper's unexpected Christian morality, he sure knows a mean way how to hand out a moral message and have a good laugh at professional moralists at the same time and not end up sounding like a cheap hypocrite.

 

There are also some killer send-ups on the record. 'Fantasy Man' returns us to the lambasting of the redneck stereotype: "I don't do dishes, and I'm suspicious of any grown-up man that does; I'm homophobic, don't do aerobics, just lay around and catch a buzz" — he hasn't nailed that stereo­type that well since 'I Love America' in 1983. 'Disgraceland', alternating punk-pop with rockabil­ly, is a, ahem, «tribute» to The King, whom we apparently meet doing time in Dragontown, re­plete with a not-half-bad Elvis impersonation. And the hilarious industrial rap of 'Just Wanna Be God' goes as far as to send up the principal anti-hero himself — now we know that all of man­kind's troubles are really, in fact, the sole consequence of some solitary individual's inferiority complexes: "I only wanna build my statue tall, that's all — why can't I be God? I only wanna be God!" Thanks a lot, pal.

 

To complete the picture, we have the obligatory woman-is-the-nigger-of-the-world sensitive bal­lad ('Every Woman Has A Name', hardly better or worse than all of Alice's similar creations, but give the guy extra points for consistency) and a lighter pop-rocker about a guy who seemingly led a righteous life but is now wondering how the hell he ended up right in it ('It's Much Too Late', which, according to rumors, is dedicated to Lennon and, indeed, sounds a bit like John, but it is a little difficult to imagine John as the protagonist of a song whose lyrics go "When I was a teen, all the sex that I missed was an abstinence blessing to me", don't you think?).

 

We are more or less accustomed to Cooper's albums arriving in pairs — Welcome To My Night­mare in a two-fer with Goes To Hell, Trash with Hey Stoopid, etc. — but most of these pairs had a clear superior and inferior member. With Brutal Planet and Dragontown, no such decisi­on can be taken. The former has the upper hand when it comes to pouring out bare emotion — it pummels you right across the floor; the latter, while slightly more restrained and calculated, is, on the other side, more interesting in that the sheer number of ideas is much larger. Naturally, it is as easy a thumbs up as its predecessor, continuing to build up Alice's reputation for the new millen­nium (and setting up an impressive record of two consecutively fine albums in two years for a rock icon in his fifties).

 

THE EYES OF ALICE COOPER (2003)

 

1) What Do You Want From Me; 2) Between High School And Old School; 3) Man Of The Year; 4) Novocaine; 5) Bye Bye Baby; 6) Be With You Awhile; 7) Detroit City; 8) Spirits Rebellious; 9) This House Is Haunted; 10) Love Should Never Feel Like This; 11) The Song That Didn't Rhyme; 12) I'm So Angry; 13) Backyard Brawl.

 

Jumping on bandwagons is a skill, one that few can master as smoothly as Cooper. Clearly, the decision to dive into the oilfield of heavy metal must have been influenced by the success of nu­metal bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit; but it was carried out in full accordance with the Alice spirit, which makes Brutal Planet and Dragontown perfectly enjoyable on their own.

 

By the early 2000s, the new trend for the «alternative mainstream» emerged as the neo-garage rock of the Strokes, the Vines, and the Hives, and, according to the strict laws of determinism, there was simply no chance that Alice could have missed the opportunity, particularly since what the Strokes and the rest were reviving was, in part, Alice's own ancient style — the proto-punk vibe of the Detroit scene. The MC5, the Stooges, and Alice Cooper of Love It To Death fame. Let's admit it: if you spot a pack of spoiled, hedonistic young whippersnappers stealing your mu­sic, it is only natural for you to get pissed off and decide to resteal it from them. Is stealing from thieves stealing at all? The Eyes Of Alice Cooper may not rise up to the level of Love It To Death — no surprise, since that would require a bottle of rejuvenation pills and a time machine — but at least it competes fairly well with the Strokes and the Vines, and it still shows who is really the boss in all of this, lack of sales notwithstanding.

 

There is no trying to mask the «retro» attitude on this one. The title itself, focusing us on Alice's «eyes», makes us notice that he is not wearing much makeup except for the spiderish shades around those eyes, just like he did in 1971. The back cover shows him together with his new band, first time in decades — ever since the demise of the original Alice Cooper band, no sidemen ever got the unimaginable honour of entouraging The Monster on any album sleeves. And, speaking of the band, well, the band may lack the crudeness and imagination of Alice's former pals, but they still do a mighty impressive job. Of particular notice is Ryan Roxie, arguably the only guitarist in Cooper's history to wilfully go through several distinct styles — he is just as convincing as a pun­kish rock'n'roller as he was in the guise of an industrial metallist.

 

Then there are the songs, on which Alice, once again, rises to the occasion. Thirteen tracks, each one pretty damn good in its own way. Monotonousness is out of the question: the rock numbers are evenly split between «poppy» and «hard», and, from time to time, interspersed with ballads (one sentimental, one comical) and even a solitary «horror» number ('This House Is Haunted', written and recorded in the «spook that kid» style, rather unusual for Alice). Melodies? You bet. Humour? Lots. If there is one thing to complain about, it is the occasional scent of excessive «overproduction»: the guitars, at times, are too noisy, perhaps the biggest difference between Eyes and the true classic Detroit sound, which, after all, was born and extinguished not only in pre-Strokes times, but even in pre-Ramones' ones.

 

It would be nicer, I think, if more of the songs here were along the lines of 'Detroit City', or, ra­ther, its first thirty seconds, with the cool old chugga-chugga hard rock style, after which the wall of sound still kicks in (it is, however, notable that Wayne Kramer of the MC5 fame himself adds some guest-guitar to the recording). But then, of course, the entire album would be skewed to­wards the «nostalgia» line — 'Detroit City' alone, with its 'Me and Iggy were giggin' with Ziggy and kickin' with the MC5...' has drawn its fair share of smirks.

 

So let us enjoy life as it is, and just give in to the hooks of the female-bashing 'What Do You Want From Me', the bourgeois-bashing 'Man Of The Year', the amour-bashing 'Love Should Never Feel Like This', and especially the self-bashing 'Between High School And Old School', which is where Alice finds himself stuck in between — a perfect projection of the «confused teen anthem» style onto the idea of «too old to rock'n'roll, too young to die». Behind the big, fat sound on all these songs we still find the same indomitable spirit, plus a catchy hook or even two per song. And, just as the genre requires, much of this is about anger, anger, anger. No wonder the last two songs are 'I'm So Angry', where he takes it out on his cheating girlfriend, and 'Backyard Brawl', where he takes it out on anyone stupid enough to get in the way. 'Backyard Brawl', in par­ticular, stomps and thrashes about with such passionate violence that, unless you have seen one of Alice's peaceful, relaxed golf videos recently, you will be fooled.

 

However, I have to confess that my own favourite song on the album is the most peaceful one — the sweet love ballad 'Be With You Awhile', which sounds 100% like a solo John Lennon ballad, right down to all the vocal modulations, and, (not) coincidentally, the most beautifully arranged Coo­per ballad so far — a mix of deep underwater-ish electric piano, high above-the-sky-ish Mel­lotrons, and juicy, colourfully distorted electric guitars that, unlike the rockers, arises completely out of nowhere and is thoroughly unpredictable. And, unlike Alice's former hits in the balladeer­ing genre, this one is completely untouched by the chisel of commercialism. As hard as it is, es­pecially in recent times, to combine simple, old-school sentimentality with a sugar-free, pathos-free environ­ment, 'Be With You Awhile' is a total success. (Although, of course, the anti-senti­mentalists of our modern age will hardly pay much attention to it; they will prefer to concentrate on the hilarious send-up of 'The Song That Didn't Rhyme', a cool joke tune about the worst song ever written — 'a three minute waste of your time, no redeeming value of any kind').

 

The Eyes Of Alice Cooper cannot be among the greatest records of Alice Cooper: any album from an old Alice Cooper that toys with the departed spirit of the young Alice Cooper is doomed to be forever sitting in the second or third row, at best. But the goal has been achieved, and the have not been disappointed; the brain marvels at the efficacy of evading all the reefs and pitfalls, and the heart rejoices at the delightful mix of the rough and tender — thumbs up from both sides.

 

DIRTY DIAMONDS (2005)

 

1) Woman Of Mass Distraction; 2) You Make Me Wanna; 3) Perfect; 4) Dirty Diamonds; 5) Pretty Ballerina; 6) Sun­set Babies; 7) Zombie Dance; 8) The Saga Of Jesse Jane; 9) Six Hours; 10) Steal That Car; 11) Run Down The De­vil; 12) Your Own Worst Enemy; 13*) Stand.

 

The album cover is almost the same as before — the important half of Alice's face staring at us from be­hind some ornamental camouflage — but the music is seriously different. Dirty Dia­monds is Alice's first album in God knows when that follows no specific agenda whatsoever, and deals with no particular concept other than «life as seen from the viewpoint of a cartoonish half-Satanic, half-criminal character», which is, by now, more than thirty years old. Now that all the points have been stated, all the comebacks effectuated, and all the trends perpetrated, there is lit­tle left to do other than simply write songs and record them. Or play golf. But I guess even a ma­niac golfer can go crazy from doing nothing other than play golf.

 

This is a good record, but it is not as focused or energetic as the four that came before it, so we can probably send the curve sloping down once again. Big bulging concepts do not work for eve­ryone, but they usually do for the Coop: his 1994-2002 «Trilogy of Hell» burned the same fuel of commitment to the idea as the rejuvenated ode to backyard brawls that was The Eyes Of... Two years later, Alice ran out of big ideas, and what we get is a rag-tag collection of small ones that frequently work, but also have the tendency to misfire from time to time.

 

Frankly speaking, the rock'n'roll numbers here are about as interesting as the recent attempts by the Rolling Stones — nostalgic riff-recyclers that will never appeal to the jaded fan, and, in all probability, will only make him mourn the fact that new generations of listeners, whose ability to turn the clock back usually gets lost together with their milk teeth, will take this for the real thing; but Alice Cooper may not be judged by 'Woman Of Mass Distraction' any more than the Rolling Stones' place in history can be decided based on 'Rough Justice'. It is a moderately fun song, but the chords are almost as recognizable as any standard 12-bar progression, and as for the sleaze — well, we sort of thought Alice would have outgrown that since his hair metal period; why return to it now? To appeal to the sacrilegious Eighties nostalgia guard?

 

The same criticism applies to 'Perfect' and maybe a couple other numbers that history, hopefully, will discard as unfortunate errors born out of boredom and temporary lack of focus. Then there are a few more similar numbers, helped out by nagging, nifty vocal hooks (the 'woo-hoo-hoo' on 'You Make Me Wanna') or by a combination of said hooks with on-the-level crunchy character asassinations ('Sunset Babies' — any song that trashes spoiled glammy trash is OK by me; where do I sign for turning the line 'Sunset babies all got rabies' into an international slogan?), but even these are sort of «melodically grim». And I do not support the idea of taking the Ramones' solo on 'Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue' and turning it into the backbone for the title track (granted, that solo was probably a lift itself, but that is beyond the point).

 

So the album is probably at its best every time it steps away from the generic rock'n'roll idiom; two obvious standouts are a beautifully felt and executed cover of the Left Banke's 'Pretty Balle­rina' (the Coop continuing the honourable mission of opening up the vaults of golden oldies to new listeners — although it is a little sad that most people commenting on the album do not even seem to realize the song's origins) and 'The Saga Of Jesse Jane', a tongue-in-cheek Johnny Cash send-up about a transvestite cowboy ending up in jail for defending his rights a bit too much on the violent side (and Brokeback Mountain had not even hit movie theaters at the time). Melody-wise, the latter at least hangs on a beautiful, melancholic guitar line that I do not recall ever ha­ving heard before — and this combination of ridiculously pointless lyrics with guitar gorgeous­ness gives it a nice post-modern flavour that the rest of the album lacks.

 

That said, I reiterate that Dirty Diamonds only sucks when taken in context — namely, in the context of Cooper's blistering renaissance with his four previous albums, and in the context of ha­ving almost nothing to add to the history of rock'n'roll as we know it. On their own, clear and unsoiled by extra knowledge, each number kicks its own midget ass, with the exception of the silly bonus track 'Stand' recorded in tandem with the rapper Xzibit (not just because it has a rap section, which can be tolerated, but because it is one of those ugly examples of the «let me teach the younger generation the important morals of life through their own voice because they are too dumb to figure them out on their own» approach that is always pretentious and fake, and I am sur­prised how a guy like Alice with his IQ level keeps falling in that pit so often). So, from the bottom of my heart, I still give it a moderate thumbs up; yet there is every reason to be afraid that the final comeback is over, and perhaps Alice should spend more time with that golf club, after all. Or, at least, try to write a concept album about golf.

 

ALONG CAME A SPIDER (2008)

 

1) Prologue: I Know Where You Live; 2) Vengeance Is Mine; 3) Wake The Dead; 4) Catch Me If You Can; 5) (In Touch With) Your Feminine Side; 6) Wrapped In Silk; 7) Killed By Love; 8) I'm Hungry; 9) The One That Got Away; 10) Salvation; 11) I Am The Spider (Epilogue).

 

After the brief relaxation of Dirty Diamonds, Alice returns to concept mode — but I am not en­tirely sure if this particular concept is really such a great step forward for the father of shock rock. That the Coop is a huge fan of generic slasher movies, we all know very well: all through the Ei­ghties, he had constantly expressed this love with both his albums and his occasional songwriting and even acting contributions to such movies. But with The Last Temptation and whatever fol­lowed, it seemed like this preoccupation was somewhat behind him, and that he would now fore­ver be focusing his attention on worthier matters.

 

Apparently not. Apparently we have been wrong all these years. Along Came A Spider brings back the fetish in full force: the entire album is a mini-rock-opera about a serial killer who — ima­gine that — is busy collecting eight human legs in order to construct his personal spider, lea­ving the rest of the bodies behind wrapped in silk cocoons. His only mistake is falling in love with his last victim — justice, after all, must triumph. (He even repents in the end — a good Christian like Alice must always leave his heros at least a theoretical chance of "Salvation").

 

The bad news, therefore, is that the overall style of the record, out of all of Cooper's past output, is most closely reminiscent of the campiness of Constrictor. The good news is that Alice is not toying with commercialism this time around, and is neither intentionally dumbing down his ly­rics to appeal to the scum of the earth, nor calling upon the most clichéd musical arrangements in exi­stence to «fit the times». He has once again changed his working partners, to be sure, replacing long-term partner Ryan Roxie with guitarists Danny Saber and Greg Hampton, but they fit Ryan's shoes pretty well, so the transition will not be painful for anyone. And these guys help him write decent songs, too — a collective Kane Roberts they are not.

 

The overall sound is more or less what we would expect based on past observations: heavy and crunchy, but not industrial-brutal crunchy à la Brutal Planet — surprisingly, this may be the clo­sest Alice has ever come to capturing the classic grunge sound: metallic sound tones applied to punkish guitar riffs. He has not asked us if we really want to hear the classic grunge sound all over again, but it does agree with the concept: setting it to the old hair metal style would be just as ridi­culous as setting it to the garage riffs of The Eyes.

 

None of the songs will probably become classics, considering that their primary way of working is as part of the concept. Alice has not even taken them along for the supporting tour (!), with the exception of 'Vengeance Is Mine', either because, deep down inside, he had a feeling they really sucked, or because he did not think performing them individually would make much sense. (The latter consideration, mind you, never stopped him from staging the freshly released Welcome To My Nightmare in its glorious entirety back in 1975). My feelings exactly: individually, the songs are no great shakes, but together, they work. For B-movie fans, that is.

 

There is plenty of exciting Cooper-worthy moments, however, scattered around. The opening funk-metal riff of 'I Know Where You Live'. The hooting harmonica on 'Wake The Dead' (where Alice is joined by Ozzy on the vocals, but you wouldn't get it without the liner notes). One more outburst of believable Lennonesque sentimentality on the chorus of 'Killed By Love'. The unex­pected piano opening of 'Salvation'. These are just a few occurrences that make the record musi­cally interesting. If only they were matched by solid riffs and choruses throughout — but they are not. The riffs are «healthy» — they growl, roar, and threaten in all seriousness — but not really «solid». The emphasis is clearly on the storyline, not on the music; too bad, because some time in the past Alice made us believe that he was capable of keeping one eye on the concept and the other one always fixed on the hooks.

 

And, coming back to where we started, what sort of concept is this, really? Yes, I realize perfectly well that, in our modern world, one can express a far more unique and profound artistic inter­pretation of one's surroundings through a concept album about a serial killer who wraps his victims in silk webs than one about the abstract vices and shortcomings of the planet in general. But, for all of Alice Cooper's genius, he is no Umberto Eco, and Along Came A Spider is no Name Of The Rose. Heck, it is even no M or Silence Of The Lambs. It is what it is: a suitably ade­quate tribute to second-rate horror movies. Perhaps, in the long run, we should be glad that Alice got it out of his system; he must have been waiting a long, long time to do that. Now that he did do it, it is time to get back to bigger and better things. And yet — still a thumbs up, because as a soundtrack to a second-rate horror movie, it works as best as it can. Plus, even though I do not watch a lot of second-rate (or even first-rate, for that matter) horror movies, it is sort of uncool to say they stink, and frequently garners the humiliating response of «go back to your Julia Roberts, you cog», so if you wanna propagate Along Came A Spider as the greatest piece of work to grace the Noughties, I am not going to be so stupid as to argue.

 

WELCOME 2 MY NIGHTMARE (2011)

 

1) I Am Made Of You; 2) Caffeine; 3) The Nightmare Returns; 4) A Runaway Train; 5) Last Man On Earth; 6) The Congregation; 7) I'll Bite Your Face Off; 8) Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever; 9) Ghouls Gone Wild; 10) Something To Remember Me By; 11) When Hell Comes Home; 12) What Baby Wants; 13) I Gotta Get Outta Here; 14) The Underture.

 

Sequels that try to catch up with the original thirty-five years later cannot work effectively — there must be some mathematical law out there to prove that, but I’ll take it on pure intuitive trust for the moment. Let us refresh our memories: in 1975, Alice was all but injecting one last breath into the dying lungs of «glam» rock, hybridizing it with vaudeville and Vegas, much to the dis­gust of some fans, but much to the delight of others. Under all of its glitz and camp, Welcome To My Nightmare had a purpose — it offered fresh, sizzling sensations with strategically placed drops of intelligence (so that for each ʽCold Ethylʼ and ʽBlack Widowʼ you got yourself a ʽDepart­ment Of Youthʼ or an ʽOnly Women Bleedʼ).

 

Compared against that landmark, the predictably, but uncomfortably titled sequel Welcome 2 My Nightmare (for one thing, you can’t even express the difference in spoken words, only graphi­cally) is an inevitable flop. It has only one advantage: SCOPE. What began as a light nostalgic collaboration between Alice and Bob Ezrin somehow managed to evolve into a sprawling, mega-ambitious project involving a whole army of people. Even if all of these songs sucked from be­ginning to end, it would still be worth at least one listen just to see all these guys assembled in one place. The three original Cooperites (Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Neal Smith) col­laborating on three of the numbers. Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, the Coop’s guitar god savi­ours of the late 1970s, on a couple others. Desmond Child, the malicious hero of Trash, co-wri­ting the lead-in track. Good old pal Rob Zombie adding backing vocals on another one. And that is just the beginning of the list. It must have taken lots of energy to simply get all these people to participate — let alone shuffle their contributions into some sort of coherent mix.

 

But is there a coherent mix? The question might be moot, since, at his most inspired, the Coop was always about eclecticism and unpredictability. The presence of a «heavy guitar rock» sound is, by and large, the only glue that holds most of this material together (and even then there are exceptions — ʽLast Man On Earthʼ is an attempt to work within the Kurt Weill / Tom Waits idi­om), but the original Alice Cooper band members certainly do not play the same way as Hunter and Wagner, let alone «modern» guitar players. From the industrial metal echoes of Brutal Pla­net to the neo-punk crunch of The Eyes Of Alice Cooper to the glam metal days of Trash to the MTV-friendly bowtie-guitars of ʽWhat Baby Wantsʼ, we have everything.

 

Concept? Well, was there really a concept behind the original Nightmare, other than just of­fe­ring a general framework within which the man could worship his fetishes and poke fun at so­ci­e­ty’s vices? From that point of view, the sequel works just as well. There are songs about ghouls, devil women, and disco dancing in hell, yet there are also songs about mechanical world evils, child abuse, life in the fast lane etc.: quite a workable mix if you know how to work it.

 

But the album still does not work as an album; it never becomes bigger than the sum of its parts, which is further exacerbated by the fact that, since there are so many different parts, quite a few of them sum together in the negative. The standard culprit, for instance, is ‘What Baby Wants’, a collaboration with a weird by-product of today’s pop culture called Ke$ha (supposedly, on the next sequel we will be seeing Justin Bieber take on the role of Steven). Some folks naturally sug­gested «big bucks» and «getting hip with the youngsters», but they are missing the point here: the former may work for Elton John and the latter for Mick Jagger, but the Coop is a seasoned joker, and bringing in the latest shit-hip-pop-sensation is this season’s idea of a joke. If only the song it­self had more to it than its insanely annoyingly catchy two-bit chorus, it might even have been a successful joke. But it doesn’t, so it wasn’t.

 

Other misfires include: (a) heavy use of auto-tune on ‘I Am Made Of You’, employed as a purely artistic device, of course (God save us from living to see the day when Alice starts needing auto-tune!), but still as utterly ugly as every other bit of auto-tune on the planet — and the song itself is one of Desmond Child’s least convincing contributions to Cooper’s legacy; (b) the lack of ei­ther humor or interesting musical ideas in ‘Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever’, a song that tries to go for the same sort of vibe as the dance-oriented tracks on Goes To Hell, but add a little techno fla­vor to the soup — the effect is confusing, and the message seems misguided (a guy as smart as Alice should not, I think, try to write songs that attempt to make fun of Boney M and the modern dance scene at the same time); (c) the big obligatory ballad, ʽSomething To Remember Me Byʼ: even if it was announced as an old song, originally written by Alice and Dick Wagner in the late 1970s, it does not have the «grit» of ‘Only Women Bleed’, nor the pretty hooks of ‘I Never Cry’, nor even the simplistic sentimentality of ‘You And Me’ — and, furthermore, it is almost arranged as a power ballad; cutting down on some of that guitar pomp might help.

 

On the winning side, there is still ‘When Hell Comes Home’, a song that returns us to the already well-exploited topic of dysfunctional families, but with the aid of one of the meanest, darkest riffs in Cooper history; and the galloping rock’n’roll of ‘A Runaway Train’ (which is the only track here that does indeed bear a strong resemblance to the «Alice Cooper Band» era). (The third track written and recorded with the old pals is ‘I’ll Bite Your Face Off’; a far less interesting pro­po­si­tion, built on generic blues-rock chord sequences and sounding like, er, well, pretty much like The Rolling Stones on A Bigger Bang, which should be telling). ʽLast Man On Earth’ is a fairly funny Tom Waits imitation, and ‘The Congregation’ does indeed sound a little Beatlesque, as Alice himself claimed, but mostly due to his singing the melody in a Lennon-like style.

 

So, on the whole, there is a lot to learn about Welcome 2 My Nightmare and quite a few things to enjoy about it, but as an album it is still an embarrassment, unfortunately, making it Alice’s se­cond embarrassment in a row, and this time, I cannot even overcome myself and explicitly give it a thumbs up — creating the illusion that it, in any way, might rival Welcome 1. (And if you are not a fan of that one, don’t even fantasize about getting this one). What should have been done, under the circumstances, was to dispatch the idea of a «sequel» altogether, and simply profit from the presence of so many old-time pals by having them write better songs. Come to think of it, nei­ther Bruce, nor Dunnaway, nor even Desmond Child had anything to do with the original Night­mare — why saddle them with unnecessary responsibility for the «sequel»? (Fortunately, in the­ory only: their songs are the least 1975-ish on the album).

 

In other words, Alice keeps balancing on the fringes: after a decade-long genuine «comeback», he goes back to being happy about playing the fool for playing the fool’s sake, regardless of how many repulsive lapses of taste this attitude is bringing along. Too bad, because even at this well-advanced age, I believe, he still may have one or two Brutal Planets inside him, and if that is right, why waste that age with ridiculous «sequels»? Just to remind us one more time how all va­lues are relative, and how one man’s «lapse of taste» is another one’s «challenge to taste»?

 

PS. ʽThe Undertureʼ, masterminded by Ezrin, is a decent enough potpourri arrangement, but if its chief message is in persuading us to accept the blood brotherhood of Welcome 1 and Welcome 2, it is wasted on me at least. And I genuinely hope that «Steven» has finally made his last appea­r­ance on this record. Imagine McCartney sticking with Sergeant Pepper for the next thirty years of his career — as an evil running gag of sorts.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF ALICE COOPER (1999)

 

CD I: 1) Don't Blow Your Mind; 2) Hitch Hike; 3) Why Don't You Love Me; 4) Lay Down And Die, Goodbye; 5) Nobody Likes Me; 6) Levity Ball (studio version); 7) Reflected; 8) Mr And Misdemeanour; 9) Refrigerator Heaven; 10) Caught In A Dream (single version); 11) I'm Eighteen; 12) Is It My Body; 13) Ballad Of Dwight Fry; 14) Under My Wheels; 15) Be My Lover; 16) Desperado; 17) Dead Babies; 18) Killer; 19) Call It Evil; 20) Gutter Cat Vs. The Jets; 21) School's Out; CD II: 1) Hello Hooray; 2) Elected (single version); 3) Billion Dollar Babies; 4) No More Mr Nice Guy; 5) I Love The Dead; 6) Slick Black Limousine; 7) Respect For The Sleepers; 8) Muscle Of Love; 9) Teenage Lament '74; 10) Working Up A Sweat; 11) Man With The Golden Gun; 12) I'm Flash; 13) Space Pirates; 14) Welcome To My Nightmare (single version); 15) Only Women Bleed (single version); 16) Cold Ethyl; 17) De­par­t­ment Of Youth; 18) Escape; 19) I Never Cry; 20) Go To Hell; CD III: 1) It's Hot Tonight; 2) You And Me (single version); 3) I Miss You; 4) No More Time For Tears; 5) Because; 6) From The Inside (single version); 7) How You Gonna See Me Now; 8) Serious; 9) No Tricks; 10) Road Rats; 11) Clones (We're All); 12) Pain; 13) Who Do You Think We Are (single version); 14) Look At You Over There Ripping The Sawdust From My Teddy Bear; 15) For Britain Only; 16) I Am The Future (single version); 17) Tag, You're It; 18) Former Lee Warmer; 19) I Love America; 20) Identity Crisises; 21) See Me In The Mirror; 22) Hard Rock Summer; CD IV: 1) He's Back (demo version); 2) He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask); 3) Teenage Frankenstein; 4) Freedom; 5) Prince Of Darkness; 6) Under My Wheels; 7) I Got A Line On You; 8) Poison; 9) Trash; 10) Only My Heart Talking; 11) Hey Stoopid (single version); 12) Feed My Frankenstein; 13) Fire; 14) Lost In America; 15) It's Me; 16) Hands Of Death; 17) Is Anyone Home; 18) Stolen Prayer.

 

Release of monstruous, multi-CD box sets for artists whose creative careers still go on is an ethi­cally questionable business. How can you call something The Life Of... when the life in question is far from over? Since the day this boxset came into existence and up to the time when this re­view has been written, Alice has released no less than five additional studio albums, and a sixth one is reportedly in the works. So, who will really need The Life Of... ten years from now, apart from curio collectors? No doubt, it will be superseded at some point by an even fatter, an even more gruesome, and, perhaps, even more senseless collection.

 

So let us take this review as simply an excuse for a few scattered general and particular remarks. First, Vincent Furnier, even discounting the last decade, has indeed had a long, unpredictable, thrilling, and wobbling career. Perhaps it does take the space of four CDs to prove that, and the selections are well-planned, placing slightly more emphasis on the Alice Cooper Band period than his solo career — reasonably so — but still careful enough to track down fine selections from each and every one of his records, even the ones that were decidedly uncommercial. (I do take offense at the slighting of Special Forces, Zipper Catches Skin, and Dada, though).

 

Second, unlike Bob Dylan, Vincent Furnier does not have a ton of concealed goody-goodies for future generations to uncover and delight in. Rarities and previously unreleased material that are in­cluded contain a few tasty bits, but no forgotten masterpieces. I count three songs exactly — no more — that really interest me as elegant pieces of art rather than curios/novelties. The B-side 'No Tricks', from 1978, written and recorded in the confessional manner of From The Inside, ve­ry much belongs on that album, and should count as one of the four or five most intensely perso­nal songs Alice ever dared to deliver publicly.

 

The 1982 single 'For Britain Only' was, true to its name, only released in the UK, and is a fine sharp stab at either Britain or those who visit Britain, I have forgotten which, but I do remember it is as hilarious as everything Alice did in those weird days of New Wave. (Two other little-known tracks from that period, movie soundtrack contributions 'Identity Crisis' and 'See Me In The Mirror', are only semi-decent, but at least show that he was still writing bizarre material as late as 1984, so his conversion to hair metal in 1986 must have been quite immediate).

 

And the 1991 cover of Jimi Hendrix's 'Fire', while obviously inferior to the ori­ginal in terms of music (those were the hair metal years, remember?), yields a deli-salaciously sleazy vocal per­for­mance — it fits in perfectly with Alice's dirty sexual escapades like 'I'm Your Gun' or 'Snakebite', but the latter were written by corporate sleazebags, and the former by you-know-who. 'Jimi's rol­ling over', the Coop sneers during the coda, and he most certainly was, but I am pretty sure that, had the Coop included more cover versions like these instead of third-rate outside material from his delivery guys, Jimi wouldn't have minded rolling over a little bit to uphold Alice's artistic re­putation. For all of its campiness, this way of doing 'Fire' is one of the few things that can, to an extent, redeem our nostalgia for the days of The Big Frizz.

 

Outside that field, the goody-goodies are mostly here to remind us that, apart from the Life side of Mr. Alice, he also had his Crime side — and by that, we do not mean his anti-social stage per­sonality, but rather true crimes, subject to capital punishment, such as:

 

—    the agreement to participate in the farce of the Sgt. Pepper movie (a memento of which is left in the form of his strange cover of 'Because');

—    the silly early days when The Alice Cooper Band were supposed to be The Spiders, but in reality tried to be lame clones of the ques­tionable facets of The Rolling Stones by covering the likes of Marvin Gaye's 'Hitch Hike';

—    the ir­ritable and malodorous love for B- and C-movie clichés, which led the man to contribute corny Seventies' bubblegum rock to corny soundtracks for cornier, com­ple­tely forgotten flicks like Flash Fearless Versus The Zorg Women ('Space Pira­tes' is pure delirious idiocy);

—    the unforgi­vable decision to include two alternate mixes of 'He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask)' — both of which are superior to the final version, but still not enough to make it into anything non-stinky;

—    the idea to transform the monster original version of 'Road Rats' from Lace And Whiskey into a whiny, wheezy, synth-heavy, smelly little gnome of a tune, donate it to a movie with Meat Loaf in the title role, and then have the nerve to include it on this boxset instead of the original.

 

That said, such was his life, and such were his crimes, that the two are hard to separate from each other. At the very least, here is a man that has definitely paid for his crimes many times over in his lifetime — you could say that to every person who has ever wished him to hang for un­lea­shing the likes of Constrictor on humanity, he was happy to donate a personal hanging. Or be­heading. Or zapping. In the meantime, The Life And Crimes Of Alice Cooper play out like a sensible, reasonable, properly constructed re-enactment of all these things, even though there is very little reason for anyone to waste money on this.

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND (1969)

 

1) Don't Want You No More; 2) It's Not My Cross To Bear; 3) Black Hearted Woman; 4) Trouble No More; 5) Eve­ry Hungry Woman; 6) Dreams; 7) Whipping Post.

 

«Southern rock» is often described as having started out with this album — brother Gregg All­man on keyboards and vocals, brother Duane Allman on fabulous virtuoso guitar, brother Dickey Betts on fabulous, but non-virtuoso second guitar, brother Berry Oakley on bass, brother Jai Jo­hanny Johanson on drums, and brother Butch Trucks also on drums, the two of them so well co­ordinated that most people would never guess about their coexistence.

 

But «Southern rock» is also a term that does serious injustice to the band. Whoever coined it back in the day was stupid enough not to foresee the consequences — that the word «Southern» would rather be associated with Dixie and, perhaps, the plantator's whip, rather than something remotely intelligent and humanistic in nature. The Allman Brothers did come up with a seriously new type of music, but nothing about their synthesis makes it so goddamn inherently «Southern», except for the indisputable fact that most of the band members came from the South (with the sole ex­cep­tion of Oakley, born and raised in Chicago).

 

On first sight and sound, The Allman Brothers Band is merely another blues-rock album from a fresh team of American musicians, following in the steps of Paul Butterfield, Canned Heat, and the like; the fact that most of the material is original, generally written by Gregg Allman, is hard­ly all that significant, since both his melodies and lyrics rarely rise above slightly individualistic variations on common blues patterns. This may explain why the world was a bit slow to catch on to this new development — the record sold poorly, and it took the band's blistering (but also grue­lling) tour schedule to patch it up.

 

On second sight and sound, The Allman Brothers Band tears Paul Butterfield and Canned Heat to shreds, scattering them along the road as pretty historical curios. These guys' purpose was not simply to pay tribute to their adored Delta and Chicago heroes, or to show off their naïve ado­ration for dangerous-sounding, voodoo-laden music of the past. As the instrumental introduction, 'Don't Want You No More', explodes out of your speakers without warning, it becomes obvious that the Allmans had been attentively listening to Cream and Hendrix at least as much as, and pro­bably maybe more than, Elmore James and Otis Rush. Further down along the line, it becomes transparent that they were quite deeply interested in various forms of jazz from all over the last two decades. And, once you reach 'Dreams', it is crystal clear that they were all ears when it came to the psychedelic sounds emanating from San Francisco.

 

Another aspect of it, lost over time, is that in 1969, for an American rock band that did not spe­cifically target itself for cult «proto-punkish» or «proto-metallic» audiences, the album was jar­ringly, abysmally loud and heavy. The big drum sound, the two overdriven guitars battling with each other at top volume, amplifying techniques that really owed far more to the fat, over­whelming sound of Hendrix than the thin, lonesome wailing of the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield — if this was blues-rock, no one in America really played blues-rock in such a defiant manner back in 1969. (With, perhaps, the lone exception of Grand Funk Railroad, who released their first record a couple months prior to the Allmans — not that GFR, even at their best, possessed one fifth of the dexterity and intelligence of the brothers). Today, of course, it's the norm rather than the exception, and way too many «Sou­thern rock» bands have turned that loudness into dumb, empty, and sometimes offensive pomp; but even today, it does not take much to clearly draw the line between The Allman Brothers Band and, say, Black Oak Arkansas.

 

At the heart of The Allman Brothers Band is brother Gregg, twenty-two years old at the time but blessed with the ability to come across — convincingly — as a fifty-two years old, belting out heartbroken tunes about waves upon waves of soulless bitches who continuously let him down in the good old blues tradition. However, it takes the collective vision of the band to turn his relati­vely simple melodies into compositions of epic proportion: sometimes by turning them into spec­tacular riff-fests ('Black Hearted Woman', with more memorable guitar lines to it than a single generic blues-rock LP will ever hold), sometimes by imbuing them with jampower ('Dreams', which does perfect justice to the title as it is extended to seven minutes' length through a long, unpredictable, impressionistic guitar solo that could put Jerry Garcia to shame), sometimes sim­ply through a series of build-ups and calm-downs and more build-ups that convey all the pain in the world ('Whippin' Post', probably the most well-known tune from the album, and understanda­bly so — the joint agony of Gregg singing "Sometimes I feel like I've been tied to the whipping post, good Lord I feel like I'm dying" and the band imitating his feelings is one of the most unfor­gettable moments in blues-rock history indeed).

 

The album takes itself dead serious. There are no lightweight boogie pieces, no humoristic aspect at all; song after song, Gregg rips apart all of the shirts in his wardrobe and scoops out all of the ashes in his fireplace. This is the blues completely shucked off of its «ladies-and-gentlemen enter­tainment» husk, elevated to bombastic, tragical levels of Wagnerian opera — these guys were no purists, they came there to make «high art» out of the legacy of Robert Johnson. Some may find this a priori annoying; if prog-rockers were so cruelly castigated by the establishment for viola­ting the spirit of rock'n'roll, I see no reason why the Allmans couldn't be «tied to the whipping post» for pretentiously tampering with the spirit of the blues. But in the end, it's all bullshit: just as Emerson, Lake & Palmer were doing their thang on one end of the spectrum, the Allmans did their hyperbolic show on the other one, and both excelled at it.

 

In a certain way, the band's debut has never been bested — subsequent albums would be more complex, diverse, and experimental from a «purely» musical point of view, but The Allman Bro­thers Band, all seven songs of it, each one a small masterpiece in its own rights, provides a com­plete, convincing, and accessible explanation of why God really put these six people in the same place, an explanation that has no need whatsoever to be repeated or rephrased. Oh, and haven't I mentioned yet that this record kicks major ass? Thumbs up.

 

IDLEWILD SOUTH (1970)

 

1) Revival; 2) Don't Keep Me Wonderin'; 3) Midnight Rider; 4) In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 5) Hoochie Coochie Man; 6) Please Call Home; 7) Leave My Blues At Home.

 

Idlewild South, the Allman Brothers' second and last Duane-era studio album, is anything but the proverbial «sophomore slump» — and yet, at the same time, it is hard to quench the feeling that, for some reason, the band was consciously trying to slightly calm down the raging spirits that dominated their first LP. Often hailed as the masterpiece, not just of the first stage of their career, but of all stages, it most probably gets that luck because it happened to put the Allmans on the commercial map — with 'Revival' and, a little later and mostly through other people's covers, 'Midnight Rider' — as well as hosting the band's most famous instrumental number. But on the overall scale, it is not quite as consistent.

 

In subtle contrast with the loud, bombastic, and daring debut, Idlewild South is really much more reminiscent of the generic image of «Southern rock». In particular, the country influence is felt quite acutely, e. g. on Gregg's rather formulaic ballad 'Please Call Home', which contains as much tormented-soul as that guy is capable of dispersing over four minutes — but that fact alone does not make it all too different from miriads of similar-sounding tunes that the deep South has pro­duced since then, and not even brother Duane's tender accompaniment can salvage it.

 

The optimistic interpretation is that the Allmans are simply trying to broaden their scope: after all, loud, jarring blues-rock did occupy something like 80% of their last record, and with a little extra coun­try and a little extra gospel influence, they now have a better chance to compete for that «all-Americana» slot recently invented by The Band. It is no fluke that Dickey Betts' 'Revival' had be­en chosen as the album opener. 'Don't Want You No More', with its immediate crash-boom-bang, was announcing the arrival of a new type of power. 'Revival' cuts down on the power aspect, let­ting us know that it is really tradition that these guys cherish more than brute force. Well... I'm all for tempering brute force with tradition, but do they have to rub it in so blatantly?

 

In short, it is not very uplifting to see a great band swap the experimental psychedelia of 'Dreams' for predictable rootsy country/gospel sounds, no matter how close those sounds are to their hearts. With an overall running length of 30 minutes, even one so-so song turns out to be fairly detri­mental to the added effect, and here there are at least two or three so-so songs. Fortunately, the «so-so» does not apply to 'Midnight Rider', immortalized through its simplistic, but unforgettable acoustic riff and a little bit of Southern mysticism in the lyrics — beautiful tune, even if it never catches as much fire as its thematic follow-up three years later, 'Ramblin' Man' (which I have al­ways thought of as Dickey Betts' «response» to Gregg Allman's «call»).

 

And, of course, there is plenty of the same stuff here that made The Allman Brothers Band so great. The pompous reinvention of 'Hoochie Coochie Man', with bassist Berry Oakley taking lead and all sorts of riff-a-licious embellishments thrown in. The roaring finale of 'Leave My Blues At Home', with Betts and Duane trading rapid-fire licks and the two drummers finally letting us know why the heck there are two drummers in the band. The sweaty swampy harmonica playing from common guest Thom Doucette on 'Don't Keep Me Wondering'. They all count.

 

But the unquestionable magnum opus — one that would go on to become magnissimum in con­cert — is Dickey Betts' unpredictable ode to an unknown woman's grave, one that has forever immortalized the simple name of Elizabeth Reed, whoever she was. Instrumental compositions modelled after the jazz pattern (theme, collective / individual improvisation, back to theme) were no longer news on rock albums by 1970, yet few of them, if any, had managed to capture the lis­teners' spirits so intently as 'In Memory...', perhaps because previous similar efforts usually came off more as technical experiments than musical compositions with a spiritual purpose.

 

'In Memory...', on the other hand, is wonderful exactly because its spiritual purpose is so firmly, but also humbly, engraved on its sleeve. It starts out almost like a Santana number: moody, a tad ominous, ever so slightly sad, then leads us through a series of signature changes reflecting vari­ous states of the human soul, with imaginative soloing from the two competing guitarists, a little less imaginative soloing from Gregg's organ, and a mercifully brief, up-to-the-point of solo inter­play from the drummers. It is hardly «dazzling», but it is exactly its lack of dazzle that makes it so respectable: after all, if you name your song in memory of a deceased person, it does not make sense to use it as a pretext for firing on all your guns — somehow, you have to channel your ta­lents into respectful servitude for the roaming spirits, and 'In Memory...' succeeds admirably at that. In fact, this relatively sparse studio version may be more likable than its drawn-out live cou­nterparts, where the «show-off» element would inevitably come through.

 

So, despite the fact that lamentable «Southern rock» clichés show through much more explicitly this time around, Idlewild South is still an indisputable classic, with the strengths not just out­weighing the weaknesses, but almost obliterating them. And, in order to appreciate it, one does not even need to subscribe to the conventional «Dead Hero Legend»: Duane Allman, whether you worship the guy or consider him overrated, is only one of the many significant attractions on this record, whose status would be well deserved even if he hadn't played one note on it. Still fresh after all those years — thumbs up, of course.

 

AT FILLMORE EAST (1971)

 

1) Statesboro Blues; 2) Done Somebody Wrong; 3) Stormy Monday; 4) You Don't Love Me; 5) Hot 'Lanta; 6) In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 7) Whipping Post.

 

Although this might easily be one of the five, six, or ten greatest live albums ever, it is fairly hard to review it without sounding like a dick. People who tear it down for the boringness of its long-winded jams have a point — courtesy of Captain Obvious. People who praise it, however, may just as well come across as art-brain-washed retards who'd slobber over any piece of improvisa­tion as long as it crossed the ten-minute mark. Essentially, At Fillmore East is one of those per­fect excuses for an argument that keep life boiling — so let's argue.

 

There are several editions commemorating the Allman Brothers' legendary performances at Bill Graham's Fillmore East on March 12-13, 1971; the 1992 version, The Fillmore Concerts, in par­ticular, is longer and more informative (and, of course, even more excruciating for jam-haters), but since much of its additional material comes from Eat A Peach anyway, in this review I am sticking to the original double-LP. A double LP, that is, that barely manages to pack seven num­bers in its eighty-minute running time. Whoo!

 

First, let us mark that The Allmans never came across as stage perfectionists. In the studio, mis­takes were banned, and creativity was always controlled with the highest amount of polish; on stage, the atmosphere was loosened, and if you want really tight, blameless versions of 'Elizabeth Reed' or 'Whipping Post', my advice is to stick firmly to the studio originals. (This is in stark contrast to Lynyrd Skynyrd, for example, who always exercised at least as much as discipline on stage as they did in the studio — not that it makes any sense to hang out the «good» and «bad» labels on this).

 

This puts the band straight into the «spiritual improvisers» camp: the emphasis is on picking up small strands of vibes right here and now, out of thin air, rather than on reproducing the pre-existing vibes synthesi­zed during studio hours. Stage jamming was, of course, nothing new by the time 1971 rolled along: every respectable live band that pretended to go beyond mere cheap en­tertainment had to engage in it. And at first, it is easy to take the extended duelling of Duane and Dickey for just another in a long, long series of similar examples, brushing it away with a «oh no, not another infinitesimal jam band» attitude. I mean — holy crap! — 'Whippin' Post' drags on for over twenty minutes! ('Mountain Jam' could easily spill over forty). Overkill.

 

But, in fact, these jams are quite different. Now, the band's style is obviously influenced by such jamming traditions as, let us name them arbitrarily, the «Airplane way» and the «Cream way» (both of which, in turn, owe a lot to free-form jazz, but let us not get carried too far away). The former emphasizes psychedelia — the player is actually possessed by a pink elephant while plu­cking the strings — where the latter emphasizes technique, complexity, and elite-ness — the pla­y­­er is on a mission to bring intellectual respect to the guitar-bass-drums combo. Then there is al­so a third tradition, the «Who way» of doing it, which essentially says: «You can do whatever you want and for however long you want to do it as long as it kicks ass». It's a pretty rare tradition, ac­tually, but it does exist.

 

As I sit here, listening to Dickey Betts wail away on 'Whippin' Post', it somehow looks like the Allmans, back in those good old days, did not quite fit in with any of the three traditions. There are occasional elements of psychedelia, when the pink elephants break away from the pen (as in the coda to 'You Don't Love Me', or the «chaotic» mid-section of 'Post'). There is obvious atten­tion to technique, emanating mostly from Duane, but seriously infecting the other band members as well. And much, if not most, of it rocks quite aggressively. But none of this spells oh so clear­ly: «We're here to (a) open, blow, and forever change your minds; (b) show you how badass the vec­tor geometry of our fingers is; (c) rock your pathetic asses to high heaven».

 

If anything, for me, it spells: «Say, why do all these good old songs really need to be three mi­nutes long? Isn't it a shame? Why worship this stupid confinement to a particular time length? Let us just allow them to roll on for as long as might seem reasonable». There is really no mission here, no deep meaning underlying this need to jam. It's just a — why not? We can do it, so why not? If we couldn't do it — if there weren't so many of us, if we weren't all highly committed, well trained musicians — that'd be another thing. But as it now stands, what's wrong with it?

 

Indeed, I used to get bored a lot with the twenty-two minutes of 'Whippin' Post' — before I ended up understanding that I wanted to get bored with it, just because it was so long. But it is not as if this were some sort of ambient landscape: each minute of its instrumental sections is seriously dif­ferent. First, you have Duane's scorching solo, all unpredictable jumps from behind corners. Second, you have Betts, more disciplined and rhythmic in his approach. Then you have the odd chaos section, with each of the guitarists taking turns to pull the band over to his side for some avantgarde trick or other. Then you have the second chaos section, where they even pull out a bit from 'Frère Jacques' (why not? anything goes). It's an exciting, intriguing musical journey — yes, it could have been shorter, but what are you, catching a train or something? (And, by the way, in headphones it makes for some great train voyage accompaniment).

 

It goes without saying that the same logic applies to the extended version of 'In Memory Of Eli­zabeth Reed', and to the twenty-minute take on 'You Don't Love Me', which grows out of its ini­tial rip-roaring blues-rocker mode (featuring the most memorable organ riff of Gregg Allman's career) into an unwarranted celebration of all sorts of bluesy modalities. It never really feels as if these guys were playing these twenty-minute jams because they were expected to play twenty-mi­nute jams — they just felt like it.

 

For what it's worth, far from every song develops into such a mammoth: 'Statesboro Blues' is gorgeous blues-rock at its most economical, Elmore James' 'Done Somebody Wrong' jumps aro­und for less than five minutes, the instrumental 'Hot 'Lanta' explores its main melancholic theme reasonably briefly, and only 'Stormy Monday' takes longer than it should, mainly because it is ta­ken, in a traditional manner, in an ultra-slow tempo. For these numbers, the band did not feel any desire to expand them, and it is easy to see why: all except 'Lanta' are traditional, and fairly gene­ric, compositions that do not provide much incentive for the flight of the mind — unlike, say, the multi-part original structure of 'Elizabeth Reed', or the 11/4 tempo of 'Whippin' Post'.

 

Also, I would not go as far as the exclusive beatification of Duane Allman, sponsored by mo­tor­cycle ma­nufactu­rers, but this is probably the best spot, along with his work on Layla, on which one could lay the temple foundation. Sharp, crisp, fluent leads with a proper combination of technique (Duane was a big Coltrane fan) and emotion (did I say that Duane was a big Coltrane fan?) and just a small, reasonable addition of «show-off-ey» flash to make his thang more blo­od-boiling than Clapton's contemporary efforts — plus, serving as a magnificent catalyst for his pals who, ever since 1971, had always struggled with finding the same kind of ignition (Wipe The Windows from 1976 shows this fairly well). If these leads are «boring», then so is improvi­sation as a whole, jazz and classical forms of music included — indeed, dare I say that if you do not «get» the improvised parts of Fillmore East, some of the least strained and self-conscious musical waves ever captured on tape, stick instead to your...

 

...All right, we got carried away. Thumbs up, particularly from the heart department, because the brain department usually endorses elegant formulae, and At Fillmore East, despite usually, and justifiedly, classified into the «roots-rock» stock, captures a glorious moment in musical history when roots-rock was about to shed its formula and advance to boundless, completely unencumbe­red free-flight mode. Cut short, unfortunately, with Duane's crash on October 29 same year.

 

EAT A PEACH (1972)

 

1) Ain't Wastin' Time No More; 2) Les Brers In A Minor; 3) Melissa; 4) Mountain Jam; 5) One Way Out; 6) Trouble No More; 7) Stand Back; 8) Blue Sky; 9) Little Martha.

 

Duane's sudden passing pretty much ended the Allmans' hopes of conquering the world. He may not have been God, but he had a far broader vision than any of the remaining band members: nei­ther brother Gregg nor chief competitor Betts saw any dire necessity in breaking out of the «Sou­thern» mold, and although both were capable of continuing to make good music, no longer would it try to be transcendental. Perhaps God was afraid of Duane, after all, requisiting him for his own barroom band with Jimi on first guitar.

 

In the meantime, though, the «Allman Brothers Band» (I am sure they had their reasons for con­tinuing to use that name) still had enough material left to shape out a proper swan song for their original incarnation. This included, for one thing, plenty of live leftovers from the Fillmore con­certs; for another, some session work done in September 1971 with Duane still alive at the Criteria Studios in Miami. Padding it out with a few tracks recorded post-Duane (but which could still bear his serious influence), the Allmans came out with another absolute winner in all respects — starting with the appetizing album sleeve and the title, stemming from Duane's famously friendly-cynical remark of «There ain't no revolution, it's evolution, but every time I'm in Georgia I eat a peach for peace».

 

The Fillmore outtakes can be problematic, for sure. Few people have any problems with 'One Way Out', a fast blues-rocker in the vein of 'You Don't Love Me', or with the grinding version of 'Trouble No More' that fully stands up against its studio counterpart, but it may be a different sto­ry with 'Mountain Jam', an improvisatory piece so long that it took a whoppin' two LP sides to fit it in (originally — the second and the fourth, but the CD version naturally reinstated the correct playing sequence).

 

Essentially, everything I said in the earlier review about the Allmans' improvisational principles holds out for 'Mountain Jam' as well. In order to appreciate it better, it may be a good idea to lis­ten to Donovan's hit single 'There Is A Mountain' first — one of those will-o-wispy rose-coloured flute-based hippie fantasies the mid-Sixties were so easy to deride for, but the Allmans latch on to it and expand its childishly optimistic spark into a full-fledged joyful celebration: thirty-three mi­nutes of pure musical happiness. Obviously, some of the lead work gets recycled, and the obliga­tory drum solo is obligatorily tedious (although the Allmans at least have two drummers going on at the same time, which makes things slightly more interesting), but this is not simply aimless jamming for the sake of killing time — this is the brothers' way of explaining about peace and love, it simply takes time to say everything they want to say about it.

 

However, it is hardly incidental that Eat A Peach opens with the Duane-less material: as much as it is a tribute to their fallen friend, it also indicates clearly that the band has no intention of stop­ping. Betts' 'Les Brers In A Minor', in particular, is a complex, intelligent instrumental that, un­fortunately, could not be matched by anything similar for the rest of the decade: its combination of a three-minute chaotic intro, a basic organ/guitar theme that stands out as one of the band's cat­chiest melodies, and a jam section that borrows far more from Santana than Southern rock, is still as fresh today as ever.

 

Brother Gregg's compositions, the slide rocker 'Ain't Wastin' Time No More' (which may sound like a hastily ta­ken vow in the light of brother Duane's misfortune, but was actually written before the accident), and the country-folk ballad 'Melissa', are more in line with the formulaic Southern stuff that was to dominate the band's sound after 1972, but both are nevertheless first-rate, and Betts' ethereal guitar work on 'Melissa' defines beauty.

 

The studio numbers with Duane are cunningly placed on side three — side four on today's CD ver­sion — so that nobody could have the temptation to skip the Duane-less tracks; only once you have come to terms with the idea that The Allman Brothers can have a musical future despite the il­lusory nature of the plural marker, you are permitted, as a bonus, to taste the last taste of Dua­ne's playing on such elegant numbers as 'Blue Sky', a rare example of an actual guitar duet betwe­en Duane and Dickey (they usually avoided crossing their different styles at the same time), and Duane's tiny acoustic flourish, 'Little Martha', a humbly fitting end to the album.

 

There are times when I am close to believing that this, indeed, is the moment where it all comes together for the Allmans (especially since I have learned to fall under the charm of 'Mountain Jam') — Eat A Peach is as much an honorary tribute to Duane's memory as it is a promise of a great artistic future, and for an album written under such a dark shadow, it is almost like a pillar of optimism: with visions of heavenly bliss and calm all over 'Melissa', 'Blue Sky', and 'Mountain Jam', ironically, it could almost be inferred that the brothers, starting out in the utmost anguish and despair with their self-titled album, have finally found the peace and love they were only hin­t­­ing at earlier. In reality, they found death — turmoil — confusion — more death, with bassist Berry Oakley eerily suffering the same accident as Duane one year later — more turmoil and pain — but little, if any, of that is showing on Eat A Peach, as if this concentration on inner peace and self-contention was their aggressive reply to life. So it's not just enjoyable, it's also intriguing; and how often is «Southern rock», good or bad, found to be intriguing? Rare enough to keep the lis­tener's thumbs up all the way through.

 

BROTHERS AND SISTERS (1973)

 

1) Wasted Words; 2) Ramblin' Man; 3) Come And Go Blues; 4) Jelly Jelly; 5) Southbound; 6) Jessica; 7) Pony Boy.

 

With the departure of Berry Oakley, whose bass playing is rarely mentioned in greatest-ever lists but who was nevertheless quite innovative, and a good foil for Duane, it became rather obvious that the powers-on-high were quite seriously bent on having «The Allmans» tone down their am­bitions, put a stop to their experiments, and become a regular Southern rock band. Brothers And Sisters saw them coming to terms with their destiny. But still — what a band!

 

Of the two remaining founding fathers (if, true to tradition, we omit the drummers), Dickey Betts was left as the major motivating force; Gregg's contributions here involve writing two out of se­ven songs, contributing vocals to two more, and mostly staying in the background with his play­ing, as the role of primary keyboardist is ceded to newcomer Chuck Leavell. And since Betts had been the «traditionalist» all along, suitably complementing Duane's forward drive, an album do­minated by his presence can have no hope of harboring even a minor musical revolution. Instead, the emphasis is on melody writing — and playing.

 

The key track is 'Ramblin' Man': if its quintessentially Southern sound bugs your sophisticated urban ears, or if its constant presence on classic rock radio has forever annihilated its potential (one reason why no rational person should ever listen to classic rock radio), Brothers And Sis­ters as a whole will hardly feel attractive. On the surface, it is a very, very generic song — exem­plified by its lyrics, which intentionally milk one bad cliché after another; I particularly «like» the lines about "on my way to New Orleans this morning, leaving out of Nashville, Tennessee". But there is some sort of magical ambiguity concealed in its chorus, a hard-to-tell invisible hook, a subtle touch of sorrow in the "When it comes to leaving..." line that raises it high and above so many other generic Southern rock anthems.

 

And then, of course, it can be seriously argued that the vocal part of the song as such is merely a prelude to the purely instrumental second part — not a «coda», since it is almost as long as the vocal section itself, but a brief symphonic bit, with guest guitarist Les Dudek supporting Betts as he dumps the vocals and goes on celebrating the reckless joys of livin' on the road by serenading them with shrill, jubilant, overdriven phrasing, none of which is too complex, but each segment simply bursting with emotion.

 

On 'Southbound', a fairly generic blues-rocker given to Gregg for the singing, Dickey adopts an even shriller, crisply-stinging tone, and transforms it from a forgettable piece of filler into a vir­tual textbook on the art of making classic rock'n'roll into a feast for the senses. His mid-part and coda solos on the song have all the construction perfection — and thus, all the memorability — of an A-level John Fogerty solo, but throw on a bit more complexity. None of the live recordings of the tune that I've heard have managed to recapture or successfully reinvent the smoothness of the original; I'm guessing that the man must have worked out quite a sweat by the time he got that take just right, but all the more respect for not allowing himself to be satisfied with anything less than pure perfection. Honorary second prize goes to Leavell, whose piano part manages to rock nearly as hard — clearly, his presence was still enough to spur Dickey on to giving it his best, preserving the «competition» angle that had been so important for the Duane years.

 

If the guitar solos on 'Southbound' easily make my personal Top 50 or so for guitar solos, then 'Jessica' can easily qualify for the Top 10 most unabashedly joyful songs ever produced by mortal man. Written by Dickey for his newly-born daughter in the key of A major, of which key Chris­tian Schubart once said that it is most suitable for "declarations of innocent love, youthful cheer­fulness and trust in God" — 'Jessica' exemplifies all three purposes, with major emphasis on «in­nocent» (all cynics are required to log off now!): there is a certain unbeatable purity of feeling about this simple, honest celebration of the miracle of birth.

 

As «cool» as it is to profess one's love for the demanding, complex instrumental compositions of Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis, and, in comparison, dismiss tunes like 'Jessica' for pan­dering to simplistic tastes, I would never want to subscribe to that ideology. To me, 'Jessica' simply embo­dies every good quality that a meaningful pop music instrumental could want: from professiona­lism and technicality to meaning and emotion, not one second wasted on anything I do not «get» or «like». In terms of complexity, 'Elizabeth Reed' may be the more enduring Betts classic, but its mid-section is way too detached from the main theme — the song does begin like a stern memo­rial service, but then quickly disconnects into awesome, yet unrelated jamming. In comparison, all of 'Jessica' — the main theme, the little repetitive bridge bit, Leavell's piano and Betts' guitar solos — is placed along the same highway of delight, diverse enough in sonic texture so as to never become boring, but never ever straining from its primary purpose. Fabulous thing.

 

With these three classics, the rest of the album could have been Osmonds' covers and it would still command a fine rating. But there is still nothing to be ashamed of. Gregg's 'Wasted Words' is a gritty, slide-dominated rocker that easily ranks alongside any of his Idlewild South originals; 'Come And Go Blues' is a fine showcase for Leavell's flourish technique; 'Jelly Jelly' is a bit over­drawn, but still culminates in a series of ear-splitting licks from Dickey; and the acoustic country shuffle 'Pony Boy' is just a cute little throwaway to end the album on a lighter, less breathtaking note after the fireworks of 'Jessica'.

 

So Brothers And Sisters does not make a point of straddling away from the conventions of «roots rock», «Southern rock», «redneck rock», or whatever else one might be predisposed to call it. But if only most Southern rock had the same inspiration and talent with which the Allmans, in 1973, were able to assault these conventions, the world would have been one step closer to the kind of para­dise that is so vividly depicted on the sleeve photos. It's pretty doggone sad that even for the Allmans, this paradise did not manage to last long. Thumbs up — and yes, I am quite ready to go on record with the opinion that this is the Southern rock album if you are only going to get one Southern rock album. Beats Skynyrd to pulp, and what other contenders are there?

 

WIN, LOSE OR DRAW (1975)

 

1) Can't Lose What You Never Had; 2) Just Another Love Song; 3) Nevertheless; 4) Win, Lose Or Draw; 5) Louisia­na Lou And Three Card Monty John; 6) High Falls; 7) Sweet Mama.

 

With the Allmans now becoming a modest-power hit machine, each new death of a band member only energizing and focusing the remaining ones even further, nobody could have predicted in 1973 that Brothers And Sisters would be the last undisputable jewel in the crown. But maybe I am exaggerating here. Maybe it was, after all, predictable, that both Gregg and Dickey would end up quarrelling with each other. That they would start releasing solo albums, and thus, becoming less interested in pooling their «brother» talents. That two years of bickering, booze, drugs, and Cher (whose tumultuous affair with Gregg still remains one of the most absurd blips on the celeb­rity radar) would eat their credibility from inside out.

 

But it is also possible that none of these factors are truly responsible for the depressing effect that Win, Lose Or Draw can produce on people. Perhaps it's just that, after Brothers And Sisters, there was nowhere to go but down. No matter how weak the follow-up is, it cannot be said that the band did not try. On the contrary, I think Win, Lose Or Draw tries way too hard to simply give the people what they want — another formulaic Allman Brothers Band™ record. Forgetting, in the meantime, that none of the Allman Brothers' records, up to now, have ever been made in strict accordance with formula.

 

The kicker is that almost every song on Brothers has its near-exact counterpart on Win. The rock­ and soul sound of 'Wasted Words' is reprised on 'Can't Lose What You Never Had'; the reckless country romance of 'Ramblin' Man' becomes 'Just Another Love Song' (albeit at a slower, more balladeering tempo); 'Come And Go Blues' = 'Nevertheless' (languid blues-rock). The instrumen­tal world of 'Jessica' gets an overweight brother in 'High Falls', and the restrained exit music of 'Pony Boy' becomes the 12-bar finale of 'Sweet Mama'.

 

«Companion albums» like these are not necessarily a bad thing — think of such classic pairs as Aerosmith's Toys In The Attic vs. Rocks, or Queen's pair of Marx Bros. tributes. But the band's creative members have to be on a roll to make it work, and neither Gregg nor Betts were, so it seems, in the same spirits. Actually, Gregg fares a little better; I am not a major lover of his drea­my country-blues stuff, but the title track is as good a sample of it as any, and both 'Nevertheless' and 'Can't Lose What You Never Had' — the latter a drastic, unrecognizable reinvention of an old Muddy Waters tune — are honest-to-goodness midtempo rockers whose mission is to wallow in pain, and that they do. 'Can't Lose' is, in all likelihood, the album's highlight, with its clever spi­ralling duet-riffs from Betts and Leavell and some frantic bits of soloing from Dickey, especially after the false ending where it seems like the man has been unjustifiedly cut off just as he was really really beginning to get into it.

 

But then he never really does. 'Just Another Love Song' is no 'Ramblin' Man', after all — just another piece of indistinguishable hillbilly entertainment, of which you can find billions of at least equal examples throughout the decade. And 'Louisiana Lou' is roots-rock by the numbers, clichéd, boring, enlightened briefly by one of Leavell's patented sprinkly piano solos, nothing else of interest. Betts' own guitar playing is unexplainably hushed, over-restrained, hidden behind the drums and pianos, and stripped of the crisp, piercing tones that did so much in the adrenaline-rai­sing department on Brothers.

 

The biggest disappointment, highly symbolic of the band's breakdown, is 'High Falls'. Beginning with a two-minute atmospheric series of rhythmless cascades — reminiscent of 'Les Brers In A Minor' — it eventually becomes one of the band's jazziest compositions, yet its inevitable inferiority to 'Dreams' and 'Elizabeth Reed', whose successor it vainly tries to pass itself for, is  bla­zing so ardently that it is hard to «love» the thing in the same way that we reserve for the Bro­thers' trailblazing instrumentals. The main theme is cutesy-pretty, and both Leavell and Betts de­liver technically decent solos, but there is no big point to these solos.

 

Clocking in at fourteen and a half minutes, 'High Falls' is the longest instrumental they ever in­cluded on a studio record — and something tells me that it only needed to be fourteen minutes long because they must have been at a loss coming up with actual songs for the record. A sharp contrast with 'Jessica', whose shorter solo passages managed to convey far more emotion. For me at least, 'High Falls' only works as pleasant background music, never even for a single moment rising sufficiently high above the ground to take you with it. One can always argue, of course, that, where 'Jessica' was supposed to represent the state of ecstatic, overflowing happiness, 'High Falls' is supposed to be more contemplative, a calmer, but no less contented, observation on the beauty and harmony of nature. Possibly so, but if I want calm and contemplation, I go for my am­bient Eno albums. The Allman Brothers Band, on the other hand, came into this world kicking serious ass, and there is little need for us to see them so «relaxed». There is nothing in 'High Falls' that makes it superior to, say, an old Quicksilver Messenger Service jam.

 

Overall, Win, Lose Or Draw lands somewhere near the «Draw» mark: it is not a bad roots-rock album, but it is a disgrace to the name of the Allmans, the first, but far from the last, clear sign that the loss of Duane and Oakley did, after all, seriously undercut the band's fortunes. A thumbs down rating would indicate that the album is essentially worthless, which is not so — I believe that 'High Falls', despite its shortcomings, is still well worth getting to know — but a thumbs up is equally out of the question, since I do not want to convey the false impression that it is in any way comparable with the band's golden/silver periods.

 

WIPE THE WINDOWS, CHECK THE OIL, DOLLAR GAS (1976)

 

1) Introduction by Bill Graham; 2) Wasted Words; 3) Southbound; 4) Ramblin' Man; 5) In Memory Of Elizabeth Re­ed; 6) Ain't Wastin' Time No More; 7) Come & Go Blues; 8) Can't Lose What You Never Had; 9) Don't Want You No More; 10) It's Not My Cross To Bear; 11) Jessica.

 

The band finally collapsed in 1976, mainly due to Gregg's tribulations. Final straws included mar­riage with Cher and testifying against the band's road manager and chief drug supplier Scooter Herring; most of the band decided they would have nothing to do with a silly playboy and a stool pigeon to boot, and quit to form Sea Level, whereas Betts went on his solo way. The worst thing was that they'd lost Chuck Leavell, once and for all; the band would never again be able to boast that kind of powerful piano sound (and, as a keyboardist, Gregg himself was never more than just adequate — he likes playing the Hammond, for sure, but his technique and passion for it has al­ways been the weak link in the band's collective chemistry).

 

This double-LP live memento fulfills the function of the obligatory rip-off on the part of the mu­sic industry: unable to acquire further studio product, they decided to go with this rag-bag of re­cordings culled from different venues over a three-year period, clumsily sewn together as if to re­enact a real live show, but with the tracks constantly fading in and out, there is no such effect. Yet, as a memento of the band's immediate post-Duane years, it works, and is well worth listening to from time to time.

 

Unfortunately, with Betts dominating the stage now, the Allmans live have quickly transformed from the unpredictable jam monster they used to be into a mere A-level Southern rock band, con­tent with faithfully reproducing their studio hits (and misses) for packs of new fans who were happy to simply hear the hits. And it is easy to see why, by simply comparing this album's lone jam number, 'Elizabeth Reed', with the older version on Fillmore East: without Duane and his imaginative stage explorations, there was no point. The man's place on that track is now occupied by keyboardists — Leavell and Gregg — and even Leavell seems to be playing his generic jazzy bits without supplying them with meaning, let alone Allman who is not able of handling it at all. They should have cut down the length here, instead of expanding it, and just allowed Dickey his usual solo, which, of course, does not fail.

 

Everything else is just faithfully reproduced standards from the band's three post-Duane albums; the only «oldie» on the setlist is 'Don't Want You No More / It's Not My Cross To Bear' from the debut, suffering from the lack of Duane, but still making their point. 'Southbound' sounds mur­dered to my ears because of Betts' nonchalance (his playing here relates to the original the same way a two-dollar penknife relates to a Fairbairn-Sykes); somehow he only really comes to life in the end, perhaps goaded by the unyielding perfection of Leavell's solo part. But he does much bet­ter on 'Ramblin' Man' and 'Jessica', and as for 'Can't Lose What You Never Had', I've always suspected that they used an alternate studio take — all of the sound is so brilliantly polished that either it is all a fake, or, somehow, somewhere, they did happen to be recorded on fire even du­ring one of the shakiest periods in their touring history.

 

In all, it is a good, carefully assembled portrait of «The Allman Brothers, Mark II» that needs to be perceived as nothing more and nothing less; no one ever seriously claimed that it would aspire to the cosmic heights of Fillmore. Apart from the butchered 'Southbound', the boring keyboard solos on 'Elizabeth Reed', and the completely baffling album title (did the band even play any Chuck Berry songs in the first place? What was that all about?), it's all decent. Thumbs up.

 

ENLIGHTENED ROGUES (1979)

 

1) Crazy Love; 2) Can't Take It With You; 3) Pegasus; 4) Need Your Love So Bad; 5) Blind Love; 6) Try It One More Time; 7) Just Ain't Easy; 8) Sail Away.

 

Leavell and Lamarr kept their promise, never returning to Gregg's side. The cynics will certainly want to point out that the two were just too pleased with their own free lives as bandleaders of Sea Level to consider a reunion that would once again relegate them to the status of sideplayers. On the other hand, Dickey Betts' latest solo album from 1978 stalled at #151 on the charts, quite a drop from #30 for its 1977 predecessor — there was your strong incentive to bury the hatchet and rearm oneself with the magic moniker of The Allman Brothers.

 

Recruiting David Goldflies on bass, Gregg and Dickey managed to make peace with the dynamic drumming duo, and also decided to return to the dual guitar lineup instead of continuing to rely on the piano. However, the addition of Dan Toler on second axe by no means makes the situation comparable to the golden days of Dickey/Duane. Most likely, Toler is responsible for some of the solo passages on Enlightened Rogues, but his style is so similar to Betts' that only a serious ex­pert could tell the difference, particularly since the emphasis is never placed on interplay between the two guitarists (but neither was it the same way in the Dickey/Duane period, when the two gui­tarists used to prefer competition over collaboration, over nobody's objections).

 

Much more important, perhaps, is the return of legendary Tom Dowd as producer: having recor­ded most of their stuff from Idlewild South to Eat A Peach, the man did not participate in the band's fortunes since Duane's death, but now he has been re-recruited to provide a much desired shot in the arm. It could fail, but it worked: Rogues is the Allmans' finest collective effort since Brothers & Sisters, and they really haven't been as good after it, at least, not until the unexpec­ted rejuvenation with Derek Trucks.

 

Not that there's anything different. The formula stays the same: unimaginative bluesy Southern rockers, mixed with even less imaginative Southern country ballads and one traditionally long All­man Brothers Instrumental™. But the rockers really do rock, providing all the sharpness, agg­ression, and spirit that you expect from rockers; the ballads are suitably ambitious, designed to soar rather than drag; and the instrumental may not be genius, but is certainly blameless. Consi­dering how sharply they went down from this record to the very next one, released but a year la­ter, it is hardly a coincidence that the only difference in lineup between there and here was the pre­sence of Dowd at the mixing controls.

 

'Pegasus', the instrumental, is sort of like a gentleman's compromise between 'Jessica' and 'High Falls'. In terms of atmosphere, it emulates the latter's romantic, dreamy, slightly otherworldly qua­lities, but moves along at a faster pace and never drags: its seven and a half minutes are timed perfectly, unlike the overkill fourteen minutes of 'Falls'. The main theme is a folksy little beauty, very much reflecting Betts' vision, even if it may be a bit difficult to make it convey images of flying horses (the Allmans, after all, had their feet planted way too firmly on the ground, especial­ly after Duane's demise); and there are a few curious twists, like the «looped», vortex-like guitar phrasing in the coda, that hint at the band's ongoing search for new combinations of sounds (very modest, but nobody probably expected even that).

 

Meanwhile, 'Crazy Love' and 'Can't Take It With You' rock like crazy — the former may smell a bit of barroom atmosphere, but the latter is a gritty, bristling number that wouldn't have been out of place on a Fillmore East concert; Betts lashes out with the same sort of fluent, emotive solos that make such a gas out of 'Ramblin' Man', but switches the controls from «happy» to «pissed off», and my only complaint is that the song fades out over his accumulating steam — that final solo part should have been streamlined into jam mode. Another song with terrific guitar work is Gregg's ballad 'Just Ain't Easy', which could have been just another pleasant, lazy Gregg ballad, but for which Betts has found enough time to elevate it to near-epic status.

 

Occasional complaints have been voiced over the addition of female backup voices on 'Crazy Love' (Bonnie Bramlett) and 'Sail Away' (Mimi Hart), but they are used very moderately — un­less one shares the misogynistic view that female voices on Southern rock albums automatically turn them into, uh, «Southern Rock Albums», there is nothing to worry about. Enlightened Ro­gues is no more or less specifically «Southern» than Brothers & Sisters — it respects a particu­lar paradigm of music-making without glorifying it. These rogues, after all, are enlightened: they know that Southern-accented singing and Southern-style playing alone won't be enough to restore Southern reputation. It also helps to make a good record, and on Enlightened Rogues, there's na­ry a bad song to be found, even if nothing rises to particularly spectacular heights. Thumbs up.

 

REACH FOR THE SKY (1980)

 

1) Hell And High Water; 2) Mystery Woman; 3) From The Madness Of The West; 4) I Got A Right To Be Wrong; 5) Angeline; 6) Famous Last Words; 7) Keep On Keepin' On; 8) So Long.

 

In 1980, The Allman Brothers said goodbye to Capricorn and signed on with Arista — same year that the label also got Aretha Franklin. Unfortunately, in both cases, the record company, whose biggest achievement would soon consist of making a star out of Whitney Houston, wasn't quite sure about what to do with these has-beens. Saddled with a pair of unimaginative hackjob produ­cers and somehow outliving the emotional reunion spark that made Enlightened Rogues such a nice treat for long-term fans, the band sort of put itself on autopilot.

 

Reach For The Sky is not awful, but it is even more of a generic Southern rock album than Win, Lose Or Draw; it certainly does not take the golden legend of the Allman Brothers to come up with that kind of result. One by one, Betts is constructing simple, catchy, danceable boogie tunes that have their little fun quotient: 'Angeline' actually managed to become a minor hit single, near­ly making it into the Top 50, and most of the other rockers have their singalong charms, too, ex­cept they all spell «local barroom».

 

But it is quite telling that his major misfire is the obligatory instrumental: 'From The Madness Of The West' is officially the first of these that makes no point whatsoever. From 'Elizabeth Reed' to 'Pegasus', all of these numbers had an evocative, dreamy quality, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, but always purposeful. These particular six and a half minutes, however, sound like a very lame attempt at crossing blues-rock with fusion, a genre that they could have, perhaps, sto­mached were Duane still alive, but Dickey's and Gregg's abilities alone do not suffice. So they incorporate boring, amateurish synthesizer solos (yes!), a main theme completely devoid of atmo­sphere, and a longer than usual drum solo to cover up their asses (if there is a pair of guys in this band to never let anyone down, it's the drummer boys). What were all those Betts fantasy worlds doing at the moment? Eclipsed by the new record contract?

 

Of Gregg's two contributions, only 'So Long' works on the level of his past successes in Southern me­lancholia; his lazy ballads may or may not be your favourite piece of the Allmans' legacy, but at least they have forever remained its most stable part. Something tells me that this is the sole song on here that could have received Duane's stamp of approval; unfortunately (but predictably) it is merely the album closer, and impatient people might not live long enough to enjoy it.

 

If you are an avid collector of stereotypical blues-boogie records that neither say anything new nor anything awful, of which there have been thousands upon thousands of releases in the 1970s alone, Reach For The Sky belongs in your collection. If you happen to be Cher, Chuck Leavell, or Derek Trucks, it also belongs in your collection through former or future professional obliga­tion. Otherwise, feel free to skip, although I refrain from giving it an explicit thumbs down.

 

BROTHERS OF THE ROAD (1981)

 

1) Brothers Of The Road; 2) Leavin’; 3) Straight From The Heart; 4) The Heat Is On; 5) Maybe We Can Go Back To Yesterday; 6) The Judgement; 7) Two Rights; 8) Never Knew How Much (I Needed You); 9) Things You Used To Do; 10) I Beg Of You.

 

If there is one nomination in which Brothers Of The Road would fail to acquire the title of «Worst Of... Ever», it requires sharp brains indeed to come up with it. If there is one disaster that reluctantly agreed to pass this record by, I have no idea what it is. Hiring Barry and Robin Gibb to do the vocals, perhaps?

 

The blame lies hard and heavy on everyone, but mostly on producer John Ryan, who seems to ha­ve been so firmly set on putting his entrusted band back onto the surface of MOR-waves that he had no problems about making a deal with the devil and magically converting the Allman Bro­thers into the Doobie Brothers. Most of these songs are tailor-made for your local Southern rock radio station with no hopes whatsoever of making it on a larger scale. Tired, generic, sometimes non-existent riffs, bland lyrics, no inspiration or innovation whatsoever.

 

What is particularly wrong? Everything. Jaimoe had been fired, destroying the final magic charm of the band — the drummer duo: his replacement, Frankie Toler, has no reason whatsoever to ex­ist since he just faithfully copies Trucks’ patterns. The album cover features seven long-haired dudes in happy shirts, smirking in the middle of a field on a hill as if to say «Betcha not even the Eagles could be as down to earth as us here!» The obligatory instrumental is at last gone without a trace: the Doobie Brothers did not build their gorgeous reputation upon no weirdass wanking, so why should these guys? (Not that I seriously mind — ‘From The Madness Of The West’ clear­ly showed their chief instrumental writer at the end of his rope).

 

And then it takes exactly three seconds of ‘Two Rights’ to understand what all these unpleasant surface omens translate to on record. All of the instruments that come in during these three se­conds join in a prime slice of musical spam, heralded by the ugly canned synthesizer. Johnny Cobb helped Betts co-write the song, along with the minor hit ‘Straight From The Heart’, which takes the worst elements of Southern rock and disco and brilliantly synthesizes them.

 

Big, big, really big fans of Dickey Betts will still want this album for several examples of his fine soloing — one thing nature had not yet taken from him — particularly on the ballad-rocker ‘May­be We Can Go Back To Yesterday'’which really kicks ass during the last minutes, almost as if the first ones, on which Gregg was singing silly lyrics in a dramatically overblown and inadequate manner, never existed. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for really big fans of Gregg: of his two contributions, ‘Leavin’ sounds like a so-so imitation of the Lynyrd Skynyrd swagger (yes, the day has come indeed when the Allmans are taking lessons from the Skynyrds), and ‘Never Knew How Much’ is way too fluffy even for his usually schmaltzy country-ballad tone. “Never knew how much a man needed a woman, never knew how much a boy needed a girl” — sure ly­rics don’t matter much in pop music, but try to sing along and you’ll know that «not much» and «not at all» are not quite the same thing.

 

Conclusion: if Reach For The Sky was simply sort of dull, then Brothers Of The Road is sim­ply sort of awful. We should all be thankful that it tanked, or else we could be stuck with this Allman-Doobie Overdrive for the rest of the decade. As it was, the «reunion», by now sunk to levels lower than self-parody, finally came apart, and all the bit players took a fortunate break right up to the end of the decade. Thumbs down with a vengeance.

 

SEVEN TURNS (1990)

 

1) Good Clean Fun; 2) Let Me Ride; 3) Low Down Dirty Mean; 4) Shine It On; 5) Loaded Dice; 6) Seven Turns; 7) Gambler's Roll; 8) True Gravity; 9) It Ain't Over Yet.

 

Since Gregg's and Dickey's solo careers in the 1980s still stubbornly refused to take off (no big surprise there), with ultra-rare exceptions, such as Gregg's surprise 1987 hit 'I'm No Angel', only proving the rule, it was only a question of time before they'd consider coming together again; the real question was — would they take off from the dust in which Brothers Of The Road had left them, or would they forget about the album's existence at all and try to start it all anew?

 

Fortune helped them out, in the shape of guitarist Warren Haynes, who'd crossed paths with Di­ckey Betts earlier in the decade and played a bit in his solo band, along with keyboardist Johnny Neel. With the second reunion coming up, Dickey invited both to fatten up the sound of the new Allmans, along with new bass player Allen Woody. Both Haynes and Woody, in addition to being thorough masters of their instruments, also turned out to be stark «old schoolers»: well open to occasionally trying out new things, but putting the restora­tion and preservation of the clas­sic Allman Brothers spirit above all else.

 

With the silly Arista contract having expired a long time ago, the rejuvenated band (yes, and they got both of the original drummers back together again) signed with Epic and returned to Tom Dowd for production duties. The issue of songwriting was dealt with in an original way: although all the songwriters are clearly listed, it does not matter much who wrote which song — Betts', Ne­el's and Haynes' names are scattered throughout almost randomly (Gregg Allman is only co-credited for the lead-in track, but at least he takes on most of the vocals), and the vibe is general­ly more important here than the actual melodies: Seven Turns is a very good album, but not a sin­gle track really threatens the safety of 'Ramblin' Man' or 'Whippin' Post'.

 

Still, it's hard to deny a little chill when 'Good Clean Fun' opens the album with the kind of thick, meaty, aggressive sound the band hadn't really put out since the early Duane years — and the track's nod to 'Don't Want You No More' (the instrumental that put them and their self-titled al­bum on the map back in 1969) is transparent, right down to somewhat similar chord progressions. The only Allman-Betts collaboration on the album, with Neel listed as third writer, it makes clear from the very first seconds that Brothers Of The Road have, indeed, been downgraded to road­kill; and, first time since 1971, Dickey finally gets a proper sparring partner who promises to re­store the band's two-guitar reputation and, more often than not, keeps that promise.

 

Naturally, with time taking a heavy toll, some of the Turns are blander than others. Dickey, in particular, cannot help throwing in annoying Southern clichés; the two tracks that he sings, 'Let Me Ride' and the title track, have a bit too much ordinary Dixie happiness in them to merit a seal of approval from Duane's heavenly office. But 'True Gravity' marks an excellent revival of the band's instrumental tradition, a challenging, risky journey from headbanging blues-rock to free-form dream ter­ritory that we remember these guys for, with Haynes literally taking us back to the idealistic days of 1970 for a few minutes; 'Gambler's Roll' is seven minutes of slow, aching, ble­eding, threatening blueswailing with both guitarists and Gregg at their absolute best; and the rest of the songs simply rock out with a vengeance, so that when we get to the final explosion of 'It Ain't Over Yet', we certainly know — the song may literally be about a guy unwilling to break up his romance for good, but what matters is still the metaphor.

 

Because Seven Turns certainly showed that it ain't over yet, marking one of the most triumphant comebacks of an «oldies act» in history, as well as proving, once and for all, that it is possible to merge talents from different generations — Haynes is thirteen years younger than Gregg and se­venteen years younger than Dickey — and still come out with a perfect chemical reaction. Seven thumbs up for each of the seven turns (minus two stinkers from Betts).

 

SHADES OF TWO WORLDS (1991)

 

1) End Of The Line; 2) Bad Rain; 3) Nobody Knows; 4) Desert Blues; 5) Get On With Your Life; 6) Midnight Man; 7) Kind Of Bird; 8) Come On In My Kitchen.

 

Compared to the regular 1990s standard for aging rockers, the time gap between Seven Turns and its follow-up was practically non-existent, and this could only mean one thing: the revamped Allmans were in tremendously high spirits and knew how to use 'em. Shades Of Two Worlds is, unquestionably, a rather rushed sequel: only eight songs, one of them a cover and one an exten­ded jam the likes of which they'd usually reserve for the stage. But it does preserve the momen­tum, and shows that, even on autopilot, the new-look Allmans remained unbeatable.

 

In fact, in some respects Shades even improves on its predecessor. Most of the material is still written by Betts, either solo or in tandem with Haynes, but this time, he wisely avoids the softer, country-rock/pop side of the business and opts instead for all-out crunch. So, either they're doing slow, tormented, wailing blues, or rocking the roof off the building — none of that sentimental "seven turns on the highway, seven rivers to cross..." sappiness. Most of the album crackles in bright red colours, like the burning sunset on the album sleeve, all the way down to the closing Robert Johnson cover, which lands the ship softly in acoustic blues mood.

 

The decision to turn 'Nobody Knows' from a rhythmically tricky folk-blues rocker into a monster jam is questionable, but respectable; the whole experience sounds like a nostalgic nod to the old days of Duane and Dickey battling it out in semi-free-form mid-tempo mode on 'Whipping Post', and here, the Betts/Haynes duo really only loses to the way it used to be in terms of freshness — but the spirit and the technical mastery remain the same. Still, perhaps they should have saved it all for the upcoming live album, where this length would seem more natural.

 

On the other hand, the obligatory instrumental is an unassailable blast — 'Kind Of Bird' must be a reference to Charlie Parker, and there is a lot of jazz here indeed, as they substitute the idea of dreamy / psychedelic wordless music for one that involves less planning and calculating, more ab­solute freedom of expression. It could fail, as it so often does on jazz records, but, due to the band's determination and experience, it works. The opening part is all fast, furious, bop-influen­ced headbanging, the middle part defies genre classification, and the third part is free-form chaos à la 'Brers In A Minor' — most of the ingredients, in some form or other, they'd already shown us on earlier records, but this particular synthesis is brand new for the Allmans.

 

The individual songs are all written in strict accordance with formula; in the hands of a band of lesser caliber than the Allmans, much of this material, including all of Betts' rockers, could have sounded ugly, perhaps even moronically flatulent (imagine "I'm your midnight man, guranteed to love you like nobody can" in the hands of Foreigner!), but it is not the melodies, it is the tightness and the intelligent force of this big sound, and the clever interplay between Betts and Haynes, that car­ries most of them through. Gregg's 'Get On With Your Life', for instance, would be nothing if not for Haynes' lengthy Clapton-esque solo, slowly, predictably, and still admirably winding its way up, up, up, until it's joined by Betts' companion guitar and the two crash down in ecstasy. Another first is the guitarists' acoustic duel on 'Come On In My Kitchen' — the number finishes the record off on the same note as 'Pony Boy' put the final stop to Brothers And Sisters, but this time, we have a fun dialog going on, instead of Betts' mono spectacle.

 

For some reason, Shades Of Two Worlds, unlike Seven Turns, went out of print fairly quickly and is now hard to find in legal form (except for ultra-expensive import versions); this is hardly a ma­jor tragedy, but certainly a minor travesty that needs to be remedied. Thumbs up, in the vain hope that this might eventually help people treasure this part of the Allmans' legacy with all the respect it deserves.

 

AN EVENING WITH THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND: FIRST SET (1992)

 

1) End Of The Line; 2) Blue Sky; 3) Get On With Your Life; 4) Southbound; 5) Midnight Blues; 6) Melissa; 7) No­body Knows; 8) Dreams; 9) Revival.

 

With the kind of high standard that the revived Allmans set themselves on their first two studio LPs, there was hardly any question that they'd be kicking the same sort of ass onstage. Even so, the band's first live album in sixteen years (the 1979-81 lineup wisely avoided official live relea­ses) manages not just to meet expectations, but to trump them — decisively.

 

Many people — way too many people — state their opinions along the lines of «this is some damn fine playing out there, though, of course, not quite on the level of the Fillmore shows». I would beg to differ — or even suggest that they might be deluding themselves, perhaps out of some subconscious fear of Duane Allman's ghost: An Evening With The Allman Brothers Band is completely on the level of the Fillmore concerts. Four of the original band members are present in the shapeliest of shapes, and number five is Warren Haynes, one of the most expressive Southern-style guitar players who ever lived.

 

The only area in which this band cannot beat the original lineup is freshness — compared to the Fillmore Concerts, these are expert swimmers showcasing their skills on a public beach rather than intrepid risk-takers diving from cliffs into unknown waters. But, on one hand, this is sort of understood, and on the other, both angles have their strengths and weaknesses. In terms of sheer musical pleasure, the Betts/Haynes version of this band has completely restored its former mag­ni­ficence. Short songs, long songs, genre fiddlings, experiments, they do it all.

 

The setlist mixes new numbers, mostly from Shades, in with the old warhorses in such a way that nobody will really feel the difference: 'Get On With Your Life' is slow burning blues that is well on par with the old classics like 'Stormy Monday', and fifteen minutes of colorful guitar wanking on 'Nobody Knows' are simply variations on whatever it was that they used to do about 'Whippin' Post'. Best news is, the setlist has enough variety to save this from becoming a monotonous cele­bration of cool crisp guitar sound: slow blues, fast boogie, country-rock, acoustic balladry, psy­chedelia (they dust off 'Dreams', which Gregg introduces as the only song he had in his pockets when the band was formed), and gospel ('Revival').

 

I may have a minor beef with the band for its reinvention of 'Southbound' as a slower, funkier, more danceable rocker — for the first three minutes, it deprives the song of its usual kicks. But once the instrumental part starts, it's all forgiven as Haynes and Betts battle it out till your spea­kers start tearing apart at the seams. If anything, Dickey only got better through the years: aban­doning the occasionally whiny, wimpy tone he used to have on stage, he goes for the same thick, brawny wail as Warren, yet the two's styles are still distinct enough, and the symphonic effect they achieve on the track — as well as several other crescendos, most notably on 'Get On With Your Life' — has to be heard to be believed.

 

Another major highlight is 'Blue Sky', turned into a veritable propaganda campaign for slide gui­tar. As much as I love the studio version, Haynes merely uses it as a foundation to transform the song into something twice as anthemic and celestial as it used to be; in his hands, the guitar be­comes, at one point, a kid angel, at another, an exuberant little piggie, and sometimes both at the same time. Once Betts enters the picture, he plays with such precision and feeling he'd previously demonstrated only in his studio work, never on stage. Overdubs? I don't think so — rather just years and years of experience, plus being goaded into action by the first serious chunk of compe­tition he'd seen in twenty years.

 

These remarks alone, I hope, will be enough to free the reader of the vain idea that he already knows all these songs, but there's more: the gorgeous acoustic trills at the end of 'Melissa'; Hay­nes' «slide nightmare» contribution to the mid-part of 'Dreams'; the way they work out hard rock bits into 'Revival', etc. By no means are these guys coasting; the Allmans, in 1992, were a full-time working band that made good use of their past glories, but never relied upon them as sacred cows — making First Set an absolute must-have; in fact, it should probably go on the list before that period's studio albums. Thumbs up from all directions.

 

WHERE IT ALL BEGINS (1994)

 

1) All Night Train; 2) Salin' 'Cross The Devil's Sea; 3) Back Where It All Begins; 4) Soulshine; 5) No One To Run With; 6) Change My Way Of Living; 7) Mean Woman Blues; 8) Everybody's Got A Mountain To Climb; 9) What's Done Is Done; 10) Temptation Is A Gun.

 

Third time around and the revitaminized formula, smart as it is, is starting to wear a little thin. From a formal point of view, this is still completely impeccable. The rockers roar, the ballads we­ep, the players put up a hundred percent. But then there is also the matter of that little checkmark in the «Innovative» box on the Allman Brothers Band's info tab. If a band like the Allmans ceases to experiment and develop, it inevitably becomes a generic Southern rock band, and there is only so much blessed earth on the planet to make room for another Black Oak Arkansas.

 

Not that they don't do anything new, but the forward steps are infuriatingly tiny and, moreover, rather hit-and-miss. For instance, the band's first attempt at writing a song based on the Bo Didd­ley beat ('No One To Run With') is misguided — they don't have a knack for good-time dance music like that, not to mention that six minutes of dum-de-dum-dum, dum-dum is a physiologi­cally damaging experience. Much better is their subtle toying with modern guitar sounds on Betts' 'Mean Woman Blues', as they transform a standard blues-rocker into something that would not be out of place on a latter day Jeff Beck record — the result is a tough, aggressive howler that rocks harder and heavier than almost anything else ever recorded by the band. Alas, it's just one track, although I admit that a whole handful of these would have shifted the band's profile way too dra­stically; besides, it's not like the modern blues-rock scene were in a real big need of yet another «metallizing» act — there's plenty of diversity as is.

 

The rest is fairly good on its own terms, but too many songs rehash too many recent feelings. The slow burn of 'Temptation Is A Gun' is a shadow of 'Gambler's Roll'; 'Back Where It All Begins', with its long happy jam section, is another of Betts' optimistic country-rock anthems that can never hope to replace 'Jessica'; and most of the four-to-five minute songs are just another bunch of well-played, nicely-felt blues-rockers that are perfectly enjoyable but generally undescribable.

 

Only 'Soulshine', written by Haynes and later exported by him into the repertoire of his own band (Gov't Mule), has more or less endured as a standard. It is a bit too power-balladeerish for my ta­stes, a bit too overtly pathetic for its own good, and a bit too clichéd lyrically for those who have already assembled a big enough collection of «When I Was Just A Little Boy, My Daddy Sat Me On His Knee»-type songs. What is not clichéd is Haynes' guitar-playing, which makes the song a spiritual tour-de-force so much more efficiently than all the other ingredients — the tune starts cooking right from the intro and never really lets go.

 

No particular individual is to be blamed for the little whiff of stagnation that emanates from the record — the worst songs on here do not have any individual stamp of poor quality, and the best ones show that all of the songwriters were trying quite hard. But perhaps it is not all that lamen­table, after all, that the next ABB studio album only arrived in the wake of the final sacking of Betts: with this sort of tendency, new studio ventures desperately called for fresh blood. Where It All Begins is still strong enough to merit a solid thumbs up; I gotta agree, however, that its title is tremendously deceptive from all points of view. Fortunately, renaming it to Where It All Ends is equally out of the question, no matter how happy it could have made Dickey.

 

PS. For the record, if you happen to be wondering about the mushroom on the album sleeve — it is the Allman's first attempt (not counting the peach image from 1972) at hand-painting their al­bum covers, with the assistance of Greek designer/painter Ioannis, based on a mushroom-shaped tattoo for the band that was designed as early as 1970. And yes, «mushroom consumption» (figu­ratively speaking) used to be a regular thing with the band members, but there is nothing particu­larly trippy or surrealistic about Where It All Begins, so don't be getting any false ideas.

 

AN EVENING WITH THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND: SECOND SET (1995)

 

1) Sailin' 'Cross The Devil's Sea; 2) You Don't Love Me; 3) Soulshine; 4) Back Where It All Begins; 5) In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 6) The Same Thing; 7) No One To Run With; 8) Jessica.

 

The slightly misleading title — the tracks here were mostly recorded in 1994, during the promo­tion of Where It All Begins — takes nothing from the fact that 2nd Set is at least every bit as good as 1st Set, and, in some ways, even more adventurous, finely compensating for the slight drop in quality on the studio LP that it was supposed to accompany.

 

It is a bit too thick on tunes from that LP, but fact is, when the Brothers play live, it does not so much matter what particular song they are playing as what sort of mood they are in when they're playing it. A brief comparison of 'Sailin' 'Cross The Devil's Sea', for instance, shows that the live counterpart kicks the studio version's ass all over the place — the guitars are louder, angrier, the tones sharper, everything is set to stun the audiences. The particular performance may have been handpicked (the tracks alternate between two different dates, signifying a diligent selection pro­cess, most likely supervised by the mighty Tom Dowd), but even if the Allmans only played with that much power for two nights out of two hundred, this is still enough to place them among the finest live acts of the 1990s.

 

Relative surprises, this time around, include:

 

— a supertight, fully satisfying rendition of the old Fillmore chestnut 'You Don't Love Me', with Haynes doing his own, rather than Duane's, thang (for good reason), and without the lengthy im­provisational part; the joint guitar/organ riff still hits as hard as it used to;

 

— a real hot version of an old Willie Dixon blues ('The Same Thing'), which even stalwart haters of generic blues-rock might appreciate for all the amazing guitar pyrotechnics that goes on — as flashy as the show-offiest act in glam metal, but at the same time completely down-to-earth; the Betts-Haynes duel at the end is honestly trance-inducing;

 

— a strange, and, I would say, not fully working version of 'Jessica' that, after the main theme, in­troduces an out-of-place «dark» passage into this formally one-hundred-percent celebratory piece. Maybe they just wanted to show us that, in order for the sun to shine, it has to wiggle its way out of all the dark clouds, but personally, I do not think there is any place for somber overtones in the tune at all. There is also really no need to extend it to sixteen minutes: too much repetition of the motives. Still, for the most part, a cool rendition (and, in retrospect, considering that it is the last track on the Allmans' last solid album with Betts, a gallant way to say goodbye);

 

— the major highlight: a fully rendition of 'Elizabeth Reed' from a club date back in 1992. Could have been a disaster, but both guys are as dexterous with the acoustic as they are with power con­ductors, and the emotional impact is almost the same as with the electric version (except it's dif­ferent, yep: in a few places, the song acquires an almost inadvertently Latin flavor).

 

All in all, 2nd Set is a fitting, respectable conclusion to this next stage of the Allmans' long stra­nge trip — one of the finest stages, mind you, considering that it had not been mar­red by one sin­gle total failure. Major kudos for which fact should, of course, go to Warren Haynes, whose in­born genius may not reach the heights of Duane or even Dickey — but who, at least, compensates well for it by not riding motorcycles or abusing substances. There is, after all, something to be said for steady professional reliability as well. Thumbs up.

 

PEAKIN' AT THE BEACON (2000)

 

1) Don't Want You No More; 2) It's Not My Cross To Bear; 3) Ain't Wastin' Time No More; 4) Every Hungry Wo­man; 5) Please Call Home; 6) Stand Back; 7) Black Hearted Woman; 8) Leave My Blues At Home; 9) Seven Turns; 10) High Falls.

 

Obviously, the new-look Allmans' winning streak could not last forever — this band, after all, was tailor-made for «slings and arrows» from the very beginning. No sooner had they released the blistering 2nd Set that even won them a Grammy for 'Jessica' (twenty-three years after the ori­ginal recording!) than Warren Haynes and Allen Woody left the band in order to be engaged full-time in their new band, Gov't Mule. Guitarist Jack Pearson and bass player Oteil Burbridge came in as their replacements, but only Burbridge survived; Pearson made his exit in 1999 (so that nobody except for staunch concert-goers even has any idea of what he sounded like), to be replaced by young prodigy Derek Trucks, Butch's nephew and, coincidentally, one of the finest slide guitar players to emerge in the past twenty years.

 

Just as this new lineup was about to stabilize, however, the band shocked everyone by firing Di­ckey — by fax, no less. To this very day, no one is truly sure about what happened. Maybe he did have a renewed problem with «substances», as the other band members sometimes insinuate, or maybe he just happened to make a dirty joke about Cher at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Fact is, that Peakin' At The Beacon, the Allmans' last contribution to the world of art in the 20th century, is their very last album to feature founding father Richard Betts. Everything else is spe­culation, no matter what the culprits and the victims pronounce themselves.

 

The release of the album has, however, frequently puzzled fans and critics alike. For one thing, it was released already after the firing of Betts — and, considering that the alleged major reason be­hind it was the extremely poor playing shape in which he had been in for some time, such a move could only be seen as sort of a half-hearted justification for the fans: «Wanna know why we fired the guy? Just listen to this!» For another thing, the sound quality is pretty poor — certainly better than audience bootleg quality, but nowhere near the perfect mix and sharpness of the 1st and 2nd sets. Not to wonder — the band, once again, parted ways with Tom Dowd (for reasons of his health, probably, since two years later he died of emphysema), but why produce a record yourself if you know for sure this is going to sabotage your high standards?

 

Peakin' At The Beacon is, therefore, for near-objective reasons, one of the least essential live ABB records to hunt for. It has some historical importance as the one and only album on which ancient guitar legend Dickey Betts and rising guitar hero Derek Trucks have played together. Un­fortunately, this historical importance can hardly be converted into pure-hearted enjoyment, beca­use (a) Betts is clearly not at the top of his game here: at worst, he does indeed play in a wretch­ed­ly awful manner (the solo on 'Ain't Wastin' Time No More' feels like it is coming from a man who hasn't picked up his guitar in twenty years or so and is re-learning the scales as they go), and at best, he is doing merely okay, with­out any of the jaw-dropping ecstatic moments scattered throughout the previous two albums; (b) Trucks, on the other hand, more often than not sticks in the background, feeling, perhaps, a little shy about outplaying the Grand Old Master, and when he actually takes a solo, it is always muf­fled by poor engineering. At best, there are only tiny hints here at the greatness to come.

 

Not even the cleverly composed setlist saves things: most of the tracks avoid repetition from the previous two sets, as they concentrate almost exclusively on numbers from the first three studio albums, throwing in a limp 'Seven Turns' (Dickey's farewell tune!) and choosing 'High Falls', this time around, as the obligatory instrumental showcase, with lengthy drum and bass solos (actually, Burbridge's bit of bass improvising — he even bursts into a little scat accompaniment at one point — is the album's only exciting surprise). Still, the performances never rise above barely compe­tent, and who needs «barely competent» from the Brothers?

 

In short, the album title is grossly misleading: nobody's doing any «peakin'». Dickin' At The Bea­con would be a much better title (but I guess it would have hurt Betts' feelings even further). There was hardly any need to disgrace the reputation of their annual Beacon Theater shows which the band became famous for ever since its 1989 reunion and which have lasted all the way down to 2009, after which they were expelled to make way for the Cirque du Soleil (!). By all means, one to skip unless you are a trusty historiographer — the Allmans have so many live records out that you can certainly allow yourself the choice. Thumbs down.

 

HITTIN' THE NOTE (2003)

 

1) Firing Line; 2) High Cost Of Low Living; 3) Desdemona; 4) Woman Across The River; 5) Old Before My Time; 6) Who To Believe; 7) Maydelle; 8) Rockin' Horse; 9) Heart Of Stone; 10) Instrumental Illness; 11) Old Friend.

 

Fortunately for all, the Allmans' latest streak of bad luck took less time and less toll on the band than earlier ones. By 2001, Warren Haynes had learnt to doubletrack, and so regained the status of a full-fledged Allman Brother. The balance was now restored; with the band once again featu­ring a monster twin-guitar attack as its main point of interest, they had a good chance of taking the Allman Brothers' legacy into the 21st century — and, sure enough, they didn't miss it.

 

Comparisons between the Haynes/Trucks and Duane/Dickey pairings are as inevitable as they are pointless, because all four guitarists have fairly individual styles. Trucks may occasionally «quo­te» from Duane, and Haynes may sometimes try to replicate some of Betts' Southern geometry, but neither of the two players could in any way be regarded as «reincarnations» — exalted cries of «Duane lives on through Dereck's playing!» should rather be treated as expressions of justified respect for Dereck's contributions than even semi-literal truths. But, obviously, this is a major ad­vantage rather than flaw: the fact that these guys, with their own styles of playing, still make the final result seem like a natural, easy-going progression from the classic ABB sound, serve to con­firm the band's exceptional status — ahead of the pack in 1969, still way ahead of the same pack in 2003, no mean feat considering how huge the pack has become since then. (The only other ex­ample of a similar late-period revitalization I can think of at the moment is Deep Purple, a band that, likewise, gained a new, fresh future from a smart lineup change).

 

The first and, for now, latest Haynes/Trucks-lineup studio LP, aptly titled Hittin' The Note, got no less than slobbering rave reviews from pretty much every critic alive — and there is no reason for any of us amateur evaluators to play it differently for the sake of being different. I do not know if it is really «better» than Seven Turns and the like, or how tall it stands in comparison to the Brothers' classic original output, but as far as energetic, heartfelt, and intelligent roots-rock can actually go in 2003, it certainly goes there — and then, just a little bit beyond, so that nobody could open his big mouth and say «Well, it's awful good, although, naturally, quite formulaic, so if you like good old Southern rock, grab this some time before your paycheck runs out».

 

Of course, you needn't expect any jaw-drop marvels of songwriting. Their oddball (but wonder­fully sweet) inclusion of 'Heart Of Stone' states this explicitly: «Mick and Keith — there's two great songwriters for you. We suck in comparison. But we can still blow 'em off the air any time of day». The material is standard fare — some fiery blues-rock to crispen up your day, some soul­ful balladry to soothe the spirit, some on-the-spot experimentation to keep the brain busy and the finger nerves well-trained. But that's how it would be on paper. With the talents pooled together for these sessions, and the clearly seen determination to pull it through no matter what, they could record an album of Barry Manilow covers, and still come up with a winner.

 

Actually, I must say that it's a big relief to see Trucks and Haynes constantly play off each other. Dereck is truly a magnificent, unique musician, but the fact that he always sticks to his sliding style makes it all a bit monotonous. Usually, as befits a traditional blues-rocker, he takes his time to get to the searing/soaring parts, and even if each individual solo culminates in near-psychedelic ecstasy, at least the early parts eventually start coming off as too predictable. The same can be said about Haynes, whose «normal» sound we have already studied to bits on his 1990s records for both the Allmans and Gov't Mule; he has not added much to it since then.

 

So it is the matching of the two styles that is Hittin' The Note's biggest attraction. On most of the tunes, true lightning strikes not when the two players are taking turns, but when they join together in a smorgasbord of sounds such as you never heard before on any Allmans' record. With Haynes' six-string all but choking on the amount of sonic venom it regurgitates, and Trucks' slide thing buzzing and stinging all over the surrounding space, it's a hell of a charge on the senses. It doesn't arrive too often, but watch out for it — for instance, during the final minutes of 'Woman Across The River', a song that would justify the existence of this seventy-plus-minute-long record on its own. Fortunately for us, there isn't really a single bad track anywhere in sight.

 

To be completely fair, one should also mention the damn fine form Gregg Allman is in — it is his presence, after all, that continues to provide the band with legitimacy after all these years, and jus­tifies their not having, as of yet, changed the name to «The Trucks Family Band». Not only does he receive a grand five co-writing credits on here (an absolute record since the 1969 debut!), but his singing also had not been so bravely upfront in almost as many years. And now, finally, his age matches his pathos: 'Old Before My Time' is a heartbreaking confession of a man looking down — in horror! — at all the different ways in which his life has been wasted, so aching and sincere that it could depress the living hell out of anyone... had that been its purpose — in reality, 'Old Before My Time' is a sad, but optimistic tune for somebody who has finally come to terms with himself. No two opinions about it, Mr. Allman: you may well have been «old before your time» back in 1970 or even 1979, but now you are exactly as old as your time requires of you.

 

Thus, with the two guitarists crackling a seemingly endless storehouse of fireworks and the singer adding his stately touch to ballads and rockers alike, Hittin' The Note truly never feels overlong for one bit. The twelve-minute jam 'Instrumental Illness' may be just a bit overdone, but the same things I used to say about the jam length in the Dickey/Duane period apply here as well — they go when they feel like going, and they stop when they feel they have really got nothing left to say. And even if the individual songs may feel underwritten, most at least have a line, a chord change, an odd gimmick or two to hold attention. Such as the ridiculously kiddie-like riff that opens and drives 'Maydelle', the album's heaviest number — I may be alone in thinking how much it re­minds me of 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider', but regardless of whether it only reflects my own craziness or if I really cracked a consciously idiosyncratic code here, it's FUN.

 

Other instances of FUN include the ballad 'Desdemona' (nothing to do with The Moor of Venice, unfortunately; I suppose they just thought of it as a cool name to use, being all out of 'Melissas' and 'Jessicas') suddenly transforming into slide-driven free-form jazz for the mid-section; the dark, smoking blues-rock of 'Who To Believe' totally owned by Gregg as if it were only yesterday that Cher finally blocked body access, and it hurts goddamn bad; and the Stones' 'Heart Of Stone' burde­ned down with years of experience and graced with weeping solos unthinkable on any Stones re­cord, even of the Mick Taylor period. Each new listen brings out some minor delight, and it almost makes you feel sad for poor old Dickey Betts — ten to one he never dreamed his old band could undergo another rejuvenation at his expense. But he did have this occasional nasty penchant for dragging them into generic Southern rock — and Hittin' The Note is certainly dren­ched in Southern, yet there is nothing generic about a record that kicks ass, surprises, provokes, and drains your emotions at the same time. Thumbs up, of course.

 

ONE WAY OUT (2004)

 

1) Statesboro Blues; 2) Don't Keep Me Wondering; 3) Midnight Rider; 4) Rockin' Horse; 5) Desdemona; 6) Trouble No More; 7) Wasted Words; 8) Good Morning Little Schoolgirl; 9) Instrumental Illness; 10) Ain't Wastin' Time No More; 11) Come & Go Blues; 12) Woman Across The River; 13) Old Before My Time; 14) Every Hungry Woman; 15) High Cost Of Low Living; 16) Worried Down With The Blues; 17) Dreams; 18) Whippin' Post.

 

With the kind of quality standard already established on Hittin' The Note, it certainly makes lit­tle sense to doubt that the same standards would be upheld for the Brothers' next wave of live shows as well. So the nearly simultaneous release, in 2004, of a high-quality live DVD (At The Beacon) and a double CD commemorating the band's live status at the same time, suffers from a certain lack of surprise (at least the two Evenings sets arrived after a fifteen-year break in live album production, and the latest live album before that (Wipe The Windows) really wasn't all that hot anyway).

 

One other significant flaw of One Way Out is that it relies way too heavily on recent material, with six out of eleven tracks from Hittin' The Note (including all the long ones) reproducing way more than half of that album. Of course, these are excellent tunes per se, but too little time has passed between their creation and reproduction for the band to think of any interesting new twists — for the most part, they just faithfully recreate the arrangements, structures, and moods of the originals, the only minor differences concerning bits of solo improvisation.

 

It is far more interesting to hear how the latest lineup handles the classics — and whether, for instance, Derek Trucks really lives up to the «Duane reincarnation» moniker. It is certainly not a coincidence that the first number to be played (or, at least, sequenced on the CD) is 'Statesboro Blues' and the last one an extended version of 'Whippin' Post' — the exact same way we experie­n­ced it on Fillmore East: more than a transparent hint at the fact that the band feels confident enough to declare that they are just as good now as they used to be then.

 

«Just as good», however, does not equal «exactly the same». No matter what, both Trucks and Haynes belong to a different, more modern, school of guitar players than Duane. A very rough phrasing would be to say that they emphasize complexity and precision over gut feeling — rough, because no sane person would ever accuse Duane of lacking amazing technicality, or Warren and Dereck of playing without their hearts in it. (Insanity, or, at least, extreme narrow-mindedness will be assumed for all the odd people who refer to Derek's total immobility and lack of stage mi­mics as showing a lack of emotion). But, on the other hand, it is hard not to sniff a whiff of «pre­dictability», an over-polished approach to these here shows — with the original Allmans, you ne­ver really knew where exactly a particular performance would eventually take you, whereas the Haynes/Trucks duo steers the ship like a pair of expert, grizzled boatsmen, disciplined enough to know when it is safe to stick to the bottle and when the situation requires complete sobriety.

 

This is, probably, what people mean when they call One Way Out «just one step below» the ori­ginal concerts — this is the step. On the other hand, there are also those who prefer immaculate, well-calculated professionalism, not to mention a perfect sound quality, unimaginable on Duane-era recordings, and we have to think of them, too. No matter how predetermined and safely pa­ckaged we see this guitar communication language between Haynes and Trucks, it is still an awesome challenge to both enjoy and study it. And then there are all the little interesting cha­n­ges they do to the classics. 'Whippin' Post', for instance, gets its second chaotic part (the 'Frère Jacques' bit) cut off — a respectable decision, allowing them to go for less self-repetition. 'Mid­night Rider' gets a much harder-rocking treatment than it used to. 'Wasted Words', in its final sec­tion, is transformed into one of the most furious twin-guitar battles on the album, etc. etc.

 

In between 2004 and 2007, the Allmans would practice a special «Instant Live» gimmick, where they would make rough soundboard quality recordings of all of their shows and then select the best ones and trade them for fans off their website, increasing their «official» discography sky-high. Nobody except for diehards and studiosos really needs to bother with all these «authorized bootlegs», but One Way Out, as one easily available sample of the Allmans' greatness in the 21st century, is recommendable for everyone.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE AT LUDLOW GARAGE (1970/1991)

 

1) Dreams; 2) Statesboro Blues; 3) Trouble No More; 4) Dimples; 5) Every Hungry Woman; 6) I'm Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town; 7) Hoochie Coochie Man; 8) Mountain Jam.

 

As befits every legendary live outfit, the Allmans had hoarded tons of archive recordings from the good old days. Their vaults seem to be fairly thin when it comes to unreleased studio material (no big wonder there, since most of the material was thoroughly tried and tested live before being committed to vinyl, so that usually the Allmans went into the studio with a fairly good idea of what they were going to do); live shows are a whole different matter, and as of 2010, there are at least eight or ten officially endorsed retrospective live albums covering dates from 1970 all the way to 1973 — not counting, of course, the millions of bootlegs.

 

Not all of these releases are of comparable sound quality, and, of course, writing individual re­views for each one only makes sense if you are a paid biographer of the band or, at least, Mark Prindle, who can use each review as one more opportunity to inform you of one more turbulent event in his oversaturated life. Me being neither of the two, I will limit myself to just a few of these archival treasures — not necessarily the best ones, since I haven't heard everything, but you will just have to let the inductive method decide about the rest.

 

Live At Ludlow Garage, played and recorded at a small local club in Cincinnati sometime in April 1970, about one year before the legendary Fillmore set, is the earliest of these releases — it came out in 1991, just as the Allmans were making their big comeback with Haynes, and it was certainly a good time to remind the world what it actually used to be, that particular thing that they eventually came back for.

 

Most listeners agree that the sound is fairly raw and unpolished here (well, they do play in a garage, after all, har har) compared to the Fillmore gigs, and that, taken together with the imper­fections of the equipment, this makes it understandably inferior. Inferior, perhaps, in the sense that Fillmore East should certainly be one's first buy regarding the original lineup. But there is no reason why Ludlow Garage could not be a close second. For one thing, it is fun — and, from time to time, inspiring — to experience the Allmans in this sort of raw form, when the long jams and multi-section performances had not yet been rehearsed to utter smoothness, and the Bros. would occasionally compensate for their rough edges with extra loudness, shrillness, and aggres­sion. For another thing, as imperfect as the sound quality is (and it is really fairly good), it brings the dead guys — Duane and bassist Berry Oakley — way up in the mix most of the time, giving all us dead guy fans an extra reason to own this.

 

In terms of rarities, this is worth hearing if only for a grizzled, rabid version of John Lee Hooker's 'Dimples', with Hooker's minimalistic riffs transformed into scorching heavy blues the way the old master could never anticipate. The slow nine-minute blues version of 'Outskirts Of Town' had, by the time Fillmore rolled along, ceded its position on the playlist to 'Stormy Monday Blues', but is in no way inferior — and culminates in a mad sea of absolutely flaming licks from Betts practi­cing his soon-to-be-'Southbound' piercing tone. There is also a rarely heard live stomping version of the Oakley-sung 'Hoochie Coochie Man'; and 'Statesboro Blues' gets an extra four-minute coda as Duane teases the audience with volume level tricks.

 

Above all, there is a goddamn forty-four minute long take on 'Mountain Jam' — longer than the Eat A Peach standard version by about eleven minutes, much of them courtesy of Mr. Oakley who takes quite a bit of time to play his solo part, much heavier and fuzzier than on the Peach version. Myself, having eventually become a convert to the religion of 'Mountain Jam' based on its Fillmore incarnation, I have no problem whatsoever with these forty-four minutes either, but all those who still do — well, beware, this thing occupies the whole of Disc 2.

 

Anyway, these are the fuckin' Allman Bros. in their prime, in terrific shape, all set and burning to go, and after a few listens, you may even grow to love this sound quality — on no other record do the Bros. sound this much like a pack of dangerous outlaws playing for their lives. Thumbs up.

 

LIVE AT THE ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL POP FESTIVAL  (1970/2003)

 

CD I: 1) Introduction; 2) Statesboro Blues; 3) Trouble No More; 4) Don't Keep Me Wondering; 5) Dreams; 6) Every Hungry Woman; 7) Hoochie Coochie Man; 8) In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 9) Whipping Post; 10) Mountain Jam (part 1); 11) Rain Delay; 12) Mountain Jam (part 2); CD II: 1) Introduction; 2) Don't Keep Me Wondering; 3) States­boro Blues; 4) In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed; 5) Stormy Monday; 6) Whipping Post; 7) Mountain Jam.

 

Hungry for more of the true, genuine, authentic, original, unforged Allman Brothers? Look no further than this 2-CD monster, recorded July 3rd and 5th (actually, 6th, since the show closed around dawn) at the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, held, as the name clearly suggests, nowhere other than Byron, Georgia (quite a bit removed from Atlanta, but you gotta admit, «The Byron Festival» might have brought in an entirely different brand of people, especially since Da­vid Byron of Uriah Heep fame had only released his first album a month before that and was of no particular fame to get confused with Lord Byron).

 

Anyway, Byron, Georgia is right in the middle of Peach County, making it the perfectly atmos­pheric place for the Allmans to perform. For some reason, the previous year's Atlanta Pop Festi­val was marred with a confusion, as the Bros. were booked for the venue by a fake booker (!) and, upon arrival, were denied the right to play (!!). To compensate, perhaps, for the embarrassment, for the second (and, as it turned out, last) Festival they were allowed to both open and close it. Which they did, and both of the shows are reproduced on this set.

 

Honestly speaking, despite the hugeness of this thing, it is not nearly as good as either Fillmore East or «the Allmans doing their proto-punkish thing» on Ludlow Garage. The sound quality is quite all right, and the playing is tight, complex, and as honest as you could expect, but the little things that turn the band's excellent shows into explosive ones are not quite there. Either the fes­tival grounds did not quite agree with them, or the festival atmosphere — not every outfit can be always happy playing these huge outdoor venues — but neither Duane nor Dickey seem to be interested in burning up their guitars.

 

Everything that is out-of-the-ordinary with this album (and that does not necessarily surmise «awesome») revolves around 'Mountain Jam'. During the first show, the band was interrupted by upcoming rainclouds, and had to return to the stage after a while, making the performance kind of smothered and shortened. For the second show, however, they managed to get by uninterrupted, with a classic 28-minute length and accompanied by Johnny Winter on second slide guitar — al­though only a seasoned listener could tell that there is a third guitar out there, and only a genius could guess who it belongs to.

 

Otherwise, it makes perfect sense that, with the vaults opened, the band's first choice was Ludlow: this performance is strictly for the fans who can already recreate every note of Fillmore in their minds, or for those who do serious research on the history of pop music festivals (for some rea­son, the Allmans remain so far the only band that has released its set from the festival, despite a boat­load of classic artists also contributing — did they have a monopoly on the use of recording equipment or what? Actually, I believe some bootleg-quality videos of Hendrix's performance also seem to be floating around). On the other hand, the original Allmans in their prime probably never ever really played a bad show — so if it somehow happens that this can be your introduc­tion to the band, don't flinch.

THE AMBOY DUKES

THE AMBOY DUKES (1967)

 

1) Baby Please Don't Go; 2) I Feel Free; 3) Young Love; 4) Psalms Of Aftermath; 5) Colors; 6) Let's Go Get Stoned; 7) Down On Phillips Escalator; 8) The Lovely Lady; 9) Night Time; 10) It's Not True; 11) Gimme Love.

 

It would seem simple and logical to suggest that when Detroit-based Amboy Dukes released their self-titled album, completely and sincerely dedicated to issues of Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll, lead guitarist Ted Nugent would take care of the Sex, rhythm guitarist Steve Farmer would take care of Drugs, and both would share equal responsibilities on the Rock'n'Roll thing. But, of cou­rse, matters are never quite that simple: Ted is regularly co-credited on most of the band's drug songs — a paradox that he has since preferred to resolve by simply claiming that he had no idea they were about drugs (some would reply that this either makes him a liar, or a coward, or a mo­ron, but we will just settle on Ted the Naughty Mystifier).

 

Plus, even if these days, The Amboy Dukes are mostly remembered as the odd druggie band the Nuge used to play in before testosterone and Artemis got the better of him, the connection is weak — The Am­boy Dukes were really a band, and their importance goes way beyond (okay, somewhat beyond) having merely served as a launching pad for the solo career of America's most famous hunter since Hawkeye.

 

In general, the Detroit scene is known as the birthplace of «proto-punk», famous for bands such as the MC5, the Stooges, and Alice Cooper, who preferred to shock the establishment with loud­ness, vulgarity, and evil rather than flower power and mushroom essence. The Amboy Dukes had plenty of loudness and vulgarity within their systems, but they had a much more tolerant attitude towards psychedelia as well, so one could think of them as sort of a cross between Alice Cooper and, say, Arthur Lee's Love — although their most serious source of inspiration was British ra­ther than American psychedelia: it is no coincidence that one of the cover versions they did was Cream's 'I Feel Free', performed in a highly competent manner, but so slavishly adhering to the original that there is no reason at all for it to linger today. (The other British cover that they do is, as a fairly odd choice, Pete Townshend's 'It's Not True', which they do not slavishly adhere to since they drop the tune's signature riff — but that doesn't make it treasurable, either).

 

The band's psychedelic inclinations are fairly naïve and dated on such tracks as 'Psalms Of After­math' (everything about which is clichéd, starting from the title and pretentious lyrics and ending with the obligatory sitar and choral vocals) and 'Down On Phillips Escalator' (don't miss the ana­gram!). But as soon as they go into hard rock mode, the situation gets better — they come up with some nicely brutal riffs ('Colors'), and Nugent consistently shows that he's done his Hendrix homework fairly well.

 

The single, which did not chart, but ranked high enough with critical taste to make it onto Nug­gets, was Big Joe Williams' 'Baby Please Don't Go', whose fast-rocking arrangement was bor­rowed by the band from Them, but, quite probably, later served as the more direct source of in­spiration for Budgie, AC/DC, and God knows who else. Anyway, no other song by the band so perfectly merges their psychedelic and their sexual side together ­— the lead vocalist, John Drake, may be no great shakes, but Bill White's unnerving bass groove is impossible to resist in its enti­cing primitivism, and Mr. Ted unleashes a juicy psychedelic extravaganza in the middle (even throwing in a direct quotation from Hendrix's 'Third Stone From The Sun' and getting away with it) that rocks your mind as much as it blows it, even if every single lick out there must have been copied from somebody else's record. Even so, he's a master splicer.

 

In short, I would easily give this record a hearty thumbs up, if not for the fact that Nugent and Farmer's songwriting is so sour. Apart from two or three cool hard rock riffs, there is very little on here that is memorable. This is no big fault for the band — they were clearly trying to find their own voice, throwing in everything that could be thrown in (I have not mentioned the Rolling Stones yet, but John Drake must surely have been a major admirer of Mick Jagger, essentially dedicating 'Night Time' and the cover of 'Let's Go Get Stoned' to his name), but it does little, if anything, to convince the listener that any other track on here besides the epochal reworking of 'Baby Please Don't Go' deserves salvation.

 

That said, it would not exactly be right to give it a thumbs down, either, because the bizarre mix of cock rock with dope rock that The Amboy Dukes had worked out from the very start is weirdly special in its own way — almost each individual song may be weak per se, but the idea itself has never been realized so completely by anyone I know (even the Rolling Stones preferred to separate these two sides: as psychedelic as Satanic Majesties is, the Stones had seriously slowed down their regular sex drive rate on it). And, as you can see from the massive amount of covers, this was, after all, just the beginning.

 

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE MIND (1968)

 

1) Mississippi Murderer; 2) Surrender To Your Kings; 3) Flight Of The Byrd; 4) Scottish Tea; 5) Dr. Slingshot; 6) Journey To The Center Of The Mind; 7) Ivory Castles; 8) Why Is A Carrot More Orange Than An Orange; 9) Mis­si­o­nary Mary; 10) Death Is Life; 11) Saint Phillip's Friend; 12) I'll Prove I'm Right; 13) Conclusion.

 

Not sure about hitting the very «center», but with their second album, the Dukes have certainly reached a stable periphery. All of this is entirely self-written and much more confident than the first time around. It's also interesting in its very pronounced division. Nugent more or less owns Side A, based on individual, fat-riffed psycho-rockers, and Farmer dominates Side B, propped by a continuous psycho-pop suite, much wimpier, but somewhat subtler than Side A. Who's the win­ner? As much as it pains me to pronounce this, the Nuge is the winner.

 

Of course, the title track which opens the suite is the album's best number, and proudly deserves its place on the Nuggets boxset — but it is also the only one co-written by Farmer and Nugent on Side B. Psychedelia is rarely done at breakneck speed, for understandable reasons (try running a 60-metre dash on pot!), but that might just be one of the reasons why the Nuge still keeps preten­ding that 'Journey To The Center Of The Mind' is not a drug song, just an ass-kicking call for ge­neral open-mindedness and what-not. Anyway, it rocks, it's catchy as hell, it's got a blistering solo from Ted, and it shamelessly steals the fabulous riff from The Del-Vetts' 'Last Time Around' for one brief section — what's not to like?

 

The directions in which Farmer pushes the band on the other parts of the suite are a different mat­ter. They borrow extensively from baroque-pop and folk-rock, and neither of these is done in a particularly exciting manner. Sure, the band learns the guitar jangle, and the harpsichord tingle, and the snowy Hammond organ badongle, but the sounds still do not come together in anything par­ticularly impressive or original. Nugent does his best to paint the generic bolero rhythms of 'Ivory Castles' with meaty, vibrato-dependent solos, but he does little to save the Witgenstein-worthy title 'Why Is A Carrot More Orange Than An Orange', and even less to pull up the loud disaster of 'Missionary Mary' (that kind of title would suggest something grossly indecent, but, much to everybody's disappointment — no titillation whatsoever).

 

Thus, my and your money should be on Ted's compositional work on Side A: 'Surrender To Your Kings', another speedy anthem with a paranoid undercurrent; 'Flight Of The Byrd', another hard rock monster with a heavy Hendrix debt; and 'Scottish Tea', for which Ted honestly reworks a traditional Celtic anthem, replacing the bagpipes with psychedelic guitar — possibly the first straightforward crossing of the Highlands with San Francisco. No masterpiece, but amusing.

 

John Drake, as lead vocalist, once again makes no strong impression, much as he tries on the ope­ning track: 'Mississippi Murderer', standing somewhat alone in its own corner, is a gruff roots-rocker, dedicated to the familiar subject of womanslaughter, and, in trying to find the proper spi­rit, Drake impersonates a thoroughly gin-soaked, smoke-choked local barroom goer, some might say successfully, but I'd rather have Tom Waits over this, since Tom has what it takes to creep me out and this guy, unfortunately, doesn't. In the end, 'Murderer' just sounds like a joke song, and a very deceitful way to start out the album.

 

Overall, this is «progress», in a way, because the Nuge has made way for his talents, adding a decent composing flair to his already well-honed guitar skills — and, on the other hand, it is the only Amboy Dukes album on which Uncle Ted's big dick consistently stays out of the conversa­tion, an amazing exception in the man's career and reason enough to not only own the album, but even to award it an explicit thumbs up without bringing on seedy connotations. But be ready for a sea of filler in compensation.

 

MIGRATION (1969)

 

1) Migration; 2) Prodigal Man; 3) For His Namesake; 4) I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent; 5) Good Natured Emma; 6) Inside The Outside; 7) Shades Of Green And Grey; 8) Curb Your Elephant; 9) Loaded For Bear.

 

So, what sort of reaction would you expect from Ted Nugent if you told him his name were really an anagram for GUN DETENT? Here we have God providing the man with an almost direct hint, and he still ends the Amboy Dukes' third album with a song called 'Loaded For Bear'. What's that? Oh, right, it's not that bear. Damn the English language and its silly homonyms. Besides, Uncle Ted's big machine is usually loaded for boar, not bear. Or, sometimes, for beaver.

 

Anyway, Migration is basically the last attempt on the part of the original Amboy Dukes to be­have like a more or less straightfaced psychedelic American band. However, they are already nur­turing a more sarcastic attitude — the one that eventually landed them on Frank Zappa's record label — as evidenced by the tongue-in-cheek cover of the old doo-wop tune 'I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent'. It's too silly to be hilarious, but it does show a desire to evolve, be it only in the car­toonish direction.

 

In other news, the band had just fired John Drake, replacing him with Rusty Day, an equally for­gettable non-presence — his lungs are slightly more powerful than Drake's, but that's just about it. Songwriting duties are still shared equally between Nugent and Farmer, with keyboards player Andy Solomon throwing in a piece of his own ('Curb Your Elephant', an uninteresting piece of whitebread R'n'B with occasional «free-form» bits of instrumental chaos thrown in, not unlike some eccentric composition by Giles, Giles, & Fripp on the other side of the Atlantic, but without the humor or the memorable melody).

 

Alas, even though the Dukes may be sounding here better than ever before — the Nuge just keeps getting huger and nuger with each new record, and Dave Palmer's drumming borders on the epic at times — they still do not have the faintest idea of what it is that constitutes a true hook, unless they come upon one through sheer coincidence. This is why the title track, a sprawling instrumen­tal that opens the album, is arguably the best that Migration has to offer — it is a colorful me­lange of various freely quoted psychedelic motives (inspired primarily by 'Beck's Bolero', so it would seem), which requires instrumental versatility rather than compositional skill, and all of the players rise up to the task, Ted first of all, alternating sweetly flowing psychedelic lines with rapid explosive bursts of fireworks, excited as if being under the spell effect of rhinoceros semen (the taste of which he would sometimes compare to marijuana in interviews).

 

'Prodigal Man' is also little more than yer basic, utterly generic hard rock when it comes to main melody, but there is enough ferocious drumming and guitar heroics on here to feed a small regi­ment of musicians; the final solo from Ted is among the most melodic and coherent pieces he ever cobbled together. Very few guitarists would play that fast, that clean, and that melodic in 1969, come to think of it: certainly, if pressured to do so, both Clapton and Hendrix could have shown Uncle Ted a thing or two in that style, but the bottomline is, they just didn't care to play in that style. (Pete Townshend did, but he was always way above disciplining himself as strictly as Nu­gent does on this, or many other, tracks). The live versions of 'Prodigal Man' used to run for fifteen minutes, too (a twenty-minute mammoth performance later surfaced on the band's live album), and, apparently, the original LP version of the song was much longer than the cut version that is available on all CD editions — vinyl collectors ahoy.

 

As long as the song in question is not all about the Nuge sending fireflies into space, though, it just floats by without much ado, like the routine psychedelic sonic cloud it is (if it's a Farmer song) or like the yawn-inducing hard rock cliché it is (if it's a Nugent song, e. g. 'Good Natured Emma'). The sound is always tasteful, but it's no fun just beating around the bush all the time, waiting for Ted to strike up a solo (oh well, at least he never disappoints); and, apparently, the music industry people shared this feeling, too — the songs got little, if any, airplay, and after the brief hopes that 'Journey To The Center Of The Mind' instilled in the band, Migration was a dreadful flop, failing to chart at all and essentially destroying the basic conception of the Amboy Dukes as a Farmer-Nugent project. And I agree with the people — thumbs down; after all, we can always hear the Nuge flash and sparkle some other time, particularly when there are some fine written songs to go along with the sparkle.

 

MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS/ROCK BOTTOM (1970)

 

1) Marriage; 2) Breast-Fed Gator; 3) Get Yer Guns; 4) Non-Conformist Wildebeest Man; 5) Today's Lesson; 6) Chil­dren Of The Woods; 7) Brain Games Of Yesteryear; 8) The Inexhaustible Quest For The Cosmic Cabbage.

 

All right — now that Steve Farmer is officially out of the band and complete control passes on to Nugent, you'd think The Amboy Dukes must have kicked aside all the silly psycho shit and moved on to a sort of permanently fixed 'Cat Scratch Fever'-like type of groove, right?

 

Dead wrong. Not only has Farmer's departure not affected Uncle Ted's testosterone level one lit­tle bit, it seems to have initially worked the wrong way — for one brief moment at least, Nugent assumed that it was now up to him to fill in the «artsy slots», left vacant with Farmer's departure. The result is, hands down, the weirdest album to ever bear association with the name of Ted Nu­gent. Were he ever to unexpectedly perform 'Marriage' or 'Children Of The Woods' at one of his shows, at least half of his fans' heads would explode. Fortunately, there is no danger of that. «He was young, he was foolish, he was angry, he was vain», Mick would describe this.

 

I do not like any of these songs. The Nuge still has problems coming up with memorable riffs, and much of the time he is not even trying. What he is doing, though, is being all over the place. No single song on here ends where it begins, and most go through several transformations at least — constant tempo and key changes, constant juggling around with instruments and guitar tones, constant mood-shifting that borders on psychic disturbance.

 

If there is any primary influence here, it is Frank Zappa, closely followed by the «street mob va­riety art rock» of Blue Cheer, Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly, and various other heavy psychedelic bands (I have met comparisons with Jethro Tull, but that's out of the question; it is unlikely that the Dukes had even heard Jethro Tull by then, much less could have been carried away by them). The major Zappa fan in the band was keyboard player Andy Solomon: his only contribution, the crazy disjointed ten-minute suite 'The Inexhaustible Quest For The Cosmic Cabbage' is fully Zap­paesque in name and spirit, except it's also boring as hell: the free-form jazz / Brit-pop / avant­garde noise / pseudo-barbershop quartet harmony bits do not mesh together with nearly as much professionalism or conceptuality as they do on Frank's Absolutely Free, and it is not really until Uncle Ted properly picks up the guitar and starts whuppin' its ass at the tail end of the show that the track belatedly justifies its existence. Still, it's a fascinating misfire in its own way.

 

Ted's own brave stab at a multi-part epic ('Marriage') is much better — it is listenable as a normal and mildly interesting piece of music with progressive overtones, although its main flaw also fol­lows the main flaw of so many aspiring progressive musicians: it is basically just a set of mode­rately complex rhythmic grooves, none of which have any real significance, over which Nugent gets a chance to showcase his melodic soloing. That Ted has a gift, and that he is not merely «wa­nking» all over the studio, but trying to invoke beauty one minute and fury the next one, is crys­tal clear. That 'Marriage' is a breathtaking prog epic, capable of taking its rightful place next to 'Wat­cher Of The Skies' or 'Gates Of Delirium', is not quite so evident.

 

The shorter hard-rockers are more in line with the Dukes' previous body of work — meaty, braw­ny, worth tapping a toe or two or kicking a butt or three. But no review of an album like this can bypass a track as crazy as 'Non-Conformist Wildebeest Man' — which could only be described as «Nashville meets Orange County hardcore»: ninety seconds of a lively country shuffle played at over-breakneck speed, nothing in 1970 could even remotely sound like that. Alas, on the ninety first second it mutates into the mid-tempo art-metal of 'Today's Lesson', a much less interesting track, even if it takes itself much more seriously.

 

Had the new-look Amboy Dukes continued that way, who knows, this could have perhaps evol­ved into a whole new genre. On the other hand, Nugent clearly shows that he is in no position to pen really complex material: he gets by on the strength of his fire-breathing playing, but any em­bellishments that the band tries to load on top of his riffs mainly fall flat. Whatever you could say, some people are born into this world to bring it 'Thick As A Brick' — and some are born to sim­ply give it some 'Wang Dang Sweet Poontang'.

 

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST (1971)

 

1) Survival Of The Fittest; 2) Rattle My Snake; 3) Mr. Jones' Hanging Party; 4) Papa's Will; 5) Slidin' On; 6) Prodi­gal Man.

 

Some pressings of Marriage On The Rocks already added a «Featuring Ted Nugent» note in small print right on the sleeve. With the band's next album, all doubts were lifted. The band is now officially «Ted Nugent And The Amboy Dukes», with TED NUGENT in thick blood-red let­ters and THE AMBOY DUKES in a poorly discernible, malicious yellow. If that ain't enough, there is TED NUGENT himself, staring right at you from the sleeve photo, dressed up in Native Ame­rican garb and ready to shoot himself some fleshy dinner.

 

Still, at least there is some small connection with the earlier Amboy Dukes, because keyboardist Andy Solomon is still part of Ted's band — a very important, in fact, ingredient of the overall sound — and he even co-writes the title track. All of the other band members have been replaced: now we have K. J. Knight on drums and Rob Ruzga on bass — not that it seriously matters, since neither of the two had enough stamina to last too long around Uncle Ted. Survival Of The Fit­test indeed — and say what you will about Mr. Nugent and his social-darwinist stance on life, but one thing nobody can deny is that the guy does belong in the «fittest» category.

 

The entire album was recorded live over two nights of playing at a Detroit theater in the summer of 1970 — home grounds boosting self-confidence — yet consists almost entirely of new materi­al, with the sole exception of 'Prodigal Man', and even that one, by the time of the recording, had evolved into a typically early Seventies twenty-minute long jam with extended soloing from all the members. This makes Survival an obligatory must for Nuge fans — whether it is an equal must for general hard rock audiences is a tougher question.

 

As close as he is getting there, the Nuge still had not shaken the artsy cobwebs out properly; his wildman image is gradually starting to get the better of him, but a little bit of shyness and, more importantly, a little bit of pretense to something bigger than blunt ass-kicking still remains. The title track begins with an intentional false start — the band launches straight into the main riff of 'Journey To The Center Of The Mind' — then transforms into another 'Marriage'-like suite with alternating blues-rock and R'n'B sections; the grooves are smooth, but the little pizzazz that can push a thing like that into overdrive is, unfortunately, missing.

 

Other than the okayish hard rocker 'Rattle My Snake' ("rattle my snake! feel free to," a young Uncle Ted invites his audience at the end of the track, officially initiating his long history of sala­cious live routines) and a semi-psychedelic workout called 'Mr. Jones' Hanging Party', the mag­num opus of Side 1 is unquestionably 'Papa's Will'. A slowly lumbering grumbly monster, it ne­ver truly kicks off until the last minutes, when it's all about Mr. Ted and his wildman behaviour, culminating in a series of feral screams that are almost the equal of Pink Floyd's 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene' — and, in a way, even sound more natural.

 

The good news is that Survival Of The Fittest drops most of the clumsy and pointless elements that Marriage On The Rocks tried to associate with the Amboy Dukes. No straightahead psy­chedelia or ambitious messing around with Bartok pieces — this is rock'n'roll that tries to be more than three-chord entertainment, but still remains pure rock'n'roll. And yet, the Nuge still had a short way to go: except for the rip-roaring finale of 'Prodigal Man' (for which you have to wade through fifteen minutes of mediocre drum, bass, and organ soloing), not one song on here truly cuts loose with the appropriate degree of Madness from the Motor City Madman; I doubt that 'Rattle My Snake' or 'Slidin' On' might ever rank high on anyone's top 100 list of Harder Than A Rock Classics. The flaming bits are truly flaming, but, overall, this is a boring thumbs down — a transitional stage that no one needs to spend too much time on.

 

I mean, this was 1970, for God's sake — with the Who, the Stones, Led Zep, the Allman Brothers, and Derek & The Dominos all at the peak of their powers that year, someone still needs Ted Nugent? Just give the smartass his due — by steering clear of drugs, in five years' time, he'd outlast all these peaks — and THEN there would be something to finally talk about.

 

CALL OF THE WILD (1973)

 

1) Call Of The Wild; 2) Sweet Revenge; 3) Pony Express; 4) Ain't It The Truth; 5) Renegade; 6) Rot Gut; 7) Below The Belt; 8) Cannon Balls.

 

Well! Is this already a completely solo Ted Nugent album in all but name? With Andy Solomon out of the band, the Nuge is now officially the only link to any sort of the Amboy Dukes' past — now there is no one but himself to even remember who the heck was a «Steve Farmer» and whe­ther he was a real farmer or just pretended to be one. Actually, with the second wildlife-dedicated album title in a row, Ted drives the last nail into the coffin of the agricultural revolution. From now on and all the way down to eternity, a-hunting we will go.

 

And yet, the label «Ted Nugent & The Amboy Dukes» still makes some sense. For one thing, Un­cle Ted's limitless libido is still kept under control: the occupation of «looking for meat», as applied to Call Of The Wild, is mostly to be understood in the literal, not figurative, way, with most of the album's rockers celebrating the simple pleasures of enjoying nature and freedom, ra­ther than the self-imposed chains of the sex drive. For another, Ted still requires a full-fledged «band-like» sound — Solomon's replacement, Gabriel Magno, contributes thick keyboard layers that are regularly battling with Ted's guitar runs. (On vocals, by the way, we sometimes find Ted himself, sometimes a certain Andy Jezowski whom I really know nothing about).

 

But, most importantly, about half of Side B is still turned over to an atmospheric, quasi-psychede­lic instrumental suite ('Below The Belt') — granted, its slow, moody unveiling, with Ted gradual­ly laying on echos, distortion, wobble, phasing, feedback, etc., is probably just supposed to illus­trate a thrilling journey through the jungle, which every brave hunter is expected to undertake in order to feel himself one with the things of nature before killing and eating them. (More nutritious that way, not to mention spiritual.) However, 'Below The Belt's direct musical influence is unque­stionably Pink Floyd's 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene' — same type of relentlessly creeping cre­scendo, culminating in blood-curdling screams. For the classic Ted Nugent style, this is much too artsy-fartsy, and fully justifies still dragging along the «Amboy Dukes» tag.

 

The real good news is that Call Of The Wild rocks. Right until 'Below The Belt' softens up and colorizes the atmosphere, it is just one energetic rocker after another — truly wild, conveniently fast, and each containing either a decent riff, or a decent chorus, or both, and all of them featuring Mr. Ted in overdrive mode, soloing away like there was no tomorrow, no holds barred at all. The man is just completely unchained — one listen to the solo on 'Sweet Revenge' at 1:56 into the song is enough to witness a happy soul in fully free flight. This is one of those seminal spots where any disgust one might harbor towards Ted Nugent, the sickening human being, must be left behind that door and replaced with admiration for such inspired musicianship.

 

Obviously, if you are asserting yourself as a major hard-rocking machine as late as 1973, some of your music will be ripped off, and Uncle Ted's listening stand, by that time, must have included quite a bit of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple — 'Pony Express', as much ass as it kicks, is very much a slightly slowed down, bluesier take on 'Highway Star' (check the beginning of each verse, in particular). But then, one thing Uncle Ted never ever pretended to was trend-setting — other than masterminding an unfortunate association between cock rock and the National Rifle Associ­ation — and his is far from the only brand of derivative hard-rock that is still enjoyable from top to bottom. Who needs historical innovation with the kind of awesome guitar thunderstorm inter­lude Uncle Ted showers on our heads at 2:16 into 'Call Of The Wild'? That's just, like, totally MURDEROUS guitar playing out there! Beats even Mötörhead for sheer headbanging purposes, if you ask me.

 

To put it short, I can understand how all those «transitional era» Amboy Dukes albums had so little impact — but why an album like Call Of The Wild should so slumpily fall through the cracks of benevolent public attention and reluctant critical recognition, I have no idea. With a bunch of steamin'-hot rockers like the title track and 'Sweet Revenge', and a fun seven-minute at­mospheric romp through the realm of sound like 'Below The Belt', it is the first Nugent-associated record I had the pleasure of enjoying all the way through — and, possibly, my thumbs up might stimulate someone else into sharing that pleasure. This may not yet be the completely print-ready cartoonish version of Uncle Ted with the cat scratch fever, but this is where Nugent truly arrives on the scene as a force in a class of his own. And no Jack London-related jokes, please.

 

TOOTH, FANG & CLAW (1974)

 

1) Lady Luck; 2) Living In The Woods; 3) Hibernation; 4) Free Flight; 5) Maybelline; 6) The Great White Buffalo; 7) Sasha; 8) No Holds Barred.

 

The Amboy Dukes finally reach the end of their transmutational career with this record — upon completing it, Nugent officially disbanded the group and embarked on a three-month deer-killing spree, a bloody intermission that formally separates «Ted Nugent & The Amboy Dukes» from «Ted Nugent, Solo Madman». But since Tooth, Fang & Claw is very much just Call Of The Wild Vol. 2, there is a substantial difference, too.

 

This is the last time Uncle Ted flirts with an itty-bitty bit of artsiness, coming in the form of two consequent in­strumentals: 'Hibernation' and 'Free Flight'. The former is just as long as 'Below The Belt' on the previous album, but much faster and much more relying on speed runs from Ted's fingers, happily bursting out in seemingly endless waves. The latter also runs fast, but is more riff-based, centered around an equally happy, memorable melody. But as loud and energetic as these guitarfests are, they are not at all «heavy», and the sweaty sexual aggression that Ted would start cultivating so hard in just a year is nowhere in sight.

 

It is much more evident on vocal numbers, such as the opening 'Lady Luck' and the closing 'No Holds Barred'; the former, in particular, is classic Nugent — not one,  but several crunchy and evocative riffs, lyrics that leave no doubts about the directions of Uncle Ted's mind, and a heavy as heck, macho as muck atmosphere that, in 1974, Ted was still learning to borrow from his pre­decessors (Steppenwolf, etc.), but of which he would soon become the ultimate priest. Great tune! As recommendable for sissies as 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme' is for bodybuilders.

 

'Lady Luck' and the instrumental rampage are the chief reasons why I believe this record to be almost as satisfactory as Call Of The Wild, but there are other points of interest, including:

 

— 'The Great White Buffalo', a Nugent classic and one of the very few Amboy Dukes-era sur­vi­vors that made it into his regular set — an environmentalist tune, mind you, blaming the stupid white man for the fate of the buffalo. (Come to think of it, I can understand Uncle Ted's rage at the stupid white man — exterminating all the buffalo before Un­cle Ted got there! Now all Uncle Ted's got left are these puny little deer things). The important thing about the song is not its ly­rics, though, but rather the quirky little riff, built around several loop-like flourishes that Ted bravely reproduces in each bar of the verse melody;

 

— 'Maybellene': Chuck's prime chestnut is updated here for the 1970s, with everything bigger, louder, faster, and dumber than it used to be, but that's to be expected. The funniest part of it is Ted imploring the drum guy to "Hit me... hit me... hit me!" in the very end, like a junkie screa­ming for a shot, then, once the desired hit finally comes — a relieved "Ah, thank you!". That fun­ny old Mr. Nugent, eh?;

 

— 'Sasha': a rather mediocre acoustic-folk ballad, but it's a NUGE-APPROVED acoustic-folk ballad, his first one, actually — and it's about his newborn daughter, so cut the caveman some slack for a little sentimental tenderness, something like the first time ever. After all, even loin­cloth-clad primordial hunters could have a weakness for babies.

 

Strange as it is, I would not say that, at any point during the album, Ted feels like he is tired of his current direction, or feeling under pressure from some atavistic obligation to inject a shot of «art» into whatever it is that he is doing. Tooth, Fang & Claw is not a great hard rock album, but it's fairly solid, so Nugent's final decision to concentrate on one and one thing only in the fu­ture really comes off as a surprise. Believe it or not, there used to be a time when Uncle Ted kept trying different things from time to time — if anything, none of these records sound as cartoonish as whatever followed. Of course, Ted's cartoons are one of a kind, too, but still, there is some­thing about his Amboy Dukes past that brews up a little nostalgia. Thumbs up to commemorate this yearning — oh, and for all the swell guitar runs, too, of course.

AMON DÜÜL

PSYCHEDELIC UNDERGROUND (1969)

 

1) Ein Wunderhübsches Mädchen Träumt Von Sandosa; 2) Kaskados Minnelied; 3) Mama Düül Und Ihre Sauer­kraut­band Spielt Auf; 4) Im Garten Sandosa; 5) Der Garten Sandosa Im Mor­gen­tau; 6) Bitterlings Verwandlung.

 

So here I was all set to start writing about Amon Düül II, one of the fundamental marvels of clas­sic Krautrock, when it somehow struck me that it is, after all, somewhat unprofessional, not to mention illogical, not to say a few words about what the «II» stands for. And this, in turn, begs for the question — why do so many people know a lot of things about Amon Düül II, but prefer to generally keep quiet about their predecessors?

 

The best answer, of course, implies taking a listen to this record (one is quite enough for the lay­man; any more and you will start träum-ing von Sandosa yourself, and we don't want any of that). The original Amon Düül was not so much a musical band as a bohemian artistic conglomeration of a dozen or so free-spirited German youths, who drifted together some time in 1967 in Munich, and, instead of plotting a beer hall putsch, decided instead to take it out peacefully — besides, with that much pot around you, it'd be pretty hard to organize even a rally, let alone a political coup. So they just called themselves Amon Düül instead: «Amon» for the Egyptian sun god, of course, but with «Düül» there are problems — some claimed this to be the Turkish equivalent for 'moon', which would be nice and symmetric except there's no such word in the Turkish language. The closest thing I have been able to locate would be Proto-Turkic *düül 'dream', which is still fairly appropriate. Anyway, sure beats «Grateful Dead».

 

The group engaged in all sorts of activities — political, social, artistic, hallucinogenic — and one of these activities happened to be music, which some people at the time still believed to be able to save the world. Of course, «music» was understood in a strictly ritualistic sense of the word: ha­ving little value in and out of itself, serving instead as a promoter of collective ecstasy. This meant that it did not matter much if you knew how to play — it only mattered if, by playing, you could lure the spirit inside you, and then be able to pass it on to the rest.

 

Hence this jam session, recorded somewhere in late 1968, with eight musicians participating, and — get this — six of them credited only for various kinds of percussion (with Ulrich Leopold try­ing, as best as he can, to lay down the bass lines, and Rainer Bauer contributing stoned-out-of-his-mind rhythm guitar). Peter Leopold is the primary drummer, and Wolfgang Krischke — who passed away one year later, having managed to freeze to death while under the influence — also contributes occasional piano rolls (or, should we say, piano bangs).

 

The session was later doctored in the studio, mostly through the insertion of various sonic col­lages that raise the album's «unpredictability» quotient — as in, sometimes the unending tribal beat simply vanishes from under your feet and is replaced by a few minimalistic piano notes, then fades in again as if nothing happened. But in general, there is nothing here to take away the total freedom of expression, so that we can all witness how boring it can be when the universe is ruled by an absolute absence of rules.

 

Well, maybe not absolute. Psychedelic Underground is not just a bunch of random noises, as could easily be expected from early, hyper-experimental Krautrock. Rather, it is a bunch of tribal dances, with the entire first side given over to a particularly expressive 17-minute one. Most of the time, the rhythm section does hold down a pseudo-African beat, and the rest of the band beat their congos and maracas and shake their shakers and tambourines and dance around the campfire, yelling in tongues and worshipping The Great Zombie or something. For a couple minutes, it's amusing, and then you start forgetting about the whole thing even while it's playing.

 

The second side of the album is, technically, more diverse: instead of one single groove, there are five, although one is very similar to 'Mädchen' ('Im Garten Sandosa') and another one is not really a «groove», but rather a long psycho-folk incantation, heavily peppered with abysmal falsetto wailings (' Der Garten Sandosa Im Mor­gen­tau'). The best thing that could be said about this stuff is that it does have atmosphere — the tribal chanting actually sounds «tribalistic», and the man­tras actually sound as if the people behind them believed they were channelling supernatural cur­rents that-a-way. Perhaps the optimal manner of enjoying this stuff would not even imply con­sumption of substances — just put on a loincloth, light a campfire, put some sacrificial meat on the spit, get out your tomtom, and join in all the fun. Just the kind of thing to seduce a respectable Munich bürger, especially at the height of the Oktoberfest.

 

I would not want to stamp a negative rating on this thing — obviously, it fares quite poorly when compared to the contemporary psychedelic jamming of Can, or even Amon Düül's own, much more disciplined, offspring («II»), but, like I said, «psychedelic jamming» is not a good way to describe the album. It is not offering «music» — it delivers a tribal ritual, and delivers it pretty damn well as far as tribal rituals in the heart of Germany could ever go.

 

COLLAPSING / SINGVÖGEL RÜCKWÄRTS & CO. (1969)

 

1) Booster (Kolkraben); 2) Bass, Gestrichen (Pot Plantage, Kollaps); 3) Tusch, FF; 4) Singvögel Rückwärts (Sing­vögel Vorwärts); 5) Lua-Lua-He (Chor Der Wiesenpieper); 6) Shattering & Fading (Flattermänner); 7) Nachrichten Aus Cannabistan; 8) Big Sound (Die Show Der Blaumeisen); 9) Krawall (Repressiver Mon­tag); 10) Blech & Aufbau (Bau, Steine & Erden); 11) Natur (Auf Dem Lande).

 

This almost immediate follow-up to Psychedelic Underground was, frankly speaking, not a very good move. For the most part, it consists of leftovers from the same jam session — think careful­ly: leftovers from a psychedelic jam session. That's sort of like replacing fresh cocaine with fresh vomit from a cocaine inhaler, isn't it?

 

The only big formal difference is that most of the tracks are short. This makes the album more di­verse; but how possibly diverse can an album get if all you hear is a set of ritualistic percussion grooves? How many different ways are there to bang a drum — okay, a lot of drums — unless you are Max Roach and you approach the drumbanging task the way a mathematician approaches a Millennium Prize Problem, which is clearly not the kind of situation that the members of Amon Düül were in when they released this sequel under the slogan of «anything goes».

 

Psychedelic Underground at least made a statement and provided you with a good soundtrack if you wanted to engage in a zeitgeist-ish religious ritual. These brief bits, however, fall under the Woody Allen principle of "really awful food, and in such small portions": as boring as these per­cussion fests are, they do not even give you plenty of time to settle into the groove. The whole venture loses its purpose, becoming a very silly album released with no particular purpose. It is fairly amazing they were able to release it at all. Not to bother — thumbs down here with not a shred of remorse. The best thing about it are the song titles, including such wasted wonders as 'News From Cannabistan' and 'Songbird Forwards (Songbird Backwards)'. But then again, it still sells for $25 at Amazon, so perhaps it is me, after all, who is missing something here — like an ability to appreciate strong young German hands on a set of bongos.

 

PARADIESWÄRTS DÜÜL (1970)

 

1) Love Is Peace; 2) Snow Your Thirst And Sun Your Open Mouth; 3) Paramechanische Welt; 4) Eternal Flow; 5) Paramechanical World.

 

An almost unpredictable surprise: Amon Düül's first, and only, attempt at establishing themselves as a real band — perhaps, spurred on by feelings of jealousy towards their musically more ambi­tious brethren in Amon Düül II (a couple of which still ended up guesting at the sessions, because the entire collected musical talent of Amon Düül proper would not even reach the level of the Monkees, let alone real Krautrock competition). Predictably, it did not work, but at least it's (a) GROWTH, (b) not as awful as it could easily have been. I mean, in 1970, an underground band of poorly trained «musicians» could release an entire album of running up and down any basic scale, and it would still sell — a little — as the ultimate mind-expanding experience. Fortunately, Paradieswärts is slightly better than that.

 

Slightly. The entire first side is occupied by one 17-minute track, consisting of two parts: first, a folk-bluesy electric part, pinned to a trivial looped riff, then a raga-style acoustic part, pinned to even more trivial acoustic strumming, with some electronic noises forming a bridge between the two. There is some overdubbing (bass, extra guitarwork, including what tries to pass for baroque acoustic flourishes, etc.), but overall, you can only think positively of this track if the atmosphere happens to be to your liking — enough to make you enter a peaceful realm of sleep.

 

On the second side, 'Snow Your Thirst...' is another Grateful Dead-ish experience, but expanded with a lengthy and, surprisingly, not too atrocious electric wah-wah solo; 'Paramechanische Welt' is another raga that sounds quite similar to the second part of 'Love Is Peace'. Furthermore, CD editions also include two shorter tracks that were released as a single slightly before the LP, of which 'Eternal Flow' could be moody and melancholic if it weren't so goddamn minimalistic — and with Amon Düül, the feeling never passes that their minimalism is due not so much to their intentional love for minimalism as it is to their formal inability to practice maximalism.

 

In short, it is all quiet, atmospheric, «pastoral», as some would claim, and utterly irrelevant in the face of so many much better albums out there. But apparently, Amon Düül themselves believed this music could get you to paradise (see the album title), and, since it is hard to scientifically fal­sify that belief, you might as well join in, to avoid frustration. Still a thumbs down, though, from a voluntarily frustrated non-believer.

 

DISASTER (1972)

 

1) Drum Things (Erschlagzeugtes); 2) Asynchron (Verjault Und Zugeredet); 3) Yea Yea Yea (Zerbeatelt); 4) Broken (Ofensivitäten); 5) Somnium (Trauma); 6) Frequency (Entzwei); 7) Autonomes (Entdrei); 8) Chaoticolour (Entsext); 9) Expressionidiom (Kapuntterbunt); 10) Altitude (Quäär Feld Aus); 11) Impropulsion (Noch'n Lied).

 

If they intentionally gave this album that kind of name to avert disaster — for instance, to have all of us blush and say, «oh come on, don't be so hard on yourselves, it's not that bad, really!»... — well, it is that bad. No need to underplay the badness. After the cute, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at actual music-making on the previous album, Amon Düül are back to basics: once again scraping out the barrel of the big 1969 jam session. And now, God help us, they have scra­ped out enough to fill out a double album of material.

 

What separates the real Disaster from a forgivable curiosity like Psychedelic Underground is that these, really truly, are dregs. Most of the tracks are, as usual, centered around drums, except that this time, there is little of anything other than drums (about one or two chords worth in gui­tar strum and some occasional howling notwithstanding), and it all sounds like a bunch of sound­checks — warming up for the real thing. Everything is taken at the same tempo, most of the pat­terns are exactly the same, and the individuality of each of the tracks basically just depends on how many drummers there are and on which particular single string the guitar or the bass player would pluck or strum in the event of a common cosmic current picking him up and carrying him along with the drummer(s).

 

Essentially, this is Metal Machine Music, but without the pizzazz — Lou Reed, at least, produ­ced his «anti-masterpiece» as a well-targeted fuck-you-all, whereas Disaster doesn't even have the proper sonic punch to offend anybody exactly as the doctor prescribed. Psychedelic Under­ground was the sacrificial ritual; this is rehearsal material for the sacrificial ritual. You interested in listening to the witch doctor getting it on in­side his hut, half an hour before they drag the sacrificial victims in the center of the village square? If yes, Disaster awaits you, all the sixty seven minutes of thumping and pumping. Thumbs down.

 

EXPERIMENTE (1983)

 

1) Special Track Experience No. 1; 2) Special Track Experience No. 2; 3) Special Track Experience No. 3; 4)  Spe­cial Track Experience No. 4; 5) Special Track Experience No. 5; 6) Special Track Experience No. 6; 7) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 7; 8) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 8; 9) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 9; 10) Spe­cial Track Ex­pe­ri­ence No. 10; 11) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 11; 12) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 12; 13) Spe­cial Track Ex­pe­ri­ence No. 13; 14) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 14; 15) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 15; 16) Spe­cial Track Ex­pe­ri­ence No. 16; 17) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 17; 18) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 18; 19) Spe­cial Track Ex­pe­ri­ence No. 19; 20) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 20; 21) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 21; 22) Spe­cial Track Ex­pe­ri­ence No. 22; 23) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 23; 24) Spe­cial Track Experience No. 24.

 

Some sources list this album, released more than a decade after the musical career of Amon Düül had been wisely laid to rest, as a bootleg; others include it in officially sanctioned discographies, and, having not the temporal resources to investigate the controversy, I can only say that I do not care, on any grand scale, but that it would, perhaps, make sense to say a few words about it any­way, to scare off the irrationally brave people.

 

Basically, these are the «dregs off the dregs» from the proverbial jam session: sixty-five more minutes of lashing, crashing, bashing, and thrashing. The only difference from Disaster is that most of these «special experiences», for which nobody even bothered inventing specific titles this time around, are relatively short, from one to three minutes in length. Some may find it a consola­tion; I find it a travesty, since slicing these percussive blasts into thin strips pretty much loses the only remaining saving grace of the original Amon Düül — their ability to genetically engineer your brain if the drumming and strumming are left alone for a prolonged period of time. These here little pieces are blatantly stripped of that power, each one cutting off abruptly, without even being provided a chance to fade away, at what looks like completely random intervals. Even on those few (two or three) occasions where I, involuntarily, would find myself slipping into the groove, this was only to be followed by the very unpleasant feeling of having the groove suddenly jerked from under you, and that can be almost as bad as a case of coitus interruptus.

 

There does, however, occur a big, big laugh here if you make it all the way to Special Experience No. 20 — which basically sounds like someone trying, over the course of one minute, to master the chords for 'Louie Louie' but... failing. Pretty much tells you everything you should know ab­out the musical level of Amon Düül. Actually, a few scattered tracks here and there offer a bit of folksy jangle, as a relief from the usual choppy rhythm chords, but it's not as if throwing in a sim­ple flourish here and there had any actual meaning in this context.

 

I'd like to give the album a thumbs down, but I can't — not before the effect of listening to it is properly tested in a psychiatric ward; after all, similia simi­li­bus curentur, if you pardon my Latin. We can only hope that, with Experimente, the well had truly run dry. If anyone ever happens to fall upon more leftovers from this accursed session (or, God forbid, come across recordings of other similar rituals), I will just have to pretend that the unfortunate indie label that will dare rele­ase them is run by Nazi pedophiles, and the Reviewer's Code says I can't deal with such types.

AMON DÜÜL II

PHALLUS DEI (1969)

 

1) Kanaan; 2) Dem Guten, Schonen, Wahren; 3) Luzifers Ghilom; 4) Henriette Krotenschwanz; 5) Phallus Dei.

 

While the original Amon Düül busied themselves with one-way communication with anonymous spirits, mostly via unharnessed drum banging and unrehearsed screaming, a rebellious subset of the commune decided that, perhaps, the spirits would be more responsive if spoken to with real music — weird music, for sure, but one that would at least be more firmly grounded in the human musical experience, collec­tively gained over the past millennium.

 

One thing in common between early Amon Düül II and their brethren is that the new group, too, started out as an improvisational outfit, burying themselves in heavy jamming and putting on re­cord those particular cuts that seemed to capture the largest concentration of inspiration. Not that, in 1969, this was any big news for the jazz idiom, but for the «rock» one the approach was still novel — even the Grateful Dead preferred not to mix their live and studio images too heavily. Phallus Dei, on the other hand, was essentially a studio recreation of the band's live set, slightly doctored with special effects and overdubs during the final stage.

 

In 1969, this set of jams must have sounded as wild as the album title, which hardly requires translation. Today, both the title and the music seem far more tame — in fact, the music is down­right accessible. The band consciously avoids overtly tricky time signatures, key changes every five seconds, or flashy, scale-jumping soloing; it simply keeps on playing, and the only truly bi­zar­re trademark are the vocals — alternately sung by guitarist Chris Karrer or, uh, tambourinist Renate Knaup, the only girl in the band. Bizarre, because the former had an occasional penchant for the Mickey Mouse thing, and the latter keeps veering towards opera vibrato; together, they sure make a pretty pair.

 

Although it is the second side of the record that is completely dedicated to a twenty-minute suite, it is actually the first one that sounds the craziest — dark psychedelic cosmic rock, of that parti­cular variety on which the instruments do not seem to be working towards a collective purpose, but play the part of randomly functioning objects speeding past your observation point in outer space. Two or more guitars drone, buzz, or jangle with enough hard-rock power to keep the liste­ner from being bored by too much wimpiness (a typical failure for the Grateful Dead) and with enough spaced-out sound effects to remind the listener that this is certified psychedelia, not Step­penwolf or anything. The most obvious parallel would be Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd ('Interstel­lar Overdrive' etc.), except that the guitarists exude far more sanity and technicality.

 

As for 'Phallus Dei' itself, it is more like a completely free-form jam, without even an introducto­ry theme, and much more steeped in standard rock'n'roll — the groove that emerges out of the first three minutes of psycho noises shows the «garage» side of this band, as the rhythm section and both guitarists rev up the tempo and start competing in the art of ass-kicking. The groove that the band launches into after a clumsy, wobbly pause must have been subconsciously borrowed from the Amboy Dukes' 'Journey To The Center Of The Mind' — one of the most perfect fusions of hard rock and psychedelia. The final results are meaty enough, but probably twenty minutes is a bit too long for a flight that, no matter how free, has been launched from such a familiar runway.

 

Essentially, Phallus Dei is like a grand rehearsal for the real show: all the elements firmly in place, but without that little special spark to really drive the performance home. The style that would ensure the uniqueness of the band has been found — dark, but not depressing, space rock with a slight touch of the carnival spirit and a healthy dose of Bavarian buffoonery. But it would take the next album to prove that this uniqueness had a really good reason to be unique. Thumbs up, but oh so modestly — if you are completely new to this band and would rather prefer to be swept off your feet than mildly amused, go straight to Yeti, and don't forget to pass go and collect your $200.

 

YETI (1970)

 

1) Soap Shop Rock; 2) She Came Through The Chimney; 3) Archangels Thunderbird; 4) The Return Of Ruebezahl; 5) Eye-Shaking King; 6) Pale Gallery; 7) Yeti; 8) Yeti Talks To Yogi; 9) Sandoz In The Rain.

 

The big difference between Phallus Dei and Yeti is that the former still sounds more «stoned» than «experimental». On the band's second album, the tables are turned. The band that recklessly and delightfully jammed on Phallus Dei was, by all means, a musical band, but one that could have easily faded away in history like so many virtual unknowns from the same era. The band that meticulously and purposefully laid down the foundation for Yeti, though — these guys are already one of the primary driving forces of Krautrock; there is no way they could disappear in smoke without the world sitting up and taking notice.

 

Not that I'd like to conjure up images of a precise plan, conveying, bit by bit, some well thought-out musical ideology: even at their tightest and most ambitious, Amon Düül II were nothing like, say, the musical philosophers of Kraftwerk. The album, after all, is named after the Abominable Snowman — whereas the front cover, for no reason I can think of, depicts The Grim Reaper in­stead (with the band's sound man posing as the gentleman in question). That just about gives the right idea of the degree of the album's conceptual or ideological coherence. Song titles and lyrics need not be paid much attention here — except for a few brief seconds of wondering at all the delirious word combinations, well steeped in the avantgarde tradition.

 

If there is an actual idea behind all the rampage of Yeti, it may be that of a certain denseness of sound, a kind of an aura that I would call «Jungle Psychedelia». When you start thinking where this strange, strange music is growing from, one immediate influence is the American psychedelic scene — the sprawling jams of San Franciscan bands — but that sound, no matter how boring or how interesting, was decidedly thinner and less picturesque than the exotic, dangerous landscapes painted by Chris Karrer and his merry German pals.

 

When 'Soap Shop Rock' introduces the album with a blues-rock riff not unlike Canned Heat or Steppenwolf, the first few bars almost give a misguided impression — has this band gone in a «root­sy» direction? 30 or 40 seconds into the song, though, you begin to understand that, altho­ugh they are using traditional blues / rock'n'roll approaches to playing, this is merely a foundation for something completely different. The guitar players throw on everything they can think of, from jazz to classical guitar to psychodrome to Indian ragas. The violin player idolizes John Cale, laying it on like a country fiddler who has just learned to play him some Schoenberg. The male singer sings with bleating Eastern overtones, the female singer sings like Isolde on speed. And on top of that, if you get too bored, they pile some memorable melodic hooks. Occasionally. And much of the time, it all goes on at once, with your ears constantly occupied in a mad rush from one spot to another, unable to settle on any one thing permanently, like in one of those Robert Altman movies.

 

That's Amon Düül II at their finest, in a nutshell. Sometimes there are softer, gentler interludes ('She Came Through The Chimney', with a bizarre electronic solo that squeaks at such a high pitch you'd think she must have had some real trouble coming through that chimney), which are quickly replaced by more of that jungle bombast. If the 13-minute 'Soap Shop Rock' seems like overkill to you, try 'Archangels Thunderbird' — all the magic of the band compressed into three and a half minutes of brutal riffage, «non-standard» singing, and thick-as-thieves series of over­dubs. Although stopping at 'Thunderbird' would be a crime, too: neither Renate Knaup's vocals, nor Chris Karrer's violin feature on it all that much. And the guitar solos on 'Eye-Shaking King' are louder and wilder.

 

The music becomes far less focused on the second LP of the package, which does honestly warn the listener that all of the music there is improvised. The title track, clocking in at 18 minutes, has its moments, and essentially follows the same vibes as the first LP, but due to a lack of pre-re­hear­sed structure, can seem like a fall back to the stage of Phallus Dei — somewhat of a letdown after the concentrated jungle assault of 'Soap Shop Rock' and its peers. Which is not denying the mood, and the background effect, and the unique combination of sound ingredients, etc. And even the second LP does have some structural planning: after the generally grim, «spooky» atmo­sphere of 'Yeti' and 'Yeti Talks To Yogi', 'Sandoz In The Rain' closes the album on a gentler note, with folksy chord sequences, acoustic guitars, and flutes, to soften down and placate the disturbed senses. Take a load off. Your trip to the musical jungle of Amon Düül II ends standing on a sunlit open patch, rather than in the densest, darkest, eeriest part of the forest.

 

This disproportionate importance of the two LPs means that, at this stage, the band was still in a state of transition — the peak of their powers would not be reached until the next record — but this sort of transition is worth ten instances of «reaching maturity» for lesser bands. And, want it or not, never again (with the possible exception of Wolf City) would the band come across as po­ssessing such monstruous rocking power — Yeti may not be as fantastically inventive as subse­quent albums, but it compensates by kicking all of their asses to high heaven; how could it not get a major thumbs up due to that fact alone?

 

TANZ DER LEMMINGE (1971)

 

1) Syntelman's March Of The Roaring Seventies; 2) Restless Skylight Transistor Child; 3) The Marilyn Monroe Me­mo­rial Church; 4) Chewinggum Telegram; 5) Stumbling Over Melted Moonlight; 6) Toxicological Whispering.

 

Not even the murky jungleland of Yeti can prepare the listener for the «shoot down all barriers» marathon that is The Dance Of The Lemmings, Amon Düül II's crowning masterpiece that earned them the right to resign in dignity (although I do not blame them for preferring to fizzle out in dis­grace — there are still plenty of goodies in the subsequent catalog). If there was an album in 1971 on which the universe of music was stretched out to a higher extreme, I have yet to hear it; and, as we all know, 1971 was no slouch when it came to stretching out.

 

Technically, each of the first three sides of this double LP contains one lengthy suite, whereas side four consists of three shorter tracks; in reality, this information is irrelevant — the «suites» themselves are created from snippets that have little to do with each other. The best choice one could make, I think, is to simply accept the album as one sprawling seventy-minute long sonic fantasy, an Alice In Wonderland filtered through the drug-fueled, but playful conscience of Ger­man «non-academic avantgardism». As all such things go, it may work better if the listener's con­science is drug-fueled, too, but you're on your own with that one (this site is strictly adhering to the «just say no» policy, no matter how hard it may get).

 

Actually, Tanz Der Lemminge becomes most delightful only in comparison. As 'Syntelman's March' starts us off on our psychedelic voyage, one can easily see the links to the acid rock sce­nes in the US and the UK — the backbone sounds like acoustic folk crossed with Eastern music and going crazy in the process. But the more it goes on, the more and more different other ingre­dients are thrown in, in radical contrast to Friscan psycho jams, usually very poor on fantasy. Any­one accustomed to dismissing psychedelic music as «hippie crap», a.k.a. interminable wan­king based on single-string drones or limited bluesy improvising techniques, will have to waive that opinion after sitting through the first ten minutes of 'Syntelman'. Spooky cosmic Mellotrons, gypsy violins, tablas, flamenco guitar, Beatlesque electric pop riffs, barrelhouse piano, and I have not listed even half of what's on there, I think — and it's just the first side.

 

The second side ('Restless Skylight'), if at all possible, is even more inventive, complementing the diversity with sitars and hard-rocking parts (the riff that bursts through your speakers at 7:08 is every rocker's dream — lower the tone a little and Tony Iommi would have paid good money to appropriate it for Master Of Reality). And then, on side three, 'The Marilyn Monroe Memorial Church' goes for a complete change of scene, dropping melody and rhythm in favor of mood and atmosphere: eighteen minutes of creepy soundtrackish «muzak», during which the intrepid jungle traveler of Yeti has finally given up his machete and, from an active breaker of new ground, has turned into a frightened passive observer, as the amicable, but deadly dangerous friends of the fo­rest hurry past him about their daily (or, rather, nightly) tasks.

 

Come to think of it, 'Memorial Church', despite being largely improvised and having no firm structure to speak of, may be one of Amon Düül II's greatest contributions to humanity. Its dark mystique is not fully unprecedented — one could say that it draws its inspiration, among other things, from the mid-section of Led Zep's 'Dazed And Confused', or from the Doors' 'Horse Lati­tudes' — but it is the first time ever that someone dared to explore the limits of that mystique to such a full extent. It is essentially eighteen minutes of «dicking around», and yet it doesn't feel bo­­ring, or, at least, doesn't have to feel boring. Just think of yourself as Snow White groping around in the dark forest, and eighteen minutes will pass in a jiffy.

 

Strange enough, the band would never again try anything as totally far out as this record. Having blown to bits all notions of limits and borders, Karrer, Weinzierl and Co. seem to have decided that operating within certain conventions is, after all, a more challenging task for the artist than demolishing any such conventions — a notion that I generally endorse, but not necessarily in this case. Tanz Der Lemminge is a triumph of near-total freedom, but it is the kind of near-total free­dom that I love the best: one that does not forget about sheer entertainment value, diversity, and melodicity (pardon my French). It sounds like nothing else, yet still goes fairly easy on the «nor­mal» ear. Not only does it have absolutely nothing to do with the weirdness of, say, Captain Beef­heart's Trout Mask Replica (weirdness that I am not afraid to call «anti-musical»), but when you get down to dissecting all of its little bits, you find out that each one of them is fairly normal and even simple in its own rights. No crazy time signatures, no earth-shaking dissonance, not even any ultra-ugly sound effects or feedback abuse. It is only the recklessly kaleidoscopic approach that makes Tanz what it is — namely, one of the most mind-blowing experiences of the late stage of the psychedelic era. Thumbs up a-plenty; in fact, I'd like to borrow yours as well.

 

CARNIVAL IN BABYLON (1972)

 

1) C.I.D. In Uruk; 2) All The Years Round; 3) Shimmering Sand; 4) Kronwinkl; 5) Tables Are Turned; 6) Hawknose Harlequin.

 

Miles ahead of the usual speed of progressive rock, Amon Düül II reached their most audacious peak in 1971 — two years ahead of Tull's Passion Play and three years ahead of Tales From To­pographic Oceans and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway — and, by 1972, the band was all but ready to «sell out». Those few admirers who held their breath, expecting the follow-up to Tanz to blow their minds to even higher heavens, must have lived out a depressingly anti­cli­mac­tic experience. The fol­low-up was a single LP; rather uniform in style and manner of execution; low on psychedelic jamming, but high on folksy singing; and, worst of all, rather flaccid and limp compared to the monster hard rock grooves of Yeti and (occasionally) Tanz.

 

Now the very idea of an elitist, far-out-there group making their sound more accessible to general audiences has nothing sacrilegious about it per se. Unfortunately, I have to side with those who consider this first attempt on Amon Düül's part more of a failure than a success. No parts of the record are «awful» — in fact, I would be hard pressed to imagine how exactly, at that point in time, it would be at all possible for those guys to churn out straightforward musical trash — but, basically, the results are neither too stunning, nor too memorable.

 

What this is is «mood-oriented» music, shorn of the excessive sound layers of Tanz; the rhyth­mic grooves once again get longer, returning us to the style of Yeti, but they are also less based on crunchy guitar riffs and more on generic, acoustic-based blues and folk patterns. In short, now they sound more like 1968-69 era Jefferson Airplane than ever before — the major distinction be­ing the German voices of Weinzierl, Karrer, and Renate Knaup, who seem to be trying really hard to almost sound serious, which may be one of this album's worst flaws, because it is frankly im­possible to get a «serious» reaction to Renate's vaudeville overtones or the male singers' strongly pronounced German accents.

 

In the process, they manage to come up with their «poppiest», most «song-like» number to date: 'Tables Are Turned', driven forward by a homely-psychedelic riff fed through a Leslie cabinet or some similar shit, is very pretty (I still prefer they'd invited a Sandy Denny to sing it instead), and, after many years, still leaves the most lasting impression, alongside 'All The Years Round' (ano­ther cozy and elegant summertime folk ballad, and another song that would have benefited im­mensely from the presence of one of the folk-rock greats, even though Renate does give it all she can). But the other numbers are merely okay, and, coming off the majestic turbulence of the pre­vious two albums, feels like a cold water bucket to me.

 

As subjective as these impressions are, I have yet to hear anyone prefer Carnival In Babylon to the band's next album — Wolf City does such an amazingly better job at combining the bedlam spirit of classic Amon Düül with «accessibility» that it just about totally annihilates the very pur­pose of Carnival's existence. Still, as a transitional effort, it does deserve minor attention.

 

WOLF CITY (1972)

 

1) Surrounded By The Stars; 2) Green Bubble Raincoated Man; 3) Jail-House-Frog; 4) Wolf City; 5) Wie Der Wind Am Ende Einer Strasse; 6) Deutsch Nepal; 7) Sleepwalker's Timeless Bridge.

 

Call me crazy, but my guess it's a lion or, at least, a leopard out there on the front sleeve rather than an actual wolf. It also looks vaguely Assyro-Babylonian to me (don't even ask why), which might tie in with the band's vague interest in all things Ancient Near Eastern, already evident in their last title. But, if anything, Wolf City, to me, sounds distinctly more pagan-empire-atmo­sphe­ric than Carnival In Babylon — and why? Because that old crunch is back.

 

Yes, second time around, Amon Düül II gets it right. Carnival In Babylon may have made some people (me!) ask the question — would the band be at all able to make the transition from sprawl­ing freakouts to a tighter, more disciplined and restricted unit while still remaining on the «cut­ting edge», or, at least, still writing good music? It took Wolf City to prove that Amon Düül II were definitely not fading away, not for the moment, at least. Short (a single, 35-minute long, LP), concise, diverse, and complex, it is their finest offering in an «accessible» vein.

 

I do think it is poorly sequenced, though. By all means, the title track should have been opening the album, setting the mood — cold, stern, unnerving, with one of the band's finest vocal parts, where, for once, the German accent comes off splendidly; not that I am specifically suggesting Nazi associa­tions or anything, because the music itself would make a perfect soundtrack to any movie about any evil empire, be it ruled by Palpatine or Ashurbanipal. From the bizarre opening noises — sounds like a plugged-in electric guitar bouncing off the walls of a deep well — to Re­nate's paranoid multi-tracked backing vocals, sounding like a flock of scared female slaves scur­rying through the streets, it's a minor atmospheric masterpiece. It takes but three minutes to make its point and chain you to the record — so be a good boy/girl and reprogram it to the album-initial position where it rightfully belongs.

 

Funny enough, that same attitude, two tracks later, is deconstructed and made fun of on 'Deutsch Nepal', where the «Nazi vocals», dubbed over the grim organ melody, are constantly interrupted with the sounds of coughing and sputtering. (Actually, that's a good thing: the melody is so iron-fisted and potentially scary that the band must have felt it necessary to de-puff the proceedings a bit — otherwise, their international audiences might have started paying attention to their Bavari­an roots on a more grave level).

 

Apart from the title track, 'Deutsch Nepal', and the kick-ass guitar intro to 'Jail­house Frog', how­ever, Wolf City still has plenty of soft, folksy vibes to it. The album's lengthiest track, 'Sur­rounded By The Stars', is almost entirely acoustic-based, but this time around, it has plenty of dynamics, incorporating American, Celtic, Spanish, and Middle Eastern motives as it moves along, and beefing them up with heavy electric chords where necessary. This is truly «Yeti lite», as opposed to Carnival.

 

Many sources speak of Wolf City as Amon Düül II's transition from «psychedelia» to «progres­sive rock». This makes sense, although Wolf City is certainly not «prog» in the ELP / Yes / King Crimson understanding of the term — the backbones of the compositions are far too simple and inexquisite. It is the wide variety, the unpredictability, and the sheer force of these backbones that counts, not their inimitable ways of stringing together incompatible notes and bizarre chords; not to mention the near-complete lack of influence from «academic» styles of music.

 

Thus, the guitar riff that opens 'Jail-House-Frog' makes it clear that, just the day before, the guitar player had been spinning his Hendrix albums. And when the first chords of the «underwaterish» electric piano complement the acoustic strum of 'Sleepwalker's Timeless Bridge', I seem to dis­cern the melancholic, but amicable mood of George Harrison's 'Isn't It A Pity' — coincidence, perhaps, but just how totally accidental? No, indeed, Wolf City is almost honoured to feed upon the legacy of late 1960s art-pop/rock and build it up from there, colorfully and masterfully. And in doing so, it becomes, in itself, one of the most impressive art-rock LPs of the decade. Thumbs up, with certified approval from the Lord-Mayor of Nineveh himself.

 

LIVE IN LONDON (1973)

 

1) Archangels Thunderbird; 2) Eye-Shaking King; 3) Soap Shop Rock; 4) Improvisation; 5) Syntelman's March Of The Roaring Seventies; 6) Restless Skylight - Transistor Child; 7) Race From Here To Your Ears; 8*) Bavarian Soap Shop Rock; 9*) Improvisation On Gulp A Sonata.

 

To be more precise — recorded at the Greyhound Club in Croydon (South London), December 16, 1972. The first consideration triggered by this date is that they either do not play, or do not put on record even one single track from either Carnival In Babylon or Wolf City: the entire setlist only pays homage to Yeti and Tanz. This is strange, because, in the studio, Amon Düül II would never again return to that kind of sound — perhaps they really intended this record to be a swan-song summary of their craziest, «jungliest» stage.

 

That said, on that fateful night in Croydon they did crank down the dial on craziness, if only a little bit. All the selections are relatively short, with the Tanz tracks bearing the main brunt of simplification. One of the recent CD releases «corrects» that benevolent gesture by adding a bo­nus live-in-the-studio re-recording of 'Soap Shop Rock', held in a Bavarian studio a few weeks later — a good old seventeen-minute-long jam — but it actually sounds out of place here, and not the least because, most of the time, the band's playing is mixed in over a bunch of distracting cha­otic ele­c­tronic noise (possibly simulating the complex movement of a million wheels and cogs inside the Artist's Brain?). These days at least, the effect is just as annoying as seeing old TV show videos of great artists marred by the addition of «colorful» «psychedelic» effects (any «classic rock» lo­ver will know what I'm talking about here).

 

The main album, however, is killer, and even if none of the renditions overwhelm the studio ori­ginals, Live In London still deserves our full attention, to complete and certify the band's reputa­tion as consummate professionals. It is one thing to build yourself your personal jungle in the stu­dio, and quite another thing to retain that sonic density and keep all the psychedelic fumes with­out the benefit of overdubbing or taking another take. But this is what they do, from the opening crushing riff of 'Archangels Thunderbird' and right down to the closing... er, crushing riff of 'Race From Here To Your Ears'.

 

The actual musical differences between the studio originals and the live interpretations are mini­mal, and too subtle either to notice or to merit discussion. Apart from completing your informa­tional picture on the band and giving the major fan a little more variety in his listening choices, Live In London is not one of the all-time live greats, because the tunes really do not kick more ass than they did in the studio. But there is no reason anyway why the record should not get a thumbs up: any chance to revisit the jammy greatness of classic A.D.II, especially from a band that only had three years of potential left within it (though, admittedly, no one could guess that in 1973), has to be taken without second thought.

 

UTOPIA (1973)

 

1) What You Gonna Do?; 2) The Wolfman Jack Show; 3) Alice; 4) Las Vegas; 5) Deutsch Nepal; 6) Utopia No. 1; 7) Nasi Goreng; 8) Jazz Kiste.

 

Strictly speaking, this is not an Amon Düül album at all. After a temporary quarrel / split with­in the band, bassist Lothar Meid and producer Olaf Kübler went into the studio on their own, grab­bing some session musicians along the way, to record some of their personal ideas; this «side pro­ject» was ambitiously entitled Utopia (funny enough, the very same year that, in a very different place, Todd Rundgren concocted his own Utopia). However, as the recording went by, the band managed to patch up its differences, and most of the original members (Karrer, Weinzierl, etc.) ended up contributing their services to the album as well, as «guests». Consequently, the record has always been associated with Amon Düül II — and, eventually, in the CD age re-released as credited simply to Amon Düül II, so this is where it fits in the discography.

 

Overall, Utopia leans even closer to the «accessible» side of the music world than Wolf City; but this does not make it an anomaly in the catalog, because the band's subsequent albums would go on and on «normalizing» the tunes. It is more disciplined and less unpredictable, yes, but the ma­terial is still inspired, turning it all into art-rock of the highest degree. In fact, it may well be the most diverse of all their records — each of the eight tracks is an attempt to work with a different palette. Naturally, some attempts are more successful than others, but I cannot find a single «real­ly bad» or «really boring» track here. See for yourself:

 

No. 1: upbeat catchy folk-rock with San Franciscan overtones, but denser, thicker arrangements and much more aggressive guitar soloing. No. 2: Dark, quasi-Satanic blues-rock with medieval vocal harmonies, like a black mass for headbangers. No. 3: For the first time ever on a Krautrock album — tender piano-and-flute balladry! Not very memorable per se, but per its uniqueness, de­finitely so. No. 4: Shuffling danceable acoustic guitar, jazzy brass riffs, folksy flute, bluesy elec­tric guitar soloing — 'Las Vegas' has certainly never experienced that kind of cross-genre enter­tainment. No. 5: A re-recording of 'Deutsch Nepal' with weaker, less satisfying vocals — the on­ly blunder on here, although the gothic music is impressive all the same, so no potential complain­ing on the part of those unaware of Wolf City.

 

The last three numbers are purely instrumental. No. 6: Closest in spirit to old-school Amon Düül, a four-minute psychedelic jam (phasing, looping, echoing, Mellotron clouds, swirling, mind-blo­wing guitar runs, the works). No. 7: Solemn, stately, organ-driven wordless gospel anthem, buil­ding up towards a mighty crescendo — if it weren't so blatantly optimistic in mood, it could have been a masterpiece. No. 8: Someone's been listening quite heavily to Bitches Brew, so it seems. Snuck this thing on any Miles Davis album from his «fusion» period and most people will pro­bably not notice the difference.

 

Hopefully, this brief description will suffice to stimulate interest. There is no such internal cohe­rence here as there used to be, and I wouldn't say that the sum of it all could be greater than its parts — the «Sci-Fi Babylonian» aura of Wolf City has mostly dissipated — but, basically, around 1973 Amon Düül II were on such a roll that they could simply do no wrong, not even when left unguided by conceptual ideas. Utopia may not blow your mind, but it is one fabulous way to keep it entertained. Thumbs up.

 

VIVE LA TRANCE (1973)

 

1) A Morning Excuse; 2) Fly United; 3) Jalousie; 4) Im Krater Blühn Wieder Die Bäume; 5) Mozambique; 6) Apo­ca­lyp­tic Bore; 7) Dr. Jeckyll; 8) Trap; 9) Pig Man; 10) Mañana; 11) Ladies Mimikry.

 

Although, after the brief disturbance of the «Utopia» project, the original band managed to re­group and put their troubles behind them, Vive La Trance continues the «normalization» trend that Utopia started. In fact, it more or less finalizes the band's transformation from a «far-out kos­mik rock» act into a «glammy weird-pop» one. No wonder the ratings on prog-related sites usual­ly start plummetting down around this time.

 

I would say, however, that the major problem about the record is not with individual tunes, but with the album as a whole. Having shortened, «normalized», and diversified their compositions, the band pretty much lost face — without the mystical jungleland atmosphere of the early phase, and without the «Gothic-Babylonian» vibe of the middle phase, the very purpose of their exis­tence is now unclear. Vive La Trance is actually bursting with ideas, but only a few of them are given a fully convincing, well-finalized expression.

 

The only tune here that should truly deserve «classic» status is 'Mozambique', supposedly dedica­ted to the memory of «Che Guevara avenger» Monika Ertl. After going through a lightweight «doo-wop» opening section, and then a brief folk-rock vocal part, at about 2:35 into the song they hit upon a fast, dense, powerful groove that builds up fat and muscle for a mind-blowing five mi­nutes, during which it rivals, fair and square, everything in the hard-rocking vein they'd ever put on record before — maybe even beats it, because they'd never, as of yet, taken it up at such a fast tempo. This is prime-time Düül blasting for eternity.

 

The rest is never bad — but always confusing. Why is the ominous syncopated groove of 'A Mor­ning Excuse' so oddly thin, supported only by an occasional annoying croaking noise rather than the band's trademark Inquisitional organ and spooky harmonies? Why does 'Fly United' bring to mind 'Fly Jefferson Airplane' – and not just because of the title? Why does the six-minute 'Apo­calyptic Bore' try so hard to justify the second word of its title, but not the first one — and why does the vocalist attempt to sing like Bob Dylan? Why is there a catchy, but pointless garage ro­cker about Dr. Jeckyll? Why is there another pointless garage rocker ('Pig Man') that is taken in a slightly more comic manner, so it sounds like The Lovin' Spoonful instead of The Who? Why does 'Ladies Mimikry' make me suspect that they'd liked the first two Roxy Music albums?..

 

On an even odder note, how come Renate's vocal spotlight 'Jalousie' sound like early Kate Bush five years before anyone could ever get the chance to learn about Kate Bush?..

 

Of course, let the fact that I am asking all these questions not lead you into mistakenly assuming that Vive La Trance is a poor record, undeserving of your attention. Most of these songs are fine enough — more often than not, saved by intelligent melodic twists, professional arrangements, and plenty of energy. It's just that the band does not seem to have enough confidence in itself to try and go for their own White Album: as diverse as the record is, most of the arrangements are still made in the «Amon Düül II spirit». Basically, if you really want to do stuff like 'Pig Man', just don't put it on the same LP with 'Mozambique', guys — your sense of humor and/or integrity isn't that strong.

 

Other than that, a fine piece of entertainment. So 'Fly United' is 100% derivative; that does not mean it cannot be evocative and transcendent, with all these pianos and violins and desperately aggressive electric guitar solos. Also, check out the colorful power pop guitars on 'Trap', so smooth and pretty. If you are a modern-day fan of revivalists like Black Mountain, remember – even that sort of rock revivalism was really born more than thirty years ago. Thumbs up for all the noble revivalists out there.

 

HIJACK (1974)

 

1) I Can't Wait (pt. 1 + pt. 2) / Mirror; 2) Traveller; 3) You're Not Alone; 4) Explode Like A Star; 5) Da Guadeloop; 6) Lonely Woman; 7) Liquid Whisper; 8) Archy The Robot.

 

This 1974 record is sometimes pointed out as the first truly «bad» Amon Düül II album, but sim­ply scolding it does not really let one understand how the very same band that just came out with a string of nearly-infallible records would suddenly allow itself such a huge drop in quality. What happened here was an increase in the drift from «dense and chaotic» to «thin and well-ordered». Some of these compositions are, in fact, memorable upon first listen, a genuine rarity in Amon Düül history so far — and a clear sign of decline for those who hold the opinion that, in order to enjoy a piece of art, you have to work for it.

 

To tell the truth, there are a few misfires on Hijack; the most blatant being 'You're Not Alone', a «minimalistic folk» anthem that, for a whole seven minutes, is hanging on two acoustic power chords (plus vocals and strings, trumpets, and keyboards in a lumpy atmospheric mass in the back of the studio). It's a clear-cut gamble that I do not buy, and neither should anyone, I believe, who would, like me, think that the overall effect is somewhat Loureedian, and, consequently, decide that there is no reason to forcefully «admire» this stuff when it can be done similarly, but diffe­rently, without this Nazi-style torture-by-repetition.

 

Hardcore fans must have also scoffed at 'Da Guadeloop', the band's first (and, actually, most suc­cessful) flirtation with «proto-disco funk» — but, really, it works modestly well in its own co­n­text, and its descending strings riff, though not tremendously original in structure, has psychede­lic overtones that usually distinguish the «art» variety of disco from its purely body-oriented ver­sions. So maybe the track would feel more at home on an Isley Brothers record — but the ques­tion is, what home are we talking about?

 

Because at this point, Amon Düül II seem to be simply moving from one turf to another without any coherent plan in their head. In trying to switch from one image to another, they lost the road, and Hijack reflects the sophisticated tracks of their blunderings. The opening multi-part suite be­gins with a bizarre pop/rock hybrid that sounds like Eric Burdon guest-singing on an ELO record: creaky, nasty, angry vocals against a background of pop cellos and happy keyboards; then grows into some sort of sci-fi sexual fantasy; finally, becomes a catchy glam rocker with uplifting brass, gimmicky guitar solo effects and other savory indulgences. If there is a «plan» anywhere here, it must have been created five minutes before the actual recording.

 

Elsewhere, there is some dark brooding pop-rock with a «visionary» vocal delivery from Renate ('Traveller'); exhilarating space-pop that could have fit in on Nuggets ('Explode Like A Star'); a «lounge» rearrangement of Ornette Coleman's 'Lonely Woman', replete with vocals; and some lightweight tongue-in-cheek comedy with circus overtones to close the album ('Archy The Ro­bot'). In short, anything goes, as long as it doesn't sound too much like everything else.

 

Frankly speaking, in 1974 Amon Düül II were still incapable of releasing a «bad» record. Their melodic senses were at an all-time high (since they only really started writing «normal» melodies circa 1972), and the outside musical world was not yet corrupted enough to taint their spirit (un­less they'd intentionally choose the Osmonds as their major musical inspiration). This is a diverse, entertaining, catchy, well-played and arranged buncha solid 1970s tunes — don't expect a once-in-a-lifetime experience, just sit back and enjoy. And yes, there actually is some deeply perverse pleasure in being «commercially» (but still tastefully and exquisitely) entertained by one of the world's formerly weirdest and wildest bands. Thumbs up.

 

MADE IN GERMANY (1975)

 

1) Overture; 2) Wir Wollen; 3) Wilhelm Wilhelm; 4) SM II Peng; 5) Elevators Meet Whispering; 6) Metropolis; 7) Lud­wig; 8) The King's Chocolate Waltz; 9) Blue Grotto; 10) Mr. Kraut's Jinx; 11) Wide Angle; 12) Three-Eyed Overdrive; 13) Emigrant Song; 14) Loosey Girls; 15) Top Of The Mud; 16) Dreams; 17) Gala Gnome; 18) 5.5.55; 19) La Krautoma; 20) Excessive Spray.

 

A particularly fine example of an album that was «born under a bad sign». With the peak of inter­est in «Krautrock» having already passed (except for Kraftwerk and their role in the establish­ment of electronic pop), with Amon Düül II themselves already recognized as a bunch of has-beens, never ever to beat the impact of Yeti and Lemmings, with the world starting to turn its at­ten­tion from progressive rock to early New Wave and early disco, our Bavarian comrades could, perhaps, have recorded the best ever album in 1975 and nobody would have taken notice. Which they did not — but they came pretty damn close.

 

Made In Germany is, as the title suggests, about Germany; it might, in fact, be the smartest, most adventurous internationally-oriented record made about Germany, and I have no idea why the German government never recognized that openly. Although it is a sprawling set of themati­cally connected songs, spread over two LPs, and starting off with an 'Overture', it is not really a «rock opera» — there is no story told here, in fact, the «vignettes» are not even unfurling in chro­nological order. But so much the better: «rock operas» tend to sacrifice melody for the sake of pushing forward the story (even Tommy could occasionally be accused of that), whereas here, nothing whatsoever is sacrificed for the «concept».

 

This is the last time that all the original members of the band truly put their heads and hands to­gether in a collective inspired effort, and it is clear that the task they set out for themselves — ba­sically, telling the political, social, and cultural story of Germany's last hundred years — invigo­rated everyone. The songs are not at all melodically complex: this is «art pop» rather than «prog rock», all of it straightforward enough to be instantaneously catchy, but always tasteful enough so as not to fall victim to the pop clichés of the time. Come to think of it, Made In Germany is pret­ty timeless — an expert ear would probably be able to date it to the first half of the 1970s, but it certainly would not be able to easily explain why.

 

Most importantly, there is no dreaded Teutonic seriousness here at all: all the details are laid down in a highly tongue-in-cheek manner, yet with sufficient respect at the same time. A wah-wah hard-rocking riff opens the album's first real song, along with a terrifying "Wilhelm, Wil­helm, the nation needs you!", but, lest you fear that this is going to turn into a crazy neo-imperia­list rant, it soon becomes obvious that we do not even understand quite well which Wilhelm the band are singing about — Wilhelm I, the creator of the Empire, or Wilhelm II, its destroyer? The song rocks out loud and proud, but the lyrics are really just a set of disconnected historical images floating before our ears.

 

Eight minutes of running time are predictably dedicated to Ludwig of Bavaria (given the band's background, their accent on all things Bavarian is understood), running from a comic fast-tempo vaudevillian introduction ('Ludwig') to a bit of deranged psychedelia in the psychotic king's name ('The King's Chocolate Waltz') to a lovely romantic ballad, with Renate viewing the poor fellow with tender compassion ('Blue Grotto'). There's also a bit of Fritz Lang (the upbeat, superbly cat­chy, and properly futuristic 'Metropolis'); and, of course, the issue of the Führer could not remain completely untouched — it is raised in a brief «link» towards the end of the album, where snip­pets of Adolf's speeches are presented in the form of an «interview» with an annoying radio DJ ("Adolf, baby, you're what they call a veteran in the entertainment biz..."), presaging Weird "Al" Yankovic by a darn good couple of decades. The «sketch» is sort of silly and not jaw-droppingly funny, but not too offensive, either — after all, a brief laugh at the expense of the führer never hurt anyone, or so I hear.

 

But first and foremost, Made In Germany is simply a damn fine art-pop album. The brief musi­cal links scattered all over the place are not particularly important, but almost all of the songs are creative, intelligent, and memorable. 'Loosey Girls' may be one of the best David Bowie epics that Bowie never wrote — pompous, gorgeously orchestrated, overlaying a whole web of guitar and brass riffs and solos, powerful and melancholic. Renate's 'Wide-Angle' is lush, up-tempo pop with echoes of Motown (maybe it's just me, but I do hear echoes of Diana Ross and 'Baby Love' throughout). 'Emigrant Song' is a successful stab at country-pop, with cool bass hooks at that. 'Dreams' is one of the finest incorporations of generic tango structures into a pop song, and argu­ably contains the album's catchiest riff and vocal hook (no wonder it was chosen to open the ab­breviated one-LP version of the record).

 

Echoes of the «old Düül» are only encountered twice. First, there is 'Mr. Kraut's Jinx', an eight minute long epic that slowly creeps along, growing like a snowball, expanding from a gloomy Gothic mood number into a complex rock jam and, finally, a carnivalesque anthemic part. And the album ends with 'La Krautoma', which is, of course, 'La Paloma' done Krautrock-style, with lotsa distortion, fuzz, and echo, and then, for a few minutes, mutating into a wild jungle jam, just the way they used to do it five years back — just to show everyone who is interested that yes, they still can do it, with just as much power and crunch as it used to be. It's just that, you know, times are different. People want more pop, less noise.

 

But frankly, I couldn't agree more, if only all sorts of pop were done like this. Yes, perhaps the record's slightly «comic» mood, the band members' German accents, the ambiguous Hitler punch, the overall length, and the choice of recent German history as the main part of the concept de­throne Made In Germany as a candidate for the best record of 1975, but that is only as far as the «brain» part is concerned. The heart is simply too busy digging all the cool melodies — heck, all the awesome melodies — to bother with that crap. Thumbs up without a second thought. Along with Yeti and Tanz, this is the one to grace your collection: in fact, grab it before Yeti if you are more of a pop addict than a psycho-jungle admirer.

 

[P.S.: Do not make the mistake of scooping up the original US release — abbreviated to the length of one miserable LP, and, along with all the links (which could at least be pardoned), throw­ing away such masterpieces as 'Wilhelm Wilhelm', 'Blue Grotto', and 'Wide-Angle'. Granted, it had a cooler album sleeve — Renate posing as Marlene Dietrich — but that particular photo does come along with the complete edition as well.]

 

PYRAGONY X (1976)

 

1) Flower Of The Orient; 2) Merlin; 3) Crystal Hexagram; 4) Lost In Space; 5) Sally The Seducer; 6) Telly Vision; 7) The Only Thing; 8) Capuccino.

 

Alas, some good things are not meant to last. No sooner had the band seemed to stabilize its po­s­sible fu­ture direction than destabilization hit once more, and carried away Renate, along with se­veral other band members. A significant part of the «core», including Karrer, Weinzierl, and Leo­pold, remained, but they had to recruit newcomers — Klaus Ebert on bass and Stefan Zauner on keyboards — and with the newcomers came further changes, such as the band's reputation could not stand. And it crumbled.

 

I used to hate this record; these days, it sounds sort of okay, a slight, harmless pop-rock album with nothing particularly atrocious about it. Unless the very idea that a band like Amon Düül II could debase itself to playing barroom-style boogies and country-rock already rubs one in the wrong way, Pyragony X is listenable. If you are stranded on a desert island with one CD and thir­ty eight minutes worth of battery load in your player, that is.

 

Much to the band's honour, there is no attempt here to openly suck up to any of the then-popular genres: no stabs at «Eurodisco», and no signs whatsoever that anyone in the band could even hear of the punk or New Wave idiom. Everything is recorded strictly according to «old school rock» values (for Amon Düül II, that's a good thing). The music is modestly diverse: a little Eastern mystique on 'Flower Of The Orient', a little piano vaudeville mixed with astral effects on 'Lost In Space', some blues-boogie on 'Merlin', etc. In short, they continue delving the catchy song mine, only this time, there is no high-brow or tongue-in-cheek concept to wrap it all in.

 

But where Made In Germany was alternately inventive, unpredictable, hilarious, tender, or moo­dy, Pyragony X is consistently mediocre. The Eastern bits on 'Flower Of The Orient' do not be­gin to compete with the likes of 'Kashmir', and Weinzierl's assured, but not too thought-out ecsta­tic «Southern rock» soloing on 'Merlin' and 'The Only Thing' is no match for a Dickey Betts. And that's just the playing; the melodies are equally uninspiring.

 

One exception is the instrumental 'Crystal Hexagram' — its slow, time-taking buildup to the two electric guitar climaxes also owes a lot to the Allmans, but it is a tasteful and emotional guitar showcase on its own, and even if it adds nothing to the formal annals of guitar-based music, its several well-placed and well-paced lines are still the highlight of this dull record. On the other end of the pole are short and pointless «stunts», such as 'Sally The Seducer' (rather a pathetic title for a band who used to come up with 'Restless Skylight Transistor Child') and 'Telly Vision' — a very flat rant against commercialism, oddly appearing on the band's most «commercial» album so far (and whoever came up with the horrid line "Ronald McDonald say, 'Big Mac to you!'" needs to be dragged out into the street and force-fed twenty pounds of burgers).

 

But most of the pole's actual length is devoid of any kind of charge, a gray mass of musical neu­trons that heralds the end of Amon Düül II as a musical force to be reckoned with. Maybe it is not exactly «pure agony», as the title humbly implies, but it is definitely some kind of agony. 'Crystal Hex­agram' would look nice as the coda to a comprehensive career overview from 1969 to 1976; the rest just screams for a non-violent, but firm thumbs down. Too bad.

 

ALMOST ALIVE (1977)

 

1) One Blue Morning; 2) Good Bye My Love; 3) Ain't Today Tomorrow's Yesterday; 4) Hallelujah; 5) Feeling Un­easy; 6) Live In Jericho.

 

I am not quite sure what kind of hole would be ready to accommodate this pigeon. Technically, it is even less of a «sellout» than Pyragony X. The compositions are longer, the melodies less trivi­al, meek attempts at sounding «rootsy» mostly purged. But even if we manage to call this stuff «art-rock», what consolation would that give? My ears only hear a band that has completely lost its original vision, and is now blindly struggling to find a new one, with no success whatsoever. Almost Alive? Frankenstein-style, you mean?

 

The marginally new direction that the band, here represented by the exact same lineup as in 1976, sets out to explore is funk, which, at least on one track ('Hallelujah'), veers dangerously close to disco. It is as if someone in the group had become a major fan of George Clinton — or the Ave­rage White Band, because, although there is a big difference between the two, it's not like it mat­ters for Amon Düül II, a band that could do many things, but hot syncopated grooves were never among them. This takes care of about half the album: 'One Blue Morning', seven minutes of bo­ring riffage that neither rocks nor makes you want to dance; 'Good Bye My Love', which sounds like a cross between the Bee Gees and Boston-style arena rock; and 'Hallelujah' — danceable, but why should anyone, way back in 1977, prefer to dance to Amon Düül II when you could have Donna Summer and Boney M all to yourself?

 

The two soft-prog mini-epics are nothing special as well. This is simply not this band's emploi, never has been. Renate is not here to trigger the band's psycho-folk inspiration channels, and the dark Gothic blasts are equally a thing of the past. What we get is just more substandard riffage, autopilot-mode Moog solos, and, in the case of 'Tomorrow's Yesterday', an attempt to mount an Anthemic Progressive Coda, with grand piano, swooping strings, and choral vocals, which could be resonant if only the actual song to match it were of any value. As it is, it's an anthem to no­thing, hopelessly lost in the din.

 

Thus, the only track of passable interest to hardcore fans of the band would be 'Live In Jericho', on which, for the last twelve minutes, the band decides to try and go back into «improv» mode, the way they used to cut it seven years back. Even then, they all but kill off the initiative by be­gin­ning the track with a drum solo (remember that classic Düül valued democracy way too much to ever allow their drummer a moment of self-indulgence), and only somewhere around the six-minute mark start barely recapturing bits of former glories. Even then, there is too much generic guitar and keyboard wanking to finish the recapturing properly.

 

In short, consider me stumped, because I have no idea why on Earth a band as original and inven­tive as Amon Düül II would one day decide that they'd rather be a combination of Funkadelic, Boston, and ELP instead. Almost Ridiculous would be a far more precise title for this record — «almost», because most of the tracks are pulled off with just enough competence so as not to sound like parodies. But in such cases, «awful» records at least may leave an imprint in the mind: Almost Alive, tottering on the lowest rungs of «simple mediocrity», is not guaranteed to produce even that effect. BORING! Thumbs down. (And let's not even talk about the album cover — their silliest one to-date).

 

ONLY HUMAN (1978)

 

1) Another Morning; 2) Don't Turn To Stone; 3) Kirk Morgan; 4) Spaniards And Spacemen; 5) Kismet; 6) Pharao; 7) Ruby Lane.

 

It is as if, with these album titles, Amon Düül II were (sub)consciously giving away the real mo­tivations behind the questionable (to put it mildly) music. Almost Alive was bad enough, but On­ly Human? As in: «YES — we're only human, so there should be nothing surprising about the fact that we are taking our cues from the Bee Gees now. Please buy this record so we can afford our Weisswurst and Bretzel.»

 

Actually, I am not even sure about the «we»: the only remaining founding father on this album is Chris Karrer. Granted, the Amon Düül sound evolved gradually: as huge a difference as there is between Yeti and Only Human, there have been enough intermediate links in the chain so as not to view this record as some sort of wicked shock therapy. But the fact remains that Only Human is the band's blandest, least interesting album ever.

 

Technically, this is another attempt to cross the «commercial» styles of the time — soft-rock, arena rock, funky dance-pop — with an «artistic» spirit, ever more laughable in the face of punk and New Wave squeezing these old genres out of the picture even when they were done well, let alone tackled by a German band coming from an entirely unsuitable background. But at least the hooks could be strong, and the playing could sparkle — in theory.

 

I think that one good, attentive listen to 'Another Morning', the album-opener, is quite enough to form a reliable impression of the record. The same funky rhythms that the 1970s gave us in dro­ves, without any individuality; a Europop piano riff that crops up every now and then as the only «hook» to hang upon, but, in itself, being nothing but a very poor man's ABBA (!); vocals whose only advantage is the ability to sing on-key, otherwise, completely devoid of personality; and a thoroughly generic melodic backup of wishy-washy synthesizers and bleak funk guitar.

 

Objectively, I cannot say that the band makes no effort whatsoever at diversifying their approach. They do try out some Spanish guitar on 'Spaniards & Spacemen', a mildly curious, but generally failed attempt at marrying flamenco with electronica; some vaguely mid-Eastern chord sequences on 'Kismet' — a mildly curious, but generally failed attempt at marrying Arabic music with disco; they almost manage to turn into Supertramp on 'Pharao'; and there is a brief drum solo on 'Ruby Lane'. (Just to make everyone sure that I actually did listen to the album in its entirety).

 

But most of these tricks leave little or no impression, because a good composition needs to do more than just «be different» — there should be some sense of purpose, some sort of trigger to elicit a gut response. From that point of view, 'Kismet' is no 'Kashmir' — at best, it sounds like a silly, uninspired parody. At worst, I cannot even remember how it goes (I do remember there is a very, very ugly synth tone used on the «Eastern» bits).

 

With no sense of purpose, no commercial or critical viability, a dangerously close to zero level of creative songwriting, and a pitiable title, Only Human is, doubtless, the lowest point in Amon Düül II's career — the only consolation is that, from a strict point of view, it is not even a proper Amon Düül II album at all, rather «Chris Karrer and His So-Called Friends». Abysmal and unlis­tenable? Not really. Just simply utterly forgettable. Thumbs down.

 

VORTEX (1981)

 

1) Vortex; 2) Holy West; 3) Die 7 Fetten Jahre; 4) Wings Of The Wind; 5) Mona; 6) We Are Machine; 7) Das Ges­tern Ist Das Heute Von Morgen; 8) Vibes In The Air.

 

This could have worked. A last-minute desperate attempt to get their act together — and a re­uni­on of sorts, with Renate back in the band, along with organist Falk Rogner; original members John Weinzierl and Lothar Meid also make guest appearances. This way, some conditions are met to try and give the old rusty engine another kick, and see if the good old Amon Düül II still have it in them to survive the Eighties.

 

It is undisputable that the album is a major change in direction after the last three records. The band has dropped all attempts to suck up to disco (none too soon, given the date), and the sound gets denser and darker, in strict accordance with the classic «jungle» philosophy of the band. At the same time, they rely rather heavily on up-to-date synthesizers and electronic drums — an in­evitable evil at the time, perhaps, but one that heavily affects the response to Vortex today. Too stiff. Too mechanical. Too Eighties!

 

Ah, but the main problem isn't even the decade. The main problem is — will the atmosphere be back? If, stylistically, this is supposed to be an Eighties' update of Wolf City and Vive La Trance, will these new songs be as evocative and penetrating as their elder brethren? My simple answer — no, they won't. For one thing, the playing throughout is fairly crappy. Jörg Evers, who is handling most of the guitar work, is, at best, just a passable player, and Rogner's synthesizers do not begin to compare with the moody organ work on early Amon Düül II records. For another thing, most of the compositions on Vortex are «songs», not «jams», and, as «songs», they mostly suck. Where are the cool electric riffs? The catchy choruses?

 

Your inner Amazon.com should tell you that, if you like the album opener (the instrumental title track), you will probably like the rest as well. It shows that the band has finally opened its eyes to New Wave and its electronic brethren; 'Vortex' sounds not unlike stuff from Peter Gabriel III, with the same potentially eerie contrast between crashing electronic drums and «The-Inquisition-is-after-you» syn­thesizers. But neither the drums nor the synths form particularly interesting or unpredictable pat­terns. The sound is dense and murky without being genuinely scary or depres­sing — and that is a pretty bad scenario.

 

Already the first vocal number, 'Holy West', is really a very simple pop-rocker, hanging upon a very simple and very senseless melody; just because Renate's voice is separated from the melody with an echo effect, and just because someone has bothered to add some chimes and extra guitar over­dubs, the song is not going to fare much better. At least it is nowhere near as embarrassing, though, as the band's misguided stab at anthemic arena-rock à la Queen ('Wings Of The Wind'), wasting a perfectly healthy slab of bombast for nothing. And nowhere near as disappointing as the grim electro-rocker 'We Are Machine', which formally justifies its title — and does nothing else. Who needs it when we have Kraftwerk?

 

In the end, paradoxically, it is not until they get to the lightest, softest, and most optimistic of the tracks — 'Vibes In The Air' — that I am able to feel at least a small bit of involvement. Essential­ly a «power ballad», this one, but a well-arranged one, with acoustic and slide guitars, harps, the works. A suitably fine conclusion, but coming in way too late to save the album from ultimate failure. Yes, it is an attempt to gain back some credit, but a half-hearted one; a far cry from a cer­tified «comeback», as some have dubbed Vortex just because Renate and Rogner's return has prompted them into self-deception. No wonder, then, that the follow-up to Vortex never came, and that Amon Düül II was finally put on hold soon afterwards.

 

NADA MOONSHINE # (1995)

 

1) Castaneda Da Dream; 2) Nada Moonshine Union; 3) Speed Inside My Shoes; 4) Sirens In Germanistan; 5) Lilac Lil­lies; 6) Kiss Ma Eee; 7) Carpetride In Velvet Night; 8) Black Pearl Of Wisdom; 9) Ça Va; 10) Guadalquivir.

 

The next reunion of Amon Düül II took place fourteen years after Vortex — and not a moment too soon, allowing the band to skip falling under cheesy Eighties' influences. The line-up here in­cludes Karrer, Leopold, Meid, and Renate, that is, most of the founding fathers and mothers, with the unfortunate exclusion of Weinzierl (who had spent most of the previous decade with his own UK-based version of «Amon Düül»), replaced by new guitarist Felice Occhionero (Italian? In a Bavarian band? Confound this age of globalization!) Nobody either expected the reunion or, in fact, noticed it, apart from a few prog veterans. The band had not given the world anything truly worth its while since Made In Germany; what would be the sense of reuniting?

 

The answer is — to prove to themselves, at least, that they still had it in them to release an album that would be unpredictable, interesting, and inspiring. This is, after all, the only reason for a re­union that is not overtly cash-targeted (never a chief concern for these guys). And how do they fare? Well, I think that they hit it right on the «unpredictable» and «interesting» notches — as for «inspiring», you'd probably have to jump through a couple hoops to reach that mark.

 

In terms of atmosphere, the band certainly tries to recapture the mystical jungle-like spirit of old. However, this is not achieved by bluesy jamming or thick instrumental density. Instead of that, they go for the mixing panel. The whole thing is echoey and wobbly, the synthesizers employ the latest in cool and uncool tones, the guitars are «treated», and there are lots of «special effects» overdubs: Nada Moonshine # is a hundred percent «studio creation».

 

This may sound like bad news. Sure, Amon Düül II had abandoned most of their jamming power as early as 1972, but, since then, the only thing that kept them alive for three more years was the ability to concentrate on melodic art-rock instead. Nada Moonshine #, in contrast, consists most­ly of rather large (five to eight or nine minutes) atmospheric pieces that are neither sweaty jams nor catchy pop songs. Worse, they do not really understand properly how to borrow stuff from the young ones without causing grounds for embarrassment (the techno beats that accompany the second half of 'Lilac Lillies' are one of the stupidest moments on an otherwise non-stupid record by a major artist I have ever heard). Still worse, the name «Castaneda» appears in the title of the first track — the way I see it, this is more or less the equivalent of admitting that the words of the songs not only do not matter, but absolutely have to be ignored. (The band was never all that hot in the lyrics department, but some of their nonsense at least used to be used to comic effect).

 

But none of this really matters, because the reunited band has resolved the major problem of Vor­tex — they finally learned to make these dense, brooding, mystical, (sometimes) Eastern-tinged landscapes sound meaningful and involving, by simply pushing the boundaries. Essentially, they just try out All Sorts Of Things to see what can happen — boldly and crudely. Sometimes it's a catastrophe ('Lilac Lillies'; the repetitive, silly-sounding "LOUIE LOUIE KISS MA EEE" mantra voiced by Renate on the appropriately titled 'Kiss Ma Eee'). More often, it's a decent hook.

 

The way the «ethereal» chorus of the title track eventually surges out of the surrounding pseudo-hip-hop chaos, or out of the blazing guitar solo. The grimly acid sax riff of 'Speed Inside My Shoes'. The «ominous» side effects of the «child chorus» on 'Sirens In Germanistan'. The unex­pected operatic coda to 'Kiss Ma Eee', verging on sheer beauty if not for the ever-weakening po­wers of Renate's voice (which never had the proper operatic stamina in the first place). And a per­sonal favorite of mine — the terrific idea to speed up 'Ça Va', which begins as something of an «old wise man ballad», all moody soothing vocals strewn over an adult contemporary type of ar­rangement — then, midway through, picks up tempo and becomes one of the fastest and most ferocious ro­ckers these guys ever tackled.

 

As much as Nada Moonshine # is plagued with «wrong moves», for me, it is unquestionably the band's finest moment in twenty years — a comeback one would never expect after all the pathe­tic blunders of the Klaus Ebert period. It is actually a little bit worriesome how «crazy» it sounds: I feel the same nervous reaction as I do when listening to late-period Gong reunions (a 70-year old Gilli Smyth impersonating sexy psychedelic witches, etc.). But this may really have something to do with the overall deterioration of Renate's vocals — she always had a strange tone, and now that strange tone borders on «decrepit». One can get used to it eventually, though; and then it's a respectable thumbs up all the way.

 

LIVE IN TOKYO (1996)

 

1) Nada Moonshine Union; 2) Black Pearls Of Wisdom; 3) Dry Your Ears; 4) Castaneda Dream (In Another World); 5) Deutsch Nepal; 6) Kiss Ma Eee; 7) Speed Inside My Shoes; 8) Lilac Lillies; 9) Wolf City; 10) La Paloma; 11) Flowers Of The Orient; 12) Surrounded By The Stars; 13) Archangel Thunderbird; 14) Jam Hai.

 

The main point of this release, as I attempt to reconstruct it, was to assert that Nada Moonshine # was, God forbid, by no means merely a pretext to get together, go on tour, and play some oldies. Believe it or not, the briefly resuscitated Amon Düül II actually insisted on the album's relevance — and, climbing up on the stage, concentrated almost exclusively on new material. Evil conspira­tors might drop poisonous hints that, perchance, the band had simply forgotten how to play the old stuff (and their not being able to get Weinzierl back in the fold guaranteed that the proper old sound was hardly recuperable). But it is more polite to presume innocence and believe that the band's worst fear was to come out before their audiences as an «oldies act».

 

With 6 out of 14 songs faithfully recreating the latest studio album, Live In Tokyo seems to go for overkill. However, despite occasionally unfocused bits and spoiled vocal notes, many of these songs work better in a live setting. The most obvious improvement is 'Lilac Lillies', done here without the annoying techno beats — still not a very good song, but, at least, shed of its unna­tural and ridicu­lous packaging. Others simply replace the excessive use of echos and electronics by a more «natural» approach, and that's a big plus.

 

Most of the old material is from Wolf City — three big numbers that are performed quite close to the original versions, and honestly reproduce their «Babylonian Gothic» atmosphere (particularly 'Deutsch Nepal'); guitarist Felice Occhionero is at least capable to reproduce the «regular» guitar parts of old, so that the band can play its old «song-like» successes. Eventually, they even go into 'Archangels Thunderbird', done a bit too noisily for my taste (the old live version from Live In London, with its violin parts, is much more impressive), but still decent.

 

There isn't really much more to say about the record, except to stress that the assessment of Mr. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at the All-Music Guide («...the group is no longer experimenting — they are simply recreating their sound, and that slavishness prevents the music from being any­thing other than a nostalgia trip») is completely off the mark, given the setlist. Most likely, Mr. Erlewine just threw on one track whose title he happened to remember ('Deutsch Nepal'), com­pared it with the studio version, and then hastened away to review Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love before dinnertime.

 

Fact of the matter, subtle changes are introduced almost every­where: if there is one thing the band is determined to prove here, it's that anyone wanting to talk about «nostalgia trips» should be dragged out into the street and shot. It's an entirely different matter if Amon Düül's attempt to re­form in a progressive way was a success or a failure. It seems that they themselves were hardly satisfied — the band's official site omits both Nada Moonshine # and Live In Tokyo from its discography section. But credit must be given for trying, and trying in a way that was not simply copying current trends, but actually «upgraded» the old sound with a mixed bag of various tricks, some modernistic, some retro. Live In Tokyo is, therefore, quite a respectable companion to its studio counterpart, and demands the same modest thumbs up reaction.

 

BEE AS SUCH (2009)

 

1) Mambo La Libertad; 2) Du Kommst Ins Heim; 3) Still Standing; 4) Psychedelic Suite.

 

As it turns out, the Amon Düül II story is not quite over with the passing of the millennium thre­sh­old. On the heels of various new compilations and CD re-masters, the original band made one more effort to reconvene — this time, featuring four of the founding fathers and mothers (Renate, Karrer, Meid, and Weinzierl). Sessions were held in April 2009, but the results, so far, have not been issued in CD form: the «album» was made officially available only on the band's site, and, as far as I can tell, Bee As Such does not even have its own album art.

 

It is, however, accompanied by a short and slightly ungrammatical press release, reading as fol­lows: «... a highly sensitive performance, of finding back to the roots – not in the past, but es­sen­ti­ally – seeking the new sounds and contents at the same time. No ‘kraut’, no ’70s’, but the music of the new millenium. This sound painting is one more of our unique works, containing the spirit of our time.» Meaning that, just as it was with Nada Moonshine #, the band is still more worried about being perceived as an «irrelevant oldies act» than about... uh, making good music?

 

Besides which, they are simply lying. Even on a fully formal and objective basis, how is it that there are «no '70s'» here, when 'Still Standing' essentially merges 'Hawknose Harlequin' from Car­nival In Babylon and 'The Wolfman Jack Show' from Utopia? And on a non-formal basis, the very fact that Bee As Such is, essentially, a set of lengthy studio jams, will automatically re­mind one of the days of Phallus Dei and Yeti. If anything, Nada Moonshine # was far more re­flective of the «spirit of our time» than this recording (although even that is not saying much). If the press release genuinely reflects the way they feel, this is fairly pathetic — an open acknowled­gement of the fact that they have no idea what the «spirit of our time» really is (not that I serious­ly blame them, but it's one thing not to know the truth and another thing to assert a lie). If, how­ever, this is just a dumb «marketing ploy», it's even more pathetic. How many incoming custo­mers has it managed to offend?

 

Still, let us forget about silly words. It certainly must be praised that, almost forty years since the band was last involved in brave, unpredictable jamming, they came together to give this approach one more try. It is at least brave — and it endorses the idea that 1969-72 were, in fact, the years of Amon Düül II; that dark experimental jamming has been and will always be at the heart of the­ir legacy. Compare the idea with that of a Genesis reunion to record another Foxtrot, or an Aero­smith attempt to blacklist their outside songwriters and record another Rocks — things that never came to pass, even though they were expected so hard.

 

But, once again turning to the negative side, Bee As Such is not at all impressive. Frankly spea­king, most of its fifty minutes sound like kitchen rehearsals, fit for inclusion as bonus tracks on special editions of «proper» albums rather than having any serious autonomous value. They are authentic «jams», almost completely improvised (or, at least, seemingly so) around simple themes and usually appearing out of nowhere and disappearing in the same direction after a while (do not be alarmed by the 26 minute running time of 'Psychedelic Suite': it is really three separate jam parts that do not have any coherent links in between themselves). But the jamming has nowhere near the power, the concentration, and the density of, say, a 'Yeti Talks To Yogi'.

 

It may have to do with the fact that there is no keyboardist in the band: only Weinzierl is credited for «synthesizers», but most of the time he just plays guitar, with Karrer accompanying on violin. But even those guitar parts are perfunctory — rhythm chords, mostly, with the instrument never really leaving the ground. The band members still remember how to keep a groove together, but they seem to have forgotten how to develop that groove, or how to make their individual persona­lities impressive within the groove.

 

And, finally, as much as I respect Renate Knaup-Kroten­sch­wanz for her immeasurable services to Amon Düül II in the past, I have to admit that on this re­cord she is simply the biggest pain in the ass. I could have stomached the music more easily, were it not infested with her tuneless croaking. Whatever thin nuages of atmosphere the players might have been able to conjure with their jam­ming, they are immediately blown apart by Renate's thoroughly anti-atmospheric vocalizations. It's okay by me if she simply cannot sing any more, but whatever made them think that the inabi­lity to sing should be compensated with unlimited freedom of quacking and croaking?

 

In brief, I tip my imaginary hat to the band's decision to succumb to nostalgia (and Bee As Such, no matter what the press release tells us, is first and foremost a hardcore exercise in nostalgia), but if the album never makes it to CD format, this will not be a reason to shed serious tears. I could be mistaken, but I think the album clearly shows it's high time to pack it in — or, at least, high time to stop deluding themselves into thinking that they can still reflect «the spirit of our times» by producing watered-down imitations of their glory days. Granted, they may still have another Nada Moonshine # in them, but only if they stop being so serious about it. As it is, the sheer inadequacy of this product requires a thumbs down.

AMON DÜÜL (UK)

HAWK MEETS PENGUIN (1982)

 

1) One Moment's Anger Is Two Pints Of Blood; 2) Meditative Music From The Third O Before The Producers Part 1; 3) Meditative Music From The Third O Before The Producers Part 2.

 

Upon resigning from the «regular» Amon Düül II, guitarist John Weinzierl, as one of the found­ing fathers of the band, decided that he had as big a claim to the name of «Amon Düül» as anyone else — and, in the early Eighties, realized that claim by reteaming with another of his former bandmates, bassist Dave Anderson. Adding former Van der Graaf Generator drummer Guy Evans and former-don't-know-who Julie Waring on vocals, the foursome set themselves a brave task — re-establish the good name of Amon Düül (II) after it had been so seriously tarnished in the late 1970s, with the band losing direction, relevance, and, ultimately, all meaning.

 

The «new» Amon Düül relocated to Britain (after all, only one of the members was German), and released its first album under the same old moniker of Amon Düül II. At the time, it was not as confusing as it might seem, considering that the «old» Amon Düül II had just released its last al­bum in fifteen years (Vortex); but these days, the usual convention is to call this incarnation of the band «Amon Düül (UK)», for reasons too obvious to discuss. The main question, though, is — does the actual music sound «Amon Düül-ish» enough to justify the name preservation / usur­pation / whatever?

 

Yes and no. Hawk Meets Penguin, despite a title that would rather suit the likes of The Resi­dents, is steeped in traditional prog-rock values, and, therefore, is a record as commercially mori­bund by the standards of 1982 as they come. There are only two compositions altogether (one of them splintered in a small introduction part and the main body to suit LP requirements), designed and structured as slowly developing mood pieces — so one might say that Weinzierl and friends were trying to recapture the spirit of Tanz Der Lemminge, as the only album from the classic Amon Düül II that was just as completely mood-oriented.

 

But neither of the two suites actually recaptures the spirit except in name only. The first one, 'One Moment's Anger Is Two Pints Of Blood', instead sounds like fairly «normal», atmospheric, Bri­tish prog-rock à la «easily accessible» side of the Canterbury scene — think mid-period Caravan or, even more precisely, Camel. The dominating bits are stern, gallant, slightly medievalistic key­board melodies, and Julie Waring's wordless chanting. There is a lengthy build-up, but around the six minute mark, the main melodies emerge as fully formed, and they are fairly impressive, if not at all «challenging» for the hardcore prog fan. The combination of slightly sci-fi synth tones and, in stark contrast, Julie's folksy vocalizing works very well — count me in on an assessment of the whole thing as «humbly beautiful», even if not for one second truly «Amon Düül-ish».

 

The second part is an entirely different matter: it is a twenty-three minute long chaotic piece, much of it running along in the mode of free-form, rhythmless improvisation, until, finally, two thirds into the «tune», they manage to slide into some sort of half-jazz, half-Latin groove. Frankly, it all sounds very boring to my ears; and it is not clear who exactly they were trying to seduce with this heavily derivative, poorly staged cacophony of random mantras, shouting, whooshing synth noises, and screwy percussion as late as 1982. Even the final groove is limp and utterly pur­poseless. If anything, it does not even remind so much of Amon Düül II as it does of the original Amon Düül I — with technically superior and more inventive musicianship, perhaps, but without any of the shock value that this A-R-T could claim in 1969. Only hardcore «genrists», I am sure, will prefer the second part to the first here — those people who value the worst of Eric Dolphy over the best of Duke Ellington, just because the former is E.D. and the latter is D.E.

 

So you probably already guessed that Hawk Meets Penguin is no «lost masterpiece» out of the depths of the Amon Düül family; but the first side, at least, is an entertaining (and, if you agree to subscribe to the charm of Julie Waring, perhaps even tear-jerking) link between that family and melodic prog-rock of the British variety. A link that will hardly downgrade anybody's musical collection, that is; and one that is not that difficult to procure, considering that, since 2005, most of the Amon Düül (UK) catalog seems to be back in print.

 

MEETINGS WITH MENMACHINES (1985)

 

1) Pioneer; 2) The Old One; 3) Marcus Lead; 4) The Song; 5) Things Aren't Always What They Seem; 6) Burundi Drummer's Nightmare.

 

When you first see the full title of this record — Meetings With Menmachines, Unremarkable Heroes Of The Past — the probable association is «Kraftwerk meets Uriah Heep» or something like that. In other words, a fine enough title for something that tries to fuse electronic Krautrock with fantasy-prog, and the very length of the title also brings to mind Tyrannosaurus Rex. Be­sides, it is a sequel to the highly avantgardist Hawk Meets Penguin, from essentially the same lineup, so bizarre music fans in 1985 should have been intrigued.

 

But instead, what we get here is a relatively straightforward, almost predictably constructed, and perfectly «accessible» col­lection of traditional art-pop tunes. The entire approach of Penguin's Side B has been jettisoned, and the style of Side A has undergone sharp budget cuts to placate lis­teners with short attention spans. No need to work on your intellectual skills here — most of the melodies rest on fairly traditional chord sequences... in fact, they are almost instantaneously cat­chy, which is why prog fans tend to brand Meetings as the same kind of pathetic sellout that was the «big» Amon Düül II in the late 1970s.

 

However, there is a big difference between an album like Only Human and this one. Where Amon Düül II were clearly looking for a way to «blend in», to find new styles of expression that would make them hip to record buyers, the UK-based incarnation is simplifying its sound in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with current tastes. There is a New Wave-like strain in this collection, mainly due to the heavy use of keyboards, but the whole thing is neither synth-pop nor hair metal nor adult contemporary nor any other «hot stuff», typical of 1985. The album sounds timeless — it could just as well be recorded today by some cool indie act.

 

And, like every inspired album released by a truly cool indie act (as opposed to boring poseurs), I happen to enjoy it thoroughly. Although Julie Waring is not a strong singer, and her voice has an immanently odd link to kindergarten, this somehow puts it in line with the melodies — which are, in and out of themselves, sometimes so simple you'd never even guess this band inherited any of Amon Düül's family genes. 'Things Aren't Always What They Seem', for instance, is an acoustic folk ballad that you'd rather expect to hear from the likes of Peter, Paul, & Mary, with appropri­ately communist lyrics and Pete Seeger marching on Washington, instead of a kiddie-mystical at­titude, courtesy of Julie's vocal stylings. But isn't it charming? We all like to associate female art rock singing with Sandy Denny or Joni Mitchell; why not try out a Shirley Temple approach in­stead, from time to time? That's, like, so post-modern.

 

The more fully-arranged numbers run the gamut from alluring mid-tempo blues-pop ('Pioneer') to psychedelic mid-tempo hard-rock ('The Old One') to gracious, elegant folk-art-whatever ('Marcus Leid', the closest number in spirit to the «beautiful» part of 'One Moment's Anger'), to fast-paced power-pop in the vein of Blondie ('The Song') and, finally, straightforward rock'n'roll with a ton­gue-in-cheek «evil» edge ('Burundi Drummer's Nightmare', with Weinzierl playing the role of an Alice Cooper-ish evil clown next to Waring's «damsel in distress» — not so much humorous as it is bizarre, but bizarre enough to pardon the failed attempt at humor).

 

All of these songs are at least catchy — some, in addition to that, are quite gorgeous, and even if 'Night­mare' is overdrawn (too monotonous for us to waste nine minutes of our life on the exact same nightmare pattern; wake up!), for most of its duration, it rocks hard enough to keep us headban­gers satisfied. The «progressive» stamp is consciously commemorated by beginning eve­ry single track with a brief, usually unrelated keyboard instrumental — almost in a joke fashion, as in... «okay, here is our next tribute to Journey because we know how much you expect us to finally get serious... nah, let's just boogie in the sandbox some more». I like that attitude.

 

I like it even more once I remind myself that the album was released in friggin' 1985, at a time when Asia ruled supreme on the commercial sector of the so-called «progressive» market, and that helps skyrocket its already well-established reputation. Of all the «lightweight» al­bums as­so­ci­ated with «Amon Düül» that way or another, Menmachines is easily the least offen­sive to good taste and the most adorable for those of us who can learn to be undemanding. Unless you happen to be a prog Nazi, rocking your kids to sleep by humming dramatic arias from Brain Salad Surgery, Make an effort to look it up somewhere — it's well worth your while. Thumbs up.

 

FOOL MOON (1989)

 

1) Who Who; 2) The Tribe; 3) Tik Tok; 4) Hauptmotor; 5) Hymn For The Hardcore.

 

Four years later, long after the sympathetic, but unfortunate Menmachines has been completely wiped out from the memories of those few who happened to have it rubbed in, «Amon Düül» are back — as usual, uncalled for, unexpected, and unwelcome. But most likely, they knew it, and this time, there are no rational calls for accessibility or fitting in with the times. Instead, in order to find new inspiration, they recruit the assistance of former Hawkwind partner, the crazy sci-fi poet Robert Calvert — and try to come up with a record that would combine the classic «Teuto­nic coldness» of Amon Düül II with the surrealistic/cosmic aura of classic Hawkwind. Two re­cords, in fact, both released the same year; but I have been unable to determine which one came first and which one came next — the UK incarnation of Amon Düül is not exactly an Elvis Pres­ley-level act, to have every aspect of their discography easily available to the public through re­liable, uncontroversial sources. So let us begin with Fool Moon because I like its title more.

 

Of course, combining the spirits of Amon Düül II and Hawkwind is the kind of goal that would be surmised from such a pooling of talent. And, to a certain extent, that is the kind of general sound that Fool Moon gives the listener. The feel of its psychedelic jams does somewhat remind of Yeti, even if the sound is much thinner and the recor­dings feel far more pre-planned. And Calvert's trademark sci-fi recitals do recall the spirit of Hawkwind, at least as far as the «ridiculous» aspect of Hawkwind is concerned (because Calvert's presence on the band's albums, with a few spontaneous exceptions, generally contributed to the effect of teenage-style silliness rather than overwhelming admiration).

 

Unfortunately, one thing Fool Moon is rather poor on are ideas — particular ideas, ones that form the backbones of individual tracks and, when the stars are right, turn them into masterpieces. There are but five tracks altogether, and, of the 43 minutes that they occupy, at least 10-12 are gi­ven away to the proverbial nothing, a.k.a. noise. The industrial percussion clanging on 'Who Who' and the endlessly annoying clock ticking on 'Tik Tok' (Dark Side Of The Moon made its point far more briefly — and far better) are bad enough, but worst of all is 'Hauptmotor', which begins with six and a half minutes of «hot summer day sounds»: birds chirping, flies buzzing, and somebody quite busy sawing up logs in the backyard. Not only is it utterly pointless (why not go out and buy a Nature Sounds CD instead?), but, I must add, having to listen to this in the dead of winter, with -20 Celsius outside the window, is not my perfect idea of assimilating an important artistic statement.

 

However, even once these 12 minutes fly out the door, the listener is still stuck with a surprising paucity of tricks. 'Who Who' only exists to show how fun it is to play with spooky echoey vocals over industrial-bluesy cling-clanging (now we raise the volume — now we lower it!). 'The Tribe' is probably the best of the lot, a sharp, aggressive guitar jam with convincing blast-offs from Weinzierl, but even that track does not get too far along, and it certainly represents nothing that we already haven't heard before. 'Tik Tok', once the instruments finally take over the clocks, be­comes a decent blues jam with one excellent riff and lots of complementary wanking. The musi­cal part of 'Hauptmotor' is just one musical line repeated over and over again, over which Calvert half-sings, half-recites something in German. And 'Hymn For The Hardcore' (I suppose that is a fairly tongue-in-cheek title) is four minutes of... sitar noodling (and rather primitive at that — like some talentless fan's tribute to 'Within You Without You'; again, I fail to understand why I need to be listening to this when I could choose Ravi Shankar instead, or Alice Coltrane at least).

 

In short, Fool Moon is one of those quintessential records that solemnly try to make a point by being utterly pointless. The riff of 'Tik Tok' and the solo on 'The Tribe' should be amputated and saved for future generations who might want to put them to better use in a context that makes more sense. Everything else is, at best, a curiosity, especially for its time: one thing I will admit is that not many acts sounded like that in 1989. (Quite a few acts sounded like that fifteen years ear­lier, though, which might explain their not wanting to sound like that in 1989).

 

DIE LÖSUNG (1989)

 

1) Big Wheel; 2) Urban Indian; 3) Adrenalin Rush; 4) Visions Of Fire; 5) Drawn To The Flame Pt. 1; 6) They Call It Home; 7) Die Lösung; 8) Drawn To The Flame Pt. 2.

 

Unlike Fool Moon, this second album, recorded more or less at the same time, does not even try to make a point. Unless the point is made by Bob Calvert, but I cannot, and will not, decipher it: for about two-thirds of the record, he «sings» in such an utterly ugly «nasal hoarse» tone that it would be impossible to take any of the words seriously — provided you could make any of them out in the first place. Quite ugly, really.

 

As for the music, this time it is not even all that experimental. It's all mid-tempo or moderately fast «rock», with chemical-sounding, utterly boring, guitar and clinical-sounding, utterly dated, synthesizers (the latter, courtesy of a couple members of The Ozric Tentacles, a band which is much better appreciated on its own, if there ever arise a need to appreciate them) — and the mood never ever changes, at least, not until the last two tracks which are sung by the eternal child Julie Waring: unfortunately, she comes in way too late to dissipate the depressing grey clouds, which are the only ingredient of the entire atmosphere of Die Lösung.

 

Sitting through forty minutes of this muck is an experience only comparable in quality to sitting through some proverbially dull lecture on a subject in which you do not have the most remote in­terest (and I have had my share of these — in fact, Calvert's babbling brings up quite a few un­pleasant memories). I have no idea who on earth could develop an honest liking to this sort of record — too sterile to stir up adrenaline, and yet, too simplistic to tingle the nerves of progres­sively-oriented fans. Then, adding insult to injury, the CD reissue doubles the longest, and most excruciatingly boring, number on the album ('Drawn To The Flame') by adding a second part of it that, for seven more minutes, sounds almost exactly like the first.

 

Apparently, it is now known that Weinzierl did not approve of the release of either Fool Moon or Die Lösung, claiming that they were unfinished recordings that were only put out because of Cal­vert's death (from a heart attack in August 1988), to commemorate the sessions. But I fail to ima­gine how these sessions could be «completed» — was Weinzierl planning to add raging guitar overdubs? The London Symphony Choir? Surprise guest appearance of Bono and Kermit the Frog duetting on a reggae version of 'Archangel Thunderbird'? Whatever. Thumbs down would be guaranteed even under all of these conditions.

 

In any case, this dead-end collaboration effectively put a stop to Weinzierl's ongoing usurpation of the name of «Amon Düül». For most of the 1990s, he was in relative hiding, and emerged only in the early 2000s to reunite with the original band for a series of gigs and nostalgic happenings, leading to the recording of Bee As Such. He still wields that axe impressively, but, overall, his attempt to carry the flag of Amon Düül throughout the 1980s must be acknowledged as a strate­gic failure, despite a few tactical victories. Just stick to the first two albums.

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER

JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT (1969)

 

1) Jacob And Sons; 2) Joseph's Coat; 3) Joseph's Dream; 4) Poor, Poor Joseph; 5) One More Angel In Heaven; 6) Potiphar; 7) Close Every Door; 8) Go, Go, Go Joseph; 9) Poor, Poor Pharoah; 10) Song Of The King (Seven Fat Cows); 11) Pharaoh's Dream Explained; 12) Stone The Crows; 13) The Brothers Come To Egypt / Grovel, Grovel; 14) Who's The Thief?; 15) Joseph All The Time; 16) Jacob In Egypt; 17) Any Dream Will Do.

 

Not too many people are aware of the fact that Jesus Christ Superstar was not the first time that A. L. Webber and Tim Rice desecrated the Bible under the intoxicating influence of the hippie age. And some of those who are aware of the duo's take on the life of Joseph might mistakenly place it after JC — simply for the reason that it was not until the worldwide success of JC made them household names that they returned to Joseph in all of its «splendor», getting it to run in prestigious Broadway and London theaters and engaging the services of Donny Osmond to en­sure a dramatic surge in teenage girl interest in the Book of Genesis.

 

But the original recording of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was actually released on Decca at least a year prior to JC. It did not manage to catch a lot of public attention, and is quite hard to come by these days as well. Completists should take note that the recording is usually credited to «The Joseph Consortium», which includes a selection of little-known players and singers in which The Colet Court Choir plays a central part: the whole work was originally commissionned by the Colet Court preparatory school, and was first performed on March 1, 1968 as a 15-minute «pop cantata», later expanded to a 30-minute «oratorio». This second version al­ready managed to catch the public eye — and the result was a contract with Decca and this here album, quite hard to come by these days, but available, for instance, as an MP3 download from Amazon and other commercial sites.

 

If you are a major fan of JC and expect to find something in the same vein, prepare to be disap­pointed. Joseph is not only shorter, simpler, and far more modest in scope and ambition: it is a work produced on an entirely different scale and in an entirely different musical paradigm. It's not just that, at this particular point in his life, Lloyd Webber was still mighty wary of this new potent force called «rock», placing much more of his trust into the variety hall format; it is also that Joseph is essentially just a bit of lightweight entertainment. Put a Bible story in a «pop musical» format? Say, what a golly gee novel idea.

 

That said, the actual music is not at all «retro». Rather, it is reminiscent of the light family-orien­ted psycho-pop of the times, such as practiced by The Association on one side of the ocean and Manfred Mann on the other. Heavy on strings, chimes, sunshine vocal harmonies, but with a light touch of electric organ, a pinch of fuzzy electric guitar, and some wobbly production effects for the sake of «hipness». Normally, this style is pitiful, although Webber seems to feel quite at home with it, churning out melody after melody in a dazzling sequence of eighteen tracks in thirty-one minutes — although some themes are reprised several times (most notably, the catchiest vocal moment on the album, ʽPoor, Poor Josephʼ, later recreated as ʽPoor, Poor Pharaohʼ), there is an impressive number of diverse chord sequences on the album all the same. Unfortunately, few of them are memorable or emotionally overwhelming.

 

There are several lead singers on the album, most notably David Daltrey of the contemporary psy­chedelic band Tales Of Justine (!; no relation to Roger as far as I can tell), but the whole thing is presented as an «oratorio» rather than a true «opera», and the vocal retelling of the story of Jo­seph, narrated Tim Rice-style, is nothing to write about. Most ear-catching of the lot is probably Tim's own take on the Pharaoh: ʽSong Of The Kingʼ is carried out as a pa­rody on Elvis — but it is not particularly funny because there is no clear reason why exactly the Pharaoh should be sing­ing in an Elvis manner (they pulled off a similar stunt in a much more convincing manner with ʽKing Herod's Songʼ, which parodied no one in particular but conveyed the hedonistic spirit of the character to a tee with its 1920's spirit). Like everything else, it's just there because there's no harm in trying anything once.

 

The attentive listener will probably spot a few melodic bits that ended up migrating into JC terri­tory: for instance, the shrill electric guitar solo in ʽOne More Angel In Heavenʼ would later deve­lop into «Pilate's theme», and the vocal melody of ʽWho's The Thiefʼ would be re-appropriated for ʽTrial Before Pilateʼ. But most of these melodies are too kid-friendly to ever suit the dark and tense mood of JC — and the entire experience is so completely tongue-in-cheek that one can ne­ver understand if the primary purpose of the two merry young Brits was to revolutionize the world of music by synthesizing traditional musical, psychedelia, and the Old Testament, or to simply take a hooliganish stab at the Scripture while no one was looking.

 

In any case, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in its original incarnation is still a fun listen; much more dated and strictly tied to its time than JC, but still a curious, one-of-a-kind experiment that has plenty of potential to survive as intelligent «family entertainment» — a musical fairy-tale for the young and old. At the very least, it is certainly far from the worst ef­fort ever undertaken to set the Bible to music — plus, the idea of Joseph as humanity's first psy­chedelic symbol is quite awesome in itself, only marginally less so than the idea of Jesus as hu­manity's first impersonation of the hippie ideal. Thumbs up.

 

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1970)

 

1) Overture; 2) Heaven On Their Minds; 3) What's The Buzz/Strange Thing Mystifying; 4) Everything's Alright; 5) This Jesus Must Die; 6) Hosanna; 7) Simon Zealotes/Poor Jerusalem; 8) Pilate's Dream; 9) The Temple; 10) Eve­ry­thing's Alright (reprise); 11) I Don't Know How To Love Him; 12) Damned For All Time/Blood Money; 13) The Last Supper; 14) Gethsemane (I Only Want To Say); 15) The Arrest; 16) Peter's Denial; 17) Pilate And Christ; 18) King Herod's Song; 19) Judas's Death; 20) Trial Before Pilate (including The 39 Lashes); 21) Superstar; 22) Cru­ci­fi­xi­on; 23) John Nineteen Forty-One.

 

It makes good healthy sense to take a brief listen to Joseph before diving deep into Jesus Christ Superstar — if only for the sake of getting amazed at one of the most gigantic creative leaps of pop music's most exciting decade. Of course, the very idea of writing a musical / rock opera on the life of JC would preclude the authors from taking it too lightly: neither Andrew Lloyd, nor Tim Rice were dedicated Christians, but neither of them could have the audacity to take on an overtly humorous or satiric attitude towards the matter. Still, intention is one thing, and execution is an entirely different one; and where Joseph, execution-wise, was for the most part funny, fluf­fy vaudeville, JCS is, unquestionably, one of the grandest high-tragical works of our age.

 

In general, critical respect and continuous fan support for JCS is due to the fact that, out of all of Sir Andrew's works, it is the most «rock-oriented» one. The music as such does not relate nearly as much to the psychedelic / hard-rock / blues-rock movements of its era as it does to contempo­rary R&B, and the bulk of the melodies still have the typical Broadway show as their forefather; but the arrangements have been cleverly designed to get in tune with the rock crowds, and it is no coincidence that, for the original studio sessions, Webber and Rice got Joe Cocker's Grease Band to record most of the parts (including electric guitarists Neil Hubbard and Henry McCulloch), not to mention, of course, offering the main vocal lead to Deep Purple's Ian Gillan. The result is fun­ny — a totally non-rock'n'roll album that totally sounds like one.

 

But the real overwhelming success of JCS, of course, has nothing to do with electric guitars and Gillan's proto-metal screaming. It has everything to do with two people setting themselves one of the hardest tasks in music history — writing a rock musical about the last days of Jesus' presence on Earth — and pulling it off. If nothing that Webber ever did later can even come close to the effect of JCS, it is not because the effort drained him of all talent; it is simply because he would never again encumber himself with a task involving so much responsibility. If you are embarking on a project like JCS, you have to (a) make sure that your work produces a cathartic effect on al­most everyone, regardless of their religious feelings; (b) make sure that your work sounds con­temporary enough to not be laughed off as pretentious mimicry, yet also timeless enough to not let its effect wear off on the very next generation; (c) make sure that your work does not offend the religious, yet at the same time stay true to your own inner feelings about the matter, which may not at all be religious. If even one of these conditions goes unsatisfied — the result is a sure­fire failure which might cost you your entire future career.

 

It is utterly amazing, then, and still amazing to me after all these years, how perfectly all these conditions are met — consequently, resulting in one of the most perfect works of musical art of the entire century. Yes, individual moments, performances, interpretations may be deficient; and, in fact, this Original London Cast version, with Gillan at the helm, has never been my personal favorite. To my ears, it sounds a little rushed, almost like an «early rehearsal» attempt. The tunes are frequently taken at way too fast tempos; the singers do not seem to always have had enough times to properly «get into character»; the players do not seem to have practiced their guitar licks and brass kicks to perfection. In my opinion, the opera needed a certain gestation period, which is why the 1973 movie version boasts more subtlety and significant «character growth», so to speak. But I also understand those who prefer the rawer, less polished spirit of the 1970 version, which they might find more blood-boilingly-aggressive, thanks in part to Gillan's delivery.

 

Extolling the individual musical virtues of particular tunes would be pointless: if you have alrea­dy heard the record, you can probably do a better job for yourself than I can, and if you haven't, just stop everything that you are doing right now and go get it — there is no excuse for not being acquainted with JCS unless you have something going on against music in general. I might sim­ply mention that I myself knew the whole thing almost by heart upon the third or fourth listen, and that not even a single track on it — not even the briefer links — is devoid of a stunning ins­trumental or vocal hook, sometimes several of them. But it isn't «just» a collection of musical hooks: each theme and passage is perfectly adjusted to its lyrical and spiritual content. Dynamic, aggressive, neurotic-paranoid passages accompany the parts of Judas; coldly ominous, scary brass pomp represents Roman power; lightweight folksiness or silly-sounding R&B dance rhythms are associated with the Apostles (one minor point for which the church people could be left genuinely displeased with JCS is Andrew and Tim's presentation of Jesus' disciples as a bunch of fame-see­king idiots); beautiful balladry is reserved for the likes of Mary Magdalene, etc. — Wagner him­self could have been proud of these guys' use of leitmotifs.

 

I have occasionally heard people complaining about the crudeness or silliness of Tim Rice's lib­retto — complaints I have never understood, since, in general, the lyrics merely represent minor variations on the original text of the New Testament. A major exception is Judas, who gets to be the show's chief original hero, right from the opening salvos of ʽHeaven On Their Mindsʼ, in which he lays down his justification for the upcoming betrayal, and down to the album's big hit single ʽSuperstarʼ, in which he, already as a ghost, reasons that "If you'd come today, you would have reached a whole nation / Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication" (okay, these particu­lar lyrics do sound a bit stupid — but we have to remember that, in the age of Flower Power Guru Explosion, they did sound far more relevant than today).

 

On the other hand, it is fairly admirable how Rice and Webber manage to keep things in hand — not a single moment on the album lets us know for sure that they are genuinely presenting Jesus as The Sa­viour, The Son of God: throughout the opera, Jesus does not produce a single miracle, even when the lepers in ʽThe Templeʼ beg him to, and the music stops directly at ʽJohn 19:41ʼ ("Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden. In the garden was a new tomb in which no man had ever yet been laid"), omitting any hints at the Resurrection. Yet, at the same time, not a single moment directly asserts the opposite, either — giving every devoted Christian a fair chance at admitting the opera into their canon of religious works. Some might see this as an intentionally commercial, even cynical attempt at recruiting fans on both sides of the fence, or as a sign of cowardice (two self-professed atheists afraid for the potential consequences of their ac­tions), but that's looking at things from a hatred point of view; I would rather just admire the skill with which they managed to guide their ship through the reef of fanaticism.

 

A bit of «crudeness» may be found, perhaps, in the constant references to the «superstarsdom» of Jesus — culminating in ʽKing Herod's Songʼ, for which Webber recycled the melody of his ear­lier vaudeville composition ʽTry It And Seeʼ (made into a hit by Rita Pavone); here, the original Biblical mention of Herod imploring Jesus to try out a miracle is basically turned into an allegory for a sleazy entrepreneur imploring his artsy-fartsy client to be a good lad and sell out like they all do. But, come to think of it, this particular projection has even more relevance today than it had in 1970, and ends up adding depth to the show rather than cheapening it.

 

A few more words are in order regarding this particular version of the opera. As I said, I find it flawed, and not least of all due to the relative ineptness of some of the performers. The major cul­prit is Murray Head as Judas: his lungs are nowhere near as steel-caged as Gillan's, which puts him in a bad position (the role requires him to be way more of a passionate screecher), and his phrasing is frequently muffled and, well, just less expressive than the melody easily allows it to be. Victor Brox as Caiaphas is fairly mediocre as well, coming off more as a mediocre Pharisee meddler than as the iron-willed symbol of conservative evil that the authors must have had in mind. Even Barry Dennen as Pilate does not hit the same heights here as he will do three years later. The only cast member I find beyond reproach is Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene — the true «miracle» of the sessions, since Webber and Rice almost literally picked the lady off the street, where she was doing serious drugs and living off slim barroom pickings; who knows, may­be that was the major reason for which she slipped into the role so quickly and so comfortably (and the decision to release ʽI Don't Know How To Love Himʼ as the album's second single was one of the wisest marketing choices they could have made at the time).

 

As for Ian Gillan in the title role... he sings it well enough, and there is no question about ever calling his interpretation «wooden» or any of those other well-known nasty names. But the per­formance still occasionally suffers from too much speed (the timing of ʽPoor Jerusalemʼ, for in­stance, is abysmal compared to the movie version — it's almost like, «hey guys, I'd like my pro­phecies to be more heart-wrenching and convincing as much as all of you, but I've still got ten more rallies scheduled in all of the city's quarters, so we'll have to get it over real quick»), and, perhaps, from a bit too much «Deep Purplism»? Basically, just ask yourself the question if you're all right with the same guy who just finished singing ʽChild In Timeʼ to go on with this Jesus role. If you are all right with the idea, Gillan is your personal Jesus for all time. If you're not, you'll just have to wait for Ted Neeley.

 

Also, there is this small matter of the original version being too short — omitting certain non-cru­cial, but still important character-building numbers, such as ʽThen We Are Decidedʼ (Caiaphas and Annas talking about Jesus' fate prior to the general priest meeting in ʽThis Jesus Must Dieʼ) and the Peter/Mary duet on ʽCould We Start Again Pleaseʼ, and criminally shortening ʽThe Trial Before Pilateʼ, giving Barry Dennen even fewer chances to prove himself firsthand. These may come off as minor quibbles, but they are not: the original cast version, once we get acquainted with the future of the opera, does not come across as «well-rounded».

 

Still, it is the original cast version — the one that announced JCS as a cultural phenomenon, the one that already ensured Sir Andrew's future knighthood (I will always prefer to think that the man was knighted for JCS and not for Phantom Of The Opera, even if the Queen herself proves me wrong), the one that sold the most copies and produced the most hits, and the one that best fit the Zeitgeist, since, by the time 1973 came along, hard drugs and assholes had already resulted in an entirely different spirit. Hence, even if this is not my favourite version (and even after all has been said and done, it may still easily be a matter of personal preference), it is clearly the most important from a historical perspective, and merits its thumbs up all the way.

 

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (SOUNDTRACK) (1973)

 

1) Overture; 2) Heaven On Their Minds; 3) What's The Buzz; 4) Strange Thing Mystifying; 5) Then We Are Decided; 6) Everything's Alright; 7) This Jesus Must Die; 8) Hosanna; 9) Simon Zealotes; 10) Poor Jerusalem; 11) Pilate's Dream; 12) The Temple; 13) I Don't Know How To Love Him; 14) Damned For All Time/Blood Money; 15) The Last Supper; 16) Gethsemane (I Only Want To Say); 17) The Arrest; 18) Peter's Denial; 19) Pilate And Christ; 20) King Herod's Song; 21) Could We Start Again; 22) Judas's Death; 23) Trial Before Pilate (including The 39 Lashes); 24) Superstar; 25) Cru­ci­fi­xi­on; 26) John Nineteen Forty-One.

 

By the time Norman Jewison got around to filming JCS for the big screen, it had already evolved from its early beginnings as a Decca «concept album» into a lavish musical, staged in London, on Broadway, and beginning to be exported to other locations as well. With several years of fleshing out the structure, arrangements, and performances, it is no wonder that the 1973 version sounds like a more «complete» experience than the 1970 original, even if this should not be forcing fans of Ian Gillan, Murray Head, and Joe Cocker's Grease Band to immediately switch their loyalties.

 

My own loyalties, though, have firmly stayed on the side of the movie soundtrack all through the years. Which is a bit comical, since I was never a huge fan of the movie itself. Like so many other rock-based movies of the 1970s (remember Ken Russell?), it leaned a bit too heavily on the kitsch side, and ended up dated and ridiculous in quite a few aspects. I do not actually mind some of the anachronisms — arming the Romans with Uzis and setting the Jewish priests up on scaffolds ad­ded a fun element, and the scene of Judas running away from rolling tanks kind of sticks in your memory, like it or not — but the «glam» elements of contemporary culture, scattered all over the place, are as out of place today as they used to be then. It is true that Rice's lyrics are replete with references to contemporary pop culture (referring to Jesus as «top of the poll» or asking «did you know your death would be a record breaker?» is certainly not the way a more clerically-minded person would address the same issues) — but I still believe that is exactly where it all should have stopped, because now, instead of watching what could easily have been one of the finest JC-mo­vies of all time, we are forced to watch a movie about Afros, R&B dancing, hippie clothes and hairstyles and lots of other stuff that, in the end, narrow the range and scope of JCS instead of attempting to broaden it.

 

Which is all the more pitiful considering just how perfect the assembled cast is. Of the original UK cast, only Yvonne Elliman as Mary and Barry Dennen as Pilate reprise their parts — for very good reason, and, in fact, this particular stab of Dennen's at the Pilate role easily trumps his first take: now he is a very smug, self-confident, even a little bit tricksterish Pilate that finally falls vic­tim to a shattering nervous breakdown. Bob Bingham's deep bass makes a Caiaphas to die for; Josh Mostel may be overacting the buffoonery King Herod part a little bit when compared to Mike d'Abo's more restrained performance, but I would say that, out of all the parts, this is one part that does not suffer too much from overacting.

 

Then there is the magnificent Carl Anderson as Judas; predictably, there was a bit of fuss about a black member of the cast playing the greatest antagonist in history — but even if we are stupid enough to accept the «racist» argument in the first place, let us remind ourselves that the Judas of JCS was never intended to be portrayed as «evil» or, in any way, a «malicious» person. And Carl succeeds in showing his inner torment far better than Murray Head — by playing out the role with noticeably more passion, aggression, and versatility.

 

Finally, the completely unknown Ted Neeley — together with Carl, both were understudies in the original Broadway version, and got the movie part through sheer luck — will always be the ideal Jesus for me. His voice is more thin and frail than Gillan's, which suits the character quite well, yet he is still able to raise it to a shrill scream when necessary (on ʽGethsemaneʼ, for instance), and he conveys the «sad little man» aspect of Jesus with great skill and subtlety. Nor do his arias sound rushed any more — ʽPoor Jerusalemʼ is now taken at just the right tempo that gives Ted plenty of time to hit each syllable as hard as is required for a prophetic passage.

 

It is interesting that the performances in the movie differ quite sharply from bits and pieces of the original Broadway stage version that I have heard, even though the cast, apart from the two major players, remains very much the same — apparently, the motto for the movie must have been «less theater, more realism», so that, even despite all the fads and trappings, the movie, and the movie soundtrack frequently produces a skin-crawling effect. The singing is in no way dominated by the kind of crap I personally hate about Broadway musicals: each performer makes his/her best to make every line come alive. When Pilate and Christ engage in their rapid-fire verbal duel in the intense ʽTrialʼ passage, they are talking, like two emotion-bound human beings — and, at the same time, singing on key. No matter how many times I listen to these performances, I still can't help feeling amazed at how startingly effective they pull off almost every line.

 

And yes, this time around the show looks definitely completed. The extra Annas/Caiaphas dia­log on ʽThen We Are Decidedʼ, early on in the show, is a delicious dark taster of grim things to come. The fanfaric ʽHosannaʼ is extended with one extra verse ("sing out for yourselves, for you are blessed") which is actually very important — it is the only place throughout the whole opera where Jesus, for once, sounds happy, surrounded by his admirers. The Mary/Peter duet on ʽCould We Start Againʼ adds an original and interesting lyrical twist from Rice and is a great emotional «tender breather» in between all the rough post-Gethsemane stuff. The extra verse and bridge in ʽTrial Be­fore Pilateʼ gives us more time — and suspense! — to prepare for the tension of ʽThe 39 Lashesʼ. At the same time, a few unnecessary bits have been trimmed — such as the ultra-long repeti­tive coda to ʽEverything's Alrightʼ — so that, in the end, the running length is just about the same as on the original, but the final album makes much better use of all that time.

 

In short, while I am always happy to have the Gillan/Head version around, it is the Neeley/An­derson version, I hope, that will stand the test of time as the ultimate JCS version. Granted, I should add here that I know almost nothing of the subsequent castings, which have been nume­rous and possibly successful; but, to be perfectly honest, I don't think I even want to know, be­cause I honestly have no idea how anyone, anywhere, anyhow could ever improve on this inter­pretation. (I once caught a glimpse of some bits of the 2000 filmed version, with Glenn Carter as Jesus — just a glimpse, since I had to shut it off very quickly, fearing for the safety of my sto­mach: the pomp, pathos, overacting, and oversinging seemed to personify everything that I could ever abhor about these kinds of staging. Unsurprisingly, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber proclaimed this his personal favourite of all interpretations).

 

And yes, the movie deserves to be seen — we should probably just learn to disregard its dated as­pects and concentrate on the performances, because visually, the actors fully match the emotions that we feel from their singing. And it actually does work as a movie about Jesus Christ — much better so, at least, than Mel Gibson's sadistic Christploitation flick; not to mention that Jewison faithfully preserves the ambiguity of the opera, and we never get to know «the truth». (We do see, symbolically, an empty cross at the end — yet we are never told how exactly it got empty, and, to be precise, Jesus was resurrected from the tomb, not from the cross). On the other hand, the «movie soundtrack» certainly needs no visuals to be appreciated as a great, thoroughly inspired and magnificently arranged and recorded piece of work. Thumbs up a-plenty.

 

EVITA (1976)

 

1) A Cinema In Bueno Aires, 26 July 1952; 2) Requiem For Evita / Oh What A Circus; 3) On This Night Of A Thousand Stars / Eva And Magaldi / Eva Beware Of The City; 4) Buenos Aires; 5) Goodnight And Thank You; 6) The Lady's Got Potential; 7) Charity Concert / I'd Be Surprisingly Good For You; 8) Another Suitcase In Another Hall; 9) Dangerous Jade; 10) A New Argentina; 11) On The Balcony Of The Casa Rosada / Don't Cry For Me Argentina; 12) High Flying, Adored; 13) Rainbow High; 14) Rainbow Tour; 15) The Actress Hasn't Learned The Lines (You'd Like To Hear); 16) And The Money Kept Rolling (In And Out); 17) Santa Evita; 18) Waltz For Eva And Che; 19) She Is A Diamond; 20) Dice Are Rolling / Eva's Sonnet; 21) Eva's Final Broadcast; 22) Montage; 23) Lament.

 

If not for Jesus Christ Superstar and its (a) superhuman musical impact and (b) nominal allegi­ance to the «rock» paradigm, I would hardly have a single pretext, or even personal stimulus, to include Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber in this section. As incredible as it may seem, JCS was an arti­stic accident — an achievement achieved simply because Webber, a talented, but misguided com­poser, for once in his life decided to «try it out this way». The result happened to transcend all known musical borders. But it was never Sir Andrew's conscious intention to transcend all known musical borders. He just needed a particular musical framework that could fit the subject, and he found it. Who knows: perhaps, in the wake of JCS' success, had he begun looking for subjects of comparable grandiosity — oh, I dunno, such as setting The Brothers Karamazov to music — he might have produced comparable results.

 

Instead, as Wikipedia niftily puts it, «the planned follow up to Jesus Christ Superstar was a mu­si­cal comedy based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P. G. Wodehouse». That is Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber to you, in a nutshell. Oh, there is nothing wrong in alternating grand tragedies with lightweight comedies, as such (Will Shakespeare could vouch for that); still, this was rather sym­bolic, and vaguely hinted at the idea that Webber would never again conceive a project on such a grand scale as JCS — and he didn't. (Enter all good Christians pointing out that you can never get a scale grander than the one upon which you mount the figure of Christ; exit all good Christi­ans after we politely point out the fact that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber himself was, and remains, at a significant distance from a «good Christian», and, probably, views Jesus himself as simply one of his action figures, on the same shelf as Old Deuteronomy and The Phantom.)

 

The «grandest» and «grittiest» that Webber ever got after JCS was in 1976. After the predictable flop of Jeeves (due in part to the fact that Andrew and his new librettist, Alan Ayckbourn, tried to cram as much of the novels as possible into the musical; Tim Rice had the wisdom to pull out of the project before it was too late), Webber and Rice reteamed once again, choosing, this time, a female deity figure for their next project — Eva Perón, who, by then, was a figure only slightly less legendary than Jesus himself, and, on the faraway shores of Argentina, was definitely «bigger than the Beatles», to paraphrase John Lennon.

 

As a musical, Evita is pretty damn good, if you have an ear for musicals; and it still managed to preserve some of the toughness of old, with much of the music built on a bluesy or R'n'B-ish fou­ndation. That said, this time around, the music is almost worthless without the story and the sin­ging; as in all traditional musicals, the tunes are there as backdrops for the singers and their per­sonalities — no wonder that the original concept album opens without an overture, since there are only a tiny handful of themes from which a solid overture could be drawn (instead, there is a sort of «underture», a ʽMontageʼ, crudely assembled from reprises of several parts of the show — quite annoying, considering that most of the themes have already been reprised several times).

 

The atmosphere is occasionally Broadwayish, but, on the whole, remains credible. The high quo­tient of Latin motives, flamencos, and ardent sentimentality, may displease, but, given the subject, hardly seems out of place — no more so than elements of Catholic church music (along with a children's choir on ʽSanta Evitaʼ), without which a musical about Argentina and its modern day neo-Madonna would be unthinkable. Many of the ballads are still cast in the typically 1970s soft-rock / folk-pop idiom (ʽHigh Flying, Adoredʼ, etc.), which is at least better than casting them in a Julie Andrews or Barbra Streisand manner.

 

As for the singers, well, Evita is really a one-actor show: although Paul Jones (the original lead singer in Man­fred Mann) is quite functional in lending his pipes to the impersonation of Juan Pe­rón, and Colm Wilkinson has enough sneer to convey the sarcasm and criticism of the narrator and one-man-Greek-chorus Che, the whole story basically belongs to Evita — with Julie Coving­ton nailing the part as perfectly as the composition allows. (Clearly, there is no comparison with the Madonna version — which arguably remains much better known simply because it is the Ma­donna version, but signora Ciccone, who admittedly had to take extra vocal lessons to sing the part, despite, perhaps, being somewhat close to the real Eva Perón in spirit — she handles the role rather well from a strictly visual viewpoint — could never accumu­late proportionally acceptable strength in her vocal cords).

 

Covington's arias are really the only good reasons to listen to the whole thing at all — and I do not mean just ʽDon't Cry For Me, Argentinaʼ, which actually works much better in the overall set­ting of the album than when ripped out of the show and overplayed and overcovered to death in the framework of our modern pop culture. ʽAnother Suitcase In Another Handʼ, ʽHigh Flying, Adoredʼ, and even the cooing ʽI'd Be Surprisingly Good For Youʼ, in which the dame is wooing over her future president husband, all have a touch of frail beauty — which is then topsy-turved into brawn and aggression on ʽBuenos Airesʼ and ʽRainbow Highʼ. All in all, Covington succeeds in making a fascinating musical character out of Eva — if not a very pleasant one: I do not know of the original reaction to the musical in Argentina, but Alan Parker's movie, twenty years later, caused quite an uproar, much as JCS succeeded in disturbing the minds of one too many mind­less Christian fanatics before it.

 

Composition-wise, Evita and its author could certainly be accused of laziness: recurring themes and leitmotifs crop up all of the time, and when you get it all together and start packing it in, there are maybe like five or six fully completed, fleshed out, memorable compositions on the album. But the record moves on with turbulence and dynamics, and there are quite a few unexpected sur­prises — for instance, the instrumental mid-section of ʽBuenos Airesʼ, delving into funk and even disco for a couple minutes; the boogie-blues of ʽDangerous Jadeʼ, associated, for some reason, with Perón's military officials; and the mournful minimalistic conclusion (ʽLamentʼ), backed with nothing but an acoustic guitar part. At the very least, Webber and Rice consistently keep it from becoming too boring.

 

Strictly «rock»-oriented listeners, not to mention all partisans of the «anti-commercial» move­ment, will find little of value in Evita — in fact, they will probably not even start looking for it. But it is definitely not yer ordinary Broadway show, and still shows Sir Andrew at the top of his game — even after a self-initiated change of rules. Just do not spoil your experience with the Ma­donna version: by all means, seek out the original. (There may be other good ones as well: last time I looked, there was something like twenty-five commercially available recordings of Evita in English alone — yet the original recording fully appeases the small Evita-loving part of my cha­rac­ter, so you are on your own for any follow-ups). A modest thumbs up — mainly for Julie Covington's performance, without which this would be «just another musical», with an unclear audience (regular musical-goers would prefer something softer and more family-oriented, where­as rock opera lovers would always just remember this as a cruel downfall after JCS).

 

TELL ME ON A SUNDAY (1980)

 

1) Take That Look Off Your Face; 2) Let Me Finish; 3) It's Not The End Of The World (If I Lose Him); 4) Letter Home To England; 5) Sheldon Bloom; 6) Capped Teeth And Caesar Salad; 7) You Made Me Think You Were In Love; 8) It's Not The End Of The World (If He's Younger); 9) Second Letter Home; 10) Come Back With The Same Look In Your Eyes; 11) Let's Talk About You; 12) Take That Look Off Your Face (reprise); 13) Tell Me On A Sun­day; 14) It's Not The End Of The World (If He's Married); 15) I'm Very You, You're Very Me; 16) Nothing Like You've Ever Known; 17) Let Me Finish (reprise).

 

In between the giant successes of Evita and Cats lies this little platter, quite delicious in its own humble way. I omit a review of Variations, a rock/classical hybrid that Andrew concocted in col­laboration with his brother Julian (a classically trained cellist) — I have no skills that would al­low me to properly «review» Paganini, much less a set of 23 variations that A. L. W. composed for Caprice No. 24 In A Minor — but the odd trick is that, eventually, the Baron found a way to integrate both projects: the musical Song And Dance would be splicing together Tell Me On A Sunday, a relatively short song cycle performed in its entirety by one female vocalist, and Varia­tions, choreographed for a ballet performance.

 

I do not care much for the Song And Dance idea: merging these two completely different ventures within one concept was merely a pretentious gesture, whose real purpose must have been not to «lose sight» of all of Webber's latest creations. It did not actually last too long, and eventually Tell Me On A Sunday re-emerged on its own, expanded with several extra songs to boost the over­all length of the performance (the original album goes only slightly over 40 minutes). How­ever, to this day it still remains one of the lesser known Webber musicals, eclipsed by one too many biggies.

 

Which is a pity, because there is an element of subtle intrigue and freshness about this project that sets it apart. For one thing, it is all targeted towards one singer: the original album is usually lis­ted as part of the discography of the UK artist Marti Webb (selected by Webber based on her previous experience as Evita in the matinee performance), although most people have probably never even heard of any other Marti Webb albums (they do exist). For another thing, it is all on a relatively small scale: the whole story, with lyrics written by Don Black after Webber and Rice had a falling out, explores the confused personal relationships of one young girl that take her from New York to Los Angeles and back again. The subject is not particularly overwhelming and, when you come to think of it, everything is oh so very Seventies, but neither is it stupid or over­tly clichéd, and, with a subject like that, there is no risk of the attitude ever becoming overbearing.

 

Apart from a few brief plot-related links, the whole record does not really have the feel of a mu­sical — more like a typically 1970s soft-rock / folk-pop album, and only Marti Webb's musical-oriented vocals betray the final stage goals of the concept. They are appropriately sweet, though, and never over-the-top (as it always happens to Webber productions as they age — starting out with technically imperfect vocalists who compensate for imperfection by actually sounding like human beings, then eventually falling into the hands of «poor man opera singers» who squeeze all the humanistic content out of them by overacting like crazy). Webb lives up to the role — the character here is not as complex as Evita, but not as fairy-tale-ish, either, and her anger, irony, sentimentality, and sadness are all believable.

 

And then there is some good music, too. ʽTake That Look Off Your Faceʼ, the lead-in number where the heroine reacts to the first news of her boyfriend cheating on her, went all the way to No. 3 on the UK charts when released as a single — at the height of the disco/New Wave era, despite its defiantly tradionalist melodic structure and arrangement. Actually, it bridges the gap between folk-pop and ABBA-style Europop (without the corny synthesizers), and gives the world a fine, appetizing transition from the light ("take that look off your face, I can see through your smile...") to the dark (the "couldn't wait to bring all of that bad news to my door" employs delightfully thre­atening chords to show us a bit of the «unsettling» side of the protagonist).

 

Other memorable compositions range from sappy, but modestly and stylishly touching balladry (title track) to quirky combinations of old school vaudeville with a hillbilly shuffle attitude (ʽCap­ped Teeth And Caesar Saladʼ) to featherlight upbeat pop ditties (ʽI'm Very You, You're Very Meʼ) and only very occasionally, a bit of a harder punch to accentuate the bad mood spells of the pro­ta­gonist (ʽLet Me Finishʼ). As usual, almost each motive gets reprised at least two or three times, which may seem overkill given the album's short running length, but all of the compositions are fairly brisky themselves — this is all «small-scale» indeed, with none of Evita's sweeping orche­stral runs or church chorals. So there is really plenty of time to fit in everything fittable.

 

If you can stand a little sentimentality, I'd at least certainly recommend Tell Me On A Sunday over... well, my personal diagnosis is that I am incurably allergic to The Sound Of Music and eve­rything of its ilk, so, naturally, a light musical with a sentimental female protagonist, for me, is automatically stripped of any presumption of innocence there may be. Yet, in a way, this whole thing sounds more like a Carpenters album than a genuine Julie Andrews orato­rio, and a fairly well-written Carpenters album with an intelligent (if not all that intellectual) concept. A nice, healthy way for the composer to close out the decade — and that entire part of his career which need not, and, quite often, should not be described with the word «cloying».

 

Thumbs up — for this original version: I have not heard the more recent expanded revision of Tell Me On A Sun­day, but, through the powers of induction, can guess that it probably does not beat the Marti Webb show. Oh, by the way, Rod Argent, of the Zombies and Argent fame, is here on all the keyboards (he also played on the Variations album before that), and Jon Hiseman, of the jazz-rock pioneer band Colosseum fame, is on drums — one good reason for the rock music fan to seek this out (not that there is a lot of keyboard wizardry or thunderous drumming going on, but still, you never know how to please your subconscious).

 

CATS (1981)

 

1) Overture; 2) Prologue: Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats; 3) The Naming Of Cats; 4) The Invitation To The Jellicle Ball; 5) The Old Gumbie Cat; 6) The Rum Tum Tugger; 7) Grizabella: The Glamour Cat; 8) Bustopher Jones; 9) Mungojerrie And Rumpelteazer; 10) Old Deuteronomy; 11) The Jelllicle Ball; 12) Grizabella; 13) The Moments Of Happiness; 14) Gus: The Theatre Cat; 15) Growltiger's Last Stand; 16) Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat; 17) Ma­ca­vi­ty; 18) Mr. Mistoffelees; 19) Memory; 20) The Journey To The Heaviside Layer; 21) The Ad-Dressing Of Cats.

 

This review is for the Original London Cast of Cats, which, predictably, is a little less Broad­wayish than the Original Broadway Cast, although the two are only separated by one year, and the difference is not particularly striking. As usual, there are dozens of subsequent versions as well, including a relatively tolerable movie (musically tolerable — the idea of enjoying people jump around in stupid cat make-up has, for some reason, never appealed to me at all), but review­ing all of them would be quite a chore, considering that I have no deep love for the original.

 

It is a bit ironic, of course, that Sir Andrew would go completely song-and-dance on a piece of work drawn from the art of T. S. Eliot. But then, the original Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats could hardly be called a «peak of intellectualism» all by itself. And if we take Cats in the on­ly reasonable way it could be taken — as a «show for the entire family, with emphasis on the kids» — then it has to be agreed that Webber did manage to find a perfectly appropriate musical vibe to fit the funny feline adventures as narrated by Old Possum.

 

Cats are lightweight, kitschy, and occasionally corny; and ʽMemoryʼ has been overplayed to such a terrible death that, like the Beatles' ʽYesterdayʼ, it is one of those songs today that one may find almost im­possible to enjoy on a gut level. Still (okay, here goes), ʽMemoryʼ is a great song, even despite being covered by Barry Manilow and Celine Dion, and there is quite a bit of excellent music to be found on the rest of the album as well.

 

The big colorful advantage of Old Possum's Book is that it introduces such an enormous variety of characters, exploring all sides of cat psychology; and, respecting that, Webber took the right decision to represent each of these characters with a different musical style — which makes Cats into his most eclectic oeuvre of all time. Let us see. There is some old time flapper jazz (ʽThe Old Gumbie Catʼ); some playful R&B (ʽThe Rum Tum Tuggerʼ); a bit of mock-Wagnerian opera (ʽGri­za­bellaʼ); some folk-pop (ʽBustopher Jonesʼ); nods to «classic» Rogers  & Hammerstein and the like (ʽOld Deuteronomyʼ); kiddie sing-alongs from Sesame Street (ʽSkimbleshanksʼ); spy mo­vie muzak (ʽMacavityʼ); big, brawny glam-pop (ʽMr. Mistoffeleesʼ); and even a lengthy multi-part suite (ʽGrowltiger's Last Standʼ) that could, for almost ten minutes, evoke a progressive rock feeling in whoever would be willing to properly assess its complexity.

 

The bad news is that the atmosphere of it all way too often seems either «cutesy» or downright «silly». The two and a half minute long ʽOvertureʼ, mostly built on pianos and synthesized horns and strings, is inspiring and occasionally even tense, but as the ʽPrologueʼ leads you on into the world of merrily dancing predators singing "jellicle songs for jellicle cats", you might begin to wonder whether you have just been politely asked to surrender a significant part of your brain, and if yes, then what are your actual gains from surrendering it.

 

Clearly, nobody should be afraid of a little silliness from a grown-up person, but when that silli­ness takes on the form of a major stage musical, that may be a little over the top. Fortunately, as on most of Webber's «original casts», the singers never tend to overdramatize (the only part that I could never really stand was Paul Nicholas as ʽThe Rum Tum Tuggerʼ, but that may be not so much his fault as an inborn element of incoherence between the music and the vocal part).

 

Unfortunately, the whimsy nature of the show makes it hard to be genuinely moved by its darker or more complex moments: basically, everything connected with the character of Grizabella (who was not a character in Eliot's book, but existed as a sketch, eventually removed by the author due to the «excessive sadness» of her persona), and the choral hymn conclusion of ʽThe Ad-Dressing Of Catsʼ. Along with diversity, they add confusion, and the sequencing requires getting used to. It is hardly a surprise that ʽMemoryʼ, sung by the Grizabella character (Elaine Page in this original version), took on a life of its own — not just because it is the best song on the album (it may or may not be), but also because it feels quite out of tune with it, and works well when disconnected from the amusing cat melange.

 

But overall, Cats is fun. It should be taken for what it is: a lightweight stage musical to give the people a good time. It is a high-class musical, set, after all, to much higher quality lyrics than Tim Rice could ever provide, and written in a broad, ambitious manner — even if the actual music, once you have eliminated all the endless reprisals and analyzed all the remaining themes and mo­tives, may perhaps be judged as a triumph of form over substance (Webber's «debts» to classical and other composers, e. g. to Puccini for ʽMemoryʼ, are well on record, nor did he ever deny those debts altogether himself). So why should anyone be cringing?

 

Only for one reason — because Cats completes and stabilizes Webber's transition into the world of second-hand fluff. JCS granted the man immortality, Evita could still be perceived as a seri­ous musical work tackling sharp subjects, and even Tell Me On A Sunday, behind its exaggera­ted simplicity and minimalism, was hiding loads of social bitterness. Cats, on the other hand, at the same time pull out all musical stops and have no «big meaning» whatsoever. They were, and still are, a commercial triumph, but they pretty much crashed Webber's reputation in «serious» circles, or, at least, initiated that crash, completed five years later with Phantom Of The Opera. In a different context, they could be just a light comedic divertissement for the man (as Jeeves was in the mid-1970s): as it happened, he somewhat got stuck in «light» mode for the rest of his life. Thumbs up anyway — but do not even think of coming close to this kind of music if JCS and Evita are your ideal projection of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and you'd like it to stay that way.

 

STARLIGHT EXPRESS (1984)

 

1) Overture; 2) Rolling Stock; 3) Call Me Rusty; 4) A Lotta Locomotion; 5) Pumping Iron; 6) Freight; 7) AC/DC; 8) He Whistled At Me; 9) The Race; 10) There's Me; 11) Poppa's Blues; 12) Belle The Sleeping Car; 13) Starlight Ex­press; 14) The Rap; 15) U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D.; 16) Rolling Stock (reprise); 17) CB; 18) Right Place, Right Time; 19) I Am The Starlight; 20) He Whistled At Me (reprise); 21) Race: The Final; 22) No Come Back; 23) One Rock & Roll Too Many; 24) Only He; 25) Only You; 26) Light At The End Of The Tunnel.

 

I have never read a single book of the Rev W. Awdry's Railway Series, so I do not have the faint­est idea if Rev Ll. Webber's musical interpretation of these oeuvres matches the vision of their li­terary creator. I am pretty sure, though, that the Railway Series did not as thoroughly explore all of the clichés of popular literary genres as Starlight Express does it with popular music — and, therefore, deduce that, for Lloyd Webber, the cutesy stories about anthropomorphic trains were mostly just an excuse to write something lite — for the «young adult» or whatever that species is called — and indulge in a bunch of simplistic pleasures.

 

Simplistic, but genuinely fun. Like Tell Me On A Sunday, Starlight Express sort of got lost in between the hugeness of Cats and Phantom Of The Opera, but it is exactly because of its rela­tive lack of ambition that I can easily see how the talking trains could be more sympathetic than the talking cats or the talking ghosts. However, there are two things one has to accept before pro­ceeding: (1) the storyline, the train characters, and their life problems sound very silly, so if you cannot stand silly, get outta here; (2) the music is as derivative as it comes — derived from all over the place, but with barely a finger lifted to write a strikingly original melody. (Oh, and the actors are all supposed to be roller-skating throughout the show, but, fortunately, the original cast recording has no whirring on it, so I suppose the singers were skate-free in the studio.)

 

This strange bout of «laziness» resulted in the album having no big hit single, no ʽMemoryʼ to flood the airwaves, but that is hardly a reason to complain: despite the overwhelming diversity of styles, Starlight Express is sternly coherent, and does not really need a big cathartic statement. It's just one for the kids, really, and it works well from that point of view. The real downside is that, having temporarily re-oriented himself on the pop/rock idiom, Sir Andrew also got entang­l­ed in 1980s production — replete with generic synthesizers, big bashing drums, programmed rhythm tracks, the works. It does not occur on all of the tracks, but about 70% are contaminated, and you have to bear with this, too, or hunt for newer versions of the musical (which I would not recommend: given the fact that Lloyd Webber's sense of taste seems to have been worsening ex­ponentially with each new decade, I can only hope that his heirs will return him the honors that he seems to be unable to bestow upon himself in person).

 

Anyway, lower your expectations, grab the popcorn, and Starlight Express is really a delight­ful little ride. As I said, the story is nothing to write home about: there is, naturally, a love element, an array of various «train personalities» in a mish-mash technically (but not musically) similar to the character array of Cats, and a shaky subject line concerning a train race, which Andrew re­gards as a good pretext to stuff disco elements into the pot — because, naturally, what other sort of music would better correspond to a train race? (Thrash metal, perhaps, but something tells me Sir Andrew was not a big fan of Show No Mercy at the time... yet).

 

The songs are harmless fun, though, particularly when they emulate older genres. ʽRolling Stockʼ sounds like bulgy disco-era ELO (à la ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ), with an extra touch of classic glam. ʽA Lotta Locomotionʼ is girl-pop with a Caribbean flavor (and a bit of pre-pubescent Michael Jack­sonism?). ʽPumping Ironʼ is pedestrian, but startlingly arrogant boogie; ʽPoppa's Bluesʼ wise­ly imitates pub-style, drunken blues-rock rather than «reverential» blues-rock; the vaudeville of ʽBelle The Sleeping Carʼ goes down easy due to P. P. Arnold's powerhouse vocal performance (best on the whole album, I'd say); and by the time we get to the closing fast-tempo gospel finale of ʽLight At The End Of The Tunnelʼ, many more of these short genre-honoring nuggets will make their appearance, way too many to waste time on their descriptions.

 

Every now and then, of course, the composer delves into the «now», usually with abysmal results because such words as «underground» or «non-commercial» are not in Andrew Lloyd Webber's lingo: his idea of keeping up with the times is best exemplified on ʽThe Rapʼ, which is more or less what it says it is and wastes five minutes of my time on having to listen to a bunch of trains arguing between each other in a «rap» fashion. There are also a few numbers like ʽAC/DCʼ that tend to drift way too far into the synth-pop realm, and seeing Lloyd Webber work in a Depeche Mode state of mind is not the happiest of choices. On the other hand, ʽThe Raceʼ, which takes all the individual train themes and sets them to disco beats, is seductively cheesy in much the same way as the disco «experiments» on Saturday Night Fever — there is something deeply embar­rassing about the experience, but it carries about a sense of silly happy giddiness that hooks you in regardless of, or maybe due to the silliness.

 

Derivative, but at times insanely catchy; silly, but unpretentious; lightweight, but cute; inconsis­tent, but diverse enough to justify the inconsistencies — Starlight Express is Webber-fluff at its absolute best, and all the lovers of solid, patented fluff should join me here in my thumbs up. But if you have kids, just give them the record: do not expose them to the sight of one too many pairs of roller skates at the same time.

 

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1987)

 

1) Prologue; 2) Overture; 3) Think Of Me; 4) Angel Of Music; 5) Little Lotte / The Mirror / Angel Of Music; 6) The Phantom Of The Opera; 7) The Music Of The Night; 8) I Remember / Stranger Than You Dreamt It; 9) Magical Las­so; 10) Notes / Prima Donna; 11) Poor Fool He Makes Me Laugh; 12) Why Have You Brought Me Here; 13) All I Ask Of You; 14) All I Ask Of You (reprise); 15) Entr'acte; 16) Masquerade / Why So Silent; 17) Notes... / Twisted Every Way...; 18) Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again; 19) Wandering Child... / Bravo, Monsieur; 20) The Point Of No Return; 21) Down Once More... / Track Down This Murderer.

 

Somewhere in the syrupy depths of ʽMusic Of The Nightʼ, there is something sung about how «silently the senses abandon their defenses», which is probably the cleverest line in the entire musical — this is exactly the effect that Sir Andrew was going for here, and I must say, it works. Perhaps my defenses are not as solid as those of the modern day Spartans who eat Henry Cow for breakfast, but why deal in extremes all the time?..

 

The Phantom Of The Opera was totally huge in its time and still remains one of the epitomes of hugeness. This alone would be sure to generate a big ball of hatred, but there's worse: it is also the epitome of kitsch, a sprawling, «tasteless» simplification of classical music values. In a way, it is the direct predecessor to these sorts of things — from Titanic to Harry Potter — that produce extremely mixed reactions in people: on one hand, they are not overtly «bad» (professional, care­fully crafted, stimulating, exciting, etc.), on the other hand... oh, well. They also divide people like few other things can — provoking either fanatical adoration, or deep hatred; the latter can very easily spread from the «piece of art» onto the people who adore it, so be careful.

 

First, let us let out some demons. The story behind Phantom, no matter how already textbook-ish before Lloyd Webber decided to tackle it, is silly and fluffy. Gaston Leroux, who wrote the origi­nal novel, was no Edgar Poe and not even a Bram Stoker (actually, it only takes a quick browse through the titles of his numerous novels to realize that). It is, in fact, the silliest and fluffiest sub­ject picked up by Sir Andrew up to that point — at least neither Cats nor Starlight Express pre­tended to adult-oriented seriousness, but Phantom does, and this is reflected in the arrangements, requiring a fully formed symphonic orchestra (which eventually had to be somewhat cut down from the original design for touring purposes).

 

Nor is the production free from the usual shortcomings of post-JC Lloyd Webber: big, clumsy hooks, simplistically adapted from the composer's musical experience, repeating themselves over and over again until one becomes unsure of the exact reason they stick in one's head — is it be­cause they're so good, or just because you have heard them so many times already? Again, the man was accused of stealing from Puccini (ʽMusic Of The Nightʼ), and, more famously, from Pink Floyd: Roger Waters explicitly stated that Sir Andrew had expropriated one of the sub-me­lodies of ʽEchoesʼ for the main «Introducing The Phantom» theme of the musical. But why didn't he sue? "Life's too short to sue Andrew fuckin' Lloyd Webber", he is supposed to have said, while writing up the subpoenas for his own former band mates. Yet I have a sneaky suspicion that he might have really been afraid of Andrew fuckin' Lloyd Webber choosing a line of defence in which he would scoop up a half-dozen earlier musical scores which would all involve the same melody — it is, after all, a rather trivial chromatic run that anyone can incidentally or deliberately run across. You don't really have to be Andrew fuckin' Lloyd Webber to write the spooky «da-da-da-da-DAAA, do-do-do-do-DOO» bit in Phantom Of The Opera and make it one of the most instantly recognizable phrases of the century. Or, wait a moment — maybe you do.

 

If, on Starlight Express, the composer's point was to make a head-spinning mish-mash of all the possible «pop» styles, his task on Phantom was more complex — to make a similar mish-mash out of the different varieties of both «academic» and «pop-oriented» classical music. Hence, there is a little bit of everything here. Church organ with baroque flourishes; Viennese court music; light-headed, free-perching Mozartian opera themes; Neapolitan heart-on-the-sleeve pathos; and, of course, plenty of attempts at reincarnating the spirits of Gilbert & Sullivan. No Alban Berg influences, though, for reasons that are easy to understand.

 

Predictably, the result is a classical music lover's nightmare, but a paradise for supporters of healthy, wholesale «family entertainment». The «scary» elements of the story are reduced to a sparse minimum (so there's a chandelier crashing down and a guy with a partially disfigured face, big deal for an epoch in which Nightmare On Elm Street was already a couple years old), with the romantic parts occupying like 60% of the story and the «comical» parts taking care of most of the rest. Phantom Of The Opera is, indeed, the last step in the gradual transformation of Lloyd We­bber from an ambitious musical rebel that used to have his own point of view on meaningful is­sues — into a calculated commercial hack thriving on the superficial.

 

But as long as we accept that, Phantom Of The Opera is, unquestionably, the master of its own domain. I mean, we can all live with a simple fairy tale, and this one has its own unique appeal. Even the singers sound like they come straight out of a fairy tale, particularly Sarah Brightman, with her voice of such otherworldly transparent clarity, it seems like they polished it with glass-dust for several years before letting her out to sing. (She does not have too much appeal beyond that clarity, but she is well chosen anyway, for a role that demands the character to be a living china doll and little else.) So is Michael Crawford in the title role, playing it so naturally as if he'd come straight off from playing heartbroken Disney villains for decades.

 

The thing is, there are some «cheap thrills» out there that do not work, and there are some that do. Lloyd Webber may have lost his credibility as a «serious» artist (although he himself would pro­bably deny the existence of the huge gap that lies between JCS and Phantom), but I would be lying through my teeth if I denied the effectiveness of these hooks — the scary ones, the comic ones, the romantic ones. The Phantom-introducing theme may be trivial, or it may be stolen, but it still triggers a little heart-jump every time it appears out of nowhere. The title track, «decora­ted» with a steady electronic beat to give it extra hit-single power, has an unforgettable Gothic glow (which made it into a favorite for various aspiring poppy-Goth-and/or-art-metal bands). ʽMusic Of The Nightʼ and ʽPoint Of No Returnʼ are beauty-and-the-beast romance done as fine as the genre is capable of doing. The vaudevillian interludes during which the theater staff is reciting the Phantom's letters are genuinely funny (including the words of the letters themselves). And the idea of contrasting the «mannered», «wooden» way in which Carlotta begins to sing ʽThink Of Meʼ with Christine Sarah Brightman's fragility-itself performance is, as much as I hate to admit it, a touch of musical genius.

 

The unavoidable consequence of all this is, as we get to the finale and a devastated Phantom Of The Michael Crawford belting out "it's over now, the music of the night", the evil Sir Andrew will have succeeded where his character has not: make many a listener, including even some ja­ded ones, swoon under his spell, and maybe even shed a tear or two for the poor Phantom. On a purely intellectual basis, the musical deserves, at best, a condescending attitude, at worst, total de­spisal. But on a gut level, I have even known a couple of genuine classical music aficionados who confessed to having enjoyed Phantom, even as they were well aware of its utter fluffiness. And even from a purely reason-based standpoint, there is probably no better way to integrate the old school of opera, the newer school of operetta, and the modern school of Broadway musical toge­ther than the way it has been done by Webber. As for all the corn syrup... well, frankly speaking, there are quite a few remarks here that could be addressed at «serious» Italian opera itself.

 

Phantom Of The Opera is a landmark that certainly needs to be heard, preferably in the original London cast version (the show shared the usual A.Ll.W. curse of cheapening up with time, and, by all means, nobody really needs to see the Joel Schumacher movie). I doubt that it could ever function as a proper introduction into the «wonderful world of classical music» for «the people», no more so than Harry Potter could ever function as a useful tool for «introducing the young rea­der to the habit of reading books» (practice showing that it only served as a useful tool for intro­ducing them to the habit of reading Harry Potter-type books). But it may serve as one of those bridges on which certain types of people, usually keeping far away from each other, may be ready to meet and discuss things together. Except the «cheap funny fluff» of one listener will be the «amazing, breathtaking musical journey» of another.

 

My compromise will look as follows: I give Phantom Of The Opera an unflinching thumbs up — and with this, make it my last review of an Andrew Lloyd Webber production. From the bits and pieces I have heard or read about, his subsequent immersion into the world of «show tunes», which I normally stay away from simply through lack of interest, was complete, yet none of his subsequent productions replicated even a tiny part of the brouhaha caused by Phantom. There may be occasional patches of populist greatness left in there, but it just makes no sense reviewing that kind of music instead of, say, Westside Story. On the other hand, the musical journey that began with Joseph and Jesus reaches quite a natural ending here — a thrilling journey, in itself, one that perhaps deserves being turned into its own musical (on the malicious effects of commer­cial success, entitled Phantom Of The Superstar). And who would be the composer and the lib­rettist? That one's easy — Roger Waters, of course!

APHRODITE'S CHILD

END OF THE WORLD (1968)

 

1) End Of The World; 2) Don't Try To Catch A River; 3) Mister Thomas; 4) Rain & Tears; 5) The Grass Is No Green; 6) Valley Of Sadness; 7) You Always Stand In My Way; 8) The Shepherd And The Moon; 9) Day Of The Fool.

 

What do you get when you take an experimental composer, specializing in atmospheric electro­nics, and a cheesy East-Europop crooner, and stick the two of them together? Feed this question to an advanced AI system, and it will probably answer: «Something that sounds awesomely crazy and unbearably sentimental at the same time». And, more or less, that is exactly what Aphrodite's Child were about. Except that the chronology is reversed: Vangelis would go on to become one of the most revered electronic wizards of his generation, and Demis Roussos to become the epitome of feta cheese already after the band had broken up.

 

When the band had just formed, though, it was all different. They were young, ambitious, and, of all things, they were all a bunch of Greek journeymen stranded in Paris in May 1968 — someone should give Martin Scorsese an idea for a script. And, of course, since most of them were musici­ans anyway, having already served time in various Greek bands, what a better time and place to try out a bit of mad genre synthesis than Paris in the spring?

 

Now here is the curious catch. Apparently, Demis Roussos, at heart, was a balladeer from the very beginning, and he was never all that interested in pushing forward musical boundaries as long as he could score one with the ladies. But the healthy climate of a shifting musical era, and the fortunate advantage of having the ambitious and daring Vangelis Papathanassiou at his side, made sure that his croonery was not backed with generic syrupy strings or whatever the croonery «norm» was in the old pre-disco days, but rather with a refreshingly romantic, and sometimes even downright «gritty», art-rock sound.

 

Put it all together — the will to experiment and innovate, the sentimentalism, the spirit of the ti­mes, the Mediterranean flavor, the talent, the youth, the energy, and Aphrodite's Child (quite an apt name for the band, as a matter of fact) emerge as a fairly unique curio in an age that had its fair share of unique curios. Most of these songs are befuddling, so much so that I cannot decide if I should laugh or cry. But as long as you do not make a definitive choice, End Of The World re­mains a fascinating puzzle.

 

The band's original direction was indicated by the debut single, ʽRain And Tearsʼ, musically ba­sed on Pachelbel's Canon — following in the vein of Procol Harum, but in a wimpier manner, since the band did not have a guitarist at that time (their regular player, Anargyros Kolouris, was on military duty in Greece, so Demis Roussos, in addition to playing bass, also has to supply all of the guitarwork). Vangelis' arrangement, with authentic harpsichord and baroque strings, is quite masterful, so it all depends on whether you are able to swallow Roussos' plaintive, operatic intonations without getting sick to the stomach. It's hard, but it may be worth the while.

 

Personally, I find it easier to succumb to the artsy charms of Aphrodite's Child when they switch from purely romantic mood to a little apocalypse — primarily on the title track, which begins de­ceptively, as just another organ-and-piano-led ballad, but then, with a mighty "HEYYYEAH!" from Demis, enters a Romantic (with a capital R) world of solemn drum-and-keyboard fury. It sounds a bit silly when you stop and think about it, but don't make the mistake of stopping.

 

Actually, the band's repertoire is quite diverse. They fiddle about with fast-paced R'n'B (ʽDon't Try To Catch A Riverʼ — with its spirited tempos, the song seems like an answer to ʽRiver Deep, Mountain Highʼ; at any rate, the Spector production must have been the chief inspiration); Kinks-flavored character-assassinating Brit-pop (ʽMister Thomasʼ); totally drugged out, dragged out, mantra-style psychedelia (ʽThe Grass Is No Greenʼ); gritty, soulful blues-rock (ʽYou Always Stand In My Wayʼ, probably the angriest, rock'n'rolliest performance Roussos ever gave in his life — and one track on which his ever-present whiny notes actually work to perfection, giving the whole song a frenzied, paranoid atmosphere); avantgarde sonic landscapes (ʽDay Of The Foolʼ, sung from the point of view of a madman and eventually «degenerating» into bits and pie­ces of his fragmented conscience); and, of course, something that they brought over with them from faraway lands — ʽThe Shepherd Of The Moonʼ is the only song here to properly incor­po­rate the Near Eastern vibe, both in the sung harmonies and the accompanying melody.

 

These tunes may sound comical, and, if you are well acquainted with the context, somewhat of a naïve, crude attempt to «fit in» with every bit of popular/trendy Western music they could lay their hands on. But the truth is, they all work to some extent. Perhaps the band rarely succeeds in making it seem like they were born and reared to perform this kind of stuff, but they certainly un­derstand all the small details that make this stuff great — the vocal hooks and the arrangement de­tails are formally impeccable, so that on a purely technical level, ʽThe Grass Is No Greenʼ has no problem holding its own against the flood of «authentic» drone-flavored psychedelia of the times, and that Tina Turner might not have refused a duet with Demis on ʽCatch A Riverʼ, had she even been aware of this band's existence.

 

In short, it is best to view End Of The World as a heartfelt tribute, coming from a bunch of en­thusiastic, adoring, and not untalented fans, to the whole wide world of «popular musical art», than as an individual «meaningful statement». But I'd rather take a chameleonic tribute like that, masterminded by a guy like Vangelis, over an «individualistic» statement by somebody with no musical gift at all — so, clearly, a thumbs up here.

 

IT'S FIVE O'CLOCK (1969)

 

1) It's Five O'Clock; 2) Wake Up; 3) Take Your Time; 4) Annabella; 5) Let Me Love, Let Me Live; 6) Funky Mary; 7) Good Times So Fine; 8) Marie Jolie; 9) Such A Funny Night.

 

With End Of The World turning into a modest commercial success, the band wasted little time to follow it up with a sequel rehashing the same formula. The good news is, the formula was so wild and utterly «permissive» in the first place, It's Five O'Clock somehow manages to come out just as strong as, and maybe even more strong, than its predecessor. And even though the band is noticeably straying even farther away from their East European roots, the resulting sound seems more credible and less prone to ridiculing than whatever preceded it.

 

The title track, another impressive hit single on the continent, is a loyal successor to ʽRain And Tearsʼ and ʽEnd Of The Worldʼ: for this one, Vangelis attaches Roussos' pop vocals to a baroque organ melody, then throws in a bunch of extra keyboards (including an early Moog synth part, I'd guess) to build up tension — another good example of how it is always possible to turn schmaltz into epic, psycho-hip romanticism when you choose your sounds carefully. It does not work quite as well on the record's two other ballads, ʽAnnabellaʼ and ʽMarie Jolieʼ, on both of which Demis' weeping vocals win over the instrumentation, so that both songs really only work well if you are prepared to weep along with the weeper (not an option for me). But even there, Vangelis' creden­tials as a «soundscaper» are growing impressively, with guitars, Mellotrons, nature sound effects, and other tiny bits combining into evocative pictures.

 

Elsewhere, the band tries its hand at various forms of folk-rock and country-rock: clearly, Vange­lis and friends did not lose sight of the «roots-rock revolution» of 1968-69, and so ʽWake Upʼ and ʽTake Your Timeʼ take their cues from The Lovin' Spoonful and The Mamas & Papas rather than Italian pop or psychedelia. There is no pretense here, and both tunes, want it or not, are insanely catchy: had they been placed on albums by the abovementioned artists, they would have been praised as good-to-great tunes without raising any controversy. (For experiment's sake, you might want to play them to an unsuspecting friend and ask for a clean-slate opinion).

 

The R'n'B-pop hybrid of ʽGood Times So Fineʼ (whose bridge section almost sounds like a Mon­kees tune, with Roussos' vocals raised in a Micky Dolenz-kind-of nasal whine) and the friendly, carnivalesque acoustic guitar figures of ʽSuch A Funny Nightʼ are cutesy as well. But the album's most ambitious, risky, and future-predicting cuts are probably ʽLet Me Love, Let Me Liveʼ and ʽFunky Maryʼ: the former embraces noisy psychedelia in its instrumental passages, while the lat­ter is a noisy, jarring psychedelic jam all by itself, with an almost «tribal» set of percussion over­dubs, beneath which Vangelis is running from free-jazz chimes to barroom tack piano and back again. It is wild, weird, unasked for, and fairly challenging for a regular art-pop band aiming at commercial success, even back in 1969.

 

If there is any real «progression» here, it just means correctly following the times: End Of The World went heavy on psychedelic techniques that were en vogue in 1967 (sitars, drones, etc.), whereas It's Five O'Clock seems less dependent on momentary trends, and takes a small step for­ward in helping Vangelis find his personal vision. But none of that matters as much as simply admitting that there is a bunch of excellent art-pop songs written here, and that they do not at all sound nearly as dated today as the total oblivion, in which this album has sunk, would have you be­lieve. In fact, with retro-oriented art-pop being one of the leading styles of «intellectual music» today, they are probably less dated now than they were two decades ago. So, with a little help from my thumbs up, just go look for it if it isn't in your collection already.

 

666 (1972)

 

1) The System; 2) Babylon; 3) Loud, Loud, Loud; 4) The Four Horsemen; 5) The Lamb; 6) The Seventh Seal; 7) Aegean Sea; 8) Seven Bowls; 9) The Wakening Beast; 10) Lament; 11) The Marching Beast; 12) The Battle Of The Locusts; 13) Do It; 14) Tribulation; 15) The Beast; 16) Ofis; 17) Seven Trumpets; 18) Altamont; 19) The Wedding Of The Lamb; 20) The Capture Of The Beast; 21) ∞; 22) Hic And Nunc; 23) All The Seats Were Occupied; 24) Break.

 

Of all the albums recorded by Aphrodite's Child before it grew up and underwent ternary fission, 666 is clearly the most dated — but also the most tempting, because only a disillusioned Sa­tanist, way past his prime, would nonchalantly bypass a record that has the number of the Beast staring at the world so defiantly from its album sleeve. Of course, skepticism is not merely allowed, it is very welcome: «What can these guys tell us about the Apocalypse? Sure they're Greeks and all, but it's not as if they wrote The Book of Revelation!» But take away the superficial trappings, the way too overtly insistent references to the text of the New Testament, and the result is an ambiti­ous, extremely curious project that succeeds at least as often as it fails. Considering that what we have here is a double album, that makes up for at least forty minutes of good music.

 

Conceptualism was the way to go in 1970, when Vangelis decided that the band had to grow up of its «three minute art-pop song» phase and join the army of progressive musical thinkers. I am not quite sure of how Demis Roussos, with his crooner aspirations, reacted to the idea, but, at the very least, he honestly participated in the project, doing his bass duties and singing where requi­red (many of the individual tracks are completely instrumental). In addition, work on the album saw the return of Silver Koulouris, fresh from the army and ready to do guitar battles now.

 

The flow of 666 is fairly straightforward: it takes relatively few liberties with The Revelation, for the most part just offering vivid musical images that accompany its happy tales of seven seals, lambs, beasts, trumpets, horsemen, and whores of Babylon. (One curious exception is a track na­med ʽAltamontʼ — apparently, Vangelis took the «apocalyptization» of the 1969 Altamont trage­dy by the rock press seriously, interpreting ʽAltamontʼ as a modern projection of the «mountain» in The Book: "This is the sight we had one day on The High Mountain"... etc.). Whether it works or does not work as a soundtrack to the book probably depends on everyone's pre-set ideas of how such a soundtrack should sound in the first place. Creepy? Scary? Overwhelming? Distur­bing? Loud/bombastic or quiet/subtle? Could we trust Miles Davis with playing the seventh trum­pet, etc., etc.? Another possibility is to simply forget about the Biblical connection and form your own idea of what the heck it is all supposed to mean.

 

Regardless of the choice, most people will probably agree that 666 is quite heavily «padded». Ap­parently, Vangelis insisted on a double album, because nothing less than a double album would have been appropriate for the subject. (Besides, double albums were all the rage by 1970). How­ever, he did not have enough original musical ideas to fill up four sides — hence, comes the spra­wling, 20-minute-long suite ʽAll The Seats Were Occupiedʼ, featuring a bit of loose jamming and then working as an «underture», rehashing and revolving all of the themes, sometimes more than once. Already upon the second listen, it becomes eminently skippable, except for the last minute of wild avant-jazz noise that follows the haughty enunciation of the title.

 

Another highly controversial bit, then and now, has been ʽ∞ʼ (ʽInfinityʼ). The basic premise is crudely funny — a sexual pun on the line "I am to come", which we are supposed to interpret in both of its meanings at the same time. The realization of the pun is a five-minute piece of percus­sion havoc, against whose background the guest-starring Greek actress Irene Papas is donated the line "I was, I am to come!" and instructed to pronounce it in a million different ways, as long as each of the ways is reminiscent of an orgasmic experience. That Vangelis actually won the long, hard battle against studio executives, who tried to keep this porno-scented stuff off the album, is a pleasant page in the history of the war for artistic and personal freedom. It would have been far nicer, though, if, upon finally gaining the studio executives' consent, he had immediately deleted the tapes. That way, freedom of art would be vindicated, and so would our ears, because having to listen to this crap for five minutes in a row is simply ridiculous. One would have been more than enough (it is rumored that the full take lasted for thirty-nine minutes).

 

That said, once all the padding and questionable sonic experimentation have been removed as dated filler, the musical parts of 666 are just as strong as anything Aphrodite's Child had ever done, and in some ways, stronger. Genre diversity, in particular, continues to be held in high esteem. We have bombastic «arena-folk» (ʽBabylonʼ), moody art-pop dreamscapes crossed with hard-rocking guitar frenzy (ʽFour Horsemenʼ), dark Floydian panoramas (ʽAegean Seaʼ), jazz-fu­sion-style jamming (ʽDo Itʼ), honky piano-led blues-rock (ʽThe Beastʼ), and, of course, plenty of Eastern motives, sometimes with sitars (ʽThe Seventh Sealʼ), but more often with a closer-to-home Greek underbelly, I think (ʽThe Lambʼ, ʽThe Wedding Of The Lambʼ). And, for the most part, it all works. The hooks and moods are there.

 

ʽThe Four Horsemenʼ were loosed on the poor horrified little world as the lead single, and, al­though the piece itself hardly had any hit potential on its own, the decision is understandable — the track is a clear standout, with the catchiest, most sing-along style chorus on the album ("The leading horse is white..."), and then, several minutes into the song, followed with a brilliantly constructed wah-wah solo from Koulouris, which has not just the finest guitar playing on the al­bum, but simply happens to be one of the greatest guitar solos ever played — and I am not joking: no one would ever suspect Koulouris of being an unsurpassed technical virtuoso, but somehow he managed to properly pick up all the «epic» chords and come out with a flying monster that could easily stand its ground next to Dave Gilmour in terms of emotional impact.

 

Other personal favorites include ʽAegean Seaʼ, which not only has some more of that fantastic guitar work, but also introduces electronic textures that predict solo Vangelis, to a large extent; ʽThe Lambʼ, with its odd mix of baritone guitars, winds, and electronics — a fast-paced Greek dance beset with mystical vibes; and the final piano-led number ʽBreakʼ, the closest thing we have here to a «normal» Demis Roussos ballad, which is probably why it was the only number from 666 to remain in his solo stage repertoire. (Not that he kept the echo effects on the voice, the organ flourishes, and Kouloris' last wah-wah guitar solo, I believe — all the things that elevate the song above the state of a generic ballad).

 

Overall, it is clear that 666 never had a chance: not only did the world market care rather little about fearless prog-rockers that did not have permanent residence in the UK, but Vangelis and his temporarily obedient friends also made plenty of false moves, both during the planning of the al­bum and upon completion of the recording. In the end, 666 only came out as late as 1972, by which time Aphrodite's Child were effectively over as a band, and it never received the proper promotion, partly because there was no one left to promote, partly because the promoters must have still felt uneasy about promoting an album with such a title. But in retrospect, despite all the flaws, 666 deserves proper recognition — let alone the high qua­lity of the melodic content, it is a bit more than simply «derivative second-generation prog». In fact, it is not only «first generation prog», but its synthesis of Western and Mediterranean stuff is, in a way, completely unique for the whole movement: if the guitar solo on ʽFour Horsemenʼ, no matter how overwhelming it is, essentially just follows the Hendrix/Clapton standards of guitar playing, tracks like ʽThe Lambʼ and ʽLamentʼ are in a class of their own — you won't hear any­thing like that from a Robert Fripp or an Ian Anderson, because on this sort of turf, they were at a heavy disadvantage next to Vangelis, a native Greek who had enough time and opportunity to as­similate the Western tradition as well. This is the only time, really, when «Greek progressive rock» came out loud and proud on the international market, and it is fully deserving of everyone's ears — and an impressive final twist to Aphrodite's Child's prematurely deceased career... out of the ruins of which came Vangelis, «The Electronic Guru», and Demis Roussos, «The Singing Kaftan» (feel the difference). Thumbs up — here's hoping for an eventual proper revival.

ARGENT

ARGENT (1969)

 

1) Like Honey; 2) Liar; 3) Be Free; 4) Schoolgirl; 5) Dance In The Smoke; 6) Lonely Hard Road; 7) The Feeling's In­side; 8) Freefall; 9) Stepping Stone; 10) Bring You Joy.

 

As far as I know, the Zombies disbanded in 1968 not because the band members hated each oth­er's guts or anything, but generally out of desperation: for the average band in the 1960s, three years without a major hit single meant artistic bankruptcy, even if it still managed to maintain a cult following. The Almighty rewarded them with an ironic twist of fate, turning ʽTime Of The Seasonʼ into a big international hit one year after the band's demise. By that time, however, lead singer Colin Blunstone had already entered insurance business, and somehow the band members must have thought it uncool to make a hasty regrouping.

 

However, the success of ʽTime Of The Seasonʼ must have been enough for lead organist and one of the chief songwriters, Rod Argent, to believe that there was still a place in this world for him. Furthermore, by 1969 the record-buying world was slowly beginning to develop a better under­standing of that strange kind of music that the Zombies kept pushing ahead of their time: classi­cally influenced, complex, «pretentious» art-pop. Giving it one more try seemed natural. And while it may seem somewhat arrogant to slap your personal family name on the visit card of your four-piece band — give our regards to Santana — «Argent» was certainly a much more appropri­ate appellation for a late 1960s / early 1970s progressively-oriented art-pop team than «Zombies» ever was. (Which begs the question: did the actual Zombies ever sit back and think just how many non-bought records their name cost them in the long run?).

 

Although all the other official band members are new (Russ Ballard on vocals and guitar; Jim Rodford on bass; Bob Henrit on drums), original Zombies member and songwriter Chris White semi-officially remained on board as one of the band's major creative personalities — making the «Argent» brand a completely legitimate follow-up to «Zombies»: there can hardly be any doubt that, had the actual Zombies managed to keep their act together through the years, they would have turned into Argent even without any lineup changes. Proof? The self-titled Argent still sounds more like the Zombies than the «classic» Argent of ʽHold Your Head Upʼ — and it is this transitional, fence-straddling nature exactly that makes it my favorite Argent album.

 

It is probably just a coincidence that Argent opens out on pretty much the same simple arpeggio as the Beatles' ʽI Want You (She's So Heavy)ʼ, not a subtle arrogant hint that the band is ready to pick it up where the Beatles have just left it off. On the other hand, late-period Beatles are an un­deniable influence: Argent is «art-pop» that is not afraid to experiment with structures, arrange­ments, and genre-melanging, but still strives to be old-school commercial, with modest composi­tion length, catchy choruses, and generally transparent moods — most of the tracks are una­bashed love songs (with occasionally cringeworthy or clumsy lyrics: am I out of my mind or is the opening line "Like honey, you're sweeter" thoroughly ungrammatical? And what is "when night falls on rare wine" even supposed to mean?).

 

But never mind the lyrics: the Argent/White team, with just two years past their Odessey And Oracle peak, is still going very strong, and newcomer Russ Ballard is quite competent in the songwriting department as well: it was his own ʽLiarʼ, after all, that was turned into Argent's first hit... unfortunately, not before Three Dog Night covered it one year later, in an arrangement that was very close to the original, merely replacing Ballard's soft, McCartney-like, vocal for a rowdy barroom rasp (I am going to take it easy on 1970's record-buyers and believe that it had every­thing to do with better promotion, something Rod Argent never cared too much about).

 

Only one number points to the long road ahead, on which Argent would only embark with the subsequent album: a six minute long mystical circle dance, appropriately titled ʽDance In The Smokeʼ. The length finally gives Rod plenty of space to practice his half-Bach, half-Ray Charles organ chops, with lots of inspired, elegant passages that succeed far more successfully than the song in general — if, that is, the ambition behind the song was to come up with their own perso­nal ʽHey Judeʼ, because the overall atmosphere is just a bit too stern and reserved to match the supposed euphoric joy of "every branch we'll tie somebody's worry to it, we will burn it and dance in the smoke". Still a great sonic landscape, though.

 

Overall, Argent is extremely romantic: on subsequent albums, hard rock and darker-tinged pagan mysticism would seriously concur with heart-baring lyricism, but this debut, with the exception of ʽDanceʼ, almost reads like a focused assault on some particular young girl's heart. Songs like ʽThe Feeling's Insideʼ and ʽBring You Joyʼ are almost too beautiful for their own good, the for­mer written on a serious Bach organ kick, the latter more modernly R'n'B-ish / blue-eyed soulish, but both sung from the mental perspective of a medieval troubadour, no less. And why not? The vocal progression during the verse flow of ʽFeeling's Insideʼ easily ranks on the same level with the best Zombies material.

 

The «rockers» of the album are also quite clever in that they are almost exclusively keyboard-based (think of ʽLady Madonnaʼ as one of the chief inspirations), so there's speed, power, and energy, but no attempts to compete with hard-rockers that would be doomed from the start. ʽBe Freeʼ essentially flies by on the strength of its vocal arrangement, and Ballard's ʽLonely Hard Roadʼ is one song on here I could possibly see evolving into a long jam — the rhythm section is particularly tight, I wouldn't mind Argent practicing his razor-sharp organ solos some more while the groove is still on.

 

For some reason, my personal favorite on the album, for a long time, was Ballard's ʽSchoolgirlʼ — a clear attempt on his part to write a particularly simple, but effective pop tune in the classic early ʽShe's Not Thereʼ-era Zombies style. It's not quite up to those standards, but close, with an unforgettable falsetto resolution of the chorus melody, and Rod is playing these keys with classic restraint, exactly the way he used to around 1964. Other than that, there is not that much happe­ning in the song, but it is a touching retro gesture the likes of which, unfortunately, would not be seen on subsequent Argent releases.

 

The record is not problem-free, of course. The songs usually blast off their full potential on the first minute, so repetitiveness is an issue. Ballard's singing is generally tasteful, but sometimes over the top, especially when he succumbs to the temptation of hitting notes outside of his normal range (the coda flourish on ʽFreefallʼ is simply awful) or tries going into full-scale operatic mode (ʽBring You Joyʼ could definitely use a different vocalist). The permanently keyboard-driven arrangements can get wearisome after a while (although if you are a Zombies fan already, that shouldn't be a serious drag).

 

But, in addition to there being no genuinely «bad» songs on here (I'd say even the worst ones are still memorable), Argent is also a very important record — it is one of the very few examples of a «typically 1960s» artist managing to re-orient himself at a «typically 1970s» musical paradigm without sounding forced or fake. Very few, if any, «pop» people from the former decade could reinvent themselves as «prog» people for the latter; the usual tendency was either for 1960s «pop» peo­ple to go on being «pop» and gradually falling out of grace, or for 1970s «prog» people to emerge out of some obscure 1960s shadow. Of course, neither the Zombies nor Argent counted as «1960s giants» (not back then, at least) or «1970s idols», but both bands had moderately res­pectable careers, and Rod bears primary responsibility for both. Thus, good songs + certain his­torical uniqueness = thumbs up guaranteed for life.

 

RING OF HANDS (1971)

 

1) Celebration; 2) Sweet Mary; 3) Cast Your Spell Uranus; 4) Lothlorien; 5) Chained; 6) Rejoice; 7) Pleasure; 8) Sleep Won't Help Me; 9) Where Are We Going Wrong.

 

Evolution happens. Where Argent could, more or less, be seen as the last true Zombies album in spirit, Ring Of Hands represents the crucial bend after which you no longer see the train (might still hear the echo). As the new band gains momentum and ensures its own stability, two new mu­sical directions are emerging. Russ Ballard is now officially the «rocker» of the band, leaning to­wards a louder, sweatier, more aggressive sound — an early brand of «arena-rock». Rod Argent, on the other hand, is taking his cue from contemporary progressive rock, exploring the world of complex structures and lengthy keyboard solos. Counterbalancing all of these tendencies is Chris White, retained as resident songwriter and contributing as many good old pop hooks as can with­stand the pressure of Ballard's Big Buffalo Riffs and Argent's Extended Toccatas and Fugues.

 

Does it work? How could it not work, when so much talent and freshness is involved? At the risk of occasional bits of corniness and silliness (yes, ʽCast Your Spell Uranusʼ is an unlucky title, and naming your songs after Tolkien toponyms never helps in the long run), the album as a whole is excellent, with nary a single genuine misstep. Neither Ballard's hard rock nor Argent's progres­sive experiments sound forced or boring, and almost every single song shows just how much fun it must have been for Rod to do this — he attacks the keyboard with the verve of a teenager at­tacking a brand new video game. There is no condemning Ring Of Hands, even if you don't like it: these guys are clearly excited, and an excited Rod Argent is beyond condemnation.

 

The troops are still marching behind hippie-idealistic banners: ʽCelebrationʼ opens the procee­dings on an exultate-jubilate folk-rock note that might just as well open a Crosby, Stills, & Nash record. But in reality, the song is not at all typical of the rest of the album: round-the-campfire idealism only serves as a formulaic bait, upon which the artists launch into either more personal or more heavily «intellectualized» ventures. It does stress the album's relative diversity, though: folk-rock anthems, heavy rockers, blues stylizations, romantic ballads, keyboard pop-sonatas — the band casts its net quite far and wide, even despite its main songwriters already patenting their own established songwriter styles.

 

Ballard is, of course, the weaker link here. He is not only incapable of matching Argent's talent and experience as player and composer, but also shows less taste, which would eventually doom the band. Most unpleasantly, he tends to overscream and kick up too much pathos where a slight­ly more tongue-in-cheek attitude wouldn't hurt (was there no one in the studio to let him know just how ambiguous the word URANUS may sound when it is made into a chorus hook?). Which, somehow, still does not prevent ʽUranusʼ from kicking some ass, mostly due to Argent's piano and organ parts that genuinely rock harder and sharper than Ballard's vocals.

 

Russ fares somewhat better on the more guitar-driven ʽChainedʼ, with a well-constructed solo and interesting work on the harmonies; but his best contribution is probably ʽWhere Are We Going Wrongʼ, which manages to end the album on a frenzied / paranoid note, in a disturbing manner that contrasts impressively with the rose-colored start of ʽCelebrationʼ. With psychedelic choral harmonies, an R'n'B-ish drive, fluent guitar and piano solos (Rod brings out his fastest jazziest licks for the latter), it's one of those «intelligent rockers» that requires a little sinking in to take full effect, but don't miss it.

 

Of the Argent/White collaborations, ʽLothlorienʼ is the most easily notable, if only due to the eight-minute length. Although the title may look provocative, the whole thing is really not so much a Tolkienist fantasy as it is a pretext for launching into some keyboard-dominated jamming: for the first time ever, Mr. Argent feels himself fully free to engage in anything he likes, swit­ching several instruments along the way and gliding from Bach into Art Tatum without effort. For the record, Tolkien's Lothlorien is the last place I would be associating with this kind of mu­sic, but it's nice to know J. R. R. can be so different for different people.

 

One should not miss ʽRejoiceʼ, either, a McCartney-inspired ballad with a sprinkling of gorgeous falsetto vocal hooks framed with even more Bach quotations (organ sound this time); ʽSleep Won't Help Meʼ, where Rod could almost seem to be inspired by Ray Manzarek's solo on ʽRiders On The Stormʼ, playing highly similar patterns on the same electric piano — except that Ring Of Hands actually preceded L. A. Woman by several months, rendering the theory impossible (and the opposite idea highly unlikely, unless Manzarek was secretly listening to little-known Bri­tish albums under his pillow); and even the blues-boogie shuffle ʽSweet Maryʼ, potentially generic, boring, and ta­king one too many cues from ʽThe Night Time Is The Right Timeʼ, is lifted off the ground by an exquisitely tasty Ballard solo. (They never did this kind of material no more, which is a pity — some old-school blues-rock instead of Ballard's lumpy-leaden-metal on subsequent albums could actually help to enliven them).

 

In the end, Ring Of Hands is probably the best «proper» Argent album — only the debut hits me emotionally in a manner truly comparable with the best of the Zombies, but Ring Of Hands ex­plicitly tells us that this band is not the Zombies, and, well, we'd have to understand that: they didn't change the name for nothing, after all. And as far as a non-Zombies Rod Argent-led band is concerned, Ring Of Hands is tops, with a fair balance between simplicity and complexity, a co­herent attitude and plenty of diverse ways to realize it. And, historically, it is a good example of a great band doing its finest work before becoming destroyed by commercial success — Ring Of Hands didn't sell, and in this particular case of this particular band, we can only thank God for that. So, thumbs up.

 

ALL TOGETHER NOW (1972)

 

1) Hold Your Head Up; 2) Keep On Rollin'; 3) Tragedy; 4) I Am The Dance Of Ages; 5) Be My Lover, Be My Friend; 6) He's A Dynamo; 7) Pure Love.

 

After two years of commercial unluck, Argent finally hit Gold (no pun intended) with ʽHold Your Head Upʼ — one of only two songs, I think (the other one is the far flatter anthem ʽGod Gave Rock'n'Roll To Youʼ), that have been carefully shrink-wrapped for classic rock radio. Don't think too much of it: the success was a fluke, and it had everything to do with the rather crude, but ef­fective hook power of the chorus — apparently, there is a way to repeat the line "hold your head up, whoah, hold your head up, whoah" several times in a row so cleverly that it grabs your entire attention. It may have something to do with the faint falsetto echoing overdub of "up!" in the background as well, or with the stern guitar/organ interplay, but I think it's just the basic slogan­eering that does the job.

 

Of course, the song in total is more than that — it's got an optimistic verse melody as well, a fine stomping bassline, and a long, reliably tasteful organ solo from Rod (the latter, however, was mos­tly edited out of the single version, I believe). But hit power never comes from organ solos, and, as a result, the success of ʽHold Your Head Upʼ inevitably pushed the band even further into the world of arena-oriented bombast, which could hardly have been Rod's original intention.

 

For now, though, the band's third album only marginally departs from the style established on Ring Of Hands: a balanced mix of «hard-art-rock», supported with Ballard's meaty riffs, and «light-progressive» paintings, dominated by Argent's keyboard playing. Only one track, ʽKeep On Rollinʼ, departs from the general rule — a side excourse into the world of piano boogie, sort of like a nice, heartfelt tribute to the likes of Amos Milbourne and Fats Domino. Its only draw­back is that a song like this demands total recklessness, whereas Rod would hardly ever «stoop» to bashing away the piano keys à la Jerry Lee Lewis, and this is why people will still be listening to ʽGreat Balls Of Fireʼ by the time ʽKeep On Rollinʼ descends to the bottom of the archives.

 

Ballard contributes two of the heavy rockers, one of which is done in «pub» style (ʽHe's A Dyna­moʼ), and the other one takes a stab at acid funk (ʽTragedyʼ). The former is rather dispensable, but ʽTragedyʼ, I think, manages to hit something, especially when it comes to the «flying vocals» of the chorus — the only thing it lacks is a properly roaring acid guitar solo; Rod's trademark or­gan does not kick the proper amount of ass required for such a groove. The third «heavy» num­ber, however, is contributed by the Argent/White team, and it may be the best of the lot: ʽBe My Lo­ver, Be My Friendʼ quickly sets up a genuine «monster groove» — its soul-based vocal melodies are not particularly seductive, but the joint guitar/drum attack spells out seriousness of intentions, and there is a brilliant five-note guitar flourish after each chorus that adds a light psychedelic touch as well.

 

Meanwhile, the tradition of ʽLothlorienʼ is preserved and strengthened by allotting most of the second side for ʽPure Loveʼ, a track that consists of (a) Rod «noodling» on the organ for five mi­nutes, paraphrasing as many quotations from Bach and Elizabethan music as can be done within five minutes; (b) two minutes of disoriented band jamming in «rootsy-tootsy» mode; (c) seven minutes of a long, slow, «sleazy» blues-rock composition, graced by powerhouse drumming and blazing guitar solos. Rather boring, if you need my honest opinion, and that applies to the first part of the suite as well — Rod Argent is a fine keyboard player, but his solos work much better within the contexts of particular songs rather than on their own. Somebody like Keith Emerson can at least entertain the listener with sheer virtuosity, but in most cases, a classically-based solo piano / organ tune should probably be played a classical pianist / organist.

 

Thus, altogether, the album is no big deal. Just for the sakes of ʽHold Your Head Upʼ and no big gaffes other than the final suite, I'd give it a weak thumbs up — but it has to be understood that the Zombies link has been sawn through, with no tra­ces of the elegant baroque-pop of old in sight; and the new directions are, at most, okay when they are backed up with solid hooks (be it vocal, as on ʽHold Your Head Upʼ, or instrumental, as on ʽBe My Loverʼ), and, at worst, quite pointless (the whole ʽPure Loveʼ suite). From here begins the swift decline of the briefly mighty Argent — a band that bravely sacrificed its steady position on a small island of a well-established style by diving head first into the ocean of limitless mu­si­cal possibilities. And sinking right down to the bottom, more or less.

 

IN DEEP (1973)

 

1) God Gave Rock And Roll To You; 2) It's Only Money (part 1); 3) It's Only Money (part 2); 4) Losing Hold; 5) Be Glad; 6) Christmas For The Free; 7) Candles On The River; 8) Rosie.

 

Strange album cover, if you ask me. Of course, it's Hipgnosis and all, but I know what is my first reaction: «Oh, hello, Mr. Argent. Going... down?» And indeed, the figure on the front sleeve is captured in a fairly uncomfortable position — matching the music, which, by now, is also begin­ning to feel somewhat strained. Or, perhaps, not so much «strained» as «misplaced» — just as the band was finally getting a grip on the progressive stylistics, the stylistics itself was slowly getting on the nerves of the musical community. In Deep never went as deep as the notorious prog-rockers were going in 1973, and thus, was doubly doomed: too lightweight, primitive, and even «regressive» for defenders of the faith, yet too pompous, long-winded, and unfocused for the modest, undemanding pop consumers.

 

It charted, at least. But at what cost? Since their previous hit record was ʽHold Your Head Upʼ, it was assumed that the follow-up should also be anthemic — and ʽGod Gave Rock And Roll To Youʼ becomes the most blatantly Bick-flicking power vehicle in the band's career. Admittedly, it is nowhere near as cheesy as the KISS cover two decades later, because it wasn't really conceived or executed in the «glam» idiom. It's got plenty of tasteful organ work, an elegant bass line, a pretty baroque chime-filled interlude, and bits of genuinely beautiful harmony arrangements. Still, most people will not fall for all these flourishes — they'll go straight ahead to the Monster Riff and the tribal incantation of "GOD GAVE ROCK'N'ROLL TO YOU, PUT IT IN THE SOUL OF EVERYONE!" At this point, I'd rather save my tears (and lighter fuel) for a different purpose — I always thought it was Chuck Berry who gave me rock'n'roll, and I do not exactly recollect see­ing a holy aureole around it when it was given. Honestly, I rarely take this crap from Freddie Mercury — why should I take it from Russ Ballard?

 

There is far more grit and actual rock'n'roll in the two-part blues-rock suite ʽIt's Only Moneyʼ, occupying the bulk of Side A and giving the impression that Ballard is now dominating all the songwriting. The first part in particular is quite heavy, riff-based, slightly funky, pierced with flashy bullying guitar and organ solos, whereas the second is a little more laid back, veering to­wards rowdy, but well-meaning pub-rock. But there is a standard problem — Argent is not a hard rock band, and its «brutal» mode simply cannot stand competition even with the likes of contem­porary Budgie, let alone the mega-popular heavy metal monsters.

 

The bad news is that the Argent/White team is also starting to lose steam. Of the two contributed ballads, ʽLosing Holdʼ is a rather sterile power thing that tries to get by on the strength of a «mas­sive» coda, in which a tiny recorder painfully tries to outsing a simplistic, but loud wall-of-sound — nice, but a better mix couldn't hurt. ʽChristmas For The Freeʼ is relatively more listenable and beautifully sung, yet it is such a blatant take on the «McCartney piano ballad» style that it is al­most impossible not to throw it on the same shelf with ʽLet It Beʼ and ʽMaybe I'm Amazedʼ — which it conveniently misses, landing instead on the same shelf with second-rate Elton John compositions. (But the vocals are gorgeous, I guarantee).

 

Then there are the two complex epics — ʽBe Gladʼ and ʽCandles On The Riverʼ. They are pro­bably the main reason to care about the album at all, although ʽCandlesʼ also suffers from exces­sive heaviness and too much pathos in the vocals; I place most of my personal trust in the piano-dominated ʽBe Gladʼ, with its merry martial rhythms, classical/boogie piano interludes where Argent keeps switching from Mozart to Fats Domino as naturally as if the two were graduates of the same music college. This is a genuinely inspiring piece, fully deserving an eight-minute run­ning time. But there is no explaining why nothing else on the album really sounds like it — pro­bably the misguided result of trying to get a more «commercial» gloss.

 

Unlike most listeners, I think that the barroom rock of Ballard's ʽRosieʼ forms a suitably «defla­ting» conclusion to the album — if one takes it that way, as a light, relaxating slide from the stuffiness of ʽCandlesʼ, rather than one more of the band's questionable «sure we can rock'n'roll with the sim­ple people» statements. But it certainly does not remedy the general feeling: flashes of brilliance aside, In Deep generally feels lost in space (or, rather, in deep waters). I would still award it an ever weakening thumbs up, since there is only one significant lapse of taste, and the actual songs range from incidental greatness (ʽBe Gladʼ) to listenable above-mediocrity (most of the rest). But the curve is clearly past its peak, and descending at an alarming rate.

 

NEXUS (1974)

 

1) The Coming Of Kohoutek; 2) Once Around The Sun; 3) Infinite Wanderer; 4) Love; 5) Music From The Spheres; 6) Thunder And Lightning; 7) Keeper Of The Flame; 8) Man For All Reasons; 9) Gonna Meet My Maker.

 

The last Argent/Ballard studio collaboration is generally quite underrated, I think. It yielded no hit singles whatsoever, sank on the charts, directly preceded the loss of a key member and only rose as high as two stars on the All-Music Guide — most probably, rated according to its histori­cal trajectory rather than actual song quality. It ain't no masterpiece, for sure, but it's hardly worse than In Deep — in some respects, it might even be better.

 

Band members are usually known to quit because of ego conflicts, yet it would be hard to suspect an ego conflict on Nexus: the balance here is tilted significantly towards Argent on Side A, then leans to the other side with the flip of the turntable. Lovers of Argent's brand of pompous hard rock will be placated with two heavy numbers, but Russ also shows his sentimental side on the minimastically titled ʽLoveʼ, and a new-found passion for Scottish martial music on ʽMan For All Reasonsʼ. In the meantime, Mr. «Hot Rod» Argent gets ever more and more progressive, with two long, complex, baroque-soaked suites (one of them fully instrumental) and yet another self-elevating anthem — after ʽI Am The Dance Of Agesʼ, comes ʽKeeper Of The Flameʼ.

 

All the usual caveats, reprimands, and honors alike apply to Nexus as well. ʽThe Coming Of Kohoutekʼ will be seen as a triumph of creativity and emotion by some, as a pretentious deriva­tive bore by others. I think it deserves credit at least for the wide variety of tricks it pulls together. There are overwhelmingly pompous, «imperial» synthesizer parts, light atmospheric guitar jams à la mid-period Floyd, Bach-derived organ interludes, Chopin-esque piano rolls, and a couple ag­gressive synth / organ / guitar climaxes that The Comet of Kohoutek might have enjoyed, had it actual ears to hear. On the other hand, everything is a little too limp and restrained to properly re­flect such a kick-ass-tral force. Enjoying is one thing, getting overwhelmed is another.

 

Therefore, I would say that the real highlight of the album is ʽMusic From The Spheresʼ, a com­position that does not try to invoke the feeling of Absolute Might, but instead plays out like an extended fairy dance — a jazz/classical hybrid driven by Rod's high-pitched melody, always stay­ing on the right end of the keyboard until the effect becomes almost hypnotic: the three-minute long coda brings a new meaning to the word «repetitive», but if you play it long enough in the dark, you might eventually start seeing little musical fireflies hopping under your nose. In the good tradition of ʽLothlorienʼ and particularly ʽBe Gladʼ, the song once again gives us Rod Ar­gent as an illusionist-mesmerizer, his best emploi in his prog years.

 

Ballard, in the meantime, is dreaming of giving his muscular rockers a religious flavor — ʽThun­der And Lightningʼ would hardly be out of place on a Manowar album, what with its GENUINE THUNDER INTRODUCTION, echoey electric current-imitating synths and guitars, and, of course, Mr. Ballard himself, screeching and bellowing like the great Thor himself. It would be utterly awful if the chorus weren't catchy, and the arrangement weren't so creative. As it is, «hi­larious» is more like it. On the other hand, ʽGonna Meet My Makerʼ is slower, more stately, ba­sed on a simple and memorable blues riff of a ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ-threatening quality, but never seems to decide whether it really wants to be a commanding Old Testament-oriented blues-rocker, or an operatic performance — Ballard's vocals clearly veer towards the latter, and this, again, gives the whole thing a sort of pre-Meatloaf sheen that I find irritating.

 

Nevertheless, even the worst stuff is still interesting, in one way or another, and Nexus certainly does not feel like the end of the road — the band is literally bursting with ideas, good, bad, or otherwise. It's just that the audience for these ideas is steadily dwindling: in 1974, the commercial appeal of Ne­xus was close to zero (way before the punk revolution), and Ballard was no longer content to «waste his talents» by pandering to Rod's artistic ambitions. In fact, listening to ʽThun­der And Lightningʼ, you can almost sense the man's potential dissatisfaction with how the band treated the song — instead of concentrating on its heaviness and «thunderous» attack, Argent keeps pushing wimpy synths, spoiling its hit potential. (Never mind the emerging subtlety — in the mid-1970s, subtlety did not translate well into fame and revenue).

 

I could be imagining things here, but facts are facts: Ballard quit soon after the recording of Ne­xus, making it the last «genuine» album by Argent as a band — the next few efforts would be completely dominated by Rod. Despite its ambiguity and occasional cheesiness, it still gets a thumbs up. Besides, it's always fun to encounter obscure records titled after Latin metaphorical terms. And they did it first! Gene Harris only released his own Nexus in 1975!

 

ENCORE (1974)

 

1) The Coming Of Kohoutek; 2) It's Only Money (part 1); 3) It's Only Money (part 2); 4) God Gave Rock And Roll To You; 5) Thunder And Lightning; 6) Music From The Spheres; 7) I Don't Believe In Miracles; 8) I Am The Dance Of Ages; 9) Keep On Rollin'; 10) Hold Your Head Up; 11) Time Of The Season.

 

This seems to have mostly been a «stopgap» record — a live album released to keep the record company happy while the band was regrouping after the loss of Ballard. But since Argent was, after all, a «prog»-type outfit, and the live album was appropriately double, the whole thing was very much in the spirit of the time. Perhaps, were Argent on the same scale of notoriety as Yes and ELP, they would have been allowed a triple format?

 

The setlist here concentrates almost exclusively on three of the band's latest albums, completely ignoring Argent and Ring Of Hands — and generally concentrating on the longest, loudest, and most pompous of the band's compositions, downplaying their «poppier» side. In this context, the weak, unconvincing call of «let's get it on and boogie!» that rings out towards the end of the set, with ʽKeep On Rollinʼ, is a relative disappointment, even though Ballard throws on a frantic Chuck Berry-style guitar solo that the original studio version never knew. It's one of these tri­butary ges­tures that way too many «artsy» bands of the 1970s engaged in, just to show the world that they never hung up their rock'n'roll shoes, and it was almost never credible, regardless of whether it came from good bands like ELO or horrible ones like Uriah Heep.

 

On the other hand, credible or not, five minutes of basic rock'n'roll can still work as a brainchar­mer after three full sides of heavy and/or symphonic art-rock showpieces. And it may not sound nice, but Rod is simply not a very interesting live player. In the studio, it is his compositions, sense of taste, and overall creativity that has always attracted me over Ballard's; but live, it is the Russ show all the way as long as Russ is on that way. ʽThe Coming Of Kohoutekʼ remains faith­ful to the original and nothing more; but ʽMusic From The Spheresʼ, for instance, is hopelessly spoiled by the band's inability to recreate the «cosmic kaleidoscope» of sounds in the coda — Ballard sets a thick, effects-laden guitar tone that smears the whole feeling, and Rod's keyboards are lost in the background.

 

ʽI Am The Dance Of Agesʼ and ʽHold Your Head Upʼ are both extended with lengthy solo parts, played consecutively on Rod's array of Mellotrons, Hammonds, and Moogs. Neither of these parts is particularly inspiring: perhaps they should have left the extra space for ʽBe Gladʼ or a couple more heavy guitar rockers like ʽBe My Loverʼ. Thus, it's up to Ballard to keep the energy flowing on ʽIt's Only Moneyʼ and ʽThunder And Lightningʼ. For the record, he also performs a non-Argent song: ʽI Don't Believe In Miraclesʼ, a soft-rock hit he wrote for Colin Blunstone's Ennismore album from 1972. It isn't very good. Too much pathos set to weak hooks.

 

You'd think that, perhaps, in order to heat up the public interest, Argent would agree to perfor­ming a good deal of old Zombies material — at least the real old hits like ʽShe's Not Thereʼ, stuff that certainly wasn't considered «dead and gone» by the mid-Seventies. But the only Zombies song here is ʽTime Of The Seasonʼ, recast in a hard-rocking mood, with a lengthy screeching gui­tar intro and a very rough coating, compared to the smooth studio original. They do it as the final encore — implying that, perhaps, quite a few people came to the show in hopes of hearing it — but that's the only nod to any kind of past that precedes 1972.

 

Which is too bad, because it means that Encore, Argent's only official live document, does not provide a comprehensive picture of the band — they were more than creators of lengthy second-hand instrumental suites and sprawling heavy rock anthems; their pop sensibility, one of their strongest sides, remains almost completely unseen. Encore deserves to be heard — the songs are good, the performances aren't rote — and so it gets a thumbs up, but there's no rush. This is not one of the decade's great live art-rock albums, like Yessongs or Jethro Tull's Burstin' Out. It is merely admirable for showing how a band that is clearly more comfortable in the studio can still honestly get away with giving a good time to a live audience.

 

CIRCUS (1975)

 

1) Circus; 2) Highwire; 3) Clown; 4) Trapeze; 5) Shine On Sunshine; 6) The Ring; 7) The Jester.

 

So Ballard is out, replaced by not one, but two guitarists — John Grimaldi and John Verity, and thus begins the final, very brief, stage of Argent, almost completely ignored by history. Only one of the band's last two albums has so far been released on CD, and even so, finding it is quite a treat. Unjustly: Circus is really as fine a record as Rod could produce under the circumstances. Working almost alone, with a little help from bassist Jim Rodford (who wrote ʽTrapezeʼ), having to sing much of the material himself, but still refusing to move in overtly commercial directions — and still displaying plenty of inspiration.

 

As you can see from the song titles, Circus is sort of a concept album, but in a very loose sense. The lyrics use various circus metaphors to convey all sorts of points ("I'm on a highwire, baby, moving far above the ground... I'm on a wheel of fire, spilling my breath into the ground..."), and the music, as far as I can tell, features no circus-related themes whatsoever. If you are nervous about the prospect of hearing a bunch of «creative variations» on ʽEntry Of The Gladiatorsʼ, be relieved — these songs have no comic overtones, most of this stuff is grimly serious, but not tre­mendously convoluted progressive rock.

 

With Ballard's testosterone-drenched rock anthems out of the picture, something had to take their place, and the band finds new inspiration in the world of «art-funk» and even «jazz fusion». Both of the long epic pieces, ʽHighwireʼ and ʽTrapezeʼ, particularly the latter (ʽHighwireʼ is still more of a «symph-prog» composition overall), feature lots of syncopated bass, fusion piano, and even shredding-type guitar solos from the new guitarists — all sorts of stuff that one can see, for in­stance, on contemporary Soft Machine albums.

 

Both compositions suffer from clumsy, cluttered structuring and lack of individual identity: there are instrumental passages that resemble each other more than they should, and if the band actually decided to stick them together as one eight­een minute-long composition, I'm sure nobody would really mind. But it would be a fun eighteen minute-long composition. The vocal melodies are original and sometimes even catchy, Rod plays everything in sight — electric pianos, organs, Mellotrons, synthesizers — and some of these guitar solos are damn, damn good. And the circus metaphors add a little bit of purpose: you don't get to perceive the tracks as «just» lengthy fusion jams. The instrumental battles sort of symbolize the ongoing battle of life the same way as the «highwire» and «trapeze» metaphors. Ah well.

 

Of the shorter songs, ʽClownʼ is a serious highlight — a solemn ballad that returns us to Argent's baroque pop sensibilities; although its main leading arpeggiated piano line is rather generic, the whole combination (majestic piano, gorgeous vocal part, «heavenly» harmonies, psycho-fusion-esque synth solo, etc.) works very well. And yes, the clown is sad. If there is any sort of a humo­rous relief on the entire record, it only comes at the end — ʽThe Jesterʼ is a bouncy, light, but «progressified» music-hall number whose merry piano-banging is only slightly offset by the ac­companying «astral» synth parts and a brief, sharp blues-rock solo.

 

All said, the simple music lover inside myself still regards the only «non-circus» track on the record, the lovely-lovely ballad ʽShine On Sunshineʼ, as its highest point — one of the greatest McCartney piano ballads that McCartney never wrote. Peaceful, humble, memorable, and the falsetto harmonies are killer. The fact that even Rod himself must have regarded it as one of his finest creations has now been directly confirmed by the re-recording with Colin Blunstone on vocals on the latest «Zombies reunion» album — a recording vastly inferior to the original, strip­ped almost completely of its warm, cuddly charm. By all means, seek out the old version with Rod himself on vocals: the masterpiece.

 

Summing up, Circus shows that the band did get up on its feet after the loss of Ballard. The fact that it did not last too long on those feet has everything to do with technical matters — lack of promotion, decrease of demand for that kind of music, an intentionally anti-commercial stand — and almost nothing to do with the quality of the music. Except that, as each and every Argent al­bum, Circus is not tremendously original, and, as usual, you can get all of its separate elements (Yes-like symph-prog, Soft Machine-like fusion, McCartney-like balladry, etc.) in various better known, better promoted, and, let's admit it, usually better executed packages. But in some res­pects, it is still a unique synthesis, fully deserving of a thumbs up.

 

COUNTERPOINTS (1975)

 

1) On My Feet Again; 2) I Can't Remember, But Yes; 3) Time; 4) Waiting For The Yellow One; 5) It's Fallen Off; 6) Be Strong; 7) Rock & Roll Show; 8) Butterfly; 9) Road Back Home.

 

The band moved to RCA for their next album, but the new deal never helped: not only was Cou­n­terpoints to become their epitaph, but, so far, it is the only Argent album that has consistently avoided a CD re-issue. So bear with me — I had to listen to it as a mediocre vinyl rip, plagued with skips and crackles, and whether that circumstance has in any way colored my judgement, you won't ever know until you hear it for yourself... but, on the other hand, I cannot honestly recommend the record, especially considering that it requires hunting for, so here we are, locked in a vicious circle over an album that doesn't deserve getting locked upon.

 

Generally, Counterpoints expands upon the «fusion» inklings of Circus, with a lot of the focus taken away from Rod's keyboard-directed landscapes and placed upon the band's rhythmic drive and frenzied jazz guitar soloing. Why they thought this could ever become the right road to fol­low is beyond me: Argent's primary source of inspiration had always been classical motives, not hard bop, and by the mid-Seventies, fusion was so well established that they could never even begin to hope to make a dent in the market. Who wants to see Argent turn into Weather Report? Probably the same people who'd expect Horowitz to start playing ʽBlue Monkʼ.

 

The album starts out with a weak promise: ʽOn My Feet Againʼ is an optimistic pop rocker with a pretty McCartney-like sentimental prelude. It is not sharp or powerful enough, on its own, to con­vince us that the band is on its feet again, but it does introduce the possibility. And then, starting with the second track and almost all the way to the end, we learn that «back on their feet» means «competing with Jeff Beck and Alan Holdsworth, because that is what all the creative people in the business should be betting their dollars on». Well, technically, the songs are passable, but I cannot say that they add anything interesting to the set of technical and mood tricks already im­plemented by masters of the genre. Grimaldi's and Verity's speedy guitar runs sometimes reach actual ignition, but there's a good reason for most people not associating the jazz-rock fusiom movement with the «Grimaldi/Verity duet» — they are copycats, not true creators. Fun fact: on some of the tracks, due to drummer Bob Henrit's unexpected illness, Phil Collins himself is sit­ting in: no wonder a few of the tracks have a «Brand X» feel to them. (My strongest guess is the instrumental ʽIt's Fallen Offʼ, which you could indeed sneak on a Brand X album without anyone taking serious notice). But it isn't a big consolation.

 

And thus, after twenty five minutes of passable, mildly listenable, generally unmemorable fid­dling about (including at least one «mini-epic», called ʽTimeʼ because there were too few songs called ʽTimeʼ written by 1975, and at least one limp, unconvincing «anti-rocker» called ʽRock & Roll Showʼ), we get to ʽRoad Back Homeʼ, a soulful ballad on which Rod's own honey voice does everything in its power to seduce you into thinking that nothing has really changed — that Argent are still a band that values traditional melodicity and sweet vocal modulation over jazzy-schmazzy finger-flashing and tricky percussion figures.

 

But the seduction is not working. Even ʽRoad Back Homeʼ itself is still built on a bass foundation that we'd rather be hearing from Jaco Pastorius, and besides, one ballad don't remedy no jazz-fusion show. Counterpoints is true enough to its title — it's an album that makes no points, only counterpoints; the only album in Argent's catalog that has very little reason to exist. If it had even one master­piece of a ballad, of the same caliber as ʽShine On Sunshineʼ, things might have been different. But it hasn't. (Actually, there is one more ballad: ʽWaiting For The Yellow Oneʼ con­ti­nues Rod's heliophilia subject, with intricate vocal overdubs but little in the way of hooks).

 

Predictably, the album did not sell at all, which led to the band's dissipation — according to some sources, Rod simply dumped the rest of the guys, tired of it all (some of the members, like bassist Jim Rod­ford and drummer Bob Henrit, went on to work with late-period Kinks). Too bad: I do not regard Counterpoints as a «loss-of-steam» for the band, rather as just an unhappy, thumbs down-worthy, move in a completely inappropriate direction. But sometimes, once you start mo­ving the wrong way, you just end up stuck there. It's a brain thing. Difficult to understand.

 

MOVING HOME (1978)

 

1) Home; 2) Silence; 3) I'm In The Mood; 4) Summer; 5) No. 1; 6) Tenderness; 7) Pastorius Mentioned; 8) Well, Well, Well!; 9) Smiling; 10) Recollection.

 

This is NOT an «Argent» album; it is a «Rod Argent» album, his first official solo project, after which he retreated into session work shadows for a whole decade. Technically speaking, this should certainly not have gone under the «Argent» session; but factually, it is not all that far re­moved from Circus and Counterpoints, and there is always room for a little cheating — in a way, Moving Home is not so much a new beginning for Rod as an album that, on the contrary, closes the book that was started in 1969. Hardly on one of its more interesting pages, but still, gi­ven the circumstances, it could have been much worse.

 

The legacy of Argent (the band) is all over this album: lush balladry, portentous attitudes, and jazz-fusion textures are on every track, sometimes even all of them at the same time. But there is no drive to make a really big statement. Even when things get «pompous», it is a homely sort of pomp, never backed with mighty crescendos or lots of physical force applied to the instruments. You'd think that on an album where Rod Argent is responsible for the keys, Phil Collins for the drums, and Gary Moore for the guitars, testosterone would be running high on a permanent basis — wrong! Even Moore mostly sticks to acoustic playing.

 

Naturally, if you are all set on making a «homely» album, conveying a peacefully tranquilizing mes­sage, you will probably be more successful with the «ballad» rather than the «rocker» form of things. So the only track here that could be called a minor classic, and deserves inclusion on any collective Zombies/Argent anthology, is ʽHomeʼ itself, with a nice, soulful vocal part and almost gospel harmonies in the background. Synthesizers are used as a substitute for strings and church organ at the same time, and produce a fine effect — unlike so many other songs here, where, un­fortunately, the selected keyboard tones mostly range from boring to stupid.

 

For instance, ʽSilenceʼ is a potentially decent upbeat art-pop song, hopelessly spoilt by a moronic «bubbling» synth bass line and several layers of electronic keyboards where pianos and older-fashioned Mellotrons could have worked much more effectively. The same keyboards also spoil large parts of the fusion-esque instrumentals (ʽNo. 1ʼ, ʽRecollectionʼ), and occasionally poison the fun in other places. All of which is strange, because, up to this point, Rod seems to have ex­ercised good taste and restraint in his complex mix of acoustic, electric, and digital instruments. Here, every now and then he seems to be losing his head, going crazy over some new electronic toy or other. This prevents me from taking Moving Home too seriously.

 

Another bad piece of news is that most of the «energetic» compositions never really come toge­ther. The «modern jazz» number ʽI'm In The Moodʼ wastes some pretty nimble Phil Collins per­cussion over a piece that tries to present Rod as some sort of jazz pro, but come on now, who are you kidding. And I was subtly hoping that ʽWell, Well, Wellʼ could turn out to be a John Lennon cover, but it is a completely original piece of piano-driven funk aiming for a «badass» attitude (the lyrics seem to be a harsh attack on musical criticism) that fails completely — Rod could ne­ver sing or play «badass-wise» even if his life depended on it. I mean, I have no idea: in real life, it is theoretically possible that he can punch his fist through a brick wall without feeling pain, but there was hardly a time when he could believably vent his frustration on record.

 

So, once all the nits have been picked and squeezed out, this leaves us with ʽHomeʼ, ʽSummerʼ (not a very memorable, but a very cute-sounding piano ballad with «aethereal» vocals), and ʽTen­dernessʼ — decent, medium-fast moving Brit-pop reminiscent of classic ELO. And while, on the negative end, the inclusion of  the ridiculous ʽSmilingʼ is a serious incentive for a negative rating (calypso should be left to calypso artists, period), on the whole, this is one of those classic «on-the-borderline» thumbs up cases when there is very little to love, very little to hate, but the final feeling hovers around «well, that was kinda cute» rather than «Jesus Christ, life is way too short to waste it in such a pointless manner».

 

As it happens, Moving Home is that final part of the slide when the journey still goes on, but the speed is decelerating and the feet are already drag­ging on the ground. Worth owning by Rod fans, but it is quite understandable that the guy went on a lengthy hiatus in its wake — because, want it or not, everything that could be said had already been said, so why say it again?

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE BBC SESSIONS (1970-1973; 1997)

 

1) Rejoice; 2) Where Are We Going Wrong?; 3) Cast Your Spell Uranus; 4) Tragedy; 5) Keep On Rolling; 6) Hold Your Head Up; 7) Liar; 8) Rejoice; 9) Keep On Rolling; 10) Tragedy; 11) It's Only Money (part 1); 12) It's Only Money (part 2); 13) God Gave Rock'n' Roll To You.

 

Coincidentally, I am writing about this CD exactly one day after reviewing The BBC Sessions by the Beatles — and what I said about that easily applies to this: the «BBC live album» is a genre in itself, an interesting curiosity that is neither here nor there, most often falling in the cracks be­tween a properly engineered studio creation and a «genuine» live album, equally lacking the supposed perfection of the former and the supposed raw excitement of the latter.

 

Granted, in the case of Argent the difference between a proper live album, like Encore, and a «BBC album» is not as well pronounced as in the case of the Beatles or the Who: with Rod favo­ring the «progressive» formula, the basic idea was to simply play live with the same level of technicality, detail, and finesse, as in the studio. But even so, Encore showed some room for re­arrangements, improvisation, and kick-ass rock'n'roll. We had Russ Ballard throw in a raunchy, distorted boogie-woogie guitar solo on ʽKeep On Rollinʼ, for instance — no signs of which ap­pear on either of the two versions of this song recorded for the BBC.

 

And they did not vary the approach in between the sessions, either: the two versions of ʽTragedyʼ, the band's most dedicated attempt to do something in the «Epic Funk» style, are pretty much in­terchangeable, which begs for the obvious question — and certain alternate semi-official releases from the archives show that Argent did do other songs live at the BBC (at least ʽBe My Lover, Be My Friendʼ, ʽSweet Maryʼ, as well as Nexus-era material appear on these releases), so, apparent­ly, someone at the BBC must have been a big fan of Ballard's funk and Rod's honky-tonk.

 

The most interesting selection here is a performance of ʽLiarʼ, probably the only selection from Argent that ended up on a live record. It is a bit louder here, with a bigger drum sound and a brawnier vocal and instrumental part from Russ, including a little screaming and a little wah-wah guitar solo. Possibly influenced by the 1970 Three Dog Night cover — which took the song's hooks, dropped the song's humble subtlety and made it accessible and acceptable by a more ge­neral audience at the expense of you-know-what. So it's interesting to see Argent give a nod to their competitors, but a little humiliating as well.

 

On the positive side, I was never a big fan of Argent's production style on the studio albums — constantly laden with echos, sometimes poorly mixed, etc., and some of these BBC arrange­ments do sound clearer and sharper than their studio counterparts: the opening funk rhythms on ʽTra­gedyʼ, for instance, hit much harder here than on All Together Now, where they seem rather muff­led. Serious fans of the band will definitely want to hear the songs this way and decide for themselves, which particular approach to the sound suits the refined Argent fan better.

 

But on the whole, the package will be neither fully satisfactory for completists (who would pro­bably rather see a larger, maybe a 2-CD, release with all the missing songs included), nor ne­ces­sary for non-completists. An un-enthusiastic thumbs up here.

ARTHUR BROWN

THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN (1968)

 

1) Prelude/Nightmare; 2) Fanfare/Fire Poem; 3) Fire; 4) Come And Buy; 5) Time/Confusion; 6) I Put A Spell On You; 7) Spontaneous Apple Creation; 8) Rest Cure; 9) I've Got Money; 10) Child Of My Kingdom.

 

Arthur Brown was a fairly crazy freak, even for the high standards of 1967, when he was arguab­ly Syd Barrett's biggest competition in the «so deliciously outrageous» department. For one thing, he had a really dangerous fire fetish, next to which Jimi's guitar-burning antics were elementary childplay — the culmination of the live show involved Arthur performing in a burning helmet (which resulted in more than one nasty hairburn, on several occasions). For another, his stage cos­tumes and makeup pre-dated the «glam explosion» by a good three or four years — in 1967, all that gear was so unusual that it could still genuinely scare people, tightly binding Brown to the «underground» scene. By the time that outlandish stage shows became truly popular, Arthur was already out of vogue — but one could argue that, perhaps, without Arthur Brown, there would have been no David Bowie or Alice Cooper, either.

 

Third and most important, although Brown was never really an accomplished music-writer, he did have the knack of attracting those kinds of people. And if the first and only officially released LP of his most famous project, «The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown», can still be enjoyed today, it is only due to near-perfect chemistry between Arthur and his chief musical mate, keyboard play­er Vincent Crane — who was even nuttier than Brown himself, but also happened to be an excellent musician and composer. If, seduced by the excesses, temptations, and virtues of The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, you start digging into the rest of Arthur's chaotic catalog and end up wondering why so little in it stands up to the same standards, remember the rule: Arthur Brown's albums are generally only as good as the people who contribute to them besides Arthur. He's got the personality and charisma all right, but writing songs comes hard to the guy.

 

This classic record from 1968, though, sounds anything but forced, derivative, or uninspired. Produced by no less than Pete Townshend himself (he is listed as «associate producer» next to Kit Lambert, the Who's manager, as chief producer, but the two always worked together anyway), it collects the cream of the cream of Brown's stage repertoire, honed and perfected throughout 1967, and still remains not just one of the first examples of full-fledged «rock theater», but also one of the best — if only because, behind all of its superficial silliness, there really hides a world of actual madness. Delve deep enough into it, and you just might release the Nameless Terror.

 

Brown's basic idea was to combine the world of classic American R'n'B, with its connections to spi­ritual ecstasy, with fashionable psychedelic and overall modern-art trends of the day — he was as well versed in European cinema and theater as he was in James Brown, and he seemed quite preoccupied about unlocking the commonalities between the two. There is even an actual James Brown cover here (ʽI've Got Moneyʼ), and it's fairly good: Brown was one of the few R'n'B sin­gers of his day who was not afraid to just completely let go when it came to singing / vocalizing, and his set of pipes was strong enough to compete with the master on his own terms.

 

Of course, of all the classic R'n'B figures one would imagine Brown's favorite to be Screamin' Jay Hawkins — the original «horror show icon» of the genre — and, expectedly so, ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ is covered here in all of its glory; coincidentally, the same year that Creedence Clearwater Revival put out their version. But Fogerty, as excellent as his vocal performance was, seemed more intent on exploring the potential of the song's musical groove, with an extended guitar solo part swallowing the bulk of the song; here, the music, dominated, as always, by Crane's organ, takes a backseat to Brown's «bigger-than-life» performance. Maybe to some people his imperso­nation of a mentally disbalanced voodoo priest here will seem overblown, caricaturesque, and ut­terly phony, but I think there's a pinch of comic self-irony here somewhere, and that's enough to make it work for me. (Plus, Crane's bluesy organ work, reminiscent of Alan Price's style on the early Animals records, is in great taste as well).

 

However, these are really just excourses on an album of mostly original compositions — dealing with nightmares, obsessions, hallucinations, lust, madness, and, above all, fire, fire, FIRE! The entire first side is about fire, for that matter (the heat only goes down a little by the time we hit ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ), and if the flame-soaked lyrics aren't enough, then the sizzling vocals of Mr. Brown and the unusually dry, crackling organ tone of Mr. Crane will do the job. The one undying classic, still occasionally recycled on classic rock radio, is ʽFireʼ itself, of course, which rocked London and the world to its core with the opening announcement that has since become quite a staple of pop culture — "I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE, AND I BRING YOU... FIRE!" — but the fact is that it's also a fabulously catchy pop song, which, in 1968, sounded like nothing else, because nobody else infused the Hammond organ with that particular sort of crazy voodoo.

 

Above everything else, The Crazy World is diverse: its influences do not stop at basic pop and R'n'B, but involve classical motives (ʽPreludeʼ), improvisational jazz (ʽChild Of My Kingdomʼ), and free-form avantgarde stuff (ʽSpontaneous Apple Creationʼ, quite spontaneous indeed). Most of the songs do serve the same set of purposes / motives that I already listed, but they all try to serve it in different ways. The album's true culmination is really not ʽFireʼ itself, I'd say, but ra­ther ʽCome And Buyʼ, a complex, imaginative, sweaty, sexy suite that has it all: a simple, but mesmerizing two-note bass hook «doubled» by Arthur's vocals, artsy strings ar­rangements, an epic brass-led crescendo, and a vivid impersonation of the protagonist's descent into Hell — yes, all of it years before Alice Cooper straddled the subject, and on a level where the «madness» of the experience weighs heavier on the listener's soul than the «theater» aspect of it.

 

If someone complains that the album goes a bit «over the top», the someone in question is abso­lutely correct — that is the very point of it. Really, few albums since have so arrogantly and out­rageously gone over the top. But when going over the top is combined with great melodies, tech­nical competence, a singer who can belt it out along with the best of 'em without stooping to tri­vial pomp, and a bunch of influences that wide — in this case, going over the top is more than recommended: it is begged for. The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown is a glorious, precious re­lic from a time when an album with the word «crazy» in the title could really mean it, rather than of­fer an entertaining facsimile of the real thing. (Do not try this at home, though, and I don't just mean putting on a burning helmet). Maybe it's really good that people don't do this kind of stuff any more — good for the people, bad for art, that is, since real art is, after all, mostly just a nice way to profit from your own craziness. But hey, better this than the Manson Family, right? Thumbs up, no further questions asked.

 

GALACTIC ZOO DOSSIER (1971)

 

1) Internal Messenger; 2) Space Plucks; 3) Galactic Zoo; 4) Metal Monster; 5) Simple Man; 6) Night Of The Pigs; 7) Sunrise; 8) Trouble; 9) Brains; 10) Medley: Galactic Zoo / Space Plucks / Galactic Zoo; 11) Creep; 12) Creation; 13) Gypsy Escape; 14) No Time.

 

As Vincent Crane broke up with Brown to pursue his own preferred trail of madness that would lead him to Atomic Rooster, a variety of mental institutions and, finally, an overdose of pain­killers, Arthur was left without an anchor, and, for a while, floated here and there without much success or purpose. The next anchor ultimately arrived in the guise of one Andy Dalby, a wander­ing guitarist with impressive chops and (presumably) some songwriting abilities. In between the two, Brown and Dalby formed Kingdom Come, later to be known as «Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come», to distinguish it from still another Kingdom Come — which is why their records will be covered here in the Arthur Brown section and not under K. In any case, Kingdom Come was even more of a Brown-controlled vision than Crazy World, where artistic duties were distributed more or less equally between Brown and Crane.

 

By the time the band, consisting of Brown, Dalby, and a «revolving door»-type variety of rhythm sections, keyboardists, and what-not, had taken its first shape, prog and glam were the hottest new thangs around, and Brown was perfectly willing to cash in on the fad, not the least because, after all, he was the godfather of both, to some extent. But where some people went for «prog», con­centrating on the complexity of the music and somewhat downplaying the stage image, and others went for «glam», dazzling audiences with super-eccentric rock theater tricks, Brown decided to go for both at the same time. His would be a «rock theater extraordinaire for the advanced music lover» — something that is already reflected a bit in the first album title of Kingdom Come: Galactic Zoo Dossier is a title way too posh even for Yes or Genesis, and way too tongue-twis­ted even for David Bowie.

 

Conceptually, there is one big problem with Kingdom Come: for this project, Brown attempted to take himself and his fantasies more seriously than he used to in 1968, when he was just a delici­ous madman in a burning helmet, using fire as a simple allegory for you-know-what. The three albums of Kingdom Come, on the other hand, have been said to constitute a conceptual triptich of sorts, where Brown is supposed to deal with Humanity, Mortality, Animality, Spirituality, Mora­li­ty, and Paranormality. Problem is — when you have a guy who, just three years ago, declared himself to be the god of hellfire, it is highly unlikely that people will want to take any of his sub­sequent messages with the same degree of seriousness as he might claim to have invested in them. Certainly not if he continues to deliver them in the same overwrought, over-the-top, bombastic manner with schizophrenic overtones. In short, there is a good reason why people chose to have Roger Waters and David Gilmour as their mentors, and mostly ignore Arthur Brown.

 

Galactic Zoo Dossier, therefore, was doomed from the start — «serious» music listeners passed it by due to too much eccentricity and whimsy, while the less patient listeners, naturally, found nothing that could qualify as an instantaneously memorable hit. The one track here that comes pretty close to the demands of 1970's rock radio is ʽSunriseʼ — a slow, stately, epic that democra­tically alternates between Brown's prophetic hair-in-the-wind wailings and a series of melodic guitar solos that eventually shoot up to glam-rock heaven. But even ʽSunriseʼ has little to remem­ber it by other than Brown's singing (which everyone is already familiar with) and Dalby's solo­ing (which is climactic / cathartic / etc., but in a rather textbook-ish blues-rock manner).

 

Everything else is just weird, sometimes for the sake of weirdness, sometimes for the more noble sake of breaking boundaries, but rarely staying in place long enough to «rock» the senses or «pu­rify» the soul. Riffs, jams, solos are constantly interrupted by insane (or inane) dialogs, screaming, electronic effects, phasing, speeding up, moving from channel to channel, disappearing in one place and reappearing in another — like on a particularly crazy Mothers of Invention record, but with less inherent humor, more forced psychedelia.

 

Your overall reaction to the album will probably coincide with the reaction to the first track, which encompasses everything about it — good and bad. Starting off with a minute of stoned dialogs about the Lord and immortality, ʽInternal Messengerʼ sets up what looks like a terrific groove — a big lumbering riffwave crashing on a bedrock of tortured, choking organ chords — only to go on and waste it on one of Brown's pompous «sermons», after which the song turns into a relatively wimpy blues-rock jam, heavy on guitars and organ, but never advancing beyond what many, many other people were capable at the time (remember Steamhammer? well, even if you don't, the second half of this song here still sounds like them).

 

And this problem keeps recurring. Instead of going truly symphonic, like Yes, or radically avant­garde, like King Crimson, these guys play a sort of «ambitiously mad R'n'B» where the themes aren't fleshed out well enough to be emotional stunners and the solos / jams aren't kick-ass or «kick-soul» enough to place the band on the level with first-rate competitors. Case in point: the final «sprawler», ʽGypsy Escapeʼ, a seven-minute musical journey through dirty organ pumping, angry blues-rock licks, signature changes, and mood variation... and what? Nothing. There was no anchor, and the gypsy escapes faster than it takes me to remember him (her?).

 

The album does leave a bizarre aftertaste. Brown's presence, no matter how obnoxious the man can be at times; the desire to try out almost anything that they can lay their hand on in the studio, nostalgically reminiscent of the atmosphere of the early days of the Jimi Hendrix Experience; and the boundless ambition oozing out of every hole — these things command respect. But when it comes to the «meat» department, it turns out that looney madman Vince Crane was a real «meat­man», whereas seemingly sane guitarist Andy Dalby is, on the contrary, just a butcher. As Brown admits himself, "I've had a little intellectual placement in a very near corner of my mind" (ʽSim­ple Manʼ) — well, Galactic Zoo Dossier is right in the middle of that intellectual placement, but transplanting it into intellectual placements for other people turned out to be downright impos­sible, and I think I know why.

 

On the other hand, if you don't think too much about it, but try and let yourself get carried away by the moment — who knows, there might be a nice, thick apocalyptic aura just waiting out there to engulf you. Few people made mad progressive albums in the early 1970s. Bizarre, twisted, yes; idealistic, ambitious, yes; mathematically calculated to reflect Apollonian beauty, for sure. Ga­lac­tic Zoo Dossier, on the other hand, could have been made by Syd Barrett, had he not been consumed by substances so soon, and gone on to develop and improve as a musical artist, instead of just retreating into the dementia. So, all things considered, this is still a unique experience in its own way, and I grudgingly advance it a thumbs up while waiting for the exploding helmet to ar­rive in the mail.

 

KINGDOM COME (1972)

 

1) The Teacher; 2) A Scientific Experiment; 3) The Whirlpool; 4) The Hymn; 5) Water; 6) Love Is (The Spirit That Will Never Die); 7) City Melody; 8) Traffic Light Stop.

 

Galactic Zoo Dossier might have been a mess, but it had promise. This follow-up is quite dis­ap­pointing, since it sort of fails to deliver on that promise. Shedding some of the theatrical grand­ness of its predecessor, it compensates with extra noises, extra nonsense, and a spoonful of bath­room humor masquerading as Artistic Metaphor. I don't know about Tales From Topographic Oceans, but Kingdom Come could just as easily be dubbed one of the reasons punk had to hap­pen — not because rock music had become too complex and intellectualized, but because it had lost its focus. Even Arthur Brown circa 1968 actually used it to say something. God damn me if I have the least idea of what it is he is trying to say here.

 

The first nine and a half minutes of the album are given over to a messy prog/R'n'B hybrid suite which delights in changing its melody every next minute, uses the metaphor of The Teacher to emphasize the fact that Arthur is still trying to open our minds... and heavily invests in lyrical re­ferences to the discharging of liquid and semi-liquid substances, including (warning!) an entire section on the adventures of Arthur's sphincter, set to fart noises, so make sure there aren't any minors in your presence when you are playing this, or the next generation will forever remember Arthur as «that guy who farts on his records», even though he only did it once (I hope).

 

The next to last section of the album, on the other hand, represents some sort of mystical journey through uncharted waters, with Mr. Brown pretending to be the captain and others informing him, over and over again, that he is not. The non-musical parts of it try to be funny and fail, then try to be wise and fail just as well. Basically, there is just too much here: the pot is so thoroughly over­loaded with ingredients that the final result is inedible. ʽCity Melodyʼ, in particular, is a great ex­ample of why «complete musical freedom» should never be praised as the highest of values: three minutes of tight, but not very inspired jamming simply do not form any sensible unity with the other three minutes of sound collages (various city noises). But do listen to this stuff if you have an innate allergy to musique concrète — it might help you gain more love for ʽRevolution #9ʼ, whose apocalyptic streak of sonic terror can be nerve-wrecking, unlike the utterly boring sonic collages of Brown and Co.

 

Which is all too bad, because all the wordy garbage, failed humor, tired collaging, and excessive overdubbing tends to overshadow the fact that, for this album, the band actually took the time to write a small handful of very good songs. ʽThe Hymnʼ and ʽLove Is (The Spirit)ʼ are the most ra­diant joy-senders to come out of the Brown camp, for instance — in fact, their radiance is very much at odds with the far more somber, negatively charged attitude exhibited by Zoo Dossier. Where ʽSunriseʼ was a Brown aria of anger and despair, framed by accordingly virulent guitar so­los, ʽThe Hymnʼ is a Brown aria of unprecedented optimism, framed by accordingly euphoric guitar passages featuring what might probably count as Andy Dalby's best work ever. And ʽLove Is (The Spirit)ʼ is a fine example of an early proto-power-ballad done right — no power chords or high-pitched operatic pathos.

 

Best of the lot is saved for the end, though, if you live long enough to get to it: ʽTraffic Light Songʼ is a mean-and-lean funk jam that manages to stay in place for almost all of its three-minute duration, with just a few seconds, perhaps, of being interrupted by an occasional extraneous piano riff or something. It is a «conceptual» tune, too, of course, because the album begins with «the teacher» conducting a «scientific experiment» by «trying to stimulate the brain of this traffic light» (yes, that should give you a pretty decent idea about whatever it is you might be going to subject yourself to). But that's precisely the point: all things «conceptual» about this record have dated so badly that, for all I know, they might already have seem dated back in 1972 (and they probably were: Frank Zappa was doing this sort of chaotic shit with Absolutely Free as early as 1967, and Brown is no match for Frank when it comes to pushing chaotic shit on the listener). Its melodic side, on the other hand, can still be salvaged from the rubble — except that most people probably will not bother, and I cannot blame them. If it takes sitting through the peripeteia of Arthur Brown's sphincter in order to get through to ʽThe Hymnʼ, one might even be excused for stubbornly sticking to Freddie Mercury.

 

"Let's face it — a sense of humor is a good thing", a reviewer on Amazon said in order to justify the extra silliness of the record. But it depends very much on who we are talking about. Arthur Brown is never truly a «serious» or a «humorous» guy; in all of his avatars, he is primarily «wha­cky», and his «whackiness», almost at every point in his career, interfered with the rest of the message — the only time he truly succeeded in matching it to the rest of the mood and the music was on Crazy World's epochal album. Kingdom Come does have a sense of humor, but crazy guys going funny is not always as humorous as it could seem — genuine humor comes from ra­tional thinking, and there are very few rational things about this record. Still, if your doctor tells you that you are in the process of going ga-ga over the way the real world is treating you, on this record you might just find the perfect soulmate for your condition.

 

JOURNEY (1973)

 

1) Time Captives; 2) Tri­angles; 3) Gypsy; 4) Superficial Roadblocks; 5) Conception; 6) Beginning Of "Spirit Of Joy"; 7) Spirit Of Joy; 8) Come Alive.

 

Kingdom Come's last album was its oddest one, and for that, is a particular favorite among the se­lect few who have chosen to receive their daily dose of truth and light from the likes of Arthur Brown. And I do have to say that, out of all of Arthur's output, Journey is perhaps that one re­cord indeed that might work better out of context than within it. I can imagine people who are not too familiar with Mr. Brown enjoy it more than those who already know him well.

 

To begin with, Journey is often named as the first album ever to rely exclusively on drum machi­nes in the percussion department. If this is true, it was one of those «accidents», like the several in­dependent inventions of hard rock through defective amps that are well documented in history — here, the «accident» was somewhat more trivial in that Kingdom Come, at a certain point, were simply left without a regular drummer, and instead of bothering with session musicians, Arthur and keyboard player Victor Peraino decided to handle all the percussion duties themselves with the aid of the «Bentley Rhythm Ace», an early invention from what would go on to become the Roland Corporation.

 

On the other hand, all the «pssht-pssht» percussion noises here do match the album's atmosphere, which is very different both from the crazy megalomaniac R&B of Zoo Dossier and the comic overtones of Kingdom Come. For some reason, guitarist Andy Dalby retreats into the back­ground and lets Peraino completely dominate the proceedings with the newest wonders of tech­nology: although old-time organs and Mellotrons still occasionally break through the walls, most of the sounds are produced electronically.

 

In a way, that makes Journey almost stupendously ahead of its time — an ice cold, shivery ce­le­b­ra­tion of the robo-digital ideology in pop music that not even Kraftwerk were fully capable of at the time, let alone all the New Wave and synth-pop artists of the times to come. With one excep­tion: it does not really look like there was any conscious effort here to break genre boundaries. Melodically and «ideologically», Journey does not constitute any significant departure from the old style of Kingdom Come. It just so happened that the melodies and ideologies had to be deli­vered through drum machines and synthesizers rather than actual drums and guitars. It could have easily happened otherwise. Is it a good or a bad thing that it didn't?

 

Hard for me to decide. Journey seems to take itself quite seriously, and, as I already said, it is ea­sier to agree with that seriousness for people who have it as their first Arthur Brown experience rather than those who have followed him from the burning helmet days. There is a «global» theme present here — the artist is breaking away from the problem chains of mankind and zoom­ing into open space, a subject for which electronic sounds are, of course, most appropriate, what with their connection to elementary particles of matter and all. But despite the appropriate sounds and the overall coldness, darkness, and «distant» nature of the music, its ability to carry you, the listener, away with it is somewhat questionable (of course, by «you» I mean «me», but who else could I put in the listener's seat? my cat is not much of a pop music fan).

 

In a small part this is because, having inadvertently fallen upon a New Sound, Arthur was so hea­vily seduced by it that he abused it on more than one occasion. ʽTime Captivesʼ, for instance, be­gins with almost an entire minute of nothing but rhythmic electronic percussion counting out time — yes, it ties in with the song's message, but maybe if so much of our time wasn't wasted by lis­tening to an electronic metronome, we could be somewhat less captivated by time? Four of seven songs go over seven minutes without presenting enough melodic content for three — in honest hope of setting your mind under the hypnotic power of the instruments, yet there is nowhere near the care here that, for instance, Pink Floyd would invest into their lengthy atmospheric numbers, meticulously, almost pedantically, alternating build-ups and come-downs. It is true that Journey sounds more calculated than its predecessors, with fewer of those spontaneous, sometimes irrita­ting wannabe-Zappa cuts-off and musical non-sequiturs, but it is still an Arthur Brown album, and that means it might be jumping off the pier any time now.

 

I would also like to add that, contrary to certain reviewers who dared to praise the use of the drum machine here, I personally find it quite dated. In 1973, these sounds were, first and fore­most, weird and otherworldly; today, they are silly and wimpy compared to what the subsequent evolution of electronic percussion has led us to. Likewise, some large chunks on ʽTime Captivesʼ, ʽGypsyʼ, etc., seem more intent on telling us «look at the real cool tone this box of knobs and cords can produce!» than on creating a cosmic mood based on suggestions that the cosmos itself is whispering into the musician's ear. If you know what I'm talking about, that is.

 

But none of this is to say that Journey is worthless — aside from being a genuinely unique al­bum for 1973, a totally out-of-bounds progressive experience for a year already rife with prog watermarks, it does have its share of memorable and inspiring moments. In its second part, ʽGyp­syʼ gains in fury and becomes an unstoppable cosmic rocker (the second song titled ʽGypsyʼ to use the title as a metaphor for space travel — after the Moody Blues). The wild screams, issuing out of the bass-heavy musical jungle of ʽConceptionʼ, still have an ability to shock. And ʽSpirit Of Joyʼ, despite only being three minutes of length, is an excellent attempt at fitting a happy R&B anthem within this tale of frightening cosmic darkness. Perhaps it should have been chosen as the album conclusion, instead of the overlong blues-rocker ʽCome Aliveʼ (where Dalby finally gets to come out with some blazing guitar work, but not for too long).

 

Altogether, Journey, like every other Kingdom Come album, is not a record that I would «trust» — and by «trust» I ultimately mean «enjoy», since it is fairly hard to honestly enjoy an album that one does not trust — but it has enough of puzzles in its sleeve, even coming off its already puzzling two predecessors, to still warrant a thumbs up. On my own cosmic journeys, I prefer to be taken by guys like Hawkwind and their B-movie visions of such things; but if a little bit of musical metaphysics conducted by a drum machine is right up your alley, give it a try by all means. After all, it's never been scientifically proven that Arthur Brown is not the ultimate source of knowledge on the universe.

 

DANCE (1975)

 

1) We've Got To Get Out Of This Place; 2) Helen With The Sun; 3) Take A Chance; 4) Crazy; 5) Hearts And Winds; 6) Dance; 7) Out Of Time; 8) Quietly With Tact; 9) Soul Garden; 10) I Know The Lord Will Find A Way; 11) Is There Nothing Beyond God.

 

«Kingdom Come» came to an untimely end with Journey, but, considering that Brown still re­tained Andy Dalby for his next — and this time, first officially solo — project, one could claim that they simply underwent a name change, since the remainder of Kingdom Come's lineup was always a revolving door anyway. That is, one could claim that only before listening to the album. If you don't hear the substantial difference, try again.

 

Not that the difference is so substantial as to justify occasional haughty dismissals of Dance. One anonymous web reviewer went as far as to blame it for showing «disco tendencies», despite the fact that there is not the slightest hint of disco on the album — most likely, falling victim of a simple psychological association: if the year is 1975 and your album is called Dance, it must be some sort of a disco sellout, regardless of what your ears tell you. Others do not venture that far out, but the overall consensus seems to be that Dance finds Arthur Brown in decline, betraying his psychedelic and avantgarde roots for a smooth, accessible, ordinary pop sound.

 

However, let us not forget the general picture. At heart, Arthur Brown was primarily a big, sin­cere fan of R'n'B in its various incarnations, the grander, louder, and more theatrical, the better. The three albums of Kingdom Come, in the overall frame of his work, look more like a part-time experiment, fueled by the mood of the times — a conscious attempt to go over the top by adding layers of extra complexity to the same old R'n'B sound. Now that progressive rock was on its way out, though, Brown's experiment, too, came to an end: and in a way, Dance is not so much a sell­out as a process of «calming down» and returning to things that are less arrogant and defying, although by no means following the particular fads of 1975.

 

It opens with a loud cover of ʽWe've Got To Get Out Of This Placeʼ — yes, including a wobbly synthesizer pattern characteristic of the Era of Funk, but otherwise, quite loyal to the 1965 origi­nal in melody and attitude: sufficient proof that Brown could care less about the present if he still didn't have an open path to his past (and, in a funny move of self-irony, the other golden oldie co­ver on the record is the Stones' ʽOut Of Timeʼ, where Brown's "you're out of touch, my baby, my poor old-fashioned baby" could just as well relate to himself as to his imaginary antagonist). Both songs are quite well done, if not particularly spectacular in any respect, and the presence of «old-fashioned» female backup harmonies and saxophone solos should not be in the least annoying for those who don't have a prejudice against «old-fashioned» R'n'B in general.

 

The original compositions, meanwhile, are diverse and, even though much less befuddling and easier to swallow than on Kingdom Come albums, also make more sense — at the very least, they give the listener enough time to flesh out an emotional reaction. There is still at least one lengthy, prog-influenced, epic: ʽHelen With The Sunʼ is hardly worse than the average anthemic ballad from Kingdom Come or Journey, with a powerhouse vocal from Arthur and tasteful arrange­ments of electronically treated guitars from Dalby. There is a little bit of facetious/salacious mu­sic hall (ʽCrazyʼ) that is so tongue-in-cheek it would be ridiculous to get offended. There are moody, lyrical R'n'B numbers (like the title track) that sound very closely to certain bits of King­dom Come properly extended and played to their full length. And there is a funny ten-minute «gospel suite» to end the album, running the gamut from kitschy ska (ʽSoul Gardenʼ) to quite sin­cere-sounding gospel-funk (ʽI Know The Lord Will Find A Wayʼ) to a rather mysterious, unpre­dictable reggae conclusion where, after having just sung all the required praise for the Supreme Being, Arthur repeats the mantraic question "is there nothing beyond God?" for two and a half minutes — obviously not hoping for an answer, but not afraid to ask the question, either.

 

My personal favorite on this record has always been ʽQuietly With Tactʼ, a song that plays out exactly as suggested — in waltz tempo, with a certain cheese-free elegance, and features some of Dalby's finest examples of guitar playing: Dalby is actually credited for writing the entire song, and, indeed, Arthur's vocal part, fine as it is, sounds here more like a taster introduction to Andy's solo parts, spiralling around the listener in a grand display of «controlled emotion». Nobody ever seems to list the song as a highlight, which is a travesty: its solos would easily make my Top 100, had I ever bothered to compile one.

 

All in all, Dance is certainly not recommendable for those who, in «The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown», value the «crazy» part above all else. But it is definitely an album that belongs to the world of Arthur Brown as safely as anything, and its combination of styles, moods, theatricality, and spirit is anything but generic for 1975. And I, for one, feel good about getting to hear a bit of the human side of Arthur Brown here — we have all gotten to know him fairly well as the God of Hellfire and the Time Captive, but it turns out that he can fairly well hold his own in the much more grounded genre of «dance-art-pop». Thumbs up, of course.

 

CHISHOLM IN MY BOSOM (1977)

 

1) Need To Know; 2) Monkey Walk; 3) Let A Little Sunshine (In Your Life); 4) I Put A Spell On You; 5) She's On My Mind; 6) The Lord Is My Saviour; 7) Chisholm In My Bosom.

 

With musical standards exploded and reassembled from the dust in between 1975 and 1977, Ar­thur Brown had pretty little hope of maintaining even a small pinch of notoriety. Even Kingdom Come, with all of their progressive trappings, were so far out as to be considered «underground» in the early 1970s. Now, with the New Wave revolution in full flight, Arthur's 1% of recognizabi­lity would be reduced to about 0.01% — particularly since he continued to behave as if his own musical evolution were on a completely self-sustainable path, not necessarily ignorant of what­ever comes around, but never for one moment giving reason to suspect that it could be influenced by some particularly current «fad».

 

So, in 1977, when everything around was changing and adapting, Brown instead made the most «normal» album in his entire catalog. Despite still working with Dalby, and despite old madman friend Vincent Crane returning to guest star on one track, Chisholm In My Bosom continues the line of Dance — upgrading the challenge a little bit by returning to epic length compositions and cutting down on cover versions, but overall, simply coming across as standard-fare «intellectual entertainment» without any serious attempts to break new ground.

 

In fact, the opening couple of numbers could easily throw the demanding listener into the arms of a hissy fit. ʽNeed To Knowʼ, with its gentle double-tracked slide guitars, sounds like formulaic country-rock, unexpectedly soft, mild, and mannered the same way Lou Reed surprised his fans with Coney Island Baby several years earlier. Not everybody will want to acknowledge that the slide arrangements are quite exquisite and emotional (Andy Dalby's talents on the podium again?), but it's also true that this isn't at all the kind of music that we would readily associate with Brown. The faster-paced R'n'B dance number ʽMonkey Walkʼ is a little more familiar, giving us Brown's sexy, rambunctious side, and the band plays very well, including the brass arrangements and the back vocals, but where ʽNeed To Knowʼ could be seen as too blatantly sentimental, ʽMonkey Walkʼ might just be a bit too generic and silly.

 

The rest of Side A wanders between Brown's newly-shaped passion for gospel (ʽThe Lord Is My Saviourʼ), epic optimistic R'n'B (ʽLet A Little Sunshineʼ), and dark funk (ʽShe's On My Mindʼ — the only track here to contain a shred of the old madness, maybe due to the participation of old friend Crane). There is also a re-recording of ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ for those who'd for­gotten he already did it a decade earlier — slower, less freak-out-ish, more keyboard-dependent, and quite unnecessary in the long run.

 

Then there is the second side of the album, given over in its entirety to the title track — which, rather than trying to play out like a multi-part progressive suite, sounds like a cross between a Bob Dylan epic, a Van Morrison epic, and a Jim Morrison epic: a long, wordy ramble spread ac­ross several relatively simple melodies with relatively simple acoustic / keyboard-heavy (Mello­tron included) arrangements. Much of it sounds (but not necessarily is) improvised, and quite per­sonal — sort of a lengthy, multi-layered confession that must have meant a lot to the guy in 1977, but is hardly the kind of item we should be expected to enjoy thirty years on. Or maybe I just don't get it, but anyone can be excused for not trying very hard to «get» a twenty-minute acoustic / Mellotron epic from Arthur Brown written in 1977, provided it is not really out there to get you itself. It's certainly no ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ, anyway — neither the instruments nor Brown's vocalizations are enough to strike out the necessary amount of magic to carry it on for such a long time period.

 

Overall, the record is quite far from a crying disaster, as it has been characterized by the very few people who still managed to hear it (or not to hear it), but it neither has the unique weirdness of Kingdom Come nor the occasionally brilliant hook of Dance (not a single highlight of the ʽQuiet­ly With Tactʼ variety). Hence, coming from the likes of Arthur Brown, it is not easily made clear why the hell it even exists. Each and every one of these tracks, in its respective genre, could have been better coming from someone else.

 

FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT (1979)

 

1) Storm Clouds; 2) Nothing We Can Do; 3) No; 4) Bright Gateway; 5) Timeship; 6) Come And Join The Fun; 7) Storm­wind; 8) Storm; 9) This Is It; 10) Tightrope; 11) Balance; 12) Faster Than The Speed Of Light.

 

Two years after the paths of Crane and Brown had briefly crossed during the sessions for Chis­holm, the two gentlemen fell into each other's arms again, this time for a fully-fledged collabora­tion — apparently, at the urge of Klaus Schulze, with whom Arthur made some recordings and toured a bit in the late 1970s. For a long time, the resulting album was very hard to find — the pressings were limited, Schulze's German-based label was small, and by the time somebody even star­ted thinking about transferring the results to CD, the mastertapes had been lost. Apparently, the recent re-release managed to locate the original tape, so look for it — I am reviewing a semi- crappy vinyl rip here, and laziness prevents me from locating a better version. That, and the fact that the music just isn't good enough to make me crave for a better version.

 

Not that it's an undeserving album or anything. The design is as follows: a loosely conceptual al­bum or even a «pseudo-rock opera», centered around one of Brown's favorite topics — surre­a­listic travel, be it in the sci-fi, me­dievalistic fantasy, or psychedelic register — played completely (or almost completely, I'm not altogether sure) without guitar participation, although Crane's numerous keyboards are still aug­mented by a normal rhythm section (no drum machines), brass players, and a small symphonic orchestra. In a way, this is sort of a brave return to the aesthetics of Kingdom Come (after two fairly «normal» albums in a row), but there is also a big difference — other than the lack of guitar, it seems that the «story» elements here were at least as important, if not more important, for Brown, than the accompanying music.

 

And so, Faster Than The Speed Of Light is sort of a cross between Kingdom Come's fantasy worlds and the «normality» of Brown's 1975-77 period. The brief interludes here function the same way they would function in a Broadway musical, and the actual songs weave together clas­sical influences, shades of R'n'B, and some «operatic pop» for good measure. Since the orches­tration never takes center stage, most of the music is relatively low-key, so prepare yourself for a bit of quiet, inobtrusive, «off-Broadway» music theater. If you prepare yourself well enough, it might even sweep you off your feet and take you along on its journey — although, frankly speak­ing, I would define those chances as close to one in a hundred.

 

The actual tunes are, indeed, theatrical rather than musical. Actually, when they get closer to «real music», the effect can be repulsive: ʽNothing We Can Doʼ, for instance, fuses its funky key­board riffs with silly-sounding disco choruses, and the point of ʽThis Is Itʼ is to play kiddie mar­ching muzak on trendy synthesizers (all the while pretending to share Arthur Brown's revelatory powers with the listeners — not easy to be convincing when the music itself is in the camp of ʽItsy Bitsy Spiderʼ). But such tracks as ʽTimeshipʼ, announcing the start of the journey, ʽStormʼ, which tries to brew the appropriate atmosphere from a set of jerky keyboard parts and «stormy» strings, and the title track, with its anthemic brass-dominated coda, are at least curious, if not tremendously effective.

 

Overall, the album just doesn't seem to have enough energy to satisfy the expected requirements. The lack of guitar harms the proceedings: many of these songs are, by nature, fast and dynamic, and Crane, as good as he is at writing memorable keyboard riffs and overlaying all the parts for maximum effect, cannot provide all the tension by himself — especially disappointing in the light of limp, pro-forma orchestration produced by people who probably thought that they were simply paid for a technical job. The «concept» is nothing special for those who are already familiar with Kingdom Come — in fact, most of those who are already familiar with Kingdom Come will pro­bably think of Faster Than The Speed Of Light as a «lite consumption version» of Galactic Zoo Dossier. The writing as such, though, is quite decent: Brown and Crane still remember how to tackle a variety of styles and sometimes shuffle them over the duration of one track.

 

From an optimistic standpoint, Faster ultimately deserves a thumbs up — it's a serious piece of art that still conveys Brown's usual work aesthetics: do your own thing against all odds, but never make it look like straightforward nostalgia. However, I couldn't honestly recommend it to anybo­dy but the most dedicated fan of Arthur Brown — and by «most dedicated», I mean neither the «heard ʽFireʼ on the radio a month ago and loved it» type nor the «Kingdom Come were the great­est, man, nothing ever comes close» type, both of which are the easiest types of «Arthur Brown fans» imaginable to my imagination. No, you'd really, really have to care a lot about Ar­thur Brown as a spiritually endowed human being to like this.

 

SPEAK NO TECH (1981)

 

1) King Of England; 2) Conversations; 3) Strange Romance; 4) Not Fade Away; 5) The Morning Was Cold; 6) Speak No Tech; 7) Names Are Names; 8) Love Lady; 9) Big Guns Don't Lie; 10) Take A Picture; 11*) You Don't Know; 12*) Old Friends My Colleague; 13*) Lost My Soul In London; 14*) Joined Forever; 15*) Mandala; 16*) Desert Floor.

 

Very little information is available on this and the next album: minimally distributed upon origi­nal release, out of print for years, we are nearing the bottom end of Brown's «scale of recogniza­bility» out here. The original date does seem to be 1981,  and the only other thing I think I know is that the producer was Craig Leon, for whom this must have been quite a curious stop in betwe­en working with the Ramones and Blondie on their self-titled debuts and then working with the likes of Joshua Bell since his late-1990s «conversion» to the world of classical.

 

And there was quite a lot to produce: Speak No Tech, contrary to its self-ironic title, is com­pletely electronic — and we know that when Arthur Brown goes all the way in any direction, the man may overdo it, but he certainly does not underdo anything. So here, there is a transparent at­tempt to show us all... or, at least, just to check up on the idea that electronic music does rule the day. Not in the Kraftwerk sense («robotic-flavored minimalism for elite audiences»), not in the early period Depeche Mode sense («trivial, but catchy dance music for the masses») — simply as an answer to the question: «What will music sound like once live instruments and analog equip­ment are gone for good?»

 

Silly-sounding question, for sure, but not that silly when answered by somebody like Arthur Brown — a guy who, no matter how obnoxious or pretentious he might get at times, has always meant business. Speak No Tech is not an example of «electronica» as such; rather, it is an ex­perimental art-rock album made with exclusively electronic means. With dramatically recited theatrical pieces, lyrical ballads, «rockers», and only a few numbers that bear a strong «New Wave» stamp, it manages to be surprisingly diverse and inventive for a record that seems to have been born out of a simple «oh, I got me a brand new Yamaha, I wonder what I can do with it now?» type of idea.

 

As with all of Brown's albums where «experiment» takes precedence over «artistic expression», Speak No Tech is a little baffling, and is more likely to pique one's curiosity than the soul. The best example is probably Arthur's daring deconstruction of Buddy Holly's ʽNot Fade Awayʼ — what used to be a prime example of Diddley-beat-based dance-pop has been transformed in a sea of electronic waves, lapping against the aural shore with perfect clock regularity. It's quite a puzz­ling piece of work, particularly so if you are familiar with the original — or, at least, the Stones cover. But who knows, maybe that is exactly the way that the little green aliens who made their camp in the back of Ar­thur's mind dance to Buddy Holly in their parallel universe.

 

Odd enough, some of the numbers are quite catchy: the New Wave synth riff in ʽConversationsʼ, for instance, might owe its existence to a period of heavy listening to Gary Numan, but is quite self-contained nevertheless. The repetitive mantra «speak no tech, speak no tech» in the title track is annoying and hypnotic at the same time; so is the melancholic dirge melody of ʽNames Are Namesʼ and the amusing «romantic techno» of ʽLove Ladyʼ. In fact, most of the songs here have something at least to draw our attention — and the something can well be anything, including, for instance, an artificially prolonged scream at the end of ʽBig Guns Don't Lieʼ.

 

If only there had been some clearer sense of purpose to the album — its least comfortable aspect is that it seems to be so totally committed to electronics just for commitment's sake. Usually, ele­ctronica artists are «sonic painters», plunging us into sci-fi environments, or «atmospheric pro­phets», using the coldness and detachedness of their instruments to express cool subtle irony on the dehumanization of humanity, or something like that. Speak No Tech, however, is neither complex and multi-layered enough to create such an environment, nor does it present any good reason as to why synthesizers are the only musical means on it. Okay, so if this is the music of to­morrow, then why does the first song divert us with a monolog on the fate of the ʽKing Of Eng­landʼ? What's up with the modernist poetry recital on ʽThe Morning Was Coldʼ? Neither these nor most of the other tracks seem to actively require an electronic coating.

 

Consequently, Speak No Tech still gets a thumbs up for curiosity's sake — it is certainly a dif­ferent album from most, and a «different» album from Arthur Brown that stands out in his own catalog is different indeed. But do not despair if you are not able to lay your hands on it: it is any­thing but a «lost masterpiece» — an attractive period curio, for sure, but reflecting much too blur­ry a vision to fall in love with it, I'd say.

 

For the record: the (semi-official?) CD release of the al­bum adds a bunch of bonus tracks that seems to be randomly assembled from various points in Arthur's career — including a very early, hiss-crackle-stuffed white R'n'B number, ʽYou Don't Knowʼ, that he recorded in 1965 with his first band, The Diamonds. Funny coincidence, I guess, but the heavily distorted electric organ that drives the song, from a sheer sonic perspective, fits in brilliantly with the electronics of Speak No Tech — and beats most of it to hell.

 

REQUIEM (1982)

 

1) Chant / Shades; 2) Animal People; 3) Spirits Take Flight; 4) Gabriel; 5) Requiem; 6) Machanicla Masseur; 7) Busha-Busha; 8) The Fire Ant And The Cockroaches.

 

Second time around, though, he got it right. I remember falling in love with this record years ago, and it still sounds just as awesome as the first day I heard it. Arthur Brown's Requiem, a concept album about the nuclear end of the world, released at exactly the right moment — the height of Cold War tension in the early 1980s — might, indeed, be his masterpiece, arguably bested only by Crazy World, and is definitely near the top positions on the list of «most underrated albums ever», considering that the total number of people who even know about its existence, let alone actually listened to it from start to finish, must still be somewhere in the two-digit range.

 

What makes Requiem so awesome? One and one thing only — a sense of purpose. For the first time in his life, perhaps, Brown seems at least as interested in conveying an atmospheric message as he is in cavorting around for crazy experimentation's sake. And this immediately translates in­to a quantum leap from Speak No Tech — an album whose main purpose was to answer the ques­tion of whether it is possible to record an art-rock experience with the sole aid of synthesizers. It was. But the results weren't tremendously exciting. So now here is an upgrade of that task: is it possible to record an art-rock experience with the sole aid of synthesizers, and see to it that it be­comes tremendously exciting?

 

Yes, it is. Requiem is not as densely packed with synth overdubs as Speak No Tech — it pre­fers to thrive on packages of simple, «brutal» synth riffs and aggressive electronic percussion rather than colorful, but digitally incompetent sonic paintings. It has more of a stern, industrial, claust­rophobic flavor to it as well — fully appropriate for an album about the consequences of a nucle­ar Holocaust. I am not sure as to which of the two records pumps out the larger number of raw «hooks», but the ones on Requiem definitely pack more punch and make more sense than the ones on Speak No Tech.

 

Odd enough, it is not a «scary» album, as could be thought of any piece of art that aims to deal with the issue of humanity destroying itself. «Arthur Brown» has always rhymed with «eccentric clown», and Requiem is no exception: most of its numbers are garish and overwrought, if not downright comic (ʽMachanicla Masseurʼ). But it is not the alleged «terror» of Requiem that makes it so treasurable — on the contrary, it is its satire, glitz, buffoonery, and, at times, traces of deep humanity. It is, in some ways, much more difficult to write a funny and exciting album on the end of the world than a scary and depressing one.

 

Robotic synth-rockers, such as ʽAnimal Peopleʼ and ʽMasseurʼ, discard with the «coldness» of Kraftwerk and tackle their subjects with intelligence and irony. ʽBusha-Bushaʼ, subtitled ʽThe Last Man On Earthʼ, is a great thematic vehicle for one of Arthur's trademark «nervous break­down» simulations, with ideally matching paranoid synth chords to boot. On the other side, ʽSpi­rits Take Flightʼ is populated with light, playful loops and solos, generating a cute psychedelic breeze that would be completely out of place on a «serious» end-of-the-world record, but here feels quite at home.

 

Because Arthur Brown's post-apocalyptic world, believe it or not, is quite a fun place to be. It is populated with merry ghosts and friendly robots, and even the cockroaches and the fire ants, at the end of the day, are cool enough to join in an uplifting pop chorus. Even Brown's solemn pray­er of salvation (the title track) somehow emits optimism rather than despair (well, the main man­tra does go "the missile is dead, the missile is dead", after all).

 

Some might find the idea disturbing — who let a reckless clown like that deal with such a touchy subject? — but it's not as if Brown's purpose here was to convince people that it is OK to de­to­nate the bomb just because life will be more fun in the aftermath. It's more like: «let's try and cre­ate the everyday living atmosphere of the post-nuclear world» — where the remaining old and the emerging new forms of life are competing for survival. To that end, it's a unique perspective: with most people bent on painting the horrors of it all, Brown is going for «fantasy realism» — the horrors are really only there in the moments of death and destruction, and then it's business, er, life as usual again. In between all the AIs and the cockroaches and the fire ants and Archangel Gab­riel, that is.

 

Obviously, all the endless synthesizers can technically get annoying at a certain point, but, un­like Speak No Tech, Requiem does not sound dated for one moment — quite the opposite, it pre­sages and previews a lot of later developments in the electronic business, exactly because, despite having been recorded in the first years of the Electronic Age, it does not care one bit for follow­ing old or new trends: this is just crazy Arthur Brown, given an exciting artistic idea and a bunch of digital mechanisms to carry it out, and he does not have to memorize the latest Ultravox album to carry it out.

 

Emotionally intriguing, intellectually stimulating, Requiem continues to get its well-deserved thumbs up, and I strongly urge everyone to check it out — at the very least, «bore­dom» is a reaction that cannot be associated with this record objectively. One might question whether it real­ly achieves its set goals, or whether those goals deserve being achieved in the first place, but definitely not whether the artist himself had a lot of fun or was driven by inspiration while trying to achieve them. Personally, I just think Requiem is cool — certainly one of the least predictable and typical requiems ever made.

 

BROWN, BLACK & BLUE (1991)

 

1) Fever; 2) Monkey Walk; 3) Unchain My Heart; 4) Got My Mojo Working; 5) Smokestack Lightnin'; 6) Hound Dog; 7) Help Me; 8) The Right Time; 9) Stand By Me; 10) The Lord Is My Friend.

 

After the release of Requiem, Arthur Brown disappeared from the public eye — figuratively speaking, of course, since, for the most part of his career, he was about the size of an elementary particle relative to the public eye — for about a whole decade. Maybe he was unable to find even the tiniest, God-forsaken record label to take care of him, or perhaps he thought he'd said it all with Requiem and finally earned the right to retire (and I'd certainly understand that).

 

However, in the late 1980s, bitten by the nostalgia bug, perhaps, he started making occasional TV appearances and hanging out with Jimmy Carl Black, the original drummer, vocalist, and Zappa's part-time creative partner in The Mothers of Invention. One thing led to another, and one of these «anothers» ended up as a joint recording by the two — a limited-issue album of ten R&B com­positions, mostly golden oldies, but also featuring a re-recording of ʽMonkey Walkʼ from Chis­holm In My Bosom, just to break up the predictability.

 

Unfortunately, at best the record is little more than just a souvenir of two old pals having a friend­ly get-together. The arrangements are tasteful, especially in the context of the late Eighties / early Nineties — real live playing, guitars, old-fashioned key­boards, brass section, harmonicas, the works — but never interesting, and Jimmy's input could just as well be replicated by any seasoned pro on the drums: he may be explicitly mentioned as an equal partner and have his name as part of the pun in the album title, but he is never really in the spotlight. And Brown — certainly Brown is not qualified to pull this off alone, particularly after his ten-year layoff.

 

He does seem to understand that merely covering the classics makes little sense, but the only «im­provement» on his mind is changing the songs' lyrics seemingly at random, and, occasionally, supplementing the regular vocal melodies with long tangential rants of either a humorous (ʽGot My Mojo Workingʼ) or metaphysical-intellectual (ʽThe Lord Is My Friendʼ) nature. Sort of a piti­ful decision — I, for one, do not generally need being told about how all the great religious figu­res of the past are really one by a guy who has just wasted thirty minutes of my time.

 

All I can say is that Brown's vocal skills are still there, and that ten years have done little to quell his theatrical manners or arrogance. So if you think that his classic cover of ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ is one of the greatest wonders of the universe, you will want to have these ten tracks as res­pectable shadows of the past. But I've always thought that song was just an excellent example of the Brown/Crane collaboration. Unfortunately, Crane was not involved in the making of this al­bum for the valid excuse of being dead, and nobody of the same caliber replaced him — none of the musicians here seem to give much of a damn about «expressivity».

 

Strictly for hardcore fans, historians, or big admirers of classic R&B and electric blues who just love these songs so much, they have to try to appreciate them in as many incarnations as possible. Of course, these are all good songs, and they are all done justice, but writing about them in more detail would only make sense if Brown, Black & Blue had been a conscious attempt to steal them away from Ray, Muddy, Elvis, and Howlin' Wolf. It wasn't; in fact, it couldn't. From that point of view, it's all strictly thumbs down, and no amount of inventive ad-libbing is going to affect that judgement. Like I said, only for completists or those with nothing else to do.

 

ORDER FROM CHAOS: LIVE 1993 (1993)

 

1) When You Open The Door; 2) When You Open The Door Pt. 2; 3) King Of England; 4) Juices Of Love; 5) Night­mare; 6) Fire Poem; 7) Fire; 8) Come And Buy; 9) Pick It Up; 10) Mandela; 11) Time Captives; 12) I Put A Spell On You.

 

Mr. Brown hit fifty in 1991, not a particularly bad year for music — and I have no idea if his de­cision to reactivate his motor was due to the fact that he sensed fashions changing and maybe even a renewed demand for his kind of music in the air, or if he just woke up one morning with a nagging sense of having wasted a decade of his life on «Nothing Much». Whatever be, the early 1990s saw the man returning, if not to creating new music, then at least to reliving the old one — obviously, he was not much of a stadium seller, but all the small elitist clubs could have him, par­ticularly if he came with a guarantee of craziness.

 

This live album, released on the small Voiceprint label, captures Arthur during one of these shows, at the Marquee Club in London, June 25, 1993 — apparently, one day after his fifty-se­cond anniversary, since birthday announcements are made several times and ʽHappy Birthdayʼ rips out of the blue at one point during an instrumental jam section. Judging by the atmosphere, it was a pretty fun birthday, considering that he hadn't played live in England for something like a decade and a half — and certainly more fun than one year later, when he passed out on stage in the middle of a brain haemorrhage, which led to a six-month hospital stay and brought the whole «live revival» thing to an abrupt stop. A temporary one, of course: «The God Of Hellfire» would never let himself be brought down by such a trivial thing as a cerebrovascular accident.

 

Brown's touring band consists mainly of unknowns here: the playing is fine enough (Jeff Danford does a particularly respectable job of filling in for the late Vincent Crane on all the classic numbers), but the chief emphasis is on the show (either the whole thing or parts of it were supposedly filmed as well, and available on Youtube for all those who like seeing aging glam-art-rock stars doing crazy stuff on stage) and Arthur's persona — predictably enough. The setlist, as can be easily seen, is heavily tilted towards Crazy World, since, by 1993, if anybody vaguely remembered anything about Arthur Brown, it all had to be tied to the 1969 album, and the God of Hellfire obliged — coming up with solid recreations of ʽNightmareʼ, ʽFireʼ, ʽCome And Buyʼ, and, of course, ʽI Put A Spell On Youʼ.

 

But he does go further than that, and in a much less predictable fashion. Kingdom Come is paid tribute with ʽTime Captivesʼ (actually a medley here, with ʽSpirit Of Joyʼ thrown in the middle as well), and Arthur's early 1980s synthesizer experiments are honored with bits from ʽThe Fire Antʼ (incorporated inside ʽMandelaʼ), while ʽKing Of Englandʼ gets a more guitar-oriented re­arrangement than it had on Speak No Tech (not necessarily becoming more interesting in the process). And then there is some new material, including the opening two-part suite ʽWhen You Open The Doorʼ, also written and performed much in the style of Kingdom Come. Was it a shelved outtake or something?

 

Overall, the impression is positive. The worst possible impression from such things is that of a desperate old wreck, cashing in on fossilized bits and pieces of former success, out of time, out of mind, and very transparently out of money. But here, even without the video, it is clear that the man is nimble, agile, and still feeling quite cozy in his «Supernatural Shoes»: neither the voice nor the spirit have aged a bit (actually, Arthur has got quite an advantage here: like Ian Anderson, he was intentionally downplaying his youthfulness in his prime, looking and sounding about twenty years older than he actually was, and this paid off handsomely in the long run — he ne­ver had the Mick Jagger problem weighing on his shoulders).

 

The new numbers on their own may not give enough of an incentive to rush out and grab the al­bum: ʽWhen You Open The Doorʼ is strictly for major fans of Kingdom Come; ʽJuices Of Loveʼ is an artsified R'n'B number that is neither too stupendous nor too memorable; and ʽPick It Upʼ is a somewhat formulaic blues-rock shuffle that is a bit too heavy on synthesizers for my taste. But they fit in well with the golden oldies, and the resulting mix is quite a faithful and sympathetic portrait of Arthur Brown at fifty-two. Too bad that Requiem is underrepresented, of course, but honoring the short memories and limited knowledge of Marquee Club audiences was an under­standable priority, I guess, so thumbs up all the same.

 

TANTRIC LOVER (2000)

 

1) Paradise; 2) Tantric Lover; 3) The Bridge; 4) Circle Dance; 5) Swimfish; 6) Voice Of Love From A Magic Hat; 7) Gabriel; 8) Love Is The Spirit; 9) Heartaches From The Music Theatre Piece ʽAirʼ; 10) All The Bells; 11) Healing Sound; 12) Welcome.

 

If you have nothing better to do these days, hunt down Mr. Arthur Brown in one of his asylums and ask him the question: «Mr. Brown! How come Tantric Lover, your first recording of ori­ginal music in the 21st century, is credited to ʽThe Crazy World Of Arthur Brownʼ, even though that band was officially proclaimed dead thirty years ago, and you are the only remaining mem­ber?» Wait for the answer, and if it is anything like «why, man, many an Arthur Brown has roa­med through this world, but there has been only one Crazy World of Arthur Brown so far, and maybe some people will be careless enough to mistake my new album for the old one — and I do need the money, I'm all out of fuel for my helmet», feel free to add +100 to Mr. Brown's artistic karma. However, if it is anything like «well, see here, man, we just had all these groovy cats to jam with, and I thought, it's like the spirit of the old Crazy World was coming back, and I know we're all crazy but some are crazier than most...», please do the reverse.

 

Because, clearly, Tantric Lover does not sound anything like the old «Crazy World». And not only does it not try to sound like Crazy World, on the contrary, it does everything in its power to present Arthur in an entirely new light. For one thing, it is completely acoustic, with elements of world music represented by the extensive use of the kora (a West African harp) and the didgeri­doo, an Australian woodwind (and Arthur has a separate band member for each, although «Phil Brown» does not sound much like a good name for an Australian aborigine, if you ask me). For another thing... it is not all that crazy, to tell the truth.

 

What it is is simply a good album of inventive art-pop compositions in a range of styles and moods. Some R&B, some reggae, some folk, some blues-rock, a little of this, a little of that, all of it sort of connected with thin psychedelic vibes and a general peace-and-love sentiment. Very well recorded at that — praise the 21st century for something, at least — and the quiet acoustic arrangements allow Brown's voice to come through bright and expressive; actually, I think this is the first time ever that he gives it to us from so many different angles. Crooning, pleading, whis­pering, muttering, screaming, talking, goofing off, it's all here. You might hate the songs and the spirit, but the man couldn't care less — he must have had so much fun doing this.

 

Since this is still «rock theater», or, rather «unplugged theater» this time, Tantric Lover gets by on the strength of its humor and eccentricity, not on any kind of cathartic vibes — and its quiet, low-key nature will never allow us to recognize it as a lost masterpiece on the same level with Requiem. But, on the other hand, it also lacks those of Brown's trademarks that are the most prone to becoming annoying — the reckless, «anything-goes» experimentation, the permanent tone and signature shifts of Kingdom Come, even the general «look at me, have you ever seen anyone crazier?» attitude. And the kora / didgeridoo duets may be a novelty trick, but in our mo­dern potpourri of ethnic traditions, it can hardly look as surprising as, say, the drum machines on Kingdom Come's third album, or even Arthur's decision to take a red-hot synthesizer bath on Speak No Tech.

 

No, this is just a «nice little album» here. And the songs are surprisingly well written and per­formed. ʽParadiseʼ steals the opening riff from the Beatles' ʽI'll Be Backʼ and puts it back where it came from — into a Latin setting, that is — and works out a half-menacing, half-magical mood punctuated by occasional flourishes from the kora. ʽCircle Danceʼ is a catchy art-pop / blues-rock hybrid, irresistible when it comes to toe-tapping, tasteful when it comes to little bits of out-of-nowhere electric guitar soloing (yes, we can!), and goofy when Arthur begins to yodel (yodeling is bad, but Arthur is good). ʽSwimfishʼ is set to a Celtic waltz; ʽGabrielʼ (no relation to the ʽGab­rielʼ of Requiem) is slightly funky, spits out broken bits of slide guitar, and has Arthur doing his best Horned King impression (or was that Horny King?). He even delivers a convincing musical aria on ʽHeartachesʼ — with a fairly complex vocal part to be sung by a 60-year old.

 

This is definitely not ʽThe Crazy World Of Arthur Brownʼ — more like ʽThe Cozy World Of Arthur Brownʼ if you ask me. But first, he is wrong who would assert that Arthur Brown has no right to have himself a cozy world at this time in his life. And second, the more I listen to it, the more unsure I am about which one of the two worlds I like more. Of course, in 1969, Crazy World was on the cutting edge, whereas Tantric Lover did not make as much as the tiniest ripple when it appeared, and remains steadily confined to Arthur's microscopic hardcore fan base. But, just like Requiem, it is an album that could have a greater appeal — it is ten times as auth­entic, memorable, and pleasant as the majority of indie favorites from the same year. Yes, the title and the album cover are a bit stupid — they could make you suspect that an old dirty has-been is lurking inside — but do not let it get you off the track: Tantric Lover deserves its thumbs up full well, and I'd personally nominate at least ʽCircle Danceʼ for the average 2000s playlist (par­ticularly if this would mean kicking out one more Bright Eyes tune from said playlist).

 

VAMPIRE SUITE (2003)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Vampire Club; 3) SAS; 4) Africa; 5) Maybe My Soul; 6) In This Love; 7) Confession; 8) Vam­pire Love; 9) Completion; 10) Divers; 11) Re-Vamp Your Soul; 12) Isness Is My Business; 13) Stay.

 

Arthur's fascination with vampires comes as a surprise, and perhaps a disappointing one. He'd ne­ver expressed tremendous interest in the subject before — or have I missed something? — yet there he is now, once again crediting «The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown», this time, for a com­plex, relatively plotless story of the fates, characters, and habits of vampires in the modern world: the story itself comes as a fifty-minute «audiobook» reading on the bonus CD (which I, honestly, had no will or patience to sit through), while the first and main CD acts as a «rock musical» loosely ba­sed on the story.

 

But I mean, vampires? Isn't a concept album about vampires a bit too kitschy even for the likes of Mr. Brown? Shouldn't it be relegated to the likes of Alice Cooper? (And, speaking of Alice, the Vegasy glitz of the opening number, ʽVampire Clubʼ, quickly brings on memories of ʽWelcome To My Nightmareʼ). Moving away from all those concept albums about space travel and huma­nity's post-apo­calyptic fate into the realm of bloodsucking, garlic strings, and silver bullets?

 

I must admit it is a little anticlimactic, what with the vampire subject beaten so firmly into the ground and all. But at this point in his career — come to think of it, at any point in his career — Arthur couldn't really care less about the particular referential topic of his creativity. His meager sales and near-negative recognizability (how many people in the world would know or remem­ber that he was still alive in 2003, let alone making records?) would not increase or decrease depen­ding on whether he was writing and singing about vampires or about superstring theory. And if the guy likes vampires, well, why not garner a bit of inspiration from vampires if it helps make some decent music?

 

The project is no longer acoustic — a serious musical needs more than an acoustic guitar and some aboriginal Australian woodwinds, after all — but neither is it «rock'n'rollish»: pianos, elec­tronics, and a heavy brass section matter much more on this album than distorted electric guitars. It does, indeed, in many respects recall different stages of Alice Cooper's career (be it from the Welcome To My Nightmare period, the DaDa period, or some of his recent records), but the bluesy and R'n'B-ish shades are all unmistakably Brownian.

 

Curiously, the best stuff here are the soulful numbers — songs that make me forget all about the context and just freely enjoy the music. ʽMaybe My Soulʼ, for instance, is one of the most up­lifting R&B anthems in the man's career — with a glorious buildup from verse to chorus, excel­lent «old-school» brass parts, and a totally triumphant vocal delivery for a sixty-year old eccentric white male with a complicated medical history. And then, immediately after the exuberant op­ti­mism of ʽMaybe My Soulʼ, on comes the cold shower of the desperate soul-blues ʽIn This Loveʼ, an equally impressive stunner. Vampires? Maybe if you tune in to the lyrics very closely, but all I hear is exuberance in number one and desperation in number two.

 

The «kitschy» numbers do not work quite as well, but ʽVampire Clubʼ is still a nice and catchy Vegasy romp; ʽVampire Loveʼ is supposed to tele-transport you to 1997, the age of "those syn­thesizers and drum machines", Arthur gleefully ironizes in the introduction to the song (but why 1997, I wonder? the track does sound somewhat 1997-ish, but wouldn't 1987 be a better bet for such a «nostalgic» trip?) — and it is a cool mix of rhythmic catchiness and absurd theatricality, not to mention Arthur's old penchant for combining the uncombinable, such as modernistic synthesizer loops and very old-school organ solos. And the retro-funk of ʽAfricaʼ is quite hard to get out of your head once it gets around to the "Africa, the cradle of civilization" chorus (even if "Afr-EEH-ca", with the accent on the second syllable, gets a bit annoying after a while).

 

The only true misstep comes at the end: Arthur has a long and dubious tradition of recycling his old (or not so old) material, and ʽStayʼ here is a remake of ʽGabrielʼ from the last album, with the precise acoustic rhythms replaced by mushy keyboard atmospherics, the steady drums replaced with machines and «tribal percussion» scattered all over the place, and the grinning, sarcastic vo­cals of the original forgotten in favor of a sterner, less humorous delivery. Not a very good ending for an album that does have its fair share of strong moments.

 

The whole thing never sounds as «unusual» as Tantric Lover, and does not look nearly as con­vincing — a half-labour of love at best, compared to its predecessor. But the well-balanced mix of humor and seriousness, the stylistic diversity, the never-ending freshness of the vocals, the re­fusal to bow to modern terms and conditions, all of this means one thing: The Crazy World of Arthur Brown is still alive and well, and you do not need to be a loyal follower of this guy for thirty-five years in order to enjoy it. Yes, a thumbs up by all means — I am glad, though, that the record never had a werewolf sequel (although, come to think of it, the idea of Arthur Brown howling at the moon should be quite natural).

 

THE VOICE OF LOVE (2007)

 

1) Love Is The Spirit; 2) Gypsies; 3) Kites; 4) I Believe In You; 5) That's How Strong My Love Is; 6) The Voice Of Love; 7) All The Bells; 8) Shining Bright; 9) Birds Of A Feather; 10) Devil's Grip; 11) Safe Now &... .

 

First thing to be noticed about Brown's latest studio venture is that it is now credited not to the crazy, but to «The Amazing World Of Arthur Brown». Sure enough, modesty and humility were never an integral part of this guy's artistic image, but there is still an even bigger contradiction here, because The Voice Of Love is, in fact, arguably the most modest and humble album ever released by the God of H.F.

 

On here, Arthur returns back to the acoustic environment of Tantric Lover: he is accompanied by much-talented, little-known multi-instrumentalist Nick Pynn, proclaimed by Brown to «play every string instrument on the planet» or something to that effect — however, the choice of ins­trumentation is generally quite simple: about 70% guitars, and the rest divided between violins, mandolins,  harps, whatever... nothing too exotic as far as my ear can tell. Furthermore, about a half of the songs are recycled from the past — be it very recent past, such as ʽAll The Bellsʼ and ʽVoice Of Loveʼ from Tantric Lover, much older past, such as yet another rearrangement of ʽLove Is The Spiritʼ, or pre-deluvial past, such as ʽDevil's Gripʼ, which was the very first single put out by Crazy World in 1967. In addition, there is a cover of Hal Hackady's ʽKitesʼ, a song first turned into a hit by Simon Dupree and the Big Sound (the original Shulman brothers band before the emergence of the most awesome Gentle Giant) also around 1967. Sweet, sentimental, a bit tangoish compared to the original, and — nostalgic, of course.

 

Yes, the whole album is drowned in nostalgia this time. Most of the tracks, formally, are ballads: Arthur pouring his soul out to tasteful arrangements of romantic-natured songs, all firmly rooted in mid-1960s and early-1970s R&B (yet another cover is the old Otis Redding chestnut ʽThat's How Strong My Love Isʼ, which Arthur approaches here like a master archaeologist would ap­proach a freshly unearthed relics — almost literally dusting off and professionally polishing each syllable, with such great love and respect for the object that the care shown in his singing ends up more lovable than the cover itself). True enough, there is very little «craziness» here, at least not until ʽDevil's Gripʼ comes along at the end of the album and shakes us up a little bit with some of the old maniacal frenzy (yet there is only so much maniacal frenzy one can conjure with just a couple acoustic guitar tracks and some screeching violin passages. Say what you will, electricity does matter when it comes to these matters). But still, it would have been more honest to call themselves «The Shadow World Of Arthur Brown» at this juncture.

 

Of the new stuff, meticulously mixed with the oldies and thoughtfully levelled with them in style, ʽGypsiesʼ is probably the standout track — make sure you neither confound it with ʽGypsy Es­capeʼ off Galactic Zoo Dossier or with ʽGypsyʼ off Journey; yes, Arthur doth love the word — if only because it deviates from the general «love is the spirit» standard and digs into a darker, Mid-Easternish, violin-dominated pattern, before picking up speed, fury, and frenzy and leading us to a climactic conclusion (by the way, Arthur's screampower has not decreased in awesome­ness one small bit — at this time in his life, he can probably do better than Ian Gillan, which just goes to show that you never really know your luck until you hit sixty).

 

Generally, though, there are no standouts. For you and your grandmother, this is a wonderful pre­text to simply lower some barriers and bask in the excellence of Brown's intonations, modulations and manifestations. This is still theater, replete with exaggerations and mannerisms, but a very stripped down, life-like, and meaningful sort of theater — and maybe quite a turn-off for the adventurous fans of Kingdom Come and the Requiem era, or even those who got a minor kick from the ab­surdist minor extravagance of Vampire Suite. Personally, I tend to favor Arthur Brown, the evil clown, not the paternalist-sentimental one — but at this time in his life, he might actually be doing better as the latter rather than the former. A pleased, if not too excited thumbs up — and [obligatory old fart addendum] needless to say, Voice Of Love still shows more genuine soul than any given starry-eyed indie market record from 2007.

 

ZIM ZAM ZIM (2014)

 

1) Zim Zam Zim; 2) Want To Love; 3) Jungle Fever; 4) The Unknown; 5) Assun; 6) Muscle Of Love; 7) Junkyard King; 8) Light Your Light; 9) Touched By All; 10) The Formless Depths.

 

One thing at least we know: as of the 2010s, Arthur Brown remains remembered and admired enough to successfully conduct a crowdfunding pledge campaign in order to raise the money for his next album. A very nice thing to know — especially considering that the album itself, despite having been recorded and issued as promised, has probably received 1,000,000th share of atten­tion compared to any recent release by any of the day's moronic «superstars». Yes, Arthur Brown has been relegated to the top back shelves of the musical world, but as long as he has a small bunch of people offering support, this will not prevent him from putting out good art.

 

Once again credited to The Crazy (rather than The Amazing) World of Arthur Brown, Zim Zam Zim continues Arthur's surprisingly consistent streak of records that nobody ever listens to. In fact, it might even be his most consistent set of tunes in the 21st century — no mean feat for a 72-year old guy. The fact that he's been so crazy and isolated all these years actually helps, because the songs, once again, are timeless, paying no heed whatsoever to any modern developments (he does mention his iPod in one song, but then even Steve Jobs invented the iPod so that he could put himself some Bob Dylan and some Bach on it), and all for the better.

 

The title of the album already suggests a phantasmagoric circus experience (the normal way of life for Arthur Brown, that is), as does the eerie album cover, as does the opening track with its grumbly brass fanfares, deep harmonies, and booming message by the maniacal herald himself. Apparently, Zim Zam Zim is a state of being that preceded even The Big Bang, to which we are being invited or, at the very least, of which we are going to be informed. Big news for most people, table talk for Mr. Brown.

 

However, if you think that the album is going to be wildly psychedelic and ultra-other-worldly-dimensional, that is not the case. All the songs are a little whacky as far as Arthur's singing is concerned, and many of the tracks feature unconventional arrangements, but the chief point here, I think, was on integrating a wide variety of different styles — to put it philosophically, explore the amazing diversity of forms postdating the solitary state of Zim Zam Zim. "In my heart all forms of life are joined", quoth Mr. Brown, and that includes such forms of musical life as ska, rumba, blues, folk, rock, jazz, and noise. Above all of that, his voice still rings out loud and clear, and it can be sentimental, aggressive, or just plain crazy whenever he wants — and he sure as hell don't sound like a 72-year old. Must be all these mystical mushrooms.

 

Melodically, most of the tunes are fairly traditional, but it helps makes them more memorable, and then there are all the different angles. ʽWant To Loveʼ has a basic ska bounce to it, bu the percussion sounds like the Nibelung anvils, and the brass, strings, and accordeon cobwebs in the background are quite a wond'rous combination. ʽJungle Feverʼ is a minimalistic boogie-blues piece that echoes back to John Lee Hooker, but the guitar is processed in a way that makes it sound closer to a Jew's harp, and the accompanying wildlife sounds truly give the impression of a crazy old man lost in the jungle, strumming his instrument and going more and more ga-ga with each passing moment. ʽThe Unknownʼ sounds like a long-lost outtake from Tom Waits' Rain Dogs (Brown even gets a credible rasp-and-gurgle going for the chorus, although he probably has to live for 72 more years to catch up with Mr. Tom), but far more densely arranged (background vocals, whistles, very busy and melodic piano line, etc.).

 

If you are on the lookout for a good strong punch, ʽMuscle Of Loveʼ offers an opportunity — nothing to do with the Alice Cooper song or album of the same name, in particulars, but just as dark, sarcastic, and glammy as Alice at his most theatrical. The chorus ("don't wear no hat, don't wear no gloves, all you wear is your muscle of love") should probably have a sexual interpreta­tion (Brown's Tantric practices are never obsolete), but it is the song's nagging brass riff that offers the most sexual imagery of it all — and the track's complex, sense-thrashing, somewhat jungle-like percussion arrangement heats things up even further.

 

There are occasional moments of heartwarming beauty (ʽLight Your Lightʼ), occasional moments of surprising musical complexity, hearkening back to the old Journey days (ʽTouched By Allʼ), and a chaotic, percussion-wild conclusion (ʽThe Formless Depthsʼ) that might, perhaps, have been more formally impressive with a larger budget, but even so, it is curious to learn how one may paint the be-all-end-all state of the universe with nothing but tribal percussion, a little elec­tronic grunting, and some primeval yodeling. I probably wouldn't have imagined it like that myself, but I do tip my hat to the effort — and to the album in general, which really gets the easi­est thumbs up I remember giving to Brown since Requiem. Highly recommended if you can find it, and reason enough, I guess, to keep sending in those pledges as long as the old «muscle of love» still retains a modicum of potential energy.

 

ADDENDA:

 

STRANGELANDS (1969; 1988)

 

1) The Country; 2) The City; 3) The Cosmos; 4) The Cosmos (cont.); 5) Endless Sleep.

 

There are quite a few «from-the-vaults» releases from different stages of Arthur Brown's long and diverse career, judging by the discographies. Most of these, however, are quite hard to get, some have only semi-official or bootleg status, and, most importantly, it is not exactly clear if any of them are worth hunting down for anything other than historical purposes.

 

I have managed to locate one of them — Strangelands, recorded in late 1969 and originally supposed to be the second official LP by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, although this world was crazy in a different way already: Vince Crane was out of the band, and the songwri­ting was dominated by Brown and his drummer pal Drachen Theaker, even more advanced in the ways of progressive avantgarde than Arthur. Different, but not any less crazy: how could an album re­corded at the Jabberwocky Studios in the merry land of Puddletown be anything less than compe­tely and utterly bonkers?

 

It seems hard to deny the decisive influence that Trout Mask Replica must have had on this re­cord, next to which The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown sounds like a bunch of innocent teen-pop singles. No more verses, choruses, hooks, or anything targeted at instantaneous memorability and seduction. Instead, we have several lengthy, multi-part suites, performed in semi-improvisa­tory style over a mesh of blues-rock and jazz-rock patterns that occasionally descend into free-form chaos. Whee!

 

How is this different from early Kingdom Come? Well, much of the musical philosophy is the same (and a few of the melodies and vocal passages actually made their way over to Galactic Zoo Dossier, eventually). But compared to this, even Kingdom Come was more «commercial» — the sound was tighter and tougher, the riffs were better fleshed out, and there were sometimes even perfectly «normal» tracks like ʽSunriseʼ. Strangelands has no masterplan, other than some vague, constantly fluctuating ideas on how to fuck your brains in the most effective way. Or, put it differently, in the most boring way?

 

The reason why this second album never even found a proper distributor is that it never had any real meaning. Trout Mask Replica, at the very least, was a diligently planned, carefully crafted experiment in creating a new face for music. It took lots of inspiration from progressive jazz mas­ters and transplanted it into a pop / blues-rock setting with the utmost care. This here stuff, how­ever, has fairly little to add to what was already quite normal ever since Frank Zappa's Absolute­ly Free came out in 1967, except for Brown's «now I'm Dr. Evil, and now I'm the little goat in your backyard, and now I'm actually being serious but you won't be able to tell anyway» routine that gets annoying in about five minutes.

 

Decidedly, this is one of the most «far out» recordings of 1969, but individually, every single in­gredient here will be done better by either Pink Floyd, Can, Captain Beefheart, or Amon Düül II, and collectively they do not amount to a singular vision — the whole thing is very much transiti­onal, before the whole plan became realized in a slightly more accessible and coherent way on Galactic Zoo Dossier. Recommended only for completists and serious historiographers of weird brain cell movements; thumbs down otherwise. PS: Apparently, there is something called Jam, credited to Kingdom Come this time, another archival release that is also mostly bent on im­pro­visational ravings and stuff. There is an infinitesimally small chance that it will ever manage to cross your path unless you make it your destiny, but beware all the same.

THE BAND

MUSIC FROM BIG PINK (1968)

 

1) Tears Of Rage; 2) To Kingdom Come; 3) In A Station; 4) Caledonia Mission; 5) The Weight; 6) We Can Talk; 7) Long Black Veil; 8) Chest Fever; 9) Lonesome Suzie; 10) This Wheel's On Fire; 11) I Shall Be Released.

 

As the elder prophets of the whole wide world of «roots rock», it is only fair, I guess, that The Band was, if not born, then at least definitively baptized in The Basement — with Dylan as parent, priest, and godfather all at once. Before 1967, «The Hawks» were basically just a faceless (and, apparently, not very good) rock'n'roll outfit. But much of Bob's spirit rubbed off on them while they served as his backing band in 1966 and especially while recording together in Woodstock a year later, during Bob's recuperation period.

 

From that point of view, The Band — even their name is really just a truncated version of «Bob Dylan and the Band» — are essentially a «daughter branch» of Mr. Zimmerman's enterprise. Pon­derous lyrics whose «meaning» should be extracted from keywords and intonations rather than wholesale analysis, guruistic attitudes, blues/folk/country chord sequences, hybridization of tra­ditional «Americana» with modernistic approaches — all these things they have in common, even if Robbie Robertson and his pals may not have directly acquired all of them from Bob and Bob only. Still, behind all that they managed to stake a claim all their own already on their first (and, in my humble opinion, their best) album — even despite the fact that it opens with a Dylan cover, and closes with two more Dylan covers.

 

The obvious factological difference is that The Band is, after all, a band, and places heavy emphasis on musical arrangements and «technicality» — not «virtuosity», which none of its members ever had or ever even strived to achieve, but the utmost care is given to the issues of putting every ins­trument in its rightful place, and getting exactly as much from that instrument as is required for each song. Not to mention that almost every member is an accomplished singer, and, although they were never big on harmonies, the collective range of Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Le­von Helm should be angelic balm on the wounds of those who failed the task of stomaching the resonations of their teacher.

 

But that's just technical, after all. Where The Band really went their own way was heaviness, and if you are dead set against it from the start, do not even think of listening to their records. The Band took themselves and their attitude seriously — very seriously — from the very start, they implicitly claimed to have shouldered The Rock of Ages, and if you deny them that right, chances are that you will never get along. Unlike Dylan, The Band never ever had a true sense of humor, never showed a single glimpse of a tongue-in-cheek attitude. This is a dangerous way of conduc­ting things — it leaves you no space to retreat when pressed against the wall, and total failure is very easy: all it takes is a lack of talent, or just no sense of direction.

 

The good news is that, as it turned out, The Band had more than enough talent to burn, and the two years spent with Bob made the direction as precise and easy to follow as possible. On their first album, there is no filler — more than that, there are no real highlights and lowlights, no mat­ter how much one could single out ʽThe Weightʼ on the strength of its ubiquitous "take a load off, Fanny" chorus. In fact, today I am more and more inclined to take all the eleven songs on Big Pink as separate movements of a lengthy, coherent, conceptual, single-minded, single-mooded suite — and also one, may I add, that sounds just as fresh and relevant today as it did in 1968. Maybe even more relevant (depending on whether humanity has indeed gotten dumber over the years or if that's just a statistical illusion).

 

The suite is, of course, heavily dependent on a sort of «Bible Spirit» that these guys nurture, al­though nobody is inviting us to interpret the album as a straightforward celebration of Christian or even Judaistic values (not any more than ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ a year later would be intended to stimulate us to whip out the Confederation flag). Mostly slow, stately, emo­tional tunes, with Garth Hudson's classically-influenced organ and Richard Manuel's blues-and-jazz-influenced piano dominating over Robbie Robertson's rock'n'rollish guitar licks, with «plea­ding» and «weeping» as the dominant vocal intonations and catharsis as the generally intended effect. And how does it work?

 

Well, if it does not work over the first thirty seconds — first, with Robertson's «throaty» guitar, run through a «black box» for plaintive effect, and then with Manuel's tragic ring of "we carried you in our arms on Independence Day...", then it just doesn't work, period. But for me, it does. Richard may be overdoing it — he is almost overstepping his regular physical boundaries — but there is no sense of a theatrical or, God forbid, «commercial» exaggeration in his singing. On ʽTears Of Rageʼ and on every other song, The Band are self-appointed prophets fresh from the pages of the Old Testament, a pack of Jeremiahs weeping into their beards over [insert your own favorite of humanity's cardinal sins], and they do mean it and they do believe it, and, in the end, I catch myself believing them, too.

 

It helps a lot that, at this stage, The Band was still very much a collective force and did not parti­cularly suffer from the domination of one single person — Robbie Robertson does claim credit for the record's biggest hit and three other songs, but he does not sing much, allows others to come up with their own ideas as well, and, in the end, Music From Big Pink is this stately-so­lemn keyboard-fuelled dirge to the goodness of humanity, rather than the jerkier, rockier guitar-centered music that The Band switched on to after Robertson became their unofficial director / dic­tator and chief songwriter. This gives Pink an even more respectable — and, the way I have always felt it, much less forgettable — face than whatever followed.

 

The three Dylan covers (well, two are actually co-credited to Bob and members of The Band) are the obvious highlights — particularly ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ, sung by Manuel entirely in a mega-vulnerable, breaking-point falsetto that has managed to take my breath away every time I heard it. It is also extremely well-placed at the very end of the record, a drop of spiritual optimism / rede­m­ption after all the self-tormenting and obscure confessions, and Manuel's interpretation of the lyrics — he delivers them like an opera hero on the brink of expiring from consumption — is one of the best, I think, in Dylan history, right up there with the Byrds' ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ and other cases of people taking the implicit beauty in Bob's work and making it explicit.

 

But even without Dylan, Big Pink would still be just as big. ʽThe Weightʼ is nonsense when ta­ken literally, but apparently, neither Aretha Franklin nor the rest of the armies of soul performers who took it up were intent on taking it literally — all they heard was a swing between the suf­fering vibe (verse, relayed from one member to the other) and the redemption vibe (chorus, sha­red by all the members), and they took it as authentic, and so should everyone because it is: this is no fake preaching shit à la mode, this is The Band's signature song for spiritual relief, and I do feel that relief when singing along — although mostly, it probably has to do with those lilting, powerful  piano chords that build a little stairway up to each chorus.

 

But there are plenty of other «elegant prayers» on the record — ʽIn A Stationʼ melancholically slides along, meditating about life, love, and the essential uselessness of both; ʽCaledonia Mis­sionʼ epitomizes the sadness of the universe ("hear me if you're near me, can I just rearrange it?" is one of the most sadly intoned lines I've ever heard in a pop song); ʽLong Black Veilʼ, yanked out of the popular traditional repertoire because its words and mood fit in with the purposes of Big Pink to a tee, is quickly echoed by The Band's own ʽLonesome Suzieʼ. Only ʽChest Feverʼ, with its grinding harshness, stands somewhat apart and does not have a lot of sense — many people must have subconsciously felt that the whole song was like a long outro to Garth Hudson's passionate, Bach-derived solo in the intro, and The Band would later play up to that feeling by allowing Garth to really stretch out on that intro in concert, turning it into a full-fledged instru­mental showcase of baroque solemnity and sternness.

 

Still, I do not want to concentrate much on individual songs: the more I try to, the tougher Big Pink sticks together as one inseparable entity. A pretentious entity, yes, and maybe even an insult to those who think that traditionally oriented music should not be spoiled with the arsenal of beat poetry (but why not?), or that it should not be «sanctified» and «sacralized» by an overtly intel­lectualized approach (but what's the harm?). Like any influential album, Music From Big Pink is indirectly responsible for much evil in this world, including, among other things, the artistic melt­down of Eric Clapton, but that is also an indication of its greatness — it ought to have taken a really strong record to make a tough guy like Eric start seriously thinking about a change in his musical direction. In a way, Music From Big Pink really was that first record which started to turn «rock» into an institution — it certainly was one of the first rock records that sounded like it was made by old, wisened, experienced people, rather than fresh, hot, sizzling body-and -soul grub for the young ones. And just look at how much facial hair was shared between all the band members, too — most rockers still preferred a clean shave in 1968.

 

All this might make it kinda hard to get a real hard kick out of Big Pink when you are still mostly driven by instincts, gut reactions, and usually prefer to increase your collection with hardcore and power pop rather than somebody sounding like a mix of Woody Guthrie, Alan Ginsberg, Moses, and Aharon. Once you get older, though, or go through some decelerating experience (losing a leg, for instance, or a loved one), Music From Big Pink — and I guarantee this with a 90% cer­tainty — is one of those relatively few truly beautiful pieces of music that will offer a good dose of spiritual healing. Thumbs up for one of the best albums of 1968.

 

PS. The CD reissue is essential for all the remastering jobs and informative liner notes, but not necessarily for the bonus tracks — most are just alternate takes with minor variations or versions of songs that should rather be heard on Bob Dylan & The Band's Basement Tapes. Although, of course, a song like ʽKatie's Been Goneʼ completely belongs, in form and spirit, on Big Pink pro­per, no question about it.

 

THE BAND (1969)

 

1) Across The Great Divide; 2) Rag Mama Rag; 3) The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; 4) When You Awake; 5) Up On Cripple Creek; 6) Whispering Pines; 7) Jemima Surrender; 8) Rockin' Chair; 9) Look Out Cleveland; 10) Jaw­bone; 11) The Unfaithful Servant; 12) King Harvest (Has Surely Come).

 

It does make some sense to argue about what's better — Music From Big Pink or The Band — because these two records, in between themselves constituting the backbone of «The Hawks»' le­gacy, are significantly different from each other. At least, different enough to have had Robert Christgau at the time openly admit his dislike for the former and unexpected deep passion for the latter: he went as far as to claim that The Band could actually trump Abbey Road as the best al­bum of 1969. Well, as far as I am concerned, The Dean could go fly a kite with that opinion, but as for the rest of it, his position may be understood.

 

The Band marks the beginning of Robbie Robertson's steady rule as The Band's creative director and major mastermind — much like Paul McCartney with the Beatles since 1967, he seems to have occupied this position just by being the most focused and «goal-oriented» of 'em all (cau­sing much grief among the «slackers», who would later accuse him of despotism, vanity, greed, and other deadly sins a-plenty; not that there was nothing to it, but, as we all know, one man's industriousness may easily be another man's authoritarianism). Of the twelve songs on their se­cond album, eight are credited to Robbie exclusively and four are allegedly co-written. Further­more, The Band is generally faster, livelier, «rockier», and much more guitar-based than Big Pink — arguably the only song here to carry over the dirge-like, solemn spirit of its predecessor is the ballad ʽWhispering Pinesʼ, not surprisingly, co-credited to Richard Manuel.

 

And, of course, the main difference is that this time around, the album does not hover in circles around the idea of «Americana» — it simply dives in, head, feet, and tail. You do not even need to go further than the song titles, with all the references to Old Dixie, Cripple Creek, Cleveland, rags, pines, and rocking chairs. Throw in Manuel's and particularly Levon Helm's «authentic» rootsy manner of singing, chord sequences and instrumentation that derive ever more transparent­ly from jugband, bluegrass, dancehall, and vaudeville, and all that remains to seal the deal is the brown color of the album sleeve and the grim, weather-worn, but somewhat satisfied faces of the five band members on the photo. Just got paid for working on the railroad?

 

I think that I will forever remain convinced that The Band made a wrong turn here — that with Music From Big Pink and its subtle, but perfect synthesis of tradition, innovation, Dylan, and non-Dylan they were onto something fabulously universalist and mind-opening, but that The Band blocked further progress on that path and steered them towards a less risky, humbler, but not quite as universally appealing route (of course, it was more appealing to Christgau, but the guy has always been a notorious isolationist in the first place, so no surprise here). If ever stuck in between ʽCaledonia Missionʼ and ʽUp On Cripple Creekʼ, I will choose the former: the vibe of ʽCripple Creekʼ is much easier to understand, assimilate, and explain away than the whiny mys­tique of ʽMissionʼ. These here songs sort of landlock and pigeonhole themselves, and with them, The Band's en­tire subsequent career.

 

But as it always happens with talented ensembles establishing a fleshed-out formula, first time is always forgivable, since it is usually the best time; and The Band themselves must have thought of it as a fresh, focused «reboot», or else they wouldn't have called it The Band. There is no de­nying neither the sincerity and dedication of approach, nor the melodicity and catchiness, nor the inventiveness and great care that went into the arrangements. In fact, Side A of the album is pro­bably the most tightly packed Band sequence of radio hits and concert favorites; and Side B is arguably the most promising Band sequence for the time when one finally gets sick of radio hits and concert favorites, and starts yearning for something underrated, forgotten, and secretly fabu­lous. Maybe ʽJemima Surrenderʼ is a bit too lumpy and straightforward in its pub-rock brutality, but at the end of the day, I have no specific concerns to voice about the rest.

 

The sheer power of these songs is perhaps most evident in the simple fact that I very rarely, if ever, hear any civil rights activists' protests about ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ. You get lots of flack if you happen to be Margaret Mitchell, D. W. Griffith, or a member of Lynyrd Skynyrd singing ʽSweet Home Alabamaʼ, but somehow the textbook image of Levon Helm drum­ming his heart out to "well he was just eighteen, proud and brave / but a Yankee laid him in his grave" is admired and imitated — even by the likes of Joan Baez, who never minded singing about the life of Virgil Caine... despite the fact that the song does not present convincing evidence that Virgil Caine was not, by all means, an active nigger-hater.

 

Of course, Robertson is very careful here with the lyrical imagery — carefully sidetracking all the uncomfortable issues — but this is still a tragic song about the downfall of Southern pride, want it or not, and yet its popularity quickly went nationwide; Yankees all over the place were na-na-nah-ing along with the chorus fairly soon, regardless of their convictions. It took all the authenti­city, melodicity, and, actually, humility of the piece (it crawls along at a snail's pace, and even though the chorus is based on group harmonies, its overall volume levels hardly rise over those of the verse), I think, to turn the song into such a universal charmer; but even so, I have never been able to empathize with the title character.

 

I feel much more at home with ʽUp On Cripple Creekʼ, the other of the two big Helm-sung hits on Side A — sort of an optimistic, earthy, downhome retort to the heavy-handed suffering of ʽThe Weightʼ, with which they roll at more or less the same pace. Of course, it would be nowhere near as memorable if not for Garth Hudson's inventive, wah-wah driven Clavinet part, made to sound like a traditional Jew's harp, especially during the brief triumphant soloing buzz at the end of each verse. It adds the necessary bit of hot spice to what would be an otherwise rather bland blues-rock arrangement. But then there's also the funny repetitiveness of the chorus (the triple hit of "she sends me", "she mends me", and "she defends me" is enough in itself to make the expe­rience unforgettable), and there is something about Helm's singing here that makes the whole song, like, the quintessential embodiment of America's «road spirit», maybe only rivaled in that department by the Allmans' ʽRamblin' Manʼ (although the lyrics of ʽRamblin' Manʼ fall back on clichés of the genre much more frequently).

 

Maybe, in the end, the real hero of this album is not Robbie, but still Garth Hudson — always on the watchout that the arrangements of the songs elevate them from «genericity». Not only would there be no ʽCripple Creekʼ without the Clavinet, but there would be no ʽAcross The Great Di­videʼ without the slide trombone parts, lending a friendly, supportive, muscular shoulder to Ma­nuel's «wimpy hero» vocal delivery, and there would be no ʽWhen You Awakeʼ without the snowy organ and accordion to reinforce the plaintive singing. Then there's also Rick Danko's folk dance fiddle parts on ʽRag Mama Ragʼ (a song that borrows its title and sort of «suggestive» ly­rics — "shag mama shag, now what's come over you", really? — from old dance blues tunes, but little else), Richard Manuel blowing a mournful, soulful sax on ʽThe Unfaithful Servantʼ... indeed, Robertson might be providing the bodies here, but it mainly falls to the other guys to bring in the clothes, and, in a way, most of them were perfectly entitled to eventually go to war with Robbie over the credits — most of these, in spirit and form, are «Band» numbers.

 

The one song here that has always looked like a particularly rewarding dark horse is stuck at the very end. Already on ʽJawboneʼ, the band experiments with 6/4 signatures, but the result is a bit clumsy, if not uninteresting. However, it is a completely different story with the contrast between the verse and chorus in ʽKing Harvestʼ — a truly bizarre effect there, what with the verse being pinned to a fairly standard, if a bit funkified, blues-rock pattern, and the chorus verging on «dark folk», delivered in a stern, uncompromising manner; the whole song is like a dialog between the poor, struggling, emotional farmer, voiced by Manuel, and the cold, impassionate forces of nature that count away the seasonal regularities ("scarecrow and a yellow moon... pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town... smell of the leaves from the magnolia trees in the meadow..."). The whole song is like the fighting of a predeterminedly unwinnable battle — with Manuel holding on until he can hold on no longer, and then a piercing, hysterical little solo from Robbie takes over to wail the last wail (and, for that matter, have the last word on the album itself: notable, since there are very few Robertson solos of note on the album altogether).

 

The whole thing eventually ties into a very coherent panorama. Way too heavily intellectualized, of course, to be «truly authentic» — it would be interesting to know what all those pre-war folk and blues survivors who had the chance to hear it thought of the execution — but that is the very point of it: Robbie and pals are not trying here to put themselves in the shoes of their heroes, they are trying to bridge the gap between these heroes and contemporary art, much like Bob used to do on his earliest albums (or on John Wesley Harding, for that matter). Those who think the whole idea is just a lot of bull will do better to stick with Creedence Clearwater Revival, who did the same thing, but without a single whiff of pretense. But those who think that there is no reason why modernism and traditionalism shouldn't ever try to sleep in the same bed, feel free to join with me in another major thumbs up. (Even though I reiterate that I'd never be willing to raise those thumbs to the level of Abbey Road — a record that appeals to the senses on so many more levels — or even to the level of Music From Big Pink — because the best album by The Band cannot not have any Dylan covers on it — so up yours, Mr. Dean, for being way too clever for poor little me!)

 

STAGE FRIGHT (1970)

 

1) Strawberry Wine; 2) Sleeping; 3) Time To Kill; 4) Just Another Whistle Stop; 5) All La Glory; 6) The Shape I'm In; 7) The W. S. Walcott Medicine Show; 8) Daniel And The Sacred Harp; 9) Stage Fright; 10) The Rumor.

 

There is a lot of good songs on The Band's third album, and it is respectable that, even though everyone probably expected them to make a carbon copy of the self-titled LP, they went ahead and did something different. The bad news is, Stage Fright is no longer a record targeted at ma­king you kowtow to it. It is a good album, but not a grand one. And when the ambitions of The Band no longer amount to «grandiosity», things may start getting plain dull. Who needs goddamn roots-rock if «it's only roots'n'roll», after all?

 

The usual judgement is that Stage Fright recedes from the mode of «Americana Bible» and del­ves into more personal matters — that most of these songs reflect Robertson's troubled state of mind in the wake of the band's critical and commercial success, and also in the wake of the Six­ties-to-Seventies transition, what with the burnout of hippie idealism and all. Since one man's «sincerity / honesty» is another man's «egomania», Stage Fright splits listeners and critics, de­pending on how far they are willing to go in their feelings for Mr. Robertson.

 

The title track is a prime example of how this split can work even over one person. On one hand, it is undeniably catchy, energetic, well-arranged (major kudos, as always, go to Garth Hudson for providing that shrill, piercing, slightly paranoid organ backing), and — I guess — as sincere as they come. And with the right singing choice: Rick Danko, much better at delivering ecstatic, bleeding heart confessions over fast tempos than Manuel (who works more efficiently in slow, drawn-out situations) and Helm (whose Southern mannerisms would be out of place here).

 

But on the other hand, I can never get rid of the feeling that Rick and Robbie overdo it — the lyrics, the jerky tempo, the hysterical notes (especially those glottalized high pitch bombs on the third line of each verse — yes, Rick, we know the protagonist is supposed to feel bad), all of this is a little too much for a tune that, essentially, deals with just a common phobia. I mean, singing about fuckin' stage fright? Vietnam, Altamont, the Hendrix/Joplin deaths, and these guys are ma­king a Shakesperian tragedy out of stage fright? Always seemed inadequate to me, even if we agree to take the whole thing as a metaphor for something bigger.

 

Similar feelings apply to the second classic off the album: ʽThe Shape I'm Inʼ, a song that is, curiously eno­ugh, also elevated to forget-me-not status through the inspiration and hard work of Hudson, huffing and puffing behind the organ, layering layers of impressively magical passages onto the song's somewhat dumb-sounding simplistic martial structure. This time, it is more about a general sense of dread and desperation ("Out of nine lives, I spent seven / How in the world do you get to Heaven?"), and Manuel gives it an earthier, more easily credible feel than Danko on the title track, but there is still something that doesn't feel quite right about it. Maybe if they'd in­vented another 19th century character to sing the song...

 

Basically, what I am trying to say is that I don't care all that much for Robertson's attempts to turn The Band into an outlet for venting his personal frustration: that's a much narrower vision than the one he displayed just a year earlier, and the clear-cut reason for Stage Fright as the begin­ning of The Band's slide into irrelevance and (relative) mediocrity. But this is only a problem if we look at the curve in its entirety: sitting there all by itself, Stage Fright is still essentially impec­cable, especially because the other members of the crew are still enthusiastically backing Robbie and coming up with good creative support.

 

In fact, there probably isn't one single duffer in the basket. Even a generic country-blues opener like ʽStrawberry Wineʼ still stands out, courtesy of Levon Helm's ridiculously «nasal» delivery (was a clothespin involved or what?) and Hudson's cheery-drunken accordion part. A long-time favorite of mine is ʽThe W. S. Walcott Medicine Showʼ, one of the most sarcastic-sounding tunes on showbiz ever written and arguably The Band's most focused victory over the music hall genre (and "once you get it, you can't forget it" indeed — this is the album's most seductively hum­mable tune). ʽTime To Killʼ was released as an A-side, overshadowed by ʽThe Shape I'm Inʼ as its B-side, but is hardly inferior — it just doesn't hammer its hooks into your brain with the same muscular brutality as its lucky counterpart, but its «treated» guitar sound gives it a delicious, al­most power-poppy resonance, one of those unique experimental tones of the early 1970s: if you ever felt that way about Big Star's ʽSeptember Gurlsʼ, this is kind of a close feeling here.

 

Parts of the album are notably more Dylanesque than anything on The Band: most notably ʽAll La Gloryʼ, where Levon's phrasing and modulation sound intentionally modeled after Bob — this song is best enjoyed on some lazy, hazy afternoon when your own dreams aren't enough and you are in the mood for some half-psychedelic, half-rootsy romanticism. Most of the verses of ʽThe Rumorʼ also sound like they could have been written directly in «The Basement». Not surprising, perhaps — now that they are out of their Civil War uniforms, it can't be helped if they keep sub­con­sciously drifting back to the man who, want it or not, taught them their songwriting in the first place. In any case, these are all good, credible stylizations.

 

Overall, Stage Fright is not a textbook masterpiece, but it does work as an «alternative» greatest album for those too haughty, snobby, or fed up with the double crown of Big Pink and The Band, and whatever be, it sure ain't a lazy record — the concepts, feelings, general ideas may be less sweeping and impressive, but the craftsmanship level here remains at an authentic A+. The final thumbs up has a lot to do with Hudson, in particular — the one man out there to clearly show that the best «roots rock» still comes fully equipped with stems, leaves, and branches.

 

CAHOOTS (1971)

 

1) Life Is A Carnival; 2) When I Paint My Masterpiece; 3) Last Of The Blacksmiths; 4) Where Do We Go From Here; 5) 4% Pantomime; 6) Shoot Out In Chinatown; 7) The Moon Struck One; 8) Thinkin' Out Loud; 9) Smoke Signal; 10) Volcano; 11) The River Hymn.

 

Cahoots is like Stage Fright without the spark, completing the transformation of The Band from something deeply extraordinary, which they were in 1968, into something completely ordinary. If The Band was an epic undertaking, masquerading as a roots-rock record, and Stage Fright was a roots-rock record, preserving some traces of «epicness», then Cahoots is just a roots-rock record, period. Maybe not coincidentally, it represents an almost complete takeover on Robbie's part: on­ly ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ co-credits Rick and Levon for anything, and the other two songs that have somebody else's name on them are either a fresh Dylan cover (ʽWhen I Paint My Masterpieceʼ) or a bit of guestwork on the part of Van Morrison, who happened to drop by (ʽ4% Pantomimeʼ).

 

Curiously enough, all of the songs are good — once all the bile has been spent, these Cahoots tunes stay with me at least until the end of the day, and maybe more. We just naturally expect more than «just good» from a bunch of guys that happened to have the nerve to set themselves such impossibly high standards. In particular, I would want more «band» involvement: it almost seems as if the idea of bringing in New Orleanian bandmaster Allen Toussaint to lead a big brass band on ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ put the rest of the teamplayers out of focus, particularly Hudson, who does not come up with even a single outstanding keyboard pattern. For this album, it looks like he was there in the studio just to get paid — diligently playing his organ, accordion, and sax parts on whatever songs require them, then packing it in for the night. The rest of the band follow suit. In addition, the vocals are horrendously produced for most of the songs — Levon? Richard? Rick? Who cares, it's all one big mess.

 

But these are still good songs. Sad, intelligent, cynical, ironic, soulful, and «hooky» enough. The mid-tempo «rockers» (quotation marks are necessary, since by this time Robbie had completely forgotten all about what it means to «rock», and most of the other guys never knew it in the first place), such as ʽShoot Out In Chinatownʼ, ʽSmoke Signalʼ, and ʽVolcanoʼ, are lazy, lumbering sloths that formally fulfill their purpose — get you to sing along to the merry chorus of "shoot out in China town, they lined 'em up against the wall", the ominous chorus of "smoke signal, hear the drums drumming", or the puffed-up, angry chorus of "volcano, I'm about to blow!", and no, the latter is not about humping — it's about feeling bad, which is this album's weakest point: no matter how they huff it and puff it, it just doesn't sound like they're about to blow.

 

Maybe they are at their «about-to-blow-ing-est» on ʽ4% Pantomimeʼ, which, halfway through, turns into a wild screaming match between their guest star, Van The Man, and all of the singing members of The Band, who just barely manage to outshout the toughest throat in Ireland. For the typical Van Fan, well accustomed to The Man's lack of conventional structure and emphasis on «blue improvisation», this will be a nice addition to the canon — for a Band fan, maybe not so much, because improvised, out-of-control rucus is not one of their strongest sides.

 

I think, although I am not sure, that if Cahoots has a heart, it is buried somewhere in the ballads — ʽLast Of The Blacksmithsʼ, with a medicinal dose of Manuel's universal sorrow, is the only track that would feel relatively at home on The Band; ʽWhere Do We Go From Hereʼ is a simple, but relevant title, and Rick sings the song so plaintively that you almot do feel sorry for the crew; ʽThinkin' Out Loudʼ is a solid grower, an exercise in «quiet desperation», and so on. These are all emotional songs — never get around to working real magic, but they do try to make the best of these guys' knack for soulfulness, even despite the so-so production and the fact that we have already heard it all before: try as it might, ʽLast Of The Blacksmithsʼ cannot beat the stateliness of an ʽUnfaithful Servantʼ.

 

In the light of this all, it is mighty mighty ironic that Cahoots kicks off so deceptively, with the Toussaint-led ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ. The match is not made in Heaven: Toussaint is the legitimate carrier of the New Orleanian go-merry, nonchalant, Mardi Gras attitude, whereas these guys are stern, morose, humorless Canadian hicks, and they can only exploit the atmosphere for sarcastic purposes, which they do. In the end, all this merry brass sort of goes to waste, even if the song is still relatively well written and memorable. In fact, it might have been a big mistake to include it as the album opener — it immediately casts off a whiff of confusion, and you know all about these critical ratings: nothing influences them as much as the first song on the record.

 

That The Band themselves never thought highly of Cahoots is well reflected on Rock Of Ages: a double live album recorded in late 1971, a time when they should have been heavily promoting the new album, includes nothing from it except for ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ (ʽWhen I Paint My Mas­terpieceʼ only got added on later as a bonus track). And I will say that Cahoots works better as a whole than as a sum of its individual parts — implying that any individual songs in any live show would inevitably pale next to their earlier competition — but I will also say that, if you need to save up shelf space, this is where you can allow yourself to stop. The Band, by definition, could never release a truly «bad» album (fortunately, they disintegrated before the Eighties hit hard upon all the veterans), but whatever they had to say, they said it all on their first three records. The rest is just variations for the loyal adepts. Still, if only for reasons of generous inertia, a thumbs up here is not out of the question.

 

ROCK OF AGES (1972)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Don't Do It; 3) King Harvest (Has Surely Come); 4) Caledonia Mission; 5) Get Up Jake; 6) The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show; 7) Stage Fright; 8) The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; 9) Across The Great Di­vide; 10) This Wheel's On Fire; 11) Rag Mama Rag; 12) The Weight; 13) The Shape I'm In; 14) Unfaithful Servant; 15) Life Is A Carnival; 16) The Genetic Method; 17) Chest Fever; 18) (I Don't Want To) Hang Up My Rock'n'Roll Shoes; 19*) Loving You (Is Sweeter Than Ever); 20*) I Shall Be Released; 21*) Up On Cripple Creek; 22*) The Rumor; 23*) Rockin' Chair; 24*) Time To Kill; 25*) Down In The Flood; 26*) When I Paint My Masterpiece; 27*) Don't Ya Tell Henry; 28*) Like A Rolling Stone.

 

Not everybody in the world would have easily dared to slap a title like Rock Of Ages onto a live album, not even a double one. Pompous double (and triple) live albums were all the rage in the early 1970s, of course, but The Band still managed to stand out — releasing a concert record that could easily compete with the average prog live album in pretentiousness, without being in the least saddled by «prog» trappings (probably not counting Garth Hudson's solo spotlight, but we'll get to that soon enough).

 

Whoever saw The Last Waltz — and we will get around to that, too, eventually — could hardly walk away from it untouched by The Band's aura of self-importance (be it «awestruck» or «irri­tated», no matter), but would probably remain somewhat uncertain as to how much of that self-importance was immanent and how much of it was conjured by Scorsese's direction: after all, the master is quite famous for being able to perceive Biblical solemnity in whatever object he has chosen to idolize this morning. One listen to Rock Of Ages will put that uncertainty to rest: no Scorsese anywhere in sight, but the not-so-bad boys of Rustic'n'Roll are every bit as manipulative with their majesty here as they would be at their final show. Or, for that matter, any time, any day, as long as there were more than two of them assembled in any one place.

 

Recorded on the last days of December in New York City, at a venue (hardly coincidentally) cal­led «Academy of Music», culminating in a Bob Dylan cameo (which was actually left off the original album, but faithfully waited in the archives until the remastered CD reissue), this is a to­tally huge show, with about 75% of The Band's material from their first three, «already classic» albums interspersed with a lonely ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ off Cahoots and a few R&B covers here and there to provide the Impressive Link With The Past. The Bob cameo actually took place in the early morning hours of January 1, 1972, and on this new, expanded reissue finds its rightful place as the «climax» of the show. I mean, what with the humble servants working their asses off for two hours, it could be expected of The Prophet to come out at the end and provide one final blessing. He provided four.

 

In addition to all the grandness, Allen Toussaint himself, fresh from working on ʽLife Is A Carni­valʼ, had been recruited for writing extra horn arrangements, and a five-piece brass band is aug­menting The Band here on many of (fortunately, not all) the numbers. Contrary to expectations, this does not provide the music with an authentic New Orleanian flavor, but it does add extra «beef» to the sound (and extra tragic hero flavor to ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ), and this here is a show that needs as much beef as it can swallow without chewing.

 

The songs themselves, actually, are generally played quite close to the way they were originally recorded, because, to quote [an imaginary] Robbie Robertson, «why tamper with [my] per­fec­tion?» Apart from the extra brass parts, an occasional extra electronic gimmick from Garth, and a few flubbed notes from the vocalists here and there (very few, actually, compared to the usual leeway allowed themselves by most rock performers — these guys were tremendously discip­lined onstage, which many people are tempted to interpret as «boring»), the music is faithfully transposed into a live environment. If there is anything here that overwhelms, it is simply the rea­lization of how many goddamn great songs they had on these three albums — not a single stinker out here, just wave upon wave of greatness.

 

The bookmarks — that is where they fall short. Neither Marvin Gaye's ʽDon't Do Itʼ which opens the main part of the show, nor Chuck Willis' ʽHang Up My Rock'n'Roll Shoesʼ that closes it, really stand comparison with The Band's own songs. Not because they aren't fine old respectable R&B numbers — they are — but the idea here is to somehow ensure this link between the old and the new, to build a bridge between the old Hawks, still crediting the reverend masters, and the new Band, the masters of today. It doesn't work. ʽDon't Do Itʼ does set a groove, but the band almost seems to be afraid to truly «get into it», and as for Chuck Willis' number, well, it does look like they may not want to, but they pretty much hung up those rock'n'roll shoes for good, because this here ain't rock'n'roll, really, it's bland, generic pub boogie, and no amount of Allen Toussaint's brasswork on top is able to transform it into the «celebration» that it is supposed to be. In a way, these two numbers predict the terrible failure to come of Moondog Matinee — and the questionable excesses of The Last Waltz, of course.

 

What works much better is when it goes the other way — into the depths of pretentiousness, with Hudson showing off his «J. S. Bach Discovers The Power Of Electricity» routine on ʽThe Gene­tic Methodʼ, a lengthy organ instrumental that grew out of the original keyboard introduction to ʽChest Feverʼ. It is gimmicky, although certainly not as «flashy» as stuff that Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman or even Jon Lord would be doing at the time — sort of a half «mock-baroque», half «tongue-in-cheek-gothic» improvisation that shows who was really the boss (Hudson was the only one of them all with the proper academic training), and just as you start thinking that you have just about had enough, the clock strikes twelve (maybe) and Garth launches into ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ and the audience goes whoooh. A touching moment, really, and much more exciting than their lame, half-hearted attempts to «rock out». Leave ʽDon't Do Itʼ to its original master, boys — or, at least, to the likes of The Who, because there is no way you can unlock its ass-kicking po­tential. This is not the way.

 

The Dylan guestspot on the bonus section of the CD is indeed a nice conclusion, but a bit super­fluous if you already know Before The Flood — recorded two years later, but setting more or less the same groove and with Bob in the same top-notch «shouting» form. The song selection that they do is rather curious, though, with two of the four numbers taken from The Basement Tapes (still not released officially at the time) — Bob is clearly being modest here, concentrating on stuff they wrote and made together, rather than turning The Band back into his backing outfit. But then, yeah, they're still on stage for the fans, so they can't help doing ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ anyway. Good version, but not too necessary.

 

Overall, yeah, Rock Of Ages — The Band pull no punches as they prepare themselves and their legacy for immortality. The album is more «important» as a memory of an event, a collection of terrific songs, a self-aggrandizing eulogy, than as something you will want to listen to over and over instead of the studio originals. Yet it does get a thumbs up, like any live album with a great setlist, plenty of verve, inspiration, and professionalism. The Band might not have had a lot of ideas about how to present their material on stage in a new light (the brass arrangements are a de­batable touch), but they certainly showed us all how much they loved their own material on that stage. And I don't mind — they may be narcissistic about their songs, but as long as these are great songs, it is a pleasure to witness them get so orgiastic about them. On The Last Waltz, the egos may have been getting too out of hand — on Rock Of Ages, they are flaunted just about right.

 

MOONDOG MATINEE (1973)

 

1) Ain't Got No Home; 2) Holy Cow; 3) Share Your Love With Me; 4) Mystery Train; 5) Third Man Theme; 6) Pro­mised Land; 7) The Great Pretender; 8) I'm Ready; 9) Saved; 10) A Change Is Gonna Come; 11*) Didn't It Rain; 12*) Crying Heart Blues; 13*) Shakin'; 14*) What Am I Living For; 15*) Going Back To Memphis; 16*) Endless Highway.

 

Apparently, Robbie Robertson got tired one day from waking up and looking out of his window to discover the rest of The Band picketing his apartment with large signs reading «ROBBIE WE NEED MORE SONGS FROM YOU» and «ROBBIE GRACE US WITH EVEN MORE OF YOUR EGO». In order to teach those guys a lesson, he decided that from now on — for a short while at least, enough to record one whole LP — The Band were no longer The Band, but would rever­t back to The Hawks, the barroom/shithouse-playing backing band for Ronnie Hawkins back in their early «Swinging Toronto» days. Alternatively, this may have been a collective decision, but who can tell now? It ain't 1973 any more, and they all lie in their autobiographies anyway.

 

Cover / tribute albums were not exactly all the rage in 1973, when the world was still young, but they were beginning to coalesce as a separate form of art — the other well known example from the same year is Bowie's Pin Ups — and with Moondog Matinee, The Band ended up playing a serious part in that coalescence. Since, at any point in their post-Basement existence, The Band could have leisurely changed their name to The Academy, Moondog Matinee is no exception: it finds our merry bunch of bearded musical intellectuals «institutionalizing» the lightweight enter­tainment that they originally grew out of. On a sheerly technical level, they succeed; on a more abstract artistic one, they utterly fail.

 

At least the choice of material is exquisite. Instead of sanctifying early garage-rock à la Bowie (which would be silly, since The Hawks were never garage-related), or early rockabilly, which would make them look like a British Invasion band, or Chicago blues, which would make them into a second-rate Butterfield Blues Band, they go for a diverse selection that does involve a bit of rockabilly, but generally concentrates on old school soul, R&B, gospel, and New Orleans party muzak — and very few of these songs even begin to come close to «radio standards».

 

If anything, Moondog Matinee is priceless for its edutainment value. If you squint at the credits hard enough, you might want to find out about Clarence «Frogman» Henry and his throaty croak (which no one in The Band, shameful as it is to say, was able to reproduce — so they just put an electronic distorted effect on Helm's voice), or about The Platters, or about LaVern Baker — or you just might want to shift gears and go watch The Third Man, which is a really good movie, al­though perhaps just a tad overrated in terms of significance and quality by today's gourmet hip­sters, according to whom, almost everything with Orson Welles in it automatically turns to gold... but we were actually talking about The Band here.

 

To tell the truth, this is not really a «bad» album. The Band honestly try to «Band-ify» the origi­nals — in fact, come 1973, they were so much one with their general style already, they could not have really gone back to their bare roots even if they wanted to — making this, at the very least, into an intriguing modernization of the freshly dug-out «non-classics». However, that is also the root of the problem: some of these songs yield quite unwillingly to the «Band-ification», and some just plain rebel and turn into uncomfortable small puddles of embarrassment.

 

I am talking first and foremost about the «rock'n'roll» numbers — in one of his monologs on art philosophy in The Last Waltz, Robbie said something to the effect of "been there, done that, could do that along with the best of 'em, got bored and moved on" about their early days playing rock­'n'roll, and listening to these tepid, languid takes on Chuck Berry's ʽPromised Landʼ and Fats Do­mino's ʽI'm Readyʼ (which happens to be one of my personal favorites from the early boogie era, so I take this as a personal offense) sure confirms that stance. Actually, the prime culprit here is not Robertson, but the rhythm section of Helm and Danko — a clear-cut case of «overcooking it»: not content to play simple four-fours and minimalistic, but steady boogie lines, they give both of the tracks a «swing» attitude that completely robs them of their basic point, because if one cannot properly headbang to these tracks in a clear, metronomic fashion, what good are they? Complete­ly no good. Ashes to ashes, funk to funky — if anything, Chuck Berry should be left to the care of the Rolling Stones, and Fats... Fats can probably take good care of himself.

 

They do a better job with Junior Parker's / Elvis Presley's ʽMystery Trainʼ, which gets seriously funkified without completely losing the vibe of the original — and also turned into a playground for Hudson, who is busy unfurling a little electronic / proto-IDM symphony in the background while Robbie and the boys are merrily hacking away. The weirdness of the combo alone would be suffi­cient to make it passable; unfortunately, the groove goes on well past its welcome, be­cause even Garth runs out of creative ideas a couple of minutes into the song.

 

Likewise, everything else is randomly hit-and-miss. One upbeat tune may reach the right spot because of the proper amount of party flavor and tongue-in-cheekiness (ʽAin't Got No Homeʼ, even despite the lame attempt to electronically compensate for the lack of a proper «Frogman» voice) — another one may be a shy, tentative recreation of a much more energetic and over­whelming original (ʽSavedʼ — somebody tell these guys to stay away from African-American parishes). One Manuel-sung ballad may be sweet and touching (ʽShare Your Love With Meʼ), another may attempt to squeeze his free-roaming style into a rigid waltzing doo-wop arrangement where his attack loses focus (ʽThe Great Pretenderʼ). One side-closer may be the completely un­expected rearrangement of the ʽThird Man Themeʼ, now a lazy-summer-day Band-style chillout polka (no zither!), another side-closer may be a moving, but totally expendable Sam Cooke cover (ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ is, I believe, one of those few tunes that are so personal, you'd really have to live it out before adding it to your repertoire — no reasons to doubt Danko's sincerity, but he is not living it out here, he is just paying a humble tribute to Sam).

 

Thus, it ain't all totally without redemption, but I would never in my life call Moondog Matinee a «success» — certainly not if the goal here was to «update» all the songs for the modern age, nor if the goal was somehow to prove The Band's «authentic» status: ʽThe Weightʼ and ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ assert their authenticity and heritage far more effectively than a million Chuck Berry and Sam Cooke covers ever could. And this is a thumbs down — still a must-own for the serious fan, an «important trifle» in the legacy, but, nevertheless, also an album which The Band's discography could definitely skip over.

 

The CD reissue adds a whole bunch of bonus tracks from the same sessions, most of them com­pletely passable (particularly a lame-o-licious acoustic guitar cover of Chuck Willis' ʽWhat Am I Living Forʼ, with a subtle melody change that totally kills off the smooth flow of the original) — including one and one only original track: the studio version of ʽEndless Highwayʼ, which, to tell the truth, would later be done with far more verve and energy on the joint Dylan/Band live album Before The Flood. No surprise here, though — like main course, like bonus.

 

NORTHERN LIGHTS – SOUTHERN CROSS (1975)

 

1) Forbidden Fruit; 2) Hobo Jungle; 3) Ophelia; 4) Acadian Driftwood; 5) Ring Your Bell; 6) It Makes No Diffe­rence; 7) Jupiter Hollow; 8) Rags & Bones; 9*) Twilight; 10*) Christmas Must Be Tonight.

 

The first «proper» Band album in four years — and, as it turned out, the last to have any signifi­cant importance: Islands would be recorded a year later mainly to fulfill contractual obligations, and all the rest comes after the Robertson-less reunion. This time, though, Robbie pulls no pun­ches: everything, every single chord change and word is credited to him personally, setting the proper stage for the apex of self-glorification that would come with The Last Waltz. But on the other hand, this is still The Band — Levon's drumming, Hudson's magic rituals behind the key­boards, and Manuel's and Danko's singing count as much here as Robbie's songwriting.

 

On second thought, emphasize that — they count more than Robbie's songwriting. Because, frankly speaking, by the time they reached this point, Robertson was far from interested in the technical side of this business. Not a single song here shows the inventiveness of a ʽKing Har­vestʼ or even an ʽUp On Cripple Creekʼ — for the most part, this is pretty standard fare roots-rock, and you can easily get the likes of ʽForbidden Fruitʼ, ʽOpheliaʼ, ʽIt Makes No Differenceʼ, etc., on a million billion other roots-rock records released before and after November 1975.

 

So what does make the difference is the «Band treatment» of these, rather conventional, musical skeletons. And in 1975, that treatment was a little different. Northern Lights is nowhere near as ambitious as Big Pink — it never launches a full-scale assault on epic Biblical heights; instead, it channels the group's depressive, world-weary emotional side into smaller rivulets, and even subt­ly disguises all that darkness by means of playful rhythms that regularly invite you to dance along (ʽOpheliaʼ, ʽRags & Bonesʼ) or at least to join in with all the «group fun» on sing-along, clap-along choruses (ʽJupiter Hollowʼ). But in reality, this is probably the saddest, bitterest record they ever made in their entire career.

 

Sound-wise, there are two important changes. First, the record reflects Hudson's new-found pas­sion for synthesizers: there are lots of «progressive» synth textures here, generated with enough sense and taste so as not to sound ridiculously dated to the modern ear — and contributing quite highly to the overall cold effect of the album. Second, Robertson finally finds a way to compen­sate for his lack of singing voice — developing a new style of soloing, with emphasis on jerky, tearing, high-pitched, agonizing «scream-chords» (you can see a lot of it in The Last Waltz, with Robbie always pulling funny faces at the same time) that might be a bit «show-off», but are actu­ally delivered with grace and harmony (ʽForbidden Fruitʼ and ʽIt Makes No Differenceʼ are two prime examples of this new style). It all adds a bit of pizzazz, and it all works out.

 

Lyrically, ʽIt Makes No Differenceʼ is one of the simplest Band songs ever — just a regular old lost love lament — but it is the album's definitive highlight, I think, maybe Danko's finest vocal performance: the guy was born on this earth to lament about lost love, and, finally, here is a tune tailor-made for him to wail on, with Robbie on «shrieking guitar» and Garth on moody sax as the perfect counteracts. Slow, simple, lengthy, and quite beautiful — and note the utter lack of theat­rical, overwrought «desperation», particularly in the dirgey, but very much restrained chorus har­monies ("and the sun don't shine anymore...").

 

ʽAcadian Driftwoodʼ is usually designated as the album's centerpiece, because it is the longest, the most «epic», and the only directly «Americana-History-related» song on the record, and also because all three singers share lead vocals in turn (think ʽThe Weightʼ) — but in reality, its me­lan­choly is no more and no less impressive than on any other song here. It does urge one to self-educate, though (I honestly knew nothing about The /Great/ Acadian Expulsion myself before hearing the song), unlike ʽIt Makes No Differenceʼ, but then don't we all have Al Stewart for those sort of purposes?.. Anyway, Byron Berline plays a catchy fiddle and Garth is all over the place with accordeons and recorders, so it all sounds great in the end.

 

On other sides of the compass, The Band comes up with fabulous grooves — ʽRing Your Bellʼ toys with funk/R&B, but not in a «rip-it-up» manner (these guys didn't even have enough ripping power to properly play ʽHang Up My Rock'n'Roll Shoesʼ, how could they compete with a James Brown or a Funkadelic?), rather in a «let's find a nifty musical solution here» manner: the key­board / brass call-and-response bits are exactly that kind of solution. ʽOpheliaʼ is dance-oriented blues-rock at its simplest, but somehow, again, the brass/synthesizer arrangements coupled with Levon's snarly delivery make the whole thing really tense and snappy.

 

In a way, this is The Band's Abbey Road — not in terms of similarities in style, of course, or re­lative importance to the world of music as such — but in terms of working like a swan song from an old, wisened, very much self-conscious, yet still fully competent and proactive swan (the big­gest difference probably being that the Beatles knew very well this was going to be their last re­cord, whereas Robbie had no thoughts of cutting access to The Band's studio hours as of yet). Northern Lights sets out to prove nothing — everything that could be proven already was: it's just a bunch of songs gelled together by a common feeling of loneliness and abandon and wrap­ped in several layers of mature wisdom and professionalism.

 

I do demand that credit for all these songs be removed from «Robbie Robertson» and given to «The Band» — had Robbie Robertson hired himself The Eagles or Black Oak Arkansas to record the album, the results would most likely turned out appropriately mind-numbing. But in the end, it's all between Robbie and his former pals; my role in all this is strictly limited to providing a respectful thumbs up. And I do like the stylish bonfire cover, except that even there, they had to put Robbie on top. On the other hand, as legitimate head of the outlaw gang, he now gets the ho­nor of being hung highest of them all.

 

ISLANDS (1977)

 

1) Right As Rain; 2) Street Walker; 3) Let The Night Fall; 4) Ain't That A Lot Of Love; 5) Christmas Must Be To­night; 6) Islands; 7) The Saga Of Pepote Rouge; 8) Georgia On My Mind; 9) Knockin' Lost John; 10) Livin' In A Dream; 11*) Twilight; 12*) Georgia On My Mind (alt. take).

 

If Northern Lights was The Band's Abbey Road, then this is their Let It Be: a somewhat «im­proper» album, consisting mainly of outtakes and a few last minute recordings, chronologically scattered over a large period and released mainly to satisfy formal obligations, so that they could get out of their contract with Capitol and be free to release The Last Waltz for Warner Bros. The analogy is not perfect — Let It Be was more cohesive, and came out already after the band's total demise, whereas Islands was not necessarily supposed to be the end of The Band. But in overall terms of status and quality, it is comprehensible.

 

Actually, it is not an overtly «bad» record — in general, it might rank somewhere close to Ca­hoots — but it is strictly a minor donation to serious Band fans: no new insights or discoveries will be made here. The only track that is frequently extolled as a highlight is not even an original composition — rather an acknowledgement of Richard Manuel's vocal genius, as he almost pulls off (or just plain pulls off, depending more on your pre-assumptions than actual feelings) a per­fect Ray Charles impression on ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ (actually recorded in 1976 to endorse Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign). However, this is not a «new reading» or anything, more like a successful, heartfelt homage to a great influence, and it belongs on a Ray Charles tribute album rather than on something more serious. Besides, Hudson's synthesizer backing is a little annoying here — some simple piano would be more effective.

 

Curiously, there is very little Levon on lead vocals — almost as a couple of leftover chewing bones, he is saddled with a perfunctory, mechanical cover of the old blues-rock standard ʽAin't That A Lot Of Loveʼ (much better done by Taj Mahal anyway), and the brief, upbeat album clo­ser ʽLivin' In A Dreamʼ. The rest is mostly handled by Rick and Richard, and their somewhat similar high soulful deliveries result in a pretty, but somewhat monotonous atmosphere — what Islands would really need is a couple of tough rootsy rockers, ʽOpheliaʼ-style, as such, it is as lullingly smooth as the sea surface on the album cover.

 

That smoothness works fine and well for the first two songs — ʽRight As Rainʼ is an elegant and soothing intro with Manuel providing his usual restrained majesty, and ʽStreet Walkerʼ is an equ­ally convincing retort from Danko, with moody harmonies and cool piano/brass interplay (even so, rather heavily derivative of ʽStage Frightʼ, I'd say). But it starts getting tiresome around the time that the generically composed ʽLet The Night Fallʼ comes up, and most of the rest is, at best, just pleasant background muzak — starting with the little «fawn dance» of the instrumental title track (why do they call it ʽIslandsʼ with such a pastoral atmosphere, I wonder?) and ending with ʽThe Saga Of Pepote Rougeʼ, which is mostly just Robbie indulging in his mythological fantasies and the rest half-heartedly playing along — or the total throwaway of ʽKnockin' Lost Johnʼ, mostly «famous» for being one of the very few Band songs on which Robbie himself takes lead vocals, and little else.

 

Rather pitiful, too, is ʽChristmas Must Be Tonightʼ, a song allegedly written by Robbie on the birth of his son — just goes to show how much the man thinks of himself if the analogy is with baby Jesus (and I suppose that Levon, Richard, Rick, and Garth are, without realizing it, playing the part of the She­pherds — well, in a way, since all the royalties go to Robbie anyway). Besides, the lyrics are donwright pathetic for Robertson's usual standards: "How a little baby boy bring the people so much joy?" It is not even clear what makes this so cringeworthy — the lack of proper grammar or the weird decision to write in such a «simplistic» Christmas fashion. But the results are cringeworthy, in any case.

 

Still, a contractual obligation has to be respected, so it is kinda fruitless to castigate the band for not delivering yet another masterpiece — on the contrary, we should probably acknowledge this as yet another demonstration of the greatness: even a clearly filler-choked, uninspired record is still listenable and, in select places, mildly charming. These are, indeed, scattered «islands», on which you can encounter — at random — awful desolation, paradise beauty, or simply nothing in particular. In a way, that, too, is exciting in its unpredictability.

 

THE LAST WALTZ (1978)

 

1) Theme From The Last Waltz; 2) Up On Cripple Creek; 3) The Shape I'm In; 4) It Makes No Difference; 5) Who Do You Love; 6) Life Is A Carnival; 7) Such A Night; 8) The Weight; 9) Down South In New Orleans; 10) This Wheel's On Fire; 11) Mystery Train; 12) Caldonia; 13) Mannish Boy; 14) Stage Fright; 15) Rag Mama Rag; 16) All Our Past Times; 17) Further On Up The Road; 18) Ophelia; 19) Helpless; 20) Four Strong Winds; 21) Coyote; 22) Shadows And Light; 23) Furry Sings The Blues; 24) Acadian Driftwood; 25) Dry Your Eyes; 26) The W. S. Walcott Medicine Show; 27) Tura Lura Lural; 28) Caravan; 29) The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down; 30) The Genetic Method / Chest Fever; 31) Baby, Let Me Follow You Down; 32) Hazel; 33) I Don't Believe You; 34) Forever Young; 35) Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (reprise); 36) I Shall Be Released; 37) Jam #1; 38) Jam #2; 39) Don't Do It; 40) Greensleeves; 41) The Well; 42) Evangeline; 43) Out Of The Blue; 44) The Weight; 45) The Last Waltz Refrain; 46) The Last Waltz Theme; 47*) King Harvest (Has Surely Come); 48*) Tura Lura Lural; 49*) Caravan; 50*) Such A Night; 51*) Rag Mama Rag; 52*) Mad Waltz; 53*) The Last Waltz Refrain; 54*) The Last Waltz Theme.

 

Unless you are a complete novice in this whole «rock» business, there is probably no need to in­troduce The Last Waltz — one of the most well-known and successful, image-wise, publicity projects in the history of rock'n'roll show business. With Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson, two of the most ambitious procreators in their respective spheres of business, at the helm of the project, it quickly became much more than a «farewell concert»: more likely, the «farewell con­cert to end all other farewell concerts», The Greatest Goodbye & Thanks For All The Good Times Ever Bidden In The History Of Mankind.

 

In fact, as far as the legend goes, everybody else in The Band was pretty much taken aback at the proposition — nobody except for Robbie really had it in mind to quit the touring circuit, and many thought (correctly) that the man's super-ego finally got to his brain core, and there he was, eager to kill off the hen with the golden eggs for the sake of a bet-it-all gesture of grandiosity. The only reason they all had to go along with the plan was that they didn't have much choice at the time: without Robbie as chief songwriter, primary organizer, and activity center, The Band would not be able to exist anyway (or, at least, that is what they thought back then: the future would prove them partially — but only partially — wrong). So everybody had to bring along their own hemp rope and their own bar of soap, and then Scorsese filmed them all committing group suicide on November 25, 1976, at the Winterland Ballroom.

 

The ultimate irony of it all, of course, is that, for the most part, Robbie was absolutely right in his decision. Yes, it could be that The Band still had one or two good, even borderline great, albums left in them, but as good as Northern Lights was, it did not add much new substance to their legacy, and the upcoming era of punk, new wave and synth-pop would have inevitably swallowed them up anyway, as it did with every other roots-rock band in existence. In fact, the decision to pull the plug on The Band was almost prophetic — The Last Waltz was held the same year that The Ramones was released. In 1976, there was still some space under the sun left for The Band; in 1977, there already wouldn't be anything but a small dark corner.

 

The real depth of Robbie's cunning, however, lies not in the very fact, but in the scope of the con­cert. On the surface, an innocent, friendly idea to invite a few guest star colleagues for The Band's last concert might seem just like that — just an innocent, friendly idea. In reality, what Robertson and Scorsese cooked up was nothing less than a grand eulogy for the whole vast field. The very name — The Last Waltz — is telling enough, but if it were allowed to drag on for a little longer, chances are we'd see something like: The Last Waltz — The Day That Music Died, And The Greatest Band In The World Became The Gravedigger.

 

Clearly, the guest selection was far from randomized. Early rock'n'roll heroes, including The Band's own original mentor (Ronnie Hawkins). Even earlier blues patriarchs (Muddy Waters). The world of light jazz and New Orleans happiness, represented by Dr. John. The world of elec­tric blues rock, represented by Eric Clapton. Blue-eyed soul in the guise of Van Morrison. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell — the male and female emissaries, respectively, of the deep folk tradi­tion. Mainstream glitzy pop, represented by Neil Diamond (who, despite all the problems people sometimes have with his apparition, really does belong in this context). And, of course, Bob Dy­lan himself stepping out to close the show with ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ, a song about imminent death and sweet redemption. And in and out and in and out of it all, The Band, The Band, and once again The Band, acting as that one particular glue pack to hold it all in place — «One Band to rule them all, One Band to find them, One Band to bring them all and on that stage to bind them, in the Land of Winter where seven 35 mm cameras have been installed».

 

But here is the last and ultimate moment of irony — even once you understand the setup and how they were all framed, there is no way, really, that you can stop watching The Last Waltz or lis­te­ning to the respective LPs. Because on a pure, simple, song-by-song basis, this was a damn fine concert, and one that all the members of The Band enjoyed giving, even despite being dragged into this by force; whatever their feelings towards Robertson might that been, on that particular evening, November 25, 1976, deep inside their hearts, they must have been pleased to be «The One Band», and took to the task with all due responsibility. Maybe even with extra responsibility — most of the songs are played so close to the originals that it makes the results a little less fun than on Rock Of Ages — but there is no questioning the effectiveness of the locked-in-a-groove thing, and that is what makes a live Band show really count.

 

Like Woodstock or other such «legendary» events, The Last Waltz, in audio form, has gone through a large number of incarnations over the years — beginning as a 3-LP set, then issued as a 2-CD set with a few bonus tracks, finally, as part of Rhino Records' extensive reissue program, appearing as a huge 4-CD boxset with 24 previously unreleased tracks. I definitely suggest going along with the latest and largest version: half of the last CD, featuring alternate versions from re­hearsal takes, might be expendable, but the rest conveys the real scope and sequencing of the show much better than the early truncated set. I mean, given that the idea was to make it BIG, one might as well go along with it — even including the two instrumental jams at the end of the show. Plus, it is always nice to get three Joni Mitchell songs instead of one, and a fun rendition of Louis Jordan's ʽCaldoniaʼ out of the mouth of Muddy Waters.

 

Discussing The Last Waltz in terms of high- and lowlights is useless: there is so much material here that the discussion can take forever, and none of it matters anyway. The Band end up perfor­ming 99% of their hits, including three blistering performances of songs from Northern Lights (ʽOpheliaʼ, in particular, is so tight-bolted that it ends up rocking real hard, despite having no trademarks of a hard rocker whatsoever), and none of their misses (although, strange enough, the ʽGenetic Method / Chest Feverʼ section is grossly abridged on all versions of the album, with just a few little bits of the former and a brief instrumental run through the latter — probably that usual trick where an audio equivalent of a video release has to have one or two songs missing or gross­ly abridged, and vice versa, pressing the audiophile into joining the videophile, and vice ver­sa).

 

The guest stars are all of the highest order (well, maybe bar «The Hawk», who merely adds a bit of barking and growling to the tight jam The Band got going on ʽWho Do You Loveʼ, and Neil Diamond, whose ʽDry Your Eyesʼ is really a generic folk anthem and not too diagnostic... maybe ʽKentucky Womanʼ would have been a more telling choice) — particular kudos goes to Clapton, whose sparring match with Robbie on ʽFurther On Up The Roadʼ prompted Eric into launching in one of his fiercest, flashiest solo passages at the end; and to Joni Mitchell for the gorgeous back­ing vocals, sung offstage to Neil Young's ʽHelplessʼ while Neil himself, according to reports, was floating in coke heaven (not that it impeded the performance in any way). As for the rest — just go see it and hear it for yourself. One might love The Last Waltz, or one might despise The Last Waltz — Robbie and Martin ensured that The Last Waltz itself cares about your feelings little more than the Tower of Pisa or the theory of evolution.

 

One special note must be made about «The Last Waltz Suite» — a little special extra that The Band made specifically for the audio variant of the experience. This is a rather strangely sequen­ced concoction of mostly newly written numbers that supposedly run the gamut from blues-rock (ʽThe Wellʼ) to country-folk (ʽEvangelineʼ, with Emmylou Harris as guest vocalist) to pop balladry (ʽOut Of The Blueʼ) to gospel (a re-recording of ʽThe Weightʼ with The Staple Singers adding «authenticity») to classical-lite (ʽThe Last Waltz Themeʼ itself, sort of a «Johann Strauss Jr. meets The Third Man Theme» thing). The new numbers are not particularly memorable, and overall, the effort seems so slight in comparison to the powerful live show that this «studio epi­log» feels like a misfire — even if it does offer the fan a few last minute new compositions, and even if the resulting addition of Emmylou Harris to the roster is a good thing in itself.

 

But a quibble is but a quibble, and it does not in the least dim the general effect. The Last Waltz is a grand experience, and it does close the book not only on The Band, but on the heyday of tasteful, intelligently crafted roots-rock as well — blame it on Robbie to have collected 70% inte­rest for the task of assisting in the closure, but in a way, he only stated and logged the inevitable. And that is just the philosophical underbelly of it — and then there are the gut feelings, which simply state that The Last Waltz is a lot of fun for all those who like The Band and the guests of The Band, and that there is no way the album could be deprived of a thumbs up, be it the 3-LP, the 2-CD, or the 4-CD incarnation. One Neil Diamond don't spoil no show, anyway.

 

JERICHO (1993)

 

1) Remedy; 2) Blind Willie McTell; 3) The Caves Of Jericho; 4) Atlantic City; 5) Too Soon Gone; 6) Country Boy; 7) Move To Japan; 8) Amazon (River Of Dreams); 9) Stuff You Gotta Watch; 10) Same Thing; 11) Shine A Light; 12) Blues Stay Away From Me.

 

Ironically, even though Robbie initially planned for The Band to simply quit touring and become a studio outfit (possibly hoping to recreate the conditions for the Sgt. Pepper experiment), fate had it that «The Band» — without Robbie — came back together in 1983 exclusively as a touring outfit, spending an entire decade as an oldies act, during which they had to outlive the tragic sui­cide of Richard Manuel, unable to cope with his alcoholism and other problems.

 

Maybe if tragedy did not strike so soon, we might have had ourselves a «Band» album from the 1980s — were such a thing able to prevent Manuel from his rash decision, I might even agree to endure it — but as it is, it is actually very, very good that «The Band» waited until the early 1990s, when the elec­tronic boom had passed and live instruments came into fashion once again, to make their first move. Because, even though Jericho adds nothing whatsoever to their repu­tation, it also does not make any serious detractions.

 

«The Band», reconvening to further the legend for the appropriately biblically titled Jericho, in 1993 retained but three old war horses — Danko, Helm, and Hudson — with new members Jim Weider and Richard Bell respectively taking the places of Robertson (guitars) and Manuel (key­boards), and Randy Ciarlante adding extra percussion; furthermore, there are about a dozen guest musicians emerging here and there on saxes, fiddles, mandolins, steel guitars, you name it — a little surprising, actually, because in the past, it was the band members themselves who would eagerly supply all that instrumental variety. This is already suspicious, but then there is the song­writing: of the twelve tracks, only two involve real Band members (Helm and Danko) as co-writers, with the rest either being covers of old / contemporary material, or special commissions from some of the guests (the complete list of songwriters, both living and dead, amounts here to a whoppin' 23 names altogether).

 

Nothing great could come out of such a huge melting pot, and nothing did come out. Of course, the vocals, the laid-back rootsiness, and the complexity of the instrumental layers reveal Jericho as a proper Band album — in form and style, at the very least. But the album has no real point to make. It is neither a proper continuation of «Encyclopaedia Americana», nor a nostalgic look back at how they left the Encyclopaedia without completion, nor even an attempt to create some­thing — anything — and prove to the world that «The Band» still has a finer grip on reality than the average random band playing for pennies on your local street corner. What Jericho really is is merely a friendly get-together. Wanna play something? Yup, why not. Okay then, let's play. Got nothing better to do anyway. Beats playing poker till dawn.

 

So they play — Bob Dylan's ʽBlind Willie McTellʼ, and Bruce Springsteen's ʽAtlantic Cityʼ, and some old stuff from Willie Dixon, and a Jules Shear song because Jules Shear happened to be passing by, and an Artie Traum song because Artie is such a nice guy and cares about the envi­ronment and stuff, and a bit of this and a bit of that, and it all sounds nice on the surface, but bland, shallow, and boring once you try to take a dive.

 

The slow tempos of the songs bring the average running time of each number to about five mi­nutes, so that Jericho drags on and on and on — above all else, it is poorly sequenced, with the most generic, comatose song of all, the formulaic 12-bar ʽBlues Stay Away From Meʼ occupying the final six minutes like an extra ten pounds of excess body fat. Only twice in all do they engage in an attempt to speed up the tempos, and only once does it sound even remotely fun and funny, on the sarcastic ʽMove To Japanʼ, where, to the merry sounds of Hudson's trusty accordion, Levon sings about the advantages of relocating one's life to Tokyo since we are all so used to Japa­nese stuff in our life already (a point that had already been well stated by John Entwistle in his ʽMade In Japanʼ twenty years earlier, actually). The song itself is little more than an average piece of fast honky tonk boogie, though.

 

The whole album has this laid back, on-the-porch atmosphere — lazy, inoffensive, and absolute­ly devoid of serious interest. Even Hudson, who used to be so involved in finding non-trivial solu­tions for arranging The Band's early classics, has nothing in the way of fresh ideas. ʽAtlantic Cityʼ is a lukewarm, energy-free take on Bruce's classic, which the romantic mandolin part is unable to compensate for in any way. Artie Traum's ʽAmazonʼ reflects the guy's New Ageisms, with an «atmospheric» keyboard arrangement by Garth who, alas, is no Enya when it comes to riding that train. The old blues covers (ʽStuff You Gotta Watchʼ, ʽSame Thingʼ) kick about as much ass as a skeleton — for comparison, check out any live version of ʽSame Thingʼ played live around the same time by the Allmans — but if you are not really in the mood for ass-kicking, they might go down relatively easy with a cold beer after a hard day's work.

 

As a «memento», Jericho also hauls out Manuel's last archival recording with the band — a dus­ty cover of the hit country single ʽCountry Boyʼ; having been cut in 1985, it is the lone example of what an «Eighties Band» could have sounded like, and apart from Manuel's vocals (which are always lovable and, so it seems, were relatively unharmed by the man's predilection for Grand Marnier), I don't think there is anything about it that strikes me as subtle or tasteful.

 

Of course, it would be all too easy to euthanize the lame dog by saying «See, there's your Band without Robbie Robertson!» — problem is, the best Robbie Robertson could have done in 1993, were he on talking and working terms with the rest of them, would be to saddle the boys with a few long pompous ballads about the heavy plight of the Native American, and, more likely than not, it would have all sounded equally plodding and tedious, because nowhere on here is there anything even remotely reminiscent of a spark. I have no idea why they made this record — money, boredom, drunken bet, whatever — but this particular Jericho is clearly past the point of the walls tumbling down. Recommended for major fans and enthusiasts only; thumbs down for everybody else on the planet.

 

HIGH ON THE HOG (1996)

 

1) Stand Up; 2) Back To Memphis; 3) Where I Should Always Be; 4) Free Your Mind; 5) Forever Young; 6) The High Price Of Love; 7) Crazy Mama; 8) I Must Love You Too Much; 9) She Knows; 10) Ramble Jungle; 11) Young Blood*; 12*) Chain Gang.

 

Rule # 1: you do not call your album High On The Hog and place an ugly swine on the cover if you care at all for your reputation. Above everything else, High On The Hog used to be the name of a commercially successful Black Oak Arkansas album, which swept up the charts with the aid of the hit single ʽJim Dandyʼ, a novelty tune that sounded cute, charming, and kick-ass when done by LaVern Baker ages ago, but dumb and tasteless when reworked by crude Southern rock­ers in the 1970s. Now these here guys in The Band must have had a complete memory reboot to forget about it — or else, they consciously went for the same title. Needless to say, that is not a good sign. Neither is the nasty grin on the piggy's face.

 

No composing activity from the original members is registered here whatsoever: «The Band» is co-credited on ʽThe High Price Of Loveʼ, which is really another Jules Shear song, and Helm and Hudson take partial credit for ʽRamble Jungleʼ, which is not really a song at all, but rather a triba­listic jam beaten out by several very tired old men. Additionally, Helm's lead vocals sound awful on most of these songs — perhaps not much worse than on Jericho, but somehow the trans­for­ma­tion of his deep-set, snappy laryngeal bark to an annoying high-pitched whine is far more notable here, further depriving The Band of energy. And there are no signs of Hudson making any efforts to return from his position of bit player to a more advanced role in the group.

 

Consequently, this is yet another decrepit show: snail-paced, melodically trivial roots-rock with generic arrangements — and are we really going to emphasize real drums, modest use of elec­tro­nics, and carefully rehearsed ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ-style brass parts as «charm-workers»? As in, «yeah all right, but this could have been so much worse»... well, no, it probably could not, beca­use to some extent, The Band are under a strict obligation to respect the trademark, and it is hard to imagine, for instance, Garth Hudson head-diving into «adult contemporary». In other words, as inoffensive background music, High On The Hog is still effective.

 

But the bad news is, they are not even pretending to try. ʽStand Upʼ, with the already mentioned brass arrangements and a stinging clavinet line straight outta ʽUp On Cripple Creekʼ, seems to be the only song at all that took a little bit of pre-writing and rehearsing; everything else could easily have been slap-dashed out in the studio with a total of thirty minutes allocated to each song. Chief culprits are a cover of J. J. Cale's ʽCrazy Mamaʼ, done in improvised 12-bar blues mode, and a long-winded, never-ending re-recording of Bob's ʽForever Youngʼ (a song that was already ori­gi­nally re­corded by Dylan with The Band in 1974) — supposedly dedicated to the passing of Jerry Garcia in this particular case, but the years have worn away the touching effect, and now it is just another ʽForever Youngʼ, and who needs it?

 

Bob actually contributes another song here, the only fast rocker on the entire album — ʽI Must Love You Too Muchʼ; it functions as a much-needed change of pace, but the guitars are dull pub-rock, and the noisy keyboard and whatever-else background makes it sound overproduced and fussy at that. Still, it is kinda fun, and definitely livelier than the stiff slow-tempo country-blues of about half of the other numbers.

 

Towards the end, they plunge into older outtakes — another post-mortem souvenir from Manuel (no less than a live recording of a Bread ballad, aaaahh!), and the above-mentioned ʽRamble Jungleʼ, where the players are led by blues pioneer Champion Jack Dupree in a session that has little other than historical interest. Again, «listenable» (only because Manuel is such a good sin­ger, even when he is totally soaked, and because we are all supposed to love all the old blues guys, no matter what) is the most polite definition that can be hung on these tunes.

 

To add insult to injury, British and Japanese first pressings of the album used to replace ʽRamble Jungleʼ with a cover of ʽYoung Bloodʼ — with most of the world unaware that the track was originally recorded for a tribute album to the recently deceased Doc Pomus. On that tribute album, it certainly belongs; on a new Band original, it only brings to mind the principle of «If you have no idea what to do, do another ʽYoung Bloodʼ», first implemented by Bad Company in 1976 (because, frankly speaking, The Coasters went as far with that novelty number as it was possible to go already in 1957), and serves as a total downer of a «grand finale».

 

Overall, of the three post-Robbie albums, High On The Hog is easily the worst — containing even less involving song material and even more boring arrangements than Jericho, dragging on for far longer than the ensuing Jubilee, and — last, but maybe not least — featuring arguably the single worst album cover in Band history. Thumbs down guaranteed a-plenty here.

 

JUBILATION (1998)

 

1) Book Faded Brown; 2) Don't Wait; 3) Last Train To Memphis; 4) High Cotton; 5) Kentucky Downpour; 6) Bound By Love; 7) White Cadillac (Ode To Ronnie Hawkins); 8) If I Should Fail; 9) Spirit Of The Dance; 10) You See Me; 11) French Girls.

 

Of the three «sorta-reunion» albums released by «The Band», it is usually only Jericho that gets a decent rap — having expressed the obligatory respect towards the legendary minstrels of Ame­ricana who are back «at it» again, the critics and the public quickly went on to forget about their presence, and the pig with the evil grin on his face was no big help either. Most critical sources either ignore these records, or give all of them a more or less equally condescending pat on the back. And it's not as if there weren't a good reason behind such behavior.

 

That said, I find myself just a wee bit more partial towards Jubilation, the last record in this relatively ill-fated trilogy. Perhaps it is a silly feeling, motivated by some trifle. For instance, the fact that they swing back to tolerable album sleeves now — instead of the ridiculously clothed Sus domesticus, we get a half-kiddie, half-Indian-style drawing (by «famed Illinois folk artist George Colin», according to Net sources). Or the fact that it is so relatively short — good old normalized roots-rock is best taken in small dosages, after all, certainly not exceeding the classic forty(-five) minute LP boundaries.

 

Or maybe just the fact that it is the last one: a year and a half later, Danko would pass away from drug-related heart failure, finally leaving Helm and Hudson in no position to go on driving Old Dixie down. Of course, there was no predicting this in mid-1998, while the album was being re­corded, but there is no denying, either, that age and health problems were quickly catching up, and (gruesome but true) it was basically a question of who would go first — both Rick and Levon sound completely wrecked on most of the tracks. Although Rick lost in the competition by more than a decade (mainly because of far heavier substance abuse throughout his life), the outcome is certainly not clear if you just listen to the songs.

 

All the more ironic is the album title: Jubilation consistently sounds like a fatalistic dirge rather than a celebration of anything in particular or in general. The title comes from a line in ʽSpirit Of The Danceʼ, which, technically, is indeed a New Orleanian, Allen Toussaint-ish dance number, heavy on brass fanfare and twisted syncopated rhythms. But its minor-key mood, dark basslines, and plaintive lead vocals do not even begin to approach an atmosphere of rejoicing — either it is a complete failure to reach the achieved goal, or that goal was never set in the first place, and the whole "dance, dance 'til the break of day, dance all our cares away" routine was firmly tongue-in-cheek from the very start. Honestly, no self-respecting Creole would probably want this played at his wedding or birthday. Maybe for the funeral?..

 

Another omen is that Jubilation was recorded at Levon's home studio in Woodstock — thus com­pleting the circle begun in 1967, when The Band was officially christened as an independent artistic unit by Godfather Bob. No idea whether shades and echoes of Music From Big Pink were ringing in the original members' ears when they were recording these songs, but the fact does remain that Jubilation has a strong «weepy» aura around it, starting from the very first song — Paul Jost's ʽBook Faded Brownʼ, either a religious anthem tailor-made for the local Amish po­pulation or just a «nostalcholic» look back at all the good times that the singers had before fate drafted them into the Confederate Army.

 

The song is generically composed, but tastefully arranged and mildly touching — and so is pretty much everything else on Jubilation, which tends to avoid experiments, production excesses, and any attempts at sounding like «rock'n'roll» (with one tolerable exception — ʽWhite Cadillacʼ, suppo­sedly a tribute to the old boss Ronnie Hawkins, who, contrary to rumors and impressions, was not dead at all, but actually outlived them all; beginning quite deceptively, with an old rockabilly in­tro that you can hear on the Burnette brothers' ʽTrain Kept A-Rollin'ʼ, it goes on to become a mild country-rock boogie where the piano and accordeon «rock» harder than the guitars). Quite a few of the numbers are now credited to The Band itself, and although that does not improve the gene­ral level of songwriting, at least it makes Jubilation into a more «authentic» proposition than its predecessors, to some degree.

 

Curiously, the album is very light on whatsoever kind of electronics: for the most part, Hudson sticks to regular old pianos and, predominantly, the accordeon, which is also responsible for gi­ving Jubilation much more of an «old-timey» feeling. All of Garth's «modernistic» passions are in­tentionally saved for the last track: ʽFrench Girlsʼ is a two-minute-long instrumental synth-based coda (still with the inclusion of saxes and accordeons, nevertheless) that, in keeping with the over­all somber mood of the album, would rather seem to be dedicated to the likes of Saint Jeanne than to the Folies Bergère, if you get my drift.

 

Perhaps if the players were in better shape, or spent more time coordinating their act, or had a slightly better and less «subconscious» understanding of why they were there in the first place, Jubilation might have even been comparable in status to one of the classic Band's «minor» albums, like Cahoots or something (ʽSpirit Of The Danceʼ does, after all, seem to have been written «in memory» of ʽLife Is A Carnivalʼ). As it is, Jubilation is limp, formulaic, and not at all memorable — but it still sounds decent while it's on: professionalism and good taste are, after all, the only proper guides through the local reefs and shallows when all else is gone.

 

Most importantly, it all sounds natural — it is all exactly the way these guys were in 1998: old, sad, nostalgizing, well aware of their imminent mortality, and maybe just driven by a subcon­scious desire to leave just one more tiny particle of themselves behind while they still have time and just enough strength to do it. That seems to be the main vibe permeating most of these songs, and that vibe suffices for a thumbs up — and, more importantly, for an acknowledgement: Jubi­lation can be accepted as a minor «post-scriptum» to the history of The Band, where I would have a real hard time convincing myself that Jericho and particularly High On The Hog could be incorporated in the same history.

 

ADDENDA:

 

A MUSICAL HISTORY (2005)

 

CD I: 1) Who Do You Love?; 2) You Know I Love You; 3) Further On Up The Road; 4) Nineteen Years Old; 5)  Honky Tonk; 6) Bacon Fat; 7) Robbie's Blues; 8) Leave Me Alone; 9) Uh Uh Uh; 10) He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart); 11) (I Want to Be) The Rainmaker; 12) The Stones I Throw; 13) The Stones I Throw (Will Free All Men); 14) Go Go Liza Jane; 15) Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?; 16) Tell Me, Momma; 17) Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues; 18) Words And Numbers; 19) You Don't Come Through; 20) Beautiful Thing; 21) Caledonia Mission (sketch track); 22) Odds And Ends; 23) Ferdinand The Imposter; 24) Ruben Remus; 25) Will The Circle Be Unbroken.

 

For all of The Band's gloriously legendary status — unlike their godfather and mentor, Mr. «I-wrote-more-songs-than-you-ever-heard-in-your-life» Zimmerman, their archived vaults have turned out to be surprisingly low on unreleased treasures. Outside of the regular discography, the only complete archival release in their history was 1995's Live At Watkins Glen, an odd mons­trosity that was presumably recorded at the Watkins Glen Festival in July 1973, although, in rea­lity, only two or three tracks were taken from the actual show, the rest being either studio out­takes with cheaply overdubbed applause or live selections from earlier shows. The album, re­leased by Capitol without The Band's consent or even knowledge, is now out of print, and most of its tracks are available as bonus cuts on Moondog Matinee or Rock Of Ages — but the fact that one had to stoop to such a silly forgery in order to make an extra buck on The Band's reputa­tion is quite telling of the state of affairs.

 

A year before that, Capitol actually put out the first Band-related boxset — the 3-CD compilation Across The Great Divide, with the third disc replete with demos, outtakes, and bits of pieces of The Band's history. This one is also out of print today, replaced by a much stouter collection — 2005 saw the emergence of The Band: A Musical History, now spread across five CDs and one DVD (the latter mostly consisting of otherwise available bits of live appearances, e. g. the three number performed on SNL in 1976 and the material from 1970's Festival Express), and probably containing every single bit of non-regular-LP stuff from The Band that we might ever need to hear. Not that the need would be overtly acute.

 

Formally, A Musical History is one of those «for-beginners-and-fans-alike» collections that will not properly satisfy either group. The fans will already have most of these tracks on the original LPs — moreover, many of the outtakes here now also feature as bonus additions to the new re­mastered CD series; beginners, on the other hand, would do much better with a small compilation (or just buy the first two albums anyway). Once I have filtered out standard album tracks, previ­ously unreleased material that has now been converted to bonus tracks, and «tangential» stuff like the «Dylan & The Band» recordings (including, among other things, several tracks from The Ba­sement Tapes and the regular single recording of ʽCan You Please Crawl Out Your Window?ʼ), I was left with a little under 2 CDs length of material — and most of it is rather slim pickings.

 

The only real bit of treasure, and even that mostly for a historian of The Band, is the first disc, which does indeed trace their musical history throughout the early and mid-1960s — arguably an essential listen for everybody wanting to understand how the band became The Band. Starting with a few sides they cut as «Ronnie Hawkins & The Hawks», with Hawkins as the unquestio­nable frontman and leader; going through the early incarnations of «Levon & The Hawks» and «The Canadian Squires»; and finishing with raw demos recorded in 1967-68 as they were just trying to lift off the ground — this is a thorough and convincing picture of the transformation of an ordinary rock'n'roll outfit into a...

 

...well, no, not really. To be honest, in the context of whatever was going on in the musical world in the 1960s, most of this first disc sucks: I cannot imagine how anybody would have sensed any seeds of Music From Big Pink in anything on here. The Hawkins-era numbers are pedestrian covers of electric blues and boogie standards — «The Hawk» has always been a much better growler and screamer than singer, and the only point of relative interest are a few scorching garage-rock solos from Robertson... both here and on most of the «Levon & The Hawks» num­bers — in the early days, the newly-liberated band was still mostly churning out formulaic boo­gie-blues like ʽLeave Me Aloneʼ, and only Robbie's stinging, screeching leads stand out: you can easily tell what it was that got Dylan interested in The Hawks in the first place. (Curiously, Bob's own rare instance of lead guitar playing on an early classic album of his — ʽLeopard Skin Pillbox Hatʼ on Blonde On Blonde — is extremely similar in style to Robbie's early solos).

 

Some of the more impressive of Robertson's early, sketchy attempts at songwriting include the catchy R&B number ʽHe Don't Love Youʼ and the gospel-folk anthem ʽThe Stones That I Throwʼ, but they are still deeply rooted in the clichés of these genres. Things only start changing when we get real close to 1968: ʽYou Don't Come Throughʼ, pitching a Manuel falsetto against a similarly high-pitched guitar melody, shows a first brief, embryonic glimpse into the roots of the sad beau­ty of Big Pink, and Manuel's own ʽBeautiful Thingʼ is a tender demo that could grow into some­thing bigger, but maybe it was deemed just a bit too waltzy to deserve elaboration. On the other hand, the early version of ʽCaledonia Missionʼ seems to pair the already well-boiled vocal melo­dy with an utterly incompatible arrangement — too fast, too upbeat, too different from the mood of Garth's merry harpsichord accompaniment. No, really, it is all almost as if they just woke up one morning — and found out that they were geniuses, after all. Same thing happened to the Bea­t­les — why couldn't it happen to The Band?

 

Of the elsewhere unavailable stuff on the other four CDs, there is only a small handful of recom­mendations I could deal out. The live performance of Woody Guthrie's ʽI Ain't Got No Homeʼ with Bob from the Carnegie Hall concert (January 20, 1968) is more of historical value for Bob than The Band (marking his first live appearance after the motorcycle crash), but is totally en­joyable even regardless of the context. The live version of ʽSmoke Signalʼ is a rare example of a number from Cahoots done live, and done well. Robbie's ʽTwo Piano Songʼ, with Manuel and Hudson manning said pianos, is a pretty piece that transcends genres — the players are trading pop / classical / ragtime patterns between each other, obviously feeling inspired; too bad they never got around to finishing the composition (which could have, among other things, made a damn stately finale for Northern Lights). And ʽHome Cookin'ʼ could have been Rick Danko's only example of a completely self-composed song in the classic era Band catalog — but maybe they decided, like me, that the chorus hook was a tad too reminiscent of ʽJust Another Whistle Stopʼ to be allowed to live.

 

The rest is mostly technical inclusions — an alternate run through ʽ4% Pantomimeʼ with Van Morrison, a live rendition of Little Richard's ʽSlippin' And Slidin'ʼ, with all the usual reservations about The Band playing visceral rock'n'roll, an early, not-too-different take on ʽAll La Gloryʼ, etc. etc.; not a lot. In the end, the boxset may be more precious for all the packaging, photos, liner notes etc. — these things always have more value as intelligent shelf decorations anyway. But I suppose that if everybody is entitled to this kind of boxset, it would be unfair to delay this honor for the very sym­bol of Americana, or else Black Oak Arkansas and R.E.O. Speedwagon might get their dues paid first, and that would be truly embarrassing.


BEE GEES

BARRY GIBB & THE BEE GEES SING AND PLAY 14 BARRY GIBB SONGS (1965)

 

1) I Was A Lover, A Leader Of Men; 2) I Don't Think It's Funny; 3) How Love Was True; 4) To Be Or Not To Be; 5) Timber; 6) Claustrophobia; 7) Could It Be; 8) And The Children Laughing; 9) Wine And Women; 10) Don't Say Goodbye; 11) Peace Of Mind; 12) Take Hold Of That Star; 13) You Wouldn't Know; 14) Follow The Wind.

 

The «real» Bee Gees did not seriously register on the world's musical scene until they relocated to England in 1967 — but The Bee Gees' 1st, with all of its stunning achievements, did not appear out of nowhere, and even technically-officially, it was The Bee Gees' 3rd, since they already had two LPs out by that time, not heard outside of Australia, where they grew up and missed a good chance of becoming that nation's Easybeats. Presumably, tough-guy Australia deemed them too sissy for its own pop market.

 

Anyway, «Barry Gibb & The Bee Gees», including Barry's underage twin brothers Maurice and Robin, had really been releasing singles as early as 1963, and a big bunch of them was put out in 1965 as their first LP whose name basically says it all. Including, that is, pointing out the band's two major strengths, already well worked out: (a) that Barry Gibb knows a thing or two about catchiness; (b) these are some dang good, unique, harmonies — kinda like the Everley Bros., but three instead of two, which adds extra power, joyfulness, and sometimes even — dare I say it? — «spirituality». I mean, "My heart cries, ʽTimber! Timber!ʼ" — is that spiritual, or what?

 

Since there was nothing better to do in Australia anyway, the Gibb brothers spent a lot of time listening to the radio, and it shows. At the same time, at a very early age, they (or at least big brother Barry) understood that writing songs, rather than covering others, was the way to go — not only is it more profitable in the financial department, but you can also find awesome ways to pass other people's ideas for your own. (Not that this is a Bee-Gees-specific jab, but maybe the Bee Gees deserve to be jabbed a bit stronger than others, given as how the LP title puts such a strong em­phasis on «Barry Gibb songs»).

 

So just about every song on here sounds like an adolescent at­tempt to emulate somebody else without directly ripping off the somebody else (not that somebody else would bother — takes a long way for the subpoenas to reach the faraway land of Oz). The Everleys, with their lightly rock'n'rolled take on the suave folk vibe, are one of the main inspirations (ʽI Don't Think It's Fun­nyʼ, ʽHow Love Was Trueʼ, etc.), but there are also nods to Motown, to the Merseybeat scene, to the new-and-upgraded folk-rock scene of the Searchers, of the Byrds (ʽAnd The Children Laughingʼ), and the brothers were not even above an occasional listen to some «cruder» boogie and garage-rock (ʽTo Be Or Not To Beʼ).

 

It is hard to say what exactly is so «wrong» with this album: in a way, there are no problems here that would not be characteristic of The Bee Gees as a whole — near-complete inability to come up with, let alone innovative, but simply «idiosyncratic» ideas of their own: from the beginning of time and until the very end of it, Barry and his brothers could only really work in other peo­ple's backyards. And these here songs aren't really much worse, on their own, than second-rate work by the Everleys: catchy, sing-along-ish, pleasant, with impeccable harmonies. Guitar-based instrumentation is a bit monotonous, but what wasn't back in 1963-64? Production is a bit scruffy, but what could we expect from a cheap Australian studio at the time? The hooks on the upbeat songs are a bit kiddie-like, but why wouldn't they be, with the songwriter himself only having turned 17 when the first of them was released? And he did write a song called ʽClaustrophobiaʼ at the age of 18, didn't he? Not every 18-year-old knows what that means. (On second thought, checking out the lyrics makes me wonder if Barry really knew what it means. Oh well, not every 18-year-old knows that it actually exists).

 

In the end, it might simply be the fact that the brothers were not quite ready yet, nor was the time quite ready for them. Even in their prime, they would almost always be writing and performing in the confines of a genre or style, but here they are still writing and performing in the confines of particular bands or artists — so much so that, if you already have the Beatles, there is no reason to cherish an inferior imitation of Lennon/McCartney such as ʽYou Wouldn't Knowʼ, and if you already have your Manfred Mann, ʽPeace Of Mindʼ will be just an infantile copy of their already juvenile approach (and at least Manfred Mann, in their early days, were accomplished musicians intentionally targeting the «innocent teen» market with their singles — the Bee Gees could only do so much as provide the basic instrumental backing for their compositions).

 

I cannot bring myself to turn the thumbs down, since I had no problems whatsoever listening to this — quite «charming» in its own way — celebration of «crass naïveté», but I do hereby con­firm that the album is only of serious value for major enthusiasts of either the Bee Gees or that «wonderful early Sixties sound, when all the people were still little children playing in the grass» and «bad» music was impossible in principle. Technical detail: although both this record and its follow-up are thoroughly out of print (and seem to have never been released on CD per se), all of the songs, and much, much more, including non-LP singles, demos, outtakes etc., are available on the 2-CD collection Brilliant From Birth (not really, I'd say, but everybody is welcome to check it out and form one's own opinion).

 

SPICKS AND SPECKS (1966)

 

1) Monday's Rain; 2) How Many Birds; 3) Play Down; 4) Secondhand People; 5) I Don't Know Why I Bother With Myself; 6) Big Chance; 7) Spicks And Specks; 8) Jingle Jangle; 9) Tint Of Blue; 10) Where Are You; 11) Born A Man; 12) Glass House.

 

This is where the «brilliance» starts getting noticeably brilliant. Technically, this may have to do with the fact that the band had much more studio time, donated to them by benevolent producer Ossie Byrne — of course, the final recordings still sound muffled and tinny compared to the sound the band would get in England, but it is more important that they actually had more time to work on the moods, melodies, and harmonies. The result is a record that has its highs and lows, but definitely sows the first seeds of the greatness to come.

 

The two main singles off the album announce the two main styles in which the pre-disco Bee Gees would excel: ʽMonday's Rainʼ is a romantic slow-burner, with Robin Gibb's «rack-the-goat» vib­rato carrying the gist of the romance (actually, his pitch is surprisingly low on this number), and ʽSpicks And Specksʼ is upbeat piano-pop in the old British music hall tradition. Tasteful Aus­tralian people clearly designated their preferences: the album itself was originally called Mon­day's Rain after the first single, but once the public let it sink and went instead for ʽSpicks And Specksʼ, the record was quickly retitled and re-released as such.

 

Who knows, actually, how things would have turned out if ʽMonday's Rainʼ were to become a hit — not only could this have delayed the Bee Gees' relocating to England, but it might have raised Robin's early credit higher than necessary, prompting the band to turn into professional crooners when they really had so much more to offer. Not that ʽMonday's Rainʼ (on which Barry and Ro­bin actually share vocal duties) is a particularly bad ballad — the main vocal melody is quite inspira­tional, even if it has to win its way over rather trite doo-woppish backing vocals and a rather sterile backing track, and it does somewhat pave the way to ʽTo Love Somebodyʼ. But for those who, like me, are in a rather complex love/hate relationship with the «nightingale» aspects of the Bee Gees, ʽMonday's Rainʼ will be the first song to fall under this relationship.

 

Not so with ʽSpicks And Specksʼ, which is fun, catchy, bouncy, and lively, despite the rather de­pressive lyrical message — it is ironic that the song became the band's biggest Australian hit just as they were embarking on the boat to England, so that one could easily interpret lines like "All of my life I call yesterday / The spicks and the specks of my life gone away" as a veiled goodbye to the country that failed to accept the Gibbs as a proper homeland. (That said, the band never failed to play the song on their subsequent Australian tours, so they probably weren't that mad). Here, too, one can see the seeds of ʽTurn Of The Centuryʼ — much tastier seeds, as far as my taste is concerned, than ʽMonday's Rainʼ.

 

The rest of the songs is a mish-mash, but nowhere near as derivative a mish-mash as on their first album. Now the brothers are already trying to put a more personal spin on everything they do, ex­cept for when they are in a plain giggly parodic mode — ʽBorn A Manʼ, for instance, is a trans­parent send-up of The Animals, right down to imitating Eric Burdon's vocal intonations, parody­ing the «macho» lyrical style of British R&B ("I'm glad I am born a man" — where is political correctness when you really need it?), and mocking the «chaotic» build-ups of that style with some open instrumental tomfoolery and sped-up vocals. It isn't a very tasteful parody, but it is so clearly a parody that it would be sort of silly to take offense at it.

 

When the brothers are being more serious, they invest into semi-decent Beatlesque pop-rock (ʽHow Many Birdsʼ, ʽTint Of Blueʼ) or folk-rock that makes good use of their three-man harmo­ny skill (ʽPlay Downʼ, ʽWhere Are Youʼ, etc.). It is clear that, had they had their wish, they would just as eagerly have invested in the emerging «art-pop» or «baroque-pop», but the move­ment was still way too fresh for them to get all the basics right, and they were heavily limited in their use of instrumentation: Geoff Grant on trumpets is the only «extra» session musician here, beyond the Gibb brothers themselves, supplying most of the basic instruments, and two guest drum­mers (one of whom, Colin Petersen, would later officially join the band and sail with them to England). So, while most of these songs are kinda nice, they are still only half-way fleshed out, with monotonous, unimaginative arrangements, poor sound mix, and a nagging sense of «we're still only learning how to be hip» dragging it all down.

 

Nevertheless, Spicks And Specks still deserves its thumbs up, if only for containing the band's first excellent song and no true stinkers (ʽBorn A Manʼ could be one, but only if it is erroneously taken seriously). Also of note, by the way, is the B-side to ʽSpicks And Specksʼ, which never made it on the LP — ʽI Am The Worldʼ, arguably Robin's proudest moment in the Austra­lian stage of the band's career; he does his best to match the title with some stunning vocal aerobics on the chorus, which deserve respect even among those for whom they do not generate admiration.

 

BEE GEES' 1ST (1967)

 

1) Turn Of The Century; 2) Holiday; 3) Red Chair Fade Away; 4) One Minute Woman; 5) In My Own Time; 6) Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You; 7) Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy Of Arts; 8) New York Mining Disaster 1941; 9) Cucumber Castle; 10) To Love Somebody; 11) I Close My Eyes; 12) I Can't See Nobody; 13) Please Read Me; 14) Close Another Door.

 

Whether the Bee Gees' 1st (technically, «3rd», but I understand the desire to erase one's Austra­lian past... boy, those kangaroos can get annoying) is or is not their «best» album is up to each of us in particular and history in general to decide. To me, it has always been the best simply by being the most diverse — because not only were the Bee Gees perfectly capable of handling di­versity with gusto, but this also helped reduce the sheer percentage of sentimental ballads: no matter how perfect a master of that art you are, too much syrup is just so much syrup. On a cult favorite like Trafalgar, for instance, the band is a pigeonholed horde of balladeer-troubadours. But on Bee Gees 1st, the band is a freelance pack of wagon-jumpers — and that's some first rate wagon-jumping if we ever saw one.

 

The move to England did not immediately change much in the brothers' attitudes. They are still playing the same copycat game, indulging their love for various musical genres, trendy hairstyles, fab suits, posh chicks, and royalties — but now they have a set of advantages, including being geographically closer to their sources of inspiration and to state-of-the-art recording studios (with access to the latter provided by their new manager Robert Stigwood, the guy who also managed Cream and Clapton's post-Cream activity); and also, last but not least, simply being grown-up — their «training years» in Australia left behind and ready for prime time.

 

There is nothing in Bee Gees' 1st that suggests an «individual artistic vision» of any kind. (In fact, there wouldn't ever be — they would sort of try forging out that vision on Odessa, due to the po­pular demand of 1969 when it was thoroughly unhip not to be a «Visionary Artist», but it didn't really stick). But on the positive side, there is nothing on the album that would arrogantly scream «we're only in it for the money», either. The real situation, I believe, is more simple and even somewhat touching. So they heard ʽPenny Laneʼ and loved it so much, they decided to make ʽTurn Of The Centuryʼ. They threw on ʽDr. Robertʼ and dug the rhythm, so they decided to make ʽIn My Own Timeʼ. Somebody brought them a copy of Pet Sounds, they were so overwhelmed that they incorporated those vocal harmonies into ʽPlease Read Meʼ (but where are the Coke bottles?). Then they found a Mellotron in the studio, and, giggling like little kids, used it to re­cord the «Gothic Cathedral» bits of ʽEvery Christian...ʼ. In short, what we are dealing here is the plea­sure of discovery, and the double pleasure of assimilating the discovery.

 

If only they weren't talented — but they were, and it all works. Fourteen short songs — nobody told the fresh young lads that, even staying within UK borders, you are no longer obliged to re­cord 14 three-minute long pop songs per LP in mid-1967 — fourteen short vignettes, each of them representing a different style, and each single one making its point in either a catchy, or a moving, or a simply curious manner, sometimes all three at the same time. Nothing here has much intellectual «depth» to it, as can be seen from the lyrics, most of which are sheer nonsense (ʽHolidayʼ may be a major tear-jerker, but God only knows what it is we are supposed to be crying about: "It's something I thinks worthwhile / If the puppet makes you smile / If not you are throwing stones, throwing stones?" Bob would sing this with an evil grin). But on the level of raw emotion, it all works, from first to last note.

 

Bee Gees 1st certainly does not sound like a «happy» album. If it may be pigeonholed at all (although that's one hell of a complex pigeon breed), it would most likely qualify as «art pop», and «art pop» in 1967 was not supposed to be about happiness — loneliness, romantic tragedy, isolation/ism/, «me against the faceless crowds», «me misunderstood and underappreciated», etc., unless you wanted to add social critique, but that latter usually came with distorted electric gui­tars rather than woodwinds and harpsichords. The seeds of those moods the brothers had already implanted in themselves when they took up with the folk stuff years earlier, but now the seeds have turned into saplings, and if there is something unifyingly conceptual about the record, it is  «melancholic nostalgia». ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ was still years away. (Actually, come to think of it, ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ is a pretty sad song, too — I have always felt pity for the poor guy who just keeps lying on his back throughout. But never mind).

 

ʽTurn Of The Centuryʼ, as I said, is somewhat of an answer to ʽPenny Laneʼ — more lushly arranged, with a complex baroque backing track, but more or less the same in terms of nostalgic sentimentality, mixed with a little brass-provided parade spirit and the now-funny complaint of "Everything's happening / At the turn of the century / I'm gonna buy myself a time machine / Go to the turn of the century" (so totally ironic today, when so many people would do anything to buy themselves a time machine and go to 1967, which is exactly when everything was happening — and who gives a damn about any round numbers anyway?). The vocal melody is not as well-rounded as a Beatlish standard would require — in particular, the chorus resolution seems weak and a bit anti-climactic after the build-up — but they make up for this fairly well with the brass arrangement, which is every bit as «optimistically pessimistic» as the finest art-pop constructions coming from that era.

 

The best known songs are probably the three singles from the album, which remained mainstays for the band's live show until the very end. ʽNew York Mining Disaster 1941ʼ, despite flagging a title fit for some pre-war Woody Guthrie workers' rights' ballad, was mysteriously promoted as a «Beatles Anonymous» track (presaging the mystification of Klaatu a decade later), even though neither the group vocals are really reminiscent of the Beatles, nor is the composition's signature all that reminiscent of a «Lennon/McCartney» approach — at any rate, the real Beatles hadn't really gone for that kind of folksy sound since Rubber Soul. All of which is puzzling, but has nothing to do with the song's quality: it is a charmingly catchy folk-pop nugget, though probably not as effective emotionally as it should be (the «tragic» undercurrents of the story of the poor imaginary miners are hardly re­flected in the music at all).

 

I used to feel uncomfy around ʽTo Love Somebodyʼ, a song originally written for Otis Redding and one that might, perhaps, have sounded less stiff and artificial in his rendition. But it is tech­nically unimpeachable — if you kill ʽTo Love Somebodyʼ, you might as well kill off the entire «soul-pop» genre, and it is simply the realization that, for some reason, this stuff is being sung by a bunch of young white whippersnappers from Australia instead of a blind old black guy at the piano that could serve as a turn-off (a racist turn-off, I should add). It's just a good old chivalrous serenade, really, overblown, but coming from the heart and written with responsibility. (I still prefer Eric Burdon's cover version, though — a little rasp-and-roll clears away the affected man­nerisms of Barry's delivery).

 

Then there's ʽHolidayʼ, one of the least comprehensible, but saddest tracks in the band's catalog — which is just the way it's supposed to be: I feel sad and I don't know why, so I'll just sing some gibberish to divert myself. Robin is playing a little medieval minstrel here, humming to himself rather than the unappreciative crowd, and the result is an unwittingly unique mix of their old Everly Brothers style with the new baroque and music hall tendencies, an odd cocktail that only happens when a talented somebody hops on two wagons at the same time (and the time being 1967 only adds to the charm).

 

These three songs are certainly unforgettable, but so is almost everything else. ʽEvery Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show Youʼ, for the uninitiated, works like a spooky creepshow, and for those who know better — like a light-hearted parody on the psychedelic movement. In fact, al­most, like a «pre-parody»: the deep church-organish Mellotron chords and Gregorian chanting (where they, apparently, sing «oh solo Dominique» instead of ecce ancilla Domini or something else with Domini it — take that, old Catholic Church!) predates the Electric Prunes' Mass In F Minor by about a year. ʽCraise Finton Kirk Royal Academy Of Artsʼ certifiedly adds The Kinks to the list of the Gibbs' influences — at least, they can do an oh-so-British bouncy piano vaude­ville number with as much gusto as Ray Davies, even if they lack Ray's lyrical insight, and it is clear that the everyday problems of the British commoner do not worry the Gibbs nearly as much as they do the author of ʽMr. Pleasantʼ.

 

Wrapping this up, we shouldn't forget that, even despite sticking to the three-minute format, the Gibbs pay attention to song structure — ʽI Close My Eyesʼ, for instance, changes its signature several times before settling on a psychedelic rather than simply-pop coda; ʽRed Chair Fade Awayʼ, likewise, gradually mutates from a nursery rhyme into a psycho fantasy (just as its lyrics would suggest); and ʽClose Another Doorʼ seems like an attempt to come up with their own ʽGood Vibrationsʼ — there are at least four distinct parts here, each with its own intricate com­bination of vocal and instrumental arrange­ments.

 

Overall, it is tempting to call Bee Gees 1st «just another well-meaning offspring of Sgt. Pepper» — the trick is that most of this stuff was recorded at the same time as Sgt. Pepper material, even if the final album came out approximately one month later. And it does seem evident that the main Beatles' influences here stem either from Revolver (ʽIn My Own Timeʼ truly sounds like a Revolver outtake, much more Beatlish than ʽNew York Mining Disasterʼ) or, at best, from the ʽStrawberry Fields Forever / Penny Laneʼ single. So there is no denying the batch of influences, or the lack of individualistic input, but there is no denying the sheer melodic genius — or simply the amazement at the fact that «It All Works» in the first place.

 

By all means, these songs, re­corded by some very specific people in some very specific conditions, should not be touching soul chords, but somehow, they are — I'd call this «borderline genius craftsmanship», and that, really, is the way that the Bee Gees would be operating from now on for most of their career. And in the generally healthy musical climate of the late Sixties, that «borderline genius craftsman­ship» frequently gives the illusion of actually crossing that border — hence, a «thinly overwhelmed» thumbs up.

 

PS. This and all the rest of the Bee Gees' 1960s catalog has recently received the de-luxe remas­tering treatment — 2-CD editions (3-CD for Odessa) with both mono and stereo versions, and the second CD comes with a bunch of bonus tracks: the bonus disc for 1st is particularly recom­mendable, with more Kinksy stuff (ʽGilbert Greenʼ), more chamber pop (ʽHouse Of Lordsʼ), more rock'n'roll (ʽI've Got To Learnʼ is actually a blues-riff-based song!), and more alternate versions and demos which are all obligatory for a real fan of the Bee Gees as a band or Sixties' art-pop as a great musical direction. And you get to hear Barry singing lead vocals on ʽOne Mi­nute Womanʼ instead of Robin! Ain't that a bait?

 

HORIZONTAL (1968)

 

1) World; 2) And The Sun Will Shine; 3) Lemons Never Forget; 4) Really And Sincerely; 5) Birdie Told Me; 6) With The Sun In My Eyes; 7) Massachusets; 8) Harry Braff; 9) Day Time Girl; 10) The Earnest Of Being George; 11) The Change Is Made; 12) Horizontal.

 

A somewhat strange title (Oval might have been more appropriate, with a reference to the sleeve photo), and a somewhat strange album — in a way, perhaps the band's stran­gest album ever. Re­corded in the wake of Sgt. Pepper's arrival, and we could expect it to be at least as diverse and multi-colored as its predecessor, considering just how heavy the peer pressure was on everybody once the Beatles put on their grotesque uniforms. But it isn't. The first impression is that the moods and textures are becoming more condensed, veering towards a unified «Bee Gees sound». This is not very good news for anti-sentimentalist crusaders. Then the second impression is that the band is not really going for a simple pop appeal — and that ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ must have moved them to more activity than ʽWhen I'm Sixty Fourʼ. That's a solid compensation.

 

Essentially, Horizontal places a solid block on several of the paths briefly explored in 1st — for instance, the mock-cheery Kinksy piano music hall of ʽCraise Finton Kirkʼ, or the Revolver-style guitar pop of ʽIn My Own Timeʼ, or the hallucinatory excesses of ʽEvery Christian...ʼ — in favor of further road-building in the other directions. There are still a few nods to psychedelia, and a few traces of a «rock» sound, courtesy of guitarist Vince Melouney, but the brothers now seem more fully aware of what it is they really like to do and what it is that they don't. Fortunately, for now, what they like to do, what the public likes to hear from them, and what we commonly ex­pect from good art-pop music, irrespective of the times, still seem to coincide.

 

The big hit and perennial fan favorite ʽMassachusetsʼ could, perhaps, have been written by Scott McKenzie or John Phillips, but it couldn't have been sung the way Robin does it — carefully and meticulously articulating each line, laying it out on the hay-covered melody waves like ultra-fragile glass. It is sort of namby-pamby (but this is the Bee Gees, what are you doing reading this if you hate namby-pamby?), but it is also tightly disciplined (the upbeat rhythm section helps out a lot), and the string melody is locked into such a genteel baroque dance with the vowel har­mo­nies that the song gets an authentic «aristocratic» feel. Even when you watch the lip-synced foo­tage from 1967 of the band singing the song, it seems as if Robin, and the rest of them, are doing it just for themselves — no pandering to the audience and its tastes whatsoever. Oh, it's a long long way from here to ʽMore Than A Womanʼ.

 

Above all else, ʽMassachusetsʼ is not a very happy song, and neither is anything else on here: overall, Horizontal is fairly glum, even if nobody quite understands why. In fact, listen closely to the lyrics of its bookmarks and you might think it's a suicidal album — ʽWorldʼ greets us with grand pianos, Mellotrons, and bombastic percussion only to ask the question "How far am I able to see, or am I needed here?", and the title track says farewell with grand pianos, Mellotrons, and no bombastic percussion in quite a literal way: "This is the start of the end, goodbye / Hours of facing my life have damned". Like I said — if it ain't the strong influence of ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ, I have no idea what it is. But in any case, existentialist despair and suicide in the Bee Gees' im­personation circa 1967 sound seductive — the catchy choral harmonies, wobbly echos, and pompous arrange­ments don't exactly plunder the depths of the soul, but they still make this «exhibitionist world-weariness» look cool and noble.

 

The band also proves that it can brew sharp tragedy out of sheer nothing just like that — this is concerning one of my favorite Bee Gees songs, whose silly title (ʽLemons Never Forgetʼ) fully matches the equally silly lyrics ("an apple is a fool but lemons never do forget... the lemon sings my song, he's known it all along"), but this is really a vibe-based experiment: Barry and Vince generate so much soul-suffering with their panicky vocal / stormy electric guitar interplay that the lyrics take on a life of their own. Don't you just hate those villainous lemons? Now there's a fruit that can push a grown man to the utmost brink of despair.

 

The song does pay a small debt to the tradition of British absurdism, although only a small one: major debts are paid on one of the two «rockier» songs of Side B — ʽThe Earnest Of Being Georgeʼ (Oscar Wilde reference aside, could this one have any possible further influence on the «Just George» suite from Giles, Giles, & Fripp's Cheerful In­sanity?), which sounds swell on first listen but does not leave a particularly lasting impression due to lack of either meaning or humor. They work it out a bit better on the second «rocker», ʽHarry Braffʼ, a re-recorded left­over from the 1st sessions, probably also inspired by the Kinks but with a much fuller arrangement than the wimpy piano shuffle of ʽCraise Finton Kirkʼ.

 

And yet, by this time it is clear that the «art ballad» is going to forever stay the band's major focus — «forever» meaning «until we move to Miami, where the sun is too hot for balladeering». In this respect, I would recommend focusing less on manneristic plaintive stuff from Robin, like ʽReally And Sincerelyʼ, and concentrate more on such tiny forgotten gems as the folksy ʽDay Time Girlʼ, well worthy of a Left Banke or even an early Joni Mitchell; or Barry's prayer-like ʽWith The Sun In My Eyesʼ, resting on a sparse bed of drawn-out organ chords and quiet cham­ber strings. All of these songs are at least well written and expertly delivered — no idea how «sincere» they are (here is a difficult philosophical question: can somebody who once sincerely wrote something like ʽWith The Sun In My Eyesʼ go on to write something like ʽNight Feverʼ? I actually think that the answer is a yes, but I'm prepared to accept defeat on this), but most of them sound beautiful to my ears regardless of the answer.

 

In the end, it's all a matter of environment. The Bee Gees simply thrived in that «dress me up as Lord Byron» atmosphere of London in 1967-68, which stimulated their creativity like no other period in musical or cultural history. And even if Horizontal, on a sheer song-by-song basis, narrowly loses to 1st in terms of diversity or plain old catchiness, it has a slightly more natural flow and cohesion, and explores the band's melancholic side so thoroughly that already on the very next album they would have to change direction — away from the moon and a little closer to the sun. Meanwhile, this stuff expectedly gets its thumbs up as simply one of the finest art-pop records of 1968 — beating the Moody Blues, I might add, if only because they don't waste their time searching for the lost chord, wisely preferring to make good use of already found ones.

 

Additionally, the 2-CD re-issue is just as essential for the fans as the re-issue of 1st, with a swarm of bonus tracks, including the single-only hit ʽWordsʼ and lots of juicy B-sides that usually accen­tuate the Britishness of it all (ʽSir Geoffrey Saved The Worldʼ, ʽBarker Of The U.F.O.ʼ), but also provide extra memories of the band's toying with psychedelia (ʽOut Of Lineʼ; the thoroughly odd ʽDeeply Deeply Meʼ, where Robin is actually doing ragas — modulating his voice like a sitar! — I wouldn't describe the effect as too pleasant, but it sure is odd).

 

IDEA (1968)

 

1) Let There Be Love; 2) Kitty Can; 3) In The Summer Of His Years; 4) Indian Gin And Whisky Dry; 5) Down To Earth; 6) Such A Shame; 7) I've Gotta Get A Message To You; 8) Idea; 9) When The Swallows Fly; 10) I Have De­cided To Join The Airforce; 11) I Started A Joke; 12) Kilburn Towers; 13) Swan Song.

 

In the beginning, Idea sounds like a huge letdown. As the psychedelic haze slowly started dissi­pating by mid-1968, and the musical world started splintering into the «roots rock camp» (which the Bee Gees took a serious liking to), the «art rock camp» (which the Bee Gees preferred to ad­mire from afar), and the «hard rock camp» (which the Bee Gees abhorred), the band found this a good pretext to allow themselves to «let go» of even more of that extra ballast they'd picked up in 1967 — and released their «wimpiest» record to-date (not counting the early Oz stuff). Lush bal­lads, sissy folkie tunes, and inoffensive country-pop — this is what Idea is all about, and no one but the Bee Gees themselves are responsible.

 

Ironically, this also happened to be the album with guitarist Vince Melouney's only songwriting credit: the soft pop-rocker ʽSuch A Shameʼ, which must have been written under the heavy influ­ence of Dave Davies' ʽDeath Of A Clownʼ — not a song of any importance, but at least it's got some bluesy harmonica runs from some anonymous harmonica blower, which adds an extra touch to the mostly keyboards-and-strings-dominated album. Vince was the one who pushed the band into a bluesier direction — but what can one little-known Australian guitarist have against a whole three Gibb brothers? Particularly once they finally decide that, God be witness, they don't need fuzzy electric guitar on their albums. Because it distracts them from their spirituality.

 

But as time goes by, Idea gains back some of the appeal that it never had. Most of these lush bal­lads, manneristic as they are and occasionally suffering from the ever-increasing prominence of Robin's lead vocals, are perfectly written and laid out, and, most importantly, they usually offer just the right «antidotes» to the potentially annoying sentimentality. ʽLet There Be Loveʼ starts out swimming in cotton candy — then, once it gets to the bridge ("I am a man, so take me for what I am..."), group harmonies come in and add a little drama and intensity. Same thing happens with ʽWhen The Swallows Flyʼ, where the dynamic chorus pulls the song out of mediocrity after a rather lackluster piano verse kinda goes nowhere (but still manages to influence a young Elton John, as I seriously suspect).

 

Meanwhile, Robin's two «tour-de-force» highlights that I used to shun — ʽIn The Summer Of His Yearsʼ and ʽI Started A Jokeʼ — are, in fact, pretty hard to criticize either from a melodic point of view (the vocal parts are designed and carried out as harmonic triumphs) or even from a «mood / style» point: they are subtle psychological portraits or prayers, rather than cheap sentimental clichés. The for­mer was supposedly written in memory of Brian Epstein, but could well apply to any young man, struck out by misfortune at a comparable age — Robin's take on the subject combines just the right amount of solemn pomp, humanity, and pity.

 

As for ʽI Started A Jokeʼ, when you look at the lyrics, it is actually rather gruesome — suicidal, in fact — and this gets me to thinking that the whole album, in fact, has more brushes with death than any other Bee Gees product: apart from these two songs, you also have ʽI've Gotta Get A Message To Youʼ (written from the point of view of someone condemned to the chair) and ʽSwan Songʼ which is not explicitly about death, but still provides a sort of «last-wish» conclusion to the album, much like the conclusive title track to Horizontal. In other words, Idea may take another solid step away from the diversity and the «grittiness» of its predecessors, but that does not mean it has to steer towards the «namby-pamby»: the overall atmosphere is still fairly dark, and the ro­mance is still understood more in Byron / Chopin terms than in Hollywood ones.

 

The upbeat, toe-tappable folk and country stuff is mostly limited in ambition, and thus, not too durable in terms of live show favorites or best-of compilation eligibility — but ʽKitty Canʼ is funny and catchy; ʽIndian Gin And Whisky Dryʼ is one of the most elegantly gallant tunes written about the perils of alcoholism; the title track features the best (if not the only) electric guitar lick on the album, delivered in a psychedelic tone (nice sonic match for the light bulb on the album sleeve); and ʽI Have Decided To Join The Airforceʼ is an amusing parody on British martial sty­listics (unless the song was actually commissioned by the UK Air Force, which I know nothing about, but it's possible — after all, if they invested their talents into writing jingles for Coke, why not this? And best thing of all, in the wake of The Who Sell Out, it would be impossible to tell the proper limit between pop-sell out and pop-art anyway).

 

In the end, I think that the only relative failure is ʽDown To Earthʼ — still an important song in any case, as it briefly explores the «cosmic loneliness» theme one year before Bowie's ʽSpace Od­dityʼ made it a commodity (and four years before ʽRocket Manʼ brought it into the average household), but it sounds a bit too lethargic and, eventually, unresolved — and applying for epic status on rather thin grounds. Maybe they should have extended it to seven minutes or something, but in mid-1968, they weren't quite ready for the big game yet.

 

In retrospect, I sort of think that Idea was the first album where the Bee Gees really realized themselves as the band they wanted to be — throwing most of the peer pressure off their shoul­ders and going for the heart. This does not mean that it is a better album than 1st or Horizontal: those whose musical tastes and conceptions are close to mine will inevitably prefer the Bee Gees with peer pressure rather than without them, if only because there is only so much «lushness» and quasi-operatic vocalizing and strings and romantic loneliness that one can take (although even from that angle, Idea is like a little kid compared to Trafalgar).

 

But if we judge artistic quality according to how well the artist managed to «find himself», then Idea should be placed in the top range of the Gibb brothers' immense catalog. The brothers themselves agree with this inter­pretation, by the way — "That was when I got an idea / Came like a gun and shot in my ear / Don't you think it's time you got up and stood alone?" And, well, in a certain way, they do, so a big thumbs up for stand-aloners and their wimpiness.

 

The bonus disc on the CD reissue is not as strong as the previous two, but it does have ʽJumboʼ (probably the strangest, most «daring» single the brothers put out in the 1960s — naturally, it did not climb up too high in the charts) as well as a funny tongue-in-cheek send-up called ʽCom­pletely Unoriginalʼ (probably a comedy recording to serve as the answer to some of the band's critics — and a good choice for a banner song for everybody who denies the importance of «ori­ginality» in song, dance, and culinary arts). On the other hand, there is also some soundtrack muzak (ʽGena's Themeʼ), a few of those cheesy Coke jingles, and lots of alternate mixes that do not sound too different from the original ones, so, possibly, upgrading your CD collection in this particular instance should not be a top priority.

 

ODESSA (1969)

 

1) Odessa (City On The Black Sea); 2) You'll Never See My Face Again; 3) Black Diamond; 4) Marley Purt Drive; 5) Edison; 6) Melody Fair; 7) Suddenly; 8) Whisper, Whisper; 9) Lamplight; 10) Sound Of Love; 11) Give Your Best; 12) Seven Seas Symphony; 13) With All Nations; 14) I Laugh In Your Face; 15) Never Say Never Again; 16) First Of May; 17) The British Opera.

 

«Fourteenth of February, eighteen ninety-nine, the British ship Veronica was lost without a sign...» Rhyming apart, this introduction line reads more like the start of some Jules Verne adven­ture novel than that of a pop record by one of The Former British Empire's sissiest bands. But in the magic year of 1969 everything was possible — and with concept albums being all the rage, particularly when stretched over two LPs, the Bee Gees needed their own answer to The Beatles (Tommy still had a few months to ripen).

 

Granted, the «literal» concept begins and ends with the title track, a seven-and-a-half minute suite that runs through several sections, several moods, a bunch of sound effects, and a mystery that pulls your leg hard enough to create the impression of the band being «really on to something» when they really aren't — in fact, rumor has it that the original title of the song was ʽOdessa (City On The White Sea)ʼ, and the endless references to «Baltic Sea» and «North Atlantic» in the lyrics show that, perhaps, the band has not fully mastered its geography even by the end of the sessions. Furthermore, there are no Vicars in Odessa, and it is not that easy for Odessa people to move to Finland (not in 1899, it wasn't), but never mind all that — if the Bee Gees require artistic licence, it would be prudent to grant them artistic licence before they take offense at our nitpicking and start singing ʽNights On Broadwayʼ instead.

 

In any case, Odessa is very much a concept album if the «concept» is not understood in a «rock opera» sort of way. If 1st and, to a slightly lesser extent, Horizontal were planned as exuberant potpourris, with the Gibbs taking a sprint through the musical candy shop and swiping off bits of everything, and Idea was an intentional balladeering «sellout» to clear their heads from excessive psychedelia, then Odessa, the last and most ambitious of the band's Sixties' adventures, is a huge romantic sprawl, penetrating your subconscious with the help of bombastic strings and multi-tracked harmonies rather than fuzzy guitar tones, distorted vocal effects, Mellotrons, sitars, and references to lemon trees, orange skies, and Lucies with diamonds.

 

Formally, it is like a test — is it possible to make a genuinely «cool» sixty-minute experience with the aid of nothing but fully traditional, «conservative» means? You do not even seriously need any electricity to play the Odessa stuff — acoustic guitars, pianos and strings dominate most of the proceedings: Vince Melouney quit the band in frustration after having recorded a few of the songs, understanding that his services (as the band's resident electric guitar player) are no longer needed. (Colin Petersen, the drummer, still held on throughout). With echoes of Idea's oc­casionally excessive sweetness still fresh in the ears, this could all spell disaster.

 

And it did spell disaster, but only on the real-life level: the recording of Odessa caused a major split within the band — Robin and Barry ended up fighting both over the musical directions to take and over the «leadership» issue: the somewhat dictatorial elder brother was being challenged by the somewhat more adventurous (at the time) younger brother, and there was a serious row concerning the lead single from the album. Barry won in the end, with his ʽFirst Of Mayʼ fixed as the A-side and Robin's ʽLamplightʼ relegated to the B-side — but at the cost of Robin calling it quits and effectively bringing the first stage of the Bee Gees to a close. (And yes, in the light of what would follow, many people would probably be happy if the first stage were to be the last stage — but what difference would it make if ʽStayin' Aliveʼ were credited to «Barry Gibb» ra­ther than «The Bee Gees»?)

 

As for the artistic level, Odessa is a total success. Yes, it is made up of lush ballads from head to toe, with a small bunch of acoustic pop and country-rockers thrown in for diversity's sake — but this is definitely «art» balladry, with complex, intelligent, meticulously crafted harmonic hooks and equally complex orchestral arrangements: easily Bill Shepherd's finest hour with the band (Paul Buckmaster, who would go on to famously orchestrate Elton John's early albums, may be noticed here among the credits, playing cello on the title track — however, as far as I can tell, he is not responsible for the arrangements in general; rather, he was probably soaking in the experi­ence in order to begin profiting from it just one year later). It is Bill Shepherd, by the way, who is responsible for the only few psychedelic twists we get — the Mid-Easternish violin «swoops» on ʽYou'll Never See My Face Againʼ, for instance, are quite trippy.

 

There are no highlights and no lowlights. This is not a «cathartic» experience: be it Barry's «knight in shining armor» approach, or Robin's «green-clad lyre-stringin' minstrel» impersona­ti­on, both, as usual, suffer from mannerisms and theatricality — it is as hard for me to imagine any­body (anybody I know, that is) driven to tears by this stuff as it is to picture anybody's eyes watering to the sounds of a Diane Warren power ballad. But hopping from song to song on Ode­ssa easily affects the same nerve centers as those responsible for, say, responding to a visit to some old Dutch masters' gallery. The colors. The vividness. The little details. The unpredictabi­lity of all the twists and turns within what, at first, seems to be a rather limited-formula model. It's a case where, at first, you seem to think of a «triumph of form over substance», then begin to realize that there is no difference between form and substance here — form is substance, and sub­stance is form. (Granted, one could say the same about the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, but the form-substance duality of 1977 and the form-substance duality of 1969 are two entirely dif­ferent things, aren't they?).

 

Each of the songs does work on its own, but Odessa is still much more than the sum of its parts. There are some recurrent motifs — mostly on the instrumental compositions such as ʽSeven Seas Symphonyʼ and ʽBritish Operaʼ — and with quality control in complete effect, each subsequent song somehow builds up on the legacy of its predecessor, stockpiling the «formalistic beauty» in your memory until it reaches the «grandiose» mark. Actually, Odessa is a bit short for a double album — barely over sixty minutes, where The Beatles ran over ninety — but that helps it mini­mize or even totally eliminate «filler»: ʽNever Say Never Againʼ on the last side echoes ʽYou'll Never See My Face Againʼ on the first side as a full-time respectable partner rather than an infe­rior re-write to pad out the remaining space.

 

In the past, I used to strongly favor Barry's material over Robin's — his «knightly» deliveries, sometimes with a bit of irony and always with a strong debt of gratitude to the Beatles, seemed to agree much better with my tastes than Robin's increasingly «bleating» minstrel-boy vibrato, here demonstrated most perfectly on songs like the title track, ʽBlack Diamondʼ, and ʽLamplightʼ (in general, Barry has more leads here than Robin, which is not surprising given the circumstances). But today, there is no question in my mind that ʽBlack Diamondʼ is an absolute vocal masterpiece — there is probably no other song in the Bee Gees catalog that would pull all the stops in the same way (stuff like ʽMr. Naturalʼ is quite unique, too, but it leaves less space for subtle varia­tions, whereas on ʽBlack Diamondʼ, few lines are sung the exact same way). And if we accuse songs written in the shape of medieval folk ballads of mannerisms, well, the logical thing to do would be to follow up on that and extend the accusation to the medieval folk ballads themselves — the Bee Gees are simply honoring the time when real emotions had to be hidden behind a fa­ça­de of «regulated» ones. So I just admire the «regulations» in Robin's voice when he is belting out his "...and I'm leaving in the morning... and I won't die, so don't cry..." as if Henry VIII and all of his eight wives were in the audience.

 

If lush orchestration, starched ruffs and doublets aren't really your thing, Odessa is not for you, but you might want to try out some of its more down-to-earth segments — ʽMarley Purt Driveʼ, for instance, an acoustic roots-rocker with a ringing lead vocal à la Hollies (who were doing very much the same thing in the late 1960s), or the light, upbeat, catchy country-rock ditty ʽGive Your Bestʼ, with the classical cellos and violins laid to rest in favor of a rustic fiddle, or the shuffling ʽSuddenlyʼ (although the latter does have some strings and woodwinds). Still, it's only a tiny fragment of the total amount of delicacies you get if you subscribe to the whole package — and I even like the instrumentals: ʽSeven Seas Symphonyʼ, as far as I'm concerned, is grander, more imposing and more memorable than any of the orchestral work on, for instance, the Moody Blues' Days Of Future Passed, often quoted as «the» textbook example of the neo-classical approach on a pioneering art-rock album.

 

Naturally, it is all a matter of the Zeitgeist. It was the musical context of the time that brought out the best in the Bee Gees, and stimulated them to work in a direction that does not look dated, cheesy, or ridi­culous forty years on — Odessa may still easily be revered, be it by only a tiny bunch of con­nai­sseurs, long after the band's disco stuff has been buried and the gravestone wea­thered down. But nobody asks anybody to love Odessa because it is a Bee Gees album — the Bee Gees were one of those bands that let itself easily be blown about by the wind, and I love Odessa because it is an album blown in by the adventurous, extravagant wind of 1969, not be­cause it materialized itself in the hands of three competitive, opportunistic, narcissistic singer brothers whose tastes and priorities, not fully evident behind the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s, would become more and more questionable with each new year. So, in a way, it is to that Zeit­geist that I dedicate the thumbs up rating — honorable second prize going to Barry, Robin, and Maurice, not forgetting Bill Shepherd and whoever else responsible.

 

PS. Being a double album, Odessa released the deluxe treatment over the course of the recent reissues — an entire 3-CD boxset, with stereo and mono mixes of the album and an extra CD of outtakes. I do not have the reissue: as far as I can tell, the majority of the tracks on the third disc are alternate mixes and demos, which might make it less of a necessity than the reissues of the previous three albums. Apparently, most of the stuff recorded during the Odessa sessions did make it onto the final record, and since there was only one single (ʽFirst Of Mayʼ), there were no extra juicy B-sides either. So, unless you are a major fan of red backgrounds with gold letters, you might want to hold off this time. Curiously enough, the Reprise Records routine of reissuing Bee Gees remasters with extra tracks broke down on Odessa — rather like the band itself.

 

CUCUMBER CASTLE (1970)

 

1) If I Only Had My Mind On Something Else; 2) I.O.I.O.; 3) Then You Left Me; 4) The Lord; 5) I Was The Child; 6) I Lay Down And Die; 7) Sweetheart; 8) Bury Me Down By The River; 9) My Thing; 10) The Chance Of Love; 11) Turning Tide; 12) Don't Forget To Remember.

 

In the long run, most people probably do not even remember that the Bee Gees split in 1969, since the «disarray» period only lasted for one year. During that time, Robin released a solo al­bum (Robin's Reign) that had its moments, but still flopped, becoming a collector's item, while Barry and Maurice carried on for a while as a duo (firing Colin the drummer for completeness of effect), then went their own ways, too — all of that over the course of one mad year, before the pangs of brotherly love took hold once again and the gap was re-bridged.

 

Had that all happened a decade, maybe even half a decade later, we probably wouldn't mind at all. But time passed at a different rate in 1969-70, and the split caused the band to «lose momentum». It is debatable if the Bee Gees were really a «major creative force» in 1967-69, what with all the derivativeness and all that subconscious passion for schlock — but I still tend to think that they were; at the very least, they had talent to burn, ideas to explore, and ambitions to satisfy. With the passing of the band's original incarnation, the talent remained, but the will to explore and develop quickly faded away. Now that the age of «soft-rock» and «contemporary folk-pop» and the Car­penters and the Eagles and America and Bread and legions, legions of them were sprung from the traps, it was clear that, without an additional effort, the Bee Gees would be swept off by that wave — and in the wake of the split, it was all too easy.

 

The original slide happened here, on this heavily disappointing album released as a «soundtrack» to a TV special that Barry and Maurice took part in — named after one of the songs on 1st, the mini-movie featured the two brothers rollicking around in medieval garb and engaging in various silly, senseless activities: to some extent, this was their own equivalent of Magical Mystery Tour. It also gave the girls a nice chance to see Barry in prime quality medieval tights (alas, no cod­piece), although, for some reason, the album sleeve designers preferred to capture them in a state of getting ready for the tournament.

 

However, the fantasy setting was rather inadequate for the music — there is no attempt here whatsoever to pull an «Amazing Blondel» and deliver a set of pseudo-medieval compositions with lutes and mandolins. Instead, Cucumber Castle is just a collection of lush pop ballads, some of them with a strong roots-rock undercurrent (gospel, soul, country), others presented in the plain old easy listening style. Absence of Robin means fewer and thinner harmonies — when the remaining brothers do harmonize, it gives you a chance to better understand the importance of Maurice for the band, but most of the vocal melodies focus on Barry burning that torch on his own, slowly, meticulously, and not always convincingly.

 

Truly, this could have been a much better album if Barry and Maurice bothered to write more songs like ʽI.O.I.O.ʼ or even ʽThe Lordʼ. The former is a simple, but refreshingly upbeat folk-pop ditty crossed with some calypso elements, and it has one of those choruses that you first hate for painfully sticking to some of your memory cells, then, eventually, learn to live with in a balanced emotional state. The latter is an equally simple and equally upbeat country-pop anthem with a tinge of earthly humor — the brothers proving here that it is not that difficult for them to write quality cotton-fields material.

 

And that's about it: only two out of twelve songs are not straightforward ballads. The other ten songs clearly indicate that, from now on, the Bee Gees target their charm at bored housewives first, and everyone else last — a very strange decision in an age that also bred intellectual singer-songwriters (who could score it with the college chicks) and glam-rock stars (who could score it with the other chicks), but if that's what your heart and mind desires, well... anyway, from a pure­ly technical point, this does not necessarily mean that the songs will all be bad, but it is a nasty blow for the reputation all the same.

 

Now that they no longer feed a grand vision, the only thing to separate a «decent» ballad on Cu­cumber Castle from a «crappy» one is the presence / lack of a particularly impressive vocal twist. I have to confess a mild passion for the gospel-anthemic ʽBury Me Down By The Riverʼ, even though the melody sounds like one of those you think you've heard a million times before; the broken-hearted love ballad ʽThen You Left Meʼ, which, if anything, may impress by the sheer number of vocal nuances and overtones with which Barry can inflect its endlessly repeated title; and the seemingly Pet Sounds-influenced ʽI Lay Down And Dieʼ, which probably has the most «adventu­rous» arrangement on the album — unfortunately, the song's rather ceremonial, «neutral» mood does not quite match the tragic lyrics, so that ultimately it sounds hollow compared to what influ­enced it in the first place.

 

Everything else just kind of slips through the fingers — and the memory cells. The acoustic folk of ʽMy Thingʼ, with brother Maurice singing lead, is unbearably fluffy (not even Sir Solo Paul Mc­Cartney could allow himself to sing a chorus of "bowzey wow wowzey", although he came close several times in his career); the orchestrated country ballad ʽSweetheartʼ would later be covered by Engelbert Humperdinck ('nuff said); and the final three songs I cannot bring myself to remember even after a half dozen listens.

 

Overall, despite the small handful of decent-to-good songs, this is a decisive (if not hateful) thumbs down — not only in the overall context of the band's career, where it represents a crucial turning point, but without that context as well: the songwriting is lazy, the diversity is minimal, the depth is non-existent, and, since this is neither a Monty Python ses­sion nor a casting session for Ivanhoe, the chainmails are unforgivable. Oh well, at least we do not get to see Brother Robin sporting one — the wimpiest of 'em all, he would have looked particularly miserable.

 

2 YEARS ON (1970)

 

1) 2 Years On; 2) Portrait Of Louise; 3) Man For All Seasons; 4) Sincere Relation; 5) Back Home; 6) The 1st Mis­take I Made; 7) Lonely Days; 8) Alone Again; 9) Tell Me Why; 10) Lay It On Me; 11) Every Second Every Minute; 12) I'm Weeping.

 

For those who did take notice — the brothers are back together, of which they inform us already in the album title. Technically, the break-up lasted less than two years (more like one and a half), but what's wrong with a little rounding-up artistic license when an uplifting, bawl-along chorus of "two years on!..." sounds so much brighter than a "one year on"? The idea is to announce the comeback with a bang, and ʽ2 Years Onʼ is meticulously generated with a bang in mind — quiet «little-man» verse, mid-level «getting-it-up» bridge, then the brothers explode in a celebratory wave. And as a final gesture of goodwill, Barry lets brother Robin carry the lead vocal on this opening number — bygones be bygones and all.

 

2 Years On is not a bad record — by all means, a huge improvement over the tiresome mushi­ness of Cucumber Castle. Nevertheless, even if Robin's return somewhat reignited the flames and re-stimulated the competitive spirit between brothers (this time, in a healthy manner), 2 Years On does not pick up where Odessa left off. On the contrary, it is almost as if the brothers were intentionally intent on forgetting about that experience — partially for personal reasons (as that one ill-omened record that drove a wedge between them), partially for artistic ones: Odessa put them on the «art rock» market, way too uncomfortable for them, and even more uncomfor­table now that the standards for that market drifted off into either the Led Zep or the ELP direc­tions, of which the Bee Gees shared neither the philosophies nor the musicianship.

 

What emerges here is a beta-version synthesis of country-rock and lush balladeering, a.k.a. a specific brand of «soft-rock» that... wait a minute, it's not as if that was anything new in 1970; if anything, this is just a return to the standards of Idea, right? Well, more or less, with one subtle change, maybe: there are almost no attempts to separate the sentimental mood from the gritty / humorous / sarcastic vibes. The Bee Gees love their romantic troubadour guise so much now that they stick it on throughout — the «rootsy» aspects are now so tightly merged with the «pop» as­pects that any deviation from the formula comes across as something jarring and out of place.

 

On 2 Years On, there are but two such moments: ʽBack Homeʼ, a «hard rocker» about the joys of homecoming, and ʽLay It On Meʼ, an acoustic «blues rocker» about the troubles of being blown by the wind. On the former, Barry is pulling off a Pete Townshend — or, rather, a Randy Bach­man? — spicing the album up with Big Electric Power Chords for a gargantuan two minutes, seemingly with no other point in mind than to prove that these guys still remember what an elec­tric socket is (the song does not really qualify as true hard rock, but it is the hardest bit you will find on here, and, for that matter, on the next three albums as well). ʽLay It On Meʼ seems less at odds with the rest of the album, but the image is still not convincing — unless we keep in mind that the song represents Maurice's individual contribution to the album (credited to him ex­clusive­ly and featuring his own lead vocals), in which case the line "I'm just a low down critter who never did any good" begins to shine through in an entirely different light.

 

That said, the ten ballads of 2 Years On, on the whole, certainly have more integrity, credibility, and other good qualities than the ten ballads of Cucumber Castle. With Robin, the enigmatic lyrics and, occasionally, mysterious auras are back, and the songwriting, overall, is up a notch. In particular, ʽLonely Daysʼ gave the brothers their biggest US hit to date — probably due to the shrewdly repetitive chorus, nicely attuned to cruising speeds, but it is really an intelligently craf­ted song whose main charm is in its orchestral arrangements: Bill Shepherd sure knows how to mutate the melancholic mood to jubilant and back again, so that the music, in keeping with the lyrics, give you a sad and a joyful vibe almost at the same time. If you think long enough about it, it is kinda confusing, though — the «hysterical» climactic part seems to build up around nothing in particular, so on the whole, the song is cleverly sewn together, but somewhat senseless... then again, this judgement does apply to the Bee Gees as such, so no big wonder here.

 

The best moments of 2 Years On are its anthems — big, pompous ballads distinguished by jubi­lant harmonies, the smoother and glossier, the better. The title track with its immaculately gliding crescendo; ʽMan For All Seasonsʼ, which could be about Sir Thomas More as well as anybody else; ʽAlone Againʼ, yet another case of the Bee Gees weirdly-successfully mastering a collective anthem about the pangs of loneliness (the Gibb brothers are at least as good at impersonating a solitary loner as a three-headed dragon could be); probably ʽPortrait Of Louiseʼ, even if it does borrow a vocal line directly from the Beatles' ʽIf I Needed Someoneʼ — these all illustrate the Bee Gees at their early 1970's best.

 

«Solo Robin» and «solo Barry» are more questionable. Robin carries the «mourning vibe» of ʽIn The Summer Of His Yearsʼ a bit too far in the silliness direction with ʽSincere Relationʼ, whose lyrics verge on eccentric British absurdism ("but then he died without an explanation / he never lied, a very sincere relation" sounds like something A. A. Milne could have written) while the vocals descend into unbridled tragism. Meanwhile, Barry tries to subdue the «epic» genre with ʽThe 1st Mistake I Ever Madeʼ, a lengthy singer-songwriter-ish confession that puts pathos in the way of interesting melody — dear Mr. Gibb the Elder, since this is not ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ level we are talking about anyway, couldn't you at least have introduced a separate bridge section into the album's lengthiest track? Four minutes of one generic folk ballad verse repeated over and over again may work when the singer is Bob Dylan or Lou Reed; when the singer is Barry Gibb, the pathos overruns the cup so quickly that I have to stand with my feet all drenched for at least half of its duration — crudely-figuratively speaking.

 

So it is a patchy, hit-and-miss job, for sure, but with the musical fashions changing, splitting, and disintegrating, it would be folly to expect consistent taste and genius from the new-look Bee Gees; on the contrary, it all looks fairly nice next to their obvious contemporary competitors on the «soft rock» market. There would be time (or, rather, times) when fashions and trends would com­pletely take over the melodic talent, but 2 Years On, those times were not yet on the horizon, so a less secure thumbs up here than for their Sixties stuff, I guess, but a thumbs up all the same.

 

TRAFALGAR (1971)

 

1) How Can You Mend A Broken Heart; 2) Israel; 3) The Greatest Man In The World; 4) It's Just The Way; 5) Re­membering; 6) Somebody Stop The Music; 7) Trafalgar; 8) Don't Wanna Live Inside Myself; 9) When Do I; 10) Dearest; 11) Lion In Winter; 12) Walking Back To Waterloo.

 

Early info on Trafalgar was that it was planned as a double LP with twenty songs, thus matching, if not exceeding, the monumentality of Odessa. Those plans were eventually scrapped, although enough material was recorded indeed to spill over onto the next album (ʽWe Lost The Roadʼ, in particular, was recorded during the Trafalgar sessions and would have fit on quite well), and, at 47 minutes, the final LP is still one of the longest Bee Gees offerings. It is also the absolutely last one of the «timelessly great» Bee Gees records — having gotten it out of their systems, they were creatively devastated and «lost the road» indeed: their own private Quadrophenia, if you wish, with all the necessary corrections for scope and style.

 

Of all the Bee Gees albums, this one is their most genuinely conceptual. If Trafalgar weren't its name, then Another Year, Another Time — extracted from ʽWalking Back To Waterlooʼ — might be the obvious choice. On all of their records, one way or another, these guys tended to look with fondness at the aristocratic past, and now they have devoted an entire album that re­volves around that topic — not always lyrically, sometimes simply in spirit. Yes, Trafalgar is slow, sentimental, drowned in orchestration and pathos, but it has itself some real class, and it seems as if with each passing year it only ends up aging better and better.

 

Curiously enough, it was not intended or pre-planned that way: the brothers simply fell upon a lucky star configuration. Maurice wrote the title track and the three of them wrote ʽWalking Back To Waterlooʼ — these bookmarks, together with the album sleeve (and Barry plays quite a dash­ing Lord Nel­son on the back cover, but where's the eye patch?), give the record its «Napoleonic» sheen, but its real theme, of course, is not a particular period in history, but merely a sort of I-just-wasn't-made-for-these-times longing — this is some rampant, raging escapism here, only dif­ferent from the Kinks in that Ray Davies liked to picture himself more like an innocent commo­ner, «sitting by the riverside» and all, whereas Barry Gibb sets his sights much higher — he is only willing to go back into the past in the guise of an exquisite, ceremonious Lord of the Manor. (I wish I could say «in the guise of a Byron or a Shelley», but in order to achieve that honor, at least one of the Gibbs would have to be lyrically competent).

 

Anyway, ʽHow Can You Mend A Broken Heartʼ broke them big in the US for the entirely wrong reason — the silly Americans took the song the same way they were taking James Taylor and the Carpenters, that is, as a simple, sissy, sentimental ballad. Consequently, when the band followed it up with the longer, denser, deeper ʽDon't Wanna Live Inside Myselfʼ, they were surprised that it did not even make the Top 50, even though, by all means, this is a much better song. Not just «better», actually — it is an absolute classic. That moment when Barry starts repeating the title against his brothers' gospel harmonies and Shepherd's monumental strings might just be the most breathtaking single moment in Bee Gees history — for me, it opens the door to some near-mysti­cal epiphany... occasionally. On worse days, it is simply one of the most successful impersona­tions of the «epic romantic loner» stereotype in pop music history.

 

Every single track on here overflows with pathos — but most of the time, it works, courtesy of Bill Shepherd's orchestral wizardry. And it is Barry's show all the way, I am afraid: like a grown-up, intelligently tasteful version of Cucumber Castle, past the stage of sappy folk-pop balladry and scaling the walls of «art-pop» now. Robin's minstrel leads here sometimes border on parodic: ʽDearestʼ, a lament to a departed love interest, is overacted so blatantly that one can't help but imagine the village's cheesy rustic foreman laying a rose bouquet on his wife's grave, while the Lord of the Manor is busy melancholizing somewhere high above in the castle tower. I used to hate the song — now I am more interested in taking it in its rightful context. However, it does not abolish the fact that Robin sometimes feels out of place on Trafalgar.

 

The foreman and the Lord do come together in a ferocious duet on ʽLion In Winterʼ (another song named after a movie on British history, certainly not a coincidence), the one place in the Bee Gees catalog where you get to hear Robin bleat and roar at the same time: once the initial aural shock is gone, it remains a memorable, inspired performance on the same old topics — loneliness, abandon, betrayal, etc. — delivered in a unique manner. (It is debatable whether the first thirty seconds of martial percussion should be part of it, though).

 

Funny as it is, I have never seen the Bee Gees accused of Zionism for ʽIsraelʼ, even if, formally, the song is one of the most passionate anthems to the Holy Land ever created in the Western world. But «formally» is the word — since the whole album is a fantasy, the ʽIsraelʼ in question here is just as far removed from reality as its Waterloo and Trafalgar, and what matters is not the word but the way Barry and Bill lay on those mighty crescendos, making for a wonderful gospel-soul experience. If it does worry your conscience for some reason, just replace ʽIsraelʼ with ʽShangri-Laʼ or something — it'd work that way, too.

 

Only a few of the songs are nominally «cathartic» — maybe three or four on the whole — but I do not mind in the least that some are less addictive and attractive than others, being too busy to dig this «early 19th century vibe». By the time we are ʽWalking Back To Waterlooʼ, the mood has been set, sharpened, and fine-tuned, and from the first notes of the "where do I begin?" cho­rus, you get teleported — not to any real «Waterloo», of course, just somewhere back in time where the grass, beyond any reasonable doubt, was so much greener and... well, unfortunately, I cannot quote any of these lyrics because they are not good ("I wish there was another time when people sang and poems rhymed" — don't tell me this is a subtle attack on atonal music and free verse, because it most probably isn't), but the words really do not matter one single bit. The voices, strings, and pianos do.

 

It is the last time ever that the Bee Gees would be working this magic, so please pardon them for the occasional oversinging, overstringing, and over-presumptuous self-aggrandizing. There is no attempt here to cover as much ground as possible, like there was on their Sixties' records — this might, in fact, be the only album in their career where they could have claimed to «find themsel­ves», once and for all. With this mission fulfilled, they could just as well «walk back to Waterloo again» and lose themselves one more time. Thumbs up, your Lordships — may you rest in peace and all. Thank God you have done your duty. 

 

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN (1972)

 

1) Run To Me; 2) We Lost The Road; 3) Never Been Alone; 4) Paper Mache, Cabbages & Kings; 5) I Can Bring Love; 6) I Held A Party; 7) Please Don't Turn Out The Lights; 8) Sea Of Smiling Faces; 9) Bad Bad Dreams; 10) You Know It's For You; 11) Alive; 12) Road To Alaska; 13) Sweet Song Of Summer.

 

In an older review, I seem to have been a bit unfair to this record — probably because, next to the concentrated, concise, and conceptual grandeur of Trafalgar, this one seems to lack focus so much that its throwaways, unlike Trafalgar's, lack the chance to be «saved by the frame». In other words, where Trafalgar was «the bomb», To Whom It May Concern is «the shards», a chaotic collection where old outtakes, surprising new experiments, and intentionally commercial, sometimes «dumbed-down» productions are mixed together without a clear plan. Obviously, this generates a feeling of «faltering» and «insecurity» — even the album title seems to suggest some­thing like, «well, naturally, we don't insist that you listen to this, unless you are a Bee Gees vet fan or something...».

 

What must have happened was that the recording of Trafalgar, much like the recording of Odes­sa two years earlier, left the band out of breath, yet, instead of taking a recommended break, they decided to plough on quickly, while the new wave of popularity, caused by the success of ʽHow Can You Mend A Broken Heartʼ, was still high. Hence, three more singles in 1972 — all of them lush ballads for sure, although not a single one came close to replicating their biggest US success so far. Unfortunately, this time around these songs are just that — lush sentimental ballads with relatively simple, easily understandable content, not particularly distinguished through any ex­quisite «aristocratism» or baroque flavors. Where ʽHow Can You Mend A Broken Heartʼ not only works on its commercial own, but also easily fits into the general puzzle of Trafalgar, a song like ʽRun To Meʼ is simply ʽRun To Meʼ, no less, no more.

 

At least ʽBroken Heartʼ had an introspective component to it, a trivial philosophy that was non-tri­vially expressed through music — the lead-in number on this record is sheer candy for the cry­stally clear teen­age heart (and I do stress «teenage», given the line "now and then, you need some­one older" — considering that Barry was twenty-six at the time, it would be a stretch to ac­cuse him of grandfatherly instincts). At least it is well-written and beautifully sung candy — just a good song, whatever — but, as a greeting, it clearly states that a second Trafalgar is not to be expected: the boys are running up the Sentimental Hill again.

 

And yet it actually helps that the band has «lost the road» one more time — this suspended state of «where to now?» results in an unexpected return to diversity. In fact, one distinguishing feature of To Whom It May Concern is that it is all over the place, easily their most diverse record since 1st. See for yourself: in addition to sentimental tear-jerkers / heart-breakers (ʽRun To Meʼ, ʽI Can Bring Loveʼ) there is a philosophical Trafalgar outtake (ʽWe Lost The Roadʼ); a loud, glammy pub-rocker with screechy electric guitars and big fat basslines (ʽBad Bad Dreamsʼ); a blues boogie (ʽRoad To Alaskaʼ); some acoustic folk- and country-rock; a hilariously absurdist Brit-poppy «mini-musical» (ʽPaper Maché, Cabbages & Kingsʼ); and a moody psychedelic piece dominated by a moo-moo-mooing Moog melody (ʽSweet Song Of Summerʼ) that almost echoes the Gregorian somberness of ʽEvery Christian...ʼ.

 

Not all of these ideas may work, but the important thing is that they are all there — this makes the Bee Gees album the equivalent of the Stones' Goats Head Soup: nothing seriously new, not all of it ringing true, and no particular idea of where we are going to, but give it time to grow, and once you have had enough of all the acknowledged «classics», you may be in for a bunch of sur­prises. ʽPaper Machéʼ, in particular, had always struck me as a fairly «risqué» piece for a band that seemed to have left sheer silliness way, way behind them in the past, yet here they are did­dling away on banjoified mandolins, making parodic fun of their own «soulfulness» in the bridge section, and winding it up with a jolly good chant of "Jimmy had a bomb and the bomb went bang, Jimmy was everywhere". Australian childhood memories?

 

ʽWe Lost The Roadʼ and ʽSweet Song Of Summerʼ are the other two «lost gems» off the album — the former was indeed recorded for Trafalgar, but was excluded from the final abridged ver­sion, judged as one anthem too many; as one of those «where have all the good times gone» ser­mons that the Gibbs are always so good at, it is beyond reproach. As for ʽSweet Songʼ, it is actu­ally one of the most «disturbing» codas to a Bee Gees album ever — brewing up an atmosphere of ominousness and impending doom with its unhurried pace, torture chamber echoes, and Moog-from-hell passages, but you never really know what sort of impending doom that is. It just im­pends, that's all. For the record, Mike Vickers of Manfred Mann is credited for mann-ing (sorry) the synthesizers on that track — apparently, getting just the right sound for the song was a top priority for the brothers.

 

ʽBad Bad Dreamsʼ, the album's lonely and risky venture into hard-rock territory, is also surpri­singly decent — mainly due to Maurice's choice of a thick, brawny, but melodic tone for his bass, and to the brothers' new working partner Alan Kendall's aggressive style of lead guitar playing (Kendall actually jumped on board ship as early as Trafalgar, but flashy electric guitar was very much not a priority for Lord Horatio «Barry» Nelson and his crewmates). Of course, with the Bee Gees and hard rock, the question is always «will they or will they not embarrass themselves?» rather than «will they or will they not come up with a hard rock classic?», but a good hard rock number on any Bee Gees album, provided it's really credible, is always welcome — at least, for an important psychological reason.

 

The «sweeter» part of the deal, always aided by Shepherd's tasteful arrangements, still strives for seriousness occasionally — Barry's ʽAliveʼ, for instance, is genuinely grandiose, unlike the much schlockier ʽRun To Meʼ and ʽI Can Bring Loveʼ. Robin is best experienced here on ʽNever Been Aloneʼ and ʽSea Of Smiling Facesʼ, but neither is a big favourite of mine — I believe his vibrato really only works well along with a baroque flavor, whereas these here songs are more in stan­dard folk-pop («soft-rock») territory and end up on the cheesy side of life. Meanwhile, Maurice tries to go for a vibe somewhere in between James Taylor and very early Beatles circa ʽAsk Me Whyʼ on ʽYou Know It's For Youʼ, but the song is almost surprisingly primitive-sounding (of course, from some perspective or other, this could be interpreted as charm).

 

To Whom It May Concern marked several important «lasts» in the band's career — most im­portantly, it was their last album recorded at London's IBC Studios (from now on, most or all of the band's recordings would be done in America) and the last one with the participation of Bill Shepherd. Thus, if we are setting up demarcating lines, it still makes sense to place it in the same period with Trafalgar, despite suffering from a clear «post-masterpiece» syndrome. It does not as much initiate the band's decline as it simply resigns itself to sweeping around the corners — with mixed, yet occasionally fascinating results. No need to rush, but if you are interested in set­ting up a block post for the Bee Gees that would leave ʽNights On Broadwayʼ somewhere on the other side, make sure that To Whom It May Concern still stays on the right side. In the end, I reassess it as a thumbs up — conceptuality be damned if it helps bring back somberness and silliness at the same time. 

 

LIFE IN A TIN CAN (1973)

 

1) Saw A New Morning; 2) I Don't Wanna Be The One; 3) South Dakota Morning; 4) Living In Chicago; 5) While I Play; 6) My Life Has Been A Song; 7) Come Home Johnny Bridie; 8) Method To My Madness.

 

Anti-americanists all over the world, rejoice: here is your chance to mark down yet another band gruesomely shot down by West Coast temptations. Oh, wait, that's just California. Well, maybe the Bee Gees did poke a bit of ironic fun at their move to Los Angeles, comparing their new home to a tin can — but in general, they took this change very seriously, making a solemn pledge to adapt and conform. Then they wrote a song called ʽCome Home Johnny Bridieʼ, and the world shuddered, sputtered, and shut them out.

 

It is important to realize, I think, that one does not simply lose one's talents overnight, even with the added inconvenience of jet lag. Play To Whom It May Concern and Life In A Tin Can back-to-back, several times, and the basic songwriting components will be quite similar. But one may, and one frequently does make wrong stylistic moves — and for the Bee Gees, their first at­tempt at thoroughly «americanizing» their music was a disastrous one. It's not as if they always were so utterly-baroquishly «European» to-the-bone (after all, they did hail from Australia): they certainly did their blues, folk, and country homework with diligence. But it is one thing to draw on «rootsy» influences when you make them a part of a large bubbling whole — and a complete­ly different one when your ideology is, «hmm, this John Denver guy seems to be all the rage with the chicks right now — so why don't we get together and show him that no one beats three Gibb brothers at any game they choose?»

 

Odd enough, this manner of thinking did not even help them put together a proper album — this one clocks in at thirty-two minutes with just eight songs (remember that Trafalgar, on the con­trary, ended up spilling over the regular cassette-side length — that should tell us a thing or two about the importance of inspiration), all of them either soft-rock ballads for L.A. housewives or, occasionally, country-pop shuffles for retired cowboys. The songs sorely lack the grand and complex orchestrations of Bill Shepherd, but what is worse, they lack the grand ambitiousness that was so important for albums like Trafalgar — I mean, if you are going to add strings, go for total overkill, flush out the basements and flood up the penthouse with these overdubs, or else it simply does not work. Just the way it does not work with ʽSaw A New Morningʼ, which opens the album with false-ringing promises of fresh hope but lacks the proper muscle to support its optimistic smile. It isn't particularly poorly written, but it is written, and arranged, on a shallow level, and has nothing to add to the initial «sunny» impression.

 

Nor does it work when they present real juicy offerings to the great god of softness and silkiness — ʽLiving In Chicagoʼ seems to pretend that it is melancholic and introspective, but in reality it is simply soporific, and they drag it out to an almost six-minute length on the dubious strength of one, not very interesting, musical idea and one seemingly «deep» lyrical line: "if you're living in Chicago, you're alone". Really? Is that why you guys decided on Los Angeles, or was it actually some­thing about the climate?

 

I have always liked, and continue to like, exactly two songs on this album, which seem solid enough to be salvaged for future consumption. One probably came about by accident: Barry's ʽWhile I Playʼ starts out with a rather pathetic variation nod to the Beach Boys ("I cry tears of emotion to spread across the USA" = "If everybody had an ocean across the USA"), but then quickly steps out of it and brews some refreshing dark clouds, mostly courtesy of guest star Rick Grech (of Family, Blind Faith, and Traffic fame) who happened to be passing by the band's L.A. studio and beefed up the song with some moody, subtly threatening bass and violin lines. This gives the start of Side B a much-needed change of tone after the relentless wimpy mush of Side A — too late to save the whole record, but a good reason to come back to it sometimes.

 

Then, after one more Robin tearjerker (ʽMy Life Has Been A Songʼ, which so needs a solid Bill Shepherd orchestral arrangement instead of Tommy Morgan's country harmonica) and one of the band's least convincing Americana excourses in history (ʽJohnny Bridieʼ — gunslinger tales do not come easy for Barry), comes the potential knockout: ʽMethod To My Madnessʼ is a worthy Bee Gees epic, with typical nonsense lyrics that can still be breathtaking — as little sense is contained in the line "I've played the game, still it's not worth it, like a woman in the rain", that "woman in the rain" bit where the brothers swoop up to the skies is the second, and last, time on the record where I find myself forced to sit up and take notice (first time is when Grech breaks through with that spooky fiddle loop on ʽWhile I Playʼ, of course).

 

After a decade or so since my last listen, Life In A Tin Can no longer sounds so appalling or disappointing as it used to — I can now appreciate the songwriting and singing qualities of ʽSaw A New Morningʼ and ʽI Don't Wanna Be The Oneʼ, and better see the melodic links to their pre­vious records. But that does not eliminate the general feeling of «misguided-ness», and the critics have been right about this from the start — Lost In L.A. should have been a much better title for the album. Apparently, so it seems, the Gibbs always needed a fatherly figure to get them in fo­cus — be it Ossie Byrne, Robert Stigwood, Bill Shepherd, or soon-to-come Arif Mardin — and this was the first time when they suddenly found themselves without one (the album was completely self-produced, for that matter). Maybe they even wanted to try hitting it on their own — just to test their own strengths and limits, for once. It did not work, but they did learn their lesson. An understanding thumbs down.

 

MR. NATURAL (1974)

 

1) Charade; 2) Throw A Penny; 3) Down The Road; 4) Voices; 5) Give A Hand, Take A Hand; 6) Dogs; 7) Mr. Natural; 8) Lost In Your Love; 9) I Can't Let You Go; 10) Heavy Breathing; 11) Had A Lot Of Love Last Night.

 

By mid-1973, the Bee Gees were in a total commercial and, one could say, «ideological» rut, as if someone had surreptitiously removed the spindle from their previously well-functioning machine — a Midnight Special performance where a completely out-of-focus, utterly ridiculous-looking band backs Chuck Berry on ʽReelin' and Rockinʼ (may be found here) might, perhaps, not be ty­pical of their live shows at the time, but is nevertheless perfectly symbolic. Their follow-up to Tin Can had the weirdest working title in Bee Gees history (A Kick In The Head Is Worth Eight In The Pants), but we never got to officially hear what it was all about, since RSO rejected it on the spot (essentially, it was Tin Can Vol. 2, and RSO were quite right in that nobody except for completists and historiographers should really bother to bother). The whole situation was ridi­culous — the brothers were really trying to adapt, but the public just wasn't buying.

 

The subsequent story is well-known and need not be retold once again: the «Atlantic alliance», the link-up with Arif Mardin, the move to Miami, the embracing of funk and then disco dance-pop, the falsettos, the leisure suits, the hairy chests... but actually, we are running a little bit ahead here. Before all the madness, there happened to be Mr. Natural — a transitional album which, as far as I am concerned, is preferable to all of their 1975-1979 (and beyond, for that matter) stuff put together: one of their best records of the decade and arguably the last «great» offering from the brothers before they switched to a completely different aesthetics.

 

If there are any «seeds» of the Saturday Night Fever spirit sown here, they are only seeds, and with a more tasteful direction, they could have actually grown into something much more serious than "what'ch' doin' on yer back?". Right from the get-go, Mardin suggested that the brothers try out a livelier style — quite a sensible suggestion, considering how somnambulant their latest al­bum turned out — and that they did, on songs like ʽDown The Roadʼ and ʽHeavy Breathingʼ that sound absolutely nothing like their subsequent slick disco productions.

 

ʽHeavy Breathingʼ, in particular, is a fairly gritty slice of funk-pop, with acid wah-wah riffage, roaring vocals from Barry, kickass soloing from Alan Kendall, and a masterfully engineered para­noid atmosphere — the title has more to do with suspense movies than sexual enticement. Accor­ding to rumors, they could extend the song to a 14-minute length when they took it on their 1974 tour, and it could probably live up to such a treatment: the concocted groove is perfect for an ex­tended funk jam if you got the energy and talent to carry it out. ʽDown The Roadʼ is sunnier and poppier, but still sounds like a perfectly authentic, and catchy, R&B number.

 

However, these moments of ruckus and rumpus are exceptions rather than the rule — for the most part, the band still sticks to balladry, and Mardin is perfectly willing to help them out with that, too, by restoring at least some chunks of the power that they had lost when they parted ways with Bill Shepherd. In particular, he helps Barry out with the best Elton John / Bernie Taupin song that Elton John and Bernie Taupin ne­ver wrote — ʽDogsʼ, a sweeping, anthemic ballad bursting with majesty and grandiosity even if you can never tell what that majesty is all about. The resolution leading from the bridge (one part of the song that actually sounds more like ABBA than Elton John) to the "are you following me just like Moses to the sea..." chorus may simply be one of the most emotionally rewarding bits in Bee Gees history — one of those «musical doors opening the way into ʽsomethingʼ» that truly makes a great artist.

 

And there are at least two other «great moments in Bee Gees history» here. One is when ʽVoicesʼ, which begins as an unassuming, barely noticeable acoustic Robin ballad, starts picking up rhythm one minute into the song, and then, out of the blue, at 1:32 into the song this shrieking wah-wah lead from Kendall crawls out of its cave, «awakened» by Robin's vocals — upon which, there is no turning back, and the song just strolls on forward in an imminent crescendo of strings, Mello­trons, and near-psychedelic, «submerged» falsetto wah-wahs in the background ("sweet voices calling wild" indeed!).

 

The second, slightly more conventional, moment is Robin's tour-de-force on the title track — the vocal tapestry as woven from the first quiet notes of the verse and to the stormy, up-and-down waves of the chorus should rank among the most complex and catchy in Bee Gees history, and suits Robin's vibrato so perfectly that it is one of those rare, if not unique, cases where I wish that Barry had not taken up the second verse and skewed the «frailty» mode of the song. In any case, Robin has the upper hand, being the hero of the chorus as he cuts through with that unbelievably smooth pitch-lowering on the "smile on my face and I'm tryyy-yyy-yyying" vibrato bit — but the song is not just a technical triumph, it is a perfect hit at combining the brothers' vulnerable senti­mentality with a strong rhythmic beat and an impressive dynamic development.

 

Of course, Mr. Natural is not «perfect». Transitional as it was, the Bee Gees still could not re­frain from including some cotton-candy for their loyal «bored housewife» audiences — ʽCha­radeʼ, in particular, is as misleading an introduction into this album as could ever have been (re­gardless of the actual qualities of the songs, just ima­gine a Beatles album with ʽHere, There And Everywhereʼ as the lead-in track!), and ʽHad A Lot Of Love Last Nightʼ is as anti-climactic a conclusion to this album as could have been after the thunder of ʽHeavy Breathingʼ (one can un­derstand the wish to smooth out the ending, but not that smooth, Barry, please!). A couple other songs seem rather underwritten, although ʽThrow A Pennyʼ at least could pass for a minor folk-pop gem — cute catchy chorus and all.

 

But that is not the point. The point is that this album, in my humble opinion, deserved all the po­pular acclaim it could get — yet it happened to flop as miserably as anything, and this ensured that, when next year ʽJive Talkin'ʼ was sent to the top of the charts, the Bee Gees would forever say goodbye to this stylistics, believing it obsolete and inviable. Silly, crazy people! This astute combination of the band's art-pop legacy, rootsy inclinations, and gritty, guitar-dependent funk was the most viable approach they could develop in mid-1970s America — and I have no doubt whatsoever that, with time, when all the Saturday Night Fever nostalgia has died out, the few re­maining people still willing to explore their roots will find themselves coming back to Mr. Natu­ral much more often than the slick and sterile dance fodder that came in its wake.

 

For now, all I can do is gratefully forgive the occasional lapses and flaws of Mr. Natural and back-congratulate the Gibbs and Mr. Mardin on a job well done — an album that is at the same time a farewell to the old Bee Gees of the «ruffled shirts age» and a welcome to the new Bee Gees of the «bare chest» age. A unique, yet perfectly working synthesis, and a great big thumbs up, of course. Next time around, the bare chest would emerge completely victorious, and things would never be the same.

 

MAIN COURSE (1975)

 

1) Nights On Broadway; 2) Jive Talkin'; 3) Wind Of Change; 4) Songbird; 5) Fanny (Be Tender With My Love); 6) All This Making Love; 7) Country Lanes; 8) Come On Over; 9) Edge Of The Universe; 10) Baby As You Turn Away.

 

A naked lady on the front sleeve of the Bee Gees' new album? What have we missed? Where are the ruffled shirts? The mighty frigates? The pawnshop chainmails? The Victorian picture frames? Why are they offering us a spoonful of female flesh...?

 

Well, obviously, because times have changed: in the midst of the «Me Decade», performers are expected to undress rather than dress up. With Main Course, the Bee Gees have crossed the line — they are still not quite there yet, but the pact has been signed and there is no turning back now. At the instigation of Mardin, they are now recording one R&B dance number after another, bor­dering on stiff disco (not quite there yet, though), and, more alarmingly, Arif has unleashed Barry's falsetto on the world: according to legend, it was during the sessions for ʽNight On Bro­ad­wayʼ that he asked Barry whether he could «scream on key», and that was one of those in­famous «the night when the music died» moments in history.

 

As an LP, Main Course is actually quite intriguing. There is a strong difference here between the first side, which is mainly left to the well-calculated hot dance grooves of ʽNights On Broadwayʼ, ʽJive Talkin'ʼ, ʽWind Of Changeʼ, and ʽFannyʼ (the Elton John-ish ballad ʽSongbirdʼ being the only exception), and the flip side, which is far more traditional in structure — you got your old-time music hall stuff (ʽAll This Making Loveʼ), your piano-based folk-pop (ʽCountry Lanesʼ, ʽCome On Overʼ), and your guitar-based pop-rock (ʽEdge Of The Universeʼ), with the exception being ʽBaby As You Turn Awayʼ, a song that simply has to close the album in groove mode (slow groove mode, to be sure, but falsetto-laden).

 

In that respect, it is actually Main Course, rather than its predecessor, that has to be counted as a properly «transitional» album — the seeds of ʽHeavy Breathingʼ have sprouted and spread, but they have not yet suppressed all «old school» competition. And furthermore, at this point, it al­most looks like a perfectly viable symbiosis: there are hits and misses on both sides here. The Bee Gees are intentionally dumbing down their image, under the pretext that everyone else is doing the same thing, but in 1975, they were still able to present it under the guise of «playfulness» — as in, «so weren't you the one complaining about all that slow stuff on our records?... well, here's a few fast ones, then, just for a change».

 

After all, ʽJive Talkin'ʼ, the first and best one of their disco era singles, is a good song. Its bubbly synth bass line sounds somewhat gross and antiquated today, but the «jivin'» rhythm guitar is still lively and fun, and so is the poppy synth line in the bridge section, and, best of all, almost no fal­setto in sight other than a few occasional adlibs. If only they stayed on that level...

 

...but ʽNights On Broadwayʼ is already an ominous sign that things are going to get much worse, with mock-seri­ous lyrics, glutinous synthesizer atmospherics and falsettos a-plenty. ʽFanny (Be Tender With My Love)ʼ is an early precursor to the sleazy romanticism of ʽMore Than A Wo­manʼ; and ʽWind Of Changeʼ is the album's one straightforward disco number that openly an­nounces a new strategy: "Get on up, look around / Can't you feel the wind of change?" And there I was wondering where that odd smell of polyester came from...

 

The second side, much more in line with the «old» Bee Gees, is more palatable. The lyrics of ʽAll This Making Loveʼ are well in line with the decadent spirit of 1975, but the hoppy music-hall melody is more of a throwback to ʽPaper Mache, Cabbages & Kingsʼ. ʽCome On Overʼ is a per­fectly performed country ballad — subtly and lavishly misogynistic, just the way all of us male chauvinist pigs like it: "And if you think I need you / Come on over, lay your body down / You know I will be here / So bring your love around" — even if you somehow miss the offensiveness in the "if you think I need you" bit, you can hardly miss it in the negligent, nonchalant, and still seductive way that the chorus melody is resolved with "bring your love around".

 

The album's highest point, though — the very last goodbye from the old Bee Gees — is ʽEdge Of The Universeʼ, which is just a good old catchy melodic pop song that cannot be spoiled even by the whining synth sirens, completely superfluous, inescapable, and still insignificant in the light of the song's overall charm. Most importantly, it has the trademark Bee Gees spirit all over it, so they sound like real, organic, friendly, and slightly idealistic human beings. Four years ago, they bid goodbye to their «grandiose» ambitions with ʽWalking Back To Waterlooʼ, and now ʽEdge Of The Universeʼ puts a final stop to their credibility as... well, let us call it «artists who have something — anything — to say that can be picked up emotionally».

 

It makes no sense to blame Arif Mardin for «the change». He came from an entirely different background, he was doing his job — returning an «obsolete» band back to stardom — and, as it happened, he actually showed as much respect for the Bee Gees' legacy as possible: Mr. Natural was almost completely «old-school», and Main Course was produced as a sensible compromise. This is not mentioning that even the «disco-est» songs on here still show a certain «band pre­sence» (play ʽWind Of Changeʼ with ʽSubwayʼ off their next album back-to-back to see how glossy and slick the latter is in comparison).

 

And yet — in for a penny, in for a pound. The huge commercial success of the singles promptly ensured which of the two sides of this album was going to cast more influence over the future, making Main Course the start of the band's meteoric commercial rise and eventual artistic and critical downfall. I do give it a thumbs up — the sickeningly sugar-sweet balladry of ʽFannyʼ and ʽBaby As You Turn Awayʼ is pretty much the only thing that really turns me off here, so I just pretend each side ends on the fourth track — but only when thinking of it without its histori­cal context. But do not blame it on the Bee Gees — blame it on every sucker who bought a copy of Main Course without buying a copy of Mr. Natural the previous year. Hopefully, once they all die and go to their little padded cells in heaven or hell, someone will place Tales From Topographic Oceans on endless replay for them.

 

CHILDREN OF THE WORLD (1976)

 

1) You Should Be Dancing; 2) You Stepped Into My Life; 3) Love So Right; 4) Lovers; 5) Can't Keep A Good Man Down; 6) Boogie Child; 7) Love Me; 8) Subway; 9) The Way It Was; 10) Children Of The World.

 

This is it — the album where the Bee Gees quasi-officially shut the door on their past. No more half-hearted compromises between the conflicting ideologies of «give the people what they want» and «show the people what we are». The very idea of the exact same band recording Odessa, or even Trafalgar, and then eventually following it up with Children Of The World is so revolting that one feels tempted to dump the Bee Gees' entire output as a result. So have the Bee Gees al­ways been «phonies»? Or was this sabotage of artistic credibility a conscious sacrifice? Or did they really love these dubious achievements? Or did they just love whatever music could return them to the top of the charts? Are they beyond redemption, or can they still be saved? So many questions — too many, in fact, for a record of such sordid quality.

 

Since Robert Stigwood's distribution deal with Atlantic was over, with RSO shifting its allegiance to Polydor, the band no longer had Arif Mardin at its disposal, and had to basically produce the album on their own, with some help from engineer Karl Richardson and his friend Albhy Galuten. The differences in style are immediately obvious — Children Of The World is far more slick and glossy, taking at least as many cues from the newborn «Eurodisco» as from the contemporary US R&B scene. The guitars are toned down, with chief emphasis on electronics — regular key­boards as well as synthesized strings: for the first time ever, the band rejects real orchestration, which used to be such an integral part of their sound, in favor of artificial substitutes.

 

Of course, the most controversial of the artificial substitutes is Barry's falsetto — which is all over the place now, regardless of how well it fits into the overall context. Most of the time, it does (and, to give Barry his due, he does not use it on the funky ʽBoogie Childʼ where it would have been completely inappropriate), but overall, it just reads as a symbolic message: «This whole thing is as true to the musical legacy of the Bee Gees as it is true to the natural tone of Barry Gibb's voice». With the entire album being so utterly «inorganic», it made total sense to de­liver it in a «homoerotic android» vocal style as well.

 

There are only two things that could have saved Children Of The World from a total repu­ta­tional fiasco. One could be humor and self-irony, a safe haven for «smart» artists who had to tackle disco (everybody from Blondie to Sparks) — unfortunately, the Bee Gees always had a very limited sense of humor, and none of it had survived into 1976. The other one could be a set of unstoppable monster hooks — irresistible dance grooves, for instance, which totally enslave the body despite vehement, but fruitless protestations from the mind. This is where they fare a little better — however, occasional fanboy claims about how the songs on Children Of The World represent the disco movement at its finest are grossly exaggerated.

 

Now there is certainly no way one could deny the killer power of ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ — although the unsung hero here is not Barry, but brother Maurice, totally responsible for the «dark» and «gritty» undertones with his mean and lean bassline (and do not forget to pay close attention to his walking all over the fretboard, getting hotter and hotter as they move into the final jam section). In fact, with that bass, those tribal congas, the grumbly synth part, and Alan Ken­dall's ear-piercing wah-wah guitar break, the song would have worked equally well as an instru­mental — except that I actually like Barry's falsetto on here, and the way he alternates it with a more regular low-pitched bark on the last lines of each verse. The song transcends the formalities and clichés of its immediate environment: all you need to complete the picture is a Tra­volta. The whole thing is about as «real» as some voluptuous, fake-tittied porn star — but there is still something to be said about «grade A sleaze» as opposed to your regular, run-of-the-mill, unima­ginative sleaze. And this is actually grade A++ sleaze.

 

The sad news is that nothing else on Children Of The World may even remotely approach the punch of its lead-in single. Take the B-side ʽSubwayʼ, for instance — simplistic sacchariney ro­mance stuffed in a dance beat, with a moronic chorus to boot (there is something very, very wrong in trying to deliver the line "take me to the subway" in heavy-breathing «carnal» mode). The only other disco song here that even tries to show a few teeth is ʽCan't Keep A Good Man Downʼ — it has a fun brass riff interwoven with a «nasty» wah-wah guitar line, and its vocals (on the verses) are more «aethereal» than «helium», but it is still strictly a passable dance groove, hardly with any potential to penetrate deeper layers of conscience.

 

And then there is all the «lyrical» stuff — even the titles could not have been any more straight­forward: ʽLove So Rightʼ, ʽLoversʼ, and ʽLove Meʼ all on the same record? What about the alle­ged lexical richness of the English language and all? Additionally, ʽLoversʼ bears the brunt of having too much Robin on it: if you think Barry's falsetto is bad enough, wait till you hear Ro­bin's caprine talents strained through the same filter (I honestly thought my eardrums were going to burst). And as much as I hate to admit it, the title track, sung partially in accappella mode, is a spi­ritual and technical ancestor of all the boy bands of the 1990s — the Backstreet Boys must have been listening to it every day on their ways to the studio.

 

Quite honestly, Children Of The World simply gives the impression of a bunch of quick, cheap filler assembled around one undisputable classic of its time — an odd observation, seeing as how the brothers would be able to crank up the quality for their next effort. Presumably, they were still «learning» the business, poking around in different corners, and ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ was their jackpot for the day — none of the other singles from the album made it as high on the charts (and their British compatriots, in particular, pretty much ignored them altogether). But whatever the circumstances, most of these songs should have never seen the light of day; and considering that ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ is perfectly well available on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack anyway, I do not think that anybody except for aging cousins of Tony Manero should bother. Hence, here comes my first «totally disgusted» thumbs down in Bee Gees history.

 

HERE AT LAST... LIVE (1977)

 

1) I've Gotta Get A Message To You; 2) Love So Right; 3) Edge Of The Universe; 4) Come On Over; 5) Can't Keep A Good Man Down; 6) New York Mining Disaster 1941; 7) Run To Me / World; 8) Holiday / I Can't See Nobody / I Started A Joke / Massachusets; 9) How Can You Mend A Broken Heart; 10) To Love Somebody; 11) You Should Be Dancing; 12) Boogie Child; 13) Down The Road; 14) Words; 15) Wind Of Change; 16) Nights On Broadway; 17) Jive Talkin'; 18) Lonely Days.

 

The Bee Gees never got around to recording a live album during their «golden» age — and there is nothing wrong with that, because throughout that age, the Bee Gees were a studio-based band through and through: even the surviving «live» footage, for the most part, consists of meti­cu­lous­ly choreographed, sterilized, lip-synched TV performances, and the actual live shows, overall, would have to be rated in accordance with how close, on that particular night, the Gibbs were able to match the perfection of their studio productions. The shows sold out fine, to be sure, but something tells me that the audiences were mainly there to see the Gibbs than hear them — Barry at least was impossibly handsome in those early days, enough to make one think twice about one's preferred sexual orientation... 'scuse me.

 

By the mid-1970s, things had seriously changed. The Bee Gees got older and a little worn out (especially Maurice, daily increasing the sacrifice of his hair in his brothers' favour), but as they went further and further down the dubious road of R'n'B-ization and then disco-ization of their sound, it gave them a chance to stretch out a bit and add some looseness and freedom to the show. An early live take on ʽHeavy Breathingʼ could be extended to over ten minutes, showcasing the band's improving instrumental technique (particularly Maurice's bass parts and Alan Kendall's lead guitar playing) and giving the crowds plenty of room to practice body language. So it is only natural that, eventually, the possibility of a live album entered the picture — and, fortunately enough, was realized in the pre- rather than post-Saturday Night Fever era, when the «total steri­lization» that the Bee Gees had already achieved in the studio had not yet completely neutralized their live shows.

 

If anything, Here At Last... is worth taking a peek at just to see how they manage to integrate the «old shit» with the «new shit». In terms of sheer quantity, the «old shit» only occupies about a third of the entire running length, but it is so skilfully scattered throughout the album that there is an illusion of «democracy». Here they start off the show with Robin's heartbreaking ʽMessage To Youʼ — and then immediately follow it up with the plastic confection of ʽLove So Rightʼ off Children Of The World, as if the two had something in common. Or, after a final sequence of their stompiest dance hits, close the album on a melancholy / psycho note with ʽLonely Daysʼ.

 

The major misstep, which turned into a practice that they would stubbornly observe up to the very end, is in their jamming most of the old hits into a rather pathetic «medley», which eats up huge parts of ʽHolidayʼ, ʽI Can't See Nobodyʼ, ʽRun To Meʼ, and other songs. This is one clear sign of where their primary allegiance now lies — I mean, sacrifice the integrity of their baroque pop legacy in order to make room for five extra minutes of straightforward disco dancing (in the guise of a lengthy coda to ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ)? It would have been more sensible to simply leave out some of these castrated snippets, but apparently they thought that the fans should be given the chance of hearing every hit single's chorus at least once — go figure.

 

One major reason why they still so left so many oldies in the setlist, I suppose, was to provide Robin with something to do — since he was practically excluded from singing lead on most of the disco stuff, and never played any instruments either, his role was reduced to strengthening the harmonies on the chorus parts and jumping around like an idiot on everything else. (Fortunately, this is not a problem with the audio record). But generally, they concentrate on Main Course and Children Of The World — and it must be said that at least ʽCan't Keep A Good Man Downʼ, with extra focus on Kendall's aggressive lead playing, is an improvement here, shedding some of the studio gloss and getting more in line with the livelier vibe of Main Course.

 

In short, this double live LP, recorded December 20, 1976, right in the heartland of newly con­quered Bee Gees territory — The Forum at Los Angeles — has its ups, downs, historical impor­tances, and dated gimmicks, but most significantly, it still has some entertainment value: at the very least, of all the officially released audio and video recordings of the band, it is unquestio­nably the best one, still capturing a small bit of the flesh-and-blood Gibb brothers just before they crossed over completely into Vegas territory.

 

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1978)

 

1) Stayin' Alive; 2) How Deep Is Your Love; 3) Night Fever; 4) More Than A Woman; 5) If I Can't Have You (Yvonne Elliman); 6) A Fifth Of Beethoven (Walter Murphy); 7) More Than A Woman (Tavares); 8) Manhattan Sky­line (David Shire); 9) Calypso Breakdown (Ralph MacDonald); 10) Night On Disco Mountain (David Shire); 11) Open Sesame (Kool & The Gang); 12) Jive Talkin'; 13) You Should Be Dancing; 14) Boogie Shoes (K.C. & The Sunshine Band); 15) Salsation (David Shire); 16) K-Jee (M.F.S.B.); 17) Disco Inferno (The Trammps).

 

Of all the dance-pop explosions in the history of music, the rise and fall of «classic disco» is the one that has a certain mystical flavor to it. I mean, already in the 1980s dance-pop reformatted it­self, incorporating elements of New Wave and electronic music, and in terms of commercial sales became just as huge as disco and maybe huger (Michael Jackson? Madonna?), but it had learned its lesson — it managed to live its life without becoming «the talk of the town», not thinking all that much of itself, and avoiding the restrictive trappings and ultimate fate of disco.

 

Saturday Night Fever — the album, not the movie — is like Hitler in 1942: huge, unstoppable, with its tentacles all over the place, grinding every musical idea ever thought of by humanity, be it pop, rock, jazz, or classical, in its monster disco grinder... and just a couple years away from total catastrophe: a glorious celebratory triumph before the final crucifixion. Who knows, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to present the «ultimate disco album» in the form of a soundtrack to a movie that is, ironically, in itself a wicked send-up of «disco values». Sure, once the movie hit the screen, most people probably stormed the theaters to catch an iconic glimpse of Travolta doing his flip-flops to ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ — but eventually, some of them might have started paying attention to, like, the plot of the movie, and then...

 

...anyway, I have not even mentioned yet what we are really talking about here. Technically, of course, this is not a Bee Gees album: this is a soundtrack to a movie of which the Bee Gees are only a part, with only six songs altogether performed by the band and only four of them previous­ly unavailable (and ʽJive Talkin'ʼ, for trivia's sake, was not even included in the final cut of the movie, although it did feature in a deleted scene). However, these six (five) songs are an integral part of both the movie and the soundtrack, not counting a seventh (sixth) song written by the Bee Gees, but performed by Yvonne Elliman, and an eighth (seventh) track that is an alternate version of a Bee Gees track performed by Tavares. In addition, it is the Bee Gees, and not Yvonne Elli­man or Walter Murphy, that got the honor of sharing the front sleeve spotlight with Travolta; and it is the Bee Gees that are at least partially responsible for the name of the movie (coined from a superimposition of Robert Stigwood's Saturday Night with the band's own ʽNight Feverʼ) — and it is, after all, the album that really made the Bee Gees into a household name, so not dealing with it in an overview of the band's discography would be ridiculous.

 

It is true that the Bee Gees really only play the role of those animals who are more equal than the others: in the end, this album is not about the Bee Gees at all, it is about a «saturday night fever» that happened to take New York City by storm and ravage it to the ground. But then again, the Gibbs had already sacrificed the last remains of their artistic identity on Children Of The World a year earlier — their creative dissolution already having occurred, it does not matter much now if they are doing it all by themselves or sharing the spotlight with KC & The Sunshine Band. Now they are simply passive conductors of the disco vibe, even if, sometimes, that vibe still bears occasional traces of their own talent and professionalism.

 

Because no amount of hatred, even if we all agree to pool however much we have, will ever suf­fice to derail the powers of ʽStayin' Aliveʼ — the ultimate swagger anthem, perfectly tailored to the ultimate visual swagger of Travolta strolling the dirty streets of 1970's NYC. My favorite part of the song, actually, are the first 15 seconds, right before Barry's falsetto comes rolling in, be­cause it is the funky guitar riff that truly embodies that swagger, not the vocals, and furthermore, it is a riff that probably wouldn't work anywhere outside a disco setting. The embarrassing "ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive" chorus I could easily live without, but the riff, and even its lively interaction with the strings, is murder. On the other hand, the lyrics are ambiguous, and clearly indicate that the Bee Gees were conscious of the movie's principal message — namely, that the disco lifestyle is but a crude front, tastelessly, but seductively set up in order to mask, not to eliminate the ugly things in life — and that the life in question is not so much about real living as it is about «stayin' alive». So the song does have a double bottom, which is good to remember for those who only think of it as a «guilty pleasure» at best.

 

The same judgement probably does not apply to ʽNight Feverʼ, where neither the music nor the lyrics betray anything but vapid shallowness — but there is still no resisting the magic when the overdriven falsetto verse spills over into the "night fever, night fever..." chorus, as the clock strikes twelve and the brothers shed their «castrated elf» disguises and turn into disembodied friendly spirits of the night, smoothly and suavely rocking out on a bed of grilled chicken-scratch guitars. This may be a guilty pleasure indeed, but I agree to bear the guilt — any sort of atmos­phere that finds a perfect representation in music is already an achievement, and this here song is about classy hooks as well, not just atmosphere.

 

The two ballads are less convincing — disco balladeering, in general, is a couple steps further down from disco dancing, and both ʽHow Deep Is Your Loveʼ and ʽMore Than A Womanʼ are essentially just romantic ear-candy, but the latter at least, moving at a slightly faster tempo (and, once again, perfectly tailored to the main dance scene in the movie), also tends to stick — maybe because of the near-impeccable violin part. Most interestingly, this is so thoroughly «whitebread», there is no sex whatsoever in the song — as if the Bee Gees had secretly imported some of their medieval chivalry from the early classic period and snuck it in (this is why the alternate Tavares version sucks in comparison: they try to ground it with a slightly «fleshier» approach and end up taking away all potential charm without adding anything worthwhile in return).

 

Still, there is some difference between the Bee Gees stuff and the rest of the album. The Gibbs, as it were, are not doing much of anything they hadn't done before: writing catchy songs and hard­wiring them to slick, professional arrangements. The rest of the crowd, assembled in the studio, seems to be operating in a different manner — providing a programmed response to the program­med query of «take musical object X and turn it into disco». And thus, we have classical (Walter Murphy's ʽA Fifth Of Beethovenʼ, vivisecting Ludwig van; David Shire's ʽNight On Disco Moun­tainʼ, vivisecting Mus­sorgsky); calypso (Ralph MacDonald's ʽCalypso Breakdownʼ); jazz-rock (Kool & The Gang's ʽOpen Sesameʼ, with distant echoes of Bitches Brew and the like); Latin (ʽSalsationʼ, also from David Shire); old school R&B (KC & The Sunshine Band's ʽBoogie Shoesʼ); and generic movie soundtrack muzak (ʽManhattan Skylineʼ) all brought on their knees to fit the same common denominator.

 

It is actually quite mind-boggling to see how much inventiveness and creativity must have gone into all of this stuff — there are certain moments on the record when you almost become convin­ced that there was a real belief in the power of disco, namely, that, yes, this would be the new musical framework, bound to assimilate and reinvent all the musical legacy of mankind. As hor­rible as that idea is, there is a perverse evil majesty in it, almost Nazi-style (thankfully, without the accompanying carnage), and there is no doubting the professionalism and ardor of the people involved. Nobody in his right mind will ever place ʽA Fifth Of Beethovenʼ next to the real thing — but neither would I just brush it away as a dumb, irrespectful «profanation». Maybe that is the way it was understood by all disco haters back in 1978, but today it seems more like a bit of post-modern hooliganry, and quite inventive at that. (And Murphy's organ solo in the improvised mid-section is coolishly tasteful).

 

The album culminates in an eleven-minute mix of the Trammps' ʽDisco Infernoʼ — maybe the length was triggered simply by the need to fill up empty space on the double LP, but the result is thoroughly symbolic: this is indeed a huge slice of «Disco Inferno», a mind-numbing, trance-in­ducing, thoroughly hellish trip on the fuzz disco bassline highway, wrapping it all up in a way in which the Bee Gees couldn't (just compare the grim, gritty jam section of the track with the ex­tended version of ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ on Here At Last and see what makes a simple dance track different from... a pretentious dance track, shall we say).

 

In short, Saturday Night Fever, even today, lives up to its troubled reputation — it is much more than a soundtrack: it is a musical Godzilla that once threatened to demolish the big city in much the same way, with the Bee Gees acting as suave spiritual leaders and the other members of the crew carrying out rowdy soldier tasks. That said, even with all of its ideological flaws, it over­flows with ideas — in an utterly perverse manner, it was really cutting edge stuff back in its day, and even these days, it may still provide some perverse inspiration. For all the guilty pleasuring, all the creativity, and all the stimulation, I give it a thumbs up — a thing I probably would never have done, were I not less than two years of age and living in the USSR back when it came out, but times, ages, and backgrounds do change, and we have to admit that.

 

In any case, as it turned out, the record did far less harm than, say, Aerosmith albums of the Pump / Get A Grip variety: the disproportionate success and stature of the soundtrack was certainly one of the factors that eventually helped bring disco down, rather than ensure its rule once and for all. All we have left today is a historical document, an instructive memory, a bunch of catchy and / or silly tunes, and a chance to evaluate this stuff without the context of its epoch — «no leisure suit required», as Phil Collins would probably say. Oh, and if, for some reason (like being born no earlier than in the 1990s) you have not seen the movie, do go see it — if only in me­mory of the late great Roger Ebert, who deservedly put it on his Great Movies list. Don't worry, the Bee Gees do not make any cameo appearances.

 

SPIRITS HAVING FLOWN (1979)

 

1) Tragedy; 2) Too Much Heaven; 3) Love You Inside Out; 4) Reaching Out; 5) Spirits (Having Flown); 6) Search, Find; 7) Stop (Think Again); 8) Living Together; 9) I'm Satisfied; 10) Until.

 

My original, rough-hewn review for this (in)famous follow-up to the Saturday Night Fever suc­cess might have been unnecessarily vicious — but the general opinion has not changed much: this album is not inspiring, not all that interesting, and definitely not fun at all. Considering how much time, thought, and effort had been invested in its preparation (and the Bee Gees took the respon­sibility of producing a follow-up to SNF very seriously), it is, at the very least, totally inadequate to all the pooled resources. In addition, I still think it sucks, but maybe that's just me.

 

According to what they say themselves, Barry and Co. were very keen on peeling off the «disco» label — even though, by the time they went back into the studio, the disco backlash had not yet hit all that hard, they already felt uneasy about being associated primarily with the disco move­ment. Which makes it all the more amazing that, even if formally there are no disco songs here (a maverick bassline does make a stray incursion on ʽLove You Inside Outʼ, but the exception only proves the rule), Spirits Having Flown still has the full feel of a disco album, and a pretty dull and disenchanted disco album at that. At least with Children Of The World, there was some sort of a discovery vibe going on — the musical toilet stall that they were entering was brand new and unused. But three years without a single cleaning? Too much, man.

 

The album supposedly yielded one pop classic, the lead single ʽTragedyʼ, which is respected even by the many detractors of disco-era Bee Gees — unfortunately, I cannot share the respect. It may have a (relatively) catchy verse-chorus structure, but it is a sort of catchiness that is emotionally emptier than even the catchiness of ʽNight Feverʼ. Because with ʽNight Feverʼ, Barry was able to capture the trivial, but realistic and even somewhat charmingly innocent spirit of the «nightclub atmosphere» — you may hate that language, but it has a language. ʽTragedyʼ, on the other hand, purporting to be a desperate lost-love anthem, has no emotional vibe whatsoever. Maybe it is be­cause of the goddamn falsetto, relevant for the nightclub spirit, but not for any serious aspirations. Maybe it is because the galloping, dance-oriented tempo of the song thoroughly contradicts the very aspect of «tragedy». In any case, I simply cannot relate to it — and I can even relate to ABBA's disco stuff on Voulez-Vous, an album that is just as tightly screwed to the floorboards of its time but whose songs still have more personality and spirit than ʽTragedyʼ.

 

The ballads — ʽToo Much Heavenʼ, ʽReaching Outʼ, the excruciatingly slow, unbearable ʽStop (Think Again)ʼ, the part-accappella, part-elevator jazz smooth finale of ʽUntilʼ — are sappy arti­ficial concoctions that are beyond discussion. The funk-pop, «who cares if it ain't disco», stuff like ʽLove You Inside Outʼ is melodically bland and instrumentally lethargic; ʽSearch, Findʼ is just a tad grittier, with a weak attempt to add a little menace and determination into the usually vulnerable falsetto, and is probably the best song on the album if we omit the issue of ʽTragedyʼ — but overall, that is not saying much.

 

Actually, maybe it is not ʽSearch, Findʼ, but the title track, after all, since the album's finest me­lodic invention — the little pastoral flute riff played by Herbie Mann — is found right there, and the song's repetitive two-minute coda is the only piece of the album that could even remotely be called «touching», without the suffocating plastic synthetic vibe of everything else. Apparently, this is where the spirits have really flown, what with their complete absence on the other tracks.

 

It's all predictable — you don't sell your soul to the devil for nothing, and now that you are coming back to your senses and start backing out of the deal, it suddenly turns out that there is really no going back. The disco years caused irreversible brain damage for the brothers — their songwriting and arranging skills genetically modified and twisted, they would no longer be able to return to the level of Mr. Natural. It does not help, either, that Barry still insists on singing most of the stuff in falsetto, or that the record is known for featuring the least amount of Robin's contributions on any Bee Gees album (he only sings lead on ʽLiving Togetherʼ, and even that one is a duet with Barry).

 

Of course, the album still sold well — riding the coattails of SNF, anything by the Bee Gees would have sold well in 1979, even a cover album of acoustic sea shanties; what is far more sur­prising for me is that it continues to enjoy some critical reputation, in sharp contrast to every other Bee Gees record released in the next two decades. Maybe the sales figures still suffice to dazzle the critics, or maybe it's a matter of subconscious nostalgia, or maybe ʽTragedyʼ is a great song and I am simply too rustic to perceive its depth and complexity. Be it as it may, in my world this record is a complete flop — thumbs down without further questioning.

 

LIVING EYES (1981)

 

1) Living Eyes; 2) He's A Liar; 3) Paradise; 4) Don't Fall In Love With Me; 5) Soldiers; 6) I Still Love You; 7) Wild­flower; 8) Nothing Could Be Good; 9) Cryin' Every Day; 10) Be Who You Are.

 

A classic case of post-(Saturday Night)fever fatigue syndrome — the Bee Gees' first album of the new musical decade sounds forced, tired, uninspired, and generally superfluous. The brothers had allegedly disowned the album themselves, claiming that they were pressed into recording by the studio at a time when they really needed to sit back and rethink their image: with the anti-disco backlash tearing their reputation to pieces, and the proverbial truth of «the higher the climb, the harder the fall» landing upon them in full force, it was really unclear where to go next after the spirits had flown and yesterday's mass-cultural heroes became today's mass-cultural clowns.

 

The biggest irony of it all is that, in the end, Living Eyes still ended up a much better album than both the one that preceded it and the «comeback» that would follow it six years later. Not having enough time to rethink anything and come up with a carefully construed «nu-image», the Bee Gees simply resorted to the one thing they usually did best — that is, writing pop songs and re­cording them. Living Eyes has no direct «affiliation»: it is not disco, it is not New Wave, it is not trendy synth-pop, it is not retro symph-pop, it is just a bunch of typically Bee Gees songs, re­corded without much forethought or gimmickry. Not particularly good Bee Gees songs, I might add — there is nothing here to suggest even a partial recovery from the disco-induced «genius' block» — but not utterly without redeem, either.

 

The overall sound of the album is glossy and synthetic alright (the Bee Gees would never again be able to recapture the «organic» sound of their pre-Main Course records), but the acoustic folk-pop harmonies that form the core of the Gibb style are well emphasized, and the guitars are not drowned out by the electronics (as they would be eventually), nor is the production crappy enough to infringe on the vocal harmonies. Speaking of which, Living Eyes almost completely rejects falsetto — ʽSoldiersʼ being the only serious exception — welcoming Barry Gibb back to the «world of real men», provided he still remembers what it used to look like.

 

So the major problem is not with the style — it is rather bland, sterile, and unadventurous, but not ugly, crassy, or cheesy — but with the songs. Things start out kind of okay with the title track, whose romantic chorus is relatively pretty and even seems to recapture a tiny spark of the «cour­teous nobility» of old. Slow it down a little bit, bring back Bill Shepherd, and it would not feel out of place on To Whom It May Concern at least. Rebirth? No, because already the second track, ʽHe's A Liarʼ, inexplicably chosen as first single, is a pointless pop-rocker, recorded in a style that could have worked for Foreigner, but not for the Bee Gees — and its main hook is a contrast between a deep baritonal and a high falsetto rendering of the song title: a silly gimmick that only confirms that yes, the well has run dry after all.

 

Only three songs out of ten have managed to register on my brain cells with a positive charge — these are the title track; ʽParadiseʼ, another midtempo adult contemporary ballad with a very natural and emotional flow from verse to bridge to chorus (my favourite part is the bridge — the "run a mile for the minute" part); and, out of the blue, a Maurice original — there is something odd about the wimpiness of ʽWildflowerʼ that produces an endearing effect. Everything else ei­ther comes across as an inferior copy of one of these three songs, or represents an inept attempt at «rocking out softly» (ʽCryin' Every Dayʼ is in the same vein as ʽHe's A Liarʼ, and goes in the same null void direction). Some diversity is provided by Robin taking significantly more leads than he did last time around, but with such poor songwriting, it does not matter much already who is singing what.

 

Maybe at least a part of the lackluster atmosphere of the record could be explained by the Gibbs firing their studio veterans at the beginning of the sessions — not only Blue Weaver, who was re­sponsible for the keyboards throughout the disco period, but even old buddy Alan Kendall, who was already hanging around in their Trafalgar days. With more than a dozen different session musicians taking their place, there is no wonder that Living Eyes has no «signature sound», or that the strictly-bread-and-butter arrangements do not offer even a single curious flourish or twist to feed the hungry ear. On the other hand — who knows if anything could be done for the Bee Gees at the time? The harder they come...

 

No, the only words of consolation would have to refer to the falsetto-dropping and the revival of the acoustic guitar — Living Eyes is boring alright, but it sounds like a record made by living people; people who, perhaps accidentally, did not have the time to program it into an efficient commercial proposition and just went ahead on an almost spontaneous basis. It is a dang shame they could not do better: this might have been their very last chance at making a late-period mini-masterpiece, but, after all, they did sign the contract, and the devil did honor his part of the deal — now it was up to him to ensure that the Bee Gees would never properly rise again.

 

Still, it seems cruel to end the review with a thumbs down, considering how, in retrospect, the record really looks like a breath of moderately fresh air in between all the methane emissions. Iro­nically, despite making history as the first album to have been printed in CD form (the brothers even got an extra BBC promotion for that, although it didn't do them any good anyway), Living Eyes has long since been out of print, and the Gibbs, dead or alive, would not go out of their way to help re-endorse it. But eventually, in a better, post-World War III world, once Bee Gees al­bums are no longer rated by the amount of copies sold, that mistake will be rectified.

 

E.S.P. (1987)

 

1) E.S.P.; 2) You Win Again; 3) Live Or Die (Hold Me Like A Child); 4) Giving Up The Ghost; 5) The Longest Night; 6) This Is Your Life; 7) Angela; 8) Overnight; 9) Crazy For Your Love; 10) Backtafunk; 11) E.S.P. (vocal reprise).

 

It is a very good thing for the world of music (I think) that, after the commercial failure of Living Eyes, the Bee Gees went into a six-year seclusion, at least, as a brotherly team — although they did briefly resurface with half a soundtrack to Stayin' Alive, an expected unnecessary sequel to Saturday Night Fever that nobody needs to either see or hear (ʽThe Woman In Youʼ was the single, a bland synth-rocker with none of the sleazy glamor of the Saturday Night singles). For the most part, they spent the mid-Eighties writing for other people — remember Diana Ross' Eaten Alive? No? Good.

 

It is a very bad thing for the world of music, though, that the Bee Gees eventually decided to go back to the studio before the Eighties were out. Now that they were under contract with Warner Bros., which had swallowed up Atlantic Records, they found out they could re-unite with Arif Mardin, and, apparently, they expected the magic of Mr. Natural and Main Course to strike out and reignite their careers. Problem is, no matter how professional or experienced, Arif Mardin was a straightforward guy — in 1974-75, he steered them towards commercial success by focu­sing on what was considered «hot» back in the day, and why would one expect him to have acted different in 1987? Electrofunk rhythms, programmed drums, synthesized bass, and elevator key­boards all the way, just exactly what the good doctor has prescribed.

 

Whether E.S.P. is or is not the worst Bee Gees album ever is questionable (it certainly has some competition from some of the records that would follow) — what seems unquestionable is that this album marks the band's transition into the last and saddest phase of their career: twenty years of total musical irrelevance when, not content with the simple status of an «oldies act», singing everything from ʽNew York Mining Disasterʼ to ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ before appreciatively glamorous Vegas crowds, the Bee Gees stubbornly went on to churn out record after record in strict accordance with «mainstream expectations». In other words, what they have become in 1987 is not so much a «synth-pop» act (at least real «synth-pop» is able to generate some bodily excitement, which is not the case here) as a strictly «adult contemporary» one.

 

And in the process, they have forgotten how to write songs. I mean, completely and utterly for­gotten. This does not always happen with age: not a lot of artists could go from 14 near-perfectly written songs (as on 1st) to 10 pieces of totally meaningless triteness in twenty years (and I am not counting Rod Stewart, since he wrote very few of his own songs). But it happened with the Bee Gees — the band that used to produce vocal hooks, generate thrilling chords, and dress them up in luxurious arrangements, now seems to think that as long as their brotherly harmonies are still in place, everything else can be taken care of by session players and producers, or not be taken care of at all.

 

Occasionally, people praise ʽYou Win Againʼ, the album's lead single, as the only thing worthy of attention — some even call it a late period masterpiece. It does have an upbeat, memorable vocal melody, but the music is horrible, from the mock-industrial percussion intro to the flabby tinkling electronic keyboards. I could easily envision the vocal melody transplanted, safe and sound, into a healthier musical body (after all, Lindsey Buckingham did save the beauty of ʽBig Loveʼ, re­corded that same year in a thoroughly dated synth cocoon, by later reinventing it as one of his greatest showpieces for acoustic guitar), but fact is, it seems to have never happened in reality — even much later live performances stick to the original horror.

 

And even so, ʽYou Win Againʼ is the only vocal melody on this record that generates decent emo­tions. Everything else is either generic stiff balladry (ʽLive Or Dieʼ, ʽAngelaʼ), or, much worse, mid-tempo dance-pop that tries to pass the brothers off as cool funksters who still know how to shake that ass like they knew in 1979. Problem: they had very little knowledge of that in 1979, and they have absolutely no knowledge of it in 1987 — I mean, ʽBacktafunkʼ, really? And what is the point of remembering all their disco hit song titles in ʽThis Is Your Lifeʼ if it is the same song that also features the line "more rap, less crap" (seriously!)?

 

Of course, plenty of people were deluded around the same time — it would be cruel to dismiss E.S.P. simply for its adherence to drum machines and synth loops. But even Phil Collins made better albums with the same ingredients. With all the previous styles that they had explored, the Bee Gees were able to sense at least the form, if not always the substance, and even if one finds the «message» of ʽNight Feverʼ disgusting, they found the perfect envelope to package it in. On E.S.P., behind the thick cardboard walls of its Excruciatingly Sonorant Production, there are no hints at all that the brothers were even mildly interested in exploring the potential of this new sound on their own — they just took whatever they were given, and ended up with a bunch of Exceptionally Stupid Pablum. For the record, no less than twenty people collaborated on the final mixes of the songs — just another good example of how much energy we waste in the modern world for obscure and dubious purposes. Thumbs down: now that the Eighties are viewed in the overall context of several decades before and after them, the most prudent solution is to regard this monstrosity as a particular aberration in Bee Gees history, and not look back at it any more.

 

ONE (1989)

 

1) Ordinary Lives; 2) One; 3) Bodyguard; 4) It's My Neighborhood; 5) Tears; 6) Tokyo Nights; 7) Flesh And Blood; 8) Wish You Were Here; 9) House Of Shame; 10) Will You Ever Let Me; 11) Wing And A Prayer.

 

This relatively quick (considering the previous six-year gap) follow-up to E.S.P. is nowhere near as awful, but, consequently, also lacks that album's shock factor — meaning that one might end up «liking» it more, but forgetting it quicker. With Mardin out of the picture again, the brothers went back to self-producing, and also relocated back to London from Florida; whether these trivia are related to the fact or not, on One they seem to have mostly overcome the difficulties of work­ing with new sounds, technologies, and equipment, so that the subdued synthesizers and electro­nic drums now grudgingly agree to work for the Bee Gees, not vice versa.

 

To be more precise, the melodies are a little more noticeable, the vocal harmonies are reasserted as the Gibbs' chief reason for existence, and the final mix corrects the major sonic errors of E.S.P. All of which is positive, but, unfortunately, never eliminates the main problem: the Bee Gees are now firmly stuck in «soft adult contemporary» mode, and there is no escape — going retro is not a solution, as the brothers continue to stubbornly believe in their commercial vitality, and this means trend-hopping and sucking up to mainstream values.

 

Actually, maybe if these efforts of theirs had sunk like a stone, this would have given them food for thought. Unfortunately, they did not. One was nowhere near as commercially successful as E.S.P., but it did climb high enough, and the title track, released as a single, hit No. 7 on the US charts — their absolute peak there ever since the late 1970s. Maybe the public sensed traces of the old magic in it: the opening upbeat rhythm and Barry's trademark-sexy "I feel my heart beat.." intro are indeed reminiscent of ʽJive Talkin'ʼ, as if somebody wrote a simple computer algorithm that would create a robo-electronic variation on the original theme. Which kind of gives you the lowdown already: imagine the old disco vibe revamped for the late 1980s market of rhythmic adult contemporary muzak. And that's ʽOneʼ the song, and One the album for you in a nutshell.

 

Mood-wise, the record is sad, since the latter part of the sessions took place in the wake of the departure of brother Andy Gibb, victim of an unfortunate combination of genetic weakness and drug abuse. Hence all the stuff like ʽTearsʼ and particularly ʽWish You Were Hereʼ, sincerely de­dicated to Andy's memory — it's only too bad that the songs received such bland, pale-grayish electronic cocoons instead of something at least superficially more tasteful: I mean, why not hire a string quartet,  at least? Or just use a solo acoustic guitar? Something?..

 

The album includes only one piece of «rock»-oriented material: Barry and old friend Alan Ken­dall have finally mastered the pop-metal style and feed ʽIt's My Neighborhoodʼ with distorted guitar riffs and a hysterically screeching Van Halen-style guitar solo. The effect is mostly laugh­able, since the song's biggest hook is still the pop chorus of "it's my neighborhood, it's where I belong", and the «tough» guitar sound of the track is just flamboyant poseur stuff. Much the same goes for the generic electro-funk of ʽWill You Ever Let Meʼ, with nothing to distinguish it from ten million songs in the same style — although both songs provide some respite from the endless stream of slow, mood-oriented ballads (ʽBodyguardʼ, ʽTokyo Nightsʼ, etc.).

 

Robin and Maurice take lead vocals on a few songs: Maurice dominates the lost love pop-rocker ʽHouse Of Shameʼ, and Robin directs the broken hearted blues-rocker ʽFlesh And Bloodʼ, and both end up more or less equally tedious. Barry lapses into falsetto occasionally, but this is not nearly as big a problem as the noticeable aging of all the voices — now that the brothers are past forty, some of the sharpness is lost and their tones tend to gravitate towards each other: twenty years ago, it really mattered a lot who sang what, but now it isn't that much of a deal.

 

Anyway, by far the only recommendation for One that I can think of is that it is, indeed, «dark», probably the most sincerely tragic record they had ever made up to that point. Considering that a lack of sincerity had always been the major accusation hurled at the Gibbs from the very begin­ning of their career, this could be a hell of a recommendation. Unfortunately, in 1989 it was more than just a little late — whatever genuine emotion they try to preserve on these tapes is ultimately wasted with (at best) mediocre songwriting and thoroughly unimaginative arrangements. I cannot imagine the album being enjoyed by anyone but the starkest Gibb fans, always ready to look be­yond the form and right into the spirit — or, at least, what they think of as the spirit. Everybody else will probably have to just share the thumbs down.

 

HIGH CIVILIZATION (1991)

 

1) High Civilization; 2) Secret Love; 3) When He's Gone; 4) Happy Ever After; 5) Party With No Name; 6) Ghost Train; 7) Dimensions; 8) The Only Love; 9) Human Sacrifice; 10) True Confessions; 11) Evolution.

 

Probably a toss-up between E.S.P. and this one for the ugliest-sounding Bee Gees album ever. Okay, E.S.P. would likely still win, since its production values were about as suitable for the Bee Gees as having them sing an entire album through a Vocoder; but this monstrosity from 1991 does not lag too far behind, and it has at least one edge over E.S.P. — considering the musical fashions of 1987, one would not really expect the band to have fared much better, but in 1991, with hair metal and synth-pop both on their way out, some of the old vets were gradually starting to get out of their midlife crises and reconcile their older selves with their true selves.

 

Not so with the Gibbs, who, for some reason, thought it beyond their sense of dignity to retrace their steps. What is even worse, they thought that they still had some hopes of positioning them­selves as a dance-oriented outfit — that after the blandly somber balladry of One, it was high time to return to some foot-stompin', body-thumpin' rhythms, provided by the latest fads and trends in nightclub territory. Thus, most of High Civilization — yes, with the exception of an ob­ligatory bunch of slow ballads — is set to chuggin' lite-techno tracks, a rhythmic shell that the Bee Gees embrace just as recklessly as they did with disco.

 

Alas, if the disco encasing did not by itself prevent them from losing their strength (melodies and harmonies), this particular style is completely disastrous. On E.S.P., the singing was loud enough, but utterly lost in its own echo merging with the sonic effects of electronic percussion. On High Civilization, the vocals sort of just splatter away in different directions, launched in thin pres­surized streaks from under the speeding wagon wheels of the hi-tech vehicle. Once again — any­one could have sung this crap, Barry, Maurice, Robin, Andy's ghost, the sound engineer, the cleaning lady, Bugs Bunny, no matter. The harmonies play no role here, and neither do the melo­dies — instrumentally, there are none to speak of, and vocally, nothing makes sense.

 

In a different age, ʽSecret Loveʼ, aptly selected for the band's first UK single, could have been a decent Motown-style hit; and ʽGhost Trainʼ could have been a nice New Wave-style mood an­them — perhaps they should have donated that one to Bryan Ferry, he might have brought out its «sensuous potential» by attaching his microphone to his mouth rather than some other body part. These two are songs with traces of hope; everything else ranks from instantaneously forgettable (title track) to abysmal (ʽDimensionsʼ, ʽParty With No Nameʼ — in 1991, I'd honestly rather hear that generic dance crap from the young Alanis Morissette than from three middle-aged guys way past not only their prime, but also their ability to get a proper grip on contemporary fashions).

 

For technical reasons, it is worth noting that the sound engineer here was Femi Jiya, who had pre­viously worked with Prince (but it didn't help, not this time); and that the album was supposed to be conceptual — everything except for the politically loaded title track was supposed to narrate a «secret love» dream sequence in the head of the protagonist. The Bee Gees later disrupted the psychedelic cohesiveness of the album by reshuffling the songs, but even if they hadn't done that, it's not as if the thematic unity of the songs were a good enough justification for the crap-o-matic unity of the structures and arrangements. Thumbs down, yucky-yuck.

 

SIZE ISN'T EVERYTHING (1993)

 

1) Paying The Price Of Love; 2) Kiss Of Life; 3) How To Fall In Love; 4) Omega Man; 5) Haunted House; 6) Heart Like Mine; 7) Anything For You; 8) Blue Island; 9) Above And Beyond; 10) For Whom The Bell Tolls; 11) Fallen Angel; 12) Decadence.

 

The Bee Gees are back — well, to be more precise, a modest pinch of Bee Gees essence is back, which does not seem to bother the band too much, because, as they say themselves, «size isn't everything». There is no question of the band even as much as lifting a finger to shake off the arbitrary shackles of mainstream production values, but at least they do remember to make some room for the harmonies. If High Civilization could have really been put out by anyone, your average local boy band included, Size Isn't Everything has «Gibb property» stamped all over it. Even Barry's occasional slip-backs into falsetto, not any less irritating by themselves, feel like home after the frustration of the sensation of alienation on Civilization.

 

Unfortunately, harmonies aren't everything. One listen to the lead-in single, ʽPaying The Price Of Loveʼ, with its primitively programmed beats and synthesizer swamp, is more than enough to un­derstand that the Bee Gees still have not remembered what it actually means to «give a damn about the way you sound» — and the same evaluation applies to every other track on the album. Even the acoustic ballad ʽBlue Islandʼ, where it is the guitar and not the keyboards that forms the musical backbone of the song (and a melancholy harmonica provides the additional flourishes), feels dull, because the melody never goes beyond simple chord strum, and all the mild moodiness of the song is tightly locked within its vocal lines. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the best thing they have offered us on the album.

 

Occasionally, the band would offer some explicit justifications for the sound. For instance, Robin claimed that on ʽHeart Like Mineʼ, he was intentionally aiming at capturing some of Enya's am­bience, which explains the dreary tempos and «cloudy» processing of the electronics. But the Bee Gees do not have Enya's natural-born feel for this texturing — they have never been able to con­quer the digital world and put it to their own purposes; and furthermore, this ambience simply does not agree with Robin's «wimpy» voice — it requires either becalmed operatic majesty or a dreamy psychedelic hush (the latter, several ages ago, used to be quite within Barry's capacities, but it's been a long, long, long time...).

 

Besides, for every tolerable, if somewhat boring, mood piece like ʽHeart Like Mineʼ or ʽHaunted Houseʼ, there is a clichéd adult contemporary ballad (ʽHow To Fall In Loveʼ) or bland dance-pop entry (ʽAnything For Youʼ). With the fast-paced pop rocker ʽAbove And Beyondʼ, they register one welcome attempt to incorporate some old-style Motown spirit; and with the album's biggest hit, ʽFor Whom The Bell Tollsʼ (alas, not the Metallica cover, which would have really been something, wouldn't it?), they conjure a puff of religious grandiosity. But nobody even needs three guesses to guess why, at the end of the day, these songs still suck.

 

And I have not yet mentioned the band's cheeky dabbling with techno — if ʽFallen Angelʼ is not enough to prove that they have as much talent and authority to cover that direction as they have with Enya, then try out the European release bonus track — ʽDecadenceʼ, a techno remix of ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ for the rave generation. In other words, whatever crumbs of good taste they may have reassembled together on ʽBlue Islandʼ get scattered to the four winds by the end of the record; and ultimately, this is just another thumbs down for a band that made the classic mistake — having conquered the trends of the 1960s and the 1970s, decided that conquering trends would be the logical way to go until the end of time. But fashion isn't everything, you know.

 

STILL WATERS (1997)

 

1) Alone; 2) I Surrender; 3) I Could Not Love You More; 4) Still Waters Run Deep; 5) My Lover's Prayer; 6) With My Eyes Closed; 7) Irresistible Force; 8) Closer Than Close; 9) I Will; 10) Obsessions; 11) Miracles Happen; 12) Smoke And Mirrors.

 

I know it is hard to believe after the previous four reviews, but yes indeed, there is one very good song on Still Waters, very much in the style of Living Eyes and, appropriately, the best thing the Bee Gees have ever done since that album — the lead single ʽAloneʼ. It's been a long, long time since they last tried that simple, open, catchy type of folk-pop with a steady beat and an intelli­gently constructed and resolved vocal melody, but here it is, and even Barry's choice of the fal­setto as chief weapon for that particular session feels appropriate. The slick production is not slick enough to smoothe out the hooks (although, perhaps, the overall effect would have been even better without the synthesizers weaving their way inside the acoustic guitar pattern), and there are even some bagpipes hanging in there, fairly refreshing for the period.

 

The fact that ʽAloneʼ opens the album on such a positive note raises false hopes — are the Bee Gees finally getting back to their roots? Alas, they are not. The evil curse of the malevolent R&B spirit still hangs over the Gibbs' aging skulls, as it already becomes evident on the second track (ʽI Surrenderʼ — you do indeed), and remains so until the final minute. From here on, generic dance grooves and echoey adult contemporary ballads take over and run in such smooth, slick, sappy streams that an inattentive listen might easily make one confuse the Bee Gees with the Backstreet Boys, especially considering that, unlike their rather shabby external appearance, the voices have been preserved marvelously.

 

One other song that is often singled out as a highlight is ʽIrresistible Forceʼ, which does indeed manage to escape the dance beat curse and is realized instead as a straightahead dark-tinged pop-rocker, say, not unlike something by Duran Duran in their classic era. With Pino Palladino on bass, Carlos Alomar on lead guitar, Steve Jordan on drums, and a desperately soulful Robin lead vocal, you'd think they simply couldn't miss, but I still find the song terribly boring, with no in­di­vidual hook and no true creativity in the arrangement. At the very least, I see no sense in the Bee Gees doing that kind of material — 1980's college rock had already explored this «rock'n'roll rhythms with a dark personal vibe» theme so well that ʽIrresistible Forceʼ has nothing new to say, except that it says it with Robin's voice, and I am not sure that makes a positive difference.

 

Other than that, the only «positive» change is that there are no open embarrassments on Still Waters: be it the schlocky ballads or the nicely combed dance grooves, the Bee Gees generally act their age and cultivate images of suave, trivially elegant old gentlemen rather than steamy sexy lovers that live to move it. Unfortunately, this «graceful acceptance» of old age has not resulted in any epiphanies or career-rerouting decisions — only in sinking into further blandness, which could not be overcome even by the accidental success of ʽAliveʼ. The song is inspiring; the album is anything but — the usual thumbs down, please.

 

ONE NIGHT ONLY (1998)

 

1) Intro: You Should Be Dancing / Alone; 2) Massachusets; 3) To Love Somebody; 4) Words; 5) Closer Than Close; 6) Islands In The Stream; 7) Our Love; 8) Night Fever / More Than A Woman; 9) Lonely Days; 10) New York Mining Disaster 1941; 11) I Can't See Nobody; 12) And The Sun Will Shine; 13) Nights On Broadway; 14) How Can You Mend A Broken Heart; 15) Heartbreaker; 16) Guilty; 17) Immortality; 18) Tragedy; 19) I Started A Joke; 20) Grease; 21) Jive Talking; 22) How Deep Is Your Love; 23) Stayin' Alive; 24) You Should Be Dancing; 25*) I've Gotta Get A Message To You; 26*) One; 27*) Still Waters; 28*) Morning Of My Life; 29*) Too Much Heaven; 30*) Run To Me.

 

According to some sources, One Night Only was supposed to be the Bee Gees' last show (hence the name) — because of Barry Gibb's worsening arthritis problems (turns out he really did love his guitar playing; ironically, in the end he still keeps on playing it as late as the 2010s, while the other Gibb brothers are up in the heavens). And where better to play the last ever Bee Gees show than at the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas? In 1998, the posh casino ambience was the only one that was still perfectly suitable for the aging Gibbs and their suaveness.

 

The show was planned as a historical retrospective of the brothers' career — hence the abundance of titles, many of which have been severely cut and medley-fied (a corrupt practice that the band had initiated already in the mid-1970s) in order to fit the bill. Unfortunately, the Bee Gees treat their backlog just the way you'd expect them to treat it: «big commercial hit» = «worth perfor­ming», «great flopped single / obscure, but exciting album track» = «forget it». Oh well, at least you cannot accuse the brothers of a lack of objectivity — and, most probably, they were giving the people assembled at MGM Grand exactly what they wanted to hear.

 

The only exception to the rule — actually, «modification» rather than «exception» — is that the brothers also perform several songs that they wrote for other artists, such as ʽIslands In The Streamʼ (a hit for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton), ʽDon't Throw It All Awayʼ (written for Andy Gibb, with some of his vocalizations played back on tape in unison with the live Gibbs), ʽHeart­breakerʼ (a hit for Dionne Warwick), and ʽGuiltyʼ (for Barbra Streisand). As far as I am concer­ned, all of these are very, very, very bad songs, reflecting the Gibbs' final crossover into the bland adult contemporary market, and the crown jewel is the recent hit ʽImmortalityʼ, for which they are actually joined on stage by the culprit — Celine Dion. «MGM Grand» indeed.

 

Nevertheless, when all the barbs have been spent, and when there is no more strength left to go on with the lashing, the Gibb brothers, even smothered in cheese, sugar, sarcasm, and irony, will be left standing on their own two feet. Because there is neither any denying the greatness of way too many of these other songs, nor, most importantly, any denying the fact that most of them are performed with professionalism, spirit, and even occasional signs of grace. Ironically, it is the falsetto tunes that Barry seems to struggle with on a regular basis: ʽStayin' Aliveʼ, in particular, is exactly what the man is genuinely trying to do after squeezing out these high notes at top speed for such a long time (where twenty years ago it all came rather naturally). (Then again, ʽStayin' Aliveʼ did always lay the heaviest tax on Barry's vocal cords — there must have been very few live performances where he'd live up to the studio version).

 

But these are also the guys that brought you ʽMassachusetsʼ, ʽHow Can You Mend A Broken Heartʼ, ʽWordsʼ, ʽI Can't See Nobodyʼ, ʽNew York Mining Disasterʼ, ʽTo Love Somebodyʼ, ʽLonely Daysʼ, ʽI Started A Jokeʼ... yes, the list could have been expanded with ʽLemons Never Forgetʼ, ʽYou'll Never See My Face Againʼ, and ʽDogsʼ, but would you really play these songs to a bunch of middle-aged suckers who may have just lost thousands of dollars at a nearby roulette table? Forget it and just savour the lushness, the style, the composure, the fitness of the magni­ficent Gibb brothers and their unbeatable harmonies. And much as I dislike the castration of the individual songs in order to fit them into the medley format (ʽRun To Meʼ in the bonus track pack is particularly pitiable), the idea to make a brief unplugged version of ʽNights On Broadwayʼ in­stead of re-running the old «smooth funk» arrangement is a good one.

 

In short, hearing the album won't hurt as much as owning it (encountering an album sleeve like that in one's collection might lead to serious problems with the vice squad) — but documentally speaking, this is the last official Bee Gees live album, and it may be instructive to know that, de­spite not having had a decent studio album in almost twenty years, they were still willing and able to cut it on stage without a glitch (discounting some of Barry's fermented falsetto notes). Having gained that knowledge, you are definitely not obliged to give the record another listen. It is, after all, designed for One Night Only — we will respect that.

 

THIS IS WHERE I CAME IN (2001)

 

1) This Is Where I Came In; 2) She Keeps On Coming; 3) Sacred Trust; 4) Wedding Day; 5) Man In The Middle; 6) Deja Vu; 7) Technicolor Dreams; 8) Walking On Air; 9) Loose Talk Costs Lives; 10) Embrace; 11) The Extra Mile; 12) Voice In The Wilderness.

 

Is this really «just another bad album from the Bee Gees», as the All-Music Guide review put it to us, even after considering all the opposite arguments? Not quite, I would say. Indeed, «not quite» to the extent that it almost makes me wonder — was the band on its way to eventual recuperation and recovery of some of the grace of old, stopped dead in its tracks by the death of Maurice, or was this major leap in quality just an accidental fluke, caused by a temporary climate improve­ment at the turn of the millennium? Make no mistake about it: This Is Where I Came In is, in­deed, a bad Bee Gees album, but it is still miles above the faceless, bodiless, and soulless dreck they had been trying to feed us since at least E.S.P. — their best album since at least Living Eyes, and, I would dare say, maybe even since Main Course: it does not have any highlights compa­rable with ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ or ʽLiving Eyesʼ, but it is, on the whole, more consistent, or, at least, more consistently surprising, than those albums.

 

There can be no mistake here: the Bee Gees are trying to get out of the nasty rut in which they had sunk when they were still «in the summer of their years» and in which they grew old, bald, tasteless, and irrelevant, only to be occasionally visited on holidays by the likes of Barbra Strei­sand and Celine Dion. That they actually placed a photo of themselves in their younger days on the front sleeve does not have to be interpreted as a desire to put out another Bee Gees 1st, but it is still a hint that is somehow substantiated by the album contents — a good luck charm, if you wish. The relative abundance of styles that they cover, modern and retro ones alike, is also a good sign. No, there was not the slightest chance of an album like this being good — only a complete miracle would have sufficed, considering that these guys had only written, like, maybe two really good songs in two decades. But we are here doing a career overview — and a career overview is impossible without paying homage to the curve — and with This Is Where I Came In, lo and behold, the curve begins to crawl upwards. Where would it end up, had the Gibb twins not lost their lives, ten years apart from each other?..

 

For the first minute, the Robin / Barry duet on the title track is framed by nothing but sharp-picked acoustic guitars — then, once the harmonies and full backing are in, there are still no signs of the awful production muck that colored their previous five studio efforts — at worst, it shares some alt-rock clichés, but for the Bee Gees, transition from adult contemporary to alt-rock is like promotion of the highest order. This is not to say that the song is great or anything, but the chorus is catchy, and the slight «danger zone» feeling generated by the arrangement marks the first time over a long, long, long period that the brothers managed to reassert their nature as humans rather than «organic robots for middle-aged housewives».

 

And then there's more. ʽShe Keeps On Comingʼ is a mediocre pop rocker, stuck in somewhere between late Kinks and early Duran Duran — but it is a style that the Bee Gees had never co­vered previously in their whole life; ʽVoice In The Wildernessʼ, despite the glossy production, rolls on at an even faster speed, and serves as the album closer — yes, instead of going out on a pompous balladeering note, these guys go out at the fastest tempo they ever tried. Even if one hates the song (and there is nothing really to hate about it), you can't help admiring them for try­ing; and kudos for letting old friend Alan Kendall strike out with a fiery, flashy wah-wah solo, the hardest he's been allowed to hit since... since...?

 

Another piece of territory that had never been visited before is Tin Pan Alley: Barry's ʽTechni­color Dreamsʼ, written and arranged in strictly vaudevillian mode, is a harmless piece of fluff, a tribute to Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby that is a little spoiled by oversinging, but works well as a first and last attempt to invade alien territory; even a word like «nostalgia» does not really apply here, since this kind of music had faded away before the Bee Gees were even born — this is just an intentional attempt to try out something that couldn't be more removed from their usual schtick than anything, and again, it begs for respect, if not love. Or maybe somebody was on a Randy Newman kick at the time — a chorus like "I'll give you Panavision pictures, 'cause you give me Technicolor dreams" seems right up Randy's alley.

 

The rest of the album is nowhere near as «outstanding», and drifts closer to the tried and true, but even there, the production is not quite as excessive — cheap synthesizer sounds are toned down, with more focus on acoustic guitars and hi-tech electronics, and Barry's and Robin's vocals are always clear in the mix (nor does Barry ever resort to full-fledged falsetto, which is a good thing, because his upper range is so shot anyway that the remaining frequencies automatically turn fal­setto into squealing or meawing). The songs are predictably not good: generic saccharine ballads like Robin's ʽWedding Dayʼ, or techno-style saccharine ballads like Robin's ʽEmbraceʼ, or per­functory synth-rockers — like Maurice's two contributions (ʽMan In The Middleʼ and ʽWalking On Airʼ), on which he also subjects his voice to electronic effect treatment, maybe in an effort to give it that extra color it had always lacked, against the background of his two more technically gifted and individualistic brothers. It neither works nor fails... come to think of it, like most of the things Maurice brought to the band. (He did bring in ʽTrafalgarʼ, which was one of the band's best songs, but he also brought in the worst of the three hairstyles, evening things out).

 

It only remains to say, in conclusion, that you hardly need to hear This Is Where I Came In if you completely gave up on the Bee Gees after Living Eyes — not to mention if you completely gave up on the Bee Gees with their transition to the disco age half a decade before that. But if you did honestly sit through all of their adult contemporary muddle, year after year, decade after de­cade, and wouldn't mind a little bit of an antidote, this album will do. In any case, it is a relief that the Bee Gees ended their creative existence on this note, and not with Still Waters.

 

In conclusion — it remains only to be said that, no matter how much suave dreck had tainted their later years, both Maurice's death in 2003 and Robin's in 2012 were unjustly premature, and even if, deep down inside, my belief is that the Bee Gees did not have and could not have another Tra­falgar or even Mr. Natural within them, just waiting to be unlocked, I still like to imagine that, had they lived on, they could have capitalized on the minor sprouts of musical sanity displayed in this record, and at least slightly repaired their critical reputation, maybe spurred on by renewed hipster interest in their art-poppy past. Who knows, though, maybe it's all for the better — that their career was cut short with this minor enigma of an album, instead of serving us up further disappointments further on down the line.

BLACK SABBATH

BLACK SABBATH (1970)

 

1) Black Sabbath; 2) The Wizard; 3) Behind The Wall Of Sleep; 4) N.I.B.; 5) Evil Woman; 6) Sleeping Village; 7) Warning; 8) Wicked World.

 

Thirty-seven seconds. Or, otherwise, «as soon as the second thunderstrike begins to subside». That's what I have to tell myself every time that the tritone-infested riff to ʽBlack Sabbathʼ kicks in, in order to avoid a quick heart jump, and even that does not always help. Kudos to Rodger Bain, who had the idea to add a rain-and-thunder setting to open the song — just imagine how differently it would all be if it just began with Tony Iommi's master-riff. You have to be prepared for that riff, build up some necessary suspense. Black Sabbath took their early cues from B-level horror movies, after all, and those movie guys knew their suspense strategies all right.

 

Simple, brutal, healthy cheap thrills — this is what these four working-class lads from Birmin­gham were about. None of that «deep» pretentious bullshit. Geezer Butler, their bass player, did tend to add a little mysticism and self-importance to their lyrics (I think Iommi used to refer to him as «the smart one» in the band, which is funny, since most of their social and educational background was more or less the same), but Ozzy Osbourne, the singer, never took the lyrics too seriously (if he did, he'd explode), and the band's basic ambition was simple enough — to kick ass in front of you, to en­tertain you, and, just for fun, to scare some shit out of you in the process.

 

That said, Black Sabbath the album as a whole can hardly be appreciated as Black Sabbath the band's finest hour. The image of the band — dark, scary purveyors of the nascent heavy metal genre — was fully formed, and from that point of view this is technically their most influential record; but the truth is that on October 16, 1969, when they went into Regent Sound Studios to cut it, they simply did not have enough songs. They played their regular live set, but, unlike, say, The Doors, they slouched around for too long to populate it with enough hook-filled composi­tions. (Speaking of The Doors, the main riff to ʽWicked Worldʼ sounds way too suspiciously si­milar to The Doors' own ʽWild Childʼ, which had come out on The Soft Parade three months prior to the Black Sabbath session — coincidence? or a trick of the subconscious?).

 

What this translates to is a clear gap in quality between Side A of the album, which proudly stands its ground against any future Sabbath release, and Side B, which, frankly speaking, seems unabashedly dedicated to filler — curious and occasionally fun filler, but definitely not prime Sabbath stuff, and Tony would probably be the first to acknowledge that, particularly seeing how they never played anything from that side live once their backlog started filling up. As a four or five song EP, Black Sabbath would be the shit to end all other shit; as it is, it's padded about as crudely as you'd expect four rather crude Birmingham lads to pad it.

 

Nevertheless, that first side is quite enough to crown Tony Iommi as the undisputed supreme ruler of the heavy metal riff from the very beginning. The title track and ʽN.I.B.ʼ went on to be­come classics of the genre, and the slightly less known ʽWizardʼ and ʽBehind The Wall Of Sleepʼ are also prime cuts that deserve similar recognition. Technically, these riffs are among the sim­plest Tony ever came up with — and they reflect his genius far better than any of the complex, but so often unsatisfying melodies he'd write for Sabbath in the post-Ozzy era. Just how simple, exactly, are those three chords that constitute the main theme to ʽBlack Sabbathʼ? Jimmy Page would have cringed at having to play something like that. It's a grotesque, phantasmagoric, «cor­ny» (if you wish) sound, for sure, but goddammit, it works on the most elementary emotional level. You want Satan? Use the tritone. It's as simple as that. Funniest of all, Tony did not have the faintest idea of what he was using — he just felt that this combination would give the scary effect that was required, and he used it. I guess Satan was coming round the bend, after all.

 

You probably couldn't find anybody at the time with ideas more «basic» than Iommi's, and, in a sense, all that press disdain that followed Black Sabbath through their first years was quite justi­fied from a sheerly intellectual point of view. Look at the riff to ʽN.I.B.ʼ and you will see that its first four notes almost coincide with the beginning of ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ; but where the latter continues with a completely different, almost jazzy, six-note pattern, Tony makes his six notes into an extended shadow of the first four — something that Bruce and Clapton would have probably condemned as too primitive a trick. But who cares, as long as it works? And if you play it low enough, and add a steady 4/4 beat, and have Geezer play his bass in unison through a wah-wah pedal, it makes your song unquestionably Satanic, and what exactly was ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ unquestionably? You couldn't give a straight answer, could you? Well, Black Sabbath are a band that has no qualms about coming up with straight answers.

 

Their singer is so straight, in fact, that when you listen to the early albums, it's as if they were locking him up in an «iron maiden» in the studio every time, then thrusting the mike under his lips. Ozzy could hit the notes, but he had no range as such, could usually only sing in unison with the supporting riff, and always had the same emotional expression to his voice that basically translated to: «don't you fuck with me, or I have no idea what I'll do if you do». It's sort of an odd mix of «mischievous», «stoned», and «panicky», and on paper, it doesn't at all sound like it would be a good combination with Tony's riffs. Honestly, I still have no idea why it is. Maybe it's just the fact that Tony and Ozzy are both one-trick ponies each of which does their one and only trick to utmost perfection, and when they do it at once, it's like a Lennon-McCartney effect for when you only have the opportunity to spare one track of your mind.

 

Anyway, on ʽBlack Sabbathʼ Ozzy is a lone madman tempted by the «figure in black»; on ʽThe Wizardʼ, he seems temporarily relieved because "demons worry when the wizard is near"; on ʽBe­hind The Wall Of Sleepʼ, he awakens from nightmares into sunny reality; but then on ʽN.I.B.ʼ it is suddenly "my name is Lucifer, please take my hand", so we have to assume multiple perso­nality disorder. Never mind, it's all in a day's work (literally) for Ozzy. Whatever Geezer would write for him, be it gloomy or cheerful, you could always count on Mr. Osbourne to give it his one and only all, and it would still sound charming when set to a prime Iommi riff. Geezer could just as well give him a list of ingredients from a soda bottle.

 

At their best, though, Sabbath already had more to offer than just heavy metal riffs and a poker face singer. Tony could play a mean lead guitar when he put his heart into it — the solos on ʽN.I.B.ʼ and the title track are still relatively simple, but scorching. And Ozzy has quite an expres­sive harmonica part on ʽThe Wizardʼ, even though, once Tony's main riff finally comes through, you'll probably forget all about the mouth harp. They are also smart enough to let the rhythm sec­tion show their strong sides: Geezer's little introductory solo to ʽN.I.B.ʼ is not very demanding, technically, but with the addition of the wah-wah effect, it is the first «evil-sounding» (rather than simply «dark») bass solo that I know of, almost literally grinning at you with its frets.

 

But then there are all those problems on the second side, when the band spends too much time jamming on the interminable ʽSleeping Village/Warningʼ rant. Critics say that one of Sabbath's chief achievements was «chasing the blues out of metal» — well, these jams are still fairly bluesy, aren't they? Clearly, somebody spent too much time listening to Cream, and echoes of late Sixties blues-rock were still ringing very loud in Tony's ears when they were recording this stuff. And, of course, Tony is no Clapton, not with these metal fingertips plucking the strings, to seriously com­pete on that market — not that the band ever wanted to in the first place. I actually like the main sung parts of ʽWarningʼ; it is the only track on the album where Ozzy manages to add a little chilly menace to his singing ("I was born without you, baby / But my feelings were a little bit too strong" is delivered with a perfect cool). But all those Claptonisms in the middle, no. Pulling in the wrong direction.

 

Still, what with all the early heavy metal perfection going on in the first half, the only way Black Sabbath could have avoided an enthusiastic thumbs up would be if they fired Ozzy before the sessions and replaced him with David Coverdale. And don't get me wrong — these, as well as all the other «thumbs up» that will follow are not in respect of the album's «influence». (In fact, in a way, I'd rather that influence never existed.) It is because, as «technically primitive» as these songs are by modern day standards of the metal genre, their primal power still blows away 99% of everything ever since recorded in that genre. And all those savvy, heavily trained modern metal com­posers, playing at 120mph and choking their albums with ultra-complex riffage that all ends up sounding the same, could only wish they were Tony Iommi circa 1970.

 

PS: A technical note — Black Sabbath comes in several varieties, with some editions containing ʽEvil Womanʼ (a rather lightweight garage-metal rocker, released as the band's first single), some containing ʽWicked Worldʼ (its B-side) instead, and some CD versions incorporating both. Also, track listings may differ depending on how many parts of multi-part compositions are given their own titles (for instance, Geezer's solo before ʽN.I.B.ʼ is sometimes called ʽBassicallyʼ and some­times not called anything). Some of the confusion is due to the differences in original US and UK releases, and some seems to have appeared in the CD era — but I guess it's only fitting for a re­cord that was originally issued on Friday the 13th.

 

PARANOID (1970)

 

1) War Pigs; 2) Paranoid; 3) Planet Caravan; 4) Iron Man; 5) Electric Funeral; 6) Hand Of Doom; 7) Rat Salad; 8) Fairies Wear Boots.

 

Funny as it is, Black Sabbath's unquestionably most popular album, and the one that the average listener probably associates the most with the band, was sort of a «fillerish» affair. Although it already took the band a whoppin' six days to record it, it was neither as image-establishing as Black Sabbath, nor as technically groundbreaking as Master Of Reality. Its best known song was, in fact, quickly thrown together at the last minute to occupy some empty space — and its actual musical innovations, such as the band toying around with acid jazz on ʽPlanet Caravanʼ, aren't usually listed as its really strong points. And yet, it's fuckin' Paranoid, the brilliant metal masterpiece to end all other masterpieces, and we're not worthy. Say what you will, but there was definitely something in the air around 1970 — some sort of spirit that was hunting for you, not vice versa. Sometimes all you had to do was just sit there and wait.

 

Anyway, Paranoid is as good as Black Sabbath and even better, because it rectifies that record's major mistake — this time, the band rarely, if ever, allows itself to just fool around, and Iommi comes up with enough individual compositions to stretch over both sides of vinyl. Of course, a few of the songs could have been cut down by a couple of minutes without much harm; I am tal­king specifically about the mid-section to ʽHand Of Doomʼ and maybe about a couple more «boo­gie interludes», such as the one that disrupts the eerie radioactive flow of ʽElectric Funeralʼ without making a lot of sense...

 

...yes, and then there is ʽRat Saladʼ — the obligatory tribute to Cream's ʽToadʼ and Led Zeppelin's ʽMoby Dickʼ with their introductory/coda riffs framing a drum solo. Now Bill Ward is a fairly good drummer for basic Sabbath purposes, but hardly a technically endowed madman of the Baker / Bonham caliber, and most people tend to view the track as pitiful filler. However, Iommi's riffage is good, and the solo itself lasts for less than a minute, so (a) how could it seriously be a bother? and (b) the short length suggests that the whole thing is more of a good-natured parody on the ʽToadʼ routine than a serious musical statement of the "I'm Bill Ward, drummer extraordinaire, I can take on any sucker!" variety.

 

Apart from those minor and easily quenchable quibbles, I cannot think of a single reason to dis­like Paranoid, an album where exciting musical ideas — sometimes so brutally simple that they border on «guilty pleasure» — start falling around you like ripe apples off a well-shook tree, or, to use a better analogy, like high-explosive bombs off a well-disciplined squadron. Because the band does show coordination, discipline, and a collective understanding — not just between Tony and Geezer, whose guitar/bass duo is responsible for the amazingly orchestrated heaviness, but also between the players and the singer, who has now learned to add extra shades to his voice: the protagonists of ʽWar Pigsʼ and ʽParanoidʼ are really two different persons now.

 

ʽWar Pigsʼ is actually an important Sabbath song in that it dispenses with the «Satanic» image­ry and shows the lads for what they really were — simple, generally well-meaning people. The classic Sabbath myth going around is that they were a mean, lean band that hated hippies and all that flower power crap, but they sang about the virtues of peace and love and the evils of war and hate as convincingly as anybody — so what if they downtuned their guitars a little bit? Ironically, the original title of ʽWar Pigsʼ was ʽWalpurgisʼ, and the song was to be more about actual «witches at black masses», but the record company insisted that ʽWalpurgisʼ was too Satanic, and the band easily changed the title to ʽWar Pigsʼ.

 

Anyway, if you want to properly understand the difference between an awesome «B-grade», «cartoonish» artist and an «A-grade», «serious» one, try listening to ʽWar Pigsʼ back to back with Hendrix's ʽMachine Gunʼ, both of them lengthy anti-war epics recorded at about the same time, both of them trying to use musical means to convey the dreadfulness of the modern battlefield. Jimi's composition, with its rat-a-tat gunfire and anguished guitar wail, penetrates such depths where Iommi's riffs and guitar tone have little hope of reaching. But that does not mean that ʽWar Pigsʼ is not a thrilling ride all by itself — it is simply more about anger and disgust than actual physical and emotional pain, and, of course, about the «hand of doom» that is best symbolized by Tony's monster riff that links the song's «accappella» verses to the bridge. Apart from that, ʽWar Pigsʼ is probably the best place to convince yourself that Ozzy was a capable singer — the way he is able to sustain those high notes at the end of each line without breaking is impressive (and even more impressively, he used to be able to replicate that onstage).

 

The two big singles, the ones that elevated the LP itself to its champion position, hardly deserve additional comment — what hasn't yet been said about ʽParanoidʼ and ʽIron Manʼ? I'll only say that I don't think I have ever heard a guitar tone quite like the one that Iommi uses for the chuggin' riff of ʽParanoidʼ. A little fuzz there, a little distortion, but there seems to be some addi­tional unknown part to that recipé which they never reproduced in concert, which is why the in­imitable stu­dio version will be always superior to any live performances (and, in any case, it is a three-minute single by definition, so no live performance would ever allow them to stretch out or improve on the song in any way). And if there is a riff out there that is able to better convey the impression of an iron giant strolling through the doomed city streets than the riff of ʽIron Manʼ, well, I'm open for suggestions.

 

But there are pleasures, subtle and non-subtle alike, to be tasted here well beyond the scope of the three best known songs. ʽFairies Wear Bootsʼ is one of the awesomest «anti-trippin' warnings» of all time, where Tony's melody — wobbling and threatening at the same time — could indeed be taken as an ironic lashing of the acid-happy side of «flower power». The wah-wah rumble of ʽElectric Funeralʼ tries to convey the atmosphere of a nuclear holocaust — honestly, it feels more like the flames of hell, but then the two are closely related anyway. The biggest surprise is their experiment with nocturnal jazz on ʽPlanet Caravanʼ, a hushed, moody interlude where Ozzy's vocals are filtered through a rotating Leslie speaker and Tony plays some simple, but tasteful jazzy improv lines over Bill Ward's congas. Down with flower power, eh? The song is as down­right «psychedelic» as Jefferson Airplane at their trippiest — and is the only place on the album where Black Sabbath actually go beyond «cartoonish» and almost end up in «haunting» territory, although maybe a few more overdubs would be necessary to complete the picture.

 

In short, Paranoid is where we first meet up with the band's «working class genius» in almost completely unbridled mode. Other than ʽRat Saladʼ (unless we treat the number as parody), they are doing their own thang here, totally and completely, aware, but utterly unafraid, of their limi­tations, and daring to tackle pop structures, jazz improvisation, and multi-part art-rock musical construction without any intellectual pretense or harsh musical training. For which they were understandably grilled in the musical press — and any lesser band in their place would have de­served that. But what lesser band could have come up with the riffs to ʽIron Manʼ or ʽFairies Wear Bootsʼ? Lesser bands are usually content to play it «simple and stupid», forgetting about the third necessary ingredient — «simple, stupid, and scorching», which is exactly what Para­noid is for most of its duration. Thumbs up, of course, although I probably have to put in the predictable request — dear «classic rock radio» programmers, how about playing some other songs except for ʽParanoidʼ and ʽIron Manʼ from time to time? I'd even settle for ʽRat Saladʼ, out of sheer propaedeutic purposes.

 

MASTER OF REALITY (1971)

 

1) Sweet Leaf; 2) After Forever; 3) Embryo; 4) Children Of The Grave; 5) Orchid; 6) Lord Of This World; 7) Soli­tude; 8) Into The Void.

 

Black Sabbath invented the image; Paranoid made it a part of the popular (sub)conscious and the general «rock idiom», if such a thing could be defined altogether. In comparison to those two records, the scope of Master Of Reality, the band's third and, up to that point, shortest record, seems to be more limited and concentrated — yet, as many agree, it is probably the single album in the history of music that is most responsible for the emergence of «heavy metal» as an auto­nomous genre. And, even more importantly, like quite a few of these daring progenitors, it is at the same time an album that sounds like no other heavy metal album ever recorded. Its ambitions are limited; its impressions, unparalleled.

 

This is where Tony began downtuning his guitar «in earnest», three semi-tones down, at first, just to ease string tension and save his chopped-up fingers some pain, and then, because it turned out to give such an awesome effect. Even without this decision, the riffs he came up with on Master Of Reality would have been among the band's best; with it, they come dangerously close to over­riding the band's «cartoonish» image and dragging your mind with them into some perilous, pre­viously unexplored abyss — ʽInto The Voidʼ indeed. If there is one particular subgenre of metal that this album should be associated with, it would be «stoner metal», because this is the kind of music capable of inflicting a brain meltdown. «Doom metal» would be a close second, though, since no other Sabbath album conjures up such a vivid apocalyptic panorama.

 

Lyrically and emotionally, Master Of Reality is, of course, a conceptual album. Most of the songs deal with sin, temptation, impending doom, catastrophes, and possibilities of redemption and salvation — essentially, as it is well known, Sabbath's heaviest and most musically brutal re­cord is also their most authentic «Christian rock» record, for which Geezer intentionally designed a set of lyrics that would help rid the band of their «Satanic» image. Of course, it did not help: with riffs of such impact and power that only Lucifer himself could have imprinted in Iommi's mind, who gives a damn about the lyrics? Oh, there's something about the Pope on the end of a rope in ʽAfter Foreverʼ, and we're really much too busy to explore the context of that line...

 

...but the fact is, the lyrics are way too dissonant with the music. Look at this song called ʽChil­dren Of The Graveʼ, where the title alone suffices to conjure an association with George Romero. Its basic message: "They're tired of being pushed around and told just what to do / They'll fight the world until they've won and love comes flowing through". Now think what sort of music this message would be accompanied with in the hands of, say, Jefferson Airplane. (You might need to relisten to Volunteers for that). Now look at the quintessentially «necromantic» guitar/bass riff duo that accompanies it in Black Sabbath's vision. Believing Geezer that the song glorifies young peaceful idealists is about as easy as believing that George Romero's zombies have really come to save the world from corruption and sin. The mercilessly galloping music, crushing everything in its path, seems to be more fit for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse — and the only thing that re­mains once the riders have trampled out everything in sight are a few eerie, ghostly wisps in the graveyard, providing a horror-movie coda to the song.

 

Or take ʽInto The Voidʼ. The verbal message: Earth is doomed, ruined by mindless slaves of Satan and destroyed by their mishandling of the ecology, but maybe some of us will be able to find peace and happiness somewhere out there in space some day. The music: First part — yes, yes, and yes, second part — where??? Is there anything in the song's iron melody that gives even the faintest glint of «peace and happiness»? It is simply one brutal beating after the other, an in­cessant queue of terror-inspiring melodic lines where the last instrumental section could be a musical interpretation of somebody being slowly tortured, stretched out on a rack, held over a burning flame, flogged, then finally decapitated in a last act of mercy. "Peace and happiness in every day", in this context, is like a faraway dream, an illusion in the inflamed mind of a slave that has no grounding whatsoever in reality.

 

Speaking of ʽInto The Voidʼ, I have to add that this song begins with my own personal favorite guitar riff of all time in the «complex» variety (as opposed to simpler, shorter phrasing). Nick­named ʽDeathmaskʼ, in actuality it has always generated one and only one image in my mind: that of a slowly awakening Great Serpent, lazily unwrapping its coils as it prepares to embrace and crush the whole world in them. In all the history of heavy metal that I have heard (and I've heard quite a few), no other complex riff, be it Metallica, Amorphis, Opeth, or any other thrash or art-metal act, has managed to conjure such a clear and vivid picture for me, though, of course, that is a purely personal impression. (A close second would probably be Led Zeppelin's ʽNo Quarterʼ and its horrifying Viking ships sailing out of the mist of J. P. Jones' keyboards). So much for «peace and happiness» indeed.

 

But the discrepancy does not end there. ʽSweet Leafʼ is the only heavy rocker on the album whose lyrical theme has nothing to do with the concept — it is, as is also well-known, the band's sentimental (and still somewhat brave in those days) ode to the joys of smoking pot, initiated with a looped recording of Tony's cough (apparently Ozzy brought him a pretty strong joint one of those days). That's understandable, but what of the music? Not being a dope smoker, I couldn't really vouch for it, but based on all sorts of outside evidence, the crashing, thrashing riff that drives the song is hardly typical of a pot smoker's sensation, unless we're talking some really bad trip, certainly not one that would cause you to sing "my life is free now, my life is clear". For what it's worth, the riff of ʽSweet Leafʼ also gives me a clear vision — huge ocean waves brea­king on the shore in steady rhythmic succession. Should have been a song about a thunderstorm or a tsunami or something like that.

 

For some reason, ʽLord Of This Worldʼ is the only song on the album that never made a com­parable impression on me — maybe because its riffs have seemed more «traditional», in a heavy blues-rock manner, to me than any others on the album (I used to think of this song as the only one here that early Led Zeppelin would be able to come up with just as well); which is not to say that it does not kick its own major ass, just in a slightly less mind-blowing way than everything else on here. At least it's one of those songs where the lyrical content does fully match the music, as Ozzy sings it from start to finish from the straight perspective of the «Master of Reality».

 

In between those ultra-heavy, earth-rattling monsters the band has inserted several rather worth­less «breathers» — two brief acoustic instrumentals and one dark folk ballad (!), ʽSolitudeʼ, which, frankly speaking, sounds more like Country Joe & The Fish than Black Sabbath and is not even all that interesting from a «novelty» point of view, like ʽPlanet Caravanʼ from the last al­bum. But, of course, this kind of structure became quite influential in heavy metal, too, with the idea of quiet acoustic interludes attenuating the ferocity of the heavy distorted riffs and serving as «book­marks» to help distinguish one heavy metal anthem from another. If anything, the band did not really have the intention of coming across as the proverbial one-trick pony, particularly when the songs threatened to merge together into one gigantic devilish monolith.

 

But as great an album as Master Of Reality is, perhaps its greatest greatness is in the fact that Sabbath never tried to make another one just like it — most metal bands, had they been blessed with the fortune of falling upon such a rich sound, would have probably milked it to death a dozen times over, running the formula into the ground and debasing it to self-parody status. In the case of Black Sabbath, though, there is only one Master Of Reality, spawning a million pale imitations from everybody except its own authors. Which easily makes it the heaviest album ever recorded in the history of popular music, bar none — from the crashing storm surge of ʽSweet Leafʼ to the thundering horsemen of ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ to the dreadful serpents and iron maidens of ʽInto The Voidʼ, no other collection has managed to match its simple, but stunning vision. So, clearly, a big thumbs up here for this unmatched show of brutality.

 

VOL. 4 (1972)

 

1) Wheels Of Confusion; 2) Tomorrow's Dream; 3) Changes; 4) FX; 5) Supernaut; 6) Snowblind; 7) Cornucopia; 8) Laguna Sunrise; 9) St. Vitus Dance; 10) Under The Sun.

 

Much to the band's honor, back in 1971-72 they did not entertain the idea of milking a particular formula to death. The new sound that they discovered with Master Of Reality could have been a gold vein that they could have easily exploited for another dozen albums in a row. But the pres­sure was on to grow, develop, and explore — even at the risk of coming up with musically infe­rior results. Maybe the fans would be content with a total carbon copy of Master, but the band members themselves would not. The heat was still on.

 

As it is, Vol. 4 is a curious result of the clash of two conflicting factors — Black Sabbath's desire to chart out new territories, and Black Sabbath's personal decline under the pressures of fame, fortune, and everything that went together with the rags-to-riches transformation, most notably, booze and drugs. There is no better track to illustrate that clash than ʽFXʼ, a short non-musical interlude that walks the line between «avantgarde» and «coke-fueled stupidity» — apparently, Tony discovered that his crucifix could make a funny noise when accidentally hit against the guitar strings, and the band members then took turns hitting the strings with various objects and adding echo effects for extra giggly fun. Wheeee! (And no, there has been no positive evidence so far for Ozzy's ding-a-ling being one of the «various objects», but I wouldn't be surprised).

 

On a more serious note, Vol. 4 sees the addition of keyboards (used sparingly and all of them played by the band members themselves, although ʽChangesʼ is pretty much all keyboards), ele­ments of «soulful» soloing (such as the short intro to ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ), and even an actual orchestra (on ʽSnowblindʼ and most prominently on the instrumental ʽLaguna Sunriseʼ). Progress ahoy, but it comes at the expense of some of that earth-rumbling brutality: the «soul» component that suddenly appears out of nowhere takes the place of the «doom» component, and, above all, if you want to love Vol. 4, you have to have a little love for Ozzy, whose presence here is far more crucial than on Master Of Reality — no wonder they put him up on the album cover.

 

Riff-wise, Tony seems to be temporarily short on great ideas. This becomes obvious almost im­mediately: the main chord sequence that drives ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ is sort of a «basic» blues-rock pattern that carries little meaning in and out of itself (no «crashing waves» impressionism of ʽSweet Leafʼ here). ʽCornucopiaʼ, melody-wise, seems like a hybridization of Sabbath's own ʽAfter Foreverʼ with Cream's ʽPoliticianʼ — not a good sign at all. The «boogie» mid-section of ʽUnder The Sunʼ unexpectedly rips off Deep Purple's ʽFlight Of The Ratʼ — no big crime, but sort of a «telling» detail, I'd say.

 

And, finally, neither ʽTomorrow's Dreamʼ, nor ʽSt. Vitus Danceʼ have ever managed to stick with me, the former sounding like a failed attempt to do something different with the «fat» psychedelic distorted guitar tone of Leslie West from Mountain, and the latter trying to glue together a «power-poppy» part with a colorful guitar merry-go-round and a generic metal part that, again, sounds like a re-stringing of several chord sequences from Paranoid and Master Of Reality. (Even so, I think the descriptions them­selves suggest that at least they're trying to go in all these different directions).

 

The only song that is a total classic in all respects is ʽSupernautʼ, which has even managed to draw praise from Frank Zappa (one of the least likely persons you'd expect to go wild about a band like Black Sabbath). Its riff actually feels as if it should be played on a fiddle — there's a distinct Celtic folk dance flavor to it — but the psychedelic effect is even more strongly enhanced by Geezer's bass «zoops» on the verses, which go along pretty well with Ozzy's stated intention "to reach out and touch the sky". Throw in the mad percussion romp in the middle and the dis­orienting multi-layer solo guitar wobble overdubs, and the song becomes an exuberant celebra­tion of self-exaltation, or something like that. As heavy as the riff is, ʽSupernautʼ is one of the happiest and proudest anthems in the band's history...

 

...but it is quite telling that, once ʽSupernautʼ finalizes Side A and you turn over the LP (well, that's how it used to be, kids), ʽSnowblindʼ greets you with the flipside of that exuberance — it doesn't have a particularly great riff to match ʽSupernautʼ's, but it has its own doom-laden atmo­sphere. "What you get and what you see / Things that don't come easily", Ozzy warns us from the outset, and pretty soon we get to the midsection, which (maybe unintentionally, but who really knows?) borrows some tragic coldness from the Beatles' ʽShe's So Heavyʼ with fantastic results: when Ozzy begins his "My eyes are blind but I can see..." part, it is not only the most touching moment on the entire album, but it is the first time ever that they have allowed to open the door to a bit of depressed sentimentalism, and it totally works — just a couple minutes ago, you were sharing the band's happiness, and now they work you up to share their despair. No contradiction there, either — heavy use of cocaine has its ups and downs.

 

To be perfectly accurate, depressed sentimentalism is all over ʽChangesʼ, which comes before ʽSnowblindʼ and, in defiance of the formulaic Sabbath image, is a soft piano ballad decorated with some Mellotron atmospherics in the background. But even though it was inspired by a real life event (Bill Ward's breakup with his wife), it is way too clichéd lyrically and too trivial melo­dically to qualify for heart-touching genius. It's not as if Ozzy cannot sing a romantic ballad (it might have come as a shock back in 1972, but he's done plenty of them quite convincingly since then) — it's just that, as a first-time experiment, the song feels about as stiff as the Rolling Stones' ʽTell Meʼ from 1964 (maybe even stiffer, since «formulaic sentimentalism» by the standards of 1972 would be judged far more sternly than by the standards of 1964). Some reviewer went as far as to call ʽChangesʼ «the scariest thing about the album», but at least I like the Mellotron touch.

 

All in all, I'd never rate Vol. 4 as being on par with its three predecessors, but for the most part, it still works well enough to be consistently listenable. Even when the «meat» of the song is only so-so, it can still redeem itself in other respects — ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ, for instance, starts out fine with those several bars of soulful soloing, and fades out equally nobly, with a moody electric piano rhythm as the backdrop for another grand solo (which, by the way, reflects Tony's impres­sive progress a lead guitar player — ironically, the more his riff genius deteriorated, the better his knack for spirited blues-rock improvisation seemed to become). ʽUnder The Sunʼ may be ripping off Deep Purple, but its coda still manages to supply a properly bombastic, decisive conclusion to the album. A «transitional» effort, for sure — closing the book on the first chapter of the Sabbath story and already opening it on the second, «artsy» one — but still, at the very least, always in­triguing and interesting, and occasionally brilliant, so a thumbs up is fully guaranteed even de­spite all the criticism.

 

SABBATH BLOODY SABBATH (1973)

 

1) Sabbath Bloody Sabbath; 2) A National Acrobat; 3) Fluff; 4) Sabbra Cadabra; 5) Killing Yourself To Live; 6) Who Are You; 7) Looking For Today; 8) Spiral Architect.

 

This and the following album mark a new, brief, and somewhat bizarre phase in the colorful career of Black Sabbath — the «art-rock» phase. Vol. 4 may not have been one of their best ef­forts, but it seems to have opened the band's minds towards two things: fear of stagnation and excitement of experimentation. Originally, «stagnation» got the upper hand: with drugs getting the better of them and endless touring sucking out the energy, the band spent a whole month in Los Angeles trying to come up with something new, and ended up with a bad case of writer's block — because, let's face it, Los Angeles in 1973 was just no place for that kind of band.

 

So they got back to the old UK, rented themselves a medieval castle in Gloucestershire, and things quickly started getting back to normal. With progressive rock pretty much at its peak in 1972-73, the basic idea here was that the band had to «mature» — explore something more com­plex and adventurous than the mere conception of a «song» being the near equivalent of a «heavy metal riff» and nothing more. This is most evident in the lyrics — with songs like ʽA National Acrobatʼ ("I am the world that hides the universal secret of all time...") and ʽSpiral Architectʼ ("Child of god sitting in the sun, giving peace of mind..."), Geezer is clearly struggling to work the turf of Jon Anderson and Peter Sinfield, often avoiding direct descriptiveness and moraliza­tion in favor of «obscure» metaphors and non sequiturs.

 

Those lyrical results are mostly laughable (and it's not as if those role models were beyond reproach them­selves), but, fortunately, it does not matter, because the collective musical genius of Sabbath was still going strong. Sure, the idea of Black Sabbath doing art rock might look like an elephant in a china shop, but every once in a while you get yourself an elephant inexplicably blessed with a good sense of balance and finesse. Most importantly, where the «quiet» moments on Sabbath albums, up to this point, usually just served as breathers (ʽOrchidʼ, ʽEmbryoʼ, etc., are definitely not the kind of stuff for which people remember Master Of Reality), they are now an integral part of the composition — and they sound nice.

 

The title track that breaks the record in is a classic example — a mere forty seconds after a classic Sabbath riff has ploughed the terrain naked, the earth is irrigated by a soft, «romantic», acoustic-driven bridge with a highly melodic vocal from Ozzy. «Soft» and «harsh» interact with each other continuously, setting yet another trend for future explorations in heavy metal, before, even­tually, the song settles on ultra-heavy mode: the dragon riff that enters around 4:05 is the toughest beast on the entire album, with a well-ahead-of-its-time proto-thrash guitar tone, a brief, but mer­cyless little musical Godzilla, in the sights of which "dreams turn to nightmares, heaven turns to hell" indeed. This is all so much better than ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ that it immediately strikes the idea of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath as a creative renaissance.

 

That said, I have always regarded this record as kinda «spotty» next to its follow-up, by which time the guys in the band would figure out exactly what works and what does not work in this new production formula. Twice over the record's course they bypass heaviness altogether, and twice the results are unimpressive — ʽFluffʼ, rather aptly titled, is a medievalistic instrumental ballad that mostly just spins around the same acoustic guitar and piano arpeggios, with some de­licate, but unoriginal lead noodling in the foreground, and is way too long at four minutes; and ʽWho Are Youʼ is essentially a stupid experiment with «evil» Moog synth tones that sounds like a first-grader's parody on ELP's ʽBrain Salad Surgeryʼ or something like that (but what could you expect from a song written by Ozzy with the basic purpose of testing out his freshly purchased instru­ment? It's good enough that he was actually able to come up with a quirky riff like that, then was left with nothing to do but to loop it around the whole song).

 

It all works much better when they leave in the heaviness as the song's basic foundation, then start weaving in little strands of experimentation. ʽSabbra Cadabraʼ, for instance, begins as your basic piece of heavy boogie, well suited for the likes of everybody from Deep Purple to Budgie, and we suspect nothing as Ozzy sings some innocent lines about loving that little lady, always on his mind. Then, hoopla, midway through they shift keys and tempos, bring in pianos and synthe­sizers (along with Rick Wakeman to play them, all for the price of a few bottles of beer!), mask Ozzy's vocals with phasing to create a ghostly effect, and suddenly what was a cock-rock-fest just a few moments ago is now a spooky extravaganza, because the protagonist turns out to be not a regular guy, but a mischievous guest spirit from the underworld (essentially, this is then a more subtle twist on the story of ʽN.I.B.ʼ).

 

Even more impressive is ʽSpiral Architectʼ, where metal, catchy pop, and lush orchestration come together in a perfectly balanced synthesis — this is probably the most musically complex piece on the album, and despite Geezer's silly-sounding lyrical pretentiousness, everything else goes like clockwork. It is more of an exuberant power pop anthem with a thick metallic base tone on loan than «art-metal» as such, sometimes breaking into an inspired «musical gallop», sometimes letting the orchestra take over, and always returning to the song's basic «spiral» riff for anchorage. It is also the first Sabbath song to end a Sabbath album on a decidedly optimistic note, even if it took a pinch of naïve mysticism to do it. But it gives the album a conceptual cohesion — we be­gin with the brutal heaviness of the title track to acknowledge the world's evil, then end with the orchestral beauty of ʽArchitectʼ to reflect the sweet opportunities offered by escapism. That at least seems more logical than singing about "peace and happiness in every day" to the doom-laden monster coda of ʽInto The Voidʼ.

 

Throw in ʽA National Acrobatʼ (another absolute metal classic, with Tony bouncing melodic ideas off the wall faster than you can catch them — the stoner rock bit, the hellfire wah-wah part, the power-pop riffage of the last instrumental section), ʽKilling Yourself To Liveʼ (this one I've never cared for all that much, but I do acknowledge the complexity of construction), and ʽLooking For Todayʼ, another heavy pop anthem that pales a little in the company of ʽSpiral Ar­chitectʼ, and you get an album not without its flaws — many of which would be rectified soon afterwards — but still one that should be inspiring musicians all over the world even today, so all you kids take your lesson here: this is how you «refresh» your formula once it gets stale, so as not to lose your quintessential strengths and skills while at the same time making a bold step forward. Plus, regardless of how one feels about the record, it must have taken real guts to produce it — the musical decisions taken here are some of the band's boldest since they first arrived on the scene. Granted, boldness alone does not cut it, but boldness + talent = thumbs up without further questions, even if some of the actual results turn out to be subpar.

 

SABOTAGE (1975)

 

1) Hole In The Sky; 2) Don't Start (Too Late); 3) Symptom Of The Universe; 4) Megalomania; 5) Thrill Of It All; 6) Supertzar; 7) Am I Going Insane (Radio); 8) The Writ.

 

It is hardly an accident that the only song to have endured in Sabbath's «typical» live set from this album was ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ. Others were tried out circa 1975-76, then quickly dis­carded and forgotten; and, according to most sources, the band members have relatively few kind words to say about the album themselves — they prefer to remember that time as a period of personal chaos, druggy stupor, and just not a lot of fun altogether. (Now Headless Cross — there was a time of much rejoicing and happiness... 'nuff said).

 

Indeed, Sabotage is anything but the «quintessential Black Sabbath» album. Fans of ʽParanoidʼ, ʽIron Manʼ, and even ʽSabbath Bloody Sabbathʼ, if they come here looking for more of the same, will inevitably run away in disappointment — as perplexed at the band's musical direction as we all would be in the band's taste in clothes (the front sleeve photo has made history as one of the tackiest style demonstrations of «the Me Decade»). Acoustic guitars are one thing, of course, and we'd had them for quite some time already, but harpsichords? synthesizers? choir harmonies? tape experiments? multi-part ten-minute epics? what is this, Selling Satan By The Pound?

 

Actually, no. Detractors of the album (fortunately, there are not too many of them) usually com­plain that at this point, the band got too heavily involved in «progressive» experimentation, lost its head in a mix of artistic influences and illegal substances, and delivered something that may have agreed with the spirit of the times, but was utterly «not Sabbath», an attempt to tread on other people's turf with predictable stupidity instead of required subtlety. My opinion is the direct opposite: I think that Sabotage is the most sincere and deeply personal album ever recorded by the band, and that this is the reason why it can still be so harrowing after all these years.

 

As great as those early classic albums were, it is hard to deny that the band was putting on an act, and that even with all his looniness, Ozzy did not think of himself as Lucifer or The Iron Man in his everyday life. Personal matters did not really begin figuring in the band's output until Vol. 4, and even then their preoccupation with their own minds was still only occasional. But they still continued growing as their own psychoanalysts, step by step, and by the time we come to Sabo­tage, it was really happening.

 

There is one central theme here, running through most of the songs: INSANITY. Ozzy, as he will be glad to tell you himself, is mentally unstable from birth, and while the same cannot be said of his pals, by the mid-1970s they were certainly living mad lives (and who wasn't?). Intentional or not, madness, fantasies, and delusions are at the heart of Sabotage as they were an integral part of the band's life at the time — and the fact that these themes coincided with a «trendy» desire to experiment in the studio is used by the band to tremendous advantage. Naturally, they lack the «education» that it would require to produce a Dark Side Of The Moon, but they more than make up for it with sheer natural talent, creative instinct, and, yes, a good dose of rock'n'roll passion (that one time where they really have Floyd in a corner).

 

Funny enough, the album begins on a completely unpretentious note: ʽHole In The Skyʼ is just a heavy rocker in the old tradition — lumpy, bluesy, driven by a good, but unexceptional couple of riffs, and only the lyrics, written by Geezer as an ever more sophisticated clump of metaphors and allusions, betray the band's current obsession with their inner psyche. That, and Ozzy's delivery, of course — he sings with such passion as if he actually gets what those lines mean: "The syno­nyms of all the things that I've said / Are just the riddles that are built in my head". Heck, maybe he does get it, he just probably couldn't explain it in words, not even if you threatened to enroll him in a Cambridge educational program.

 

It all begins at the end of the fourth minute, when ʽHole In The Skyʼ is unexpectedly cut off in mid-riff (artsy!) and the short acoustic interlude ʽDon't Startʼ announces the start of the «serious» part of our program, as we slip into «experimental» mode and never let go. ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ begins fast and heavy, then, midway through, dives into moody acoustic lite-jazz as Tony becomes José Feliciano for a change. Conversely, ʽMegalomaniaʼ ends fast and heavy, but begins as a dark psychedelic trip with ghostly musical overtones and time-warped vocals at the start of each verse. ʽThrill Of It Allʼ is a fifty-fifty mix of «Satanic Sabbath» with the all-toge­ther-now colorfully psychedelic atmosphere of Yellow Submarine. ʽSupertzarʼ (the title alone is worth a grand) puts Iommi's metal guitar on top of Gregorian harmonies from the London Phil­harmonic Choir... or was that vice versa? ʽAm I Going Insaneʼ takes Mozart's / The Nice's ʽRondeauʼ as the foundation and turns it into a synth-pop song with a catchy chorus, but no guitar. Finally, ʽThe Writʼ, an anti-lawyer song of particular value to Ozzy because he wrote the lyrics himself, goes from dark arena-rock to confessional harpsichord-driven baroque pop — and, in the good old tradition of Abbey Road, the album ends on a self-deflating note with the band banging away on a piano and singing a joke tune (ʽBlow On A Jugʼ).

 

If you are yet to savor those crazy delights and that paragraph seemed tempting to you, rest assured that the music actually does match all that weirdness, and, moreover, none of that weird­ness seems particularly forced or senseless. Even a track like ʽSupertzarʼ, probably the easiest target on here to shoot down for «stupidity», works very well in the overall context —  I suppose the band invented the title not merely as a pun, but because the choir reminded them of «Russian church singing», and where there's Russian church singing, there's also a sort of «foolishness-for-Christ» association going on, and one thing ties to another and suddenly Iommi's frantic guitar riffs, locked with those religious choral harmonies, start making some sort of bizarre sense — perfectly put right in front of ʽAm I Going Insaneʼ.

 

However, my own personal favorite here, and a vote for most criminally underrated Sabbath song of all time (at least in that the band has never tried resuscitating it live after the 1975-76 season), is ʽMegalomaniaʼ. The song is yet another example of an odd lyrical/musical mismatch — its two parts respectively deal with the self-realized deadly plight of a satanic megalomaniac (Hitler?) and the successful search for redemption ("Now I've found my happiness / From the depths of sorrow"), but if anything, the second part of the song is even gloomier and scarier than the first one: at least, Tony's major riff that is driving it forward contains no hint at «redemption» or «happiness». One totally ad hoc association that crossed my mind, for some reason, was Jesus Christ Superstar — there are some moments here when ʽMegalomaniaʼ conveys the same «un­redeemable darkness» feel as ʽThe Death Of Judasʼ, with those atmospheric, ghostly, fleeting heavy chords laid over the main melody. Thematically, though, the song probably has more in common with Tommy... one thing is for certain: this is as close as Black Sabbath ever came to writing their own «rock opera», and something tells me that in 1975, they might have succeeded with it. On the other hand, maybe it is just as well that the album was made without such a strictly set purpose, and just came out naturally the way it did.

 

Fate would have it, though, that the chief memory of Sabotage in the collective mass conscience would have to be the main riff to ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ — the «first ever thrash metal riff», as it is now retrospectively featured in encyclopaedias, even though the term certainly did not exist in 1975 (Tony himself has humorously mixed it up in his memoirs, writing that it has been called «the first progressive metal riff»), and, furthermore, Pete Townshend was already playing something very close to that same pattern as early as 1969-70 on some of the versions of ʽYoung Man Bluesʼ. What matters, though, is that it is just a frickin' great riff — simple, monstruous, powerful, and, while we are on the subject, more memorable and more cool than 99% of the «real» thrash metal riffs I have heard. And what is even cooler is how Ozzy manages to saddle it with his own speedy vocal part — witchy lead singer ripping through space on a heavy metal riff broom — and how they come up with the idea of crash-landing the song in an otherworldly jazzy paradise at the end, instead of just fading the riff away as many others would have done.

 

And yet I insist that the legend of ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ should not have overshadowed the overall punch of Sabotage as a thematic and unpredictable album. As a whole, it certainly is «progressive metal», and a million billion times more impressive than, say, the entire output of a band like Queensryche, simply because it happened to be made by a score of talented people who refused to bind themselves by silly genrist rules. Alas, pretty soon already Black Sabbath would turn into a prime example of a band ruining itself by sticking to genrist rules — like most other people, they paid attention to record sales, and with sales of Sabotage failing to match their pre­vious successes, it was believed that «this is not what the fans want of us» (which was at least partially true). But this is also what makes Sabotage so pricelessly unique in the band's catalog, and, in fact, in Seventies' music in general — thumbs up on all counts.

 

TECHNICAL ECSTASY (1976)

 

1) Back Street Kids; 2) You Won't Change Me; 3) It's Alright; 4) Gypsy; 5) All Moving Parts (Stand Still); 6) Rock'n'Roll Doctor; 7) She's Gone; 8) Dirty Women.

 

If we put it very bluntly, the crucial difference between Sabotage and Technical Ecstasy is that the former was an «art rock» album, whereas the latter was a «hard rock» album. Not «heavy metal» in the typical Sabbath sense, but a much more blunt, straightforward, lumpy, «leaden» form of heavy music, ideologically closer to AC/DC, Kiss, and early Judas Priest than to Master Of Reality. I mean, look at the songs — there is at least two tracks here whose primary purpose is to sing hosanna to «rock and roll» (ʽRock'n'Roll Doctorʼ is a Kiss-worthy title if there ever was one, and the refrain of ʽBack Street Kidsʼ — "nobody I know is gonna take my rock'n'roll away from me" — begs for one and only one question: is somebody whom Ozzy doesn't know going to take his rock'n'roll away from him?).

 

Why in the world did the band decide to make that switch when nobody really asked them to is anybody's guess. «Drugs» as such does not cut it: the stylistic change was clearly rational and could not have been fuelled by substance intake (and, for that matter, Iommi's guitar playing skills and Ozzy's vocal technique on Technical Ecstasy are impeccable, so from a «technical ecstasy» point of view at least, drugs really made no difference). Shifting musical tastes seem more like it — I think that Tony paid close attention to popular taste, and consciously wanted to shift the sound in the direction of the new wave of heavy bands, without any artistic pretense or particularly «satanic» connotations. Black Sabbath were going to try on the guise of a heavy rock'n'roll band, and see how it worked.

 

Unfortunately, it did not work too well. The crucial problem of Technical Ecstasy is that Black Sabbath just do not cut it as a «rock'n'roll band». Ozzy is not a rock'n'roll singer, and Tony is not a rock'n'roll player, and this is immediately obvious on the very first track, which is not bad per se, but relies on generic boogie chords to make its point rather than one of Tony's classic riffs. Why bother coming up with a classic riff, anyway, if all you wanna do is boogie? "I'm a rock'n'roll soldier, gonna play it until I'm dead" — 'nuff said. It sounds especially convincing when delive­red in Ozzy's glassy, inflexible vocal tone (as much as I generally prefer Ozzy's singing to Paul Stanley's, ʽBack Street Kidsʼ should rather be sung by somebody like Paul).

 

This «keep it loud, simple, and basic» ideology is maintained throughout the album, despite its strange title and Hipgnosis cover showing two robots engaged in robosexual activities — you'd think it would all be more fit for a Kraftwerk record. The only «sci-fi» or «futuristic» element here is the occasional sound of synthesizers (provided by Gerald Woodruffe), but it's actually less prominent than it was on the previous two LPs, although keyboards as such are laid over most of the songs. All of this merely adds to the overall confusion, because it sort of looks as if they started out with one agenda, then messed up and ended up with another, by which time it was already too late to straighten things out.

 

The good news is that the band was not yet completely wasted, and even in a state of misguided confusion was able to come up with occasional winners. Although the only song to endure in their setlist was ʽDirty Womenʼ, a last moment attempt at a throwback to the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath epoch (with a rather disappointing mid-song riff that sounds like a variation on the ʽN.I.B.ʼ theme), where they really excel here is in... the sentimental department! Cue Bill Ward and his ʽIt's Alrightʼ, an unabashedly romantic pop rocker on which the drummer sings lead vo­cals himself — and unexpectedly demonstrates a sweet and pleasant tone. The tune has often been compared to the Beatles, although it has a very prominent Seventies style pop rock sound and should rather be compared to Badfinger or Eric Stewart's 10cc, but the main thing is that, as a piano pop rocker, it's a cool, convincingly optimistic tune, and it plays a respectable role in de­molishing the «Sabbath stereotype», even though it would be the last Sabbath song in a long, long while to demolish the stereotype.

 

The true forgotten gem of this record, though, is ʽYou Won't Change Meʼ, a song that has been cruelly overlooked by fans and unjustly underappreciated by the band members themselves — if anything, it should have become a personal favorite of Ozzy's, but apparently neither Sabbath as a band nor Ozzy as a solo artist have ever performed it live, nor has it been covered by anybody else, for reasons I cannot fathom, since this song holds my personal top spot for «greatest non-Sabbath-like Sabbath song». A dark, heavy ballad, opening with a suitably Gothic guitar intro and then riding on a gloomy, funebral organ pattern and Iommi's doom-laden power chords — and on top of it all, what might be Ozzy's single best vocal performance of his entire career, just because it sounds so totally like him, Ozzy: a song about a morally dysfunctional human being who might occasionally question his own existence and grope for a ray of light, only to conclude with grim determination that "nobody's gonna change my world, that's something too unreal, no­body will change the way I feel". I will even confess to having occasionally found myself empa­thizing, against my will, almost to the point of tears — then again, I guess Jesus weeps for Ozzy, too, on an everyday basis.

 

The song is also notable for introducing Iommi's new soloing style — each of Ozzy's stone-heavy concluding statements puts Tony in a state of overdrive, where flashy, frenzied, «shredding» licks flood the room in hysterical torrents that used to be characteristic of Jimmy Page rather than Tony Iommi. Of course, this playing style can easily degenerate into meaningless wanking, but on ʽYou Won't Change Meʼ, both solos are in perfect agreement with the singer's state of mind, not to mention the important demonstration that Iommi is, in fact, ready and able to enter the Van Halen / Iron Maiden era with the required chops for the business. Nevertheless, on the whole ʽYou Won't Change Meʼ is an Osbourne classic, not an Iommi one (and, in a funny way, all those lyrics — from "you give me life woman" to "although you won't change me anyway" — predict the complicated story of the Ozzy / Sharon relationship to a tee).

 

I wish I could garner the same level of exuberance for the other ballad of the album (ʽShe's Goneʼ); alas, this is where the melodrama in Ozzy takes over, and he oversings Butler's corny lyrics to a lite-baroque pop arrangement, fully in line with all the stereotypical «arena (pseudo)-art balladry» clichés of the decade. Maybe they were trying to become The Moody Blues on that particular track, but they forgot to write an interesting melody for it, beyond Tony's repetitive acoustic arpeggios. Actually, the Moody Blues connection could also be seen in that they have a psychedelic art rocker called ʽGypsyʼ on the album — far less impres­sive than the Moodies' ʽGypsyʼ, but one of the most experimental numbers on Technical Ecstasy anyway; I'm not sure I love it, but I can see where it could be lovable if you give its complex structure, various overdubs, and alleged seriousness some time to seep in.

 

As you can see by now, the album is an oddly mixed bag — on the whole, probably a failure if viewed from a «music as never-ending progress» angle, but not without its share of underrated classics and musical experiments. In recent years, its reputation seems to have slightly improved as more and more people have begun evaluating it on its own terms, rather than from the «how does it compare with the punk/New Wave spirit, or at least with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal?» point of view. In any case, it is not a record that is only too happy to pigeonhole itself, and I'd gladly take it, hits and misses included, over most of what would continue to be issued under the Black Sabbath moniker — even if it is much less true to the «essence» and «legacy» of the Black Sabbath moniker than, say, all of those Tony Martin albums. A «technical», if not parti­cularly «ecstatic», thumbs up here.

 

NEVER SAY DIE! (1978)

 

1) Never Say Die; 2) Johnny Blade; 3) Junior's Eyes; 4) Hard Road; 5) Shock Wave; 6) Air Dance; 7) Over To You; 8) Breakout; 9) Swinging The Chain.

 

This album has always had such an awful reputation, and this awful reputation has always con­firmed itself so efficiently upon first listen, that it took me quite a while to appreciate some of the record's redeeming qualities. Indeed, under a different set of circumstances it could have been shaped up into something much better — it has all the makings of a really intriguing, stylistically experimental album. Unfortunately, few of its original ideas managed to outgrow the embryonic stage, and for every such idea there is a swamp of boring dumbness surrounding it.

 

The thing is, Never Say Die! was originally to be something completely different — a «Black Sabbath featuring Dave Walker» album, conceived in the wake of Ozzy's brief departure from the band (of his own free will). Dave Walker was a veteran blues-rocker who'd probably only joined up with Sabbath for financial reasons (Tony invited him over as an old Birmingham pal); prior to that, he'd been a member of Savoy Brown, and then briefly a member of Fleetwood Mac, with whom, incidentally, he released one of the band's blandest albums ever (Penguin). Naturally, the «match» with Black Sabbath was a disaster, as were most of the songs that the band recorded with him — once Ozzy came back, he refused to sing on any of the Walker material, and not just because his pride was hurt or anything, but also because the songs sucked. A good example of just how badly they sucked is ʽSwinging The Chainʼ, a Walker-era leftover that was eventually given to Bill Ward — a lumpy slab of blues-rock with lots of socially conscious pretense but no subtlety or catchiness whatsoever. It does happen to be the first song after ʽThe Wizardʼ (I think) to feature a harmonica part, but it's a boring harmonica part, and it does not fuse well enough with Tony's distorted, mushy rhythm parts.

 

Anyway, once the Walker disaster was over and Ozzy was back in the band, they decided to recut the album in a hurry — and it feels hurried: nine tracks, most of them overlong, yet relatively low on ideas. Even the similarly structured titles, flashing before your eyes — ʽHard Roadʼ, ʽShock Waveʼ, ʽAir Danceʼ — convey a feeling of being rushed and undercooked. Worse, the primary flaw of Technical Ecstasy, namely, the attempt to cross over to a cruder, headbangier, more boogie-based platform, is still very much in action. As the title track kicks in with its power chords and «ass-kicking» airs, you suddenly realize that Black Sabbath have begun to sound like Thin Lizzy — ʽThe Boys Are Back In Townʼ, that sort of thing. But where Lizzy had a sort of natural street-wise attitude, with Lynott's quasi-working-class charisma doing its thing perfectly, Sabbath never had it in them. Even though their early years were spent close to the «slum kids» format, none of the band members had any good idea at how to become the champion of the blue-collar guy. This weird «social conscience» that you see in the title track and especially in the immediate follow-up, ʽJohnny Bladeʼ, a dark tale of an outcast underdog, feels wasted.

 

What is not completely wasted are some of the band's experimental ideas. Let the record sink in a little bit, and you will see that ʽJunior's Eyesʼ is the first time that Tony has cobbled together a riff that depends on a wah-wah pedal and an echo effect for completion, and it fits in well with Ozzy's almost tearful delivery of the lyrics that relate to the passing of his father. Skip over the yawn-inducing intro riff to ʽAir Danceʼ and see how Don Airey's keyboard work actually contri­butes to the song — there are some lovely passages here, both in the «ambient jazz» and even «jazz fusion» styles. Actually, jazz seems to have been this album's chief inspiration after boogie rock: ʽBreakoutʼ is a bona fide jazz instrumental with flashy saxophone solos and a big band arrangement orchestrated by Will Malone. It is nothing to write home about, but remember at least that bad post-Ozzy Sabbath albums do not have big band jazz arrangements on them, mea­ning that even at its relative worst, the pre-1980s Sabbath was still a band that regarded «risk taking» as a prerequisite for going into the studio — something that was gone for good once Dio came on board two years later.

 

Of course, stuff like ʽHard Roadʼ, ʽShock Waveʼ, ʽSwinging The Chainʼ, etc., is beyond redemp­tion — all these songs sound like they were written in about two minutes; their riffs are either non-existent or «unresponsive», since Tony probably did not have enough time to work on them. At least the title track has a catchy anthemic chorus, meaning that it worked well enough on tour during their last concerts with Ozzy, but I'd rather have the album end than start with it, because, as it happens, Ozzy-era Sabbath waves us its last goodbye with ʽSwinging The Chainʼ, which is probably in the Top 5 worst Sabbath songs ever put to tape (Seventh Star excluded, because otherwise the entire Top 5 would be occupied with songs off that one).

 

To top it all off, the album cover was once again provided by Hipgnosis, and this time it is even more ridiculous than in the case of Technical Ecstasy — all you want to say when glancing at those air pilots, perplexed and confused, is «...which one's Ozzy, I wonder?» The bottomline is that an album like this simply does not call for a symbolic / enigmatic cover; one might just as well have slapped those pilots on top of Back In Black or The Beach Boys' Party!. Just one more confusing detail to add to this pitiful disaster of an album — and yet I refuse to complete this critique with a thumbs down rating, since I believe it should at least be instructive to take a listen to Never Say Die! and try and figure out for yourself what, how, and why went wrong here and whether there might have been a chance of a different outcome.

 

HEAVEN AND HELL (1980)

 

1) Neon Knights; 2) Children Of The Sea; 3) Lady Evil; 4) Heaven And Hell; 5) Wishing Well; 6) Die Young; 7) Walk Away; 8) Lonely Is The Word.

 

So, is Black Sabbath without Ozzy Osbourne still Black Sabbath? Or is it really «Heaven & Hell», as this new incarnation of the band, with Ronnie James Dio on vocals, would actually start calling itself twenty-six years later? This is certainly a more difficult question than a similar one about, say, AC/DC — who, incidentally, were another great heavy rock band to reinvent themselves with a different singer the very same year. But where Brian Johnson, taking over the late Bon Scott, simply contributed to a slight change in the band's aesthetics (a little less irony, a little more working-class crudeness), the arrival of Dio seems to have revitalized Black Sabbath at the cost of completely shifting its ambitions in a different direction.

 

The difference between Ozzy and Ronnie is, of course, «heaven & hell» incarnated. Not only is Dio, technically, a genuine «singer» rather than just «vocalist» (albeit with a somewhat limited vocal range), but he was also a visionary — obsessed with escapist images of fantasy worlds, medievalistic values, and all sorts of dark romanticism. In addition to that, he was a really strong, charismatic personality who tended to eclipse everybody else: it is, in fact, amazing that he managed to survive with Ritchie Blackmore in the same band (Rainbow) for a mind-boggling four years (twice as long as his first stint with Sabbath). The idea to invite him over to Sabbath upon Ozzy's departure was a very weird whim: perhaps Tony and Geezer thought that a singer is, after all, only a singer, and can be molded into whatever the composers wish him to be molded into. As it happened, it was Dio who transformed Sabbath according to his masterplan, and not vice versa — and all the other band members could do was sit back and watch.

 

From the opening chuggy notes of ʽNeon Knightsʼ and right down to the epic fade-out of ʽLonely Is The Wordʼ, it is clear that the old Black Sabbath is gone for good. Of course, the band did go through a series of experimental transformations with Ozzy, but somehow, Heaven & Hell is an album that produces an immediate clear impression — finally, they have found a comfortable «genrist» niche in which they are going to stay (and indeed, this is where they ended up staying even after Ronnie was gone), and it's all because of Ronnie. Now, at last, with Tony Iommi being a far friendlier and milder chap than that Blackmore guy, Ronnie could find someone to make all his fantasies come alive — little wonder that he'd end up remembering the Heaven & Hell sessions as some of the most perfect moments of his life.

 

Musically, Heaven & Hell walks a line somewhere in between «doom metal», «art metal», and «power metal» — dark, heavy music that takes itself seriously and is also oriented at «retro» ideals (medieval, Gothic, romantic, whatever). Now that I think of it — although subsequent de­cades have seen zillions of albums in those genres, as late as mid-1980, did music such as re­corded here even exist? Some of it sounds like Accept (who were only just starting), some of it sounds like Iron Maiden (who were in the process of working out their sound), some of it sounds like Opeth (who would not form for another decade), the point being that Heaven & Hell is sort of a milestone, though certainly not a milestone that would be impressive for fans of «classic» Sabbath. Because this is where, in a way, the «classic rock»-era Sabbath ceases to exist, and what we are left with is «heavy metal»-era Black Sabbath, and I mean «heavy metal» as a narrowly defined genre that suits certain restricted conventions. An era which can produce its fair share of excellent songs, but has no space for ʽPlanet Caravanʼ, or ʽChangesʼ, or ʽSupertzarʼ, or any other such deviation.

 

Fortunately, even though the overall tone of the album is so monotonous, Ronnie's arrival at least refreshed the atmosphere and infused a new hope — and, riding on that new hope, the band came out with a solid, consistent set of songs. One thing that you are going to notice, though, is that Tony's riffs, which once used to be the begin-all-end-all substance of Black Sabbath, no longer are so. It's not even that there aren't any riffs — it's simply that they are much less prominent. Sometimes they only arrive at the time of the chorus (ʽChildren Of The Seaʼ), and Ronnie, singing across them, is stealing most of the attention for himself. Sometimes they only make brief appearances in between verses (title track). Most of the times, they are simply not too memorable, and work more as tough, brutal pedestals for R.J.D. to get on top of them and shower the audi­ence with his medieval metal opera arias. Rather convenient, given R.J.D.'s short stature.

 

But I would not count this as a big problem. We are here presented with a radically new ideology for the band, and for the time being, this ideology works — many of Ronnie's vocal melodies are quite catchy, and the man's passionate conviction for what he is doing is undeniable. Of all the pathos-drenched, pretentious, pseudo-operatic metal singers, Ronnie James Dio has always held my highest respect for one single, simple reason: he's actually got the right pipes to justify all that. Apart from sheer technique and audacious pomp, there is such a strong strain of animal vicious­ness in the man that even when he is spouting forth lyrical nonsense about "circles and rings, dragons and kings", the words are convincing and infectious. And as for Iommi, even though his playing here might not yield a lot of memorable melodies, it is tighter, more energetic and, in a way, more melodic than ever before.

 

The title track, which would quickly become the signature song for the Dio-led version of the band, is an obvious highlight — doom-laden, multi-part, music and lyrics all suggestive of an inescapable fate, and a «begin slow, end fast» principle that seems to suggest they were consci­ously or subconsciously trying to repeat the formula of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ, i. e. really start a new musical life. Okay, the words may be even clumsier than Geezer used to make them ("the devil is never a maker, the less that you give you're a taker"?), but only R.J.D. can bring the chorus down on the word "hell" with such a gloriously evil pharyngealized thud, and that prancing bass line goes so much better with Ronnie's delivery than in its original incarnation (ʽMainline Ridersʼ by Quartz, whose former member Geoff Nicholls brought it over with him once he was hired by Sabbath as a bass, and then a keyboard player).

 

Other than that, I am quite partial to the entire first side — the fast-and-furious opening with ʽNeon Knightsʼ; the slow-paced ʽChildren Of The Seaʼ, a song that began life with Ozzy still in the band but now seems thoroughly associated with Dio and his awesome "LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT!" coda; and even ʽLady Evilʼ, which is clearly the silliest tune of the lot but whose grin­ning, gleefully corny «evilness» I simply cannot resist — Tony, too, gets caught up in the game and comes up with all sorts of «nightmarish» wah-wah effects. The important thing is to learn not to have to take these songs too seriously — this is all part of a highly professional phantasmagoria; but there is some real grit to the singing and playing that makes it believable, like the high quality writing and erudition of J. R. R. Tolkien helps make at least some of The Lord Of The Rings believable. I mean, nobody is demanding you to shed tears over the tragedy of the lost ʽChildren Of The Seaʼ, but shouldn't we at least tip our hats to the way that tragedy is brought to its final apocalyptic conclusion?

 

The second side is not nearly as impressive, since it largely rehashes the ideas of Side A (ʽDie Youngʼ = ʽNeon Knights Vol. 2ʼ; ʽWalk Awayʼ = a poppier take on ʽLady Evilʼ, both songs being upbeat rants about evil bitches; ʽLonely Is The Wordʼ is yet another slow-moving epic ballad in the same vein as ʽChildrenʼ, etc.), but then the actual melodies are still different, and if you are okay with the overall style, you'll be okay with the second side as well. Heaven & Hell is not a «song-based» album, it is a «sound-based» album, and the Iommi/Dio sound is the sound of two metal titans at work. You can pigeonhole it, label it, jeer and sneer at it, but there is no get­ting around the fact that Heaven & Hell kicks the Devil's ass, and is right up there with Back In Black as one of the year's greatest heavy rock triumphs. Thumbs up (there should probably be some sort of pun here on Dio's «metal horns» gesture, but I'm sure I wouldn't be the first one, so it is perhaps more prudent to abstain).

 

MOB RULES (1981)

 

1) Turn Up The Night; 2) Voodoo; 3) The Sign Of The Southern Cross; 4) E5150; 5) The Mob Rules; 6) Country Girl; 7) Slipping Away; 8) Falling Off The Edge Of The World; 9) Over And Over.

 

In later years, Tony Iommi was actually a little bit embarrassed that the second album with Dio turned out to be more or less a carbon copy of the first one — something perfectly in the line of work for the average heavy metal band, but still a bit of a blemish on the so-far pioneering repu­tation of the great Sabbath. The funny thing is that he did not seem to experience the same qualms about the later fate of the band — but I guess that when you are fronted by somebody like Ronnie James Dio, expectations will always be higher than when you are fronted by somebody like Tony Martin. In any case, in the early 1980s the Dio/Iommi line-up, want it or not, was still on the cutting edge of «heavy metal», if not necessarily «classic rock».

 

And even if there is very little progression on Mob Rules — aside from a few novel details that we will get around to in a moment — there is no doubt that the band was still on a creative high. Having replaced the physically detrimented and psychologically battered Bill Ward with new drum­mer Vinny Appice, the «Heaven & Hell» lineup of the former Black Sabbath was now firmly in place, and although Dio had already begun vying for leadership position with Tony, the two were still enjoying the musical chemistry so much that, if anything, Mob Rules actually rocked even heavier and more viciously than its predecessor.

 

Maybe this impression just has to do with the title track, though. In spirit, ʽThe Mob Rulesʼ is probably the most «punkish» creation to come from this (or any other) incarnation of the band — a fast, righteously angry, brutally delivered message to the powers-that-be on the dangers of misusing and abusing said power. Except that no punk band would probably refer to the people as a «mob», something that Ronnie is not afraid to do, being an elitist escapist by nature. The melody of the song is lumpy, ugly, bursting with power chords and bass drum murders, but its spiky message fits in well with the arrangement, and it is quite refreshing to hear Dio roar "if you listen to fools, the mob rules!" for a change, instead of the usual dragon narrative.

 

Other minor new details of certain interest include: (a) Dio's rare use of his higher range on the medievalistic acoustic section of ʽThe Sign Of The Southern Crossʼ — a lulling introduction to the otherwise dark and doom-laden fantasy epic; (b) the thoroughly unexpected use of a Celtic folk motive for the heavy riff of ʽCountry Girlʼ, which is probably Sabbath's only direct experi­ence of completely transposing an old folk melody into a heavy metal setting; (c) the attempt at incorporating a soul-blues element into the album's conclusion — admit it, every time Dio opens his mouth to wail "sometimes I feel..." at the opening of ʽOver And Overʼ, you just want to finish with a "...like a motherless child" for him, don't you?

 

But my personal second favorite on the album, beyond the title track, is ʽVoodooʼ, just because it provides Dio with a perfect vehicle for unleashing some prime-time hatred on an unspecified unlucky soul — if that "say you don't know me, you'll burn!" at the beginning doesn't get you, how about the even more terrifying "bring me your children, they'll burn!" at the end? I guess all those Christian organisations did have a reason for chasing after Dio with threats of exorcism, after all, because on ʽVoodooʼ, he is slipping into this Satanic character like there was absolutely no tomor­row, not for the experienced voodooist, at least. "Call me the Devil, it's true, some can't accept but I crept inside you". It could be hilariously embarrassing, but that subliminal roar in his voice gets me every time. There is a real beast crouching here.

 

That said, it must also be stated that once again, the riffs in general are not too good. ʽCountry Girlʼ somewhat qualifies, but the sole innovative aspect of its melody is the application of the heavy guitar tone; elsewhere, even ʽThe Mob Rulesʼ employs a rather lackluster boogie chord sequence (though, as I said, appropriate for the occasion). The «sludge monster» riff of ʽThe Sign Of The Southern Crossʼ seems to be on about the same level of complexity and originality as, say, ʽElectric Funeralʼ, but is more of a lazy growl rather than a snappy jawbite, prowling for the lis­tener like ʽFuneralʼ did. And, weirdest of all, we might never have dreamed we'd live to see the day where Tony Iommi would be ripping off Keith Richards, but never say never — ʽSlipping Awayʼ, through and through, is dependent on a riff that is every bit the derivational function of ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockingʼ from Sticky Fingers. Which is more of a curiosity than a tragedy, but why?.. These men belong to different worlds, with hardly a hope of ever bridging them.

 

But yet again, flawed as it is and all, Mob Rules has its proper spirit, and when Iommi, Dio, and the proper spirit are all in their right place, a thumbs up is guaranteed by definition. When you get down to it, this half-fantasy, half-reality world turns out to be an invigorating location — so just ʽTurn Up The Nightʼ and forgive the record its occasional pathos and overdramatism so you can have some easy metal fun with it.

 

LIVE EVIL (1982)

 

1) E5150; 2) Neon Knights; 3) N.I.B.; 4) Children Of The Sea; 5) Voodoo; 6) Black Sabbath; 7) War Pigs; 8) Iron Man; 9) The Mob Rules; 10) Heaven And Hell; 11) Sign Of The Southern Cross/Heaven And Hell (cont.); 12) Paranoid; 13) Children Of The Grave; 14) Fluff.

 

Two strange things, both marked with the tags «Black Sabbath» and «live», happened prior to the release of Live Evil. The first was Live At Last, a compilation of old live recordings with Ozzy from 1973, released in 1980 without the band's consent by their former manager Patrick Meehan. The recordings were all right, actually, but since the band originally decided not to use them, Tony was understandably pissed off about the incident. Second, in early 1982 Ozzy, going through his batshit-and-doveshit crazy stage, decided to release a solo live album that consisted of nothing but Sabbath songs, and Tony was understandably pissed off about that Brad Gillis guy trampling on his classic riffs.

 

So, operating in vengeful mode, Tony gave the green light to the release of Black Sabbath's first «proper» / «officially sanctioned» live album — one on which Ronnie James Dio would have the right to not only sing new material, but the old classics as well. Naturally, this would have to be a double album (what with the band's impressive backlog and all), and naturally, it would have to prove, once and for all, who was the real master of his domain. Unfortunately, the album pola­rized the audience in a way that Heaven And Hell could not — up to this day, the debate about whether or not Ronnie should or should not have put his mark on Ozzy-era classics is still raging like there was no tomorrow. Then again, it is always pleasant to see just how much Black Sabbath still lives on in the hearts of the old and the young alike.

 

One thing that Live Evil does show, quite obviously, is that Ronnie was no Ozzy when it came to establishing the share of one's presence in the band. Ozzy, when on stage, always seemed a little (or a lot) stoned, seriously enthusiastic about the music, but also mindful of the fact that he was only one out of four — a fact that was all too easy to be mindful of since those four guys started off together as equals. Ronnie, on the other hand, clearly viewed the stage — just as it was in the old Rainbow days — as a battlefield, where the winner took it all. And subsequently, Live Evil is all about Ronnie James Dio. The stage banter. The singing, so loud it occasionally drowns out Tony's metal guitar (!). The incessant ad-libbing and posturing, often performed on top of Tony's classic riffs, so that anybody who has the misfortune of choosing this album for an introduction to the Sabbath sound will know the band as «the one with that Valhalla guy» rather than the world's most amazing riff machine provider.

 

But you know what? I don't care, and you shouldn't either. I find Ronnie's big ego, so amusing to behold in such a tiny body, at worst hilarious, and at best awesomely overpowering. Yes, every once in a while you get the urge to strangle the little guy, especially when he is wailing right on top of the ʽBlack Sabbathʼ tritones. Yet he seems so sincere, passionate, and ferocious in his stage attitude that anything can be forgiven. Of course, the difference between Ronnie and Ozzy is heaven and earth (heaven and hell?), but there is at least one additional justification for Ronnie's almost grotesque «oversinging» on the classics — to tell the truth, all those early Geezer lyrics are so atrocious that you either have to be Ozzy to sing them in an appropriately stoned manner, or, if you are Ronnie, you just have to add a twist and a flourish to each word so that the listener be overwhelmed by the twists and flourishes rather than be stumped by the idiocy of it all.

 

To that end, Ronnie delves into ʽN.I.B.ʼ with such abandon as if he really were Lucifer, or at least that werecat creature that Michael Jackson turns into in the ʽThrillerʼ video. The performance is so over the top that it is frighteningly hilarious one minute, and then hilariously frightening in the next one — he's really ripping the throats out of those words. When we get to ʽBlack Sabbathʼ, instead of Ozzy's paranoid madman we see a genuinely possessed spirit, somebody who's sold his soul to the devil not one hour ago. And who but Ronnie could growl the "I AM IRON MAN" bit without the special metal effect on the vocals and it would still come out ironish? Just to experience that guy sweat it out is... quite an experience, and I see no reason whatsoever to stand firmly on any one side of the debate. Of course, those are interpretations, and one has no more reason to listen to Ronnie sing ʽWar Pigsʼ or ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ than to, say, Ray Charles sing ʽYesterdayʼ or Paul McCartney sing ʽWords Of Loveʼ — but in all these cases, a certain reason does exist, and what Dio does to these Ozzy songs looks perfectly legit to me.

 

Probably the only grave misfire is ʽParanoidʼ, a song that Black Sabbath Mark II still felt obliged to perform before the expecting fans but also one which, with its speedy melody and personal lyrics, simply could not yield to a Dio reinterpretation. He simply does not know what to do with the song, whose tempo gives him no time to properly savor any of the syllables, and delivers it in the usual devilish growl, well fit for every other tune but not for ʽParanoidʼ. Then again, it's just three minutes, and you really can't call yourself Black Sabbath and not do ʽParanoidʼ in a Black Sabbath live show, Ronnie or no Ronnie, so we will just have to live with that.

 

As to what concerns the new material from Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules, it is usually done in close accordance with the originals — ʽHeaven And Hellʼ being the big exception, as it was restructured in order to spotlight Tony's numerous soloing exercises. He plays lots of alternately «brutal» and «melodic» passages, none of which defy imagination, but he's got enough crafts­manship and he never sticks around one particular key for too long to induce boredom, so I guess that ʽHeaven And Hellʼ, with its leisurely pace and adaptable structure, is indeed the best choice to «feature Mr. Tony Iommi». The rest mostly feature Mr. Ronnie James Dio, always eager to prove that it is his apocalyptic vision, and nobody else's, that is now the dominant force in this band. Oh, for the record, ʽN.I.B.ʼ does not feature the introductory solo by Mr. Geezer Butler (so much for the «Geezer Butler!» introduction from Ronnie), but ʽWar Pigsʼ does feature an unne­cessary drum solo from Mr. Vinny Appice, Bill Ward's replacement and a somewhat weak link in this show, but not so much because of poor playing (the playing's ok) as rather because of a fairly tinny sound to the drums, so that it is hard to take them seriously.

 

Speaking of which, the album itself allegedly went through a whole series of transformations, not the least of which was the infamous rumor that Dio was secretly tweaking the final mixes in order to bring his voice even more to the front — a rumor that he violently denied but which I personal­ly have no trouble believing, and which added to the ongoing rift between him and Iommi. Later on, the album was released on CD in abridged form, then reinstated, then remixed with either more or less audience interaction (I don't remember which), then reinstated again, but I guess that, one way or the other, I am listening to the «real thing» in the end, whatever «real» might be. In any case, Live Evil certainly deserves a thumbs up, despite the mucking-up of ʽParanoidʼ, the tin drums, and the abysmal front cover which, if I am correct, actually tries to depict the protagonists of Black Sabbath songs — I'm sure I recognize the war pigs, but is that an Iron Man or a Neon Knight in front? Or an amalgam of both? Whatever. Gimme a Bill Ward in tights and an Ozzy in platform shoes over this cartoonishness any time of day.

 

BORN AGAIN (1983)

 

1) Trashed; 2) Stonehenge; 3) Disturbing The Priest; 4) The Dark; 5) Zero The Hero; 6) Digital Bitch; 7) Born Again; 8) Hot Line; 9) Keep It Warm.

 

Tony Iommi certainly knows a great singer when he hears one, but the flipside is that Tony Iommi never really knows when the singer in question is thoroughly incompatible with the basic idea of «Black Sabbath». At least when they got Ronnie, they got themselves dungeons, dragons, kings, and queens, which was not that far removed from taking Lucifer's hand or playing the role of a repenting megalomaniac. But when, on manager Don Arden's suggestion, after the Live Evil fiasco they invited Ian Gillan, the result was... comical.

 

No, really, Born Again is, in fact, the most unintentionally funny Black Sabbath album ever re­leased. Tony, honest and hardworking guy as he was, came up with the usual dark, hellish melo­dies, but you couldn't find a less dark, hellish lead singer than Ian Gillan unless you went directly to the Sha Na Na training grounds. So he used to be the frontman for that «heavy metal» band, Deep Purple, but all those years he was just a reckless rock'n'roll singer, not even close to a prophet of doom or something like that. And now here he was, writing lyrics and contributing vocal melodies for Satan's household band! If you think this sounds ludicrous on paper, just wait until you hear the album.

 

This mismatching is so hilarious that it pushes the «camp» value of the album sky high. Never even mind the surrounding paraphernalia — such as the snarling red baby on the front sleeve, or the grotesquely massive, miscalculated Stonehenge stage sets that the band took on tour along with dwarves and mushrooms (inspiring one of the most famous bits in Spinal Tap) — the record is grotesquely campy all by itself, although some context knowledge is probably necessary to assess and savor that campiness in full.

 

A good example is the opening number, ʽTrashedʼ. Formally, it is just a fast rocker commemora­ting a special event in Ian's life with the band (getting drunk and trashing his car). But there is no way you could listen to it without associating the song with the melodically similar ʽHighway Starʼ, one of Deep Purple's biggest hits. Similar, but different: where ʽHighway Starʼ exuberantly celebrated the art of dominating the road, becoming one of its generation's most arrogant rock'n'roll anthems (hooray to the power of youth, brute force, ambition, and desire), the hero of ʽTrashedʼ is the victim of the ʽHighway Starʼ lifestyle a decade later. Older, balder, sleazier, whinier, far more miserable, and sort of down on his luck — the most memorable line in the song is the twice-repeated "...but there was no tequi-i-i-i-ila!..", as if that was the most tragic aspect of the situation. Needless to say, it is also one hell of an anti-climactic opener after the Dio-era blitz­kriegs of ʽNeon Knightsʼ and ʽTurn Up The Nightʼ, especially if you throw in the argument that Gillan's voice had already begun to deteriorate by that point, getting higher and whinier.

 

Ironically, Iommi seems anything but spent. It is clear that he did listen to some Deep Purple, as an homage to Ian (in fact, he was even gallant enough to add ʽSmoke On The Waterʼ to the set­list), but he must have also been intently listening to the New Wave of heavy metal, and perhaps even to some first offshoots of the emerging trash metal scene, although there is certainly much more Judas Priest in the air here than Metallica. As long as it's heavy and doomy, there is quite a bit of melodic diversity in the songs — not that it always helps the particular melody, but the man was still searching, that's for sure. Abysmal production, though: the guitars frequently sound as if coming from the bottom of a medieval well, and Gillan's vocals are mixed in from a different well a couple dozen yards away. If you are going to play like Judas Priest (ʽHot Lineʼ), couldn't you at least produce your records like Judas Priest?

 

Still, the album produced at least one classic metal tune: ʽZero The Heroʼ is an atmospheric mas­terpiece, and possibly Iommi's highest point of the decade — after the spooky, screechy introduc­tion (with guitars that sound like a cross between whining red babies and a beehive gone mad), comes a simplistic, terrific riff, totally on par with anything on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and not at all spoilable even with the song's rather dumb-sounding chorus or the fact that Ian prefers to rap rather than sing through the verses. Tony's extended soloing is also a highlight — in fact, the song might have worked even better as an instrumental, but, on the other hand, the song's social message (essen­tially, it's all about the power of brainwashing) agrees with the scorched-earth onslaught of the main riff as being symbolic of the dehumanization process, and Ian likes these songs that stir up righteous anger emotions, so let us forgive him the lack of a strong chorus.

 

I wish I could tip my hat in a similar manner to any of the other songs, but this just does not seem possible. A few are messy beyond repair, such as ʽDisturbing The Priestʼ, with idiotic fits of «evil» laughter; vague, scattered metal chords that never come together in a meaningful riff; and a lot of vocal posturing without any particular reason (allegedly, the words were written by Ian after some local priests had complained of the band's rehearsals disturbing their peace, and it does seem like the truth). The title track is a slow, draggy power ballad — a direct precursor to the disaster of Seventh Star lying ahead; boring, murkily flanged guitar sound and a lead singer who once used to sing effortlessly with tons of soul, but now has to basically kill himself in the studio to achieve the same effect, and still the effect is not achieved. And songs like ʽDigital Bitchʼ are just gross ("keep away from the digital bitch, she's so rich, the digital bitch" is the kind of a chorus where even Ozzy would have ended up with a facepalm).

 

A total critical disaster upon release, Born Again has been reevaluated over the last couple of decades — with the original shock at the Gillan/Iommi mismatch overcome, people have begun praising some of the music, recognizing at least the fact that this is far from Iommi's worst half hour as a composer. Indeed, the novelty value alone should earn the album some points, but other than ʽZero The Heroʼ, the songs just do not seem to have any replay value. The singer is not only mismatched, but his voice is shot as well, most of the time. The production is gray and murky (and even though Bill Ward has been restored to the drum seat, I wouldn't ever know by myself, because his skins now have a glossy electronic coating that was all the rage back then, and ended up reducing most of the drummers' individualities to a uniform pulp). And the melodies, diverse as they are, seem way too lazy way too often, as if Tony were content to adopt one or another style without taking any time to bother about the substance.

 

All in all, even though I no longer hate the album like I used to, but rather just feel amused about it, this is not enough to shift the final thumbs down evaluation — a curious failure, this one. Not that the band was too tight-assed to admit it: Gillan himself has since then acknowledged that he was probably the worst singer Black Sabbath ever had (even though he had a great time with the band); I'd say he is doing a huge favor to Tony Martin (not to mention Glenn Hughes), but some­times self-criticism is not merely a form of humility, you know.

 

SEVENTH STAR (1986)

 

1) In For The Kill; 2) No Stranger To Love; 3) Turn To Stone; 4) Sphinx (The Guardian); 5) Seventh Star; 6) Danger Zone; 7) Heart Like A Wheel; 8) Angry Heart; 9) In Memory.

 

We should not really take as an excuse that bit of historical trivia which says that Seventh Star was not supposed to be a «Black Sabbath» album, and that the decision to present it as such was thrust upon Tony by his management, in a publicity move that was even more dishonest than with Born Again (at least Born Again featured three original members of Black Sabbath — Seventh Star features one) and introduced a new brand of linguistic euphemism into the world: «Band X featuring artist Y» = «Artist Y who used to be in band X».

 

We should not take it as an excuse, not because somebody had the gall to discredit and dishonor a sacred brand, but simply because «that which we call a turd by any other name would smell as sweet». Wait, did I say «turd»? I meant to say Seventh Star, an album that introduces formerly great musical guy Tony Iommi to the pleasures of generic mid-Eighties pop metal and, along with Alice Cooper's Constrictor, has to count as one of the year's hugest disappointments, and a good reminder to all of us how those years used to bring out all the worst in rock dinosaurs, as the softer ones embraced adult contemporary and the harder ones were swallowed up in hair metal.

 

Yes, after the eventual and inevitable implosion of the Gillan-fronted version of Black Sabbath, whereupon, for a few years, it was thought that the band had finally been done in for good, Tony did really want to make a solo album, and Don Arden did persuade him that sales would be higher if it were billed as a «Black Sabbath» release. In any case, Black Sabbath did already go through three different incarnations, where Tony and Geezer were the only constant links, and with the advent of Dio and Gillan as full-time lyricists Geezer's role in the band was steadily diminishing away, so it could be said that in 1986 Tony Iommi was Black Sabbath, de-facto. And is Seventh Star really so different? If albums like Paranoid, Heaven And Hell, and Born Again are all Black Sabbath — despite sporting such different musical ideologies — why not Seventh Star? It's a heavy metal album, after all, little doubt about that.

 

A horrible one, though. Iommi's riffs, already quite questionable for the past decade, are not getting any better, whereas the production and commercial orientation are getting much worse. The Dio and Gillan-era records still had some «shock value» to them: doom-laden and snarling with Ronnie, as Mephistopheles went on the prowl, «drunk-evil» with Ian, as Mephistopheles settled down in a pub with a black eye, whining about how life's tough and all. These songs, how­ever, with a few minor exceptions, are completely user-friendly: singalong arena-rockers and power ballads that owe as much to Journey and Bob Seger as they do to classic Sabbath, if not more. Yes, I guess Tony wanted to try something new for a change, but I just have to wonder how the heck a guy whose art was formerly in such stark opposition to «user-friendliness» could allow himself to be duped into adopting this stylistics? Not that he was the only one, and it is also true that, with heavy metal gradually gaining mainstream acceptance, the values were being com­promised regardless of one's intent, but still, ʽNo Stranger To Loveʼ? Gimme a break.

 

The other cause for running and hiding is the backing band. The drummer, Eric Singer, was from Lita Ford's band (later on, he would join KISS and become really famous). The bassist, Dave Spitz, looked like a spitz, was nicknamed ʽThe Beastʼ, and went on to join Great White. The key­board player was Geoff Nicholls, who had originally played on the Dio-era albums and was brought back for his ability to master the synthesizer (so he is responsible for all the stuffy, plastic-soulful overdubs on the record). And the singer — oh God! — was Glenn Hughes.

 

Now since we are on the subject, let me make this remark: there seems to be a very important, very crucial difference between «power metal» singers like Dio (or Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickin­son, for instance) and Glenn Hughes (or David Coverdale, both of which were known to converge upon and destroy Deep Purple in the mid-1970s). From a certain point of view, they do more or less the same things — present the closest possible approximation to an «opera singer» in a heavy rock context; but since they are not actually «opera singers», the effect is corny and laughable unless they compensate by making their voice echo the brutality of the music. Dio and Dickinson do that all right, but Glenn Hughes just sounds like a pompous windbag, and now that the pomp is laid right over the lifeless Eighties production, the effect is unbearable.

 

A few of these songs could have been okay in a different world — ʽIn For The Killʼ, despite the unimaginative title that Budgie had already exploited in a much better way, has a hell-raising machine-gun hard riff; the 12-bar blues ʽHeart Like A Wheelʼ is surprisingly effective for a band that almost never does 12-bar blues (similar to the manneristic, over-expressive, and sometimes uunintentionally parodic style of Gary Moore, but with Tony's dark metal preferences redeeming the atmosphere a bit); and ʽTurn To Stoneʼ is at least fast, breaking up the mind-numbing depres­sion of crap metal ballads like ʽNo Stranger To Loveʼ and the title track (oh, actually, the title track tries to be some sort of stately mystical anthem à la ʽKashmirʼ, but with that production and Geoff Nicholls' rather pathetic attempt at incorporating a mid-Eastern flavor, it doesn't have much in the way of competition).

 

But ultimately, there is no sense trying to rescue and remedy any of these tracks in your imagina­tion, unless one day somebody actually does that in real life. So there are only two further re­marks to accompany the unfortunate thumbs down: (a) apparently, there is a 2-CD deluxe edition of this bunch of crap (actually, the second disc is just a recording of a 1986 live show, with Ray Gillen replacing Hughes; but still, the word «deluxe» shouldn't be caught dead near the title of this album); (b) the oh-so-1986 video for ʽNo Stranger To Loveʼ is notorious for featuring a slightly younger Tasha Yar from Star Trek TNG — naturally, with the requisite big hair, so if you're a fan of Star Trek (or a fan of big hair), you should probably check it out. Actually, they all have big hair in the video. It's a good thing Tony's was always a bit curly by itself — he's the only guy in the band to mostly keep his own.

 

THE ETERNAL IDOL (1987)

 

1) The Shining; 2) Ancient Warrior; 3) Hard Life To Love; 4) Glory Ride; 5) Born To Lose; 6) Nightmare; 7) Scarlet Pimpernel; 8) Lost Forever; 9) Eternal Idol.

 

Goodbye Glenn Hughes, and hello good riffs — and where have you been hiding all this time? Hidden in an endless sea of subpar products, The Eternal Idol is that one post-Ozzy, post-Dio album which, when placed in context, might just be the biggest surprise in Tony Iommi's entire career. The sessions were a mess, with not one, but two bass players coming and going (Dave Spitz recorded the original parts, quit, was replaced by Bob Daisley, who re-recorded all the parts, then quit); not one, but two drummers coming and going (Eric Singer recorded the original parts, quit, was replaced by ELO's Bev Bevan, who re-recorded some of the parts, then quit); and one vocalist coming and another one going (Ray Gillen recorded the original parts, quit, was replaced by Tony Martin, who re-recorded all the parts... then kinda stuck around).

 

But over this mess Tony Iommi remains as the anchor, and he seems intent on correcting the silly mistakes of Seventh Star. Gone are the crappy sentimental power ballads, gone is the short-lived fling with «heroic romance» filtered through power chords and synthesizers. The basic idea is to deliver an album that would be the true successor to Heaven And Hell — restoring some of that record's hellfire and putting real power back into Black Sabbath's post-Ozzy brand of «power metal». Naturally, in order to have real power, what you need is reliable powerlines — riffs that eagerly imprint themselves in your brains and trigger fist-clenching and air guitar playing on sight. In all honesty, we had very few of those even in the Dio era; the last time we remember Tony coming up with a genuinely impressive collection was in 1975, with Sabotage. Well, pre­pare yourself for the odd wonder: The Eternal Idol is, without a single doubt, the absolute best collection of original Iommi riffs since 1975. In fact, might even be since 1971.

 

Yes, the problem is that there is little, if anything, other than the riffs to recommend. The produc­tion is slightly improved over Seventh Star, but most of the basic problems typical of generic Eighties' power metal remain in place. Stiff drums, slightly synthetic guitar tones, even more syn­thetic keyboards, and a bass guitar that is only there strictly for formal purposes. On top of this, we have this new singer who seems to have carefully studied every trick in Dio's handbook, but who is simply not a natural like Ronnie — he knows not how to use the back of his oral cavity, only the front, and, consequently, has no way to properly scare the shit out of the listener. At least he is not trying to be a frickin' rock'n'roll opera star, like Hughes, so when his vocals drift off on you in the context of a decent song, they are not an immediate turn-off.

 

Ah, but those riffs. If you only have patience for one song, go along with ʽHard Life To Loveʼ, which is basically all riff — heavy, simple, threatening, jumping at you like a hungry tiger locked in its cage, and at a respectable tempo at that. Second champion is ʽBorn To Loseʼ, where the riff is a bit more complex, a bit more high-pitched, maybe even a bit more poppy, but every bit as memorable — not so much in a «threatening» way this time, but being more of an aural tease, if you get what I mean. Give these tunes a better singer, and they will both be better «fast power metal anthems» than ʽNeon Knightsʼ, in a jiffy.

 

They don't fare too bad in the slow department, either. ʽThe Shiningʼ, selected to open the album as well as be its only single (didn't chart) and its only video (Gothic lighting!), meanders a bit in the intro before a simple, brutal monster riff breaks out with all the verve of Master Of Reality. The big silly drums obscure it, and the production effect strips it of some of the potential power, but this is the same Tony Iommi that had almost made us forgot why the hell did we single him out of the faceless crowd seventeen years back. Martin's call-to-arms ("Rise up! To the shining!") is naïve and ineffective, but the non-vocal rumble behind it is at least loud enough to allow you to attune your ears only to the music — only to the riff — and that's what makes you rise up.

 

Of the two «supernatural descents into the dark and hellish», ʽNightmareʼ and the title track, it is the former that has the better riff, well adapted to the song's title; ʽEternal Idolʼ tries harder to be epic and religious, evoking a feel of doom that would make it the Tony Martin era equivalent of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ itself — not half-bad, actually, though it does lack the necessary crushing riff, and so Martin's "sinners say your prayers tonight! your judgement day is here!" rings a bit hollow no matter how viciously the drummer smites his skins. Still, it's been a long time since they tried to go for this devilish atmosphere, and it could have been much worse (and soon would be).

 

In conclusion, if there is one Black Sabbath simply screaming to be remade after all those years, it is The Eternal Idol, pure black gold at heart but marred with the predictable ravages of its time. I have no idea whatsoever how all these riffs came about — and why this weird comeback of Tony's chief talent only perked up for this brief moment in 1987, a year not at all benevolent to the «comeback spirit» of old rockers. But the simple fact remains — at least two or three songs off this album have made it to my personal «post-Ozzy best-of B.S.» compilation, which is far more than could be said of any of the other Martin-era records. A flawed, but auspicious begin­ning, worthy of a thumbs up; too bad that the future would turn out so treacherous.

 

HEADLESS CROSS (1989)

 

1) The Gates Of Hell / Headless Cross; 2) Devil And Daughter; 3) When Death Calls; 4) Kill In The Spirit World; 5) Call Of The Wild; 6) Black Moon; 7) Nightwing.

 

Hello Cozy Powell, goodbye good riffs. Many fans actually view Headless Cross as the second, and sometimes even the superior part of Tony's massive Martin-era «comeback» — freed both from the craziness of the Gillan-led Born Again and the pop metal gloss of Seventh Star, here is this new version of Black Sabbath doing exactly what Black Sabbath is supposed to do: writing and performing dark, dreary, doom-laden epics about the devil, dying, killing, going to hell, and never coming back. Tony Martin, say the fans, is the new incarnation of Dio, and now that they have legendary Cozy Powell with them on drums, they are ready to pummel us into the ground with Thor's hammer like never before.

 

Indeed, I think I know why Headless Cross is so popular. In all of its superficial qualities, it is the album that the more, shall we say, «occult-oriented» fans of Sabbath had been waiting ever since Heaven And Hell. Many of these songs were made to be sung at your local crossroads at midnight — and there is not a single speedy headbanger here like ʽHard Life To Loveʼ. Genre-wise, Headless Cross is a mix between power metal and doom metal, everything about it being sprawling, epic, with both Tonys trying to be as theatrically phantasmagoric as possible. No «fun» allowed as such: we are being deadly serious, as the first track already recalls the legend of the Headless Cross and Satan is always round the bend now. In fact, he's right there every time that Tony Martin sends his pitch sky high, and that's a lot of times.

 

Basically, Headless Cross picks up right from where ʽThe Eternal Idolʼ (the song, not the album) left off, intending to overload your senses with dark-tinged supernatural imagery. ʽThe Gates Of Hellʼ opens like the soundtrack to some creepy video game — synthesized moans, groans, and yawns of ghosts, wraiths, and demons greeting you for about a minute until Cozy kicks in with some mighty Cozy kicks, and in case you don't know it, the late Cozy Powell didn't have a lot of swing, but he did have more bada-boom than anybody else around. In a way, the fact that the music begins with a few bars of drums, before the guitar comes in, is symbolic — placing the accent on «power» over «melody» right from the start.

 

Actually, the title track isn't all that bad, if you overlook the fact that they subconsciously dupli­cated the rhythmic structure of ʽHeaven And Hellʼ — but at least it's got a couple of brand new Iommi riffs, not the best, perhaps, but memorable. Martin's efforts at getting into the character of a thunder-and-lightning heavy metal prophet of doom are not very convincing (he's still being a second-rate Dio and there is nothing anybody can do about it), and the main riff that drives the chorus sounds more like AC/DC in structure and effect than Sabbath, but I guess it might be fun to think of the song as a sort of (headless) cross between ʽHeaven And Hellʼ and ʽHells Bellsʼ. If all the album followed suit, it wouldn't be so tragic.

 

Alas, already on ʽDevil And Daughterʼ, with flat pomp dominating the speakers and the key­boards almost drowning out the feeble attempts at a guitar melody, Headless Cross begins its descent into total mediocrity — melody-wise, that is, because «taste-wise», mediocre power metal can be a seriously miserable experience. Bombastic mid-tempo or slow-tempo anthems with laughable lyrics, unmemorable riffs, and a singer who seems to seriously believe he can spook people into cowering and freaking out with his pathetic choruses ("WHEN DEATH CALLS!" "IT'S THE CALL OF THE WILD!" "NIGHTWING FLIES AGAIN!") — a complete victory of style over substance, which is certainly not what we usually expect of Tony.

 

It's not that there aren't any riffs at all, but what there is gets bogged down in bad production (Tony and Cozy are listed as co-producers) — for instance, the chorus riff of ʽNightwingʼ could have been handled in a much more distinctive way — and every once in a while, there does come along a song like ʽCall Of The Wildʼ where most of the melody is reduced to just yer basic power chords, while the chorus is dominated by Geoff Nicholls' keyboards. The melody of ʽKill In The Spirit Worldʼ could be written by just about any pop metal band at the time — or, even worse, fit like a glove on something like Yes' Big Generator. ʽBlack Moonʼ, for a change, begins with a great Iommi tone, fat and grumbly, the way we like it, but a few seconds into the song it is already obvious that we will have to do with a generic heavy blues-rocker, nailed to the ground with Cozy's bada-boom patterns. Queen's Brian May makes a guest appearance on ʽWhen Death Callsʼ, but this only counts as a bit of useless trivia — not even Frank Zappa could have saved the song from soaking in its own pathos.

 

Recapitulating: take Heaven And Hell, add late Eighties glossy, bombastic production, replace Dio's «roar» with Martin's «whine», throw in lots of cheesy keyboards, dumb down the riffs, and what you get is Headless Cross, an album doomed by way too much doom. You'd never think that a time would come when somebody'd pray for Tony Iommi to start boogieing, but maybe a bit of boogie could save this record — it is exactly this «ultra-serious» tone adopted by everyone involved that makes it so disastrous. Thumbs down.

 

TYR (1990)

 

1) Anno Mundi; 2) The Law Maker; 3) Jerusalem; 4) The Sabbath Stones; 5) The Battle Of Tyr; 6) Feels Good To Me; 7) Heaven In Black.

 

According to Iommi, the 1989-1990 period of the band was heavily influenced by Tony Martin in the following way: (a) for his first batch of lyrics, he thought that Black Sabbath was all about the Devil and stuff, so he accordingly colored the lyrics and atmosphere of Headless Cross; (b) for his second batch of lyrics, they told him he was wrong about the first one, so he thought that Black Sabbath was all about the Vikings and stuff. So, accordingly, he colored the lyrics and atmosphere of Tyr. Or, actually, TZR, because if you read the runes of the title properly, that is what you are going to get, so I assume this is just an abbreviation for Totally Zany Record.

 

Curiously, Tyr came out in the same year as (a little later than) Bathory's Hammerheart, often called, if not the first, then at least the «quintessential» «Viking metal» album — which, I guess, justifies a comparison between the two, and listening to them back-to-back will clearly show which of the two bands had a clue about how to best combine metallic riffage and production with Scandinavian flavor, and which one had no clues whatsoever. In fact, I couldn't even blame Tony too hard. Here he was, just trying to rig up some new ideas for the next album, and there is this guy bringing him stuff on Valhalla and Odin and all that Wagnerian «paganism vs. Christi­anity» baggage. A simple, hard-working guy from Birmingham could go crazy, you know.

 

No wonder that Tyr rarely, if ever, comes alive or makes «emotional sense». Pompous, porten­tous, and overblown, it wastes Iommi's talents completely, its main heroes, as before, being Tony Martin and Cozy Powell, and its motto being «more power! more power!». Iommi's riffs aren't that bad (when you fish them out, leave them out to dry, and then do the calculations, Tyr might even come out as an improvement over Headless Cross), but they are indecisive, and most of the time, buried deeply under everything else — drums, keyboards, front vocals, back vocals.

 

There are three types of songs here. First, so as not to bore the listener completely, there are a couple fast rockers for a change (ʽThe Law Makerʼ, ʽHeaven In Blackʼ), which have nothing to do with Viking metal but are reminiscent of vintage Iron Maiden — except that Iommi has no qualifications to duplicate the skills of Maiden's guitar duo, and Martin, as I already said, is no Bruce Dickinson when it comes to adding snarl to operatic flavor. Even so, these are probably the best of the bunch, if only because it's fun to hear Cozy Powell trying to drive his drumset into the ground at twice or thrice his usual speed.

 

Second, there are «stately», slowly proceeding, ceremonial chants, sometimes with a ʽKashmirʼ-type flavor — ʽAnno Mundiʼ and ʽJerusalemʼ. These require spiritual submission from the listener, but there is just no way I could respond to Martin's ecstatic "can you see me? are you near me? can you hear me crying out for life?" with a proper "I see thee, I am near thee, I hear thee", because in reality I can only hear him crying out for a living. All of this is stiff, clichéd, and, when you get to the bottom of it, very repetitive and musically simplistic. Where classic Iron Maiden would have a multi-part, compositionally challenging epic, this variant of Sabbath just proceeds along Iommi's usual lines (riff, chorus, riff, chorus), sometimes dropping in a predic­table «soft» acoustic section. Boring.

 

Third, the «epics» themselves (ʽThe Sabbath Stonesʼ, ʽThe Battle Of Tyrʼ), running longer than everything else, and aspiring to higher status, are impossibly boring. ʽThe Sabbath Stonesʼ is their equivalent of ʽEternal Idolʼ and ʽHeadless Crossʼ, a slab of spooky mysticism that will spook no one, and for most of the duration of ʽBattleʼ, you will actually be waiting for some sort of a battle to begin, only to ask, at the end, «oh, so that was the battle? I thought it was only the village idiot running through the streets, shouting ʽValhalla! Valhalla!ʼ until somebody finally puts him out of his misery». To add insult to injury, they throw in a power ballad, Seventh Star-style — ʽFeels Good To Meʼ, which Iommi himself later apologized a little about, saying that they were in need of a hit single. Guess how hard that one hit.

 

All in all, TZR is a bona fide candidate for «worst album ever to be associated with the name of Black Sabbath», closely approaching Seventh Star in that respect. No respectful fan of Odin's court will want to fall for this tripe — last I heard, the Valkyries were on the line and reported that they never ride out for anyone who tries to make his connection through Tony Martin, who can't even spell three runes right before embarrassing himself. Thumbs down.

 

DEHUMANIZER (1992)

 

1) Computer God; 2) After All (The Dead); 3) T.V. Crimes; 4) Letter From Earth; 5) Master Of Insanity; 6) Time Machine; 7) Sins Of The Father; 8) Too Late; 9) I; 10) Buried Alive.

 

As the Nineties kicked in and heavy metal had pretty much exhausted its basic list of subgenres, Tony Iommi completely ceased to care about any sort of «strategy» for Black Sabbath. Having begun the decade with Tony Martin still at the wheel, the band went through a second Dio phase, a second Martin phase, and a second (third?) Ozzy phase in less than ten years (and I am not even mentioning their brief live stint with Judas Priest's Rob Halford at the mike) — clearly indica­ting that Iommi did not give much of a damn, and was simply happy to jam along with whoever and whatever came along.

 

Not that there's any use to complain, when the result is as good as Dehumanizer, unquestionably the best Sabbath album in at least ten years. The return of Dio and drummer Vinny Appice was encouraging, but even more encouraging was the return of Geezer — and with the Heaven And Hell lineup back in place, they could finally let go of Geoff Nicholls and his incessantly and in­creasingly annoying keyboard presence. And get down to some mean, lean, serious business.

 

Dehumanizer may not have the best riffs in the history of Iommi/Dio collaborations (alas, Tony's skills were so heavily damaged during the sessions for Headless Cross that repercussions would follow for ever after), but it has some of the best atmospherics. Instead of dungeons, dragons, cabbages, and kings, the album goes for a full-throttle «apocalyptic» mode — humanity doomed and destroyed by technology, media manipulation, and the seven deadly sins in general, that sort of thing, vividly illustrated by the front sleeve's imaginative reinvention of the trials of Luke Skywalker (I guess). This direction was certainly not new to Sabbath (they'd worked that way since the earliest Ozzy days), but this is the first time they really tried to go for a strictly concep­tual approach with Dio at the helm, and the results are... satisfactory.

 

Well-produced, well-arranged, full to the brim of traditionally heavy Tony riffage and with Dio, as usual, in top vocal form, Dehumanizer just couldn't possibly fail. It could have been a master­piece, had Tony been struck by inspirational lightning — instead, it sounds seriously «crafted», and it seems obvious that Tony spent a lot of time working out the details for those riffs, which is a better option than on Headless Cross, but still, a little bit of extra guitar genius couldn't hurt any of these songs, which have to rely upon Dio's vocal hooks instead.

 

Picking out individual high- or lowlights would be a waste of time: most of the numbers follow the same formula, except for the occasional speed rocker offering a welcome change of tempo (ʽT.V. Crimesʼ, grittier and snappier than ʽNeon Knightsʼ, but not necessarily more memorable), and the occasional unintentional drift into psychedelia (ʽSins Of The Fatherʼ opens with a lighter guitar tone and echoey vocals as if it were a bona fide cosmic rock jingle from 1967 — soon enough, Tony understands that they started off from the wrong foot and corrects the mode back to «metal», but the hilariousness cannot be erased).

 

More typically, this is just medium-quality Sabbath, but in a very, very angry mood, with Ronnie and Tony competing in who can get a «nastier» tone from his respective instrument, and this is the only thing on the album to warrant a little fascination. You just gotta love the cello-like in­strumental beginning of ʽAfter All (The Dead)ʼ and how it then spills over into Ronnie's "what do you say to the dead?..", slowly and venomously roared away in his finest killer-zombie tone. Maybe Ronnie's finest moment on the record comes with ʽIʼ, a song riding on double irony (the lyrics seem to ridicule extreme egotism, but then you remember just how much of an extreme egotist the late great Ronnie actually was, and it all shines in a different light) rather than on any particular interesting riff. But then again, maybe not — I am not seriously going to try and break that promise not to mention any highlights, as even as the record is.

 

Funny enough, the closest album to Dehumanizer in spirit that I could think of off the top of my head would probably be Alice Cooper's Brutal Planet — also heavy, also doom-laden, also about the fall of humanity and personal degradation, so that you could see this as some sort of dress rehearsal for the Coop's (much poppier) descent into doom metal territory. However, De­humanizer takes a much more serious tone (Black Sabbath could sometimes use irony, but very rarely pure humor or satire), and probably overestimates its own ambitions. In retrospect, it is difficult even to regard it as a «comeback», though technically, it most certainly was one. Still, it is impossible to disregard the vibe — and after Headless Cross and TZR, Dehumanizer sounds more like Revitalizer, if you ask me. The very possibility of blasting ʽT.V. Crimesʼ at full volume from your windows and terrorizing the neighbors alone should give ample grounds for a thumbs up. And you may laugh all the way to the bank at the clichéd anti-technological lyrics of ʽComputer Godʼ (writing about digital dreams and virtual reality takes a heavier toll on Ronnie's brain cells than writing about witches and demons), but hey, twenty years on down the road, they have only become more relevant, and personally, I love even the abstract idea of Ronnie the Witch-Hunter lending his talents to a song about the evil powers of computers. Whatever you might think of the album, it does have plenty of intrigue — and the last time we saw Black Sabbath mix with intrigue, I think, had to do with Ian Gillan and the absence of tequila.

 

CROSS PURPOSES (1994)

 

1) I Witness; 2) Cross Of Thorns; 3) Psychophobia; 4) Virtual Death; 5) Immaculate Deception; 6) Dying For Love; 7) Back To Eden; 8) The Hand That Rocks The Cradle; 9) Cardinal Sin; 10) Evil Eye.

 

Well, at least it's an improvement over TZR. As Dio and Appice left once again to pursue their own destinies and Tony Martin with Geoff Nicholls are brought back to the family, you'd think the band would automatically sink back to the level of 1989-90. Fortunately, the experience of Dehumanizer was still fresh in the band's mind, and, very importantly, they still had Geezer with them — as long as at least half of the original line-up is in place, the Sabbath spirit is still there somewhere, and it takes more than a second-rate vocalist and a generic keyboard sound to suf­focate that spirit.

 

Perhaps some of the songs might have been leftovers from the Dehumanizer sessions, or, at the very least, Iommi just happened to like that doom-growl and tried to provide Martin with more of the same. In any case, there are some decent riffs here — ʽImmaculate Deceptionʼ, ʽPsychopho­biaʼ, ʽBack To Edenʼ and, most importantly, the downtuned album closer ʽEvil Eyeʼ are all quite on the level of the 1992 album. Again, the riffs usually sound like inferior variations on early classics, and each of these songs has a bunch of better prototypes (ʽEvil Eyeʼ, I think, is a sub­conscious attempt to echo ʽSabbath Bloody Sabbathʼ), but they are competently composed riff-rockers with their own melodies — and thank you very much, Mr. Iommi, for letting Mr. Butler step in with that little bass interlude in the middle of ʽEvil Eyeʼ, just to remind us one more time of how it used to be in the good old days.

 

Even better than ʽEvil Eyeʼ is the opening tune: ʽI Witnessʼ is not simply fast, it is riffaliciously fast, and I can only imagine how much better it may have sounded with Dio still at the wheel, adding deep growl to where Martin can only offer shallow, shrill screaming. Special mention must be made of drummer Bobby Rondinelli, who, coincidentally, was also originally from Rain­bow, but whose lighter, less mastodontic style of drumming actually suits Sabbath better than Cozy Powell's thud (remember that Sabbath never thrived on really heavy drumming — Bill Ward's parts always relied on expressiveness rather than brute force).

 

Alas, about half of the album still consists of boring atmospheric mysticism à la Headless Cross: in fact, usage of the word "cross" for these guys should probably be banned forever, because ʽCross Of Thornsʼ is one of the album's worst tracks, only surpassed in that category by the sentimental ballad ʽDying For Loveʼ (you wish), and the next in an endless series of ʽKashmirʼ / ʽStargazerʼ tributes called ʽCardinal Sinʼ. And I still remain undecided on the album's oddest track: ʽVirtual Deathʼ shows that somebody in the Sabbath camp was clearly keeping an eye open on the latest developments in the grunge camp — with its sludgy tempo, hyper-distorted guitars, and hushed multi-tracked vocals, it sounds as if it belonged on an Alice In Chains album rather than an Iommi-led one. Probably a bad Alice In Chains album, though, like one of those post-Staley reunion crapfests. Curious curiosity, but neither Iommi's riff nor Martin's vocals are able to convey a genuine impression of «virtual death» for the protagonist.

 

I seem to remember that Geezer was particularly unhappy with the final results, and quit the band once again right after the ensuing tour freed him of any further obligations. The disillusionment is easy to understand, but secretly I think that he just did not get along well with the lead singer. Indeed, time has changed little about Tony Martin, whose style is still lacking any sort of inte­resting perso­nality — he tries, he really does, but he is simply unable to come up with a special angle at which to deliver these lyrics. Remember, some of the songs here have real potential, they just had to be served under a different sauce (I would certainly pay something to see Dio try out ʽEvil Eyeʼ and ʽI Witnessʼ). If you are a major sucker for Iommi riffs, Cross Purposes will make the grade — if you only want A+ quality riffs, though, or if you think that Sabbath should never be reduced to just the riffs, stay away. You've been warned by Geezer.

 

CROSS PURPOSES LIVE (1995)

 

1) Time Machine; 2) Children Of The Grave; 3) I Witness; 4) Into The Void; 5) Black Sabbath; 6) Neon Knights; 7) Psychophobia; 8) The Wizard; 9) Cross Of Thorns; 10) Heaven In Black; 11) Symptom Of The Universe; 12) Head­less Cross; 13) Paranoid; 14) Iron Man; 15) Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.

 

A live album of a 25-year old Black Sabbath with Tony Martin as lead vocalist was exactly what was needed in 1995 to restore the band's reputation, I guess. At least Live Evil (a) had the novelty of being the first officially sanctioned B.S. live record, (b) had Dio on it, adapting the old Ozzy classics to his own style, (c) coincided with a creative revival for the band, whether the fans were willing to admit it or not. Cross Purposes Live has none of these advantages — in fact, it doesn't even have its own frickin' title (although that was probably due to the fact that the concert was first and foremost released as a video, with the audio CD as a bonus accompaniment).

 

Still, as long as Black Sabbath consists of Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and whoever else, no live Sabbath album can be a completely worthless proposition — if there ever was a night in history when Tony played real bad, or the setlist was completely dominated by subpar material, I'd actually be interested in hearing how that may have sounded. If Martin's voice does not piss you off immediately, there is no reason why Cross Purposes Live should be written off. Because of the setlist? Well, as you can see, more than half of the songs are impeccable classics — and there is even one pleasant surprise, as the band resurrects ʽThe Wizardʼ, a song not performed at all since their first gigs in 1970, unjustly forgotten just because it wasn't a radio hit. And out of the Martin-era material, only ʽCross Of Thornsʼ is a suckjob, and should have been tossed out in favor of ʽEvil Eyeʼ or, at least, ʽVirtual Deathʼ, if we want to be funny.

 

Martin's live personality is not seriously different from his posturing in the studio, and not a lot of stage banter made it onto the audio disc, anyway. Of course, hearing him howl on the Ozzy num­bers is a weird thing — rather than Ozzy's amusingly stoned intonations, and rather than Dio's entertaining «corn-de-luxe» roar-from-Hell, what you get is a guy who seems to be trying to imbue «sincerity» and «genuine passion» into these phantasmagoric, anti-reality soundscapes. Who really wants to hear a ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ or a ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ that de­mand to be taken sternly-seriously, let alone a ʽBlack Sabbathʼ? The poor guy is stuck in the middle between the excessive extremes of Ozzy and Dio, and with Sabbath, there is no middle ground by definition. Then again, the man is just doing his job the best he can — I hope very much that nobody cheated him out of any money on that or any other tours.

 

Trivia-wise, ʽTime Machineʼ begins with a few brief samples of classic Iommi riffs (as in, "let us illustrate this title for those who think it needs illustrating!"); ʽBlack Sabbathʼ, as usual, has a brief «medieval» introduction; ʽParanoidʼ is preceded by one minute of Iommi playing around with the evil wah-wah effect; and ʽIron Manʼ is inexplicably cut down to three minutes (perhaps due to CD length limitations). Oh, and ʽHeadless Crossʼ sounds much better live, free from the clutches of the hideous 1989 production values. And that's about it, folks.

 

FORBIDDEN (1995)

 

1) The Illusion Of Power; 2) Get A Grip; 3) Can't Get Enough; 4) Shaking Off The Chains; 5) I Won't Cry For You; 6) Guilty As Hell; 7) Sick And Tired; 8) Rusty Angels; 9) Forbidden; 10) Kiss Of Death.

 

On their sixty-sixth studio album, Black Sabbath go for the gusto — they pay a humble tribute to their degenerate friends in Aerosmith (ʽGet A Gripʼ), nostalgize for the old innocent days of Bad Company (ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ), tip their hat to bluesman Johnny Winter (ʽSick And Tiredʼ), and slyly reference old film noir classics (ʽKiss Of Deathʼ). Or else they just run out of ideas for new song titles, you choose which idea you like best.

 

Forbidden is often extolled by fans and anti-fans alike as one of the absolute worst, if not the absolute worst, record to have the misfortune of being associated with the name of Black Sabbath. Honestly, I do not see what makes it so much worse than Seventh Star or TZR or even Headless Cross — they all consist of the same uninspired, by-the-book musical sludge. The only extra flaw on Forbidden is the horrendous desecration of the Sabbath temple by allowing a goddamn rap­per inside: the first track, ʽIllusion Of Powerʼ, features a spoken-word contribution from Ice-T, and even if it is very brief and he doesn't even «rap» as much as he just blurts out the words, that was quite enough to do the damage.

 

That this was a stupid idea from the outset is pretty obvious — some classic metal bands make a point out of meshing with hip-hop (Anthrax, for instance), but the Sabbath spirit and the hip-hop spirit can only annihilate each other, and it shows a remarkable lack of insight that they still went on with the idea. Any Ice-T fans out there who made their acquaintance with Sabbath through Forbidden? I hope to God there were none.

 

But apart from that one bit of silly pseudo-publicity, the rest of these songs are not «offensive», they are just boring. A (mercifully) short, unassuming, unnecessary record, for some reason produced by Ernie C, lead guitarist of Body Count (I think it was he who got them Ice-T, since they went to high school together), and seemingly trying to put on a «commercial» face once again, a decade after Seventh Star had showed how awful it could be if Tony Iommi switched over to harmless pop metal. So there's rotten power balladry (ʽI Won't Cry For Youʼ — who really cares if Tony Martin cries or does not cry for anybody?), stale blues-rock that rehashes old ideas in new sterile incarnations (the «heavy» parts of ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ sound like the heavy parts of ʽMegalomaniaʼ with all the excitement sucked out of the riff), and colorless pop metal that tries to deliver a message but forgets to add atmosphere (title track).

 

How, within less than a year, the band went from an album that at least faintly glimmered with a sense of (cross) purpose, to this batch of songs that try to growl but show no healthy teeth what­soever, is not exactly clear. We can blame Cozy Powell, whose presence had always ended up a bane for the band and who is back in the saddle here; or Neil Murray, whose return in Geezer's stead is equally deplorable; or the producers; or the rapper; or Tony Martin's ridiculous over­singing on the pop choruses. But ultimately, the blame probably rests on Iommi for allowing this underwritten, overproduced piece of metal junk to go public — a decision which, according to his own admission, he'd since come to regret.

 

Thumbs down with a vengeance and all, yet at least one good thing came out of it: this was the last ever product to bear the name of «Black Sabbath» that did not relate to the original Black Sabbath. With Forbidden, The Great Tony Martin And Cozy Powell Experiment finally came to a close. These days, Tony Martin is said to occasionally front his own band called — guess what? — right, Headless Cross; and I can only imagine what sort of stuff they play before fans who are generous enough to give them money — yet, all the same, good luck to them in whatever it is they do, even if it means replicating Ice-T's parts on stage. Apparently, Iommi booted Martin out rather unceremoniously (just hung up and never called him back or something), and Martin said that he'd never go back to Sabbath after being humiliated not once, but twice. Formally, that was very bad behaviour on Iommi's part, and I hope he blames himself for that — but thank God, we never got to see the proper follow-up to Forbidden.

 

REUNION (1998)

 

1) War Pigs; 2) Behind The Wall Of Sleep; 3) N.I.B.; 4) Fairies Wear Boots; 5) Electric Funeral; 6) Sweet Leaf; 7) Spiral Architect; 8) Into The Void; 9) Snowblind; 10) Sabbath Bloody Sabbath; 11) Orchid / Lord Of This World; 12) Dirty Women; 13) Black Sabbath; 14) Iron Man; 15) Children Of The Grave; 16) Paranoid; 17) Psycho Man; 18) Selling My Soul.

 

It is amusing that the first ever officially sanctioned, contemporary live release from one of the world's greatest rock line-ups should have taken place thirty years past the formation of that line-up — and twenty years past the last time it stuck together (not counting brief hazy quirks like the Live Aid appearance). But it is even more amusing, actually, that this reunion show, recorded December 4-5, 1997, in the band's home city of Birmingham (as if we needed even more nostal­gia!), is every bit as good as any good show played in Sabbath history, young or old.

 

With Forbidden marking a particularly low point in Iommi's, and Black Sabbath's, biography, it may well have been inevitable that they made a conscious try to break away from endless em­barrassments and mediocrities and take a single big leap back into the stratosphere. How they all patched up their differences and got back on track once again is a long (but not particularly unique or fascinating) story, so we will skip it and turn right to this Birmingham gig. Is it any good? Should anybody besides hardcore Sab fans give a damn?

 

Well, first of all, everybody's in fine form. Everybody put on a bit of weight, figuratively or lite­rally speaking, over the years, meaning that Bill Ward has lost a bit of the old-school maniacality (this is immediately obvious on his heavier, but less fussy fills on ʽWar Pigsʼ), but apart from that, Tony is always rock-hard reliable, and the biggest surprise, of course, is Ozzy, who returns to the stage with his former friends like the past twenty years had never happened — getting into the spirit of the songs (many of which he hadn't sung live since the split, although some of the Sabbath classics did, of course, stay in his repertoire) and even consistently managing to stay in tune, health factors notwithstanding.

 

Second, the setlist alone is like a virtual greatest hits compilation — for obvious reasons, the entire post-1978 (in fact, the entire post-1976) Sabbath catalog is happily ignored, and we get to remind ourselves why this band actually mattered in the first place. I do have my complaints, since they mostly do the big hits, without any big surprises, and also since one of their best albums, Sabotage, is completely ignored (not even a ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ!); at the very least, they could have dumped ʽDirty Womenʼ, one of the least satisfying pieces on Technical Ecstasy, and replaced it with something more challenging and less predictable. But then again, what are you going to perform for your fans after a 20-year break, if not the frickin' hits?

 

Third, the final decision probably depends on what you think of Ozzy as a showman. If the endless (and, ultimately, quite gratuitous) assaults on the F-word, the incessant toying with the audience ("let me see your fucking hands!" — Ozzy, why don't you just put on your glasses?), the strange manner of patronizing ("louder! louder! I can't fucking hear you! LOUDER!... [pause] ... here's a song called ʽInto The Voidʼ" — so if they all shut up out of principle, does that mean you wouldn't be playing that song?), and the numerous, but not totally overwhelming ad-libs on the songs are up your alley, the album is a must-have, because the man is clearly having fun rather than faking it. If you consider this irresponsibly clownish behaviour, going against the darkly insane spirit of the tunes, then each and every song will host at least one, and often more, cringe­worthy moments for you. On the other hand, it might be worth hearing just for the price of that bit of croaky laughter on ʽBlack Sabbathʼ — "Satan's standing there, he's smiling..." — so 100% Ozzy, could anybody else have produced a demented laugh of that kind?

 

Concerning the differences between these live versions and originals, only one curious thing caught my attention: the disappearance of Ozzy's sung part during the «brutal» mid-section of ʽSabbath Bloody Sabbathʼ, the one where Tony comes up with one more of his Godzilla-powered riffs. Possibly the original part was too high-pitched for him to recreate it twenty-five years later, but then again, he did downtune the melodies in quite a few other spots, so it is strange — and then, apparently, they just dropped the song from their later reunion shows altogether. One of those little reminders that time does go by, no matter how much you want it to stop.

 

As a small compensation for the album's inevitable age-related flaws, though, the reunited band offers a bonus — two new songs, sort of a water-test to see if the old Sab chemistry is still in place when it comes to creating, not just re-creating. On ʽPsycho Manʼ, they seem to be trying a little too hard: yes, we know this is a band singing dark songs on creepy subjects, but should their first song after such a long interruption really be a straightforward portrait of a homicidal maniac? Regardless, it follows the classic Sabbath recipé very loyally, with an expected key/tempo change in the middle and then yet another again in the end — I just wish Tony had come up with a better set of riffs. ʽSelling My Soulʼ is more effective, since it is another one of those «autobiographi­cal» Ozzy songs — as long as the man is still crazy after all these years, you can never get tired of sentimental depictions of his craziness, so this time, the lack of a great riff is forgivable. If these tunes fail to come close to the greatness of yore, they at least show that, with Ozzy and Geezer back in the team, the Sabs can fare much better than they did in the Martin years.

 

With Past Lives now easily available on the market, Reunion has automatically ceased to be the «if-you-only-buy-one-Sabbath-live-record-buy-this-one» choice for fans, especially because Sab­bath have always been a fairly conservative band, and Reunion is a particularly conservative live album, specially designed to re-establish the band «as it was». Still, with all these great songs performed with such faith in their greatness, how could this be anything but a thumbs up? Or just buy it in recognition of the human being's inalienable right to say "fuck" at awesomely ever-increasing rates, long predating the golden days of HBO.

 

13 (2013)

 

1) End Of The Beginning; 2) God Is Dead?; 3) Loner; 4) Zeitgeist; 5) Age Of Reason; 6) Live Forever; 7) Damaged Soul; 8) Dear Father; 9*) Naivete In Black; 10*) Methademic; 11*) Peace Of Mind; 12*) Pariah.

 

I really don't want to get mad about this album. It is nothing but admirable, how, after all the in­cessant talks and all the innumerable get-togethers, and with Tony's cancer, and with Ozzy's, well, ozzmosis, they still managed to get together one more time, after more than a decade of beating around the bush, and come up with enough songs to fill up an LP and still have some to spare as bonus tracks for special editions. So they lost Bill Ward at the last moment over some financial disagreements, replacing him with session man Brad Wilk, which technically makes the experi­ence incomplete, but still, three out of the original four ain't that bad.

 

I also admire the decision to make a thoroughly «nostalgic» album. Had they decided that it was time they «caught on», borrowing from nu-metal, rap-metal, Babymetal, or any of the latest trends in heavy music, the results would probably have been catastrophic. As it is, their decision was simple. Nothing whatsoever in heavy music beats the quality of early classic Black Sabbath — so let's just cut the crap and make another early classic Black Sabbath album, as if it were 1970 all over again. In fact, on a hilarious note, the last track of the LP, ʽDear Fatherʼ, ends with the rain and thunder sounds of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ (the song) — which could be interpreted as if 13 were supposed to be the prequel to Black Sabbath! It ain't 1970, it's really 1969.

 

I also admire Ozzy, to an extent. Never mind how the man let himself become a silly symbol, first of the crazy sensationalist excesses of the «rock and roll lifestyle», then of the crass exploitative machinery of rock journalism and MTV gluttony. In the end, he used them as much as they used him — and retained his integrity along with his madness. It is him, not Tony or Geezer, that comes out as the true hero of 13, singing about individual and collective crises of the 21st century not as the protagonist of The Osbournes, but as somebody who is even more haunted by his de­mons these days than at the start of his career. Maybe he isn't, but he truly sounds like he is, and deep down inside, I do believe that he really is. In any case, if there is one wisp, one tiny strand of mystery in any cell of 13, it is to be sought in Ozzy's performance. When he asks, "is God alive or is God dead?", you have to know it really matters to the guy.

 

All of this makes up for enough admiration not to condemn the record, and to safely recommend it to veteran fans of the band. Problems should start, though, if you are a youngster who'd only vaguely heard of Black Sabbath and are merely wishing to check the record out because, well, it's fresh and everything. Trying to recapture the old vibe is fine for all if we remember and cherish the old vibe — but should 13 happen to be anybody's introduction to Black Sabbath, this would be a major mistake with consequences that would be very hard to clean up. Likewise, if you are expecting an album of the same quality as the «first six», don't. You probably aren't, but you might still subconsciously hope for a miracle. Kill off your subconscious.

 

Miracles do not happen, and Tony «the human riff» Iommi is not going to grow himself an extra brain component just because he is suddenly working with his old pals again. Every single melody on this album sounds like a variation on something from his past — an inferior variation — with the exception of cases where the melody sounds like a variation on somebody else's past (for instance, the riff to ʽLonerʼ is closely reminiscent of the stage riff that Pete Townshend would frequently employ circa 1970-72 in the «jam section» of ʽMy Generationʼ). Producer Rick Rubin has unjustly borne the grunt of most of the reviewers' complaints for participating in the «loudness wars» and overcompressing the sound on the record, but it is not the production that is the music's worst enemy here — it is the lack of interesting ideas.

 

One doesn't need to go any further than the opening DOOM-laden chords of ʽEnd Of The Begin­ningʼ — a brief perusal of memory cells reveals that this is a simplified re-run of the introductory riff from ʽYou Won't Change Meʼ, furthermore played in alternating loud and quiet fashions so as to revive the «feel» of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ. The tradition is loyally obeyed, but the excitement, as you can understand, is minimal. As you go from there, into the different sections of the same song as well as subsequent ones, direct predecessors become a little harder to find, but the feeling rests the same: it's as if Tony is drawing upon his own past for inspiration, and that is the primary difference — when he was coming up with the riffs of ʽIron Manʼ or ʽInto The Voidʼ or ʽSymp­tom Of The Universeʼ, he wasn't browsing for ideas in the «Tony Iommi Handbook of Great Riffs». But now he is — and from that point of view, is no better or no worse than any mildly talented teenager who «hates the crappy music of today» and wants to «write swell music just like those cool guys in Black Sabbath did thirty years ago».

 

Again, I do not discard, in theory, the possibility that shifting a few old chords around might have resulted in impressive combinations, easily visualized as more metal Godzillas or giant snakes or Satan coming 'round the bend. But in practice, they do not. The spiralling grumble of ʽLive Foreverʼ might possibly come close, but I may simply be enticed by its fast tempo and steady beat rather than real musical essence. At the end of the day, not a single riff from this record has managed to take root in my head, not even after three or four listens — and this is a record that is all about riffs, from start to finish. Where is the goddamn magic? "Is this the end of the begin­ning — or the beginning of the end?"

 

The vocal melodies are, in fact, more memorable than the riffs — so damn ironic, considering how in the past Ozzy would simply sing the riff, to save himself the extra trouble. As I already mentioned, his performance on ʽGod Is Dead?ʼ is outstanding, as he totally gets into the spirit of the "if there is no God, everything is permitted?" Dostoyevsky vibe. ʽZeitgeistʼ, a moody acoustic ballad that is an oh-so-blatant attempt at re-summoning the vibe of ʽPlanet Caravanʼ (right down to Tony playing a similarly stylized jazz guitar solo), has Ozzy getting into a Major Tom-type character, ruminating about the fate of humanity from above, beyond, and without any other re­presentatives of said race — and enjoying every moment of it. And there is something disarming­ly simple, but convincing about his "don't wanna live forever, but I don't wanna die" that makes me suspect his old friend Geezer, this time around, was writing his lyrics specifically for Ozzy, or maybe even specifically about Ozzy.

 

This, and nothing else, is 13's saving grace: where Tony is trying to recapture his youth, and largely failing, Geezer as lyricist and Ozzy as singer are trying to come to terms with their old age, and largely succeeding. In fact, as simple and un-enigmatic as these lyrics are, I'd say they con­tain some of the finest verbal imagery Geezer had ever come up with — and they're all about death, death, death. "I don't mind dying, cause I'm already dead". Hey, it's Ozzy singing that, you can believe him all right. Could you believe Taylor Swift?

 

It's been a fascinating experience, really, listening to 13 — not because I enjoyed any of the songs but just because it opens up so many questions, Sabbath-related and general musical type alike. As in, why are some riffs better than others? When is a riff «impressive» and when is it «boring»? Is «running out of ideas» an inevitable outcome, or may there be exceptions? How come we may be intrigued and fascinated by certain singers who barely know how to sing, yet remain un­touched by certain «professionals»? At what point does a laughable, clichéd piece of lyrical content become hard-hitting? What are the flaws and benefits of aging when it comes to creating art? Why are these songs so goddamn long, and why don't I really see that as a major problem of the album? Why is it that I am asking all these questions here, is it that, at such a terminal stage in their career, Black Sabbath have finally managed to «get to me» with their middle school level philosophy of life, death, and everything in between? And — of course — is God really dead?..

 

I cannot give the album a thumbs up, of course — my fascination with Ozzy's behavior on it is not strong enough to redeem the toothless music — but I am pretty sure that, years from now, 13 will be regarded as a fairly adequate musical testament from the original band (provided they do not record anything else, which is not highly likely), if one limits oneself to viewing it as a musi­cal testament, emphasis on the T, and accepts that it really only works as a structural element — the completion of the circle, with fairly little independent value. Then again, I suppose the circle had to be completed, didn't it? And in any case, it is at least a bit more cohesive and sensible than Never Say Die! — speaking of which, it might be cooler, and truer, if they decided to name it Just Say Die, Already instead of 13 — what sort of title is that? This isn't even the thirteenth BS album with Ozzy, they just waited until 2013 to release it. Feels like cheating.

 

ADDENDA:

 

PAST LIVES (1970-1975; 2002)

 

CD I: 1) Tomorrow's Dream; 2) Sweet Leaf; 3) Killing Yourself To Live; 4) Cornucopia; 5) Snowblind; 6) Children Of The Grave; 7) War Pigs; 8) Wicked World; 9) Paranoid;

CD II: 1) Hand Of Doom; 2) Hole In The Sky; 3) Symptom Of The Universe; 4) Megalomania; 5) Iron Man; 6) Black Sabbath; 7) N.I.B.; 8) Behind The Wall Of Sleep; 9) Fairies Wear Boots.

 

Unlike its closest compadres in the early days of heavy metal, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, Black Sabbath were never a «great» live band — they pretty much gave it their all in the studio, where they sounded every bit as heavy, raw, and «Satanic» as they could sound on stage, and even more so (for instance, that genuinely mind-melting guitar tone that Iommi had himself for Master Of Reality was never properly recreated live). They were also limited by their skills: Ozzy's vocal flexibility, unlike Plant's or Gillan's, was mainly restricted to ad-libbing stuff like "come on you fuckin' fuckers, I wanna see that fucking roof come fuckin' down!", and Tony's «iron fingers», while empowering him in his regular Sabbath schtick, prevented him from fully exploring the capacities of his guitar.

 

Nevertheless, it goes without saying that such a legendary band has to have a proper live docu­ment to its name — and up until the 21st century, the only such document to capture Black Sab­bath in their alleged prime was Live At Last, a record released without the band's consent in 1980. They'd recorded the tapes themselves during several UK shows in March 1973, but even­tually left them lying around, unhappy with the results; its eventual release was really more like an act of revenge on the part of their former manager, Patrick Meehan. Sound quality was bad, the performances were no great shakes as such, and everybody was unhappy except for the buying public, who still managed to send it up the charts.

 

Fast forward to 2002, and lo and behold, past wounds have been healed, and now the band mem­bers have no problems with the album as long as it's been cleaned up and remastered. Not only that, but half of the second disc is filled up with tracks from yet a second aborted attempt at a live album, this time, recorded in August 1975 in Asbury Park — and then, to round things out, five more tracks are added from an early show (December 1970) in Paris, which had also been filmed and is these days available as the earliest detailed glimpse of a very young, very heavy, very ex­uberant heavy metal band in their prime.

 

Naturally, the recommended order of listening would be chronological — start off in the head-spinning era of Paranoid, then leap forward to the drug-heavy, artistically confused period of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and finally make the transition to the last days of Black Sabbath as a seriously creative, trend-setting unit in the era of Sabotage. There won't be too much difference (technically, the sound on the 1970 tracks is noticeably muddier, but we can live with that): you'd expect Ozzy to gradually deteriorate through these years, but I wouldn't bet my money saying that these particular recordings can be used as proof of that. There is only one song here where he comes close to completely losing it — the fast part of ʽMegalomaniaʼ; but this is really not so much due to his being high or anything as it is simply due to the fact that it is, on the whole, a pretty hard song to sing for a singer as «lumpy» as Ozzy. He flounders on the high notes of the chorus, struggles with them bravely, then mentally says «fuck it» and finally just shifts to a much lower range. No wonder ʽMegalomaniaʼ only lasted for, like, several weeks in their setlist, before being jettisoned once and for all.

 

That said, in the historical and basic-emotional sense the tracks from 1970 are the best of the lot: just as Led Zeppelin's early concerts are usually preferable to their «jet set» period from 1973 on, so it is that Sabbath, in 1970, was not yet spoiled by stardom (not to mention drugs) and certainly not yet bored by the necessity to reproduce the same old hits over and over again. Ozzy, in particular, only begins to display the first signs of his irritable stage antics, and Bill Ward is playing like a madman rather than an experienced professional. It is only the wise Tony Iommi, keeping cool and distanced, for whom time has been beneficial rather than detrimental, as his guitar playing skills only improved through the Seventies (alas, the same cannot be said about his riff-generating genius).

 

In the Live At Last set, the most interesting piece is an eighteen-minute jam centered around the old song ʽWicked Worldʼ, where, instead of mere improvisation, Tony is weaving in parts of other compositions, for instance, the opening riff of ʽInto The Voidʼ, or a large chunk of ʽSuper­nautʼ. Apparently, after a brief period of toying with «getting musical ideas out of thin air» in the early 1970s, he'd finally settled upon the simple truth — some people are born to improvise, and some people are born to deliberate, and who's to tell who's wrong and who's right? This way, at least, you get to be thrilled by trying to guess what will come next. Or, for instance, trying to guess whether the coda to ʽHand Of Doomʼ will include all of ʽRat Saladʼ, together with Ward's drum solo, or just the cool riff part? (Answer: just the cool riff part. But they may have edited out the drum solo — besides, there is a drum solo in ʽWicked Worldʼ already).

 

The 1975 set is interesting in that Sabotage had not yet been released, and thus, they are «pre­viewing» the songs — for instance, only the speedy proto-thrash part of ʽSymptom Of The Uni­verseʼ is played, and despite the obvious inconveniences for both Ozzy and Tony (the song really demands two guitars for the coda at least, and do we actually hear backing tapes with recorded synthesizers? Talk about the Quadrophenia effect), I am sure glad they got to include ʽMegalo­maniaʼ with its Gothic atmosphere, so cool and refreshing next to all the basic metal monsters.

 

In its current status as the only official live Sabbath release from the «prime» era, could this whole thing be better? Perhaps. Hardcore fans, well educated in bootleg studies, tend to point out various small flaws in the Live At Last section and, sometimes, to heavily put down the Asbury Park recordings as well. But I seriously doubt that the «live magic of Sabbath» could be pushed up to a significantly higher level than this. Setlists and sound quality could be better (in theory; not sure about how much we have in practice), but not the overall presentation style. From that point of view, Past Lives deserves a modest thumbs up — yet I can still recommend it, like any other Black Sabbath live album from any other period, only to very serious fans of the band.

 

BLIND FAITH

BLIND FAITH (1969)

 

1) Had To Cry Today; 2) Can't Find My Way Home; 3) Well All Right; 4) Presence Of The Lord; 5) Sea Of Joy; 6) Do What You Like.

 

In 1968, Cream was one of the greatest rock bands on Planet Earth, and Traffic was, at the very least, one of the hottest new teams on the UK scene, spearheading the back-to-roots movement on the other side of the Atlantic from The Band. By mid-1969, Cream were forever gone, and, as it seemed at the time, so was Traffic (they did pull themselves together, eventually, but at a cost, and it does not concern us here anyway). In their place, for just a few odd months, arose Dairy Truck Fleet, er, I mean, Blind Faith: Eric Clapton on star guitar, Ginger Baker on crushin' percus­sion, Steve Winwood on gee-whiz keys, and Ric Grech on the case of bass.

 

Ric Grech, for that matter, did not yet serve the proper time in Traffic — being fresh out of Family, he would only team up with Traffic after Blind Faith had faded away. But that does not screw the general point: Blind Faith, at least the way Clapton originally felt about it, had to be an experiment where the avantgarde and psychedelic side of Cream might be tempered with the soul and «earthiness» of Traffic's folk and jazz roots.

 

If it did not work, it is not because Blind Faith were unable to make music — their only album proves that they definitely understood their mission and had the knack to realize it — but rather because of an unlucky crossing of complex personalities at a complex time. Clapton, in particular, was going through an identity crisis at the time that did not let him have normal relations with just about anybody, let alone a renegade drummer from Cream; and the renegade drummer from Cream, likewise, was too full of ambition and cockiness to play thoroughly second, third, or fourth fiddle (and it is true that Ginger's presence, despite a graciously allocated drum solo, is less acutely felt on this album than on any preceding Cream release). And we might just as well not get started at all on the drugs issue — particularly vital for at least two of the band members.

 

In short, it all just fell apart due to «circumstances beyond cultural control», but not before they managed to record and put out this album — retardedly controversial for its album cover (accor­ding to the artist, the idea was that of a symbolic representation of «technology in the hands of innocence» or something like that, but, naturally, most of us have to be dirty perverts with a one-street way of thinking). Other than the cover, though, there is no «shock value» whatsoever in Blind Faith: neither Clapton nor Winwood, the two big brains behind the music, ever cared much for epatage.

 

Considering that the album was «rushed», due in part to restrictive demand from the record label (another reason why the band did not last long), it is actually stunning to realize how much good stuff it contains. It does not have any central theme or concept, and the band did not have enough time to work out a proper musical philosophy of their own (which is not necessarily a bad thing — Led Zeppelin, for instance, did not quite pull their classic image together right from the very start, and this is exactly what explains my soft spot for their first album). But they do give it everything they got, especially Winwood, credited for three songs out of six, with Clapton hold­ing one other credit, Baker another one, and a Buddy Holly cover completing the dish.

 

As we all know, Steve Winwood started out under the «blue-eyed soul» banner, gifted as he was with a high and easily modulated set of pipes and a knack at figuring out and expanding upon Ray Charles' organ playing tactics, but even so, that part of his image is only one component in the sonic structure of ʽHad To Cry Todayʼ, ʽCan't Find My Way Homeʼ, and ʽSea Of Joyʼ. The former is, first and foremost, a riff-revering blues-rocker — the riff in question is so sharply de­fined, prominent, and repetitive that it seems as if they were trying to come up with a ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ to call all their own. It is more complex and intricate than the ʽSunshineʼ riff, though, lacking the brutality and menace that made the Cream song a rock radio hyperclassic, and the song's switching between gruffer and friendlier tonalities in the chorus area might also be a little confusing and require a little «getting into» period. Other than that, the song also exists to serve as a guitar battle between Eric and Steve (a trick that was strangely overlooked on their ori­ginal tour, where Winwood played organ on the song, but recreated almost forty years later when the two reunited for several joint shows).

 

ʽCan't Find My Way Homeʼ would go on to become a highlight of Clapton's mid-1970s shows (with Yvonne Elliman usually taking on the lead vocals) and was eventually covered by Swans — which means we are definitely not dealing with a sissie sappy ballad here: the gloomy, des­cending scales of the acoustic guitars and the grim chorus of "I'm wasted and I can't find my way home", express fairly well what some of the band members must have been feeling at the time, and it does it completely naturally and subtly, without any overt displays of desperation. Likewise, ʽSea Of Joyʼ may contain the word «joy» in the title, but most of its music carries a warning / menace rather than anything close to hippie idealism — and the way Stevie's vocals jump up several tones from second to third line of each verse strangely reminds me of George Harrison's manner of singing circa 1970-74: probably just a coincidence, but Blind Faith does share such things as world-weariness, disillusionment, and «inobtrusive moralizing» with George's stuff, even if, to the best of my knowledge, there was nothing going on between Steve Winwood and Pattie Boyd... or was there?

 

The best known song off the album is, of course, Clapton's ʽPresence Of The Lordʼ, just because it went on to be featured in most of his compilations, and he continues to regularly perform it up to this very day. It is not one of his finest creations, though. The lyrics may be sincere, but they are rather inept (and singing the exact same lengthy verse three times in a row is a bit humiliating, though it was probably conceived as an intentionally repetitive confessional); the music mainly serves as obedient backup to the lyrics; and, worst of all, the fast-and-flashy mid-section with the «thunder-solo» has always seemed somewhat alien to me — stuck in between the slow, contem­plative verses, what point does it serve? is it the illustration of a «temper outbreak», as the prota­gonist falls back into sin and lust, eventually coming back to his senses? or does it illustrate the very «presence of the Lord», who simply decided to take a brief detour and show his (rather Old Testamnental, I'd say) angry face to his new admirer? Or was it just a case of, «hey, there has to be at least one fast Eric Clapton solo on the record, I wonder where we might put it... oh, look, there's three identical verses on this song, this deserves some splitting anyway...»

 

Still, the song has a point, presents it, defends it, and the fast solo begins and ends with Clapton's first (and quite successful) attempt at a truly funky riff, so we might even be benevolent enough to pardon the man for involuntarily lying through his teeth (quite clearly, by 1969-70, at the height of his Pattie Boyd / heavy drugs problems, he was farther from "I have finally found a way to live, in the presence of the Lord" than any other time in history). Especially since he also found a time, together with Steve and Ric, to take a formerly simple and happy Buddy Holly song (ʽWell All Rightʼ) and transform it into a mix of power pop, pagan folk dance, and psychedelic jamming — probably one of the most bizarre twists on Buddy's legacy, ever.

 

Most of the hatred toward the record is usually associated with Ginger's ʽDo What You Likeʼ, a brief snippet of a silly moralistic ditty that serves as a platform for solo improvisation — organ, guitar, bass, and, finally, Ginger's own battery array. The song part comes along nicely if you dis­regard the lyrics (I especially like the combination of "Do what you like / That's what I said / Everybody must be fed" — how come it was so difficult to understand that, if one really does what one likes and nothing else, there can be no guarantee that everybody will be fed?), and the jam part... well, it is easy to say that most of it is there just to fill up space, but, on the other hand, free-form soloing in the vein of one's jazz idols was an important element of progressively-orien­ted bands those days, was it not? It is quite likely that they would have tried out something like that anyway, even given plenty of time. And, for that matter, Ginger's drum solo here is actually more disciplined, (poly)rhythmic, and in line with the rest of the band members' spotlights than on ʽToadʼ. In fact, I have more problems with Grech's bass solo — he is a good player when sup­porting the rest of his pals, but as a soloist, he seems to barely go through the motions.

 

In the end, occasional flaws and errors aside, Blind Faith is a very good record, for a record made under such specific circumstances — even if it did not manage to become quite the perfect synthesis of the «progressive» with the «retro-oriented» that it was supposed to produce. Most of the songs have stood the test of time fairly well (the warm welcome for Clapton and Win­wood's 2007-2009 reunion is good proof of that), even if the same cannot be said of the front sleeve. Whether the band had potential for a grandiose future, provided things were to unwind in a dif­ferent direction, is impossible to say — in any case, had Blind Faith not broken up, we would not have ourselves our Layla, and Duane Allman was, by all means, a better sparring partner for Clapton than Steve Winwood. But who knows?..

 

Thumbs up, but an additional word of warning: there is an expanded, 2-CD limited edition of Blind Faith out there that is only for completists — it adds a few alternate versions, a generic blues cover (ʽSleeping In The Groundʼ), and an entire disc of studio jams, all of them long, cau­ti­ously tedious, and considerately more boring than ʽDo What You Likeʼ: most probably, they just served as early morning work-ups to get into shape before taking care of the real business. There is no point whatsoever for anybody to seek this out, unless you've taken a vow to collect every lick of Eric's committed to tape anywhere in the space/time continuum — just go ahead with the regular version, or, better still, spend the extra money on the recently released footage of Blind Faith's 1969 Hyde Park performance, preserved in fine fashion and featuring, indeed, a young, beardless, and not-yet-thoroughly-wasted Eric Clapton in his prime.

BLODWYN PIG

AHEAD RINGS OUT (1969)

 

1) It's Only Love; 2) Dear Jill; 3) Sing Me A Song That I Know; 4) The Modern Alchemist; 5) Up And Coming; 6) Leave It With Me; 7) The Change Song; 8) Backwash; 9) Ain't Ya Comin' Home, Babe?; 10*) Sweet Caroline; 11*) Walk On The Water; 12*) Summer Day; 13*) Same Old Story; 14*) Slow Down; 15*) Meanie Mornay; 16*) Backwash.

 

What in the hell is a «Blodwyn Pig», anyway? Surely a band that chooses to call itself thusly can hold no high hopes for the future — offending vegans, Muslims, and people with Celtic heritage at the same time. But none of that seemed to bother guitar player Mick Abrahams, when, after having quarrelled with Ian Anderson over the planned career trajectory for Jethro Tull, he quit that band in order to become undisputed master of his own domain. In the process, he enlisted the temporary loyalty of his own flautist (and also saxophonist) Jack Lancaster, bassist Andy Pyle (later known for a brief stint with the Kinks in 1976-78), and drummer Ron Berg. And a trendy, shades-wearing, nonchalant-looking pig mascot to boot.

 

Ahead Rings Out, the band's debut album, came out in August 1969, at almost the exact same time as Jethro Tull's Stand Up — and although it is sometimes fondly mentioned by rock histo­riographers as a neglected classic (okay, minor neglected classic), there is clearly no comparison between the two: where Ian Anderson was using old school blues-rock as merely a foundation for something excitingly new and dizzy, Mick Abrahams simply stuck to doing old school blues-rock, period. Well, not merely blues-rock, okay. Jack Lancaster provides a strong jazz flavor, there is an acoustic folk ballad or two, so it would be more fair to speak of «roots-rock» in general, with­out any serious experimental or «progressive» sides to it. However, even conservative roots-rock can be done blisteringly well if one has the proper talent — and, unfortunately, Mick Abrahams is no Ian Anderson when it comes to stringing notes together.

 

Do not expect a Beatles cover with the opening ʽIt's Only Loveʼ — that would have been a much more stunning move than giving this title to a loud, fast-moving, moderately energetic boogie blues number that never amounts to anything more than a boogie blues number. Mick Abrahams is a competent vocalist and guitar player, but his burly Bedfordshire voice pales next to Noddy Holder's (this sort of material does, indeed, work best in the hands of drunken hooligans such as Slade), and his Clapton-influenced guitar playing style offers little that Clapton himself — or, for that matter, Martin Barre, Mick's replacement in Jethro Tull ­— could not have offered.

 

In fact, the chief asset of Blodwyn Pig was not even Abrahams, either as songwriter, singer, or lead guitarist, but the woodwinder Jack Lancaster. It is his merry double-tracked sax-solo on ʽIt's Only Loveʼ that turns the performance into a spirited one, and it is his sax and flute improvised pieces on most of the other tracks that give the album a little bit of personality: at least, as far as our being able to call it «a decent sequel to Jethro Tull's This Was» — the jazzy instrumental ʽLeave It With Meʼ has a flute theme and a crazyass flute solo that could, indeed, very easily be mistaken for a little bit of early Ian Anderson creativity.

 

The best song on the album is probably ʽSing Me A Song That I Knowʼ, with a well-constructed wall-of-sound (very loud bass + double-tracked sax = decibel heaven!) that cleverly disguises the song's true «pastoral minstrel ditty» nature, coming out clearer in the accappella bits of the chorus. Abrahams himself was more fond of ʽDear Jillʼ, an acoustic country blues number that sounds like a poor man's Beggar's Banquet outtake, briefly lifted out of the mire with a sunset-mood Lancaster soprano sax solo, but quite plain otherwise. And you know something goes wrong when the whackiest moment in a song is a thirty-seconds spoken intro, delivered in such a thick, exaggerated Cockney accent that you cannot understand a single word (ʽThe Change Songʼ), even if you are sort of supposed to dig the song's guitar-and-fiddle vibe itself.

 

Personally, I think that Ahead Rings Out truly «rings out» in its «thickest» bits, when all the musicians are engaged in creating a meaty, beaty jam monster — on such tracks as ʽThe Modern Alchemistʼ and ʽAin't Ya Comin' Homeʼ. On the former, they eventually hit the cool jazz spot, with Abrahams stepping away from second-rate Claptonisms and getting bolder and riskier in a (quasi-)Django Reinhardt-like mood; and on the latter, they get really dense and heavy, like a slightly more disciplined Blue Cheer, which goes real fine on the ears, if not necessarily so on the memory storage cells.

 

So I probably will not be exaggerating much if I state that the most memorable thing about the record is its front sleeve — an inspiration, no doubt, for Black Sabbath's ʽWar Pigsʼ? — but also that the album is a must-have for all serious fans of ballsy roots-rock in all of its incarnations. Because the band did have balls a-plenty. They did not write interesting melodies, they did not have any great musicians, but at least they weren't treating the roots idiom in any «reverential» fashion. Too bad they didn't manage to get too drunk at these sessions.

 

GETTING TO THIS (1970)

 

1) Drive Me; 2) Variations On Nainos; 3) See My Way; 4) Long Bomb Blues; 5) The Squirrelling Must Go On; 6) San Francisco Sketches; 7) Worry; 8) Toys; 9) To Rass Man; 10) Send Your Son To Die; 11*) Summer Day; 12*) Walk On The Water.

 

The critical consensus (provided that the tiny handful of consenting critics can be reliably called «consensus») seems to consider Getting To This, the original Blodwyn Pig's second and last album, as an artistic letdown after the inspiring promises of Ahead Rings Out. Even the two titles, taken together, give out a whiff of irony — ahead rings out, and you're still only «getting to this»? At a time when everyone else has already gotten to this, and more than this?.. A year like 1970 wasn't exactly the best time for half-measures, if you know what I mean.

 

What really did happen was sort of predictable. Even with the jazz-influenced Jack Lancaster aboard ship, Ahead Rings Out was very much a «conventional» blues-rock record in the well-established, but already not very cool UK tradition of John Mayall, Peter Green, pre- (and post-) Cream Clapton and all these other well-meaning guys who decided that channelling the spirit of American blues was a worthier enterprise than trying to find their own. But as the 1960s closed and «progressive» was on the verge of becoming a viable commercial proposition, even the staunchest roots-rockers began thinking in terms of «progress or perish». Blodwyn Pig were a good example — even if Ahead Rings Out, upon release, sold enough copies to be commercially compared to Jethro Tull's Stand Up, it didn't take a lot of brain to understand which of the two bands was awaited by a more glorious future.

 

Maybe Mick Abrahams did stay cool enough so as not to bite his fingernails each evening, regret­ting the decision to leave and start his own band, but he was smart enough to understand that the formula of Blodwyn Pig needed some shaking up. Consequently, there is no more generic blues on Getting To This — it is still bluesy in essence, of course, but syncopation is the word of day, as the controls are seemingly placed in the hands of Lancaster, and the status of role model is transferred almost completely to Blood, Sweat & Tears, even as Blodwyn Pig continues to rock in a far grittier manner.

 

The band's major «progressive test» is the multi-part suite ʽSan Francisco Sketchesʼ, beginning with some assorted seagulls and going through several, mostly jazzy, sections dominated by flutes or saxes; only one part, an anthemic piano ballad, has vocals and is, for some reason, stuck in the middle rather than at the end, where it would have far more naturally summarized all the sketches. Never once particularly outstanding — the basic themes are not too captivating and the energy level seems lower than required, maybe due to somewhat slacky work on the part of the rhythm section — it is still a very competent, mood-wise diverse, and entertaining performance, much as I fail to see what exactly, apart from the seagulls, it has to do with San Francisco. (Still, better this sort of mood-alternating jazz jamming, I guess, than a genuine attempt to write a tri­bute to Quicksilver Messenger Service).

 

Also, the fact that they glued together several distinct jazz-rock parts to make one cohesive whole does not prevent them from using very similar jazz-rock parts to serve as the basis for most of the other, shorter, songs as well — in terms of general approach, ʽSan Francisco Sketchesʼ is not al­together different from the flute-driven funky dance of ʽVariations On Nainosʼ, or the ominously dressed jazz dance of ʽWorryʼ (which seems itself to have been influenced by Tull's ʽFor A Thou­sand Mothersʼ), or the anti-war diatribe ʽSend Your Son To Dieʼ, or the instrumental ʽThe Squir­relling Must Go Onʼ, the title hinting that the tune is supposed to be a sequel to ʽCat's Squirrelʼ, which Abrahams had earlier arranged for This Was while still a member of Jethro Tull, but ended up carrying it over to Blodwyn Pig's live setlist.

 

In the end, what the record suffers from the most is not its relative lack of diversity (there have been thousands of less diverse albums that had more impact), but its relative lack of commitment: Lancaster's flutes and saxes have a formally restrained, «academic» nature, and Mick, despite his burly chap image, always ends up sounding far less wild and «out there» than his replacement in Tull, Martin Barre. Repeated listenings confirm that a lot of work must have gone into these songs — they constantly try locating interesting themes and coming up with unusual arran­ge­ments (for instance, the combinations of Mick's slide guitar parts with Jack's woodwinds can be quite fascinating for those who pay enough attention) — but while the formal craft is there, the vision is lacking. The band is simply locked in a perpetual state of «getting to this». To their ho­nor, they must have realized that, too, and disbanded soon after the album's release.

 

On a sidenote, the two bonus tracks appended to the CD edition — strangely enough, the same tracks are also appended to the CD edition of Ahead Rings Out as well — are arguably the best pair of songs to come out of Blodwyn Pig in the first place: an A-side and a B-side of a mid-1969 single, where ʽSummer Dayʼ is a hyper-catchy rocker with what might be the coolest riff ever thought of by Abrahams; and ʽWalk On The Waterʼ cleverly sews together bits of folk, jazz, blues-rock, and even a boogie bridge and infests them with a little bit of starry-eyed hippie idea­lism, giving the song a better sense of purpose than almost anything on Getting To This.

 

All of which means that Blodwyn Pig were essentially a classic example of a singles band — it just had the misfortune of working in a time zone where albums happened to be valued over individual songs, and so, in the battle of Jethro Tull against Blodwyn Pig, it was quite clear from the start who was predestined to be the winner. Still, let us be kind to the loser: even without a clear sense of purpose, Mick Abrahams and his friends made music that always tried to respect our emotions and intellect rather than offend them — as a result, this plainly B-grade stuff will continue finding a grateful listener for quite some time, I'm sure.

 

LIES (1993)

 

1) Lies; 2) The Night Is Gone; 3) Deep Down Recession Blues; 4) Latin Girl; 5) Gnatz; 6) Funny Money; 7) Witness To A Crime Of Love; 8) Aby's Lean; 9) The Victim; 10) Love Won't Let You Down; 11) Dead Man's Hill; 12) Maggie Rose; 13) I Wonder Who; 14) All Said And Done.

 

I have no idea why this album was credited to «Blodwyn Pig» in the first place. Once the original Blodwyn Pig split up because of creative differences between Abrahams and Lancaster (actually, the band went on for a short while without its founding father, with ex-Yes guitarist Peter Banks replacing Abrahams, but did not even manage another LP), Mick went on with a solo career, putting out a few records either as a part of the «Mick Abrahams Band» or completely by himself (allegedly, the uniquely educational record Learning The Guitar With Mick Abrahams, re­leased in 1975, even managed to find some moderate popularity).

 

Then, after a long break during which Mick tried out several alternate professions, he reunited with Andy Pyle, added a couple new players, and went on to play some gigs as Blodwyn Pig once again. Then he became so fond of the old name again that he retained it for his next LP — even though, as far as I can tell, by that time Andy Pyle already went his own way, and the primary credits go to Graham Walker on drums, Dave Lennox on keyboards, Mike Summerland on bass, and Nick Payne on saxophone. None of these guys ever had anything to do with the original Pig, but it is possible that Mick was simply on a linguistic nostalgia roll.

 

Another possibility, of course, is that Mick thought the new album was so damn good that it de­served the Pig stamp on it. And you know what — if that were the case, he wouldn't be too far off, because Lies is indeed a damn good record. It does not sound at all like the «classic» Pig. There is no guitar / sax or guitar / flute dialog whatsoever — in fact, the second most notable instrument after Mick's guitar are Lennox's keyboards, and this is not very promising, since the tones are too smooth and synthetic. There is also little, if any, will to experiment and innovate; but, since we already know that the classic Pig never succeeded in wooing audiences with their innovation, this might actually be an advantage. In fact, it is.

 

Essentially, Lies is just a simple blues-rock album, masterminded by a veteran and pursuing no other purpose than relieving the veteran's hands from the recording itch, accumulated therein for the previous decade. From this angle, it reminds me of the Allman Brothers' early 1990s come­back with Seven Turns — especially since I would judge it almost as respectable a comeback as the Allmans' was, adjusting for the initial disparity, of course.

 

There are some healthy, strong songs here, such as the title track (an old-school funk-pop num­ber with catchy interaction between main and backing vocals in the chorus); ʽDead Man's Hillʼ (fun­ny fast boogie with a sly, enticing slide riff for the main hook); ʽDeep Down Recession Bluesʼ (a true slide guitar lover's paradise here on this laid back pub rocker); and ʽLatin Girlʼ, a celebratory «roots-pop» number with a suitably Santana-esque solo, and a fine alternative to populating the record with unsavory ballads.

 

Corny trappings of mainstream rock still have to be suffered on occasion — usually on those songs that rely too heavily on keyboards (ʽFunny Moneyʼ would stand a better chance if its main riff were not played on the synthesizer; ʽThe Night Is Goneʼ is too overtly glossy, although key­boards are not the song's only flaw). Also, the inclusion of several «generic» covers may irritate those who still look for a little melodic originality — although Mick's choices are curiously un­predictable, including Dr. John (ʽVictimʼ) and the long-forgotten Alexis Korner (ʽI Wonder Whyʼ) — a weird salute from one obscure British bluesman to another. But they are well performed and do not take up too much space: ʽI Wonder Whyʼ does go on for nearly seven minutes, but come on, the guy should be allowed to have at least one lengthy guitar workout per record, and this one shows that his sheer technical skills have only increased ever since he taught those vinyl-loving kids how to play guitar back in 1975.

 

Throw in a couple of pleasant instrumentals (the multi-tracked acoustic ʽGnatzʼ is nifty, and ʽAby's Leanʼ is a bit of fast-going, feel-good country-western), and Lies is a definite keeper — much better, at least, than whatever could be expected from a guy who never managed to find a proper face for himself in rock's golden era, and, now that rock is past its golden era, has sudden­ly turned that flaw into an advantage. Lies does not set out to prove, confirm, or discover, it just wants to have fun with you, and in that, it is successful — thumbs up.

 

The bad news is that, ap­parently, Mick had one more original «Blodwyn Pig» album after that, called Pig In The Middle and released in 1996, but it seems to be super-rare: I have not been able to locate it, and have no idea if it matched the quality of its predecessor. Even if it does, not hearing either of these albums is not a crime, but, considering how stiff and boring most of the post-early 1970s blues-rock records usually turn out to be, there would be no crime in building up some curiosity about it, either.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE BASEMENT TAPES (1998)

 

1) The Modern Alchemist; 2) Mr. Green's Blues; 3) It's Only Love; 4) See My Way; 5) Blues Of A Dunstable Truck Driving Man; 6) Baby Girl; 7) The Leaving Song; 8) I Know; 9) It's Only Love; 10) See My Way; 11) Blues Of A Dunstable Truck Driving Man; 12) Hound Dog; 13) Drive Me.

 

Blodwyn Pig belongs to that slightly irritating kind of bands whose official catalog of archival re­leases has managed to surpass in quantity (but definitely not in quality) the number of their ori­ginal LPs. This is probably due mainly to the activities of Mick Abrahams, or perhaps the band was blessed with a small, but energetic fan club — in any case, there is at least half a dozen CDs on various labels out there, collecting all sorts of outtakes, rarities, and live performance recor­dings, most of these in really bad quality. It would hardly make any sense to list them all, but a couple might be worth a brief mention.

 

First, there is this collection, somewhat arrogantly called The Basement Tapes even though not only does it not even begin to approach the relative importance of Bob Dylan & The Band's famed release — to the best of my understanding, it wasn't even recorded in any sort of basement, unless, of course, the BBC Studios put Blodwyn Pig on their special «basement list» reserved for second-rate artists. Basement or no basement, though, at the very least this is one of the cleanest-sounding archive releases for Blodwyn Pig, which is already reassuring.

 

The recordings are divided into three unequal parts. The first three tracks, with the original lineup, were made in 1969 for the Top Gear program. The next eight tracks date from the band's brief re­union in 1974 and thus happen to be the most historically important, since that lineup, which hap­pened to include former Jethro Tull drummer Clive Bunker instead of Ron Berg, left behind no original studio recordings — these eight tracks all come from John Peel's and Radio 1 Live In Concert BBC archives. Finally, as an odd postscriptum, two more tracks are tackled at the end that were recorded by Abrahams and his backing musicians as late as 1990 — prior to the recor­ding of Lies, but long after the world had forgotten that «Blodwyn Pig» used to be the name of a band and not some special Welsh recipé for pork roast.

 

The 1969 tracks do not deserve much special mention, other than to say that ʽMr. Green's Bluesʼ is a slightly revised version of ʽUp And Comingʼ, with a long spoken rant on John Peel occu­pying what used to be the wordless instrumental section. The rant is funny ("my friend John Peel is a vegetarian, he's got the greens, and that's why he got the blues, 'cause he's got the greens, he don't eat no meat y'all"), but not funny enough to make history: ʽThe Modern Alchemistʼ is far more impressive, but, unfortunately, not too different from the studio version.

 

The 1974 lineup is more interesting: in addition to two rather scorching versions of ʽSee My Wayʼ, they actually try out some new material, such as the nifty folk-blues acoustic number ʽBlues Of A Dunstable Truck Driving Manʼ, done by Mick in the Piedmont tradition; and the len­gthy jazz/blues/folk suite ʽI Knowʼ, conceived in the overall style of Getting To This, but less diverse and evocative than ʽSan Francisco Sketchesʼ. In any case, Mick's speedy 'n' greedy solo­ing on ʽSee My Wayʼ is arguably the most spark-sending part of these sessions.

 

Finally, the new tracks are — not exactly an embarrassment, but an incongruent oddity. They give the album a certain «then & now» flavor, but at the expense of common sense: why exactly is Mick covering ʽHound Dogʼ, and remaking it as a generic modern blues-rock exercise in the process? And why does the «original» ʽDrive Meʼ sound like somebody's semi-successful attempt to remake Aerosmith's ʽLast Childʼ, changing a few chords, but carrying over Brad Whitford's sleazy-echoey guitar tone?

 

Oh well: at the very least, The Basement Tapes has the crazy audacity to provoke these ques­tions, so it is probably not a complete loss. That said, I wish I could say that the record was re­commended strictly for diehard Blodwyn Pig fans, but it is hard for me to picture a real, life-size diehard Blodwyn Pig fan — although somebody must have probably bought the album when it came out originally, or maybe Mick just has a large, extended family. Anyway, it's not at all a bad listen, and the sound quality is as good as it usually gets with BBC standards.

 

LIVE AT THE FILLMORE WEST 1970 (1999)

 

1) It's Only Love; 2) Ain't Ya Comin' Home Babe?; 3) Dear Jill; 4) Worry; 5) San Francisco Sketches; 6) It's Only Love; 7) Change Song; 8) Cat Squirrel; 9) See My Way; 10) Slow Down; 11) Rock Me.

 

And, as a last word on Blodwyn Pig, here is a quick account of one of those archival releases that are almost impossible to listen to because of awful sound quality. This here is a show that the band played on the 3rd of August, 1970, shortly before the break-up, but still in peak form: they now had two albums behind their belt, almost two years of gig experience, and some sort of rock vision that they tried to break through to us on Getting To This. And they were playing at the Fill­more West — a good chance to try and blow the Grateful Dead off the stage with some brusk, brawny, British rock'n'roll.

 

The album loyally presents both of the short sets that the band played on that day, opening for not-too-sure-whom, but the «official bootleg» tag should count as a warning, since the sound quality is that of a good front row audience recording — you can hear all the instruments, but there is no question of any sort of «mixing» present, and this, as far as I can tell, is the norm for most of Blodwyn Pig's non-BBC live recordings, so get ready to live with this if your soul hap­pens to vibrate on the same amplitude with Mick Abrahams.

 

The biggest problem for me, unfortunately, is not the sound quality, but the fact that this is still only Blodwyn Pig, and that means «B-level». The band was reasonably tight, but never really «Fillmore-proof»: the level of transformation that was implicitly required from studio bands as they became live bands in 1970 is not reached. True, some of the songs are expanded with addi­tional jam sections, and there is also a twelve-minute run through ʽCat's Squirrelʼ, which Mick took with him from his This Was legacy. But their attempts to plow through these sections in «Cream mode», with lengthy solo passages from Abrahams' guitar or Lancaster's sax, end up boring — loud, proud, and sincere, but lacking individuality.

 

There are also some «atmospheric mistakes» that may embarrass the listener — for instance, in­serting a Tull-esque flute lead part in the beginning of Larry Williams' ʽSlow Downʼ is a classic «conflict of interests», somewhat typical for early 1970s art-rockers wanting to «embellish» the rockabilly oldies with artsy flourishes. On the other hand, when they don't offer no embellish­ments (ʽRock Meʼ), the results are simply non-descript.

 

On the whole, the album has mostly historical importance — as in, this is the way (or one of the ways) a typically solid, but unexceptional British roots-rock band would structure and conduct its show when guesting on the West Coast; also, in the light of the overall legendary status of Bill Graham's Fillmore enterprise, any extra small piece of the puzzle is always welcome to complete the picture. (For instance, it may be useful to know that Blodwyn Pig weren't booed off the stage or anything — Californian audiences being quite friendly and receptive towards their guests, even if the music was decidedly non-psychedelic). But only a thoroughly omnivorous person, I sup­pose, could listen to this and experience genuine pleasure; in every respect other than historical, this is a thumbs down in the context of all the truly great live shows from its era.

 

BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS

CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN (1968)

 

1) Overture; 2) I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) Morning Glory; 4) My Days Are Numbered; 5) With­out Her; 6) Just One Smile; 7) I Can't Quit Her; 8) Meagan's Gypsy Eyes; 9) Somethin' Goin On; 10) House In The Country; 11) The Modern Adventures Of Plato, Diogenes And Freud; 12) So Much Love / Underture.

 

A slightly cumbersome name for a somewhat encumbered band — but in early 1968, the game was worth it, considering that nobody in the rock'n'roll department had properly done it before: namely, integrated the «rock band» format with the «big band» format, expanding the regular lineup to no less than eight permanent members, four of them confined almost exclusively to the brass section (although Fred Lipsius, in addition to alto sax, is also credited for piano). For all we know, this here is indeed the birth of «jazz-rock», a gleefully incestuous combination in which «rock», the child, turns on «jazz», the mother, and takes his Oedipus complex out on her.

 

No wonder the pagan gods got angry, and although they could not stop the jazz-rock virus from spreading, they did ensure that, for all their prolific career, Blood, Sweat & Tears would only have one proper masterpiece of the genre — this album. The formal reason is obvious: the band was essentially conceived and formed by Al Kooper, «the master of creative thinking» in roots-oriented American pop music, fresh out of The Blues Project — but no sooner had they released their first record that the unlucky guy was booted out of his own band, due to «creative disagree­ments»: much like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck on the other side of the ocean, Al must have simply been incom­patible with normal teamwork, and eventually had to go solo.

 

The good news is that Child Is Father To The Man, a groundbreaking and, one could say, visio­nary collection of new compositions and old songs rethought in a radically new manner, did hap­pen. Like many similar artefacts of the time, it is quite a pretentious affair — the name of the band, the name of the album, the sleeve photo with all the band members holding cardboard re­plicas of themselves, the presence of an overture and an «underture», the understandably loud, sprawling sound... but its intentions are also honestly idealistic — this is not complexity for com­plexity's sake, this is complexity for the sake of building a ladder to the sky — and, most impor­tantly, it simply got a bunch of great songs on it.

 

I must say, though, that this is one of those cases where the presence of a small handful of major personal favorites sort of obscures the rest, and dims the whole picture. Namely, I am talking about the three principal Kooper originals: ʽMore Than You'll Ever Knowʼ, ʽMy Days Are Num­beredʼ, and ʽI Can't Quit Herʼ, which not only happens to be the best triad he ever wrote — there is no doubt in my mind about that — but should also rank as high as anything contributed to the world by a major songwriter in 1968. The man's career in The Blues Project gave only vague hints at the soulful depths he would eventually uncover, and how was that made possible? In the least predictable manner — by surrounding himself with trumpets, trombones, and saxophones that could be organized into a genuine power machine.

 

Actually, ʽI Love You More Than You'll Ever Knowʼ is the one song on here that would have been just as poignant without the brass backing — first and foremost, it is the greatest one-man show in Al's entire career. Recording a song that formally matches the required criteria for «soul­ful desperation» is not difficult, and has been done millions of times; making it fully credible and epically breathtaking is a feat manageable only with a fortuitous combination of talent and luck. Although, technically, the song is molded in the well-known «blues-de-luxe» idiom, and you can very well see its roots in the output of B. B. King and Ray Charles, Kooper's vocal composing is all his own — the gradual build-up, rising to near-hysterical heights on "is that any way for a man to carry on?..", then suddenly turning from rage to sobbing tenderness on one of the awesomest "i-love-you-baby" of all times, then bringing it all the way up with the first "more than you'll ever know", then gently lowering it back down with the second one. «Heart-wrenching beauty» — check, and I would personally take that vocal part over literally anything Robert Plant has ever committed to tape, much as he liked to dabble in the same sort of aesthetics.

 

That said, the individual beauty of ʽI Love You More Than You'll Ever Knowʼ does not quite tie in with the ideology of Blood, Sweat & Tears: its chief reliance is on Kooper's voice and the con­cordingly weepy lead guitar parts from Steve Katz (who, by the way, also rises to the occasion and comes up with lines far more impressive than anything previously tried in The Blues Project). That the album, after the string snippets of the overture have died down, is actually launched with this particular tune, might even be a bit of a surprise for the uninitiated, as the brass section truly comes in only on the bridge, and is not at all essential to the tune. But Child Is Father To The Man is actually quite big on surprises — as befits any classic work of art.

 

The brass section does get essential on ʽMy Days Are Numberedʼ, a faster, tenser, and even more desperate sequel to ʽMore Than...ʼ — the opening brass melody gives you con­templative melan­choly resolving into decisive musical seppuku in a matter of just a few bars, and although the fast rock-based verses and the slow baroque-styled choruses are a little too crudely sewn together, the contrast still works towards making the experience even more unforgettable. Finally, the «Love Junkie Trilogy», as the whole thing could be suitably called, ends with ʽI Can't Quit Herʼ, more piano-based and a little less gloomy than its two suicidal companions, but still picturing the pas­sion as a hopeless addiction, driving the protagonist crazy and, perhaps, more than a little psycho­pathic. Here, the piano is soon joined by strings and brass in a fairly democratic ensemble, but again, everything is dominated by the vocals and the inner demons — belying the image of «jazz-rock» as something that has to be bombastic and anthemic, ʽI Can't Quit Herʼ is really as personal and intimate as it gets.

 

And this is also why everything else on the album, as thoroughly thought out and implemented as it could be, inevitably pales next to the «Love Junkie Trilogy». Steve Katz, Kooper's old pal from the Blues Project days, in stark contrast to Al, still seems to be living in those days — his psycho-folk ballad ʽMeagan's Gypsy Eyesʼ is pretty and courteous, but hardly endowed with much stay­ing power. However, Kooper himself is hardly free of the old «training days» legacy, either, con­tributing the eight-minute mammoth blues jam ʽSomethin' Going Onʼ that is quite pedestrian in the old Blues Project way: at least Katz's «post-Hendrix» guitar tone and the thick brass backing give it more substance, but hardly enough to compete with the new blues-rock language of Jeff Beck or the upcoming Led Zeppelin.

 

The jazzified covers of Tim Buckley, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and Carole King are all perfectly listenable, intelligently reworked, and pleasantly soulful — certainly not «filler» in any sense of the word — and, in between the four of them, show quite exhaustively how this new musical formula can be applied to any sort of material, though it is interesting that the band pre­fers to concentrate on «singer-songwriter» stuff rather than try, for instance, to put their touch on any of the pop hits of the day. Kooper's intentions seem clear enough: build his art at the intersec­tion of the confessional style, typical of loners and recluses, and the loud «arena» style — show how, when the deeply personal gets expressed through the openly public, the end results may, surprisingly, turn out to become even more deeply personal. This is the greatest paradox of Child, and the one reason why the band became such a different artistic entity after Kooper's departure: the form was retained, the substance was lost.

 

Anyway, the bottomline is: even if, for some reason, you are afraid of «jazz-rock» — for instance, associate it with Chicago ballads, or with instrumental fusion conundrums for those who value mathematics over music, do not make the mistake of ignoring this record, which sounds nothing like either of the two formulae. In fact, it pretty much sounds like nothing else out there: «Al Kooper with horns, strings, and heartbreak» finds no reasonable equivalent in my experience, and gets an assured thumbs up for that reason alone, not to mention all the others.

 

BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS (1969)

 

1) Variations On A Theme By Erik Satie; 2) Smiling Phases; 3) Sometimes In Winter; 4) More And More; 5) And When I Die; 6) God Bless The Child; 7) Spinning Wheel; 8) You've Made Me So Very Happy; 9) Blues (Part II); 10) Variations On A Theme By Erik Satie.

 

No band that fires Al Kooper and hires David Clayton-Thomas deserves appraisal for its actions. With their second album, in a brief, unpleasant flash, Blood, Sweat & Tears dispense with at least several meters of soulful depth — making a transition from «art rock» to «professional enter­tainment» and, worst of all, probably not even realizing it. The good news was that they made the charts, something that is, indeed, easier to do for a professional entertainer than for an art-rocker: the record went all the way to No. 1, became quadruple platinum, yielded several hit singles, and essentially made the band into a household name — now that they finally had a singer who could provide them with that «Tom Jones» feel.

 

Despite the disappointment, the record is not bad. First, Kooper had some time to work on these songs — a few of them do seem to have a bit of the Kooper touch, although I do not know the exact details. Second, the idea of BS&T as an «art» band is not yet completely abandoned: the record is di­verse, unpredictable and largely experimental — after all, no entertaining act targeted at bored housewives would probably start the album off with a rearrangement of an excerpt from Satie's ʽTrois Gymnopédiesʼ. Third, they still retain a good sense of taste in their selection of covers: whatever be, one has to admit that Traffic, Laura Nyro, Billie Holiday and even Brenda Holloway are fairly good company on the road.

 

The worst thing about Kooper's departure is that the awesome contrast between the loud and bom­bastic, on one side, and the lonesomely personal and the introspective, on the other, which really made Child the masterpiece that it was, has vanished into thin air. The band itself under­stood it well enough, I guess, since self-titling the record symbolized a sort of total reboot. Now all the songs were not only loud and bombastic, but also sunny, cheerful, optimistic, well suited for an audience that did not care to see a lot of «suffering» on its playlists. Of course, the switch itself was neither «right» nor «wrong», but it did put the record, right from the start, into a cate­gory where failure becomes irredeemable, if you know what I mean.

 

As a songwriter, David Clayton-Thomas was, of course, no match for Kooper. He contributes only one song altogether: ʽSpinning Wheelʼ is a friendly jazz-pop piece that occasionally pretends to be loaded with a little bit of psychedelic powder — which goes all wet at the end, as the band unexpectedly launches into several flute-led bars of ʽLieber Augustinʼ and the drummer makes a comment of "that wasn't too good" as the rest of the band snickers around him. The song, alto­gether, is more efficient than its coda, but not by much — the best thing about it (and many other things around here) is probably Jim Fielder's bass playing, combining a perfect sense of rhythm with a desire for inventive melodicity.

 

Of the two covers chosen for single release, Laura Nyro's ʽAnd When I Dieʼ seems to me by far the winner, what with all the melodic transitions (from slow country-rock to fast vaudeville-rock and back) and the clash of the song's unsettling title with its lyrically and melodically optimistic message — although, frankly speaking, Clayton-Thomas is hardly the right vocalist for this kind of material. He does seem to be far more in his element on ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ, a song that quickly became the new-look BS&T's calling card but, honestly speaking, adds little to the Holloway original — which had already taken the composition to its joyful peak, and neither the rough-hewn, pompous, quasi-Southern growl of Clayton-Thomas nor the horn gymnastics of his band members can push it up any higher, so it seems to me. Nor is the guy genius enough to uncover any new depths in ʽGod Bless The Childʼ — great song, for sure, but never because of being blessed by a Blood, Sweat & Tears interpretation.

 

In all actuality, the best song on the album (bar ʽAnd When I Dieʼ) is probably ʽMore & Moreʼ, a cheerful, but tough funk rocker on which both Fielder on bass and Steve Katz on his Cream/Hen­drix-in­fluenced «acid tone guitar» are allowed to shine on par with Clayton-Thomas. At the very least, it is still a song that rocks hard in solid 1960s mode, which is almost always a plus. Less of a plus, but still respectable as an ongoing tradition, is the presence of a near-obligatory psycho-folk ballad by Katz (ʽSometimes In Winterʼ) — these things are generally pleasant to the ear, but totally lack any staying power.

 

Where the album really starts taking serious chances is on ʽBlues, Part IIʼ, an 11-minute improvi­sational (or «seemingly» improvisational jam) with just a little bit of vocal blueswailing at the end. Along the way, almost every band member gets to show some jazzy tush, culminating in them all happily diving into the riff of ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ, and then, for dessert, Katz leading them into a few psychobars of ʽSpoonfulʼ — a ritualistic tribute, no doubt, to the freshly deceased supergroup. The piece is not «great» or anything, but the band takes care to switch its groove as soon as it risks becoming boring, so, in the end, its role on the album seems more posi­tive than negative: at the very least, it symbolizes that this here band is still searching for some­thing, even if it may not necessarily be looking in the right place.

 

With our hearts perhaps full of sorrow at such flat-out spoiling of such a flat-out terrific begin­ning, we can still give Blood, Sweat & Tears a thumbs up, if only because it is hardly possible to nosedive from the peak into the pit in one single go. But there is little, if anything, about the record that makes it as timeless as its predecessor, stylish and professional as it might be — un­less one actually prefers the powerful, but one-dimensional and pompous vocals of Clayton-Tho­mas to the technically weaker, but (in my opinion) far more expressive and meaningful wailing of Al. Of course, I could see where such a preference could take place, but it is hardly the location to which these particular reviews are addressed, anyway.

 

BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS 3 (1970)

 

1) Hi-De-Ho; 2) The Battle; 3) Lucretia Mac Evil; 4) Lucretia's Reprise; 5) Fire And Rain; 6) Lonesome Suzie; 7) Symphony For The Devil / Sympathy For The Devil; 8) He's A Runner; 9) Somethin' Comin' On; 10) 40,000 Head­men.

 

We can safely bet that way too many admirers of ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ must have been fairly puzzled to buy an album called Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 right after having bought an album called Blood, Sweat & Tears — sending them out on a hard-to-explain quest for that mythical second album that never was. With a little less safety, we can also bet that these same admirers may also have been puzzled by the fact that the band's lack of creativity in choosing their album titles had, unfortunately, also extended to their albums' contents. With only two ori­gi­nal compositions out of nine, the new-look Blood, Sweat & Tears were now clearly positioning themselves as a cover band. And who the heck needed a cover band back in 1970?

 

Worse than that, they did give a concise answer here as to why it might have been wiser for them to stick to covers. The «artsy» past of the band catches up with it, and fills its collective head with unnecessary ecstasy, on the thoroughly pointless, and sometimes rather offensive, version of ʽSympathy For The Devilʼ. For some reason, somebody thought that a little bit of free-form jazz, with plenty of tuba and trombone polyphony, made a good companion to the pseudo-Satanic vibe of the Stones' contemporary classic — probably picked out of the lot not by pure chance, but due to increased public in­terest with it in conjunction with the Altamont disaster — but the result is not so much «experimental jazz-rock» as «Vegasy jazz-schlock», especially given Clayton-Tho­mas' «Tom Jones with tail and horns» vocal delivery. Nothing gels, nothing makes sense, and most of it genuinely irritates, because the band really feels quite clueless throughout the entire performance. Maybe it could have worked better, had they picked out a track that wasn't already «epic» in the first place — then again, maybe it couldn't.

 

Therefore, when they actually cover stuff without any attempts to turn it into a «symphony», it usually works better. Goffin & King's ʽHi-De-Hoʼ, a smart choice for the album's first single, suits Clayton-Thomas' normal singing style much better than any Rolling Stones song, and there is also a nice climactic buildup to the grand «Southern gospel» finale. ʽHe's A Runnerʼ is another Laura Nyro song that they do full justice to (not to mention that Laura Nyro could always use a good popularization from a more popular act), and there is a very nice piano/bass instrumental inter­lude that certifies their jazz chops without turning into a pretentious mess.

 

Most of the other covers, too, range from passable (ʽLonesome Suzieʼ has the lead singer doing a Richard Ma­nuel impression that almost works — although, who really wants to hear David Clayton-Thomas sing like Richard Manuel when one can instead listen to Richard Manuel not singing like David Clayton-Thomas?) to likable (Traffic's ʽ40,000 Headmenʼ). The problem is, none of them make much sense apart from the «and now, your favorite song by Mr. X... done with horns!» message. In fact, I'd say that James Taylor with horns (ʽFire And Rainʼ) is a down­right sordid idea, but that's just me.

 

All the more puzzling it is to realize that the two originals here are pretty strong songs in their own right. ʽThe Battleʼ, co-written by Katz and keyboardist Dick Halligan and sung by Katz, continues Steve's tradition of gallant baroque / medieval-influenced folk compositions, but is tighter, catchier, more ambitious and less mushy than usual — a nostalgic minstrel tune with a good balance between the harpsichord and the brass section. As for Clayton-Thomas' ʽLucretia Mac Evilʼ, yes, it is overwrought, over-exuberant, and Tom Jones-y, but it does have a good slew of memorable brass riffs — something that ʽSpinning Wheelʼ, for instance, did not have, and the instrumental reprise gives Jim Fielder the best of opportunities to practice his nimble bass runs, as the rest of the band, too, feels invigorated by the tightness of the funky groove. So why did they have to waste solid musicianship on clumsy attempts to get into somebody else's groove, then (ʽSympathyʼ), when they were still capable of growing their own? Beats me.

 

Although the record enjoyed heavy commercial success, on the huge impulse of its predecessor, it must have been obvious to everybody that the overall reaction would be one of disappointment — or, perhaps, they thought they could make it on the strength of the singles alone, in which they were only partially right. Oh well, at least they did retain a good taste in covers, and at least there is a working logic in that Al Kooper would cover Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman where Clay­ton-Thomas would cover Joe Cocker and Steve Winwood. No thumbs down in the end — the awful ʽSym­pathyʼ is nicely counterbalanced by the excellent ʽLucretiaʼ, and most of the rest is so utterly neutral that the band seems more poised for a shrug than a negative judgement.

 

B, S & T 4 (1971)

 

1) Go Down Gamblin'; 2) Cowboys And Indians; 3) John The Baptist; 4) Redemption; 5) Lisa, Listen To Me; 6) A Look To My Heart; 7) High On A Mountain; 8) Valentine's Day; 9) Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While); 10) For My Lady; 11) Mama Gets High; 12) A Look To My Heart (duet).

 

An unexpected improvement upon the band's disappointing third album — suddenly, the band wakes up and remembers that writing songs can be as much fun as covering them (not to mention much more satisfactory in the financial scheme of things). Nine out of eleven tunes are originals, and a tenth one is contributed by Al Kooper, still the «blood» of the band where Clayton-Thomas could have been its «sweat» (and the proper «tears» had yet to come). Only one bona fide cover remained, because what is a Clayton-Thomas era BS&T album without an authentic cover of an R&B standard? Original songwriting be damned, nothing can get an audience on its feet as effec­tively as good old Motown — and ʽTake Me In Your Armsʼ is as good a choice as anything.

 

The point is not that Clayton-Thomas, Katz, Halligan, and Lipsius suddenly turned into genius songwriters. The point is, their investment in trying out new chord combinations gives the band a sense of purpose, even if that purpose is rarely satisfied. Most amazingly, it seems to somehow procure some much needed dignity for David's voice: be it on the introspective country waltz of ʽCowboys And Indiansʼ, on the tough blues-funk of ʽRedemptionʼ, or on the courteous folk bal­ladry of ʽFor My Ladyʼ, he sounds a little more thoughtful and a little less flashy / corny than he did on most of 3. A little original songwriting may go a longer way than one usually thinks?.. Or is it just a misguided gut feeling?

 

The decision to start out on a hard rock note, most likely influenced by the Zep-dominated tastes of the time, does feel somewhat pathetic, especially considering that ʽGo Down Gamblin'ʼ isn't really much of a classic — its generic and not particularly memorable blues chords are not even much of a match for the brass riff of ʽLucretia Mac Evilʼ. Competing with the «monsters of rock» did not pay off: thoughtlessly released as a single, the song only went as high as #32, and why should it have gone any higher, with the market already oversaturated with bulgy riff-rockers? (And most of the fans of bulgy riff-rockers had little interest in hearing a bunch of sissy brass instruments overclouding the guitars, anyway).

 

But it gets better from there: ʽCowboys And Indiansʼ exudes some simplistic nostalgic sentimen­talism — co-written by Halligan with Terry Kirkman from The Association, it challenges David to convince us that the protagonist does prefer, nowadays, to «play the Indian» rather than «play the cowboy», and in order to do that, the guy chooses the «mumble-in-your-beard» style that suits him much better than the Tom Jones posturing. The song is written in relatively free style, more like a distracted Van Morrison type of rambling than a verse-chorus thing, but the brass arrange­ment gives it a bit of grizzled-heroic atmosphere, and ultimately, it works.

 

ʽRedemptionʼ is more impressive for its funky instrumental section, with plenty of punch contri­buted by the bass and drums, than for any main melody, but, unlike ʽSympathy For The Devilʼ, this is a groove that they worked out all by themselves, and it is far more effective. ʽLisa, Listen To Meʼ is a pretty damn good «roots-pop» ditty, too, highlighted by a classic fuzzy psycho-riff from Katz — by all means, it should have been the first single from the album, not the second one: by the time it hit the market, ʽGo Down Gamblin'ʼ had already flopped, and the band was spin­ning down commercially at an alarming rate.

 

The second side of the LP is unexpectedly dominated by Katz compositions: formerly relegated to the duty of contributing one or two lushy-mushy folk ballads per LP, he now has a whoppin' four songwriting credits — of which only two are ballads (ʽValentine's Dayʼ sung by Katz him­self); ʽHigh On A Mountainʼ is a slow and rather boring attempt at a hymn, and ʽMama Gets Highʼ is a piece of old-school vaudeville, which would probably not be deemed good enough for Cabaret, let alone a respectable rock band. All of which just goes to re-confirm the old truth about sleeping dogs — Katz was not improving as a songwriter by expanding his range. Still, somehow, I'd rather have these limp attempts at living than yet another bunch of Traffic, Laura Nyro, and The Band covers. (Speaking of which, Al's ʽJohn The Baptistʼ sounds uncannily like a Band song from circa 1969 — and, what's even more funny, Al's own version of the song, re­leased the same year, is so much more overproduced and stuffed with brass overdubs that it ends up sounding more like typical Blood, Sweat & Tears than the BS&T version!).

 

Cutting a long story short, very little of this stuff is impressive, but it holds together well, and the album as a whole is a «moderate grower», becoming a wee bit more friendly and invigorating with each new listen rather than the opposite. Unfortunately, 1971 was not a good year for «mo­derate growers»: the public, already disappointed with what had been offered to them the year before, could do with nothing less than a strong jolt, and a strong jolt is one thing that BS&T4 does not manage to deliver even once — ʽLisa, Listen To Meʼ is a good song, but much too plain to attract the required attention. Alas, the lack of commercial success shattered the band's self-confidence, and what could have been a new humble beginning proved instead to be the begin­ning of the end.

 

NEW BLOOD (1972)

 

1) Down In The Flood; 2) Touch Me; 3) Alone; 4) Velvet; 5) I Can't Move No Mountains; 6) Over The Hill; 7) So Long Dixie; 8) Snow Queen; 9) Maiden Voyage.

 

And lots of it, too. By 1972, the band had lost not just Clayton-Thomas, who thought his position solid enough to try and go for a solo career, but also two more of its founding fathers — Lipsius and Halligan, whose arranging and songwriting talents had been one of the band's assets. In their place, the remaining veterans hired Jerry Fisher, a big fan of the jazz-rock sound who'd been hanging around Dallas for a couple of years, playing BS&T and Chicago covers; Lou Marini on woodwinds; and Larry Willis on piano. In addition, Georg Wadenius was added to the lineup on extra lead guitar — maybe because the band just couldn't stand the prospect of not having a band member whose family name ended in "-ius" among them.

 

However, strangely enough, the basic essentials of the BS&T sound remain the same even with all the «new blood» pumped in those not-too-attractive veins. The new vocal guy sounds some­what like a deflated version of Clayton-Thomas — a barroom screamer who'd like to have the same amount of brawn, but is incapable of conquering his gene machine. That is a change, but not a very significant one. In all other matters, this is still the same old brand of roots music with horns — a little jazz, a little blues, a little pop, and a lot of blowing.

 

One change for the worse is that, with the departure of Clayton-Thomas and Halligan, the band is once again deprived of the songwriting initiative. Trombonist Dave Bargeron tries his hand in the business, but his ʽOver The Hillʼ ends up being a fairly standard pub-rock cut, very much influen­ced by Joe Cocker's ʽDelta Ladyʼ — the grizzly wah-wah riff that drives the song is a nifty inven­tion, but everything else about the song is way below par. New band member Lou Marini also jumps in with a slice of soulful funk (ʽAloneʼ) that only shows signs of life during the instrumen­tal jam section — in other respects, it's just your Vegas show most of the way.

 

Elsewhere, the impoverished band has no choice but to fall back on covers, trying out everything from Bob Dylan to Carole King to Herbie Hancock to Teddy Randazzo. Naturally, the choice could have been much worse, and the decision to cover ʽMaiden Voyageʼ alone signified that the band was not yet done with its «artsy» pledge — the mid-section with scat singing over a nimble jazz guitar solo by Wadenius could hardly qualify as «commercial» stuff in 1972. However, it is hard to sense any genuine inspiration in most of these covers: on the whole, the band does not seem to understand very well why exactly they are making these particular choices.

 

Thus, Dylan's ʽDown In The Floodʼ is unexplainably set to a slowed-down variant of the bassline from Cream's ʽCrossroadsʼ and transformed into a less-than-subtle blues-rock rucus — not too bad per se, but what's that got to do with Dylan? Randazzo's ʽTouch Meʼ is arranged as a bona fide Elton John piano ballad — all fine, but we already have an Elton John, and he sings better than Jerry Fisher. ʽSnow Queenʼ is a good song, but, from this particular rendition, you'd never guess it had anything to do with Carole King — and so on.

 

I suspect that the album would have worked much better as a fully instrumental project: almost everywhere on here, the tracks are easier to appreciate when the band just «gets it on» — nobody is able to deprive Jim Fielder of his great bass skills, and all the trumpet and trombone solos and duels are completely on the level with many jazz greats of the era. The cover of ʽMaiden Voyageʼ, which is completely instrumental, is unquestionably the highlight here for that very reason. But every time these guys drift off in a pure «entertainment» direction — and this happens way too often for comfort — they run out of purposes faster than you can pull that mouthpiece away from your lips. Nothing on here sucks bad enough to warrant a negative assessment, but RateYourMu­sic currently evaluates the record as «#868 for 1972», and I'd say that's a fairly rational place for it — be sure to check out those other 867 albums first.

 

NO SWEAT (1973)

 

1) Roller Coaster; 2) Save Our Ship; 3) Django (An Excerpt); 4) Rosemary; 5) Song For John; 6) Almost Sorry; 7) Back Up Against The Wall; 8) Hip Pickles; 9) My Old Lady; 10) Empty Pages; 11) Mary Miles; 12) Inner Crisis.

 

No Sweat? Really? Sure, the album cover is «funny» and all, but with the heated way the band throws itself on the glam rock barricades of the day, surely some sweat must have been sweated out while rehearsing and recording these tunes, not to mention performing them live before audi­ences who demanded that sweat from their performers. Preferably gleaming and glistening off their bare chests, for better effect.

 

With Steve Katz out of the band, the number of the original remaining members has now dwindled to two — the rhythm section of Jim Fielder and Bobby Colomby. (Additionally, Tom Malone replaces Chuck Winfield on trumpet, but he only lasted one year anyway, before leaving the band to accompany Gil Evans, and I don't blame him). The musical compass is now being provided by woodwinder Lou Marini and guitarist George Wadenius: in particular, they take it upon themselves to once again raise the quota of original songwriting — and to update the band's sound for those strange new times, when «flashy» seemed to take over «substantial».

 

There were three alleys now for the band to follow — with only one of them remaining the «ori­ginal» alley that BS&T themselves had a hand in constructing in the first place: instrumental jazz-rock / «fusion», here illustrated, first and foremost, by keyboardist Larry Willis' album-closing suite ʽInner Crisisʼ. The piece was, in fact, just a small fragment of the guy's creative mind — best illustrated on his solo LP from the same year, which, not coincidentally, was also called Inner Crisis and contained an alternate, even more harsh and funky version of the same compo­sition. Jazz fusion is not my favorite genre, so I cannot rave and rant about the great atmospheric wonders of the piece — but it is fairly adventurous, starting off on a solo piano note and then moving into a solid, riff-heavy groove (Jim Fielder offers lots of help on bass, too).

 

At the very least, ʽInner Crisisʼ sounds positively respectable next to the album's only other piece to contain some instrumental exploration: ʽAlmost Sorryʼ starts as «pub-rock de-luxe», then quickly turns into a portentous Vegasy piece, with hyper-loud trombone solos, hysterical synth parts and, ultimately, a vaudeville atmosphere — not so surprisingly, the brass / guitar / key­boards babble on the final couple of minutes sound eerily similar to the textures created by Alice Cooper on ʽWelcome To My Nightmareʼ (the song) a couple years later. Was Alice enough of a BS&T fan to get that influenced? In any case, it is one thing to combine vaudeville with parody, irony, and humorous titillation, as Alice does — ʽAlmost Sorryʼ is just boring in comparison.

 

But do not get me wrong: there is nothing truly trailblazing about No Sweat. On the contrary, the other two directions that it explores are not just traditional in themselves (soulful ballads and pompous rockers), but strictly follow recently established formulas. Two of the ballads, both con­tributed by Wadenius — ʽSave Our Shipʼ and ʽMy Old Ladyʼ — sound like totally bona fide Elton John songs, relatively convincing but spoiled by weak lyrics (no Bernie to save the day) and even weaker vocals (well, there is a reason, after all, why Elton John is celebrating his 60th anniver­sary at Madison Square Garden and Jerry Fisher is not — and it doesn't even have much to do with The Lion King or Princess Diana). In fact, the band is so well aware of the fact that it even hires Paul Buckmaster, Elton's trusty classic sideman, to oversee the orchestral arrange­ments — which happen to be the best thing about both of these tunes: Buckmaster had this mean, lean way with cellos, emphasizing them over violins, that automatically makes him one of the most distinctive, if not just plain best, string arrangers on that era's pop records.

 

Then there are the rockers — ʽBack Up Against The Wallʼ does sound like a smoothed-down version of the garage-era Alice Cooper, while Mark James' ʽRoller Coasterʼ, Randy Newman's ʽRosemaryʼ, and Traffic's ʽEmpty Pagesʼ are rootsier and/or funkier, but all four are equally loud, «triumphant», and designed to give you a good time in stretching your limbs, but not necessarily in getting an emotional high of any sorts. In other words, all of this is yer average «okay» music, perfectly adequate as a background soundtrack — no matter how seriously they try to make it loud enough for the foreground — but not really working on any other levels. Maybe that is really what the title of No Sweat is trying to tell us, except I think that the band members them­selves would be honestly pissed off at such a suggestion.

 

Overall, my final suggestion is that the album does no harm, but is mainly listenable for the sake of curiosity, especially if you are a big Elton John fan — like it or not, not everybody is physical­ly capable of nailing that style as expertly as they do on ʽSave Our Shipʼ — and especially if you are a serious fusion collector, in which case you do need to hear ʽInner Crisisʼ. (Then again, you might just want to head straight for the lion's den and get yourself a copy of Larry Willis' solo LP instead — certainly a better investment for the true fusion lover).

 

MIRROR IMAGE (1974)

 

1) Tell Me That I'm Wrong; 2) Look Up To The Sky; 3) Love Looks Good On You; 4) Hold On To Me; 5) Thinking Of You; 6) Are You Satisfied; 7) Mirror Image; 8) She's Coming Home.

 

Presumably, after New Blood and No Sweat, the next obvious LP title should have been Near Tears, or something like that. I can sort of see the band passing on that one, but the bare fact re­mains — Mirror Image is just a gallant euphemism for Near Tears, because (a) most of these songs do bring the knowledgeable listener «near tears», and (b) the album is, to a large extent, a «mirror image» of whatever this band used to be five years before.

 

Setting their glam-rock ambitions aside, Fisher, Bargeron, Wadenius & Co. have now decided that neither Elton John-style balladry nor Mick Ronson-style «flash-rock» are really where it's at (for «it», feel free to substitute either «big bucks» or «the future of music», depending on the po­sitive / negative charge of your feelings for the band). Instead, they decide to put their trust in funk-pop — those hot, catchy, sweeping dance grooves that were becoming all the latest rage and had already evolved to the state of «proto-disco». With Earth, Wind & Fire having recently begun to conquer the charts with that style, it was only natural that «Blood, Sweat & Tears» should use the same formula (most record buyers would be confusing the two anyway, wouldn't they?).

 

Consequently, Side A of the album is completely dedicated to trying out this new approach — steady, streamlined dance-pop interspersed with a few gentler soul numbers — while the B-side still pretends to a slice of artsiness, being almost completely turned over to a huge, four-move­ment suite (title track), with each movement written by a different band member or subset of band members. Speaking of which, almost all of the LP is self-penned, except for two of the most «shake-yer-booty» style songs, contributed by Patricia Cosby, wife of Motown veteran Henry Cosby, who produced the album for the band.

 

Also of note is another important lineup change: Jim Fielder, the amazingly nimble-fingered bass wonder behind all of the band's classic numbers, finally got fed up with the constant turnover — and, perhaps, he was feeling that this simplification of the band's playing style left no space for his talent. Replaced by the reliable, but nowhere near as impressive / expressive Ron McClure, Fielder left for a humble session musician career — leaving drummer guy Bobby Colomby as the only original member of the band.

 

If you are a deep fan of this funky dance music, regardless of the compositional and atmospheric value of the actual songs, that first side, actually, isn't that bad. The grooves are danceable and perfectly professional; Jerry Fisher continues to be reliable as the «never oversinging» singer; and they try to introduce bona fide brass hooks and vocal hooks to almost every song, the best of the brass riffs arguably captured on the album's lead single ʽTell Me That I'm Wrongʼ, and the most memorable vocal hook contained on ʽLove Looks Good On Youʼ, where lead vocals are taken by temporary guest member Jerry LaCroix (soon to join the mid-1970s lineup of Rare Earth).

 

But, of course, everything suffers from BS&T's predictable flaw — too smooth, too cautious, too middle-of-the-road. The hooks ain't Bee Gees level, the soul is tepid compared to Al Green, the energy does not begin to approach Funkadelic, the subtlety is just non-existent next to Curtis May­field etc. etc. Just as No Sweat fell right into the «generic glam-rock» category, Mirror Image is equal parts «generic dance music», with hardly any good reasons to single it out of the swarms of records by other, less reputable, artists riding the same train in 1974.

 

All hopes rest on the four-part suite — how good is that one? Well, other than a hard-funk vocal movement at the end, this is competent jazz-fusion that suffers from the very same problem: it should feel itself mighty uncomfortable in the company of John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck, the Soft Machine, Weather Report, etc. Had Jim Fielder still been in the band, he could have, perhaps, supplied parts of the suite with some super-tight monster basslines — as it is, the band is still able to keep its shit together, but lacks the virtuosity necessary to push it in a whole new dimension. For instance, at one point Wadenius lets rip with an aggressive, sky-high guitar solo, but it does not either have a distinctive voice of its own, or reach the same levels of dazzling technicality as you'd expect from a Santana or an Alan Holdsworth in this context.

 

Consequently, like everything else on here, ʽMirror Imageʼ is as perfectly listenable as it is perfectly boring — at this point, the band really starts looking like a respectably dressed, but a pennyless ticketless passen­ger, desperately trying to board one train after another, regardless of the actual direction, and inavoi­dably thrown off upon each attempt. The only thing about this whole process that is truly curious is how the hell they all managed to stick together and retain the original moniker for so long — considering that this particular «revolving doors» approach did not even depend on one or two permanent members (like Jethro Tull is always Jethro Tull as long as it has Ian Anderson in it, or King Crimson only has to preserve Robert Fripp to go on be­ing King Crimson). Blame it all on some sort of «Blood, Sweat & Tears spirit» that Al helped generate in 1968 — sweet, sour, or stale, it had this odd magnetic effect that simply would not wear off, whatever the circumstances. Mystical stuff.

 

 

NEW CITY (1975)

 

1) Ride Captain Ride; 2) Life; 3) No Show; 4) I Was A Witness To War; 5) One Room Country Shack; 6) Applause; 7) Yesterdays Music; 8) Naked Man; 9) Got To Get You Into My Life; 10) Takin' It Home.

 

The attempt to re-model BS&T as a funky dance-pop band having miserably failed, both critical­ly and commercially, it was officially decided that the group had lost its way, and needed to re­trace its steps back to the point at which they seemed more generally accepted. To that end, Jerry Fisher amicably left the band, taking most of the Mirror Image-era extras (like Jerry LaCroix, etc.) with him — and David Clayton-Thomas was welcomed back into the fold.

 

The result is an album that is at least «on the level» with the band's output circa 1970-71: the kind of sound they had back there had not yet become «dated» circa 1975, and the restructuring pro­bably injected a few extra drops of adrenaline into the outfit — and although I have never been a big fan of Clayton-Thomas, I have to admit that, next to the absolute non-remarkability of Fisher, he sounds like The Supreme God Of Vocal Expression by comparison, so that alone is a big step up from the passable, but colorless years of Fisher rule.

 

To herald the «comeback», BS&T tried out a move that, in retrospect, seems so utterly obvious that it only makes one wonder how they managed to hold out on it for so long — then again, per­haps they were saving it up for the rainiest day in their history, and it was getting pretty cloudy in 1975. I am talking, of course, of the release of the Beatles' ʽGot To Get You Into My Lifeʼ as the lead single from the album — that particular song that is referenced, in so many textbooks, as the song that gave life to the «jazz-pop» brand of BS&T and Chicago, much like ʽI Am The Walrusʼ gave life to the «strings-pop» brand of the Electric Light Orchestra.

 

Curiously, the band's version is actually much more guitar-heavy than the original — it is almost as if they were returning the Beatles a favor, with the «original brass band» paying homage to the «original guitar band» by reinterpreting the original guitar band's brass-led number as the ori­ginal brass band's guitar-led number. That said, unlike the Beatles, BS&T forgot to shape their guitar parts into any memorable riffs — the result is a slippery, mushy style of production that preserves the vocal melody but cheapens the song instrumentally. Despite that, the single still managed to chart: a Beatles song is a Beatles song, after all, it's fairly hard to spoil it to the ground.

 

But there are plenty of more adequate covers on New City as well. ʽRide Captain Rideʼ, the only hit by the little-known band Blues Image, originally recorded in 1970, is here given the proper BS&T treatment, including a lengthy cool-jazz keyboard solo, and Clayton-Thomas gives an in­spired performance — the original had a more exquisite guitar part (courtesy of Mike Pinera, who would later play with Iron Butterfly and Alice Cooper), but, overall, a thinner, less overtly kick-ass sound (and it also features here one of Ron McClure's toughest basslines, good enough to rival some of Fielder's), so count me happy.

 

The band also sounds revitalized on such party-oriented stuff as Allen Toussaint's ʽLifeʼ (similar in style to David Bowie's ʽFameʼ — coincidence? technically, yes, since Young Americans was released only a month prior to New City, but in general, no, since both songs reflected the same musical tendencies of the epoch); and Randy Newman's circus number ʽNaked Manʼ, introduced with a little bit of popular Mozart, but played out in «mock-silly» rather than «unintentionally-corny» style. And, just for diversity's sake, Laura Nyro as the band's resident «semi-popular in­tellectual singer-songwriter with musical pretense» is now replaced by Janis Ian, whose ʽAp­plauseʼ is extended by an extra three minutes of jazz-fusion and classical-fusion travels — no­thing too awesome, but at least they are trying something out, and this is the kind of something that their reputation was built upon in the first place.

 

Of the original numbers, Clayton-Thomas' ʽYesterdays Musicʼ is a dang good soul-pop song, simple, but with a subtle build-up and an elegant melodic wrap-up at the end of each verse. The ballad ʽI Was A Witness To Warʼ is not as good — too much vocal pathos, too little in the way of discernible melody — and McClure's instrumental ʽNo Showʼ is equally mushy for the first half of its duration, before a nicely placed twist pushes it over into upbeat rhythmic territory, where it becomes another passable, but forgettable, fusion piece.

 

Still, I have nothing against awarding the album an overall thumbs up. It is musically competent, mildly adventurous, gives us back a singer that is above average (no matter what I might hold in general against this particular type of singing), and, unlike its immediate predecessors, does not try to blindly compete against prevailing fads and trends, but rather just goes on to quietly pursue its own business. The very fact alone that they were able to put that blundering train back upon a crude, but functional railtrack deserves recognition.

 

IN CONCERT (1976)

 

1) Spinning Wheel; 2) I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) Lucretia MacEvil; 4) And When I Die; 5) One Room Country Shack; 6) And When I Die (reprise); 7) (I Can Recall) Spain; 8) Hi-De-Ho; 9) Unit Seven; 10) Life; 11) Mean Ole World; 12) Ride Captain Ride; 13) You've Made Me So Very Happy.

 

Well, at least they had the good sense to wait until Clayton-Thomas was back to release the ob­ligatory double live album — this way, all the hits are re-generated the way they are supposed to: even a non-fan of the C-T style like me will gladly acknowledge that having ʽAnd When I Dieʼ or ʽLucretia MacEvilʼ sung by the completely colorless personality of Jerry Fisher would have de­prived the experience of the smallest modicum of sense it could ever contain.

 

Anyway, In Concert, a non-US LP release (only issued in the States as late as 1991, under the alternate title of Live And Improvised), was culled from at least four or five different gigs that were played in the US and Canada in late summer and early fall of 1975, and, technically, were intended to promote New City, even though only two songs off that album were included in the tracklist (no idea how many were actually performed); the band lineup is essentially the same as on the studio album, except that George Wadenius, the guitar player, was halfway out, and is on some tracks replaced here by Steve Kahn, and on others by Mike Stern, who would go on to play with the band on the next two studio albums.

 

There is really not much of any substance to be said about In Concert. Whatever their flaws, BS&T are never anything less than professional — money-grubbers they might be, but nobody can say they don't work hard for their money, and the record proves it. The rhythm section is tight, the improvised passages at least try to be inspired, and, most importantly, the setlist nicely fluctu­ates between predictable, but worthwhile, hits and unpredictable excursions into tasteful jazz-rock territory: they give out energetic renditions of Chick Corea's ʽSpainʼ and Cannonball Adderley's ʽUnit 7ʼ, the latter as a tribute to the recently deceased performer. This is not my kind of music at all, really, but as far as my ears suggest, the performances should be pleasing enough for the general jazz fan, unless he's racist or something. Better this, at least, than covering the latest Bee Gees hits or still trying to grovel at the feet of Earth, Wind & Fire.

 

Occasional turn-offs do occur, and, sad to say, they are mostly the fault of Clayton-Thomas, who sometimes lets his hair down too much — for instance, turns the finale of ʽLucretia MacEvilʼ into blabbery mush (how many "talk to me, Lucy!"'s does it take to make us get the point?), or has a little too much fun with the audience at the end of ʽHi-De-Hoʼ (okay, so its anthemic chorus may be the perfect trigger for happy audience participation, but that is no excuse for turning it into sheer silliness). Worst of all, however, is that we get to hear David's take on ʽI Love You More Than You'll Ever Knowʼ — with all the throbbing pain of the original replaced with a Vegas-ap­proved schmaltz delivery, oversung, overscreamed, and even the lead guitarist somehow manages to transform the original wail into a pseudo-Page blues-de-luxe solo without any soul.

 

But on the whole, the experience is adequate: ʽLifeʼ, ʽRide Captain Rideʼ, the bulk of ʽLucretiaʼ and ʽHi-De-Hoʼ, the ubiquitous ʽYou've Made Me...ʼ — I do not see how these could be suscep­tible to serious criticism. Besides, ʽSpinning Wheelʼ gets an improvised fanfare-ridden passage in the middle, and ʽAnd When I Dieʼ is split in half with a John Lee Hooker cover and a Dave Barge­ron-led trombone jam — so they are being at least mildly inventive. All in all, In Concert might even be a good alternative to getting all the studio albums: in between the hits, the oldies, the improvisations, and the tributes, it captures the spirit of post-Kooper BS&T much better than any individual studio record, possibly with the exception of the 1969 one, and, several nasty flaws notwithstanding, deserves a thumbs up.

 

MORE THAN EVER (1976)

 

1) They; 2) I Love You More Than Ever; 3) Katy Bell; 4) Sweet Sadie The Savior; 5) Hollywood; 6) You're The One; 7) Heavy Blue; 8) Saved By The Grace Of Your Love.

 

Curious, yes, but as late as late 1976, the band was somehow still holding up. As rhythm & blues, black and white alike, was steering ever closer to sterilized disco standards, and men were co­ming to terms with beginning to sound like machines rather than human beings, there are practi­cally no signs of catastrophe on More Than Ever — yes, at the expense of sounding way too old-fashioned, Blood, Sweat & Tears make an album here whose reputation a couple of decades or so past its original release must have inevitably exceeded the «warmth» of the initial reception (when the record stalled at #165, and was used as an excuse by Columbia to drop the band from its roster — not that the label itself didn't have a hand in this failure).

 

Anyway, more than anything else, More Than Ever takes its cue from the peak years of Stevie Wonder — with plenty of funky clavinet, brass fanfares à la ʽSuperstitionʼ, «ominous», socially acute, R&B, and excursions into gospel soul territory. Almost half of the album is self-penned, and the other half is allocated for relatively obscure covers, sometimes provided by guest players (e. g. ʽSweet Sadie The Saviorʼ, credited to Patti Austin, who took part in the sessions as backup vocalist). There is very little here that could be even remotely called «daring» or «experimental», but the songs are written and recorded with care, and, most importantly, with enough obvious love for the purely musical side of the business.

 

Occasionally, there are tasteless missteps. ʽHollywoodʼ, a glitzy dance-funk number that, out of everything on here, moves the closest to disco, was probably intended as a tongue-in-cheek self-paro­dy — the band sending up their own image of «prisoners of Las Vegas / Beverly Hills» — but it is not funny enough to be perceived as a purely comic number, and so, the ecstatic chants of "Hollywood! Hollywood! I think we're gonna be here a while!.." can easily come across as silly pandering rather than self-irony.

 

The big, bulky, gospelish ballads are also a problem. ʽI Love You More Than Everʼ, despite not being written by any of the band members, is entitled way too similar to ʽI Love You More Than You'll Ever Knowʼ to suggest sheer coincidence — and invokes unfavorable comparisons, since this here song is just a sentimental, hyper-orchestrated love ballad. The oboe part from guest star Sid Weinberg is a useful bit of peaceful pastoralism to draw attention away from the corny string arrangements, but it is still not enough to push the song into «artsy baroque» territory. In the end, it's just another sappy love hymn, suffering from excessive weight. ʽSaved By The Grace Of Your Loveʼ, closing out the album, suffers from the same, and this time, it does not even have any oboes for partial redemption. But at least they both give it an honest try.

 

A little more adequacy seems to be present in the tougher numbers. ʽTheyʼ is a funk / fusion ve­hicle that seems to grumble against organized religion, but, most importantly, has several instru­mental passages that dispense with predictability — guitars, brass, vibraphones, and the rhythm section move around in semi-free-form mode, groping for ideas, and generate a few minutes of thoroughly anti-commercial controlled chaos à la Zappa, which, furthermore, fits very well the overall confused / angry mood of the song. The funky instrumental ʽHeavy Blueʼ, in comparison, never tries to move into previously uncharted territory, but it does establish a moderately cool proto-disco groove — delightfully integrating all of the band's varied instrumentation to capture the now-dated, but then-resonant stylishness of the decade without sacrificing the musician.

 

The rest of the songs do not deserve much commentary, but, as usual, none of them are awful — in fact, beyond the unlucky corniness of ʽHollywoodʼ, there is nothing on More Than Ever that would significantly challenge good taste: «generic decent album» would be closer to the truth than «generic failure». Why they decided to release ʽYou're The Oneʼ, one of the better ballads from the set, as the lead single instead of the much more hard-hitting ʽTheyʼ is anybody's guess — probably deemed ʽTheyʼ too adventurous for the masses, or hoped for yet another ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ — but on the whole, of course, their stubborn clinging to the old style was commercially doomed from the start. However, that is no reason to dismiss the record today without giving it a chance: it remains perfectly listenable, and deserves an unethusiastic, but honest thumbs up.

 

BRAND NEW DAY (1977)

 

1) Somebody I Trusted; 2) Dreaming As One; 3) Same Old Blues; 4) Lady Put Out The Light; 5) Womanizer; 6) Blue Street; 7) Gimme That Wine; 8) Rock & Roll Queen; 9) Don't Explain.

 

Dropped from Columbia, the band briefly signed on with ABC Records, getting one more limp chance to «redeem» themselves from a commercial perspective — and predictably blowing it. Brand New Day was an arrogantly optimistic title, but it did not help. By 1977, BS&T were out of touch with everything and everybody: on one hand, with disco hitting really hard, Clayton-Thomas and friends were quite obstinate about making the necessary transition — on the other hand, their brand of slightly obsolete jazz-funk-pop was still classified as «light entertainment» rather than «serious musical exploration».

 

The results were predictable — the critics still hated them for being too shallow and silly, and the general public had no interest in them for being too out-of-time. Throw in the inability to accom­pany the LP with a solid single (ʽBlue Streetʼ — a ballad by Randy Edelman, a songwriter usual­ly covered by The Carpenters, Barry Manilow, and Olivia Newton-John, to give an indication), add a complete lack of serious promotion, and there you have it — the album was critically vili­fied, and did not even manage to break into the Top 200.

 

Frankly speaking, though, it is a significant drop-down even from the level of More Than Ever. Not a single original composition — and the cover selection, in retrospect, is very odd. Making use of material by contemporary songwriters worked well for them at the beginning, when they latched on to serious artists like Randy Newman or Laura Nyro; but Randy Edelman? Daniel Moore? Guy Fletcher? Phil Driscoll? you'd have to be one hell of a connaisseur to remember all these names, but why would you want to be that kind of a connaisseur? All of these songs are just easy-going, instantly forgettable tripe, be they ballads or be they «rockers», and the only thing that makes them listenable is that the band is still capable of getting a tasteful groove going.

 

They only hit disco land once, on ʽRock & Roll Queen (A Tribute To Janis Joplin)ʼ — however, they hit it hard enough for Janis to revolve in her grave, full turn on every next bar. Well, stripped of its ambitions, the song is an inoffensive dance track, with Mike Stern trying to ennoble it with screechy rock'n'roll guitar soloing, but it is not understood why the collective talents of BS&T should be wasted on such stuff — which could have been, with much fewer expenses and in a more adequate manner, handled by the likes of Billy Preston. Or Boney M, for that matter.

 

Elsewhere, they are mining two types of ground: «hilarious» lite-funk (ʽSomebody I Trustedʼ, ʽGimme That Wineʼ — "I just can't get well without Muscatel" should probably have been the title of the album; note, however, that the clumsy, overweight funky rearrangement does not in any way diminish the genuine hilariousness of the original Lambert/Hendricks/Ross jazz version from 1962) and Late Evening Balladry for You-Know-What (ʽLady Put Out The Lightʼ, ʽWo­manizerʼ). Every now and then a grumpy blues tune appears to shift the mood, but even if they respect and mostly preserve the original somber mood of J. J. Cale's ʽSame Old Bluesʼ, they add nothing of interest to the original (except for some unnecessary brass overdubs).

 

Still, it must be said that even in 1977, the band was functioning as a tight-oiled, professional machine, constructed out of living people — the essence of the grooves they set up may not be too interesting, but they still work each groove to the bone, demanding top results from every single player. This perseverance alone, a sort of «ethical music code» that they might have broken in favor of stiff, slick disco numbness and synthesizer swamps a million times already, does not allow me to give the record a thumbs down. If only the songs weren't that dumb and generic, Brand New Day, in its context, could have easily been a minor lost gem. As it is, its unavailabi­lity on CD up to this very day is no big loss.

 

NUCLEAR BLUES (1980)

 

1) Agitato; 2) Nuclear Blues; 3) Manic Depression; 4) I'll Drown In My Own Tears; 5) Fantasy Stage; 6) (Suite) Spanish Wine.

 

Losing the entire band after Brand New Day had infamously ended up as the «Same Old Flub» was no big deal for Clayton-Thomas — after all, earlier on in the decade the entire band had lost him, so a quid pro quo was in the works anyway. Some sources state that he was not going to use the BS&T tag at all, but that the band's old manager somehow persuaded him, so David simply enlisted a bunch of his Canadian friends and ploughed on, brave guy.

 

Listening to Nuclear Blues makes it fairly obvious why this «new» Blood, Sweat & Tears was only able to get one new album on the MCA label. The reason is that the lineup may be new, but the music, the vibe, the sentiments stay exactly the same — by the standards of 1980, these guys might just as well have been «reinventing» the Charleston. In retrospect, Clayton-Thomas should probably earn our admiration for the obstinacy. In general, it did him no good: the album expec­tedly sank again, and most people probably did not even go to the trouble of noticing that it did come out. But those few people who are ready to take note might actually find something they can not only respect out of a general respect for bravery, but actually enjoy.

 

When the album is being bad or silly, it is the kind of badness / silliness that we are quite used to from Clayton-Thomas. Not for the first time, he picks out a solid soulful oldie (Ray Charles' ʽDrown In My Own Tearsʼ), then slows it down and stretches it out to breaking point, mutilating every inch with his overacting. For the hard rock part of the show, he picks out another solid oldie, Jimi's ʽManic Depressionʼ, and gives it a flashy brass reading that only works if you forget all about the schizo-psycho original. From his own songwriting gut comes the title track, a pas­sable piece of funk-blues that does not sensibly match the song's ominous lyrical message — and the predictable piece of cabaret schlock, ʽFantasy Stageʼ, which could work in Las Vegas, but hardly in my or your living room.

 

However, the unsung hero of this album is not Clayton-Thomas, but rather his hitherto unknown pal, trumpetist Bruce Cassidy. He not only contributes the opening instrumental (ʽAgitatoʼ), but is also responsible for a large chunk of the closing 15-minute suite, ʽSpanish Wineʼ — an inventive mix of various Latin musical forms with elements of fusion. In between both, this makes for twenty minutes of competent, energetic, and occasionally memorable music. Naturally, a third-, if not fourth-generation BS&T circa 1980 could hardly be capable of pushing boundaries or any­thing, but the various movements of ʽSpanish Wineʼ, most of them intelligently sewn together with Dave Piltch's subtly thrilling bass part, form an intriguing, if not very deep, composition, something that the old BS&T hadn't really tried out since the early 1970s.

 

All in all, this almost desperate attempt to stick even harder to their guns and go all-out retro on listeners who were just saying goodbye to the age of disco and hello to the age of electrofunk, synth-pop, and man-machines, was as good a «swan song» for BS&T as anything — it goes with­out saying that this nostalgic meandering, sometimes impressive and sometimes embarrassing, was much preferable to the option of trying to fit in with the times and incorporate contemporary synthesizers, drum machines, and pop-metal guitars. Hence, despite the many problems of Nuc­lear Blues, I will succumb to the temptation of giving it a thumbs up: at the very least, ʽSpanish Wineʼ deserves one all by itself, even if it comes in tandem with some gummy Ray Charles.

 

LIVE (1980/1994)

 

1) Intro; 2) Agitato; 3) Nuclear Blues; 4) Manic Depression; 5) God Bless The Child; 6) Lucretia MacEvil; 7) Hi-De-Ho; 8) And When I Die; 9) Spinning Wheel; 10) You've Made Me So Very Happy; 11) (Suite) Spanish Wine; 12) Drown In My Own Tears; 13) Gimme That Wine; 14) Trouble In Mind / Shake A Hand.

 

Although this album was recorded on October 12, 1980 (at the Street Scene in Los Angeles), it took fifteen years for it to see the light of day — meaning that nobody really cared until Rhino Records started out on their missionary mission to salvage, cherish, and promote historically re­levant (or irrelevant — no big deal) material that the big ones left in the vaults for one reason or another. But it does make sense that the last album to be officially released by BS&T had to be a live one, considering that the band name has continued to serve as a tag for various incarnations of the «BS&T spirit», going out on the road for over thirty years since they last churned out some studio product.

 

Essentially, it happens as follows: Bobby Colomby has the rights to the band's name, and leases it out to whoever is willing to buy for a reasonable price, as long as there is a trumpet and trombone attached. Some of these groupings have included Clayton-Thomas and some have not; certain sources say that he has not sung with BS&T since 2004, but as long as he stays in good health, there is no telling what tomorrow may bring. Altogether, BS&T should probably be in the Guin­ness book — through those thirty years, approximately 120-150 different people have been listed as formal members of the band, even if some may have lasted for just a month or so. Then again, why not? They never hurt anyone, and they wisely refrain from «creating» stuff under the name of Blood, Sweat & Tears, and if you want to get rid of twenty bucks, there sure are worse ways than spending them on an opportunity to sing along to ʽHi-De-Hoʼ.

 

Anyway, this here live album still comes from an era when Clayton-Thomas provided a solid link to the past — namely, it is from the small tour undertaken to promote Nuclear Blues, and so the album is played here almost in its entirety (with the happy exclusion of ʽFantasy Stageʼ). The sound quality is pretty good, the energy level is all right, and the songs are played quite faithfully to the studio versions, so that the excellent stuff still rocks (ʽAgitatoʼ; the ʽSpanish Wineʼ suite), the overwrought stuff still irritates (ʽDrown In My Own Tearsʼ is still drowning in its own bathos like there was no tomorrow), and the so-so stuff still remains inexplicable (why ʽManic Depres­sionʼ? who in the band was ever maniacally depressed?).

 

Unfortunately, being so preoccupied with this promotion, the band succumbs to the «medley curse» — or maybe Clayton-Thomas only had time to teach his Canadian friends the bare rudi­ments of the old classics (but they do play quite impressively on all the sections, so there is no question in my mind that they could have handled the proper load, had they had the opportunity to do so). In between two sections, completely devoted to Nuclear Blues material, they stuff a 15-minute potpourri of the classic hits, where only ʽHi-De-Hoʼ gets the royal treat­ment because of its karaoke potential. And even if those classic hits were not the greatest masterpieces of 20th century music, they still deserved a better fate.

 

Particularly since there was no reason to castrate them in order to make more space for a twelve-minute jam to the theme of ʽGimme That Wineʼ — where did that get resuscitated from? It's es­sentially a joke number, not to be promoted, much less to be used as a fanfare conclusion to the whole show. «We're a cabaret band and we want you to leave the building with that feeling?» Is that the message? Silly. But well representative of the band's entire career — where, for every splash of serious artistic ambition, there had always been a compensating splash of glitzy Vegas cheapness. There is nothing wrong with a little silliness or a little lighthearted humor every now and then, of course, but it all depends on the timing, the context, and on how high the joke in question is ranked on the playlist. (And this is not even mentioning all the ultra-critics who think that Blood, Sweat & Tears as a whole was just one big gag that ran for way too long — some­thing that I strongly disagree with, because even ʽSpanish Wineʼ has some serious points of in­terest to it).

 

In any case, if you actually want a BS&T live album, do make sure that your primary choice is the one from 1976, because this particular Live is not even proper BS&T — it's essentially just Nuclear Blues plus a medley of deeply humiliated classics and a joke-style funk-pop number run into the ground with way too much force. But if you are just an obstinate completist, chances are you won't be too irritated with this stuff, either, particularly because the basic condition is satis­fied: David's Canadian friends are organised, tight, collected, and energetic throughout. If much of this ends up being applied either to the wrong material or in the wrong way to the right mate­rial, well, that's quite a traditional part of the Blood, Sweat & Tears idiom, too.

BLOODROCK

BLOODROCK (1970)

 

1) Gotta Find A Way; 2) Castle Of Thoughts; 3) Fatback; 4) Double Cross; 5) Timepiece; 6) Wicked Truth; 7) Gimme Your Head; 8) Fantastic Piece Of Architecture; 9) Melvin Laid An Egg.

 

What kind of an association would you have with the word bloodrock? Any band that calls itself that should probably be imagined as some sort of particularly gory, trashy younger brother of Black Sabbath. There's even a couple horror flicks out there called Bloodstone, but, of course, the «stone» part should be swapped for a «rock» part — the band is American, after all. Actually, not just American, but Texan, which would naturally spruce up further associations with Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and when you look at the album cover, there's, like, blood on it, plenty of it, and even a rock for good measure.

 

In reality, though, the boys from Bloodrock were nowhere near that creepy. A bunch of honest rock'n'rollers from Fort Worth, they spent three years playing as «The Naturals» (indeed) and then three more years playing as «Crowd + 1» (because if you just call yourself «Crowd», people might suspect you of arrogant minimalism), before teaming up with Terry Knight, the producer of Grand Funk Railroad, who came up with the «Bloodrock» moniker for them. Knight, not fully satisfied by already having one big fat ass hard rock ensemble under his belt, decided to procure himself a Southern (Texan) counterpart to the Northern (Michigan) brand of GFR, took Blood­rock under his wing, secured them a contract with Capitol, and produced their first LP.

 

Testosterone-driven, sweaty, radio-friendly American hard rock is generally not my cup of tea at all — I can cope with the macho attitude, and I can cope with the family-friendly attitude, but combining them is bad for spiritual digestion. Fortunately, Bloodrock, especially on their first al­bums, went beyond that. They had a fairly testosterone-respecting lead singer, Jim Rutledge, with one of those grizzly voices that suggests pumping iron, and a crunchy guitar player, Lee Pickens, a big fan of thick, grumbly guitar riffs, of which he'd written a fair share for this album (more, I think, than Steppenwolf in their entire career). But they also had a streak of darkness and psy­chedelic esca­pism to their craft — Bloodrock is not any less inspired by the Doors and Hendrix than it is by Steppenwolf and GFR.

 

I think that nothing better illustrates this idea than the start of the album — ʽGotta Find A Wayʼ begins with a low, heavy, «macho» rhythm pattern, but five seconds later is complemented by a high-pitched, fuzzy, psycho-wailing «siren», and more space is given to the battling guitar and organ solos than to the vocal sections. Then ʽCastle Of Thoughtsʼ is the album's most directly Hendrix-inspired track, its rhythm being almost directly lifted off ʽStone Freeʼ, but Stephen Hill's keyboards add an extra layer of complexity, and the guitar/organ interplay part at the end is exciting in a purely «musical» way, putting the emphasis on melody rather than «power».

 

There may not be anything on Bloodrock that pushes it over the top: although the complete combination of ingredients is somewhat unique, it is not unique enough to turn them into prime league members overnight. But on a song by song basis, Bloodrock is intelligently written and effervescently well performed hard rock. The riffs on ʽDouble Crossʼ, ʽWicked Truthʼ, and par­ticularly ʽMelvin Laid An Eggʼ are all perfectly respectable even for the highest standards of 1970; the lyrics, fluctuating between absurdist, idealistic, and morbid, are unpredictable and not always laughable (ʽTimepieceʼ, after all, is about a prisoner's last minutes before the gallows); and the lengthy songs have enough of dynamics to them, including softer in­terludes and jammy bits. Towards the end, they even try to boldly overstep the boundaries by offering a little Gothic art-rock suite — ʽFantastic Piece Of Architectureʼ is a Poe-worthy tale of disillusionment and «time-conquers-all» sentiment, ceremoniously dressed up in solemn organs, Bach-inspired piano lines and echoey guitar tinkles, and it works surprisingly better than one could expect from a bunch of down-to-earth Texan rockers (although I can't help wondering how much better still it would have sounded in the hands of an Alan Parsons).

 

In fact, on a song-by-song basis there are simply no bad tracks on Bloodrock at all, which ulti­mately makes their debut record their greatest one (as it happens much too often with second-rate bands). I even like ʽFatbackʼ, despite its lack of a great riff (the song is cleverly driven by piano chords, giving it a little whiff of modern jazz), and ʽGimme Your Headʼ, despite the fact that its own riff deserved a thicker sound and a more prominent position in the mix. Even so, these two minor creations are actually the shortest ones on the album, meaning that Bloodrock were never above stretching out a good idea when the good idea deserved to be stretched out.

 

Do not expect a jaw-dropping masterpiece, but do expect an interesting combination of ideas. Turning on the «grumbly old-timer» mode, I will say that, had these guys come together forty years later, Bloodrock would almost certainly be a completely one-dimensional creation; back in 1970, though, being one-dimensional was a rather embarrassing perspective, so they gave us this rather oddball take on Texan rock instead. Thumbs up.

 

BLOODROCK 2 (1970)

 

1) Lucky In The Morning; 2) Cheater; 3) Sable And Pearl; 4) Fallin'; 5) Children's Heritage; 6) Dier Not A Lover; 7) D. O. A.; 8) Fancy Space Odyssey.

 

Bloodrock got their biggest — in fact, their only — break with the rather unexpected (and rather tacky) popularity of ʽD.O.A.ʼ, or, rather, the heavily abbreviated single version of ʽD.O.A.ʼ as opposed to the eight-minute long «epic» version on the LP. In terms of «cheap thrills», it was probably the most Sabbath-style song they'd ever committed to tape — a story told through the dying brain of an airplane crash victim, experiencing his last moments on Earth, with heavy use of «intimidating» musical tricks and volume tricks that recall ʽBlack Sabbathʼ (the song) in matters of «setting» rather than musical substance.

 

Most people were probably perversely attracted to the tune because of the gory lyrics, with each single reference to blood, pain, and death articulated so slowly and gravely by Rutledge as if he were reciting from the Iliad. But even if your English is not good enough to allow you to under­stand what is going on, the tune is still appropriately moody, driven by an organ riff that cleverly emulates an ambulance siren and Rick Cobb's expert percussion work, as the drummer subtly prepares us for the chorus explosions. It certainly doesn't have enough original ideas to fill up all of its eight minutes — but then you can always have the short single version. And it does feel a little eerie; at the very least, one could always argue that its subject matter is much closer to home (Lee Pickens claimed that it was inspired by a real accident that he had witnessed) than the gro­tesque Satanic imagery of ʽBlack Sabbathʼ.

 

That said, ʽD.O.A.ʼ is hardly typical of Bloodrock 2 — it's just that, in their prime days, the band took special care that each album include at least one lengthy mood piece, so this one merely sits here in the same spot where they last had ʽFantastic Piece Of Architectureʼ. The rest of the music is almost strictly in the basic rock'n'roll scheme, heavily marinated in the «Americana spirit». In particular, John Nitzinger, another of their Fort Worth friends who had previously contributed three songs for the Bloodrock album, was now involved heavier than ever, and began supplying the band with expansive roots-rock anthems, such as ʽLucky In The Morningʼ, and novelty tunes, such as ʽFancy Space Odysseyʼ, which combines barroom boogie with seemingly absurdist lyrics (as it happens, they actually relate to the band's early days when they were called «Fancy Space» and played in a Fort Worth nightclub).

 

This bunch of new songs, while not at all bad per se, still indicates a downward slide in the curve, mainly because the heaviness and crunch of the first album are frequently downplayed in favor of a slightly more rustic — dare we even say «redneckier»? — atmosphere. The guitar tones are still low and distorted, but more in a «brawny» than an «evil» kind of way, and, in agreement with that, Rutledge's singing keeps generating a braggadoccio effect rather than the angry / snappy effect it had earlier on tracks like ʽCastle Of Thoughtsʼ. The absolute low point is ʽSable And Pearlʼ, the band's attempt at hitting it from the soulful side, where Rutledge overscreams in the bridge section (a "TEACH ME TO LOVE YOU!" that sounds more like a "get out of the kit­chen!", if you get my drift) to a very irritating effect — the rest, thankfully, is a little more restrai­ned, but still, a bit on the «flat» side of things.

 

Riff-wise, I feel partial to ʽFallin'ʼ and Nitzinger's ʽChildren's Heritageʼ (the former A-side of ʽD.O.A.ʼ), even though both tunes are essentially just fast-paced slices of blues-rock; and ʽFancy Space Odysseyʼ is catchy, but excessively silly — its somewhat carnivalesque riff suggests a comic tune, yet Rutledge sings all the lyrics in his usual grave voice, without any hints at irony, and the end result is confusing. Come to think of it, the whole album is confusing: lots of decent ideas, none of which are taken to their logical conclusions: the band is clearly stuck in the trea­cherous space between «cock rock» and «artsiness», afraid to push too hard in the latter direction but also a little embarrassed to root itself too deep in the former. Ultimately, Bloodrock 2 is a bit of a bore, and the presence of ʽD.O.A.ʼ in all of its stretched-out quasi-glory does not necessarily serve as a relief. But then again, it could have been so much worse — I mean, rough Texan hard rock? God only knows to what sort of lower depths that could descend, so let us all say thank you to the healthy musical climate of 1970.

 

BLOODROCK 3 (1971)

 

1) Jessica; 2) Whiskey Vengeance; 3) Song For A Brother; 4) You Gotta Roll; 5) Breach Of Lease; 6) Kool-Aid-Kids; 7) A Certain Kind; 8) America, America.

 

All right, looks like we might want to rethink our thoughts about the self-titled debut. Unques­tionably, that was Bloodrock at their freshest, and they'd never really improve on the formula in general — but on a rigid song-for-song basis, Bloodrock 3 might just be their most consistent application of the dang formula. The trick is that it lays in a slight course correction: only one tune carries on with the dumb barroom rock sound (ʽYou Gotta Rollʼ), while everything else is retransferred back to the state of primordial darkness. ʽJessicaʼ, in particular, is a far more distur­bing way to kick off an LP than a rise-and-shine anthem like ʽLucky In The Morningʼ — and the rest of the record rises up to the challenge as well, with suitably creepy riffs, scorching lyrics, and a vocal performance from Rutledge that never forgets to add a «doom» element to all the brawny mas­culinity.

 

Of course, something like ʽBreach Of Leaseʼ is, first and foremost, a self-conscious attempt at repeating the success of ʽD.O.A.ʼ (although it was never released as a single: big mistake for the band, actually, to override it with the relatively toothless ballad ʽA Certain Kindʼ). But it is more ambitious than ʽD.O.A.ʼ (lyrically, the «breach of lease» refers to the relations between man and God, no less) and has a better chorus — wordless, in fact, just an inspirationally played descen­ding heavy riff that could rival Iommi, issue of guitar tone omitted. It lacks the gory sensationa­lism of ʽD.O.A.ʼ, and you can't sing "I REMEMBER!" at the top of your whiskey-aided lungs to the anthemic chorus, but it's the better song out of the two anyway.

 

Other highlights include ʽWhiskey Vengeanceʼ, a song that has both the words ʽwhiskeyʼ and ʽvengeanceʼ in its title, which is very appropriate for a band called Bloodrock, and sounds like a Western movie theme with just a small pinch of B-movie horror spirit thrown in; and ʽKool-Aid-Kidsʼ, with a speedy guitar / organ dialog that is very close in effect to classic Deep Purple — I am particularly partial to the relentlessly pounding main guitar riff, but the whole song is deli­vered over six minutes in what feels like one correctly focused breath.

 

As usual, Bloodrock are at their weakest when they start going all soulful on our asses, even getting downright preachy on ʽSong For A Brotherʼ, a number that is, fortunately, an inoffensive blues-rock jam for about half of its duration. The only really weak number is ʽA Certain Kindʼ, although it is useful to remember where that one came from — it is actually a cover of a ballad from the self-titled debut of Soft Machine! One thing you can't deny is that these Bloodrock guys were much better educated than people usually want to give them credit for. Problem is, they can't do much with the song other than just reduce it to a rather mediocre hillbilly-ballad level, and Rutledge's singing loses its pizzazz every time he rinses the «evil» out of it.

 

These are all but minor exceptions, though. In general, Bloodrock 3 is all about anger, frustration, paranoia, and the local Texan interpretation of the apocalypse. It ain't no masterpiece, but it's got a mix of American roots-rock, British heavy metal, and continental «artsiness» that very few people... come to think of it, nobody could get such a good grip on. Even if the songs may not strike you as powerful compared to those people from whom Rutledge and co. were taking les­sons, you still got to remember — this sonic blend is quite a thing in itself, and even if I didn't like the songs (but I do), I'd still end up with a thumbs up.

 

U.S.A. (1971)

 

1) It's A Sad World; 2) Don't Eat The Children; 3) Promises; 4) Crazy 'Bout You Babe; 5) Hangman's Dance; 6) American Burn; 7) Rock & Roll Candy Man; 8) Abracadaver; 9) Magic Man; 10) Erosion.

 

The last and most colorful — at least, in regard to the sleeve — album by the original Bloodrock, before Rutledge and Pickens left the band to a cruel and miserable fate. No major changes in style, but you can see a slight increase in the number of tracks, which indicates the transition to a more compact, less epic scale of things. Even the longest song here, ʽMagic Manʼ, is not a spooky Gothic phantasmagoria à la ʽD.O.A.ʼ or ʽBreach Of Leaseʼ, but a restrained, collected blues-rocker, the most «phantasmagoric» piece of which might be the opening electric piano solo (si­milar in style to and possibly influenced by Ray Manzarek's solo in ʽRiders On The Stormʼ, though, naturally, nowhere near as brilliantly constructed).

 

The thing is, with this record Bloodrock seem to be taking their «social duties» more seriously than ever — song after song carries a flash of some apocalyptic vision or a scrap of some prophetic message. With Bloodrock's lack of proper atmospheric skills, these messages never carry the convincing force of a ʽGimmie Shelterʼ or a Dark Side Of The Moon, but at least it helps Rutledge, Pickens, and Co. to preserve the «snappy» attitude of their best efforts so far and deliver the goods with enough energy and feeling to shoo away Mr. Languid Boredom.

 

Not that I could name any particular highlights. For some weird reason, the most memorable bit on the album for me has always been the maniacal laughter fit at the end of ʽAmerican Burnʼ which I have always associated with the album sleeve (which, when fully spread, depicts a very green Mephistopheles embracing the Capitol with one hand and performing lobotomy with the other) even without realizing that the lyrics of the song are indeed referring to the same cover. Which is a little embarrassing, since the song is riff-based, after all, and should be memorable for its twin guitar/organ melodic line instead. But it isn't.

 

Still, we could at least namedrop ʽDon't Eat The Childrenʼ, a fairly upbeat and jolly tune to be matched with such a title, especially when it comes to the fussy honky-tonk piano solo; the harsh funk-rocker ʽRock & Roll Candy Manʼ; and the closest thing here to an actual «epic» — ʽHang­man's Danceʼ, which borrows the chords from the coda to Yes's ʽStarship Trooperʼ but puts them to different use, replacing the beauty-focused futuristic gaze of Yes with a grittier, more grounded perspective on current things (not that Bloodrock ever created anything as breathtaking as ʽStar­ship Trooperʼ, but at least they tried).

 

But in the end, my thumbs up for this album would be explained not by any individual songs, but rather just by the record showing some character. It's all mild and never rocks you to the core, yet most of the songs are infused with a mix of sadness, anger, and irony that you wouldn't expect from a completely «generic» American hard rock album. The lack of a single distinctive «peak» like ʽD.O.A.ʼ may actually help things — the music here does not get by on goofy (gory) gim­mickry, but rather on this sense of sadness that subtly inhabits the melodies and even Rutledge's vocal deliveries, which get progressively less brawny and more tragic. As it is, USA may not be a great album, or it may not even be Bloodrock's best album, but it may be that one Bloodrock album which has finally found itself a general purpose. Ironically, God (or Mephisto) simply would not have that, so USA would also be the last LP from classic era Bloodrock as we know it.

 

BLOODROCK LIVE (1972)

 

1) Intro; 2) Castle Of Thoughts; 3) Breach Of Lease; 4) Lucky In The Morning; 5) Kool Aid Kids; 6) DOA; 7) You Gotta Roll; 8) Cheater; 9) Jessica; 10) Gotta Find A Way.

 

Quite superfluous, really. When it comes to hard-rocking bands playing live, you generally expect them to pull all the stops that haven't already been pulled in the studio, but this particular live album shows there was fairly little left to pull. So little, in fact, that Jim Rutledge even went all the way to dishonor the band by including two studio tracks, slightly remixed and overlaid with fake applause (ʽYou Gotta Rollʼ and ʽCheaterʼ), because, apparently, there was not enough material for a proper double live album. Considering that the final recording still only lasts for barely over an hour, they could have easily gone with a single long LP instead of two short-run­ning ones instead — but double (and triple) live albums being all the rage circa 1972, Bloodrock preferred a different shade of shame. Come to think of it, maybe they thought that by mid-1972, nobody would remember how the old tunes went anyway.

 

The actual live recordings cover the band's first three albums (U.S.A. is not included at all, pro­bably because the live shows were played before its release) and, for the most part, are under­whelming. The mix is good enough, and the band gels together fairly well, but the songs are played in rather strict accordance with the studio originals, small minutiae notwithstanding, and even if the setlist is consistently strong (with the possible exception of ʽLucky In The Morningʼ, although that song, with its arena flavor and hymnal pretense, is clearly a natural candidate for a live highlight), the band does virtually nothing to expand on the songs' potential.

 

The only exception is an extended version of ʽGotta Find A Wayʼ, mainly through the addition of some unimpressive jamming and organ soloing and a very shaky, faux-energetic bit of audience participation (which, among other things, comprises Jim Rutledge trying to scat in between the collective clamoring — not a very harmonious activity). In the end, that makes the song worse than it used to be, while everything else is just about the same. And you know there's something deeply not right with a hard rock band if it simply replicates its hard rock sound on stage.

 

I mean, even AC/DC tried to rip it up harder than in the studio — not an easy task, but occasionally, they did manage. Bloodrock, on the contrary, do not even try. Maybe it is because they thought of themselves as an «art» band rather than just rock'n'rollers, but, well, they thought wrong: these songs need to be crispy and crunchy — simply reproducing all the lumpy slowness of ʽBreach Of Leaseʼ and ʽD.O.A.ʼ the way it used to be does not work. I cannot give the album a thumbs down, since the setlist saves it fairly well — in fact, feel free to use it as an introduction to the basic Bloodrock sound if you wish — but, unfortunately, it will not let you know anything (good) about Bloodrock that you did not already know otherwise, even though it should have.

 

PASSAGE (1972)

 

1) Help Is On The Way; 2) Scottsman; 3) Juice; 4) The Power; 5) Life Blood; 6) Days And Nights; 7) Lost Fame; 8) Thank You Daniel Ellsberg; 9) Fantasy.

 

More accurately, I think the album's real title is Bloodrock Passage, since what we see on the cover is the image of a ship passing between what might look like two bloody rocks. In that case, the name of the band is either Zero, which happens to coincide with the number of positive emo­tions I get from listening to the album, or Led Zeppelin. In any case, this band is definitely not Bloodrock, an early 1970s Texan rock outfit that produced such grumbly monsters as Bloodrock, Bloodrock 2, Bloodrock 3, Bloodrock USA, Bloodrock Live, and that great lost masterpiece, Bloodrock Play The Entire Engelbert Humperdinck Catalog Just To Prove That Nobody Ever Pigeonholes A Real Texan.

 

What this new band is, having just lost Jim Rutledge and Lee Pickens, i.e. the only half-decent reasons one ever listens to a Bloodrock album, is a progressive rock band with a fixation on folk, classical, and jazz influences. The new singer guy... well, imagine the Rolling Stones losing both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and replacing them with, say, Woolly Wolstenholme from Barclay James Harvest, because, I mean, who else do you turn to when you are really in such a desperate need to salvage the Rolling Stones brand? Except you have to downscale the volume a bit: Warren Ham is really no Woolly when it comes to talent. He is a competent singer, as well as saxophone and flute player, but all he really knew at that point was how to listen to others — Jethro Tull, King Crimson, ELP — and imitate them. Granted, this was better than what followed: in the early 1980s, Ham would be touring with Kansas, then he would go on to join Kerry Liv­gren's new Christian rock band AD as lead singer, and, finally, become a Christian rock solo per­former in his own limited right.

 

Of course, condemning an album like Passage just because «it ain't real Bloodrock» is silly. Passage is a very bad record not because it dares to replace the heavy riffs, gloomy lyrics, and scorching solos of classic Bloodrock with more formally complex progressive rock escapades, flute solos, and synthesizer-led jams, but simply because all of this music happens to be very, very boring. The songs, mostly co-written with Ham and the band's old keyboard player Stephen Hill, all seem like pale, limp shadows of their betters, without a shred of individual vision and nowhere near close to their general energy level. In fact, I'd rather have preferred them to be awfully distasteful and primitive, like Uriah Heep — as such, they are not even any use as a pun­ching bag. Just your basic bland, instantly forgettable crap.

 

Just a couple of quick examples will suffice. ʽScottsmanʼ milks the same territory as Jethro Tull's Elizabethan marches — in fact, its main flute part echoes the "I've come down from the upper class..." part of the freshly released ʽThick As A Brickʼ, which could hardly be a coincidence. But there is no sharp Martin Barre guitar accompaniment to give it teeth, nor does Ham's attempt at «heroic» singing (for which his voice is too weak anyway) have any stun power — second-hand copying at its most blatant. Further on down the line, ʽDays And Nightsʼ is stretched to eight minutes in order to incorporate a lengthy jam section, a large part of which is driven by a brass riff expressly taken from King Crimson's ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ. Take it, but don't waste it — all it does is just hang there while the keyboard player noodles for several minutes around it with one of about eighty billion organ solos that were recorded in 1972 and all sounded the same (imitating either Emerson or Wakeman).

 

It gets worse, because Ham, Hill, and the rest of Hoodrock insist on being diverse and matching their progressive rock «skills» with time-honored Americana, so they also massacre funk (the one minute long introduction to ʽLost Fameʼ, after which it becomes an anthem to the power of the Mighty Moog), blues (ʽThank You, Daniel Ellsbergʼ, which has to be one of the lamest fusions of B. B. King with contemporary American politics that I've ever heard), and swamp rock (ʽThe Powerʼ). In conjunction with the original stiffness and lumpiness of the band's rhythm section, Ham's march-on-Christian-soldiers vocalizing and Hill's somnambulant keyboard tinkering re­duce each and every one of these genres to the nightmarish question of «does humanity actually need to listen to music, anyway?»

 

It is all so mind-numbing that I wouldn't even want to recommend the album to fans of Kansas — as much as I hate the band, at least it had its own silly schtick sort of worked out from the very beginning; Passage is just a meandering mess with no reason whatsoever to exist. Amazingly, the album almost managed to grope its way into the Top 100 — not so wonderous, perhaps, given the fact that Thick As A Brick had made it all the way to the top that very year, but at least, not too many people were tricked into a "hey, it's got flute on it, it's just like those groovy Jethro Tull guys!" mindset, so that's okay, and there is no need to accompany the thumbs down with any extra hatred. They pretty much got what they deserved, right on the spot.

 

WHIRLWIND TONGUES (1974)

 

1) It's Gonna Be Love; 2) Sunday Song; 3) Parallax; 4) Voices; 5) Eleanor Rigby; 6) Stilled By Whirlwind; 7) Guess What I Am; 8) Lady Of Love; 9) Jungle.

 

I am going against the grain here, including my own old assessment of this album, but I do be­lieve now that Whirlwind Tongues is an ever so slight improvement over Passage where song­writing and impartial self-assessment of the band's abilities are concerned. Not that it matters in the slightest: the Ham-led Bloodrock at their absolute best can only present sufficient interest for historians of the «pretentious pop music scene» in the post-Beatles, pre-punk era, and maybe for a small group of strange people who'd probably scare me shitless if they were to present themselves in person. But still, just for justice' sake: Whirlwind Tongues is weak, but not awful.

 

The major difference is that this time around, they are not so openly emulating their betters — they still have a serious problem with trying to find their own style, but something is beginning to materialize. Perhaps a sort of folk-rock sound in the vein of contemporary Traffic, but gentler and more sentimental (a.k.a. «sissy»). With an occasional surprise or two, and some basic diversity. No eight-minute epics with bad Moog solos (okay, some bad Moog solos are inevitable, but we could live with these). Mostly boring, sometimes too cute for their own good, but give them a break — they are really trying.

 

I mean, it must have taken some brainwork to take ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ, speed it up, add flutes, and make it rock, if only ever so softly, right? I must admit that it is a more inventive recasting of the song than Aretha Franklin's, for instance — I much prefer my ʽEleanor Rigbyʼ in a steady tempo, tight, focused, and with flutes than see it turned into a rather chaotic R&B number. Not that the world really needs either of these, but this novelty approach is not at all repugnant. Other than the singer getting a bit too carried away (should have kept it modestly trimmed, without any extra yeah yeah yeahs, I think), it's actually fun.

 

Other than that, ʽIt's Gonna Be Loveʼ is a solemn soft-rock anthem that suffers from the absence of authentic Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonies (and the presence of one of those corny Moog solos); ʽSunday Songʼ is loungey vaudeville that tries to mix sentimentality with humor; ʽParal­laxʼ is like Blind Faith's ʽDo What You Likeʼ with a Jethro Tull-style flute part thrown in; ʽVoicesʼ speeds along with good confidence and has the album's best riff, which would have been even better if they knew it themselves and got it rid of the distracting «flanging» effects; ʽStilled By Whirlwindʼ is too preachy, too long, has too many instances of the word "propaganda" and em­barrassing falsetto harmonies, but is okay otherwise; ʽGuess What I Amʼ is an awful piano ballad that shows Ham's lack of vocal power in all its anti-glory as the man desperately tries to prove that he can do it all, from tenor to falsetto; ʽLady Of Loveʼ is a simplistic serenade, not particularly redeemed by the heavy use of saxes blended into its primitive keyboard riff; and ʽJungleʼ is the band's attempt at doing something darker and weirder, partially successful, as they populate the minimalistic skeleton with «jungle noises».

 

Whew, at least there was some incentive to briefly namedrop all the songs on the album. That does not mean it merits a thumbs up, but it does mean there was enough diversity and creativity to evade any accusations of idleness and laziness. No talent, sure, but any idiot with talent can be creative — now creativity without talent, that's gotta count for something! In a way, it almost makes me feel sorry that the band finally called it a day soon afterwards — not sorry enough, though, to hunt for one more final LP, recorded in 1975, but shelved and not released officially until 2000 (as part of the rare 2-CD Triptych edition that combines both Ham-era albums with nine more songs, allegedly joined under the working title Unspoken Words).

 

Although, let us not exaggerate. Bloodrock were not all that outstanding in their prime, merely worth getting to know if you are a sucker for 1970 — and whichever direction Ham could take the survivors in the mid-Seventies would probably be a dead end, so I guess it's all for the better that we did not get to see the Bloodrock Disco Album, not to mention the Bloodrock Hair Metal Comeback, or be subjected to the «Bloodrock Dig Their New Indie Label So Much They Have Decided To Release Two New Albums Each Year For The Sake Of Their Three Fans» reality show. Having run out of blood (and out of rock) back in 1972, at best, they could be opening shows for the likes of Styx, and how much more embarrassment could this world stand?

 

BLOSSOM TOES

WE ARE EVER SO CLEAN (1967)

 

1) Look At Me I'm You; 2) I'll Be Late For Tea; 3) Remarkable Saga Of The Frozen Dog; 4) Telegram Tuesday; 5) Love Is; 6) What's It For; 7) People Of The Royal Parks; 8) What On Earth; 9) Mrs. Murphy's Budgerigar; 10) I Will Bring You This And That; 11) Mister Watchmaker; 12) When The Alarm Clock Rings; 13) The Intrepid Balloonist's Handbook Vol. 1; 14) You; 15) Track For Speedy Freaks Or Instant LP Digest.

 

How many times have we heard the term «Sgt. Pepper rip-off» applied to album so-and-so, only to put it on and understand that «being influenced by Sgt. Pepper» or even «being recorded in the era of Sgt. Pepper» would be a more honorable definition? The truth is that real «rip-offs» of Sgt. Pepper, as a rule, have not survived — be it the Stones, the Hollies, the Moody Blues, the Bee Gees, Procol Harum, or any other band of any notoriety that we still remember as having produced LPs in 1967, each of them had their own voice, with Sgt. Pepper spurring them on to flash it rather than just serving as a role model that had to be imitated throughout.

 

From that point of view, I've always been interested in actually hearing a «genuine» Sgt. Pepper rip-off — just for curiosity's sake: were there really any bands who'd slobber so much at the sanctuary of the Beatles to try and mime to all of their production techniques and melodic lan­guage elements? If there were any such albums, they must have quickly sunk to the bottom of the ridicule pit, not least because originality and stylistic autonomy were far more valued in 1967 than they are today. Yet out of everything that I have heard so far, it is this quirky debut album by the Blossom Toes that arguably comes closest to winning first prize.

 

Indeed, the Blossom Toes came together in early 1967, just as the Beatles were putting the final touches on Sgt. Pepper, and were immediately assigned to Giorgio Gomelsky's appropriately titled «Marmalade Records» label. The LP that the band recorded was announced in Melody Maker as «Giorgio Gomelsky's Lonely Hearts Club Band» — and for once, the label was perfect­ly accurate: not because the album was as good as Sgt. Pepper, but because it basically used Sgt. Pepper (and a bit of Revolver) as its blueprint.

 

The two main songwriters in the band were Brian Godding and Jim Cregan, both of them singing and playing guitars, with some additional writing contributions from drummer Kevin Westlake and maestro Gomelsky himself (only bass player Brian Belshaw is left as the poor schmuck with no songwriting royalties whatsoever). To be fair, Godding and Cregan are not exactly gene-by-gene projections of Lennon and McCartney. Lyrically and atmospherically, they also take a lot of clues from the Kinks — in fact, We Are Ever So Clean, with its local imagery and whimsical ideas that are part-time redcoat marching music and part-time Mary Poppins, is such a quintes­sentially British album that its lack of popularity outside the UK is quite easy to explain (a simi­lar story later happened to The Cheerful Insanity Of Giles, Giles & Fripp).

 

It is in their electic approach to things and in their «anything-goes» approach to arrangements that the Sgt. Pepper idolatry really shows up. Backward tapes? Eastern-tinged vocal harmonies? Piccolo trumpet solos? Echo, fuzz, overkill overdubbing? The general feel of a freaky circus show? It's all here, even including a frenetic one-minute «recapitulation», at the exact same time, of all of the album's themes at the end. Yes, the lads are clever enough so as not to steal anything outright (the only time I caught them redhanded was during the call-and-response psychedelic harmonies at the fade-out of ʽWhat On Earthʼ — that trick is lifted directly from ʽShe Said She Saidʼ), but on the whole, there is no mistake: We Are Ever So Clean is a self-conscious, amusingly arrogant attempt to outplay the Beatles at their own game by raising the stakes in such departments as «extravagance», «absurdity», «eccentricity», and «vaudeville».

 

The good news is that the music really sounds as unpredictable, crazy, and all over the place as that description suggests. The bad news is that the album has no real substance: it is daring and risky, but what exactly is being gained by these risks remains unclear. Song after song, the Blos­som Toes are challenging our imagination, and I don't know about yours, but mine rather quickly gets stumped and disconcerted. Where the Beatles and the Kinks, even at their worst, were sort of goal-oriented and evocative, songs like ʽI'll Be Late For Teaʼ, even despite having the word tea in the title, are, instead, rather befuddling. "Look at me I'm you! Look at me I'm you!" goes the pounding chorus to the lead-in track, but it's not as if the decisiveness of that declaration were particularly convincing: not only am I perfectly sure that I am not any of the lead singers in the Blossom Toes, but I even have a hard time finding out what the Blossom Toes are as such.

 

Which is not to say that We Are Ever So Clean is not bizarrely fascinating in much the same way in which, say, the Animal Collective have re-defined «bizarre fascination» in the 21st cen­tury. If anything, there is simply so much going on here that, by probabilistic reasoning, the brain is bound to explode in a flash of white lightning sooner or later. Maybe it is not very likely to happen on catchy kiddie anthems like ʽRemarkable Saga Of The Frozen Dogʼ, but it just might come to pass on the weirdly orchestrated psychedelic love ballad ʽLove Isʼ, or on ʽPeople Of The Royal Parksʼ, which starts off like your average Kinks or Small Faces-style British march and then threatens to fall apart in a different manner every thirty seconds, or on the accordeon-led mini-saga of ʽIntrepid Balloonist's Handbookʼ, or anywhere else, in fact.

 

Unfortunately, neither Godding nor Cregan happened to have the true melodic genius of a Len­non, or a McCartney, or a Ray Davies, and ultimately, these songs may be «stunning», but they are not very memorable, except where the songwriters are relying on music hall clichés, usually the same ones that had already been exploited much better by said McCartney or said Ray Davies (or would be exploited — truth be told, I will take the simplistic melodic potential of a single ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ over all the intricacies of We Are Ever So Clean). Or, if we wish to avoid mentioning the word «genius», it may simply be so that Godding and Cregan are only focused on being eccentric and whimsical, rather than trying to pack some deep, genuine emo­tion into the psychedelic box. Sgt. Pepper, after all, puts you, the listener, on a distant fantasy planet; the Blossom Toes hit much closer to their UK homeland, but reduce it to a rather clownish per­spective. We Are Ever So Clean attempts to be a little bit of everything, but in the end, is neither too deep, nor too funny, nor too beautiful, nor too evocative.

 

A thumbs up all the same, because I heartily recommend getting acquainted with this quaint little artefact — first, you might see something in it that I do not, and second, the workmanship is admirable per se, whether it contains substance or does not. Just the very sound that they get going, all of those layers of instrumentation, it actually feels very «modern»: dozens of 21st cen­tury retro-oriented indie-pop bands continue to milk this baroque whimsy tit, except that these bands aren't actually living in the middle of it, whereas the Blossom Toes are «the real authentic thing» from one of the greatest years in the history of popular music. At the very least, it was enough to warrant a recent CD reissue with a heapload of bonus tracks (outtakes, B-sides, live and BBC performances etc.), even including a live rendition of Bob Dylan's ʽI'll Be Your Baby Tonightʼ from early 1968 or so — by which time, so it seems, the roots-rock revolution was already catching up with the band.

 

IF ONLY FOR A MOMENT (1969)

 

1) Peace Loving Man; 2) Kiss Of Confusion; 3) Listen To The Silence; 4) Love Bomb; 5) Billy Boo The Gunman; 6) Indian Summer; 7) Just Above My Hobby Horse's Head; 8) Wait A Minute.

 

Is this really the same band that was ever so clean but two years ago? Looks like somebody de­cided to get dirty after all. The drummer is different, but other than that, it's all the same guys writing and performing the songs — yet apparently, they have switched to heavier stuff, and I might mean that in reference to chemical substances, too. No more whimsy, afternoon tea, and music hall; we are going hard and heavy all the way, and if you want my opinion on what is the closest prototype of this sound, I'd say... early Chicago. (Incidentally, Chicago did release their debut LP in April of 1969, and If Only For A Moment dates from July of the same year.) Or any of those loud, lumpy 1968-69 bands who took after Hendrix but couldn't get their psychedelia to properly roll, rather than just rock, and ended up sounding like World War I-era tanks next to Jimi's elegant cruiser models.

 

Not only that, but somebody also told them they had to get serious — everybody's doing it and all, so a proper LP striving for artistic recognition has to get away from «frozen little dogs» and make a statement of high social significance. The first song already, as you can tell by the title, is a sarcastic pacifist anthem ("take this bomb, drop it on old Hong Kong" — I'm sure they meant "Saigon", but maybe they got sidetracked by Hoagy Carmichael), and then the «bomb» motive surfaces in a different, but related, context on ʽLove Bombʼ (which we need to make things right), and then they also cover a song by Richie Havens, in the name of peace, love, and understanding. Overall, it's all starting to make sense now.

 

Unfortunately, this self-conscious transformation into a heavy blues-rock outfit with psychedelic overtones never feels honest — there is not a single song here that would convincingly prove that the Blossom Toes keep on doing, or at least searching for, «their thing». ʽPeace Loving Manʼ, which was the single, is moderately catchy, but instead of an alternately horrifying and optimi­stically soulful anthem to the evils of war of joys and peace, they end up creating some sort of vaudeville number, with horrible vocals on the verses (Brian Belshaw sings them like a terminal stage TB patient with electrodes attached to his toes) and a chorus that still can't help but carry traces of merry music hall. Granted, when you throw in the chaotic bridge sections with «spooky» whispered vocals and shit, the track ultimately emerges as an intriguing musical freak mutant, but since that could have hardly been the original intention (Bonzo Dog Band is not an inspiration for these people), the result is still a failure.

 

Here is what I really appreciate about the album: the broken riff of ʽBilly Boo The Gunmanʼ, which, together with the cowbell, seems like the forgotten grandaddy of Blue Öyster Cult; the little quasi-Elizabethan guitar dance melody that crops up in the corners of ʽIndian Summerʼ and seems like the forgotten great-great-uncle of Jethro Tull circa Thick As A Brick; and... that's more or less about it. There is a lot of different musical ideas scattered around, but they never combine into anything worth a serious discussion, and the song lengths can be exhausting — nowhere more so than on ʽLove Bombʼ, an «epic» that takes like millions of years to build up... to what? A happy carnivalesque chorus that goes: "What we need is a love BOMB / We don't have any and we need SOME / Easily operated, purified love BOMB"? It doesn't even matter that these lyrics stink to highest of heavens (how does one go about purifying a bomb?); it matters that the chorus in general, music, words, singing, is a laugh rather than a prayer.

 

Overall, the transformation is a disaster: at least ʽPeace Loving Manʼ and ʽLove Bombʼ are so bad they actually give food for thought and curses, but most of the other songs fall into that most dreadful of categories — «non-descript» — that condemns the record to total oblivion. Even the hard-rocking guitar solos feel like second-hand imitations of Hendrix, Clapton, and the Frisco people, without any success in finding one's own ground. And even if the songwriting on We Are Ever So Clean was never all that good, the album's head-spinning kaleidoscopic programme could easily and harmlessly trick you into thinking those were great songs — here, gruesomely stretched out song lengths and repetitive passages could not even provide a decent soundtrack to a reefer-based experience; thumbs down all the way.

 

Naturally, the album neither managed to sell nor become any sort of cult favorite — at which point the best thing that the poor Blossom Toes could probably do was to dissolve, so they dis­solved. From then on, you could look for Jim Cregan in the ranks of Family (whom he joined in time to record their last and arguably weakest album, It's Only A Movie), Cockney Rebel (with whom he recorded ʽMake Me Smileʼ), and finally, Rod Stewart (whom he faithfully accompanied all the way down to the lowest depths of his career, Camouflage included). Brian Godding, on the other hand, chose a less flashy pop route and went on to hone his skills in various jazz and prog rock outfits (even including Magma, that enigmatic French band, at one point). Which, I should add, hardly excuses him from the embarrassment of having both ʽPeace Loving Manʼ and ʽLove Bombʼ credited all to himself.

 

BLUE CHEER

VINCEBUS ERUPTUM (1968)

 

1) Summertime Blues; 2) Rock Me, Baby; 3) Doctor Please; 4) Out Of Focus; 5) Parchment Farm; 6) Second Time Around.

 

«The Jimi Hendrix Experience for Lunkheads», this is what this band really is, but if you ask me, this is still much better than the poseur professionalism of Grand Funk Railroad, whose enduring popula­rity should have been more justly enjoyed by Blue Cheer. Had they been a Detroit band, their bite might have been worse than their bark, as they would have to compete with the Stooges; as it happened, they were based in San Francisco, where they did enjoy the cult status of the hea­viest, wildest band for miles around, but depended a bit too much on the usual «blues pedigree» that was shared by everybody in the business, and, despite being at about the same level of formal musical competence as the Stooges (zero), did not catch neither the contemporary nor the «revi­sionist» critical eye with the same force.

 

But they really should have. For one thing, there is so much that is «wrong» with this band that this realization alone should already turn them into cultural heroes. Like, what is their very name supposed to mean — how on Earth does one produce a «blue cheer»? Or if you are really going to show off by giving your debut LP a Latin name, how about getting it right? The correct Latin translation of "to break out of chains" would be vinculis eruptum, whereas vincebus is not even a proper wordform in the language. Or if you are covering Mose Allison's ʽParchman Farmʼ, do you really need to show how much you care by retitling it ʽParchment Farmʼ? It's not like any in­mates in any American prison ever spent much time scraping calfskin.

 

However, defying the laws of grammar, orthography, and semantics is one thing for a musician, and defying the music is quite another. From a simple, straightforward point of view, what this album represents is an attempt by three well-meaning, but barely competent guys (Dickie Peter­son on bass and vocals, Leigh Stephens on guitar, Paul Whaley on drums) to provide a local Fri­sco substitute for Hendrix — mainly by acquiring the same kind of musical equipment, but defi­nitely not by learning the same kinds of chords or nurturing the same kind of imaginative vision. In other words, an embarrassing fraud.

 

From a somewhat more complex point of view, this is a «caveman punk» take on Hendrix that could deserve its own special acclaim. Not just on Hendrix, of course: Blue Cheer were fascina­ted by everything as long as it was loud, screechy, and heavy — their cover of ʽSummertime Bluesʼ must have been inspired by The Who's version (which was not yet commercially released at the time, yet The Who had had the song in their repertoire since the early days), and they were certainly no strangers to the Yardbirds and Cream, either. But where they could not match any of these guys in terms of instrumental prowess, they could match and overcome them in terms of sheer brute force, which is really what classic Blue Cheer is all about: PURE MUSCLE.

 

If the opening chords to ʽSummertime Bluesʼ do not sound quite as mind-blowing as Jimi's ʽFoxy Ladyʼ, from which they are borrowed, at least they are more distorted — and if the body of the song does not produce the impression of a thunderstorm (because the bass and drum parts are fairly wimpy when compared with the Entwistle/Moon rhythm section), it still comes closer to con­veying «dumb teenage frustration» than the exquisite interplay between The Who could ever bring it. Which is to say, really, that this particular version also deserves to exist and be listened to — even if most of whatever Leigh Stephens is playing here does not make any particular musi­cal sense, other than "hey look, I can make those strings go WHEEEEE! and now I can make them go BOOOOO! and now I can make y'all believe I'm playing this thing with my teeth!" Fun thing, that rock'n'roll stuff.

 

They do have a feel for it, and it can be infectious. The songs are not so much songs as simply vehicles for wild improvisation (Peterson is credited with writing three of them, but other than the mediocre riff on ʽOut Of Focusʼ, I have been unable to spot much «writing» going on) — ʽSe­cond Time Aroundʼ sounds like they just left the tape rolling for three extra minutes after the song was over, and then decided to leave that uncontrolled chaos on the record (in honor of ʽThird Stone From The Sunʼ or any such other Hendrix noisefest). Laughable, yes, but every once in a while it so happens that all you need to do at a certain moment is just «go to eleven», and the result will be... impressive?

 

Besides, it's not like they do not know how to play at all. Stephens' obsession with pedals, wob­bles, fuzz, and distortion does not prevent him from correctly resolving the melody where he sees it fit to be resolved, or from borrowing some tricks from the arsenal of free jazz artists as well: at times, it is hard to understand if he is just being drunk / sluggish / incompetent or if he is really trying to pull off an Ornette Coleman. Whatever be the case, his playing turns Vincebus Erup­tum into the craziest hard rock album of 1968 I have ever heard, bar none — an affair in which he is much aided by Peterson (whose sin... screaming is a little colorless, but loud and brawny enough to match the guitar) and Whaley, who gives his best Keith Moon / Mitch Mitchell impres­sion — it still ain't good enough, but not a lot of people in Frisco were even trying.

 

In a system of values that praises «wildness» and «kick-ass potential» in rock music over every­thing else, Vincebus Eruptum is one of the indisputable champions. In a subtler system that re­quires, at the very least, a unique or technically gifted playing style, and at most, an individual artistic vision, Blue Cheer will forever be stuck as one of the epitomes of bad taste. As for my­self, in situations like these I do tend to select the «subtlety be damned» approach — the album has always been a minor favorite of mine, and I still go for the thumbs up judgement. Want it or not, these guys pretty much invented «brontosaur rock», where size does matter, and I both respect it — a little bit — and enjoy it — especially when it helps flush out unwanted guests.

 

PS. Oh, and, if I am not mistaken, that riff they hit in the middle of ʽParchment Farmʼ pretty much predicts ʽIn-A-Gadda-Da-Vidaʼ; so there you have some of the band's immediate influence on their contempo­raries.

 

OUTSIDEINSIDE (1968)

 

1) Feathers From Your Tree; 2) Sun Cycle; 3) Just A Little Bit; 4) Gypsy Ball; 5) Come And Get It; 6) Satisfaction; 7) The Hunter; 8) Magnolia Caboose; 9) Babylon; 10) Fortunes.

 

The idea of a band like Blue Cheer trying to add a little «intellect» on their sophomore record may sound fairly scary in theory, but the results are hardly catastrophic — most importantly, the album does show that they were something more than just a one-shot act, if not something much more than a one-shot act. Given the context of the times, their decision to push the controls some­what farther in the direction of psychedelia and even the newly-emerging «art rock» ideology was not surprising; what was surprising is that, in a certain way, they almost managed to get away with it. Under a slight risk of getting sued for slander, I'd suggest that, perhaps, this was due to their fortunate rejection of originality — most of the musical ideas on Outsideinside belong not to Blue Cheer, but to somebody else, although all of them were properly subjected to the patented Blue Cheer treatment (louder, fuzzier, clumsier).

 

First thing one hears is a piano. A piano? Not a mistake, no, the band has indeed enlisted the ser­vices of Ralph Burns Kellogg, a professional musician, to help them get accommodated in this brand new world that just keeps upping its requirements for bands that want to stay alive and well and ahead of the competition. Next come the overdubs — the vocals on ʽFeathers From Your Treeʼ come from all sides, echoing the verses and framing out the choruses like they belonged to a small band of angels. The only things that still remind us of the beast inside is the obligatory heavy fuzz of the guitar and the brawny screaming of the lead vocalist. The end result is indeed quite trippy, if not particularly good: as far as soaking basic, brutal, fuzzy hard rock in psy­che­delic effects is concerned, Hawkwind would later take this art to a whole new level.

 

Although, formally, there are only two covers on the album (an intentionally «Godawful-™» ren­dition of ʽSatisfactionʼ and an altogether less shocking and much more reverential ʽHunterʼ from the stockpile of Albert King), like I said, much, if not most of the other stuff is thoroughly deri­vative as well. For instance, ʽGypsy Ballʼ is what Jimi's ʽWind Cries Maryʼ might have sounded like if the guitar were three times as distorted, the drummer tossed aside all modesty, and the overall point were to crush, rather than seduce, the listener. ʽBabylonʼ is a slowed down and fun­kified take on ʽSweet Little Sixteenʼ, sometimes drifting off into generic 12-bar blues territory. ʽFortunesʼ is like a «heavy bubble-gum» amalgamation of ʽFortune Tellerʼ and some Nuggets single whose title escapes me at the moment. And so on and on and on.

 

Yet, at the same time, taken in context, Outsideinside comes across as an amazingly crude pio­neering effort. All those early 1970s bands trying to put a «heavy» spin on every musical style (and subtlety and «tastefulness» and meticulous planning be damned), be it psychedelia à la Hawkwind, pub-rock à la Slade, or bubblegum-rock à la Sweet — in embryonic form, it's all here on Blue Cheer's second album. It is embarrassing, yes, because it clearly aspires to some­thing «higher» than a simple urge to bang your head against the wall while trying to overcome your sex drive, and it is pretty hard to aim «higher» while still trying to bang your head against the same wall — especially if you are not endowed with the chops of a Jimmy Page or even the simple genius of a Tony Iommi.

 

But in between all the embarrassment, there is still plenty of sheer amusement going on. Every­thing is unpredictable — you never know when they are going to speed up, slow down, throw in a guitar or organ line that absolutely and utterly «does not fit», or just boogie along without a set purpose (ʽMagnolia Cabooseʼ, a brief, ferocious instrumental that might actually be the most passionate track on the entire album — even if, like everything else, it is highly derivative, this time from Jimi's ʽDriving Southʼ, I believe). And for every single piece that does not work, like ʽSatisfactionʼ (useless without the sneering attitude), there is a ʽHunterʼ that does work — few people could say "I've got you in the sight of my love gun" more convincingly than Peterson did that in 1968. It all adds up to a thumbs up, after all. Plus, Outsideinside would turn out to be the last album by the original lineup — Leigh Stephens would quit soon after the official release, and the band would never be the same again, so one more reason here for every fan of Vincebus to pay extra attention.

 

NEW! IMPROVED! (1969)

 

1) When It All Gets Old; 2) West Coast Child Of Sunshine; 3) I Want My Baby Back; 4) Aces 'n' Eights; 5) As Long As I Live; 6) It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; 7) Peace Of Mind; 8) Fruit & Iceburgs; 9) Honey Butter Lover.

 

I think the title said it all even way back in 1969, when the words «new» and «improved» actually could have quite a positive ring to them. Yes, even great bands with established formulae were capable of occasionally «renewing» and «improving» their image. But how do you improve on a band like Blue Cheer, on an album like Vincebus? You just don't, unless you totally and decisi­vely change your direction — and how could a band like Blue Cheer change its direction? One doesn't usually expect a Neanderthal to rapidly accelerate his evolution in the presence of a Cro­magnon. There are some laws of nature that are quite tough to beat, you know.

 

Actually, this record is not so much of an improvement as it is of a total mess. With the depar­ture of Leigh Stephens, the band was left without an essential ingredient, and had to reestablish its balance — first, by hiring little-known guitar player Randy Holden, a former member of The Other Half (an underappreciated, short-lived psycho-garage band from LA), then, after he found out that his style was largely incompatible with the band's image, by replacing him with Bruce Stephens (presumably, no relation to Leigh). Consequently, the band's third LP featured both of their guitarists — the earlier one on Side B, the later one on Side A — and essentially sounds like two completely different mini-records.

 

The Bruce Stephens stuff is generally tolerable, but a little boring. None of the songs come within ten miles of the band's trademark crunchy bombast — it is all a rather chaotic mix of blues-rock, psychedelia, «roots» stuff, and pub-bound braggadocio, generally derivative and hollow. Original ideas are, for the most part, silly, like the attempt to reinvent Dylan's ʽIt Takes A Lot To Laughʼ as a heavy, aggressive rocker, with Dickie screaming his head off on the final verse and the gui­tars threatening the listener in a glum Chicago-electric-blues sort of way. Nice try, but either they didn't get the song's essence or they failed in their quest to mutate it.

 

Even more laughable is their piano player's contribution, ʽWhen It All Gets Oldʼ, sort of a mix of Traffic with Satanic-era Rolling Stones — a sunny, friendly psychedelic anthem that invites you to «bring back a whole new change» (how do you actually bring back a change?) without offering any collateral, such as, for instance, a truly mindblowing sound effect or melodic synthesis. Blue Cheer as the late-coming prophets of The Great Revolution of Conscience? Yeah, right. Even the pigs wouldn't be flying until at least eight years later.

 

Instead of talking about the rest of the songs on Side A (we could, since some are better than others, but it is still hardly worth the space), let us therefore look at Side B, which reflects an en­tirely different ideology. There are only two lengthy songs on it, plus a short useless acoustic coda, but they make all the difference, amply featuring the talents of Randy Holden — the guy who has been called, by some critics, one of the greatest overlooked guitarists of the 1960s, and for a very good reason, I'd say.

 

ʽFruit & Icebergsʼ, in particular, is transformed by Holden into one of the finest examples of the era's heavy blues-rock style — not as experimental and groundbreaking as contemporary stuff by Jeff Beck or Led Zeppelin, but every bit as powerful and awe-inspiring. The descending bass riff sets a creepy, nightmarish mood that wouldn't be out of place on a classic Black Sabbath record (no wonder, considering that it incorporates the same «Devil's Chord» tritone as ʽBlack Sabbathʼ) and the lengthy solo that comes in at 2:23 and occupies the bulk of the song is, likewise, one of the most «evil» solos of the decade — where all of his garage predecessors were using their axes to express righteous anger and straightforward frustration, Holden clearly uses his to summon the forces of evil; had he come forward with the song a year earlier, it would have made a great soundtrack for Night Of The Living Dead. The only thing that feels altogether out of place on this fantastic mood piece are the lyrics — "It's so nice to feel the colors / All days when you are new / You close your eyes / And feel the foam of silence"? Unless it's spoken from Dracula's point of view, I just refuse to understand.

 

ʽPeace Of Mindʼ, which is the slightly longer piece, is not nearly as impressive: its main part is an arpeggiated, slowly moving dirge, waking up midway through and launching into yet another massive Holden solo, by which time, unfortunately, it can no longer qualify for masterpiece sta­tus. Still, the solo is equally nimble and melodic, with a perfect flow and sense of timing — enough to make one think of an analogy with Mick Taylor, another technically and emotionally gifted blues-based musician who happened to find himself in the utterly wrong band, ultimately, to the great benefit of all mankind. Although, come to think of it, ʽPeace Of Mindʼ and ʽFruit & Ice­bergsʼ are basically Randy Holden songs with Dickie Peterson guest-starring on them — this has very little to do with any kinds of «Blue Cheer», and this is why Holden spent so little time with the band. There were really only two choices — either «Blue Cheer» would have to become «The Randy Holden Experience», or Randy Holden would have to go on increasing his experience without any assistance from Blue Cheer.

 

As far as any final judgement is concerned, I would award an unquestionable thumbs up to Side B and a sceptical, if not altogether hateful, thumbs down to Side A — merely to reinforce the idea of «two different entities». But if a single answer is still required, I will repeat that ʽFruit & Icebergsʼ alone is worth the full price of the album: there is something about that solo there that I cannot remember about any style of 1960s guitar playing. It's like a perfect merger of the «thin», folk-and-country-derived electric styles of West Coast bands and the «thick», aggressive, show-no-mercy style of British hard rockers. And if you play it loudly in a church, it will most certainly attract lightning, I'm sure of it.

 

BLUE CHEER (1969)

 

1) Fool; 2) You're Gonna Need Someone; 3) Hello L.A., Bye Bye Birmingham; 4) Saturday Freedom; 5) Ain't That The Way (Love's Supposed To Be); 6) Rock And Roll Queens; 7) Better When We Try; 8) Natural Man; 9) Lovin' You's Easy; 10) The Same Old Story.

 

With Paul Whaley out of the band, replaced by Norman Mayell, Peterson is now the sole original member — but nothing changes much, because Whaley's drumming on New! Improved! was already quite timid compared to Blue Cheer's original style, and this self-titled release largely con­tinues in the vein of Side A of Improved!: ten more pieces of well-mannered blues-rock, with catchy pop choruses and guitars playing conventional melodies. At this point in time, they essen­tially sound like Steppenwolf, or any other such bands: the sound is «rock», but with emphasis on «light fun» rather than oddball psychedelia or scary heaviness. No questions about «uniqueness» or «unpredictability» — everything is played quite safe, even homely.

 

The only things that save the record from total oblivion is a limited amount of creativity and a pinch of humor. I could pretend if I wanted to, but there is no way I could really avoid the catchy impact of a song like ʽNatural Manʼ — a minor pop-rock gem in its own rights, with the bumbly grumbly bass line, the «slyly smiling» riff, and the ideally constructed vocal melody. This is as far removed from the original Blue Cheer as possible: the song belongs in jokerland territory, and the meticulousness of its execution would have aggravated the original band to no end. "You can't buy the love of a natural man" is as good a vocal hook as any, and it's a good thing that the song really doesn't try too hard to uncover the band's understanding of what a «natural man» is actually supposed to mean, in their own world. It's just a funny song.

 

The first and last song are fun tunes as well, both contributed by local friend Gary Lee Yoder, who would eventually join the band on a full-time basis for a while — here, he just donates them ʽFoolʼ, a ʽJumpin' Jack Flashʼ-type song with a pub rather than arena flavor (play the two tunes back to back, and no better demonstration suffices to show why the Stones ruled the world while Blue Cheer, particularly in their «timid» incarnation, were a third-rate act); and the acoustic-ba­sed ʽSame Old Storyʼ, which is likewise a variation on the classic ʽRockin' Pneumonia And The Boogie Woogie Fluʼ, but with its own twist — a clownish enough ending for the album, but the band are now positioning themselves as clowns, and fortunately, they can be a bit funny.

 

Actually, they are better when they're adapting pinched ideas to funny matters than when they try to do it with a straight face on — the «artsy» pop song ʽBetter When We Tryʼ, unabashedly stealing part of its appeal from Blind Faith's freshly released ʽCan't Tell My Way Homeʼ, has too much hippie starry-eyedness about it and too little in the actual «beauty» department (and those baroque organ solos are fairly useless these days when you have all those Zombies records lying around, anyway). In another corner, ʽSaturday Freedomʼ tries to generate some fuzzy melodic psychedelia, with a lengthy «stoned» solo, but guitarist Bruce Stephens is neither a Randy Holden nor a Jerry Garcia, and the results are accordingly unimpressive.

 

Summarizing in a nutshell, Blue Cheer's major flaw is that the album has no personality — Vin­cebus Eruptum and even its trippier follow-up, flawed as they were, reflected a specifically «Blue Cheer» attitude towards life, but now that they actually release a record called Blue Cheer, it turns out that there's some cheer, and there's just a bit of blue, but they don't really mix. Peter­son just isn't that interesting a singer when he is not playing the pitecanthropus erectus, Stephen­son knows how to play the guitar but does not know how to put his own mark on it, and why listen to their cover of Delaney Bramlett and Mac Davis' ʽHello L. A., Bye-Bye Birminghamʼ when even Nancy Sinatra sings it with more intrigue?.. All that's really left is — become clowns and sing silly catchy songs about cheating women and natural men. God knows why, but that is one emploi that they are quite able to get away with on this record.

 

THE ORIGINAL HUMAN BEING (1970)

 

1) Good Times Are So Hard To Find; 2) Love Of A Woman; 3) Make Me Laugh; 4) Pilot; 5) Babaji (Twilight Raga); 6) Preacher; 7) Black Sun; 8) Tears In My Bed; 9) Man On The Run; 10) Sandwich; 11) Rest At Ease.

 

It seems reasonable to suggest that Gary Lee Yoder, officially replacing Bruce Stephens as Blue Cheer's resident guitar player, was a better proposition for this band altogether than his predeces­sor. Not only did he contribute Blue Cheer's funniest song, but somehow, his permanent pre­sence put the band back on track, so that their fifth album is an acceptable compromise between the chaotic wildness of old, the established hard rock standards of the day, and a little bit of chart-oriented pop sensibility in between (The Original Human Being even got the band back into the lower ranges of the album charts for a brief while).

 

There is nothing particularly great or awesome here, but the very attempt to stir up some creative juices is admirable. All of the members are involved in the songwriting process now, even the drummer, with Peterson and Yoder veering towards heavy blues, piano guy Burns Kellogg drif­ting towards roots-rock, and the drummer actually contributing the weirdest number of all — ʽBa­baji (Twilight Raga)ʼ, which is, so far, the only instrumental composition I know whose central point is a duet between sitar and Moog synthesizer: an unlikely combination in general, let alone on a Blue Cheer album! The most amazing thing about it is that it actually works, a pretty, cloudy piece of simplistic, but effective lite-psychedelia.

 

Genrist exercises are, in fact, the talk of the day. We have some shiny, uplifting, brass-loaded, and catchy jazz-pop (ʽLove Of A Womanʼ); a rough, partially out-of-tune, but sincere-sounding country waltz (ʽTears In My Bedʼ); a sleazy, snappy, and quite exciting white-funk jam that sug­gests somebody in the camp must have been wooed over by The James Gang (ʽSandwichʼ); and a sentimental, idealistic, bombastic, gospel-influenced coda (ʽRest At Easeʼ) that — dare I say it? — sounds suspiciously similar to Dylan's ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ, which would only come three years later. Okay, coincidence. The important thing is: Blue Cheer, the local cavemen of San Francisco, are telling you to "rest at ease today" and "be redeemed today", because "all my love is on the way" and "my heart is open to you, slow down, we can make it". Actually, it seems that those lyrics are mostly improvised, consisting of «soul clichés» hastily scrapped together, but there is something haunting to that piano / organ / French horn mix. The beast done got soul, and it ain't always cringeworthy or laughable to look at.

 

On the other hand, The Original Human Being also succeeds in getting back some of the wild vibe — mainly on dark blues-rock numbers such as ʽGood Times Are Hard To Findʼ (indeed) and ʽPreacherʼ; more generic 12-bar stuff like ʽPilotʼ or ʽMan Of The Sunʼ also recovers some extra grit-and-gravel that was missing on the last two records, although these are probably the most expendable numbers of the lot. Everything is still quite polished when compared to the original chaos (short, jam-less, structured), but «nasty» guitar tones, «evil» vocalizing, distortion and fuzz are all present — the songs are fun to listen to, and warrant a thumbs up. Altogether, the album is more than the sum of its parts: diversity, and this curious struggle for survival in an increasing­ly competitive context, make it a small chapter worth reading in the musical history of 1970.

 

OH! PLEASANT HOPE (1971)

 

1) Hiway Man; 2) Believer; 3) Money Troubles; 4) Traveling Man; 5) Oh! Pleasant Hope; 6) I'm The Light; 7) Eco­logical Blues; 8) Lester The Arrester; 9) Heart Full Of Soul.

 

Okay, come out and confess: who was it told Blue Cheer that they should drop whatever they were doing and start being The Band, of all people? Or, if not The Band, then at least The Doobie Brothers. All of a sudden, just as Original Human Being showed assured signs of the band set to return to their «caveman glory», they do a 180-degree twist and give us acoustic guitars, on-the-porch attitudes, lyrical tales of highway men, traveling men, money-troubled men, believers and arresters, and as if that weren't enough, Dickie Peterson only takes lead vocals on the last three tracks, leaving the rest to Gary Yoder. Granted, not a lot of people must have been paying any atten­tion to Blue Cheer in the era of ʽStairway To Heavenʼ, but for those that were, the band's conversion to a roots-rock-oriented strategy must have been quite a shock.

 

The saving grace of the album, however, is that it never tries to take itself too seriously. Much to Blue Cheer's honor, they do not even attempt to generate a «soulful» or «spiritual» atmosphere, as the instrumental abilities and arranging skills of the band would be inadequate. Instead, they make good use of their pop sensibility, loading many of the songs with modestly catchy, some­times even funny «roots-pop» choruses — like, probably the only point in listening to ʽHiway Manʼ is hearing Yoder bawl "MONEY, give me all you have!" as if he were rehearsing for a Monty Python sketch or something. It ain't much to go on haunting you in your dreams, but at least it saves the song from proverbial boredom, and that is more or less the way this entire album works — through decent pop hooks.

 

The title track, in particular, amounts to pure parody: its verses are set to the precise melody of ʽThe Weightʼ ("Billy Joe went lookin' round..." = "I pulled into Nazareth..."), but the uplifting / optimistic message of the chorus, unlike the obscure invocation to Fanny, is spelled out with the utmost precision: "Oh, pleasant hope / Where we're gonna get our dope? ... / Oh, pleasant hope / Grass will flow like wine" — except that even Steppenwolf sounded like they really meant it when conversing with the enemy (ʽDon't Step On The Grass, Samʼ), whereas ʽOh! Pleasant Hopeʼ is sung so nonchalantly that you don't even get to feel it for them.

 

But if the title track simply pokes fun at marijuana deprivation, ʽI'm The Lightʼ is downright blasphemous — not only does it mix gospel organ with Indian sitar (did George Harrison ever have something like that?), it actually means what it says: the protagonist tells his girlfriend that "I'm the light, I'm the only one you'll see" and that "It's one hand for all mankind while the other holds the flame". For that matter, the sitar plays quite a seductive pop melody — transpose it to electric guitar or flute, speed up the tempo a little bit, and you got yourself a readymade Manfred Mann pop single. Not a masterpiece, of course, but second time in a row that Blue Cheer have used the sitar in a non-conventional manner and gotten away with it.

 

For nostalgia sufferers, there is a bit of a heavy rock vibe here: ʽBelieverʼ is driven by crunchy distorted guitar (despite being one of the poppiest songs on the album), and ʽHeart Full Of Soulʼ (a Peterson original, nothing to do with the famous Yardbirds hit) has a dark, scruffy bassline, chaotic leads, and growling / screaming vocals straight off Vincebus — a little peace offering for the veteran fans if they were obedient enough to sit all the way through to the end. But all of this is still quite tame even compared to Human Being, let alone Vincebus, and seems to be here mainly in order to establish some sort of shaky link to the past.

 

Still, all things considered, I like the record, and give it a thumbs up. The fact that it never char­ted is expectable and understandable, as is the fact that, totally frustrated over their loss of direc­tion and obscure future perspectives, Blue Cheer finally broke up after it had flopped. But once you get over the initial disappointment, and once you start realizing that they weren't really trying to establish themselves as a «serious» roots-rock act, but rather urged us all to take it with a grain of salt, Oh! Pleasant Hope comes across as an inoffensive, occasionally charming trifle, not en­tirely devoid of interest. And after a few listens, it might even come across as a concised, focused send-up of the whole genre — which, by early 1971, was certainly in need of a good send-up, like all genres that eventually start falling back on their own clichés.

 

THE BEAST IS... BACK (1984)

 

1) Nightmares; 2) Summertime Blues; 3) Ride With Me; 4) Girl Next Door; 5) Babylon; 6) Heart Of The City; 7) Out Of Focus; 8) Parchment Farm.

 

A little research shows that it is not altogether correct to talk of a Blue Cheer breakup — more like several extended vacation periods. Various incarnations of the band did function in 1974, 1975, 1978-79, and 1983, with Dickie as the only permanent link; none of them, however, suc­ceeded in landing any record contracts, which is why, for many, this vinyl resurgence in 1984 appeared as a complete surprise — a feeling that the band further enhanced with the appropriate title. (Which, upon subsequent re-releases, was cheesily changed to The Megaforce Years, after the name of the label to which they were signed at the time).

 

In any case, the title alone clearly announces vengeance — no sissy-hussy roots-rock shite for the good old fans, this is going to be «The Beast» all the way through. The track list does not look too promising, though: half of the songs are re-recordings of old classics from Vincebus and Outsideinside, which is usually not an auspicious sign — what good is a comeback, after all, if you have not managed to write more than four new songs in thirteen years?

 

Expectations drop down even lower, though, once you hear the first notes of the record and see how the band tries to catch up with the times. In 1984, if you were a veteran of the bang-your-head-against-the-wall aesthetics and wanted to impress the kids, you had basically two routes to choose from — thrash metal and glam metal («New Wave metal» was more of a British thing), and guess which one those guys had taken. Nothing against Dickie Peterson, or the original drummer Paul Whaley, making a triumphant return in style; but the band's resi­dent guitarist, Tony Rainier, is a Van Halen-influenced B-grade hack, in command of a suitably nasty tone but thoroughly relying on cocky pop-metal clichés, well-tested and over-abused on Sunset Strip for several years already.

 

To be more precise and polite, we have all heard worse than that, but still, was it really worth coming back to let us hear a Def Leppard-style re-recording of ʽSummertime Bluesʼ? Maybe it seemed like fun at the time to try that old stuff with new production values and improved tech­nique, but thicker layers of distortion/fuzz and flashy high-pitched lead trills/arpeggios were so commonplace at the time that it is impossible to look back on that stuff without irony — where Vincebus Eruptum, with all its flaws and potential negative influence on the evolution of hard rock, was still an innovative, daring breakthrough, The Beast Is Back prompts just one inevitable question: But Who Gives A Damn This Time?

 

The new songs, however, are not at all bad. Once you get past the production clichés, three of them have solid pop-metal chorus hooks (particularly ʽHeart Of The Cityʼ, where Dickie manages to convey the «lethal insanity» atmosphere of being sucked into the whirlpool of city life), and one (ʽRide With Meʼ) does a good job at gradually building up tension until they botch it with the lack of an adequately climactic resolution. No masterpieces, but a decent bunch of snappy pop-metal anthems that makes one wonder whether they really needed to leave the rest of the album to useless re-recordings. In fact, calling this «glam metal» would be quite inaccurate — the songs are influenced by the commercial metal sound of the times, for sure, but they have none of that unhealthy Sunset Strip hedonism (other than ʽGirl Next Doorʼ, I guess, with beautiful lyrical lines such as "I'm gonna wait right here just to get the right meat / ...get what I need from the girl next door" — and the song is credited to Rainier, too).

 

Altogether — not a tragedy, but a relative disappointment, although, come to think of it, any pre­diction-yielding model would have probably guessed that, were these guys ever to reform, their first album would look something like that: re-recorded old chestnuts + glam metal production + a few nostalgic signs that hint at the band's arrival from a distant past, rather than being a young artistic cousin of Def Leppard. Giving it a thumbs up would be out of the question; putting it down would be too unjust, because I really have nothing against most of the songs, be they old or new ones. Proceed at your own risk.

 

BLITZKRIEG OVER NÜREMBERG (1989)

 

1) Babylon; 2) Girl Next Door; 3) Ride With Me; 4) Just A Little Bit; 5) Summertime Blues; 6) Out Of Focus; 7) Doctor Please; 8) The Hunter; 9) Red House.

 

Blue Cheer never released a live album in their heyday, largely because the heyday turned out to be so short — by 1969, it was all over, and live albums, even for hard-rocking bands, were not yet seen as an obligatory part of one's portfolio back in 1968. «Better late than never», thought Peterson, and, four years into Blue Cheer's «comeback» as an odd hybrid of nostalgic late Sixties pothead rock and contemporary glam metal, decided to set up some professional recording equip­ment for the band's live show at the Rührersaal in Nüremberg, Germany (October 10, 1988). Whether the choice of a German audience was accidental or intentional (a special affinity for the country that gave us Accept and the Scorpions?) is not clear, but there is an obvious connection between the players and the fans, who do not even seem offended when told by Dickie about the planned title for the upcoming album. Nothing like a nice little Blitzkrieg for the Germans... oh, never mind. It does have a nice ring to it, though.

 

Once again, however, this particular «Blue Cheer» is just Dickie and his revolving door: no Paul Whaley and not even a Tony Rainier in sight. Instead, guitar duties are handled by Duck Mac­Donald, known mostly for always willing to lend a helping hand to defective reunions of old heavy rock bands with color-based names (in addition to Blue Cheer, he would also tour with Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult); the drummer, if anybody is interested, is Dave Salce, and he does a fairly decent job reproducing the percussive madness of Whaley, but his fills are less unpredictable and not so much all over the place.

 

The setlist continues the trend already set on The Beast: as the only original member to deter­mine what is properly Blue Cheer and what is not properly so, Dickie performs only songs from the first two BC albums and The Beast (but it is interesting that, out of the new material, he chooses Rainier's compositions rather than his own ʽNightmaresʼ). Which is understandable if you want to limit your live material to loud crunchy rockers, but even so, The Original Human Being is quite unjustly given the finger. There is also a tribute cover of Hendrix's ʽRed Houseʼ, done surprisingly close to the spirit of the original, even if MacDonald cannot restrain himself from throwing in some histrionic hair metal vibrato cliché every now and then.

 

The most memorable thing about the album, though, is arguably the small bits of stage banter delivered by Peterson — always sounding a little drunk, a little stoned, a little wasted, a little toothless, a little bit too old to rock'n'roll, but ultimately quite sympathetic: nice simple old guy with a bit of street wisdom tucked under his belt for good measure ("we're gonna do a song called ʽSummertime Bluesʼ... and believe me, there is no cure, I've been looking for twenty fucking years!"). He has a pretty hard time coping with vocal problems, particularly on fast numbers such as ʽGirl Next Doorʼ where he clearly lacks the necessary strength to muster the appropriate roar, but even if he did have laryngitis or something, on most of the classic numbers the gurgling in his throat only adds to the overall ragged punch of the material. And he certainly has no problems holding down all the basslines on which the tightness and general well-being of the songs depend from start to finish.

 

Throw in a good setlist, decent sound quality, and MacDonald's general willingness to play Se­venties-style rather than Eighties-style on the extended instrumental sections of ʽRide With Meʼ and ʽDoctor Pleaseʼ, and Blitzkrieg turns out to be much more enjoyable as could be expected on the average from such a setup. Thumbs up; heavily recommended for Blue Cheer fans and hard rock lovers in general.

 

HIGHLIGHTS AND LOWLIVES (1990)

 

1) Urban Soldiers; 2) Hunter Of Love; 3) Girl From London; 4) Blue Steel Dues; 5) Big Trouble In Paradise; 6) Flight Of The Enola Gay; 7) Hoochie Coochie Man; 8) Down And Dirty; 9) Blues Cadillac.

 

In order to better prove that they are not «glam metal», and that they use their heaviness for dar­ker and deeper purposes than attenuating their sexiness, Blue Cheer hire Jack Endino to produce their next album — the same Jack Endino that had just produced Nirvana's Bleach and enginee­red LPs by Mudhoney and Soundgarden. Clearly, Dickie was still hip to whatever was happening musically (at least, as far as heavy stuff was concerned) on the West Coast, and it is only natural that his heart and soul would be drifting towards the emerging grunge scene rather than the hedo­nistic and glossy-commercial style of the hair metal crowds.

 

Unfortunately, it does not help. Endino probably agreed to work with those guys out of a basic sense of respect — after all, one can trace a fairly credible line from the original stoner rock of Vincebus Eruptum to the Seattle grunge bands — but there was nothing he could do about rec­tifying their sound or modernizing their attitudes. Duck MacDonald, a faithful supporter of Tony Rainier's legacy, keeps pushing on with «muscle riffs» and «lightning solos»; Peterson's primary points of lyrical and atmospheric interest remain in the territory of girls, hot rods, and glorifying wasted lifestyles; and altogether, there is no other point to this record than proving they can still push it all the way to eleven.

 

Now I couldn't even say that the riffs are «bad»: if you look at a song like ʽFlight Of The Enola Gayʼ outside of any sort of context, its pop metal lines are somewhat catchy. It is only when you realize that this sounds like an early rehearsal tape for Judas Priest that the desire to hear it one more time completely evaporates. I mean, if you are writing a heavy metal song about the bom­bing of Hiroshima, you want to make your listeners' hair stand on end, right? You want them to feel the terror, the heat, the megadeath in their very bones, right? So how are you going to achi­eve that effect by relying exclusively on decade-old heavy metal clichés? And no, «low-register guitar riff» does not automatically result in an allegory of a nuclear explosion, you have to work just a little bit more for that.

 

Conversely, much of the album does not stray too far away from old school 12-bar territory — ʽBlue Steel Duesʼ is nothing but your basic slow blues-rock jam, and the metallized cover of ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ speaks for itself (granted, it is probably one of the heaviest versions of the song I have ever heard, and Peterson plays the protagonist with gusto, getting way more into character than on any other song here, but still, just how many different hoochie coochie men do you really need in one lifetime?). And what does stray away sometimes borders on the ridiculous: ʽGirl From Londonʼ is a sentimental-cum-metal attempt to conquer the heights of impressionistic romanticism à la ʽLittle Wingʼ — Peterson and MacDonald start off quiet and «deep», with nos­talgically gallant-psychedelic imagery conveyed by bad lyrics ("She wears a diamond beneath the moon / We bring her flowers in the afternoon"), then gradually unwind and crank it up to high heaven, but the guitar tones and melodic structure are so predictable it's not even funny.

 

Maybe the best thing that can, and should, be said about the album is that it avoids power ballads: ʽGirl From Londonʼ is the only ballad as such, and it reminds far more of the early successes of Hendrix and Led Zeppelin than the pompous anthems of the hairy heroes of the Eighties. At the very least, Peterson is true to his past and consistent in his approach to music-making. But this does not make Highlights And Lowlives any less unnecessary — it just makes it a little more palatable if you do have to listen to it, for reviewing purposes, for instance. Without even a single point of genuine interest, it's a thumbs down all the way: plenty of lowlives all right, but good luck trying to pick out the highlights.

 

DINING WITH THE SHARKS (1991)

 

1) Big Noise; 2) Outrider; 3) Sweet Child Of The Reeperbahn; 4) Gunfight; 5) Audio Whore; 6) Cut The Costs; 7) Sex Soldier; 8) When Two Spirits Touch; 9) Pull The Trigger; 10) Foxy Lady.

 

A rather prophetic title for an album, since, to the best of my knowledge, this is exactly what this particular LP, along with this particular incarnation of the band, is busy doing at the moment. By the early 1990s, «Blue Cheer» had completed their relocation to Germany, where their new sound unexpectedly found just a tad more acclaim than elsewhere — a fact that Peterson acknowledged and honored by not only hiring a German guitarist (Dieter Saller) to play on the record, but also by writing songs with titles like ʽSweet Child Of The Reeperbahnʼ. Which might or might not also contain an intentional nod to Guns N' Roses, but in general, the Peterson/Saller sound rather continues the «Accept-ization» of Blue Cheer's legacy begun on the previous album, much to the delight of all those sons of rowdy Hamburg sailors whose fathers, thirty years back, used to get equally aroused to the merry sounds of The Silver Beetles.

 

That said, even the least inspired Accept albums are still preferable to this tremendously boring piece of sludgy-muck. The only thing that could be briefly admired is Peterson's consistency of character — other than the acoustic / steel guitar-driven folk-blues of ʽWhen Two Spirits Touchʼ (still sounds dirty) there is not a single nod here towards «sentimentality», «softness», «depth of feeling», and whatever other silly qualities could distract The Beast from grinding its axe, strut­ting its stuff, rolling its dough, and porking its chops. The problem, however, is that The Beast got old, stupefied, and unadaptable to modern world conditions.

 

Everything that could go wrong, goes wrong. With Peterson, who has never shown signs of melodic genius, being credited for most of the songwriting, the majority of the riffs are clichéd reruns of The Hard Rock Textbook, with echoes of Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and those German bands all over the place — in fact, some of that stuff has to be heard to be believed. If you did not think, for instance, that it was humanly possible to rip off the Kinks and ZZ Top on the exact same song, take a peek at ʽPull The Triggerʼ, whose verse riff copies ʽI Got The Sixʼ and whose chorus riff copies ʽ(Wish I Could Fly Like) Supermanʼ (and all the while the bass gui­tar keeps on playing the old pattern from ʽSummertime Bluesʼ!). This is just the most obvious example (to me), but I'm fairly sure most of the songs could be analyzed the same way.

 

To this one should add the exact same leaden guitar tone on each track, and the complete inabi­lity of the new German player to raise any interest in his solos — he just seems like a well-meaning kid with lots of reverence for Wolf Hoffmann, but no particular talent of his own, and maybe that is why his leads are usually mixed in so deep in the production, which makes the experience of listening to the whole album comparable to the experience of crossing a mile-long cesspool with a light, but constant electrical charge running through it. The dubious «delight» of having it all capped off with a similar-sounding cover of Jimi's ʽFoxy Ladyʼ is comparable to scooping out a piece of Turkish Delight at the end of the crossing — bon appetit.

 

Finally, as if that wasn't enough, Peterson must have been struck down with laryngitis on that particular day — his vocals were never a huge gift of Fortune, but here he sounds like a lite ver­sion of Motörhead's Lemmy and AC/DC's throat-problem-era Brian Johnson rolled in one: hoarse, gurgling, and completely unadapted for the «macho» spirit of his own compositions. Then again, given titles like ʽAudio Whoreʼ and ʽSex Soldierʼ, I guess it all fits, on some particularly depra­ved level, into the typical Reeperbahn aesthetics. But still, even something like ʽWhat Do You Do For Money Honeyʼ seems chic and stylish compared to this miserable sludge.

 

If this were at least «comically» bad, I could have found it in me to say a few kind words — but since it is «boringly bad», which is really the worst kind of bad there is, the final verdict is an as­serted thumbs down all the way; you'd have to be one of Peterson's groupies-for-life to enjoy this, I think, or a Hamburg slum native or something. As it is, just do yourself a favor and get an Accept record instead.

 

WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU (2007)

 

1) Rollin' Dem Bones; 2) Piece O' The Pie; 3) Born Under A Bad Sign; 4) Gypsy Rider; 5) Young Lions In Paradise; 6) I Don't Know About You; 7) I'm Gonna Get You; 8) Maladjusted Child; 9) Just A Little Bit (Redux); 10) No Relief.

 

Seeing as how Dickie Peterson died in 2009, a mere two years after the release of Blue Cheer's last album, he maybe should have thought of a different title. On the other hand, it is not likely that the recording of What Doesn't Kill You could in any way be responsible for the Original Beast's demise — first, most of the sessions were held in 2005, way before Dickie developed prostate cancer, and second, it's not as if the songs were the result of any superhuman effort strong enough to cause cell deformation. Even if they do sound like they were rather painfully pooped out, pardon my French and all.

 

Although Peterson had retained an active network of German connections until the very end, this record was ultimately made in the States, with Duck MacDonald resuming his guitar duties and the German guy pulling out for good. The drumming was originally done by Joe Hasselvander, but then Paul Whaley returned from Germany as well to resume touring with the band, and they promptly replaced the original drum parts with Whaley's re-recorded ones, for the sake of authen­ticity (and maybe royalties as well, but I seriously doubt that the album could have sold more than a few hundred copies, or that Peterson or Whaley could have hoped otherwise).

 

The final result is certainly a huge improvement on Dining With The Sharks. Twelve years of relief from making new music were enough to make the band forget their one-time allegiance to the military riffage and mock-Wagnerian solos of German pop metal, not to mention the excesses of Eighties' hair metal, and advance to a sound that was closer in spirit to the original Blue Cheer — namely, that of the «sludge metal» and «stoner rock» categories. The typical Blue Cheer song is now a slow, draggy, grinding chain of distortion and fuzz, over which the lead guitar rises in waves of wah-wah terror and «woman tone» overdrive, but not loud enough to outscream the persistent roaring crunch of the rhythm.

 

It's a good sound, in theory and practice, capable of assigning good shape to good ideas. But since Blue Cheer have always been short on good ideas, the general result is easy to predict — just about everything on this hour-long CD sounds like one lengthy trip on a road of sludge, whether we be dealing with newly «written» compositions, more remakes of one's own oldies (ʽJust A Little Bitʼ), or a cover of Albert King's ʽBorn Under A Bad Signʼ that reduces the original's un­forgettable riff to the exact same sludgy monotonousness. On the positive side, it no longer mat­ters that the final behemoth, ʽNo Reliefʼ, with its running length of 9:30, is about twice as long as common sense should have dictated — the listener's ordeal is to endure fifty-five minutes of this stuff, who cares if some pieces of the pie are larger than others if they all taste the same?

 

Fans of Peterson's «the-beast-got-sensitive-soul» side might want to check out the only exception from the rule — ʽYoung Lions In Paradiseʼ is a «heavy ballad» with a strong nostalgic compo­nent, as Dickie reminisces about those who are no longer with us. It is so unusual in the context of this record and Peterson's career in general that it almost becomes touching — in fact, Dickie's vocal part is touching, and far more credible and just plain human than ʽPiece O' The Pieʼ, ʽMal­adjusted Childʼ, or any other macho / «bad boy» anthem on the album. Nothing out of the ordi­nary in terms of melody, but a fitting last goodbye to his old pals from someone who, even if he did not know that at the time, would soon be saying hello once again.

 

However, one song out of ten is hardly enough to make a big change in the weather, and the others do not seem to deserve even one-liner descriptions. The best I can say is that Blue Cheer never once attempted to sell out in an Aerosmith kind of way — not a single «power ballad» on any of their comeback albums, not a single attempt at wooing the MTV crowds. Detractors might say that Peterson and Co. were simply too stupid to even try that, but even if that is true, a prin­cipled fool still deserves more respect than an opportunistic wise guy. The record, naturally, gets its usual thumbs down, but it also brings down the curtain on an overall thumbs-up career, and may the Beast rest in peace — even if I am not at all sure that even Paradise could cure this par­ticular old lion's summertime blues.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE & UNRELEASED '68-'74 (1968-1974; 1996)

 

1) Summertime Blues; 2) Out Of Focus; 3) Doctor Please; 4) Fighting Star; 5) Adventures; 6) Make It To The Party; 7) New Orleans; 8) Ace In The Hole; 9) Punk.

 

Naysayers may say their nays in their gayly ways, but Blue Cheer are still sort of a «legend», and every «legend» presumably deserves a set of archive releases, and any set of archive releases is worth at least a brief mention and a sample, and I assume that Live & Unreleased '68-'74 is as good a sample as any to try and convince the audience that nobody really needs to hear, own, or seriously discuss Blue Cheer archive releases. But sure, they deserve all the archive releases they can get, if somebody is willing to invest.

 

This package, released quite a while ago, is bluecheerfully messy in that it combines two abso­lutely different things — three live performances of Vincebus Eruptum material by the original Blue Cheer, and then a set of six studio tracks that were recorded, but left in the can by a short-lived version of the band in 1974, which included Ruben de Fuentes on guitar and Terry Rae on drums. Apparently they just happened to find themselves in a studio one day without a record contract, and twenty-two years later, we were informed.

 

The live tracks (first two taken from the Steve Allen TV show, third one God knows from where) are played very close to the studio arrangements, although ʽDoctor Pleaseʼ is further extended by two more minutes of noise, chaos, and feedback: dynamic and spirited, but adding nothing to the studio experience, while the sound quality is totally abysmal. Best thing about the whole deal is Steve Allen announcing, "the Blue Cheer... run for your life!" at the end of the first track — a com­mentary that says it all, whether you want to take it seriously or sarcastically.

 

Surprisingly, sound quality does not get any better on the studio material from 1974, suggesting that the tapes had spent those twenty-two years in somebody's damp basement, or maybe Dickie was using them as wrap-ups for his personal stash. The material does, however, fill in an im­portant know­ledge gap: as you remember, Oh! Pleasant Hope ended the band's early career on an unusual «roots-rock» note, while The Beast Is... Back reinvented them more than a decade later as a heavy metal outfit — this particular pit stop shows that already by 1974 Peterson had completely cleared his head from all that «folksy» nonsense, returning to a heavy, pub-rock ori­ented sound that recalls Slade or early Rocka Rolla-era Judas Priest. From here, it would only be a matter of adding an extra layer of distortion and glossy pop metal production to get to the even­tual sound of The Beast.

 

However, the songs themselves are uniformly dull — uninventive blues-rock with just enough competence to make it listenable, but nothing to make it stand out from all the competition. The cover of ʽNew Orleansʼ does not work at all, because combining the song's original party cheer­fulness with an aggressive hard rock sound makes as much sense as trying to put salt in your chocolate — and it is still more memorable than all the other tunes put together, although, gran­ted, the impression may be exacerbated simply because of the dreadful bootleg-quality murk of the sonic flow. At any rate, it is hardly the fault of Ruben de Fuentes, who seems to honestly try to get the best out of his typically mid-1970s hard rock guitar. But whatever be the situation, Live & Unreleased is clearly recommendable only for the staunchest fan of the band; for everybody else, it is as good a thumbs down as any.

BOBBY WOMACK

FLY ME TO THE MOON (1968)

 

1) Fly Me To The Moon; 2) Baby! You Oughta Think It Over; 3) I'm A Midnight Mover; 4) What Is This?; 5) Some­body Special; 6) Take Me; 7) Moonlight In Vermont; 8) Love, The Time Is Now; 9) I'm In Love; 10) California Dreamin'; 11) No Money In My Pocket; 12) Lillie Mae.

 

Although his first solo LP did not come out until 1968, by which time the world of popular music had changed beyond recognition, the name «Bobby Womack» must have already been well fa­miliar to every­one closely following both the black and the white R&B market — on the former, Bobby was a member of The Valentinos, a vocal group under the protection of Sam Cooke, and, upon Sam's passing, a resident songwriter for the likes of Wilson Pickett; on the latter, he was known as the author of ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ, which the Rolling Stones went on to transform from a fun variation on Chuck Berry's ʽMemphis Tennesseeʼ into something sharper and barkier, but Bobby's original vocal performance is still well worth checking out.

 

Anyway, for a variety of technical reasons Bobby's first proper recording contract was not signed until 1968, when he put himself under the wing of Minit Records and went to Memphis to work with Chips Moman, the guy who would, just one year later, help record the Elvis comeback al­bum (From Elvis In Memphis) and other stuff. The band assembled for the sessions was not particularly notorious, but Womack and Moman somehow managed to rev them up, so much so that people are sometimes surprised to find out that this was not, in fact, a «genuine Stax produc­tion». It wasn't, but it was quality production, fully adequate for a worthy soul/R&B album.

 

In fact, there is nothing here that would make the album any less of a «knockout» than any given Wilson Pickett album — the only difference being that Pickett had the Atlantic / Muscle Shoals «brands» on his side, while the guy who actually wrote the songs for Pickett had to settle with a lesser proposal. Yet when it comes, for instance, to deciding on the better singer, it is very much a matter of taste — Pickett has slightly more range and power, perhaps, but Bobby has a grittier rasp, and is sometimes able to pack more human drama into a short two-and-a-half minute explo­sion than his more famous predecessor.

 

Case in point: the title track, a 14-year old pop song that Bobby turns from a basic sentimental love declaration into a vocal tempest — as if all the "let me see what spring is like", "hold my hand, baby, kiss me", and "please be true" were not merely rhetoric questions and admonitions, but an honestly desperate outburst of pleading. Peggy Lee (and Brenda Lee, for that matter) sang that song with sexy security; Bobby gives it so much insecurity that one almost forgets about the sexiness in the first place. And it works so well that he goes on to apply the same approach to such a well-established standard as ʽMoonlight In Vermontʼ — given an entirely new face, with sped-up tempos, muscular brass overdubs, and a vocal delivery that eschews subtlety, nuance, nostalgia, and melancholy and goes for burning soul ecstasy all the way.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, the songs Bobby originally wrote for Pickett (ʽI'm In Loveʼ, ʽI'm A Midnight Moverʼ) are not one inch inferior to Pickett's own versions, but those who alrea­dy know the Pickett versions will probably be more interested in such minor gems as ʽWhat Is This?ʼ, a soul-funk hybrid that stands with one foot firmly in the Sixties and the other one alrea­dy in the next decade, presaging its penchant for moodily orchestrated funk and disco, or ʽLilly Maeʼ, with a concentrated bass / rhythm guitar / lead guitar / organ / brass attack that rocks as tough as any feedback-free song could rock in 1968. A little less successful, in my opinion, is Womack's reworking of ʽCalifornia Dreamin'ʼ, as it often happens with R&B covers of perfectly constructed pop hits whose magic was primarily due to vocal harmonies — but if you manage to put the idea of comparison out of your mind, Bobby's take is just another splash-o'-soul, fully credible and enjoyable, like everything else on here.

 

The album did not sell much, yielded no huge hits, and Bobby was still a long way from his crea­tive peak of the early 1970s, but sticking in, out, and around of the music business for ten years certainly helped — few R&B/soul debut albums of the decade sounded that self-assured, profes­sional and with the artist in full control of the vibe, and this means a certified thumbs up even if, from a purely technical viewpoint, the «creative-innovative» component was nothing to write home about. Nothing wrong with the «charismatic» component, though.

 

MY PRESCRIPTION (1969)

 

1) How I Miss You Baby; 2) More Than I Can Stand; 3) It's Gonna Rain; 4) Everyone's Gone To The Moon; 5) I Can't Take It Like A Man; 6) I Left My Heart In San Francisco; 7) Arkansas State Prison; 8) I'm Gonna Forget About You; 9) Don't Look Back; 10) Tried And Convicted; 11) Thank You.

 

Pretty much the exact same formula here as on Fly Me To The Moon — not particularly sur­prising, seeing as how it was produced by the same producer, released on the same record label, and probably (I am not completely sure here) played by the same backing band, while the songs, evenly divided between covers and originals, cover the same soul/funk territory and work the same kinds of grooves. Thus, although the lead single, ʽHow I Miss You Babyʼ, fared decently on the R&B charts, on the whole, all three singles and the LP in general sold significantly less than Fly Me To The Moon — in 1969, I guess even R&B audiences expected innovation, and Bobby was much less interested in innovating here than in «solidifying».

 

But in retrospect, My Prescription holds up just as proudly as its predecessor. It is difficult to praise these tunes to high heaven, yet, on the other hand, it is just as hard to find any problems with them. I mean, if you just want to write a soulful song about missing your baby and you have no other ambitions, ʽHow I Miss You Babyʼ will show you the right way to sew together electric guitars, organs, brass, strings, and a yearning wail — nothing exceptional about it, just setting a humble goal and fulfilling it 100%. The same applies to everything else.

 

If there is one thing about these songs that makes them stand out, it is Bobby's own guitar parts: as a confident player believing in the importance of his instrument, he makes sure that the guitar is always heard loud and clear and never gets lost behind the fanfares. Considering also that the bass parts for the songs are consistently inventive, I wouldn't actually mind hearing ʽMore Than I Can Standʼ, ʽIt's Gonna Rainʼ and the other songs without that many overdubs — Bobby's funky riffs and the fretboard-roaming basslines create enough excitement between each other.

 

On the arranging front, Womack continues the practice of reinventing classics, turning ʽI Left My Heart In San Franciscoʼ into a charmingly tight slice of fast-groovin' funk-pop with jazzy over­tones à la George Benson (with whom Bobby spent some time working earlier that year), while his mentor Sam Cooke's ʽI'm Gonna Forget About Youʼ is, on the contrary, slowed down and turned into something that does not bear the slightest resemblance to the original — the original was «decisive, but melancholic», whereas Bobby throws in some wound-up righteous anger, playing the ball-of-fire to Sam's wall-of-ice. He is being more merciful to Jonathan King's starry-eyed, sentimentally-ironic pop hit ʽEveryone's Gone To The Moonʼ, keeping both the sentimen­tality and the irony, but substituting Southern soul for Britsy folk-pop, and the substitution works without a hitch, probably even better this time than on ʽCalifornia Dreamin'ʼ.

 

Ultimately, though, the album's one highlight probably got to be ʽArkansas State Prisonʼ, an ori­ginal in every sense of the word — the way Bobby integrates bluesy slide guitar licks and strange, deeply mixed, ominously atmospheric blasts of strings worthy of a Paul Buckmaster into an ove­rall R&B arrangement shows that the man was perfectly capable of pushing forward boundaries if he really put his mind to it. The lyrics, a daring tale of a prison break, were quite edgy for their time, too, but it is the musical meld that still holds up in an interesting way, not the social mes­sage. If Sam Cooke was first and foremost a wizard of vocal melodies, then Bobby was a master of guitar/voice grooves, but both of them saw their primary mission as entertainment, not solu­tion of the world's problems, although that, too, could occupy their minds from time to time. Anyway, My Prescription on the whole is not there to save the universe, but to give you a bit of a good time, and for that, it earns its thumbs up without any problems.

 

THE WOMACK LIVE (1970)

 

1) Intro; 2) Oh How I Miss You Baby; 3) California Dreamin'; 4) Something; 5) Everybody's Talkin'; 6) Laughin' & Clownin' / To Live The Past; 7) I'm A Midnight Mover; 8) The Preacher; 9) More Than I Can Stand.

 

Despite its relative brevity and despite the fact that Bobby was not even close at the time to his career peak, The Womack Live is a hell of a great record — one of the best live R&B recordings of its age, in fact. Played out somewhere in Hollywood in late 1969 or so, it really sets a great standard for how an inventive soul artist should entertain his audience if he is not endowed with either the maniacal energy of a James Brown or the virtuoso playing chops of a Hendrix.

 

First, it is very much a matter of the setlist. Although he already had two solo albums under his belt, not to mention the entire Valentinos career, only four songs from the studio records make it onto the record — and at least one of these merely serves as an excuse for something completely different. The rest consists of such contemporary classics as ʽSomethingʼ and ʽEverybody's Tal­kingʼ, supposedly already well known to the audience but seriously recast, some ecstatic impro­visation (ʽThe Preacherʼ), and even a fleeting guest appearance by Percy Mayfield on his own ʽTo Live The Pastʼ — anything out there to make the show more intriguing.

 

Second, it is very much a matter of knowing your audience and conducting your interaction in a manner that is both energizing and intellectually inoffensive. For all of James Brown's talent at revving up his listeners, the usual soul-burning "d'ya feel alright? I said D'YA FEEL AL­RIGHT?" manner of interaction can quickly get tiresome, especially in the context of a live al­bum, so Womack finds alternate ways of entertaining — for instance, excusing himself for wan­ting to «play my guitar for five minutes» during ʽCaliforniaʼ, then turning the jam section into a mock-contest between himself and his second guitarist, or dragging out Percy Mayfield from no­where, or, once again, apologizing for the onset of a «preaching» mood, or insisting on limiting the audience participation to «lonely women» only on ʽOh How I Miss You Babyʼ, or doing something else; simply announcing a song and playing it always seems like a rather boring chore to the man, but the best thing is, he never really comes across as an annoying clown or an irrita­ting narcissistic self-admirer.

 

Third, of course, the level of musical performance is impeccable. He drops the guitar solo from ʽSomethingʼ, because playing like Harrison is not his thang, but the arrangement comes with or­gans, steel guitar, and... sitar? I'm fairly confident there was a sitar plucked back there, or at least something that arrogantly imitated a sitar, and meshed quite well with the other instruments. (Of course, there was no sitar on the original, but all the more reason to put one in the reinvention). The guitar solo on ʽCalifornia Dreamin'ʼ combines old-school jazz with new-school funk and could well have been much longer, except that Womack does not dare to burden the audience too long with free-flight improvisation. And ʽI'm A Midnight Moverʼ gets transformed into a sweaty R&B jam that incorporates everything that flies through Bobby's mind at the moment — even a brief excerpt from ʽShake Your Moneymakerʼ.

 

Thus, the only reason why The Womack Live is not a superb top-level live album is that there is only so much you can do with that sort of set of limitations — a competent, but not extraordinary, backing band, a soulful, hard-working, but not vocally unique singer, and a set of pleasant, but not jaw-droppingly original songs (well, ʽSomethingʼ is a bit more than that, but it'd be a bit of a cheat to highly rate any artist just because he covered ʽSomethingʼ). Usually, though, such limita­tions, especially in a live setting, would probably result in utter boredom — all the more glory to Mr. Womack for making it as exciting, enjoyable, and unpredictable as possible. Thumbs up.

 

COMMUNICATION (1971)

 

1) Communication; 2) Come L'Amore; 3) Fire And Rain; 4) (If You Don't Want My Love) Give It Back; 5) Mono­logue / (They Long To Be) Close To You; 6) Everything Is Beautiful; 7) That's The Way I Feel About Cha; 8) Yield Not To Temptation.

 

Although his previous records were hardly the epitome of commercial success, fate still smiled on Bobby and got him a nice promotion in the early 1970s — for his next record contract, Womack was rewarded with United Artists, and a possibility to record with the cream of the crop: the re­gular team at Muscle Shoals. Not that his older band was worth any serious criticism, but they were kind of old-fashioned, and in 1970, whether you were black or white, you had to change and adapt, or be ready to go down.

 

That same year, Bobby also played guitar on Sly & The Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On, learning how to behave in a hotter, crazier, funkier environment, and the results are immediately obvious on the very first track of his new album: ʽCommunicationʼ is a sleazy, steaming guitar groove that could be very easily mistaken for a mating call, if the lyrics did not explicitly refer to the idea of improving social relations through the power of communication and mutual trust (well, on the other hand, one does not necessarily exclude the other). Wah-wah riffage, distorted wailing leads, brass fanfare, Bobby at his screeching best (still a few notches below James Brown, but a decent substitute in case of need) — if this is a graduate exam in Funk School, I'd give senior student Robert Dwayne Womack a solid A, hold the plus for disciplinary reasons.

 

In general, however, Communication cannot be pigeonholed as a «funk album». Apart from the opening track, everything else is much more traditional: smooth, non-syncopated mid-tempo R&B grooves alternating with slow soulful ballads. As it always happens with Bobby, tracks are regularly loaded with small surprises, but «small surprises» are not «major stylistic revolutions»; the general difference is really in the backing band, which always seems on the verge of laun­ching into something different, but in the end, stays where Bobby wants them to stay. On ʽGive It Backʼ, for instance, they fiddle and fuss around for about ten seconds, even starting out with the first bar of ʽBaby Please Don't Goʼ (that might actually be Bobby himself), then straighten out for the album's second-funkiest, but still «lite-dance-funk»-oriented groove.

 

The biggest hit from the album, and the song that genuinely restored Bobby's name on the chart of public conscience, was ʽThat's The Way I Feel About Chaʼ, a credible, but not particularly outstanding, love anthem whose major point of attraction might not even be the vocal melody and the repetitive chorus, but the melodic lead parts played by Jimmy Johnson, who does not get to have an instrumental break, but still takes the opportunity to solo all the way alongside Bobby's singing. This adventurous approach from the Muscle Shoals people is certainly an improvement over the competent and devoted, but not too initiative-oriented, style of Bobby's Memphis band.

 

In a particularly risky and bold approach, the man allocates almost ten minutes of Side B to an extended version of ʽClose To Youʼ, the first half of which is actually given to a half-spoken, half-hummed «monologue» in which Bobby apologizes to his audience for going «commercial» — quite an apt thing to do on a cover of a Burt Bacharach song that had just been turned into a monster hit for The Carpenters. With this cover, Bobby sets out to illustrate the major point of the monologue — that «music is music», and that, no matter what sort of material you sing or play, what really matters is the amount of soul you put into it.

 

To be honest, I am not sure that he is completely right on the issue — in fact, I'd probably take the slick, straight-jacketed Carpenters version of the song, pre-packaged and calculated as it is, over Bobby's sincere attempt to «ruffle» it up here and make it live and breathe. You can't really bring the stillborn back to life — you can stuff the stillborn and make it into an imposing, eerie waxwork, but you can't make it walk and talk, and ʽClose To Youʼ is one of those songs I'd rather hear as stiff and mechanical, because they are more memorable that way. Still, at the very least, Bobby's stance makes sense, and it is curious and instructive to hear him cover the song the way he does it. Whatever be, these nine and a half minutes are not wasted.

 

Without discussing the other songs (most are covers of not particularly strong material, and it is not clear if you will ever really need yet another individualistic version of James Taylor's ʽFire And Rainʼ), I will simply conclude that Communication is an uneven, but curious and rewarding «transitional» album, worthy of its thumbs up but not quite on the same level with the stuff that would follow. The most important thing about it is that the shift to a major label had not, in any way, silenced or muted the individual voice of Bobby Womack — on the contrary, just like Mar­vin Gaye and Stevie Wonder at about the same time, the man's primary concern always rests on one crucial issue: how to remain inside the machine without turning into a part of the machine. He does not exactly resolve that issue — Communication has its fair share of «genericity» — but he is willing to give it a bigger try than ever before.

 

UNDERSTANDING (1972)

 

1) I Can Understand It; 2) Woman Got To Have It; 3) And I Love Her; 4) Got To Get You Back; 5) Simple Man; 6) Ruby Dean; 7) Thing Called Love; 8) Sweet Caroline; 9) Harry Hippie.

 

If a record called Communication is quickly followed up by a record called Understanding, this already suggests that there is not going to be a hell of a lot of difference between the two. And indeed, they have more or less the same length, more or less the same message, more or less the same stylistic and emotional variety, more or less the same players, and more or less the same balance between original songwriting by Bobby, original songwriting by his partners (Joe Hicks), and covers of contemporary material and oldies. The only objective difference is that Under­standing was a much bigger hit — selling far more than its predecessor, as well as yielding ano­ther Top 50 single for Bobby (ʽHarry Hippieʼ).

 

The LP sales were actually bolstered by the radio popularity of the lead-in track, ʽI Can Under­stand Itʼ, which never made it onto a legit single, but became a club favorite nevertheless. Tech­nically, it is not disco, but the combination of steady dance rhythmics, brass, and «lush» strings makes it the perfect accompaniment for nightlife in 1972 — loud, romantic, intoxicating, and calling for peace, love, and mutual understanding. My only complaint is that Bobby's sensuous lead lines are buried so deep in the mix, making the brass/strings combination the focal point of the tune and, consequently, somewhat dating its continued impact.

 

At the time, though, the track was extremely «commercial», and the rest of the album shows that Bobby was not at all interested in aligning himself with the likes of either Sly (for extra psyche­delia or «social rebelliousness») or Funkadelic (for extra experimentation and a more aggressive sound). He got some teeth to chomp, for sure, but he does it only once: ʽSimple Manʼ is a nasty funky groove with an appropriately simple, but nagging bass line around which Bobby parades distorted guitar riffs, screechy blues leads, dark electric piano rolls, brass fanfare, and even some relatively primitive Moog synth solos. A simple man he may be, but so much less the reason to fool around with the simple man who can growl and snarl alongside the best of 'em.

 

But this is actually rare. More commonly, Bobby is content with covering Neil Diamond (ʽSweet Carolineʼ — finally, a cover that sticks relatively close to the original and, in some ways, trans­cends it) — and the Beatles (ʽAnd I Love Herʼ, not as good because the song predictably loses much of its uniqueness by being given a full-blown early 1970s soul arrangement), or co-writing, with either Joe Hicks or other Womacks, soft «dance-soul» numbers, such as ʽWoman Got To Have Itʼ, the first single for the album whose most memorable aspect is probably its jumpy bass­line, tense, boppy, and fidgety in comparison to the relatively stable groove of the rest of the song. Meanwhile, ʽRuby Deanʼ is notable for some fine acoustic riffage, which goes along fine with harmonica solos and Bobby's melancholic howling.

 

Still, the most striking song on the album is probably ʽHarry Hippieʼ — written by songwriter Jim Ford. The song acquired additional poignancy two years later, when Bobby's brother, Harry Womack, was killed by his jealous girlfriend, upon which the tune became re-dedicated to him; but the original lyrics seem to have been referring to an abstract-collective Harry, summarizing the artist's feelings towards the hippie stereotype — "I'd like to help a man when he's down / But I can't help him much when he's sleeping on the ground". You can feel Bobby really getting into the spirit here, trying to rub up as much sympathy towards the character as possible, but put it all in a tragic context all the same. For Bobby Womack, who was always careful to walk the thin line between «manufactured, well-paid, stable entertainment» and «artistic recklessness», the song must have been a particularly important manifesto at the time. And its choice for the album's coda has its own meaning — letting us know that Understanding is not that easy to come by if your mental languages differ so much.

 

I would not rip Understanding out of its context and award it with a much more enthusiastic thumbs up than usual just because it incidentally happened to be more popular than usual. But its spirit burns just as brightly as that of Communication, and together, they represent early 1970s «dance-oriented soul» at its average finest. It isn't «great art», but it is perfectly crafted, meaning­ful, and highly tasteful entertainment.

 

ACROSS 110TH STREET (1972)

 

1) Across 110th Street; 2) Harlem Clavinette; 3) If You Don't Want My Love; 4) Hang On In There (instrumental); 5) Quicksand; 6) Harlem Love Theme; 7) Across 110th Street (instrumental); 8) Do It Right; 9) Hang On In There; 10) If You Don't Want My Love (instrumental); 11) Across 110th Street (part 2).

 

Nice little soundtrack here to a mostly forgotten «blaxploitation» movie (come to think of it, are there any «blaxploitation» movies that have not been mostly forgotten?), starring Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn. The soundtrack was mostly forgotten, too, until Tarantino acted on the urge to revive the title track for Jackie Brown, which is where the average pop culture fan is most like­ly to get his first taste of ʽAcross 110th Streetʼ.

 

It is somewhat unfortunate, though, that the song never made it to a regular LP: it is good enough to transcend soundtrack quality, a tempestuous tale of «gotta-get-out-of-this-place» ghetto suffering with a formulaic, but terrific arrangement and one of Bobby's most soulful vocal deliveries ever — you won't find much of that sort of ominous, disturbing fury even on a Stevie Wonder or a Marvin Gaye record. Sure, the brass fan­fares and howling pre-disco strings sound dated not only to their epoch, but even to their movie genre, yet in this case, they actually work in full unison with the escapist message of the song. And this is without even mentioning the reprise of the theme at the end, where the vocals quickly give way to a nightmarish mix of wailing gui­tars, electronic keyboard effects, and occasional ghoulish screaming — the thickest, densest ar­rangement on a Womack album so far, with a heavy psychedelic effect if played at top volume.

 

The rest of the album wanders between several other vocal numbers, masterminded by Bobby, and several instrumental themes, directed and conducted by Jay Jay Johnson «and his Orchestra»: Jay Jay, formerly a bebop trombonist, had only recently moved to film score composing, and his work here is quite outstanding in its own way — ʽHarlem Clavinetteʼ is swaggerishly funky and polyphonic, with predictable wah-wah guitar passages alternating with far less predictable flute solos; ʽHarlem Love Themeʼ is a good example of early 1970s «fusionistic» take on the late night jazz standard of the 1950s (provided you can stand the ultra-high frequencies of those opening keyboards — Jay Jay must have been appealing to the bat segment of his audience); and his in­strumental reworkings of Bobby's own compositions always bring out the best in their melodies (the brass substitution of the vocal melody in ʽAcross 110th Streetʼ fully preserves the tension and decisiveness in Womack's delivery).

 

As for Bobby, he contributes a new, slower, more romantic reworking of ʽIf You Don't Want My Loveʼ, and a couple extra funk numbers: ʽQuicksandʼ goes by too fast to be memorable, but ʽDo It Rightʼ is a pretty hot rocker, set to a rhythm that will be familiar to everybody who knows The Who's live rendition of ʽSpoonfulʼ (though I'm sure it must have had an even earlier precedent) and featuring some smoking guitar and Moog solos. On a curious note, most of these numbers also feature Bobby in «totally loose» mode, repeatedly screaming his head off like he'd never al­lowed himself earlier on any of his proper LPs — talk about the liberating powers of blaxploita­tion filmmaking!

 

For technical reasons, Across 110th Street has no chance to remain as culturally significant and thoroughly enjoyable as Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, still arguably the definitive blaxploitation soundtrack of its era — too many instrumentals, too many reprises, too many rewrites — but in the overall context of Womack's artistic travelog, it is not to be overlooked, and if you are a major fan of orchestrated funk experiments of the decade, Jay Jay Johnson's work here also makes it a must-have. Thumbs up.

 

FACTS OF LIFE (1973)

 

1) Nobody Wants You When You're Down And Out; 2) I'm Through Trying To Prove My Love To You; 3) If You Can't Give Her Love Give Her Up; 4) That's Heaven To Me; 5) Holdin' On To My Baby's Love / Nobody; 6) Facts Of Life / He'll Be There When The Sun Goes Down; 7) Can't Stop A Man In Love; 8) The Look Of Love; 9) Natural Man; 10) All Along The Watchtower.

 

Back from soundtrack territory to regular LP turf again, Bobby tosses off another fine batch of tunes — nothing particularly spectacular, just some more of that solid, believable, classy-soun­ding soul stuff that seemed to come so easily to him in the early 1970s. By now, it was obvious that he would not be remembered as a major visionary or innovator of Stevie Wonder's caliber, but his interest in «minor» experiments and production twists still kept him miles ahead of many, if not most, competitors in the same genre.

 

For instance, how many people would be able to come up with the idea of redoing the old Jimmy Cox standard ʽNobody Wants You When You're Down And Outʼ as a funk-pop number, with a nasty bassline and proto-disco strings? Nothing whatsoever, except for the lyrics, is left over from the original in the process, but hey, good idea — the song is about internal turmoil and pissed-off disillusionment, and why not strengthen these feelings with a bit of a funky tempest? Perhaps the mix is not clever enough to let us fully appreciate Bobby's electric guitar parts (too eclipsed by the overriding brass), but fairly strong all the same.

 

Another example — who would dare take ʽ(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Womanʼ, so clo­sely associated with Carole King and Aretha, and turn it into ʽNatural Manʼ? Well, apparently a little-known R&B singer called Fred Hughes got the start on Bobby five years earlier, but, from what limited amount of his songs I have heard, Fred sported a bit of a «womanly» image, follow­ing in the shoes of Clyde McPhatter and Smokey Robinson, whereas Womack was totally «vi­rile», and this kind of gender turnaround might have been seen as risqué by some of his fans. Yet his vocal parts are totally credible, as he'd already cut his teeth on reinterpreting stuff like ʽClose To Youʼ — and, for that matter, they also inspired Rod Stewart to repeat the venture on his own cover, recorded for the Smiler sessions a year later. (Not sure of whether this should be used as a positive argument — Smiler wasn't that hot a record, but at least he still had Ronnie Wood by his side at the time, and the decline process was not yet irreversible).

 

More questionable is Bobby's decision to put his own stamp on ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ, where he takes the Hendrix version for default and dares to offer his own guitar playing, heavily wah-wahed and double-tracked, for comparison. The final results are good, but there is a reason, after all, why Jimi is revered as a visionary guitar player and Bobby is not — Jimi's fire comes out of ingeniously tuned firethrowers, while Bobby's fire is satisfied with steady crackling in the hearth: the song has no dynamics, and is in danger of becoming boring already after the first mi­nute, especially if it is hard for you to erase the Jimi comparison from your head.

 

Concerning originals, there are relatively few here: ʽHe'll Be There When The Sun Goes Downʼ, a rhythmic, lush-string-drenched ballad of the Al Green variety, is probably the best of the lot, just because the string groove seems unusually complex and emotional, and, most importantly, it falls well in line with the song's lyrical vibe. It actually begins as a long spoken piece (title track), where Bobby, a little tongue-tied and confused, explains that his contract does not allow him to keep a steady relationship — so "don't get hung up on me, cause tomorrow I might be gone on down the road". The strings help carry on this subtle mix of romance and loneliness, even if the message itself is sorta questionable, but then, as long as he ain't justifying date rapes or anything, the man has a right to defend his lifestyle of one-night stands, and the music here is an excellent soundtrack for a one-night stand if you're sick and tired of family values or anything.

 

Most of the other songs, be they originals or covers, do not submit themselves to comments that easily — I could rave on about how wonderfully deep and tender I find ʽThat's Heaven To Meʼ, but it's a rather faithful Sam Cooke cover, and should rather be discussed in a Sam Cooke con­text. In any case, it all sounds good; my only problem with Facts Of Life is that it goes a bit too far in the «soft» direction, with only the first and last track rocking out with decisiveness — and all the ballads and melodic upbeat R&B numbers are starting to fall together after a while. But it's not as if this problem did not exist before, be it with Bobby or a million other serious, hard-working ar­tists, and it ain't no reason to deprive the album of another thumbs up — if only because, given the musical climate of the time, the age of the artist, the original talent, and the good sense of taste, it would be hard to imagine how Facts Of Life could be anything but not a «solid» album, at least. Maybe if he'd been impressed by Barry White's early singles...

 

LOOKIN' FOR A LOVE AGAIN (1974)

 

1) Lookin' For A Love; 2) I Don't Wanna Be Hurt By Ya Love Again; 3) Doing It My Way; 4) Let It Hang Out; 5) Point Of No Return; 6) You're Welcome, Stop On By; 7) You're Messing Up A Good Thing; 8) Don't Let Me Down; 9) Copper Kettle; 10) There's One Thing That Beats Failing.

 

It is not exactly clear why Bobby decided to re-record his decade-old Valentinos hit, ʽLookin' For A Loveʼ, for the lead single off his new album, not to mention using its title for the entire LP. One might have easily taken this for a sign of stagnation — even despite the fact that Bobby did come up with a bunch of original compositions this time; none of them, apparently, could be re­garded as commercially viable, and indeed, while ʽLookin' For A Loveʼ still managed to hit No. 1 on the R&B charts, its follow-up, the «soft-funk» dance number ʽYou're Welcome, Stop On Byʼ, was a relative flop in comparison.

 

The essence of ʽLookin' For A Loveʼ, which used to be indeed one of the finest mergers of R&B and doo-wop in the early 1960s, is preserved quite caringly, but the arrangement has been up­graded to include an intrusive synthesizer lead that makes the revision as dated to its epoch as the original; so you have yourself a choice of preference here, depending on whether you prefer ge­neric Sixties production (crisp, but poorly-recorded sound) or generic Seventies (well-recorded, but somewhat sterile and stuffy in comparison). In any case, revisiting past successes is always a bad omen for the artist, and it does not help that the remaining nine songs all pale, one way or another, next to the opening vigorous punch of the title track.

 

Bobby still retains enough strength to come up with another unpredictable reinvention — this time, he is experimenting with the old folk standard ʽCopper Kettleʼ, but even though the new ar­rangement, envisaged as a lush blend of country and R&B, with a slow bass groove and slide guitars, is properly creative, it all ends up losing the song's original essence and turning it into just another soulful declaration of... well, whatever can be soulfully declared. Reinvention keeps the juices flowing alright, but everything has got to have reasonable limits: you can't do that much with yer basic campfire tune without depriving it of its basic sense (for an example of a reasonable reinvention, check out Dylan's version on Self Portrait).

 

Other than that, you've got your regular proto-disco dance fun (ʽLet It Hang Outʼ, with some fa­bulously ecstatic guitar soloing), your regular R&B ballads (ʽI Don't Wanna Be Hurt Againʼ), your regular slow soul-burning ballads (ʽDoing It My Wayʼ), and so on. As usual, it all sounds good, and Bobby's singing is formally impeccable, but there is a strong impression that he is not trying all that much, running on auto-pilot and milking that old «strong feeling» vibe instead of looking for interesting chord sequences or startling vocal flourishes. As a result, everything is even, smooth, and modestly classy, but the distinct lack of individual highlights means only one thing: the man is finally caught in a rut. Consequently, I cannot recommend this record for «fans of R&B» in general — only for fans of Bobby in particular, since, at the very least, there are no attempts here to change at the expense of his own identity.

 

I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE WORLD IS COMING TO (1975)

 

1) Interlude No. 1 / I Don't Know; 2) Superstar; 3) If You Want My Love, Put Something Down On It; 4) Git It; 5) What's Your World; 6) Check It Out; 7) Interlude No. 2; 8) Jealous Love; 9) It's All Over Now; 10) Yes, Jesus Loves Me.

 

Yes indeed, it is hard to tell what the world is coming to if it no longer agrees to buy mass quan­tities of Bobby Womack records. This one completely fell through the floor — the lead single ʽCheck It Outʼ barely scraped the charts, and its follow-up, a revised (in fact, completely reinven­ted, which might have added to the problem) take on ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ, missed them complete­ly. The LP itself also fared poorly, and the most disappointing thing about it was that you couldn't even accuse Bobby of feeling «out of time» — on the contrary, the record clearly pays attention to ongoing trends, incorporating more electronics and tighter dance beats than ever before. All in all, Bobby makes it clear that he is ready to undergo a transition to disco. So why the decline in popularity? How come he got outsold by the Bee Gees on this market, anyway?

 

Most likely, the album simply fell through the cracks. At his best, Bobby was a master of the friendly funky groove and the soulful vocal tear. But the more he stoops to the new demands of the time, the less impressive the groove is, and the less space is left for the soulfulness. A succes­­ful disco hit needs a major hookline, and just how many major hooklines are there on these parti­cular songs? ʽCheck It Outʼ features a pleasant enough four-note brass / guitar riff as its main point of attraction, but it has neither sufficient cockiness for the boys, nor the required sexiness for the girls. The thing is, Mr. Womack's soul is still dwelling in the «gallant Sixties», and the thrills that he offers here for listeners in 1975 are too obsolete to properly thrill — in fact, proper­ly titillate — their gut feelings. In other words, ʽCheck It Outʼ is no ʽYou Should Be Dancingʼ when it comes to really getting people up on their feet in a way they've never been gotten up be­fore. The old funk school is getting dusty.

 

Re-evaluated forty years after the fact, though, I Don't Know What The World Is Coming To seems to be just another decent, not-too-special Womack record. Other than the quickened tem­pos, everything seems to be in place: passionate vocals, clever guitar licks, unusual arranging ideas, tight backing band. The title track, for instance, has a thoroughly cool twin set of guitar lead lines trailing through all of its duration — a «clean» «woman tone», playing a melodic part all based on sustained humming notes, and a distorted, frenzied, psychedelic guitar explosion. Unfortunately, they are not separated into separate channels and are kept well below Bobby's vocals in the mix: as usual, the man is just too humble to let the guitar play a distinctive part, not even if one of the players on the track is Glen Coins from Parliament/Funkadelic.

 

On Side B, the same double-tracking trick is repeated on ʽWhat's Your Worldʼ, another classy groove where the tension is further driven up by the mean bassline which, at about 3:14 into the song, explodes in a murky sea of apocalyptic fuzz, then, a minute later, comes back to its senses, then, towards the fade-out, does it again. It's the little things like that — totally superfluous from a general point of view — that add spice to the otherwise plain, not-too-memorable grooves and show that Bobby's will to hunt for new sounds was hardly diminished. The problem is, you, the listener, likewise, have to sniff that will out; sometimes only an intent, thoroughly focused listen in headphones will bring out the complexity of the arrangements.

 

And there are misfires, too. The new version of ʽIt's All Over Nowʼ, for instance, is a mess; where Bobby's previous self-reinventions always preserved the gist of the tune, this particular one is clearly self-referential, and could only work as an extra coda to the original — Bobby's duet with Bill Withers centers on endless re-runs of the chorus and chaotic vocalizing: you are offered three minutes of cheerful dance-centered insanity without a good understanding of what all the hoopla is about. The only thing sillier than recording this track was the attempt to release it as an official single — for whom?

 

It is also a little strange to sit through a whole album of mostly high-powered dance music, lightly interspersed with a few ballads, only to have it end on a slow, reverential note with a gospel num­ber: ʽYes, Jesus Loves Meʼ seems like a hasty toss-off, almost like an instantaneous apology to the Lord for over-indulging in «pleasures of the flesh» on the rest of the record (musically more than lyrically), and the gospel genre is not really tailor-made for Bobby's stylistics.

 

But in all honesty, that's just nitpicking. It would be all too easy to say that the album finds Bob­by in a directionless state of confusion, and use its very title for an indirect confirmation — in reality, I don't feel any confusion, and, for what it's worth, serious soul artists have always com­plained about the state of the world, regardless of the actual historical context (which is why so much of their stuff sounds timeless, applicable to any epoch). It is really quite a self-assured, so­lid recording in its own right — its only serious «flaw» being in that it tries to give the people what they want, the way they want it, but fails, because it is still delivered the way the author wants it. Or something like that, anyway.

 

SAFETY ZONE (1975)

 

1) Everything's Gonna Be Alright; 2) I Wish It Would Rain; 3) Trust Me; 4) Where There's A Will There's A Way; 5) Love Ain't Something You Can Get For Free; 6) Something You Got; 7) Daylight; 8) I Feel A Groove Comin' On.

 

Ironic title, considering that this was Bobby's first serious plunge into disco waters — the last track is a ferociously non-stop eight-minutes-on-the-floor workout, and ʽEverything's Gonna Be Alrightʼ and ʽWhere There's A Will...ʼ do their best to keep up with the hotness as well. For the first time in his life, alas, it seems like Bobby is giving in to outside pressure, with a loss of face. When it comes to straightforward disco, he has no way of «womackizing» it.

 

Seriously, ʽI Feel A Groove Comin' Onʼ, despite preceding ʽDisco Infernoʼ for about three years, already sounds like an embarrassing parody on The Trammps (a gruesome conclusion, conside­ring that much of the time, The Trammps themselves sounded like an endless self-parody). Eight minutes of a totally mind-boggling, robotic groove, with one ska-derived brass figure repeated over and over with no extra coloring — my only hypothesis is that this was Bobby's way of snap­ping back, «oh, you want real red hot? I'll give you real red hot, you brainless idiots!» There is an odd surprise — at 6:30 into the song, there is an unexpectedly classy piano break that pushes the song sky high for about one minute, and no wonder: check the liner notes and you will see that the piano player is no less than Herbie Hancock himself (!). A beautiful reward, no doubt, for those who have been patient enough to suffer through the rest of the song, but is it really adequate relative to the overall cruelty?

 

ʽWhere There's A Will, There's A Wayʼ is actually less embarrassing if you like that sort of jumpy mid-1970s vaudeville (of which Billy Preston was a particular master) — at the very least, it has an intricate, non-trivial brass-pop arrangement that Blood, Sweat & Tears would probably kill for (just the kind of sound they needed to fortify the dance-oriented part of their reputation). And the seven minutes of ʽEverything...ʼ actually try to balance between darker, funkier verses and the lighter, bouncier, more discoish chorus — an interesting, unusual attempt to merge the two facets, but it does not seem to work well: the «seams» are too crude and artificial for the mood transitions to become believable. One minute you are standing in a spooky swamp of wah-wah riffage, faraway ghostly-echoey guitar shrieks and warlike brass blasts, then the next minute you are happily dancing your head off to a merry disco beat — sounds intriguing on paper, per­haps, but not so much in real life.

 

The remaining half of the album is still occupied by examples of the more traditional Womack sound: highlights include ʽTrust Meʼ, written half a decade ago for Janis Joplin and revisited here under a more modernistic coating — but even so, the plastic synthesizer sound is not enough to wipe out traces of genuine soulfulness — and ʽDaylightʼ, a dance ballad with an ironic flavor, sung by Bobby from the viewpoint of a «nightlife addict» who treats «daylight» as «the only time when I can unwind». Could be hilarious if Bobby didn't succeed in making it sound a little tragic. As for the trademark «oddity number», this time around it is the old Chris Kenner chestnut ʽSomething You Gotʼ, redone as a comical reggae number: too self-consciously cute for its own good, but at least showing that the old style of cerebral gymnastics is still very much alive.

 

All in all, this round of the battle is still being won by Bobby, but when you start counting tro­phies and casualties, the former only barely exceed the latter. It is clear enough that, at this point, the man finds himself forced to engage in something that he obviously does not like too much, and that it gets harder and harder to find an acceptable compromise between «soul» and «com­merce». The solutions that he offers on Safety Zone — such as merging the dark and the light on the lead-in track, or subtly mocking the values of disco on the lead-off number — betray a con­cealed cry for help and may be read as the Morse code equivalent for «I'm as irritated with this crap as you are, guys and girls», but that does not automatically redeem an album where Herbie Hancock is invited to contribute just one minute of piano playing on a generic eight-minute disco track. Whose idea of a pleasant surprise was that, anyway?

 

B. W. GOES C&W (1976)

 

1) Don't Make This The Last Date For You And Me; 2) Behind Closed Doors; 3) Bouquet Of Roses; 4) Tired Of Living In The Country; 5) Tarnished Rings; 6) Big Bayou; 7) Song Of The Mockingbird; 8) I'd Be Ahead If I Could Quit While I'm Behind; 9) You; 10) I Take It On Home.

 

The album that singlehandedly brought Bobby's career to a standstill. At the height of the disco era, for an R&B artist to come up with an album that consisted exclusively of covers of country songs — well, you gotta give the man some respect. After all those years and years of enduring compromises between the will to experiment and commercial expectations (even saving up space on his own records to explain the situation), Bobby suddenly comes up with this mighty torpedo, blowing his ship to bits: he almost shoved the record down the throats of United Artists executi­ves, but after it predictably bombed, they had no choice but to let him go, and, from a business point of view, that was probably the only reasonable solution.

 

What is really depressing about the situation is that the circumstances surrounding this record are far more curious and amusing than the record itself (for instance, when first asked to come up with a suitable title, Bobby suggested Step Aside Charley Pride, Give Another Nigger A Try). The actual songs recorded for the album, ten of them, all covers of old country standards by Charlie Rich, Eddy Arnold, Jimmy Newman, etc., might appeal to really big fans of the genre, but it's not as if Bobby were doing anything surprising with them. The material does get a little funkified and decorated with the appropriate synthesizers and wah-wah guitars, typical of the mid-1970s, but other than that, I am not even sure of what to say.

 

Ironically, the only song that Sam Cooke ever wrote about the country was ʽTired Of Living In The Countryʼ ("gonna get me a fine apartment, where the water runs hot and cold"), and, of course, Bobby had to do that one as well, addicted as he was to having at least one Sam cover per album (or, at least, per every couple of albums). It generates a little more excitement than every­thing else, even ʽTarnished Ringsʼ where Bobby drags out his own father, Friendly Womack, to sing a family duet (in authentic country-western fashion, I guess).

 

It isn't as if Bobby couldn't have done anything with the songs — the man who could turn ʽNo­body Knows Youʼ into a red-hot funk workout, and ʽSomething You've Gotʼ into ska comedy, could probably come up with some hilarious transformations for regular country stuff as well. But it seems as if he thought that the very gesture was enough — that, perhaps, the very fact of em­barking on this enterprise could turn him into the Ray Charles of 1976. And in thinking that, he forgot to introduce any spice into the arrangements: even the guitars are bland and mechanic throughout the sessions. The singing tries to be passionate, but Bobby's singing is always passio­nate: like with so many first-rate R&B / soul singers, there is abso­lu­tely no telling when he is exactly «getting into it» and when he is just being professional.

 

Even though the album only runs for less than half an hour, it is still less than half an hour of excruciating boredom, unless you worship the power of the waltz tempo, the slide guitar, and the sentimental strings in all their doings. A ridiculous decision if there ever was one (and, if I read Bobby's own memories of that correctly, drugs had some say at least in the matter). Thumbs up for the audacity, perhaps, but the music is clearly thumbs down worthy, even if it is a very dif­ferent thumbs-down in nature from all the usual thumbs down circa 1976-77.

 

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS (1976)

 

1) Home Is Where The Heart Is; 2) Just A Little Bit Salty; 3) Standing In The Safety Zone; 4) One More Chance On Love; 5) How Long; 6) I Could Never Be Satisfied; 7) Something For My Head; 8) A Change Is Gonna Come; 9) We've Only Just Begun.

 

Although Bobby's «country-western debacle» cost him his contract with United Artists, he did deliver the album, so all they could do in the end was sell him out to a different label — which they did, and Bobby found himself transferred to Columbia. Not a particularly shabby deal, either, but now that he discovered that they could trade him around as much as they wanted to, until he ended up on some totally God-forsaken label, he had to come around to his senses and work more carefully. Consequently, Home Is Where The Heart Is drops all crazy pretense and returns us to the safe, commercial formula of Safety Zone.

 

Few things, good or bad, could be stated about this record. It has a significant disco quota to fill (title track; ʽSomething For My Headʼ; most importantly, the mind-melting groove of ʽStanding In The Safety Zoneʼ), but it is not gruesomely dominated by disco, preserving plenty of space for older style funk, R&B and balladry as well. Unfortunately, the production mostly bows down to the requirements of its time, smoothing and streamlining the sound until all of Bobby's backing band begins to sound like a mere background canvas for the vocal hooks (if they are present) or the vocal atmosphere (in case of ballads that do not require hookpower).

 

Bobby's guitar is the only instrument that consistently shows signs of life, but there are so many additional players that his signature licks, no matter how inspired, are not enough to properly tilt the balance. It is not at all likely that you will remember ʽSafety Zoneʼ as «that one song with some classy wailing guitar» on it — more likely, it will simply be «that lengthy disco vamp, all pinned to just a couple of bars of melody». On the other hand, the guitar bits (as well as a sax part that sounds as if that instrument, too, was trying to procure itself some individuality) at least add a pinch of replay value, so it is one of those examples of «semi-successfully working from within the formula» that guarantees itself at least some fans even after quite a while.

 

Still, the only memorable song on the entire first side for me is Eddie Hinton's ʽJust A Little Bit Saltyʼ, and only because it manages a great vocal build-up from verse to chorus, with the first line of the chorus delivered by Bobby with almost percussive precision (for that matter, the late Eddie Hinton remains quite an underrated sessionist and songwriter from the Muscle Shoals team). There is some injustice, I believe, in that the song only runs for three minutes where a flabby, mushy ballad like ʽOne More Chance On Loveʼ drags on for almost seven (largely due to Bobby's decision to have a pseudo-improvised «scat duet» midway through with his piano player, all of which sounds quite forced and artificial).

 

The second side works better, mainly since it is dominated by two covers of classics — finally, not a moment soon, Bobby decides to cover his beloved mentor's magnum opus (ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ), and then immediately follows it up with ʽWe've Only Just Begunʼ, a duet with some unknown lady who sure is no Karen Carpenter, but carries out her duties well enough. I am not sure, however, whether we should be happy or sad about both of these songs performed in a very straightforward manner, without any of Bobby's usual experimental trimmings. I mean, it is understandable if he worshipped ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ like a sacred object to the point of not wanting to change anything, and he nails its essence as understandingly and lovingly as Sam did in his time, but what do we get out of this? Not to mention that, with all of its sociopolitical connotations, the song was perfect for 1964, but not necessarily so by 1976, when racial tension in the US had already moved to a different level — at any rate, it does feel a little weird to have Sam's song, performed so very close to the original, sitting on the same album with red-hot disco vamps, even when you look at it from a forty-years-later perspective.

 

That said, the record has to be set straight: a few comments that I have encountered referred to the Columbia transfer as having a negative effect on Bobby's artistry — just put it all in context, and it is clear that it is not the record label, but the overall musical environment, that has to be held responsible. The transition to a smoother, more dance-oriented, empty-headed style, leaving less and less space to create, had already begun circa 1974, and the «mad» country-western record only aggravated the situation: it was a reckless go-out-and-get-drunk move after a week of point­less, depressing toil in the office, and in the end, it cost Bobby whatever still remained of his creative freedom and inspiration. But since the slide was gradual, Home Is Where The Heart Is is still quite listenable, and in spots, quite lovable (unfortunately, none of these spots were written by Bobby himself — yet another sign that things were not going in the right direction).

 

PIECES (1978)

 

1) It's Party Time; 2) Trust Your Heart; 3) Stop Before We Start; 4) When Love Begins Friendship Ends; 5) Wind It Up; 6) Is This The Thanks I Get; 7) Caught Up In The Middle; 8) Never Let Nothing Get The Best Of You.

 

If you like disco as a phenomenon — if the tracks in question do not have to have something juicily outstanding about them, rising over the conventions, in order to satisfy your taste — Pieces, which is Bobby's first full-speed-ahead plunge into the pit, might sound just as healthy and enjoyable to you as anything else he put out in the 1970s. Besides, not every track on here is «regular» disco: ʽIt's Party Timeʼ, ʽWind It Upʼ, and ʽNever Let Nothing...ʼ are the three «an­chors» that are strategically placed at the front, at the back, and in the middle to keep the party going strong and throw the obligatory fuel into the fire whenever necessary — yet there are quite a few moody ballads, and even a couple old-schooler funk numbers, to offer diversity.

 

Nevertheless, so many crucial elements are missing from the platter this time around that yes, I think it is quite safe to define Pieces as that particular turning point beyond which lies shame, obscurity, and only a slim, costly chance at redemption. For starters, Bobby Womack the guitar player is almost completely absent from the stage — ʽWhen Love Begins, Friendship Endsʼ is pretty much the only song here where he is still playing excitingly soulful lead licks. For another thing, gone completely are his creative re-inventions of classic songs: all the material here is new, credited to either Bobby himself, or the rest of the Womacks, or Bobby's producer, or some of the local riff-raff that nobody remembers any more. For good reason, because the «writing» process must have occupied Bobby and his backers least of all circa 1978.

 

Without his playing, and without his unpredictability, Bobby becomes merely one more face in the crowd — and not as colorful or clownish as hinted at on the album sleeve, either. The ballads, such as the Candi Staton duet on ʽStop Before We Startʼ, still show him capable of solid soulful drama, but it is the kind of material that every more or less respectable soul singer with a good timbre could deliver in his or her sleep at the time; and the subject matter — resist temptation or yield to temptation — is hardly worth praising all by itself, seeing as how it had alreay been ex­plored by Bobby as deep as it was possible for him.

 

In the end, the title of the last track, ʽNever Let Nothing Get The Best Of Youʼ, is hilariously ironic, seeing as how Bobby belts it out against a backdrop of cheesy disco beats, corny Latin horns, and cooky «party noises» overdubbed in the background — here, clearly, we have our­selves a man who let quite a few things get the best of him, be it the record industry, the stupid musical fashions of the time, the party lifestyle, or just that good old cocaine. Deeply embarras­sing in some spots and merely listenable in others, Pieces is the first — and, unfortunately, far from the last — definitive thumbs down in Bobby's career.

 

ROADS OF LIFE (1979)

 

1) The Roads Of Life; 2) How Could You Break My Heart; 3) Honey Dripper Boogie; 4) The Roots In Me; 5) What Are You Doin'; 6) Give It Up; 7) Mr. D.J., Don't Stop The Music; 8) I Honestly Love You.

 

Bobby's label-hopping begins in earnest here: no longer welcome at Columbia, he is switching over to Arista, for which he only made this one album before getting the sack. And do we even need to wonder why? Bland, hookless, run-of-the-mill disco grooves and sentimental ballads that pick up right where Pieces left off and downgrade the artist one or two more notches. This time around, old-school «funky grit» is eliminated completely, so that the entire album flows by with­out demanding any of your attention. Just forty minutes of unnoticeable background muzak for healthy clubbing. You go on the floor to stretch out your limbs during the fast ones, then back to the table for a drink and a chat during the slow ones. You don't even remember the dude's name, not even if ʽMr. DJʼ has taken the time to announce it.

 

The most dreadful thing to realize is that all of the songs, except for the last one, are self-penned this time. The only choice for a cover is quite telling: ʽI Honestly Love Youʼ, a 1974 hit for Olivia Newton-John, a pretty awful song when it came out, and Bobby's attempt to inject some «genuine soul» in it is about as successful as trying to force-feed amphetamines to someone who's been paralyzed from head to toes. In reality, this can only mean one thing: by 1979, lost and confused in the whirlwind of musical change and personal troubles, Bobby had become com­pletely separated from good taste. Oh well; it's not as if he was the only one.

 

The less said about the «originals», the better. Deep lovers of soul in all of its varieties might find something enjoyable about ʽHow Could You Break My Heartʼ (easily done, Bobby, as long as you keep seducing your ladies with this sort of material; the tacky «phone conversation» alone at the beginning of the track makes it unpalatable), or about ʽThe Roots In Meʼ, a romantic duet with singing lady Melissa Manchester, but probably even those who are ready to forgive almost everything will find it very hard to become inspired by the interminably boring disco grooves that take themselves too seriously to generate the required fun quotient — ʽMr. DJ, Don't Stop The Musicʼ is almost like a philosophical piece in itself, even if there is absolutely nothing going on in the song. As in, you know, somebody told us that there has to be this four-on-the-floor thing, and some wah-wah guitar, and some strings, and some chicks singing backup in the background, and that's, uh, the way it goes. Hey, how come Mr. DJ stopped the music after all? What do you mean, he never even began it? What's wrong with the way we're doing it?

 

What is wrong is that it's all deadly dull. Disco works if you really agree to stoop to its level — make it raunchy, or at least make it catchy, and there's a guilty pleasure for you all right. But on Roads Of Life, just like on Pieces, Bobby still works from an essentially «polite» point of view, incapable of crossing the line. And he ain't the Gibb brothers, either, having always placed his faith in the groove and the soulfulness rather than melody, so there is no chance of any of these songs attaining the level of a ʽNight Feverʼ. In the end, it's just another forgettable embarrassment, and a thumbs down without any regret.

 

THE POET (1981)

 

1) So Many Sides Of You; 2) Lay Your Lovin' On Me; 3) Secrets; 4) Just My Imagination; 5) Stand Up; 6) Games; 7) If You Think You're Lonely Now; 8) Where Do We Go From Here.

 

By 1981, Bobby was stuck with Beverly Glen Music, a record label so insignificant that it does not even have its own Wikipedia page. Amazingly, this did not impede the man from undergoing a brief revival of sorts: ʽIf You Think You're Lonely Nowʼ, a romantic «new style R&B» ballad, unexpectedly became a huge hit, and helped pull the album up the charts as well — higher, in fact, than any previous Bobby Womack album. Of course, the well-chosen title and the cool sleeve photo (nice match between guitar and suit color, among other things) helped a lot, but on the whole, this dazzling commercial success requires some effort to understand.

 

It is definitely true that The Poet reflected a certain shake-up. With disco dead and gone, and R&B beginning to undergo the next stage of transformation — with synthesizers and electronic drums replacing live bands — it was only natural that Bobby, who had already kowtowed to cur­rent trends on his previous two albums, would not be above kowtowing to the latest change in fashion. From that point of view, The Poet sounds more or less like any normal R&B album circa 1981. We do have the synthesizers, and the treated drums, and the echoey backing vocals, and every production aspect typical of those years.

 

But it is also true that these songs, unlike anything on Roads Of Life, carry some actual meaning. To appreciate the album, it helps a lot if one listens to the acoustic demos for two of its key tracks (ʽGamesʼ and ʽSecretsʼ), appended as bonus tracks to one of the CD issues. They are actually so good that I cannot help wondering how much stronger would the entire album have been if it were just Bobby and his acoustic guitar — naturally, an album like this wouldn't be much of a chart contender, but a legend contender, for sure. ʽGamesʼ, in particular, comes across as a tragic plea for humanity, punctuated by mournful chords and plaintive vocals. When you listen to it in its final incarnation, the mournful chords are gone, replaced by completely expressionless key­boards, and the plaintive vocals are diminished in power by the rest of the arrangement.

 

Still, that fact alone is enough to realize that at least Bobby is back on an «artistic» track. A few songs dealing with spiritual matters, most of them still dealing with his favorite topic (dissatis­faction with his latest object of desire), but all of them conceived as actual songs and not simply launchpads for mindless (and toothless) grooving. Even the openly dance-oriented tracks like ʽLay Your Lovin' On Meʼ are sung with a level of passion that exceeds any of his disco numbers; and musically, there is a strong soft-jazz streak to them, with pianos and saxophones sometimes rising over the synthesizers and introducing a moody, living vibe that redeems some of these ar­rangements. There may not be any particular masterpieces — or, at least, the arrangements al­most never succeed in bringing out the best in these melodies — but this stuff is not «fodder».

 

Of course, the album's best known song, as it frequently happens, is arguably one of its worst tracks — ʽIf You Think You're Lonely Nowʼ, a midnight ballad about Bobby dumping his bit­chin' girlfriend (again), is mostly memorable for the endless repetition of its chorus hook and little else (well, Bobby does play some nice jazzy electric licks in the background, but, as usual, they are few and far in between and when I say «background», I really mean it). But if you hear it on the radio and fail to pay attention to its never-ending monotonous coda and then learn with surprise that it was a huge hit for Bobby Womack, do not let it fool you: there is more to The Poet than that one song. The big question is, would you actually care to go back in time and re­cover the soul of this album from under the crappy generic arrangements?

 

If anything, Bobby should have done the record with a small jazz combo — acoustic guitar, bass, piano, maybe just a little sax, maybe no drums at all — and it would have been a beautiful, oc­casionally deep-reaching experience (do look for these acoustic demos, they are far worthier than the finished product). As it is, The Poet is badly dated through generic misproduction, the songs suffocated by plastic treatment. But even so, I still give the album a thumbs up, since its inten­tions are clearly good — and wherever they are not hampered too much by extra gloss, carried out brilliantly: for instance, ʽJust My Imaginationʼ (not a Temptations cover!) may have been one of the most gorgeous songs recorded by the man.

 

THE POET II (1984)

 

1) Love Has Finally Come At Last; 2) It Takes A Lot Of Strength To Say Goodbye; 3) Through The Eyes Of A Child; 4) Surprise, Surprise; 5) Tryin' To Get Over You; 6) Tell Me Why; 7) Who's Foolin' Who; 8) I Wish I Had Someone To Go Home To; 9) American Dream.

 

Playing the «sequel game» is always a risky business, and if you are doing it in the hedonistic / technocrazy 1980s, and if you have already shown declining immunity to musical crap-a-titis in the disco era, winning chances are slim. It all begins, as usual, with the album cover: same Bobby, same guitar, but the way he is dressed and the way he is wielding it shows that the fashionable Bobby is out, and Bobby «The Ladies' Man» Womack is in. Of course, the man was never a stranger to direct sexual attraction, but this presentation is a tad too obvious.

 

So it comes as no big surprise that the first three songs are rather shapeless, and emotionally si­milar, R&B ballads on which Bobby engages Patti LaBelle in a series of soulful duets, every one of which, sooner or later, turns into a screaming match — which Bobby inevitably loses, because trying to outscream Patti LaBelle is a futile enterprise for any man. The songs are extremely bland and generic, though, just the regular anthemic, overproduced crapola of the times, and not even Bobby's guitar licks, moving closer and closer to regular jazz patterns, can redeem the lack of memorable melodies or the empty keyboard sound. Besides that, Patti LaBelle's singing style is also an acquired taste (most of the time, the lady operates in overdrive mode, and that can wear a listener out pretty quickly).

 

It gets a little better from there on in the songwriting department, but not in the production area. ʽSurprise, Surpriseʼ is written in late period Stevie Wonder's style (soft, steady dance rhythms, gently rocking synths, catchy chorus, etc.) and has a touch of genuine tenderness to it (percussion is really dreadful though). ʽWho's Foolin' Whoʼ is actually a potentially great electrofunk groove, but also spoiled with excesses (silly backing harmonies and way too many synth overdubs — why didn't they just leave it all to Bobby and the bass guitar?). And probably the best two songs are left for last: ʽI Wish I Had Someone To Go Home Toʼ finally gives us a pinch of classic Bob­by Womack desperation, featuring his best (most credible, at least) vocals on the entire record, in addition to some surprising tone and mood changes from verse to bridge — and ʽAmerican Dreamʼ, hinting at the latter's unreachability, is a fairly grand social statement to conclude such a lightweight album, but at least it's a curious conclusion (even incorporating a bit of Martin Luther King for extra heaviness). «Probably» the best, because, like everything else, these songs, too, suffer from dated production ideas.

 

Despite a few bright spots, the album as a whole still gets a thumbs down. It did manage to sell relatively well, carried on by memories of The Poet, but, nevertheless, failed to match the sales and chart success of its predecessor, and initiated the beginning of Bobby's final (as we all thought until recently) slide into total obscurity and oblivion. The LaBelle duets that were re­leased as singles never matched the success of ʽIf You Think You're Lonely Nowʼ, either. And yet, at the same time, The Poet II is clearly way more commercially-oriented than The Poet, a much more clearly calculated / manipulative affair that should have duped the public, but did not, maybe because of the presence of so many fresh new stars in the early 1980s who actually had interesting new things to say — Bobby, on the other hand, was pretty much spent with that one last gasp, no matter how much his cheerful poise on the album cover, with so many inches of his guitar sticking out your way, try to insinuate the opposite.

 

THE BRAVEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE (2012)

 

1) The Bravest Man In The Universe; 2) Please Forgive My Heart; 3) Deep River; 4) Dayglo Reflection; 5) What­ever Happened To The Times; 6) Stupid Introlude; 7) Stupid; 8) If There Wasn't Something There; 9) Love Is Gonna Lift You Up; 10) Nothin' Can Save Ya; 11) Jubilee (Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around).

 

Flip forward almost thirty years. For almost a decade after his Beverly Glen albums, Bobby went on riding from one short-lived record contract with a little-known label to another, releasing al­bums that never charted, rarely attracted any (positive) critical attention, and went out of print so quickly that, in the end, I sort of gave up upon trying to locate them, especially since there is re­latively little hope that the chase would be well worth the catch. Then, after 1994's boldly titled Resurrection (which was anything but), he ceased writing songs altogether, and, apart from a Christmas album from time to time, sank into near-complete seclusion — not that I blame him at all, considering the dire fate of modern R&B, a genre Bobby had worked so much for.

 

Then something really weird happened, one of those accidental turns of events that generate an auspicious opportunity — none other than Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz fame contacted Bobby with a suggestion to work together. Apparently, the man was a fan of Womack's classic material, yet simply being a fan is one thing, and actually going out all the way is quite another: an Albarn / Womack collaboration, without prior notice, would be quite an unlikely combination. It was Bobby's daughter (a closet Gorillaz fan?) who convinced her father to accept the invitation, and this first led to Bobby adding vocals to several Gorillaz tracks — and then, in return, to Al­barn co-writing and co-producing a brand new Bobby Womack album, his first and, so far, only one in the 21st century.

 

Based on this information alone, you can easily tell without even hearing it that The Bravest Man In The Universe would be somewhat of a «special» record. Critics fell all over it, not ne­cessarily because they loved it, but probably because they'd never heard anything quite like it. And, indeed, the record defies simple analysis — each of its ingredients is not at all special or even all that good in itself, but together, Albarn and Womack create a puzzling combination that you can love or hate, but cannot ignore.

 

Almost in its entirety, the album is electronic — loops, beats, cycles, lots of programming, the usual thing, not too surprising, considering that it all stemmed from Gorillaz anyway. On top of these electronic grooves, which are usually moody and minimalistic, Womack records his vocal melodies — shaky and a bit gargly in an elderly manner, but still capable of an emotional grip — to work out a series of reflections on life, love, the past, the future, man's destiny, and even on those who use the Lord's name in vain, ʽStupidʼ being his lyrical answer to Genesis' ʽJesus He Knows Meʼ, in a way. The two are aided in this (un)godly mix by Albarn's co-worker Richard Russell, and big trendy femme-fatale™ star Lana del Rey makes a guest appearance on ʽDayglo Reflectionʼ; other than that, the studio is empty — quite an unusual deal for Bobby.

 

Does it «work»? I don't know. In all honesty, I would say that it doesn't. It is intriguing to see Albarn take the old chum in the studio and provide him with a background of drum machines, bleeps, pings, and synthesized sonic veils (he does play some live instruments from time to time, too, but they are not so much upfront) — but none of this stuff seems tailor-made to suit Bobby's style. The electronic and vocal melodies are synchronized, yet it is hard for me to imagine Bobby drawing actual inspiration from these sounds and using it for his own vocal delivery. Albarn says that he gave instrumental demos to Womack, who would then write lyrics around them — I do wonder what those demos were and whether they were not simply played on acoustic guitar, be­cause it is hard for me to imagine Bobby putting lyrics and vocal melodies on top of these elec­tronic arrangements. (It is even harder for me to imagine Bobby, with his life-long penchant for guitar and funky groove, liking Albarn's and Russell's production, but at least officially he did).

 

Nevertheless, at least these arrangements try to be creative, unlike, say, the generic Eighties pro­duction on The Poet series — the title track, for instance, puts a thin, moody veil of strings and some minimalistic piano tinkles on top of the programmed percussion, giving the song an am­bient feel, that is, something previously unthinkable for a Bobby Womack song. The title is for­mally cut out of the song's refrain — "the bravest man in the universe is the one who has forgiven first" — but could easily be seen to refer to Bobby himself, of course, as it must have taken him quite a bit of bravery to go along with such a radical reinvention of himself.

 

«Classic» Bobby makes a brief appearance on the traditional tune ʽDeep Riverʼ, where the man is featured solo with an acoustic guitar — barely two minutes in all, just to give us a brief reminder of what it used to be like, yet it manages to take a good shot at winning top prize in that short time span, especially when placed next to ʽDayglo Reflectionʼ, a self-consciously «mystical-ro­mantic» composition where the main hero is not Bobby, but rather the perfidiously crowned «siren of the 2010s», large-lipped lady Lana del Rey that, according to everything I've heard and seen of her, is the perfect embodiment of phoniness in «sensual pop art».

 

Unfortunately, this is not the only song where there is too much going on and not nearly enough Bobby Womack — upbeat «dance» tunes like ʽLove Is Gonna Lift You Upʼ and ʽJubileeʼ also sound more like Albarn and Russell's take on making an electronic facsimile of classic R&B than songs that merit and justify Womack's presence on them. (ʽJubileeʼ is kinda fun, though, with its big badass bass drum pounding out the tribal beat like crazy — the one track on the album where, instead of scratching or wracking your head, you might just be tempted to lose it for a bit.).

 

But on most of the ballads, Bobby does sing as if he cared, and his ruminations on the world, the times, and even the exorbitant fake preachers sound exactly like they should — troubled, but tightly controlled and technically sound confessions of a worn and torn, but still viable old man. Actually, the age is only being betrayed by a little extra hoarseness and maybe just a tad lessened range (which was never that big to begin with): no decrepit relic here, even if he has to struggle a bit to strike out the anger necessary to fuel ʽStupidʼ (that's the one about the preachers).

 

I give the album a thumbs up, first and foremost, not for «quality» as such, but for its unusual­ness (I was going to write «novelty factor», but we are talking of a feat rather than a gimmick here, so that might be a little demeaning). The very fact that something like this came out in 2012 deserves recognition — and, let's face it, it could have been worse in all possible respects (even Lana del Rey at least has her own brand of phoniness, where they could have invited some com­pletely faceless chick instead, out of millions available). The Bravest Man In The Universe should not be judged as a collection of songs — it's more of an experimental modern art lick on an old canvas, where some will pretend to going gaga over the modern art, while others will simply admire the good old art of weaving canvas. Personally, I'm just glad the old guy can still sing with so much feeling — and a big thank you to Damon Albarn at least for ensuring that the arrangements always stay minimalistic enough to let that voice soar and flutter all over them.

 

BONZO DOG (DOO-DAH) BAND

GORILLA (1967)

 

1) Cool Britannia; 2) The Equestrian Statue; 3) Jollity Farm; 4) I Left My Heart In San Francisco; 5) Look Out, There's A Monster Coming; 6) Jazz (Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold); 7) Death Cab For Cutie; 8) Narcissus; 9) The Intro And The Outro; 10) Mickey's Son And Daughter; 11) Big Shot; 12) Music For The Head Ballet; 13) Piggy Bank Love; 14) I'm Bored; 15) The Sound Of Music.

 

Long before there was Monty Python, there was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (originally Dada band, which makes things more comprehensible — not that this particular outfit ever hunted for comprehensibility). They began by playing absurdist jazz and vaudeville, then got bored with it and started moving into other genres — all sorts of genres, actually: of the fifteen tracks, cram­med into 35 minutes on their debut album, not two sound alike. And what's that thing ought to be called? Why, Gorilla, of course. Less predictable than Chicken, which might have been the first and most obvious option.

 

There are two schools of thought on Viv Stanshall, Neil Innes, and their merry band of sidekicks: one that treats them as serious, responsible, important, and influential musical innovators, lodged in the same camp as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, and one that tends to view them more like intelligent, well-educated, tasteful clowns, good for a healthy laugh, but ultimately forget­table in the grand scheme of things. Consequently, Gorilla is generally viewed by adherents of the first point of view as a funny, but very lightweight preview of much grander things to come, whereas the second group might see it as the band's finest (half-)hour, adequately showing their talents without any unsuccessful attempts to overreach their grasp.

 

Personally, I am stuck in the middle here: on one hand, Gorilla is the most easy-going, immedi­ately enjoyable set of tunes (and/or musical jokes) that these guys put out, but on the other hand, I do not like the idea of Stanshall, Innes & Co. as «musical clowns», either: humor was their chief weapon of choice at all times, but they were also accomplished and disciplined musicians striving to innovate. But it is hard for me to deny that Gorilla finds the band completely at ease with all the goals they are trying to achieve. No matter whether they are dabbling in old-school vaudeville, pop, standards, calypso, rockabilly, or bubblegum, they always nail the essence — and then turn it inside out to create, like, the best parody of the style ever.

 

Yes, Gorilla is «just» a comedy record, but dammit, what high quality comedy we have here, to the extent that almost each single track brings on some new realization about some peculiarity of the selected genre. For instance, ʽThe Equestrian Statueʼ with its melancholic harpsichord is written in the sub-style of «Britpop» commonly used for songs about loneliness and personal troubles (think ʽTwo Sistersʼ by the Kinks, etc.), but, regarding the lyrics, are we supposed to empathize for the protagonist — the bronzed and polished "famous man" who "on his famous horse would ride through the land"? Nope, it's just that playing the harpsichord that way makes you feel gloomy and melancholic all over, so much so you'd even pity a statue.

 

Another fabulous highlight is ʽThe Intro And The Outroʼ, on which the band set a boppy jazzy groove, get introduced one by one, and then, as they run out of proper band members but not out of musical instruments, add a host of imaginary players to the roster — including Quasimodo on bells ("representing the flower people"), Adolf Hitler on vibes, Charles de Gaulle on accordion, and lots of contemporary British celebrities and politicians that are today only recognizable through historical textbooks. In a way, it's just a silly, albeit catchy, gag, but it also makes you ponder on the issue of sprawling «big bands» where, sometimes, the function of a single player is reduced to simply «being there» for the sake of providing the illusion of massiveness — play a single lead line, then disappear forever into the background...

 

ʽDeath Cab For Cutieʼ, which the Bonzos were also given to lip-sync to in Magical Mystery Tour (the scene where everybody watches the hot stripper instead of listening to the music, and you can't really blame 'em) and which later became the name of a proper band in its own rights, parodies «Vegasy» Elvis, but the lyrics tell such a macabre little story, and the arrangement is so delightfully rudimentary (just a boogie piano line and a light brass accompaniment) that it goes beyond parody — an absurdist-minimalist mash-up of Elvis, brutality, and light jazz. It ain't no masterpiece, but somehow, it's cool in its straight-faced smoothness.

 

The weirdest number on the album (and that makes it truly weird, because all the songs here are weird) is ʽBig Shotʼ, which, technically, parodies a trendy mid-1960s soundtrack to a film noir (of the type where everybody wears sunglasses and walks the streets to the latest hard bop grooves). If you manage to get rid of the «intentionally annoying» voiceover that very quickly descends into schizophasia, the song, however, is a perfectly valid modern jazz composition in its own right — dark, bluesy, and with a frantic free-form sax solo to boot: they are setting the genre up at the same time as they try to make their own serious mark on it.

 

At the very least, one thing that can be said about Gorilla without reservations is that it ain't boring, not for one single second. With all the diversity and unpredictability floating around, it got more musical ideas, or spin-offs on musical ideas, in 35 minutes than some bands manage to produce over an entire career, and they almost always work. Even the short bits, such as the «flubbed vocal audition» of ʽI Left My Heart In San Franciscoʼ, or the gratuituous, but forgivable, dig at ʽThe Sound Of Musicʼ, are funny — even when they intentionally play out of tune and as uncoordinated as possible (ʽJazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Coldʼ), they still manage to be funny, and just a little bit insightful. Of all the musical hooliganry that pervaded Great Britain circa 1967, Gorilla is that one record that is «guaranteed to raise a smile», no matter what the circumstances, and, come to think of it, the Bonzos were the original Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band more than anybody else — their short-lived alliance with the Beatles was no accident.

 

Thumbs up, of course — oh, and, incidentally, this is also the album that introduced the phrase «Cool Britannia» to the world, wasn't it? For fairness' sake, they should have flooded Neil Innes with royalties in the late 1990s, but guess the real Britannia isn't nearly as cool as they make it out to be. Not that the Bonzos did not know this — they knew, and subsequently deflated expecta­tions by abruptly seguing the melody into a sequence of a lumberjack cutting wood, whatever symbolic meaning that sequence might be attributed.

 

THE DOUGHNUT IN GRANNY'S GREENHOUSE (1968)

 

1) We Are Normal; 2) Postcard; 3) Beautiful Zelda; 4) Can Blue Men Sing The Whites; 5) Hello Mabel; 6) Kama Sutra; 7) Humanoid Boogie; 8) The Trouser Press; 9) My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe; 10) Rockaliser Baby; 11) Rhinocratic Oaths; 12) Eleven Mustachioed Daughters.

 

The biggest shift from the «adolescent» stage of Gorilla to the «(anti-)maturity» stage of Dough­nut, I think, is that the Bonzos' second album shows a very strong Zappa influence — in parti­cular, lots of parallels can be drawn between it and We're Only In It For The Money, released about a half year earlier. For instance, just like Zappa's parodic masterpiece, this one, too, begins with a weird, «mucky» intro section, foreboding some bizarre hallucinogenic experience before suddenly shifting gears without a warning and leaping head first into whacky uptempo merriment and an endless pool of musical sarcasm. If the earlier Bonzos still retained some sense of restraint, this time they are truly «unleashed» — ideas come and go with the speed of a McDonalds atten­dant on a particularly busy day, and most of the ideas play out at top volume, energy, and crazi­ness. Here, they are no longer a band — they're the big bright green absurd-generation machine, to paraphrase an astute New Yorker of the times.

 

In a way, this produces a detrimental effect: The Doughnut is so diffused, distracting, and dis­concerting most of the time, that once it's over, all that remains in your head is a woozy, fuzzy feeling, as if you have just emerged out of a forty-minute experimental slideshow where your eyes had to react to colorful images at the speed of one image per half-second. Almost every «song» here is spliced together from several distinct sections that often have next to no connec­tion with each other — you have all sorts of combinations and deconstructions where old school foxtrots can walk hand in hand with free-form avantgarde, piano-based music hall can rapidly metamorphose into modal jazz, and somber Latin grooves can make a transition into a mock-solo piano recital. In this house, nothing is impossible.

 

As a result, the songs on this album, unlike most of the songs on Gorilla, simply do not exist on their own, but only function properly as part of a single package; at the very least, in order to disentangle them, you'd have to separate the melodies from the surrounding studio trickery, and filter out some of the noisy overdubs. In particular, I cannot speak of highlights or lowlights — as in Zappa's case, it makes more sense to regard the whole thing as part of a single, (dis)integrated, (in)­coherent musical show. Of course, the Bonzos do not have, nor do they really intend or claim to have, Frank's musical vision — where Zappa, even at his most humorous and/or offensive, still tended to pay attention to the «boundary-pushing» factor, Innes and Stanshall concentrate first and foremost on pushing the boundaries of humor, satire, and absurdity, rather than those of the music. But at the same time, the very «kaleidoscopic» nature of The Doughnut does not allow to classify it as «just» a parody album: on the overall greatness scale, I would certainly place this album seriously higher than, say, any given Weird Al record.

 

For instance, ʽBeautiful Zeldaʼ may be seen as just a parody on the «space-pop» thing of the times (like ʽMr. Spacemanʼ by The Byrds, etc.), but with its moody psychedelic intro, its old-fashioned doo-wop harmonies, and its jazzy brass section, it is clear that the band was aiming for more than just parody — in a way, it simply builds up on the «join pop music with sci-fi ele­ments» trend of the mid-Sixties, perhaps with a little more verve than the basic rules of adequacy would require, but that's the Bonzos for you: they want to bring out the ridiculousness and the excitement and the innovation of certain ideas at the same time.

 

And then there's the issue of these guys being sharp. ʽCan Blue Men Sing The Whites?ʼ, for instance, takes on the problem stated in the title (in reverse, that is) and dresses it up in the guise of a ridiculously over-distorted blues-rocker which has very little redeeming musical value, per se, but even that may be intentional, because the point of the song is, well, that blue men cannot sing the whites, whichever way in particular you'd like to explain that statement. ʽKama Sutraʼ paro­dies simplistic early Sixties teen-pop for about forty seconds, substituting the usual boy-meets-girl lyrics with something a little more up to the point ("we tried position thirty-one, it was ter­rific fun; in position seventy-two, you was me, and I was you") — imagine Jan and Dean circa '61 supplying their horny audiences with those kinds of words. ʽThe Trouser Pressʼ ridicules the «new dance craze» ideas on the soul/R&B circuit, inventing its own little dance in the process, punctuated by actual «trouser-pressing» noises and featuring a really bold call-and-response opening section exchange ("do you like soul music?..." — dead silence — quietly, but decisively: "no"). Further examples are unnecessary.

 

Of course, like everything else the Bonzos did, Doughnut is inextricably linked to its epoch, and with each passing year, its humor and wit gets more difficult to warm up to without a serious introductory course to all the main players on the music and entertainment scene not just of 1968, but of the entire decade. (Bonus tracks on the CD edition throw on parodic performances of ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ, ʽBang Bangʼ, and ʽAlley Oopʼ, among other things). Comedy records tend to date easier than tragedy records, in general, for being more dependent on the particular realities of their own time and place. However, the «kaleidoscope of sound» effect that blurs the boundaries between songs ultimately becomes the album's saving grace — even on an alien, of the kind that gets addressed so often on the record itself (ʽBeautiful Zeldaʼ, ʽHumanoid Boogieʼ, etc.), Dough­nut will most likely produce a dazzling effect.

 

What I am trying to say is that, in order to enjoy Doughnut, you do not necessarily have to «get» all of its parodic elements, much like you do not really have to take a crash course in the history and customs of the Irish people to get a jolt out of Ulysses. With the band's professional musi­cian­ship (nothing extraordinary, but all the grooves are honed to perfection), technological savvi­ness (all the overdubs are laid on with enough care and precision to rival the production team of Sgt. Pepper), and understanding of all the basic attractions of all the musical forms that they tackle, Doughnut can, after all, work as just a happy old celebration of music — fun in its since­rest and most inspired variant. And, what with it being «dated» and all, 1968 was a really great year to be having fun, wouldn't you agree? Thumbs up, of course.

 

Technical notes: the band had dropped the «Doo-Dah» from its name for this album (perhaps re­flecting the transition to a slightly more «serious» routine, although I'd rather prefer it if they'd dropped the «Bonzo Dog» part instead). Also, in the States this was released as Urban Space­man, incorporating a concurrent non-LP single — the usual practice for those times, but also, they probably thought that the title would be too inscrutable for thickheaded American audiences (legend has it that the title refers to a lavatory and was acquired by the band from an anecdote by Monty Python friend Michael Palin — which would make this the second lavatory-themed inci­dent of the year that I know of, right beside the story of the front sleeve of Beggar's Banquet).

 

TADPOLES (1969)

 

1) Hunting Tigers Out In Indiah; 2) Shirt; 3) Tubas In The Moonlight; 4) Dr. Jazz; 5) The Monster Mash; 6) I'm The Urban Spaceman; 7) Ali Baba's Camel; 8) Laughing Blues; 9) By A Waterfall; 10) Mr. Apollo; 11) Canyons Of Your Mind; 12*) Boo!; 13*) Readymades; 14*) Look At Me I'm Wonderful; 15*) We Were Wrong; 16*) The Craig Torso Christmas Show.

 

The Bonzos' third album is much closer in spirit and form to Gorilla — a creative retread, some might say, but only depending on whether you revere these guys more in their «surrealist-kiddie-comic» mood or their «surrealist-Zappa-like» mood. The heart of the matter is that most of these particular songs were culled from Do Not Adjust Your Set, the proto-Python TV show that re­gularly featured the Bonzos and was originally intended for kids, before Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and others decided they'd still target it towards mixed audiences and see what happens. So, naturally, the proper-accurate way to enjoy these tunes is to see them in the context of the show (something that can be easily done these days with a little help from Youtube), especially consi­dering that many of the tracks feature integrated bits of dialog (ʽShirtʼ) or implied theatrical per­formance (ʽAli Baba's Camelʼ).

 

That said, there is nothing like Tadpoles, really, when it comes to averaging out the number of tightly composed, insanely catchy, delightfully funny Bonzo Dog Band songs per record. This is their one UK album, for starters, that's got ʽUrban Spacemanʼ on it — produced by good friend Paul McCartney, it's a piece of genius vaudeville and an amusing assault on the concept of the fantasy superhero at the same time (the final «twist» is simple, predictable, and unforgettable), so unbeatable that it became the band's highest charting single ever: I have to guess that even some of the seri­ously-minded people, generally well above the Bonzos' level of humor (or so they thought), had no power to resist.

 

Equally sharp and up to the point are such songs as ʽMr. Apolloʼ (jubilant folk-pop that describes the «wonders» of body-building exactly the way somebody else would be describing the «won­ders» of turning on and tuning in) and ʽCanyons Of Your Mindʼ (yet another Vegas-Elvis imper­sonation, crossed with a ridiculously «inept», out-of-tune guitar solo and some of the grossest misuses of the echo effect in recorded history). Then there's the «Britishness» thing, which pops out at the very beginning (ʽHunting Tigers Out In Indiahʼ, with the band members impersonating old-school British army officers, even if the song as a whole sounds as it belongs more with the Soviet than the British army) but is not too abused on the whole — most of the time, they are too busy professing their sarcastic admiration for old-timey jazz (Jelly Roll Morton's ʽDr. Jazzʼ gets covered), blues (ʽLaughing Bluesʼ is «authentically» lo-fi, croaky and creeky, like something from Louis Armstrong's ʽSt. Louis Bluesʼ days), and pop standards (ʽTubas In The Moonlightʼ is... Bing Crosby? Whatever).

 

Some of the inventions are less inventive than others, or, at least, less appropriate — I could do without the proto-Python conversations on ʽShirtʼ, and their cover of the old comic tune ʽMonster Mashʼ is expendable when you know that they are capable of much better writing on their own (I'm perfectly happy with the old performance from the Beach Boys' Concert), but one cannot expect even a genius comedy act to act with 100% accuracy, and besides, these nuances reflect personal tastes more than anything else. Plus, the reissue throws on a bunch of satisfactory bonus tracks, almost any of which can be used to replace any perceivable flaw.

 

Strong thumbs up here, but the warning has to be repeated: Tadpoles is mostly about comic ditties, and not recommended to anyone who finds himself disgusted with the likes of ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ and suchlike. At the same time, I cannot qualify it as a «letdown»: the Bonzos were simply pursuing different activities and trying on different faces, like many other people at the time — Manfred Mann, for instance, who could be seriouz jazzmen one minute and teenybop propagandists the other. Count Tadpoles as just another high point in the Bonzos' «teenybop» service book, then, but do not put down the idiom as such — not before you are able to write a song as maddeningly catchy as ʽUrban Spacemanʼ, at least.

 

KEYNSHAM (1969)

 

1) You Done My Brain In; 2) Keynsham; 3) Quiet Talks And Summer Walks; 4) Tent; 5) We Were Wrong; 6) Joke Shop Man; 7) The Bride Stripped Bare By 'Bachelors'; 8) Look At Me, I'm Wonderful; 9) What Do You Do?; 10) Mr. Slater's Parrot; 11) Sport (The Odd Boy); 12) I Want To Be With You; 13) Noises For The Leg; 14) Busted.

 

You can use Wikipedia or a million other sources to learn why the album was called Keynsham, and it might even help you to form a more informative, complete, and systematic picture of the universe, but it will probably not provide you with an extra key to enjoying, admiring, or even «understanding» the fourth LP by The Bonzo Dog Band, so we will not dwell too long on the trivia and instead, will skip right on to the generalization — Keynsham is their second most com­plex record after Doughnut, but still a little less complex, sort of a partial compromise be­tween the experimentation of Doughnut and the accessible silliness of Tadpoles. Let it not be said that the Bonzos made even two albums that sounded completely alike — their menu items all share the same core, but are varied enough to fit quite a plethora of different tastes.

 

One thing that is hard not to notice is how quite a few tracks here either parody or deconstruct the «art pop» thing — where Doughnut was more obsessed with fooling around with blues-rock and rock'n'roll, Keynsham seems to take note of the increase in popularity of such bands as the Bee Gees or the Moody Blues or any of their other competitors: songs like ʽQuiet Talks And Summer Walksʼ and ʽWhat Do You Do?ʼ combine elements of vocal crooning, pastoral flutes, swooping strings, heavenly harmonies, etc., and end up sounding like authentic «artsy» compositions of their age — until you start concentrating on the lyrics: ʽWhat Do You Do?ʼ parodies the «Serious Philosophical Question Song» movement, and ʽQuiet Talks And Summer Walksʼ depicts a couple's romantic relations as seen through the somewhat bleek perspective of the protagonist, only to become suddenly deflated by the sound of a dentist's drill.

 

At the same time, the boys are not at all past their usual «slap-schtick»: ʽTentʼ is brassy Sha-Na-Na style pop with a brawny caveman angle, ʽWe Were Wrongʼ is romantic Zombies-style pop with a corny joke angle (ʽThis Will Be Our Yearʼ may have served as the musical inspiration, provided the Bonzos actually did have access to the not-so-popular Odessey And Oracle), and then there's material like ʽMr. Slater's Parrotʼ that sounds as if it were taken straight from the Benny Hill Show soundtrack. Naturally, there is no coherence whatsoever between the «serious-sounding» stuff and the directly comedic numbers, but that is something you either have to take or leave: the Bonzos declared war on coherence before they were born.

 

In terms of sheer inventiveness, we should tip our hats as usual: the mix of melodies, hilarious lyrics, recitatives, mini-stories, and sound effects is as dazzling and delirious as ever — speaking of sound effects, ʽBustedʼ probably has the single best example of a cow's mooing sampled in the history of all cow moo samples, and ʽNoises For The Legʼ probably has the most irritating ever example of the use of a Theremin on record (one that was actually installed inside the leg of a mannequin, which explains the song's title).

 

On the other hand, somehow you can tell that, by intentionally avoiding all elements of «formula», the band has driven itself into a rut — now that they know they can handle it all, and now that they have already handled it all on Doughnut, Keynsham feels a little bit... predictable. Like their TV brothers Monty Python, who only lasted a few years before their romance with intellectualized absurdity became boring, the Bonzos were unable to settle their awesome initial explosion into a pleasantly useful routine.

 

As an incidental introduction to the band's sound, Keynsham is as good as any other Bonzo album — but if taken in chronological order, it does not seem to fulfill its assigned task to stick a wise-cracking knife under the ribs of 1969 the same way that Doughnut did for 1968. The simple pop parodies are a little late, and the art pop exercises do not work very well as «serious» Lieder for the masses (the Bonzos could mime to the Moodies and the Bee Gees, but their songwriting relative to these guys was more or less like the Rutles / Beatles relationship) and do not properly fulfill the task of desecrating these temples of romanticism, either. They're a little bit pretty and a little bit funny, but sort of «midway» in both categories.

 

The record deserves a strong thumbs up in any case — these criticisms are relative, not absolute, and repeated listens do bring out both the melodic hooks and the pockets of intellectual depth in the material. But the decision to split, which the band took around the same time the LP was issued, was utterly wise: in their current incarnation, they found it hard to keep up with the rapidly changing times — as a 1969 album, Keynsham is simply nowhere near as impressive as Doughnut was for a 1968 album. Perhaps if they had a real Frank Zappa in their ranks, things would turn out different, but neither Stanshall nor Innes could lay claim to anything like that.

 

LET'S MAKE UP AND BE FRIENDLY (1972)

 

1) The Strain; 2) Turkeys; 3) King Of Scurf; 4) Waiting For The Wardrobe; 5) Straight From My Heart; 6) Rusty; 7) Rawlinson End; 8) Don't Get Me Wrong; 9) Fresh Wound; 10) Bad Blood; 11) Slush; 12*) Suspicion; 13*) Trouser Freak.

 

For one of those «contractual obligation» albums that usually turn out to be predictably disap­pointing, the sardonically-titled Let's Make Up And Be Friendly actually isn't half-bad. Not only is it the longest Bonzo Dog Band record up to date (although that is mostly the result of two intentionally drawn-out and overlong tracks), but it is clear that quite a bit of imagination and work was involved in its production — even despite the fact that Stanshall, Innes, and bassist Dennis Cowan were the only regular Bonzos to oversee all of the recording (ʽLegsʼ Larry Smith and Roger Ruskin Spear make guest appearances on a few tracks). In spirit, Let's Make Up is closer to a «comedy» product than an «experimental» release, but it has its parallels with just about every single other Bonzo Dog Band release, so, as a career wrap-up, it is fairly adequate, and, in my opinion, quite unjustly maligned by fans.

 

Arguably the major miscalculation was to open the album with ʽThe Strainʼ — a comic blues-rock ode to constipation that many people logically consider way too crude and unworthy of these guys' reputation. I mean, toilet humor? Come on now! But on second thought, there is really nothing that wrong with toilet humor if it is done well (the major mistake of 99% of toilet humor being in that people somehow think that the subject is always funny per se, and does not need any special intellectual input), and ʽThe Strainʼ is done well to the point of genuine hilariousness — with Stanshall singing it in a Captain Beefheart voice and, of course, ʽThe Strainʼ itself being a mock-analogy with a popular dance ("Hey hey human gonna do The Strain / I'm gonna grip the seat I'm gonna pull the chain"). Throw in a kick-ass guitar solo, the most authentic «straining noises» possible in a human being, and you really get the best song about constipation issues the other side of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' ʽConstipation Bluesʼ (which may have very well served as the basic inspiration for the Bonzos' polite British answer).

 

Nor does the album sound particularly out of time or out of touch — even for these contractual purposes, the Bonzos still keep their eyes and ears open, so that the inspiration, production, and mood-setting touches are very much reminiscent of the early 1970s or, at least, very late 1969. ʽRustyʼ, a tragicomic spoken monologue about a homosexual couple breaking up, is set to a slow soulful arrangement, with deep gospel harmonies and a blazing wah-wah lead part all the way through, as though it were influenced by Funkadelic's ʽMaggot Brainʼ. Roger's ʽWaiting For The Ward­robeʼ begins as a somber avantgarde number, all electronic noise and percussion, before turning into a schizophrenic electric blues-rocker. And ʽDon't Get Me Wrongʼ is naturally re­miniscent of ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ, although the melody is a bit more Otis Redding.

 

On the «serious» side of things, there's ʽTurkeysʼ, a curious instrumental that shows traces of interest in avantgarde jazz and not-too-modern classical (of the Bartók and/or Shostakovich variety, I'd say), and ʽRawlinson's Endʼ, mostly resting on a series of piano improvisations, from ragtime to impressionistic to completely free-form — although the track essentially functions as a musical introduction to the character of Sir Henry Rawlinson, a favorite character of Viv Stan­shall's whom he would later explore in greater detail in his solo career. The spoken-word mono­log, very much in the vein of the nonsensical ʽBig Shotʼ from Gorilla, may be freely ignored, but the accompaniment is not without its merits.

 

As a matter of fact, there is not a single track on here that I could just call «plain bad». Where they are saddling old warhorses like Elvis-style balladry (ʽStraight From My Heartʼ) or write very straightforward parodies on specific genres (the country-western ʽBad Bloodʼ), the results are at least mildly fun, and ʽKing Of Scurfʼ is one of their best stabs at old-fashioned teen-pop, though, admittedly, this one is a bit outdated by the standards of 1972 (and it was probably way beneath their contempt to try a stab at The Osmonds). One really strange thing, though — why write and perform a song that intentionally sounds like mediocre John Lennon circa 1963 (ʽFresh Woundʼ)? (There is also an explicit Beatles reference in the song, when Neil says "come on George, snap out of it" — apparently, a «hidden message» to a then-currently depressed Harrison).

 

Finally, the two-minute coda of ʽSlushʼ is probably the sweetest-funniest way of saying goodbye to the fans imaginable — leave it to the Bonzos to «spoil» a sweet, innocent, pastoral soundscape, written as if specially for a romantic movie soundtrack, with their zany looped overdub: a ridicu­lous and symbolic gesture. Or you could go even farther and say that the echoey looped laughter is the voice of Pan, The Great Satyr himself, always happy to conjugate beauty with mischief at the most improper moment in time.

 

It is said that, when pressed into their «contractual obligation», their first bitter move was to go into the studio, set a timer for 45 minutes, and make a record out of anything and everything they recorded in the meantime — but then the next day, they relented, repented, and decided that they couldn't be that cruel to their remaining loyal fans. Maybe it was all for the better, because that way, they were able to let off steam, then sleep on it and gather some inspiration and good sense by the morning. That way, from ʽThe Strainʼ and all the way through to ʽSlushʼ and the farewell message of "...dada for now!" on the back cover, Let's Make Up And Be Friendly is consistently busy tying up loose ends and, occasionally, maybe even indicating new ways of development for the future. Not that it really is the Bonzos' Abbey Road or anything, but it is quite a graceful way to go out all the same, well worth a thumbs up and a get-it recommendation — particularly if you are not afraid of a little bit of high-quality toilet humor.

 

WRESTLE POODLES ...AND WIN! (2006)

 

1) Rule Britannia; 2) Hunting Tigers; 3) My Brother Makes The Noises; 4) Doorstep; 5) Little Sir Echo; 6) Ali Baba's Camel; 7) Falling In Love Again; 8) Watermelon; 9) Look Out, There's A Monster Coming; 10) Whispering; 11) By A Waterfall; 12) Sheik Of Araby; 13) Hello Mabel; 14) Jollity Farm; 15) The Equestrian Statue; 16) Cool Britannia; 17) We Are Normal; 18) The Strain; 19) The Sound Of Music; 20) Exodus; 21) The Trouser Press; 22) My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe; 23) I'm Bored; 24) Sport (The Odd Boy); 25) Mr. Apollo; 26) Humanoid Boogie; 27) Tent; 28) Can Blue Men Sing The Whites; 29) Look At Me, I'm Wonderful; 30) San Francisco; 31) Rhinocratic Oaths; 32) Mr. Slater's Parrot; 33) Monster Mash; 34) Urban Spaceman; 35) Canyons Of Your Mind.

 

There is nothing too surprising about a Bonzo Dog Band reunion — in fact, what is more sur­prising is that, since the band's ultimate breakup, they have only had one minor attempt at getting back together in thirty years (recording one «political» single in 1988). However, old age nostal­gia, as well as increased popular interest in all things retro, eventually did its thing, and so, in early 2006, in order to celebrate the band's 40th anniversary, the «proper» reunion finally took place at the London Astoria — in the form of a sprawling celebratory show, a representative retro­spective of all things that originally made The Bonzo Dog Band the real and uncontested champions of The Doo-Dah.

 

By this time, Stanshall was already deceased, making the reunion look a little like a Lennon-less posthumous Beatles show: no less than four different guest stars from the «alt-comedy» routine have been invited to fill in for the dead legend, with varying (but always incomplete) degrees of success. Original bass player Dennis Cowan was also no longer in this world; everybody else seems to be there, and trying to enjoy the whole thing as much as possible.

 

Although, apparently, there is a DVD version of this album, and much of the show was centered around theatrical comic performance, I am ever so slightly happy that I have not seen it — it makes much more sense to seek out old videos of their TV show instead, rather than watch the old geezers re-promote their legend in an age in which they so painfully do not belong (and the same goes for Monty Python, by the way, whose recurrent reunions compare quite pitifully to the original show). Just listening to whatever they're doing out there, though, almost completely erases the chronological context — and since they are doing it so well, Wrestle Poodles could almost pass for an original, old-school live album, minus the guest stars and the inevitable old crackle here and there in one of the singer's voices.

 

Indeed, these here are one hundred minutes of prime Bonzo stuff, delivered with all the authentic merriment, sarcasm, and energy as could and should be expected, and strung together with little staged vignettes and stage banter as one grand vaudevillian celebration. The setlist mostly con­sists of comic classics, going heavier on Gorilla/Tadpoles-style material than on the more ex­perimental stuff, for obvious reasons (to please the audience, and also because much of that ori­ginal tape-splicing experimentation would be hard, and useless, to reproduce on stage) — but since they play all their super-melodic ditties like ʽEquestrian Statueʼ and ʽUrban Spacemanʼ, who'd want to complain?

 

Of all the guest stars, Stephen Fry probably does the best job, but that is because he is Stephen Fry, and unlike everybody else, he does not even try to be Viv Stanshall — he just gives a typi­cally Fry take on a couple of tunes, most notably ʽRhinocratic Oathsʼ where the complex surrea­list mono­log is delivered without a single hitch or glitch. On the other hand, Ade Edmondson tries way too hard to emulate Stanshall's personality on ʽThe Strainʼ, and overcooks the toilet humor side of the song so much that... well, it stinks, frankly speaking; and Paul Merton, accor­ding to reports, had to recite the words to ʽMonster Mashʼ from cue cards — how un-Bonzo is that? Not to mention that he just doesn't seem to get into the mock-ghouly spirit of the song at all: if you are trying to perform something of that level of silliness, you can really only allow your­self to do it if you are willing to go all the way, otherwise it's just... silly. Or even stupid.

 

Still, despite these minor nitpickings, on the whole the show seems to have been a success. The audience, probably largely consisting of the band's 50-60-year old fans, plays along with every­thing that requires audience participation (such as the "hello! – hello!"'s of ʽMr. Slater's Parrotʼ, or the "do you like soul music? — NO!!!!" bit on ʽTrouser Pressʼ), the musical side is faithfully and loyally well-rehearsed, and ultimately, it is just a cool thing to have so much of the Bonzos' comic greatness stuffed together in one such lovingly prepared package. A thumbs up, then, although, unlike the original albums, this one's value will probably fizzle out together with the passing of the Bonzos' last original fan.

 

POUR L'AMOUR DES CHIENS (2007)

 

1) Pour L'Amour Des Chiens; 2) Let's All Go To Mary's House; 3) Hawkeye The Gnu; 4) Making Faces At The Man In The Moon; 5) Fiasco; 6) Purple Sprouting Broccoli; 7) Old Tige; 8) Wire People; 9) Salmon Proust; 10) Demo­cracy; 11) I Predict A Riot; 12) Scarlet Ribbons; 13) Paws; 14) And We're Back; 15) Stadium Love; 16) Mornington Crescent; 17) L'Essence D'Hooligan; 18) Early Morning Train; 19) My Friends Outside; 20) For The Benefit Of Mankind; 21) Beautiful People; 22) Ego Warriors; 23) Cockadoodle Tato; 24) Tiptoe Through The Tulips; 25) Sweet Memories; 26) Sudoku Forecast; 27) Now You're Asleep; 28) Jean Baudrillard.

 

A proper reunion of the (mostly) original Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. In 2007. No Viv Stanshall to come down from the sky, even if only for a moment, but most of the rest somehow cuddled together. Do you really want to hear that? A relic so inextricably associated with the Sixties. It is certainly one thing to see a brief glimpse of them in a nostalgia-oriented show, but to actually subject ourselves to new material from these guys, in the iPhone and YouTube age and all? Who in his right mind would want to do that, unless out of some twisted understanding of «pity»?

 

Apparently, nobody did: the album was barely noted upon release, and you can count the online-available reactions to it on the fingers of both hands, be it professional critical reviews or average music fan assessments — and the reaction, mostly, was as expected: «kinda fun, but why should this ever exist in this age?» And from a purely logical standpoint, this is absolutely correct: it should not. Fortunately, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band never operated on Aristotelian logic, or else they wouldn't have any right to the title of «Doo-Dah».

 

Once logic has been politely asked out the door, Pour L'Amour Des Chiens is an excellent album — nostalgic, futuristic, whatever, it is bursting with all sorts of ideas, some good, some bad, some exquisitely tasteful, some disgustingly (or delightfully) distasteful, and all of them sounding as if The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band never really went away. Well, they might have climbed into a refrigerator for a while, but it's not even as if they were frozen unconscious all that time: at the very least, they know who Gary Numan is.

 

For the most part, the record relies on musical (and comical) structures and gimmicks that do not, indeed, transgress the human experience accumulated by around 1969. For the most part, yes — but that does not prevent them from certain intentional anachronisms. For instance, around the middle of the album there is a track called ʽPawsʼ, in which you are advocated to press the pause button on your player and go have a snack or something, since this is the way LP records were designed in the 1960s. However, what they do not warn you about is that back in the 1960s, few, if any, record sides could run for about 32-35 minutes — whereas Pour L'Amour Des Chiens makes full use of the CD format, running for over 70 minutes, almost enough for a double LP, come to think of it, and certainly the most sprawling record in the entire life of the Bonzos.

 

Fortunately, with not a single track running over five minutes, and lots of small spoken-word, faux-commercial, and general-goofy interludes, the album does not truly seem overlong — not to mention that, in solid Bonzo tradition, the amount of different styles is truly staggering. Only twice do they seriously venture outside the comfy zone of «the Sixties and everything beyond that back in time»: ʽMy Friends Outsideʼ is a rather sneery send-up of artsy synth-pop (the one with the explicit Gary Numan references and a hilarious discussion on the emotional implications of various electronic effects at the end), and the ʽLegsʼ Larry Smith spotlight number ʽSweet Memo­riesʼ, despite being one of the album's most explicit nostalgia-oriented song, is «perversely» arranged as a late Seventies disco dance number — indeed, it would be too boring for these guys to set their memories to a soundtrack from the same time as those memories, wouldn't it?

 

Wait, actually, I'm wrong: another all-too obvious piece of evidence for the Bonzos knowing what time of day it is is their cover of the Kaiser Chiefs' ʽI Predict A Riotʼ; it's just that the Kaiser Chiefs themselves are such a blatantly retro-looking band that, in a way, it is not quite clear who exactly is covering who. Well, so the Bonzos, if my memory serves me right, did not actually try their hand at straightforward garage rock back in 1967-69, but they do now, and do it in their expected manner, taking the word «riot» a little too literally and then taking a look at what fol­lows (no spoilers). In any case, a good choice and yet another bit of success.

 

Highlights on the whole are too numerous to mention everything. Just a few random quick notes, then. ʽLet's All Go To Mary's Houseʼ is a piece of crackling vaudeville that belongs equally well in 1925 and on Gorilla. ʽPurple Sprouting Broccoliʼ gives us a merry banjo-led country spoof; additionally, ʽOld Tigeʼ then kicks the bucket even further by covering an old Jim Reeves tune (one of those sentimental «me and my dog» narratives) and winding its spoken narrative up to truly absurdist highs. ʽWire Peopleʼ should be read "why are people..." and included in a Sesame Street episode. On ʽDemocracyʼ, Neil Innes fumbles around with a little reggae and offers a little bit of supposedly-serious insight in the issue of human rights. And my personal favorite at the moment is probably ʽEgo Warriorsʼ, which not only rocks harder than everything else, but also probably makes the most biting — nay, the most annihilating — lyrical point of all (which point can be already well seen from the title, but do check it out for the rest of the words).

 

The album seems to be dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased Jean Baudrillard, who gets namechecked in a French version of the opening ditty — appropriately so, considering the Bonzos' post-structuralist pedigree: whatever nasty counter-arguments one might fling at the theoretical skeleton of post-modernism, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band is one of its happy side effects, and Pour L'Amour Des Chiens, with its boatload of catchy, funny, inventive tunes, is quite a happy side effect of the Bonzos. A comeback? As far as eternity is concerned, the mighty Doo-Dah has never really gone away, so the term hardly applies. In fact, new guests like Stephen Fry (who plays a fully appropriate Jeeves-type role on ʽHawkeye The Gnuʼ) carry on the old spirit in full understanding, so, apparently, as long as Great Britain, humor, intellect, and a lack of fear of offending too many people still exist, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band still has a future. Try to find the album if you can — a timeless delight, really. Thumbs up.

 

ADDENDA:

 

ANTHROPOLOGY: THE BEAST WITHIN (1967-69/1998)

 

1) Tent; 2) Busted; 3) I'm The Urban Spaceman I; 4) Mr. Slater's Parrot; 5) Canyons Of Your Mind (intro); 6) Can­yons Of Your Mind; 7) Canyons Of Your Mind I; 8) The Equestrian Statue; 9) Tragic Magic; 10) Quiet Talks And Summer Walks; 11) What Do You Do?; 12) Give Booze A Chance; 13) And 3/4; 14) National Beer; 15) Canyons Of Your Mind II; 16) Joke Shop Man; 17) A Wonderful Day Like Today; 18) Mr. Hyde In Me; 19) Look At Me, I'm Wonderful; 20) We Were Wrong; 21) Sofa Head; 22) By A Waterfall; 23) Boiled Ham Rhumba; 24) Intro; 25) The Monster Mash; 26) Humanoid Boogie; 27) I'm The Urban Spaceman II; 28) The Sound Of Music; 29) Little Sir Echo; 30) You Done My Brain In.

 

Save yourself the trouble, I guess. There is a rather disproportionate amount of various Bonzo Dog Band compilations on the market, some lightly peppered with otherwise unavailable goodies and some not at all — but there is no such thing as «a magic vault» for these guys, as this parti­cular collection of outtakes and rarities clearly shows. Released in 1998 and proclaiming to re­present «rehearsal material» from around 1967-68, Anthropology, out of its 30 tracks, has maybe 4 or 5 «true surprises» in stock for the casual Bonzo Dog fan (that is, if the word «casual» is at all applicable to any Bonzo Dog fan), and not all of them nice surprises at that.

 

In fact, only Stanshall's ʽMr. Hyde In Meʼ could probably pass for a valuable addition — a pretty hilarious impersonation of a guy's «sexual transformation», unfortunately a bit spoiled by some of those annoying high-pitched mock-doo-wop backing harmonies. The demented waltz of ʽLittle Sir Echoʼ is also silly-funny, although its major hook (the "hello! — hello!" echo in question) would eventually be borrowed for ʽMr. Slater's Parrotʼ and the rest discarded. And those who respect the Bonzos for their musical experimentation will probably want to be exposed to ʽSofa Headʼ, a fairly wild free-style romp through the world of jungle jazz, cosmic rock, and chime-led nursery rhymes, well in line with any typical bit of Doughnut-era material.

 

On the other hand, off-the-cuff novelty material like ʽGive Booze A Chanceʼ (yes, a very straight­forward parody of ʽGive Peace A Chanceʼ) is simply not funny, and only exists as a symbolic showcase for the Bonzos' already well-known «irreverence»; nor is it easy to get won over by half-baked piano exercises such as ʽBoiled Ham Rhumbaʼ, which honestly sounds like Neil Innes sitting down at the piano and nonsensically improvising for a couple of minutes. (On the AMG side, somebody supposed that this could be a parody on John Lennon — really? Does the re­viewer know something we don't know?).

 

Even so, all of these «new» songs are swept away by the ocean waves of all-too-familiar material, presented in alternative versions — as a rule, inferior ones either in arrangement, or in sound quality, or both. You do get to see how songs like ʽBustedʼ or ʽMr. Slater's Parrotʼ evolved, and no number of different versions of ʽUrban Spacemanʼ can be too huge for such a jolly tune, but on the whole, there is little to discuss unless one has really, truly, loyally worn out his faithful copies of the original studio albums. Which, not coincidentally, could also be said about the Beatles' Anthologies — which, not coincidentally, must have served as the obvious model for this CD. Indeed — back in 1967-69, the Bonzos were like the Beatles' comic twins (no wonder the two had a bit of a symbiotic relationship at the height of the flower power era), so it comes as no surprise that they would choose this particular timing, just two years since the wrapping-up of the Anthology project, to review the raw edges of their own career. However, that is the fate of all comical twins — their sketches and leftovers inevitably pale in comparison with their more serious brethren. Besides, these are not even sketches, more like «rehearsal versions» indeed: too close to the final variants to become interesting — too different from the final variants to become «alternatively perfect». In other words, for completists only.

 

THE COMPLETE BBC RECORDINGS (1967-1986/2002)

 

1) Do The Trouser Press; 2) Canyons Of Your Mind; 3) I'm The Urban Spaceman; 4) Hello Mabel; 5) Mr. Apollo; 6) Tent; 7) Monster Mash; 8) Give Booze A Chance; 9) We Were Wrong; 10) Keynsham; 11) I Want To Be With You; 12) Mickey's Son And Daughter; 13) Craig Torso Show; 14) Can Blue Men Sing The Whites; 15) Look At Me I'm Wonderful; 16) Quiet Talks And Summer Walks; 17) We're Going To Bring It On Home; 18) Sofa Head; 19) Can­yons Of Your Mind; 20) I'm The Urban Spaceman.

 

And another one for completists only — released on the semi-official Strange Fruit label that, among other things, specializes on disclosing radio archives (such as the various John Peel sessions, etc.). I have no idea whether this is really «complete» (most probably not, since there are too few track repetitions for a «complete» package), but it does combine tracks from a variety of performances, mostly recorded for «Top Gear» in 1968 and 1969, and ending with a very brief snippet of ʽUrban Spacemanʼ, performed solo by Neil Innes on vocals and acoustic guitar for «Late Night Lineup» as late, indeed, as 1986.

 

Even the true completist might be disappointed, though, because the collection offers no genuine­ly new material. The few songs that had not been included on the original LPs are available these days as bonus tracks (e. g. the mini-spoof of ʽThe Craig Torso Showʼ), and others have been included on Anthropology (ʽSofa Headʼ, ʽGive Booze A Chanceʼ). If I am not mistaken, the only exception is ʽWe're Going To Bring It On Homeʼ, a quirky mix of a flute-led art pop song and a barroom-style roots-rocker that is neither too funny nor too touching (in the same way as quite a few songs on Keynsham) — Strange Fruit have a monopoly on this one, having originally re­leased it in 1990 as part of a small Peel Sessions EP.

 

Everything else is just the same old stuff, treasurable only for the fact that these are the original young Bonzos playing their material live in the studio, showing off their accomplishment as genuine musicians and offering a rare occasional twist on the studio version. (Actually, I think that the first live version of ʽCanyonsʼ here might predate the studio version, because instead of the rather incoherent "to the ventricles of your heart / I'm in love with you again", Stanshall sings "through the ventricles of your heart / I am pumping you again" — what looks like the probable original lyrics, later censored by the band themselves in order to avoid extreme ambiguity by inadvertently introducing a new meaning of the verb "to pump" in the English language.)

 

It should probably be added that Stanshall's vocal style on ʽThe Monster Mashʼ leans here to­wards the «comically crazy» rather than the «ironically croony», and that the «trouser pressing» guitar imitation on ʽDo The Trouser Pressʼ, done without the benefit of additional studio effects, is still inventive and funny (the freshly demented Syd Barrett would have probably appreciated it). Other than that, there is nothing to add — except that I am still a little disappointed to learn once more that there are indeed no hidden wonders in the vaults for Britain's greatest comic band of rock music's finest era. Oh well — at the very least, it's not as if the album, loaded with all these wonderful tunes in solid renditions and stable sound quality, were an unpleasant listen or any­thing. Completists won't be disappointed.

THE BOX TOPS

THE LETTER/NEON RAINBOW (1967)

 

1) The Letter; 2) She Knows How; 3) Trains & Boats & Planes; 4) Break My Mind; 5) A Whiter Shade Of Pale; 6) Everything I Am; 7) Neon Rainbow; 8) People Make The World; 9) I'm Your Puppet; 10) Happy Times; 11) Gonna Find Somebody; 12) I Pray For Rain.

 

In late 1967, The Box Tops consisted of Alex Chilton on vocals and guitar, Danny Smythe on drums, John Evans on keyboards, Bill Cunnigham on bass... actually, I am not even sure if any­one on that list other than Chilton actually matters, since on most of these tracks The Box Tops did not even play their instruments, but were replaced in the studio with unknown professional players, courtesy of producer Dan Penn who, apparently, had little trust in the playing skills of these white youngsters from Memphis.

 

The only trust, so it seems, was placed in the vocal gift of Alex Chilton, who was only sixteen years old when he got to record Wayne Carson Thompson's ʽThe Letterʼ during his band's first recording session at American Sound Studio in Memphis. Now if your first genuine exposure to Alex Chilton has been via his later, more revered band Big Star, and if you have somehow missed out on the ubiquitousness of ʽThe Letterʼ in its original version, you might very well be stricken by the difference in vocal styles. For Big Star, Alex would sing clearly and cleanly, putting the same youthful gloss on his vocal chords as he would on his guitar sound. But here, despite being five years younger, he sings as if he were fifty years older — there's a rasp and a gurgle in his throat that implies «soulful world-weariness», and it certainly does not sound like he's faking it: by all means, this is not the kind of voice that would be naturally associated with 16 years of age. (Unless you start smoking at age four and catch your first STD at age twelve, of course).

 

I do not count myself as a big fan of Chilton's «blue-eyed soul» voice, but the very fact that a 16-year old white kid was so readily accepted in the heart of the soul kingdom of Memphis sort of speaks for itself. As a song, ʽThe Letterʼ is quite a moving composition, but perhaps not as nearly deserving of its sky-high reputation as the immense number of succeeding cover versions would have us believe — after all, it is a very short, simple, and straightforward number that accurately conveys the link between love and insanity, but that's about it. Mad props to Thompson and Chilton, though, for being able to turn the line "my baby wrote me a letter" into a haunting hook for generations to come.

 

Actually, I might be even more partial to the band's second single, also written by Thompson: ʽNeon Rainbowʼ does a great job taking a verse melody reminiscent of Simon & Garfunkel, one of those quiet, boppy, slightly childish folk-pop ditties, and letting it effortlessly flow into a full-fledged R&B chorus, with optimistic brass backing and Alex really belting it out. The difference is that ʽThe Letterʼ is a dark and paranoid song, while ʽNeon Rainbowʼ is a light, colorful, opti­mistic song — and people tend to remember darkness and paranoia for longer periods of time, especially musical critics. But on their respective scales, both tunes, I think, should occupy com­paratively respectable spots in the busy ledgers of 1967.

 

Of course, by late 1967 the «LP era» was not yet properly recognized in the USA — and so, in­stead of giving The Box Tops and their songwriting partners enough time to put together a pro­per, cohesive record, their label made them quickly scramble together a full-fledged follow-up, for which they did not even dare suggest a more interesting title than the names of the two hit singles (the same tasteless strategy that also marred The Left Banke's debut album from the same year, and God knows what else). Since the songwriting partners weren't total hacks, and since, if you had any talent at all, it was pretty damn hard to put out a complete suckjob in 1967, The Letter / Neon Rainbow came out much better than it could have been — still, it certainly ain't The Doors or any other such 1967 debut that had a cohesive «plan» behind it, let alone «concept».

 

The main contributing team for the album were Dan Penn himself (who, other than producing, was a major songwriter and even singer in his own rights) and his partner Spooner Oldham — in between the two, they place no less than four originals in the hands of Chilton here, including one catchy, fast, prickly soul-pop number (ʽHappy Timesʼ — and by «prickly» I mean that its main hook, the vocal-call-brass-response of "times!.. times!" makes some of your brain neurons jump in excitement) and three slower, bleeding-heart-mode soul confessions, of which ʽI'm Your Pup­petʼ is probably the best known one, since it had already been an earlier hit for the duo of James & Bobby Purify — and it works better for The Box Tops, since it makes more sense for one guy to sing "I'm your puppet" than two guys at the same time (not to mention that Chilton slurs the words a bit as if in a druggy haze — getting into the puppet character, no doubt).

 

These are good songs in good hands, mostly. More questionable is the inclusion of ʽA Whiter Shade Of Paleʼ, a great song with which, however, Alex cannot do anything that Gary Brooker has not already done — other than, perhaps, popularize early British prog-rock and J. S. Bach a little bit among the local Memphis crowds. Then there are some truly questionable inclusions, such as the laid-back country-rock ditty ʽBreak My Mindʼ, in a style to which Chilton's voice is not suited at all, or Burt Bacharach's ʽTrains & Boats & Planesʼ, which has the misfortune of finding itself way too close to ʽThe Letterʼ to count as an equally mind-blowing song about one's means of travel. But even the questionable inclusions aren't cringeworthy as such, it's just that they do not exploit the band's (actually, the lead singer's) talents to full capacity.

 

On the whole, the album ain't no masterpiece, and I can even picture myself a serious Big Star fan who could be seriously disappointed in these first steps of Alex Chilton's career — no original material, a distinctly different vocal style, rather perfunctory musical backing from anonymous session guys, etc. But the presence of two strong singles, the lack of anything particularly dread­ful, a generally sensible taste in covers, and the auxiliary fact that THIS IS 1967!! altogether make it well worth a friendly thumbs up.

 

CRY LIKE A BABY (1968)

 

1) Cry Like A Baby; 2) Deep In Kentucky; 3) I'm The One For You; 4) Weeping Analeah; 5) Every Time; 6) Fields Of Clover; 7) Trouble With Sam; 8) Lost; 9) Good Morning Dear; 10) 727; 11) You Keep Me Hangin' On.

 

This is a rather typical example of the «sophomore» approach: a record that is intentionally (and also rather hastily) designed to follow up on the preceding success, formula-wise, and almost inevitably one small or one large notch below its predecessor, depending on the amount of talent and resources involved. Here, we have the same players (or the same «non-players»; I am not sure how much was left to session musicians this time around), the same focus on the lead singer, the same team of songwriters, the same styles, the same mechanisms to prolong the band's com­mercial success. So — minus the «freshness» of 1967. Any pluses?

 

No «special» pluses, but some good songs. The title track, written by the Dan Penn / Spooner Oldham team in a rather tense brainstorming session, was right on target and almost ended up re­turning The Box Tops to the top of the charts, stalling at #2; today, it is often considered a blue-eyed soul classic, and even veteran R&B artists like Arthur Alexander would later cover it with verve and admiration. It is undeniably catchy and has a fun electric sitar lead part, but the match between lyrics and melody does not seem to be nearly as perfect as in the case of ʽThe Letterʼ — its main chorus hook triggers the «happy» nerve with its resolution, whereas the words are un­deniably tragic (and the song would sound even «happier» in Alexander's rendition; at least Chil­ton does everything in his power to impersonate a broken-down human being despite the melodic odds being so seriously against him). I do believe it would have worked much better if the «cry like a baby» chorus were to imply tears of joy and happiness rather than tears of loss and loneli­ness — but then, that might be the very reason why ʽCry Like A Babyʼ would ultimately be a tad less popular than the perfectly self-adequate ʽLetterʼ.

 

Then again, this raises the chances for the rest of the tracks — what with the quality gap between the lead single and everything else diminishing and all, I actually like the second track, Bill Davidson's ʽDeep In Kentuckyʼ, more than the first one: a subtly and eerily arranged folk-pop gem, thoughtfully stuffed with oboes, trumpets, chimes, electric pianos, strings, ghostly hushed backing vocals — far more complex, actually, than ʽCry Like A Babyʼ, and with all of its ele­ments working in coordinated tandem to convey a general feeling of gloomy rejection. And the third one, ʽI'm The One For Youʼ, is one of those perfectly executed «consolation tunes» ("I'll come running to you", etc.), with a wonderful series of epic-tragic "no, no, no, no" flourishes winding up each chorus — unfortunately, the authors of the tune failed to fully capitalize on this «now I'm being so protective and chivalrous... and now I'm being so paranoid and desperate» mood shift, and ultimately the "no no no"'s do not go anywhere. Still, really good song.

 

Eventually, the tunes do begin to merge together, as it often happens with blue-eyed soul records, and the moods, chords, and bags-o'-tricks begin repeating themselves: there is even another «aeroplane song», ʽ727ʼ, clearly written by Penn and Oldham as a «sequel» to ʽThe Letterʼ, but this time a much fluffier and happier one. As a rule, they are pulled out, one by one, mainly through the charisma of Chilton's voice, but even that one only goes up to a certain limit.

 

So it is quite a shock when the band finishes its pleasant, but tiring program with a surprisingly heavy-rocking ʽYou Keep Me Hangin' Onʼ, adapted from the Vanilla Fudge version rather than the Supremes original. Chilton goes all-out Gargantuan on the track, and I'd say he pulls it off fairly well, but the key moment comes at the end — as the band braces itself for the frantic noisy coda, Alex drops off a single ad-libbed phrase, "and he walked on down the hall", which, perhaps, was not immediately understood by the recording supervisors, but in this context, worked like a sign of allegiance: they may be covering Vanilla Fudge all right, but Chilton's real heart lies with Jim Morrison, as would later be reconfirmed time and time again with Alex whenever he'd be in one of his dark periods, and this surreptitious quote from ʽThe Endʼ (confirmed moments later with a chaotic raga-like guitar solo which, too, sounds suspiciously influenced by ʽThe Endʼ) is one of these first quirky signs.

 

In any case, on the whole it's a good record, perhaps deserving of a slightly less enthusiastic thumbs up than the first one, but as you can see, at least there's enough going on here to hold detailed discussions on several of the songs — not every «sophomore effort» by a band that does not write its own songs has that kind of good luck. And don't you forget that Alex Chilton was still only 17 years old! (They told me that every mention of the Box Tops in a popular source has to have at least one reference to Alex Chilton's age, until he gets old enough to drink).

 

NON-STOP (1968)

 

1) Choo Choo Train; 2) I'm Movin' On; 3) Sandman; 4) She Shot A Hole In My Soul; 5) People Gonna Talk; 6) I Met Her In Church; 7) Rock Me Baby; 8) Rollin' In My Sleep; 9) I Can Dig It; 10) Yesterday Where's My Mind; 11) If I Had Let You In.

 

Maybe this one was rushed out a little too quickly after Cry Like A Baby, because even repeated listens with an extra spoonful of attention do not do much in the way of excitement. Two things are immediately noticeable, neither of them auspicious — first, the Penn/Oldham partnership only contributes two songs, and second, there are way too many horns here, as if somebody were intentionally pulling The Box Tops away from their dabblings in the «baroque» and the «psyche­delic» and urging them to compete with the newly formed Blood, Sweat & Tears (or the not-yet-formed Chicago, in an act of artistic prevention).

 

I would not say that this latter move is completely wrong — sometimes the results are amusing, for instance, on their cover of Hank Snow's ʽI'm Movin' Onʼ. That one used to be a no-frills country song (which The Rolling Stones had already managed to transform into an ass-kickin' rhythm'n'blues killer machine in their early live shows), and here, too, it starts out all country-like, but then midway through the horns kick in, the bass zoops move closer to hard rock territory, the vocals disappear altogether, and we witness a smooth, natural-sounding transformation from quiet country to loud, anthemic, gritty R&B.

 

Unfortunately, surprises like these are fairly rare throughout the album. The same horns can sound pedestrian and formulaic just as often as they can sound useful and inspiring, and on the whole, it seems as if once again they were using Chilton here as their main attraction — on some of the songs, his voice is even more wild and gravelley than before, so much so that if I did not know how smooth and clean Tom Waits sounded in his early youth, I'd easily have mistaken Alex for a young Tom on his own ʽI Can Dig Itʼ and particularly on the dark folk ballad ʽYes­terday Where's My Mindʼ, written by Jon Reid and Bill Soden. For this song, the Box Tops earned numerous comparisons with the Doors that came one album too late — musically, this one is very much rooted in traditional Britfolk, which the Doors didn't play much, and is more in line with the Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane; also, Chilton's vocal impersonation is much more «earthy» than Jim Morrison's not-of-this-world lizard-king promenades.

 

(Sidenote: for a really, really bizarre version of ʽYesterday Where's My Mindʼ, check out the recently uncovered Paint A Lady album by odd-folk singerine Susan Christie, shelved in 1970 and critically savored only around 2006. She doesn't necessarily do a better job than Chilton, but her tacked-on three-minute free-form introduction gotta rank as one of the most bizarre perfor­mances of its epoch).

 

None of these songs were considered for release as singles: instead, that honor fell to ʽChoo Choo Trainʼ, a fairly ordinary tune of longing for one's baby. Apparently, they were once again trying to recreate the «yearning / travel» theme of ʽThe Letterʼ, replacing the aeroplane with a more grounded form of transportation, but for some reason, decided to give the song a slightly «vulga­rized», pub-rock atmosphere. The trick did not work — the single charted much lower than ʽCry Like A Babyʼ, and then it all went further downhill when they tried to remedy the situation with ʽI Met Her In Churchʼ: not only was the title of the song probably not the most appropriate thing to capture the hearts of the single-buying market, but the song itself, though technically ambitious (with a little «mini-serenade» in the place of the instrumental break), brings them into the sphere of anthemic «gospel pop», in which sphere you usually get your ass kicked by the likes of Maha­lia Jackson unless you do something totally mad and unpredictable. In this case, though, Chilton just does not sound as if he's all that into it.

 

Throw on all sorts of stuff that is just plain boring — for instance, these guys have no business whatsoever covering ʽRock Me Babyʼ (nobody really has, not after Jimi), and ʽRollin' In My Sleepʼ actually puts me to sleep, despite being superficially pretty — and the lack of anything truly outstanding, and there remains little mystery about why this is indeed the beginning of the end. That said, Non-Stop is not a «bad» record: it is simply too self-conscious for its own good, trying way too hard to «do it right» by looking at what everybody else around is doing, comple­tely forgetting the need to cobble together its own face. In this, it is far from being alone, and it is still much better than a lot of the competition — the «Neanderthal model of Alex Chilton» alone is worth a couple visits. But probably not much more than a couple.

 

DIMENSIONS (1969)

 

1) Soul Deep; 2) I Shall Be Released; 3) Midnight Angel; 4) Together; 5) I'll Hold Out My Hand; 6) I Must Be The Devil; 7) Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March; 8) The Happy Song; 9) Ain't No Way; 10) Rock Me Baby.

 

The final album by The Box Tops does not have all that much to recommend it. It is formally notable by featuring no less than three Alex Chilton originals — none of which is particularly im­pressive on its own, but collectively they show that the man is trying his hand at several different directions at once: ʽTogetherʼ is blue-eyed soul in the same vein as all those hits that Penn, Old­ham, and Thompson were writing for the band, ʽI Must Be The Devilʼ is dark piano blues remi­niscent of early Animals, and ʽThe Happy Songʼ is a short, fast, upbeat country-rocker. Of these, ʽDevilʼ is the only song that gets occasionally remembered, though, and only because its doom-laden lyrics always bring on associations with Chilton's ill-fated life and career — but in 1969, he probably just wrote all these "I can't bear to see my face, wrong's done I can erase" lines because, well, that's sort of how blues stuff usually gets written, you know.

 

The primary album single was ʽSoul Deepʼ, another Thompson contribution that earned them the last bit of chart success, but with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks having rewritten the rules on «blue-eyed soul» a few months earlier, you could tell that anything like ʽSoul Deepʼ already sounded a bit behind the times in 1969 — indeed, no melodic or «semantic» progress here, just two and a half minutes more of catchy soulful pop, and furthermore, the song is jubilant rather than mournful, which is not a very good thing for Chilton, to whom «sad» always seemed to come more naturally than «happy» (for that matter, ʽThe Happy Songʼ, despite the title and the lyrics, ends up sounding bitterly ironic the way he does it).

 

More interesting, if not necessarily better written, is another single, ʽSweet Cream Ladies, For­ward Marchʼ, which has nothing to do with the recently deceased Cream, but is instead a Brit­poppy march (proper brass backing included) dedicated to lovely ladies of the night and the use­ful services they provide to society. It's... uh... ironic, I guess, but I am not sure Chilton himself understood all that well whether it should have been sung with more sneer/irony or more em­pathy/compassion, and his delivery is kinda bland — somebody like Ray Davies, perhaps, would have been able to turn it into one more of his lovable social portraits, but here it just sounds like a novelty number.

 

In addition to other minor disappointments (such as a completely pointless cover of ʽI Shall Be Releasedʼ, following The Band's arrangement but smoothing out all the pain-stuffed edges that Richard Manuel brought to our attention so expressively), it is clear that the band did not have enough material — so, to bring the record to a proper conclusion, they recorded ʽRock Me Babyʼ once again, this time in a nine-minute (!) version taken at two different tempos (mid- and slow) and featuring extended guitar and piano solos that must have sounded totally amateurish by this time in rock's instrumental journey. For a band that began its career by having session musicians play most of the instruments, this was a rather ironic way to end that career. (Not that it's a bad sound or anything, and I know Gary Talley has a rather high reputation in some circles, but there is nothing in this playing that would strike me as specifically individualistic).

 

On the whole, though, the worst thing about Dimensions is that, if you play it back to back with the band's debut, you won't hear any significant difference — and no band that sounded the same way in 1969 as it sounded in 1967 was deemed worth to live, or at least to thrive, at the time. So, naturally, as Jesus Christ said, «to conquer death, The Box Tops only had to die», and so The Box Tops went ahead and did the right thing to do, upon which Chilton could finally reboot his career, shake off the «young promising blue-eyed soulman» tag, and put his talents to more efficient use.

 

TEAR OFF! (1998)

 

1) Flying Saucers Rock'n'Roll; 2) Wang Dang Doodle; 3) Ain't That A Lot Of Love; 4) It Tears Me Up; 5) Last Laugh; 6) Treat Her Right; 7) Soothe Me; 8) I'm In Love; 9) The Letter; 10) Trip To Bandstand; 11) Little Latin Lupe Lu; 12) Keep On Dancing; 13) Last Bouquet; 14) Big Bird.

 

I suppose that even fewer people are aware of this surprising Box Tops comeback than those that know about the Big Star comeback — then again, maybe not, since I really have no idea whether «old school power pop» still remains more popular among the knowledge-seeking youngsters today than «old school blue-eyed soul». Anyway, this particular comeback was actually quite a proper comeback, since it did reunite all the original band members from 1967, right down to the rhythm section (not that the rhythm section had much to play in 1967). The resulting album, how­ever, was downright odd.

 

I mean, you could rightfully expect the guys to go nostalgic, but Tear Off! goes way beyond simple nostalgia — it plays out like a consciously assembled encyclopaedia of pop music forms in the pre-Sgt. Pepper era. Putting together a jumbo-combo of golden oldies, forgotten oldies, and some pseudo-originals, these Elderly Box Tops begin with stereotypical rockabilly (ʽFlying Saucers Rock'n'Rollʼ), continue with some rockin' Chicago blues (ʽWang Dang Doodleʼ), follow that up with gritty R&B (ʽAin't That A Lot Of Loveʼ), throw in some torch ballads (ʽIt Tears Me Upʼ), heat it up with some hard rock (ʽTreat Her Rightʼ), mix it with pop-soul (ʽSoothe Meʼ), spice it up with late Fifties' novelty-comedy stylistics (ʽTrip To Bandstandʼ), bring on a bit of twistey innocence (ʽKeep On Dancingʼ), remind us how country music used to sound when Hank Williams was king (ʽLast Bouquetʼ), and finally, end things with a loud, overdriven garage-rock jam (ʽBig Birdʼ) that seems to suggest — «yes, boys and girls, and then, eventually, the angry, crazy, distorted rock guitars took over and swallowed them all, and they all lived happily ever after in the satiated belly of the heavy rock guitar».

 

Oh, I forgot: in the middle of it all comes a re-recording of ʽThe Letterʼ, because otherwise, I guess, the record label wouldn't let them release the package. Come on now — what good is a Box Tops album in 1998 if it doesn't have ʽThe Letterʼ? It's like a Sgt. Pepper with no ʽYes­terdayʼ on it!... oh, never mind. Anyway, this new version sounds almost like the original, except that Chilton's voice, retaining its gruffness, has lost much of its frailty and vulnerability, and that makes them sound like their own inferior tribute band.

 

Anyway, on the whole this is a totally harmless, perfectly fun, and completely useless record. Very cleanly and wholesomely produced, which is the only thing that betrays its date of origin (sort of like Clapton's From The Cradle), but little more than a respectable tribute to all those heroes of long ago — nobody is going to cherish this version of ʽWang Dang Doodleʼ over How­lin' Wolf or this version of ʽSoothe Meʼ over Sam Cooke. This is disappointing in that Chilton had gone a long, long way since the Box Tops last saw each other, and with their legacy that, after all, goes a little deeper than generic rockabilly and twist numbers, this may have been a more meaningful album. Instead, it's just like a gathering of old friends for old times' sake — stick around, have some drinks, play a couple songs we used to play when we were thirteen, except we do it like professionals now.

 

In the end, the lengthy ʽBig Birdʼ cover happens to be the only place where they seem like they're trying to do something — even if that something largely amounts to kicking up a ruckus, and is not very successful even as a ruckus (the exaggerated screaming is way too «acted»: all these "OH BIG BIRD!" and "TAKE THE BIG BIRD HOME!" and all the ooh-aahs seem sort of point­less). And everything else is just a nostalgic souvenir — and it's not even the kind of nostalgic souvenir you'd most likely expect from these former soulsters. But yeah, everything sounds kinda cool. If you were a directionless teen in 1998 and you saw this in a used bin and had your first acquaintance with ʽI'm In Loveʼ and ʽSoothe Meʼ by donating fifty cents, it would at least give you a fairly good understanding of the essence of Sam Cooke and Wilson Pickett. Wouldn't let you understand too much about Alex Chilton, though.

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ (1970)

 

1) Hymn To Me; 2) Shining Brightly; 3) Rock And Roll Women; 4) Lady Constant; 5) What Do You Suggest; 6) Mayfly; 7) Ballad Of A Hasbeen Beauty Queen.

 

I like it how the band was named «Brinsley Schwarz», even if all the songs were actually written by Nick Lowe. But, to be fair, «Nick Lowe» sounds far less cool than «Brinsley Schwarz»; in fact, I don't even think that anybody's first reaction to the name of the band would be «oh, that's pro­bably the name of one of the guys in the band», because there's just no way in hell that any single living person could have a name like «Brinsley Schwarz». Of course, guitarist Brinsley Schwarz had exactly that name, which makes it all the more exciting, and in 1965, he had formed a band called Kippington Lodge, which made the phrase «Hello, I'm Brinsley Schwarz from Kipping­ton Lodge» the coolest thing on Earth since any number of lines from select Dickens novels. After the band's first singles flopped, though (they were written in the regular Britpop style after the Kinks and the Small Faces, and did not manage to be distinctive enough), Kippington Lodge was abandoned in favor of something more ambitious and less overtly English — and, after all, Schwarz is not much of an English family name, anyway.

 

Most people are introduced to Brinsley Schwarz by means of the label «pub rock», which was attached to them around 1971 and never really meant much of anything other than playing in pubs rather than large entertainment venues. Personally, I have always misunderstood «pub rock» as something down-to-earth, rowdy, and bawdy — anything from ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ to Slade and Geordie — but even if you reject that definition and go along with just the «small scale» aspects of pub rock, it is still hard to view Brinsley Schwarz's debut album as anything of the kind, since it is clearly a very ambitious, if not a very successful, project.

 

In a nutshell, Brinsley Schwarz tries to combine country, folk, and «progressive» influences from both sides of the Atlantic — like a softer, smoother, subtler version of Traffic, largely avoiding that band's blues, rock, and R&B roots while still trying to hover in the air several feet above the label of «easy listening». They have this laid back, clean, professional, intelligent, if not all that exciting, sound going on, and sometimes they actually even manage to sound like early Yes — mainly on ʽLady Constantʼ, the first of the album's two epic pieces. At other times they manage to sound almost exactly like Crosby, Stills & Nash, which isn't actually that surpri­sing if you remember that early Yes covered the Byrds' ʽI See Youʼ and that the distance between American folk- and country-rock and early British progressive rock actually used to be much smaller than its subsequent Tarkus-ization would lead us to believe.

 

This is all interesting in theory, but in the boiling-bubbling musical explosion of 1969-70 Brin­sley Schwarz were not the only player in this game, and as nice as this album is, the songs just do not make that much of an impression. The band's harmony singing is pretty and sometimes down­right angelic, but hardly exclusive, and both The Byrds and CS&N were there before. The hooks on the shorter songs are about as strong as on the average Traffic songs — variations on roots-rock themes with little emotional depth, since both the playing and the singing are usually kept in check and restrained (the fastest and most energetic song on the album, ʽMayflyʼ, is still played as if they were afraid to wake up the neighbors or something). And, worst of all, there is hardly any distinct personality behind the songs and the album in general — you can tell that they're really trying, but it is much harder to tell what they're trying or why they're trying it. The simple answer that they just like «soft rock» is no more going to cut it than if they just liked hard rock. I did spend some time trying to locate that one special angle, but no dice.

 

Actually, I do not want to put this record way too down, but it is hard to find kind words for pseudo-epic stuff like ʽBallad Of A Hasbeen Beauty Queenʼ, which simply has no reason to exist in a world that already has Van Morrison in it. After a brief and boring hard rock intro (for a change), the thing becomes a slow country-rock shuffle that tries to be psychologically deep and aims for a musical crescendo, but all they really have at their disposal is an organ player and a lead guitarist who are either too afraid or too shy to let their hair down, spending fruitless minutes trying out generic lead lines and finally just turning up the volume for the last «climactic» verse of the song. And the singer? Nick Lowe has a pleasant, intelligent tone when he is humming under his nose, and an ugly way of nasal screaming when he is going «all out», and by the time the climax has, you know, climaxed, he still has not convinced me that he just managed to tell me something important, deserving of ten minutes of my time.

 

In the end, it all boils down to a few nicely shaped country-pop(-rock?) tunes like ʽShining Brightlyʼ and a few moments when the sunny-day-laziness of the tune can actually seem like cynical wisdom (ʽRock And Roll Womenʼ). But only somebody who, incidentally, feels really tired of the insane, aggressive musical dynamics of the late Sixties / early Seventies could pro­bably «love» this album — and even when I get those inclinations myself, I'd still rather take some guy who is very deliberate about getting away from all the hullabaloo, like J. J. Cale, over this half-hearted attempt to be «humble» and «progressive» at the same time, where the two ten­dencies just outcancel themselves rather than complement each other.

 

Thumbs down, then, if not necessarily accompanied with any hard feelings. Ironically, this is probably the same decision here that was made by contemporary British critics — some of whom felt themselves pressured by the so-called «Brinsley Schwarz Hype», instigated by their manager Dave Robinson, a good example of why it is fruitless to seek direct correlation between publicity and critical / public recognition, bypassing real musical merit. Fortunately for us, this was not the end for Brinsley Schwarz: in retrospect, their career, curve-wise, is somewhat similar to their contemporaries Mott The Hoople, who also began with a «promising failure» of a self-titled al­bum around that same time, yet ultimately managed to find themselves at a later date.

 

DESPITE IT ALL (1970)

 

1) Country Girl; 2) The Slow One; 3) Funk Angel; 4) Piece Of Home; 5) Love Song; 6) Starship; 7) Ebury Down; 8) Old Jarrow.

 

Hey hey, pack up the mules and ride out west — on their second album, Brinsley Schwarz seem to have caught the country flu head-on, even if they also continue to be influenced by Van Mor­rison along the way. The main units of adoration, though, are by now firmly on the other side of the Atlantic: The Byrds, The Burritos, and The Band are all carefully studied as textbook material and, if possible, strictly imitated. Thus, already the album opener, ʽCountry Girlʼ, is a fun, sweet, innocent little bopper, but 100% derivable from ʽYou Ain't Going Nowhereʼ, except that, of course, lyrics like "I want to go where my country girl goes / Back where my green-grass roots are growing" are just way too flat as an allegory when compared to "Genghis Khan, he couldn't keep / All his men supplied with sleep", and the collective group harmonies of Brinsley Schwarz do not even begin to compete with the lonesome timbre of Roger McGuinn. Nice fiddle part from guest star Willy Weider, though. Really countryesque and all.

 

Everything else, too, sounds and feels strictly like a bunch of genre exercises: despite having written all but one of these songs, Nick Lowe hardly seems to have any serious connection with the material, so that something like ʽLove Songʼ, a very straightforward soft-rocker, simply states that "this here is a love song, I gotta get back to my baby's heart again", rather than sets out to prove it in some sense-perturbing manner. All I know is, if I were Nick Lowe's baby, he wouldn't even get back to my front porch with this barely tepid carcass of a song. Or take ʽStarshipʼ — theoretically, a likeable country waltz, but not half an inch different from a million generic coun­try waltzes. So... uh... they can keep up the tempo, and they have a pretty slide guitar tone. Does that rate a B+, or an A- on the regular Nashville curriculum?

 

I would say that the only song on this album where they are trying at least a bit is ʽOld Jarrowʼ, the closing seven-minute country-rock epic where the country instrumentation is continually spiced up with sharp, high-pitched lead guitar parts. The lyrics (as you can see from the song title) have nothing to do with country-western themes, and the song just uses a country setting to even­tually explode into a really fierce barrage of guitar-hero soloing (although for contemporary guitar heroics, that tone is still impossibly thin — Marc Bolan or Mick Ronson would have eaten these guys alive). A respectable attempt that still fails to justify its running length, let alone sal­vage the album as a whole.

 

Another thumbs down here, as the apprenticeship period of Brinsley Schwarz enters yet another phase — the most fascinating thing about it all being that, you know, Capitol Records were still willing to back them for this one. Today, they would probably have shipped them straight away to songwriting school, under the tutorship of Max Martin. No, wait, for this line of work, Kelly Clarkson, probably.

 

SILVER PISTOL (1972)

 

1) Merry Go Round; 2) One More Day; 3) Nightingale; 4) Silver Pistol; 5) The Last Time I Was Fooled; 6) Un­known Number; 7) Range War; 8) Egypt; 9) Niki Hoeke Speedway; 10) Ju Ju Man; 11) Rockin' Chair.

 

This is where the Brinsley Schwarz formula undergoes the last cosmetic modifications... and turns out to be a very polite, accurate, and somewhat tepid formula after all. The songs are shor­tened, cleaned up, straightened out, and made to completely conform to the standards of folk- and country-rock, with no «progressive» ambitions whatsoever, and nary a hint of hard rocking, either. So this time around you will never once confuse this band with early Yes or late Steppenwolf, much as you'd want to. However, you might perhaps confuse it with Wildlife-era Mott The Hoople, and probably with several dozen other bands that had this sort of sound at the time — Byrds-Band-style roots-rock, but without the uniquely expressive features of either of these bands, and without a whole lot of impressive songwriting, either.

 

New member, bass and rhythm guitar player Ian Gomm, steps in here as a supporting songwriter, getting credits for four songs (Nick Lowe has six), and there are also two covers of American singer-songwriter Jim Ford, largely unknown but, apparently, hugely favored by Bobby Womack, who would record a shitload of songs of his for The Poet and The Poet II later on. The Jim Ford covers are actually distinctive — they are the two songs at the end of the album that display the highest energy level: ʽNiki Hoeke Speedwayʼ is a loose, drunk-sounding blues-rocker, and ʽJu Ju Manʼ is an uptempo boogie piece that, in this rendition, kicks about as much ass as the Grateful Dead when they were playing rock'n'roll. Which is not that much, as you could guess, but for those who like their rock'n'roll at low chamber temperatures, very stylish and tasteful.

 

Unfortunately, there is very little I can find to say about these songs, and what little I can find will not be flattering. As much as I respect Nick Lowe's songwriting in theory, let's face it, it is just a wee bit embarrassing when you realize that one of the most memorable tunes on the album, so humbly titled ʽUnknown Numberʼ, is only memorable because it is built on a joint piano/guitar riff that completely nicks (nick-lowes?) the melodic line from Buddy Holly's ʽWords Of Loveʼ — and adds nothing of serious value on top of it, so I guess the only reason Buddy's estate did not sue is that either nobody knew who Nick Lowe was, or they knew they wouldn't get much out of these guys anyway. In any case, this is just not a good sign.

 

The album's centerpiece is ʽEgyptʼ, a long, slow, meditative ballad whose point is made perfectly clear in the first thirty seconds or so — still it drags on for more than five minutes, with Bob An­drews' solemn wintery organ lines and Lowe's tender vocals sustaining the atmosphere. Some will find this deep and romantic, but it annoys me how manneristic the whole thing is — they're handling the procedure with such exaggeratedly exquisite finesse, you'd think they were afraid that just a little more strain and the entire studio would crumble around them. It's so goddamn quiet that, in fact, that at the beginning of the third minute you can actually hear a dog barking somewhere near the studio — I have no details, but I'm 99% sure it was just an accident that they decided to leave in, and good thing they did, because it's probably the best bit in the song.

 

The new songwriter apparently still takes his cues from Nick, because his contributions are large­ly just the same relaxed, generic country-rock — pleasant, but mellow and with little in the way of individualistically-rememberable melody. A typical example is the last track — the instrumen­tal ʽRockin' Chairʼ, which would fit nicely in any average country-western soundtrack, but when I really need my share of such music, as in, for a spiritual uplift or something, I can always have the Allman Brothers' ʽJessicaʼ instead. That's Ian Gomm for you. And Nick Lowe? I actually like ʽMerry Go Roundʼ a decade later when its verse melody was remade as ʽManic Mondayʼ and its chorus melody was made completely anew.

 

You get the point by now — Silver Pistol sounds very nice, and it may even be the best country-rock (soft-rock? whatever) album produced by a UK band in 1972, but in that range, they did not have that much competition, did they? Well, some; pop music historians will most likely be able to find far more blatantly rotten examples. The sad truth, I believe, is that the band was still way too much dominated by its rootsy American influences to develop their own style — and if they did not want to take a lesson from the dirty ugly Rolling Stones, well, by 1972 you had the Kinks and Muswell Hillbillies to show you just the right way of merging American and British tradi­tions. As it is, contrastive perception forces another thumbs down.

 

NERVOUS ON THE ROAD (1972)

 

1) It's Been So Long; 2) Happy Doing What We're Doing; 3) Surrender To The Rhythm; 4) Don't Lose Your Grip On Love; 5) Nervous On The Road; 6) Feel A Little Funky; 7) I Like It Like That; 8) Brand New You, Brand New Me; 9) Home In My Hand; 10) Why, Why, Why, Why, Why.

 

Hey hey, now this is what I call pub rock! Same year — two completely different worlds. All of a sudden, Brinsley Schwarz are no longer a homebrewed pale copy of «The Band trying to sound like Van Morrison», but a vivacious outfit whose songs make you want to dance, frolick, have a good time in general — with a sentimental ballad or two in the works, but nothing that would pretend at soulful depth and fail (and somehow, «failures of the deep» always produce a more mi­serable effect than «failures of the shallow» — it's like losing $2,000 at poker compared to losing $20 at poker). The songwriting does not get noticeably better, but it gets more adequate, and this arguably makes Nervous On The Road into the definitive Brinsley Schwarz album.

 

This time, Ian Gomm writes only one song; with the addition of two external covers, this once again leaves Nick Lowe as the principal songwriter, contributing seven new numbers. However, it also feels like Bob Andrews has been pushed to the foreground, and his seemingly relaxed, but really quite disciplined and colorful playing helps drag many of the songs from mediocrity — starting early on with Gomm's only contribution, another so-so Buddy Holly imitation (ʽIt's Been So Longʼ) which, however, has such delicious, light-Mozartian piano flourishes accompanying the main guitar melody as the original Crickets could have never thought of. And then on Lowe's ʽHappy Doing What We're Doingʼ, a quintessential «pub-rocker» if there ever was one, Andrews' organ and piano overdubs also steal the spotlight from everyone else — and then it becomes the regular pattern: Nervous On The Road is a record for piano lovers, not guitar fans.

 

That detail aside, the record is what Exile On Main St. might have sounded like with much cleaner production, much weaker songwriting, fewer gospel/soul ambitions, and no traces of sleaze, grease, and grit whatsoever. The «politeness» of Brinsley Schwarz becomes especially visible on their cover of ʽI Like It Like Thatʼ, a song that sounded more «dirty» and «raw» when it was performed by The Dave Clark Five, of all people — this version, with soft, playful vocals, a crystal clean guitar solo, and a totally tame rhythm section, suggests that they probably serve nothing but goat's milk at the place called ʽI Like It Like Thatʼ. But just because the tempos have been sped up and the soulfulness has been replaced by friendly low-key entertainment, this polite­ness does not always result in boredom.

 

The faster rockers, such as the title track (where Nick tries to emulate the Lou Reed vibe a bit) and the Ronnie Self cover ʽHome In My Handʼ, done here as a one-chord boogie, are hardly a match for the Stones or even the Faces, but technically, they got a great mix, with perfect separa­tion between guitars, keyboards, and vocals, and this is probably just exactly how it's gotta be done if you can't make yourself sound «really special». Things get a little more suspicious when they go for a very low-key, subdued road-blues vibe (ʽFeel A Little Funkyʼ) with guitars and keyboards going for a jazzier, loungier style, but Andrews is on such a roll that I can even stand his bit of Amos Milburn impersonation. And even the album's only reminder of the band's love for the «soulful roots-rock» of The Band and Jackson Browne, ʽDon't Lose Your Grip On Loveʼ, might be their best contribution in this genre — some harrowing vocal twists, a catchy chorus, a piano line copped and well-adapted from ʽThe Weightʼ, it's all enjoyable.

 

Most importantly, they do sound like they're finally ʽHappy Doing What We're Doingʼ, if only for a brief while — even when the music remains derivative, this lowering of ambitions helps the band achieve better coordination and just have more fun in each other's presence. They may be Nervous On The Road all right, but in the studio they feel quite relaxed and amicable, and the record exudes this hard-to-describe homely charm that every soft-rock record aspires to, but not every soft-rock record actually achieves. With all due reservations, and with the understanding that this is still hardly an album that I might find myself voluntarily coming back to, I still give it a moderate thumbs up — mainly because it provides such a refreshing contrast with everything that preceded it.

 

PLEASE DON'T EVER CHANGE (1973)

 

1) Hooked On Love; 2) Why Do We Hurt The One We Love; 3) I Worry ('Bout You Baby); 4) Don't Ever Change; 5) Home In My Land; 6) Play That Fast Thing (One More Time); 7) I Won't Make It Without You; 8) Down In Mexico; 9) Speedoo; 10) The Version (Hypocrite).

 

Apparently, this is a «stop-gap» album, thrown out on the market to appease the fans (but how many fans?) while waiting for the boys to write and record a proper set of new tunes — which explains its very lightweight nature, even judging by Brinsley Schwarz's usual standards. But even so, its title is symbolic: formally, it is simply the title of an old Goffin/King song that they are covering here, but allegorically, it reflects the band's ever-growing ideology of «if it ain't broke, don't fix it» — which this album is all about, from head to toe.

 

Be it as it may, this time around Nick Lowe and Co. are not even trying to imitate The Band — or, if they are, they are inadvertently imitating The Band's Moondog Matinee (inadvertently, be­cause both records happened to be released at the exact same time, October 1973). Then again, if you throw in Bowie's Pin Ups, 1973 was probably the first year of massive nostalgia for pop mu­sic of the previous decades (and then we'd also have to mention American Graffiti, and then there is simply no stopping...), so no wonder that Please Don't Ever Change is filled to the brim with Fifties- and Sixties-sounding soul, R&B, doo-wop, Latin, rockabilly, ska, and New Orleanian music. The only difference being is that most of these songs are not covers, but Nick Lowe (and Ian Gomm) originals, but other than the lyrics and the arrangements, little about these «originals» is «original» in the proper sense of the word.

 

Since this is Brinsley Schwarz we are talking about, this implies that the sound will be professio­nal and clean, the «show-off factor» will be less than zero, the atmosphere will be light, homely, and pleasant, and the memory of the album will probably wear off you in 24 hours if no more music is listened to, and in much less than that if you aurally compare this stuff to whatever, say, Genesis, The Who, or even The Faces were doing that same year. Some of the songs are just total novelties (or, rather, «oldities») here, with no individual reasons to exist — ʽDown In Mexicoʼ is not a cover of the hilarious old Coasters number, but an «original» Latin serenade pastiche, which the band is unable to play better than your average Mexican band and, what is worse, is also unable to render distinctly «Brinsley Schwarz-ian», whatever that could mean; and their take on ska is either limp and devoid of energy (in between ʽWhy Do We Hurt The One We Loveʼ and ʽWrong 'Em Boyoʼ, I know which one I'd choose in a jiffy), or simply puzzling (what is that in­strumental cover of Leroy Sibbles doing there in the first place?).

 

With the blues, these guys are in more familiar and comfortable territory, and soulful numbers like ʽI Worryʼ and ʽI Won't Make It Without Youʼ, whose spiritual ancestors include B. B. King, Sam Cooke, and Fats Domino, among other people, are smooth and touching, though I would not know what else to say. Somewhat more exciting is the live version of ʽHome In My Handʼ from the previous album, with a nice jamming section where Brinsley and Ian heat up the hall with nasty riffs and hysterical solos (think of the little brother of Marc Bolan on rhythm guitar and the little brother of Alvin Lee on lead, though both clearly have a long way to go). But on the whole, even here there is not much to say — just tap your toes and be happy, and please don't ever change, because, you know, we like you just the way you are. (At least they do this song better than the Beatles did it on the BBC — but fortunately for Brinsley, the Beatles never tried to re­cord it in a regular studio session).

 

THE NEW FAVOURITES OF BRINSLEY SCHWARZ (1974)

 

1) (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding?; 2) Ever Since You're Gone; 3) The Ugly Things; 4) I Got The Real Thing; 5) The Look That's In Your Eye Tonight; 6) Now's The Time; 7) Small Town, Big City; 8) Trying To Live My Life Without You; 9) I Like You, I Don't Love You; 10) Down In The Dive.

 

For their last album, Brinsley Schwarz turned to Dave Edmunds, already a minor celebrity in his own right, an avid lover of early pre-Beatles rock'n'roll who would as much want to impose that love on others as dwell in it himself — and indeed, The New Favourites should have rather been titled The New Old Favourites, since it just might be the single most retro-oriented Brinsley Schwarz album there ever was.

 

It does begin with what is arguably Nick Lowe's most famous song — the catchy pop anthem in support of idealistic ideals that would, however, only truly catch on in the popular conscience with the Elvis Costello cover several years later (and then be cemented even later with the version from the Bodyguard soundtrack, but we will try to erase that from the record). You could argue that this song, too, is «retro» in a way — advocating for a fallback from decadence and cynicism to the naïve, but noble (if also somewhat mythical) sentiments of the previous decade — but mu­sically, it should probably be described as «power pop», punchy, muscular, employing the three-chord punch of ʽBaba O'Rileyʼ (to weaker effect, though), and quite modern for 1974. It's not a great song in terms of composition, but Lowe makes an excellent, passionate vocal run towards the chorus resolution, and at the very least, comes across as a convincing spokesman for the cause — no wonder the song was endorsed for the Vote For Change tour in 2004 (even if the election results that year ultimately showed that something really was very funny about peace, love, and under­standing, but that's really beyond the point...).

 

Nothing else on the album, however, even begins to approach the anthemic fire of that song: all the other songs are quite down-homey, humble, and formulaic in comparison. Symbolically, one of the record's two covers is ʽNow's The Timeʼ, a very early, very simple and naïve pop song by The Hollies — not a songwriting gem like ʽBus Stopʼ or ʽKing Midas In Reverseʼ, but a generic early Merseybeat-style ditty that the Schwarzes perform with their usual diligence, yet how could they ever beat the Hollies' harmonies — their only serious advantage as of 1963, and one which still makes these early ditties outstandingly enjoyable, as opposed to this immediately forgettable cover? The second cover, by the way, is much more recent — Otis Clay's ʽTrying To Live My Life Without Youʼ, but, again, it is not clear how the band can improve on the song or make it more interesting in at least some respect.

 

Most of the «originals» also turn out to be pastiches and imitations — like ʽSmall Town, Big Cityʼ, which is essentially ʽAlley Oopʼ with new lyrics — and it looks like the band is not even trying to cover that up; maybe Edmunds was the one who convinced them that «good bands bor­row, great bands steal», but they got the causation wrong — it's not «if you steal, you're a great band», it's «if you're a great band, you steal», and because of this, here we have a good band stea­ling, which is embarrassing. I am not 100% sure that each and every one of these chord progres­sions had already been used in some pop / rock / country song in the 1950s/1960s, largely be­cause my memory is not vast enough to stockpile all those chord progressions, but it does honest­ly feel like this is the case, and then the idea of Brinsley Schwarz as the Stray Cats of the 1970s or something like that just doesn't seem so hot — except for the tactical idea of preserving the pleasures and vibes of pre-Beatles entertainment in the mid-1970s, which has been inevitably obsolete since, well, the mid-1970s, there is nothing about this music that elevates it above «listenable if you are ever forced to listen to it, so cross it off the Guantanamo list».

 

Since Brinsley Schwarz disbanded in 1975, The New Favourites could be regarded as one last bluff, undertaken to revitalize their image — and I am not saying it could not have worked, be­cause a large part of the world, fed up with progressive, glam, and Californian soft-rock, might have welcomed a retro-twist like this, were it properly presented. But this was a weak band from the very beginning, and even the addition of a dedicated producer could not have made it any stronger. Besides, the presence here of ʽPeace, Love, And Understandingʼ shows that Lowe could write passionate and powerful songs, at least occasionally — the logical question then being, why couldn't they write any more like that, instead of focusing on low-key secondhand stuff. Perhaps they didn't want to, because low-key secondhand stuff was what they really liked — in which case, well, they arguably got what they deserved.

 

ADDENDA:

 

HEN'S TEETH (1967-1975; 1998)

 

1) Shy Boy; 2) Lady On A Bicycle; 3) Rumours; 4) And She Cried; 5) Tell Me A Story; 6) Understand A Woman; 7) Tomorrow, Today; 8) Turn Out The Light; 9) In My Life; 10) I Can See Her Face; 11) Hypocrite; 12) The Version; 13) I've Cried My Last Tear; 14) (It's Gonna Be A) Bring Down; 15) Everybody; 16) I Like You, I Don't Love You; 17) Day Tripper; 18) Slow Down; 19) I Should Have Known Better; 20) Tell Me Why; 21) There's A Cloud In My Heart; 22) I Got The Real Thing.

 

Somebody's love for Brinsley Schwarz must have been bubbling indeed, if it prompted its victim to assemble such a painstakingly meticulous compilation of just about every studio-based rarity that the band put out during its lifetime and much, much beyond that. Because formally, only a few of these tracks are credited to «Brinsley Schwarz». The first ten tracks represent the small legacy of Kippington Lodge, with Nick Lowe joining in only about midway through and only having enough time to contribute one single song. Tracks 17-20 are Beatles covers that were re­corded by the Brinsleys all right, some time in late 1974, but were anonymously credited to «The Knees» and «Limelight», two different bands with two different styles (!). Tracks 11-12 are yet another stab at anonymity as «The Hitters», from 1973.

 

Finally, the last two tracks have them as simply «The Brinsleys» — an odd attempt at name shortening right before the break-up: did they think it was the name Schwarz that prevented them from fame and fortune? (Come to think of it, does anybody know of any famous and fortunate Schwarzes from the UK? Maybe there was something to the idea). And thus, only tracks 13-16 are properly billed to «Brinsley Schwarz», with two singles from 1974-75, neither of which is credited to Lowe or Gomm, either (the B-sides are, but one of the B-sides, ʽI Like You I Don't Love Youʼ, was already available on New Favourites anyway).

 

It isn't much of a pain to sort through this mess, given that all the information is laid out in the track listings and liner notes. It isn't that much of a great pleasure, though, to sit through the music, either: only by some anomalous miracle could an album of Brinsley Schwarz and «para-Brinsley Schwarz» rarities turn out to be as good as, let alone better than their regular output. It ain't much worse, either, but I doubt that, apart from a tiny handful of these tracks, anything here could truly satisfy even the most forgiving fan of the band — heck, even the liner notes, written in an age when raving and ranting liner notes are written about anything, admit that, well, you know, it ain't no great shakes, but, you know, historical importance, charming period pieces, the regular drill. And yeah, they're kinda right about it.

 

The Kippington Lodge stuff shows what we'd probably expect to see — yet another bunch of nice, clean, well-meaning kids striving to be the Beatles, but falling somewhere in between the Hollies and just about every other band you heard on Nuggets II. Most of the songs are from outside songwriters: for instance, the first song, ʽShy Boyʼ, was donated to them by Tomorrow (the Steve Howe-nurturing band of ʽMy White Bicycleʼ fame), although this excited the band so much that they tried to write the B-side themselves — and, of course, it was named ʽLady On A Bicycleʼ, because, you know, bicycles are so British and so psychedelic ever since Albert Hofmann rode one. To be fair, neither of them sounds like the Beatles: ʽShy Boyʼ is a music hall number much closer to the Kinks, and ʽLadyʼ is more of a swingin' jazz-pop ditty with a sappy chorus that's more Mamas & Papas than Lennon/McCartney.

 

In fact, when they do tackle Lennon/McCartney directly, it sounds awful: ʽIn My Lifeʼ, released in May 1969, coincided with the era of "let us reimagine early Beatles songs as grandiose art-pop epics!" (remember ʽEvery Little Thingʼ by Yes?) and has wailing distorted guitars, organs, ins­trumental breaks and vocals overdriven into frenzy mode by the end. The B-side to that single was Lowe's first solo original: ʽI Can See Her Faceʼ, a mournful guitar-organ slab of soul-pop that will bring to mind early Deep Purple, but with every aspect of early Deep Purple brought down to amateur level. Endearing, perhaps, but as forgettable as every other song by this early incarnation of the band — real gallant name, though, that Kippington Lodge.

 

Of the other stuff, «anonymous» or no, only two tracks caught my attention: ʽEverybodyʼ was curious because it probably has the heaviest sound the band was ever allowed in the studio, with such a gruff riff that, for a brief second, it opens them a little bit of that door into the Sweet / T. Rex league (not that this is necessarily a plus — just noting that they so very rarely sounded «glam», every such attempt jumps to attention). And of those Beatles covers from 1974-75, al­though ʽDay Tripperʼ and ʽSlow Downʼ, which «The Knees» play in rock mode, are pitiful, the other two tracks, which «Limelight» play in «artsy» mode, are much less so — especially ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ, where I really appreciate how they take the song into another di­mension by replacing the harmonica with the organ and the guitar solo with strings,  so it's a «Hard Day's Night meets Procol Harum and The Moody Blues» kind of event that deserves to be heard, maybe even in a higher status than just «historical curio».

 

Another historical curio is that the Leroy Sibbles ska song, ʽHypocriteʼ, turns out to have been first recorded as a vocal version — with very pretty vocal harmonies at that — and ʽThe Versionʼ was its instrumental track, for some reason released as the B-side; and then, for an even stranger reason, it was the instrumental rather than the vocal version to make it as the coda for Please Don't Ever Change. Accident? Humility? Copyright issues? Anyway, just another example in a series of tiny odd blunders that probably contributed to their career never taking off.

 

Anyway, it all sounds okay, and in each such retrospective there is at least an instructive value — with the Kippington Lodge tracks, for instance, you can quickly and succinctly track down much of the general evolution of the UK musical scene from 1967 to 1969, starting out as wispy, sensi­tive, music-hall influenced psycho-pop and then gradually getting bleak, thick, and heavy, with layers of vanilla fudge strewn over grand funk railroads — that is, before the roots-rock craze sets in and we become all downhome and earthy and stuff. Not that the Brinsleys always followed this simplistic model, but ultimately, this was a band that could not overcome somebody else's limi­tations and fully come into its own — in the logical end, this is why Hen's Teeth is indeed an appropriate title for this collection.

 

Part 4. The Age Of Excess (1971-1976)

10CC

10CC (1973)

 

1) Rubber Bullets; 2) Johnny Don't Do It; 3) Sand In My Face; 4) Donna; 5) The Dean And I; 6) Headline Hustler; 7) Speed Kills; 8) The Hospital Song; 9) Ships Don't Disappear In The Night; 10) Fresh Air For My Mama.

 

Here be an album so arrogantly brilliant, so perfectly balanced in its topsy-turvy attitude, that the very idea of the world forgetting about its existence comes across as preposterous — and yet this is, more or less, exactly what has happened. You would expect that when an experienced pop­meister, loaded with credentials (Graham Gouldman — among other things, the author of the Yardbirds' big hits ʽFor Your Loveʼ and ʽHeart Full Of Soulʼ, and the Hollies' ʽBus Stopʼ), teams up with a young inventive / innovative guitar player (Eric Stewart), and a couple of lesser known, but freshly brilliant freakout weirdos (multi-instrumentalists Lol Creme and Kevin Godley), the results could be enough to blow the roof off the public conscience.

 

Unfortunately, even in 1973, public tastes were already much too differen­tiated, and it's been getting worse ever since. These days, the adventurous mind usually shrugs this stuff off as way too commercial or fluffy to be cared about — while the non-pretentious pop-inclined spirit, on the contrary, shies away from it as a goofy oddity from days long gone by. How many of us are looking for a world in which Captain Beefheart and Karen Carpenter would be able to shake hands and, perhaps, share a double bill?..

 

As far as my opinion is concerned, 10cc's intentions, as they set out to conquer the world (or at least the Hammersmith Odeon, whichever came first), were of the noblest kind — nothing less than create an entirely new type of pop music, one which would rely almost entirely on Conven­tional Chord Sequences, yet also be so thoroughly irradiated with Sarcasm, Satire, and Unpredic­tability, that the smelly old «conventionalism» of the chord sequences would acquire a brand new sheen. Wait, scrap that: not «acquire a new sheen» — actually, for the first time in existence, it would finally justify its presence. Finally, someone would be putting these melodic moves to something far more intellectually loaded than yer average schmaltzy love song, or yer boring re­bellious anthem, or even yer old acid-drenched flower-power mantra.

 

To list all of the musical ingredients of 10cc would take at least a sleepless night of research, and at most, a PhD in popular culture. However, ones that are recognizable off the cuff include [a] the Beach Boys and surf music in general (ʽRubber Bulletsʼ), [b] doo-wop and its tribu­taries (ʽJohnny Don't Do Itʼ, ʽDonnaʼ), [c] psychedelic pop-rock (splattered almost everywhere), [d] lush pop à la Paul McCartney — and more, much more. One might recognize the oddest touches in the oddest places. For instance, why in the world does the buildup to the chorus on 'Headline Hustler' sound so much like vintage solo George Harrison, what with its gently weeping slide guitar and plea­ding vocals? There is no easy logic here, just an empty pleasant feeling of coolness.

 

One strict rule that 10cc, in their finest days, always abided by, is that no single melody overstays its welcome. Indeed, most understay it: after a short while, it is safer to just aban­don all hope of easily discerning between verse, bridge, and chorus, and simply treat every composition, in­clu­ding the shortest ones, as tiny independent mini-operas (and even then, this is still absolutely nothing compared to the far more radical approach the band would take on their sophomore al­bum). With adventurous, but mediocre bands, there is always a risk that such mini-operas will quickly devolve into unmemo­rable pretentious chaos, or that they will treasure the «storyline» far above the music. But Gouldman is always there, steering the band into «hook» territory with an iron hand — cleverly combining time-honoured melodic phrasing with unexpected twists and turns makes the final experience super-weird and super-catchy.

 

Besides, there is nothing wrong with the storylines. ʽRubber Bulletsʼ tells us about suffering for trying to amelio­rate your cell block conditions ("...is it really such a crime for a guy to spend his time at the local hop at the local county jail?"). It was a smash hit on the UK charts, establishing the band's reputation overnight, but in a somewhat misguided way — most people probably thought that here, at last, were the genuine British Beach Boys. It is amusing how the song essen­tially plays out as a surf-pop rocker on the ʽJailhouse Rockʼ subject, and then, during the mid-sec­tion, launches into several distinct vocal passages that actually emulate the «art» era of Brian Wil­son's team — but the fact is, of course, that for these smartypant pre-post-modernists the Beach Boys' legacy was just one small slice of the pie, and the unsuspecting British boys and girls happily dancing and prancing around in the audience to the upbeat sounds of 10cc playing the song on Top Of The Pops never really knew what hit them.

 

ʽRubber Bulletsʼ, however, is only the final step in a process of evolution that led 10cc, originally «Hotlegs», away from their parodic, Zappa-inspired takes on the essence of doo-wop. Originally released as singles in 1972, they were so successful that, despite their relative slightness com­pared to most other songs on 10cc, it was decided that they could do no wrong. Of these, ʽDonnaʼ may be the swee­test send-up on the genre ever released — if Lol Creme's «honey-overdose» falsetto on the first line of the chorus cannot be taken seriously, the second line, on which he lowers it into the «soul­ful» register, has, for some reason, always taken my breath away, no matter how obviously the lyrics are just there to kick the stuffing out of romantic clichés. But ʽJohnny Don't Do Itʼ, lamenting a wannabe biker with a fatal lack of braking experience, is far more hilarious — if there ever was something like a Leiber & Stoller Special Award, this song could easily have been its first proud recipient.

 

Since almost each of these tunes is a mini-opera, this review could be stretched out to infinity and beyond, but it is much wiser to spend that time giving the music one more listen instead. So let us pack it in briefly: ʽSand In My Faceʼ is a blues-pop extravaganza about getting your girlfriend back from the local beach bully ("dynamic tension make a man out of you!"); ʽThe Dean And Iʼ deals with extreme forms of college romance ("it was no infatuation, but a gradual graduation"), going from brightness and optimism to darkness and despair and back again; and ʽHeadline Hust­lerʼ takes a strong stab at yellow journalism, dressing it up in an arrangement that only ardent dreams of George Harrison could have implanted in their heads (but I already mentioned that).

 

Lest someone think, however, that this is all about stories, and that the music comes in as an afterthought, there is also a special semi-instrumental number ("Speed Kills") which gives the band ample opportunity to showcase some chops and dexterity. It rocks with a vengeance, and, the title notwithstanding, would sound cool even today, when proverbially blasted out of one's car windows on the highway. There is a curious «synthesized guitar» sound here (as well as on some other solo passages on the album), produced by a special device invented by Godley and Creme, who called it the «Gizmo»; it may sound a wee bit experimentally obsolete these days, but at least the tone is used for actual playing, rather than avantgarde farting noises.

 

Finally, one should not forget about the immense diversity of ways they use to arrange and present this content. Vocal arrangements alone draw on almost the entire experience accumulated over the past several decades — solo crooning, group harmony, echoey Floydish back­ground, highest falsetto, deepest bass, opera, theatre, it's all in there (fortunately, all four group members happened to be vocally endowed, a rare blessing even for «supergroups»). Instruments range from basic guitars, pianos, and newfangled synths to just about everything I have still got to learn a name for.

 

On an album like this, intellectual reaction and gut feeling go happily hand in hand, in a way that is usually reserved for the cream of the crop — the heart simply cannot stop embracing all the pretty melodies and singing along (be it to "hum-drum days and a-hum-drum ways" or "he was an angel, such an angel" — if you have already heard the album, do not tell me this hasn't set you going!), whereas the brain is stupefied, trying to calculate just how many creative musical and lyrical ideas one can fit in per 1 square inch of record, provided «one» means «four dorky-loo­king guys from early 1970s England». No wonder that, for a very short period of time, 10cc were looked upon as the finest inclusion into the «Next generation Beatles» club. 10cc's only compara­tive flaw is that much of it sounds silly — but silly does not equal stupid, and, in a way, this band went to shit exactly at the same time that they stopped being silly. Coincidence? Hardly. Just ig­nore the long-faced critics and join me in my hearty thumbs up.

 

PS: There are several CD issues of the album; the true fan should probably look not for the com­mon one that merges 10cc with Sheet Music on one piece of plastic, but for the bonus-heavy edi­tion that throws on the alternate single version of ʽRubber Bulletsʼ and four additional B-sides, of which ʽWaterfallʼ is a must-have — a beautiful ballad in the vein of solo McCartney, with some of Eric's most memorable and evocative guitar flourishes on record. (It was originally planned as an A-side, with ʽDonnaʼ as the flip — then the roles were reversed, which pretty much tells us everything we need to know about classic period 10cc priorities).

 

SHEET MUSIC (1974)

 

1) Wall Street Shuffle; 2) The Worst Band In The World; 3) Hotel; 4) Old Wild Men; 5) Clockwork Creep; 6) Silly Love; 7) Somewhere In Hollywood; 8) Baron Samedi; 9) The Sacro-Liliac; 10) Oh Effendi; 11) Waterfall.

 

The jump from 10cc's first album to their second one is, in all fairness, enormous. 10cc was basically a set of weird pop songs. Sheet Music is, on the contrary, a set of pop-tinged weirdnes­ses. Not that it's atonal or anything — it is easily their most melodic album ever, simply because there's an average total of five or six different melodies per song... sometimes per twenty seconds of it, too. "Never A Dull Moment" — what is this title doing on a Rod Stewart record?

 

I have heard criticism that tended to basically just write off 10cc from this moment as a pack of goofballs. However, if anything, Sheet Music is even more lyrically focused and biting than 10cc. No matter how "goofy" the actual songs might be, most of them carry a message: tearing apart the capitalist world on 'Wall Street Shuffle', acidly self-ironizing on 'The Worst Band In The World', ridiculing lyrical cliches of popular music on 'Silly Love', butt-kicking oil-pumping sheiks on 'Oh Effendi', and even stopping on the way to take the time for a tender lovin' tribute to the silver screen — 'Somewhere In Hollywood' is almost like a more sophisticated response to the Kinks' 'Celluloid Heroes', released two years earlier. All of this makes perfect sense, regardless of the oddness of the form it has been presented in.

 

Predictably, my own favourites are those where the melodies go on just a little bit longer, or at least have a memorable central theme to them. For instance, the wall-rattling opening riff on 'Wall Street Shuffle' that is even more of a threat to Wall Street than the lyrics themselves ('Bet you'd sell your mother/You can buy another') — this is instantly classic. So is the mock-metallic thump of 'Silly Love' that, of course, dissolves fairly quickly into attractive pop fare ('hey toots, you put the life into living, you brought the sigh out of sight') and ends up formulating the band's main principle: 'take up your own time, make up your own rhyme, don't rely on mine — 'cause it's SILLY!'

 

These two songs that bookmark Side A are the obvious highlights, but the whole record brims with such boundless, boiling energy that it never lets go even when it doesn't let you memorize it too easily. Only once do they take a short breather, on the Gizmo-dominated soft ballad 'Old Wild Men', but it turns out to be the album's lowlight, because their incessant shuffle of patterns really only works when it's backed up with plenty of adrenaline; otherwise, it's just boring.

 

Of course, it goes without saying that the amount of genre territory covered is quite spectacular. Completely dropping their penchant for doo-wop, they instead proceed to deconstruct calypso ('Hotel'), Haitian tribal-voodoo stuff ('Baron Samedi'), prog rock ('Somewhere In Hollywood'), folk balladry ('Waterfall') and... uh, what­ever 'Sacro-Liliac' is supposed to deconstruct. And if these songs won't struck you as magnifi­cently planned compositions, most of them are at least guaranteed to give you a good laugh (ex­cept 'Waterfall', which seems to take itself rather seri­ously — but I don't mind, given how pretty the guitar and the singing are).

 

Not only that, but they really master all these genres: the pompous, ominous introduction to 'Somewhere In Hollywood' could easily fit on any second generation prog band record, and the percussion on 'Baron Samedi' could make you swear Kevin Godley must have spent his child­hood drifting around the Caribbean instead of around the boroughs of Great Manchester. It's only when they start combining the uncombinable — for instance, bringing in a lumbering hard rock middle eight for 'Baron Samedi' — that you feel you're living in a post-authentic world after all.

 

Needless to say, the brain wins the race here with a solid gold thumbs up, praising the record for its phenomenal inventiveness. But it should be known that, after several listens, the heart is well on the way to catch up with the brain, and if you haven't grooved along to 'Silly Love' at least once in your life, you've all but missed out on the art of intellectual headbanging, and I feel great overwhelming pity for you.

 

THE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK (1975)

 

1) Une Nuit A Paris; 2) I'm Not In Love; 3) Blackmail; 4) The Second Sitting For The Last Supper; 5) Brand New Day; 6) Flying Junk; 7) Life Is A Minestrone; 8) The Film Of My Love; 9*) Channel Swimmer; 10*) Good News.

 

If 10cc was the sound of a genius band in its infancy, and Sheet Music — the teenage wild child running round and trying all sorts of nasty tricks on its neighbours, then The Original Sound­track is, by all means, a mature and much more responsible young man looking for a job. (Hint: not everyone will consider this to be a good thing).

 

Experimentation is still the word of the day, and so is Satire and Sarcasm; but Madness and Whirl­­­wind no longer are. They seem to have gotten tired of genre-hopping, for one thing, and most of the selections here are strictly within "pop rock" territory, or maybe "prog-pop" territory... it's still a huge territory, to be sure, but the most oddball of styles, like the calypso of 'Hotel' or the tribal airs of 'Baron Samedi', do not make any more appearances.

 

For another thing, the piecemeal melodies are almost gone as well. They have relegated all the jig-saw puzzle constructing to just one track, the opening mini-operetta 'Une Nuit A Paris', about the life and death of a, so to speak, respectable courtesan, but mini-operettas are supposed to be multi-part, and since when do we have a band like 10cc doing what it is supposed to do? The element of surprise is pretty downtrodden here, to say the least.

 

Or maybe this whole feeling of increased seriousness and solemnity is due to 'I'm Not In Love', the band's first (and biggest) hit to not sound like a parody. The song stupefied listeners with its arrangement — layers upon layers of vocalizing synthesizers and synthesized vocals that created an atmosphere of such heavenly dreaminess as had never been experienced before. Today, much of this is routine matter, and the same tones and tricks have been used over and over again in un­countable "adult contemporary" ballads, so it's almost as hard to realize the groundbreaking po­tential of 'I'm Not In Love' back in 1975 as it is to marvel at the wonders of the first notes played on electric guitar. But that doesn't make the song itself any less inspiring, or its lyrics any less inspired — 'I keep your picture upon the wall/It hides a nasty stain that's lying there' sounds sad upon first listen, hilarious upon the second one, and soon afterwards achieves a perfect synthesis of irony and des­pair so that guess all you like, you won't be able to discover the primary motiva­tion behind the composition.

 

It's little wonder that after the grand opening of 'Une Nuit A Paris' and the groundbreaking follow-up of 'I'm Not In Love', the rest of the album seems rather hastily slapped on, or, at best, just somewhat out of place. For instance, 'Blackmail', a lively pop-rocker about a hilariously botched attempt at blackmailing a promiscuous girl's husband, would feel more at home on Sheet Music or even 10cc — closing out the first side with this little ditty is a bit anticlimactic. And as for the second side, I can never memorize much of it except for the blistering heavy metal ope­ning of 'The Second Sitting For The Last Supper' (the lyrics, about how we really need a second Last Supper these days, are great, though) and the carnivalesque optimism of 'Life Is A Minestro­ne' (served up with parmesan cheese, no less). It's not bad, just not up to 10cc's better standards.

 

Therefore, although the brain, as usual, is on highly friendly terms with this band (that is, while it was still a band rather than a duet), it is only reluctantly that the heart issues its thumbs up, which hardly applies to the second half of the record. Still, this is certainly not "the beginning of the end", rather just a momentary loss of focus justified by ambitiousness of the goals.

 

HOW DARE YOU! (1976)

 

1) How Dare You!; 2) Lazy Ways; 3) I Wanna Rule The World; 4) I'm Mandy, Fly Me; 5) Iceberg; 6) Art For Art's Sake; 7) Rock'n'Roll Lullaby; 8) Head Room; 9) Don't Hang Up; 10*) Get It While You Can.

 

With How Dare You!, 10cc have comfortably and gracefully settled into middle age — an age which might have lasted forever, had the very fact of it not been grating heavily against the rest­less souls of Godley and Creme. Usually it is the more "commercially-oriented" members of the band that tend to carry the blame for a great unit's falling apart, but in this case the situation is reversed — Godley and Creme left the band entirely of their own will, unsatisfied with its crea­tive stagnation (at least, that seems to have been the pretext).

 

Ironically, the creatively stagnant How Dare You! turned out to be a far more greater record than anything that either the experimental unit of Godley & Creme or the "commercial" unit of Ste­wart & Gouldman's 10cc managed to produce since 1976. In a way, it is the band's Abbey Road: a record that consciously rejects any more musical revolutions, but in terms of pure quality al­most manages to outstrip all of its predecessors. And just like the Beatles may have had a sub­conscious feeling that Abbey Road were to be their swan song, boosting the desire to make it a superb piece of product, so could the four members of 10cc have felt the same — and turned their creative volume knobs all the way up to eleven.

 

There is no return here to either the dazzling energy level or the diversity of Sheet Music; the songs are generally more quiet and relaxed, the amount of melodies per song more limited. But that's merely a sign of maturity. The melodic hooks remain stronger than ever, the lyrical wit and the unique story-telling ability undamaged, and the arrangements, if possible, have become even more polished, refined, and complex than on The Original Soundtrack. The flow is wonderful, with a few weaker tracks carefully dispersed among the stronger material and the lazier material only better attenuating the energetic stuff. And if there is no one or two songs that are particularly jaw-dropping, like 'Silly Love' or 'I'm Not In Love', that's only due to the quality of the rest.

 

Much of the album is sweet and sentimental — Sir Paul might have loved this — like the lead off single, 'I'm Mandy, Fly Me', sort of a fantasy sequel to 'Clockwork Creep' off Sheet Music, with a totally off-the-cuff story of how the protagonist is saved by his lovely stewardess in the midst of an airplane crash. Taking a stupid airline slogan ('I'm Cindy, fly me'), the jokers make it into the basis for a love confession which, as is usual with 10cc, is stuck somewhere in between sincere and sarcastic — as confusing for some as it is exciting for others. 'Lazy Ways' and 'Rock'n'Roll Lullaby' have sweet vocal hooks that will send spinning the head of anyone with a thing for sweet vocal hooks; and the album closer 'Don't Hang Up' is the band's most realistic ode to quiet despe­ration, culminating in... hanging up, of course!

 

The harder side of the album is illustrated by the blistering 'Art For Art's Sake' (the opening riff is one of the most memorable moments in the catalog) which takes several evil punches at The Artist ('give me your love, give me it all, give me in the kitchen, give me in the hall'), and the equally biting and hilarious 'I Wanna Rule The World' ('I wanna be a boss I wanna be a big boss I wanna boss the world around I wanna be the biggest boss that ever bossed the world around'). And finally, the 'sonically creative' side is featured on the title track — a (possibly) Zappa-inspi­red instrumental that isn't so much enjoyable per se as per trying to figure out where exactly it will be heading off in the next ten seconds. Good luck hunting!

 

All said, How Dare You! requires a little time (say, a decade or so) to properly sink in, as do all such lazy, mature, deep, flash-less (but certainly not flesh-less) albums. Once it does, though, there's nothing preventing one from even thinking of it as 10cc's finest hour — at least, that's one possibility that's worth exploring. Naturally, with the brain harboring respect for it from the very first minute and the heart gradually accumulating love for it over the years, this is a thumbs up all the way. Don't hang up on it.

 

DECEPTIVE BENDS (1977)

 

1) Good Morning Judge; 2) The Things We Do For Love; 3) Marriage Bureau Rendezvous; 4) People In Love; 5) Modern Man Blues; 6) Honeymoon With B Troup; 7) I Bought A Flat Guitar Tutor; 8) You've Got A Cold; 9) Feel The Benefit; 10*) Hot To Trot; 11*) Don't Squeeze Me Like Toothpaste; 12*) I'm So Laid Back, I'm Laid Out.

 

Despite leaving so abruptly, Godley and Creme couldn't help but leaving some scent behind them, and for a brief moment of one or two years it almost seemed like the castrated Gouldman-Stewart variant of 10cc might be able to make it anyway. Deceptive Bends may be a small step down from the level of the fearsome foursome, but it is still a thoroughly enjoyable and frequently un­predictable record that not only pledges allegiance to the band's old credo, but even manages to uphold that allegiance in more than just words.

 

After all, one might complain that the songs have become more streamlined, featuring fewer sur­prising twists and grotesque stylistic clashes than we came to expect from 10cc, but wasn't that already the situation on How Dare You? and its "mature" type of sound? Deceptive Bends is generally made in the same mood, mixing up tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and sweet sentimentality until you cease to understand which is which and what is where.

 

Only occasionally do we get true signs of the decay and decline to come: the percentage of slow ballad stuff is ominously going up, and although a song like 'People In Love' is quite melodic and quite exquisitely arranged with its light-symphonic mixture of pianos, weepy slide guitars, and strings, in the end it lands in MOR territory where 10cc have never landed before. 'The Things We Do For Love', too, is like a slightly de-arenified version of Foreigner, although that might as well be a compliment (given how Foreigner's first two albums weren't that bad at all). Still, 10cc turning into Foreigner isn't exactly a heartwarming observation.

 

And yet these unhappy feelings are still quite muted next to the album's successes — 'Good Mor­ning Judge', 'Modern Man Blues', and 'Honeymoon With B Troup', in particular, are all catchy, funny highlights, showing that the Gouldman-Stewart duo is still able to handle both ferocious melodic hooks (the opening to 'Good Morning Judge' is simplistic, but nevertheless one of the most energetic openings on a 10cc record) and snappy lyrics (no record with lines like 'My baby goes topless and brings her beauty to a bottomless day' can be all bad).

 

Finally, the duo's brave take on a multi-part suite ('Feel The Benefit'), although it feels somewhat meaning- and directionless next to 'Une Nuit A Paris', is still easily listenable throughout all of its eleven minutes. I used to get somewhat indignant at its openly "borrowing" the melody of 'Dear Prudence' for the main opening theme, but now that I think of it, its complex structure, bom­bastic conclusion (featuring some truly soaring leads from Eric — arguably his most "spiritual" playing in 10cc) and overall feel are all intended to be Beatles-like, reminding one of the closing sym­phony on Abbey Road. In this light, 'Feel The Benefit' is not only pardonable, but forms an ex­cellent conclusion to the album — and, in fact, just like the closing symphony on Abbey Road, forms an excellent swan song to the band's career as a whole.

 

For all I know, Deceptive Bends might, and should, have been a goodbye record — created by just the duo of Gouldman and Stewart (with a little help from Paul Burgess on the drums), with the spirit of Godley and Creme still whirling around in the studio. Everything that follows is but one large footnote, and one that gives fairly little pleasure to study. Deceptive Bends is our last and smallest piece of Turkish delight to gobble up, but it's still a piece of Turkish delight and so deserves a good thumbs up from both the emotional and the intellectual departments.

 

LIVE AND LET LIVE (1977)

 

1) The Second Sitting For The Last Supper; 2) You've Got A Cold; 3) Honeymoon With B Troup; 4) Art For Art's Sake; 5) People In Love; 6) Wall Street Shuffle; 7) Ships Don't Disappear In The Night; 8) I'm Mandy Fly Me; 9) Marriage Bureau Rendezvous; 10) Good Morning Judge; 11) Feel The Benefit; 12) The Things We Do For Love; 13) Waterfall; 14) I'm Not In Love; 15) Modern Man Blues.

 

For some reason, 10cc never got around to releasing a live album while still in their prime — not that, being a «pop» band by definition, they should have felt as obliged to do it as their colleagues in the heavy rock and prog rock departments. But with Godley and Creme out of the band, Stewart and Gouldman may have sensed a need for proving that «10cc still exists!» in as many ways as humanly possible — and so, with Deceptive Bends only six months away, they hurried­ly followed it up with a sprawling double LP of live recordings, made in June-July 1977 in London and Manchester. Another possible goal was to flaunt their newly reassembled band, showcasing Rick Fenn (who gets a bass solo on ʽFeel The Benefitʼ), new keyboardist Tony O'Malley, and no less than two different percussionists.

 

Unfortunately, even in their prime 10cc were not a particularly great band to enjoy outside of the studio — and in 1977, the only reason to buy this live album was to show financial support for the band. Deprived of contributions by its weirdest, riskiest members, the 10cc setlist was now al­most exclusively limited to Stewart/Gouldman material, which, of course, had plenty of winners, but this also means that Deceptive Bends is reproduced here almost in its entirety, so you are basically buying the same album twice — and it's not as if the live renditions had anything to prove that was not already proven in the studio.

 

Other than that, ʽShips Don't Disappear In The Nightʼ is stretched out to unreasonable limits with the addition of a slowed down part; ʽArt For Art's Sakeʼ is stretched out to include a jamming part at the end, with a passable, melodic, but rather out-of-place solo from Eric; and ʽWaterfallʼ fares better, since its desperate romanticism is perfectly compatible with guitar heroics — so Stewart adds an epic solo built along the same lines as Jimmy Page's solo on ʽStairway To Heavenʼ (in fact, one might actually state that they are trying to transform ʽWaterfallʼ into their own private ʽStairwayʼ). All in all, Stewart's guitar playing skills is more or less the only thing that distingui­shes these songs from their studio counterparts — and they are not nearly as unique or inventive as should be required to make Live And Let Live into a lead guitar lover's wet dream.

 

Nevertheless, the album still sold well, reflecting 10cc's general level of fame and prosperity: with Deceptive Bends still showing traces of the classic spirit, Stewart and Gouldman were only on the verge of squandering the band's artistic reputation, and the power and the glory of their hit singles still rang out loud and clear — enough to make people buy even something that nobody really needed. Besides, most of the songs are so good, why not buy them twice anyway?..

 

BLOODY TOURISTS (1978)

 

1) Dreadlock Holiday; 2) For You And I; 3) Take These Chains; 4) Shock On The Tube; 5) Last Night; 6) Anony­mous Alcoholic; 7) Reds In My Bed; 8) Lifeline; 9) Tokyo; 10) Old Mister Time; 11) From Rochdale To Ocho Rich­dale; 12) Everything You Wanted To Know; 13*) Nothing Can Move Me.

 

Somehow, 'Dreadlock Holiday' managed to be a huge hit — maybe because its village-idiot style nod to reggae fell in with the emerging New Wave's preoccupation with Jamaica (after all, if 'Roxanne' could be a hit, why couldn't 'Dreadlock Holiday'?). On the coattails of its success, the entire album managed to sell respectably. In retrospect, however, Bloody Tourists, now quite explicitly, continues 10cc's slide into mediocrity and irrelevance.

 

I feel obliged to stress that the songwriting is still at a high level, and that there are plenty of de­cent pop hooks, and that, given time enough, the album is a "grower", not a "shrinker". Stewart and Gouldman still continue to do their best trying to come up with interesting subjects and match them with unpredictable music. But they're mildly interesting, and the music is mildly un­predictable: for one thing, they have completely lost the ability to rock out — when the 'hard' section on 'Shock On The Tube' takes over, it turns out to be little more than 'clown-rock', a term that I think well-suitable but almost unexplainable.

 

For another thing, they start going too heavy on the ballads; in fact, the entire album is divided almost evenly between straight-faced sentimental balladry and the 'weird' numbers — this sort of worked on Original Soundtrack, where 'I'm Not In Love' was a swell tilter that made you lose sleep over thinking just how much they actually meant it, sandwiched in between 'Une Nuit A Paris' and 'Blackmail', but when these things become the rule rather than the exception, and when you take them in perspective — CLICK! — you really understand that this band has changed, and not necessarily for the better.

 

But I repeat: if you manage to stay away from the perspective, Bloody Tourists, on its own, isn't bad at all — I'd put it on the same shelf with some second-rate solo Paul McCartney album. I do like 'Dreadlock Holiday', with its eerie tale of an unfortunate English guy on an unhappy vacation in Jamaica (apparently inspired by a real incident that happened on a real vacation undertaken by Eric Stewart and Justin Hayward) — one might complain that the band really knows nothing of reggae, but that would be missing the point, because they're not here to play reggae but rather to make fun of the reggae craze; I feel happy about the catchy retro-pop of 'Take These Chains', simple, unpretentious, and fun; I think that 'Anonymous Alcoholic', appropriately starting out as slow barroom rock and then going into a hot funky section, is more of an artistic success than a hoodlum failure; and I even like some of the ballads — why not? They're pretty.

 

So, as you understand, this is where the brain enters into a serious conflict with the heart. The best advice here, I think, would be — for those who were primarily enthralled with 10cc for their quirkiness and experimentation, to stay away from this album (let alone everything that follows; it would only get worse from here); for those, however, who loved 'Rubber Bullets' and 'I'm Not In Love', but hated 'The Worst Band In The World' and 'Clockwork Creep', Bloody Tourists is recommendable. And since I do not insist that a record has to be both intellectually stimulating and emotionally pleasing to be good, I still give it a thumbs up.

 

Useless bit of trivia: on this album, 10cc are once more a 'full' band, adding drummer Paul Bur­gess, guitarist Rick Fenn, keyboard player Duncan Mackay, and an extra percussionist (Stuart Tosh). Does it show? Not really. But some people like to know.

 

LOOK HEAR? (1980)

 

1) One Two Five; 2) Welcome To The World; 3) How'm I Ever Gonnna Say Goodbye; 4) Don't Send We Back; 5) I Took You Home; 6) It Doesn't Matter At All; 7) Dressed To Kill; 8) Lovers Anonymous; 9) I Hate To Eat Alone; 10) Strange Lover; 11) L.A. Inflatable.

 

No thank you. I can still look (especially since the album has two different covers — the UK release had 'ARE YOU NORMAL' written on it in huge letters, and the US release had a picture of a sheep reclining on a Roman-shape bed located on a beach, transatlantically suggesting, per­haps, that the cor­rect answer to the former question is NO), but I'd rather not hear.

 

The only redeeming quality of Look Hear?, in contrast to the following two albums that lacked even that, is that it's still nicely melodic. Apart from a completely non-descript bad prog rock contribution by two new members ('Welcome To The World'), Gouldman and Stewart can still ensure that the bulk of the record is constituted by chord-based pop melodies that took time to write and incorporate some real feeling as well.

 

The trouble is, tons of people can write moderately decent pop, but from these guys we have come to expect more than that. We expect some wit, some grit, some laughs, some unpredic­ta­bility — in short, that 10cc feel that everyone brought up on Sheet Music instantly recognizes. Well, Look Hear? is the first 10cc album that sounds nothing like 10cc. It doesn't rock out at all — the closest it comes to rock is on Rick Fenn's 'Don't Send We Back', but even there the sound is seriously watered down. It isn't in the least unpredictable: same reliance on McCartney-style balladeering and reggae influences as on their last record.

 

But, worst of all, it isn't funny at all. Almost as if Mother Superior had removed the crucial mem­bers' tongue-in-cheek mechanisms for long-term repair, most of the songs take themselves dead serious. The love ballads are lyrically straightforward, the character impersonations almost try to make you care about the impersonations, and 'Don't Send We Back', entrusted completely to the cares of Rick Fenn, is the band's first ever straight social song — not satire, not sarcasm, but an angry comment on the sad fates of illegal immigrants. What the heck??

 

The best song is Gouldman's 'I Hate To Eat Alone', a pretty and touching ode to loneliness that could have creeped in as a minor highlight on one of the band's better albums — unnoticed and unloved at first, perhaps, but cherished later. (See 'Old Wild Men' on Sheet Music). But the rest of the ballads, such as 'I Took You Home', pompous beyond reason, or 'Lovers Anonymous', go way too heavy on the melodrama and unpleasantly remind me of the worst excesses of Seventies' pop. I've already mentioned how 10cc managed to end up sounding like good Foreigner — on Look Hear?, way too often, they end up sounding like bad Foreigner without the heavy guitars. So much so that it's even a relief to have the album ending on a lightweight, forgettable, but — in the context of it all — heartwarming bit of generic boogie ('L.A. Inflatable').

 

So this is the real beginning of the end, although the agony would be prolonged further for seve­ral unhappy years. Thumbs down from the brain, who thinks himself so insulted he is seriously considering challenging the G-S duo to a brain duel, and likewise from the heart, which does not accept betrayal of its confidence lightly.

 

TEN OUT OF 10 (1981)

 

1) Don't Ask; 2) Overdraft In Overdrive; 3) Don't Turn Me Away; 4) Memories; 5) Notell Hotel; 6) Les Nouveaux Riches; 7) Action Man In Motown Suit; 8) Listen With Your Eyes; 9) Lying Here With You; 10) Survivor.

 

The band was once again "stripped down" for this release, with Gouldman and Stewart exclusive­ly sharing all the songwriting and most of the playing credits (for the American release, several songs were replaced by collaborations with American singer-songwriter Andrew Gold). However, essentially this is just a bit of trivia: in spirit, there is no significant difference between this record and the few ones before.

 

Except for the sad fact that there is no spirit whatsoever on Ten Out Of 10. In fact, it may be the first 10cc record that has absolutely no reason for existing; I do not have the vaguest idea of the kind of serious music listener who could be satisfied with it. It's just a bunch of mid-tempo, mid-volume, mid-relevance, mid-everything mid-pop songs written by two mid-aged gentlemen that seem to be but mid-knowing what they're mid-doing. Someone like Paul McCartney could proba­bly allow himself to get away with it from time to time; but, after all, Paul's gift for melody has always been more generous than Gouldman's, and Paul's vocals have always been lovelier than Eric Stewart's (a debatable opinion, that, but I'd probably be supported by the masses here), and even then Paul did not always get away with it — and it is hardly a coincidence that Paul's least satisfying record, Press To Play, was but a matter of several years away from 1981, and would be representing the pitiful results of his collaboration with none other than Eric...

 

...but I digress. Although, frankly, I'd rather digress a while than speak about these songs. As usu­al, they fall strictly into two genres: sappy ballads, only saved from the ultimate depth of fall by slightly above average lyrics, and limp pop rockers that crumble into reggae every now and then, as if that still mattered in 1981. 'Don't Turn Me Away' stands out as an okay representative of the former, and the biting, but toothless social critique 'Les Nouveaux Riches' stands out as an okay representative of the latter; both were singles, and both deservedly flopped — of course, they didn't flop because they were bad songs, but rather because they sounded so miserably outdated against the background of 1981's hit material, regardless of quality.

 

I have encountered several critical opinions on the record stating that it was really a creative re­bound for the band or even a true "return to form" after Look Hear? I have no idea what that meant, and I have no idea how or why in between two really weak records they could have mana­ged to place a true artistic winner. My feelings and thoughts on Ten Out Of 10 are in full agree­ment with each other: it's just one more step down the ladder from two guys who continue to go on making music because it's their professional duty and for few, if any, other reasons. And if the album title is indeed a shameless psychological trick (after all, if you simply state that something is good, there'll always be someone who'll believe it without questioning), it's just one more rea­son to hand this a certified thumbs down resolution.

 

WINDOWS IN THE JUNGLE (1983)

 

1) 24 Hours; 2) Feel The Love (Oomachasaooma); 3) Yes I Am!; 4) Americana Panorama; 5) City Lights; 6) Food For Thought; 7) Working Girls; 8) Taxi! Taxi!

 

The final squeak from the band, before it went on a decade-long hiatus. What we have here is a desperate, but even so, only half-hearted attempt to squeeze the last bit of power from the few remaining drops of fuel — you can almost literally hear the agonizing sounds of the engine dying down in the middle of an Arizona desert. Windows In The Jungle is just another mix of sappy ballads, now veering on the brink of choppy adult contemporary, and all-natural reggae grooves made from 100% concentrate; "auto-pilot" is the best way to summarize it in one word.

 

The saddest thing of all is that the Gouldman/Stewart duo still had some creative songwriting left within — many of these songs have sane, interesting melodic ideas, nothing too original, but, under better conditions, you could at least shape 'Americana Panorama', 'City Lights' and 'Wor­king Girls' into convincing New Wave rockers. But it's not enough to string together memorable choruses — you have to imbue them with some sort of sense, to energize them, so to speak, and neither the musical arrangements nor the singing betray any signs of energy. The music is all ei­ther syn­thesizers or Eric's gentle, but — by this point — lethargic jangle, and the singing is completely passionless.

 

Windows In The Jungle also has the merit of featuring at least two of the worst tracks ever crea­ted by the band. If the main problem of the album opener '24 Hours' is the length (eight minutes may be too long even for a good progressive rock number, it certainly is overkill for a synth-pop one), the next two songs are enough to kill off any semi-decent impression or semi-tepid hopes you had for the record. 'Feel The Love' is "cod reggae", an attempt to imitate Bob Marley that miserably fails because of its rigid and robotic attitude, and 'Yes I Am!' is every bit as pathetic as the most pathetic ballad you'll ever see on a Foreigner album — which is pretty pathetic. Just how sad is it to hear a band that used to have some of the sharpest lyrics on all the British Isles permit itself a chorus like 'yes I am, I'm ready for love'?

 

The only redeeming moment on the whole record is the coda to the album closer 'Taxi! Taxi!', a trifling, but pretty instrumental passage based around Eric's looping guitar theme and some non-ugly keyboard work. It is quite sympathetic in its position of a humble goodbye to the fans (not that Eric and Graham were really meaning it), as long as you manage to detach it from the rest of the song. There is no greatness here, of course, just a drop of sadness, warmth, and nostalgia. And it is obviously not redeeming the existence of this album as a whole, justified only by the fact that it would be a great help in accelerating the milk-curdling process if you play it next to your milk. Thumbs down — from the indignant brain, mostly, because the heart has long since fallen asleep.

 

...MEANWHILE (1992)

 

1) Woman In Love; 2) Wonderland; 3) Fill Her Up; 4) Something Special; 5) Welcome To Paradise; 6) The Stars Didn't Show; 7) Green Eyed Monster; 8) Charity Begins At Home; 9) Shine A Light In The Dark; 10) Don't Break The Promises.

 

A ten-year long break can sometimes work wonders... not in this case, though. After spending a decade working on their individual projects, Stewart and Gouldman have come back to pick up from the exact same place where they left us with Windows In The Jungle, as if neither the Eighties, with their tackiness and their perverse charms, nor the early Nineties with their drastic shift in musical values have ever happened. Well — you don't have to love this judgement, but maybe you have to respect it.

 

A long-term tactical blunder hailed this as a "Reunion" album of the original 10cc — under the pretext that Godley & Creme were mesmerized into appearing in the studio for the sessions to add backing vocals for some of the tracks (Godley also sings lead on 'The Stars Didn't Show'). But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that neither of the two had even a pinch of creative im­pact on the proceedings; ...Meanwhile is, if possible, even more straightforward and simplistic a record than Windows.

 

It isn't worse, though; perhaps it's even a little better. About half of it is the same old boring adult contemporary refuse, but the other half at least cheers up the proceedings with some upbeat bar­room rock, on which the band is assisted by the piano-playing talents of Dr. John. And the lead-off single, 'Woman In Love', is at least a good pop song: it somehow manages to tap-dance on the bottle top of retro-Seventies "cock-sentimentalism" (i. e. sentimental songs emanating from artists with a general cock rock attitude, by default one of music's greatest offenses against both good taste in general and the feminine sex in particular) without getting stuck in the bottleneck, maybe because of exquisite guitar work from Stewart.

 

One bothersome thing is a striking number of déjà vus I am getting — consciously or subcon­sciously, Gouldman and Stewart seem to be so strung up on creative songwriting that they keep yielding either atmospheric or melodic bits that belong not to 10cc, but rather to someone else. 'Wonderland', for instance, for the most part sounds like the Police circa Synchronicity; 'Some­thing Special' keeps reminding me of some McCartney song I can't recall the name of; 'Shine A Light In The Dark' borrows a line from the Hollies' 'Long Cool Woman In A Red Dress', etc. Not that it's necessarily bad: if your own sack of ideas is depleted, a little borrowing can be a big help, and if this helps make ...Meanwhile more listenable — why not? Except that it doesn't make it all that much more listenable, certainly not to the point where we could count it as a minor latter day masterpiece. The best songs here, like 'Woman In Love', or the flat rocker 'Charity Begins At Home', would still be forgettable filler on any of 10cc's major albums.

 

Nor do I understand why Godley agreed to sing lead on 'The Stars Didn't Show', a tepid synth ballad every inch of which is so square they should make it an anthem of McDonalds' or some­thing. They didn't even manage to squeeze out any money of this effort, because the old fans had been washed away and who'd want to be a new fan? Part of the blame can perhaps be laid at the feet of producer Gary Katz of Steely Dan fame — what may have been good for Steely Dan, namely, extreme cleanliness and "stiffness" of the sound, compatible with the Dan's exquisite taste in arrangements, only augments the suffocation one experiences from Gouldman and Ste­wart's late-period musical values. On the other hand, maybe the tables should be turned and perhaps it was actually Katz who saved the album from becoming a complete snoozer. But complete or incomplete, it still hurts my brain so bad that it temporarily shuts down my heart — guaranteeing the usual thumbs down rating.

 

MIRROR MIRROR (1995)

 

1) Yvonne's The One; 2) Code Of Silence; 3) Blue Bird; 4) Age Of Consent; 5) Take This Woman; 6) The Monkey And The Onion; 7) Everything Is Not Enough; 8) Ready To Go Home; 9) Grow Old With Me; 10) Margo Wants The Mustard; 11) Peace In Our Time; 12) Why Did I Break Your Heart; 13) Now You're Gone; 14) I'm Not In Love.

 

At least this one does not pretend to be a "reunion", but that's hardly a sufficient excuse for the album's predictable weakness. If ...Meanwhile was made somewhat marginally acceptable with the aid of one or two strong melodies ('Woman In Love') and relaxed party atmosphere on its barroom rock numbers, then Mirror Mirror plunges the listener back into the stale waters of adult contemporary head-on.

 

The best I can say is that Stewart is jumping over twenty-feet high fences, trying at all costs to emulate the melodicity of Paul McCartney, as if their 1985 collaboration on Press To Play was the most important event of his life, deserving to be waxed nostalgic about every time he crosses the threshold of a recording studio again. 'Yvonne's The One', the opening number, is, in fact, a ten-year old outtake from those sessions, and Paul even drops by to play rhythm guitar on it, which never saves the song from being completely pedestrian and forgettable (well, it's hard to expect anything other from an outtake for the sessions for McCartney's worst album). And 'Blue Bird' is not a cover of the McCartney song, but it sounds eerily like a fifty-fifty cross between McCartney and Justin Hayward (also, by the way, one of Eric's good friends — coincidence? may­be not, although why is the track credited exclusively to Gouldman, I wonder?); so eerily, in fact, that I am completely unable to judge it on its own, and the most that it gets me is a nagging desire to relisten to my Moody Blues collection.

 

I can't say that Mirror Mirror is not melodic; that would be a direct lie. But these aren't melo­dies that one should live or die for, and certainly not when they're used to convey straight-faced, deadly serious sentimentality ('Code Of Silence', one of the most revolting songs about broken relationships I've ever heard from a formerly good artist; 'Grow Old With Me' — much worse than the Lennon song of the same name; 'Why Did I Break Your Heart' — yuck) with the help of synthesizer arrangements that, by 1995, were already considered the epitome of cheesiness by just about everyone who wasn't a ten-year old ten years before that. Another heavy blow is that barroom rock is out, and in its place they reinstate their bland reggae and calypso schtick ('Take This Woman', 'Margo Wants The Mustard', etc.). And as a final insult, the record includes a re­working of 'I'm Not In Love' (some editions include two different reworkings of 'I'm Not In Love'!) that dares to suggest their limp adult contemporary of 1995 somehow owes something to their masterpiece of 1975!

 

On second thought, it does owe something, but it just goes to show you what twenty years of taste deterioration can do to one's creativity. Thumbs down; a most ignoble end to a formerly brilliant career — at least no one seems to have noticed, because for most people 10cc had already died a quiet death at least twelve or fifteen years ago, and only a few unfortunates (like record reviewers) are forced to see these old ghosts.

 

ADDENDA:

 

IN CONCERT/KING BISCUIT FLOWER HOUR (1975; 1995)

 

1) Intro; 2) Silly Love; 3) Baron Samedi; 4) Old Wild Men; 5) Sacro-iliac; 6) Somewhere In Hollywood; 7) Donna; 8) Ships Don't Disappear In The Night; 9) The Worst Band In The World; 10) Wall Street Shuffle; 11) Rubber Bullets.

 

This is the only live album from 10cc recorded in their glory days (might, in fact, be the only live 10cc album as such), and, although it is sort of semi-official (like all the "King Biscuit Flower Hour" releases), it is quite essential for any fan of the band, and even worth checking out if you're just casually interested in these eccentrics.

 

Given that most of 10cc songs are strictly and straightforwardly studio creations, based on meticulously planned combinations of arrangements, special effects, and tricky melody shifts, one would naturally be curious to learn how they handled all this on stage (a decade earlier, the Beatles basically ran off the stage for much the same reasons). Plus, like with so many art- and prog-rock bands, there was the evident danger of their just being happy to reproduce the original sound on stage as faithfully as possible — a feat in itself — and leaving the fans in the audience well-contented and the live album buyers equally well-disappointed.

 

In the light of this, it is a relief to learn that on stage, they behaved themselves like a good rock band is supposed to behave. This setlist, although it was recorded on November 11, 1975 (Santa Monica Civic Center), focuses entirely on Sheet Music and, to a lesser extent, 10cc, even though The Original Soundtrack had already been released and was riding up the charts. Not knowing the facts, I'd guess that, perhaps, they might have played some numbers from that album, but that they weren't too keen about recording and broadcasting them, preferring to let all the extra liste­ners in on the simpler, more rocking stuff.

 

Indeed, it is far more exciting to hear the band jam on the ending to 'Silly Love' or on the middle part of 'Baron Samedi' than attempt to recreate the icy synthesizer patterns to 'I'm Not In Love' or  to replicate, bit-by-bit, all the operatic details of 'Une Nuit A Paris'. The best news is that they can jam — not that you'd doubt it, given the pedigree of the players, but it's nice to have documental evidence. Stewart is the main star of the show, playing inventive, aggressive, and diverse solos throughout, but the rhythm section of Gouldman and Godley deserves honorary mention as well.

 

Some of the songs don't have jam sessions and are, in fact, faithful recreations of the studio wi­zardry, e. g., 'Somewhere In Hollywood'. Some are crowd-pleasers that don't always go off as well as you'd like them to go off ('Donna', in particular, is ruined by some off-key singing and poor harmonizing - apparently, these guys didn't have a natural gift for doo-wop after all). And the eight-minute jam on 'Rubber Bullets' might be pushing things a bit too far. But, twenty per­cent misfires aside, the album is still forty percent enjoyable rock'n'roll and forty percent skilled demonstration of the uniqueness and inventiveness of the band. Therefore, a thumbs up from both the heart and brain departments.

 

LIVE IN JAPAN (1993)

 

1) The Wall Street Shuffle; 2) I'm Mandy, Fly Me; 3) Good Morning Judge; 4) Welcome To Paradise; 5) Things We Do For Love; 6) Across The Universe; 7) The Stars Didn't Show; 8) Art For Art's Sake; 9) Feel The Benefit; 10) Dreadlock Holiday; 11) I'm Not In Love; 12) Bullets Medley.

 

Originally released as simply Alive, with a slightly extended setlist (including cover versions of 'Paperback Writer' and even 'Slow Down'), but today more easily found as Live In Japan or Best Of Live or, perhaps, under a further extra dozen titles, and with fewer tracks. Not that it makes any difference: there is no reason whatsoever even for major fans to own this album.

 

It does, I suppose, present a relatively faithful picture of 10cc's live power circa the early 1990s: golden oldies mixed in with recent material, performed with enough professionalism and energy to justify the ticket price. But if the old-time 10cc at least bothered to make their immaculately polished studio stuff acquire extra vivaciousness, at the expense of neutralizing some of the hooks but with the added benefit of genuine rocking-out, this late-period 10cc is, in all respects, stiffer than a stiff. 'Art For Art's Sake' is the only track on which the band dares to jam a little towards the end, with Stewart churning out a solid extra guitar solo. Everything else is just scared shitless of adding something to or detracting something from the originals, no matter how fresh or how bearded those are — even to the extent of wiping out most of the audience noises, a technique that is very rarely encountered. We've all heard of "false live albums" with overdubbed applause, but how often do we hear of true live albums with suppressed applause?

 

A particular sign of bad taste is when the bad songs — like 'Welcome To Paradise' — are given all the necessary time to further ingrain their badness in us, but the great songs — like 'Rubber Bullets', 'Silly Love', and 'Life Is A Minestrone' — are crammed together into a medley, as if the people at the show actually bought tickets to hear 'there's a coup coming on, there's a coup co­ming on'. Of course, they do faithfully run through their biggest commercial hits — 'Good Mor­ning Judge', 'Dreadlock Holiday', and a further adult-contemporarified 'I'm Not In Love' — but none of that is particularly adventurous either.

 

Thumbs down, of course, primarily from the brain that is justified in seeing no reason for the record's existence, although that does not mean these are technically "poor" performances or that the setlist isn't mostly consisting of great material (I certainly could do without the over-emotive cover of 'Across The Universe', and I have little reason to believe that their 'Paperback Writer' is a threat to Paul McCartney's stature in any way possible, either). If it's your only chance to get to know 10cc, there's no reason to turn it down, but it destroys my brain to even attempt to imagine that kind of real life situation.

 

ABBA

RING RING (1973)

 

1) Ring Ring; 2) Another Town, Another Train; 3) Disillusion; 4) People Need Love; 5) I Saw It In The Mirror; 6) Nina, Pretty Ballerina; 7) Love Isn't Easy (But It Sure Is Hard Enough); 8) Me And Bobby And Bobby's Brother; 9) He Is Your Brother; 10) I Am Just A Girl; 11) Rock'n'Roll Band; 12*) Merry-Go-Round; 13*) Santa Rosa; 14*) Ring Ring (Bara Du Slog En Signal).

 

When this record first came out, there was no ABBA as such; instead, there was the barely pro­nounceable 'Björn, Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid', and any band with that kind of name must be the kind of band that is still wavering between a musical career and daytime jobs as insurance salesmen and art dealers. And while on its own Ring Ring stands as a decently realized pop re­cord, in the context of major works to come it looks seriously pale.

 

Technically, it does feature most of the usual ABBA trademarks. All of the songs were written by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (with the exception of 'Disillusion', uniquely credited to Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog), most of the songs have somewhat captivating hooks that have a weird way of sticking for unclear reasons, and many of the songs have the two girls joining in classic powerhouse harmony of which nobody was ever a better master than A & A.

 

Nevertheless, it is very clearly a record hastily built up around one monster hit ('Ring Ring') and one mini-monster semi-hit ('People Need Love'). The former isn't as melodically complex as the hits that would ensue, and its emotional content is completely trivial ('ring ring, why don't you give me a call' pretty much describes it all), but then no one seemed to hold either argument against 'I Want To Hold Your Hand', which is hardly that much more inspiring from purely com­positional terms. What matters is the powerful riff that drives the song and grabs you right at the very first second, and the perfect transmission of joy in the chorus. It's dumb, but it works.

 

It works so well, in fact, that in comparison the rest of the tracks end up six inches smaller. The selections are the usual ABBA kaleidoscope of a little sanitized rock'n'roll, a little faux vaudeville, a little Swedish music hall, and more than an ounce of James Taylor- and Carly Simon-like (soon to be Eagles-like) folk-pop; in short — just about everything that the Knights of Good Taste are supposed to despise in public. This range would never ever change, except for the addition of dis­co to the list in later years; but the real problem is that the melodies are often half-baked, al­most kiddie-level so, and the lyrics, although never ABBA's forte, are particularly blush-inducing. No one can seriously take a record with song titles like 'Nina, Pretty Ballerina' or 'Me And Bobby And Bobby's Brother', unless they expressly represent kitsch, but in this context they are taken quite literally — the former song does indeed tell us about a ballerina, while the latter does tell us about Bobby and Bobby's brother, and do you really want to know about the kind of things they were engaging in with 'me'? Do you? Well, here goes: 'We would play together climbing the apple tree'. Uh... okay then.

 

Another disadvantage is that Benny and Björn sing too much; Björn in particular is taking the lead way more frequently than good sense would have supposed him to. 'I Saw It In The Mirror', for instance, may have worked better with the girls' voices, and so would other numbers. I don't have anything in particular about Björn's voice, but I always had the impression that his English singing was too tense and way too straightforward for people to connect with it emotionally (of course, so was Agnetha and Anni-Frid's, but they at least had the advantage of gorgeous timbres and rarely matched power).

 

The resumé is all too simple: by 1973, the former Hep Stars had not yet fully realized the perfect combination that would take them to the top. They made a nice try, though. I would never dare to use Ring Ring as fanbait — if you want to convert someone to the magic of ABBA, even one of their disco hits would work better — but in retrospect, it comes off as a somewhat respectable first stepping stone rather than a horrid mutation of an album that it used to look like to me.

 

WATERLOO (1974)

 

1) Waterloo; 2) Sitting In The Palmtree; 3) King Kong Song; 4) Hasta Mañana; 5) My Mama Said; 6) Dance (While The Music Still Goes On); 7) Honey, Honey; 8) Watch Out; 9) What About Livingstone; 10) Gonna Sing You My Lovesong; 11) Suzy-Hang-Around; 12*) Waterloo (Swedish version).

 

This isn't a masterpiece, either. It may have the benefit of being one of ABBA's most diverse al­bums: rearing for the international market, the Swedes make stabs at just about every commercial style of pop music currently in vogue, but, given their generally "fluffy" disposition, predictably manage to connect with not more than one or two.

 

For one thing, there is still a heavy overdose of Björn on vocals: he dominates 'Sitting In The Palmtree' and 'Suzy-Hang-Around' and is also all over the place alongside the girls on a whole pack of other numbers. I'm sure there are some major Björn fans out there that are perfectly hap­py about it, but it seems that the band eventually wasn't, because already on the next album the gentleman got seriously cut down in the singing department. His strength is in the writing; let us not waste it on areas where it is bound to be wasted.

 

But the major problem is, of course, that around half of the album is devoted to stylistic deviati­ons that are clumsy and awkward. Glam and shock rock was at its public peak around 1973-74, and it's understandable that the band couldn't resist the temptation to go "heavy" and "theatrical" with numbers like 'King Kong Song' and 'Watch Out'; yet they are neither emotionally resonant nor hilarious — in fact, 'King Kong Song' gives me the impression of a typically bad kiddie song at a typically cheesy kiddie festival, while 'Watch Out' tries to sound "scary" but doesn't even reach Alice Cooper level.

 

Other songs just don't feel focused enough — 'What About Livingstone' is given a "big" sound and "important" lyrics as if it were making a serious social statement, but it isn't; their experi­ments with country-rock and ska are not very convincing; and their vision of dance music, at this point, still reminds one of the overwrought, generic sound of bad Italian Europop ('My Mama Said'). All of these songs are memorable, in a way, but their melodic power is not yet enough to override the crap factor.

 

So the record rolls on on the strength of its hit singles: 'Waterloo', the song that made ABBA in European public conscience, and arguably the best ever song to win Eurovision; 'Honey Honey', the most overtly erotic song that the band recorded (the girls' voices drip so much with sex on here that, at one point, I used to indignantly dismiss the song as unsuitable for their generally more restrained style, but then it makes no sense to put down 'Honey Honey' while at the same time praising Madonna's debut, does it?); and 'Hasta Mañana', a Swedish-only chart-topper with Agnetha's angelic sweetness all over it. 'Dance (While The Music Still Goes On)' and 'Gonna Sing You My Lovesong' are also prime ABBA, showing that by 1974, they'd already fully mas­tered their classic style — they simply weren't too sure that this was to be their classic style, or that the best choice for them would be to stick exclusively to their classic style.

 

For all the good stuff, this does deserve a thumbs up, yet it is still very clearly a hit-and-miss record hastily built up on the heels of 'Waterloo'; and 'Waterloo' isn't even in my Top 10 of hit ABBA singles — its over-the-top Wagnerian bravado does not compare well with all those later classics that put more emphasis on romanticism and sentiment than on the pomp-and-stomp. Which is not to say that 'Waterloo' shouldn't be counted, all the same, as Eurovision's most glori­ous moment, or that any Europop lover should stay away from this album just because it features lyrics like 'This is the King Kong song, won't you sing along?' (For the record, I did catch myself singing along to 'Honey Honey' one day — that's when I knew there was nothing left in store for me, not ever again).

 

ABBA (1975)

 

1) Mamma Mia; 2) Hey, Hey Helen; 3) Tropical Loveland; 4) SOS; 5) Man In The Middle; 6) Bang-A-Boomerang; 7) I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do; 8) Rock Me; 9) Intermezzo No.1; 10) I've Been Waiting For You; 11) So Long; 12*) Crazy World; 13*) Medley: Pick A Bale Of Cotton/On Top Of Old Smokey/Midnight Special.

 

It is tempting to speculate, based on these album titles, that Ring Ring and Waterloo were just it — LPs hastily brewed around their imperial single, but the self-titled ABBA is where the band finally announces its explicit arrrival. (Or wouldn't that be until Arrival?..)

 

No matter; whatever the historical reality, ABBA is their first album where the force flows unin­hibited and the atavistic detours are all but eliminated. "All but" — meaning they still insert a few oddball tracks here and there that break up the pop bliss by simply standing there and being highly questionable in everyone's faces. I am speaking mostly of the Björn-led numbers: 'Rock Me' is awkward in its attempt to blend rock star pathos and sexist lyrics with a toothless music hall arrangement (well, any song that is called 'Rock Me' but fails to do so could be called awkward), and 'Man In The Middle', despite showing us that Benny really has a way with those Stevie Wonder-like funky clavinets, is equally unconvincing as a piece of social criticism — which, again, goes to show that ABBA are always at their worst when they're trying to imitate someone from the rock/funk idiom.

 

But if you just judge these innocent — still catchy, by the way — bits of fluff as inertia-born re­lics from the age of Waterloo, the rest of the songs are power pop heaven. Or "Europop heaven", provided the reader takes offense at the "power pop" label being applied equally to the likes of ABBA and, uh, Big Star. Then again, no: ABBA is quite a few steps away from what we typical­ly call "Europop" and equate with some generic canzone Napoletana played on cheap keyboards in a disco arrangement. It is, in fact, Benny and Björn's biggest achievement that they managed to step over that limitation, and instead produce a brand of pop that would only superficially be "Euro" (mostly when it came to guitar and keyboard tones), but, in fact, be based much more on a unique synthesis of American mainstream pop, classical influences, and such modern trends as glam and art-rock (later, alas, to be substituted for disco).

 

None of these songs have any deep meaning — in fact, they're all rose-colored and tailored so as to appeal to the most undemanding segments of the market, and I love this, deeply. I love this because if all mainstream music that appeals to undemanding audiences were like this — yester­day, today, tomorrow, doesn't matter — the world would have been a far more interesting and far less irritating place to live in. Few songs of the Seventies convey the pure, simple, naïve feeling of overwhelming joy better than 'Bang-A-Boomerang' or 'Mamma Mia'; few display operatic, but sincere emotion sweeter than 'I've Been Waiting For You'; and fewer still make the heavy riffage of glam rock put on such a cheery attitude as the slow-moving 'Hey Hey Helen' or the fast-bop­pin' 'So Long'. And then there's 'S.O.S', which even Pete Townshend is known to have praised as a great piece of music.

 

Where, normally, a typical pop song waits for the chorus to deliver its main hook, Benny and Björn have explicitly set themselves the standard of around three main hooks per song, so that no one has to wait for thirty seconds of mediocrity to be awarded with fifteen seconds of prize value. 'S.O.S.' is perhaps the best illustration to this approach — Benny's simple, instantly recognizable keyboard intro would be enough on its own to make the tune somewhat worthwhile, but then there's the plaintive verse melody, played out by Agnetha with the most rueful countenance, the acoustic guitar-led first part of the chorus, and the dark, almost Gothic-like key change for the second part. None of this is technically difficult, but genius shouldn't be.

 

Thus, after two false, if promising, starts, ABBA firmly establishes the formula and shows that the men in the band have finally attuned their antennae in the 100% perfect position, while the women have blossomed into the perfect vocal surrounding for these antennae. And if the brain is, as usual, a little cautious about praising, without reservation, this kind of "safe", "glossy", "main­stream" music, the heart seems to have no problem with it whatsoever. Besides, what harm can a little ABBA-loving do to an organism that has already assimilated Zappa and Zeppelin? Cheer up and put your thumbs up along with me.

 

PS. The newest reissue of the album adds one uninteresting song of Ring Ring caliber ('Crazy World'), but also the oddest thing ABBA ever did — an ABBA-style medley of three old folk standards, including even 'Pick A Bale Of Cotton'. I hesitate to say it's good, but it certainly sounds like nothing else and deserves to be heard for that fact alone.

 

ARRIVAL (1976)

 

1) When I Kissed The Teacher; 2) Dancing Queen; 3) My Love, My Life; 4) Dum Dum Diddle; 5) Knowing Me, Knowing You; 6) Money, Money, Money; 7) That's Me; 8) Why Did It Have To Be Me; 9) Tiger; 10) Arrival; 11*) Fernando; 12*) Happy Hawaii.

 

Another perfect title for ABBA's first of two perfect albums in a row. "Perfect", here, does not necessarily mean "beautiful" or "great" or even "timeless" — simply that, as far as the record's goals and ambitions are concerned, they are satisfied with perfect perfection. On Arrival, there is no "filler"; not a single note is, in fact, out of place. Huge (and well-deserved) hits alternate with lesser numbers in a way that's respectful for the latter and profitable for the former. And, by 1976, ABBA were finally in full control of their bodily functions when it came to songwriting.

Even if I hated this particular form of glossy Euro-pop — and, normally, I do, because I have no choice — I would still be forced to admit that the guys who wrote these melodies were no ordina­ry hackmen. Ordinary hackmen do not usually make their verses as memorable as their choruses, and they do not strive to get their middle eights to sound like entirely different mini-compositions gracefully wedged in between the verses.

 

When you've settled in, you start noticing that Benny and Björn's hooks, particularly the ones they employ on the hits — like the piano runs in 'Money, Money, Money' or 'Dancing Queen' — are extremely simple, sort of nursery rhyme level-simple (hardly a coincidence that one of the songs, 'Dum Dum Diddle', basically is a nursery rhyme), and that may make you ashamed of fal­ling for these melodies instead of, let's say, Keith Jarrett. My advice would be to fuck it. There is a time for the beauty of Keith Jarrett, and then there's a time for the admirable simplicity — and efficacy — of 'Money money money, must be funny in a rich man's world'.

 

They certainly could have employed (what with all the money that'd started rolling in) a better set of lyricists. The slightly on-the-edge "high school giggle" of 'When I Kissed The Teacher' and the explicitly and obviously grim "depression" of 'Knowing Me, Knowing You' (their first 'parting' song, foreshadowing the band's personal problems to come) are probably the only tunes on here that could scramble for at least a C+ on the Singer-Songwriter Scale of the decade; everything else ranges from the thoroughly trite to the unintentionally hilarious ('Dig in the dancing queen' is quite notorious, but I'd say that the cake is taken by 'And if I meet you, what if I eat you?' from 'Tiger'). However, I have seen people dissing these lyrics as if this somehow discredited the whole experience — and some of these were the same people who, the very next moment, would begin colorfully headbanging to AC/DC.

 

In terms of arrangements, Arrival and The Album are, in between them, the best illustrations of the default ABBA sound after they'd stripped away all the shortcomings, but before becoming de­railed with the disco wave. Layers of acoustic guitars, usually, with a simple or electric piano ac­companiment, and moderate usage of electric guitars and strings and, sometimes, accordeons, re­flecting Andersson's Swedish folk music influences. In the end, it is stuck somewhere in between the opposing poles of hard rock/power pop, the heights of which they never even try to scale, and the American folk-rock scene, which some of the songs clearly resemble, but regularly trump in terms of sheer pop energy (after all, Arrival is not a meditative album à la James Taylor — it's dance music, pure and simple).

 

As a result, the songs seem quite lively even today, and show plenty of soul from under the gloss. For many, the album peaks at the end, when the incompetent lyrics fade away and the title track greets us with its heavenly waves of Nordic melody — a choral mantra of such bliss that even Mike Oldfield could not resist from covering it. Following the general line, 'Arrival', like everything else, is not a technically demanding piece — basically just one melodic line brushing against you over and over again, but every good band needs an anthemic mantra to its name, and 'Arrival' has a good chance of making the shortlist of candidate melodies to welcome earthly saints to the gates of Heaven (at least in the "pop" category).

 

Special honourable mention: 'Why Did It Have To Be Me', arguably the best Björn-sung number in the catalog, blissful vaudeville which begins as if they were painfully trying to disguise it as rock'n'roll, but then just drops all the pretense altogether in favour of the fat brass riff and the pompous chorus delivered by Frida-on-Fire (her campy punch onstage in the version in ABBA: The Movie is so grotesque that it has to be seen to be disbelieved). It simply embodies everything about the band that you might want to consider good, and everything that you might want to con­sider bad, if you still have any idea of what these words mean. I do not pretend that I do, yet I am certain that Arrival will go on finding admirers until the day we're done with as the human race, and, in keeping with that, I gladly put my thumbs up.

 

THE ALBUM (1977)

 

1) Eagle; 2) Take A Chance On Me; 3) One Man, One Woman; 4) The Name Of The Game; 5) Move On; 6) Hole In Your Soul; 7) Thank You For The Music; 8) I Wonder (Departure); 9) I'm A Marionette.

 

"Getting serious" is not a concept that works well with ABBA. In fact, once ABBA and Arrival had firmly put them up on the big screen, it is hard to imagine how it would have been at all pos­sible for them to "get serious". Start donning black leather? Teach Björn the essentials of chain­saw buzz guitar? Hire Lou Reed as a lyricist? Recast the girls as Debbie Harry lookalikes? Do all these things at once — and come out as the ultimate clowns in the entertainment?

 

Naturally, they did not resort to anything of that type. And still The Album manages to be that one ABBA record which even the professional haters might somewhat appreciate: sacrificing none of the trademarks of their classic mid-1970s sound, it injects a few extra elements that sug­gest going beyond cheap entertainment — and, might, in fact, indirectly be responsible for the fact that the band's legacy has so far remained above ground. Who knows: if it weren't for 'Eagle' and 'I'm A Marionette', we might not be listening to 'Honey Honey' and 'Mamma Mia' today.

 

Just like Arrival, this next record is almost frighteningly consistent — all the more amazing con­sidering the band were superstars now, jet planes and megatouring and parties and all. Its one and only attempt at straightahead rocking ('Hole In Your Soul') is, as usual, questionable — certainly catchy and exciting, but there is always something cringeworthy in the lines 'there's gotta be rock'n'roll to fill the hole in your soul' if the song that contains them is not rock'n'roll at all. But other than that, each song nails its pur­pose, and quite a few of these purposes are well worth knowing.

 

At the heart of the album is its "mini-musical", 'The Girl With The Golden Hair', dedicated to the undying issue of the ups and downs of show-business. The innocent and charming young heroine happens to be musically endowed ('Thank You For The Music'), gets whisked away from her little hometown by the temptations of showbiz ('I Wonder'), is sucked into the paranoid whirl­wind of the entertainment machine ('Get On The Carousel'; for some reason the song never made it onto the album, but can be seen and heard performed, e. g., in ABBA: The Movie), and finally realizes that she has become a helpless victim of the monster — but, of course, it is too late alrea­dy ('I'm A Marionette').

 

The subject is as old as show business itself, but nobody forced the band to go in for all the dark overtones, and for that they deserve a bit of praise; what matters most, though, is the excellence of the music throughout. 'Thank You For The Music', like it or not, is an anthem for the ages, bound to be treasured by sissies around the world just like 'We Will Rock You' is treasured by all the tough guys (and it is advisable to check out the silly cutesy cover version by the Carpenters — who had their share of admirable covers, but totally missed the boat on this one — just to see whatever makes the original so great in the first place); 'I Wonder' is not a favourite, but works well as a solid Broadway-style sendup; and 'I'm A Marionette', ABBA's grimmest offering so far, shows that the girls can pull off a convincing 'desperate plea for help'-style song even in spite of all the Swedish accent. Do not miss Janne Schaffer's exquisite guitar battle with the strings arran­gement during the lengthy instrumental section, either.

 

This final three song-kicker is not even the best stretch on the album, though. The biggest shock comes at the beginning, when 'Eagle' welcomes you with its swelling synth blast and mountain­ous sound — first and last time the band starts off an album with something that rises high above an effective, but superficial pop hook. 'Flying high, high, I'm a bird in the sky' does not look that great when it's on paper, but few songs I have heard in my life really capture that feel any better with their musical arrangement. The acoustic guitars, the pounding majestic synth riff, the post-psychedelic electric guitar trimmings, the soaring vocals, no other ABBA song does the job of transporting you somewhere else that effectively. Perhaps 'Tropical Loveland' did conjure images of hot beaches and papayas, but what's that next to snowy peaks and heights and swooping up and down along with the torrents of trippy electric licks, and looking down at the world from the stratosphere? This is ABBA's masterpiece.

 

They could have instead chosen to open the album with 'Take A Chance On Me' — a song that, with its clever usage of the title as the main rhythmic basis for itself, represents further progres­sion over the 'Mamma Mia' approach. Or with 'The Name Of The Game', possibly their best hit in the 'multi-part mini-suite' category. Or with 'Move On', another whirwind-like anthem whose la-la-las are impossible to forget upon first listen. Or even with 'One Man One Woman', the album's most lyrically revealing moment where Frida lets you in on some of the boy-girl tensions within the band before concluding that 'it's never too late for changing' — optimistic, aren't they? — and gracefully ending ABBA's most underrated ballad in the entire catalog.

 

But they opened it with 'Eagle', and that was a clear signal that the band did try to "grow", if not in overall image or lyrics quality, then at least in terms of complexity, inventiveness, and raw emotion. No matter how much I listen to the song or the album, I can't help admiring all the little tricks and touches that are all over the place. For me, this is unquestionably ABBA's highest point — subsequent records never managed to even begin matching it in terms of exploration (with the possible exception of The Visitors, an album whose "interestingness", however, does not catch up with its lack of consistency). In fact, this just might be the highest point of 1970's "Europop" as a whole — one of the few reasons that prevent us from forgetting the thing ever existed.

 

VOULEZ-VOUS (1979)

 

1) As Good As New; 2) Voulez-Vous; 3) I Have A Dream; 4) Angel Eyes; 5) The King Has Lost His Crown; 6) Does Your Mother Know; 7) If It Wasn't For The Nights; 8) Chiquitita; 9) Lovers (Live A Little Longer); 10) Kisses Of Fire; 11*) Lovelight; 12*) Summer Night City.

 

As if ABBA needed yet one more proof of their being the least cool band on the planet, they fina­lly hit disco at the exact same time that most cool people were starting to shrug it off. Before Sa­turday Night Fever, disco was a silly, but semi-hip trend that was really looked upon as just one more step in the evolution of R'n'B and funk; after Saturday Night Fever, it became the curse of all nations, and that was when ABBA jumped on the bandwagon.

 

The first sign of change to come was 'Summer Night City', a "preview" single from 1978 that an­nounced the start of ABBA's invasion of disco club territory. Almost arrogantly, it downplayed the strength of both the girls' voices and Benny's instrumental skills: the singing is mostly 'hu­shed' and the keyboards are content with beating out the rhythm, with disco bass taking center stage and the arrangement completely focused on capturing the heated atmosphere of your local disco bar. Had it come just a wee bit earlier, John Travolta might have had lots of fun doing his moves to it. As memorable as it is sleazy, 'Summer Night City' is that one train stop along the ABBA ride where one might consider getting off — or not.

 

Me, I distinctly remember hating Voulez-Vous as the record that set a clear demarcating line be­tween early, peak-level ABBA with their mixture of classical, progressive, and Europop in­flu­en­ces, and late ABBA with stereotypical disco bass, rudimentary keyboard hooks, and a conscious attempt to sex-up their image — which works about as well as an attempt on the part of the Catholic church to canonize Madonna (Ciccone, that is) for charity and piousness. And for someone whose early affectuation with ABBA was primarily based on their image (more importantly, their music) in ABBA: The Movie, it is only understandable that Voulez-Vous will at first feel like a wholesale transfusion of an incompatible blood type.

 

On the other hand, there is no denying that, with The Album, the band's old style had reached a point where they were already unable to top themselves — logically, they should either have dis­banded or reinvented themselves; and how, in 1979, could a pop band hunting for further chart success not reinvent itself around disco? Nohow. Disco dumbs down genius, it's true, but it is not a reason in itself to forsake genius, and besides, one cannot live on nothing but masterpieces.

 

It is also untrue that Voulez-Vous is that primitive musically. Some of its non-hits are just as in­teresting, at least from a technical point of view, as the band's non-disco legacy. For instance, 'Lovers (Live A Little Longer)', with its tricky time signatures and vocal counterpoints, is all but generic; it may even turn off a jaded ABBA fan or two for being so rough around the corners, but it is clear that Benny and Björn gave the song a good workover and made it intentionally experi­mental (in a relative ABBA way, of course) and confusing; 'acid disco', some call it — a sharp contrast with the clearly fillerish 'Kisses Of Fire', which, with its primitive, bland chorus, was probably just written at the last moment to round out the running time.

 

The hooks also run strong on the hits — the title track, one of the darkest, bitterest numbers they ever did, which probably explains why it hit No. 80 on the Billboard; and 'Does Your Mother Know', one of the tritest, silliest numbers they ever did, which probably explains why it hit No. 19 on the Billboard. Did Björn really need to lecture his audience on the dangers of fan worship­ping and sex with minors? I am sure he must have received quite a few offers from 12-year olds, but it is highly unlikely that a song like 'Does Your Mother Know' could have fulfilled the pur­pose of stopping them. In fact, it was probably the opposite, as you can easily see by watching the video of the Wembley concert where he is singing the words right in front of an audience of 12-year olds... and they're loving it.

 

Apart from that, the record is not all disco; the songs generally lack the production lushness of The Album, featuring fewer overdubs and less orchestration, which is why it gives the overall impression of a "club record", but certainly the anthemic 'I Have A Dream' (Frida at her best, al­though I am hardly a fan of such choral pomposity), the folksy 'Chiquitita', and the fast-tempo pop rocker 'Angel Eyes' have nothing to do with disco, nor does the overlooked mini-gem 'The King Has Lost Crown'. Most of them do seem a little repetitive and "economical" in terms of mu­sical ideas compared to past successes, though. Perhaps the band members just had to spend more time sorting out their own personal problems (Björn and Agnetha, in particular, were getting di­vorced), and this left fewer precious moments to embed in more distinct middle eights.

 

Voulez-Vous is, by all means, a letdown. But unless you just cannot stomach disco at all, there is no reason to think of it as a catastrophe; rather a slightly disappointing, but arguably inevitable reinvention. Most of the tunes still range from endearing to likeable (sure I hate the gist of 'Mo­ther', but can I resist that big fat chg-chg-chg-chg-chg-chg-chg that opens it? Not on your life!), and on the strength of that the heart wrenches out a thumbs up, while the brain is still able to appreciate the clever intricacies of 'Lovers', 'Voulez-Vous' and some of the rest.

 

SUPER TROUPER (1980)

 

1) Super Trouper; 2) The Winner Takes It All; 3) On And On And On; 4) Andante, Andante; 5) Me And I; 6) Happy New Year; 7) Our Last Summer; 8) The Piper; 9) Lay All Your Love On Me; 10) The Way Old Friends Do; 11*) Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight); 12*) Elaine; 13*) Put On Your White Sombrero.

 

ABBA reached their disco peak not on Voulez-Vous, but with 'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)', a monstrous hit released in October 1979 and still remembered fondly, as evidenced by Madonna's blatant sampling of its main riff for her incomparably weak 'Hung Up' single twenty six years later. The song gives us ABBA doing their absolute immaculate best to sound their absolute immaculate worst — the hookline is as utterly dumb as it is unforgettable, the chorus as thoroughly robotic as it is danceable. And the key question remains unanswered: why is it so that Agnetha Faltskog needs someone specifically after midnight? Surely this cannot mean... oh my God...

 

There is still some straightahead disco on Super Trouper, the last of the band's commercially stellar records, but most of its upbeat numbers lead into new areas of dance-pop, replacing disco bass with less funky, more electronic-style grooves. They have changed their style — again — not necessarily for the best, since they seemed more humane and lovable when the sound was a bit more loose, with acoustic guitars and shuffling beats rather than synth-and-metronome-packed creations like 'Super Trouper'. But this is not to say that they lost any of their creativity — they simply may have sacrificed a little bit of it, to fit in with the worsening times.

 

What's interesting about Super Trouper is its emotional tug of war. By now, the days of shiny happy pappy (such as the band experienced around 1974-75) are long gone, and, with the band members' personal lives in complete disarray, the soap opera is perfectly well reflected on disc. Yet, as commercial craftsmen, they are also well aware that the buying public will never want their ABBA spouting nothing but depression, and the scathing bitterness is so seriously mixed up with "fun and joy" that only Benny and Björn's seemingly endless stream of great melodies saves the record from utter confusion.

 

Case in point: not everyone would dare to place the album's most optimistically resplendent num­ber — the Frida-led title track — back-to-back with its gloomiest opus, the Agnetha-led 'Winner Takes It All', all about you-know-what. The former is instantly memorable, major key, light, an­gel-style with its brilliantly arranged vocal parts; the latter is «faux-minor» (major, but still with a «gloomy» tinge to it), dark romantic, winding up high with a plea for help rather than out of an overwhelming feeling of joy. But both work equally well, despite the relative melodic simplicity of each.

 

The biggest disco leftover is even darker than 'Voulez-Vous': 'Lay All Your Love On Me' is 'S.O.S.' for the new generation, transmitting its panicky atmosphere through metronomic dance beats and electronically-altered down-crashing vocals at the end of each verse rather than more, shall we say it, "classical" means; but, again, it works. A whole album of tunes like that one might have been unbearable, but to see it jammed in between the folk stylization of 'The Piper' and the anthemic closer 'The Way Old Friends Do' is quite acceptable.

 

The biggest laugh is also unforgettable: 'On And On And On' shamelessly steals its major key­board and vocal hook from the Beach Boys' 'Do It Again', but if the latter, when it came out in 1969, was utterly nostalgic, an almost desperate calling out to the happy carefree days of yore, 'On And On And On' transforms it into something totally futuristic, announcing a new age of dance-pop rather than yearning for a past age of it. Still, the overall message is about as light­weight as it always used to be: 'Keep on rocking baby till the night is gone, on and on and on'.

 

But if you still prefer to do it like they used in the old times, right after 'On And On And On' you get 'Andante, Andante' — for all we know, this is basically the same meaning and the same mes­sage, except you get in an old-fashioned waltz atmosphere (well, it's not waltz technically, but it gets you waltzing all the same), with just a few gracious electric guitar licks to give it a new shiny coat. It's as stately and refined as 'On And On And On' is reckless. You let your hair down, then you pick it back up. That's the way life goes.

 

All in all, this is quite an exciting journey of an album. Yes, it is somewhat colder and more de­void of living instruments and their quirky behaviour than I'd like it to be, but it compensates for that with more maturity (there are even some lyrical passages that are not half-bad!) and even more diversity than is usual for these guys, and for that, I'd have to consider it their finest moment in the late, post-1977 stages of their career. Thumbs up from every beat of my heart and every impulse of my brain.

 

THE VISITORS (1981)

 

1) The Visitors; 2) Head Over Heels; 3) When All Is Said And Done; 4) Soldiers; 5) I Let The Music Speak; 6) One Of Us; 7) Two For The Price Of One; 8) Slipping Through My Fingers; 9) Like An Angel Passing Through My Room; 10*) Should I Laugh Or Cry; 11*) You Owe Me One; 12*) The Day Before You Came; 13*) Cassandra; 14*) Under Attack.

 

The Visitors was not necessarily intended to be ABBA's last album, but, given that both marria­ges were in tatters by the time it came along, and also given a major shift in commercial tastes that prevented the band from being able to combine its musical vision (yes, they had a vision) with further strings of number one hits, I am pretty sure they must have felt some premonition. Already the next year, when they went into the studio once again, they found themselves inca­pable of putting together an LP's worth of material. With The Visitors, the effort did work, but the results were more than strange.

 

In fact, I remember actively hating the record upon hearing it for the first time — a shattering anti-climax to Super Trouper, everything dim and wobbly and lacking in polish, and who in the world needs an ABBA album without polish? Also, objective assessment would state that this is the record that has the least share of proverbial ABBA classics — the biggest and, in fact, the only hit from it was the bitter pop song 'One Of Us', and even that was sort of a minor achieve­ment even in the face of their earliest successes like 'Ring Ring' and 'Waterloo'. And who in the world needs an ABBA album without hits?

 

But there is also a different kind of opinion, and I have been slowly working my way from the former right up to the latter. That opinion states that The Visitors is the only ABBA album that was not, in fact, targeted at all at hit-making; that Benny and Björn, consciously or subconscious­ly aware that their days as prime hit-makers were at an end, simply let their musical instincts have their way without paying too much attention to the market, and that the songs on here were writ­ten and performed so as to reflect the kind of things the people in the band were really going through at the time. Not that ABBA ever lacked a streak of sincerity — from 'One Man, One Wo­man' to 'The Winner Takes It All' you can observe it quite transparently — but The Visitors is the one and only ABBA album coming straight from the heart.

 

Therefore, it is only natural that it can take a little more time to sink in; its hooks are not as pain­fully obvious, its potential gloss and shine mostly sacrificed to give way for a slightly more com­plex and meaningful melodic approach. Even the lyrics have matured: 'Slipping Through My Fin­gers', for instance, tells a similar "family trouble" story to 'Hey Hey Helen' (one could, in fact, see the mother-daughter split in 'Fingers' as a natural sequel to the wife-husband split in 'Helen'), but in words that have been chosen with far better care and intelligence.

 

The weirdness of The Visitors, however, is nowhere as evident as it is in the title track, which some people keep mistaking for a tale of a strange encounter with alien beings — probably beca­use of all the odd sci-fi type arrangements at the beginning, as well as the title itself — but which seems, in fact, to have been written about the persecution of dissidents in the Eastern Europe bloc under Soviet domination: ABBA's one and only overtly political song. It takes some gall to take such a serious subject and arrange it as a fast-tempo catchy pop number ('Now I hear them mo­ving...'), but the slightly paranoid tinge of the melody atones for that, and, besides, in the long run the song's most bewitching part is its opening — a disturbing polyphony of synthesizer tones with Frida's ghost vocals droning in the background: 'I hear the doorbell ring and suddenly the panic takes me...'. Pretty unsettling for a first impression of the world's leading pop band's latest record; no wonder the public did not have the courage to buy into it.

 

There is plenty of disturbance and paranoia elsewhere as well. 'Soldiers' makes some odd allu­sions to some upcoming apocalypse, panicky singing and menacing guitar and a strangely "cheer­ful" chorus that only makes things even more suspicious. 'Head Over Heels', sarcastic character assassination over a dark retro-pop melody. And then there's all the divorce songs, of course: 'One Of Us', 'When All Is Said And Done', 'I Let The Music Speak' (well, the latter is not techni­cally a divorce song, but its main message — trying to find consolation in music without much success — is very much in line with the other two).

 

But this is still ABBA, and all the paranoia is well-compensated for with elements of beauty: the melancholic march of 'Let it be a joke, let it be a smile...' in 'I Let The Music Speak', the graceful chorus resolution in 'Head Over Heels', the controlled, but burning desperation in 'one of us is crying, one of us is lying...', the humble majesty of 'Slipping Through My Fingers' — all of this is priceless, and its combination with elements of the unusual only raises the stakes.

 

The album's only misfire, as far as I am concerned, is the Björn-sung 'Two For The Price Of One', a rather forgettable and lyrically lame tale of a goofy attempt at sexual encounter. You'd think that by now they would have learned to leave all the Björn-sung numbers off the record at the last minute, but then, I guess, life would be so much duller if we did not have at least one permanent flaw in our genetic structure. Fortunately, we live in the days when we can all make our own al­bum, and my recommendation is to swap this tune with the excellent B-side 'Should I Laugh Or Cry', much more suitable for the overall tone of the album.

 

It goes without saying that the album gets an assured thumbs up judgement on all sides, even though it took me some time to become certified. Whether the existence of The Visitors does gua­rantee ABBA a late-coming blast of "artistic respectability" or not is up to debate. Some might argue that "artistic respectability" is firmly reserved for the likes of the Soft Machine or at least Elvis Costello, and The Visitors does not even begin to touch Elvis Costello. Others might argue from the opposite side — that ABBA were only as good as they were dumb, and any at­tempt at seriousness on their part would smash their artistic integrity the same way that the career of KISS was undermined by Music From 'The Elder', etc. But these are brainy judgements, while ABBA's melodies were always directed primarily at the heart — and in this department, The Visitors does not fail, although it requires a little more time to succeed.

 

ABBA LIVE (1986)

 

1) Dancing Queen; 2) Take A Chance On Me; 3) I Have A Dream; 4) Does Your Mother Know; 5) Chiquitita; 6) Thank You For The Music; 7) Two For The Price Of One; 8) Fernando; 9) Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight); 10) Super Trouper; 11) Waterloo; 12) Money Money Money; 13) The Name Of The Game/Eagle; 14) On And On And On.

 

ABBA quietly faded away in late 1982, each girl going her own way — both Agnetha and Frida managed to pack a few more international hits under the belt before settling down and mostly dis­appearing from public view — and Benny and Björn still occasionally sticking together, e. g. for the Tim Rice collaboration on the musical Chess and other projects. Even with the recent revival of the band's popularity — most lately illustrated by the intentional cheese of Mamma Mia the musical — they have avoided the temptation to reunite; a wise decision, perhaps, since it gives them an additional touch of class that most of their pop brethren could only wish for.

 

In any case, the lack of new material has ensured a small, but steady stream of from-the-vaults releases: small, because the band members seemingly do not want to make every sneeze they ever recorded public, but steady, because everybody wants to pay the bills. Chief among these is the live album from 1986, an odd mix of tracks pulled from the Australian tour of 1977 (which, by the way, is captured much more prominently and excitingly in ABBA: The Movie), a London gig in 1979 (which, by the way, is captured much more prominently and excitingly in ABBA: In Con­cert 1979), and the Dick Cavett Meets ABBA TV special in 1981 (which, by the way, is captured much more prominently and excitingly in the Dick Cavett Meets ABBA TV special, provided you can get a high quality non-Youtube copy).

 

As things go, this one is clearly a "memento" above all else. The intermingling of the band's 1977 "Eurofolk" sound with their 1979 disco image is not entirely unauthentic (after all, they did inter­mingle that material in 1979), but the sequencing is poor; the Cavett tunes, recorded in an entire­ly different environment, do not fit in well with the rest; the mix is a far cry from the gloss of the studio records, not to mention rumours of overdubs; and the idea of arranging 'The Name Of The Game' and 'Eagle' as a medley is a bad one, even if it belonged to the band members themselves.

Nevertheless, I am totally sure that ABBA Live deserves its place under the sun and merits hea­ring even on the part of non-diehard fans. Reason? Simple: it proves, once and for all, that ABBA were a band, not just a soulless chemical concoction of Swedish record industry. As you look through old footage of the band, you might get the impression that they always lip-synched on ca­mera, but that is mostly true of their videos and innumerable TV appearances (not the Dick Ca­vett appearance, though); for ticket-buying concert fans, everything was honest. Real instruments, real singing, real kick-ass energy (in places).

 

Granted, like every band with primary emphasis on pop perfection, ABBA were always studio-oriented, and for pure enjoyment, you do not really need to add the "live" element (unless it is to watch rather than to listen, but even there for each appetizing sight of the girls wiggling their bot­toms you get to stare at Björn's bare chest for half a minute — oh, was that sexist? sorry — and let's not even mention the costumes). None of these versions even begin to overtake their studio counterparts; generally, the closer they are to reproducing the original, the better it comes off, and while the girls are almost impeccable in that respect, the playing suffers almost inevitably. Some­times, for an extra touch of "stadium rock" atmosphere, they let their real guitarist (not Björn, who mostly just used his instrument on stage to look cool) fly off with an ex­tended solo ('Does Your Mother Know', 'Eagle'); he is highly competent, but no Dave Gilmour, and his well-crafted instrumental breaks in the studio are far more memorable and inspirational than the improvised guitar heroics on these live takes.

 

But, as I was saying, this is not the point: if there is a noble point to the album, it is merely to show you that the band generally did a good job on stage, and did not hide behind pre-recorded tapes and lip-synching, unlike most teenage idols of today. If anything, it is just one more remin­der of how truly awesome, from a technical point at least, the Agnetha-Frida duet had really been at the band's peak — there is really not a second on this album that would make me cringe from a displaced note or discordant harmonizing. Looking at it from this side, I emerge with a resolute thumbs up, even if the cash-in motives behind the release are more than plain. Now, perhaps, a good way of redeeming executive greed would be to retire the album from the catalog and replace it with a couple of remixed and remastered complete shows from "the Golden Era" — including, among other things, a complete performance of the 'Girl With Golden Hair' mini-musical. What are you waiting for, industry people? Now that Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan have reignited the old flames, here is your fat chance of combining common good with personal gain.

 

LIVE AT WEMBLEY (1979; 2014)

 

1) Gammal Fäbodpsalm; 2) Voulez-Vous; 3) If It Wasn't For The Nights; 4) As Good As New; 5) Knowing Me, Knowing You; 6) Rock Me; 7) Chiquitita; 8) Money, Money, Money; 9) I Have A Dream; 10) Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight); 11) SOS; 12) Fernando; 13) The Name Of The Game; 14) Eagle; 15) Thank You For The Music; 16) Why Did It Have To Be Me; 17) Intermezzo No. 1; 18) I'm Still Alive; 19) Summer Night City; 20) Take A Chance On Me; 21) Does Your Mother Know; 22) Hole In Your Soul; 23) The Way Old Friends Do; 24) Dancing Queen; 25) Waterloo.

 

Oh wouldn't you know it — almost thirty years later, the dudes return to bring an originally half-assed job to perfection. The reason why, even after ABBA's popularity had resurged and their classic hits proved to stand the test of time, they waited so long to put out a proper live album from the vaults, is that the band members themselves never saw ABBA as a truly great live band, and had largely shyed away from extensive touring even at their peak (it is no coincidence that the majority of «live» performances of ABBA from various TV shows that you can catch on YouTube these days are actually lip-synched). Yet the botched legacy of ABBA Live, sewn to­gether from various sources and cursed with poor mixing and electronic drum overdubs, must have finally pushed Benny and Björn into unearthing the old tapes, and ultimately, as part of the band's 40th anniversary celebrations, they settled upon the November 10, 1979 show from the Wembley Arena to be released in its entirety, «as was», with nothing but a proper remastering procedure to separate us from the alleged truth.

 

Since it was the Wembley shows that also constituted the bulk of ABBA Live, a significant chunk of the tracks overlaps between the two releases (and I am talking exact same performances, not just the same songs) — but even the most basic comparison shows the new release to be far superior, with a much cleaner, juicier mix and no silly electronic doctoring. In fact, it pretty much renders ABBA Live expendable, with the exception of the tracks from 1980 recorded at the Dick Cavett show performance (and still historically important as ABBA's last live show). It is also a major improvement on the equally eviscerated ABBA In Concert video, also culled from the Wembley shows and largely giving us snippets of the concert (less than half of the songs that were actually performed, and some in abbreviated versions and interspersed with the usual crap­ola like backstage chatter and fan ravings). Basically, it is the first and, so far, only official docu­ment of a complete, authentic, uninterrupted ABBA show from their peak period.

 

Okay, well, maybe not exactly «peak», because we were still living in the disco era back then, and the band was busy promoting Voulez Vous, which, let's admit it, was their weakest offering in the entire 1975-82 period of pop glory — precisely because of too much disco influence. So the setlist, as we now learn, is quite heavy on tracks from that album (6 out of 10 songs), and I am still not sure if these, clearly less polished and mechanical, versions of songs like the title track and ʽAs Good As Newʼ actually improve on the studio originals (by adding an element of natu­ral roughness) or detract from them (because these were songs whose intended impact depended on a complete avoidance of all roughness and on total mechanical precision). In any case, this is a minor encumberance, but it also reflects on the rest of the performances: classic songs from the pre-disco years now have a shade of the «been through that, time to move on» spirit — a feeling impos­sible to justify properly, but one that still makes me yearn for a proper live release from, say, the Australian tour of 1977 (which, judging by what we know from ABBA: The Movie, was the true peak of ABBA as a live band).

 

Nevertheless, on the whole, it's a lot of fun. Yes, many studio nuances inevitably get lost in the live setting, but the crystal clear mix reveals a beautiful balance of technical precision and human feeling in the singing — if anything, the girls in the band were working it much harder on the stage than the guys (Björn was never a great guitarist, and most of the complicated guitar parts are played by Lasse Wellander; Benny gets his big break with ʽIntermezzo No. 1ʼ, but otherwise is mainly just busy tracing out the basic melodic contour of the songs), never missing a note and taking good care of all the parts that require special effort (such as Agnetha's ear-piercing high B on ʽHole In Your Soulʼ). Special mention should be made of: (a) ʽMoney Money Moneyʼ, with Frida and Benny running rings around each other until an «angry» Frida retorts with "It's my song!" and sets things straight; (b) ʽWhy Did It Have To Be Meʼ, which gets a ʽKansas Cityʼ type of introduction to prove they're playing rock'n'roll which they are not, but it's still hilarious; (c) ʽI Have A Dreamʼ, performed with the assistance of a local children's choir — cute to the point of almost puking, but I still cannot blame them for rewarding the choir with an encore, since every kid deserves his/her taste of encouragement for a job well done; (d) ʽThe Way Old Friends Doʼ, receiving here a nice friendly preview with Benny's accordeon; (e) Lasse Wellander's Rock God Guitar Solo on ʽEagleʼ, although that one has already been discussed in the context of ABBA Live (I think it's the exact same performance — and the guy had quite a difficult job to perform, considering he had to do it with Frida and Agnetha wrapping themselves around his legs, accor­ding to mainstream conventions of «sexy» at the time).

 

Overall, the only thing that spoils the experience a bit is the stage banter — there's nothing really bad I can say about the performances, it is only the little things in between that show how unac­customed the band really was to arena-size performing (an example from Frida: "I only want to ask you one question... WHAT DO YOU THINK OF OUR BAND?" — uh, Frida, nobody really came there for your band, did they?). I also suppose that Björn's official introduction of Agnetha as «the blond one» would not be looked upon with benevolence by the feminist-oriented mindset of today, but, honestly, I suppose he just did that because introducing her as «Agnetha» would be too boring, and he just couldn't think of anything more inventive — thank God at least he did not refer to her as «the blond one with the big bum» or something like that.

 

Bottomline: you can safely throw away your ABBA Live now and replace it with this, far more comprehensive, document — although, while I certainly do not think that ABBA deserve to have a large archival live catalog, I still think that they owe us one more live release from the 1976-77 vaults to complete the picture. Ten years from now? 50th anniversary? We'll be waiting; in the interim, thumbs up for this Wembley experience, anyway.

 

ADDENDA: SOLO WORK

 

AGNETHA FÄLTSKOG

 

WRAP YOUR ARMS AROUND ME (1983)

 

1) The Heat Is On; 2) Can't Shake Loose; 3) Shame; 4) Stay; 5) Once Burned, Twice Shy; 6) Mr. Persuasion; 7) Wrap Your Arms Around Me; 8) To Love; 9) I Wish Tonight Could Last Forever; 9) Man; 10) Take Good Care Of Your Children; 11) Stand By My Side.

 

To be perfectly precise, the solo career of Agnetha Fältskog began as early as 1968 (yes, let us not forget that ABBA were ultimately another product of the late Sixties), and she had released a whoppin' four solo LPs before submerging her personality in ABBA's collective identity. From what I have heard, those records had their hits and misses, but since I am really not interested in carrying out a highly detailed survey of everything that the ABBA people did on their own, and also since most of these records were really only targeted at the local Swedish market, we will concentrate on the post-ABBA, internationally oriented products only.

 

People who are not major fans of the band, and are only willing to tolerate them for their melodic skills, but cringe at the production values, general aura, and visual image, will probably fall back in horror at the very idea of looking into the post-ABBA solo careers of any of its members, let alone the girls, who never did anything but sing and dance. To some extent, they may be right — but in reality, the worst thing about the international solo careers of both Agnetha and Frida is that they had the bad luck to sprout in the Eighties, a pretty rotten decade for commercial pop in general. On the other hand, both ladies had solid musical tastes, and knew well enough what it is that separates a well-written and creatively performed song from a hackjob.

 

Consider this: Agnetha's first post-ABBA LP was produced by Mike Chapman, the driving force behind such cheeseball artists as Sweet, Smokie, and Suzi Quatro, but also responsible for such late-1970s pop classics as Blondie's Parallel Lines and The Knack's debut — just the sort of guy you'd want by your side in order to put the magic touch on a bunch of catchy, harmless pop songs. And songwriting is all over the place: Agnetha herself takes credit for one song only (ʽManʼ), collecting «tributes» from all sorts of collaborators, the best known of whom is probably Russ Ballard (of Argent fame), and making sure that it does not all sound like ABBA. In fact, very few songs here sound like ABBA.

 

The big hit was ʽThe Heat Is Onʼ, which is a little surprising, considering that it was not all that differently arranged and sung from the original 1979 version by Noosha Fox — talk about the importance of public image and proper promotion, although Chapman's production does shed some of the disco-era gloss and goes instead for a slightly Latin-influenced carnivalesque atmo­sphere, which is kind of appropriate for a hedonistic tune about proper summer relaxation. Still catchy after all these years, I guess, though admittedly way too shallow even for the ABBA level; but if you have any feeling for «party music» at all, this one's for you.

 

Diversity is the key, though, as the party spirit of ʽHeatʼ is immediately followed by the slightly paranoid spirit of the Ballard-penned ʽCan't Shake Looseʼ, which even managed to chart in the generally ABBA-unfriendly United States. Its electronic production dates it fairly accurately, but the vocal melody is undeniably catchy, and the subject matter (unbeatable sexual attraction) has always been right up Agnetha's alley anyway. Melodic slide guitar serves as a solid heartstring-tugger on the dark pop of ʽOnce Burned, Twice Shyʼ; ʽMr. Persuasionʼ is a spot-on retro Motown imitation, with Agnetha doing a convincingly sexy imitation of young Diana Ross; and the pop reggae rhythms of ʽTake Good Care Of Your Childrenʼ also lay the foundation for a much better song than could be thought of based on the title — most such songs are just sappy crap, but here the bluesy harmonica, the occasional odd police whistle, and the deep background vocals add a pinch of suspense and even impending danger.

 

The straightforward ballads are a different kind of story: lacking the genius hooks of ABBA composers, they always run the risk of being little other than generic mush. The title track, written by Chapman himself, is way too deep in «Disney princess» territory; its vocal melody, journeying across a tricky, challenging path, has some merit, but should have been supported by something other than the old predictable «strings of paradise». Agnetha's own ʽManʼ is a sincere attempt to write something in the old ABBA style, and some of the vocal moves show that it may have been unfair for Benny and Björn not to ever let the girls partage of the songwriting credits; but the accompanying music, again, is completely non-descript.

 

Still, on the whole this is a pleasant surprise. Stereotypical male chauvinist thinking tends to regard Agnetha as the «dumb blonde» and Frida as the «risky redhead», and it is true that, artisti­cally, Frida's solo debut was a little bit more intriguing, but the question here is not whether these albums show you the meaning of life — the question is whether you are guaranteed to fall asleep on the third song, as it happens with so much generic pop muzak, and Wrap Your Arms Around Me, despite its generally uneven quality, is still very far from what I'd call a typically boring album. Besides, if you get the deluxe edition, one of the bonus tracks is ʽIt's So Nice To Be Richʼ, a tune recorded for a 1983 Swedish movie that has to count as one of the most hila­riously campy things to ever come out of the whole ABBA camp (sort of a spiritual successor to ʽMoney Money Moneyʼ, only adapted to the Eighties' style). Thumbs up, definitely.

 

EYES OF A WOMAN (1985)

 

1) One Way Love; 2) Eyes Of A Woman; 3) Just One Heart; 4) I Won't Let You Go; 5) The Angels Cry; 6) Click Track; 7) We Should Be Together; 8) I Won't Be Leaving You; 9) Save Me (Why Don't Ya); 10) I Keep Turning Off Lights; 11) We Move As One.

 

The proper way to go about reviewing this album is sifting through the list of people who con­tributed to the songwriting. This time around, perhaps spurred on by Agnetha's proven potential for commercial success on her own, the array of contenders was really impressive: Elvis Costello (a self-proclaimed ABBA fan — ʽOliver's Armyʼ, remember?), Jeff Lynne, Eric Stewart of 10cc (who also produced the album), Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, jazz guitarist Phil Palmer, and even the songwriting core of the classic Asia team (Wetton and Downes). Understandably, who could resist the charms of that hot blonde ABBA chick? All she needed to do was leave a recording of ʽI've Been Waiting For Youʼ on their answering machine.

 

So far, so good. Now for the inauspicious news. First, the contribution by Costello — pretty much the only artist of the lot to have anything to do with «cutting edge» in contemporary music — was not used. (Instead, it ended up recorded by Billy Bremner of Rockpile, and, sure enough, it failed to chart — guess those music industry advisor people know their stuff after all). I have no idea whether poor Elvis ended up shredding all of his bedroom and bathroom ABBA posters, but in any case, the decision was a little symbolic: even if the song was not all that great, the fact that Hayward and Stewart got the preference over Costello meant that the lady did not feel comfor­table about overstepping the boundaries of «suave romance».

 

Second, by 1985 Eric Stewart had pretty much squandered away his reputation, having made the transition from smartass musical innovation to generic adult contemporary troubadouring (and in a year from then, he would go on to produce one of the worst albums of Paul McCartney's solo career — certainly not a coincidence). Of the two songs that he contributes, ʽI Won't Be Leaving Youʼ is a predictably late 10cc-ish corny ballad, more fit for a Disney cartoon than a respectable pop album, and ʽSave Meʼ is a predictably late 10cc-ish corny dance rocker, more fit for a Weird Al satirical cover (if he could only find a hook to latch onto, that is) than a... oh well, you'd have to have an original in order to do a cover anyway, I guess.

 

Fortunately, we still have old Jeff to count upon for salvation: his ʽOne Way Loveʼ is at least written with a nod to the old Motown and the old ABBA, and has a fun, catchy melody, sup­ported with guitar jangle (in addition to pesky synths) and a sax outro. Hayward's ʽAngels Cryʼ, like any song written by Hayward, is also written with a complex vocal melody in mind, although I certainly wish they'd mixed Agnetha in a better way, with the vocals more upfront and less personality-effacing echo on them. On the other hand, the Asia song (ʽWe Move As Oneʼ) is one of those big fat Asia anthems that has a lot of pomp, but not a lot of interesting substance, and Agnetha lacks the big Wetton voice to make you fall under the illusion that this whole grandio­sity shenanigan really deserves its poise.

 

Recapitulating, I conclude that out of all suitors, Jeff Lynne is the most easily adaptable to take the lady's hand, but if dark glasses and big beards put her off, Justin Hayward is the second best candidate, whereas Wetton, Downes, and Eric Stewart should have been given the boot right away — certainly they would at least deserve to catch the same train as Costello. But actually, the best track on the entire album is probably ʽClick Trackʼ (co-written by Jack Ince and Phil Palmer), an unassuming pop rocker with sarcastic lyrics and a light, fun, not-give-a-damn attitude, like a slightly more musically conservative Tom Tom Club or something.

 

Bottomline is, the album's not awful, which is already quite an achievement, given that the record could have been easily filled up with run-of-the-mill power ballads and all sorts of «adult con­temporary» crap. Well, it does have a bit of each, but the general idea — to gather contributions from different established songwriters with different styles — was right, I think, because it at least gives Eyes Of A Woman a flair of unpredictability, so very important for a mainstream pop album. Too bad she didn't get Prince to produce it instead of Eric Stewart, but then, Prince pro­bably likes to accept his royalties in flesh rather than in cash, and Agnetha Fältskog is, above all, a proper, well-behaved lady, not accustomed to grinding with strangers.

 

I STAND ALONE (1987)

 

1) The Last Time; 2) Little White Secrets; 3) I Wasn't The One (Who Said Goodbye); 4) Love In A World Gone Mad; 5) Maybe It Was Magic; 6) Let It Shine; 7) We Got A Way; 8) I Stand Alone; 9) Are You Gonna Throw It All Away; 10) If You Need Somebody Tonight.

 

A properly laconic review of this album would only need to state three things. One: Look at that new hairstyle. Two: Produced by Peter Cetera of Chicago fame, the author of ʽIf You Leave Me Nowʼ. Three: Two of the songs are co-credited to Diane Warren. Now multiply these three, cal­culate the cheese factor, and pre-draw your own pre-conclusions.

 

On the other hand, this laconicity would be just a tad too cruel. Although it is true that the title of the album is fairly stupid — it would be far more interesting if Agnetha actually dared to stay alone, rather than in the company of Pete Cetera, Diane Warren, and her latest hairdresser — it is also true that all of this album could have been very easily dedicated to lethargic adult contem­porary and embarrassing power ballads. Fortunately, coming from an ABBA background and all, Agnetha is so used to pop hooks and so not used to the generic power ballad format, that even Diane Warren cannot spoil things too bad: those last two songs, although I'd rather have her save them for Celine Dion, are formulaically romantic, but never try to go for that «storm in a teacup» approach that Warren's power ballads usually surmise — flat and forgettable, but not sickeningly exaggerated.

 

Furthermore, if we close our eyes on Cetera's soft-rock / synth-pop production, there is a small bunch of friendly, catchy, inoffensive pop songs here: ʽLet It Shineʼ, written in the old tradition of Carole King and Christine McVie, is arguably the best (but I'd so much rather see it produced by the likes of Lindsey Buckingham — then again, not in 1987, I guess, remember Tango In The Night?), but ʽLove In A World Gone Madʼ is also salvageable; curiously, its lyrics were written by Pete Seinfeld of King Crimson fame, who had apparently sold out in the 1980s and switched from "the rusted chains of prison moons are shattered by the sun" to "love in a world gone mad, the best thing we'll ever have, it's so precious what's between us two". Then again, why should poets be any different from musicians when it comes to survival?

 

ʽThe Last Timeʼ, ʽLittle White Secretsʼ, and ʽWe Got A Wayʼ are all decent pop songs as well, with fairly strong choruses, but always suffering from the «Eighties' bane» — faceless, stillborn production, with sterile keyboards and processed guitars (one interesting aspect, though, is that there are no drum machines, and relatively few drum parts suffer from electronic enhancement). And, no getting away from it, they are regularly interspersed with too overtly dramaticized, wishy-washy ballads, including a particularly disgusting bombastic duet with Cetera (ʽI Wasn't The Oneʼ) and songs with titles like ʽMaybe It Was Magicʼ that are unjustly deprived of ironic subtitles (ʽBut, Most Likely, It Was Just Crapʼ or something like that).

 

Nevertheless, even if the record still gets a thumbs down (it must take real magic for an LP to earn a «thumbs up» rating if it has Diane Warren on it), I must stress that it is not the proper epi­tome of a real bad mainstream 1980s pop record, and that my original expectations were set lower than that: in particular, I was not expecting any upbeat, traditionalistic power-pop cuts here, but there they are, supporting our faith in the overall decent taste of the ABBA crew. And, for what it's worth, I also have to add that Agnetha's singing is always lovely, properly restrained, and never overdone even on the worst songs here.

 

What is even more interesting is that, apparently, Agnetha was rather reluctant to record the album (apparently, Cetera had to press really hard to convince her to fly out to California and do it), and, once it came out, refused to engage in any promotional activities and went into a 14-year period of retire­ment from an active music career — a respectable decision if there ever was one. All of which gives us complete freedom of choice: we can take the album if we are Eighties buffs and like it, or we can pretend it never happened because somebody just didn't have the proper strength to say no at a certain point in time, or happened to be in need of a California vacation.

 

MY COLOURING BOOK (2004)

 

1) My Colouring Book; 2) When You Walk In The Room; 3) If I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mind; 4) Sealed With A Kiss; 5) Love Me With All Your Heart; 6) Fly Me To The Moon; 7) Past, Present And Future; 8) A Fool Am I; 9) I Can't Reach Your Heart; 10) Sometimes When I'm Dreaming; 11) The End Of The World; 12) Remember Me; 13) What Now My Love.

 

Maybe Agnetha's decision to break the seal and come out of her retirement was somehow con­nected to the big «ABBA revival», culminating in the stylistically atrocious, but commercially successful Mamma Mia! musical, along with other things. Maybe it wasn't, and she just felt like singing. In any case, nobody's expectations should be expected to run too high for a 21st century Agnetha album — but I also think that, to some extent, an album like this could be predictable: a nostalgia trip back to the singer's roots, consisting exclusively of covers of 1960s pop songs. And when I say «pop», I mean pop: Barbra Streisand, Jackie DeShannon, Cilla Black, Shirley Bassey, that sort of thing. «Girl stuff». Sappy sentimental ballads. Just the kind of stuff you'd obviously expect a teenage girl to be growing up with in the early 1960s.

 

Except for ʽWhen You Walk In The Roomʼ, which was always a great, upbeat, catchy pop song, regardless of who was doing it, I have little love for most of these tunes in their original incarna­tions — a «genrist bias» I have never really felt the need to be ashamed of: too much mush, not enough backbone (something that ABBA themselves used to remedy very well, which is why I'll always hold their music over, let's say, The Carpenters). However, a «pop standard», if it is estab­lished well enough, may shift its substance over time, and on albums like these, they are treated like cherished institutions: My Colouring Book is not really a record about sap and sentiment, but rather a gallant display of reverence towards the people and the sounds that influenced the current artist. From that point of view, I am actually more thrilled (if you could call it that) to hear Agnetha cover Cilla Black's ʽIf I Thought You'd Ever Change Your Mindʼ than listen to Cilla Black's original — after all, Cilla Black just wanted to be a star and have a hit, but Agnetha, with this cover, wants to thank Cilla Black for brightening up her day in 1969, and that, to me, seems like a way cooler type of emotion.

 

Of course, you could technically say that any time about any artist covering any other artist, but the advantage of My Colouring Book is that Agnetha really loves this stuff, and is very clearly doing this not for the money or because «somebody asked her to». She was never a great singer (in terms of individuality, at least), but she approaches this material in just the right way: re­strained, but tremendously expressive within the limits of that restraint, and considering that her vocal power has remained amazingly well preserved (at 54, her voice has deepened only slightly, retaining most of its range and power), it is safe to say that this is one of the best-performed re­cords in her career.

 

Production-wise, this is «retro» through and through: lots of strings, and mostly acoustic backing all the rest of the way (guitars, pianos, brass, drumming — there is a loud electric guitar part on ʽWhen You Walk In The Roomʼ, which is required, but strings and pianos normally dominate); again, compared with the average standard of 2004 this is almost «stylish», and, in any case, a much better proposition than getting her to «modernize» things, which might have turned into a much bigger disaster than the production on I Stand Alone.

 

Because of the «setlist», I cannot properly afford a thumbs up rating for this album: there is only so much shallow, overblown orchestrated sentimentality I can take per one sitting, and even if I somewhat admire the purpose of the record, it is not likely that I will ever listen to it again, nor can I actively recommend it to anybody who is not as much of a «lush pop buff» as Agnetha is. But one thing, however, I can say: all those people complaining about how those ABBA girls «had no soul» on those ABBA albums, and were merely technically going through the motions, unable to express or convey genuine emotion with their plastic deliveries, can take a hike — or, rather, should be forced to listen to My Colouring Book, lie through their teeth about it, and then take a hike. In particular, no «plastic soul person» should probably have picked out the Shangri-Las' ʽPast, Present And Futureʼ as one of her choices — a song that wasn't even a big hit, but was probably the coolest exploitation of Beethoven ever to express basic teenage emotion, and must have struck Agnetha senseless even way back when.

 

A (2013)

 

1) The One Who Loves You Now; 2) When You Really Loved Someone; 3) Perfume In The Breeze; 4) I Was A Flower; 5) I Should've Followed You Home; 6) Past Forever; 7) Dance Your Pain Away; 8) Bubble; 9) Back On Your Radio; 10) I Keep Them On The Floor Beside My Bed.

 

Although this record was heavily advertised as «Agnetha's first collection of original material in a quarter of a century!», I would urge even diehard ABBA fans not to get too excited, and take this information with a bag of salt. Sure, it is somewhat nice to see the lady still going strong (on the surface at least) — she looks healthy on the album cover (Photoshop?), she sounds pretty on the songs (Autotune?), and she is engaged in various promotional activities — live shows, inter­views, documentaries — that prove she still got energy (stimulants?).

 

But there is a serious downside: the songs. These songs are not ABBA (not being penned by Benny or Björn), not typical early Agnetha solo (not being selected «by tender» from a bunch of respectable songwriters competing with each other), and they are not Colouring Book-style grateful nostalgia. Instead, the album has been written in its entirety, as well as produced, by Jörgen Eloffson, the guy best known for writing the first hit single for Kelly Clarkson, and prior to that, the co-author of quite a few songs on Britney Spears' first album; as far as I can under­stand, he has a tight association with American Idol, Pop Idol, and all those people.

 

Friend or no friend, I have no idea why Agnetha consented to let this guy flood her with his compositions. The album's chief influences are bubblegum pop, boy bands, and diva balladry, with the songs more or less evenly distributed between these three categories — there is also a «retro» category, though, represented this time by ʽDance Your Pain Awayʼ, a credible stylization in classic disco that could even be enjoyable if not for the synthesizers, which have infiltrated the song from the modern technopop era. ʽBack On The Radioʼ is somewhat retro as well, I guess, and inevitably brings to mind ʽThat's Why God Made The Radioʼ — the Beach Boys' creative fiasco from the previous year. But this one's worse, because instead of classic Beach Boys har­monies you get a transparently autotuned delivery. Intentionally autotuned, I'd say, as when you use Autotune not to correct vocal weaknesses, but as a symbolic artistic statement — «well, it's a song about the radio, we gotta have a little interference in there». It's still ugly.

 

Trying to seek out «niceties» on this album would immediately turn this review into a condescen­ding one, so I am not even going to try — instead, we should probably show our respect to the artist by harshly stating that A is a bunch of crap, and that, no matter how hard she tries (and I don't think she tries hard enough), her generally well-preserved, and still largely beautiful, voice cannot redeem this shallow, by-the-book material. It's better than the Britney Spears songs, I'll give you that, but not by much — certainly not in the production department, which is exactly the same, coating a boring acoustic guitar / piano skeleton with a tasteless mixture of electronic per­cussion, synths, and strings. Its emotional palette is completely predictable, and so are its hooks.

 

In short, I have nothing against Agnetha slipping into soft, slow, nostalgic «granny mode» — given her age, this would only be natural — but it is the most ridiculous thing in the world to let your «granny mode» be controlled by the guy who makes a living writing for American Idol. As far as I know, Jeff Lynne, Russ Ballard, and Justin Hayward are still living — and maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea, either, to finally acknowledge Elvis Costello and his burning desire to make himself useful to an ABBA member. I mean, the possibilities are really endless, so what the hell?.. Thumbs down, and here's hoping Lady A lives and thrives long enough to get the message. At least, as of 2013, she can still sing, and feel, and think, but she sure as hell doesn't keep herself good company.

 

ANNI-FRID LYNGSTAD (FRIDA)

 

SOMETHING'S GOING ON (1982)

 

1) Tell Me It's Over; 2) I See Red; 3) I Got Something; 4) Strangers; 5) To Turn The Stone; 6) I Know There's Something Going On; 7) Threnody; 8) Baby Don't You Cry No More; 9) The Way You Do; 10) You Know What I Mean; 11) Here We'll Stay.

 

Because of all the casual stereotypes, Agnetha was always cast as the «dumb blonde» part of the female ABBA component where Frida was, if not exactly the «dark-haired intellectual», still sort of regarded as the brainier element of the two. To be fair, Agnetha did get most of the solo parts on ABBA's lyrically shallowest love ballads, while Frida, with her deeper voice, accordingly got the parts that tried to probe a little further, but still, that ain't really sufficient ground for proper discrimination — at best, it shows that Benny and Björn were in on the «dumb blonde» game as well, because even songwriting genius does not save one from stereotype attack.

 

Much more diagnostic would be the kind of situation where both dames were finally completely independent and had the freedom of asserting their own identities — Something's Going On came out approximately at the same time as Wrap Your Arms Around Me, and although both albums consisted almost entirely of covers (Agnetha, unlike Frida, did write a couple of her own, but there'd hardly be any difference if she didn't), the difference in tone was striking. Agnetha's performances were predominantly songs of passionate love and romance — Frida's were darker (like the hair!), concentrating much more on paranoia, breakup, loss, and only occasional conso­lation — romance as antidote against grief. Roughing it up, we have here the classic opposition between comedy and tragedy, where you can take your own pick.

 

It wasn't all Frida's own invention though. For her first post-ABBA solo album (like Agnetha, she had a few Swedish-only solo albums before and during ABBA), she teamed up with Phil Collins, being tremendously inspired and impressed with the freshly published Face Value — a record that was all about paranoia, breakup, and loss, and, incidentally, was also the first (and best) Phil Collins solo album, so somehow the two turned out to be sympathetic souls, and Phil not only produced Frida's record for her, but also contributed one of the songs and even sang with Frida on the closing duet. Touching!

 

Naturally, Phil's production style is not for everybody. We have here the same «gigantic» drum sound as on Face Value, much, though not all, of it programmed; and all the electronic keyboards / pop metal guitars / echoey effects on the vocals that were so trendy at the time — the ironic thing is, no matter how hard Frida tries to distance herself from her ABBA past here, in the end it all still sounds ABBA-esque, not just because of the familiar voice, but also because the assem­bled songs must have been subconsciously filtered. None of them were written by Benny or Björn, but just try to imagine how it all might have sounded without Phil in the producer's seat, and you will have yourself a smooth and natural transition from The Visitors to here. (Whereas with Wrap Your Arms Around Me, the transition would probably be from 1975's ABBA — ʽThe Heat Is Onʼ is kinda sorta the natural successor to ʽTropical Lovelandʼ, isn't it?.. on the other hand, it was Frida who sang ʽTropical Lovelandʼ... oh, never mind).

 

The big single was ʽI Know There's Something Going Onʼ (with you and her, not with the world today), written by Russ Ballard, who, as it turns out, was happy to serve both the red and the white queen at the same time (ʽCan't Shake Looseʼ, written for Agnetha, did not manage to have quite the same chart success, though). Behind its production gloss there is a genuinely ominous vibe, greatly added by Daryl Stuermer's acid guitar solo, although the song is still too repetitive and dependent on the endlessly looped chorus hook to be considered an atmospheric masterpiece — so, in an unpredictable contrasting move, I'd like to declare it melodically inferior to the non-hit, non-single ʽBaby Don't You Cry No Moreʼ, a nostalgic jazz-pop ditty contributed by Bal­lard's former colleague, Rod Argent in person. It may seem shallow in comparison, but it's got a luvverly piano melody, a cool vocal resolution, and it reminds you of Paul McCartney's ʽBaby's Requestʼ with extra vocal flourishes, so who's to complain?

 

Other highlights include: ʽI See Redʼ, a disturbingly introspective song written by Jim Rafferty — one year later, it would turn into a minor pop hit for the chart-hungry Clannad, whose version was a bit more creepy compared to this reggae-influenced recording, but Frida, too, is able to sense the paranoid potential of the song, and even the echo effect on the vocals, normally a bad thing for such an expressive singer, is in its perfect place, conveying insecurity and uncertainty; the opening pop-rocker ʽTell Me It's Overʼ, written by Stephen Bishop and as rousing as any average ABBA pop-rocker; and Per Gessle's melodisation of Dorothy Parker's ʽThrenodyʼ, very sweetly and lightly arranged — a tight beat supporting a largely acoustic melody, with mandolins and chimes and just a short sweet touch of the synth around the edges.

 

In fact, the only serious disappointment is that last duet with Phil — ʽHere We'll Stayʼ is, of all things, a Xanadu-tinged romantic disco number, with Frida being cast in the Olivia Newton-John part and the happy duo even making a run for the falsetto register during the climactic bits: at the very least, this is a fairly tacky ending that they came up with, in poor taste overall, not to men­tion seriously at odds with the general tone of the album. They did release it as a single, which is understandable (Frida and Phil, together for the first time!), but it didn't chart, so the effort was wasted and the reputation sullied (of course, now that many people are reevaluating that entire stylistics from a completely different angle, the whole thing may even seem stylish!). So you just might want to hit that stop button one track ahead of its time — or suffer the insufferable.

 

On the whole, though, this is a decent, sufficiently moody pop album, not pretending to any huge depth, but not too dumbed down, either. I cannot say for sure that Phil's production did Frida a lot of good — but what she obviously wanted was to make a «non-ABBA» album, so this decision can be respected. What really matters is that Anni-Frid's vocals are at the heart of each song —  and, really, what else should one expect from an Anni-Frid solo album? Thumbs up.

 

SHINE (1984)

 

1) Shine; 2) One Little Lie; 3) The Face; 4) Twist In The Dark; 5) Slowly; 6) Heart Of The Country; 7) Come To Me (I Am A Woman); 8) Chemistry Tonight; 9) Don't Do It; 10) Comfort Me; 11*) That's Tough.

 

If you manage to disregard the cheeky album cover (okay, so the world was living in the era of ʽPhy­sicalʼ back then), Shine is actually a very strong, engaging, even «experimental» pop album. Why it bombed on the charts, turning Frida off recording for more than a decade and off English-language recording almost forever, is unclear. One guess is that the world was shaking off the «ABBA cobwebs», setting the band aside as obsolete fluff until the 1990s revival — thus, even though only one song on Shine really sounds like classic ABBA, Frida got the boot simply for being Frida. Another guess is the opposite one: Shine is so different from ABBA that Frida's veteran supporters, constituting the bulk of the buyers, were turned off by the sound.

 

And no wonder: this time around, the producer is Steve Lillywhite, who was, back then, one of the hottest things in town, masterminding cutting-edge albums by Peter Gabriel, U2, and whoever else wanted to make use of the latest developments in studio technology in order to record some­thing dark, freaky, unsettling, or futuristic. The assembled musicians also represented «the new breed» and had already made big names for themselves: Tony Levin of King Crimson fame is on bass, Mark Brzezicki of Big Country fame is on drums, and singer-songwriter Kirsty McCall supplies much of the material, often co-written with Simon Climie, the man who'd later become known for the «Climie Fisher» duo (and then for the next stage of ruining Eric Clapton's solo career with atrocious albums like Pilgrim, trying to modernize the unmodernisable — but that would be a long, long time away: here, the guy just plays synthesizers).

 

The result is a bona fide synth-pop album (with very limited guitar presence) that takes the already dark overtones of its predecessor and compacts them into something even more emotio­nally disturbing. The title track's release as a single must have confused audiences, because it is not at all clear what it is — a simple love ballad, or a tale of an unhealthy psychoaddiction? The "you give me love, you make me shine" chorus, with its high uplifting harmonies seems to sug­gest the former, but the unexpectedly dissonant bass chords, the ghostly harmonies, the aggres­sive drum patterns, the sickly "you give me love, you give me love, you give me love..." repe­titions, it all suggests probing certain subconscious depths that are way below «fluffy lightweight romance» levels. This fluctuation between the light and the dark throws you off balance and prevents easy pigeonholing — hence, perhaps, the hesitation to buy up extra copies.

 

The one small «giveaway» to ABBA fans was certainly not enough to compensate. ʽSlowlyʼ, which Frida actually accepted from Benny and Björn (so, for all purposes, one might count it as a legitimate ABBA song), is awash in typically ABBA vocal hooks, tailored to Frida's abilities: a «multi-movement» ballad going through several layers of the emotional spectrum (the way she brings it all around with her velvety delivery of the title is gorgeous), and, for that matter, showing that the ABBA pool was anything but spent in the early 1980s. Still, just one song, and it comes on after the album's «creepiest» number: ʽTwist In The Darkʼ, contributed by songwriter Andy Leek, is like a slightly more accessible Melt-era Peter Gabriel track — big booming drums, ghostly keyboards and backing harmonies, and a menacing hookline. Now it's never really as threateningly Freudist as the description makes it out, but it's still fairly serious: if you liked the «darker» elements of The Visitors, this is a logical development.

 

Less stunning, but still catchy highlights include ʽOne Little Lieʼ, a lively synth-rocker with a rather gratuitous, but harmless, Beethoven lick in the intro, and ʽHeart Of The Countryʼ, contributed by Big Country's own Stuart Adamson. Individual disappointments would be limited to ʽDon't Do Itʼ, a rather shapeless ballad with nowhere-going echoey guitar used purely for at­mosphere — written by Frida herself, and maybe she shouldn't; and ʽCome To Me (I Am A Woman)ʼ, another ballad, this time, an even gentler and adult-contemporarier one, but it wouldn't be as embarrassing, I guess, if only Frida did not sing the chorus as "come to me, I am woman" (without the article!), which, if your English is on an okay level, gives the oddly dumb impression of "me Tarzan, you Jane" and dumbs down any hopes at romance.

 

Still, in terms of our general expectations, Shine is a relative masterpiece — nobody would demand a genuine Peter Gabriel-level record from an ABBA singer, no matter who the producer is, if the songwriting remains in the hands of a bunch of pop-oriented outsiders, but they come as close to this result as physically possible, and with a rather natural grace. Many people have floundered in the transition from «typically 1970s» to «typically 1980s» music: Frida clearly understood how not to flounder, and thus, it is actually a little distressing that she had all but severed her relations with the music industry from then on — unlike Agnetha, who eventually succumbed to DianeWarren-itis, Frida seems like the type who could have preserved a modicum of good taste throughout the decade (yes, sometimes my inner optimist does manage to beat up my inner pessimist).

 

But then, it does not make much sense to talk in «ifs»: the truth is that Shine was Frida's last internationally-oriented album, and she only made brief occasional returns to the public eye since then. One more Swedish-language album followed in 1996, and that was it. Should we lament the missed opportunities or appraise the humbleness and modesty? I guess we'd need to at least be close friends or something to answer that question. In the meantime, Shine gets an expected thumbs up rating — if you like tasteful synth-pop, and can stand the idea of it being slightly blemished by superficial sentimentalism, this record is made for you. Additionally, it is the last ever album to feature a song written by Benny and Björn and sung by one of the ABBA girls — most likely, this should wrench a commitment out of some people at least.

 

BENNY ANDERSON / TIM RICE / BJÖRN ULVAEUS

 

CHESS (1984)

 

1) Merano; 2) The Russian And Molokov/Where I Want To Be; 3) The Opening Ceremony; 4) Quartet (A Model Of Decorum And Tranquility); 5) The American And Florence/Nobody's Side; 6) Chess; 7) Mountain Duet; 8) Florence Quits; 9) Embassy Lament/Anthem; 10) Bangkok/One Night In Bangkok; 11) Heaven Help My Heart; 12) Argument / I Know Him So Well; 13) The Deal (No Deal)/Pity The Child; 14) Endgame; 15) Epilogue: You And I/The Story Of Chess.

 

In all honesty, I am quite fidgety about the musical as a form of art, and would make a fairly predictable and wretched musical reviewer («thumbs down» being the default and rarely over­turned decision). However, I am also all for overcoming the natural illness of «genrism», since a «musical», after all, need not necessarily be strapped down by conventions, such as having to be a heavily diluted, cheapened, saccharinized, and flashified cousin of classical opera. A musical can be anything you want it to be, and Chess is an excellent example of stretching the concept out to include just about anything.

 

First, the concept, libretto, and structure of the musical are quite daring for their time: too daring, in fact, to please the critics, who'd never waste the occasion to rip the boys an extra hole for the befuddling plotline, soap opera flavor, and shallow characterization — all of it justified, but mainly because lyricist Tim Rice (of Andrew Lloyd Webber fame!) took on the task of creating a story that would cover all the important bases, from political to personal. Formally, the musical is about Russian/American tensions in the Cold War as seen through the prism of chess competition (inspired by the Fischer/Spassky match of 1972), but it is just as much, or maybe even more, about personal issues — vanity, greed, obsession, jealousy, depression, loyalty, whatever. This does not leave too much time to explore every possible (or necessary) nook, but what it does is provide the composers, Benny and Björn, with a variety of twists that perfectly suit their own variegated tastes in music, and turn Chess into an almost bizarre musical mish-mash, whose in­fluences vary from baroque composers to the most modern strains of electropop.

 

I could not describe Chess as a collection of great individual songs or musical pieces (the review applies to the «Original Cast» recording from 1984, produced well before the actual show in order to help raise money for the staging, but I imagine the same judgement would probably apply to the later recordings as well, including the heavily revised Broadway version of 1988). Its biggest song in the UK was the compassionate duet ʽI Know Him So Wellʼ, sung with feeling by Elaine Page and Barbara Dickson, but, as a ballad, not even coming close to the perfectly engi­neered (in heart-tugging terms) hooks of classic ABBA ballads. In the US, the largest impact was made by ʽOne Night In Bangkokʼ, which could probably be best described as a cross between the electrofunk of Prince and the embarrassing electronic-prog of mid-Eighties Jethro Tull (or maybe it's just the addition of the flute that triggers this association): too serious for mindless dancing, too rhythm-driven for serious emotions.

 

But, as it sometimes happens (and should, in fact, happen) with concept albums, the sum of the parts of Chess is greater than its whole — or, to use a more appropriate analogy, it is no big deal to sacrifice a few pawns or even a couple of rooks to assure a guaranteed checkmate. Much more important is the feeling of dynamics, as the music switches between intimate, chamber-style pieces to ballroom grandeur to post-disco coolness in a smooth, nicely integrated manner (usually because subtle «modern» elements are always included in the more classical passages, and vice versa), with little risk of ever boring the listener.

 

As is usual with Benny and Björn, they thrive on soaking up classical influences and converting them into «easy-listening» mode, yet somehow still retaining a sense of taste by not limiting themselves to hollow pathos. The title track, a «grandiose» instrumental that reiterates several of the musical's themes, underture-style, begins like a lite requiem, goes on to become a grand quasi-Tchaikovsky ballroom piece, then tries to go for an almost Wagnerian crescendo — and ultimately succeeds as a whole, even if I have no idea why.

 

I couldn't even say that the singers of the original Chess have a serious hand in its success. The main male leads are Murray Head (ʽThe Americanʼ), whom I have never managed to see as a great vocalist (he was not a great Judas Iscariot, unlike Carl Anderson) and Tommy Körberg (ʽThe Russianʼ), who is not much known outside of this role and who comes across as a compe­tent, but not particularly unique musical singer. The title lead of Florence is given to Elaine Page, who sang ʽMemoryʼ in Cats — she actually gets into this complex character (well, you'd have to be pretty complex to be dating both the American and the Russian champion) very convincingly, but she doesn't get too many memorable parts.

 

So I guess that any cast will do, really, as long as the complexity and fullness of the score are retained — the real heroes of Chess are its librettist and its composers. Frankly, the record is puzzling and intriguing rather than an indisputable work of genius, but when we're talking musi­cals, puzzle and intrigue work better for me than genius, because anything to shake up and crack the formula is always welcome. As far as I'm concerned, Benny and Björn's first attempt at a mini-musical (ʽThe Girl With The Golden Hairʼ, a four-song cycle off ABBA's The Album) will always be their best (some of its musical moves, funny enough, seem to still echo throughout the themes of Chess as well), but Chess is where they'd really allowed themselves to run wild with the form, and it's fun to see them run.

 

I would have, of course, liked to see the whole thing in a more «pop» light — as long as Benny and Björn are indulging their chamber / symphonic appetites, no problem, but the sometimes way too overlong romantic duets (ʽYou And Iʼ, etc.) still tend to devolve into schmaltz, which is where I really miss the silly gut punch of ʽLay All Your Love On Meʼ. Still, all the flaws aside, this really is one musical that fully deserves a thumbs up — at the very least, it totally trumps Phantom Of The Opera, meaning that Tim Rice made the right decision, parting ways with the Londoner to team up with the Swedes.

 

Unfortunately, it was simply too dense for the audiences, used to associate the idea of the musical with a simple, easily summarized story rather than this Dostoyevsky-proportions psychological maze. So these days, as far as musicals are concerned, you are more likely to know all about Mamma Mia, the most putrid thing ever that could have happened to ABBA's legacy, and so, naturally, far more popular than Chess could ever hope to be. Of course, Mamma Mia has the seductive grace of con­sisting of original ABBA songs — but that's really cheating, you know.

 

 

AC/DC

HIGH VOLTAGE (1975)

 

1) Baby Please Don't Go; 2) She's Got Balls; 3) Little Lover; 4) Stick Around; 5) Soul Stripper; 6) You Ain't Got A Hold On Me; 7) Love Song; 8) Show Business.

 

Australia's national pride did not have much of a growth period: the basic sound, style, and testosterone level of High Voltage has remained steady ever since. But in early 1975, the band had not yet completely slammed the door and turned the key on their intentionally ascetic rock formula, and the album arguably holds more "surprises" for the seasoned AC/DC lover than any other in the catalog.

 

The only AC/DC album to start off with a cover — and the cover being the album's highlight as well; the only album to feature guitar sparring duets between brothers Angus and Malcolm Young (after that, Malcolm would forever stick to rhythm); the only album to have a love ballad (unless one counts 'Let Me Put My Love Into You' as a ballad, of course); and all that during the period when lead singer Bon Scott would still occasionally perform in a woman's dress rather than his later trademark blue-collar bare-chest outfit. Yes, wonders a-plenty.

 

History has not held the record in particularly high esteem, though. Not a single of these songs has earned the status of an AC/DC classic — even 'High Voltage' (the song) ended up on the next album, one more victim of the confusing 'title track relocation' principle — and few, if any, sur­vived into the live setlists of 1976, not to mention later times.

 

In the long run, this may be just, and if the Young brothers prefer to remember High Voltage as merely a first-time semi-successful teeth-cutting effort, I see no reason to argue with them about it. The album most definitely loses steam after the first three songs, being built around simple, but not very captivating riffs that fail to deliver the proper AC/DC crunch: sort of thin and second-rate, particularly 'Stick Around', 'You Ain't Got A Hold On Me' and the totally generic 'Show Business'.

 

'Soul Stripper', in stark contrast, tries to give us a somewhat more complex picture, with atmosphere-setting instrumental intros, an artsy-sounding hard rock melody, and the above-mentioned guitar duel between Angus and Malcolm as the centerpoint. But they end up sounding more like Thin Lizzy than AC/DC, and we already have one Thin Lizzy. Worst offender is cer­tainly 'Love Song': if there ever was one person less fit for conveying sentimentality, it was the band's lead singer, and if there ever was one guitarist less fit for generating a state of "emotional catharsis", it was the band's lead player. On a pure historical level, though, 'Love Song' is a glo­rious oddity that deserves to be heard at least once.

 

Still, High Voltage does have three very high points that deserve honourable places on any AC/DC collection. 'Baby Please Don't Go', continuing the tradition of playing this old blues stan­dard in an ass-kicking, speedy rock'n'roll manner (The Amboy Dukes, Budgie, etc.), takes it to a whole new level, showing that the Young brothers' playing technique was perfectly immaculate from day one in the recording studio — the perfect coordination of the playing, the ability to play fast, precise and fiery at the same time, Angus' "proto-hammer-on" style, it's all there. 'She's Got Balls', dedicated by Bon Scott to his wife, no less, is their first "less-is-more"-type classic, with the dumbest, but scariest riff on the entire record. And last, but not least, is 'Little Lover', a Bon show all the way: unremarkable in terms of playing or arrangement, but establishing his sly, sleazy, sexy, disgustingly lovable personality once and for all. Where other cock-rockers sounded merely dumb — animal sex machines, winding up and down when told to — Bon's 'Little lover... I can't get you off my mind...'  is pure Mephisto, and it feels nice, warm and cozy sitting so close to the flames, doesn't it?

 

For these three songs alone, High Voltage would deserve a thumbs up even if all the rest were Carpenters covers. It simply looks that the band did not have much of a strong parcel when faced with the prospect of recording their first album, or perhaps they just wanted to test several directions before choosing the main one.

 

T.N.T. (1975)

 

1) It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll); 2) Rock'n'Roll Singer; 3) The Jack; 4) Live Wire; 5) T.N.T.; 6) Rocker; 7) Can I Sit Next To You Girl; 8) High Voltage; 9) School Days.

 

From a certain point of view, AC/DC never made a better album than T.N.T. Logic? Simple. It is unquestionably an improvement over High Voltage, as they throw out everything that promises to screw up the winning formula — pompous guitar duels, love balladry, glammy stuff like 'Show Business' — and concentrate exclusively on what they do best: balls-out, crunchy, sweaty RAWK that gives no quarter and shows no compromise. And since, from here onwards, this description perfectly fits every other AC/DC album, it is impossible to argue that any single one of them — even Highway To Hell and Back In Black — shows AC/DC in artistically finer form than they shaped themselves into by late 1975.

 

Perhaps only 'Can I Sit Next To You Girl', a re-recording of the band's first single which they'd released back in 1974 with Dave Evans as lead singer, and Chuck's 'School Days', the last cover they ever did, still point one little finger backwards. But even so, one needs only compare the ori­ginal version of 'Can I...' — tiny and whiny — with the new one to understand that there is no going back to the original "glammy" image these young punks tried on in 1974.

 

You actually learn everything and more about AC/DC during the first twenty seconds of the al­bum. Malcolm starts out with the basic riff: simple, rough, brutal, with a guitar tone that seems fairly ordinary — but what is it that makes it so uniquely recognizable? Over just a few bars, you begin headbanging (if you're alone) or toe-tapping (if you have company) or headbanging and toe-tapping (if you have a company of AC/DC fans). A few seconds later, join­ed by Angus: same tone, same brutality, but a countermelody, something to bring the song out of the pure realm of headbanging bait into the realm of exciting rock'n'roll. Finally, the drums kick in, only to make you realize in astonishment that all this time, you've been violently headbanging to a song whose rhythm was not even emphasized by a steady drum pattern. But now it's here, and it's steady as a rock, and now they are the true Gods of this style.

 

The rest is a bunch of nuances, only serving the purpose of distinguishing one album from the other in some way at least. On T.N.T., nuances include: Bon Scott's notorious bagpipe solo on 'It's A Long Way To The Top', arguably the only time they ever used an extra instrument in the studio or onstage; the ridiculously ultra-fast tempo on 'Rocker', as they try to generate absurdly over-the-top excitement, making the rockingest rocker that ever rocked; and the corny 'oi! oi! oi!' bursts on the title track, delivered by the Young brothers as Bon Scott's powerload threatens to explode. We also have 'The Jack', which, depending on your tastes, may contain the corniest or the wittiest double-entendres of the 1970s ('her deuce was wild, but my ace was high'); I used to belong to the former group before understan­ding that this must have been Bon's heartfelt tribute to the salacious blues greats of the pre-war era, and thus it works all the better by being AC/DC's starkest 12-bar blues number in the catalog, minimalistic as hell — even the chorus consists of nothing but 'she's got the jack!' repeated over and over again.

 

Finally, T.N.T. must be the most anthemic album recorded by the band: 'It's A Long Way To The Top' and 'High Voltage' are both heartfelt hymns to rock'n'roll and rock'n'roll lifestyle as such, while 'Rocker' and 'Rock'n'Roll Singer' (I think I spot a trend here, don't you?) are odes to parti­cular bearers of that lifestyle. Future records would generally be restricted to just one louder-than-life statement per album, but T.N.T., of course, is a powerload. Thumbs up for both historical (raising ass-kicking standards sky-high) and personal (bagpipe fan!) reasons.

 

DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP (1976)

 

1) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 2) Love At First Feel; 3) Big Balls; 4) Rocker; 5) Problem Child; 6) There's Gonna Be Some Rockin'; 7) Ain't No Fun (Waiting Round To Be A Millionnaire); 8) Ride On; 9) Squealer.

 

It is hard to write a PhD thesis around this album. I would like to call it «rushed», but chronolo­gically, it does not look rushed — the band's only new record in 1976, all the more puzzling since it gives out a very strong impression of having been stuffed from top to bottom with rejected out­takes from T.N.T. At the very least, it simply does not improve on anything.

 

Unquestionably it does contain two absolute classics. 'Rocker' has the distinction of being the fas­test number in the band's catalog, and winds their obsession with basic rockabilly up to such an absurdist level that, once they recorded it, they never ever returned to rockabilly — what sense would it make if you have already created the ultimate experience? Angus' solos, in places, re­mind me of Alvin Lee's hyperbolic madness on 'I'm Going Home', and the two songs do have a lot in common, except AC/DC, of course, sound much more like naughty schoolboys. In concert, they would rather unreasonably stretch the number out to six or ten minutes of tomfoolery, inclu­ding Angus riding through the crowd on Bon's shoulders while soloing, yet I prefer the terse, compact three-minute version. Rock'n'roll at its drunkest.

 

And, of course, we have the title track — all Bon's realm, even though the primary riff is also a sort of minimalistic treasure. Rather daring for its time (I guess only in Australia, the happy home­land of the chain-gang, could you so easily get away with singing 'I lead a life of crime' in such a cheery, gleeful tone), and even today quite a strong vehicle for titillating the brain, despite all those new levels of lyrical straightforwardness that we have gained access to since 1976. The band gives him a strong backing, too — the moment when the Young brothers lower their voices, grumbling 'dirty deeds and they're done dirt cheap, dirty deeds and they're done dirt cheap' may be the most hilarious seven seconds in the band's history.

 

Against the background of these crazy/evil masterpieces, the rest just comes out in a rather bleak perspective. 'Ride On' is slow, moody, bluesy, and unusually sentimental — must be a great favo­urite among ardent Bon lovers, as it gives a little glimpse of his vulnerability — but it is not a style that suits the band well. 'Problem Child' has a great coda, in fact, one of the band's first great codas (watch out for Angus' head-spinning trills at the very end), but the song itself is only so-so. Seven minutes of hollow jamming on 'Ain't No Fun' are openly boring — they try to make ano­ther anthemic piece in the vein of 'It's A Long Way To The Top', but the riffage is clearly deriva­tive of the former and not as hard-hitting, and oh my God, seven minutes is just too much. 'Big Balls', to me, indicates that Bon's stream of successful double entendre's is running dry (do you think that lines like 'it's my belief that my big balls should be held every night' constitute some sort of smutty genius? I have my doubts about that). Etc., etc., etc.

 

So I will take a little risk here and say that, for all it's worth, Dirty Deeds merits a thumbs down. The two classics should be salvaged and treasured, like Pooh's pots of honey from the flood, but the rest is quite subpar by the band's usual standards. Why that is, I don't know, but there is such a thing as occasional loss of focus, or, as philologists say, an occasional fuss of locus, which is ba­sically the same thing.

 

LET THERE BE ROCK (1977)

 

1) Go Down; 2) Dog Eat Dog; 3) Let There Be Rock; 4) Bad Boy Boogie; 5) Problem Child; 6) Overdose; 7) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; 8) Whole Lotta Rosie.

 

Pay attention how nearly each and every song on this album begins with a little dry guitar «click» sound, sometimes accompanied with a muffled, but intentionally preserved, initial countdown. It is a unique thing for Let There Be Rock: already on Powerage, all the intros would be made tho­roughly clean. So it is symbolic, and the best guess is that the band is telling us that, having found its schtick on the previous two albums, it has now found its sound.

 

Because if AC/DC ever did make the transition from «hard rock» to «metal», or any other sort of sound-related transition if these terms do not suit us, this is the spot. Malcolm and Angus add a rough, leaden touch to their guitars, going for more distortion and «dirt», and realize the head­banger's dream: a sound so fat and crunchy that, when played at the proper volume, it never fails to bring out your devil if only God did not forget to endow you with one.

 

The album is not without problems. Some of the songs have lazy riffs — 'Go Down' recalls their least inspired blues-rock romps, 'Overdose' has never even once surfaced as a live recording, 'Dog Eat Dog' is equally so-so, and, for some sort of silly censorship reason, the classic number 'Crab­sody In Blue', worth it for the title alone, has never surfaced on the international version of the record, instead replaced by a slightly shortened version of 'Problem Child'. This is depressing, especially given that the whole album hosts but eight numbers.

 

Still, fillerish as they are, all of these songs rock as well, and none of them spoil one's appetite for the classics. 'Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be' has one of the band's most memorable «angular» riffs going for it, and a great cool 'Hey you! Yeah, you!' from Bon at the start. The title track and 'Whole Lotta Rosie' are acknowledged classics, both for their mock-anthemic quality and the ut­most level of madness that Angus achieves with his solos, literally the musical equivalents of a fire team drowning your burning house or car in avalanches of foam; at the end of 'Whole Lotta Rosie', one risks the real danger of suffocating, since there is every chance of you forgetting how to breathe under the onslaught of the younger Young's incessant pummeling.

 

But, upon being heavily saturated with the two hits, my heart chooses to belong elsewhere. Where 'Bad Boy Boogie' is frequently viewed as merely a cool element in the band's stage show — it is that number during which Angus does his strip show — I have gradually come to the conclusion that it might simply be the AC/DC song. Everything about it is perfect to per­fection. The noisy intro, and how the song's riff grows out of it. The riff itself — simple, bluesy, amazing in its austerity, triggering your inner rhythms like crazy. Bon Scott as the ideal man to blurt out the message: 'It was the seventh day, I was the seventh son — and it scared the hell out of everyone!' The breathtaking pause before Angus rips into the solo. The lengthy one-note pas­sage. The deception as the drums kick back into full gear, only to disappear entirely a few bars later. The build-up back to the main melody, by which time — notice? — the riff has actually changed, but did not lose any of its power. Mark Evans' crescendo on the bass, piling up high high high until Bon relaunches the vocal part. In terms of how much is going on, it may be the band's most complex creation, ever, and yet it is still perfectly fit for the hormone level of a seventh grader, a masterpiece of insulting brutality.

 

Let There Be Rock is an arrogant, but perfect title. Presumptuously, it almost seems to imply that before it there was no rock as such, and that it is only now that this pack of sacrilegious Aus­tralians, playing God, allow it to come into existence. (Presumption seriously confirmed by the video that accompanied the title track, in which Bon is seen dressed as a preacher and Angus, oh good heavens, is playing with a self-made halo stuck on his head). Of course, Bon's lyrics, hila­riously retelling the story of the birth of rock'n'roll, would seem to contradict that. But whoever listens to AC/DC for the lyrics, hilarious as they might be?

 

Come to think of it — from a certain point of view at least, they may be right. Certainly rock had never ever sounded quite like this, and, more importantly, it has never ever sounded more «rock» than this. In the whole history of popular music after 1977, no one has ever written a song that rocks — in the simplest, commonest, basest sense of the term, not in its intellectualized perver­sion — harder than 'Whole Lotta Rosie'. So, «let there be rock» indeed. Thumbs up without a single question asked, even despite all the filler.

 

POWERAGE (1978)

 

1) Rock'n'Roll Damnation; 2) Down Payment Blues; 3) Gimme A Bullet; 4) Riff Raff; 5) Sin City; 6) What's Next To The Moon; 7) Gone Shootin'; 8) Up To My Neck In You; 9) Kicked In The Teeth.

 

A slight dropoff from the high fever of Let There Be Rock, this record goes generally easier on the ears — cleaner, tighter, more disciplined, almost everything strictly mid-tempo — but, no matter how many times I listen to it, just does not seem to have that many unforgettable riffs. Best tunes are right there in the middle ('Riff Raff' and 'Sin City'), but it takes a long time to get around to them, and an even longer time to wait after they're gone.

 

The «laziness» of the record is exemplified by numerous rewrites: the riff of 'Gimme A Bullet' is really just a variation on 'Dirty Deeds'; 'Up To My Neck In You' was not so good even back when it was called 'Ain't No Fun (Waitin' Round To Be A Millionnaire)'; and although the great pun­kish punch of the riff that opens 'Let There Be Rock' was a viable contender for the title of 'Best Rock Moment of 1977', there is really no need to recycle it for the entire melody of 'Kicked In The Teeth'. No wonder the boys almost never revive these numbers in concert: what good are weaker copies when you can go straight for the powerhouse originals?

 

Nevertheless, there is still a relatively strong pro-Powerage lobby among AC/DC fans, one that transcends the ordinary attitude («all AC/DC albums kick ass, every AC/DC album is their best since the previous one») and finds some sort of really special charm in these songs. This can har­dly have anything to do with a change in lineup (new bassist Cliff Williams is on board, but does that make a big difference?), or with Angus' new soloing techniques, as he continues coming into his own style rather than simply speeding up the old rockabilly licks.

 

Rather, it has to do with Bon Scott's continually upshifting position in the band. The early records established him as a competent frontman, capable of matching the Young brothers' guitar power and writing a hilarious double entendre every now and then. Let There Be Rock upped the stakes on guitars, and Scott had to comply by developing an even scarier rock'n'roll roar that con­firmed his status as one of the genre's loudest, most reckless screamers. On Powerage, he conti­nues his evolution by starting to write interesting lyrics.

 

Subjects are no longer limited to describing the bare thrills of carnal pleasures; Scott tries on the shoes of a prophet of carnal pleasures, one who is no longer content to merely experience them and state the experience as such, but — God help us! — attempts to ponder upon that experience. Not only that, some of the lyrics are downright ambiguous and, sometimes, loaded with meta­phors that take time to decipher. All of a sudden, the idea of earning a Ph.D. based on AC/DC songs no longer looks like a totally ridiculous matter!

 

And, actually, Bon could not have found a better time to reinvent himself as this sort of tough street guru than the Young' brothers temporary respite: whenever the riffs get tired and lazy, it is Scott who steps in to overshadow the proceedings. What is the best thing about a song like 'Kick­ed In The Teeth'? Why, obviously Bon's ferocious acappella intro: 'Two face woman with your two face lies, I hope your two face living's made you satisfied!' The rest is nowhere near as good. What is the best thing about a song like 'What's Next To The Moon'? Why, obviously Bon's lust­ful, but ironic chorus: 'It's yer love that I want, it's yer love that I need!' The rest is just okay.

 

None of this prevents the entire band from adding 'Riff Raff' to their already long list of total classics. Now here is a phenomenal rock'n'roll riff that is impossible to underrate, along with ex­perimental scratchy-noisy sections and lengthy barrages of over-the-top soloing that pick off from where we had been left with 'Whole Lotta Rosie' and carry the ecstasy even further. Bon's prese­nce here is minimal — two small verses in a sea of instrumentation — but he still leaves his mark, with simple, but enigmatic lines ('Riff raff, it's good for a laugh, riff raff, laugh yourself in half' — how come the fans never take offense at that chorus?).

 

The only other song whose riff (raff) is still fresh in my head after all these years is 'Sin City', but it is almost certain that Scott has had a hand in this, too: his 'I'm going down to Sin City!' is no less anthemic than the far better known 'I'm on a Highway to Hell!', but far more refined and sar­castic. I think it is the only song off the album that they have continued to perform with Brian Johnson on a regular basis — just because the melody is so stadium-rousing — but, overall, I can see how Brian would be seriously uncomfortable with most of the material on here (although most of the songs have occasionally been performed with Brian from time to time).

 

I understand that «an intelligent AC/DC album» is an oxymoron, but pare down the notion of «intelligence» to be level with typical AC/DC values, and you may have something there. For a brief while — two short years — the band was on the verge of trading their clownish image for the status of an Australian Thin Lizzy, and if you like blazing hard rock, but cannot stand explicit dumb­ness, Powerage is unquestionably the AC/DC album for you. But the riffs are really not that good, trust me on that one. Almost not that good to the point of getting a thumbs down, but thumbs up nevertheless, because that sudden surge in the level of Bon Scott's charisma has to be reflected in some sort of judgement.

 

IF YOU WANT BLOOD, YOU'VE GOT IT (1978)

 

1) Riff Raff; 2) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; 3) Bad Boy Boogie; 4) The Jack; 5) Problem Child; 6) Whole Lotta Rosie; 7) Rock'n'Roll Damnation; 8) High Voltage; 9) Let There Be Rock; 10) Rocker.

 

A live album from AC/DC, the ultimate live band, was imminent at some point, and it is nice that «some point» managed to fall upon the peak years of the Bon era. Of course, there really is no very particular reason to listen to an AC/DC live album. The band made little, if any, difference between the studio and the stadium, and I would not at all be surprised to learn that Angus had a habit of per­forming his famous «spasms» even without any audience present. In fact, some of these live performances — recorded, suitably, in the band's primal habitat, in Glasgow, before a bunch of wild drunken Scottish cavemen — are decidedly tame compared to the studio versions.

 

The AC/DC live show must, of course, be witnessed live, with the unannounced charisma contest between the lead guitarist and the vocalist as its primary point of attraction. It is a brilliant, if sometimes hard to stomach, combination of ugliness, monster power, and cheerfulness, in which even such a stupid, clumsy mock-ritual as Angus' on-stage striptease has its proper place. You will headbang, you will vomit, you will be disgusted and enlightened at the same time, in the best tradition of drinking stronger spirits. But sound without sight? It's like sight without taste.

 

Still, there are three good arguments why it will not hurt to at least get acquainted with the record. First, it sort of works as a well-made, well-meaning compilation of some of the band's most ass-kicking material: I have no problems with the setlist whatsoever, especially seeing as how it in­cludes all the best tracks from their best album to that point, Let There Be Rock. Second, it is a very good showcase for Bon, who not only proves that he can easily tame wild Scottish cavemen (look at how skilfully he rules over them during 'The Jack' and 'High Voltage'), but also demons­trates a superb ability to scream on-key throughout the entire performance.

 

Last and not least, Angus never plays the same solo twice, and he is at his most impressive on 'Bad Boy Boogie' (in which they cut out the «striptease» section, leaving you no time to remove your own shirt and thus pay tribute to the best hard rock band of all time) and, believe it or not, 'The Jack', which is reinforced in its status of «AC/DC's Slow Blues», not to mention getting a new, less double-entendrish, more sluttish, set of lyrics from Bon. Bad news: 'Whole Lotta Rosie' is sacrilegiously shorn of its madman coda, and 'Rocker' lasts all of three minutes, when in reality it was a lengthy, major highlight of the show, with Angus blazing off solos while riding on Bon's shoulders and stuff. Perhaps the shoulder-ride did not manage to be captured well enough.

 

Obviously, this is forty minutes of tremendous, high-energy-level fun, and one cannot deny the heart a solid thumbs up judgement. But the brain doth protest that it is very well possible to live without AC/DC live albums, and this, too, has to be accepted.

 

HIGHWAY TO HELL (1979)

 

1) Highway To Hell; 2) Girls Got Rhythm; 3) Walk All Over You; 4) Touch Too Much; 5) Beating Around The Bush; 6) Shot Down In Flames; 7) Get It Hot; 8) If You Want Blood (You've Got It); 9) Love Hungry Man; 10) Night Prowler.

 

The wild critical and commercial success of this and the next album is often associated with the switch of producers — trying something «different», the Young brothers have turned to Robert «Mutt» Lange, back then, still relatively fresh and unknown, and he did his best to make the record sell well. At least, that is the general idea.

 

Certainly Lange's production style is different from George Young and Harry Vanda's. Those guys, after all, used to be at the helm of the Easybeats, Australia's garage outfit par excellence, and their idea — a great idea, too — was to make their Young-er brothers sound even more reck­less, rambunctious, and raw than the Easybeats ever were. But that does not help you sell records. Lange, on the other hand, takes the Youngs' guitar sound and does the impossible: preserves the headbang magic, but cuts down on the ear-bleeding side effect. A lesser producer would have pro­bably turned AC/DC into Foreigner: a heavy rock sound, formally, but completely stripped of any traces of primal aggression. Highway To Hell, on the other hand, rocks ferociously — and, at the very same time, raises the band's commercial stakes sky high.

 

But then a producer is only a producer; it is not Lange that makes the album so enjoyable, simply the fact that the Young brothers happened to reach their creative peak. Perhaps sensing that they started repeating themselves in too obvious a manner on Powerage, they go for a little creative exploring, and end up with a record that, on their respective level, is the epitome of diversity. We got straight-up speedy rock ('Beating Around The Bush'), arena-style anthems (title track), a little power pop ('Girls Got Rhythm'), punk-flavored socially conscious statements ('If You Want Blood'), heavy balladry ('Touch Too Much'), and slow blues ('Night Prowler'). With all that bag­gage, it is no surprise that Malcolm and Angus finally find the time to write some fresh riffs (in fact, some are so fresh that they kept reusing them, guilt-free, for the next thirty years), or that Bon Scott, overall, gives his greatest vocal performance.

 

'(I'm on a) Highway To Hell' has been, of course, immortalized not so much by the catchy, enti­cing character of the chorus as by the fact that, unknown to anybody but our supernatural overseers, in 1979 Bon Scott was nearing the end of that highway. It is a bit flat in the melody department, and does not so much give the guitarists a chance to shine as it gives the audience a chance to flash their empty beer cans, but it is still awesome in a clucky kind of way.

 

Generally, though, you judge an AC/DC tune on the strength of its riff. Here, we got a particular­ly seductive riff on 'Girls Got Rhythm', a poppy, almost danceable loop that accompanies Bon as he sings about his lady who is 'enough to stop a freight train or start the Third World War'. Note, of course, the slight fall-off from the lyrical level he had achieved on Powerage — but I guess that if you want to sell records to love-hungry teens, you gotta sing about love-hungry teens. An even simpler, but equally effective six-note sequence drives 'Shot Down In Flames', where Angus actually tries to paint a musical picture of being shot down in flames, and, in the process, invents a new, metallic style of soloing that would become his trademark for the next decade.

 

However, you do not reach the utmost peak here until the third to last track. 'If You Want Blood', borrowing the title from the freshly issued live album, is truly the closest AC/DC ever came to capturing the punk spirit — the song name would have been perfectly usable for a Dead Ken­nedys or Rage Against The Machine album title, and even if the tempo is a bit too slow and the riff a bit too high-pitched to fit into the basic musical conventions of «punk», Scott's performance is certainly anything but, as he throws the happy public a message that is normally expected to come from the likes of Ray Davies: 'You get money for nothing / Tell me who can you trust / We got what you want / And you got the lust / If you want blood — you've got it!'

 

Even the slow, brontosaurish blues of 'Night Prowler' that closes the record shows they have come a long, long way from the early days of 'The Jack'. Again, this is Bon's deal all the way, but only a very stupid person — such as the guy who allegedly went on a killing spree after hearing the song, bringing the band lots of unwanted problems — would honestly believe that Mr. Scott is channelling the spirit of a serial murderer, when it is clear as daylight that he is living out a hilarious sexual fantasy. 'I'm the night prowler, when you turn off the light', how more obvious can one get? As far as uncomfortable titillation goes, 'Night Prowler' is certainly no 'Midnight Rambler' — but it is a delightful, powerful theatrical piece, and one hell of a great way to go out with for good. 'Shazbot, na-nu na-nu'.

 

For sheer metallic power and breathtaking highlights, Back In Black is a better place to go than Highway To Hell, but for a highly balanced mix of consistency, cleverness, and moderate expe­rimentation, it is Highway that takes the cake. I would say that Brian Johnson's initiation into the world of AC/DC rule is an absolute immediate stunner, whereas Bon Scott's final hour is more of a grower, but it grows fast and secure. The heart may be already accustomed to issuing thumbs up judgements to the Aussies; the brain, however, is far more mightily surprised at the witty construction of the record — one might not have expected such a thing from the band at all.

 

BACK IN BLACK (1980)

 

1) Hells Bells; 2) Shoot To Thrill; 3) What Do You Do For Money Honey; 4) Given The Dog A Bone; 5) Let Me Put My Love Into You; 6) Back In Black; 7) You Shook Me All Night Long; 8) Have A Drink On Me; 9) Shake A Leg; 10) Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollution.

 

Bon Scott died in the proper manner for a noble rock'n'roller — choking on his own vomit — and his replacement was certainly different. I do not think Brian Johnson has, or ever had, even a mi­nor part of Scott's charisma. His lyrics show him to be incapable of matching Scott's wit and hu­mour, his stage behaviour is rougher and far less subtle, and, overall, he has rarely contributed to­wards making the band more interesting and less predictable. He has always blended in with the band very well, but the blending was somewhat bland, and it may have been — partly — his fault that the groove he synthesized with the Young brothers in 1980 has changed less in the last thirty years than Bon Scott's groove had in five.

 

Yes — but what a groove! For his first three albums at least, he gave AC/DC a vocal sound that was previously unimaginable — neither for AC/DC, nor for his own previous band, Geordie, nor for anyone else. Singing at the top of his range ninety percent of the time — and going over the top the remaining ten percent — giving even mediocre tunes an intensity the band could never have dreamt of in the Scott days — squeezing out the last remaining bits of «intelligence» in ex­change for an all-out assault on the senses — this is AC/DC reaching the climax in its message.

 

Plus, there was a certain element of bravery in their putting out an album as arrogant as Back In Black. I am pretty sure that even some of the toughest fans of the band might have felt a little un­easy upon hearing that the man who, only a few months ago, so defiantly sang 'I'm on a highway to hell!' before arena crowds, was taken away so promptly. To celebrate his death with a grinning, gleeful acknowledgement of the fact that Hell is, indeed, where Scott belongs ('Hells Bells'), and then to imply that the same establishment has speedily issued out a replacement ('Back In Black') — even non-religious people might be shook up with this blatantly «amoral» line of conduct, let alone those who truly believe that Hell is not to be toyed with.

 

On the other hand, I doubt that even the religious right would be thoroughly immune to the temp­tations of 'Hells Bells', possibly the greatest song ever in the AC/DC canon. For me, 'Bad Boy Boogie' illustrated the perfection of their early rock'n'roll vibe; 'Hells Bells' is the older, matura­ted perfection of their heavy metal vibe. Its depiction of hellish images is cartoonish, both lyrics-wise ('if you're into Evil, you're a friend of mine!') and musically — you do not truly intimidate people with simple rock riffs — but, then again, the Devil has a long history of being portrayed in a delightfully cartoonish manner, and 'Hells Bells' is far from the first, and, hopefully, from the last, in the series of these portrayals.

 

The song is great because it does not have one wasted second — from the opening bells (might those, in a way, be a nod to John Lennon's bells at the opening of 'Mother'?) to the slow, meticu­lously planned and executed build-up, to Johnson's powerful entry — within three seconds he is able to show that the band did just the right thing — to his climbing higher and higher and higher until the chorus explosion, to the deceitful pause before the storm as Angus takes over the mad­ness, to the maniacal coda as Brian opens up more and more internal channels for the evil prese­nce, to the utterly brilliant «guitar thunderstroke» at 4:45. In fact, cartoonish it may be, but I have caught myself, a couple of times, nervously fidgeting when Johnson goes into the 'they're drag­ging you down, they're bringing you 'round' part. Come to think of it, can anyone guarantee that this is not what was happening to poor Bon at that exact moment?

 

The Satanic vibe is then once again recaptured properly, albeit in a slightly more lightweight and playful fashion, on the title track that cleverly opens Side B (cleverly, because, for AC/DC al­bums, I always get the feeling that critics usually just listen to the first tracks on each side — the only reason, in my opinion, why the vastly inferior For Those About To Rock is commonly ra­ted high and above the exuberantly superior Flick Of The Switch). Combining the uniquely con­structed «step-jumping» riff with Johnson's rapid-fire, over-the-top delivery could hardly fail, and it never did, giving the band another signature song and giving Brian his own personal anthem with which he proved, once and for all, that he did belong in the band.

 

But if someone had the idea that Brian Johnson's arrival symbolized the band's slipping further into mock-Satanism, that someone probably never went beyond the album sleeve and a glimpse of 'Hells Bells'. In reality, Brian Johnson is just a bawdy, fun-lovin' guy from the Scottish high­lands, who has always valued the earthly pleasures of a smoke, a drink, and a shag way above the dubious honours of purchasing a piece of property in Lucifer's domain. Accordingly, the rest of the tracks are all about having a smoke, a drink, and a shag. Actually, plenty of shags — the en­tire Side A after 'Hells Bells' is dedicated to that perennial subject.

 

It helps that the Young brothers were still on a roll. The riffs for 'Shoot To Thrill' and 'What Do You Do For Money, Honey' are top notch and very well aligned with Johnson's rampant sexism, the madman guitar barrage on the ungrammatically titled 'Given The Dog A Bone' efficiently drown out Brian's inane lyrics about a girl who lives for blowjobs (supposedly old Scotland is just swarming with these), and even 'Let Me Put My Love Into You', the closest AC/DC ever got to writing a stupid power ballad and thus committing a serious blunder, has a chord sequence that stays within the listener for days.

 

Side B, after the initial two-way punch of 'Back In Black' and the eternal football crowd favourite of 'You Shook Me All Night Long' (a song covered live by Celine Dion, no less — a must-see for any dedicated fan of I Spit On Your Grave!), gives way to more moderate thrills, and sort of fiz­zles out with the not particularly successful ode to popular music ('Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollu­tion' — great line, but why the boring mid-tempo?), but then AC/DC were rarely consistent from start to finish, and there is no use scorning Back In Black for something that is innately present in each of the band's LPs.

 

The big difference is that Back In Black is bigger, denser, darker, and dumber than these guys ever were before. Is it their best? I do not know, but it can very well be argued that it is, indeed, the one particular album that God, or his less respectable colleague in the business, has commis­sionned from them. And this has very little, if anything, to do with the fact that Robert "Mutt" Lange has produced it in such a subtle commercial manner that even grandmas on wheelchairs were rushing to the stores to order an extra copy, feeling young and strong again as the virile, Dionysian sounds of 'You Shook Me All Night Long' were flooding their senses. It is just that, at this moment, they happened to be writing great riffs, using great tones, handling a great screamer, and pushing the delightful absurdity of rock music to its utmost limits. This is headbanging incar­nate, and no headbanger's heart can allow it to get away without a major thumbs up.

 

FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK (1981)

 

1) For Those About To Rock; 2) Put The Finger On You; 3) Let's Get It Up; 4) Inject The Venom; 5) Snowballed; 6) Evil Walks; 7) C.O.D.; 8) Breaking The Rules; 9) Night Of The Long Knives; 10) Spellbound.

 

Back In Black certainly brought in a lot of money and, more importantly, a lot of confidence, but its success was arguably a bit too much for the band. There was no reason whatsoever for AC/DC to be turned into a household name: somebody who regularly puts out songs on the level of 'Hells Bells' can hardly be expected to become a permanent mainstay in the home of the average Joe. But the devil did play this ingenious trick on humanity, and, as if having woken up from a deep, semi-decade-long slumber, people were rushing out to stores for more AC/DC product. Back In Black did not even have enough time to go all the way to No. 1 in the US, but its follow-up, For Those About To Rock, did. Ironically so, because it is one of the band's worst records.

 

Since it only makes sense to measure AC/DC albums on the riff-o-meter, the verdict is inesca­pable: there is not a single great riff here, nowhere in sight. Nowhere. Most of the time, this is just lumbering mid-tempo bluesy sludge, not even properly fit for headbanging. At best, the cho­ruses are catchy — how can they not be catchy, when each one consists of repeating the song title four times in a row? — but the music is unimaginably unimaginative. Almost as if the band were simply too busy scooping up all the accolades, and decided, instead of a proper new record, to put out a bunch of outtakes from the Back In Black sessions.

 

Where Back In Black yielded at least three or four immortal classic tunes of the you-know-which genre, its follow-up has one — the title track, which picks up at the exact same spot where 'Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollution' dropped us off the train one year ago. And even that one is not so much immortal because of its melody (which is just as rote and unmemorable as everything else on the record), but because of its pompous, bloated anthemic character. Yes: Brian Johnson delivers the grand line 'For those about to rock — we salute you!' with plenty of flash, and the cannon blasts add a rare unexpected touch (particularly exciting when they bring them out onstage). But it is my deep conviction that rock anthems are one thing, and National Anthems are another, and that the aes­thetics of the two should not be mixed. Somehow, in the Bon Scott days, the band used to under­stand that, and made 'Let There Be Rock' into a classic example of a true rock anthem — one that speaks through kick-ass energy and ironic delivery, not through pom­pous screeching and generic power chords that do not add up to anything distinctly meaningful.

 

There is little desire on my part to discuss individual songs. Two that may, as far as my opinion goes, rise above the overall sludgy dreck are the ones that you have to wait for the longest time. Side A ends with 'Snowballed', the only — get this: the only — fast rocker on the entire album, far from their best, but definitely a highlight on this morbid collection. And Side B ends with the phonetically similarly titled 'Spellbound', which is also mid-tempo sludge, but unexpectedly dar­ker and grimmer than most of the Johnson-era tracks: for some reason, for this last track they pre­ferred to drop all the glaring sexual innuendos, all the show-off-ey worship of Rock'n'Roll, all the cartoonish Satanism, and simply write a song about internal torment. I am not sure that, during this moment of glory, Brian Johnson really felt 'spellbound, my world is tumbling down', but he is definitely convincing.

 

Everything else is decidedly for the seasoned fan only. But rest assured: the guitars are loud and crunchy, each song has a mad Angus solo, and this is the second of only three records in AC/DC history where Brian still had the full power of his sonic tank. Even Rolling Stone originally fell for the trick, finally pandering to the record-buying public's tastes and providing AC/DC with the first truly glowing review — and, what the heck, anyone would probably give For Those About To Rock a glowing review if it were the first or second AC/DC album he/she'd ever heard in their life. But were we to entirely ignore context, we might as well sit tight and cozy with our «Greatest Hits» and «Best Of» collections instead.

 

An almost surreal idea is that they may have intentionally recorded a sub-par LP in order to solidify and purify their fanbase, so that only the steadfast and loyal would remain, and all the desperate housewives expecting another 'You Shook Me All Night Long' would go back to their proper lives, feeding on Boston and Styx. If so, they succeeded admirably: once For Those Abo­ut To Rock hit its No. 1 and everyone actually started listening to it, their commercial sta­tus would start dropping immediately, while the quality of the music would, surprisingly, start grow­ing again. But that is just a mad, mad thought: the Young brothers are no Bob Dylan, after all. Consciously shunning the limelight? I must be crazy. But a decisive thumbs down in any case.

 

FLICK OF THE SWITCH (1983)

 

1) Rising Power; 2) This House Is On Fire; 3) Flick Of The Switch; 4) Nervous Shakedown; 5) Landslide; 6) Guns For Hire; 7) Deep In The Hole; 8) Bedlam In Belgium; 9) Badlands; 10) Brain Shake.

 

The idea behind Flick Of The Switch was that the band had become much too bloated and over-polished — the blame for which, unsurprisingly, was pinned on Mutt Lange, who had already ful­filled the important task of securing the band a happy old age, anyway. Subsequently, Malcolm and Angus fired the man and decided to produce the record on their own.

 

The changes are not huge, but important. The brothers do retain the «full» sound of the previous records, making the songs very bass-heavy and the riffs over-distorted, getting a much more metallic sheen than they used to in the Seventies. Accordingly, they stick Brian Johnson way over there in the corner, so that on each single song he has to struggle tremendously in order to out­shout the guitars. This is where you start to notice the differences: Mutt would solve the problem by emphasizing the vocals with a bit of echoing, so that, on their best songs of the early Eighties, Brian would be hovering over the musical waves like a supernatural evil presence. On Flick Of The Switch, he goes back to being the big nasty sweaty bulldog in the corner.

 

But they do achieve their goal — that way, the album is indeed much rawer and more «imme­diate» than its predecessors. And, as if rejuvenated and re-inspired by this approach, the brothers, this time around, complement it with yet another set of kick-ass riffs. Gone are the sleepy power chords of For Those About To Rock; in their place, we once again have perfect musical phra­sing — the melody that opens 'Rising Power' may not be one of their best, but it is a simplistic, catchy, fun hard rock riff, and there is nothing wrong with it that wasn't equally wrong with a song like 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap', for instance.

 

Other tunes show a renewed interest in the band's blues roots — 'Badlands' most obviously so, where Angus, armed with a distorted slide guitar, extracts a «sample part» of a 12-bar riff and somehow transform it into a head­banger's paradise (the mid-tempo build), but 'This House Is On Fire' sounds like it might have originally been conceived with the help of a slider as well. And, finally, they reward the fans with at least one breakneck speed anthem — 'Landslide' — with an unusually complex build-up from verse to bridge to chorus and quite a difficult picking pattern in the main melody, which, I think, Angus only topped with 'Thunderstruck' seven years later.

 

The lyrics are the album's weakest point: admittedly, Johnson never liked writing them all that much, and not only are all the subjects fairly typical, there is not even any effort to make their descriptions stylistically polished; lines like 'I'm a pistol-packing man with a gun in my hand, looking for a woman who will understand' have always left me wondering what exactly the woman is supposed to understand — for instance, why the hell does the man need one gun in his pack and another in his hand at the same time? Big exception: 'Bedlam In Belgium', not only a phonetically delicious song title, but actually a coherent, well-put account of an unhappy accident the band happened to run into on their latest European tour. Not exactly their 'Smoke On The Wa­ter', but pretty smouldering all the same.

 

Amazingly, there is not a single song on here that does not work in at least some way. The album yielded no hits at all, because nothing is particularly anthemic or immediately striking — this will probably explain the all too commonly encountered negative attitude, since, in AC/DC and gene­ral rock'n'roll lore, Flick Of The Switch is frequently singled out as the start of the decline, the turning point where AC/DC became «generic» and «stale» and «irrelevant». Such is the general critical consensus, at least, and even some non-hardliner fans have stated that this is where they jump ship in indignation.

 

Rubbish, as far as I am concerned; AC/DC have always been generic, but as long as they were fun, they were never irrelevant, and this is their secondmost funnest album of the Eighties. That ascending guitar line on the title track? FUN. 'Guns for hire, shoot you with desire'? FUN. 12-bar blues turned stoner rock on 'Badlands'? FUN. The way Brian howls 'Yonder she walked...' from inside a tin can at the start of 'House On Fire' and then immediately follows it up with a full-vo­lume 'Yow!' as if he'd crossed a large distance in one second? FUN. The way it takes 'Landslide' a whole minute of confusing ad-libbed blabber before it cuts to the main lyrics? FUN. There's lots of such amusing touches on the record — which, to me, prove that the band were in pretty high spirits indeed when making it, and that is the only thing that counts. Thumbs up all the way. And remember, this is the last time in history when you can hear Brian Johnson's voice in all of its primal glory.

 

FLY ON THE WALL (1985)

 

1) Fly On The Wall; 2) Shake Your Foundations; 3) First Blood; 4) Danger; 5) Sink The Pink; 6) Playing With Girls; 7) Stand Up; 8) Hell Or High Water; 9) Back In Business; 10) Send For The Man.

 

For a band that much busy with promoting a dumb image, AC/DC certainly raise quite a few com­plicated issues. For instance — we all know that AC/DC are generally as good as their riffs, but what is it, exactly, that makes an AC/DC riff, or, in fact, a hard rock riff in general, so utterly great for the body and soul? And what is it that makes an AC/DC riff boring and generic? And why would most — not all, but most — people agree on the greatness of the riffage in 'Hells Bells' or 'Whole Lotta Rosie', while at the same time failing to notice anything special about the riffage on 'Flick Of The Switch' or 'This House Is On Fire'?

 

Or — vice versa — some fans and critics, even those convinced that Fly On The Wall represents AC/DC's all-time lowest point, would still note that the title track, however, is sort of okay, or even «excellent». How could that happen? 'Fly On The Wall' (the song), to my ears, has always seemed the weakest start ever to an AC/DC album, a return to the power chord sludge of the 1981 album, a song that could have been slapped together in three minutes on a particularly lazy day. Does it even have a riff? Can one hum it? Can one appreciate it? If so, how and why can one ap­preciate it and another even fail to notice it...?

 

These are all interesting questions, and to discuss them is perhaps more appropriate within the review of a mediocre album than an excellent one. But since I do not even have a hypothetical answer, let us just skip the theoretical part and concentrate on the record for a while. By 1985, AC/DC were getting older, and their schtick was already illustrating the definition of «predictab­le» in every thesaurus, so it is no wonder that fans and critics alike were not at all happy with Fly On The Wall. Today, in retrospect, the album still stands as a fine testament to AC/DC's tenacity — coming out at the height of the hair metal boom, it was, nevertheless, firmly and frighteningly true to the band's style. Even the drums (now played by new band member Simon Wright, having replaced Phil Rudd due to the latter being sacked for non-disciplinary behaviour) have not been enhanced by any modernistic electronic effects — leaving AC/DC probably the only classic rock act of that era so steadfastly clinging to the past.

 

History has rewarded them with the last laugh: today, Fly On The Wall is one of the few hard rock albums of 1985-86 that does not sound ridiculously dated. If only its material stood up to the production values, we would all be sitting pretty. Alas, the songwriting has once again taken a sharp downturn, and the lack of focus on the title track is but one indication. None of the tracks at all have persisted in the band's live setlist, and some are just silly macho throwaways that are on­ly production-wise better than the goofy hair metal crap they were supposed to contest with. 'Send For The Man'? 'First Blood'? 'Back In Business'? (The latter's title probably tries to somehow al­lude to 'Back In Black', but how could this unimaginative hard-funk riff, somewhat reminiscent of Rainbow's 'Man On The Silver Mountain', ever hope to compete with the genius simplicity of the bang - ba-da-bang - ba-da-bang of 'Back In Black'?) All of these songs have the required crunch and punch, but AC/DC pride themselves on being a rock'n'roll band, and this is not rock'n'roll — this is pompous heavy rock posturing, and it is boring at best and ugly at worst.

 

Still, some nice rock'n'roll is present: the riffs seem noticeably better on songs like 'Shake Your Foundations', 'Sink The Pink', 'Playing With Girls', and 'Hell Or High Water', and these also con­tain the catchiest, most likeable choruses — getting dumber with each year, as most people who have ever tried singing along to "ai-yee-yay-yay, shake your foundations!" will probably agree, but still preserving the fun quotient. Which makes Fly On The Wall very inconsistent, but cer­tainly not a complete disaster, as was thought at the time.

 

One major disadvantage is that AC/DC's magic only really works when all the ingredients are equally strong; lose or weaken just one and the seams will start showing. By 1985, Brian John­son's voice had finally begun giving in to all the strain, embarking on its transition from the most powerful high-pitched scream of 1980 to the «stuck pig hoarse rasp» of 1990. At that time, the problems were showing up more frequently onstage than in the studio; but, for some reason, the band decided that it was necessary to «mask» them all the same — so they put some kind of ugly echo or reverb effect on the vocals, for once, yielding to technological pressure.

 

The result is that the singing problem still remains and is well visible, but the vocals tend to sim­ply disappear behind the guitars' wall of sound — to the point that sometimes I almost fail to no­tice when exactly the vocalist is supposed to come in, or, at least, when exactly his ad-libbing in the song intro finally shifts into the verse melody. This is totally frustrating, particularly on the better songs: I cannot help thinking how, with improved mixing and production, 'Playing With Girls', for instance, could have turned into a fabulous classic, well on the level with Back In Black material. (Could have, I'm not taking any chances).

 

Throw in the strangest album title so far — the first AC/DC album title, in fact, to completely dump their power effect — and the unimpressive album sleeve (an actual fly on the wall? imagine that!), and there is no disputing the fact that the band has, indeed, ran into deep trouble. But I still give the album a moderate thumbs up, on the strength of its strong half and the bravery of its very existence in the age of Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe.

 

BLOW UP YOUR VIDEO (1988)

 

1) Heatseeker; 2) That's The Way I Wanna Rock'n'Roll; 3) Meanstreak; 4) Go Zone; 5) Kissin' Dynamite; 6) Nick Of Time; 7) Some Sin For Nuthin'; 8) Ruff Stuff; 9) Two's Up; 10) This Means War.

 

After the critical and commercial failure of Fly On The Wall, AC/DC's fortunes perked up some­what with the release of Who Made Who, the band's soundtrack to Stephen King's Maximum Over­drive (apparently, AC/DC happen to be King's favorite band, which should come as no sur­prise to King fans because, in reality, AC/DC are everybody's favorite band, it's just that not eve­rybody has properly understood it so far. But someday, even you will see the light). Granted, it merely gave the fans an opportunity to re-buy such old hits as 'You Shook Me All Night Long', along with two punchy, but forgettable instrumentals and the title track — a catchy pop-rocker that nevertheless may have alarmed some purists with its big electronic drum sound.

 

Two years later, the purists had every cause to rejoice: not only did the band's next album con­tain no traces whatsoever of any electronic tampering, but the Young brothers were obviously dead set on correcting Fly On The Wall's horrendous mix problems by reteaming with their old pro­ducing duo of Vanda & Young. They were also dead set on recapturing the ballsiness of yore: for the first time since 1980, they come up with a proper album title — alluding to healthy destruc­tion and, along the way, poking fun at MTV; a proper album sleeve — Angus bursting through a shattered and splintered video screen; and a proper album introduction, as 'Heatseeker' stomps into your room at breakneck speed.

 

At this point, stylistics would require the use of a turn of phrase such as «Too bad they manage to strangle all hope by the time the second song comes along...», and, in fact, such was, and still is, the attitude of quite a few critics, who have worked hard at creating the image of Blow Up Your Video as the lowest, or one of the lowest, points in the band's career. But guidelines for measu­ring the level of awesomeness of an AC/DC album do not generally go beyond gut reaction, and what can I do if my gut reaction reads overtly positive?

 

Seriously, at least half of these songs are fun. What other AC/DC record starts and ends with a speedy rocker? And not just a speedy rocker, but 'Heatseeker' is their liveliest anthem to the plea­sures of headbanging in a long, long time — I will certainly take its Chuck Berry attitude over the fat pomp of 'For Those About To Rock' any time of day — whereas 'This Means War' is just as exciting in terms of showcasing Angus' «tapping» technique as the far better known 'Thunder­struck', just not as anthemic.

 

There are also nice apocalyptic notes scattered here and there, most overtly so in 'Some Sin For Nuthin', with arguably the most meaningful lyrics Brian Johnson ever wrote: 'Some sin for gold, some sin for shame, some sin for cash, some sin for gain, some sin for wine, some sin for pain, but I ain't gonna be the fool who's gonna have to sin for nothing!' — and the brothers come up with a suitably grim riff and an ominous atmosphere. «Intellectually oriented» fans of the band like to complain, with generally good reason, about how the coming of Johnson ruined AC/DC's flashes of street wit, sarcasm, and self-irony embodied by Bon; but songs like this could have very easily fit onto an album like Powerage, and might make one want to think twice before pro­nouncing judgement on Johnson's cranium capacity (which would necessarily involve some lame joke about his cap, I suppose).

 

Other good riffs can also be found. 'Meanstreak' has one, presented in a cool alternation with a memo­rable bass line (a rarity!). 'Two's Up' has one — a weeping one! 'Kissin' Dynamite' hasn't got one, but the chorus is still fun, and the song, with its slow ominous build-up, has later been employed as the blueprint for about half of the Ballbreaker album. It may take a couple listens to get used to the amicable nature of these hooks — which, perhaps, accounts for the lack of luck, since we generally expect to be satisfied with an AC/DC record at first listen, otherwise, what's the point? — but once you're in the game, you won't want to let it go. As for the filler tracks, there certainly are some (I can never remember a single thing about 'Ruff Stuff' or 'Go Zone', for instance), but this is the obligatory blame of just about any AC/DC album.

 

The saddest thing is the ongoing deterioration of Johnson's voice. They still put a heavy echo on it, but not nearly as heavy as the last time around, and the ever-increasing rasp begins to get on one's nerves. The thing to do is try not to concentrate on it at all; every time I start thinking about it, I begin to feel a nasty lump in my own throat, and, instead of just digging the music, experi­ence admiration for the humanism of the Young brothers, stuck with a pathetic voiceless shadow of a formerly terrifying singer for the next two decades, yet gallantly refusing to let him go — surely they didn't just let him tag along because of the fans growing accustomed to the cap and the wife beater shirt? There's chivalry involved, right?

 

All in all, a thumbs up; this is, by all means, a serious improvement on Fly On The Wall, even though it is still riddled with problems of inconsistent songwriting, average mixing, and progres­sively deteriorating singing. But it does rock.

 

THE RAZOR'S EDGE (1990)

 

1) Thunderstruck; 2) Fire Your Guns; 3) Moneytalks; 4) The Razor's Edge; 5) Mistress For Christmas; 6) Rock Your Heart Out; 7) Are You Ready; 8) Got You By The Balls; 9) Shot Of Love; 10) Let's Make It; 11) Goodbye & Good Riddance To Bad Luck; 12) If You Dare.

 

The choice of Bruce Fairbairn, the former producer for Bon Jovi and the corporate incarnation of Aerosmith, was weird, especially right after the reteaming with Vanda and Young — in spirit, no two production styles could be more different. However, what with all the critical lashing and the singer continuing to lose his voice at an alarming rate, the band needed a commercial shot in the arm, and, most probably, they expected Fairbairn to give them the same kind of slick stimulus that they had earlier received from Lange. Amazingly, this is exactly what happened!

 

The Razor's Edge is AC/DC's «poppiest» record since at least Highway To Hell, and, although some of the veteran fans despised its clean and merry nature, the casual listener need not be afraid. Fairbairn was not stupid enough to try to deprive the band of its trademarks — he simply pushed them into exploring other directions than the exclusively blues-oriented hard rock style, and he is probably responsible for the odd diversity of the album.

 

Indeed, had it sustained the same level of variety as displayed by the first four tracks, The Ra­zor's Edge might have become one of AC/DC's biggest artistic triumphs. The famous «tapping» (actually, «pseudo-tapping») melody of 'Thunderstruck' might have partially endeared the song to hair metal lovers, but it still retains the tone and the punkish spite of AC/DC, never ever going in­to any of the corny van Halenish «God of Thunder» modes, despite invoking thunder all the time  — and its busy droning instantly commands the listening attention of just about everyone. Who says this band is boring? On 'Thunderstruck', there is about a miriad subtly different ways in which An­gus' and Malcolm's guitars connect with and disconnect from each other, and, at the same time, it is one of the greatest driving songs of all time. At least today, when people are no longer cursed with having it blast out of every second car window, as it used to be in 1990.

 

'Fire Your Guns' returns us to more traditional territory, but in a major way — not only is it one of the band's fastest songs ever, but they seem to have remembered what it is like to plan and re­cord a superbly constructed three-minute rocker with not one second wasted. Riff, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, instrumental bridge, instrumental verse, bridge, chorus, short ma­niacal build-up to the finale, each in its right place: three minutes of getting your ass kicked by the elite squad of ass-kicking. Johnson sounds like he is busy regurgitating his vomit most of the time, but, in a way, this only adds to the ass-kicking.

 

Then — one more surprise with 'Moneytalks', another hit single that lands them firmly in the «po­wer pop» camp, what with that anthemic chorus and the song's general party attitude. Who cares? Why complain? The Youngs have provided not one, but two memorable riffs for the occasion — I actually like the brain-pounding verse riff far better than the beer-chugging chorus riff — and what other criteria are there for judging the quality of their songs? Yes, one can understand some of the old fans worrying, but there is no need for us to join their ranks, at least not until we get the true statistics on how many people started going to AC/DC shows hoping to hear 'Come on, come on, listen to the money talk!' and leaving in disgust at the sounds of 'Whole Lotta Rosie' or 'Hells Bells'. And even if some did — so what?

 

Speaking of 'Hells Bells', the title track clearly strives for a similar apocalyptic vibe, but with a denser, more multi-layered and imposing sound, trying to go a little beyond basic ass-kicking and establish a generally sinister background with its heavy reliance on power chords and «evil» vocal harmonies. Again, while the approach in itself is not all that different from 'Hells Bells', the overall synthesis is fairly new and, I would say, successful. AC/DC were never in great danger of becoming Iron Maiden anyway, but it is fun to see them trying on this kind of image.

 

It is with the (un)suitably titled 'Mistress For Christmas' that the band starts running out of steam and reverting back to the usual clichés; the remainder of the album is patchy, alternating tight, focused, but not tremendously memorable, rockers ('Shot Of Love', 'If You Dare') with slow-mo­ving lumbering monsters that sound like outtakes from Blow Up Your Video ('Got You By The Balls') and songs that do not have any creative ideas at all ('Goodbye & Good Riddance To Bad Luck', 'Rock Your Heart Out'). They are still crisply produced and all, but this is the breaking point at which Brian's gurgling voice becomes a real nuisance.

 

Another nuisance is that Brian did not write any of the lyrics. In some of his interviews, he con­fesses that he never really liked that occupation, and was only too relieved to hear Malcolm and Angus propose that they shoulder this burden themselves. This is strange, because, next to the Young brothers' word-wielding skills, Johnson is at least a Yeats (and Bon Scott no less than a Lord Byron). As late as Blow Up Your Video, Brian was writing at least some texts that dealt — crudely, but listenably — with the traditional blues topics of trouble, sin, and redemption; the Youngs, ninety percent of the time, seem to only be able to come up with the traditional blues to­pic of the dirty old man. Their idea of a good lyric goes something like this: "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the day; I just can't wait till Christmas time when I can grope you in the hay". Bon must have been rolling in his grave.

 

The album is thus riddled with problems — yet it is still a miraculous achievement for a band of 40-year old codgers who, long past their prime, were still able to make the world pay attention without significantly compromising their style and their values. For that fact alone, as well as the four opening classics, The Razor's Edge is a surefire thumbs up experience. But even on the whole, and even taken out of its context, and even when you have to sit through all the filler, it still delivers the right punches. Since then, the band has failed to deliver anything that would top it, and, at this point, probably never will.

 

LIVE (1992)

 

CD I: 1) Thunderstruck; 2) Shoot To Thrill; 3) Back In Black; 4) Sin City; 5) Who Made Who; 6) Heatseeker; 7) Fire Your Guns; 8) Jailbreak; 9) The Jack; 10) The Razors Edge; 11) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 12) Moneytalks; CD II: 1) Hells Bells; 2) Are You Ready; 3) That's The Way I Want My Rock'n'Roll; 4) High Voltage; 5) You Shook Me All Night Long; 6) Whole Lotta Rosie; 7) Let There Be Rock; 8) Bonny; 9) Highway To Hell; 10) T.N.T.; 11) For Those About To Rock.

 

This memento of the Razor's Edge tour exists in two versions — single-disc and a «deluxe» two-disc variant — and if you care about the band at all, there is no reason not to go for the double CD version, giving a much more precise and detailed impression of a late-period AC/DC show. Culled from various venues, it is very «honest» in that the sound fades out after each track, but on practice this constant fade-in/fade-out is annoying and gives the impression one normally gets from cheap Greatest Hits Live packages, even though the album is actually quite representative of the true AC/DC live set of the period, big hits, fresh numbers from the last two albums, and occasional rarities and oddities interspersed.

 

Arguably, The Razor's Edge tour was the last time the band rocked on stage with the usual amount of juvenile delight — during their subsequent live shows, old age started biting at their heels, which is particularly well visible on video (Angus being a little more restrained and less psychotic), but is subtly reflected in the overall sound as well. On Live, there is no such thing — the band rocks like crazy, which makes it all the more sad to see the further deterioration of John­son's voice, particularly showing on the old Back In Black hits. Of course, he tries to compensate by fini­shing the announcement of each song's title with a beastly roar ("this one's called... 'Sin City', YYAARGGH!"), but this schtick gets fairly obnoxious second time around, not to mention third, fourth, and forty-fourth. Poor guy.

 

Apart from the voice problem, the only other question is the same I have already asked about If You Want Blood: what's the point of an AC/DC live album in the first place? That previous live record made good mainly on the strength of Bon and Angus. This live record, on the contrary,  succeeds despite Brian Johnson rather than because of him, leaving Angus as the only undisputed hero, but even Angus cannot make all of the tracks special, and the recent ones, in particular, are played very much by the book ('Thunderstruck'), meaning you have to pay for more or less the same thing twice.

 

So, what's actually different? Well, some things. You get to hear a less squeaky clean production of 'Who Made Who', without the electronic effects on the drums. You get to hear 'Heatseeker' be­gin with a few bars from 'Rocker' (a song that Brian only performed briefly with the band at the start of his tenure — it was too much of a personalized Bon vehicle for him to hold on to it). You get to hear 'The Jack' with Bon Scott's original «uncensored» lyrics — much less interesting than the double-entendre version, if you ask me (see how censorship rules?). You get to hear Angus play a little bit of Scottish folk music ('The Bonnie Banks O' Loch Lomond') as a happy crowd of Scots actually sings the words. And, most importantly, you get to hear heavily extended versions of 'Jailbreak' (as Angus masturbates — figuratively — and strips — literally), 'High Voltage' (Brian's bit of audience participation), and 'Let There Be Rock' (which spends the last five mi­nutes or so desperately trying to stop, but always failing).

 

None of this is essential, but little is disappointing (I would recommend to skip 'Hells Bells', a song that Brian never managed to get right onstage even in the early days, much less now when the pearly gates to the required high notes have been sealed with nicotine and alcohol), and, be­sides, this is the last young AC/DC album you are ever going to hear. Three years later, they would officially change their names to Angus and Malcolm Old, and the world would never be the same. So, thumbs up for now.

 

BALLBREAKER (1995)

 

1) Hard As A Rock; 2) Cover You In Oil; 3) The Furor; 4) Boogie Man; 5) The Honey Roll; 6) Burnin' Alive; 7) Hail Caesar; 8) Love Bomb; 9) Caught With Your Pants Down; 10) Whiskey On The Rocks; 11) Ballbreaker.

 

The title is stupid at worst, the songs are mediocre at best, and the balance is off. In between The Razor's Edge and Ballbreaker — an interim that lasted five years, seriously longer than any pre­vious lapse period — AC/DC got old, and this is their panicky way of denying the obvious. The only thing that is truly «hard as a rock» about this record is the Young brothers' fingers that certainly get harder with each passing year — through experience as much as worsening skin con­dition. The sound is unmistakable.

 

Still, it must be stated clearly that Ballbreaker is decidedly uncommercial: after the occasional power pop melodies, crowd-pleasing singalong choruses, and dazzling gimmicks of The Razor's Edge, the band goes to basics again. Strictly mid-tempo, very much bluesy, sometimes even lazy and relaxed, this is music for the hardcore AC/DC fan, one who cherishes the vibe of these guys far more than the imprintability of their riffs in memory.

 

Not that there aren't any imprintable riffs. The Youngs stick to two styles — apocalyptic and sexalicious — and when they are in the «look out, danger ahead» mood, one that can be experien­ced equally strong regardless of age, it works: 'The Furor', 'Burnin' Alive', and 'Hail Caesar' are masterful highlights. 'Hail Caesar', in particular, has them seriously playing with fire, culminating in a series of mock-Nazi 'Hail!' exclamations as they warn the unsuspecting beer-guzzling fan against the evils of absolute power; and the riff, totally trivial but utterly evil, shows that they still have it in them to wring total genius from utter simplicity. As for 'Burnin' Alive', its introductory fifty seconds are only second to 'Hell's Bells' in the band's catalog for the status of «Greatest Tension Mounting Moment in AC/DC History» — slowly and patiently, the Youngs' guitars urge their way in, like a couple of vultures circling from afar, finally settling on the carcass to rip it apart to wild carnal cries of chief vulture B. J.

 

It is with the sexalicious part of the story that the real problems begin. Having concocted a cute pop melody for the album opener and lead single, 'Hard As A Rock', they apparently decided not to bother with the rest at all. Not only do songs like 'Cover You In Oil', 'Love Bomb', and 'The Honey Roll' feature some of the most inane lyrics in the band's pedigree (they base their approach on the innuendo-swarming pre-war blues style, but second-rate imitations of salaciousness cannot usually be described by words other than «laughable» or «idiotic»), the melodies are not at all en­gaging. And how many rewrites! Haven't we already heard 'Cover You In Oil' as 'Meanstreak' (where it was much better)? Didn't 'Boogie Man' used to be 'Night Prowler'? And why do they want to parody their own stop-and-start style of 'Whole Lotta Rosie' on the thoroughly inferior 'Caught With Your Pants Down'?

 

On the positive side again, five decent songs out of eleven (three ominous numbers plus 'Hard As A Rock' and the title track, which somehow manages to combine the ominous with the sexalicious) is not an altogether invalid proposition. Plus, Johnson seems to have somehow managed to cope with the destruction of his voice — he does not attempt so frequently to scream his head off, settling into a quiet, but shrill whine that alternates with sporadic Tom Waits-ish gruffness (the latter works par­ticularly well on regular blues numbers like 'Boogie Man' — too bad AC/DC are not truly a blues band), and his presence is thus made more bearable (still, never make the mistake of playing this back to back with Back In Black).

 

So, Ballbreaker is not such an utter waste as it can seem on first listen; a flawed, uncomfortable album whose creators find it hard to deal with the mid-life creativity crisis, but one that might be worth revisiting if you are pursuing the study of the evolution of ballsy hard rock nuances. Judge­ment used to be thumbs down all the way, but these days, I'm not too sure. Surprisingly, I find myself returning to 'Hail Caesar' and 'Burnin' Alive' all the time. They just keep talking to me, the doggone bastards.

 

STIFF UPPER LIP (2000)

 

1) Stiff Upper Lip; 2) Meltdown; 3) House Of Jazz; 4) Hold Me Back; 5) Safe In New York City; 6) Can't Stand Still; 7) Can't Stop Rock'n'Roll; 8) Satellite Blues; 9) Damned; 10) Come And Get It; 11) All Screwed Up; 12) Give It Up.

 

Returning to elder brother George for production — and elder brother George helps them restore the balance by steering them back into the amplified pub rock direction of their earliest releases. If The Razor's Edge was heavy metal with a power-pop edge, and Ballbreaker was heavy metal with a blues-rock edge, then Stiff Upper Lip is no longer heavy metal: it is hard barroom rock, and it works pretty well for the band at this juncture.

 

Turns out the Youngs' riffpark is still running strong. The title track runs on a sly, relatively com­plex blues riff that seeps inside only slowly, but gradually it becomes a cool, humorous pub rock an­them that is neither too lax nor too overstated. It is also fun to see Angus begin his solo with a series of drunk, disjointed, incoherent licks, only to have a steady, climactic Chuck-o-Berry me­lody emerge from under them a few bars later and smash the listener into the ground. But it is Brian Johnson who takes the cake, starting the song off with some gruff Tom Waits-like blues­roaring, tricking one into believing that, perhaps, the high notes are gone forever? — then, once the main body of the song kicks in, bringing you back those high notes with a freshness that you have not experienced for over a decade. (Apparently, he had some throat surgery in the interim).

 

What makes the song so likable? Thematically, it is not all that different from 'Hard As A Rock'; but the former was anthemic and sounded like it took itself too seriously, where 'Stiff Upper Lip' just kicks some modest ass and presents a little self-irony: "I keep a stiff upper lip / And I shoot from the hip", Brian sings, and although we all know that he is quite liable to missing if he really shoots from the hip, there is some relaxed fun in his voice, indicating that he might be firmly aware of that, too. 'Stiff Upper Lip' does not try to prove that they are still tough; it just busies itself with giving you a good time.

 

The same applies to most of this album. The doom-laden feeling of 'The Furor' and 'Burnin' Ali­ve' is nowhere to be seen. The closest this record ever gets to «ominous» is 'Safe In New York City', and even so, mostly because of the tension-mounting arrangement on the opening riff and the late-coming association with 9/11, even though the song itself was released more than half a year before the catastrophe. It is pretty gritty, but certainly not apocalyptic, just tough in a street­wise way, ridiculing the concept of a «safe metropolis» as such.

 

Much more biting and, in my opinion, a minor overlooked gem, is the slow pounding groove of 'Damned', where the Young brothers take on the issue of straightjacketing society — apparently, the most picking issue they have with The Man, as they condemn it with arguably one of their best sets of lyrics. Johnson catches on to it fairly quickly, and his "I'll be damned if I drink or smoke, damned if I steal your joke, damned if I go for broke, damned if I do, damned if I don't!" is surprisingly relevant and poignant for the modern age.

 

But most of the other songs are simply about having a good time. They are ready to rock, they can't stand still, it's getting hot, you can't stop rock'n'roll, she start a-rockin', come and get it — all the regular news. No bad songs, no timeless masterpieces. Catchy choruses. Good clean produc­tion with very little metal edge. Johnson totally tolerable throughout. Throw in a couple extra beers and Stiff Upper Lip goes down nice and smooth. If they and I live for another two hundred years, there is no harm in getting a new album like this with every new decade.    

 

BLACK ICE (2008)

 

1) Rock'n'Roll Train; 2) Skies On Fire; 3) Big Jack; 4) Anything Goes; 5) War Machine; 6) Smash'n'Grab; 7) Spoilin' For A Fight; 8) Wheels; 9) Decibel; 10) Stormy May Day; 11) She Likes Rock'n'Roll; 12) Money Made; 13) Rock'n'­Roll Dream; 14) Rocking All The Way; 15) Black Ice.

 

With most of its members steadily nearing pension age, each new AC/DC album is a curio in it­self, and if there is one reason behind people sweeping it off the racks, it is most likely the need to find out — do they still deliver the kind of crunch that is at least comparable to their classic hits? Can they still cut it? Can I still bang my head to it?

 

This time the firm of Young, Johnson, & Young, Inc., has pushed the waiting period even further: almost eight years between albums. But the length does not really matter. In a certain sense, the last ever AC/DC album — and not a very fine one — was Ballbreaker. Both Stiff Upper Lip and Black Ice function on a different plane: their aim is not to continue the band's career, but ra­ther to remind us, occasionally, of the band's existence. And in between reminders, they can take as much time as they want.

 

Which is why Black Ice got mostly positive responses. It's not because the songs are good — frankly speaking, they are not — it is because, deep down inside, we have all been waiting with accumulating impatience for a new AC/DC album. Then it finally comes out. What's it like? How is Brian's voice? Well, it got better, not exactly Back In Black, but at least back in shades of grey, one can easily listen to it without cringing. How are the guitars? Well, how can the guitars be? Did we seriously expect the Young brothers to switch to banjos and ukuleles? How is Phil Rudd doing on the drums? Well, unless they cut off his arms and legs, he will always be the perfect drummer for this band. Okay, stop right here. Five stars out of five? No, wait, let's make that four stars out of five. After all, only Back In Black can have five.

 

Black Ice does break some of the rules of decency. First, fifteen songs is way too much. I under­stand the Youngs must have accumulated quite a lot during these eight years, but the more songs there are on an AC/DC album, the easier it is to spot reused riffs (e. g. 'Spoilin' For A Fight' = 'Bedlam In Belgium', etc.). Second, they do not need to convince me that they represent the old guard faithfully protecting the legacy of rock'n'roll. 'Rock'n'Roll Train', 'She Likes Rock'n'Roll', 'Rock'n'Roll Dream', 'Rocking All The Way' — guys, enough already. Not even Chuck Berry was that obnoxious with his titles.

 

Third and related, the lead single, 'Rock'n'Roll Train', is not very helpful. AC/DC are at their most punchy with tight, angry, focused tunes, in which respect 'Stiff Upper Lip' was an excellent cho­ice; but this here bombastic anthem, instead, tries to invade the territory of 'Highway To Hell', and, although musically they are about equally simplistic, the latter was at least provoking, while 'Rock'n'Roll Train' simply breeds a bunch of stadium-happy chords. Anthems, with few excep­tions, are embarrassing in general; late-period AC/DC anthems are embarrassing in particular.

 

So it could have been better. But let me, nevertheless, join the chorus and say that an AC/DC al­bum of such caliber is perfectly welcome every ten years (maybe even every five years, although I doubt they are capable today of meeting those deadlines). The 'Hail Caesar'-ish menace returns with the fire and smoke of 'War Machines'; the power-poppy charm of Razor's Edge finds a wor­thy successor in 'Big Jack'; in a rare experimental mood, Angus successfully deflowers the slide guitar on 'Stormy May Day', reminiscent of Led Zeppelin's 'In My Time Of Dyin' but not truly ripping it off, as some pessi­mists have complained; and Brian Johnson follows suit by trying on the shoes of Robert Plant (!) in 'Rock'n'Roll Dream', arguably the closest these guys have ever come to art-rock in their career (if you do not believe it, check the eerie «crowing» effects at the end of the song and tell me there is a precedent).

 

Best of the bunch, however, is 'Anything Goes', a brawny pub-rock tune that explodes with the kind of shiny happy delight one could frequently see on albums by Brian Johnson's original band, Geordie. It is sometimes mentioned that producer Brendan O'Brien was constantly pushing Brian towards singing rather than screaming, calling him a «soul singer» throughout the sessions, and on one song at least, Johnson has managed to remember the way it used to be in the 1970s — to terrific effect. The result is an uplifting, powerful tune, absolutely unoriginal, but delightfully bre­a­king up the monotonousness of the band's hard rock crunch. They even took it with themselves onstage — and as much as I hate to admit it, this is the singing style that best suits Johnson's voice and personality, which, in turn, leads to uncomfortable thoughts about how the man has been pretty much sacrificing himself for the past thirty years. But if he gets at least one song like this per album from now on, the payback will be sufficient.

 

Like Stiff Upper Lip, Black Ice is the kind of an album that is only real good while it is still real hot — we listen to it to celebrate the phenomenon of AC/DC in the 21st century, not as the first choice to satisfy our basic craving for kick-ass rock'n'roll. But what's wrong about a little celeb­rating? Thumbs up for all the good times these guys have given us.

 

LIVE AT RIVER PLATE (2012)

 

1) Intro; 2) Rock'n'Roll Train; 3) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; 4) Back In Black; 5) Big Jack; 6) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 7) Shot Down In Flames; 8) Thunderstruck; 9) Black Ice; 10) The Jack; 11) Hells Bells; 12) Shoot To Thrill; 13) War Machine; 14) Dog Eat Dog; 15) You Shook Me All Night Long; 16) T.N.T.; 17) Whole Lotta Rosie; 18) Let There Be Rock; 19) Highway To Hell; 20) For Those About To Rock (We Salute You).

 

Throughout the later stages of their career, AC/DC have taken good care of ensuring a steady flow of live videos — beginning with 1992's «classic» Live At Donington — but it has been 20 years now since they last released a live audio album, and the reasons are obvious: since most AC/DC shows sound exactly the same way, the only proper way to «relive» an AC/DC show is through the appropriate picture. Basically, what good is a live Angus chord when unaccompanied by an Angus grimace? And how are we supposed to tolerate the irritating gurgling produced by Brian Johnson's larynx if we do not simultaneously get to watch him fist-pumping the air, in that ever-present working man wife-beater?

 

So the natural question is — why did they finally decide to combine the release of this live show, filmed and taped in December 2009 at a Buenos Aires stadium, with a 2-CD audio release? Can there be anything special about this performance? Are AC/DC finally, almost forty years into their career, going to give us a big surprise? Yes, they are... with a seventeen-minute performance of ʽLet There Be Rockʼ. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

 

No, of course not. The only reason for the existence of Live At River Plate is to act as a remin­der — it has now been thirty years since these guys came back in black to us, and they are still here, and they are still kicking the same old ass. To be honest, they do not kick it quite the same way — not so much age, as basic stage professionalism has set in, and even the wildest of the wildest of Angus' ecstatic outbursts seem more disciplined and «ingrained» than they used to be. But that is probably inevitable: the important thing is, the lads prove the point — not only do they not sound in the slightest like old relics, but, on the contrary, the old war machine is still well-oiled and running faster and tighter than ever. Plus, of course, all the technological benefits of modern production — guitars, drums, bass, vocals, everything sounds cleaner and more distinct than ever before. Nothing but the best for these guys — well, you'd probably have a right to noth­ing but the best, too, after spending forty years in the business.

 

All of which, of course, guarantees one and exactly one listen to the album, upon which you may safely return it to your local library or collector's shelf. The fact that they decided to include re­cordings from one show only (actually, three nights were involved, but these are petty details) gives this better continuity and authenticity than the Live album from 1992, but also surmises the inavoidable — most of the songs are well-known crowd pleasers; in fact, 12 out of 19 songs over­lap with Live, with 4 others played from the latest studio album — essentially, only the deci­sion to bring back to life ʽShot Down In Flamesʼ and ʽDog Eat Dogʼ comes across as mildly surprising, and not particularly indicative of the whole atmosphere.

 

So what is there to comment upon? Brian Johnson's voice is in good form for his age, proving that the studio feats of Black Ice were not performed by a fake (but we trust the band on that one — if we stop trusting AC/DC, what else is there remaining in the world to trust?). The Young brothers remain reliable warhorses. The Argentinian audiences are enthusiastic to the core (after all, for most people in the world, AC/DC is the next best thing to soccer, and some don't even see the difference all that well). Angus does his striptease thing on ʽThe Jackʼ, which only works for the video — on the audio, the unsuspecting novice simply gets to wonder what the hell it is that makes the people go ga-ga as the band is simply pushing a melody-less 12-bar structure on them for ages. The new songs mesh in well with the old stuff (although I, for one, would love to hear ʽAnything Goesʼ for a change). The 17-minute jam on ʽLet There Be Rockʼ is overcooked be­yond mercy, but at least most of it is set to the song's general frantic pace, so feel free to indulge your inner headbanger until the head finally falls off.

 

In short, the universe still stands, so, if anything, a two-hour long listen to Live At River Plate is simply a good remedy against the hidden menace of the Mayan calendar for those who think they might need one. Global financial crisis? Arab Spring? Justin Bieber? Go on, take one more bite of AC/DC — add some much-needed stability to your life. Even in the 21st century, some things never change, and that's cool by me.

 

ROCK OR BUST (2014)

 

1) Rock Or Bust; 2) Play Ball; 3) Rock The Blues Away; 4) Miss Adventure; 5) Dogs Of War; 6) Got Some Rock & Roll Thunder; 7) Hard Times; 8) Baptism By Fire; 9) Rock The House; 10) Sweet Candy; 11) Emission Control.

 

The album cover looks suspiciously reminiscent of Back In Black, and this may be no coinci­dence: just like its more than thirty-year old predecessor, Rock Or Bust comes with the loss of a crucial member — not nearly as lethal, but equally gruesome, since brother Malcolm, suffering from severe dementia, was unable to continue working with the band, and had to be replaced. His riffs and «anchoring presence» had been every bit as vital to the AC/DC sound as the surface flashiness of brother Angus, so, in theory, this could have been a crippling loss. In keeping with the family spirit, though, they now enlist nephew Stevie Young to fill in his shoes — and, sur­prisingly (or not too surprisingly: a Young is a Young, after all), we end up not feeling a lot of difference at all: Stevie keeps the famous tone and the equally famous metronomic precision of Malcolm right there in the family.

 

That said, Rock Or Bust ain't no Back In Black. If we are talking on the nuanced level, where not every AC/DC album actually sounds the same, remember that Back In Black was tremen­dously energized by the desire to show the world that «we're back, we're kicking more ass than ever before, we own this motherfuckin' universe, and we laugh Death, Hell, and good taste right in the face». In comparison, Rock Or Bust only tells us that «we're still here, and we're holding our positions steady enough». Where Black Ice still had at least one or two novel ideas to it, Rock Or Bust, in its entirety, consists of re-assembled and slightly re-tweaked / re-constructed songs from the past two decades. In fact, you could probably make a case that it is almost com­pletely derivable from Black Ice itself — most notably, ʽRock The Blues Awayʼ is a near-total clone of the «poppy» ʽAnything Goesʼ from that record.

 

The album is also worryingly short — for most reviewers, 34 minutes seemed like a blessing and one of its major high points (because AC/DC should be taken in small dosages?), but to me, this feels so unusual that I cannot get rid of the subconscious feeling: Rock Or Bust exists only to assert that they «still exist», and serves no other purpose. They might just as well have put out a single with two songs on it, like the Rolling Stones have occasionally done in the past decade, to keep the infospace and the public warmed up a bit. At this point, numbers have no significance — two, twelve, twenty, two hundred, whatever.

 

In terms of sound, Rock Or Bust leaves no questions: this is still AC/DC alright. Angus has not lost anything in terms of energy, precision, or madness, the rhythm section ticks and tocks away with the usual gruff determination, Brian Johnson's voice is still at the same «late-period top level» as it has been ever since Stiff Upper Lip, and nephew Stevie shows that the Young gene­tic pool is one of the most stable things in the universe. (If there are any more Youngs in the family, and if Brian has a promising relative as well, we could probably keep the band well up into the 2050s and beyond). Thematic subjects also remain the same: sex (#1), rock'n'roll (#2), and what's-the-world-coming-to (#3), not necessarily, but very preferably in that order. Select bits of lyrical wisdom, one per each thematic direction, include "Let's play ball / Shoot down the walls", "In rock we trust / It's rock or bust", and "We'll be the dogs of war / Send me with dogs of war" (I think they were not able to find a proper rhyme for this last one).

 

In all honesty, the band commands respect and even provides some intrigue — now that we know that they can, at least formally, get it on when they are all past sixty and suffered such a heavy blow, there is again no telling when they are going to finally fail. With Rock Or Bust, Angus Young remains the only «founding father» of the band, so I guess that there is no replacing him, at least, but until he joins his brother in the shadows, I guess we can all say that AC/DC's future still looks secure. Not in terms of composing, though — with all these tunes being derivatives of derivatives of derivatives in the n-th degree, I don't even want to waste any time focusing on their riffs or choruses; for historical/chronological reasons, the title track may deserve a corner spot on some future anthology, but that's about it. Nice to hear the old guys can still get it up, though. "Emission control / It's good for the soul" and all that. Who knows how it goes in real life, of course, but whatever is coming from those speakers still has the good old orgasmic effects for their female (and not only female) fans.

 

ADDENDA:

 

BONFIRE (1974-1979/1997)

 

CD I: 1) Live Wire; 2) Problem Child; 3) High Voltage; 4) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; 5) Dog Eat Dog; 6) The Jack; 7) Whole Lotta Rosie; 8) Rocker; CD II: 1) Live Wire; 2) Shot Down In Flames; 3) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; 4) Sin City; 5) Walk All Over You; 6) Bad Boy Boogie; CD III: 1) The Jack; 2) Highway To Hell; 3) Girls Got Rhythm; 4) High Voltage; 5) Whole Lotta Rosie; 6) Rocker; 7) T.N.T.; 8) Let There Be Rock; CD IV: 1) Dirty Eyes; 2) Touch Too Much; 3) If You Want Blood (You Got It); 4) Back Seat Confidential; 5) Get It Hot; 6) Sin City; 7) She's Got Balls; 8) School Days; 9) It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock And Roll); 10) Ride On; CD V = Back In Black.

 

Many fans were seriously disappointed with AC/DC's first attempt at contributing to the «Boxset Movement». They expected rarities a-plenty, outtakes, demos, previously unheard or, at least, well-remastered live recordings, and other surprises. After all, even though the boxset was only supposed to cover the band's years with Bon Scott — hence the punny name — there must have been plenty of gold stuff lying in the 1970s vaults, no?

 

Well, either no or else they are letting it age for a couple more decades. Let us see. The first CD is a live performance from the Atlantic Studios, recorded December 7, 1977. Previously unrelea­sed? Hardly so; it had a very limited LP promo release as early as 1978, although, granted, from 1978 to 1997 it only existed as a collectable. The second and third CDs are the soundtrack to the concert movie Let There Be Rock, filmed in Paris in December 1979 and already owned on VHS (although not on record) by every respectable fan.

 

By the fourth CD, Volts, we finally get to the vaults (get it? vaults — volts! genius!), and this is where things become really odd: studio rarities are basically limited to two alternate versions of songs from Highway To Hell with only slightly different arrangements (this is AC/DC; their ar­rangements of one single song cannot be seriously different), and two early versions of 'Whole Lotta Rosie' and 'Beating Around The Bush' that are given different lyrics and, hence, different titles, but that is obviously not enough to fool anyone. Then there are a couple more live ver­sions and a few tracks from early Australian-only releases.

 

Finally, the fifth CD is Back In Black. 'Nuff said.

 

The biggest mistake that one can make about Bonfire, however, is to think of it from the perspe­ctive of hardcore AC/DC fans, who, for some reason, thought this boxset was for them. It is not. First and foremost, it is for Bon Scott, whose memory the band still lovingly cherishes after all these years, and for the band members themselves, who seem to have taken far more delight in designing and materializing this boxset than in raking in the money from its sales. Second, it is for novices who do not, as of yet, own any AC/DC, and for whom a combined set of Back In Black and some well-recorded live performances (always a better choice than regular best-of compilations) will do nicely as an introduction to the sleazy magic of Scott. Third, it is for the rock critic — to give him a nice pretext for ranting on how disgustingly cool and how street-wise intelligent AC/DC's former frontman has always been in comparison to his replacement.

 

For all those reasons, Bonfire is actually one of the better boxsets on the market. And the per­formances are kick-ass. One finally gets unabbreviated live versions of 'Whole Lotta Rosie', ten awesome minutes of 'Rocker', thirteen of 'Bad Boy Boogie' (alright, this one is not so fine: much of it is just basic chugga-chugga on rhythm guitar, while Angus is busy stripping — there was a good reason they filtered that part out on If You Want Blood), and quite a few Bon-sung numbers from Highway To Hell, including a 'Girls Got Rhythm' that discards all the «poppy» production elements and realizes its hardcore potential to the max.

 

As to the surprising lack of studio rarities, the Youngs have gone on record stating that there ac­tually were none — the band pretty much used up all the good ideas it ever came up with, and bad ideas are hardly worth releasing. Besides, who needs outtakes from AC/DC sessions if each second album they release sounds like a bunch of outtakes anyway?

 

BACKTRACKS (1974-2001/2009)

 

CD I: 1) High Voltage; 2) Stick Around; 3) Love Song; 4) It's A Long Way To The Top; 5) Rocker; 6) Fling Thing; 7) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 8) Ain't No Fun (Waitin' 'Round To Be A Millionnaire); 9) R.I.P. (Rock In Peace); 10) Carry Me Home; 11) Crabsody In Blue; 12) Cold Hearted Man; 13) Who Made Who (12" Extended Mix); 14) Snake Eye; 15) Borrowed Time; 16) Down On The Borderline; 17) Big Gun; 18) Cyberspace; CD II: 1) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 2) Dog Eat Dog; 3) Live Wire; 4) Shot Down In Flames; 5) Back In Black; 6) T.N.T.; 7) Let There Be Rock; 8) Guns For Hire; 9) Sin City; 10) Rock'n'Roll Ain't Noise Pollution; 11) This House Is On Fire; 12) You Shook Me All Night Long; 13) Jailbreak; 14) Shoot To Thrill; 15) Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be; CD III: 1) High Voltage; 2) Hells Bells; 3) Whole Lotta Rosie; 4) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap; 5) Highway To Hell; 6) Back In Black; 7) For Those About To Rock; 8) Ballbreaker; 9) Hard As A Rock; 10) Dog Eat Dog; 11) Hail Caesar; 12) Whole Lotta Rosie; 13) You Shook Me All Night Long; 14) Safe In New York City.

 

Another cooky boxset, released at the peak of the Black Ice hype and featuring the latest and gre­atest in boxset technology: a box that represents a real small working amplifier (one watt power, so as not to disturb the neighbours). Apart from the packaging delights, however, Backtracks on­ly goes to show, once more, just how uncluttered the vaults are.

 

The set exists in two versions — three CDs/two DVDs and two CDs/one DVD, respectively — and only the first CD really makes any proper sense, since it carefully collects all, or most, of the B-sides and rarities that used to make the professional collector a human being of a different or­der from the mere mortal. No more. Now even the laymen have regular, simple access to pleasu­res they had missed, such as:

 

—    the B-side to the 'Jailbreak' single, surreptitiously called 'Fling Thing' but in reality the same 'Bonnie' that the band sang along with the audience on the Live album, only in the studio, with nearly inaudible vocals but quite well-pronounced guitar;

—    the Australian-only release of 'Rock In Peace' (originally on Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Che­ap) and 'Crabsody In Blue' (originally on Let There Be Rock), a mid-tempo and a slow blues shuffle respectively, both of which further develop Bon Scott's sickly predictable brand of teenage humor ('Crabsody In Blue' is basically 'The Jack Part 2');

—    'Cold Hearted Man', a rocker from Powerage that sounds exactly like most other rockers on Powerage and (possibly, for that same reason) disappeared on the American LP;

—    some unremarkable Johnson-era B-sides from the late Eighties. If you hate Blow Up Yo­ur Video, don't bother. I don't, but I still don't bother;

—    'Big Gun', a pretty damn good thing written for the soundtrack of Last Action Hero (well, it ain't Scorsese, but still a good excuse for popcorn consumption). That is, until you rea­lize the principal excitement comes from the same type of vocal hook that used to be 'Bed­­lam In Belgium' (the riff from that one they recycled elsewhere).

 

Granted, this (plus a couple other unmentionables) is no Ali Baba's treasure cave, but still a good source of iron for completists. As for the two live CDs, the small bunch of Bon Scott-era live ma­terial is expendable (no surprises next to the wealth on Bonfire); the nine songs recorded live at Donington in 1991 are a complete waste of space — they are more or less the same as on the Live album from the 1991 tour — unless you are a particular fan of the Donington concert (avai­lable on video in its entirety) and are too lazy to rip the audio off your DVD all by yourself; the live stuff from 1996 lets you see that Ballbreaker was not all bad, but also shows that, by that time, the band was not able to amass the same level of fury onstage that it did in the studio; and the extended live version of 'Jailbreak' from 1985 is terrific until the strip section, where you will be subject to approximately five or six minutes of the bass drum going BOOM... BOOM... BO­OM... while Angus is slowly trying to figure out whether or not to give in to the crowd's demand for admiring his manhood. Authentic, but imminently skippable.

 

So, basically, the only real reason to own these extra two CDs is for the eight live tracks from 1981 to 1983, which capture a still young and fearsome band with hard rock's deadliest singer in his absolute prime. Granted, Brian, even at his very best and healthiest, never sang as good on stage as he did in the studio — apparently, lack of concentration and the necessity to lash and thrash about in order to keep up with the world's wildest guitarist, not to mention the necessity of constantly adjusting his cap (why he never came up with the idea of gluing it on is one of rock's deepest mysteries), hindered him from hitting all the right notes. But belt it out he could, and did, and once you get adjusted to all the little mistakes, these live renditions will be a nice change from the overplayed studio counterparts — plus, they include two of the best songs from Flick Of The Switch, and I count this as a personal gift.

 

Overall, while this is not the symmetric Johnson-era companion to Bonfire that the fans were ex­pecting (under a guessable title like Brianstorm or Brianshake), it is almost the thing — the Bon-era material is underrepresented, and the Brian-era material graciously lets us remember some of the best pages of his legacy. In that sense, it is a companion, and a must-have for fans, if not for general audiences.

AEROSMITH

AEROSMITH (1973)

 

1) Make It; 2) Somebody; 3) Dream On; 4) One Way Street; 5) Mama Kin; 6) Write Me A Letter; 7) Movin' Out; 8) Walkin' The Dog.

 

In the beginning, «The Bad Boys of Boston» were not all that bad. Aerosmith's de­but is loud and raw, but to call it «dirty» would be pushing things; it is even considerably milder than Rolling Stones' records from 1971-72, and the Stones were the particular band that Aero­smith were intent on not just defeating, but obliterating in the big game of sleazy and smutty.

 

Perhaps it is the «backlog syndrome» that is really responsible. All of the songs here, minus one Rufus Thomas cover, are credited to lead vocalist Steven Tyler (one co-credited to lead guitarist Joe Perry), and at least some of them had been written or at least conceived as early as the 1960s, when the art of songwriting still implied certain standards of decency. What Tyler wrote was ir­reverent, kick-ass blues-rock, to which guitarists Whitford and Perry added a tiny touch of glam, and the results entertained, but did not overwhelm.

 

Nevertheless, Aerosmith did sound like no one else from the very beginning. Take, for instance, the opening lines of the near-classic 'Mama Kin' — today, they sound awesomely familiar, but in 1973, few, if any, bands really played like that. The principal role model are the Stones, but Whit­ford and Perry add an extra bit of technicality — not too much, just enough — that Keith was al­ways too lazy or too snobby to bother out, without, however, making a big fuss over it. From the start, they could play in a more complex and precise manner than the Stones without sacrificing the fun and raw energy (running a little ahead of the train, the Stones could never have written anything like 'Toys In The Attic', if you know what I mean).

 

This does not mean Tyler (and Perry) wrote better songs than the Stones, or had cooler guitar tones — but it does mean that questions like «why listen to Aerosmith at all when they're just an American clone of the Stones?» are really pointless, and, in most cases, stem from all sorts of biases, from rampant anti-Americanism to being allergic to the sight of Steve Tyler's facial fea­tures (the latter problem I can certainly understand, but then it's all in the eye of the beholder, and, besides, it is no mean feat being half-Cherokee, half-Italian).

 

Anyway, there are some excellent barroom blues-rockers on the album — apart from 'Mama Kin', whose opening chords were soon to be shamelessly stolen for Patti Smith's 'Ask The Angels' and Blondie's 'One Way Or Another', there is the powerful show-opener 'Make It', the seven-minute harmonica-drenched epic 'One Way Street', the dry, gritty, sex-driven 'Somebody', and even the Rufus Thomas cover rocks quite effortlessly (they do not shy away from pinpointing their idols, since the Rolling Stones also had a cover of 'Walkin' The Dog' on their debut album).

 

On the other hand, there are no truly memorable riffs: the best ones are standard, well-known blues-rock phrases that have been given a little dusting, and the worst ones are just ordinary 12-bar-based accompaniment. Most of the excitement centers on the guitar tones and Whitford's to­tally self-assured, intricate style of stringing chords together; yes, and Joe Perry delivers a couple red-hot solos. Likewise, Tyler has not yet grown into the laryngeal monster we all know and fear; his voice might even sound annoying on some of the tracks, and his forced «throat explosions» during the climactic moments of 'One Way Street' are somewhat out of control.

 

In the middle of all this we find 'Dream On', a song I used to professionally hate for the exact same rea­son that it has been entered in gold letters in the Big Rock Songbook — ushering in the genre of the Power Ballad. Of course, some might say that the first Power Ballad was really Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway To Heaven', or the Carpenters' 'Goodbye To Love', or even Hendrix's 'Little Wing' — but of all these early candidates, it is 'Dream On' that most faithfully satisfies the stereo­type. Big, pathetic, anthemic, building up from sad, silent complaint to explosive prayer without really changing the melody (unlike 'Stairway', where the «soft» and «power» sections are really two different songs somewhat clumsily sewn together), it is the stereotypical «monster ballad» of the 1970s, and its echo still resonates all around us.

 

But it is really a good song; taking more than half of its time to get to the climax (the 'Dream on, dream on...' chorus does not even begin until the three minute mark!), it totally delivers with its epic ascending guitar line and Tyler's transition to falsetto during the culmination. Its mentality is really that of a gospel song, along the lines of the Stones' 'Let It Loose' or 'Shine A Light', only delivered with a transparent sense of pain and desperation, and that is what makes it different from the ordinary, clichéd power ballad (check out the Who's 'Love Reign O'er Me' for a similar case). Particularly stunning is the realisation that Tyler, if his account is to be believed, wrote the song on the piano in friggin' 1965 — had it found its way on record back then, it would have cer­tainly put him on the pop map already in his teens.

 

Joe Perry, notably, did not like the idea of balladeering at first, and was only convinced to record it because of the necessity of generating a radio hit. Turns out that he made the right concession: without 'Dream On', Aerosmith would be forever pegged as a «passable debut», but with its pre­sence, even the lesser numbers are given extra solidness in the context, and a thumbs up rating is guaranteed properly and sincerely.

 

GET YOUR WINGS (1974)

 

1) Same Old Song And Dance; 2) Lord Of The Thighs; 3) Spaced; 4) Woman Of The World; 5) S.O.S. (Too Bad); 6) Train Kept A-Rollin'; 7) Seasons Of Wither; 8) Pandora's Box.

 

No matter how high we may reinstate the value of Aerosmith in years to come, there can be no second opinion about Get Your Wings as the album that defined, explained, and firmly stated the reasons for the band's existence and asserted their individuality. In a symbolic gesture, it introdu­ced the famous Aerosmith logo and, for the first time, gave a large picture of the band in black and white, with facial expressions threatening enough to justify comparison with the famous pho­to of the Stones on their 1964 debut.

 

But let us no longer linger on the Stones connection. The important thing, of course, is not the photo, but musical evolution. The debut album, like we said, was mostly 'Dream On' plus a bunch of solid, but not spectacular blues-rockers. The process of getting one's wings, on the other hand, involves appropriating two musical styles: (a) sleazy, swaggery, nasty cock-rock born out of utter despisal and mockery of not just «the order», but just about every human being in existence — Aerosmith view females as disposable sex objects not because it simply pleases their hormonal system, like AC/DC, but because women are trash and deserve to be treated as such (not that the band has ever had anything against equality of the sexes — men, for them, are just as much trash); (b) dark, dense, uncomfortable, provocative art-rock that involves mutilating the blues-rock idiom until it bleeds enough to resemble the highly convoluted self-expression of progressive artists of the day, but still retains its rootsy core so as not to offend future generations of Jethro Tull-hating rock critics (and, also, because none of the band members ever could, or, in fact, cared about mas­tering the complex techniques of prog).

 

Sometimes both directions are captured at the same time. For instance, 'Lord Of The Thighs' is one of the band's most distinctive sleaze anthems, whose point it is to insinuate that mating with the heavenly beauty of Steve Tyler is, in fact, the primary duty of every respectable woman. (Another version has it that he is impersonating a pimp looking for fresh recruits). But what's up with the weird thudding bassline and its being doubled by Tyler's piano? Why does a simple cock rock song need all the creepy guitar effects and spaced-out vocal howls? And why the concealed Golding reference (it is a Golding reference, isn't it)? This is ritualistic pagan mu­sic, ac­com­pa­nying a friggin' phallic religious ceremony, rather than a mere soundtrack for the simple pleasures of copulation.

 

Things are much simpler with 'S.O.S. (Too Bad)' and 'Pandora's Box', where we first have the lead singer complain about not getting any (life sucks) and then extol the bodily virtues of a lady on a nude beach (well, occasionally, life is good). Normally, the former song gets a decent repu­tation because its melody is desperate and it touches upon the sordid aspects of slum life, whereas the latter has its worse because the melody is cocky and the lyrics are worse — truth is, I believe they were written with about the same level of inspiration and both serve their purposes quite adequately. If you like Aerosmith at all, you gotta accept 'Pandora's Box', although, as Tyler sings, "I gotta watch what I say, or I'll catch hell from women's liberation" — words that ring even truer today than they did in 1974.

 

Things are much more complex with 'Spaced', formally about someone lost in space but metapho­rically about someone lost somewhere much closer to home; and with 'Seasons Of Wither', ano­ther epic ballad that tries to follow the medieval excursions of Led Zeppelin, but, fortunately, does not stray too far away from restrained folk balladeering. These are songs that try to find them a corner on the serious artists' market, and, although they had to bitterly fight for that corner for the rest of their career — just how many people think of Aerosmith as «serious»? — they are both good songs, especially 'Seasons' which Tyler manages to inject with plenty of stateliness.

 

The lead-off single was 'Same Old Song And Dance', a simple balls-to-the-wall rocker that tells you that life sucks in yet another way; but the utmost popularity, for some reason, went to the band's version of 'Train Kept A-Rollin', which is a great song but to which there was little to add after the Yardbirds truly showed the world the phenomenal aggressiveness of its riff. That aggres­siveness is perfectly recaptured by Joe Perry (in a sly fashion, they start the song off as an uncer­tain, boring shuffle, before kicking into high gear after a couple minutes), but if there is any im­provement, it is in Tyler's singing, whose creak and crunch kicks the shit out of Keith Relf (of course, considering that Keith Relf was easily the worst lead singer to front a great Sixties' band, that is not saying much per se).

 

So is the title telling? I guess it is. Aerosmith are being told to get their wings, and they get 'em all right, although they are still a little too inexperienced to learn how to flap them properly. With the solid material easily outweighing the undeveloped throwaways, this is unquestionably a thumbs up record — but, even so, the growth period was far from ever.

 

TOYS IN THE ATTIC (1975)

 

1) Toys In The Attic; 2) Uncle Salty; 3) Adam's Apple; 4) Walk This Way; 5) Big Ten Inch Record; 6) Sweet Emo­tion; 7) No More No More; 8) Round And Round; 9) You See Me Crying.

 

Had Aerosmith never written or played one other song next to 'Toys In The Attic', it should still have been enough to ensure rock immortality — not everyone realizes that, of course, but let me be the first to tell you. Not all blues-rock played at breakneck speed can be breathtaking, and, as a rule, blues-rockers dislike playing at breakneck speed, either out of fear of making too many mis­takes or because they somehow feel that the notes would not be «felt properly». Fools!

 

If there is any direct predecessor to 'Toys In The Attic', it might be Zep's 'Communication Break­down' or Deep Purple's 'Fireball', but I have always felt 'Toys' to be the better song of the three. As Joe Perry's rough, broken-up, don't-give-a-damn riff breaks out of the speakers, it combines the speed and precision of those two with the tattered and battered Keith Richards spirit, and this unique combination, to the best of my knowledge, has never been improved upon. That single second when, out of a bunch of cymbal hiss, there erupts Perry's distortion, is the single greatest moment in Aerosmith history, bar none.

 

Let us not forget, either, that the song's riff is only one good thing about it. Tyler expropriates it for another of his «message» songs about connections between past and present, this time, pain­ting nostalgia as horror — "voices scream... nothing's seen... real's the dream..." — and culmina­ting with the ghost chorus of "toys, toys, toys in the attic" that, on paper, may seem like an unli­kely mating pair for the song's brutal riff, but, on practice, merges with it to form the perfect psy­chedelic experience. Somehow, even Perry's frantic guitar break, all Berry licks and broken limbs, is a great find for this.

 

The album certainly does not live up to the strength of its opener — unsurprisingly, since such openers are generally granted one or two per an entire band's career. But Aerosmith were on a roll all the same. They had found their style: a synthesis of the Stones' rebellious spirit with the achie­vements of hard rock and heavy metal bands of the past five years, and they were still fresh eno­ugh to explore that style's capacities to the very bottom.

 

Toys In The Attic does it all. It kicks ass all over the place, it threatens, it humours, and it is ne­ver boring. A few of the songs want to be boring ('No More No More'; Brad Whitford's 'Round And Round') by putting too much stock in repetition, but are still saved by the sweet sweet spirit that inhabits them — Tyler, in particular, delivers every song as if he were living it out at the exact same moment, and, considering the unique quality of his voice, this alone suffices to neu­tralize the repetitiveness, or even turn it to his own advantage.

 

On the other end of the pole, there are the additional classics. 'Walk This Way' is still unkillable by classic rock radio after all these years (the single great thing about «bad boy anthems»: it is ten times as hard to get sick of them as it is to get sick of 'Hey Jude' or 'Stairway To Heaven'), and the original version is still a much tastier vintage than the not-less-famous, but much-more-pragmatic remake with Run-D.M.C. from the next decade. (On an indirectly related note, Tyler's lyrics can certainly give most gansta rap a good run for their money: "you ain't seen nothin' 'til you're down on a muffin" is, in fact, prime time American Academy of Arts material). 'Sweet Emotion', the band's first encounter with the talk box, defines the idea of «bittersweet» in a rock song — a he­donistic anthem with a terrified heart, and a chorus that is most befitting to be chanted by a seri­ous junkie right upon shooting up (which they probably did).

 

At the center of the pole we find another bunch of moderate classics, including Genesis Accor­ding To Aerosmith ('Adam's Apple'); the joke throwaway cover 'Big Ten Inch Record', where Ty­ler improves on the double-entendres by making the line "...she don't go for nothin' 'cept for my big ten-inch record..." sound exactly like "...suck on my big ten-inch..."; and the obligatory clo­sing ballad 'You See Me Crying', which tugs at certain non-trivial strings in your heart just like the Stones could, at their best, tug at them with ballads like 'Moonlight Mile'.

 

The worst problem with Aerosmith is that much of the time, given their past record of «Stones worship» and their future record of selling out, it is hard to take them seriously. Toys In The At­tic fires off a brief, but magical, period in their career when — once you forget all context — it is hard not to take them seriously. In 1975, Steve Tyler was the troubadour of the slum party style, far grittier and more cutting edge than Bruce Springsteen, and Joe Perry was his guitar partner extraordinaire. The celebration did not last too long, but for two or three brief years, the band did become the undisputed kings of «shit-rock», in the good sense of the term. Thumbs up.

 

ROCKS (1976)

 

1) Back In The Saddle; 2) Last Child; 3) Rats In The Cellar; 4) Combination; 5) Sick As A Dog; 6) Nobody's Fault; 7) Get The Lead Out; 8) Lick And A Promise; 9) Home Tonight.

 

The Day At The Races to Toys' Night At The Opera, Rocks mines the same depths and extracts the same amount of precious metal — if not actually more, because, now that all the holes have been drilled, the flow is made even easier. The general critical consensus tends to think that, al­though it was the big hits on Toys that continue to make Aerosmith a household name, Rocks is, overall, more consistent, and pounds harder all the way through. Well: there certainly is no 'Big Ten Inch Record' on it, and for many, this argument will be decisive.

 

Without getting into fights over quality, let us just notice that Rocks is much thicker than Toys. Since drugs, internal fighting, and changing times had not yet corroded the band's creative spirit, they were still willing to try out new approaches and techniques, which, in the case of Rocks, amounted to more overdubs, an overall heavier sound (some of the riffs here rank among the band's most brutal), various small experiments with song structures, and a damn high tax on Ty­ler's vocals which he has, nevertheless, been able to pay for several more decades of concert life.

 

Another important personal achievement is that second guitarist Brad Whitford steps into his own element as well: not only is he directly responsible for writing two of the album's best songs, but he plays lots of lead guitar throughout, and his quaky, trebly, at times, almost threateningly psy­chedelic textures are a great contrast to Perry's «earthier» riffs. Simply put, Rocks contains some of the greatest bits of twin guitar interplay on an American rock'n'roll band album; with this re­cord under their belt, Aerosmith were now completely immune to the «Stones clones» accusation, since they now rocked way harder than their older brothers. In all likeness, in 1976 Aerosmith were the world's greatest rock'n'roll band.

 

The major hit, still overplayed on classic rock radio, was 'Back In The Saddle', a goofy tale of cowboys, barrooms, and the sex drive, and that is the spirit of Rocks all right. There is no danger here, no incentive to run for your life or to lock up your daughters: when Tyler sings "I'm calling all the shots tonight, I'm like a loaded gun", you know that, in reality, his protagonist is so full of booze (and shit) that a single punch of the nose is prone to make him keel over — not to mention that whether "this snake is gonna rattle" indeed is highly questionable. But there is no question at all that no average Joe is ever going to match the tearing intensity of Steven's 'I'm ba-a-a-a-ck!', every instance of which leaves aching gashes across my own throat from merely hearing it, or the unbelievable high pitch of the final 'riding high!'. He may be dead drunk all right, and unable to get it up when it comes to real action, but boy, what an image — with an attitude like that, few brave men will be able to call the bluff.

 

The rest of the album never lives up to the opening punch, but this is not so much slighting the album as merely stating the fact that 'Back In The Saddle' is in its own class. The good news is that Rocks totally lives up to its name: the next seven songs, from start to finish, do rock like cra­zy, and manage to do that in lots of different, but equally exciting ways. 'Last Child' starts out de­ceivingly, with a mournful line borrowed from the Beatles' 'I Want You', but in a matter of se­conds becomes a cocky, swaggering funkster that is about... going back to the plough? 'Take me back to south Tallahassee'? Uh, ex­cuse me, has someone substituted the wrong lyrics sheet at the last moment? Were Lynyrd Sky­nyrd recording in the next studio? Oh, all right, just some more irony on the part of the proverbial bad dudes. One of these days, they are really going to get it.

 

Also of particular note are 'Rats In The Cellar', with its breackneck speed that tries to outdo 'Toys In The Attic', and that evil, evil break in the middle, with its punk riffage and bluesy harp; and, of course, Slash's favourite song, 'Nobody's Fault', where Tyler drops the comedy and tries on a true apocalyptic mood. The usual saying is that the song is about Californian earthquakes, and so it is, literally, but Tyler is trying to move it beyond that level, to turn it into a macabre pamphlet on man's stupidity (it does remain a little unclear whether the point is that man is so stupid that he cannot prevent earthquake damage, or that man is so stupid he has been sent earthquakes in pu­nishment, or both), while Bradford contributes the correspondingly «rumbling» music. The song would have made Black Sabbath proud, and it is no surprise that quite a few metal bands have covered it with reverence.

 

The incessant, insane ass-kicking only stops on the last track: 'Home Tonight' is another textbook example on how one should tackle the art of the power ballad — by not only writing a decent me­lody, but also giving it a great arrangement, with sharp electric pianos and gruff, garage-style distor­ted guitar breaks instead of anti-musical synths and genetically engineered guitar substitu­tes. And the sense of humor is back, too, with the Beatles quote (everyone knows, after all, that Rin­go Starr was the first person in the world to say 'Now it's time to say good night', although, in gentle­manly fashion, he immediately ceded the copyright to Lennon/McCartney).

 

Rocks is so very much mid-Seventies, and yet, so very much timeless, still a delight after all these years — it is exactly the same age as myself, and here's hoping I might never get old eno­ugh for it. Thumbs up from all sides, of course. This is how Aerosmith are going to be remem­bered by future generations, the children of the children of the children of 'Crazy', 'Cryin', and 'I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing'. No question about that.

 

DRAW THE LINE (1977)

 

1) Draw The Line; 2) I Wanna Know Why; 3) Critical Mass; 4) Get It Up; 5) Bright Light Fright; 6) Kings And Queens; 7) The Hand That Feeds; 8) Sight For Sore Eyes; 9) Milk Cow Blues.

 

Some of the juiciest records in rock happen to be «crash albums» — made during that one parti­cular period where everything is falling apart under the pressure of too much fame, too intense tou­ring, too stubborn record company executives, too stressed personal relations, and, of course, way too many samples of heavy substances. It is completely unethical to expect such albums from your favourite artists — comparable to expecting extra profits from your plantations once you really start putting the whip to those lazy slave bastards — but, after all, no pain, no gain.

 

On the other hand, not everyone is entitled to a proper «crash album». You cannot be talentless (no one will give a damn about your going down if you never truly went up in the first place), and you have to time it carefully — not too soon, because that would be sort of pretentious («who do they think they are? one platinum album and they're already snorting more coke than my wife does at our home parties?»), and not too late, because if you do it past your creative prime, the re­sults will almost certainly be so pitiful that you won't be able to inspire even one future ge­ne­ration of heroin ad­dicts.

 

Considering all these things, Draw The Line is one of the absolute best crash albums that can be found on the market. It's just like Rocks, only with the polar signs reversed: same sound, utterly different side effects. An album that the band didn't really feel like recording (not the «proper» way that the studio expected it to be recorded, anyway), but plowed on regardless. They were still young and brawny, already professional, and completely wasted, and Draw The Line is like a reckless, totally drugged out party, with the level of self-exposure reaching up to the skies.

 

Think of this: Draw The Line is the only Aerosmith album not to feature even a single ballad — meaning that the band really put the commercially-oriented department of their collective brain on hold. The sequencing is about as abysmal as the ugly band caricature on the album sleeve: in­stead of elegantly closing the record with another gentlemanly goodbye like 'Home Tonight', they shut it off with a rippin' version of 'Milk Cow Blues', a blues-standard-turned-rock'n'roll that used to serve as a great album opener (e. g. The Kink Kontroversy). The mix, overall, is as muddy and dirty as the one on Exile On Main St., to which the album is often compared. No wonder that ninety-nine percent of the critics either slammed the record completely upon release, stating that the Aerosmith miracle was over, or grudgingly acknowledged this to be «the beginning of the end». Which it was, of course, but could we have two of those, please?

 

From the opening power chords, slide intro, and massive, unforgettable riff of the title track, and right to the very end Draw The Line rocks just like Rocks. Not all the songs are expertly written, but neither is this a songwriting disaster, as some claim. 'Draw The Line' did not become Aero­smith's last major Seventies' hit for nothing — Perry's melody ranks up there with their finest. On 'Get It Up', he effortlessly switches from rootsy slide to growling funky metal over the course of one and the same riff; how cool is that? And 'Sight For Sore Eyes' is their most exciting venture into the realm of sweet sleazy funk.

 

That said, it is true that the groove is more important for Draw The Line than the chord sequen­ces. Perry's hoodlum chops have gotten even hoodlum-er, and he offers us yet another proof to being the American counterpart of Keith Richards — by getting one vocal solo spot per album on an entirely self-written song, showing that he has got no singing voice whatsoever, and still so­me­how getting by merely on the convincing strength of the performance ('Bright Light Fright', a song that, in 1977, he could have easily donated to Keith and no one would have noticed: "It's the dawn of the day, and I'm crashed and I'm smashed, as it is I'm feeling like my chips are cashed"). Whitford, unabashed, adds light and color to Perry's gloom, more responsible for the party spirit of the album than anyone else. And Tyler, never forgetting how to pharyngealize on key, delivers some of the most piercing screaming of his career, be it in the climactic verse of 'Draw The Line' or on the rabid screaming of "daaaahhhctor, daaahhhctor, pleaaaaahse!" in 'The Hand That Feeds' (a much-maligned song, by the way, but which I have always liked for its sheer madness).

 

Stuck in the middle of this debacle is 'Kings And Queens', a song that shows exactly how crazy they were at that time — to the point of writing an amateurish prog-rock epic! If the rest of the album fit in relatively well with the angry punk explosion of 1977 (closing our eyes on a total lack of the «socially conscious» factor), 'Kings And Queens' singlehandedly aligned them with the rest of the dragons that the Pistols were out there to slay. For a reputation-killing five minutes, Tyler withdraws from the party and dreams about how cool it must have been when «long ago in days untold...» there used to be knights, maidens, swords, Vikings, might and magic, but — wha­d­daya know — "Lordy, they died". There are pianos, too, and synthesizers, and ultra-serious ba­cking vocals, and epic instrumental passages (at one point, an alarm siren goes off for about thirty seconds, probably to warn us all of the impending death of everyone and everything).

 

In a way, this is even more ridiculous than classic Uriah Heep material, but this is where the po­wer of context comes into play: the sheer weirdness of hearing this in between 'Bright Light Fright' and 'The Hand That Feeds' adds a pinch of surprise value. Had they written it four years before and placed it on the same record with 'Dream On', this might have been judged as a corny, disgusting move (young ambitious whippersnappers who think that rock music cannot be taken seriously unless it is «serious», i. e. telling people about St. George and the dragon); on Draw The Line, it is like a bizarre, unpredictable action of a mental patient. (And it is not all that bad from a melodical standpoint, either — there, now I've said it).

 

If I were a professional determinist, I would probably set out to prove the theory that, after Draw The Line, the band had but two choices: within a decade, either all of its members, or, at least, the «Toxic Twins» of Tyler and Perry would be dead from various drug- or drink-related ac­cidents, or they would have to end up with Permanent Vacation. Their taking the latter choice was depressing for us true grit lovers, but sane and healthy for them, and, like all good Samari­tans, we must be happy for their corporal and mental regeneration. The good news is, we don't ne­cessarily have to participate in it. If the price for this breathtaking exploration of The Lower Depths with Draw The Line were Desmond Child and Diane Warren, I'm willing to take it, be­cause Diane Warrens will come and go, but "Checkmate, honey, beat you at your own damn ga­me, no dice honey, I'm livin' on the astral plane" will stay forever. Resumé: with the brain shut off completely, annihilated by the vile flank assault of 'Kings And Queens', the heart takes center stage and issues the album a thumbs up from its very bottom.

 

LIVE! BOOTLEG (1978)

 

1) Back In The Saddle; 2) Sweet Emotion; 3) Lord Of The Thighs; 4) Toys In The Attic; 5) Last Child; 6) Come To­gether; 7) Walk This Way; 8) Sick As A Dog; 9) Dream On; 10) Chip Away The Stone; 11) Sight For Sore Eyes; 12) Mama Kin; 13) S.O.S.; 14) I Ain't Got You; 15) Mother Popcorn; 16) Train Kept A-Rollin'.

 

Obviously not a bootleg, but just as obviously live — the intent here was to beat the bootleggers by offering the public at large an official equivalent of a bootleg: raw, untampered, and sweaty, yet at the same time boasting professional sound quality. The stuff that dreams are made of. The «pseudo-bootleg» touches, like the plain bootleggish album sleeve or the «missed» listing of one song on the album ('Draw The Line'), are a show-off, but the rest is genuine.

 

Two schools of thought dominate here. One says Live! Bootleg is a rough-hewn, exciting, price­less document of America's greatest rock'n'roll band at its most intense — that small period right after the creative peak when everything has started to fall apart, but only just started, so that this very threat of disintegration keeps things interesting. The other one says Live! Bootleg does nothing but engage in an aw­ful-sounding, muddy, sacrilegious destruction of the classics on the part of a bunch of babbling junkies, thoroughly wasted, basted, and pasted.

 

Both schools are right, and, furthermore, there is no contradiction between the two. If you want a tight, fearsome, unstoppable live performance of 'Back In The Saddle', skip forward fifteen or even twenty years; I've heard technically better versions from the band dating to as late as their oldie tours of the 2000s. The difference is that in the 2000s, they were performing 'Back In The Saddle' as a classic — an untouchable part of the sacred rock'n'roll treasure grove; in 1977, they were still living it out. So if Tyler's "I'm baaaack!" on this particular album sometimes degenera­tes into butchered-piglet squealing, and Perry's riffage sometimes stands on its head, it is not just the drugs that are responsible (although that, too) — it is the classic damn-it-to-hell attitude of the 1970's rocker. Take it — or leave it.

 

Of course, with the level of ferocity displayed on their studio albums, none of these live equiva­lents are truly equivalent. Missed cues, flubbed lines, confused chords, all of the big hits have this kind of shit in spades; you will love this if you think that is what «real life» is, and hate this if you think that you have had plenty of «real life» already from your neighbor kid downstairs, a guy so utterly tonedeaf, his parents had no choice but to buy him an electric guitar for Christmas. Then again, it's not that bad, and, overall, tragedy usually only strikes on the numbers that are the most vocally demanding — 'Back In The Saddle', 'Toys In The Attic' (for some reason, Perry always sings harmony with Tyler on this one, even though the guy can barely hold a note even on his bet­ter days, and those were far from the better ones), and a couple others.

 

Minor additional reasons to own the album include an extended, dark and creepy jam on 'Lord Of The Thighs'; Perry's ridiculous, but amusing decision to filter the riff of 'Walk This Way' through a talkbox, a regular fixture on the 1977 tour; and two new songs — the band's relatively success­ful cover of 'Come Together' (which they also sang for the infamous Sgt. Pepper movie, admit­ted­ly, one of the few highlights) and 'Chip Away The Stone', a solid, but hardly classic, Rocks-style mid-tempo rocker.

 

Major additional reason includes the «bootleg-style» insertion of two old live recordings from 1973, covers of Jimmy Reed's 'I Ain't Got You' and James Brown's 'Mother Popcorn', giving us the early bluesy Aerosmith in full flight and also offering a glimpse of the early funky Aerosmith: nobody beats Brown at his own game, but at least it gives Tyler a good excuse to show us how deep down his unusually lengthy larynx he can really go. Actually, both performances are subpar and as far removed from the classic big smelly Aerosmith as possible, but what a supercool histo­ry lesson — and I wish your next door band could kick so much ass on a Jimmy Reed number.

 

So, this was the worst of times, this was the best of times, in any case, Live! Bootleg gives you a taste of some of the dirtiest live rock'n'roll playing in history just like Draw The Line showed us some of the dirtiest studio rock'n'roll production in the exact same history. For glossy pornogra­phic polish, check out 1975 and 1976; for playing it rough, Live! Bootleg gets a hearty thumbs up — at the very least, if you only need one live Aerosmith album, this one's it, warts and all.

 

NIGHT IN THE RUTS (1979)

 

1) No Surprize; 2) Chiquita; 3) Remember (Walking In The Sand); 4) Cheese Cake; 5) Three Mile Smile; 6) Reefer Head Woman; 7) Bone To Bone (Coney Island White Fish Boy); 8) Think About It; 9) Mia.

 

The burning-out was accelerating almost exponentially by this point; still, the band were all set and poised for Draw The Line Vol. 2, another equally delightful mess of dirty bad-boyism with­out a cause, and, doubtless, would have managed a perfect duplicate if, midway through the ses­sion, their clueless management had not sent them on yet another tour in order to repay the accu­mulated debts. The tour became a personal disaster and broke out the five years of Tyler/Perry feud, with Joe slamming the door midway through; he was quickly replaced by Jimmy Crespo, a strong hell-raiser in his own right but lacking Perry's songwriting talents and personality.

 

As a result, the album is seriously flawed, although, to the band's credit, the Perry part and the Crespo part do not seem too disjointed or incompatible. Once you disentangle them, the diffe­rence is obvious: with Crespo, they keep falling back on Tyler-dominated power ballads ('Reme­mber', 'Mia'), and poorly conceived covers (the Yardbirds' 'Think About It') — a long distance from Per­ry's sleazy boogie that rules the rest of the record (although it is also Perry's playing, not Crespo's, that we hear on 'Reefer Head Woman', an obsolete piece of generic 12-bar blues that last saw the light of day around 1973). However, the sequencing is intelligent enough so that the weaker material seems strengthened by the powerhouse numbers, not vice versa.

 

Besides, «weaker» does not mean «worthless». The decision to go ahead with their cover of the Shangri-La's classic 'Remember (Walking In The Sand)' as the lead single was ridiculed at the time, and still remains controversial, but, in all fairness, Tyler gives a good reading, and the song, with its mix of overdriven teenage pathos and unforgettable melodic moves, had been screaming for a power-ballad arrangement for at least a decade, so one can only rejoice that it was Aero­smith who got there first, and not, say, Bon Jovi. Plus, it gives Steve another opportunity to reach for those hysterical high notes that fit the song's heartbroken mood; considering that original sin­ger Mary Weiss could never reach that high, it is only too just that she herself shows up to sing backing vocals on Tyler's version (but definitely not just that she was left uncredited on the ori­ginal single release).

 

And, while 'Mia' starts showing the first signs of balladeering pomposis that ate up the band's soul a decade later, it is still fairly interesting; at the very least, it leaves you wondering why Tyler de­cided to dress this harmless little McCartney-style piano ode to his daughter in Gothic overtones, minor chords and echoes and sorrowful solos and ghost-whispered name-calling and all. Fortu­nately, today Mia Tyler lives the prosperous life of a heavily tattooed «plus-size model» rather than a nightmarish Edgar Allan Poe heroine, so Daddy's spook thing must not have worked.

 

The hardcore Aerosmith fan, however, will hardly want to bother with the ballads; the album's true meat is to be found among the ass-kickers and ball-breakers. The straightforwardly autobio­graphical 'No Surprize' is a worthy sequel to 'Draw The Line' as an album-opener; the main riff is not as memorable, but the punch is comparable. 'Chiquita' is not a Latin dance number, as the title might want to suggest, but rather a thunderous glam-rock rave-up in the old style of 1972-73, all big waves of distorted guitars and mean-sounding brass backing. 'Cheese Cake' is way too deriva­tive of Led Zeppelin's 'When The Levee Breaks', but done the nasty Aerosmith way (it's about what really matters, after all — wild sex in the working class, not some meaningless apocalyptic shite). And both 'Three Mile Smile' and 'Bone To Bone' are solid funky rockers that still manage to totally satisfy the formula, if little else.

 

In short, if we did not know about the awful happenings in the Aerosmith camp at the time, it would be impossible to firmly guess that Night In The Ruts shows something wrong with the band. At worst, there is a slight shortage of material — which is why the generic blues of 'Reefer Head Woman' crawls back — but every great artist, even in peak forms, is sometimes liable to in­cluding a bit of filler. Technically, and under great scrutiny, the cracks start to show, but overall, Night In The Ruts is just another solid Aerosmith album from their best decade. Turn off your critical brain, which is often prone to confusing «faint beginning of the slide» with «artistic cata­strophe», and let the heart direct your thumbs up.

 

ROCK IN A HARD PLACE (1982)

 

1) Jailbait; 2) Lightning Strikes; 3) Bitch's Brew; 4) Bolivian Ragamuffin; 5) Cry Me A River; 6) Prelude To Joa­nie; 7) Joanie's Butterfly; 8) Rock In A Hard Place; 9) Jig Is Up; 10) Push Comes To Shove.

 

With Brad Whitford leaving the band no sooner than the start of the recording session for their next album, replaced by newcomer Rick Dufay, Rock In A Hard Place, informally, could be regarded as a solo Steve Tyler album masking as an Aerosmith production. But it shouldn't. For all its flaws, and it got some, it is, most undoubtedly so, a proper Aerosmith record; in fact, in a certain important sense, it is the last proper Aerosmith record.

 

Clearly, the new-look band, now under Tyler's unwavering rule (wavered only in direct pro­por­tion to the consumed cocaine), were trying to pull their act together and steer away from the total chaotic jumble of the last two records. There is a slightly higher level of coherence to the tracks, a slightly more calculated approach to riffs and melodies, and a slightly improved attitude towards experimenting with new sounds. However, for the most part, they still fail to straighten out the mess, and thank God for that — we need this band as smelly and sleazy as they can get.

 

The single was 'Lightning Strikes', a modernized rock song opening with a silly synth intro — be­ca­use if Queen themselves deemed it unsuitable to enter the new decade without undergoing key­boardial defloration, how could the rest not follow suit? Fortunately, the silly sounds evaporate fairly quickly, leaving us with a kick-ass rock'n'roller (the only one on the album that still has Brad Whitford playing rhythm). 'Jailbait' was not a single — maybe the title was deemed too pro­voking — but is even better, bringing Tyler's sexual urges to the hardest boil in Aerosmith histo­ry: fast, screamy, agonizing, punctured by a simplistic, but insane descending riff that culminates with a "ja-a-a-a-ail... BAIT!" — Tyler's vivid impression of himself as a hungry shark making a swipe at the nearest 15-year old. Excellent way to satisfy your inner pedophile (which we all have inside, or we would not be listening to Aerosmith in the first place).

 

The rest of the album's rockers are not up to those standards, but the general sound is the same: Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay do not match the drunken hooliganry of Joe Perry and the imagi­native powers of Brad Whitford, but they can definitely understand what is the Aerosmith sound and what is not. We can all try to imagine just how differently would, say, 'Cheshire Cat' have sounded with the old guys on guitars, but we can hardly say that, as it is, it does not sound mean, ballsy, and aggressive.

 

The non-rockers are shaky, but still a far cry from the power ballad swamp of years to come: 'Cry Me A River' is an old torch song that fails to capture the same level of intensity and desperation that the band had managed to attain with 'Remember'; 'Joanie's Butterfly' is a really bizarre art-pop song, one of the most enigmatic creations in Aerosmith history that will be either genius or garbage to you no matter how hard you try to keep the middle ground; and the anthemic closer 'Push Comes To Sho­ve' is nearly destroyed by Tyler's ridiculous decision to sing the chorus in his highest range (a.k.a. « The Way I Sing While They Are Slowly Sawing Away At My Throat Ar­teries»). No masterpieces, but nothing intolerable, either.

 

For all the negative press the record got in its time and continues to get (yeah, because only the inimitable twin magic of Joe Perry and Brad Whitford can bring worth to such Aerosmith master­pieces as the rock'n'roll guitar monster 'I Don't Want To Miss A Thing') I can only hope that, in time, Rock In A Hard Place will get its proper respect as an album that is better — okay, almost better — than all of the band's subsequent career put together. This is the very last time you get to hear the Bad Boys truly play it «Bad». No more no more. Thumbs up, and a big thank you to Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay who did their best to prolong the existence of the true Aerosmith spirit by a few more years.

 

DONE WITH MIRRORS (1985)

 

1) Let The Music Do The Talking; 2) My Fist, Your Face; 3) Shame On You; 4) The Reason A Dog; 5) Sheila; 6) Gypsy Boots; 7) She's On Fire; 8) The Hop; 9) Darkness.

 

Reunion! Things happen fast with this band — at the time when their progenitors, the Stones, were just entering the crucial splintering phase, Aerosmith were already welcoming back their lost guitarists. Joe Perry, in some of his interviews, remembers how Rick Dufay pulled out of the new-look Aerosmith of his own free will, stating that this will never work unless the «Toxic Twins» get back together. No idea about Jimmy Crespo, but the dry fact is that by late 1984, all five original members were back together, although still high on drugs much of the time.

 

Unfortunately, the momentum was lost. The world had already shown a clear lack of interest in the old Aerosmith sound through the diminishing sales of Rock In A Hard Place, and then three years of complete studio silence finished the job. With hair metal on the rise, capturing the mar­ket niche formerly occupied by trashy Seventies' rockers, Aerosmith had to adapt — sacrificing their integrity — or to fade away to the status of a small cult band. It is our big luck, then, that in 1985 their minds were still too clouded by substances for them to see it properly.

 

Of course, Done With Mirrors is no longer the Aerosmith of old. Much of the fault lies with the outside circumstances: having signed a new contract with Geffen Records instead of the old Co­lumbia association, they dumped their old producer, Jack Douglas, very much responsible for engineering the classic Aerosmith sound. New guy Ted Templeton (of the Doobie Brothers and Van Halen fame) had a solid agenda behind him, but either he was intent on molding a new-look Aerosmith for the new decade or he had little interest in the band as such, because the unique magic that made up the band is gone.

 

Fellow reviewer Mark Prindle couldn't have stated it better when he mentioned that, all over Done With Mirrors, «the guitars sound like walls, not like the electrical currents and loose wires of classic Aerosmith». But is this really Joe Perry's fault? The old boy is definitely trying, and, even though only a few riffs are memorable (generally at the beginning of the album), with a lit­tle more care this could have been another Draw The Line. But when the guitars are flattened and splattered, muted and muffled, hidden under pillows, glossed and glued together as if someone were afraid that people would laugh at Joe's obvious lack of virtuoso technique — quite possible to expect of a producer guy whose main protégé was Eddie Van Halen — you know that the Ei­gh­ties are upon us indeed.

 

Granted, it could have been much worse. The drums could have been reduced to electronic pulp, instead of simply made to sound pompously big and non-rock'n'rollish. There could have been a synthesizer invasion, but the record is mostly keyboard-free. All of the songs are self-penned, and the ballads are pretty much non-existent (with a little effort, one could call 'Darkness' a ballad, but certainly not when it picks up tempo). The choruses are catchy (with a few exceptions, such as Brad Whitford's 'The Reason A Dog', which seems to me about as underwritten as its title), Tyler is in his usual vocal form — so perhaps we'd better just get over the sad deal with the production and count this as another solid offering from the band?

 

Perhaps, except that there is a clear, if subtle, change in the agenda. On Rock In A Hard Place, the agenda still went something like «don't mess with the bad boys of rock'n'roll»; here, it is «you may not believe this, but we are still the bad boys of rock'n'roll». "Nobody gonna get my rock­'n'roll", Tyler screams on 'Shame On You' — hmm, was there any doubt about that in the first place around 1977? And what's with all the self-quoting? "Back in the saddle gets you sore" ('My Fist, Your Face')? References to Aerosmith and Joe Perry in 'The Hop'? Even musical quotations — when 'Let The Music Do The Talking', a re-recording of the best song from Perry's short solo career, starts the record off with a bang, it's like all the problems never happened, but then all of a sudden it goes into the riff of 'Draw The Line' for a few bars, and you realize, with fright, that this little bit kicks much more ass than the rest of the song. That's when you know, for sure, that the band's golden days are properly over.

 

And yet, let us be fair. Together with Rock In A Hard Place, this album has pretty much slipped through the cracks of the public conscience and the critical appreciation. People have a strange habit of associating the goodness of Aerosmith with chart positions and total revenue: for most listeners, these were the «dark years» for the drugged-out band, steadily on the decline ever since chemicals began to get the better of them around 1977 and then beginning to «come back» ten years later. But the «comeback» was actually just a change of master — freed from the iron rule of drugs, the band sold themselves to fashion.

 

Done With Mirrors may not be a very good re­cord, a sharp quality drop-off from the former level, but there is no doubt that, at this point, Aero­smith were still doing what they wanted to do. Their tragedy was that no one else wanted them to do it — and that they could not get over it, and so their heart was not perfect with rock'n'roll their God, and Aerosmith did evil in the sight of rock'n'roll, and went not fully after rock'n'roll, where­fore it was said unto Aerosmith, «surely will rock'n'roll be rended from thee, and given to thy betters». But all that was still a couple of years away; Done With Mirrors, in the meantime, may be threatened with a thumbs down for the exe­cution (including the rather silly gimmick of the «mirrored» writing on the sleeve), but still gets a thumbs up for the effort.

 

CLASSICS LIVE! (1986)

 

1) Train Kept A-Rollin’; 2) Kings And Queens; 3) Sweet Emotion; 4) Dream On; 5) Mama Kin; 6) Three Mile Smile / Reefer Head Woman; 7) Lord Of The Thighs; 8) Major Barbara.

 

This is just a stop-gap record put out while the boys were in rehab, purging their blood and sel­ling their soul. Classics? Absolutely. Live? Most assuredly. I am not so certain about the excla­mation mark, though. The LP is a rag-tag-grab-bag of performances both from the Live! Bootleg era and the Perry-less / Bradford-less stunt (although the liner notes do not specify most dates for each of the performances explicitly), and it boasts neither coherence nor quality.

 

The truth is that, while Aerosmith were consistently superb at the height of their mid-Seventies powers, from 1977 to 1984 the live performances were uneven and depended a lot on just how far strung out the band members were — the bad boys from Boston or the crap boys from Shitrock­ville? As a matter of fact, spontaneous mistakes and flubs are the essence of rock’n’roll, but no one has ever revoked the golden middle principle. For Live! Bootleg, where the band still had the strength to remain in charge, they made all the right selections — this particular setlist, though, must have been produced by a tonedeaf programmer in search of data to test his newly-program­med randomizing algorithm.

 

If you respect pre-Armageddon Steven Tyler as much as I do, don’t ever listen to the atrocious rendition of ‘Kings And Queens’ where the man obviously cannot keep up the high notes — it is, in fact, amazing how he can keep it up at all, what with all the crack and booze taking it out on each other inside his system, but why make us all involuntary witnesses of that battle? (And, whi­le we’re at it, Steve’s idea to reproduce the alarming synth-string-siren of the original with his own vocal cords is equally ugly). ‘Dream On’ is only marginally better: this time, the high notes come out decently, but... at the expense of all the other ones.

 

As for the rockers, they rock, but, without Perry and Whitford, it just isn’t the same. The other guys may have been okay with their own material, and may have given the paying fans a decent time, but as for the record — no, it just does not feel like they are able to pass on the same fervent conviction as is oozed out by Perry ninety percent of the time. One needs only compare the crack­ling improv on the original live 'Lord Of The Thighs’ from 1978 and the pro forma version on Classics. Or, perhaps, one does not even need to compare.

 

In short, most of this is about as listenably-mediocre as the lone old studio outtake with which the company tried to entice the fans (‘Major Barbara’, a lazy, plaintive cowboy waltz from 1973) — but even so, it is still a way more pleasant experience than having to sit through all of the band’s Nineties’ hits on their later live records in order to break through to the golden oldies, especially if one happens be much too anal about pressing the skip button.

 

CLASSICS LIVE II (1987)

 

1) Back In The Saddle; 2) Walk This Way; 3) Movin' Out; 4) Draw The Line; 5) Same Old Song And Dance; 6) Last Child; 7) Let The Music Do The Talking; 8) Toys In The Attic.

 

The second volume in this odd series easily trumps the first one in terms of quality, but somewhat baffles the mind in terms of coherence. Most of the tracks are from a December 31, 1984 show (coinciding with Tom Hamilton's birthday, so there is no escape from the obligatory h-b-t-y with Tyler directing the audience) — most, that is, with the exception of 'Let The Music Do The Tal­king', recorded around two years later, and 'Draw The Line', recorded around six years earlier. So, technically, this is all the same band with all the same five members, but representing three en­tirely different life stages — the drugged-out pre-breakthrough, the still drugged-out reunion, and the cleaned-up, er, post-reunion.

 

The final product might have gained better credibility had Columbia simply released the entire show from 1984; but, apparently, the point was not to replicate any of the «classics» from the previous volume, so here we are with another bunch of hits (but what the hell is 'Movin' Out' do­ing among them?) hastily glued together. Another waste of vinyl?

 

Perhaps, but it still kicks ass. As the band was getting ready to enter the «Lite» stage of their ca­reer, the live performances were taking on a special appeal. What I mean is, even twenty years after the completion of the sellout, Aerosmith were still phenomenal onstage when performing the old classics; watch any live version of 'Back In The Saddle' from the early XXIst century and it does not take much to understand that the Tyler/Perry duo have kept their brawn and grit as fine as, or, perhaps, even finer than the Jagger/Richards pair. So how could they go wrong in the 1980s — reunited, refired, and with Tyler's voice so far free from the pranks of old age?

 

Classics Live II certainly rocks. There is not much need for it on the part of anybody who alrea­dy owns Live Bootleg, but, for the record, 'Back In The Saddle' is way superior to the 1978 ver­sion (all the screaming is carried off with honor, and Perry never messes up the riff), 'Walk This Way' is devoid of the talkbox mutation (provided you hated the talkbox in the first place), and the collective singing on 'Toys In The Attic' generally manages to stay on key (a very frequent prob­lem for this particular number). These are the few tempting moments. The rest is just regular pro­fessional entertainment. It won't blow the pants off any regular Aerosmith fan — but, inasmuch as pure joy is concerned, it is miles better than Permanent Vacation.

 

PERMANENT VACATION (1987)

 

1) Heart's Done Time; 2) Magic Touch; 3) Rag Doll; 4) Simoriah; 5) Dude (Looks Like A Lady); 6) St. John; 7) Han­gman Jury; 8) Girl Keeps Coming Apart; 9) Angel; 10) Permanent Vacation; 11) I'm Down; 12) The Movie.

 

Permanent Vacation. What a brilliant title — no, not for the album, but for the entire career of Aerosmith starting with the unhappy day of September 5, 1987, when the first record buyers sub­jected themselves to its treatment. Or, perhaps, starting with the Run D.M.C. collaboration on 'Walk This Way' from the previous year? No, probably not. When they did their rap-rock thing in mid-1986, the band was still drugged out and scary, and the friendship between rock'n'roll and hip-hop was still an exciting, rather than languid, thing to consider. In fact, when Steve Tyler pop­ped his head through that hole in the wall that Perry cut with his guitar, screaming a bloody 'WALK THIS WAY!' into the surprised faces of his black partners, this just might have been the very last time we caught him in a genuinely scary appearance.

 

With the appearance of Permanent Vacation, the bodies were healed and the souls were sold. This, of course, is not just a personal impression, but is deeply rooted in factual basis. In order to «modernize» (shudders!) the band, Geffen Records brought in producer Bruce Fairbairn, whose main claim to fame was engineering Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet, and outside songwriters Desmond Child and Jim Vallance, to «help out» the band in the same humiliating way that mai­nstream labels were «helping out» old-time heroes like Cheap Trick and Eric Clapton. The goal was as obvious as the quest — the goal, to make a record that sells, the task, to maintain some sort of artistic integrity and save some sort of artistic face in fierce battle with the demon of cor­porate songwriting. The goal was achieved; the quest, mostly flunked.

 

I am not saying that Permanent Vacation is a bad album. It has to be approached according to the standards of its day; as a chunk of hairy pop-metal, it is actually better than most of the Poi­son / Def Leppard / Bon Jovi albums of its era, if only because old-time guitarists like Perry and Whitford, even if they really wanted to, could not play in the same flat, leaden, funkless way than the guitarists in most of these bands. But every effort has been taken to make them sound like these guys. The worst news is that the guitar melodies do not register any more in my memory bank. In the Seventies, it was all about the guitar groove; on tunes like 'Toys In The Attic' or, let's say, 'Get It Up', Joe Perry was the hero and Steve Tyler the afterthought. On Permanent Vaca­tion, the roles are permanently reversed. Guitars are there to provide loud, fat (I'd even say «over­weight»), and utterly unmemorable backing to catchy pop choruses. Nothing else.

 

And they aren't necessarily ugly pop choruses. After all, corporate songwriters usually know their job, and at least a guy like Desmond Child knew a thing or two about catchiness (unlike, for in­stance, Diane Warren, the biggest musical orgasm faker in the history of bad sex). If the chorus to 'Rag Doll' or to '(Dude) Looks Like A Lady' (which otherwise sounds like a bizarre cross between the Who's '5:15' and a particularly sleazy AC/DC anthem) does not stick in your brain, you must be tonedeaf or something. But even 'Rag Doll', arguably the strongest song on the album, is hopelessly spoiled with its dumb electronically enhanced drums and marinated guitar sound.

 

Nasty green stuff keeps splurging out all over the place. What is the point of covering 'I'm Down' by The Beatles, reproduced note-for-note but with atrocious late-Eighties production values? No point. What is the point of the closing pseudo-«Kashmir»ian drone 'The Movie'? To reaffirm the listener's faith in the band as «artists»? Four minutes is hardly enough time to fish that faith out from the depths of the well in which it has been dropping for the previous forty. What is the point of the hedonistic title track — to confirm that the band are having a braindead competition with Mötley Crüe, even though it was already obvious from the first two songs? And let's not even get started on 'Angel', the first in a series of deadly biological weapons commonly known as «The Aerosmith Power Ballad» (fortunately, these particularly scary death-bringers were still in the testing stage; real mass production would not start until Get A Grip).

 

My personal two favourites are in the middle; 'St. John' sort of breaks up the pop-metal formula in favor of something sincerely darker and more bizarre in the blues-rock vein, and 'Hangman Jury' is sort of what it would be like to have Leadbelly produced by Bruce Fairbairn — crass, but fun and, at least, entirely unpredictable. If anything, these two songs show that the band were still not above searching for new sounds and experiences, something that the record industry would completely forbid by the time of Pump.

 

But these itty-bitty experiments get hopelessly lost in the sea of sludge and filth, with Steve Ty­ler, formerly one of the shiveriest nasty young men in existence, now jumping into the role of one of the ugliest dirty old sleazebags in the industry. Just like in the good old days, more than half of the songs are about getting some; but where the frenzied screams of "doctor, doctor, doctor, get your sweet ass off the floor" once sounded authentic, all this new stuff like "somebody better call a doctor or wake me up with a shove" ('Magic Touch') is no longer convincing at all — a forty­year old Tyler is, of course, still decades away from being a Viagra patient (at least, I hope he was), but he is no longer able to sustain or justify his sex drive all through the album. Granted, again, there are not as many cringeworthy moments here as there are on Pump ('Love In An Ele­vator' — GOD!), but they're there all right, and I really don't want to hear song after song about dirty old men from dirty old men, be they Aerosmith or the Rolling Stones or Frank Sinatra.

 

Sometimes I feel genuinely envious of people who have no problem enjoying Permanent Vaca­tion with the same happy abandon that they enjoy Rocks or Toys In The Attic, i. e. with the ide­ology of «these guys rocked in the Seventies, now they rock in the Eighties and Nineties! — sure they rock in a different way, but times change, you know?» Try as we might, I and those with similar feelings will never be able to experience similar emotions from 'Rats In The Cellar' and '(Dude) Looks Like A Lady' — but maybe this is just our problem? Maybe we are overintellectu­alizing things instead of just letting go?

 

Then again, if we just let go, pretty much every rock song with a mid-tempo 4/4 beat may be able to rock our socks off, and where's the fun in that? Nah. I freely admit there are some good vocal hooks on the album, and a few creative ideas, but no sober Aerosmith album deserves anything higher than a rigid thumbs down. Back to drugs, boys; back to drugs — the only way to save the music. (Then again, maybe not. Dirty old men are bad enough, but dirty old junkies would make Requiem For A Dream look like an innocent joyride).

 

PUMP (1989)

 

1) Young Lust; 2) F.I.N.E.; 3) Going Down / Love In An Elevator; 4) Monkey On My Back; 5) Water Song / Janie's Got A Gun; 6) Dulcimer Stomp / The Other Side; 7) My Girl; 8) Don't Get Mad, Get Even; 9) Hoodoo / Voodoo Me­dicine Man; 10) What It Takes.

 

As promised, the vacation goes on. The only difference between Pump and its progenitor is that the last traces of creativity and freshness have been expertly removed from the final product, en­suring even greater commercial success. The record sets new standards of slickness which, true to their competitive nature, the band would then raise with every new studio album.

 

Everything is loud, roaring, catchy, and guaranteed to keep the customer satisfied. Intelligent de­fenders of the album frequently point out that it does stand out from the average hair metal record of the day, because, like it or not, Perry and Whitford are still masters of their instruments, and both gentlemen honestly try to come up with twisted, sleazy, funky riffs and honest bluesy solos. Remove the pop choruses, break through the glossy sheen of the production, they say, and you will still see the same old gritty Aerosmith rockin' out like there was no tomorrow, no matter how many Desmond Childs there are in the studio ensuring that there be plenty of tomorrows, and that each such tomorrow bring in a sizable check in the mail.

 

As a matter of fact, I absolutely agree. Play Pump back to back with all them Bon Jovi and Def Leppard albums, and you will immediately notice what difference there is between a hair-metal album from a new-generation hair-metal band and a hair-metal album from an old-style Seventies blues-rock band. Faced between these two monsters, I will undoubtedly sacrifice my ears to the Scylla of Pump than the Charybdis of New Jersey or Hysteria (which should, generally, be un­derstood as simply preferring the old school to the new school rather than a direct slap-in-the-face for these particular albums — hey, Def Leppard is a guilty pleasure if there ever was one).

 

But we are talking Aerosmith in the context of Aerosmith, and in the context of Aerosmith, 'The Other Side' and 'Monkey On My Back' is as dull as they come. Most of this blends together into one never-ending mess of monotonous riffage (again — it may not formally be monotonous, but Fairbairn's production smoothes out all the edges; even when Perry is playing something inte­re­s­ting, he makes sure to overdub another guitar on top of it which is not playing anything inte­re­sting), screaming for the sake of screaming, and big dumb drum patterns that sound louder than everything else put together. In fact, in between the drums and Tyler's throat-tearing, everything else just sort of gets lost.

 

The big hits were 'Love In An Elevator' and 'Janie's Got A Gun'. The former is credited to Tyler and Perry alone, as they are trying to outdo Mötley Crüe without outside help, and come up with a catchy, fun, but gruesomely inadequate sex anthem, sending elevated society into a state of shock with its accounts of making out you-know-where. Overdone, overplayed, and rather pitiful, it's hardly the worst thing they ever did, but one cannot even call it «self-parody» — in the past, they sang about sex, not about silly sexual fetishes flashing in dirty old minds. How come they never realized — or, if they did realize, how come they were never disturbed by the fact — that this ongoing sexual bravado simply made them all into show-biz clowns?

 

'Janie's Got A Gun' belatedly returns us to the field of «social relevance». The girl gets raped by her own father and then pulls a gun on him. This can be cutting edge. But as it sits there in the middle of all these dumb sexual anthems, it ceases to be cutting edge and becomes a musical tab­loid — somewhat like the Stones' 'Too Much Blood' or any other song whose author will probab­ly defend it as «an attempt to draw public attention to important social issues», when in reality it is simply one more application of the «give the people what they want» principle. Rape, pedo­philia, and murder — all in one bag! Cool. Let's make it a hit single. At least it's a half-decent pop song (notice, too, how it borrows the alarm siren thing from 'Kings And Queens').

 

I have, and can have, no personal favorites on Pump. 'Voodoo Medicine Man' could theoretically have gotten my hopes up — why couldn't they justify the title by turning the song into another Southernish romp like 'Hangman Jury'? — but it's just another slab of similar hair-metal. 'Young Lust' raves along at a fast pace, but what's the point if the stylistics is just the same? 'What It Ta­kes' is not the awfulest ballad to disgrace the name of Aerosmith, but it is still a power ballad that takes the aesthetics of 'Home Tonight' and turns it into a big lump of melodic and lyrical clichés.

 

To reiterate the obvious, Pump is a step down even from the standards of Permanent Vacation. Never mind the experimentation of 'St. John', there are even no traces of light funny funk à la 'Rag Doll', for which 'Janie's Got A Gun' is no acceptable substitute. "Going down, Mr. Tyler?" You bet your ass he is, and taking the whole band with him. Thumbs down.

 

GET A GRIP (1993)

 

1) Intro; 2) Eat The Rich; 3) Get A Grip; 4) Fever; 5) Livin' On The Edge; 6) Flesh; 7) Walk On Down; 8) Shut Up And Dance; 9) Cryin'; 10) Gotta Love It; 11) Crazy; 12) Line Up; 13) Amazing; 14) Boogie Man.

 

If you do not own this album, go out and buy it, now. Listen to it in your best ceremonial robe, your mind intent on prayer. Then take it out and solemnly burn it in your back yard, if you have one, or in the nearest forest, if you live near one, or, if that fails, just grind it to little pieces and flush it. Repeat said procedure each Sunday, and, provided you keep it up for at least ten years, you will undoubtedly find grace in the eyes of the Lord as well as earn gratitude undying in the eyes of your descendants the way they are pictured in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

 

"There's something wrong with the world today, I don't know what it is", they sing in 'Livin' On The Edge'. But it is not hard to guess, really, because Get A Grip takes its time to embody pretty much everything that is wrong with the world today. It is difficult even to decide where to start. How about this: the song before that features lyrics that go "Fever gives you lust with an appetite, it hits you like the fangs from a rattlesnake bite", and the song immediately after that states that "When the night comes, everybody gotta have FLESH — the only thing that's worth the sweat". Er, I'm pretty sure few of us would abstain from having a little FLESH every now and then, but if it is really "the only thing that's worth the sweat", there must surely be something wrong with the world today, and I do know what it is.

 

As the «St. George» of grunge bands started hacking away at the «dragon» of hair metal, one would think that Aerosmith, of all people, might finally get their heads straight — after all, with their natural predisposition towards hardest-rock-riffage and punkish attitude, they could have fol­lowed other heroes of the past like Alice Cooper in rejecting the Bon Jovi aesthetics and re-set­ting a fine example for the kids. Instead, they hardened their hearts and came out as defenders of that aesthetics against the grunge wave. The risk paid off. Get A Grip sold almost as many co­pies as Nevermind, became the band's best-selling album ever, and solidified the basis for «MTV Rock» for years to come, plunging the brains of millions of teenagers worldwide into a hedonistic coma whose end, even today, is nowhere in sight.

 

Get A Grip is a thoroughly evil album — easily in my Top 10 Most Evil Albums Ever Recorded — and, although I am well aware that this is just a convenient symbol, the symbolism is just too overbearing so as not to merit a little verbal pathos. One of the most ironic aspects of its evil is that it's catchy: with the corporate songwriting machine continuing its run, most of the songs con­tain hooks that are exceedingly hard to get out of your head. But what are these hooks? Mostly the same trashy pop choruses, tolerable, perhaps, if steeped in moderation, irritating if molded as pseudo-rebellious anthems.

 

Embarrassment jumps sky high already with the first track. Musically, 'Eat The Rich' is a poor man's 'Walk This Way' (it even starts out with a brief quote from the song), whose main vocal melody (verse) also has the nerve to rip off Zappa's 'Trouble Every Day' (a transparently obvious observation which, for some reason, I have never met stated elsewhere). Lyrically, it is exactly what its title suggests: a primitive diatribe against rich people. Uh... excuse me, Mr. Tyler, may I take a peep at your latest tax declaration form? Oh, that's right: you only go heavy on "rich folks who get rude", and you "believe in rags to riches", so you're only rambling against those who have not earned their right to yacht clubs and poodles and pills. Oh, excuse me, and here I was thinking that, perhaps, you were sort of poking fun at your own attire the way it looks on you in the opening bits of the 'Love In An Elevator' video. How silly of me. And when you tell me that "you gotta live large, gotta let it rip" in the very next song, you obviously do not mean that "you gotta live large" may surmise poodles and yacht clubs. You probably mean it just surmises having FLESH — the only thing that's worth a sweat. My, my.

 

Get A Grip is, indeed, a philosophical album; almost every song has its moral. We get instruc­tions every step of the way. How about this: 'Talk is cheap, shut up and dance / Don't get deep, shut up and dance'. If so, what is so surprising about the fact that 'there's something wrong with the world today'? And yet, there is consistency. 'If you can judge a wise man by the color of his skin, then mister you're a better man than I', Tyler adds, periphrasing the Yardbirds — that's about as deep as his understanding of the world's problems can really reach. Yes, sir, your whole life path is set out here before you. You gotta eat the rich, gotta get a grip, gotta shut up and dance, gotta love it, gotta line up, and, of course, you gotta have flesh — the only... oh, excuse me. The whole album is a veritable Bible of MTV faith.

 

And I have not even yet mentioned its Psalms — three power ballads that are all clumped toge­ther, with very small breaks, on the second half of the album. All were hit singles, and all intro­duced us to the High Priestess Alicia Silverstone, MTV's house-rebel Barbie doll of the mid-Ni­neties whose chief acting talent consisted of knowing how to give the finger with a dismissive glare on the face. If rumours about introducing navel piercing into mainstream culture with the video for 'Crying' are true, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised — the ludicrous idea of mass-marketed self-muti­lation as the expression of «one's true self» or «rebellious attitude» ties in one hundred percent with the overall shit-aesthetics of Get A Grip. (Or was it, instead, the cow udder piercing on the album sleeve? which raises the question of the analogy between Alicia Silver­stone and a domesticated quadruped, and, mind you, it is not me who is responsible).

 

Of course, it does not help mat­ters much that 'Crying' and 'Crazy' are more or less the same song (the only big difference is that the first one has brass where the second one has harmonica... oh, wait, the first one has harmonica, too, never mind...), and that both satisfy the stereotype of the big bad hairy power ballad to a tee.

 

Words cannot express the way I hate this album, even as I can't help but bop along to the funky instrumental break in the title track, sounding like the accompaniment to some particularly cheesy Nintendo karate simulator. Against the background of this wave after wave of cultural pollution, only Joe Perry's 'Walk On Down' sounds like a vague, vague reminder of this band's fabulous past, and only makes the pill more bitter in the process. It's one thing to have your intelligence insulted by some good-for-nothing twenty-year old sucker raised on Grease and Van Halen, and another thing to realize that the dragon — nay, the Antichrist — of MTV culture has bought off one of the world's formerly greatest rock'n'roll bands to serve as its chief weapon of mass destruction. For what it's worth, Darth Vader has nothing on Steve Tyler. Thumbs? Can't even see where they went. Too dark, too deep.

 

NINE LIVES (1997)

 

1) Nine Lives; 2) Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees); 3) Hole In My Soul; 4) Taste Of India; 5) Full Circle; 6) Something's Gotta Give; 7) Ain't That A Bitch; 8) The Farm; 9) Crash; 10) Kiss Your Past Good-Bye; 11) Pink; 12) Falling Off; 13) Attitude Adjustment; 14) Fallen Angels.

 

No less than eight outside songwriters this time, ranging from real old friends like Richard Supa (who'd already worked with the band on 'Chip Away The Stone' in the late 1970s) to trusty work­horses like Desmond Child to completely unbelievable surprises like Glen Ballard (of Alanis Morissette fame!). The biggest disappointment is actually Mark Hudson, the man who singlehan­dedly reinvented and rejuvenated Ringo Starr's lackluster solo career — but not before saddling Aerosmith with the triteness of 'Livin' On The Edge' and the ridiculousness of 'The Farm' (at least he also takes responsibility for the second best song on the album, 'Crash').

 

On the other hand, having to feed so many mouths must have gotten the band's minds off the idea to expand their role as godfathers of / spokesmen for «MTV Rock». Nine Lives does not have as many imperatives in its song titles, as many Alicia Silverstone videos, and as many obnoxious, hypocrite lyrical banalities as Get A Grip. These are its good sides. The bad side is that there is no sense of purpose to the record. The band's old-school rocking instincts, its natural propensity for pathetic power ballads, and the mainstream pop pull of the outside songwriters all seem to mingle in one sticky, viscous, ponderous lump where it is no longer possible to distinguish «bal­lad» from «boogie», «teen pop» from «hard rock», and «sincere» from «forced». Upon first listen, it is bizarre; subsequently, it is just boring.

 

The record starts out with a promise. 'Nine Lives', as an appetizer, is their ballsiest track to open the proceedings since at least 'Let The Music Do The Talking'. That gruff opening chord, the little feedback bit, the funny «Steve Tyler outscreeching the local feline competition» bit, the lyrics that fall back on the exquisite innuendo principle instead of yer basic foul-mouthing, the drive, the guitar tones... old Aerosmith back? Not quite. It may take a couple listens to understand that the balls are, unfortunately, quite low on life-giving content. For one thing, there is no distinctive riff; just a fast tempo against which Bradford and Perry play a bunch of basic blues-rock and po­wer chords. For another, the chorus ("Nine lives, feelin' lucky...") is pure MTV pop again. Perfect for a headbanging session? No doubt. Timeless classic? No way.

 

And then the record, head forward, dives into that strange, strange muck. 'Falling In Love Is Hard On The Knees' — what the hell is it? Should it rock? Should it bring tears to your eyes? Should it get you to dance at the local night club? All of these, some of these? Is it even a good song? It's about as catchy as the average Lenny Kravitz song, and just about as nutritious. What the heck are 'Hole In My Soul', 'Ain't That A Bitch', 'Kiss Your Past Good-Bye' (in the latter's case, dock a point for Tyler explicitly uncovering the pun in one of the choruses) — fist-punchers or tear-jer­kers? With Get A Grip, you knew the three ballads and could easily program them out if they annoyed you more than the rockers; with Nine Lives, it is not so easy, because all dividing lines have been blurred. If the melodies were great, this might even have been an asset. As they are, it is a troublesome bother.

 

I must confess, though, that 'Ain't That A Bitch' is a fine performance; the melody is generic po­wer-balladry, but the mix of slide guitars, strings, blues-rock solos, and Tyler's crescendo from «lazy» to «schizophrenic» is a vast improvement on the technique of, say, 'Crazy'; one may not go wild about the pomposity, but the song aspires to more than straightforward dumb teen bait, and it is hard not to at least tip your hat to the amount of work that went into it. The same applies to quite a few other tracks as well; some fans may complain about overproduction, but, if you ask me, overproduction is fine as long as it gives you something to concentrate on rather than the limp songwriting levels.

 

True «dumb teen bait» does not really start until 'Pink', which was, of course, the biggest single, the most famous video, and the Grammy-winning song off the album. With a title like that and lyrics like "pink on the lips of your lover, 'cause pink is the love you discover", it is not difficult to understand the primary target audience of the song, arranged as loud, but toothless pop without any Aerosmith trademarks whatsoever (shame on you, Joe Perry). But let us cut them some slack: when you are a fifty-year old rock star, you have to be extra meticulous about finding new ways to attract freshly pubescent girls, or you risk getting stuck with an old, ugly wife forever.

 

Little bits of experimentation on the album mostly fall flat, or land like heavy boulders on your toes. 'A Taste Of India' has Glen Ballard, who'd already once saddled Alanis Morissette with Eas­tern influences, for better or for worse, lending the same overtones to Aerosmith, except that, as one could guess, for Tyler «a taste of India» does not surmise a trip to the Taj Mahal, but rather something a bit more flesh-related. The effect is dirty cheap. 'The Farm' begins and ends with sni­ppets of The Wizard Of Oz, again suggesting unhealthy sexual fantasies about getting it on with the Tin Man and Scarecrow at the same time (the lyrics make no sense, but "somebody get me to the farm" somewhat echoes 'Last Child', yet, again, with more emphasis on the "I ain't no Peter Pan" part, if you think like I think what they think).

 

Overall, Nine Lives is a cooling-off record; it is much less teen-geared than Get A Grip, and thus, comes off as nowhere near as insulting for Aerosmith's adult audience. But it also contains fewer guilty pleasures, and it's dreadfully long, too; when half of your album consists of overproduced mid-tempo rock-ballads, you do not really need to extend it over an hour. So take your pick: the disgusting titillation of Get A Grip or the more restrained, but boring pop strains of Nine Lives.

 

A LITTLE SOUTH OF SANITY (1998)

 

CD I: 1) Eat The Rich; 2) Love In An Elevator; 3) Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees); 4) Same Old Song And Dance; 5) Hole In My Soul; 6) Monkey On My Back; 7) Livin' On The Edge; 8) Cryin'; 9) Rag Doll; 10) Angel; 11) Janie's Got A Gun; 12) Amazing; CD II: 1) Back In The Saddle; 2) Last Child; 3) The Other Side; 4) Walk On Down; 5) Dream On; 6) Crazy; 7) Mama Kin; 8) Walk This Way; 9) Dude (Looks Like A Lady); 10) What It Takes; 11) Sweet Emotion.

 

No matter how deep the depths this band has attained with its latter day career, one thing is for certain: Aerosmith have always been terrific live performers. This is one unquestionable ad­van­tage they have on their forefathers — most of the Rolling Stones' shows have followed the hit-and-miss principle ever since the departure of Mick Taylor, always depending on just how much out of focus the guitar players are on this particular evening, and on how «playful» the frontman is feeling (as in, «do I want to sing tonight, or do I just feel like jumping?»).

 

Aerosmith have steadily remained far more reliable. There is not a single video or live recording of the band that I've seen that does not combine a fun atmosphere with a lot of hard work, and their stage presence has only solidified with age. They could be slightly wobbly in the good old days of drug rule, as is clearly seen on Classics Live and bits of Live Bootleg!, but ever since the big clean-up it almost feels like Perry and Whitford have not missed or flubbed one note, whereas Tyler's on-key screaming is, if anything, even more precise and powerful than in the early days. In other words, in the studio they might have still be selling their souls to the devil from dawn to dusk, but onstage, no matter how many crappy MTV hits they had tucked behind their belts, they were still one of the world's greatest rock'n'roll bands.

 

Which would have surely made this lengthy double CD of live recordings from the Get A Grip and Nine Lives tours their best offering to true fans since the Seventies — if not for the utterly depressing setlist, of course. With but seven out of twenty-three selections recreating the glory of their classic period, this is not even an accurate reflection of the way these tours really went, since normally they used to do about half old stuff, half new stuff. It may, of course, be simply due to the fact that the band did not want to reuse the same tunes that everyone had already heard live on Live Bootleg! etc., but it is way more likely that they were simply hoping to play more into the hands of their new generations of adoring fans, open-minded to the point of digging 'Livin' On The Edge' on par with 'Last Child' and 'Hole In My Soul' on par with 'Dream On'. Well — «no harm in being open-minded», said the executioner, swinging his axe.

 

Of course, not all of these new hits are bad, and sometimes the live renditions can make you think twice of their quality: 'Love In An Elevator', for instance, in this particular version comes across more like a nice pretext for Perry and Whitford to do some blazing guitar sparring than a forced attempt to outgross the hair metal bands of the late Eighties. But what is the point in offering us note-for-note recreations of all the power ballads they had recorded from 1987 to 1997? As silly as it looks when the entire stadium is rocking its lighters to the steady hypnotic sway of the next processed anthem, it is much sillier (and just as dangerous) when your average fan is doing it alone in front of his stereo.

 

The one true moment for which the whole record is worth owning is the start of the second disk, as the band, speared on by Tyler's mega-yell of "I GOT BLISTERS ON MY SISTERS!", threate­ningly launches into 'Back In The Saddle'. "So you like the new shit, the old shit, where were you in '78?" he teases the audience. "Where the fuck were you in '79? Magic Mountain, baby, Magic Mountain!" Well, at least the band still remembers where it was in '78, and is able to rock out with the exact same strength. Too bad they only do it for one more number in a row, 'Last Child', and then switch back into teen-pop mode with 'The Other Side'. Oh well; at least they make sure that the album says goodbye with a true classic like 'Sweet Emotion' rather than a generic power ballad like 'What It Takes' (I admire Tyler's courage in singing the first verse acappella, but, gi­ven the number's nauseating level of bathos, the effect is even uglier).

 

Still, despite all the obvious reservations, a thumbs up — if only out of respect for the band's le­gacy and its ability to maintain integrity on stage even when wading through all the dreck. Plus, 'Walk On Down' rocks. They should let Joe Perry take lead vocals more often.

 

JUST PUSH PLAY (2001)

 

1) Beyond Beautiful; 2) Just Push Play; 3) Jaded; 4) Fly Away From Here; 5) Trip Hoppin'; 6) Sunshine; 7) Under My Skin; 8) Luv Lies; 9) Outta Your Head; 10) Drop Dead Gorgeous; 11) Light Inside; 12) Avant Garden.

 

When this came out, even some of the biggest fans of Get A Grip must have felt stumped. No matter how slick all of the band's albums from 1987 to 1993 turned out to be, they were at least nominally rock'n'roll — loud rhythmic headbanging music with distorted guitars, screaming, and, if not always fast, then at least always danceable grooves. Nine Lives was a mixed bag, but you still couldn't say no to the title track and 'Crash' and... well, much of it was boring and bland, yet somehow it was still «rock music».

 

But Just Push Play is not «rock music». About a third of it consists of so-so attempts at mimick­ing and mining the latest trends — most notably, the twenty-first century edition of hip-hop (on the title track and 'Outta Your Head', but, strangely, not on 'Trip Hoppin') and various electronica achievements (usually in the form of «spicy» sound effects scattered all over the place). The other two thirds, in dire contrast, are dedicated to some bizarre retro-psycho-pop thing that, at times, al­most threatens to invoke nostalgia for the sunny Sixties — a place where Aerosmith, of all people, have never ever set foot before.

 

In all likelihood, the culprits are fellow songwriters Marti Frederiksen and Mark Hudson, present on all of the tracks (although not always together), and if Hudson's decision to steer the band to­wards a retro style comes as no surprise, given his previously mentioned successful restoration of Ringo Starr's solo career, Frederiksen is a darker sheep — although his first significant contribu­tion is usually logged as writing and performing for Almost Famous' «Stillwater» — this might give you a clue if you are familiar with the movie.

 

Regardless, the simple fact is that Just Push Play is the most un-Aerosmith Aerosmith album ever recorded. It's not as unimaginable as AC/DC doing an album of Gilbert & Sullivan covers, perhaps, but close. A simple test involves playing the first ten seconds of 'Luv Lies' to any of your friends still in the dark — and then making them believe, prior to hearing Tyler's vocals come in, that this is not frickin' Electric Light Orchestra they are listening to.

 

It is no surprise, then, that in terms of overall respectability, the experiment had failed. It still hit the charts high enough, but, I believe, more due to inertia power — Aerosmith's «power run» of 1987-1993 has certainly ensured that, like with the Stones (who had their «power run» much ear­lier, of course, but it still affects public opinion), people will continue buying the records no mat­ter what. But quite a few fans — as can be easily seen by browsing through amateur reviews — were quite unable to «get it», not the least of them Mr. Joe Perry himself, who has openly distan­ced himself from the album in press, saying that the final product had very little, if anything, to do with Aerosmith as a real band.

 

The most ridiculous thing about it all, however, is that Just Push Play is not at all bad! Once one has discarded the most obvious «ones for the kiddies», there are some interesting melodies and arrangements to be found. The big hit single 'Jaded' is a solid power pop anthem, a little on the pathetic side (these are the 'Amazing Crazy Crying' guys, after all), but with cute «astral» guitars, nostalgic strings and stuff — it may take a while to understand that the song has nothing serious to do with the generic Aerosmith power ballad, but it will sink in, eventually.

 

'Trip Hoppin', despite the title, has more to do with Beatlish pop of the Revolver era, only ear-splittingly overproduced. So does 'Sunshine' — with both songs featuring psychedelic backing vocals to boot, fresh off the 1966 train. Even 'Light Inside', rushing along at a far more frenetic pace than the rest, has «Beatles» written all over it; and 'Avant Garden', again with a totally mis­leading title, could have been a non-hit for Big Star, for all I know. There is also a drastic change in the lyrics — most are far less obnoxious and «mock-dirty» than we are used to.

 

Now how on earth did Hudson and Frederiksen drag the band in on this non-trivial project, made three times less trivial by being donated to Aerosmith, is something that will take only a very skilled biographer to figure out. Because the biggest weakness of Just Push Play is not the songs: it is just that the songs have just about the same relationship to the band to which they were en­trusted as the real Marilyn Monroe has to her robot facsimile on the album sleeve.

 

What I mean is, out of all the band members Brad Whitford alone, with his old predilection to­wards «colourful» guitar playing, could have readily adapted to this kind of music. Joe Perry, wherever he is, looks like a fish out of water — when he does not even try to rock out, the resul­ting sound is boring, and when he does try, he just gets smacked in the face with the «poppiness» of the melody that he cannot subdue. And Tyler? Hard rock screamer, yes; R'n'B belter, perhaps; power ballad guru, by all means — but there is nothing he can do to make this new style, or these new styles, his own.

 

All of which makes Just Push Play an eccentric, unpredictable, and thoroughly misguided expe­rience. It is not a «sellout» — they sold out for good fourteen years before the fact; it is, in fact, their least obviously commercial album in all that time. Rather, it's a pre-doomed experiment. It's their Satanic Majesties Request, in a way, but condemned by the epoch — in 1967, you could risk trying to make the Beatles out of the Rolling Stones and get something weird, but worthwhile in return. But to make the Beatles out of Aerosmith, long after the band has been dragged through the gloss, the big bucks, and the cheap, generic sleaze of its downfall — nah. And Hudson and Frederiksen should bear the blame, no doubt. "You're so jaded, and I'm the one that jaded you", indeed. Thumbs down, but with a certain dose of respect.

 

HONKIN' ON BOBO (2004)

 

1) Road Runner; 2) Shame, Shame, Shame; 3) Eyesight To The Blind; 4) Baby, Please Don't Go; 5) Never Loved A Girl; 6) Back Back Train; 7) You Gotta Move; 8) The Grind; 9) I'm Ready; 10) Temperature; 11) Stop Messin' Aro­und; 12) Jesus Is On The Main Line.

 

Most bands, sooner or later, experience the back-to-roots drive — because, once you've got no­thing left to prove, the only thing left is to realize just how much the grass was greener back in the days when you did have something to prove, and still greener even before those days. With Aerosmith, though, who were never all that attached to their roots in the first place, and whose proverbial sellout made everyone see they weren't even all that attached to the stems, everything was possible — including the preposterous thought of «Hey, maybe these guys have lost them­selves so hopelessly in the world of Top 10 hits, Vegas galas, and safe, sterile sex with MTV teenage whores, they will never release their back-to-roots album?»

 

But perhaps the disgust that Joe Perry had to live out every night upon the release of Just Push Play, an album not horrible in itself but farther from the spirit of Aerosmith than anything ever associated with the band, had served as a catalyst — and here, three years after Aerosmith tried to become Lenny Kravitz & The Beatles, is Aerosmith trying to become The Chess Blues Singers. Or, rather, Kid Rock & The Chess Blues Singers.

 

Honkin' On Bobo has been usually billed as their «blues covers» album, but Aerosmith are not, nor have they ever been, a blues band; they probably did just one or two pure blues numbers in their entire career, usually to fill up some empty record space at the last moment (remember 'Ree­fer Head Woman'? No? That's what I thought). But if you speed up and toughen the blues, you get rock'n'roll, and this is what they try to remind us of by covering Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, and Mississippi Fred McDowell not the way those guys sang their songs, but the way other guys, less tolerant of the blues' monotonousness and semi-religious infatuation with itself, sang them. Loud, fast (if possible), dirty, sleazy — the way slum kids like it the best.

 

If this does not work exactly the way it should, this is because it can't. The 'Smiths have been re­moved from this territory way too long to be able to meet anyone along the way who'd tell them how to do it right. Granted, they even went back to their old producer Jack Douglas for an extra pinch of authenticity. For brass, they used the Memphis Horns. On piano, they recruited the le­gendary Chuck Berry accompanist Johnnie Johnson (lucky to catch a bit of the good old spirit in him before he died next year). So many pieces in place, and yet the final product still sounds fair­ly calculated and surviving somewhat on artificial breath.

 

Perhaps the discrepancy is in that Honkin' On Bobo might have originally been conceived as a semi-improvised, good-time jam-party record, but then Douglas went on to make it sound like an Aerosmith album, with emphasis on the second word. I do not care much for the production; it still bears the patented late-Aerosmith post-1987 gloss, and as loud and roaring as the guitars are, welcoming you to the hard rock of 'Road Runner', they just don't kick ass the way they used to. Still, if it's the best we can get, better 'Road Runner' than 'Eat The Rich', I'd say.

 

This whole idea of «Let's have fun fun fun, but let's also sell this thing to the kids who want ano­ther Permanent Vacation» sort of ruins the experience. An Aerosmith album for the kids has to have power ballads, right? And there ain't no such thing as a blues power ballad, right? So they take Aretha Franklin's 'I Never Loved A Man', change the title and the lyrics, and make it into the next 'Crazy'. Not good.

 

Nevertheless, shoot the legs off the context and 'Road Runner', 'Baby Please Don't Go', 'I'm Rea­dy', and 'You Gotta Move' rock out well without any back thought (the latter even mutates into some sort of psychedeliv heavy metal monster midway through; thankfully, Mississippi Fred mi­s­sed hearing it by a good thirty years). Backup vocalist Tracy Bonham (no relation to John) does a good job helping Perry out with the singing on the swampy 'Back Back Train', and the way they all wind it down with an acoustic gospel sing-along ('Jesus Is On The Main Line') is truly heart­warming. Maybe they should have done it all unplugged.

 

Or maybe not. It's been a long time, after all, since those of us that drew a sharp line between 'Rats In The Cellar' and 'Monkey On My Back' got the occasion to rock'n'roll to a 'Smith tune without a vague fear of breaking some unwritten code of honour. So, even if Joe Perry has not invented any new riffs and Tyler still uses each song as an opportunity to practice his animal scream (what a scream, though, especially for a guy in his fifties), it's all decent shit. Certainly better to go out this-a way. Thumbs up.

 

ROCKIN’ THE JOINT (2005)

 

1) Beyond Beautiful; 2) Same Old Song And Dance; 3) No More No More; 4) Seasons Of Wither; 5) Light Inside; 6) Draw The Line; 7) I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing; 8) Big Ten Inch Record; 9) Rattlesnake Shake; 10) Walk This Way; 11) Train Kept A-Rollin’.

 

Recorded in 2002 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, not released until three years later when nobody really cared, featuring a suitably trashy album sleeve and an oddly short setlist, the album was either mildly trashed or ignored by the critics — and has no chance whatsoever to join Live! Bootleg in its semi-legendary status. Too bad, ‘cause it’s a lot of fun.

 

On the heels of South Of Sanity, you’d think the guys would be happy enough to entertain the Vegas crowds with a generous serving of their glossy hits. They do not; with the exception of two numbers from their latest studio album (well, they were promoting it, after all), and one more that is pretty painful to mention at this time, everything they play goes back to the gold period — in­cluding freshly unearthed rarities such as ‘No More No More’ and ‘Seasons Of Wither’!

 

Everything changes in an instant. Where the Sanity tracks, with a few exceptions, reflected Aero­smith honestly earning their daily bread, giving fans note-for-note perfect versions of pre-poli­shed plastic rock’n’roll hits, on Rockin’ The Joint they are clearly having fun. Because with the­se old classics, you don’t care for ideal execution; you just care to get your kicks. The way Joe Perry hammers out that riff for ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ — don’t you want to trade the band’s entire post-1987 career for that experience? The way Tyler screams his head off on the last verse of ‘Draw The Line’, even if a bit of it is off-key, isn’t it more exciting than all of his come-in-at-the-right-moment bansheeisms on Sanity? The way the band jams its toes off during the instrumental sections of ‘Big Ten Inch Record’, don’t it send these Vegas people into a dance frenzy, so much more exciting than the alleged two-step of ‘Rag Doll’?

 

Look at this. Midway through, the waves of excitement are unexpectedly interrupted as Steven bursts into a perfunctory rendition of ‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’, the worst song ever to be associated with the name of Aerosmith — not only is it a power ballad, after all, but it was writ­ten by Diane Warren, a weapon of mass destruction from outer space fifty times as destructive as the asteroid in the bullshit movie Armageddon for which she wrote the song and Aerosmith, look­ing for new, thrilling, and ever more humiliating ways to sell out, recorded it. (How fortunate it is that the studio version is only available as a single, or on compilations that nobody need buy any­way). Anyway, once they’re done with this monstrosity, obviously targeted at the tasteless gamb­ling ladies in the crowd, “So you like the old shit or the new shit?”, asks Tyler — “OLD SHIT!” yells everyone in the audience with the power to yell. Good for Ms. Warren she was not among the audience that evening.

 

So, overall, this is terrific — a rejuvenation, a return to senses, perhaps only temporary, but who cares: this is Aerosmith playing as if they were in some lousy joint in 1976, and they haven’t lost a thing — Tyler’s singing still perfect, Perry’s playing still gritty as hell. Perhaps the Peter Green blues cover, presaging Honkin’ On Bobo (‘Rattlesnake Shake’) is a bit too slow and drawn out, but they do insert the fast jam from ‘Rats In The Cellar’ in the middle, so I’d rather hear that than another rendition of ‘Falling In Love Is So Hard On The Knees’.

 

Absolute fuckin’ best rock’n’rollin’ moment: the band totally cuts loose with ‘Big Ten Inch Re­cord’, fluid guitar solos from Whitford and some guest piano player, and then, when everyone is already pretty well on their feet, “JOE PERRYYY!” from Tyler and the guy cuts in like mad, a cross between Chuck Berry and Alvin Lee. Tune in to this and it may yet make your day. With the sordid exception of the Diane Warren thing — even the two numbers from Just Push Play are decent — this is Aerosmith’s best live offering since Bootleg, and one of the best live albums ever from a band of rock veterans each of which is way beyond 50. For the record, the Stones have never played with that kind of quality upon crossing the half-century age range, although they still get by on enthusiasm and great material. Thumbs up.

 

MUSIC FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION! (2012)

 

1) LUV XXX; 2) Oh Yeah; 3) Beautiful; 4) Tell Me; 5) Out Go The Lights; 6) Legendary Child; 7) What Could Have Been Love; 8) Street Jesus; 9) Can't Stop Loving You; 10) Lover Alot; 11) We All Fall Down; 12) Freedom Fighter; 13) Closer; 14) Something; 15) Another Last Goodbye; 16*) Up On A Mountain; 17*) Oasis In The Night; 18*) Sunny Side Of Love.

 

Word of the day is «tedious». Seven years in the making, during which the band almost came to a complete halt (as Joe Perry started spreading rumors that Aerosmith would go on with a new lead singer) — eleven years, actually, since the world's greatest rock'n'roll band, MTV-style, graced us with their last all-original collection of tightly polished, relentlessly professional, thoroughly washed-up rock-a-pop. And now — not only are they back, but what they are offering us is Mu­sic From Another Dimension. Sure thing, guys. Any dimension in which Diane Warren may be residing at present is definitely another by me.

 

If, like poor deluded me, you ever thought that the not-particularly-inspired, but still relatively tough, blues-drenched, Honkin' On Bobo gave a weak hint at salvation, and that the subsequent live release so strongly reminded us of what was ever so great about Aerosmith in the first place — forget all hopes even before you put the record on. The album cover is cheesier than ever, and once again, they fall back on their corporate songwriter squad: Marti Frederiksen! Jim Vallance! Desmond Child! Russ Irwin! And, oh yes, Lady Di in person, with a brand new power ballad and she's not afraid to use it. If you thought these guys were long since packed in naphthalene, you got another think coming. Another dimension has opened up, and the living dead are upon us.

 

Except that even the living dead, as it turns out, are not immune to aging. Where «classic late pe­riod Aerosmith» managed to become an outrageous offense to good taste while still retaining a serious level of energy and catchiness, Music From Another Dimension is nowhere near as of­fensive (it is not altogether «mentorial», with neither the carnal nor the humanitarian save-the-world side of these guys over-emphasized as usual) — it is simply dull. Long, overdrawn, repe­titive, monotonous, and deadly, mind-numbingly D-U-L-L.

 

No one has bothered writing a single new interesting riff. At best, you get rehashes of ʽLast Childʼ, ʽDraw The Lineʼ or even ʽWalk On Downʼ, and at worst, you just get the basic wall of stiffly produced sound that Aerosmith can produce in their collective sleep, having built up so much experience since 1987. Yes, it all sounds like Aerosmith — why should it all sound like anybody else? — and it all sounds tired. Of course, they are old men, and one has to lower the ex­pectations in proportion to age. Or has one, really? With a million and one bands in the world still punching out loud rock'n'roll, why settle for somebody just because they are — just because they used to be — Aerosmith?

 

Take my advice, if you wish, and make your decision based on the very first track, since most of the rest will sound more or less the same way. Loud, compressed, based on a blues-rock melody taken directly from the stockpile, and featuring multi-tracked vocals from Tyler that finally show serious signs of aging — he is quite consciously sparing his throat after the surgery performed in 2006, and avoids overtaxing the larynx. Obviously, he cannot be blamed, but it is just as obvious­ly clear that, without Tyler's vocal antics, Aerosmith is going to look no happier than the three-legged dog on the cover of an Alice In Chains album. (For honesty's sake, Steve can still hit his famous high notes, but he only does this in exceptional cases now — mostly saving it up for the «climactic» moments of the album-closing ballad, ʽAnother Last Goodbyeʼ, and, actually, it isn't all that pretty any more). And then there are the air-brushed lyrics, no longer dripping sexy sweat as they used to, but somehow it seems that the taming is more generally due to the overall aura of political correctness flowing in the air than the wise decision to finally «act their age»: "Love three times a day, love your life away... there ain't no other way, it's in your DNA" — sounds like a Viagra commercial to me, don't you think?

 

In terms of general «musical philosophy», the album continues the line of Just Push Play, subtly erasing the line between «rocker» and «ballad» and throwing on poppy lines and psychedelic hugs every now and then — but it also cuts down on the most overtly «Beatlesque» moves of that album; on a purely formal basis, Another Dimension rocks harder (on an intuitive basis, it does not rock at all). Will this please old-time fans? Not sure. Even with the fast-moving songs like ʽStreet Jesusʼ and ʽLover A Lotʼ, there is really no feel that these were recorded with any other purpose than «hey, we still have to prove that we can do another ʽToys In The Atticʼ». Forget it. They can no longer do even another ʽFeverʼ.

 

Then there are the genuinely dorky bits. The album's equivalent of ʽBack In The Saddleʼ, for instance, is ʽOut Go The Lightsʼ, with the sexual bravado culminating in a chorus that will just have to go down the annals — or the drain, one of the two: "If you wanna take a lookie cookie / Tonight might be your lucky". And ʽCan't Stop Loving Youʼ is a duet with American Idol winner Carrie Underwood — and the song sounds like it belongs on American Idol, one of those «neo-country» pieces of garbage that even a post-Permanent Vacation Aerosmith should be ashamed of being associated with.

 

And it's loooooong. Sixty seven minutes of one non-descript piece of muzak after another (occa­sionally my brain even fails to register the pauses between the tracks). In this totally draggy at­mosphere, there are almost no high- or lowlights: even the Diane Warren ballad is no better or worse than everything else. Perry gets two lead vocals, including the one on ʽFreedom  Fighterʼ, a perfunctory anti-war rant that sounds as if made on order; it ain't even no ʽWalk On Downʼ — back in the days of Get A Grip, you could at least count on old man Perry to strike out some old-timey rock'n'roll excitement as an antithesis to the band's generally glossy sound, but here there is no difference: the glossy sound has worn off some of the gloss, and the exciting bits have lost some of the excitement. It's all just one big gray blob of sonic murk.

 

Music From Another Dimension! is not a general offense to good taste (at least, not until the Ameri­can Idol woman enters the studio): even if they still wanted to, Aerosmith simply no longer have it in them to spearhead the «MTV taking over the world» movement. But, much like every bit of original material that their forefathers, The Rolling Stones, recorded in the 21st century, this is first and fore­most merely a reminder — that this here band, Aerosmith, is still with us, whether we like it or not. Naturally, they have every right to issue a reminder like that — and we have every right to remind them that this is nothing more than just a reminder. By giving it a certified thumbs down, for instance.

 

ALAN PARSONS

TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION (1976)

 

1) A Dream Within A Dream; 2) The Raven; 3) The Tell-Tale Heart; 4) The Cask Of Amontillado; 5) Doctor Tarr And Professor Feather; 6) The Fall Of The House Usher: Prelude; 7) Arrival; 8) Intermezzo; 9) Pavane; 10) Fall; 11) To One In Paradise.

 

There is one solid objective reason for why Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, a concept al­bum based on a bunch of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, should have been the best album by the Alan Parsons Project — namely, because the Alan Parsons Project, to a large part, was launched out of a desire to record a concept album based on a bunch of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.

 

Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson met in 1974. The former wanted to become something more than «the guy who engineered Dark Side Of The Moon», and the latter loved Poe. The union was blessed, and the outcome was a record the likes of which did not really exist prior to 1976; at the very least, to the best of my memory, no rock album presented as a soundtrack to literary glo­ries had ever captured the public eye so much before that time. Commercially, it was hardly huge, but it established the Project as a serious attraction, and has ever since remained as the corner­stone of their legacy — even many of the active Parsons haters confess to falling under its charm from time to time.

 

There is some strange magic at work here indeed. On one hand, Tales is a huge venture. It covers the matters of three Poe stories and one Poe poem on the first side, then invests everything into the lengthy multi-part 'Fall Of The House Of Usher' suite on the second. It downplays Parsons' manipulations with electronic keyboards in favour of a whole ton of guest musicians and an entire orchestra. It features a different guest vocalist on each song, including moderately big names like Arthur Brown, John Miles, and Terry Sylvester. And yet, on the other hand, apart from a few iso­lated moments, it feels wrong to describe it as «bombastic». It has an odd claustrophobic aura around it, as if one were locked in an ice palace, staring out the frozen windows at distorted sha­des of reality and not knowing how real they really were. It may be off-putting, and it may not be exactly suitable for Poe-related purposes, but somehow, it works.

 

Indeed, some original reviews complained that the album had missed its mark — that, regardless of how good the music was on its own, it did not convey the proper associations, that the tense sensations of fear, thrill, death, and gloom were nowhere to be found. They were right, but, after all, The Alan Parsons Project formed as a progressive rock outfit, not as a brand of shock-rock à la Alice Cooper. The songs should be thought of as inspired by Poe rather than reflecting Poe, at which point they really come to life as original creations.

 

The first side is the diverse one. 'The Raven' is taken at an almost martial pace, emphasizing the inescapability of the bird's message right from the first bass note that drips on your ears in comp­lete loneliness for a few seconds. 'The Tell-Tale Heart' is molded as a rocking chunk of Arthur Brown madness — probably the closest they ever get to pinning down one of Poe's heroes (one might think that the fast blues-rock tempo may not be the most suitable choice for picturing a cra­zy protagonist going nuts over the heart of a murdered man pursuing him from beyond the floor­boards — but then it's also a pretty good approximation of a crazy-beatin' human heart). 'The Cask Of Amontillado' ascends from a lovely ballad (think one half Paul McCartney, one half Peter Gabriel) to epic horn-held heights of mu­sical vendetta. And 'Doctor Tarr And Professor Fe­ther' is just a good pop-rocker with a memorable riff — an amusing trifle in Poe's career, a fun, but not breathtaking entry in Parsons' catalog.

 

The second side, almost entirely dedicated to the 'Usher' suite, is an acquired taste like most prog rock suites at the time — a piece to be tolerated in some spots and admired in others. Taking a few cues from Debussy's unfinished opera of the same name, it moves through different sections that are not as much creepy as «archaic»: the 'Pavane' section lives and breathes the souls of past generations, but never once does it suggest death and retribution, which is why the minute-long 'Fall' itself is sort of flat and anti-climactic. Fortunately, the album prefers to end with 'To One In Paradise', another ballad worthy of a distinguished disciple of both the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

 

(For the record, a little more than a decade after the album's initial release, on the threshold of the CD age, Parsons could not resist tampering with the original and significantly remixed it, adding in some electronic enhancement and, most importantly, several bits of artistic reciting originally sent to him by Orson Welles soon after the original release. All of this hardly spoils the final pro­duct, but purists with lots of useless time on their hands will want to go for the «Deluxe» 2-CD edition that provides access to both ver­sions.)

 

On the whole, one shouldn't be too harsh on Tales. It is intelligent, tasteful, and melodic, and if it does not exactly reach cathartic effects (although the ominous climactic bits on 'Amontillado' come close), it is only because it does not aspire to them, not because it fails at them. It also has the dubious honor of being one of the coldest, iciest prog-rock albums ever released, just by the very fact of its existence, not because Parsons and Woolfson derive some sort of sadistic satisfac­tion by sucking the warmth out of your bodies as you listen to this. It's just a particular type of musical animal. Rare at its peak, completely extinct today. Thumbs up.

 

I ROBOT (1977)

 

1) I Robot; 2) I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You; 3) Some Other Time; 4) Breakdown; 5) Don't Let It Show; 6) The Voice; 7) Nucleus; 8) Day After Day; 9) Total Eclipse; 10) Genesis Ch. 1 v. 32.

 

If asked, «Who would be the perfect artist to transfer the ideas and the general feel of Asimov's work(s) onto a musical setting?», the average knowledgeable person would probably name Kraft­werk, or, perhaps, somebody within their innumerable legions of electronic followers. And that would be wrong — because Kraftwerk would try to approach the goal exclusively from the ro­bot's point of view, whereas Asimov's concern has always been that of depicting the man — ma­chine interaction rather than the machine itself.

 

Which means that, in 1977, no one could have done it better than The Alan Parsons Project, a musical team assembled specifically for the purpose of gluing together traditional values of melo­dy and harmony with the world of technical progress and automatic programming. You may like I Robot or hate it, but what it sets out to achieve, achieve it does. Not to mention that it is also the most technically complex and unpredictable record in the band's catalog, which, per se, could be an asset only for major prog-rock fans — and major prog-rock fans generally tend to avoid Parsons for all of the man's immaculately calculated commercialism. (They do fail to remember that if commercial success were Parsons' prime interest, he could have turned his band into Styx or Journey with one wave of his hand; he never did).

 

More than a third of the record is completely instrumental, with tracks ranging from purely am­bient-atmospheric ('Nucleus' — solemnly happy electronic waves of sound to illustrate physical processes; 'Total Eclipse' — a spooky marriage of Gregorian chant with synthesizer science) to re­petitive, but memorable melodic drones (the title track, unexpectedly white-funky; 'Genesis 1:32', announcing the next unwritten episode in the history of Creation but not sounding too hap­py about it — well, the Alan Parsons Project is very rarely happy about things). In terms of con­ceptuality and complexity, the instrumentals are really the meat of the LP as such, and they are so well done that any talk of progressive rock being deader than a doornail by 1977 must be put to rest on this sort of evidence alone. This stuff sounds good, and it sold, too.

 

But sell it did, most likely, on the strength of its vocalized poppier-oriented content. Two of the singles were ballads: 'Day After Day', sung by Jack Harris, is gallantly Floydian in tone and me­lody, yet never once injected with Waters' misanthropic venom, and 'Don't Let It Show', sung by Dave Townsend, is a sappy soft-rock tear-jerker whose artificial tenderness will undoubtedly lead many to accuse the song of criminal activities against good taste. I would probably hate it per se, were I to hear it on some classic rock radio station, but it feels nice and cozy in the overall con­text of the LP, where the listener can make sure that, in fact, this kind of sound is an exception for this album rather than its norm.

 

Third single was 'I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You', whose single-power is derived from its be­ing so attractively rhythmic; with the rhythm section locked in a shy funk groove and the guitar player taking a lesson in chicken-scratching, you could stick it in the midst of your local disco­theque selections and no one would have noticed. Funk rears its head on 'Breakdown', too, graced with the instantly recognizable vocals of Hollies' frontman Allan Clarke, and even more so on 'The Voice' (Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel fame at the wheel), with a wah-wah solo, no less.

 

In fact, the only vocal number which does not reflect a 180-degree turn from the style of Tales is 'Some Other Time': stately, mid-tempo, solemn brass, choral vocals, cold lonesome feeling, the works. Everything else is subtly targeted at modernistic audiences. But the charm of I Robot is that the first impression is still that of an intelligent, complex, well-crafted album dedicated to a serious topic; it is not until later that you start to notice how busy Parsons and Woolfson actually are concocting the balance between paying tribute to Asimov's vision (or, more precisely, their vision of Asimov's vision) and making a record fit for the public taste of 1977.

 

In the end, not all that much is left of Asimov's vision. The instrumental numbers are ambiguous, and the lyrics, which are generally described by reviewers as being «about robots», are in fact somewhat obscure, not to mention clichéd. But there is a huge emotional palette here, all the same — anger, fear, sadness, tenderness — making I Robot stand on its perfect own as, perhaps, the richest musical experience to be gained from the Project; and, disregarding most of the critical scorn that used to go hand in hand with each of Parsons' new ventures, one should not really be ashamed of issuing a thumbs up to this album at least, fantastically solidly constructed from the brainwise point of view and harboring plenty of delight for the senses as well.

 

PYRAMID (1978)

 

1) Voyager; 2) What Goes Up...; 3) The Eagle Will Rise Again; 4) One More River; 5) Can't Take It With You; 6) In The Lap Of The Gods; 7) Pyromania; 8) Hyper-Gamma-Spaces; 9) Shadow Of A Lonely Man.

 

Pyramid sold a little less than I Robot, perhaps because it was neither punk nor disco, and it did not have 'Come Sail Away' on it, either. For all the critical derision that the Alan Parsons Project got through the years, they never abased themselves to blunt populism. If, with each new album, they were becoming more «pop» than «prog» — well, heck, so did Pink Floyd, more or less.

 

On the down side of things, the textures of Pyramid, even on instrumentals that had so far tended to represent the complex, demanding side of the Project, had by 1978 drifted dangerously close to the Elton John/Billy Joel fief, perhaps over a conscious attempt to avoid being called cheap Floyd clo­nes (all the more curious as to why none of the songs were hits; sheer lack of luck, I suspect). 'In The Lap Of The Gods', in quite a few of its places, brings to mind 'Funeral For A Friend' — the same sort of get-rich-quick-with-a-keyboard-riff attitude that the seasoned prog fan will want to detest and deride for pandering to the oligophreny-inclined segment of the population, before retreating into his world created by Roger Dean and jointly ruled from Canterbury and Kobaia.

 

On the up side, this is definitely not Styx we are talking about. Even if going a bit overboard with the sentimental and the simplistic bits, Parsons and Woolfson have not let down their sense of taste, and there is not an ounce of cheap populist melodrama on Pyramid that so many of their «Serious» contemporaries had wilfully submitted to. Think about it: an artist of lesser stature, ri­ding the «pyramid power» craze of the 1970s, would have, most likely, released a bunch of bull­shit anthems on all sorts of paranormal hogwash. The Project, on the other hand, upon calling their album Pyramid, deal out just one cruel, lambasting, but fully deserved blow to Patrick Fla­nagan's charlatan tripe ('Pyromania') — and dedicate the rest of the album to the real historical pyramids and the living gods they were built for. Of course, it's not like they really did their homework on Egyptian history or anything — but then, not everyone is supposed be the pop music equivalent of the BBC History Channel à la Al Stewart.

 

In basic spiritual terms, The Project remains completely true to its essence: musical reflections on the sad, pathetic aspect of human existence. 'What Goes Up...' expectedly ends in "...must come down", and if the songs are not about the vanity of constructing pyramids, they are about the va­nity of constructing personalities. E. g. my personal favorite, 'Can't Take It With You', a pretty folk-pop song that pairs a very Revolver-like electric riff with very Byrds-like vocals (Dean Ford takes the lead) to remind us of the fact that we cannot take it with us indeed — when we go, that is, regardless of what the "it" is. Banal, yes, but it works.

 

In this respect, sentimental ballads such as 'The Eagle Will Rise Again' (sung by former Zombie Colin Blunstone) and 'Shadow Of A Lonely Man' (sung by John Miles) work very well: they are insecure, frail, and pitiful, with soft, breaking vocals (Miles almost seems to be crying in his ja­cket when delivering his lines) perfectly matching the melodies and the lyrical content, even if this limp thing can turn off many a rockier listener. The only time when the ensemble does try to rock out — very mildly — is on the Lenny Zakatek-sung 'One More River', a song that rolls along with a good punch, but feels a bit out of place, a strange attempt at pointless gung-ho opti­mism amidst a sea of self-doubt and cynicism.

 

Nevertheless, there are really no serious misfires. If it ain't a masterpiece for the ages, it is still a finely designed, deeply felt, and professionally executed concept album, on which The Project's usual «coldness» — as always, provided mostly through Alan's velvet keyboard sound — for the third time around, is a perfect conductor for the moods/ideas these guys want to make you ex­perience or ponder upon. They nail it with the first doom-laden steps of 'What Goes Up...' and never really let go.

 

And there is every pos­sibility that even tracks that are the easiest one to dismiss might come back to haunt you (on the strength of Pyramid Power, no doubt!) — that keyboard theme from 'Hyper-Gamma-Spaces', for instance, no matter how dumb and repetitive it is, has pretty much stuck with me for good, I beli­eve; it is about as hard to shake off as the riff for 'Satisfaction'. As for 'Pyro­mania', the «kiddie humour» bit of the album, I really like it, not so much for alleviating the mood (The Project work as soft, never as hard, depressants, so there is really not much need for any arti­ficial cloudbursting) as for stating so clearly and explicitly that the album and the band have nothing to do with cheap pocketbook mysticism, and are as happy as the next intelligent person to give it a proper whipping. It's good, clean fun.

 

In short, if this is «poor man's progressive rock» — and, from certain formal points of view, it might very well be — consider stepping into a poor man's shoes for forty minutes, and join me in my unequivocal thumbs up.

 

EVE (1979)

 

1) Lucifer; 2) You Lie Down With Dogs; 3) I'd Rather Be A Man; 4) You Won't Be There; 5) Winding Me Up; 6) Damned If I Do; 7) Don't Hold Back; 8) Secret Garden; 9) If I Could Change Your Mind.

 

Up until 1979, The Alan Parsons Project had not only exercised a total ban on «love songs», but, in fact, the issue of male/female relationship was almost conspicuously absent from their art as a whole — so much so that it is highly likely that many must have been questioning the nature of the relationship between Parsons and Woolfson themselves. Of course, there is a formal  justifi­cation — that issue was not of central importance to their concepts — but, after all, neither Edgar Allan Poe, nor Isaac Asimov, nor, least of all, the Egyptian pharaohs were ever above «getting some», neither in their writings nor in their actions.

 

Then, in 1979, they released Eve, and the people's worst fears came to life. Song after song after song, Parsons and Woolfson push forward the idea that «getting some» is an understandable tem­ptation, but, in the long run, it's simply not worth it. Look at the string of song titles from track 2 to track 6: it may be the single longest-running, most expertly and intelligently crafted assault on the female sex ever committed to vinyl. Move over, Bernie Taupin, tell Mick Jagger the news. She lies down with dogs, she's winding me up, she won't be there anyway, so I'd rather be a man, but damned if I do and damned if I don't no matter what.

 

The concept was that long-awaited catalyst for critical oxidation — most of the pen-holding brothers never loved The Project all that much anyway, but at least the previous three albums, with their immaculate execution, never provided them with a strong enough excuse to torpedo them right to the bottom. And it did not help matters either that Eve was, unquestionably, the most lightweight «pop» album from The Project so far. Individually, there are no songs here that pander to tastes even simpler than those that demanded 'Don't Let It Show' and 'One More River', but collectively, Eve is almost exclusively remembered for its catchy pop choruses rather than dense arrangements or breathtakingly complex «progressive» instrumentals.

 

So there is nothing really surprising in the fact that Eve fell through the cracks. It must have dis­gusted women, feminists, and liberal critics (and conservative critics weren't listening to the band in the first place); it must have betrayed the expectations of the dwindling, but still present, prog-rock crowd; and at the same time, it was not that much of a sellout — because the one thing that was definitely not on the Project's mind when making the record was making it sell à la Styx or Journey or the Bee Gees.

 

Too bad. Eve is a pop album, for sure, but it is one of the best and, in this writer's opinion, least dated pop albums of 1979. Yes, the points that most of the songs make are certainly debatable, but, as with all kinds of art, it is not the substance of the points that counts, but the coefficient of success with which they are made. Your woman may not lie with dogs neither literally nor meta­phorically, but if 'You Lie With Dogs' manages to be Biblically-angry enough to convince you — for that one particular moment! — that she does, then the song is a respectable piece of art. And Lenny Zakatek sings it in quite a convincing manner, not to mention the trivial, but unforgettable guitar riff that goes along with the singing.

 

Likewise, 'I'd Rather Be A Man', with its 'Run Like Hell'ish echoey guitar, brims with misogyni­stic paranoia so much that lead vocalist David Paton must have understood he was running cer­tain career risks there; 'You Won't Be There' is an excellent send-up of a typical BeeGees-style Seventies ballad that ends up demeaning its object rather than glorifying it; 'Winding Me Up' subtly conceals its anger behind bouncy rhythms and Vivaldi-colored interludes; and 'Damned If I Do' does a good job of conveying a mesmerized lover's desperation. It all works, right down to the sleeve cover on which two females of suspicious occupation are busy unsuccessfully covering their herpes sores with stylish veils. Symbolism, what?

 

Nevertheless, it is sometimes forgotten that women are given a fair chance to rebound on the al­bum: in fact, Eve is the only record by The Project that actually features female lead singers: Clare Torry of 'Great Gig In The Sky' fame ('Don't Hold Back') and Lesley Duncan, an occasional hitmaker and Elton John backup vocalist ('If I Could Change Your Mind'). The former gives poor men an optimistic perspective on things, the latter sort of admits that, whaddaya know, these cold heartless bitches have feelings, too. And, once again, both make good points: 'Don't Hold Back' is catchy and uplifting, while 'If I Could Change Your Mind' is a fine example of a cheese-free Se­venties ballad that, in a reasonable and refined society, should and would have been a much big­ger hit than — oh, I dunno, 'More Than A Woman', for one thing.

 

Anyway, do not be misled by the inappropriate application of political correctness and do not be afraid of liking this record if it is its subject matter, not its music, that seems off-putting to you. There are all kinds of women in the world, and some actually «lie down with dogs» (want it or not, my spam inbox reminds me of the fact every few days), and it doesn't sit well with some men — that's the kind of situation Parsons and Woolfson are playing around with, but it doesn't mean they are forcing the listener into making some absurdly generalizing misogynistic conclusions. Proof? No true woman hater would have let his patented woman-hating album end up with a song as gorgeous as Lesley Duncan's ballad, which, on its very own, makes one forget all about the female transgressions so vividly depicted on Side 1.

 

As for the watering-down of the progressive style in which the band initially started out, well, I would say that mixing «progressive» and «pop» is a very difficult art in itself, and whoever suc­ceeds in making the final results not come across as overtly dumb and cheesy deserves recogni­tion per that success alone. Pink Floyd had set that standard on Dark Side, and Parsons, as their #1 disciple, would be expected to follow suit. I would say that on Eve, for the first time ever, the band's instrumental compositions — 'Lucifer' and 'Secret Garden' — while still immaculately ar­ran­ged and produced, no longer show us the band's true heart; they are intended more as a lure for old-school fans, an obligatory tribute to tradition. But I don't think it's a problem at all.

 

Anyway, the intrigue, controversy, and originality alone make Eve a standout in Parsons' disco­graphy — and what's wrong with having a bunch of good melodies finalize the picture? Ani Di­Franco will, no doubt, want to rip me to shreds for this, but a powerful thumbs up all the same.

 

THE TURN OF A FRIENDLY CARD (1980)

 

1) May Be A Price To Pay; 2) Games People Play; 3) Time; 4) I Don't Wanna Go Home; 5) The Gold Bug; 6) The Turn Of A Friendly Card (i. Part One; ii. Snake Eyes; iii. The Ace Of Swords; iv. Nothing Left To Lose; v. Part Two).

 

The pooled brainpower of Parsons and Woolfson is admirable. This follow-up to Eve, skilfully crafted according to their continuously high standards, when dissolved into simple separate com­ponents, is just as «pop» as its predecessor — and yet, through subtle shifts of palette, a more dis­tinct emphasis on conceptuality, and a correctly calculated touch of musical feng shui, it restores the «art-rock» feel of the band's first three albums that some fans had started missing on Eve.

 

The record is about gambling — look at the song titles. But, of course, it is not literally about gambling: we only take the art of gambling as a metaphorical pretext to reflect on the concepts of chance, luck, risk, etc., and their role in and effect on people's lives. Nothing way too deeply phi­losophical, but, just like with Pink Floyd, it works because the simple, age-old truths of the lyrics are well attenuated by new musical ideas.

 

«New», however, not in the sense that The Project pay a lot of attention to trends — The Turn sounded quite archaic in 1980 (one reason why it sounds surprisingly modern today). Sometimes the musicians resort to specific «25th frame»-style techniques — look, for instance, how surrepti­tiously 'May Be A Price To Pay' hops into a sort of Saturday Night Fever-ish dance groove for its instrumental break, then snaps back out as if it were only a brief dream; or the small out-of-no­where reggae bit after 'Nothing Left To Lose' — but for the most part, this is the same classically or folk-oriented balladry, and the same funkified pop they'd been doing for ages. None of that  New Wave shit for brainwashed kids. Serious adult music for serious adult people.

 

For me, it works. First, it works as a concept. These guys were born to lament the ills and misfor­tunes of humanity, and the gambling disease, taken both literally and figuratively, is right up their alley (besides, it's also a far safer topic for the critical eye than the «woman disease» of Eve). There may be only two basic moods explored — the ominous/angry/frustrated and the melancho­lic/pitiful/desperate — but, after all, those are the two basic moods of gambling, and they are interspersed well enough so that the record never feels monotonous.

 

Second, it works as individual songs. The hit 'Games People Play' is, composition-wise, probably one of the most trivial tunes on the album, a simple keyboard pattern expanded into a simplistic dance number whose main source of inspiration almost seems to have been ABBA's 'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!' (classy smooth guitar breaks, though). However, the other hit, 'Time', is one of the best Pink Floyd songs that Pink Floyd never wrote (probably because they already had a 'Time' of their own, har har). There is no presumption of innocence for pretentious artists that name one of their songs 'Time', letting us mortals know that they have a better existentialist grasp on the issue of chronospace than every one of us; and this is exactly why this combination of swe­et McCartney-like vocals, Harrison-like slide, and Parsons-only synth backdrops works so much better than simply «well».

 

Among those who take great care to separate the «intelligent» bits of The Project from the «sell­out» bits, 'Time' has garnered a fair amount of hatred — for its silly clichéd lyrics (indeed), and its monotonous melody with no sense of development. Not everyone thinks that it was a good choice to let Eric Woolfson, first time ever, step up to the mike, either. I beg to disagree: 'Time' is no more a pop sellout than something like Floyd's 'Us And Them' (whose verse melody it brings up very vividly in my mind), and Woolfson has a sweet, sensitive, charming voice — which he also puts to great use on 'Nothing Left To Lose' — that should have been used much earlier. It may not be more complex in its melody than quite a few Styx or Journey ballads that we are trai­ned to despise, but the important thing is that it assumes far less: nobody is ripping his shirt off and sticking his sweaty, smelly heart right under your nosdrils. So to speak.

 

The entire second side is one big song... nah, not really. It is four completely distinct songs (one of them in two parts), joined together with brief interludes and, sometimes, instrumental reprisals. But, hey, artistry on the rampage. 'Nothing Left To Lose' is the band's finest exercise in the folk pop genre, a song that would be an unusually high-standard attraction on a Barclay James Harvest album, perhaps, or, come to think of it, on a Baby James Taylor one as well (although, the way I see it, spoiling the spoils with cheesy Bee Geesy backup vocals was not a good thing). 'Snake Eyes', getting us back into angry mode, has the most memorable guitar riff on the album. And the title track has us witness more of Parsons' skill in brass arrangements, as its second part gradually transforms from a medievalistic ballad into an all-out apocalyptic romp (last time they did it so well was four years earlier, on 'Cask Of Amontillado').

 

The only thing that is somehow devoid of interest are the instrumentals: 'The Gold Bug' is a de­cent sax-dominated «fusion» romp that really just works as an interlude, and 'The Ace Of Swords' is, by all means, just an interlude, fairly well lost in between the big guitar sound of 'Snake Eyes' and the folksy prettiness of 'Nothing Left To Lose'. As with Eve, this is not a good sign: clearly, the band is investing most of its powers into the vocal hooks, neglecting the harmony exploration that used to be such an integral part of their sound. But all you have to do to stop worrying is just accept that, ever since Pyramid, maybe even since I Robot, The Project had been an «adult pop» band — leaving only the more anally-obsessed ones to argue about the exact prog-to-pop ratios of each of their albums. And Turn Of A Friendly Card, with all of its songs ranging from tolerably decent to openly beautiful, is one of the best «adult pop» albums ever recorded. Thumbs up.

 

EYE IN THE SKY (1982)

 

1) Sirius; 2) Eye In The Sky; 3) Children Of The Moon; 4) Gemini; 5) Silence And I; 6) You're Gonna Get Your Fingers Burned; 7) Psychobabble; 8) Mammagamma; 9) Step By Step; 10) Old And Wise.

 

This might probably be the most seductive album ever recorded about Big Brother — and a cle­ver one at that. We are well used to imagining Orwellian worlds as chilly nightmares, but they were never really intended to look like that. People don't like nightmares. They do, however, like nice guys singing catchy melodies with warm, silk overtones, and as Eric Woolfson steps up to the mike again and sings "I am the eye in the sky, looking at you, I can read your mind", with all the lulling cuteness he can muster, it might dawn on you that this might not really be such a bad thing. Big Brother — he is, after all, your brother, supposed to care about you. What's so awful about having your mind read by somebody who cares?

 

If there is an «angle» to Eye In The Sky, The Project's most blatantly pop-oriented album so far and, coincidentally, their hugest commercial success, it is hiding somewhere in that kind of logic. Smooth-sounding, nerve-calming, spirit-lowering pop album on anti-Utopian subjects; quite a bi­zarre contradiction. 'Eye In The Sky' is really the kind of rhythmic ballad for which you'd expect a generic love lyric — and it would still be a finely written piece at that, but it is the jarring con­trast between the words and the music that generates pizzazz, and it works.

 

The band's «progressive» attractions, this time around, are strictly limited to one track, seven mi­nutes of the multi-part 'Silence And I', with an out-of-nowhere jiggy instrumental section disrup­ting the melancholy wails of the first and last parts; but even here, a few whacky melodic changes in the middle and the overall length are about the only «prog» aspects of it. The instrumentals, in the meantime, have totally lost their significance: 'Sirius' is but a mere chunk of atmospheric in­tro (and has, moreover, been since then appropriated by the mainstream as the theme for sports talk shows — «progressive» my ass), and 'Mammagamma'... well, Parsons had to try out his brand new Fairlight CMI computer, so he programmed some disco rhythms on it, added echoey synth guitar in The Wall-style, and, for some reason, smelled art in it. The basic groove is actually cool, but overall, it is the band's most throwaway-ish instrumental up to that point.

 

Throughout, the album mostly relies on the strength of modest soft-rockers — 'Psychobabble', 'You're Gonna Get Your Fingers Burned', and 'Step By Step' all groove by without a lot of staying power, but neither do they annoy; only 'Children Of The Moon', with Parsons' favorite trick, the marti­al brass arrangement, packs a bit more ambition than the rest.

 

Arguably the most surprising development will be seen on 'Gemini', a serious exercise in dreamy vocal harmony arrangement, led by Chris Rainbow and most closely reminiscent of the Beach Boys' late Sixties work. The Project were always suckers for a good vocal, but never before did they pay such detailed attention to the voices — and it can hardly be said they did this out of any sort of commercial drive, either. Come to think of it, Eye In The Sky, for an album that came out in 1982, is about as much commercially oriented as it would be were it to come out today, in an era when straight, well-written, melodic, and relatively humble pop music has no chance of sel­ling. Nor did it have a lot of chances in 1982.

 

But in 1982, somehow, it sold. You know why it sold? Because 'Eye In The Sky' — the song — is really a great song. With New Wave, dance-pop, and heavy metal ruling the charts, it would never have sold if it weren't really a great song. Not sure if people actually listened to the lyrics (maybe if they did, they would have recoiled in horror), but the music alone is hypnotizing eno­ugh; in a different world, I'm sure Parsons would be well off making a living as the court compo­ser for The Inner Party. Thumbs up, or we'll all end up in Room 101.

AMMONIA AVENUE (1984)

 

1) Prime Time; 2) Let Me Go Home; 3) One Good Reason; 4) Since The Last Goodbye; 5) Don't Answer Me; 6) Dancing On A Highwire; 7) You Don't Believe; 8) Pipeline; 9) Ammonia Avenue.

 

I honestly did not quite grasp whatever particular social topic Parsons and Woolfson sank their teeth into this time around. Something about a communication breakdown between scientists, in­dustrialists, and laymen — one more serious tragedy of humanity filtered through the Cassandra eye of The Project. Who cares, we're all gonna die anyway. Ultimately, what matters is that this is just another nice little collection of adult pop songs.

 

It is safe to say that, with Eye In The Sky out on the market, any discussions on the ratio of prog-to-pop on Alan Parsons albums had lost whatever relevance they once might have had. The biting question has now totally shifted to the ratio of bad, cheesy, conventional pop where all that mat­ters is a big, steady beat and a sci-fi attitude represented by the «two fingers on a Casio» principle vs. pop as a combination of intelligent craft and genuine feeling.

 

As far as I know, even those who loathe Parsons can rarely deny the craft; and as for genu­ine feeling — what else but genuine feeling could be responsible for choosing 'Don't Answer Me' as the lead single, a song that slavishly imitated, of all things, the classic Phil Spector wall-of-sound style of the early Sixties, additionally empowered only with Mel Collins' sax solo (which, in turn, recalls Phil's work in the Seventies, e. g. with John Lennon)? That a song like that, so drastically out of sync with what was hip in 1984, could have nevertheless gone on to become a big com­mercial hit, is nothing short of amazing, and, in my opinion, can qualify as one of pop music buyers' finest decisions of the year; one of very few «tribute songs» worthy of occupying the same rank as those creations to which it is paying tribute.

 

Elsewhere, of course, the sounds are far more «modern», but still very rarely stray away from the typical Parsons formula. Steady beats, smooth keyboards, pretty catchy singing, and the expected pinch of melancholia. Not everything works — Lenny Zakatek's pathos on 'You Don't Believe', another in a series of 'Run Like Hell'-style echo-rock concoctions, and a relatively weak one, is somewhat over the top, and so is Chris Rainbow's sappiness on 'Since The Last Goodbye' (which is nevertheless a damn finely written folk-pop ballad). But never say no to 'Prime Time', with one of the most elegant pop melodies these guys ever had the luck to give us, or to the Bluntstone-led 'Dancing On A Highwire', or to the title track, which summarizes the album on a mournful note very much akin to the one we heard on 'Turn Of A Friendly Card' three years back.

 

It is hard for me to find instructive things to say about Ammonia Avenue, and this might mean that, by 1984, The Project finally hit stagnation; this is the band's first album on which they did not really manage to find any new twists (discounting the bizarre, delightful Spector tribute). But if they were no longer able to change the face of music, they could at least slap on a few extra beauty marks. Ammonia Avenue is a record to be quietly enjoyed, not wildly revered or deeply analyzed. Its role within the «Big Seven» of The Project's uninterrupted run of artistic successes is graceful, small, and friendly. "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" — remem­ber that one? Roger Waters pretty much predicted all of this band's career. Thumbs up.

 

VULTURE CULTURE (1985)

 

1) Let's Talk About Me; 2) Separate Lives; 3) Days Are Numbers; 4) Sooner Or Later; 5) Vulture Culture; 6) Hawk­eye; 7) Somebody Out There; 8) The Same Old Sun.

 

This hurried follow-up to Ammonia Avenue (it is rumoured the two were originally intended to form a double album) may be way too pop for even undemanding listeners. Now that no signifi­cantly new ideas were being contributed, the best they could do was to simply keep the Eye In The Sky formula afloat — but the Eighties were happening, and, sooner or later, the decade of electronic brimstone would have caught up with them anyway. Vulture Culture makes a point of railing against soulless commercialism, all the while being steeped in it. Today, we may say that this is exactly the way it was meant to be, yet it does not make the effort any least dated.

 

Of course, the Project had so much talent pooled that the results are crudely goofy rather than blandly atrocious. Something like 'Hawkeye' is probably awful from God's point of view, but if I describe it to him as «a Depeche Mode style take on Ukrainian Hopak», he might at least consi­der the possibility that freedom of choice does exist, because how could the Almighty ever san­ction the production of 'Hawkeye'? That be sheer devil muzak!

 

Drum machines and crude tape loops spoil many a creative idea on this album, marrying Woolf­son's gorgeous vocals to routine synth-pop like 'Separate Lives', and adding an aura of dorkiness to the usually cool performance of Lenny Zakatek on the title track (which is still as catchy as a dorky pop tune could ever hope to be: «Vulture culture, use it or you lose it...»). It is also hard to understand why they choose to emulate Supertramp on 'Let's Talk About Me' — who ordered Breakfast In America with its plaintive vocals and one-finger-on-the-piano melodies? It's not a bad emulation, but didn't these guys used to have, like, a vision?... all their own?...

 

The sap also flows a bit too freely on paradise-style ballads such as 'Days Are Numbers' and 'Same Old Sun', although denying the sincerity of Woolfson's romantic outbursts or the hard com­posing work that underlies them would be rude. One song only, as far as I can tell, approaches the highest standards of the pop benchmark: 'Sooner Or Later', which is technically this album's 'Eye In The Sky / Prime Time', i. e. a metronomically organized pop-rocker with a falsetto chorus from Eric, but melodically even more seductive than its predecessors — the vocal moves borrow from Jeff Lynne's style, which in turn borrowed from the Beatles, and I keep arguing with myself over whether it is the verse melody («Oh what a price we pay...») or the chorus («Sooner or later I'll be free...») that is the more touching. Guitar friend Ian Bairnson rises to the challenge, too, offering an economic, perfectly constructed pop solo.

 

It is easy to see how Vulture Culture is usually taken for the scapegoat in the band's catalog — their poppiest, their worst arranged, their runningest-out-of-fresh-ideas, so to say. The mid-Eigh­ties were no walk in the park for most people. Still, it would only be a thumbs down by Parsons' own standards, and even then, I do not advise those who like the man's musical mindset to skip it or anything. Just keep in mind that the plank has been lowered.

 

STEREOTOMY (1985)

 

1) Stereotomy; 2) Beaujolais; 3) Urbania; 4) Limelight; 5) In The Real World; 6) Where's The Walrus; 7) Light Of The World; 8) Chinese Whispers; 9) Stereotomy Two.

 

Perhaps, after all, it was the continuing neglect towards the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe — the man respon­sible for the very existence of The Alan Parsons Project — that underlied the Project's slo­wly ongoing decay? Just in case, it would make sense to invoke the great spirit one more time, at least briefly, by calling the album after a rarely-heard construction term that one usually learns on­ly from carefully reading Murders In The Rue Morgue.

 

'Stereotomy' is basically the art of ta­king big blocks and cutting them in differently shaped small ones; here it refers to the art of taking talented people and shaping them in various ways to please the shape master. Or perhaps not. If you really want it, you can read 'Stereotomy' (the title track) as a thinly masked invitation for a BDSM session: "Silent knives dissect me and I feel no pain... Stereotomy, we can make it together, do anything you want with me". Woolfson's lyrics were ne­ver all that inspiring, really — it used to be interesting to hear his poetic interpretations of Poe's prose, but he never truly capitalized on these early achievements.

 

The important thing is that Stereotomy is clearly a conscious attempt to recapture some of the complexity that had been sacrificed for the sakes of 'Eye In The Sky', 'Prime Time', and 'Hawk­eye'. An album gloomier, denser, and heavier than at least the last three of their records — so much so that, first time in years, Woolfson even steps away from the mike to avoid the temptation of falling back on McCartneyisms. A pity, that: I loved his McCartneyisms, certainly much more so than any given «serious» piece of vocals from, say, Lenny Zakatek.

 

Ironically, it does not work. By late 1985, it was obviously too late for these guys to believe that they could still produce «pure» art-rock masterpieces without leaning too far over to the pop side. One major reason is instrumentation: no matter how anti-commercial they are trying to get, Ste­re­o­tomy fully relies on generic techniques of the day — stiff electronic keyboards and polished, glossy «heavy» guitar riffs learned from arena-rock masters. As a result, overall, the sound is ve­ry, very dull, even for the standards of The Alan Parsons Project, a band very well known for be­ing commonly hated for the general dullness of its sound.

 

There are some songs here that have no reason to be heard from Parsons and Woolfson. 'In The Real World', for instance, rather belongs on a bad Foreigner record; give me Woolfson's simplis­tic, but lovable and unpretentious pop melodicity over this fat, ugly stadium sound any day. For 'Limelight', they come up with a first, recruiting Procol Harum's Gary Brooker to sing lead vocals — and the number sounds, yes indeed, like a weak outtake from a solo Gary Brooker record, a ty­pically soulful delivery set to some of the laziest, languid-est keyboard chuck-chucks ever heard. Chris Rainbow is wasted on 'Beaujolais', a synth-popper whose main claim to fame is a careful, intricate arrangement of vocal harmonies on the chorus. The other claim is probably just that it sounds like one of the silliest numbers in Alan's entire catalog.

 

Still they plow on, making the title track run well over seven minutes and returning to the practice of producing artsy instrumentals — including the bombastic synthfest 'Where's The Walrus?', which even managed to earn a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental (I think it lost). The ti­tle may be a sly reference to Magical Mystery Tour, but the main theme of the track sounds un­cannily like a potential soundtrack theme to some third-rate detective soap or computer game — again, primarily due to the unfortunate choices of arrangement. For all his studio craft, Parsons is not a super-cool master of electronica: he still represents the «old» school of music-making, and thus, falls in the same trap as so many of his colleagues who somehow thought that continuing to make music in the old way with their new digital toys, all those Fairlight CMIs, would result in a successfully modernized version of the classical spirit. From that angle, Stereotomy is even more pitiful than Vulture Culture (although, granted, both still exercise far more restraint and intelli­gence than something like Jethro Tull's Under Wraps). A transparent and unfortunate thumbs down here — not even a single song I could wholeheartedly recommend.

 

GAUDI (1987)

 

1) La Sagrada Familia; 2) Too Late; 3) Closer To Heaven; 4) Standing On Higher Ground; 5) Money Talks; 6) Inside Looking Out; 7) Paseo De Gracia.

 

If you ever saw the coral reef-style oddity that is the Temple de La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, you'd probably want to make a concept album about it, too. Eric Woolfson went as far as to eve­n­tually re­make the album into a musical — as close as an artist ever got to realizing Frank Zappa's sarcastic idea of dancing about architecture — and, at the very least, got some people to check out information on Antonio Gaudi, Barcelona, and weirdass architecture in general.

 

It is a whole different question of whether the music on here is more stimulating than the intellec­tual baggage. Gaudi essentially continues in the same direction as Stereotomy: heavily depen­ding on by-the-book Eighties' sonic technologies, but also very strictly safeguarding the stability of the «artsi­ness» quotient. The title track is a bombastic, quasi-religious, suite-like structure; the lonesome instrumental at the end conceptually reprises the theme of the title track; and in be­tween... well, here is the problem: in between, it's the same old adult contemporary.

 

Still, it works better than Stereotomy. 'La Sagrada Familia', not so much about the cathedral or its creator as it is about hope and faith, has John Miles adopt a Gary Brooker singing style, so that some of the passages sound suspiciously similar to 'Limelight' off the previous album, or to late period Procol Harum/solo Brooker records — bombastic and somewhat rigid prayers that do not overwhelm but do not annoy, either, because the singer is kinda likeable, not the kind of guy you'd expect to dedicate one song to angels high in heaven and then the next song to unsophisti­cated carnal delight, without making any serious distinction between the two. And Parsons' brass arrangements are always welcome: it is one of the few areas in which he has never failed, going just as strong as he used to ten years before.

 

Woolfson is back on vocals, gracing the somewhat too generically «angelic» 'Closer To Heaven' (I understand that the closer you get to heaven, the louder it gets, but the important question is: how much of a discount does St. Peter get on the SDS5 kit?) and 'Inside Looking Out', a complex, inspired prayer with some of the most gorgeous vocal moves on a Project record; it would have been an unquestio­nable highlight on any of the classic-period albums, but on Gaudi it remains mostly unnoticed.

 

Oddly, these intense, seriously emotional, prayer-like compositions are interspersed with rather crude synth-pop and Eighties-pop-rock slabs that provide diversity, but not necessarily quality. 'Money Talks', for instance, is a straightforward protest song whose message is more or less the same as the message of any other song with the word 'Money' in it, but this particular angry at­mosphere seems to have been transposed directly from the Pink Floyd song (apparently, Alan's memories of 1973 had not ceased to haunt him yet), and since it is obviously futile to try and write a 'Money'-style song that would expand on the original 'Money', John Miles' effort predicta­bly falls flat. 'Standing On Higher Ground' is too much routed in Norwegian synth-pop to qualify as a success (the chorus is memorable, though). And 'Too Late' is too much routed in... I don't know, Bryan Adams? Foreigner? Does anyone still like that ugly clucking keyboard sound that had all but replaced electric rhythm guitar back then? Urgh.

 

The bottomline is: Gaudi is clearly much more inspired and focused than its two predecessors, and, in a better world, would have easily returned the Project to the forefront of the conceptual art world, but ever since technology killed the cat, the Project was way too heavily tainted by the mysteriously ugly world of dancing electrons to be able to make a proper comeback. Of course, in 1987 Gaudi may have still looked like art-rock's cutting edge, but today, its good intentions are embarrassingly dated. Yet I still give it a thumbs up, if only for the rekindled flames, that are at least responsible for the stunning fanfares of 'Sagrada Familia' and the beautiful vocals of 'In­side Looking Out'. Remember, next time you're at the end of your rope, just take a trip to Bar­celona — and there's much more to the city than just the Familia.

 

TRY ANYTHING ONCE (1993)

 

1) The Three Of Me; 2) Turn It Up; 3) Wine From The Water; 4) Breakaway; 5) Mr. Time; 6) Jigue; 7) I'm Talkin' To You; 8) Siren Song; 9) Dreamscape; 10) Back Against The Wall; 11) Re-Jigue; 12) Oh Life (There Must Be More).

 

The Alan Parsons Project, in its classic form of Parsons/Woolfson cooperation, ground to a halt through the creative duo's personal disagreements over Freudiana, their next conceptual install­ment that Woolfson decided, of all things, to turn into a musical. For Parsons, who had been sec­retly lamenting the pop drift of their music ever since Eye In The Sky, this was a bit too much — there are people for whom the very sound of the word «musical» is an insult to taste — and even­tually, it was decided that their artistic philosophies had drifted way too far apart, so it would be more productive to split. Woolfson went on to make musicals, from Freudiana to a reworking of Gaudi and other stuff; and Parsons set out to refresh and recapture the original Idea that brought the Project into existence in the first place.

 

Woolfson's solo career will be tackled in its own time and space; for now, let us see whether, shorn of its opening article and closing technical Latin borrowing, those «Alan Parsons» records are in any way deserving of a good reputation.

 

Already the credits list shows Alan's biggest limitations, and why he had to go along with Woolf­son in the first place. He has always been a great arranger, engineer, and producer, and he could even envisage and materialize a serious, classically- or folksy-influenced instrumental composi­tion. But to write an art-pop song, with verses and choruses and lyrics, that must have been a har­der task. Without Woolfson around, he mainly sticks to instrumentals; for songs, his new primary partner is Ian Bairnson, the Project's trusty guitarist and, overall, the third important person res­ponsible for the APP's classic sound.

 

The results are mixed, but ultimately satisfying. Like most of the Project's albums, this one's not for the younger people; too frequently the sound borders on «intelligent adult contemporary», and keyboards, strings, and ominous pretense win over guitars, good vocals, and complex experimen­tation. But with so many different people around to contribute ideas, this is at least better than post-Waters Pink Floyd (the most obvious comparison, starting with the regular Hipgnosis album cover and ending with the overall depressed atmosphere).

 

Ironically, no matter how much Alan would like to distance himself from the stark pop overtones of The Project's last period, most of the tunes still end up catchy (if not necessarily «bouncy»), with sing-along choruses (if not neces­sarily commercially calculated ones) and, occasionally, rather pedestrian melodies (if not neces­sarily «dumb»): Bairnson must have tried his best, but he is still no match for Woolfson's melodic gift. Later on, Parsons simply claimed that the album was still influenced by Arista executives, as usual, undermining his artistic drive. (Thank God we always have the bad guys around, or how else would we look like good guys?).

 

But on the other hand, from the opening notes there is no denying that the «Parsons style» has not been seriously tampered with. 'The Three Of Me' unfurls with a solemn instrumental introduction that has it all: thunderous power chords, pulsating electronic beats, classical piano playing, even unexpected psycho-Eastern string arrangements for a brief moment. The more you listen to it, the stronger Try Anything Once deserves its title: new musical ideas are being introduced constant­ly, and this time, it doesn't even look like Alan bothered to come up with the usual light con­cep­tual wrapper. It's all about trying.

 

Almost perversely, the best song on the album originally had nothing to do with Parsons. 'Mr. Time' was written around 1990 by the short-lived, little-known band The Dreamfield, fronted by Jacqui Copland, whose credentials consisted of little other than having served as backing vocalist for Duran Duran. Having somehow crossed paths with the band, Parsons got interested in the song and invited Copland to sing it on his own album; a terrific decision — not only does it fit in brilliantly with the overall morose melancholy, it's just an excellent art-pop song. No new insights — there's only so much you can wiggle out of the concept of Time — but a suitably creepy arran­gement for Jacqui's suitably creepy, light-Gothic delivery. (The rowdy ones in the audience may want to dismiss it for sounding too close to post-Waters Floyd, but if at least half of Momentary Lapse Of Reason sounded like this, I would have enjoyed that record much more. Come to think of it, close to a half of it does sound like this, and as the years go by, I find myself more attracted to that solo Gilmour vibe than I ever believed I could be. "Mr. Time has come for you" indeed).

 

Other than that, we get more of those goofy Parsons instrumentals that feature simplistic melodic hooks dressed in complex, multi-layered arrangements ('Breakaway' has a silly, annoyingly un­for­gettable kiddie sax melody surrounded by a virtual swarm of accompanying sonic effects; 'Ji­gue' sounds like a combination of Clannad, Pink Floyd, and Depeche Mode; 'Dreamscape' is basi­cally just a lush semi-ambient Bairnson guitar solo). We get Manfred Mann's Chris Thompson contributing world-weary vocals on Bairnson's suicidal composition 'Back Against The Wall'; we get 10cc's Eric Stewart singing a very 10cc-ish pop-rocker ('Wine From The Water') that is still catchier than most of the stuff 10cc wrote after 1977; and, of course, nothing works without a grande finale — 'Oh Life', delivered by Ambrosia's David Pack, tries a bit too hard in the pathos department (you can almost feel the fake tears soaking through your speakers), but the power chorus, during which the vocals become less weepy and more hymn-oriented, still manages to be engaging and convincing — Harry Nilsson used to succeed with these kinds of things, so, after all, why can't Alan Parsons?

 

Since the album never got any heavy promotion (its lead single was 'Turn It Up', a weak adult contemporary number that is not at all indicative of the record), and since individually released albums formed from the disintegration of creative duos tend to be frowned upon, Try Anything Once never got the recognition I believe it deserves; it is certainly a more essential page in Alan's history than any of the Project's post-Ammonia Avenue albums, and a certified grower if one ag­rees to look past the few flaws. After all, Woolfson's contributions to the Project's sound had not been unanimously wonderful — he could be as gorgeous in his pop sensitivity department as he could be trite, and in that respect Try Anything Once does not change a thing: Bairnson can be trite ('Turn It Up') just as fine as he can be exquisite ('Siren Song'). Thumbs up.

 

ON AIR (1996)

 

1) Blue Blue Sky; 2) Too Close To The Sun; 3) Blown By The Wind; 4) Cloudbreak; 5) I Can't Look Down; 6) Bro­ther Up In Heaven; 7) Fall Free; 8) Apollo; 9) So Far Away; 10) One Day To Fly; 11) Blue Blue Sky.

 

Parsons' second solo album, or, to be precise, the second album by The Ian Bairnson Project (Alan is credited as co-writer only on the two instrumentals, as well as 'Fall Free' and 'Too Close To The Sun'), finds the team independent of major labels (their Arista contract expired with Try Anything Once), free to pursue their artistic inspirations full-time, but, alas, somewhat dulled down and disfocused as time goes by and senses wither.

 

On the formal side, On Air is Parsons' first major conceptual release since at least Eye In The Sky. All of the songs explore the concept of flying, in one form or another — just look at the tit­les — and, in theory, this should work well, since Parsons' sonic landscapes have always been a bit, uh, «airy»; all the way from Icarus to balloons to parachutes to jet planes to space rockets, su­rely Alan can, and should, be your man to give all of them a perfect musical reflection.

 

That's just on paper, though. The reality is such that all the songs were written by Bairnson, and their pedestrian nature shines through more and more with each new record. Test case: 'Brother Up In Heaven', a song that must have been written with the best of motives — to commemorate the tragic death of Ian's cousin in Iraq — but ends up sounding like a bunch of soft-rock clichés, more fitting for some radio-fodderish «rootsy-artsy» Seventies' American band than an act with such a respectable «intellectual pedigree» as the APP. Vocalist Neil Lockwood adds even more fuel to the fire with his forced, theatrical pathos; a more restrained performance might have saved the song, but as it is, I just keep getting visions of onion bulbs attached to the mike.

 

Most of the melodies aren't completely hopeless, and all of them get the classy Parsons treatment, but there are simply no «clinchers» here — no sharp standout tracks like 'Mr. Time' or 'Oh Life' that not only become minor classics on their own, but also spread their strong aura on the rest of the album. The angry numbers ('I Can't Look Down') do not muster enough aggression, the sad gloomy ones ('Too Close To The Sun') do not accumulate enough despair, the tender pretty ones ('So Far Away') do not radiate enough beauty. To make matters worse, the folksy 'Blue Blue Sky' that both opens and closes the re­cord is a poor choice for a theme — folk guitar ballads are not Parsons territory at all, and, as de­cent as the main melody is per se, it kills off Alan's age-old trademarks: the atmospheric start and the grande finale. Why should a Parsons album invite comparisons with James Taylor in the first place? I have no idea.

 

It might have been better if 'Blown By The Wind' had been the coda, since it is the biggest and grandest of all the songs on here, and arguably Bairnson's hardest try to match either the classic APP, or the late period Pink Floyd sound. Again, no great twists in the melody, which cuddles way too close to a generic power ballad for comfort, but they provide a solid Floydian guitar ba­cking, Ian adds exquisite solos (he has always been a much better guitarist than songwriter, as far as I'm concerned), and Eric Stewart's gentle melancholic delivery stops exactly one inch away from the line that separates «romantic» from «pathetic» (unlike that Lockwood person) — in all honesty, he should have stolen that song for a 10cc reunion.

 

The instrumentals ('Cloudbreak', 'Apollo') are not at all catchy, but suitably atmospheric, and it is only while listening to them that I sort of «get» the idea of why Parsons considered On Air an ar­tistically free release — most probably, no more silly record executives were putting pressure on him to make his instrumental music hummable. After all, the sax melody of 'Breakaway', three years before, was no less stupid and cheesy than the synth-folk dance rhythms of 'Hawkeye' ten years before. 'Cloudbreak' gives you the true Alan Parsons, a little out of breath, a little tattered, but still striving to explore new sounds — for once. Then Bairnson takes over again, and runs the good intentions into the ground.

 

No bad words whatsoever on the mixing, engineering, production, playing, singing (from a tech­nical point), or the fine-looking balloon on the album cover. No denying that it is a thoroughly «Alan Parsons» album in spirit and form. Now if only the songs weren't mostly bland and boring, we could all celebrate. As it is, here is one more example of how somebody can have a great feel for solo guitar melody — and heroically suck at the art of simple songwriting. (Eric Clapton is, of course, the prime example here, with but a handful of occasional exceptions, but you all saw that one coming).

 

THE TIME MACHINE (1999)

 

1) The Time Machine (part 1); 2) Temporalia; 3) Out Of The Blue; 4) Call Up; 5) Ignorance Is Bliss; 6) Rubber Universe; 7) The Call Of The Wild; 8) No Future In The Past; 9) Press Rewind; 10) The Very Last Time; 11) Far Ago And Long Away; 12) The Time Machine (part 2).

 

This just might be the single least having-to-do-with-the-artist album by (nominally) a solo artist ever released. Parsons' only songwriting credit here must have been an intentional joke, or a trick to get him at least some royalties: 'Temporalia' is fifty seven-seconds of quiet background choral harmonies over which particle physics expert Frank Close is talking about how space itself func­tions as a time machine. For some reason, Prof. Close is given no credits, though.

 

Other than that, The Time Machine is simply more of the Ian Bairnson Project, with Ian occa­si­onally relegating songwriting duties on percussionist Steve Elliott. It is not hopeless, and has its own moody charms, but it shares all the flaws of On Air and adds one more: Bairnson, Elliott, and Parsons (who still engineers and produces as good as he can) start toying with the world of techno, which is completely alien to the classic spirit of APP. The title track is a cheesy disaster. 'Blue Blue Sky' might have been a disappointing, badly uncommon start to a Parsons album, but 'The Time Machine' is just stupid. They should have slowed it down, set it to a normal beat, and put more thought into the layers of instrumentation. What were they trying to do — come up with a super hot club hit for the young ones?

 

The conceptual framework here is as sturdy as the one that framed On Air — and just as simple, or, perhaps, simplistic: Woolfson's concepts always deviated much further from the main theme, but that was an essential part of their charm, and occasional depth. With The Time Machine, we learn various truisms about the past, present, and future. The past, you might be surprised to learn, is riddled with mistakes ('No Future In The Past'), but it used to be much cooler than today any­way ('Ignorance Is Bliss'), so it would be nice to have all the greats come round and help us see the light ('Call Up'; I like how they namedrop Jesus and Darwin in the same song — aren't matter and anti­matter supposed to cancel out each other?) so we could all live for a better and brighter future ('Call Of The Wild'), etc. etc.

 

Still, once you weed out the silly techno elements (and they never really go beyond the title track — it took Parsons five more years to embarrass himself without any hope of deliverance), the songs mostly range from tolerable to pretty. For one thing, the band does good to bring in girl power. Clannad's Máire Brennan is always a joy to experience when she is not prostituted over cheap faux-Celtic synth-pop, and 'The Call Of The Wild' is but an art-pop rearrangement of a tra­ditional Irish ballad that puts her skills to great use. Beverley Craven is said to be «Kate Bush lite» for those unprepared to assimilate the real thing; I have not heard any of her records, but Bairnson's 'The Very Last Time' is a nice enough piano ballad that fits the definition to a tee — this is something that Kate could have easily written at the tender age of, say, twelve years.

 

For another thing, Elliott's 'Press Rewind', sung by unknown vocalist Graham Dye of unknown band Scarlet Party, is a damn good Brit-pop song — if you like, uh, Oasis, you'll probably like this as well, even without the fat distorted guitars. So is Bairnson's 'Out Of The Blue', riding one of those immediately recognizable Project guitar lines and sung by the lead vocalist of Spandau Ballet, which begs the question — how come Parsons didn't start using the vocal magic of New Romantics back in the days when those guys were still New?

 

But in general, of course, The Time Machine is nothing to write home about, not even from a time machine, provided you were gullible enough to bring it along for the soundtrack. It tries to be truer to the spirit of the Project, with more echo, somber chords, and mystical pretense than we last heard On Air, yet the triteness of the concept, the mediocrity of the songwriting, and the fai­lure to come up with respectable instrumentals makes it another missed opportunity. Perhaps they should have just called it a day and all joined Clannad instead.

 

A VALID PATH (2004)

 

1) Return To Tunguska; 2) More Lost Without You; 3) Mammagamma 04; 4) We Play The Game; 5) Tijuaniac; 6) L'Arc En Ciel; 7) A Recurring Dream Within A Dream; 8) You Can Run; 9) Chomolungma.

 

Part of me wishes there had been a proper question mark at the end of that title, because I am not at all sure of the actual validity of this path. Of course, there is nothing particularly good about stagnation, and in theory it is commendable that, at the age of 56 and almost thirty years into his artistic career, Alan has undertaken the starkest revisions to the basic conception of his sound sin­ce... well, ever. His entire old team — Bairnson, Elliott, Blunstone, etc. — is gone, replaced by a host of younger generation representatives, mostly various electronic artists working in similar, but different genres. He co-writes, once again, all the songs, some of them with his son Jeremy. Good news, right?

 

Both yes and no. There is always a mixed reaction when the old start taking lessons from the young. It certainly indicates humility and open-mindedness, but it does not always make for great art. Case in point: the two completely unnecessary and, in part, offensive remakes of past succes­ses. 'Mammagamma '04' is a techno/trance avatar of the track from Eye In The Sky, which was never one of the Project's better instrumentals in the first place — way too relying on one single gimmick throughout — and now it makes for half-decent club fodder, but at the expense of ha­ving the last vestiges of «art» surgically removed from it. 'A Recurring Dream' is, in fact, an elec­tronic remix / recreation of 'The Raven' that, at best, functions as a curious modern age deconst­ruction of the original, at worst, just makes one laugh out loud, especially when the synthesized vocals start rolling in. What's the point — other than showing how hip you are to all the new tech­nological breakthroughs?

 

It is certainly a treat for old fans to see Parsons make such a bold move away from the basic pop of his last ten or so records: there are but two or three pure pop songs on the album altogether, stuck as short breathers in between the lengthy instrumental numbers, and the instrumental num­bers (the ones that are not 'Mammagamma', of course) are true art-rock compositions with plenty of complexity and development. But are the employed electronic devices and textures really an asset here, or an obstruction?

 

Personally, I do not get the feeling that this forced breeding of Parsons' idealistic mystique and his new electronic partners' dryer, sci-fi-er approach is all that good. Apples to apples, oranges to oranges. The man brings in old friend Dave Gilmour to solo extensively on the opening 'Return To Tunguska', but the chugging synths and robotic percussion detract from his contributions ra­ther than happily complement them. Most of the time I catch myself thinking, «wow, nice moody bit from Alan, the good old kind», or «hmm, I wonder if I'd be interested in checking out those electronic guys' own records... nah, never mind, it's not like I've got nothing better to do». But ve­ry rarely, if ever, at the same time.

 

Of the vocal numbers, 'More Lost Without You' is the more memorable one, sounding sus­pi­ci­ous­ly like some corny old Manfred Mann folk-pop thing stuck in a time warp only to re­emerge in this modernized P. J. Olsson-sung setting. (Predictably, it was the only song to be sung live on the accompanying tour — the rest just wouldn't fit in at all with the classic hits). Parsons does sing lead vocals himself — first time ever! — on 'We Play The Game', displaying a voice that is alarmingly close to Woolfson's but not making much of an impact since the song sucks anyway.

 

Were I to review this years ago, I'd probably just pour sincere shit over all these tracks, singling out 'Mammagamma '04' as the single stinkiest crapfest Parsons ever had me subjected to, and be done with it. Today, I am almost ready to accept this as a bold and honest artistic move. But, to tell the truth, as of 2004, or as of 2010 when I am writing this, I don't want any bold and artistic moves in this corner of the art-rock market. I wouldn't mind getting another Alan Parsons Project album, particularly since Alan Par­sons is still around and kicking (alas, not Eric Woolfson, who died of cancer in 2009). I don't even mind young electronica guys coming in the studio and lend­ing a hand, provided they're qualified. But nobody fucks with the Raven ­— understood? Thumbs down, and that's final.

 

EYE 2 EYE: LIVE IN MADRID (2010)

 

1) I Robot; 2) Can't Take It With You; 3) Don't Answer Me; 4) Breakdown/The Raven; 5) Time; 6) Psychobabble; 7) I Wouldn't Want To Be Like You; 8) Damned If I Do; 9) More Lost Without You; 10) Don't Let It Show; 11) Prime Time; 12) Sirius/Eye In The Sky; 13) (The System Of) Dr. Tarr & Professor Feather; 14) Games People Play.

 

The Alan Parsons Project, in all of its existence, never went on the road. That's why it was a «Pro­ject», after all, not a «Band»: a thoroughly studio-based creation. Certainly, once they started out, it was no longer the Sgt. Pepper era, and they could have easily replicated most of their stuff onstage had they wanted to; but they didn't want to. The music was sort of supposed to come wi­th­out the faces — and besides, neither Parsons nor Woolfson looked anything like rock stars.

 

I am not sure exactly what happened in the early 2000s to make Alan suddenly yearn for a shift in policy. Probably not money matters — not being a huge spender, he must have made enough to last him long enough — perhaps it just went along with the desire to try out all these new things that we heard on A Valid Path. However, if Path announced a radical departure from many of the former trademarks of the Project, the accompanying tour did nothing of the kind.

 

Instead, it simply promises — and delivers — manna from heaven for all the veteran fans of the Project. With his newly assembled band («The Alan Parsons Live Project» — with Woolfson's per­mission), in which he is the only representative of the old guard, Parsons constructed a pro­gram that touched upon most of the classic hits of the Project, pretty much disregarding his solo career (on Eye 2 Eye, the only new song is 'More Lost Without You'). Statistics speak for them­selves: 2 songs from Tales, 4 from I Robot, 1 each from Pyramid and Eve, 2 each from Turn Of A Friendly Card, Eye In The Sky, and Ammonia Avenue, and then silence: just the right proportions for the Taste Guardian for the Alan Parsons Project.

 

Predictably, most of the songs are played fairly close to the studio versions; minor exceptions in­volve making a medley out of 'Breakdown' and 'The Raven' (it works) and extending 'Psychoba­ble' with a prolonged «psychobabble» instrumental passage (I'm not sure it works). The big dif­ference is with the vocalists, who are, for the most part, all competent; and it is interesting that all of the band members (six of 'em) sing, with the original parts distribu­ted to them based on their own voice qualities. Grandest surprise is Parsons himself, who is responsible for some of Woolf­son's original parts — and shows a nice singing voice, slightly weaker than Eric's, but capable of pulling out most of the harmonies and radiating the same intelligent tenderness.

 

The most frequent vocalist, however, is P. J. Olsson, who looks approximately like what most people would think Eric Woolfson should look like (young, blonde-haired, a bit Wagnerian, etc.) and sings with perfect competence and involvement (his 'Time' is absolutely wonderful and, just like on the original, takes one's breath away long enough to forget about the triviality of the ly­rics). Actually, it would be ridiculous to suspect any overall quality problems: Parsons the Perfec­tionist would have never dared to put up any show like this without a hundred percent guarantee.

 

It's an interesting show, all right, to listen to as well as to watch (the accompanying DVD accor­dingly places Parsons, most of the time, in the background, nonchalantly strumming an acoustic guitar) — and there is even nothing wrong with using the album, provided you can find it, as a basic introduction into the Project. Live records from art-rockers usually define the meaning of «superfluous», but that's only when they come in droves; one live record from an art-rocker is al­ways interesting and instructive, not to mention this particular record that fans had been waiting for for over thirty years. And what a setlist — a legacy to really be proud of. Thumbs up.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE SICILIAN DEFENCE (1981/2014)

 

1) P-K4; 2) P-Qb4; 3) Kt-KB3; 4) ...Kt-QB3; 5) P-Q4; 6) PxP; 7) KtxP; 8) Kt-B3; 9) Kt-QB3; 10) P-Q3.

 

I am not even sure if this stuff deserves a separate review, but since it now exists as an officially released separate album — albeit only as a «bonus» part of the newly released 11-CD boxset that contains all of the Project's albums — it probably does merit a few words and a chuckle, if only to show that these guys did have their unique brand of «humor», nothing about which was tech­nically funny, but still, it does help to learn about this considering how «stiff» we usually consi­der these Parsons and Woolfson guys.

 

So, apparently, the story goes that in 1981, the two were locked in a formal battle with Arista over some contract details, and, unsatisfied as they were, decided to get out of the contract by submitting one last due album that they'd record in three days, rather than the several months that it usually took their sense of perfectionism to be pacified. So they went into the studio, quickly threw together a bunch of instrumental tracks made on-the-spot, named them after various chess moves, figuratively called the album The Sicilian Defence (in which Arista people, apparently, played white and the Project played black), and submitted the results.

 

Said results, as the rumor went, frightened the Arista people so much that they gave up without putting up too much of a fight, renewed Parsons' and Woolfson's contract on profitable terms, and kept Alan with them all the way up to his first solo album. The Sicilian Defence, in the mean­time, was permanently shelved (just as the duo had hoped it would), and vanished off the radar com­pletely for more than thirty years. Small bits and pieces were occasionally showed to the public, but on the whole, Alan had no plans of ever releasing the whole thing, and probably the only rea­son why it finally saw the light of day was acute demand on the part of devoted fans — just the kind of people who'd want to buy the complete boxset in order to get to the juicy bonus.

 

Now here is why it may be important to add those few words. The album got this reputation for being a «musical joke», or even a display of «musical hooliganry», and I am sure I even saw the word «atonal» used somewhere in a brief description. This may lead one into thinking that Alan and Eric had really let their hair down on this one, making something of a ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ, or of a Metal Machine Music, and since «musical hooliganry» is definitely not the kind of thing with which we are accustomed to associate those stern, glossy British gentlemen, this can create an atmosphere of intrigue — indeed, it might even make one spend all that extra money on the boxset just to hear what all the hoopla was about.

 

More than likely, you will be seriously disappointed. There is nothing «atonal», or «rebellious», or «hooliganish» about this record. And, in fact, there couldn't be, since it had no gestation period and had to be made in three days. Instead, it sounds more or less just like you'd expect an Alan Parsons Project record, made in three days, to sound. A bunch of instrumental numbers — all of them rhythmic, usually set to simple drum machine patterns, all of them played either on synthe­sizer or on piano, all of them probably largely improvised, but mostly in standard keys, using standard chords, and generating the usual melancholic aura associated with the Project. Nothing particularly exciting — and nothing particularly «Awful» with a large A. Boring, as a matter of fact: just plain old boring.

 

The two longest tracks, ʽP-Qb4ʼ and ʽKt-QB3ʼ, are piano pieces, of which the former, also known as ʽElsie's Themeʼ, was earlier released in truncated form as a bonus track on Eve, and for good reason: it has the prettiest melody on the album, nocturnal and elegant, that may deserve salvation, even if six minutes is still overkill. ʽKt-QB3ʼ is even longer, mainly consists of one single jazzy theme looped on endless repeat, and could, perhaps, work as a rhythm part for a more elaborate composition, but nothing else.

 

The rest is basically just Parsons dicking around with synthesizers without much forethought or afterthought — a couple of the tracks sounding like, say, an early underworked demo for Pink Floyd's ʽOn The Runʼ (maybe he did drag out one of these, I have no idea), and others sounding like equally underworked demos for the Project's own stuff, usually with one or two basic mu­sical ideas per track. Nothing revealing in here, except that it might be interesting to hear, very quickly, what kinds of things Parsons could come up with when working on autopilot. Well, it ain't Blonde On Blonde, where composing and recording on-the-spot are concerned, that one thing at least is for sure.

 

Best thing about it all is we now know what exactly is Alan Parsons' idea of the proverbial «al­bum of fart noises» — apparently, these guys are so stuffy, they cannot even allow themselves to fart anything other than MIDI grooves and piano romances. Yet I cannot officially condemn the album with a thumbs down, since we have all been warned and there has never been one single good word on the part of Alan himself about the record. Clearly, he didn't even release it in order to make an extra buck — most likely, he just wanted to implode the «legend», so that people no longer harass him about the «legendary lost Alan Parsons Project album». So maybe this review can offer a little modest help with this purpose.

 

ALAN STIVELL

REFLETS (1970)

 

1) Reflets; 2) Suite Des Montagnes; 3) Marig Ar Pollanton; 4) Brocéliande; 5) Son Ar Chistr; 6) Sally Free And Ea­sy; 7) Suite Irlandaise; 8) Sil Vestrig; 9) Tenval An Deiz; 10) Je Suis Né Au Milieu De La Mer.

 

To place Alan Stivell in the chronological category that approximately corresponds to «Mid-Se­venties» might seem a little off: he had been recording a bit of this and that since as early as 1960, and his first LP, Telenn Geltiek («Celtic Harp») already had a limited release in 1964. Yet it wasn't really until the early Seventies that he emerged on the international scene as a major cultu­ral revivalist as well as an individual artist in his own rights, no doubt due to the overall folk-rock boom of the era — without groups like Fairport Convention to pave the road for his much more esoteric, «hardcore» creativity, he would have forever remained the exclusive stuff of professio­nal musicologists and a snobby pastime for art college students. Come to think of it, that isn't very far removed from what he actually is today, but still...

 

Anyway, the first real international release from formerly gifted kid Alan Cochevelou, now tur­ned se­rious 26-year old message-carrying artist Alan Stivell, is this album, Reflets, («Re­flec­ti­ons»), released on the Fontana label and carrying a modest selection of traditional melodies, all of them based on Stivell's Celtic harp playing — his instrument of choice, without which he is as unimagineable as Ian Anderson without his flute — but diverse enough because of a wide range of supporting instruments: bagpipes, organs, cellos, harmonicas, you name it. There are even oc­casional outbursts of electric guitar moans, although on Reflets, Stivell had not yet really begun to cre­ate the unique Celtic/Rock synthesis of his later records.

 

Both song titles and lyrics range from French, his native language, to Breton, his ethnic legacy language, to English, the new language of that part of the world where, fifteen hundred years ago, Alan's forefathers used to reside. Or the language of Hollywood and McDonalds, you choose. He does have a bit of an accent in English, which is possibly why it is confined here only to the bal­lad 'Sally Free And Easy' (but he masks it well by rendering the whole song in the drawn-out folk style — if you sing well, then the more you sing, the less funny you sound).

 

Stylistically, Reflets is not much different from early Clannad albums, except, perhaps, concen­trating far more on the meditative balladry part than on the entertainment side of the business: only 'Son Ar Chistr', with its background chorus, 'Suite Irlandaise', with its little jig, and 'Tenval An Deiz', which does give the impression of a fairly old courteous Breton dance tune, have strong rhythmic support. The meditative ballads, of course, sound extremely similar, especially for those who lag behind in their Breton, but Stivell's fluent, complex, and sensitive playing contains eno­ugh magic to at least mold it all into a pleasant escapist background, and his bardic singing is also an essential component of his charm.

 

Finally, of tremendous importance is the production: lots of echo, subtle fade-ins and fade-outs, and expert manipulation of background instruments — so much so that, even in the complete ab­sence of «nature sounds» (such as waves crashing, winds howling, and seagulls defecating), it is still easy to visualize a wise old druid clutching his magic harp on a tall, tall hill, as lower-rank human beings are getting busy way down below transforming it into a quarry for Stonehenge. Or maybe it's just the subconscious effect of the album cover. Whatever be, the spirit of the picture does match fairly closely the spirit of the music.

 

For Stivell, this was just the beginning — he has but two original compositions here, and as good as the sound is, it does not yet define him and him only. The obligatory thumbs up is, therefore, modest and moderate, and there is an understandable, if insufficient, reason why it is almost im­possible to get it on CD these days. Still a must-get for all fans of Stivell and/or all things Celtic, particularly all things Bretonic.

 

RENAISSANCE DE LA HARPE CELTIQUE (1971)

 

1) Ys; 2) Marv Pontkalleg; 3) Ap Huw / Penllyn; 4) Eliz Iza; 5) Gaeltacht.

 

No less an authority than Bruce Eder, writing for the All-Music Guide, once called this «one of the most beautiful and haunting records ever made by anybody». Truth be told, I believe that this statement has more to do with basically falling in love with the overall sound of a well-played Ce­ltic harp than with Alan Stivell's personal-individual artistic contribution to the world of musi­cal ideas. These days, with Celtic revivalism going stronger than ever before, whole battalions of twenty first century minstrels are doing the same thing all over the world.

 

But it must not be forgotten that most of them are doing it exactly because, in 1971, Stivell relea­sed this key record in his career that launched the «Celtic hardcore» movement. Before Harpe Celtique, most of these motives had either been tapped in various folk-rock syntheses, or sculp­ted into relatively simplistic LPs with immediate popular appeal. Few, if anyone, actually dared to explore that sound in more complex, demanding ways.

 

The album is completely instrumental, a forty-minute sequence of brief compositions (some au­thored by Stivell himself, some recreated from various traditional sources) sometimes formally merged into longer units — 'Gaeltacht' takes up an entire side, but is really a set of five or six en­tirely different tunes. The harp is, of course, the leading instrument, but it is almost never comple­tely alone, with either a cello or a fiddle or an organ or a guitar or, in a few spots, some drums — at one po­int, even tablas! — providing the accompaniment. More disconcerting for the average listener might be the fact that very few of the tracks include tight, «danceable» rhythmic struc­tures: if what you're after in Celtic music is jigs-a-plenty, you're probably much better off sticking to The Pogues. This is the sitting man's sound, not the moving one's.

 

Adequately reviewing Harpe Celtique is akin to reviewing a lengthy chamber music piece: since no «pop ho­oks» are surmised, no words are spoken, and no radical mood changes are involved, you can either get all technical on this (if you're qualified, which I am not) or just sit back and let the music do all the talking. The only question one might pose is whether one is supposed to en­joy Stivell's unquestionably beautiful playing from an «ambient» perspective — heavenly sounds with a background-embellishing function — or a «classical» one: fleshed-out, meaningful com­po­sitions that should be listened to over and over again until they finally sink in properly.

 

For my ear, most of these pieces sound way too «samey» to justify spending significant time on them so as to learn to know the difference. (Obviously, I am talking about the basic musical ske­leton: the fact that 'Eliz Iza', for instance, boasts a much fuller sound through the addition of cello, bagpipes, drums, and choral vocals does not in essence make it seriously different from the radi­cally minimalist 'Marv Pontkalleg'). After all, this is an attempt at faithfully recreating sounds that represent either «folk» or «medieval court» music, emotional and spiritual but also confor­ming to an intentionally limited formula. Best way to assimilate it is pretend you're King of Wales and this Stivell guy is standing to your left while you're enjoying your banquet — works great for the digestive system.

 

Trivia buffs will want to learn that 'Ys' is dedicated to the legend of the God-cursed, ocean-swal­lowed Bretonic city of Ys (hence all the ocean waves in the background); that 'Marv Pontkalleg' ('The Death of Pontcallec') is an old Breton ballad about a failed conspiracy in the 18th century; that Penllyn is in Wales, meaning that track number 3 takes us from Bretonic tradition to the closely related Welsh one; and that 'Gaeltacht' refers to Irish-speaking regions, meaning we now jump to the next island. Not that it is all that easy to distinguish between Irish, Welsh, and Breto­nic music, mind you, but as far as the various sub-styles of Celtic playing are concerned, Harpe Celtique is fairly diverse.

 

I have no idea how overtly sincere are those who, like Bruce Eder, declare this to be one of the most haunting records ever made, but one thing is for certain: I would be very pleased if this kind of music were ever able to really haunt me. Ambient or not, it requires additional listening, and if you are already a major fan of the likes of Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span, this is the next logical stop — but even in this case, you might find it somewhat of a challenge. Better still, start learning how to play the harp, and, if possible, forget any Marx Bros. movies you've seen, at least, for the time period it takes to get used to this. A reverential thumbs up.

 

A L'OLYMPIA (1972)

 

1) The Wind Of Keltia; 2) An Dro; 3) The Trees They Grow High; 4) An Alarc'h; 5) An Durzhunel; 6) Telenn Gwad / The Foggy Dew; 7) Pop Plinn; 8) Tha Mi Sgith; 9) The King Of The Fairies; 10) Tri Martolod; 11) Kost Ar C'hoad; 12) Suite Sudarmoricaine.

 

If Harpe Celtique sounds a bit too extreme, how about this — a full show played by Stivell at the Olympia music hall in February 1971? No lengthy multi-part suites, very little Celtic harp (most of it on the opening 'Wind Of Keltia'), but an amazing sound nonetheless; no wonder the album became a bestseller (in Europe, at least) and a high watermark in the chronology of «Celtic revival». (Ironically, it is nearly impossible to find on CD these days).

 

With a five-piece band behind his belt, Stivell sets out two humble goals — (a) to show the mass audience that tra­ditional Celtic music is only as «boring» and «obsolete» as the unskillful non-ex­pert would make it seem, and (b) to try out a real synthesis of Celtic and rock music rather than just play simple folk ballads with electric guitars, or complex Celtic ballads on traditional instru­ments and still call it «folk-rock» because they are mixed in with rock songs.

 

The first half of the album is mostly dedicated to satisfying the first goal, as he alternates between slow haunting ballads and livelier dance numbers, constantly varying the instrumentation — vio­lins, bagpipes, guitars, organs, drums — and the moods (magical-mystical à la Merlin in 'Wind Of Keltia', Sherwood Forest in 'The Trees They Grow High', sentimental in 'An Durzhunel', dark and omi­nous in 'Foggy Dew'). The audience gets to stomp and clap along on the faster numbers, and continuously rips into applause that, to me, sounds «frantic» rather than «polite».

 

Then, halfway into the album, we finally get some genuine «Celtic rock», with massive electric guitar parts that are not always «Celtic» in essence: the solo on 'Pop Plinn' sounds like it comes straight off an early 1970s prog-rock album, but it is set to a traditional melody all the same. 'Tha Mi Sgith' is just as good (this time, guitar and fiddle just follow Alan's vocal melody), and by the time they get to the encore, a smouldering, rabble-rousing Breton anthem ('Suite Sudarmoricaine'), most people in the audience are ready to subscribe to Neo-Druidism and start embracing oaks.

 

Unquestionably, this is the best introduction to Stivell for any type of neophyte — a failure to grasp this means a basic failure to grasp the pleasures of Celtic music as such. (Which is not a condemnation or anything: like most pre-18th century music, this stuff is generally less palatable to the cathartic nerves of the modern listener). And even if these performances take us even fur­ther away from the «pure» revival of authentic Celtic melodicity and instrumentation — if such a thing in itself is at all possible — they prove, better than any attempts at such a direct revival, that all of these long-time-ago folk musings were not mused in vain. Thumbs up, once again, more out of intellectual respect than straightforward feeling, but that's really just a problem of time and space, not one of will and spirit.

 

CHEMINS DE TERRE (1973)

 

1) Susy MacGuire; 2) Ian Morrison Reel; 3) She Moved Through The Fair; 4) Can Y Melinydd; 5) Oidche Maith; 6) An Dro Nevez; 7) Maro Ma Mestrez; 8) Brezhoneg' Raok; 9) An Hani A Garan; 10) Metig; 11) Kimiad.

 

The perfect studio companion to L'Olympia. More or less the same band and the same approach — a small portable encyclopaedia of all musical things Celtic, with a few additional ideas thrown in on how to ornate and present them for the modern listener whose parents have not taught him how to hunt wild boar or fashion torcs.

 

Once again, Alan shows off both his egalitarian principles — dedicating the first side of the LP to the British Isles, singing in English, Irish, and Welsh — and his native predilections — filling the entire second side with Bretonic sounds, most of them rearranged from traditional sources, but also including one completely original composition. By this time, however, it becomes rather cle­ar which of these two sides, the «broad Celtic» or the «narrow Bretonic», receives the larger part of the man's spirit.

 

Because, although side A is pretty damn good, it does not really transcend the level of «sincere professionalism». Both the jig of 'Ian Morrison Reel' and the harp balladry of 'She Moved Thro­ugh The Fair' are expertly delivered, yet there is no question that I'd rather listen to Clannad do­ing both — their jigs are livelier and brawnier, and even after one has finally acquired a taste for Alan's twangy, shrill manner of singing, can one still be blamed for preferring the haunting so­u­n­d­ of Moya Brennan, especially when it's tender, sentimental balladry we're talking about?

 

Let's face it: traditional Celtic music is, in essence, quite beautiful, but just as limited in formula as any folk tradition, be it Chinese, Balkan, or African, and picking out the subtle differences between twenty artists drawing upon the same formula is suitable job for an expert rather than the average music lover. To my ears, when shifting to Irish and Welsh motives, Stivell fares no better or worse than most of the recognized soldiers of the modern day Celtic armies.

 

His meal of choice, the preparation of which he has mastered well beyond basic tourist level, is an integration of his native Armorican sounds with his own creativity and modern technological advances. This is why the true magic starts as soon as we flip the record over, and 'An Dro Nevez' greets us with a trance-inducing fiddle duet, soon to be joined by a grumbly electric guitar rhythm track, occasionally bursting into ecstatic mini-solos. This is something radically different, well worth living for.

 

Even when simply singing acappella, Alan still does it best in Breton ('Maro Ma Mestrez'), em­ploying a complex, trickily flowing folk style, the true fish'n'chips of folk musicology students. But his very best still shines through on original compositions: 'Brezhoneg' Roak' in itself could qualify as a genre-founding track, with the genre provisionally called «Bretonic Rock» — it's a loud, bombastic, hard-rocking song that culminates in an ecstatic prog-rockish guitar symphony, but is at the same time dominated by «druid harmonies»; a unique creation if there ever was one.

 

The other traditional tunes on Side B are less imaginative, but still, the bulk of Stivell's interesting ideas and approaches about their general arrangements and different kinds of acoustic/electric in­terplay are to be found there rather than on the Irish/Welsh side. It's a good thing he placed the two in this particular order — this way, Chemins De Terre gets an awesome sequencing, from the merely pleasant to the uniquely impressive and then, letting it slide gracefully with the bag­pipes of 'Kimiad' (no, no, we are still in Armorica. Apparently, of all the Celtic subcultures Stivell does Scotland rarest of all, for some reason). A gallant thumbs up, and if you need a specific re­commendation, 'Brezhoneg' Roak' is required listening for anyone interested in getting a complete musical picture of the 1970s.

 

E LANGONNED (1974)

 

1) E Parrez Langonned; 2) Gavotenn Pourled; 3) Planedenn; 4) Ne Bado Ket Atao; 5) Bwthyn Fy Nain; 6) Ffarwl I Aberystwyth; 7) Briste Leathai Pheadair / Mairseal A'Chearc; 8) Dans Fisel / Gavotenn Ar Menez / An Sagart Cheol­nhar; 9) Bal Fisel; 10) Deus Ganin Me D'Am Bro; 11) Jenovefa; 12) Sagart O'Donaill; 13) Diougan Gwenc'hlan; 14) Ar Voraerion; 15) Faili Faili Oro; 16) Oye Vie.

 

Probably the most «hardcore» record in Stivell's catalog, as you can tell by looking at the track names alone: not a single title in English or even French, only endless streams of user-unfriendly Breton, Irish, and Welsh phrases. The musical content matches the impression: taking a break from further explorations in «Celtic Rock», here Alan concentrates exclusively on traditional mo­tives, moods, and instrumentation. «Langonned» is actually an odd orthographic hybrid of Bre­ton Langoned = French Langonnet, a Breton commune, yet, once again, the album is not fully Bre­ton-based — not that it would matter to anyone but obsessive professional Celtologists and mo­dern day druid culture revivalists with their blue paint, mistletoe, and menhir fixation.

 

According to Dave Thompson of the All-Music Guide, E Langonned «is frequently described as his (Stivell's) most accessible album». The passive voice is a marvelous device that helps avoid responsibility, but I am still deeply curious as to who, and under the aid of which substances, would ever describe E Langonned as «accessible». Yes, this is technically unadorned, minima­listic, individually-interpreted collective-traditional music, but, from the point of view of any ty­pi­cal rock mu­sic listener, it should be much harder to digest than, say, A L'Olympia.

 

The tunes are not, by any means, «hooky». Many of them start out — and many end as well — as pure vocal numbers, and you must really get into the spirit of medieval folk singing to dig them, including a predilection for melody-varying and top range reaching on most verses that place the tunes closer to Eastern vocalizing than to commonly known Western. A few of the numbers, e. g. 'Ne Bado Ket Atao', represent the traditional Breton style of kan ha diskan (call and response) — again, very strictly an acquired taste (Vying for village idiot status? Just play this loud enough in your immediate neighborhood). But yeah — quite accessible, I'm sure, if you come from a small Breton village and, preferably, are two or three hundred years old.

 

There is also a bit too much bagpipe music here for my tastes, most of it on Side A ('Ffarwel I Aberystwyth' is a particularly vicious dog-killer if there ever was one); and some of the fiddles seem basically attuned to the same wavelength, so that if the one flows seamlessly into the other, the headache merely shifts its center of mass. Fortunately, the second side drops it all in favor of generally more meditative and proverbially pretty harp music, occasionally interrupted by Alan's acappella chants. As usual, the tunes are impossible to tell from each other, but I guess you are supposed to get lost in their thicket, rather than meticulously stuff them into little numbered cells inside your brain. Hey, it works with me.

 

I do not believe, though, that E Langonned is an album that you are supposed to simply enjoy. You can learn from it — this is about as «authentic» as Celtic music ever gets; if there is some­thing more authentic, I don't even want to hear about it. You can, if you wish, seek out the mean­ing of life in its depths (which our partial forefathers, the Celts, apparently knew everything about, or else they wouldn't let the Romans and the Germans whack their asses so easily). But it is not a record to «like», whatever that means — unlike, say, Jethro Tull and their take on the wise old bearded forest-loving clown routine.

 

E DULENN (1975)

 

1) Spered Hollvedel; 2) Délivrance; 3) Ha Kompren't 'Vin Erfin; 4) Tenwal Eo'r Bed; 5) Digor Eo An Hent; 6) Deb­h­air An Rinceoir / Jig Gwengamp; 7) Pachpi Kozh / Pachpi New; 8) Laridenn; 9) Ton-Bale Pourled; 10) Bal Ha Dans Plinn'; 11) An Droiou.

 

Now this is more like it, and a worthy companion to the Olympia concert. «This nice little live album features folky and electric arrangements of traditional music», the AMG review informs the listener in a raging fit of laconicity, and, sure enough, those who have not buried themselves throat-deep in the intricacies of «traditional music», will probably have little else to say about the record other than «uh... nice little live album!».

 

On the other hand, at least there is always the factual side. Recorded on November 26 and 27, 1974, at the National Stadium in Dublin (Dulenn). Released in 1975. Played with the aid of Sti­vell's regular band, including Dan Ar Bras on guitars and... others. Also involved in the perfor­mances is Bagad Bleimor, a traditional Breton pipe band, equipped with lots of bagpipes, flutes, and bo­mbards (the reed-shaped ones, not the cannons — these guys ain't no AC/DC). Tunes are mostly of Breton origin, with a few Irish divertissements thrown in for good measure (note the location of the concert — a Breton playing nothing but Breton tunes in the heart of Ireland would be an odd type of chauvinist, to say the least).

 

As for the setlist, there are, actually, several Stivell originals here, such as the rabble-rousing an­them 'Délivrance', with which he gets the audience up on their feet at the very start of the show, reciting freedom-loving lyrics to the sound of freedom-loving bagpipes. But overall, there is in­deed heavier emphasis on the «traditional» here than on the Olympia concert, with most of Sti­vell's usual inventive wit invested into rearrangements. Sometimes the wit is demonstrated head-on: 'Pach Pi Kozh' (translated loosely as 'Ancient Passe-Pied', a type of Breton dance) starts out driven by flutes, violins, and pipes, then, two minutes on, is provided with a rock rhythm section (but no electric guitars).

 

Of course, merely adding rock drums and bass to a traditional tune is not necessarily the best in­dication of wit; the most glaring example of Alan's «Celtic rock» here is 'Bal Ha Dans Plinn', wi­sely chosen as the show closer, as it is here that the band really pulls out all the stops, as you get flutes folksily whistling the same melody as the progressive rock guitar in the adjacent channel. Then the violins start coming in, the bagpipes, the bass starts shredding à la Chris Squire, the gui­tar player eventually takes over the flashy playing à la... Ritchie Blackmore?, and finally it all comes down in a mighty final clash of all the instruments on stage. Thar be sum b'dass Celtic rock, mate, as any famous Celtic pirate — Sir Henry Morgan, for one — would surely testify.

 

Overall, there is not too much rational sequencing going on here, but sparsely arranged ballads are mixed well enough with bombastic folk-rock to prevent any onset of boredom. Of the former, 'Debhair' is a particularly gallant gentlemanly-pastoral masterpiece, and of the latter, 'Ton-Bale Pourled' deserves special mention as the «heaviest» number on the album, with a gloomy, mur­derous riff that some heavy metal bands would kill for — until, midway through, it vanishes into thin air, replaced by a couple of fawnish pipes to alleviate the feelings. Quite exquisite.

 

In passing, it should perhaps be mentioned that both of Stivell's famous live sets almost never du­plicate his contemporary studio recordings — and, with more emphasis on band interplay and basic brawn than the generally subtler non-live creations, are every bit as essential as something like Chemins De Terre. «Nice little live album», aye. Thumbs up.

 

TREMA'N INIS (1976)

 

1) Stok Ouzh An Enez (En Vue De L'Île); 2) Hommes Liges Des Talus En Transe; 3) Rinnenn XX; 4) An Eur-Se Ken Tost D'Ar Peurbad (Cette Heure Si Près De L'Éternel); 5) Negro Song; 6) E-Tal Ar Groaz (Face A La Croix); 7) Ar Chas Doñv'yelo Da Quez (Les Chiens Redeviendront Sauvages).

 

Not much to say here. The album serves a very specific and narrow purpose — a tribute to Alan's recently deceased father Georges Cochevelou, much less known than the son but without whom the son could never exist nether physically nor artistically; it was Georges, a professional inter­pre­ter and connaisseur of all things Breton, who originally «reconstructed» the Celtic harp in 1953 and taught the young Alan to play it.

 

So Trema'n Inis ("Towards The Island") is almost entirely dominated by the harp, and not so much in an «explorative» way as simply to serve as quiet, meditative background to various bits of Breton poetry (some of it in French, actually), credited to various Breton poets of all ages. The poetry, all of it available in French translations in the liner notes, is surprisingly decent, and only the uncouthly titled 'Negro Song' is expressly hammering in rough Breton nationalism ("I am Bre­ton, I was a slave", it starts out); the rest is dedicated to much more transcendent issues.

 

Unfortunately, there is nothing else to the record. It either functions as a bunch of meditative back­ground sonic waves, or as a crash course in the fundamental values of Breton culture (al­though, to be frank, once you filter out all the Christian and XIXth century European influences out of it, it is not quite clear how much is left for the truly «fundamental»). The sixteen-minute long 'Hommes Liges Des Talus En Transe' is enough to test your determination — if your inner Celt may be awoken, you will remain «en transe» for all of its duration, but if there has never been an inner Celt in you, you will want to turn it off the very second that Stivell puts down the harp and starts the first of many pathos-spreading French recitatives.

 

'Negro Song', as a musical composition, is the only track that stands out, with a grand, chilly stop-and-start structure that counts as a «hook», I guess. It is well worth searching out (and you may disregard the lyrics altogether — Breton discrimination, although undeniable as in the case of just about any national minority, is still somewhat embarrassing to compare to black slave discrimina­tion). The rest of the record... well... more Celtic harp, gentlemen?

 

RAOK DILESTRA (1977)

 

1) Ar Gelted Kozh (Les Anciens Celtes); 2) Ar Vritoned 'Ba' Inis-Breizh (Les Britons Dans L'Ile De Bretagne); 3) Ar Vritoned D'An Arvorig (Les Britons En Armorique); 4) Rouantelezh Vreizh (Le Royaume De Bretagne); 5) Du­ge­lezh Vreizh (Le Duché De Bretagne); 6) An Aloubidigezh Gant Bro-C'hall (Le Traité D'Union Franco-Breton); 7) Em­sawadegoù (Révoltes); 8) Dispac'h Bro-C'hall Ag An 19e Kantwed (La Révolution Française Et Le 19e Siècle); 9)  Lodenn Gentan An Ugentwed Kantwed (Première Moitié Du 20e Siècle); 10) Eil Lodenn An Ugentwed Kantwed (Deuxième Moitié Du 20e Siècle); 11) Da Ewan (A Ewan); 12) Gwriziad Difennet (Racines Interdites); 13) Marw Ewid E Fobl (Mort Pour Son Peuple); 14) Naw Breton 'Ba' Prizon (Neuf Bretons En Prison); 15)  Tamm-Kreiz New' (Nouveau Tamm-Kreiz); 16)  Plinn (Slogan).

 

For the layman at least, Stivell must be at his most interesting when he is at his most ambitious. Harp-centered minimalism is all right for a while, but not when one is dealing with hours and hours of music varying only through slight nuances. For grand purposes, however, Alan is always ready to go berserk with extra instrumentation and genre-mixing, and this is where even a regular prog-rock or folk-rock fan can safely board his train.

 

Raok Dilestra («Before Lan­ding») is his loudest, brawniest album so far; no wonder — its ambi­tion is to capture pretty much everything there is to capture about the achievements and the prospects of the Breton people. Side A is entirely dedicated to a multi-part suite detailing the his­tory of the Bretons, from their ancient Celtic roots through all of their migratory tribulations and right down to the 20th century — a musical lecture of sorts, alternating sung passages with infor­mative voiceovers over the instrumental sections. Side B, subtitled 'The Present', is a bunch of disconnected songs dealing with... uh, various Breton-related subjects.

 

As a sort of symbol of how much Raok Dilestra is «integrated» into the better known musical world of its time, it should be mentioned that the album features guest contributions from Richard Harvey on woodwinds (of Gryphon fame) and Dave Swarbrick on violin (of Fairport Convention). Most of the instruments are, however, still played by Alan himself and his regular band (Dan Ar Bras on guitar, etc.) — and there's plenty of them, ranging from atmospheric background syn­thesi­zers (used quite intelligently and moderately) to sitars (which, believe it or not, go quite well together with bagpipes. Sometimes).

 

The opening suite takes some time to build up, starting off with a bit of moody bagpipe-backed chanting, devoid of rhythm section support, then getting louder and louder and rockier and rock­ier as we slowly progress into the Middle Ages and the modern epoch — 'The Breton Kingdom' and 'The French Revolution' are musically associated with complex, constantly signature-chan­ging progressive bombardment reminiscent of Yes, and 'The 20th Century' relies heavily on elec­tronic sounds, incorporating a sci-fi element (despite our lack of knowledge about the degree of Bretons' involvement in space travel and nanotechnologies).

 

As impressive as the suite is, it suffers somewhat from the usual illness of all conceptual suites — the concept sometimes overshadows the music — but the illness is thankfully absent from Side B, which contains several of Stivell's strongest, most individually memorable melodies. 'To Ewan My Son' is a tender/powerful personal message, sung as a gorgeous duet with a supporting lady friend, and backed with a barrage of synthesizers, acoustic and electric guitars, harps, and pipes that is so dense and so constantly shifting emphasis from one instrument to another that one al­most forgets about the droning nature of the song. 'Dead For His People' is a hard-rocking kicker, dominated very much by (Swarbrick's, probably) violin playing and ranking up there with the best of Fairport Convention's material. 'Nine Bretons In Jail' begins in standard kan ha diskan man­ner, then clicks into fully-arranged mode, again, jumping from one lead instrument to another as if it were matching each of them with each of the nine unfortunate Bretons (well, three or four of them, at least).

 

And, of course, how could an album so concerned with Brittany not end with a stern and serious call to freedom ('Plinn (Slogan)')? Keep in mind that if you are singing along — and it is tempting to sing along — you are formally expressing solidarity with Breton separatism, and position your­self as opposed to the long-term stability of the French government. On the other hand, Bre­ton separatism is little more than a nice spiritual game at the moment, and if playing this game helps people like Alan Stivell to make such excellent music, I'm all for playing.

 

In short, while the subject matter may be a bit too constrictive here, and Stivell's «Celtic egalita­rianism» forgotten in favor of a rigid nationalistic approach, Raok Dilestra still shows the man at the peak of his creativity, and arguably at the absolute peak of his bombastic creativity; easily in the top 5 or so of the thumbs up issued for his output.

 

UN DWEZH BARZ GER (1978)

 

1) Trinquons Nos Verres (Let's Clink Glasses); 2) Ar Wezenn Awalou (The Apple Tree); 3) Henchou Kuzh (Hidden Ways); 4) Tabud Kemper (Wrath In Quimper); 5) Warlec'h Koan (After Dinner); 6) An Try Marrak (The Three Knights); 7) 'Tal An Tan (In Front Of The Hearth); 8) An Nighean Dubh (The Black-Haired Maiden); 9) Slan Chear­bhallain (O'Carolan's Farewell); 10) Inisi Hanternos (North Of Midnight Islands).

 

A brief interlude, conveniently titled Journée A La Maison (A Day At Home, although the usual English title is A Homecoming); taking a break from his bombastic syn­the­sis of Druidism and Steve Howe, Alan records a short, quiet album of new rearrangements of tra­ditional tunes, fully stripped of electric instruments and pretentious anthemic statements. Yet it is not a minimalist creation — the multi-instrumental approach is preserved. You will not miss the bombarde, or the tabla, or the cellos. It's like a small home party that the guy throws at you from his porch. Overlooking the white cliffs of... uh... well, I guess Armorica has plenty of white cliffs, but I'm not exactly an expert on that kind of geography (I did visit the Île-de-Bréhat once, quite a long time ago, though, which should count as some qualification).

 

Concerning the music, there is not much to write about. The only minor surprise is the mini-«Cel­to-Indian» suite of 'The Apple Tree / Hidden Ways', accompanied all the way through with a grand sitar melody. Stivell probably has, or, at least, at the time had a strict monopoly on crossing Indian instruments with his trademark Celtic harp, so these resulting sonic waves are unique — I am not sure if they inspire unique emotions, but if you take a very firm decision to give in to this effect, you are in for your personal world of magic, able to beat up any other world of magic in no time. 1001 Nights meets Lord Of The Rings, that kind of weirdass concoction.

 

Side B, with the exception of the near-tribal-sounding 'Black-Haired Maiden', is all dark forests lit with firefly sparks. Lots and lots of fair harp drones, some crossed with tender multi-tracked harmonies that relate this kind of music to David Crosby ('Three Knights' just so totally belongs on If I Could Only Remember My Name, although, of course, in terms of overall influences it is Dave drawing his inspiration from acid-drenched night visits of Queen Guinevere, rather than Stivell popularizing his work by adapting it to hippie sensibilities).

 

Overall, this «nice little studio album» is just a minor blip on Stivell's radar, but many people live for such minor blips rather than nuclear explosions, and it is to those humble souls that I dedicate my thumbs up. Just do not judge the man's position in the pantheon of world music by this little adventure-on-the-porch.

 

INTERNATIONAL TOUR (1979)

 

1) Ar C'hoant Dimezin; 2) Rouantelezh Vreizh; 3) Dugelezh Vreizh; 4) Stok Ouzh An Enez; 5) Liegemen Of The Trembling Slo­pes; 6) We Shall Survive; 7) Cailin Og Deas; 8) O'Carolan's Farewell/The Musical Priest; 9) An Nighean Dubh; 10) Fest-Hypnoz.

 

Now this one is truly a «nice little live album»: enjoyable throughout, but easily the most «skip­pable» of Alan's live releases. Recorded at different venues, in Germany for the most part, unlike his previous concert LPs, this one mostly concentrates on slightly rearranged versions of tunes from Alan's recent past — an excerpt from the Celtic history suite on Raok Dilestra, another exceprt from the Breton poets tribute on Trema'n Inis, a couple of recreated highlights from Un Dwezh Barz Ger, etc. It's all nice and good, but was it supposed to signify that the man was be­ginning to run out of ideas? Not a particularly ominous sign for the upcoming 1980's.

 

That said, it only takes a brief comparison of the originals with the new live renditions to under­stand that these tour versions at least try to add to or improve on the past. For instance, 'Stok Ouzh An Enez' is about two minutes longer, allowing Alan to launch into some very tricky and sonically enchanting passages (improvs?) on the harp, masterminding the ringing strings into something so proverbially Elven-like, even Arwen "Liv Tyler" Undomiel would likely want it for her ringtone. 'The Breton Kingdom' is played in a much harder-rocking setting, with Dan Ar Bras really putting that low grumbling metal thing in his sound, so that the whole idea of «Celtic rock» gets a vivid upgrade. 'Black-Haired Maiden' gets an extra flute part that seems to have been lack­ing on the original (well, they couldn't just let the flute player stand around empty-handed all day... or, wait, is that Stivell himself playing the flute? Whatever).

 

So, in the end, «skippable» refers to those who want to limit their Stivell collection to a moderate­ly reasonable size — for those who really dig this Celtic thang, it is a must-own. But neither should one hesitate to hear it if it happens to be the only Stivell record in sight: the selections are diverse, the music clearly dominates over the nationalism (even that long long long piece of poe­tic propaganda masquerading as Celtic music on Trema'n Inis is reduced from sixteen minutes to five, concentrating on sound far more than the message), and the inspiration has not yet waned, or, rather, has not been subtly poisoned by changing musical fashions.

 

Finally, one of the few new numbers, the show-closer 'Fest-Hypnoz', with its spasmodic flute part will be a great joy to all you fans of Jethro Tull. Considering that, around 1978-79, Stivell and Ian Anderson had pretty much the same length of head and facial hair floating around the upper parts of their bodies, not to mention oddly converging musical tastes, it seems almost unjust that some­thing like Heavy Horses would still be selling and these albums would not. Sure, all the songs are in this goddamn internationally incomprehensible language that managed to reduce its Indo-European legacy to much the same rubble as English, but it's not as if we so totally understood what Ian is singing about, either, even when he gets all his articles and tenses right.

 

SYMPHONIE CELTIQUE — TIR NA NOG (1979)

 

1) Beaj; 2) Gwerz 1; 3) Loc'h Ar Goulenn; 4) Divodan; 5) Emskiant; 6) Kendaskren; 7) Imram; 8) Dilestran; 9) Ar C'hammou Kentan; 10) Ar Geoded Skedus; 11) Ar Bale; 12) Gouel Hollvedel; 13) An Distro.

 

It could make sense to say that, perhaps, releasing one's longest, densest, deepest, broadest, most ambitiously conceptual double LP in the year 1979, several hundred days into the heyday of punk, New Wave, and disco, was not the smartest idea to emanate from Stivell's pathologically artistic spirit. But then again maybe it wouldn't, because (a) 1979 was, come to think of it, also the year of The Wall (which was also long, dense, deep, broad, ambitious, conceptual, and still sold like hotcakes — granted, most people bought it for "we don't need no education", while Stivell was way too conservative to seduce people with "Disco Druid"); (b) Stivell's corner of the market was fairly well defined and covered anyway — his audience never depended on trends. So what did he stand to lose? Nothing but an All-Music Guide review, and even that situation is so scandalous that eventually someone is bound to remedy it.

 

Tír na nÓg is the name of one of the Irish mythical worlds — the «Land of Youth» that few mor­tal men have reached, except for the legendary tribe Tuatha Dé Danann, the legendary hero Oisín, and the Marx Bro­thers right after they dumped Zeppo. I am not sure if the entire album is strong­ly dedicated to exploring this legend; but it is very appropriate, when you are basing a concept album around a mythical world that emanates from a Celtic conscience but also trans­cends it, to make sure that the music, too, transcends Celtic motives. Surely, if the Irish believed in a land of eternal youth located somewhere in the Caribbean, they didn't think all of its people would be playing the Irish harp and the bagpipes all day long?

 

A mind-boggling seventy guest musicians play on this album, ranging from an entire Berber female vocal group to a whole pack of Indian artists. It is Stivell's equivalent of Lifehouse: some­thing so utterly grandiose in its idealism and spiritualism, the listener is supposed to almost feel the chains of flesh shatter and fall to pieces all around the immortal soul. Except, unlike Life­house, this album did come to pass. So?...

 

One thing is for certain: Symphonie takes quite a bit of time to start properly working its magic. The entire first LP relies more on drones and ambience than dynamic themes, even if, at times, there seem to be more instruments involved in the procedure than on any of Beethoven's sympho­nies. Still, one has to admit to a certain interest when a composition is an Indian raga, an Irish mood piece, and a modern classical experiment at the exact same time ('Divodan'). Throw in a few electronic background textures, surround it with church organ and mild chamber pieces — quite a heck of a melting pot.

 

Lazy listeners may, however, safely skip the first six tracks and enjoy a shortened, but more «ac­tive» experience starting with the textbook Celtic rock of 'Imram'. This is where the record pro­perly becomes a «symphony», with all the required formal grandeur and cathartic moments. Amu­singly, the stately rhythmic pieces have an almost Mike Oldfield feel to them: devoid of confusing, unpredictable signature changes, smooth nearly to the point of becoming «commer­cial» (but in the good sense of the word).

 

And most are fine, but the truly awesome parts are cle­verly hidden from view until the end: first, the complex vocal overdubs on 'Ar Bale' weave out a pattern of absolute happiness and tran­quility, one of the finest «visions-of-angels»-type pieces of music I've ever heard, and then the repetitive, but intelligently expanding melody of 'Gouel Hollvedel', with fifty different variations on its danceable theme in a row, eventually bursts out to become Stivell's own little ode to joy — probably the most overtly celebrative and uplifting piece of music he ever did. The transition, forty seconds into part IV, when the strings and pipes take over the theme, is my favourite mo­ment in all of Stivell's catalog — and, as far as my knowledge extends, the perfect moment in the synthesis of Celtic folk values with symphonic ones.

 

It is hard to tell if the presence of all those seventy musicians was truly justified, but maybe it is not so much their actual playing that matters as, indeed, the presence: now that they are all here, there is no backing out of the grandiosity of it all. And thank God for that — flawed and all, yes, with plenty of parts that are fairly weak on their own, Symphonie Celtique is still a one-of-a-kind record that fully justifies the concatenation in its name; a grand thumbs up.

 

The sad news is that the effort pretty much drained Stivell: the creative surge that started with Renaissance De La Harpe Celtique and, all through the decade, goaded him into curious expe­riment after curious experiment, ends here — the remainder of his career, although not without its moments, is basically just one lengthy footnote after the final glorious notes of Symphonie have faded away. But what's a poor Breton harpist to do after he has completed his predicament? Go fishing? Poaching boar? Carving menhirs? Every Celtic rocker has as much of a right to jump the shark as anybody else.

 

TERRE DES VIVANTS (1981)

 

1) Terre Des Vivants; 2) Rentrer En Bretagne; 3) Beg Ar Van; 4) M. J.; 5) Raog Mont D'Ar Skol; 6) Androides (parties 1-2-3); 7) Ideas; 8) Androides (partie 4); 9) Hidden Through The Hills; 10) Cameronian Rant; 11) Q-Celts Fiesta; 12) L'Ere Du Verseau.

 

Stivell's first album of the musically cursed decade (granted, in 1981 it had not yet been cursed strong enough) is a relative oddity — quite curious, but not clearly successful. It leans a bit too heavily on the «rock» side of the business, and on Stivell's own terms almost plays out as his big­gest concession to popular tastes up to date: the harp is either neutralized or hidden behind the bombast, and the musical structures are generally simpler and more repetitive. Not that there are any explicit nods to New Wave or anything, but at least there certainly are nods to the courses that progressive rock was taking in the late 1970s: distorted arena-rock guitars, electronic key­boards, thick, bombastic drumming, dense echoes, all of this responsible for a drabby, morose, and ultimately generic sound that threatens to replace the mystique of the Celtic forest with pic­tures of post-apocalyptic technocratic worlds ruled by the people in gray. Not pretty.

 

Nevertheless, it is still worth a listen, if only for hosting one of the man's most gorgeous ballads: 'Rentrer En Bretagne' is simple (and catchy), but he selects his most seductive vocal tone to pass along the message, and there is something doggone right about the distribution of the melody be­tween the acoustic guitar, the harp, the bass, the pipes, and whatever else there is in the back­ground (Mellotron?); a calm, classy chamber piece that every Breton should feel happy about, because that's the proper way in which one's own country should be advertised.

 

As for the rest, it ranges from the okay to the bizarre. The four-part 'Androides' suite could not have been intended as anything other than a little «shocker» — why would a master of Celtic mu­sic suddenly turn to sci-fi, be it only in the title (the entire suite is instrumental, apart from the interrupting 'Ideas'), and, furthermore, dress it up in jazz-fusion overtones? Meanwhile, the nine minutes of 'Beg Ar Van' are the first time ever when it is possible for me to say that a lengthy composition of Alan's clearly overstays its welcome (with the exception of 'Hommes Liges Des Talus', of course, but at least that one never pretended to being anything other than a music-ac­companied recitation of Breton poetry). A slow, overproduced, cluttery dirge with one verse me­lody chanted over and over again — so perhaps Dylan could sometimes get away with this, but at least he didn't sing in a language that no one except the singer could understand (sorry, all my little friends down in Armorica, but this guy is working for the international market). And that saxophone backing — bland fusion territory again.

 

In short, this may be curious, but not very interesting. It takes some time to warm up to Stivell's magic, and now here is an album that almost intentionally cuts down on the magic in favour of finding new types of arrangements that are clearly not his forté: not so much a «sellout» as a little bit of self-betrayal, inevitably followed by self-loss. On the other hand, it would have been a mi­racle to see the man able to come up with another great whopper right after the big punch of Sym­phonie Celtique, so there is no need to be extra harsh.

 

LEGENDE (1983)

 

1) Tour An Arvor; 2) Marc'heien; 3) Barn; 4) Azenor; 5) Sawen; 6) Tour An Arvor; 7) Eireog Shineidin; 8) Imram Brain; 9) Les Peuples Dieux De Danu; 10) Dagda & Morrigan; 11) Eriu; 12) Dans Le Tertre; 13) Le Songe D'Angus; 14) Le Pacte; 15) Au-Delà Des 9 Vagues.

 

Stuff started happening to musical traditionalists in the Eighties that is fairly hard to describe. Wi­thout expressly «selling out», many of them tried to adapt to common shifts in «sonic value», ta­king more advantage of various studio technologies than they ever paid attention to in the previ­ous decades, sometimes putting production and atmosphere way in advance of the melodies.

 

Clannad were probably the most notorious example — all of a sudden, going from a fresh, lively band sound to exaggeratedly mystical ambience that eventually dissolved them among miriads of commercially oriented New-Ageists. But at least Clannad never had any serious progressive am­bitions — their scope and reputation always made it obvious that those guys, if necessary, could and would go with the flow. But Stivell? In a certain way, the man was a creative giant of the 1970s; and the higher he ascended, the more cause we all had to worry with the upcoming change of the third number from 7 to 8.

 

Légende is the first album from Stivell that, while not being expressly bad or distasteful, does ab­solutely nothing for me. Technically, it consists of two long suites ('Si J'Avais 1,000 Ans' and 'La Venue Des Peuples-Dieux'), the first one serenely meditative, the second a musical recasting of a little bit of Irish mythology. Substantially, not only does it add relatively little, if anything, to our already accumulated hoard of Stivell wisdom, but it simply sounds slight. Most of the music just seems like bits of homebrewed harp and flute improvs without much depth or development — in comparison with Renaissance De La Harpe Celtique, it is almost as if Alan had a strange idea to reward his fans with old bits and pieces from the scrapbooks of his youth.

 

What is new on the album is what I'd call the «gathering-of-the-clouds» approach: lots and lots and lots of synthesized background noises, whirlwinds, echoes, dark choral vocals, etc. — typical New Age stylistics with its silly paradox: using ultra-modern electronic technologies to create an atmosphere of allegedly archaic, reverential mysticism. Of course, this stuff can be done well, but if you just prop it up by humming under your nose, distractedly plucking the same old chords, that's not inspiration, that's crisis.

 

I honestly cannot recommend this at all. Thumbs down. As an amusing bit of trivia, Clannad would release their album called Legend just one year later — and that, too, would be one of their blandest efforts. Coincidence or revenge of the old gods?

 

HARPES DU NOUVEL AGE (1985)

 

1) Musique Sacrée; 2) Dor I; 3) Piberezh; 4) Dor II; 5) Rory Dall's Love Tune; 6) Kervalan; 7) Luskellerezh; 8) Dihun'ta; 9) En Dro Inis-Arzh; 10) Dans Fanch Mitt; 11) Suite Ecossaise; 12) Dor III.

 

This is a minor and little-known release, sort of a tiny footnote in Alan's 1980s catalog, notable for but two things: (a) it garnered him an Indie Award (his only «official» recognition by the Ame­­rican industry, if I have not missed anything), (b) simply put, it may well have been his fi­nest hour for that decade.

 

What we have here is simply thirty-five minutes of slow, samey, meditative harp playing. With New Age and ambient stuff a firm presence on the market, why refrain from showing the world that his old love, the Celtic harp, can be just as effective at this «maximum mood, minimum me­lody» thing that everyone was going so crazy about at the time? If there is an audience out there for Music For Airports, surely there must be someone who will lap at the chance to hear the same stuff reproduced on an exotic plucked instrument.

 

And? Well, the harp definitely works fine as an «ambient» instrument. Of course, you have to un­derstand that this kind of «ambient» is still very different structurally from the Glass/Eno school: Stivell's «ambience» is derived from — guess what — Celtic folk and the amount of notes he plays is still fairly high; the difference is that about ninety percent of this stuff is built on drones or circle loops that go on and on with but slight changes that only register on the subconscious level. Sort of a virulent Celtic radiation thing on your brain.

 

One technical innovation is Stivell's use of a freshly designed electric harp — which, to my un­trained ears, sounds indistinguishable from an acoustic one (now if he'd only attach a distortion pedal, that would be something!..), but the man is fond of those kinds of symbolic gestures — bridging the gaps between the past and the future, that sort of thing.

 

Anyway, it all sounds lovely and fresh, with very little in the way of «murky», «cloudy» ambi­ence of his last two records, certainly a major rarity for an album from 1985. None of the «tunes» seriously merit individual description, but altogether they add up to a one-of-a-kind experience from Stivell and show that his fantasy well had not yet completely run dry by then. On the other hand, I hesitate to freely recommend this to anyone not yet deeply engaged in meditative spiritual practices — and Zen Yoga devotees will probably prefer something with a more Eastern flavor.

 

THE MIST OF AVALON (1991)

 

1) La Dame Du Lac; 2) Morgan; 3) Camaalot (Hymn 1); 4) Guenievre; 5) Le Chant De Taliesin; 6) La Blessure D'Arthur; 7) Le Val Sans Retour; 8) Belenton; 9) Olwen; 10) Quest; 11) An Advod; 12) Horses On The Hills; 13) Strink Ar Graal; 14) From Ava­llac'h; 15) Gaelic Tribes Gathering; 16) The Return (Hymn 2).

 

If you have some tiny suspicion that a title like The Mist Of Avalon did not come by accident, but could be targeted at the medium-mass-buyer who mistily remembers the word «Avalon», but cannot be bothered to look with reverence or interest at the bizarre intricacies of Breton ortho­graphy... well, you might be onto something. By all means this is Stivell not just at his most ac­cessible, ever, but also at his most aggressively accessible. Sixty minutes of Celtic-style arena-rock, dance-pop, and somber, but rhythmical, New Age noodling.

 

There may also be some connection here with Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists Of Avalon, of course, all the more fitting given how her most humane of all humane retellings of King Arthur's story was such a popular success in itself a decade before. But this is rather irrelevant to the tradi­tional Stivell fan, who may probably think of the whole thing as a sick cheapening of the typical Stivell experience.

 

Synthesizers. Big electronic drums. Simplified melodies with improved catchiness (sometimes) and dissipated mystery. Bombastic vocals. Listen to the first fifteen seconds of 'Le Chant De Ta­liesin' — is this Stivell or Black Oak Arkansas when, after several bars of big ol' boozy drum pounding, the arrival of the main melody is announced by a "YEEEAAAAAH!" that should typi­cally be followed with a HOUSTON, ARE YOU READY TO ROCK kind of thing?

 

Not that it isn't at least curious to see Stivell sell out — the man does it with class, enough to en­sure that the album will never sell. Lots of singing in French and Breton anyway, too many bag­pipes and harps for the common ear, and if you want to headbang to 'Guenievre' or 'Chant De Ta­liesin', you still have to endorse the serious medieval agenda. In fact, once you listen to the tunes really closely, there will be little details (such as the angelic choir on 'Le Val Sans Retour') that suggest Alan did actually put some care and some heart into the album. But then you fall upon the silly-sounding synth loops of 'Gaelic Tribes Gathering' (Around The Mighty Synth, no doubt), and you begin to wish he didn't.

 

I cannot bring myself to give this stuff a thumbs down: even in the grip of strange rock hero de­lusions and modern technology, Alan still manages to keep most of the songs in relatively good taste. But this is definitely not the kind of album that could ever explain why in the world any­body would want to review the man in the first place. Not that parts of it wouldn't work fine as a soundtrack for the likes of Excalibur — oddly murky, dated, cheap-thrilling music for an oddly murky, dated, cheap-thrilling movie.

 

AGAIN (1993)

 

1) Suite Sudarmoricaine; 2) An Dro / Tha Mi Sgith; 3) Ar An Garraig / Telenn Gwad; 4) The Foggy Dew; 5) Suzy McGuire; 6) Suite Irlandaise; 7) Spered Hollvedel; 8) Son Ar Chistr; 9) Marv Ma Mestrez; 10) Kimiad; 11) Suite Des Montagnes; 12) Metig; 13) Pop-Plinn; 14) Bal Ha Dans Plinn; 15) O'Neill's March/The King Of The Fairies; 16) Ian Morrison Reel; 17) Tri Martolod.

 

Either out of nostalgia or out of ideas, Stivell recorded this album of self-covers that relates to his early output much like the «enhanced» new DVD versions of Star Wars relate to the originals: with the artist procuring himself tons of pointless fun watching the fans kill each other over the issue of how much should an artist really be allowed to tamper with one's own art. Except that it takes the much less numerous Stivell fans much less time to exterminate themselves than it takes Star Wars fans — which must be the reason why we so rarely see them on the streets any more.

 

Anyway, all or most of the tracks are new recordings of old «classics» going as far back as Re­flets and, I believe, stopping around Chemins De Terre, with these two albums and the Olympia Concert taking up the lion's share. Considering that Stivell is an acknowledged technophile, and has always dreamed of reaching the perfect synthesis between the past, present, and future, it was perhaps inevitable that one day he'd want to «clean up» the old stuff. But it is also predictable that «cleaned up» it may be, but improved upon — no way.

 

One should admit that, if you play the old stuff back to back with the new stuff, Stivell's harp sound definitely sounds cleaner, fresher, «thinner» than it used to be — but one wonders, of cou­rse, if the same effect could not have been reached by simply re-remastering the old records. The downside is the electronic vibe: swampy synths and booming electronic drums. They aren't eve­ry­where, but they sure stick around, and every time they do, I cannot help but think how come by 1993 Stivell had not yet realized these New Age paraphernalia were no less dated than hair metal and 'Owner Of A Lonely Heart'.

 

Some of the stuff is even more dated, and with even less reason to be so: for instance, 'Kimiad' from Chemins De Terre receives a generic and completely unnecessary «jazz-fusion-style» bass solo in the middle, something Stivell had not touched upon in the past because there was really no need. All of a sudden we're in this Joni Mitchell mode circa 1979 — why?

 

That said, it could all have been worse. It is not a total crime to become acknowledged with Alan's classics through these re-recordings. It is a total crime to make this your one and only Sti­vell record, though, because Again operates under the presumption of the «Dumb Modern Per­son», unable to perceive the value of any work of art unless it is draped in contemporary drapes. Even if Stivell's own conception is more noble (modernization as just another inevitable stage of the creative process), in the grand scheme of things it still comes out that way. Even the Star Wars analogy does not quite work — George Lucas, after all, had placed technophilia above eve­rything else from the very beginning, and it is only natural of him to renovate the old stuff accor­ding to the new standards. For Stivell, on the other hand, melody and vibe was always more im­portant than production, and Again might easily deviate the innocent into suspecting the opposite. For all these reasons — an offended thumbs down, even despite the fact that nothing on the al­bum is explicitly cringeworthy per se.

 

P.S. Kate Bush fans may be delighted to know that she plays keyboards on 'Kimiad', and Pogues fans may be delighted to know that Shane McGowan duets with Alan on 'Tri Martolod'. Not that there's any real worthy reason to be delighted, but it's a nice turn of phrase to wrap up an obliga­tory trivia bit.

 

BRIAN BORU (1995)

 

1) Brian Boru; 2) Let The Plinn; 3) Mnà Na hÉireann; 4) Ye Banks And Braes; 5) Mairi's Wedding; 6) Cease Fire; 7) De' Ha' Bla; 8) Sword Dance; 9) Parlamant Lament; 10) Lands Of My Father.

 

Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig is one of Ireland's legendary cultural-political heroes, credited with cementing the Irishness of the Irish in the face of the Scandinavian threat. As is often the case in such situations, Brian's real role may have been vastly exaggerated by tradition, but why should the average O'Brien care about it? We all need someone we can bleed on, as Mick tells us.

 

Anyway, the title alone is enough to guess that this must be Stivell's brotherly contribution to the nation of Ireland: not a mixed pan-Celtic product as usual, but concentrated strictly on all things Irish. He still does a lot of singing in Breton, though, presumably because of rather poor pronun­ciation skills when it comes to enunciating Irish words instead (so the knowledgeable people say, at least, although most of us will never know the ultimate truth); and when he switches to Irish, he is frequently accompanied by fiddle player and singer Máire Breatnach, endowed with one of those proverbially gorgeous Celtic singing voices that eventually run the risk of becoming a bit too generically gorgeous. She's alright in limited doses, though.

 

As for the music, this is typical late-period Stivell: some nice, not too original melodies, occasio­nally spoiled by overproduction, mixed with an occasional horrible-shit-idea or two. It never real­ly gets better than the title track, with a well-rounded epic (and catchy!) duet between Alan and Máire, who, out of nowhere, throws on a couple verses from Irish poet Caitlin Maude's «Viet­nam Lovesong» (!) — which, obviously, fit in well with an ode to Brian Boru since nobody under­tands a word in the first place.

 

Then, in standard typical late-period Stivell manner, he introduces us to 'Let The Plinn', a goofy bass-heavy, effects-laden «world music» dance number that probably begs for being pigeonholed as «Celtic rap». It is not so much «cheesy» per se as simply unnecessary, a track whose only function is to advertise itself as a novelty gimmick, a far cry indeed from the inspired synthesis of Celtic Symphony. It is an unusual twist, and it does give Brian Boru a unique facial feature, but would you want to be able to remember a person primarily because of a huge wart right under his nose, or something like that?

 

Still, overall, Brian Boru is an improvement over Avalon. Stivell's technophile excesses, with the exception of 'Plinn', are kept to a minimum, the harps and bagpipes dominate the proceedings, and 'Ye Banks And Braes' and 'Mairi's Wedding' are beautiful upbeat traditional ballads with well adjusted electric guitar solos. It does not look like Alan is trying too hard: the days of master class in creativity are long gone. But with Brian Boru, it seems as if he has more or less reached a cer­tain truce with himself, comfortably settling into a formula that pleases his own spirit and his small fan following; and in this context, the artist is usually guaranteed a steady flow of «B-level» albums, with a risk of descending into «C-level» territory only if some inner demon tempts him to transform all of his music into lame attempts at modernization à la 'Let The Plinn'. Fortunately, the temptation process was never completed on this cozy, lovely, middle-of-the-road little record. Thumbs up, I guess.

 

1 DOUAR (1998)

 

1) A United Earth I; 2) La Mémoire De L'Humain; 3) Hope; 4) Ensemble (Understand); 5) Crimes; 6) A United Earth II; 7) Scots Are Right; 8) Ever; 9) Kenavo Glenmor; 10) Una's Love; 11) Aet On (Into The Universe's Breath); 12) A United Earth III.

 

Back to musical pan-globalism, with surprisingly classy results. The target audience of Eunn Douar («One Earth», but, as the exact title suggests, still seen through the unmistakeable eyes of a Breton) comprises admirers of «world music» understood as a synthesis of one or two areal tra­ditions with Western pop music elements and production values (as opposed to, say, «ethnic mu­sic» where you actually listen to a real tribe of hunter-gatherers banging the drums for fifty minu­tes as the neighbours go quietly mad). To that end, we have lots and lots of guest stars, including Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour, Algerian star Khaled, and a bunch of Stivell's pals from the Cel­tic musical business world.

 

My own knowledge of «world music» is fairly limited, possibly because I have always regarded it more as a «social tool» than a set of self-contained art forms. As far as I'm concerned, Youssou N'Dour exists primarily to inform people of the fact that there is such a country as Senegal, with its own history, culture, and art. That's a good, healthy, educational mission. Real specialists in African art and culture may, however, dismiss the man as a «Western sellout», and they will have their point, too (even if they do acknowledge his role in changing Western perceptions about the rest of the world). In any case, there has been relatively little «world music» that I have heard which would make me want to spend time and resources on a full immersion, from the Americas to Africa to the Middle East to the Pacific and back again.

 

That said, 1 Douar, with all of its Celto-African fusion bits, is still primarily a Stivell album. Alan and Youssou N'Dour may duet in their respective tongues on 'A United Earth' all they want, but it is still the quirky Celtic harp rhythms and the merry sound of ye olde recorder that drive the tune forward, and it is only on the reprise version that both are complemented by explicitly Afri­can-style drumming. 'Crimes', with Khaled singing a Bedouin raï against Stivell's Celtic folk mo­tive, is more democratic in that respect — but, perhaps not surprisingly, much less memorable.

 

The album's true surprise is 'Ever', a duet with John Cale of all people, set to hard-rocking dis­torted guitar chords and an almost trip-hoppy rhythm track. However, it is also a disappointment, since a little bit of crunch is just about everything that separates it from the rest of the tracks, and it is not clear why John Cale should be associated with crunch when he is usually associated with lots of other things; a misused presence indeed.

 

In general, 1 Douar is perfectly listenable, without any tasteless slip-ups, and its main theme may well be included in any Stivell retrospective, but it is definitely not the «comeback» that I have seen a few people call it. Where Celtic Symphony was a grand, epic, spirit-arousing triumph, this next attempt at fusion is languid easy-listening stuff, to be played at quiet, inobtrusive volume le­vels in your local stylish ethnic restaurant. (Probably goes down real well with a good helping of baba ghanoush, over a good glass of chouchen, to celebrate a truly united earth).

 

BACK TO BREIZH (2000)

 

1) Vers Les Iles Et Villes De Verre; 2) Rêves (Hunvreoù); 3) Ceux Qui Sèment La Mort; 4) Arvor-You; 5) Rock Harp; 6) Skoit 'N Treid!; 7) Iroise; 8) Kreiz Hag Endro; 9) Back To Breizh!; 10) Harpe De Vies; 11) Brian Boru In French; 12) Armoricaine Suite.

 

«Back» is right: the last time Stivell came out with an album com­pletely centered on his native locality was in... 1981? 1979? Whatever. Of course, most people would never notice much dif­fe­re­nce be­tween Breizh, Cymru, and Eire in the first place, but it's been a long, long time since Alan recorded anything for «most people». Back To Breizh, too, is strictly for the fans.

 

For those nostalgic fans, actually, who dislike Stivell's synthesis of Celtic and anti-Celtic musi­cal traditions: at the expense of sounding too monotonous and retrograde, he sticks to Breton melodi­city all the way through, ending the album with a massive re-recording of 'Suite Armoricaine' and offering new variations on old melodies that I would hardly dare to call exciting.

 

The good news include a major improvement in production values. Synthesizers are used sparing­ly, so that the «swampy» New Agish effect is generally missing; most of the tunes show a clean, sparkling sound that we really hadn't heard on Stivell's song-based albums since the 1970s. At the same time, he is not abandoning modern technologies at all: the title of 'Rock Harp' speaks for it­self, as the man attaches yet another distorted technogadget to his instrument to make it sound like one of Adrian Belew's treated guitars. And on the title track, memorable mostly because of its sentimental-nostalgic melodica 'n' bagpipe curve, he toys a bit with voice encoding (just a bit, punctuating certain moments in the chorus — just so that you wouldn't mistake the album for something recorded around 1976).

 

Other than that, there is not much to say, except that this might be Stivell's most «authentic-soun­ding» record from the last part of his career, and in 2000, when it must have been lying around at least in some of Europe's musical stores, it was no big crime to use it as an introduction to his world. These days, there is no reason to seek it out instead of going straight for the real thing.

 

AU-DELA DES MOTS (2002)

 

1) La Harpe, L'Eau, Le Vent (A); 2) La Celtie Et L'Infini (A); 3) La Celtie Et L'Infini (B); 4) Dihun Telenn vMarzhin; 5) La Harpe Et L'Enfant; 6) Bleimor, Le Bagad; 7) Gourin-Pontivy; 8) E Kreiz Breizh; 9) Goltraidhe; 10) Et Les Feu­illes Repousseront; 11) Demain Matin Chez O'Carolan; 12) Harpe Atlantique/La Route De L'Etain; 13) La Celtie Et L'Infini (C); 14) La Harpe, L'Eau, Le Vent (C).

 

It does not require a deep knowledge of French to understand that this is yet another purely ins­tru­mental album from Mr. Stivell, and, as such, not deserving of a long review. This one is less explicitly ambient than Harpes Du Nouvel Age: the arrangements are more complex, and the overall spirit is a bit more dynamic ('Bleimor, Le Bagad' refers to the music of Breton pipe bands called bagad, and, sure enough, an actual ear-bursting bagad is enlisted; and 'Gourin-Pontivy' is a very quiet, hushed-down, but still danceable tune).

 

On the other hand, it is certainly no Renaissance Of The Celtic Harp: next to Stivell's landmark breakthro­ugh record, this one is just a modest collection of pretty, but relatively unstimulating and mostly unremarkable melodic weaves. However magical and otherworldly the sound of the Celtic harp may be, there are certain limits to it; being tailor-made for exclusive needs of traditi­onal Celtic melodic patterns, it cannot be molded into much of anything else.

 

Nevertheless, it is probably quite indispensable for any major lover and/or student of the harp, as well as for everyone who loves proverbially deep titles such as 'La Celtie Et L'Infini' (much as listening to the actual melody convinces me of its oxymoronic nature, unless under 'Infini' he ac­tually means infinitesimals). Me, I'm only qualified to acknowledge its soothing New Age-style qualities, rather than recognize its thematic depth and adventurous spirit.

 

EXPLORE (2006)

 

1) Miz Tu; 2) Là-Bas, Là-Bas; 3) You Know It (Anao'rit); 4) Té (Beyond Words); 5) They; 6) Into; 7) Druidic Lands; 8) Me­nez; 9) Explore; 10) Un Parfait Paradis (Miz Tu 2).

 

From one extremity to the other: if Back To Breizh was a stark piece of nostalgia, Explore, with its telling title, is the most «modern» Stivell ever got since his endorsement of prog-rock trap­pings back in the Seventies. The harp still plays the lead role on most of the tracks, but now it is inseparable from hi-tech electronic pulses and programmed beats — not that he never toyed with either before, but this time, the experiment is carried through over the course of an entire album, and, starting from the very first track, it is the electronics that catch most of the attention, rather than the harp. Particularly if you are already a Stivell fan and take the harp for granted.

 

None of the modern elements are taken in a «dumb» manner: hard-working guy Stivell takes as much care about diversifying his drum machines and synchronizing them with the harp melodies as he takes about the melodies themselves. The results are... interesting. At the very least, they show that the man is consistently sticking to his credo: fusing deep past with cutting-edge present. At most, their uniqueness may trigger an unpredictable psychedelic reaction in your brain. Trip-hop rhythms multiplied by masterful Breton harp — you don't find that lying around on every corner, not when it is that creative, at least.

 

Sadly, I never felt any magic; to my ears, the combination worked about as well as putting whip­ped cream on seafood. As an original «vaccination» against decaying in one's conservatism, it is probably a good move on Stivell's part. As the possible start of a new genre, say, «Celtic IDM» or whatever, it is ridiculous, bound to alienate lots of Alan's «traditional» fans (those who either vi­ew any kind of programmed beat as an immediate sellout, or, like me, just do not see the appeal of these things going together) and hardly capable of attracting new ones — I mean, if you are an admirer of the Electronic Arts, what in the world would make you want to enrich your experience by listening to an old Breton geezer adding plinking harps and buzzing pipes to a sound that, by nature, should rule out «live» instruments as atavisms?

 

Not that there aren't any good songs — 'Là-Bas, Là-Bas' in particular has a marvelous harp «riff» to it — and not that the whole thing is, in any way, «unlistenable». It is just that it sets a very high goal, and, for the most part, shows that the goal is unreachable (to me, at least). Alas, sometimes it is better to just stick to that harp.

 

EMERALD (2009)

 

1) Brittany's - Ar Bleizi Mor; 2) Lusk - Skye Boat Song; 3) Marionig; 4) Tamm Ha Tamm - Rennes, Nantes & Brest; 5) Gael's Call - Glaoch Na nGael; 6) Harplinn; 7) Goadec Rock; 8) Eibhlin - Eileen A Roon; 9) Aquarelle - Er Penn All D'Al Lanneg; 10) An Hirañ Noz - Noël, Espoir - Ar Hyd Y Nos; 11) Mac Crimon (part I); 12) Mac Crimon (part II); 13) Mac Crimon (part III).

 

Emerald has the same number of letters as Explore and both begin with an E. The similarities do not end there, as you understand, but overall, the two records drift on completely different pivots. This time, Alan is back to «normal» music-making, and three years of procrastination have done well for the 21st century druid: not only has he managed to come up with his most diverse album in years, if not decades, but he has even done what I already believed impossible — scaled those catha­r­­tic heights once again.

 

It comes on in the very end, though; you'll have to wait for it, but the three-part epic 'Mac Cri­mon' is worth every bit the wait. It is one of Alan's grandest finales, the grandest, perhaps, since Celtic Symphony, if nowhere near as complex — just a stately piano melody, some bagpipes, and choral singing ('L'Ensemble Choral Du Bout De Monde', to be precise) to wind up the solemnity motor. The middle part is the real juicy bit, but it sits well in its coating of pipes and gloomy acappella singing from both sides. It probably will not work, though, if there was never a moment somewhere deep in your childhood when you did not shun away from the opportunity of shedding a tear over 'Auld Lang Syne'. (Never too late, though).

 

The rest of the record also aspires to grabbing one's attention, in a better planned and more seri­ous­ly concentrated effort than anything since... quite a long time ago. Simply put, this is a wor­king syn­thesis of just about all the directions, with the exception of «world music fusion», that Stivell had pursued in the past thirty years. Some of this sounds like cocky Celtic power-pop ('Ar Bleizi Mor'), some, like Mist Of Avalon-style Arthurian opera ('Lusk'), some, like his New Age experiments, but with more distinctively fleshed out musical themes ('Harplinn'), and for those who like it loud and brawny there is even some really jarring, grumbly Celtic hard rock ('Goadec Rock' may be driven by the deepest, heaviest guitar rhythm part in all of Alan's catalog, and, sur­prisingly, it sounds quite tasteful at that).

 

All of which shows that, even if the main bulk of Stivell's legend is unlikely to get more props (not that it is in dire need of any more), the 65-year old artist is still going strong. Emerald is the kind of record of which he could make fifty carbon copies and everybody would be happy — un­like Explore, this stuff is timeless, and as long as Alan is not infected by the notion that new legi­ons of upcoming young fans must learn to appreciate Celtic motives by hearing them in hip-hop or nu-metal or emocore arrangements, all new albums such as these will be an incessant source of B-level enjoyment (the A-level, I'm afraid, ended with the Seventies). Thumbs up.

 

AMZER (2015)

 

1) New' Amzer — Spring; 2) Other Times — Amzerioù All; 3) Matin De Printemps — Kesa-no Haru; 4) Mintin New' Hañv; 5) Au Plus Près Des Limites — Je Marcherai; 6) Purple Moon; 7) Postscript; 8) Kala-Goañv — Calendes D'Hiver; 9) What Could I Do?; 10) Kerzu — December; 11) Halage; 12) Echu Ar Goañv? — Till Spring?.

 

For several years, word has been leaking out about the preparation of a new Stivell album, but then the process became so stretched out that eventually everybody lost interest. When it was finally released in 2015, it was done to such tiny fanfare that even some of the regularly updated Internet databases failed to register the event — but yes, there it is, finally: a brand new Alan Stivell record that shows the man ready and willing to settle into very old age, but unwilling to abandon his dedicated search for the last cosmopolitan chord.

 

Once again, this is not so much a «Celtic» album as a fusion between several genres, or, at least, a «Celtic perspective» on different parts of the globe. In addition to the predictable vocal and musi­cal motifs of French, British, Brezhoneg, and Gaelic origin, Stivell now displays a fascination with traditional (and I stress — traditional!) Japanese culture, even inviting a couple of Japanese ladies to recite some classic haiku lines on some of the tracks. Actually, that's not really a lot of internationalization: musically, Stivell remains closely tied to his harp and the Celtic tradition, and he might be a little too old now to try and pick up the koto. On the other hand, it does count as a symbolic recognition of the close connection between all sorts of folk traditions, Eastern and Western, and the link between Celtic harp melodies and haiku recitals feels almost surprisingly natural. So, hey, if this is any help in getting some Japanese cultural fund to donate to the preser­vation needs of Brezhoneg culture... why not?

 

The problem with Amzer (which, by the way, is the Breton word for 'time, weather, season' and announces the rather obvious conceptual theme for the album) is that most of the actual music here is not very interesting. According to Stivell himself, it was largely based upon his improvi­sation routines, and also reflected a growing interest in studio experimentation — many of the tracks feature elements of «computer-assisted deconstruction-reconstruction», which sounds cool on paper, but in reality makes the whole thing very confusing and unfocused. There are really no memorable melodies, just a lot of atmospheric «harping» around, usually at low volume and with very little energy — bordering on sheer ambience most of the time, really. As atmospheric back­ground muzak, it's every bit as good as any Stivell product that remained unspoiled by silly tech­nology: pretty harp, chirping birds, cloudy synths, and Stivell's voice, despite the aging process, has not lost a shred of its friendliness or expressivity. But where even Emerald was, after all, a collection of compositions, some of them very memorable, this is a decorative piece — yes, like a cute little Japanese garden or something.

 

The only actual «song» is ʽWhat Could I Do?ʼ, a strangely un-cozy, blues-tinged dirge with bits of distorted guitar and wheezing synths cluttering the background and a general atmosphere of worry and even depression. It is not completely out of place, because it fits in rather naturally with the ensuing harsh coldness of ʽDecemberʼ, apparently illustrating a grim winter mood. But most of the time, the atmosphere is very light — not exactly joyful, but optimistic and spiritual-celebrational, right from the opening ʽSpringʼ and until the album closing instrumental ʽTill Spring?ʼ that brings us full circle. A quiet, unpretentious affair: despite all the digital experimen­tation, Amzer is first and foremost an album by somebody who's got absolutely nothing new to say, and does the next best thing — sits on his front porch and cooks up nice radiovibes, dissipa­ting as quickly as they are generated but leaving a pleasant aftertaste.

 

I do have to state that if this is really the best that the man can come up with over a six-year period, this means that he's largely finished as an artist. But then again, who at this time could expect a new Symphonie Celtique from him? These «front porch improvisations» are nice enough to serve as background music for the time being — and if it happens to really be his last album after all, who knows, maybe repeated listens in the future will make it seem like the perfect musical goodbye from an old tradition-cherishing geezer who decided to go out with a gentle breeze rather than a stunning bang of an album.

 

AMAZING BLONDEL

THE AMAZING BLONDEL (1970)

 

1) Saxon Lady; 2) Bethel Town Mission; 3) Season Of The Year; 4) Canaan; 5) Shepherd's Song; 6) Though You Don't Want My Love; 7) Love Sonnet; 8) Spanish Lace; 9) Minstrel's Song; 10) Bastard Love.

 

There used to be a little-known British band called Methuselah, whose musical philoso­phy con­sisted of merging hard rock, folk music, and gospel and whose thinly veiled intent must have been to last for nine hundred and sixty nine years. (Not) coincidentally, their first album was rele­ased in 1969, and was named after the original four members of the band: Matthew, Mark, John & Luke. Oh wait, that was a different band. Anyway, instead of carrying on for 969 years, the group, having failed to attract anyone's interest, fell apart in less than one, and out of its ashes rose Amazing Blondel.

 

The original members were John Gladwin and Terry Wincott, both singers and multi-instrumen­talists, and the original purpose was to cut down on the hard rock side of Methuselah (which ne­ver stood any competition with the real hard rock bands of the day) and emphasize the folky side, digging way deeper into Britain's musical past than the average folker of the day would usually dig. Many bands had previously borrowed elements of medieval and Renaissance music, but none of note had yet been formed around those styles — meaning that Blondel were not even compe­ting with the likes of Fairport Convention, so very much a rock band despite all the folk influen­ces. The niche was free, and Gladwin and Wincott were there to take it.

 

Had they been talentless nincompoops, the taking would not have mattered. Fortunately, Gladwin also turned out to be a first-rate composer (pocketing the lion's share of credits on all of the band's albums prior to his departure, and, unsurprisingly, the alleged decline of Blondel started exactly around the time of that departure), and few artists of the XXth century managed to prove the via­bility of Elizabethan and suchlike music more convincingly than Amazing Blondel did over the three or four years of deep inspiration that were granted to them.

 

The self-titled debut, also known as The Amazing Blondel & A Few Faces («Blondel», after all, is just one person, and the band always positioned itself as a collective force, despite Gladwin writing most of the music), is arguably Blondel's «lightest» and «most accessible» record. With no extended instrumental suites and not as much academic purism as the band's ensuing output, it is a perfect introduction for all those who prefer to wade in slowly than to dive in head first. Ten songs that range from gallant pastoral balladry to what may pass for 19th century barroom enter­tainment, with shades of gospel and even a little R'n'B — each one built around a catchy, friendly, sing-along chorus and embellished with thick, well-varied «multi-instrumentation».

 

It can very clearly be seen, though, that the band's strength tends to increase in direct proportion to the archaicness of their influences. Stuff like 'Though You Don't Want My Love', which can easily be imagined as gracing some second-rate Atlantic artist's country/R'n'B crossover record, is tolerable, and sung with as much fire as possible, but still sort of useless. The gospel wave of 'Canaan', although delivered with enough sincerity, is hardly all that exquisite. 'Bethel Town Mis­sion' is a generic «lowbrow» folk tune, performable by just about anybody etc. etc.

 

It is the courteous trouveur thing at which the band really excels, starting with the opening 'Saxon Lady' and continuing with such fragile beauties as 'Season Of The Year', 'Shepherd's Song', and 'Minstrel's Song'. The arrangements weave together guitars, mandolins, pipes, subtle orchestra­ti­on, and sometimes even «extraneous» elements, e. g. sitars and tablas on 'Saxon Lady', which somehow manage to fit in perfectly with the atmosphere. The instrumental melodies are not so much original (for the most part, they must be little more than variations on older themes, although I have no ex­pertise on that) as they are highly «unusual» in a 1970 setting, and the vocal melodies are sung in a nice compromised manner between XVIth century mannerism and XXth century heart-on-the-sleeve style.

 

However, on the whole I would still classify Amazing Blondel with those records on which the «so-so» material is ennobled and illuminated by the first-rate compositions rather than the oppo­site (first-rate compositions dragged down by the filler) — because the band is fully committed to making their sound work, regardless of whatever it is they are actually playing. There is not one truly «weak» moment here, and, in a way, the diversity of approaches may be easier to stand than the much stricter «mono-channelling» on some of the more classic records. Thumbs up; had I begun my acquaintance with the band ten years earlier, it would even have been possible for A Few Faces to be rated above everything that followed.

 

EVENSONG (1970)

 

1) Pavan; 2) St. Crispin's Day; 3) Spring Season; 4) Willowood; 5) Evensong; 6) Queen Of Scots; 7) Ploughman; 8) Old Moot Hall; 9) Lady Marion's Galliard; 10) Under The Greenwood Tree; 11) Anthem.

 

With the addition of Edward Baird to the line-up, Amazing Blondel become a stabilized trio with one firm goal in life: be reincarnated alive as authentic «Renaissance men». Discarding gospel, blues, and contemporary rural folk motives, they concentrate on one style only — that of the gal­lant courtier music 'round the 16th century. Their influences now span a pretty short distance — say, from about Henry the Eighth to about William Byrd — but at least nobody could now accuse them of lacking an identity all their own. In 1970, no other band sounded like this on a constant, workman-like basis.

 

Now one thing we must all understand is that the most «authentic» thing about the classic Blon­del lineup is their use of period instruments. Lutes, theorboes, citterns, violas, harpsichords, re­cor­ders, crumhorns, pipe-organs, and so on; dozens of different instruments are listed, and not a single one of them invented in post-Elizabethan times. And yet, at the same time, John Gladwin mostly plays his lute the way he'd be playing a guitar — were I not made aware of the lack of guitars in the credits, I would have made the mistake quite easily.

 

Any average connaisseur of Renaissance music, let alone serious musicologists, would have im­mediately spotted forgery: Gladwin's compositions, whether he wants it or not, always tend to drift away towards simple, basic folk balladry structures rather than inventive musical experimen­tation at Tudor courts. In this respect, much more impressive work would be done later in the decade by Gryphon; as for Evensong, all of the music on it is so light and fluffy, it could be pi­ge­on­holed as «twee-Renaissance».

 

However, Blondel's saving grace lies in the fact that none of the band mem­bers took this stuff too seriously. They themselves openly admitted to playing «pseudo-Elizabethan» music; and live, they would be spicing up their shows with bawdy banter, as if wanting to stress the fact that they were more jesters than minstrels. Therein lies the reason why the band has never garnered much attention or respect from «progressive» audiences: in spirit, these guys really be­longed to the mid-to-late Sixties generation of the innocent, idealistic flower power generation, even if in form they would be aligned with the stern, technically endowed, strictly music-bent prog- and medieval-rockers of the early 1970s.

 

But even if, in a way, Evensong belongs to the category of «fluff», it is terrific, highly entertai­ning, irresistible fluff. The kind of fluff that the Monkees would probably want to play if stuffed inside a time machine and transported five centuries back. Ten lightweight minstrel ballads here, each one catchy in its own way, right from the very first seconds of 'Pavan', with Wincott's pasto­ral recorder dancing along with Gladwin's guitar-like lute. Most of the themes concern gentle­men's lady issues ("This is spring season, and the time for courting's come around", the third track politely states), i. e. quasi-16th century equivalents of 'I Want To Hold Your Hand', and only the album-closing 'Anthem', built around a solemn harmonium and organ part, changes the general mood, in a rather bizarre way — as if to tie up ten gentle and frivolous ditties with one harsh strand of stern (but optimistic) pomp. Somehow, it works.

 

In retrospect, Evensong is really like a general rehearsal before the next two albums, which are generally acknowledged to form the true cornerstone of Blondel's reputation. But, being more «feather-light» than those two, it may actually be truer to the band's essence. One thing's for cer­tain: no one can complain that on Evensong, Amazing Blondel bit off more than they could chew. And another thing is my personal amazement at Gladwin's melodic ideas — for an album com­posed of ten similar-sounding, same-mood archaicized ballads to be able to hold my attention from top to bottom is a rare feat indeed. Thumbs up for all the fair sounds, no matter how «pseu­do» they might actually be.

 

FANTASIA LINDUM (1971)

 

1) Fantasia Lindum; 2) To Ye; 3) Safety In God Alone; 4) Two Dances; 5) Three Seasons Almaine; 6) Siege Of Yad­dle­thorpe.

 

Blondel's third album finds the band in dire need of adding complexity to their sound — what with folk and medieval motives becoming more and more merged with the «progressive» ideolo­gy. Unfortunately, none of the musicians were quite up to that task, so instead they offered a ruse: join some of Gladwin's songs into a multi-part «suite» that would swallow up the entire first side of the album, yet consist of exactly the same catchy pseudo-Baroque ditties, loosely connected through brief instrumental links.

 

As strange as it seems, though, either the links are capable of throwing one off the track, or they assembled the whole «Fantasia Lindum» from scraps and leftovers — the individual parts are way too glossy and smooth to stand out. It is twenty minutes of the usual refined gallantry, but without memorable choruses or particularly distinctive instrumental lines: everything sounds too an­gelic, too even, to make much of a lasting impression. Perhaps that was the exact intention, kee­ping in mind the name of the suite — a tribute to the stately (and static) beauty of Lincoln and Lincoln Cathedral. But you wouldn't know that, anyway, without consulting the sources.

 

At first, I thought this feeling was just some sort of emotional echo of some of my long-time past difficulties with «complex» music of the 1970s, but it never passed, and, besides, let us reiterate that there is nothing particularly complex about Blondel. Then there is also Side B, which has all the real highlights. 'To Ye' introduces a vivid demarcation line between soft verse and loud cho­rus, with an uplifting recorder melody to boot. 'Safety In God Alone' is one of the tenderest songs ever offered to the Almighty — in fact, its tenderness is so sexy that when the chorus enters with "Light up all your candles, keep the vigil tonight", you'd think they were singing about escorting the young king to the royal bedroom on his wedding night rather than about "praying for salva­tion, for it's always just in sight".

 

The only track that seriously stands out from the rest musically is 'Siege Of Yaddlethorpe', a short martial fantasy with a Scottish mood created by multi-tracked crumhorns (the more multi-tracked they are, the more they sound like low-tuned bagpipes) and powerful drumming courtesy of guest star Jim Capaldi. (For the record, Yaddlethorpe is the name of a district in Lincolnshire, and, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been any «siege» of it, nor could there possibly be since there is next to nothing to besiege — just another little self-ironic hint at how «faux» this whole enterprise really is).

 

Thus, reaction to Blondel's evolution in this direction may be mixed. On one hand, yep, it all ge­nerally works, and the band is certainly true here to the rules of the game it has defined for itself. On the other hand, there are signs of insecurity — if there ever was one «artsy» band at the time that had no need of sidelong suites whatsoever, it'd be Blondel, and the fact that they went ahead and did one anyway shows an odd, perhaps subconscious, tendency to «conform» that spoils part of the fun. Thumbs up, anyway, for I love this style, but they would still have to tighten up their act one more year before reaching the perfect synthesis.

 

ENGLAND (1972)

 

1) Seascape; 2) Landscape; 3) Afterglow; 4) A Spring Air; 5) Cantus Firmus To Counterpoint; 6) Sinfonia For Gui­tar And Strings; 7) Doctor Dulcis; 8) Lament To The Earl Of Bottlesford Beck.

 

England is, quite unquestionably, the Amazing Blondel album. It is quite symbolic that John Gladwin quit the band soon after its release — the direct reason might have been personal and cre­ative disagreements, but in terms of more global thinking, England had simply fulfilled the band's purpose. With their limited ambitions and modest technicality, Amazing Blondel had no­where left to go after this.

 

Which does not mean that England is necessarily a «great» album, or even their best. It is very one-sided and monotonous. It also surreptitiously discards with much of the Renaissance flavor: real acoustic guitars are back, big time, and conversely, many of the old-time instruments are gone, replaced by quite «normal» chamber music arrangements. We are quite clearly stepping out of the somber medieval halls and into the sunlit XVIIIth century meadows. To be honest, I am not even entirely sure just how specifically «English» these melodies are and not, say, German, once you really start reshuffling all the influences. But the band says England, and who are we to dis­agree? Either way, the «England», allegedly recreated and venerated in XXth century folk-prog, has as much to do with the real England of yore as Braveheart has to do with Scotland.

 

The first side is no longer an interconnected suite of folk-pop ditties, but rather consists of three majestically unfurling «folk-ambient» tracks, grouped together as «Paintings». Funny as it may be, there is not much, if any at all, atmospheric difference between 'Seascape' and 'Landscape'. Both are long, both are propelled forward by gentle flute melodies, both are wrapped in multi-layered guitar, strings and woodwinds arrangements, both should be attributed to the «pastoral» genre if it didn't seem so cooky to call a song named 'Seascape' «pastoral». But, after all, this is a quiet, pleasant, somewhat lazy seascape, not the ninth wave or anything. Then the much more brief 'Afterglow' comes along and wraps things up more or less on the same note.

 

The somewhat less conceptual second side does have a couple more formulaically beautiful tunes in the same manner. But, for diversity's sake, the band throws in a sterner, somberer church hymn ('Cantus Firmus', quite a tongue-in-cheek performance considering just how many times they ram Alleluia into your head); a purely instrumental number ('Sinfonia For Guitar And Strings'), pos­sibly the most complex composition (and also the most medievalistic) on the album, although still somewhat ambient-sounding; and yet another instrumental, 'Lament To The Earl Of Bottesford Beck', which starts off as a church organ piece and then merges quasi-psychedelic sound effects with more of that pastoral melodicity.

 

Today, with music audiences in a state of permanent fracturing, I am not sure how many people would even want to bother with England — it is not proggy enough, not folksy enough, not pop­py enough, not ambient enough, not authentic enough to merit the appraisal of any of the «core groups». Were it just a half-hearted surrogate of any of these directions, I wouldn't even want to recommend it. But it's really a synthesis, an attempt to tack together a special kind of «naive beauty» from lots of simple, but not entirely obvious elements. Evensong may be more memora­ble, after all, but this puppy is more adventurous, all the while staying true to the conventions of good taste (for one thing, they never ever go overboard with the sweetness of the strings), and, at the very least, it is a magnificent alternative to the generic boredom of early 1970s soft-rock — if you want some wimpy music for breakfast, take Amazing Blondel in their prime, don't take, oh, I dunno — America? Thumbs up.

 

BLONDEL (1973)

 

1) Prelude; 2) The Leaving Of A Country Lover; 3) Young Man's Fancy; 4) Easy Come, Easy Go; 5) Solo; 6) Sai­ling; 7) Lesson One; 8) Festival; 9) Weaver's Market; 10) Depression.

 

Although the band did not really change its name upon Gladwin's departure, I do not think it is just a matter of coincidence that their 1973 and 1974 albums downplay the word «Amazing», re­legating it to the back of the sleeve. Music lovers may beat themselves to pulp arguing over just how much exactly the original Amazing Blondel were amazing, but there is no arguing over the fact that, once Gladwin left for good, he packed most of the amazement with him.

 

A Gladwin-less Blondel, everyone knew, would be somewhat of an Anderson-less Jethro Tull, but somehow Island Records coerced the remaining duo into writing and releasing another record. Eddie Baird, previously «assistant songwriter» at best, had to take on the primary duties, and this resulted in an immediate change: apparently, playing pseudo-Renaissance music was all right with him, but writing pseudo-Renaissance music was governed by an entirely different mecha­nism altogether, one that Baird knew not.

 

So, the only thing that still ties Blondel to its past is the soft-silky-pastoral atmosphere: the band clings on to acoustic-based music, dropping, however, most of the exotic instruments and recrui­ting, for the sessions, such thoroughly non-Elizabethan players as Steve Winwood on bass and Simon Kirke from Free on drums (with the illustrious Paul Rodgers himself making a guest appearance on one of the tracks).

 

The results are predictably pitiful, if not entirely disastrous. This is inoffensive, easy-going, and, in most cases, instantly forgettable soft-rock, targeted at James Taylor and Bread fans rather than Renaissance Fair goers. Baird is no stranger to either nice melody or decent taste, and as generic as the guitar / flute / strings arrangements are, he does not revel in banalities or hollow Seventies pathos. It's just that there is no «edge» whatsoever to this kind of music, which, by 1973, was tur­ned out in droves by softrockmeisters all around the world.

 

It makes no sense to try and pick out specific songs. Traces of the original Blondel can only be found on an eight-minute, two-song sequence on Side B: 'Festival', a flute-led proto-waltz for all ye gallant gentlemen and lovely ladies, and 'Weaver's Market', shuffling along like any good ho­mage to Fairport Convention should, with crumhorns and Paul Rogers trading vocals with a pair of girl singer invitees. But they are no more than traces, and most of the rest is built around Baird and his acoustic guitar and his attempts to add introspective singer-songwriter mentality to the mix, and that is not what Blondel were about and not something they could easily become, either. Big disappointment, but the worst was yet to come.

 

MULGRAVE STREET (1974)

 

1) Mulgrave Street; 2) Iron & Steel / Leader Of The Band; 3) Light Your Light; 4) Hole In The Head; 5) Help Us Get Along; 6) See 'Em Shining; 7) Love Must Be The Time Of Your Life; 8) All I Can Do; 9) Goodbye Our Friends; 10) Sad To See You Go.

 

With this record, Blondel officially close the book on their pseudo-Elizabethan past and step into their pseudo-Carpenters present. With a full rhythm section, electric guitar leads, silky hippie vo­cals, and generic 1970s soft-rock melodies, Mulgrave Street is... a brave and honest move for­ward: the band freely and openly admits that, without Gladwin's participation, it is unable to draw any more inspiration from the Tudors. Now they draw their inspiration from Bad Company, all of the members of which (except Paul Rogers) are here to help them out.

 

The natural thing to do would have been to change the name, but since the name remained the only rea­son why anyone could bother with buying the new album, it was decided to keep it, much to the dismay of all future progarchives.com review writers. Yet, to be fully honest, I found my­self enjoying Mulgrave Street. There is nothing specific here to distinguish it from, say, a con­temporary Carly Simon record, but Baird is clearly a better songwriter in the regular folk-pop vein than he is in the medievalistic/Renaissance genre, and the arrangements of the songs do not at least attempt to drown them in a messy strings/pianos/horns syrup, as it so frequently happens with Seventies' soft-rock.

 

There is one oddly brief attempt to «rock out», on the two minutes of 'Hole In Your Head': the song really sounds like a snippet that should have been a coda in a larger art-rock epic, the best thing about it being the cathartic electric guitar soloing from Free's Paul Kossoff — but it is faded out almost as soon as it starts, a pretty silly teaser (perhaps the band was still feeling uncomfor­table about loud electric lead sounds, but they must have felt the power of this particular bit any­way — so yeah, thanks for letting it out of the studio, but give us the whole thing, dammit).

 

Everything else is silky soft, sweet, melodic, and occasionally memorable if one's memory stands so much sweetness, romantic acoustic guitar, falsettos, and cooing back vocals. Highlights in­clude: the title «suite», particularly its 'Dear Prudence'-inspired first and last movements; 'See 'Em Shining', a song that does borrow some elegance from the band's past, somewhat amazing in how its exemplary wimpiness is redeemed by a well-written vocal part; and 'Sad To See You Go', graced by Eddie Jobson's violin playing and living up to its name.

 

Obviously, there is no need whatsoever to shoot for this rare album, not until one has thoroughly assimilated the James Taylor textbook, at least. But to shoot it down would be fairly cruel: it has not done anything that bad. The worst thing that Mulgrave Street could be is «boring», which it is not, due to its cheerful, catchy choruses. As for «disappointing», «generic», and «wimpy», well, I can live with that for a while.

 

INSPIRATION (1975)

 

1) All Time For You/Inspiration; 2) Thinking Of You; 3) You Didn't Have To Lie About It; 4) I've Got News For You; 5) The Lovers; 6) Good Time Gertie; 7) On A Night Like This; 8) Love Song; 9) Standing By My Window; 10) Be So Happy; 11) They're Born, They Grow And They Die.

 

There are several known usages of the word 'inspiration' as defined in Webster. One is: «the act or power of exercising an elevating or stimulating influence upon the in­tel­lect or emotions». Ano­ther is: «a supernatural influence which qualifies men to receive and communicate divine truth». Thus, all I can say is, if this album has really been created under a «supernatural influence», we're all doing good staying well grounded in the non-supernatural; and if it was recorded with the in­tention of exercising an elevating or stimulating influence upon my intellect or emotions, I can only thank God it's not 1975 all over again.

 

Think a sequel to Mulgrave Street, but this time, with (a) all traces of Blondel's past washed away, (b) any hopes for Blondel's new future dissipated — no wailing electric guitar solos, no catchy choruses, just a never-ending string of watery, utterly predictable mid-Seventies soft-rock à la Carpenters or, at times, even Barry Manilow. There is exactly one fully decent song on here: 'You Didn't Have To Lie About It', and even that one mostly sounds good in its context, what with its bass-heavy boppy-poppiness so reminiscent of the Beatles' style circa Sgt. Pepper (think 'Getting Better' and the like). But already the second Beatles rip — title track — commits the ut­ter sacrilege in being built around... a musical bit that is directly lifted from the instrumental sec­tion of 'Something' (!!). (Which, for a moment, brings me onto thinking that 'Something', in its way, basically invented the «deep ballad» format of the 1970s, without falling victim to it, kinda like 'Stairway To Heaven' is the Blessed Mother Power Ballad of so many rotten kids).

 

Everything else is, at best, forgettable, ultra-sweet acoustic pop, and, at worst, polysaccharidic balladry. Basically, the distinction is simple — as long as Baird and Wincott hunt for the Beatles, the music is tolerable ('Good Time Gertie', a 'Dear Prudence' rip-off instrumental, is another OK contribution); once they start hunting for America or James Taylor, the music is no longer music, just sap dressed up in musical clothes. To finish you off with one last staggering blow, Baird ends the album with five minutes of pure orchestral Mantovani ('They're Born...') as if Inspiration were some frickin' Hollywood epic in need of a proper exit music arrangement. Well, I exit here all right. Like I said, Mulgrave Street was at least sing-along-able, in parts; Inspiration, in comparison, is vomit-along-able, and the only reason George Harrison did not sue the bastards was that The Chiffons taught him to be a peace-abiding, court-avoiding gentleman. Thumbs down, without further debate.

 

BAD DREAMS (1976)

 

1) Give Me A Chance; 2) Big Boy; 3) One Bad Dream; 4) Until I See You Again; 5) It's Got To Be A Girl; 6) I'll Go The Way I Came; 7) Wait For The Day; 8) Liberty Bell; 9) The Man That I Am; 10) Call It A Night.

 

At least this time around, the title is much more appropriate (which I could not say about the front sleeve — is the webbed duck foot sticking out of the cuff link supposed to self-ironically sym­bo­lize the band's regressive evolution? Or is it merely some sort of a Burroughsian flash, conjured at the last moment to give the record a little mystique at least in terms of visual appearance?). The entire record is, indeed, a series of bad dreams — not nightmares, which could at least be memo­rable; just one icky mental turd after another.

 

The Big Change, this time around, is that Blondel no longer stick exclusively to soft-rock (al­though it is still their major style of expression): now they turn their attention to contemporary dance music, which, for the Europe 1976, means smooth, desensualized, cleaned up pre-disco funk grooves ('Big Boy', 'The Man That I Am') or horns-and-piano-driven uptempo pop ('Call It A Night', clearly written under the influence of one too many listens to ELO's recent hits; 'I'll Go The Way I Came'). And when they do not, it's sugar time again — more dippy ballads that do not offer anything besides dippiness ('Give Me A Chance', etc.).

 

Basically, with Bad Dreams the band confirmed its death sentence. By swearing allegiance to mainstream pop mechanisms and aligning themselves with the Bee Gees, the band lost its final fans from the old days — yet, naturally, was unable to procure any new ones, because who needs Eddie Baird providing the market with third-rate expendable dance grooves when you can have those right out of the hands of true giants? You really need to be a huge fan of the Seventies, and I mean huge — one who takes pleasure in amassing giant collections of all the generic crap that legions of long-haired, blue-eyed, bare-chested, sandal-wearing, coke-snorting young people put out in that decade, forever devolving the currency value of such notions as «sincerity» and «ro­mance» — like I said, a huge fan of that vast marshy territory in order to even notice Bad Dreams in that collection, let alone evaluate it on its own terms. Everyone else will just have to stick with the predictable thumbs down.

 

The best thing Blondel could do under the circumstances was retire, or, at least, retire the name; fortunately, that is exactly what they did when it turned out that Bad Dreams sold almost literally fewer copies than there are fingers on that duck foot. There are some rumors that both Wincott and Baird went on to have solo careers after that; I only know of one solo Baird album, called Hard Graft and also released in 1976, a date which does not make me overtly hopeful. As it is, at the time being Bad Dreams seemed to have closed the book on the Amazing Blondel story in tragic mode, with all the noble protagonists of the novel either metaphorically dead or figu­ra­tively pwned. But the story does not end here.

 

RESTORATION (1997)

 

1) Benedictus Es Domine; 2) Preludium In D; 3) Highwayman; 4) Fugue; 5) Cawdor And Widdershins; 6) Aubaird; 7) Love Lies Bleeding; 8) Edagio; 9) Sir John In Love Again; 10) Interlude; 11) Road To Sedgemoor; 12) Cawdor Revisited.

 

Brilliant title, and an awesome idea for a photo to go along with it — the heroes of Fantasia Lin­dum twenty-five years later. With Baird, Wincott, and Gladwin suddenly and unexpectedly cros­sing their paths once more, this is indeed a «restoration» rather than a «reunion», since the resul­ting music once again carries us into the (not so distant) past in which loyalty to one's sovereign could bring on great artistic inspiration. (Alas, today we just have Ted Nugent).

 

As tempting as it is to state something like «Restoration takes off from where England left us in 1972», this is not quite the case. The original Blondel, at their most self-assured, tended to drown you in sights and sounds, layering on archaic instrumentation piece by piece, dub over dub, until you were almost ready to accept its authenticity just because there was so much. Restoration is a far more low-key affair than that. The album is completely dominated by classical guitar — granted, they still prefer to play it mandolin-like — very frequently in a gentle duet with some woodwinds. The other instruments (organs, harpsichords, dulcimers, etc.) are used only occasio­nally, and there is no orchestration anywhere in sight, unlike on England.

 

Which means that this is a very moderate restoration, of a constitutional order, if you wish, rather than an absolute one. But why should that be a problem? Certainly not in a situation when Glad­win, once again, assumes his natural role of chief songwriter; Baird is only credited for two in­strumentals (the very oddly spelled 'Aubaird' and 'Edagio') — which, frankly speaking, merely work as cute interludes — and Wincott comes up with the tragically martial 'Road To Sedgemoor' (with guest singer Joan Crowther adding atmospheric vocals).

 

The rest is Gladwin, and twenty years of sitting in his nowhere land have not impaired his ability to create enthralling archaicized hooks none. An atmosphere of chamber solemnity is set imme­diately with the Latin-sung hymn 'Benedictus Es Domine' — a little tongue-in-cheek, perhaps (ac­tually, hopefully a little tongue-in-cheek), but still inspiring — and then several well-written Renaissance ballads like 'Highwayman', 'Cawdor And Widdershins', and, particularly, 'Love Lies Bleeding', nothing to do with the Elton John song, just a highly stylized, manneristic, courtsy la­ment whose retro gallantry is obvious even without hearing the music: "Savour the kiss, for love lies bleeding / The horn beneath her rose pricks your pleading / The end so gently comes dis­guised in pity / That flower once warm, sublime, falls bereft in decline" — pretty impressive Sha­kespirian stylization, if you ask me. Or is that Southwellian?

 

Obviously, the album did not sell (in 1997, the band could appeal only to its old old fans, most of which were probably sitting on the dole and couldn't afford the record anyway; younger folk re­vival audiences preferred to go with something of a less dinosaurian nature), but I have yet to see a negative critical response — the only people who noticed Restoration were those who respec­ted the original Blondel, and if you like Fantasia Lindum at all, there is no way you won't like this experience. It didn't work out for long: the reunited band stuck around for some touring, but no further new music came out of this. Well, no wonder — restorations do not tend to last long, and, considering how much these original guys owed to the original Tudors, they could hardly hope to outlast the briefly-restored Tudors. But it was fun, and quite touching, while it lasted — hence, a loyal thumbs up from your humble servant.

 

THE AMAZING ELSIE EMERALD (2010)

 

1) Cool Margarita; 2) Fools Gold; 3) Maybe; 4) Fools Who Try; 5) Don't Turn Your Back; 6) High Time; 7) Next Time; 8) When I Get Home Tonight; 9) Here At Last.

 

Betcha didn't know about this, didja? Yes, it's the new millennium alright, and Blondel are back — as simply Blondel, slyly tossing the Amazing component into the album title, because, once again, they have returned to the Dubitable Duo of Terry Wincott and Eddie Baird, bringing the circle back full time. No idea what happened to Gladwin. Maybe he went to join the House of Lords (there actually is a John Gladwin in the House of Lords, but not that one).

 

Last time we saw Wincott and Baird carrying on the A.B. tradition, they were busy spoiling the band's reputation in sick, perverted ways typical of the Seventies — which, supposedly, should make one highly skeptical of the results of a second reunion of such type, because turning Ama­zing Blondel into a superficially commercial proposition in the 2000s would mean taking lessons from... uh... the Backstreet Boys? Maybe Taylor Swift? Yikes.

 

Fortunately, no. It would take a complete set of brain drains to believe that an aging folkster duo that was never able to find steady commercial success even in its prime could raise as much as half an eyebrow in an era when musical competition is fifty times as cruel as it used to be — and, lucky for them, Baird and Wincott have aged in a graceful, not demented manner. Elsie Emerald is not a masterpiece, it is not even a very good album, but it is a bunch of songs that the old guys simply wrote and recorded because they felt like it — because, well, once a songwriter, always a songwriter, and if you do write songs, you might as well want to share them.

 

As expected, «Blondel» in duo format steps away from pseudo-Renaissance stuff and turns to quiet acoustic folk / soft-rock. It does not quite sound like quiet acoustic folk, because on most of the songs, they include synthesized strings arrangements, giving the whole record an odd sound — imagine a generic Seventies soft-rock LP re-recorded today in your little home studio, substi­tuting electronic instruments where possible (real drums, though). The oddest thing is, it does not sound awful! Maybe just because of the uniqueness of the approach.

 

Or maybe because the songs, in general, have a more tasteful atmosphere than on something like Inspiration. There are no sappy ballads; the vocals are very quiet and restrained, without ever trying to wind up to pathos or senti-falsetto (one benefit of aging — steals away your capacity for falsetto — not that it ever stopped Barry Gibb); and the duo even does its best to award each song with a modestly catchy chorus or something.

 

The downside is that these guys are no J. J. Cales, either, and keeping it low and hushed does not automatically make these songs into soul-delving bathyscaphes. There's no shame in singing along to pleasantly rhythmic and melodic tunes like 'Cool Margarita' and 'Fools Gold', or admi­ring the skill and professionalism with which they are still capable of weaving their harmonies together on 'Here At Last', but there is no discernible electric current flowing through this — just a case of two old guys who decided to give it one more try, for old times' sake. As in, «Can we prove that we can still make an album that does not suck Gerry Beckley's balls? Can we do any­thing to redeem the evil of Bad Dreams? Can we put up a hot young girl in a leotard on an LP sleeve and get away with it without being branded a pair of dirty old wankers?» Yeah, verily they can do all of it. Which does not, however, make The Amazing Elsie Emerald into a record that anybody, even a seasoned Amazing Blondel fan, should ever wish to own. But if you happen to run into it by accident, don't be afraid. No preliminary shots required.

 

ADDENDA:

 

A FOREIGN FIELD THAT IS FOREVER ENGLAND: LIVE ABRO­AD (1972-1973/1999)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Seascape; 3) Dolor Dolcis; 4) Willowood; 5) Pavan; 6) Spring Air; 7) Shepherd's Song; 8) Celes­tial Light; 9) Fantasia Lindum; 10) Landscape; 11) Saxon Lady.

 

No missing this archive release — for anyone who is even mildly interested, that is, in learning what Amazing Blondel were really all about in their prime. Recorded on the band's 1972-73 Eu­ro­pean tour (most of the tracks seem to be from some French club gig), it's a prime slice of live Blondel at their peak — right before Gladwin's departure twisted the neck of the hen with the gol­den eggs — and it's LOADS OF FUN.

 

Basically, if you had any doubts about it, during the band's live shows the entire presentation was a buffonade — a bunch of jesters that never for one moment thought of their pseudo-recreation of the musical gallantry of old as any sort of «solemn» or «serious» activity. Light entertainment for the ladies and gentlemen of the audience, punctuated every now and then with bad (occasionally, good) jokes, intentionally flubbed notes, village idiot impersonations, and at least one sing-along number that's gotta rank among the goofiest audience-teasers ever put on record.

 

None of which belies the band's professional reputation: if anything is played «wrong» here, it is played so on purpose, and the group's collective harmonies are every bit as concentrated and con­trolled as they were in the studio. In fact, most of the songs are generally done very much by the book, and the performances themselves do not give you an Amazing Blondel that would be ama­zing in some sort of different way. The album is really treasurable for the atmosphere and the un­predictable surprises — such as singing "I'd screw you if I could" instead of "I'd woo you if I could" ('Willowood') to a stone-faced French audience, whose mastery of «Ænglisc» clearly does not extend that far.

 

Concerning other individual tracks... well, 'Shepherd's Song', turned into a ten-minute musical joke, may be delightful or annoying, depen­ding on your DNA structure, but is definitely unforgettable (how could one forget an aggressive­ly out-of-tune crumhorn?). 'Seascape' and 'Landscape', stripped of their orchestral arrangements, may please one more if the orchestration on England seemed too corny and overbearing (not to me, though). And 'Fantasia Lindum' is here complete in all of its 20-minute glory (one of the bits, 'Celestial Light', is even done twice).

 

Although I am usually wary of live albums that go over their heads in attempts to be lightweight and funny, Blondel were all right. They'd built up this weird collective personality that was, in it­self, much more English than the music they performed, and the album shows that they were fully capable of upholding it at least for the running length of one performance. Thumbs up. Not sure if Rupert Brooke would enjoy the joke at his expense, though.

ARMAGEDDON

ARMAGEDDON (1975)

 

1) Buzzard; 2) Silver Tightrope; 3) Paths And Planes And Future Gains; 4) Last Stand Before; 5) Basking In The White Of The Midnight Sun.

 

It is somewhat unfortunate that these guys only lasted together for one album — on the other hand, I suppose that is pretty much what you have to expect if you give that kind of a name to your band. A genuinely true Armageddon can only happen once. Then the chief culprit gets elec­trocuted in the bathroom. (Or, rather, in the basement, as the updated and fact-checked story goes, but bathroom just sounds so cool, the myth will never die.)

 

Actually, the band came and went before the tragic demise of Keith Relf in 1976. At the heart of Armageddon stand two former members of the mediocre, but not hopeless British art-blues-rock band Steamhammer, guitarist Martin Pugh and bassist Louis Cennamo. Keith Relf was a good friend, a decent vocalist, and an inspiring influence, bringing on artistic baggage from his days in the Yardbirds and in early Renaissance (Cennamo also played bass in the latter). Finally, percus­sionist and occasional keyboardist Bobby Caldwell came from the equally artsy institution of Cap­tain Beyond.

 

Of course, the band couldn't have chosen a worse moment to pool their forces together: what they wanted to do was complex progressive rock with a gritty edge to it, and by 1975, prog rock's days as a major critical and commercial force were on the wane. And they couldn't even well enough pass themselves off for a «supergroup» — more like a rag-tag band of has-beens, what with nei­ther Steamhammer's, nor Relf's post-Yardbirds career having done all that much of a splash any­where inside the mainstream circles. They were also mismanaged, couldn't get enough tour boo­kings, etc. etc., the usual works.

 

All that was left was this one album, typical of the times and of the chosen direction: five tunes, four of which go over eight minutes. Funny as it may seem, the atmosphere does remind of the Yardbirds circa Roger The Engineer: the emphasis is on jerky, paranoid, highly nervous hard rock atmosphere, somewhat apocalyptic in nature indeed. Pugh and Relf form a good partnership. Keith has actually gone a long way from his Yardbirds days — there, overshadowed by the giant figures of the guitarists, he was merely there to ensure the band's not turning into a purely instru­mental outfit, and that was that. Now he is louder, huskier, and, overall, making more of a point than he ever used to. As for Pugh, his playing here is more concentrated and ecstatic than on any Steamhammer album — gallantly, he agrees to do his best to be the Clapton/Beck/Page six-string brother to Keith, and, at times, he is almost successful.

 

'Buzzard' is the one song from this album that everyone needs to hear. The song is built on one of the funkiest riffs of the decade, and with Cennamo's trippy bowed bass guitar playing off that riff and Relf entering the picture at top volume, the song fully justifies its title: if that ugly, evil wah-wah is not a fine embodiment of the ugly bird rearing in the sky in seek of prey, then nothing is. These eight minutes are fully justified, right down to the psychedelic harmonica solo and the high and mighty thirty-second coda, driving in these last nails with cruelly calculated brutality every bit as stunning as on early Jethro Tull records.

 

Unfortunately, the album never truly lives up to its powerful opener. The next three songs — the pleasant, but never-tear-inducing ballad 'Silver Tightrope'; the relatively simple blues-rock of 'Paths And Planes'; the metronomic hard rock swinging back and forth on 'Last Stand Before' — offer nothing unusual, even if the riffage is occasionally quite good. There just aren't enough musical ideas to justify the song lengths; the tunes are not too complex, not too tricky, not too un­predictable... and at the same time, they do not turn into visionary solo blasts, either — honestly, I'd rather have 'Last Stand Before' turn into a ten-minute long psychedelic Cream-like guitar jour­ney than just witness the band run through a set of so-so hard rock subsections.

 

The 'Buzzard'-like paranoid style only re­turns in full force on the last track, the 11-minute epic 'Basking In The White Of The Midnight Sun', and by then, the band has already embezzled much of the confidence. Truth be told, though, Armageddon ends just as powerfully as it starts.

 

I cannot pretend that the band was much more than a footnote in the annals of «rock as art», but they gelled together well, and, compared to the contemporaneous slowly forming hybrid of metal and prog à la Rush and its future offspring, had the distinction of being more colorful and less intensely serious (a nice genetic marker for almost every Sixties veteran). Frankly, I can't think of any other song in the entire prog genre that would try to do the thing of 'Buzzard'. I'm pretty sure that there are no «ifs» in this category, and that the band was doomed from the start, but it's fairly pleasing to have this album as a memento, and it feels right to give it a thumbs up in the hopes that someone will be adventurous enough to want to look for it. If anything, just think of it as the al­bum that drove Keith Relf to the bathroom, har har, uh, sorry about that.

ASH RA TEMPEL / ASHRA

ASH RA TEMPEL (1971)

 

1) Amboss; 2) Träummaschine.

 

In 1971, «space rock» was still in a state of infancy, associated either with the lightweight dro­nes of the Grateful Dead or the harsher, more aggressive sound of early Pink Floyd. Hawkwind were beginning to stir things up, but had not yet turned into the comic strip monster boss of all things astral. The electronic genre was still groping its way through all the complicated knobs and swit­ches of newfangled technological gadgets. In brief, people had not yet finished finding the proper way of communicating with faraway galaxies without leaving their home planet.

 

Why am I saying all this? Mostly to place this here debut album of Ash Ra Tempel in its proper historical context. With both electronic and guitar-based «astral muzak» growing faster than a Godzilla on steroids in a matter of several years, it is easy to overlook the overall significance and originality of this record, and I have always held the opinion that an understanding of how fresh a certain work of art once was actually does influence our ability to enjoy it as such, even if there is never a direct correlation.

 

Besides, there is also something about Ash Ra Tempel that sets it aside from everything else (even much of the band's own further output). When flexible guitar player Manuel Göttsching, bassist Hartmut Enke, and percussionist/keyboardist Klaus Schulze got together in an attempt to forge out a new mind-expanding sound, they placed the «space» component at the top of their priorities all right, but they never forgot about the «rock» aspect of it, either. The album can pro­duce a static effect at one point and a dynamic one at another, but overall, it feels like a space journey from point A to point B, rather than a constantly looping orbit circuit, which would soon become the priority of one of Ash Ra Tempel's chief competitors — Tangerine Dream (with which Klaus Schulze actually played a brief stint in 1969-70).

 

Two encouraging factors are at work here. One: Klaus Schulze, who would leave the band for a solo career soon afterwards, is mostly active here as a percussionist rather than an electronic wi­zard, and you will be surprised at the monster drum sound he can get going when necessary, firing away on all cannons like crazy. Two: Manuel Göttsching is, by trade, a professional rock guitarist, and when he gets carried away, no amount of psychedelic echo effects on his guitar can hide the fact that he likes ecstatic, frenetic rock guitar soloing, and that he is actually good at it.

 

Of the two sidelong tracks (still a relative novelty in 1971), 'Amboss' is the fast and furious one, and 'Träummaschine' is the more atmospheric and relaxed, although its subtle ambience still has a dynamic aspect, and, from time to time, Göttsching and Schulze break out the kick-ass jamming mode even on the latter. Rock kind of guys, unafraid of lengthy jamming, will most likely favor 'Amboss' — if only for the reason that, at times, once the motor has been properly wound up, Ash Ra Tempel end up sounding like an eerily «astralized» version of The Who in their Live At Le­eds mode: check the groove they get going around the 5:00 minute mark, or, especially, the riff that Göttsching breaks into at about 8:05 into the tune, and if you do not hear the influence of a 'Young Man Blues' in there... nah, an impossible «if».

 

Of course, the track has much more than that — there is a careful percussion/synthesizer build-up that leads to the main ferocious groove, there are some funky bits, some free-form soloing with multiple overdubbed tracks, and a feedback-drenched, Hendrix-inspired coda that provides the blueprint for decades of noise-rock to come. It actually helps, I think, that there are only three people engaged in this battle — it helps to keep things tight and focused, although, clearly, had Schulze and Göttsching shown less individual awesomeness on their respective instruments, the whole experience could have quickly degenerated into repetitive boredom. 'Amboss', however, is nowhere near repetitive — the guys never emulate the exact same landscape twice.

 

'Träummaschine', in comparison, is less immediately appealing, and, I would say, a bit overlong. The tension builds up gradually, explodes, builds up again, explodes once more, then quietly fiz­zles out — stuff like that might work fine in a classical symphony, but on an early space-rock al­bum feels superfluous. But lop off eight or ten minutes off the twenty-five, and the piece will stand on its own, quite proudly, like a softer, less danger-fraught part of the same journey.

 

As a mostly drums-and-guitar based (Schulze's synthesizers work as occasional mood-setters here but are almost never at the center of the sound) mood-oriented astral-rock LP, Ash Ra Tempel has few rivals, and still ends up having its own individual sound after all these years. Thumbs up are automatically guaranteed — even if, at the end of the day, I would really love to have just a few more musical themes integrated inside these forty-five minutes. Call it «the layman's wish», if you will.

 

SCHWINGUNGEN (1972)

 

1) Light And Darkness: Light (Look At Your Sun); 2) Light And Darkness: Darkness (Flowers Must Die); 3) Suche & Liebe.

 

As Klaus Schulze drifted off into a solo career that would very soon propel him to the top of the Electronica movement, Göttsching was left behind to re-scramble the band and see if the holy idea of Ash Ra was really larger than the sum of its most talented members. In order to prove this, he resorts to an expansion of the sound. Wolfgang Müller steps in to replace Schulze on percus­sion, but they also bring in Matthias Wehler to blow an alto saxophone in a few spaces, and, most importantly, we now have vocals, provided by a certain semi-nameless John L. — whose out-of-nowhereness and style of vocal delivery clearly owes a lot to the vocalists of Can (both Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki, notable for their ghost-like appearances).

 

I could not say that, in between the five of them, they were able to scale the same heights that the debut album had scaled. Schwingungen is less edgy, more rambling; it tries to do more, but ends up achieving less. Some of the ideas are downright silly in their derivativeness. The first part of 'Light And Darkness', for some reason, is bluesy, and with John L.'s mantra of "we are all one, we are all one" set to Göttsching's crackling solos, it ends up reminding me of... Eric Burdon — yes, his psychedelic babble with the new-look Animals circa 1967-68 ('All Is One', etc.). I like the blues, and I like Manuel as a soloist, but these six minutes are just way too retro-looking for 1972, when everyone was supposed to move forward; what were they thinking?

 

Things get better on the second part, which starts off as a sequence of electronic dreamscapes and then eventually becomes a part-free-jazz, part-cosmic-voyage jam, whose serious trippiness is, however, undermined by John L. Perhaps he was really taking his cues from the likes of Can's Su­zuki, but Damo was an actual madman, and whatever figures of speech and sound he engaged in on Can albums had the true potential to creep you out. This guy, however, just yells out or mut­ters stuff in the manner of a local boozer — not very interesting or atmospheric, and, after about five minutes, so tremendously annoying that you cannot help but start looking for that kara­oke voice-cancelling switch on whatever system you're using. Because the guitar/sax/drums/key­boards interaction is really compelling. Towards the end, in a sea of phasing and feedback, Gött­sching finally takes off amidst fumes and blazes, with the vocal guy almost burning out — but it takes a long way to get there, and it's only about two minutes of prime space rock ecstasy.

 

The first half of 'Suche & Liebe' is similar in style to 'Träummaschine' — very quiet, magical, and mystical, all chimes and faraway bells and Mellotrons, as if they shove you within an enchanted musical box and you just happen to find the entire Milky Way inside. Then, at around nine minu­tes into the experience, the quiet is broken with an ominous tribal drum sound, which, to be frank, sometimes feels as if Müller took his major cue from Ringo's sole drum solo in 'The End' and car­ried on from there (not that I mind). And then, after a few minutes of chaos, the band enters jam mode once again, this time taking on a solemn and stately Pink Floydian air — wave-breaking thrashing cymbals, dream-like guitars, deeply buried vocal harmonies (if they, too, belong to John L., I take away at least some of the things I have said, or left unsaid, about the guy), altogether, not tremendously original, but powerful and beautiful enough to just get swept away by the sound waves without a second thought.

 

So it does not all work — there are problems — but, clearly, the band had not stagnated, either, and the best parts of the record (and they include Side B in its entirety, after all) totally match Ash Ra Tempel in overall quality, hence, a clear thumbs up, and respectable recognition as one of the finest records that the year 1972 brought to Germany. Second only to the Scorpions' Lone­some Crow, of course, because who could withstand the sheer masculine brutality of early Teu­to­nic metal? Not a bunch of wimpy, artsy-fartsy German space-rockers, that's for sure.

 

SEVEN UP (1972)

 

1) Space; 2) Time.

 

The most famous bit of info here is that Seven Up was a collaboration between Ash Ra Tempel and Timothy Leary — and that the title honours a particularly memorable experience of spiking the band members' 7-Up drinks with acid (no idea if it is true). It is also the most useless bit of info, because little good usually comes out of collaborations between musicians and their non-mu­sical gurus (who normally happen to be tonedeaf), and Seven Up is no exception.

 

Not that I have a clear understanding of what Leary's exact contributions to the album actually con­sisted. He is supposed to «vocalize» on some of the extended passages, and he may be respon­sible for some or all of its «concept»; but other than that, putting his name on the front sleeve alongside the band's own moniker must have been more of a general homage thing than anything else. If the concise message is that, without Timothy Leary, there would have been no Ash Ra Tempel, I can understand it. At the very least, even if Seven Up is quite far removed from the greatest Ashra experience ever, at least the acid guru's guest spots do nothing to ruin it.

 

The first side of the LP is, overall, more accessible, but also slightly less interesting. It is a spli­cing of several «normal songs», recorded in a rather generic blues-rock vein, but sewn together with psychedelic noises, cosmic announcements, and electronic stardust. 'Downtown' is almost pure 12-bar blues, whereas 'Power Drive' is more like your average ga­rage extravaganza, and 'Right Hand Lover' is Canned Heat-style boogie-blues. The idea may have been to play all this stuff while being on acid all the time and see what happens.

 

Well... if so, there is no better con­firmation to the fact that the best psychedelic music actually comes from a completely drug-free conscience, rather than a chemically altered one. Because the psychedelic processing is mostly boring, and, sacrilegious as it may sound, I'd rather just hear Göttsching play straightforward blues-rock, because already the self-titled album showed how competent he was in that department.

 

Or, perhaps, considering the titles of the tracks, this is an intentional sly hint at how utterly un­fascinating the concept of «space» is next to that of «time». Because Side B is where it's all really at — a long, drawn-out, half-raga-like, half-ambient meditation, not as otherworldly magical as 'Suche & Liebe', but very much in the same vein, like a series of interchanging lullabies, each disseminating its own mood: some scary ones, to frighten you off to sleep, some majestic ones, to awe you into sleep, and some trance-like, to freeze you with your eyes open when all else has fai­led. Then it all ends in a fizzly cloud of white noise which may symbolize the relativity and the true sta­tic nature of time as such. Or it may simply be a case of somebody forgetting to turn down the controls at the end of the session.

 

Göttsching's playing skills are not as well displayed on this record as they are on the ones that surround it; Leary's presence is not annoying, but hardly necessary; and whatever idea could go­vern the building of 'Space' wasn't a very good idea. For all these and possible other reasons, Se­ven Up is a relative failure, a bit of a misguidance in an otherwise well-designed program of con­quering the world. But even as one of those big whoppin' question marks, or silly dead ends, it  remains curious enough for me not to want to downgrade it.

 

JOIN INN (1973)

 

1) Freak 'n' Roll; 2) Jenseits.

 

This is the first Ash Ra Tempel album I'd heard, many years ago, at a time when satisfying all your desires in chronological order was nowhere near as easy as today — and it is nice to realize, now, how much of a right impression it gave me of the band. Because it may not be as ground­breaking as the self-titled debut, but it is every bit as impressive: a conscious and successful at­tempt, after the last couple of decidedly mixed efforts, to recapture everything that was so mind-cracking about Ash Ra in the first place.

 

To that purpose, Klaus Schulze returns to the fold once again, contributing drums and electronics just like in the good old days. Also like in the good old days, the album's two long pieces are neat­ly split into one dynamic and one static side, brutally kicking ass for 19 minutes and then subtly soothing it for 24 more. Unlike the good old days, side B also has one more human addition: Rosi Müller, contributing dreamy spoken sibyl-style vocals. But I wouldn't say this harms the procee­dings in any way. How can a pretty girl with a sweet/stern voice be harmful? We're not talking of a Yoko Ono here.

 

Not that either side truly attempted to be a clone of its correlate on Ash Ra Tempel. For starters, 'Freak'n'Roll' is a bit less psychotic than 'Amboss'. With its out-of-nowhere fade-in, it sounds like a no-beginning, no-end extract from a much larger improvisation, which must have been much less pre-planned than 'Amboss', and thus, has a more live feel to it. Göttsching's guitar is generally higher in the mix, sharper and bluesier, and the rhythm section of Schulze and Enke is more interested in exploring all the possible polyrhythmic combinations than in raising hell. In short, if 'Amboss', with certain reservations, could be said to be the Krautrock equivalent of a vo­calless jam by The Who, 'Freak'n'Roll' is closer in feel to the psychedelic improvs of Cream circa 1967 — just add some keyboards.

 

The lengthier 'Jenseits', meanwhile, is different from 'Träummaschine' because it invokes a so­lemn mourning atmosphere, almost something like a cosmic requiem — great funebral music for an important alien chief, who bravely gave up his life, trying to protect his people from de­tri­mental radio waves conveying Osmonds and Bay City Rollers hits into open space. Schulze is re­sponsible for most of the sound on the track, playing organ and «synthi A», with Göttsching ad­ding drone-like guitar that has also been processed to receive a more keyboardish sound. The re­sults can be classified as ambient — there are very few well-noticeable transitions, mostly having to do with shift of emphasis from one instrument to another — and this gives one a great opportu­nity to bitch about the length, but why should we? Had they cut it down by five or six minutes, they still wouldn't be using that space up to replace it with anything different, because that would ruin the concept. If you think 24 minutes takes us off limits, no one prevents you from fading the track out after 20 or 15 of them.

 

All of which literally translates into this: Join Inn comes across as a slightly less psychedelic, slightly more pure-musical experience. Free-form, muscular improvisation on one side and a so­lemn mess in the Gothic Cathedral of Krautrock on the other, with each member of the band fully up to the task and cooking. Thumbs up.

 

STARRING ROSI (1973)

 

1) Laughter Loving; 2) Day Dream; 3) Schizo; 4) Cosmic Tango; 5) Interplay Of Forces; 6) The Fairy Dance; 7) Bring Me Up.

 

I wouldn't go as far as to say that this album really «stars» Rosi Müller, who had already been in­troduced to the audience on the previous record and isn't exactly getting that much more prime time on here, except for serving as the band's only representative on the front sleeve. But the title is still not accidental. Starring Rosi was recorded in a transitional stage of upheaval: Schulze, as it turned out, was not interested in rejoining his old band on a permanent basis, after all, and, even worse, bassist Harmut Enke has also jumped ship, leaving Göttsching as the sole founding father of Ash Ra Tempel and the only one to decide whether the band had to live or die.

 

For a brief while, it had to live — but with Göttsching providing everything he could be able to provide. He rose up to the task, playing guitar and bass and all the electronic and non-electronic keyboards; only for the drumwork he had to resort to hiring an outside player (Harald Grosskopf). And, for some reason, this sudden shift in the levels of responsibility also brought about a signi­ficant change in sound — arguably the biggest single-moment change in sound Göttsching ever went through. A change so strange and utterly unexpected that no accusations of «selling out», «dumbing down», «softening up», etc., which the loyal Krautrock guard sometimes presses aga­inst the album, can really overshadow the plain old weirdness factor.

 

When 'Laughter Loving' begins with twenty seconds of psychedelically processed... laughter, this is something new (for Göttsching), but not particularly bewildering. Processed maniac laughter is stuff one should always be prepared to meet in «cosmic rock». But as the music kicks in, all of a sudden you realize yourself caught in the midst of a textbook Southern rock jam, with melodic country-folk guitar jamming loaded with the spirit of, say, Allman Brothers' 'Jessica' (which, by the way, had only just come out and, thus, could have easily inspired Göttsching, never an enemy to good old American roots-rock).

 

Actually, it is a very pleasing and soothing Southern rock jam, even if Göttsching's phrasing can hardly be expected to match the fluidity and ease of a Dickey Betts when it comes to playing this kind of music. And that's how it is with the rest of the record, which keeps moving from style to style without ever producing a single masterpiece, but always bringing on competence and con­tentedness, so that the sum of the parts eventually transgresses their individual worth.

 

Altogether, even if Rosi's laughter comes off as faux-mystical rather than cheerful, and the rest of her vocal contributions mostly consist of the same sternly delivered otherworldly monologs that distinguished 'Jenseits', the album is overall far more lively and optimistic than the end-of-the-world aura of 'Jenseits' itself. There is 'Day Dream', set in a minor tonality, dark, repetitive, rather simplistic folk with San Franciscan overtones, but its dark does not imply doomsday-dark. There is 'Schizo', with lots of piercing, high-pitched guitar wailing over wah-wah'd electronic bubbles, and multi-tracked banshees (Rosi again?) swooping from above, but that kind of music, too, is just telling you that there's danger around, not an imminent Ragnarök or anything.

 

There is even a bit of humor — as represented by 'Cosmic Tango', whose music perfectly mat­ches its title — and then, on Side B, almost all of the space is dedicated to harmless magic, cul­minating in 'The Fairy Dance', where Rosi strums a bit of harp and Manuel gives the semi-acous­tic, semi-electronic treatment to trusty old Celtic motives; quite an innovative track, when you come to think of it, considering how little Krautrock people in general usually paid attention to the traditions of their left-bank Gaulish neighbours.

 

There is no doubt that Starring Rosi is the most immediately accessible record in Ash Ra's cata­log, which does not at all make it, per se, the weakest Ash Ra record — since when have melody and diversity counted as weaknesses? Personally, I think it is a doggone pity that Göttsching him­self decided to pull the plug on this new direction so early, afraid, perhaps, of losing his artistic integrity; his subsequent deep plunge into Electronica had its payoff of beautiful moments, but this here is some fairly exciting, untapped turf for practicing musical synthesis, whereas in the realm of pure electronics the man had himself some strong competition.

 

I am also completely unaware of what happened to Rosi Müller. Since she is said to have been Manuel's girlfriend, it is possible that the whole point here was to offer her a unique sort of love song. Perhaps they simply broke up somewhere around 1974, with personal problems leading to further musical changes — I was not able to find out. Whatever really happened, it's a really nice record, and a really nice example of how positive feelings towards someone can result in musical magic rather than musical cornball. Not to mention that I'd much rather listen to Rosi Müller speaking over a mu­sical piece than to, say, Yoko Ono singing over one. Thumbs up, for one of the most «atypical swan songs» in a band's career — even if, on a substantial level, it would be more correct to think of Join Inn as the last true «Ash Ra Tempel» record, and interpret Starring Rosi as a time-filling side project in between Ash Ra Tempel's cosmic rock and Ashra's... umm, cosmic soup.

 

NEW AGE OF EARTH (1976)

 

1) Sunrain; 2) Ocean Of Tenderness; 3) Deep Distance; 4) Nightdust.

 

Although, after the final split of Ash Ra Tempel, Göttsching did actually record a solo album un­der his own name (Inventions For Electric Guitar from 1975), he quickly returned to the old moniker — afraid, perhaps, that the trance-inducing powers of the old band's sound made his fans insensitive to individual members' names, so that an album from «Manuel Göttsching» would im­press them no more than one from Roger Rabbit. But since it was fairly strange to retain the ori­ginal name for a solo artist, the compromise solution turned out to be the shortened variant. Ash­ra sounded nice, and today, Wikipedia tells us that it is also an abbreviation for All-sky Survey High Resolution Air-shower detector at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of To­kyo, which, coincidentally, was established in 1976 — exactly the year in which Ashra's first al­bum was released. Bizarre!

 

Because the album is all about cosmic rays, in a way. If Starring Rosi took Göttsching the far­thest he ever got away from electronic landscapes, his mid-1970s output reversed the direction. On New Age Of Earth, synthesizers not only rule the day, but fill it up for a total of about 90%. So much so that when Göttsching actually starts adding guitar overdubs, it is possible to miss them — to be aurally duped into thinking it's all about keys and knobs when, in fact, Manuel has already been playing lovely lead parts for a couple of minutes.

 

The major problem with this new «reboot», however, is that it is not at all clear what would be the point of Göttsching's new image. With Join Inn and Starring Rosi, he was, either with the aid of his band members or on his own, carving out sound paintings that had no direct analogies. But here what he did was land squarely in the niche already firmly occupied — almost privatized, I'd say — by Tangerine Dream and, around the same time, his former pal Klaus Schulze. Dyna­mic ambient fields of electronic sounds can be diverse enough, but it takes a braver mind to as­sess that diversity than in the case of ordinary pop music. And as pompous as the album title is, it does not exactly provide any brand new thrills that listeners hadn't already experienced with the aid of Rubycon or Timewind.

 

But if we only manage to forget such words as «groundbreaking» and «landmark», and content ourselves with knowing that Göttsching recorded this simply as a result of falling in love with pure electronica, New Age Of Earth is a not half-bad representative of the genre. Divided in two unequal parts, the former consisting of 'Sunrain' and 'Deep Distance', built on rhythmic loops, and the latter of 'Ocean Of Tenderness' and 'Nightdust', built on pure atmosphere, it is at least as good as the electronica-dominated passages on Ash Ra Tempel's albums. Which, for me, is not saying much, because my favorites, for the most part, were the not-electronica-dominated passages.

 

If you are still more interested in how the German genius' fingers pluck the strings rather than press the keys, fast forward to the end of 'Ocean Of Tenderness' and 'Nightdust' — the former culminates with a series of semi-jazzy, semi-country-rock licks played without a rhythmic back­bone, and the latter ends in a stern distorted solo, on a gruff apocalyptic note that might also show acquaintance with the Who's Quadrophenia. Altogether, however, this is about 10% of the com­plete running time. (Also, the repetitive hum of the bassline on 'Ocean Of Tenderness' might be physically annoying — I almost literally got a headache from it, so be warned). The rest is all Beautiful Bleeping. Don't forget the record on your next trip outside the Milky Way.

 

BLACKOUTS (1977)

 

1) 77 Slightly Delayed; 8) Midnight On Mars; 3) Don't Trust The Kids; 4) Blackouts; 5) Shuttle Cock; 6) Lotus.

 

The album cover speaks for itself. Göttsching must have received a few death threats in his mail­box, or at least a telegram that went something like this: «Return guitar sound. Join Keith Relf if failure to comply. Acknowledge through photo with guitar on sleeve. Long-time admirer.» Natu­rally, he would never admit the fact of chickening out to anybody, but hey, this free-form recon­struction of history may be as good as any other.

 

The critical reputation of Blackouts, as well as all other subsequent Ashra albums, is weaker than that of New Age Of Earth, but this, I'm sure of it, is a technical misunderstanding that will be corrected with time. With the prominent return of Göttsching's guitar playing, superimposed on the same electronic loops in a much more obvious and persistent way than before, this record, un­like its predecessor, regains somewhat of an individual character.

 

Its nature is still thoroughly «ambient»: development of themes is very limited, and even though all of these themes are rhythmic (each of the tracks is firmly pinned to a repetitive bassline), the basic sensation is still that of running on the spot. But now that Manuel has returned to the prac­tice of multi-instrumental overdubbing, his various ways of soloing over the rhythm tracks not only create entirely different moods, but are also well worth following in regard to what is actual­ly being played. In other words — involving.

 

On '77 Slightly Delayed', for instance, he returns to a slightly «rootsy» style of playing (remem­ber 'Laughter Loving' from Starring Rosi), taking the lightness and cheerfulness of country-rock and leaving out the redneck flair. 'Midnight On Mars' shifts gears towards a more progressive style, with trebly «cosmic» guitar wailing high over your head. For the 'Don't Trust The Kids / Blackouts' uninterrupted suite, he experiments with various processed tones, taking a cue from Fripp, but playing his notes in a more accessible, «emotional» manner.

 

'Shuttle Cock' is a very odd combination. The rhythmic base is syncopated, with one gui­tar play­ing in an almost reggae manner, and one or two others laying on funky licks and strict «musical-geometric» figures — authentic «math-rock» way before the term was invented, but all the guitar tones still have a spacey feeling to them, so that these complex forms are not totally devoid of spi­rit. (Then again, neither is modern math-rock at its best).

 

Only the last and longest track, the four-«movement» suite 'Lotus', cuts down on the explicitness of the guitar sound, and ends up feeling like an outtake from New Age that did not manage to make it there because of the length. It produces more or less the same shiny effect as 'Sunrain', the only difference being that there is a layer of guitars accompanying the electronics: it is more obviously felt than heard, but it still gives the experience a genuinely human stamp, much more to my personal liking but, perhaps, disappointing to electronica buffs.

 

As far as I'm concerned, Blackouts, far from being the end of Ashra as a significant proposition (although it is, technically, the end of Ashra as a solo Göttsching undertaking — starting from the next LP, Ashra would once again become a real band), is the culmination of Ashra as such a pro­position. The merger of guitars and electronics here is unique: nobody did that in the 1970s, with the brief exception of Fripp & Eno, and those two had a radically different approach to the idea. I may not ever listen to this record again, of course, but it's still a big old thumbs up. Would be a hats off, too, except I don't normally wear hats.

 

CORRELATIONS (1979)

 

1) Ice Train; 2) Club Cannibal; 3) Oasis; 4) Bamboo Sands; 5) Morgana Da Capo; 6) Pas De Trois; 7) Phantasus.

 

Although this is hardly a «masterpiece» of the jaw-dropping variety, it is still one of the most un­usual records of its era. Recruiting keyboardist Lutz Ulbrich and drummer Harald Grosskopf, Göttsching goes back to band format — for a good reason. Blackouts showed that he was quite capable of producing a multi-layered art-rock record on his own, but the idea of Correlations re­quired extra people, and he got himself some good ones.

 

From the most obvious point of view, Correlations is a hands-down sellout. Its rhythmic base is «generic» 1970s funk, frequently rolling on to disco; and, normally, if you were an art-rocker, re­cording of even one disco number around 1977-79 could mean brutally sodomizing your credibility. (The only thing that could be worse was putting a photo of your hairy chest on the front sleeve). Clearly, it did matter to Manuel how many copies his albums would sell. Or did it? Because, in reality, he was running a serious risk here — he could have easily alienated Ashra's veteran fans without recruiting any new ones: after all, what would motivate lovers of Boney M to spread their adoration onto something as odd as this?

 

Regardless of Göttsching's original purpose, though, Correlations is a delight. Art rocker going disco? Why not, if he does not cease to be an art rocker? What Göttsching does here is simply transpose his usual schtick («cosmic rock») onto a bedrock of popular rhythms. If anything, it can pass off for subtle irony: using a generic, lightweight foundation to support complex sonic land­scapes. A «dance album» poking fun at the dance generation — or, at the same time, an «art al­bum» poking fun at the snobby art-rock crowds. Whichever way you want to turn it, it all works.

 

Actually, while listening to the last track, 'Phantasus', I realized that the closest analogy would, of course, be Pink Floyd's 'Another Brick In The Wall' — a much better known attempt at merging «artsiness» and «disco» that managed to become a critical and commercial success without sabo­taging the band's reputation. Ashra, unlike Pink Floyd, make no simplistic social statements (to make a statement, they'd at least need to hire a vocalist), but in terms of sheer tenseness and po­wer, the guitar playing on 'Phantasus' is not significantly below Gilmour's solo on 'Brick'. Not as tightly focused, perhaps, preferring to weave loops and coils around your brain rather than bull­doze it like mad, but this only means that, someday, you might get tired of 'Brick', and that'll be the day when you might be happy to pick up 'Phantasus' instead.

 

Or almost any other one of these tracks, for that matter. 'Ice Train' honestly does sound like an ice train, moving through fields of snow at a steady set rate as grim synthesized choruses and robotic funky solos swoop around it: danceable and evocative at the same time (or at different times if you cannot combine body and mind activity). The rhythm section of 'Club Cannibal' would be greatly appreciated by any sleazy Eurodisco act — but I am not sure whether they would have ta­ken all the accompanying sonic noise, ranging from astral bleeps to jazz-fusion soloing.

 

Speaking of fusion, I would actually take Correlations, disco rhythms and all, over a great deal of «classic» instrumental fusion albums, all of which it easily beats in terms of direct entertain­ment, diversity, and a certain «sense of purpose». (It doesn't beat them in terms of «flash», but that's actually a good one for the critic — nobody would accuse Göttsching of «pretentiousness» or «self-indulgence» corrupting the rock'n'roll spirit, etc.). A few of the grooves are overcooked (the 8-9 minute length for 'Ice Train' and 'Pas De Trois' is a bit too much; everything works fine when centered around the 5 minute mark), but, in compensation, each of the grooves is different: the moods they create are notoriously hard to describe, but they never repeat each other.

 

Keep in mind that already the next album would be significantly divergent in style, too. It may not be the best sound in the world, but nothing really sounds like Correlations — the «Tony Ma­nero In Outer Space» album. Thumbs up, of course. Even if the record's historical significance is thoroughly undermined by the fact of no one remembering about its existence, that does not stop it from being an exotic aural delight for ages to come.

 

BELLE ALLIANCE (1980)

 

1) Wudu; 2) Screamer; 3) Boomerang; 4) Aerogen; 5) Sausalito; 6) Kazoo; 7) Code Blue; 8) Mistral.

 

Another goodie-goodie. With the «disco sucks» movement in full blossom mode, Göttsching de­ci­­ded to cut down on the easy-to-ridicule aspects of his newfound accessible sound, and Ashra's follow-up to the hot funky grooves of Correlations came out in a colder, sterner, but still quite «toe-tappable» casing, which, this time around, took good hard notice of various New Wave-re­la­ted happenings. Quite content now with following trends rather than setting them, Belle Alliance still set out another good example of how to follow trends in style, instead of unveiling yourself as a pitiful lapdog, whining for a bite, or, rather, for a buck.

 

The album, sort of returning to the old Ash Ra Tempel tradition, consists of a «hard» and «soft» side, which few people will be able to enjoy in equal doses. Predictably, my sympathies strongly veer to the «hard» side, with an overall irresistible punch, lots of stylistic diversity, and some ter­rific guitar soloing. 'Screamer', in particular, is a heck of a screamer, chasing along at super speed like a respectable punk number (there is even a «chainsaw buzz»-style rhythm guitar track) with some accompanying mock-shouting, until midway through it gives way to Göttsching's flashy astral-rock guitar, sometimes issuing bursts of speedy psychedelic licks, sometimes melting in a sea of distor­tion and feedback, more often doing both at the same time. (Should be listened to at top volume in headphones; chances are the ground will disappear from under your feet).

 

Following it up, 'Boomerang' may be one of the finest examples of guitar playing over a reggae rhythm base — especially since Manuel changes keys several times throughout the track, going from Caribbean to pop-rock to country-blues stylistics and back. But the best build-up is on 'Ae­ro­gen', which begins as a set of electronic loops, then slowly grows itself a funky foundation, and finally becomes a lightning-speed rock anthem with a crisp, fiery rock'n'roll solo. All of these are simply exemplary examples of intelligently imagined kick-ass instrumental pop music — in my humble opinion (but don't tell anyone), beating out quite a few much better known «masterpie­ces» of fusion, Santana-rock, and suchlike.

 

Side B is mainly dominated by the snowy majesty of 'Code Blue', whose primary «gimmick» con­sists of gradually, almost unnoticeably, transforming from a pre-Bach-oriented church organ instrumental into a contemporary electronic ambient landscape. The landscape has some dynamic aspects to it — over time, Manuel adds extra synth layers and percussion — but overall, little change is in vogue until the track, without interruption, seagues into the optimistic/romantic coda of 'Mistral', where Göttsching's guitar is eventually used in the spirit of Santana (but, of course, with Manuel's own playing technique). All of it constantly goes from pretty to majestic or vice versa, but suffers from the usual flaws of ambient — too thin density of cool ideas per minute to let you override the drowsiness effect. Will certainly be your favourite of the two sides, though, if you are one of the drowsy types.

 

Altogether, the album is such an obvious thumbs up that Göttsching's subsequent decision to pull the plug on Ashra as a studio team (he still continued touring with Ulbrich and Grosskopf for some time after that) is quite surprising. Ashra's official site claims that the man was «fed up with the corporate music industry business» — quite odd for someone whose albums never showed the least sign of the music industry business people's interfering or tampering with any of his work. (Unless, of course, it eventually turns out that it was the record industry people who forced him to turn to funk and disco in 1979 — for which I'd like to thank the record industry people).

 

What­ever be the real reason, nothing further was heard from Ashra throughout most of the decade — then again, considering that the decade was the 1980s, perhaps we should not feel too sorry about that. In any case, the German musical scene at the time was not the best place to behold. Just imagine a collaboration between Ashra and... uh... Modern Talking?

 

WALKIN' THE DESERT (1989)

 

1) 1st Movement: Two Keyboards; 2) 2nd Movement: Six Voices; 3) 3rd Movement: Four Guitars; 4) 4th Move­ment: Twelve Samples; 5) Dessert: Eight Tracks.

 

After a decade spent doing nothing or nearly nothing, interrupted only by the recording of the acclaimed solo album E2-E4, in 1988, Göttsching eventually reteemed with Lutz Ulbrich, and the results of their rather lengthy collaboration (date of recording is given as «May 1988 – Spring 1989») were deemed successful enough to be released as the next Ashra album. Much of it stems from the reworking of a large 65-minute suite performed live on June 4th, 1988 at the Berlin Pla­netarium, but a large chunk had to be cut out to fit on one LP — perhaps for the better.

 

Walkin' The Desert is certainly not bad, but it does sound a bit like the title suggests: listening to it is about as much fun as walking through a desert. Basically, if you have a long way to go through the desert and not go crazy from the process, you have to train your mind to recognize the desert as a colorful, inspirational place to be. Listening to ambient music is different in that you do not usually have to listen to ambient music (unless Brian Eno has promised you unlimited access to his porn collection in exchange for a set of glowing reviews). Thus, it is all to easy to just put on Walkin' The Desert and say: «Oh no, not another Göttsching album without any kick ass guitar solos!» and back out, pleased to feel indignantly offended, much as I did upon my first listen to New Age Of Earth.

 

But, although this record is hardly a masterpiece, to my ears, it sounds far more intriguing and unu­su­al than New Age. First, it is thematically coherent. The «movements» are not just an at­tempt at adding pseudo-academic «respectability» to the overall experience — they really repre­sent several different, yet interconnected mood states that one could... well, not necessarily lite­rally associate with «deserts», but with vast, seemingly empty spaces; the more you stare at them, the more kaleidoscopic they become before your eyes. Lots of ambient loops are simply used as tasty (or tasteless) background decorations; the point of the loops on Desert is to transform your background and make it float before, or behind, your eyes. That goal may not be reached on all the tracks, but at least all the tracks strive to reach it.

 

Second, there are some nifty individual ideas. The 'Two Keyboards' part is almost funny: it's like some sort of Chopin prelude that caught stuck in its first few bars and lost the capacity to evolve into anything beyond those bars, but is frantically struggling — for eight minutes — to get out of its cage anyway. 'Four Guitars' uses the experience that Göttsching and Ulbrich developed in their «disco days» to ground a minimalistic space-rock set of melodies and effects on a funky founda­tion, but without any signs of a rhythm section, so you cannot as much dance to it as you can... uh... quaver and wobble, I guess. And 'Twelve Samples', each and every one of them, incorporate some Middle Eastern motive, with a lengthy prayer topping it off and getting a nice processed treatment — sounds like an underwater minaret experience. (It does get a bit annoying after the first couple of minutes, though, and becomes well worth a haraam after the second one — why it had to be the longest track on the album, we'll never know).

 

Finally, for «dessert», you actually get a magnificent echoey Göttsching solo, grand, eloquent, and ag­gres­sive, the way we like it (although the MIDI tones on 'Eight Tracks' could have been less bla­tantly Eighties-style). As much as it looks like a consolatory gift for those who felt them­selves let down, the rest of the album is by far the most interesting non-guitar-centered opus of Manuel's career — a well-placated thumbs up here.

 

TROPICAL HEAT (1991)

 

1) Mosquito Dance; 2) Tropical Heat; 3) Pretty Papaya; 4) Nights In Sweat; 5) Don't Stop The Fan; 6) Monsoon.

 

For Ashra, the Nineties began with showing us that the Eighties did, after all, exist. Tropical Heat was not released until the dawn of the grunge revolution, but was actually recorded in 1985 and 1986. And it shows. If Göttsching and Co. were a bit too slow to catch on all the latest trends and developments of the club scene, I certainly do not blame them; but Tropical Heat is that one Ashra album for which the use of the term «dated» can only be with a negative twist.

 

First of all, that is a cheesy album title, and it leads to even cheesier song titles. A mood album about lonesome walks in the desert will, at the very least, bring on visions of Peter O'Toole's blue eyes, but an album called Tropical Heat will, at best, bring on visions of tourist ads. Furthermore, what's the use of building a concept like that on a bedrock of MIDI controllers and similar stuff? How well guaranteed is it that an album like this, lightweight by definition, will turn out to be pleasant to all sorts of ears at all sorts of times, if every now and then you get the feeling that you are listening to a soundtrack for Sexy Beach?

 

With next to no guitar (except some rather generic Spanish chords on 'Don't Stop The Fan'), big stupid drum machines, and robotic keyboards all along the way, this is not the kind of Ashra you will want to hear if, like me, you have already tipped your hat to their «classic» albums. It is not atrocious, because a lot of work went into it anyhow, and Göttsching, an obsessive perfectionist, would never release an album «just for the money», unless he would be sure it had some value. Each track has its own «tropical» groove, sometimes more than one, and the arrangements are complex enough to ensure that there is always some part to which your ear may latch on without being offended. Yet it still ends up being offended — always.

 

Thus, the funky arrangement of 'Nights In Sweat', with jangling guitar and pompous fanfares, is the coolest combination on the album; but it is almost killed off by electronic percussion and excessive length. The «Mellotron»-like cooing waves of sound on 'Mosquito Dance' are trance-inducing and lovely, but they only come in very late, on top of all the other keyboard waves of sounds, not worth mentioning — and so on.

 

In short, Tropical Heat is an okay record that is badly in need of re-recording; it is a bit puzzling, in fact, why Göttsching did not take the chance to re-record it — I am fairly sure that, by 1991, Ashra could make use of far more advanced production techniques than they had at their disposal in the disastrous season of 1985/86. But that's the way it happened, so a thumbs down is im­minent. Final opinion — if you are looking for one Ashra album to skip, skip Tropical Heat. Donate your money to starving Somali pirates instead.

 

SAUCE HOLLANDAISE (1998)

 

1) Echo Waves; 2) Twelve Samples; 3) Niemand Lacht Rückwärts.

 

Late-period Ashra albums are more of a cult thing than anything else — but don't let that stop you from knowing that these old masters, even in an age when the ownership of «Electronica» had es­sentially passed on to an entirely new generation of select arrogant revolutionaries and swarming talentless hacks, were still able to kick some classic ass.

 

This here is the regular Ashra lineup (Göttsching, Ulbrich, and Grosskopf), augmented by Steve Baites on sampling and rhythm machines, playing live at the KLEMDag fest in Nijmegen, appa­rently one of those hot spots for cool electronic people who hate living in the past and are not af­raid to boldly proclaim it to each other. That said, when Ashra takes the stage, all these people are still forced to live in the past, if only for a little bit — leave it to the genius of Göttsching to be able to sound modernistic and trendy, and yet still convey the spirit of the 1970s at the same time.

 

Leave it to his genius, too, to come up with three titles, two of them running over twenty minutes and one over thirty, and make it not sound like overkill. Two components are crucial: rhythm, which only occasionally switches to «generic» techno, and is otherwise based on fairly traditional beats (not the least because a real live drummer is present), and build-up, which has always been Ash Ra Tempel's, and then Ashra's, greatest know-how. On a certain level, the thirty minutes of 'Echo Waves' end right at the same spot where they started, but on another level, it is a track that emulates growth and development, and by the time the thirty minutes are over, you've become a thirty years older. Figuratively.

 

Musically, 'Echo Waves' is all about... echo waves — like a long long tribute to 'Run Like Hell'. It is melodically simplistic and trivial; the fabulous thing is how this triviality keeps reproduced, over and over, on different instruments, with various tones and pitches, and how the band mem­bers steer these waves around each other, now interlocking, now coming apart, now with a slight delay, now with a slight speed-up. Twenty-five minutes pass that way before Göttsching picks the guitar up properly and delivers a mind-blowing «classic rock» solo. Is it «overkill»? Perhaps, but I feel that the trance-inducing goals of the track have been fulfilled. Once they catch you up on their «echo waves», the sense of time becomes blurred, and it may well be that many a person has emerged from this experience with a whiff of surprise, as in, «how come my beard is an inch lon­ger than I last remember it?»...

 

The lengthy version of 'Twelve Samples' from Walkin' The Desert is now stripped of its vocal overdubs (I like it better this way, actually), and gains a bit in energy and an almost carnivalesque attitude, particularly towards the end. The third track is more of a showcase for the drummer (in­cluding a long nearly-solo passage), but also picks up steam towards the end with another wall-rattling solo and a crazy noisy race-towards-the-end. Neither is as grand an undertaking as 'Echo Waves', hence the relative «shortness», yet both are still atmospheric monsters in their own right.

 

Although all three of these would be later reprised on @Shra, making the acquisition somewhat redundant, Sauce Hollandaise still stands out on its own. For the live shows of @Shra, the band would be adopting a more techno-oriented sound; here, the keyboards sound, on the whole, live­lier and juicier, and the human-dominated drumming is a major plus as well. This arguably makes the album the most representative and the most enjoyable Ashra experience in the 1990s, so how could it not get a massive thumbs up?

 

@SHRA + @SHRA VOL. 2 (1998/2002)

 

1) Echo Waves; 2) Twelve Samples; 3) Timbuktu; 4) Niemand Lacht Rückwärts; 5) Sunrain; 6) Four Guitars; 7) Hausaufgabe; 8) Oasis; 9) Move 9 Up.

 

Strictly speaking, these are two different albums, released subsequently in 1998 and 2002, and thus, should be given different reviews. But there are at least three combined reasons for which they deserve to constitute an exception. (1) All of the material is taken from the same set of To­kyo and Osaka live shows, from the band's Japanese tour in February 1997; (2) All of the mate­rial on @shra, with the exception of 'Timbuktu', duplicates the setlist on Sauce Hollandaise, so there is little sense in reviewing it separately; (3) Both albums were eventually combined into one 2CD set, released in 2008, so we can pretend they never existed as separate entities in the first place.

 

To these three reasons, add a fourth: I really have no good idea on what could be said about these albums that hasn't already been said before. There is one significant change from the sound of Sauce which I do not appreciate: the percussion, most of the time, is electronic, resulting in a much more «generic techno»-oriented sound. Why this is so, despite the fact that the band still has Harold Grosskopf at its full disposal, is beyond me. Maybe they just thought that the «Land Of The Rising Sun», with its penchant for all things robo-related, would appreciate a more mech­a­nized sound than the folks in Holland, who supposedly like it «jazzier». (Wild, wild guesses). In any case, if the idea was to get more hip with the times, it could only help in the short run — in the long one, Sauce Hollandaise will always be more recommendable than @shra.

 

On the positive side, the basic recording quality here is a tad higher than on Sauce: Göttsching's solos, e. g. on 'Echo Waves', are less echoey, more shrill, and rise more notably above the mix than they did before — always laudable, because atmosphere and trance is one thing, but at the bottom of it, first and foremost, we all come back to Ashra to hear these wall-rattling solos. This is why the addition of the eight-minute long lightweight safari-style 'Timbuktu' to @shra does little to improve its status — no solos!

 

The second disc has a number of tracks whose titles I do not recognize (some may be new, some may be reworkings of Göttsching's solo album tracks), plus an extended version of 'Four Guitars' from Walkin' The Desert — and yes, somehow they work up these samplers to replicate all the necessary guitar parts (don't ask me how they manage it technically, I'm the least close person in the world to a techno buff). The setlist cleverly alternates between soft, mood-setting pieces ('Sun­rain', 'Oasis') and harder, darker stuff ('Hausaufgabe', 'Move 9 Up'); 'Move 9 Up', in particu­lar, is a guitar monster, starting off in an Ashra-generic «echo-wave» form and then going off into speedy, punchy, aggressive hard rock mode; unlike other tracks, where Göttsching would emerge with a solo climax only towards the very end, 'Move 9 Up' is carried on by guitar fireworks for all of its 14 minutes, clearly making it the highlight of Vol. 2.

 

Overall, if you can stand a little «umtsa-umtsa» in your life without blushing, or, vice versa, if you are not offended by your umtsa-umtsa in the hands of fifty-year old farts, @shra is yet ano­ther example of one of Germany's most intelligent gifts to the art of sound incapable of any wrong moves. As for myself, all I can say is — any electronic album that goes on for two hours without forcing me to start climbing up walls is okay by me, so a thumbs up it is.

 

FRIENDSHIP (2000)

 

1) Reunion; 2) Pikant; 3) Friendship.

 

A full-fledged collaboration between Göttsching and Klaus Schulze — so full-fledged, in fact, com­pared to Göttsching's relatively recent guest-starring on Schulze's In Blue, that the two deci­ded to go ahead and release it under the old moniker of Ash Ra Tempel. I have no reason to think of the decision as commercially-oriented — most of the people who'd care about a real reunion of the two, in 2000, would have to be either dead or such huge fans of Manuel and Klaus they'd sniff out the album even if it were credited to «Gothel and Rapunzel».

 

However, this does not sound much like «classic» Ash Ra Tempel. In fact, it does not sound much like the basic idea of Ash Ra Tempel, lest I be accused of requesting the gentlemen to des­cend into unabashed nostalgia. Ash Ra Tempel was a band that made solid use of electronics — the presence of an additional bass player and live drumming, in particular, was a must. Friend­ship is an electronic music record, with no bass at all and all the drumming strictly programmed, while Göttsching is overlaying his guitar lines almost in «guest» mode.

 

Considering that, by the year 2000, Schulze's solo career already numbered more than thirty ori­ginal al­bums (a typical bane for electronic artists), and that his most significant records had all been released in the mid-to-late Seventies, it would be imprudent to expect anything spectacular. And, rest assured, there is nothing spectacular on Friendship. It is a very long, very modest, very even collection of three rhythmic-ambient landscapes that, at best, sound nice, but we've all heard it many, many, many times before. Maybe it actually adds credit to these guys' reputation that they are not trying to replicate the tempestuous aggressive atmosphere of Ash Ra Tempel's early years, concentrating exclusively on the «pensive» side — after all, when you are in your fifties, trying to be the Mick Jagger of electronics may even look more ridiculous than simply trying to be Mick Jagger, period. But the down side of this «graceful aging» is... YAAAAWN.

 

'Reunion', for a merciless thirty minutes, burdens you with a soft, steady, R&B-ish percussion groove over which Schulze spreads his walls of humming noise and simple synthesizer loops, while Manuel keeps coming and going with very minimalistic playing, sometimes hardly distin­guished at all from the synthesizer backing. 'Pikant' is different only in that it is a wee bit faster; hangs continuously upon one repetitive electric organ-like loop; and has a brief interlude with Göttsching picking some rather generic Spanish guitar for us.

 

Only the title track may interest fans of Göttsching's playing: fabulously, it's a twenty-five minute long guitar solo, for which Schulze simply provides some atmospheric background. The first fif­teen minutes are completely rhythmless, before the electronic percussion enters to add some spice to the proceedings. Unfortunately, the solo is, at best, just «good»: melodic, yes, but restrained, and much too repetitive to build up any proper ground for catharsis. In fact, it sounds improvised — for an improvisation, it's a first-rate world-class solo, but it does not have much staying power. Plus, improvised guitar solos, in order to have any impact, should be produced differently. Dres­sing them up in sonic effects and echo does not help.

 

All in all, please disregard that this is another «Ash Ra Tempel» album — do not let the «fantas­tic reunion» rumors conceal the fact that, out of these three tracks, the shortest one runs over 20 minutes, that only the last one has some major guitar playing going on, that the whole thing is ba­sically «ambient», that there is no bass or real drums, and that people who can take seventy-five minutes out of their lives to listen to this stuff and get inspired by it while not doing anything else (except masturbating) are socially dangerous and should be locked up in cells, stocked with ABBA and Michael Jackson CDs. Otherwise, pretty good album, though.

 

GIN ROSÉ AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL (2000)

 

1) Eine Pikante Variante.

 

I think that the following is going to be quite close to a thoroughly objective recommendation: Do not go for this one before hearing Friendship, and only go for this one if you found something in Friendship that I failed to find. And even then, do not make the mistake of paying for it. Under any conditions, this album should count as a free bonus.

 

As the album title states, this is a live recording from the «reunited» Ash Ra Tempel (Göttsching and Schulze), made on April 2, 2000. After a brief announcement reminding us that they are play­ing together for the first time in thirty years (an implicit apology for ticket pricing?), the duo revs up their tape machines, straddles their keyboards and guitars, and goes on to play a non-stop single track for a bleeding sixty-nine minutes — yes, no track separation whatsoever, although, forty minutes into the playing, they do actually make a stop for a few seconds.

 

'Eine Pikante Variante' is not exactly Friendship Live: most of the themes seem to crop up from time to time (especially 'Pikant' itself, with its memorable simplistic synth loop), but they are shuffled and mixed with other themes that are either new or stem from older Ash Ra Tempel or solo Göttsching/Schulze work and which, frankly, I do not care at all to track down. But the over­all vibe is exactly the same as on Friendship. Burbling ambient keyboards and moody trance guitar played over drum machines. For sixty-nine minutes.

 

Actually, the initial build-up is done masterfully. First, setting the scene up with «astral» blurps and bleeps, then slowly moving on to grumbling earthquakes, then subtly establishing an ambi­ent synthesizer backdrop, then moving on to minimalistic guitar flourishes and light percussion tap­ping, finally, by the twenty-minute mark, going all out with loud rhythms and moderately ag­gres­sive keyboard solos. But as it gets as good as it ever gets, for the next forty minutes it's all rol­ling downhill. I can only hope they did play something else that night, or else I, for one, would be demanding my money back.

 

Biggest disappointment: Göttsching's final solo, his typical trade­mark on Ashra epics, lasts for something like three or four minutes out of sixty-nine. If that is not reason enough for a thumbs down, I do not know what is.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LE BERCEAU DE CRISTAL (1975; 1993)

 

1) Le Berceau De Cristal; 2) L'Hiver Doux; 3) Silence Sauvage; 4) Le Sourire Volé; 5) Deux Enfants Sous La Lune; 6) Le Songe D'Or; 7) Le Diable Dans La Maison; 8) ...Et Les Fantômes Rêvent Aussi.

 

As a post-scriptum, it might be useful to mention this hour-long soundtrack, recorded by Gött­sching in 1975 with the assistance of Lutz Ulbrich, but still under the moniker of Ash Ra Tempel, even if its purely electronic, ambient nature was far closer to the style of «Ashra», or even Manu­el's solo projects. But what's in a name? Nothing but the ability to save your brain from exploding — and why would a respectable Krautrock artist want to do that?

 

Anyway, Le Berceau De Cristal is some sort of crap avantgarde movie by the French filmmaker Philippe Garrel. Apparently, it stars Nico in the title role, with a special guest appearance by Keith Richards' witchy girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and if that alone is not enough to confirm the movie's unwatchability, try and find an overall description on the Net — apparently, Zabriskie Point looks like The Godfather in comparison. Fortunately, we are not here to talk movies.

 

Göttsching's soundtrack is historically important in that it is only his second venture ever into the realm of pure atmospherics, after his solo album Inventions For Electric Guitar, and, in fact, is even less dynamic and more trance-inducing than the former, being a direct precursor to New Age Of Earth. Thus, it will be useless to concentrate on a separate review: everything I wrote about New Age, more or less, applies here as well. The only difference is that New Age strives for a more «global» sound, one that preserves the cosmic rock aspirations of Ash Ra Tempel, but materializes them through pure electronic means. Berceau, being a soundtrack to a movie about one woman and her psychotic activity (or something), is less expansive, somewhat darker, gloo­mier, colder... in fact, I can very well hear Nico, in my imagination, deliver her stern Teutonic lines across Göttsching's synths — it is sort of reassuring to realize that I have a magnificent op­portunity to never, ever do it in reality.

 

Actually, there is quite a bit of guitar playing on this album, mainly processed through lots of electronic warp, but saving the record from total monotonousness. Once you have sat through the first two epic ambient monsters, you start getting modest rhythms, bass loops, jangly echo-laden chord sequences, and, on the very last track, even a «diabolic» distorted guitar solo (short one). So it is not merely a sequence of snowy landscapes and Gothic panoramas. But fairly close. Re­commended for completists, historians, Nico's ex-lovers, and all those who think that mysterious French titles suit electronic compositions much better than pedestrian English ones.

ATOMIC ROOSTER

ATOMIC ROOSTER (1970)

 

1) Friday The Thirteenth; 2) And So To Bed; 3) Broken Wings; 4) Before Tomorrow; 5) Banstead; 6) S. L. Y.; 7) Winter; 8) Decline And Fall; 9*) Play The Game.

 

There must be something about the name «Vincent» that drives its owner in the direction of the schizophrenic and/or the macabre — keep that in mind if you're expecting. In between the well-known Vincent van Gogh and Vincent Price, we have the far lesser-known, but equally spooky Vincent Crane. Formerly the organist and «senior partner» in The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Crane showed an early interest in all sorts of things that veered towards the occult, the apocalyp­tic, the «devilish», and eventually parted ways with Brown because two psychos like that was a bit too much for one band.

 

Teaming up with young drummer prodigy Carl Palmer and bassist/vocalist Nick Graham, Price formed «Atomic Rooster» — the name itself, accompanied with the image of a bird with tits on the de­but album's front sleeve, is fairly telling — a progressive-oriented band that was to follow in the foot­steps of Arthur Brown and King Crimson with their fiery breath, rather than the lighter-spirited, clean-shirtier brands of Procol Harum or the Moody Blues.

 

Unfortunately, that one particular «cherry» that could have kicked the band's reputation high up in the sky — the dark-devilish attitude — was stolen from under their very noses by Black Sab­bath, whose debut album came out at exactly the same time as Rooster's (February 1970) and im­mediately exposed Crane and his buddies for the powerless wimps that they were. The fact that Rooster's lineup was far more professional, the music — far more diverse and technically com­plex, and the lyrics far less straightforward and clichéd, hardly mattered for the average record buy­er. And I can understand the average record buyer: Atomic Rooster has nowhere near the massive and immediate «gut-kick» that Black Sabbath can still deliver, even today.

 

Nevertheless, it is still one of the most impressive debuts of 1970 (a year that, in itself, was posi­tively exploding in impressive debuts), and a minor classic of the progressive genre. The original recording, which I have only heard in bits, had no guitar on it; the leading instrument was Crane's Hammond organ, and the resulting sound was rather unique for the time, but drastically thin. How­ever, fairly soon after the album's UK release, a decision was taken after all, to boost the sound with some rawk guitar, and master player John Du Cann (formerly of Andromeda) was brought in. At the same time, Nick Graham quit, with Crane taking over the bass parts on his or­gan, à la Ray Manzarek. Consequently, the band took the original tapes and «fattened» them up by overdubbing Du Cann's guitar parts on some of the tracks; this became the US release, and one that is generally more available today.

 

The overdubbing was done intelligently, and gave the album extra power. The lead-in track, 'Fri­day 13th' — the band's direct equivalent of a 'Black Sabbath', with the lyrics also depicting a de­vilish, haunting presence — now became a solid kick-ass prog-rocker, even though its main riff is based on a somewhat ordinary boogie chord progression (a similar one would soon be put to bet­ter effect by the Rolling Stones on 'Bitch'). Other «rawk» tunes on the album also owe way too much to the already well established and, in some ways, rather stale British blues-rock tradition, namely, 'S.L.Y.' and the instrumental 'Before Tomorrow', which, for all they're worth, could just as well be recorded by the likes of Traffic. It is not the actual melodies that count, though, but the sheer pleasure of listening to three terrific musicians locked together in ferocious and dexterous grooving — particularly impressive if one remembers that the third musician only locked himself into this groove on a «post-factum» basis. (Be sure to check Du Cann's soloing on the mid-part of 'Before Tomorrow' — sounds like an inspired brand of «proto-shredding» with all the gut excite­ment it can deliver and none of the «pretentious» side effects).

 

Crane asserts himself as the leader of the band on the (superficially) calmer numbers, such as the anthemic proto-power ballads 'Banstead' and 'Broken Wings', dominated by his church-styled or­gan (and also featuring great soulful vocals from Graham, delivered with just the right mix of power, romanticism, and grittiness; at times I actually wonder what ELP could have sounded like, had Palmer taken Graham along with him instead of Greg Lake — not that Lake isn't Greg, er, I mean, great, but his voice does have that annoying commanding-preacher aspect to it that pre­vents me from enjoying ELP's vocal compositions as much as I could otherwise). Surprisingly, his piano skills are nowhere near as interesting: the seven-minute long epic 'Winter' chiefly fails because his piano parts, mixed in with Graham's limp flute-playing, are nowhere near as sharp and inflammatory as the Hammond organ numbers. Well — supposedly, the devil only plays the Hammond organ, leaving pianos for angels, so no wonder, after all, that this one misfires.

 

All in all, Atomic Rooster clearly announces the arrival of a «B» level band, but one that ma­naged to synthesize its own identity nevertheless. Part blues-rock, part early progressive, part «Sa­tanic» — it was certain, and still is certain, to find its own small target hardcore audience, because, on a formal level, no one else really sounded exactly like those guys in 1970. A pleasant thumbs up — or, perhaps, should we «raise the horns» instead, just for the occasion?

 

DEATH WALKS BEHIND YOU (1970)

 

1) Death Walks Behind You; 2) VUG; 3) Tomorrow Night; 4) Streets; 5) Sleeping For Years; 6) I Can't Take No More; 7) Nobody Else; 8) Gershatzer; 9*) Devil's Answer.

 

Drummer Paul Hammond has never gotten anywhere near the acclaim of Carl Palmer, but then, let us face it, the music of Atomic Rooster never really needed Carl Palmer as badly as the music of Emerson & Lake. Vince Crane's and new guitarist John Du Cann's songwriting did not rely on lightning-fast tempos or classically-influenced passages that required arch-complex drumming patterns to match the keyboards. Thus, it is quite likely that many people will not even notice the drummer change — especially since Paul Hammond is a fairly good tomtom-hitter in his own right, supplying all the necessary drive and power throughout.

 

What is noticeable is a dramatic increase in song quality. The self-titled debut album was hardly recorded «in vain», many of the songs were inspired and creative, but it lacked the proper atmos­phere — and a band that is called «Atomic Rooster» and is led by a crazy, near-suicidal organist simply cannot be expected to lack atmosphere. With their second LP, Atomic Rooster are finally on the level, matching the fire, brimstone, and general evil grin of Crane's former master, Arthur Brown. Except the actual music is even better.

 

Death Walks Behind You is already much closer to «progressive rock» the way it became flesh­ed out in 1970 — music that keeps jumping in between blues-based, folk-based, jazz-based, and classical-based forms without making a single simple preference. That said, the majority of the tracks are still blues-based, putting the band in a second-row position in terms of importance. Only the closing instrumental, 'Gershatzer', tries to take its cue from The Nice rather than Cream, but I would not qualify it as comparable in overall complexity. It's got drive a-plenty, and its an­themic organ riffs are gut-level awesome, but the «complexity» is mainly limited to including a drum solo and a «psychedelic» section on which Crane has some unimaginative fun with his in­strument, making it suffer in different ways, most of which had already been patented by Keith Emerson (knives under the keys, etc.).

 

None of that matters, though, when you have songs like 'Death Walks Behind You' — fairly simple, in that it is based around one looped chorus riff and one descending chord pattern for the verse melody. But oh boy, are those riffs and patterns ever awesome. The song is not scary in a Black Sabbath way (the band has nothing like a Tony Iommi guitar tone to them), nor is it scary in a 'Gimme Shelter' way, because the atmosphere is a bit too theatrical, if not to say carnivales­que. It is not «scary» — it is «epic». The little build-up in the beginning, with the bass piano notes and the isolated guitar screeches — the way it smoothly mutates into the main riff played on the piano — then the full band joins in — then "Death walks behind you!" — then the well-staged descent into hell — it all smells of a show, yes (although staged by a documentally real madman), but a supercool one.

 

Other devilish highlights include the instrumental 'Vug' (five minutes of organ and guitar mad­ness: nothing too surprising, but tremendously energetic); the minor hit single 'Tomorrow Night', gentle and lyrical text-wise, rough, rocking, and cowbell-driven melody-wise; and two «rock fu­neral» pieces, 'Sleeping For Years' and 'Nobody Else', which sound like... well, imagine the state­ly baroque-rock sound of Procol Harum injected with a rebellious hard rock attitude. (Unfortuna­tely, guitarist John Du Cann, while unquestionably a pro in his own right, has a somewhat more generic style of playing than Robin Trower — but this is fully compensated by Crane victimizing his keyboards in a way that would cause Gary Brooker to have a heart attack).

 

As a bonus, some CD editions also append 'Devil's Answer', the band's highest charting single that is almost openly done in the «glam» paradigm — an anthemic riff-rocker, with 'I Can't Ex­plain'-style power chords and a danceable beat. It is nowhere near as impressive as 'Death Walks Behind You', but it is also seriously different, illustrating the band's versatility and open-minded­ness. In the future, unfortunately, that versatility was to lead them into new directions that were too hard to handle. On Death Walks Behind You, it ensures them just the right unforgettable place in rock history. Thumbs up to this «mini-masterpiece».

 

IN HEARING OF ATOMIC ROOSTER (1971)

 

1) Breakthrough; 2) Break The Ice; 3) Decision/Indecision; 4) A Spoonful Of Bromide Helps The Pulse Rate Go Down; 5) Black Snake; 6) Head In The Sky; 7) The Rock; 8) The Price.

 

Some things come together in perfect harmony, others just don't have the luck. Some madmen preserve enough common sense to live and prosper, others do not even begin to operate in terms of living and prospering. Apparently, the happy pairing of Crane and Du Cann just wasn't meant to be: under different conditions, Death Walks Behind You could have been followed by some­thing even more ambitious, innovative, and grandiose, but evolution was thwarted by the differ­ences in approach — essentially, a debate between the two key members over whether it would be the heavy guitar rock thing that should dominate the next record, or the artsy keyboard sound. Although, in this debate, Du Cann was the sane guy, and Crane the mental one, Crane had the advantage of holding the rights to the name of Atomic Rooster — and, in the end, Du Cann had to go, forever squashing the band's chance at advancing to first-rate level.

 

In Hearing Of... is, therefore, a transitional album, recorded with the same lineup as Death (with the addition of extra temporary member Pete French on vocals), but heavily discriminated in fa­vor of Crane's personal vision. Only two of the tracks are credited to Du Cann: 'Break The Ice', featuring the album's most memorable guitar/organ melody that almost borders on funk, and 'Head In The Sky', the heaviest number on here, although Crane still does everything in his power to obscure Du Cann's guitar work with organ «noodling», making it all sound somewhat like ear­ly, «artsy», pre-Gillan Deep Purple.

 

The bulk of the material is, however, dominated by Crane's keyboards and Crane's songwriting. It is mainly middle-of-the-road, blues-based art-rock that is, at best, pleasant, but rarely exciting. 'Breakthrough', despite the title, does not break through anything — either Vincent refrains from giving it all he's got, or he ain't got all that much: these piano riffs and solos do not even have the passion of a young Elton John murdering his instrument on 'Burn Down The Mission', let alone the fury of a Keith Emerson in his prime.

 

«Tepid» is the best word to describe his attempts at rocking out — as well as his attempts to se­duce us with lyrical balladry ('Decision/Indecision') or «devilish» mid-tempo mood pieces in the blues paradigm ('Black Snake'). With subsequent listens, the material goes down easier, but it is not as if there is anything deeply hidden here — just a question of habit and attitude. And, in my humble opinion, positive proof that Vince Crane, no matter how talented or how psychopathic, is quite unable to do anything outstanding on his own. In Hearing Of... is the closest he ever got to a «solo» album within Atomic Rooster, and the results are discouraging, if not to say catastrophic — denying the band a chance to rank up there with the mighty ones.

 

MADE IN ENGLAND (1972)

 

1) Time Take My Life; 2) Stand By Me; 3) Little Bit Of Inner Air; 4) Don't Know What Went Wrong; 5) Never To Lose; 6) Introduction; 7) Breathless; 8) Space Cowboy; 9) People You Can't Trust; 10) All In Satan's Name; 12) Close Your Eyes.

 

Once again, recorded with a totally new lineup: Steve Bolton on guitar, Ric Parnell on drums, and veteran soulster Chris Farlowe, once famous for singing blue-eyed cover versions of Rolling Sto­nes songs ('Out Of Time', etc.), and now fresh out of the jazz-rock team Colosseum, on vocals. And, al­though Crane is still responsible for most of the songwriting, this no longer has anything to do with the Atomic Rooster of old. This is «Post-Atomic» Rooster: more tits, less balls.

 

Made in England the record might be, but the title is clearly ironic: most of the album shows an extremely strong influence from the soul and funk genres. This may not be so surprising, conside­ring that, of all the «prog» bands of the early 1970s, Atomic Rooster were among the most deeply rooted in blues-rock, and the distance from bluesy riffs to funky syncopation is nowhere near as long as it is from Bach or Bartok to the same. But white British people engaging in groove-based funk still take on much more responsibility than white British people churning out blues patterns — and with Rooster's backlog and general pedigree, prejudices against their switching direction just like that are fully justified. Crane is an excellent musician, but plenty of excellent musicians have fallen flat on their backs tackling rhythm-based music forms, and Made In England, unfor­tunately, is no exception.

 

The album's one redeeming point is that many of the songs are relatively well written. If the gro­oves are not all that «hot», they are at least memorable, as on the non-hit single 'Stand By Me', be it through the catchy chorus melody or through some other directly undetectable trick. The pro­vocative title of 'All In Satan's Name' is never justified by the proper eeriness of the melody, but the Allman Brothers-like riff that sets the stage around two minutes into the song is good. And 'People You Can't Trust', per se, is a fairly respectable attempt to create something in the style of Funkadelic — except that the song should have rather been donated to Funkadelic themselves.

 

The few tracks that still remind us of the former Rooster include the instrumental 'Breathless', a concentrated and powerful piano romp, whose new-school wah-wah guitars still cannot conceal the fact that the track serves as an excuse to demonstrate Crane's technique; and the lyrical ballad 'Ne­ver To Lose' (but not the album-closing ballad 'Close Your Eyes', a tepid gospel-soul excursion whose temperature only slightly hovers above zero degrees). The «evil child» of the re­cord is 'Space Cowboy', a strange track that does seem to want to combine elements of hoedown stylistics with sci-fi effects — it is up to the listener to decide if the effect is comparable to an orgasmatron or a necronomicon.

 

Personal assessment: I have never liked Chris Farlowe as a solo artist or a member of Colosseum, and I certainly am not prone to liking him here. Big, bulgy, brawny singers should either be drunk all the time (like Noddy Holder), or impersonate psychos and street bullies (like Brian Johnson); «opera star» style is abysmal in the context of a rock-oriented record, particularly when that style leaves no place for subtlety or, come to think of it, range — all of these songs convey a «pom­pous ass» spirit, no matter how humble and down-to-earth Farlowe might be in real life.

 

In any case, the real problem of Made In England is not the actual quality of the songs — there have been much more bland and boring records released in the UK that year — but the sad reali­sation that it put a premature stop to any serious aspirations that Atomic Rooster could have at the time, and seriously hints at Crane's instability: only a true madman could have chased away John Du Cann and replace him with a second-rate guitarist (I actually saw a video of Steve Bolton sup­porting the Who on their 1989 reunion tour, where he was filling in for Townshend on the elec­tric guitar parts — the word «hack» was the only one that came to mind) and a has-been opera-pop star. At least the album conjures pity rather than hatred ­— given the circumstances, that in itself is a major achievement.

 

NICE 'N' GREASY (1973)

 

1) All Across The Country; 2) Save Me; 3) Voodoo In You; 4) Moods; 5) Take One Toke; 6) Can't Find A Reason; 7) Ear In The Snow; 8) What You Gonna Do.

 

The second and last Farlowe-containing album from Atomic Rooster continues in the direction of Made In England — so assuredly and predictably that it is even less interesting. By now, the band has completely transformed into a roots-rock act, evenly spreading its creativity between ba­sic blues-rock, «blue-eyed funk», and soul balladry. Crane's piano instrumental 'Moods' is a sole minor glimpse of what used to be, but even here the melody is R'n'B-ish rather than classically in­fluenced, and, frankly, the instrumental's emotional effect is nothing to write home about.

 

Not that Atomic Rooster were ever about «academicity», though. They were about «Evil as a Side Effect of Mental Instability» — with Vince Crane's personal problems serving as the driving wheel for everything that made this band stand out. By the time Nice 'N' Greasy came along, ei­ther he got temporarily better at controlling these problems, or the other band members were so successful at side-sweeping them, that Nice 'N' Greasy comes out as a perfectly normal — and a perfectly boring — record. One needn't go further than the limp, unnecessary, funkified rewrite of 'Friday The 13th', re-titled 'Save Me', saddled with a «celebratory» Sly & The Family Stone-like brass section, and completely bereft of its devilish attitude. For this kind of music, one needs to go to George Clinton anyway.

 

The only track that still establishes a weak link to the past is the seven-minute «epic» 'Voodoo In You', which, curiously, is the album's only non-original number (a cover version of an older, lit­tle-known R&B composition by Jackie Avery). It is deep, somber, driven by brutal mid-tempo riffage rather than chicken-scratch, and, although new guitarist Johnny Mandala's lengthy solo is little more than a set of professionally played, uninventive Clapton-isms, in this context I would rather listen to a so-so Cream imitation than all the fruitless attempts to place Funk on the payroll of Vince Crane's personal demons. (Note that «Johnny Mandala» is actually the first stage name of John Goodsall, who would later become much better known for his fusion work in Brand X; in 1973, though, he must still have been learning, because there is nothing particularly outstanding about the guitar sound on Nice 'N' Greasy).

 

The UK and US versions of the album were once again different: the UK version ended with 'Sa­tan's Wheel', and also contained Mandala's only contribution to the band ('Goodbye Planet Earth'). Both were rather mediocre R&B, and for that or for some other reason were replaced on the US version with 'Moods' and... the equally mediocre fast-paced blues number 'What You Gonna Do', whose only point, I guess, is that Farlowe wanted to try out a B. B. King impersonation. It's pas­sable, as is everything else on here, but is never going to make history.

 

On the whole, Nice 'N' Greasy is so painfully «unnecessary» that it must have been obvious to everyone: the band had stuck its nose into a dead end. Falling apart was the only reasonable thing to do. Of course, we'd always expect of Vince Crane to do only unreasonable things, but there was this little matter of his far more sane friends — and, after the record label dropped them for losing all signs of vitality, Farlowe and Co. simply took off and left. Can't blame them, either — after such a thumbs down reaction, who'd want to stay?

 

ATOMIC ROOSTER (1980)

 

1) They Took Control Of You; 2) She's My Woman; 3) He Did It Again; 4) Where's The Show; 5) In The Shadows; 6) Do You Know Who's Looking For You?; 7) Don't Lose Your Mind; 8) Watch Out; 9) I Can't Stand It; 10) Lost In Space; 11*) Throw You're Life Way; 12*) Broken Windows.

 

While Crane was busy trying to strike a damp match with funk and Farlowe, John Du Cann spent his time jumping from one mediocre, long-forgotten English hard rock band to another, honing his chops and saving his talents. Fortunately for us all, lightning struck twice, and as the Eighties loomed upon the nation, the two masterminds behind the golden years (months?) of Atomic Roo­s­ter decided to reconvene and try their luck one more time. The decision was, in fact, to «reboot» the band — hence a new self-titled album, and a new, upgraded rooster on the front sleeve. Big­ger, gruffer, and with a real mean look in the eye. Luckily, the album sleeve is just the very worst thing about the album.

 

The songwriting here is completely dominated by Du Cann: Crane is fully credited with one ins­trumental number, and co-credited on just three others, although his organ playing is still essen­tial to every song. Du Cann is also the sole vocalist, since this is a complete re-formatting of the band (new drummer Preston Heyman is the only other official member). This helps understand the new direction. All the undercooked soul and funk is gone without a trace. The new look Ato­mic Rooster is a brand new fusion of 65% classic hard rock, 20% power pop, and 15% old-time «progressive» and «psychedelic» elements.

 

The mix is not unique or innovative enough to qualify as a «masterpiece», perhaps, but the album is still fabulous. Each single song is either insanely catchy, or intelligently moody, or ferociously bawdy. I do not quite understand why the record is often tagged as being in line with the «New Wave of British Heavy Metal»: the only thing that brings it close to a Judas Priest is the overall level of energy, because the driving force behind it is never brutal metallic riffage — in fact, the actual riffs are usually unexceptional, it is during their merger with the vocal melodies and the keyboard phrasing that all the main wonders are happening.

 

Actually, with Du Cann's vocals having obtained an even more eerie, mock-sinister sheen since his last gigs with Rooster, the closest parallel I can think of is Alice Cooper — as the first notes of 'They Took Control Of You' start screeching from the speakers, and Du Cann grins at you with the lines "Bright lights they shine down on you / Have they really come to take you away?", the most blatant association is with Alice's "Who do you think we are? Special forces in an armored car", even though that particular creation actually postdates Atomic Rooster by a year. (So who influenced who? Not an easy question).

 

Did I mention yet that the new band likes to take it fast now? 'They Took Control Of You' rolls along at a 'Highway Star'-ish frenetic pace, only with the band's trademark aura of paranoia in­stead of Purple's euphoria. That is not to say that the entire album is paranoid: 'Where's The Show' is a surprisingly happy pop-rocker that might even display a little punk influence (I could easily imagine the Ramones covering it, considering that some of the chord changes are exactly the same as on 'Beat On The Brat').

 

In between all the ass-kicking, the band does not forget about their demonic legacy: 'In The Sha­dows' is a conscious attempt to come up with another 'Death Walks Behind You', although the lack of an instantly memorable / mesmerizing melody brings it down almost immediately. Still, it's a respectable enough seven-minute ghost-epic, with Du Cann at his snappiest and gnarliest and Crane gathering all of his Gothic tricks in one place. Du Cann also contributes 'Don't Lose Your Mind', a booming half-power-pop, half-AC/DC style monster that must have been a veiled song of support for his unfortunate organist friend — it didn't help in the long run, but at least the plea's sincerity helped make the song into one of the many highlights on the album.

 

The best song, however, is the last one. 'Lost In Space' starts out slowly and leisurely, tricking the listener into thinking it's going to be a boring blues-rock shuffle, but, in a minute's time, makes the transition to one of the greatest power-pop choruses of its time — forget about Cheap Trick for a moment, and listen to these guys head for the sky, screaming about how you're «lost in space for sure, lost in space for sure — losing control, oh no, no, lost in space for sure!» while Crane is hitting higher and higher organ notes. The depressing message of the song is totally at odds with the euphoric pounding of the chorus, and usually this brings in confusion and disap­pointment, but not this time: this time, the effect is psychedelic rather than plainly confusing (as in, it ain't necessarily a bad thing to get «lost in space»). A classic number that ought to be resus­citated, brushed off, and installed as one of the finest songs of 1980, no doubt.

 

Alas, just as Alice Cooper's sales were fairly slow for this period, so were the new look Atomic Rooster's — the album and accompanying tour went so deadly unnoticed that Du Cann took it personally, and defected after a while, putting a final stop to all hopes. But let us look at it from the bright side — they did leave us one excellent souvenir, and who knows whether they'd have been able to repeat its quality? Thumbs up for this «un-forgotten» little gem.

 

HEADLINE NEWS (1983)

 

1) Hold Your Fire; 2) Headline News; 3) Taking A Chance; 4) Metal Minds; 5) Land Of Freedom; 6) Machine; 7) Dance Of Death; 8) Carnival; 9) Time; 10*) Future Shock; 11*) Medley: Watch Out / Reaching Out.

 

With Du Cann completely disillusioned about the band's possible future and jumping ship in 1981, Atomic Rooster managed to hang on a little longer, before once again disintegrating into elemen­tary particles. By and large, the band's last album is a Vince Crane solo effort in all but name. He handles all the keyboards, sings all the vocals (for once!), and writes all of the music and lyrics (with only his wife Jean lending a helping hand with the words on a few tracks); although, tech­nically, this is no less an original «Atomic Rooster» album than the previous one, because old time guitarist Du Cann is out — and old time drummer Paul Hammond is in.

 

Not that it matters. On Headline News, Crane consciously moves into modern territory. Electro­nics abound from the very onset, and even if Dave Gilmour himself is credited for some of the guitar parts (along with two other guitarists, Bernie Tormé and John Mizarolli), this fact alone will hardly cause anyone to raise an eye, because the approach here is completely «depersoni­fied». Headline News is an icy cold, moody, un-rock'n'rollish-as-they-come stiff monster of a record, a very far cry from everything this band ever stood for in the Du Cann era. Consequently, unlike 1980's Atomic Rooster, this one is never invoked as a «lost gem» — hardly a surprise, considering the difference between the ecstatic opening riff punch of 'They Took Control Of You' and the slow synth-heavy buildup of 'Hold Your Fire'.

 

But find the patience to hang on to it for a few more moments — and Headline News may turn out to be the real «lost gem» in Rooster's pedigree, this time, «lost» so deeply that it's hard even to scoop up a positive review from the archives (or, for that matter, any review or mention of this album). With Crane as the only creative force at the helm, Rooster finally turns into his personal vehicle for self-expression, self-exorcising, and self-cleansing. A dark, somber, ominous collec­tion of laments, fears, melancholic observations, and, sometimes, cautious optimism. And all of this, without any exaggerated «Satanism» or intense revelling in one's own schizophrenia.

 

The odd analogy with Alice Cooper may freely be continued here: if Atomic Rooster was well in line with Alice's brawny, upbeat, New Wave-influenced hard rock records of 1980-82, Head­line News makes the same unexpected, even overwhelming jump as DaDa — into a mechanic, ice-cold world with little sympathy or pity for early 1980s record buyers. The incessantly repeated chorus for the fourth song on the LP goes, "Metal minds will keep you warm tonight", and this could be used as the tagline for the entire record — which, while we are at it, has no bad songs whatsoever, because each one is imbued with genuine worries and cares, and when your worries and cares are genuine, they translate into musical hooks quite easily.

 

Much as I dislike Eighties' electronics on the service of rock veterans, I have no problems when the electronic sound actually matches the planned atmosphere. So the oscillating synth bass cre­ates just the right environment for the mercy-begging anti-war diatribe 'Hold Your Fire'; the bash­ing electronic drums suit the creepy Gothic ambience of 'Dance Of Death'; and the robotic harp­sichord is perfectly fine with the stern, implacable message of 'Time' (yes, another song named 'Time' – not quite up there with Floyd's in terms of artistic cruelty, but definitely grittier and more evocative than either Alan Parsons' or, perhaps, even David Bowie's).

 

Lighter-sounding numbers include the echoey piano-pop charm of 'Land Of Freedom', with some unbeatable vocal hooks and, for once, uplifting female backup vocals; and the album's one genu­ine «dance-pop» escapade, 'Taking A Chance', which, with proper care taken, could and should have been on the pop charts that year — unfortunately, the production is a bit too murky and mi­nimalistic to grapple a large audience. (Actually, it was not even released as a single ­— 'Land Of Freedom' was, which was probably the second best choice). But even these relatively «happy» tunes do not go against context — 'Land Of Freedom' has a disturbing, close-to-paranoid mid-sec­tion, and the optimism of 'Taking A Chance', jammed inside all of the darkness, comes across as hopeless and desperate. The very next track is 'Metal Minds', after all, whose aura is the equi­valent of acute claustrophobia — with a touch of autism, perhaps.

 

The effect is curious and creepy — at first, I was ready to dismiss the album, like everyone else, as a mediocre, boring attempt to «fall in» with the post-punk movement, but with each new listen it was moving closer and closer to the category of «depressing confession from Lost Soul No. 9», but with its own individuality, nurtured on a bit of Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley. There is really no other Atomic Rooster album on which Vincent Crane, the troubled sick man, comes out as such a distinct personality, making his death in 1989, from an overdose of painkillers (no one knows whether it was intentional or not), even more ominous. Yes, its overall sound is badly da­ted, but at least it is badly dated for a reason, unlike quite a few albums from the same year that I could name. Which, I guess, makes it «goodly dated» — with a guaranteed thumbs up. Do not repeat the mistake of ignoring it.

 

PS: The CD reissue adds a couple extra tracks, including 'Future Shock' that is credited to the band's new gui­tarist, John Mizarolli; accordingly, it is the only guitar-dominated rocker on the whole CD, and a fairly strong one — that riff may sound generic at first, but its «resolution» is quite inventive, and the guitar tone kicks honest ass. All in all, it is simply amazing how con­sistent Crane and Co.'s songwriting had gotten at the very end of their tenure — considering that hit-and-miss songcraft was one of AR's major curses throughout their «peak years».

 

ADDENDA:

 

RARITIES (1970-1981; 2000)

 

1) Moonrise (last recording from 1981); 2) Atomic Alert (US radio ad 1971); 3) Death Walks Behind You (studio live from 1981); 4) V.U.G. (with Carl Palmer 1970); 5) Broken Windows (outtake from 1980); 6) Alien Alert (US radio ad 1971); 7) Throw Your Life Away (different mix from 1980); 8) Devil's Alert (US radio ad 1971); 9) Devil's Answer (original demo with Carl Palmer from 1970); 10) Do You Know Who's Looking For You? (original demo from 1980); 11) Don't Lose Your Mind (original demo from 1980); 12) He Did It Again (original demo from 1980); 13) Backward/Forward Revealed (Death Walks Fans Only 1971); 14) End Of The Day (original demo from 1981); 15) Lost In Space (original demo from 1981); 16) Hold It Through The Night (outtake from 1981); 17) No Change By Me (outtake from 1981); 18) Play It Again (original demo from 1981); 19) I Can't Take No More (live from Marqueee 1980).

 

Over the past twenty years, there has been a veritable swarm of various best-of, worst-of, lost-of, flossed-and-drossed-of Atomic Rooster compilations on the market. Some were released without official authorisation on the part of any of the surviving members, but eventually quite a few were overseen by John Du Cann personally — to the extent that, I believe, pretty much every recording these guys ever left in the studio vaults or in the sidewalks of concert halls has, at some point or other, been officially released. Reviewing them would, however, be way too much honor for a band whose A-grade material fits well onto one (okay, maybe two) CDs.

 

Additionally, most of these compilations (a) bear the evil blame of mixing original LP tracks with outtakes, demos, and live recordings, (b) go forever out of print upon initial release, and (c) much of their content is now available as bonus tracks appended to the seven main LPs. Very important bonus tracks at that — such as the band's last hit single 'Devil's Answer', etc. — but, altogether, the band now hardly needs a separate Past Masters-type entry in their catalog.

 

So we will limit ourselves to some notes on a single one of these packages — Rarities, officially released in 2000. The title is honest, because there is no overlap with regular studio albums, and practically no overlap with the bonus tracks on new re-issues (except for 'Throw Your Life Away' and 'Broken Windows', which seem to be the exact same recordings as the bonus tracks to Ato­mic Rooster, but possibly with different mixes). And the contents clearly show that only an obsessed completist need spend his time hunting for extra Atomic Rooster material.

 

Well, almost. There is one fairly appetizing chunk of material here: de­mos (actually, full-sound­ing demos, with guitars, keyboards, and drums all in place) of four new compositions that Crane and Du Cann recorded in 1981, presumably for the planned sequel to 1980's Atomic Rooster — a sequel that, unfortunately, never came to pass, even if the songs show they had every single chance of releasing a worthy follow-up. These are four crunchy rockers, a bit simplistic for those who prefer their Rooster with a truly «Atomic» breath, perhaps, but catchy and energetic enough for the average hard rock fan.

 

Everything else is just alternative versions of well-known tracks, but sometimes with additional surprises: an early demo of 'V.U.G.', for instance, with Carl Palmer still on drums; a 1981 live-in-the-studio recording of 'Death Walks Behind You', losing some of its original eeriness but effec­tively «metallized» by Du Cann; and a very long live version of 'I Can't Take No More' that turns into a hot organ/guitar battle between the two main players midway through — and shows that the reunion Rooster live shows were quite a serious business right to the very end.

 

The sequencing is fairly messy, defying chronology, but it gives the band a good excuse to book­mark portions of the album with funny old radio ads — "It's coming, it's coming! From out of the nuclear holocaust of our times, Atomic Rooster is coming!" — and stress the fact that, whenever Crane and Du Cann came together, be it in 1970 or 1980, the results were uniformly impressive (and I agree). For that matter, the Chris Farlowe era and the Headline News coda are completely ignored — unsurprisingly so, since the track selection was overseen by Du Cann himself, and it is understandable that he had no interest in those Rooster periods that he had nothing to do with. Not that there's anything wrong with that — the Farlowe period can just dissipate into oblivion as long as I am concerned.

 

Aside from Rarities, there may be some archive live albums of Rooster's worth getting; at least several have been released of the band's appearances on the BBC, both with Du Cann and with Farlowe — although, once again, many of these live recordings have also been scattered around the bonus tracks on current original LP releases. Live At The Marquee, from which 'I Can't Take No More' has been sampled for Rarities, is also available separately in its entirety, but, apparent­ly, the sound quality on most of the tracks is considered to be fairly poor, so beware. One doesn't really want to not experience the full strength of Atomic Rooster's nuclear blast, or does one?

THE AVERAGE WHITE BAND

SHOW YOUR HAND (1973)

 

1) The Jugglers; 2) This World Has Music; 3) Twilight Zone; 4) Put It Where You Want It; 5) Show Your Hand; 6) Back In '67; 7) Reach Out; 8) T.L.C.

 

In 1973, this record was one of the biggest novelty items on the UK market. Plenty of British bands had by then already fallen under the influence of funk, but few, if any, were willing to con­sciously establish themselves as legitimate funk acts — because, well, it is a strange overseas black thing, and one does not want to look too ridiculous, openly aping an overseas black thing in­stead of dressing it up in patriotic clothes, like those early British R'n'B bands used to do at the dawning of the rock era.

 

The Average White Band knew that, and took some precautions. First, they called themselves The Average White Band — a brilliant PR move, immediately giving the entire act a tongue-in-cheek attitude that told listeners «do not take us too seriously», even when the actual songs might seem to be telling the opposite. Second, armed with all the Scottish verve they could muster (all the original band members were Scottish, although, curiously, each one was born in a different town), they practiced hard enough so as to pre-eliminate all possible accusations of «unprofessio­nalism». Third and most important — the point was to synthesize a particular version of «white funk», so that, for the well-trained ear, Show Your Hand could never be mistaken for a genuine «black» album, nor could it be claimed that it genuinely tries (and fails) to be one.

 

From the beginning, the sound of the AWB was very smooth and easy-going. This is not heavy psychedelic funk à la George Clinton, or wild party grooving à la Sly Stone. Most of the usual compari­sons are with the slightly watered-down-for-mass-consumption sounds of Tower Of Po­wer (or, perhaps, Earth, Wind & Fire as well). But even compared with these guys, the AWB are much more intent on keeping themselves in total check, never taking the direction of religious ec­stasy, common for black bands. This reduces the possible infectiousness of their groove power, but also reduces the risk of emotional embarrassment — because, let's face it, it is one thing to learn the basics of funk music and achieve perfect coordination between all the members of the band (and a pretty damn hard thing, too), and quite another to pile up «spiritualism» on top of the trade. It is fortunate for us that the AWB, in their better days at least, never even tried to invoke  spirits dancing in the flesh.

 

What they tried to do instead was to flesh out the individual grooves to the point at which they started to resemble pop hooks. Watch the intro to 'The Jugglers' — a brief percussion flash that leads straight into a syncopated bass/keyboard riff that is not merely «danceable», but memorable, and even somewhat disturbing, which is appropriate given how, lyrically, the song seems to be about fighting addiction. It is not exactly a funk-pop masterpiece (the AWB were far too A to pro­duce pure pop perfection and, as I said, way too W to foment full-force funky flavour), but it is solid B-level entertainment with a brain.

 

And it is with these fast-played, precise, intelligent, and catchy funk tunes that the AWB make the grade. Show Your Hand may not have gained too much attention in the UK and remained completely unknown in the States (it was only released two years later, with a slighty different track listing), but up to this day it remains one of the band's finest hours. Of this fine hour, the fi­nest five minutes are unquestionably a cover of The Crusaders' 'Put It Where You Want It', an irresistible proto-disco tune that was already fine enough in its original incarnation, but is totally cooking here thanks to Malcolm Dun­can's lengthy sax solo at the end — joyful, inventive, hi­larious, infectious, and something else from a more obscure part of the thesaurus. The band seri­ously reworked the composition, adding lyrics as well to the formerly instrumental number — now it is a sort of a sex song that doesn't as much assert its se­xiness in a harassing manner as it learns to approach its subject with nonchalance. "Put it where you want it, lay it on the line, you can share your love around and I can share my time" — or perhaps not, whatever, just as long as that sax is blowing it all out.

 

Another major highlight is the eight-minute 'T.L.C.', whose complex web of scratchy guitar riffs, geometric figures laid out by the brass section, and tight vocal harmonies is not what I would call «ass-kicking» or «sweaty», but rather «subtle» and «well-nuanced». It's like a public love celeb­ration that, for some reason, you have to hold behind closed doors in the middle of a small audi­ence so as not to disturb the neighbours — compensating with subtlety and innuendo for the im­possibility of belting it out loud and proud. It might seem boring to some, but I prefer to think of it as funny — even touching, perhaps.

 

The odd average white magic does not work so well on slower, more lyrical numbers, such as the soulful 'Twilight Zone' and the title track, both of which move closer to bland, generic soft rock with little in the way of a backbone. At least 'Reach Out', although structured as an equally gene­ric blues-rocker, adds some much-needed grit to the proceedings, with respectable «sting guitar» work from one of the guitarists (Hamish Stuart, probably?).

 

Unfortunately, these songs already show the exact way in which AWB would be developing into WBAWB («Way Below Average White Band») in a few years. But as they started out, the high­lights were numerous enough to cancel out the lowlights — and even the lowlights were not that low, as even the worst songs here still feature well-written choruses; their main defect lies in the sanitized arrangements, and an awful «snowy» keyboard sound typical of very mediocre jazz-fu­sion acts of the time (keyboards are, indeed, the weakest musical link on this record). And even if my gut feelings didn't immediately feel like it, Show Your Hand is one of those strange albums that one could develop an almost intellectual attraction to — in a way, I believe I did, which ex­plains the thumbs up reaction better than simply saying «hey, nice groove».

 

AWB (1974)

 

1) You Got It; 2) Got The Love; 3) Pick Up The Pieces; 4) Person To Person; 5) Work To Do; 6) Nothing You Can Do; 7) Just Wanna Love You Tonight; 8) Keepin' It To Myself; 9) I Just Can't Give You Up; 10) There's Always Someone Waiting.

 

This is the one that broke 'em big. Relocated by Bruce McCaskill from the misty highlands to sun­ny Los Angeles, and receiving a proper amount of promotion, The Average White Band un­expectedly found more acclaim in the States, where their second, self-titled, LP shot all the way to No. 1 (in the UK, it only climbed to No. 6, and the discrepancy would be even more noticeable on their next two records). Apparently, American audiences felt more at home with the idea of this inherently-black music played by genuine Scotsmen than Scotsmen themselves. You draw the head-spinning sociological conclusions, I will try to restrict myself to the music.

 

Success actually came on the heels of the big hit single 'Pick Up The Pieces', which, up to this day, arguably remains the AWB's best known and most frequently radio-spun piece to be picked up. For good reason — unless you disrespect «groove-based» music in the first place, it is very hard for me to imagine how this particular groove could be resisted. There are plenty of things that can go wrong with the AWB: they may be too sappy, too sentimental, too generic, too boring, too «white» in a «black» setting or vice versa etc. etc., but none of these accusations work in the case of 'Pick Up The Pieces'.

 

Roger Ball blows some fine melodic sax in the solo part, but the main attraction is, of course, the basic groove — bass, drums, guitar, and sax locking into one another in one of the finest complex figures that mid-1970s dance music had to offer. And these days, we may actually drag it out of its cocaine-drenched hedonistic L.A. context and just enjoy it for the general inspiring atmo­s­phere that it conveys. Who knows, people might still be wanting to tap their feet and jerk their heads to it long after L.A. itself finally sinks into the sea... but we digress.

 

For the most part, the AWB smooth out the edges even further out here. Most of the traces of 12-bar blues-rock (like 'Reach Out' from the last album) have been eradicated, so that the album is more or less evenly divided between «edgy» and «soft» grooves (the only exception is 'There's Always Someone Waiting', which closes the album in «blues» mode, but even this «blues» has been tampered with by means of funky wah-wah guitar, fusion-esque keyboards, syncopated drumming, and jumpy transitions from section to section).

 

The «soft grooves» sometimes feature exciting vocal twists — like 'Keepin' It To Myself' and its falsetto chorus — but the album's reputation still rests on the edgy ones, from 'Pick Up The Pie­ces' to the second-best cut 'Person To Person' to the proto-disco 'Got The Love' and 'I Just Can't Give You Up' (particularly the latter of the two could easily compete with any given Bee Gees hit of the same era — terrific combination of ingredients on that one).

 

As far as I am concerned, the one weak link on all of these tracks is lack of implosive guitar pre­sence. Hamish Stuart is competent and moderately inspired, but there isn't one single «fabulous» funky riff on here, or wall-rattling solo, to jump out at the world and conquer it in one go. (Actu­ally, 'Got The Love' begins with a faint hint at such a riff, but it goes away instead of developing in the right direction). Whether that reflects lack of talent or intentional modesty, I have no idea – but then, if the saxophone is allowed to lack modesty on 'Pick Up The Pieces', what's up with dis­criminating the most important instrument in pop music?

 

Maybe they thought, though, that too much loud guitar would disrupt the sexy smoothness of the grooves, supposed to match the seductiveness of the curves of the letter W on the front sleeve. This is understandable — the AWB never concealed the fact that they were, essentially, writing music for couples, be it on the dance floor or on the bedroom one. But writing music for couples that is neither «fake» nor «cheap» is very hard business all the same, and if the AWB do not ma­nage to scale much further heights than achieving that goal, this is still sufficient reason for an honest thumbs up, perfectly cleansed from nostalgic overtones.

 

CUT THE CAKE (1975)

 

1) Cut The Cake; 2) School Boy Crush; 3) It’s A Mystery; 4) Groovin’ The Night Away; 5) If I Ever Lose This Hea­ven; 6) Why; 7) High Flyin’ Woman; 8) Cloudy; 9) How Sweet Can You Get; 10) When They Bring Down The Curtain.

 

Recording of this album was somewhat darkened by the accidental death of the band’s drummer, Robbie McIntosh, from overdosing, with a story that would be fairly typical for the rock hero party style of the time — an unfortunate side effect of «normal» L.A. party entertainment, with someone «accidentally» substituting cocaine for heroin (could be from here that Quentin got the inspiration for Pulp Fiction, or from a billion similar stories, I guess).

 

The evil joker inside me wishes to state that the rest of the band were too stoned to notice any­way, and that is why they carried on like nothing happened, with Cut The Cake continuing in exactly the same vein as AWB; but, as a matter of fact, they did notice (if anything, Alan Gorrie nearly died as well in the same incident, only saved in the nick of time by Cher — «best thing Cher ever did», adds the evil joker), quickly replacing Robbie with Steve Ferrone and dedicating their next record to his memory. If there ever was an individualistic change in the drumming style, count me too coarse to notice.

 

Having mentioned the band’s transfer to sunny California in the previous review, I forgot to men­tion that the label was Atlantic, and the new producer was Arif Mardin — the same guy who was, at the exact same time, responsible for rebooting the career of the Bee Gees; and, for that matter, I find it quite unfair that even the finest efforts of the AWB have mostly fled from public memory where albums like Main Course managed to take solid root in it. The Bee Gees had the unques­tionable advantage of finding the better hooks for their dance grooves; but the AWB were far more respectable as a real groove-based band of actual musicians, rather than three pretty voices backed by interchangeable session players.

 

Even the songwriting, at this point, could be disputed. Maybe it was their bandmate’s death that provided an unprecedented fit of sentimental inspiration, but the ballads on this record — ‘If I Ever Lose This Heaven’, ‘How Sweet Can You Get’, and particularly ‘Cloudy’ — find beautiful vocal lines to host their emotions, and, at the same time, feel livelier and less glossy than any ‘More Than A Woman’ could be. They are glossy: Mardin, ever the dedicated escapist, gives every number the cleanest sound possible and lays enough echo on the vocals to place an unbrea­chable distance between the singer and the listener. But the playing is inventive and even impro­visatory, which compensates for overproduction.

 

That said, us tough guys will probably want to throw out the sissy stuff and look for red meat. The juiciest slice is right on top — the title track, a worthy sequel to ‘Pick Up The Pieces’ as one of those near-instrumental compositions that the AWB deserve to be remembered for: another combination of interlocking guitar, bass, drum, and brass lines that is simply infectious beyond reason, or adequate description. But there is also ‘Groovin’ The Night Away’, whose purpose adequately matches the title, and ‘School Boy Crush’, which starts out cool-struttin’ and arrogant like an Aerosmith number (unfortunately, not really delivering upon the promises of that terrific bass groove), all of them quite worth the while of any big fan of the syncopated approach.

 

And, for that matter, only the last number, ‘When They Bring Down The Curtain’, should pro­ba­bly qualify as proper «proto-disco», even if the rhythm section is still playing by its own rules without properly subjugating itself to the simplifications of disco. So for those who like drawing strict lines between «funk» and «disco», I can safely certify that Cut The Cake is quite «old school». It is also one of the AWB’s finest efforts, although the degree of its adventurousness will probably be better assessed by professional musicians than an average white listener: like all of its predecessors, Cut The Cake really only starts growing once your ear has been properly con­verted into a democratic six-track system, in which Gorrie’s bass is given the same attention as Hamish Stuart’s guitar etc. I am not sure I have completed the process, but at least it has progres­sed far enough where, without scruples, I would be glad to support Cut The Cake with yet another thumbs up — if everybody in the world who makes music without a single spark of ge­nius would at least aspire to this level, that would certainly save us all a lot of trouble.

 

PERSON TO PERSON (1976)

 

1) Person To Person; 2) Cut The Cake; 3) If I Ever Lose This Heaven; 4) Cloudy; 5) T.L.C.; 6) I'm The One; 7) Pick Up The Pieces; 8) Love Your Life; 9) School Boy Crush; 10) I Heard It Through The Grapevine.

 

The Average White Band Live Experience is pretty much what you would expect it to be after gulping down the Studio Experience. Basically, everything is kept the same, with the addition of some major jam power. Naturally, in an era of double live LPs Person To Person could only be double, but that's understood — considering that ʽT.L.C.ʼ goes on for fourteen minutes and ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ is stretched to eighteen, only two LPs could have made this even the slightest bit representative of the band's actual shows.

 

Unfortunately, all of the things that confirm the «average» tag for the AWB in the studio do not seem to dissipate live, either. First and foremost, the band is still playing it cozy and safe. Stretch­ing the songs out into jam mode could give them a chance to go wild; but the individual solos that explain the length of ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ are still well-mannered and restrained, even Steve Fer­rone's drum solo, which is very pefunctory and boring in comparison to a John Bonham or a Ginger Baker or a Mi­chael Shrieve. And none of the other members are great soloists, either; in fact, there must have been a bery good reason why they always emphasized collective groove over individual showcases on their studio albums — none of the guitarists or brass players have anything even remotely approaching an individual style, preferring to blend into the surroundings. (Still wonder why Paul McCartney spent so much time recording and touring with Hamish Stuart in the late 1980s / early 1990s? This is the kind of sidekick that he appreciates the most).

 

Second, the setlist is good, but far from perfect. Everything is funky-midtempo or slow-balladry; a fast romp along the lines of ʽPut It Where You Want Itʼ would have made the experience far more convincing. Where, in a different context, I would bemoan the presence of disco, here I find its absence equally bemoan-ful: too much white-boy funk, even played with all due professiona­lism and inspiration, can eventually render the heart immune to its charms. It doesn't help matters, either, that the two new numbers, previewed from Soul Searching (ʽI'm The Oneʼ and ʽLove Your Lifeʼ) show that the formula, good for the first three years, was getting seriously stale and repetitive into its fourth. And finally, the cover of Marvin Gaye's ʽI Heard It Through The Grape­vineʼ is a genuine failure — it takes the guys a whole three or four minutes to set up the groove, and then the groove turns out to be rather limp compared to both the classic «black» and «white» versions (CCR's, for instance).

 

Overall, a huge disappointment — funk bands are supposed to give their best on stage, but this here is clearly not the case. I still like the fourteen-minute version of ʽT.L.C.ʼ (very few solos and some nice tension build-ups on the way), but if the boys place more emphasis on precision and cleanliness of playing than on letting their hair down, it should be obvious that studio records are the way to go. Hence, a logical thumbs down — avoid, unless one of those inexplicable forces of Nature happened to transform you into a major AWB fan.

 

SOUL SEARCHING (1976)

 

1) Overture; 2) Love Your Life; 3) I'm The One; 4) A Love Of Your Own; 5) Queen Of My Soul; 6) Soul Searching; 7) Goin' Home; 8) Everybody's Darling; 9) Would You Stay; 10) Sunny Days (Make Me Think Of You); 11) Dig­ging Deeper (Finale).

 

A technical success, perhaps, but this is where the meter finally started dropping down. Although Soul Searching still shows no signs of the band seriously embracing disco, it veers dangerously in the department of «suave»: the band, formerly known for its warm (if not exactly «hot») dyna­mic grooves, is putting more and more effort into producing lyrical balladry. Of the nine primary songs on this record, six are ballads (or, at least, slow, soft, sentimental grooves), and only three take us back to sweaty, funky territory. Surely this is not what I usually associate with the idea of «soul searching» — unless we consider the soul to be six parts honey and only three parts grit.

 

Furthermore, the three «gritty» numbers are nowhere near classic level. Two had already been previewed on Person To Person, where they did not look particularly inspiring next to big ones like ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ, and here, they are the best of the lot. On ʽLove Your Lifeʼ, the whole band still works as a terrifi-team; all that is lacking is a set of memorable guitar and/or brass riffs, instead of a set of nice-sounding, but not particularly inspired wah-wah grumbles. ʽI'm The Oneʼ has a much more interesting brass part, even if the syncopated blasts were clearly reaped from the same territory on which ʽSuperstitionʼ had sown its seeds four years earlier. The third dynamic dance groove is the near-instrumental ʽGoin' Homeʼ, and there is nothing I can say about it ex­cept that... well, it could have worked well in a blackspoitation movie.

 

As for the ballads, it may be worth one's while to locate and try to enjoy ʽA Love Of Your Ownʼ, sometimes extolled as one of the band's finest, although I find the wheezing synthesizer annoying, the brass backing purely atmospheric, and Gorrie's falsetto completely generic; ʽQueen Of Your Soulʼ is a slightly better proposition, with a better oiled rhythm section and tolerable chimes in­stead of the synthesizer. Actually, at this point I believe that my favorite band member is... who­ever is playing the bass at any given moment (Stuart or Gorrie): the bass lines, in general, show more originality and creativity than any other lines on the album.

 

It does not help matters much that the record is dressed up in conceptual clothes, with an ambient ʽOvertureʼ that previews some of the album's themes at ultra-slow tempos, and an equally slow and moody ʽFinaleʼ, subtitled ʽDigging Deeperʼ — perhaps a hint at the band not having found its soul, after all, but promising to do better next time. In the process, they ended up giving us some average mid-Seventies equivalent of what would later be known as «adult contemporary», the on­ly difference being that it is sometimes interesting to trace the traces of the band members' fingers on their instruments, whereas in classic «adult contemporary» the very idea of «musical per­for­mance» would be devalued.

 

Still, that's no reason to go easy on Soul Searching: it must be cli­ni­cally boring for everyone but the most dedicated nostalgic funky guy (especially if he happened to get his first lay to the softporn sounds of ʽWould You Stayʼ), and since 1976 is my year of birth and I couldn't experience any nostalgia for this whatsoever, I give it a thumbs down with the clearest state of conscience that I could ever feel.

 

BENNY & US (1977)

 

1) Get It Up For Love; 2) Fool For You Anyway; 3) A Star In The Ghetto; 4) The Message; 5) What Is Soul; 6) Someday We'll All Be Free; 7) Imagine; 8) Keepin' It To Myself.

 

Who would have known it — a derivative, cautious funk act in the middle of a downhill slide, and a formerly great, but drastically outdated R&B hitmaker turn out to be a match made, if not in heaven itself, then at least somewhere on the outskirts. Well, sometimes even in the world of music two minuses yield a plus, and there is no question that in 1977, both acts could easily be considered as «minuses», despite their past achievements.

 

But this one-album collaboration project between the AWB and Ben E. «Stand By Me» King somehow managed to reignite the cold fuel in all parties concerned. At the moment, King was ac­tually not doing too badly: his disco single ʽSupernatural Thing (Pt. 1)ʼ had managed, two years earlier, to return him to a brief resurgence of national prominence. But he was unable to keep it up, and clearly needed outside assistance. Likewise, the AWB still hit the charts with regularity; but the original formula seemed to be exhausted.

 

As the two acts found each other, good things started happening. King's vocal delivery gave the band that element of authenticity that they usually found so hard to achieve, precisely because their vocalists could sing falsetto, but could never reach the level of conviction that great R&B stars seem to ascend with such natural ease. And the band, in turn, provided King with excellent backing, heavy on funk and light on strings and sappiness.

 

Already the first notes of ʽGet It Up For Loveʼ announce that the ride is going to be much more fun than it was on Soul Searching: a grumbly wah-wah track wrestles with ringing syncopation, the bass sets a very minimalistic, but stern and firm groove, and Benny gives us a nice repetitive chorus to sing along with. But, although the performance is far from a masterpiece, the coolest thing is that the same level is sustained throughout the album, unlike Soul Searching, which be­gan promisingly enough with ʽLove Your Lifeʼ and then quickly plummeted into puddly, wishy-washy balladry. (On Benny & Us, there is some balladry, too, but much less than we'd expect from a Ben E. King album, and much nicer than we usually see on an AWB album.)

 

The centerpiece here is ʽA Star In The Ghettoʼ — pure dance-pop formula with by-the-book brass and strings arrangements, but somehow it works for all of its seven minutes. Maybe it is because it is hard to go wrong when a genuine star from the ghetto sings this kind of song, but, actually, the orchestral arrangements are quite emotional, and the transition from verse to chorus has a lit­tle bit of cathartic effect worked into it. Somehow one does get the feeling that this is the real thing — even if it is nowhere near as catchy as the Bee Gees.

 

Further on down the line, both ʽThe Messageʼ and ʽWhat Is Soulʼ are fine dance grooves as well, although it is King's energy that consistently keeps them above generic mediocrity (otherwise, ʽThe Messageʼ is not too different from ʽGoin' Homeʼ off the previous record). Donny Hatha­way's ʽSomeday We'll All Be Freeʼ has King getting into character with more vitality and passion than anywhere else on the album; the decision to segue the number right into a somewhat dilu­ted and unfocused cover of ʽImagineʼ was hardly a correct one, but at least it is not the most awful take on ʽImagineʼ that you will ever hear (and you will hear plenty). Finally, the revised version of ʽKeepin' It To Myselfʼ is engineered by King in an Al Green manner, and nearly blows away the original — except that they change the tonality on the chorus, and, with this move, strip the song off its major vocal hook (at least, such is the effect produced on my ears).

 

Of course, all the differences are really very subtle. It is not as if the two acts were so thrilled by bumping into each other that they generated an accidental masterpiece. Benny & Us never inten­ded to break any new ground — in fact, it looks fairly conservative and «old-mannered» even next to its disco contemporaries of the Chic-type crowd. But the two acts liked each other, and clearly enjoyed collaborating, which makes the results friendly, inviting, and filled with a sense of purpose. Hence, a friendly thumbs up.

 

WARMER COMMUNICATIONS (1978)

 

1) Your Love Is A Miracle; 2) Same Feeling, Different Song; 3) Daddy's All Gone; 4) Big City Lights; 5) She's A Dream; 6) Warmer Communications; 7) The Price Of The Dream; 8) Sweet & Sour; 9) One Look Over My Shoulder (Is This Really Goodbye?).

 

The jolt, transmitted by «Benny», was electrified enough to inspire the band for another fine ef­fort, arguably their best in four years. No changes in style whatsoever — not only disco, which the guys continue to solemnly ignore, but New Wave influences as well begin to pass them by. But the compositions go up one or two notches. The slower grooves gain in the «sexy / sleazy» respects, and the faster ones are pinned to generally more delicious, juicy melody lines.

 

The former category is best illustrated by ʽYour Love Is A Miracleʼ, which is probably the closest they ever came to capturing the musky smell of Funkadelic — «lite», yes, but all of the instru­ments, rhythms, and harmonies work cohesively towards a nasty, dirty big-boy sound that no mo­rally trained housewife would ever tolerate. The title track is equally fine, with their most memo­rable chorus in years — there may be nothing revolutionary about choosing the line "we gotta have warmer... we gotta have warmer... warmer communications" as a hook basis, but its unin­tentional sex mantra seems to work against all odds.

 

On the faster side, ʽSame Feeling Different Songʼ kicks in with the finest brass riff we have heard from the AWB since ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ, and they keep it strung up and tense for five minutes, regularly switching the focus from brass to the blubbering, «telegraphic» guitar and back again. And the instrumental ʽSweet & Sourʼ, straying slightly away into jazz-fusion territory, is built upon a dep-reaching, nagging, ascending guitar line that goes straight to the subconscious and does strange things with it, especially if you are listening in headphones.

 

If it weren't for the ballads, which, unfortunately, cannot be moved from the usual levels of bore­dom (the cover of James Taylor's ʽDaddy's All Goneʼ is particularly trite, although, technically, it «got soul» all right), War­mer Communications could easily rival their best efforts in terms of consistency; and the band's conservatism, at this point, becomes almost respectable — at a time when traditional R&B was starting to get restructured into its disco and post-disco forms, minimalizing, if not nullifying, the role of particular instrument players, they continue to tighten up their act and rely on complex time signatures and tricky chord changes, instead of watering it all down. It may have been re­corded in 1978 all right, but it sounds positively 1973-ish, and for this type of music, it is an en­ormous plus, well worth the usual tepid, but friendly thumbs up. And if four or five «warmer» funky grooves ain't enough to thrill you, how about that album co­ver? Those were the days...

 

FEEL NO FRET (1979)

 

1) When Will You Be Mine; 2) Please Don't Fall In Love; 3) Walk On By; 4) Feel No Fret; 5) Stop The Rain; 6) Atlantic Avenue; 7) Ace Of Hearts; 8) Too Late To Cry; 9) Fire Burning.

 

How can I «feel no fret», I wonder, when, without a warning, all of the advantages gained in 1978 are lost one year later? The Average White Band finally make their way through to disco, and it is not a pretty sight. Actually, it is no sight at all. The whole album just speeds by, and once it's gone, nothing remains but the sad echo of involuntary toe-tapping.

 

Let us begin with this: ʽWalk On Byʼ used to be a decent pop song, a highlight of the Dionne Warwick catalog and all. What was the reason for trying to reimagine it as a mid-tempo dance­floor standart sung in disco falsetto? It takes all the power out of the hooks without adding any extra groove strength. There is nothing wrong with trying to modernize classics as such, but there has gotta be a point. This particular rearrangement has none. And that is what's wrong with the whole album altogether: the band seems to have snapped out of their conservative formula — and found itself aimlessly adrift in musical space.

 

The central piece here is the title track. At six minutes and thirty seconds, it is supposed to de­mon­strate how firmly the AWB has now grasped the essence of disco. Sure enough, they repro­gram their rhythm section — hardly a monumental task — speed up the tempo, and provide the club-goers with an extra bit of dance fodder in case the club-goers run out of «average white dis­co» artists before dawn. But the groove as such is non-existent: the guitars are limited to beeps and bleeps, the brass section plays nothing but lazy, quiet flourishes, and the keyboards are limi­ted to «atmospheric» hissing synths. Basically, they just forgot to add some music to our day.

 

Unfortunately, I cannot locate any hidden gems, either. ʽWhen Will You Be Mineʼ is probably the strongest of the lot, opening with grumbly wah-wah and preserving a strong funky attitude throughout — it sounds like a second-rate outtake from Warmer Communications, and, for that reason, is quite a traitorous introduction to the album; once it's over, it's lazy balladry and limp, unsubstantial disco all the way to the end. ʽAtlantic Avenueʼ is occasionally extolled as a high­light as well, and it is a semi-notch above the rest due to its proud anthemic ambition, but the ly­rics are ultimately dumb ("So come on, down Atlantic Avenue / Let the samba take ahold of you" embodies the decade's hedonism without the slightest bit of irony — even the Bee Gees could do better than that), and the melody only really goes well together with a leisure suit.

 

In short, Feel No Fret simply reflects a complete loss of whatever individuality these guys had — and I have no idea how it is possible at all to enjoy this without first constructing a late 1970s dance club atmosphere framework in one's mind. (For that matter, I strongly believe that ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ or ʽSame Feeling, Different Songʼ will find their admirers any time, any day). But if, for some reason, you are in need of a concrete example of how «transition to disco ruins a solid funk band», a «paired» listen to Warmer Communications and Feel No Fret will do nice­ly, and a perfect thumbs down is guaranteed for all.

 

(PS: For some reason, the CD edition of the album not only added four extra tracks, but was even re­titled as Feel No Fret... And More — as if we should all be happy to get more of the same for the same money exactly when it comes to selling the worst album in the band's history so far. Marketing is a strange, strange art indeed).

 

SHINE (1980)

 

1) Catch Me (Before I Have To Testify); 2) Help Is On The Way; 3) Watcha Gonna Do For Me; 4) Let's Go Round Again; 5) Into The Night; 6) Our Time Has Come; 7) For You For Love; 8) If Love Only Lasts For One Night; 9) Shine.

 

Somehow I forgot to mention that the noticeable shift of sound from Warmer Communications to Feel No Fret had much to do with the band's change of label and, more importantly, producer: from Atlantic veteran Arif Mardin they went on to Victor Records and new producing guy David Foster, one of the big heroes of mainstream Eighties pop. It was under his guidance that the Ave­rage White Band began and completed the transformation into the Average White Automaton; which, naturally, does not take the blame off the shoulders of each individual member as well.

 

Shine is basically Feel No Fret No. 2, but goes even further in the direction of dispensing with the «live» feel and machinizing the sound of the band. They still play their own instruments, even the drums, but all of the grooves have been streamlined, and there is a stiff, robotic feel to all the tracks — exactly the kind of thing Foster was aiming for. Thus, it does not really matter any more if it is the AWB playing this shit, or any other run-of-the-mill dance band with ten years of heavy practice behind its back.

 

The pretentiously jovial ʽLet's Go Round Againʼ managed to become a minor hit single here; and as far as generic, but expertly produced disco goes, it is neither better nor worse than any other such minor hit single. The chorus is catchy, the rhythm is danceable, the strings and horns well placed, and Hamish even gets to play a melodic solo. But crowd pleasers like that really go for a dime a dozen, and I would rather take ʽHelp Is On The Wayʼ, whose vocal melody is nowhere near as easily memorable, but not as silly, either.

 

Alas, the only track on here that is vaguely reminiscent of the AWB's former «average greatness» is ʽInto The Nightʼ. It is almost completely instrumental (apart from a few mood-setting vocal lines in the «chorus»), so you do not have to put up with Gorrie's formulaic falsetto. It has a per­fectly well worked out brass groove that takes a brief, but effective musical idea and explores it, unlike the horns on the other tracks, which merely exist to provide an extra sonic layer. It is «fun­ky-pretty» rather than «disco-crappy», and is more influenced by Stevie Wonder than Donna Summer. If anything ever survives from Shine, it's gotta be this one rather than ʽLet's Go Round Againʼ — I'd rather have the mainstream disco epoch be remembered through its clever facets than its populistic anthems.

 

Still, if you like smooth, perfectly polished, un-annoying disco as background muzak to accom­pany your home chores or morning aerobics, Shine might find some sort of useful application: when played loud enough, it will effectively hinder your sleeping reflexes. This is why the pre­dictable thumbs down reaction arrives hatred-free.

 

Curious P.S.: It is exceedingly funny how all the reviews of these late-period AWB on Amazon rave about their greatness and consistently come furnished with 5-star ratings. It takes a stupid person like me a few minutes to realize that, in most cases, there are about three to four reviews for each, and that, most probably, they are all written by nostalgic 50-year old geezers whose me­mories of this music are inextricably tied in with memories of their first sexual experience. Tee­nage musical experience can be so detrimental, once you think of it.

 

CUPID'S IN FASHION (1982)

 

1) You're My Number One; 2) Easier Said Than Done; 3) You Wanna Belong; 4) Cupid's In Fashion; 5) Theatre Of Excess; 6) I Believe; 7) Is It Love That You're Running From; 8) Reach Out I'll Be There; 9) Isn't It Strange; 10) Love's A Heartache.

 

I will try to be brief. An album titled Cupid's In Fashion cannot be a great album – period. An album titled Cupid's In Fashion and featuring six white-clad guys on the album cover cannot even be a good album. And an album titled Cupid's In Fashion, featuring six white-clad guys on the album, and coming from a band that went from playing their instruments to manipulating them, is zooming straight ahead into the realm of total darkness.

 

The only comforting thing I can say about Cupid is that, even in 1982, the band was holding out against going electronic, and, apart from some occasional robotic tampering with the drums, most of the music was still built around funky guitar playing, brass riffs, and gentle keyboard patterns. But this time around, there is not even an ʽInto The Nightʼ in sight — everything is either pedes­trian dance muzak or mushy, instantly forgettable balladry.

 

ʽReach Out I'll Be Thereʼ is the obvious standout, of course, since great Motown hits of the past have very little competition when they are surrounded by flat hackwork; but, predictably, the band adds nothing to the original, yet detracts quite a lot — and this is probably the first time I really feel the urge to strangle Gorrie for his falsetto.

 

Other than that, the title track is the only one that even attempts to build up a hookline, but it is a shallow and cold hookline, and marred with awful lyrics to boot. This whole musical schtick was hopelessly dated by 1982 — on-the-edge dance music was evolving in the direction of Contro­versy and Thriller, which these guys were unable to follow, being completely stuck in the reser­ved, «uptight» state of the 1970s. An obvious thumbs down — the only sensible thing they could have done at that time was to break up, and, fortunately, that is exactly what they did, once it be­came clear that Cupid, apparently, was not nearly as much in fashion as advertised. Especially when the Cupid that you are advertising looks suspiciously like a rubber doll.

 

AFTERSHOCK (1989)

 

1) The Spirit Of Love; 2) Sticky Situation; 3) Aftershock; 4) Love At First Sight; 5) I'll Get Over You; 6) Later We'll Be Greater; 7) Let's Go All The Way; 8) We're In Too Deep; 9) Stocky Sachoo-A-Shun.

 

Here is one more for the rapidly increasing collection of proofs that «generic mainstream muzak» in the 1970s was nine heads and eighteen tails over the same thing in the 1980s. After doing the sensible thing and packing it in after Cupid's In Fashion, the AWB, mercifully, spent most of the decade busy with their solo projects and recreation, but then the devil made them do it and re­convene just one year before it expired (although it's not as if the album would have sounded much different had they put it off until, say, 1993: this kind of music had pretty much solidified in the late 1980s and never truly budged since).

 

The reconvened line-up is flawed: Hamish Stuart was busy doing the right thing (playing guitar on Paul McCartney's Flowers In The Dirt), and so was Steve Ferrone, here replaced by Eliot Lewis, credited as much for «programming» as he is for «percussion». Additionally, Alex Ligert­wood, a one-time lead vocalist for Santana, is contributing some lead and background vocals. With these shifts, the remaining band members (Gorrie, Ball, and McIntyre) set out to reconquer the world... through the offer of an achingly wretched collection of «songs» that, for the most part, seem like a talentless imitation of Phil Collins' No Jacket Required (an album that, by itself, took no large amount of God-shared inspiration to create).

 

Seriously, a reunion has got to at least try to have a purpose; the only «shock» of Aftershock is to discover that the record does not attempt to do anything. All of its seven dance «grooves» and two so-called «ballads» are as hollow, unmemorable, and sonically annoying as R&B ever gets (and boy, can this «new school» R&B ever get annoying!). There is not a single moment any­where in sight — never mind a complete track — that would attract my attention. The rhythm section is programmed most of the time (some of the basslines are real enough, but fairly crude compared to what these guys used to fabricate); guitars are relegated to the background; and even the vocal hooks do nothing but drag, drag, drag.

 

To be completely honest, I would take one of those infamous pre-Jagged Little Pill Alanis Mor­risette dance pop albums over this tripe — at least the girl had some goddamn energy to compen­sate for the awful arrangements and melodic weakness. But the Average White Band were unlu­cky in that, from the very beginning, they always played it «soft», and now, in an age when no­body within that genre gave a damn about the silly old obsolete notion called «musicianship», they found themselves still playing it «soft» and «limp», only this time to programmed beats, streamlined no-presence rhythm chords, and third-grader keyboard sounds. Had anybody in the band at least found the courage to stand up and say, "fellas, why don't we stop this awful, awful shit, when was the last time you listened to your own ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ?", they might have achieved something. As it is — better just forget about there ever having been a 1989 in the his­tory of the So Below Average It's Not Even Funny Anymore White Band. Thumbs down.

 

SOUL TATTOO (1997)

 

1) Soul Mine; 2) Back To Basics; 3) Livin' On Borrowed Time; 4) Every Beat Of My Heart; 5) When We Get Down On It; 6) Oh, Maceo; 7) Do Ya Really; 8) I Wanna Be Loved; 9) No Easy Way To Say Goodbye; 10) Love Is The Bottom Line; 11) Welcome To The Real World; 12) Window To Your Soul.

 

No band, good or bad, deserves to go out with an album as lame as Aftershock; thus, long-time fans just had to wait for a move of redemption. Fortunately, there comes a time in the life of most (if not all) artists when they get to think about themselves as too old and tired to care about fol­lowing trends — realizing that they'd rather just fuck all that shit and get «back to basics», which, coincidentally, happens to be the name of one of the tracks here.

 

With Gorrie, McIntyre, and Ball still forming the bulk of the band, and Eliot Lewis on keyboards plus Pete Abbott on drums supplementing the old guard, Soul Tattoo may not be a masterpiece of the R'n'B genre, but, coming eight years past Aftershock, it is pure gold in comparison. It is, in fact, as if the past twenty years never happened. No awful electronics, drum machines, real instru­ment playing, real funky grooves — the band is clearly committed to the safe old formula once again, sending all those dark times when they were betraying their master style into oblivion. No disco, either. Just old-fashioned dance-oriented R'n'B and a few old-fashioned ballads to boot. Gi­ving the finger to all the «new school R'n'B» as well. GOTTA LOVE THAT.

 

The rewinding is announced already on the first seconds of the album, with the opening syncopa­ted chords to ʽSoul Mineʼ; then, as Abbott kicks in with a solid rocking beat, the bass starts draw­ing complex geometric figures in the air, and the repetitive "working in a soul mine!" chorus starts getting addictive — that is where you actually start to remember that there used to be things that made you like, if not love, this band. The track does not have a melodic line as memorable and infectious as their few greatest-ever hits from the past, but in every other respect it is as hard-driving and authentic as anything they had ever done — and it sets just the right mood for the en­tire album. Even if the only other track that replicates its sweaty, funky success is the near-instru­mental ʽOh, Maceoʼ, a specially constructed showcase for Roger and his ball, er, sax, I mean. I do mean it — it is one of their most sax-drenched numbers, ever, probably with more sweat spilled over it than during the entire recording of Aftershock.

 

The other groove-based tunes are somewhat smoother and more pensive, but generally move one step beyond «boring», usually by means of a funny catchy chorus (ʽLove Is The Bottom Lineʼ, ʽDo Ya Reallyʼ). Eliot Lewis comes into his own as an okay vocal replacement for Hamish Stuart, but the star of the show is Gorie, whose range has not deteriorated one bit in twenty-five years time and who is now able to make the best of his falsetto, rather than blindly imitating the Bee Gees (even using it for a gorgeously placed vocal hook on the chorus of the album's worst song — ʽEvery Beat Of My Heartʼ, an over-sappy ballad that incidentally sounds like a boy band pro­duct). That said, it's too bad they did not try to populate the album with more tunes like ʽSoul Mineʼ and ʽOh, Maceoʼ — it is highly improbable they were still trying to use that smooth sound of theirs to charm the pants off ladies, so they could at least kick some extra ass for the guys.

 

On the modest critical scale that was specially invented for the AWB, this is a terrific, completely unexpected comeback, and a noble end to the band's studio career (unless they plan to reward their long term, arthritis-ridden fans with another offering — highly unlikely, considering that there has been no follow-up in fifteen years). Fans of their classic sound will definitely get a kick out of parts of it, to which I must add a pinch of pure respect. To come back together, screw the fashion in grand fashion, and make a defiantly retro album that can, at worst, be «dull», but al­most never «tasteless» — not everyone has it in them, and so the thumbs up judgement is as much based on rational context analysis as it is on pure pleasure. Which I am not denying, either: ʽSoul Mineʼ is great fun, regardless of any damn context.

 

FACE TO FACE (1999)

 

1) Soul Mine; 2) Got The Love; 3) A Love Of Your Own; 4) Oh, Maceo; 5) Back To Basics; 6) Work To Do; 7) Every Beat Of My Heart; 8) Pick Up The Pieces.

 

Any respectable studio comeback deserves a live counterpart. Over the past decade, the AWB has released quite a number of these, actually, and spending a lot of time, words, and web space on them would be overkill, but Face To Face, as the first one in the series, deserves a brief mention. Roger Ball left the band shortly after the recording of Soul Tattoo, and, for the ensuing tours, was replaced by Fred Vigdor — clearly a hard-working guy, since he seems able to fill Roger's shoes to the extent that I honestly do not hear any big difference. The album itself is said to have been recorded at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco — not the legendary Fillmore of old, of course, which was closed down by Bill Graham as early as 1971, but still the Fillmore, lending a bit of extra glitz to the whole thing.

 

The track listing is somewhat bizarre, though. Clearly, the band did not want to be perceived as simply an oldies act, so the inclusion of four tracks from the new album is understandable. But, altogether, there are only eight (plus a ʽLet's Go Round Againʼ as a bonus on some releases), and this leaves rather a miserable amount of space for the classic hits — and, for that matter, where are the classic hits? Other than ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ, there are none. If you are going to bring back the oldies at all, why resuscitate mushy balladry like ʽA Love Of Your Ownʼ (particularly since mushy balladry is already represented well enough by the new song, ʽEvery Beat Of My Heartʼ)? Where is ʽCut The Cakeʼ? What's wrong with ʽPut It Where You Want Itʼ? ʽPerson To Personʼ, anyone? Huh?..

 

It is all the more bizarre considering how well the new-look band actually sounds. ʽSoul Mineʼ almost had me believe that I am listening to a studio re-recording with fake crowd noises; I hope to God the suspicion is not true (what point can there be for a band like this to release a fake live album?). Sound quality is impeccable, as is the level of coordination between all the band mem­bers. Most importantly, they are still having fun, going at it as if the past twenty years had not happened, and we were all still huddled in a circa-1974 club venue, knocking off that sweaty-funky mu­sic while it was still relatively fresh.

 

So it is no surprise that, most of the time, the audience is kept well awake and on its feet, with a particularly huge rise of enthusiasm at the opening trills of the show-closing ʽPick Up The Piecesʼ ("I think you know this", Gorie adds, and they sure do). If only they left out the slow ballads — there should be a law out there, allowing no more than one «slow-burner» per a show like this — and concentrated more on funky grooves, there could even be a chance of beating the impact of 1976's Person To Person. As it is, only ʽSoul Mineʼ, ʽOh Maceoʼ (explained from the stage to be a tribute to James Brown's sax player, Maceo Parker — shame on me for not realizing that earli­er!), ʽGot The Loveʼ, and ʽPiecesʼ help us work up a respectable sweat. Still, it's a fair enough do­cument, and solid proof — at least, for the turn-of-the-century period — that it still made good sense to purchase tickets to an AWB show.

 

LIVING IN COLOUR (2003)

 

1) Check Your Groove; 2) Down To The River; 3) Living In Colour; 4) One Of My Heartbeats; 5) Close To You Tonight; 6) Half Moon In The Crescent Street; 7) Think Small; 8) I Can't Help It; 9) I'm Gonna Make You Love Me; 10) Love Won't Let Me Wait.

 

But wait — they are not done yet! In fact, I was that close to missing this release at all: very little information on it is available outside of the band's fan-targeted website, and, furthermore, this new studio album almost threatened to get lost in the small, but steady trickle of live releases that the AWB are still baking on a regular basis. Yet there it is: a brand new studio album, much as I hate to admit that. Let us approach it with an open mind and a friendly heart, hard as it is to treat that way a record whose very front sleeve is screaming at you — «do you remember the soft, sweet, sexy days of 1974? Do you?» Particularly hard to take if you were born in 1976.

 

The good word is: this music still sounds very much like the AWB, despite the fact that there are, by now, only two of the original members left — and that even long-term post-peak member Eli­ot Lewis is no longer in the band by now, replaced by Klyde Jones. But the presence of Gorrie, who still handles most of the vocals, and Onnie McIntyre on guitar ensures healthy conservatism. Dubstep influences are nowhere near to be found, and neither is auto-tuning. In fact, all of the music continues to be recorded with live instruments.

 

The bad word, however, is that Living In Colour is a clear step backwards from the minor re­vi­val of Soul Tattoo. If anything, the band seems to be retracing their original steps — where Soul Tattoo was a partly successful attempt to restore the «classic» sound of their first three or four albums, Living In Colour brings us back to the late 1970s, the age in which their sound got soften­ed, their grooves got simplified, and their ability to capture the imagination, not just the feet, vanished into thin air. What for — I don't know. Maybe they got a call from a rich millionnaire fan, saying, «oh man, oh man, those days of rockin' it out to Feel No Fret in 1979 were hot — here's a million dollar check if you get me one more of those!»

 

It only suffices to compare ʽSoul Mateʼ with ʽCheck Your Grooveʼ, which opens this record on a superficially similar note — «checking the groove» reveals that the groove is pitifully limp from all points of view. Even the drummer releases zero energy hitting on the skins, not to mention the twice-as-minimalistic bass. It is still a well-constructed dance groove, but they forgot to adjust the dentures. And, unfortunately, it is the best track on the album.

 

Or, to be more honest, one of the best tracks. As long as they are ready to throw on even a small pinch of funky energy, the compositions are mildly fun. ʽHalf Moon In The Crescent Streetʼ, in particular, is a touching anthem to New Orleans, and its cajun attitudes add some bright colors to the otherwise dull-gray hue of the record. And ʽThink Smallʼ, presumably recorded live (although my only arguments are Gorrie's spoken introduction and occasional applause on the part of a small audience, both of which could be overdubbed), is a solid brass-led jazzy jam, «in the style of Cannonball Adderley, or The Crusaders, all the stuff we grew up on», Gorrie says. It is not tre­mendously exciting, but it is respectable second-hand jazz-pop.

 

Most of the rest of the album, unfortunately, is given to ballads — all of them equally dull and lifeless in their by-the-book sentimentality, culminating with a particularly lifeless cover of ʽLove Won't Let Me Waitʼ (which was already fairly lifeless when Major Harris had a hit with it in 1974, and has only managed to lose its last shreds of pulse since then). Some are slow and some are a bit faster, but who really cares? If you are that nostalgic, just throw on a karaoke version of ʽMore Than A Womanʼ. Going all mushy on us once again is not the way to go if you want to up­hold your R&B credibility. Thumbs down — and, as far as I can see, this really is the last studio album by the AWB; considering that age and lineup issues will probably no longer allow them to fabricate hot grooves, I can only hope that they will have the good sense not to release another ballad-soaked record in their twilight years. Gracefully, gentlemen; the keyword here is grace.

BAD COMPANY

BAD COMPANY (1974)

 

1) Can't Get Enough; 2) Rock Steady; 3) Ready For Love; 4) Don't Let Me Down; 5) Bad Company; 6) The Way I Choose; 7) Movin' On; 8) Seagull.

 

«Beware of bad company», they would warn us all in Victorian times, «nothing like bad company to bring shame and disrepute to the respectable, intellectually stimulating type of music they call hard rock». But did we listen? Hell no! And instead of ejecting ex-Free vocalist Paul Rodgers, ex-Free drummer Simon Kirke, ex-Mott The Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs, and ex-King Crimson bassist Boz Burrell from the midst of our good company, we blessed them on their long road to­wards radio success, popularizing guitar distortion among truck drivers and competing with Frank Sinatra for the love of bored housewives. No longer would hard rock have to be associated with words like «scary» or «creepy». And while it would be unfair to put all the blame on Bad Com­pany, they share an impressive enough chunk of it to deserve this opening shot. It is extremely ironic, in retrospect, that the band was the first act to be signed by Led Zeppelin's new label Swan Song — considering that Bad Company stand for pretty much everything in hard rock that Led Zep usually stand against.

 

None of which should be interpreted as a flat-out condemnation of their self-titled debut, which is actually pretty good, as far as «soft hard rock» ever goes, and may be even better for those whose ears have not been punished in childhood through continuous exposure to mind-numbing «Clas­sic Rock Radio». The long-term fiasco of Bad Company could be predictable right from the start, but the start itself was respectable. All of the members came from vastly superior bands — Free were among the original pioneers of blues-based hard rock; Mott The Hoople were among the first outfits to blend hard rock with singer-songwriting and punk attitude; and King Crimson were... um, a band with a sitting guitarist — and even though the basic idea was to keep it simpler, stupider than their predecessors, their «supergroup» status at first helped minimize the trauma.

 

Of all the individual band members, in terms of sheer sonic contribution, nobody matters much here except for Rodgers. On a Free album, the man would always compete for attention with the guitar player and the bassist, both of whom were not only accomplished, but earnestly strived to flash and flaunt their accomplishments. On Bad Company, all of the musicians merely play — doing their best to simply keep a steady groove and lay down the basic chords. In his Crimson days, Boz Burrell was actually taught how to play bass by Fripp, and although they taught him well enough to lay down some fine playing on a few KC songs, by the time he ran away to Bad Company he'd already forgotten most of it. Mick Ralphs never was a guitar phenomenon even in his Mott days, much less here. Simon Kirke is a fine drummer, 'sall. All of which means — no competition for Paul: Bad Company belongs to him, fair and square.

 

The general policy of the album is announced immediately. A brief countdown, a gene­ric C po­wer chord, two more, off you go — and a greatest hit is born, a song that one could probably learn to play in five minutes, which is likely to constitute 0.0000001% of the total amount of time it has been played on radio stations around the world since 1974. I still cannot understand what it is about ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ that makes it stick, but somehow it does something for me that ten thousand similar songs, following in its wake, do not. Maybe it's just Rodgers' personal charm. It certainly cannot be any sort of «melodic impact».

 

That said, the only two songs from Bad Company that I would want to preserve for the perennial playlist are ʽRock Steadyʼ and ʽReady For Loveʼ, conveniently placed side-by-side. ʽRock Stea­dyʼ is like ʽFoxy Ladyʼ-lite, built around a similar chord sequence, but simplified, trimmed, lo­tioned, and meticulously integrated in The Establishment. Still, the guitar and bass retain some primal meanness which, when multiplied by Rogers' slightly threatening intonations, belies the band's nature as totally robotic and artificial. ʽReady For Loveʼ was brought by Ralphs over from his Mott days (it had already appeared two years earlier on All The Young Dudes), and even though the original was rougher and grittier, with a thick distorted rumble at the center of things, Rodgers is clearly the man to sing it, far more convincing than Mick Ralphs with his lack of range and vocal power could ever be. (It was Ralphs rather than Ian Hunter that took the lead on the original Mott recording, and sizzly-steamy slowburners like ʽReady For Loveʼ honestly deserve a different fate).

 

Bad Company ballads are a whole lotta different story. I can handle the combination of «Paul Rod­gers + muscular hard rock groove», but «Paul Rodgers + wimpy country-rock mush» is a bit too much. Therefore, ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ (no relation to the Beatles song, fortunately), ʽThe Way I Chooseʼ (aren't they the exact same song, by the way?), and even the minimalistic acoustic ballad ʽSeagullʼ, which have nothing whatsoever to recommend them except for Rodgers' «ma­gic», may freely and without compensation vanish off the face of the planet for all I care. The only song that redeems the second side is the title track — a romantic outlaw painting tailor-made for Rodgers' persona, even distinctly echoing Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection in spots.

 

And still, a thumbs up. Bad Company is what we might call a ʽbad album gone goodʼ, to para­phrase one of the band's future titles: as lame as the basic idea behind the existence of Bad Com­pany may be in general, this particular realization of it exceeds expectations. The band's complete motto for 1974 actually read «keep it simple, but inspired». Over the next two years, with money, dope, and cheap fame rolling in, that motto would get short-circuited.

 

STRAIGHT SHOOTER (1975)

 

1) Good Lovin' Gone Bad; 2) Feel Like Makin' Love; 3) Weep No More; 4) Shooting Star; 5) Deal With The Prea­cher; 6) Wild Fire Woman; 7) Anna; 8) Call On Me.

 

Progress-schmogress? The second album picks up where the first one left off, then performs a nice 360-degree curve over eight songs — why change a winning formula while the market is still hot? Straight Shooter sold just as well as the debut album, if not better, and solidified the band's reputation as providers of highest quality third-rate hard rock for the masses even further. It may be hard for some people to understand how an album as generic and trivial as Bad Com­pany could ever have a successful sequel in the same style. But it does.

 

The two hit singles are not quite up to this band's highest standards: there is nothing here that re­peats the subtly dangerous grumble of ʽRock Steadyʼ or the sly seductive restrain of ʽReady For Loveʼ. In fact, Rodgers is playing his cards even more in the open now: when he is not screaming his head off, he is either crooning or «narrating» (ʽShooting Starʼ), and although, technically, it all goes well, the «mystical» effect that this man's voice may sometimes produce is almost never felt on this record. Not that a lot of Bad Company fans would ever want to hunt for it, of course.

 

Still, ʽFeel Like Makin' Loveʼ has a strange charm to it, probably hidden in the transitional folds when the acoustic verse melody flows into the hard rock riff of the chorus (stealthily appropriated from a theme from Tommy, mind you). And the band still has a way to come across as respec­tably cool when you no longer expect it — midway through, the catchy, but unexceptional «semi-power ballad» becomes a psychedelic rocker, as Mick Ralphs suddenly lets fly with a series of wailing, echoey solos that most fans of the single probably wouldn't even need, as long as they could simply sing along with the chorus. Those last two minutes of the song are easily my favou­rite part of the album.

 

ʽGood Lovin' Gone Badʼ, the other big one, got itself some wildly distorted, sludgy guitar, which could indicate a movement towards «glam» territory, but not for these guys — one step forward and they could have turned into KISS. They do make sure that the lyrics are «polite», the intona­tions are ecstatic and emotional, but not «brutal», and the sound does not stimulate active head­banging. And the main hook is the title itself, of course: "good lovin' gone bad, yeah yeah yeah!" just sticks, and there's nothing you can do about it except shoot yourself.

 

But the album eventually loses momentum, just as Bad Company did. For starters, ʽShooting Starʼ is an arena-oriented anthem dedicated to the memory of «Club 27», and it does not work well beyond the verses — the verses are sung by Rodgers with a touch of emotional honesty, upon which the weak, unconvincing chorus seriously lets the song down. Ralphs repeats the ʽFeel Like Makin' Loveʼ trick with some explosive soloing at the end, but this time, there is no rock solid riff to go along with it, so it doesn't come off with the same effect (and besides, where's the fun of a new discovery?).

 

The album's most in-your-face ballad, ʽAnnaʼ, was contributed by Simon Kirke, and is probably the band's first real duffer. Slow, languid, devoid of invention, hanging exclusively upon Rod­gers' ability to pull off a sentiment, and that coda? "I found me a simple woman, a simple woman for a simple man" — a line that might be passable when hidden within one verse out of three or four, but there is a certain paradox when one tries to focus the listener's attention on a line like that: the trick is, it stops being simple, becoming forcedly pretentious. Like yeah all right, we all know that Bad Company are a Simple Band writing Simple Songs for Simple Fans who easily associate with Simple Men trying to find themselves some Simple Women. Which would beg the question: what the heck's wrong with complicated men and women?

 

In fact, the only song on the second side that rises slightly above mediocre is ʽDeal With The Preacherʼ, where Ralphs digs deep into his heaviest tone and Rodgers raises as much fuss as on ʽGood Lovinʼ. Next to its crunch and energy, the far slighter ʽWild Fire Womanʼ does not qualify at all; and as much as ʽCall On Meʼ tries to reach the skies with its solemn piano chords and wai­ling guitars (the coda almost reads like a poor, poor man's ʽWhile My Guitar Gently Weepsʼ), it still has a hard time leaving the troposphere. If not for Rodgers, all of these songs wouldn't even be worth mentioning, but even his presence cannot save them from mediocrity.

 

Still, by and large, Straight Shooter honestly performs everything the people expected from it, so none of these complaints make too much sense. In fact, I should probably even reward it with a thumbs up, especially considering how much more adequate and even inspired this record is compared to whatever would follow. But, like its predecessor, it still begs the question — these guys were so obviously capable of so much more, individually and collectively; was it merely for the money that they were lowering standards, or did they perceive their actions as some sort of High Mission? As in, take all the fun out of rock'n'roll?.. Because this is not just «simple» music — it is deadly stern, with far more seriousness than these hooks could possibly take.

 

RUN WITH THE PACK (1976)

 

1) Live For The Music; 2) Simple Man; 3) Honey Child; 4) Love Me Somebody; 5) Run With The Pack; 6) Silver, Blue & Gold; 7) Young Blood; 8) Do Right By Your Woman; 9) Sweet Lil' Sister; 10) Fade Away.

 

Bad Company established the general style. Straight Shooter provided the vector — milk the formula until the udder runs dry. Run With The Pack gave a clear overview of how much milk there was in the first place: barely enough to fill two albums, certainly not enough to fill three, unless one is ready to mix milk with other, less appetizing, bodily substances.

 

The most telling thing about the whole project is that they couldn't even settle on an original com­position for a lead single: the final choice fell on a cover of Leiber/Stoller's ʽYoung Bloodʼ, a twenty-year old Coasters chestnut already interpreted by plenty of people. For a questionable, but audacious «theatrical» interpretation, check out Leon Russell's performance on George Harrison's Concert For Bangla Desh. The song is essentially a lyrical joke that does not work at all if there is no «rock theater bit» included (deep bass on "you better leave my daughter alone...", etc.) — how was it at all possible for these guys not to understand that? Rodgers just sings the song, Ralphs just plays the guitar melody — no interesting twirls, not even a goshdarn solo.

 

Of course, once you have listened to all the other songs, the faceless cover of ʽYoung Bloodʼ might no longer seem all that faceless. The band is at a genuine loss for vocal or instrumental hooks. The songs are so amazingly generic, repetitive, monotonous, simplistic, that it is hard to believe this was not the band's intention — if you ask me, I'd suggest that Run With The Pack was planned as a «super-simple» record, with all of its songs written, rehearsed, and recorded du­ring one 24-hour session, just because I do not want to think that badly of the people responsible for it: they are all experienced and respectable musicians, after all.

 

One thing that would agree very well with this hypothesis is that the lyrics on most of the songs aren't even laughable, because there ain't much to laugh at. ʽSimple Manʼ (what a surprising title!) repeats almost the exact same verse/chorus sequence three times in a row, and that verse? "I am just a simple man, working on the land / Oh, it ain't easy / I am just a simple man, working with my hands / Oh, believe me". Is this supposed to imitate the aura of a salt-of-the-earth folk song? When was the last time these guys actually consulted any real lyrics of well-known folk songs? ʽHoney Childʼ: "Well the first time that I met you, you were only seventeen / But I had to put you down, 'cause I didn't know where you'd been". Nice start, Mr. Rodgers. ʽLove Me Somebodyʼ: "Love me somebody, somebody love me / Take me for what I'm worth / But only love me, but only love me". What is this, 1962? The age of Merseybeat? If so, how come this is sung within the framework of a James Taylor-type ballad?

 

Top prize goes to: "Give me silver, blue and gold / The colour of the sky I'm told". I could some­how get used to «silver, blue and gold» as the colour of the sky (as highly debatable as that is), but there is something about this I'm told, clearly just stuffed in at the last moment to make it rhyme, that irritates me to no end. Yes, it is true that even after the Bob Dylan revolution lyrics are not necessarily supposed to be paid attention to within a rock song. But if the main strength of your band stems from the soulful vocals of your frontman, it is your patriotic duty to fill up these vocals with something at least a little bit above primitive, clumsily stated trivialities. Why even watch Spinal Tap, when you have the real thing going on here?

 

Now if you really, really, really like the two first Bad Company albums, you might still want to check out the third one. ʽLive For The Musicʼ is at least a real groove-based hard rocker, with a properly enflamed solo and an oddly proto-disco-shaped bassline. ʽHoney Childʼ, were it taken tongue-in-cheek rather than seriously, could have fit in on one of the early ZZ Top records, with its creaky Billy Gibbons-type guitar tone. The chorus of ʽSilver...ʼ, despite the atrocious lyrics, is the album's only moment of attractive guitar pop charm, and there is some simple, but melodic slide guitar and mandolin (I think?) work to make it stand out from the rest. And Rodgers' vocal parts on the formulaically «dark» ʽFade Awayʼ still have that fatalist ring. Just forget everything your mama — or your teacher — ever taught you about the English language, and you'll be fine.

 

That said, for each single «nice» moment there will be at least two crimes against taste. Do you, do you, do you, do you wanna waltz and waltz and waltz to the endless mantra of "do right by your woman, she'll do right by you"? Do you want to learn how many different shades of emotion can be concealed within the syntactically uncomfortable construction "but only love me" if it is repeated six times in a row? Do you want to sit through three and a half minutes of the limp-rock blandness of the title track just to hear the band's latest and greatest innovation: a heavy strings-enhanced arrangement for the coda? I know I don't, and, in accordance with the principle of «do right by your readers, they'll do right by you», Run With The Pack receives a certified thumbs down from the bottom of my heart, provided the heart can have thumbs at all. Granted, there is at least some ground for redemption here. The next several years would flood it altogether.

 

BURNIN' SKY (1976)

 

1) Burnin' Sky; 2) Morning Sun; 3) Leaving You; 4) Like Water; 5) Knapsack; 6) Everything I Need; 7) Heartbeat; 8) Peace Of Mind; 9) Passing Time; 10) Too Bad; 11) Man Needs Woman; 12) Master Of Ceremony.

 

Apparently, this album was recorded so quickly after Run With The Pack that they even had to delay the release a few months — so as not to let two records compete on the charts at the same time. But what am I saying? Compete? Only in terms of whichever one manages to bore the ma­ximum shit out of you. And by now, even the fans were getting tired: Burnin' Sky peaked at #15, ten positions below Run With The Pack, and its only single of any importance (the title track) went no higher than #78. For a band that placed 100% of its faith in record sales, the sky must have been burnin' indeed.

 

But then again, what else do you expect from a record that allows itself to build a seven-minute long track on a four-note bass riff? ʽMaster Of Ceremonyʼ may feature plenty of absent-minded organ punching, a distraught, echoey Paul Rodgers vocal that seems to betray traces of pot, and even an occasional sax solo or two, but they are just fooling you: it is really all about the «doo-dum... doo-dum! doo-dum... doo-dum!» Nazi torture assault on your brain. Seven bleeding minu­tes of a pseudo-funky, pseudo-gritty pseudo-jam whose only purpose is to let you know: «Yes, we can make long improvisations that are every bit as minimalistic as our singles!»

 

The rest is divided more or less equally between rote, unmemorable, trivial rockers and rote, unmemorable, trivial ballads. The title track, believe it or not, is also based on a four-note riff that is nearly the equal of ʽMaster Of Ceremonyʼ, and it happens to be the hookiest thing on the whole album, with Ralphs' electronically treated solo briefly reminding the listener of the existence of such a thing as «danger». But ʽLeaving Youʼ, ʽEverything I Needʼ, ʽMan Needs Womanʼ, etc. — does anybody need to hear these songs even once? Trust me, the music inside is about as appeti­zing as the mega-inventive titles.

 

Straining my already tired mind, I can perhaps acknowledge that there is a bit of pretty acoustic picking on ʽMorning Sunʼ, and the joint effort of the phasing effect between verses and the pasto­ral flute interludes is enough to at least recognize the song as something on which these guys might have worked, meaning it at least creates an atmosphere (in comparison, something like ʽPeace Of Mindʼ doesn't even begin to create one — just blunders about in a mid-tempo puddle of generic country-pop pianos and electric guitars).

 

Come to think of it, I may be slightly downplaying the band's will for change. There is really a noticeable increase in all sorts of instrumentation that is not hard rock guitar: folksy acoustic melodies, pianos, saxes, even synthesizers (including synthesized strings). None of which helps, unfortunately, because the basic ideology and style remains the same: SMUT (Simple Music for the Undemanding Toiler). Sometimes I think that the job must have really been a hard one — the guys had so many things to unlearn about their playing, I almost feel like pitying them. Howev­er, not even this kind of pity should stay our thumbs from going down. This is an album that was born begging for a thumbs down.

 

DESOLATION ANGELS (1979)

 

1) Rock'n'Roll Fantasy; 2) Crazy Circles; 3) Gone, Gone, Gone; 4) Evil Wind; 5) Early In The Morning; 6) Lonely For Your Love; 7) Oh, Atlanta; 8) Take The Time; 9) Rhythm Machine; 10) She Brings Me Love.

 

Surprise! Just as you started to think it could never ever get better, the Bad Company boys make one last concentrated effort. Perhaps even the band members themselves were so horrified with the apathy and facelessness of Burnin' Sky — Desolation Angels at least sounds as if somebody gave them a much-needed cold shower.

 

I know the idea of Bad Company doing disco sounds horrendous on paper, and that their decision to hop on the train during disco's last profitable year reveals agonizing desperation, but ʽRhythm Machineʼ is not utterly trashable as far as trashable disco goes: its chunka-chunka bassline does not take the attention away from triple guitar parts, with Ralphs alternating catchy slide lines and razor-sharp electric leads over a rhythmic jangle. If you can get past such amazing showcases of lyrical genius as "I'm a rhythm machine, you know what I mean" (not exactly atypical for disco hits), the thing almost counts as a breath of fresh air in the context of the ultra-stale BC formula.

 

The band did not dare to release the song as a single, though, probably afraid of losing the truck driver segment of their audience without picking up the «Tony Manero» group. They went with ʽRock'n'Roll Fantasyʼ instead, which became their last certified big hit — and also represented a weak effort to catch up with the times: Ralphs is playing electronically treated, «cold-hearted» guitars, giving the whole thing a little bit of a «Cars» attitude. Why they decided to further «em­bellish» the song with silly-sounding electronic percussion bursts that punctuate the breaks is not clear. Or, rather, it is quite clear, but I am not sure it works in any way other than utterly comic. But remember, one reason why Burnin' Sky sucked so much was its total lack of humor, inten­tional or not. Even a good laugh at the band's antics automatically makes Desolation Angels an improvement, if not exactly a proper «comeback».

 

There is also a feel of increased diversity, something the band never displayed as a cherished va­lue before. Besides disco and «electronized» pseudo-New Wave rock'n'roll (the second single, ʽGone Gone Goneʼ, also belongs to the same category), there is also a touch of basic country-rock — the unexpectedly catchy ʽOh, Atlantaʼ, which I really like in all possible ways: upbeat, boun­cy, lyrically simple, but non-moronic, cool singalong vocals: «poor man's Allman Brothers», which really sounds like a great compliment for the band.

 

And, of course, a couple traditional varieties of the band's hard rock spirit: another spin-off from the pub boogie of ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ (ʽLonely For Your Loveʼ, perfect for stomping your beer mug on the table) and another metal-tinged blues-rock growler (ʽEvil Windʼ, also «spoiled» a bit with the band's strange new passion for electronic percussion). The soft, folksy numbers are no­thing to write home about, but ʽEarly In The Morningʼ could almost be worthy of a contemporary Eric Clapton solo record — not that this should be a reason for rejoicing.

 

In any case, the album puts the band at an interesting crossroads: the incorporation of synthe­sizers, disco rhythms, and a puff of New Wave spirit does not disrupt the continuity — this is still very much a bona fide Bad Company record — and points a possible way at a marginally respec­table future. Why they preferred not to pursue it any further is beyond my comprehension. Maybe Paul Rodgers got cornered by one of the truck drivers. Maybe they experienced a nervous break­down seeing the «disco sucks» campaign unfurl at the very moment that they came forward with their first experiment in the genre. May be a million other reasons — the fact is, this is the only point in the «listenable» part of their timeline that they had a good chance to modernize their sound and remain relevant for the next decade. Then again, does it really surprise anyone that they ended up blowing it?

 

ROUGH DIAMONDS (1982)

 

1) Electricland; 2) Untie The Knot; 3) Nuthin' On The TV; 4) Painted Face; 5) Kickdown; 6) Ballad Of The Band; 7) Cross Country Boy; 8) Old Mexico; 9) Downhill Ryder; 10) Racetrack.

 

A completely misguided, fatal failure here. Apparently, the band was not «feeling well» in the ear­ly 1980s, due to personal problems, exhaustion, and, according to some sources, a certain dis­appointment in their image and the whole rock star thing, brought on by the deaths of labelmate John Bonham and soulmate (you wish) John Lennon. Thus, following up on their hearts' desires, they decided to make a more «personal», «darker» record than usual.

 

They forgot one important thing, though: dark and personal albums absolutely require musical genius in order to make their point. Just to select a few minor chords, sew them up in a traditio­nally honored way, and let Paul Rodgers take care of the rest won't do. But that is exactly how the band preferred  to behave anyway, dumping most of their «conquests» on Desolation Angels — all the disco and New Wave influences — in favor of the good old brand, without any interesting riffs but with a lot of feeling. Paul Rodgers isn't feeling too good, and he wants you to tear your sorry little ass out of the embraces of Thriller and know it. Obey!

 

Okay, it isn't really that gloomy. Actually, the album does veer between the usual mid-tempo not-so-hard-rock in the pangs of depression, and a set of cheerier, more evidently danceable R'n'B numbers with heavy emphasis on saxophone support, provided by guest star and one-time Boz Burrell's colleague in King Crimson, Mel Collins. On any other album most of these numbers would just look stupid, but here, stuff like ʽBallad Of The Bandʼ is at least a temporary respite from hearing Rodgers complain about life's treachery on interchangeable dreck like ʽKickdownʼ and ʽElectriclandʼ. (Yes, the former is a sincere lament built upon horror brought on by the Len­non murder. No, it isn't a good song at all. The very fact of Lennon's death did not exactly set off an extra wave of genius inspiration in people).

 

For objectivity's sakes, I can list a few scraps of relative goodness. John Cook's piano intro to ʽCross Country Boyʼ (apparently three or four seconds out of one hundred and seventy). The dumb, but sticky five-note riff in ʽDownhill Ryderʼ (but why the ʽyʼ?). Mick Ralphs' excellent slide guitar part on ʽRaceʼ — a last-moment set of gorgeously strung chords, totally wasted in the context of an otherwise pedestrian song on an otherwise pedestrian album. Not much, eh?

 

All right: for total objectivity, I must say that the overall sound of Rough Diamonds is fairly decent for a 1982 album. The new style of mainstream-oriented production had not yet taken over fully, and electronic support is used quite sparingly: a few synth parts here and there, but no at­tempt to let the robots take over the real men. On the other hand, in 1982 this couldn't be quali­fied as a brave, integrity-boosting artistic move. It just meant the new standards hadn't yet been fully established. By 1986, the band would catch on. In short, nothing saves Rough Diamonds from a predictable thumbs down — not even the fact that ʽElectriclandʼ scored relatively well on the single charts. Everything that had to do with Lennon's death scored well on the charts, so it doesn't really count.

 

FAME AND FORTUNE (1986)

 

1) Burning Up; 2) This Love; 3) Fame And Fortune; 4) That Girl; 5) Tell It Like It Is; 6) Long Walk; 7) Hold On My Heart; 8) Valerie; 9) When We Made Love; 10) If I'm Sleeping.

 

Had this band enjoyed a little less fame, and had I had a little more fortune, I would not be ob­liged to review this at all. But it so happened that, after the initial dissolution of Bad Company after Rough Diamonds, as Mick Ralphs and Simon Kirke were about to team up with ex-Nugent vocalist Brian Howe for just a little fun and a little cash, some thugs at Atlantic convinced them that the cash would be flowing far steadier if triggered by the good old moniker. Besides, how could 1986, arguably the worst year for commercially oriented music in the XXth century, begin and end without a Bad Company album?

 

Not that Fame And Fortune sounds anything like old time Bad Company. Instead, it sounds like new time Foreigner — no surprise, since it was produced by Foreigner's producer Keith Olsen. Thus, folksy and bluesy stylizations are mostly out, replaced by bombastic arena-rock. Heavy, but glossy-safe guitar riffs, crappy cheap keyboards all over the place (played by Gregg Dechert, whose only claim to fame so far was playing for Uriah Heep in 1980-81), electronic echo on the drums, and a generic pop vocalist with Siegfried-size ambitions. Whoo!

 

It goes without saying that there isn't a single song on here that even barely approaches «good». The only possible question is «in a better time and place, could any of these songs be better?» I am not sure. The riffs are fairly rotten, and the vocal melodies are mostly dependent on how much pathos the new singer guy is capable of generating. Considering that 99% of the time he flat out refuses to sing like a normal human being, I am not sure that replacing him with a Ray Davies could have saved the situation.

 

Particularly low points involve the power ballad ʽWhen We Made Loveʼ (on which Howe's little «rasp» seems even more annoying than usual); the awful teen pop send-up ʽThat Girlʼ (unless the chorus reall goes fat girl!, which is how I hear it every time, in which case it's self-ironic... nah, not really); and the humiliating ʽHold On My Heartʼ, a suspicious attempt to write something in the style of Born In The USA — except that it takes more than simply mimicking Bruce's brea­thy intonations to succeed.

 

The only track here that deserves half a grain of attention is ʽTell It Like It Isʼ, a rougher-edged rocker, generally unspoiled by keyboards and somewhat strengthened by a well-meaning sax backing. This one could be thought of as slightly watered-down, less focused and intense AC/DC, and in the context of all the chest-beating, synth-pumping dreck on here it almost feels like real rock'n'roll. Of course, there is still no reason to keep its memories in your head one hour after the fact. Useless, spiritually and intellectually offensive dreck. Even honest, hard-working truck dri­vers — the band's most faithful audience — acknowledged that at the time, judging by the charts. Total thumbs down.

 

DANGEROUS AGE (1988)

 

1) One Night; 2) Shake It Up; 3) No Smoke Without A Fire; 4) Bad Man; 5) Dangerous Age; 6) Dirty Boy; 7) Rock Of America; 8) Something About You; 9) The Way That It Goes; 10) Love Attack.

 

There must be one thing and one thing only that has determined the sound shift from Fame And Fortune to Dangerous Age, and it must have been the success of Aerosmith's Permanent Vaca­tion in the interim. Suddenly, it was mathematically proven that aging, no-longer-hip rockers could be cool with the primary record-buying crowd once again, as long as they filled out a sub­scription to cheesy pop-metal with an almost clownish approach to sex matters. And the most awesome thing about it: you don't even have to rely on synthesizers any more, because synthesi­zers do not prolong your male dignity to the same extent as Mr. Rawk Guitar.

 

So the first thing you get to see when you pick the album up is the title, and it has the word Dan­gerous on it. Dangerous? Bad Company? Even Paul Rodgers could only seem «dangerous» to a very, very bored housewife with pretty low-set standards of «danger», and Fame And Fortune was no more dangerous than Chris de Burgh. Then you put it on, and whoops, a blues-pop-metal riff explodes straight in your face. Then come the lyrics: "One night ain't no love affair, but I won't ask no more from you / One night with you anywhere, heaven knows what we can do". See? It's a song about a one-night stand. And Brian Howe really only asks to plug her once, like the good old-fashioned gentle­man he is, because he is a God-given gift to all the ladies. As long as they do their hair in 1988 fashion, enjoy Dirty Dancing, and have not already been chosen by Steve Tyler whose publicity advantages over Brian Howe are undeniable.

 

You have already understood, I gather, that, in between 1986 and 1988, Bad Company made the «smart» choice to shift from one sort of awfulness (bland, languid synth-rock) to another: metal-guitar-dominated cock-rock. «Smart» only in that this really helped them, on the heels of Aero­smith, to sell more copies: quality-wise, this shit is only marginally better than that shit, since the change gave the band more chances to work out some concentrated, precise riffage — most of which is still fairly rotten.

 

There is more to this than the riffs, though. If your goal is to present yourself to the rest of the world as some sort of orgasmic terror-inspiring sex god of hellfire, you have to know how to do it with humor and irony — qualities that were no enemies to Steve Tyler or Gene Simmons, but se­em fairly incompatible with Brian Howe and Mick Ralphs. Instead of truly sounding «dangerous», or at least «hilarious», the title track just sounds stupid. Chorus lines like "young girl has found her stage, watch out, she's a dangerous age" are delivered as if the singer is really warning you to watch out. Of course, the style was not invented in 1988; but it looks ever so dumber when it is dressed up in musical clichés of 1988 — its glossed-out metal sound, Big Terror Drums, and sa­tanic echo effects on the dude's voice.

 

Things can only get worse in a song that has the word «rock» in the title, and there it is: ʽRock Of Americaʼ, a certified «truck driver anthem» the likes of which this band had never stooped to be­fore. It's a good stimulus for punching your fist through the wall to the merry sounds of "I wanna ROCK!", but it isn't a frustration-venter, and what's the use of having to pay the repairman if you didn't even properly vent your frustation? If you really want to rock the rock of America, go climb Mount Rushmore or something.

 

Just like Permanent Vacation, this miserable imitation features just one schmaltzy ballad (ʽSomething About Youʼ, a song that even Diane Warren could never have written — I think she ge­nerally uses a couple more chords in her monstrosities), buried in a sea of Sex, No Drugs, and a Facsimile of Rock'n'Roll — a sea whose individual waves roll over and fade away so quickly, it hardly makes sense to mention them at all. Recommendable only for those who are curious about cross-breeding «classic» Bad Company with «classic» hair metal. Those who have better plans for their time can simply follow my thumbs down.

 

HOLY WATER (1990)

 

1) Holy Water; 2) Walk Through Fire; 3) Stranger Stranger; 4) If You Needed Somebody; 5) Fearless; 6) Lay Your Love On Me; 7) Boys Cry Tough; 8) With You In A Heartbeat; 9) I Don't Care; 10) Never Too Late; 11) Dead Of The Night; 12) I Can't Live Without You; 13) 100 Miles.

 

If Dangerous Age was Bad Company's Permanent Vacation, then Holy Water is its Pump. Of course the gross figures are incomparable, but look at the tendency: Fame And Fortune – US No. 106, Dangerous Age – US No. 58, and Holy Water going all the way up to No. 35! Hitting pla­tinum heights! And the title track going all the way up to No. 1! Holy water indeed!

 

Honestly, though, this next try is a little better cooked than the previous. There are all sorts of funny little rip-offs, from Aerosmith to Michael Jackson, that are fun to spot; the truck stop an­thems are gone (unfortunately, the power ballads are not); and the overall proportion of sticky riffs and quasi-fun singalong choruses has also increased. Basically, Holy Water is as good a pop metal record as this band would ever be capable of putting out — its «rootsiness» is long gone now, all of it squeezed out, filtered and concentrated in a brief two-minute long acoustic ditty that finishes the album on a most surprising note — drummer Simon Kirke's first lead vocal on a Bad Company record (and the guy actually shows more soul than Brian Howe, but somehow, that doesn't come off as such a big surprise for me). Other than those few seconds of hearkening back to the good old days when the rock of America absorbed its strength from the salt of the earth, it's all strictly under the rule of hair, hedonism, and high technologies.

 

But you gotta give hair and hedonism their due — those first ten seconds of ʽHoly Waterʼ really kick ass. That's one really mean bluesy guitar roar from Ralphs, and the song is genuinely im­pressive until it gets to the chorus, when it just becomes catchy, but loses the thunder-and-light­ning potential as the ballsy riffage gets lost behind the fruity vocal harmonies. But it isn't the only relative highlight: ʽStranger Strangerʼ opens out on another fine riff, and adds sharp slide lead work to its advantages; and even though ʽDead Of The Nightʼ is not about zombies, as I had ho­ped in utter vain, it is still dominated by guitar crunch rather than poppiness.

 

ʽFearlessʼ is odd, somewhat of a cross between generic AC/DC and the funky wobble of ʽ(Dude) Looks Like A Ladyʼ; ʽWith You In A Heartbeatʼ is more in the style of Jackson's ʽBeat Itʼ; but then the gentlemen get their revenge by previewing Genesis' ʽI Can't Danceʼ with ʽI Don't Careʼ (really, there is a curious similarity between the riffs, although probably not enough to override chances of sheer coincidence). All of this is silly rather than stunning — clumsy attempts at co­ming up with their own hard rock formula — but at least they had enough sense to cut down just a bit on the machismo angle, focusing less on the «nasty» lyrics and more on the riffs.

 

Still, don't get me wrong: the simple fact that Holy Water might be the peak of the Howe years does not mean it can be honestly recommended. Why listen to a bunch of mediocre old pros try to sound like Def Leppard when nobody has so far deleted the Def Leppard catalog? Why listen to an album where, in the first song, the singer tells you that he is walking on holy water, and then in the very next one, he already could walk through fire? If they themselves don't really know all that well what they are walking through, how can anyone else?.. Maybe they should have re­leased a Simon Kirke solo album itself. Somehow, "Hey little girl, I love you so, I'd walk a hund­red miles to let you know" sounds more humane here than everything before it.

 

HERE COMES TROUBLE (1992)

 

1) How About That; 2) Stranger Than Fiction; 3) Here Comes Trouble; 4) This Could Be The One; 5) Both Feet In The Water; 6) Take This Town; 7) What About You; 8) Little Angel; 9) Hold On To My Heart; 9) Brokenhearted; 10) My Only One.

 

Misery comes in different flavors, some of which are more tolerable than others. For their last al­bum with Brian Howe at the helm, Bad Company preferred to choose «Romantic Dung», which might explain why the album failed to go platinum — quite a few people out there prefer to ex­tract their ro­manticism out of other substances — but also might explain why, in the end, it did at least go gold — quite a few people out there are easily satisfied with said flavor.

 

At least the previous two albums could qualify as glossy, pop-metallized hard-rock; Here Comes Trouble, for the most part, consists of singalong feel-good arena anthems and «let-me-die-for-you-on-the-spot-every-night» power ballads. No idea what happened here, or why they suddenly felt the need to mutate the formula in this particular way — maybe the ongoing «grunge revolu­tion» simply threw them off balance, and they decided to cut down on the «hair metal» elements in the music. But in the end, what we are left with is no longer just «uninspiring», for the most part, it is simply «unlistenable».

 

The musicality of the big single ʽHow About Thatʼ extends to three notes in the riff and one silly old power chord in the chorus, the rest of the spotlight almost completely occupied by Mr. Howe pouring his tired old heart out — and ending each chorus with a raspy, «sexy» "how about that?" which does not even come across as provocative. Just pompous and annoying in its operatic op­timism (which might have sounded more convincing in a different musical setting).

 

«Heavy» songs on the album are limited to the title track — catchy, but riffless — and ʽBoth Feet In The Waterʼ, a little stronger in the riff department, but less catchy. Nobody needs them any­way, because Mick Ralphs must have slapped together those arrangements over a sandwich break or something. And at this particular juncture, titles like ʽLittle Angelʼ, ʽHold On To My Heartʼ, and ʽMy Only Oneʼ should probably speak for themselves (the latter in particular is a synth-led adult contemporary ballad whose first verse runs: "I miss you / I just can't resist you / I need you like the sun needs the day / Oh please, won't you come back again" and is delivered with all the seri­ousness of feeling you'd expect from a John Donne poem).

 

True enough, some of the choruses are catchy — ʽHere Comes Troubleʼ and ʽTake This Townʼ were written as singalong audience baits, and they work that way. But the music they are equip­ped with is almost non-existent, and raises the old issues of «adequacy» and «entertainment vs. art» and what-not. Maybe if they had thought about reinventing themselves as a bona fide power pop band, with legit, non-trivial guitar melodies, tonal variety, unpredictable overdubs etc., these and other songs could have fared better. Instead, this is rote, banal, instantly forgettable corporate rock that does not even do justice to the best of the Brian Howe years, let alone Paul Rodgers. Avoid, avoid — probably their weakest offering since Fame And Fortune; thumbs down all the way and then some.

 

WHAT YOU HEAR IS WHAT YOU GET (1993)

 

1) How About That; 2) Holy Water; 3) Rock'n'Roll Fantasy; 4) If You Needed Somebody; 5) Here Comes Trouble; 6) Ready For Love; 7) Shooting Star; 8) No Smoke Without A Fire; 9) Feel Like Makin' Love; 10) Take This Town; 11) Movin' On; 12) Good Lovin' Gone Bad; 13) Fist Full Of Blisters; 14) Can't Get Enough; 15) Bad Company.

 

It is curious, actually, that Bad Company never released a live album while still in their prime — one of the very few 1970s’ hard rock bands to do so, or so it seems. This was probably acciden­tal, but it might also have something to do with the fact that, simply put, they were never a particular­ly interesting live band (not that they ever were a particularly interesting studio band, for that mat­ter, but hey, it’s always up to you if you want to suck twice, rather than once) — and they may have subconsciously felt it themselves. They certainly gave the fans their money’s worth, but they never felt the pressure to pay any interest.

 

All the more strange is this decision to finally come forth with a live album in 1993 — more than an entire decade after they’d already shred the last vestiges of relevance. Recorded at various ve­nues on the 1992 tour of America, the sternly titled What You Hear Is What You Get, subtitled The Best Of Bad Company (not necessarily so, if you take a glance at the setlist), seems to have but one reason for existence — other than ensuring a little extra cash flow — and that reason is to satisfy our curiosity in one department: how well does Brian Howe handle «classic» Rodgers era material? The predictable choice is between «barely tolerable» and «Godawful», of  course, but still, that curiosity is not going away all by itself, so the record warrants at least one listen.

 

I have to admit that, for the most part, it’s okay. Howe cannot handle the subtlety where subtlety is needed most of all — the most glaring fuck-up is on ʽReady For Loveʼ, a song that was, from the very beginning, very much «made» by Paul drawing out the “I want you to stay.... I want you today” passage with a bit of subliminal howling, nursing a dangerously affected libido. Howe just does not «get» it, and cannot convey this sexual torment that Rodgers captured so well. But on the rockers (ʽGood Lovin’ Gone Badʼ, ʽCan’t Get Enoughʼ) he is way more successful, and at least there is no denying the professionalism — you can hate his tone, or his volume, or his path­etic overtones, but he does hit the right notes, and when they are stuck on good songs, well... the fans did get their money’s worth.

 

The main problem is with the setlist, which simply features way too many «hits» from recent al­bums, including the lacklustre Here Comes Trouble which they were promoting on that tour — hilariously, the announcer yells «ARE YOU READY FOR SOME TROUBLE?» at the start of the show and then the band launches into ʽHow About Thatʼ, arguably the friendliest and most toothless tune of them all. Furthermore, not all of the songs stand to their studio counterparts — for instance, the Zeppelinish bluesy riff rage of ʽHoly Waterʼ is oddly compressed, as if the rhythm gui­tarist just didn’t see fit to play all the extra notes (this is probably because Ralphs played both the rhythm and the lead parts on the studio original, whereas here all the rhythm du­ties go to Dave Colwell, a pretty bland player even for the usual level of Bad Company).

 

On the other hand, it is Ralphs’ and nobody else’s fault that the original cool psychedelic guitar swoops on the coda of ʽFeel Like Makin’ Loveʼ have been replaced by muffled, low-pitched guitar grum­bling that deprives the song of its impressive metamorphosis. Now it’s just a song about feelin’ like makin’ love. Were you a Bad Company fan in 1992? Did you pay to see them just to hear a song about feelin’ like makin’ love? Do you give the slightest damn about the band compressing the pleasant little subtleties into a monolithic leaden sound? If you do, remember the title of this record and stay away from it.

 

If you don’t, well, the only really bad song on here is ʽIf You Needed Somebodyʼ (and we can excuse them for it — what is a mainstream rock’n’roll band without a power ballad?), and the only laughable «track» is ʽFist Full Of Blistersʼ, a one-minute long drum solo from Simon Kirke who handles drum solos with about as much love for them as Ringo, to whom the title is alluding. But maybe he was able to get a bit more royalties that way. Drummers all over the world, remem­ber — if you do drum solos, insist on having them credited to yourselves and occupying a sepa­rate track. Best guarantee of not ending up in the gutter.

 

Other than that, it’s all moderately competent; there just isn’t any need to listen to any of it. Par­ticularly now that the archives have finally cracked, and true fans of the band have easy access to hearing the band live in its «prime» (Live At Albuquerque ’76). I cannot bring myself to be­stow­ing the «true fan» label on admirers of Brian Howe, but I do know that such peculiar gents do exist — for them, this record is a must, since their idol works as hard as he can on stage. It’s just that «hard work» and «adequate performance» do not always coincide.

 

COMPANY OF STRANGERS (1995)

 

1) Company Of Strangers; 2) Clearwater Highway; 3) Judas My Brother; 4) Little Martha; 5) Gimme Gimme; 6) Where I Belong; 7) Down Down Down; 8) Abandoned And Alone; 9) Down And Dirty; 10) Pretty Woman; 11) You're The Only Reason; 12) Dance With The Devil; 13) Loving You Out Loud.

 

Believe it or not, but this is a genuine «comeback». A whole decade after they had broken their allegiance to roots-based hard rock, trading in the salt-of-the-earth aura for hair metal posturing and bland pop hooks, Bad Company are on the right trail again! Goodbye, Brian Howe; hello, Ro­bert Hart, a singer who sounds not at all unlike Paul Rodgers, and who, along with his voice, brings pack the old predilection for country-rock, acoustic guitars, barroom boogie, and, well, everything you need to try and wipe out the memory of that awful last decade.

 

There is but one problem: the songs, with not a single exception, leave a uniform impression of «uh? what was that?». The sound is perfectly decent — not overproduced, stylishly retroish, quite compatible with what they did in the 1970s. But the vocal and instrumental melodies are every bit as good/bad as the hundreds of «authentic country-rock» records with a hard edge thrown on the mar­ket every year. And even worse, there is a clear feeling that the band has consciously set the mode to «nostalgia»: "Let us make a record the way we used to!"

 

Because, somehow, I cannot get the same kicks out of something like ʽAbandoned And Aloneʼ the same way the kicks were coming from some of the Rodgers-era «despair» songs. They have everything here: a singer ready to rasp his guts out, Mick Ralphs in the mood for shrill blueswai­ling, a classic build-up from tense, moody, quiet verse to screechy chorus — but there is no desire to try and hook your own emotions up to the song, because it still comes out hollow. I don't know why. ʽJudas My Brotherʼ tries to bare the band's soul in an even more obvious manner (the title alone suggests a shirt-ripping tear-jerker), but its power chords are by now tired rehashings, and its painfully stressed chorus is a stale cliché. Maybe in a different age these tunes would have sounded more involving.

 

But in this age, it's, you know, mostly stuff you expect to encounter in truck commercials. Too safe, too predictable, too bland (even for a Bad Company album). ʽClearwater Highwayʼ has an odd shade of CCR to it — ʽClearwaterʼ in the title may be a conscious hint, but Hart's vocals on the chorus are very much in a Fogerty style, and the whole thing seems influenced by the likes of ʽSweet Hitch-Hikerʼ, which is a bit silly, but at least turns it into a marginal standout. The rest al­ternates between country ballads and barroom rockers without any staying power.

 

Still, as the last ever Bad Company album consisting entirely of new studio material, Company Of Strangers is a half-decent way of going out — even the title somehow alludes to them co­ming round full circle, and, indeed, all major fans of the «classic» Rodgers era that jumped ship as soon as Howe came aboard should feel free to scrape this one off the walls of used bins with­out feeling the slightest pang of guilt. If there ever was such a thing as «Bad Company magic» (well, at least when the gruff riff of ʽRock Steadyʼ is combined with Rodgers' singing, it does come close), it is probably not rekindlable any more, not even if they bring Boz Burrell back from the dead. But at least it is possible to make another Bad Company record that does not sound as if it came from a bunch of miserable clowns, applying for whatever job there is to earn one last buck. In that respect, it is a comeback — to the state of «satisfactory boredom».

 

STORIES TOLD & UNTOLD (1996)

 

1) One On One; 2) Oh, Atlanta; 3) You're Never Alone; 4) I Still Believe In You; 5) Ready For Love; 6) Waiting On Love; 7) Can't Get Enough; 8) Is That All There Is To Love; 9) Love So Strong; 10) Silver, Blue & Gold; 11) Down­pour In Cairo; 12) Shooting Star; 13) Simple Man; 14) Weep No More.

 

There can only be two motives behind the production of this kind of album, and neither of the two is particularly cheerful. One is that you just don't have enough creative energy in you any more to pro­duce an entire LP of new material, and have to resort to re-recording old standards out of plain old desperation. Another one is that, deep down inside, you instinctively feel that your new material is not up to par — mildly speaking — and that it would be a good commercial move to somehow «legitimize» it by mixing it up with classic, sanctified material.

 

My personal feeling is that Stories Told & Untold must be a combination of the two, because these new songs really, really suck. They do try to continue the «rootsy revival» of Company Of Strangers, but with a deeper nod to adult contemporary this time: except for the opening number, ʽOne On Oneʼ, whose riff sounds gritty enough for about five seconds before you realize it has been shamelessly lifted from the Stones' ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockingʼ, everything else is in the deeply sentimental vein and hopelessly generic. ʽWaiting On Loveʼ and ʽDownpour In Cairoʼ, with slightly more down-to-earth arrangements, are listenable if,perchance, encountered on a modern country rock radio station. Everything else is disgusting plastic soul pathos.

 

Surely against a background like this the old classics must sound revitalized and refreshing — es­pecially considering that the band was so intensely pushing forward Robert Hart's «new Paul Rod­gers» image. And for the most part, he is doing a fine job on the old tunes: I personally find his tone a little bit more «grayish» than Rodgers', but that's a purely subjective feeling. The real problem, of course, is that the re-recordings slavishly follow the original versions, and when they do not, it actually gets worse — for instance, setting the entire first verse of ʽReady For Loveʼ to a minimalistic «unplugged» setting simply deprives it of one minute of enjoyment (the deeply melancholic rhythmic arrangement of the original was one of its major assets). ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ also gets a laid-back acoustic basis, but it's not as if the entire idea was to make an «un­plugged» version of Bad Company's biggest hits — it just sort of happened that way, with the old bite surreptitiously taken out of the arrangements. And these horn overdubs on ʽWeep No Moreʼ? No, can't say that I'm a fan.

 

No big surprise that much of the material here was recorded in Nashville and featured cameos from contemporary country-rock stars, since it is contemporary country-rock: professional, clean, formulaic, and deadly dull. It is true that replacing Howe with Hart made Bad Company sound more like Bad Company, but the price was that they sort of became the wax facsimile of what they used to be, and who really needs that? Thumbs down for this whole cheesy business — not even the regular fans were fooled, and Stories Told & Untold became even more of a commer­cial bomb than Company Of Strangers.

 

MERCHANTS OF COOL (2002)

 

1) Burnin' Sky; 2) Can't Get Enough; 3) Feel Like Makin' Love; 4) Rock Steady; 5) Movin' On; 6) Deal With The Preacher; 7) Ready For Love; 8) Rock And Roll Fantasy; 9) All Right Now; 10) Bad Company; 11) Silver, Blue And Gold; 12) Shooting Star; 13) Joe Fabulous; 14) Saving Grace.

 

And now we know who is really the heart and soul, the kernel and pivot of Bad Company: drum­mer Simon Kirke, the only irreplaceable member of the band. It is the year 2002 and things have changed, and how. After a brief reunion of the original Bad Company in 1998, resulting in a total of two new songs released on a new compilation of old hits, Ralphs and Burrell left the band for good, but Rodgers and Kirke decided to carry on, with the help of Dave Colwell on guitar (who had already backed Ralphs on several albums in the Howe / Hart era) and Jaz Lochrie on bass.

 

So what we have here is basically «Paul Rodgers & Piss-Poor Company», playing a live selection of Bad Company's greatest hits (1974-1979), one classic Free track — which does not hurt, since ʽAll Right Nowʼ, in style and mood, could very well be considered the true progenitor of Bad Company — and two new studio recordings, supposed to carry on the flames of old. The new band does take itself pretty seriously, as the album title (directly incorporated into the lyrics of ʽJoe Fabulousʼ) implies. But do we need to follow the implications?

 

Well, at the very least Paul Rodgers is still in fine voice, as you would probably expect from a lead singer who (a) did relatively little over several decades to blow it to pieces and (b) was never famous for a wide-reaching range anyway. He does seem to lose a bit of the smoothness and «in­telligence of phrasing» of old, but that might simply be due to the live context, where these things can be lost at any time. Other than that, it's okay.

 

What is not okay is that Dave Colwell is no Mick Ralphs, and although he does a technically res­pectable job of learning all the required parts, his guitar tones are blander, and his inventiveness equals near-zero. He is not helped out too much by Rodgers, either: check Live In Albuquerque from 1976, where Rodgers is handling rhythm guitar while Ralphs delivers a blazing solo at the end of ʽFeel Like Makin' Loveʼ — on Merchants Of Cool, Colwell just plays the old Who-rip­ped-off-riff over and over again. Most of the melodies are set to the same grayish distorted tone, often «smudging» the precise riffage of the original tunes, so you don't even get to enjoy what little there originally was of a composing talent of the band. You do get to headbang, though, and maybe that's what is more important in a live setting — who knows.

 

«Surprise» elements are quite few. There is an audience participation bit in ʽShooting Starʼ where Rodgers makes the crowd sing not just the chorus, but even an occasional verse (personally, I'd be deeply embarrassed caught knowing an entire Bad Company song by heart, but then again, I wasn't there). ʽAll Right Nowʼ gets an unimpressive bass solo in the middle. And ʽRock And Roll Fantasyʼ, after an announcement of "I'll take you to a land you've never seen, come dream with me", flows into a short medley of Beatles songs — with ʽTicket To Rideʼ and ʽI Feel Fineʼ ma­king guest appearances, even though the announcement would rather make one think of Sgt. Pep­per or Yellow Submarine. Actually, the gesture feels nice rather than corny, even if all the songs, be it the Bad Company original or the Beatles covers, are set by Colwell to more or less the same guitar melody. Makes one think, doesn't it?

 

The two new tracks are nothing special, but they are better than the Howe / Hart stuff — nicer, old-school guitar tones, less country-rock-radio-oriented hooks, and Rodgers on vocals. If this is where the official studio history of Bad Company is supposed to end, it is better to see it end with ʽJoe Fabulousʼ than with Stories Told & Untold, no question about that. And then it is probably better to just have them around as an oldies act — in all fairness, they should have stopped polluting the planet with new «creations» right after 1979, as the setlist of Merchants Of Cool more or less implies on its own. That is the policy to which Bad Company have been adhering ever since Rodgers reclaimed the label, although it should be noted that quite a few different «Bad Companies» have circled the globe in the 2000s, including a «Mick Ralphs' Bad Company» with Hart on vocals — so don't forget to check the billing closely if you find a «Bad Company» doing a local gig in your backyard or something: you might just as well get a Hart / Colwell expe­rience, which is the last thing anyone in this world really needs.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE IN ALBUQUERQUE (1976; 2006)

 

1) Live For The Music; 2) Good Lovin' Gone Bad; 3) Deal With The Preacher; 4) Ready For Love; 5) Wild Fire Wo­man; 6) Young Blood; 7) Sweet Little Sister; 8) Simple Man; 9) Shooting Star; 10) Seagull; 11) Run With The Pack; 12) Feel Like Making Love; 13) Rock Steady; 14) Honey Child; 15) Can't Get Enough; 16) Bad Company.

 

The «Bad Company Archives» are hardly the merriest place on Earth to spend one's free time, but on this particular occasion at least, they might be worth a brief visit — in 2006, Mick Ralphs fi­nally got around to cracking the vaults, within which he had stored a large amount of live shows taped from the band's classic era, and selecting for release this lengthy concert, played on March 3, 1976, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the time when Bad Company's successful run had al­rea­dy begun to lose steam and purpose (ʽYoung Bloodʼ — "it's a silly tune, really, but we like it", Rodgers admits right in front of the hardcore New Mexican audience), but the setlist still con­sis­ted of catchy tunes, and the energy level had not yet sunk below «optimistic». Unfortunately, soon after the original release, Live In Albuquerque was pulled from the shelves for obscure «licensing rea­sons», never properly explained in any press releases, and the 2-CD package is somewhat of a collectible item today — of course, in our modern age, this does not automatically surmise «un­avai­lability», especially considering how many Paul Rodgers fans are still out there.

 

But is it worth searching for? Surprisingly, yes. At the height of their powers and influence (a fairly modest height, but still...), Bad Company actually did follow the golden rule of hard rock bands: polished and, consequently, somewhat restrained in the studio, lean, mean and dirty in a live setting. This isn't necessarily a good thing for Paul, whose secret weapon has always been the subtlety of phrasing, and in the live setting, especially if he has to play something while singing, it is very hard to keep that subtlety. But it is a great thing for Mick Ralphs, who, after all, initially made his reputation with Mott The Hoople as one of the grittiest rock'n'roll players of the 1970s, and on Live In Albuquerque, he has plenty of opportunities to confirm that status.

 

No surprise that he was the chief culprit behind the album's release — of all the original players, Ralphs gains the most from making it public. Boz has always been «just a bass player», no excep­tions ever. Simon Kirke is a good enough drummer and that's that (he is given a little «solo» at the beginning of ʽRock Steadyʼ, which is quite pathetic — it would be much better not to draw special attention to him at all). Rodgers is decent, but, as I said, his charisma works fullest in the studio. But Ralphs? Listen to him go on the final barroom boogie numbers: this version of ʽHo­ney Childʼ, had it only been a little bit faster, could give AC/DC a good run for their money (ac­tually, parts of the instrumental jam bit sound uncannily like AC/DC's live arrangements of ʽHigh Voltageʼ — that is, before Ralphs rips into the riff of the bridge section of ʽJumpin' Jack Flashʼ), and ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ, as soon as you get through the obligatory audience participation bit, be­comes a rock'n'roll fiesta that no lover of rock'n'roll could honestly despise.

 

The best thing about the album, really, is the setlist — it doesn't just consist of the band's cat­chiest hits, it also emphasizes those particular hits that have the most rocking potential. The only non-rockers are ʽSimple Manʼ — a nasty blight, but they did need to play some songs off their freshly released third album — and ʽSeagullʼ, performed to let the rhythm section take a short toilet break. Everything else is non-stop rock'n'roll ranging from the passable to the excellent (this version of ʽRock Steadyʼ almost ends up beating the studio original, were it not for several flub­bed vocal lines on Paul's part).

 

And yes, there are quite a few kick-ass live rock'n'roll albums that put Bad Company to shame in terms of technique, loudness, speed, and creativity, but that is not the point here — the point is to show that, after all has been said and done, Bad Company were still a legit rock'n'roll band rather than some sort of 1970s-bred perversion of the correct image. These performances show that they did have as much spirit as Slade, AC/DC, Aerosmith — any of those baddest boys of their era — even if their act was «cleaner» and targeted at less risk-taking audiences. In a way, Live In Albu­querque is reassuring — there is nothing wrong with guarding those Rodgers-era B.C. records on your shelves, they have their marketing flaws, but it's not as if these guys are just phoney clowns or arrogantly crass money-makers.

 

Actually, if the latter were the case, I think they would have put this album on the market a long time ago — indeed, 1976 was the year when it should have come out, propping up the band's re­putation that had already started wobbling. But even today is not too late, particularly with the aid of some extra thumbs up from people whose judgement you can trust (wink, wink). In any case, the whole thing is much better — sharper, crisper, louder, reckless-er — than those come-lately live albums from the Howe era, or Merchants Of Cool which is not really Bad Company; it takes a Live In Albuquerque to clearly show that a Bad Company without Ralphs at the helm is really Bum Company.

BADFINGER

MAGIC CHRISTIAN MUSIC (1970)

 

1) Come And Get It; 2) Crimson Ship; 3) Dear Angie; 4) Fisherman; 5) Midnight Sun; 6) Beautiful And Blue; 7) Rock Of All Ages; 8) Carry On Till Tomorrow; 9) I'm In Love; 10) Walk Out In The Rain; 11) Angelique; 12) Knocking Down Our Home; 13) Give It A Try; 14) Maybe Tomorrow; 15*) Storm In A Teacup; 16*) Arthur.

 

A bizarre title. This is pretty good music, here on Badfinger's debut album, but it could hardly be called «magic», and it's certainly not very Christian, either. So perhaps it is really the soundtrack to The Magic Christian, an eccentric black comedy from 1969 featuring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr? Not really, since only three songs out of fourteen were actually used in the movie: ʽCarry On Till Tomorrowʼ, ʽRock Of All Agesʼ, and ʽCome And Get Itʼ — all three songs produced by Paul McCartney, and the latter one actually written by McCartney, and, as the now-available de­mo version on the Beatles' Anthology 3 clearly shows, recorded following McCartney's original arrangement and instructions to a tee.

 

Of the remaining 11 songs, 7 were taken by Apple Records directly off the poorly promoted LP Maybe Tomorrow, which Badfinger released in 1969 when they were still going around as The Iveys; and only 4 were newly written by the band members. Still, the results are not really as cha­otic as they could seem — in the early years at least, Badfinger had a pretty steady style of pop songwriting, and as for production values, there is relatively small difference here between the styles of Paul McCartney or Tony Visconti, who produced the early Iveys material: maybe be­cause both of them were still relatively inexperienced in the tricky art of production, and for the most part, let the dogs run free wherever they wanted to.

 

Anyway, it is best to forget about any phantom «soundtrack» connections (there actually was an entirely different, much more obscure «proper» soundtrack to The Magic Christian) and just treat this as a standard debut album, especially since it's a very good debut album. Guitarist Pete Ham and guitar / bass player Tom Evans emerge as chief songwriters (although early member and bass player Ron Grif­fiths' sole contribution, ʽDear Angieʼ, is among the catchiest tunes here as well), and they already try their hands at different varieties of the pop sound.

 

ʽCome And Get Itʼ, typically of any McCartney-colored song of the era, became a big hit for the boys, although Paul had a very good reason for not leaving the tune for himself — it very clearly sounds underwritten and unfinished, and he probably just could not find the proper way to turn it into something truly Beatles-worthy, so he just decided to leave it at a «Badfinger-worthy» stage. It's basically just one verse and a «semi-chorus» (you sort of expect a second half after the "...will you walk away from a fool and his money?" line, but it never comes), repeated several times — with a melodic hook strong enough to trigger a mild attack of beatlemania and guarantee sales, but not strong enough to bring a sense of completion to the song, so that I cannot even state that ʽCome And Get Itʼ is the best song on the record.

 

Although, granted, it is pretty hard to single out any highlights. Both Ham and Evans were sym­pathetic, innocent, romantic boys with a deep love for «pop beauty» and a good understanding of rock'n'roll, even if they were always much too «clean» and «pretty» to be able to rock out along with the best of 'em. There is exactly one bona fide «rock'n'roll» number on the album — ʽRock Of All Agesʼ, which sounds almost exactly like classic Slade, right down to the throat-bursting vocals (the likes of which are usually expected to come from Scotland), and it kicks plenty of ass, but its barroom boogie atmosphere feels quite out of place on the album (although, as an under­cover admirer of the barroom boogie atmosphere, boy am I glad it's there!). Every other track where you hear heavy distorted riffage — ʽMidnight Sunʼ and ʽGive It A Tryʼ, in particular — is in the «power-pop» vein: although Badfinger did not necessarily pioneer the synthesis of Britpoppy hooks with heavy guitar sound, it is also true that ʽMidnight Sunʼ, almost gloating over that synthesis, sounds like nothing else from 1970, when most people were concerned about ma­king an ultimate choice between the «hard» and «soft» camps.

 

On the other hand, without displaying any aversion towards distorted guitars, Badfinger's prefer­red means of expression is still a folkish vibe, best served with a mild touch of psychedelia, as on ʽBeautiful And Blueʼ, the album's finest, most delicate ballad, built on a complex contrast be­tween at least three different guitar tones (one hard-rocking, one psychedelic, one country-rock­ish) and a strings arrangement on top. Songs like these derail the stereotype of Badfinger as «Beatles-lite» (as well as it could be supported by the likes of ʽCome And Get Itʼ) — unlike the Beatles, Badfinger were never as experimental and unpredictable in the studio, but their arrangements, even though always sticking to time-approved instruments, could be equally complex and varie­gated if they really wanted to.

 

At the other end of the anything-but-monotonous spectrum is ʽCarry On Till Tomorrowʼ, starting out nice, quiet, acoustic, lightly sprayed with high-pitched harmonies, but eventually building up towards a set of orchestral crescendos and powerful electric solos that almost presage the emer­gence of ʽStairway To Heavenʼ (except that Badfinger, at this point at least, preferred to stay on the optimistic side and not share the burden of all the griefs and sorrows of humanity).

 

And in between these mini-epic, homebrewed-grand highlights, we get pretty ditties a-plenty — unless the concept of a «pop song» as such annoys you, ʽDear Angieʼ, ʽI'm In Loveʼ, and ʽGive It A Tryʼ are all charming little catchy trifles, and the boys' slightly parodic attempt at writing some­thing in the musical genre (ʽKnocking Down Our Homeʼ) is a bit kitschy, but works due to their «angelic» harmonization.

 

In short, do not be fooled by the title of the album or its patchy reputation: assembled as it is from several various sources, it already shows all the strengths of Badfinger, even though some of the craft still remained to be perfected, and some extra seriousness and depth still had to be attained. It simply happened to become very quickly overshadowed by No Dice, seen as the «proper» de­but for the band — a little unjust, I'd say, considering that there is not a single genuine misstep on Magic Christian. So we will decisively disregard the gesture on the album sleeve and raise our thumbs up instead.

 

NO DICE (1970)

 

1) I Can't Take It; 2) I Don't Mind; 3) Love Me Do; 4) Midnight Caller; 5) No Matter What; 6) Without You; 7) Blod­wyn; 8) Better Days; 9) It Had To Be; 10) Watford John; 11) Believe Me; 12) We're For The Dark; 13*) Get Down; 14*) Friends Are Hard To Find; 15*) Mean Mean Jemima; 16*) Loving You; 17*) I'll Be The One.

 

It is easy to see why this record is generally seen as Badfinger's «proper» debut. It is their first al­bum with a stable lineup, as Joey Molland replaces Ron Griffiths, with Tom Evans switching to bass duties — and all four members of the band sharing songwriting duties, while no longer ac­cepting donations from outside songwriters (not that they were offered any: by this time, Paul McCartney had his own solo career and could keep all of his non-Beatle-worthy trifles for him­self if he wanted them to appear at all). Furthermore, all the songs were written and recorded wi­thin a limited time period, with the sole purpose of forming a coherent cycle.

 

And that they do. On No Dice, Badfinger are a perfectly competent, self-assured pop band with one edge very faintly touching the hard-rock scene and the other one reaching out to folk- and country-rock. They are not Beatles clones — even though the album is full to the brim of consci­ous and subconscious Beatles references and quotations, No Dice was made out of love for mu­sic, not just out of the realization that «wouldn't that be cool to be the next Beatles?»

 

Badfinger did inherit some of the elements of the early Beatles' spirit ­— a propensity to keep it simple (occasionally, simplistic, but we will have to cope with the fact that the songwriting cali­ber of these lads was a little less impressive than that of John/Paul and even George), a predilec­tion for idealistic sentimentality, and a penchant for expressing loneliness in music. But all these things seemed to come quite naturally to the band members — they were lonely, idealistic, unso­phisticated senti­mentalists, born to create lonely, idealistic, unsophisticated melodies.

 

And therefore, even their «rip-offs» are perfectly forgivable. ʽBelieve Meʼ steals half a hook from Paul's ʽOh Darlingʼ, but steers further proceedings into a soft, ironic, «homely» direction instead of the deep soul tragedy of its main source of inspiration. The chorus of the bonus outtake ʽI'll Be The Oneʼ accidentally (?) coincides with "eight days a week...", but the arrangement of the song is far more «rootsy» than the Beatles usually allowed themselves. And Joey Molland's ʽLove Me Doʼ shamelessly steals its title from one of the Beatles' first songs and almost lifts the basic rhythm from one of their last ones (ʽGet Backʼ), but did the Beatles ever have those crunchy rhythm chords and loud, dynamic, distorted boogie solos on their songs? Not these ones, they didn't, if only because these ones bear the mark of the next musical decade upon them.

 

The hit single ʽNo Matter Whatʼ is usually singled out as the major highlight of the album, al­though the lead-in number, ʽI Can't Take Itʼ, could be just as representative of Badfinger's brand of power pop — it's just that ʽNo Matter Whatʼ has this instantly captivating monster riff and a strong atmosphere of gallant chivalry about it (speaking in Beatles terms, its chief inspiration would probably be ʽAnytime At Allʼ), whereas ʽI Can't Take Itʼ is a bit more diffuse and does not wear its heart on its sleeve. Over time, though, both songs should be able to take their rightful stand in the "power pop laureates" corner of the museum — ʽI Can't Take Itʼ, in particular, could serve on its own as the blueprint for most of Cheap Trick's career.

 

At the same time, Badfinger show excellent skill at exploring the depths of the human heart as well. ʽMidnight Callerʼ is a ballad written in strict accordance with the McCartney recipé — sim­ple, but moving piano chords, «humanistic» vocal modulation, and sincere pity for the protago­nist à la ʽFor No Oneʼ. Like McCartney when he's at his worst, though, the song sounds disap­pointingly unfinished — "...she unlocks the door and there's no one there..." is a fairly weak re­solution for the bridge, and, overall, the song seems one or two musical ideas too short, and the exploration of the human heart remains inconclusive.

 

Whereas ʽWithout Youʼ, a song that I would like to like less than ʽMidnight Callerʼ, preferring lonely melancholy over grand sentimentalism, is certainly one of the most «conclusive» Badfin­ger songs ever, and this version, despite Harry Nilsson's solid job with it several years later, still remains the definitive one for me (granted, there have been many covers since, and the only other one I know of belongs to Mariah Carey — no comments here). One can shed a river of tears to it, or engage in four minutes worth of Bic-flickering, but what I like most about it is: (a) Tom Evans' subtle bass work on the acoustic intro, especially the moment at 0:39 into the song where his syncopated minimalism morphs into full phrasing; (b) the equally minimalistic beauty of the gui­tar solo, again, clearly influenced by Harrison's style but not necessarily following any particular «Harrison-esque» chord layout. These are among the elements that provide ʽWithout Youʼ with integrity and even «grit», saving it from tumbling into a sea of cheap soft-rock mush — a sea that usually eagerly waits for every song whose chorus goes "I can't live, if living is without you". (At the bottom of this sea, you'll find Mariah Carey waiting for you).

 

If there is anything close to a glaring misstep on the album, it might be ʽWatford Johnʼ — that one time when Badfinger are not trying to be themselves (by «being the next Beatles»), but in­stead try to be... Elvis. (With even a «teddy bear» reference in the lyrics). As long as you keep yourself from realizing that fact, the piece works as a bit of generic boogie, but eventually it just becomes sad, particularly since Badfinger can rock — as long as they do not dress their rock and roll in the clothes of a rockabilly revival. ʽLove Me Doʼ, snappy and modern as it is, works very well; ʽWatford Johnʼ is a near-parodic send-up that doesn't.

 

But all in all, beginning with the muscular power-pop of ʽI Can't Take Itʼ and ending with the pretty acoustic balladry of Pete Ham's ʽWe're For The Darkʼ (a perennial fan favorite, although I still find the melody somewhat flat), No Dice is the ideal «unpretentious pop album» for 1970 — and marks a brief moment of good time for Badfinger, when the band really had a chance to make it on the strength of their singles; a chance blown away almost entirely due to the incompetence and greed of their management. Not a masterpiece — mainly because the ratio of «cool ideas» per song is too small — but a very solid thumbs up all the same. And the bonus outtakes on the CD edition are well worth taking in as well.

 

STRAIGHT UP (1971)

 

1) Take It All; 2) Baby Blue; 3) Money; 4) Flying; 5) I'd Die Babe; 6) Name Of The Game; 7) Suitcase; 8) Sweet Tuesday Morning; 9) Day After Day; 10) Sometimes; 11) Perfection; 12) It's Over.

 

There is clearly a certain distance that separates Straight Up from No Dice, but it is hard to ex­press it in words — with the solid, but not spectacular consistency of Badfinger through those five years during which the band members somehow managed not to hang themselves, it takes a little getting used to their style in order to spot the evolution.

 

It might have something to do with the experience that the band gained from playing on Harri­son's All Things Must Pass: Straight Up seems to aspire to bigger pop heights, sometimes even to «epic» heights, as if George and Phil Spector somehow showed these kids the light, and the light quickly led them away from the well-focused, but thin sound of No Dice. This is not neces­sarily a good thing.

 

On one hand, it does result in a more consistent listening experience — not only is there not a single utter embarrassment here, like ʽWatford Johnʼ, there are also fewer straightforward «Beat­lisms», with the band striving further and further towards their own identity. But on the other one — surprisingly, there's always that other one — this does come at the expense of some of the «pure fun» quotient. Here, Badfinger are getting more serious, more philosophical, more pensive and gloomy, and no matter how hard you try to tackle the «power pop» tag on Straight Up, it always seems to come off in a matter of minutes. ʽI Can't Take Itʼ and ʽNo Matter Whatʼ — there's your power-pop: happy crunchy riffs and life-asserting choruses. These songs are more like «epic folk-pop» or something.

 

The original Straight Up was rejected by Apple, allegedly at the instigation of Harrison himself, and for good reason: the recordings, some of which are now available as bonus tracks on the CD release, sound like demos — with the song structures, lyrics, and melodies fully worked out, but the production and playing leave quite a lot to be desired. Harrison volunteered to produce the new sessions himself, and even ended up playing on a few tracks (he is distinctly credited for a guitar duet with Pete Ham on ʽDay After Dayʼ), but eventually fell out of the project because of the Concert for Bangladesh — where Badfinger actually backed him to return the favor, earning some ambiguous onstage praise from George ("I don't know if they're coming through on the acoustic guitars", quoth George during the band introduction part).

 

So Todd Rundgren was brought in to complete the sessions, and a fine job he did, with a thick, heavy, and at the same time crisp / sharp production style — re-injecting as much basic pop rock ener­gy as possible into what began life as a somewhat limp folk-pop exercise. Whether this hel­ped the band commercially is hard to guess: both Straight Up and its singles did moderately well on the charts — ʽDay After Dayʼ even broke them into the US Top 5 — but, on the whole, sales and chart positions could hardly be called impressive. There was nothing «titillating» about this kind of music, be it from a T. Rex, Led Zep, or Jethro Tull point of view; and the lack of a gol­den-voiced singer prevented the band from hitting it with the housewives, either. (I do have to say that quite a few of these here songs could have used a different vocal approach — Pete Ham bra­vely, but pointlessly sacrificing his weak throat on ʽTake It Allʼ is hardly the most pleasant expe­rience of my life).

 

And yet, a careful listen to Straight Up reveals more individual character and maturity than No Dice. The place of ʽNo Matter Whatʼ, with its seriously clichéd lyrics and, what's worse, some­what exaggerated attitudes, is here taken by ʽBaby Blueʼ, an entirely different type of bombastic love anthem — with open slots for some personal insecurity and some credible tenderness, con­densed and then exploded with each chorus release of "my Baby Blue...". And instead of ʽWith­out Youʼ, written according to the strict rules of the sentimental love ballad canon, we now have ʽName Of The Gameʼ — a piano-driven proto-power ballad with philosophical aspirations, clearly inspired by all that extra time shared in George's company; its hooks may not be as well pronounced as on ʽWithout Youʼ, but, on the other hand, there is no danger of ever sniffing a whiff of cheese on this particular occasion.

 

I am not a huge fan of ʽDay After Dayʼ, if that means somehow singling out this song from the rest of the Badfinger catalog and putting it on some Top 10 pedestal or other. Its main vocal hook seems based on a cheap trick (extra loudness emphasis on the song title in the chorus) and its main instrumental hook seems based on a cheap flourish (don't those piano notes they hit at the end of each chorus sound a bit Carpenter-ish to you?). However, for many people the chief point of attraction here is the Harrison / Ham slide guitar duet (which allegedly took a very long time to work out correctly, and was the chief problem that prevented the band from including the song in their live setlist) — and here I'd have to agree: all the lovers of George's slide style circa 1970-73 will want to include this resplendent example in their collection (and Pete is certainly no slouch, either, when it comes to standing up to the master).

 

Meanwhile, Joey Molland emerges as the band's only true rocker-in-residence: ʽSometimesʼ and ʽSuitcaseʼ add a necessary pinch of kick-ass excitement (the latter actually rocks harder in its original version, with distorted rhythm guitar ex­changed for a slide guitar and electric piano arrangement under Rundgren's supervision), although the "..tell me why" at the end of the first verse ʽSometimesʼ brings on uncomfortable associations with the Beatles' ʽWhat Goes Onʼ. In ad­dition, Molland and Evans collaborate on ʽFlyingʼ, which also happens to share its title with a Beatles song and its attitude with colorful psychedelia — but actually sounds more like contem­porary solo McCartney than anything circa 1967.

 

By the time Straight Up finally hit the record shelves, the band was already being ripped off by its managers, but its problems had not yet struck full time; consequently, Straight Up is the last relatively «cloudless» Badfinger record — its «dense», «serious» sound has more to do with a sincere desire to grow up and plant themselves some relevance, rather than with drawing inspira­tion for their art from their personal problems. I am not sure they were quite up to the task, and, faced with an uneasy choice between the «early misguided blunders» of No Dice (ʽWatford Johnʼ) and the occasionally forced, not-too-natural «seriousness» of Straight Up (ʽPerfectionʼ — I have no love for this song at all; it just adds some stuffy bullshit philosophy to an acoustic riff that re-writes ʽNo Matter Whatʼ) — I'd rather choose No Dice, albeit by a very thin margin.

 

Still, any album with the forceful delicacy of ʽBaby Blueʼ, the slide gorgeousness of ʽDay After Dayʼ, the toe-tapping catchiness of ʽSuitcaseʼ, the sweet bitterness of ʽSweet Tuesday Morningʼ and so on — any such album is a respectable thumbs up by definition; and anyway, Badfinger were not really a band that would dare to, or be capable of significantly overstepping their limits. In fact, probably the only way they could have recorded a bad album would be to live and let live all the way up to the mid-1980s; fortunately for us and unfortunately for them, the silly people at Apple Records took all the necessary precautions so as not to let that happen.

 

ASS (1973)

 

1) Apple Of My Eye; 2) Get Away; 3) Icicles; 4) The Winner; 5) Blind Owl; 6) Constitution; 7) When I Say; 8) Cow­boy; 9) I Can Love You; 10) Timeless; 11*) Do You Mind.

 

Badfinger's last album for Apple Records is usually considered their «heaviest» record — which automatically generates a premature bias: «Badfinger? Heavy? Is that a contradiction or a contra­diction?» Well, not so much a contradiction as a slight exaggeration. The trick is, for some rea­son Pete Ham took a relatively small part in the songwriting process this time — he only contributes the first and last track, while the majority of tunes on Ass belong to Joey Molland, and Joey Mol­land was, indeed, the «resident rocker» of the band, its one and only member who had a genuine penchant for boogie, and was always tempted to create it, not just play it.

 

This does not mean, however, that Badfinger tried to go «heavy metal» or anything like that. In fact, there is only one genuinely «heavy» rocker, with deep metallic bass, dark riffage, and scor­ching wah-wah solos — ʽConstitutionʼ, an amusing attempt on Joey's part to sing about how he chooses to «be like everybody else» against a musical arrangement that sounds like nothing else Badfinger had ever done before. The tune is completely generic, but saved in the nick of time by Ham — he didn't write it, but he plays terrific wah-wah throughout, once again proving how se­riously underrated he has always been as a lead player, learning a little from everyone but directly imitating no one.

 

In the meantime, Molland's biggest problem is that, unexpectedly faced with the reality of beco­ming the band's main songwriter, he does not live up to the task, and frequently falls back upon clichés or, as I suspect, subconscious rip-offs from whomever he happened to be listening to at the time. The oddest Frankenstein here is ʽThe Winnerʼ, which takes its vocal hook ("you can drive a car, be a movie star...") from Ringo's ʽIt Don't Come Easyʼ, its closing vocal harmonies from the Beatles' ʽThe Wordʼ or suchlike, and its bridge riff from Deep Purple's ʽSpace Truckinʼ (not quite sure about the chronology: ʽThe Winnerʼ is one of two songs that the band recorded while still under the supervision of Todd Rundgren, in early 1972, but ʽSpace Truckinʼ did come out in March — coincidence?).

 

ʽGet Awayʼ is faceless (but still not very heavy) roots-a-boogie as well, leaving the ballads ʽIci­c­lesʼ and ʽI Can Love Youʼ as Joey's finest contributions to the record — which is not to say they are very good: ʽIciclesʼ is a bit too flat, pathetic, and moralistic, and ʽI Can Love Youʼ tries to establish a cunning hook in the chorus, but fails, I think. Overall, both are just sort of stuck in inoffensive, evenly flowing mid-tempo without generating much excitement. Big difference be­tween both of them and Pete's only ballad on the album — ʽApple Of My Eyeʼ, not too subtly commenting on the band's severing of relationships with the label. It may not be a huge improve­ment on Joey's standards in terms of melody, but Pete was always the better «artist», and his ly­rics, vocal modulation, and phrasing convey the atmosphere of bittersweetness to a tee — making the song into one of the most gallantly and chivalrously delivered «fuck yous» in the business.

 

Evans' and Gibbins' contributions are not particularly memorable or respectable (Gibbins' ʽCow­boyʼ might, in fact, be one of the most oddly misguided Badfinger efforts ever, along with ʽWat­ford Johnʼ: har­monica, fiddle, and steel guitar-driven coun­try-western? Silliest moment: "...now I know you well enough to say ʽyeahʼ... YEAAAAH!"), which leaves us with a very weak Side B, and the most difficult question here is what to do about Ham's eight-minute epic ʽTimelessʼ, an attempt to suck up to the «pretentious art-rock» movement, but still following the guidance of the Beatles rather than Yes or King Crimson — the structure, the mood, the duration, the chords, the lengthy coda sprayed with blasts of white noise, all of this brings on obvious associations with ʽI Want You (She's So Heavy)ʼ, although in strict factual terms the song is, of course, quite an ori­ginal creation. Does it work or doesn't it?

 

It does for me, to some extent. First, everyone is entitled to a little bit of metaphysical panic from time to time, and Pete Ham is as qualified as anybody to ask the question «are we timeless?». Se­cond, it is his first attempt to write something oddly shaped, decidedly removed from the stan­dards of a potential pop hit — the instrumental melody seems cobbled from unpredictable chord sequences, and the vocal melody is more akin to a Shakesperian monolog than a sym­metric pop construction. Third, the coda is very well made, with another of those stirring, aggressive solos of Pete's that are just so goddamn believable.

 

In the end, Ass is an album riddled with problems — starting with its very title (and the illumi­native picture of a donkey on the front cover does not really help out) and ending with the unfor­tunate story of its creation (Apple once again rejected the original version, and ended up releasing the final product something like a year too late, clashing with the band's new first album for Warner Bros.). It is not a complete disaster, and there is nothing wrong about including one or two heavy rockers as long as Joey Molland remains a rocker deep in his heart and Pete Ham can easily slip into rock'n'roll mode on the strength of his natural gift. But it is a «middle-of-the-road» effort, as it downplays the presence of the band's finest songwriter and, on occasion, slips into embarrassment mode (really, ʽCowboyʼ is something I'd think they should have left behind in their early Iveys days). Ham's contributions are still strong enough to guarantee a shaky thumbs up, but, overall, the album is one of those «transitional» efforts that give more food for thought for band historians than cause for joy for regular fans.

 

BADFINGER (1974)

 

1) I Miss You; 2) Shine On; 3) Love Is Easy; 4) Song For A Lost Friend; 5) Why Don't We Talk?; 6) Island; 7) Mat­ted Spam; 8) Where Do We Go From Here?; 9) My Heart Goes Out; 10) Lonely You; 11) Give It Up; 12) Andy Nor­ris.

 

Badfinger's move to Warner Bros. was hardly «smooth». The new label would poke its nose into the band's results just as frequently as the old one did, and for a short while, it seemed completely unclear what exactly the record people were to expect from this band, and what exactly this band would want to turn out for the record people — being so 1969 in spirit, when the body was al­ready dragged into early 1974.

 

A nasty problem of this self-titled album is that the producer, Chris Thomas, actually did a hor­rendous suckjob. For some reason, he must have thought that, since these guys are such mediocre singers, things will work better if they all sing from under the bed, with a mike stuck under the pillow. Except Ham, that is, who is the only one regularly allowed a «clean» sound. Similar mud­diness, extra echo, bland guitar tones, etc. mar the instrumental work as well. And when this sloppy production style is overlaid on songs that are melodically decent, not spectacular — well, you can see real well why Badfinger never wooed the critics upon release.

 

Sadly, sadly, the record starts out tremendously strong, with two terrific Ham contributions that might set you up for a masterpiece. ʽI Miss Youʼ is a heart-on-sleeve piano-and-organ ballad that might be the most subtly chivalrous piece Pete ever wrung out of himself; and the interlocking keyboard parts, half McCartney, half «baroque pop», with no guitar presence whatsoever, are one of the most unusual arrangements these guys ever did. And then the Ham/Evans collaboration ʽShine Onʼ flips the switch to catchy, rousing, energetic folk-pop, flawlessly conceived and at­tractively executed. Nice, optimistic, energizing, toe-tappy, whatever.

 

These two openers really set up the impression of a bright new beginning — now that the band's troubled Apple days are over, and Pete Ham is back in the saddle as the leading creative force, they might finally combine their musicality and maturity in perfectionist bliss. But the impression is blown away before it can solidify: little, if anything, on the record manages to approach the one-two punch of ʽI Miss Youʼ and ʽShine Onʼ.

 

Funny thing is, there were quite a few things that Badfinger could do right. They could make ex­cellent «retro» pop songs (it only took lighting a candle to George or Paul), or they could fit in well with the soft-rock / folk-pop spirit of early 1970s mainstream American market. They knew how to rock out — in a very «clean» way compared to the hard rock standards of the day, but they did have a small stock of the rock'n'roll bug inside them. With a bit of focus, they could have made an album with no bad songs on it that would be anything but monotonous. Instead, they continued delving into genres, styles, and moods where they had no advantage whatsoever even over second-tier competition.

 

Pete himself is not exempt from this problem — his ʽMatted Spamʼ (and what a title!) is a white­bread funk-rocker, intelligently conceived but completely unfit for his singing style. Throw in a flexible bass player, a James Brown-caliber vocalist, and a bunch of hot female back vocalists, and you might have something there... but Badfinger, a funk outfit? No way.

 

Meanwhile, Joey Molland is trying to convert his love for rock'n'roll into something that sounds more «contemporary» — his mutual understanding with Chris Thomas is that «contemporary» means «thick», «muddy», and «lumpy», like ʽIslandʼ, all grayishly distorted power chords, thra­shing drums and cavernous echoes, or ʽLove Is Easyʼ, a wannabe-boogie whose boogie power is only thwarted by ponderous lead balls attached to each chord. Instead of simply letting go — the way they did on ʽLove Me Doʼ, for instance — they are tying weights to their feet. On ʽGive It Upʼ, it looks like Joey was trying to create something to match the tempestuous effects of Ham's ʽTimelessʼ, but the build-up to the climax is a relative failure, and the climax itself is not so much tempestuous as simply messy in comparison.

 

Overall, the only other song here that strikes a chord without overdoing or underdoing it is Evans' ʽWhere Do We Go From Here?ʼ — soulful vocal hooks, solid electric piano backing, nice tempo, intelligent atmosphere, admission is free; if not for the all-pervasive echo and the unnecessary «calypso» sounds eventually breaking in to clutter the arrangement, this, too, could be perfect in its own humble way. But that arrangement is still less cluttered and generic than, for instance, the one given to Ham's ʽLonely Youʼ and ʽSong For A Lost Friendʼ, both of which just float by me without leaving much of a trace.

 

In short, Badfinger is inadequate — it simply does not hold enough authentic «Badfinger» for my tastes. Rather, it is Goodfinger — an attempt to trade off some of the things the band held dear in order to appeal to the radiowaves of 1974, and the attempt played a hideous trick on them: none of these songs charted even remotely. Not that, with such stupid decisions, they ever had a chance: instead of doing it right and putting out ʽShine Onʼ as the lead single, they went with ʽLove Is Easyʼ. Who the heck is going to buy a single where the lead singer sounds as if he is whining through a bagpipe while trying to play «kick-ass» rock'n'roll? Ridiculous.

 

That said, I still have a tiny soft spot for the record: it was my original introduction to Badfinger, and Ham's two-song introduction quickly ensured that I would never regard this band as just a laughable wannabe-Beatles outfit (as some do), so I could never bring myself to giving it a nega­tive rating. It does cast off some colorful shades of life every now and then — as the follow-up would show, the band simply did not have the time or strength to focus while recording it.

 

WISH YOU WERE HERE (1974)

 

1) Just A Chance; 2) You're So Fine; 3) Got To Get Out Of Here; 4) Know One Knows; 5) Dennis; 6) In The Mean­time/Some Other Time; 7) Love Time; 8) King Of The Load (T); 9) Meanwhile Back At The Ranch/Should I Smoke.

 

Wish You Were Here may be no masterpiece for the ages, and it might not have the most easily memorable, stay-with-you-for-life Badfinger songs, but it is definitely the Badfinger-est album of the all. A record, that is, which tries to dig as deep and to climb as high as could be physically possible for these guys, without a single overtly wrong twist or turn, a single glaring lapse of taste, a single court case of the band trying hard to be somebody else. It probably would not have been a big commercial success even if it did not undergo the proverbial «Badfinger luck» treatment  (due to legal haranguing between Warner Bros. and the band's management, it was pulled from the stores only seven weeks after the initial release; we cannot even technically call it a «flop», since it did not have enough time to flop). But it is exactly due to the fact of sounding like a Bad­finger album, not like a «1974-oriented album», that it has aged much, much better than nume­rous hit records from that year.

 

With all the neuroses and psychoses pursuing the band's members, I do not even manage to un­derstand how they succeeded in getting it so right after two relative misfires in a row. Maybe things had temporarily settled down, and the band just had a chance to sit down, catch a breath, and realize that, perhaps, if they were not able to achieve success with stuff that they weren't too good at (hard rock, funk, arena-rock, whatever), then they might be able to do better if they just concentrated on what they did best — folk-based pop songs with «power» arrangements, with varying degrees of complexity.

 

Chris Thomas is still retained as producer, but who could tell? The production is no longer mud­dy: the guitar sound is effervescently clear, and the vocals are for the most part echo-free (with one or two exceptions) — there is simply no need to compensate for the melodic weakness with extra varnish, since the melodies are anything but weak. Furthermore, there is not a single song here — not one — that has any direct connotations to a Beatles predecessor. On Wish You Were Here, Badfinger are, for the first time in their life, fully transformed into a self-sustainable band. Big tragic irony, considering all that happened next.

 

Song-wise, Pete Ham is almost absent on Side B, but his creations dominate Side A, creating a somewhat tilted balance of quality. ʽJust A Chanceʼ is one of the band's crunchiest pop-rockers: the riff may not be nearly as much in your face as on ʽNo Matter Whatʼ, but it's still a good roots-rocky riff that earns extra points for subtlety — and the song could have easily become a classic rock radio staple, if only there had been an opportunity to cull a couple singles from the album. ʽDennisʼ is a slightly veiled ode to Pete's little son, Blair, which starts off a little lumpy (not un­like, say, a «prog ballad» à la Styx, with a somewhat heavy accent on «anthemic» power chords), but soon picks up steam, conjures some genuine fatherly love, and then ends in an optimistic explosion of heavenly harmonies — the coda is a brilliant example of the band's «lush pop» sen­sitivity, here rivaling the Beach Boys themselves in force of expression, I'd say, if not necessarily in the technicalities (perhaps if Pete Ham only had two brothers and a cousin...).

 

Most won'drous of all, and my personal favorite Badfinger song of all time (yes, with these guys, I'm really quite a sucker for conciseness and simplicity), is the orthographically silly ʽKnow One Knowsʼ, which, as a chivalrous love confession, I'll take over ʽDay After Dayʼ, well, day after day after day. Where that particular classic had a little blemish — it was way too self-consciously designed as a thing of «heavenly beauty ™» — ʽKnow One Knowsʼ is perfectly natural, and it might even have been by pure supernatural accident that Pete (or was that Joey?) fell upon that particular sparkling guitar tone when recording the rhythm parts, the kind of deep ringing that affects the subconscious in such a special way (later favored so much, for obvious reasons, by the Cocteau Twins). The riff itself could hardly be any simpler, but this is gorgeous simplicity, and taken together with Pete's catchy and ever so «humanly» singing, the sparse, but meaningful gui­tar solo aping the vocal melody, and the strange gimmick of having Japanese artist Mika Kato reciting the chorus words translated to Japanese over the instrumental section (somehow it does add a little extra mystery spice, particularly if you have no knowledge of Japanese) — well, per­sonally, I like to describe these moments as «breathtaking beauty». There's not much of it in the overall Badfinger catalog, but there's plenty of bands who aren't capable of even a single moment like this, so let us give due where due is due, I say.

 

Amazingly, the rest of the guys generally rise to the challenge. Gibbins contributes the light­weight, but amicable folk-rocker ʽYou're So Fineʼ — perfectly adequate, especially when you remember that, only a year ago, he was veering into the realm of the cowboy song instead. Evans' ʽKing Of The Loadʼ is a bit of meditative Brit-pop with Dylanish lyrics, which they decided to set to the sound of two different keyboards and no guitars (bar Pete's shrieky solo) — again, nothing great, but it gets where it wants to get. And Molland's highest point is ʽGot To Get Out Of Hereʼ: an attempt not to «rock out», but to create an oscillating mood piece that would take you from despair to hope and back to despair and back to hope depending on whatever simple organ chord is played at the moment. J. S. Bach would certainly be appalled at the crudeness of it, but for less demanding tastes, it works quite well.

 

The two long medleys on Side B are not quite as striking — I am not even sure they should have been medleys, even if Ham's ʽMeanwhile Back At The Ranchʼ and Molland's ʽShould I Smokeʼ do belong together quite naturally, with a melody overlap in the chorus. They seem to have a little too much of everything thrown in, without the ability to grow a face of their own. Still, there is nothing embarrassing about them or even particularly boring — I just wish they didn't put that goddamn echo on Pete's vocals on ʽRanchʼ — and quite a few people list them among their favo­rite tracks on the album, maybe because of some sort of Abbey Road-esque thrill which I do not think was intended here at all (in line with the overall «no more Beatles dependence!» policy).

 

Contrary to what one could expect, and contrary to the lonely whiff of the title and the album co­ver, Wish You Were Here is not a particularly depressed record. On Side A, in fact, there is only one track dealing with despair — ʽGot To Get Out Of Hereʼ — and although some of the songs on Side B are a little more mopey, nothing here even remotely approaches the universalist grief of ʽTimelessʼ. Rather, it is just a very humane record, and a mature one at that. The love songs are never sappy, the complaining songs never wallow too heavily in misery, and there are no attempts to suck up to someone or something just for the sake of «trying out something that's not us». All of which makes this one of the most wonderful not-to-be-thought-of-as-wonderful albums of the decade, and my guess is that, had Badfinger's career not crashed right upon its release, this is as high as they could go anyway. Naturally, a delighted thumbs up.

 

HEAD FIRST (1974; 2000)

 

1) Lay Me Down; 2) Hey, Mr. Manager; 3) Keep Believing; 4) Passed Fast; 5) Rock'n'Roll Contract; 6) Saville Row; 7) Moonshine; 8) Back Again; 9) Turn Around; 10) Rockin' Machine.

 

I really should be doing this in the «Addenda» section, but this album almost made it on the store shelves. Almost, that is, before Warner Bros. suspected that the band's manager Stan Polley was stealing funds (actually, Badfinger themselves suspected the same, but for whatever reason War­ners sued both Polley and Badfinger) and, over the course of the accident, rejected the completed album. The master tapes were subsequently left to rot, and were never recovered, so this particu­lar Head First, finally out with a twenty-five year retardation, has been reconstructed from rough mixes (so that one can only guess what the actual ʽSaville Rowʼ must have looked like: this track here is only thirty six seconds long, an atmospheric, artsy keyboard-based introduction that fades away before you can even try guessing where it might lead).

 

Head First was cut in two weeks over a focused work period in December 1974 — an admirable feat, actually, considering the heavy blow that befell the band with the withdrawal of Wish You Were Here, the subsequent resignation of Pete Ham (replaced by Bob Jackson), the subsequent return of Pete Ham (because Warners were not willing to work with the band without Pete), and the subsequent resignation of Molland. Under such circumstances, you'd normally expect either a disaster or a masterpiece — but Head First is neither. Maybe the master tapes, had they survived, could produce a different impression, yet I somehow doubt it.

 

Just like in the days of Ass, Pete is keeping his head down here. He gets the usual honor of open­ing the album, and ʽLay Me Downʼ is a respectable power-popper, but without a particularly me­morable or emotional riff to kick it up to the skies of ʽNo Matter Whatʼ or even ʽJust A Chanceʼ, and the nagging chorus of "need your loving, need your loving, need your loving, it's everything to me" sounds a bit perfunctory and repetitive. The rhythmic acoustic-and-slide ballad ʽKeep Belie­vingʼ is a little better if you like your Pete Ham in a subtle / tender / confessional mode bet­ter than you like him in «power» mode, but the hooks are nowhere near great.

 

Since Molland was already out, Evans, Gibbins, and new band member Bob Jackson had to take the burden of songwriting on their own shoulders. Jackson's solo contribution ʽTurn Aroundʼ is a rather lumpy hard rock anthem that, truth be told, is more Grand Funk than Badfinger, only with­out all the testosterone. Gibbins continues with his fairy-light folksy stuff with ʽBack Againʼ, a pleasant cowboy ditty without any cowboys, but with some curious harmonica vs. synthesizer interplay. And Evans is the one to serve as the band's personal spokesman here. He takes it out vi­ciously and vivaciously on their enemies with telling titles like ʽHey Mr. Managerʼ and ʽRock'n'Roll Contractʼ — the two best songs on the album, actually, suggesting that, before set­ting up an installment plan for sui­cide, it might have been a good idea to come up with a fully conceptual album on the evils of rock management.

 

Overall, I wish I could say that it doesn't show this whole thing was tossed off in two weeks time, but more often than not, it does. But if we look at this from a different side — yes, they really needed something out on the market quick, yes, they were in a complete mess, yes, none of them were genius songwriters, yes, these are rough mixes, and still it's a perfectly nice record that does not in the least pathetically wallow in self-pitying (even such a lyrically bitter tune as ʽHey, Mr. Managerʼ tries to be as upbeat as possible when castigating Mr. Manager for "messing up my life"). As a «swan song» for the original Badfinger, it does not work, but as a worthy addition to the hardcore canon, it isn't any worse than any of the band's second-tier albums. Thumbs up, but do not expect a revelation or anything.

 

The official edition, by the way, adds a whole extra CD of mostly acoustic demos saved up from the same sessions — some of which could have been nourished to full health, had they had the time and will, but by early 1975, they clearly had nothing left. Was it all really that desperate? Did Pete really have to hang himself, or was that just the hideous effect of a nerve wreck shatter­ing an already unstable mental system? Who the hell could tell? In a way, I've always thought that, perhaps, it wasn't all just a matter of bad luck and unfortunate accidents — maybe the eerie downfall of Badfinger has to be thought of in «Altamont terms», sort of one of those symbolic events that separate the idealistic 1960s from the grim 1970s. After all, Badfinger were an idea­listic 1960s band at heart — at a time when the whole thing was becoming cynically obsolete. They learned to sound different from the Beatles, but they did not want to learn to sound like the Bay City Rollers, either, and paid the symbolic price for that. In any case, there must have been more to the whole thing than just a treacherous manager and poor understanding from the record industry bosses. Mustn't there?

 

AIRWAVES (1979)

 

1) Airwaves; 2) Look Out California; 3) Lost Inside Your Love; 4) Love Is Gonna Come At Last; 5) Sympathy; 6) The Winner; 7) The Dreamer; 8) Come Down Hard; 9) Sail Away; 10*) One More Time; 11*) Send Me Your Love; 12*) Steal My Heart; 13*) Love Can't Hide; 14*) Can You Feel The Rain.

 

Slay me on the spot, but I am really somewhat fond of this one, in spite of all the objective pres­sure that pressures me into stoning it together with the rest of the critically-minded crowds. Yes, the obligatory first impression is that this is a «Badfin­ger» album in name only, one of those suspicious cases when a brand is resus­ci­tated mostly for commercial reasons. The whole thing was not intended to be a reunion — it just so happened that Joey Molland, in yet another of several failed attempts to assemble a new band, hooked up with Evans, among other guys who never had anything to do with Badfinger, and when Elektra Re­cords saw two of Badfinger's principal songwriters working together again, guess what the reac­tion was? Never mind the fact that, by 1979, most of the public's memories of Badfinger had been completely erased — here was at least a little something to latch on to.

 

It is true that Badfinger was not exclusively Pete Ham's backing band: both Evans and Molland contributed mightily to the original music and image, and one could theoretically imagine the two trying to resuscitate and preserve the original spirit. That is, however, not the case with Airwaves. First, much of it was done with the active participation of a third creative member, guitarist and vocalist Joe Tansin, whose songwriting and arranging techniques were seemingly raised not on the Beatles, but rather on mid-1970's dance hits, ballads, and MOR «classics».

 

Second, Molland and Evans themselves are trying to bring their sound more in line with late-1970's «standards» of power-pop. They completely ignore any punk/New Wave innovations of the past few years — the backbone of ʽLook Out Californiaʼ, opening the album, is so defiantly Chuck Berry-esque that it ain't even funny — and that may be a plus, because a Badfinger taking lessons from Blondie or the Cars sounds like a miserable idea. But, on the other hand, this does not prevent the cur­rent Badfinger incarnation from taking extra lessons not only from Cheap Trick, but maybe even from... Billy Joel? At any rate, it all sounds very much like clean-shaven, well-meaning, slick, glossy, generic mid-1970s pop.

 

Worst of all, I like it. Behind all the gloss lies a bunch of well-crafted hooks, memorable melodies and even some genuinely resonating emotional content. Joe Tansin is responsible for the two weakest numbers — the «heavy» rockers ʽWinnerʼ and ʽSympathyʼ, combining gruff distorted riffs with dance beats, keyboards, and strings in a loud show of nothing in particular (although even under these conditions, there is still some nice jerky tension in ʽSympathyʼ). But Evans and Molland manage to stuff this new formula with plenty of fresh meat.

 

Molland's ʽLove Is Gonna Come At Lastʼ was the right choice for a single, and it even made a brief chart appearance (#69 on the US charts wasn't so bad, considering the band's past reputation of «commercial poison») — dominated by a fabulous slide guitar riff on top of an old-timey jangle pattern, but with a modernistic-mainstreamish hook in the chorus (so it sounds a little like ABBA, what's really wrong with that?). Evans' sentimental piano ballad ʽLost Inside Your Loveʼ is even better — it's as if he took the whole «Badfinger reincarnation» thing really seriously, and tried here to compensate for the lack of Pete Ham by coming up with something comparable in sheer vulnerability: his "what can I say, what can I do..." is a genuine tugger and ranks among the band's finest moments of soulful purity, whatever that might mean.

 

Then, on side B, Joey contributes the excellent ʽThe Dreamerʼ, a big lump of power chords, lush piano, and romantic strings, and the mediocre ʽCome Down Hardʼ, an even bigger lump of power chords that uses the mean trick of double-tracking its rhythm guitar parts to imitate brawn and hooks; and Evans brings things to a close with the cozy McCartney-esque piano balladry of ʽSail Awayʼ... yes, eight songs in all, not counting the brief acoustic intro (title track), but for a «B-quality» record like this, thirty minutes seems just all right anyway.

 

At the end of the day, Airwaves still is, in some way, a Badfinger album — just as it was with the band's output in the early 1970s, they are modifying their sound to «suit the times», but they still never end up suiting the times because they never go all the way. Behind all the production gloss we still see Tom Evans, the charming, idealistic small town bumpkin, and Joey Molland, the slightly snub-nosed street punk, not having altered their original personalities one bit. As usual, there are hits and misses — hardly atypical for even the best Badfinger records — but the hits are strong enough to keep the album in a modestly respectable position in the catalog. Thumbs up.

 

PS. Please keep in mind that the five bonus tracks, even though they do a fine job of beefing up the album's length, should be kept separate — all of them are Joe Tansin songs, with the first three recorded by the man solo in the mid-Eighties (the only reason they are here is that they were allegedly written, not recorded, during the Airwaves sessions). Most are power ballads or synth-pop tunes, and ʽSend Me Your Loveʼ sounds bit-by-bit like something off a Christine McVie solo album, if you need a guideline. Skippable.

 

SAY NO MORE (1981)

 

1) I Got You; 2) Come On; 3) Hold On; 4) Because; 5) Rock'n'Roll Contract; 6) Passin' Time; 7) Three Time Loser; 8) Too Hung Up On You; 9) Crocadillo; 10) No More.

 

Badfinger's last album was recorded throughout 1979 and 1980 with more lineup changes: no Joe Tansin, a new guitarist in Glenn Sherba, a new drummer in Richard Bryans, and a new keyboard player in ex-Yes member Tony Kaye. Since the band was quite heavily touring at the time, the lineup turned out to be a bit more stable, tight, and focused, and Say No More certainly sounds much more like a «rock'n'roll band» product than the shiny gloss of Airwaves. But this is where the good news ends (provided this is good news at all).

 

Because, honestly, Say No More must have been designed as a conscious «antidote» to the gloss, sweetness, and poppiness of Airwaves. Everything here is loud, upbeat, more often fast than not, and usually relying on keyboards and guitars battling it out in a melodic, but «aggressive» man­ner. In other words, this is Badfinger trying to be what Badfinger never were — a muscular, an­ti-sentimental, sweat-pumpin' pop-rock band and just about nothing else. Not a single ballad in the pot. Not that Molland and Evans were inept at rocking out, of course; it's just that their melody skills rarely stood out whenever they began to «crank it up».

 

Here, for instance, despite the relentlessly bash-it-out attitude, there are next to no memorable rock'n'roll riffs, apart from a few basic chord sequences nicked off past experiences: everything that could be worth something is invested in the pop choruses. The rock'n'roll attitude seems to be all-pervasive here for one reason only: to prove Badfinger's ongoing «authenticity» — none of that commercial shit, none of those New-Wave-style gimmicks, just good old power-pop straight out of 1971 and forget about the last ten years. (Renegade Tony Kaye does manage to slip in a few new-fangled synthesizer solos and effects from time to time, but never long enough to make the listener suspect «relevance in a modern world» within even a single song).

 

The vocals are sweet enough, though, and Say No More is never a total waste. The single ʽHold Onʼ, a last-minute collaboration between Evans and Tansin, even made a tiny bump on the charts — for a good reason, since Tom's singing here is excellent; it captures a shade of Badfinger's trademark romantic chivalry with some nifty mood-sequencing (going from calm, unexciting se­renading to the heated-up passion of the chorus and then to the seductive falsetto resolution of "baby hold on..." — quite a respectable example of songwriting as far as I am concerned). ʽToo Hung Up On Youʼ is also a nice love confession, but with nowhere near as much personality as there is on ʽHold Onʼ (maybe it's all the double-tracking that spoils the effect).

 

The basic rock'n'roll stuff, in comparison, just sounds tasty for 1981, a year in which basic rock'n'roll stuff mattered about as much as Doris Day (maybe even less); thirty years on, there is little reason to listen to ʽI Got Youʼ or ʽCome Onʼ if you can just throw on some vintage Stones or T. Rex in­stead. Still, even despite the garage rock clichés of the former and the wannabe-Slade attitude of the latter, the only real failure is the ridiculously titled and ridiculously delivered ʽCro­cadilloʼ, which they try to do with a bit of a «pop-metal» flair: a big mistake on Evans' part, since playing it really down-and-dirty is a no-go for these guys.

 

There is also a remake here of ʽRock'n'Roll Contractʼ which, as we now know, was originally re­corded in 1974 for Head First; as could be expected, the song is tightened and sped up, and now features longer and leaner guitar solos, yet its gloomy pathos still feels a bit out of place on this generally cheerful record. As we now know, too, it wasn't really out of place, given that, in two years time, Evans would be joining Pete Ham in the noose; but on the whole, Say No More is even less indicative of the tragedy to come than Wish You Were Here and Head First were in­dicative of the upcoming suicide #1.

 

Fact is, as troubled as Badfinger's life was, they rarely let their everyday personal problems in­fluence the atmosphere of the music — unlike, say, Fleetwood Mac, theirs was the old-time ide­o­logy of keeping their «routine» feelings apart from the artistry, and leaving most of their troubles behind the doors of the recording studio (even on Wish You Were Here, most of the real-life in­spiration they brought with them was based on positive, not negative emotions, ʽGot To Get Out Of Hereʼ being the major exception). Of course, some would condemn this as artistic insincerity, while others might praise it as a sign of lack of vanity («ain't it just grand, the way I can make myself suffer and show it so well on my recordings?»).

 

But, in reality, it's just whatever works for you that really matters. And Say No More does not work all that well, I'm afraid. Not a bad album by any means, but doomed from the start by the wrongly chosen direction, it now has to formally count as the band's «swan song» while quali­fying more for a sparrow rather than swan level. It's one of those moments where I wish time would loop the wrong way and let Say No More be the first, «tentative» effort of the two reunion albums and Airwaves be the second — because, despite all the gloss and Joe Tansin, Airwaves has more of the old Badfinger spirit in it.

 

On the other hand, who knows how Molland and Evans would have fared in the future, had Tom not been driven by fate to the same level of insanity as Pete. Fantasizing about a whole string of Say No More-like albums throughout the 1980s actually makes me feel happier than listening to one single Say No More — the way these guys went about their music in 1979-81 makes one suspect that they might have withstood the synthesizer / drum machine onslaught, had they ma­naged to hold on to a record contract. But maybe that was impossible even in theory, and with the Eighties upon us, Badfinger just had to finally go down, once and for all. Maybe, had they not reunited to take this last chance, Evans would still be alive and well. Maybe it was all a very bad idea. Still, something deep inside me says that it is a nice thing, after all, to have these two al­bums as a last-minute, half-hearted souvenir — Badfinger have always had this simple magic aura about them, such that even their worst records can still sound endearing... under certain cir­cumstances, at least.

 

ADDENDA:

 

MAYBE TOMORROW (1969)

 

1) See-Saw, Granpa; 2) Beautiful And Blue; 3) Dear Angie; 4) Think About The Good Times; 5) Yesterday Ain't Coming Back; 6) Fisherman; 7) Maybe Tomorrow; 8) Sali Bloo; 9) Angelique; 10) I'm In Love; 11) They're Knock­ing Down Our Home; 12) I've Been Waiting; 13*) No Escaping Your Love; 14*) Mrs. Jones; 15*) And Her Daddy's A Millionnaire; 16*) Looking For My Baby.

 

Curiously enough, Pete Ham's Badfinger actually spent more time playing as The Iveys — they were known under that name as early as 1964, when they were still mostly doing small gigs around Swansea, although back then, Ham was still the only member to remain as part of the clas­sic lineup (it is a bit ironic, though, that he'd actually been out on the scene almost as long as the band itself that was supposed to nurture and foster Badfinger). But throughout the mid-1960s, the band never found its proper way to a recording contract until the (mis)fortune of contacting Apple Records; and as «The Iveys», they only released one sole LP, which, furthermore, never even had any UK or US distribution, being limited to Germany, Italy, and Japan. (Yes, Badfin­ger's streak of bad luck was already there even before they got themselves their name).

 

There is not much to say about this album, really, since seven of its twelve songs would eventual­ly be incorporated into Magic Christian Music, undergoing only a cosmetic remixing job along the way. The very fact that it did get a limited CD release in the early 2000s, remastered, repack­aged, and with bonus tracks, is somewhat surprising and goes to show the serious amount of re­verence for these guys that some music lovers still hold (good for them). On the other hand, the release was not a total waste, since it adds one more informative stroke to the exciting story of Badfinger's musical evolution.

 

It is usually assumed that, in creating the running order for Magic Christian Music, the band took what they considered the best of these early Iveys tunes, and left out the dreck. This is not quite the case — the «rejects» were not awful, they just represented additional directions that they were unable to explore properly and convincingly. Or at least, they themselves must have thought that at the time.

 

Probably the most telling example is Ham's «epic» mindset on ʽI've Been Waitingʼ, an experi­ment in heavy progressive blues-rock à la early Deep Purple / Led Zeppelin, with lengthy distor­ted guitar solos, brutally aggressive drum bashing, and an acid smokescreen — the new-look Bad­finger wouldn't get thus «terrifying» again until Ass. But they do not have a chance to leave their own imprint on the basic melody here (borrowed firstand off ʽMilk Cow Bluesʼ), and the heavy-psycho instrumental jam section can hardly be too exciting if it competes in the same line of duty as, say, Led Zep's ʽDazed And Confusedʼ.

 

Other unlucky rejects include: ʽYesterday Ain't Coming Backʼ — a loud, anthemic ballad with a quintessential «UK Nuggets» spirit, maybe discarded because it reminded them too much of all those other Brit bands; ʽThink About The Good Timesʼ — an upbeat, but slightly «hushed» pop-rocker with a funky wah-wah guitar arrangement, maybe discarded because they eventually got afraid of the wah-wah (again, the only time they would later use that effect freely would be on the heavy arrangements for Ass); ʽSali Blooʼ — lumbering blues-pop that is neither heavy enough nor memorable; and the triumphant power-pop opener ʽSee-Saw, Granpaʼ, which they could, per­haps, see as way too simplistic and happy (but maybe not).

 

(The CD reissue adds a few early outtakes as well, even more heavily derivative of contemporary acts — The Kinks, The Move, The Small Faces etc. — all of them kinda cute and cuddly, but the final denominator still remains Manfred Mann: dedicated copycat practice without a face of one's own, only The Iveys happened to lack Manfred Mann's sole serious advantage — musical profes­sionalism. They did well to restrict these harmless, forgettable pastiches to B-sides).

 

All in all, you are not missing much if you already have Magic Christian Music, but you will not harm your ears, either, if you take a brief listen to these scattered remainders. It doesn't hurt to condescendingly pat somebody on the head for diligently doing their homework on Led Zep and Manfred Mann, and it is also fun to realize that, before getting into real close contact with The Beatles, The Iveys never even attempted to model their sound upon the Fab Four — apparently, there must have been some heavy «Beatles-conditioning» in the air of Apple Records.

 

DAY AFTER DAY (1974; 1990)

 

1) Sometimes; 2) I Don't Mind; 3) Blind Owl; 4) Give It Up; 5) Constitution; 6) Baby Blue; 7) Name Of The Game; 8) Day After Day; 9) Timeless; 10) I Can't Take It.

 

Amazingly, Badfinger's bad luck went on to hold the band in a tight grip even long after all the breakups and suicides. By all means, they were quite a decent little band when playing live; their goal was to establish themselves as an authentic «rock» act onstage — developing and practicing a much more rough and aggressive sound than the cuddly power pop of their studio records — and in that, they succeeded. Of course, nobody is going to mention Badfinger while listing the most obvious «gritty rock'n'roll acts» of the early 1970s, but the very fact that they can please a closet headbanger like myself (unlike, say, The Beach Boys, who were never truly able to gene­rate a genuine rocking vibe during their live shows, even though they did try occasionally) has to count for something.

 

Problem is, the band never got around to releasing a proper live album in their lifetime — and by the time public interest in Badfinger slowly started to grow for nostalgic reasons, most of the ar­chival recordings were either lost, deteriorated, or turned out to be unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. In 1989, Joey Molland got hold of the tapes recorded at the Agora venue in Cleveland on the band's 1974 American tour and offered them for official release on the Rykodisc label. Clai­ming, however, that the tapes were all but unusable in their original state, he went on to overdub most of his vocals... most of his guitars... some of Pete's guitars... a bit of the bass... and... well, you know. Even today, judging by some of the reviews, people still wreck their brains trying to understand if the whole thing can officially count as a real Badfinger live album, by seeking out old bootlegs  and running comparative tests.

 

The absolute worst thing, however, and one that really brings Day After Day close to unlistena­ble, is that Joey slapped on a thick electronic echo on all the drumwork. Maybe he wanted to have it out with Mike Gibbins, or perhaps the drum mike was indeed dysfunctional that evening, but, anyway, the result is honestly godawful: first thing you get when ʽSometimesʼ hit the speakers is this moronic BASH-BASH-BASH — and a cognitive dissonance: this is Badfinger, right? how do they get this stereotypically Eighties sound in friggin' 1974?

 

The effect is hard — nay, almost impossible — to overcome; the ridiculousness of the situation completely bars Day After Day from any sense of respectability. Which is sad, because the band happened to be in fine form that evening. The setlist was rather evenly spread between all the al­bums from No Dice and up to Badfinger, omitted some of the most obvious hits (ʽNo Matter Whatʼ) in favor of a few dark horses (ʽBlind Owlʼ), and the rest of the power-pop numbers were sped up, distorted, and «crunch-formed» for extra rock'n'roll excitement, bridging the gap be­tween formerly cuddly songs like ʽI Can't Take Itʼ and originally hard-rocking material like ʽCon­stitutionʼ. Quite a solid bridge, as a matter of fact.

 

ʽDay After Dayʼ, deprived of its piano flourishes for technical reasons, and substituting a sincere, but all too fragile and thin slide solo for the classic bit of Ham/Harrison interplay, is the only ma­jor disappointment (apparently, the band itself understood that and refused to play the song live for several years, before finally succumbing to the temptation in 1974). Minor disappointments include the lengthy jams at the end of ʽGive It Upʼ and ʽTimelessʼ: Ham and Molland are good guitarists, capable of emotionally charged lead work in the studio, but their improvisations tend to fall back on perfunctory blues-rock clichés, and there is really no reason why you should listen to a made-on-the-spot long long long solo by Badfinger instead of, say, Jimmy Page or Santana.

 

Still, in general, these crunchy re-modelings are quite headbang-worthy, and do a good job in de­molishing the myth of Badfinger as the «exemplary innocent wimps» of the power-pop move­ment. And it would have been a nice, recommendable album, if not for the fact that Joey decided to take care of it in 1989. Had he waited for an extra decade or so, with electronic drums finally going out of fashion and sound-cleaning technologies up a notch, Day After Day could have over­turned the bad luck streak. As it is — who knows where those tapes are now, or really just gives a damn about a better remastering job?

 

BBC IN CONCERT (1972-73; 1997)

 

1) Better Days; 2) Only You Know And I Know; 3) We're For The Dark; 4) Sweet Tuesday Morning; 5) Feelin' Al­right; 6) Take It All; 7) Suitcase; 8) Love Is Easy; 9) Blind Owl; 10) Constitution; 11) Icicles; 12) Matted Spam; 13) Suitcase; 14) I Can't Take It; 15) Come And Get It.

 

And we finish off our exciting journey with the world's unluckiest rock band by dropping a few words on yet another attempt at a live album, and yet another somewhat unlucky one, although it is by far the best one available — certainly a huge improvement over the horrendous plastic surgery of  Day After Day.

 

Badfinger did three major recording sessions for the BBC services, one of them apparently lost and two others saved. Both of the saved ones were recorded in a real live setting, at the Paris The­atre in London, with a year's interval in between, and both are well representative of Badfinger's «authentic» live act. The sound, unfortunately, seems to have been taken from soiled copies, and leaves a lot to be desired, especially for the first show, where the vocals sometimes barely ma­nage to rise above the noise level, and the noise level is sometimes a little overwhelming due to the lack of proper instrument separation. But — hey, still beats an electronic drum overdub.

 

On the other hand, here, at last, we get to fully appreciate Badfinger as a sweaty, hard-rocking band onstage — and not just hard-rocking, but intentionally and consciously ignoring all of the hits in favor of extended instrumental jams and crunchified LP-only tracks. Each of the two sets includes up to not more than two «light» numbers (ʽWe're For The Darkʼ / ʽSweet Tuesday Mor­ningʼ and ʽIciclesʼ); everything else is distor­ted, loud, heavy, well in the scheme of the early 1970s hard rock scene à la Free and Grand Funk Railroad (as distinguished from the darker «heavy metal» scene of Led Zep and Sabbath).

 

In a total state of defiance, two of the first seven numbers even happen to be Dave Mason / Traf­fic covers — six minutes of ʽOnly You Know And I Knowʼ and nine minutes of ʽFeelin' Alrightʼ, although, frankly, the songs are just used as excuses for jamming, as is ʽSuitcaseʼ, the only num­ber here that was played at both shows. And the jamming is predictably passable — Pete and Joey do all they can to create a good mix of their own pop melodicity and the old stock of rock and roll clichés, but they cannot keep it interesting for longer than a minute or two, and very quickly start going in circles (on ʽSuitcaseʼ, actually, they seem to be going in circles for almost the entire duration — hey guys, if you can't do better than get stuck with the same riff for bar after bar after bar, it might be a good idea to stop and try something else).

 

Much is forgotten for the sheer kick-ass power of the bookmarks — ʽBetter Daysʼ, sped up and grittified, is as energetic a lead-in as ʽI Can't Take Itʼ is a lead-out. In general, the shorter the per­formance, the higher the resonance: in the overall heated context, even the funky ʽMatted Spamʼ, which was hardly a highlight on Badfinger, feels right at home in between the metallicized ʽCon­stitutionʼ and ʽSuitcaseʼ.

 

Cutting it short, these sessions do finally prove that, with proper planning and effort, Badfinger could have easily landed themselves a fine, respectable live album that could hold its own next to all the biggies of the era. Could, but did not. In order to truly qualify, these BBC sessions should have (a) belonged to a single, coherent show (because, what, two versions of ʽSuitcaseʼ? Ple­ase!); (b) cut down on the jamming (the six fast minutes of ʽOnly You Know And I Knowʼ are perfectly enough, completely lay out all the instrumental techniques of all the band members and do not require to be further supported by the nine slower minutes of ʽFeelin' Alrightʼ); (c) included a few of the hits — not ʽDay After Dayʼ, perhaps, which never worked well live, but why not ʽNo Mat­ter Whatʼ?; (d) been recorded, or preserved, in better quality. Satisfy all these conditions, and you get yourself a platter worthy of a... well, of a T. Rex or a David Bowie live album, at the very least (we won't be pushing things too far here).

 

So it's a damn appropriate way to finish up the section — show just one more thing that Badfin­ger could have been, yet never became. In the end, their legacy for the wide crowds consists of Mariah Carey's version of ʽWithout Youʼ (and she actually learnt the song from Harry Nilsson and pro­bably does not know the real authors herself up to this day), and their legacy for the nar­row crowds mainly consists of three old power pop hits (ʽNo Matter Whatʼ / ʽBaby Blueʼ / ʽDay After Dayʼ) plus, maybe, ʽCome And Get Itʼ (a Top Of The Pops version of which is, by the way, included on this BBC disc as a small bonus to fill up empty CD space). Is this explainable? Yes. Understandable? By all means. Justified? No way. If you haven't already done it, go buy a Bad­finger CD. Do good by Petera Ham, who did not even get to see her dad.

BAKER GURVITZ ARMY

BAKER GURVITZ ARMY (1974)

 

1) Help Me; 2) Love Is; 3) Memory Lane; 4) Inside Of Me; 5) I Wanna Live Again; 6) Mad Jack; 7) 4 Phil; 8) Since Beginning.

 

In the late 1960s, there used to be a band called Gun in the UK, run by the creative brotherly duo of Adrian Gurvitz (guitar) and Paul Gurvitz (bass). Both were accomplished musicians, but not terribly original songwriters, dabbling in psychedelic art-pop, progressive hard-rock and whatever else there was en vogue at the time. They were young, naïve, derivative, and not quite sure about how best to dispose of their talents. They did have one hit (ʽRace With The Devilʼ, a grinning mock-evil boogie piece that may actually have been a bit of an influence on Black Sabbath, evil laughter and all), but couldn't capitalize on it, dissolved, reunited as yet another band (Three Man Army), then crashed again in a commercial stupor.

 

And then along came Ginger Baker, fresh from the dissolution of his five hundred and fifty se­venth project (Ginger Baker's Air Force). Ginger, of course, wasn't much of a songwriter, but he was much of an «adventurer», and the ensuing brief romance between Baker and the Gurvitzes turned out to be almost surprisingly fruitful — particularly on this self-titled debut album. In a strictly mathematical sense, it was probably incorrect to label their power trio an «army», but they certainly generate enough rucus for at least a small squadron.

 

Essentially, the relative uniqueness of Baker Gurvitz Army comes from the clashing back­grounds. The Gurvitzes cut their teeth on blues-based «heavy art-rock», with a somewhat conven­tional approach to «aggression» and «beauty» in music. Ginger, on the other hand, came from a less «common-sense-oriented», so to speak, jazz background, to which he had also been adding a passion for the true African roots of jazz (he'd been living in Nigeria in the early 1970s). And the merger is lucky. On his own, Ginger couldn't have supplied the songwriting (not to mention the singing), and the Gurvitzes, without his aid, would have probably just made another Gun album — smooth, bland, and forgettable.

 

As it is, the record alternates between pop-rock anthems à la Grand Funk Railroad (ʽHelp Meʼ), stern, arena-flavored jazz-fusion workouts (ʽLove Isʼ), rootsy confessionals with weeping slide guitars (ʽInside Of Meʼ), orchestrated gospel sendouts (ʽI Wanna Live Againʼ), freakout jams (ʽMad Jackʼ), electric blues sendups in the style of Duane Allman (ʽ4 Philʼ), and atmospheric major key improvisations to brighten up your day (ʽSince Beginningʼ). It's not really quite as di­verse as that, because all of the band members have their trademark tricks that they reproduce in all genres, but still, fairly impressive, eh?

 

Ginger takes the firm spotlight only twice — during a (fortunately) brief drum solo on ʽMemory Laneʼ and lengthy spoken (actually, muttered) ramblings on ʽMad Jackʼ. But his presence is just as deeply felt, and overall, more impressive everywhere else. On ʽLove Isʼ, for instance, in be­tween all the mammoth riffs and flashy soloing, it is his polyrhythms, off-beat venturing, and unstoppable energy that breathe real life into the music. The Gurvitzes may be a little too stiff and stern at times, taking more care not to make any technical mistakes than to let in real rock'n'roll drive — Baker, on the other hand, couldn't care less about conventions, and simply flails in all directions with the same recklessness he showed in his Cream days (still sort of fresh in his me­mory, I guess, at such an early date). For those used to tighter, less impressionistic, but more te­chnically complex patterns in 1970s prog drumming (think either Bill Bruford or Carl Palmer), this combination might be a fine distraction (or a sacrilege).

 

Not that I'm diminishing the merits of the Gurvitz brothers in any way, because they do come up with lots of cool riffs and occasionally breathtaking bits of guitar interplay. The slide melodies of ʽInside Of Meʼ, for instance, have that emotional enigma that should be embedded in the best of 'em; ʽ4 Philʼ does deserve the comparison with Duane (as derivative as those bends and vibratos are, they are delivered with honesty and inspiration); and ʽHelp Meʼ, as funny as it is, sort of pre­dates all the best sides of Ozzy Osbourne's solo career a semi-decade before the fact (the idea came to me as I realized the similarity of the vocal parts, but really, the whole idea — cheery, me­lodic pop disguised as hard rock — is quite comparable).

 

The only track that does not manage to get off the ground is, amusingly, the one track that for­mal­ly tries to — ʽI Wanna Live Againʼ is pompous soul with gospel overtones, too idealistically pretentious for a bunch of white guys to pull off convincingly and, furthermore, misplacing Gin­ger's talents: this is the only track on which he is just a backing player, nothing else. But I sup­pose they just didn't dare put out an album without a single ballad on it, and I cannot imagine Ginger making a valuable contribution to a ballad, anyway.

 

Overall, the album did not leave a strong trace on the scene of 1974, falling through the cracks as usual — too much of a stylistic melange to amass a strong, devoted fan base, too many fluctuati­ons to appeal to «prog» crowds, «hard rock» crowds, or «glam» crowds in particular. But for to­day's retro-favoring fans of various intellectual or «intellectualized» directions of the 1970s, Ba­ker Gurvitz Army is a must. It's professional, it's loud, it's memorable, and it features a one-of-a-kind talent combination — what's to ignore? Thumbs up, of course.

 

ELYSIAN ENCOUNTER (1975)

 

1) People; 2) The Key; 3) Time; 4) The Gambler; 5) The Dreamer; 6) Remember; 7) The Artist; 8) The Hustler.

 

This is probably the best of the three Baker/Gurvitz albums, even though the general movement tendency leaves space for worrying: the vector is strongly biased towards «more Gurvitz, less Baker», which would culminate in the trio's disappointing final album. But for the moment, the major difference is just that there is no equivalent of ʽMad Jackʼ. Elysian Encounter, starting already from the cool-sounding, but overtly pompous title, is bent on taking itself more seriously and ra­tionally — which leaves more space for «layman-accessible» melodic overlays and less space for one of the world's favo­rite crazy drummers.

 

Not a lot less space, though; and fortunately, for Elysian Encounter, a sort of concept album built as a «musical portrait gallery», the Gurvitzes come up with a coherent framework, a fine set of riffs, melodic themes, and vocal hooks, and a fine production style that takes the best of all worlds — progressive, R&B, fusion, roots-rock — and leaves me no grounds for complaining. Okay, so the vocals are a bit hicky in places: for some or most of the parts they hire an additional vocalist, hiding behind the suspicious pseudonym of ʽMr. Snipsʼ (real name is Steve Parsons), who is absolutely nothing special — then again, I wonder if hiring Meat Loaf would have really been a better idea. Probably not. In any case, the music of Baker Gurvitz Army is not about great vocals — it's all about setting up a melodic groove and putting as much on top of it as the faithful horsie can stand without burying its hooves in the ground.

 

Thus, ʽPeopleʼ is exactly the sort of jazz fusion that I like the most — with all the trademarks of the genre (technique, speed, complexity), plus a strong basic riff-based hard rock theme, plus vocals, plus crazy solos that contrast nicely with the vocals. In the end, the energy, precision, and «intelligence» of the whole thing are not squandered, but tightly packed into a four-minute long thunderfest that might well be worth an entire album by the Mahavishnu or late period Soft Ma­chine (not any album, but you probably know what I mean).

 

ʽThe Keyʼ, on the other hand, is a somber cold shower after the thunderstorm — a tight, swinging groove with a soulful atmosphere and several «devil-or-angel»-type slide guitar overdubs that sounds like everything else and nothing else at the same time. Eventually, the whole thing starts inducing trance, as the slide parts pile up and the wailing reaches psychedelic heights, with Gin­ger's drumming and the "God only knows how I found you" mantra acting as the «lullifier» and the slide guitars acting as the «covert indoctrinator».

 

This is just two examples, but, really, each and every song on this album joins together disparate, familiar, oftentimes trivial elements and results in a synthesis that is, at worst, curious, and at best, awesome. Look how, on ʽThe Artistʼ, Ginger masterfully wiggles his way around a basic waltz melody, and a set of pretty, pastoral slide lead lines (well fit for a George Harrison solo record) are perfectly integrated with jarring electric blues solos. Wonder at how ʽTimeʼ sounds so much like early 1970s Traffic, and yet packs so much more angst and tension than a typical Traffic track (so is it our problem that Steve Winwood and his pals never whetted their instruments be­fore entering the studio?). Think about whether ʽThe Dreamerʼ would have fit in on the Allman Brothers' Brothers And Sisters — probably wouldn't, since the vocal melody is more Byrds than Allmans — making it an even quirkier combination, since these busy country guitar runs are just so much Dickey Betts in style.

 

They leave the busiest for last, though: ʽThe Hustlerʼ wraps up things on an even more frenzied, self-choking note than they were opened — here we have nearly seven minutes of groovy phased guitar backing, freight train drumming, and overdriven speed runs (this time, with some of them worthy of an Alvin Lee or even of an Angus Young) that never feel like seven minutes. It's a bit cheesy, yes, but heck, that's just what the progressive genre needed in 1975 — a little novelty and cheesiness, just a little whiff of cheap excitement atop the complexity and the seriousness.

 

Maybe if it weren't so over-the-top derivative in all respects, Elysian Encounter would not be as forgotten as it is today. People like their masterpieces with at least something that's totally indi­vidualistic — a personal chord change, a guitar tone, a unique vocal, anything. This here is a mo­saic, consisting of shrink-wrapped, sold, and delivered pieces, in which even Ginger's drumming style is sort of reduced to a slightly inferior imitation of itself. But then there's always the cooking process, and in this particular case, the three chefs are beyond reproach. Thumbs up — for one of the most underrated records of 1975.

 

HEARTS ON FIRE (1976)

 

1) Hearts On Fire; 2) Neon Lights; 3) Smiling; 4) Tracks Of My Life; 5) Flying In And Out Of Stardom; 6) Dancing The Night Away; 7) My Mind Is Healing; 8) Thirsty For The Blues; 9) Night People; 10) Mystery.

 

Now who was it ordered a change in style? They had such a lovely thing going on, and without a single warning, in just one year's time, they went from a smooth synthesis of jazz, prog, and roots stuff to a disheartening brand of heavy funk, bordering on disco (and sometimes crossing over directly — on ʽDancing The Night Awayʼ, which, alas, is anything but a throwback to Cream's ʽDance The Night Awayʼ, even though Ginger at least must have felt a slight discomfort). I'd like to place this burden on the conscience of Mr. Snips (because what the hell of a name is Mr. Snips, anyway?), but apparently, he is only credited for two of these songs, so what we are really deal­ing with is nothing less than a shameless sellout by the Gurvitzes — and Ginger playing submis­sive accomplice.

 

Not that these songs are all that awful. The Gurvitzes' songwriting instincts were honed well enough by the first two albums to produce a set of decent riffs, shuffle in some variety and play around with guitar tones and overdubs. It's just that ʽHearts On Fireʼ, with its macho stomp and electronically treated guitar solos, rather belongs on a Peter Frampton album. These guys did not really have enough brawn to «sex it up» — Mr. Snips, as a vocalist, lacked personality or power, and the riffage was too clean anyway to inspire the expected dirty thoughts.

 

There is one interesting composition here: ʽNeon Lightsʼ, despite the misleading title, is actually a tight, swinging blues-rocker with a subtle, cool-oriented chorus and a weird selection of guitar tones — hard to describe, but it seems to generate a gloomy forcefield all its own, with a wobbly psychedelic aura, not terribly original, but standing out a bit. Everything else is simply «listen­able» and even «memorable» after a few listens, but you'd have to have those few listens first, and why should you, when there were probably about five thousand albums released all over the world that year, covering the same grounds?

 

The band even stoops to including a generic 12-bar piece, dressed in a «blues-de-luxe»  treat­ment (ʽThirsty For The Bluesʼ) — to my ears, even more of a lowlight on this album than the cheesy disco stuff: Adrian Gurvitz is no B. B. King, and neither is Mr. Snips, and the worst they could do was drag down the tempo so that, for over five minutes, we'd have to slowly savour each bar, de­livered in pseudo-vintage fashion (and wasting Ginger's presence — this man has no business whatsoever doing generic blues material).

 

Granted, ʽThirsty For The Bluesʼ may simply have been a chunk of filler that they came up with at the last moment, with ideas running low and contractual obligations pressing closer. But the truth is that I really cannot recommend any other tracks — ʽNeon Lightsʼ is okay, and «funk-rock» collections may probably benefit from ʽHearts On Fireʼ and ʽFlying In And Out Of Star­domʼ (the latter is at least fast and furious, if only they had a better singer), yet even these are only impressive while they last.

 

Consequently, here is just another of the many examples of decent bands eaten up by the com­mer­cial bug — since Elysian Encounter did not cut it with the crowds (it hardly had a chance anyway, with progressive rock already drifting out of mainstream fashion by 1975), they tried to go the Physical Graffiti-era Led Zep route here with a foray into accessible, danceable hard-rock and predictably fell flat on their faces. The only honorable decision after that would be to commit seppuku, and that they did, disbanding once and for all. Which is a pity: had they been able to remain satisfied with what little they had, and develop it further, we might have seen many inte­resting developments that could organically grow out of the Elysian Encounter stylistics. As it is, they just cruelly aborted the baby, and for that, they get a merciless thumbs down from me — even though, on my third listen, having overcome the initial disappointment, I could already sto­mach most of these songs with good old toe-tapping indifference. But is that enough for a change of heart? And speaking of hearts, an extra -100 for the album title. I cannot exclude that Mr. Snips' heart was indeed on fire during these sessions (you'd have to be a professional cardiologist to reach a proper diagnosis), but I am more interested in Mr. Ginger, and this just isn't the sort of music that he was born to play.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE IN DERBY '75 (2005)

 

1) The Hustler; 2) Space Machine; 3) Remember; 4) White Room; 5) Neon Lights; 6) Inside Of Me; 7) Memory Lane; 8) Sunshine Of Your Love; 9) The Artist; 10) Freedom; 11) Time; 12) Going To Heaven.

 

Although, at their peak (and they were almost always at their peak, considering they only lasted three years), Baker Gurvitz Army were a real swell live act, somehow they never got around to putting out a live album — probably because there was little hope of commercial success, given the failure of the studio ones (too bad they never got inspired by the example of KISS). The vaults did open, eventually, in the 2000s, with a whole stream of low-budget, but sometimes sur­prisingly high-quality releases, the most representative of which is this show, recorded for a live BBC broadcast (hence the quality) during the Elysian Encounter tour.

 

In the true spirit of progressive ambition, the setlist barely fits onto a single CD with only twelve numbers — but, in all honesty, the seventy eight minutes never feel tedious. These are just long songs, sometimes launching into jam mode for brief periods (this ain't Cream, really), sometimes giving the guitarist or the drummer an individual chance to shine (only one, and a relatively brief at that, drum solo — probably at the BBC's cordial request), but most often fixed in a steady groove mode, just getting it on, with the Gurvitz brothers providing the hard rock excitement, Ginger adding a jazz foundation, and the keyboard guy laying on the funk 'n' fusion. Although, honestly, to hell with the keyboard guy — his presence is notable, but as a keyboard guy, he is the weakest link in this chain.

 

The setlist is predictably concentrated on Elysian Encounter, with a couple of numbers from the debut album, a «preview» of ʽNeon Lightsʼ from Hearts On Fire, and a 7"-only song (ʽSpace Machineʼ, "our last single that vanished without a trace", Mr. Snips says) to hold up some balance — as well as two Cream classics (guess which ones) donated specially for Ginger fans, and a late period Jimi Hendrix cover, because what fun must it be to feel yourself in the shoes of The Band Of Gypsies from time to time.

 

The spirit of the transformation into the band that made Hearts On Fire is already evident — there is a very strong emphasis on danceable funk grooves throughout the show, most obvious on the drastic rearrangement of ʽInside Of Meʼ, where they drop the melancholic blues and lay on the dirty funk like there was no tomorrow. But it works much better in the raw live setting than it would work in the polished confines of the studio. As I said, it ain't Cream — there is never any feeling that the players are fighting a mortal combat against each other, even Ginger seems fairly content to be just a member of the team — but there is no fear, either, of letting their hair down and sacrificing, where possible, precision and discipline for the sakes of gutsy excitement.

 

They could actually do without the Cream covers, though: it is quite clear that both were per­formed for purely perfunctory reasons, and that neither Mr. Snips (who omits an entire verse from ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ) nor Adrian Gurvitz (who refrains from playing the last solo on ʽWhite Roomʼ) have any real interest in playing a Bruce or a Clapton. But I suppose that having Ginger Baker in your band surmises certain ironclad obligations — especially when one starts thinking of all the potential ticket buyers. Anyway, that is just six minutes out of seventy-five, and they don't sound awful or anything.

 

Overall, a content thumbs up here: the whole thing is a sweaty, crunchy, agile, and intelligent sample of mid-Seventies' «hard-art»-rock with a respectable balance between the hard and the art parts. Less elitist and esoteric than something like The Mahavishnu Orchestra, perhaps, but high­ly recommendable for all those who'd like to combine intelligence with headbanging without having to take it from the likes of Uriah Heep.

 

LIVE (2005)

 

1) Wotever It Is; 2) The Gambler; 3) Freedom; 4) 4 Phil; 5) Remember; 6) Memory Lane; 7) People.

 

If, for some reason, you are still in the mood for more gurvitz-bakery, this extra release, also from 2005 and, seemingly, also from the post-Elysian Encounter tour, might do the trick. Unpreten­tiously called Live (or, as some sources put it, Live Live Live, or even longer, depending on how many times you spin around the CD cover), these are not remastered, but still good quality re­cordings that only partially overlap with Live In Derby, and thus, have some real appeal that warrants at least a quick reconaissance download (or even a certified purchase, although I am not even sure that the artists themselves get anything from these limited-issue foreign imports).

 

Anyway, there is at least one song here that is totally unavailable anywhere else — the introduc­tory ʽWotever It Isʼ, a jiggly hard-funk number, unfortunately, mostly keyboard-driven for the first half, but once Adrian finally steps in with burning solos, the groove starts unfurling, and by the fourth minute, the BGA are completely in their element. Then there is a rather faithful, and not very intriguing, rendition of ʽThe Gamblerʼ, and a somewhat more intriguing version of ʽ4 Philʼ which, as Ginger says, «starts off as it used to be, and finishes as it is» — that is, with a new section, now featuring life-asserting vocals from Mr. Snips, thrown in. Finally, the major addition to Live In Derby is the red-hot finale with ʽPeopleʼ — Baker-Gurvitzes are always at their most infectious live when doing fast stuff, and this here is no exception.

 

The stage banter tidbit to be associated with the album is Ginger's mid-show mumble about how «the police have said that they are gonna raid the place, but the stage is a sancrosanct area, so you if you all throw your illegal things onto the stage, we promise we'll look after them for you». Jud­ging by the average comprehensibility of the mumble, you'd think that quite a few «illegal things» had already landed on the stage by then — then you remember that it's just Ginger, and that he always talks that way.

 

If you are still in the mood for one more red hot gurvitz on your baker, keep in mind that there is more: for instance, Still Alive from 2008, featuring even more archival live stuff from the same tour, scattered on 2 CDs. There is a bit of good stuff there, too — such as an early, and quite im­pressive, live version of ʽHearts On Fireʼ, and the only official live version of ʽHelp Meʼ (which should really have been a stage favorite — I have no idea why they didn't do it in Derby). Oh, and during his stage banter bit, Ginger actually says «drugs» now instead of «illegal things». I guess that must be the difference between knowing you're being recorded for the BBC and not knowing you're being recorded at all.

 

But the whole thing still shows clear signs of being scraped together, since (a) the overall sound quality is much worse than on Live, and (b) there are no less than four separate drum solos, altogether add­ing up to about thirty minutes — and each of them sounds just like ʽToadʼ. To be sure, Ginger Baker was one of the most distinctive drum soloists in the business, but it's not as if the fifth minute of a ʽToadʼ-style drum solo is all that distinctive from the eleventh minute of a ʽToadʼ-style drum solo. Well, actually, the eleventh minute is usually louder than the fifth (that's just about the time when the drummer goes into full acceleration mode on each limb). But that, too, is sort of predictable.

 

Overall, it is always sort of a lottery — which one of the «lost legend» bands will be the next in line to start getting the let-it-all-hang-out treatment, particularly now that the task of digitalizing an archive recording and releasing it as a «limited issue» pressing has never been easier. In reality, nobody but the starkest fan should care about Live (Live Live), and nobody but the looniest re­viewer should care about Still Alive. Which should never detract from the fact that the Baker Gurvitz Army were a dang fine band anyway, both in the studio and live.

BANCO DEL MUTUO SOCCORSO

BANCO DEL MUTUO SOCCORSO (1972)

 

1) In Volo; 2) R.I.P. (Requiescant In Pace); 3) Passaggio; 4) Metamorfosi; 5) Il Giardino Del Mago; 6) Traccia.

 

Every «international genre» with a «national flavor» always runs a certain risk of inheriting not only the finest, but also the dippiest features of that flavor. A very good case in point is the early 1970s Italian progressive rock scene. The proud Roman nation loved it all, from Yes to Genesis to Gentle Giant, as so many things there tended to borrow from their own musical traditions — and eventually joined the fray themselves: 1972, in particular, saw the debuts by two of Italy's most renowned prog acts, both with lengthy, flashy names, pompous-sounding to a foreign ear but quite tongue-in-cheek in reality (Premiata Forneria Marconi were named after a bakery, while Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso means «bank of mutual aid», and you can sort of see that in meta­phoric form on the album sleeve).

 

The biggest problem of both bands, though — and I do understand that many might think the op­posite — is that, being Italian, they, rather naturally, crossed the emerging UK-led school of symph-prog / jazz-prog / «avant-prog» / whatever with the world of Italian pop. In a way, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso is what you get when you cross Emerson, Lake & Palmer with the Sanremo Music Festival. Within Europe, this seems to have been a specifically Italian thing: the small French progressive scene, for instance (Magma and the like), did not see the need to add Charles Aznavour to their influences, but Italians probably thought that there was no way to capture the musical market if they did not, in some way at least, pander to fans of musica leggera, which (no offense to my good Italian friends) is altogether one of the most awful music scenes to emerge in the XXth century, yuck yuck yuck.

 

Of course, the very emergence of bands like Banco was a step in a healthy direction. This is real progressive music — complex, demanding, occasionally gritty, with a strong will to search for new forms and solutions. The key(board) members are the two Nocenzi brothers — Vittorio on organ and Gianni on piano, forming a sparring duo that remains a relative rarity in the world of European art-rock (Procol Harum comes to mind, of course, but their keyboards were less flashy and more integrated into song-based forms). In addition, Marcello Todaro is a competent guitarist with a serious taste for «hard psychedelia», and the rhythm section of Renato D'Angelo on bass and Pier Luigi Calderoni on drums did their King Crimson homework well enough.

 

The weakest link in the band is the singer, Franceso di Giacomo. Every time he opens his mouth — and I absolutely literally mean every time — I want to turn this off and never ever hear it again. He has this shaky Italian tenor, quite devoid of individuality, far too cheesy and manneristic to stir up genuine emo­tionality, yet, obviously, far too weak and untrained to match the quality of a great opera singer. Most of the vocal melodies seem slightly tweaked from standard Italian pop clichés, and the resulting «ailing romantic» aura suffers accordingly.

 

But the good news is that di Giacomo is also the most expendable link in the chain. His vocal bits here and there are more like «solos» — twisted flourishes on top of the pudding, rather than being at the heart of the music. The focal point of the album, for instance, is the 10-minute ʽMetamor­phosiʼ, where he only comes in towards the very end. The other two major compositions — the 7-minute long prog-rocker ʽR.I.P.ʼ and the 18-minute-long prog suite ʽIl Giardino Del Magoʼ (ʽThe Magician's Gardenʼ — hello, Uriah Heep!) — feature him more extensively, but still more like a bit player than an actual frontman. All of which means that the singing is an unfortunate evil side effect that one can learn to cope with in order to savor the real taste of the album. (Besides, if you happen to like Sanremo style...).

 

Because, in general, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso is not about wearing your heart on a sleeve; it is about how one can generate a cobweb of jazz, classical, psychedelic, and pop motives in an unin­hibited flight of fantasy. Far more indicative of its overall quality is the introduction to ʽGiardinoʼ, where Vittorio's steady bluesy organ riff is answered by Gianni's sprinkling glissandos — nothing particularly «virtuoso» about either, but the combination is fresh and exciting even for the overall innovative standards of 1972. And when Todaro comes in, doubling the organ with his light-heavy fuzzy tone, the freshness and excitement get reinforced with some much-needed crunch. Later on, we get acoustic guitar, clarinet, and harmonica-imitating clarino parts to add to the di­versity, and in the end, the suite matches its title well — there is an atmosphere of «lite magic» throughout, not exactly one of celestial beauty (the band is relatively unskilled in the technical wonders of «atmospheric» production styles, and it all sounds as if it had mostly been recorded live over several takes), but definitely one of tasteful prettiness.

 

ʽR.I.P.ʼ shows that they can rock out as well, also in «lite» mode, but keeping up a respectable tempo, allowing the drummer to show some muscle, and coming up with gruff, mean-sounding bass lines against the background of which even quiet, mumbling jazz-rock «noodling» acquires an ominous sheen. But it is ʽMetamorphosiʼ that really represents the quintessence of the classic Banco sound: sounding almost as a free-form jam session, flying from one tempo and theme to another, with the piano, organ, and guitar conducting a lengthy trialog on several different sub­jects — including whether they like Bach more or less than Chopin, or Robert Fripp more than Dave Gilmour. For my ears, there are neither any passages of breathtaking beauty here, nor any moments that rock out to high heaven, yet it still sounds attractive, and all of the influences are combined creatively, rather than as direct, unimaginative rip-offs.

 

As far as my intuition is concerned, the album is very strictly «second rate» in terms of finding one's own voice, and the situation is further exacerbated by the lameness of the lead singer (who is absolutely not needed here at all) and the superfluous «conceptual» mini-links between the large opera, with boring atmospherics, pompous declarations, and dated sound effects. But none of that prevents it from getting a firm thumbs up — what the Nocenzi brothers lack in terms of technique and genius, they effectively make up for simply in terms of sticking together, and look­ing for various ways of making their instruments talk to each other, fight with each other, and sometimes fuck each other, in both the good and the bad senses of the word. All in all — a curi­ous, pleasant experience, and about as 1972-ish as it ever gets.

 

DARWIN! (1972)

 

1) L'Evoluzione; 2) La Conquista Della Posizione Eretta; 3) Danza Dei Grandi Rettili; 4) Cento Mani E Cento Occhi; 5) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore?; 6) Miserere Alla Storia; 7) Ed Ora Io Demando Tempo Al Tempo... .

 

Although the theory of evolution has always constituted a rich source of material for pop art, I am not quite sure if I actually know of any other concept album that would be entirely based around this subject. Of course, lots of artists, starting with The Hollies and ending with Viper, have had LPs out called Evolution, but they weren't really about evolution — they just used a cool word with a progressive ring to it. Hence, Banco can be commended not only for a formally pioneering artistic effort, but also for choosing a reality-based theme as a foundation for their concept, in an era when progressive artists generally preferred constructing fantasy worlds of their own. (Of course, for some people, even today, the story of evolution is little more than a fantasy world in itself — one terrific comment on Darwin! at RateYourMusic reads: «as much as I can't stand the Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and atheism, I'm glad it's in Italian! Because I don't under­stand a lot of it! GREAT MUSIC TOO!» — but that point of view is beyond our current scope).

 

I know relatively little about old Charles' musical preferences, but it is usually claimed that he had a taste for Chopin and piano-based music in general, so he might have been pleased to learn how deeply this Italian piano-based prog band was inspired by his findings. And much of this al­bum, indeed, consists of fabulously composed, arranged, and performed music. It is not my favo­rite Banco album — I would say that the basic musical themes on Io Sono Nato Libero are bet­ter fleshed out and even less conventional — but there is a good reason why it remains a critical fa­vo­rite and, essentially, serves as the band's calling card for all newcomers, and that reason has nothing to do with atheism or scientism. (Well, maybe it does... a little... but actually, that's a dif­ferent reason altogether).

 

Here, the band consciously purges out the last remainders of the «boogie» approach (such as were still evi­dent on ʽR.I.P.ʼ), and goes for an organic synthesis of pop, psychedelia, jazz, and Italian «lite clas­sical» — the latter with much more emphasis on the piano than on the vocals, and this means relying a little less on DiGiacomo's vocal trills. Direct influences of musica leggera are limited to the melodramatic ballad ʽ750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amoreʼ, DiGiacomo's chief moment of dubious glory on the record — he ends up sounding exactly like Demis Roussos in spots, which means that this is, at best, an acquired taste. In the «lush Mediterranean ballad» category, it may objectively rank quite high, but I would prefer just to hear the piano.

 

However, most of the rest of the album avoids excessively romantic pitfalls, which is only natural considering the decidedly non-romantic subject of natural selection that lies at the core of the al­bum's concept. ʽL'Evoluzioneʼ is a grand 14-minute panorama, the chief musical inspiration for which must have been ELP's ʽTarkusʼ, as it fluctuates between classically and «jazzily»-arranged parts, going from stately-majestic to jerky-paranoid and back. But these guys are no power trio, and their big advantage is not the tightness of their collective sound, but rather the textural diver­sity they bring in — pianos and organs are always the mainstays for the show, yet every now and then they drag out guest stars: Moog synths, chimes, clarinets, psychedelic guitars with flashing colors... creativity on the rampage, and, of course, one should expect no less from an anthem to the leading force in the establishment of organic diversity on Earth, right?

 

Actually, discussions of individual songs would only make sense here in the context of a long and detailed study — almost every track, no matter how short or long, consists of several sections, some of which duplicate each other mood-wise, and it makes much better sense to simply take it all in, like an extended ʽTarkusʼ or a compacted Thick As A Brick, especially since few of the themes are strikingly individualistically memorable on their own. Well, there is this dangerous-sounding synthesizer motif in ʽLa Conquista Della Posizione Erectaʼ... and this melancholic mu­sic-hall-derived piano melody in ʽDanza Dei Grandi Rettiliʼ... and this moody clarinet dirge in ʽMiserere Alla Storiaʼ... but they still tend to blend in unless you are paying lots of attention.

 

The important thing is that, like most of the really great complex prog albums of the early 1970s, this is not something that demands to be memorized upon first listen — upon first listen, we are simply supposed to admire the freedom, the genre mergers, the sincerity of intentions, and the playing dexterity (for that matter, some of the piano parts here could rank quite high on the Cho­pin / Liszt fan list). Then, eventually, the melodies will start sinking in, and who knows, in just a little while you might find yourself dancing along to ʽThe Dance Of The Great Reptilesʼ, even if it is really about as danceable as the average Thelonious Monk number.

 

Perhaps Darwin! is not really quite up to the task of providing an adequate musical soundtrack to the bearded one's scientific vision — perhaps Wagner or Mahler would be more suitable primary influences here than the comparatively «wimpy» romantic players of the first half of the XIXth century. In fact, without the album and song titles, or ready access to the album's lyrics with a bit of knowledge of Italian, no one will probably want to associate the shifting moods, styles, and to­nalities of the record with billions of years of mutation and selection. But, as you can see, if Dar­win's theory helps inspire this kind of genre-smelting progressive rock, it can't be all wrong even from a creationist's point of view. Thumbs up — for the influence of the erect position on classic Italian progressive rock, and for the best impersonation of the gene flow process ever attempted on a classically tuned piano.

 

IO SONO NATO LIBERO (1973)

 

1) Canto Nomade Per Un Prigioniero Politico; 2) Non Mi Rompete; 3) La Città Sottile; 4) Dopo... Niente E Più Lo Stesso; 5) Traccia II.

 

This record is less known than Darwin! — for a technical reason, I believe, since «second-row» progressive rock (or any rock, for that matter) bands tend to be illustrated in textbooks by just one album, and Darwin! is an obvious choice due to its thematic cohesion. «Italian prog-rockers break through with an album centered on evolution», etc. This follow-up, in comparison, tends to be overlooked: it is not as thematically coherent, has fewer songs, and a long Italian title that, even if it is really hardly in any need of translation, is still a long Italian title.

 

However, it is every bit as good as Darwin!, and, perhaps, in some ways even better. It does suf­fer from the usual standard issue: ʽNon Mi Rompeteʼ is yet another in the ongoing series of Banco's ro­mantic Mediterranean ballads that will either make you swoon — or cringe, depending on your genetic constitution and social upbringing. Personally, I would gladly do with just the lovely folk patterns from Marcello Todaro's guitar, watching them gradually turn psychedelic through added phasing effect and form the backdrop for Vittorio's «whistle-synth» solo. Alas, I also have to live with DiGiacomo's «proverbially beautiful» singing — but if you are a fan of that style, it is probably done perfectly.

 

But other than the ballad (which would, of course, go on to become a crowd favorite), the album is dang near impeccable. ʽCanto Nomadeʼ (ʽA Nomad Chant For A Political Prisonerʼ) follows up on the album title — a 15-minute suite devoted to issues of personal and political freedom that mixes classic symph-prog, folk motives, noise, jazz-fusion improvisation, and a weird tribalistic percussion-dominated section without any seeming effort, as if to prove us the point about being born free. The individual themes are not exceedingly striking on their own, but, as in all of Ban­co's best works, they have this seductive lightness and fluency to them — the track hops along butterflyishly, from flower to flower, right down to the finale, where, fed up with nectar, it finally makes the landing with a swift and satisfied bombastic thud.

 

Side B is dominated by two shorter epics: ʽLa Città Sottileʼ is a dark mid-tempo piano-based epic, and ʽDopo... Niente E Più Lo Stessoʼ, opening with the album's catchiest theme — a strange «pas­toralesque jig» that almost sounds childish in comparison to everything else — soon turns out to be the album's resident rock piece, with heavy electric riffs, aggressive drum patterns, and a steady build-up to a state of barely-controlled instrumental chaos... before switching back to the little-boys-and-girls whistling dance once again at the very last moment.

 

Does it all «make sense»? Not in any objective manner — more than anything else, Io Sono Nato Libero simply seems carried away by its flow: other than the carefully pre-composed ʽNon Mi Rompeteʼ (and the brief final crescendo theme of ʽTraccia IIʼ, ending the album with an appropri­ate slice of stately majesty), the boys are working according to the «try anything» principle, as long as the «any­thing» in question does not carry them too far away from the shores of melody, harmony, and purity (such things as «feedback» or «atonality» do not seem to be favored in Ban­co's lexicon). But that is one hell of an exciting flow anyway — as usual, not bent on lengthy «noodles-style» soloing, but on carrying on a lively dialog between various instruments, one that never sticks too long around a single topic. Hence, it never becomes boring, and hence, there is always a good pretext to return to the album again. Thumbs up.

 

BANCO (1975)

 

1) Chorale (From Traccia Theme); 2) L'Albero Del Pane; 3) Metamorphosis; 4) Outside; 5) Leave Me Alone; 6) Nothing's The Same; 7) Traccia II.

 

I am not sure if Banco, the band's first English-language album, had any serious merit in putting the band on the international market — chart information is missing (and it probably didn't chart anyway), and, besides, by 1975 popular interest in progressive rock was already waning a bit, so it is highly unlikely that the release of Banco on Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Manticore label made even a tiny handful of people aware of the existence of the fine Italian team. Regardless, though, even if Banco were to break them through internationally, it should by no means be al­lowed to go on serving as anybody's introduction to the band.

 

The very idea is ridiculous — «prog» audiences are generally expected to be more open towards other languages and cultures than «pop» audiences, and how's that sound anyway? «Oh no, not me, I only listen to ten-minute suites with weird time signatures and unpredictable chord changes if the lyrics are in English, otherwise it's a bit too complicated for me». Not to mention, of course, that, with certain reservations, the language of music transcends national boundaries by definition, whereas singing — and emoting — in a non-native language might be a fairly risky business.

 

In particular, while I personally do not care too much for DiGiacomo as the band's lead singer, there is no denying that he is a perfect natural — raised on the Italian opera / pop tradition and everything. The same style, transposed on the phonetic and verbal structures of English, at best, sounds forced, and at worst, embarrassing. Granted, DiGiacomo does his best to camouflage the proverbial Italian accent, but it still isn't good enough, certainly not on ʽLeave Me Aloneʼ (ʽNon Mi Rompeteʼ), which has no business whatsoever being sung in English with carefully preserved Italian intonations. This is not-ta too good-duh.

 

Furthermore, it just does not look like the band was too happy about doing this conversion. Sur­prisingly enough, they went to the trouble of actually re-recording all the tracks, maybe because they'd lost the mastertapes and were unable to wipe DiGiacomo's vocals off the originals (the completely instrumental ʽTraccia IIʼ is the only number here that has been directly carried over), but the re-recordings never reach the same level of power and enthusiasm — and they also go much easier on the electric guitar (played by new band member Rodolfo Maltese, replacing Mar­cello Todaro) and seriously heavier on synthesizers, which is not to my liking at all.

 

Finally, what's up with the idea of re-recording the old stuff anyway? I am not that much of a fan to spend lots of time comparing the old ʽMetamorfosiʼ with the new ʽMetamorphosisʼ, and thus, only the first six minutes of the album are of relative interest: ʽChoraleʼ, subtitled ʽFrom Traccia Themeʼ, is an atmospheric «look-how-impressively-we-synthesize-church-organ-effects» com­position that has nothing to do with either the original ʽTracciaʼ or ʽTraccia IIʼ (all three could have been constituents of a single dismembered multi-part suite, though), and ʽL'Albero Del Pa­neʼ (ʽThe Bread Treeʼ) is an uplifting, dynamic anthem built on the conjunction of ferocious acoustic strum and a sea of romantic synthesizer joy. I suppose that both were included mainly to provide the Italian sector of the market with an incentive to buy the album.

 

As things are, the album seems to be generally out of print today, and for a good reason. Nobody really needs to understand what the band is singing about — the finest musical masterpieces re­quire the listener to supply his own images and interpretations, and once the frontman starts bat­tling with a foreign accent, all images and interpretations start deteriorating accordingly. A curi­ous document indeed — but, even though ʽL'Albero Del Paneʼ is salvageable, it is hardly enough to save the album from a decisive thumbs down. Recommended to avoid, even if found in a used bin (or, more likely, in some forgotten dusty container that accidentally did not make it onto the Rome – New York flight).

 

GAROFANO ROSSO (1976)

 

1) Zobeida; 2) Funerale; 3) 10 Giugno 1924; 4) Quasi Saltarello; 5) Esterno Notte; 6) Garofano Rosso; 7) Sugges­ti­oni Di Un Ritorno In Campagna; 8) Passeggiata In Bicicletta E Corteo Dei Dimostranti; 9) Tema Di Giovanna; 10) Siracusa. Appunti D'Epoca; 11) Notturno Breve; 12) Lasciando La Casa Antica.

 

A soundtrack to an obscure Italian movie on the rise of fascism in the 1920s, this usually counts as a «proper» entry in the Banco discography — not only does the album incorporate several in­strumentals that were not actually featured in the movie, but most of them do not really sound much like «movie muzak». The only tangible reference to the movie theme is in ʽ10 Giugno 1924ʼ, at the beginning of which an angry crowd keeps chanting "Assassini! Assassini!" (refer­ring to the assassination of a socialist leader by fascists on that day) — but if you were listening to the album without any knowledge of its background, you wouldn't be able to guess what the hell this soundbite is doing there, other than to add a little whiff of the ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ spirit, perhaps (which would not be true: avantgarde sound collages were never on Banco's agenda).

 

The good news for those who, like me, are not awestruck over DiGiacomo's vocal powers (and, conversely, the bad news for those who are), is that the album is completely instrumental, with the focus placed exclusively on the Nocenzi brothers. The bad news is that it is still cursed by the typical soundtrack curse — although there are no attempts whatsoever here at «dumbing down» the sound, and from all points of view the album qualifies as rigorous symph-prog, it still fun­ctions primarily as background ambience. All the themes are tasteful and range from «pretty» to «ominous», but I was not able to spot any particularly resonant motifs. Except for one — the dark ascending piano pattern that first appears on ʽEsterno Notteʼ and then is re-introduced in ʽTema Di Giovannaʼ. Creepy, doom-laden, and... essentially, borrowed from The Beatles' ʽI Want Youʼ, once you come to think of it (the fact that they changed the last note, which only makes it less effective, only confirms the suspicion).

 

Overall, this is fairly mellow stuff: forty minutes of witnessing a slow, time-taking competition between the piano and the organ / synthesizer, played out according to an almost baroque code of combat. It does not strive to reach previously unexplored ground — adequately enough for a mere soundtrack, made on order — and there are no moods here that these guys had not already built up to better effect on their previous albums.

 

The title track, beginning with a bit of free-form «self-adjustment» and then stabilizing into a steady blues-rock jam, was deemed important enough by the band to become incorporated into their live shows — but this is really the kind of number that the Allman Brothers would have done with more spice (and more guitar! that «pastoral synthesizer» thing does get tedious after a while!) on a good day. And it is only overcome in length by ʽSuggestioniʼ, which has almost no noticeable changes in dynamics throughout its eight minutes. Ambience!

 

«Pleasantly boring» is what I call these kinds of records — acknowledging, at the same time, that obstinate fans of the symph-prog genre could still find plenty of minute delicacies to savor here. Unless you are really obstinate, though, don't bother — your time might be better spent reading a book on the history of the fascist movement, little as that has to do with the actual spiritual con­tent of this particular «quasi-soundtrack».

 

COME IN UN'ULTIMA CENA (1976)

 

1) ...A Cena, Per Esempio; 2) Il Ragno; 3) E Così Buono Giovanni, Ma...; 4) Slogan; 5) Si Dice Che I Delfini Par­lino; 6) Voilà Mida (Il Guaritore); 7) Quando La Buona Gente Dice...; 8) La Notte E Piena; 9) Fino Alla Mia Porta.

 

Since this is not a soundtrack no longer, but rather a good old concept album, loosely (very loosely) based around the theme of the Last Supper, with DiGiacomo returning to his normal place as band frontman, initial hopes of getting another Io Sono Nato Libero are fairly high. But alas, as it turns out after a few listens, the main problem of Garofano Rosso was not in being a soundtrack — incredible as it may seem, the band simply started running out of fresh ideas and basic energy, and Ultima Cena continues that process.

 

It is still essential for the fans, since at this point, the band does not yet show any signs of «com­mercializing» their sound. Technically, we are still dealing with the same old Banco: a complex fusion of classical, jazz, rock, pop, and «San Remo» influences, formally unpredictable at every turn and aiming for an equally complex mix of emotional / intellectual reactions. Nor is there any technical sign of «slacking»: the Nocenzi brothers and Rodolfo Maltese give themselves no re­spite, churning out riffs, solos, and tonal experiments a-plenty.

 

Bad news, though: it no longer works so well, particularly in the context of their earlier successes. Banco's musical themes were never all that «catchy» — their approach to music was more in the classical than in the rock vein — and while it paid off well during the early stages, by 1976 the trick was getting stale. There is hardly anything here that they didn't do better on their first three albums — which is especially ironic considering how much there is: just about every single sty­listic twist, technical move, emotional pass, etc., that they were capable of will be encountered on one or several of the tracks. Everything going on at once — and nothing imprintable.

 

At first, I was afraid it was just me; then I began to find out that many reviewers had the same feelings — for instance, the All-Music Guide review clearly stated that the album «shows signs of breathlessness», although the reviewer was kind enough to let ʽIl Ragnoʼ (ʽThe Spiderʼ) and ʽSloganʼ off the hook for their «power» and «energy». I wouldn't be capable of the same kind­ness. Sure, ʽIl Ragnoʼ has a steady beat, a heavy bass line, and a distorted guitar riff to keep it going, and the introductory part of ʽSloganʼ tries to be dark and ominous... but none of that goes far enough, or, rather, all of it goes too far: not one of the instrumental parts has enough power to impress on its own, and, when taken together, they cancel out rather than strengthen each other. The cogs are grinding with all the required mechanical precision, but somehow, the clock does not run with the necessary effectiveness.

 

Some small consolation may be taken in the fact that this time around, the obligatory soft ballads are almost completely stripped of that irritating Italian suaveness — ʽE Così Buonoʼ and ʽLa Notte E Pienaʼ are formed by little acoustic-and-flute patterns that are more in the old baro­que tradition than in the «Mediterranean pop» style, and DiGiacomo's vocals sound much less manne­ristic and affected in that setting. Which is not to say that either one is a musical masterpiece of unprecedented depth and power — only to say that, with their presence, Ultima Cena reaches a consistent standard of «uninterrupted mediocrity»: an album that is bound to delight dogmatic fans of «That Classic Banco Sound», wherever it may be found, but is far more likely to disap­point those who rigidly demand «progress» from their «progressive». Because this here is not progress — this is a classic example of stagnation, and (just as it happened with quite a few other «prog» acts) it may even serve as a weak justification for the band's soon-to-be transition to an unabashedly pop stylistics.

 

...DI TERRA (1978)

 

1) Nel Cielo E Nelle Altre Cose Mute; 2) Terramadre; 3) Non Senza Dolore; 4) Io Vivo; 5) Nè Più Di Un Albero Non Meno Di Una Stella; 6) Nei Suoni E Nei Silenzi; 7) Di Terra.

 

If you are an old school progressive symph-rock band, and you want to avoid stagnation, and most of the world is divided into the New Wave and the disco camps and doesn't give a damn about academic approaches to popular entertainment, what do you do?

 

Well, normally you sell out, with faint hopes of gaining short-term advantages and avoiding long-term reputation loss, neither of which usually comes true. But every once in a while, just prior to selling out, you might make a startling, unexpected, out-of-time and out-of-touch move that will provide your future generation fans with a cool extra subject for discussion. Never be afraid of going «against the grain» — even if the results are awful, the very fact of your bravery will go down in the annals, and there will always be admiring fans who have a thing for bravery.

 

As you can already make out from the album sleeve, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso have lopped the last three words from their name already in 1978. That «shortening», following in the wake of their colleagues in the business, Premiata Forneria Marconi, becoming simply «PFM», is some­times associated with the band's transition from serious prog to cheesy pop — however, that is not accurate, since the first «Banco» album, ...Di Terra, is anything but cheesy pop: on the con­trary, it is one of the most ambitious and «academic» projects the band ever came up with. A completely instrumental album, once again, but not a soundtrack like Garofano Rosso — this time, it is a full-blown seven-part symphony, recorded with the participation of the Orchestra dell'Unione Musicisti di Roma. A classical / jazz / rock hybrid that was arguably as far from «cool» with the critics in 1978 as... oh wait, I guess nothing could be farther.

 

Di Giacomo's absence from the album, this time around, is feebly compensated by naming all the tracks with lines from a puffed-up metaphysical poem he wrote — similar in style to Graeme Edge's poetry he wrote for the Moody Blues but, thankfully, only implied in the music, never sung or recited in itself. Still, it yields a certain hint — taken together with the grandiose pull of the arrangements, the title brings on associations with Mahler's Song Of The Earth, and even if the music itself has little (but not exactly «nothing») to do with Mahler, the ambitions are some­what comparable. As a polyphonous, multi-theme, «sprawling» instrumental concept album by a nominally «rock» artist, ...Di Terra is sometimes compared with Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, but the two are grounded in completely different traditions — Mike's magnum opus was, after all, far more indebted to Celtic folk and stuff, whereas the Nocenzi brothers' passions steadily re­main rooted in late XIXth / early XXth century classical schools.

 

Anyway, the end results are impressive. Reviewing the separate movements of the piece is a task as arduous as reviewing the separate movements of a Bruckner (or, indeed, a Mahler) symphony, but a lot of well-schooled compositional activity has been invested here, with great care for dy­namics and development. The «overture» (ʽNeil Cielo...ʼ), for instance, permanently pinned to a rising-and-falling string theme, gradually transforms from a «pastoral» setting to a «parade» one, as brass instruments overtake woodwinds. Then ʽTerramadreʼ leads us into fast-paced «modern jazz» territory, with rampant dissonance and atonality — replaced three minutes later by the odd mix of baroque influences, elevator jazz, and New Age-isms that is ʽNon Senza Doloreʼ. And so on and on, right down to the «galloping» finale of the title track, which combines most of the ingredients — a little spaghetti western, a little blues-rock, a little Tchaikovsky, you name it.

 

There is not enough power and muscle here — there probably could not have been, had they sedu­ced Herbert von Karajan himself to direct the orchestra — to separate your lower jaw from the rest of your face, I suppose. But this is still a very good, and a very unusual, application of Banco's «synthetic» powers — all of those jazz and ambient elements that they mix in so freely with the classical make ...Di Terra a near-unique experience, and one that probably deserves much more publicity than it has among music lovers. I have no problem calling this their «last gasp of brilliance» or something like that, and a firm thumbs up is guaranteed. At the very least, it does sound like absolutely nothing else produced in the Saturday Night Fever era.

 

CANTO DI PRIMAVERA (1979)

 

1) Ciclo; 2) Canto Di Primavera; 3) Sono La Bestia; 4) Niente; 5) E Mi Viene Da Pensare; 6) Inferno Città; 7) Lungo Il Margine; 8) Circobanda.

 

We are still not quite in the Eighties yet, and this album does not yet have the proper license to be «atrocious». At this point, it looks as if Banco are taking the relatively easy way out — instead of properly selling out, like everybody else, and going for a fully «commercial pop» sound, they are instead becoming a «soft jazz» / «lite fusion» act. Apparently, the experiment of ...Di Terra did not work out to critical or commercial success, so for their next project, they went with something that goes easier on the budget than a full-scale orchestra, and easier on the average listener than a completely instrumental «neo-classical» recording.

 

The album title is right on the money: the whole thing is a fairly coherent «Spring Song», with mostly bright, sunny, happy melodies, many of them with a «pastoral» flavor (title track, for in­stance), driven, as usual, by the Nocenzi interplay — the only bad thing about which is that Gianni has completely switched over to new brands of electric pianos and clavinets, so the whole experience has a decidedly «inorganic» flavor to it. Even when they throw in some folky bits, making us dance along to the opening lines of ʽSono La Bestiaʼ, they do it with these rather un­suitable keyboard tones — eventually, who needs to hear those sounds played on stiff electric keyboards when you can listen to Ian Anderson doing the same stuff on real flutes?

 

Worse, most of the atmospheric textures are tripartite — the annoying electric keyboards set the first layer of melody, the brand new synthesizers set the second one, and the third one is usually provided by Luigi Cinque's echoey saxophone that is not that far removed from the standards soon to be set by Kenny G — smooth, inobtrusive, «melodic», boring to the point that, if you listen to this stuff too intensely for too long, the only cure is to throw on ʽYakety Yakʼ as soon as possible, or you might develop a lifelong incurable hatred for the instrument.

 

The melodies are not exactly complete throwaways — there is a lot of compositional activity going on here, and from a formal technical point of view, Canto is probably not any less com­plex than ...Di Terra. But the fact that the boys are not officially «slouching» hardly means anything if there is no exciting dynamics — no rises, no falls, no climaxes, no Sturm-und-Drang, just a lot of key and tempo changes that make the separate pieces about as different from each other as the different blades of grass on that bright green spring meadow they are singing about. Where are the thrills, the chills, the kills, goddammit?

 

On the other hand, with the exception of the ornamental framework (ʽCicloʼ and ʽCircobandaʼ are two similar-sounding happy-fusion-esque instrumentals that bookmark the record), this is all very much DiGiacomo's show — the relatively short tracks offer full compensation for the man's ab­sence on ...Di Terra. And with that, the San Remo spirit is back as well: every song is full to the brim with flourishing mannerisms, exaggerated sentimentality, beards soaked with artistic tears, and, occasionally, some theatrical martial punch. None of it holds any serious emotional reso­nance for me, but most of it is done reasonably fine and will always have its fans.

 

In a certain way, what this reminds me of is a sort of Italian equivalent to Steely Dan's Aja — except that beyond the smooth, seemingly «corny», «easy-listening» surface of Aja there hides a darker, leerier heart (a common thing with Steely Dan), whereas subsequent listens to Canto Di Primavera do not reveal any surprises. I mean, Italian pop (heck, most Italian music from any time period, for that matter) usually bares it all at once, and Banco are no exception — and cer­tainly not when they try to emphasize their «national» side over their «cosmopolitan» ambitions. In the end, the only thing that prevents this ball-o'-blandness from a «thumbs down» is that... well, we are still not quite in the Eighties yet.

 

CAPOLINEA (1980)

 

1) Non Mi Rompete; 2) Il Ragno; 3) Canto Di Primavera; 4) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore; 5) Capolinea, Pt. 1; 6) Capolinea, Pt. 2; 7) R.I.P.; 8) Garofano Rosso.

 

Why these guys had to wait until 1980 to release a live album is anybody's guess — perhaps they thought it boring to jump on the «triple live album» fad while they were still playing the songs close to the originals, but now that they had so daringly reinvented themselves for the Modern Age, it was time to show the world how infinite those adaptive capacities of progressive rock really are? Particularly now that you can actually dance to those formerly tricky oldies and all?

 

All right, so this is not quite the brand new, Eighties-ready Banco yet. This is a transitional album: they do a selection of mostly old material, alternating between (a) tear-jerkers — ballads that need very little readjustment to set the crowds a-weepin'; and (b) old «rockers» remade according to the electro-funky standards of the day, with hot syncopated basslines that sometimes go all the way up to disco (even though in general this is not «Banco's disco album», as the fans sometimes brand it, steeping away in horror — but a dance album this is, of course).

 

The only new composition is the two-part title track, a fast, but relatively old-fashioned boogie piece with alternating synthesizer and guitar solos, and a bass part that pays proper tribute to the fusion genre. It's listenable and nimble, but generic, and the synthesizer tones are ugly anyway. But it may be a better proposition for the fans than the funkified rethinking of ʽR.I.P.ʼ, or the disco pounce of ʽIl Ragnoʼ, or the new life of ʽGarofano Rossoʼ as the Italian equivalent of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

 

On the other hand, in retrospect the experience is sort of amusing — it is curious to hear, at least once, how these old classic tunes behave in a «nightclub» setting, and it will ultimately depend upon your attitude towards something like Walter Murphy's ʽA Fifth Of Beethovenʼ: ridiculous, disgusting, money-grubbin' desecration or cheesy, bold, tongue-in-cheek experimentation? For Banco, scrap «tongue-in-cheek», though: there are no signs of self-irony anywhere in sight, they are clearly targeting these rearrangements at a new kind of audience — one that is accustomed to standing up and getting it on at live shows, not sitting down and contemplating.

 

The recording quality is fairly good (every throb of each disco line wobbles your speakers im­pressively), DiGiacomo is in fine vocal form (in fact, at this point he emerges as the most «con­servative» element of the music, faithfully reproducing the original vocal melodies), and the No­cenzi brothers do work their asses off, regardless of the goals and results. The album hardly qua­lifies for a proper end-of-the-decade «summarization» of achievements — it stares way too in­tensely into the glum future, and the song selection is too restricted — but, at the very least, it is a semi-decent way to cap off one's collection of BMS records, because, compared to what would follow, and follow very soon, Capolinea is a frickin' Mozartian masterpiece. Prophetic title, too: Capolinea means «terminus» in Italian, so take a hint before proceeding further.

 

URGENTISSIMO (1980)

 

1) Senza Riguardo; 2) Dove Sarà; 3) C'E Qualcosa; 4) Luna Piena; 5) Paolo Pà; 6) Felice; 7) Ma Che Idea; 8) Il Cielo Sta In Alto.

 

Fresh, sizzling, off-the-grill electronic Italian dance-pop from 1981, anyone? Didn't think so. Per­haps the move to a blatantly commercial sound was as inevitable for Banco as it was for the ab­solute majority of their progressive brethren — but even such brethren as Yes, Genesis, or Gentle Giant mana­ged to handle the transition with more self-esteem: thirty years on, it is still possible to think of a few reasons to dig out 90125 or Abacab other than pure childhood nostalgia. This transformation, in comparison, results in such utter shite that the only reason to listen to Ur­gen­tis­simo is strictly culturological, as in — you thought US and UK mainstream pop tastes in the early 1980s went down the drain? have a look at the Italian pop taste!

 

In the short term, the strategy worked: the band managed to launch several local hits on the Ita­lian charts, of which ʽPaolo Pàʼ was the biggest, convincing Banco that this was, indeed, the way to go on. In the long run, these corny abominations serve as the perfect textbook example of how it is possible to take the worst aspects of a successful «intellectual» band and use them to reforge it into a conglomeration of happy pop idiots.

 

It is not just that these «post-disco» Eurodance tunes are utterly primitive in comparison to you-know-what. I am not sure that, composition-wise, ʽPaolo Pàʼ or ʽDove Saràʼ are that much more «dumb» or «simplistic» than, say, some Oingo Boingo ditty from the same time period. ʽDove Saràʼ, for instance, has a fairly liberal lead guitar score from Maltese, and ʽPaoloʼ has several keyboard parts with the Nocenzi brothers still competing for the listeners' attention like they al­ways used to. Basically, if you want «totally primitive», there are much, much worse examples in the same genre.

 

The one thing that is really disgusting is a complete loss of a sense of «adequacy». DiGiacomo's vocal talents are now let loose to convey «serious emotions» in a musical context best fit for a teenage disco club — the songs are sung as if they are supposed to mean something when they really don't: the only meaning implied is «please keep on buying our records so we don't starve in this strange new age». And the only real purpose behind the Nocenzi brothers' keyboard hooks, this time, is to get your sorry butt wiggling to those Hot New Funky Sounds — best illustrated, perhaps, by the repetitive six-note chorus melody of ʽMa Che Ideaʼ, which could, for all I know, be an old AC/DC riff transcribed for synthesizer.

 

Only two of the tracks still preserve faint traces of more worthy purposes: ʽSenza Riguardoʼ, once you have suffered through its Big Heavy Mammoth Riff (which honors the slowly emerging pop-metal move­ment), has some free-form soloing in the middle, and ʽFeliceʼ has a brief nod to the band's former fusion pedigree (but even so, integrates the fusion-esque chord changes into a to­tally club-oriented dance number). Note that this paragraph has been inserted strictly out of con­siderations of courtesy and politeness — it is not, by any means, recommended that anybody go out and look for these songs as «lost delights». They are simply marginally less disgusting than the rest. Also, the brief instrumental album closer ʽIl Cielo Sta In Altoʼ is supposed to work as an artistic atmospheric coda, with two synthesizers trading «heavenly» lite-jazz lines against an irri­tatingly repetitive clavinet bassline.

 

Does it work? Well, even if it did, what's two minutes of soft, inobtrusive, jazz-poppy textures to us after thirty minutes' worth of complete embarrassment? Welcome to one of the cheesiest sell­outs in European pop music history, with a crashing thumbs down.

 

BUONE NOTIZIE (1981)

 

1) Taxi; 2) Canzone D'Amore; 3) Si, Ma Si; 4) Buona Notte, Sogni D'Oro; 5) Baciami Alfredo; 6) Michele E Il Treno; 7) AM-FM; 8) Buone Notizie.

 

If possible, this is even more «pop» than its predecessor. Now there aren't even any of those stu­pid «monster riffs» like the one that opened ʽSenza Riguardoʼ, nor any attempts to preserve their jazz-fusion legacy like ʽFeliceʼ. Every single track you can dance to, sometimes in slower, some­times in faster motion, and everything is almost unbearably, disgustingly happy — in an odd con­trast with the sleeve photo, where the band members choose to look like a band of captured parti­giani, grimly preparing to meet the firing squad.

 

I will not deny that the arrangements are not always awful, or that the songs are not always hook­less. They could have done a lot worse: this upbeat, playful, New Wave-influenced vibe that they latch on is at least much better than choosing to drown themselves in saccharine balladry or up­date the «San Remo vibe» by refueling the pomp with synthesizer arrangements — both of these options would be very easy to implement, and the consequences would have been absolutely hor­rendous. Thus, in a way, this particular mode of selling out is probably the least painful way in which they could sell out at the moment.

 

This does not, however, remove the basic problem — these are simply stupid songs, as in «stupid stupid», not «cutely stupid» or «charmingly stupid» or even «silly stupid». Even if your Italian is good enough to understand such witty lines as "Ho un libro di Bukowsky sull'eiaculazione" (ʽTa­xiʼ), it does not save the situation. The texts, overall, try to be impressionistic, educated, and, oc­ca­sionally, socially relevant, but they are set to such «slap-happy» arrangements that any attempt to get a «message» out of them will be spiritually blocked. All they do is simply invite you to jump on the spot like a two-year old, in an incomprehensible paroxysm of rhythmic joy. Fast ones like ʽSi, Ma Siʼ and the title track are the worst of the lot, but slower lullabies like ʽBuona Notte, Sogni D'Oroʼ do not actually change the mood — they are less idiotic, but more boring.

 

By the general standards of mainstream Italian dance-pop, this is fairly decent quality, I guess: with keyboards and guitars still striving for modestly complex melodicity, and with DiGiacomo still in full control of his voice, the album is technically accomplished. But its rhythmic base is absolutely, utterly primitive, its emotional impact is negligible, and its hooks stupid and meaning­less. Consequently, yet another thumbs down — and by now, it seems all but impossible that the band will ever get a chance to see the light once again.

 

BANCO (1983)

 

1) Ninna Nanna; 2) Lontano Da; 3) Moby Dick; 4) Pioverà; 5) Allons Enfants; 6) Velocità; 7) Moyo Ukoje; 8) Trac­cia III.

 

Stuck in between two of Banco's worst excuses for existence, this eponymous release from 1983 is marginally better — at least every once in a while it tends to veer into long forgotten «art-pop» territory, with occasional baroque vocal flourishes and flashes of intellectualism: I mean, how bad can an album with direct references to Herman Melville, the French national anthem, and a phra­seological expression in Swahili really be?

 

Well, it can be pretty bad, for sure, but not entirely hopeless. Granted, the audacity even to sug­gest that there may be some feeble continuity with Banco's classic legacy — as evidenced by the inclusion of a short bookmarking instrumental called ʽTraccia IIIʼ — is hardly permissible, parti­cularly in view of the fact that the song in question is a bland piece of post-New Wave dance mu­zak heavily struck with synthesizeritis. But if we bring ourselves to forget that there ever was a ʽTraccia Iʼ or ʽTraccia IIʼ in the first place, Banco has its better moments.

 

ʽMoby Dickʼ, in particular, is a tolerable, at times even jubilantly infectious, chunk of Euro-pop, laden with catchy choruses, decent slide guitar and ʽDancing Queenʼ-ish piano patterns, maybe the best track to stem from Banco's pop period in general — see, it isn't really that hard: all one needs is not sound too stupid and include some instrumental work that does not value flashiness and rhythm above subtlety and melodicity.

 

And make that a big emphasis on «not sounding too stupid» — throughout the album, the atti­tudes and tonalities are significantly shifted towards a melancholic, autumnal mood with a little bit of old-timey romantic idealism carried over from the progressive days. If only the rhythmic pulses here weren't so utterly flat and predictable, ʽNinna Nannaʼ could have been a passable jazz-rocker, and ʽPioveràʼ could have been an okayish fusion ballad. There is even an attempt at jumping on the «world music» wagon with ʽMoyo Ukojeʼ, even if its Swahili title is more or less the only «world» element to it... still, it's a bit of an improvement over ʽBacciami Alfredoʼ, if you know what I'm talking about.

 

It's not as if any of these observations constituted sufficient reasons for the album to exist — it is quickly and easily forgettable — but, at least, in the general context of the band's history it comes across as a weak muscle convulsion from what already seemed like something that «ceased to exist». One could even hope that, had things continued to unfurl in the same way, Banco could have been the beginning of a resuscitation. Unofrtunately, the Eighties were only beginning — Genesis, too, released their best «pop-era» album in 1983, as did Yes, and look what happened later. Could we expect anything radically different from their Italian brethren? I don't think so.

 

...E VIA (1985)

 

1) Notte Kamikaze; 2) Ice Love; 3) Black Out; 4) (When We) Touched Our Eyes; 5) To The Fire; 6) Mexico City; 7) Lies In Your Eyes; 8) Baby Jane.

 

With your permission, I will keep this one brief. For some reason, the «moody» twist of the self-titled Banco did not appear satisfactory — and just two years later, the band fell back on its «silly Italo-pop» schtick, except, this time, with an appropriately (for 1985) larger emphasis on big stu­pid electronic drums and «sci-fi» synthesizers. Results are predictable: a record that is just as dumb as Buone Notizie, but goes even harsher on the ears.

 

Summarizing: a total of 4 cretinous (yes, I need to drag out my thesaurus for this) «hot» electro-pop dance numbers — I can just imagine the Nocenzi brothers, with naked torsos, getting it on with those sexy portable synths!; one deeply bathetic power ballad that might as well have been written by Diane Warren; and three calmer, adult-contemporary numbers, the last one of them with a faint, distant echo of the band's fusion legacy (but at this point, that echo is pretty much indistinguishable from the domain of soft jazz muzak).

 

Additionally, most of the songs are delivered in English — never a forte of DiGiacomo's, and at this point, who really cares? I seriously doubt they managed to sell a single copy of this crap out­side the borders, where everybody had their own national crap at the time. (Not to mention that a single look at DiGiacomo's facial expression on that billboard would shoo away even the buz­zards). Somebody must have gone completely wild in the marketing department — or maybe singing in English over ear-splitting electronic drum backgrounds was all the rage in Italy circa 1985, which I doubt.

 

As is often the case on such of the lyrics, a few of the choruses are «formalistically» catchy, but usually in the form of «idiot catchiness» — if the Italian line about dancing with the protagonist all night long from ʽNotte Kamikazeʼ gets stuck in your head for a couple hours, nothing good will come out of it anyway. Nobody except for the most corrosively perverted Eighties' buffs need ever bother about locating this record — E Via, indeed. And yes, that's the wrong way you are pointing out there, signor DiGiacomo — thumbs down, all the way, never up or even side­ways.

 

DONNA PLAUTILLA (1989)

 

1) Ed Io Canto; 2) Cantico; 3) Piazza Dell'Oro; 4) Mille Poesie; 5) Un Giorno Di Sole; 6) Un Uomo Solo; 7) Bla, Bla, Bla; 8) E Luce Fu; 9) Mille Poesie (version 2); 10) Donna Plautilla.

 

Finally, an Eighties album from Banco that does not at all sound like the Eighties... hmm, I won­der if this could have anything to do with the fact that all of the recordings here allegedly date from the late 1960s / early 1970s? The decision to open the vaults and flood the fans with pre-proto-nostalgic demos, recorded way back when DiGiacomo was not even a member of the band yet, and most of the vocals were handled by the Nocenzi brothers themselves, came at a strange time — just two years earlier, Gianni had left the band for good in order to embark on a solo ca­reer, and what with ...E Via being the latest and «greatest» trace of their legacy, the band must have looked essentially finished for everybody still the least bit concerned.

 

So the fact that they turned to their almost archaeological past was quite telling: you do not usual­ly bother publishing your teenage scraps unless (a) you happen to be one of the greatest bands in the world, in which case your legions of fans will be happy to buy anything, or (b) you happen to be totally defunct, in which case your three or four remaining fans will be happy to buy anything. And Donna Plautilla offers few revelations — by default, it happens to be the best Banco album of the decade due to utter lack of competition, but in the overall scheme of things, it is primarily of interest for the historian.

 

The songs are surprisingly well recorded: these are not bare-bones demos, but full, professional stu­dio productions, background harmonies, multiple overdubs and all — strange enough, there seems to be no trace of this material ever having been officially released, even though I am pretty sure that some of these songs could have been turned into (at least) modest hits on the Italian mar­ket. Rather predictably, this is mainly «sunny» Italian art-pop, already with some baroque ten­dencies, but very much derivative of the typical Italian scene, particularly in the vocal depart­ment — and, speaking of vocals, Vittorio Nocenzi's singing is not all that bad: nowhere near as distinctive, sharp, or «soulful» as DiGiacomo's, but also less manneristic and overwrought. Fans of Francesco should probably stay away in the first place, but non-fans of Francesco who hold the opinion that his singing frequently distracts one, in an irritating manner, from the intricacies of the music, could actually find satisfaction — provided, that is, that the melodies were awesome in any way, and it looks like they are not.

 

If the songs are arranged in chronological order (I am not sure), then there is a clear «growth» ten­dency: the first song, ʽEd Io Cantoʼ, sounds like a typical late-Sixties pop «nugget», a hybrid of hip British psychedelic style with Italian dramatism that is neither too inventive nor too catchy, while the last one — the instrumental title track — already boasts the trademark Nocenzi organ / piano duo in full flight, engaging in a flashy jazzy duel reminiscent of contemporary Traffic (some of the glissandos and stuff sound inspired by ʽGladʼ off John Barleycorn). In between you have it all — hyper-driven, corny acoustic ballads (ʽCanticoʼ); distorted heavy piano boogie (ʽPiazza Dell'Oroʼ); even an early attempt at a «universalist» epic anthem (ʽE Luce Fuʼ).

 

In short, they were trying hard, but the short art-pop song format just does not yield good results for these guys — they never really hit their stride until they'd finally worked out the long multi-part instru­mental form. Essentially, it is just that some bands function best in «Procol Harum mode» while others have limited pop sensibility and tend to thrive in nineteen-minute long sym­phonic rock à la Yes environments. Thus, Donna Plautilla, while listenable overall and having its occasional moments, clearly shows that, as an «art-pop singles band», the early Banco had no chance whatsoever at being noticed in the crowd — there is nothing here except for general com­petence. If you want yourself some really solid «Mediterranean» art-pop from the era, equally influenced by Romance and British (as well as Greek) spirits, check out Aphrodite's Child instead — hooks galore, plenty of atmosphere, and surprising diversity out there that expose Donna Plau­tilla for the timid training camp that it really was.

 

Nevertheless, the album is unquestionably of great importance for those wishing to experience and assess the Banco curve from start to finish — after all, the marvels of ʽR.I.P.ʼ and ʽMetamor­phosiʼ did not come out of nowhere. And just because the brothers' playing technique is already well established, as well as for the sake of having, that way, secured at least one mildly worthy release in the 1980s (through cheating, but would we rather have another ...E Via? no way!), I am definitely not giving it a thumbs down.

 

DA QUI MESSERE SI DOMINA LA VALLE (1991)

 

1) In Volo; 2) R.I.P.; 3) Passaggio; 4) Metamorfosi; 5) Il Giardino Del Mago; 6) Traccia; 7) L'Evoluzione; 8) La Conquista Della Posizione Eretta; 9) La Danza Dei Grandi Rettili; 10) Cento Mani, Cento Occhi; 11) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore; 12) Miserere Alla Storia; 13) Ed Ora Io Domando Tempo Al Tempo.

 

As the 1990s introduced their «revivalist» spirit, and former sellouts, one by one, started shaking off the slick commercial haze, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso came to their senses as well — alas, at the expense of losing Gianni Nocenzi, so this here is a one-kidney band trying to restore and then preserve what can be restored and preserved of its former face.

 

They did it in a strange way, though: by completely re-recording their first two albums and relea­sing the new versions both separately and as a 2-CD package, subtitled with a line from ʽIn Voloʼ. As far as I understand, they were the only ones of the major prog veterans to have done that — allegedly, the «restoration» of Yes was also due to re-recordings of old classics (Keys To Ascen­sion), but those were live shows, and the compositions were taken from different albums. These, in comparison, are studio productions, completely faithful to both the sequencing and the arran­gements of the original versions. So what's the point?

 

In all honesty, since the original albums are classics, after all, a fully responsible review should take pains to carefully compare all the differences and present a well-researched conclusion on whether the subtle changes introduced in the re-recordings may be qualified as improvements. Particularly since some of the tracks are noticeably longer (ʽR.I.P.ʼ, ʽMetamorfosiʼ, and ʽL'Evo­luzioneʼ, in particular, have each been extended by about three minutes, by means of extended instrumental sections, so it seems, usually of the «atmospheric» variety — such as the new lengthy build-up to ʽConquista Della Posizione Erettaʼ). But I am rather loath to assume this responsibility — the task seems more appropriate for professional Bancologists, not for someone who is just here to offer a quick en-passant judgement.

 

Hence, my irresponsible judgement is as follows: The re-recordings are listenable, but the subtle changes, on the whole, are (predictably) detrimental. Of course, in 1991 they do have the benefit of better production values than in 1972, but that benefit is brought to nought when you realize that (a) the drums sound pretty bad, with tinny electronic effects disrupting the tight focus; (b) even though it is the piano player and not the guitarist who has left (piano parts are handled either by brother Vittorio or guest player Piercarlo Penta), it is often the guitar parts that suffer the most, as can easily be seen already on ʽR.I.P.ʼ — Maltese uses unnecessary electronic effects throug­h­out, so that, overall, the live and intimate feel of the original is replaced by digital murk that does not trigger the same kind of emotional response (to put it mildly).

 

DiGiacomo is completely on the level throughout, and it is not as if, having never heard the ori­ginals, you would be hard pressed to understand what all the fuss was about — the melodies, structures, and overall goals are all the same. Maybe they just thought this could eventually turn into a trend: «refresh» all the classics with the new, improved aid of modern technologies. Natu­rally, it did not, so in retrospect, this acquires the status of a misguided historical curio, for com­pletists only — not that there is any further danger of mistaking the re-recordings for the origi­nals, since the originals are back in print, and the re-recordings are out of it, possibly for ever, so that once again, time is on our side.

 

IL 13 (1994)

 

1) Dove Non Arrivano Gli Occhi; 2) Sirene; 3) Brivido; 4) Sirene, Pt. 2; 5) Guardami Le Spalle; 6) Anche Dio; 7) Spudorata (pi-ppò); 8) Bambino; 9) Tremila; 10) Rimani Fuori; 11) Emiliano; 12) Mister Rabbit; 13) Magari Che (Gar­garismo); 14) Tirami Una Rete; 15) Bisbigli.

 

Finally, a proper attempt to justify the band's obstinate craving for survivalism — an entirely new studio album of freshly composed material that tries to put the mutuo soccorso back into the ban­co, if you get my drift. An hour's worth of music that still retains plenty of «body power», but, first time in years, sounds motivated by ambition and exploration rather than pure dumb fashion — a chance to really tell the world that the true Banco never really went away, they just spent fif­teen years getting DiGiacomo's beard out of the drum machine.

 

Perhaps the results could have been better if they hadn't lost Gianni in the scuffle. Without one of the two key links in the chain, Banco would never be able to restore its classic sound — and, in fact, they are honestly not even attempting to do it. Instead, their conception of «seriousness» in music now involves a propensity for heavy funk — the «rock» in the «return to prog-rock» age­nda is understood as chuggy syncopated guitar riffs, jumpy bass, and loud, but simple drum pat­terns. They had already toyed with R&B elements several times in their «lost years» — now all they have to do is cleanse it from the ugliness of Eighties' production, add extra bridge sections and extend the jam parts, and presto... Art!

 

Well, not really. Actually, the songs aren't bad — they don't sound particularly silly, and for that reason alone, are nowhere near as offensive as it used to be (except that the chorus of ʽMister Ra­bbitʼ, with its peculiar Italian insistence on loudly pronouncing the second word as «rah-bit», brings on inappropriate visions of kindergartens). They are simply «sparkless» — no matter how fast or frenetic or ecstatic they want to make themselves look on something like ʽSireneʼ, it does not sound convincing, not even when their new guitarist Max Smeraldi breaks into a furious Van Halen-esque metal solo. ʽBrividoʼ, on the other hand, shows that they still carry a strain of the «glam-pop» virus — the song begins in atmospheric, Floydian, mode, then proceeds into the re­gular «anthemic» territory (pompous synths, big booming drums, and not a lot in the way of in­teresting melody or subtle nuances). And it isn't even contagious.

 

Arguably the best of the lot are several «experimental» numbers deprived of vocals — ʽAnche Dioʼ, for instance, echoes New Wave-era King Crimson with its tricky, off-balance time signa­tures and dissonant processed guitars à la Adrian Belew; and ʽEmilianoʼ is a showcase for Vitto­rio's jazz piano skills, although it is hardly likely to ever replace Thelonious Monk on your Ipod — outside of this album, ʽEmilianoʼ will probably shrivel and die in seconds. Then there are the acoustic ballads that require the usual tolerance / passion for Italian pop traditions (ʽTirami Una Reteʼ, ʽRimani Fuoriʼ, etc.) — still miles above the smelly plastic pablum of...

 

...yet, anyway, I do not understand why I should be forced to feel good about this record just be­cause it is less embarrassing than E Via — no Herculean feat, really, to make an album that would sound less embarrassing than E Via, especially in 1994, when musical fashion temporarily took a turn for the better. In retrospect, Il 13 is simply tolerable, but boring: Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso are on an egotistical mission to prove that they, Banco, are still a musical force — and this whole «let us make a stereotypical Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso album, and throw in a few funky arrangements to throw them off the scent» attitude is an overall failure. Oh, and it's pathe­tically overlong — a whole sixty minutes of this futuristic nostalgia? Thumbs down.

 

NUDO (1997)

 

CD I: 1) Nudo, Pt. 1; 2) Nudo, Pt. 2; 3) Nudo, Pt. 3; 4) E Mi Viene Da Pensare; 5) Prologo #1; 6) R.I.P.; 7) Il Ragno; 8) Emiliano; 9) L'Evoluzione; 10) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore; CD II: 1) Sul Palco; 2) La Conquista Della Posizione Eretta; 3) Metamorfosi; 4) Guardami Le Spalle; 5) Roma/Tokyo; 6) La Band; 7) Bisbigli; 8) Passaggio; 9) Coi Ca­pelli Sciolti Al Vento; 10) Traccia; 11) Prologo #2; 12) Non Mi Rompete.

 

What good is releasing a double CD if you are only going to put one new song on it? And not a good one, at that: the three-part ʽNudoʼ suite is most definitely one of those «failed experiments» where the artist thinks he is being all smart and complex and cool and modern, but in reality just comes up with something that makes no sense whatsoever. ʽNudoʼ is very loud, very full of itself, but fails to come up with melodies that would venture outside second-rate synth-pop and adult contemporary — it is about as «progressive» as circa-Union Yes; in fact, it is a serious stylistic letdown even compared to the already lax standards of Il 13. Granted, the riffs and solos are at a much higher level of complexity than on E Via, but the synth tones, the drum machines, and the over­produced guitars make that observation pointless: in the end, there is more pomp here than style, and far more technophilia than substance.

 

All the more curious is the fact that the rest of this stuff, even though it all consists of oldies done anew, is delightful. The first CD, once the accursed suite is over, is then dedicated to an «unplug­ged» section where they do their classic tunes in acoustic mode, with the aid of a young colleague guitarist, Filippo Marcheggiani (who was not even born when they already recorded most of their classic albums). The results are hardly essential, but sound almost surprisingly inspired — lack of amplification does not impact the energy of the melodies, just gives them more of a «chamber» feel (actually, the lack of amplification only refers to guitars — synthesizers are still quite promi­nent, particularly on ʽL'Evoluzioneʼ).

 

The second disc (there is also a 1-CD edition that omits it) contains a selection of properly live titles, recorded at two shows in Tokyo; the tracks do not overlap with the «unplugged» ones, but are also mostly classic stuff, with the exception of the Vittorio-sung ʽGuardami Le Spalleʼ from Il 13 and a new instrumental, flatteringly called ʽRoma / Tokyoʼ — another pompous symph-rock composition, but somewhat more effective than ʽNudoʼ, maybe because the live environment makes it feel more like a real heated battle between all the players than just another demonstra­tion of their worship of loud-sounding technogadgets.

 

As for the classics, well, this is actually the first time we get to hear Banco in full-out live mode playing the classics without turning them into disco attractions — the versions of ʽConquista Del­la Posizione Erettaʼ and ʽMetamorfosiʼ in particular are quite impressive. Now they share the re­gular prog-rock live album bane («find ten differences from the originals... not»), but with twenty five years lying between the originals and the copies, who would really blame them? And while we are at it, DiGiacomo's voice has not lost a thing in terms of range or power, only gained in terms of self-assurance and professionalism.

 

Overall, Nudo clearly shows that at this point, Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso are only functional as a «nostalgia act», but they can be a damn fine nostalgia act if they really put their minds to it — their days as composers of quality music long since gone, their talents for melody and innovation worn out, eaten up, perhaps, by the syphilis of the reckless musical prostitution of the previous decade, or by other reasons. Much to their honor, the band members must have acknowledged this and come to terms with it — although Banco never officially disbanded, and still continue to play and record, the ʽNudoʼ suite was their last ever attempt at creating new music. If you know for sure that you are never going to create anything on the level of Darwin!, not ever again, why bother hopelessly trying? Just enjoy life as it is, that's all.

 

NO PALCO (2003)

 

1) Prologo #1; 2) R.I.P.; 3) Il Ragno; 4) Cento Mani, Cento Occhi; 5) Quando La Buona Gente Dice; 6) Canto Di Primavera; 7) La Caccia / Fa# Minore; 8) Moby Dick; 9) Non Mi Rompete; 10) Come Due Treni Intro; 11) 750,000 Anni Fa... L'Amore; 12) Traccia I; 13) Traccia II.

 

Hey, another live album — bet you didn't see this one coming. Then again, what a better way to celebrate the band's 30th anniversary than with a major live extravaganza, staged in the heart of Rome itself, with a swarm of friends, old and new (some of which are allegedly big names on the Italian stage), and a setlist that makes it pretty clear that the Eighties and Nineties never really hap­pened? And why not release it as an official CD if the performances are generally flawless, and if Nudo already showed so clearly that re-recordings of the «old shit» are so inherently supe­rior to whatever new shit they could try to come up with?

 

In any case, No Palco is at least interesting in that, for the last bunch of tracks, the band is joined on the stage by brother Gianni, doing a solo piano instrumental (ʽCome Due Treniʼ) and taking on the key role in ʽ750,000 Anni Faʼ and both of the ʽTracciaʼ pieces. Additionally, Mauro Pagani, one of the founding fathers of Banco's chief competitors, Premiata Forneria Marconi, makes a guest appearance on ʽNon Mi Rompeteʼ and ʽCanto Di Primaveraʼ, contributing violin parts, and even the band's old drummer, Pierluigi Calderoni, sits in on a few numbers. Meaning that the whole thing does qualify as a celebration of sorts, and is worth picking up if you are in serious love with the band.

 

The setlist is actually quite clever, evenly spread between most of the band's classic period up until 1979 — the only song from a later date is ʽMoby Dickʼ, an excellent choice to remind us of the band's only moderately worthwhile album from their creepiest decade of work; it is preceded by a piano instrumental (ʽLa Cacciaʼ) that seems to be new, and, additionally, ʽQuando La Buona Gente Diceʼ is expanded from its original length to become a jam session, with all the keyboard and guitar players taking turns to prove the world that Italian rock music is nothing to joke about. (Well, that still won't stop us from... ah well, never mind).

 

Other than the general «superfluousness» of the record, there is nothing to complain about — the setlist is respectable, the players gel perfectly, DiGiacomo remains in the finest of all possible vocal forms (his range seems invulnerable to age, and his energy and self-confidence only seem to increase), and the audience is genuinely enraptured — on ʽNon Mi Rompeteʼ, they go totally against the message of the title and interrupt the singer with such verve that he just steps away from the mike and lets them handle the first verse. Corny, but touching.

 

Overall, No Palco («No Stage» — excessive arrogance or heart-melting idealism?) was such a success that the band would repeat it ten years later, with Quaranta released in 2012: I have not heard that one, since (a) there are only so many BMS live albums one can take and (b) the track­list includes ʽNudoʼ, which is not a good sign, but fans should probably take note. In the mean­time, let us close the main book on BMS with a modest thumbs up to No Palco, unless the old boys garner enough strength and ambition to master another studio recording before finally heading for the great gig in the sky (with Darwin in person as MC, no doubt). But hopefully, they won't be that silly.

 

ADDENDA:

 

SEGUENDO LE TRACCE (1976/2005)

 

1) R.I.P. (English version); 2) L'Albero Del Pane; 3) La Danza Dei Grandi Rettili; 4) Passaggio; 5) Non Mi Rompete; 6) Dopo... Niente E Più Lo Stesso; 7) Traccia II; 8) Metamorfosi.

 

Well, this totally makes sense: after almost three decades of waiting, finally release a live album from Banco's golden days. This particular show, played out at Teatro Verdi in Salerno on April 23, 1975, could easily have been a big hit in the old days, when double and triple live prog al­bums were steadily released on a monthly, if not daily, basis — and the excellent sound quality of the tapes would have made it a standout back in the day, too, so it is fairly odd that we only get official access to this as an afterthought. But a twenty-first century release, with progressive rock having largely regained its used-to-be-tattered reputation, is not that bad either.

 

As time goes by and chronology flattens out, this record is bound to become Banco's equivalent of Yessongs — capturing the band at their absolute creative peak, just before personal burn­out and changing fashion issues cause them to start faltering, and burning down the stage with abso­lute pride at their achievements. The setlist is predictably titanic, the playing is predictably tight and inspi­red, and the self-interpretations allow for variability, improvisation, and general freedom without demolishing the original constructions.

 

The only piece of bad news is that ʽR.I.P.ʼ is presented in its English version: with the band either working on or having just released their first English album (Banco) at the time, they were eager to try out at least one of the re-recordings, for which DiGiacomo offers the audience a blurry Italian apology post-factum. Not only that, but they also keep the loosened up, funkier rhythmic reinvention, missing a good chance to open the show with a tight, aggressive punch. A mistake, I think, echoing the even larger mistake of recording in English in the first place.

 

However, from then on, there are virtually no complaints. Apart from the obligatory ballad inter­lude of ʽNon Mi Rompeteʼ, one lengthy epic is played from each of their three major albums: ac­tually, ʽLa Danza Dei Grandi Rettiliʼ from Darwin! is transformed into an epic, stretched almost four times beyond its original length by means of free-flowing jazz breaks (with Maltese swit­ching to trumpet and doing his best Miles Davis impersonation) and Latin-colored percussion solos. Likewise, ʽMetamorfosiʼ gets an extra fifteen minutes to its already impressive original running time, with the Nocenzi brothers taking turns to prove us that they really need these extra fifteen minutes... not really sure about that, but they get into it with enough verve not to have me worrying all the time about pressing the fast forward button.

 

In other words, this here is live-and-breathing progressive rock the way we remember it — bold, ambi­tious, pretentious, self-indulgent, constantly plunging into «musical masturbation» with no respect for modesty and conciseness... and vindicated by superbly tight internal coordination and sheer technical mastery of everyone involved. Needless to say, the record is an absolute must-have for every progressive rock studioso — and an absolute must-avoid for everyone who still believes that a twenty-minute live phantasmagoria from, say, Ornette Coleman is «an inspiring feast of artistic liberty and inventiveness», whereas a twenty-minute live version of ʽMeta­mor­fosiʼ would be «a pathetically boring display of meaningless self-indulgence». Fortunately, Seguendo Le Tracce arrives at a good time for the genre, when the silliness of such oppositions becomes more and more apparent, and this brings on hope that my thumbs up for this record will not go completely unnoticed, either.

BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST

BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST (1970)

 

1) Taking Some Time On; 2) Mother Dear; 3) The Sun Will Never Shine; 4) When The World Was Woken; 5) Good Love Child; 6) The Iron Maiden; 7) Dark Now My Sky.

 

With a little extra luck, Barclay James Harvest, formed in late 1966, could have had their names entered into the «founding fathers» list of UK art rock. As it happened, the band did not manage to find a proper record contract until 1970, and spent its first three years admiring the recording successes of their peers rather than working out their own individuality. On the other hand, it is not very likely that, had they been given a chance to release their first album before Days Of Future Passed, they could have invented that Moody Blues sound on their own.

 

Indeed, few albums on the British market as per 1970 were as blatantly derivative as BJH's debut. Just about every song on here has a well-identifiable proto-type: the list of influences includes the Beatles, the Bee Gees, the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Traffic, and King Crimson — I could probably dig up some more, but on the whole, this list seems pretty exhaustive. Being influenced per se, of course, is never a problem: what is a problem is that BJH were never a particularly, let's say, «intelligent» band, and, unlike many of their competitors, they were unable to, or did not care about, masking, or even «assimilating», these influences in any way.

 

All the more amazing is the fact how unbelievably good this debut album turned out — derivative or not, in my world this will forever remain the definitive BJH record, the «one BJH album to get if you only have to get one», and, even more importantly, one of the most consistently satisfac­tory art-rock albums of 1970. Ironically, BJH started losing it once they began attempting to de­velop a personal identity — as long as they were just aping their superiors, the aping process was irreproachable. Perversely, the band would later seem to be almost ashamed of the album, quickly dropping all of the material in their live shows — probably regarding it as one of those inade­quate, embarrassing teenage activities that are best forgotten upon reaching adulthood (but for­get­ting that only idiot adults are consistently ashamed of their teenage days simply because every­thing you did in your teenage days must be embarrassing, right?).

 

But as far as my perception is concerned, all of the seven songs recorded for the album, at worst, have their likeable moments, and at best, count as catchy, resonant, emotionally effective «little brothers» of better known compositions, recorded by the band's predecessors. Altogether, they are still more in the «late 1960s» vein than in the «early 1970s» one — art-pop songs with extra­neous influences rather than complex progressive compositions — but unless we happen to think that the Moody Blues were only there to prepare the red carpet for ELP and nothing else, there is nothing wrong with a little extra poppiness and naïveness, is there?

 

Of the four band members, three are credited with individual compositions, but not with individu­al styles: at this point, it is too early (thank God!) to speak of a «BJH sound», let alone a «John Lees sound» or a «Woolly Wolstenholme» sound. Thus, guitar player and, at this point, more or less active bandleader John Lees gets credited for four out of seven songs, and they are all quite different. His are the only «rockers» on the album that open both of the album's sides: ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ is a half-folk, half-psychedelic sing-along anthem very much in a Traffic vein, whereas ʽGood Love Childʼ arguably takes its inspiration from the heavier stuff on Revolver (I can almost imagine the entire band putting on dark shades before the decisive take). Both have simple, but attractive riffs, plenty of energy, and magnificent production values — the sea of gui­tar overdubs on ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ, in particular, is totally worthy of the bestest in British psychedelic blues-rock, and ʽGood Love Childʼ is just a load of unassuming pop-rock fun.

 

On the other hand, it is also Lees who is credited for ʽMother Dearʼ, a folksy Mellotron / strings / acou­stic guitar ballad in the vein of Justin Hayward — sentimental as heck, but with a stunning chord change from verse to chorus that adds nervous tension to basic prettiness and a pinch of uneasy darkness to the general lightness. And it is also Lees who takes credit for the «magnum opus» of the album — the huge Crimsonian epic ʽDark Now My Skyʼ (Crimsonian, I say, be­cause I am pretty sure it must have been inspired by stuff like ʽEpitaphʼ), with wailing, soaring dis­torted guitar melodies, gargantuan piano and organ chords, choral vocals, spoken theatrical intros... in short, with every requirement for «progressive» status fulfilled, even if something is still lacking (maybe something very basic, like instrumental prowess).

 

Keyboardist Woolly Wolstenholme's ballad ʽThe Iron Maidenʼ is in the same ballpark as ʽMother Dearʼ, although it is somewhat closer in style and structure to straightahead British folk — and no, the title does not have anything to do neither with heavy metal, nor even with any creepiness normally associated with iron maidens. (Not even sure that the band members themselves knew properly what an «iron maiden» is — the title is to be taken purely figuratively). His other contri­bution is ʽThe Sun Will Never Shineʼ, which sounds more like... one of those symphonic pop numbers by the Bee Gees on 1st, only puffed up to five minutes. Nice epic chorus, cool guitar lines, soulful attitude — no problem there.

 

Bassist Les Holroyd probably offers the most blatant rip-off: his ʽWhen The World Was Wokenʼ in almost every single detail, from the high-pitched breathy vocals to the Bach-style organ parts to the overall manner of crescendo producing, replicates the approach of Procol Harum (only the heavy use of orchestration is novel: Procol Harum themselves would not start piling up brass and string parts until the departure of Robin Trower). But the melody itself is not ripped off, the cre­scendo is thought out meticulously, and the rhythmic bass pulse is a toe-tapper's delight.

 

In short, you get my drift: there is not a single genuine clunker on the album. If there is anything that «betrays» this band, other than this blatant inability to hide their ingredients, it is probably the lyrics — which are normally very simple, accessible, and clichéd: "Dark now my sky / The sea of peace has left my shore / No birds sing / The silent spring will overflow / Oh you'll never know / I love you so / You'll always be / A part of me" is definitely not something you could ever expect on a King Crimson album. But BJH had never, from the very beginning, positioned them­selves as a «highbrow entertainment» band — and although this attitude would eventually drag them down much lower than a good band should be able to tolerate, on Barclay James Harvest it all works, even with all the trivial wording.

 

For accuracy's sake, a large part of the success should be credited to the band's producer — none other than Norman Smith, the creative engineer behind the Beatles' early records and also the producer of Pink Floyd's early stuff: he is also responsible for the lush orchestral arrangements. The very fact of recording at EMI's Abbey Road Studios must have also been quite inspiring. Un­fortunately, neither the producer nor the environment helped prevent the band's steady downhill course from there on, but in 1970, that course was completely unpredictable anyway, and the al­bum gets a certified thumbs up from me — a highly underrated treasure that every fan of the band's chief idols should be able to enjoy without reservations.

 

ONCE AGAIN (1971)

 

1) She Said; 2) Happy Old World; 3) Song For The Dying; 4) Galadriel; 5) Mocking Bird; 6) Vanessa Simmons; 7) Ball And Chain; 8) Lady Loves.

 

Only their second album, and already they are taking steps in the wrong direction. Granted, the result no longer sounds like a bunch of easily guessable tributes — something more uniquely their own is starting to congeal in the middle of the bubbling broth. But what is it? Is it juicy, or even eatable? Does it stand competition? Does it show taste? Can we put a finger on it?..

 

Judging by how much Mellotron and strings there are out here, the band has finally pitched a stable tent somewhere right next to the Moody Blues' bastions — dumping their rootsy-rocky avatar (ʽTaking Some Time Offʼ, ʽGood Love Childʼ) for good. In a way, they had their reasons: the band's overall «wimpy» visual appearance and overall predilection for artsier material did not agree well with attempts to «rock out». But on the other hand, John Lees was a capable rock gui­tarist who knew how to swing an axe, and now that he had decided to only swing it in «epic» mode on ambitious symph-pop compositions, the band clearly lost something.

 

This time, the heaviest rocker on the album is actually a blues tune — a Wolstenholme original, somewhat incompetently sporting the quite unoriginal title of ʽBall And Chainʼ. Actually, I am not sure what exactly is original about the song's blues progression, unmemorable vocal lines, or angsty vocals, but all the guitar work is good: they can play generic blues with plenty of techni­cality and energy, it's just that in 1971, if you wanted the latest and greatest in the blues, you went out and bought yourself some Led Zep. Or Layla, if you were still scared o' the devil.

 

Naturally, much more interesting is the band's latest batch of symphonic art-pop songs with an epic sweep — Les Holroyd coming out on top with ʽShe Saidʼ, which has that good old-fashio­ned «stately desperation» feel, greatly aided by Lees' distorted wailing guitar parts, also in the blues vein even though the song itself is written well within the British folk tradition. The chorus tries very, very, very hard to overwhelm — falling very, very, very short of the mark, because "and I will always love her, and I will always care" neither qualifies as a great lyric nor as an un­forgettably chanted tagline, but overall, still quite impressive.

 

The sad, solitary atmosphere is carried over to the aptly titled ʽSong For The Dyingʼ and, most importantly, to Lees' ʽMocking Birdʼ, which would go on to become a signature tune for the band and one of their most frequently performed numbers. The song is said to have begun life as an acoustic folk ballad in 1968, but now it has matured into a full-scale epic, with strings, brass, Mel­lotrons, and guitars that keep building up and up and up until you start suspecting the boys of having ingested one too many Mahler symphonies — not that this really sounds a lot like Mahler, more like Max Steiner or something, still, they do have a feel for this kind of thing to match the ambition. The lyrics are, again, the weakest part: "there's a mocking bird, singing songs in the trees" as the central vocal hook is something that not even James Taylor would probably allow himself in 1971, and this here tune aspires to so much more.

 

Lees is also responsible for the shorter folksy ballads, such as ʽGaladrielʼ (a Tolkien title was im­minently unavoidable, I suppose, even if there are no direct elfish references in the lyrics) and ʽLady Lovesʼ (which could just as well have been called ʽGaladriel IIʼ, for that matter) — on the whole, writing approximately two-thirds of the album and consolidating his grip on the band, but, like I said, mostly at the expense of hard rock ambitions. On the whole, they clearly intended Once Again to be less «pop» than the Moody Blues — but in their nobly motivated attempt to put aside not only hard rock riffage, but also any sort of upbeat, mid- or fast-tempo pop-rock, they created a record that is... well, you have to be in a very lazy, relaxed mood to benefit the most out of it. Otherwise, the monotonousness might quickly wear you down.

 

Still, there is no denying neither the complexity of the occasional arrangement, nor the catchiness of the occasional vocal flourish or guitar shriek, nor simply the fact that, «once again», it works — the band's combination of folk, blues, pop, and symphony may be a far cry from the reckless experimentation of their «progressive» contemporaries, but it is melodic, involving, and manages to combine pomp with a certain humility of character that was not at all typical of most of the active players on the scene at the time. Thumbs up.

 

BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST AND OTHER SHORT STORIES (1971)

 

1) Medicine Man; 2) Someone There You Know; 3) Harry's Song; 4) Ursula; 5) Little Lapwing; 6) Song With No Meaning; 7) Blue John Blues; 8) The Poet; 9) After The Day.

 

The key word is «short»: although ʽBlue John Bluesʼ almost reaches the seven-minute mark, the record consciously stays away from «epic sweep» this time around — almost defiantly so, what with progressive acts all around going in the opposite direction. Even if the decision was not set in stone (epic length would make a return on the next album, with rather questionable results), it was still important — BJH letting us know that they still pledge allegiance to the «art-pop» attitude of Moody Blues / Procol Harum in an era when the «art» and the «pop» components were beginning to get segregated once more.

 

And the results were worth it: most of the songs still work very well, on some level or other. Mel­lotrons, cellos, melodic vocal harmonies, a little baroque mixed in with a little gothic, and even the song titles and lyrics are somewhat improved, without any straightforward Tolkien references provoking accusations of cheap fanboyism or trend-hopping. At the same time, the entire album is permeated with a healthy sick world-weary spirit — nothing like a strong shot of intelligent pessimism to make a meaningful statement out of potentially empty art-pop hooks.

 

Of course, the Merlin-meets-Bradbury words of ʽMedicine Manʼ are not exactly a peak of «intel­ligence» per se ("oh what a cold surprise the flying horses cried"?), but the good thing is that they are vague enough to not warrant any direct analysis, just like Jon Anderson's blistering logorrhea (provided that the listener is not familiar with Something Wicked This Way Comes, which served as the chief inspiration for the song). The important thing is that the orchestral arrangements once again transform this dark folk ballad into something grand, stately, and ominous, and thus it sets the general tone for the album: softer and smoother than ʽShe Saidʼ (in general, Short Stories goes easier on screechy Lees leads, but the loss, for now, is compensated by many gains), yet just as retro-romantic.

 

On the other hand, ʽHarry's Songʼ, if you do not pay much attention to the words, may seem to be one of those «little man» tunes in a Ray Davies vein — actually, it is about the death of a parrot (no, there will be no gratuitous Monty Python references here), but parrot or person, it is a memo­rial song written without a gram of artificial sentimentality: in fact, it's an angry song, and the way they resolve the chorus — "something stirred today, and Harry he passed away", with the record's angriest riff echoing the pissed-off bitterness in John's voice — makes for one of the re­cord's finest hooks. Arguably the best song about the death of a parrot ever written.

 

The «magnum opus» of ʽBlue John Bluesʼ is allegedly a lyrical swipe at the musical industry; it may take a few listens to sink in, since its basic structures are more «rootsy» than «artsy», but it moves quite self-assuredly from a slow piano ballad format to pub-rock energetics and back, as if illustrating the public demands of cheap entertainment over introspective depth — quite a clever song, really, that makes it all the more amazing how the band would very soon lose the ability to come up with such inventive moves.

 

In the meantime, Beatles fans — or, rather, ELO fans — will be mighty pleased with Wolsten­holme's ʽSomeone There You Knowʼ, all of it built upon seductive Jeff Lynnian vocal modu­la­tions and power-pop guitar accompaniment; baroque folk lovers will welcome ʽUrsulaʼ and ʽSong With No Meaningʼ, two more contributions to the band's luvvable pastoral backlog; and ʽAfter The Dayʼ is «Armageddon-lite», way too melodic to properly reflect an end-of-the-world scenario, but moving all the same.

 

Overall, I would judge that Short Stories are tied with the self-titled debut as a solid proposition for BJH's finest half-hour: running a bit shorter on «major» hooks, perhaps, but without a single misfire or way-too-obvious rip-off — this here is a band that shows more than simply fanboy adoration of their influences, coming into its own as a markedly early 1970s guardian of mar­kedly late 1960s values, so to speak. Too bad this homely magic did not work for long, but at least the tapes are still rolling. Thumbs up.

 

BABY JAMES HARVEST (1972)

 

1) Crazy (Over You); 2) Delph Town Mom; 3) Summer Soldier; 4) Thank You; 5) One Hundred Thousand Smiles; 6) Moonwater.

 

I used to think this was a «bad» album, and a real downer of a closer for the first and best period of BJH's presence on the scene. But a more just and balanced look would rather suggest that this is merely a «problematic» album, one that reflects pressure on the band from within (creative bickerings — something that inevitably creeps up when almost everybody in the band writes his own material) and without (apparently, some or all of them were exhausted from touring). And when Barclay James Harvest have problems, they don't beat around the bush: they simply fall back upon their influences and become even more derivative than usual, which is their own trade­mark way of being «uninspired».

 

The first «problem» is the name of the album itself — clearly alluding to Sweet Baby James. Not a smart move: it's bad enough to make a pun on a James Taylor album if you are going to make something that sounds like a James Taylor album — it is completely incomprehensible if you are not going to make anything that sounds like one. At best, the album opener ʽCrazy (Over You)ʼ may be said to sound like Crosby, Stills & Nash — in fact, it does sound very much like Crosby's ʽLong Time Goneʼ in its chorus — but overall, it wobbles between art-pop and progres­sive structures, never truly attempting to toy with the «California sound» or any other introspec­tive schools of soft rock. And the wobbling seems a bit out of control.

 

The album returns to epic format: side A is dominated by Lees' anti-war suite ʽSummer Soldierʼ, and side B is ruled by Wolstenholme's orchestral suite ʽMoonwaterʼ — apparently, the two were recorded separately, with Lees and the rest of the band working in Stockport while Woolly was rearranging the different pieces of the «Barclay James Harvest Orchestra» in London. The former is decently sewn together, and features at least one highly memorable «symphonic guitar» theme in the middle, one that probably wouldn't be refused by a Steve Howe — however, on the whole it just doesn't have enough muscle to convey the anti-war sentiment properly (and the straight­forward lyrics with their rally-like structure and clichéd imagery do not help much). The track's heavy use of sound effects at the beginning, with church bells, marching feet, gunfire, and looped tapes of "kill, kill, kill", may have been inspired by ʽThe Unknown Soldierʼ — but as far as my nerve centers are concerned, the Doors achieved much, much more over that song's three and a half minutes than Lees does here in ten.

 

That said, the Lees opus is still enjoyable and mildly touching, which is far more than could be said of ʽMoonwaterʼ — who on Earth wants to hear Woolly Wolstenholme do a straightforward Mahler tribute, particularly if (as usual) it comes out sounding like Max Steiner instead? This is neither proper Barclay James Harvest, nor proper progressive rock: just a lot of romantic melo­drama, aping late 19th / early 20th century masters without any major purpose.

 

Of the remaining songs, ʽDelph Town Momʼ is pleasant, well orchestrated folk-rock with a jazz streak; ʽThank Youʼ is a pleasant, upbeat rocker combining elements of «power pop» with a brawny «pub» attitude, although its repetitive looped riff is promoted a bit too heavily; and ʽOne Hundred Thousand Smiles Outʼ is a rather strange tribute to ʽSpace Oddityʼ and ʽRocket Manʼ at the same time (the freshly released ʽRocket Manʼ must have been the stimulus, but "can you hear me there below?" is way too similar to "can you hear me major Tom?" to be a coincidence — granted, Les Holroyd's singing is also at times highly reminiscent of Lennon's style, so the song is a real crazy mishmash of influences).

 

Overall, except for ʽMoonwaterʼ, which is simply an important-sounding waste of time, each of the songs has something to offer for the not-too-demanding art-pop lover. The album's major problem is that the band is once again short on genuine creativity — for their self-titled debut, this could be excused, but now that they had almost begun coming into a style of their own on Short Stories, Baby James looks «regressive» in comparison: solid if judged exclusively on its own merits (and ultimately deserving of a skeptical thumbs up), but somewhat disappointing when viewed in context.

 

EVERYONE IS EVERYBODY ELSE (1974)

 

1) Child Of The Universe; 2) Negative Earth; 3) Paper Wings; 4) The Great 1974 Mining Disaster; 5) Crazy City; 6) See Me See You; 7) Poor Boy Blues; 8) Mill Boys; 9) For No One.

 

Be warned — this is a different band now, a seriously different one, and without a single change in the line-up at that. A little of it may have had to do with the record label change (a shift from Harvest/EMI to Polydor); a little more of it may be related to the new producer, Rodger Bain, who had previously worked with Black Sabbath and Budgie. But I would guess that most of it had to do with shifts in popular taste — with complex symphonic prog already on the way out of fashion, and a more straightforward, simplified approach to «intellectual music» gaining the upper hand on the charts, Barclay James Harvest ditched the orchestra, restrained the Mellotron (without, however, shutting it out completely), cut down on the multi-part epics, said goodbye to the psychedelia, and decided that they were, after all, a «rock» band. A nerdy, wimpy, naïve one perhaps, but firmly committed to the idiom.

 

In a way, the band now sounds like an English equivalent of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: so­cially conscious roots-rock for the post-hippie age, produced by world-weary music veterans tee­tering between idealism and disillusionment. The one thing that they do not have on CSNY — gorgeous three-way / four-way harmonies, that is — they compensate for by retaining echoes of their baroque-pop sensibilities: there is still some occasional «lushness» in the arrangements, and John Lees, when in the mood, can still cut a richly melodic solo in the romantic idiom (where a Neil Young or even a Stephen Stills would rough-cut a kick-ass ragged block of «rawk» notes). But overall, the sound seems significantly impoverished compared to the first four. Not surpri­singly, it was this album that almost put BJH on the charts — picking up the interest of the ave­rage listener. From here on, the second half of the 1970s would be more commercially viable for the band, but much more disappointing artistically.

 

Not coincidentally, the album marks the complete elimination of Wolstenholme from the roster of songwriters: from now on, Woolly would be getting one, maximum two tracks per album for the rest of his tenure with the band. (The one track he did write for Everyone, the anthemic ʽMaes­tosoʼ, was canned by the rest of the guys, and not released until 1980 on Woolly's first solo album, although, as a repentant compromising gesture, it is now available as a bonus track on the re­ma­s­tered CD version). The songwriting is now completely dominated by Lees and Holroyd — the latter having risen quite highly from an initially modest position.

 

Lees, at this point, illustrates both the very best and the very worst about the band. On one hand, his two tracks that bookmark the record are probably its high points. Both are anti-war anthems and could, in fact, be regarded as a two-part suite: ʽChild Of The Universeʼ opens up from a more personal angle ("I'm a small boy with blood on his hands"), whereas ʽFor No Oneʼ concludes the subject in communal prayer mode ("please lay down your pistols and your rifles"). Both are very straightforward, lyrically trivial, and melodically monotonous, but played with enough strength and conviction to justify the simplicity, and the stormy wah-wah solo at the end of ʽFor No Oneʼ could rank among the finest displays of flashy guitar pyrotechnics of the decade (the good ones, fueled by the spirit, not just the fingers).

 

On the other hand, it is also Lees who is behind the corny idea of «reworking» the old classics on the tellingly titled ʽGreat 1974 Mining Disasterʼ — a song that superficially purports to reflect current class struggle in the UK, but in reality is a serious-faced deconstruction of the respective Bee Gees number, right down to a direct aping of the chorus: very strange, actually, that the Gibbs did not sue for copyright infringement, since what BJH do here goes way beyond «fair use». Additionally, the song throws some Beatles ("heard a song the other day... and though the song was kind of grey...") and some David Bowie ("...about a major out in space... about a man who sold the world away...") into the melting pot, with unclear purposes and ambiguous effects. Altogether, it seems as if the intention was to make a synthesis that would claim originality and, perhaps, simulate depth, but ultimately, it gives the impression of intentional theft due to lack of one's own ideas — an embarrassing failure, the way I feel about it, although it would soon be overshadowed by the even deeper crime against taste on the next album.

 

Holroyd's contributions are generally less ambitious than Lees'; the most prominent of these is probably ʽPoor Boy Bluesʼ, which sounds like a slightly «fairy-folksier» variant of Eagles stuff, and is seamlessly integrated with Lees' ʽMill Boysʼ in one big Muswell-hillbilly-whole (yes, the Kinks are also in here somewhere). The bass guy also continues to explore the outer sphere theme with ʽNegative Earthʼ, one more lonesome romantic space oddity that adds relatively little to the already available collection and relatively a lot to our understanding of Les Holroyd as a rather obstinate fellow — who knows, maybe he would have made an even better astronaut than a mu­sician, had he really been able to pursue his one true dream.

 

In overall curve terms, Everyone Is Everybody Else is the beginning of the fall — the initial transition works reasonably well, but when you start saving up on ideas (and most of these songs are really based on quite simple, repetitive, and scarce hooks), it does not usually take long before the infection takes over completely. With only one openly embarrassing track, at least one major highlight worthy of the old days (ʽFor No Oneʼ), and an overall inoffensive aura everywhere else, the album deserves an equally inoffensive thumbs up — much like, in fact, the Eagles do at their best, or CSNY do at their most relaxed. But it is an ominous thumbs up: from here on, the «big cheese dip» is all but completely predictable.

 

LIVE (1974)

 

1) Summer Soldier; 2) Medicine Man; 3) Crazy City; 4) After The Day; 5) The Great 1974 Mining Disaster; 6) Galadriel; 7) Negative Earth; 8) She Said; 9) Paper Wings; 10) For No One; 11) Mockingbird.

 

Released just a wee wee bit too late — I would much have preferred a live album recorded prior to the stylistic transition that we see on Everyone Is Everybody Else, in full-fledged «Stuck Be­tween the Procol and the Moody Blues Again» mode. As it is, five out of eleven songs are here to promote the latest studio album, and the difference between the «impoverished» new sound and the much richer sound of the days of yore is still striking — although, granted, nowhere near as striking in a live setting, where the sound is beefed up with thicker guitar tones and denser clouds of Mellotron radiation, as it is in the confines of the studio.

 

Still, other than the «intertextual cheese» of ʽMining Disasterʼ, the new songs all range from great (ʽFor No Oneʼ) to passable (everything else), and the only reason for sorrow is that they leave no space in the setlist for anything off the debut album (which the band had pretty much disinherited long before that anyway). The soundboard recordings have not been captured too well — or, per­haps, have not received all the digital remastering they deserved — but the «brutal» aura of the sound quality is quite appropriate for a live show, where, after all, one does not expect to revel in all the subtle minutia of the studio equivalents.

 

John Lees is, of course, the unsung (but singing) hero of the album: his rough, extra-distorted, but melodic, psy­chedelically tinged, and occasionally, quite glammy soloing makes him a serious competitor of Mick Ronson in the «knock-yer-pants-off» department. ʽMedicine Manʼ, in particular, is trans­formed from an acoustic guitar / strings-based art song into a heavy riff-rocker, with a lengthy instrumental part where John plays the god of thunder, scattering lightning bolts through the audience (and Woolly keeps up respectably, playing the god of hailstorm and occasionally tor­turing his organ in perverted ways previously known only to Keith Emerson). But everything else, with the exception of the short and soft interlude of ʽGaladrielʼ, also bears the burning stamp of his electric (and electrifying) solos.

 

I wouldn't say that, except for the completely revamped ʽMedicine Manʼ, any of these versions open up and explore previously unknown dimensions. The band knows what the people want when they come to see them — a feeling of collective ecstasy that involves both romance and power — and they stock up on the power without losing the grasp on romance, sticking fairly closely to the original creativity but giving it a little more gas at the expense of subtlety, which is what a predictable solid art-rock concert should look like, I guess. Fans of Lees should know that most of the guitar tones are different, and fans of Woolly should know that the man is capable of losing his head and getting carried away in a power frenzy. All of this is enough to guarantee a solid thumbs up, and leave BJH with at least one all-through excellent live album in their history — their Yessongs and Welcome Back My Friends rolled into one, although, funny enough, they did refrain from making it into a triple LP set.

 

TIME HONOURED GHOSTS (1975)

 

1) In My Life; 2) Sweet Jesus; 3) Titles; 4) Jonathon; 5) Beyond The Grave; 6) Song For You; 7) Hymn For The Children; 8) Moongirl; 9) One Night.

 

For this somewhat uninspired (very mildly speaking) sequel to Everyone Is Everybody Else, the band moved to a studio in San Francisco, and either the nice summer climate of California molli­fied their brains after the proverbial London rain and fog, or such was the overall decadent musi­cal atmos­phere of 1975 that the rotting process would have started in any case. The average song quality on Time Honoured Ghosts drops down another couple of notches — mainly because the band seems intent on purging out both the last drops of psychedelic influences, and its hard-rocking component at the same time (the presence of a few distorted riffs here and there notwith­standing, their collected crunch now never really rises above Crosby, Stills & Nash level). The melodic quotient still remains, but so does the narcissistic sentimentalism — and there is only so much heart-on-sleeve attitude that a tired old sense of perception can stand.

 

Moreover, it does not help that Lees continues to explore the gimmickry line, launched with ʽThe Great 1974 Mining Disasterʼ. This time, we are offered ʽTitlesʼ — a dreamy, more or less inof­fensive mix of the California sound with the European art song, but rendered unlistenable by stay­ing loyal to its name: the lyrics do indeed consist of little other than titles of Beatles songs, stringed together to form a ghostly Profound Message ("across the universe one after nine-o-nine, I've got a feeling for you blue and I feel fine"). Every artist may have his, her, their ups, downs, collapses, revivals, breakdowns, and comebacks, but this, unfortunately, is a kind of creativity re­served for artists with serious mutations in their taste buds — not only does it cast its cheesy sha­dow over the entire album, but it simply blocks my ability to take these guys seriously.

 

Once again, Lees and Holroyd share primary songwriting and singing duties, this time on a more or less equal basis, and now that the band is firmly rooted in soft rock territory, the styles of the two also begin to merge. Lees tries to set an intense atmosphere over the first seconds of the LP: ʽIn My Lifeʼ (another glaring nod to the Beatles, as if ʽTitlesʼ weren't enough) opens (and closes, after a rather dreary mid-section) as a fast melodic blues-rocker that probably has more energy than the rest of the album put together. The preachy lyrics are, as usual, quite off-putting ("But I was young, did not know, grace is for God, greed is to know"), but if the entire album had been relatively faithful to this style, instead of switching to unexciting acoustic foundations, slower tempos, and exaggeratedly soulful high-pitched vocals (from ʽSweet Jesusʼ and onwards), the band might have earned more respect from me. Instead, it just bores me one minute and offends me the next, and there is nothing I can do to myself to prevent those effects.

 

Every now and then, Holroyd's ʽMoongirlʼ on the second side is extolled as the album's definitive highlight, a magical-mystery art song where Sgt. Pepper-influenced guitars are integrated with Woolly's enchanting keyboard overdubs like never before or after. I probably would not mind, had the main chord progression and its key role in the song's coda not been so blatantly (with very minor changes) lifted from a far superior song — Eric Clapton's ʽLet It Growʼ, which al­ready has more than everything that ʽMoongirlʼ has to offer.

 

In between this «contextual failure» of one of the album's suggested highlights and the embarras­sing pretense of ʽTitlesʼ, the rest of Time Honoured Ghosts simply fails to attract this writer's attention or provoke any interesting comments. So I will finish by saying that, perhaps, the best song on the album is the sole contribution from Woolly — ʽBeyond The Graveʼ is yet another of those attempts to emulate the symphonic ambitiousness of early XXth century music (from Mah­ler to Strauss), this time carried out with surprisingly few overdubs and practically no guitar at all: organs, synthesized strings, and choral harmonies do all the job instead. The «poor man's majestic effect» is there all right, although I would have honestly preferred that the song remain complete­ly instrumental — not only are the vocals needlessly delivered in plaintive Procol Harum mode, but the lyrics, as usual, are beyond contempt ("we will survive beyond the grave, and as we sleep we will be saved, life in its essence will endure while still on earth we can be sure" — we can take stuff like that from Black Sabbath, perhaps, but hardly in a song that pretends to draw its inspiration from academic styles of music).

 

So, although it would still take a long time to reach the genuine creative nadir for these guys, Time Honoured Ghosts is the first BJH album to which I could not possibly react with a thumbs up even if a swarm of professional musicologists were to prove that each of the songs features a variety of subtle, previously unheard of musical ideas. Mushy, unmemorable, preachy, gimmicky, downplaying the band's strengths and extolling their weaknesses, it is not a «catastrophe» — it is a «failure», which is even worse, because catastrophes can at least be curious and amusing. Well, check out ʽTitlesʼ, perhaps, for such curiosity's sakes, then join me in my thumbs down if you, too, do not react so lightly to taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

 

OCTOBERON (1976)

 

1) The World Goes On; 2) May Day; 3) Ra; 4) Rock'n'Roll Star; 5) Polk Street Rag; 6) Believe In Me; 7) Suicide?

 

As the band keeps on wobbling between slightly pleasant and slightly tasteless ideas, this some­what less gimmicky recording from 1976 seems like a bit of an improvement over Time Honou­red Ghosts. The title makes little sense — it is a pun on the name of Oberon, making use of the fact that this was to be the band's eighth record; yet there is absolutely nothing «Oberonian» about it other than the album sleeve, as that would surmise either medieval folk or at least color­ful psychedelia. But then, we should have already gotten used to BJH's senseless discrepancies between the sleeves and their contents (a curse they do share with many other artists). The impor­tant thing is that Octoberon is a little less commercial than its predecessor (maybe by accident, I don't know — it feels a little weird in the overall context of the curve), and takes a little more time and effort to crack open.

 

The anti-hero of the album is Les Holroyd. On Octoberon, his mind seems fully and completely occupied by orchestrated soft-rock of the mushiest category. ʽThe World Goes Onʼ and ʽBelieve In Meʼ are not entirely devoid of hooks (the former, in particular, is partly redeemed by a cathar­tic pair of guitar solos), but use tenderness rather than melody as their chief weapon, and Les' high register is just not very interesting or engaging, unless you simply like high registers, period. Even when he goes for something different and contributes a simple moral message about the perils of stardom (ʽRock'n'Roll Starʼ; this time around, it is up to Les, not Lees, to plunder and pillage the classics with a lyrical and musical quotation from the Byrds' ʽSo You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Starʼ), he does it in such a sleepy, near-frozen manner that I just can't imagine any­body who'd want to be that kind of a rock'n'roll star.

 

The «art silk» of these numbers is in some ways compensated for by Lees. ʽMay Dayʼ, in particu­lar, is a worthy epic on the subject of ideological confusion, appropriately mixing in a mishmash of musical segments (some short hard rock blasts, some choral vocals, even a bit of ʽIt's A Long Way To Tipperaryʼ) over the primary jangle-folk melody. ʽPolk Street Ragʼ is the heaviest, slea­ziest number on the album, reportedly inspired by Linda Lovelace ("Didn't know when I entered / Second seat, second row / It was then that I saw you / But your mouth stole the show" — yikes!) — cringeworthy, I guess, but at least I prefer this over ʽTitlesʼ. Finally, ʽSuicide?ʼ is a funny cop-out to end the album: a song pervaded by vocal and instrumental melancholy, but the question mark in the title and the line "felt the quick push, felt the air rush" in the lyrics eventually leave you in the dark as to whether there has been a suicide. After all, Barclay James Harvest are in no position to negate the value of life — not even Pink Floyd, to whom they are so indebted, went that far. And so the song forges out a bushel of pure sadness, but not depression.

 

All of which leaves Woolly with just one composition — expectedly, the most far out one out there. Maybe the gentleman was inspired by an Aida performance or a trip to Hurghada, but any­way, ʽRaʼ is an attempt to quickly trace the rise and fall of the great pagan deity over a seven-minute musical journey. One might ask, perhaps, why the musical journey owes all of it to the European tradition (Woolly himself admits that the first notes were directly quoted from Mahler's 1st Symphony — oh no, not Mahler again!) rather than trying to go for a mid-Eastern flavor, but then, heck, one could ask the same of Verdi, I guess. As far as slow, stately, atmospheric multi­part epics go, this one passes for a «poor man's Pink Floyd», with a heavy ideological debt to ʽEchoesʼ, yet still manages to hold its own — with heavy help from Lees, who is well willing to get into character and play the role of high priest-axeman.

 

So, as you can see, Octoberon is highly uneven in quality, but its diversity is appealing — Hol­royd pulling the band in the direction of Kenny Loggins, Lees blindly shuffling ideas from his own bag of thoughts and experiences, and Woolly still being able to remind the guys that they started out as a classically-influenced art-rock band. Of their mid-Seventies' albums, this is the one that best illustrates this odd «Steven Stills meets Mahler» melange, and works well on the nerves (if you are not looking for the sharpest of thrills in the art rock department). Consequently, the album deserves its not-too-excited, but honestly-deserved thumbs up.

 

GONE TO EARTH (1977)

 

1) Hymn; 2) Love Is Like A Violin; 3) Friend Of Mine; 4) Poor Man's Moody Blues; 5) Hard Hearted Woman; 6) Sea Of Tranquillity; 7) Spirit On The Water; 8) Leper's Song; 9) Taking Me Higher.

 

Well, this record is certainly memorable. From the «ambitions» point of view, it is a step back from the relative complexity of Octoberon — more songs on the whole, and more simple songs in particular, with «soothing repetitiveness» as one of the key factors that determine memorability. But there are some cool songwriting ideas here, and the soft-rock atmosphere is still resonating with echoes of Sixties' art-pop idealism, and the formula still works.

 

Ironically, the song that helped make Gone To Earth into «the» BJH album of all time (their big­gest commercial success and the first pick of many a critic in retrospect) is... a joke song. Not only does ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ truly sound the way it is called, but John Lees actually de­signed it that way, as a slap-in-yer-face in the direction of many a reviewer who had previously derided the band as a cheaper imitation of who-do-you-think. Essentially, it is just one of those silly ideas — like ʽTitlesʼ — to tinker around with the old treasure chest. And, just like ʽTitlesʼ, it fails because it never really lets you know what it wants to be.

 

I mean, for somebody who has never heard ʽNights In White Satinʼ, ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ may be a stately, solemn, chivalrous love anthem rather than a senseless deconstruction of the original, subtracting most of its pluses (the inimitable Hayward vocals, the group harmonies, the flute solo, etc.) and offering nothing in return. For those of us who do know the original, this is, at best, a self-ironic statement, something like: «...so you thought we were all a poor man's Moody Blues? well, you couldn't be more wrong, because here is what a true poor man's Moody Blues really sounds like, and nothing that we did before is really that ridiculous!» But if such was the reasoning, it is doubly ironic how the song became a hit for the band, and ended up as a perennial favourite on their live setlist.

 

The other live highlight from the album is John's ʽHymnʼ, which can be easily mistaken for a loving retelling of the story of Jesus for kindergarten-age children, then correctly reinterpreted (with the aid of John himself, who would always clarify the interpretation in concert) as a war­ning for the simple folks not to use drugs as a means of attaining Godlike status. Then, finally, it becomes a Kansas-style moralization without the Kansas-style musicianship, and the final effect is — too much preachiness and pathos, but just not enough depth. Granted, it is hard to explain why something like ʽHymnʼ feels like pablum where something like George Harrison's ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ, largely designed according to the same rules, is genius — either George uses the more ap­propriate tonalities, or has more soul in his vocals, but the feeling is unmistakable, even if it may not be shared by everyone.

 

John gets more interesting on ʽLove Is Like A Violinʼ, where folk verses are integrated with upbeat, disco-wise (but not really disco) choruses with an elegant resolution — this time, the fluff manages to be charming; and on ʽLeper's Songʼ, which sounds sort of like Supertramp (in fact, it is not the only song on the album that sounds like Supertramp), but in this context, it is more of a compliment than anything else. (The lyrics are allegedly inspired by reading Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene — well, at least this beats ʽHymnʼ, which must have been inspired by «The New Testament For Preschool Conservatives»).

 

Holroyd's contributions are a little bouncier this time, and not all of them emphasize the sugar-and-spice, as it was on Octoberon: ʽFriend Of Mineʼ is catchy, if hardly original, Eaglish country-pop, ʽHard Hearted Womanʼ is a dark, mildly brooding, Eaglish country-rocker à la ʽWitchy Womanʼ, and ʽSpirit On The Waterʼ, breaking the tendency, is a clear attempt to emulate the Beach Boys circa Sunflower and Surf's Up — and, if you look past the ugly synthesizer tones, an almost successful one: at least the harmonies are pretty well arranged; although, truth be told, I wouldn't be surprised (and would be very amused) to see the song titled ʽPoor Man's Beach Boysʼ, just to complete the circle.

 

Meanwhile, Woolly, true to his nature, goes on with the ʽPoor Man's Gustav Mahlerʼ project, this time in the context of a space-age song, about being either lost in space or losing the space race or something like that — ʽSea Of Tranquillityʼ is no better and no worse than ʽRaʼ, a stately project carried out with some dignity, but in a completely predictable fashion, with the usual fanfares in their usual places. The man does know his Mahler and his Strauss — too bad that, cruelly reduced to one contribution per album, Woolly decided to stick exclusively to these pastiches; perhaps he thought that this was the best possible antidote he could offer to the excessive soft-poppiness of his bandmates, but it would certainly have been nice to see him try out other styles as well.

 

Altogether, the reasons why Gone To Earth has achieved such a «special» status in BJH history, other than the accidental popularity of ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ — I wonder if the success of that song could have played any part in the Moody Blues themselves reuniting the following year, recognizing how much they were still missed? — those reasons remain a mystery to me, because for those who perceive BJH as an «art» band, Octoberon would be a much better choice, and those who think of them as primarily soft-pop, light-fluff artists, have no reason to worry about album favourites in the first place. With the exception of ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ, a song that makes me feel very stupid every time I listen to it, Gone To Earth is pleasant, inoffensive, and, as I said, occasionally «hooky» and memorable, so a thumbs up it is, but in retrospect, it is hard­ly a high point for the band, and definitely not up to their classic early standards.

 

LIVE TAPES (1978)

 

1) Child Of The Universe; 2) Rock'n'Roll Star; 3) Poor Man's Moody Blues; 4) Mocking Bird; 5) Hard Hearted Woman; 6) One Night; 7) Taking Me Higher; 8) Suicide; 9) Crazy City; 10) Jonathan; 11) For No One; 12) Polk Street Rag; 13) Hymn.

 

Only four years separate Barclay James Harvest's second live album from their first — that and the unexpected commercial success of Gone To Earth, which must have been the decisive factor in the appearance of Live Tapes, a record that is just as long as Barclay James Harvest Live and about twice as unnecessary. The actual tracks are a mix of performances recorded on the 1976 and 1977 tours, and the original album title was to be Caught Live until somebody pointed out that, once again, this would only help prolong the «poor man's Moody Blues» curse, as the Moodies already had a Caught Live + Five to their name. The advice was heeded, and the band eventually went along with the genuinely original, groundbreaking, and inspirational name of Live Tapes instead.

 

This time around, the band has jettisoned its pre-1974 incarnation output almost entirely, retai­ning only a somewhat perfunctory run through ʽMocking Birdʼ as the only link with their «pro­gressive past». The result is that the setlist now consists only of their derivative art-pop songs that leave very little space for improvisation, restructuring, or rearrangement (besides, songs like ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ were already «restructured» in the first place, so how much further tampering could they stand?). So the only thing that makes the record worth any of our while is that the live setting removes some of the problems with extra-glossy production or too much silky soft­ness in the arrangements on the studio albums.

 

Concerning the setlist, it is interesting that not a single one of Woolly's tracks is performed — the poor keyboardist is thus completely degraded to the role of session player — and that Lees gets a slight advantage over Holroyd, which is well understandable since it was Lees who was respon­sible for writing most of the band's harder-rocking and anthemic tunes, suitable for an arena-rock setting. As usual, Lees' melodic soloing is practically always the high point of the performances, and he does get at least one of those on each song. But the only track that can be seen as a relative improvement is Holroyd's ʽRock'n'Roll Starʼ: in this setting, it gets a little more meat on its bones and a little less ground to be accused of soft-rock bogginess.

 

From a certain point of view, Live Tapes may act as a decent shortcut for evaluating the band's entire career in their «silver» period of 1974-77 — most of the highlights are here, and, fortuna­tely, they do not include such thorough lowlights as ʽTitlesʼ, and go easy on Holroyd's exaggera­ted sentimentalism (only ʽTaking Me Higherʼ manages to break through the arena-rock filter). But the live setting may be a turn-off just as well — in particular, the roar of audience approve­ment that Lees gets after announcing ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ as the next song brings on the usual troubled thought on the elusive nature of good taste... then again, maybe the good gentle­men wre just happy that, with the Moodies no longer around, somebody was able to go on stage and at least offer a credible substitute for all the yearning hearts.

 

XII (1978)

 

1) Fantasy: Loving Is Easy; 2) Berlin; 3) Classics: A Tale Of Two Sixties; 4) Turning In Circles; 5) Fact: The Closed Shop; 6) In Search Of England; 7) Sip Of Wine; 8) Harbour; 9) Science Fiction: Nova Lepidoptera; 10) Giving It Up; 11) Fiction: The Streets Of San Francisco.

 

At least we now know that Barclay James Harvest were definitely not deaf and blind to recent musical developments, including that whole oddball «New Wave» thing — considering that the stern-marching bassline that opens ʽLoving Is Easyʼ was lifted directly from ʽPsycho Killerʼ. (Perhaps Lees just thought that there was no way the base audiences of BJH and Talking Heads could have any overlap whatsoever — and he was probably right, too).

 

Unfortunately, where the bassline of ʽPsycho Killerʼ flows quite naturally into the funky guitar riff, and the funky guitar riff nicely tills the soil for the paranoid vocals, the bass in ʽLoving Is Easyʼ does not even technically fit in with the rest of the song — it was stuck there just for a fla­shy flourish, and this decision very neatly summarizes the main flaw of BJH: a band that never stopped looking for ideas (not necessarily their own ones), but ever so rarely had a good under­standing of how to «set up» an idea once it had been found.

 

It's not even that ʽLoving Is Easyʼ is that bad an album opener — it's got a catchy Foreigner-style chorus, a vicious solo, a perky-arrogant synthesizer tone... well, okay, it is pretty bad, because all of it is hardly enough to override the confused amusement at John's salacious double-entendres. I mean, "...as I shoot all my love into you"? "just get a hold and watch how it grows"? I do not exactly remember anybody ordering a blue plate special à la AC/DC, although it is the Foreigner comparison that is more appropriate here: sexist arena-pop with crude, stern hooks and no sense of irony whatsoever. And leave it to a band as perplexed as BJH to mix all that with the bassline of ʽPsycho Killerʼ.

 

If I have unintentionally made the song sound more curious than it is, I apologize, because, in all actuality, XII is a fairly boring record. Those who do seriously care about the second phase of poor Barclay's career will probably still want to own it, and make it their last: after XII, Woolly, disgruntled with disproportionate discrimination, finally quit the band and became free to pursue his own Wagnerian-Mahlerian dreams in a solo career. But even as XII still sticks fairly close to the band's «progressive» or, at least, «art» roots, it seems to run on an even smoother, less per­ceptible railtrack than its predecessor. It is melodic, modestly complex, and rarely indulges in huge lapses of taste, the biggest exceptions being the aforementioned ʽLoving Is Easyʼ and ʽA Tale Of Two Sixtiesʼ, where, once again, Lees puts on his old-and-worn Rock Guru Shoes and pours out a name-filled «baby-boomer complaint» on the decline of rock music: apparently, "rock and roll died with Easy Rider" and "I'm cutting out now before the New Wave takes my surf board flair". (That's all fine, but why steal from David Byrne then?).

 

On the formal side, the album is notable for containing ʽBerlinʼ, a typically mushy Holroyd an­them that endeared the band to the Germans so much, they would go on to sell most of their al­bum stock in that country — Les is honestly trying to come up with a McCartney-quality ballad here, and it probably wouldn't be too cringeworthy if not for his elfish voice, carrying such an overdose of sentimentalism that my emotional centers immediately regurgitate the stuff.

 

It is also notable for an «encyclopaedic» twist on Lees' part: all of John's songs are arranged in «library folders» (ʽFantasyʼ, ʽClassicsʼ, ʽScience fictionʼ, etc.), to reflect the wide variety of his interests and the genuine Renaissance nature of his character. This bold artistic move is a little diluted, though, by the necessity of mixing his material with that of Les and Woolly, both of whom refuse to play the game; and by the rather loose adherence to the rules — for instance, why the hell is ʽLoving Is Easyʼ placed under ʽFantasyʼ when it clearly should have been labeled ʽAdultʼ (unless, of course, under «fantasy» we first and foremost understand something like this)? And why does he write such deadly boring «fiction» as ʽThe Streets Of San Franciscoʼ, which closes the album with three minutes of a repetitive dark-descending-acoustic coda with splutters of barely audible morose harmonica pasted over it for consolation?

 

Overall, they seem to have succeeded in creating a slightly darker, denser, more stylistically uni­fied and, subsequently, less memorable and «flashy» sequel to Gone To Earth: Woolly went on record stating that he actually prefers XII (probably, among other things, because they let him have two songs on it instead of the usual one — mercy gift before the final breakup?), and in a way, so do I, because it does not at least have a ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ on it. But that does not make it recommendable, either: darkness and density aside, the music is still as limp and spineless as ever — by this time, only a miracle could lift them out of this bog, and Barclay James Harvest were a steady, self-assured band that never really believed in miracles.

 

 

 

EYES OF THE UNIVERSE (1979)

 

1) Love On The Line; 2) Alright Down Get Boogie; 3) The Song (They Love To Sing); 4) Skin Flicks; 5) Sperratus; 6) Rock'n'Roll Lady; 7) Capricorn; 8) Play To The World.

 

Woolly's departure did not make much of an actual difference — his regular «one track per al­bum» quota (occasionally graciously increased to two) seemed to uninspire him to the point of not really giving a damn, and, with the possible exception of Octoberon, most of his songs re­corded in the «silver age» of BJH were not the major highlights of those albums. His keyboards may certainly be missed, but the new guest player Kevin McAlea, drafted in mid-session when it became clear that Lees and Holroyd were unable to properly compensate without a separate key­boardist, does a fine job both filling in for Woolly's «old-school artsy» style and propelling the band into the electronic age — ʽLove On The Lineʼ opens the record with a gruff synth loop in a Kraftwerk fashion. Would Woolly have wanted that? Would Mahler have wanted that, for that matter? Isn't this transition a bit too straightforward?

 

Then again, who cares. Eyes Of The Universe sold exceedingly well in continental Europe, fur­thering BJH's reputation in Germany and other neighboring countries, but in retrospect, the only thing that makes it different is a bit of homage to contemporary musical styles. ʽAlright Down Get Boogieʼ, for instance, is a disco-rocker, supposedly tongue-in-cheek, given the unhidden sarcasm in Lees' lyrics — but if you do not consult the lyrics, it is quite easy to take the "lights, boogie, lights, get down boogie alright" chorus of the song for serious, and the more seriously one takes this song, the more stupid it ends up.

 

ʽLove On The Lineʼ, apart from its electronic loops, also makes room for a disco bassline; and ʽThe Song (They Love To Sing)ʼ is a completely synth-dominated rhythmic ballad that makes ABBA sound like tough hard-rockers in comparison. Sequenced together and placed at the top, these three songs really create a strong impression that Eyes Of The Universe is the beginning of something radically new for Barclay James Harvest — a third period, in which the gates are finally opened for the onslaught of disco, New Wave, synth-pop, electronics, and all kinds of fresh new ideas used in predictably bad ways. As if it were only the presence of Woolly that hin­dered Lees and Holroyd from finalizing the bill of sale.

 

However, once we are past the opening three, the remainder of the album is much more tradi­ti­onal. ʽSkin Flicksʼ is an acoustic-based, orchestrated, anthemic ballad about how glitz, glamour, and easy money separated the protagonist from his loved one, continuing Lees' ongoing and slightly suspicious fascination with «adult-oriented» themes. ʽSperratusʼ wobbles from tragic introspective ballad to agitated pop-rock chorus and back, before launching into a spirited, but somewhat cartoonish guitar duo battle à la Thin Lizzy. ʽRock'n'Roll Ladyʼ is one of those many late-Seventies songs that have a subversive mention of "rock'n'roll" in the title, but are really targeted at nightclub audiences, with their stiff, glitzy, dancebeat-oriented atmosphere. And the last two songs are traditionally «wall-of-soundish», but completely non-descript — ʽPlay To The Worldʼ, in particular, might be the most boring, uninventive, one-finger-on-a-piano epic ballad  that ever served as a coda to a BJH album.

 

I suppose that it must have been the double-punch of the silly disco send-up and the achingly boring seven minute epic at the end that made me, at one time, think of Eyes Of The Universe as one of the worst efforts from an «art» band in the 1970s, and rate it as 1 star out of 5. In all fair­ness, it is not that bad — with a few exceptions, BJH do not have to sacrifice much of their usual melodic talent to keep up with the times. At the very least, it is about as consistent as XII, and should be rated modestly high by everyone who generally favors the «poor man's Moody Blues» vibe. Still, for old times' sake, I award it a thumbs down, if only because I still cannot stand ʽPlay To The Worldʼ and everything it represents — pretentious sentimental pomp without any genuine dynamics whatsoever. Leave it to the mighty state of Germany to disagree — they are all wusses anyway. Imagine making a national hero of Les Holroyd instead of Lou Reed.

 

TURN OF THE TIDE (1981)

 

1) Waiting On The Borderline; 2) How Do You Feel Now?; 3) Back To The Wall; 4) Highway For Fools; 5) Echoes And Shadows; 6) Death Of A City; 7) I'm Like A Train; 8) Doctor Doctor; 9) Life Is For Living; 10) In Memory Of The Martyrs.

 

This time, the album title is anything but random: this is arguably the most optimistic-sounding record put out by BJH since God knows when, if not ever. Perhaps it had just sunk in how much happier they were without Woolly and his Mahlerisms (not likely), or maybe, like the song ʽHow Do You Feel Now?ʼ, it reflects John's uplifted mood upon the birth of his daughter (a little more likely), or it could be a consequence of the band's surprisingly high commercial success in Europe — in many a well-known case, all it takes is to start making a little money on artistic depression to make artistic depression go away. But this is all guesswork, and the plain fact is that most of these songs (with the deceptive exception of the opening lost-love-style number) stick together as a consciously designed, and sincere-sounding, ode-to-joy.

 

More importantly for long-time followers, Turn Of The Tide is also the first BJH album to be almost completely keyboard-dominated: in addition to Kevin McAlea, new guest member Colin Browne also adds his support on numerous instruments, including synthesizers — and guitars are all but relegated to either, sometimes, providing a wimpy acoustic foundation, or, even more rare­ly, squeezing out a hard-rocking solo or two, just to remind us that John Lees can still play guitar and remember what a lead melody is. So, from a purely technical point of view, one could try and argue that this is the band's first «synth-pop» album — except that, from a deeper point of view, «synth-pop» also requires a shift of approach to melody as such, and in this respect, BJH remain staunch traditionalists ("that kind of rock don't appeal", grunts Lees on ʽHighway For Foolsʼ be­fore engaging in one of those ass-kicking rock'n'roll solos with wah-wah a-plenty).

 

Surprisingly, though, it's all neither as boring nor as tasteless as could be expected. The band pays a little more attention to the hooks — a little too much attention, in fact, with obsessive repe­ti­ti­ve­ness as a key factor in their memorability — and carefully avoids falling into the trap of mistaken identity (e. g. posturing as disco kings or «New Romantics»). Instead, they just focus on their old-school, «Beatlesque» idealism, dress it up in trendy (but not too trendy) new (but not too new) sounds, give it a bit of punch, and voilà, something listenable is born.

 

As usual, I could very easily do without the sappier Holroyd parts. His high point here is pro­ba­bly ʽI'm Like A Trainʼ — not coincidentally, the least catchy of his songs, but the one that grows the most, with an almost surprisingly complex vocal arrangement, coming in cadences and cas­cades that are normally associated with The Beach Boys; the whole thing ends with a series of accappella harmonies that were earlier reserved for the likes of Smile. It's not tremendously great in all its derivativeness, but a fair try nonetheless — which I couldn't say about the rather idiotic Caribbean-styled ʽLife Is For Livingʼ, written with ritualistic arena audiences in mind (it is all based on exactly one endlessly repeating musical phrase), or about ʽEchoes And Shadowsʼ, also minimalistic to the point of stupidity (and it doesn't help, either, that they are selecting some very yucky, long since outdated synth tones for both).

 

Lees, however, is in better form, and a more variegated one: he contributes a sentimental, but clear­ly heartfelt ballad (ʽHow Do You Feel Now?ʼ, delivered in a vocal style midway between Jeff Lynne and George Harrison), a couple of glossy, but crunchy pop-rockers with a hard edge (the instrumental sections of ʽHighway For Foolsʼ are the only corner of this record where a heavy rock fan could find some refuge), a dumb post-disco dance number (ʽDoctor Doctorʼ) that should probably count as the most «modernistic» song on the album (when applied to a band like BJH and a year like 1981, this does not promise any bliss, though), and the obligatory closing anthem — ʽIn Memory Of The Martyrsʼ, where «the martyrs» explicitly refers to those who perished while trying to cross over the Berlin wall. Naturally, that last song would have been a success in Germany even if it were melodically horrible, which it is not: as far as anthemic acous­tic ballads with a singalong chorus and a sophisticated touch (symbolized by moody fusion-style synth solos) are concerned, it is simply overlong, but at least the punchline — "we are love, we are, we are love" is delivered without pathos, and that is laudable.

 

Altogether, for an «uplifting» record (and in art rock, good or bad, convincingly «uplifting» re­cords are a relative rarity — usually reserved for the likes of Yes), Turn Of The Tide is not at all disgusting, and occasionally entertaining. This is not sufficient grounds for a thumbs up, but it does show that Barclay James Harvest did not enter the Eighties completely empty-handed; like most of their art-rock contemporaries, they still had something to say at that point, or at least it could have seemed that way. They left the Eighties quite empty-handed, to be sure, but in that, too, they were quite far from being alone.

 

A CONCERT FOR THE PEOPLE (BERLIN) (1982)

 

1) Berlin; 2) Loving Is Easy; 3) Mockingbird; 4) Sip Of Wine; 5) Nova Lepidoptera; 6) In Memory Of The Martyrs; 7) Life Is For Living; 8) Child Of The Universe; 9) Hymn.

 

We all saw it coming. I'm guessing they just ran out of space on the front sleeve, preventing the album from flashing its true full name: A Concert For The People (Who Continue To Buy Our Records Because We Wrote A Very Sappy Song About Their Hometown And They Fell For It, Well What Do You Expect Of Them Dumb Krauts Anyway). In grateful and sincere recog­nition of that fact, Barclay James Harvest did indeed play a live show on the steps of the Reich­stag, no less, on August 30, 1980 — and recorded this historical event (why historical? no idea) on audio and video for as much posterity as will be ready to stand the band.

 

Consequently, the biggest problem with this third BJH live album in less than ten years must have been the setlist. It is not very likely that they only played the nine songs on the album (al­though these are also the same nine songs that are available on the official video): most likely, they just selected the stuff that was not yet written in the age of Live and Live Tapes. So the set­list, or at least this particular section of it, mostly focuses on their recent period — the majority of the songs stemming from either XII or the yet-to-be-released Turn Of The Tide (oddly enough, Eyes Of The Universe is completely snubbed — too bad, the 175,000 Berliners assembled for the show might have enjoyed some disco dancing). ʽMockingbirdʼ is also included since, well, it is BJH's equivalent of ʽSatisfactionʼ; and ʽChild Of The Universeʼ and ʽHymnʼ make a re­ap­pe­ar­an­ce because a live album just ain't a live album without its fair share of singalong anthems, and XII was rather lean on singalong anthems.

 

The album is reported to have been seriously doctored, since there were multiple problems with the recording equipment (the spirit of the Reichstag does not take lightly to overseas intruders, so it seems), and some of the guitar parts had to be recut, which is why the final version came out so relatively late. This explains why Lees' guitar solos sound so much cleaner and sharper than they did on the earlier live releases — and, as usual, plunges us into the philosophical discussion on pre-calculated quality vs. flawed spontaneity. But at least they did go to the trouble of re-recor­ding rather than, say, using the solos from the original studio mix.

 

Still, it is hard to think of any reasons that would make Berlin an essential listen. There are a few rearrangements — ʽLoving Is Easyʼ, for instance, is sped up (which does not make the opening bassline any less ʽPsycho Killerʼ-ish) and recast in a rockier mode; whereas ʽChild Of The Uni­verseʼ, on the contrary, seems a bit softer and slippier than the original, with more emphasis on the keyboards and less heaviness in the guitar department. But it's almost impossible to under­stand what makes this seven-minute version of ʽIn Memory Of The Martyrsʼ preferable over or in addition to the studio version — naturally, this song, written in homage of the unlucky Berlin Wall crossers, had to be played there, but it would probably make more sense to try and get ins­pired by watching the faces of the people listening to it than by the audio track of the actual per­formance. Same goes for ʽHymnʼ, of course, except that ʽHymnʼ, unlike ʽMartyrsʼ and ʽBerlinʼ itself, is not specifically targeted at German audiences.

 

At least, with the possible exception of ʽLife Is For Livingʼ, they don't play any of their bad material — and the concert catches them in that short-lived upwards spiral of the post-Woolly era, so it represents another bookmark in the Amazing Technicolor Story of Barclay James Harvest that most people couldn't care less about. Oh, and do buy the DVD rather than the CD if you are really desperate — Lees cuts quite a melodramatic figure, jumping around in his matching red pants and jacket, and, with his beard shaved off, he sort of looks a bit like Roy Orbison now.

 

RING OF CHANGES (1983)

 

1) Fifties' Child; 2) Looking From The Outside; 3) Teenage Heart; 4) High Wire; 5) Midnight Drug; 6) Waiting For The Right Time; 7) Just A Day Away; 8) Paraiso Dos Cavalos; 9) Ring Of Changes.

 

There is practically nothing that could be called «synth-pop» on this album, but neither is there anything that would even remotely qualify for a «rock» sound. Acoustic guitars, keyboards, and orchestration fully dominate the proceedings: Ring Of Changes is Barclay's mellowest album since the very beginning, and that says a lot, considering how mellow they had been since 1974. In a way, this is even curious, because the record goes against the grain: in 1983, «mellow» usu­ally meant stuffing your songs with bland synthesizer tones that reached all the way to heaven, not placing your trust in old-fashioned cellos and violins.

 

Much of the credit for this must proba­bly go to the band's new producer, Pip Williams, who was previously mostly known for produ­cing a long bunch of Status Quo records — but who also helped relaunch the comeback of The Moody Blues. And, supposedly, once he had helped the «rich man's Moody Blues» get back on their creative feet with Long Distance Voyager and The Present (the only two of their Eighties' records that could at least partially match the quality of the old days), it must have been only natural for him to go across and try and do the same thing with the «poor man's Moody Blues».

 

The beginning is weirdly promising: a baroque chamber music passage instead of the expected synthesizers. Midway through, the strings turn Hollywoodish, though, and then sink into the background as ʽFifties' Childʼ finally takes shape as a typical BJH number: soft, romantic, thinly intellectual, mildly nostalgic, just a teeny bit touching while it's on, and completely forgettable when it's off. The vocal melody in some respects seems like a variation on the already not-too-awesome ʽHymnʼ — and the message is of comparable profundity: ʽLove was a lesson we tried to learn / There were no exams to pass or failʼ. With each passing year, as nostalgic tributes to Sixties' idealism keep multiplying and, consequently, depreciating in net value, there is less and less motivation to be interested in this one.

 

But you know what? Easily the best thing about ʽFifties' Childʼ is its bassline — all of a sudden, Holroyd's lines start drawing more attention to themselves than whatever Lees is doing, because the guy suddenly gets the urge to make them as melodic and expressive as possible. Maybe he had some serious Sgt. Pepper inhalation or something, but the way he explores all possible swerves from the basic rhythm is really the only thing that prevents me from falling asleep to Lees' soft preaching. And later on, it turns out that this is not an exception: about half of the songs here have excellent basswork: ʽHigh Wireʼ, ʽJust A Day Awayʼ, ʽMidnight Drugʼ... we probably have Pip Williams to thank for putting these parts so high in the mix, but, whatever be the situa­tion, Ring Of Changes is the first album in the BJH catalog that made me aware of Holroyd's above-average talents as bass player.

 

Holroyd is also responsible for the most memorable, if also most repetitive and unadventurous, bass phrase on the album — the pulsating loop that drives the title track, which is itself an anthem to the endless cycle of life, going on for way too long (unless the underlying message is that the endless cycle of life is a continuous bore, which would be at least worth considering) but cleverly arranged, with the bass loop, the grumbling electronic bleeps, and the strange Eastern-vibe strings combining in a unique manner. The bass loop and the bleeps might illustrate the relentless cogs of life locked in an endless grind, but the psychedelic strings?.. Makes one wonder.

 

As for the rest of the songs, they're okay — on the whole, less satisfactory than Turn Of The Tide because of the lack of a rock sound (not a single uplifting Lees solo!), but, as usual, melodic and somewhat memorable for those who will stand several listens. Occasionally, they do begin to sound like late period Bee Gees (ʽWaiting For The Right Timeʼ — strange that Les held back on singing this one in falsetto, all the other adult contemporary ingredients already present), but on the whole, the 1970s folk-pop vibe is still prevalent, and as long as they manage to hold out against mainstream Eighties' values, BJH are still a listenable outfit.

 

One last particular mention: the orchestration on ʽParaiso Dos Cavalosʼ, John's hyper-sentimental ode to a horseback vacation in Portugal, is absolutely marvelous — formulaic and a little cheesy, perhaps, but the New World Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by David Katz, gives the song a far more uplifting and grandiose flavor than its main melody. Probably an accident — on the whole, the orchestral arrangements on the album are not too adventurous — but every happy ac­cident on a late period BJH album counts, because that's what a typical late period BJH album usually is: mush and mediocrity with an occasional tasty treat for the seeker.

 

VICTIMS OF CIRCUMSTANCE (1984)

 

1) Sideshow; 2) Hold On; 3) Rebel Woman; 4) Say You'll Stay; 5) For Your Love; 6) Victims Of Circumstance; 7) Inside My Nightmare; 8) Watching You; 9) I've Got A Feeling.

 

No big changes from the formula here, either — just small ones, and, as usual, for the worse. For instance, there is a further slight tilt into adult contemporary: ʽI've Got A Feelingʼ, another vile bur­glari­zation of a Beatles title, represents Holroyd's most faithful adoption of the Eighties' sen­ti­mental ballad style (watery synthesizers, trembling falsettos, the works). A little more guitar than there was last time, but what guitar? The leaden arena riffs of ʽHold Onʼ have nothing to do with John's lilting melodic solos.

 

Perhaps the biggest introduced «novelty» is a set of female singers singing backup, an idea that might have meant wanting to give the record a little soulful-gospel flavor, but ended up, I think, moving the band closer to Europop. One needs to go no further than the album opener: ʽSide­showʼ starts out as a glossy uptempo folk rocker, but then, as massive strings and female choirs start fountaineering from the speakers, it becomes an odd mix of Bee Gees and ABBA (in fact, a few of the string movements are almost openly copied from ʽDancing Queenʼ). As usual, they have the means to pull it off without embarrassment, but the whole style is really so alien for John and Les that they have no means whatsoever to turn it into something remarkable.

 

Those who have never embarked on an anti-arena rock crusade might get to like the rockier stuff on here. ʽRebel Womanʼ (despite the title, this is, curiously, an anti-Soviet song, written in the wake of the Korean airliner incident) has a streak of grim catchiness, although it could have done better without the irritating synth loops — and, perhaps, with an actual guitar solo (for some rea­son, Lees saves all of his solos for the ballads on this album — an unexplainable choice, since he used to do really well on the fast rockers). ʽInside My Nightmareʼ could have been just as good, had they kept the girls away from the microphone and made the basic guitar riff less sterile. At the very least, the two songs are a refreshing change of pace from the usual mush.

 

And the usual mush is hardly worth commenting — lots and lots of ballads that mostly reshuffle old ideas, scraped off Bee Gees and Elton John (ʽFor Your Loveʼ) records; I wouldn't be surpri­sed, either, to learn they had been listening to late Genesis and early solo Phil Collins as well (ʽSay You'll Stayʼ definitely has the same atmosphere as ʽFollow You Follow Meʼ). The staying power of these tunes is expectedly close to zero, although, once again, I have to stress: even at this late period, BJH songs are all «forgettable» and «mediocre» rather than openly offensive and embarrassing (unless you start bringing in the lyrics).

 

It should also be noted that this is the first BJH album on which Holroyd compositions outnumber those of Lees (5:4), and also the first BJH album on which Holroyd compositions are significant­ly weaker, as the man completes the transition from folk-based soft-rock into synth-choked adult contemporary, while Lees still attempts to at least nominally justify the «rock» heritage of the band. Thus, even though at this point there is still no talk whatsoever of splitting the alliance (after all, they didn't just kick Woolly out of the band for nothing: Turn Of The Tide showed how happy they could be as a duo), it is not excluded that the first faint traces of the creative rift can be tracked to some time around this period.

 

FACE TO FACE (1987)

 

1) Prisoner Of Your Love; 2) He Said Love; 3) Alone In The Night; 4) Turn The Key; 5) You Need Love; 6) Kiev; 7) African; 8) Followed Me; 9) All My Life; 10) Panic; 11) Guitar Blues; 12) On The Wings Of Love.

 

All through 1985 and 1986, some of the worst years in commercial pop music history, thankfully little was heard of Barclay James Harvest — in fact, this was the first time ever in the band's his­tory that they decided to take such a long break, and the musical press must have finally breathed a sign of relief. But not to worry: refreshed and remobilized, John «Jesus Loves Africa» Lees and Les «Boy Loves Girl» Holroyd are back, and now they have the opportunity to make full use of the CD format: the full CD version of Face To Face contains twelve songs and stretches out for a grand sixty minutes. Turns out that the years weren't simply wasted, after all. But maybe this is exactly what all the German fans were waiting for — that new, improved TV dinner from your favourite band, now 20% more nutritious.

 

The best I can say about Face To Face is that every time I listened to it while doing something else at the same time, I had no impression / memory / faint reminiscence of what I just heard ten seconds after I'd heard it. And this was the good news, because when I finally got angry with my­self, dropped everything, and started focusing in on the music... well, the most awful thing about this whole late-period BJH trajectory is that there really was no single-moment werewolf trans­formation: it was more like a portrait-of-Dorian-Gray kind of a thing, with each subsequent al­bum adding another streak to the general degradation. But by this time, Barclay James Harvest can no longer even be called «poor man's Moody Blues» — this late Eighties stuff sounds like a parody on late Seventies BJH, which itself sounded like... oh well.

 

Without going into serious details (this album certainly ain't worth it), I will just briefly mention some of its more appalling elements. Number one: how many song titles with the word ʽloveʼ in them does one really need? we got the message twenty years back, thank you very much. Number two: didn't John Lees already set The New Testament for Kids to music with ʽHymnʼ, a decade ago? so why did he feel the urge to do that again, in an even more thorough, and even more trivial, manner? Number three: didn't John Lees already come up with his best anti-oppression / anti-war song more than a decade ago with ʽChild Of The Universeʼ? Who needs this particular ʽAfricanʼ, with its plastic synth-rock arrangement? Number four: excuse me, but the combined evil of the melody, the arrangement, and the lyrics makes ʽPanicʼ a fine candidate for worst BJH song ever written by Lees on any occasion — tough as the actual competition might be. The "yeah yeah yeah rock'n'roll" bit simply shows that the man must have not been in his right mind at the time: no normal human being could have agreed to release this crap on a commercial basis.

 

You might think that Les Holroyd is finally doing better, but no dice: his ʽTurn The Keyʼ is hor­rendous Phil Collins-type adult contemporary, his ʽPrisoner Of Your Loveʼ is bland synth-pop, and, although his ʽKievʼ may have been driven by pure generous empathy with the victims of Chernobyl, in the context of his past karma it just feels like a continuous quest to write a sugary love song to every bisyllabic European city: for some reason, we never got around to hearing his ʽBelgradeʼ or ʽMadridʼ, and I am still personally and impatiently waiting for my own ʽMoscowʼ. And, for that matter, do Barclay James Harvest fans exist in India? China? Central African Re­public? They may want their own personal tribute to their capital cities, too.

 

All right, enough sarcasm. Truth be told, under normal conditions Face To Face provokes neither laughter nor anger — even when the band are at their most appalling, they cloak it so well with slick, inoffensive production and soft, inobtrusive singing that all the senses just go plain numb. I do feel like giving the album a thumbs down this time, though, seeing as how it has no re­dee­ming qualities whatsoever, and even the band's trademark «melodicity» is reduced to rehashing, recycling, and regurgitating chords and leads that weren't on anybody's hot list in the first place.

 

GLASNOST (1988)

 

1) Nova Lepidoptera; 2) Hold On; 3) African; 4) Love On The Line; 5) Alone In The Night; 6) On The Wings Of Love; 7) Mockingbird; 8) Rock'n'Roll Lady; 9) He Said Love; 10) Turn The Key; 11) Medicine Man; 12) Kiev; 13) Child Of The Universe; 14) Life Is For Living; 15) Poor Man's Moody Blues; 16) Berlin; 17) Loving Is Easy; 18) Hymn.

 

If, having lived way past the Gorbachev era, you happened to forget the exact meaning of the Rus­sian word glasnost', or if, on the contrary, you are too young to have lived through that era and are in need of a good translation, look no further than the fourth live album by Barclay James Harvest! Of course, they forgot to put it on the album cover, but I will gladly fill it in for you: «Glasnost' is when they finally let us sing our crappy songs in East Berlin as well!»

 

Recorded July 14, 1987 at the Treptower Park (the actual date would rather suggest a different location, like the Place de la Bastille, but the BJH codex of honor explicitly states that all memo­rable dates in BJH history must take place on German soil, or else John Lees' right to a life-long supply of free Sauerkraut will be forfeit), this is a full CD — these days, actually a nearly full double CD, containing the entire concert — of songs played live before an appreciative audience of East Germans, about a year prior to the demolition of The Wall, but with change already high in the air. The band was invited to play as part of a larger celebration of Berlin's 750th anniver­sary, and the attendance was measured at way over 100,000, particularly since many were able to get in for free. (In retrospect, I wouldn't probably go to a BJH concert around 1987 if you paid me, but those times were sure different).

 

However, even if there actually was a feeling of liberty and excitement at the venue (and there obviously must have been), it is not well translated onto the recording. Chief reason for this is that, even at that juncture, Barclay James Harvest still refused to come to terms with themselves as an oldies act, focusing chiefly on new material. Consequently, we get an eye-(and ear-)popping set of six songs from Face To Face — songs that deserve to be forgotten upon first listen, much less revived in a live environment — and, on the whole, more than half of the set is culled exclu­sively from the post-Woolly era. With minor exceptions, all of these loyally reproduce the studio recordings, bringing the sonic wonders of such late-period masterpieces as ʽHe Said Loveʼ, ʽAfri­canʼ, and ʽOn The Wings Of Loveʼ back to your tired ears just as you thought you would never have to encounter them again.

 

Real golden oldies, in addition to the ever-present ʽMockingbirdʼ, are also represented by the welcome return of the hard-rocking arrangement of ʽMedicine Manʼ, done in good style and with the expected frantic solo by Lees. Mid-1970s oldies, though more abundant in scope, are also to­tally predictable — ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ to drown the crowd in third-rate sentimentalism, ʽBerlinʼ to justify the paying crowd's expenses, and ʽHymnʼ to merge with the crowd in throbbing religious ecstasy at the end of the show. Only the album opener ʽNova Lepidopteraʼ is a relative surprise. but, again, the live version is almost completely identical with the studio album's. (At least the new CD edition makes it into a slightly unexpected opening — the original would open with ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ!).

 

Clearly, there are only two groups of people who should care in the least about this album — (a) the really hardcore BJH fans, those who simply need to have an official live record from Ger­many recorded on proper equipment (something that Berlin did not really offer), and (b) East Germans, particularly those who were there on that memorable day and, naturally, attach special nostalgic value to the show; for them this event may have had a very special meaning — anything, after all, that makes one's life happier and nobody else's life unhappier, should be worth owning and cherishing. That said, I'm fairly sure that many other good things — better things — than this show could have taken place in Berlin on that day, so, for justice' sake, let us not forget how almost utterly awful this particular setlist is, and settle with a thumbs down after all. One thing must be said for Lees, though — he learned to speak a fairly good German in all those years that the funny old Krauts were sponsoring his personal and artistic existence.

 

WELCOME TO THE SHOW (1990)

 

1) The Life You Lead; 2) Lady Macbeth; 3) Cheap The Bullet; 4) Welcome To The Show; 5) John Lennon's Guitar; 6) Halfway To Freedom; 7) African Nights; 8) Psychedelic Child; 9) Where Do We Go; 10) Origin Earth; 11) If Love Is King; 12) Shadows On The Sky.

 

By the late Eighties / early Nineties, some of the prog dinosaurs were willing to show signs of life, but most were still hibernating in «commercial» lairs, and Barclay James Harvest, of all people, were fairly safe in one of those lairs as long as the East European markets were open — and open they were, with more and more breachings of the Iron Curtain, as lovingly commemorated by Les Holroyd in one of these album's worst songs (ʽHalfway To Freedomʼ). Consequently, Welcome To The Show — no, this is not a live album, wouldn't it be too damn obvious even for a band like BJH if it were? — simply offers you twelve more slabs of different varieties of adult contem­porary muzak for all tastes. Sappy adult contemporary, hard-rocking adult contemporary, mysti­cal adult contemporary, anthemic adult contemporary, ethnic adult contemporary — you name it, we got it, as long as it is glossy, «serious», and deadly dull.

 

Needless to say, Holroyd's half is about twice as putrid as Lees' — mostly either electronic pop junk with a steady beat, but no true hooks (title track; ʽThe Life You Leadʼ) or Phil Collins-style big ballads with big brass saxophones and so much h-e-a-r-t you'll cry out for liver in no time (ʽWhere Do We Goʼ; ʽShadows On The Skyʼ). Of particularly specific cringeworthiness is ʽAfri­can Nightsʼ, a nostalgic remembrance by Les of the band's tour of South Africa in 1972 — if the annoying electronic congas do not do you in a matter of moments, the lyrics surely will: if it is indeed true that one of Les Holroyd's most lingering memories of traveling through the apartheid-torn South Africa in 1972 is how "the sound man played The Eagles / As we listen / ʽTake It Easyʼ echoes on through our lives"... words fail me so utterly.

 

But every once in a while, Lees comes quite close to matching the tastelessness of his crumblier partner. The juiciest «highlight» is ʽJohn Lennon's Guitarʼ, a song about how — listen to this! — a guitar, borrowed from John Lennon at Abbey Road Studios in 1970, turned out to be instrumen­tal for the recording of the Barclay James Harvest song ʽGaladrielʼ. Yes, that is what the song is about, and it tells the story in plain documentary fashion. No, there is nothing wrong in borrow­ing a guitar from John Lennon, or even in acknowledging that fact twenty years later. Yes, one does not usually do this in the form of a sentimental ballad, for fear of not only looking stupid on one's own, but also making every recipient of said ballad feel equally stupid. Yes, the Beatles were great and all, but why all this relentless sucking up? ʽTitlesʼ were bad enough, and now "I remember the day, I remember the day, the day that I played John Lennon's guitar, I remember the day, as if it was yesterday, and I know that the memories will never fade..." — am I the only one to suspect some neural imbalance here?

 

Almost as bad, but in a different way, is ʽPsychedelic Childʼ, a slurred logorrhea of «flower power clichés» set to... no, not retro-stylized «psychedelic» sounds of fuzz guitars, harpsichords, and sitars, as could be thought, but to a muscular riff-rock sound with a serious hair metal flair: the «heaviest» that Lees gets on this album, perhaps under the influence of a Def Leppard concert or something in the same style. A song that sounds awful and makes no sense whatsoever at the same time — mission accomplished to perfection.

 

Struggling to find anything even vaguely redeeming about the album, I can only think of two songs that have potential: ʽLady Macbethʼ is John's valiant attempt at writing and recording some­thing inscrutably mysterious (but the song is still butchered with plastic electronic key­boards), and ʽIf Love Is Kingʼ features one of those quintessential-classic Lees solos that can be melodic, intelligent, and kick-ass at the same time — unfortunately, it has the unluck to be stuck on top of yet another forgettable pop-rocker, driven by a corny synth riff. It really baffles me how this obvious talent — at his best, the guy could rival Dave Gilmour as a soloist — could be com­bined with such poor skills at decision taking, but natural selection works in mysterious ways.

 

If BJH are the poor man's Moody Blues, then Welcome To The Show is the equivalent of a poor man's Sur La Mer, and that, as anybody vaguely familiar with Moody Blues history can easily tell, is not much of a compliment. And, naturally, the album runs for one whole hour straight, be­cause, according to an unbreakable law of physics, the worse a BJH album is, the longer it has to run. To give the record a thumbs down is to say nothing — I'd like to submit an official demand to remove it from public circulation, but, fortunately, it seems that nature has already settled this in its own wise way.

 

CAUGHT IN THE LIGHT (1993)

 

1) Who Do We Think We Are; 2) Knoydart; 3) Copii Romania; 4) Back To Earth; 5) Cold War; 6) Forever Yester­day; 7) The Great Unknown; 8) Spud-U-Like; 9) Silver Wings; 10) Once More; 11) A Matter Of Time; 12) Ballad Of Denshaw Mill.

 

Apparently, browsing the Web reveals that a small bunch of fans continues to regard this album as a «comeback» of sorts — some call it BJH's most «progressive» effort since the late 1970s. But only a very strong love for the art of John Lees and Les Holroyd, leading to malicious self-delusion, could trick anyone into mistaking this vapid, turgid, somnambulant pile of sonic mush for an artistic comeback. The way I see it, Caught In The Light simply scales another peak in turning the band into a bland adult contemporary act — and this time, their act lasts all of sixty minutes, letting you savour each whiff of that blandness for minutes on end.

 

Maybe Barclay James Harvest were never a first-rate art-rock band, and maybe their devolution was slow, subtle, and treacherous, but it actually makes sense to think back twenty-three years and compare their first (and, in my opinion, best) album with this piece of junk. Think, let's say, ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ, a song that seriously and amusingly mined the psychedelic rock mines, and ʽSpud-U-Likeʼ, a song about... well, basically, this is John Lees complaining about Gameboy and «Mega drives» squishing out the rock'n'roll spirit, get it? "Don't want a Gameboy, just rock and roll... Don't want a system that ain't got no soul", Mr. Lees complains over a backdrop of electronic drums and synthesizers that is, altogether, more «Modern Talking» than anything even remotely approaching ʽrock'n'rollʼ. In a long, long story of one stylistic embarrassment after ano­ther, ʽSpud-U-Likeʼ just might be the lucky one to take first prize.

 

Subtler, but even more embarrassing, is ʽOnce Moreʼ. If you already know your BJH well enough, you might, perhaps, suspect that the title really means «let us re-record an old song», and indeed, this is a re-write of ʽMockingbirdʼ, lock, stock and barrel, only with synthesizers replacing strings — Lees does let go with some frenetic soloing towards the end, but this does not save the ridi­culous monster, it only raises further questions, such as, if this guy's only remaining talent is to squeeze out beautiful lead sequences from his guitar, why does he do this on one or two songs per album, and lets generic synthesizer parts rule with an iron fist over the rest of it?

 

But wait, there is more. ʽBallad Of Denshaw Millʼ is a nine-minute track that is almost complete­ly — barring the noisy intro and the small solo of the outro — ruled by a keyboard «melody» that requires the compositional skills of a 6-year old after his second piano lesson. «Based on a Saddleworth legend», apparently, but who gives a damn? In a world populated by miriads of at­mospheric epics, this one does not even begin to qualify. ʽForever Yesterdayʼ took me a few lis­tens to understand its source, but then the title ultimately helped out — of course, the verse me­lody is but a slight variation on Dylan's ʽForever Youngʼ, with the first line completely the same and the rest deviating by split hairs. And if I were offered to cherish the memory of my departed father with a corny synth ballad like ʽBack To Earthʼ, I know I would quite certainly be offended. (And I can certainly understand this grief, but did those lyrics really need to sound like a rhyth­mic rearrangement of a schematic memorial service?).

 

And now for the big one — all of the songs mentioned above are Lees songs. You can try to imagine what the Holroyd songs are like — better still, don't even try, because it is fairly hard for a mind not thoroughly accustomed to sentimentally synthesized adult contemporary to imagine such a copious amount of pathetic triviality all at once. Each of these songs must have been com­posed in about three minutes' time, then took about three years of huffing, puffing, and convin­cing oneself that this is one of the most serious, profound, heartfelt songs ever written. Then they go in, play the required three notes on the rhythm synthesizer and the required one note on the «lead» synthesizer and go out.

 

All in all — my hearty congratulations: after Welcome To The Show, it seemed that they could already sink no further, but Caught In The Light successfully conquers an extra five or ten feet of depth (we are talking sewer territory here, of course). Then again, for justice sake, it should be remembered that this is just my irate personal opinion, and there are alternate ones, for instance, such as «in the age of trivial grunge, these brave people returned with their deepest, most intro­spective album in more than a decade!» So take this next thumbs down with a grain of salt — especially if you have a habit of, for instance, thinking of Chris de Burgh in terms of «depth», «introspection», and «progressiveness».

 

RIVER OF DREAMS (1997)

 

1) Back In The Game; 2) River Of Dreams; 3) Yesterday's Heroes; 4) Children Of The Disappeared; 5) Pools Of Tears; 6) Do You Believe In Dreams; 7) (Took Me) So Long; 8) Mr. E; 9) Three Weeks To Despair; 10) The Time Of Our Lives.

 

If you actually managed to stay with me here, all the way through that interminable string of «papcore» records getting duller and duller with each subsequent release... well, I wouldn't exact­ly call River Of Dreams, Lees' and Holroyd's last BJH collaboration, a «reward» for all that patience, but at the very least, it is a partial recompense. It was not intended to be a swan song for the band — but, luckily indeed, the guys managed to stay together long enough to not let the to­tally abysmal Caught In The Light close the book on Barclay James Harvest.

 

This, not its predecessor, is the real objective «comeback»: finally, somebody started paying atten­tion to how far away the band had drifted from its mid-1970's sound into the territory of smooth-bland adult contemporary, and the record is a very conscious, very hard-working attempt to get back where it all... not «began», exactly, but where it had that relative balance between be­ing «artistic» and «commercial». Not only are the guitars back in a big way, fighting back the synthesizer mush with renewed forces, but so is the «poor man's Moody Blues» / «poor man's Pink Floyd» / «poor man's Beatles» spirit, which seemed so pathetic back in the 1970s, compared to what was going on at the time, but, by the late 1980s, was so goddamn sorely missed as the band plummeted into «poor man's Phil Collins» territory.

 

Of course, subtlety was never a forte for the band — you could suspect something of the sort hap­pening just by glancing at the song titles: ʽBack In The Gameʼ, ʽYesterday's Heroesʼ, ʽTook Me So Longʼ... And then there is all that musical legacy — the Harrison-esque slide guitar parts that open ʽDo You Believe In Dreamsʼ, the unflinching "let me take you down..." quotation on ʽMr. Eʼ, along with the psychedelic cellos, the Wall influence on ʽYesterday's Heroesʼ... but then again, without all these links, how could we call this a «comeback» in the first place? Barclay James Harvest used to make a living out of «plundering» everyone in sight — the quintessential «art-rock vultures», and now they're back with a flesh-ripping vengeance.

 

There is nothing «awesome» about these songs, and there probably could not be at this point, but there are almost no embarrassments, and the nostalgia is handled with care. ʽBack In The Gameʼ opens with a little chamber muzak, then enters energetic pop-rock mode with acoustic power chords backed by a permanently wailing electric part and multi-part harmonies — plenty of juicy stuff going on to excuse the expectedly trivial lyrics about "spirit of the 1970s live forever" etc.; and, what's more, it is written by Holroyd, who I'd already think had, by that time, completely forgotten how to write anything other than suave synth ballads. Lees follows with ʽRiver Of Dreamsʼ, an equally catchy «arena folk» song — not great, not awful, and vastly helped by being backed with ye olde electric organ rather than cheesy synth.

 

Later on, ʽYesterday's Heroesʼ gives us a rockier sound: the guitar tone is a bit rotten, like on those post-Waters Pink Floyd albums, but the main echoey riff shows inspiration. The main prob­lem with the song, I think, is that Barclay James Harvest are too «happy» a band — at least, have been too happy a band ever since their reformating in the mid-1970s — to be able to plow the lower depths of depression and desperation: ʽYesterday's Heroesʼ somehow tries to convey the despairing realisation of being stuck in an endless wheel of fate, but the growling wobble of the song's main riff is as far as they can go about expressing that despair. Still, this is light years ahead of ʽSpud-U-Likeʼ, no question about that.

 

The album is not entirely free of Caught In The Light's nightmarish legacy: sooner or later, electronic sentimentality must take over, and it certainly does on Holroyd's ʽTook Me So Longʼ, an elevator ballad with no redeeming value, and on Lees' ʽPool Of Tearsʼ (glycerin ones, I sup­pose), riding on pure, and very boring, atmosphere. But these, I'm happy to say, form the mino­rity among a generally acceptable bunch of songs that honestly try to get back to the source — they don't always manage to get there, but most of them are at least headed in the right direction. For that particular reason, I am inclined to mark the album with a very modest thumbs up, if only to indicate the huge «upwards» step in comparison to everything they did in the previous ten years, and to put a checkmark in the «finished career on a positive note?» box.

 

LIVE AT HIGH VOLTAGE (2011)

 

1) Nova Lepidoptera; 2) Poor Wages; 3) She Said; 4) Galadriel; 5) Ball And Chain; 6) Mockingbird; 7) Taking Some Time On; 8) Medicine Man; 9) Song For Dying; 10) The Poet; 11) After The Day; 12) Hymn.

 

Our saga is almost at an end — technically, it has ended, because, other than a couple archival releases from the old days on the BBC, «Barclay James Harvest» was no more after River Of Dreams. In its place, through a simple budding process, two new entities were generated: «John Lees' Barclay James Harvest» and «Barclay James Harvest featuring Les Holroyd» — yes, the only thing better than a Barclay James Harvest are two competing Barclay James Harvests, each of them with its own personal assembly line.

 

It is beyond my level of endurance to go for a close analysis of Lees' and Holroyd's post-split careers, but just a few words may be in order. Holroyd had always been the «lesser» part of the two, writing relatively fewer hits and generally acting as a «sissy» counterpart to John's «tough­ness» (the distinction is embedded about as firmly as the Lennon/McCartney division line, which is to say not firmly at all, but there is a distinction) — on the other hand, he did take the drummer, Mel Pritchard, with him, so, from an arithmetical point of view, he might have more rights to the name of BJH than his tougher colleague. So far, «Barclay James Harvest featuring Les Holroyd» has had only one studio album out (Revolution Days, 2002: the small bits that I have heard con­firm the predictable suspicion — mostly pathetic adult contemporary with melodies as attractive as a bunch of squished caterpillars), as well as a couple live ones, and I suppose they must be pretty big in Germany, as always, and pretty small everywhere else.

 

The story of «John Lees' Barclay James Harvest» is marginally more interesting, because, in order to even out the quotas, Lees got back together with Woolly: their first effort, Nexus, re­leased in 1999, mostly consisted of reworkings of old classics, going all the way back to the early days, with a few new ideas thrown in. Also featuring Craig Fletcher on bass and Kevin White­head on drums, the band, from then on, mostly stuck to touring, and did that with modest success until Woolly's suicide in December 2010, caused by mental health problems. He was then re­placed by Jez Smith.

 

Live At High Voltage is a rather typical example of several live performances that the band has released in the 21st century. Recorded on July 23rd, 2011, at the High Voltage Festival in Lon­don (rather than Berlin!), it was then released as a 2-CD set (which, as a «bonus gift», included a third blank CD on which the buyer was invited to burn some photos and a video interview from the band's own site — is that marketing genius, or what?), with a side aim to act as an honorary  tribute to Woolly: they even performed Woolly's own ʽBall And Chainʼ, which they did not cover onstage while Woolly was alive.

 

The first thing, of course, that strikes you about the album is that none of the material dates past the late 1970s — and that most of the material (10 songs out of 12!) is from the band's earliest period (1970-72). Usually, this kind of behavior is branded as «turning into a nostalgic oldies act», but in this particular case, the aim is altogether different: for John Lees, who had been crea­tively stagnating over two decades, this is a rebirth — almost like a rejection of all that utter crap, going back to the spring of youth, that sort of thing. Listening to the band crank the volume up on those early tunes was fun to me, and a good reminder that there did really exist a time when Bar­clay James Harvest could lay claim to some depth, creativity, and good taste.

 

I mean, a Barclay James Harvest live album with no ʽPoor Man's Moody Bluesʼ on it? No ʽLove On The Lineʼ? No ʽLoving Is Easyʼ? No ʽTitlesʼ? Not a single Les Holroyd ballad? Most impor­tantly, no ʽSpud-U-Likeʼ or any traces of the band's existence in the synth-pop era? Bring it on, even if the actual performance is far from perfect: Lees' singing has grown craggy and cranky, the other guys, replacing Woolly, cannot sing expressively at all, the rhythm section does not feel particularly tight, and John seems to have lost a bit of the old «fluidity» in his soloing, as seen best of all on the slightly clumsy phrasing in ʽMedicine Manʼ (arthritis? or just nervous?).

 

But they do drag out the very first song on the very first BJH album — a fairly good run through ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ, even if, naturally, they cannot properly reproduce the psychedelic over­dub-fest that made the original coda so head-spinningly impressive. They do the entire ʽPoet / After The Dayʼ suite, with a ferocious solo at the end that quite compensates for the imperfection of ʽMedicine Manʼ. They do lots more of that nice early stuff. It's a pretty swell trip «down the old memory lane».

 

It is not that I am advocating for anyone to rush out and look for it, or any other «John Lees' Bar­clay James Harvest» record — normally, if you want to hear ʽTaking Some Time Onʼ or ʽSong For The Dyingʼ, you should just go back to the original source. The important thing is that this and other live records fulfill a «redemptory» function: it is pretty much John Lees saying to us, "yes, ladies and gentlemen, everything I did past 1979 was fairly crappy, and this here is me trying to undo some of the wrongs I'd done». Well, it seems to be that way — I may be getting it all wrong, but this is the interpretation that I like the most, and since I'm a sucker for happy end­ings, this is just the kind of happy ending I'd been hoping for. Therefore, all's well that ends well; thumbs up to this imperfect, but vivacious and well-meaning live album; and here's hoping that Barclay James Harvest, for a brief while at least, will continue to be remembered for the many beautiful things they'd done in their early years, rather than the numerous crimes against Taste, Queen and Country perpetrated in later ones.

BE-BOP DELUXE

AXE VICTIM (1974)

 

1) Axe Victim; 2) Love Is Swift Arrows; 3) Jet Silver And The Dolls Of Venus; 4) Third Floor Heaven; 5) Night Creatures; 6) Rocket Cathedrals; 7) Adventures In Yorkshire Landscape; 8) Jets At Down; 9) No Trains To Heaven; 10) Darkness (L'Immoraliste).

 

Take any random opinion on Axe Victim today, about forty years away from its original syn­thesis, and it is very likely that the opinion will be judging the album from a Ziggy Stardust per­spective: «Oh, it's such a wannabe David Bowie project!» This is not altogether unfounded, but, for some reason, most of these opinions miss another connection, in my view, perhaps even better justified — Peter Hammill. Naturally, many more people are familiar with classic Bowie than with classic Van Der Graaf Generator or Peter's solo career, but still, I believe that a description of the early Be-Bop Deluxe sound as a meticulously engineered «cross» between Bowie and Hammill would be much more accurate than simply branding Bill Nelson and his associates as a bunch of «Bowie copycats», for better or worse.

 

«Be-Bop Deluxe» was just a posh name for Bill Nelson, who wrote all the songs, sang all the lead vocals, and played all the guitar leads — well, okay, his backers on Axe Victim include Ian Parkin on rhythm guitar, Robert Bryan on bass, and Nicholas Chatterton-Dew on drums, but no one is supposed to memorize this info, since already by the time of the second album Nelson had dissolved the band and recruited a completely different line-up, and also because Nelson is, fair and square, the only instrumentalist on the album to deserve serious attention: an «axe victim» in­deed, stuffing all possible and impossible bits of space with his trills, drills, fills, and thrills. If it didn't work so well, it would be suffocating. Strangely, it does work.

 

Despite the name, «Be-Bop Deluxe» never played any be-bop, deluxe or not. Instead, Nelson had a thing for sprawling, glammy, anthemic art-rock with a futuristic twist — hence the Bowie con­nection, particularly well visible in his vocal style (he likes to combine starry-eyed idealism and snub-nosed sarcasm within a single line) and his guitar playing, which, of all possible compari­sons, indeed, seems closest to Mick Ronson's classic style — shrill, grand, frenetic playing, thick on high pitch, speedy arpeggios, crescendos, echo effects, and everything else necessary to throw the listener in overdrive, whatever it takes. But he does have plenty of real technique, so it is not just a cheap show-off manoeuvre — nor do the songs ever turn into interminable boring jams, caressing the player's ego until his fingers start hurting.

 

On second thought, it's not that often that the «songs» ever really turn into actual songs, either, and this is where the Hammill comparison falls in place. Keeping up with the rock theater spirit, Nelson does not hold much respect for verse/chorus structures — his creations are spirited rhyth­mic rants, prone to unexpected tonality and tempo changes whenever they feel like it, and to short or long lead guitar intrusions whenever the lead guitar feels it. The title track introduces the for­mula — the vocals enter on the first second, the first lead line enters on the fourth, and from then on the two seem to be locked in a death-fight. Will the singer outbawl the guitar player? Will the guitar player bring the singer down in a lightning barrage? Oh wait, they're the same guy. Well then, it's sort of obvious that they can't waste too much time on silly things like choruses, hooks, riffs, and any of that «pop» drivel.

 

Consequently, it might take a bit of time to get into the spirit of things — imagine, if you wish, a Ziggy Stardust with all of the obvious attention-grabbing twists removed, and the operatic nature of it enhanced fiftyfold. What do you get? Peter Hammill — a little more rock'n'roll-oriented, a little less gifted as a singer, but a little more skilled at guitar fireworks. The question is: are you ready to buy this, or is it all just one big, hollow, insubstantial put-on? Does this guy have a heart of gold or is he made of straw and sawdust on the inside? (I couldn't put this any other way, so excuse me the clichés).

 

Personally, I like this stuff. The way Nelson gets right down to business, jumping into the spot­light with his big voice and bigger guitar from the very first second, displays a stunning lack of fear at being branded «pretentious» — and as his lyrics spin strange tales of vain stage glories, sci-fi escapism, and ruined English countrysides, and his guitar throws out semi-improvised pas­sages that seem inspired by pop, rock, blues, jazz, and classical alike, depending on the artist's mood, Axe Victim has every chance of eventually placing you under an odd spell.

 

For those who really cannot imagine their life without a catchy hook, it may be advisable to start out with ʽJet Silver And The Dolls Of Venusʼ, which is probably the closest they got to a «glam-pop» sound here (the song was actually released as a single) — it's a glorious mess that is equal parts Cream's ʽAnyone For Tennisʼ, Kinks' ʽWaterloo Sunsetʼ, Bowie's ʽStarmanʼ, and probably several other influences / quotations / inspirations I missed, but fused into something completely different anyway — a spaceship joyride that is actually believable, mainly due to Nelson's perso­nal charisma. Cool guitar, nice voice, right pitch, proper mood.

 

Other highlights would be ʽJets At Downʼ, a seven-minute epic ballad with another bunch of lilting solos; the honestly amazing, mostly instrumental rocker ʽNo Trains To Heavenʼ, all of it holding together exclusively through Nelson's energy, sweat and blood on the axe; and... well, just about everything else. Take it from me — normally, I would be the first to condemn this sort of record, but sometimes all it takes is an intelligent vocal style and a little demon hiding in one's fingers to turn potential boredom into overall excitement. Axe Victim may not be particularly deep, and it may not show a lot of compositional genius, and it certainly does not break a lot of new ground, but it takes good care of the old one, and it kicks serious ass — something that «rock theater» à la early 1970s does fairly rarely. Thumbs up.

 

FUTURAMA (1975)

 

1) Stage Whispers; 2) Love With The Madman; 3) Maid In Heaven; 4) Sister Seagull; 5) Sound Track; 6) Music In Dreamland; 7) Jean Cocteau; 8) Between The Worlds; 9) Swan Song.

 

This stylistically similar follow-up to Axe Victim sounds somewhat inferior to me: the novelty of approach is gone, the hooks do not seem to be quickly hurrying to the rescue, and the slight toning down of «glam» elements results in the whole thing looking more sullen, solemn, and serious in form, but not necessarily in substance — at the same time sacrificing some of the hu­mor and irony of Axe Victim.

 

The band itself is completely different: this time, we have a trio, with Charlie Tu­mahai (originally from New Zealand, no less) on bass and Simon Fox on drums — and the music produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who had earlier worked with Queen and Hawkwind, among others. However, the show is still completely run by Nelson, now overdubbing his own rhythm, lead, and keyboard playing — so that only a highly perceptive ear will notice the subtle changes from Axe Victim, at least, the ones that do not directly deal with Nelson's own artistic evolution.

 

The subtlest change, perhaps, is that there are no more songs like ʽJet Silver And The Dollsʼ: that strain of ceremonial-idealistic space anthem songwriting has been eliminated in favor of sharper, sneerier compositions that look more and more like free-form post-Shakesperian monologs. An example is ʽBetween The Worldsʼ, released as the first single from the album but withdrawn after just one day of (non-)sales — a stormy, theatrical performance that gets by on the strength of Nelson's passionate guitar parts and Hammill-esque vocals, but little else. It was then quickly re­placed on the shelves with ʽMaid In Heavenʼ, a shorter, more heavy riff-based power anthem that could, perhaps, be described as «Boston covering Hunky Dory-era Bowie»: emotionally un­in­volving music, redeemed by the frontman's personality and then, for some reason, provided with an extra level of thick distortion, phasing, background vocals, etc., as if putting on all this make­up might be enough to finally make our heads spin. No, I don't think it really works.

 

Sometimes it does — when the frontman manages to come up with a truly impressive musical or «sonic» solution. ʽSister Seagullʼ, for instance, has a two-part heavy / high-pitched riff that re­gisters well in the head, and the «seagull» motif is featured very consistently in Nelson's playing, nowhere more so than in the directly birdcry-imitating outro. ʽStage Whispersʼ opens the album with a barnstorm of crazy licks, promising to be even more of a gas than ʽAxe Victimʼ — but then it ultimately fails to deliver on that promise. Everybody can produce that sort of gallop; not everybody can make it stand out, and this time, even Nelson's technique does not help.

 

I give the album a thumbs down. It was a tough decision to make: the frontman has lost none of the conviction, energy, or technique, and I have no reason to doubt that this boldly anti-commer­cial music (although one could probably list Nelson's kick-ass guitar-hero playing style as a com­mercial element all the same) truly comes «from the heart». But I was not able to get into almost any of these songs, with the exception of ʽSister Seagullʼ; even the music-hall and pastoralist elements in the Brit-pop-influenced ʽMusic In Dreamlandʼ never seem to gel together into any­thing genuinely meaningful, or at least «probing». On the whole, this just looks like one of those «sophomore slumps» — the best ideas having all been used up for Axe Victim, Futurama is just scraping the bottom of the original proverbial barrel.

 

SUNBURST FINISH (1976)

 

1) Fair Exchange; 2) Heavenly Homes; 3) Ships In The Night; 4) Crying To The Sky; 5) Sleep That Burns; 6) Beauty Secrets; 7) Life In The Air Age; 8) Like An Old Blues; 9) Crystal Gazing; 10) Blazing Apostles.

 

Turning temporary session player Andy Clark into the band's resident keyboard master was pro­bably not the main reason why Sunburst Finish might look like a serious improvement over the «sophomore slump». After all, he is never credited for any songwriting, nor is he some sort of Rick Wakeman, capable of adding exciting (if not always meaningful) passages to melodically unexciting compositions. On the other hand, fleshing the band out with an additional layer of sound could somehow have brought about a more disciplined approach to songwriting... well, the point is, Sunburst Finish is a little less about virtuoso guitar playing than Axe Victim, and a little more about meaningful hooks than Futurama. In other words, all the three albums of Be-Bop Deluxe's «glam» period are similar, yet all are also different.

 

Although ʽFair Exchangeʼ opens the record with feedback blasts, these are quickly replaced by quite modern-sounding synthesizer patterns — inspired, one might add, not so much by the robo­tic fantasies of Kraftwerk as by the idealistic pulsations of Who's Next: modern they might be, but the New Wave penchant for «refrigerator electronica» had not yet caught up with Nelson by that particular point in time. In fact, electronic pulses soon give way to good old-fashioned rock and roll guitars (playing a riff akin to AC/DC's ʽHigh Voltageʼ), enhanced with a grand piano sound that seemes to show Roy Bittan's influence. Bruce Springsteen meets the Young brothers — hey, that could actually work, and on ʽFair Exchangeʼ, it does. As is often the case, it is hard to get what the song is about, but it is definitely about somebody's highbrowed anger, and the riffs, solos, and keyboard enhancements are all in agreement on that.

 

However, Nelson is willing to compromise his artistic integrity even further: ʽShips In The Nightʼ, released as the «commercially oriented» single from the album, is basically a ska song, tripped up and decorated with artsy passages, but, in the end, with an overall message that is hardly much different from that of ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ: "Without love, we are like ships in the night, selling our souls down the river", sung to a boppy, cheery pattern. There is not that much guitar on the song at all — it is primarily driven by the rhythm section and the keyboards, culminating in a «mock-sax» electronic solo that almost puts the song in campy parody territory. Who knows, maybe it was a parody — Nelson's ironic take on a «commercial» tune that paid off very well, since the song became Be-Bop Deluxe's highest point on the charts. But I think that it must only have soured Bill's impression of the true meaning of «chart life» even further.

 

That said, ʽShips In The Nightʼ is hardly the best choice to convey the general spirit of the album. Such a choice could, for instance, be ʽSleep That Burnsʼ, an ambitious chunk of composing that rolls through hard-rocking choo-choo sections, music hall extravaganzas, psychedelic interludes with backwards solos, and finally explodes after a massive guitar/keyboard build-up in the coda. And it does have a catchy chorus behind all that, despite its primary goal of conveying an atmo­sphere of hyperactive personal torment: the «sleep that burns» in question is of a kind that causes the patient to chuck his TV out of the window rather than pop pills and moonwalk. Emphasis is always on burning, not on sleeping (or not sleeping).

 

Or it could be Nelson's equivalent of the power ballad spot — ʽHeavenly Homesʼ, an inspiring mix of romantic piano, acoustic guitar, and glam riffs that, once again, sounds like an arithmetic mean between Bowie and Hammill, but grander than the former and more «song-like» than the latter. For all his irony and cynicism, Nelson has nothing against the old heart-on-sleeve trick from time to time, except that he never forgets to back it up with a return to harsh reality — ʽHea­venly Homesʼ joyfully flutters past the stars for several minutes before smashing, full speed, into the hardbodied asteroid of the "Heavenly homes... are hard to find..." chorus, set to a variation on Pink Floyd's descending/ascending ʽEchoesʼ riff for a sharp doom-laden effect.

 

Since most of the songs are marinated in the same musical and lyrical idiom, it makes little sense to comment on all of them: chances are that if you like one, you'll like the rest as well, so a thumbs up is quite imminent. But note that it also makes sense to hunt for the CD reissue, which adds three interesting bonus tracks: an almost totally instrumental psycho-funk jam (ʽShineʼ), a dark romantic ballad with a surprisingly tender and introspective underbelly (ʽSpeed Of The Windʼ), and a slow dance-style B-side with a psychedelic guitar/synth duet (ʽBlue As A Jewelʼ) — all three are curious in their own ways, and all three are quite different from the average style of the album itself.

 

MODERN MUSIC (1976)

 

1) Orphans Of Babylon; 2) Twilight Capers; 3) Kiss Of Light; 4) The Bird Charmers Destiny; 5) The Gold At The End Of My Rainbow; 6) Bring Back The Spark; 7) Modern Music; 8) Dancing In The Moonlight (All Alone); 9) Honeymoon On Mars; 10) Lost In The Neon World; 11) Dance Of The Uncle Sam Humanoids; 12) Modern Music (reprise); 13) Forbidden Lovers; 14) Down On Terminal Street; 15) Make The Music Magic.

 

Even more disciplined and «song-oriented» than Sunburst Finish — although one needn't get any false ideas about shifting the overall style by simply looking at the album cover: suits and ties they may be sporting, but the hair is still fairly long, and even the word «modern» in the album title does not necessarily mean «New Wave», «punk», «reggae», «electronica», etc. For now, only one concession is being made, albeit a serious one: Modern Music shows serious quotas introduced on «guitar wizardry». For the first time ever, Nelson intentionally refuses to stretch out with heroic solo passages on any of the tracks — which is why most of them are so unusually short — and concentrates on songwriting and atmosphere rather than dazzling technique.

 

In fact, he might even be concentrating a bit too hard. The final version of the record has 15 tracks instead of the usual 10, and, although some of these are represented by very brief musical «links», the general feeling is that there is too much going on. Some of the songs are genuinely meaningful and evocative, but on the whole, Nelson is not a master songwriter, and when he sud­denly sets himself this challenge — to generate as many songwriting ideas as possible per one LP — it is probably inevitable that a large fraction of these ideas will not work, and those that will may get lost in the forest. And when I say «forest» with a negative connotation, I mean tracks like ʽHoney­moon On Marsʼ: big, pompous, Ziggy Stardust-age compositions, all echo and phasing and anthemic vocals and little in the way of interesting melodic concept. Unfortunately, there is a lot of such stuff here, and it has nothing to do with suits and ties, in fact, it almost sounds nostal­gic in the context of 1976.

 

On the other hand, this is the album that also gave us ʽKiss Of Lightʼ — a conscious attempt, I think, at recreating the success of ʽSister Seagullʼ, since both songs are driven by a major hook in the form of a screechy, high-pitched guitar riff, and both are among the decade's finest brand of «burly romantic» arena-rock anthems, combining crowdpleasing potential with intelligence and craft. On paper, a crude start like "the woman of moon flew into my room last night" might make one cringe, but put it together with Bill's tricky shuffling of thick distorted riffage and liltingly clean melodic lines — and it works. Maybe because underneath all that romance, as the guitar and the vocals suggest, lies a thick layer of irony.

 

It is also not true that the pomp is never enjoyable. On ʽThe Gold At The End Of My Rainbowʼ, it most certainly is, since the anthemic chorus is so elegantly and conclusively shaped — and the song becomes a credible power ballad even without the power of the guitar solo. But in general, the most interesting moments of Modern Music are those where Nelson strays the farthest away from the already well-known formula: for instance, on the funk oddity ʽDance Of The Uncle Sam Humanoidsʼ, which, according to its title, should be about something anti-American, but, since it's instrumental, who can really tell (unless the occasional sound effects such as bullets whistling over your head count as implicit condemnations of Yankee violence). Or on ʽTwilight Capersʼ which, for no obvious reason, quotes the Dragnet theme out of the blue. Or on the title track which opens with a series of radio noises — including the listener tuning in, out of sheer accident, of course, on ʽAxe Victimʼ and ʽSister Seagullʼ — before turning into the album's most senti­mental number, almost a prayer to the power of music on the radiowaves.

 

Actually, ʽModern Musicʼ is not entirely self-contained, but rather acts as an introduction (and, later on, as a reprised coda) to an Abbey Road-style futuristic mini-suite — the one that includes both boring (ʽHoneymoon On  Marsʼ) and exciting (ʽUncle Sam Humanoidsʼ) parts. Presenting it all as «modern music» seems like a funny miscalculation: futuristic it may be in spirit, but on the whole, it is still way more old-school glam-rock than a foresight of the radically new things to come. But the idea of transition from lengthy, drawn-out space jams to these economic snippets, where Nelson's guitar forms the backbone of the song, but leaves out the fireworks, might be such a foresight — as if putting on that suit and tie was a symbolic gesture that also surmised imposing limits on Nelson's «sonic ego».

 

The bottomline is — it all depends on whether you have more love and respect for Bill as a player or for Bill as a songwriter. If one of your favorite Be-Bop Deluxe songs is ʽNo Trains To Heavenʼ, you will need to come to terms with Modern Music, and live with the fact that the end of 1976 was marked by imposing a heavy tax on guitar pyrotechnics. If, however, going against the grain of mainstream criticism, you find Nelson to be a great master of melody, Modern Music has every chance of becoming your favorite Be-Bop Deluxe album — good melodies or bad melodies, there is a lot of them here, and the old spirit, perhaps not as freely roaming as before, is still largely intact. Anyway, a thumbs up is still well guaranteed.

 

LIVE! IN THE AIR AGE (1977)

 

1) Life In The Air Age; 2) Ships In The Night; 3) Piece Of Mine; 4) Fair Exchange; 5) Mill Street Junction; 6) Ad­ventures In A Yorkshire Landscape; 7) Blazing Apostles; 8) Shine; 9) Sister Seagull; 10) Maid In Heaven.

 

Recorded on a UK tour in early 1977, this is the official answer to all of the fans' red-hot prayers for a live Be-Bop Deluxe record — but coming just a wee bit too late in the band's career, I'd say. Because there is no better reason to hope for some documentation of Bill Nelson's live powers than a desire to check the man's guitar prowess in action — yet, by that time, Nelson was already edging away from the status of a guitar hero and moving more in the direction of «economic» songwriting. There is plenty of guitar prowess on display here, not to worry; but not the sort of bold, reckless melodic experimentation as first seen on Axe Victim — for the most part, things are kept under tight control, almost as if, with new musical values on the horizon and all, Nelson was becoming afraid of potential accusations of «wankery».

 

Altogether, the selected setlist, spread across an unusual format of one LP and one «bonus» EP, includes but two sprawling workouts. ʽAdventures In A Yorkshire Landscapeʼ, extended by a good four minutes from the original running length, contains several fusion-style workouts in the spirit (though not quite in the form) of John McLaughlin, interspersed with Simon Clark's less involving, but pretty, keyboard solos. In stark contrast, ʽShineʼ (not the same as the studio re­cording, appended as a bonus track to Sunburst Finish) goes for a completely different mix of funkiness and psyche­delia — real trippy, far-out-there stuff that sounds like nothing else in the band's catalog.

 

The majority of the other tracks comes from Sunburst Finish — oddly enough, none of the material from Modern Music was seen fit for inclusion, even though the tour itself was allegedly held to promote the latest record — and they are not too drastically different from the original, be­ing about as well-polished and well-rehearsed as the studio blueprints. Then, almost as a «for-the-casual-fans» afterthought, Futurama is represented by quick, polite, but honest runs through ʽSister Seagullʼ and ʽMaid In Heavenʼ on the last side of the EP.

 

All in all, due to solid choice of material and professional commitment, In The Air Age is never «bad» or «unlistenable», but it is still a disappointment — adding very little, if anything at all, to our understanding of and «spiritual bond» with the band and Nelson in person. Serious fans will, of course, enjoy the many nuances and appreciate the minute differences in tones, tempos, and textures, but this really ain't no Live At Leeds or Made In Japan, where these differences just jump out and kick you in the face, regardless of how many years of experience you have had with the bands in question. A pity, that — Be-Bop Deluxe was one of those bands that seems like it had enough brains and brawn to make their stage act into a separate phenomenon from their stu­dio creativity. Maybe it was just a case of unlucky selection, but, whatever be the answer, I am not going to implore you to run off in search of Be-Bop Deluxe live bootlegs based on this par­ticular experience; sticking to the studio albums seems quite enough.

 

DRASTIC PLASTIC (1978)

 

1) Electrical Language; 2) New Precision; 3) New Mysteries; 4) Surreal Estate; 5) Love In Flames; 6) Panic In The World; 7) Dangerous Stranger; 8) Superenigmatix; 9) Visions Of Endless; 10) Possession; 11) Islands Of The Dead; 12*) Blimps; 13*) Lovers Are Mortal; 14*) Lights.

 

It seems very easy to mistake Drastic Plastic for a New Wave album, but if we are operating with genrisms in the first place, I would still rather think of it in terms of «glam». Up to the very last moment of its existence, the Be-Bop Deluxe sound was loud, expansive, flashy, cocky, what­ever, even long after Nelson had reneged on the principle of choking his basic melodies with mountains of guitar improv. Yes, he did cut down on guitar heroics, add more keyboards, expand his horizons with new ideas, but Drastic Plastic still betrays a child of the early 1970s, as far as my ears tell me, at least.

 

It is a good album all the same, and it may, in fact, even contain the single largest number of memorable hooks that Nelson ever had the chance to collect on a single LP. However, its being all over the place — as Bill explores page after page of the blues, pop, funk, hard rock, even rock­abilly books — is not necessarily a plus. The songs are not that good, and the overall impression is that of a highly experienced and talented, but kinda clueless artist in search of... well, in search of a new light for an old direction, so to speak. I enjoy this stuff, sure, but I am not certain if there would be any reason for me to come revisit it some time later.

 

ʽElectrical Languageʼ is a pretty attractive power-pop opener with a romantic (not «New Roman­tic», just romantic) flavor and a very democratic balance between the synthesizers, now turning cold but still friendly rather than robotic, and Nelson's guitar. One could see where it might have been some invigorating introduction to a concept album of sorts — on how to express old feel­ings with new technologies, that kind of thing. Then, however, we start meandering. Titles like ʽNew Precisionʼ and ʽNew Mysteriesʼ, especially if they are sitting right next together, suggest that the focus will be on «technocracy», and both have a certain «Gary Numan scent» to them, but they are not exactly the epitome of admirable precision or deep thrilling mystery — they just kind of roll along to more or less the same martial rhythms, nothing too mystifying or terrifying about them. Rumour has it that Nelson was, in fact, closely monitoring the latest developments in his major idol's career, but these songs are nowhere near the psychic intensity of Bowie's «Berlin trilogy» — among other things, this is also because Bowie had Eno to keep him company (not to mention an occasional Robert Fripp as well), whereas the keyboards on Drastic Plastic are hand­led with taste and reservation, but without any seeming touch of genius.

 

Still, the record gets by merely on the strength of its bizarre plunges into the unpredictable. For instance, ʽLove In Flamesʼ sounds like a proto-New Waver's parody on hard rock ecstasy — with a guitar-hero finale in which Nelson is channelling the spirits of Angus Young and Alvin Lee at the same time in a hilariously flashy mode. ʽDangerous Strangerʼ is nothing if not a «new-era re­write» of Eddie Cochran's ʽSummertime Bluesʼ (even the bass vocal line is retained from the ori­ginal), inessential fun but curious simply in terms of its existence. ʽPossessionʼ is glossified garage, Alice Cooper style — all that is missing is that extra snarl in Nelson's voice to make the track register on the same shelf as something from Alice's own Flush The Fashion.

 

Arguably the best track (although some competition is provided by the humorous catchy pop song ʽPanic In The Worldʼ) is the album closer, ʽIslands Of The Deadʼ, a fine tribute to Nelson's own departed father — no predictable sadness, no trivial sentimentality, just a solid folk-based art-pop song with a friendly pagan concept (others would have probably sung about the joys of Heaven; Bill goes beyond the boring tenets of monotheism). Still, it is not fabulous «per se»; its classiness is mainly provided by the context — writing a song about the dearly departed without falling on musical and lyrical clichés by the dozen is complicated even for a genius, and Bill Nelson does not quite fit my vision of genius (at the very least, just like Bowie, he is just too smart to let the genius come awake, and usually gets by through the force of intellect).

 

In any case, even if I do not see anything drastic about this plastic, this is yet another stimulating experience — rounding out a small, but remarkably even (with the possible exception of Futu­rama, where I do not see eye to eye with the fans) collection with another respectable thumbs up. Less than a year later, Nelson would pull the plug on Be-Bop Deluxe, realizing that, in the im­mortal words of Decca executives, «guitar bands are on their way out» and finally shifting to the intellectual department of modern sound exploitation — leaving behind the oh-so-seventies image of the «brainy guitar rocker». Come to think of it, he may not have had another choice. But it was fun — although a very strange kind of fun — while it lasted.

 

ADDENDA:

 

RADIOLAND DELUXE: BBC RADIO 1 LIVE IN CONCERT (1976-1978/1994)

 

1) Life In The Air Age; 2) Sister Seagull; 3) Third Floor Heaven; 4) Blazing Apostles; 5) Maid In Heaven; 6) Kiss Of Light; 7) Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape; 8) Fair Exchange; 9) Ships In The Night; 10) Modern Music; 11) New Precision; 12) Superenigmatix; 13) Possession; 14) Dangerous Stranger; 15) Island Of The Dead; 16) Panic In The World.

 

This is one of those BBC packages which collects tracks that were actually played at theater venues in front of live audiences and broadcast subsequently, so it does function as a «real» live album, not «live in the studio», and is in some ways preferable to Live! In The Air Age. Most of the tracks are also chronologically coherent, dating back to early 1976 (the Sunburst Finish era; tracks 1-4, recorded at the Paris Theatre on the 15th of January) or late 1976 (the Modern Music era, recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon on the 10th of October) — with a further six-track «appendix» from a show at Golders Green Hippodrome on the 19th of January, 1978, represen­ted exclusively by numbers from Drastic Plastic. (Note also that the whole package was originally released in 1994, then remastered and re-released in 2002 under the somewhat less clumsy title of Tremulous Antenna).

 

There is not really that much to say about the whole thing, except that the sound quality is excel­lent — Nelson's vocals and guitar blaze across the living room with as much power and clarity as you'd expect from a well-produced studio recording — and that the band, as expected, is precise and consistent throughout. The major problem is the same as with Live!: the songs just do not depart all that much from the studio counterparts, or at least the departures do not jump right out at the listener, and should rather be appreciated by long-term hardcore fans. This is a particular concern for Drastic Plastic-era material, where Nelson was leaving less space for improvisation and variation — not so much for the early stuff; in that respect, as usual, ʽAdventures In A York­shire Landscapeʼ is the primary focus of attraction, with Nelson and keyboardist Andy Clark taking turns to offer their spontaneous bursts of inspiration to the listeners.

 

On the other hand, it may be interesting, for instance, to hear the entire ʽModern Musicʼ suite per­formed without the cloak of studio trickery, or ʽNew Precisionʼ without the «walking into the sea» overdubs of splashing water, but with extra guitar and keyboard noises to suggest aquatic interference rather than simply bring it over, or a slightly «lazier», but no less mind-blowing call of the seagull at the end of ʽSister Seagullʼ... there, I have pretty much exhausted the list of dif­ferences. But when all has been really said and done, Radioland is basically just a way of revi­siting the different, but similar faces of this band one last time — particularly since I have no problem whatsoever with the track selection (no repeats, as is BBC's custom, and no mediocre material from the early Futurama days, bar the great concise hits). Thumbs up.

BETTY DAVIS

BETTY DAVIS (1973)

 

1) If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up; 2) Walkin' Up The Road; 3) Anti Love Song; 4) Your Man My Man; 5) Ooh Yeah; 6) Steppin' In Her I. Miller Shoes; 7) Game Is My Middle Name; 8) In The Meantime; 9*) Come Take Me; 10*) You Won't See Me In The Morning; 11*) I Will Take That Ride.

 

In 1967, Betty Mabry was in luck, as she happened to be picked up by Miles Davis himself — and although their marriage lasted but three years (Miles later complained she was «too wild» for him, and whatever that really meant, I don't think I even want to know), it is said to have been greatly mutually beneficial: she introduced him to the «electric» scene of the psychedelic Sixties, thus being partly responsible for his transition to the fusion period of In A Silent Way and Bit­ches Brew (being one of the «witches», a.k.a. «bitches», herself) — and he introduced her to... umm, his bank account? Whatever — anyway, without that marriage, there would neither have been a «Betty Davis» name tag, nor, quite likely, any of these strange albums that the funk lady engineered during her short, but vivid, career.

 

The reason why that career never really took off, with all those albums flopping one after the other, is as plain to see as the reason why, in recent years, it has been given a serious re-evalu­ation, so that these days, Mrs. Davis is finally enjoying some serious popularity in knowledgeable circles. First and foremost, Betty Mabry was not much of a singer, and back in those days — heck, back in any days — a black performer, particularly a female one, was expected to live up to the standards: if you couldn't belt it out like Aretha, or coo the pants off your listeners like Diana, or rattle the walls and shatter the glass like Tina, you hardly stood a chance, regardless of how much character or personality you could offer in compensation. A racist standard, come to think of it, but nobody said stereotypes can be that easily overthrown.

 

Second, Betty Mabry was not that much of a songwriter, either. In reality, her «songs» are perfor­mance acts — theatrical monologues set to whatever musical backing she may be offered. Since all of her records are funk records, you can dance to these tracks, but you are not very likely to be humming them, or memorizing the (usually non-existent) choruses. They have neither any pop chart po­tential, nor any seductive value for those looking for musical innovation: Betty did not know that much about music to truly care about the notes, and the musicians backing her were simply having a good time in the studio.

 

Third, Betty «Game Is My Middle Name» Davis was admittedly way too wild, confusingly so, even, for 1973. Everywhere you look for info on the lady, you will see comparisons to Madonna and Prince popping up, but neither Madonna nor Prince were on the scene in 1973, and both Ma­donna and Prince, when they did appear on the scene, compensated for their provocative behavior with catchy hooks, so that you could simply close your eyes on the former — I mean, not even Tipper Gore found out about this before it was already too late. Not so with Betty Davis: the very major, if not the only, point of these «songs» is to drench the listener in waves and showers of aggressive, near-sadistic sexuality. Then again, what does one expect of a girl who, as far as rumors go, wrote her first song at the tender age of 12 and named it ʽI'm Going To Bake That Cake Of Loveʼ?..

 

Put it all together, and you can easily see that, even if the crazy musical climate of 1973 could allow for such an album to come out, the somewhat more predictable «consumer climate» could hardly allow it to be successful. Nowadays, though, as our tastes have shifted and mutated, the picture looks entirely different. Of course, Betty is not a «singer» in the technical sense, but what she does with her voice is impressive all the same — think something of a black female equi­valent of early Iggy Pop, going all the way and never looking back. The lower part of her larynx, which she heavily exploits throughout, is her chief instrument: the lack of diversity of delivery may eventual­ly get a bit on one's nerves, but the album is fairly short anyway, going off in one brief concentrated punch — or like a thirty-minute brutal «vocal rape», if you'll excuse the crude­ness of the definition. She may be singing about wanting to "get picked up", and how she is "wig­gling her fanny" to achieve that purpose, but it is pretty clear who is really doing the picking.

 

None of that would matter, though, if the assembled musicians were not so totally hip to whatever Betty was doing. The roster here is impressive — due to her connections in the biz, she gets no less than the regular Sly Stone rhythm section of bass genius Larry Graham and drum expert Gregg Errico, as well as certain members of Santana, including Neal Schon on guitar (well on his way to form Journey, but we will ignore that particularity), and some brass players from Tower Of Power, while The Pointer Sisters are providing background vocals. And they all cook — maybe not a prime-series «bitches brew», but, if you ask my opinion, that very title would con­vey the essence of Betty's debut much better than it conveyed the essence of Miles' hymn to fusion. Here we do have a certified «bitch», and she's brewing it up to high heaven.

 

Most of the songs follow the same simple pattern: set up a riff-based groove going, around which the lead instruments (guitar, organ, brass, in that particular order of preference) play circles with a very high degree of freedom allowed, to match the equally high degree of freedom for Betty to scatter, spit, and snarl out the exotic tales of her own sex drive and, occasionally, offering acid comment on other people's lives (ʽSteppin' In Her I. Miller Shoesʼ is a mean-spirited diatribe against the «celebrity itch»). This sounds fairly simple, and too much like a potential recipe for disaster to be credible — but just wait until you actually hear it.

 

The trick is that Betty's spitfire act must have invigorated the musicians as well, so that every­body is trying to match her in terms of «badness» and «nastiness». ʽIf I'm In Luckʼ starts sizzling from the very first second, as the Zeppelinish blues-rock riff rips through the speakers and is soon joined by the equally «badass» bass and organ parts. The time signatures and lead riffs change from song to song, but the drive and passion stay the same — occasionally, the message shifts from direct aggression to a more subtle threat, but this does not make it any less vicious: ʽAnti Love Songʼ, driven by bass-'n'-keyboards interplay rather than guitar, is the album's best tune, in fact, it is probably the hottest tune about sexual abstinence ever written.

 

By the time they get around to the last movement of this molten-lava-suite (ʽGame Is My Middle Nameʼ accidentally borrows the «crawling» guitar melody from The Doors' ʽBack Door Manʼ, and, while we're on it, this gal could definitely teach ol' Jim a thing or two about pork and beans), the floor has already most likely caved in from exhaustion — the only problem is that they were not able to come up with a properly soothing conclusion: ʽIn The Meantimeʼ is sort of a «ballad» that tries to wrap things up on a softer note, but this is also where Betty's disabilities as a singer come to the forefront, and the gospel organ melody that dominates the song is a snoozer com­pared to what they just did on the meat'n'potato numbers.

 

Still, one mediocre piece of dessert should not spoil the basic impressions of the main course — besides, if you get the remastered CD version, there are three extra, previously unreleased, cuts from the same sessions that yield 12 more minutes of violent sexual games, mid-1970s fashion, ensuring that you get your money's worth. Just remember that this ain't Funkadelic or Sly Stone — it's all a bunch of provo­cative «punk-funk» (Betty is sometimes called the godmother of Nina Hagen, although Nina was a far better singer and a far loonier type of person), which does not get by on the wings of inventive­ness of diversity. But it does show that sometimes all you need is a spirited «bitch», a decent hard-rock riff, and a well-hewn backing band to create an enduring clas­sic, or, at least, a resurrection-worthy one. Thumbs up, or we can just «wiggle our fanny» in acknowledgement.

 

THEY SAY I'M DIFFERENT (1974)

 

1) Shoo-B-Doop And Cop Him; 2) He Was A Big Freak; 3) Your Mama Wants Ya Back; 4) Don't Call Her No Tramp; 5) Git In There; 6) They Say I'm Different; 7) 70's Blues; 8) Special People.

 

Out of the three completed original LPs engineered by Betty during her short career, this is the most «quiet» one, if the term is at all applicable to someone so bent on mixing glamor with a Zulu warrior image. The «quietness» mainly means that, this time around, Betty was not able to assemble such a stellar cast to play for her —there are at least twenty different people credited in the liner notes, but most are relatively unknown, and, unlike the 1973 band, they do not seem to understand that well what particular sort of «bitch-from-hell» they are supposed to be backing. Consequently, the grooves are still well-cut and the riffs are still memorable, but they generally lack the crackle, sizzle, and sparkle they had on Betty Davis.

 

Maybe the best way to understand what the hell I am talking about is to listen, in succession, to the first five seconds of each of the opening tracks. The bluesy riff of ʽIf I'm In Luckʼ snarls and threa­tens from the very first note — the funky riff of ʽShoo-B-Doop And Cop Himʼ is softer, subtler, and sleazier, and Betty complements it with a softer, more «sly» and «seductive» delivery than her "if I'm in luck I might just get picked up!" where you'd really be smart if you thought twice before picking up that hot little thing. In the case of ʽShoo-B-Doopʼ, though, she seems to be showing us a less aggressive side — going ash far ash introdushing a shweet little lishp to her articulation: "...and when the clock shtrikesh twelve..." Sssshekssshy!

 

Overall, there is a little less emphasis on heavy rock and a little more on hot funk throughout — I wouldn't mind if the band were a perfectly tight littlwe funky outfit, but it seems to be crafting arrangements rather than snatching them out of the clouds; no wonder, perhaps — given how many different musicians there are, it is not likely that many of them had enough time to gel toge­ther. Still, just like before, most tracks get along well because they have some sort of nifty com­positional idea — a bassline, a twin guitar dialog, a funny clavinet phrase, something to pin it all to with certainty. That way, even something like ʽDon't Call Her No Trampʼ, which essentially consists of little other than Betty barking out the song title, becomes contagious: that clavinet is really «nasty» in a ʽSuperstitionʼ-like kind of manner.

 

The title track here is a black-pride anthem to pre-war and Chicago blues heroes, appropriately set to a series of «swamp-blues» licks — Betty explicitly establishing her link with the spirits of the past: "My great-grandma didn't like the foxtrot / Instead she'd spit her snuff and boogie to Elmore James... that's why they say I'm strange / that's why they say I'm funky". Lots of sincere feeling, I guess, but somehow it still comes across as posturing, maybe because the average pedi­gree of a Robert Johnson or a Leadbelly does not get superimposed so smoothly over the Green­wich Village pedigree of the young Betty Mabry. (Then again, she did spend her youth on her grandma's farm in North Carolina, so at least what she sings about not liking the foxtrot is most probably true). Anyway, it doesn't sound bad, but it is hardly as convincing as when the lady is singing about wiggling her fanny — seems more like an attempt to explain herself in a predic­table fashion (you think this is nasty? go listen to some of my predecessors!).

 

Like last time around, this record also ends with a bit of «crude tenderness» — ʽSpecial Peopleʼ has Betty cooing and purring to the sounds of soft jazzy electric piano (with a punchy rhythm section playing along, it's not a «sissy» ballad or anything), showing off the uncomfortable im­per­fections of her voice and almost reveling in the amateur flair of it all. Too amateur, perhaps, but then there should be a discount for female Zulu warriors contributing to the blacksploitation scene, I suppose. One notch down from the self-titled debut, yet still a thumbs up — the grooves hold and the kettle is still boiling.

 

NASTY GAL (1975)

 

1) Nasty Gal; 2) Talkin' Trash; 3) Dedicated To The Press; 4) You And I; 5) Feelins; 6) F.U.N.K.; 7) Gettin' Kicked Off, Havin' Fun; 8) Shut Off The Light; 9) This Is It!; 10) The Lone Ranger.

 

Maybe Betty herself felt that the second album was a bit softer and a tad more compromising than the first — in any case, something must have stimulated her to pull herself together and make damn sure that the third one would blow the lid off the kettle. The band was wound up tighter, the record label was changed to Island for better production and distribution, and look at that album sleeve: too hot to handle or what?..

 

Other than, perhaps, again lacking the same consistency of crunchy riffage as Betty Davis (none of Betty's guitar players simply had as much flashy arrogance as Neal Schon), Nasty Gal is in every other respect a funk monster. First and foremost, this is because Betty is simply unleashed: obviously, her vocal range has not improved one bit, but for sheer nastiness / bitchiness, look no further — if the singing circa 1973 might still sound a little repressed and stiff at times, in 1975 there are no inhibitions whatsoever. Usually, it takes a very well-developed artistic persona to make a slogan like "I ain't nothing but a nasty gal!" sound like the real thing — in this particular occasion, I do not even wish to consider this «artistry», it seems to be the real thing. I'm sure Tina Turner could do this if she wanted to (in fact, being a much better technical singer, she could have done this even better), but the truth is that she just didn't do it, and neither did anybody else. And when everybody else started doing it, it was too late anyway, because the accompanying music had turned to shit long ago.

 

Every single song on here is great in its own way. The music, heavily dependent on clavinet and funky bass parts, takes active cues from Stevie Wonder (you can almost tell how many times each of these musicians had spun Innervisions before walking into the studio), but exchanges Stevie's socially charged spirit with a sexually charged one. The nagging «nasal» riff of ʽTalkin' Trashʼ agrees with the «talking trash» message of the song to perfection; the speedy mix of keyboard and guitar notes on ʽFeelinsʼ reflects the physiological message of ʽFeelinsʼ ("pinch her, squeeze her, help her live again!", and the whole song is nothing but a rapid succession of «pinches» and «squeezes», like an aggressive-erotic musical massage); and few funk tunes have the catchiness of ʽShut Off The Lightʼ, whose clavinet backbone could almost rival ʽSuperstitionʼ, except that it intentionally goes in a «nasty fun» rather than «danceable seriousness» direction.

 

Somehow, even every kind of approach that did not work earlier on now does work. ʽF.U.N.Kʼ continues the line of ʽThey Say I'm Differentʼ, with Betty once again resorting to the «list prin­ciple», counting off her idols — this time, they are R&B and funk people rather than old blues­men, though, culminating in a brief reminiscence of the good times Betty had with Jimi (nobody really knows if they had an actual affair, but Miles sure thought so), and this whole stuff is much more up her alley, not to mention the music, which is darker, thicker, and, well, funkier. Even the obligatory ballad (ʽYou And Iʼ), recorded in big band jazz style, is good, as she finally learns to bypass her limitations and, instead of trying to cope with a complexly modulated vocal hook, just turns it into a hot sexual dream ("I'm just a child, trying to be a woman...") that, goddammit, is almost believable (as much as the old «nasty bitch got soul» trick is a cliché, every once in a while somebody comes along and executes it to perfection one more time).

 

However, the lady seems to be sitting firmest of all in the saddle when she's got someone, or something, to play off — in ʽDedicated To The Pressʼ, she addresses those critical naysayers that dared to condemn her style for extreme wildness, and for about four minutes turns her vocal tract into a veritable cat-o'-nine-tails: "Well I really don't know what they're talking about / I just can't seem to keep my tongue in my mouth / That's all folks". True enough, but it's not the tongue that matters so much, actually, as it is the throat — and not the actual words she speaks, but the way that they are spoken. The press happens to be lucky that the message was delivered by vinyl transfer — anybody who got that personally, face-to-face, would have probably melted away on the spot.

 

Throw in a couple of slower, steamier, subtler sexual provocations (ʽGettin' Kicked Offʼ; a new­ly re-recorded, and much sharper, version of ʽI Will Take That Rideʼ, now retitled ʽLone Rangerʼ), and Nasty Gal wins out even in terms of diversity — the message may be the same throughout, but there are several routes of delivery, thoroughfares, shortcuts, and space warping included. It is amazing that an album of this level of verve ultimately failed to chart, even despite heavy pub­licity from Island Records, but, apparently, the «black market» at the time was even more con­servative than the «white market», with people opting for Earth, Wind & Fire, Al Green, Kool & The Gang, and The Pointer Sisters instead; all of them worthy contenders, but in terms of sheer bravado, not even close to the level of fury that Nasty Gal has to offer.

 

But make no mistake — the reasons behind my enthusiastic thumbs up here are not at all limi­ted to the «unleashing» of the sex demon in Betty's persona, because much, if not most, of Nasty Gal is fine, top-level funk stuff as well. Even without the vocals, it would still be an impressive ins­trumental feat — one might think, though, that it probably couldn't have existed that way without the vocals, because, no doubt about it, it was nothing but the lady's fiery personality that managed to rev the musicians up to these ecstatic heights. A coin toss between Betty Davis and Nasty Gal as the finest she had to offer, but then, why choose at all when her recording career was so unfor­tunately short anyway?

 

IS IT LOVE OR DESIRE? (1976; 2009)

 

1) Is It Love Or Desire; 2) It's So Good; 3) Whorey Angel; 4) Crashin' From Passion; 5) When Romance Says Good­bye; 6) Bottom Of The Barrel; 7) Stars Starve, You Know; 8) Let's Get Personal; 9) Bar Hoppin'; 10) For My Man.

 

Recorded in 1976, not released until 2009, when the small «Light In The Attic» label somehow managed to got hold of Betty's entire stock and reintroduce it to the small segment of knowledge-seeking public. This is not a bootleg, though, or some obscure rag-tag collection of demos — this is a bona fide Betty Davis LP that Island Records were supposed to release, but canceled for un­known reasons, possibly over some creative falling out with the artist or simply being way too disappointed by the low sales of Nasty Gal. In any case, from a commercial standpoint their de­cision may have been right: I seriously doubt that Is It Love Or Desire could have sold more copies than its predecessor.

 

For one thing, the record not only clashed with the times, it made a point out of clashing with the times — ʽBottom Of The Barrelʼ is a fierce anti-disco stand, recorded at an age when disco had not yet completely pushed «classic funk» out of the limelight, but was already invading its terri­tory with a vengeance, being still relatively fresh, hip, and, in the eyes of some people, «progres­sive», so any type of battle cry like "take off that disco, dance to what you're hearing", not to men­tion "remember how it used to be in the Sixties", might have easily been interpreted as a self-pitying retrograde rant. But, for that matter, it is probably the first rant, chronologically, that con­sciously opposes the cool sounds of the Sixties to the down-in-the-dumps musical state of today, which makes it somewhat historically important, I'd say.

 

Yet on the whole, Betty's fourth album itself is a little «dumpy»: one additional reason why the people at Island decided to condemn it to a quarter century of shelf life is simply that it does not stand competition with Nasty Gal on any level — songwriting, performance, production. The music is not bad at all, but it seems that throughout her short career Betty worked in sine function mode: one «red-hot» record followed by a «tempered» one, and, following that principle, Is It Love Or Desire? had in its mind to explore some new sound combinations, throw in a few subtle and not-so-subtle new messages, and also lend more space to Betty's backers than Betty herself. That last point is probably the most important: this is the only album in Davis' catalog where the primary emphasis, due mainly to production reasons, frequently shifts from Betty to the instru­mentalists and additional vocalists, so that the «nasty gal» feels more like part of a band than the out-of-her-mind band leader.

 

And, even though it was never in Betty's character to forget all about the music and just concen­trate on her personality in the first place, this shift of balance is still unpleasant — I mean, who the heck would want to listen to a Betty Davis album on which she feels like a bit player in her own band? Yet this is exactly the kind of thing that greets us on the title track, where the lady seems altogether lost in a thick mesh of clavinets, guitars, and back vocalists who are mixed al­most as high as the front vocalist herself. The basic clavinet groove, as usual, is funky, tough, and ideally suited to her style, but the vocal presence leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps it is just a fault of the mix, I am not denying that — but then it's a fault that permeates the entire album.

 

The hideously titled ʽWhorey Angelʼ is the album's centerpiece, and it is as deeply flawed as it is great — the introductory riff alone makes life worth living, but then most of the tune is given over to Fred Mills (the band's keyboard player) to sing, and there is something about his duet with Betty that just doesn't seem right; maybe a lack of distinct personality — technically, he is a bet­ter singer, but hardly a more interesting one. Still, it's a good exercise in tension-pumping: their dynamic build-up towards the "I spread my wings" bridge rocks just fine with me.

 

Oddly enough, it is the more quiet, suspense-oriented tracks here, with fewer overdubs and more Betty presence, that seem to crawl under the skin on a more consistent basis. The minimalistic R&B ballad ʽWhen Romance Says Goodbyeʼ and particularly the album closer ʽFor My Manʼ (unfortunately, an all-too short quasi-snippet) are really dialogs between two thrilling, subcon­science-undermining bass lines and Betty in «dark sentimental mode», and both of them point to a very interesting, unpredictable line of future development — it is hard, after all, to retain the same «nasty gal flame» for years on end, but it is also a shame to lose the flame, and stuff like ʽFor My Manʼ shows how the flame can be very successfully internalized.

 

Still, despite this uncomfortable muffling of personality, the actual music on the album does rule throughout, no matter if the band is playing it soft or loud, and there is little doubt that a character as strong as Betty's would be agreeing to compromise quality — thus, faced between the choice of compromising or disappearing, it is no wonder that she preferred to disappear. After her break­up with Island Records, she resurfaced only once: in 1979, a recording session was held where she redid some of the songs from Is It Love and threw in a few new ones, later bootlegged under the name of Hangin' Out In Hollywood without the artist's consent and not generally held in high esteem by the connoisseurs. Upon that, she retired completely from the music scene, and who could blame her? Most of the sweaty funk outfits of the 1970s did not survive the transition to the new decade either, crashing down in flames or, even worse, evolving into trashy, anti-mu­sical automatons; most people never had the luck of a Michael Jackson, or the enhanced-for-the-Eighties genius of a Prince...

 

...but that is really digressing way beyond the point, and the point is: strike my criticism off the record and, if you have already heard Betty's first three albums, get this one as well. Everybody needs an honest-to-God disco-bashing funk song in their collection, everybody needs to learn that "stars starve, you know" as narrated by a too-hot-for-stardom artist, everybody needs some catchy reggae-pop à la ʽBar Hoppin'ʼ, and on the whole, of course, this is a certified thumbs up.


BIG STAR

#1 RECORD (1972)

 

1) Feel; 2) The Ballad Of El Goodo; 3) In The Street; 4) Thirteen; 5) Don't Lie To Me; 6) The India Song; 7) When My Baby's Beside Me; 8) My Life Is Right; 9) Give Me Another Chance; 10) Try Again; 11) Watch The Sunrise; 12) ST100/6.

 

The legend of Big Star, the proverbial «out-of-time underdog», radiates such a strong field that for each of Big Star's three «classic» albums, there is its own group of champions — and then there is a fourth one that claims all three are equally great, but my understanding is that these guys are mostly poseurs, because there is no way one could have equally strong feelings for #1 Record, Radio City, and Sister Lovers, so different are they in terms of songwriting, production, attitude, and cohesiveness. Personally, I have always belonged to the #1 Record camp, and the more I listen to this album, the more I feel that the band's legendary status may be fully justified by it and it alone. Speaking of Big Star in clichéd terms of «the greatest band you have never heard of» is an uninteresting occupation, but, fortunately, one does not need to do that in order to just sit back and enjoy some of this wonderful music.

 

The actual «wonder» is generated by a brief, happy collaboration period between two talented songwriters — Alex Chilton, formerly of the Memphis-based blue-eyed soul combo The Box Tops; and Chris Bell, formerly of Rock City and Icewater, also Memphis-based but incomparable to The Box Tops in terms of chart success or overall notoriety. Chilton's original idea was to es­tablish a Simon & Garfunkel type of partnership, but Bell convinced him to retain the rock'n'roll band format, and, fortunately, good sense prevailed, or else we'd have no power-pop aesthetics and millions of aspiring indie kids and hipsters would be deprived of their biggest idols.

 

Of course, «power pop» is an extremely vague term, and if you think of it in purely musical terms («pop songs with hard rock guitar riffs» or something like that), #1 Record hardly even qualifies. There might be, like, just two or three «power pop» songs like that on the entire album — ʽFeelʼ, ʽIn The Streetʼ, probably ʽWhen My Baby's Beside Meʼ (ʽDon't Lie To Meʼ has more of a blues-rock feel to it, not a proper «pop» tune). Most of the songs are quite soft, with acoustic founda­tions, owing much more to the folkie idioms of the West and East coasts than to the Kinks, the Small Faces, or Cream. This, by the way, is the source of much misguided disappointment: plenty of people come to #1 Record, expecting «power», and come away disappointed because all they got was some sissy acoustic strumming and whiny vocals.

 

But the real trick of #1 Record is not «power». Its real trick is a mix of emotional simplicity, naïve idealism, musical honesty, and melodic talent. Chilton and Bell sounded just as passionate and convinced about what they were doing as the craziest prog rock stars of the time, but saw no need for infusing that passion into ever-more-complicated musical formats. On the other hand, they saw no need to pander to ongoing trends and fashions, either, eschewing excessive sentimen­talism or artificial sweetness à la Carpenters — everything on #1 Record sounds totally healthy and organic, no sappy strings or cheap Broadway inference allowed.

 

The second side of the album has been especially frequently subject to criticism by «power pop fans» — a silly thing to do, really, because, to my ears, it contains one of the finest sequences of beautiful ballads ever committed to tape. How they managed it is something I cannot understand, and can only ascribe to a great big positive influence that Chilton and Bell had on each other, and which neither of them could subsequently recreate on their own. ʽGive Me Another Chanceʼ deals with a fairly simple and well-studied topic — guy gets mad at girl, girl throws guy out, guy repents and begs forgive­ness — but each and every line of the vocal melody is so totally realistic (this may be the sorriest "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" I've ever heard) that one cannot help but be remin­ded of all those Lennon ballads, late in his Beatles or early in his solo career, that operated along the same lines: take a simple theme of love / repentance / sadness / anger, etc., and strive to make it sound like you really mean it.

 

Or ʽTry Againʼ — isn't it a wonder how its melodic twists so meaningfully echo its lyrics? "Lord, I've been trying to be what I should...", done in a slightly lazy, twangy, hammocky country mode (so you already get a feeling that maybe the hero hasn't been trying that hard). Chord change, a touch of tenseness and darkness, "but each time it gets a little harder", a Harrison-esque "I feel the pain" (and he does, he does), "but I'll try again" — loop, revert back to the beginning. ABC-level simple, 100% efficient. Then the vocal melody is lended over to the guitar, and they repeat the same stuff without words — to exactly the same effect. Chillin'.

 

When it comes to loudness and, well, «power», Chilton and Bell are equally capable. Look at how ʽFeelʼ is all based on descending chord patterns — echoing the «personal apocalypse» mood of lines like "you're driving me to ruin" and "I feel like I'm dying, I'm never gonna live again" — even though, in general, the song is so loud and rock'n'rollish and even has a brawny brass section during the instrumental breaks. Conversely, the main riff of ʽIn The Streetʼ is always rising and going in circles, well adapted to the song's «cruising anthem» stylistics. And ʽWhen My Baby's Be­side Meʼ is their equivalent of ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ — repetitive, triumphant, obli­vious to everything other than that overwhelming love wave.

 

But the album's magnum opus, no doubt about it, is ʽThe Ballad Of El Goodoʼ. A young pop boy's impression of a deep gospel-soul anthem — a song about standing up for oneself, with just a little help from God — it sounds particularly ironic in the overall context of Big Star's misfor­tunes, yet at the time it was written, the future did look promising, and Chilton's performance here is totally credible. The hooks are actually very simple: the song does not «properly» pick up until the chorus / bridge part, and, basically, all they do is hammer the same two-part message in your subconscious — "ain't no one going to turn me round" and "hold on" — but the first part is determination incarnate, and the second part gets by not through shouting, but through stretching out the "hold" part so as to actually convey the impression of hooooooolding on to something. So simple, so clever, so unforgettable. If ʽFeelʼ does not succeed in making you a lifelong friend of this band, ʽEl Goodoʼ will complete the task with a flourish.

 

Even though I have not mentioned all the greatness of this album (ʽThirteenʼ and ʽMy Life Is Rightʼ deserve their own extended kowtows), the things that have been said probably suffice — #1 Record is a product of spontaneously, perhaps even accidentally, generated melodic genius, and the first in a never-ending, though slowly dwindling, series of great records that kept the simplistic pop idealism of the Sixties alive and kicking through the following decades. From that point of view, there was no competition whatsoever for this sort of style in 1972, since the other two ends of the «holy power pop» triangle of the early 1970s, Badfinger and The Raspberries, did not have Big Star's ambitions. Chilton and Bell were «pretentious», yes, and it shows up not only in their chosen band name or their chosen album title, but in their playing style, in their vocal harmonies, in their quasi-religious attitudes, but all of that, when coupled with said melodic genius, is to their advantage. Pretentious, but simple; trivial, but bombastic; always accessible, but never «fluffy», #1 Record is certainly not an album that could be brushed off as mere light entertainment — it does lay a serious claim to the status of #1 record for the year 1972, at least in the «simple pop» department. (Although, for the record, I do wish they would have kept bassist Andy Hummel's ʽThe India Songʼ off the album — it is superficially pretty, but not only does it have nothing to do with India, being all acoustic guitars and flutes, it actually sounds like a se­cond-rate flower power era outtake from some long forgotten Frisco hippie band).

 

On a historical note, rumors saying that #1 Record was either ignored or maligned at the time are grossly exaggerated: most of the critical reviews recognized the album's genius (and how could anybody with ears not recognize it?), and, with proper marketing strategies, at least its rocking numbers, such as ʽIn The Streetʼ or ʽWhen My Baby's Beside Meʼ, could have been major hit singles like anything else at the time. Unfortunately, Stax Records, responsible for the distribu­tion, somehow flunked at it, and even though the record got sufficient airplay, it was simply un­available for purchase throughout the States, or so it has been said — a proverbial tale of bad luck and the importance of good management for great art to find its way. On the other hand, really great art will always find its way, eventually, even without proper management, so I am happy to know that #1 Record does not need my thumbs up endorsement in the slightest to help it achie­ve «classic» status: like the even less-selling Velvet Underground's debut, it is one of those al­bums that launched a thousand ships anyway.

 

RADIO CITY (1974)

 

1) O My Soul; 2) Life Is White; 3) Way Out West; 4) What's Goin' Ahn; 5) You Get What You Deserve; 6) Mod Lang; 7) Back Of A Car; 8) Daisy Glaze; 9) She's A Mover; 10) September Gurls; 11) Morpha Too; 12) I'm In Love With A Girl.

 

By the time Big Star got around to recording its second album, it had already gone through the loss of a founding member (Bell), the return of a founding member (Bell), another loss of a foun­ding member (Bell again), disbandment, and reunion. All of which means: if, somehow, ʽO My Soulʼ happens to sound to you like a rusty, creaky, patched-and-mended old engine ready to fall to pieces at any second, but still puffing away and doing its job — well, this is no coincidence. Chilton, Hummel, and Stephens are learning to play as a trio, and it shows.

 

The absence of Bell logically leaves Chilton as the primary songwriter (Hummel wrote ʽWay Out Westʼ and gets songwriting co-credits on a number of other songs; also, Bell's input has been ack­nowledged for two of the album's best songs — ʽO My Soulʼ and ʽBack Of A Carʼ, even though he has not been officially credited), and opinions on that turn of events happen to differ. Personal­ly, I lament it: Alex may have been a talented, sincere, and «visionary» songwriter and performer, but he lacked the self-discipline and patience necessary to shape all those ideas in a proper musi­cal form. At the same time, his mental health was certainly stable enough so as not to make him eligible for the «mad genius» category where we put people like Syd Barrett and Skip Spence; neither Radio City nor its even more bizarre follow-up really qualify as «schizophrenic» albums. Radio City, in particular, shows a fairly conventional understanding of melodicity, and its lyrics and basic emotions are not all that different from the ones of #1 Record. Essentially, these are all simple pop songs, and their uniqueness stems as much from «personal untidyness» as it does from one-of-a-kind artistry.

 

This explains why, no matter how much I listen to Radio City, there are probably only three or four songs that stay with me when the music's over. Take something like ʽMod Langʼ, for in­stance — there may be some potential here for an impressive glam-rocker, but neither its distor­ted blues-rock riff nor its vocal melody ever manage to come together in a proper hook. These chords really sound like something a Pete Townshend could have stumbled upon in one of his 15-minute long live improv pieces, fussed around with for a few seconds, then dropped in favor of some other ideas — and here we have Chilton trying to build an entire song around it, but he can­not find anything better than a repetitive snap of "how long... can this go on?" for the chorus hook. Stuff like that is, at best, okay for some bonus demo outtake.

 

It does not necessarily get better on the moody sentimental stuff: a song like ʽWhat's Going Ahnʼ may have plenty of sad autumnal atmosphere, but its guitar lines and harmonies seem dis­con­nected and under­worked, while its lead vocals seem artistic, but simply telling a sad story rather than drawing the listener in with the same tricks of inflection and modulation as, say, ʽGive Me Another Chanceʼ or ʽTry Againʼ. Worst of all, every once in a while Alex comes across as a pa­thetic, annoying whiner rather than a noble broken heart — so maybe there is something to be said about extra spontaneity and «honesty», but then this is supposed to be art, not life, doggone it, and I'd rather hear «heartbreaking polish» than «irritating rawness». (That is not to say that raw­ness cannot be heartbreaking, or that polish may not be irritating, of course — it's just the way it seems to work with Big Star in particular).

 

Naturally, these complaints should not be extrapolated to the high points of the album. ʽO My Soulʼ, in particular, be it by accident or not, sounds like nothing else ever written — the funkiest power pop song ever made, or was that the poppiest power funk song?... whatever, the interaction between Hummel's «surf-style» twangy bass swoops, Chilton's merger of jingle-jangle with chicken-scratch, and Stephens' exuberant «look-at-me I'm-so-power-trio gonna-be-Keith-Moon- for-a-while» assault on his drumset creates a completely unique sound. Probably accidental — they never did anything even remotely close to this one ever again. No proper vocal hook, which is one of several reasons why the single flopped commercially, but it could just as well be an instrumental number — the vocals are the least interesting aspect of this maniacal celebration of the wonders of life.

 

It is less interesting to rave on about ʽSeptember Gurlsʼ, as that song has long since left the lower stratosphere where it could be affected by criticism — «hating it» would be telling more about the hater than the song, and «praising it» would bring no new stimulus to this world. Clearly, its legend is all about that guitar tone — candy-sweet compression with an aggressive punch, jangle and power all in one, «Roger McGuinn meets Pete Townshend», the sound that launched a thou­sand bands. Everything else is secondary: the lyrics do not match the mood (the protagonist may have been "crying all the time", but it hardly shows), the Byrdsey solo, as usual, is as crudely thought out as they come, and the line "I was your butch and you were touched" really only makes sense now when the Bangles sing it, but who cares? That song is immortalized by its first twelve seconds, and everyone knows that the first twelve seconds are always the most important ones in any song, unless it's a sidelong or something. Or, if not everyone, then at least the Beatles knew that, and weren't Big Star trying to... well, you know?..

 

I mean, they obviously were on ʽBack Of A Carʼ, whose title resembles a then-recent McCartney song from Ram but whose overall mood is certainly closer to the fumes of Rubber Soul, except that it sounds more like the unruly, shirt-out, pants-down, heavily ungroomed younger brother of ʽNowhere Manʼ and ʽIf I Needed Someoneʼ than a disciplined copy-cat effort — which, I will admit that, may be an essential part of its charm: if you are going to rob your idol's apartment, at least do not forget to rip up the bedsheets and piss in the closet for extra spice.

 

Altogether, this ramble-tamble certainly deserves a thumbs up, if only for being such a great candidate for the title of «messiest power-pop album ever released». Many people actually love this mix of fabulous guitar tones with green-banana pop hooks, forming the liberal «Radio City Party» in opposition to the similarly influential conservative «#1 Record Party» (and the much less popular, somewhat extremist «Sister Lovers Party») — since both albums are usually sold on the same CD these days, it makes no sense to formally recommend one over the other, but my own opinion is on record: Chilton is good enough, but Chilton/Bell is better, and if we are talking influence, well, the Chilton/Bell example of how to add good form to your pop instincts should have been much more influential than the solo Chilton example of how to flash your pop instincts while avoiding good form. Unfortunately, it wasn't — and I am pretty sure I would have a much more favorable general opinion of modern indie pop bands if they were taking their clues from #1 Record than from Radio City.

 

THIRD/SISTER LOVERS (1975/1978)

 

1) Kizza Me; 2) Thank You Friends; 3) Big Black Car; 4) Jesus Christ; 5) Femme Fatale; 6) O, Dana; 7) Holocaust; 8) Kangaroo; 9) Stroke It Noel; 10) For You; 11) You Can't Have Me; 12) Nighttime; 13) Blue Moon; 14) Take Care; 15*) Nature Boy; 16*) Till The End Of The Day; 17*) Dream Lover; 18*) Downs; 19*) Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On.

 

Lord knows I am far from the world's biggest Big Star fan, and I am even farther away from be­ing the biggest fan of their third and strangest attempt at world domination, but man oh man is ʽHolocaustʼ a terrific song — one of the most unique and greatest ever recorded. There have been many different ways tried out in the history of pop music to make musical pictures of «human wrecks», and there have been tons of experts on human wreckage, from Ray Davies to John Len­non to Bob Dylan to Pete Townshend etc., but none of them ever scaled such odd depths of, well, let's call it «darkly haunting romanticism», as Alex Chilton on this particular song.

 

I do not know if this was the first ever usage of the word ʽholocaustʼ in a pop tune, let alone a metaphorical usage: Chilton himself prudently saves it for the last line of the song, as if every­thing that came before was just an atmospheric buildup to the culmination — "you're a wasted face / you're a sad-eyed lie / you're a holocaust" (and thank God the song never became a huge hit, or he would have imminently been forced to eat shit from idiots who would accuse him of calling the Holocaust a sad-eyed lie). Anyway, if it was, it is a well-deserved first, a daring move that is perfectly adequate for such a musically daring composition. The piano/guitar duo alone would be worth any musical prize, as the faraway slide licks, cooing, weeping, or wailing like small packs of seagulls, are upheld by the romantic piano — then there is the grim cello part, hanging over it all like a dark cloud, occasionally spilling some ice-cold rain — then there are the vocals: bitter­sweet, detached, caring and tender on the surface, but emotionally dead deep inside.

 

When it all begins — "your eyes are almost dead / can't get out of bed / and you can't sleep..." — that is exactly the message that we are getting. Unlike Syd Barrett, Chilton did not drive himself to genuine madness or any drug-induced cerebral coma, but he sings the song as if he were frozen in space, locked forever in a state of semi-functional dismantlement. Was he justified in this? Did the clumsy flop of his previous two albums, in which he had invested so many hopes, really trig­ger this state, or was it an artistic put-on? As usual, it does not matter — what does matter is that his personal troubles unexpectedly uncovered and enhanced his greatest talent, that of creating haunting moods out of incoherent, sometimes downright chaotic musical fragments.

 

If Big Star's first album opened in «sexually frustrated teenager» mode, and the second album in «idealistically exuberant adult» mode, with both ʽFeelʼ and ʽO My Soulʼ setting much of the tone for whatever would follow, then Third opens in dangerously disturbed maniac mode. Chilton's relationship with Lesa Aldridge, who is the ʽLesaʼ of the song and to whom it is obviously dedi­cated, was said to have been stormy, and it shows: dating a guy who sings "I want to feel you deep inside" with all the passion of a Buffalo Bill from Silence Of The Lambs is not a very wise thing to do. ʽKizza Meʼs schizophrenic piano part is like a bunch of brain cells set in some random Brownian motion, and what does "I want to white OUT!" even mean? In a way, this might really be one of the scariest love confessions ever recorded.

 

In between ʽKizza Meʼ and ʽHolocaustʼ, opening and closing the first side of Third/Sister Lo­vers as «properly» reconstructed by producer Jim Dickinson when the album was finally released on CD in 1992, lies a small world of weirdness and unpredictability. The recordings themselves were made in 1974, almost immediately after the flub of Radio City, but already after the depar­ture of Andy Hummel; in fact, Chilton did not even think about them as «Big Star» material, which allowed him to break away from the «power pop» formula. But since he did record it with Jody Stephens on drums (and a host of session musicians on bass, extra guitars and keyboards), and since Jody contributed at least one song (ʽFor Youʼ), the name «Big Star» was retained after all — now doubly ironic, since both #1 Record and Radio City at least had some actual «big star potential», whereas Third had no commercial prospective from the very start. Which is exactly what the record executives decided: upon hearing the freshly pressed promotional copy in 1975, they immediately shelved it for posteriority. The album was not released until 1978, on the PVC label, in a differently running track order. Whether it sold more than ten copies, I have no idea.

 

As far as the first side is concerned, Third fully deserves its cult-legend reputation. Besides the two already mentioned highlights, there is ʽThank You Friendsʼ, which may be one of the finest demonstrations of how important the proper intonation and modulation can be to whatever you are singing — the lyrics per se do not give out a single hint, but just listen to the way Alex sneers at us with his "thank you friends / wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you" and you will almost feel sorry for his so-called «friends». There is ʽJesus Christʼ, where he does pretty much the same thing by sending up the idea of a Christmas carol — although in this case, there are several layers to the song, as if Chilton were truly rejoicing at the beauty of the story of Christ while at the same time satirizing its time-worn clichés and the associated brainless traditionalism. (Nice guitar lines, too ­— the closest they actually get to the good old «power pop» here). There is a faithful, very much à propos cover of the Velvets' ʽFemme Fataleʼ (with pretty backing vocals from Lesa), and an oddly hysterical, near-crying «folk-soul» number (ʽO Danaʼ) with Chilton babbling out non­sense in an utterly heartbroken manner.

 

Second side of the LP does not hold nearly as many thrills, in my opinion: too often, these termi­nally ill «songs» drift off into pure atmosphere (ʽKangarooʼ), which can still be delightful be­cause of all the odd combinations of different melodic bits played by different instruments (ʽStroke It Noelʼ is like a mix of Vivaldi and acoustic Neil Young), but lack proper hooks and, too often, seem to lack intellectual or even emotional interpretation — as if, at some points during the sessions, Chilton would let his unhappiness, disillusionment, and paranoia completely over­rule his artistic wit and just carry him wherever his subconscious would go, and, despite what we are so often told by music critics, letting your subconscious directly in the pilot seat rarely, if ever, results in solid, long-lasting art. Still, even the worst material on this album, despite sounding like chaotic sketches of bizarrely mixed ideas, is always arranged with taste, and fans of «experi­mental baroque pop», whatever that means, will find everything to their delight.

 

Rock critics usually love «broken albums» recorded by «broken artists», the madder the better, and consequently tend to overrate Third. Like its predecessor, the album could have benefited from longer sessions, better planning, and more catchiness — none of which would be incom­patible with wallowing in self-pity and reveling in madness. But if you happen to be wallowing in self-pity yourself, and need a trusty companion, Alex Chilton is your man on this happy occasion. Scare away your girlfriend, viciously trash all your friends, insult your religious neighbors, have your mum call for the paramedics — Third does all that and more, and for this psychological help alone deserves a clear-cut thumbs up.

 

PS. On a further technical note, the CD edition contains five «bonus» tracks, recorded at the same sessions, some of which used to appear before on some of the multiple versions of the album (e.g. ʽDownsʼ and a completely out-of-place cover of ʽWhole Lotta Shakin' Going Onʼ, so very bad that its only function here is that of an oxymoron — find the song that is as far removed, mood-wise, as possible from the overall theme of the album, and throw it in with the rest). Of these, ʽDream Lo­verʼ is of essential value — like a blueprint for about 50% of the total output of trendy indie art-pop bands of the 2000s: twisted, bizarre, moody, pretentious, and if you learn it by heart, you may easily be excused for missing out on the entire career of, say, Deerhunter. Well, yes, I am exaggerating, but you can't really make an efficient point these days without a hyperbole.

 

IN SPACE (2005)

 

1) Dony; 2) Lady Sweet; 3) Best Chance; 4) Turn My Back On The Sun; 5) Love Revolution; 6) February's Quiet; 7) Mine Exclusively; 8) A Whole New Thing; 9) Aria, Largo; 10) Hung Up With Summer; 11) Do You Wanna Make It; 12) Makeover.

 

What a sweetly awful album — well worth hearing, actually, if only to procure oneself a prover­bial example of how everything can go utterly wrong when one thinks way too much about getting everything just right.

 

When Chilton and Stephens were making Third, they may have been wasted, but one thing they were not trying to consciously make was a «Big Star recipé». The album simply reflected the state of Alex Chilton's head at the time, give or take a few neurons. Fast forward to 2005 now, by which time a revamped, strictly nostalgia-oriented «Big Star», consisting of Chilton, Stephens, and two members of The Posies, a new-school UK power pop band with plenty of their own en­tertainment value, had been touring the local circuits for more than a decade, concentrating al­most exclusively on a #1 Record/Radio City setlist. With the Big Star legend riding strong and re-gaining in popularity among the hipster crowds, somebody must have come up with the idea of giving people a little bit more of what they want — and this is how In Space, a collection of 12 bona fide power pop songs co-written by Chilton, Auer, and Stringfellow, was born.

 

First things first: do not believe those that say «this does not sound like Big Star at all!» (and pay even less attention to those who retort with «well, times change, don't they, why should you ex­pect this to sound like the Big Star of old?»). Because In Space does sound very much like Big Star. The idea was, by all means, to make an album that sounded very much like Big Star, and since it is not tremendously difficult to make an album that sounds like Big Star, unless you are a complete musical moron, there was no way In Space would not end up sounding like Big Star. Pop rhythms; guitars that glitter and jangle; guitars that play colorful distorted pop rhythms; psy­chedelic vocal harmonies; lyrical themes of sun, summer, and sentimentalism; occasional break­throughs into more rocking territory; retro-oriented production values — what have I missed?

 

The correct criticism to make is not that In Space «does not sound like (classic) Big Star»; the correct criticism is that it tries too hard to sound like classic Big Star, and concentrates so much on the form that it totally forgets about substance. The absolute majority of these songs — nay, all of these songs, without a single exception — are melodically bland, three-times derivative, and completely devoid of any artistic sense. Ballads, pop rockers, hard rockers, whatever, every­thing here is a cliché, pulled out of the dusty storage box full of Beatlisms, Beachboyisms, and, somewhere at the bottom, Marcbolanisms and a few other ism-ism-isms. Sometimes those isms are fully intentional, which does not make them any better: for instance, ʽTurn My Back On The Sunʼ begins with a «deceptive» quotation from ʽWouldn't It Be Niceʼ, which would be acceptable if the song itself were any good, but it isn't, so it wouldn't.

 

As for original hooks, there simply aren't any. None whatsoever. Which is actually quite amazing: so maybe Chilton's gift for songwriting had gone down the drain as a combined result of too much stress in the 1970s and largely laying off the business in the subsequent decades, but Auer and Stringfellow weren't too bad as main songwriters for the Posies — so I will just have to assume that they inadvertently drove their songwriting instincts into the wall when operating un­der the self-imposed command of «write a Big Star album». For every song that is crafted even a wee bit more exquisitely than the average mass (ʽLady Sweetʼ has a whiff of genuine elegance about it), they compensate with something honestly terrible (ʽLove Revolutionʼ is one of the chee­siest chunks of pop-funk ever put to tape by a non-R&B artist; even if it were intended as a parody, its immediate effect is simply that of a bad song) — but the average mass sim­ply elicits no emotional response whatsoever. Dull, empty shells of songs, which neither the nice guitar tones nor the pretty harmonies can help to save — even though I am fairly sure that it is exactly the nice guitar tones and pretty harmonies that have tricked many a power pop fan into accepting or even admiring In Space, as seen from multiple Web reviews.

 

Do not waste money on this pathetic cash-in, if it can be helped at all; most likely, the very exis­tence of this album will go down in history as just a minor unfortunate footnote to the legacy of Big Star. My biggest regret is that Chilton did not live long enough to remedy the situation — in 2010, he died of a heart attack, remembered, respected and loved by all those who (I hope) were willing to look past his latest failure, a disgraceful thumbs down if there ever was one. Take a lesson here, kids, and don't ever let nostalgia rule the day when it comes to writing music. Influ­ence — yep, inspiration — for sure, but never nostalgia. It'll only make you look stupid.

 

ADDENDA:

 

 

 

LIVE (1974/1992)

 

1) September Gurls; 2) Way Out West; 3) Mod Lang; 4) Don't Lie To Me; 5) O My Soul; 6) Interview; 7) The Ballad Of El Goodo; 8) Thirteen; 9) I'm In Love With A Girl; 10) Motel Blues; 11) In The Street; 12) You Get What You Deserve; 13) Daisy Glaze; 14) Back Of A Car; 15) She's A Mover.

 

Arguably the most symbolic, and the saddest, moment of this album is when, in a short interview that links the two parts of the radio concert (recorded at Ultrasonic Studios in NYC), the an­nouncer/interviewer says, "...I just came across a review of your new album called Radio City, and the guy started off the review by saying, ʽhere it is only January, and we already have the album of yearʼ... you're getting an awful lot of critical acclaim for your new album, it's really good!". "Yeah, that's, uh, nice", replies a quite transparently lemon-faced Chilton, "I hope it sells. We've had critical acclaim before".

 

Whether this internal panic is somehow reflected in the band's actual live performance is deba­table, but it is hard not to perceive this archival release from that particular point of view — a tense, nervous Chilton, having to cope with the recent loss of yet another band member (Hummel quit right after the recording of Radio City, briefly replaced by John Lightman, who is captured live on this album) and with worried anticipation of whether they might be able to make it this time around. Nowhere does this tension show as strong as on the solo acoustic performance of ʽThe Ballad Of El Goodoʼ, a song that I'd never have thought could work without all the psy­chedelic-gospel harmo­nies and cool flanging guitar effects, but it does work very well, with just a slight extra drop of desperation in each of Alex's "ain't no one going to turn me round", as the man slowly comes to realize that, soon enough, he might be facing a choice of agreeing to be turned round — or to be turned down by circumstances beyond his control and determination.

 

On the whole, this is not one of those great lost live albums of all time, since Big Star was first and foremost a studio band, only as perfect as the harmonies, the overdubs, and the mixing on each of their songs. But it is still well worth hearing, if only to admire how closely their «mini­malist» lineup (one guitar, bass, drums) comes to recapturing all the essence of their best songs. Even the short acoustic set that Alex generates all on his own in the middle of the performance is fully adequate — I have already mentioned ʽEl Goodoʼ, but ʽThirteenʼ with just a six-string is every bit as gorgeous as the fuller arrangement on #1 Record. (ʽMotel Bluesʼ, a rather whiny folk ramble, is not as good, a song written more for its plaintive lyrics than anything else, and wisely left off the original albums).

 

A few of the numbers are somewhat botched: I am speaking particularly of the very disappoin­ting choice of ʽSeptember Gurlsʼ for the opening number, since Alex was not able to reproduce that caramelly tone of the original which constitutes about 50% of the song's success, and that is one song that really cannot work with just one guitar and no harmonies. But ʽO My Soulʼ, on the other hand, is terrific, with Lightman in full control of Hummel's quirky bass zoops, Alex playing the funky rhythm parts with perfect precision, and Stephens firing away with as much excitement as he displayed in the studio. Most of the rock-oriented material from Radio City is, in fact, be­yond complaining, particularly when the original songs themselves were good (because no amount of raw live rock'n'roll energy can save something as pointless as ʽMod Langʼ).

 

My only sorrow is that the material focuses too much on Radio City rather than #1 Record, but this is predictable — with Bell long since out of the band, and the whole radio concert basically serving as a promotional spot, and the «rockier» material of Radio City being altogether more suitable for a live performance, complaining is futile. And who would dare to complain, really, when listening to an obviously troubled musician who can still play his fairly complex guitar lines and sing on key and in tune at the same time? Unless you are a Big Star maniac or some­thing, you probably will not find yourself listening to this all the time, but even one listen may generate some serious extra respect for Chilton both as a human being and as a master craftsman, and from that point of view, Live is an essential archive release, fully deserving of a thumbs up.

 

KEEP AN EYE ON THE SKY (2009)

 

[Track listing limited to titles that do not appear on regular Big Star albums.]

CD I: 1) Psychedelic Stuff [Chris Bell]; 2) All I See Is You [Icewater]; 3) Every Day As We Grow Closer [Alex Chilton]; 4) Try Again [Rock City]; 7) In The Street (alt. mix); 8) Thirteen (alt. mix); 10) The India Song (alt. mix); 11) When My Baby's Beside Me (alt. mix); 12) My Life Is Right (alt. mix); 13) Give Me Another Chance (alt. mix); 15) Gone With The Light; 16) Watch The Sunrise (single version); 17) ST 100/6 (alt. mix); 18) The Preacher (Rock City); 19) In The Street (alt. single mix); 20) Feel (alt. mix); 21) The Ballad Of El Goodo (alt. lyrics); 22) The India Song (alt. version); 23) Country Morn; 24) I Got Kinda Lost (demo); 25) Back Of A Car (demo); 26) Motel Blues (demo).

CD II: 1) There Was A Light (demo); 2) Life Is White (demo); 3) What's Going Ahn (demo); 9) Mod Lang (alt. mix); 10) Back Of A Car (alt. mix); 14) Morpha Too (alt. mix); 16) O My Soul (alt. version); 17) She's A Mover (alt. ver­sion); 18) Daisy Glaze (rehearsal version); 19) I Am The Cosmos (Chris Bell); 20) You And Your Sister (Chris Bell); 21) Blue Moon (demo); 22) Femme Fatale (demo); 23) Thank You Friends (demo); 24) Nightime (demo); 25) Take Care (demo); 26) You Get What You Deserve (demo).

CD III: 1) Lovely Day (demo); 2) Downs (demo); 3) Jesus Christ (demo); 4) Holocaust (demo); 5) Big Black Car (alt. demo); 6) Mañana; 25) Till The End Of The Day (alt. mix); 26) Nature Boy (alt. mix).

CD IV: 1) When My Baby's Beside Me; 2) My Life Is Right; 3) She's A Mover; 4) Way Out West; 5) The Ballad Of El Goodo; 6) In The Street; 7) Back Of A Car; 8) Thirteen; 9) The India Song; 10) Try Again; 11) Watch The Sun­rise; 12) Don't Lie To Me; 13) Hot Burrito #2; 14) I Got Kinda Lost; 15) Baby Strange; 16) Slut; 17) There Was A Light; 18) ST 100/6; 19) Come On Now; 20) O My Soul.

 

A short-lived band like Big Star is an ideal proposition for a comprehensive boxset — 3 or 4 CDs can easily digest everything that it has released officially, as well as offer an exhaustive tour through the vaults of demos, alternate versions, outtakes, and even samples of «band-related» work that was not officially credited to it upon release. Keep An Eye On The Sky, released just a year before Chilton's death (nice to know he was able to take one last look at his collected le­gacy before finally heading out to his Big Star), proclaims to be doing just that. The perfect box, right? «Drop everything and run», right?

 

Well, not quite. First and foremost, if you think that buying this boxset eliminates the need to buy the albums, pay closer attention. It does include all of the completed recordings for all three clas­sic Big Star records (and completely ignores the embarrassment of In Space, which is a plus as far as I'm concerned), but at least a third part of them comes in «alternate mixes», which some­times include a few extra seconds of studio talk or noise before the song comes in (not necessa­rily a good idea) and do, indeed, mix the tracks slightly differently. Whether the old mixes or the new mixes sound better is a debatable issue which you could easily debate without my participation (I am definitely no «Mr. Mix Guy»), but the fact is, if you are a dedicated fan, this means you will have to have the boxset and the separate albums as well. In fact, I am fairly sure that the «alter­nate mixes» were little other than an intentional bait to raise interest on the part of fans who, na­turally, already owned all the CDs.

 

Suppose, though, that you are a newcomer to Big Star, and that you do not own any of their al­bums — would it make sense, then, to go straight for the box? I do not think it would, no. All three albums put together are cheaper, and the bonuses... well, this is where the interesting part begins, though, frankly speaking, it is not that interesting.

 

Truthfully, one may Keep An Eye On The Sky for as long as it plays on, but the sky hardly seems to hold a lot of surprises in store. Arguably the best additions here are Chilton's acoustic demos, particularly of songs recorded for Radio City and Third. Most of them work very well on their own, with solid, inspired playing and singing, although, frankly speaking, only a few of them are actual «demos» — in the case of Third, we generally hear just the basic tracks laid down in preparation for the overdubs. Even so, ʽHolocaustʼ has its own eerie minimalistic charm when it's just Alex and his piano.

 

As for the small bunch of previously unavailable songs, they are no big deal. Early pre-Big Star tracks from the solo careers of Chilton and Bell are basically the work of inexperienced Beatles apprentices. Thus, ʽAll I See Is Youʼ by Icewater (one of Bell's early bands) is nothing that you won't hear in a much better rendering by Badfinger; actually, the chorus sounds suspiciously close to Lennon's "all I want is you" from ʽDig A Ponyʼ, but since the song was admittedly recorded in 1969, when Let It Be had not yet come out, I have to assume a bizarre coincidence. (On the other hand, ʽGone With The Lightʼ, an outtake from Big Star's early sessions, does rip off ʽGood Nightʼ, which, as I assume, they realized just in time to keep it off the album). Bell's ʽPsy­chedelic Stuffʼ, which opens the chronology, predicts nothing particularly enlightening with its title, and, sure enough, it is psychedelic, but nothing else.

 

Later outtakes also include ʽMotel Bluesʼ, of whose existence we were already aware through its inclusion on the Live album — this version is neither better nor worse; ʽGot Kinda Lostʼ, a rather grayish pop-rocker in the style of Rubber Soul, but without much passion; and several alternate versions of well-known songs with different sets of lyrics (ʽCountry Mornʼ is really ʽWatch The Sun­riseʼ). Furthermore, there are also two singles from Chris Bell's solo album, I Am The Cos­mos, which, in 2009, acted as a «teaser» for the upcoming re-release on CD — showcasing his own journey into the realm of ambitious art-pop, far more disciplined than the paranoid ramble of Third, but also somewhat less haunting, and making one regret even more that Bell and Chilton only had the space of one LP to work on with each other.

 

Disc 4 of the package is probably the one that might have the fans salivating: a complete recor­ding of a live show played at Lafayette's Music Room in Memphis in January '73, right after Bell's departure, but with Hummel still in the band. The show is most notable for the setlist — predictable entries from #1 Record and previews of Radio City numbers are then followed by an interesting set of covers, as the boys promote the Kinks (ʽCome On Nowʼ), Todd Rundgren (ʽSlutʼ), T. Rex (ʽBaby Strangeʼ), and even The Flying Burrito Brothers (ʽHot Burrito #2ʼ) — in­structive, since Gram Parsons is probably not the first person one would associate with Big Star's sound, image, and atmosphere, but now that they bring it on themselves, there most certainly has to be an influence. Unfortunately, the downside of the recording is poor quality: audience noise does not interfere for the simple reason that there were probably something like ten or twelve people present altogether, but the equipment must have been piss-poor. And as for those covers, well, you've heard them once for educational reasons, you probably won't feel any need to hear them again. (Unless you simply want to show your admiration for a band that can cover the Kinks, Todd Rundgren, T. Rex, and Gram Parsons in one gig, and I do admit that bands like these are not always easy to localize in one's neighborhood).

 

All in all, this is simultaneously a great boxset (with particular care given to packaging and liner notes) — and a serious disappointment. If anything, it would have made better sense if the whole shenanigan was just put together as the three original albums, cleaned up and remastered, each CD accompanied by a large set of bonus tracks, plus the Live album with bonus performances of the Kinks / Rundgren / Bolan / Parsons tunes from the Memphis show. In this particular form, Big Star's legacy looks somewhat fussy, chaotic, and «gappy». Then again, who knows? A band as fussy and chaotic as Big Star might actually look more adequate with a fussy and chaotic box­set to go along. It's up to you to decide.

BILL WITHERS

JUST AS I AM (1971)

 

1) Harlem; 2) Ain't No Sunshine; 3) Grandma's Hands; 4) Sweet Wanomi; 5) Everybody's Talkin'; 6) Do It Good; 7) Hope She'll Be Happier; 8) Let It Be; 9) I'm Her Daddy; 10) In My Heart; 11) Moanin' And Groanin'; 12) Better Off Dead.

 

There has certainly been many a strange album recorded in 1970-71, as idealistic psychedelia be­gan losing ground to musical psychotherapy, but the official debut of Bill Withers definitely de­serves a special place of its own. He was certainly not the first performer to combine aspects of the post-Dylan «singer-songwriter» approach with the foundations of soul and R&B, but he may have been the first black artist to try it out on such a consistent basis — generating a sound and a feel that you cannot get from any other artist, black or white, circa 1971. The title of the album it­self seems almost ironic in that light: Just As I Am? It actually takes quite a while to figure out just as what exactly the man is, and even then, it's hard to be sure.

 

Unlike typical R&B performers, Bill Withers materialized out of nowhere — rather than being spotted in some local church or club and put through a period of grooming, he just sent in some demo tapes to L.A.-based Sussex Records; the label owner Clarence Avant liked what he heard, signed Withers to a contract, and assigned no less than Booker T. Jones himself to produce the man's first album. (Yes, boys and girls, it used to be that easy, provided you had real talent to burn and a proper place to turn it up). More than that — on his debut album, Withers is accom­panied by Jim Keltner on drums, Chris Ethridge (of the Flying Burrito Brothers) on bass, and Stephen Stills on electric guitar. Any other debutant could have pissed his pants from utter hap­piness right there in the studio — but one single listen to Just As I Am will suffice to understand that Bill Withers is as far from a potential pants-pisser as can be.

 

Most encyclopaedias and online review sites tag Just As I Am as a «soul» or «R&B» album, just because it had some members of Booker T. & The MGs playing on it, and was sung by a black performer, and we all know black people used to sing «soul» or «R&B» before they all turned to rap and other crap. In reality, this is ridiculous: Just As I Am is a dark, seriously disturbing and disturbed singer-songwriter album that mixes some elements of traditional soul and R&B (and blues, and jazz) with the «whitebread» folk-rock scene of the time — in fact, it is more James Taylor than Al Green, I'd say, but way, way bleaker than both. In fact, if we were to believe that the album title tells the truth, we probably wouldn't want to mess around with the guy. The album ends with the sound of a gunshot, for Christ's sake!

 

Most of the time, however, the album simply resonates with tension, never coming to the brink of a genuine explosion. ʽHarlemʼ initiates us into the world of Bill Withers with a swinging, dan­ceable rhythm, and lines like "Saturday night in Harlem / Ev'rything's alright / You can really swang and shake your pretty thang / The parties are out of sight" would suggest that we are invi­ted to have fun — but the dark bass groove and almost threatening strings, gradually rising up and gaining in shrillness, insist that the party is rigged, and then there's the counterpoint: "It's too hot to sleep / And I'm too broke to eat / I don't care if I die or not". Immediately, it is made clear that we are not to be entertained — that the performer's vision of Harlem and everything that goes with it is certainly not encumbered by rose-colored glasses.

 

From there on, song after song deals with the little horrors of life — loneliness (ʽAin't No Sun­shineʼ), nostalgia for dead relatives (ʽGrandma's Handsʼ), losing your loved one to another (ʽHope She'll Be Happierʼ), and losing a battle with alcohol (ʽBetter Off Deadʼ — the idea of shooting oneself in a bout of alcoholism would later be explored by Alice Cooper on ʽPass The Gun Aroundʼ to a more dramatic, but less subtle and suggestive effect). Every now and then the atmosphere is a bit alleviated with the joys of a healthy sex life (ʽSweet Wanomiʼ, ʽMoanin' And Groanin'ʼ), but when romance is rather seen as temporary salvation from a life full of misery and self-inflicted stupidity, maybe «healthy» is not quite the right word to use.

 

Creepiest of the lot is ʽI'm Her Daddyʼ, a gloomy, threatening blues-rock number whose lyrics may look innocent on paper — a father demanding to see his six-year old daughter of whose exis­tence he was only recently informed — but sound nearly psychopathic on record, even though Bill himself resorts to screaming only occasionally, preferring to impersonate the neurotic father as quietly as possible, to convey an even more disturbing image. Not grief, not remorse, and ob­viously not happiness — this is a «give-me-back-my-daughter-you-bitch-or-face-the-consequen­ces» type of rant, stunningly realistic and just a tad shivery.

 

On the other hand, as long as the protagonist is not high and does not present an immediate threat to society, he is prone to acute fits of murderous loneliness — ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ, which be­came Bill's first major hit and went on to be covered by lots of people, tells it like it means it, in a brief series of four-line verses, each line pinching sharp and painful. One of the verses did not work out at first and was temporarily filled by Bill with a series of "I know, I know, I know..." that he was later convinced to keep — this must be a technical record of sorts (how many "I know"s can one fit within one breath?), but it also works very well emotionally within the song. For that matter, Bill is a fantastic singer — check out the way he drawls out "she's gone" on ʽHope She'll Be Happierʼ without a single wrong fluctuation in the airwave.

 

Strangely, the only relative «misfires» on this weird, haunting album are two cover versions, neither of which is particularly bad, yet they just do not seem to fit. Well, ʽEverybody's Talkin'ʼ could fit thematically, but in the process of reinventing it, Bill somehow flushes out the sad-and-tired mood of the original; and the gospel-style, clap-your-hands-together rewrite of ʽLet It Beʼ can only be qualified as sheer filler. There ain't no talk about finding inner peace, like the song suggests, on this album — ʽLet It Beʼ and ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ are mutually exclusive, not to mention ʽBetter Off Deadʼ which is sort of an anti-ʽLet It Beʼ if there ever was one. It's almost as if they told him, "hey, we won't release the record unless there's a McCartney number on it", and he went, "oh yeah? I'll show you McCartney!" — and recorded this quasi-parodic deconstruction that replaces solemnity with stupid forced cheerfulness.

 

Everything else rules, and is as far removed from «formulaic» soul records of the period as pos­sible; if anything, Just As I Am belongs on the same shelf as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Joni Mitchell's Blue and all those other singer-songwriters' confessionals, even if the lyrics are relatively straightforward in comparison — but when it comes to psychological layers, there is comparable depth in here, sadly, not often mentioned in reviews of the album, which prefer dwelling on formal aspects (such as the subtle textures of Stephen Stills' electric guitar, which are important to the album's sound — in fact, I could easily see some of these songs covered by Stills on an auspicious day — but are hardly at the very heart of it). Major thumbs up.

 

STILL BILL (1972)

 

1) Lonely Town, Lonely Street; 2) Let Me In Your Life; 3) Who Is He (And What Is He To You)?; 4) Use Me; 5) Lean On Me; 6) Kissin' My Love; 7) I Don't Know; 8) Another Day To Run; 9) I Don't Want You On My Mind; 10) Take It All In And Check It All Out.

 

More than anything, Bill's second album clearly demonstrated that the man's success was not a fluke one — and I certainly do not intend to prove that by adducing the example of ʽLean On Meʼ, which went on to become Bill's greatest commercial hit and probably the song that is most com­monly associated with the man due to ferocious radio rotation, innumerable cover versions, and other what-not. The funniest thing about it is that ʽLean On Meʼ, honestly good soul number as it is, is completely atypical of the album and of Bill's classic artistic personality as a whole. It is a well thought out, understandably manipulative musical remedy, uplifting and not uninteresting from a compositional point of view (especially in how it sews together its personal-sentimental and clap-your-hands-together-anthemic sections) — but there are no other songs like this on the album, and if there were, well, frankly speaking, they would completely eliminate the very reason for Bill Withers' existence. I mean, if you want uplifting gospel-rock, you have just about every­one from the Spinners to Earth, Wind & Fire to Aretha. Come on now.

 

What is really fascinating about the record is that, even with the near-complete removal of star power (this time, the album was recorded and produced by a bunch of relative unknowns), it still sounds fabulous and is full to the brim of perfectly written and convincingly played out little mu­sical «character studies». Still Bill is a perfect title, since Withers usually impersonates the same type of character here — an unbearably sensitive, touchy, jealous, paranoid, sarcastic guy who would love to enjoy life but feels like it's too much of a bitch to let him enjoy it. His philosophy is perfectly summarized in the first lines of ʽAnother Day To Runʼ: "If you don't look into your mind / And find out what you're running from / Tomorrow might just be another day to run". And he follows that philosophy to a tee — most of the album involves prying into his own mind and trying to find out what it is that he's running from.

 

Paranoia as the ruling force of the record is immediately established in the very first notes — when the acoustic rhythm, the electric lead, and the funky bass guitar all play the same «shaky» syncopated melody to stress the idea of uncertainty and insecurity. The Bee Gees, too, would later have a song about «Big City Stress» opening an album that praised the glamorous rhythms of the big city, but the difference is that people could enjoy the glam of Bee Gees' disco without smelling its dangerous underside, whereas Withers, writing songs that you can dance to, puts that underside up front — lyrically, musically, vocally ʽLonely Town, Lonely Streetʼ is a blinking warning, a groove that pulsates with nervous tension of the ʽGimme Shelterʼ variety.

 

Then there are some nifty tunes about jealousy and separation. ʽWho Is He (And What Is He To You)?ʼ is a small masterpiece of unresolved suspense, matching its threatening bass and lead lines to fit Bill's reserved, but on-the-brink vocal delivery, and the lyrics may just be the very best discrete psychological description of a jealous lover, peppered with classy lines like "you're too much for one man, but not enough for two". ʽUse Meʼ (which was the second single and was far more representative of the album's sound than ʽLean On Meʼ) is driven by a Stevie Wonder-wor­thy clavinet riff that «grumbles» its way through just like Bill himself grumbles about how "all you do is use me" — before admitting, grudgingly, that he doesn't mind.

 

Eventually, though, the lovers do separate, and then we have ʽI Don't Want You On My Mindʼ, trotting along at a mind-numbing tempo and punctuated by «ugly» wah-wah wails, illustrating brain pulsations: he doesn't want you on his mind all the time, but, of course, this is exactly what he has on his mind all the time. The song proper ends at around the three minute mark, but is then followed with a coda that could illustrate the painful process of trying to clear out the protago­nist's mind — unfortunately, it fades out too quickly to let us know how successful he was.

 

There is a bunch of more conventional songs here as well (the rather syrupy ballad ʽLet Me In Your Lifeʼ; the somewhat-too-happy funk-pop number ʽKissin' My Loveʼ), but they are not with­out their own hooks, either, and, ultimately, as much as I hate these «whole world is silly» rants, in this case I do feel like ʽLean On Meʼ is the weakest song on the album, and if it happens to be the only thing you know about Bill Withers, be sure not to jump to conclusions — that would be a bit like judging the Beatles on the strength of ʽYesterdayʼ (certainly not a «weak» song, but just imagine a "oh, so that's what those Beatles sound like" kind of reaction!). Instead, just get the whole album and brace yourself for Mr. Withers' fascinating world of wit, pain, and psycholo­gism on the dangerous edge of insanity. One more thumbs up like this and you'd really start to wonder how many girlfriends this individual has buried in his backyard.

 

LIVE AT CARNEGIE HALL (1973)

 

1) Use Me; 2) Friend Of Mine; 3) Ain't No Sunshine; 4) Grandma's Hands; 5) World Keeps Going Around; 6) Let Me In Your Life; 7) Better Off Dead; 8) For My Friend; 9) I Can't Write Left-Handed; 10) Lean On Me; 11) Lonely Town, Lonely Street; 12) Hope She'll Be Happier; 13) Let Us Love; 14) Harlem / Cold Baloney.

 

Well, apparently it does not take that much practice to get to Carnegie Hall — the bare minimum is to have yourself a No. 1 single with clap-along potential. Not that Bill Withers did not deserve a show at Carnegie Hall on October 6, 1972, or a live double album memorizing the event, but it is a little ironic how quickly he got there, especially keeping in mind that his two first albums easily convey the impression of an introvert loner, hardly fit for the large stage at all.

 

I must say that the concert performance, despite actually having happened, does not dispel that impression. Like a typical R&B show, it incorporates some lengthy groove-based workouts: ʽUse Meʼ, opening the proceedings, is stretched out from its original length to around eight minutes (could have been shorter, but Bill does a second re-run of the jam section at the crowd's request), and ʽHarlemʼ, closing the show, runs for about thirteen minutes, mutating into another funky jam, sarcastically titled ʽCold Baloneyʼ.

 

In a way, it is cold baloney: Bill's backing band is no James Brown Orchestra or Parliament, and Bill himself is not much of a crowd stimulant — he can cer­tainly lead the audience in an R&B ritual, entrancing them with a couple looped lines from ʽShake 'Em On Downʼ, but his talents in that sphere are nothing out of the ordinary; it's more like he is engaging in a genre-obliging con­vention here. In fact, even the main groove of ʽUse Meʼ, converted from clavinet to guitar, seems a bit limp and toothless when compared to the studio original. The audience, still under the fresh spell of the song, did not seem to mind, but in retrospect, I am not sure whether anybody would want to trade in the studio version for the live run.

 

The show's greatness certainly lies elsewhere — in between the obligatory dance-oriented book­marks, the material is gradually unwrapping like a multi-angled portrait of Bill Withers, «the thinking man's R&B artist» and an all-around interesting person. First, there's some incredibly cool stage banter, probably some of the best you'll ever get on a live R&B album, ranging from innocent, but funny jokes concerning members of the band ("on bass, we got cool Melvin Dun­lap... Melvin's so quiet, he said eight words last year, and six of those were 'airport'...") to fabu­lously worded accounts of his past, such as the one that introduces ʽGrandma's Handsʼ and, to­gether with the song itself, should now probably count as the coolest eulogy that anybody ever gave to his grannie in show business. Bill's feelings towards the ladies (ʽLet Me In Your Lifeʼ) and the Vietnam War (ʽI Can't Write Left-Handedʼ) are also made known in a manner that is sensitive, intelligent, and reasonably funny at the same time (well, «funny» in case of the ladies, that is, not the Vietnam War).

 

But, of course, the banter is still only secondary next to the songs themselves: we have faithful renditions of lots of classics, not particularly different from the studio versions but sung with the same combination of abandon, introspection, and technique (the extended "she's gone" bit at the end of ʽHope She'll Be Happier With Himʼ draws excited audience applause, as does the "I know I know..." trick on ʽAin't No Sunshineʼ), and then, most importantly, there is a bunch of new songs here that never made it onto any official studio LP. Of these, ʽWorld Keeps Going Aroundʼ is a dark confessional, sort of a personal exorcism set to a bubbling mid-tempo funk groove; ʽFor My Friendʼ is equally shivery, foreboding blues-rock with a particularly gloomy bassline and a wah-wah lead croaking in the darkness (a bit of an unsettling background for a tune that allegedly deals with the issue of making up among friends — unless the friend in question is Satan himself, of course); and the already mentioned ʽI Can't Write Left-Handedʼ is a repetitive, but haunting groove, supported by the band's collective graveyard harmonies. Subtle and moving tribute to the dead, with one leg in the old Afro-American tradition and the other one well in the present.

 

There is no evident reason for us to call this one of the greatest live albums of the decade: Bill's band is competent, but restrained (which is probably due more to the bandleader's conscious will than to lack of experience, since most of the members were professionals, recruited from the wreck of the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band), the songs are mostly not «reinvented» live, and Bill's commitment to the performance is pretty much at the same high (but not «hyper-high») level in the studio and in the live hall. But the general atmosphere of the event, which cannot really be described in words, makes the experience as a whole very rewarding; there is a certain naturalness and completeness to Bill Withers here, in this long setting, that could be missed on the much shorter studio records.

 

My only gripe is that the long jam sections should have probably been sacrificed to make way for better songs (so much great stuff on Still Bill that is not featured here!) — I under­stand the decision to frame the «Bill Withers soliloquoy» with a few numbers that make the listener feel as one with the performer, it's just that this guy here is one performer who has a far better chance to get under your skin when he is singing dark odes to loneliness to the solitary sound of an acoustic guitar than when he gets you to clap his hands and stomp your feet along with the band. Oh well, standard laws of the world of entertainment, and, after all, Bill was never a self-conscious «rebel» against the laws, which only emphasizes his humbleness. Thumbs up.

 

+'JUSTMENTS (1974)

 

1) You; 2) The Same Love That Made Me Laugh; 3) Stories; 4) Green Grass; 5) Ruby Lee; 6) Heartbreak Road; 7) Can We Pretend; 8) Liza; 9) Make A Smile For Me; 10) Railroad Man.

 

By the time Bill got around to recording his third studio LP, it seems like his sudden burst of popularity went to his head a little bit — the album shows much more «self-importance» than its predecessors, starting from the incomprehensibly scribbled sermon on the front cover ("life, like most precious gifts, gives us the responsibility of upkeep..."), and ending with the songs them­selves: ʽYouʼ, the five minute long soft-funk opener, is one continuous preachy rant that does not even begin to bother with the issue of a chorus.

 

Of course, Bill Withers is an insightful individual and an above-ordinary lyricist, so that his prea­ching as such never gets irritating, and sometimes you even get caught up in it — ʽYouʼ, in fact, should be counted among the angriest, most sharp-tongued AAPs (Anonymous Antagonist Put­downs) in the history of popular music this side of ʽPositively 4th Streetʼ. ("You're like a man loving Jesus / That says he can't stand the Jew" is just one of the many spikes). But even so, prea­ching is sort of a universal business, and Bill's idea to try and re-route his music in the direction of «lessons in morality» goes against his individual gift — musical, lyrical, and theatrical imper­sonation of the psychologically imbalanced person.

 

The main problem with the two lengthy «epics» that bookmark the album (ʽYouʼ and ʽRailroad Manʼ, the latter featuring José Feliciano on congas and, as it often happens in songs about trains and railroads, nostalgizing about Bill's childhood) is that their length is not backed up by musical dynamics — it is more or less exactly the same funky groove from beginning to end, restrained and repetitive. And at least ʽYouʼ bothers to come up with enough fire-and-brimstone lyrics to pull it through, but with ʽRailroad Manʼ, Bill just repeats the same lyrics twice, as if they really really mattered or as if they did not matter at all, and we were just supposed to get in the groove and carry on for six minutes. But it ain't that cool a groove, even if Feliciano can indeed bang some mean congas.

 

Fortunately, there are still some very good songs in between. ʽThe Same Love That Made Me Laughʼ is a catchy dance number that successfully combines proto-disco toe-tappiness with Bill's melancholic attitudes (unfortunately, its release as the album's lead single pretty much confined Bill back to the R&B chart section). ʽStoriesʼ is a beautiful piano ballad with the album's finest vocal delivery (the «airplane lift-off» modulation on Bill's voice does make it soar, and blends in brilliantly with the otherwise corny harps and strings). ʽRuby Leeʼ may not be a masterpiece in all of its ingredients, but its «insinuating» bassline is easily the single greatest bassline that Melvin Dunlap came up with (and Bill made the just decision to reward him with a songwriting co-credit for it). And ʽHeartbreak Roadʼ is... well, sort of fun to tap your foot and clap your hands to. Nice, if a little silly-sounding, keyboard accompaniment.

 

So, on the whole, it wouldn't be at all bad if Bill himself didn't sound disinterested and rather «ordinary» much of the time — especially on Side B, much of which is given over to sentimental ballads and generic preachiness that cannot be fully redeemed even with a lead acoustic guitar part from Feliciano (ʽCan We Pretendʼ). And a song like ʽLizaʼ, a hyper-tender ode from "a worldly old uncle" to "a very innocent young niece", will probably have to wait until you are just in the right mood for it — its potential «gorgeousness» stems mainly from the vocal and key­board tone rather from any jaw-dropping melodic moves, and not all of us are always on the ready for that kind of tone to make us swoon and fall over. Whatever be the case, it'd be best to wait until you have a very innocent young niece.

 

Criticisms aside, +'Justments does earn its thumbs up, but remember: if, like myself, you loved the first two albums for their unique attitude, you will most probably find that the attitude has changed, and that this post-Carnegie Hall edition of Bill Withers, modified by success, public attention, and simply the passing of time, is not nearly as unique as it used to be. However, the «base mix» of R&B groove with singer-songwriter atmosphere is still very much in place, so, in a way, you could say all that's really lacking is that tasty cherry on top.

 

MAKING MUSIC (1975)

 

1) I Wish You Well; 2) The Best You Can; 3) Make Love To Your Mind; 4) I Love You Dawn; 5) She's Lonely; 6) Sometimes A Song; 7) Paint Your Pretty Picture; 8) Family Table; 9) Don't You Want To Stay; 10) Hello Like Before.

 

So Sussex Records eventually folded, and Bill found himself in the arms of Columbia. Without some serious digging, it is hard to understand whether this very fact led to a change in sound or if, as usual, it was all just part of the global trend to adapt or survive. The fact is, Making Music is an album that is even more smooth, slick, glossed-out than +'Justments, and, consequently, is easier to categorize as a «typical mid-Seventies R&B album», which is not really what Bill Wi­thers was about in the first place. Some of the songs are still in the orchestrated folk-pop ballpark, but they are getting uncomfortably sentimental and sappy — alcoholics, jealous lovers, and pro­digal fathers are more or less out of the picture, replaced by romantics, moody lovers, and grate­ful descendants. We have an all-too-happy Bill Withers here, and that doesn't spell good.

 

The songs are still mostly enjoyable — the problem is that they draw much of their strength from being too repetitive. The slow, lazy funk groove of ʽMake Love To Your Mindʼ, combining wah-wah guitar, «cool» bubbly synthesizers, and proto-disco strings, is really all about making us enjoy and wallow in the awesomeness of the basic message: "before I make love to your body / I wanna make love to your mind", a refrain repeated so frequently that you are almost tempted to look for some extra depth in it. But there's no particular depth, just a quirky turn of phrase that Bill thought useful and attractive. It is, but not for six minutes.

 

There is nothing wrong as such with the lush pastoral ballad ʽPaint Your Pretty Pictureʼ, either, but exactly how many times do we need to hear that the protagonist is going to "paint your pretty picture with a song"? By the fourth minute, the repetition begins to border on parody, and there's still two more to go. Same applies to ʽShe's Lonelyʼ, a song that could be described as «anti-feminist»: "what she's doin' does some good", Bill admits, "but she lonely, but she lonely, she lonely, but she lonely". Would it have hurt to work on that chorus a little more? Because the song is really good — just way too repetitive.

 

The biggest departure from the old sound is on ʽFamily Tableʼ, a song with a nostalgic message taken from the same box as ʽGrandma's Handsʼ (but much flatter, lyrics-wise) but a melody that pushes Withers very close to disco, if not melodically, then at least in terms of all-out-danceable atmosphere. Again, it's not a bad tune at all — catchy, fun, probably still quite sincere — but to say that it downplays Bill's talents would be an understatement, since, other than the catchy vocal hook in the chorus, it leaves no space for any talent whatsoever.

 

Closest thing to a «classic» here would probably be ʽSometimes A Songʼ, which delivers the leanest, meanest groove on the album — I don't know whether the bass player is James Jamerson or Louis Johnson, since they are both credited in the notes, but whoever it is, thanks for that killer rockin' bass line that adds gruff seriousness to Bill's message. If Bill does not convince you that a good song is a real bitch, that bass line will. Of course, it is also a song that could have been written by anybody — from Curtis Mayfield to Isaac Hayes to even Billy Preston — but by 1975, it was clear that Bill had nothing against «streamlining» his musicmaking, and this here is sort of a cut-off point beyond which only serious lovers of solid, but «faceless» R&B are welcome, not those who welcome unique manners of artistic self-expression. At the very least, an album like Making Music should never serve as your introduction to Bill Withers, since there is very little Bill Withers here to introduce.

 

NAKED & WARM (1976)

 

1) Close To Me; 2) Naked & Warm; 3) Where You Are; 4) Dreams; 5) If I Didn't Mean You Well; 6) I'll Be With You; 7) City Of The Angels; 8) My Imagination.

 

It is always at least a little sad to see a favourite artist turn from the utmost sincerity to arrogant dishonesty. Nevertheless, we must brace ourselves and face the facts. There is definitely a serious probability as to Bill Withers being «warm» on that album sleeve, given its immediate context — sunny skies, a summer attire, and suitable ultraviolet-ray-blocking headwear. But unless my eyes trick me into some sort of optical illusion, I would state it as a given fact that the description «naked» does not apply at all. One never knows, of course, whether this could be an act of last-moment censorship imposed upon the artist by the record label, but even so, the album cover is tacky enough without the title — with the title, it's tacky and self-contradictory. And it is with this troubled feeling of deception already creeping in that we proceed on to the music.

 

And — sure enough — the music more or less matches the album cover in terms of tackiness and self-contradictions. Most of the songs still show the same disappointing direction, towards soft, thoroughly inoffensive balladry and soft funk grooves that take the bill out of the withers without providing anything in return. Keyboards have completely taken over as the musical foundation, with that typical mid-1970s sound that dissolves the musical bone under the pretty skin. And it no longer matters whether any of this is or is not properly «disco» — I've heard dozens of «legit» disco tunes that had far more grit and snappiness to them than something as instantly forgettable as ʽWhere You Areʼ, even if the latter has a fairly tricky time signature.

 

The only tunes that register even a tiny bit are the title track — only because it turns into a repe­titive, but enigmatic, jam in the end, where Bill keeps asking us whether we want to go to Heaven in such a worried tone that one might start believing that really ain't such a good idea; and ʽDreamsʼ, where the electric piano, bass guitar, and synthesizer engage in a pleasant enough tria­log while our host for the evening is trying to convince us that "dreams are as good as the real thing sometimes". At least the tonality of the song gives us a whiff of the old paranoid Bill Withers, not this new romantic face, indistinguishable in a crowd of similar faces.

 

Worst of the lot, unfortunately, and the one song that I would really consider a «failure», as op­posed to the «nothingness» of the rest, is the sprawling 10-minute epic ʽCity Of The Angelsʼ, Bill's sudden attempt at going «artsy» on us. Starting off with a 4-minute proto-disco groove, he then shatters it in a sea of analog and digital keyboard sprinkle, and the next six minutes are all spent wading through this quasi-ambient sonic mush. It is almost as if he were really writing a song about an «angel city» (the tune as such is about Los Angeles, as we could all guess), and thought that the perfect soundtrack to a gathering of angels would be this atmospheric «piano soup» — but, to tell the truth, if this kind of atmosphere is typical of angels, then I'd just as rather not go to Heaven, thank you very much. Nothing against ambient muzak per se, but these arran­gements sound like one lengthy boring prelude to an equally boring generic fusion jam.

 

On the whole, this might just be the single lowest point in Bill's career, and I have no idea what he was thinking to himself at the time, unless he was on drugs or something (then again, Califor­nia occasionally has this really unhealthy anti-artistic effect on Easterners) — one of those cases where a thumbs down is quite well correlated with the fact that the album was not released on CD until 2010. For very major fans only.

 

MENAGERIE (1977)

 

1) Lovely Day; 2) I Want To Spend The Night; 3) Lovely Night For Dancing; 4) Then You Smile At Me; 5) She Wants To (Get On Down); 6) It Ain't Because Of Me Baby; 7) Tender Things; 8) Wintertime; 9) Let Me Be The One You Need; 10) Rosie.

 

Strangely, even though this album is even more upbeat, sunny, and dance-oriented than Naked & Warm, it seems to produce an overall stronger impression. Maybe it is because of consistency and coherence — this time around, Bill is not even beginning to pretend that he still has any of that old «dark streak» left in him, not to mention that there is no ʽCity Of The Angelsʼ anywhere in sight, or any other attempts to carve an «art» sound out of the basics of the California dance scene. This time around, it's all about romance, chivalry, happiness, and smooth body music in the disco paradigm — soothing entertainment to relieve you of your troubles, not to remind you of your troubles. Meet Bill Withers, next in line for the title of The Ladies' Man.

 

The best news for miles around is that the album begins with ʽLovely Dayʼ — incidentally, one of the best «happy-sunny» R&B grooves of the decade, pulled up by the hair into the stratosphere by Bill's ability to hold one note (the right note, of course!) for what seems like an eternity, while his backup singers have enough time to pull in and out several times. It is really a simple trick, and it eclipses the rest of the song (which is actually quite commendable for its well-thought out funky bassline at least), but without the trick, we would not find ourselves coming back to it for any special reason. Whatever be, the song manages to ooze happiness without exaggerating it — the arrangement is fairly minimalistic, and Bill sings everything, including the extended notes, in an easy, relaxed, self-controlled manner, implying that you don't really need to jump out of your pants in order to convey that happy feel. But you do need technique and discipline.

 

The rest of the album never quite lives up to the subtle punch of the opener, but the opener sets up the mood, locks it shut, and somehow ensures that the record stays listenable and non-irritating right to the very end. Oddly, it is the funkiest / disco-est numbers that stay around for the longest time, probably because of all the repetition in the grooves — I wouldn't ever want to speak of ʽShe Wants To (Get On Down)ʼ as a dance-pop masterpiece, but the call-and-response vocal hook is infectious against my will, as is the "get up and dance with me" exhortation on ʽLovely Night For Dancingʼ (yes, there is a lot of invitations to dance throughout the album — and who'd be surprised, with Saturday Night Fever coming 'round the bend at any time?).

 

On the other hand, there is no need to pretend, either, that, apart from ʽLovely Dayʼ, Menagerie has any reason to be singled out of a swarm of similar R&B products on the mid-1970s market. The dance numbers are still undermined by Bill's «softness» and «gentlemanliness» (next to the «ruffian sound» of Chic, for instance), and the ballads... well, even the previously unissued demo version of ʽRosieʼ, now appended to the CD version of the album, with just Bill and his piano, fails to move me beyond the expectably-predictable «niceness», so when it comes to full arrange­ments, things get worse — Bill used minimal arrangements on most of his masterpieces, and most of the string and harmony parts on songs like ʽLet Me Be The One You Needʼ suffer from corny melodic moves, too much syrup, and too much formula.

 

In the end, while this is not a «thumbs down» record per se (the presence of ʽLovely Dayʼ and the absence of a ʽCity Of The Angelsʼ equivalent guarantees some neutrality), neither is it a mira­culous «return to form» as one could conclude from reading the occasional happy-faced review. Then again, not being particularly familiar with the story of Bill's personal life (I only know that 1976 was the year of his second and happiest marriage), I am quite willing to suggest that the man was simply playing the honesty card — a well-balanced, content, peaceful personal life, with all the demons exorcised and crucified, might be translatable to a musical re­cord like Menagerie with the utmost sincerity. Good for him — Marvin Gaye might have had a far more exciting musical career from beginning to end, but nobody in one's right mind should wish anybody else the life of a Marvin Gaye rather than that of a Bill Withers, right?

 

'BOUT LOVE (1979)

 

1) All Because Of You; 2) Dedicated To You My Love; 3) Don't It Make It Better; 4) You Got The Stuff; 5) Look To Each Other For Love; 6) Love; 7) Love Is; 8) Memories Are That Way.

 

This relatively uninspiring sequel to Menagerie was produced by Paul Smith, a legendary jazz pianist mostly known for accompanying Ella Fitzgerald; he also co-wrote several of the songs and played on all the recordings. If there ever was a waste of talent, though, that must be it, be­cause 'Bout Love has nothing to do with classic jazz and everything with generic, «tepid» R&B: no disco as such, just another bunch of friendly, danceable, and almost completely interchan­geable grooves that leave no lasting impression whatsoever.

 

Unfortunately, this time around there is no ʽLovely Dayʼ to redeem the album with at least a single unbeatable hook, and not even a ʽShe Wants To (Get On Down)ʼ to add frenzied energy: indeed, I would rather welcome a fast, tight, determined disco-rocker than have to listen to these happy, toothless, family-friendly grooves one after another. ʽYou Got The Stuffʼ, with a funky rhythm pattern, probably comes the closest to satisfying the desire for a bit of grit, but it more or less makes its point over the first thirty seconds, and then just goes on grooving without any de­velopment — if it were a live funk jam, that'd be one thing, but in this context the musicians just stick to the groove and refuse to let go of the pre-arranged patterns. And where the heck is Paul Smith and his piano chops? He is, indeed, co-credited, but it is not highly likely that this is the kind of arrangement he would have offered to Ella.

 

Are the songs catchy? Perhaps. As on his previous two or three albums, the choruses are so re­petitive that all these "high as the birds that fly above the clouds..." (ʽAll Because Of Youʼ) and "love is caring, love is needing..." (ʽLove Isʼ) will end up sticking to your brains after a few lis­tens. But it is a boring kind of catchiness: try as the man might, he just isn't able to come up with any outstanding take on the virtues of love. As supercool as he was when exposing the underbelly of the human soul, Bill Withers as a Preacher of Goodness continues to be just another smiling face in the crowd. It is a pleasant, likeable, friendly face alright — you know that guy on the front sleeve will be a gas to hang out with, since that smile don't lie — but it doesn't come equipped with any wonderful musical ideas.

 

As usual, there is at least one song per album to offer a brief reminder of the old Bill Withers: this time, it is the album closer, ʽMemories Are That Wayʼ, a slow, moody ballad with inarguably the best vocal performance from the man — infused with melancholia and sadness, peppered with drawn-out, painfully soaring notes, and actually featuring some discernible piano playing from Paul Smith for a change. It is completely incompatible with the rest of the album — an «after­party» song, to be savored for last once the basic club audiences have all gone home and the entertainment is over — and, interestingly enough, it is the only song here credited solely to Bill, as if he surreptitiously wanted to lay at least a part of the blame on the shoulders of his co-writers, but decided to save up the best song completely for himself.

 

All in all, ʽMemories Are That Wayʼ is definitely worth salvaging, and perhaps one or two of the tighter grooves here, such as ʽYou Got The Stuffʼ, might be worth including on compilations for historical purposes, but on the whole, 'Bout Love drops one notch below Menagerie in quality. No thumbs down, what with everything being so innocent and harmless, but only really recom­mendable for fans of standardized 1970s dance music, and maybe also for that elusive subcate­gory of «shiny happy people» who might want to mind-meld with Bill on that one.

 

WATCHING YOU, WATCHING ME (1985)

 

1) Oh Yeah!; 2) Something That Turns You On; 3) Don't Make Me Wait; 4) Heart In Your Life; 5) Watching You, Watching Me; 6) We Could Be Sweet Lovers; 7) You Just Can't Smile It Away; 8) Steppin' Right Along; 9) Whatever Happens; 10) You Try To Find A Love.

 

No matter what the circumstances are, generic, unadventurous R&B from the Seventies will always be preferable to generic, unadventurous R&B from the Eighties — for the simple reason that in the Eighties, musicianship as such was pretty much exiled from the world of generic R&B, replaced by plastic electronics and robotic dance grooves. Consequently, the only good R&B to come from the Eighties is non-generic R&B, and the more it violates these standards, the more chances it has to be good.

 

I sure wish Bill Withers' last studio LP could have satisfied this hope, but alas, that was not to be. Produced and engineered by a bunch of hacks, this pathetic result of Bill's long-awaited return to Columbia studios is a stylistic disaster, and should rank, along with Naked & Warm, as one of the biggest disappointments in a formerly great artist — the distance between Still Bill and Wat­ching You, Watching Me is comparable to... well, then again, pretty much any great R&B artist ruling the public tastes in the Sixties or Seventies sucked in the Eighties. The difference is that Bill, at his best, was so much more than an R&B artist — and here, well, he ends up sounding like a roughly trained disciple of Luther Vandross.

 

Electronic drums, synthesizers, and ecstatic guitar wank-a-thons that plague Watching You are, however, only one half of the problem — the other half is that most of the songs are completely uninteresting. Bill's voice, always pleasant in and out of itself, is still in great shape, but it is applied to rotten melodies whose only purpose is to sound «uplifting». It's not as if the melodic structures of the songs got too simplified or ran out of inspiration — it is simply that the album is drenched in banality, and Bill's one-time ability to play this multi-faceted, almost perversely fas­cinating character, sweet and frightening at the same time, has completely evaporated. This end­less stream of superficially diverse, but substantially quite interchangeable love ballads and softly lukewarm dance rockers is instantaneously forgettable.

 

The only possible exception, which might not even reveal itself upon first listen, is ʽSteppin' Right Awayʼ, a slightly grittier groove that begins as an ode to the secret magic of love and then ends up incorporating The Lord's Prayer in the funkiest arrangement ever seen since the days of Jesus, when the Master, no doubt, used to get it on with his disciples on a daily basis. Nowhere near a classic, the song stands out simply because everything else is so forgettable — I am sort of interested in thinking what would somebody like Prince have made out of it, given the chance, because Bill, unfortunately, can put a groove under his control, but cannot develop it to any sort of climactic peak, if you know what I mean.

 

No other track here deserves even a brief mention. Everything is as glossy and sterile as the al­bum sleeve suggests — with its dashing white colors more suggestive of a stuffy hospital than of Paradise — and the result is a rather ignoble thumbs down and a pretty sad end for a career that began with so much promise. I do not know why Bill chose to retire from the music business (or, at least, from studio recording) almost completely after this album, but I would not be surprised if, deep inside himself, he actually understood that he had nothing left to say to the world, and that his life hours would rather be spent somewhere else than wasted on further impotent attempts at songwriting and recording. One might also suggest that here was just another victim of stupid musical fashions and cruel music business. Whatever be the case, you'd be much better off saving yourself the trouble and forgetting this album ever existed.

 

BILLY JOEL

ATTILA (1970)

 

1) California Flash; 2) Wonder Woman; 3) Revenge Is Sweet; 4) Amplifier Fire; 5) Rollin' Home; 6) Tear This Castle Down; 7) Holy Moses; 8) Brain Invasion.

 

From time to time, critics get bored and go on a hunt to find «the worst album of all time». As a rule, the hunt process does not involve the critics specifying what they mean by «worst», so, de­pending on one's own criteria, they might return with either Rod Stewart's Blondes Have More Fun or Sgt. Pepper hanging on their belt — no matter, really, as long as the album seems «out­standingly» something. Outstandingly pretentious, outstandingly unprofessional, outstandingly overproduced, outstandingly conceptually-idiotic, whatever. You cannot take, say, a Backstreet Boys album and declare it the worst ever just because it is so utterly boring. Boring is not out­standing. The album has to scream I'M THE WORST right in your cringing face.

 

Viewed from that angle, Attila is as easy a piece of game as they come. Recorded in 1970, at the peak or near-peak of trendiness of all things «heavy» and «progressive», it features young aspi­ring keyboardist and singer Billy Joel, his pal Jon Small on percussion, and... that's it. An organ / drums combo, with Billy, like Ray Manzarek, supplying the required bass parts with his second (sometimes third) hand. A unique experiment, to be sure, within the «rock» world at least, and one that would surely have to be loved, if it succeeded, or hated, if it failed. Guess which.

 

Ever since the album's release, it has quite consistently been featured on all sorts of «worst ever» lists, with its status currently codified by S. Th. Erlewine in the All-Music Guide: «there have been many bad ideas in rock, but none match the colossal stupidity of Attila» — a phrase that, I am sure of it, has increased Attila's popularity twentyfold and sends dozens, if not hundreds, of curiosity seekers and cheap thrill aficionados in search of used copies or faithful uploads of the album on a yearly, if not daily, basis. Who could ever stay away from savoring The Most Colos­sal Stupidity in Rock? The sight of the two thoroughly stoned Huns in quasi-authentic attire alone, standing as they are inside a meat locker, would be enough to ensure proper cult status.

 

What is more interesting, however, is whether any of these people would actually want to agree with Erlewine's and other critics' assessments. As far as mine is concerned, I find nothing inhe­rently wrong in the «idea» of Attila, and even find a few things to like about how the idea was realized — the one major flaw of the record is its monotonousness, as the same basic emotional state is being generated and explored on virtually every song. For instance, with Billy being a competent organist, you'd think they might have allocated a couple spots for «softer» stuff — mixing in some gospel, soul, or classical influences. In fact, knowing Billy's subsequent reputa­tion, you would probably very much expect a couple spots for «softer» stuff! But no, what you get throughout is «Billy Joel, The Organ Godzilla», and as fun as it may be to watch Godzilla blast its way through several blocks of Manhattan, you'd probably fall asleep midway through, were you forced to watch the beast's entire journey from Battery Park to Isham Park.

 

That said, it is downright hilarious to see the dinosauric duo open up with a set of distorted, over­driven organ hiccups that clearly mimic the intro to Hendrix's ʽVoodoo Chile (Slight Return)ʼ — but only to serve as the opening fanfare for a song about a... male stripper? Whatever. Along the way, as Billy unfurls the silly saga of «California Flash», he makes his organ squeal, grunt, roar, and make just about every aggressive noise that the poor instrument is capable of when connec­ted to every amp, pedal, and special effect generator that could be afforded by two struggling bar­barian musi­cians operating from inside a meat locker. However, I have no idea what the afore­mentioned Mr. Erlewine is talking about when he speaks of a «wall of white noise» — no matter how much gadgetry Billy has hooked up to his keys, he is most clearly playing them; and, while we're at it, the funky bass riff he blasts out at about 1:06 into the song is awesome.

 

Fairly often, Attila sounds like Gillan-era Deep Purple with Gillan (and Blackmore, and Paice) removed — similarities between Jon Lord's incorporation, use, and abuse of classical motifs and Billy's «experimental» approach are inescapable, although, to be fair, it must be noted that In Rock, on which Lord finally consented to adopt a heavy distorted sound, was only released a month prior to Attila, and it is not even clear if Billy and Jon knew at all about Deep Purple's ex­istence on the other side of the ocean. In any case, extended organ jamming on tracks such as ʽAmplifier Fireʼ and ʽBrain Invasionʼ is stylistically quite similar to the lengthy escapades one hears from Lord on early Purple jams, and even though Joel's technique and complexity seems to be slightly (but not tremendously) below Jon's, Attila is not to be castigated for being inept or incompetent — both men had enough qualification to work in any second-rate «progressive» band of the time. The question is, with so many first-rate progressive bands around, why would we actually care about their employment?

 

Ultimately, it all depends on whether you believe that a combo like this could actually «rock». This is, after all, what they set out to do in the first place — «tear the castle down» with «amp­li­fier fire» in an all-out «brain invasion», «Holy Moses»! There is no place for subtlety, spiritual depth, or contemplation here. Even a forty-minute album by Hendrix himself with that much brawn on the outside would be capable of melting your brains — now what about a forty-minute album where, instead of inventive electric guitar soloing by one of the most visionary players who ever lived, you get formally competent, but utterly derivative distorted organ soloing by a guy who would later go on to give us... well, you know.

 

I have read statements that complained how Joel's organ tones on this album gave people head­aches — a little amusing, really, for anybody living in a post-Metal Machine Music world. Much more troubling is to realize that the songs work as «unintentional comedy», reminding one of parodies on the whole «let's rock the classics» movement, like ELP's ʽNutrockerʼ, except that the only people in the world who do not realize the album's parodic value are its very authors. But on the other hand, I also believe that at least half of these songs do feature interesting riffs, and that in terms of composition alone, Attila is hardly worse than a large part of Billy's subsequent output. It's all wasted — on a curious, but inadequate enterprise, but «worst album ever?» Come now, Uriah Heep's Very 'Eavy, Very 'Umble was released at the same time, shared many of Attila's problems (silliness, pretentiousness, extra overdrive) and actually had fewer memorable riffs. Just because the band actually had its own guitar player should not automatically act as a status raiser. And a rotting head on the album cover is not too much of an upgrade over a couple of «Huns» in a meat locker, unless you're a vegetarian and a necrophile at the same time. Oh, and the rating? Well, thumbs down, without any provocative iconoclasm, but a mildly amused one. Still worth a listen, if only to capture just a bit more of that ultraviolet from 1970.

 

 

COLD SPRING HARBOR (1971)

 

1) She's Got A Way; 2) You Can Make Me Free; 3) Everybody Loves You Now; 4) Why Judy Why; 5) Falling Of The Rain; 6) Turn Around; 7) You Look So Good To Me; 8) Tomorrow Is Today; 9) Nocturne; 10) Got To Begin Again.

 

One would be hard pressed to think of a more confused and silly-running beginning of a profes­sional career than Billy Joel's. So you have just formed one of the strangest combos in rock music and released one of the most maligned and ridiculed albums of all time, and you really have no one to blame for that but yourself. So what is your next move? Naturally, to elope with the wife of your drummer (Elizabeth Small / Joel, whom Billy would marry in 1972 and divorce ten years later when she got too old for him, a process that he subseuqently put in replay mode). When this, too, somehow failed to bring him artistic success, Billy started feeling like a brokedown table — and drank a whole bottle of furniture polish to remedy the situation.

 

Had he succeeded in that, B. J. would have forever remained in our hearts and souls as the «Meat Locker Hun», a perennial scarecrow to shoo novices away from dangerous musical excesses and distorted organ overdosing. Fortunately, the good fairy intervened at the last moment and turned the furniture polish into a 20th century equivalent of Brangäne's Love Potion: overnight, Billy woke up with a sick stomach and the tender, sentimental spirit of a romantic balladeer. No more ridiculous «hard rock» for yesterday's Hun — in July 1971 he was back in the studio, recording his first «proper» album for the soft-rock / folk-pop market.

 

Cold Spring Harbor is kind of a special record in the hearts of some of the fans. Although it is not really «transitional», since it pretty much lays down all the foundations of the Billy Joel for­mula for centuries to come, it still has its own distinct personality — the relative sparseness of arrangements, where, all too often, it is just Billy and his piano, sets it apart from the full-band style of Piano Man and subsequent releases, so we have sort of an Intimate Portrait of the Bud­ding Artist here. Or maybe it's just the fact that he still got his moustache, I'm not really sure. In any case, there are backing musicians (such as Richard Bennett, Neil Diamond's resident accom­panyist, on guitar; Emory Gordy Jr. on bass, etc.), but they are really only there to save the record from becoming too monotonous.

 

Of which there is a serious danger, since Billy's commitment to modern-day troubadour aesthe­tics is fairly unidirectional. Completely jettisoning his «psychedelic rock» persona, he now declares an open love for sweet piano pop in all of its forms — hearkening back to pre-war vaudeville and Hoagy Carmichael as much as being influenced by Carole King, Paul McCartney, and that whole newly nascent merger of pop, folk, country, and watered-down rock which, by 1971, had already became one of the most popular types of music in mainstream entertainment. Furthermore, Billy selects the «starry-eyed», «heart-on-sleeve» attitude rather than the self-consciously ironic or hyper-intellectualized approaches — nothing that would particularly appeal to fans of, say, Randy Newman or Joni Mitchell.

 

Under these conditions, the only thing that can save one's music is raw talent — playing, singing, composing, or, better still, any of these combined. The problem is that, on all these scales, Cold Spring Harbor registers as «okay». In the playing department, Billy's self-taught technique is impressive (he certainly spent far more time practicing than McCartney), but not enough to put him over any particular top — the instrumental ʽNocturneʼ, for instance, is not likely to make Chopin roll over, making its point with persistent repetition of the theme rather than throwing in any intricate variations. As a singer, he certainly earns more respect here than with Attila, and his tones and phrasing suit his melodies fairly adequately (it would have been much worse if he'd tried to pull off a Neil Diamond), but the voice lacks «that certain something» to carve out its own niche — as much as I like to poke fun at something like Neil Young's whiny soundwaves, they at least have their own personality, whereas the presence of any sort of «personality» in the ballads of Cold Spring Harbor (or any of its follow-ups, for that matter) is under doubt.

 

What remains are the melodies themselves: Billy's chief claim to fame — yet they, too, give the impression of «competence» rather than «genius». A song like ʽShe's Got A Wayʼ has all the ex­ternal signs of a gorgeous love ballad, but falls quite a few slices short of a loaf, earning the liste­ner's love with atmosphere rather than chord sequences or elegant, admirably symmetric const­ruction of the vocal melody. You'd think there'd have to at least be some sort of an explosion in the bridge / refrain, but there is none, other than a slight pitch rise on the final "...I get turned around", which is basically just a simple cop-out of an unsolved problem, so it seems. The result is a «pretty», not too annoying, tune that never truly reaches for those strings that lead directly to the seat of emotions — and I'd probably rather take something as simple as Paul McCartney's ʽWarm And Beautifulʼ (a little-remembered tune from Wings At The Speed Of Sound) over this, as well as just about any other ballad on the album.

 

As it happens, Cold Spring Harbor wouldn't even begin making it into my personal Top 100 chart for 1971 (to be fair, nor did it with the general public at the time, although Billy himself used to ascribe this to an unfortunate incident in which the tapes were slightly sped up during the vinyl transfer, making him sound like a bit of a chipmunk — since the reissue, this has been cor­rected, but who really knows? maybe the record was more fun that way). In fact, it is a record that almost invites you to despise it: mediocre, generic, striving for lofty heights with trivial means, and I have not even begun to talk about the lyrics. (ʽTomorrow Is Todayʼ is said to be Billy's re­collection of the furniture polish incident — "Made my bed, I'm gonna lie in it / If you don't come, I'm sure gonna die in it" is quite a furniture-polish-level couple of lines, to be sure).

 

Still, somehow, somewhere, just like Attila ended up surprisingly better than its reputation, Cold Spring Harbor also exudes a certain mystical charm that prevents me from cringing all the way through. Maybe it's a matter of production — all this minimalist flair, with minimal orchestration (Artie Ripp, the guy responsible for the speeding-up mistake, originally added orchestration to ʽTomorrow Is Todayʼ, but Billy later removed it). Maybe it's because some of the simple little vocal hooks — very simple little hooks — that Billy adds to sapfests like ʽYou Can Make Me Freeʼ or ʽTurn Aroundʼ are delivered in an accordingly simple manner: no pomp means no hate. But most of all, maybe it is because Cold Spring Harbor is very much a «homebrewed» affair: unlike, say, a Neil Diamond album or a Carpenters album, you do not get the feeling of The Big Corporate Machine backing up Billy's moustache. It's his own game here, sincerely conceived and honestly laid down. «Poor man's Paul McCartney / poor man's Elton John», for sure, but at this stage, this is at least an honestly poor man trying to lay down his feelings as best he can (and doing tolerably well), not a spoiled ugly millionaire divorcing his third wife.

 

PIANO MAN (1973)

 

1) Travelin' Prayer; 2) Piano Man; 3) Ain't No Crime; 4) You're My Home; 5) The Ballad Of Billy The Kid; 6) Worse Comes To Worst; 7) Stop In Nevada; 8) If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You); 9) Somewhere Along The Line; 10) Captain Jack.

 

Third time's the charm: on Piano Man, Billy Joel finally found Billy Joel and confronted him face to face. The album title may have been a little arrogant, because by 1973, everybody knew who was the real piano man — Elton John; Billy, however, indirectly insinuated that the US of A should have its own piano man for its own patriotic reasons, and that he was perfectly willing, capable, and ready to be to Elton what the Monkees were to the Beatles. And for now, let us as­sume that this is a compliment for the Monkees, not a slur for Billy.

 

After a live Philadelphia radio broadcast of ʽCaptain Jackʼ garnered much interest, Billy got him­self a contract with Columbia, moved to Los Angeles, got himself a professional backing band, and finally recorded an album that managed to present him as a coherent artist without, however, having to pigeonhole himself directly in one image, be it a mad organ grinder or a sentimental serenader. Piano Man is a well-balanced mix of roots-rock, vaudeville, folksy singer-songwriting, orchestrated ballads, and a little bit of old-fashioned rock'n'roll — essentially the same formula as Elton's, but ever so slightly «Americanized» for local enjoyment. No coincidence, after all, that the very first song greets us with banjo, fiddle, and a general honky-tonk atmosphere.

 

One thing Billy never thought of was hiring a good lyricist: all the words to his songs come from his own mind, and neither depth of meaning nor complexity of expression were ever among his fortes — which, on one hand, helped him find mass appeal, but, on the other, exposed him to plenty of critical ridicule. He is a clumsy one, for sure: ʽThe Ballad Of Billy The Kidʼ, for ins­tance, takes great liberties with the historic facts on Billy The Kid (who was never hanged, for that matter), without ever letting us know why it does that, creating the impression that the author was either illiterate or had a warped understanding of the meaning of «artistic license». Or take the title track — «meaningless lives commemorated at the local bar stand» is a worn out theme that, nevertheless, can always use a little extra exploration, but Billy's «telling it like it is» ap­proach reeks of boredom and limited verbal talent rather than artistic realism.

 

None of which would be too bad if Piano Man were one of those albums where «the lyrics do not really matter», but they do, since Billy wires them up to his melodies; and just like his lyrics, his melodies are easily comprehensible, accessible, and even memorable, but not particularly in­teresting. On the «epic» tunes, such as the title track, ʽBilly The Kidʼ, and ʽCaptain Jackʼ, Joel seems to be more interested in telling a story, with predictable musical accompaniment through­out, playing the part of a «street poet-observer» (or, in the case of ʽKidʼ, «dirt road poet-obser­ver»), and your ability to enjoy these songs as a whole will surely depend on whether the guy manages to hook you up in the first few minutes, whether that stark, simple combination of voice, piano, and content will make you feel inspired, or cringe in disgust, or leave you utterly unaffec­ted in either direction. And that, in turn, will surely depend upon your previous experience. For instance: if you have heard Elton John's ʽBallad Of A Well-Known Gunʼ and Billy Joel's ʽThe Ballad Of Billy The Kidʼ, what would you prefer? And if you prefer the former, would it, in any way, bias you against the latter? In my case, it does.

 

The thing that works in Billy's favor is that it takes impoliteness and cruelty to shoot the piano man. His singing on the album is exceptional — powerful, ringing, well-ranged — and his play­ing fluent and fun as usual. He is neither being too humble or minimalistic so as to let anyone suspect unprofessionalism, nor trying to rise to particularly pretentious heights: ʽCaptain Jackʼ comes a little close, but it's about heroin addiction, after all, and when you are subtly campaign­ing against heroin addiction, anything goes. These songs aren't great, because great songs ought to have a mystery component, and my feelings detect no mystery here whatsoever — but they all sound «okay» where they could have sounded much worse, and maybe it's even for the better that Joel sets them to such basic, familiar melody patterns.

 

Actually, from a melodic standpoint, Billy's best compositions should probably be sought among the shorter tracks here — particularly ʽWorse Comes To Worstʼ, distinguished with a funky wah-wah guitar part that sounds highly unusual for this kind of album (and this is probably the only time in music history when somebody tried to marry funky wah-wah guitar to an accordeon!); and ʽSomewhere Along The Lineʼ, which might be the most blatantly Elton John-like tune on the entire record (echoes of ʽBorder Songʼ and ʽTake Me To The Pilotʼ all over the place), but it still takes talent to come up with such a good variation. The orchestrated coda to ʽBilly The Kidʼ is fairly good, too, come to think of it: Billy's take on what a «Billy Joel Piano Concerto No. 1» would probably look like.

 

If we are going to give any thumbs up to Billy at all, Piano Man is as good a record as any in his catalog to be our first choice. Of all the flaws to be found on Billy's records, it only shows those general flaws that are inherently wired in «Billy The Artist» as a concept — there is really no complaining about how the songs lack hooks, or how the production lacks taste, or how the singer lacks commitment, or how the lyricist is a stupid moralizer, etc. Like myself, you may feel no pressing need to ever hear a single one of these songs again — but that would be no reason to deny or condemn access to them for other people, because Piano Man, unlike, say, something like Aerosmith's Get A Grip or a late period Rod Stewart album, seems completely harmless for the central nervous system and the future paths of human evolution. Just as long as you don't spend too much time looking at the album sleeve, that is — I've heard rumors that Medusa look on the cover acts as a strong petrifier on people with low immunity levels.

 

STREETLIFE SERENADE (1974)

 

1) Streetlife Serenader; 2) Los Angelinos; 3) The Great Suburban Showdown; 4) Root Beer Rag; 5) Roberta; 6) The Entertainer; 7) Last Of The Big Time Spenders; 8) Weekend Song; 9) Souvenir; 10) The Mexican Connection.

 

Brace yourself for a serious statement — this is not just a «piano pop» album, but a sprawling panorama of California circa 1974. A couple of instrumental tunes and a couple of universally suitable ballads can be still tied in with the general concept, which revolves around the perceptive and insightful singer-songwriter sick and tired of the gay, nonchalant, sunny lifestyle on the West Coast that yields only superficial comfort and prevents the artist from aspiring to higher goals, because how can you ever aspire to higher goals with mountains of coke and hordes of bikini-clad beauties blocking the sun from you? "Such hot sweet schoolgirls, so educated", "going into garages for exotic massages" and all that. Tough, ungrateful life without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Damn all that hot sun and light sea breeze.

 

The music honestly reflects the darker, sterner processes in Billy's mind — it is now less oriented at a «rootsy» sound and seems more influenced by the progressive movement, as the man pro­cures himself some trendy synthesizers (most prominently heard on ʽThe Entertainerʼ), rolls out some dark piano colors, strengthened by hard rock guitars (most prominently heard on ʽLos An­gelenosʼ), and does everything in his power to come up with an album that would be traditionally «accessible», yet not too overtly «commercial» — the only single was ʽThe Entertainerʼ, a song that actually bashes the ideology of entertainment and the structure of the charts so explicitly that even the public seems to have gotten it: few people bought the single, even fewer people bought the album, and in the end, Streetlife Serenade cost him some public support without compensa­ting for any extra critical favor.

 

The basic problem remains the same as before: the ambitions of the artist are by no means mat­ched by artistic genius. ʽThe Entertainerʼ raves and rants about the cruel industry ("It was a beau­tiful song / But it ran too long / You're gonna have a hit / You gotta make it fit / So they cut it down to 3:05"), but if the lyrics do indeed refer directly to Billy's struggle with the record in­dustry people over the length of ʽPiano Manʼ — well, Billy, not everybody in the world agrees that ʽPiano Manʼ actually deserves a six-minute running time; it's just a generic waltz, for Christ's sake, not a Beethoven's 9th or even a ʽHey Judeʼ, for that matter. How about some modesty here? For that matter, without all the righteous anger ʽThe Entertainerʼ could have been a nifty little pop teaser, vocally catchy and with fun use of the synthesizer, but using that sort of melody for a Big Cultural Statement is off-putting.

 

If you «mentally delete» most of the lyrics and some of the heroic posturing, Streetlife Serenade isn't too bad, though, and should probably rank up there with «second-tier» Elton John albums (although, of all the songs, only ʽLast Of The Big Time Spendersʼ sounds directly like one of those semi-inspired Elton ballads). ʽStreetlife Serenaderʼ has an inoffensive, nicely flowing piano melody whose lack of dynamic flow is somewhat compensated by nuanced little flourishes that show Billy's romantic classical piano influences without compromising good taste. ʽThe Great Suburban Showdownʼ skilfully combines pedal steel with synthesizers and ends up sounding like a Bee Gees song circa Life In A Tin Can — yet another record with a brotherly spirit about how boring life can be in L.A., but ʽShowdownʼ would have probably been a highlight on it. ʽWeek­end Songʼ is a good one to enjoy on a lonesome evening when you'd like to get drunk and go on the town but lack the money, the spirit, and the real will to do so.

 

And then there are the instrumentals. ʽRoot Beer Ragʼ sounds pretty much the exact way as the title would suggest — with a few whiny whees from synthesizers that creep up behind your back every now and then, but mostly just relying on the good old honky tonk and Scott Joplin for in­spiration. ʽThe Mexican Connectionʼ begins like an incidental piece of elevator muzak, cuddled around a pretty, but repetitive pop riff, but then does break into a Mexican part, also justifying the title. In the end, both provide some harmless fun.

 

What totally kills off Streetlife Serenade, though, and opens up all sorts of possibilities for get­ting seriously irritated, is its — and Billy's in general — total lack of any sense of humor. So ʽRoot Beer Ragʼ is «funny», because, you know, it's ragtime played light and fast, that's always funny by definition, but we are not talking about that: we are talking about how deadpan serious this whole thing plays out, even if the man simply cannot handle «serious» on the same level with the truly «serious» performers. Even the irony is delivered with a vengeful attitude, but even when Billy Joel was playing Attila the Hun, he could never begin to hope to scare the shit out of you — much less now, when he is playing lyrical pianos and futuristic synthesizers.

 

The whole thing is about as huge a Social Artistic Statement as you'd expect from the average Miss North Carolina, memorizing answers to generic questions on family values and world peace from cue cards. And I sure wish I could forget about it and just enjoy the tunes, but the awful thing is, the tunes just aren't that great — decent, not great — to win over you on their own. They are served to you on the same platter with personality, and you can't really separate one from the other. The only reason I can sit through an album like this without cringing is that I honestly like Billy's voice and phrasing — even when he is splurging out banalities, he sounds more like a genuine human being than, say, Tom Jones or David Coverdale, and for that alone, Streetlife Serenade should be redeemed from the numerous accusations by professional «Joel haters» who could spend their time more wisely hating somebody else. Leo Sayer, for example. Why don't we all go hate Leo Sayer? He sold a lot of records, too.

 

TURNSTILES (1976)

 

1) Say Goodbye To Hollywood; 2) Summer, Highland Falls; 3) All You Wanna Do Is Dance; 4) New York State Of Mind; 5) James; 6) Prelude / Angry Young Man; 7) I've Loved These Days; 8) Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway).

 

Billy Joel is back on the East Coast, and he wants you to know it. No, scrape that, make it «he wants you to feel it with the most sensitive fibers of your soul». He did not like it in California, he likes it a lot better in New York, and this provides him with enough inspiration for 36 con­ceptually organized minutes — and a rather odd-looking album sleeve photoshoot where he is looking at you as if you were a policeman, readying to apprehend the artist for attempting to take a subway ride without a ticket. Meanwhile, each of the people behind his back is supposed to illustrate one of the stories behind the songs, solidifying this comprehensive panorama of life in the Big Apple as forming a much more interesting, if not necessarily much more wholesome, opposition to life on Sunset Boulevard.

 

The album quite consciously begins with a Californian touch — not only is the message of ʽSay Goodbye To Hollywoodʼ totally transparent already from the title, but it also chooses the rhyth­mics and arrangement style of Phil Spector's and the Ronettes' ʽBe My Babyʼ for its backbone: not coincidentally, the original song was recorded at the Gold Star Studios in LA, even though both Phil Spector and the Ronettes were both from the New York area, so this is as good a hint as any at Billy's «transition» — bye-bye Hollywood, hello Manhattan.

 

But it's all fine and dandy with the symbolism, what about the actual song? Well... it's «okay». Decent imitation of Spector's wall-of-sound, big bombastic drums and saxes and all, except Phil used these things to imitate romantic soaring of the spirit, while Billy seems to imitate them just because he wants to. The repetitive chorus of "say goodbye to Hollywood, say goodbye my baby" quickly sticks in your head all right, but I have no idea what I am supposed to feel about it. Laugh? Cry? Ache? Rejoice? For a good example of a tribute that is quite spiritually true to Spector's vi­sion, check out ʽDon't Answer Meʼ from Alan Parsons' Ammonia Avenue; ʽSay Goodbye To Hollywoodʼ, in comparison, is technically accomplished but emotionally dead.

 

Not that it necessarily gets better even when the song is quite emotionally alive: few things in this world are cornier than ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ, where Billy channels about 50% Sinatra spirit and 50% Ray Charles and, once again, ends up like a really cheap, but extremely pretentious, shadow of both. It may be one of the most lyrically direct and slavering anthems to the city ever written, but the lyrics are awfully crude and straightforward, the melodic moves are too text­book­ishly predictable, and the resulting love declaration really has all the potency of a birthday greet­ings card bought in the nearest Five and Dime. It is too bad that the talents of sax master Phil Woods, specially recruited by Billy to add depth and authenticity to the song, are unable to save the song — it still sounds way too much like the product of somebody's rashful decision to have himself his own ʽGeorgia On My Mindʼ or die trying.

 

Unfortunately, I do not have anything better to say about the rest of the songs. The only one I'd really care to hear again is probably ʽAngry Young Manʼ, mainly due to its introductory ʽPreludeʼ section — which arguably packs more composing ideas than the rest of the album in its entirety, and provides the album's lightest, most adequate and simply-friendly two minutes of entertain­ment. What follows, though, is an attempt at yet another Deep Important Statement, in which our hero expresses profound sympathy towards the collective Angry Young Man ("he's been stabbed in the back, he's been misunderstood") while at the same time decisively distancing himself from such a personality ("I believe I've passed the age / Of consciousness and righteous rage"). It is very hard to refrain from snickering at lines like "I once believed in causes too", though, looking back on Billy's past and remembering Attila the Hun in the meat locker — does that count as one of the causes? Look at the «angry young man» of Attila and, say, the «angry young man» of ʽMy Generationʼ or ʽLondon's Burningʼ, then tell me who is really an expert on the «age of righteous rage» and whose credentials are more trustworthy.

 

And we have not even begun to mention the really awful songs on the record — such as ʽJamesʼ, a tepid electric piano ballad that swaddles you sick, or ʽAll You Wanna Do Is Danceʼ, which, seeing as how it is a song about New York in 1976, should have been a disco track, but, for some reason, is really ska (taken much too seriously once again for such a style). Here there is really no interesting composing to speak of — but the tone and the message stay as intentionally serious as everything else. The man is simply riding on his own wavelength, overestimating his talents and insights to such a huge extent that he is simply bound to get himself a fanbase, out of all the people who regularly confuse style with substance. Throw in a bit of orchestral bombast with ʽI've Loved These Daysʼ and a bit of «rock'n'roll bombast» with the half-Elton, half-Springsteen ʽMiami 2017ʼ, and voilà, you are already a source of simplistic inspiration for a massive audience, and ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ gets covered by Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett.

 

To be fair, Turnstiles was a serious commercial letdown for Billy, with sales dropping quite radically from the level of his Californian records — it would take the extra sophistication of The Stranger for New York to finally accept his new streetlife serenader. Musical life was rich and diverse in the Big Apple in 1976, way too colorful for people to fall in droves for this third-rate piano pop pretending to major artistry level. Unfortunately, this did not prevent the songs from eventually becoming radio and concert staples: once Billy Joel became a household name, ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ, ʽI've Loved These Daysʼ and ʽAngry Young Manʼ became a constant pre­sence in American life — and, for some reason, in a «rock» context at that, despite really be­ing a set of Broadway musical tunes.

 

As usual, «hatred» for this album is out of the question: on the whole, Turnstiles is not so much «godawful» as it is «useless», a record that has no reason to exist in the presence of Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, and, I am afraid to say, even Bee Gees albums of the same era. And maybe I wouldn't have been so direct in this judgement if it weren't for Billy's provocative pose on the album sleeve — every time I take another look, it's like he's staring me directly in the face: «Well? What do you think, really? Have I made it? Is it on the level? Are they gonna let me past that turnstile? See, I've brought some friends with me, they'll all vouch I'm a good guy, really! Ho­nest­­ly! Swear to God, I do belong!» Come on now, Mr. Joel, you don't need to be trying that hard, really. Nothing against you personally, but it gets irritating. I'd like to like this music, but I can't stand that striped tie of yours, so a thumbs down it is.

 

THE STRANGER (1977)

 

1) Movin' Out (Anthony's Song); 2) The Stranger; 3) Just The Way You Are; 4) Scenes From An Italian Restaurant; 5) Vienna; 6) Only The Good Die Young; 7) She's Always A Woman; 8) Get It Right The First Time; 9) Everybody Has A Dream.

 

Add a good producer to Turnstiles, and you get The Stranger — Billy's critical and commercial zenith; indeed, a good candidate for «Billy Joel at his ultimately possible best». Phil Ramone had only just produced Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years, a bright example of singer-songwriterish soft-rock elevated to high artistry level, so Billy's interest in the man was natural, and laudable, seeing as how the poor production quality of Turnstiles was among that album's weightiest flaws. And when I say «poor production quality», I do not merely mean engineering and mixing — I mean choice of arrangements, lyrics-to-melody matching, excessive reliance on imitations and clichés, and other such things for which Joel could have used a good mentor by his side. The Stranger corrects that mistake.

 

But first, about Billy's own «progress». From my general point of view, the value of the average Billy Joel album can be aptly described with the formula «catchiness divided by self-importance» — in other words, the heavier the message, the cringier the impression. In that respect, The Stranger is a major improvement over Turnstiles: there is no big overriding concept here, such as «Los An­geles, the Whore of Babylon, vs. New York, the Thinking Man's City», or «The Artist and His Management». The lyrical and emotional content of the album still strive for seriousness, but they are scattered all over the map and rarely impose on the listener in a brutal manner — even such a magnum opus as ʽScenes From An Italian Restaurantʼ is merely an understated narrative; and in most cases, words and music combine with each other quite sensibly.

 

Speaking of the music, the album's loudest tracks now consistently resemble Supertramp — the same kind of glossy vaudeville combined with elements of «progressive» complexity and delive­red in an atmosphere of bitter irony. And insanely catchy — ʽMovin' Outʼ is one of the liveliest tunes about the trials and tribulations of hard-working immigrants ever written. You listen, you have a good time, you tap your feet, you play air guitar, and you sympathize for poor Anthony working in the grocery store. (Of course, soon enough he might be hitting it off with Karen Lynn Gorney, but Billy's vision is not always that far-reaching). The main melody, especially when played on solo piano, stands way too close to the instrumental coda of Clapton's ʽLaylaʼ for com­fort, but this is just an impressionistic observation, not really a criticism.

 

In fact, by this point in time criticizing Billy for lack of «originality» becomes a moot point — the man has made a living out of thriving on other people's ideas, clinging on to their catchiest bits, re-piecing them together «billy-lite» and introducing as much minor variation as possible so as to avoid technical (or legal) complications. Listen intensely enough to these songs and chances are you will come up with a suitable prototype, either melodic or stylistic, for each one, distilled and diluted for easier consumption, but always with that little «pretense to emotional depth» — just the kind of thing that drives professional Joel-haters so crazy. On the other hand, you'd have to be really stuck up to generate hatred vibes for these songs: as transparent as their structure and emotional content is, they always value «craft» over «bloat».

 

Thus, the ballad ʽJust The Way You Areʼ clearly takes its cues from 10cc's ʽI'm Not In Loveʼ, from the proto-New Age keyboard sound right down to the psychedelic vocal harmonies. The tempos are a bit faster, the sax solos bring the whole thing closer to lounge jazz, and the lyrics completely dispense with 10cc's irony. This helped it win the Grammy for both «Record of the Year» and «Song of the Year» and eventually turn into a modern vocal jazz classic (the presence of Phil Woods certainly had something to do with it as well), even though in terms of composing it is one of the simplest and laziest pieces on the entire album — the whole song rides on one generic groove from beginning to end, and its ability to charm the listener depends mostly on the listener's vulnerability to Joel's charisma.

 

Perfectly crafted ballads also include ʽViennaʼ and ʽShe's Always A Womanʼ, both of these rounded up and smoothed out so much better than, for instance, ʽShe's Got A Wayʼ, that it is im­possible to deny how far Billy has progressed in half a decade. ʽViennaʼ is really good — a much more sensible candidate for «Song of the Year» if you really had to choose from a Billy Joel al­bum: the lyrics are seriously above average for the man, with «Vienna» unexpectedly used as a metaphor for taking it easy and settling down (like Billy's own father did), and the music would be good enough for Neil Young on a lazy day. It is not entirely clear what that decidedly Parisian accordeon break is doing on a track named ʽViennaʼ, but then again, Austria is known as the homeland of the instrument, so maybe Billy is simply clearing up our stereotypes here.

 

The title track and ʽScenes From An Italian Restaurantʼ are arguably the two songs here written in an attempt to appease the «demanding» segment of the public — longer, more complex (multi-part), and more ideologically ambitious than the rest. For the main theme of ʽThe Strangerʼ, Billy came up with a somber Morricone-style melody that Phil had him whistle rather than dress up in a complex arrangement; not my cup of tea outside a good Western, but reasonably atmospheric as an intro to the main part of the song, which sounds kinda like Leo Sayer in a bad mood. (This is not really an accusation, since, come to think of it, Leo Sayer is never in a bad mood). As far as catchy funk-pop goes, ʽThe Strangerʼ qualifies, but its quasi-Freudian lyrical message, urging you to "let your lover see the stranger in yourself", is not exactly mindblowing, as is the music.

 

ʽScenesʼ are much better, probably the best track on the album: seven and a half minutes of more than decent music-hall piano pop, telling a simple, unadorned nostalgic story of two lovers that hardly offers any serious insights into the subject (not since Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage it doesn't), but you are not forced to dig deep into it — just enjoy, if you can, the piano riffs of the slow part and the catchy boppiness of the fast part, including the "whoa-whoa"s, which are cute, funny, and make much more sense than choosing an abstract "Italian Restaurant" as the backdrop for everything that is happening when the music itself has nothing specifically Italian about it. Watch out for the clarinet breaks — lite-jazz fans will appreciate Richie Cannata's work, I think.

 

All in all, speaking about massively commercial pop albums of the time, The Stranger is cer­tainly no Rumours when it comes to sharpness, intensity, and pure compositional talent — ra­ther, it is in the same league with Hotel California, as a finely designed and produced, relatively ade­quate and memorable collection of pop songs which (and this is one of its major advantages) still sounds fresh and enjoyable. Come to think of it, Joel has to be commended for not sticking ex­clusively to the trendy styles of the times — with his talents and instincts, he could have easily turned half of the record into stuffy disco grooves and the other half into Barry Manilow and still win in the short run. As it is, he won in the long run: The Stranger is still capable of garnering new fans in the 21st century, with its clever mix of then-contemporary and retro ideas. And even the album sleeve remains weirdly attractive with its «masked mystery» pantomime, rather than just another expressionless photo of The Piano Man. With all the usual reservations, I give the album a thumbs up — I could perhaps even find a slot for it on a later schedule, if I am in a spe­cific mood for «lite-art-cabaret entertainment with a rock production angle» or something.

 

(Except I would probably have to cut off the last track: Billy as a gather-round-the-Christmas-tree gospel preacher of future happiness on ʽEverybody Has A Dreamʼ is an inevitable evil if we agree that the album requires a Grand Finale / Happy Ending, but I'd rather have it end with ʽViennaʼ, on a humbler note. Taste, you're a bitch.)

 

52ND STREET (1978)

 

1) Big Shot; 2) Honesty; 3) My Life; 4) Zanzibar; 5) Stiletto; 6) Rosalinda's Eyes; 7) Half A Mile Away; 8) Until The Night; 9) 52nd Street.

 

This follow-up to The Stranger does not seriously mess with the formula and even retains the same golden-egg-laying producer, but the general layout, nevertheless, has somewhat changed, possibly reflecting Billy's awareness of the market's increased demand for shorter, less ambitious musical pieces. To say that 52nd Street, in any way whatsoever, acknowledges the arrival of punk and New Wave, would be a tremendous overstatement (although I guess that the dirtiness of the wall on the album sleeve could be taken as «punkish», in some manner), but it does acknow­ledge the arrival of disco (ʽMy Lifeʼ), and the lack of multi-part suites like ʽScenes From An Ita­lian Restaurantʼ is quite telling.

 

The album title formally refers to the location of both Billy's record label and the studio where the sessions were held, but, since 52nd Street is commonly known as the center of NYC's jazz life, 52nd Street is sometimes referred to as «Billy's jazzy album» — even though its seriously jazzy bits only come through every once in a while, most notably on Freddie Hubbard's flugelhorn and trumpet ins­trumental breaks on ʽZanzibarʼ. In reality, the album, like its predecessor, goes for an all-en­com­passing, diverse approach. There is no single theme or style that dominates over the others, but there are also no true standouts. It's just a solid Billy Joel record, by Billy Joel's own, not particu­larly demanding, standards.

 

The big hit single was ʽMy Lifeʼ — the disco song — and I have no idea why it was so big in the first place, but the keyboard riff at its melodic base is indeed quite catchy, and the arrangement is a bouncy fun generator, although Billy's lyrical message is once again much too overtly serious ("go ahead with your own life, leave me alone") to go along with the fun. Come on now, Mr. Joel! How come you can write funny music without learning how to be funny? How can we leave you alone when you are making millions on such an inadequate approach to art?...

 

The nearly-as-big hit was ʽBig Shotʼ, whose opening riff sounds decisively brutal before you un­derstand that the man really nicked it from Ray Charles' ʽSticks And Stonesʼ. But that's all right, he put it to good use, as long as, once again, you manage to ignore the lyrics that viciously lam­bast some poor spoiled socialite victim of Joel's verbal cruelty (some have speculated about Bian­ca Jagger, no less) — and, speaking of Bianca Jagger, her soon-to-be-ex-husband would pretty soon treat her no less malignantly in ʽRespectableʼ, but the big difference is, Mick always had a perfectly clear sense of humor about such things (which showed up first and foremost in his thea­trical-style delivery), whereas Billy here, and there, and everywhere, sounds deadpan serious, as if he really hates Halston dresses, Elaine's, and Dom Perignon (but in that case, how is it that he knows so much about all this stuff?). Anyway, like I said, ignore the lyrics, and the tune is a de­cent pop rocker with a slightly hard edge to it — no more, no less.

 

But enough with the hit singles, or I will have to say something about the ballad ʽHonestyʼ when I'd much rather talk about ʽZanzibarʼ, whose Steely Dan vibe with a light touch of mysticism seems to fare much better than Billy's «angry» songs. Freddie Hubbard's parts are indeed the ob­vious highlight, but there is something about the entire tune that makes it sound genuine. In fact, it seems as if Billy is always at his most natural when he's not doing much except sit at the bar — the closer he is to that particular stand, the more convincing his self-expression. "I've got a tab at Zanzibar, tonight that's where I'll be" — this is, like, the most believable statement on the entire album. No wonder Hubbard is being so enthusiastic with his support.

 

I also happen to like the quiet Latin ballad ʽRosalinda's Eyesʼ, with elements of jazz fusion woven in and a top-level chorus resolution (although I sure hope he'd find something less clichéd to rhyme the title with than "Cuban skies"), and ʽHalf A Mile Awayʼ, which is a blatant rip-off of Elton John circa ʽLove Lies Bleedingʼ, but a skilled one. The only true stinker on the entire re­cord is ʽUntil The Nightʼ, a corny folk ballad that, for some reason, was awarded the dubious honor of the album's most bombastic style of production — not Phil Spector style, but rather a proto-power ballad style that could have easily influenced Bryan Adams. (Actually, Billy says the song was influenced by The Righteous Brothers... but why?).

 

In short, life is fairly routine, but diversified and relatively easy-going on 52nd Street. ʽZanzibarʼ, in particular, shows that Billy could have thrived, sucking on that Steely Dan vibe à la Aja; his mistake, the way I see it, was in putting just as much emphasis on his «hard rocker» and «anthe­mic balladeer» sides, where ambitions overwhelmed talent. Still, the album is pretty well-balan­ced between the relative highs and the relative lows, and I would even feel justified to mark it with another thumbs up — the difference with The Stranger is that the former took some risks that unexpectedly paid off, whereas this one hardly ever takes any, but it still pays off.

 

GLASS HOUSES (1980)

 

1) You May Be Right; 2) Sometimes A Fantasy; 3) Don't Ask Me Why; 4) It's Still Rock And Roll To Me; 5) All For Leyna; 6) I Don't Want To Be Alone; 7) Sleeping With The Television On; 8) C'Etait Toi; 9) Close To The Border­line; 10) Through The Long Night.

 

Another step in the right direction. This album is usually tagged as Billy's «hard rock record» — not simply for harboring more distorted guitar-driven pop rockers than usual, but for a general toughening-up of the attitude. Oh look out there, he's really gonna crash that glass house on the album sleeve, isn't he? He did crash it, didn't he? We all heard the breaking glass at the beginning of ʽYou May Be Rightʼ, and we all saw the resulting hole on the back sleeve photo. What an angry young man! What a punk, eh?

 

In reality, there is at best one or two «socially relevant» tracks here, and that is very, very good news. The «toughness» helps as long as it keeps Billy away from one too many lounge jazz bal­lads, but Billy Joel as a public agitator, particularly in the age of punk and New Wave, would not be a good idea at all. What Glass Houses really is is a good old-fashioned pop rock record, reaso­nably well written, almost completely free of ambitions/pretentions (maybe even more so than 52nd Street), and containing exactly one corny tune with sickening potential — ʽYou Were The Oneʼ, an attempt to imitate the sentimental vibe of the French pop scene (even including some actual singing in French, with a fairly bad accent, as one can guess). But it's all right, too. A Billy Joel album without a single bad Billy Joel song would be too much of a mindshaker.

 

ʽYou May Be Rightʼ is really just an old-fashioned pub rocker, walking an assured line between cockiness and catchiness, putting back the rock'n'roll ecstasy in its guitar and saxophone solos, and, most fun of all, setting it to an electric folk-rock rhythm pattern that recalls the Beatles circa 1965-66. ʽSometimes A Fantasyʼ follows it up with echoey guitar and vocals that either pay tri­bute to the man's rockabilly idols, or show that he has been paying attention to New Wave, after all; on second thought, it does sound more like the Cars than Gene Vincent. But attention or no attention, "it's still rock'n'roll to me", the man says on the album's most anthemic track. Three minutes of brisk guitar trot that slightly recalls the Shadows — and proclaims that the more it changes, the more it rests the same. Cool sax solo, nice bounce, and only a slight touch of self-righteousness at that.

 

The album also contains what might possibly be Billy's finest ever stab at being Paul McCartney — the bouncy (sorry for that word again, but Glass Houses really keeps up this non-stop bounce for almost unreasonable periods of time!), yes, the bouncy acoustic pop song ʽDon't Ask Me Whyʼ, which could have easily fit on... on... well, I'm not exactly sure on what particular Mc­Cartney album it would fit best of all (Flaming Pie?), but it's got all the right McCartney moves. All it needs is a Paul-style falsetto to complete the picture, but Billy no like falsetto. Oh, and the Latin piano interlude in the middle is a little out of place, too. Still, excellent try.

 

Everything else is all right, I guess. There really isn't a lot one could write about songs like ʽAll For Leynaʼ (power-piano-pop with a mildly desperate edge), or ʽSleeping With The Television Onʼ (Elton strikes again on the verses, but the "all night long, all night long" chorus is a bit too bland and smooth even for Elton's mid-1970s standards), or the album closer ʽThrough The Long Nightʼ whose intent is to finally put you to sleep with the aid of suitably lullabyish vocal har­monies. Not a lot, but they are all decent, adequate compositions, well produced, as usual, by Phil Ramone and mostly concentrating on thinly disguised stories of relationships.

 

Thus, another thumbs up here: nothing truly stands out in particular (other than ʽC'Etait Toiʼ, in a bad way), but the album still forms an integral part of Billy's winning streak, particularly now that the man has learned the secret to true success — with his strong, but limited talents, the less important he sounds, the better it is. The best thing about Glass Houses is that he never really threw that stone, you know. He never even planned to. What, did you think Billy Joel capable of something as stupid as that? He's just doing it all for Leyna.

 

SONGS IN THE ATTIC (1981)

 

1) Miami 2017 (I've Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway); 2) Summer, Highland Falls; 3) Streetlife Serenader; 4) Los Angelinos; 5) She's Got A Way; 6) Everybody Loves You Now; 7) Say Goodbye To Hollywood; 8) Captain Jack; 9) You're My Home; 10) The Ballad Of Billy The Kid; 11) I've Loved These Days.

 

What is the more ethical choice — put out a live album of your greatest and best-known hits, or put out a live album of your obscurities from the vaults (or «from the attic», to be more precise)? Maybe the most ethical choice would be not to put out a live album at all. Concentrating on hits is too redundant and predictable, whereas concentrating on the rarities is pretentiously vain — isn't there a reason that they were obscure in the first place? shouldn't one just give people what they want? isn't there a sort of «look-at-me-how-great-I-am» mentality issue here?... and so on.

 

In the case of Billy Joel, whom I certainly do not consider a «great» artist, this dilemma is even more pronounced. But I am happy to say that the concept behind Songs In The Attic — getting his «new» audiences, turned on to him since the success of The Stranger, to get better acquain­ted with the man's past — is pretty darn classily executed, by means of two things: (a) a thought­ful, meticulous selection of material that manages to avoid most of the lows and focus on all the highs; (b) a relative reinvention of many of these songs; formally — to better fit Billy's format of playing with his more or less permanently assembled band, in reality — to try to improve on the original production and arrangement flaws wherever possible.

 

The reinventions are never too radical, though; they are mostly done in the spirit of «virtual re­mastering», which is quite impressive considering that these are actual live recordings. Billy's singing, in particular, has never been better: he pays full attention to getting all the harmonies right, and does not spare his voice any trouble — even turning it into a snappy roar at the climac­tic moments of some of the tracks (ʽCaptain Jackʼ). Meanwhile, the backing band bravely takes it upon itself to compensate for the lack of overdubs, with David Brown's thick electric guitar tone replacing string arrangements (ʽThe Ballad Of Billy The Kidʼ); or, sometimes, it actually makes the arrangements denser than they used to be (ʽEverybody Loves You Nowʼ now has a frantic acoustic strum pushing it forward, in addition to Billy's flashy piano rolls).

 

As for the setlist, well, it did not manage to shift my original disappointed feelings for ʽShe's Got A Wayʼ (a song that feels as melodically unfinished to me as ever), but, apart from that, it is a fairly representative and solid selection from Billy's pre-mass popularity years, very evenly dis­tributed between his first four solo albums (the only thing that's lacking is an ass-kicking organ grind from Attila — I mean, would it have hurt the man to throw in a ʽCalifornia Flashʼ every once in a while, just for some good plain fun?). To keep the concept stable, he keeps away from all the pre-Stranger hits (ʽPiano Manʼ, ʽThe Entertainerʼ) and popular tunes such as ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ, and it helps, since Billy's hits always tended to be selected from either his most repetitive or his corniest strata of material.

 

Some fans almost literally swear by Songs In The Attic, convinced that it is the album to succes­fully prove that Billy Joel is «The Artist», or, at least, that the album managed to breathe a wholly new strain of life into the old songs. I would not go that far: the essence of the songs always re­mains the same, no matter how many extra piercing guitar solos David Brown prefers to add to the new ʽCaptain Jackʼ. But if you only have room for two or three Billy Joel albums in your col­lection, it goes without saying that Songs In The Attic would be a good substitute for the entire 1971-76 period — with mostly the best selections, and each performance either fully matching the power of the original or slightly improving upon it, what you get here is a comprehensive overview of the man's formative years, recorded in pristine sound quality.

 

Oh, and, just in case you didn't know it, the audiences did go wild over the old songs; sometimes, it has to do with Billy's choice of location (at least one show was recorded in NYC, so every time he mentions Brooklyn or any other such place on ʽMiami 2017ʼ, the crowds go nuts), but usually, they just love him regardless of which East Coast city he is playing in. And, for the record, there is a shitload of different locations from which the selections (recorded in June/July 1980) were made, but the Westernmost we ever get was Milwaukee (Wisconsin) and St. Paul (Minnesota). (Not that Billy never played California since relocating back to NYC, but perhaps the crowds were slightly less enthusiastic back there — especially if he ever tried to play ʽLos Angelenosʼ to any of them).

 

Anyway, the popular reaction shows that at least the people who actually went to see Billy play live were already well familiar with his back story. But this did not prevent Songs From The Attic from still going triple platinum and reaching an impressive (for a live album) No. 8 on the charts — and while that might be pushing it a bit too far, it certainly agrees well with my own thumbs up on the issue.

 

THE NYLON CURTAIN (1982)

 

1) Allentown; 2) Laura; 3) Pressure; 4) Goodnight Saigon; 5) She's Right On Time; 6) A Room Of Our Own; 7) Surprises; 8) Scandinavian Skies; 9) Where's The Orchestra?

 

In Billy's own words, this is the material he is most proud of, and that would be reason enough to get scared. A concept album about the lives and fortunes of baby boomers at the start of the Reagan era — a conscious decision to push into Springsteen territory, made by a man whose lyrical ta­lents, emotional insights, and sense of music-to-lyrics adequacy have no hopes of ever coming close to Bruce's (regardless of how one actually feels about Bruce). Just a couple extra wrong steps here, and The Nylon Curtain could easily turn into Billy's worst embarrassment.

 

Funny, but it isn't. Knowing full well his musical preferences and his strong and weak sides, it is not to Springsteen that Billy turns for inspiration, but rather to the same old crowds: the Beatles, Elton John, Jeff Lynne, and various other late Sixties' / early Seventies' artists. Almost every single melody here is deeply rooted in one influence or another, leaving pretty limited space for creativity — but when the influences are that good, and the digesting is carried on with sufficient intelligence and craft, and, most importantly, when this retro vibe prevents the artist from getting swallowed and assimilated by all that new Eighties stuff that he wouldn't be able to conquer any­way, what sense would there be in complaining?

 

To tell the truth, unless you really sit down with the lyrics sheet, you might not even get a sense of how «self-important» the album claims to be. A song like ʽAllentownʼ, with its honest, but not particularly poetic portrait of out-of-work blue-collar workers in a depressed community, has garnered much discussion, mostly concentrating on the song's words — has Billy been able to paint a proper picture of these people's lives? is he being respectful or insulting?... But musically, the song is just a somewhat routine, inoffensive acoustic rocker, mildly catchy, with a vocal part that is strangely buried in the mix as if the singer were a bit shy of his own voice (this kind of mixing is a common thing, for instance, on George Harrison's solo records). It isn't better or worse than dozens, if not hundreds, of similar songs. And its symbolic factory whistle at the be­ginning, as well as its symbolic industrial clanging at the end, are just tacked on for information's sake — there is nothing in the music that would suggest a connection with disillusioned, despai­ring workers. Inadequate? If you bother to check the lyrics, for sure. If you don't, ʽAllentownʼ is not about blue-collar suffering. It's about tapping your feet and strumming your air guitar.

 

Or let us take another of the album's most famous tracks, the Vietnam epic ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ. Would you really be willing to participate in a discussion of how precisely Billy has managed to convey the lives, feelings, and memories of the veterans? Honestly? Chirping crickets and heli­copters aside, this is a cozy acoustic ballad with a rather clumsy power chorus («and here is something for our friends in the arena to get wild to», Billy probably thought as he threw in the "and we would all go down together" bit), one that would have fit in much better with memories of your troubled, but innocent childhood rather than the living hell of Vietnam. Which is, really, just the way I hear it in my head — there is no more genuine Vietnam in ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ than could be found in, say, ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ. Which, as far as I am concerned, does not prevent ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ from being a pleasant song (if you only take out the «gung-ho chorus»).

 

Or take ʽPressureʼ — with a title like that, you'd expect the song to be about the hardships and tension of everyday life in the modern age, and lyrically, it is, but musically, it is completely dominated by a synthesizer riff with a ridiculously sterile tone (this is probably the most «mo­dern» Billy got on this album for 1982's standards) and a chord structure that sort of walks the line between nursery rhyme and football field chant. (Maybe that's what all the Peter Pan and Sesame Street references are all about?). Overall, the song is a little weird, a little funny, definite­ly catchy (in a good way? in a bad way? still trying to tell), but «serious», no.

 

And then there's all the rest, where you just gotta sit back and admire, or despise, or take into neutral consideration Billy's chameleonesque nature. ʽLauraʼ sounds almost precisely like Jeff Lynne and ELO circa 1972-73, vocals, harmonies, guitars, strings, tempos, dynamics, the works. ʽA Room Of Our Ownʼ picks up the rhythmics of the Beatles' ʽShe's A Womanʼ and adds a few extra layers for some extra fun. ʽScandinavian Skiesʼ, with its drawn-out, «floating» sound elici­ted from all the instruments and vocals, aims for light, happy-but-ominous psychedelia. And in the not-so-big finale, ʽWhere's The Orchestra?ʼ suddenly remembers about the artist's vaudevil­lian roots and jumps to self-irony — arguably the album's best lyrical moment is the opening to this particular song: "Where's the orchestra? Wasn't this supposed to be a musical?" Well... you said it, Mr. Joel. You really said it.

 

I like this album — not a lot, just a normal, regular like, you know. The certified Billy Joel hater will hate it for being too pretentious — I don't really manage to hear that pretentiousness. I would never understand a blue-collar worker who'd want to make ʽAllentownʼ his personal sacred an­them, or a Vietnam veteran who would shed tears to ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ, or, for that matter, a girl called Laura who'd go on to say that the song ʽLauraʼ really nails all her troubles. But I wouldn't mind playing The Nylon Curtain some more, every once in a while: it is diverse, sufficiently creative, reasonably memorable, almost free of annoying moments, and if you take it in its his­torical context, it sounds amazingly good for a 1982 album recorded by a «veteran». In fact, it sounds fairly timeless — an even bigger thanks to Phil Ramone here, who was able to safeguard Joel from the easy pitfalls of the new decade — and I see no reason whatsoever to deprive the al­bum of its well-deserved, if a little tepid, thumbs up. Nice stuff. Nothing too serious. Except, maybe, that he says the word "fucking" once, but I sincerely hope this isolated fact will not suffice to turn your whole world upside down.

 

AN INNOCENT MAN (1983)

 

1) Easy Money; 2) An Innocent Man; 3) The Longest Time; 4) This Night; 5) Tell Her About It; 6) Uptown Girl; 7) Careless Talk; 8) Christie Lee; 9) Leave A Tender Moment; 10) Keeping The Faith.

 

Once again, you gotta give it to Billy — in an era when New Wave, electrofunk, synth-pop, and glam metal were all the rage, going out there to record an entire album of tributes to late 1950s / early 1960s pop, rock, and R&B and making it chart, as well as yield a whole bunch of big hit singles, is a genuine accomplishment if there ever was one. In retrospect, An Innocent Man does not particularly stand out from the general streak of Billy's change-face-records, but in its historic context, it probably holds the record as «least expected thing for Billy to have done at the given moment». This already makes it worth hearing, at least once.

 

The album, as Billy admits himself, was triggered to life by his divorce from his first wife, which allowed him (finally!) to date hot young Cosmopolitan chicks like Elle Macpherson and Christie Brinkley (whom he finally married two years later) and «feel like a teenager all over again». As a result of this, the seriousness and pessimism of the previous two albums are cast to the wind, and we are invited to a retro-styled rock'n'roll party, where one by one, Mr. Joel impersonates a long series of his idols — R&B entertainers, soul belters, doo-wop crooners, rock'n'rollers, Motown stars, you name it. There is no attempt to veil, conceal, or modernize these influences: on the con­trary, the album openly bills itself as a tribute, and should be regarded as such, so there is really no sense in criticism like «this song is a blatant Wilson Pickett rip-off, how can it be good?». The real questions are — (a) how close do these imitations come to recreating the right spirit? and (b) is there any reason to listen to them instead of the real stuff?

 

Question (a), I think, should rather be answered in the positive. There is no doubting the profes­sionalism of Billy Joel, or of Phil Ramone who agreed to go along with the idea and adapted his production to all the old-time values. There is no doubting, either, the sincerity and adoration that went into this project — Joel really truly loves this music (and why shouldn't he?), and, more ar­guably but still quite likely, understands its spiritual essence. Throw in his hook-crafting poten­tial, and voilà, all the required ingredients are there. ʽEasy Moneyʼ bangs the ground with typically Pickettish ferociousness, ʽChristie Leeʼ pounds the piano with typically Little Richardish abandon, ʽCareless Talkʼ steals and remixes all the right vocal inclinations from Sam Cooke, ʽTell Her About Itʼ is pulsating with all the right catchy-excited romanticism of Motown girl groups, and so on. An Innocent Man succeeds not only on the surface, but deeper as well — with the under­standable reservation that most of the songs and styles imitated here by Billy were never that deep themselves, to begin with.

 

The second question is trickier. There are even some major Billy Joel fans out there who do not think much of the album, since to them, «this is not the real Billy», and one might even feel of­fended to have ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ immediately followed up by such a light-hearted pastiche as ʽTell Her About Itʼ. But we are not really discussing this from the point of view of major Billy Joel fans — as far as I am concerned, I have no idea of what exactly is «the real Billy Joel»: for all I know, «the real Billy Joel» could mostly be about wanting to bed hot Cosmopolitan models, so let us just steer clear of the issue for safety reasons. The real concern is whether you could, for instance, intersperse these songs with ʽMustang Sallyʼ, ʽCupidʼ, ʽYou Can't Hurry Loveʼ, ʽSe­cond That Emotionʼ, etc., and not feel a «cringing» moment whenever a Joel song comes along on the setlist. Or, even worse, a «boring» moment.

 

My own answer is that I do not. Or, rather, that I think these songs are typically as good as the stuff they are imitating, with one major exception: Billy moves uncomfortably close to «black­face mode» when he is openly imitating the vocal styles of great singers — it is a little ridiculous to hear him try out the vocal attack of Pickett on ʽEasy Moneyʼ, or Sam Cooke's modulation rou­tine on ʽCareless Talkʼ, or go ahead and bawl like Little Richard on ʽChristie Leeʼ. He is a good singer, and he does a fairly decent job with these approximations, but «doing impersonations» is not really quite the same as «paying tribute».

 

Other than that, I like the results — the brass-punctured fast Motown sweep of ʽTell Her About Itʼ, the Four Season-ish vocal harmony-drenched pop punch of ʽUptown Girlsʼ, the R&B gallop of ʽEasy Moneyʼ (although I thought that, after The Doors had already exploited that rhythm on ʽThe Changelingʼ, there would be little reason for white performers to try it on for size again), and even the soft, echoey Drifters-like style of the title track. I am much less enamored of ʽThe Longest Timeʼ, which sounds as silly and corny as most of the doo-wop that it imitates, and of ʽThis Nightʼ, which sounds like it belongs on Zappa's parodic Cruising With Ruben & The Jets, but I think Little Anthony himself must have been in awe of the melody.

 

I think that, in the end, it all depends on the level of worship. If you think of all these old tunes as light, friendly entertainment for the simple senses, Billy's copycat imitations, stylistically mat­ching the originals but with sufficient melodic divergencies so as not to count as «stolen items», are equally light, friendly entertainment for the simple senses (more or less the job that Billy Joel, the Artist, was born into this world to carry out). If you put them on a higher pedestal — for in­stance, as proud expressions of the liberated Afro-American spirit — in that case An Innocent Man might seem misguided and even offensive. If bashing Billy Joel for all the sins of the world is on your agenda, this is a great and innovative way of performing the task. But it really isn't on mine, so I'll just say this: An Innocent Man is nice, harmless fun, and if you take it in the overall context of commercial 1983, it is extraordinarily nice, harmless fun.

 

So I give it a nice, harmless thumbs up, at least until I can think of a way to prove that ʽYou Can't Hurry Loveʼ boasts a more sophisticated and groundbreaking style of composition than ʽTell Her About Itʼ. For the moment, all I can say is that I prefer Diana Ross as a singer to Billy Joel, but that would be a lame excuse.

 

THE BRIDGE (1986)

 

1) Running On Ice; 2) This Is The Time; 3) A Matter Of Trust; 4) Modern Woman; 5) Baby Grand; 6) Big Man On Mulberry Street; 7) Temptation; 8) Code Of Silence; 9) Getting Closer.

 

Once again, a pound of respect to be handed over to Billy Joel for recording a very-much-not-1986 album in 1986. With the dark star rising for the absolute majority of «rock veterans» that year, Billy Joel, of all people, could be expected to participate in the championship as a major contender. But while The Bridge does indeed show a significant drop-off in quality, lucky for Billy, by that time he had so much solidified in his «retro» mentality that a full embrace of all the trappings of 1986 was out of the question.

 

Yes, we do have some plastic synthesizers, some electronic drums, a bit of power ballad atmo­spherics, even a couple of Rambo-style pop metal riffs, but at the heart of it all we still have the same old Broadway show — a big ball of vaudeville and jazz-pop and old time balladry, lightly seasoned with some production elements that do land the album in the 1980s, but do not disqua­lify it as a victim of the 1980s. On an important sidenote, The Bridge marks the last time Billy worked with Phil Ramone, and it is clear that Phil was as adverse to submitting to those global suffocating trends as his regular client.

 

The opening number of the record is rather oddball, though: ʽRunning On Iceʼ is an unmistakable tribute to Sting and The Police circa 1979-80 (yes, even when Mr. Joel is emulating modern acts, he still can't help being a little retro with it!), with Liberty DeVitto impersonating Stewart Cope­land and Billy himself adopting Sting's vocal modulation. The fussy, syncopated-paranoid verses could really be mistaken for a forgotten Police outtake — it is only when we get around to the happier-sounding ska chorus that a certain «it's really Billy» feeling starts creeping in, because The Police would never choose an ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ chord sequence for the hook. Still, as a homage, ʽRunning On Iceʼ is a great showcase for Billy's chameleonesque abilities, and in the overall context of the album, it probably packs more fun than any other number here.

 

After that deceptive opening, though, The Bridge slowly starts creaking and collapsing. The songs are not particularly awful, they are simply not too well written. Somehow, over those three years that separate the intentionally hook-laden Innocent Man from Joel's next public statement, the emphasis has shifted from «instrumental hook» to «soulful vocal expression», and too many of these songs focus on «Billy the passionate singer» rather than «Billy the creator of interesting piano and guitar melodic lines». Consequently, in order to like The Bridge, you have to really like Billy Joel as an artistic personality and a sensitive soul. And that can be tough.

 

The double faux-punch of ʽThis Is The Timeʼ and ʽA Matter Of Trustʼ, in particular, seems tre­mendously anticlimactic after the opening number. The former is an adult contemporary ballad with a Diane Warren-worthy chorus and probably the most dated production values on the entire album; the latter is one of those «steroid-muscular» pop songs, pinned to a boringly distorted pop-metal riff, that everybody was trying at the time, hoping to become Springsteen (including Springsteen himself) — in fact, Billy's epic-hero 1-2-3-4 count-off at the beginning is already enough to curdle fresh milk.

 

Eventually, as the artist begins going backwards in time, the atmosphere gets more tolerable. Stuff like ʽBaby Grandʼ, a soul duet with Ray Charles himself, and the big-band style ʽBig Man On Mulberry Streetʼ, is completely free of cringeworthy moments — the latter may be more at­mosphere than melody, and the former may be way longer than its basic theme requires (actually, the basic theme probably requires some instrumental improvised parts, but Billy imprudently saved all of them up for the live shows), but stylistically, I'd say they are both beyond reproach, and, together with ʽRunning On Iceʼ, are the only songs on here worth remembering. The rest is a mixed bag of rootsiness, poppiness, and schmaltz that ranges from blandly forgettable (ʽGetting Closerʼ; ʽCode Of Silenceʼ, with wasted backing vocals from Cyndi Lauper) to overcooked in the vocal department (ʽTemptationʼ, with a bit too much heart on that sleeve, as if he were offering a little bit of it to every person in the arena).

 

Still, simply in recognition of the fact that this is, truly and verily, a 1986 Billy Joel album that sucks nowhere near as bad as a 1986 Billy Joel album could have sucked in a logically structured parallel world — I refrain from a thumbs down. The Bridge is well worth owning by any legit fan of Billy's, and well worth hearing at least once for anyone who is merely «tolerant» of the man. It is almost an objective fact that The Bridge marks the beginning of the slide, but we do have to admit that it was a slide like no other slide: unlike so many of his peers, Billy seems de­railed not so much by the changing standards in recording and production, as he is by finally overrating himself as a «soul serenader».

 

KONTSERT (1987)

 

1) Odoya; 2) Angry Young Man; 3) Honesty; 4) Goodnight Saigon; 5) Stiletto; 6) Big Man On Mulberry Street; 7) Baby Grand; 8) An Innocent Man; 9) Allentown; 10) A Matter Of Trust; 11) Only The Good Die Young; 12) Some­times A Fantasy; 13) Uptown Girl; 14) Big Shot; 15) Back In The USSR; 16) The Times They Are A-Changin'.

 

It is really lovable how Amazon, and quite a few other websites (and maybe even book sources, too), announce this album as Kohuept, a word that sounds like a rather gross mix of Greek, Aztecan, and Klingon, but in reality, merely a consequence of one's inability to correctly trans­literate the word concert in its Cyrillic orthography. (First prize in this competition certainly goes to Paul McCartney's Choba B CCCP = Snova V SSSR, a.k.a. "Back In USSR" in Russian, but it seems to be Billy's regular fate to always remain the second runner-up next to Paul in everything he does. Even if «Kohuept» came first, in terms of sheer chronology).

 

Anyway, Billy took to the stage in Leningrad in the summer of 1987, with the Perestroika already in full swing but the Communist system still rigidly enforced, so I suppose that not a lot of people were even aware of the show taking place (certainly not myself, being 11 years old at the time and not having the least idea of who Billy Joel was in the first place — ah, the happy years...). Getting Western artists to perform in Russia was still a mind-boggling task, since everything had to be approved by Party officials responsible for culture policies; but then, the Party had already given the green light to Elton John nearly a whole decade ago, and if Elton was considered «clean» enough for innocent Soviet youth, I suppose there was no reason to be particularly sus­picious of Billy Joel. (Merely two years later, in 1989, we'd already have Black Sabbath in the country, but 1987 was still pretty much iron-curtainish for everybody).

 

Funny retro-bits keep cropping up throughout the show — for instance, the way it opens with a one-minute choral piece delivered by a Georgian folk ensemble (ʽOdoyaʼ), probably as a wel­come sign of Soviet international brotherhood, as well as a subtle reminder that all music stems from The People, rather than individualistic capitalist entrepreneurs; or the presence of a stiff, dorky-sounding, but perfectly professional interpreter, translating Billy's banter for the Russian audience (a practice that evaporated with the transition to capitalist economics, when it became necessary to pay these people money for their work); or the relative lack of excitement from the same audience after many tracks — since it was still common practice for Soviet audiences to sit quietly and politely at concerts, or you'd be in serious trouble with security. And, of course, there was no way in hell Billy could not do a cover of ʽBack In USSRʼ, especially since some of the Party officials present probably had difficulty distinguishing him from Paul in the first place, whereas the real music lovers present must have been hungry for anybody coming out there and doing ʽBack In The USSRʼ for them in real time. Could have been Uriah Heep.

 

How was the show itself? Decent. Leaning a bit too heavily on The Bridge material, perhaps, but this is understandable — a promotion tour is a promotion tour, let alone the fact that there was not much chance Soviet buyers could rush to any musical store in 1987 and get themselves a fresh copy of Billy's latest. ʽA Matter Of Trustʼ still sucks, ʽMulberry Streetʼ is still okay, and ʽBaby Grandʼ, deprived of its biggest attraction (Ray Charles), is now quite boring. The rest of the set­list is more or less evenly spread between all of Billy's career moments since 1976 (no early stuff at all), and the songs are performed with care and professionalism, but add nothing important to the original versions. The best thing I can say is that there are almost no clunkers on the list, but also no surprises — mostly just the hits.

 

At the end of the show, Billy trots back on stage with an acoustic guitar and plays us ʽThe Times They Are A-Changin'ʼ: a sensible gesture, since they were, but probably less appreciated than he could surmise, since Dylan's popularity in the USSR was largely restricted to a small intellectual circle (language barrier and all). And that pretty much sums it up: the entire Kontsert, from the very moment of its release, was more of a symbolic gesture than a really-necessary live album from a man who certainly shouldn't rank among the great live artists of his generation (and, to be honest, never ever strived for that kind of ranking). In the end, it makes much better sense to watch the video version of this stuff, if only for culturological reasons; without the picture, it's just another average Billy Joel show.

 

STORM FRONT (1989)

 

1) That's Not Her Style; 2) We Didn't Start The Fire; 3) The Downeaster "Alexa"; 4) I Go To Extremes; 5) Shame­less; 6) Storm Front; 7) Leningrad; 8) State Of Grace; 9) When In Rome; 10) And So It Goes.

 

It is really a huge consolation that Billy sat out most of the Eighties in the lap of Phil Ramone. But as the last year of the decade swung around and everybody felt it was time for another shot of artistic expression, Billy suddenly decided to modernize. He fired much, if not most, of his regu­lar band, put together a huge crowd of session musicians, and exchanged Phil for Mick Jones of Foreigner fame in the producer seat. Whee! Granted, it could have been much worse, but fortu­nately, Phil Collins was not available at the time.

 

The result is an album that, in genre terms, stands somewhere on the intersection of «arena rock» and «barroom rock». (Maybe think of a barroom converted to a mini-arena, or vice versa). Gone altogether are the old-timey jazzy and vaudevillian stylizations, replaced by steady 4/4 beats, macho blues-rock guitar chords, and singalong choruses. Loud drums, bombastic synthesizers, and singing verging on the point of shouting also become the norm of the day as Billy tries to «make himself look big» by having everything puffed up around him; the only catch is, Billy himself is not what you'd call a «big guy» at all, and that translates, way too often, to a rather ri­diculous effect (the title track is an obvious example).

 

Worst of all, to paraphrase the man himself, «that's not his style» — this sudden desire to make music in the style of Foreigner goes against Billy's natural melodic skills, and, most importantly, why should he want to imitate this music? It takes little effort to churn out a bunch of simplistic arena-rockers; but unless they happen to be accidentally adorned with genius vocal hooks or master riffs, they are usually worthless — and Billy has had very little experience with «master riffs». Vocal hooks are better handled, to some extent, but the playing and production style leaves little place for subtlety.

 

It does not help, either, that the album begins with one of the corniest numbers the man ever had the gall to come up with — ʽThat's Not Her Styleʼ is a misguided lyrical defense of his then-cur­rent wife Christie Brinkley ("some people think that she's one of those mink-coated ladies..."), listing all the popular accusations with such precision and detail ("gave the pilot somethin' extra for a perfect ride"  — really?) and doing it in such a moronic singing tone that the only thing it manages to convince us of is that that is her style very much indeed (but maybe that's exactly the way it was intended to be... irony?).

 

I have sort of mixed feelings for the album's grand slam number. Some might say that ʽWe Didn't Start The Fireʼ only went to #1 because all the teenagers of America started buying it as a handy shortcut replacement for textbooks on modern history. Others might object that it has got one of the catchiest choruses in Billy Joel history, which helps overlook the crappy-sounding keyboards and the musical monotonousness. I would classify it as one of those harmless «novelty» numbers that quickly run out of fun potential — along the lines of the Beatles' ʽAll Together Nowʼ (al­though the latter at least had a far more tasteful musical arrangement, but then it wasn't put to­gether in 1989, either). There is some serious incongruency between the song's nursery-rhyme aura and the «seriousness» of the message, however — "we didn't light it but we tried to fight it" does not say much about how they were fighting and what they were fighting — was it Belgians in the Congo, Ben Hur, or hula hoops?.. Silly old Billy, always getting himself in some kind of fix with his «moral lessons».

 

The rest of the songs fluctuate between the already mentioned uninspiring/uninspired arena-rockers (title track; ʽState Of Graceʼ), cartoonishly soulful adult contemporary ballads (ʽLenin­gradʼ, a souvenir from Billy's Russian trip that might have healed a few simple psychological traumas back then, but now comes across as one of those oddball artistic children of Perestroika — "the Russians love their children too" and all that stuff), and a couple attempts at «art pop» songs, marred by production excesses and superfluous pomposity (ʽThe Downeaster Alexaʼ, which must have increased Billy's popularity with baymen worldwide, but sounds fairly crass and manipulative otherwise).

 

Some fans have praised the closing number, ʽAnd So It Goesʼ, as the best song on the album and maybe even an all-time classic — too much praise, I'd say, for a number whose melodic potential is completely exhausted in the first twenty five seconds (possibly in the first five seconds, as I am quite sure any professional musicologist would be able to predict the next twenty). Those few bars of solo piano are indeed quite nice, and at least the entire coda sounds refreshingly simple and unadorned next to the glossy production of the original.

 

But if anything, it is a glaring example of what is altogether wrong with the entire album: horrendously lazy songwriting. In the past, Billy had always used his ideas sparingly, distributing interesting chord changes and vocal modulations between songs in a miserly manner, but Storm Front is the first album where you really begin to wonder whether he has reached the bottom of the barrel. Of course, no talent lasts forever, yet it still seems odd — Billy had shown so much discipline in not allowing himself to «burn out» over two decades of music-making that the qua­lity dropdown of Storm Front is surprising. Perhaps we should blame it all on Christie Brinkley. You know — Christie Brinkley, Mick Jones, crappy drums and synth tones, Leningrad, miss my Dad, rock is just a passing fad, we didn't jump the shark, no we didn't jump it, we just tried to hump it... sorry, what I really meant to say was just a thumbs down.

 

RIVER OF DREAMS (1993)

 

1) No Man's Land; 2) The Great Wall Of China; 3) Blonde Over Blue; 4) A Minor Variation; 5) Shades Of Grey; 6) All About Soul; 7) Lullabye; 8) The River Of Dreams; 9) Two Thousand Years; 10) Famous Last Words.

 

Regardless of how one feels in general about Billy Joel, you must give the man his due: ʽFamous Last Wordsʼ, closing out this album, may not be particularly famous, but, up to date at least, they have really been «last». "That's the story of my life", the man tells us, "now it's time to put the book away", and, against all the predictably sneering «yeah rights», River Of Dreams remains the very last album of original pop compositions recorded by Billy Joel, the quintessential Some­times Thinking Man's Artist of his generation. He gave his word, and he kept it. How often does that happen with public figures in general, let alone corny pop stars?

 

Even more curious is the fact that River Of Dreams has earned quite a shaky reputation, when it is actually not half-bad. Where Billy's previous two albums showed plenty of rot, as the man naturally drifted towards mushy adult contemporary and dumb «muscular pop-rockers», River Of Dreams actually sounds as if the man were trying to pull himself up, one last time. Like he did in the early 1980s, Billy goes against the grain and delivers a well-produced nostalgic album (California folk-rock veteran Danny Kortchmar comes on board as one of several co-producers) — not nostalgic enough to make us think it was really made in the Seventies, of course, but not at all in line with the mainstream pop values of 1993, either.

 

The word of the day is «stylistic diversity»: as a final gesture, Billy decided to revisit most of the styles that he used to excel in, and even throw in a couple new ones — the «dark horse of the family», this time around, is ʽShades Of Greyʼ, an unconcealed tribute to Cream (its opening and recurring «bap-pa pa-doo-wap-pas» are lifted directly from ʽSweet Wineʼ) that remains as Billy's one and only open foray into the area of blues-based psychedelic pop. It is not a great song, but it is catchy, a little bizarre, and features Leslie West of Mountain fame (the closest facsimile Billy could find of Cream's Clapton guitar) on a couple of colorfully scorching guitar solos.

 

Psychedelic notes are also apparent on ʽThe Great Wall Of Chinaʼ, whose floating strings sound like a cross between true Far Eastern sounds and the orchestral parts of ʽI Am The Walrusʼ — and form a nice contrast with the minimalistic «crunch chords» of the verses — and, to a lesser extent, in the darkly romantic falsetto of the chorus to ʽBlonde Over Blueʼ, although, in general, that song is more in the vein of the «midnight uptempo balladry» of Bryan Ferry or some other decadent crooner. Perhaps Billy does not quite have the vocal chops to do the song the way it de­serves to be done, but at least he wrote it with good intentions.

 

Other than that, we got us our basic angry power-rock (ʽNo Man's Landʼ), some brass-adorned blues-rock (ʽA Minor Variationʼ), some working man soul-rock (ʽAll About Soulʼ), a solo piano ballad (ʽLullabyeʼ), a light choral spiritual (title track), a bombastic power ballad (ʽ2000 Yearsʼ), and those ʽFamous Last Wordsʼ that might just as well have been written by Danny Kortchmar himself, so much do they sound like a friendly early 1970s folk-rocker. Not too bad for a swan song, I'd say — even if, of course, the individual merits of all these tunes are quite different from each other: my own tastes push the indignation level ever higher when it comes to bombast, then bring it down together with the volume level, but with a selection like that, no two people will probably get to completely agree on the highlights and lowlights.

 

Lyrically, it's all the same old shit — some love stuff, some attempts at introspection, and lots and lots and lots of social criticism, this time, as Billy grows older, with a noticeable «grass was greener» angle to some of the songs, particularly ʽNo Man's Landʼ. All I'd like to say is that I really love the line about "give us this day our daily discount outlet merchandise", which might just be the single best line ever penned by Billy Joel, the Daily Discount Man's Artist. Say what you will, Roger Waters can only dream about writing a line like that, can he?

 

That said, apart from the final track, the album does not properly feel like a swan song or musical testament; you'd have to cobble that impression together out of its stylistic diversity (an all-out binge for the big final!), its nostalgic components, maybe even out of its front sleeve painting (Christie Brinkley repaid her husband for ʽThat's Not Her Styleʼ by painting him almost in the guise of a Christian martyr — which did not prevent the latter-day saint and the mystery woman from separating one year later). But, contrary to rumors spread by reviewers who probably did not even listen properly to the songs, River Of Dreams was hardly a dishonorable way to go out of the songwriting business. As far as my own judgement goes, it was at least a definite improve­ment over Storm Front, to the extent that Billy would be justified to claim that he went out of the business not because his songwriting gift had run out, but before his songwriting gift would have run out. Consequently, I (a) give the album a thumbs up and (b) sincerely hope that Billy continues to keep his word and releases no more pop albums in the future. Just keep on touring those stadiums until they tear 'em all down, Mr. Joel!

 

2000 YEARS: THE MILLENNIUM CONCERT (2000)

 

1) Beethoven's Ninth; 2) Big Shot; 3) Movin' Out; 4) Summer Highland Falls; 5) The Ballad Of Billy The Kid; 6) Don't Ask Me Why; 7) New York State Of Mind; 8) I've Loved These Days; 9) My Life; 10) Allentown; 11) Prelude / Angry Young Man; 12) Only The Good Die Young; 13) I Go To Extremes; 14) Goodnight Saigon; 15) We Didn't Start The Fire; 16) Big Man On Mulberry Street; 17) 2000 Years; 18) Auld Lang Syne; 19) River Of Dreams; 20) Scenes From An Italian Restaurant; 21) Dance To The Music; 22) Honky Tonk Women; 23) It's Still Rock And Roll To Me; 24) You May Be Right; 25) This Night.

 

While River Of Dreams was slowly running dry into oblivion, Billy Joel was not doing much of anything — divorcing his next wife, putting on a little weight, growing himself a bit of a wise old man beard, losing some hair off the top of his head for compensation, and collecting enough ro­yalties to eventually become an institution. And who but a whole institution should have had the honor of welcoming in the new millennium at Madison Square Garden, NYC? It's been a long, hard, excruciating road all the way from JC to BJ, but here we are at last. At the center of the Uni­verse is Earth, and at the center of the Earth is New York City, and at the center of New York City stands Madison Square Garden, and in the center of Madison Square Garden sits Billy Joel, playing his piano and telling us that science and poetry rule in the new world to come, and what an amazing future there will be.

 

Naturally, it would not have been in line with Billy's usual modesty to appropriate this entire important mission all to himself, and the stage at MSG that night was shared by multiple guests, reflecting large, notorious parts of musical history. As you can see from the track listing, we also have here The Rolling Stones (brilliantly impersonated by Billy Joel on ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ), Sly & The Family Stone (with Billy Joel subtly sitting in for the band on ʽDance To The Musicʼ), Robert Burns (impressively recreated by Billy Joel with a couple verses from ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ), and no less than Ludwig van Beethoven himself (I am not sure if Billy Joel himself is playing all the orchestra parts and singing all the choral parts on the intro sections of the 9th Symphony, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if he were). A little extra research on the cuts that did not make it onto the 2-CD edition shows that Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin were there on that night, too, transforming the already unforgettable event into a completely supernatural phan­tasmagoria, but the No. 1 Recording Company in Heaven, for selfish reasons, would not release them from their Doomsday contract, so their contributions had to be scrapped from the official album. You can, however, ascertain their presence through various bootleg versions (beware, though, as they do not bear God's official seal of approval).

 

Needless to say, it would have been very surprising if all that star presence and the grandiosity of the occasion itself did not go just a teensy-weensy bit over Billy's head. And, as a matter of fact, it's a good thing they do, because The Millennium Concert can be quite hilarious in places. It is not up to me to guess the amounts of alcohol consumed prior to the show (and no matter what the amount, I would never blame the man for needing a little stimulation to overcome the nerves), but Billy's banter with the audience should probably be taken as a hint. «First of all, I wanna thank all of you for paying those ridiculously expensive ticket prices... I don't know who bought those $999 jobs, I might have gone for that if Hendrix came back, you know?.. How many people here are rich?... [boo boo boo]... Oh, so you paid, like, those scalper prices? Well, I'm sorry...» Allow me to refrain from further comments.

 

Oh yes, the music. Well, Billy's voice has deepened a little, which probably empowers him to do more of that «rock and roll stuff», or to sing some of the older tunes in a more hard-rock manner (the opening ʽBig Shotʼ, for instance), but every once in a while, champagne literally or figura­tively goes to his head, and he turns a certain song into an over-drawn, over-sung showpiece of the drunk variety — ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ was never a subtle masterpiece to begin with, but here it is turned into a screamfest, and then culminates in a grossly overdone coda where the man literally sounds as if he is taking a really painful dump, suffering from a serious constipation problem. Is that a typical thing for New Yorkers? Hopefully not. Does that mean that a «New York state of mind» is really just a bowel problem? Not a nice thing to suggest when you're sitting at the center of the Universe, surrounded by rich New Yorkers who'd just bought a bunch of $999 tickets for scalper prices.

 

Questions, questions, questions. Why does ʽDon't Ask Me Whyʼ become ʽDon't Axe Me Whyʼ? It's not as if we were in the deep South or anything. Why does ʽMy Lifeʼ open up with a bass-heavy, quasi-hard-rock introduction, when the song itself has nothing to do with this stylistics? Why is there only one song from Billy's pre-1976 period? (Apparently, ʽSouvenirʼ and ʽPiano Manʼ were cut from the final release, but that does not eliminate the question). And, most impor­tantly, did Billy really write ʽ2000 Yearsʼ seven years before the show with the secret goal of performing that particular song right before the clock struck twelve and the date changed to 2000? (And even more importantly, was he aware that only 1999 years had passed up to that point and, strictly speaking, we were still living in the old millennium?).

 

But questions aside, the show itself wasn't too bad. Even the «guest spots» were done professio­nally enough to carry their «symbolic» value, regardless of the general stiffness with which the band launches into Sly & The Family Stone's funky groove, or of the fact that Billy's guitar play­er for the evening, Tommy Byrnes, does not seem to get which particular licks make the guitar solo on ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ into more than just another guitar solo. The setlist, or what of it made onto the album, is hardly problematic, predictably skewed in favor of classic hits, but what else are you expected to play before people who bought tickets for scalper prices? Play it wrong and they just might want to scalp you on their way out. The important thing is that the audience does seem to feel like they're getting their money's worth, and Billy sounds so drunk that he seems to believe he is having himself a good time as well, so everybody's happy, and the con­jured benevolent spirits were just enough in quantity to help us overcome the Y2K problem, and — get this — Billy Joel actually remembers all the lyrics to ʽWe Didn't Start The Fireʼ in the correct order even under intoxication, which might just be the major Herculean feat of the past 2000 years. How do you get to Madison Square Garden on the eve of the new millennium? Prac­tice... your history trivia. 

 

FANTASIES & DELUSIONS (2001)

 

1) Opus 3. Reverie (Villa D'Este); 2) Opus 2. Waltz # 1 (Nunley's Carousel); 3) Opus 7. Aria (Grand Canal); 4) Opus 6. Invention In C Minor; 5) Opus 1. Soliloquy (On A Separation); 6) Opus 8. Suite For Piano (Star-Crossed); 7) Opus 5. Waltz # 2 (Steinway Hall); 8) Opus 9. Waltz # 3 (For Lola); 9) Opus 4. Fantasy (Film Noir); 10) Opus 10. Air (Dublinesque).

 

Try and make a hit record out of this. Seven years into doing nothing much of anything, Billy finally decided that it was time to branch out. If Paul McCartney can do this — and Paul McCart­ney hasn't even been much of a «piano man» anytime in his life — why not Billy Joel? Going classical should be a natural thing for an artist who'd already explored so many different roads (in fact, he'd already experimented with the classical format a long time ago — remember ʽNocturneʼ from his solo debut?); and if you are a piano player by trade, it is only natural that you should begin diligently and humbly, with a set of piano pieces rather than anything as bombastic and pretentious as an oratorio (eat that, Sir Paul).

 

As a champion of the simple folks, Billy does not set his sights particularly high or cast his net particularly wide. This is certainly not «modern classical», nor does it show any influences of old-school innovators like Debussy, nor does it attempt to cover too much technically challenging ground — although even the way those pieces were written, Billy did not dare play them himself, and passed this honor to his friend, Richard Hyung-ki Joo, a British-Korean pianist specializing in shows that combine classical music with comedy. Not that there is any attempt at comedy on Fantasies & Delusions (unless you think that Billy Joel going classical is in itself sufficient rea­son for comedy). There is simply an attempt to write a bunch of waltzes, ballads, scherzos, and nocturnes (no mazurkas detected, though), largely in the style of Chopin — the best combination of exquisiteness with accessibility imaginable — with maybe just a little bit of Liszt and Rach­maninoff thrown in for good measure. Oh, and just one brief quasi-Bach piece (ʽInvention In C Minorʼ), over in just a minute.

 

Now, how could I ever rate this? I do not review classical music, unless bits of it happen to be incorporated into progressive rock albums, since any music that is properly «composed», that is, put down in sheetnote form (Tin Pan Alley notwithstanding), requires a very different writing approach, and from that point of view, Billy Joel is no exception. It is the easiest thing in the world to say that Chopin rules and Billy Joel sucks (and it is highly probable that it would be true), but you'd need to say why, and this requires serious musicological analysis that I would not be capable of providing.

 

On a layman level, I would just say this. The pieces sound «accomplished» — I think they would have earned a reasonably high score on any music school graduation test. The general rules of mid-19th century music making are adhered to fairly well; at the very least, it's not as if Billy were occasionally hopping into Broadway territory or anything. (Well, maybe once or twice he does, but then, it's always possible to count that as artistic license). He understands Chopin and the other romantics — that much, I think, we can all admit. Whether he can replicate them, how­ever, not to mention add something of his own to this replication, is a different matter.

 

In the case of Chopin, at least, Chopin's best piano pieces are extremely catchy, even for the untrained ear — we all recognize the waltz in C sharp minor well enough even without being able to identify the piece — due to wondrously well worked out and strategically repeated main themes. The most surprising element about Billy's exercises, however, is that «catchiness» does not even begin to enter the picture — and this coming from one of pop music's greatest master of sheer «hookery»! The pieces sound «nice», but the themes lack individuality and character, never take any musical risks, and, overall, simply consist of playing various scales in different tempos and at different volumes. Some of the pieces are more dynamic than others, but certainly not enough to generate «drama». Enough, perhaps, to be used for a soundtrack to a quiet evening in a local (Italian?) restaurant. Hardly more than that.

 

Which begs for the question: why? In interviews, Billy himself has admitted that it was just an experiment, nothing too serious or ambitious about it, and that he himself was surprised that it managed to sell more than a few copies. Nothing too surprising, I'd say, considering the huge army of Joel fanaticists who'd probably buy anything associated with the man, even if he decided to sing Wagner arias to an accompaniment of Jew's harp and washboard. (On second thought, I'd definitely buy that, too). But what would be the posterior use of this product? If it managed to fulfill an educational purpose — for instance, increase the interest of at least a small chunk of these buyers in classic romantic piano pieces — more power to Billy. More likely, however, it just prompted some of these buyers to rave about how «Billy's towering genius allows him to create highbrow music along with the best of 'em!», a reaction that Billy himself would explicitly distance himself from (but secretly might enjoy).

 

Consequently, upon deliberating, even though I do not actively «hate» what I have heard, I still give the record a thumbs down. It is humble and vain at the same time: humble, since the chosen musical style is devoid of formal bombast, and vain, since, want it or not, it triggers comparison with the «academic greats», and, consequently, still has a bit of that «I want to be the greatest sorcerer in all the world» spirit to it. Of course, this is ironically reflected in the album's title — and the compositions are more «delusions» than «fantasies» by definition. Nobody needs to hear this, really; nor are the late Artur Rubinstein or Vladimir Horowitz shaking in their graves at the glorious Steinway sound coming from under the fingers of Mr. Joo here. Oh, and, to add injury to insult, this whole damn thing runs for seventy-five minutes — which is more than all of Chopin's Etudes put together, so, in a highly improbable situation where you might be tempted... just do yourself a favor and do not fall for bland facsimiles. Or at least consult your local musicologist.

 

PS. I especially like how exquisitely they labeled all of Billy's compositions as opera, and then shuffled them around so that the track listing looks like a genuine recital. Yes, ladies and gentle­men, Waltz No. 2 was chronologically written after ʽFantasyʼ, not right after Waltz No. 1, and we have to reflect that, or else we will be disrespectful to the composer with our inaccurate listing. Even if the entire catalog is not too likely to be expanded in the future... then again, just recast all of his previous compositions as Lieder and you have yourself a friggin' Schubert in the works.

 

LIVE AT SHEA STADIUM (2011)

 

1) Prelude/Angry Young Man; 2) My Life; 3) Summer, Highland Falls; 4) Everybody Loves You Now; 5) Zanzibar; 6) New York State Of Mind; 7) Allentown; 8) The Ballad Of Billy The Kid; 9) She's Always A Woman; 10) Goodnight Saigon; 11) Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway); 12) Shameless; 13) This Is The Time; 14) Keeping The Faith; 15) Captain Jack; 16) Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel); 17) River Of Dreams/A Hard Day's Night; 18) We Didn't Start The Fire; 19) You May Be Right; 20) Scenes From An Italian Restaurant; 21) Only The Good Die Young; 22) I Saw Her Standing There; 23) Take Me Out To The Ballgame; 24) Piano Man; 25) Let It Be.

 

In 2008, they decided to tear down Shea Stadium, and three guesses who was selected to play the venue's last couple of shows... nay, not even Sir Paul McCartney, although he does make a guest appearance. Up to date, Live At Shea Stadium has been Billy's last live album, and with at least two others under his belt from the new millennium (the previous one was 12 Gardens Live, once again from Madison Square), it will really be sort of pathetic if he tries out yet another one, what with the setlist generally repeating itself over and over.

 

At the very least, this is a tighter, better controlled affair than the half-drunk slop of The Millen­nium Concert, but there are disadvantages to this as well — everything is a bit too strict this time, and the songs are played the way Billy's live audience at the stadium wants to hear them, not the way a skeptically minded live album listener would. Tight band, good singer (adapting the songs to his ever-lower range and not trying to pull any weird stuff like the «constipation blues» coda of ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ on Millennium), what else?

 

Well, a few guest stars couldn't hurt, and this is where the CD edition makes some bad choices: the first CD features singing duets with Tony Bennett (appropriate for ʽNew York State Of Mindʼ, perhaps, but multiplying the song's cheese factor by two) and Garth Brooks (on ʽShamelessʼ, which was never even that good a song to begin with), as well as new generation guitar hero John Mayer adding bland blues-pop licks to ʽThis Is The Timeʼ. With these three guys close together in the setlist, it's like he had to have a special «quota on bad taste» to fulfill, and this is a little sad considering that Steve Tyler and Roger Daltrey were also among the invited guests on those nights, singing, respectively, ʽWalk This Wayʼ and ʽMy Generationʼ — even if they were out of vocal shape, I'd rather have a hoarse Daltrey than a perfectly well-calibrated Garth Brooks.

 

At the end of the show, Sir Paul McCartney is being dragged out by the breeches to sing ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ and ʽLet It Beʼ — how come it was Paul McCartney as a guest of Billy Joel and not vice versa is still a mystery to me, but then, why should Paul McCartney ever consider adding Billy Joel as a guest? These are decent performances, anyway, except that Billy's guitarist is so stiff that he can't even grasp the art of spiritually igniting the solos on these songs. Oh, and there is another stiff Beatles moment when Billy inserts ʽA Hard Day's Nightʼ in the middle of ʽRiver Of Dreamsʼ where it has no reason to belong.

 

Stage banter is kept to a minimum this time, if you don't mind Billy giving the people a little bit of mundane advice every now and then — for instance, at the end of the show: "drive safe, not like me, and don't take any shit from anybody!" Whatever you say, O Great Champion of the People — 50,000 fans have presumably never taken any shit from anybody ever since (whether they all still drive safe, though, is an unresolved issue). The setlist does include a few relative «rarities» from the old days, like ʽEverybody Loves You Nowʼ, but not a lot, and you'd do much better with Songs From The Attic for those purposes.

 

The one classic moment worth experiencing here is when the band launches, without announce­ment, into the rock drive of ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ, and then... "ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Sir Paul McCartney!" and the whole stadium explodes in a way that no Tony Bennett or Garth Brooks could ever have dreamt of — no Billy Joel, for that matter, either. I am not saying that «Paul stole the show»: he's not that long on the stage, and Paul's own band would have performed the songs in a livelier manner than Billy's — but the roar over the tribunes cer­tainly brings on analogies with the Beatles' classic performances in 1965-66 at the same location.

 

Is it symbolic that they brought in Billy to draw the curtains on one of the most famous land­marks of 20th century pop art (especially if you also add sports to pop art)? Probably not, but it is still curious how the man is constantly used to close the door on something, be it the old millen­nium or simply fifty years of baseball and rock'n'roll. The irony is that Billy Joel does not really belong in the new millennium — where «intellectual» styles of music have long since advanced to unreachable (for him) heights, and «popular» styles of music have mostly sunk to unthinkable (for him) lows. These are good old-fashioned simplistic family values celebrated here, from the good old boys of ʽGoodnight Saigonʼ to the unemployed factory workers of ʽAllentownʼ, sung to old-fashioned chords and with old-fashioned words, and as corny as those songs used to be in the 1970s and 1980s, now there is a certain «relic from the past» aura around them that might, for a few moments, make even a veteran Billy Joel hater come to terms with the man and his values. (Even if it only takes Sir Paul McCartney a few seconds to show who's really timeless here.)

BLUE ÖYSTER CULT

BLUE ÖYSTER CULT (1972)

 

1) Transmaniacon MC; 2) I'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheep; 3) Then Came The Last Days Of May; 4) Stairway To The Stars; 5) Before The Kiss, A Redcap; 6) Screams; 7) She's As Beautiful As A Foot; 8) Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll; 9) Workshop Of The Telescopes; 10) Redeemed.

 

Heavy metal does not really need to be stereotyped. While there is no escaping the fact that dis­torted heavy riffage will inescapably be associated with «the forces of evil» in one way or another, there is really a lot of different opportunities, and dungeons, dragons, Mordor, Satan, wars, gore, guts, nuclear apocalypse, and the Four Horsemen are only a subsection of these. By the early 1970s, though, Led Zeppelin sort of epitomized the magical-mystical-medieval aspect of the heavy metal business, Black Sabbath prioritized intimate relationships with The Horned One, and that, kinda sorta, was it.

 

Two bands, emerging more or less at the same time, showed, however, that heavy metal (or heavy rock, at least — without getting bogged down in terminology) could be made to sound quirky, ironic, and tongue-in-cheek. The lesser one of the two was Budgie, and the bigger one was Blue Öyster Cult. In fact, that umlaut over the O pretty much says it all: a humorous quasi-«Ger­manization» of the band name, suggesting some sort of terrifying Teutonic brutality, but at the same time so self-consciously silly that not even the dumbest fan of this band would probably be tempted to check the proper spelling of the word «oyster». Come to think of it, it is even hard for me to imagine how this band could have had any dumb fans in the first place — certainly not in their earliest and finest period.

 

What can one say, really, about a band that was managed and directed not by one, but by two art critics and intellectuals? Sandy Pearlman «manufactured» the band way back in 1967, when they were still called «Soft White Underbelly», in order for them to write music to his lyrics, and later on, Richard Meltzer, his fellow student and author of The Aesthetics Of Rock, also joined in the fun. Blue Öyster Cult were their «experimental Monkees», in a way, although all of the band members participated in the songwriting process from the very beginning (on the debut album, five of the songs are co-credited to Pearlman, two to Meltzer, and three were written without any inteference from the literary gurus).

 

Interestingly enough, the band's earliest opera sucked plenty: several of their recordings from 1969, when they were engaging in some sort of comical bluegrass-rock, are appended as bonus tracks to some of this album's CD editions, and they are uniformly boring and instantaneously forgettable, regardless of the lyrics. It all changed overnight, with the release of Black Sabbath's first album — suddenly, the band had a point: they were to become the «intellectual equivalent» of the Sabs, playing comparably heavy, but less predictable music, set to first-grade rock lyrics that would clearly expose Geezer Butler for the lazy schoolboy that he was.

 

Under different circumstances, the album may have been an epic failure — the band could have turned out to be too smart for its own good, and from a commercial angle, they certainly were: Blue Öyster Cult only barely scraped the charts, probably allowing the band to make about as much money as would be enough to cover Ozzy's 24-hour coke supply. Hip New York critics loved them, though, with Lester Bangs himself issuing a glowing review in Rolling Stone, and they had their point: Blue Öyster Cult were weird and unpredictable, but they also rocked. At their best, these songs can be wild snarling beasts, or they can be sizzling pots of voodoo gumbo, or they can be loaded with heavy soul — these guys, hired by Pearlman and pointed in the right direction by Meltzer, turned out to be classy, evocative musicians.

 

The music is not really as heavy as Sabbath or Zeppelin: there is only a small bunch of monster riffs on the album, and it is just as strongly influenced by basic boogie-rock or moody pop-rock in the style of The Doors as it is by the metal masters. Lead vocals, alternately shared by four out of five band members, are efficient, but nothing to write home about. Technically, that is: when it comes to delivering the basic storyline, Eric Bloom is an effective actor, as are most of his col­leagues, who all like getting into character, be it the sad, moralistic storyteller in ʽThen Came The Last Days Of Mayʼ, nobly and epicly narrated by Buck Dharma, or the arrogant hellraiser in ʽCities On Flame With Rock And Rollʼ, wailed and growled out by drummer Albert Bouchard. Melodies, arrangement tricks, vocal flourishes — most of the time they compensate for the (relative!) lack of brute power.

 

This is not exactly «thinking man's heavy metal», because, fairly speaking, many of the lyrics are absurd or parodical, with Pearlman and Meltzer having more fun assembling and blowing up rock clichés rather than genuinely engaging the thinking man's thinking mechanisms; and the music is quite openly derivative, sometimes almost mockingly deconstructive (as when they suddenly launch into the melody of ʽMemphis, Tennesseeʼ in the middle of ʽBefore The Kiss, A Redcapʼ), and certainly not «progressive» in any possible sense of the word (and how could it be, with the music produced under the supervision of the author of The Aesthetics Of Rock?). None of which prevents the songs from being cool, classy, and kick-ass quality.

 

Being a sucker for a good heavy metal riff, I will not deny that ʽCities On Flame With Rock And Rollʼ, one of the tunes not having to do anything with the Pearlman/Meltzer agenda, has always been my instantaneous favorite on the album. The riff in question is derived from Black Sabbath's ʽThe Wizardʼ, but packs more suspense and condensed evil: this is really one of the best songs in existence that drives the idea of rock'n'roll exuberation through a filter of hellflames, Sodom and Gomorrah — the transition from the relatively merry chords of "let the girl, let the girl rock and roll" to the macabre "cities on flame now, with rock and roll" resolution is totally thrilling.

 

Other than that, I could not name any particularly outstanding highlights, but this is a good thing, because the album is amazingly consistent, and each song presents its own intrigue. ʽTrans­maniacon MCʼ announces the band's entrance as a scary eruption of the forces of evil, with re­ferences to Altamont, terror, pain, steel, "a plot of knives", and a nasty lead guitar part that bursts out in sneering laughter after each chorus — the band's own take on ʽSympathy For The Devilʼ, if you wish. ʽI'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheepʼ further raises the stakes on tension and para­noia, its fast and nervous tempo matching the lyrics about a pursued fugitive (and the additionally sped-up, super-paranoid coda is pure genius). ʽStairway To The Stairsʼ uses brutal, bludgeoning chords and mutilated vocals that are reminiscent of ZZ Top's Texan rock (except ZZ Top them­selves had not yet quite mastered that style by 1972), and Meltzer's lyrics that poke fun at the newly emerged rock star image are right on the money.

 

The subtle-and-subdued vibe also agrees with these guys: ʽLast Days Of Mayʼ almost makes you want to shed tears for the poor drug dealer suckers betrayed and murdered by their own colleague in crime — roots-rock of the Eagles variety (Desperado was not yet released, though) turned on its head: Buck Dharma's show all the way, as he writes the song, sings it in a mournful, soulful manner with spiritual echo all around, and euphonizes the poor dead guys with the most ecstatic leads on the album. ʽShe's As Beautiful As A Footʼ is consciously absurdist ("didn't believe it when he bit into her face / it tasted just like a fallen arch"?), musically structured like a parody on the classic Doors sound, with Krieger-esque melodic leads, but endowed with a mystery aura of its own. And most chilling of all — the way ʽScreamsʼ opens with that ghoulish phased vocal track ("screams in the night, sirens delight...") right out of Hell's own lush antechamber.

 

Special kudos for ending the album with ʽRedeemedʼ, a song contributed to the band by outside friend Harry Farcas, utterly nonsensical and Bonzo Dog Band-ish in nature (apparently, ʽSir Rastus Bearʼ was the name of Harry's pet dog, but that doesn't help matters much), but it has the word "redeemed" in the title and in the chorus, so you get to think it is some sort of grand gospel folk anthem to logically wind things up, and it does sound uplifting and optimistic next to every­thing else on the album — another pop cliché, carefully extracted, bottled, processed, and muta­ted for public enjoyment.

 

In short, even if this is not Blue Öyster Cult's highest point (but it might be), this is definitely their atmospheric masterpiece — an album so tightly stuffed with mystery, intrigue, suspense, irony, and implicit intelligence that in many ways, topping it would be impossible, certainly not if they wanted to achieve commercial success. Not only that, but it is also a certain landmark in the story of «rock music taking an introspective look at itself», chiefly due to the Pearlman/Meltzer contributions, but then neither Pearlman nor Meltzer wrote or performed the actual music, so we have to assume the band members were totally in on the masterplan. «Black Sabbath meets Frank Zappa» — wouldn't be a totally legit comparison, of course, since there's a lot more other influ­ences here, and only a few of the Sabbath or Zappa features would be implied, but it could work for starters, especially if you need a tempting stimulus to get the record. Thumbs up from all possible perspectives: a record that is as intellectually stimulating as it is emotionally enjoyable.

 

TYRANNY AND MUTATION (1973)

 

1) The Red & The Black; 2) O.D.'d On Life Itself; 3) Hot Rails To Hell; 4) 7 Screaming Diz-Busters; 5) Baby Ice Dog; 6) Wings Wetted Down; 7) Teen Archer; 8) Mistress Of The Salmon Salt.

 

It is still a little puzzling why the band decided to re-write ʽI'm On The Lamb But I Ain't No Sheepʼ from the first album as ʽThe Red & The Blackʼ, opening the second one, but at least the rewrite helps immediately tag the significant difference in style between Blue Öyster Cult and Tyranny And Mutation — beginning here and continuing throughout. Unfortunately, it is not a difference that would, from my point of view, seriously benefit the second album.

 

Although the basic ingredients (band line-up; the Pearlman/Meltzer connection, to which is now linked an additional connection with the still little-known underground personage Patti Smith; emphasis on hard rock values, mixed with a post-modern attitude) remain the same, Tyranny And Mutation is notoriously more «rock and roll» than the «mysterious heavy rock» of its pre­decessor. The production is clearer and much more in your face, as the guitar sound now brutally lashes you across it, rather than emerges from some distant dark enchanted forest. Eric Bloom and the rest of the singers rely more on the snarling, sneering «glam» posturing vocal attitudes on the day than the eerie, hushed, voodoo-drenched deliveries. The tempos are faster, the riffage is briskier and, on the whole, more generic (ʽO.D.'d On Life Itselfʼ starts out with one of the most common barroom rock patterns in existence). In short, most of this album will probably be more palatable for fans of the Faces or, say, Billion Dollar Babies-era Alice Cooper, than Black Sab­bath or Led Zeppelin. Sort of.

 

Which is not to say, of course, that the album is just «boring»: the band has simply switched to a type of music where it takes a little more effort to keep things enticing, and since they are still fresh and enthusiastic, they do manage to keep up with the challenge more often than they do not. The only condition is that one must learn to employ both gut feeling and intellectual reasoning at the same time to get the best out of tunes like ʽ7 Screaming Diz-Bustersʼ: the pure rock'n'roll punch of this seven-minute epic is incomparable with anything a band like AC/DC might have to offer, but its structure, switching back and forth between a maniacal «rock'n'roll rondeau» and a whole slew of different time signatures, compensates for this in an experimental manner. The «diz-busters» in question have not been identified, but, judging by the urgency and unstoppability of that main «choo-ka-choom, choo-ka-choom» riff, they are the modern world projection of the «four horsemen», presenting their own deconstructed strategy for the end of the world.

 

Other songs worthy of extra comment include ʽHot Rails To Hellʼ, which is a little more fast and a little more lyrically obscure than ʽHighway To Hellʼ, but essentially deals with the same pro­blem — and, for what it's worth, has a better fundamental riff, not to mention a far more imagi­native coda, in which the other riff of the song almost literally «gets fried» as you descend into "the heat from below" that "can burn your eyes out"; the Patti Smith-cowritten ʽBaby Ice Dogʼ (always refreshing to hear a female-penned lyrical piece begin with the line "I had this bitch you see..."), with one of the most minimalistic and saddest guitar solos ever committed to tape; and ʽMistress Of The Salmon Saltʼ, which starts out with the same chord punch that we all know from the far more famous ʽSpace Truckin'ʼ but then goes on to make a completely different point (not that I know what point, exactly, but at least it's a catchy one).

 

On the whole, though, the album tends to drag a little, especially everywhere where the band tries to be moody without being heavy — there isn't a single song on here, for instance, which would match the soulful tension of ʽLast Days Of Mayʼ or the spookiness of ʽScreamsʼ: something like ʽWings Wetted Downʼ, whose tales of black horsemen and echoes of empires also suggest apo­calyptic predictions, does not manage to infiltrate my mind on any serious level, sounding more like one of those second-rate late-Sixties psycho-art songs usually done by British people but sometimes copied by Americans as well, and they are not giving it any special flavor.

 

A thumbs up rating is still guaranteed in the end (wings wetted down, it all turns around), yet, in a way, one could easily build up a case against the band stating that «it all went downhill from here» — actually, it did not, but such an easy, almost casual dropping of some of their most intriguing properties shows how it could. On the other hand, if you prefer worshipping your blue oyster cult with less psychedelic smoke and fog, and more kick-ass rock'n'roll, your feelings will be reversed in comparison, so, naturally, this disappointment should not be taken as an absolute. Besides, this seems to be the very first appearance of a Patti Smith poem in the context of a rock and roll record, which sort of makes it a collectible by itself, I gather.

 

SECRET TREATIES (1974)

 

1) Career Of Evil; 2) Subhuman; 3) Dominance And Submission; 4) ME 262; 5) Cagey Cretins; 6) Harvester Of Eyes; 7) Flaming Telepaths; 8) Astronomy.

 

Each of these early BÖC albums has its own separate identity, but it is hard to delineate them without resorting to technicalities. If the appropriate keyword combination for the self-titled debut was «ironic mystique» and then Tyranny And Mutation replaced it with «in-yer-face ironic hard rock», well, I'd say Secret Treaties is neither of these things. It is noticeably lighter — still technically «hard rock», but with a stronger nod to pop and, most interestingly, with a certain minimalistic flavor: the riffs are getting more sparse, abrupt, and laconic, occasionally predicting the highly expressive minimalism of AC/DC or even the punkers. Listen to ʽDomi­nance And Submissionʼ and tell me you don't recognize ʽWe're A Happy Familyʼ (incidentally, the Ramones were one of the opening acts for BÖC in early 1977, and the song was on the setlist — how's that for a little detective work?).

 

As such, I don't know about enjoyability, but they do manage to throw on some extra intrigue after the slight relative disappointment of Tyranny. By calming down a bit and concentrating seriously on musical development and lyrical content, the band produces a «hard-art» record that actually taps into some serious matter — not «proverbially dark» or «theatrically eerie», but snappy in a genuinely disturbing way if you pay sufficient attention. Nowhere more so than on the album opener, ʽCareer Of Evilʼ, a naughty grin of a song that could very well fit onto any Alice Cooper record; all the more amazing that its hyperbolic lyrics, presented from the point of view of the allegorical meanest motherfucker you've ever seen in your life, were penned by Patti Smith (then again, this is the Patti Smith of ʽRock'n'Roll Niggerʼ fame, too). The repeated line "I'm making a career of evil" concludes one of the catchiest choruses in the band's history — so prepare to forever suffer the harboring in your head of a song that threatens to steal wives, inject brains, and "do it to your daughter on a dirt road", yuck. Nasty.

 

ʽDominance And Submissionʼ hits sparingly, but harsh, its grim simple chords delivering power­ful punches and its lyrics seemingly dealing with the impact of the media on public conscience (I think). The second part of the song (starting off with "In Times Square now people do the polka") is one of the weirdest bits they ever did — the "dominance! / submission! / (radios appear)" sequence is two minutes of sheer delirium, followed by an even more delirious guitar solo, and in combination with all the not-so-innocent references to 1963, 1964, digging ʽThe Locomotionʼ, and questionable rides in backseats with «Susan and her brother, Charles the grinning boy», this is pretty disturbing nostalgia, if you ask me. They overplay it so hotly that, eventually, it becomes more bizarre and/or hilarious than creepy, but fishing creepiness out of the depths of weirdness is a respectable activity in its own rights, isn't it?

 

They pull the whiskers of public taste even more strongly on ʽME 262ʼ, whose lyrics depict an aerial battle in WWII from the perspective of a German pilot, no less: "Must these Englishmen live that I might die"? Granted, BÖC are an American band, not a British one, and run a slightly lesser risk of being dragged through the mud in New York than they'd run it in London, but still, if you throw in the fact that ʽME 262ʼ is really a happy-sounding barroom boogie number at heart, and that they also illustrated the song vividly on the album cover, that's one hell of a provocative move: "Hitler's on the phone from Berlin, says I'm gonna make you a star...".

 

As we move forward, it becomes more and more obvious that Pearlman, Meltzer, and Patti Smith have really formed a «secret treaty» to turn Blue Öyster Cult into a critical weapon, launched against public manipulation and sheep mentality — a title like ʽCagey Cretinsʼ speaks for itself, while the ʽHarvester Of Eyesʼ seems to be a metaphor for your TV set. The lyrics are always ambiguous enough to suggest multiple interpretations (or refrain from interpretation altogether), but the «satirical» interpretation complements the music best of all, adding extra depth to these odd riffs, like the «probing claw» mini-melody of ʽHarvester Of Eyesʼ that seeks to implant itself in your brain and take possession of your ears, eyes, and everything else. And the desperately weeping intonations of ʽFlaming Telepathsʼ go together fairly well with the recurrent line — "I'm after rebellion, I'll settle for lies", which is like a funny retort to the Who's ʽWon't Get Fooled Againʼ. It occupies the album's niche for «mini-epic», with Moog, piano, and guitar solos fueling the big pathos furnace until the song suddenly begins to match its ambitions and overwhelm the senses — regardless of whether you understand who the hell are the "flaming telepaths" in ques­tion and whether the lyrics are supposed to be taken socially, personally, or to the incinerator.

 

My only problem is with ʽAstronomyʼ, which closes the record off on another grand note, but with some pretense at «soul» — as if somebody thought it'd be a good idea to pay a joint tribute to Elton John and Van Morrison at the same time, but ended up sounding like Journey instead, or some other second-rate/hand quasi-prog band. To succeed at this sort of thing, they'd need at least one or two individual geniuses among them, a great vocalist or a super-flashy soloist or two, but their strength has always been in the collective realm, and from that point of view, ʽAstronomyʼ is neither as weird as ʽRedeemedʼ nor as tightly assembled as ʽMistress Of The Salmon Saltʼ. If it is an intentional send-up of «pretentious», «romantic» values, it would be more logical at least to place it in the middle, because using it as a coda aggrandizes it, want it or not, and it does not seem to deserve any proper aggrandization, I think.

 

Still, these are minor nitpicks next to how altogether consistent and stimulating the record is — one of the most intellectually challenging hard rock artefacts of 1974. Which is not saying that nobody should ever listen to the self-titled KISS debut from the same year in the event of availa­bility of Secret Treaties, because Secret Treaties is not a headbanger's delight, it just uses hard rock as a useful tool for something completely different, and it is this difference more than any­thing else that earns it a thumbs up. It rocks, sure enough, but more importantly, it's quirky, and it cannot be easily cracked upon one listen — and it's one of those «meta-rock» albums which should really only be appreciated once you've thoroughly gone through all of the usual biggies. If you're only in it for the rock'n'roll, well, better stay away from records where Patti Smith might be responsible for at least some of the words.

 

ON YOUR FEET OR ON YOUR KNEES (1975)

 

1) The Subhuman; 2) Harvester Of Eyes; 3) Hot Rails To Hell; 4) The Red & The Black; 5) 7 Screaming Diz-Busters; 8) Buck's Boogie; 9) Last Days Of May; 10) Cities On Flame; 11) ME 262; 12) Before The Kiss (A Redcap); 13) Maserati GT (I Ain't Got You); 14) Born To Be Wild.

 

I guess we all saw that coming — a double live album, the ultimate prooftest for all of the era's art rock and hard rock performers. Even if the basic image and substance of Blue Öyster Cult was of the «meta-...» nature, and most of the music was sharply tongue-in-cheek, one should not forget that there was still a serious dividing line between the band's ideological gurus (Pearlman, Meltzer, the occasional Patti Smith, etc.) and the actual boys in the band, most of whom had authentic rock'n'roll hearts; in fact, were it otherwise, the band would have never made it so good. Behind all the irony, there was a real beast out there, and On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, culled from several performances from their 1974 tour in support of Secret Treaties, was clearly supposed to focus on the beast rather than the irony.

 

Not that «the beast», unleashed on the audience, is completely free of the irony. The biggest difference of these performances from their studio equivalents is that some of the songs are seriously stretched out — most notably, ʽME 262ʼ and ʽDiz-Bustersʼ — and by «stretching out», Blue Öyster Cult usually mean «engaging in ridiculously overdone guitar pyrotechnics», like the ʽFreebirdʼ solo or the sonic acrobatics that Mick Ronson would perform before the front rows of bedazzled screa­ming kids during a Ziggy Stardust show. Some of the time the stage show focuses on Buck Dharma's soloing, at other times Bloom joins him with «stun guitar», creating a high-wailing, sense-overloading wall of sound that plays up to the «rock hero» image about as much as it sends it up — anyway, whatever happens out there in the middle of ʽME 262ʼ isn't really «rock and roll» in its purest form (like at a Stones concert or something), more like a consciously staged behaviorist experiment. Not a criticism — just a statement.

 

The actual songs are not changed all that much from the studio versions, except for the tempos, dutifully sped up for extra excitement at some expense of playing precision — sometimes it is for the better (ʽThe Red & The Blackʼ), but sometimes it hurts: ʽCities On Flameʼ loses much of its demonic sheen by not allowing the guitar riff to fully realize its grin — the timing is off, and the main body of the song is over much too quickly. Unfortunately, the mix is not ideal, either, with the vocals suffering throughout and some of the subtleties of the rhythm guitar probably lost due to technicalities. It wouldn't matter if the losses were compensated for with added rock'n'roll excitement, but... see above on rock'n'roll excitement.

 

The setlist, while omitting several obvious highlights of the first three albums, is still quite strong, and features three further additions to the catalog. ʽBuck's Boogieʼ is a lengthy instrumental, most of it happening at breakneck speed and featuring the personal talents of Mr. Donald Roeser (as far as live performance goes, it was actually quite an oldie by 1974, and a studio version is now available as a bonus track on Tyranny And Mutation). ʽMaserati GTʼ is a reimagined version of the old Jimmy Reed tune ʽI Ain't Got Youʼ with lotsa extra jamming; and ʽBorn To Be Wildʼ is the band trying to be Steppenwolf — I suspect that it is actually a studio track thrown on at the last moment, maybe as a friendly gesture or because they had it lying around and didn't know what else to do with it. It's all passable, the only question being: why did they have to throw an excerpt from ʽCat's Squirrelʼ into both ʽBuck's Boogieʼ and ʽMaserati GTʼ? Is that an unpleasant hint at the paucity of improvisational imagination — or just an unfortunate coincidence?

 

In any case, while you can tell that I am not head-over-heels in love with the album, it would be useless to insist that the Blue Öyster Cult Machine is not a real machine, but just an imitation. They do pack a good punch; the problem is that there is too much «show» here and not nearly enough «spirit». When we're talking bands like the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, or Deep Purple, in all those cases their classic live shows, different as they are from the studio activities, will rank at least as high as the studio activities. Blue Öyster Cult, on the other hand, seem to be primarily a studio-oriented band, even despite all the hard rock muscle that would seem so natu­rally geared towards live performance. But live, they are more of a «glam» act than a «rock» act, and this is why, like Bowie or T. Rex, no matter how much of a hell of a live show they could put on, and no matter how much their live records sold (and they did sell), they are more likely to be remembered for what they did in the studio. Still, thumbs up for all that hard work, and for featuring Buck Dharma in full flashy capacity for a change.

 

AGENTS OF FORTUNE (1976)

 

1) This Ain't The Summer Of Love; 2) True Confessions; 3) (Don't Fear) The Reaper; 4) E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence); 5) The Revenge Of Vera Gemini; 6) Sinful Love; 7) Tattoo Vampire; 8) Morning Final; 9) Tenderloin; 10) Debbie Denise.

 

Sometimes live albums are just live albums, and sometimes live albums mark off, or summarize a certain period — been there, done that, recapitulate, draw a line, time to move on. This is one of those cases: the Blue Öyster Cult of Agents Of Fortune is not the Blue Öyster Cult of Secret Treaties or any previous records. Goodbye, heavy metal — hello, pop rock.

 

Of course, it's not as if the band had always been a stranger to «softer» forms of music: from ʽRedeemedʼ to ʽWings Wetted Downʼ to ʽAstronomyʼ, their repertoire had frequently had its nods to folk, art-pop, and «progressive» styles. Nor is Agents Of Fortune completely devoid of riff-based tunes: ʽTattoo Vampireʼ has a riff as gritty as anything they'd done previously. But it would be futile to deny that the accents have seriously shifted — with the band being more pre­occupied with melody and harmony now, rather than the good old kick-ass routine.

 

Case in point: if there is one logical predecessor to the album's big hit song and the one number that is today most commonly associated with Blue Öyster Cult — ʽ(Don't Fear) The Reaperʼ — it would hardly be any of the hard rock bands, but rather The Byrds circa 1966-67. Buck Dharma's famous «jangly» riff is like a minor variation on the riff that opens ʽSo You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Starʼ, and the gentle folksy harmonies, culminating in the simplistic la-la-las of the chorus, sound as if coming straight out of sunny California, rather than the twisted, post-modern alleys of New York City. Add to this that Roeser envisioned the song as a fairly straightforward invitation to get rid of the fear of death — nothing ironic in that — and the "seasons don't fear the reaper" line, with its associations with ʽTurn! Turn! Turn!ʼ, and there you have it. Oh, and don't forget all the raga influences in the guitar break, too, which just about clinches it.

 

Why the song became such a big hit and such a ubiquitous staple is hard to tell — it was popular way before Will Ferrell and co. immortalized it for the hip crowds in the «more cowbell» SNL sketch, but I am not altogether sure that the cowbell itself could have had such a hypnotic effect on the public. Maybe its «optimistic melancholy», embodied in Roeser's unusually tender singing, filled in some sort of spiritual niche that was empty in 1976, or something. It is a good enough folk rock song, for sure, but hardly a classic example of «The BÖC Special» — knowing the band through this tune is a bit like knowing The Rolling Stones through ʽMiss Youʼ (which, I guess, could also be quite an option for a young person circa 1978).

 

Now if we take ʽThis Ain't The Summer Of Loveʼ, now we're talking: for all the difference that Agents Of Fortune makes, it opens in classic-traditional fashion, with heavy distorted guitars, eerie grinning vocals ("this is the night we ride!"), and a mock-apocalyptic message that is only a little bit set back by the raucous barroom-rock abandon of the chorus — the hookline is delivered by a bunch of bozos who've had one too many, rather than the Four Horsemen in their prime. You should not read too much profundity into the song — by 1976, everyone in the world knew fair well that «the summer of love» had ended with Altamont seven years back, or so they said — but this is not to say that the song has no snap, or has that snap misplaced. Most importantly, they can still generate that snap through music rather than words: the heavy riffage on ʽTattoo Vampireʼ, for instance, is so much more engaging than the silly lyrics about the protagonist's adventures in a tattoo parlor that the song may have worked better as a mean, fast-paced, athletic instrumental. (On the other hand, the endless references to vampires, daggers, demons, and flying skulls do a good job of directing one's mind to various «dark» associations for the music — otherwise, it might just as well be a modernistic tribute to Link Wray).

 

But the bulk of the record is far softer than that — you have your Band-style ʽTrue Confessionsʼ, dominated by honky-tonk piano and oddly plaintive vocal harmonies resolving in a falsetto hook; your arena-rock-oriented ʽExtra Terrestrial Intelligenceʼ, with bombastic guitars and anthemic choruses (all that's missing is a stadium and a neon-lit flying saucer landing in the middle); more falsetto harmonies on ʽSinful Loveʼ, mostly memorable for its bizarre refrain ("I love you like sin, but I won't be your pigeon"); more cowbell on ʽTenderloinʼ, where Eric Bloom suddenly decides to introduce a little bit of croon into his vocals and the whole thing ends up sounding like a slightly toughened up Billy Joel rocker; and ʽDebbie Deniseʼ, which is their softest album closer since ʽRedeemedʼ — pop harmonies all around and a chorus that, from my perspective, borders on sea shanty (or maybe it is just because I keep mishearing the "where I was out rolling with my band" line as "where I was a-rowin' with my band").

 

This should not, however, be taken as a criticism, for one simple reason: most of these songs are fun. They are imaginative, intriguing, (sometimes) lyrically challenging, memorable, and, most importantly, they come alive — it's almost as if the band were temporarily rejuvenated by gaining the right to step away from the hard rock formula and explore some contiguous territory. I mean, they even get Patti Smith to not only continue supplying some of the lyrics, but — now that her own musical career had kicked off with Horses a year ago — actually acquiring the right to duet with them on one of the tracks (the vampire anthem ʽRevenge Of Vera Geminiʼ): regardless of whether you are partial or not to the idea of Patti's warbling voice echoing Bloom, this is evi­dence of the band frantically searching for new solutions.

 

It all smells of a little campiness, where even ʽThe Reaperʼ might eventually begin to look like a parody on the «serious life-and-death message» song than the real thing, but ideologically, the album is not all that different from the early «meta-rock», «post-modern», «intertextual» etc. BÖC — most of the songs really work whichever way you want them to work, so that ʽVera Geminiʼ may look creepy one moment and hilarious the next one. In any case, ʽReaperʼ or no ʽReaperʼ, the record as a whole is a success, hard as it is to understand exactly what is so special about it. Maybe it's just that whole aura, a mix of sleaze, sarcasm, and «modernist spirituality», and the amazing discovery that it still stays relevant and involving even as the band rejects the gritty hard rock stomp as the primary means for conveying it. Thumbs up.

 

SPECTRES (1977)

 

1) Godzilla; 2) Golden Age Of Leather; 3) Death Valley Nights; 4) Searchin' For Celine; 5) Fireworks; 6) R. U. Ready 2 Rock; 7) Celestial The Queen; 8) Going Through The Motions; 9) I Love The Night; 10) Nosferatu.

 

This is actually a very good album, but I see how it can be (and is) often viewed as a major dis­appointment, coming right off the heels of Agents Of Fortune. First of all, its lead-off track and best known song, ʽGodzillaʼ, is a straightforward novelty number — never yet had Blue Öyster Cult sounded as close to «parody» as on this song, whose thick, grumbly, but ultimately humo­rous riffs sort of mockingly imitate the tread of Japan's beloved monster, and whose braggard chorus announces ʽGodzilla!ʼ as if it were a bunch of male cheerleaders welcoming the world's latest heavyweight champion, stepping out of his limousine on the red carpet. Ironically, both of the band's biggest successes of the 1976-78 period are credited to Buck Dharma — but ʽGodzillaʼ couldn't be more different from ʽReaperʼ, and any fan who had previously admired ʽReaperʼ for subtlety and depth would only find crudeness and silliness in ʽGodzillaʼ. Which, however, does not make the song any less catchy or fun.

 

The rest of the album, however, remembers that the band's chief strength lies in putting meanings on top of other meanings, and not only in choosing bizarre subjects for their songs, but also in finding bizarre structures and sequences to present them in — and from that point of view, Spectres is still classic Blue Öyster Cult in very good form. If there is an overall complaint, it is that the record all but says goodbye to the pop vibe of Agents Of Fortune, but does not return to the lean, crunchy hard rock of earlier times. Instead, the band is now regularly going for an «arena» type of sound — taking its cues from Boston and Foreigner rather than Black Sabbath, with power chords, glossy, «clean» guitar melodies, lots of keyboards, and a rather grayish production tone plaguing good and bad songs alike.

 

Something like this could, of course, be guessed just by looking at one of the titles: ʽR. U. Ready To Rockʼ — amusingly, the song was recorded around the same time as Queen's ʽWe Will Rock Youʼ, and this is telling, considering that News Of The World was also the most «arena-rock» type release that Queen ever offered its audiences. Except that ʽWe Will Rock Youʼ, as cheaply populist as it was, at least fulfilled its promise, whereas the BÖC song, slow, meandering, and with a lazy riff, only shows that, while you may be ready to rock, the band has pretty much for­gotten how to do that effectively, even in a post-modernist manner.

 

Fortunately, the meat of the record lies not in its unconvincing appeals to rock'n'roll, but in some of its imaginative mini-world journeys. ʽGolden Age Of Leatherʼ is an ironic, multi-part saga about bikers — from folk chant to ballad to James Bond theme to catchy pop-rock (later to turn into ʽDemolition Manʼ by The Police), the tune has it all. Albert Bouchard's ʽFireworksʼ is a mystical story of romance and tragedy, one of those songs where the verse melody hits harder than the chorus (I love those rapidly descending "she, went, down, to-her-house, by-the-water..." sequences and the moody guitar lines that echo them, creating a sense of doom in a highly un­conventional manner). And the band's obsession with the occult/supernatural culminates in not one, but two songs about vampires closing out the album — ʽI Love The Nightʼ approaches the subject from a sentimental-romantic angle, while ʽNosferatuʼ is essentially a brief retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula, done in properly Gothic fashion (echoey vocals, doom-laden pianos and Mellotrons, stately descending harmonies, whatever).

 

Synthesizers and thick, bulgy, arena-rock pop-metal riffs populate many of these songs, and do not always make up for fascinating listening, but the songs can grow on you over time, with hooks and meanings slowly arising from the somewhat murky turf: even something as dumb as ʽSearchin' For Celineʼ, one of the band's rare excursions into funk-pop, eventually makes its point as one of those obsessive, stalker-type songs, whose relentless exploitation of a single chord (or a couple of them) intentionally sets up a paranoid atmosphere. In the end, the only song to which I could not warm up was ʽDeath Valley Nightsʼ, a total musical disaster that rests on nothing but simplistic «bashing» power chords, and cannot be distinguished from a million billion overloud arena rockers en vogue at the time. On the other hand, ʽGoin' Through The Motionsʼ, which would later be even covered by Bonnie Raitt, is a good example of harnessing that production style by choosing an upbeat tempo, a catchy pop hook, a Farfisa organ (I think), and church bells to compensate for all the «gray». In the end, one or two bad songs aside, Spectres is nowhere near the awful letdown as it is sometimes proclaimed by those who actually fear the reaper, and deserves its stable thumbs up.

 

SOME ENCHANTED EVENING (1978)

 

1) R. U. Ready 2 Rock; 2) E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence); 3) Astronomy; 4) Kick Out The Jams; 5) Godzilla; 6) (Don't Fear) The Reaper; 7) We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.

 

At the moment, I only own the original short version of this album: in 2007, it was doubled in length with the addition of a whole bunch of extra performances, which might have doubled its value, I don't know — fact is, it was the original 36-minute long platter that managed, for some odd reason, to become the band's best-selling album ever. Maybe it was just the fact that here was a chance to get ʽReaperʼ and ʽGodzillaʼ on the same record, so people just mistook it for a best-of compilation — or maybe everybody and their grandma just wanted to own a pretty picture of The Reaper sitting atop a black horse with a rather stoned expression on his face.

 

Anyway, even more so than On Your Feet, and even despite the short running length, Some Enchanted Evening presents the band as a fire-breathing rock monster sent from rock hell to kick everybody's ass, even though the band's tongue remains firmly in the band's cheek, as they more often send this image up rather than across. To honor their rock'n'roll legacy, they perform a couple of covers — the MC5's ʽKick Out The Jamsʼ is significantly tightened up, its primal chaos converted into a more crowd-friendly blast of focused «social anger», and ʽWe Gotta Get Out Of This Placeʼ shows that they... well, understand how to play around with the obsessed, paranoid soul of that song, even though not one singer in this band is an Eric Burdon when it comes to «winding yourself up» during the performance.

 

Other than the hip classics, the track list (again, culled from several different venues — don't be fooled by the reference to Atlanta, Georgia in the ad-libbed section of ʽReady To Rockʼ, because that's just one of the songs) concentrates on their recent albums, going only as far back as Secret Treaties, with an extended version of ʽAstronomyʼ that downplays the original's prettiness (re­placing pretty pianos with ugly synths), but has many more passionate distorted guitar solos in store, all in line with the «kick-ass» attitude. Even ʽThe Reaperʼ trades «clean» jangle and subtle­ty for a rougher, coarser approach, robbing the song of some of its otherworldly magic — but probably making it easier for the fans to headbang non-stop.

 

The funniest thing about the record, I'd say, is the intro. "ATLANTA, GEORGIA! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK'N'ROLL?" So many millions of times we've heard about this sermon, but fact is, you don't hear the "ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?" mantra on actual live albums all too often, unless you regularly listen to really stupid bands — which makes it all the more hilarious to hear it done by one of the smartest bands (at the time). The only problem is, this album rocks nowhere near as hard as On Your Feet: for all their bravado, Blue Öyster Cult have already moved well into their second, «smoother» phase, and most of the hard rock on this album is either cumbersome and lumpy (ʽGodzillaʼ — meant to be cumbersome like its protagonist, but that don't make it biting, snappy rock'n'roll, and the «Japanese» ad-libbing actually pushes it close to comedy), or closer to the power-pop idiom (ʽE.T.I.ʼ, which in this setting sounds almost exactly like something you'd hear from Cheap Trick in their Budokan era — come to think of it, this was Cheap Trick's Budokan era, and the two bands could easily learn a few expensive tricks from each other).

 

Which should not be taken as a criticism — it's a fun album, except that I do not particularly feel any desperate need for its existence, other than simply to document the then-current BÖC at the top of their arena-rock popularity, and that popularity has always seemed a little weird to me. In other words, it still does not convince me of the greatness of this band in its live incarnation, more like, of its ability to successfully manipulate the audience, following in the footsteps of the decade's early glam heroes like Bowie or Bolan, and in all these cases, I tend to view the live avatar of the artist as perishable, contrary to the studio avatar. Subsequently, the record does deserve a thumbs up if we're not being too serious about it, but if we are being serious about it, just stick to their studio albums.

 

MIRRORS (1979)

 

1) Dr. Music; 2) The Great Sun Jester; 3) In Thee; 4) Mirrors; 5) Moon Crazy; 6) The Vigil; 7) I Am The Storm; 8) You're Not The One (I Was Looking For); 9) Lonely Teardrops.

 

As the band's commercial fortunes started slipping somewhat with Spectres, a shift of direction and environment was thought of as a potential good move. A radical shift indeed — the band not only ditched Pearlman (temporarily) and long-time co-producer Murray Krugman (permanently), but it also betrayed its alma mater — New York City, going to California for the bulk of the re­cordings. The new choice of producer wasn't too bad: Tom Werman, the guy behind several clas­sic late-1970s Cheap Trick albums — but the choice of location certainly was, at least for 1979, the last year of the classic disco era.

 

Mirrors is not a disco album, but it is certainly one of their most danceable records, going very light on heavy metal riffs (no ʽGodzillaʼ for a hundred miles around) and very heavy on Cali­fornia-style folk-pop and contemporary R&B influences. Technically, it is not so much a sellout as an experimental attempt to plant the «BÖC spirit» into a different kind of soil and see how it works — the songs are still relatively «weird» in construction terms, and the lyrics still contain plenty of the mock-Gothic, ironic-romantic imagery of yore. On ʽThe Great Sun Jesterʼ, they even enter into collaboration with a new familiar face — fantasy goon Michael Moorcock, who probably needed a change from his long-term collaboration with Hawkwind. All in all, this here is not a case of «band on autopilot»: Mirrors is an honest-to-goodness attempt to reinvent them­selves and stay up-to-date while at the same time conserving the old essence.

 

Naturally, it is a little offensive when a song called ʽDr. Musicʼ opens the album and sounds like a mix of ʽPretty Womanʼ, ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ, and some dinky mid-1970s proto-disco dance number that I can't quite lay my finger on. But it is essentially a comedy number, more of a straight parody on sexy posturing than anything else — Bloom's vocals are quite indicative of that — and condemning the band for this experiment, while trying in vain to get its catchy chorus out of your head, would be as useless as condemning the Beatles for ʽMaxwell's Silver Hammerʼ. It is much easier to condemn the closing number: Lanier's ʽLonely Teardropsʼ, riding on a Clavi­net line not unlike the one in ʽSuperstitionʼ, and taking it a little more serious than necessary (the "Lord I tell you, all I want to do is get back home" bit sounds achingly poignant, but the rest of the track is so dance-centered that the vibes clash and explode).

 

Yet the album is diverse, enough for everybody to be able to pick at least one or two favorites. I really like ʽThe Great Sun Jesterʼ, for one thing — a fun, exciting lite-prog epic, which I could have easily imagined on a Yes album, exuberantly sung by Jon Anderson instead of Eric Bloom and with a high-in-the-sky Steve Howe solo for the climax, but even in the hands of this here band it still rolls along with a wallop of life-asserting optimism, a little surprising for a song that laments the «death of the fireclown» (a Moorcock fantasy personage), but where there's death, there's always rebirth, you know.

 

On the other end of the pole, there's ʽI Am The Stormʼ, the album's only seriously rocking cut: a little Boston-glossy, perhaps, but it does rock the socks off, true to its name, with magnificent lead guitar from Buck Dharma and a hyperbolic-exaggerated old-testamental anger at the betrayal of love that we haven't seen since ʽI Can See For Milesʼ. It's a pop song at heart, but they work hard to imbue it with rock fury, and I am quite won over by its theatricality. Heck, I am even won over by the theatricality of ʽMoon Crazyʼ, with its odd wobbling between old-time Kinksy music-hall and new-style whitebread 1970s pop — especially when it goes into overdriven drunken Slavic rhythmics and wild guitar pirouetting at the end.

 

Quite a bit of the time the record is boring, or somewhat limp: you'd have to be a major fan of the decade's conventional pop balladry, for instance, to get any thrill out of the ballad ʽIn Theeʼ (de­livered way too sincerely to be salvaged by irony), and ʽYou're Not The One (I Was Looking For)ʼ seems to be a very self-conscious effort to write something in the style of that hot new Boston sensation, The Cars, but with those boring power chords for the chorus hook, the song becomes Foreigner rather than the Cars when it comes to climaxing, and gets the death sentence for that. Even so — it is at least interesting to watch it start out so promisingly and then self-de­struct so maddeningly.

 

Underwhelming as the effort is next to Spectres, with the lack of a definitive highlight (ʽI Am The Stormʼ comes close, though), I still give it a thumbs up — if you want to look for something really bland in this style, check out the average Average White Band from the same time period; Mirrors has its own intrigue, diversity, and charming clumsiness when you view it in context and see them try to corrupt all those new influences with their irreverent approach. One of these days we might even forget them the temporary move to California, I guess.

 

CULTÖSAURUS ERECTUS (1980)

 

1) Black Blade; 2) Monsters; 3) Divine Wind; 4) Deadline; 5) The Marshall Plan; 6) Hungry Boys; 7) Fallen Angel; 8) Lips In The Hills; 9) Unknown Tongue.

 

Kind of a confused record, but not without some major points of interest. As the disco backlash hit the streets, Bloom and Co. must have realised that they'd wandered a bit too far off in the back alleys — even if songs like ʽDr. Musicʼ and ʽLonely Teardropsʼ were not without their merits, hearing them in 1980 might make the fans feel as if they'd just caught the band with their pants off or something. Quickly, the boys devised Salvation Plan B — drop all the vaudeville and get realigned back to heaviness. For extra security, they teamed up with famous hard rock producer Martin Birch, fresh off work on Heaven And Hell, the new album by the new-look Black Sab­bath (with Dio) — and once Birch helped them get out their own record, they even went on tour with Sabbath together (an old video, still officially unavailable on DVD, predictably called Black And Blue, actually captured that glorious moment).

 

Getting back some of that heaviness was a good thing, and, in fact, what with all the advances in technology and all, Cultösaurus occasionally sounds thicker and denser than anything they ever did before (Birch certainly saturates some fat inside Joe Bouchard's bass, for one thing) — but don't let that fool you: this is not an improvement on the first three albums, and, in fact, I'd rather we did not compare them at all, because the poor skeletal beast will not survive the procedure.

 

With just a couple exceptions that I will save up for a little later, Blue Öyster Cult have finally entered what is commonly referred to as «Spinal Tap territory». The typical song here is a big, bombastic, superhero-style light metal rocker — sometimes equipped with its own riff, but more often not (I'm still trying to locate one in ʽBlack Bladeʼ, but to no avail: most of the time it is the bass that drives the song rather than the rhythm guitar). The first songs start us off in sci-fi / B-movie mode, but as the album progresses, the band moves on to the subject of «Rock And Roll Hero», dedicating song after song to issues of superstardom, rebellion, and fall from grace — and much of this stuff just sounds like parody (sometimes rather pedestrian parody) on rock'n'roll aesthetics. Not deconstruction of rock'n'roll aesthetics, as it used to be in the glory days, more like relatively simplistic parody.

 

The «epic» number that opens the album is ʽBlack Bladeʼ, another collaboration with Moorcock on one of his fantasy subjects (the «soul-sucking» sword of Elric) — but, unlike ʽSun Jesterʼ, this one has no emotional subtlety whatsoever, and even though its fat chords, Neanderthal vocals, and scree­ching guitar leads do a good job visualising images of Boris Vallejo characters, the melody is not particularly memorable, and the song is neither awesomely impressive nor awesomely funny, so I am not exactly sure what to do with it. ʽMonstersʼ is much more interes­ting, melody-wise, especially the way it manages to combine jazz with hard-rock (the mid-section reveals direct influences of King Crimson's ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ), but... it doesn't sound much like «monsters». More like a passable jazz-fusion piece integrated with some generic hard rock passages. No visions springing up.

 

The second side is dominated by the shadow of ʽThe Marshall Planʼ, a bombastic saga of a proverbial rock'n'roll hero, peppered with lyrical references to Don Kirshner, quotations of the ʽSmoke On The Waterʼ riff, fake audience noises, and endless namecalling of a certain «Johnny» — good thing the album was released a good half-year before the Lennon shooting. As a glam-rock theat­rical piece, it's okay, I guess, but not particularly necessary after we've had ourselves that lengthy Alice Cooper streak of early 1970s albums, much more powerful on the whole. Again, musically it is the shorter songs that have more pull. ʽHungry Boysʼ is a rare case of a New Wave-influenced pop-rocker here, with electronic effects and slightly robotized vocals that contrast with fully traditional rock and roll guitar leads; and ʽLips In The Hillsʼ is a good showcase for the boys' guitar interplay — nasty swirling arpeggios overlayed with stinging solos, fully redeeming the song for Meltzer's whacko lyrics.

 

But all of this is merely «decent». The only moments where the album approaches an oasis of greatness are, interestingly enough, ʽDivine Windʼ and ʽDeadlineʼ — two songs credited solely to Buck Dharma, indicating that, at this particular time, he was the most reasonable of the band members. ʽDivine Windʼ is melodically unexceptional — a fairly standard blues-rocker — but, alone of 'em all, it actually sounds serious: Buck's chorus — "if he really thinks we're the devil, then let's send him to HELL!", with heavy threatening emphasis on the last word — occasionally sends a shiver down my spine. Apparently, never mind the actual title, but the song was referring to the Ayatollah and the Iran crisis, and in these politically sensitive days would probably count as warmongering and maybe cost Blue Öyster Cult their place in respectable society and align them next to Ted Nugent, but things were kinda easier in 1980, and besides, regardless of deeper causes, the Ayatollah was one rather sick son of a bitch, so I can empathize. Most ardently, though, I empathize the howling guitar breaks and the doom-laden basslines.

 

ʽDeadlineʼ, one of the record's lighter tracks, memorizes an incident in which one of the band's booking agents was shot by a guy from whom he wanted to wrestle out a gambling debt — and the memorial is well held, with a chorus that somehow implies that being resolute and determined is not always a good thing ("he missed the deadline / he passed the deadline, darling"), and some moody, echoey guitar leads for atmosphere. Lighter it may be, but ultimately it cuts deeper than anything else on here, and I'd certainly return to the album in the future for ʽDeadlineʼ rather than ʽBlack Bladeʼ or ʽThe Marshall Planʼ.

 

Unquestionably a thumbs up here, because even the «bad» songs are so obviously tongue-in-cheek that only an idiot could get offended. But I would be lying if I said the album didn't have its problems — the major one being a noticeable disappearance of good rhythm guitar. You can't live on solid Buck Dharma solos for eternity, and the riffs did provide a reliable foundation for the BÖC legend in the past. Taking them out and substituting «theatrical pomp» in their place, hoping that we do not notice, is a bad move, and one that would eventually lead to their downfall. Fortunately, here we are still some way away from it.

 

FIRE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN (1981)

 

1) Fire Of Unknown Origin; 2) Burnin' For You; 3) Veteran Of The Psychic Wars; 4) Sole Survivor; 5) Heavy Metal: The Black And Silver; 6) Vengeance; 7) After Dark; 8) Joan Crawford; 9) Don't Turn Your Back.

 

Seeing as how everybody and their tattooed grandmothers seem to love ʽBurnin' For Youʼ, I won't say anything particularly bad about this song — but I do want to express a little sorrow in light of the fact that, where their first big hit (ʽReaperʼ) sucked up to the Byrds and their second big hit (ʽGodzillaʼ) sucked up to... well, let's say The Move and Roy Wood's Wizzard, among other things, their third (and last) big hit sucks up to Foreigner. And it's written by the band's bestest melody-writer (Roeser) and bestest lyricist (Meltzer), no less! Yes, gentlemen, change is definitely in the air, and not necessarily for the better.

 

Not that ʽBurnin' For Youʼ is a particularly disappointing spokessong for the arena-rock genre: as a catchy, danceable vehicle to express longing and torment, it is totally on par with the best that Foreigner and Boston had to offer us. Nor would I want to deny Buck Dharma the right to con­tribute another «serious-sounding» rather than «tongue-in-cheek» song, after he'd proved himself so capable with ʽReaperʼ and ʽDeadlineʼ. But the pop metal riff tone that he generates (or is made to generate by Martin Birch, once again returning into the producer's seat) is so far removed from the classic hard rock sound of BÖC, and the chorus hook is so unashamedly «commercial» (in the not-so-good sense of the word), that even if we «accept» the song, it will still be clearly indicative of the numerous embarrassments to follow.

 

On the whole, Fire Of Unknown Origin still preserves the basic accoutrements of a typical BÖC product. The original line-up is still intact, Meltzer is on board, and so is Moorcock, contributing the lyrics from another of his fantasy scenarios; and so is Sandy Pearlman, with lyrics for ʽHeavy Metalʼ, a song that, along with several others, was intended to appear in the soundtrack to the animated movie of the same name; and so is even Patti Smith, helping out with the title track. There is sci-fi, fantasy, spoof horror, and campy, grotesque atmosphere a-plenty, starting with the album cover and ending with a song about Joan Crawford as a ghoul that has risen from the grave to keep on tormenting her unfortunate daughter (ironically, the album was released three months before the premiere of Mommy Dearest with Faye Dunaway, so who influenced who?..).

 

But the music, oddly enough, even though they still retain their heavy metal producer, once again veers off the «heavy» trajectory (as they tried to re-establish it with Cultösaurus). Those pop metal riffs I have mentioned are, in fact, the heaviest element of the sound — which is otherwise very much dominated by synthesizers. Thankfully, they try to use them creatively and in diverse ways, from background tapestries (title track) to doom-laden church-organ substitutes (ʽSole Survivorʼ) to playful, danceable New Wave patterns à la Cars (ʽAfter Darkʼ), and, besides, we have only just begun to knock upon Eighties' doors, so there is a good sense of balance. Addi­tionally, we must keep in mind that the band was essentially a «meta-rock» formation, meaning that they had to present their own quirky take on whatever was currently en vogue, so this shift to an early amalgamation of pop metal and synth-rock was probably inevitable. However, that does not mean that we have to enjoy it, and I would not call this album tremendously enjoyable.

 

In fact, out of its exaggerated, cartoonish, corny darkness (well fit for the exaggerated, cartoonish, corny darkness of Heavy Metal, for which many of these songs were written, but almost none were used), I would say that I instinctively enjoy only two songs, for different reasons. ʽVeteran Of The Psychic Warsʼ somehow, almost as if against its own will, manages to capture a bit of the war-weary, troubled-paranoid syndrome — forget about Moorcock's fantasy-based lyrics, it could just as easily be about Vietnam — with an impressive build-up towards the ominous conclusion of the chorus ("oh please don't let these shakes go on..." is almost creepy), and its sonic atmos­phere, with those booming martial drums, is vaguely reminiscent of Peter Gabriel's ʽIntruderʼ, perhaps not accidentally so. A mini-masterpiece that I would recommend, hands down, over ʽBurnin' For Youʼ as the album's best track any time of day, night, or the interim.

 

The second track that I get a real kick out of is... yes, ʽJoan Crawfordʼ. It is a silly joke, yes, but a hilarious one, as if the band is spoofing its own predilection for the subject of vampirism and revenants — I can see how some stuck-up admirers of ʽNosferatuʼ could be offended by being offered this parody, but as a (self-)parody, I'll be damned if it doesn't work. Not only is it one of the best-produced tracks on the album (classical Chopinesque piano instead of synths! old-school distorted guitars!), but that little ghostly whisper ("Chrissssteeena! Mother's home!...") gets me every time. Plus, for what it's worth, there might be a glimmer of wisdom to this parody — in ad­dition to sending up their own obsessions, it also sends up the exaggerated «celebrity-bashing» wave after the sensationalist publications of Crawford's daughter had turned the late Joan into a model monster. Maybe the song does not have a great melody, but it has great theater.

 

The remainder of the songs are tolerable and not without compositional decency or hooks, but tunes like ʽSole Survivorʼ keep getting stuck halfway between «serious» and «campy», not at­mospheric or heartfelt enough to overawe the senses and not funny or inventively arranged enough to be appreciated as first-class parody, satire, or intriguing exercise in post-modernism. ʽHeavy Metal: The Black And Silverʼ is the worst of the bunch (Spinal Tap incarnate); ʽVenge­anceʼ sounds like it should be the personal anthem of Conan the Barbarian, but would he have liked all those keyboards, really?; and, closing the album, ʽDon't Turn Your Backʼ is a repetitive, syncopated white R&B number that wants to say goodbye to us with a moody, but friendly piece of advice for the road ("don't turn your back, danger surrounds you...") but, in all honesty, sounds about as exciting as The Average White Band — which, all through the 1970s, BÖC never were. White, yes, but definitely above average.

 

Even so, Fire Of Unknown Origin deserves a lukewarm thumbs up. Its flaws are very much defined by its epoch, and the band's interest in pushing forward the boundaries of their sound and in exploring various alleyways around their main street is still very much intact. By all means, it could have been much better if they had a better grip on the really exciting things that were going on in the musical world around that time (for comparison, one of their chief American competi­tors in the «glam and satire» market, Alice Cooper, did get a much better grip — his Flush The Fashion was a far smarter and snappier exploration of the New Wave scene at the time). But even the way it turned out, it was anything but a simplistic sell-out, or a betrayal of the band's ide­als. They just thought it'd sound more cutting-edge with the keyboards, that's all.

 

EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIVE (1982)

 

1) Dominance And Submission; 2) Cities On Flame; 3) Dr. Music; 4) The Red And The Black; 5) Joan Crawford; 6) Burnin' For You; 7) Roadhouse Blues; 8) Black Blade; 9) Hot Rails To Hell; 10) Godzilla; 11) Veteran Of The Psychic Wars; 12) E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence); 13) (Don't Fear) The Reaper.

 

Okay, so maybe Blue Öyster Cult do need that many live albums out, if only to demonstrate how far they had evolved as a touring act over the decade — just as far, actually, as they'd evolved as a studio band, from once having been a tough, experimental, tightly focused meta-hard-rock act to now realising the wet dreams of Spinal Tap fanbase right there on the stage. On Extraterres­trial Live, it's «rock and roll burlesque» all the way.

 

Not that I really mind. By 1982, the band was so grotesquely over the top that only the most hateful listener, or the most naïve listener, could suspect them of being serious in their approach. The whole concert was basically one big circus show — so that founding member Albert Bouchard, who was either kicked out or left inimicably halfway through the tour, should have been glad to be deprived of the dubious honor of participating in this debacle. And yet, there is something delightfully silly about how they re-deconstruct their already deconstructed material and poke irreverent fun at themselves, their music, the audience, and the «rock mentality» even as they give out the superficial impression of embracing it.

 

Invocations to the great power of rock and roll start immediately, right from the hysterical "one two three four!" that opens ʽDominance And Submissionʼ. Then, taking over from the departed Bouchard on vocals, Eric Bloom gleefully salivates over the words "rock and roll" in ʽCities On Flameʼ — and then there's simply no stopping the band, particularly on ʽGodzillaʼ and an extended cover of the Doors' ʽRoadhouse Bluesʼ, which they try to turn from a mere «epic» track into a multi-mega-arch-epic powerhouse-of-a-track, adding extra repetitions of the "let it roll" section and a lengthy monolog on the details of the process of waking up and getting myself a beer. Meanwhile, ʽGodzillaʼ, complete with a spoken warning about the nuclear peril, finally de-cloaks itself as a contemporary update of ʽWild Thingʼ, but hip enough to quote ʽMilk Cow Bluesʼ in the instrumental section. In short, it's all a madhouse.

 

There is one serious reason to own this record, though: Buck Dharma. You could always count on that guy to save the band out of a tight spot, and on this record, he seems like the only member who can still remember what a proper straight face looks like. His playing throughout is awesome, but nowhere more so than on the lengthy solo in the middle of ʽVeteran Of The Psychic Warsʼ: with little warning, they suddenly pick up the tempo and let Mr. Roeser explode in a super-fast, flashy passage that is totally overflowing with passion and ecstasy — unquestionably one of the best ever guitar solos captured on a live album, period. Even though he did not write the original song, he must have sensed its potential — that, despite its Moorcock origins, it was really that one sci-fi tune in the band's catalog that could have a universal application, Cold War and Viet­nam associations included — and he gave it his due.

 

In addition, just like their preceding two live offerings, Extraterrestrial Live also serves as a marking time album, closing the door on the «third age» of Blue Öyster Cult — the band as sea­soned veteran cosmic rockers with a penchant for campy excess and arena-oriented bombast, towards which they re-orient even their older material. Little did anybody suspect to what sort of depths this band would soon plummet, even if in retrospect, it does look fairly predictable that 1981-1982 would just have to be the last years where good taste and common sense could at least occasionally prevail over market demands, or at least go hand-in-hand with them. In memory of that, let us conclude the review with a big fat thumbs up («big fat» being a reference to the overall sound of the record, not the emphatic nature of the thumbs up in question).

 

THE REVÖLUTION BY NIGHT (1983)

 

1) Take Me Away; 2) Eyes On Fire; 3) Shooting Shark; 4) Veins; 5) Shadow Of California; 6) Feel The Thunder; 7) Let Go; 8) Dragon Lady; 9) Light Years Of Love.

 

Rule of thumb: if you go to the producer of Loverboy, who has only recently completed produc­tion of a multiplatinum album by Loverboy — do not be surprised if your album ends up sound­ing like Loverboy. That is, of course, provided your original plan, for some reason, was not to have your album sound like Loverboy — but for all we know, the 1983 edition of Blue Öyster Cult, replete with new member Rick Downey on (mostly electronic) drums, wanted to sound like Loverboy. See, the whole idea behind Blue Öyster Cult was that they had to override this «cult» status — had to be super-bizarre, post-modern, ironic rockers of stadium, rather than small club, caliber. And if you need stadium-size audiences, you gotta hang on to stadium-size commercial success. So off you go and find yourself one of the hottest new things in town: Bruce Fairbairn, the guy who would very soon not only be the guy behind Loverboy, but also the guy behind Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet and Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation and Pump.

 

The real weirdness of the situation does not begin to come out, though, until you realize that substantially, fundamentally nothing has really changed. The band is still working with Meltzer (ʽVeinsʼ), Pearlman (ʽShadow Of Californiaʼ), and even Patti Smith (ʽShooting Sharkʼ). They are still writing songs about darkness, thunder, dragon ladies, and all sorts of sordid subject matters, and are still willing to play their «grinning gods of rock» game with anybody still willing to stick around and listen. They do not seem to realize, as it is, that something vital has gone out of their sound with this transition to a new style of playing and production — they probably think, like so many of their contemporaries, that it's just a matter of stylistic progression.

 

And back in 1983, it might have been, but in retrospect, that «stylistic progression» turns out to have been a near-complete loss of face. Songs like Gregg Winter's ʽEyes On Fireʼ are little more than instantaneously trashable synth-rock, devoid of grit and decent melody — but when they try to preserve the grit, the results are even more pitiable: no matter how much ʽFeel The Thunderʼ begs me to obey its title, all I have to say in response is «I have no true feel for Rambo Metal», regardless of whether I hear it on Alice Cooper's Constrictor or any other record. Get rid of those ugly keyboards first, and then we'll talk — maybe.

 

Production, occasional bad ideas, and poor outside contributions aside, Revolution By Night (can I be spared the task of pasting in yet another of these gratuitous Umlauts?) has its share of «decent beginnings» — ʽShooting Sharkʼ and ʽShadow Of Californiaʼ are both solid epic tracks that deserved a much better fate. The former is a collaboration between Buck Dharma and Patti Smith, a dark, smoky ballad of love gone bad with a touching vocal performance, a catchy funky bassline (courtesy of guest star Randy Jackson — Joe Bouchard does not have a knack for this funky shit), and moody lead guitar and sax parts: somewhat monotonous, perhaps, but still one of those ʽReaperʼ-type songs where Roeser's melancholic-romantic personality makes a temporary break from the band's usual tongue-in-cheek attitude prison.

 

On the contrary, ʽShadow Of Californiaʼ is completely tongue-in-cheek, a hilariously spooky portrait of a band of Hell's Angels as a Satanic symbol of the West Coast — apparently, Pearlman still hasn't quite managed to exorcise his demons, or satisfy his fetish, since the days of ʽTrans­maniacon MCʼ. With a memorable riff, evocative guitar work that does resemble a swarm of bikes casting a shadow that "will grow to cover California", it could be that perfect devilish anti­dote to the angelic ʽCalifornia Dreamin'ʼ that all of us cynics had been waiting for — if not for the production, which predictably sucks a couple pints of blood out of this organism. Dammit, why couldn't they have written this circa 1976 or 1977?

 

Alas, but in addition to these problems, there are further embarrassments: ʽLet Goʼ starts out promisingly punkishly, like a deconstructed take on ʽI Can't Explainʼ, but quickly degenerates into lameass stadium football chants ("B-O-C! You can be whatever you want to be!") that rank among the tackiest things this band has ever stooped to. And the closing ballad ʽLight Years Of Loveʼ makes ʽAstronomyʼ sound like the epitome of refined profoundness and complexity in comparison — not only are the lyrics here completely pedestrian ("our love is like the shining sea?" — come on guys, we know you can do better than that), but they are delivered by Joe Bouchard in such a pathetically whiny manner, and accompanied with such a stiff guitar tone, that the song has no life whatsoever, and I have no idea who the hell it was meant to woo over — early Eighties' teenagers? bored housewives? certainly not the veteran fan guard.

 

We almost forgot to mention the opening track and lead single, ʽTake Me Awayʼ, but that is only because there is very little to mention: it is just another leaden, lifeless, stillborn arena rocker from Bloom and his Canadian friend Aldo Nova. There's an embryonic silhouette of a good riff somewhere at the end of the chorus, but other than that, it's pop metal mess personalized. All in all, thumbs down seems to be the only reasonable solution — a pity, since I'd almost gotten partial to ʽShooting Starʼ and ʽShadow Of Californiaʼ, but two good songs (one of them overlong at that) do not a recommendable record make. Blame it on the Eighties if you will, but really, given the band's evolution over the Seventies, we all saw this one coming, I guess.

 

CLUB NINJA (1986)

 

1) White Flags; 2) Dancing In The Ruins; 3) Make Rock Not War; 4) Perfect Water; 5) Spy In The House Of The Night; 6) Beat 'Em Up; 7) When The War Comes; 8) Shadow Warrior; 9) Madness To The Method.

 

Hello, I'm Leonard Pinth-Garnell, and welcome to «Bad Rock Music». As I throw a sideways glance at the calendar, I happen to notice that we are, indeed, right in the middle of 1986, and as every true connaisseur of rock music is liable to knowing, 1986 is a year well famous for pro­ducing — indeed, festering, as some might say — some of the absolutely worst rock music ever known to man, woman, kitten, or door-to-door salesman. As we have only just found out, the year was no exception for once popular and creative, ever so slightly post-modern rock act «Blue Öyster Cult», who have confirmed the rule with their newest LP, one that sports no less than one of the absolutely worst LP titles in the business — Club Ninja — and contains some very, very, very bad songs that seem almost custom made for our show.

 

To begin with, it must be noted that, while this band had previously been known to write the majority of their material themselves, and harvest some verbal help from the likes of acclaimed celebrities and pop-culture-intellectuals such as Richard Meltzer, Sandy Pearlman, Patti Smith, and Michael Moorcock, Club Ninja is their first record to have a mind-blowing four songs pro­vided by completely outside songwriters — corporate songwriters, one might add. With contri­butions by Larry Gottlieb (who had also written songs for Marie Osmond and Kenny Rogers that very year), Bob Halligan Jr. (a hard rock singer who'd written a couple of tunes for Judas Priest), and another song taken over from the Leggat Bros., there is little reason to doubt that Columbia Records played the usual trick on the poor fellows — saddled them with «commercial» material in order to have a hit on their hands. Unfortunately, what worked for Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and even Eric Clapton (in terms of popularity, not artistry) backfired for Blue Öyster Cult, who simply lost their reputation without any financial gains to compensate for the shame.

 

In the midst of this utter travesty, it remains almost unnoticed that the band also lacks their keyboardist, Allen Lanier, now, temporarily replaced by Tommy Zvonchek. This might even be for the better, because the keyboards are not so much at the center of the sound now as they were on the previous albums — but what is at that center? Rotten, faceless pop metal guitar, for the most part, acting primarily as a monotonous background for the band's pop metal gang choruses. If you thought "B-O-C! You can be whatever you want to be!" was bad enough, wait until you hear "ROCK NOT WAR! Make ROCK NOT WAR!" or "BEAT 'EM UP! BEAT 'EM UP!" (the latter song, courtesy of Bob Halligan Jr., also features probably the worst verse in BOC history, which simply must be quoted: "You take a lickin', keep on kickin' / This fight we both can win / We'll stop sockin' when you stop rockin' / You don't give up, you just give in" — the idea, of course, is that you are supposed to deliver these words while keeping a straight face, which was probably only possible circa 1986).

 

The biggest disappointment is Roeser, who finds himself very much a part of this travesty — for instance, handling the lead vocals on ʽDancing In The Ruinsʼ, the Larry Gottlieb song that was supposed to become a hit for the band but did not, perhaps because the song never manages to properly let us know if it is «romantic» (Roeser sings it that way) or «apocalyptic». In any case, the great American nation much preferred to be ʽDancing In The Darkʼ at the time, so Buck Dharma's effort to make this boring piece of schlock come to life was doomed artistically and wasted commercially. The problem is, his own contributions are not much better: ʽSpy In The House Of The Nightʼ does not even reach the catchiness of ʽBurnin' For Youʼ, and I really hate the way he drawls out the word "rendez-vous", as if he were a Vegasy crooner for a second.

 

Arguably the only song on the entire record to merit somebody's attention is ʽMadness To The Methodʼ, a seven-minute final epic where the band suddenly remembers that their «bad boys of rock and roll image» is supposed to be an ironic front, after all. Had the album been a commercial success instead of a flop, the P.M.R.C. would probably have had a thing or two to say about such totally gross lines as "it's the time in the season for a maniac at night" or "there's a lot to be said for a blow to the head", but, of course, the song really just pokes bitter fun at the «violence men­tality» of rock music, or, at least, it definitely reads that way when it is not «drunk caveman» Eric Bloom taking lead vocals, but «quiet melancholic» Donald Roeser. Even so, the song never truly grips the senses — musically, it is a rather generic, monotonous New Wave-style rocker that sounds tired rather than inspired. Ironically, it is Mr. Zvonchek, the band's new keyboardist, who provides the best bit with a beautiful piano solo at the end — probably wanted to make a real good impression for his first time.

 

After all this, minor questionable trivia (such as the infamous Howard Stern reciting the spoken-word introduction to ʽWhen The War Comesʼ) are of no importance, and all that remains is to issue the predictable thumbs down and deposit the unfortunate LP in the specially designed trash bin. The worst thing about this, though, is that we cannot even say «This is no longer Blue Öyster Cult», because it is — the band's fascination with all things BÖC-ish is still very much in place, you know, darkness, vampirism, sci-fi, heaviness, «rock warriors in po-mo garb», whatever. It has simply mutated into a totally gross, grotesque, faceless form. And, ironically, it is also their first record in a while for which Sandy Pearlman has returned as a producer. Boy, did he ever produce a mess. Bad, bad rock music.

 

IMAGINOS (1988)

 

1) I Am The One You Warned Me Of; 2) Les Invisibles; 3) In The Presence Of Another World; 4) Del Rio's Song; 5) The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein's Castle; 6) Astronomy; 7) Magna Of Illusion; 8) Blue Öyster Cult; 9) Imaginos.

 

What do you mean, it took us nearly twenty years to realize that the true purpose of Blue Öyster Cult was to serve as a backing band for a sprawling sci-fi rock opera, adapted from the wrinkled pages of Sandy Pearlman's school yearbook? Here we were thinking that this band was some sort of high-falutin', acid-satiric, pre-post-modern take on rock and pop culture, and in reality it was just this imaginative young fellow with the hots for Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and whatever cheap sci-fi flicks they were making in the hot-for-outer-space Sixties. Of course, the band very quickly got out of control and started following its own path, but the shadow of Sandy Pearlman haunted them all the way, and in the end, it got 'em.

 

Actually, as far as I understand, by the time 1987 rolled along, Blue Öyster Cult as a viable pro­ject was altogether finished. Their latest albums bombed and sucked at the same time, band members were scurrying away from the ship like rats on speed, and the remaining ones were aging, sulking, and uncomfortable. In other words — the perfect condition (not!) for Sandy Pearlman to try and resuscitate the original idea of a major concept album (at one point, the idea was for a trilogy of double albums — no mean feat indeed, although, funny enough, I think that Ayreon eventually did something like that) about Imaginos. Who is Imaginos, you're asking me? Well, I used to think that «Imaginos» was the fictional name for a band of Mexican rogues, but apparently, it is about this «modified child» born in 1804 in New Hampshire, and there's this group of seven extraterrestrial beings called Les Invisibles, see, and they foster the child's occult and mystical powers, and then he goes to Mexico to search for a magic artefact, and his ship sinks and he is picked up by Les Invisibles and their servants, who call themselves Blue Öyster Cult (with an Umlaut, for certain. How do we know that? Well, they all wear specially designed T-shirts), and they accept him as a member and give him a new name, Desdinova (have you said your prayers tonight, Desdinova?), and he begins to influence world history, and...

 

...well, to cut the story short, you see now that Pete Townshend's Lifehouse has got nothing on this: Sandy Pearlman takes the whole thing seriously, and, unlike Pete, he actually offers a rea­sonable explanation to why World War I and II actually happened. (No, not because people did not buy enough Blue Öyster Cult records). I suppose that the story, had it been realised properly and had all the loose ends been logically tied, wouldn't have been any worse than your average sci-fi epic — of which I have never been a magic fan — but ultimately, the only thing that mat­ters in all these mixtures of sci-fi concepts and rock culture is the music. The question is: was this sudden stab at «conceptualization», in an era when «concept album» and «commercial offer» had become antitheses, at least capable of producing anything better than Club Ninja?

 

You'd think that it could, since, anyway, bits and pieces of the «Imaginos» concept had already been scattered throughout many of the band's albums — ʽAstronomyʼ, for instance, which was a song about Imaginos discovering that the stars are the source of his knowledge of powers — and, furthermore, the album itself had been a long time coming. Within the band, the biggest fan of Pearlman's fantasy concept was drummer Albert Bouchard, and the two had been working on a separate album already in the 1970s, and even more so after Bouchard had been fired from the band: in fact, if you look at the credits, you will see that Bouchard is listed as composer on 7 out of 9 tracks — appropriate, since most of the basic tracks actually date back to 1981-84, when they were produced (along with many others) as potential candidates for inclusion on Bouchard's first solo album. Lots of people guested on those sessions, even including Robby Krieger of The Doors and several members of the Ian Hunter Band. Fun time it was, but Columbia Records refused to release the album. Smart lads.

 

Fast forward to 1987, and here we are wondering where to now, St. Peter, after Club Ninja turned out to be such a turd. The group is falling apart, but Pearlman steps in with the proposition that Blue Öyster Cult complete work on Imaginos. Since most of the work had already been done, a small budget is allocated to clean up, refresh, and remix the tracks, as well as add lead vocals by Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma. The budget is spent way too quickly, so not too much work is done: only nine songs (some of them stretched to rather absurd lengths if seen in proportion to their pure musical value), mixing different parts of the story in an order that blocks the listener from understanding the concept without a separate digest. The album is then released, left without any promotion (to be fair, I am not certain how it could be promoted in this form), neglected by the public, rejected by the critics, and for a long time, it even remained unavailable on CD.

 

No wonder then, that Imaginos came to be regarded, under all these circumstances, as something of a «legendary» object — an overlooked epic classic or something like that. Unfortunately, it isn't. Had Pearlman had his way in the early 1970s, and forced the band to fully accept and realize his vision while they were still young, fresh, and unspoiled by the «hit mentality», Imaginos might have had a chance to be the ultimate in «fantasy-rock». This, however, is but a pale shadow of what could have been: enough of a shadow, that is, to genuinely hint at some potential great­ness, yet only a shadow nevertheless. Most unfortunately, they chose a very wrong time period to go through with that concept.

 

For starters, the production on the album is atrocious — most, if not all, of it is realized within the «pop metal» framework: big booming drums, «steroid-powered» riffs, and a deep, cavernous echo on everything. If this really were pop metal, like Mötley Crüe, that'd be a different story, but I do not understand why a concept album about supernatural beings altering the course of world history should sound like a cheap soundtrack to Conan The Barbarian: surely these guys deserve better than taking their instructions from the hairy giants of the day!

 

Even when there is a moderately interesting riff pattern going on (ʽThe Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein's Castleʼ, for instance), the guitar tone and drum/keyboard overdubs still end up sucking all the life out of it. (And let's not even mention the awful wheezy lead vocals of guest star Joe Cerisano, who used to sing backup vocals on Michael Bolton records, among other interesting details of his pedigree). I used to be disappointed with the original ʽAstronomyʼ, but that was like a total masterpiece next to the complete and utter butchering of the song's melodic and atmospheric potential that they do here. ʽDel Rio's Songʼ is supposed to be about Imaginos' ship­wreck off the coast of New Orleans — so why the heck does the song sound like one of Bon Jovi's pop hits? What is this, the only extant rock opera in the hair metal genre?

 

The only reason why I am not giving this a thumbs down is that I think I sense potential. Many of these songs were conceived at much earlier dates than 1987; Bouchard and the other members of the band do have enough of respect for Pearlman to approach the task with reverence; and even though Buck Dharma's guitar is usually misplaced or misproduced, there are enough scattered flashes of brilliance (check out the lead parts on the final jam part of the title track or the stinging lightning bolts on ʽLes Invisiblesʼ) to make me yearn to have these solos transplanted in a more deserving setting. Fairly speaking, the more you listen to these metallic slabs of sheer bombast, the more lumpy, amorphous goodness you smell beneath them — there are some inspired piano parts, some nice sax solos, some moody vocal lines every now and then. It just never really comes together into anything fully satisfactory.

 

In fact, guys, as of 2014, it's not too late yet to do the job right. Most of the original band mem­bers, with the exception of Lanier, are still alive, as is Pearlman. Now, when anything can be done right even on a very tight budget, is just the time to do it right. Double album (three double albums, if you wish, as per the original plan — if Ayreon can do this, anybody can), convincing guitar tones, completed and polished riffage, come on, you can do it, you got nothing better to do anyway. Make Imaginos that latter day equivalent of SMiLe and Lifehouse that you know it has always deserved to be, at least according to the laws of the universe of Michael Moorcock.

 

CULT CLASSIC (1994)

 

1) (Don't Fear) The Reaper; 2) E.T.I.; 3) M.E. 262; 4) This Ain't The Summer Of Love; 5) Burning For You; 6) O.D.'d On Life Itself; 7) Flaming Telepaths; 8) Godzilla; 9) Astronomy; 10) Cities On Flame With Rock'n'Roll; 11) Harvester Of Eyes; 12) Buck's Boogie; 13) (Don't Fear) The Reaper (instrumental); 14) Godzilla (instrumental).

 

Yes, you have heard all these songs before, and no, this is neither a live album nor a greatest hits compilation. These are re-recordings. That is right, straightforward re-recordings of BOC classics, engineered at several different studios in New York City in early 1994 by three original members of the band (Bloom, Roeser, and Lanier) and the band's then-current rhythm section (Jon Rogers on bass and Chuck Burgi on drums). Not «reinventions» or «special guest mixes» — just really rigid, rigorous, note-for-note re-recordings of the original songs.

 

Do not ask me the obvious question: I do not have enough information to give a convincing answer. The «polite» version that I have encountered is that the band was trying out those tempt­ing new alleys of digital recording, and wanted to engineer their best songs in a brand new format that breathed modernity and coolness. I myself tend to veer towards the cynical version, though: seeing as how they were dropped from the big Columbia label that must have owned the rights to their old recordings, they simply went to all that trouble for good old financial reasons. After all, if the customer walks into a store and sees an album called Cult Classic and it's got that ʽReaperʼ song on it, how is he going to tell the difference between the original and the copy? He ain't no musical art dealer, he's just a customer.

 

Therefore, BUYER BEWARE: Cult Classic with all these classic Cult songs is NOT a compila­tion! Others, too, have been part of this fraud program — I vaguely remember Eric Burdon, for instance, re-recording the old Animals classics with a band that had nothing to do with the real Animals — but nobody I know of, at least if you're talking the real great ones, came as close to genuinely duping the consumer as the good old Blue Oyster boys. You have to remember your classics fairly well to understand that something's wrong here.

 

On the positive side, when it comes to evaluating the material here on its own terms, I would not know where to begin complaining. Re-recordings they may be, but they are surprisingly good re-recordings, and if you ever wanted to have a good case for digital recording over analog, you simply cannot go wrong with Cult Classic. The sound is crystal clear, the mix is as perfect as it could possibly be, and that guitar tone... well, suffice it to say that the opening riff of ʽHarvester Of Eyesʼ simply blows away the original. Thicker, creepy-crawlier, breaking out of the speakers to run you over with its track, leaving behind lifeless pulp with eyes extracted.

 

I have no idea how they did this, but everything sounds totally authentic, not one bit spoiled by any production excesses — in addition, Bloom's vocals have not deteriorated one bit, and that new drummer guy is every bit as dexterous as Bouchard used to be. It is possible, of course, to prefer the old versions, but it is impossible to deny that they did a fine, fine job copycatting them twenty years later. Oh, and for ʽAstronomyʼ they actually preferred to remake the live version of the song — the one where they added a lengthy coda with a killer solo by Buck Dharma. The one here is not as impressive, but still serves as a very useful tension-builder in a song that I have, until now, tended to underrate.

 

It is not quite clear how an album like this could merit a thumbs up — but, curiously, I will not recommend it as a representative introduction to the greatness of Blue Öyster Cult for all them youngsters not because it is a «rip-off», but because the youngsters might actually remain un­impressed with the original recordings from the 1970s in comparison, just because of all these vastly improved production values. Originals are originals, and they have their little sonic nuances that, want it or not, probably did get lost in the re-recording process. But it would take us some time to find, properly feel, and describe this, with multiple relistens and stuff — who wants to spend valuable time doing that? I certainly do not — veteran fans of the band, though, unless they believe in such a thing as «desecration», should by all means check this stuff out and try to savor new values quite respectfully applied to the old classics. That said, the band certainly loses points from me if I ever find out that the record, when sold in record stores, did not bear an explicit sticker with the word «RE-RECORDINGS» on it. At least a small one. At least in minu­scule print or something. They obviously handled this whole re-recording business with love and care — so why mix it with customer dishonesty?

 

HEAVEN FORBID (1998)

 

1) See You In Black; 2) Harvest Moon; 3) Power Underneath Despair; 4) X-Ray Eyes; 5) Hammer Back; 6) Damaged; 7) Cold Gray Light Of Dawn; 8) Real World; 9) Live For Me; 10) Still Burnin'; 11) In Thee.

 

Say, it's a new Blue Öyster Cult album, and perhaps I'm «damaged», but I like it. It is not really a proper «comeback» album, because, as it happens, the band never truly went away — they just stopped producing new music for a while, but the original duo of Bloom and Roeser, usually combined into the original trio with Lanier, never really split, continuing to tour on a limited scale and quietly biding their time. That time finally came in 1998, with a new record deal with the indie label CMC, and a new traditional collaboration with one of the pulp fiction guys: John Shirley, specializing in cyberpunk sci-fi and other stuff that I have little interest in. I do have some interest in moderately successful career rejuvenations by oldies' acts, though, and Heaven Forbid, while certainly and predictably not on the scale of BÖC's classics, passes the test — as surprising as that is.

 

First and foremost, it sounds good, and that is what counts. Almost no synthesizers (gone are they together with the Eighties); healthy, grumbly, nicely distorted heavy metal tones, occasionally lapsing into pop metal style, but usually reminiscent of the band's classic sound; great drumming from Chuck Burgi; unspoiled powerhouse vocals from Bloom — I have not a single complaint about how the record has been produced. In fact, come to think of it, they haven't sounded that well since at least Fire Of Unknown Origin... hmm, perhaps even earlier. Okay, so perhaps the iron Teutonic grip of ʽHammer Backʼ pushes them a little farther into Accept territory than us conservatives would have desired, but they understand how to handle this approach, and make the song kick as much primal ass as any Accept clone would.

 

The songs — that's a different matter. The songs are not too memorable, and it would have been a total wonder if they were. It's not that there aren't any hooks: it's simply one of those records that may enthrall while it's on, and then quickly evaporate when it's off. But that in itself is already a sign of some progress. And then there is at least one song here that is totally on par with the clas­sics: ʽCold Gray Light Of Dawnʼ, a grim, dusty slab of doom-laden-rock, burns with terrifying implied threats as properly as anything they'd done earlier. The "you can't hide the truth, hide the truth anymore" bit at the end of the chorus hits hard, as does Buck Dharma's soloing throughout. I sure wish they'd re-record some of the Imaginos material in the same style.

 

A couple other songs seem to have been written by Roeser in «heartfelt» mood as well, and I think that ʽHarvest Moonʼ and ʽLive For Meʼ, reflecting Buck Dharma's trademark «heavy lyri­cal» style, both have potential; at the very least, there is no denying a certain mournful nostalgic pull of ʽHarvest Moonʼ, whose verses, with Roeser recounting the imaginary losses borne by all sorts of people, are actually emotionally superior to the chorus. Then again, I guess that, as Buck Dharma grows older, his little death-and-misery fetish must only get stronger and stronger. So more songs about famine, devastation, and nuclear fallout, please.

 

As for such simpler, less moody, more directly hard-rocking tracks as ʽSee You In Blackʼ, ʽPower Underneath Despairʼ, ʽDamagedʼ — well, they're okay. Catchy choruses, not too catchy riffs, and an atmosphere that never gets too out of bounds ("I'm damaged, and I like it, I live for rock'n'roll" is as close as they come to «campy» here, but it's not that bad when it's taken at such a fast tempo and with such a cocky-funky attitude). Nothing to go bananas over, but nothing to seriously complain about, either.

 

There is some playing around with their own legacy here that we could all do without — for instance, there was no need to name one of the songs ʽStill Burnin'ʼ, as it is not even stylistically similar to ʽBurning For Youʼ (it actually sounds more like a Van Halen tribute), and the decision to finish the record on a live acoustic performance of ʽIn Theeʼ is a dubious one: it's a nice per­formance, but gestures like these inevitably bring on associations with creative burnout — all the more surprising since, on the whole, Heaven Forbid shows that the band, on the contrary, has somewhat picked up steam after a decade and a half of drifting around in a figurative sea of radioactive waste. But then I suppose that it is really hard to avoid the temptation to fall back upon auto-quotations when you want to remind your old fans what was it that was great about you in the first place. Even if you do stupid things in the process.

 

Anyway, a pleasant minor thumbs up here, and a rock-hard recommendation for the seasoned fan. Also, there are two alternate album covers for the record: the normal one features a horribly mutilated guy with a glass eye and half of his face burnt, and the ugly one features Morgan Fair­child following printed instructions on how to probe her patellar reflexes with a steel-cast female gender symbol (or so I read). Thank you, Blue Öyster Cult, for proving in such an innovative manner that «freedom of choice» remains more than an empty idiom in 1998.

 

CURSE OF THE HIDDEN MIRROR (2001)

 

1) Dance On Stilts; 2) Showtime; 3) The Old Gods Return; 4) Pocket; 5) One Step Ahead Of The Devil; 6) I Just Like To Be Bad; 7) Here Comes That Feeling; 8) Out Of The Darkness; 9) Stone Of Love; 10) Eye Of The Hurricane; 11) Good To Feel Hungry.

 

This is, fundamentally and spiritually, as close to a legitimate «comeback» as the aging remnants of (Rotten-)Blue Öyster Cult could ever hope to get. Everything, beginning from the title of the record (which echoes Mirrors and just generally sounds like a good title for a BÖC-related some­thing — indeed, it was taken from an old unreleased song going all the way back to 1970), going on to the stylish album cover, and ending with the unexpected return of Meltzer as a lyricist on one of the tracks, just screams that they want to be the real Blue Öyster Cult just this one more time, and make some music that is, if not worthy of their legacy, then at least consistent with that legacy. And in some respects, they succeed.

 

Where Heaven Forbid made a big point of being loud, heavy, and brutal, this quasi-follow-up is more subtle. The songs still rock, but there is very little stuff here like ʽDamagedʼ or ʽSee You In Blackʼ, because the emphasis tries to be on dark, brooding atmosphere. They continue their asso­ciation with John Shirley, who keeps on supplying them with lyrics that fluctuate between mysti­cism and psychoanalytics, yet the lyrics take second and third place to melodies, harmonies, and dark, cavernous production when it comes to justifying the record's existence. Exciting freshness and instantly gripping melodies are the only things that do not let you forget that this is, after all, «just one of those comebacks», and not a proper follow-up to the band's classic stretch.

 

Individual missteps are an occasional pest, but they'd always had some of these, even on the best of days, so let us forgive them when, every once in a while, they accidentally slide into bland adult «hard-pop» while trying to pen another sentimental rocker in the vein of ʽBurnin' For Youʼ (ʽHere Comes That Feelingʼ). And let us even disregard the fact that the Meltzer-aided song ʽStone Of Loveʼ begins with the lines "There is a box that I have shown / And in the box / There is a fox that I have known" (swear to God, these are the exact words, and this is the only song I know of that has actually dared to rhyme ʽboxʼ with ʽfoxʼ). Really, none of it matters.

 

What matters is that the best songs on this record (a) take some getting used to and (b) even when you get used to them, they still sound like songs written and performed by old men, who are really more tired than they let you see, and are way too preoccupied about glancing back at their past, and maybe even idealizing it a little. Is this bad? It certainly ain't unpredictable, and it is much better than it could be — in fact, from that angle, Curse Of The Hidden Mirror is a pretty damn good last word, addressed by BÖC to themselves and their veteran fans. ʽThe Old Gods Returnʼ, all by itself, is a frickin' anthem to the past: Shirley may have written the lyrics about something completely different, but when Bloom sings lead vocals on that song, culminating in a series of ecstatic "forever! forever!"s, and Roeser whips out the ol' axe, there is no doubt who they actually mean under «old gods».

 

Once the songs do sink in, there are some nice riffs and choruses, though — even if they now seem a bit too dangerously close to other people's: ʽOne Steap Ahead Of The Devilʼ could be easily mistaken for a late-period Aerosmith rocker, with its «glossy-swampy» main blues riff, and the verses of ʽDance On Stiltsʼ sound rather leaden and lumpy, like a Black Crowes song, and I am still trying to figure out what the hell that dancey funky bass figure on ʽGood To Feel Hungryʼ reminded me of. More Aerosmith? Oh well, all the better than emulating «Rambo metal», which they were sometimes guilty of in the past, but not here.

 

Although Bloom still hasn't lost his caveman growl (I suppose the man is on a steady raw meat diet three times a day, right?), the most pinching moments still come from Buck Dharma — where ʽHere Comes That Feelingʼ fails, the power-pop anthem ʽPocketʼ that could just as well have been done by the Bangles (sorry, couldn't help it) succeeds, with a bit of a heartfelt tug, and if you can distance yourself from the hilariously abysmal words of ʽStone Of Loveʼ, that one, too, is a pretty emotional tune. In fact, now that everything has been laid so bare, it is funny to see Bloom and Roeser so vividly illustrate the two faces of Blue Öyster Cult — the «Alien Nean­derthal» of the former and the «Alien New Romantic» of the latter, happy as the latter occa­sionally is to pour some additional kerosene on the former's bonfire. Their musical faces may have become wrinkled and a tad ugly, but they have not melted away.

 

Unfortunately, by 2001 most of the veteran fans of the band seem to have faded away, and the young ones were not interested — the album failed, and, consequently, their record label (Sanc­tuary) unflinchingly gave them the boot (ironically, since Sanctuary used to specialize on jaded-faded rock stars of the past), meaning no new attempts at studio production. On the other hand, why unfortunately? Further clones of Curse Of The Hidden Mirror would have been just that (clones), and this record really works much better as The Godfather Part III than as anything that supposedly has a future. It is good that they were able to say goodbye to us in this-a-way, much more fitting than Heaven Forbid or any of those awful Eighties' records — Curse comes full circle, reminding us of the band's original purpose and mission and pretty much saying «mission accomplished, thank you, beddy-bye now». So just a modest thumbs up here to a fitting career conclusion (not too disappointing, not too uplifting), and all in all, it's been a fun ride, despite a few bumps every now and then, particularly on those last circles.

 

A LONG DAY'S NIGHT (2002)

 

1) Stairway To The Stars; 2) Burning For You; 3) OD'd On Life Itself; 4) Dance On Stilts; 5) Buck's Boogie; 6) Quicktime Girl; 7) Harvest Moon; 8) Astronomy; 9) Cities On Flame; 10) Perfect Water; 11) Lips In The Hills; 12) Godzilla; 13) Don't Fear The Reaper.

 

Okay, one more encore — just because you asked for it so nicely and persistently and obsessive­ly, here is yet another live Blue Öyster Cult album. Everybody knows by now that each cohesive period of this band's existence has to be summarized by a live document, and just because we have moved into a new millennium does not mean that the principle warrants an exception. This one was recorded in Chicago on June 21, 2002 (solstice day!), and came out on CD and DVD; I have not seen the DVD in its completeness, but it is longer by six tracks, all of them from the band's most classic period, so, reasonably, the DVD release is the one you should be more inte­rested in. For marketing purposes, though, the DVD lacks the 10-minute version of ʽAstronomyʼ, including Roeser's most gut-wrenching guitar solo of the entire evening, so if you are a true fan of the salmon salt, you have no choice but to get both.

 

With Bobby Rondinelli on drums and Danny Miranda on bass as a perfectly reliable and well-involved rhythm section, there is little reason to doubt that the whole thing will be professional and suitably spirited, but what can be said about yet another bunch of live performances of ʽGod­zillaʼ, ʽReaperʼ, ʽCities On Flameʼ etc.? Setlist-wise, much more curious is the inclusion of ʽPerfect Waterʼ from Club Ninja — apparently, the band takes this «retrospective show» concept seriously, leaving no stone unturned; but, as you might have guessed, the live version eschews the evils of Eighties production, and sounds much more like a normal sentimental hard-rocker in Buck Dharma's usual style than a bad reminiscence of 1986. Another surprise is the long-forgot­ten ʽLips In The Hillsʼ from Cultosaurus, with all of its frenzied arpeggiation intact. And the two songs from the band's latest record, while not on the classic level, still align pretty damn well with the classics in style and mood.

 

Still, all this professionalism can be a bit tiresome — the Rolling Stones, for instance, whose live performances from around 1975 to 1982 had turned into a sometimes exciting and hilarious, but persistently drugged-drunken sloppy mess, later tightened up their act significantly and made the contrast between their «early», «mid-life», and «late» live albums so interesting that most of them are worth owning, for one reason or other. In comparison, these guys just evolved from a tightly professional hard-rock act to a tightly professional arena-rock act to a tightly professional oldies act. Compare the original live performance of ʽBuck's Boogieʼ from 1975 with this one — gene­rally the same stuff, but just a wee bit more «formal» on the 21st century side of the business. Rondinelli gives it a much steadier, but also less youthfully exciting rhythmic base, and Roeser sounds ever so slightly by-the-bookish on it.

 

In any case, we should not take the record for anything other than what it is — a document of the entertainment potential of this band circa 2002. If you were wondering, back then, whether to attend or not a BÖC show, A Long Day's Night would have suggested «yes» (these days, more than a decade later, with further lineup changes and Lanier dead, I really have no idea). If you have any special personal memories of your own of a late-period BÖC show, here be a memento status, obviously. But other than that, A Long Day's Night is probably not turning into your favorite live album from these guys any time soon — it's got plenty of worthy competition from past decades to render itself superfluous after just one listen. Oh well, at least they keep the silly audience teasing bits in ʽGodzillaʼ on a tight leash this time.

 

BO HANSSON

MUSIC INSPIRED BY LORD OF THE RINGS (1972)

 

1) Leaving Shire; 2) The Old Forest & Tom Bombadil; 3) Fog On The Barrow-Downs; 4) The Black Riders & Flight To The Ford; 5) At The House Of Elrond & The Ring Goes South; 6) A Journey In The Dark; 7) Lothlorien; 8) Shadowfax; 9) The Horns Of Rohan & The Battle Of The Pelennor Fields; 10) Dreams In The House Of Healing; 11) Homeward Bound & The Scouring Of The Shire; 12) The Grey Havens.

 

«Inspired» is the right word. If all of these compositions pretended to the status of an actual sound­track to Lord Of The Rings, it'd be a Lord Of The Rings in which Frodo would be a som­nambulant lunatic, Tom Bombadil would be a decrepit old organ player, stoned out of his mind in a basement, Lothlorien would be the name of an opium den, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields would be carried out by Grateful Dead fans in a mosh pit, and «leaving for the Grey Havens» would be a euphemism for a heroin injection. But as it is, the music does not pretend to anything — it simply happens to be inspired by LOTR. And some elvendust and magic mushrooms.

 

In all honesty, these pieces of music that the Swedish multi-instrumentalist Bo Hansson put together for his first solo album do not have much to do with Tolkien, and the title might even be a little misleading: for one thing, people who have never joined the club of J. R. R. admirers, or people who actually find Tolkien's significant influence on 1960s-1970s music somewhat embar­rassing (remember Plant's lyrics for ʽRamble Onʼ, eh?) are quite likely to be turned off by the title, thinking that this is just some silly slobbering fanboy tribute. Tribute it might be, in name, but in actuality Hansson is too busy concocting his own magical mystical world to grovel and kowtow before somebody else's.

 

The world is not characterised by a staggering amount of diversity. It most closely resembles the efforts of Pink Floyd circa 1970-72, when they were already out of their wildest psychedelic / avantgarde phase, but were not yet ready to flood the world with their newly awakened social conscience, and were mostly content with exploring the possibilities for strange ambient beauty. Hansson, playing most of the instruments himself (Rune Carlsson is handling the drums, and a couple of additional sax and flute players are also available from time to time), sees himself as a mood-brewer: these are smooth, quiet, repetitive instrumentals that invite the listener to relax and soak in the atmosphere. The actual melodies are so straightforward and simple that you will be humming them in no time if you set your mind to it — much like Floyd's melodies, come to think of it — but the simplicity is meaningful and seductive enough to forgive the lack of flash.

 

Hansson's keyboards are the essential link: originally, he was a major Hammond player (as part of the late-Sixties duo Hansson & Carlsson), and here, too, the organ remains his instrument of choice, although he's also added the Moog to his inventory (whose first notable appearance is impersonating a nasty wight in ʽFog On The Barrow-Downsʼ). Whatever simple melody is play­ing at any given moment, there is almost always a quiet baroque (or pseudo-baroque?) keyboard «floor» under it, and together with Hansson's respect for the echo effect, these are his major world-building ingredients. He does not manage a sound as vast as Floyd do on their better tunes (like ʽEchoesʼ), but he is not hunting for that — his space is fairly well shut in, so if you want my Lord Of The Rings association, I'd say that the majority of these tracks should be stripped of their titles, sewn together and renamed «The Crossing Of Mirkwood, Pts. I-X», because that is exactly how it all feels to me — an endless, monotonous journey on a narrow forest path, barely looked over by some feeble rays of light: boring, perhaps, but also hypnotic in some strange, undescri­bable way.

 

Every now and then the music picks up the pace a little, but really, even ʽThe Battle Of The Pelennor Fieldsʼ, despite the quirky «treated» electric guitar part that presages Mike Oldfield, sounds more like a merry Celtic dance than a fierce combat between the forces of good and evil. «Evil», in fact, tends rather to be impersonated by «scary» fiddling with the Moog, from the already mentioned ʽFogʼ to ʽA Journey In The Darkʼ, while «beauty», be it ʽLothlorienʼ or the romantic gallop of ʽShadowfaxʼ, is associated with simple, clean, sometimes slightly jazzy electric guitar licks. All of it is very homebrewed and not a wee bit «epic»: as we get to ʽGrey Havensʼ, for the Grand Finale we are offered nothing but a stern couple of sliding electric licks (to mirror the movement of oars?), some quietly bubbling organ parts, and Carlsson's usual «muffled» percussion, to avoid any direct references to a «rock sound», if possible.

 

Considering how unassuming the music is, it is curious that it even managed to reach the ears of a large audience in the first place. Hansson originally recorded and released it as Sagan Om Ringen in Sweden in 1970, but later on, it caught the attention of Tony Stratton-Smith (the guy behind the success of Genesis), and by the time it hit the UK and US shelves in 1972, Hansson was already a minor celebrity in the prog-rock ranks. Maybe it is this quiet, ascetic nature of the album that made it stand out even back then, when most people were being so flashy and bom­bastic — anyway, it is a good thing that Tolkien's agents never let him carry on with the idea of adding voices to the record, because I believe that any singing here would have spoilt the overall effect. As it is, this is just one of those albums that will go down easy with a cup of camomile tea — not «stunningly beautiful», but «quietly becalming» in much the same way as something like Brian Eno's Another Green World, just on a less radical level. Thumbs up.

 

MAGICIAN'S HAT (1973)

 

1) Big City; 2) Divided Reality; 3) Elidor; 4) Before The Rain; 5) Fylke; 6) Playing Downhill Into The Downs; 7) Findhorn's Song; 8) The Awakening; 9) Wandering Song; 10) The Sun (Parallel Or 90 Degrees); 11) Excursion With Complications.

 

This is one of those classic situations where one tries to correct the balance between accessibility / entertainment and complexity / intellectualism and may end up pushing the slider too far in the opposite direction. On one hand, Magician's Hat, Bo's second foray into the world of progres­sive instrumental exploration, takes reasonable precautions to protect itself from the vicious sarcasm of critics crusading against starry-eyed idealism and fanboyism — namely, although quite a few of its tunes could have easily been slipped onto the previous record without anybody noticing, there are no direct references to Lord Of The Rings, and the compositions are open to any sort of unrestricted personal interpretations. That is probably good.

 

What is probably not so good is that Magician's Hat sounds awfully scattered and even less focused than its predecessor. Some of the reviewers define it as a «folk-prog» album, others de­scribe it as moving away from folk influences and more into jazz-fusion territory, still others just say that «this is great music that takes you to another dimension» without even trying to specify what sort of dimension that might be. The logical truth is that Magician's Hat is all these things — «folksy», «fusionesque», «otherworldly» — and more; and also, unfortunately, that this is not the kind of diversity that makes a whole lot of sense. As pretty as these soundscapes are, the album has not managed to override the «pleasant background music» tag that my subconscience has slapped on it during the very first listen.

 

Case in point: the epic-length ʽBig Cityʼ which, in its original form as ʽStorstadʼ on the Swedish edition, ran for 11 minutes, then was cut down to 7 on the international market release, then, finally, was restored back to full duration on the CD edition. I'd like to call the track «epic», but that would mostly refer to the sheer running length and the number of different «movements» — if that is enough, so be it, but normally, «epic» also surmises the idea of power, rising and falling dynamics, build-ups, crescendos, climaxes, etc., whereas ʽBig Cityʼ just sort of... trots along, sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, mutating from blues-rock to choral folk chant to bossa nova to samba to fusion to a bit of avantgarde, being all over the place but fairly low-key most of the time. Not only does it not give out the impression of a ʽBig Cityʼ (more like a bunch of very small ones that you pass by in an old car at half-speed), but there are also next to no memorable themes — it is like a mediocre jazz album, with professionally set grooves and com­petent, but never too enlightening solo improvisations.

 

As we move away from the lengthy suite and into the realm of shorter tracks, things do not get better — because giving the short tracks separate names does not change the fact that the rest of the album is essentially just more of the same stuff. Every now and then, you do meet up with an interesting theme (ʽPlaying Downhillʼ has a curiously constructed brass/organ jazz melody that seems almost mathematically explorative), but, like fireflies, the interesting ones light up and fade away just as quickly as the uninteresting ones. Hansson has a ton of ideas in store for the album, but he gives poor ones as much space as rich ones, and almost never takes the time to prove that melody so-and-so actually needed inventing.

 

Some might see this as a challenge, and set themselves a worthy goal of learning to hum all the 20+ melodies of Magician's Hat, so as to easier win friends and influence people. I, however, seem to suffer from attention deficit syndrome in this situation, and keep on seeing all this as the result of dissipation of focus — professional instrumental noodling whose lack of conceptual purpose strips the music of the necessary energy. You know it's not really a good sign when the album's most memorable moment is basically a musical joke  — in this case, ʽExcursion With Complicationsʼ, which begins as a somber bluesy march, dominated by doomy organs and stern, electronically treated solo guitar, and then transforms into a New Orleanian piece of carniva­lesque boogie-woogie, thus ending the album with the author's tongue sticking out.

 

The album may hold up to repeated listens, I guess, if one deals with the fact that this is «prog-rock» with the «rock» component surgically extracted and dissolved in acid — as was the case with its predecessor, you'd better get yourself all comfortably relaxed to enjoy its smooth, inob­trusive hooks, atmospheric echoes, and tasteful, but uneventful soloing (including lots of guitar parts, which are now at least as prominent as the keyboards). Unfortunately, few of us will pro­bably have the time to determine just how much Magician's Hat reflects subtlety of vision rather than lack of vision. And it goes without saying that, having originally come out in 1972 (under the Swedish title Ur Trollkarlens Hatt), the album would be very quickly quenched by Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells — where most of the pieces of the puzzle would logically come to­gether, instead of being lazily scattered around, as they are here.

 

ATTIC THOUGHTS (1975)

 

1) Attic Thoughts; 2) Time And Space; 3) Waiting...; 4) Waltz For Interbeings; 5) Time For Great Achievements; 6) The Hybrills; 7) Rabbit Music; 8) Day And Night; 9) A Happy Prank.

 

For what it's worth, Attic Thoughts is little more than a second installation of Magician's Hat. Same variation of short tunes and lengthy multi-part epics, same freedom of thought and direc­tion, same unpredictability of influences — and the same quiet inobtrusiveness, making it excessively hard to remember what you have just heard, or to experience any particularly strong emotional responses. «Tastefully pretty» and «slightly moody» pretty much does it.

 

The album was recorded with more or less the same backing band as Hat, and this time around, released in the same year in Sweden (as Mellanväsen) and abroad. Bo's influences were again diverse and scattered, one of them being Watership Down, the weird novel about rabbits by Richard Adams — eventually, he'd devote an entire LP to this work, but for now, just one two-part suite (ʽRabbit Musicʼ) should be sufficient. However, the overall effect remains the same — that of a slightly weird, magical «other» world where, truth be told, nothing much ever happens, but then, why should anything happen? Your average magical world can be just as boring as your average non-magical one, and I suspect that this is exactly what Bo wanted to show us: a «realis­tic», «uneventful» musical universe, completely free of any pretense at «rocking».

 

As far as actual musical texture is concerned, of course, «uneventful» is pushing it. Many of the songs feature multiple key, tempo, and mood changes — ʽWaltz For Interbeingsʼ being the most impressive example, I suppose, where bits of genuine waltz are interspersed with fast fusion passages and something that I could only describe as Bo's futuristic preview of the lambada. All of it occupies the space of three and a half minutes; the longer compositions, like ʽRabbit Musicʼ and the title track, naturally feature even more changes. However, I would still assess them as fairly «uneventful» changes — they never radically shift the mood, or rev up the energy levels.

 

Nor is it all that easy to get overawed by Bo's omnivorous nature. Okay, so ʽTime For Great Achievementsʼ glues together a possible theme for a spaghetti-western with electronic psychede­lia and a little more jazz-rock, but what is the meaning of this fusion? All the individual compo­nents sound nice, and make for decent background muzak, but why is it exactly in this sequence that they should be listened to, and would the effect be diminished/spoiled if we changed it all around? I have no answer for these questions.

 

In the end, Attic Thoughts seems like it must have taken even more effort on Bo's part than Hat (more ideas, more movements, more influences), but the lack of focus stays the same, and once again, I am a little sad that he did not use any single piece as a chief influence — Lord Of The Rings, with its conceptual organization, made a little more sense than this disjointed, messy, tepid collection of «snippets», inoffensive as it is. Nevertheless, this is perfect «progressive elevator muzak», and I do not regret even one second of listening — I only wish I had something more meaningful to say about it, but I don't, and apparently, neither does anybody else (most of the reviews of this album that I'd browsed through made zero sense as well).

 

MUSIC INSPIRED BY WATERSHIP DOWN (1977)

 

1) Born Of The Gentle South; 2) Allegro For A Rescue; 3) Legend And Light; 4) Trial And Adversity; 5) The Twice-Victory; 6) The Kingdom Brightly Smiles; 7) Migration Suite.

 

Even after ʽRabbit Musicʼ, the furry bunnies from Richard Adams' novel still plagued Bo's mind so terribly that he had to dedicate his entire next album to the little guys, making this his second record completely «inspired by» a literary work. The original Swedish release was called El-Ahrairah, after the name given to one particular trickster rabbit in the book, but for the interna­tional market, it was apparently thought that a more explanatory title was in order — or perhaps  the record industry people thought the name sounded too Arabic for the eyes and ears of the Western public, and would trigger visions of hijacked planes and terrorist attacks.

 

Regardless, the album never charted even with a «safe» title, and its total lack of commercial suc­cess was one of the factors responsible for Bo's subsequent withdrawal from the music scene. Indeed, given that the age of prog rock's «coolness» was long gone, in 1977 you had to conform or combust, and it is quite evident from these tunes that Hansson had no wish whatsoever to set aside his personal muse and suck in any of the arena-rock, disco, or New Wave influences. In­stead, he just used up the last drops of credit he'd earned from the success of Lord Of The Rings to do the same thing as always — and then faded away.

 

The few tepid reviews I have seen of this album were mostly dismissive, with «nothing new» being the most often repeated motive. This is surprising, because, from a general point of view, ever since making his mark with the Tolkien tribute, Hansson had kept on making «nothing new» records on a steady basis, and if we are to maintain accuracy, El-Ahrairah actually sounds more different from Attic Thoughts than the latter does from Magician's Hat. For one thing, the com­positions tend to be a bit louder, angrier, and more relying on electric guitar playing than ever before — possibly to capture some of the dynamic spirit of the book, but possibly also because he wanted to brush away the illusion of creating «progressive elevator muzak», and put together some tunes that would force the listener to pay more attention.

 

Indeed, on the opening multi-part suite ʽBorn Of The Gentle Southʼ, the composer pulls all the stops — tempos, tonalities, moods shift constantly like the wind, going from slow soul-burning Floydisms to spinning polkas with psychedelic guitar solos to grand gospel passages to vicious blues-rock blasts to whatever else is imaginable. Whether all these ingredients are cohesive enough to form an impressive whole is up to you to decide; personally, I happen to feel that none of the ideas are given enough time and space to blossom properly, but then, I could probably say the same of quite a few classical concertos and symphonies, so let's just say that I find the suite easier to pay attention to (because of its dynamic jumps), but just as generally unmemorable as any average Hansson composition on the previous albums.

 

The best tracks, in my opinion, are ʽLegend And Lightʼ, where there is an interesting contrast between Bo's solo piano passages (merging music hall with avantgarde jazz) and the grand an­themic reso­lutions in the «chorus» parts, making the track a «teasing» experiment worthy of Zappa; and ʽThe Twice-Victoryʼ, whose main stately theme, slightly reminiscent of the spaghetti western style, is probably the most successful stab at grandiosity on the album — too bad it is never given enough time and space to bl... oh, okay, never mind.

 

Unfortunately, I am at the disadvantage of not actually having read the source novel (there's only so much fantasy that I can digest, which is not very much), so it is hard for me to understand how these musical themes truly relate to that entire rabbit business. Even more unfortunately, it is hard for me to visualise any concept to which this music, as a whole, would be applicable. There is Bo's usual strain of sorrow and melancholia stretching throughout the entire work (those are some fairly morose and somber rabbits indeed), but that is not nearly enough to blow one's mind — although I have to admit that out of all four albums, this is easily the one that tries to invoke the spirit of grand tragedy on the most regular basis. If only these invocations didn't usually end up sounding like «Pink Floyd lite», the album could have been 1977's dark masterpiece — as it is, it's more like 1977's dark coffee-table.

 

Bo Hansson did make one more record later on in his career: the Swedish-only Mitt I Livet came out in 1985, never got an international release, never came out on CD, and remains a little-heard ob­scurity (so I have no way of ascertaining whether it is in the same style or if he finally decided to make a transition to synth-pop). Twenty-five years later, he died, and to this day, he remains generally revered in a small circle of connoisseurs — a curious figure, capable of inspiring chi­valrous devotion and agonizing boredom, sometimes at the same time. Whatever be the case, he may not have written the best Tolkien soundtrack ever, but one thing is certain: he did manage to forever change my casual perception of rabbits.

BOB MARLEY

SOUL REBELS (1970)

 

1) Soul Rebel; 2) Try Me; 3) It's Alright; 4) No Sympathy; 5) My Cup; 6) Soul Almighty; 7) Rebel's Hop; 8) Corner Stone; 9) Four Hundred Years; 10) No Water; 11) Reaction; 12) My Sympathy.

 

For all those who are accustomed to Marley's Island-era worldwide hits, from ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ and ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ to ʽOne Loveʼ and ʽJammingʼ, these early albums by the Wailers, produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry and recorded back when «the Wailers» did not yet signify «any interchangeable body behind Bob's back», but meant an actual reggae band with elements of active democracy, might sound a little... tough.

 

Soul Rebels is a good example of «hardcore» reggae, one that does not try to render itself more accessible to the ears of the global listener — by incorporating «rock» elements, or simply by trying to be more melodic — but instead concentrates almost exclusively on groove, atmosphere, and its own type of rugged spirituality. This is Perry's typical style of work, and this why Soul Rebels is as «authentic» as these guys are ever gonna get. For proof, compare this here version of Peter Tosh's ʽ400 Yearsʼ with the fuller-arranged, slower, subtler arrangement on Catch A Fire three years later — both have their own strengths, but this early one has a brutal roughness, expressed by the prominent position of the bass guitar and the «scratch» pattern of the rhythm, without any further embellishments, that would eventually be gone.

 

Although the Wailers had already been around for more than half a decade, this particular in­carnation, consisting of the «original» Wailers (Marley himself; Peter Tosh on guitar, keyboards, and vocals; Bunny Wailer on percussion) as well as the Barrett brothers, formerly from Perry's "Upsetters" (Aston on bass and Carly on extra percussion), was transitional — the «originals» would part ways with Marley in 1974, while the Barretts, on the other hand, would hold on until the very end. In this particular case, «transitional» might easily mean «best», the single largest accumulation of talent in the Wailers' history — except that you really have to «get it» before you can make proper use of that accumulation.

 

The key test, I think, is in whether one has any good words to say about the album's final track, ʽMy Sympathyʼ, which is really just an instrumental variation on the main theme of the album's vocal title song (ʽSoul Rebelʼ; for the record, the remastered and expanded CD edition of Soul Rebels adds a whole big bunch of instrumental takes on the songs). The main groove is set about in the first three or four seconds, after which nothing new happens right until the final fadeout at 2:43 — just the same rhythmic pattern, with scratch guitar and Tosh's quietly bubbling organ part in the background repeating the same chord pattern over and over again. It is the easiest thing in the world to call this thing «crap», but that could very logically lead to calling the entire album crap, and, subsequently, the entire reggae genre, or, at least, Marley's entire career.

 

The thing is — if the groove is well set, the groove is likeable. Just as it is possible to dig the 12-bar blues progression, per se, and dig it specifically when it is performed with extra gusto, so it is possible to feel abstract sympathy towards the skank, straight or shuffled. A whole album of ins­trumentals like ʽMy Sympathyʼ would soon become unbearable, but this placing of one instru­mental «re-run» at the end of an album is sort of a symbolic gesture — this is who we are, and this form of music is what we play, and it is through this groove that we convey everything that we have to say, because that's how Jah set it all up, basically. One of the most fascinating things about the groove is how, despite requiring very strict rhythmic coordination, it ends up giving this impression of nonchalant friendly laziness, steaming in the Jamaican heat — I guess they don't emphasize the «offbeat» quality of the rhythms for nothing.

 

Still, it goes without saying that the most important part of the compositions are the vocals — leads, harmonies, tones, mantras, expressions. The primary topic, «escape from Babylon» and everything that it entails, dominates the album's theme, from the title track, now and for all time branding Marley as a «soul rebel», and right to ʽ400 Yearsʼ, sung by Tosh and serving as the al­bum's, if not the entire movement's, definitive anthem of liberty. These two are the most memo­rable bits of the puzzle — ʽSoul Rebelʼ not only because of Marley's bittersweet confession, but also because of the way it opens, with Aston's soul-pumping bass brought all the way up to 11 by Perry and immediately pulling your ears down to the ground, because that sound weighs a fri­ckin' ton, no less. As for ʽ400 Yearsʼ, it really makes you wonder why Tosh did not take up lead vocals more often — his voice, lower and more «solemn» than Marley's, was really great for taking on grand, anthemic statements. They say he was kinda lazy, though, in a Rastafari manner.

 

Other, less notorious, highlights include ʽNo Sympathyʼ (where the Wailers do a great wailing job, joining the lead singer on the last mournful vowel of each line) and a series of «funny» num­bers that show a strong James Brown influence, such as ʽMy Cupʼ (actually a cover of James' own ʽI Guess I'll Have To Cry, Cry, Cryʼ) and ʽSoul Almightyʼ, full of references to doing the alligator and the mashed potato. Both songs are firmly reggae-based, yet even in this «hardcore» setting, they show that the Wailers were perfectly okay about interacting with other black music subgenres. Indeed, ʽSoul Almightyʼ could probably be called a halfway hybrid between reggae and funk — so much for the idea of stark monotonousness.

 

One thing that, at this stage in their history, the Wailers still pull off weaker than the rest is the love theme: songs like ʽTry Meʼ and the heavily allusive ʽCorner Stoneʼ ("you're a builder, baby, here I am, a stone") never really go beyond «nice» into that territory where Marley's relations with women start taking on an almost religious quality. Their little «humorous» interludes, such as ʽRebel's Hopʼ, are also relative trifles without a whole lot of replay value — in other words, Soul Rebels is not entirely filler-free. But then again, neither were the Wailers quite prepared for prime time: Soul Rebels is very much an album for «local consumption», and there is no way for most of us to assess its sound the same way it was assessed around Kingston in the year 1970. For all I know, ʽRebel's Hopʼ may have been a local smash.

 

In any case, the album as a whole gets a thumbs up from me, which I would never deliver solely for the sake of «politically correct» reasoning — there is no getting away from the original Wailers' charisma, no matter who they were and what cause they were standing for. I do, however, have to repeat the warning that Soul Rebels requires affection, not sheer tolerance, for reggae. It is technically possible to be completely indifferent to reggae as a whole and still love an album like Natty Dread — whether this would work with these Perry-produced records is not so clear to me. Then again, I really don't know a whole lot about the various kinds of reggae, and I seem to dig this, so maybe that's a sterner judgement than necessary.

 

SOUL REVOLUTION (1971)

 

1) Keep On Moving; 2) Don't Rock My Boat; 3) Put It On; 4) Fussing And Fighting; 5) Duppy Conqueror; 6) Memphis; 7) Soul Rebel; 8) Riding High; 9) Kaya; 10) African Herbsman; 11) Stand Alone; 12) Sun Is Shining; 13) Brain Washing.

 

Even though this second album, too, was produced by Lee Perry, it actually sounds quite different from the first one — lighter and much more playful, in contrast with the more firmly pronounced «protest» spirit of Soul Rebel. Maybe this was deliberate, to show how the true Rasta spirit is supposed to concentrate on the positive by default, leaving the negative for very special occasions — in any case, the fact is that most of these here songs are not about four hundred years of slave­ry, but rather about the delights of chillin' out, gettin' down, ridin' high, and swingin' low, not necessarily in that order.

 

The record does begin with ʽKeep On Movingʼ, one more song about escape, salvation, and sweet dreams of "a land somewhere not near Babylon". But musically it is a lazy, nonchalant, almost melodic tune, friendly to boot, as if the singer were dreaming of all these things while enjoying some warm Jamaican sun in a swinging hammock — the misery and agony of the Rasta preacher is only implied, not expressed in easily understandable terms. Later on, ʽFussing And Fightingʼ, calling upon all of us to stop the aforementioned, is delivered without the slightest trace of anger or anguish in Bob's voice (well, maybe only at the end of the song does he get heated up enough to raise his voice a bit: "LORD, I wanna know!"). And then there's the final track, ʽBrain Washingʼ — if you really need to know, it is a rant against... nursery rhymes and fairy tales, all of which are acknowledged to be "just the poor's brain washing", and "I don't need it no longer" — sure enough, when you got Haile Selassie, who needs Cinderella and Little Miss Muffet?

 

This is about as «rebellious» and «political» as the album gets. In between these tracks, there is a lot of short, tight, often catchy, always friendly, and usually quite endearing little numbers about smoking pot, making love, and not giving a damn if the ganja is worse than expected or the lover is jivin' around with some other, temporarily luckier, soul brother. There is a lot more vocal har­monies from the Wailers on these tracks, too, echoing the band's early days and owing a lot to old-time gospel and, occasionally, doo-wop (ʽPut It Onʼ). There are also more keyboards, and there is even an extended melodica solo from Peter Tosh on ʽMemphisʼ, an instrumental formally credited to Chuck Berry for some reason (I fail to see any resemblance with ʽMemphis, Ten­nesseeʼ whatsoever — did they just want to toss ol' Chuck some royalties for no particular rea­son?). In short, it's really all fun and games over there in sunny Jamaica.

 

One of the main highlights is ʽKayaʼ, arguably one of the finest combinations of exuberant joy and simplicity in Marley's repertoire — catchy and invigorating enough for him to revive it half a decade later on the Island album of the same name. Ironically, in 1978 Kaya would be written off by quite a few fans and critics alike as a disappointingly «relaxed» follow-up to Exodus — but the story actually begins here, with Soul Revolution being an equally «relaxed» follow-up to Soul Rebel without the Wailers having any international notoriety whatsoever. Sure enough, reggae can be fiery and militant, but what about peace, love, and understanding, then? Marley's "got to have kaya now, got to have kaya now, for the rain is fallin'" acknowledges sufficiency of «the bare necessities» without a shred of self-aggrandizing — even if few of us can tell the proper difference between kaya and ganja, you don't even need to understand exactly what he is reaching for on the song to succumb to its peacefulness.

 

Another highlight is ʽSun Is Shiningʼ, punctuated by Tosh's lonesome, slightly gloomy, but not desperate melodica puffs — I don't think the song does much of anything except simply proclaim the fact of life: "here I am / want you to know just if you can / where I stand". Its mood is some­where in between «neutral» and «sad», so that both the melodica and the occasional overtones in Bob's singing hint at life's harsh realities — yet, at the same time, it is quite clear that as long as "we'll lift our heads and give Jah praises", ultimately, it's going to be all right. So what is this if not the ultimate anthem of the primordial way of life? Even if it was recorded in a modern studio, listening to the song can still transport you thousands of years back.

 

The album also includes a cover of Richie Havens' ʽAfrican Herbsmanʼ, which is probably the closest they come to the subject of ʽ400 Yearsʼ, but, again, in a far more lightweight, even poppy, manner, with a spritely-hoppin' bass line and tender harmonies that seem a little odd when applied to lyrics about "old slave men" who "grind slow but it grinds fine", yet that is the record's message — even dire, gruesome subjects are approached with a levity of heart and mind. Hatred, hysterics, and vengefulness have no place here; maybe that is what Soul Revolution is really all about, brother. Thumbs up for that.

 

Technical note: although most sources show the album sleeve to include the title Soul Revo­lution Part II, the real «Part II» was actually a «dub» companion to the vocal version, consisting of purely instrumental tracks of the same songs — a special offer for cannabis patients, I suppose. In the process, Part II somehow also got stuck on the cover of Part I, so that unsuspecting people might think that the record was intended to be a conceptual sequel to Soul Rebel, which is not the case (it being an «anti-Soul Rebel», in a sense). To confuse matters further, three years later there would also be a special UK release of the album, retitled as African Herbsman and replacing a couple of the tunes with non-album singles (including an early version of ʽLively Up Yourselfʼ, among other things). You'd think that musicians had finally got rid of that messy crap, so typical of the mid-Sixties and so passé after LPs had finally become a respected medium, but apparently, Jamaica caught on slowly to those new trends. Must be all that heavy smoke.

 

THE BEST OF THE WAILERS (1971)

 

1) Soul Shake Down Party; 2) Stop The Train; 3) Caution; 4) Soul Captives; 5) Go Tell It On The Mountain; 6) Can't You See; 7) Soon Come; 8) Cheer Up; 9) Back Out; 10) Do It Twice.

 

This is a fairly weird entry in Marley's yearbook. To «the best of» my knowledge, this is the only The Best Of... album in existence that is not actually a true «best of», but rather just a collection of tracks recorded during a brief time period, none of them previously issued. Namely, these songs were recorded by The Wailers circa 1969-70, prior to the band's engagement with Perry and under the supervision of equally notorious (back then, at least) producer Leslie Kong. Some­thing stalled or backfired, though: the band did not get along with the man too well, eventually abandoned him for Perry, and the tracks remained shelved for about a year and a half.

 

As the band started gaining traction, though, Kong decided to capitalize upon those leftovers, and released them under this super-arrogant title — translated to «you thought the Wailers with Scratch Perry were good? you ain't heard nothing yet, you silly amateurs!» According to urban legend which is too awesome to be true, Bunny Wailer, upon hearing Kong's plans, told him that it would really only be the «best» Wailers if the man didn't live long enough to hear anything else by the band — and, true enough, Kong died of a heart attack, aged 38, one week upon release. I'm positive Bunny just invented that story post-factum, but the fact does remain that the album was released without the band's consent, and with a stupid title to boot.

 

Not that there's any serious reason to complain, because, best or not best, these ten short tracks (making up for a «mini-LP» at the most) are really quite good. Without Perry around to make them concentrate on the basic essence (or should I say «bassic essence»?), they are somewhat croonier, poppier, and doo-woppier than anything on Soul Rebels, and, in fact, the whole album still gravitates more towards old-fashioned ska than newly-born reggae. The atmosphere still reminds of the early days when the Wailers used to wear suits and ties, and cut their hair short — but the music is already bubbling with fine songwriting ideas, and the «social value» of the songs, while not immediately jumping out at the listener, is already quite deeply embedded.

 

The only number to appear on later releases in a re-recorded format is Tosh's ʽStop That Trainʼ, showing a Sam Cooke influence (ʽGood Timesʼ), but completely readapted for the sound and style of the wailing Wailers — Peter's powerful delivery and barely concealed desperation makes the song every bit of the band's equivalent for the Beatles' ʽHelp!ʼ: a "lonely man" brought down by something that is hard to express in words and searching for refuge/salvation, all the while clothing his desperation in poppy choruses and friendly rhythm patterns. And his sheer vocal strength and soulful conviction, both here and on the traditional hymn ʽGo Tell It On The Mountainʼ, are two more reasons to sorely lament his parting ways with Marley, since he is every bit the better, or, at least, definitely the more «epic» singer of the two.

 

Interestingly enough, at least half of the songs are credited to Rita Marley rather than Bob, showing that her stature within the band was even more prominent in those early years than later (although she is still responsible for a good bunch of the Wailers' mid-period classics, like ʽCrazy Baldheadʼ etc.). Like her husband, she is not specializing in any particular direction: ʽSoul Shakedown Partyʼ, for instance, is a quiet love celebration (the best thing about which is its simple, instantaneously memorable organ riff), whereas ʽSoul Captivesʼ and ʽCheer Upʼ are quiet by-the-rivers-of-Babylon-style anthems of hope and liberation: danceable rhythms, relaxed, optimistic Caribbean/surf lead guitar parts, and statements that "freedom day will come", so we might as well start rejoicing on the spot.

 

Other than ʽStop That Trainʼ and ʽSoul Shakedown Partyʼ, the only true standout is once again Tosh's — ʽSoon Comeʼ, another dissatisfied rant about expecting stuff and not getting it (techni­cally, complaining about being constantly let down by a love interest, but allegorically inter­pretable as complaining about being let down, period). The trivial hook — song title made into a falsetto mantra — bites into you at once, and focuses your attention on one of Peter's finest examples of «getting into character», whereas Bob, throughout the album, is playing it cool, never letting himself get carried away. Funny, yes, but at this point it was not at all certain who would eventually come out «on top» within the Wailers.

 

Although, technically, this is more like a footnote in the story of Bob Marley, the record is still an essential acquisition for all the fans of Peter Tosh, all the admirers of Rita Marley as a songwriter in her own rights, and all those who want to remember Leslie Kong as one of the first influential Jamaican record producers, responsible for the rise of reggae. For those who just love good music, it is probably not so essential, but there is nothing whatsoever to dislike — amicable rhythms, pleasant solos, cool organ riffs, catchy harmonies, and some social value. Thumbs up, closing our eyes on the ridiculousness of the title.

 

CATCH A FIRE (1973)

 

1) Concrete Jungle; 2) Slave Driver; 3) 400 Years; 4) Stop That Train; 5) Rock It Baby; 6) Stir It Up; 7) Kinky Reggae; 8) No More Trouble; 9) Midnight Ravers.

 

And now we see The Wailers get in the big league. From a certain justified point of view, this is where Bob Marley «sold out to the system», making the jump from local Jamaican labels and the local Jamaican market to a major label (Island Records, which, not coincidentally, was founded by Chris Blackwell in 1959 on Jamaica, but had been operating from London as early as 1962, and was not at all limited to ska/reggae by the time Marley signed his contract) and to an inter­national audience — Catch A Fire got all the way up to #171 on the Billboard charts, and Mar­ley's commercial stance would only be toughening up since then, all the way to Exodus.

 

More importantly, and somewhat predictably, the jump was accompanied by a significant change in sound. In order to properly put Bob on the international scene, some concessions would have to be made: listeners worldwide, it was deemed, would hardly have the assiduous tolerance for the «hardcore reggae» approach of Lee Perry, meaning that the songs would have to be a little more «pop», and the arrangements would have to be a little less Spartan. After The Wailers had recorded the master tapes in Jamaica and brought them over to Chris Blackwell in London, the latter took the decision to «spice 'em up», hiring a host of session musicians, such as Wayne Per­kins on guitar and Rabbit Bundrick on keyboards, to generate ear-pleasing overdubs that would put that stuff more in line with the commercial sounds of the Seventies. Marley, ever the vigilante man, sensitive to trends and striving for world recognition, did not object — yet I am not so sure about how Peter Tosh reacted to the whole thing, and whether that was not one of the reasons for the beginning of his alienation from Marley.

 

Nevertheless, I will admit to the «embarrassing» reality — I do find the Wailers with extra over­dubs more accessible, and I do find these overdubs in very good taste. Case in point: ʽStir It Upʼ, one of Bob's most charming, tenderest reggae ballads, has a wah-wah lead from Wayne Perkins that utilizes a gruff, grumbly tone to play a suitably tender part, and adds an extra individual voice to the beautiful, but repetitive group harmonies of the chorus. Would the song have become a hit without that lead guitar, or without Tyrone Downie's organ accompaniment? Possibly, pos­sibly not, and who cares about the exact number of sold copies anyway: the important thing is, these additional layers steal nothing from the «base» of the song, but add quite a lot. Naysayers may go back to the original two-chord ska version from 1967 — just remember that, had all of Bob Marley's output been like that original version, most likely, very few of us would have ever heard of who the hell Bob Marley was in the first place.

 

Quite a few other songs here are oldies as well, including both of the Tosh-sung numbers (ʽ400 Yearsʼ and ʽStop That Trainʼ) — these ones, curiously, are taken at much slower tempos than the originals, sung and played with less energy, but more «soul», that is, not necessarily with more feeling but a bit more in line with what is usually expected of the experienced soul singer / show­man. This makes them no better or worse, just a little different, but ʽStop That Trainʼ does get an extra guitar riff that makes the song even more memorable.

 

That said, the album is really all about its first two tracks — ʽConcrete Jungleʼ and ʽSlave Driverʼ. The former is as highly tragic as Marley can ever get, putting his optimism aside for a moment and lamenting about the impossibility of escaping from this «concrete jungle» (all the more ap­propriate considering the Wailers' temporary relocation to the big cities). Perkins adds another suitably wailing guitar solo to the track, but really it's all about Bob losing his head and shouting "illusion! confusion!" as if banishing by name the evil demons that have turned all our lives into such a wretched mess. As for ʽSlave Driverʼ, one of the most sparsely arranged tracks on the al­bum, well, what can be said? Other than this is probably one of the calmest, most self-contained «rebel anthems» ever recorded? "Slave driver, the table is turned, catch a fire, so you can get burned" — never was an extremist slogan presented before in such a catchy, collected, almost friendly singalong manner.

 

Catch A Fire leaves plenty of space to explore the Wailers' non-political side — besides ʽStir It Upʼ, there's also the equally catchy and lovable ʽRock It Babyʼ, and ʽKinky Reggaeʼ is one of those novelty numbers that veers between total absurdity and presentation of society's flipside — but it ends more or less the same way it begins, with the anthemic ʽNo More Troubleʼ demanding to give peace and love a chance and the arousing ʽMidnight Raversʼ offering a rather uncomfy apocalyptic vision, ten thousand chariots without horses and all. Clearly, there is a strong sense of purpose here: Bob knew that the album had to break in him and his message, and so there is an extra «push» to this record that would gradually weaken and abate with the coming years, right until Exodus when Bob would give himself the next such push.

 

Not coincidentally, Catch A Fire consistently occupies one of the top spots in the ratings of Marley's catalog — a turn of events with which it is very hard to disagree. A great, diverse, in­spiring job from everybody, starting with the Wailers' core and ending with the understanding session musicians (Wayne Perkins, apparently, did not know a thing about reggae when he was asked to contribute, yet he got into the spirit immediately), and a very natural thumbs up.

 

BURNIN' (1973)

 

1) Get Up, Stand Up; 2) Hallelujah Time; 3) I Shot The Sheriff; 4) Burnin' And Lootin'; 5) Put It On; 6) Small Axe; 7) Pass It On; 8) Duppy Conqueror; 9) One Foundation; 10) Rastaman Chant.

 

Once something has caught fire, it then usually proceeds to burn — a simple truth that, until 1973, found no expression in a succeeding line-up of album titles, though. But clearly, the underlying idea of Burnin' was to dispel the popular myth of the Rastafari movement as just some local Jamaican version of the hippie wave. As per Bob Marley, reggae people may be friendly and pacifist, but that does not mean that they completely reject forceful activity or even violence in their behaviour and their music. Branding and condemning Babylon is noble enough, but there's nothing like watching Babylon burn, really.

 

The sociopolitical ferocity of Burnin', reaching such levels of energy, passion, and explicitness that all of the Wailers' previous efforts seem like Tiny Tim in comparison, has arguably led all the politically correct people to somehow overrate the album. Technically, it was recorded in a bit of a rush, forcing the Wailers to fall back once more on their back-stock from Kingston (at least three tracks are re-recorded from earlier times), and this time, there are no overdubs from addi­tional session players, so the sound returns to Spartan standards. (Still, there is no Lee Perry any­where in sight to rev up that bass: the Wailers would never again return to the same «skeletal» type of sound they'd been awarded on Soul Revolution).

 

Most commonly, Burnin' is known and revered for its rebellious classics — ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ, ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, ʽBurnin' And Lootin'ʼ, to a lesser extent ʽSmall Axeʼ as well — and almost certainly, much of that knowledge and reverence has been stimulated by the Eric Clapton cover of ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, which became a major hit in 1974 and probably made millions more people aware of Marley and reggae in general. To be fair, Eric Clapton singing ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, a song very much rooted in the realities of Jamaican life, is as awkward as if Jimi Hen­drix decided to put his stamp on ʽLa Donna E Mobileʼ, but he does always play a mean guitar on that song, so let us not be too harsh on the «white boy perversion» that did help bring reggae to a larger audience, and ended up making the world a better place (we hope!).

 

ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ is not so much rebellious, though, as it is fatalistic: the gradually descending melody of the verse is like the grim pull of destiny, swirling and spiralling and eventually cutting the thread in one final desperate flash. The lyrical matter is pretty much the same kind of stuff you can find in so many folk, blues, and country-western songs, but Bob sings it in the first per­son (Clapton once pressed the man into telling him whether the story was true or not, and Marley said that parts of it were, but he wasn't going to say which ones), and the effect is intimately haunting. It's all simple and accessible and unforgettable — the falsetto harmonies on the chorus may take some getting used to (mainly because that kind of voice has become so firmly associa­ted with disco, post-factum), but they do provide the important hookline that helps draw your attention towards the rest of it (and, come to think of it, the verse part of this song is far more emotionally resonant than the catchy chorus).

 

Likewise, ʽBurnin' And Lootin'ʼ is more of a philosophical mourning, or a bitter justification of Jamaican violence, than a direct call to action. As if to enhance the understanding that the chorus is not to be taken too literally, the Wailers expand upon the initial "that's why we gonna be bur­nin' and a-lootin' tonight" with the metaphorical "burnin' all pollution tonight, burnin' all illusion tonight" — for those who want to hear it, of course. The slow, gently swaying groove is nowhere near «aggressive», either: the chorus sounds more like a cross between a lullaby and a funeral march than anything «punkish» or genuinely violent in nature. At the same time, you do have your "how many rivers do we have to cross / before we can talk to the boss?", which, as has been previously noted, is like a clever retort to Jimmy Cliff's ʽMany Rivers To Crossʼ, and implies that real burnin' and real lootin' is not a totally excluded solution, either.

 

The most aggressive and militant song on the album, of course, is ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ — one of the few songs in the Wailers' catalog that could really be called a revolutionary anthem, and one that would certainly have rallied plenty of troops around the banner of Jah in case of need. For the first time, Bob is properly and intentionally feeding upon negative energy, learning how to throw thunderbolts, and even Peter Tosh, replacing him for one of the verses, is adding an angry vibe to his formerly epic, but peaceful tone. It is more of a sermon than a song, instructing people to search for Heaven on Earth rather than wait for a time when "Great God will come from the skies, take away everything and make everybody feel high". But it is set to one of their most tightly focused, clenched-teeth grooves ever — just as lyrically it disbands the myth about Rastaman people «feeling high» all the time and not giving a damn about much of anything else, so, musi­cally, it can dispel the myth of reggae being «relaxed», «lazy-sounding» music. ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ has as much rocking power as ʽSuperstitionʼ or ʽSatisfactionʼ, if «rocking power» is to be understood as the impulse that shoots extra adrenaline into your brain and makes you feel as if you could take on the world with your bare fists.

 

In between these particular landmarks of class struggle reflected in music, the rest of the tracks on Burnin' veers between hit and miss. Side B, in particular, has always felt like a relative letdown to me: the «socially relevant» material there seems to lose some of the energy and focus, either degenerating into too much monotonousness (ʽRastaman Chantʼ — with its ʽLouie Louieʼ-ish musical attitude, this one does feel like everybody finally got high at the end of the sessions) or swerving into too much pleasantness (Tosh's ʽOne Foundationʼ is way too friendly in comparison with the first side's barn-burners). On the other hand, Side A reaches near-perfection with the addition of the gospel-reggae chant ʽHallelujah Timeʼ and the hypnotic feel-them-spirit mantra of ʽPut It Onʼ — also monotonous, but it does convey a good impression of somebody being taken over by a benevolent spirit and busily merging the manly and the godly in one's own person.

 

It is hard to tell whether the legend of Burnin' owes more to the quality of the music or the loud­ness of the expressed social feeling — I would personally suggest that, from a sheerly musical point of view, Catch A Fire contains more original and exciting ideas, but about half of the songs on that one are love songs, whereas Burnin' is completely dominated by tunes «with a message». But then again, this is reggae we are talking about, where the power of the groove is always more important than any melodic hook, and in terms of power, the first side of this album easily trumps Catch A Fire and would not, in fact, be matched until the appearance of Exodus. So let us just call this another relative triumph, give it a thumbs up and, just in case somebody stupid lands on this page, remind one more time that Bob Marley and The Wailers are not advocating violence, and that they'd rather you burn up your illusions than anything physically flammable.

 

NATTY DREAD (1974)

 

1) Lively Up Yourself; 2) No Woman, No Cry; 3) Them Belly Full (But We Hungry); 4) Rebel Music (3 O'Clock Roadblock); 5) So Jah Say; 6) Natty Dread; 7) Bend Down Low; 8) Talkin' Blues; 9) Revolution; 10*) Am-A-Do.

 

And so Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer split off, and the band becomes «Bob Marley and The Wailers» — forever splitting the fans, too, as some hardcore veterans accused Marley of exer­cising too much of his «I», while others pointed out that this was simply a wise move that helped spread the word of Jah far wider into the world than could have ever been foreseen. Who knows who's right and who's wrong? In the end, all we should care about is the music.

 

Naturally, Natty Dread is completely different from everything that came before it. While reg­gae rhythms are still its foundation, there is a whole lot of other stuff here — catchy pop choruses, pleasant female backing harmonies, complicated brass overdubs, relatively loud guitar solos from the band's newest member Al Anderson, in short, a whole lot of stuff to take your attention away from the bare groove and draw it to the same elements that, in 1974, you'd be attracted to on various «rock» albums. But the recompense is that almost each and every song here has its own separate face — try and accuse this record of being monotonous; you might just as well apply the same accusation to The White Album.

 

Interesting enough, only two songs on the album are credited to Bob himself, of which at least one (ʽBend Down Lowʼ) is a playful bit of filler, catchy in a nursery-rhyme way (its main opening theme is somewhat of a cross between Mother Goose and ʽLet It Beʼ), but nothing more. The other one does set a good tone for the rest of the album — ʽLively Up Yourselfʼ opens the proceedings on a «lively», jumpy note, while at the same time being driven by a slightly scary bassline: once the brass section starts doubling the bass, the atmosphere becomes downright threatening, or, at least, solemn to the point that the recommendation to lively up yourself becomes a stern order. "You rock so, you rock so" — yes sir, whatever you say sir.

 

There are all sorts of speculations as to whether «Vincent Ford», a little-known Jamaican perso­nage, actually wrote ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ or if that was just an act of generosity on Bob's part, giving away a song to the needy (although, in retrospect, it wouldn't become all that famous until next year's Live! version). Its popular appeal is easily crackable — where Marley's lyrics are often obscure to those not well versed in Jamaican cultural or linguistic realities, everybody, including non-English speakers, easily understands what "no woman no cry" and "everything's gonna be alright" is supposed to mean. But singling it out from the rest of the album would be absurd — as good as that organ melody is, its overall emotional power is neither weaker nor stronger than the power of the more overtly political material here.

 

At the very least, the Barrett brothers and Rita Marley show that they can be every bit as cool at songwriting as Mr. I-And-I himself. My personal favorite on the album is actually Rita's ʽSo Jah Sayʼ, a song whose stern bass and Mount-Sinaic brass simply breathe the Old Testament down our backs — every time I hear that introduction, it makes me want to prostrate myself before His Presence, whoever He might be (the Great God of the Left Speaker, or was it the Right one?). On that one, genre considerations simply melt away, and you are no longer aware of what you are listening to — reggae? R&B? soul? gospel? Essentially, it is the genre of «solemn musical pro­phecy». You can shake your body to these sounds, sure, but it will be a shamanistic kind of shaking, not just a fun dance kind of thing.

 

Another good one is Aston Barrett's ʽRebel Music (3 O'Clock Roadblock)ʼ, a lengthy song that knows how to gain in intensity by rising the pitch on every next chorus of "aaaaaaaaah, rebel music!", reaching new levels of desperation while the harmonica blasts add a «swampy» atmos­phere to the proceedings. Better than most songs on here, it manages to convey the impression of a world where danger might be around every corner, and where people's brief moments of happi­ness are constantly interspersed with a «watch-your-back» sense of vigilance. Every now and then, we are told to "forget your troubles and dance" (ʽThem Belly Fullʼ), and we do, but "I've been down on the rock for so long / I seem to wear a permanent screw" (ʽTalkin' Bluesʼ).

 

This idea of a «permanent screw» is actually important in that Natty Dread, even despite taking good care of its individual components, still works better as a whole entity. Now that Bob has the full weight of the band on his shoulders, as well as the responsibility to bring The Message to every new-fangled fan of ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, he has to uphold a thematic unity and maintain a serious tone throughout the album on a whole new level, and he totally rises to the occasion: other than ʽBend Down Lowʼ, each song is tied to the ones around it with one uniting idea — end the suffering. Other than the man's conviction that Heaven can be found on Earth, the rest is so totally in line with early Christianity that sooner or later, you'll figuratively begin looking for figurative traces of stigmata on the man's figurative hands. Is that emotional manipulation? If it is, it's one of the highest order — bring it on, I like to be manipulated that way, even if there's no chance convincing me of the Second Advent where I have enough trouble with the First already.

 

Anyway, a great record whose total is so much more than its parts. One can only wonder what it would have sounded like if Tosh and Bunny decided not to split — but something tells me they would have objected against all the colorful overdubs, and I cannot imagine these songs without Al's weeping-and-wailing lead guitar, or without those brass parts that add a symphonic compo­nent. So, cutting it short, just put your hardcore worries behind your hardcore back, all you great lovers of Lee ʽNo­thing But Scratchʼ Perry, and join Mr. Marley on his last and grandest ride through the mid- and late Seventies as reggae's, Jamaica's, Haile Selassie's, and all the oppressed and suffering people's messenger to the world. Thumbs up.

 

LIVE! (1975)

 

1) Trenchtown Rock; 2) Burnin' And Lootin'; 3) Them Belly Full (But We Hungry); 4) Lively Up Yourself; 5) No Woman, No Cry; 6) I Shot The Sheriff; 7) Get Up, Stand Up; 8*) Kinky Reggae.

 

To have witnessed an actual show put on by Bob Marley & The Wailers is usually considered as one of the luckiest possible things that could have happened to a human being. The presence, the vibe, the energy, the brotherly love, the dance, the groove, the inspiration, do I even have to go on with this list? Naturally, one could try to be cynical about it, insist that it was all really just show business (to a certain extent, it certainly was), bring out the old argument that «when the Wailers lost Peter Tosh, they really lost it all», but nobody could deny the primal effect that Marley had on his audience. He was a Jamaican witch doctor (a benevolent one, lucky for us all), and his audience were his willing and obedient patients. It was as simple as that.

 

However, I am not nearly as sure as the majority that this whole vibe was so easily captured on record. All hype and rave aside, the Wailers' first album, recorded at the Lyceum Theatre in Lon­don, July 19, 1975, is an excellent performance, but the sound does not really easily provide the impression of the pastor and his church joining as one into a single, focused, star-bound spiritual wave of energy. The Wailers are doing their thang, the people are listening and frequently going wooooh! (most importantly, at the beginning of ʽNo Womanʼ), but it's not as if being in the pre­sence of his flock pushes Bob to any extra heights that have not already been reached in the studio, nor does the flock itself seem to inspire any additional emotions. Perhaps it is simply one of these «you had to be there» moments.

 

Anyway, formally speaking, there is no complaining, because the songs are so great, and per­formed with a fine mix of spirit and discipline. At the very least, there are enough tweaks in the arrangements to warrant an additional listen: ʽNo Woman, No Cryʼ is taken at a slower, softer tempo, and Al Anderson adds his lead guitar lines everywhere where he wasn't able to earlier (ʽBurnin' And Lootin'ʼ, ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ, etc.). The biggest tweak is added to ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ which, as it winds down to its conclusion, is expanded with a different groove, including a call-and-answer session with the audience — and, believe it or not, a bass riff that seems to have been borrowed right from John Lennon's ʽHow Do You Sleepʼ (coincidence, probably, but after the naggin' question of «where the hell did I hear that before?» had pestered me for several days, once the answer finally came, there was no way I could leave it out of the review).

 

Come to think of it, the way the audience swoons in tact with Marley's "everything's gonna be alright" on ʽNo Womanʼ, or his ee-yo-yo's on ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ, the album does show some glimpses of the shepherd and the flock becoming one — in that respect, it's got plenty of historical importance, demonstrating the Western world's, or at least, part of the Western world's recognition of dreads, reggae, Rastafari values, and the poor black man's struggle for peace, freedom, and happiness in a thoroughly unjust universe. But outside of that context, «live reggae» is not a huge improvement over «studio reggae» if both are done reasonably well. I admire the vibe (as long as, as it happens with any religion, I do not have to focus too much on its external parapher­nalia), but I see no reason to prefer these versions to their studio counterparts — not even the famous live rendition of ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ, because I really have no use for it as a stadium anthem and prefer to hear it in a far more natural, intimate setting. I mean, it's a dialog between Bob and his woman, for Chrissake. Why do we need several thousand mouths singing along to it in unison? Beats me.

 

On a technical note — curiously, the original LP was only 37 minutes long; plans for an expan­ded deluxe edition still have not come to fruition (not that it is particularly important, considering the overall wealth of live Marley material already on the market). The remastered CD version does add ʽKinky Reggaeʼ as a bonus track, used for Bob as a setting to introduce his «brothers» and «sisters», but otherwise, fairly true to the original.

 

RASTAMAN VIBRATION (1976)

 

1) Positive Vibration; 2) Roots, Rock, Reggae; 3) Johnny Was; 4) Cry To Me; 5) Want More; 6) Crazy Baldhead; 7) Who The Cap Fit; 8) Night Shift; 9) War; 10) Rat Race; 11*) Jah Live.

 

Although this record became Bob's big breakthrough in the US, selling lotsa copies and yielding his most popular single in that country (ʽRoots, Rock, Reggaeʼ — supposedly American people were reluctant to buy up reggae singles that did not have the word «rock» in the title), I would say that Rastaman Vibration is somewhat less impressive than the two studio albums flanking it in Marley's discography. Natty Dread was somewhat of a challenge, in that Marley had to prove he still had it in himself to survive without the rest of the original Wailers — and the soon-to-come Exodus would be fueled with mega-ambition, some of it perhaps brewed up in the aftermath of the unsuccessful attempt on Bob's life in December '76.

 

In comparison, Rastaman Vibration has neither quite the impressive hooks of its predecessor, nor the undeniable grandeur of its follow-up. It is as sharply politicized as ever, perhaps even more ("it's not music right now, we're dealing with a message", Marley himself told interviewers in 1976), and in this intermediate context, such politicization means a certain unity in the groove: every track starts off with more or less the same little explosive drumroll from Carlton Barrett, after which you get more or less the same tempo, more or less the same instrumentation, more or less the same vibe, and more or less the same body temperature. Throughout.

 

This does not mean it ain't a nice enough vibe or temperature. By now, Marley has fully mastered the art of capturing the listener's attention with a bare minimum of means — his punch is econo­mic and simplistic, but it is hard not to feel it every time. Even when the music really occupies second place next to the message — ʽWarʼ is little more than just a famous UN speech by Haile Selassie set to a rhythmic pattern — just by simply repeating the mantra "everywhere is war, me say war" at the end of each paragraph, Bob makes his point (but note how he has this trembling wave of sadness inserted, just so you know that it is not his declaration of war, but rather his constatation of other people making war on his people: a defensive, not aggressive stance).

 

This bit of trouble determining whether he is on the attack or on the defense ain't accidental: there is always some sort of vague mystique, incomprehensibility, ambiguity, associated with Marley — like all great people, he was not that easy to pigeonhole. Another good case is ʽPositive Vib­rationʼ, with another unforgettable chorus hook (the "Rastaman vibration ye-e-ah, positive..." bit) that is nevertheless offset by the positively threatening bassline, which makes it seem as if the man is harassing you into "making way for the positive day" (at certain points, when they begin asking you "are you pickin' up now?", the melody once again goes straight into ʽHow Do You Sleep?ʼ territory — terrifying, almost!). He'd probably deny any such intention, but the fact is, even when Mr. Marley seems to be spreading that positive vibe, the music is anything but shiny and happy. Gloomy reggae, not some kiddie-happy ska here that Paul McCartney appropriated for ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ (now that was some «positive vibration» indeed).

 

On ʽRoots, Rock, Reggaeʼ, the band's mantraic declaration — "play I some music, dis-a reggae music" — is, in itself, stern and war-like: for Marley, new trends in music should necessarily be accompanied with new trends in spirituality, and he is unwilling to offer the people just the music without the message. The trick is that he is singing "we're bubblin' on the top one hundred / just like a mighty dread" with the same intonation he normally uses to describe the sufferings of his people in and out of slavery, and this works: you might think you're just boppin' and hoppin' around to a nice little rhythm, but in reality you're, like... joining The Cause! And the funniest thing of all, the single did get into the top one hundred, so it's not just you.

 

On the whole, though, Marley raises his voice noticeably high only once here — not on ʽCrazy Baldheadʼ, as one might think, whose basic seemingly-aggressive message ("we gonna chase those crazy baldheads out of town") is delivered in a surprisingly peaceful tone instead, but rather on ʽWant Moreʼ, a song that seems to be usually overlooked in the huge Marley catalog, yet it is really the strongest precursor here to the Moses-and-Aaron-rally of Exodus, with the sharpest, shrillest riff on the album, well matched with Marley's «driven-to-the-edge» point: "you get what you want, do you want more?..." "You think it's the end, but it's just the beginning" is one of the most threatening moments here in Wailers history, so do not overlook it.

 

Like most of Marley's output, this record almost automatically gets a thumbs up regardless of specific criticisms — not out of an act of boring political correctness, but more like a recognition of a steady genius, capable of delivering gripping material even in a temporary state of «musical inertia», so to speak. (Technically, Rastaman Vibration is somewhat innovative in that it intro­duces synthesizers into the Marley sound, but this is really so peripheral that I almost forgot to mention it in the first place). No fan, after all, could properly call himself a fan without having grooved heavily to the sounds of ʽPositive Vibrationʼ or without witnessing the peaceful consta­tation of ʽWarʼ (as opposed to, for instance, the gross misuse of the song by Sinead O'Connor, whose radical stance makes Bob Marley look like Rush Limbaugh in comparison). But in a larger context, somehow, many of these tunes seem a bit like... peanuts, maybe, for the real level of Mr. Marley and his team.

 

EXODUS (1977)

 

1) Natural Mystic; 2) So Much Things To Say; 3) Guiltiness; 4) The Heathen; 5) Exodus; 6) Jamming; 7) Waiting In Vain; 8) Turn Your Lights Down Low; 9) Three Little Birds; 10) One Love / People Get Ready; 11*) Roots.

 

I am pretty sure that this album would have been impossible without Marley's brush-with-death experience in late 1976. With a miraculous escape like that, you start thinking, quite naturally, of all the things you have not yet completed in your life — you get an incentive to accelerate, to realize your grandest ambitions, no matter how much energy and spirit it costs you. So, perhaps Exodus is not necessarily the best Marley album lying around, as critical ratings often evaluate it (and it is even more absurd to call it «the best reggae album ever», because Exodus honestly does not give a damn about what musical style it was accidentally cast in). But it is quite clearly the «biggest» Bob Marley album, in scope and in execution; there is no use denying that the man set himself pretty high marks here, and there is no need to insist that he did not manage to hit most of them as best he could.

 

Exodus means Moses, and it is this album that turned Bob Marley into a modern-day Moses indeed: particularly the first side, all of which is structured like a multi-part sermon from the most esoteric depths of the Old Testament. "There's a natural mystic blowing through the air / If you listen carefully now you will hear / This could be the first trumpet / Might as well be the last". The musical backing is nothing particularly special — sparingly minimalistic, but with a neces­sarily ominous ring to the bass, and most of the overdubs (guitar, occasional brass) have been pushed way back into the mix: this helps generate the impression that the man is somewhere over there (on Mount Sinai, perhaps, receiving the latest instructions from Jah), letting you, the listener, in on his serious conversation — and the rest of the crowds are someplace down there. Waiting for the trumpets and all.

 

Although the first four songs are all good, in reality they all sound like honest-to-God dress re­hearsals for the title track. At 7:40, it is the longest track so far on a Wailers album, and its epic length is not accidental: most of the actual musical secrets of the groove are disclosed within the first minute already, but, like all great grooves, it is supposed to put you in a state of trance that you'd wish could last forever. The combination of stinging wah-wah guitar, that ominous bass, and the funky brass section that almost seems temporarily loaned from Sly & The Family Stone is quite worthy in itself, but it is the vocal shamanizing that pushes the whole thing over the top. Did Bob Marley truly believe that, like Moses, he could rally the people around him, leading them out of «Babylon»? (Should be «Egypt», of course, but it's all the same to them Rastas any­way). Even if he was naïve enough to believe that, the ensuing idealism, bottled in this track, still suffices to give you a spiritual jolt — maybe not strong enough to set you on the proper path of demolishing Babylon, but enough to make you go out and feed a homeless kitten or something.

 

The song is not even properly a «reggae» song, more like a reggaeified funk vamp, full of grim determination that is as far removed from the usually more relaxed atmosphere of reggae as pos­sible. There is one motto throughout — "move! move! move! move!" — echoing around the room like a retranslation of Jah's own command, and you can just feel that crazy, but disciplined drive urging and urging you on. The heat that is generated by the moment is on a James Brown level, but James Brown, even at his very best, was an entertainer, not a prophet, and his trance inductions could only be called «religious» figuratively, whereas ʽExodusʼ is indeed a religious musical ritual that even Moses himself could appreciate. Easily the most single powerful track of 1977, a year that was fairly ripe on powerful tracks — but no anthem from the punk or New Wave crowds could pack that much depth.

 

The second side of the album intentionally brings the level of tension down: not only are there some tender love songs, but even the political ones, like ʽOne Loveʼ, are delivered in a more lyrical and friendly key. There is ʽJammingʼ, which has always seemed like a fairly tame and unimpressive little ditty next to ʽExodusʼ to me — go figure why it has become so insanely popu­lar, but I guess that the majority of the population can't take it as heavy as ʽExodusʼ, and needs something lighter and catchier for their personal freedom anthem. If anything, I like ʽThree Little Birdsʼ with its nagging little keyboard riff, more than ʽJammingʼ, maybe because it is so simple and childish in every aspect of its execution that it comes out as more adequate — a simple love message for a simple song. Then again, it really makes no sense to compare.

 

Some people complain that Exodus is too glossy — that they like their Wailers «raw», not pre­pared carefully in the studio according to some particular technological recipe. I do not buy this accusation, and neither should anybody: by 1977, Bob Marley was anything but committed to the formulaic demands of «hardcore reggae», yet at the same time he had lost none of the fiery spirit of old — if anything, that attempt on his life only rejuvenated that spirit — and if Exodus sounds overproduced to you, well, so does Pink Floyd, and we have never found that aspect of their sound to be a problem. On the other hand, the «gloss» and all the extra overdubs really help to overcome the sometimes uncomfortable simplicity of the basic groove and push the songs to­wards masterpiece status on the strength of their atmosphere.

 

Listen, for instance, to ʽThe Heathenʼ and to whatever Julian Jr. Marvin, the band's new lead guitarist, is doing out there in the background, sometimes sending out small, compact thunder­balls of distortion and sometimes letting go with killer screeching blues-rock leads, and how Tyrone Downie begins his part with simplistic three-note synth phrases and then gradually buries himself in some real crazy jazz-fusion stuff. Or how Julian adds some lovely country guitar licks to ʽTurn Your Lights Down Lowʼ, a song that brings Marley dangerously close to «adult contem­porary» (or, at least, some really boring 1970s R&B) but keeps its distance because of the devotion of the nuances of the indivudual players. That may all be «gloss», but unless I am in some very special mood, I will take that gloss over Lee ʽScratchʼ Perry's minimalism any regular time of day. Deep bass groove, after all, is not the only possible way to worship Jah.

 

In all possible respects, Exodus is an outstanding record that goes way beyond the basic values of reggae as a musical genre and/or of Rastafarianism as a religious ideology. It is a triumph of in­spiration and active drive, a certain spiritual push-up that Marley would not be able to replicate ever again (in fact, and perhaps to his honor, he did not even try). Not the best place to come looking for hooks — Catch A Fire or Natty Dread would be more obvious choices; not the best place to understand what the hell is «reggae» supposed to mean (since, even technically, about half of this album is not really reggae); but just a great place, no doubt about it, if you're looking for a little outside aid to charge up your batteries. Exodus, movement of Jah people, the works. Major thumbs up guaranteed.

 

KAYA (1978)

 

1) Easy Skanking; 2) Kaya; 3) Is This Love; 4) Sun Is Shining; 5) Satisfy My Soul; 6) She's Gone; 7) Misty Morning; 8) Crisis; 9) Running Away; 10) Time Will Tell.

 

Look no further than Kaya for a good argument why records may mean different things when taken on their own and when taken in context. The level on which Kaya works best is the level of contrast with Exodus — the Wailers' most bombastic, exuberant, quasi-messianic statement to date quickly followed up by Marley at his most peaceful and mellow, with nary a single song carrying a sharp political message (with the possible exception of ʽCrisisʼ and ʽTime Will Tellʼ) and most of them simply inviting you to quiet down, relax, share a joint, and strive for inner peace rather than actively pursue the issue of human rights. Well, let's face it, even Moses could have hardly en­dured forty years in the desert without taking a well-deserved break every now and then.

 

Not only that, but Bob even falls back upon the idea of digging into his past, resuscitating at least two oldies here (the title track and ʽSun Is Shiningʼ), as if he were a bit lazy to come up with a whole album of original tunes — on the other hand, the arrangements are completely different now, so this is not so much laziness as nostalgia, a throwback to the good old days when the Wailers were quite far from embarking on a world-level mission, and were fully content to enjoy the bare necessities and complain in allegory, or, at least, in a hushed voice.

 

Many people dislike the new arrangements, implying, once again, that the «raw» originals work better. They do have a point — when we compare the original melody of ʽKayaʼ, carried by bass vocal harmonies, with its new incarnation, where the human voice is replaced with a not-too-em­pathetic synthesizer tone, it must be hard on one's conscience to take a stand near the synthesizer rather than the original Wailers. But somehow, when this new production gloss is being sanc­tioned by Bob himself, and when his vocal delivery on the new version is just as life-asserting and uplifting as it used to be, I can easily disregard the lack of rawness, and enjoy Bob in all of his hi-fi rather than lo-fi glory. As for ʽSun Is Shiningʼ, it is given almost three extra minutes to let the groove soak in deeper, and give Junior Marvin enough space to seduce us with his nerve-tingling bluesy licks (many of which he probably lifted from Clapton, but who's complaining?).

 

As is now usual with Bob, there are no bad songs on the album — repetitive, obsessive vocal hooks are all over the place, Kaya really being a fine pop record, thinly masked as another exer­cise in reggae grooving. ʽIs This Love?ʼ asks the obvious question in the same way in which a melodic, sensitive, romantic Californian singer-songwriter would have asked the same thing. ʽShe's Goneʼ actually has elements of crooning to it — yes, putting a traditional melodic spin on that vocal delivery bit. And on ʽRunning Awayʼ, the singing duties are largely relegated to back vocalists, while Bob moves amusingly close to scat singing, and the entire arrangement pays serious tribute to lite-jazz entertainment.

 

None of these songs really sweep you off your feet, but together, they combine into a very pretty, very pleasant relaxation package — this is not Bob Marley «losing steam», this is Bob Marley turning down the temperature a bit, wooing you over with his sentimental side, and it goes without saying that he is doing a much better job about it than the average professional crooner with his predictable pathos. However, as I already said, context is key: a whole string of Kaya-like records, had this turned into a mission to cross reggae grooves with sweet sentimentality, would have quickly become routine and unbearable. As it is, this particular dish is really best served after the inspirational, hyper-stimulating main course of Exodus, a sweet, refreshing lull after the big storm, and it is mainly in this context that I give it a certified thumbs up.

 

P.S. And, just for the record, if you can find a sweeter, more emotionally calming way to sing the line "think you're in heaven but you're really in hell" (ʽTime Will Tellʼ) without losing the seri­ous­ness of this message, let me know. Kaya places its bet to win — even the harshest truths on this record are unequivocally delivered in the soothing-est of possible tones.

 

BABYLON BY BUS (1978)

 

1) Positive Vibration; 2) Punky Reggae Party; 3) Exodus; 4) Stir It Up; 5) Rat Race; 6) Concrete Jungle; 7) Kinky Reggae; 8) Lively Up Yourself; 9) Rebel Music; 10) War/No More Trouble; 11) Is This Love; 12) Heathen; 13) Jamming.

 

It is interesting that, although the tracks for Marley's second live album were all recorded in mid-1978 on the Kaya tour, only one song on the setlist is from Kaya itself, although quite a few more were actually played as a regular part of the show. Clearly, the resulting live album had to expand and deepen the image of the Wailers as cutting-edge «social» artists with a message — no wonder that the record begins with a Rastafari greeting in the name of Haile Selassie and all his living-godly splendor. And then there's that whole «spiritual party» aspect, where the performer and the audience join souls and dissolve in the universal conscience on a sub-atomic level. Not so easy to do with Kaya songs, which are typically more individualistic.

 

As far as I can figure out, fans generally prefer the earlier Live! to this one, and I cannot quite understand why — maybe they find that Babylon By Bus is a bit too megalomaniac an exercise to properly convey the humble reggae spirit. It also makes a point of not repeating any tracks from Live! (with the notable exception of ʽLively Up Yourselfʼ), meaning that neither ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ nor ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ, two of the most iconic Marley songs, appear here, but it's not as if the man had nothing to offer in their place. So, instead of ʽSheriffʼ you can take the plaintive stateliness of ʽConcrete Jungleʼ, and instead of ʽNo Woman No Cryʼ, you can relax a few minutes to the tender rocking of ʽStir It Upʼ.

 

There also seems to be significantly more difference between the originals and the live versions now than there used to. Many of the songs are extended, sometimes simply to give the groove more time to soak in, but sometimes also to place the spotlight on individual players — most notably on ʽHeathenʼ, where Junior Marvin gets to play an incendiary blues guitar solo in the best tradition of blues-rock (the studio version was twice as short and had no solos). Some of the tempos are sped up, and some of the production gloss that could be a source of irritation on the studio albums has also been shed (inevitably). This is not always an advantage: ʽExodusʼ and ʽRebel Musicʼ, for instance, are inferior to the originals — the former is a tad more loose and less rigorously mobilized, dissipating the required feel, and the latter suffers because the "aaaaah, re­bel music!" backing vocals are less well coordinated. But as a general tactic to «lively up your­self» and add some extra energy and volume to the live show, it works.

 

That said, I am once again at a loss when it comes to commenting on specific performances — everybody is having a good time, and that's about it. Just because the album is longer (and more Marley is better Marley), and because it does a better job of showing off Junior's talents, I'd rate it very slightly over Live! and give it a minor thumbs up — oh, actually, there is one more reason: the audience reaction is better captured on tape this time around (maybe because there is simply more audience, period), so if you really want to suck on the vibe, Babylon By Bus is your most obvious audio ticket to the spiritual unity between the shepherd and the flock. Too bad the she­pherd, free as he was to tour Babylon by bus, remained altogether unable to properly lead the flock out of Babylon — maybe that Haile Selassie guy is not, after all, nearly as powerful (or empowering) as they make him seem, eh?

 

SURVIVAL (1979)

 

1) So Much Trouble In The World; 2) Zimbabwe; 3) Top Rankin'; 4) Babylon System; 5) Survival; 6) Africa Unite; 7) One Drop; 8) Ride Natty Ride; 9) Ambush In The Night; 10) Wake Up And Live.

 

Kaya was a very smart follow-up to Exodus — a spiritual detour showcasing «the other side of Bob Marley» — but as internal and external pressure on Bob's spirit to return to full-scale prophet mode increased, a «proper» follow-up to Exodus, one that would push the rebellious, militant spirit of The Wailers even further, was inevitable, and Survival is all about the message — an honest, noble, progressive, if sometimes a bit naïve or even misguided, message, but one that, unfortunately, works against the music: this is the first Marley album that I would have to dub «generally unsatisfactory» — mildly speaking.

 

The best thing that can be said about the music is that the songs are still catchy. And they should be: a set of powerful political anthems should have quickly gripping, easily sing-alongable cho­ruses that seem to come so easily for Bob at all times. The fervor and charisma are still there, whether Bob is crying out his soul at how there's "so much trouble in the world", or grimly stating that "we're the survivors, yeah the Black survivors", or calling on Africa to unite, or urging us all to "wake up and live, y'all!" (a bit creepy, considering his own beginning battle with cancer at the time). However, the balance is just not right — there's too much fervor and charisma this time, not enough sheer musical power.

 

Honestly, I do not care all that much about Bob Marley as a prophet. His idealistic vision of Africa as a potential spiritual paradise where people can break free from their chains and show the world the one true way is endearing, but desperately naïve — «uniting» is by far the last thing on the minds of the majority of Africans, too busy with much harsher problems, and, while in 1979 it might have seemed progressive, today the ode to the glorious liberation of Zimbabwe, in the light of what has happened in that country ever since, sounds totally ridiculous. That said, even the most ridiculous plight, or creed, or ideology can be pardoned and lived with if it is ex­pressed in the form of genius — and on previous records, the Wailers were not only prophets, but also serious musical innovators and «groove-masters». Had something like ʽExodusʼ (the song) lyrically been an ode to Robert Mugabe, it would not have (seriously) influenced my admiration for the power of the recording.

 

But compare ʽExodusʼ (the song) with ʽSurvivalʼ (the song), and you will probably see how the power level suddenly has dropped down — ironically, the more politicized the message gets, the less energy and passion there is in the playing. ʽSurvivalʼ is a not-too-bad groove in itself, but it lacks the sharp funky horns, the tense harmonies, the mystical echoey production, the "Move! Move!" bits that drive you to action, basically, all the flourishes that made ʽExodusʼ such a sym­phonic experience. At the same time, ʽSurvivalʼ is not an exercise in stark minimalism, either: it has a fairly standard arrangement, with a bit of everything thrown in (keyboards, horns, harmo­nies), but nothing in particular standing out.

 

I do not think even a single one of these songs has managed to attain truly «classic» status, even though not a single one of them is truly «bad» (except for some of the lyrics) and the album is pretty even, and goes down very easy. There's nothing wrong, in fact, about singing along to these choruses, but I only wish that a song called ʽWake Up And Liveʼ would really make me want to wake up and live — this one, instead, with its completely static, unyielding groove, puts me into a somnambulant trance. (A great idea would be to transform it into a zombie anthem soundtrack in the next instalment of Night Of The Living Dead or something).

 

Political blunder of the day: ʽAfrica Uniteʼ is a kind slogan all right, but was Bob really so naïve as to think that the majority of Africans would be inspired by a unification anthem with lines like "we are the children of the Rastaman"? Most likely, they'd simply think that sly old Bob is pushing for a pro-Ethiopian agenda here — Africa united under the bening rule of the followers of Haile Selassie. What works for Addis Ababa might not necessarily work for Kinshasa, you know. Real noble utopian sentiment, though.

 

UPRISING (1980)

 

1) Coming In From The Cold; 2) Real Situation; 3) Bad Card; 4) We And Them; 5) Work; 6) Zion Train; 7) Pimper's Paradise; 8) Could You Be Loved; 9) Forever Loving Jah; 10) Redemption Song.

 

The last album released by Marley in his lifetime is sometimes criticized for being way too overt­ly Rastafarian and message-directed, and sometimes criticized for not being too interesting from a musical standpoint, but my general impression is that such criticisms should much more appropri­ately be reserved for Survival, whereas Uprising is actually a musical rebound — a brighter, more colorful record that attempts to break out of the rigid reggae formula way more often than you'd expect from somebody who was not only clearly past his absolute peak, but also dying, as a matter of fact. The latter circumstance one should keep in mind, I guess, when looking at the album cover and seeing Bob depicted as a mythical awakening giant — an excusable bit of self-aggrandizing for a cancer patient, who may already be more concerned about his image in the afterlife rather than the here and now.

 

Anyway, Uprising is surprisingly diverse and even «poppy» for Marley: there is no telling where the Wailers would go had he been kept alive for another half a decade at least, but Uprising shows that they could have expanded into such areas as R&B (ʽWorkʼ), dance-pop (ʽCould You Be Lovedʼ), and acoustic balladry (ʽRedemption Songʼ), without losing the «Marley spirit» nor the «Wailers sound». ʽWorkʼ sews together reggae and a slow funk groove, along with some ominous bluesy guitar playing and larger-than-life vocal harmonies. ʽCould You Be Lovedʼ bops along as if it were a party-time summer dance piece, pinned to a bassline that shakes its musical butt like an oversexed young lady, and it is fun, not to mention a little baffling to be hearing this and realizing it is, in fact, a piece by Bob Marley, and not by Kool & The Gang.

 

Then there is ʽRedemption Songʼ, of course, widely celebrated for its humble understatements and simple acoustic beauty — and, cynical as it sounds, hugely aided by the fact of being the last song on Marley's last album, thus forming a natural musical-lyrical testament for the guy: "Eman­cipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds". Musically, there's not much here, and lyrically, there's not a lot of news, but you could say the same about Lennon's ʽImagineʼ, I guess — some things are easy to criticize, but not easy to wipe out of the collective conscience, and Bob's "won't you help to sing these songs of freedom?" is one of those naïve, but persistent questions that will probably dangle in the air till the end of time.

 

In between these formula-challengers we have our usual reggae schtick, but with the balance smoothly corrected from «messagism» to «catchism», so that a song like ʽComing In From The Coldʼ first grips you with its repetitive, but funny chorus, and only later, if you want to, you can begin pondering its predictably serious message. Equally catchy is the chorus to ʽPimper's Para­diseʼ, a song made ever so moody with some clever synthesizer textures in the background that it will take some time before you begin wondering whether, this time, the message is not just a tad too conservative and moralistic for a guy who wants us to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery (some might even call the song «misogynistic» — of course, that would be pushing it too far, but some­how, up until now Bob had had no incentive to rail against party-going women).

 

There is no question of these songs being truly on the level with Marley's best stuff, but some­times, all you really need to have to get by is «solidity», and this is as solid a swan song for Bob as, say, something like In Through The Out Door was for Led Zeppelin the previous year, or Who Are You was for the Keith Moon-era Who the year before that: a bit tired, lumpy, and grumpy, but still capable of looking out for new ideas and adapting themselves to the rapidly changing world. Well worth a thumbs up, anyway.

 

CONFRONTATION (1983)

 

1) Chant Down Babylon; 2) Buffalo Soldier; 3) Jump Nyabinghi; 4) Mix Up, Mix Up; 5) Give Thanks & Praises; 6) Blackman Redemption; 7) Trench Town; 8) Stiff Necked Fools; 9) I Know; 10) Rastaman Live Up!.

 

As an equally-righted Bob Marley album, Confrontation is nothing special, and it certainly does not stand out that much against the background of the similarly-titled Survival and Uprising. But as an album released posthumously, worked up by Rita Marley and friends and colleagues from a set of raw demos left over from Bob's 1979-80 sessions, this is an excellent job: most chances are that you won't even be able to guess that the final record was released without Bob's explicit consent — although, who knows, maybe Rita did feel the presence of such a consent, transmitted directly into her conscience from the lower levels of Jah heaven.

 

The songs mostly go back to the Survival sessions, so the album feels a bit less «poppy» and innovative than Uprising, once more going back to the rather stern, stiff, anthemic style of the fight-for-your-rights propaganda of 1979, with some inevitable lyrical failures — for instance, ʽBuffalo Soldierʼ uses the image of the enlisted black man in late 19th century US army as a sym­bol of fighting for freedom and independence, when in reality the «Negro Cavalry», formed already after the conclusion of the Civil War, was regularly used to mop up natives in the Indian Wars, or at least clean up after the whites had mopped up the Indians, so using that particular image as a symbol for all things good and progressive is rather questionable. Then again, poetic licence and all, and the phrase ʽbuffalo soldierʼ has got such an empowering ring to it, who could really resist temptation to use it in a freedom-loving context?

 

Anyway, one more word on that and we will be falling into the trap of placing the words before the music. The problem is, there is not much I, or any other reviewer, could say about the music, other than just re-stating the fact that all the post-Marley overbuds, applied to his demos, are quite consistent with the Marley spirit — synthesizers, horns, backing vocals, which is not all that surprising, considering that they have been applied by the same people who'd worked with him through the last half-decade of his life. The horns, by the way, are the only thing that adds a little distinctiveness to such tunes as ʽTrenchtownʼ, which they Latinize a little bit; and the synthesi­zers help transform ʽI Knowʼ into the closest thing to a «dance-pop hit» that Bob could ever have (I know that he expressly wanted the song to be turned into a single, but I do not know if that was before or after the pseudo-orchestral synths had been added to it).

 

Probably the single best song is ʽJump Nyabinghiʼ, referring to one of the oldest Mansion of Rastafari and featuring here more as a positive, light-headed, celebration of life and love than an anthemic call-to-vigilance. Just due to that, it stands out in a bright light against the rest, not to mention a funny reference to smokin' it ("we've got the herb! we've got the herb!") the likes of which, I believe, we have not heard since Kaya hit the stores. Its chorus may not be as catchy as the one on ʽRastaman Live Up!ʼ, ending the album on one final sloganeering note, but it sounds more wild and tribal than anything else on here, the only time where Bob comes close to briefly losing his head and giving in to the ancestral spirit inside.

 

All of this is harmless fun, yet upon hearing Confrontation, I have to say that I am somewhat relieved that Marley did not leave enough stuff in the vaults to last Rita and the boys for another half of a lifetime. Whichever direction he was planning to take (if he was planning anything at all) after Uprising, we can only guess about — the problem is that, after all has been said and done and all the homages have been paid, Bob Marley was essentially a one-trick pony (okay, two-trick, if you succeed in separating his romantic troubadour side from his hero of the people side), and Exodus took that trick to levels that could not have possibly been outdone: just like no classical opera can surpass The Ring on the 1-11 scale of «grandiose regality», so no record that subscribes to the reggae idiom can trump «Movement of Jah People!». Could he have moved out into other areas? Would he want to? Certainly Confrontation is not the right kind of record to address that question to — but if your demands towards the man's art are reasonable, it is quite the right kind of record to own and enjoy, in loving memory of Haile Selassie's most loyal servant.

 

ADDENDA:

 

TALKIN' BLUES (1973-75/1991)

 

1) Talkin'; 2) Talkin' Blues; 3) Talkin'; 4) Burnin' And Lootin'; 5) Talkin'; 6) Kinky Reggae; 7) Get Up Stand Up; 8) Talkin'; 9) Slave Driver; 10) Talkin'; 11) Walk The Proud Land; 12) Talkin'; 13) You Can't Blame The Youth; 14) Talkin'; 15) Rastaman Chant; 16) Talkin'; 17) Am-A-Do; 18) Talkin'; 19) Bend Down Low; 20) Talkin'; 21) I Shot The Sheriff.

 

Although the format of this album is rather strange, yet in a way, Talkin' Blues may be the most important live record by the Wailers ever put out. Essentially, this is the complete or near-com­plete show that the band played for a San Francisco radio station on October 31, 1973, with the original lineup still in place — interspersed with cut-up segments of an interview that Bob recorded for Jamaican radio in 1975, and throwing on, as a bonus, some alternate studio cuts and a lengthy, bombastic performance of ʽI Shot The Sheriffʼ from a London show, also in 1975: not a trivial way of sequencing your data, by any means.

 

The interview bits are a tough nut for anyone not used to Jamaican English — about 70% of the time I have absolutely no idea what the man is saying, although you can generally guess the topics (music, spirituality, communication with people, relationships with Peter Tosh, etc.) and then you probably have some vague idea about what is being said even without making out the particular words. Not that any of it is particularly important — in fact, I'd say that the very sound of Marley's voice earns him far more sympathy and admiration than whatever semantic content is concealed in that sound. Like most modern-day «prophets», he was never particularly deep or innovative in his message, and as for the deep meaning of his music, well, I'd always prefer to somehow infer it from the music on my own than strain myself to understand his verbal explana­tion. But hey, at least these spoken bits substantiate the «punny» album title.

 

The performances are an entirely different matter. These are the young Wailers here, unspoiled by fame or fortune, still earning their «musical Messiah» credentials, captured live in the studio in pristine sound quality, not having to toy or fool around with their audiences, but having some­thing to prove in the way of musicianship. As they launch into ʽBurnin' And Lootin'ʼ, the degree of internal coordination between all five involved musicians is awesome — they are already way past the «minimalistic» Lee Perry stage, when the bass was all that really mattered, but quite far away from the stage when the music began to matter less than the Exultation / Exorcism ritual. All of these performances, without exception, are at least as good as their studio analogs, and sometimes may be even better — for instance, the guitar duet on ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ is much more lively (extra scratch, bark, and snap) than it was in the studio.

 

For those who want something more than a set of alternate versions, no matter how flawlessly executed, there are also some rarities — including Tosh's ʽYou Can't Blame The Youthʼ, a song that is quite questionable as to its lyrical content (all reservations applied, Christopher Columbus was a very great man, and so was Marco Polo — not so sure about the pirates Hawkins and Morgan — and this is just not a very convincing example of why the elders, rather than the youth, are to be blamed for current problems, even if they really are), but quite admirable by way of its basic groove and lively workin'-team harmonies. The previously unreleased outtake ʽAm-A-Doʼ is nothing too special, but any outtake from Marley's most important period is... important? Whatever be the case, you will not leave here empty-handed.

 

To be fair, the talking and singing are actually integrated rather than interspersed randomly. For instance, at one point they have a short conversation with the interviewer about Bob's playing the flute, and this is followed by an alternate take of ʽBend Down Lowʼ that does indeed have a flute lead scattered all over the place — never made it to the final runthrough, and it is somewhat of a pity, since the extra touch of pastoral tenderness is quite appropriate. But in the end, it really does not matter — if the talking bugs you, it is extremely simple just to edit it out and still have a re­spectably lengthy live album, worthy of an assured thumbs up. For obvious reasons, Talkin' Blues will never be anybody's first choice for a live Marley album (the man is too strongly asso­ciated with the «shepherd-and-the-flock» imagery to make one believe to try him out first in a radio studio environment), but that's alright as long as you do not forget about its existence: an essential acquirement, really.

 

LIVE AT THE ROXY (1976/2003)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Trenchtown Rock; 3) Burnin' And Lootin'; 4) Them Belly Full (But We Hungry); 5) Rebel Music (3 O'Clock Roadblock); 6) I Shot The Sheriff; 7) Want More; 8) No Woman No Cry; 9) Lively Up Yourself; 10) Roots Rock Reggae; 11) Rat Race; 12) Positive Vibration; 13) Get Up, Stand Up/No More Trouble/War.

 

Although this performance, recorded at The Roxy in West Hollywood on May 26, 1976, had been widely bootlegged ever since its original radio broadcast, it was not until the release of the com­plete performance, together with its lengthy encore, in 2003 on Tuff Gong Records that it became sort of a consecrated Holy Grail for Marley fans, quite a few of whom now swear by it as the ultimate Marley live album, putting both Live! and Babylon By Bus to shame. This means that it at least merits a separate mention, if not necessarily a lengthy review.

 

The encore is actually the kernel of the legend: without it, the performance was already previous­ly available as a bonus disc on the «deluxe» edition of Rastaman Vibration (yes, «grabbing for cash» is a practice not unfamiliar to people dealing with the legacy of the world's most famous Rastaman). It is a 24-minute non-stop medley of ʽGet Up, Stand Upʼ, ʽNo More Troubleʼ, and ʽWarʼ, one that not only confirms that most reggae songs can indeed be played to the exact same rhythm pattern without a single change (as if we didn't know!..) but also confirms that the Wailers were perfectly able to hold a steady, unnerving, unyielding, constantly energetic groove for as long as Jah was willing them to hold it. There are no build-ups, or climaxes, or gimmicks, or audience teasers — the team sounds pretty much the same at any given moment, but somehow, the performance does not ever get boring or really feel like 24 minutes, probably because of Bob's ability to hold the listener's interest by merging three songs into one and making it look as if he is slowly building up to the «vocal climax» of ʽWarʼ, and then gradually taking us back down through the same stages.

 

Other than that, Live At The Roxy is perfectly solid, but I could not confirm that the quality of the performance definitively «trumps» the rest of Bob's live catalog or anything. For one thing, Earl ʽChinnaʼ Smith on lead guitar is a decent player, but too humble for an arena performance: Julian Marvin's arrival in 1977 would change things significantly, adding more lyrical individu­ality to the music, whereas Live At The Roxy is really all about the collective groove, and there is nothing wrong with that, but maybe not for 86 minutes. For another thing, this is already Bob Marley in his «mission» era, where there is a constant danger of putting more emphasis on the «message» than the «music» — on a purely technical level, there is no accusation that could be justified against the band's playing, but instinctively, I still prefer the live band on the 1973-74 recordings, prior to the departure of Tosh and Bunny Wailer.

 

That said, if you belly hungry for another Marley live album, and "now you get what you want, do you want more?", that kind of thing, Live At The Roxy is indispensable. One major argument in its support is the excellent sound quality — although all of Bob's live albums were recorded indoors, The Roxy must have had the best acoustics of 'em all, so that you really get to hear all the musicians close-up and uninhibited by the audience or by empty space, almost as intimately as if they'd been recording in a radio studio. Plus, I think this one has the only live version of ʽWant Moreʼ to be released on an official album — a fine, tense, desperate song to be played live and really get the juices flowing, somehow overlooked elsewhere. Probably I could scramble to­gether a few other minor arguments as well, but on the whole, such things should rather be left to seasoned Marley veterans, so I will just say goodbye here with a conventional thumbs up.

 

BONNIE RAITT

BONNIE RAITT (1971)

 

1) Bluebird; 2) Mighty Tight Woman; 3) Thank You; 4) Finest Lovin' Man; 5) Any Day Woman; 6) Big Road; 7) Walking Blues; 8) Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead; 9) Since I Fell For You; 10) I Ain't Blue; 11) Women Be Wise.

 

Upon entering Radcliffe College, Bonny Raitt majored in social relations and African studies, and it shows — what other type of artist would have covered not one, but two songs by (then still fairly obscure among everybody but very hardcore blues aficionados) Sippie Wallace? Both of which are, of course, all about social relations (gender relations, to be exact) in the Afro-Ameri­can community of the 1920s, and not at all out of date or out of touch in the early 1970s. Yet it is not so much the actual subject that is interesting here as it is the approach, which can make all the difference and make you love this record, hate this record, or use it as casual background for the «boring» category of house parties.

 

Roots-rock, in those days, used to come in extremes — it could be reverential and self-conscious­ly «spiritual», downplaying the earthiness of the music (they don't call it «roots» for nothing, but too many people played «roots rock» as if it were «angels' rock» instead), or it could assume the «dirty» form of hard-rockers, pub-rockers, shit-rockers, or whatever you'd like to call the self-consciously irreverential crowds. If it didn't come in extremes, though, it was running an even higher risk of not finding its own face. And it is very easy not to be impressed by this record and just walk away saying, «yeah, so what's the big deal?..»

 

Because on most counts, the 21-year old Bonnie Raitt is professional, but whether she is anything special is not so evident. She knows how to play guitar, pleasantly but not exceptionally (and in any case, her playing on this debut album is intentionally devoid of any flashy demonstration of her later-to-be-respected slide technique); she is a good enough singer, but her voice is physically weak, or, rather, at this juncture she has not yet learned to control it rigorously; and she is not at all a «singer-songwriter», because she writes very few songs — the two numbers that are credited to her are, respectively, a rather generic folk-pop ballad and a rather simplistic blues vamp.

 

She is, however, an interpreter and a blender of tradition; perhaps the most interesting aspect of the album is its choice of cover material — ranging from then-contemporary songs by Stephen Stills and Paul Siebel (and Bonnie's own, of course) to Motown (the Marvelettes) to vocal jazz to old acoustic blues to, most intriguingly, the «urban blues» tradition of the 1920s, as illustrated by the two Sippie Wallace covers: love for Robert Johnson, one of whose songs is also covered here, may have been ubiquitous in the early 1970s, but proper understanding of the importance of the female blues singers of the pre-Depression era was yet to come (I think that even Bessie Smith was more revered for her legend than actually listened to — unless that feeling is being secretly nurtured by the association with the Band song of that name that bears no resemblance to Bessie Smith's real style whatsoever. Whatever).

 

There is no particular strife for «authenticity», thank God, outside of Bonnie hiring blues legend Junior Walker to contribute harmonica throughout — and the production by Willie Murphy is intelligent and tasteful, as he tends to avoid any unnecessary tricks or effects, but makes good use of all the immense host of musicians that Bonnie dragged into the empty summer camp on Lake Minnetonka to help her carry on the musical tradition. And this is important, because Raitt sees to it that the album never becomes a pure guitar celebration — pianos, harmonicas, flutes, saxes, even a tuba, comically-importantly puffed into by Freebo on ʽBig Roadʼ, are just as important to make this whole experience into a celebration that is as much «blues» as it is «vaudeville», not to mention «jazz» or «R&B» or «folk-based singer-songwriting, California-style», all one.

 

Under this sauce, style becomes far more important than substance: I'd like to complain that Bonnie's folksy ʽThank Youʼ is not very memorable, and that the straightforward blues covers where she is being «tough» (ʽMighty Tight Womanʼ) hit harder than the easily-dissipated ballads, but that impression would probably apply to anybody, be they as talented as Ms. Raitt or much less talented. The truth is that Bonnie intuitively gets where it's at: she is able to present herself as a strong, independent character, but does that in the same restrained, self-contained, «polite» manner as her pre-war idols. This is an attitude that does not work wonders for short-time enter­tainment value — not surprisingly, the album failed to chart — but might command certain respect in the long run.

 

From a certain point of view, this is Bonnie Raitt at her very best; with a song selection like that, when «old masters» are only marginally offset by contemporary singer-songwriters, Junior Walker on harp, and production that cleverly updates the old honky-tonk without succumbing to the usual 1970s clichés (like drowning everything in a sea of syrupy strings, for instance), if you don't like Bonnie Raitt, you won't like Bonnie Raitt, and if you don't get Bonnie Raitt, there is no stopping you from completely despising her for everything she's done once she stopped drinking, put out Nick Of Time, and became the roots-rock-spokeswoman for people without a proper sense of humor. But you know, it can actually be fun trying to get Bonnie Raitt, at least, in that period of hers where she still had some sort of meaningful agenda, rather than just wanting to hang out with all the other cool people. Thumbs up.

 

GIVE IT UP (1972)

 

1) Give It Up Or Let Me Go; 2) Nothing Seems To Matter; 3) I Know; 4) If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody; 5) Love Me Like A Man; 6) Too Long At The Fair; 7) Under The Falling Sky; 8) You Got To Know How; 9) You Told Me Baby; 10) Love Has No Pride.

 

No attempts at tweaking the formula here, just tightening it up by hiring even better musicians, writing one more song than the last time around, and possibly playing a bit more electric guitar, too, although it is hard to guess who is playing what without the individual credits for each song, considering that no less than six different guitar players are listed in the notes. These are all just subtle nuances, though, so do not let the album cover shift (from dark living room to sunny countryside) fool you into imagining that something major has changed.

 

Bonnie's songwriting abilities have not improved by much — and, to tell the truth, they would never improve by much — but you still gotta admire somebody who has the gall to write a song in the near-authentic style of 1920s vaudeville (ʽGive It Up Or Let Me Goʼ) and then immediately follow it up with a song written in the near-authentic style of Carole King (ʽNothing Seems To Matterʼ — transpose that guitar melody to piano and you'd be able to sneak the song on Tapestry without anyone noticing). The third song, ʽYou Told Me Babyʼ, is written in the near-authentic style of blandly-friendly Californian blues-rock, I think, but it is really not so much a «song» as an excuse to trade some classy guitar licks between two or three guitarists in the coda.

 

The covers, like before, are split between forgotten golden oldies (Sippie Wallace's ʽYou Got To Know Howʼ), classic R&B (Barbara George's ʽI Knowʼ), and contemporary material, with the balance seriously tipping now in favor of the latter — not necessarily to the benefit of good taste, since there is just a tad too much sentimental melodrama here; certainly ending the record with an honest-to-goodness, but way too emotionally puffed-up ʽLove Has No Prideʼ is not a great choice compared with ʽWomen Be Wiseʼ on Bonnie Raitt. Still, at least she is still diligently splicing quotas: other than sentimental ballads, there are also tough blues-rockers (ʽLove Me Like A Manʼ) and upbeat country-rockers (Jackson Browne's ʽUnder The Falling Skyʼ), and ʽToo Long At The Fairʼ is at least one song that transcends sentimental clichés and, aided with some lush singing and a carefully engineered crescendo, rises to nearly epic heights.

 

But on the whole, it seems clear that Bonnie Raitt's second album predictably confirms what was already suggested by the first one — namely, that she is a competent, likable, respectable blues mama who is not afraid to dig all the way down into the roots and the original functions of the blues (one of which is just sheer entertainment), and that everything else, whether she likes it or not, comes across as more of a concession to modernity. ʽGive It Up Or Let Me Goʼ, with its self-confident swagger, jazzy flavor, and cocky slide guitar playing, is the album's best performance, the rigid 12-bar blues of ʽLove Me Like A Manʼ, which she sort of sings like a man, comes second, and Wallace's ʽYou Got To Know Howʼ, putting the final touch on Bonnie's fully solidified «wise woman» image, comes third. The more emotional and psychological she gets, though, the less use there seems to be for this music — in light mode, there's always Carole King, and in heavy (emotionally, not musically, that is), there's always Joni Mitchell.

 

Nevertheless, the album is consistently listenable: with so many people around and such relative­ly complex, yet seemingly spontaneous, arrangements, Give It Up generates a loose, good-time, friendly atmosphere that not many «generic» blues-rock records can offer with such ease. Addi­tionally, you get Paul Butterfield himself blowing his harmonica on a few tracks (ʽUnder The Falling Skyʼ), and some really tight brass players jazzifying the proceedings along the way. So, nothing too special in the grand scheme of things, and not even necessarily an improvement on her first try, but still well worth an empathic thumbs up, I'd say.

 

TAKIN' MY TIME (1973)

 

1) You've Been In Love Too Long; 2) I Gave My Love A Candle; 3) Let Me In; 4) Everybody's Crying Mercy; 5) Cry Like A Rainstorm; 6) Wah She Go Do; 7) I Feel The Same; 8) I Thought I Was A Child; 9) Write Me A Few Of Your Lines/Kokomo Blues; 10) Guilty.

 

Third time's a charm? Actually, all three times had their charm: Takin' My Time is the last piece of the «original Bonnie Raitt trilogy», stylistically and ideologically continuing the old trend and, in some people's opinions, perfecting it to the highest possible degree. (In Bonnie's own opinion, too, as far as I know, although she has her own personal reasons — at the time, she was roman­tically involved with Lowell George of Little Feat, who is also contributing to this record and was even considered for primary producer at one time).

 

The credit list for this record is even longer than for Give It Up, and involves some stellar players: besides Lowell George and some of the old regulars like Freebo, we have Taj Mahal on guitar, Ernie Watts (mostly known to the layman for his Rolling Stones association in the early 1980s) on sax, both Jim Keltner and Earl Palmer on drums, and even Van Dyke Parks, the creative soul behind the Beach Boys' SMiLe project, on keyboards; as usual, I am not exactly sure who is playing on which of the tracks, but on the whole, Takin' My Time does indeed sound awesome much of the time — as far as «regular» early 1970s roots-rock records with a soft edge go, you would be hard pressed to find anything more tasteful than this.

 

However, the chief virtue of the album, once again, is its excellent eclecticism and stylistic balance. Although pre-war material is no longer present (unless you technically count the Missis­sippi Fred McDowell cover as «pre-war style», even though Fred himself was a post-war artist), Bonnie's Motown vibe is still active, as is evident from the opening number, a brashly swinging, funky version of Martha and the Vandellas' ʽYou've Been In Love Too Longʼ. To this, she adds a brief flirtation with Pete Townshend's favorite, Mose Allison (ʽEverybody's Crying Mercyʼ, here arranged as a slightly threatening «midnight blues» number with creepy harmonica lines from Taj Mahal); a quick affair with the calypso groove, in the guise of a suitably arrogant and amusing take on Calypso Rose's ʽWah She Go Doʼ; and a rejuvenation of the old fast tempo doo-wop hit ʽLet Me Inʼ, which must have been all the rage when The Sensations first introduced it in 1962, but had, of course, been completely forgotten since.

 

And these are not «just» covers, mind you — they have all been reworked, in a good way, actual­ly, in different, not always predictable, ways. The Martha and the Vandellas song is seriously funkified, getting an extra snappy edge that the original, fairly formulaic, Motown arrangement never had. The Mose Allison song gets this serious dark boost from the thick bassline and Taj Mahal's harmonica — Bonnie understands the «eerie» vibe of Mr. Allison and does her best to enhance it. As for ʽLet Me Inʼ, this is where she really unlocks her pre-war vaudeville closet, letting out a whole merry brass section to cheer up the speakeasy atmosphere: again, the song gets a whole new layer of meaning that the original never sought.

 

As for the more contemporary material, a few of the songs unpleasantly point the way to the commercial blandness of albums to come, but this is rather an accidental development: on the other hand, you have stuff like Chris Smither's ʽI Feel The Sameʼ, a «modern blues» with a ter­rific arrangement — particularly the screechy, angry, but tastefully reserved slide guitar lead parts, which I really hope were played by Bonnie herself. Eventually, the song develops into one of those late-night jams, with several acoustic and electric guitars trading gruff short phrases — not exactly Crosby, Stills, & Young level, but fairly comparable if you make the necessary adjust­ments for «soft mode» rather than «hard mode».

 

So when the album ends with a slightly-more-serious-than-necessary reading of Randy Newman's ʽGuiltyʼ (Bonnie has no chance of preserving the author's sense of irony and deeply ensconced «Jewish sarcasm», but she does good about preserving the world-weary attitude), it's almost like, «yeah, she finally drove her point all the way home»; the point in question, of course, being the ability to come out as conservative (or, rather, «preservationist» in a Kinksy sense of the word) and innovative at the same time — «new skin for the old ceremony», as the title of a certain Leo­nard Cohen album goes. Oh well, I guess it never hurt anybody to have an affair with a guy as classy as Lowell George, but never mind whether this consideration has any impact on the strength of this here thumbs up evaluation. Just enjoy the music while you can, because this would be the last time that it would be so tastefully enjoyable.

 

STREETLIGHTS (1974)

 

1) That Song About The Midway; 2) Rainy Day Man; 3) Angel From Montgomery; 4) I Got Plenty; 5) Streetlights; 6) What Is Success; 8) Ain't Nobody Home; 9) Everything That Touches You; 10) Got You On My Mind; 11) You Got To Be Ready For Love.

 

Listen to Takin' My Time and Streetlights back to back and you get a valuable lesson in what was deemed «more commercial» and «less commercial» circa 1974. While some of the songs on Takin' My Time sound just like the songs on Streetlights, the big difference is that everything that constituted Bonnie Raitt's own artistic sauce has pretty much been ditched — her guitar play­ing skills, her diversity in selecting other people's material, her very important feel for pre-war blues and vaudeville music, and even her own humble attempts at writing songs.

 

None of that matters, thought Bonnie's new producer Jerry Ragovoy, and pushed her towards becoming a «normal» artist — singing soft orchestrated acoustic ballads, collected from outside contemporary songwriters. Apparently, the new idea was to market Ms. Raitt as a singer: Warner Bros.' answer to Karen Carpenter, or something of the sort. Although her career was slowly gaining traction, with Takin' My Time finally making it into the Top 100, apparently, they succeeded in convincing her that a slight image change was necessary in order to attract larger audiences — and that this image change necessitated dropping Sippie Wallace covers from her repertoire, for one thing, and replacing them with something more «relevant».

 

Okay, says Bonnie, and starts things off with a cover of Joni Mitchell's ʽThat Song About The Midwayʼ. She nails the sentiment of the original pretty darn well, but then comes the inevitable: what's the goddamn point? The arrangement has been made a little more «user-friendly» as we add some bottom, in the form of a delicate bassline and some soft congas, and later on, some inobtrusive strings and woodwinds — and you could say that the vocals also make the song more «user-friendly», since Bonnie's voice is higher than Joni's, not to mention free from the pecu­li­arities of Joni's irregular jaw structure, so the average listener might deem Ms. Raitt's rendition «nicer» than Ms. Mitchell's. But in a different lingo, that same thing is called «watering down», and I, for one, have no need whatsoever of anybody watering down Joni Mitchell. Radical trans­formations are one thing (e. g. ʽThis Flight Tonightʼ in the hands of Nazareth), but this sort of treatment adds nothing whatsoever to the original.

 

Adding almost an insult to almost an injury, the second track is a cover of James Taylor's ʽRainy Day Manʼ — this time, the arrangement adds some jazzy electric guitar licks, louder drums, and a heavily muffled brass and string section, all of them superimposed in such a polite manner that the song becomes boring almost before it has started. Again, Bonnie does a good job, but there is no «edge» to the material, and whatever sentiments James Taylor himself had conveyed through the song, there ain't even a single extra one here.

 

The rest does not stray too far away from the path: songs are reduced to more or less the same soft, «shallow-introspective» register, regardless of whether they have been penned by overrated superstars (Taylor) or semi-obscure cult legends (John Prine's ʽAngel From Montgomeryʼ). By the time we get to the second side, things start heating up a little, as Bonnie includes several R&B numbers, relatively higher on energy level (Allen Toussaint's ʽWhat Is Successʼ, with a hilarious­ly «ominous» string arrangement; Ragovoy's own ʽAin't Nobody Homeʼ, where the brass section is finally given free reins), but even that idea is discredited on the last track — ʽYou Got To Be Ready For Loveʼ is a campy proto-disco number that is as far removed from Bonnie's artistic inclinations as possible (as they hop through the chorus, I cannot help imagining the lady in ABBA-like glitter, grooving along to the good vibe, and thinking back on how far people are ready to go for vague «image demand» purposes).

 

Nothing, except for that last track, is properly «bad» — the ballads have occasional hooks, the material has been chosen with intelligence (after all, covering Joni Mitchell and John Prine can hardly get one accused of bad taste, right?), and Raitt still has at least the distinctive feature of being able to make a transition to «rough blueswoman snap» mode whenever she feels the song might demand it: an important footnote, because neither a Joni Mitchell nor a Karen Carpenter could have managed this trick. Unfortunately, she does not resort to it too often, not to mention that sometimes, due to the nature of the material, it just makes her seem like a Nashville cowgirl, and that ain't nothing special, either. In the end, Streetlights simply streamlines her talent, instead of allowing it to develop into something truly outstanding — and that, woe and alas, is pretty much the way it would generally stay throughout the rest of her career.

 

HOME PLATE (1975)

 

1) What Do You Want The Boy To Do; 2) Good Enough; 3) Run Like A Thief; 4) Fool Yourself; 5) My First Night Alone Without You; 6) Walk Out The Front Door; 7) Sugar Mama; 8) Pleasin' Each Other; 9) I'm Blowin' Away; 10) Your Sweet And Shiny Eyes.

 

All right, so even if «something» had truly died forever with the transition from Bonnie's first three albums to Streetlights, that does not necessarily mean she would not be able to still turn in a decent record from time to time. In the place of Jerry Ragovoy we now see Paul Rothchild, the legendary producer for The Doors — and, incidentally, also for the last Janis Joplin album; per­haps the Warner executives were secretly aspiring for the man to be able to dress Ms. Raitt up as a legitimate successor to Janis?

 

Well, not even the most astute producer could handle such a task, I guess, but one thing that was done right was to pull Bonnie out of that «introspective singer-non-songwriter» mode and get her to play a little rock'n'roll instead. Once again, there are no originals, and once again, most of the songs represent contemporary material, but the arrangements are more energetic and electric this time, and the album sounds more like a bawdy roots rock party than an intimate confession ses­sion, which is a good thing with Bonnie Raitt: as a bawdy roots-rocker, she is more interesting and involving than she is as a lonesome sensitive soul.

 

One noticeable thing about the album is how heavy it is on backing vocals (with at least a dozen supporting singers, including such luminosities as Emmylou Harris and — no shit! — Tom Waits himself listed in the credits, although back in 1975, I guess that his voice was still usable for «regular» backup purposes). This gives many of its blues-rock compositions a bit of a gospel/soul feel: indeed, the main hook of Bill Payne's ʽPleasin' Each Otherʼ, multiplied by the choral har­mony approach, sounds like a rip-off of Leon Russell's ʽSpace Captainʼ as done by Joe Cocker (with the "pleasin' each other, pleasin' each other can't be wrong" refrain replacing the original "learning to live together, learning to live together 'til we die"). But it is done very well all the same — Bonnie is not trying to compete with Cocker, entrancing her audience in the same sha­manistic-possessed manner, she is putting more emphasis on melody and build-up, and there is a nice balance between strength and tenderness in the end.

 

She even manages to «tame» those proto-disco rhythms: ʽGood Enoughʼ, with a bouncy groove and a funky Stevie Wonder-like clavinet line, is a tremendous improvement over ʽYou Got To Be Ready For Loveʼ — no strings, a tightly coordinated performance, and a vocal that asserts strong personality over sentimental cliché. But even this one does not hold a candle to material on which the lady gets to play slide guitar: ʽSugar Mamaʼ (a gender-based remake of Texas blues rocker Glen Clark's ʽSugar Daddyʼ) is a delicious slab of blues-rock feminism — if she does not do «proper» female urban blues no more, at least this contemporary revision still hearkens back to that old independent spirit, and with a deliciously aggressive slide tone to boot.

 

There is even a touching ballad here: I heartily recommend J. D. Souther's ʽRun Like A Thiefʼ, which starts out quite generically, but then delves into one of those tugging vocal hooks that you either fall for (and subsequently become vulnerable to at least some of the songs by Linda Ronstadt and/or the Eagles) or stay immune to ­— I confess to liking the notes she holds on the "run in the night, run in the night, run in the night like a thief" chorus, or, at least, feeling like mentioning them, which is already a big plus when you're talking generic country-rock balladry. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about ʽMy First Night Alone Without Youʼ and ʽI'm Blowin' Awayʼ (was the latter responsible for the silly album cover, or was that Bonnie Raitt's idea of how «going over the rainbow» would look like?) — those sound exactly like all the in­stantly forgettable, wishy-washy stuff on Streetlights.

 

Still, even with all the filler, there are enough quality performances here to merit a weak thumbs up — most importantly, the album feels more loyal to the true essence of Bonnie Raitt than its predecessor, including the important component of having fun, of which she had so much on her first three records. I'd like to see more of that fun coming back, but I guess we have to be grate­ful for what there is, and give out special thanks to Rothchild. For all we know, they could have cut the budget and limit the sessions to just Bonnie and her acoustic guitar, and for all her charms, she ain't no Nick Drake, let alone Syd Barrett.

 

SWEET FORGIVENESS (1977)

 

1) About To Make Me Leave Home; 2) Runaway; 3) Two Lives; 4) Louise; 5) Gamblin' Man; 6) Sweet Forgive­ness; 7) My Opening Farewell; 8) Three Time Loser; 9) Takin' My Time; 10) Home.

 

Produced by Rothchild once again, this one marked Raitt's first and lesser commercial peak, climbing all the way up to No. 25 on the charts and even yielding a modest hit single — her cover of Del Shannon's ʽRunawayʼ, a great song that, like most of the old hits back in 1977, was con­temporarily out of vogue and could certainly use some twitching to get upgraded to the basic standards of commercial music in the 1970s. Right?

 

Well, maybe, but this harder-rocking arrangement is surprisingly soulless: neither the music nor Bonnie's «powerhouse» singing convey the light melancholy of the original that was its greatest asset — its essence, in fact. Melody-wise, ʽRunawayʼ is finely constructed, and that construction is dutifully preserved and just a little bit tweaked on this album, but on an emotional level, it does not really work as a loud «rock-and-soul» number: as it opens with a harsh distorted chugging riff and a swampy harmonica blast, your senses prepare for something dark and apocalyptic rather than something tender and personal. Bonnie's vocal work is technically great, but makes little sense — strong enough to make people sit up and notice and buy the single, though.

 

On the whole, Sweet Forgiveness is more «rock» than anything she previously offered us — perhaps the idea was to try and recast her a little bit in the vein of successful sentimental arena-rockers like Foreigner. The session musicians have largely been sacked — there's only about 15 different people credited on the record, which is really a miserable number (normally, there'd be about twice as many) for a Bonnie Raitt album, and even so, most of the instrumental parts were simply played by the members of her regular touring band, so the album on the whole is tighter, tenser, and rockier than it used to be. This is neither good nor bad in itself, but it does guarantee that there is no going back — the spirit of Sippie Wallace is no longer hovering over the studio in any of its forms.

 

The sheer strength of Raitt's voice means that she is perfectly capable of putting out a regular hard rock record — the only problem is that this particular hard rock record cannot boast great songwriting, and refuses to take any chances whatsoever when it comes to laying down the tracks. Something like ʽGamblin' Manʼ, for instance, is just standard-fare mid-tempo blues-rock, with neither the rhythm guitar nor the lead guitar nor any other part ever rising above the «we get paid for this, we're doing our job as honestly as the contract requires» level.

 

Composition-wise, the title track, written by songwriter Daniel Moore, is probably the most unusual thing here, spliced together from several different parts (a funky rocking part and a gos­pel-tinged uptempo ballad part) — even so, both parts are so tepid on their own that it is only the sharp contrast between the two, as Bonnie hops forward and backward from «aggressive» to «forgiving», that makes the final result worthwhile. Musical and emotional restraint, sometimes useful because implying certain things works better than saying them out loud, work against Raitt because there is really nothing implied here anyway. Slick and clean, ʽSweet Forgivenessʼ is a technically decent product that does not make me too angry or too forgiving.

 

Still, while the album is on, it's generally okay. The ballads have their little tugs (ʽTwo Livesʼ is kinda sad, though the Carpenters would probably have made it lovelier; ʽLouiseʼ is kinda sym­pathetic, though Joan Baez would probably have made it sharper and shriller), the rockers are superficially fun (ʽThree Time Loserʼ has an expressively flowing slide guitar part), and even slow «grand» roots-rock numbers like ʽTakin' My Timeʼ have a generally tasteful sound, decora­ted with pianos, organs, and battling guitars. The atmosphere of the whole thing, in any case, is much superior to the general arena-rock atmosphere, because nobody is trying to be too flashy, to lay down that old soul as if it were the biggest, fattest, most monumental soul of all time.

 

This is why, in spite of all the complaints, I'm still giving this a thumbs up — as I am usually doing with all «high quality mediocre albums». Do not, however, make the mistake of forming an opinion here based only on ʽRunawayʼ: it may be typical of the general style of arrangements on Sweet Forgiveness, but it is not typical of the general style of songwriting, and, most importantly, it will almost inevitably set your mind on the path of comparisons between Bonnie Raitt and Del Shannon, which is not at all what anybody had in mind for Sweet Forgiveness, I'm sure.

 

THE GLOW (1979)

 

1) I Thank You; 2) Your Good Thing (Is About To End); 3) Standin' By The Same Old Love; 4) Sleep's Dark And Silent Gate; 5) The Glow; 6) Bye Bye Baby; 7) The Boy Can't Help It; 8) (I Could Have Been Your) Best Old Friend; 9) You're Gonna Get What's Coming; 10) (Goin') Wild For You Baby.

 

Whenever we are dealing with more than one stage in the career of the illustrious Bonnie Raitt, we are dealing with nuances within nuances and subtleties within subtleties — but speaking in terms of nuanced nuances and subtle subtleties, I think I like The Glow one subtle nuance more than I like Sweet Forgiveness. Perhaps because it's got a bit more of that «sandpaper» edge to it. Or maybe the leading lady just got me covered and trapped with that reproaching stare on the front cover — looking every bit the same at thirty as she'd later look at sixty, and communicating a «what the heck do you want from me, anyway?» kind of message, as if I ever wanted anything from her in the first place — or anybody else, for that matter.

 

A more serious reason might be a better playlist: unlike Sweet Forgiveness, The Glow tempora­rily returns us to a better balance between contemporary songwriting and the old classics — no, no Victoria Spivey covers, but some good old-fashioned soul, rock'n'roll, and Motown pop here, nestled among the obligatory James Taylorisms (actually, Jackson Brownisms and Robert Palmerisms, to be much more precise). Still another factor may be a near-complete change of the playing team — trimmed down to about 12 people (that ain't much for Bonnie) and consisting almost entirely of first-rate players on the market: Danny Kortchmar and Waddy Wachtel on guitars, Paul Butterfield on harmonica, guys from Little Feat, and even David Sanborn comes along to contribute a sax solo or two.

 

There are only three ballads out of ten, and all three are decent. Browne's ʽSleep's Dark And Silent Gateʼ begins to redeem itself already with its title and ends with an inspired, tasteful and highly lyrical guitar break from I don't-know-who (Danny? Waddy? Diddy Wah Diddy?). The lengthy title track, dealing with the perils of drinking (all too actual for Bonnie at the time) is nothing to really write home about in ecstasy, but it is nice that they arrange it as smooth mid­night jazz rather than orchestrated schlock, so that the most prominent thing about the song are its wobbly basslines — always a cool thing in ballads. And the closing ʽWild For You Babyʼ, as poor as it is as an original composition, has that slightly distorted guitar lead improvising various figures around Bonnie's croon, again, adding some much-needed «earthiness».

 

The punchy stuff includes a quirky gender twist as Bonnie remakes ʽThe Girl Can't Help Itʼ into ʽThe Boy Can't Help Itʼ, grinning at her male audience with sarcastic slide guitar runs ("you know the boy can't help it, he was born to please" must have been particularly humiliating for all them male chauvinists), but overall, the punchy stuff is there just to be punchy — with the ope­ning drum roll for the old Sam & Dave hit ʽI Thank Youʼ, Raitt springs immediately into action, and this «cut the crap, let's get right down to business» attitude is well felt throughout the record, whether she is putting the 1970s rock stamp on Mary Wells' ʽBye Bye Babyʼ or asserting some lean 'n' mean personality on ʽBest Old Friendʼ. Most importantly, she is now milking that slide guitar sound with a tight grip, and adjusting her own singing voice to it — together, they form a very natural-sounding sneery duo, much better united than anytime in the past.

 

On the whole, this one earns a much more assured thumbs up from me than its predecessor, but, of course, far be it from me to fool anybody: The Glow is not a «great» album by any means, just as fine a record as it ever gets in the vicinity of the middle of the road, and only really recommen­dable if you are a big sucker for that clean, smoothly engineered, technically precise and humbly soulful roots-rock sound of the 1970s. It is somewhat of a miracle, though, in a way, how they manage to be so completely dismissive of all the musical and technological innovations of the New Wave era — so get it if you are a certified conservative in life, too.

 

GREEN LIGHT (1982)

 

1) Keep This Heart In Mind; 2) River Of Tears; 3) Can't Get Enough; 4) Willya Wontcha; 5) Let's Keep It Between Us; 6) Me And The Boys; 7) I Can't Help Myself; 8) Baby Come Back; 9) Talk To Me; 10) Green Lights.

 

Another interesting change of pace here — reflecting the end of the Seventies and, in a way, the end of the singer-songwriter era, Green Light is a simple, ballsy, and ever so slightly New Wave-influenced rock'n'roll album. Once again, the entire songwriting and recording team has been shifted. The new producer is Rob Fraboni, best known for working on various roots-rock projects of the previous decade (such as The Band's Last Waltz and Eric Clapton's No Reason To Cry; not coincidentally, The Band's own Richard Manuel gets credited in the liner notes for background vocals), and the most notorious instrumentalist on the album is Faces' veteran Ian McLagan, who, I think, is chiefly responsible for the somewhat nonchalant, barroom-boogie attitude that rules on Green Light.

 

For all of Bonnie's «excesses» of that era, brought about by heavy drinking, and for all of her desire to let it all hang down for a bit, the record is still quite reserved and delicately polished — no use expecting sloppiness or high levels of distortion and fuzz from the lady. However, as you can easily see from the title track, she is not above allowing modern production techniques (in­cluding a little bit of electronic treatment), so that today, ʽGreen Lightsʼ is quite easily datable back to the early 1980s. This is not a problem, though — the whole album pretends to little more than casual lightweight entertainment, for which aims the production is adequate.

 

There are almost no ballads on the album: the closest thing is probably ʽRiver Of Tearsʼ, contri­buted by long-term partner Eric Kaz, but even that song's melodic base is blues-rockish — in fact, the opening guitar lines sound like they were lifted directly off some alternate version of ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ, open G-tuning and all; it is only the overall broken-hearted sentimentality of the lyrics and the slight whiff of angry tragedy in Raitt's vocals that would allow to classify the song as a «heartstring-puller», if there were any need for such a classification. Everything else just ranges from straightahead rock'n'roll to dynamic Motown-style R&B (ʽI Can't Help Myselfʼ).

 

Interestingly, one of the exceptions from that formula, ʽLet's Keep It Between Usʼ is a Bob Dylan reject that he occasionally performed in concert but never recorded in the studio — no idea if he could be able to flesh it out into some­thing more exciting than the slow 12-bar blues on this album, but before I took a look at the liner notes, I had not the smallest inkling to associate the song with Bob: clearly, Bonnie is much better at capturing the spirit of pre-war black female blues singers than nailing the Zimmerman essence (it may be a good thing, after all, that they never got her involved in the 30th anniversary show in 1992 even if, on the surface, she'd make a far more natural choice than Sinead O'Connor). It's just boring.

 

The speedy numbers, though, like ʽMe And The Boysʼ or ʽTalk To Meʼ, are catchy, harmless fun. Curiously, ʽTalk To Meʼ, opening with a couple of chords nicked from Blondie's ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ and then quickly turning into a «post-disco dance-rock» number, was written by Jerry Lynn Williams, the same guy who wrote hit songs for Clapton in the mid-1980s (ʽForever Manʼ, ʽPretendingʼ, ʽRunning On Faithʼ — the latter one was actually quite good), but ʽTalk To Meʼ sounds most closely to the one song that Williams did not write for Clapton, namely, ʽTearing Us Apartʼ, from which I conclude that Williams not only wrote songs for Clapton, but also inspired Clapton to write songs in the style of Williams. It's a pretty complicated network out there in the world of show-biz, as you can tell.

 

Considering that the band behind Bonnie's back is competent and tasteful, and that Bonnie's own vocal style is perfectly compatible with barroom rock (strictly reserved to those barrooms that do not let their clients throw up on the counter and pass out on the floor), I have no problems about a friendly thumbs up for the album, despite its expectable problems — the four lines from ʽMe And The Boysʼ pretty much sum up everything about what's right and what's wrong here: "Me and my buddies just like to go / We'll have fun, everybody knows / We don't fuss and we never cry / We just groove, taking in the sights". No fuss and no crying, indeed. Very cautious groove, too, but some new sights are definitely taken in. And — no doubt about it — any relations with the boys are restricted to the purely platonic sphere. But then, you don't always have to imitate Lemmy in order to play good rock'n'roll.

 

NINE LIVES (1986)

 

1) No Way To Treat A Lady; 2) Runnin' Back To Me; 3) Who But A Fool (Thief Into Paradise); 4) Crime Of Passion; 5) All Day, All Night; 6) Stand Up To The Night; 7) Excited; 8) Freezin' (For A Little Human Love); 9) True Love Is Hard To Find; 10) Angel.

 

I find it a little bit funny — and a little ominous — that the title of this album would ten years later be appropriated by Aerosmith, because this here is the beginning of the «Aerosmith-ization» of Bonnie Raitt. Of course, she'd never exactly been a symbol of «artistic independence» as such, but up to 1986, there was very little evidence for branding her a «tool of the industry», either. However, in 1983, already in those early stages of the «adjust-or-perish» period, Warner Bros. showed her who really is the boss by rejecting a completed album for lacking commercial po­tential, and only after two years of nervous bickering, finally allowed her to put out an alternative, recutting and rearranging most of the tracks.

 

Nine Lives is far from the worst album I have ever heard (I mean, every time we get exposed to this kind of stuff, remember Rod Stewart in the Eighties to be brought back to senses), but it is certainly a record that could be cut by anybody — completely faceless and robotic even for the standards of Bonnie Raitt, who isn't exactly Ms. Inimitable Personality herself. It's a big band affair (once again, the number of people credited in the liner notes is skyrocketing to ridiculous heights), molded as a very generic, sterilized pop-rock record, heavy on synthesizers, electronic drums, processed guitar sounds, and corporate songwriting. Revealing moment: the first song, ʽNo Way To Treat A Ladyʼ, was written by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, and was released in the same year, 1986, by still another Bonnie — Tyler! And it is fairly hard to decide whose ver­sion is more pompous, overproduced, and deadly dull.

 

The entire album is full of cringeworthy moments. Synthesized horns on ʽRunnin' Back To Meʼ, with all these trumpet players in the studio? Why? Muscular-metal guitar on the steroid power ballad ʽStand Up To The Nightʼ — who the hell could see Bonnie Raitt competing for space with Heart and Cher in the Eighties? The simplistic electro-pop groove on ʽFreezin'ʼ — who the hell could see Bonnie Raitt competing for space with Prince, or associate her with «music for the body» as such? And then there's the lyrics disease — as corporate songwriting sinks to new de­grees of lowness, we get lines like "my body is the only place where we meet anymore" (!!!!!). Good job, Danny Ironstone and Mary Unobsky, whoever and wherever you may be, for saddling a formerly reputable performer with ʽCrime Of Passionʼ, arguably one of the most embarrassing entries in her entire catalog.

 

In an ultimate bout of irony, ʽTrue Love Is Hard To Findʼ, a bland cod-reggae offering, features none other than the 88-year old Sippie Wallace herself on background vocals — Bonnie's per­sonal idol finally got a chance to back up her disciple something like a few months prior to her demise on November 1, 1986. Shame it had to happen on this particular track, in this particular setting and epoch — about twelve or fourteen years too late for the move to have any serious meaning. For the record, her cracked vocals, in those few moments when she can actually be heard above the production din, have more personality here than everything else put together — but then they are quickly washed away by the coda, a dull piano-based blues ballad written by Bonnie's old friend Eric Kaz and sporting the title ʽAngelʼ. The following year, a power ballad called ʽAngelʼ would be released by Aerosmith for Permanent Vacation, their first album to mark the transition from living human beings into automated mannequins. Coincidence? Yes. And no, if you think of certain deeper reasons. Thumbs down.

 

NICK OF TIME (1989)

 

1) Nick Of Time; 2) Thing Called Love; 3) Love Letter; 4) Cry On My Shoulder; 5) Real Man; 6) Nobody's Girl; 7) Have A Heart; 8) Too Soon To Tell; 9) I Will Not Be Denied; 10) I Ain't Gonna Let You Break My Heart Again; 11) The Road's My Middle Name.

 

Unlike Nine Lives, Nick Of Time could hardly be accused of «not being Bonnie Raitt». No, that's her all right — a balanced mix of «tough» blues and «soft» ballads, not exploring any weirdly unfamiliar territories, played by the usual army of professional roots-rock sidemen, and feeling as sincere as they come. So how to explain, in plain simple words of the English language, why it sucks so much that I'd rather have Nine Lives?..

 

Put it this way: there's something tremendously wrong in the air when a record like this tops the Billboard charts, sells five million copies, and gets all the Grammies. We can admit that in 1971-1973, back when Bonnie Raitt made her only records that are still worth relistening to on a con­stant basis, competition was way more tough, and what seemed like a mere blip on the radar then could aggrandize itself into something much more impressive in 1989, at least in the antiquated world of «traditional» rock'n'roll. But even then, there were so many «traditional rock'n'roll» albums in 1989 that could have made the same grade — why Nick Of Time?

 

Admittedly, the record gave Bonnie Raitt a new face. The singles mostly charted as «adult con­temporary», and the whole thing was strongly marketed as an emotionally charged record for aging baby-boomers — no way any of the kids could get interested in these songs. In a couple of years, the same strategy would work with Eric Clapton's Unplugged: calm, steady, «wise» music for those old rockers who had no wish to pretend they were young any more, and preferred the quiet, slow-burning sounds of Clapton and Bonnie Raitt to the «eternally young» sounds of the Rolling Stones, perceived as fake and strained. There must have been a strong demand for this among the elders who were too tired to keep on searching — «nick of time» indeed.

 

But this lack of innovation, this desire to settle down and do something simple and honest, this «graceful acceptance of age» — who ever said it all had to come with such poor packaging? Pro­ducer Don Was, who would soon become a major provider for rock veterans (the Stones, Dylan, Ringo Starr, Joe Cocker, etc.), gives Raitt the slickest production she ever had — yes, he is a magnificent master of sound, polishing, scrubbing, and disinfecting each note until it glitters like fake gold on a piece of pseudo-antique furniture. The keyboards, which dominate all the ballads and even some of the blues-rock numbers, are those modern (well, for 1989) synthesizers and electric pianos that never had any soul to begin with, glossy and boring like everything else; the guitars, always kept in strict check, give the impression of being pre-programmed; and the voice... well, the thing about Bonnie's voice, which has changed very little since the early days, is that most of the time it blended into the surroundings, and usually sounded exactly as good as the non-vocal instrumentation. Nick Of Time is no exception.

 

These songs aren't even «bad» per se — except maybe for the biggest hit, ʽHave A Heartʼ, whose robotic reggae rhythms are only the second worst thing after the chorus (each time she sings "hey, hey, have a heart!", I cannot instinctively understand if we are being implored for human mercy or if we are being offered a delicacy in a brand new restaurant opened up by cannibals). Some are even catchy, although that catchiness never ventures beyond the safe walls of predictable blues patterns, and the blues-and-ballads formula is strictly observed, the two main-and-only mottos being «don't mess around with tough mamas» and «tough mamas have broken hearts, too». Lack of taste, good sense, or adequacy is no good grounds for whipping out a subpoena — taken to court, Nick Of Time would have you roasted in return and paying all expenses.

 

But oh man, is it ever simply boring. «Lifeless» — no. There is plenty of life in that voice, it's just that it is an altogether uninteresting life, and I have no idea who could be emotionally en­tangled in it. These arrangements, where you have musicians forcefully restraining themselves so as not to break out of the «easy listening» mold — yes, songs like ʽI Will Not Be Deniedʼ and ʽReal Manʼ could have turned the spark into flame, if they'd let the former develop some instru­mental fury and the latter a sloppy-drunk aura, but no: word of the day is «sterilized», or there'd be no chance for a Grammy.

 

Even as somebody who is inevitably drifting closer to mid-age, and has an open attitude towards many records that may have seemed dull and plodding at 20, but take on new life as we get older, I cannot see myself ever cherishing an album like Nick Of Time, not even on any sort of death­bed. Clapton's Unplugged was really a different thing — a successful attempt to pour out some soul in a masterful series of acoustic reinventions, and it worked. Nick Of Time brings nothing new to the table except for gloss, calculation, and uninspired smoothness that tries to pass itself off as «experience».

 

Unfortunately, its commercial success, surpassing Bonnie's wildest expec­tations and making her into a household name after two decades of hanging on the fringes, would guarantee, iron will and all, that she'd pretty much spend the rest of her career trying to remake this album, over and over and over again. No, it is not the worst fate imaginable — Rod Stewart or even Clapton himself, with embarrassing attempts at «modernization» like Pilgrim, would produce plenty of «unlistenable» stuff — but sometimes you wonder what is really worse: go for total stiff «preservation», or try and change with the flow, even if this is done for obviously com­mercial purposes. As far as ratings are concerned, though, this is a fickle opposition: all things are equal in a thumbs down judgement.

 

LUCK OF THE DRAW (1991)

 

1) Something To Talk About; 2) Good Man, Good Woman; 3) I Can't Make You Love Me; 4) Tangled And Dark; 5) Come To Me; 6) No Business; 7) One Part Be My Lover; 8) Not The Only One; 9) Papa Come Quick; 10) Slow Ride; 11) Luck Of The Draw; 12) All At Once.

 

I will wholeheartedly admit that Luck Of The Draw, building up on the commercial success of Nick Of Time and managing to sell even more copies (as more and more baby boomers passed a certain age limit?), is a better album, and probably holds up a little better after all this time. How­ever, the only reason for this is us passing into the next decade — gradually wringing ourselves out of the clutches of truly bad, suffocating production. This time, everything is handled more smoothly, and has a much more «natural»-looking superficial flavor. Whether this lack of obvious ugliness makes for extra depth, not to mention entertainment, is a different thing.

 

I will even admit that ʽI Can't Make You Love Meʼ, one of those pillars of adult contemporary (yet also a song fully and completely rooted in early 1970s soft-rock / country-pop / whatever), is a song that operates efficiently on gut level. As much as I perversely expect, every single time, her to rhyme the line "here in the dark, in these final hours" with something ending in "golden showers" (admit it, it's such a natural rhyme, isn't it?), there is a real tug there on the "I can't make you love me" bit that Bonnie nails just right. She does have a knack for capturing that entire "two meters away from happiness, but no way we're gonna make it" vibe, and if only a little bit more effort went into the music...

 

...the problem, of course, being that the music is completely uninteresting. Blues, ballads, full arrangements, sparse arrangements, fast tempos, slow tempos — there is not a single guitar lick or piano chord to be found here that would step one inch out of the ordinary. Not one inch! As in, you know, you just don't want to mess up a good formula — no need to upset your potential audience. Consequently, the best track on the album is probably the one where little upsetting could be done in the first place, due to format limitations — the little acoustic ditty ʽPapa Come Quickʼ, with a New Orleanian accordeon overdub for company, sounding like something out of The Band's Cahoots stage, though less ambitious. It's traditional, predictable, enjoyable, forget­table, and unregrettable — everybody does just what they can do. In almost every case, much more could be done. But wasn't.

 

Where it can still get offensive is in the «message» area. For instance, ʽSomething To Talk Aboutʼ, written by Canadian songwriter Shirley Eikhard, is about — imagine that! — two repre­sentatives of the opposite sex wrongly assumed to be having an affair by the outside world and wishing to — you don't say! — capitalize on this. This almost TITILLATING, nearly ADULTE­ROUS subject should have probably been set to a nasty, sleazy, Stonesy soundtrack, but instead, all we get is some bland keyboards, some weak soul harmonies, and a shamefully lazy slide gui­tar solo that probably took three minutes to figure out. Not convincing!

 

A bit of atmosphere is injected in Bonnie's own ʽTangled And Darkʼ, although both the melody and the atmosphere have triggered an association with The Grateful Dead's ʽWest L. A. Fade­awayʼ in my mind — and probably not just in mine. (One thing that is special to this track is a set of brass overdubs that give it extra nocturnal, slightly spooky flavor.) On the other hand, the mix of «jello-wobble keyboards» and «ethnic» whistles on ʽOne Part Be My Loverʼ feels like an at­tempt to ride that New Age wave — not something that can, or should, be ever done in a half-assed manner: if you want to be Enya, you should go all the way and farther than that, or else you're simply channelling a new route for boredom and an inferiority complex.

 

In short, as we get to the title track, written by Paul Brady, there's a nagging suspicion that she means it: "Forget those movies you saw / It's in the luck of the draw / The natural law". That this album and its predecessor managed to enjoy such a huge success — out of literally hundreds of such releases — has very much to do with «the luck of the draw», and I am not even beginning to search for any scientific explanation. At the same time, if it's really luck and not well-program­med calculation, I guess that this eliminates the need to plant seeds of hatred for either Bonnie or her producer. Except for some of the really slow ballads and that whole inescapable sensation of «why-the-heck-am-I-listening-to-this-when-I-could-be-Superman», Luck Of The Draw is com­pletely inoffensive and perfectly listenable for all those who appreciate clean, smooth, professio­nal roots-rock, sometimes bordering on «adult contemporary». Comestible enough circa 1991, but who really wants to drag it along into the next century?

 

Except for Adele, perhaps, who has frequently covered ʽI Can't Make You Love Meʼ in live performance. But then again, with all due respect, Adele and her voice could make Bonnie Raitt's diary come alive, let alone one of her glossy ballads that does accidentally feature a pre-set wor­king hook from the very beginning.

 

LONGING IN THEIR HEARTS (1994)

 

1) Love Sneakin' Up On You; 2) Longing In Their Hearts; 3) You; 4) Cool, Clear Water; 5) Circle Dance; 6) I Sho Do; 7) Dimming Of The Day; 8) Feeling Of Falling; 9) Steal Your Heart Away; 10) Storm Warning; 11) Hell To Pay; 12) Shadow Of Doubt.

 

By the mid-1990s, Bonnie's sound gradually returned into the river bed of «straight» country-blues and blues-rock, cleaned up from the excesses of «synthetic» production. In fact, the only song on Longing In Their Hearts, her third album with Don Was, that would adequately fit the bill of «adult contemporary» is ʽYouʼ — for some reason, her biggest hit in the UK. Silky jazz-fusion bass and a hazy screen of synthesizers are responsible for this, even though the song would have sounded much better if things were kept down to just the acoustic guitar and accordeon; as a matter of fact, it does have quite a lovely vocal part, with Bonnie dropping her trademark rasp on the chorus and showing that she could have become quite an impressive falsetto crooner, had she wanted to. Fortunately, she did not, but nobody minds a little bit of falsetto.

 

Everything else is kept clean, tasteful, professional, and as for excitement, well, you now know very well what you are going to get. Surprisingly, it is not the fully arranged, rhythmic, «ener­getic-aggressive» blues-rockers this time that attract most of the attention, but the stripped-down balladeering stuff: as Bonnie ages, her vocal style becomes more and more sensitive and even sensual on the tender songs, whereas the «don't-mess-around-with-me» schtick gets less and less convincing. The best track on the album is arguably her cover of Richard Thompson's ʽDimming Of The Dayʼ — just a couple of acoustic guitars (some keyboards still make their way into the song midway through, but are kept down), some backing vocals, and wonderfully dramatic modulation throughout. The second best track is the swamp-blues ʽShadow Of Doubtʼ that closes the record — nothing extraordinary, but a nice enough synchronization of her voice with the slide guitar and harmonica overtones.

 

As soon as the band steps in, though, the whole thing becomes just another routine country-rock experience, the kind that you can get plenty of in just about any big or small American town that can allow itself to wine and dine some well-trained musicians. The title track; ʽI Sho Doʼ; ʽHell To Payʼ; and the record's biggest hit, ʽLove Sneakin' Up On Youʼ, all follow the same formula. ʽLoveʼ has the catchiest chorus of 'em all, but "it ain't nothing new", and, worse than that, it ain't nothing particularly credible. Everybody sounds professional, nobody sounds particularly in­spired — the message is delivered with the tone of a very boring college professor, completely disinterested in explaining a potentially exciting subject.

 

As usual, most of the mainstream reviews raved on about this one, though — and I guess that if you're in business for this kind of album, it would be hard to think of a better one. Everything is so perfectly in its right place and so perfectly «normal», one is either bound to love this silly or be bored to death. As much as certain people hate the solo career of Eric Clapton, at least that guy had it somehow going up and falling down, switching from relatively exciting highs to abysmal lows: with Bonnie, we have this technically unimpeachable formula where, at a certain point, you actually begin secretly wishing for an embarrassment — a techno beat with Autotune? a lengthy rap interlude? a duet with Montserrat Caballé? anything, just to keep the boredom away. Then you come back to your senses, of course, but that does not make the record any friendlier. Or, rather, it is already way too friendly to be any good.

 

ROAD TESTED (1995)

 

1) Thing Called Love; 2) Three Time Loser; 3) Love Letter; 4) Never Make Your Move Too Soon; 5) Something To Talk About; 6) Matters Of The Heart; 7) Shake A Little; 8) Have A Heart; 9) Love Me Like A Man; 10) The Kokomo Medley; 11) Louise; 12) Dimming Of The Day; 13) Longing In Their Hearts; 14) Come To Me; 15) Love Sneakin' Up On You; 16) Burning Down The House; 17) I Can't Make You Love Me; 18) Feeling Of Falling; 19) I Believe I'm In Love With You; 20) Rock Steady; 21) My Opening Farewell; 22) Angel From Montgomery.

 

From a logical perspective, live Bonnie Raitt should always be better than studio Bonnie Raitt — less gloss, more energy, better opportunities to let herself really go on that slide, in short, every­thing to celebrate the spirit rather than worship the form. Which, of course, begs for the question: why wait so long? Surely a live recording from the old «drunken days» would have captured a little more fire, not to mention a little higher percentage of good songs?..

 

The answer is that in the 1970s, Bonnie Raitt was not as much «part of the machine» as she be­came with Nick Of Time, and since she did not sell that much, nobody, herself least of all, pro­bably thought that a live album could help raise any serious extra cash. But now, with three commer­cially successful albums in a row under her belt, a live follow-up would seem like the most ob­vious thing. Precautions were taken, however — Bonnie Raitt on her own could hardly have sold as much as Bonnie Raitt and Friends. And if old-timers like Jackson Browne and R&B veterans Ruth and Charles Brown are not necessarily going to cut it, then relatively recent chart toppers like Bruce Hornsby and Bryan Adams sure will.

 

Even the setlist has been constructed with almost mathematical precision. Four songs from her latest, for promotional reasons. Three songs each from Nick Of Time and Luck Of The Draw — her biggest commercial successes to date. Three more songs from Sweet Forgiveness, the only album from her past that could be called commercially successful, to a degree (odd enough, no ʽRunawayʼ, though). And a small bunch of songs, usually one per album, from her earliest period when she was still interesting as an individual artist, so that nobody could accuse Road Tested of not presenting an accurate chronological portrait of Bonnie Raitt, all the accents dutifully lodged in their right places.

 

Big surprise of the day involves the band offering a lively take on Talking Heads' ʽBurning Down The Houseʼ, even though none of the Heads is guesting on the recording (which, by the way, was made on July 11-19, 1995, at the Paramount Theater in Oakland). The groove is lifted reasonably well, but Bonnie Raitt replacing David Byrne is a bit like Al Gore replacing Woody Allen — to­tally different personalities, and if you take the vocal atmosphere of irony and paranoia away from the song, the song becomes pointless. And, with all due respect, you couldn't find an artist less capable of playing absurd character roles than the totally straightforward Bonnie Raitt. In all honesty, I'd rather see her doing ʽClose To The Edgeʼ than this.

 

Anyway, getting right to the bottom of it, the big deal about Road Tested is that you get more spontaneity and more slide guitar solos, with ʽKokomoʼ, for me, being the obvious high point of the show — but honestly, just about every song from these last three albums is enhanced when you don't have your engineer diligently smoothing out all the sharp edges. This is never good enough to make me fall in love with any of these songs (and no spontaneity can save ʽHave A Heartʼ), but good enough to make me forget for an occasional moment or so just how much Bonnie Raitt had become the walking/sliding symbol of adult contemporary. Unfortunately, as soon as Bryan Adams walks out on stage to duet with the lady on their collectively written ʽRock Steadyʼ, that old nasty feeling kicks back with all its might. And just how many songs titled ʽRock Steadyʼ does the world need, I wonder?..

 

One final moment, though: if you want to try a bite of this anyway, try to lay your hands on the DVD edition rather than the one-disc or two-disc CD edition. Somehow, Bonnie's self-assured strut­ting, mighty red hair, sexy black outfit, and visual slide technique all seem much, much more cool than whatever you get from just the audio channels. Much of that visual image is in common with certain female country music superstars, of course, but she is still on the bluesier side of things, and at least there ain't no flag-waving or anything like that. It's also fascinating how her less-than-stunning looks circa 1972 had paid off so splendidly, as she hardly looks one day older in 1995 than she did more than twenty years earlier. Totally stable mediocrity can be worth some re­spect, too — although in a better world, Bonnie Raitt might have become the female equivalent of a Rory Gallagher, and earn herself much more respect than that. Less money, though.

 

FUNDAMENTAL (1998)

 

1) The Fundamental Things; 2) Cure For Love; 3) Round & Round; 4) Spit Of Love; 5) Lover's Will; 6) Blue For No Reason; 7) Meet Me Half Way; 8) I'm On Your Side; 9) Fearless Love; 10) I Need Love; 11) One Belief Away.

 

You can probably already guess without scrolling that Fundamental will be anything but. "Let's get back to the fundamental things", the first track incites us, but if so, what's up with the produc­tion? Its «moaning» guitar hook may have a certain primal potential, but everything else is just the same old cozily packaged gloss, as overseen by Bonnie herself, her new co-producers Tchad Blake and Mitchell Froom, and her latest big bunch of assistant songwriters, too numerous to mention — loaded with songwriting and playing regalia to boot, but boring.

 

Perhaps what they really want to say is that Fundamental takes a sharp turn from the primarily commercial sound of the previous albums back into blues territory. Or, more precisely, just «takes a turn» — the word ʽsharpʼ is better not used in any descriptive Bonnie Rait chronology. Maybe so: the album feels bluesier on the whole, with no adult contemporary ballads on it and only one cod-reggaeified number to close out the proceedings (ʽOne Belief Awayʼ). If that is an achievement, feel free to rate Fundamental much higher than Nick Of Time and its offspring. If you do not care all that much for the way Bonnie Raitt plays the blues (in the studio, at least), feel free to pass up on it like on everything else.

 

The closest that the record actually comes to some real fire is probably on ʽSpit Of Loveʼ, a self-written song that talks about the «aggressive» side of love business and tries to create a suitable atmosphere, with deep dark basslines, threatening electric piano, and «howling» lead guitar parts which are probably the most experimental thing that Raitt had done on guitar in God-knows-how-many years. Towards the end, when she adds some playful vocal howling as well, it almost manages to sound spooky for a little bit. And even so, there is always that hard-to-define some­thing that prevents the song from crossing the threshold of greatness. What is it? Why is the simi­larly styled ʽRun Through The Jungleʼ a Fogerty masterpiece and this one just one of the more decent Bonnie Raitt tracks? No idea. Just intuition.

 

Still, on a scale of A and B, where B = «awfully bland, spoiled by too much sentimentality and production gloss» and A = «listenable, mildly tasteful, instantly forgettable», which seems to pretty much exhaust the range of Bonnie Raitt in her post-alcohol days, Fundamental is a bona fide A all the way. The Los Lobos cover ʽCure For Loveʼ has some Chicago-style shrill electric guitar soloing; the Willie Dixon cover ʽRound & Roundʼ is friendly acoustic dance-blues (those soporific "round and round and round..." vocal harmonies really have to go, though); John Hiatt's ʽLovers Willʼ has probably the best pure slide guitar solo on the album, one of those reminders that the lady has to do an instrumental album dedicated to the art of slide playing before she goes; and ʽI Need Loveʼ, by Joey Spampinato, is kinda funny, set as it is to the ʽGet Backʼ rhythm and featuring a fairly unorthodox approach to soloing for a Bonnie Raitt song (as if somebody were messing with a harpsichord from the inside of the instrument for a few bars).

 

This is still not really enough for a proper thumbs up, but at least the quality curve perks up a little bit — at the same time as Raitt's commercial potential began to drop down again, what with the album only going to No. 17 (it still managed to reach platinum status, but not multi-platinum as its predecessors): apparently, a large subset of Bonnie's admirers was not too pleased about the lack of plasticine-heavenly ballads, so they all went to buy Eric Clapton's Pilgrim instead. Which does remind me that, as tepid as these Raitt albums are, I'd rather have her retro attitude all the way than the horrendous attempts to «modernize» one's roots-rock sound like the one that pretty much cut the throat of Clapton's recording career with Pilgrim.

 

SILVER LINING (2002)

 

1) Fools Game; 2) I Can't Help You Now; 3) Silver Lining; 4) Time Of Our Lives; 5) Gnawin' On It; 6) Monkey Business; 7) Wherever You May Be; 8) Valley Of Pain; 9) Hear Me Lord; 10) No Gettin' Over You; 11) Back Around; 12) Wounded Heart.

 

«Raitt's singing has never been more finely tuned, especially on... the final track, ʽWounded Heartʼ, a breathtaking duet recorded in one take with keyboardist Benmont Tench; after nailing it, Raitt reportedly fled the studio, moved to tears; any second attempt proved both undoable and unnecessary» (Robert L. Doerschuk, All-Music Guide; I have not been able to find additional confirmation, but no clear reason to disbelieve the story).

 

This pretty much tells us all we need to know, because ʽWounded Heartʼ, a piano ballad written by contemporary singer-songwriter Jude Johnstone (who also included it on her own debut album which came out twenty days after Silver Lining), is the very definition of «trivial»: the entire song rides on exactly one endlessly repeated and not particularly fresh (to say the least) musical phrase, and the lyrics go like this: "If you listen you can hear the angels' wings / Up above our heads so near they are hovering / Waiting to reach out for love when it falls apart / When it can­not rise above a wounded heart". You could pardon bad wording if it were set to glorious music, or you could pardon the boring music if it were accompanying brilliantly stringed verbal phrasing, but damn, this is bad — generic, corny singer-songwriter fluff that doesn't even begin to ap­proach the level of some of Bonnie's old ballads like ʽLouiseʼ, let alone any really high standards of ballad writing. ʽWounded Heartʼ? More like ʽWooden Heartʼ if you ask me.

 

In other words, the relative «comeback» that she had with Fundamental has pretty much ended, as we see Ms. Raitt return to the comfortable territory of soft-rock / adult contemporary. The entire album consists of bland ballads, limp rockers with a funky underbelly but no energy what­soever, and somnambulant folk-pop, completely devoid of hooks, fresh ideas, or individuality. The miriad of players and contributing songwriters are completely unrecognizable to me — seeing as how I have little interest in this particular marketline — and not a single song here stimulates me into getting to know any one of them better (I did skim through a couple tracks off that debut album by Jude Johnston — my bad).

 

In the middle of it all, though, unexpectedly comes ʽGnawin' On Itʼ, a blues-rocker with a dirty, distorted rhythm track reminiscent of Paul Burlison's playing in the Johnny Burnette trio — in other words, a real good sound as compared to everything else on this flaccid affair, and in order to match it, Bonnie digs deep and recovers some of her trademark gritty huskiness. The slide work on the track is also good and merges fine with Steve Berlin's sax — what I'm a-guessin' is that Los Lobos had their hand here, as well as Roy Rogers, a fine guitar player who had first made his name with John Lee Hooker in the 1980s... well, all right, some people with a sense of taste actually were involved in the making of this record. Too bad they only made one track sound like it had a decent pair of musical balls attached.

 

Do not get me wrong: softness, tenderness, emotionality, sensitivity, vulnerability are all very much welcome on a Bonnie Raitt record, or on anybody else's record — as long as they go hand in hand with some melodic or vocal move that is at least remotely interesting, unlike the dissipa­ted atmospheric phrasing of, say, the title track, which combines a hell of a lot of different string, keyboard, and percussion ins­truments into a melting pot where they never come together into anything coherent or more-than-superficially-pretty. Worse still, many of these songs try to rock (ʽFools Gameʼ, ʽMonkey Businessʼ) — but why would you want to listen to Bonnie Raitt going middle-of-the-road funky, when you can listen to, say, Prince going all the way? What would you be — afraid to enjoy somebody going all the way? Maybe that is what «adult contemporary» is all about — people too scared to turn their emotional stove up all the way, or it might, you know, blow up and hurt somebody.

 

Total thumbs down — and I am not taking that pun-based hint from the match between the album title and the «silver lining» foxily flashing out of the ongoing general redness of the lady's hair. If this is her way of communicating to us that one need not be afraid of aging, and that aging only brings on more wisdom and a sharpened sense of responsibility (towards one's fans, for in­stance), I will opt for a whole load of irresponsible stupidity instead.

 

SOULS ALIKE (2005)

 

1) I Will Not Be Broken; 2) God Was In The Water; 3) Love On One Condition; 4) So Close; 5) Trinkets; 6) Crooked Crown; 7) Unnecessarily Mercenary; 8) I Don't Want Anything To Change; 9) Deep Water; 10) Two Lights In The Nighttime; 11) The Bed I Made.

 

There's a little less tepid funk and wishy-washy adult contemporary on Souls Alike than on Sil­ver Lining — and a little bit more blues and jazz; consequently, it marks a (at least temporary) return to Dullsville from Offensivetown. There might even be a small handful of relatively decent songs for those who normally despise all forms of «soft rock». The problem is, 2005 is not the kind of year where anybody could have a «change of heart» concerning anything that might be done by the likes of Bonnie Raitt, and a detailed discussion of any such album could only be of interest to hardcore fans with a penchant for distinguishing between the «fifty shades of grey».

 

Not addressing that category, we shall keep it very brief here. Randall Bramblett's ʽGod Was In The Waterʼ is a pretty good song — dark, unsettling country-blues, well adorned here with bitter­ly, but rather unsentimentally weeping organs, wah-wahs, and swampy slides, and even the lyrics are good, finding a fresh angle for the old perspective: "God was in the water that day... / Castin' out a line to the darkness / Castin' out a line but no one's biting". And Bonnie's bitterish vocal tone is practically perfect for this particular setting.

 

Emory Joseph's ʽTrinketsʼ is another standout: introspective nostalgia without the obligatory sappiness, sort of a «talking blues» (at times, coming close to «rapping blues») with a bit of musi­cal muscle, not particularly catchy, but each of Bonnie's bitter dry "when I was a kid..." verses has a whiff of intrigue. I mean, with a little bit of imagination you could see Lou Reed doing a song like this, and it's a rare Bonnie Raitt song that allows you to cast such a projection. Nicely fluent piano and slide dialog in the outro, too.

 

Finally, there is Jon Cleary's ʽUnnecessarily Mercenaryʼ, a sly, but big-hearted New Orleanian romp that could actually benefit from a brass section — but the well-worded chorus remains memorable even without any extra support. Cleary himself plays the piano solo, and he pretty much owns the song (as well as any other song here where he is prominent enough), being a well schooled disciple of the Professor Longhair / Dr. John school of Mardi Gras Keyboards. As usual, just a tad more energy and wildness couldn't have hurt, but it's still fun.

 

The rest is hardly worth a mention — blues and ballads, gently rippling through the air without generating much excitement. The trip-hop beats on ʽDeep Waterʼ are an intentional «modernis­tic» nod that fails for that exact reason (do it because it's good, not because it's a special gesture that puts a chronological seal on the album). The final number, ʽThe Bed I Madeʼ, is a moody jazz ballad written by David Batteau where Bonnie tries to be Madeleine Peyroux, but she doesn't have the voice or the knack for it — so at least there's more going on here than on ʽWounded Heartʼ, but it is still a very (appropriately) sleepy conclusion for an overall sleepy album. So just borrow ʽGod Was In The Waterʼ for your «Contemporary Roots-Rock Nuggets» compilation and ʽUnnecessarily Mercenaryʼ for your «New Orleans Lives!» compilation and feel free to forget the rest if you feel like forgetting the rest.

 

BONNIE RAITT AND FRIENDS (2006)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Unnecessarily Mercenary; 3) I Will Not Be Broken; 4) God Was In The Water; 5) Gnawin' On It; 6) You; 7) Love Letter; 8) Two Lights In The Nighttime; 9) Well, Well, Well; 10) Something To Talk About; 11) I Don't Want Anything To Change; 12) Love Sneakin' Up On You.

 

Once again, this significantly shortened version of the show is objectively inferior to the complete DVD release — not because more Bonnie Raitt (and friends) is better Bonnie Raitt (and friends), but because watching the lady perform is somehow always a more satisfactory experience than hearing the lady perform, even if for this particular evening (September 30, 2005, at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City) it seems as if she slightly overdid it with the «amazing technicolor dreamcoat», in Tim Rice's words. Fortunately, no jealous brothers of Joseph stuck around long enough to tear that outfit to bits after the show.

 

The actual guests include Wolfman, Dracula and his son... that is, I meant to say, there is Keb' Mo', Ben Harper, Alison Krauss, and Norah Jones — four major professionals with impeccable taste, four «keepers of the flame» who keep it relatively low, but firm and steady, and, just like Bonnie herself, each of them could be accused of being frequently bland and even more frequent­ly boring, but not of not knowing their craft. Consequently and predictably, the album is even, well-combed, tastefully sensitive, and instantaneously forgettable.

 

A large part of the problem is the setlist, though: I was actually hoping that with a supporting pool like that, Bonnie had a chance of actually going back to the roots of the roots and doing stuff like, well, for instance, a whole bunch of cover versions of old urban blues and country blues numbers — recuperate some Sippie Wallace and/or Memphis Minnie obscurities, for instance. Alas, six out of twelve numbers included here are taken directly from her latest album, and most of the others do not go back further than Nick Of Time, either. So what's the big deal?

 

As it happens, Keb' Mo' is pretty much wasted on ʽLove Letterʼ (he does play better lead guitar than on the studio original, but the solos are too short and non-flashy to notice that). Norah Jones duets with Bonnie on ʽI Don't Want Anything To Changeʼ, a limp, all-atmosphere ballad from the latest album that hardly gains anything from the addition of Norah's «affected» singing style (for some reason, that little «wheeze» of hers really irritates me, direct predecessor as it is to the even more atrocious «husky» style of such glossily packaged femme-fatales as Lana del Rey). Much better is the duet with Krauss on ʽYouʼ — a good idea to bring in an additional spoonful of vocal beauty to a song that was already quite pretty in the first place.

 

But arguably the major highlight is the duet between Bonnie and Ben Harper on ʽWell, Well, Wellʼ, an old-timey blues tune with new lyrics (by Dylan himself) but that old Blind Willie Johnson spirit. They tear it up on the acoustic and slide guitars so fabulously (well, maybe «tear» is not quite the right word) that, once again, I have no idea why so much of that other space had to be wasted on the adult contemporary crap or faithful renditions of decent tunes like ʽUnneces­sary Mercenaryʼ and ʽGod Was In The Waterʼ that simply sound like identical twins of their studio counterparts. Yes, it is still «smooth» and «safe», but I'd rather see Bonnie Raitt go on car­rying a time-honored tradition than engaging in a time-dishonored one.

 

Ultimately, if you want to interpret «Bonnie Raitt and Friends» as «Bonnie Raitt gets together with some mighty fine blues musicians and dabbles in old-time fun with the lot of 'em», do not. Really, this is mostly just Bonnie Raitt promoting her latest album in a non-totally-dull fashion. That album was not among her worst, and the friends do provide some extra amusement, and the live CD goes down well (and the live DVD even better), but ain't nothing to write home about even if you are in the habit of writing home about Bonnie Raitt, in which case you must be a pretty weird specimen of H.S.S.

 

SLIPSTREAM (2012)

 

1) Used To Rule The World; 2) Right Down The Line; 3) Million Miles; 4) You Can't Fail Me Now; 5) Down To You; 6) Take My Love With You; 7) Not Cause I Wanted To; 8) Ain't Gonna Let You Go; 9) Marriage Made In Hollywood; 10) Split Decision; 11) Standing In The Doorway; 12) God Only Knows.

 

Odd, but I like this album. It isn't altogether different from any other Bonnie Raitt album, but I like it more than anything she's offered us in... let's see here... scroll up... scroll up... scroll... scroll... more scroll... okay, Green Light was the last time I gave her a thumbs up, wasn't it? well, looks like the most sympathetic (cautiously refraining from using the word «best») record she gave us in thirty years. Quite a record, that.

 

Good choice of co-producer in Joe Henry (never mind that the guy is married to Madonna's sister: his production credits include veterans like Mose Allison, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Solomon Burke, as well as Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm, so he's cool by me). Relatively small band mostly consisting of Bonnie regulars (the Hutchinson-Fataar rhythm section, etc.) and some sur­prising guests like experimental guitar guru Bill Frisell. Very few signs of adult contemporary. But most importantly — there's a touch of sharpness here throughout, chasing out the flabbiness and genericity whose shadow haunted Bonnie's work since Nick Of Time (and some acid-ton­gued folks would say, since she first stepped into the studio).

 

It is something on which you cannot put a finger at all — just a pinch of crispness in the vocals, bitterness in the playing, a slightly grumblier tone for the electric rhythm guitar, a basic instinc­tive feeling that is slowly generated out of a hundred tiny nuances. It may have something to do with the lady's age: as she hops over the 60-year barrier and feels that two thirds, or maybe more than two thirds of the way have passed by, a sniff of the imminent scythe (cynically speaking) sometimes works wonders for the artist. Hardly a coincidence, wouldn't you say, that she covers here not one, but two songs from Dylan's Time Out Of Mind — probably the most quintessential «death harbinger» album from a rock veteran? None of the two are ʽNot Dark Yetʼ, but that would have been way too obvious.

 

However, Slipstream on the whole is not a slow, moody, soft-textured record. ʽUsed To Rule The Worldʼ is not a particularly optimistic title for the album's opening song — indeed, written once again by Randall Bramblett, it is a set of bitter thoughts on the failed illusions of the baby-boomer generation — but in its own restrained way, it rocks, and Raitt spits out the angry sum­marizations ("Your life had come and gone / Now you're mystified / Standing with the rest of us / Who used to rule the world") as if the blame were to be placed on the baby boomers themselves (and maybe that is exactly where it is to be placed), as well as delivers her fieriest slide work in ages, both here and on several other of the rocking tracks. (Actually, her best slide work on the album is on ʽSplit Decisionʼ, a humorous «boxing» song full of lyrical double entendres, written by guitarist Al Anderson who also figuratively duels with Bonnie on the solo parts — this is as close as a Bonnie Raitt song ever gets to «fun» and «exciting»).

 

The Dylan covers are done really well, and I mean musically, not merely in a «Bonnie sings them credibly» manner, which would be dull, because she sings almost everything credibly (dull). But on ʽMillion Milesʼ, there is a mean, swampy, overtone-loaded slide solo, and on ʽStanding In The Doorwayʼ, there are some really exquisite slide licks that remind me better than anything else how she can turn the instrument from slithering snake to high-hoppin' singin' bird in a single moment. And, no doubt, this all has to do with the fact that these are just the right songs selected by her at exactly the right time — in fact, I am sure that the album could have been even better had she simply decided to donate 70% of the space to appropriately selected Dylan covers. Hey, the man has written gazillions of songs on death and despair — each of them more gripping than anything Gerry Rafferty or Kelly Price could offer.

 

Slipstream is Raitt's first album of original material since 2005 — seven years between albums is the longest break she ever took, and while there is no evidence whatsoever that it might be her last record, it does look as if now, at her age, she were still interested in regularly expectorating new stuff like clockwork, which is good, because it gives more opportunities for a meaningful statement on something fundamental every now and then. Perhaps my scent has been misled by the seductive Dylan covers, or by too much theorizing, but what the heck, just one more thumbs up will not hurt anybody. We will even overlook the fact that the quasi-obligatory boring piano ballad at the end has the nerve to be titled the same way as Paul McCartney's favorite song in the world, despite not being worthy to kiss its footprints.

 

Two things annoy me the most about Ms. Raitt — her way-too-tight in­tegration in the formulaic roots-rock industry, and her courteous self-restraint and «politeness». Slipstream may still be well integrated and much too gallant for its own good, but at least this time around, it doesn't exactly make a cult of these values, and we'll take it as a positive sign. And if it does happen to be the last Bonnie Raitt album, we'll take it as an even more positive sign — as decent as it is on the whole, I seriously doubt that she will be ever able to top it.

 

DIG IN DEEP (2016)

 

1) Unintended Consequence Of Love; 2) Need You Tonight; 3) I Knew; 4) All Alone With Something To Say; 5) What You're Doin' To Me; 6) Shakin' Shakin' Shakes; 7) Undone; 8) If You Need Somebody; 9) Gypsy In Me; 10) The Comin' Round Is Going Through; 11) You've Changed My Mind; 12) The Ones We Couldn't Be.

 

The unimaginativeness of those album covers is beginning to get me down, but then again, it does fit in very well with the music. So here we are now — another four years, another album that shows Bonnie doing her thing, not giving a damn, getting rave reviews from mainstream critics for doing her thing and not giving a damn, and pretty much ignored by the world at large and probably to be forgotten at the precise moment that she releases her next one, despite all the rave reviews and despite doing her thing and despite not giving a damn.

 

Is there anything particularly unpredictable here? Well, she covers Los Lobos (ʽShakin' Shakin' Shakesʼ), which is sort of a first, and INXS (ʽNeed You Tonightʼ), which is a complete surprise, but then ʽNeed You Tonightʼ is one of the band's most rocking tunes, and it's cool to see Bonnie's band redo it in the manner of a Stones' rocker (incidentally, the Stones themselves had already recycled the song's trademark trilling riff on ʽLook What The Cat Dragged Inʼ ten years before). For that matter, a lot of stuff here sounds like Stones-lite — Bonnie's second guitarist George Marinelli suddenly decides to go all Keith Richards on tracks like ʽThe Comin' Round Is Going Throughʼ, while Bonnie's slide lead wraps around him like a Ronnie Wood solo.

 

Not that I mind — in fact, at this time I don't mind at all whatever she is doing, because neither the Stonesy rockers nor the country ballads sound annoying or distasteful: there are no objections I could raise against the arrangement and production values of the tunes, or against the professio­nalism or even against Bonnie's vocals: now, after all those years, she finally reaps the fruits, with a vocal delivery every bit as strong and technically perfect as it was forty-five years ago, when her vocals were considered emotionally and technically mediocre compared to so many of her peers... and where are her peers now? But if you want a nuanced opinion, I'd say that Dig In Deep is a little weaker than Slipstream, because it sounds more like a bunch of bluesy jams re­corded for fun in the studio rather than a record with an attitude.

 

That's about all I can say before I turn into Thom Jurek of the All-Music Guide and start pepper­ing you with enticing, but meaningless phrases like "her earthy singing voice is more disciplined and holds more emotional authority than ever before". Isn't "disciplined" sort of the opposite of "emotional"? And, anyway, if what he is trying to say is that Bonnie Raitt only gets better as she gets older, wouldn't that be somewhat underselling her early records? As far as I can tell, she's just stuck in a formula, and all she can do is polish that formula to professional perfection, and the only reason why this stuff is preferable to the Nick Of Time era (and it is) is because it avoids the pitfalls of hollow, soulless production. And that's about it.

 

PS. I actually enjoyed listening to this album, and even toe-tapped and played air guitar on a couple of tracks. Honestly, I did. I'm just jotting this down because I will most likely never ever hear it again, so check: "In 2016, I did truly and verily enjoy Bonnie Raitt's Dig In Deep". Let posterity be the judge.

 

BRAND X

UNORTHODOX BEHAVIOUR (1976)

 

1) Nuclear Burn; 2) Euthanasia Waltz; 3) Born Ugly; 4) Smacks Of Euphoric Hysteria; 5) Unorthodox Behaviour; 6) Running On Three; 7) Touch Wood.

 

I kind of like that album cover, you know. Oh man, that look, that priceless look in the guy's sole discernible eye peeking out at you from behind the blinds, as if saying: «Yeah, hi everybody, it's me, your old friend Phil from Genesis, but shh, don't tell anybody I'm playing in this fusion band, see, they'll sort of beat me up if they find out, they'll maybe even do bad things to my contract, and then I won't be able to write ʽFollow You Follow Meʼ and change the face of the music busi­ness, but you know, they're telling all sorts of bad things about me now, but what I really like to do most of all is just drum like crazy in a fusion band, see, and we got this new fusion team all lined up for you to hear just how cool I can be behind the drumset, because those frickin' buddies of mine out there in Genesis, they're all these folk-and-classical nutsos, they have no idea how to syncopate, and I'm a major Buddy Rich fan and all, and... uh... d'you think I'm letting too much sun inside this place?..»

 

Okay, fun's over. In reality, the album sleeve was designed by the mighty Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis fame, and the partial face staring at you from behind the blinds most likely has nothing to do with either Phil Collins or any other member of the band. It is just an artistic trick, really, that would make you think that something creepy, weird, and maybe even illegal, or at least per­verted, is going on — especially when taken in combo with the album title. So, like any normal person, you rush out to immediately buy it... only to discover that the music behind it is rather standard fare jazz-fusion, without any such deeply questionable connotations. Still, the illusion, once generated, does not go away so quickly. There's a sick mystery tied in to the album cover, so eventually you will still be trying to pick up on it in different corners. Besides, one of the tracks is called ʽEuthanasia Waltzʼ. I mean, how sick is that?..

 

Not particularly sick. The band, which was really started off almost by accident, through some executive fancy at Island Records, consisted of «core» members John Goodsall on guitar (pre­viously only known from a brief stint in Atomic Rooster), Percy Jones on bass (previously not known at all), and Robin Lumley on keyboards (likewise) — and Phil Collins just happened to be walking by as they began thinking about growing up from a meandering «jam band» into some­thing more serious and equipped with a recording contract. Phil, having just ascertained his future as lead singer in Genesis with the success of A Trick Of The Tail, probably felt himself ready to tackle two completely different projects at the same time — especially since the Genesis project never really allowed him to show off everything that he could do with his kit.

 

Now, as far as I can tell, «fusion» is generally allowed a rather low quota in public memory — despite the enormous wealth of fusion-style material to come out of the Seventies, most people only remember two or three figures, maybe John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea... some might come up with Weather Report or mention the brief «fusion period» of Jeff Beck, and the rest is really mostly for connoisseurs.The reasons are simple enough — the marriage between jazz and rock was not all that warmly embraced by fans on either side, with jazzmen thinking that it was a sellout and rockers thinking that it was a wankfest. And indeed, even to my ears a lot of fusion sounds like both things at the same time. But there are exceptions, even credited to names that are not as big as Chick Corea, and I think Unorthodox Behaviour is an excellent record that belongs in that category.

 

First, the album hits a very decent balance between «meaningful composition» and «technical proficiency». These players are all undeniable professionals with impressive technique, but they rarely, if ever, strive to amaze the player with million-notes-per-second, flight-of-the-bumblebee-in-under-one-minute runthroughs and the like — heck, there's not even a single drum solo any­where in sight. The emphasis is often on groove and sometimes on improvisation, but most often it is on perfectly stating a theme, developing it and carrying it to a logical conclusion: Brand X really compose, they do not merely rely on the Great Sonic Spirit to take them into the strato­sphere and drag them through an endless chain of space bars and galactic hangouts.

 

Second, some of the themes are really quite engaging. ʽNuclear Burnʼ, for instance, takes about a minute and a half for the players to «gather themselves», warm up and tone their muscles around a collected groove, and then to launch into the slightly Spanish-influenced Goodsall guitar theme, aggressive and melancholic at the same time, fast, complex, and yet totally memorable, especially when it is echoed to a tee by Phil's drumming patterns. ʽBorn Uglyʼ starts out as something hot and funky, with a groove not unlike any given James Brown number, but soon makes it known that its main hook will not be the funky guitar, but a series of three-chord sequences played by Lumley that sound as if they'd rather belong in a pop song — and so, what's a nice piano chord like you doing in a funky groove like this? Well, don't ask me, really, but I find the contrast hila­rious, and its establishment at the beginning of the tune makes it easier to sit through the entire eight minutes, even if later on it does tend to meander and sometimes degenerate into empty finger-flashing (for very brief periods of time, though).

 

It is not every day, indeed, that you find good strong riffs in fusion, but Goodsall comes up with a riff that is most certainly good and strong in ʽSmacks Of Euphoric Hysteriaʼ — maybe not the best title for a track that rather resembles the triumphant dance of a belligerent tribe on the eve of their first major military victory, euphoric, perhaps, but not particularly hysterical. It is also not every day that you find fusioneers influenced by Brian Eno, but the title track here is indeed based on Eno's ʽOver Fire Islandʼ, borrowing its rhythmic pattern and bass line and extending the formerly spooky two-minute piece of incidental music into an eight-minute long exploration of «musical jungle», as guitars, keyboards, and chimes engage in dialogs, trialogs, and polylogs like birds and beasts in the trees, while the bass melody ties them all together like The Force. Kudos to Lumley for all the hilarious bells-and-whistles from his keyboards — they make it all sound really, really cool, and Phil provides a suitably convincing tribalistic backing.

 

Most of all, Unorthodox Behaviour is just fun. All you have to do is to let it through the proper gate in your mind, and a record that might seem dull and generic under different conditions will suddenly appear as sprightly, colorful, and amusing, completely free from both the annoying pedantism and the murky pessimism that often make fusion hard to stand. These gents here are not really trying to show you how great they are (well, perhaps Phil is trying, just a little, but cut the guy some slack — after five years spent sitting in the dark behind some guy in flower costumes and fox masks, you'd probably want to show off, too), nor are they trying to prepare you for the end of the world or even to crack open your overwhelmed and superawed mind. They're just sharing some light, harmless, positive fun with you. I'd say, for one, that that is pretty unorthodox behaviour, wouldn't you agree? Thumbs up, of course.

 

MOROCCAN ROLL (1977)

 

1) Sun In The Night; 2) Why Should I Lend You Mine (When You've Broken Off Yours Already); 3) Maybe I'll Lend You Mine After All; 4) Hate Zone; 5) Collapsar; 6) Disco Suicide; 7) Orbits; 8) Malaga Virgen; 9) Macrocosm.

 

The title of the album is a pun that is somewhat misleading, because, while this album certainly contains a dose of rock and roll and shows some definite Moroccan (or North African / Near Eastern in general) influences, neither the first nor the second components are all that essential to its essence and success. Instead, what Moroccan Roll is really about is team playing: like most of the good fusion albums, what matters is how the musicians gather around the groove, regard­less of where the groove is coming from — jazz, blues, Malhun, Chaabi, or polka.

 

In fact, Eastern influences are mainly limited here to the first track, ʽSun In The Nightʼ, which is fairly atypical of the album as a whole — a slow, quasi-spiritual-meditative number with sitars, ethnic percussion (some or all of it contributed by new band member Morris Pert), and, most surprisingly, vocals from Phil Collins, singing in Sanskrit, no less. It's only a few lines, repeated several times, but still, somewhat of an achievement — too bad he didn't try that one again on No Jacket Required, it might have helped save his reputation with the progressively-minded. The results are amusing rather than enlightening — as, to tell you the truth, would seem to be the gene­ral case with jazz-blues-rock people straightforwardly appropriating Indian, Near, or Far Eastern motives for «deep-reaching spiritual purposes» — but the track does generate positive vibrations, and is almost guaranteed to make you smile.

 

Already on the second track, though, Moroccan Roll becomes More Unorthodox Behaviour: once more we enter the realm of funky beats, syncopated bass grooves, speedy guitar runs, and sci-fi era keyboards. The good news is that the band remains inspired and dedicated, and you can see that they are still having fun playing together. It does not always result in memorable music: the 11-minute long ʽWhy Should I Lend You Mineʼ gives the impression of being seriously im­provised, with the first part of the jam played at a steady mid-tempo, but never really going any­where in particular, and the second part slowing down to a crawl and attempting to generate a romantic, but maybe slightly dangerous nocturnal atmosphere. It is all too easy to dismiss it as a boring noodlefest — much less so if you approach it from a «free flight» angle, just watching all four (five?) players trying to stay coordinated with each other and yet take the groove in a slightly different direction every twenty seconds. Sure it's a typical thing with jazz/blues improvisation, but not everybody always sounds like a natural at this.

 

Amusingly, it is precisely this somewhat meandering jam that is credited in its entirety to Phil Collins — soon-to-become master of the concise (and much more annoying) pop hook. As we move on to tracks credited to Lumley, Goodsall, and Jones, we end up with tighter grooves and more distinctly expressed themes: ʽHate Zoneʼ has a lightly ominous descending riff whose final cadence leads us into a sort of «funky hell», punctuated by jerky bass and guitar figures; ʽDisco Suicideʼ has nothing whatsoever to do with disco (and, I would like to hope, with suicide), but is instead a moody, contemplative track for most of its duration, filled with romantic piano solos and even a brief chime-and-choral part at the end — celebrating the suicide of disco with bells and joyful da-da-da's? whatever. Finally, the mid-section of ʽMacrocosmʼ is the fastest bit on the entire album, with some amazing guitar/drum interplay, even if the track as a whole does not quite justify the ambitious title — these guys still have a long way to go if they want their music to reflect a Mahler-type vision or something like that.

 

Amusingly, I'd say that this is one Brand X album that probably has most in common with contemporary Genesis — its overall contemplative, but simultaneously fussy mood, mixed with an ounce of melancholy and gloom, a slightly autumnal atmosphere, would be quite compatible with Wind & Wuthering, and fairly representative of «the autumn of prog» in general. But then again, one shouldn't be reading too much into a rather light-hearted venture like this — just give it one more thumbs up and move on.

 

PS. And yes, apparently so it seems that the album was originally (mis)titled Morrocan Roll, but don't blame them record people too much for this. Everybody's entitled to a mispelleng every once in a while, and besides, it's sort of a relief to know that people were as bad with names of foreign countries in 1977 as they are now.

 

LIVESTOCK (1977)

 

1) Nightmare Patrol; 2) -Ish; 3) Euthanasia Waltz; 4) Isis Mourning, Pt. 1; 5) Isis Mourning, Pt. 2; 6) Malaga Virgen.

 

Live albums by fusion artists are somewhat of a puzzle — first, because fusion as such always tends to be associated with the «live-in-the-studio» principle, what with its being the rock-era inheritor to classic jazz and all; second, because jazz-rock musicians are simply not expected to wear different faces for their studio and live avatars. So, unless the live album consists entirely of new material, its only purpose would be to prove that the actual musicians in the band are, indeed, cunning and dexterous, and can keep a tight groove going in real time — and even so, that would be thin proof, since nobody knows to what extent the results could be doctored in the studio. Un­less you want to be real obnoxious about it and compare them with bootlegs. But are there really people in this world who are obsessed with hunting for Brand X bootlegs?

 

Anyway, Livestock was put together from recordings that cover a period of one whole year and two different drummers: three tracks were culled from London club gigs with Collins and two more — from an August 1977 concert at the Hammersmith Odeon with Kenwood Dennard, re­placing Collins who had only just completed his duties for Genesis' Wind & Wuthering tour. And it does have to be admitted that much of the material is new: ʽEuthanasia Waltzʼ and ʽMalaga Virgenʼ are the only tracks (though they do take up more than a third of the album) to have been previously available. Not that the new material sounds all that difficult from the old one, though — but then, nobody would expect it to.

 

As it happens, they could have omitted the references to «live» altogether. The tracks either fade in or fade out; the audience response is limited to maybe just a couple seconds of applause every now and then; and there is no stage banter whatsoever (according to the «if you don't sing, you don't speak, either» principle that is also rather typical of the instrumental jazz tradition). The two songs taken over from the studio catalog are almost totally identical to the studio versions (except for muddier production values in the live setting), and so the album's real worth lies in the new material — not because it is live, but because it is new.

 

From that point of view, the opening ʽNightmare Patrolʼ is one of their best compositions from that period — it does have a slightly ominous, nocturnal atmosphere to it, if not necessarily night­marish, as well as a dreamy-poetic guitar riff and an involving adventurous mid-section in which they show themselves able to build up suspense and then happily release it to everybody's relief and satisfaction. It is also the first track to feature the new drummer who shows himself quite worthy of the crown, although, for my money, his fills and rolls are not nearly as smooth and totally natural-sounding as Phil's.

 

The central composition on Side B is ʽIsis Mourningʼ, where they bring down the tempo and try to inject a little «soul» — lots of atmospheric synthesizers and weepy bluesy soloing, but the focus is still on group playing, so neither Lumley nor Goodsall get to properly show off just how passionate, loud, and overflowing with salty excretions Isis could be in mourning. So, instead of trying to be moved to tears ourselves, we should probably just enjoy the interplay instead — the way Goodsall and Jones trade licks, arpeggios, scales, and occasional dissonances around each other once the tempo slows down and they get a better chance to impress us with the musical dia­log. Hardly unique, but fun, and they never hang around one repetitive theme or gimmick for too long — Goodsall, in particular, has this knack for frequently changing the tones and effects within a short time, so once you get close to getting tired of hearing him do minimalistic jazz licks, he'll sense that and start spitting out funky wah-wah chords, before going into 12-bar terri­tory and back to jazz guitar again.

 

Still, the fact remains that as a composition, only ʽNightmare Patrolʼ seems to have stick-around potential — the rest are more like temporary vamps, enjoyable because of the players' professio­nalism and creativity, but hardly pretending to much else. Throwing in the album's slightly in­ferior sound quality (as compared to the studio albums, of course — on the whole, the recording is perfectly acceptable), I would certainly not recommend it as a point of entry. Once you have become a Brand X fan for life by assimilating Unorthodox Behaviour and Moroccan Roll, feel free to proceed. Or, at least, take additional advice from some genuine fusion expert, the kind of person who can actually offer a serious opinion on why one fusion album is «better» than another fusion album — my own opinions here are as innocently amateurish as any thoughts I might have on global warming or the Big Bang.

 

MASQUES (1978)

 

1) The Poke; 2) Masques; 3) Black Moon; 4) Deadly Nightshade; 5) Earth Dance; 6) Access To Data; 7) The Ghost Of Mayfield Lodge.

 

Telling «bad fusion» from «good fusion» is a worthless, ungrateful task if you are not a fusion musician yourself. But there is no getting away from gut feelings, either, and mine tell me that somehow, in some way Brand X «lost it» with the loss of Phil Collins, yes indeed. Perhaps this is not really related, but it is a fact, or, rather, two facts, that (a) Masques is the first album not to feature Phil at all, and (b) the first Brand X album about which I genuinely do not feel at all thrilled. Could these facts be related? We'd need to waste a lifetime to find out.

 

Anyway, this here is a very straightahead, no bull, no deviation, highly formulaic fusion album. No Moroccan influences, vocals, or anything that would distract us from jazzy grooving. Only the first track, ʽThe Pokeʼ, is based on a steady rock beat, but what they do with it is not very interes­ting — it sounds a bit like Rush in places: gruff hard rock molded into a complex, «progressive» form that has more to do with dry musical geometry than spiritual excitement (not that Rush always sound unexciting or anything, but they do have a lot of filler passages like this one). Once ʽThe Pokeʼ is over, though, it's all about Percy Jones and his trademark «bass zoops» for the rest of the album. Even if he only wrote or co-wrote two tracks here, this album sounds like it belongs to the bass player almost exclusively.

 

The bad news is that this time, there are no particularly intriguing or moving themes. You'd think, for instance, that an 11-minute long track named ʽDeadly Nightshadeʼ should have a properly deadly sound, deserving of its name — instead, it just moves from slow to fast and back to slow sections without even trying to look like it were going somewhere. A lot of stuff is happening, but essentially it is just a meandering jam. Likewise, ʽThe Ghost Of Mayfield Lodgeʼ has a cool title, too, and is apparently based upon ghost stories about a real lodge in which Percy Jones used to dwell for a while, but apart from a minute-long rhythmless section that could be interpreted as «ghostly interplay» between keyboards, bass, and percussion, there is nothing I would regard as all that «ghostly» about the track — just another groove. In fact, you could transplant parts of ʽNightshadeʼ into ʽMayfield Lodgeʼ and vice versa and no one would probably take notice.

 

The only more or less memorable theme is discoverable in ʽEarth Danceʼ, but that one, too, once they move away from the theme into soloing, is interchangeable with ʽNightshadeʼ. And even the theme is not that awesome — a rather basic salsa variation. Apparently, there's no place like Cuba if you want to envision something as grandly universalist as an «Earth Dance». Kind of a light­weight atmosphere, I'd say, for such an ambitious venture.

 

All said, I'm almost tempted to put the thumbs down for this, but two things stop me from being so mean — first, there'd be much worse stuff on the way, and second, well, boring or not, it is clear that they were still working their asses off on these grooves. If I completely clear my mind from that «context» thing, Masques still provides almost fifty minutes of exemplary playing — on autopilot, perhaps, but not without the collective guardian angel from the Fusion Department guiding minds, hands, and plugs. As background music, this is still first-rate; I'm just disappoin­ted that the tunes are so completely association-free this time around. Or maybe we should read the title more literally, and agree that the band is indeed playing with their «masques» on, and then spend the next ten years of our life trying to peek behind them.

 

PRODUCT (1979)

 

1) Don't Make Waves; 2) Dance Of The Illegal Aliens; 3) Soho; 4) Not Good Enough/See Me!; 5) Algon (Where An Ordinary Cup Of Drinking Chocolate Costs L8,000,000,000); 6) Rhesus Perplexus; 7) Wal To Wal; 8) ...And So To F...; 9) April.

 

A good title indeed. Not «commercial product», or «soulless product», but just «product» — this and the following album were the results of a bizarre rotating line-up where Goodsall would essentially play with two different bands. One included Percy Jones on bass, Morris Pert on per­cussion, and newcomers Mike Clark on drums and Peter Robinson on keyboards; the other had John Giblin on bass and, surprisingly, Robin Lumley on keyboards and our old pal Phil Collins, back on drums and, yes, on vocals.

 

So put together the fact that we actually have «Brand X» and «Brand Y» here, and also the fact that we have two Collins-sung pop songs on the record, and you can see why it is a «product», in the sense that there is hardly any pretense at spontaneity and getting carried away on the wings of inspiration. Not that the two playing ensembles sound all that different from each other, or any different from what they used to sound — in fact, if anything, this fresh-blood-mix approach shook everybody up a little bit and made Product an overall more interesting LP, I think, than Masques before it. But the approach is not without its problems.

 

First, many fusion fans went berserk at the idea of including ʽDon't Make Wavesʼ and ʽSohoʼ, both of which really sounded more like contemporary Genesis than genuine Brand X; all the more curious that the first song was actually written by Goodsall, and the second co-written by him with Collins. It is true that both are no great shakes — overproduced pop-rock without any particularly interesting hooks or enthralling messages — and neither of the two agrees themati­cally with the band's general fusion sound. But it's not as if their presence here is particularly annoying, and it's certainly not as if their inclusion blocked the way of any instrumental master­pieces, judging by the quality of what else we got. At the very least this presence comes across as a surprise — are Brand X gearing up to become a daughter project of Genesis? Is Phil Collins capable of turning fusion into adult contemporary pop as expertly as he does with prog?

 

Well, for the moment it just looks like a timid experiment, because the rest is quite traditional. Amusingly, the first of the two long jams is called ʽDance Of The Illegal Aliensʼ, presaging the title of a well-known Genesis pop hit several years later — hardly a coincidence, even though the track was written by Jones, does not feature Phil at all, and has nothing to do with illegal aliens outside of the title (but a lot to do with Jones' magnificent «rubber bass» patterns, though apart from of that, I cannot applaud or remember much of anything else). Likewise, the second of these jams, ʽNot Good Enoughʼ, is almost completely about Percy and his bass — occasional synth and guitar solos surrounding it are simply keeping it company.

 

Of the last four tracks, three are unremarkable, but ʽ...And So To F...ʼ is a bit of a standout: al­though an instrumental, it is credited to Collins, and it's got serious art-pop overtones that remind one of Genesis' style on Trick Of The Tail (particularly ʽLos Endosʼ). Thus, ironically, Product turns out to be the only non-Genesis album on which you can get a taster of circa-1976 Genesis and circa-1982 Genesis at the same time, even as they peep in and out of a generally fusionistic environment. This is weird, and if at least half of these tunes were as catchy or emotionally cap­tivating as classic Genesis, and the other half were worthy of Brand X's early days, I would have certainly awarded the album a thumbs up. But on the other hand, it's «product», and the careful manufacturing does not seem to leave a lot of space for genuine inspiration, so I guess I'll pass.

 

DO THEY HURT? (1980)

 

1) Noddy Goes To Sweden; 2) Voidarama; 3) Act Of Will; 4) Fragile; 5) Cambodia; 6) Triumphant Limp; 7) D.M.Z.

 

I think it is technically enough just to state that all the tracks here are outtakes from the Product sessions, and that if the band did not think them good enough for Product, then we are complete­ly free from any respectable obligations. Arguably the best thing about the record is its cover, and even that one is fairly tacky in a New Wave-era fashion. The second best thing are probably the liner notes, just because they were written by Michael Palin (and the album title itself is an elu­sive reference to witches from The Holy Grail).

 

The third best thing would have to be at least one stand-out track, but everything that stands out here is actually not good: most notably, ʽAct Of Willʼ, which sounds like a hookless Alan Parsons Project-style adult pop song, with meaningless verses sung by Goodsall through a vocoder for «mystical» effect. I suppose the guys had a lot of fun with this in the studio, but Brand X as an adult pop band is a suicidal proposition by definition. Goodsall's other attempt to write a «dark and serious» composition is ʽCambodiaʼ, slow, dense, arpeggiated, gradually layering on heavy riffs and shrill solos, but never truly realizing its potential — somehow, it seems to promise an apocalyptic crescendo, yet all it eventually squeezes out of itself is a simple ceremonial blues theme that is neither too threatening nor too awe-inspiring.

 

Most of the rest consists of Jones-dominated numbers that just give us more fusion clichés and no truly memorable themes. Fans of Percy's fretboard-walking will certainly enjoy them, but ʽNoddy Goes To Swedenʼ, ʽFragileʼ, ʽD. M. Z.ʼ — they all sound like technically flawless, spiritually pedestrian fusion jamming to me. Robinson's piano work on ʽD. M. Z.ʼ is funny in places, as if he is trying to deconstruct some pre-war pop melody with his odd tempos and dissonances, but that is just the main theme, and the rest is guitar and bass noodling, mainly, and this time, it really begins to look as if the alleged «freedom of self-expression» has become an invisible cage for these guys. ʽTriumphant Limpʼ, the title of a half-hearted and ultimately forgettable attempt to bring a more hard-rocking sound into their lives, would have been a much more telling title for the entire album — «triumphant», because you have to admire both their tenacity (clinging to the tried-and-true in spite of changing musical fashions) and their nimbness, agility, and professio­nalism, but «limp» because, well, this music has long since ceased to be «progressive» in any reasonable meaning of this word. Thumbs down.

 

IS THERE ANYTHING ABOUT? (1982)

 

1) Ipanaemia; 2) A Longer April; 3) Modern, Noisy And Effective; 4) Swan Song; 5) Is There Anything About?; 6) Tmiu-Atga.

 

Yes indeed, the title is a not-so-subtle reference to the process of «scraping the barrel». Despite the 1982 date (by which time Brand X no longer even existed as a functioning outfit), most of these tracks were recorded in 1979, hailing from the same sessions that already yielded the pre­vious two albums — all but the title track, which dates from an even earlier period. As if that weren't enough, ʽA Longer Aprilʼ is indeed a much extended version of ʽAprilʼ from Product, and ʽModern, Noisy And Effectiveʼ is based on the backing track from the pop song ʽSohoʼ, also from Product. That should give you some ideas.

 

To be fair, seeing as how the band had effectively run its course, and how that particular brand of fusion had pretty much worn itself out by the end of the Seventies, it may be a good thing that they did not stick around to reinvent themselves as an electrofunk party or a synth-pop outfit. At the very least, Is There Anything About? does not irritate — nothing on it is really seductive or mind-blowing or of much use to anybody, but it has the same predictable Brand X style as any­thing else the band did, and you do get to hear more Collins percussion (he is credited for all the drumwork, since the outtakes here do not seem to include any of the Clark/Pert sessions).

 

The title track may have originally been rejected because it does not have a particularly distinct theme, but it does remind one of the jerky suspense of Unorthodox Behaviour, before the band settled on an overall smoother style — Goodsall's sizzling-bubbling wah-wah lines and Jones' «nervous-breakdown-style» bass rip at each other like crazy, and Phil wacks them both on the back relentlessly to keep things permanently hot. The difference between this track and some­thing like ʽIpanaemiaʼ is clearly visible — the latter is a smooth, easy-going, soft-funk mood piece with soothing Spanish guitar passages and ambient synthesizer background, high quality elevator muzak with little artistic pretense. But that's okay. If more elevators played muzak like this, humanity would only benefit.

 

On the down side, ʽModern, Noisy And Effectiveʼ sounds much more silly than ʽSohoʼ, now that the vocals have been wiped out and replaced by simplistic «happy» keyboards of the «your local TV sitcom» variety, where you are expected to jump up and down in a fit of artificially induced happiness as the credits roll on. Unless the effect here is intended to be parodic, this is really stu­pid, but, unfortunately, there are no straightforward hints at irony or sarcasm. And some of the titles continue to be misleading — ʽSwan Songʼ neither literally nor figuratively sounds like a swan song, unless Lumley's squeaky synth parts are supposed to remind you of swans, which they do not (more like pigs than swans, if you ask me). Some nice harmonies, though.

 

Still, as a bunch of outtakes to wrap up the original story of Brand X, this could have been much worse. The band's biggest mistake, I believe, was when they began to hunt for «beauty» in their music rather than «mystery» — even if this does not qualify by itself as a sell-out, it sold short their actual talents and blended them in the already hard-to-tell-apart mass of instrumental pedd­lers of the late Seventies. Had they pursued a somewhat more, let's say, «aggressive» path of action, history would have been kinder to them. But even so, for four years they did not make one single move that would definitively place them into the «easy listening» category, and that's gotta count for something — especially if your band has Phil Collins in it.

 

XCOMMUNICATION (1992)

 

1) Xanax Taxi; 2) Liquid Time; 3) Kluzinski Period; 4) Healing Dream; 5) Mental Floss; 6) Strangeness; 7) A Duck Exploding; 8) Message To You; 9) Church Of Hope; 10) Kluzinski Reprise.

 

Say what you want, but there are dumb careers and there are smart careers, and even if you hap­pen to be instinctively bored by any sort of jazz fusion, you will still have to admit that Brand X had an almost unusually smart career for a band that was once started by Phil Collins. For in­stance, they totally sat out the Eighties, a most unfortunate decade for old-timers as a whole, and only once its excesses were over, Goodsall revived the old brand once again — this time, envi­sioning Brand X as a lean and mean «power trio». The only old veterans here are Goodsall him­self and Percy Jones (the two guys who were most important in the first place), with new drum­mer Frank Katz perfectly adequate to the task ahead. As for the keyboard layers, they are all being taken care of by means of new technologies — namely, Goodsall's MIDI-guitar.

 

The result is a very solid record whose fanbase will probably count up to a few hundred people, as it happens with most jazz teams on the planet these days — nothing groundbreaking, just a tasteful and intelligent application of the formula with a few quirky, amusing, and/or memorable nuances. No toying around with dance pop, adult contemporary, stadium rock, or New Age motives — just forty-five minutes of good old fusion where your ear only tells you that we are way past 1976 because of those MIDI guitar tones (hence, occasional flashes of Belew-era King Crimson before your eyes).

 

Another more modern association might be with Steve Vai, except Goodsall never goes for the gusto with distortion, special effects, or shredding — but he does now occasionally integrate monster heavy riffs into tricky time signatures, alternating them with softer jazzier passages, as it happens on the opening ʽXanax Taxiʼ, where the first half is jackhammered inside your head and the second half lightly tap-dances on the crushed dust of your skull. Also, on the suitably titled ʽChurch Of Hypeʼ he has a few «rock god» flashes where he turns his guitar into a Harley-David­son for a brief while, but, like Vai, there's a reasonable sense of irony there if you can feel it.

 

More often, though, what makes this album stand out a wee bit above the rest are the little things — for instance, the way Goodsall sustains that intense vibrato on the main theme riff of ʽLiquid Timeʼ; or the little «pseudo-orchestral» interludes on ʽKluzinski Periodʼ (who the heck is Kluzin­ski, I wonder?) where the man's MIDI guitars occasionally break in like a strictly disciplined army of business-meaning cellos, before we go back to «sloppy» free jazz mode; or Percy Jones' predictable, but still-fun-after-all-these-years bass showcase on ʽStrangenessʼ; or all the weird noises on ʽA Duck Explodingʼ (there might be something exploding there, but how can a duck explode for seven minutes?).

 

Most importantly, there is enough musical diversity in these tracks to make them distinguishable from each other, which, as far as I am concerned, is the key thing in distinguishing good fusion from bad fusion — there's even an acoustic guitar interlude in the middle (ʽHealing Dreamʼ), and none of the pieces are there simply as excuses for jamming. Again, this does not make them great as such, but it does assure you that XCommunication is more than just a «nostalgic comeback»: it is a bona fide attempt to push the Brand X sound into further territory from where it was stan­ding a decade ago. If the results are not overwhelming, it is solely because it is hard to think how they could be overwhelming at this juncture (you don't exactly see, say, John McLaughlin revo­lutionising the world of music circa 1992, and John Goodsall ain't him). Other than that, though, it's all certainly worth a thumbs up, for the fans at least.

 

MANIFEST DESTINY (1997)

 

1) True To The Clik; 2) Stellerator; 3) Virus; 4) XXL; 5) The Worst Man; 6) Manifest Destiny; 7) Five Drops; 8) Drum Ddu; 9) Operation Hearts And Minds; 10) Mr. Bubble Goes To Hollywood.

 

A fairly ambitious title — particularly for an album that went by practically unnoticed, disap­peared in a flash, and was not followed by any new Brand X record ever since. Of course, if the intended intention was to manifest that Brand X's destiny is to fade away and never come back, then everything is perfectly correct. Especially because the record kinda sucks.

 

Well, no, I guess it doesn't exactly «suck» as such, but compared to XCommunication, it does not offer even the same kind of «moderate thrill». Obviously, Goodsall and Jones wanted, once again, to show that the old rocking horse could still learn new tricks. So now, instead of continu­ing to work in the nice and concise trio format of XCommunication, they puff up the band, re­cruiting two additional bass and keyboard players (Franz Pusch and Marc Wagnon), one more drummer (Pierre Moerlen of Gong fame) and even a flautist (Danny Wilding) — and proceed to reinvent their sound in this configuration.

 

The results are... well, it seems as if they finally have decided to modernize their classic sound, but do it gradually, so that, despite being recorded in 1997, much of the record sounds like it was done in the Eighties. Now they have some New Wave influences, some adult contemporary, some pop metal, some Prince-style electrofunk, some Belew-style electric guitar, and the overall tone of the album is more robotic, stiff, and harsh than it had ever been in the past. And this is not really a good thing, because making stiff robotic records prevents them from exploiting their biggest strengths as guitar- and bass-playing musicians.

 

For one thing, Goodsall's guitar here frequently sounds atrocious — already on the first track, he goes into overdrive and starts shredding all over the place, sending off metallic blasts that would rather be enjoyed by fans of Joe Satriani, and occasionally invade the particularly corny turf of Yngwie Malmsteen. Fortunately, this is not an all-pervading problem, but he does display this new penchant for finger-flashing in «virile metal mode» quite a few more times, and he never really did that before. For another thing, with this heap of new players, Percy Jones' fundamental role in the band is diminished — he still gets to have some great bass parts, particularly on his own compositions such as ʽThe Worst Manʼ and ʽDrum Dduʼ, but they are buried in the mix.

 

Finally, there is a serious lack of memorable themes: it just seems like they are so happy to test out this new lineup of theirs and the new groovy sound effects and playing styles that they forgot to write meaningful tunes. The only composition here that produces the immediate impression of «well thought out» is ʽXXLʼ, a «cool-sounding» funky dance number that has a sharp groove, some awesome fretboard finger-running from Percy, and even some vocals mixed deep in the background — but its «sexy» sound is hardly what we come to expect from Brand X, nice as it is to know that they have a fondness for James Brown and Prince.

 

Overall, the most memorable aspect of Manifest Destiny is its relative weirdness — as if the band were trying to change lanes on the highway and ended up swerving off the main road and finding itself lost in the middle of nowhere. This is a very subjective judgement, because, after all, we are dealing here with a fusion album from 1997, but it does sort of objectively agree with what would happen in the future for Brand X — nothing, that is. As of 2015, when this set of reviews is being finalized, the band has kept quiet for eighteen years: I guess Goodsall and Jones are still trying to come up with a good answer to the question «what should ʽunorthodox be­haviourʼ look like in the 21st century?», and until they believe they have found one, we're rela­tively safe from Manifest Destiny Vol. 2.

 

BRIAN ENO

NO PUSSYFOOTING (w. Robert Fripp) (1973)

 

1) The Heavenly Music Corporation; 2) Swastika Girls.

 

«Both of these compositions are terrific, or both are crap, I can't decide» — that's what I wrote ages ago about this album. So much time has passed, though, and now I believe I can.

 

In 1973, albums with just one track per side were nothing new, and neither were lengthy droning compositions that took ample time to explore a single musical groove, idea, chord sequence, believing that there was no better way to go totally transcendental. What did not happen yet was a fortuitous meeting between two musicians — one with a beyond-the-ordinary vision for electric guitar playing, another one with an above-the-common understanding of the possibilities of elec­tronic gadgets — who could pool their talents together and come up with a deeply intellectual conception for how The Perfect Psychedelic Record could sound.

 

Eno and Fripp began working on No Pussyfooting in 1972, back when the former was still an official member of Roxy Music, but already felt uncomfortable about having to compromise his vision for the sake of Bryan Ferry's flamboyance. The main pretext was to test out the tape-delay system commonly known as «Frippertronics», because nobody was ever able to figure out how it works except for Fripp himself. Actually, it shouldn't be all that complicated — essentially, it's just a special technique, requiring two tape-recorders trading signals back and forth so that your guitar sounds like it's being played in a deep, multi-sectioned cave with a great echo system. But, of course, you have to coordinate the recorders so that the delays and echos do not turn the whole thing into an atonal mess, and in order to do that, you probably have to be Robert Fripp.

 

Still, when it's just one guitar, even hallucinating like that, one can feel a little lonely, and this is where Eno really comes in. On both these tracks (which were, by the way, recorded almost a year apart of each other), it is his ambient loops that provide the foundation for Fripp's guitar. On ʽHeavenly Music Corporationʼ, the loops are mostly droning buzz, wobbling in amplitude and continuously yielding a cello-like sound, as if you were stuck in some fifteen-minute snippet from a particularly dark Wagner passage. On the much more merry sounding (and even more merrily titled!) ʽSwastika Girlsʼ the loops are completely different — high-pitched, ringing, more imita­tive of a fairy-tale harp sound than anything else.

 

Whether Fripp actually coordinates his guitar playing with Eno's loops or not is hard to say, especially since a lot of work was done by Eno at the mixing stage — apparently, he had himself a lot of fun with Robert's tapes, cutting and splicing at will. In any case, the best thing about both of his extended and transformed solos is that they are actually solos — not one-chord drones or anything, but thoughtful improvisations along the same lines as contemporary King Crimson. On the first track, the solos come quickly and are stern, dark, brooding, but not particularly angry or unhappy — sometimes they resolve themselves into majestic swoooooops that sound like birds of prey unleashed by the «heavenly corporation» upon the listener, but they don't cause any damage or anything. On the second track, there are many more overdubs, including what seems to be a droning acoustic guitar loop mixed with Eno's vibes, and the actual soloing arrives later, around the eighth minute — and it sounds a lot happier. In fact, I've got a hinch that they originally wanted to call the composition ʽRainbow Girlsʼ, but changed their minds at the last moment and called it ʽSwastika Girlsʼ instead. Not that much of a difference anyway.

 

So how good is it? Groundbreaking — for sure, but is this something that is still worth listening to? Personally, I now believe it all totally works as an emotional experience. On one hand, the pieces can be classified as «ambient», but on the other hand, they are not really «minimalist», since there is simply too much going on there. The first track is actually quite tempestuous in nature, and the second has this resplendent, kaleidoscopic nature that sort of celebrates diversity and singularity of everything at the same time. And if you can see the beauty in Fripp's guitar playing at all, then these fourty minutes will be anything but boring: inspiration and soul-seeking dominate both tracks.

 

Ultimately, it is the combination of these two powers that wins me over. Eno's dark-wobbly or shiny-clinky loops + Fripp's multi-layered «intellectual drones» are a perfect combination, it's a joy watching them making this «pseudo-conversation» with each other, and it does sound some­what transcendental. It would never be the same with just a regular keyboardist, who probably would have just played some Bach tribute instead of Eno's Terry Riley fetish. And best of all, there is not a single ounce of noise on the record — no feedback, no crunch, nobody trying to drown the proceedings in a sea of nasty distortion to mask the lack of talent. Nope, it's all clean and melodic in its own way, even humorous, as Fripp sometimes makes the guitar grumble, growl, or croak in laughter. Great record, totally worth a thumbs up after all these years.

 

HERE COME THE WARM JETS (1973)

 

1) Needle In The Camel's Eye; 2) The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch; 3) Baby's On Fire; 4) Cindy Tells Me; 5) Driving Me Backwards; 6) On Some Faraway Beach; 7) Blank Frank; 8) Dead Finks Don't Talk; 9) Some Of Them Are Old; 10) Here Come The Warm Jets.

 

If you dissect Eno's proper debut album into its integral components and muss over each one separately, you will probably find nothing new under this particular sun. Brian's chief musical inspiration in terms of basic melody must have come from the Velvet Underground — references to the banana LP are in abundance here, and we will mention a few later on — and his use of crazy-looking and crazier-sounding electronic devices owes a lot to minimalists, Krauts, and maybe even Keith Emerson. His «affected» vocals are Marc Bolan and Tiny Tim at the same time, and his lyrics are... Captain Beefheart, perhaps? Whatever.

 

None of this prevents Here Come The Warm Jets from still being one of the most stunning and unusually striking debut albums in existence, because never before had there been such a brash, exciting, colorful amalgamation of catchy pop structures, weirdass studio trickery, surrealist lyrical and sonic imagery, intelligent humor, and heartfelt emotion at the same time. Above and beyond everything else, this is a pop album — it is totally accessible to those who have issues with staggering song lengths, off-putting time signatures, excessive noise, or jarring dissonance — but it is a pop album created by an experimentalist intellectual pretending to be the patient of the world's largest nuthouse. And he's got soul, too.

 

The busily droning three-chord guitars that usher in ʽNeedle In The Camel's Eyeʼ are exactly midway in be­tween the Velvets' ʽI'm Waiting For The Manʼ (which had two chords, I believe) and the Ramones' ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ (which also had three), but the accompanying vocal melody is actually sung rather than recited — in fact, if you dig it out from under the guitars that keep it buried as if in a tightly sealed sarcophagus, it's a perfectly catchy vocal melody that would feel right at home on any Beatles album: "Those who know / They don't let it show / They just give you one long life and you go...". Hmm, sounds like something Lennon could write, too. But then there comes this gruff bass solo, and it's like the one on the Velvets' ʽSunday Morningʼ — and then it makes an unexpected couple of pit stops, like on King Crimson's ʽSchizoid Manʼ — and then we reprise and fade away with da-da harmonies — and what you just heard was a relatively simple pop song, but very bizarrely produced.

 

It is probably because of the loud distorted guitars that people sometimes call this a «glam» album — which it certainly is not if by «glam» we mean «epic rock theater» like Bowie's Ziggy, or even if we just mean «rock'n'roll with a really, really loud and thick guitar sound», because the latter does not crop up here too often. But really, it is just for the lack of a specific term that the word «glam» is used, because Here Come The Warm Jets stubbornly defies pigeonholization: what is ʽThe Paw Paw Negro Blowtorchʼ, for instance? Seems to be a blues-pop number with a pubroom attitude and with vaudevillian vocals — that is, right before two or three synthesizers enter the room and start chatting with each other about their casual robotic problems of the day, and it all becomes some sort of a sci-fi freak show, and by the time we get back to the vocal part, it is too late because the backing guitars have completely gone off their rocker and now sound as if somebody put 100,000 volts through them.

 

The album's got a great feel for dynamic shift, too — if the first song is (technically) an optimis­tic anthem, then the second already moves in the direction of a deranged carnival, and by the time we get to the third one, the mood has shifted to positively mean: I mean, "Baby's on fire / Better throw her in the water / Look at her laughing / Like a heifer to the slaughter" isn't exactly a reas­suring view on personal relationships, and the extended solo by Robert Fripp here is much darker than his usual work, especially when it starts flashing and wobbling on the lower strings in an almost Black Sabbathy fashion. On the whole, it's a rare glimpse inside the «evil» part of Eno's mind, which he usually does not allow free access into the studio.

 

Then, once the evil has been properly exorcised, we get the tender heart of Eno — ʽCindy Tells Meʼ is another throwback to the Velvets, both in the lyrics ("Cindy tells me the rich girls are weeping..." — compare "Candy says I've come to hate my body...") and melody-wise (some of the chord changes are once again reminiscent of ʽSunday Morningʼ), but there is no misanthropy or reclusiveness here: Eno has a much more positive view on things than Lou Reed (I mean, even ʽBaby's On Fireʼ is more like the mock-evil grimacing of a mischievous imp than a blast of the devil's proper hellfire), and where the Velvets used their atmosphere to sing about femme fatales and Freudian matters, Eno uses it to sing about the unforeseen consequences of too much wo­men's lib ("they're saving their labour for insane reading", "perhaps they'll re-acquire those things they've all disposed of" — disgusting male chauvinist porn fan).

 

The show never ceases to amaze — these are just the four first songs, and then there is the out-of-tune paranoid insanity of ʽDriving Me Backwardsʼ, the epic piano-and-synth gorgeousness of ʽOn Some Faraway Beachʼ (presaging the peaks of ambient-pop that would be reached on Another Green World and Before And After Science), the «Bo Diddley goes New Wave» hooliganry of ʽBlank Frankʼ, the McCartney-esque piano pop of ʽDead Finks Don't Talkʼ (psychedelic back­wards guitars included), the choral harmonies of ʽSome Of Them Are Oldʼ, and the instrumental title track — which, as far as I'm concerned, could serve as the blueprint for a staggering amount of indie-rock creations of the 21st century, with its simple, repetitive, triumphant synth blare over propulsive tribal beats: British Sea Power and even Arcade Fire, eat your as-of-yet-unborn heart out, or at least acknowledge your debts. Not that it is all that easy to acknowledge one's debts to a song that, according to rumor, surreptitiously glorifies «golden showers», but since when has rock music been a stranger to kinky metaphors?

 

As you might have already guessed, Here Come The Warm Jets is quite a juicy album, but the thing I like the most about it is that it's really got a heart — some of the tracks are almost reli­giously beautiful (ʽFaraway Beachʼ) or inspiring (those synth blasts on the title track are pretty much welcoming you to a brand new world), or hilarious (the «chatting robots» on ʽBlowtorchʼ sound much more human to me than some actual humans from that particular era). No filler, plenty of creativity, even a touch of spontaneity (achieved by cramming tons of «incompatible», according to Eno, guest musicians in the studio), and there you go — one of the best «intelli-pop» albums ever released. It even managed to chart, very briefly, reaching #26 in the UK, a feat that no other Eno album managed to repeat (then again, Eno has never cared much for promotion campaigns, let alone touring). And it actually makes you feel great about the man's split-up with Roxy Music — which allowed for two masterpieces (this one and Roxy's Stranded) rather than one to be released the same year. In short, an exuberant thumbs up.

 

TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN (BY STRATEGY) (1974)

 

1) Burning Airlines Give You So Much More; 2) Back In Judy's Jungle; 3) The Fat Lady Of Limbourg; 4) Mother Whale Eyeless; 5) The Great Pretender; 6) Third Uncle; 7) Put A Straw Under Baby; 8) The True Wheel; 9) China My China; 10) Taking Tiger Mountain.

 

The title of the album, borrowed from one of the eight «model operas» produced for the needs of the Cultural Revolution in China, seems to hint at some sort of «strategic design» for the album, but it will take a lot of analysis and research to uncover the design in question — or, for that matter, any actual Chinese influence: even a song called ʽChina My Chinaʼ shows no signs of Eno's preoccupation with any Far Eastern motives. Eno was, however, much interested in Orien­tal philosophy and mysticism, and it is said that the process of creating this album involved the usage of «Oblique Strategies», a set of printed cards with cryptic remarks like «Honour thy error as a hidden intention» or «Work at a different speed» that was largely influenced by the I Ching (one wonders why they didn't just go ahead and use the I itself).

 

The one thing that does get noticed is that the album is much more quiet, leisurely paced, and stripped of vocal and instrumental «hooliganry» that was all over Here Come The Warm Jets. It is by no means «ambient» or «becalmed» (only the final title track approaches true serenity), but it feels much more «planned», evenly paced and well-measured, as if there was, indeed, some imaginary chessboard upon which the songs were strategically arranged into a well-fitting confi­guration. The tempos are mostly similar (slow to mid-tempo), with only one jarring exception that will be discussed later; the vocals are natural, easy-coming, and mostly unaffected; the hooks are laid out in strictly disciplined geometric patterns; and the lyrics, though largely nonsensical, create the illusion that we are being communicated something important, in impenetrable code: "The fat lady of Limbourg / Looked at the samples that we sent / And furrowed her brow... Her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue / The subtleties a spectrograph would miss / And announce her decision / While demanding her reward / The jellyfish kiss".

 

So is this just one of these «put-on» albums — something that aspires to deep meaning but is in reality an empty shell? By no means. Taking Tiger Mountain is a terrifically successful exercise in «intellectual spirituality» — an attempt to make a rule-based mix of intentional strategy and fateful chance, where songs would be carefully crafted and guided by spontaneous decisions at the same time: think Blonde On Blonde with a mathematically precise mind behind all the crazy ruckus. Actually, do think so — doesn't ʽBack In Judy's Jungleʼ give the impression of a much more tightly disciplined ʽRainy Day Womenʼ?

 

On the whole, the album is decidedly less «fun» than Warm Jets, but also on the whole, it is darker and more mysterious. The first two songs are somewhat lulling and friendly — ʽBurning Airlines Give You So Much Moreʼ does sound like a charming, leisurely bit of publicity (for a burning airline, that is), and the aforementioned ʽJudy's Jungleʼ is a merry-go-round that is only slightly offset with a slithering, nasty guitar tone (is that Eno playing his «snake guitar»?). But beginning with ʽFat Lady Of Limbourgʼ, the record assumes a somber tone that is rarely abando­ned (only ʽPut A Straw Under Babyʼ, another lighthearted waltz, temporarily lets some sunlight through the clouds), although «somber» does not equal «depressing» or «threatening». Rather, these tracks weave together a tapestry in which some professional alchemist is busy brewing up green bubbly potions in his tower — with just a tinge of black magic, but it's not as if it's being used for particularly sinister purposes. More out of curiosity.

 

The album particularly comes to a boil (sorry for another cauldron reference) on ʽThe Great Pre­tenderʼ, whose clattering bass pattern does sound related to a (not very frightening) horror movie, and then on ʽThird Uncleʼ, the fastest, busiest track on the album that certain superficial critics used to call an «early precursor to punk», even if it would be harder to find someone more removed from the quintessential punk mindset than Eno — this here is just another strategy of his, where maybe they just pulled out that card that read «Work at a different speed», so they sped it up, and Manzanera thought it adequate to play a howling, «angry» guitar solo, and the result is just another of Eno's little mysteries, maybe one that takes you on a wild, out-of-breath chase through a thick bamboo jungle.

 

I must confess, though, that the «strategic layout» of the album has always seemed a bit too cal­culated for me — out of Eno's «big four», Taking Tiger Mountain is the one that has the least amount of pure soul, in fact, «soul» does not properly emerge until the serene conclusion of the title track. There is no complaining over the fact that the entire album sounds like one huge musi­cal conundrum — such was the artist's intention, no less, and this is what makes it unique, and indeed, it may be awesome fun listening and re-listening to these songs, trying to make wild (and most probably wrong) guesses about its internal logic just like a crazed-out Sinologist would make wild guesses about the I Ching. But I would not recommend it as a representative introduc­tion to Eno's «pop period», because it would give you the wrong impression of «Eno the alche­mist» instead of the correct one — «Eno the trickster with a heart of gold», which you can get from any of the other three classics.

 

Nevertheless, it must also be stated that the record sounds more original and individualistic than Warm Jets — this time around, it is much more difficult to reduce it to the sum of its influences; I guess we have to thank the «Oblique Strategies» for that, as well as the active presence of Phil Man­zanera and Robert Wyatt, neither of whom were interested in imitating anybody else. In any case, this is absolutely essential listening — haunting, intriguing, literate, creative, and totally open to whatever interpretation your own mind comes up with for it. Thumbs up.

 

ANOTHER GREEN WORLD (1975)

 

1) Sky Saw; 2) Over Fire Island; 3) St. Elmo's Fire; 4) In Dark Trees; 5) The Big Ship; 6) I'll Come Running; 7) Another Green World; 8) Sombre Reptiles; 9) Little Fishes; 10) Golden Hours; 11) Becalmed; 12) Zawinul/Lava; 13) Everything Merges With The Night; 14) Spirits Drifting.

 

Attention all instrumental album composers! Remember this — if you're going have minimal vocals on your record, or no vocals at all, the only thing that's going to explicitly speak up for you is SONG TITLES. So if you have this really frenetic, delirious, free-form mess instrumental going on, well, I know you like being cool and all, but come on now, it does not make rational or irrational sense if you call it ʽAunt Jemima Goes Shopping For Proustʼ. And if you have this slow, soothing, transcendental electronic hum thing, with minimalist overdubs, you are not going to convert any extra fans by calling it ʽMore Salami, Pleaseʼ. You might claim that by forcing the listener's brain to search for available connections between the words and the music, you are unblocking previously unknown neural pathways — but you wouldn't exactly have scientific proof for that, and without scientific proof you'd just be a pretentious dick here.

 

What I really love about Another Green World, which one could alternately call «the most ambient of Eno's pop albums» or «the most pop of Eno's ambient albums», is how it all makes sense largely because of perfect matches between song titles and the music. He has created an alternate universe here — a very natural, organic world completely represented by sound — whose elements, while not being perfectly unambiguous, still take on far more concrete shapes than almost anything you previously heard on «otherworldly» psychedelic records. It is probably the closest equivalent, in art-pop music, of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition — a series of vignettes that transmit particular impressions and situations, except that the whole thing takes place in a parallel world rather than our mundane reality (then again, ʽBaba Yaga's Hutʼ was not exactly a local landmark, either).

 

First, the very title of the record. It is «another world», yes, but it is also a «green» world, which is an important connecting link — so it's got chlorophyll, and oxygen, and we can all breathe in it and relate to it, and the music reflects that: as many odd types of sound as Eno manages to get out of his electronics and effects this time, they all have an emotional stratum in them. You can go ahead and call these tunes «gorgeous», «romantic», «playful», «somber», «threatening», etc., as much as you like — this is a very deeply human approach to electronic equipment, unlike the contemporary robot-like approach of Kraftwerk (which was still very much understandable) or completely abstractionist electronica à la Autechre, which is all about «what the heck is this and how am I supposed to wire my brains to ʽlikeʼ it?»

 

The song sequencing is probably the only thing about which I'd like to voice a second opinion. For instance, ʽSky Sawʼ is a brilliant composition, but I am not sure that our introduction to this «green world 2.0» should be dominated by a lead guitar that does sound like a «sky saw», threa­tening to saw the sky in half in manual regime first, and then (in the «solo» section) in chainsaw mode. Phil Collins and Percy Jones, soon to become partners in the fusion band Brand X, pro­vide the rhythm section; John Cale plays the whirling (dervish) viola part; but it is Eno's own «snake guitar» that provides the tune's major unforgettable hook, and if you play it loud enough, the effect can be really terrifying. Whatever is happening out there sure ain't pretty, and should have at least occurred after the title track. Then again, maybe it's just like one of those modern novels that have to immediately plunge you into the action on the very first page, even if they have to start the story from the middle that way — because otherwise they run the risk of losing your attention and failing to make the New York Times bestseller list in time for Christmas.

 

In any case, now that the playlist era is upon us, you can divert yourself by making these tracks segue into each other any way possible — and since there are 14 of them, this means you can have any of your own 14! (where are you, calculator?) journeys to make. For instance, in order to arrive at your destination you could first take ʽThe Big Shipʼ — a steamer, judging by the puff-puffing percussion, whose mighty engines not only work perfectly, without any glitching, but also instill a regal-heroic feel in the listener. At a certain point in time, the ship becomes a flying ship and takes you ʽOver Fire Islandʼ — this is not at the center of our green world, but a separate location where you can look but you'd better not touch: dominated by Jones' bass work, the track only gives you a very faint glimpse of what is happening down below, and it ain't pretty.

 

Once you're finally there and your new habitat welcomes you to the threshold with Eno's «desert guitars» fanfare, you are free to roam in the green world's enchanting spaces (the transcendental meditation piece ʽBecalmedʼ), its playful areas (ʽLittle Fishesʼ use a number of prepared pianos to produce a very vivid impression of said fishes jumping in the air), or its dark and creepy con­fines (ʽSombre Reptilesʼ — I bet they eat little fishes for breakfast; ʽIn Dark Treesʼ — dare to enter that and you are bound to get confused and disoriented by the echoes, oscillating howls, and rhythm generators that sound like wild pigs foraging in the bushes). And, of course, ghostly presences are a must — a parallel world without dematerialized entities would be of no use, so ʽSpirits Driftingʼ give you exactly that, with synth tones that are neither friendly nor hostile, just... substanceless. Either it is the spirits drifting through you, or you are drifting through them.

 

There are a few vocal numbers here, too, whose main function seems to be commercial (they relieve the atmosphere for those of us who are too unused to completely instrumental pop albums) but who nevertheless fit in fairly well. ʽSt. Elmo's Fireʼ is a catchy and welcoming little travelog, sort of Brian's answer to ʽYellow Submarineʼ, though decidedly less childish; ʽEverything Merges With The Nightʼ is like a piano pop song to which somebody wrote the introduction but forgot to write everything else, and thank God for that; and ʽI'll Come Runningʼ is probably the only song here that could qualify for hit single status — provided you could get 1975 kids to hum "I'll come running to tie your shoe, I'll come running to tie your shoe" all day long.

 

The vocal numbers may be a little disrupting, since they are not nearly as otherworldly as every­thing else, but then they give you another dimension — you could, for instance, think of them as reflecting a sort of reality, with everything else being a dream (or vice versa), in and out of which you keep floating throughout the album, like a chronologically more complex variant of Alice In Wonderland. In any case, individually they are as pretty, catchy, and «gallant» as anything Eno ever wrote, so no need to make a big conceptual fuss over that.

 

The critical status of Another Green World has aggrandized so much over the years that it is now very commonly regarded as the ultimate peak of all things Eno-related, and it is not uncom­mon to hear people complain «ah, if only all his ʽregularʼ ambient albums sounded like this!» There is no question that the album was a milestone in the emergence of what is now sometimes called «post-rock», and you can feel its influence on everyone from the Cocteau Twins to Sigur Rós, but I would never say that it stands head and shoulders above any of the rest of the «classic four», even if it has a very distinct personality. In particular, if we are allowed to use the clichéd term «spirituality», I would say that some of these instrumentals now sound like a grand rehearsal before the genuinely breathtaking minimalist epiphanies of Before And After Science — that the music here strives a little too much to describe the fantastic worlds without us rather than the no less fantastic ones within us. But then again, this just might be the subjective reaction of an intro­verted personality. Maybe some day a team of neuroscientists and anthropologists will discover a connection between fanboyish love for AGW and extreme tourism, and another team will find a similar connection between adoration for BAAS and shutting oneself in dark basements. Until then, we will just tacitly assume that there is no accounting for taste, particularly when it comes to musical masterpieces like these ones, nitpicking over which can be intellectually stimulating, but materially unrewarding. So, just a big thumbs up here.

 

DISCREET MUSIC (1975)

 

1) Discreet Music; 2) Fullness Of Wind; 3) French Catalogues; 4) Brutal Ardour.

 

First things first: in general, I «like» and «accept» Eno's ambient albums, or, rather, the philo­sophy behind these albums. They are not supposed to be listened to — they are supposed to be heard when you're busy doing other tasks, and not only is that something right up every re­viewer's alley, it is an understandable and perhaps even necessary niche, that «furniture music» conception of Satie's. Of course, any piece of music could become furniture music if you so de­sired, but the mistake of so many mediocre artists is that they aim for loftier goals while never rising above furniture music level — not to mention that, like furniture itself, furniture music can wide­ly vary in quality.

 

Do not, therefore, make the mistake of listening to Discreet Music intently, in order to achieve some transcendental illumination or advance to Arhat level with a super cheat code. Legend says that the idea to make this kind of music came to Brian when he was lying in a hospital bed, lis­tening to an album of 18th century harp music with the volume turned all the way down, unable to get out of bed and turn it up — «feeling» the sounds rather than «hearing» them directly. Per­haps if this accident had not happened, he would have gone on making pop records, all the way into 1986 and beyond. But it did, and although Discreet Music is not tied into it directly (not featuring any harp music at all), it marks the start of the gradual, and utterly painless, transmu­tation of Brian Eno into furniture.

 

As a first try, though, the album is distinctly different from the «typical» Eno ambient album. The first side (30 minutes of the title track) is all electronic, but the second side is not — it consists of three minimalist chamber pieces, performed by the so-called «Cockpit Ensemble», conducted by Gavin Bryars who also co-arranged the pieces with Eno, all three being «deconstructed» varia­tions on Pachelbel's Canon In D Major. In the future, Eno would largely refrain from twiddling around with classical motives (at least those not transposed to the electronic format), but this re­mains a curious and somewhat unique experiment, though, obviously, not to everybody's liking.

 

The algorithmic nature of ʽDiscreet Musicʼ has been described in many sources, and I would probably mess something up trying to retell the process — all that interests us, really, is that there are only two simple superimposed musical phrases here, produced by an EMS Synthi AKS machine and then subtly played around with for half an hour. The «melody» has a becalming, somewhat pastoral feel (you could imagine it as a call-and-response session between several shepherds, piping each other in some high mountainous area), and for about three or four minutes, you could even give it your attention — then go on about your business if you have any business. If you don't... well... try to get some. It'll save you the trouble of hating the track's last twenty minutes, and pointless hatred tends to shorten people's life spans.

 

The three «Pachelbel variations», all based on cutting out small pieces of the original and stret­ching, twisting, and looping them until they begin to look like polyethylene pieces under a micro­scope, all have the same mood and feel — a seemingly endless sea of extended violin tones. For­tunately, the violins are well tuned and there is no musical hooliganry involved, so the sound never becomes irritating, which is an essential quality for furniture music.

 

The simple reason why this experiment, to me, looks like a successful one, is because it lacks ideological pretense. «Minimalism» as such tends to take itself seriously, even when the mini­malist is clearly endowed with a sense of humor — think Steve Reich, for instance — and this results in experiments that are ugly and crazy when you «listen» and annoying and off-putting when you restrict yourself to «hearing». Eno's understanding of ambient, however, has not the slightest intention of messing up our layman conventions of «musical beauty» — such as were, among other people, set up by the likes of Pachelbel himself.

 

The idea is simple: you just cut yourself out a small piece of that beauty, then magnify it tenfold, fiftyfold, hundredfold, and set it out as a desktop background, and see (hear) what happens. It is even reflected, I believe, to some degree in the punny album title: this is «discreet» music, as in, «music to be played privately and quietly», and it is also «discrete» music, consisting of these separate chopped-up and meticulously scrutinized pieces, each of which is taxed to the max for every ounce of «beauty» it can yield. I am totally at home with this ideology, as long as I am not forced to play this stuff at top volume with my ears glued to the speakers. I will not, however, give it — or any of Eno's «good» ambient albums, for that matter — an individual «thumbs up», since it kind of goes against my principles to describe furniture music in terms of blue, red, or gray. And in any case, discreet music should be rated discreetly. No need to shout about it.

 

EVENING STAR (w. Robert Fripp) (1975)

 

1) Wind On Water; 2) Evening Star; 3) Evensong; 4) Wind On Wind; 5) An Index Of Metals.

 

Eno's second collaboration with King Frippson is often described as more precisely pre-planned and more explicitly artistic than No Pussyfooting, and I think it is easy to hear that even without reading anything about it — besides, even from a purely logical stance, Fripp and Eno had been working together for three years already, and what was an almost completely «experimental», «let's-press-this-button-and-see-what-happens» approach in 1973 had become an established working technique by 1975. Also, by this time Eno's «ambient fetish» was out of the closet, and it is no coincidence that the album has so many nature references — the album cover, the track titles (ʽWind On Waterʼ, ʽWind On Windʼ) — where No Pussyfooting was essentially a pure psychedelic experience, with few visible ties to the natural world.

 

Which all basically translates to this: although both albums are credited to «Fripp & Eno» and were recorded just several years apart, they are so different in scope and purpose that it is hard to make a useful opinion on which one's the better of the two. Evening Star, or at least its A-side, is definitely more accessible, in that both players concentrate on «prettiness» or even «beauty» as opposed to experimental «ugliness» in which they both used to delight just a short while back. You could even say that the dudes are mellowing out here — chillin', in fact, paying a techno­logical tribute to Mother Nature, and temporarily fed up with feedback and «ugly» instrumental tones. Which may have come across as a surprise for Fripp fans, what with the harsh, aggressive King Crimson sound of the 1973-74 lineup.

 

The first three tracks consist of typical minimalistic Eno loops, over which Fripp applies his Frippertronics, but this time, with grace and gentleness — his soloing on the title track sounds like the approximate aural equivalent of a sweet violin part on some romantic sonata. He is much less visible on ʽWind On Waterʼ and ʽEvensongʼ, preferring to blend his parts in with the elec­tronics, and completely absent on ʽWind On Windʼ (which is actually an unused part of Discreet Music that was originally intended to serve as a backdrop for Fripp's soloing), but that's all part of the plan — this is, after all, supposed to be an impressionist album, not a dynamic plot-based one, and most of the time, Robert is merely content to add one more layer to Eno's stately, repe­titive, evocative, pantheistic melodies.

 

It does get very different on the second side, which returns us to the world of twenty-minute (in this case, almost thirty-minute) long compositions, and, more importantly, to the world of uneasy sonic nightmares. ʽAn Index Of Metalsʼ, in stark contrast to the lovely naturalistic soundscapes of the first side, is a mess of grim electronic hum, gradually building up in intensity until it begins sounding like a nuclear reactor just about to blow, and Fripp solos that are technically quite simi­lar to the ones on ʽEvening Starʼ, but in a different tonality, this time, much closer to Crimsonian improvisation circa 1973, though still nowhere near as jarring and demanding on the listener. Per­haps the word «nightmare» is too strong — especially since the noisy crescendos are deliberately restrained, again, so that the tune would not have too many blatant «peaks» and «dives» — but the impression is definitely unsettling compared to the lush beauty that was unfurling here before our ears just a few minutes ago. And, well, yes, you might say that thirty minutes is pushing it a bit too far. Who knows how symbolic that is, though? Beauty is discrete and brief — ugliness is continuous and lengthy. Something like that.

 

Other than ʽIndexʼ being overlong, though, I really appreciate the idea of this «light / peaceful» vs. «dark / unnerving» contrast — meaning that on the whole, the album succeeds more than it fails. Maybe from an ideal point of view, both sides would have to be more symmetrical: throwing in a couple more «scary» tracks like these and reducing the length of ʽIndexʼ could have rounded out the experience to perfection. But then, symmetry like this can seem boring to some, and doesn't the very concept of «Frippertronics» somewhat defy or even mock symmetry? Any­way, an assured thumbs up for the album here, even if only for the sake of a near-perfect first side. Be sure to enjoy it in its proper setting, though. It most certainly works best when you get to play it against some natural background that looks like its front cover. You might have to move to Mars for that, though, or something.

 

CLUSTER & ENO (w. Cluster) (1977)

 

1) Ho Renomo; 2) Schöne Hände; 3) Steinsame; 4) Wehrmut; 5) Mit Simaen; 6) Selange; 7) Die Bunge; 8) One; 9) Für Luise.

 

This is the first of two collaborations between Eno, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius — the latter two of the experimental/electronic «Krautrock» duo Cluster (sometimes thought of as a trio because of their long-term association with producer/musician Conny Plank, at whose studio this record was made as well). German electronica was riding high in artistic circles at the time, with Kraftwerk making it big, and it is no coincidence that Bowie's «Berlin period» hap­pened around the same time — all these albums should really be seen in the context of one ano­ther, as all these people were really excited about how all the new technologies allowed them to create new aural art with completely different textures.

 

Set against Eno's best works of the period, Cluster & Eno inevitably gets a little lost, and I re­member not at all being impressed when I first heard it decades ago. However, its main difference is simply that there are no immediately resonating themes/hooks that would shatter your brain­waves at once — like that searing-cutting sound of the Sky Saw that opens ʽSky Sawʼ. Cluster & Eno should not be formally classified as «ambient»: its basic melodies and overdubs are too com­plex and dynamic, requiring the listener to pay some attention at least. But on the other hand, its eventual charms are so subtle that paying this attention is a bit of a chore. This is why the album used to leave me somewhat frustrated... but I'm feeling better now.

 

One key to enjoying the record is realizing how diverse it is, and how many different, unpredic­table combinations these three guys have managed to search out. ʽHo Renomoʼ, for instance, combines a pretty piano ballad with an impassive electronic pulse, a specially treated «diving bass» part that sounds like Indian percussion, and faraway droney echoes of guitars that add an extra dimension to the experience. ʽSteinsameʼ is based on a draggy synthesizer melody remini­scent of some Bach organ piece and doubled on Fripp-style howling guitar (the actual player, if credits are to be believed, is Okko Bekker). ʽFür Luiseʼ, founded on a series of synthesizer power chords, ties them together with rising and falling electronic «swoops» that sound like a particular­ly drunken musical saw, tottering, wobbling, and just a little melancholic. ʽSelangeʼ sounds like an unfinished demo for a stern blues-rocker, for which somebody has recorded a piano part and some rudimentary percussion — then decided to turn it into an atmospheric piece instead by adding «heavenly» synthesizer overdubs. And ʽDie Bungeʼ is like a soundtrack to a rocking horse ride, with an electronic bug caught up in the fray, buzzing its way around you, unable to escape the gravity pull among all the gentle merriment.

 

It's no great shakes, for sure; the record would be of serious interest only to ardent fans of both Eno and Cluster — think something like Cluster's Sowiesoso crossed with a slightly more deve­loped version of Discreet Music, where elegant electronic soundscapes are integrated with ro­mantic piano loops. But it is a nice kind of sound, not aspiring to much depth, perhaps, yet still evocative, synthesizing a little cozy universe of its own, where you have caves, clouds, fogs, blizzards, swamps, pools, and, yes, rocking horses — no cozy universe should be without its own rocking horse. The three of them would get much better on After The Heat, but this one is totally deserving of its thumbs up as well.

 

BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE (1977)

 

1) No One Receiving; 2) Backwater; 3) Kurt's Rejoinder; 4) Energy Fools The Magician; 5) King's Lead Hat; 6) Here He Comes; 7) Julie With...; 8) By This River; 9) Through Hollow Lands; 10) Spider And I.

 

In my life, this little record holds a very special position. There are musical pieces that you learn to respect or at least tolerate, there are those that you «sort of like», but could live your life with­out, and then there are albums that serve as your own personal «gateways» into certain spheres, of which, prior to this, you were unsure if you could ever connect with them on some deep per­sonal level — to the «this is it!» point. Selling England By The Pound, by Genesis, was my such introduction or, more correctly, initiation into the world of progressive rock which, up until then, I preferred to treat, at best, on a «politically correct» level. But Before And After Science was an even more major turning point — ultimately, it was the one album that convinced me, much more than formally, that the spirit of music did not die circa 1975, and that, most impor­tantly, there is no such musical form that cannot, one way or another, be properly inhabited by the musical spirit, if the artist is endowed with one.

 

Why do I bestow this praise on Before And After Science, an album that has earned its right­ful share of averaged critical acclaim but is hardly ever considered on the same level as Talking Heads, Joy Division, or U2 when it comes to lining up masterpieces from the punk / post-punk / New Wave era? There is no simple answer to this question, so let us first talk a bit about the al­bum in general, as well as some of its particular points, and maybe the answer will gradually crystallize out of all the different observations — on its own.

 

The record was not specifically intended to become the «swan song» for Eno as a pop-rock per­former — it just so happened that after its release he concentrated on various ambient projects — but it does eerily sound like a certain «wrap-up» of all the different directions that he pursued in the mid-1970s. It combines and stratifies both his energetic/dynamic side, as previously seen on Warm Jets, and the transcendental/ambient side of Another Green World, but with a new level of maturity and sonic depth that neither of these albums had seen. Formally, Side A is «rocky» and «bouncy» while Side B is slow, moody, and intimate, but the album is sequenced in a way that does not make the shift jarring (ʽHere He Comesʼ, which could technically be classified as a «folk rocker», is really a transitional point between the two halves), and many of the textures on both sides are quite comparable in style. Furthermore, both sides show a state of spiritual calm­ness — if there is one single difference from all that was before, it is that Before And After Science is no longer the album of a seeker; it is the album of a finder.

 

If Side A is to be considered the «Before Science» part, this implies that rhythm and energy are a vital force only for those who have not yet made the big intellectual leap — but make no mistake about it, these are rhythmic and energetic tunes that are as intelligent as it gets. The sci-fi funk of ʽNo One Receivingʼ, driven by a vivacious polyrythmic percussion track from Phil Collins (with which Eno has some additional fun as he loops the drums into mysteriously fading out rolls, as if the drumkit were located on a giant see-saw), takes James Brown's inventions and turns them into a strangely beautiful alien-tribal ritual. The dark seriousness is then immediately alleviated with ʽBackwaterʼ, which sounds like an oddly deconstructed McCartney «nursery ditty» of the ʽAll Together Nowʼ variety, with completely nonsensical lyrics and a highly catchy melody, simple as heck but gradually layered over with more and more synth and guitar overdubs until it becomes a three year old's equivalent of the Ode to Joy — repetitive, intentionally silly (the song, that is, not the Ode to Joy), but infectious like no other Eno pop tune.

 

ʽKurt's Rejoinderʼ, featuring Percy Jones on bass, is instrumentally reminiscent of contemporary Brand X — no wonder, since both Percy and Phil were key members of that quirky fusion outfit, and a bit of a wonder considering the additional fun elements that Eno brings to the formula, so much so that one can only guess how much more memorable could the Eno touch actually have made those already impressive Brand X workouts. The lyrics are once again delivered in a chil­dish style (they almost sound like a counting rhyme), but what really matters is the interaction between the propulsive rhythm section and the minimalistic electronic overdubs: the whole track is like a non-stop maniacal run through a musical jungle with flurries of ghosts hovering over your head the whole way. Percy and Phil are the heroes here, but without the electronic over­dubs and the odd «kid vocals», the song would never be so effectively visualized.

 

Then, after a brief moody instrumental intermission (ʽEnergy Fools The Magicianʼ — more cool «scrambled» bass lines here), comes the first side's conclusion and its most representative track. Although ʽKing's Lead Hatʼ is well known to be an anagram of ʽTalking Headsʼ, by this time Eno was not yet involved with the Heads as such, and the song itself, with its straight 4/4 beat and insane tempo, is not particularly reminiscent of the band — it just shows Eno as a big lover of anagrams and other word games, which he is (is that "the kilocycles, the kilohertz" or "the killer cycles, the killer hurts"?). More importantly, this is one song where we all so desperately needed a Jon Landau to come along and say something like "I have seen the future of rock'n'roll, and its name is ʽKing's Lead Hatʼ", because, unlike most Springsteen songs, ʽKing's Lead Hatʼ really does have (or at least credibly emulate) the true rock'n'roll spirit, and it does so in a technological­ly updated way that shows how electronics, tape manipulations, and other technological trickery are in no way an obstacle to just ripping it up like there was no tomorrow.

 

There are just so many things to love about that song — the maniacally strummed phased guitar, the little electronic mosquito-sting pings punctuating the beat, the weird «quaking» electronic pulses, and, of course, that insane half-Jerry Lee Lewis, half-John Cale pummeling of the piano (did the poor instrument even survive that instrumental break?). Throw in the hilarious lyrics that make no sense as usual but contain some of the most brilliantly absurd word combinations this side of Dylan ("the biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface" has been my personal motto of existence for almost twenty years, and, come to think of it, "the passage of my life is measured out in shirts" may be much deeper than it seems at first sight), and the awesome «mer­curial explosion» of the electronic signals that Brian saves up for the coda, and you have yourself a modernistic rock'n'roll masterpiece that I can never tire of hearing.

 

Most people that I know of, however, believe that it is not until the second side, where the absur­dity and the childishness gives way to a much more relaxed, philosophical, meditative pace — now we are in the «After Science» territory — that the record truly hits its stride, and I am okay with that (these are probably the same people that prefer Lennon over McCartney as well). No need to worry, though: all these slower tunes have every bit as much melodic bliss and catchiness, even if their «ambient» nature can occasionally bore a not particularly easy impressionable lis­tener. But who could ever dislike at least the mid-tempo folk-rock of ʽHere He Comesʼ, which is somehow produced so that you really feel yourself gradually "rising above the clouds", not to mention "rising above reason"? There is the same kind of vocal melody here that you'd encounter on a record by some magical folk queen like Sandy Denny, but Eno, as usual, has it his own way: just barely speeding up the tempo so that nobody gets dulled out, dressing the jangly folk-rock guitars in silky electronic overcoats, throwing on New Age-y harmonies, and then coming up with the awesome idea of a bass solo — other people would probably just add some extra jangle, but the master of contrast tries out something completely different, so that you can expressly get yourself a distinct dark shape making a beeline through the guitar-jangle and synth-hum clouds. If this ain't ethereal beauty, nothing is.

 

Then, just to show you that beauty comes in all sorts of different shapes, including uncomfortable and dangerous ones, he switches from the day-light, cloudy ambience of ʽHere He Comesʼ to the twi-light, foggy ambience of ʽJulie With...ʼ. As the tempo slows down to a crawl and the lyrics suddenly become one with the music ("I am on an open sea, just drifting as the hours go slowly by..."), time begins to stand still and the slow rocking of the musical boat becomes so mesmeri­zing that you have no intent of wondering whether this slice of «suspended beauty» is of a good or of an evil nature (as somebody rightfully observed, the song could be seen from the perspec­tive of a romantic poetic admirer every bit as completely as from that of a serial psycho killer). Special mention should be made of the occasional one-note guitar «sighs» that punctuate the song at certain moments, minimalistically resolving the gradually accumulating tension — it would still be great without them, but they give it so much more, don't they? This is probably the most perfectly Taoist piece written by Eno in the «pop song» format — dark, mysterious, impenetrable, all-pervading, and completely devoid of «action», not to mention Brian's vocals that seem to be full of feeling by being completely stripped of feeling.

 

ʽBy This Riverʼ was co-written with Cluster, which is maybe why it sounds like the saddest, coldest, and most fatalistic track on the entire album — then again, with Eno there is no real sadness to be spoken of, because the man is at such a stage of enlightenment that he never lets pure emotion overcloud reasoning. The song's minimalistic piano melody is just one phrase that could well be inspired by some Schubert sonata — forming a soft backdrop for yet another mag­nificent vocal: the transition from the almost romantic-sounding "here we are, stuck by this river, you and I..." to the doom-laden "...underneath a sky that's ever falling down, down, down, ever falling down" that he finishes on his lowest note is just harsh. You know there's no escape... but somehow, you don't care, because at this point, tragedy is as much an inescapable and natural condition of being that it is no longer tragic. In fact, it is more beautiful than tragic.

 

Skipping the instrumental ʽThrough Hollow Landsʼ (nice, but I still cannot view it as anything other than a brief intermission between the two final major movements), we then go to ʽSpider And Iʼ, which ends this bliss on a perfectly transcendental note. If ʽBy This Riverʼ had a deeply intimate, piano-based sound, this one employs organ tones to mimick grand cosmic waves to which the protagonist attaches his personal conscience — "Spider and I sit watching the sky on a world without sound...". More Taoism here, perhaps, but what I am really amazed at is how the heck the man gets to create the illusion of such depth and broadth with just a bare handful of polyphonic notes — and the illusion actually grows as the song goes by. As the final blasts fade away, you begin to realize that, perhaps, after ʽSpider And Iʼ the man really had nothing left to say in the «song» format, that he is being carried away on the waves of nirvana, and now all we have to do is listen to him put three notes on an album for the rest of our lives, which are short enough, and his life, which is most likely eternal and not measured out in silly concepts like time, space, or Grammy awards.

 

If, by now, you have not yet glimpsed some of the possible answers to that question I asked in the beginning — why this record and not some other one? — you probably just need to listen to this thing for yourself. But the review still necessitates a conclusion, so I will try this. The balance of cutting-edge musical technology; pop sensibility; accessible, but not watered-down, mystical metaphysics in music and lyrics; and general humanity of it all (from humor to silliness to ten­derness) — there is not a single album in the «New Wave and later» era of modern music making that has this kind of balance to it, and yet, somehow, at the same time, «getting» Before And After Science has, at one point, allowed me to «get» so much more of everything else. A mini­malistic spiritual masterpiece that is almost too good for a routine thumbs up, but then again, let us not become too carried away and get way too ecstatic about it — such a reaction would, after all, be somewhat against its very nature.   

 

AFTER THE HEAT (w. Cluster) (1978)

 

1) Foreign Affairs; 2) The Belldog; 3) Base & Apex; 4) Tzima N'Arki; 5) Luftschloss; 6) Oil; 7) Broken Head; 8) Light Arms; 9) The Shade; 10) Old Land.

 

Do not miss out on this one — the second Cluster/Eno collaboration is notably more ambitious than the first one, and a strong, reliable, supportive companion to both Another Green World and Before And After Science, not just because it is really the last time in a long, long while that Brian would be working in the «song» format (My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts excluded), but also because it is the last time in a long, long while that you are going to get some massive, sti­mulating, maybe even mind-blowing art-pop hooks from the guy.

 

We are talking, first and foremost, about ʽThe Belldogʼ, a six-minute atmospheric masterpiece which truly feels like a collaboration — a perfect synthesis of industrial-robotic Krautrock with Eno's ability to generate a transcendental aura out of almost nothing. The lyrics could be inter­preted as usual nonsense — or they could be interpreted as another constatation of the inevitable «man-machine merger» ("then in a certain moment I lose control and at last I am part of the ma­chinery"), which is supported by the music: the heavenly synthesizers, the relaxed, but rhythmic chimes, the impressionistic piano «spills», and Eno's graceful singing are the «human/spiritual» part of the equation, and the steady electronic pulse that serves as the rhythmic basis for the song represents the «machinery». Without the electronic pulse and the lyrics, the song would have easily fit in on Science, but Science, despite being all smothered in electronics, never once strived for a «robotic» feel — ʽThe Belldogʼ, on the other hand, has this clearly designed internal conflict between artificial intelligence and spiritual essence, where both sides seem to come to terms rather than destroy one another; fascinating and a bit creepy at the same time.

 

However, although it is hard to notice this at first, After The Heat is actually more than one song. Its goals and results are more diverse and more dynamic than those of Cluster & Eno, even if the overall feel of both records are compatible — the «depth» provided by Eno is combined with the «sternness» and «solemnity» of Cluster, resulting in a cold, physically uncomfortable impression that is perfectly compatible with the dark-blue seascape on the front cover. Occasionally, there is some humor: ʽTzima N'Arkiʼ, for instance, could have been a gloomily deconstructed «post-blues-rock jam», but for some reason Eno decided to accompany it with backward vocals, inclu­ding the chorus to ʽKing's Lead Hatʼ (the song title is apparently the reversed phonetic transcrip­tion of ʽEconomiesʼ, which is itself an anagram of ENO IS COME — yes, so the man has an unhealthy obsession with the power of sounds and letters, sue him if you have nothing better to do) — anyway, this makes the tune kind of funny, but the overall feel of the album is not.

 

The average instrumental here is cold and remote, like ʽBase & Apexʼ, where an electronic pulse similar to the one in ʽThe Belldogʼ is wedged between freezing minimalistic keyboard chords and recurrent ghostly «sighs» that seem to be produced by treated slide guitars, but I am not exactly sure; or ʽOilʼ, with a creepy bassline, swoops of more ghostly synth wings, and premonitions of ecological catastrophes (this is ʽOilʼ, see?). Every now and then a ray of sunlight does appear, like in the form of the sprightly pop piano melody of ʽLuftschlossʼ, which is continuously stuck in «introduction mode», never receiving the chance to break out of the minimalist pattern, but the sunny impression is there all right. However, even without the obviously uplifting patterns After The Heat has nothing depressing or «horrendous» about it — like most other Eno and/or Cluster records, this is a weirdly executed celebration of beauty, and beauty should not always feel totally comfortable and predictable.

 

At the end of it all, ʽOld Landʼ leads us out with slow, stately, meditative synth and piano pat­terns — somewhat similarly to ʽSpider And Iʼ, although the textures are much less dense and much more economical. I mentioned the «pop» nature of many of its tunes, but it is, of course, also clear that on the whole it is already far more influenced by minimalism and ambience than Before And After Science, a record almost «commercial» in comparison, and will hardly ever produce an impression of comparable force. Nevertheless, almost each track has its own face here, and ʽThe Belldogʼ towers over everything else like... well, like a belldog, so this is a very worthy addition to the overall catalog — a thumbs up without further doubts or questions.

 

AMBIENT 1: MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS (1978)

 

1) 1/1; 2) 1/2; 3) 2/1; 4) 2/2.

 

The biggest problem with Music For Airports is that it is not really music for airports. It was briefly used at one of the terminals of the LaGuardia Airport as an experiment, but I assume that people complained too much, or perhaps the airport personnel just went crazy after a while, and the idea fell through. Ironically, it was actually thought of by Brian as a pragmatically oriented therapeutic measure against the tense, stuffy atmosphere of your average airport. But could you imagine being stuck out there, waiting two or more hours for a delayed plane while the soft piano tinkle of ʽ1/1ʼ gets looped and re-looped and trans-looped and be-boop-a-looped into your ears? Eventually, you'll begin wishing for twenty crying babies at your side instead.

 

That is the biggest problem with Eno's ambient experiments: no matter how much he may insist that the music is not to be focused upon on its own, but merely taken in as a side dish next to whatever else it is that your are consuming or producing, it is difficult to do so. Sooner or later, you will want to say, "okay, does ʽ1/1ʼ really have to be 17 minutes long?", and once you say that, the carriage turns back into the pumpkin, Snow White bites the apple, and Brian Eno drops the sheepskin and is exposed for the big bad wolf that he really is, duping poor credible art lovers into believing that they were presented here with a masterpiece.

 

Technically, these four recordings are not the simplest pieces on Earth, but there is also nothing radically challenging about them — ambient minimalist pieces that owe their structures to Steve Reich, and mostly just exploit the idea of incommensurable cycles, with different loops repeated under different time patterns, creating infinite variety out of a minimal amount of sounds, but this is not something you'd notice until you were paying very close attention, and you're not supposed to do it — you're supposed to be biting your nails at an airport terminal, wondering about whether you'll be able to make your connection rather than wondering whether the distance between oc­cur­rences of loop A is really 23 seconds and the distance between two instances of loop B is really 27 seconds. So it's a little confusing this way.

 

Indeed, the little piano melody on ʽ1/1ʼ (co-credited to Robert Wyatt and producer Rhett Davies) is very impressionistic and pretty. The holy-ghostly vocals on ʽ1/2ʼ, recorded by Eno with three additional female vocalists and sounding very much like the heavenly overdubs on 10cc's ʽI'm Not In Loveʼ three years earlier, are a little creepy. Then ʽ2/1ʼ puts the minimalistic piano and the ghostly vocals together, and then ʽ2/2ʼ yields the field to synthesizer tones, brightly announcing a new dawn (for the tired traveller who finally had to cuddle up and spend the night on the hard, unwelcoming airport bench, lulled to sleep and called to reveille by the all-pervasive sounds of Ambient 1). They're all nice, they just don't have to run for... oops, sorry.

 

Any additional writing on the subject would cause either excruciating pain or embarrassment; you would not really want to find yourself in the shoes of the AMG reviewer, for instance, who wrote that «these evolving soundscapes... can hang in the background and add to the atmosphere of the room, yet the music also rewards close attention with a sonic richness absent in standard types of background or easy listening music», as if the reviewer were an active specialist in all types of background music and immediately knew how to distinguish the «sonic richness» of Music For Airports from... umm... Forest Sounds With Soft Rains & Gentle Winds: For Deep Sleep, Meditation & Relaxation (yes, they sell these on Amazon, too). Even if there is «sonic rich­ness» in the way the loops meet each other and then go on their merry way at different rates, it is not clear how that translates into an awesome spiritual experience. So let's just cut the crap — instead of thinking all the wrong thinks, just imagine you're an airport and then decide whether this one's for you, or if you'd like to pass it on to Pyongyang Sunan International.

 

MUSIC FOR FILMS (1978)

 

1) Aragon; 2) From The Same Hill; 3) Inland Sea; 4) Two Rapid Formations; 5) Slow Water; 6) Sparrowfall (1); 7) Sparrowfall (2); 8) Sparrowfall (3); 9) Alternative 3; 10) Quartz; 11) Events In Dense Fog; 12) There Is Nobody; 13) Patrolling Wire Borders; 14) A Measured Room; 15) Task Force; 16) M386; 17) Strange Light; 18) Final Sunset.

 

Nice choice here for those who'd like to own an Eno ambient album but feel stupid listening to the same 3-5 notes over and over again. This collection, where recordings span an almost four-year period, originally had a limited release, largely serving as a bunch of «promos» sent out to various studios and film directors — although, apparently, only very few of the pieces eventually found their way to celluloid (Derek Jarman, one of the greatest heroes of somber arthouse, used up as many as two of them, but most «normal» directors allegedly had a hard time synching the material to any of their own visuals), and it is not very likely that Brian actually believed that these bits would be used in actual films — much like it would be hard to suspect him of naïvely believing that Music For Airports would ever become a favorite theme in any actual airport, other than the platonically ideal airport of his own dreams.

 

Nevertheless, the illusiveness of the title by no means signifies the worthlessness of the music. As far as Enambient is concerned, these pieces are (a) short, (b) relatively diverse, (c) showing subtle dynamic elements, and (d) not always completely electronic — some of the tracks are, in fact, outtakes from the Another Green World and Before And After Science sessions, so you will find such guest stars as Robert Fripp, Fred Frith, John Cale, Phil Collins, and even Rhett Davies on trumpet scattered among the electronic jungle. Most importantly, while it is almost inevitable that 18 snippets like this (and on the early edition, the number ran all the way up to 27) will con­tain a share of filler, Music For Films still features the genius in, well, genius mode.

 

Thus, for instance, ʽEvents In Deep Fogʼ sounds exactly like one could expect from the title — there's not really all that much that could happen in dense fog, and there isn't a lot happening here, but what matters is the awesome haziness of the selected tones, and how the music completely dies down every few bars, and then resurfaces like a new shadow of some blurry object emerging from the haze, and also how the atmosphere feels so close to some of the tracks on David Bowie's Low, and yet there is no sense of dread, because the music here pursues — and accomplishes — different goals, with largely the same means.

 

The instrumental combinations here range from subtle (like the minimal acoustic guitar twangs on ʽFrom The Same Hillʼ, a lonesome expressive voice against the collective electronic hum) to quite tricky — like ʽTwo Rapid Formationsʼ, where Eno is joined by Fred Frith of Henry Cow, Bill MacCormick of Matching Mole, and Dave Mattacks of Fairport Convention, and the four concoct a suspenseful, «cavernous» attitude where you get the feel of slowly making your way through some damp underground tunnel while occasional pairs of bats, or ghosts, or interstellar ambulance vehicles make their way past you at an alarmingly regular, but harmless, rate. Some­times there is even a whiff of aggressiveness: ʽPatrolling Wire Bordersʼ features John Cale almost literally biting into his viola, playing the same note over and over again as if sending out a dis­tress — or an attack — signal, which is then picked up and echoed in a metal-scrape manner by one of Eno's processors (I think; I'm not sure what actually goes on there, but the effect is very much «industrial», and where most of the tracks here have a «natural» or «transcendental» flavor to them, this one just grinds all over the place).

 

I am a little bit disappointed by the finale: ʽFinal Sunsetʼ, despite being the longest track of 'em all and clearly positioned as a conclusive coda, is not one of Eno's best statements of grand serene beauty — too light, perhaps, and way too inobtrusive, probably feeling like a real sunset all right, but hardly the «final» one. Still, this disappointment is relevant only if you decide that Music For Films should necessarily feel like a musical story, coherent from beginning to end, which it is not: it was never intended as anything other than a loosely tied together collection of electronic vig­net­tes — in fact, Eno might have done it a disservice by going over the original (lack of) sequen­cing and rearranging the tracks in a more «meaningful» order on the EG reissue, since, in a way, this is just a matter of useless tampering with the original artistic (lack of) intent. As a series of brief, ultimately forgettable, but instantaneously very pleasing impressions, this thing totally suc­ceeds. Although, if you are a young aspiring film director looking for a good soundtrack, I would advise staying away from this stuff — most likely, your movie already sucks, so why consider any additional ways to make it even more unwatchable?

 

AMBIENT 2: THE PLATEAUX OF MIRROR (w. Harold Budd) (1980)

 

1) First Light; 2) Steal Away; 3) The Plateaux Of Mirror; 4) Above Chiangmai; 5) An Arc Of Doves; 6) Not Yet Remembered; 7) The Chill Air; 8) Among Fields Of Crystal; 9) Wind In The Lonely Fences; 10) Failing Light.

 

In this collaboration, it must be acknowledged, the leading role clearly belongs to Harold Budd, who plays piano on all ten tracks, while Brian is either diverting himself by putting various magi­cal effects on the played chords, or, more frequently, just adds his own synthesizer gravy to the piano melodies. Nevertheless, since the record was (a) released in the «Ambient» series as #2, (b) features Eno as an active collaborator rather than just producer, it makes sense to include it in his regular discography, even if he is acting rather like a henchman here.

 

I am not well acquainted with Harold Budd, but I did hear parts of his alleged masterpiece from 1978, Pavilion Of Dreams, which was actually produced by Eno as well. That album could by no means qualify as «ambient» — more like «impressionistic», building upon the legacy of Satie, Debussy, and others, while also introducing elements of jazz and world music. However, Eno was probably attracted to Budd because of their mutual penchant for naturalistic soundscapes — and so it is hardly a surprise that The Plateaux Of Mirror is all about naturalistic, or, rather, su­per-naturalistic soundscapes.

 

The album title is right on the money: «plateaux» implies heights, «mirror» implies glass and trans­parency, and most of the tracks do sound like you've been lifted high up in the air and put up on an uneven glass surface, where the slightest breeze causes psychedelic sonic repercussions. If you think I'm talking bullshit, look at the titles — ʽAbove Chiangmaiʼ and ʽAmong Fields Of Crystalʼ should be enough to confirm the rightness of the vision. The album also hints at a certain pace of development, as all the action begins to take place with ʽFirst Lightʼ and ends with ʽFai­ling Lightsʼ, so with a little help from your imagination you could actually generate some kind of story to go along with the tracks — provided you can get that obsessed with this record.

 

Budd's frugal melodies follow the «accessible» trail of minimalism — usually, they sound either like Bach or like 19th century romanticists with 95% of the notes removed — and, as a direct sequence, there is not a single moment here that would sound «unpleasant» even to the not well trained musical ear. However, I doubt it that even the most discriminating Bach listener would easily memorize these compositions and distinguish them from one another, not because they aren't different, but because every effort is directed at making them fuse together in a hazy, foggy, superglued jello mass that disorients and distracts your perception organs and reassures you that nothing whatsoever is happening, when in reality, when you come really close and pay really se­rious attention, it becomes obvious that there are actual melodies played on real instruments. That be the colorless magic of Eno production.

 

Unable as I am to speak about the individual tracks, I only have to say this — «beauty», whoever she is, does reside here, gently swaying on the sound waves. Importantly, this is the first time an Eno album gets a professional classical pianist all over it, which makes it very different from something like Discreet Music, not to mention Music For Airports: Budd's introduction of these «sonata elements» ties Eno's vision to Western musical legacy much tighter than could be achie­ved through Brian's work alone — though whether this is a «good» thing is anybody's guess. My guess is that this is a serious work of art, deserving to be studied rather than just be used as a routine sonic tapestry. Unfortunately, I'm hardly competent to study it, so all I can really say is — sure is one cold, slippery, transcendental-magical plateau. Oh, actually that's plural — plateaux, which does make sense, because the melodies wobble in and out of your conscience as if taking place in a multi-dimensional space. But I guess, where there's one imaginary plateau, nothing prevents you from upgrading your imagination to the next level.

 

MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS (w. David Byrne) (1981)

 

1) America Is Waiting; 2) Mea Culpa; 3) Regiment; 4) Help Me Somebody; 5) The Jezebel Spirit; 6) Very, Very Hungry; 7) Moonlight In Glory; 8) The Carrier; 9) A Secret Life; 10) Come With Us; 11) Mountain Of Needles.

 

This album is frequently hailed as a milestone in the history of sampling — the first ever LP to employ sampling techniques on a regular basis, as a fundamental element of the music, as oppo­sed to sporadic earlier experiments by other people; all the more fascinating from our modern perspective in that everything here was still recorded on analogue equipment, and apparently it took a lot of fuss to synchronize the samples with the beats (but must have been fun, though). But as nice as it is to know that, I don't really give a damn: use of samples is not a blessing per se, no matter how many mediocre hip-hop artists might think so, and unless it serves some bigger pur­pose than «coolness», it's just an additional layer of sound.

 

Actually, from that perspective My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is not really an Eno album, and should probably be discussed under «David Byrne» — but we will take the easy way out and decide that, since it is credited to «Brian Eno — David Byrne» and not vice versa, Brian is recog­nized as senior leading partner (or, at least, as someone whose first name starts with a B rather than a D). In reality, though, the majority of the instrumental tracks here sound very, very close to the Talking Heads sound of Remain In Light — hardly surprising, since they were actually re­corded in between Eno's work with the band on Fear Of Music and Remain In Light itself; it is only because of additional legal problems with getting permission to use all the samples that the release of the record was delayed, by which time Remain In Light had already come out and changed the face of popular music.

 

That said, things wouldn't change much if the release order were reversed, because My Life is by no means a «popular» album — its tracks, though definitely musical and even danceable, relay on weird samples for vocal content, and have nothing that would even vaguely resemble a singalong chorus. The samples themselves are usually of two varieties: either Near Eastern singers or Ame­rican radio evangelists, exorcists, and politicians — which might be understood as a symbolic indication that the spiritual values of traditional and (post-)industrial societies are not as far removed from each other as could be thought. Or maybe Eno just randomly selected stuff that appealed to him on a (sub-)sonic level, and then left it open for anybody's interpretation. In any case, the final product was obviously and arrogantly «bizarre», and the impression was only further magnified with its title (taken from a 1954 novel by Amos Tutuola about the adventures of a West African boy that neither of the artists had even read) and its abstract painting on the front sleeve (which was actually taken from a video monitor, so that's probably the most digital part of the whole thing).

 

But it is a «visionary» kind of bizarre, all right, and I just can't see any fan of Remain In Light remaining in the darkness concerning this record, which really looks a bit like its older, slightly less gifted, but maybe even more eccentric brother. Eno used to refer to it as a «psychedelic visi­on of Africa», yet I think he was kind of selling his own product short: African rhythms and Afri­can instrumentation play as big a part in this as they did on Remain In Light, but the record itself is not about Africa as such — and certainly you wouldn't get that impression based on the very first track, whose main sample goes "America is waiting for a message of some sort or another". With all these evangelists, exorcists, and radio hosts walking all over the funky rhythms, My Life is the busiest album to have ever been released with Eno's name on it — a staggering contrast with all these hush-hush ambient records — and if it is a psychedelic vision of anything, it is more likely a psychedelic allegory for life on the streets of a big modern city, where African rhythms and polyrhythms just illustrate the general hustle and bustle. In fact, you could choose a good half, if not more, of these tracks to accompany some mad police chase scene in Miami Vice or anything similar — whereas the other half could be a good soundtrack for crowded bar scenes. The album does sort of quiet down towards the second half, with subtler, slower, more suspense­ful soundscapes, but you could argue that it simply reflects the passage of time, Side A taking place in broad daylight and Side B taking you on a trip into the shadows of night.

 

Individual highlights do not exist on this record: it really exists as a single conceptual piece with multiple movements. The grooves do not struggle for memorability: ʽThe Jezebel Spiritʼ, for in­stance, is very close in texture to the fast danceable numbers of Remain In Light, but has no central super-memorable riff or lead line, just a paranoid bass pulse and recurrent machine-gun rounds from various guitars and keyboards that are either too brief or too simple to imprint them­selves in memory — and the same applies to most other tracks, but that's OK: My Life is suppo­sed to produce a general overwhelming impression, not a set of particular small ones. In reality, no two tracks really sound the same, be it the rhythmic base, the musical overdubs, or the used samples, but the basic gut reaction from each one is the same — «fussy». Which is a perfectly normal state of being for Byrne, but not usually for Eno: the last time he got that fussy was on the first side of Before And After Science (whose own funky rhythms, by the way, are a direct pre­decessor to some of these tracks here).

 

And yes, returning to the samples, the samples do work. Arguably the best example would be the exorcist in ʽJezebel Spiritʼ, who just blends in so well with all that funk (and I am fairly sure the whole track must have been an influence on King Crimson's monstruous masterpiece ʽThela Hun Ginjeetʼ, released later in the year), but Reverend Paul Morton hardly lags behind on ʽHelp Me Somebodyʼ (I have no idea how they could secure the rights to that piece of sermoning, unless they somehow convinced the Reverend that, you know, God moves in mysterious ways), and Dunya Yusin is especially haunting on the creepy ʽRegimentʼ, whose syncopated bass line and Frippertronics (yes, Robert was there too) create quite an ominous atmosphere by themselves, but it never hurts to reinforce the atmospherics with the aid of a Lebanese mountain singer.

 

Fun fact: the first track on Side B on the original release was ʽQur'anʼ, for which Brian and David sampled the chanted recital of The Holy Book by a bunch of Algerian Muslims — only to have it removed and replaced with ʽVery, Very Hungryʼ (formerly the B-side of ʽJezebel Spiritʼ) at a later date due to the insistence of the Islamic Council of Great Britain, "in deference to some­body's religion", Byrne said later. Hey, we understand — nobody wants not to wake up one mor­ning with Yusuf Islam's dagger sticking out of your back, guys, even if those were not exactly the Je suis Charlie times. You can still listen to the finished track on Youtube these days, though (for now) — there is really nothing offensive about the way the recital is sampled, what with the groove itself having a distinct near-Eastern flavor, but of course the «protests» were issued more on general principle than any particular gripes.

 

Anyway, just forget about the alleged historical importance — sampling is such a poorly under­stood and clumsily theoretized business (like a lot of developments in modern art) that singling out its «revolutionaries» and «torch-bearers» is like dancing without a floor. The best way to get into this album is just to adapt yourself to the groove and then mentally transfer yourself to some imaginary setting — and then understand that setting as an actual metaphor for your own every­day life, particularly if you're a big city dweller that just keeps on running. Adopt this perspective, and thumbs up are guaranteed. Renounce it, and the whole thing will just be a weirder, but more boring imitation of Remain In Light. I know which one I choose.

 

AMBIENT 4: ON LAND (1982)

 

1) Lizard Point; 2) The Lost Day; 3) Tal Coat; 4) Shadow; 5) Lantern Marsh; 6) Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills); 7) A Clearing; 8) Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960.

 

Once you have travelled long enough in the ambient microcosm, the realisation that not only does it not all sound the same, but that it is actually capable of showing an impressionistic palette as broad as anything else will eventually come. For instance, On Land may seem just like «another Eno ambient album» — but in reality, it sounds like nothing he'd ever done previously. Most of his previous ambient albums focused on minimalistic keyboard melodies — short, meaningful phrases placed under a sonic microscope. On Land, allegedly recorded over a period of three years, was the first attempt to completely break away from that and go further, into the realm of sheer sonic atmosphere that is more hum and noise than melody. Nothing generally revolutionary about that — Krautrock authorities, among others, had pioneered that approach a decade earlier — but somewhat revolutionary on a personal level.

 

Above everything else, it would be interesting to see how Eno, a guy with a very traditional-emo­tional understanding of music deep in his heart, would handle such a transition to «non-melody»: and indeed, he handles it in the most melodic way possible, if we mean «melody» in its etymolo­gical sense, which is «limb-song», implying a harmonious and logical combination of parts into a whole. If the action of On Land really takes place on land, this is a dark, creepy, uncomfortable type of land — something in between the Forest of Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains, if you pardon my resorting to Tolkien for a second — but also a very naturalistic type of land, every bit as believable as Another Green World, even if this one seems anything but green (and it is no wonder that Eno would go from here straight on to Apollo Atmospheres).

 

It is curious, though, that many of these tracks are actually named after various locations in En­gland — ʽLizard Pointʼ, ʽLantern Marshʼ, ʽLeeks Hillsʼ, etc. — implying that these are, after all, musically transformed and deconstructed impressions of real landscapes that Eno was familiar with; if so, this is definitely one of the gloomiest depictions of non-industrial England ever put to tape, and one good reason to refuse knighthood for Seigneur le Baptiste de la Salle if the issue ever comes up (that and the man's unconcealed pornography fetish, of course). Even if nothing much really happens on ʽLizard Pointʼ — basically just the wind blowing over some humming synth tones — but midway through, the wind gets joined by ghostly voices, as if it were carrying around the spirits of all those unfortunate who happened to drown there (Lizard Point, the most southerly tip of England, actually has a rather nasty history in that regard).

 

«Ghosts» are, of course, an almost obligatory presence on almost any Eno ambient album, just because it is so easy to get «ghost tones» out of your synthesizer — but, let's face it, the man has perfect control over his ghosts, and a perfect understanding of what a ghost is all about. Above all, a ghost is not something that is actually supposed to harass you — a ghost usually just floats around, minding its own (rather mindless) business, so neither on ʽLizard Pointʼ, nor on the some­what less creepy, but not less evocative, ʽLantern Marshʼ do these ghosts sound personally intimidating — the ghosts on the ʽMarshʼ are just whistling and hustling past you, creating an illusion of being in a hurry, when in reality they just spin in circles. And in ʽUnfamiliar Windsʼ they just seem to huddle together and hum their own ghostly little requiem, provided it makes sense for ghosts at all to sing their own requiem.

 

Or maybe not their own. The final track of the album is ʽDunwich Beach, Autumn 1960ʼ — no idea what happened there in 1960, when Brian was just 12 years old (but he did grow up in near­by Ipswich, so perhaps some childhood recollection is involved), but Dunwich itself is a textbook example of the rise-and-fall thing, having once been the capital of the Kindom of the East Angles and having since then deteriorated into a depopulated village due to coastal erosion. The track is as gloomy and fatalistic as (almost) everything else here, lonesome droplets of electronic water trickling down the grooves to a mournful electronic hum — and suggests that the entire On Land be taken as one huge mourn for something. A lost childhood, a lost England, maybe a lost world or universe altogether, something that once stood firm but now is only represented by echoes, murmurs, and wordless ghosts. Once that understanding falls into place, On Land really begins to work as a whole, and scores another non-triumphal triumph for the man.

 

For the record, Jon Hassell, the famous trumpet player, is present here on ʽShadowʼ, where his sporadic blows are almost unrecognizably merged by Eno with the vague-fuzzy female vocal part; guitarist Michael Brook is responsible for some of the mentioned «droplets» on ʽDunwich Beachʼ; and various frogs, insects, and other organic compounds have also been credited for contributing, although I am not so sure about the royalties. But don't get any ideas — you are not going to get any «nature sounds» stuff here, because everything is processed through the Enochip before get­ting back at you from the speakers, so occasionally you might have a hard time distinguishing the frogs from the trumpets, not to mention guitars from keyboards. Nothing is what it seems, even if at first it may all seem like one big nothing.

 

APOLLO: ATMOSPHERES & SOUNDTRACKS (1983)

 

1) Understars; 2) The Secret Place; 3) Matta; 4) Signals; 5) An Ending (Ascent); 6) Understars II; 7) Drift; 8) Silver Morning; 9) Deep Blue Day; 10) Weightless; 11) Always Returning; 12) Stars.

 

One thing I really love about Eno is his sense of realism, which almost always shines through even the most bewildering of his experiments. As much as the guy likes challenging conventions, he is really not an abstract artist — he produces logical, reasonable soundtracks to different uni­verses, some of them real, some imaginary and fantastic, but still perfectly visualized with the minimum effort. This, I believe, is the main reason of this big demand on his music when it comes to soundtracks for movies that challenge our imagination: it's not just that Eno is the «ob­vious choice» because nobody knows any better, it's that he has this ability to sort of jump right in the middle of any given ambience and convert its chemical substance to sounds so efficiently that you, the listener, will be able to reconvert it back even without any clues.

 

No better place to make this point than the review of an actual soundtrack to a universe that is not entirely ima­ginary, but for most of us, is no different from imaginary — the world of space travel. Curiously, looking back upon all of Eno's projects before 1983, I fail to see anything that would be directly related to space: most of his soundscapes took place here on Earth (or, alternately, there on an alternate Earth), anywhere from jungles to high mountain peaks, sometimes rising as high as the stratosphere, but never really making a dash for deep space. Perhaps he thought these associations to be too trivial or something, already well explored by everybody from Pink Floyd to Tangerine Dream. But when he was approached by director Al Reinert with a request to pro­vide a musical backing for a documentary about the Apollo Moon missions, well... as a dedicated public servant, Seigneur De La Salle just couldn't refuse.

 

What also makes a big difference is that this is his first major collaboration with guitarist and sound guy-extraordinaire Daniel Lanois — from here, you could draw a straight line to The Joshua Tree if you so wished, which kind of makes sense seeing as how The Joshua Tree was, after all, U2's big attempt to shoot the moon, which is what Apollo: Atmospheres & Sound­tracks is all about. Although Lanois, as anybody familiar with his production style knows well, also has a penchant for minimalism, he is not extreme about it, and cares more about depth, echo, and suspense than about riding atop a single soundwave for thirty seconds. This makes the col­laboration ideal for the purpose, and the purpose ideal for the collaboration.

 

The record, even if it might be supposed to just represent a collection of incidental music for an ambitious documentary, actually seems divided in two parts — call them «the Atmospheres part» and «the Soundtracks part» if you like, but here's the deal: the first part, from ʽUnderstarsʼ to ʽDriftʼ, is largely electronic and «atmospheric», but starting with ʽSilver Morningʼ, the composi­tions begin to feature a lot more guitar, and you feel... well, you may feel as if your scary voyage through black holes and cosmic anomalies has finally led you out towards a brand new world, be it an imaginary Moon or an imaginary summer resort for Jon Anderson. In other words, this is by no means a static album — despite all that we know about Eno, and despite all that we know about incidental music for films, it can be construed to tell a story.

 

Even at its most purely atmospheric (in the first half), the music still acts — on ʽUnderstarsʼ, for instance, which mostly consists of pulsating electronics representing the various heavenly bodies, there is this odd creepy bassline, sounding as if it were an unexpected intruder from some jazz-fusion universe, like a black snake spirit writhing its way through the twinkle. ʽMattaʼ portrays some sort of quietly bubbling primordial soup, yet every once in a while some early predatory life form bursts through to the surface and emits a deep solitary howl. When the music does not act, this, too, follows a certain logic — ʽSignalsʼ is a melodic interpretation of radio waves flowing through ether, and ʽDriftʼ... well, you don't expect much of anything to happen when you're just drifting, do you? But then ʽDriftʼ takes you directly into ʽSilver Morningʼ, and that is the point of arrival where the natives send out a greeting delegation that plays you a nice welcome tune, some­what influenced by Indian music... oh wait, it's the Moon, there's nobody there. Well, seeing as how we're listening to this outside the documentary, why not just make one more step and allow a bunch of Moon people inside your imagination?

 

Granted, these Moon people also seem to have developed a strange taste for blues and country-western: tracks such as ʽDeep Blue Dayʼ and ʽWeightlessʼ, defined by Lanois' reserved, but melo­dic and even somewhat memorable guitar melodies, alternately bring to mind either Bob Dylan's soundtrack to Pat Garrett or some of David Gilmour's bluesy musings. But there is nothing really wrong with that, and some of the chord changes in ʽWeightlessʼ reveal a nice understanding of musical depth on Lanois' part — after all, Brian does not choose his partners straight out of the blue, does he? This duet with Lanois sounds and feels nothing like the Eno/Fripp musical marri­age, but is every bit as natural, simply replacing wild movement and aggressiveness with safe, cozy, and introspective calmness.

 

The last track, ʽStarsʼ, brings us back into the «atmospheres» camp, as if it were a last reminder: Moon people or no Moon people, all of us are just dust in the... sorry. Anyway, it is a nice con­ceptual come-around, where you start out with electronic imitation of The Cosmic Conscience, progress to having guitars imitate organic life infused with said Conscience, and then zoom out back to the point of magnification where said organic life ceases to be significant. And oops, all of a sudden this is a multi-layered conceptual album like The Dark Side Of The Moon, rather than just a bunch of ambient tracks for movies. All it took on our parts was a benevolent desire to bury ourselves in the little details for a bit. See, not all of Eno's post-pop-rock career is really worthless — you just have to wait for the right moment to hit you, and then you can trace the ups and downs of this ambient stuff the same way you trace the ups and downs of somebody really dynamic in comparison, say, David Bowie. But yes, it takes a little getting used to.

 

MORE MUSIC FOR FILMS (1983)

 

1) Untitled; 2) Last Door; 3) Chemin De Fer; 4) Dark Waters; 5) Fuseli; 6) Melancholy Waltz; 7) Northern Lights; 8) From The Coast; 9) Shell; 10) Empty Landscape; 11) Reactor; 12) Secret; 13) Don't Look Back; 14) Marseilles; 15) Dove; 16) Roman Twilight; 17) Dawn Marshland; 18) Climate Study; 19) Drift Study; 20) Approaching Taidu; 21) Always Returning II.

 

I might be on Brian Eno's payroll, surreptitiously inflating his reputation for hundreds of people who like to be brainwashed by Only Solitaire, but not even a really generous helping from the man's most highly treasured private stash of juicy porn could make me state, poker face-style, that More Music For Films is not an album «for completists only». Originally titled Music For Films Vol. 2, it used to be an even less helpful proposition than it is today — because on the ori­ginal release, about a third of the tracks were simply carried over from Apollo. In 2005, when it came to remastering the material for the CD age, some wise decisions were taken: «doubling» tracks were mostly removed, and in their place Eno shoved lots of snippets that were either com­pletely unavailable up to then, or had been released earlier, as rarities, on the 1993 boxset Eno Box I, which was out of print anyway.

 

But regardless of this, both the original release and the new one feel scraggly. The original Music For Films, too, was rather heterogeneous, yet Eno managed to put the different pieces together so well that, even if they never had the coherence of Another Green World, there was a certain... well, mood continuity, let's call it. In any case, it was an original and conceptual undertaking, whatever. This «sequel», though, is really just scraping the barrel — gathering together every­thing that, for one reason or other, had hitherto avoided being gathered, and throwing it out with little regard for proper sequencing. All sorts of snippets and outtakes in all sorts of styles: take your personal pick, chances are you'll like at least some of it, but you certainly won't be walking away from it thinking, «wow, that was some album I just listened to!»

 

Amusingly, around the time of the original release Brian would remark that the second volume is quite distinct from the first largely because the tunes, on the average, are longer — but with the CD release, that distinction has been largely erased, because most of the new tracks are very brief, usually minute-long, snippets that do not have a serious chance to make a lasting impression. ʽUntitledʼ, for instance, sounds like an outtake from Before And After Science, probably with Percy Jones on bass again, but the overall composition only barely begins to find its footing by the time it's over, and ends up sounding like a warm-up rehearsal at a Brand X recording session (as well as the next two tracks, by the way).

 

Elsewhere, you get some transcendental electronic drone (ʽDark Watersʼ), some transcendental country muzak (ʽMelancholy Waltzʼ indeed), some solemn baroque ambient (ʽFrom The Coastʼ), some menacing industrial grind with Frippertronics (ʽReactorʼ), and then the last third of the al­bum, which is really the only part that overlaps with the original Vol. 2, largely sounds like a con­tinuation of Apollo, if you were all that desperate for a sequel, because, you know, Eno always leaves you with a cliffhanger — many of us are still dying to see the thrilling suspense of Music For Airports resolved, one way or another.

 

On a concluding optimistic note, I really enjoy the track ʽDawn Marshlandʼ. It might be one of the clo­sest times he ever came to capturing that «nature sound» without there being anything «natural» about the track — synthesized hum and slightly spooky bird hoots, creating a foggy dawn atmosphere that veers between the mystical and the terrifying. As usual, nothing too com­plex about it, just this stunning realization that... you know, so many people are doing these things and so many people have trouble coming up with good semantics behind them. And with Eno... right or wrong, but with so many of these short tracks, logical semantic interpretations just hop inside your brain, easy, focused, like bees inside a hive. How does he do that? He really is one of the very few people in the world who make electronic instruments feel so utterly natural (which, of course, could also be used as a criticism — what's the point of making electronic in­struments sound «natural» when you can just use «natural» sounds instead? which could lead to a lengthy discussion, but that would be well beyond my current point). For the moment, we'll just assume that the man is smarter than most of them (and most of us), pending logical proof, and move on.

 

THE PEARL (w. Harold Budd) (1984)

 

1) Late October; 2) A Stream With Bright Fish; 3) The Silver Ball; 4) Against The Sky; 5) Lost In The Humming Air; 6) Dark-Eyed Sister; 7) Their Memories; 8) The Pearl; 9) Foreshadowed; 10) An Echo Of Night; 11) Still Return.

 

It is not easy, by all means, to find those precious words which would explain the difference be­tween the second Budd/Eno collaboration and the previously discussed first one (Plateaux Of Mirror). Technically, this one does not bear the subtitle Ambient #, which does not, however, make it any less ambient; and also technically, this one was co-produced by Eno and Lanois, which does not, however, imply that Lanois played anything on it or contributed something in the way of production technique that we would never hope to perceive on a completely Eno-produ­ced record. I mean, when it's U2 playing their instruments or Bob Dylan shaking up the musical world with a mighty comeback — yes, that is when Daniel's production really makes its mark. But when it's just Harold Budd at the keys and Eno responsible for synth hums, no, not really.

 

Which is not to say that The Pearl is somehow deficient in comparison to Plateaux. Thematical­ly, perhaps, its soundscapes are now more closely related to water, rather than air and heights, yet I wonder how much of that impression has been forced upon me by secondary reasons — such as the album cover, or the album title, or ʽA Stream With Bright Fishʼ. Maybe it also has to do with Budd's regular piano-playing occupying even more time here, or with his using the sustaining pedal more often, giving the melodies a «rippling» effect (title track is a good example). In any case, it's a convenient impression that allows me to put both records together as companion, rather than competing, pieces.

 

Again, if you wish, you can interpret the sequence as an uneventful, but highly impressionistic journey, from the wake of a ʽLate Octoberʼ day, culminating in the finding and blissful contem­plation of ʽThe Pearlʼ and ending with ʽAn Echo Of Nightʼ (this is the one track where Budd al­most completely disappears and lets Eno and Lanois spin a crepuscular web of chirping crickets, chilly night breezes, and deep ghostly sighs), after which, as a post-scriptum, ʽStill Returnʼ offers either a dream perspective or an outsider archangel's look at the sleeping world. None of the tracks stand out, as usual, or offer any particularly stunning musical solutions, but that is not the point — for stunning musical solutions, check out Debussy's Préludes instead. The Pearl is still an exercise in minimalism, where you are supposed to admire the beauty of the overtone rather than the beauty of the chord change. On his own, Budd is hardly a great composer or a great piano player — but Eno (and Lanois) simply use his phrasing as source material for transforming the piano into a «super-piano», enhanced with studio technologies and contrasted with electronic backgrounds for increased effect. It may not work well enough to encourage them to repeat the experiment with Budd playing actual Bach / Schubert / Debussy pieces, but it works well enough with Budd's own pieces, and that counts.

 

THURSDAY AFTERNOON (1985)

 

1) Thursday Afternoon.

 

For full, originally intended effect this single track, stretched out over an hour, should go hand in hand with a video installation, where, allegedly, seven immobile shots of a semi-nude model were filtered through various video effects. Without the accompanying visual impressions, the sheer transcendence of the sonic palette will travel through your conscience unfertilized, and you will be forced to quench your spiritual thirst with imperfection. Damn you, Brian Eno, then, for allowing Polydor Records to distribute this work of art as a stand-alone audio CD, providing the illusion of perfection for your fans worldwide when in reality they are surreptitiously offered but one half of the apple of revelation.

 

Then again, who in his right mind would want to spend sixty minutes (or even more) staring at a video installation? Even if it shows semi-nude models? If it happened to be any of you reading this review, please take the time to leave behind a happy memory of an epiphany you had in the process, one that alleviated for you the uneasy task of opening your mind to possibilities and looking at the material and trans-material world in front of you with a different set of eyes. If it did not happen, well, let us join forces and see what we can make out of these sixty minutes of sounds, and how, even today, it can help us cure cancer and neutralize ISIL leaders.

 

One visual association that I definitely do not get is with semi-nude models. The composition consists of a set of seemingly random, but in reality quite complicatedly patterned processed piano notes, playing against a very, very slow crescendo of electronic hum. The notes, as is quite common with Eno's ambient experiments, are subject to delay, subtle timbre change, and over­laying, so, technically, you probably could not state with certainty that «it all sounds exactly the same», but from a layman's point of view, it certainly does. The electronic hum eventually drowns out the piano tinkling, but only around the 58th minute or so, after which the humming machine simply fades out.

 

If there is a visual association, it would most likely be something in the cubist style... no, not even cubist: more like De Stijl. Yes, actually, Thursday Afternoon would have made a fine audio companion to a van Doesburg exhibition — its piano «plops», appearing on the surface as quickly as they vanish again into nothingness, are just like randomized, proto-Tetris geometric figures on De Stijl design pieces. Which is not really a compliment: De Stijl, as far as I am con­cerned, works much better on T-shirts and table cloths than it does in a museum, but would then Thursday Afternoon also have a purely pragmatic function? Other than, I guess, you could set it as the default receiving melody on your cell phone and spiritually illuminate all your contacts instead of picking up the phone and replying to their petty harassments?..

 

This is a piece of music that is, in the words of certain business executives, "inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional"; the only option that is not observed here is that "it must be 3¼ seconds long", because the quotation, as retold by Brian, re­fers, of course, to the Windows 95 theme, which was basically Thursday Afternoon condensed to that sort of length (imagine Windows 95 taking sixty minutes to load, though). That was a nicely pragmatic «applied» use for Eno's magic. Other than that, you could set it to run in the background, for relaxation and harmonization and purification purposes (burning some incense alongside would be nice as well), but I am afraid that, whatever else you'd be doing at the moment — scrubbing the windows, doing your taxes, writing your novel, or, God forbid, making love to your equally nutty New Age-y girlfriend — you would begin slowly going crazy around the 15 minute mark, and finalizing the deinstallation around the 40th minute, because this stuff is naggy: the synth hum is okay, but the piano notes may eventually cause the same effect as drip­ping water in a torture cell.

 

That said, (a) the main «theme», if run for about a couple of minutes, is every bit as beautiful and mystical as anything the man ever did, and (b) if you are a professional risk-taker or just an avid listener, hardened in many a battle against arrogant genius, submitting yourself to the full experi­ence at least once is probably not the stupidest way to delete sixty minutes of your life. Which, like anybody else's life, is worthless anyway next to the deep mysteries and wonders of the uni­verse — and we might just as well proclaim this as the basic overall meaning of Thursday After­noon, an album that one might easily condemn, but hardly ever forget.

 

WRONG WAY UP (w. John Cale) (1990)

 

1) Lay My Love; 2) One Word; 3) In The Backroom; 4) Empty Frame; 5) Cordoba; 6) Spinning Away; 7) Footsteps; 8) Been There Done That; 9) Come In The Desert; 10) The River; 11) You Don't Miss Your Water*; 12) Palanquin*.

 

With Thursday Afternoon behind his belt, Brian Eno unofficially changed his name to Brian EnoUGH, and focused primarily on installations and all sorts of musical carpentry — so when he came back in 1990 with his next proper «musical» album, that part of the world for whom the name still mattered was probably quite shocked to learn that (a) not only would it be a collabora­tion with John Cale, another giant from the past, but (b) it would also be a pop album — Eno's first pop album in thirteen years, to be correct.

 

And if anything, as you listen to the opening electronic-syncopated rhythms of ʽLay My Loveʼ that opens the record, it's like those thirteen years never happened. Maybe the keyboard tones are a little different, since, clearly, Eno uses a different set of sound-generating gizmos in 1990 than he did in 1977, but the basic style of the song is not one inch different from Eno's basic style on Before And After Science, or, for that matter, Here Come The Warm Jets. Not one! Just the same combination of catchy melodicity, warm friendly vocals, tense rhythmics, and overall weird­ness that used to make those records so accessible and so inimitable at the same time.

 

Behind all the joy there are problems, however. One is that, although all but one songs are jointly credited to Cale and Eno, Wrong Way Up does not sound like much of a collaboration. When you had Eno and Cluster, or Eno and Budd, or even Eno and Byrne, it was rather easy to spot the individual talents and tell who's contributing what, and it all added up to all sorts of exciting com­binations of vibes. This record, in comparison, feels like half-Eno, half-Cale, and even if techni­cally Cale probably plays keyboards, strings, and horns on some (all?) of the Eno songs and vice versa, the other guy is always being low-key while the first guy is singing and flashing his per­sonality. So you have the Eno part (ʽLay My Loveʼ, ʽOne Wordʼ, ʽEmpty Frameʼ, ʽBeen There Done Thatʼ, etc.) and the somewhat smaller Cale part (ʽIn The Backroomʼ, ʽCordobaʼ, ʽFoot­stepsʼ, etc.), and they're quite different: Brian is still largely the friendly guy with a grin, Cale is still that second-gloomiest guy from the Velvet Underground after, you know... the first-gloomi­est guy. The two personalities do not mesh that well.

 

Of course, they are not necessarily supposed to: Wrong Way Up could run on contrast rather than coherence. But this is where the second problem knocks on the door, and that is — these songs are not that good, honestly. After the first pangs of pleasure at the familiar sight and sweet memories triggered by ʽLay My Loveʼ are over, you begin to realize that the song is neither as fresh nor as tightly gripping as anything Eno did in the 1970s, even if the looped string riff is kinda cute and uplifting. This is just too much of a «let's go back there and see what we can do with the same old ingredients again» spirit to allow me to rate the song on the same level as ʽNeedle In The Camel's Eyeʼ or ʽNo One Receivingʼ, if you get my drift. It's a nice song, but it just doesn't — has no intention to — stick around all that long.

 

They even selected one of the songs here for a single, and it even charted in the States: ʽBeen There Done Thatʼ is a New Wave-stylized pop hopper that nicks its verse melody from Paul Mc­Cartney's ʽJunior Farmʼ (isn't that actually weirder than anything else on here?), is fairly infec­tious while it's on, but in the end just sounds like any medium-quality New Wave pop hit produ­ced in the late 1970s or the early 1980s. Again, it's all fair, but it's Eno-lite, no surprises, all smoothness and nostalgia and, if you pardon the expression here, not a lot of soul. And then ʽThe Riverʼ sounds nice, but it is essentially fashioned in the mode of an old country-pop tune, some­thing of a cross between the darkness of Johnny Cash and the sweetness of Ricky Nelson. I can understand Brian wanting to write and record something like that, but surely he could have no illusions that this (rather than, say, ʽBy This Riverʼ) is something that he would be remembered by long after Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, and his truly have given that unpredictable trio perfor­mance at Live Aid: A Benefit Concert For The Children Of Limbo, organized and sponsored by the Archangel Committee.

 

I must say that, in a way, I actually prefer the «purely Cale» slices on here — apparently, he was in some sort of Spanish phase here, so ʽIn The Backroomʼ is a moody Mexican tale with castanet overdubs and echoey guitars and violins, and ʽCordobaʼ is a subtly haunting minimalistic ballad about... nothing in particular; it tries to conjure a little bit of puzzling mysticism out of thin air and generally fails, but at least the attempt is worthwhile. In other words, whatever John is doing here does not simply seem like a stab at recapturing and repackaging old glories — Eno, on the other hand, can almost literally be seen hopping with a butterfly net after that elusive «spirit of 1977», and it is just a little odd for such a respectable gentleman to be seen hopping around.

 

Since none of the songs are decidedly bad, a thumbs up is still in order: the disappointed tone of the review is explained primarily by context — with those almost impossible quality standards that Eno's pop albums were setting in the mid-1970s, you could predict that any «comeback» like this would be a disappointment, but you'd still secretly hope for another grand slam. Still, let us look at the good sides, too — for instance, they pay no attention whatsoever to the actual pop trends of the time, bent completely on doing their own schtick by their own standards. And, as is usual with Eno, there are no attempts at self-aggrandizing or putting on Elder Statesman clothes or anything like that — aside from the usual cryptic lyrics that may or may not hold the key to the meaning of life, it's all quite unpretentious. And catchy, and well-produced, and enjoyable; but as for replay value — only for big fans of both artists, I'd say.

 

NERVE NET (1992)

 

1) Fractal Zoom; 2) Wire Shock; 3) What Actually Happened?; 4) Pierre In Mist; 5) My Squelchy Life; 6) Juju Space Jazz; 7) The Roil, The Choke; 8) Ali Click; 9) Distributed Being; 10) Web; 11) Web (Lascaux Mix); 12) Decentre.

 

The revival of Eno's «pop» career ended as quickly as it began: in 1991, Brian almost finalized what would have been his first completely solo pop record since the Seventies, ironically calling it My Squelchy Life — but at the last moment, the project was scrapped, shelved, and ultimately replaced with Nerve Net, an allegedly much less accessible affair that did incorporate some mate­rial from MSL, but on the whole, did not look much like a «pop» album, let alone anything even remotely close to the nostalgic spirit of Wrong Way Up.

 

What Nerve Net is, actually, is an attempt to modernize and «harshen up» the man's electronic sound. Throughout the Eighties, Eno was largely following his own path, making all sorts of becalmed ambient albums that fit in with nothing else. But he may have eventually noticed that, in doing this, he had pretty much fell out of time — and even as a producer, he'd hit his cutting-edge peak with Talking Heads in 1979-80 and, well, that was that. Nerve Net sounds like a con­scious, even desperate attempt to catch up, and since the hottest thing around to catch up with was IDM (well, actually, the term IDM itself wouldn't be coined until 1993, but still...), this is what he is catching up with here. Electronic textures set to dance rhythms — produced by a man who hadn't really come close to a dance rhythm in at least a decade.

 

Saying that Nerve Net is a «bad» album wouldn't be meaningful at all. Rather, it is the stereo­typical useless album: an old-school pro treading on the turf of younger artists who are much more agile and knowledgeable in this department — I do not think that many a fan of Aphex Twin will think all that highly of Nerve Net in comparison. It is creative and moderately diverse, but the tunes are neither memorable nor all that powerful, and one reason behind that may be their compromising nature: the rhythmics may be modern enough (although the actual rhythms are rarely techno — more like good old syncopated funk), but the guest stars, including old friends Robert Fripp and Robert Quine on guitar, are old school veterans, and are just doing their usual schtick, not looking particularly excited about Eno's call for rejuvenation.

 

Problem is, if you're making a dance album (and this is a dance-oriented album), it has to go all the way, but this one does not. It sets up groove after groove with tense, nervous atmospherics (hence the name Nerve Net, right? right?), but it's almost as if Eno's decade of creating relaxed ambient sounds were refusing to let go off him, and every groove that tries to go for a harsh, grim, merciless effect ends up sounding soft and tender. In fact, about half of them sound like Brand X reprogrammed for drum machines and keyboard loops — atmospheric jazz-funk that tended to get boring even with live players, and gets useless with machines.

 

Attempts at singling out «better» tracks have been fruitless for me. Maybe it is the ones that have Fripp soloing all over them, like ʽWire Shockʼ with its vocoder-ish guitar tone vomiting all over your living room. Or maybe it is ʽAli Clickʼ, just because its funky groove sounds more loose and cocky than any other, and there's also this fade-in-fade-out piano line swooping down, and Eno is rapping something out on top of the music as if this were a surrealist pop number out of the past? Or maybe it's ʽWebʼ, because its «web» of distorted synthesizers and scared piano tinkling is the most ominous soundscape on the album? Whatever be, to me these observations do not come naturally — I have to concentrate really, really hard on the tunes to be impressed by them. Not that they aren't professional or creative or anything like that: they are simply too busy and fussy to be «ambient», yet too reliant on atmosphere and repetitiveness to be properly «dynamic».

 

Disturbing bit of trivia: apparently, the vocoder-distorted vocals on ʽWhat Actually Happened?ʼ encode the discussion of a rape situation. You wouldn't notice it unless you listened in very at­tentively or checked the lyrics online, but there it is. The words would agree with the general tone of the album — nervous, paranoid, deranged, psycho — but their blurriness also agrees with the general timidity of the album: Selected Ambient Works it sure ain't. On the other hand, those who still like to have their dynamic, kick-ass electronica with a bit of a humanoid face to it (all these guitar solos and drum loops that give the impression of being hand-generated) might still want to give this a try. Eno's mediocrity does have growth potential, you know.

 

THE SHUTOV ASSEMBLY (1992)

 

1) Triennale; 2) Alhondiga; 3) Markgraph; 4) Lanzarote; 5) Francisco; 6) Riverside; 7) Innocenti; 8) Stedelijk; 9) Ikebukuro; 10) Cavallino.

 

And now, back to magic ambient territory. This is actually a collection of various tracks, most of them recorded by Eno in the second half of the 1980s for assorted installations around the world (hence all the titles where you can distinguish Italian, German, Dutch, and Japanese words that relate to installation geography) — and then put together as a mix tape for the Russian artist Sergei Shutov. The latter, as it happens, contacted Eno saying that he loved to work to the sound of his records, but that he also had limited access to these records (I guess the contact either took place before 1991, or else Sergei was too poor at the time to buy imported CDs and too honest to stock up on bootlegs), so Eno took pity on the music-hungry artist and put together all these tracks as a present (I guess Sergei didn't mean to say that he was actually shaking his ass off to Here Come The Warm Jets while working — now that would have been one funny case of artistic miscommunication).

 

Eventually, Eno liked his own mix tape so much that he proclaimed there was a common theme to all these tracks (mere mortal men will not be able to see it, though, so it is a good test on whether you are predisposed to immortality), and put it out commercially. Normally, I tend to avoid commenting on his «installation albums», because there's so many of them and they are so interchangeable, but The Shutov Assembly does not formally count as one, and at the same time it does give you a very representative peek into Eno's music-as-painting approach. Unlike Thurs­day Afternoon, this one can be rather easily sat through: all the tracks but one are relatively short, there is some diversity involved, and the minimalism is rarely jarring, because, for the most part, this is not Eno trying to see how much he can squeeze out of one note — this is Eno producing soundscapes to match visual settings, and the degree of minimalism here most likely depends on the type of visual setting.

 

Nothing here counts as a breakthrough idea or anything like that, but it might be the best kind of «guess your environment!» game album by the man since Another Green World (stuff like Apollo was all just one environment, and the Music For Films series were quite scattered and sketchy). Here is a quick runthrough, made up on the spot.

 

ʽTriennaleʼ is clearly a quiet, beautiful, and slightly dangerous underwater environment, small currents and aquatic organisms gliding past you without paying much attention. ʽAlhondigaʼ is a cavernous setting, with various minerals glistening off the walls and cool, fidgety breezes running through the tunnels in the form of white-noise swooshes or violin-like tremolos. ʽMarkgraphʼ is a dusty old dungeon, inhabited by loyal spirits of the former occupants quietly hooting around. ʽLanzaroteʼ probably takes place on a moonless night somewhere in a large clearing, surrounded by deep forest on all sides — you're placed in the middle and you have to sniff out which side does the danger come from. (Hint: it never ever comes). ʽFranciscoʼ takes you to a cave once again, but this time it is a magical one, maybe Ali Baba's or something, with gold glistening all around that you find yourself afraid to touch.

 

ʽRiversideʼ, despite the title (which really just refers to Riverside Studios in London), could have fit in well on Apollo — it's full of little space bleeps that convey the serene beauty of nothing out there. ʽInnocentiʼ is actually similar in mood to ʽRiversideʼ, but has a larger amount of robotic electronic noises, so maybe it has you inside the spaceship rather than on the ʽRiversideʼ outside. ʽStedelijkʼ has lots of church organ-like tones, so you could try and imagine yourself inside some sort of futuristic temple where you float through the air when communicating with God, because gravity prevents you from successful communication. ʽIkebukuroʼ, the longest track on the album, is also the weirdest one — a 16-minute pattern of deep faraway chimes that echo off each other, overdubbed with what sounds like furiously, frantically, and pointlessly flapping wings... umm... Pegasus caught up in a musical spider web? Whatever. Finally, ʽCavallinoʼ is a quiet, but stately sunset that also takes place on a distant planet with its own Sun.

 

If there really is a «common theme» to it all, I have yet to find it, although one must not forget that the thin line between deep insight and ridiculous bullshit in modern art is dainty thin indeed. Regardless, this is a pretty nifty collection of atmospheres: I certainly wish he'd taken some un­ne­cessary fat off ʽIkebukuroʼ (sixteen minutes of wing-flap brings this way too close to Thurs­day Afternoon for comfort), and the degree of diversity isn't really so high as to make it his latter-day equivalent of Another Green World, but at least this is one fine gift for the likes of Shutov.

 

NEROLI (1993)

 

1) Neroli.

 

«Thanks to the calming nature of the piece, Neroli has been implemented in some maternity wards, both to instill a sense of calm as well as enhance the organic nature of childbirth» (Wiki­pedia). I am not quite sure how exactly a series of intricately looped, digitally synthesized notes is supposed to «enhance the organic nature of childbirth», but who am I to question advanced psy­chotheurapetical practices? Let us instead concentrate on the title — most likely an anagram, but what for? "Lorien"? Unless the elves actually spend most of their time frozen in cocoons, not very likely. "Lenoir"? That's a pretty common surname; probably not the inventor of the internal combustion engine, though, as that would be too loud for this album. "Nilore"? What does the man care about nuclear technology research sites in Pakistan? Beats me.

 

Anyway, this is basically Thursday Afternoon Vol. 2 — only a «darker» counterpart to that record's «lighter» aura, as the played notes are much lower; there is also no humming electronic background whatsoever, so the only thing left between you and the gradually fading soundwaves of the dripping notes is silence. Imagine your roof leaking in a regular pattern, with a set of pots capturing the droplets, as the pattern very slowly shifts due to the droplets dropping at different speeds, yet essentially remains the same, and that is basically Neroli for you, except the dripping process has been given an electronic coating. And, of course, it is almost one hour long.

 

Perhaps it really does help young mothers, lying in beds resting with nothing much to do. Per­haps it is a cool soundtrack to help you meditate — as an experiment, you could try playing it in its entirety every evening before you go to bed, and it might drain your brain of all the silly, distur­bing, nerve-wrecking events of the day. I am not denying the worth of this as a medical tool (it should definitely have at least some sort of placebo value), and I am not even denying it the status of an artistic statement, one that would prompt people to exclaim: "Ah, that Neroli! Verily, has a more astute metaphor for the entire universe behaving just like circles on the water been thought of by mortal man? That Eno — musical philosophy has never been more profound in its simpli­city and directness! Not even John Cage has got anything on him!"

 

What I am denying is the capacity of these «circles on the water» to do much of anything for me, or for people who, while not denying the powers of «ambient» as a genre, think that minimalism in composing is long past being valuable per se. Honestly, one Thursday Afternoon per artist is quite enough; so I would prefer to simply label this «Brian Eno's Limited Time Offer For Mater­nity Wards — Not To Be Taken Seriously» and forget that it ever existed.

 

SPINNER (w. Jah Wobble) (1995)

 

1) Where We Lived; 2) Like Organza; 3) Steam; 4) Garden Recalled; 5) Marine Radio; 6) Unusual Balance; 7) Space Diary 1; 8) Spinner; 9) Transmitter And Trumpet; 10) Left Where It Fell.

 

As most of those people who are supposed to generally know stuff about people named «Jah Wobble» already know, but those people who find names like «Jah Wobble» kinda funny probably may not know, Jah Wobble was an old friend of the Sex Pistols' John Lydon, and to­gether they originally formed PiL, where he played bass guitar before he got bored and moved on to an even more experimental/avantgarde solo career. That a guy like that would eventually attract Brian Eno's attention was quite probable, but it is important to keep in mind that Spinner was not really a «collaboration» as such.

 

Instead, what happened is that Eno simply sent Wobble a bunch of his tapes that were originally recorded for the soundtrack to one of Derek Jarman's experimental movies — just, you know, because what do you do with a bunch of tapes left over from a soundtrack? Why, you send them to Jah Wobble! Like, what could be more natural and predictable? Remember, Jah Wobble is always there behind your back to make good use of your leftovers (provided your skill level is at least 20 points, which makes you eligible for co-operation).

 

The results are not particularly thrilling, though. Wobble decided not to disrupt the steady ambient flow of Eno's tapes — instead, he just made them more bass-heavy, added some rhythm (in places), and emphasized the dark / mystical / ominous aspects, but all very gently, even on those of the tracks that also received a volume boost from percussion and electric guitar overdubs (some of the percussion was handled by Can's own Jaki Liebezeit, which is particularly notice­able on the title track with its fussy, overspilling drum track). What emerges is a mix of ambient, industrial, and even dub compositions that are never too intrusive, not very illuminating, and mainly just keep returning you to those dark sonic caverns that you have probably already ex­plored in depth on earlier Eno albums.

 

It's not bad, and not even meaningless, but none of this inspires any creative writing: the beats sound normal, the synth and bass tones are nothing special, the «acid jazz» overtones that some­times arise out of nowhere are fairly routine, and the last track, which goes on for 15 minutes, according to Brian himself, was not liked by anyone, so he called this style, self-ironically, «un­welcome jazz», which it is: starting out like a limping jazz-fusion shuffle with Eastern overtones and wildly wobbling volume levels, it is then transformed into something that sounds like an intro to a soothing smooth jazz instrumental, only looped to eternity. Yes, it's moody, but so is every­thing Eno ever did.

 

Overall, it is weird: there is actually much more happening on this record than is usual for Eno's ambient projects, but in the end you are left with the feeling that you got much less than you bar­gained for. Apparently, Enoisms and Wobblisms just do not make good partners — the ambient soundscapes are not in agreement with the bass grooves, and the end product is a disappointment somewhat on the same grounds as Neroli: an attempt to sound harshly modern that still relies on old-fashioned ideas of beauty — a conflict of interests that remains unresolved. But I guess that the very manner in which the record was produced automatically precluded it from potential mas­terpiece status. It's not as if Eno cannot work in a dynamic environment — his work with Talking Heads and David Byrne is best proof that he can — it is simply that here, there was no dynamic environment to begin with, just a bit of quick fiddling about by correspondence. Definitely not essential for fans of either Eno or PiL, I'd say.

 

THE DROP (1997)

 

1) Slip, Dip; 2) But If; 3) Belgian Drop; 4) Cornered; 5) Block Drop; 6) Out Out; 7) Swanky; 8) Coasters; 9) Blissed; 10) M. C. Organ; 11) Boomcubist; 12) Hazard; 13) Rayonism; 14) Dutch Blur; 15) Back Clack; 16) Dear World; 17) Iced World.

 

True to its name, I believe that all of this album, except for the last track, is about «the drop». Since gravity causes different effects depending on the nature of the object subjected to gravity, things, you know, tend to drop at different rates with different sonic repercussions, and this is exactly the subject that Brian Eno explores on this album. And if you think the subject is slight, well, think again — can you even imagine a world without dropping? It's not every second, mind you, that a starving child dies in Africa — but every second, millions and billions of objects around the world effectuate The Drop. And has anyone in the history of music ever made a work of art about that? Absolutely nobody, not even The Fall.

 

On the down side, when you dig deep into the art of dropping, it shows little potential for fasci­nation. If you emphasize it and make tricky electronic interlocking patterns, like Autechre, it can have some crazy appeal — but if you treat it minimalistically, like Brian does here, it doesn't do all that much. Sixteen short tracks — snippets, really — that range from rhythm-less atmospheric textures to (theoretically) danceable tracks with drum-'n'-bass support, and most of them just float by without awakening any unusual thoughts or feelings. There is little here that wasn't already done better on Nerve Net or Spinner, and those, too, weren't exactly huge artistic successes. At best, this music feels like a collection of moody intros to potentially gripping songs — some mildly intriguing groove is set up, you subconsciously expect it to develop / transition into some­thing more exciting, it never does, and you walk away... dissatisfied. Maybe you will get an idea of what a ʽBelgian Dropʼ really is, but how exactly is that going to help you develop your spiri­tuality and keep in touch with The Eternal?

 

Since the tracks are so frustratingly non-descript, I believe that the only thing that remains is to point out that the last track, called ʽIced Worldʼ and stretching out for more than thirty minutes, is actually just an extended version of the second part of the last track from Spinner, and that nothing particularly different happens in those 25 minutes of it that were not included on Spinner. I do wonder if there's a skyscraper high enough anywhere in the world that would require a 32-minute ride with ʽIced Worldʼ as the soundtrack. If there is, they should be waiting for you with a straitjacket at the top, just for the purpose of extra security — or, at the very least, you might never ever want to hear a piano again as long as you live.

 

It is so ironic, of course, that the worst of Eno's ambient albums seem to be those on which some­thing actually happens — at least Music For Airports, with its Zen-Spartan poise, entrances you with its superficially humble arrogance, but this «unwelcome jazz» thing that Brian got going in the late Nineties is just yawn-inducing. Never even mind that these albums put him at a total dis­advantage with all the experimentation and innovation that was happening at the same time on the electronic scene — it's just a bunch of bland sonic collages by itself, in and out of any context. I can understand that the man was bored, but rubbing your boredom off on others is simply im­polite, especially for such a great artist.

 

DRAWN FROM LIFE (w. J. Peter Schwalm) (2001)

 

1) From This Moment; 2) Persis; 3) Like Pictures, Pt. 1; 4) Like Pictures, Pt. 2; 5) Night Traffic; 6) Rising Dust; 7) Intenser; 8) More Dust; 9) Bloom; 10) Two Voices; 11) Bloom (instrumental).

 

Definitely an improvement here. Apparently, J. Peter Schwalm is a German experimental musi­cian and composer, primarily a drummer and later on a human synthesizer, combining elements of jazz and electronica to produce some of that sweet music of the future. And considering how much Eno was moving in that direction himself, first with Jah Wobble and then on his own on The Drop, the two guys were probably destined to work together. Or, to put it more accurately, one of those days Eno was destined to work with an electro-jazz guy from Germany — the fact that this guy was J. Peter Schwalm we will ascribe, however, to historic incident.

 

The pair collaborated first on an esoteric project — an «image album» for a manga (Music For Onmyo-Ji) where the first disc was allocated to a Japanese gagaku ensemble, and the second one featured six Eno/Schwalm compositions. The partners having apparently taken a liking to each other, they decided upon a «proper» follow-up that would be in a position to make more waves, and not only did they carry it through, but they even went as far as to tour in support of the al­bum, which, if I am not mistaken, was Eno's first tour since the faraway days of Roxy Music (although he did have occasional sporadic concert appearances, such as with 801, from time to time) — in­teresting how a totally unknown Peter Schwalm succeeded in dragging him out, where neither Robert Fripp nor David Byrne could do the trick.

 

In any case, the product of their collaboration is arguably the most... eventful record, let's put it that way, to come out of the Eno camp since at least Wrong Way Up. Formally, it continues his obsession with «unwelcome jazz», but the compositions seem more inspired, meaningful, and dynamic than ever before — not all of them, perhaps, but enough to bring back a little bit of faith in the man, unless it is really Schwalm who's doing all the composing here. Memorable themes, diverse atmospheres, suspenseful build-ups, and, most importantly, that old feeling of getting lost in a surreal, but totally realistic musical world, it's all here to some degree, and without any hints of either forced nostalgia or forced modernization.

 

The most impressive compositions are arguably the ones that bookmark the album (discounting the brief intro and outro sections) — ʽPersisʼ and ʽBloomʼ. The former, a juxtaposition of Peter's drum'n'bass tracks and Eno's synthesizer textures, is a great example of «suspenseful ambient», as you keep waiting for these chimes and drips to resolve into something creepy, and eventually there is some sort of «intermediate» resolution, when an ominous string riff appears out of no­where and heightens the suspense — dark clouds on the horizon, approaching at an alarming rate, that sort of thing. Of course, the storm itself never comes, but that would be too much to ask for from a guy who is only interested in premonitions.

 

ʽBloomʼ, on the other hand, is a far more calm, gently-wobbling, trip-hop-influenced track, a careful musical rocking horse with bubbly percussion and a two-note cuckoo-clock-style synth rhythm, somewhere behind which you can distinguish (though hardly understand) the merry pat­ter of a little kid. As a bonus track, the album also adds a purely instrumental version of the same track, but, curiously, it works better with the kid — the contrast, or, rather, the perfect synthesis between the serenity of the lightly orchestrated musical track and the child's cute little noises is endearing without being cloying, and also helps remind us of this charming humanity that infests the best of Eno's works, despite all of their technophilia.

 

In between the two, there's all sorts of stuff, good and bad: extremely ugly and dated vocal effects on ʽRising Dustʼ, which sounds like somebody having too much fun with Autotune and not min­ding the consequences is something I could easily do without, but ʽNight Trafficʼ is another case of Brian's solemn organ-like keyboard parts and Schwalm's stern, doom-laden basslines well com­plementing each other, and ʽMore Dustʼ has a pretty, if not downright beautiful, minimalistic guitar/keyboard pattern that slowly «drips» on the listener and is much more evocative than any­thing on The Drop (or maybe it is just because in reality, I am charmed out by the equally mini­malistic bass «zoops» that have an entrancing quality to them).

 

In short, if we are ever to move away from «minimal minimalism» and closer to a world that requires a rhythm section and some musical development, the direction of Drawn From Life is a promising one — it's as if we have Brian slowly awakening from a slump here, correcting the mistakes he'd been guilty of ever since Nerve Net led him closer to the «techno world» and made him forget about his own identity and his own strongest sides. I am not sure if, given the strange strange strange musical standards of ambient, New Age, and all these next-level-of-conscience musical genres of the modern world, this record could be objectively called a «comeback», but in my perso­nal ledger at least, nobody could deny me such a record, or the prerogative of recom­mending the album to all of those people who'd lost their faith in St. Brian ever since the attempt to forgive him for Thursday Afternoon ran into translational difficulties. (That said, if you hap­pened to lose your faith in the man right after Before And After Science, the recommendation still does not apply — intelli-pop music this ain't).

 

THE EQUATORIAL STARS (w. Robert Fripp) (2004)

 

1) Meissa; 2) Lyra; 3) Tarazed; 4) Lupus; 5) Ankaa; 6) Altair; 7) Terebellum.

 

Long time no see! The last «Fripp & Eno» album had been released almost thirty years ago, even though, technically, the two sonic wizards still managed to cross creative paths every now and then. Lots of water under the bridge, too, and while the title of this third full-scale collaboration also happens to have the word star in it, the album has very little in common with Evening Star, or, in fact, with anything that you'd normally associate with Robert Fripp.

 

Genre-wise, this here is not «noise», or «drone»: The Equatorial Stars, a record dedicated to the still, visibly immanent beauty and mystery of those little lighted dots above our heads, is a 100% ambient record, focusing on static atmosphere much more than on any sort of musical develop­ment. And old man Robert seems perfectly content here to stick to a quiet, inobtrusive, repetitive style of playing, without any dynamic pre-planning of where a particular guitar melody is sup­posed to go or how it could gradually and subtly gain in intensity. In other words, a perfect setup is made for one of the most boring albums ever released — a record in which Robert Fripp, the demon hero of ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ, signs a contract with your local airport.

 

Strangely, though, the setup works, and scrolling up to see which was the previous Brian Eno ambient album that I liked to a comparable degree, I stopped at Apollo, which was hardly sur­prising — it's like The Equatorial Stars simply forgets about everything Eno did in between 1983 and 2004, and acts as a logical sequel to that mini-masterpiece. Only instead of grizzly Canadian bear Daniel Lanois you get clean-cut English gentleman Robert Fripp, who never forgets to wear a freshly starched collar under that space suit. Do they offer five o'clock tea on Meissa? Probably not, which is why they had to visit all the other stars as well.

 

Actually, Fripp as a contributor to the frozen field of ambient turns out to be surprisingly efficient. On ʽMeissaʼ, set against Brian's twinkle-twinkle-little-star droplets of electronic keyboards, he plays a minimalistic bass-heavy humming solo, which often sounds as if someone were really slowly bowing a cracked old cello with just one string on it — and the two parts merge together blissfully, as if Eno's high-pitched sounds were «life», Fripp's low-grumbling solo were «death», and everything else was trapped in between. Or if you think that's pretty far-fetched, you can just return to the usual idea of various types of aliens roaming the galaxy. Small, hasty, fussy ones engineered by Eno and large, slow, grumbly ones manipulated by Fripp.

 

The formula is repeated in a number of similar, but slightly different ways throughout the record, and it's not as if every track here has its own face: in fact, your conscience will probably only be slightly altered with ʽAltairʼ, where we have some programmed percussion and a surprisingly funky, though very faintly mixed, rhythm track — hello from the age of Nerve Net? — that might just as well not be present. Maybe they got it from a reliable source in the astrological com­munity that the population on Altair is particularly fond of nightclubbing, but more likely, they just had this rhythm track lying around by accident and they thought that it would be a nice inci­dental way to confound some people's expectations. Because it doesn't really matter — what matters are those little whistling flushes and flusters of guitar-like keyboards and keyboard-like guitars, probably representing the careless (and purposeless) spirits of all your dead ancestors who were seduced by low rent costs on Altair over the millennia. The rhythm track is just an echo of the irritating boombox that one of the brothers forgot to turn off.

 

Anyway, to me it all seems like a decent return to ambient form by Eno, and a startling side pro­ject for Fripp — unlike those two early albums, Equatorial Stars may not lay any claim to any sort of innovation, but it is still a somewhat different project, and it actually makes an even colder, an even more dangerous and impenetrable place out of open space than Apollo ever did. It seems too busy to get everything possible out of just one type of atmospheric texture to be really com­parable to Apollo — but it does achieve what it set out to do. Probably the best way to experience it, though, would be by blasting it at full volume into the sky on a particularly clear and starry night while lying on your back in the grass and trying to remember as many constellation names as your memory allows you to carry. This will bring you one step closer to rupturing the space­time continuum, I'm sure, and you'll never want to worry about the little things again.

 

ANOTHER DAY ON EARTH (2005)

 

1) This; 2) And Then So Clear; 3) A Long Way Down; 4) Going Unconscious; 5) Caught Between; 6) Passing Over; 7) How Many Worlds; 8) Bottomliners; 9) Just Another Day; 10) Under; 11) Bone Bomb.

 

If it ain't broke, don't fix it; if it done got broke — for goodness' sake, just replace it already. All of Eno's half-hearted attempts to make bits of vocal pop music past the Seventies, be it with Cale, Schwalm, or anybody else, were incomparable in quality to the classic era; so why, after all this time, once again return to the vocal format, and this time, for an entire album? This attempt was simply bound to be half-hearted again, and it is.

 

Tucking some modern rhythms behind his belt, enlisting the help of some proverbially progres­sive stars, and alternating between sung, spoken, mumbled, and jumbled vocals, Brian here gives us an album that is both ambient and pop at the same time — or, rather, one that is neither am­bient nor pop. Essentially, it's a platter of moody mush that presents itself as something much more deep than it really is, and also contains some really bad sonic decisions, such as the frequent use of Autotune to transform Eno's normally handsome vocals into the last sounds of a rapidly melting Wicked Robot of the West.

 

Saddest of all, Another Day On Earth shows that Eno totally lost the capacity to amaze — now, when he is generating pop music, he is just generating pop music. It's not as if ʽThisʼ were a bad song, but it just sounds like any other semi-decent New Wave and later art-pop song. The drum machines are openly crappy (oh, where are those happy days when studio technology and organic Phil Collins could join in bliss and ecstasy on an opening track?), but much worse is the hidden crap effect, when the song is over and you realize that you don't remember anything about it ex­cept that, uh, it was... kind of happy-sounding and peaceful.

 

Or maybe this entire album is just a bit too happy-sounding and peaceful. See, when you combine faint pop hooks with friendly ambient soundscapes and meditative disposition, there's always a danger of losing focus, of drifting apart in your own mellowness. It's one thing when you are directly producing a stereotypical ambient album — it's totally another when you are using ambi­ence as a support for a «song», because then you get something like ʽA Long Way Downʼ, which is neither here nor there: as an ambient piece, it is let down by the inclusion of vocals, but as a vocal piece, it suffers from melodic minimalism. Like, would those Harold Budd collaborations have been better if Eno thought they needed vocal overdubs? Probably not, or he would have added those overdubs. Then why make that mistake here?

 

In the middle of the album, we unexpectedly get an almost upbeat, McCartney-esque pop ballad (ʽHow Many Worldsʼ), riding on a simple acoustic guitar riff and sporting unusually pathetic lyrics for Eno; I would have thought that lines like "our little world turning in the blue" would be way below his usual level of acceptance, but there you go — actually, the credits state that the lyrics were co-written with Michel Faber, the Dutch writer, and I sure hope he writes better no­vels than he does poetry. Anyway, it's kind of pretty, but it's also kind of childish: where in the past Eno had this knack for finding minimalist melodies that sounded like they were telling you The Lost Chord Truth of the universe, ʽHow Many Worldsʼ seems poised for a Sesame Street soundtrack. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but then offer it for a Sesame Street soundtrack, goddammit, not your long-awaited «pop comeback».

 

ʽJust Another Dayʼ, arriving near the end of the album, tries to somehow summarize it all and pre­sent a stately finale, and it's decent — with Brian using his imposing lower range on a basic vocal hook that, in a typical Eno manner, tries to marry the macrocosmically grand with the ut­most in simplicity. Decent, but not devastating: just like the song tries to convince us that "that was just another day on Earth", so is the song itself "just another song", celebrating Eno's gift for serenity and bliss in a routinely manner. After all, the music behind all this is just another mix of humming electronic textures, isn't it? And the percussion is dreadful.

 

The one really weird song on the album is ʽBone Bombʼ, serving here as a totally unexpected afterthought-style appendix — a series of bass and keyboard pulses, over which a vocally desen­sitized lady with a Laurie Anderson flair (not Laurie Anderson, though) piles up strings of free-form poetry, as if from the point of view of a suicidal terrorist ("bone bomb" is apparently a technical term for a suicide bomber whose own bones serve as lethal projectiles). Predictably, it's kind of creepy, although the subject matter is masked well enough for most people not to take notice. And even though the track is not pop at all, and even though I am not generally a fan of this kind of pretentious pseudo-shocking Relevant Art, I find myself strangely wishing that Ano­ther Day On Earth contained more of the same, instead of generally relying on that safe, cuddly, no longer all that interesting sound.

 

The sad truth is that the days on which Eno released albums like Another Green World and Before And After Science were not «just another day on Earth» kind of days — they were really special days with special musical events. We may, of course, simply agree with the artist that these days are gone for ever, and now every new day is just another day, regardless of whether you find a new Brian Eno record waiting for you or not. But if so, I don't think I want to be expli­citly told about it; I sort of know it already, you know. Disappointing.

 

BEYOND EVEN (1992-2006) (w. Robert Fripp) (2007)

 

1) Ringing Beat; 2) Gasp; 3) Sneering Loop; 4) Tripoli 2020; 5) Behold The Child; 6) Timean Sparkles; 7) Dirt Loop; 8) The Idea Of Decline; 9) Deep Indian Long; 10) Hopeful Timean; 11) Glass Structure; 12) Voices; 13) Cross Crisis In Lust Storm.

 

More Fripp & Eno for those who prefer their ambient spicy and with extra feedback on top. This album, too, has had a rather strange release history: originally made available only as a digital download, under the odd title of The Cotswold Gnomes, it was later released on CD as Beyond Even (1992-2006) in two versions: a single-CD package and a double-CD edition where you could either listen to all the compositions separately or segued together by means of rather un­sophisticated fade-ins and fade-outs. Additionally, discographies tell me that at least one limited edition print of the CD (Japanese, I think) came under the title Unreleased Works Of Startling Genius — which, I assume, may be a title inspired by the form term «Area Of Outstanding National Beauty», which is actually applied to Cotswolds, referenced in the original name. But enough with this detective crap, or it may begin to look as if I'm actively interested in this or something.

 

As the title (one of the titles) tells us, these are indeed collaborative works with Fripp, many, if not most, of them being outtakes from the Equatorial Stars sessions. Since, however, there is no intended conceptual unity here (which sort of makes you question the necessity of making that special segued version), the tracks are more variegated in texture, mood, and arrangements: some are rhythmic, some purely atmospheric, some dark (more often), some light (more rarely), and at least one where a lisping (or Japanese) lady whispers "behold the child" in a multi-layered loop — good choice if you want to make your Christmas celebration as modernistically psychedelic as possible, although I might be misreading the artists' lofty spiritual goals here.

 

Additionally, where on Equatorial Stars Fripp would largely dissolve his solos in the surroun­ding atmosphere, adopting a quiet minimalistic mode as if he were Brian's humble disciple in the art of staying invisible (and inaudible), here there is a bit of the good old Frippertronics in the air, and some mighty devilish Crimsonian soloing from time to time, which comes greatly in handy when you want to shut your mind off, get all conservative as heck and just enjoy the old man getting all pissed off and volcanic on his guitar. For these purposes, I'd especially recommend ʽSnee­ring Loopʼ (which is indeed a loop, and a fairly sneering one), parts of ʽRinging Beatʼ (al­though the wildest guitar parts there are locked inside a near-soundproof sarcophagus), and... and... okay, looks like I went over a top a bit. Oh no, there's actually some more on ʽThe Idea Of Declineʼ, bu that's about it.

 

Perhaps I was misled by the frequent presence of fellow Crimsonian Trey Gunn on a lot of these tracks — hugging the band's famous «Chapman Stick» that communicates a ferocious bass groove to most of them and greatly enhances the overall feeling of darkness by itself, so that Fripp can just sit back and modulate nonchalant cosmic rays with his six-string. That's how it goes on ʽTripoli 2020ʼ (the equivalent of cool jazz for the electronic age) and on most of ʽRinging Beatʼ. Elsewhere, the grooves are just replaced by impressionism (ʽGlass Structureʼ, which makes you feel trapped inside one, desperately trying to get out), exorcism (ʽVoicesʼ, taking you away to Ghostland), and try-your-patience minimalism (ʽDeep Indian Longʼ, which is like one bass note stretched out to five minutes — even a drone would drop dead from this drone).

 

On the whole, it's okay — definitely more «entertaining» than Equatorial Stars, but it also feels like these guys are long, long past the peaks of their creativity, because the tracks that remind of their early work are inferior to that work, and the tracks that try to take them into the future or at least keep them suspended in the now are most likely useless to fans of Aphex Twin or any other major IDM hero that was younger than fifty years old when he first began dabbling in IDM. On the other hand, you can't also get around the issue of professionalism and experience, or from the philosophical intrigue of what actually separates «a young man's ambient» from «an old man's ambient» — with rockers, as they age, the differences usually become clear, but what about wizards of atmosphere and technology? Seems like there's no proper dividing line here... or is there? Maybe that is the only credible reason why we still keep listening to these new Eno albums when we really should not be doing that.

 

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY (w. David Byrne) (2008)

 

1) Home; 2) My Big Nurse; 3) I Feel My Stuff; 4) Everything That Happens; 5) Life Is Long; 6) The River; 7) Strange Overtones; 8) Wanted For Life; 9) One Fine Day; 10) Poor Boy; 11) The Lighthouse.

 

Everything that happens once in Eno's life eventually happens once again — you just have to be patient enough, sometimes for twenty-seven years, which is the timespan that separates this re­cord from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. However, this album sounds nothing like it. Maybe it would be improper to say that Eno and Byrne have mellowed out with age — but some of their sides definitely have, and it is these sides that are facing each other now. The Wandering Knight of Electronic Havoc and The Roving Shaman of Spastic Rock cast off their armor, pack up their rituals, and quietly settle down on the porch of the house that occupies the front sleeve. Not exact­ly a hobbit-like design, but a fairly hobbit-like atmosphere all the same.

 

Since all the songs here feature vocals and are quite Byrne-like in spirit, I was not altogether sure whether this should have been included in Brian Eno's section — but as it turns out, most of the music here actually belongs to Eno, who gave a bunch of his half-finished demos to David and urged him to add his own vocal melodies. Interestingly, Eno himself plays not just the keyboards here, but guitars, bass, electric drums, and even some brass parts, although this is not really a one-man (or two-man) affair: quite a few additional musicians were drafted to complete the procee­dings, most importantly, Leo Abrahams on guitars and Seb Rochford on drums.

 

In other words, this is not a «poppified ambient» record; Eno specifically selected those of his demos that had a sharper pronounced rhythmic/dynamic flair to them, then proceeded to convert them to full-fledged song status — and made one of the finest decisions in his 21st century career to engage Byrne. Because one of the things that actually didn't work well with Another Day On Earth were the vocals: that whole «impersonal» approach to singing, which worked well when he was young and creepy, seems to have gotten a bit bland once he got older. Byrne, on the other hand, has lost none of the strident charm of his youth even as his hair got all white, and his singing adds a lot of personality and style to Eno's melodies.

 

Not that this is a great record — it is, intentionally and purposefully, a laid-back record, an exer­cise in leisurely contemplating life in all of its beauty and ugliness, in the face of a troubled past, a shaky present, and an uncertain future, and somehow it seems even more poignant and helpful in 2015, when I am writing this review, than it was in 2008. It totally works, yes, because Eno's melodies sound as if they were conceived in a hammock on a hot, lazy summer day, and Byrne here is the good old Byrne of ʽThis Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)ʼ, if you remember that cozy, comfy coda to Speaking In Tongues. A few of the tunes have jerky rhythm tracks, and a couple plunge into disturbingly dark electro-funk (ʽPoor Boyʼ), but on the whole, this is a very peaceful, though by no means rose-colored, affair. Byrne takes all sorts of stuff for lyrical inspi­ration — but even something like ʽThe Riverʼ, allegedly inspired by the Hurricane Katrina disas­ter, is a friendly, slow-rolling, sentimental ballad in execution. And even if few songs are catchy or heartbreaking, Byrne makes it all worthwhile by being as seductive as possible — sometimes, when he rises all the way to falsetto, he almost comes across as A-Ha's Morten Harket with a less cheap sense of taste and more intellectual experience. It's... odd, but good.

 

Some descriptions, following Eno's and Byrne's own interviews, pin this album down as «elec­tronic gospel», and there might indeed be a certain influence — primarily mood-wise, in its de­termination to rejoice against all odds; but even such tracks as the closing ʽLighthouseʼ could hardly be categorized as gospel, since they lack the energy and straightforward passion of the average gospel epic (not to mention a good old choir of black singers in the background). I would rather take this description as tongue-in-cheek — a joking, but meaningful metaphor; and use it as a ʽLighthouseʼ for those who are weary and desperate, maybe equally disillusioned with the old world and afraid of the new one, but refusing to wallow in dead-end pessimism, because "Everything that happens will happen today / And nothing has changed but nothing's the same" in the long run, and I guess this applies equally well to this album's music (heck, to music in gene­ral) as it does to life in general. And this album kind of sucks, but it sort of rules, and it gets a thumbs down but what you see is a thumbs up.

 

SMALL CRAFT ON A MILK SEA (2010)

 

1) Emerald And Lime; 2) Complex Heaven; 3) Small Craft On A Milk Sea; 4) Flint March; 5) Horse; 6) 2 Forms Of Anger; 7) Bone Jump; 8) Dust Shuffle; 9) Paleosonic; 10) Slow Ice, Old Moon; 11) Lesser Heaven; 12) Calcium Needles; 13) Emerald And Stone; 14) Written, Forgotten; 15) Late Anthropocene; 16) Invisible.

 

Chocolate milk sea, that is, if there is any significance in the album sleeve; but perhaps Eno thought that an extra word like that would make the whole thing seem too childish, particularly for an album that marked his formal entrance into the world of Warp Records — the sanctuary of Aphex Twin and other IDM geniuses. Not that Eno hadn't tried (mostly unsuccesfully) to tread on that turf for years now: he'd capitulated before the army of Modern Electronics as early as 1992, with Nerve Net, and there was hardly any reason to expect that, since he was now with Warp, this would somehow enable him to put out product that would be totally on the level.

 

Then again, in 2010, who the hell can tell what's on the level when it comes to electronica? It's more of a fluctuating fashion thing now than of anything having to do with indisputable break­throughs, and this works fine for Brian — where those Nerve Net-era pieces sounded tentative and half-hearted against contemporary cutting edge artists, in 2010 he already knows this stuff on the same level as decade-old formerly-cutting edge artists, and these albums seem far more self-assured and reasonably meaningful. And above all, Eno is still Eno, an artist with a love for well-organized beauty, rather than flashiness and coolness.

 

On this record, Brian is assisted by Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins (co-credited for all the tunes), the former mostly contributing guitar parts, the latter more commonly responsible for piano; this does not mean that this is not primarily an electronic record, but it is very «naturally textured» on plenty of the tracks, sometimes hearkening back to the days of collaboration with Harold Budd and sometimes to Daniel Lanois. The compositions themselves are split between «soft / atmos­pheric / ambient» and «hard / groove-based / IDM-ish», the latter mostly concentrated in the middle of the record, so that the whole milk sea journey seems to consist of three complex move­ments — the serene set-up, the shaky-stormy climax, and the dark-mystical denouement; this promises more spiritual excitement than you've had in years.

 

The opening pieces, in fact, feature quite a few lovely passages — ʽEmerald And Limeʼ is more like a 19th century romantic piano ballad with floating electronic overtones than mere sonic wall­paper; ʽComplex Heavenʼ places Heaven at an intersection between serenely Budd-ian minima­listic piano chords and an echoey stairway of acoustic guitar notes, while Eno's synth clouds and winds occupy all empty space; and the title track has probably the most chime-dependent imper­sonation of a milk sea that you've ever heard (not that it sounds much like a craft crossing a sea, but perhaps milk seas behave in their own milky ways?).

 

Once the synthesized drums kick in and we find ourselves in techno / house territory, though, things get predictably less seductive — this is not Eno's forte, and his collaborators aren't exactly making much of a mark on such rump-shaking tracks as ʽBone Jumpʼ or ʽDust Shuffleʼ, either. It's all just one forgettable IDM panorama after another. ʽPaleosonicʼ tries to make a difference by throwing in bits of finger-flashing jazz-fusion guitar solos (!), but it's more like a «let's be dif­ferent» post-modern trick than a sincere, well-placed tribute to Alan Holdsworth.

 

On the other hand, if you think of that 12-minute sequence as a slightly overextended bookmark, separating the warm atmospherics of the album's start from the cold atmospherics of its finish, then it's not that bad — beginning with ʽSlow Ice, Old Moonʼ, we enter familiar, but still haun­ting territory, where spirits of black nights, cold winds, subterranean caverns, and aquatic depths come back to do their, you know, spiritual schtick. Our small craft makes it through the calm, but subtly threatening zephyrs of ʽLesser Heavenʼ, wobbles through the weird wind-and-bone rattle of ʽCalcium Needlesʼ, and eventually ends up in the age of ʽLate Anthropoceneʼ, which, accor­ding to Eno's musical philosophy of humanity, sounds like subtle organic processes within a well-isolated cocoon — I'm not sure if Eugene Stoermer, who allegedly invented the term, would agree with this futuristic interpretation, but we'll just have to come back in a couple thousand years and see whether Eno was right after all.

 

On the whole, this might just be the best instrumental Eno album since Apollo — not as «shock-oriented» as Thursday Afternoon or Neroli, not as catch-up-with-the-times-oriented as Nerve Net, not as static as Shutov Assembly, not as filler-clogged as Drawn From Life, etc. It is not, and probably could not be, formally «innovative», but it is still a fresh update on Eno's concep­tion of the musical form, and it's got enough pure loveliness to just enjoy it out of any particular context. The journey continues, even if you have to invent yourself a milk sea to keep it challen­ging and imaginative.

 

DRUMS BETWEEN THE BELLS (2011)

 

1) Bless This Space; 2) Glitch; 3) Dreambirds; 4) Pour It Out; 5) Seedpods; 6) The Real; 7) The Airman; 8) Fierce Aisles Of Light; 9) As If Your Eyes Were Partly Closed...; 10) A Title; 11) Sounds Alien; 12) Dow; 13) Multimedia; 14) Cloud 4; 15) Silence; 16) Breath Of Crows.

 

So apparently this guy Rick Holland is a «poet and independent artist», as Wikipedia tells us (but really, isn't «independent artist» sort of a pleonasm? I always thought that the more «dependent» you are, the less you are of an artist), and his first book, Story The Flowers (how deliciously de­lightfully ungrammatical!), was published in 2010 and was constructed in the tradition of psycho­geography. Up to now, I thought «psychogeography» meant getting naked, taking acid, and wrapping yourself in a world map, but oh boy was I ever wrong about that.

 

Knowing what we know of Eno, it was only a matter of time before he'd enter into a collaboration with an expert on psychogeography — besides, he'd had joint albums with all sorts of musicians before, and written music for all sorts of artistic installations, but this is the first time that he tried out a symbiosis between ambient music and recited poetry, and if anything, the album was at least instrumental in introducing yet another word to the oversaturated English language: poet­ronica, the ingenious art of hybridizing verbal textures with digital sounds and breathing new life into two established forms of artistic expression.

 

Immediate disclaimer: I am almost totally desensitized to any form of modern poetry — conser­vative, innovative, English, Russian, whatever — and leave it to you, much more sensitive or much more pretentious reader, to decide for yourself whether the words of Rick Holland elevate you to a new level of consciousness or degrade you to the state of thinking really bad thoughts about people. One sample, I believe, is enough: "Bless this space / In sound and rhyme / As we suspend it / Arrested from the race / For meaning / By these slices / Of cityscapes / Each one / To the site of a thousand Londoners / The reburied and reborn / Brought together / In one life". Per­sonally, I think the word ʽLondonersʼ does not belong, but then I'm not an editor or anything.

 

However, somewhere deep inside I nurture a hope that Eno did not really choose Holland as a collaborator for the unfathomable beauty or deeply hidden meaning of his words — but rather just because the rhythmic basis of that poetry was eccentric and diverse enough for him to ex­periment with various ways of not only setting it to music, but also of playing around with the words themselves. Besides himself and The Poet, there are five extra ladies and one extra gentle­man delivering the words in a variety of silver-and-gold vocal tones, to which Eno may or may not add psychodigital processing, depending on his mood, the weather, and stock market values. And it works! Some people have said that they liked the completely instrumental version of this album better (it is available as a separate CD in the Deluxe Psychogeography Edition), but I dis­agree — the music here is not jaw-dropping on its own, but is made more fun and less predictable by the addition of this varied set of vocal overdubs.

 

The record begins in «clubby» mode, with a couple rhythmic tracks (ʽGlitchʼ, in particular, comes close to acid house, and has the most robotic-sounding vocals on the album), but then switches over to a more comfortable ambient mode, with recitations accompanied by minimalistic piano (ʽDreambirdsʼ), Lanois-style guitars (ʽPour It Outʼ), cloudy synth hum (ʽThe Realʼ), industrial grumble (ʽFierce Aisles Of Lightʼ), and... well, suffice it so say that, amazingly, no two tracks here sound the same — there's 15 of them here, and each one is a separate autonomous part of the sonic kaleidoscope. In a way, it is almost as if Brian took this concept as a pretext to run a con­densed retrospective of everything he made so far — you will find echoes of Thursday After­noon, of Apollo, of the Budd collaborations, even of Brian's vocal pop glories (ʽDowʼ, where his merry listing of Holland's groups of objects somehow reminds me of ʽKurt's Rejoinderʼ). So even if the album does not have a specific point to make, at least it's never truly boring.

 

Two of the tracks, ʽThe Realʼ (near the middle) and ʽBreath Of Crowsʼ (the finale), take nearly seven minutes to wind down to a close, but there's got to be something on an Eno album to put you in trance, right? A bit too much Autotune on ʽThe Realʼ for my tastes, making the lady singer sound like a chromium clone of Björk, but ʽBreath Of Crowsʼ is a fine, stately conclusion, all chimes and deep bass vocals, like a mourning song without dread/desperation or a last lullaby before the inevitable apocalypse. The sort of stuff you'd expect from a Dead Can Dance on a dark day, or from Current '93 on a bright day.

 

I do urge you, even if it runs against your modernistic / futuristic / nihilistic attitude to A-R-T, to ask the question «what the hell does this whole thing mean?» every once in a while, if only for psychological sanity reasons. The album title, actually, does sound meaningful to me — remin­ding me of The Bell And The Drum, a classic monograph on ancient Chinese poetry with which Brian may very well have been acquainted and whose major point was to seek out the origins of the poetic form in ritual music and dance; and what we have here is a reverse merger of the poetic form with ritual music, so that's hardly a coincidence. Let's be real stupid, then, and say that Eno's major purpose here is to generate magic through the marriage of spoken word and played sound. Whether he succeeds in that or no depends on whether, upon playing this record in its entirety, you are able to uncover a hidden portal in your wardrobe. If you're not, this probably means that your faith was insufficient, so go on and do it once more, this time with feeling. But if you are not floating in space third time around, Rick Holland will be happy to return your money and go back to coal mining, panhandling, and ghostwriting for Dr. Seuss.

 

LUX (2012)

 

1) Lux 1; 2) Lux 2; 3) Lux 3; 4) Lux 4.

 

With all these collaborations and new ideas and attempts to conquer the world of body-oriented electronic pulses, we'd almost forgotten Eno's primary function in the world of instrumental elec­tronic music — as provider of heavenly ambient soundscapes. Ever since Thursday Afternoon made a, ahem, definitive statement on that, «heavenly ambience» became largely reserved for scattered installations and Windows themes; I think that The Shutov Assembly was really the last album tagged as simply «solo», whereas purely ambient releases from later years were all supposed to go along with the installations.

 

Actually, Lux, too, was originally commissioned as a soundtrack to an art gallery (and, prior to that, was exposed at airport terminals), but it counts as an artistic work in its own rights — not to be specifically associated with any particular space, time, or n-th dimension. Consisting of four tracks that run for about 18-19 minutes each, it returns us to the good old days when Mr. Eno was trying to make us understand and slowly savor the inherent beauty in one single piano note before moving on to another one — a nostalgic trip, if you wish, to the times of Music For Airports and On Land, when the world was so young and unspoiled and Man had plenty of time to relax and chill out after unloading all the fresh kill and waiting for Woman to cook his supper.

 

These days, we've all advanced to a new level of conscience — and preoccupation — that pro­bably will not let you get in the 100% proper mood to enjoy this new musical painting. For what it is worth, though, I find it every bit as well-developed and beautiful as anything he'd ever done in the genre. All four tracks sound very much alike, with relatively minor nuances responsible for minor mood shifts, so, in a way, it is sort of like a somewhat busier, more involving Thursday Afternoon, where the point is no longer to infuriate you with its subtle arrogance, but to honestly entertain you with visions of yet another glass castle... or tropical aquarium, whichever way your imagination takes you, provided you have one and it includes hardware support for Enotronics.

 

The specific catch is that, in addition to Eno, Lux also features the contributions of Leo Abra­hams on «Moog guitar», and of Neil Catchpole on viola and violin: I do not even remember when was the last time, if there even was a last time, that Brian recruited string players for his purely ambient projects, and these textures make a lot of difference. Usually it is just a single note, of course, bowed smoothly and steadily somewhere in the background, fading in and out ever so slightly, but in combination with the slowly tinkling keyboards this can have an even stronger hypnotizing effect than bare keyboards (unless the wheezy sound happens to irritate you; if so, better shut off and reboot your ears in safe mode before continuing).

 

Most of the positive responses to Lux, I think, came from people who never realised before how seriously tired they were of all the information overload and all the frantic activity (or frantic si­mulated activity) of modern music (particularly electronic) — probably putting it in the same category as all those «slow reading clubs» and other feats of deceleration and downshifting — so it is quite possible that this was Eno's intention all the way: for him, to release Lux in 2012 is pretty much the same as it would be for a major former disco star to put out a canonical disco record. Just to see if it still holds up, you know. From that point of view, Lux is a total success: critics liked it, fans seemed pleased, and yes, the man can still put you to healthy sleep after all these years. And, as I have always insisted, there's nothing wrong with music that puts you to sleep if its original intention is to put you to sleep. The nagging question is: if you pay full price for a ticket to one of those galleries where they play this, are you offered a complementary pil­low and blanket, or do those cost extra?

 

SOMEDAY WORLD (w. Karl Hyde) (2014)

 

1) The Satellites; 2) Daddy's Car; 3) Man Wakes Up; 4) Witness; 5) Strip It Down; 6) Mother Of A Dog; 7) Who Rings The Bell; 8) When I Built This World; 9) To Us All; 10) Big Band Song; 11) Brazil 3; 12) Celebration; 13) Titian Bekh.

 

Still another addition to the already seemingly endless list of Eno's collaborators, this time in the form of Karl Hyde, one of the founding fathers of the electronic band Underworld and, since 2013, also a solo artist. In other words, this is the first time since the Peter Schwalm collaboration that Brian enlists another electronic musician as equal partner; and considering how frequently the old guru gets in creative trouble when trying to saddle more modern styles of electronica, the setup suggests disaster from the get-go — once again, the master of soft nuance will try to con­vince us that he's just as good at techno-trance as the youngsters? (Let alone the fact that Karl Hyde himself is only nine years younger than Eno himself).

 

Surprisingly, the suggestion is screwed: not only is this not a disaster, but Someday World is, in fact, one of the most impressive, if not the most impressive, record to come from the Eno printing press in the 21st century. Its basic denomination is pop — most of the tunes feature vocals, repe­titive structures, hooks, choruses — but the individual styles, mostly furnished with electronic arrangements, are quite varied, ranging from Eno's classic upbeat style of the 1970s to dance music styles that rather reflect the «Hyde generation» of the late Eighties / early Nineties than anything considered «modern» in the 2010s. Which is a good thing — the two gentlemen are doing here what they do best, without necessarily attempting to sound in line with the times.

 

There are a lot of synthesized horns here, although, since there are also real horn players (in­clu­ding none other than Roxy Music's Andy Mackay on alto saxophone), it is not always easy to tell digital brass from analog brass with digital treatment; on ʽThe Satellitesʼ, for instance, real and «fake» horns often play off each other, creating a wildly polyphonic, dense sound. Sometimes they go into overdrive: ʽDaddy's Carʼ plays out like a cross be­tween some wild Latin dance and classic Stone Roses, with the addition of a wall of background harmonies and maniacal funky per­cussion. Sometimes you get echoes of Talking Heads and King Crimson (ʽMan Wakes Upʼ; the short instrumental ʽBrazil 3ʼ, whose throbbing electronic theme sounds like they're quoting the beginning to ʽBurning Down The Houseʼ). More often, though, they are being quiet, subtle, and vaguely creepy, with lulling sweet vocals over threatening bass lines — even if the absolute majority of the songs here are «beat-conscious», as they say.

 

Mostly, though, it's the hooks, and the almost unbelievable ease with which they produce an at­mosphere of solemnity that is quite reminiscent of the glory days. Check ʽTo Us Allʼ — taking two minutes to build up some tension, then finally exploding in an anthemic vocal sermon, a prayer in the face of the whole universe, well represented by a few beautiful guitar and keyboard parts. The eerie ʽMother Of A Dogʼ is one of the best Radiohead songs that Radiohead never wrote (actually, there's quite a few of these, isn't there?), with so many peacefully conflicting overdubs in the background that you'd easily get lost if not for the "I was raised by the son of the mother of a dog, I was raised by the mother of a dog" mantra that glues it all together (and no, the verses will not make it any easier to understand what they mean — it is up to you, in this as well as all other cases, to come up with your own interpretation). Eventually, they just run out of words and either put their strength in simple vocalizing (ʽBig Band Songʼ) or dispense with vo­cals altogether (ʽCelebrationʼ), but the musical themes are sufficiently interesting and/or pretty to agree with that decision (although Hyde, who takes the lion's share of the vocals, is a fairly good singer).

 

Despite all the moments of darkness, though, Someday World is basically a happy, optimistic album — I mean, come to think of it, Eno never made a truly depressing record (although some of his ambient opera may come across as scary or alienating), and the older he gets, the more hopeful he seems to become of humanity as a whole (bless his trusting old heart). There is one song here on which they have the nerve to speak for God himself — ʽWhen I Built This Worldʼ — but despite all the unpleasant things the Lord says of us in an uncomfortably auto-tuned voice, and despite the upsettingly funky-paranoid interlude that immediately follows the declaration, the se­cond part of the song sounds carnivalesque and oddly uplifting. Well, nice to know we don't have to expect the next great flood anytime soon.

 

I could probably live without the lengthy acoustic ballad that ends the album (and sounds like something Greg Lake might have contributed to an ELP record in one of his «I'm so romantic, I could just die» moments), but it has its legitimate place there — as a stripped-down, intimate coda to an overall «lush» experience — and if you couldn't quite guess the overall friendly and courteous mood of the album while the electronic pieces were playing, the coda lets you do this in «old school mode», so let it stay. On the whole, it's just nice to know that the man can still realize a visionary project like this — a little bit of complex intellectual naïveté never hurt anyone anyway; and since this is ultimately a modern pop album, not a confusedly ambient one, I have no difficulty giving it a major thumbs up.

 

HIGH LIFE (w. Karl Hyde) (2014)

 

1) Return; 2) DBF; 3) Time To Waste It; 4) Lilac; 5) Moulded Life; 6) Cells & Bells.

 

Usually, when an artist releases a quick follow-up to a recent project, stating that the point is to "extend some of the ideas we'd started" (in Eno's own words), what you think of is a collection of outtakes that weren't good enough for the main record — a collector's item for the way too deeply impressed individuals. This is definitely not the case with High Life. It does extend some of the ideas they'd started, sometimes almost literally so (ʽDBFʼ sounds like a longer, funkier, slightly more developed version of ʽBrazil 3ʼ, for instance), and it did come out just one month later than Someday World, but it has a very different spirit. If you merged them together as one release in one 2-CD package, it would be like... well, like the difference between the first two LPs and the Apple Jam segment of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass.

 

Of course, that is a mediocre analogy, because Apple Jam had no conceptual purpose, was com­pletely spontaneous and was only valuable inasmuch as some stellar musicianship was involved. But it did place the magic of the groove over the magic of pre-meditated composition; and like­wise, High Life is also all about the groove, where Someday World was more about the spiri­tual-beautiful aspects of music-making. Basically, it's like this: we have said all we wanted to say about our vision 2.0 for the future, so now let's just drink to it and be merry. And dance, provided you share our perspective on certain dance moves for the future.

 

Personally, I do, and I particularly welcome the lengthy running times it takes these guys to ex­pand their grooves to full strength. There are vocals here occasionally, but they do not mean much next to the instrumental pastures, where Hyde supplies the simplistic guitar drone and Eno dresses it up in select rainbow colors. ʽReturnʼ and ʽLilacʼ are the best examples. On the former, Hyde strums two guitar chords like a slightly more robotic shadow of Lou Reed for nine minutes (well, most of it is probably tape-looped anyway), with happy electronic bells and whistles, as well as Arcade Fire-style schoolboy-choir harmonies surrounding him — the effect is that of a speedy, monotonous train ride through a hustlin'-bustlin' Elysium. ʽLilacʼ is far more focused on the guitars, with two (or more?) rapidly droning parts superimposed and only slightly attenuated by electronics: the sound reaches its loudness peak around the fifth minute, and from then on it's four more minutes of smooth, repetitive, trance-inducing funkiness. It should be boring, but there's something so mysteriously daring and teasing about the whole thing that you just get caught up. Maybe they are slowly shifting volume levels in the mix, because somehow it gives you the feel of an inescapable crescendo wave without there actually being a real crescendo. In any case, it's absolutely infectious in its measured rush.

 

Two shorter tracks, ʽDBFʼ and ʽMoulded Lifeʼ, are even more funky, with more sexy syncopation going on than seen on any Eno album from the past several decades — if not for all the tape ma­nipulation, you could easily mistake it for a special King Crimson experience. ʽMoulded Lifeʼ, however, also has industrial overtones on top of the funkiness, plus some Eastern phrasing in the synthesizer passages, plus psychedelic harmonies, and I must state that it works much better with Hyde's guitar as the foundation than if it were simply a 100% electronic track (a subtle cue for all you IDM fans out there). At the same time, ʽTime To Waste Itʼ has a notable reggae influence in the rhythm, and although it is yet another example of treated electronic vocals spoiling the cake (I will probably never get used to this idea of vivisectioning the human voice, of which Eno has be­come a major fan lately), on the whole it is also quite celebratory and life-asserting.

 

Finally, ʽCells & Bellsʼ is a far more typical and convincing finale than the prog-balladeering at the end of Someday World — a textbook example of a transcendental Eno mantra. The crazy rhythms fade away, we find ourselves stranded in an odd electronic swamp, with duralloy frogs croaking and titanium trees swaying and silicic acid dropping from the skies and The Master him­self reciting some distantly futuristic form of The Lord's Prayer, with the line "cells and bells and flesh skins build a new career" replacing the traditional Amen. Well, I suppose that cells and bells may have actually built a new career for Eno, but I don't even want to know what he means by "flesh skins". And, as is often the case, the conclusion is neither optimistic nor pessimistic in it­self — like the best tracks on Before And After Science, this is a meditation whose extreme emotionality comes from being fully detached of any emotions.

 

I will conclude by re-stating: despite the short time gap and the obvious similarities, High Life is a completely autonomous piece of work, and it may very well be that you can get bored by one of the Eno/Hyde collaborations — any one, depending on whether you're in the mood for a song or in the mood for a groove — and get thrilled by the other. I am glad to find myself delighted by both, in two different ways, and also to find that they perfectly complement each other. Given Eno's usual promiscuity, it is not very likely that Brian and Karl will ever go for a third one, but most likely this is as close to perfect as it is ever going to get with them, anyway. Thumbs up for what turns out to be one of the most successful team projects for the man ever, well on par with his work with Fripp, Byrne, and Cluster: no mean feat for an artist past sixty-five, I'd say.

 

THE SHIP (2016)

 

1) The Ship; 2) Fickle Sun (I); 3) Fickle Sun (II): The Hour Is Thin; 4) Fickle Sun (III): I'm Set Free.

 

Back to solo territory, and to (almost) pure ambience again. The major difference being that this is the first of Eno's ambient albums where his own voice serves as one of the ambient instruments: the original plan was to simply have the whole thing as another «installation», but then, as Brian told Rolling Stone, he suddenly discovered that he was able to sing the lowest notes of the piece due to the aging of his voice — and this impressed him so much that he decided to add vocal support for the whole piece. Which certainly does not make it «poppier» or more accessible — merely adds another layer of sonic support to the picture.

 

ʽThe Shipʼ in question is the Titanic, of course — the idea is that of a conceptual piece that is probably focused on the adventures of the broken Titanic underwater (where «adventure» is to be understood philosophically — in a sense, if nothing whatsoever happens to you, this is by itself quite an adventure). The «lyrics» to the piece were not written by Eno himself, but rather selected by him from a string of sentences randomly generated by a Markov chain algorithm from a data pool that included a passenger's account of the sinking of the boat, plus some translations of dirty French songs from World War I for a change (although that last detail might be a hoot — don't see any particularly dirty tidbits in the lyrics; perhaps the algorithm included a modesty clause); fun, but ultimately pointless, in my opinion — although, come to think of it, quite consistent with Eno's general fatalism, belief in luck, and fascination for stuff like Tarot cards (and maybe help­ful in some way — he did rant, for instance, about the greatness of the line "the hour is thin" that was totally computer-generated, and, uh, he just might have something there...).

 

Anyway, what's really good about The Ship is that its ambience is of a stern, metallic character, with elements of the industrial style consistently incorporated throughout — for ʽThe Shipʼ, you really do get the impression of being placed underwater and watching the huge metal monster groan and moan while tiny currents and occasional biological organisms swish and swoosh past the metallic covering. Ropes and seams are creaking and straining, little gas bursts escaping, and multiple vocal overdubs sound like a mix of ghost apparitions and aural hallucinations. After twenty minutes of completely static ambience, the first part of ʽFickle Sunʼ comes on in a much more dynamic manner — as a slow anthem of death, with almost Gothic overtunes, gradually gaining in intensity, with grinding feedback waves and quasi-orchestral pomp (reminiscent of classic Coil, really) — and then, again, somewhat randomly, the same «suite» continues as ʽPart 2ʼ (with a professional, but boring voiceover by Peter Serafinowicz over a simple ambient piano melody) and as ʽPart 3ʼ, which, out of the blue, is a very 1970s-sounding cover of The Velvet Underground's ʽI'm Set Freeʼ, beautifully sung by Eno and once again featuring Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins on additional instruments.

 

Fans of Eno's melodicity will most definitely want the album for that cover — it is quite prover­bially gorgeous, stripping away all the lo-fi «ugliness» of the original and replacing it with a paradisiac atmosphere: violins, violas, layers of keyboards, and, above all else, the semblance of a beautiful tribute to Lou Reed, who, upon finally being «set free», certainly does deserve an ange­lic tribute from the man who, after all, forty years back, raised the «angelic standard» to nearly unreach­able heights: this is a fascinating cross-breed of Velvet Underground values with Eno values, even if I still struggle to see its relationship with the bulk of the album. But as for the bulk of the album, well, it's not generic Eno by all means, but it is neither the beautiful ambient Eno nor the dark and mysterious out-there-in-space ambient Eno, and I am not sure I am capable of squeezing yet another ambient Eno in my storage room — I'd just say that the album is sufficient­ly atmospheric to be a curious listen, but I can't say it really gave me a whole new perspective on what it would be like to spend 100 years in incorporeal form at the bottom of the ocean.

 

REFLECTION (2017)

 

1) Reflection.

 

It has been a long while since Eno last went totally hardcore on us — or, at the very least, most of his «hardcore ambient» output tended to be written for art installations rather than the regular LP market. Reflection takes no such compromises: released on CD and vinyl from the start, it is in­tended as a purely musical piece, and with its rigid minimalism embodied in a single 54-minute track, the obvious and inevitable comparison is to Thursday Afternoon, and the obvious and inevitable reaction is, «oh no! not again! why????...»

 

Well, first of all, the older Monseigneur de la Salle gets, the more likely he probably will be to return to his meditative, introspective, reflective side than to try and compete with the acid elec­tronic buzz of today (let alone any accompanying pop inspirations). And with so many of his friends and colleagues dropping dead around him, the more inclined he will be, naturally, to contemplate his own physical mortality / spiritual immortality. Eno himself describes the record as a "psychological space that encourages internal conversation", and he's not bullshitting you with this one — except, I think, that it may have been vice versa: as the title itself suggests, Reflection may have been a reflection of an internal conversation that the artist happened to have with himself during one of the days of the much troubled year of 2016.

 

And since everything is always understood better in comparison, it is only natural to go back to Thursday Afternoon and trace the differences between the two. The 1986 exercise was, above all, an affair of The Light — the perfect soundtrack of finding yourself slightly under the surface of the water with your eyes wide open and experiencing the rays of sunlight penetrating that surface, here and there, out of a skyline beset with rapidly, but gently moving white clouds. It had this caressing, floating ambience of whiteness and purity to it that could have served to illustrate any miraculous experience, from the resurrection of Jesus to losing your virginity. The textures of Reflection, in comparison, are also gentle and soothing, but deeper and darker, as if an invisible hand has firmly pushed you way down below the surface, and any sources of light that you now have access to have to come from the bottom of the sea — or, perhaps, from the depths of your imagination — rather than from the top.

 

Here, too, there are two layers to the sound: a basic rhythmic «hum», though less polyphonic in texture than the one on Thursday Afternoon, across which minimalistic bits of keyboard melo­dies vary in pitch and timbre — cold and emotionally detached, though, and you are probably not expected to experience any basic human feelings over them; you are simply expected to revel in the mystery, be it on your own microcosmic level or on the macrocosmic one — you decide if the music of Reflection is more about Outer or Inner Space. I would probably opt for the latter one, because I think Eno is more interested in what goes on within his own head now than whatever it is happening to the universe at large.

 

Of course, as of 2017, there is nothing particularly innovative about the concept, except for, may­be, the fact that the project comes equipped with its own multimedia application, and apparently, there is a «generative» plugin for this thing that allows the listener to tweak the settings and mo­dify the textures depending on the time of day and other factors — something I do not really have the time to explore, although, perhaps, this is where the real money value of Reflection actually lies. Yet, strange enough, as I briefly rewind my recollections of Brian's various ambient projects, there is nothing there that sounds exactly like Reflection — they are either too dynamic and me­lo­dic (yes, the ʽ1/1ʼ part of Music For Airports is like Beethoven compared to this), or, on the contrary, even more radically minimalistic (like Neroli), or, as I said, create a completely diffe­rent atmosphere (Thursday Afternoon). It's like you always saw this sort of record coming from Eno's meditative mind, yet it still took him almost fifty years to achieve it.

 

I mean, I can understand him when he seems to speak so proudly of this achievement — I'd never describe it myself as a «culmination» or «catharsis» record, but it seems very much... like him, something like a perfectly faithful sonogram of his internal state of mind, where most of his previous ambient exercises sounded more like musical reimaginations of various things outside of that mind, be it little fishes jumping in the water or the faraway craters of the Moon. And since, after all, Brian Eno is only a man, it may well be so that your internal state of mind is not that far different from his — particularly if you, too, experience these strange periods of «worried tran­quility» where nervousness emanates from complete calm and dissolves back into it. That's kind of what Reflection is for me, and it makes a fine, healthy addition to the man's ambient catalog, even if I am probably never going to listen to it again — not until my dying bed, at least.

 

 

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, N.J. (1973)

 

1) Blinded By The Light; 2) Growin' Up; 3) Mary Queen Of Arkansas; 4) Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?; 5) Lost In The Flood; 6) The Angel; 7) For You; 8) Spirit In The Night; 9) It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City.

 

No sooner had Bruce Springsteen and his band recorded ten songs that were to constitute his aspiring debut album than Clive Davis, the president of Columbia Records, began to complain that there were no potential hit singles on the record. Subsequently, the release was postponed, three songs were deleted, and two new songs, including the rousing opener ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ, were written by the Boss and placed in strategic locations. Both Davis and Bruce mis­calculated — neither of the singles managed to chart, though, ironically, four years later, when Springsteen's fame had already reached nationwide limits, Manfred Mann's Earth Band managed to correct that mistake and turn ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ into a smash success.

 

This seems like a small enough detail, but it is an important one when you begin to consider all the Dylan/Springsteen comparisons, especially in the early period. While Dylan did have hit singles, I am not aware of anybody ever forcing a «hit single» on him — and yes, it is very easy to pin the difference on chronology, where record labels, including that very same Columbia Re­cords to which Dylan was brought by the very same John Hammond who recruited Springsteen a decade later, would give the artists more freedom in the Sixties than they did in the Seventies, and where the Seventies forced artists for harsher compromises than the Sixties. Very easy, but not very correct: unlike Dylan, who has always followed his muse and nobody else's, «The Boss» has always kept his ratings high by regularly giving the people what they want. If there's one motto with which we could describe his lengthy career, it would be something like «One for myself — two for y'all». Not that there's anything wrong with that, right?

 

In fact, you could probably make a case that out of the two — Mr. ʽIt-ain't-me-babeʼ Dylan, quietly sitting in a corner and mumbling gibberish under his nose, and Mr. ʽThunder-roadʼ Spring­steen, boxing the shit out of his sweat-drenched Telecaster under stadium lights to the sheer delight of the roaring thousands — it is Mr. Springsteen who is being the more humble and less pretentious, making himself one with the earnest folks whose spiritual needs he is covering, rather than putting up an invisible, but impenetrable force field between the two. But then this logic would rather quickly lead us to recognizing the saintly nature of Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi, the Backstreet Boys, and ultimately even Taylor Swift, and that is not the road down which I would have the strength — and humility — to travel.

 

Anyway, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., even though it has rarely, if ever, penetrated any­body's Top 5 for Springsteen, and even though it happened to slip through the cracks of the public consciousness back at the time, already finds the Springsteen formula well established. The hinges yet have to be oiled, and the front still lacks a glossy paint coating, but the sound is that of a guy who knows very well what it is he is doing and what his main talents are and how they should be applied (well, after all, he had almost eight years to figure it out, having first begun to play in regular bands like The Castiles in the mid-Sixties).

 

What puts Greetings apart from the majority of singer-songwriter stuff circa 1973 are not the lyrics (who still own a lot to Dylan, Robbie Robertson, and Van Morrison) and certainly not the melodies (who also own a lot to Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Van Morrison, and all the legions of anonymous people in the pre-rock era folk music tradition to whom these three guys own their melodies). It is the overall approach to arranging and recording these lyrics and melodies — an approach that would arguably induce me to the somewhat sensationalist claim that it was Bruce Springsteen and nobody else who actually invented «folk-rock», or, rather, «folk-rock'n'roll», or, if you don't like that either, «hard-folk-rock». If we think of «folk-rock» in terms of, say, the Byrds, as we often do, it is clear that even at their heaviest, the Byrds did not have even half of the maniacal stomping energy that the Boss stores in his musical batteries. If you listen to some of Bruce's earlier material, like stuff he recorded with Steel Mill in the early Seventies, you will see that they were essentially a gruff, brawny hard rock band along the lines of Bloodrock or Grand Funk Railroad — and even as he moved to more sensitive, thoughtful territory, the idea of Rocking The House Down never left his mind for a second.

 

But you don't really need a maddeningly loud, terrifyingly distorted heavy rock guitar to rock the house down. You can easily do it with an acoustic instrument, and a piano, and a saxophone, and a regular rhythm section — and record something like ʽGrowin' Upʼ, a song that, technically, has nothing to do with hard rock, but ultimately rocks as hard as any hard rock there is, because it's the spirit that counts, not the amplification. You wanted yourself some James Taylor and some Eagles, but they had too little crunch for your rocking heart? You were almost ready for Budgie, Steppenwolf, and even Sabbath, but they repelled you with the dumbness of their sound? You would be happy to endorse yourself some «progressive rock», but couldn't stand the unnecessary complexity and meandering of the twenty-minute long suites? Well, then, your problems are at an end now — and, by the way, greetings to you from Asbury Park, N.J.!

 

One reason why I have always complained about Bruce's approach was that I found it «populist», but I would like to rephrase this, so as to avoid getting stoned by the majority — it is not so much «populist» as it is (or, if it is «populist», it is so due to its being) «mystery-free». Whether or not The Boss calculates his formula with cold, detached, psychologically insightful precision, it is a formula that is very easily laid out, scrutinized, and understood, upon which it finds itself prone to inducing boredom or even annoyance. Frantically strummed guitars; aggressively punched drums; pianos and saxes going at full power nearly all the time, with every member of the band equally important to the final sound; lyrics that carefully alternate between metaphor-laiden poetry (for the intellectual critics) and «streetwise clichés» (for the average Joe), never forgetting the powerful singalong hook explosion in the chorus; and a good understanding of the magic power of diminuendos and crescendos.

 

Doubtless, even a perfectly understood formula, when it is taken to the utmost limit, can still impress and seduce (see AC/DC's ʽHells Bellsʼ for a great example). But here begin the local problems: Greetings does not yet take that formula to its limits. If you take the typical «big» songs here, like ʽFor Youʼ or ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ or ʽIt's Hard To Be A Saint In The Cityʼ, you will see that the overdubs still leave a lot to be desired (there's just too few of them), that the guitar sound is still underdeveloped (largely due to Steven Van Zandt, Bruce's sparring partner, not yet being a regular member of his E Street Band), and that The Boss has not yet begun to fully exploit the earth-shaking capacities of his vocal cords — apart from just a few chest-tearing moments on ʽLost In The Floodʼ, which mainly serve as a teaser for things to come, he sounds here like a shy younger brother of Van the Man, and ever so often, even comes across as a piti­able whiner rather than a fearless commoner-preacher of rock'n'roll.

 

Indeed, the two «solo songs» that are included here without full band support — ʽMary, Queen Of Arkansasʼ and ʽThe Angelʼ — are arguably among the weakest spots in his entire catalog. Meandering, folksy-derivative, and overlong, they end up being irritating rather than soulful; and even if the basic vibe of ʽMaryʼ, come to think of it, is no different from the basic vibe of ʽBorn To Runʼ and ʽThunder Roadʼ ("I know a place where we can go Mary / Where I can get a good job and start all over again" — "sure Bruce, but you have to grow yourself some facial hair and get a second guitarist before you can really convince me"), the presentation is lamentable, and you really have to have some religious love for the man, I think, to appreciate this stuff. It is not surprising that when it came to deciding which songs would have to be pushed off the album in favor of the freshly written and recorded «potential hit singles» — the «band songs» or the «solo songs» — it was three of the latter that they decided to sacrifice. Maybe Bruce was just being generous to his pals, but clearly, at this point he was not yet ready to go «solo».

 

ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ I find to be too obvious a rip-off of some song from Astral Weeks or its periphery, but the record does have at least two really fine offerings. ʽSpirit In The Nightʼ, where Clarence Clemmons finally gets his first chance to shine on his own (the main instrumental hook is his sax riff), the chorus features cool call-and-response vocals between Bruce and his men, and the grizzly «life-on-the-streets» atmosphere is well reflected in the nonchalantly, but menacingly shuffling music. And then there is ʽLost In The Floodʼ, the first and far from the least of the man's «tragic masterpieces» — nothing all that great in the way of melody, but a fairly great theatrical delivery from The Boss as he carefully builds the tension over each long verse to lead us to the climax. I must state here and now that I always prefer the pessimistic Springsteen to the optimistic Springsteen (not that it is always easy to tell the difference), and so, naturally, the most pessimistic song on his debut album is also the best song on it.

 

When it comes to the final rating, after some deliberation, I think I would rather stay on the fence. No thumbs up will be coming for a record on which Bruce Springsteen is simply being Bruce Springsteen, because I cannot count that as a rewardable virtue; and there are too few seductive «extras» on Greetings to push the spirits any higher. Yet, on the other hand, this here is a new, workable, reasonable formula for 1973, and neither the «populism» of the approach, nor the im­mediately noticeable influences, nor the two forgettable «solo» tracks should count as arguments for hating or dismissing the album. And a first effort is always a first effort, after all, there being something in common between so many of them. "Last night I said these words to my girl — I came for you, but you did not need my urgency — I know you never even try girl — I came for you, but your life was one long emergency". See? Always something in common.

 

THE WILD, THE INNOCENT & THE E STREET SHUFFLE (1974)

 

1) The E Street Shuffle; 2) 4th Of July, Asbury Park; 3) Kitty's Back; 4) Wild Billy's Circus Story; 5) Incident On 57th Street; 6) Rosalita (Come Out Tonight); 7) New York City Serenade.

 

Before there was Born To Run, an album that put it all on red and won, there was this thing — and I do wish I had the chance to judge it from the perspective of 1974, when nobody except Jon Landau had the prescience of seeing Bruce Springsteen as the sweaty sacred prophet of blue-collar stadium rock. Lyrically, blue-collar themes are, of course, prevailing on this record as well, but the soundtrack to which they are set is a different thing — for once, it seems as if the Boss took up a more active interest in music than usual, rather than in sheer power. I have seen some people twitch at this record's «jazzy flourishes», justly stating that «jazz» is not something they expect from Springsteen. But they are wrong, because Springsteen is a talented professional who could probably master anything if he wanted to — the «Springsteen formula» is narrow and occa­sionally stultifying because he intentionally made it so, not because he wasn't capable of making the E Street Band into a more aggressive version of Steely Dan.

 

As opposed to the debut album, there are but seven songs here, and four of them go over seven minutes — partly because the man has some long-winded street life stories to tell, but also partly because he wishes to showcase the instrumental skills of his E Street Band, especially on the energetic numbers ʽKitty's Backʼ and ʽRosalitaʼ. The «innocent» part of the record, allocated for sentimental, heart-wrenching gutter romantics (ʽ4th Of Julyʼ, ʽWild Billyʼ, ʽIncident On 57th Streetʼ, ʽNew York City Serenadeʼ), is primarily for personal fans of the big man, but the «wild» part of it really showcases the E Street Band at their absolute best — a grand-sounding, tightly coordinated, perfectly oiled machine for the production of... of...

 

...well, Landau and the rest of 'em would certainly say «rock and roll», but, as I already stated in the previous review, the E Street Band never played «rock and roll» in the sense that the Rolling Stones, or the Who, or even the Beatles played «rock and roll». It is hard to define this sound with one term, and it may be wrong to even try. ʽThe E Street Shuffleʼ begins with a brassy jazz intro (Blood, Sweat & Tears, anyone?), continues with a spritely, happy-sounding funk riff (Average White Band?), and finally merges jazz, funk, and folk in a democratic trinity that com­bines the freedom of the first one, the dynamics and vivaciousness of the second one, and the earnestness of the third one in a combination that could have very easily blown people's minds back in those days when you expected Thin Lizzy to be over here and David Bowie over there, rather than meld their minds in a brawny-brainy synthesis like this one.

 

The only song here that really tries to «rock» for a while is ʽKitty's Backʼ, opening with scorching blues-rock licks from the Boss himself (he is actually credited for all the guitar playing on the album) and later developing into a tight, fast jam with Bruce leading the band to the heights of an almost psychedelic crescendo. But it is merely one of the many different ways in which he ex­presses his feelings — and far from the most preferred one. ʽRosalitaʼ, for instance, is already a song that I would not define as «rock and roll», because behind all the fatness of the sound lies something like your average folk dance, devoid of the sharpness and rebelliousness of true rock and roll. Not that there's anything wrong with that: whoever said that energetic dance music must have the listener clenching his fists to be «great» or «artistically relevant»? But it is also impor­tant that we try to use different words to describe ʽJumping Jack Flashʼ and ʽRosalitaʼ, because the two songs go for completely different purposes and responses.

 

Now, naturally any long-winded review of any Springsteen album should normally mention the lyrics, or it would look really strange. But see, I don't like these lyrics — none at all. There is something horribly, off-puttingly inadequate about Bruce's «pseudo-working class poetry». In real life, his Little Angels and his Sandies and his Kitties and his Billies and his Spanish Jonnies and whoever the hell is else on here do not talk like this, and do not think like this, and do not get carried away so much by these romantic ideas or impulses. Maybe if the man took a more de­tached, third-person view of his characters (as Dylan does whenever he is telling one of these stories), it would have made more sense — but most of the time, he makes himself one with his characters, and this inevitably results in an atmosphere of fakery. Everything is too complex, too convoluted, too intellectualized, in a way: as a convincing lyricist, I will take the much more straightforward and much more verbally challenged Phil Lynott over Springsteen any time, and heck, I might even take Bon Scott over Springsteen. (And yes, for the record, I've never been a big fan of West Side Story, either).

 

This is why the best way for me to enjoy an album like this is to simply shut my brain off towards all of its «realistic» pretense, and to imagine that something like ʽNew York City Serenadeʼ takes place in an alternate reality — one where young ruffians walk the midnight streets actually thin­king of how to "shake away your street life, shake away your city life, and hook up to the night train". Then it works — the midnight lounge jazz piano rolls, the low-key strings, the vocals that gradually build up from barely audible sleepy soulful croon to the full-chest screaming when it comes to the "junk man" who is "singin', he's singin', all dressed up in satin, walkin' past the alley" (another detail for the parallel reality, where all junk men are jazz men and they tend to casually dress in satin because they happen to find it mucho poetic).

 

Sometimes even that doesn't help — like on the album's weakest track, ʽWild Billy's Circus Storyʼ, which fulfills the function of ʽMary Queen Of Arkansasʼ on this album. Not only are these circus metaphors older than the oldest circus performers, but the tuba-accordeon-acoustic arran­gement is cheesy and generic, and it is really no fun listening to The Boss on his own here when this is clearly an album that thrives on full band support.

 

Still, it has always been my belief that The Wild was one of the most open-minded and promi­sing records of the man's career. It isn't perfect, but it spreads out in many directions, and the only straightforward «populist» song here is ʽRosalitaʼ — no wonder that it became the regular show closer for years to come. It did not sell much, and it did not cement any stereotypical images of Springsteen — had he decided to come out with, say, an instrumental jazz-folk-fusion record after this one, nobody except for Landau would have pinned him down to the ground for such a sacrilege. The problem is, this whole approach was just too convoluted and messy to really click with those «blue collar folks» who were his main lyrical protagonists. An incoherence, yes, both for the critics (who could be pampered in retrospect) and the Billboard charts (who couldn't), that would be rectified with his next release. Unfortunately. Anyway, this is arguably the first and last time you get a chance to observe «Bruce the Musicmaker» — so hurry up and support me on this thumbs up before he turns into «Bruce the Superhero», once and for all.

 

BORN TO RUN (1975)

 

1) Thunder Road; 2) 10th Avenue Freeze Out; 3) Night; 4) Backstreets; 5) Born To Run; 6) She's The One; 7) Meeting Across The River; 8) Jungleland.

 

After all these years, my favorite song on this album is still ʽ10th Avenue Freeze Outʼ. You know why? Because it is the only song on this album that inherits and develops the style of its prede­cessor — with that tight, cocky, vivacious, and not in the least simplistic jazz-pop sound. The guitar is sly and boppy rather than bombastic, Roy Bittan's honky-tonk piano and Clemmons' saxophone parts are deliciously New Orleanian, and as the verses merrily lead to the "10th ave­nue freeze out, 10th avenue freeze out!" chorus, defiantly shot out word by word, the track, to me, offers more sincere «rebellion» than a thousand ʽThunder Roadsʼ could ever hope to.

 

But the song is an anomaly here, on an album that is not about having defiant fun on the street corner. Born To Run is all about size — everything bigger than everything else, including life itself. Now that Jon Landau had seen rock'n'roll's future, and now that the man had properly cut his teeth with two uneven, but ultimately successful records, in Bruce's own words, he wanted to make «Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan and produced by Phil Spector», yes indeed.

 

We could just leave it at that, stating the obvious fact that Bruce Springsteen does not possess the voice of a Roy Orbison, the verbal talents of Bob Dylan, and the studio experience of Phil Spec­tor. But that would not be honest, because in reality, he never tries to sing like Roy Orbison, write lyrics like Bob Dylan, or rip off Spector's wall-of-sound techniques. The statement has to be understood allegorically — all of these guys were the smashing-est in their class, and Born To Run tries to be smashing in all these respects, too: big tales of passion, hope, and despair sung with a big voice and played in a big sort of way. Melody? Groove? Yeah it's nice if we can have some of that, too, but it ain't what matters here.

 

I mean, ʽThunder Roadʼ has a riff alright (the piano-sax duo), but it only really appears in the coda section, once the tale is over — before that, all that matters is the crescendo, as the Boss gradually revs himself into action. The intrigue is — where does it all lead? Instruments enter one after the other, the voice rises higher and higher, and once it becomes clear that the protagonist is gonna grab his guitar, get Mary (another appearance by the Queen of Arkansas?), hop in the car, and skedaddle out of here, there's just no way we wouldn't be having that mighty coda. Melody-wise, I still have no idea what goes on there: I only know it started out small and inconspicuous and ended up bigger than a brontosaur's ass, and that's probably the only thing that matters in the grand scheme of things. Very grand scheme of things.

 

The question is — are you ready to get caught up in these windy blasts that the Boss is huffin' and puffin' at you, or have you got second thoughts about it? All of these «classics» — ʽThunder Roadʼ, ʽBackstreetsʼ, ʽBorn To Runʼ, ʽJunglelandʼ — all of them have always left me with mixed feelings. The skill, the craft, the energy are undeniable, and there has hardly been any «working class poet» in the pop music business (certainly not in 1975) who could beat the man in this de­partment. The sincerity of it could be doubted, of course, but why? It's not as if Bruce wrote and recorded ʽBorn To Runʼ out of some cynical «yeah, the boys back home will really dig this one and finally make me a superstar» motive — and it wouldn't really be until the Eighties, anyway, that «commercially oriented music-making» would become a big part of the man's life.

 

The key to this dissatisfaction is, I believe, in the songs' combination of simplicity, monotonous­ness, and predictability. The «Springsteen formula» gets established here as a viable critical and commercial proposition, but hardly as a gift for those who do not cherish pathos and bombast on their own, even if they are done really convincingly. The six-note riff of ʽBorn To Runʼ (which, if you pin it down, sounds like somebody trying to master the style of Duane Eddy) is okay, but it just serves as the backbone for a lot of instrumental bombast, and come on now, you're not here for the guitar or even for the crazy sax break, you're really supposed to be here to sing along with Bruce, also wanting to know if love is wild, or if love is real. "Tramps like us, baby, we were born to run" — that "us" does not mean me and my lady friend, it really means me and you, my devoted soon-to-be-stadium-rock-fan. But this sort of emotionalism is just too crude and too stereotypical. And, yes, too populist, of course — even if no cynical intention is suspected.

 

Other than that, few people talk about the non-classics, and for good reason — ʽNightʼ is really like a lesser quality preview of ʽBorn To Runʼ, rather pleonastic in light of the latter; ʽShe's The Oneʼ wastes a good Bo Diddley beat on an unsuitably pompous arrangement; and ʽMeeting Across The Riverʼ, dominated by Randy Brecker's midnight trumpet, meanders and sinatras its way across the brief filler space that leads us to the much more prominent ʽJunglelandʼ. A skeptic like me could have tried to build up a stronger case for these lesser known songs, but no, they have every reason to be lesser known — two out of three at least following the album's general logic, but failing to deliver quite as well in the energy and bombast department.

 

If there is one indisputable hero on Born To Run, it is The Big Man — sax guy Clarence Clemons. I am pretty sure that without his contributions the album might have flopped as badly as its predecessors, because nothing here hits as hard as his blasts: not even Bruce at his brawni­est, when he is roaring out "hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets!", can really com­pare with the totally focused, totally magnetic short solo on the title track — and the best instru­mental passage by far on the entire album is the famous sax solo on ʽJunglelandʼ, well worth waiting for even if you happen to find the rest of the urban tale somewhat of a drag. Unfortunate­ly, there's only so much you can do with a saxophone, and all of Clarence's breaks set the same mood — perfectly compatible with Bruce's lonesome-heroic approach and more nimble and awe-inspiring than any other voice or instrument here, but the guy is really used as much as he should be used, no more, no less.

 

I think he's also pretty much absent on ʽBackstreetsʼ, where Roy Bittan is instead the hero — and he plays it loyal and regal, but six minutes of his keyboards are boring, because... well, could he play something else for just a moment? Oh no, he could not, because the Boss really just needs him to accompany his power Lied about Terry (and, by the way, we still do not know if Terry was a man, a woman, a dog, or Ziggy in disguise). Do not get me wrong — the basic punch of ʽBackstreetsʼ punches heavy and hard, but when the major hook in your song is the sound of your own voice screaming, it's... well, imagine ʽWon't Get Fooled Againʼ getting along solely on the strength of Daltrey's final roar. Would we want to spend those nine minutes so we could all just live up to it? And in ʽBackstreetsʼ, there's just too much pathos and not enough resolution.

 

Ultimately, Born To Run sealed the man's fate. Before that one, his creative trajectory was still somewhat unpredictable — but the success of this «future of rock'n'roll» project established him as Working Class Rock Hero ¹1, and since a working class hero is something to be, this leaves less space to experiment with music and piles up many more obligations to conform to the image. But that would be later: on Born To Run, he still has that image to construct, before he can begin to con­form to much of anything, and so the album is not so much «calculated» and «manipu­lative» as it is simply «mono-focused». We just want everything to be big, huge, voluminous beyond measure. Whoever said it was in bad taste to be young, wild, and ambitious circa 1975? Even Billy Joel was young, wild, and ambitious circa 1975.

 

So there's really no reason to insist upon «hating» the record or viciously thumbing it down. It was unquestionably an event, it went on to become a classic that still attracts young listeners even today, it's got its share of unforgettable songs and its undeniably brilliant musical moments. It is probably responsible, at least in part, for the subsequent careers of Bob Seger, John Mellencamp, Bryan Adams, and God knows who else, but we are not going to hold that against it, either. It in­troduced the «big bearded muscular man with Telecaster» image, too, which is not accidental because of all guitars in the world, nothing resembles a mighty sledgehammer as much as a good old Fender Telecaster — cue Working Class Rock Hero ¹1 image yet again — but why should we suppose anything other than just a personal preference for this particular model? Let's just say this: Born To Run is sort of a fascinating record, torn between genius and mediocrity, richness and cheapness, rampant imagination and clichéd formula. A formula which, by the way, Bruce would go on to easily tear down on his next album — only to have it rebuilt from scratch for the next one — and tear it down again — and build it up — and tear it down — and then we lost count, and it wasn't so fun anymore anyway.

 

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN (1978)

 

1) Badlands; 2) Adam Raised A Cain; 3) Something In The Night; 4) Candy's Room; 5) Racing In The Street; 6) The Promised Land; 7) Factory; 8) Streets Of Fire; 9) Prove It All Night; 10) Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

 

Three years of litigation with his former manager kept the people in frenzied suspense over the sequel to Born To Run — over this period, Springsteen wrote a veritable shitload of songs, some of which would later spill over to The River and others would surface much later on Tracks and The Promise. As the legal troubles finally wound down and it came to deciding which of the songs should be finally given the green light, Bruce made the correct decision — instead of going the «Formula Lockdown» routine like a B-grade entertainer, he chose the «Artistic Sabotage Route» like a proper A-grade artist. Sure enough, Born To Run wrote him into history, but it was Darkness On The Edge Of Town that ensured his perspectives for longevity.

 

I guess there may have been a bit of «punk» influence reflected here, not in the music as such which is very decidedly traditionalistic and features not a single nod to punk or New Wave, but in the overall spirit (including the album cover, where we certainly have a much «punkier» mugshot of Bruce than the bearded guitar-hero posturing of Born To Run). But if so, that is more of a chronological coincidence than a deliberate exploitation of the prevailing mood — you really do not need to dig in much into the musical context of 1977-78 to understand the stylistic shift from Born To Run to Darkness; this has much more to do with the artist's internal reshaping (or, at least, the happenings in his personal life) than any social context.

 

Ironically, the song that Bruce selected to open the album, ʽBadlandsʼ, is somewhat misleading — its opening piano riff is actually taken from the Animals' version of ʽDon't Let Me Be Misunderstoodʼ, but the song is transposed from B minor into E major, and the mood is shifted from tragic to uplifting-optimistic, with a message that is fairly close to ʽBorn To Runʼ: "We'll keep pushin' till it's understood / And these badlands start treating us good". The arrangement is nowhere near as pompous, though: technically, all the ingredients are the same, but the band is tighter, «poppier», and a little less wild — the «drunken fervor» days are over, and here we get a more sober protagonist who "got my facts learned real good right now". Yes indeed, but ultimately the song should still be classified under «optimistic anthem», and it gives you the impression that this is going to be a similarly-styled sequel to Born To Run, if a little bit more grown-up and restrained.

 

But then we have ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ, and all expectations are shattered — the single blackest song in the Boss' catalog that far, and in some ways, maybe the single blackest song in his catalog altogether. I still find myself surprised that, for some reason, very few people ever single it out from the rest of the tunes here, and that quite a few people completely misinterpret it as a failed attempt at playing a «wild guitar hero» or even at «cock rock» (!!; yes, I've actually seen it called that by at least one or two persons). The only explanation I can offer is that it is too unsettling, too unusual for the average Bruce fan. But as for myself, this is the only song by the man that almost literally makes my hair stand on end if I'm in the right mood.

 

Melody-wise, it is just a decently written blues-rock number, but its strength is in the perfect combination of lyrics, vocals, and guitar playing — few, if any, other songs convey so well the idea of it being impossible to escape the chains that bind one to one's past. Formally, it's just about the relation between the singer and his father (Douglas Springsteen was alive and well at the time, and probably felt a bit miffed upon hearing this), but it applies equally well to any other blood or non-blood ties, and the use of Biblical imagery in the title is justified because this is the first time when Bruce does get all Old Testamental on our asses — the solemnity, the darkness, the cruelness of the situation. The guitar solo on the song is his best ever — simplicity itself, but blind rage incarnate as the man throws his entire weight on those couple of strings, now in fast tremolo mode, now in slo-mo, now alternating low-pitched groans with high-pitched wails. And the «overscreaming» for which he is sometimes blamed has nothing here to do with the usual melodrama — it's aggressive, violent, deadly serious and deeply personal overscreaming, compa­rable with anything Lennon did on Plastic Ono Band. This here is really a man channelling some of his deep childhood traumas you don't want to know about, but to which many of us could probably relate one way or the other. As he works those muscles at the very bottom of the vocal tract on the final "Lost but not forgotten, from the dark heart of a dream!...", it is like a final blast of self-damnation — no escape! — and the final «tribal» harmonies, slowly fading out, are escorting our hero straight away to Hell because "you inherit the sins, you inherit the flames". No matter what you do, no matter who you are, it all ends the same.

 

Clearly, there was nothing even remotely like this kind of vision on any of the preceding three albums — and once the album derails from ʽBadlandsʼ and establishes this tone, it casts its shadow on everything else, though no other tune quite matches the intensity level of ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ. It does come close on ʽStreets Of Fireʼ, where we have ourselves more screa­ming and more of those ecstatic guitar solos and more of that existentialist desperation — even without the blood ties aspect, we are still "stranded on the wire across streets of fire", which is a pretty nerve-wrecking experience, and I think that it is musically supported by something like two chords on the organ and an equally minimalistic bass line, and the Boss giving his best «Ne­anderthal ancestor of Van Morrison» impression. Again, compare something like ʽBackstreetsʼ — the former barked a lot, but this one bites, snaps, and spits out. Just compare how the ecstasy is handled on "hiding out on the backstreets!" and how the inner rage is externalized on "streets of fire, streets of fire!". Yes, I sure prefer the aggressive Springsteen to the romantic Springsteen. If this is what they call «maturity», I'll take it.

 

Even ʽRacing In The Streetʼ, which once again returns us to the territory of Bruce's «epic stories of the working class», has a darker sheen here than ʽJunglelandʼ or ʽBackstreetsʼ — we will for­get for a minute that its main piano/vocal melody pilfers Neil Young's ʽAfter The Gold Rushʼ, will agree that the "summer's here and the time is right for racin' in the street" line is an intelligent rephrasing of Martha & The Vandellas in a brand new context, and will take this for an honest-sounding late night drunk moment of self-introspection by the guy who used to think that he was «born to run» but now finds out that «racin' in the street» is all he's really capable of. Is the song better written than anything on Born To Run? Hell no. There ain't that much «composing» in­volved on either of the two albums. But grimness and subtlety agree much better with this guy than grandiosity and that old on-top-of-the-world feel.

 

The record still smells of «teen drama» every now and then — for instance, the highly unusual spoken word intro to ʽCandy's Roomʼ is most reminiscent of the old style of the Shangri-Las, the uncrowned proto-emo queens of Sixties' suicidal teen-pop. It has its lyrical drawbacks — ʽThe Factoryʼ is just way too blatant even for Bruce, who, after all, never pretended to be Woody Guthrie in the past and has no reason to begin pretending now. It has its uncomfortable outbursts of brutal masculinity (if any song actually comes close to real «cock rock» on the album, it is ʽProve It All Nightʼ, but I guess there should have been at least a little something for Bruce's adoring lady fans on the record, or they'd all desert him for Lou Gramm). It ain't perfect, because Bruce Springsteen never made a perfect album — he couldn't have, by definition.

 

But of all the albums that Bruce Springsteen churned out in his career, this one is my favorite. Not because I automatically prefer «dark» over «light» (hey, I'm a big McCartney fan, after all), but because Bruce's «dark» always feels more natural, less contrived/theatrical to me. Born To Run was an explosive escapist blast, all power and volume and energy and extrovertness; Dark­ness On The Edge Of Town im-plodes rather than ex-plodes, and sends out probes into the darkest corners of the soul — sometimes they just shoot by, but sometimes they hit right in the middle, and this makes me convinced that Bruce Springsteen does have creepy magical powers, except he is always being careful about not relying on them too much. I mean, yes, I do believe that ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ is the best song he ever came up with, but good luck trying to turn that one into a popular megahit — you might as well try and do it with a Swans song.

 

I should probably also add that the record has a great big share of memorable piano riffs — if Clarence Clemons was the Boss' main guy on Born To Run, here the key player is unquestionab­ly Roy Bittan, whose phrasing dominates all but two or three of the tunes (ʽStreets Of Fireʼ with its Federici organ is the major exception), and although the riffs are simple and, as has already been hinted at, frequently unoriginal, they are memorable and somewhat easier to pin to your brain cells (well, my brain cells at least) than anything off Born To Run. This, of course, is a natural precursor to the even more simplified and streamlined keyboard pop of Born In The USA, but as long as it is done in an emotionally meaningful manner, it's more of a blessing than a problem. I mean, it is clear that at this point the «jazz-funk» experiments of ye olde E Street Band are no longer a viable proposition anyway, so we might just relax and wish The Boss a successful career of developing sharp pop instincts instead. Here, he's really doing a good job.

 

Some day, perhaps, when «revisionists» like me get the upper hand and Truth triumphs over Circumstance-Triggered Critical and Commercial Success, Darkness On The Edge Of Town will become regarded by the mainstream as this man's finest hour. Until then, I'll just be holding my thumbs up a little longer than usual and hope for the corresponding cumulative magical effect. Then again, most people don't care that much for bleakness and pessimism, and upon second thought, that's probably more of a blessing than a curse in the long run.

 

THE RIVER (1980)

 

1) The Ties That Bind; 2) Sherry Darling; 3) Jackson Cage; 4) Two Hearts; 5) Independence Day; 6) Hungry Heart; 7) Out In The Street; 8) Crush On You; 9) You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch); 10) I Wanna Marry You; 11) The River; 12) Point Blank; 13) Cadillac Ranch; 14) I'm A Rocker; 15) Fade Away; 16) Stolen Car; 17) Ramrod; 18) The Price You Pay; 19) Drive All Night; 20) Wreck On The Highway.

 

How do I put this right? Basically, with this album Bruce Springsteen was pretty much over as a major artistic force. He himself admitted that The River more or less shaped out and defined his song­writing style for the rest of his career, and there is indeed a bigger barrier between Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River than between any other two subsequent albums in his life, including all the great ones and all the real shitty ones.

 

As the «album rock» era drew to a close and the hit single (and, fairly soon, the hit video) re­claimed its positions in the early Eighties, Springsteen and Landau chose the «top» road over the «bottom» road — which meant intentionally dumbing it down in search of mass appeal. There are still patches of uncomfortable darkness on The River, and a few clever songwriting ideas, but for the most part, this is by far the least musically interesting record he'd done to date. Never mind that it is a double LP and that we should expect some filler on a double LP — from a purely song­writing perspective, I would dare say that most of these tunes are filler. Remember all those Roy Bittan piano riffs on Darkness that could be perceived as intelligently composed and ins­pired? Not a single one like that here. Instead, all we get is variations on all sorts of classic rock­abilly, folk rock, and Phil Spector progressions — very blatant variations at that, because The River is not about music-making, it is all about image codification.

 

This time, we are ʽOut In The Streetʼ again, with the «blue collar life philosophy» thrown right in our face by the simplest, straightforwardest, brawniest of means. ʽI'm A Rockerʼ, the Boss tells us in his cockiest track so far, which sounds like an Eddie Cochran number updated Eighties-style, with a triumphant, exuberant, over-the-top-joyful delivery that basically screams out, "this, boys and girls, is how real rock'n'roll is supposed to be done today!"... well, guess some people are entitled to a different opinion. And this is not even the over-the-top exuberance of ʽBorn To Runʼ: it is something... cheaper. In all respects — the lyrics, the vocals, the instrumentation, the rene­wed application of the same formula with more predictability and less trepidation. And these joyous «rockers» come one after another, one after another, and they're all pretty much the same. Is there really any big difference between ʽCrush On Youʼ and ʽCadillac Ranchʼ, or between ʽTwo Heartsʼ and ʽYou Can Lookʼ, or between ʽThe Ties That Bind and ʽJackson Cageʼ?..

 

Nor does the «dark» stuff offer that much redemption. Lyrically, there's too much open manipu­lation — the title track, with its sad, but clichéd tale of innocence-lost, is a slightly over-arranged folk ballad which could have worked a little better in «stark naked» form (in two years' time, Bruce would realise the dignity of such an approach himself), but the way it is presented here, crumbles down very quickly under its own pathos. The same can be said about ʽPoint Blankʼ, which tries to melt our sympathetic hearts down merely on the strength of its lyrics and atmos­phere, created at the intersection of Bittan's and Federici's soft, romantic jazzy playing — but no real hooks in sight. And why did ʽDrive All Nightʼ have to be eight minutes long? Why not eight hours then — so that the title could reflect reality? Particularly since there is nothing going on at this relaxed tempo, other than some basic dull atmospherics.

 

So much for the disgruntled moping. But then, once we have gotten that off our chests, let us also admit that in some ways, particularly in certain primal and straightforward ways, The River is... a lot of fun. Yes, these are clichéd, well-worn hooks, but... I can complain about ʽCadillac Ranchʼ all I want and write pages on how this stuff only pretends to be rock'n'roll and how it ain't got the truly authentic spirit, but do I deny the catchiness and the energy and the dedication of the E Street Band and its leader? Or even the rough sense of humor displayed in ʽYou Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)ʼ, where the protagonist is prevented by a stringent society from indulging in his friendly animal instincts, all set to another one of these neo-rockabilly melodies and en­hanced with a garage-style lead guitar part? Or the efficiency of the basic hook of ʽHungry Heartʼ, with a Supertramp-ish keyboard melody and Beach Boy harmonies combined to render the idea of unfulfilled emotional yearning as simply as it gets?

 

Basically, I would not want anyone to think that I am scornful of The River's vibe in the same way that I would be dismissive of, say, Bon Jovi (who would take quite a few lessons from their New Jersey neighbor, but never to good effect). These here are safe, simple, über-accessible tunes that directly pander to the lowest common denominator, but what saves them from constituting an anti-musical / anti-intellectual criminal act is that they are written and performed in the spirit of youthful innocence. Although the instrumentation is already smelling a bit of the Eighties' tech­no­logical boom, The River is anything but a New Wave album — its melodic and atmospheric carcass is almost completely construed from Eddie Cochran rockabilly, Ricky Nelson teen pop, Johnny Cash country folk, and Phil Spec­tor grand pop elements from the late Fifties/early Sixties, and this surmises an atmosphere of total inno­cence and directness.

 

If there is a problem as such, it lies not with Bruce, but with the way this album has been treated in «mainstream» musical criticism — like some sort of sprawling, majestic, all-out-American panorama, with endless five-star ratings and continued admiration for how well the songs depict «the small victories and large compromises of ordinary joes and janies whose need to understand as well as celebrate is as restless as his own» (guess who). Relax, people! The more serious you get about The River, the less respect you have to pay to your own intellect. The best way to treat it is just to regard it as two hours of simple headbanging fun, with occasional patches of theatrical darkness thrown in for diversity's sake. Then at least you don't have to bother about «filler» — because there is really no filler here as such, everything is more or less on the same level of musi­cality and intensity.

 

So is this a thumbs up or what? Ultimately, yes. An unambitious Springsteen is not nearly as impressive as the successfully ambitious Springsteen of Darkness, but he still seems more agree­able here than the way-too-uncomfortably ambitious Springsteen of Born To Run. And as for the record being too long, I respectfully disagree. I do not at all see any «great single LP» hidden in­side this «merely good double LP», and since most of the songs do not outlast their welcome and the general vibe is acceptable, it could have been a triple or quadruple one, for all I know (in fact, it really could have, considering how many outtakes from the Darkness sessions ended up here and how many more songs were written in 1979-80). And you can turn this opinion both ways — on one hand, the songwriting formulae of The River work so well that they would indeed be reused by The Boss on a regular basis for the next thirty-five years, on the other hand, it ensures that from now on, Bruce would forever remain in this «kinda okay artist with lotsa mass appeal» role, permanently locked out from more interesting or, dare I say it, experimental artistic inspi­rations. So, if you're one of these «looking for extra character development» types, The River might just be the last Springsteen album to look out for (well, you could also use Nebraska for a nice post-scriptum flourish, but that's about it).

 

NEBRASKA (1982)

 

1) Nebraska; 2) Atlantic City; 3) Mansion On The Hill; 4) Johnny 99; 5) Highway Patrolman; 6) State Trooper; 7) Used Cars; 8) Open All Night; 9) My Father's House; 10) Reason To Believe.

 

And here comes another self-conscious «career bomb». An album even darker in tone than Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and this time, with Bruce doing it all alone — just a man and his guitar, with a little harmonica on the side. A perfect counterbalance, one would think, to the basic bigness of The River and its all-out-rockin' arena hits: an album that would never be able to sell as many copies by its very nature, even if, on the strength of Bruce's already respectable re­pu­tation, it did reach #3 on the charts (not the singles that were culled from it, though).

 

If analogies are still allowed to be indulged in, then this is Springsteen's John Wesley Harding, surprising the populace with its humble, intimate scope just as they'd finally gotten used to the grand scale of the previous records. However, if Dylan at least actually came from an original acoustic folk background, Springsteen's prowess with the guitar-harmonica schtick was previous­ly largely confined to occasional songs like ʽMary Queen Of Arkansasʼ: the man was anything but a moody six-string loner, and although his troubadour nature always hinted that something like this might one day appear on the horizon, I guess it still took most people by surprise when he emerged with the actual results.

 

But while these results are generally good, the project on the whole suffers from the obvious: a lack of mystery. Suppose that you have never heard a solo acoustic Springsteen album — now close your eyes and try to think real hard what such an album would probably sound like. Some folk melodies, some country waltzes, a bit of blues, maybe a touch of rockabilly, right? Strong, friendly, masculine, but tired, disillusioned, and weather-worn vocals? Lyrical themes that cover issues like poverty, depression, crime, maybe a little nostalgia, and properly mix desperation with just a spoonful of hope so that nobody kills oneself in the end? Everything sincere, passionate, and catchy, but probably not very imaginative or unpredictable?

 

Yep, this is Nebraska all right, even if I cheated and formulated these questions after listening to the album. Now as proof that the record «sucks» this would, of course, be laughable: formula is formula, and most artists live and die by the formula anyway. The problem is that it takes a great deal of skill and effort to make a minimalistic record like this that would truly stand out — and this one, for the most part, stands out just because Springsteen stands out. But do the songs stand out? What about the songs?

 

In my own humble opinion, there are only two songs on this record that have a special «pull» to them. ʽAtlantic Cityʼ ended up being arguably the most famous one, and for good reason: it is the other side of the ʽBorn To Runʼ coin, another desperately determined attempt to escape, but this time realising all too well that the escape takes place in the direction of Hell, since Heaven has been closed off tight — and this psychological mix of near-weeping desperation with clenched-teeth determination is brilliantly carried over by the vocals. Live, the Boss would turn it into a grand ten-minute E Street Band-backed anthem, with the entire arena chanting "put your make­up on, fix your hair up pretty / and meet me tonight in Atlantic City" as if celebrating a new begin­ning, but, as usual, there is quite a bit of irony here.

 

My personal favorite, however, is ʽState Trooperʼ, which carries the minimalist vibe of the al­bum to a logical conclusion — two chords altogether, somehow sufficient to generate a spooky, tense atmosphere, and nervous mumbled vocals from which we gather that the protagonist is probably guilty of something (most protagonists on Nebraska are guilty of one thing or another) and that "Mr. State Trooper" might actually get it if he tries to stop our guy. It's all in that tension — three minutes of incessant D-major-A-minor reflecting the relentlessness of the pulse, and then, right before the fade out, the tension is released with a single, short, well-placed scream that will have you jumping out of the chair... yes, one of these moments that still have me jumping after all these years (like the loud band opening on The Wall).

 

These two tracks, the way I see it, show a certain amount of divine inspiration, and confirm that Nebraska should by no means be considered as nothing but the result of stylistic calculation. Un­fortunately, the rest of the songs seem fairly pedestrian in comparison. The title track is basically just a generic murder ballad — the story of a serial killer and his girlfriend, Badlands in four and a half minutes, concluding with a strand of rather cheap «folk wisdom»: "They wanted to know why I did what I did / Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world" really doesn't cut it when you hear it from the lips of a supposedly literate singer-songwriter rather than some ano­nymous pre-war folk balladeer. Nostalgic musings like ʽMansion On The Hillʼ and ʽMy Father's Houseʼ have nothing but the unmistakable tone of Bruce's voice to recommend them. And ʽOpen All Nightʼ sounds like one of them clichéd rockabilly rockers from The River that would cer­tainly have benefited from a full band sound, if it cannot already benefit from innovative song­writing. And so on and on and on.

 

What makes it worse is that, despite all the superficial «humility», it is clear that Springsteen him­self must have felt pretty assured about the strong reactions these songs would cause — other­wise, there would be no need to wrap it up with ʽReason To Believeʼ, a tune that largely exists with the sole purpose of «providing hope» after the general bleakness of the record is supposed to wear you down and make you lose your faith in the human race and all. Yes, the world is just this one big Nebraska place where people lose jobs, lovers, health, and confidence, become crooks, hitmen, and serial killers, but don't worry that much, because "still at the end of every hard day people find some reason to believe". Credo quia absurdum. Hope that helps, folks. Do not begin reaching out for your razors and cyanide capsules just yet.

 

Because of the individual greatness of ʽAtlantic Cityʼ and ʽState Trooperʼ, I am that close to a positive rating, but a thumbs up here could be taken as a sign of my belief in Springsteen as a successful folk singer-songwriter, and I do not have any "reason to believe" this. At least this re­cord is livelier, wittier, and less thoroughly drenched in banality than the truly abysmal Ghost Of Tom Joad, awaiting us further on down the line, but overall, I think I'd rather have Woody Guthrie — who, as a poet, may have been far cruder and blunter than Springsteen, but who at least knew better how to separate his big ego from the struggle for working class rights.

 

BORN IN THE USA (1984)

 

1) Born In The USA; 2) Cover Me; 3) Darlington County; 4) Working On The Highway; 5) Downbound Train; 6) I'm On Fire; 7) No Surrender; 8) Bobby Jean; 9) I'm Goin' Down; 10) Glory Days; 11) Dancing In The Dark; 12) My Hometown.

 

There's no use pretending that this album is devoid of magic. There's no going against the bare facts: two listens at most, and these songs will stay with you forever — just remember the title, and the whole picture will come to you in a flash. Yes, this is largely because there is very little original songwriting here: most of these brawny rockers feature completely formulaic chord sequences, borrowed from blues, folk, country, and rockabilly, and very well tested by Father Time. But ol' Bruce knows how to make them come alive again under his own personal identity, and which particular notes, nooks and angles should be flash-lighted by means of the technolo­gical wonders of mid-Eighties' production. This could not have been anything but his commercial high peak — a simple, straightforward, immediately accessible and invigorating collection of kick-ass pop-rock tunes that was almost impossible not to buy in 1984.

 

Of course, it is also almost shamelessly manipulative. Liberals and democrats of all trades like to use the title track as indicative of conservative stupidity — always remembering how the Reagan people actually got in contact with the Springsteen people, asking them to allow the president to use the song in his ongoing campaign for re-election, despite the lyrics being so clearly ironic. But in fact, the Reagan people were certainly not stupid: most people, when hearing the song, would first and foremost be swayed by its anthemic, heck, its almost «jingoistic» refrain, and would hardly notice the lyrical content of the verses until much later. Does anybody really think this was not intentional — that neither Bruce nor Landau had anything but sheer intellectual irony on their minds? Maybe when it was still a humble acoustic demo during the Nebraska sessions, sure — but certainly not when it was transformed into this braggartly declamation, driven by Max Weinberg's killer drums and Bittan's fanfare-like synth riff. Like many other Springsteen songs, this one has a pair of different faces — one for the money, two for the show, and you have your choice of which one you'd like to consider the more important one.

 

Legend has it that after Nebraska, Springsteen actually engaged in a body-building program (any coincidence that First Blood came out in 1982?), and when you see the videos that accompanied the album — title track, ʽDancing In The Darkʼ, even ʽI'm On Fireʼ (where who else could our hero represent than a hard-working auto mechanic?) — you can understand that the man was really going all the way to refresh, solidify, and unify his image across all modes of perception, in a much more populist manner than even Born To Run could ever hint at. One reason why Bruce never made, or even tried to make, another album like this is that there was no need: Born In The USA made him into a living legend overnight, and from then on he could have released nothing but industrial noise or minimalist ambient albums all his life — having made his mark on the entire American nation, and even on quite a few people outside it, even if, technically, Born In The USA stigmatized him as a «local» phenomenon more than any other record.

 

And I have to admit that, on a sheer gut level, I feel more enthralled by this simplistic, straight-in-your-face approach than by the «quasi-progressiveness» of Born To Run. Case in point is ʽDancing In The Darkʼ, a song written at the last minute to complete the album and capture the man's then-current state of mind — the catchiness of its synth riff and elegantly resolved verse-chorus attack is not a simple formality, it is the perfect summarization of The Boss's entire «hope-in-the-face-of-impossible-odds» philosophy and quite a powerful musical anti-depressant in its own rights. In the famous video (and subsequent recreations of the video during the man's touring schedules, where he would pull out allegedly random girls from the audience for the last dance section), the song was primarily loaded with sexual connotations — what sort of a girl would re­fuse a fiery hunk like that? — but even its sexual connotations seem warranted here, not to men­tion all the other ones. And yeah, they found the perfect riff to fuel the fire.

 

Another personal favorite of mine has always been ʽBobby Jeanʼ, the most romantic-nostalgic track here and one of the few that could have perhaps fit in on Born To Run as well — a favorite largely because of Bittan's ABBA-style «grand» piano chords (three of them? four? no matter, less is more) that mesh so well with those vocals. It's a goddamn street romance story like every other, and I have no idea why it moves me so much more than ʽThunder Roadʼ, but there's just something about that piano and those hoarse vocals, and then of course Clarence has to come up and blow you away with one of those desperate sax solos. Such a simple, such a perfectly effec­tive formula, I cannot resist it.

 

Yes, the genius of Born In The USA is that, unlike The River which was somewhat bland, this one is really Darkness On The Edge Of Town, repackaged in this much more simple way. Most of the songs are pretty bleak — ʽCover Meʼ is about using love as a last resort, ʽDownbound Trainʼ is about when not even love can help, ʽI'm Goin' Downʼ is about when love turns out to be a drag, and ʽI'm On Fireʼ is about... uh, well, it's kinda creepy, actually, when you listen to his "six-inch valley through the middle of my skull" metaphors. You don't want to mess around with The Boss when he's singing about his sex drive — Mick Jagger would be mincemeat against this heap of muscles circa 1984. But even so, ʽI'm On Fireʼ is explicitly about not getting any, and does anyone have any idea how many horny teenagers identified with the song that year?

 

On the other hand, if the album were all bleak, this might have hurt sales — so there's one for the truck drivers (ʽDarlington Countyʼ), one for the chain gang (ʽWorking On The Highwayʼ), one for the school skippers (ʽNo Surrenderʼ), one for the old folks (ʽGlory Daysʼ)... basically, it would only be the jaded intellectuals, I guess, who wouldn't have a tune here designed especially for them, everybody else in America had at least one or more. Really, the construction of the al­bum is totally admirable — it is a perfectly thought out mechanism, no cog or wheel wasted, not a second out of place. Look how each of the two sides ends with a «softie» — ʽI'm On Fireʼ slowly putting out the flame of Side A, then ʽMy Hometownʼ, on an almost «adult contempo­rary» note (ironically, presaging much of the sound of Tunnel Of Love), quietly calms us down after ʽDancing In The Darkʼ had us all riled up. These are darn clever engineering solutions. Darn clever. How could this not have been such a huge success? After all, people who bought the record were only people. Defenseless against such a well-armed construction.

 

Is there any actual harm, though, from falling under the spell of Born In The USA? Well, there's nothing particularly wrong with liking Springsteen in general or this record in particular — it ain't sleazy, it doesn't have too much pretense, it isn't too dumb from a general musical standpoint (yes, these synth riffs are simpler than anything so far, but in many cases, this is genius simplicity, even if I do feel silly listening to ʽGlory Daysʼ), and it kicks ass. Many «hardcore» Springsteen fans seem offended by its simplicity — this sudden appeal to millions rather than just thousands makes them feel that Bruce is intentionally cheapening his act here, and he is, but see, the thing is, there's nothing inherently wrong about cheap acts if they're done with spirit. Even if he is acting all the way, Born In The USA sounds more adequate and convincing to me than Born To Run, and I can neither admit to hating it nor even to wanting to find a reason why I should.

 

Rereading an older review of this record by a much younger me, I'm sort of amused how I used to take this «he's dumbing it down, oh God no how come he's dumbing it down so much?» thing so much to heart, essentially leaving The Boss in a «damned if you do, damned if you don't» posi­tion: when he is «glorifying» and «complexifying» the common man on Born To Run, he gets slapped — when he is talking to the common man in common language on Born In The USA, he gets destroyed, come on now, this just ain't fair. As a symbol of repentance, I have just happily sung along to all the sha-la-la-las of ʽDarlington Countyʼ, and you know what? it was fun, you should try it, too, some day. Thumbs up, I'm going to play air guitar to ʽWorking On The High­wayʼ now — just please don't ask me to jack off to ʽI'm On Fireʼ, because that would be taking this album way too seriously and spoiling all the fun.

 

LIVE 1975-85 (1986)

 

1) Thunder Road; 2) Adam Raised A Cain; 3) Spirit In The Night; 4) 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy); 5) Paradise By The "C"; 6) Fire; 7) Growin' Up; 8) It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City; 9) Backstreets; 10) Rosalita (Come Out Tonight); 11) Raise Your Hand; 12) Hungry Heart; 13) Two Hearts; 14) Cadillac Ranch; 15) You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch); 16) Independence Day; 17) Badlands; 18) Because The Night; 19) Candy's Room; 20) Dark­ness On The Edge Of Town; 21) Racing In The Street; 22) This Land Is Your Land; 23) Nebraska; 24) Johnny 99; 25) Reason To Believe; 26) Born In The USA; 27) Seeds; 28) The River; 29) War; 30) Darlington County; 31) Working On The Highway; 32) The Promised Land; 33) Cover Me; 34) I'm On Fire; 35) Bobby Jean; 36) My Hometown; 37) Born To Run; 38) No Surrender; 39) Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out; 40) Jersey Girl.

 

Nothing but the biggest for The Boss! Unless I'm very wrong, this was the first ever live album to be released not on two or even three LPs (that did happen in the prog-rock era), but on five. And of course, it is a live retrospective that spans a whole decade, but even so, I don't think even the Grateful Dead had the gall to put out anything like that in 1986. Bruce did have a certain excuse, though — he had established his reputation as a major kick-ass live performer already at the time of his first studio records, yet somehow even after the major success of Born To Run live albums did not appear on the horizon. Modesty? Laziness? Lack of interest?

 

Well, whatever. Live 1975-85, released as a sort of major summarization of Bruce's live career, is neither modest nor lazy, and, judging by its careful construction, shows somebody who is very interested in establishing a memory of himself as one of the greatest live players in his generation, so we should assume that this is just Bruce catching up. (We could assume that he intentionally waited all this time, so he could accumulate enough material and market the biggest live album ever made — but then, rock musicians don't usually plan that far ahead). The downside, of course, is that the album is so goddamn sprawling, there probably are very few people in the world, bar complete Springsteen nutsos, who sat through it more than once — and I, too, have to confess that I am writing about it after only just one listen. It was a good listen, though, and I might find myself coming back to at least parts of the monster at later dates.

 

The title is actually a bit misleading, because only one song here, out of a whoppin' 40, really goes back to 1975 — the opening ʽThunder Roadʼ, presented here in its stripped-down, totally non-thunderous rendition (just piano, chimes, and harmonica). To listen to Bruce in all his early bearded glory, loyal bootleg-hating citizens would have to wait for another twenty years, until the archival re­lease of Hammersmith Odeon '75. The real bulk of this album, though, begins July 7, 1978, at the Roxy Theatre, and takes us through three consecutive sections: the 1978 tour, the 1980-81 River tour, and the largest and the most recent section, occupying almost half of the set — the 1984-85 Born In The USA tour. Understandably, most of the sections focus seriously on contemporary material, but, also understandably, the first section dips heavily into the man's early catalog, so, all in all, all of his seven studio albums up to that date are well represented (Neb­raska suffers the most, but it would also be the least reasonable source of material for live per­formances, unless Bruce started doing all those acoustic songs in full E Street Band arrangements or something. Which he would later do, but not in 1984).

 

Unless you are of the utterly cynical persuasion, it makes no sense to insist that the tremendous energetics that has always been the norm for Bruce's shows is somehow not felt on this collection: it is, all the way through. Regardless of the «inherent» quality of the song being played, it is al­ways played at the top level — admittedly, maybe the man could have occasional weaker nights, but that is what the selection process is there for (though I guess that tracks were shuffled from different shows largely because of varying sound quality). As the E Street Band kicks in with full force into ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ (great choice for a lead-in track), you understand that this live rendition from The Roxy is every bit as powerful as its studio counterpart, and the studio counter­part was one of Bruce's most powerful moments in the studio, ever. Later on in his career he would, unfortunately, begin to slur and speed up the words, disrupting the perfect flow of the song, but back in 1978, when it was still fresh, he just made sure that his demons were properly exorcised in front of the population, night after night.

 

Most of the other songs also stay true to their studio versions, with just a few variations (ʽCover Meʼ gets a pathetic-dramatic introduction, with Patti Scialfa wailing "nowhere to run!" and her future husband calling back drama-pop-metal fashion — totally unnecessary, I'd say, but appa­rently Bruce thought back in 1984 that the song needed something to «cover» it up. Some great soloing from Lofgren and the Boss himself, though). Nothing really needs to be reinvented, though, as long as the songs come to an extra life on stage due to the raw passion of all the play­ers involved. Stuff like ʽRosalitaʼ would be the perfect example, but for some reason I am really digging this version of ʽCadillac Ranchʼ — a song that never jumped out at me that much when it was on The River, but here, it is just admirable how great a song consisting of 16 simplistic bars can be if you just give it your all (unfortunately, it also means that these bars have become so permanently lodged in my head that it will take quite a few days to get it out — I guess I have The Big Man to thank for that. By the way, if you check some of the old live videos for that song, Bruce does some really hilarious dance moves at the end).

 

It is somewhat different about the stories, though — an integral and indisputable element of each of the man's shows, but every time he starts out with some recollection of how he was abused by his parents (ʽGrowin' Upʼ) or of his girlfriend troubles (ʽThe Riverʼ, naturally), some red light comes up in my mind: «man, you're overdoing it». The music is heartfelt enough; do we really need that additional element of intimacy? Granted, we are spared here from his foam-at-the-mouth impersonations of an Afro-American preacher, all set to baptize you in the alleged name of rock'n'roll, that would become the norm at later concerts — but those nasty jabs at his folks that accompany ʽGrowin' Upʼ are really just as irritating. This is where Bruce the musician, in my opi­nion, becomes completely overshadowed by Bruce the populist, and I don't really buy it that the two are inseparable — after all, these stories were not present on the studio recordings, were they? At least if they were improvised and spontaneous, that'd be an excuse, but clearly they were just as well rehearsed as the songs themselves. Not good at all.

 

Fortunately, that's just three or four spoilt tracks out of forty, and for compensation, you have a bunch of tracks that were (back then) unavailable anywhere else — such as Bruce's own rendition of ʽBecause The Nightʼ (he did right to give the song to Patti Smith, who sings it better, but she never had the full power of the E Street Band behind her, alas); ʽFireʼ, which ended up as a huge hit single for The Pointer Sisters, but is actually done better by Bruce (less pop, more feeling); ʽSeedsʼ, a surprisingly tough and gritty blues-rocker from the Born In The USA era that may have been left off the album due to being too heavy (bad synths, though); and a couple of R'n'B covers like ʽRaise Your Handʼ and ʽWarʼ, to which the man's hoarse roaring voice is ideally suited. Oh, and just so that you do not forget where the roots are, the record ends with a cover of Tom Waits' ʽJersey Girlʼ (whose lyrics Bruce doctored a little bit, replacing "whores" with "girls" so that, you know, Jersey people would feel less confused about their homeplace).

 

Because this monster is so big, this makes it really hard to get into any of the tracks in major de­tail — and it probably isn't the point anyway. The point is that the monster is big, big, B-I-G, American size big, and whether you like it or whether you don't just don't matter, because it is simply an objective fact. Tons of songs, top volume, top energy, most dedicated people in the business, and sooner or later, the atmosphere becomes contagious. Despite the length, at no par­ticular point does the record become boring (maybe only a little bit during the Nebraska section, but it also has its place as a «breath-catcher» in between all the high energy jolts), and, well, it's just three and a half hours long in the end — the approximate length of a single Springsteen live show, as it were. Thumbs up.

 

TUNNEL OF LOVE (1987)

 

1) Ain't Got You; 2) Tougher Than The Rest; 3) All That Heaven Will Allow; 4) Spare Parts; 5) Cautious Man; 6) Walk Like A Man; 7) Tunnel Of Love; 8) Two Faces; 9) Brilliant Disguise; 10) One Step Up; 11) When You're Alone; 12) Valentine's Day.

 

There are two ways to think about Tunnel Of Love. The first one is that this is one more unex­pected career twist — after the thunder, the sweat, the blood-pumping of Born In The USA, The Boss just flushes the «Rambo rock» down the drain and goes all adult contemporary on us. The second way of thinking is that this is simply where The Boss... grows old. Take a mental snapshot of the man in the ʽDancing In The Darkʼ video — then, with that snapshot still in active memory, take a look at this album cover. Two different people. Heck, he almost looks like Vincent Vega in that outfit and with that particular posture.

 

Thing is, I can easily live with either way of thinking, or with both at the same time, but in either case Tunnel Of Love is simply not very good. Going introspective, personal, and depressed after the flamboyant extravert show that was Born In The USA is all very good, but in 1987, it just does not look like Bruce was all that ready for such a metamorphosis. He really was depressed, worn down by his «pop idol» image as well as devastated by the collapse of his first marriage, but he was not able to channel his depression into music — the songs on Tunnel are as simple and straightforward as they used to be, but now they're just depressed. And boring.

 

The synthesizers on Born In The USA may have had crappy Eighties' tones, but when you are caught in that kind of frenzy, let's face it, you don't really give a damn about the synth tone. The album suffered from mediocre production, but more than made up for it in terms of drive, energy, and hooks. Not so on these songs. Electronic drums, «dinky» lead keyboards and «heavenly» synth tones in the background dominate the turf here, and what does it all have to do with Bruce Springsteen? The title track is a bland dance number that could have been sung by Kim Wilde, with each one of the above-mentioned elements present, and some awful metallic guitar solos to complete the picture. Even the lyrics, which many critics have praised, are nothing special — "You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above / If you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love". Not very original, if you ask me.

 

The recording was originally planned to be a Springsteen solo recording, before he relented and let some of the E Street Band members to sit in — a misguided decision, methinks, because with Bruce, it's either all the way or no way at all. Maybe if all the tracks were completely acoustic, just the man and his guitar Nebraska-fashion again, it would have produced a stronger impres­sion because of the intimacy. But when I listen to a decent track like ʽBrilliant Disguiseʼ, I can't help thinking how much better it would have been with a full-hearted rather than half-hearted ap­proach — more guitars, louder drums, a wild sax solo, some shouting, the band wilding out, and who cares about the lyrics being so personal? He did let other people play on the track anyway, didn't he? And not going all the way, he let it get limp. And who knows, he might have had ano­ther ʽBobby Jeanʼ in his pocket here. The accompanying minimalistic video, shot in black and white and featuring the man adding live vocals to an acoustic track, is offset by the bland musi­cal backing — if it is a song of such personal strength and depth, why is it so blandly arranged and so devoid of any decent musical hooks?

 

Fact is, if it were a record by anybody other than Bruce — Sting, for example, not to mention Bryan Adams — critical attention would probably pass it by. However, as this was a dark, deeply introspective album following the man's biggest success to date, it was tacitly decided that Tun­nel Of Love would be endorsed: it is, after all, so tempting to have the big guy first scatter his thunder and lightning around, then suddenly let you in on his deepest secrets, make himself vul­nerable, open up his bleeding heart and disclose to the public that even the People's Champion has his own personal problems that tie into human, not social relations. And this temptation was stronger than simply admitting that ʽTougher Than The Restʼ and ʽWalk Like A Manʼ are lazy, poorly written, crappily arranged ballads that cannot be said to contain more «soul» than any given adult contemporary ballad of the decade — unless your position is that any track on which Bruce Springsteen opens his mouth already got soul a-plenty.

 

Re-reading my old vitriolic assessment of this record years ago, I thought that, heck, I myself am one year older now than Bruce was when making this album, maybe the reaction would be dif­ferent this time — but it wasn't. I do not find the atmosphere of Tunnel particularly seductive, captivating, or intriguing; I do not find any interest in its melodies; I have no frickin' idea why so many people reward it with so many stars as if it were the ultimate breakup album. I have no idea why ʽValentine's Dayʼ drags on for so long, or what exactly the swamp rockin' ʽSpare Partsʼ is doing here (I wish I could call it the best song on the album, but that would probably get dogs snappin' at my heels). I feel sorry for the guy circa 1987, but I am also glad that he made it out very easily — all it took was realizing that fellow musicians make better wives than models (but don't tell Keith Richards, or there'll be a violent Telecaster battle somewhere out in space). So no hard feelings whatsoever, but a thumbs down all the same: as an artistic statement, Tunnel Of Love is bland and boring, and as an entertainment package, it does not even begin to exist.

 

HUMAN TOUCH (1992)

 

1) Human Touch; 2) Soul Driver; 3) 57 Channels (And Nothin' On); 4) Cross My Heart; 5) Gloria's Eyes; 6) With Every Wish; 7) Roll Of The Dice; 8) Real World; 9) All Or Nothin' At All; 10) Man's Job; 11) I Wish I Were Blind; 12) The Long Goodbye; 13) Real Man; 14) Pony Boy.

 

There are some big problems here that even a topsy-turvy assessment of Springsteen's like mine could find hard to ignore. Four years in the making — so long, in fact, that the succeeding Lucky Town caught up with it and both were released on the same day — Human Touch finds the Boss jettisoning the E Street Band almost completely, retaining only Roy Bittan to go on playing the worst kind of synthesizers imaginable. Even worse, it also finds him moving to Los Angeles, of all places — recording in Los Angeles — and employing Jeff Porcaro from Toto to contribute percussion, the rest of his new band members being almost completely unknown.

 

Perhaps if this album were yet another moody brooding in the vein of Tunnel Of Love, where it was all about personality and very little about energy, the flaws of Human Touch might have been overlooked. But it is not — it is a very blatant attempt to return to the frenzied arena-rock style of Born In The USA, or, at least, it is simply a very distinctly pronounced rock album, peri­od. And playing rock without the E Street Band does make him feel a bit like a duck out of the baking oven... ten minutes earlier than it should be, that is. The playing throughout is stiff and very «professional» — just your usual session musicians getting paid for whatever it is that they are getting paid for. Bad keyboards, overprocessed guitars, and although Jeff Porcaro is quite well respected in musical circles, next to Springsteen he just doesn't have the same regal stature as Max Weinberg. This is not his native turf, anyway — why should he be doing anything other than, you know, drumming?

 

But the irony of it all is that the songs themselves, on the whole, are not that much better or that much worse than any randomly picked tune on Born In The USA (ʽDancing In The Darkʼ and its absurdly genius synth line excluded). Most of the time, this is uninventive, but still catchy pop-rock, not as «anthemic» as it used to be (though some of the songs, like ʽRoll The Diceʼ, unsuc­cessfully try to come across as inspiring anthems), just moderately exciting Bruce'n'roll that does not ask you to worship it but sort of tries to invite you to have a good time. Repeated listens will let you get over the weakass production, and then you will understand that very little has actually changed in Bruce's songwriting ever since he adopted the River formula. And since he's always been relatively content to go along with the general musical flow, never distancing himself from the current mainstream trends, well, no wonder that in 1992 he sounds like they all sound in 1992 (granted, maybe still a little worse: with the grunge explosion hitting hard and influencing even the veteran rockers, you'd think those guitars could use a little overdrive without spooking off the population — I mean, ʽMan's Jobʼ almost sounds like the frickin' Cure's ʽFriday I'm In Loveʼ! not that this would be bad for The Cure, but it is fairly weird for the Boss).

 

Thematically, everything here is quite simplistic — largely just love songs, though every once in a while Bruce still lashes out tangentially at those weird ways in which the world has developed: ʽ57 Channels (And Nothing On)ʼ is not the most intelligently written anti-TV song ever written, but it is a pretty funny satirical blurb for Bruce — a talkin'-blues musical joke, on which he even took up the bass guitar himself, and whose message, simple as it is, is unfortunately still relevant for a large part of the population worldwide. But even in that song, "home entertainment was my baby's wish", and most of the other songs are quite straightforwardly about his baby — kind of understandable, considering how Bruce managed to patch up his personal life after Tunnel Of Love and was several years into a happy marriage with Patti Scialfa.

 

The less said about individual songs, the better. Personally, I am still very much bored when he is getting soft and sentimental (the title track; ʽWith Every Wishʼ), but it gets much better when he lets in a little bluesy darkness and a little more hoarse-throated soul (ʽSoul Driverʼ, with a nice vocal journey from angry verse to pleading chorus), or when he is just raving and ranting about the fool he has been (ʽGloria's Eyesʼ, which, if I am not mistaken, borrows the guitar hook from Don Covay's ʽMercy Mercyʼ, but this is not an album where you're supposed to be noticing any guitar hooks anyway). Then it gets worse when he stoops to braggardly cock-rock (ʽAll Or No­thing At Allʼ, where one of the implied lines is "you'd slip me just a piece of ass", last word coyly masked as the neutral "it", but rhymes don't lie!), but again it gets better when he rises to purely romantic sexism ("lovin' you baby is a man's man's job" — even despite the song's message soun­ding so atavistic in the era of gay marriage, the catchiness of the chorus can't be denied; hopefully, we'll hear a George Michael cover some day).

 

Clearly, at 59 minutes this sucker's just plain overlong: when, towards the end, nearing exhaus­tion, you are forced to sit through the triumphantly moronic synth riff and the clichéd mascu­linity of ʽReal Manʼ, ideas of progressive taxes on bad songwriting start taking actual shape. But trim it down to a decent size, and Human Touch shows an artist who may be out of touch and a little out of shape, yet still essentially true to his formula. Lyrics, production, and energy all show signs of wear — but what about those of us who were never all that awed by his lyrics in the first place, and occasionally felt a little embarrassed about those levels of energy? To those people the deep gap that separates Human Touch from Born In The USA, or the allegedly even deeper gap that separates it from Born To Run might not feel that deep — nothing that can't be bridged with, you know, just a little of that human touch.

 

LUCKY TOWN (1992)

 

1) Better Days; 2) Lucky Town; 3) Local Hero; 4) If I Should Fall Behind; 5) Leap Of Faith; 6) The Big Muddy; 7) Living Proof; 8) Book Of Dreams; 9) Souls Of The Departed; 10) My Beautiful Reward.

 

Local lore says that Bruce went into the studio to record one last song for Human Touch, ended up recording ten more, and eventually just decided to put them on a separate album and release both on the same day. The decision was not just a marketing ploy — Lucky Town is different in mood, scope, goals, whatever, even if both titles are so structurally symmetric that I sometimes confuse one with another. That said, it's still a late period Springsteen album, and even when he is at his best, the Boss finds it hard to reinvent himself — when he is not at his best, you could pro­bably build a computer program correctly predicting most of his moves.

 

Anyway, this relatively short collection is less overproduced, somewhat more stripped down and domestic (although the man still employs a full band), and focuses more on Springsteen's per­sonal life than on character impersonating. And since Springsteen's personal life was sort of nor­malized, with a loving woman and a little child at his side, the songs here reflect that — Lucky Town is a fairly happy album of generally satisfied songs. "These are better days", "I'm going down to Lucky Town, I wanna lose those blues I've found", "Looking for a little bit of God's mercy, I found living proof" — well, at the very least he's being honest: certainly it is no good to write bitter, angry, or depressed songs if you don't feel bitter, angry, or depressed.

 

The problem, however, is not that we refuse to acknowledge Springsteen's right to be happy, or his right to express that happiness in his songs and then sell them to anyone who's buying. The problem is that, for twenty years, it was either negative emotion or passionate drive that were responsible for his successes. Were he a fantastic composer, or a Musician with a capital M, there is a chance that he could come up with some great happy songs — cozy, settled-in, with unfor­gettable melodies. But as sincere as ʽLiving Proofʼ, a song about his newborn son, probably is, from a musical standpoint it ain't no ʽIsn't She Lovelyʼ, and does not even begin to come close to those musical pieces that actually manage to convey that pure baby-joy. ʽLiving Proofʼ just sort of states the fact, you know. He's happy, he's had a son, we feel happy for him too, end of story, period. What's so special? Certainly not the musical wrap-up of the info.

 

It is rather eerie that on the front cover, he kind of looks like Dylan on the cover of Infidels ten years go, back when it was Bob who was entering the third decade of his career — and, likewise, with an album that told us, "Hi! I'm nice and friendly, but please do not count on me for any new revelations or insights, I'm really just here to let you know that life goes on, and the ragged hair and dark glasses mean that I'm still a little hip, but also a little lost and confused as to my creati­vity, and also I just don't want to look you straight in the eye because I might end up looking em­barrassed, so shades seem like the best option". But at least Infidels had ʽJokermanʼ, which was a great epic song, and it had all those ridiculous, but fun, Zionist connotations — Lucky Town is just a record about a loving husband and a happy father.

 

Okay, so there is one «dark» song about the Gulf War — ʽSouls Of The Departedʼ, with swampy guitars, echoes, and overproduction that suggest it rather belongs on Human Touch, and must have ended up here by mistake. It is bitter, though not exactly accusatory (more like an abstract deep mourning for those about whom we never know whether they died in vain or not), but it is also very restrained, and Bruce just does not have that invisible intelligent coolness that can make his rock songs work without the man going berserk on them — this laid-back attitude actually makes it seem like he's being indifferent about what he sings. Which is probably not the case, or else he would not sing about it, but that is how it comes across.

 

But all said, Lucky Town is also an album to which I would feel ashamed to issue a thumbs down judgement. It doesn't sound too shitty, the songs are not too way below Bruce's usual level of catchiness, it is sincere and accurately conveys his then-current state of mind — it's probably the best he could do at the moment, indeed, stuck in a safe, not-too-exciting rut of domestic hap­piness. At least he's not posing, or calculating, or puffing up his image (there is even an ironic song here about his own personality cult — ʽLocal Heroʼ). There is no need whatsoever for any­one to hear or own this record unless you have to know all the details of the ups and downs of the man's artistic career — however, within that career it has its own certified place, a little lake of musical tranquility straight in between the musical storms of 1984 and 2002.

 

IN CONCERT/MTV PLUGGED (1993)

 

1) Red Headed Woman; 2) Better Days; 3) Atlantic City; 4) Darkness On The Edge Of Town; 5) Man's Job; 6) Human Touch; 7) Lucky Town; 8) I Wish I Were Blind; 9) Thunder Road; 10) Light Of Day; 11) If I Should Fall Behind; 12) Living Proof; 13) My Beautiful Reward.

 

Considering the veritable ocean of live Springsteen releases that were freed from the vaults in the past decade, there really is not one single reason in the world why anybody but the most diehard completist could want this one in the collection. Sure, it was different in 1993: MTV's «Unplug­ged» series were all the rage (at least, in the mainstream world), and the only officially available live album from the Boss was the 1975-85 boxset that could be intimidating even to the serious fan, not to mention the serious fan's wallet. But even in 1993, few people went bananas for the Bruce-MTV combination, and it is easy to see why.

 

First, the man's involvement with the franchise occurred at the wrong time — he'd recently dis­banded The E Street Band, and was touring with what was jokingly called «The Other Band», where only Roy Bittan was retained from the veterans, and everybody else was just... professional, with little of the common enthusiastic spirit that had carried the Boss and his players through the previous two decades. Second, he was touring in support of Human Touch and Lucky Town — as we have already seen, not altogether godawful records, but certainly formulaic and «safe» ones, and definitely undeserving to overshadow the man's classic catalog; yet 8 out of 13 songs here are all from Human Touch and Lucky Town, and «The Other Band» is not hurrying up to make them come much more alive on stage than they were in the studio.

 

Third, as is already obvious from the record's title, the album is not un-plugged — the only acou­s­tic performance is the opening ʽRed Headed Womanʼ, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek folk-blues serenade to Patti Scialfa that is really more of a cute musical/lyrical joke than anything else. Once it is over, it's "let's ROCK it!" time, as if Bruce and his new pals were performing some incredible feat of bravery by defying MTV's scenario and turning the tables on them. Bruce later explained that, apparently, acoustic versions of these songs «did not work» when he tried them out with the band, and indeed I can believe that — the only way they could have worked would be for Bruce to just perform all of them solo, and that would have been Nebraska Live, but with generally worse songs, so maybe it's a good thing they brought those cables.

 

In the end, though, what we have is just a regular audio equivalent of a generic Bruce concert circa 1993 — with most of the classic stuff left off, but lots and lots of «okay» songs that, truth be told, do not differ all that much from the studio versions. The stripped-down rendition of ʽThun­der Roadʼ will not overwhelm the equally stripped-down version on 1975-85; the anthemic rock­ing version of ʽAtlantic Cityʼ is best heard with The E Street Band; and the lengthy, aggrandized rocker / jam / sermon ʽLight Of Dayʼ, to tell the truth, is a strange choice for an «epic» — it's a bit of aggressive roughneck fun as a rocker, but why it is this song in particular that deserves a foam-at-the-mouth New Jersey gospel interlude in the middle sort of beats me. Besides, didn't he originally give the song to Joan Jett? Her version actually has more silly-funny aggression in it than Bruce's own take — he adds too much masculine brutality, killing some of the fun cells.

 

Ultimately, this is not a bad performance; it simply has too many factors working against it, and it really has no deeply hidden redeeming arguments — such as interesting rearrangements, obscure brilliant rarities, or even original stories, much as I am mistrustful of these when they are driven by the man's populist ego. And while I am not as dismissive of the entire MTV series as some (it did produce its fair share of intimate gems), going plugged on the series really just sucks all sense out of the idea. Next time, let's rock it in a different setting and with a different band, okay, Boss? This one's sort of a misfire.

 

THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD (1995)

 

1) The Ghost Of Tom Joad; 2) Straight Time; 3) Highway 29; 4) Youngstown; 5) Sinaloa Cowboys; 6) The Line; 7) Balboa Park; 8) Dry Lightning; 9) The New Timer; 10) Across The Border; 11) Galveston Bay; 12) My Best Was Never Good Enough.

 

Perhaps another solo acoustic album, a return to the simpler-than-simple values of Nebraska, was precisely what Bruce needed at the time — to help cleanse out some of that «generic rock» and «adult contemporary» residue that had accumulated to disturbing levels over the previous ten years. Maybe so, and maybe it is even so intricately construed that there would be no Rising without Tom Joad, no reconvening of the E Street Band after a fresh start, and, oh gosh, no Tom Morello fireworks on subsequent live and studio reinventions of the title track. And you have to admit, Tom Morello fireworks are exciting, even if you find them silly.

 

Nevertheless, to like this album you have to be very, very warm to the idea of solo acoustic Springsteen — without the pop-rock hooks, without The Big Man, without the devilish energy, and, I have to say, without most of the things that make a Boss out of a mere Bruce. Yes, «naked Bruce» is a very positive, humanistic soul, and his spiritual connection to Tom Joad and all those waiting for the chimes of freedom is natural and almost certainly sincere. But last time I checked, The Ghost Of Tom Joad was billed as a new musical album with twelve new songs on it, and this is what we are here for, songs. Melodies. Moods. Chords. And a little freshness.

 

Instead of this, we get hardcore — real hardcore. Aside from the instrumentation, which is actu­al­ly a little less sparse than on Nebraska (some occasional percussion, some occasional accor­deon, and a lot of hazy, foggy synthesizer background, fortunately, pushed very deep in the back­ground so it does not even begin to threaten to overshadow the gentle guitar picking), this is a record that serves one and only one noble, but narrow purpose: make you, the listening receptacle, deeply feel the sad and lonesome plight of the common man. First, the ghost of Tom Joad is summoned as a non-living witness (and potential protector), and then, one by one, we go through a gallery of characters, already known to us all too well, I'm afraid — but this time, there is no getting away from the characters, because nothing stands in the way between them and you. No­thing except a little bit of soft, quiet guitar plucking to get you in the mood. Well, there has to be some difference between listening to this record or to an audiobook version of Grapes Of Wrath (personally, I'd still prefer the latter).

 

Okay, so it might be fine not to have any original melodies. A few of these songs are almost exactly the same, and many more just recycle the chords of gazillions of folk tunes that people were composing and re-composing before Woody Guthrie, after Woody Guthrie, and being Woody Guthrie. It is not technically impossible, though, to reinvent these melodies one more time in some new context. But that is not Bruce's point here — no, the point is to strip them down to the barest of the bare, cut straight to the heart and stay there, wiggling the knife a little to the left and a little to the right, until the very end. The problem is, when you just do it like that, the process is not very interesting to watch.

 

It is useless to discuss these songs one by one: all of them set and hold exactly the same gray melancholic mood, mixing a little bit of hope for a brighter future to the desolation and despera­tion of present conditions. Are the lyrics any good? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't; even for an undoubtedly talented person such as Bruce, it gets hard to find new ways to state the same common old truths (so sometimes he resorts to almost literally quoting Steinbeck). It really does not matter, though: be they randomly strung together bunches of dusty clichés or a genuine verbal revolution, they are always delivered in exactly the same way, and you know what way it is. The way you'd expect a singer to sing after he'd just finished unloading a couple of trucks or climbed out of a coal mine. Nothing bad about that, but... maybe not for 50 minutes without a single second of respite.

 

Unfortunately, I do not subscribe to the idea that anything (a) acoustic, (b) relating to the plight of the simple person, (c) «composed» and performed by Bruce Springsteen should automatically be praised to high heaven because it is so sincere, emotional, and deep. Sincere, perhaps; but way too predictable and formulaic to deserve to be called emotional, and «deep» only if you have had no prior experiences with folk music whatsoever. Moreover, I have a gut feeling that with the level of the man's undeniable talent, he could crank another Ghost Of Tom Joad maybe once every couple of months, and would we be supposed to cheer every single goddamn time? My decision, made up a long time ago, still stands: Bruce Springsteen has too little diversity, subtlety, or (very importantly) sense of humor in his bones to make successful acoustic albums. At least Nebraska had an element of surprise to it (and, actually, some bits of composing — ʽAtlantic Cityʼ alone is worth Ghost in its entirety), but this here is just totally pedestrian stuff, and my conscience will not bother me if I reinforce a thumbs down judgement here. Just do yourself a favor and go read (or re-read) some Steinbeck instead. Or hear the electric version of the title track with Morello — at least, you know, that's entertainment.

 

LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY (2001)

 

1) My Love Will Not Let You Down; 2) Prove It All Night; 3) Two Hearts; 4) Atlantic City; 5) Mansion On The Hill; 6) The River; 7) Youngstown; 8) Murder Incorporated; 9) Badlands; 10) Out In The Street; 11) Born To Run; 12) 10th Avenue Freezeout; 13) Land Of Hope And Dreams; 14) American Skin (41 Shots); 15) Lost In The Flood; 16) Born In The USA; 17) Don't Look Back; 18) Jungleland; 19) Ramrod; 20) If I Should Fall Behind.

 

While it is common (and reasonable) to state that the last and, from a certain point, the most stable, predictable, and self-assured stage of Bruce Springsteen's career began with The Rising, which was itself triggered by the events of 9/11, in effect The Boss's transformation into the solidified «elder statesman» of rock began earlier — the most solidifying event being his 1999 reunion, after more than a decade of wandering, with The E Street Band. The «Reunion Tour» was a huge event, and culminated in a series of MSG shows, some of which were professionally shot with all the benefits of modern technology and broadcast on HBO. Since then, Bruce and the camera became almost inseparable on all his subsequent tours, but in 2000, this was still relative news, and thus Live In New York City — the video and the accompanying 2-CD package — has quite a bit of historical significance.

 

And not just on a purely technical level, either. Most of the young people these days are only really familiar with this 21st century edition of Bruce Springsteen — one for which certain changes had to be introduced, given some limitations imposed by the aging process. Although for a 50-year old he was still in great physical shape (hey, those body-building years couldn't just go to waste, could they?), his voice had aged, and he could no longer sing and strut with the same amount of energy and precision as he used to — not to mention that, had he tried to, it might have looked just a bit silly now. So this new look Springsteen is quite a bit less stage-crazy than he used to, and everybody else in the band has put on a bit of weight as well (literally, figuratively, or both), and the resulting sound is somewhat more «imposing» than it is «invigorating».

 

Not that this is in any way tragic if you tend to value The Boss for his «Soul» as much as you value him for his «Raw Power». Of the former, there is a lot here — starting with the hugely ex­tended, atmosphere-above-all-else version of ʽThe Riverʼ and ending with the exaggeratedly tear­ful ʽIf I Should Fall Behindʼ, where all standing members of The E Street Band take their turn at the microphone, and Patti Scialfa's hiccupy "wait for me...e...e...e...e" refrain garners as much acknowledgement from the crowds as anything uttered by her husband. Of the latter, there is ex­pectedly somewhat less than there was in evidence on Live 1975-86: in particular, simplistic rock'n'roll-de-luxe crowd pleasers from The River, namely ʽTwo Heartsʼ, ʽOut In The Streetʼ, and ʽRamrodʼ, seem overloud, lumpy, and perfunctory, but how could a legit Springsteen show do away with all of these? It cannot, and you just gotta have 'em.

 

Bruce does everything in his power, though, so as not to make it all seem like a has-been parade of old glories. The hits are cleverly interspersed with rarities and obscurities: the album even kicks off with an ancient outtake (ʽMy Love Will Not Let You Downʼ) that surprisingly turns out to be a perfectly anthemic, rabble-rousing little gem of an opener, and later on, you get ʽMurder Incorporatedʼ, dating back to the days of Born In The USA, on which it could have easily been the angriest, most fucked-up song, had Bruce decided to make the album any more angry and fucked-up and compromise its commercial success.

 

New material, premiered during the tour, is also well in evidence — including ʽAmerican Skinʼ, a poignant topical tune based on the shooting of Amadou Diallo; and ʽLand Of Hope And Dreamsʼ, a gospel-rock inversion of the old ʽThis Trainʼ chestnut. And some of the old songs continue to undergo renovations — the formerly acoustic ʽAtlantic Cityʼ and ʽYoungstownʼ are given full band arrangements that work very well: the fanfare-piano riff works brilliantly as a counterpoint to the "meet me tonight in Atlantic City" chorus, and as for ʽYoungstownʼ, well, anything to re­lieve the tedium of a generic Ghost Of Tom Joad number is always welcome, and you just can't go wrong with the fully unleashed fury of a complete E Street Band, even past its prime.

 

The shows are also almost completely free of story-telling this time (perhaps the stories were simply edited out, but they didn't tell us anyway), which I personally find a blessing — especially since the only track on the album that does have a long spoken interlude is rather embarrassing: in the middle of the overall entertaining ʽ10th Avenue Freezeoutʼ, Bruce takes a lengthy detour, im­personating a gospel preacher of the (sexual) healing powers of rock'n'roll, which goes on for way too long before we eventually understand that this is just a pretext for a really pompous introduc­tion of each and every member of the E Street Band. For a couple minutes out there, the thing is hilarious, but eventually it just ruins an initially fine performance. (The good news is that the other extended foam-at-the-mouth prayer to the delirious god of rock'n'roll, inserted in the middle of ʽLight Of Dayʼ, was left off the album and is only featured in the video version — maybe because the audio ecstasy was already presented to us on MTV Plugged).

 

Other than this bit of misguided misdemeanor, and a few other minor complaints (such as the attempt to transform ʽBorn In The USAʼ into a steel guitar swamp blues tune — I understand the desire to get away from its arena-anthem appeal, but not at the expense of losing the pop hook, please!), anyway, aside from that, this is a pretty damn good live album for someone reshaping his stage image for age purposes. This is certainly not how the «Bruce Springsteen Live» brand will go down in history in the long run, but it's a fairly accurate picture of it for the age of the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, social networks, hipsters, hi-def audio/video, and glamorization, to the latter of which not even Springsteen remains completely immune. No matter how healthy, sweaty, sincere, and «real» it all seems, do not forget that essentially, the B.S. live show is as much an in­tegral part of the show-biz machine as, say, a Rolling Stones show, or even a Britney Spears one, and I am fairly sure The Boss is more aware of this than anyone.

 

Still, it's a fairly close approxi­mation to «real», and quite a few moments here cause real heart-throbbing — be it the powerful intro to ʽProve It All Nightʼ, or the seconds when Cla­rence kicks in with his frenetic sax solo on ʽBorn To Runʼ, or his extended soulful workout on ʽJunglelandʼ, or the way The Boss gets it so perfectly right at the climactic releases of each verse of ʽLost In The Floodʼ. Since the release of Live In New York City, the floodgates have really opened, and lots and lots of newer shows are now available in pristine audio and/or video quality — but this one is still a bit special, since you can clearly feel the atmosphere of excitement about working with his home band once again, and turning over a new page in his life; if just for this reason alone, the album deserves a thumbs up. For a fuller appreciation of whatever was going on, though, you'd really have to see the video — while Steven Van Zandt's Baba Yaga stage image leaves something to be desired, Clemmons and Weinberg cut even more dramatic figures as they get older, wiser, and grander, and hey, priceless close-ups of thick drops of sweat on The Boss' guitar! The man ain't making his money for nothing, that's for sure.

 

THE RISING (2002)

 

1) Lonesome Day; 2) Into The Fire; 3) Waitin' On A Sunny Day; 4) Nothing Man; 5) Countin' On A Miracle; 6) Empty Sky; 7) Worlds Apart; 8) Let's Be Friends; 9) Further On (Up The Road); 10) The Fuse; 11) Mary's Place; 12) You're Missing; 13) The Rising; 14) Paradise; 15) My City Of Ruins.

 

The very idea of a 70-minute long album, primarily inspired by the events of 9/11 and intended to serve as mass spiritual therapy for the aftermath of 9/11, makes me feel somewhat uneasy. There is no getting away from the fact that Bruce Springsteen is the living patron saint of the entire New Jersey area and its immediate surroundings, including New York City — and to ignore 9/11 in his music would have been regarded as a personal insult by most of the people living there and as a bewildering puzzle by the musical press; after all, Springsteen is no Dylan, and occasional con­founding of people's expectations is as far as he is willing to go. And yet, an entire album? Isn't this too much of a temptation to play God — something that Bruce had come pretty close to, but never quite nailed at least a few times in his career?

 

And maybe the biggest problem with The Rising is also its most predictable problem: striving, as usual, to reach the largest possible audience, the Boss trivializes the issues at stake and addresses them on a very simple (and safe) gut level. There has been a terrible tragedy. Many people have died, and even more people lost their loved ones. The grief is almost unbearable and makes you question the very meaning of your existence and whether it makes sense to go on at all. But, as we have always done before, we will pull through, rebuild our lives from scratch, if necessary, and hold on to our beliefs and ideals because there's nothing wrong with them. This is what The Rising is all about — no less, no more. There is not the slightest attempt here to put the whole thing into a larger context: other than, perhaps, a very thickly veiled lyrical hint at the distance between East and West (ʽWorlds Apartʼ, Bruce's not-half-bad attempt at introducing Near Eastern motives into his songwriting), 9/11 is basically just pictured as an ordinary natural disaster. Like an earthquake or something. Well... nobody said it ain't permissible, right? But then... looks a bit cheap. But then again... since when has Bruce Springsteen been all that expen­sive, anyway? Everything is just the way it should be.

 

The best thing about The Rising, however, is not that it gives us any new, deep, revealing in­sights into the tragedy of 9/11 or an amazing spiritual instruction on how to overcome the after­shock of that particular tragedy — the best thing is that, somehow, the tragedy inspired Spring­steen into writing his most consistent, powerful, memorable, and just plain interesting set of songs in almost two decades, and also one that he has not been able to top ever since, despite the steady rate of new studio output in the 21st century. These songs are bombastic, but convincingly so, thanks to the definitive return of The E Street Band into the studio; emotionally straight­forward and (usually) not-too-subtle, but diverse and hard-hitting; rhythmically plodding in the same 4/4 midtempo most of the time, and yet still somehow experimental for the man's stan­dards, due, among other things, to the heavy (and thoughtful) use of strings.

 

Quite a few of the songs here were actually written well before 9/11, but Bruce specifically took the ones that could be directly or indirectly related to the event (ʽMy City Of Ruinsʼ was origi­nally written about Asbury Park, but whaddaya know) and hammered them together into this coherent requiem/oratorio for E Street Band and orchestra, where everything seems organic, and expressions of sorrow, sympathy, and temporary despair regularly alternate with tremendously life-asserting songs — without a single hint of corniness, I should admit.

 

Some of the sorrowful songs sound like outtakes from the «adult contemporary» era: ʽNothing Manʼ, for instance, with its hazy aura, would have fit in very well on Tunnel Of Love. But when this stuff comes in small dosages, is well produced and armed with a good vocal hook, it works much more efficiently than anything on his lazy breakup record. ʽEmpty Skyʼ is simple, direct, Biblical, and best distinguished by its hoarse, almost distorted harmonica line, Bruce's local ver­sion of the Archangel's trumpet. But maybe the saddest song here is really ʽThe Fuseʼ, a deeply atypical, unconventional, almost psychedelic song for Bruce — hip-hop beats, samples, «cosmic» guitars, by the end it becomes more ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ than good old Springsteen, and the lyrics are genuinely disturbing, alternating between wedding night imagery and "blood moon risin' in a sky of black dust", all delivered in a voice that has been intentionally stripped from all emotion, like in a Robert Bresson movie. This is one of those unique Springsteen songs, like ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ, that shows to what sort of scary psychological depths the man can really go when he lets out his demons instead of keeping them on a commercial leash.

 

Fortunately, there's much to laud here even about the simple, unadorned, easily accessible stuff. Like ʽWaitin' On A Sunny Dayʼ, whose instantly memorable riff is entrusted to strings (for the first time in Springsteen history, right?) and thrusts a good chunk of sunny hope right in your face before taking it away once again with the next song (ʽNothing Manʼ). Or the ultra-traditionally titled ʽFurther On (Up The Road)ʼ, which has nothing to do with the old Bobby Bland blues song except for also being bluesy in essence, but promises redemption in a gritty, sweaty, grimy way, through brutal riffage and «dirty» harmonica playing. Or ʽMary's Placeʼ, which shows some re­semblance to ʽRosalitaʼ — a happy, exuberant romp in the face of all disasters and calamities, well supported by Clarence's sax (and a whole brass section in the background), even if the pro­tagonist of ʽRosalitaʼ is visibly older now, almost by thirty years. But he still remembers Sam Cooke with fondness, and wants to invoke a bit of his name to help brighten up your day.

 

As we get to the anthemic title track, the ground has been tilled well enough to make it seem like a gargantuan climax to the whole oratorio — an echo is laid on Bruce's voice to make it sky-high, the background singers woo-hoo like well-trained angels, the lyrics are Catholic to exhaustion, and for those of you who want more rock than soul, the Boss plays a shrill, distorted, ecstatic, Neil Young-ian guitar solo, so that basically just covers everything. And just in case you didn't get it first time around, you will be prompted to rise up one more time, during the long, bombas­tic prayer of ʽMy City Of Ruinsʼ. (The first prayer of the album was already recited near the be­ginning, with ʽInto The Fireʼ, which should probably be made into the International Fireman Anthem or something — it just begs to).

 

It's all simple and a wee bit manipulative, but it works, and at least it's all for a good cause. In fact, maybe the best thing about The Rising is that it is not tightly bound to its historical context — even the lyrics are crafted thoughtfully, so that they do not have to be associated with any parti­cular details. It's just a very good rock record about tragedy and recuperation in general, taking away Bruce's usual emphasis on «aggrandizing the little man» and replacing it with something even more sweeping and grandiose — the collective experience of tragedy and the collective hope for a rebirth. Amusing, but The Boss never really did anything like this before; certainly he did not have to assume the position of a newly elected military leader, gathering up the remains of his forces after a crushing defeat. And he must be given credit for carrying out the operation in good taste, without descending into simplistic jingoism and paying as much attention to the musical backbones and arrangements of the songs as he does to the lyrics and vocals. All in all, The Rising still remains one of his best albums — no small feat for a rock artist thirty years into his career — and with every new year that takes us farther away from 9/11 and dissipates its con­textual relevance, it seems to sound better and better to me. Thumbs on up for The Rising, al­though we probably should not be thanking Osama bin Laden for rekindling the creative fires of a nearly-has-been rock visionary. The price may have been just a wee bit too steep.

 

DEVILS & DUST (2005)

 

1) Devils & Dust; 2) All The Way Home; 3) Reno; 4) Long Time Comin'; 5) Black Cowboys; 6) Maria's Bed; 7) Silver Palomino; 8) Jesus Was An Only Sun; 9) Leah; 10) The Hitter; 11) All I'm Thinkin' About; 12) Matamoros Banks.

 

If you are not a dedicated Boss man, most likely you will not be interested in any Springsteen albums past The Rising. He deserves mega-respect for the effort, which was not only his most gargantuan, but also most daring and experimental blast in years — but it seems to have drained his creativity, and everything released since then played it safer, homelier, and more predictable. The man had little left to prove, after all, and was only too happy, it seems, to slip into a stable «elder statesman» image, promoted by such institutions as Rolling Stone (whose editors would never dare to give any of his subsequent records anything less than 4.5 stars) and the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame (where he is one of the most frequent guests whenever anything presumably important is going on). This is not to say that he's turned to crap or anything — however «frozen» his sound has become, it is at least frozen in a tasteful configuration, unlike, say, Aerosmith — but, I repeat, unless you are a diehard fan, it is not easy to get a natural adrenaline rush from lis­tening to anything he created after the Twin Tower crash.

 

With Devils & Dust, released three years after the triumph of The Rising, Bruce repeats the old trick of «cooling down» — a low-key, largely acoustic record, made without the help of the E Street Band, to reroute the huge external emotional rush of its predecessor and internalize it. A move that, by now, has become all too predictable, and all too dangerous, given how The Boss is such a master of the «big and bulging», but not doing so good at the «subtle and nuanced», where he'd never really managed to dethrone Dylan or Johnny Cash. Luckily, this is not a flat-out bad album like Tom Joad; but neither does it have any staggering highlights like Nebraska's ʽState Trooperʼ or ʽAtlantic Cityʼ.

 

Then again, on Nebraska what we saw was a still young, hungry, and angry Bruce Springsteen, and even some of its worst songs could still vibrate with emotional tension. Here, what we have is an old, tired, and contemplative Bruce Springsteen — and, I dunno, he might not really be that old and tired, but he's playing out that role anyway. The title track was written from the perspec­tive of a soldier in the Iraq war, and it is a very quiet, soulful, mournful, and maybe even bashful acoustic ballad that simply describes the psychological effects of war rather than rails against them. It is decent, but it is absolutely unexceptional — lyrics, vocals, melody, arrangement, at­mosphere, all of this is rather standard singer-songwriter fare. And by 2005, I'm sure, all of us have heard so many anti-war songs that this one will not be likely to come across as an amazing epiphany. All I can say is that it sounds «authentic», like one more professionally performed exe­rcise in folk-style songwriting — and the same goes for just about everything else here.

 

Of course, the Boss remains a revered word man to an even larger extent than a music man, and he offers plenty of points for lyrical discussions here — in ʽRenoʼ, for instance, he imagines (or remembers? whatever) an encounter with a local hooker in almost pornographically explicit de­tails, making his subset of housewife fans blush all across the neighborhood; of course, the main point is not that the song features the line "two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty up the ass", but that even during a quick local dirty sex act, the protagonist is still reminiscing of "sunlight streaming thru your hair" and "that smile coming out 'neath your hat" — but, you know, those kinds of lines we all know in Boss songs already, while "two-fifty up the ass" is definitely a no­velty. And then there's ʽThe Hitterʼ, which is his personal ʽThe Boxerʼ, only set to some Woody Guthrie melody rather than a Paul Simon one. And then there are stories of ramblers, cowboys, lots of Mexican imagery for some reason, and a bit of Jesus on the side.

 

But even if you can still extract a few samples of clever folk-poetry images from some of the songs (not all, though — ʽJesus Was An Only Sonʼ is so oddly straightforward, it could just as well have been an outtake from Dylan's Saved), as songs, these things aren't all too compelling. Looking back one more time, I can remember being mildly entertained by two of them — ʽMaria's Bedʼ has some seductive slide guitar riffs, played à la George Harrison circa 1973-74, a catchy vocal melody, and an irresistible toe-tapping groove; and ʽAll I'm Thinkin' Aboutʼ is a humorous folk boogie where Bruce is attempting to express his feelings for his baby by rising all, or most, of the way up to falsetto — it's shakey, but fun.

 

Unfortunately, both of these songs are semi-comic interludes, and it is the «heavy», «serious» stuff that largely leaves me unmoved. It's all listenable — it's simply not clear why exactly we need somebody of Bruce Springsteen's caliber to perform it, when any experienced old-timer from Nashville or Oklahoma could easily do instead. Worst of all, these really aren't deep songs: this is Springsteen trying to write something in the half-century-old folk idiom, instead of adap­ting that idiom to his own personality, as he'd occasionally done in the past. Perhaps this is a noble case of artistic humility, but if so, I would be perfectly happy to bow down in acknowledg­ment — humility is a rare and respectable quality — and move along to the next record.

 

WE SHALL OVERCOME: THE SEEGER SESSIONS (2006)

 

1) Old Dan Tucker; 2) Jesse James; 3) Mrs. McGrath; 4) O Mary Don't You Weep; 5) John Henry; 6) Erie Canal; 7) Jacob's Ladder; 8) My Oklahoma Home; 9) Eyes On The Prize; 10) Shenandoah; 11) Pay Me My Money Down; 12) We Shall Overcome; 13) Froggie Went A Courtin'.

 

Was this inevitable? Bob Dylan entered his «roots revival» stage in the early Nineties, having turned 50, and even though many more people probably praised Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong than people who actually keep on listening to these records a quarter cen­tury later, at least nobody will deny that they did help revitalize his artistically sagging career and, in a way, prepared the ground for Time Out Of Mind. Springsteen enters that same stage com­paratively a little bit later (about five years or so), but a bigger difference is that, unlike Dylan, Bruce never had an early folk-loving stage — his very first albums were already influenced much more by Dylan himself than any of Dylan's folk hero predecessors, and Bruce was never known all that much for covering other people's songs, anyway.

 

But I do not think that, once the initial news leaked out that Springsteen was recording a whole bunch of traditional folk songs from the Pete Seeger songbook, anybody doubted that he could make these tunes his own. I'd rather think that, perhaps, one could doubt whether he could have preserved something of the old spirit of these songs — instead of just Springsteen-izing them — and it is for this precise reason, arguably, that the sessions were held not with the regular E Street Band, once again temporarily put on hold, but with a bunch of new musicians from the New Jer­sey Area, not at all well known but apparently well versed in traditional music. Acoustic guitars, fiddles, banjos, old-timey percussion, the works. On top of that, one major surprising addition are The Miami Horns, regularly sitting in on most of the tracks and giving them a decidedly New Or­leanian flavor — and on top of it all, there's The Boss and his well-worn raggedy voice, now per­fectly adaptable to conveying that grizzly folk spirit.

 

How does it work? Well, the biggest flaw of the album is that it's almost predictably good. Most likely, you already know many of these songs — and unless you just hate the folk tradition as such, these are all fine examples of the genre. Most likely, you already know how The Boss in­spires his backing bands to play at top energy level — and how well he can impersonate that pro­verbial Working Man, taking his time on the front porch after a hard day's work to provide some simple, unadorned musical joy for himself, his family, and his neighbors. Most likely, you also know how The Boss is stubbornly resistant to musical fashions (especially having learned his lesson with bad production in the Eighties), and you know he is not going to rearrange these songs as raves, raps, or metalcore. A project like this has a near-zero probability of failure, and this is precisely what makes it not very exciting.

 

I don't even want to comment on any of the songs individually, because most of them serve the same purpose: entertainment. This is not some sort of sanctifying project where one turns the songs upside down and shows you the interesting stuff in those little corners and pockets that you never saw there before. These are big band arrangements for party halls and country fairs, to which people simply dance the night away, regardless of whether the lyrics tell bloody stories of Jessy James, Biblical parables, sailor sagas, or silly kid tales of how Froggie went a-courtin'. This is why the tracks are long and repetitive, and all the choruses are catchy because they are looped almost to infinity — you're not really supposed to notice that, you're simply supposed to keep on dancing, caught up in a rhythmic whirlwind. And the Boss is right there, giving you a prime example of inexhaustible energy and passion. You stop only when he stops, no earlier.

 

That said, I am still content to have this. The brass arrangements of the material are somewhat of a novelty, yet they work — giving the songs an extra «cabaret» flavor, perhaps, but one that does not feel alien to the material. And if you want to hear those old-timey numbers played with gusto, with as much bravado, volume, and recklessness as possible, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better candidate than The Seeger Sessions — Bruce never relents, and on songs like ʽJacob's Ladderʼ or ʽO Mary Don't You Weepʼ, you can almost feel him pushing, pushing, pushing the band to further heights of passion with each new reprisal of the chorus. Subtlety is not a welcome guest on the record; subtlety is left over to the real Pete Seeger, or the likes of The Country Gen­tlemen. Here, it's all about going wild, and who's better at going wild than Springsteen? And at the tender age of 55, too, it's like the perfect balance between being old enough to lend some spirit of authenticity here, but young enough to still be able to kick up a good ruckus.

 

This does not conceal the fact that the record is lightweight, and in general more of a temporary amusement for Springsteen rather than a serious project — but clearly, the man has earned a right to some lightweight detours, and paying tribute to a musical genre without which your musical genre would not exist in the first place may be the best choice for such a lightweight detour. I will probably refrain from an explicit thumbs up here, because after the first few songs, the predicta­bility effect becomes so strong that tediousness begins to set in; however, I will never say that the album is completely expendable, either — at the very least, it is a meaningful chapter in the Springsteen book, if not necessarily a meaningful milestone in the art of folk music revival.

 

LIVE IN DUBLIN (2007)

 

1) Atlantic City; 2) Old Dan Tucker; 3) Eye On The Prize; 4) Jesse James; 5) Further On (Up The Road); 6) O Mary Don't You Weep; 7) Erie Canal; 8) If I Should Fall Behind; 9) My Oklahoma Home; 10) Highway Patrolman; 11) Mrs. McGrath; 12) How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live; 13) Jacob's Ladder; 14) Long Time Comin'; 15) Open All Night; 16) Pay Me My Money Down; 17) Growin' Up; 18) When The Saints Go Marching In; 19) This Little Light Of Mine; 20) American Land; 21) Blinded By The Light*; 22) Love Of The Common People*; 23) We Shall Overcome*.

 

Apparently pleased with the vibes, results (and sales?) of We Shall Overcome, Bruce took The Seeger Sessions Band on tour — and not just anywhere on tour, but all the way to The Point Theatre in Dublin, to show these Irish sissies what a real man's reel really sounds like. The Irish sissies did not mind, and gave The Boss a truly international welcome. Probably feeling sancti­fied about getting to sing tura-lura-lura-lay smack dab in the heart of tura-lura-lay country and getting away with this, Bruce released the proceedings as a live DVD and a live album — not just «another live album», but a special one.

 

The obvious problem here is that The Seeger Sessions Band, as you might have guessed, mainly plays songs from The Seeger Sessions — all of that album is reproduced here with the exception of ʽJohn Henryʼ (too political?), ʽShenandoahʼ (too intimate and dirge-y?), and ʽFroggie Went A-Courtin'ʼ (now THAT I consider the crime of the century — depriving worthy Dubliners of a passionate, rabble-rousing, ball-breaking ʽFroggie Went A-Courtin'ʼ? What were they thinking?). Naturally, with the exception of a few extended jam bits, these songs sound mostly identical to the studio versions, which were produced less than a year ago, and it's not even a question of adding «live spirit», because The Seeger Sessions were themselves imbued with live spirit. So the enthusiastic roar of the Irish crowd may add a little adrenaline, but on the whole, when it comes to «paying me my money down», most people will think twice before paying twice for more or less the same thing.

 

The gimmick of the record is that, in addition to all the traditional songs, Bruce sneaks in some of his own material, rearranged... nay, rewritten in the same format, and then it all depends on what you think of the idea. Personally, I think it sucks. Perhaps he thought that he had no choice — the people wanted to hear at least some of his own songs, yet they would obviously sound strange wedged in between the old folk classics, so he just had to reinvent them as «pseudo-old folk clas­sics». But who needs an ʽAtlantic Cityʼ shorn of its hooks and recast as a speedy, but utterly generic bluegrass romp? Or ʽBlinded By The Lightʼ losing the verse-chorus contrast and reduced to a mumbled vocal delivery set to a relentless ska beat? Or ʽFurther On Up The Roadʼ turned from a dark, grizzly blues-rock number into a happy highlander anthem, with flutes and accor­dions and bagpipes (okay, no bagpipes... but there should have been bagpipes)?..

 

As a one-time experiment, this may be amusing, but artistically, this is a dead end: Bruce may have succeeded as an interpreter of traditional old-school songwriting, but as an imitator, he does poorly even when compared to Woody Guthrie, let alone all those nameless ballad writers whose legacy has outlived their identities just because the legacy meant so much more to people than the identities. Likewise, he does not fare that well when he takes old songs with well-established forms and tries to recast them into something completely different — his multi-vocalist take on ʽWhen The Saints Go Marching Inʼ, remade as a soulful acoustic ballad, is plain boring. Besides, what's up with having a fully formed brass section, capable of hitting up that New Orleans sound in no time, and not doing ʽSaintsʼ the way it should be done? Shouldn't he be old and wise enough now to stop with these «confound-all-expectations» childish games? Come on out and decide, Mr. Springsteen — is it «give the people what they want», or is it «the artist bows down to no public pressure»? You've been having it both ways at the same time for so long now, it's become downright irritating at times.

 

Anyway, it's not as if I did not enjoy Live In Dublin — it's just that, on the larger scale of things, it feels like a conjectural appendix to The Seeger Sessions. Or you might turn it around and say that the Springsteen vibe really only shines to its brightest extent in the context of an arena, in which case The Seeger Sessions will be merely a warm-up prelude to the mass epiphany of Live In Dublin. But viewing both as equally important would be quite illogical, and I, personally, choose the former — it's more concise and compact and it lacks any failed self-experiments. The only track I'd gladly salvage from here is ʽOpen All Nightʼ, which I didn't even recognize at first, an old Nebraska number completely redone as a rollickin' / rip-roarin' honky-tonk number with a bedazzling piano part. Put it as a bonus track onto The Seeger Sessions and that's all we need.

 

MAGIC (2007)

 

1) Radio Nowhere; 2) You'll Be Coming Down; 3) Livin' In The Future; 4) Your Own Worst Enemy; 5) Gypsy Biker; 6) Girls In Their Summer Clothes; 7) I'll Work For Your Love; 8) Magic; 9) Last To Die; 10) Long Walk Home; 11) Devil's Arcade; 12) Terry's Song.

 

Please take a good, hard look at the grumpy old guy on the front sleeve and tell me if you notice any «magic» there. Come on now, I want you to admit, right here and now, that «magic» is the first word that springs to your mind when you look at that picture. No? Not really? Not even the slightest association? Now listen to the music on this album. More than likely, you will have to admit that the mood of music — autumnal, rough, gritty, grumpy, sulky, etc. — more or less suits the facial expression and even the tint of the front cover. So where's the magic?..

 

Really, even though after The Rising the Boss was untouchable from the critical angle, it is as if that record just sucked all the spirit of adventure out of the old guy. Magic is totally Springsteen by-numbers, as pattern-dominated and monotonous as The Rising was unpredictable and clearly inspired. All songs are brand new (no outtakes this time), and all songs feature the E Street Band, but essentially this is the E Street Band equivalent of Devils & Dust — the Boss is not really trying on this one. Of course, it gives the songs and the arrangements an air of spontaneity and looseness, and the songs do have their points and all; and yet, there is nothing new.

 

This isn't quite the equivalent of Human Touch or Lucky Town, though: in his respectable position of elder statesman, the Boss sees it as his duty now to write songs about big issues on a much-more-than-personal level, and there is plenty of comment here on the current state of things in America and the world at large, mostly concentrating, of course, on wartime issues (but some­times also on ʽGirls In Their Summer Clothesʼ, because, well, war is over there and girls in sum­mer clothes are over here, after all). In this way, Magic does look like a sequel to The Rising, and is perhaps best appreciated from this angle — only where The Rising was a strong electric jolt to put the nation back on its feet, Magic is the sound of asthenia setting in, a depiction of the directionless meandering of the nation, unable to find new cures for old problems.

 

"This is Radio Nowhere / Is there anybody alive out there?" is sort of the leitmotif of the entire album. It's a decent song, for which Bruce has adopted a crunchy, but muted and gray alt-rock guitar tone, and that tone is a frequent guest here, suggesting the usual power and energy of the E Street Band, but with something gone rotten in the process. From there on, it is the usual 4/4 snare beat and the well-worn mid-tempo without end, grooves that have been recycled for the dozenth time and only occasionally salvaged by fresh vocal hooks — faithfully holding up that grim, thoroughly non-magical mood, as if the man were all set on telling us: "Just get out of here, I'm depressed like hell and you want me to wreck my brain trying to come up with inventive song­writing? Why don't you do something inventive for a change — like go out there and vote the Republicans out of office, for instance?"

 

Which, you know, is a fine enough imaginative stance that I can buy, but uninventive songwriting leads to uninventive reviewing, and therefore I will just say that there are three more songs that stand out in various ways. ʽGirls In Their Summer Clothesʼ is a Springsteen-ized power pop song, with echoes of Phil Spector and Motown, where he actually tries to sing instead of grumble (to the same mid-tempo beats, though). ʽLong Walk Homeʼ has the album's catchiest chorus and may have been seriously influenced by the Seeger sessions with that folksy refrain ("hey pretty darling, don't wait up for me, gonna be a long walk home" sure sounds like it belongs in an Irish barroom song). And ʽDevil's Arcadeʼ is the only tune here that seems like a Rising outtake — with its ominously bombastic guitar, keyboard, and string overlays, it almost matches the epic peaks of that record, though even in this song all that desperation, poured into melancholic melodicity, feels somewhat stiff, numb and frozen. But maybe it's just because the man's voice got lower, and all the instruments have to accommodate.

 

Anyway, it is possible to look at Magic both ways — as simply another by-the-book uninspired batch of same-sounding, deeply derivative Bruce songs, or as an anti-climactic companion to The Rising, reflecting how the shock, grief, and decisive «start it all over again» attitude got bogged down in stupidity, backwardness, and disillusionment, with the music following suit. In both cases, though, this is an album conceived, arranged, and performed without too much energy or inspiration — either intentionally or unintentionally, I don't really care. It's not bad, but I could definitely stand a bit more diversity in melodies and arrangements. Heck, I could even use ano­ther rewrite of a ʽCadillac Ranchʼ or a ʽRamrodʼ for a change — this monotonousness could be justified if the sonic atmosphere or the melodies were outstanding, but as it is, fourty seven minu­tes of Springsteen being depressed over the Iraq war and God knows what else is real hard to take. I wish I could say "Oh well, at least this ain't another stab at Nebraska", but fact is, not even the E Street Band can help out here. Even The Big Man is playing his sax solos in a completely per­functory manner — like, "oh yeah, here we play like we did in ʽJunglelandʼ". Not good.

 

WORKING ON A DREAM (2009)

 

1) Outlaw Pete; 2) My Lucky Day; 3) Working On A Dream; 4) Queen Of The Supermarket; 5) What Love Can Do; 6) This Life/Good Eye; 7) Tomorrow Never Knows; 8) Life Itself; 9) Kingdom Of Days; 10) Surprise, Surprise; 11) The Last Carnival; 12*) The Wrestler.

 

This one was released seven days after Obama's inauguration — coincidence? Perhaps, but the fact that the mood here is way more sunny and optimistic than it was on Magic is not a coinci­dence at all, especially keeping in mind that the title track was first played live at the November 2, 2008 concert in support of Obama, two days before the general elections. And now comes the blatant question: do you prefer your Springsteen morose and grumpy, or do you prefer him humo­rous, lightweight, and idealistically optimistic?

 

Of course, it really depends on a lot of other factors. ʽWorking On A Dreamʼ (the song), for in­stance, is a sunny power pop anthem that feels more like Christine McVie than Springsteen, pos­sibly because the "aa-ooh la-la-la, aa-ooh la-la-la" backing vocals had been borrowed directly from ʽSay You Love Meʼ (it's true, I swear!) and possibly because Bruce was all set to beat Bill Clinton's success with ʽDon't Stopʼ. Like, Americans all over the States heard the song on Novem­ber 2 and the fate of the elections was sealed, you know. But that doesn't prevent the tune from sounding a wee bit silly and manipulative in retrospect.

 

Not as silly, granted, as ʽQueen Of The Supermarketʼ, which arguably features the worst exten­ded lyrical meta­phor of the man's career — okay, there's nothing wrong about writing yet another story of sexual attraction between two simple people, but "take my place in the check-out line"? "I'm in love with the Queen of the Supermarket, though her company cap covers her hair"? Worst of all, "beneath her white apron her secret remains hers"? Boy, we've come a really long way since ʽIncident On 57th Streetʼ and the like. At least if there were some indication that this is an intentional tongue-in-cheek self-parody or something... apparently, though, this is an UN-in­tentional self-parody, ohmygosh.

 

The embarrassment does not stop there, because the real burning question that has gone unan­swered since 2009 is this: Does the sprawling quasi-Western epic ʽOutlaw Peteʼ consciously nick the primary melody of KISS' ʽI Was Made For Loving Youʼ, or is this just a really unfortunate coincidence? Never mind that the lyrics of the song are once again triter than tripe (just put the words next to, say, ʽJunglelandʼ, and see for yourself how fickle that poetic gift is) — why does this have to sound like a cross between Tommy ("can you hear me? can you hear me?") and a three-decade old corny disco song? Was that a serious attempt at breaking away from the formula? Well, ʽOutlaw Peteʼ is a strong breakaway from the formula, but the price is just too high.

 

And even that is not all: why does the song ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ borrow its title from the Beatles and its scratch-guitar opening from CCR's ʽLooking Out My Back Doorʼ, yet ends up sounding like neither, but instead turns out to be a simple, fast-paced country tune with steel gui­tar and female backing vocals a-plenty? Why do I actually have this strange uncomfortable fee­ling that Bruce's desire to make a cheerful «roots-pop» album has lessened the gap between him­self and his compatriots, Bon Jovi, in their «country» phase?..

 

Yes, about half of these songs have sunny pop hooks that might even get entangled in some of your nerve nodes (ʽSurprise, Surpriseʼ is a good example: you might reasonably complain about the word "surprise" being repeated way too many times, but it'll still get you), but this is still Bruce Springsteen, you know — all these slight, simple pop hooks are imbued with his sweaty earthiness, and thus, it is a simplistic, lightweight record that demands to be taken as seriously as ever. Which is where we have a communicative failure. How can you take Bruce Springsteen seriously when he's (sub)consciously stealing melodies from KISS, for Christ's sake? Oh well, at least that is a bizarre oddity that does go against formula. But most of the songs here do not go against formula, and stuff like ʽQueen Of The Supermarketʼ just parodies the formula (honestly, it's the kind of tune I'd expect to see featured in some SNL broadcast).

 

On the positive side, this is really the Boss at his happiest since... Lucky Town, I guess, which probably makes Working On A Dream the relative equivalent of that album for the next decade. Not exactly a compliment, I know, but we should be glad to see other people in happy moods, shouldn't we? After all, it's not as if he'd give us another Darkness On The Edge Of Town now even if America invaded half of the world's countries at once, so we might as well relax and give the man a break. If he wants to flirt around with supermarket clerks, that's none of our business, it's all between the man and Patti anyway.

 

WRECKING BALL (2012)

 

1) We Take Care Of Our Own; 2) Easy Money; 3) Shackled And Drawn; 4) Jack Of All Trades; 5) Death To My Hometown; 6) This Depression; 7) Wrecking Ball; 8) You've Got It; 9) Rocky Ground; 10) Land Of Hope And Dreams; 11) We Are Alive.

 

Okay, so at least the surprisingly elevated «poppiness» of Working On A Dream put a special mark on it. Fans may have been irate at Bruce borrowing musical ideas from KISS, but one can­not deny that, in this way, he at least gave us all something to remember that record by. Fast for­ward now to 2012 and his next studio LP, and here is something that is completely by the num­bers — conforming to all known stereotypes of The Boss and violating none of them.

 

Naturally, Springsteen feeds on social problems and regurgitates them as vibrating, spirited music, which is where he is usually at his best — and this time, the incentive behind the music and the anger has been the global financial crisis: a great opportunity to finally realize one's dream to be­come an authentic Woody Guthrie, strolling through Depression streets and providing voice ser­vices to all those devoid of voices. Never mind that by 2012, the crisis had largely abated; it only matters that there be a spark to light up the fire, and as prolific as Bruce usually is, he likes to have these sparks flying around, rarely venturing into the studio without a good pretext.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wrecking Ball conjures active memories of The Seeger Sessions: even though all the songs are original, they are mostly written in the folk paradigm, with simple, repe­titive, traditional structures that have more in common with highland ballads than with Bruce's usual rock formula. Only a few members of the E Street Band appear on the record, and even then not on all the tracks; there are a few sax solos from Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011, a few tracks with Weinberg on the drums, and a couple Van Zandt mandolin tracks — the rest is taken care of by session musicians, which has a negative impact on the album's energy levels, but I guess if the Boss decided the E Street Band was not appropriate enough for these songs, he must have had his own reasons.

 

Alas, if he hoped this would be a new Rising — in the sense of that major «jolt» to put the nation back on its feet or something like that — I am afraid that it has only been one in the minds of Rolling Stone-style critics. The songs aren't exactly bad (in fact, relying on these formulas is a good guarantee against «badness» in general), but without the E Street Band, and with his own strength also beginning to give up after all these years, Bruce gets bogged down somewhere in between a whimper and a bang.

 

ʽWe Take Care Of Our Ownʼ, the opening song, was once again used in Obama's (second) presidential campaign, and it is a perfect song for a presidential cam­paign — loud, muscular, optimistic, smooth, safe, catchy, cozily played out by the New York String Section, and ultimately forgettable like any of your average anthems. It has its rallying use, I guess, but it is essentially one simple musical phrase repeated over and over again in a glossy manner: the muscle is there all right, but there is hardly any genuine sweat on it. It sounds like something made on order — and yes, I remember well that ʽBorn In The USAʼ was all made up according to the same principles (and its synthesized sound had dated fairly quickly, unlike this string orches­tra thing), but at least back in 1984 Springsteen still had plenty of youthful soul and stamina to push into that form. ʽWe Take Care Of Our Ownʼ is just... limp.

 

As is most of everything else. A particularly good example is ʽLand Of Hope And Dreamsʼ, a fairly old song that was performed live as early as 1999, and used to be one of the highlights of Bruce's show — with a "this train..." section that may be the man's sincerest and most emotional contribution to the gospel genre — but this version is surprisingly flaccid compared to the way it used to sound, not just because the man's voice is giving out, but also because the arrangement replaces raw energy with a wall-of-sound approach. Still a good song, but give me the Live In New York version of this any time.

 

I have not even mentioned that the man's lyrics seem to turn more and more into tripe as the years go by. You may adore or hate the lyrics of ʽBorn To Runʼ, but you have to admit that, in any case whatsoever, something like "This is my confession / I need your heart / In this depression / I need your heart" is just way below the threshold — and this song is supposed to be a spiritual conso­lation for all the poor souls ravaged by the crisis. Or this: "We are alive / And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark / Our souls and spirits rise / To carry the fire and light the spark / To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart" — exactly how many dusty clichés are entrenched within this passage? No matter, as long as old and new fans alike are willing to gobble it up. And then there is the irony of the title track, which can be taken half-literally (as a cocky protest of the old Giants Stadium against its demolition) and figuratively (as a nation's cocky stand-off against economic trouble), but then when you realize that the Stadium was demolished after all, the line about "bring on your wrecking ball" takes on a fairly ironic shade.

 

In the end, as simply a collection of songs Wrecking Ball is relatively okay. But as a major social statement, it seems to me a transparent misfire, embarrassed by its own ambition and buried in its shallowness-masquerading-as-depth; and if Magic at least still showed signs of life, and Working On A Dream still showed signs of searching for life, Wrecking Ball is like a wad of chewing gum that finally ran out of the last bits of flavor. At the very least, it shows that being deeply moved by other people's troubles no longer guarantees high quality — or, who knows, it might show that in this particular case, the Boss was not that deeply moved by other people's troubles. After all, with the Democrats in power and the crisis clearly not being on the level of the Great Depression, it's hard to believe that the man was in some really deep apocalyptic mood; and thus, we just have another set of optimistic «we shall overcome» statements where, truth be told, it is not quite clear even to the artist what exactly it is that we need to be overcoming.

 

For the record, ʽRocky Groundʼ here features the first ever appearance of a rap vocal on a Spring­steen album — provided by backup singer Michelle Moore (happily for all of us, Bruce changed his original mind about performing the rap himself). So there's at least one objective argument for defending the man's ability to keep up with the times, about twenty years too late but better late than never. This patented bit of sarcasm, however, has nothing to do with my thumbs down assessment of the album. Rather, the thumbs down have to do with the bitter realisation that, in a way, Bruce Springsteen has turned into a pale parody of his former self. And if you happen to disagree and are preparing an angry retort here, please take the time to relisten to Darkness On The Edge Of Town first, and then see if your angry retort has lost any of its anger.

 

Oh, and if you happen to be David Fricke from Rolling Stone, the author of a five-star review that began with the phrase "Wrecking Ball is the most despairing, confrontational and musically tur­bulent album Bruce Springsteen has ever made", I do so hope that you be rewarded in the after­life by having to listen to nothing but Billy Joel, of whom you also seem to be a huge fan.

 

HIGH HOPES (2014)

 

1) High Hopes; 2) Harry's Place; 3) American Skin (41 Shots); 4) Just Like Fire Would; 5) Down In The Hole; 6) Heaven's Wall; 7) Frankie Fell In Love; 8) This Is Your Sword; 9) Hunter Of Invisible Game; 10) The Ghost Of Tom Joad; 11) The Wall; 12) Dream Baby Dream.

 

I guess it's a big help for us all to see the ol' Boss still asserting his masculinity with such confi­dent posture on the cover of his nine billionth studio album, but wait ten more years and people will start mixing him up with Clint Eastwood, and then where will we be? Another question is whether a brand new album from the Boss is really necessary, when we have not yet completed our disappointment ritual with Wrecking Ball? Why does he refuse to come to terms with the fact that millions of fans all over the world just want to hear ʽBorn In The USAʼ and ʽBorn To Runʼ, because they don't have time to learn all those new words?

 

Actually, High Hopes is a bit of a cop-out. On most of his previous albums, Bruce had freely re­sorted to resuscitating some of his outtakes and older raw ideas, but High Hopes is the first one in a long time, if not ever, to consist almost exclusively of outtakes and old ideas — even a casual fan like me immediately recognizes ʽAmerican Skin (41 Shots)ʼ, which was played as early as the Live In New York City tour, and, of course, ʽThe Ghost Of Tom Joadʼ is not just a re-recording of the old title track from that one LP, but a studio take on a live electric version with Tom Mo­rello that Bruce had also been playing since God knows when (I know I first saw it on the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert in 2009 and was duly impressed with Mo­rello's fireworks, and here you have them all over again). Information on the provenance of the other songs is easy to come by as well, but we shall not dwell too much on trivia here.

 

Instead, the good news is that, for all of its mixed nature, High Hopes somehow ends up being more interesting and involving than Wrecking Ball — maybe precisely because the man had no single, obsessive, and poorly executed concept here, but simply rounded up a bunch of isolated good ideas and left them for us to piece together. There's some of that traditional Seeger-inspired folk rock here, some typical old school Springsteen epics, and some really odd stuff, like the title track, which was originally written and recorded by the obscure artist Tim Scott McConnell, a.k.a. «Ledfoot», the self-proclaimed creator of the «Gothic blues» genre; actually, Bruce recorded his first version of the song as early as 1996, but this is a totally reinvented version, with Morello's pyrotechnics and a crazed-out Latin brass rhythm section turning the tune into a tribal dance round the fire (funny enough, the drum intro almost tricks you into thinking that the band is all but ready to launch into Led Zeppelin's ʽRock'n'Rollʼ — probably an accident, though).

 

The songs, as usual, are relatively simple and often tremendously repetitive, which is excusable on folk stylizations like ʽDream Baby Dreamʼ (a cover of Suicide!) but a little irritating on the originals like ʽHeaven's Wallʼ. Nevertheless, there are some good hooks, including orchestral ones — ʽHunter Of Invisible Gameʼ is a generic folk ballad in form, but well redeemed by the orchestral line that pierces the song throughout and essentially plays the same role that the Char­lie McCoy guitar flourish plays on ʽDesolation Rowʼ. And some good lyrics, too: ʽThe Wallʼ is a genuinely moving tribute to Vietnam vets, not even so much because of the lyrical trumpet part, but because the words are so well put together: "Apology and forgiveness got no place here at all, here at the wall". Then again... he wrote this circa 1998, back when the old imagery bag still had some good stuff tucked away at the bottom.

 

The strange alliance with Tom Morello actually works out well for the album: not only does the man add his flashy, indulgent, but oddly efficient guitar fireworks to several of the songs, but he was also the motivator behind Bruce's unpredictable choice of covers — not that ʽJust Like Fire Wouldʼ and ʽDream Baby Dreamʼ are such great songs per se, you understand, but the idea of Bruce Springsteen covering The Saints and Suicide, if only to acquaint the general public with these bands' existence, is endearing, and doubly endearing, perhaps, if we remember that this is being done in 2014, by which time no layman is supposed to remember anybody but Michael Jack­son and Madonna from that decade. This is at the same time a «retro» move for the man, and a bold leap forward — let's have high hopes for a Captain Beefheart cover next time around.

 

Without much of anything else to say, I would just like to let this go with a thumbs up. By its very nature, High Hopes, comprised as it is of odds and ends, could not be a «great» Springsteen album. But at this time, I'd rather have a «simply good» Springsteen album that does not strive for much rather than a «would-be great failure» like Wrecking Ball, which struggles to ensnare you with its Grand Message, but falls flat compared to all those early Grand Messages. Some hooks, some decent lyrics, some diversity, a bit of weirdness... no, really, can't complain. Perhaps it was a good idea to let all those songs stew for a decade or more — sometimes it does not work (like with the weak version of ʽLand Of Hope And Dreamsʼ on Wrecking Ball), but here, these particular studio sessions caught the Boss in an invigorated mood, and even ʽAmerican Skinʼ sounds every bit as punchy as its live counterparts.

 

ADDENDA:

 

TRACKS (1972-1995/1998)

 

CD I: 1) Mary Queen Of Arkansas; 2) It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City; 3) Growin' Up; 4) Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?; 5) Bishop Danced; 6) Santa Ana; 7) Seaside Bar Song; 8) Zero And Blind Terry; 9) Linda Let Me Be The One; 10) Thundercrack; 11) Rendezvous; 12) Give The Girl A Kiss; 13) Iceman; 14) Bring On The Night; 15) So Young And In Love; 16) Hearts Of Stone; 17) Don't Look Back.

CD II: 1) Restless Nights; 2) A Good Man Is Hard To Find (Pittsburgh); 3) Roulette; 4) Dollhouse; 5) Where The Bands Are; 6) Loose Ends; 7) Living On The Edge Of The World; 8) Wages Of Sin; 9) Take 'Em As They Come; 10) Be True; 11) Ricky Wants A Man Of Her Own; 12) I Wanna Be With You; 13) Mary Lou; 14) Stolen Car; 15) Born In The U.S.A.; 16) Johnny Bye-Bye; 17) Shut Out The Light.

CD III: 1) Cynthia; 2) My Love Will Not Let You Down; 3) This Hard Land; 4) Frankie; 5) TV Movie; 6) Stand On It; 7) Lion's Den; 8) Car Wash; 9) Rockaway The Days; 10) Brothers Under The Bridges ('83); 11) Man At The Top; 12) Pink Cadillac; 13) Two For The Road; 14) Janey Don't You Lose Heart; 15) When You Need Me; 16) The Wish; 17) The Honeymooners; 18) Lucky Man.

CD IV: 1) Leavin' Train; 2) Seven Angels; 3) Gave It A Name; 4) Sad Eyes; 5) My Lover Man; 6) Over The Rise; 7) When The Lights Go Out; 8) Loose Change; 9) Trouble In Paradise; 10) Happy; 11) Part Man, Part Monkey; 12) Goin' Cali; 13) Back In Your Arms; 14) Brothers Under The Bridge.

 

Ohgodohgodohgod, how am I ever gonna do this. Okay, let's put it into personal perspective: I write a new review almost every day, and never ever would I want to defend each and every one of these texts as «insightful», «original», or even properly written (let alone the fact that I never have much time for proofreading). Even if all the records I was writing about were dazzlingly original and adventurous, I'd still end up repeating myself, falling back on stock phrases, under­whelmed on bad days, and overhyped on good days. It is a routine process, after all, and routine eats away inspiration and insight like a termite infestation.

 

Tracks, a monster 4-CD boxset of (mostly) previously unissued material that Bruce prepared in the late 1990s, may be a coveted treasure house for fans — but to me, it shows, first and foremost, that for Bruce, the art of «songwriting», too, was a very routine process. Of course, it's not as if he came up with a new song every day of his life, but during numerous periods in his life, he generated them with the speed of a well-written spammer script; and the sheer number of these tunes that had to be locked in the vaults, biding their time, shows that the «Springsteen formula», which we really saw originate on Darkness On The Edge Of Town and reach sexual maturity on The River, actually worked with twice, if not thrice, the efficiency that we could suspect by listening to the officially released stuff.

 

If you were ever worried about all that generic filler on The River; if you were ever troubled about the formulaic, simplistic approach to melodies and arrangements on Born In The USA; if you ever felt like The Boss was dumbing down and/or copy-pasting the hooks on Tunnel Of Love or Human Touch — all of your worries, troubles, and suspicions will be fully confirmed with this 60+ item set of second-hand tunes. It is instructive that out of 4 discs, 1 is given up al­most entirely to outtakes from The River, 1 consists of leftovers from Born In The USA and Tunnel Of Love, and 1 is allocated to the Human Touch/Lucky Town period — which leaves only one disc to all of the Seventies, a decade when Bruce's «gigantomania» extended not just to the big sound of The E Street Band, but also covered the fields of lyrics (which were more com­plex), melodies (which were more jazzy and experimental), and song structures (which used to have fare more intros, codas, and internal development than any of his post-1978 stuff).

 

It is also precisely on that one disc, as soon as you pass a bunch of forgettable (historical interest only) early acoustic demos of well-known songs, that you get to encounter the best and least ob­vious material — compositions over which you can actually lament that they were taken off the respective albums for space reasons (although nowadays, with the CD format, there's always room for them if they ever want to come back). The most obvious highlight is ʽThundercrackʼ, an eight-minute epic that was probably cut from The Wild in favor of ʽRosalitaʼ, another long and even more exuberant track admiring a lady's charms, but even though ʽRosalitaʼ is faster, rowdier, and would always constitute a better turn-on for concert audiences, ʽThundercrackʼ may actually be its musical superior — especially when the band gets to the lengthy instrumental passage and starts cracking out terrific lead riffs, one after another, with occasional support from Clarence's ever-helping sax. There's some delicate subtlety and exquisite romance in this song that very rarely cropped up in Bruce's songs even in the early days, and then disappeared forever once he made the complete transition to arena-rock mode.

 

A much less popular, but very unusual and offbeat inclusion from those days is ʽBishop Dancedʼ, a rough-rugged folk-dance tune driven by acoustic guitar and accordeon and slightly reminiscent of The Band — the recording is live, taken from an early 1973 show at Max's Kansas City, and, judging by the audience's lively response, stuff like this could excite small crowds just as strong­ly as ʽBorn To Runʼ would later excite large crowds. Well, maybe not quite, but still — it's fun seeing him stringing together these off-the-wall lines of chaotic imagery, still very much influen­ced by Dylan but also still trying to experiment with musical form, putting his own stamp on the folk dance genre, way before turning into the predictable «working class champion».

 

That said, even for those early days you can easily see why stuff like ʽSanta Anaʼ or ʽZero And Blind Terryʼ were left off the final product — they're okay, but they add nothing extra to the moods and vibes that are already there. And as time goes by, these «superfluous» tunes become more and more the norm — for just about any track here past ʽThundercrackʼ you can pinpoint one or two officially released songs that said all the same things and more, or better. Do believe me when I insist that you will not discover any hidden sides of The Boss by listening to these songs, even if I also have to admit that there are almost no stylistic embarrassments or openly bad / dumb material included (well, maybe "Ricky's almost grown, Ricky wants a man of her own" comes close to dumb, but it's really just one of those Fifties-imitating nostalgic teen-pop numbers that he really had a crush on in 1980).

 

The relative consistency of these songs facilitates the listening process — I sat through the entire hog twice, which would be a real chore for most 4-CD collections of outtakes, but this one went surprisingly easy — however, I just don't feel like talking about the songs: whatever I'd have to say was already probably said in conjunction with some other song. To fill space, here are just some random observations: (A) I don't mind that ʽSo Young And In Loveʼ borrows the intro from ʽLawdy Miss Clawdyʼ, but how come ʽGive The Girl A Kissʼ is so blatantly influenced by Fleet­wood Mac's ʽDon't Stopʼ? The intro and outro are simply lifted from that song, almost as if the man had a subconscious desire for some of that Rumours gold to rub off on himself; (B) the Ne­braska-era acoustic demo of ʽBorn In The USAʼ has a vibe amusingly similar to ʽState Trooperʼ and is so totally tragically paranoid that one can only think how hilarious it would have been if Reagan's advisors got the man to consent to lend them the song — in this version; (C) ʽMy Love Will Not Let You Downʼ was one rejected song from the Born In The USA sessions that Bruce actually salvaged for his concerts, and although here it sports the ugly dated early Eighties synth sound, it is still gloriously anthemic and somewhat exceptional; (D) ʽFrankieʼ is a weird 7-minute long epic that I would have never guessed was also a Born In The USA outtake — it's a winding epic tale of Born To Run proportions (perhaps Bruce reminded himself in time that it was too melodically similar to ʽThunder Roadʼ), though, again, not vastly original.

 

And that's pretty much it. I would find any attempts to pick «bad» and «good» songs here so subjective and depending on such thin nuances that I'd much rather discuss angels dancing on the head of a pin. Clearly, this is first and foremost «for the fans»; Dylan's Bootleg Series, whose popularity may have inspired Bruce to follow suit, at least had a small bunch of major lost gems on each of its discs, whereas Tracks is far more evenly «mediocre» (people often complain about the last disc or the last two discs being inferior to the rest, but these are people who like to ima­gine a huge qualitative gap between Born To Run and Born In The USA — I am not so sure it was that huge in the first place), and simply offers «more of the same» for those who'd like to have more of the same. But it ends up putting the reviewer in a bad position, and I don't want to be one of those guys who can exude the same glowing intonations for a bunch of outtakes as they can for a genuine paradigm-shifting masterpiece.

 

Bottomline: I genuinely enjoyed listening to this, but no spiritual revelations ever manifested — and that is even if we define «spiritual revelation» in the broadest possible sense, like including frenetically banging my head against the wall to the bulgy sound of ʽCadillac Ranchʼ. Didn't really find no ʽCadillac Ranchesʼ here, either.

 

HAMMERSMITH ODEON, LONDON '75 (1975/2006)

 

1) Thunder Road; 2) Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out; 3) Spirit In The Night; 4) Lost In The Flood; 5) She's The One; 6) Born To Run; 7) The E Street Shuffle; 8) It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City; 9) Backstreets; 10) Kitty's Back; 11) Jungleland; 12) Rosalita (Come Out Tonight); 13) 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy); 14) Detroit Medley; 15) For You; 16) Quarter To Three.

 

Although you could theoretically apply the tag «archival release» to Live 1975-85 as well, or at least parts of it, that sprawling monster was a mish-mash retrospective, joining the past with the present, and not really part of the «vault-emptying drive» that began with Dylan and truly caught up with the majority of classic rockers at the turn of the millennium. Having successfully entered the game with Tracks, what Bruce really needed at this point was a bona fide recording of a com­plete, unaltered performance from the glory days — and hardly a better choice could have been made than this show from November 18, 1975, Bruce's first ever gig across the ocean in which he managed to conquer the somewhat skeptical British audiences in one two-hour long shot.

 

The recording, made available in both CD and DVD format, as some cameramen were fortunate enough to capture the young Boss in all of his bearded, hat-wearing, proto-indie-rock glory, has tremendous historical importance — although Born To Run was already climbing up the charts and critics were already outgushing each other, this is still Bruce Springsteen in his «pre-super­star» days, when all the now-classic material was still fresh and vibrant, and he got to perform ʽBorn To Runʼ not because, you know, what's a Boss show without ʽBorn To Runʼ? but simply because he'd only just written it and meant every word and every note of it. This is that particular era where the man had to work hard, and though nobody can accuse Bruce of not having worked hard enough even after the world was his for the taking, there are different kinds of hard out there, and this is one of these shows that actually caused people like Landau to go nuts, so...

 

In terms of surprises, there's not a lot of them, though people unfamiliar with the man's mid-Se­venties routine might find it amusing to hear Bruce insert so many strains of his various influen­ces into the songs: Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Isaac Hayes, and even Gary U. S. Bonds are all channelled, either by themselves, or as threads interwoven into the man's own com­positions. Not that these bits are in any way the best parts of the show — as good as Bruce is at setting fire to his own songs, he is usually awful when covering other people, because he's really only got one mode of functioning (Boss mode!) and he always converts everything to that mode, no matter how much he might like and respect the originals. Was that really a piece of Sam Cooke's ʽHavin' A Partyʼ at the end of ʽThe E Street Shuffleʼ? Did he really lead ʽKitty's Backʼ into Van Morrison's ʽMoondanceʼ at one point? Oh, I'm sorry, I thought that was just some ran­dom small twist in the arrangement.

 

This is why the most easily skippable part of the album is the so-called ʽDetroit Medleyʼ, where Bruce mashes together some Shorty Long and Little Richard tunes with seemingly no other pur­pose than demonstrating his Rock And Roll Credentials, or else people might want to think of him as a jazz-pop artist or something. Not that the E Street Band couldn't carry a proper rock and roll tune — on the contrary, they just try way too hard, and yet it still feels that this isn't the kind of music that comes naturally to them. One catch is that Springsteen has always had a poor sense of humor, and for basic rock'n'roll humor is essential — he's singing ʽGood Golly Miss Mollyʼ as if he were pounding it with a wrecking ball or something, with his pay depending on how many small bits and splinters he could produce: energetic, powerful, and deadly serious. Okay, Cap'n, we got it, just stop it right there, please? The poor girl can't take any more of this.

 

For his own stuff, though, this approach is naturally the perfect one, and the performance is gene­rally stellar, with relatively little in the way of storytelling to prevent Bruce from setting up Fort New Jersey in what used to be Gaumont Palace. The songs are not too different from the studio counterparts, except for maybe ʽE Street Shuffleʼ, which is much countrified from its funky ori­gins and features an extended slide guitar solo that might remind you of the Allman Brothers, al­though the sprawling, messy nature of the tune on the whole shows more of a Van Morrison in­fluence (no wonder ʽMoondanceʼ is quoted, albeit inside another song); and the opening ʽThun­der Roadʼ which, as was typical for Bruce at the time, is performed in its stripped-down version, with keyboards and harmonica bearing the brunt of the melody.

 

But, of course, you don't need me or anyone else to tell you that this here stuff is all about youth­ful exuberance and total conviction, rather than about making the live audiences witness some­thing they could never encounter on the studio record. In terms of sheer intensity, these versions might really blow some of the originals out of the water — if you prefer the man's full-throttle roar to the inevitably slightly more subdued, controlled singing in the studio — and let us not forget that The E Street Band on stage takes pride in being even tighter and more focused than when contributing overdubs to studio tapes. Me not being the major Springsteen fan on the block, the originals are not that well ingrained in the brain to allow for astute nuance-spotting compa­risons with this show — but, heck, even I have to admit it was one hell of a show.

 

It probably makes more sense to just watch the video, though, which (at least in the original re­lease) came packaged together with the CDs (in fact, the video was released even earlier, on the 35th anniversary edition of Born To Run) — the image quality is not much to speak of, but at least it is professional, and it really is fun to see The Boss working hard to earn that title, rather than just keep on confirming it. The beard! The hat! No muscles! Little Stevie still years away from his Baba Yaga image! How could this not be a thumbs up?

 

THE PROMISE (1977-1978/2010)

 

1) Racing In The Street; 2) Gotta Get That Feeling; 3) Outside Looking In; 4) Someday; 5) One Way Street; 6) Be­cause The Night; 7) Wrong Side Of The Street; 8) The Brokenhearted; 9) Rendezvous; 10) Candy's Boy; 11) Save My Love; 12) Ain't Good Enough For You; 13) Fire; 14) Spanish Eyes; 15) It's A Shame; 16) Come On (Let's Go Tonight); 17) Talk To Me; 18) The Little Things (My Baby Does); 19) Breakaway; 20) The Promise; 21) City Of Night.

 

And the rains keep falling and falling, and now we learn — those of us, that is, who have not been avid bootleg collectors over the years — that in compiling Tracks, Springsteen intentionally sidetracked one particular period in his history, the «murky years» in between Born To Run and Darkness On The Edge Of Town when he was busy fighting his former manager and waiting for the ban on his new records to be lifted. Indeed, of these new songs only ʽRendezvousʼ was formerly available on Tracks, and even there, only in a live version.

 

The wonderful thing about The Promise, for hardcore fans at least, is that it plays out like a co­hesive, even conceptual, double album — The Great Lost Springsteen Album; yes, a few of the songs would later be reworked for Darkness, but they'd change significantly in the process. The not-so-wonderful thing is that his first official double album, The River, had already shown the excessive simplicity and repetitiveness of the new churn formula; and The Promise, had it been released to the general public in 1977 or 1978, would have been his first The River, albeit a little less exciting and more predictable than the 1980 album.

 

Just like the material on Tracks, these songs are decent and nothing more. What distinguishes them is that, oddly enough, The Promise is really just one big huge enormous tribute to the music of Bruce's teenage years — early rock'n'roll, Motown, R&B, Phil Spector's wall-of-sound, whatever. We know he'd returned to those inspirations in 1980 and then, occasionally, on later albums as well, but never did they seem to be so consistently and naggingly on his mind than in those «murky years». Perhaps he sought consolation from all his troubles in the music of the Ro­nettes, the Crystals, the Supremes, Ben E. King, and Buddy Holly, or maybe he thought that, since he'd already been branded «the saviour of rock'n'roll» and stuff, he'd really have to go back to his roots and save the goddamn son of a bitch a second time, this time for real. Who really knows? The thing is, say a big thank you to Mike Appel, who effectively kept this from beco­ming the disappointing sequel to Born To Run at the time and whose activity ultimately boxed the Boss into a much darker, and psychologically deeper corner.

 

Perhaps if you listen to this album in «fresh» mode, taking a long, long break from Bruce-lore, the songs will find a way to appeal to you on song-individual level. My problem here is that I find myself in a position to write about The Promise as a conclusion to a lengthy chronological run, and each of these chords, tones, words is as familiar to me now as the wallpaper staring me in the face. And I will harshly state that this is Bruce's problem, not mine — we are not guilty, after all, that ever since the man locked in on national and international fame, he'd become such a fabu­lously lazy songwriter, mostly exploiting familiar chord sequences and making them his own by putting them on a steady Springsteroid diet.

 

There is nothing inherently wrong, of course, in putting your own unique stamp on music that you have so openly derived from Phil Spector or Buddy Holly. Problems begin when you overdo it, and The Promise overdoes it with gusto: song after song, you have exactly the same vibe, and remember, back in the Sixties, you had this stuff in single format, or, at best, in relatively brief 30-to-40 minute LP format. Here, you have an hour and a half of Buddy Holly with Springsteen vocals (ʽOutside Looking Inʼ), the Ronettes with Springsteen vocals (ʽSomedayʼ), Mary Wells with Springsteen vocals (ʽOne Way Streetʼ), Roy Orbison with Springsteen vocals (ʽThe Broken­heartedʼ), the Supremes with Springsteen vocals (ʽAin't Good Enough For Youʼ — okay, actual­ly I must admit this is the best song the Supremes never got to sing, the piano melody is so infec­tious), Elvis with Springsteen vocals (ʽFireʼ), Solomon Burke with Springsteen vocals (ʽSpanish Eyesʼ)... need I go on?

 

Had he had the opportunity to put it out in the old days, it might actually have been clipped and compacted into a shorter, more easily assimilated record (and he'd also patented the concept way before Billy Joel's An Innocent Man, although Billy's retro-tribute probably had more contras­tive impact in the synth-pop days of 1983 than Bruce's would have had in 1977). But then we should also remember that in 1978, once his legal troubles were over, nobody could prevent him from releasing or at least re-recording these tracks — the fact that he chose not to do that, and came out with the much more original (and meaningful) Darkness instead shows that he was probably looking back on this stuff, already then, as a trifling business.

 

You can still hear shades and echoes of The Promise on Darkness — for instance, the lyrical connection between ʽRa­cing In The Streetʼ (also included here in an early version) and ʽDancing In The Streetsʼ becomes much more clear, since worship of Martha & The Vandellas is a totally integral part of this album; also, ʽFactoryʼ is explained as a lyrical re-write of the much more lightweight ʽCome On (Let's Go Tonight)ʼ. But there is almost nothing of Darkness on The Pro­mise — aside from maybe the title track itself, whose first lines already suggest the whole lyrical trajectory ("Johnny works in a factory / Billy works downtown..." — kids in middle school should be given this couple of lines as part of the regular «Write your own Bruce Springsteen song!» assignment) and whose refrain makes it a logical pessimistic sequel to ʽThunder Roadʼ. However, it comes in so late in the evening that it changes nothing about the general perspective on the record as a whole.

 

Still, despite all the criticism, it is probably a good thing that Bruce eventually got around to clea­ning up this particular shelf. After all, these are not raw demos or anything — it is a coherent, self-sufficient piece of product; it nicely plugs in the odd three-year gap in what still remains Springsteen's most creative and important decade of all; it is an undeniably generous gift to the fans; and I'm even sure it will be perfectly listenable and enjoyable for me in the future, once the «Springsteen overdose» effect wears off. One thing, however: this polished version of ʽBecause The Nightʼ still leaves me convinced that Bruce made the perfectly right decision when he dona­ted the song to Patti Smith. He sounds pathetically constipated on these verses — I don't know, maybe there's something in them that only makes it right for female voices. Or for demon-haunted avantgarde convention-defying crazy feminist voices, for that matter.

BUDGIE

BUDGIE (1971)

 

1) Guts; 2) Everything In My Heart; 3) The Author; 4) Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman; 5) Rape Of The Locks; 6) All Night Patrol; 7) You And I; 8) Homicidal Suicidal.

 

Apparently, the distance between Birmingham, England, and Cardiff, Wales is smaller than 120 miles — no wonder, then, that the stylistic difference between early Budgie and early Black Sab­bath is so tiny, your first and fully legitimate reaction should be: «Rip-off! Inferior rip-off!» Of course, this is actually better explainable by the fact that all these early albums shared the same producer, Rodger Bain; having just completed work on Sabbath's Master Of Reality, he clearly had little strength or desire left to search for a different sound when faced with the task of producing ano­ther hard rock-oriented bass/drums/guitar combo.

 

Indeed, when that low, rumbling, carnivorous seven-note riff of ʽGutsʼ breaks through the audio channels, then gets augmented by the rhythm section several bars later, then finally gets comple­ted with another, more high-pitched but even more mean and hungry second guitar overdub, dif­ferentiating this sound from classic Sabbath is downright impossible without prior knowledge. This is, in fact, precisely the same type of sonic buildup that Bain had just engineered on ʽSweet Leafʼ and a few other Sabbath songs. And since that sound was clearly in high demand at the time, we can hardly blame the band for embracing it. The question is: does it hold up? After all these years, is there a safe place for Budgie on your shelf next to Paranoid?

 

My own answer would be a definitive yes, because behind all the superficial similarities, Budgie are actually quite a different band from the Sabs. Although not exactly a «thinking man's heavy metal group», their heaviness was not so much due to their fascination with B-movies and the occult, but was rather inherited from the psychedelic excesses of Vanilla Fudge and Blue Cheer, to which they added a tongue-in-cheek attitude and a sense of irony that presaged and predicted Blue Öyster Cult. Oh, and let us not forget the thin, nerdy, bespectacled countenance of bass player and helium-voiced lead singer Burke Shelley — the earliest prototype for Mr. Geddy Lee, with whose four-letter band these guys also share occasional similarities (particularly if you think of Rush's first couple of albums, before they went all-out Ayn-randian on us).

 

None of that would matter, though — we could just keep treating these guys as second-rate imi­tators or pale predecessors of their betters — if their songs weren't so well-written. The key to enjoying Budgie is the same as the key to enjoying the Sabs: if the riffs are good, the songs are swell, but if the riffs are boring, the songs are shite. And in Tony Bourge, the band had the great luck to own a riffmeister who, while not quite on the same level with the other Tony (Iommi), still had a God-given knack for simple, meaningful, powerful note sequences delivered in delici­ously fuzzy «earthquake tones». Like the one in ʽGutsʼ, yes — a giant mutant mole burrowing through your back yard regardless of any obstacles. Just run for your lives.

 

Like Sabbath, Budgie prefer drawn-out, multi-part compositions, where slow parts alternate with bits of boogie (and, for what it's worth, they're actually better at boogieing than their occultist Birmingham brethren); in between we may find a few short acoustic «links», but they are really not necessary here — minute-long snippets of Burke Shelley romancing the band's potential girl fans before turning his full attention to the band's potential boy fans: "yes, you are everything in my heart", even repeated four times, is not nearly as convincing as the protagonist's psychosleazy visions of a ʽNude Disintegrating Parachutist Womanʼ, descending upon him on the clouds of yet another classic early stoner rock riff. That song, by the way, with its nearly nine-minute running length, is the clear central point of the album, and a fabulous ride it is — first in its hazy slow part, then in the lengthy speedy boogie escapade, probably influenced by the Amboy Dukes' ʽBaby Please Don't Goʼ (which they would later cover directly) and Deep Purple's ʽWring That Neckʼ in equal degree. Bourge gets a good solo on that part, but really Budgie sound their best when the guitar and the bass player are galloping along in complete unison — for one thing, Budgie could be really incredibly tight, far tighter than the Iommi/Butler/Ward combo ever got to be.

 

My only gripe is that at this early point, the Budgie formula is not quite ripe yet; they'd polish it to near-perfection on the next two albums, but here, they are sometimes too obsessed with the ly­rical message over the musical substance (ʽRape Of The Locksʼ, a stereotypical rant in defense of long hair as part of one's ego — heavy on accusations, low on A-level riffs), and have not yet learned to seamlessly integrate soft acoustic and heavy electric parts (ʽThe Authorʼ seems like a mere warm-up to similar numbers on Squawk). But in the face of classics like ʽGutsʼ, ʽParachu­tist Womanʼ, and ʽHomicidal Suicidalʼ, this is but a minor gripe.

 

Derivative as hell, Budgie is still instantly likeable — which is far more than I could say about similar «derivative» albums by modern day acts like Black Mountain, to whom you still have to warm up for quite some time. Just goes to show that you can't kill the vibe — back in 1971, there was this special something in the air that allowed you to put out a really solid album in somebody else's style (styles), even if you had no truly groundbreaking ideas of your own. Well, other than naming your grizzly Welsh band after a pet parakeet, of course. That alone could be worth a thumbs up, but fortunately, there's also a bunch of kick-ass songs here as a bonus.

 

SQUAWK (1972)

 

1) Whiskey River; 2) Rockin' Man; 3) Rolling Home Again; 4) Make Me Happy; 5) Hot As A Docker's Armpit; 6) Drugstore Woman; 7) Bottled; 8) Young Is A World; 9) Stranded.

 

This was originally my first introduction to the Budgie sound, and so I am somewhat partial to their second album, even though, when you put it in the proper context, it loses to the self-titled debut in terms of freshness and to their third album in terms of polish and ambition. Still, it seems clear enough that Squawk is not just a mechanical retread of Budgie: in the year 1972, broade­ning of the horizons was still considered more noble than locking oneself into a tight, never-changing formula, and next to Budgie, Squawk has a bit more of everything — more acoustic numbers, a stronger folk and even Delta blues influence, and a small, but solemn progressive streak that suggests Moody Blues and King Crimson as humble, but insistent competitors to Black Sabbath as the band's primary musical mentor.

 

Two tracks in particular stand out, each one illustrating a different facet of the band. On the in-yer-face blood-and-guts hard rock front, the neorealistically titled ʽHot As A Docker's Armpitʼ is an early classic, with a super-catchy pop-metal riff whose notes are precisely echoed by Shelley's vocals (even if it requires introducing a rather silly stutter) and a speedy mid-section with one of Bourge's speediest solos ever played (possibly influenced by ʽChild In Timeʼ), while the final section, with its bolero structure, plays out like a Jeff Beck tribute. Derivative as heck, yes, but its swagger cannot be beat — and while it is possible to be distracted or irritated by Shelley's «goat» vocals, I think they work very well in the context of this ironic, irreverent music that never asks you to take itself too seriously. There's some sort of early proto-hipster snootiness about all this that could be despised in a different context, but comes across as delightfully hilarious when you remember all the «serious» hard rock bands playing around in 1972 — yes, even Deep Purple.

 

The second track is ʽYoung Is A Worldʼ, showcasing Budgie's romantic / sentimental / artsy-folksy side — their initiation, in fact, into this tricky world, and a fairly successful one. The acoustic introduction, the Mellotron touch, Shelley's oddly seductive declarations of "I can be big" and "I can be small", Bourge's massive infusions of thick riffs and droning solos that come and go while the main romantic theme keeps returning — all of this is not exactly King Crimson quality, but a reasonable facsimile; at the very least, this helps them break out of Sabbath's sha­dow, since Sabbath themselves would not begin their own «artsy» phase until a year later. Even outside of any context, though, ʽYoung Is A Worldʼ is just a nicely pulled off epic track, and Shelley in particular plays the part of a naïve wild child very convincingly — he should have actually sung more often in this high-and-deep register.

 

The rest of the material, though not as immediately hooky or epic, is still quite consistent. ʽWhis­key Riverʼ cleverly introduces a funky vibe into an otherwise generic blues-rocker (Ray Phillips' drumming is particularly recommendable here); the title track begins like it wants to rip off Jimi's ʽIf 6 Was 9ʼ, but then moves into Zeppelin territory instead and becomes their answer to ʽWhole Lotta Loveʼ; ʽBottledʼ is a short and cool slide guitar instrumental (hence the title); and on ʽRol­ling Home Againʼ, Budgie become the Monkees and play a friendly little country-pop ditty, which sounds totally out of outer space in this context, but feels like a very welcome companion. I am definitely not a fan of such relatively by-the-book blues-rockers as ʽRockin' Manʼ and ʽDrugstore Womanʼ (the titles kind of speak for themselves), but I don't have anything against them, either — there's enough sectional changes and plenty of energy to keep them afloat without raising too much interest.

 

Nevertheless, I do have to admit that if Squawk happened to be the last record by this band, any memory of it would have washed out fairly quickly. Its thumbs up are perfectly well guaranteed, but it is not here, no, that Budgie would briefly turn into an unstoppable monster on the brink of dominating the hard rockin' scene. To do that, they'd need to tighten and sharpen their act some more — and one element of that was shedding their Sabbath skin completely, by getting rid of Rodger Bain in the producer's chair.

 

NEVER TURN YOUR BACK ON A FRIEND (1973)

 

1) Breadfan; 2) Baby Please Don't Go; 3) You Know I'll Always Love You; 4) You Are The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milk; 5) In The Grip Of A Tyrefitter's Hand; 6) Riding My Nightmare; 7) Parents.

 

Smart move — replacing Rodger Bain with Roger Dean. After all, when it comes to production Budgie could very well be their own producers, but when it comes to painting your album sleeve, none of the band's members could draw worth a damn, so why not hire the hippest of the hip? The style is immediately recognizable; the only question is, will that style be superimposed on music that will be closer in sound to Yes — or to Uriah Heep?

 

The answer is neither. The album cover may be colorful and enigmatic (what the hell is that guy doing with that mutant eagle?), but Budgie stubbornly remain a heavy rock band above every­thing else — only one track on here displays extra «progressive» ambitions, and, to be honest, they are not even the kind of ambition that Black Sabbath displayed that very year, when they got Rick Wakeman to play for them a bit. To compensate for this, though, they tighten up their for­mula to the max: there is really no other Budgie album where they would kick ass on such a consistent, inventive, and, might I add, intelligent basis. (Yes, kicking ass can actually require inventive­ness and intelligence).

 

Of course, I suppose that the true reason why this record is usually brought up as Budgie's finest hour is ʽBreadfanʼ — not only would that be the only Budgie song to be revived and popularized in the future (by Metallica), but it is clearly also the Budgie song, period; the one that, in Mick Jagger's own words, "makes a dead man come". Bourge's opening riff is so good that the band repeats it over and over for almost a minute before Shelley starts singing — a classic combination of speed, precision, and fury that predicts the stylistics of thrash metal a good decade before thrash metal. There's other goodies scattered around, too — like the hilarious (anti-capitalist?) lyrics with nursery rhyme elements, or the slightly creepy dark-folk acoustic bridge; but essen­tially it's all about the riff, and if you think the song is too abusive and repetitive, well, it's meant to be that way. It must actually be quite a chore, I suppose, to be able to play that tricky riff so many times in a row so quickly without making any mistakes — of course, with the advent of Slayer and Megadeth this all became standard practice, but I honestly don't know a single other track from 1973 that would have a riff like ʽBreadfanʼ's.

 

Still, the album is much more than just ʽBreadfanʼ. Their cover of ʽBaby Please Don't Goʼ, which they borrowed from Them (and the Amboy Dukes) rather than Muddy Waters (and which would later be re-borrowed by AC/DC), has the crunchiest rhythm sound of all these covers and an ex­cellent slide guitar solo that puts Ted Nugent to shame (and I am quite a fan of Ted Nugent's guitar playing) — AC/DC would have more fun with the track, but this one's my bet if you want a stone cold dead face to go along with it. ʽYou Are The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milkʼ could certainly live a healthier life without the silly «phased» drum solo that eats up almost two minutes, but other than that, it is still a major riff-fest, even if it is arguably the most Sabbath-de­rived tune here (particularly when the second, boogie-oriented, part comes along).

 

On Side B, you have the magnificent ʽIn The Grip Of A Tyrefitter's Handʼ, where Tony has a brilliant idea — chop the minimalistic four-chord riff in two parts and place both of them in dif­ferent channels, so you get the effect of two guitars chatting with each other in point / counter­point mode; beyond that, the instrumental breaks totally dispense with solos in favor of an extra bunch of riffs, including an oddly tuned «pseudo-Eastern» one. And then there is ʽParentsʼ, a 10-minute epic about the perils and insecurity that await you upon graduating from Dad's and Mom's care — not a particularly innovative or insightful topic, but somehow they manage to get the tragic vibe just right. I still don't know why they thought it useful to mimic a seagull squad on top of these solos, but apparently «seagulls shrieking» = «thunderstorm coming», and that's, like, a metaphor for the perils of grown life once you're ripped out of your safety net. Anyway, it's a major improvement on ʽYoung Is A Worldʼ and arguably Budgie's best attempt at a sentimental, heart-on-sleeve, and simultaneously heavy/thunderous epic.

 

In the end, my only gripe with the album are the acoustic links — ʽYou Know I'll Always Love Youʼ and ʽRiding My Nightmareʼ definitely overdo the soft-and-tender thing, and Shelley's fal­setto actually grates on my nerves far worse than his normal «bleating» on the harder tracks: there is something very unnatural about his trying to pass for Art Garfunkel. Fortunately, that's just two short tracks that can be skipped if you find this style an irritant, too.

 

No unreasonable expectations, please — ʽBreadfanʼ may indeed contribute their most significant contribution to the world of heavy music, but other than that, Never Turn Your Back On A Friend is just a solid piece of work in an already well-functioning and properly explored area. But it is a solid piece of work: I mean, if a band can be complex-and-catchy (ʽBreadfanʼ) and simplistic-and-catchy (ʽIn The Grip...ʼ) on the same album, it's gotta count for something. Deri­vative or not, Tony had the golden touch at the time, and even made a few tentative moves to wiggle himself out from under the other Tony's shadow (even ʽIn The Grip...ʼ sounds like nothing Sabbath ever did up to that point, let alone ʽBreadfanʼ). Clearly a thumbs up here — this record is a must-hear for any hard rock fan, even those who have a natural aversion towards Roger Dean covers, because you can sometimes find a Jon Anderson hiding underneath.

 

IN FOR THE KILL (1974)

 

1) In For The Kill; 2) Crash Course In Brain Surgery; 3) Wondering What Everyone Knows; 4) Zoom Club; 5) Hammer And Tongs; 6) Running From My Soul; 7) Living On Your Own.

 

Despite some minor inconveniences, such as the departure of drummer Ray Philips (replaced by Pete Boot), at least the first side of Budgie's entry for 1974 is as strong as anything they ever did; maybe even stronger than anything they ever did, if you consequently test all four links in this chain. The title track borrows its introduction from Jeff Beck's cover of ʽI Ain't Superstitiousʼ, but then quickly segues into an original monster riff, one of Budgie's heaviest ever — think Sabbath's ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ with the accents reversed, so you get a lumbering Godzilla instead of a charging T. Rex. There's not much more to the song than the riff and how well it agrees with the chorus tagline ("...the meaning of life is I'm in for the kill"): the bridge section devolves into run-of-the-mill blues-rock, and they couldn't think of a good coda, so they just fade it out after a while. But that riff, woohoo boy, I could listen to it for the entire six minutes. Such a deep, crisp, re­freshing guitar tone to go along with it. Snappy!

 

The two short songs that ensue, likewise, represent one of Budgie's best rockers and one of their best ballads. ʽCrash Course Surgeryʼ, later covered by Metallica along with ʽBreadfanʼ, is actual­ly remixed from a much earlier version, originally released in 1971 as a single (so it features Ray Philips on drums). If anything, it is this band's answer to ʽParanoidʼ — the same type of short, concise, anguished heavy rocker with a nagging, repetitive riff racing along the short track with grim determination — and although the level of intensity is not nearly as high (mainly because this riff is not tying our attention to a single note), it is still an excellent specimen of the «crash course» approach to heavy metal. And then, finally, with ʽWondering What Everyone Knowsʼ, Budgie emerge with an excellent acoustic ballad — going for a depressed-melancholic rather than sweet-romantic attitude, which suits Shelley's vocals much better. The lyrics are too obscure to allow for a straightforward interpretation (lost love? dearly departed? cold turkey? whatever), but this only works to the song's advantage as it conveys an atmosphere of general confusion.

 

Finally, there's ʽZoom Clubʼ, a lengthy epic with funky and progressive overtones, possibly in­spired by some of Zeppelin's work on Houses Of The Holy, but also, in a way, presaging much of Zep's subsequent work on Physical Graffiti (Bourge's guitar work on the song's first two mi­nutes should remind you of the likes of ʽCustard Pieʼ, ʽTrampled Underfootʼ, etc.). Shelley cooks up a vocally challenging chorus (the resolution on the "..move on, music man!" bit of the chorus is quite unusual and unexpected), and Bourge throws in a long instrumental passage, alternating funky riffage with bluesy solos in a way that should have definitely earned some respect from Jimmy Page: the song is totally on the level, and at nearly ten minute length, it does not feel parti­cularly overlong due to the never-slackening intensity of the groove.

 

Unfortunately, they do seem to run out of great ideas on the second side, with three more songs that never stick around for too long. ʽHammer And Tongsʼ is slow, lumpy blues-rock that is so utterly derivative of ʽDazed And Confusedʼ that it isn't even funny. ʽRunning From My Soulʼ is a piece of generic boogie blues, which is not what this is band is really about. And ʽLiving On Your Ownʼ is another epic piece, but this time devoid of memorable riffs — then, for some rea­son, it transitions into an uncredited cover of ʽBeck's Boleroʼ (Jeff could have very easily sued the band, except that the instrumental's authorship has always been problematic — there's a still un­resolved dispute between Beck and Page over the priorities), before returning to the original un­focused melody. Not particularly bad, just lacking in inspiration.

 

Nevertheless, the first side alone is worth stating that Budgie had entered the mid-Seventies with enough dignity, and were going to survive at least into the late Seventies era; the album clearly deserves its thumbs up, at least as a 20-minute long near-perfect EP with 20 more minutes of take-it-or-leave-it bonus tracks. And, might I add, that's a pretty mean-lookin' budgie out there on the album sleeve. Shouldn't they have renamed themselves "Killer Eagle", given the chance? I mean, just think about how the name "Budgie" must have negatively influenced their sales among the hard rock crowds...

 

BANDOLIER (1975)

 

1) Breaking All The House Rules; 2) Slipaway; 3) Who Do You Want For Your Love; 4) I Can't See My Feelings; 5) I Ain't No Mountain; 6) Napoleon Bona-Part, pts. 1 & 2.

 

Arguably the last album of Budgie's «classic» period, Bandolier is also fairly short — just six compositions, with the long ones being fairly repetitive at that. Nevertheless, it is hard to guess that they were running out of steam, because on the whole, the results are quite satisfactory. The music is a little less heavy than last time (nothing even remotely approaching the evil bass blasts of ʽIn For The Killʼ), but still heavy enough and riff-a-licious enough to keep the entertainment value high while they're poking around basic boogie, funky R&B, and faintly proggy flourishes. Oh, and they have yet another drummer here, Steve Williams, although I honestly can't tell where he is to be found on the album sleeve — those parrakeet heads are quite confusing.

 

Anyway, the spot to aim for here is the epic ʽNapoleon Bona-Partʼ. The first part is a rather in­conspicuous, melancholic acoustic/slide ballad, but the second is a vicious galloping monster with a chuggin' riff that is half-thrash and half Morricone, heroic vocals and solos, and a brace-yourself race to the end; the bit where Tony enters with yet another high-pitched, banshee-wailing counter-riff at around 5:20 is, in fact, my single favorite sonic moment in the entire Budgie cata­log — the perfect answer to that eternally nagging question, «how to double the excitement when it's already there?» With a little nudge to the imagination department, you could also think of that second part as a musical representation of a Napoleon cavalry assault — crushing everything in its path as presumed, but then suddenly disappearing into thin air. Kind of agrees with the Napoleo­nic fantasies of the protagonist, too — and, come to think of it, they were almost ready for their own Waterloo just as well, if you pardon the triteness of this remark.

 

Next to ʽNapoleonʼ, the opening long number is a bit more primitive and lightweight, but I still respect it how the band is able to take one of the world's most obvious five-note sequence and pro­mote it like The Riff To End All Riffs, returning to it over and over and over until it suddenly begins to produce a mantra-like effort, especially at the end, where there's, like, no escaping it — the band should have stopped long ago, but it just keeps returning and returning, like a homeless dog that can endear itself to you by stubbornly sticking around, until it feels like family despite your strongest psychological resistance. Maybe this is what they really mean by ʽBreaking All The House Rulesʼ, although, actually, the song is about a family man succumbing to some fleshy temptation. Can you imagine a nerdy, freaky fellow like Burke Shelley succumbing to temptation? On the other hand, it doesn't seem like he is the one taking the initiative here.

 

The rest of the album is spottier: ʽWho Do You Want For Your Loveʼ starts out on the wrong note, either as an unfunny parody on or an unsuccessful imitation of a sentimental funk ballad, then picks up a more proper groove, but still refuses to match the awesomeness of ʽZoom Clubʼ; the ballad ʽSlipawayʼ has some pretty solos, but little else; ʽI Can't See My Feelingsʼ, later co­vered by Iron Maiden, relies too much on borrowed chords (from ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ, ʽFoxy Ladyʼ, and a couple Sabbath songs) to provide much of a memorable melody; and what the hell made them go out and cover Andy Fairweather-Low? ʽI Ain't No Mountainʼ sounds like a really, really stupid hillbilly joke, a barroom rocker without any redeeming humor to it. Would the next step be Gary Glitter? This just isn't like Budgie at all.

 

Still, that one kind of embarrassing song aside, the rest of the album ranges from awesome (the bookmarking tunes) to passable (everything else), and to me, that is enough for a modest thumbs up rating, particularly since after 1975, such ratings would be harder and harder to come by. You can already see the beginning of the demise — the fate of this band was always directly depen­dent on the strength of Tony's riffs, and with the musicians moving into other, less riff-dependent directions, they would inevitably lose out. But Bandolier still features barely enough of the clas­sic, vintage Budgie style to make the jump. As to whatever follows — buyer beware!

 

IF I WERE BRITTANIA I'D WAIVE THE RULES (1976)

 

1) Anne Neggen; 2) If I Were Brittania I'd Waive The Rules; 3) You're Opening Doors; 4) Quacktor And Bureau­crats; 5) Sky High Percentage; 6) Heaven Knows Our Name; 7) Black Velvet Stallion.

 

Budgie's first serious misstep on the road to oblivion — and what makes matters sadder is rea­lizing that this was not even an intentional commercial sellout, but rather a confused, uncertain attempt to branch out and experiment without any clear understanding of where they were going and why they were going there. Alas, some people are born to make their mark in many places, but some should rather stick to set formulae. Imagine AC/DC trying to play James Brown-style funk or Canterbury-style progressive rock — this is not exactly what happened to Budgie on this album, but it comes close.

 

The title track here, for instance, is a real mess. Opening up with a decent enough metal riff, it quickly dispenses with it in favor of a light, wimpy funk groove alternating with boring folkish arpeggios, then eventually slips into disco territory, with Shelley in full-fledged Studio 54 mode and Bourge previewing the Nile Rodgers style; all that's missing is some of those disco strings to complete the picture. Not that there's anything wrong by default with Budgie playing disco, but this particular section seems to exist only for the sake of contrast with the opening heavy metal bits — and it's a rather meaningless contrast, frankly. All the song does is waste a potentially good pun on a stupid musical synthesis where the individual parts exist only for the sake of a col­lective effect, and the collective effect is best described as "what the..."?

 

Worse, they are beginning to lose it even when staying in more familiar territory. ʽAnne Neggenʼ, opening the album, is an honest rocker, but they probably had so much fun shaping a monde­green from the refrain ("and again, and again, and again...") that they not only forgot to throw in a good riff, but did not even bother to bring the track up to their esteemed standards of heaviness — Bourge plays almost the entire song as quietly and cautiously as if he were afraid to wake up the neighbours. In the past, all of their albums started out with impressive heavy openers (ʽGutsʼ, ʽBreadfanʼ, ʽIn For The Killʼ, etc.) that immediately set a sympathetic tone for the entire album; ʽAnne Neggenʼ immediately sets the wrong tone, as if we are being introduced to a forced change of musical diet for health reasons.

 

As we go further and further, corrections to these mistakes are not being made. The ballad ʽYou're Opening Doorsʼ sounds like another preview — to bad Foreigner. ʽQuacktor And Bureau­cratsʼ at least starts out with a thick, distorted tone for the rhythm guitar, but hopes for something crunchy and snappy are quickly dissipated as the song proves to be a fairly (sub-)stan­dard baroom rocker with totally predictable chords and no musical development whatsoever. ʽSky High Percentageʼ is a generally okay, but unmemorable piece of boogie, and the second ballad just completely passes me by.

 

In the end, there is exactly one song worth salvaging off the album: ʽBlack Velvet Stallionʼ some­how succeeds as an epic piece despite the melody hanging upon a four note syncopated bass/rhythm guitar riff throughout, the kind of phrase that tends generally to be used for tran­sitions from one section of the song to another. However, Shelley manages to inject a good dose of the old «Budgie sorrow», and Bourge finally gets a chance to unleash some inventive soloing, going from minimalist, almost ambient mode into a series of scorching bluesy licks and then building up to an awesomely climactic coda. What exactly prevented them from featuring the same level of intensity on all those other songs, I have no idea.

 

Usually, when trying to explain such failures, people pronounce the word «drugs» (which is a great universal key to everything — as we know, both the greatest music ever and the shittiest music ever always owe their success/failure to drugs), but I don't even know if drugs were invol­ved in the first place. More likely, they just said to themselves at one point, "Hey! We're doing great, but it's all because we have awesome riffs and guitar solos. Why don't we show them how great we can do if we toss away the awesome riffs and guitar solos? If we were Brittania, we'd waive the rules, you know!" I almost hate to be giving this a thumbs down, because deep down inside, I respect failed experiments, but these failed experiments aren't even particularly fun to listen to for the sake of understanding where and how they failed. And one good song out of seven, coming on as a comforting bonus for your patience, does not count for much.

 

IMPECKABLE (1978)

 

1) Melt The Ice Away; 2) Love For You And Me; 3) All At Sea; 4) Dish It Up; 5) Pyramids; 6) Smile Boy Smile; 7) I'm A Faker Too; 8) Don't Go Away; 9) Don't Dilute The Water.

 

A brief, if somewhat half-assed, return to hard rock quality here. Perhaps they realized that Brit­tania took things a little too far and placed them in danger of completely losing whatever little bits of identity they had. In any case, Impeckable rocks with more energy and has somewhat better riffs — but that's about it, then: not a single song has the stunning power of a ʽBreadfanʼ or the viciousness of ʽIn For The Killʼ. Which is too bad, because some stunning power and vicious­ness would have fit in very well with the look on the face of that black cat on the cover. Wait a minute, though... the cat is aiming for the budgie, right? So what is this, a hint at the dark hand of fate poised to tear the band in two?

 

As in some other cases as well, the best songs here are probably the first and last tracks. First one comes on as a strong imperative (ʽMelt The Ice Awayʼ), boogies like crazy, and builds a nice descending ladder in the chorus, while Bourge tries on Angus Young's speed-choked soloing style for a change. Last one is a prohibitive (ʽDon't Dilute The Waterʼ) has some well constructed sectional transitions and arguably the best riff on the album (there are several, actually, but you'll know the one when you hear it), providing us with at least one «snappy» moment (meaning that you'll actually be feeling the guitar attacking you, lashing out at your heels, rather than just doing its independent shtick somewhere out there in the atmosphere).

 

In between... well, some of the songs are really strange, like ʽLove For You And Meʼ, where the verse sounds like a preview of late period AC/DC (slow lumpy leaden riffage) and the chorus bor­rows its formulaic soulfulness from Foreigner; or like ʽDish It Upʼ, where they once again make the mistake of descending into funky territory. But the power ballad ʽAll At Seaʼ is surpri­singly not bad, with tasteful, lovely, melancholic harmonies in the chorus; and the return to acous­tic guitars and falsetto harmonies on ʽDon't Go Awayʼ seems to me to be more successful than ʽRiding My Nightmareʼ from their best album.

 

Still, it is clear that re-embracing the past is no longer an option for these guys: something went wrong, and now it is as hard for Bourge to stay sharp and inspired as it was for his senior pal Iommi that very same year (Sabbath's Never Say Die alos showed a sharp drop in quality — was it really the wind of change, or, more accurately, the New Wave of change that kicked the ground from under all these old heavy rockers' feet around 1978?). Even the best songs meander, and it never feels as if the players believe in themselves and their mission. At least Tony certainly did not: right after the album was released (and flopped), he quit the band for good.

 

Essentially, Impeckable was released at a turning point for the heavy metal scene — the old school ideas were running out of steam, and the New Wave hadn't quite kicked in yet, let alone the speed and thrash idioms. On the other hand, since the «refreshed» Budgie of the 1980's never truly managed to make a respectable transition to the new values, a half-hearted, meandering, transitional record like this is still preferable to whatever happened when Mr. Shelley switched his role model from Black Sabbath to Judas Priest. Seen from that angle, ʽDon't Dilute The Waterʼ is at least a fitting swan song for the classic era of this band.

 

POWER SUPPLY (1980)

 

1) Forearm Smash; 2) Hellbender; 3) Heavy Revolution; 4) Gunslinger; 5) Power Supply; 6) Secrets In My Head; 7) Time To Remember; 8) Crime Against The World.

 

I used to be excessively harsh on this album, and, in truth, it is hard not to be harsh on an album that sounds like an unimaginative cross between Judas Priest and AC/DC. But then it might also be a little silly to accuse Budgie jumping on the early Eighties metal bandwagon, if only because Budgie had always been professional wagon-jumpers, ever since ʽGutsʼ so openly nicked off the Sabbath sound ten years before. So how could we call it a crime when, upon Bourge's departure from the band, Shelley instigated a transition into more «modern» territory?

 

If there's a problem here, it is with Shelley's personality. One thing that early Eighties metal de­manded was brutal, sweaty, swaggering frontmen that could match the sweat, brutality, and swag­ger of that new guitar sound — and Burke Shelley, with his lean lanky nerdy figure, whiny vocals, and encumbering bass, could hardly qualify. His voice is high-pitched enough, for sure, and he can raise it to a proper scream when necessary (see the chorus to ʽHeavy Revolutionʼ), but it has none of the steel overtones of a Brian Johnson or a Bruce Dickinson, and that scream can never turn to roar; just not the same level of aggression, sorry. Just like it's hard to imagine Geddy Lee doing a credible cover of ʽHell's Bellsʼ, or something like that.

 

New guitarist John Thomas is quite competent, though, I'll give them that. He can come up with riffs that are almost as good as K. K. Downing's, and he can play insane-delirious solos just like Angus Young — both these skills are immediately evident on the opening number, ʽForearm Smashʼ, where in the mid-section they nearly pull off a ʽWhole Lotta Rosieʼ. ʽHellbenderʼ and ʽHeavy Revolutionʼ are also not half-bad, riff-wise, with all those nasty tones and clever use of stock metal licks. Nothing too special, but the instrumental sections of these songs are seriously enjoyable — provided you like the not-too-experimental, ass-kick-oriented style of early Eighties metal in general, I don't see how it is possible not to toe-tap or play at least a little air guitar to these songs. They're fun.

 

If you try to subject them to a little closer analysis... well, don't. You might stumble upon the lyrics to ʽHeavy Revolutionʼ, which seem to be a sincere appraisal of the arena-rock image: "Our heads jumping up and down / Heavy rock bands are back in town", without a single noticeable shred of irony — quite embarrassing to see them associated with Mr. Shelley and his nerdy looks (it's a good thing that no video footage of the band from that era has been preserved). Essentially, all of Budgie's «cleverness», including those nutty song titles which used to relate them to Blue Öyster Cult, seems to have evaporated, replaced with far more explicit and provocative imagery. Not that Budgie lyrics have ever mattered much — and the words do go well with the music, they just don't go all too well with the singer.

 

There's exactly one power ballad in the mix (ʽTime To Rememberʼ), mediocre, but not awful (depending on whether you think the echo on Shelley's vocals — "time... time... time... to remember" — is an impressive or a stupid idea). There's exactly one song with an acoustic intro­duction (ʽGunslingerʼ) that dutifully segues into an epic rock guitar battle of life against death. There's exactly one slow rocker (ʽCrime Against The Worldʼ) that concludes the album on an almost relaxed note compared to most everything else. And most everything else taps their not-so-large «power supply» to the max. So at least they're going for it hardcore-style — no «sissy keyboards», not too much overblown sentimentality. Certainly could be worse, had they hired a less competent guitarist. But do remember that this is «Budgie 2.0», a completely different thing from what it used to be, and even if you loved Impeckable, you have to have yourself a ʽHeavy Revolutionʼ to love Power Supply.

 

NIGHTFLIGHT (1981)

 

1) I Turned To Stone; 2) Keeping A Rendezvous; 3) Reapers Of The Glory; 4) She Used Me Up; 5) Don't Lay Down And Die; 6) Apparatus; 7) Superstar; 8) Change Your Ways; 9) Untitled Lullaby.

 

I cannot really make up my mind whether I should feel more empathy towards Power Supply-era Budgie or Nightflight-era Budgie. What's the difference, you might ask? Well, there is some — basically, their second album with Thomas is a step back from the «hardcore» new-wave-metal­lism of the 1980 offering, as they try to sweeten and mollify Power Supply's dry brutality with some poppy and even «retro-progressive» (is that even a word?) elements. Probably, this means that Nightflight will have a little more appeal for fans of classic Budgie — yet on the other hand, it is also clear that the classic days will never come back, and it does not make a whole lot of sense trying to force them back.

 

I am talking about ʻI Turned To Stoneʼ, of course, the six-minute «folk-metal» anthem that opens the record on a very different note from ʻForearm Smashʼ. We get those melancholic minor chord acoustic melodies, powerful build-ups and slide-downs, and the metal-soulfulness which these guys could master well earlier on (ʻParentsʼ, etc.). Ultimately, however, the guitar tones are too much «early hair metal», the main riff of the chorus sounds like «under-chugged» Sabbath-lite, and although John Thomas unleashes some nice furious soloing in the sped-up gallop coda, it is hardly enough to redeem the song on the whole. Nice try, though.

 

Curiously, the tone of the record gets much lighter after that, and some of the tunes could, in fact, qualify as «lightly metallized» power-pop — ʻKeeping A Rendezvousʼ, ʻShe Used Me Upʼ, ʻChange Your Waysʼ are toe-tappy sing-along pop-rockers with a fairly light mood. However, they wobble on the edge of MOR blandness, and sometimes go right over that edge: ʻApparatusʼ is a faceless power ballad that could be Foreigner, Foghat, Styx, or whatever you wanted it to be in the late Seventies.

 

Arguably the most memorable — in a rather stupid way — tune here is ʻSuperstarʼ, a song that must have very clearly been influenced by AC/DC's ʻGirl's Got Rhythmʼ, which would have been perfectly fine if Shelley were able to demonstrate a better sense of humor; instead, for some rea­son, he intends to transform this funny, harmless little pop chugger into a serious social statement on superstar hypocrisy, for which he has neither the charisma nor the power of conviction. The variation on the ʻGirl's Got Rhythmʼ riff is a nifty one, though, I'll admit that much.

 

Overall, I guess it's just different from Power Supply — not for better or worse. At this time, «better» and «worse» aren't even valid options for Budgie: Shelley seems lost in space, unable to bring back the aesthetics of old and not quite getting the new realities, either. Not that this was a good time for power trios: heavy metal was all about creative guitar duos, of the Judas Priest type or the Iron Maiden type, or, if you only had one guitarist, you had to make sure it was a Van Halen type. John Thomas is a nice guy, but he doesn't experiment much, and he hasn't quite got the flashy technique of even one of the Iron Maiden guitarists, not to mention a Van Halen. So they try to get by, and I've heard much worse albums than this, but I do not think there'll come a time in anybody's life when ʻI Turned To Stoneʼ is exactly the kind of soul-crushing epic one is in dire need of at any particular moment. Unless you're so much a child of the Eighties that your ears only perk up at the sound of those thick, overproduced heavy guitar tones.

 

DELIVER US FROM EVIL (1982)

 

1) Bored With Russia; 2) Don't Cry; 3) Truth Drug; 4) Young Girl; 5) Flowers In The Attic; 6) N.O.R.A.D.; 7) Give Me The Truth; 8) Alison; 9) Finger On The Button; 10) Hold On To Love.

 

The less said about the last Thomas-era Budgie album, the better. I wish things could be ex­plained as easily as «they hired themselves a keyboard player, and it totally ruined them», but even without Duncan Mackay's keyboards (which are not the worst sort of keyboards played on a metal album, no) these songs seem absolutely pitiful in the era of classic Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, not to mention absolutely unworthy of Budgie's own legacy.

 

At least Power Supply had those jagged Priest-like riffs, and Nightflight tried a bit of a pop-metal approach that was essentially listenable — here, the band goes for «power», with lots of power chords, gang choruses, brawny-hero screaming, and stadium appeal. Bad move for every­body involved: Shelley is about as natural in this "scream for me Long Beach!" role as Woody Allen, and the guitarist's modest, but non-zero talents are more or less wasted on this collection of completely interchangeable power-fests.

 

The influence of the pop style of Nightflight is still evident — most of the choruses aim for catchiness, though usually of the super-stupid kind (ʻHold On To Loveʼ is a particularly annoying example, with an anthemic refrain that probably took five seconds to write and whose simplicity is not redeemed by its stupidity, because when you deliver simple-and-stupid with such grand pathos and no signs of irony, how can you truly convince the demanding fan of how important it is to "hold on to, hold on to love, everyone hold on to love?").

 

Respecting the spirit of the times, they do a political song that wishes to offend politics but ends up offending countries (ʻBored With Russiaʼ is really one of the most misguided titles in the his­tory of Cold War-related pop songs) — fortunately, the song is so bland that it should have been called ʻBored With Budgieʼ instead, with a chorus that is more adult contemporary than solid hard rock or metal. They also do a ballad on which the synthesized strings drown out the vocals and the vocal melody seems to be written only up to a certain point, after which the singer just takes the sentimentality wherever it takes him (ʻAlisonʼ). And they do an «epic» number (ʻFlowers In The Atticʼ) about abandoned children or something like that with a power ballad chorus and not a shred of personality.

 

Overall, this was a clear sign that the band had better vaporize before it put out something even more embarrassing (and this was only 1982, the decade still being so young), so upon getting the predictable thumbs down from just about everybody, Budgie were no more.

 

YOU'RE ALL LIVING IN CUCKOOLAND (2006)

 

1) Justice; 2) Dead Men Don't Talk; 3) We're All Living In Cuckooland; 4) Falling; 5) Love Is Enough; 6) Tell Me Tell Me; 7) (Don't Want To) Find That Girl; 8) Captain; 9) I Don't Want To Throw You; 10) I'm Compressing The Comb On A Cockerel's Head.

 

Anyone up for a new Budgie album in the 21st century? I originally had sort of assumed that after the release of Deliver Us From Evil, Shelley just retired the band's name and went on to have a solo career or something — apparently, though, «Budgie» as a touring band functioned all the way into 1988, and even after the last gigs Shelley never did much of anything except for a few collaborations on side projects. But supposedly, boredom got the better of him after a while, and there you have it — a brand new Budgie album in 2006, replete with a typically Budgie title and a typically Budgie album cover.

 

The music, unfortunately, is not at all typical Budgie. The original post-1974 drummer Steve Williams returns as a loyal servant, but the guitar player is brand new: a guy called Simon Lees, who was actually born one year before the release of Budgie's first album, and began his guitar training at the height of the hair metal era, and it still shows, no matter how much he is trying to hide it. In any case, the guitar sound on this album is largely bad — overcompressed, genetically modified, synthetically treated, and way too much influenced by nu-metal — and the aesthetics of the album is way too heavily rooted in the Twisted Sister / Poison camp, which is all the more surprising considering that Budgie did not even have the proper time to live into the hair metal age. It's as if at least half of these songs were really written circa 1984-85 (and why not?), then given the «modern» production treatment.

 

The record is not without a certain bizarre charm: Shelley and Lees use the pop metal idiom without subscribing to the pop metal lifestyle — this is not a collection of "let's party" anthems, cock rockers, and power ballads; the approach has elements of unpredictability, surrealism, and Budgie's obfuscated social criticism. But what of it all if the riffs are no good? To be sure, songs like ʻJusticeʼ and ʻDead Men Don't Talkʼ are full of metal riffage, but this is just metal riffage like tons of other metal riffage — no revelatory note combinations, no juicy tones, no personality whatsoever. In addition, Shelley has to really strain his aging voice to outshout the plastic electric noise, and he was never a screamer and still isn't.

 

Ultimately, the only songs on the record that have a bit of emotional resonance are the quiet ones. The title track is a decent ballad, leaning towards toothless adult contemporary, but with some pretty harmonies in the chorus — pretty enough to make me believe that, perhaps, we are all living in cuckooland indeed, or else why would we have to bother with this record in the first place? ʻCaptainʼ is a bit of acoustic folk that would be 100% filler on a classic Budgie album, but here becomes a highlight just because it is one of the few not-overproduced, not-overscreamed tracks. Is this praise? Doesn't sound much like praise to me.

 

Strangest of the lot is ʻI'm Compressing The Comb On A Cockerel's Headʼ, a track that sports a trademark Budgie title but sounds like a cross between Devo and Limp Bizkit, spludging along to a martial-industrial-metal rhythm and a particularly ugly vocal melody, as if Shelley tried to imitate the death metal growl to the best of his abilities. Adding insult to injury, almost the entire second half of the lengthy track is given over to a «phone-dialing» synth solo (or is that a synth guitar solo?) the likes of which went out of style at the end of the New Wave era, I think. Again, there's a certain bizarre attraction stemming from the stupidity of it all, but should we give the songs a thumbs up just because they're so ridiculous?

 

The real bad news is that the record will most likely confuse and baffle veteran Breadfans who'd like to be in for the kill, without attracting any new fans because that task is impossible unless Shelley somehow gets some of his Metallica admirers to guest star on the record. Ultimately, the best thing about this unfortunate «reunion» attempt remains the album cover — yes, the lanky bassist still retains some style, but the substance, alas, is still long gone and can never be re­covered again. Thumbs down.

 

ADDENDA

 

RADIO SESSIONS 1974 & 1978 (2005)

 

CD I: 1) Breadfan; 2) You Are The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milk; 3) Hammer And Tongs; 4) Zoom Club; 5) Parents; 6) Rocking Man.

CD II: 1) Melt The Ice Away; 2) In The Grip Of A Tyrefitters Hand; 3) Smile Boy Smile; 4) In For The Kill / You Are The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milk; 5) Love For You And Me; 6) Parents; 7) Who Do You Want For Your Love; 8) Don't Dilute The Water.

 

Budgie proudly subscribe to the rule that says the less important a certain band is, the more archive releases it has to put up on the market (because ten cheaply assembled albums will even­tually sell more than two, even if the total number of copies will still be hardly enough to cover your cigarette expenses). There's quite a few packages of outtakes, rarities, and live performances out there for the hardcore devoted fan — we are only going to focus on a couple, and rather brief­ly at that, because...

 

...well, see, one of the reasons why Budgie never put out a live album in the Seventies (just like Black Sabbath) is that they were never a particularly outstanding live band, and this double live CD is a very representative example. We have two shows here, one recorded relatively early in the band's career (London, 1974) and one from the Impeckable era (Los Angeles, 1978) — different drummers, but Bourge is the guitarist on both shows, so you could theoretically hope for the best. Unfortunately, even if you disregard the questionable sound quality of the 1974 show (the 1978 one is much better), it is not easy to recommend them as useful additions to the studio versions, let alone suitable replacements.

 

Technically, the band sounds good, although Shelley occasionally finds it hard to sing and play bass at the same time (ironically, he has his worst flubs on ʻBreadfanʼ, where you'd rather expect Bourge to slip every once in a while on the speedy riff). But the songs are performed very close to the studio originals and inevitably pale whenever Tony finds it impossible to reproduce all the original overdubs (he does try to insert a few screeching gulls on the early version of ʻParentsʼ, with questionable effects, but he hardly even tries any more on the later version). There is no extra improvisation whatsoever, with the exception of an obligatory-unnecessary drum solo in the middle of ʻRocking Manʼ; and the songs are not taken to a new level of wild wild metal energy because... because, I guess, Budgie are not really wild wild metal people.

 

Basically, the guys were hard working pros with a knack for a certain humbleness (and maybe so much for the better, because Burke Shelley as a Robert Plant-style swaggering frontman would only embarrass people) — perfect for the studio, not so interesting for the stage. Add to this the occasional problem with the setlist (ʻHammer And Tongsʼ does not cease to be a lame ʻDazed And Confusedʼ rip-off just because it is rolled out on the arena), the occasional problem with the sound, and most likely you will not be returning to these recordings fairly soon. Which should not prevent you from having at least one good listen, though. But Live In Japan or Live After Death this ain't, not by a mile.

 

THE BBC RECORDINGS (1972-1982; 2006)

 

CD I: 1) Rape Of The Locks; 2) Rocking Man; 3) Young Is A World; 4) Hot As A Docker's Armpit; 5) Breaking All The House Rules; 6) Crime Against The World; 7) Napoleon Bona-Part 1 & 2; 8) Forearm Smash; 9) Panzer Divi­sion Destroyed; 10) Wild Fire; 11) Breadfan [lost edit].

CD II: 1) Sky High Percentage; 2) In The Grip Of A Tyrefitter's Hand; 3) I Turned To Stone; 4) Superstar; 5) She Used Me Up; 6) Forearm Smash; 7) Crime Against The World; 8) I Turned To Stone; 9) Truth Drug; 10) Superstar; 11) She Used Me Up; 12) Panzer Division Destroyed.

 

Okay, here is another one worth a quick mention. Again collected from radio transmissions, but this time spread out over a much larger period and concentrating way too heavy on the John Thomas stage of the band, including not one, but two mini-shows (or excerpts from shows) at the Reading Festival, in 1980 and 1982 respectively, which explains why some of those less-than-stellar songs are captured here in two versions.

 

Of course, fans might be interested in the John Thomas version of the band performing ʻBread­fanʼ — just to see if he can nail that fabulous riff, and you know what? He comes somewhat close, but he can't, which is probably why they cut down the number of bars repeating it, and did not include the number in the original transmission either (it is qualified as a «lost edit» here, with a lopped off intro and probably a lopped off outro as well, since it concludes with a lengthy show-off guitar solo without returning to the opening theme). Just a somewhat telling bit of difference between the old and the new guitarist — or, rather, between classic Seventies and early Eighties styles of metal playing.

 

On the other hand, the disc is historically treasurable for containing some of the earliest live Budgie recordings caught on tape — four tracks from a 1972 show at the Paris Theatre in London, with Bourge setting the world on fire with his soloing on ʻYoung Is A Worldʼ and ʻHot As A Dockers Armpitʼ, the band still riding that old Sabbath vibe for all it's worth. The two tracks from 1976 are not nearly as stellar — ʻSky High Percentageʼ is a throwaway from one of their weakest albums, and the classic riff of ʻTyrefitter's Handʼ sounds so much shriller and sharper in the stu­dio that they might as well have left it out of the setlist for good.

 

And the new stuff? Well, one thing's good: the decision not to include (or perform) any of the awful songs from Deliver Us From Evil, except for one (ʻTruth Drugʼ, which was originally not transmitted, but the Devil made them excavate it anyway). I certainly do not mind them doing their AC/DC-type schtick like ʻForearm Smashʼ and ʻSuperstarʼ, except that AC/DC have ways to make their stuff even more exciting live than it is in the studio and these guys are too laid back to do it. The audiences love it, though — from both festivals, you have your fans going wild and screaming their heads off for "Budgie! Budgie! Budgie!" (One question, though: why didn't you buy the records, if you loved the band so much?).

 

In any case, this collection still does not properly satisfy the demand for a Budgie live album, and makes one wonder how the hell is it at all possible that not one single complete recording of a classic era Budgie live show has survived in acceptable quality to complete and dignify this series of semi-satisfying archive releases. Was the band too hard up back in those days, or were they just too lazy to set up a bunch of recording equipment, letting the BBC do it all for them? (Note that there is at least one officially released live album from the reunion era — 2002's Life In San Antonio, but the setlist there is way too unappealing, with way too many songs from the expen­dable 1980-82 era, for me to bother).

 

Part 5. From Punk To Hair Metal (1977-1988)

10,000 MANIACS

SECRETS OF THE I CHING (1983)

 

1) Grey Victory; 2) Poor De Chirico; 3) Death Of Manolete; 4) Tension; 5) Daktari; 6) Pit Viper; 7) Katrina's Fair; 8) The Latin One; 9) National Education Week; 10) My Mother The War.

 

There are two kinds of people who may piss themselves silly over the classic sound and style of 10,000 Maniacs: the Natalie Mer­chant fan and the Robert Buck fan. Right from the start I will proclaim that I tend to gravitate towards the latter, hold no animosity towards the former, but can­not distinctly acknowledge myself as either. So the Maniacs, after all, are not my cup of tea. But they, too, have their strange place in history.

 

Secrets Of The I Ching is, as its name so bluntly tells us, sung entirely in Chinese and boldly pro­mises to succeed where so many professional and eminent Sinologists of the past have met their final destiny. The blending of traditional Southeast Asian motives and instruments with the New Wave standards of the time is an interesting and well-rewarding move, and if only all of us knew what the hell the band is singing about...

 

...okay, now that I've actually heard the record, it's really none of that. Robert Buck and John Lombardo on guitars, Steve Gustafson on bass, Dennis Drew on keyboards, and Jerry August­y­ni­ak on drums mostly just play unassuming, rhythmic, almost danceable folk-pop, close in attitude to early R.E.M., over which a 20-year-old, but already not-so-hot, Natalie Merchant sings or, more correctly, «melodically recites» something that may or may not be considered poetry.

 

The band's debut, which sounds like it was written, recorded, and mixed in about two hours' time (but don't worry, most of this band's music gives that impression), together with a short preceding EP (Human Conflict Number Five), originally came out on a small indie label, cheerfully called Christian Burial Music, and quite soon became all but completely unavailable until the two were eventually combined on one 1990 CD called Hope Chest: The Fredonia Recordings 1982-1983. It is not, however, a typical case of «early immature crap»: I see nothing in these tunes that makes them that much inferior to the band's hit years to come.

 

Frankly speaking, for quite some time I saw nothing in these tunes at all. But the reason was plain: like so many others, I made the mistake of concentrating too much on the importance of Natalie Merchant's persona. And taking a serious liking to this lady is a stark exercise in volun­tary auto-washing of the brain. She has a technically nice, but never ever special voice with a ve­ry limited range (if any; she would get a little better with the years, but even her biggest admirers will have to admit that vocalizing is not her main strength). Her «poetry» is competent, I guess, but just as most male rock poets have a hard time beating the standards once set by Dylan, so do fe­male rock poets have an equally hard time beating Joni Mitchell, and besides, this is music, not words, that we are supposed to be getting. Finally, her attitude — self-righteous, deadly serious, and so often bent on generic liberal moralizing — is just plain annoying. Did we, in 1983, really need another naïve, but pretentious 20-year old reminding us about the horrors of atomic warfare ('Grey Victory')? I wouldn't be surprised were I to find out that the band took special care that a brand new copy of the album, along with a notarially certified Russian translation of the lyrics, be FedExed to Yuri Andropov in person.

 

But it all changes once you realize that the major creative force behind the Maniacs is never really Merchant. No, the best thing about this band, the one saving grace that prevents it from be­ing forever dated as Eighties' college rock radio fodder is the guitar playing of Robert Buck and  John Lombardo. Buck, in particular, is every bit the equal of his namesake Peter (what is it with Eighties' folk-pop-post-punk and awesome guitar players named Buck?), tossing out not particu­larly catchy, but extremely nice-sounding riffs, now turning to Byrds-y jangle, now to distortion-less post-punk chainsaw, now to wah-wah-emphasized whoos and whees: the «Johnny Marr» ef­fect to Merchant's clumsy Morriseyisms, even if the band's first EP preceded the Smiths' debut by a good two years.

 

It also helps that most songs move along at a nice pace. The fast tempos quench any attempts that Natalie might make at actually singing the lyrics rather than scattering them all over the place in jagged, disconnected syntagms, but they are the album's only chance at avoiding plunging the lis­tener into a general state of lethargy — were all of this reduced to slow balladry, not even the gui­tarists' talents could have done anything, because they sure as hell can play, but even surer is the fact that not a single member of this band can write a memorable tune to save Natalie Merchant's life. As it is, it's just a joy listening to these quirky little blasts of notes that they give out, no mat­ter how derivative or even how out-of-place they could be.

 

For the record, the band's idea of «diversity» is to change, occasionally, from the standard «fast post-punk» formula to ska ('The Latin One'), reggae ('Poor De Chirico', 'National Education Week'), calypso ('Daktari'), and even rough disco ('Pit Viper') — not bad, and it helps, but it's not like they do any of these genres any better than they do their primary schtick. 'Grey Victory' and 'My Mother The War', bookmarking the record, are still the best examples of what these guys can do. Maybe it wouldn't have been a bad idea to dump the vocalist altogether — after a few listens and a newly-gained appreciation for all the guitar work, I have learned to tolerate Merchant, but to believe that she may be one of the album's assets is completely out of the question. At this jun­cture at least, 10,000 Maniacs could just as easily hire an assistant professor from the Berkeley College of Letters and Science in her place — granted, that would have cost 'em.

 

THE WISHING CHAIR (1985)

 

1) Can't Ignore The Train; 2) Scorpio Rising; 3) Just As The Tide Was A Flowing; 4) Lilydale; 5) Back O' The Moon; 6) Maddox Table; 7*) The Colonial Wing; 8) Grey Victory; 9) Among The Americans; 10) Everyone A Puzzle Lo­ver; 11) Cotton Alley; 12*) Daktari; 13) My Mother The War; 14) Tension Makes A Tangle; 15) Arbor Day.

 

Recording for Elektra Records now, with Joe Boyd as producer — upon first sight, an excellent choice, considering his immaculate folk-rock pedigree (The Incredible String Band, Fairport Con­vention, Nick Drake, Maria Muldaur, you name it). Real improvements, though? A few. Natalie Merchant is slowly, but steadily learning to sing (as in, «draw out vowels for a short extra length of time, sometimes raising or lowering the pitch»). Keyboard player Dennis Drew is given a little more breathing space, sometimes even a chance to solo (nice organ work on 'Just As The Tide Was A Flowing'). And overall, the sound is, of course, fuller and denser than it used to be.

 

Elsewhere, the approach remains the same — so much so that the band has even carried over some of its supposedly best tunes from I Ching; 'Grey Victory', 'Daktari', and 'My Mother The War' are sometimes said to have been re-recorded for this album, but they sound completely iden­tical on my copies — the only real re-recording is 'Tension', now called 'Tension Makes A Tangle' and truly sounding much better, due to a much more self-confident (and just plain loud) delivery from Merchant.

 

The bad news is that they still haven't figured out how to write songs, and yet are already ready to mellow out a bit, loosening the rhythm section and too often misusing the talents of Robert Buck. The latter, now that Joe Boyd himself has recognized him as a folk player, happily hauls out the mandolin, an instrument which is usually great for providing counter-melodies and extra flouri­shes, but is too medievalistic to carry a good hook, if you know what I mean. And there is a man­dolin track here on at least half of the songs, I think, sometimes with accordeon to boot.

 

Yet we cannot really fault the producer, because he clearly has no intention of spoiling the band's vibe — on the contrary, he just wants to clean it up. In fact, given that the band was signed by an English manager and recorded their major label debut in London with a famous British producer, the idea could have been to establish some sort of cross-Atlantic alternative to R.E.M. (although, ironically, R.E.M. themselves had only just recorded Fables Of The Reconstruction in London with the same Joe Boyd at the wheel) — despite the fact that all the band members were American, there is a lot of subtle «Britishness» around The Wi­shing Chair, from Merchant's angry anti-colonial ode ('The Colonial Wing', originally a B-side, now part of the album) to straightahead immersions into Anglo-Saxon folk history ('Just As The Tide...' — a rearrangement of a traditional tune).

 

The overall sound is still classy and pleasant, and the tempos are still generally upbeat, helping to overcome the lack of instantly captivating melodies. Given time, the loudest of these, e. g. 'Scor­pio Rising', will start penetrating the spirit; as usual, one needs to scrape Merchant's residue off the ears though — her presence may have improved, but it is still blocking the music rather than supporting it; and her lyrics may have become more coherent and «tolerably intellectual», but there is still no serious incentive to start analysing them seriously, no matter how serious are the particular problems she is singing about.

 

Word of the day is «transitional» — the band makes it into the big leagues, but does not yet pro­perly learn to behave in these leagues. Definitely not a record to be used as one's introduction to the stern joys of 1980's college rock.

 

IN MY TRIBE (1987)

 

1) What's The Matter Here?; 2) Hey Jack Kerouac; 3) Like The Weather; 4) Cherry Tree; 5) The Painted Desert; 6) Don't Talk; 7) Gun Shy; 8) My Sister Rose; 9) A Campfire Song; 10) City Of Angels; 11) Verdi Cries.

 

This is where 10,000 Maniacs definitively become the backing act behind Natalie Merchant. With John Lombardo out of the band, she gets around 30% more songwriting credits, and if previously it could seem like the lyrics and the music were created independently of each other, or, even more radically, like some of the lyrics were just randomly thrown on to pre-written and arranged backing tracks, now it is the opposite: most of the songs feel constructed around Natalie's ever more aspiring, self-assured, and moralistic verbal paintings.

 

Musically speaking, there is little to speak of. 'Like The Weather' has a beautiful ascending riff, a cozy little melodic invention that, unfortunately, happens to be an unreachable peak for all the other songs. To be utterly fair, though, it's not like R.E.M., generally considered a far greater band than the Maniacs, had a great amount of unique melodies. You can't get really far away, af­ter all, if you are usually content to stay within the folksy-jangly formula. And for some bands, it is preferable to stay within that formula — the attempt to mess around with Mexican rhythms on 'My Sister Rose' really comes across as corny; if the intended effect was to lighten up the general­ly somber attitude of the record, they couldn't have miscalculated worse. Or, perhaps, the effect was to show how much they suck at faking gaiety, so be happy now that we're back to our usual state of morose judge-ment-ality.

 

These days, when liberalism, political correctness, and active-cause-support are almost a sine qua non of all «respectable» music acts (up yours, Ted Nugent!), it is sort of hard to take seriously a record that almost literally reads as an in-yer-face manifesto of all these things. Very little is vei­led even thinly, as Merchant takes on child abusers (track 1), the issue of illiteracy (track 4), army problems (track 7), capitalist greed (track 9), and then moves on to scale truly Biblical heights (the last two tracks that seem to already transcend the problems of humanity). But, on the other hand, every type of young brain in every generation needs to learn about these things, and not everyone can be bothered to read Charles Dickens instead of easily-listening to 'Campfire Song' (a collaboration between the Maniacs and Michael Stipe, by the way).

 

Plus, the more this girl is in the business, the more charisma she is able to raise: her singing has now become fully confident, yet at the same time intelligently restrained — a great benefit, set­ting her apart from the punky female crowd attitude that would be soon reshaping itself into the Riot Grrrl approach. The charm of 'What's The Matter Here?', for instance, is not in the fact that, technically, Merchant refuses to give a definitive answer to the question of whether or not one has a moral right to report the abusive behaviour of the parents in your neighbourhood; she is not so much refusing to do it as scorning all those who refuse. The charm is that, as much anger as there is in the song, she does not give it away. When performing these blasting accusations live, she'd be prancing around the microphone as if the song in question were 'Let's Go To The Hop' (and technically, her prancing is awful, choreographed the way a two-year old girl dances to her Se­same Street tape — but intentional, I guess). It looks and feels odd — but, somehow, right.

 

Of course, there is always Robert Buck, who consistently saves all the songs, one by one, with an endless variation of same-but-different takes on the folk jangle, sometimes going U2-ish on the louder numbers ('Don't Talk'). So it is a perfectly healthy listen up until 'Verdi Cries', on which Merchant is left all alone with a piano and a chamber string section, a track that is a mighty fan favorite but, to me, sounds like a second-rate Elton John imitation — the same type of epic piano ballad, only without the patented hook in the chorus (certainly the la-la-la's don't count). Lyrics are good, but the song just goes to show that, at this point at least, Natalie without her boys is still a musical non-entity.

 

As impressively as R.E.M.'s best material seems to have outlived its time, In My Tribe remains chained to its epoch, and is unlikely to inspire new generations. But as a curious and moving do­cument of that epoch, it deserves salvation — and then again, there are always those who prefer clear, clean, ringing-out girl singing to the mumble-grumble of Michael Stipe. So thumbs up any­way, and then it's up to you the tight-collared college-rock lover to make your choice. Ooh, fun fact, almost forgot: apparently there used to be a decent cover of Cat Stevens' 'Peace Train' on this album, but once the band learned of Mr. Yusuf Islam's approval of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, they pulled it off all subsequent releases. Up yours, too, Mr. Islam. Should have known better in 1971 than to write silly peace anthems instead of doing the RIGHT thing. And how are you going to keep up your Al-Qaeda contributions now, without these much needed royalties from 10,000 Ma­niacs' albums? :)

 

BLIND MAN'S ZOO (1989)

 

1) Eat For Two; 2) Please Forgive Us; 3) The Big Parade; 4) Trouble Me; 5) You Happy Puppet; 6) Headstrong; 7) Poison In The Well; 8) Dust Bowl; 9) The Lion's Share; 10) Hateful Hate; 11) Jubilee.

 

Every bad poet, given time and persistence, will produce at least one masterpiece — and if he is really, really bad, he might even produce two. Anyway, 'Eat For Two' is a tremendous song. It is impossible to explain why — it is written exactly the way all of the other upbeat tunes by 10,000 Maniacs are usually written, but somehow Merchant, banging on solid rock, managed to dislodge a single speck of gold lodged in one tiny nook. The wobbly, paranoid guitar backing from Buck, joining with Natalie's grim recounting — "I eat for two, walk for two, breathe for two..." — is a perfect setting for one of the darkest songs about accidental pregnancy ever written (actually, I'm not even sure what other songs about accidental pregnancy I can remember at present).

 

What ma­kes it even more cool is the ambiguity of the message — is this conveying happiness? tenderness? anxiety? desperation? horror? a little bit of everything? who knows? All the soon-to-be-mothers in America must have been eagerly listening to the song back in 1989, and now, from a retro perspective, it is clear that this is exactly that one song that no one could ever do better than Ms. Merchant. Any other gal would have overcooked it. Here, she's perfect.

 

Unfortunately, the rest of the album does feel very much like a blind man's zoo, no matter how sincerely the band tries to convince us it's really a metaphor for the whole wide world we live in. Take the paranoid guitar waves and the morose chorus away from 'Eat For Two', and here is your recipé for all the other upbeat songs on the record. And things only get screwed up more by the bluntness. If Merchant wants to ask the world for forgiveness on behalf of the entire United States of America for their nasty imperialist behavior, it may not be a particularly spectacular artistic choice to call the song 'Please Forgive Us' — and make sure that the song's major (and only!) ho­ok is the title itself, delivered in a supremely guilt-ridden tone. Yes, liberal guilt is a noble feeling alright, but converting it into popular music as if that were the sole purpose of popular music ma­kes the results not any more different from yer average «Christian rock» on the other side. And don't even get me started on the other titles — I mean, 'Hateful Hate'? Is this supposed to be a good title just because no one ever used it before? Isn't there, like, a good reason for the fact that no one ever used it before?

 

Three songs break the paralyzed formula. 'Trouble Me', wisely chosen as the other single along with 'Eat For Two', is a relatively simple and touching fast ballad — not memorable at all, but a light little «breather» in between all the preaching. 'Dust Bowl', lyrically, is almost like a sequel to 'Eat For Two', and musically, is full of beautiful interlocking jangly folk lines. And for the coda ('Jubilee'), they enlist a small string section to deliver a six-minute long chamber piece, also not particularly memorable, original, or even good, but... different at least.

 

Not that it changes things all that much. In strict accordance with the band's agenda, they just give you an attitude-filled diary of world events — Natalie Merchant wants to be your conscience, not your entertainment. Obviously, good music under such conditions can only be produced in a somewhat accidental manner. BUT! — and I do mean but! — before writing it all off, you'd bet­ter check it out with your conscience first. Who knows, you might find some parts of it, or even all of it, misplaced somewhere. If so, I reverse my judgement, Blind Man's Zoo is a damn fine record to help one grow back the damaged parts.

 

(There is also a great recipé to help you confound your friends and befuddle your enemies — put Blind Man's Zoo together with Ted Nugent's Love Grenade on one playlist and hit shuffle. Nu­clear reaction guaranteed). Thumbs down, by the way, but I guess that was already understood.

 

OUR TIME IN EDEN (1992)

 

1) Noah's Dove; 2) These Are Days; 3) Eden; 4) Few And Far Between; 5) Stockton Gala Days; 6) Gold Rush Brides; 7) Jezebel; 8) How You've Grown; 9) Candy Everybody Wants; 10) Tolerance; 11) Circle Dream; 12) If You Intend; 13) I'm Not The Man.

 

Merchant's last studio album with the Maniacs is a bit of an enigma. In all respects, it feels terrib­ly, almost excruciatingly mature. Earlier on, you could justify your bad attitude towards the band by laughing at the simplistic grey melodies, or poking fun at the preachy lyrics, or ironically dis­missing Natalie's half-spoken poetry-bent vocals. Our Time In Eden is hardly more enjoyable than any other of their albums — same old problems all over the place — but it's their one record that I, for one, find absolutely impossible to laugh off.

 

Virtually no traces left here of the once bouncy, pop-rock-driven band that liked to deliver a so­cially conscious message like a bunch of frenzied schoolchildren. Even the fast tempos are driven mostly through somber moods, with the guitarists laying on echoes, low keyboard notes high up in the mix, and Merchant, for most of the time, assuming a wisened-up world-weary tone. Fur­thermore, the lyrics have taken a turn for the disturbingly personal, and even the socially con­scious bits are veiled. 'I'm Not The Man' is by far the only song here that usually receives a lite­ral interpretation — a song about an unjustly jailed and executed person — but it does not really come ac­ross as anything other than just another metaphor, a comparison of her own inner tribu­lations with the feelings of an I'm-not-the-man kind of person.

 

Also, growth and development abound as the band, once again, brings in a swarm of outside mu­sicians to beef up the sound (including Merchant's later replacement, Mary Ramsey, on violin), and even goes for an R'n'B-type approach, with prominent horns and dance rhythms, on two of the tracks ('Few And Far Between' and 'Candy Everybody Wants' — still dark dance tunes, if you ask me), which they were smart enough to release as singles, because, heck, even nerdy college students that form the bulk of this band's audience like to move it sometimes.

 

Nothing, however, changes the golden rule: each single 10,000 Maniacs album sounds pretty, but contains only one or two truly treasurable songs surrounded by the Idea of Prettiness (And Depth), unattached to a material object. Here, the only two songs I could ever latch on were 'Stockton Ga­la Days', a grand nostalgic trip to somewhere highlighted by a very special enunciation of the line "...you'll never know!" (well, if you say so); and the above-mentioned 'I'm Not The Man', which was fortunate enough to combine Merchant's somber singing with an equally somber supporting line from a bassoon — almost spine-tingling, in a way, if you manage to set your spine in the pro­per tingle-ready position. Everything else, even the dance tunes, just spins around. Intelligently.

 

Still, dumb-good or dumb-bad, I go with a thumbs up, if only because I may not like this record, but it is the one 10,000 Maniacs record I would like to like. Melodic hooks aren't everything, after all, and even if, after a while, Out Of Eden stops dead in its tracks growing on you, there still lin­gers some strange, unexplainable goodness about it — like that neighbor girl with her plainest of plain faces, simplest of simple clothes, predictable attitudes, humble disposition, going around every day concentrated on minding her business; most likely, you'll never propose to her, but you're sure gonna miss her if she goes. (And I mean this as a musical metaphor — do not take this as an indirect evaluation of Natalie Merchant's sex appeal, which is an altogether different matter. Fairly complex, too).

 

MTV UNPLUGGED (1993)

 

1) These Are The Days; 2) Eat For Two; 3) Candy Everybody Wants; 4) I'm Not The Man; 5) Don't Talk; 6) Hey Jack Kerouac; 7) What's The Matter Here?; 8) Gold Rush Brides; 9) Like The Weather; 10) Trouble Me; 11) Jezebel; 12) Because The Night; 13) Stockton Gala Days; 14) Noah's Dove.

 

In August 1993, Merchant announced her resignation from 10,000 Maniacs, admittedly because she said she needed more creative freedom — which must have given a serious confidence boost to the other band members, considering that the average Joe must have always thought of the Ma­niacs as a bunch of backing musicians for Natalie's ego anyway: The Curse of the Frontwoman Dancing Barefoot.

 

Generously and wisely, the announcement did not take place until the recording, a few months earlier, of 10,000 Maniacs' most satisfying and well-summarizing album — the fact that it took the MTV Unplugged series to trigger it is a little quirky, but, want it or not, the project did yield quite a few excellent results, from Eric Clapton to Alice In Chains; and there are few people who got more lucky out of it than the original Maniacs.

 

First, the setlist: consistently consistent, with the band concentrating almost exclusively on their «hookiest» songs (bar just one or two soporific numbers from Our Time In Eden, which they did have to promote heavier than the rest, after all). Use this as your introduction to 10,000 Mani­acs and you might find yourself easily intrigued and steeped in wonder at why I keep dissing all the studio LPs for lacking interesting ideas. Even the single surprise of the evening, a cover of Springsteen / Patti Smith's 'Because The Night', adding nothing eye-opening to the original, does not take anything away either and is as nicely listenable as everything else.

 

Second, the setting is very convenient. One might simply want to package all of the studio origi­nals on a Best-Of, or demand a full-blown electric concert album instead — one would be wrong, because at heart all of these guys are folkies, and this is the first time that their sound seems to have soared in a new fit of inspiration ever since they traded in the sharper punk-folk style of the early 1980s in favour of blander overproduction of the second half of the decade. What I mean is — sometimes it is better to go all the way and prove why the «soft» in «soft rock» has any real reason to exist, than to try and mask it with pseudo-rock styles of production. If you're unhip, just come out and say so. MTV Unplugged sort of does, and gets my respect for it.

 

Third, the atmosphere sort of works wonders attenuating the soft, humble charms of Ms. Na­tasha. This is, after all, her only official live album with her band, and she sings each song to per­fection without ever trying to stick out with some on-the-spot vocal gimmick or to spice up the proceedings with lots of moralistic or simply forced banter (compare Ani DiFranco with her eternal nerve-wrecking giggle whose only purpose is to tell us «yeah, I do have a sense of humor — a stupid sense of humor, perhaps, but at least you will leave this show convinced that I'm not just a man-hating bitch, no matter how much the actual songs make you all feel inferior»). There's grace and loveliness and humility and it all compensates for the boredom and monotonousness.

 

Can't say, however, that I'm a great fan of this slowed-down, «sensitivized» new reading of 'Eat For Two' — the disturbing paranoia of the original was a much better message than this suddenly appearing aura of melancholic tenderness. But the rest of the songs, from the lovingly crafted gui­tar hook of 'Like The Weather' to the dark bassoon palette of 'I'm Not The Man', faithfully carry over all of the original good points, for which the band recruits lots of supporting musicians (in­cluding, once again, Mary Ramsey, soon to inherit the band from Natalie). Thumbs up without a question — even Republicans might want to add this to their collection, much as Ms. Merchant would want to personally remove all of their internal organs and feed them to Africa's starving children.

 

LOVE AMONG THE RUINS (1997)

 

1) Rainy Day; 2) Love Among The Ruins; 3) Even With My Eyes Closed; 4) Girl On A Train; 5) Green Children; 6) A Room For Everything; 7) More Than This; 8) Big Star; 9) You Won't Find; 10) All That Never Happens; 11) Shi­ning Light; 12) Across The Fields.

 

Here must it be said that, after leaving the band in 1986, co-founder Jon Lombardo refocused his attention on a new project — the neo-folk duo «John & Mary», along with classically trained vio­linist Mary Ramsey. With John & Mary regularly opening live sets for the Maniacs, it was only a matter of time before they started guesting in the studio, particularly Mary with her violin contri­butions to Our Time In Eden. And then it was only a matter of time before John was back in the band — and then along comes Mary, and did she ever want to be a steady chick... uh, sorry, wrong band.

 

No matter how hard it were to believe this from time to time, 10,000 Maniacs were a band, not a faceless vehicle behind Natalie Merchant's personality — and, by all means, they were not res­pon­sible for her departure, so there could hardly be any ethical question about their right to carry on. There could be a question of whether they would remain the same old boring 10,000 Maniacs, or perhaps profit from the occasion by incorporating elements of grindcore and acid jazz. They did not, and fans were relieved to still hear the same middle-of-the-road tepidness.

 

Nevertheless, Mary Ramsey still managed to bring on huge changes. Politics and social consci­ousness have been more or less expurgated from the lyrics and the vibe. From now on, the Mani­acs would be just a folk-rock act — singing light, friendly, comfortable fare about stars, hearts, shining lights, fields, grasshoppers, and fucking in the barn. (Okay, that last one is merely sur­mised). You want environmental concern and liberal propaganda — off you go to follow Mer­chant and her solo endeavours. This band is bound for the music-only train now.

 

Not only for this, but also out of some sort of general disenchantment reviewers generally fell upon Mary Ramsey, condemning her for lacking the spirit, the fire, the passion, the dedication, the blah blah blah of Merchant. All of this was true, but hardly a proper pretext for criticism; Ma­ry is simply different, a quiet, humble, seemingly introvert performer who, nevertheless, obvi­ous­ly loves this kind of music and has the proper combination of grace, intelligence, loveliness, and vocal training to be suited to it. Never ever pretending to possess even a tenth part of Merchant's rowdy personality, I can still see how it would be possible to like her overall approach even more, particularly if one cherishes humility in art above posturing.

 

The problem with Love Among The Ruins is definitely not Mary Ramsey — it is the ongoing inability of the band to create music that would rise one hair-width above «pleasant background». 'Rainy Day' is an A-grade, hopeful kick-starter, mainly because of its clever use of silence to in­troduce the vocal hook, but after that, they only come relatively close with 'Green Children', an epic retelling of an old legend about a pair of alien children (almost by chance falling upon a fine chord progression in the chorus), and then with a more than adequate cover of Roxy Music's 'More Than This' — predictably, they cannot beat the original (it would be impolite towards the lady to begin comparing her range and strength with that of Bryan Ferry), but they do not spoil it, either, and, frankly, at this point I'd rather hear them do lots of covers of good songs than pile up the world's stores of mediocrity by continuing to write their own ones.

 

Still, it almost feels cruel to give this new version of the band a negative rating. With the guitars, violins, and pianos sounding so nice, and Mary singing so nice, and the whole vibe being so nice, is it their fault that their parents forgot to endow them with songwriters' genes? Let us not forget that there are, on the other side of the globe, tons of great songwriters who could never even be­gin to assemble together this kind of a nice sound. Surely there must be something said for nice­ness. I place this album together with my ambient Brian Eno collection: the perfect way to rock you to an easy, pleasant, revitalizing sleep, for about fifty minutes.

 

THE EARTH PRESSED FLAT (1999)

 

1) The Earth Pressed Flat; 2) Ellen; 3) Once A City; 4) Glow; 5) On & On (Mersey Song); 6) Somebody's Heaven; 7) Cabaret; 8) Beyond The Blue; 9) Smallest Step; 10) In The Quiet Morning; 11) Time Turns; 12) Hidden In My Heart; 13) Who Knows Where The Time Goes.

 

This review will be kept short. Most of the band's second studio album with Mary Ramsey con­sists of outtakes from sessions held for their first. Therefore, everything said about Love Among The Ruins applies to this album, along with the self-understood warning that these songs were not seen fit for inclusion by the Maniacs on an album which, all by itself, was already a typically tepid affair. With that in mind, fans of Mary Ramsey are welcome to enjoy the songs.

 

One strangely annoying aspect of this record, worth a brief mention, is that, starting from track six, the tunes initiate a continuous run with little in-between-song links eliminating pauses; these range from absent-minded mandolin plucking to ambient synthesizer landscapes to even a little bit of goofy rapping on Mary's part. Very annoying in all, because little bits of silence are some­times necessary on 10,000 Maniacs records to be able to tell when one song is over and the next one has begun, plus it adds a whiff of ambitious conceptuality that is not at all justified by the ma­terial. You can't really turn a third-rate album of second-rate outtakes into a work of art.

 

That said, there is some nice echoey picking on the title track, and 'Once A City' and 'On & On' both have their stereotypical bits of charm. And the cover of 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes', in the usual Maniacs fashion, works as a likeable, listenable tribute to an original whose true heights these guys would not even know where to begin to scale.

 

It is almost fortunate that The Earth Pressed Flat became the Maniacs' last studio album so far: almost, because a good reason behind this could be the band's realization that the world really did not give a damn about their getting it on — but instead, it turned out to be Robert Buck's death from liver failure one year later. Not that the story was over. Various band members still conti­nued to tour and record occasional live albums as 10,000 Maniacs (in the mid 2000-s, they even released a couple of them done by a line-up that included singer Oskar Saville from the Chicago band Rubygrass — and no, don't worry, Oskar Saville is really a girl), and as of 2011, with Mary Ramsey officially back in the band, rumor has it that they are planning on a new record — one that, if it does come out, will probably redefine the meaning of the word «tepid» one more time in its already cluttered history. I'll let you know.

 

MUSIC FROM THE MOTION PICTURE (2013)

 

1) I Don't Love You Too; 2) When We Walked On Clouds; 3) Gold; 4) Triangles; 5) Live For The Time Of Your Life; 6) It's A Beautiful Life; 7) Whippoorwill; 8) Fine Line; 9) Tiny Arrows; 10) Downhill; 11) Chautauqua Moon.

 

Okay, so I promised to let you know, after all, and yes, our favorite band, Ten Billion Maniacs, are back with a brand new album, although maybe not even all the fans know of its existence. Yes, three of the original members (the rhythm section and Dennis Drew on keyboards) still re­main, and, after a long period of absence, Mary Ramsey is back, too. The late Robert Buck has been replaced by Jeff Erickson, who not only handles the guitar duties, but also sings lead vocals on a couple of numbers — is that a first for the band or what?

 

Those who actually liked Love Among The Ruins, the band's friendly, but uninspired attempt at carrying on after the loss of Merchant, will be pleased to know that very little has changed — as of the early 2010s, guess what? they are still busy writing and recording friendly, but uninspired music. Mary Ramsey sounds warm and lovable, more like a young happy mother cuddling her child than a moody, insecure, guilt-ridden young girl; and her violin always stays in tune with her vocals. The guitars and keyboards breathe with folksy life, never subject to overproduction or encumbered with smart modern sound effects. Even Dennis Drew, at liberty to do what he wants, gets a lead vocal on the somberly waltzing ʽDownhillʼ, and it's a likable middle-aged «croak» (or «quack»?) that fits the song's mood perfectly. So?..

 

So the only problem is that, just like before, the individual songs never stick. Every second is more or less equally «pretty» as every next or preceding one, and if this band never «tore it up» when it was young, why should we even expect that it could add more dynamism when it got old? The overall genteel atmosphere knocks on your door with the opening seconds of ʽI Don't Love You Tooʼ (a message expressed by Ramsey with the outmost courteousness and gallantry) and fizzles away with the closing seconds of ʽChautaqua Moonʼ (a little chamber chat between violin and viola, probably overdubbed by Mary as she is credited for both). And rarely shifts to anything else, and practically never congeals into any memorable hooks.

 

On ʽIt's A Beautiful Lifeʼ, they dabble in a bit of experimentation, changing from folk-pop to reggae-pop, while the lyrics of the song present a slightly reworked version of ʽBig Rock Candy Mountainʼ. They pull it off without embarrassment, but reggae is a limiting form by itself, and they have no time or strength to do anything «special» with it other than offering a brief repose from the more standard formula. Other than that, I think I could only loosely single out ʽWhen We Walked On Cloudsʼ, with its focus on fast acoustic picking, «cloudy» organ background, and dreamy nostalgic singing, as a humble highlight that produces a «deeper» feeling than anything else on the album. But only loosely.

 

That said, I reiterate that the band still sounds adorable, and, at any rate, more enamored of and more sensitive towards this kind of music than most indie bands of the 21st century trying out this pastoral, idyllic, inoffensive brand of folk-rock. It might, indeed, be even better than Love Among The Ruins, since the band has aged and wisened up, and 10,000 Maniacs always tried to sound like they were «so much older then», and now they're sort of getting adequate, even if they do it at the expense of a near-total loss of songwriting skill. (Okay, I'm just beginning to get something back from the ringing electric riffs of ʽWhippoorwhillʼ... but it's such a thin, «wimpy» sound, it's going to take a while to woo these ears).

 

Anyway, no thumbs up, no thumbs down — strictly for the fans, but if you're a fan, seek it out while there still remains a micro-blip of it on the news radar. And that title: it's almost as if they knew they were releasing an album designed strictly for background listening!

 

TWICE TOLD TALES (2015)

 

1) Lady Mary Ramsey; 2) The Song Of Wandering Aengus; 3) She Moved Through The Fair; 4) Dark Eyed Sailor; 5) Misty Moisty Morning; 6) Bonny May; 7) Canadee-I-O; 8) Do You Love An Apple?; 9) Greenwood Sidey; 10) Carrickfergus; 11) Death Of Queen Jane.

 

As of 2015, it's officially alive — and no, it's not «Mary Ramsey and friends», it is still a more or less authentic version of the 10,000 Maniacs, with the original keyboardist, bassist, and drummer still loyally in place, and even John Lombardo making an appearance as the protective husband and the keeper of the flame, all in one. The only problem is that this time, they did not bother to compose any original material at all; instead, the idea is to really put the old «folk» back into «rock» and come out with an album of nothing but old folk tunes — an idea that both Natalie Mer­chant and the late Peter Buck would probably have abhorred. But it is 2015, and chances are that even if they manage to come up with another ʽDon't Talkʼ or ʽNoah's Doveʼ, nobody will give much of a damn anyway; so why, indeed, can't they just relax and be playful?

 

Actually, it's a nice little record. Not much to speak of: the arrangements are very straightforward and conventionally accessible — bass, drums, acoustic and soft electric guitars, some strings and keyboards, strictly middle of the road: no odd touches of electronica, and no attempts at strict acoustic-only «authenticity». It just sounds good, and Mary Ramsey's vocals still sound young and sweet, despite her recently pushing 50. Of course, it's also the kind of record that has already been produced countless times — more like Tales Told To Infinity, if you ask me — but if this material is handled with enough love and depth, well, it won't hurt to enjoy the old stuff once more in a very slightly different reading.

 

Oddities include the record being bookmarked by two strings-only performances of the instru­mental ʽLady Mary Ramseyʼ (amazing that, with a Mary Ramsey actually in the band, they never tried this stunt before!) and an accappella rendition of Yeats' ʽThe Song Of Wandering Aengusʼ, which sort of acts as a promotional introduction to our ageless national treasures, like a foreword or something. There the oddities end, and you get your predictable selection of Saxon, Irish, and Scottish ditties, shanties, canticles, and an occasional murder ballad thrown in.

 

I do reiterate that everything sounds nice, and they even put some effort in the arrangements — for instance, ʽShe Moved Through The Fairʼ gets a fairly complex set of overdubs and even a vaguely psychedelic guitar solo. The worst thing about the record is probably its album cover, cheesy to the point where you'd have to be a very cartoonish stereotype of a folk enthusiast to even want to pick up a CD like that at your local store; I do give my word that the music is much more rewarding than the album art would make it seem. However, none of the songs deserve individual comments — even Loreena McKennitt injects more personality into ʽCarrickfergusʼ than Mary Ramsey and 10,000 Maniacs, who, by the way, should really have changed their name to «10,000 Diligent, Respectful, Bookish Folkies» before giving us something like that.

 

Still, it's somehow nice to know that the band still has enough fans to support them, as the album was funded through PledgeMusic and released on an independent label — although why it feels nice, I'm not able to answer even to myself. I mean, when Jon Bon Jovi gets old and tired and washed up and penniless and starts appealing to fans on PledgeMusic, will that feel nice, too? Shouldn't that kind of compassion be reserved for people who still have something left to say even when long past their prime?.. Ah well, anyway, that would be taking it too seriously. All I know is, this record generated a decent vibe for fifty minutes, then sank into the swamp, but may­be it still made me a better man in the process; who really knows?

 

PLAYING FAVORITES (2016)

 

1) What's The Matter Here?; 2) Like The Weather; 3) Love Among The Ruins; 4) Trouble Me; 5) More Than This; 6) Can't Ignore The Train; 7) Stockton Gala Days; 8) Because The Night; 9) Rainy Day; 10) Candy Everybody Wants; 11) My Sister Rose; 12) Hey Jack Kerouac; 13) These Are Days; 14) My Mother The War.

 

Apparently, the performance used for this live album was recorded prior to Twice Told Tales (on September 13, 2014, at an arts center in Jamestown), but they held off releasing the recording for almost two years for some reason. This is not the first live album for the band — besides the obvious Unplugged, there is also an obscure 2006 release (only sold on tour) Live Twenty-Five, com­memorating the band's jubilee and featuring short-term lead vocalist Oskar Saville. This one, however, seems to be more widely distributed, and besides, it features no less than four original members of the band — everybody except for Merchant and the deceased Robert Buck is present, making the record almost, you know... legitimate.

 

The kick is that everything sounds very nice. They run through their own minor hits and classics without any glitches whatsoever — new lead guitarist Jeff Erickson is respectful of Robert Buck's original style, and the extra guest musicians (a brass section, a cellist, and an additional backing singer) flesh out their more musically ambitious songs, like ʽCandy Everybody Wantsʼ, to near-perfection. Of course, considering how thoroughly the tracks have been cleansed of any signs of audience participation (they even choose the fade-in, fade-out principle to present the material, with no in-between-songs banter whatsoever), the problem is that most of the performances just faithfully reproduce studio originals. But then again, considering that most of us probably have serious trouble remembering how any of those 10,000 Maniacs hits used to go, I guess this isn't too much of a crime, considering how technically smooth the performances are.

 

And then, of course, this is the only live album by the 10,000 Maniacs where you get to hear Natalie Merchant songs performed by Mary Ramsey — well worth hearing at least out of sheer curiosity. (They also do three tunes from Love Among The Ruins, but you can tell that, as much as they love Mary as a bandmate, the band's post-Merchant musical output is not exactly bursting with «favorites»). All her life, Merchant was a crusader, unlike Ramsey, who seems more like the quiet, earthy, folk-loving type; so it is interesting to hear her add a touch of that earthiness to the band's «socially troubled» classics, and I would not hasten to declare her performances less touching or less tense than Merchant's just because her voice is lower or because her phrasing is a tad slower. These are not her songs, but she still does them a special kind of justice.

 

The only surprise on the record is the final track: not only do they drastically rearrange ʽMy Mother The Warʼ, making it sound much more like modern bombastic indie rock à la Arcade Fire or British Sea Power rather than typical New Wave pop-rock from the early Eighties that it used to be, but they also invite returning founding member John Lombardo to sing on it — probably not a very good decision, because the man cannot sing worth a broken nickel, but a touching gesture all the same. Actually, the entire album is a touching gesture: if you really like the old 10,000 Maniacs classics (enough to keep on relistening to them on a regular basis), I heartily recommend it as a tasteful diversion from the usual routine. If you think they are just all right, though, I doubt that switching from Merchant to Ramsey will work wonders in terms of your love, recognition, and support.

 

ADDENDA:

 

CAMPFIRE SONGS: THE POPULAR, OBSCURE & UNKN­O­W­N RECORDINGS (2004)

 

CD I: 1) Planned Obsolescence; 2) My Mother The War; 3) Tension; 4) Scorpio Rising; 5) Like The Weather; 6) Don't Talk; 7) What's The Matter Here?; 8) Hey Jack Kerouac; 9) Verdi Cries; 10) Trouble Me; 11) Poison In The Well; 12) You Happy Puppet; 13) Eat For Two; 14) Stockton Gala Days; 15) Candy Everybody Wants; 16) These Are Days; 17) Because The Night; CD II: 1) Poppy Selling Man; 2) Can't Ignore The Train (demo); 3) Peace Train; 4) Wildwood Flower; 5) Hello In There; 6) To Sir With Love; 7) Everyday Is Like Sunday; 8) These Days; 9) Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You; 10) Starman; 11) Let The Mystery Be; 12) Noah's Dove (demo); 13) Circle Dream (alternate lyrics demo); 14) Eden (alternate lyrics demo).

 

Not to be confused with the Animal Collective album of the same name — which, odd enough, had only just come out one year earlier — this is a 2-CD compilation of assorted 10,000 Maniacs stuff, compiled in strict accordance with the common and abominable principle: «layman gets one half, fan man gets one half, tax man gets to laugh». Meaning, of course, that each of the ten thousand maniac admirers of the band, before buying this, would do better to find an average Joe on the street and convince him to split the deal in half. Only that-a way will everybody be happy. One CD of greatest hits, one CD of obscure demos and outtakes. How else does one manage?

 

That said, if the split does not happen, the average Joe may still remain pleased, and the average maniac will be comforted by the fact that the second disc is actually very strong — much stronger, in fact, than any average original LP by the band. Both CDs are quite comparable in quality, so that, without any additional information, I doubt that one will be easily able to tell which of the recordings are «popular» and which ones are «obscure».

 

There is a simple reason behind this, though: the absolute majority of the songs on disc 2 are co­ver versions, and the Maniacs had always been a credible, trustworthy cover band, specializing in doing justice to source material without ever threatening to improve upon it. Even when they are experimenting — for instance, going wildly Jamaican on David Bowie's 'Starman' — they still sound passionately nice, and when they are not and are just going for the goods, they sound stately and gracious, e. g. 'These Days', which Merchant interprets along the same Gothic lines as Nico used to, but her voice will, of course, be always more palatable to everyone who feels un­easy about Nico's odd-accented iciness. Equally fine are the covers of John Prine, Morrisey and Tom Waits, and there is even a wild two-minute turkey chase fiddle romp as the band rip their way through the Carter Family's 'Wildwood Flower'. Finally, their faith in Cat Stevens is rein­stated, as the original cover version of 'Peace Train' once again makes its way onto a 10,000 Ma­niacs album. Someone just got smarter!

 

Add to this a couple fun collaborations (a live version of 'To Sir, With Love' with a sentimental duet between Merchant and Michael Stipe, and another duet with David Byrne on Iris DeMent's 'Let The Mystery Be') as well as one excellent original outtake (Merchant's 'Poppy Selling Man', driven by the finest organ riff these guys ever came up with; not the tiniest clue as to what made them keep the song in the vaults all those years), and it really makes you wonder how come they missed their chance at becoming America's hottest shit when they had so much going for them. They could even write good songs — they... sort of... chose not to.

 

Anyway, if only the first CD were to be replaced with Unplugged, the resulting package would really make for a killer collection of non-overlapping material. On the other hand, if you already know that one album from the Maniacs is your uncrossable threshold, go for Campfire Songs, and do not be afraid of the B-sides and outtakes. Some may say that Natalie Merchant was born into this world to sing 'My Mother The War' and 'Can't Ignore The Train'; I say that she might have equally well been born to remind us of the fine qualities of Cat Stevens, Nico, and John Prine, even if it has to be done through the prism of her own ego. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, really. Thumbs up.

ABC

THE LEXICON OF LOVE (1982)

 

1) Show Me; 2) Poison Arrow; 3) Many Happy Returns; 4) Tears Are Not Enough; 5) Valentines Day; 6) The Look Of Love; 7) Date Stamp; 8) All Of My Heart; 9) 4 Ever 2 Gether; 10) The Look Of Love (part 4).

 

History has commanded that ABC remain in it represented exclusively by their first album: a cruel decision, considering that The Lexicon Of Love is just as much owned by the band's pro­duction team as it is by its own songwriting and performing. ABC were certainly not a «manufac­tured» outfit: guitarist Mark White and sax player Stephen Singleton play their own instruments, and play them fine, lead vocalist Martin Fry howls, wails, and croons in his own voice, and all of the songs are completely self-written. But the real reason why The Lexicon Of Love became huge in 1982, and continues to remain huge in the brains of all retrospectivists up to this day, has nothing to do with the band.

 

Because, essentially, The Lexicon Of Love is the album that created The Art Of Noise: assigned to the production guidance of Trevor Horn, ABC soon found their songs tampered with and em­bellished by about half a dozen extra musicians, including Anne Dudley, who was put in charge of the orchestration, and J. J. Jeczalik, responsible for most of the keyboard programming. This was the first time Horn, Dudley, and Jeczalik worked together, and they liked it so much they de­cided that, next time around, they would be changing history on their own, without no nerdy pop kids spoiling their fun with silly danceable love songs.

 

Of course, if you're a pop kind of person rather than a freaky avantgardiste, The Lexicon Of Love, to you, will be the best Art Of Noise album that Art Of Noise never made. I cannot help (predictably) mentioning, though, that, like most of the popular stuff made in the 1980s, it is unpleasantly dated. The keyboards, more often than not, sound just like the cheap, lifeless, hollow-ringtone stuff that they should sound like; and the pro­grammed drum machines are totally in line with the whole «let's cut down on budget expenses by firing the drummer» ideology of the time (ironically, ABC still had a real drummer, David Pal­mer, and he was pretty damn good when they actually let him drum).

 

Discount that time-related factor, though, and The Lexicon Of Love will probably appear to you exactly as the un­questionable masterpiece that most critics have proclaimed it to be. Nine well-written songs (plus one reprise), each dominated by at least one catchy vocal chorus/hook, but ne­ver forgetting about real meat value when it comes to instrumentation either: there are enough funky basslines, quirky guitar riffs, and mesmerizing sax patterns to fill out a minor band's entire career. Meanwhile, Horn and Co. ensure that the background be properly strewn with as many overdubs as it takes to instigate a symphonic feeling, but never too many so as not to drown any of the songs' original attitudes. After all, this is supposed to be «the lexicon of love», not «the le­xicon of cool studio tricks».

 

The difference it takes is striking when you compare the original single release of 'Tears Are Not Enough', produced by Steve Brown, with the Horn team re-recording: from the very first seconds, the chicken-scratchy guitar rings out as if it were trying to establish itself as an art form, rather than simply mumbling quietly in the background, allowing you to dance to it and nothing more. This pushes the disco form much further than, say, Giorgio Moroder's style, further away from the hunting territory of «body music» and more into the realm of the «anything can happen» spi­rit. But, of course, technically it's still dance music.

 

The hit singles — 'Poison Arrow', 'The Look Of Love', 'All Of My Heart' — were all deserved, but really, any of these songs would do as a hit single, despite the fact that the album is some­times described as «conceptual». Obviously, when you give that kind of a title to your record, people will expect to see an actual «lexicon» — for instance, each song describing a separate kind of love-related emotion. But even if that were so, each of these emotional tugs would still work on its own. In this respect, it is Martin Fry's personal achievement that the band pulls it off: fre­quent comparisons with Bryan Ferry are an exaggeration (Fry never had the range, smoothness, or slickness of Mr. Lounge Rocker; it is really the visual style of his performance that is primarily responsible for the comparison), but he has enough intelligence, both in his lyrics and his voice, to perform all of his relatively simple, and potentially quite banal, duties well in style.

 

A firm advice is to go for the recent 2-CD «deluxe» edition of the album. Not only does it throw on such tasty outtakes as a whole whoppin' big 'Overture' (featuring Dudley's orchestrated rendi­tions of each of the album's songs, unfortunately, dropped off the original album except for a few opening bars at the beginning of 'Show Me') and a hilarious eight-minute version of the disco rave-up 'Alphabet Soup' (showcasing the impressive instrumental skills of each of the band's members); the real highlight is a complete live performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in No­vember 1982, with pretty much the entire album reproduced. You'd think it'd suck without the Art of Noise to lend a helping hand, but it does not: on the contrary, you get to hear a live, fresh, young, aggressive sound, with real crunchy drumming throughout to compensate for the lack of studio trickery. If the original release understandably gets a heart-felt, mind-endorsed thumbs up, the reissue is reason enough to grow an extra pair of thumbs.

 

BEAUTY STAB (1983)

 

1) That Was Then But This Is Now; 2) Love's A Dangerous Language; 3) If I Ever Thought You'd Be Lonely; 4) Po­wer Of Persuasion; 5) Beauty Stab; 6) By Default By Design; 7) Hey Citizen!; 8) King Money; 9) Bite The Hand; 10) Unzip; 11) S.O.S.; 12) United Kingdom.

 

A classic case of «sophomore slump». Or, perhaps, not so classic. Normally, «disastrous second time» usually means that the band had spent a lot of time polishing their act and practicing their art of songwriting, then unloading its full potential with the debut record — and then finding out, much to their surprise, that they have to make a second LP already the next year, without having the time or the strength to write some equally good material.

 

Beauty Stab suffers from a different problem. The songwriting is pretty much at the same level: handy-dandy guy Martin Fry and his friends are churning out brisky New Wave anthems at a ve­ry regular rate. However, the Horn/Dudley production team was already busy establishing itself as The Art Of Noise; only Gary Langan was left behind to help them put out the record, and it does not look as if he cared all that much about arrangement flourishes.

 

Also, there seems to have been more emphasis on coming across as a «rock» band this time. To that end, the band cuts down on the keyboards (a bit) and compensates in the way of guitars (a lot). Were they funky guitars, like the way they sound on Lexicon Of Love, it would have been one thing; but, clearly, they felt some sort of need to distance themselves from formulaic dance rhythms (maybe they'd just caught on to the idea that disco sucks), and they are mostly «hard rock guitars», of the ugly, over-processed, Eighties kind. Expectedly, the more they strive to­wards «authenticity», the more fake it all sounds.

 

The public never went wild over this «anti-dance stance» foolishly taken up by ABC in the year of 'Flashdance... What A Feeling', and from there onwards the band's commercial and critical reputation never truly recovered (although both did go one notch up with their next record). Still, the songs are mostly decent. ABC's powers of hook-making still rate highly: the post-pause sax riff of 'That Was Then But This Is Now' gives the song a stern, crunchy, decisive character that agrees well with its title; 'Unzip' is a delightfully sleazy call for sexual liberation ("she's vegeta­rian except when it comes to sex" is one hell of an immortal line), with its mesmerizing bassline and endless background mantraic repetition of the chorus almost work as a subconscious call to lose your virginity (and many did, I bet); and the same bass also transforms 'If I Ever Thought You'd Be Lonely' from a boring ballad into a little bit of a musical thriller.

 

Best of the bunch may be 'Bite The Hand', which sounds like a near-perfect cross between the style of Le­xicon and this newly established «synth-rock» idiom: starting out with disco-style or­chestration and syncopated bass, it eventually adds near-Sabbath heavy metal guitar which flows in and out of the ravaging instrumentation, and does so quite harmoniously. 'Bite The Hand' is a «socially conscious» song, as are many others on here — perhaps Fry got sick of all the Bryan Ferry comparisons and intentionally decided to move into territory that Bryan would never touch with a ten-foot pole. Not that it matters, though: atmospherically, the «ominous» in his socially relevant songs is indistinguishable from the «ominous» in his love tunes, and 'Bite The Hand' could just as easily be about a bitchy vamp as it is about the upcoming apocalypse.

 

Thumbs up for the songwriting; but if Lexicon Of Love has dated like a vintage Charlie Chap­lin movie, Beauty Stab is more like some third-rate Douglas Fairbanks picture — still entertaining, amusing, and pleasing if you really feel like it, but not worth hunting for unless you have a strong penchant for Ferry/Fry-style personalities.

 

HOW TO BE A ZILLIONAIRE (1985)

 

1) Fear Of The World; 2) Be Near Me; 3) Vanity Kills; 4) Ocean Blue; 5) 15 Storey Halo; 6) A To Z; 7) How To Be A Millionaire; 8) Tower Of London; 9) So Hip It Hurts; 10) Between You & Me.

 

One thing you cannot deny about early ABC is that these guys never intended to settle on a for­mula. Lexicon Of Love was unrepeatable anyway, and Beauty Stab did not work well enough to establish them as a rock band with synthesizers; thus, on their third album they threw away all of the «rock» elements — together with half of the band members — but kept the synthesizers in order to try out a new image, that of a trans-hip, meta-pop team that would subtly ridicule the ex­cesses of the decade (which, by 1985, had already shown all of the warts and scars on its glossy face) by fully embracing them.

 

Fry and Mark White are responsible for all the songs and arrangements, with minor external par­ticipation from a couple of freaky art-world characters, such as David Yarritu and «Eden», a.k.a. Fiona Russell-Powell; in normal life, both functioned as musical journalists and photographers, but, as the clock struck twelve, mutated into epatage-crazed «beings». Their contributions to the actual record consist of little other than an occasional bit of spoken voice overdub or record scrat­ching (rumor has it that even Fiona's infamous self-presentation on 'A To Z' — "Hi, I'm Eden, I want you to kiss my snatch" — was recorded not by herself, but by Fry, who used a simple voice-altering device; of course, that may have been one of Fiona's later inventions), but visually, they were employed by Fry and White as a pair of grotesque mannequins that emphasized the band's new stage show in a novel manner.

 

Not that it helped their sinking popularity in any way; in the UK, the album sold even less than Beauty Stab, and the only single that managed to crack the Top 40 was 'Be Near Me', a dance­able ballad whose one-finger-on-the-keyboard melody is indeed quite difficult to get out of your head — but it is in no way typical of the album (and, in fact, isn't even its best ballad; that honor should arguably go to 'Ocean Blue', blessed with an excellent jazz-fusion bass part that really had no business being there, but, as it is, turns the song from routine junk into something treasurable).

 

What is typical of it is a set of jumpy, paranoid, and overtly sarcastic «synth-boppers» — 'Vanity Kills', '15 Storey Halo', 'Tower Of London', the title track — all of them light, trashy, catchy, and, overall, tons of fun, because it is all but impossible to take them «seriously». You do have to lend your ear to the lyrics from time to time, or else you could mistake this clump of annoyingly clever kitsch for a half-witted attempt to get in with the times and win over new waves of synthesizer-happy idiots who'd be glad to dance to anything as long as it's got a beat at all, or as long as it's got a mind-numbing repetitive vocal hook like the "scoobey-doo-ba" refrain in 'Tower Of Lon­don', which is really, above all, a send-up of «cool people»'s love for chic places.

 

It is quite telling, one might argue, that, although the lead-in number reasserts Leibniz in that "We are living in the best of all possible worlds" and the chorus goes "Fear of the world — No fear, no fear of the world!", the title of the song is still 'Fear Of The World' rather than the expected 'No Fear Of The World': on paper, the tune optimistically tells you to battle and overcome your trou­bles, but in reality, there is grim sarcasm oozing out of every pore. All of which makes How To Be... an excellent case study of the epoch — and could make it a mini-masterpiece, if only the in­strumentation were not so horrendously dated.

 

All of these beats, synth rhythms, cheap-sex backing vocals, everything needed to be done diffe­rently, if only Fry and White could look just a little ahead of their time; today, it makes no sense putting the album on for a friend and saying «how about me introducing you to a real smart re­cord from 1985?» — most people just wouldn't understand. Thumbs up for the concept and the hooks, but clearly a thumbs down, in retrospect, at least, for execution.

 

ALPHABET CITY (1987)

 

1) Avenue A; 2) When Smokey Sings; 3) The Night You Murdered Love; 4) Think Again; 5) Rage And Then Re­gret; 6) Ark-Angel; 7) King Without A Crown; 8) Bad Blood; 9) Jealous Lover; 10) One Day; 11) Avenue Z.

 

After a two-year hiatus during which Fry was treated from Hodgkin's disease (a rather serious type of cancer, actually, which he was lucky to survive), ABC once again split their fans with an album that some thought to be their most boring and irrelevant so far, and others lauded as the on­ly slightly inferior, long-expected sequel to Lexicon Of Love.

 

Dropping most of the goofiness, sarcasm, social critique (not too good), but dropping also the or­namental duo of «Eden» and Yarritu (pretty damn good compensation), Mark and Martin turn to Chic veteran Bernard Edwards for guidance, and record a slick, strictly commercial, but not alto­gether insubstantial set. I mean, personally, I hate bad or even average synth-pop with a venge­ance, on an animal level, but I do not have any seriously negative feelings for Alphabet City at all. It really must have something to do with Fry's personality, because the arrangements are quite sterile (despite a welcome return from Anne Dudley to arrange some strings for a couple of num­bers), and none of the humor, be it brilliant or annoying, of Zillionaire is to be found.

 

The real big deal are the hit singles. 'When Smokey Sings' is one of the decade's finest exercises in rose-colored glasses production: as silly as the chorus line "When Smokey sings, I hear vio­lins" may sound, it is perfect in the context of this really silly, happy, but, somehow, quite intelli­gent tribute to the world of R'n'B (not only Smokey, but "Marvin", "James", "Sly", "Luther" are mentioned as well). And it is certainly a better song than whatever Smokey was singing at the time — I'd like to think that Fry is relying more on his childhood memories here than on an acci­dental glance at Smokie on some late-Eighties TV show.

 

Meanwhile, 'The Night You Murdered Love' and 'King Without A Crown' return us to more fami­liar territory, two similar, but equally memorable and convincing breakup tales, each based on a terrific bass groove and at least two different vocal hooks. 'The Night...', in particular, is structu­red like a well-calculated series of vocal blows, each one landing heavier than the former — as ge­neric as the subject matter is, Fry's singing on it almost deserves a thorough note-for-note study from a psychological point of view. Not to be overlooked is Howie Casey's geometric wonder of a saxophone solo part, either (for the record, Howie Casey is quite a notorious session player in England; it is his sound you hear on Paul McCartney's 'Jet', for instance).

 

The non-singles are a lesser breed, and usually come across as paler recreations of the singles, with limper grooves and wobblier hooks. 'Bad Blood' is sometimes listed as a highlight of the LP, but I'm not sure about that: it just takes on a slightly more solemn, knitted-brow attitude than the rest, sacrificing tightness of groove for that purpose. 'One Day', however, with Dudley's strings guiding it as if it were some sort of Ravellian piece, is a fine, stately conclusion, breaking away from the basic synth-pop formula.

 

Altogether, Alphabet City should be commended: not everyone, after slipping into shock/goof mode with a post-modernist flavor, can return to «romantically serious» (in an Eighties dance style, no less!) and make it sound attractive once again, rather than end up with an embarrassing flop on one's hands. For its period of time, with its type of sound, against its superficial attracti­ons, it's almost a masterpiece, even if nothing but the singles and 'One Day' really holds up after all these years. Thumbs up.

 

UP (1989)

 

1) Never More Than Now; 2) The Real Thing; 3) One Better World; 4) Where Is The Heaven; 5) The Greatest Love Of All; 6) North; 7) I'm In Love With You; 8) Paper Thin.

 

Well, there was every chance it would come to this, so why should we be angry at all? Toying with electronic dance-pop is about as risky as living in a «bawdy house» with no knowledge of «barrier devices», if you get my meaning; you're bound to catch something, sooner or later. On Up, ABC decided to go one step further about modernizing their sound, bringing in elements of house — which could only mean one thing: the boys were no longer cutting edge at all, and, ins­tead of coming to terms with it and continuing to live out their own dream, embarked on a pathe­tic recreation of somebody else's.

 

These here songs still have something ABC-ish about them, occasionally, but for the most part, it's just empty, lengthy, excruciatingly boring exploitation of a so-so dance groove. Forget about Anne Dudley's orchestration or Trevor Horn's quirky arrangements: even the return of «Eden» would have made Up a little less bland than it is. Worst of all is the dissipation of Fry's personal magic and charm, as the tri-unity of lyricist, singer and lady's man turns transparent against the background of beats, beats, beats and pretty much nothing else.

 

'One Better World' was certainly the band's most disappointing single release so far: the artistic content of the song laps at zero level, as the only thing it does is stimulate the wish to jump up and down in the utmost happy stupidity at the perspective of, one day, getting to live in "one bet­ter world", where "underneath the moon we are all the same" (why the moon, we never get to know; supposedly the song was to become the International Werewolf Anthem, but they couldn't quite understand where to mix in the howling effects).

 

If the other songs are slightly less yucky kiddie-happy, this does not mean they are in any way more deserving. Everything sounds plastic and silly, even stuff like 'Never More Than Now', which may be the only salvageable track here because of a classy saxophone arrangement and the only musical idea on the album which I'd call great — a hot, swinging jazz piano solo in the in­strumental part, the only short moment during which Up comes alive. Well, not quite: if you have the patience to wait for it, the closing number 'Paper Thin' is somewhat of a reminder of what it was that used to make ABC into ABC, with less emphasis on dance-dance-dance, dumb falsettos and one-finger-on-a-keyboard melodies and more on Fry's decadent-critical personality.

 

Even so, it did not need to drag on for six minutes; it is way to "paper thin" indeed to deserve that length. And neither of the two songs are respectable enough to justify the album title — this is ever so much a thumbs down record rather than a thumbs Up one.

 

ABRACADABRA (1991)

 

1) Love Conquers All; 2) Unlock The Secrets Of Your Heart; 3) Answered Prayer; 4) Spellbound; 5) Say It; 6) Wel­come To The Real World; 7) Satori; 8) All That Matters; 9) This Must Be Magic.

 

The sea horse on the album cover is just about the best thing about this album, if you favour exo­tic life forms in the first place. As for the music — there is hardly anything exotic about these songs. The duo's move to EMI accomplished nothing whatsoever, except providing them with one more kind chance to prove their usefulness in the post-New Wave era, and, accordingly, they blew it one more time.

 

Just like Up, this is a personality-deprived, instantly forgettable collection of dance tunes, not all of them entirely hopeless, but all of them eventually merging into a single mass of similar «mo­dern R'n'B» grooves. One of the singles, 'Say It', is «innovative» in that it combines a disco bass line with a techno rhythm — apparently, though, instead of finding a way to multiply two nega­tives, they add them up, and the results are predictable.

 

The music is pretty much non-existent — most of the «melodies» are just simple synth loops tacked on to drum machines — and Martin Fry, as a bleak shadow of his former personality, only maybe appears on one or two of the bleaker songs (the best moment, for me, is the itsy-bitsy roar he lets out on the chorus of 'Spellbound'; just a tiny thing, but, somehow, the most notably human moment on the entire record). But generally, the album strives way too much to be happy, and, as a result, is just cloying, like its lead single, 'Love Conquers All' (pretty discouraging title for a band who used to make its reputation with 'Tears Are Not Enough' and 'Poison Arrow').

 

Arguing about whether Up or Abracadabra should be considered the absolute low for the band would be a ridiculous activity, so I will just say that Up, at least, has 'Never More Than Now' and 'Paper Thin', which I could see gracing an anthology. On the other hand, Abracadabra got the sea horse, so it's up to you to decide in the end. But an egalitarian and, I believe, uncontestable thumbs down for both is in order in any case. Yuck, mainstream Nineties dance muzak.

 

SKYSCRAPING (1997)

 

1) Stranger Things; 2) Ask A Thousand Times; 3) Skyscraping; 4) Who Can I Turn To; 5) Rolling Sevens; 6) Only The Best Will Do; 7) Love Is Its Own Reward; 8) Light Years; 9) Seven Day Weekend; 10) Heaven Knows; 11) Far­away.

 

Six years later, ABC returns once again... as Martin Fry & A Bunch Of New Faces, confirming the idea that a «rock group» is driven by an ethereal musical spirit that can inhabit whatever ma­te­rial body it prefers. Or, if you wish, the idea that a «rock group»'s longevity is proportional to the degree of egotistic assholishness displayed by whoever was smart enough to pocket the brand name in the first place.

 

I believe it's both at the time: on one hand, Skyscraping could just as well be a Martin Fry solo album, on the other, it is as perfectly ABC-ish as a perfect ABC album should be. With Mark White disappearing on the horizon, Fry draws in his old competitor Glenn Gregory (from the synth pop outfit Heaven 17) and Keith Lowndes, and finally, in a long, long while, offers the world something decent.

 

Comparing Skyscraping to ABC's better albums like Alphabet City is somewhat useless, since the sound is much less grounded in electronics. Of all their previous LPs, only Beauty Stab made that much emphasis on guitars and other live instruments — and Skyscraping is a much stronger effort. This is not a «label» album; first time in ages, Fry is not attempting to jump on any band­wagon (having, no doubt, learnt the ugly lesson of Up and Abracadabra), but is simply writing and performing fine, solid, hookish, and quite pretty pop-rock material.

 

The opening track, 'Stranger Things', also released as one of the singles, is quite typical of the al­bum: if it is up your alley, there is more of 'em here. Acoustic guitar undergrowth, pianos, strings, quasi-Mellotron effects in the background, lyrics that wobble between the sentimental and the anti-social, and a beautiful vocal snare when Fry throws in a falsetto hook with "It's funny how it used to be...". By now, he has lowered just about all of the defenses — if 'Stranger Things' is not a declaration of slavish love to Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry in person, nothing could ever be — but who cares? At this point, the man is adequate enough to simply do what he pleases, and if it please him to write Roxy Music-style, why not? Especially considering that Roxy Music have not been around for fifteen years.

 

The title track is a little different, a conscious nostalgic nod to New Romantic days, but it was ano­ther great choice for a single: catchy, danceable, and utterly charming in its modest escapism. The mood is later reprised on 'Faraway', a classic case of how to build up an unforgettable five minutes on a single hook — this time, the chorus line "you're as faraway as faraway can be", which may seem silly on paper, but works astonishingly well on the air.

 

Many of the songs «rock» — in a compressed, glossy way, as faraway from true rock'n'roll as far­away from true rock'n'roll can be, but still fun when the melodies are strong, e. g. 'Seven Day Weekend', which takes the brass brashness of classic T. Rex and mixes it with vocals that seem to be influenced by 'Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting' (surely Martin's "seven day, seven day... seven day weekend" must be at least an unconscious homage to "saturday, saturday... saturday night's alright"). 'Rolling Sevens' adds threatening wah-wah roar; 'Light Years' adds astral-psy­che­delic lite; 'Heaven Knows' is simply first-rate power-pop with no blemishes; and so on.

 

Simply put, Skyscraping is one of the 1990's best pop albums from a 1980's survivor. Why does nobody seem to care? For a simple reason — the world is not interested in survivors, much less 1980's survivors. Even had there been some real marketing behind Skyscraping, with strong MTV rotation and such, chances are nobody would give as much as half a smile, because, well, we all know — ABC is that bunch of guys who gave us Lexicon Of Love, and we do not remem­ber ourselves giving them permission to give us anything else. But take a good, hard listen to the album, and you will know that, in many ways, this is the Fryest of all Fry albums that are not Le­xicon Of Love. And when it comes to cool-walking, smooth-talking ladies' men, I'd rather em­pathize with Fry at his Fryest than, say, Tom Jones at his Jonesiest. Thumbs up.

 

LEXICON OF LIVE (1999)

 

1) Poison Arrow; 2) Stranger Things; 3) When Smokey Sings; 4) How To Be A Millionnaire; 5) Be Near Me; 6) Who Can I Turn To; 7) Show Me; 8) Skyscraping; 9) Rolling Sevens; 10) One Better World; 11) Tears Are Not Enough; 12) All Of My Heart; 13) The Look Of Love.

 

There is obviously so not much to say about this record that the current Wikipedia entry on it is marvelously laconic, and very much up to the point: «The Lexicon Of Live is a live album released by pop group ABC. Although Martin Fry was the only member left, he had a backing band, and came out in his trademark gold suit». I guess that pretty much says everything a layman needs to know, but just for the sake of I-don't-know-what, let's add a few extra details.

 

Apparently, ABC never toured all that much while they were still all together, which makes this Skyscraping-era «coming out» with a live album even more of an odd cash-in. On a video, at least, you could enjoy the gold suit in proper lighting, but as it is, all you have to do is sit through a bunch of ABC classics, interspersed with a few selections from Skyscraping, as they are faith­fully and professionally reproduced on stage by Martin and his then-current backing band. It's not as if Fry sounded too disinterested or anything — he gets all of those songs' original strengths through without any problems — but neither is he interested in letting the people experience anything above and beyond these original strengths.

 

The setlist is respectable, predictably concentrating on Lexicon Of Love material and the most popular hits that followed (ʽWhen Smokey Singsʼ, etc.), and the disappointing Up/Abracadabra period is represented only by ʽOne Better Worldʼ, which at least sounds a little better with real drums, and is also shortened by about a minute and a half. They also take the best material from Skyscraping, so, on the whole, no complaints in that direction. But ABC were so much of a studio band in all possible ways and manners that, paradoxically, only their bad songs would benefit from a live rearrangement — all the good songs inevitably suffer from poor mixing and lack of studio gloss that defines the ABC sound.

 

For reasons of politeness, we do have to thank the band for being tight, and Fry's backup vocalists for being appropriately sexy, but a live ABC album simply does not compute, let alone a live ABC album that only pretends to be an ABC album (at least it might have been vaguely interes­ting to witness original member Mark White play some guitar on stage). I guess you really have to be into gold suits in order to convince yourself to own it.

 

TRAFFIC (2008)

 

1) Sixteen Seconds To Choose; 2) The Very First Time; 3) Ride; 4) Love Is Strong; 5) Caroline; 6) Life Shapes You; 7) One Way Traffic; 8) Way Back When; 9) Validation; 10) Lose Yourself; 11) Fugitives; 12) Minus Love.

 

The ABC anabasis continues into the 21st century with the help of VH1's Bands Reunited, a Me­phistophelian show that tried to bribe former bands into reuniting, but, for the most part, only suc­ceeded with those bands that were crappy in the first place. In the case of ABC, they only ma­naged to convince ex-drummer David Palmer to join up with Fry (understandably, drummers ge­nerally tend to be more pliable than band members that occupy the front of the stage), but some­how this led to a permanent reunion of the two, followed by a new «ABC» tour — and, in four years time, a new ABC album.

 

Because of all the «reunion» business, and also due to old friend Gary Langan also returning to pro­duce the album, Traffic got generally benevolent reviews, some even hinting that, finally, ne­arly thirty years after the fact, ABC managed to come up with a true successor to Lexicon Of Love. I honestly believe most of these people simply missed out on the much less advertised Sky­scraping. ABC is simply not ABC without a strong dose of the head-in-the-clouds factor, and Skyscraping had that in spades, starting from the album cover and all over the actual songs.

 

In comparison, Traffic is a grittier, more hard-rocking, heavy-beat-oriented affair that is very likely influenced by the post-punk scene — everything from Franz Ferdinand to Arctic Monkeys and beyond. After the ethereal atmosphere of 'Stranger Things' that ignited things in classic ABC mode on Skyscraping, the rough, almost garage-style 'Sixteen Seconds To Choose' that opens Traffic is the last thing you'd expect of Martin Fry — sounds more like modern day Alice Coo­per, if you ask me. It's not bad at all — it kicks some impressive ass in its bullying glamminess, even though the chorus line "Prestige, power, money, money, money" seems quite hammy. It simply tempts one into asking: WHY?

 

There are a few songs here that carry on little quanta of classic ABC frailty — 'Love Is Strong', for instance; 'Validation' and 'Minus Love', too... perhaps. But they are not very memorable. It is as if all the songs on here are strictly separated into those that are powered by instrumental hooks (most of the «rocking» stuff) and those powered by Fry's charisma (the «tender», «frail» stuff), but at their best, ABC could have both at once, and Traffic is not quite up to the task.

 

Still, it sounds good: guitars and keyboards are mixed in satisfactory proportions, and, of all the songs, only 'Caro­line' sounds dangerously close to «adult contemporary» — big, big kudos to Fry, actually, for not succumbing to the temptation of clouding his Mystifying Vocals in Enigmatic Synthesizer Clouds. 'Validation' may not be a great song, but it is so nice to be able to get to the instrumental break and hear an acoustic guitar solo underpinned by an electric organ rhythm track where a less taste-oriented guy would prefer Kenny G-ish sax against a background of Casios.

 

All said, I do not guarantee that fans of classic ABC will inevitably want to adopt Traffic, and it is also possible that big personal fans of Martin Fry will be disappointed with his modest prese­nce. But it's okayish, B-level 21st century pop that won't embarrass your 21st century speakers.

 

THE LEXICON OF LOVE II (2016)

 

1) The Flames Of Desire; 2) Viva Love; 3) Ten Below Zero; 4) Confessions Of A Fool; 5) Singer Not The Song; 6) The Ship Of The Seasick Sailor; 7) Kiss Me Goodbye; 8) I Believe In Love; 9) The Love Inside The Love; 10) Brighter Than The Sun; 11) Viva Love (reprise).

 

Five or six years ago, perhaps, the very idea that a stylistically loyal sequel to ABC's «Eighties Rule Supreme!» masterpiece The Lexicon Of Love, could be anything more than ridiculous self-parody by a strapped-for-cash old geezer, would have seemed impossible to me. But as we move farther and farther into the 21st century, it seems that the dominant ideology is «anything goes»: in the face of a near-total lack of any true progression, 2016 is a good a year as any to put out a sequel not only to The Lexicon Of Love, but also to Revolver, Kind Of Blue, The Rite Of Spring, Hamlet, and the Code of Hammurabi — each of these enterprises has approximately as many chances of becoming a smash hit / bestseller as the next upcoming attempt by some «inno­vative» indie band to knock us off our feet with their unprecedented artistic vision.

 

So, therefore, do give old boy Martin Fry a chance and at least be merciful enough to hear him out. After all, he hasn't been completely washed up for all these years — both Skyscraping and Traffic were decent pop albums, and I cannot believe that The Lexicon Of Love II was made with money in mind: just how many people these days actually remember how popular the origi­nal was thirty-five years ago? On the other hand, if remembering the romantic punch of Lexicon could bring some extra inspiration to a much older Fry, why not give it a go? The worst thing that could happen would be another album that sucks, no big deal.

 

And, upon first listen, it does look like it could suck, because The Lexicon Of Love II truly does try to sound like the first record — the dance rhythms, the sweeping strings, the luscious vocals, the romantic hooks, all of that is quite consistent with the original, except the much smoother production that gives you a fuller, less cavernous sound, without all those un-organic echoes of the classic Eighties. You hear all that and it's like, «oh no, next thing we'll be having is the return of polyester suits». Or, at least, you go, «no no no, he's trying too hard, who is that guy to pull that ʽaging Casanovaʼ shit on us, how can anybody listen to such corniness?»

 

Yes, that was me for a short initial while. But two things managed to turn the emotional tide. First, the songs are written.... well, as scrupulously, I'd say, as possible. Fry really wants them to be as good as his best stuff — you can see how much energy he involves into finding the right kind of vocal hook for all of them. Yes, I do cringe at the song title ʽViva Loveʼ (it offends my linguistic taste as much as would something like ʽMake L'Amour To Meʼ), but I cannot deny that it's a well written pop stomper with some genuine feeling to it.

 

The second piece of good news is that there's no Lexicon Of Love without Anne Dudley — and now Anne Dudley is back, together with her orchestral arrangements that really make all the dif­ference. The album opens with an orchestral prelude, finishes with an orchestral finale, and care­fully and tastefully arranged strings are all over the place, including even a near-flawless simula­tion of a slow 18th century baroque menuet on ʽThe Love Inside The Loveʼ (for which she is dutifully co-credited together with Fry). It is, in fact, possible to forget all about Fry in the first place and just concentrate on the orchestration — yes, it is that good. The strings on ʽViva Loveʼ, for instance, seem to obey the general rules of disco, while at the same time retaining baroque elegance (I couldn't ever formulate that in strict musicological terms, but I'm old enough to have the right to trust my impressions). And on the slow ballads where Fry's hooklines are the most worn out, the strings are the only thing that saves the tunes from stinking (ʽTen Below Zeroʼ).

 

Subject-wise, Lexicon Of Love II breaks no new ground, and Martin never pretended that it would — he is merely revisiting the same topics (Endless Battle of Instinctive Feeling Vs. Rational Intellect) from the point of view of a much older man who is still capable of making the same mistakes (rephrasing here something he said himself in an interview), and the unabashed and downright simplistic (but turbulent) romanticism of it all may indeed sound antiquated for the modern ear, but give me a record full of decent pop hooks and beautiful orchestral arrangements over a quasi-serious post-modern statement of a nobody about nothing in particular any day, I say. In fact, it must kind of take guts for someone these days to release a song called ʽI Believe In Loveʼ (curiously, based on a hand picked acoustic pattern not unlike Lindsey Buckingham's ʽBig Loveʼ, before the synth-pop spirit takes over) — and not only that, but also (a) sing it without the slightest irony and (b) not be an Elton John or a Bryan Adams or somebody else who is fond of wrapping emotional platitudes in very boring music.

 

Fry's personal manifesto is perhaps best summarized in the last track — he admits that "I'm a man out of time, trapped in rewind", but "when all is said and done... our future's looking brighter than the sun", because, you know, them good old-fashioned values will never be gone completely, and might even return triumphantly. There's no scientific evidence, of course, why it should be so — it's a matter of belief, and ʽBrighter Than The Sunʼ perhaps succeeds better than any other song on here in convincing me just how strong his belief really is; Fry's personal charisma, picked up and magnified by the lens of Dudley's orchestration, might even radiate stronger here than on the original Lexicon, when ABC were still an actual band and their synth-pop hooks were more im­personal. For what this sequel lacks (in comparison) in grappling melodic patterns, it almost compensates with personality, and I, for one, am always ready to appraise a decent, not too overbearing, old-fashioned, nicely composed batch of romantic pop tunes. Most definitely re­commended — not just for veteran fans of the band, but for anybody; for my money, this is as good as any «average-good» record of 2016, regardless of whether it comes from a fifty-year old dinosaur or an eighteen-year old rising indie star. Thumbs up, and looking forward to The Lexicon Of Love III from a ninety-year old Fry, with predictable titles like ʽI Still Believe In It, I've Just Forgotten The Wordʼ and ʽVi(v)a Gra (The Flames Of Desire, Rekindled)ʼ.

 

ACCEPT

ACCEPT (1979)

 

1) Lady Lou; 2) Tired Of Me; 3) Seawinds; 4) Take Him In My Heart; 5) Sounds Of War; 6) Free Me Now; 7) Glad To Be Alone; 8) That's Rock'n'Roll; 9) Helldriver; 10) Street Fighter.

 

For the abstract «casual metalhead», Accept usually begins with Restless & Wild (1983), cul­minates with Balls To The Wall (1984), and shoots its final load on Metal Heart (1985); at least, such is the picture that one usually gets from run-of-the-mill music guides. As is quite common, the picture is seri­ously flawed, confusing «notability», «commercial success» and the «so-many-bands-out-there-why-waste-time-on-more-than-two-or-three-records-for-each» attitude with the simple gut pleasures that come from enjoying good music. I would beg to differ, and go for the slightly more complicated view that says Accept were cool from the very start — maybe not «awe­somely» cool, but with a hard rock punch that already bore a sign of uniqueness.

 

On their first album, much like on every other album, Accept clearly state that they don't do nothing much except just play rock'n'roll. It does not take a leap of genius to deduce this if one of the songs in question is titled — three guesses? — ʽThat's Rock'n'Rollʼ. Granted, Accept were never quite as hilariously obstinate about it as AC/DC. For one thing, they always allowed them­selves the li­ber­ty of adding a power ballad or two. Also, their guitarists (Wolf Hoffmann and Jörg Fischer) placed heavy accent on traditional melodicity, occasionally dipping into classical sources of inspiration, just like certified metalheads. But overall, this is quite basic, brutal, gut-wrenching, head-banging music for gutwrenchers and headbangers. And in terms of basic headbanging po­wer, Accept delivers the goods in fine German style almost every bit as well as the records from the band's «classic» period.

 

At this stage, they are essentially modeling their sound (crunchy, but precise and punctual riffs + fluent melodic solos + on-key screeching from an «insane» vocalist) on the already well-estab­lished Scorpions model. But this is hardly a problem if they happen to be writing songs every bit as lean and mean, and sometimes leaner and meaner, than those of their «teachers». ʽTired Of Meʼ, ʽSounds Of Warʼ, ʽThat's Rock'n'Rollʼ, ʽHelldriverʼ — all solid hard rock with catchy vocal choruses (and a healthy enough injection of the pop spirit as well: ʽLady Louʼ almost sounds like an early rehearsal version for Ozzy's ʽCrazy Trainʼ!). And the band is already professional enough to know the difference between «gritty» and «stupid»: lead singer Udo Dirkschneider displays a set of pipes that is more likely to com­mandeer respect than ridicule, whereas Hoffmann and Fischer's riffs are rarely, if ever, boring: these guys actually know how to encapsulate genuine anger in metallic notes.

 

They know it so well, in fact, that quite frequently they almost seem to be catching the punk virus of the time; this is best demonstrated in tracks like ʽStreet Fighterʼ (with the lyrically banal, but emotionally honest refrain of "hate you hate you, leave us alone man!"), as well as the reckless speed and crazy drum punch of ʽThat's Rock'n'Rollʼ that is moderately reminiscent of Mötorhead (but is, of course, much «cleaner» in the purely musical sense). In short, for an album that even the band itself has been prone to dismiss ever since, and almost everyone else normally considers to be «formative», there is too much food for thought here to let it go with one pitiful star, as a clueless «evaluator» from the All-Music Guide once did without listening to the album.

 

The album's centerpiece, and the most complex track, is ʽGlad To Be Aloneʼ, one of the most bombastic pieces the band ever recorded. Alternating between slow, power-balladeering parts (al­though, since the main attraction of these parts is Udo's masterfully hateful ranting at the world, it is a bit of a stretch to bring up the term «power ballad») and faster «art-metal» choruses, it is hardly a masterpiece, but the band still pulls it off surprisingly well, mainly thanks to Udo and to the fact that the lead guitarist does not just run up and down the scales, but bothers to squeeze the obligatory arpeggios into honestly emotional and memorable solos.

 

The bombastic approach does not work nearly as well on the album's one true power ballad, ʽSea­windsʼ — but that particular track was bound to be a misfire, because the whole schtick of Accept really works only as long as they are pissed off, and the miniature goblin figure of Udo Dirk­sch­neider waxing lyrical over some trifling matter is nobody's idea of a cool time. (The band would learn a few subtle tricks as time went by, but not a lot).

 

All in all, this may not be the place to start with Accept if you are only looking for a brief ro­mance; but I see no reason not to own and moderately cherish it if your intentions are more se­rious than that. Accept is no major feast for the intellect (the album cover alone should be able to tell you that), but its power grooves and brawny German anger can work well on the gut level, and this is where all the thumbs up really come from.

 

I'M A REBEL (1980)

 

1) I'm A Rebel; 2) Save Us; 3) No Time To Lose; 4) Thunder And Lightning; 5) China Lady; 6) I Wanna Be No Hero; 7) The King; 8) Do It.

 

Udo Dirkschneider doesn't like this album very much, because of "unsuccessful experiments", as he himself said. Well, I can understand, except that it's not so much experimentation as an odd will to conform to standards that mars the record. They set an excellent standard with the title track, a number formerly written by Australian guitarist Alex Young for his brothers in AC/DC (they say AC/DC even recorded it back in the day) — that's why it's got a bit of a drunken party sound to it, which is unusual for Accept who have always sounded stone cold sober, but still, it's an AC/DC-worthy song, and any song like that can be handled well by Accept.

 

Unfortunately, right after that the album starts shaking. There is only one other number that is truly solid from head to toe: 'China Lady', built upon an unforgettable riff and an equally unfor­gettable banshee wailing part from Udo. A couple more rockers are so-so, and then there's the cringeworthy stuff: power ballads that match simplistic melodies against pathos, the kind of stuff that, at the same time, was eating away the Scorpions' intestines ('No Time To Lose' may be my least favourite Accept song of that entire period), and then we're watching the unwatchable as Accept do disco ('I Wanna Be No Hero'), something that they are so poorly adjusted for they can't even help imitating Kiss (if the 'I can give you nothing but love babe' line does not, for you, im­me­diately bring to mind 'I was born for loving you baby', you must be the unassociative type).

 

Disco motives even show up in the album's third best song, 'Save Us', which starts out strong and spiteful but then turns to silliness in the middle-eight, including "choral" singing that should be banned from Accept records once and for all; if the only member in your band who can sing well is Udo, what's your problem? Bass guy Peter Baltes knows how to stay on key, for sure, but what's the use of staying on key if you're staying on key on songs like 'No Time To Lose'?

 

The good news about all this is that 'I'm A Rebel' (the song) did become a hit for the band, and this must have helped them to get by and gather their forces for a full-fledged return to form. But nevertheless, my heart is also a rebel, and it rebels all the way against disco-metal and rotten power balladry, and, ripping the two side-openers off the album, proceeds to reward it with a hearty thumbs down, while the brain is, of course, still sleeping on this one.

 

PS. As irrelevant as it is to the review, I can't help but publish the idea for the greatest of all non-existent Weird Al Yankovic parodies: the heavy metal anthem 'I'm A Rabbi' ('I'm a rabbi, I'm a rabbi, don't you just know it?'), dangerously bordering on the sacrilegious but all the more fun for all the titillation. Where can I patent this?

 

BREAKER (1981)

 

1) Starlight; 2) Breaker; 3) Run If You Can; 4) Can't Stand The Night; 5) Son Of A Bitch; 6) Burning; 7) Feelings; 8) Midnight Highway; 9) Breaking Up Again; 10) Down And Out.

 

With Breaker, Accept finally... no, not "find their voice" — they'd already found it two years earlier — but rather manage to convince them­selves that their voice is truly their voice, and nobody else's, and that nobody else's will do. Breaker initiates a string of four or five records whose only flaw is that they all sound like each other, but if you like that sound, and I can't ima­gine anyone who's at least marginally partial to hard rock and heavy metal not liking that sound, you'll have no reason to complain.

 

Apart from the silly decision to let Peter Baltes sing on one more silly soft ballad ('Breaking Up Again'), there is not another single weak spot on the album. Eight fantastic hard rockers with blazing riffs and catchy choruses, plus one more ballad ('Can't Stand The Night') that is, thank God, saved by the wise, wise, wise choice of letting Udo rather than Baltes carry it through with his grizzled out, world-weary delivery. A metal lover's paradise all the way through.

 

One thing that's formally new is that they have learned how to play it real fast, but without turning the performance into the worst kind of melody-deprived thrash. 'Starlight' and 'Breaker' exemplify this new skill, with the band gelling perfectly, especially the latter with its double-tracked riffs and perfect drumming from Steven Kaufmann. (It's amazing to think they'd eventually top this combination of speed, precision, and melodicity on their next album!) These two stem from the new school of heavy metal as pioneered by Judas Priest; but the band shows itself equally versatile at the old school as well — 'Burning', recorded in a 'quasi-live' setting, is good old Berry-style rock'n'roll dressed up in modern production and polished with modern guitar tones, yet not for a single second does it actually lose the good old rock'n'roll spirit. 'I say hey rock'n'roller, power in your hands, you and your music made me a rockin' man' may not be the smartest type of lyrics to set to this kind of music, but with this here insane level of headbanging, one has to be stone cold sober in the spirit to stop and pay even the smallest attention to the lyrics!

 

Finally, it is impossible not to mention the hilarious 'Son Of A Bitch': you haven't lived if you haven't heard Udo Dirkschneider scream 'cocksucking motherfucker' along with a string of other obscenities that the band must have been copying directly from a slang dictionary as they went along. Maybe the original intention was to present this as a terrifying, threatening rocker, but with all of its great riffs and Udo's craziness, it works beautifully even as a ridiculous send-up of every terrifying, threatening rocker ever made.

 

In the end, even the brain has little choice but to applaud the cleverness of it all, but the main player here is still the heart, which, after having pumped wildly for all of the album's duration (only getting a short break to cool off during Peter Baltes' turn), has no choice but to reward it with the most headbanging thumbs up ever given.

 

RESTLESS AND WILD (1982)

 

1) Fast As A Shark; 2) Restless And Wild; 3) Ahead Of The Pack; 4) Shake Your Heads; 5) Neon Nights; 6) Get Ready; 7) Demon's Night; 8) Flash Rockin' Man; 9) Don't Go Stealing My Soul Away; 10) Princess Of The Dawn.

 

It is funny that even with bands whose records all sound (generally) the same, there is some sort of inner feeling that even so, they aren't just rolling along a smooth highway, but still steadily climbing up the mountain — until they reach the peak, of course, and then there's the inevitable slide down. And all that time, the records STILL sound the same!

 

There is even some sort of a consensus on this in many cases. With AC/DC, for instance, many, if not most, people think about Back In Black. With Motorhead, almost everyone thinks Ace Of Spades. It's impossible to define why, it's just a question of inner feeling, a very certain inner feeling at that. And with Accept, the certain feeling rests on Restless And Wild.

 

One thing that has always seduced me in particular about this record is how perfectly they put the two best songs at the start and at the end — and how the wildly different moods of these two songs perfectly suit the start and the end. To begin with, they beat the speed record of 'Breaker' and 'Starlight'; 'Fast As A Shark', true to its title and even more so, is the fastest Accept have ever played, and, in fact, it might be the fastest metal track ever played which manages to be melodic at the same time (I'm sure Slayer can outrun even this, but whether they can retain the precision and fluidity of Accept's guitarists at the same time is an open question). Steven Kaufmann's unbelievable double bass-drumming is another asset, practically redefining the meaning of drums in heavy metal history. And furthermore, it's just good old catchy rock'n'roll, once one has fini­shed admiring it from the technical side.

 

If 'Fast As A Shark' is the band's ultimate headbanging number, then 'Princess Of The Dawn' closes the album on their best dungeons-and-dragons note. Most metal and "heavy prog" bands have to rely on cheesy synthesizers to build up atmosphere on their fantasy-oriented work, almost immediately cheapening the results (because some people think that once you get that particular tone out of your Casio, you've already set up the atmosphere). On 'Princess', Accept achieve that eerie medieval-mystical effect without hitting one single piano note — just by doubletracking the guitars, attenuating them with an equally ominous bass, and having Udo sing in his world-weary, "old grizzled magician" voice which is his second best after the "straightjacketed maniac" one. The whole song is an amazing kaleidoscope of memorable riffs, enchanting vocal hooks, and melodic solos — all set to an unnerving mid-tempo rhythm that effortlessly transports you through six minutes of medieval mystery until it abruptly cuts off in mid-song, almost like a nod to the Beatles' 'I Want You' (maybe a conscious one, given the brooding atmosphere of both com­positions, although the adjective 'brooding' pretty much drains the resemblances).

 

In between these two metal masterworks, you get more great Accept songs that are not worth describing in detail. No sissy ballads, no Peter Baltes on lead vocals (finally!), just one great riff tune after another, just like on Back In Black. 'Neon Nights' probably could qualify as a power ballad, but, after the misleading acoustic introduction, it is inaugurated with a second electric intro of such effect-laden heaviness that one could never accuse the boys of selling out with it. Not that with Udo's voice it is even possible for them to sell out, of course.

 

Predictably, a wild thumbs up emerges from the bottom of the heart, but even the brain, even today, after many, many listens, still remains amazed at the album's ideal consistency. The only puzzling thing is why they decided to title it after the song 'Restless And Wild', when an even truer approach would be to title it after 'Ahead Of The Pack', because that's exactly what they were for that brief moment in 1982: 'Ahead of the pack — never look back!'.

 

BALLS TO THE WALL (1983)

 

1) Balls To The Wall; 2) London Leatherboys; 3) Fight It Back; 4) Head Over Heels; 5) Losing More Than You've Ever Had; 6) Love Child; 7) Turn Me On; 8) Losers And Winners; 9) Guardian Of The Night; 10) Winter Dreams.

 

Nothing beats Restless And Wild, but one cannot spend all one's life listening to Restless And Wild. When you've learnt it by heart, try Balls To The Wall. Having now studied the essence of their talents and having reached the peak of their creativity, Accept just continue, without see­ming effort, to crank out not particularly imaginative, but solid, explosive metal tunes — one after the other, they just go off like a series of splendid, if samey, firecrackers.

 

Balls To The Wall, on average, is somewhat slower, denser, and darker than its predecessor. After 'Fast As A Shark', Accept have all but renounced breakneck thrash tempos; only 'Fight It Back' and 'Losers And Winners' (the latter's riff is superficially based on Black Sabbath's 'Symp­tom Of The Universe') fit the bill, but even these fall beyond their previous speed records. Appa­rently, they'd simply taken the speed thing as far as they could take it, and were now happy with concentrating more on the melody aspect.

 

So, in sharp contrast to 'Fast As A Shark' and 'Starlight', the album begins with a really slow song. But oh my God, what a song. It took real balls — pardon the pun — for Accept to begin their new record with (and this is my firm conviction) the best ever opening riff in a heavy metal song, only to retire it several bars into the song and never ever show it up again. It is the perfect opening. An opening that makes even non-metalheads pay attention. A riff that, perhaps, only a Teutonic metal guitarist could be capable of.

 

Still, now that I think of it, that riff belongs in the intro — I don't see it easily reappearing any­where else, nor can I imagine Udo singing over it. And besides, the song itself easily lives up to its opening. The revolutionary lyrics — the same old subject of the oppressed masses rising up and breaking their chains — are trite, but they're basically just a pretext for showing how mighty pissed-off Udo and the gang can be. Accept aren't revolutionaries, they're rock stars, and I have no idea just how much they care for the working class, but one thing I do know: few, if any, things let you vent your frustration better than singing along to '...they're coming to get you and then — you'll get your BALLS TO THE WALL, MAN!' After all, this is so much more humanis­tic and time-saving than actually strangling your boss when you feel like it, right?

 

Previous Accept albums were relatively even in terms of quality; here, nothing even comes close to matching the sheer motivated power of the title track — one reason why I always get a little annoyed with the album. At the same time, just like on Restless, there is not a single stinker: just more and more catchy metal riffs and choruses. American critics and listeners have often reacted strongly to what they perceive as a 'gay thread' running through the album — starting from the hairy leg on the album cover and ending with 'London Leatherboys' (actually a song about bikers rather than gays) and 'Love Child'; but then, it's the same American critics and listeners for whom the issue of Hamlet sleeping with Horatio overshadows "to be or not to be", so there's no need whatsoever to perceive Balls To The Wall as a specifically 'gay metal' record — it just toys with the subject on one track (and why shouldn't it?).

 

Odd as it may seem, my second favourite track is the album closer, 'Winter Dreams'. After nine rounds of explosives, they round out the proceedings with a ballad — but not a power ballad, rather a dark, brooding ballad where Udo sings in his world-weary voice, very appropriate in this place, as if tired and exhausted from giving it his all on the previous nine numbers. With its minor acoustic chords, church bells, and deep, echoing riffs, you once more (as you did on 'Princess Of The Dawn') get a medievalistic/D&D atmosphere, but this time combined with a very realistic sense of melancholia and futility of being. Nine balls of fire — and a cold shower at the door.

 

Balls To The Wall begins Accept's slow descent into mediocrity — but begins it barely a few feet down from the peak, so that you can only get such an impression from a later, general per­spe­ctive on their career. As it is, it would merit an unbiased thumbs up for the title track alone — even forgetting the fact that a lesser band would just as likely kill for any of the rest.  

 

METAL HEART (1985)

 

1) Metal Heart; 2) Midnight Mover; 3) Up To The Limit; 4) Wrong Is Right; 5) Screaming For A Love-Bite; 6) Too High To Get It Right; 7) Dogs On Leads; 8) Teach Us To Survive; 9) Living For Tonite; 10) Bound To Fail.

 

The followup to the big commercial breakthrough, Metal Heart, like most similar followups, offers no surprises. But under the circumstances, they could have done much worse — for in­stance, intoxicated by the fumes of the power and the glory and the big bucks, turn into a cartoo­nish hair metal band. Instead, there is no sign of compromise. It is sometimes suggested that they did make Metal Heart slightly "poppier", adding more catchy chorus hooks for the public to go along, but I don't see it in the least — not that these chorus hooks aren't catchy, but having the audience easily singing along to their choruses had always been Accept's priority.

 

Just like on Balls, the most ambitious track on the album is the title one that opens it. Unfortuna­tely, this time around they haven't been able to come up with a bunch of riffs for it that would knock the pants off you in the same effective way. But they still find an alternative way to draw you in — by incorporating symphonic influences, quoting Tchaikovsky in the intro and Beet­hoven in the guitar solo. "Symph-metal" can be awful in the wrong hands, but if you get your classical quotations right, arranging them so that the power of the original melody is smoothly stretched alongside the power of heavy metal guitar, the effect can be awe-inspiring, and Wolf Hoffmann channelling the spirit of Beethoven turns out to be a majestic embellishment of 'Metal Heart' rather than a ridiculous embarrassment.

 

On the rest of the tracks, it may be said that the band is "coasting": the riffs are still loud and po­werful, but generally simpler and more derivative of former glories than they used to be. Some are even suspiciously reminiscent of similar power-chord driven AC/DC stuff — not a good thing, because the riff-playing skills of Accept are, from a technical point of view, more sophisticated than those of AC/DC, and that's the way Accept fans would probably have liked them to stay. And this, for the first time in a long stretch, makes one experience the old nasty feeling of 'for­mula': one high-adrenaline level rocker after another, buildup, bombastic chorus, kick-ass guitar solo, lead-out section, buildup again, bombastic chorus again etc. — you don't so much feel these things when the songs are awesome, but if they're just one small notch below awesome, the atmo­sphere changes radically.

 

Still, what am I saying? — 'Up To The Limit', 'Wrong Is Right', 'Too High To Get It Right', 'Dogs On Leads', these are all first-rate metal stalwarts, each and every one a headbanger's dream. 'Up To The Limit', in particular, is the number two Accept song to help you vent your frustration — it doesn't have the great chords of 'Balls To The Wall', but, in partial compensation, it's got the speed and the fury to match. And 'Screaming For A Lovebite' and 'Living For Tonite' are as great for party-hellraising as anything this band ever did.

 

Therefore, Metal Heart's main weakness is that it gives a bad premonition — a premonition that the end might be near, that the band already has some trouble sustaining the same high quality level. But if you don't believe in premonitions — and if you're 'living for tonite', why should you? — then Metal Heart has got no serious weaknesses whatsoever, and, no matter how much one's brain might complain about the band turning into AC/DC and losing its identity, the heart just keeps going along with the thunder. Thumbs up, no doubt about it.

 

RUSSIAN ROULETTE (1986)

 

1) T.V. War; 2) Monsterman; 3) Russian Roulette; 4) It's Hard To Find A Way; 5) Aiming High; 6) Heaven Is Hell; 7) Another Second To Be; 8) Walking In The Shadow; 9) Man Enough To Cry; 10) Stand Tight.

 

One picture that can be constructed around the recording of this album is that it is darker and less compromising than Metal Heart, going easier on simple hooks and heavier on grim atmosphere, and that this reflected the creative struggle between grittier front man Dirkschneider and more flexible lead guitarist Wolf Hoffmann, a struggle in which, for this round, Udo had the upper hand but which eventually led to his departure from the band that Hoffmann would be free to lead to complete disaster.

 

At least this is what you get from reading the yellow press on the Internet; the real picture... well, you know. Russian Roulette is certainly a departure from Metal Heart, but in more ways than one, and both good and bad ways. The good news is that they start varying the approach a bit; that nasty nagging feeling that you're listening to a pre-programmed algorithmic artefact, where all the songs are modeled on the same formula, is gone. There is more diversity to the moods and tempos, and even a return to "epic" form (title track; 'Heaven Is Hell'). The bad news, alas, is that not all of this works, and that the band begins to sound tired and out of steam.

 

You know they're tired and out of steam when the first song of the album begins in the style and tempo of 'Fast As A Shark' — but forgets to pack an equally convincing and memorable riff, and ends up sounding like respectable, but still generic trash, elevated to this status of "respectable" more through a purely psychological understanding that this is still Hoffmann on the guitar on Udo on vocals, and there's no escape from their onslaught.

 

You know this even better once you understand that the convincing and memorable riff of the second song ('Monsterman') is actually lifted directly from Judas Priest's 'You Got Another Thing Coming' — intentionally or subconsciously, doesn't matter. And this is also where you could start getting the uneasy feeling that, first time in years, it is the gruff chorus chanting that interacts with Udo's solo wailing which is the major thing to get stuck in your head. 'I am the monsterman!' on 'Monsterman'. 'WAR GAMES! SHANGHAI'D!' on the title track. 'HEAVEN IS THERE WHERE HELL IS — AND HELL IS DOWN ON EARTH!' 'WALKING IN THE SHADOW, WALKING IN THE NIGHT!' All of a sudden, it's not that hard to understand the rest of the band might have developed the suspicion that they could go on getting by without Udo's help.

 

None of this should be disconcerting per se. 'Heaven Is Hell' is a glorious epic along the lines of 'Balls To The Wall' (but certainly not a rewrite of it, as some detractors have suggested) that de­serves eternal recognition in the metal canon. The sense of doom and gloom on 'Russian Roulette' arguably echoes the sense of doom hanging over the band itself, and is fully realistic, for that mat­­ter. Some of the shorter songs, like 'Aiming High', also reach their mark through the usual combination of grittiness and catchiness.

 

Yet they also recline back into the cesspool of arena rock — 'It's Hard To Find A Way', 'Man Enough To Cry', and the closing anthem 'Stand Tight' are, by all means, not the kind of songs that this band should be writing. Maybe it's the Hoffmann stamp, maybe not, but these are songs for the likes of Foreigner, not the Udo-led combo that, at their best, either avoided sentimentality or found subtler cloaks for it than power chords and passionate choral vocals. Looking back at the calendar, it's nothing short of amazing that it was 1986 — as far as I'm concerned, one of the worst years in history for popular music — and they still managed to get only two or three of those, but this realization doesn't make them any more listenable on their own.

 

So the crisis here is obvious, but "crisis" needn't necessarily be a horrendous thing — in times of crisis, you can start wildly fluttering around your cage, trying out every direction, and end up hitting upon a few gaps in the bars (as well as a few particularly rough spots). There is still that element of fascination in Russian Roulette, with its mixture of pompous failures and equally pompous hits, that prevents it from being the kind of blemish on Accept's reputation that their next album would turn out to be. The brain is, therefore, intrigued, and the heart gripped by mixed emotions, and I can't give this either a positive or a negative rating, but I do recommend hearing this at least once, because sometimes "confused" heavy metal albums give more food for both the heart and the brain than perfectly self-assured ones.

 

EAT THE HEAT (1989)

 

1) X-T-C; 2) Prisoner; 3) Love Sensation; 4) Chain Reaction; 5) D-Train; 6) Generation Clash; 7) Turn The Wheel; 8) Mistreated; 9) Stand 4 What U R; 10) Hellhammer; 11) Break The Ice.

 

With each new account of yet another glorious Accept album, I risk the risk of passing for a devoted metalhead, which I am frankly not. What with all the diversity and complexity that, to­day, characterizes the heavy metal genre, at heart it is still fairly silly and clichéd, and, for me, the deal with every metal album I listen to is simple — is this particular album strong enough to make me, for a few moments at least, forget about the silliness of it all? Are the riffs powerful enough to overcome the stench of machismo? Is the singer superhuman enough for my organism to recognize him as a true rather than a false prophet? Very few albums, very few bands actually manage to pass that test, and Accept are one of the lucky few that had this lucky streak for a long, long time — half a decade at least, a whole eternity of music-making by pop standards.

 

But if Russian Roulette contained only the first signs of an upcoming headache, then Eat The Heat is hangover in full flight. Udo Dirkschneider left the band due to a creative falling out with Hoffmann, reluctant to pursue a more commercial, "hair-metal" style direction, and nothing but a blind, uncontrolled desire to get more airplay explains the band's decision to replace him with a new frontman. That was an American, going by the name of David Reece, very little known in heavy rock circles outside his former local base in Minneapolis; but I dare say that it would have made little difference even if they had had the good fortune to pick someone of the high stature of Ronnie James Dio or Bruce Dickinson instead.

 

Because it isn't just that Reece's vocals, powerful as they are on their own, are no match for Udo's one-in-a-million powerhouse screaming. More important is that Reece was a nobody — due to his newcomer status, he could hardly have much creative influence on Eat The Heat. The songs, as usual, are credited to "Accept" for music and "Deaffy" (a pseudonym of Hoffmann's wife, Ga­by Hauke) for lyrics, and it probably wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that it is mostly Hoff­mann himself who is responsible for the band's new sound.

 

Eat The Heat isn't exactly "bad" — for instance, it goes very easy on pathetic power ballads, where 'Mistreated' (no relation to the vastly superior Deep Purple/Rainbow song) is the only seri­ous offender, and the aggressive rock songs still bear traces of the old Accept crunch. Yet every­thing, every single song has been recast in the dominating hair-metal mold: the production is cleaner and glossier, the guitar tones are brighter and less frightening, and the catchy choruses seem to emphasize "brute power" over "intelligent hatred", so that the simple average lad off the street wouldn't be turned off by too much scariness.

 

Alas, the problem is that in this corner of the market, Accept were unfit for the competition. All they could do was lose the old fans, pissed off at this change of direction — and fail to bring in legions of new ones, already well-satisfied with the likes of Poison and Cinderella. Of course, it was a gamble where one could theoretically win, like Alice Cooper did with Trash; but Trash, released the same year, was a far more intelligently crafted record than Eat The Heat — for one thing, it sacrificed none of Cooper's personality, ensuring its own identity among the crowd, whereas no personality whatsoever is evident on Eat The Heat.

 

I might also add that musically, the record is pretty lazy — completely lost in the effort to com­mercialize the sound, Hoffmann had forgotten to write any original riffs. One listen to the ope­ning track, 'X-T-C', is enough to give you a general impression of the entire thing: everything sounds very powerful, but you know you've heard it all before, and you know the main emphasis here is on making you just blindly headbang to the music until you reach the chorus, which is the point at which you're supposed to become happy. This isn't so much heavy metal as it is bland arena-rock with crunchier overtones. And this certainly isn't a true Accept record.

 

In terms of individual songs, there is nothing to discuss. I am amused by the somber chorus of 'Generation Clash', a song whose message could have been much stronger had it been better backed up in terms of music, and by the rousing chorus of 'Hell­hammer' ('HELL HAMMER, HELL, HELL HAMMER!'), so it might be fun to think about covering these two in a more con­vincing manner if, by any chance, you're in a metal band (or, for that matter, in a bluegrass com­bo — a fun melody is a fun melody in any genre). But this is certainly not enough to stop the heart from sulking in a relentlessly thumbs down mode, or the brain from wondering just what exactly was it in the Eighties that made so many talented people go so utterly crazy you'd think the first of the Four Horsemen was upon us already — maybe playing drums in one of those L.A. hair bands, as a warm-up.

 

OBJECTION OVERRULED (1993)

 

1) Objection Overruled; 2) I Don't Wanna Be Like You; 3) Protectors Of Terror; 4) Slaves To Metal; 5) All Or Nothing; 6) Bulletproof; 7) Amamos La Vida; 8) Sick, Dirty And Mean; 9) Donation; 10) Just By My Own; 11) This One's For You.

 

The little blunder is over: Reece is out, Udo is back, having lost neither his honour nor his powers: six years without Accept haven't impacted his singing in the least (actually, he'd been doing pretty much the same old thing with his own band, U.D.O.). Nor has anything else been impacted: Objec­tion Overruled sounds as if neither hair metal nor grunge ever happened. Just more of the old supertight metallic rock'n'roll, crisply produced and sounding quite close to you, without the echoey effects of Metal Heart; as if the Metal Gods finally decided to come down from above and have fun with their fans on the small stage of a local bar — without ever forgetting that they're Gods and the fans are scum in their faces, though.

 

As far as "reunion" efforts go, Objection Overruled is excellent, and since no one expects any more musical revolutions from Accept anyway, perfectly enjoyable as simply more classy mate­rial from these guys — classy and uncompromising. Brutal riffs, catchy choruses, passion and power above pathos, and Udo and Hoffmann battling for attention as usual. There are misfires: the power ballad 'Amamos La Vida' is somewhat boring, the marching anthem 'All Or Nothing' is somewhat silly, and the instrumental 'Just By My Own' is somewhat excessive. But if we are studying Accept in chronological order, this little weakness they have for over-the-top ballads and anthems is well-known to us, and as long as it doesn't overwhelm the album, it's possible to live with it like it's possible to live with a hump on your shoulders or smallpox traces on an other­wise beautiful face.

 

On the other hand, the rockers are a ton of fun — like the title track, where Udo pleads not guilty to an unforgiving chorus jury of his guitar players over blinding speed riffs, or like the traditional fuck-you hate peon of 'I Don't Wanna Be Like You', or the double-edged macho slash of 'Protec­tors Of Terror' (that's them others) and 'Slaves To Metal' (that's the band).

 

A minor surprise is 'Donation' — which sounds exactly like prime time AC/DC in terms of lyrics, music, and singing; although I'm not sure, I think it was consciously intended as a tribute to the band, given the line 'there she was, shaking more than my foundation' (cf. AC/DC's 'Shake Your Foundations'). Actually, ano­ther nod to their Aussie brethren can be found on 'I Don't Wanna Be Like You', whose main riff bears an uncanny similarity to 'Sin City' and whose lyrics include lines like 'the walls can be shaking, the earth could be quaking'. This may be upsetting to people who prefer Accept as a much more refined, and maybe even much deeper, version of AC/DC, but there's no question that the German band, from the start, owed quite a bit to the Young brothers, and I find nothing wrong about doing a song or two directly in the AC/DC style, especially if they do it well, which they do. No one would probably want to see them put out another Eat The Heat instead — right?

 

Of course, they already sound a bit out of time, no longer as sincerely menacing as before, but time slowly levels these effects, and for today's listeners, Objection Overruled may easily kick as much ass as Balls To The Wall. My rock'n'roll heart was perfectly happy with it, anyway, and thumbs up were always guaranteed.

 

DEATH ROW (1994)

 

1) Death Row; 2) Sodom And Gomorra; 3) The Beast Inside; 4) Dead On!; 5) Guns 'R' Us; 6) Like A Loaded Gun; 7) What Else; 8) Stone Evil; 9) Bad Habits Die Hard; 10) Prejudice; 11) Bad Religion; 12) Generation Clash II; 13) Writing On The Wall; 14) Drifting Away; 15) Pomp And Circumstance.

 

This isn't bad. But if you want to get a decent idea of what this record sounds like, try taking a deep breath and yelling out all the song titles, in a row, taking note of my brief comments: "DEATH ROW!" (mid-tempo, martial-like, as if you were sending someone in that direction); "SODOM AND GOMORRA!" (fast, indignant, as if this is where you were living in); "THE BEAST INSIDE!" (mid-tempo, sneeringly, like a cross between Punch and Mephisto); "DEAD ON!" (slow, with a good mixture of self-importance and machismo); "GUNS 'R' US!" (mid-tem­po, with a modicum of pride, as befits someone who could have this written on his door); "LIKE A LOADED GUN!" (mid-tempo, stern, could be from an imaginatory Terminator soundtrack!); "STONE EVIL!" (mid-tempo, ominous, don't go there or it will tear you limb from limb); "BAD HABITS DIE HARD!" (fast, a little bit à la Dirty Harry, sounds great right before you whomp that sucker); "PREJUDICE!" (mid-tempo, boring, out of steam); "BAD RELIGION!" (mid-tempo, boring, completely out of steam).

 

Death Row is every critic's dream — it is an album that's more formulaic than the critic's own approach; if musicians can be so predictable and derivative, why can't people that write about the music? One riff per song (not all the riffs are good), one gang chorus per song, and not even Udo can elevate this to a higher level because he frankly sounds disinterested: like a seasoned pro, he gives it his all, but he doesn't try even remotely to give it something extra.

 

The album makes good use of the allowed length of the CD — for instance, instead of one pom­pous, unnecessary instrumental, we have two (in a row!), and it also allows the band to offer us a remake of 'Generation Clash', with Udo on vocals this time (it doesn't work much better than the first time, though). This means that you can pretty much shut the album off after 'Bad Religion', but not every dedicated fan will probably be able to sit straight through everything else: the stiff formula gets so mind-numbing eventually that one can honestly become ashamed about letting one's brain gather dust on the nearby shelf for so long.

 

Technically, this is Hoffmann's show all the way — he handles lead and rhythm duties, making the arrangements seem a bit sparse. He's also trying to be inventive, throwing on wah-wah and other effects to make the proceedings more "brutal"; in the process, the band pretty much invents "nu-metal" with the title track ('Death Row' does not at all sound unlike Korn and Limp Bizkit). He also tries to brush up on his classical influences with the reproduction of Khachaturian's 'Sabre Dance' theme in 'Sodom & Gomorra' — pure kitsch but quite refreshing in the overall con­text of the album, I must say.

 

Overlong, uninventive, curiously lifeless, this is a serious letdown after the promises of Objec­tion Overruled; nevertheless, lower your expectations, throw away your ambitions, and you'll still have enough to get your ass kicked properly. Thumbs down from the brain, but the heart insists on having a tight E.P. shaped from the album's four or five best tracks and thereby proving that in 1994, the band was still going relatively strong.

 

PREDATOR (1996)

 

1) Hard Attack; 2) Crossroads; 3) Making Me Scream; 4) Diggin' In The Dirt; 5) Lay It Down; 6) It Ain't Over Yet; 7) Predator; 8) Crucified; 9) Take Out The Crime; 10) Don't Give A Damn; 11) Run Through The Night; 12) Primitive.

 

Again, this isn't awful, but the band sounds really tired, as if the invisible hand of fate had roun­ded all the members up right after their having run an up-the-hill marathon and placed them in the studio with no creative ideas, no prepared material, and a total lack of commitment. A band of one notch less quality than Accept, under such conditions, would have produced some monstro­sity; Predator isn't one, but the end results clearly showed that the band was so much out of steam that it was high time to call it a day.

 

It's funny, but in the light of Predator even the endless streak of "gang choruses" on Death Row seems refreshing and memorable. Predator cuts down on much of the heaviness, cuts down even more seriously on the speed aspect, features a slicker, less involving production style from vete­ran hair metal producer Michael Wagener, and even reintroduces Peter Baltes on vocals on a couple tracks (they're not power ballads this time, but they're still pretty so-so). The riffs are most­ly recycled from their own and other people's songs, and even Udo sounds disinterested. To make matters worse, the album closer 'Primitive' may just be the silliest and ugliest Accept song ever put on record: it's an unfortunate experiment at making some sort of ugly industrial-metal hybrid, quite unsuitable for Accept's overall style.

 

All of this calls for an unquestionable thumbs down, but as long as Accept aren't truly betraying their essence, as they did on Eat The Heat, there is, and will always be, at least something redee­ming about each of their records, and, in the end, 'Hard Attack', 'Don't Give A Damn', 'Crucified', and 'Making Me Scream' are all decent rockers with plenty of headbanging power. 'Run Through The Night' is actually one of their better "rocking ballads", with curious jangling guitar arrange­ments from Hoffmann (he is in charge of all the guitarwork on the album again). So there's no reason for the fans to stay away from it; people have been known to end their careers on notes far more pitiful than Predator, and, in fact, we can only applaud Accept for their wisdom — once they perceived that the thing was no longer working smoothly, they just packed it in, instead of stubbornly sticking around, wasting money and good old CD plastic.

 

BLOOD OF THE NATIONS (2010)

 

1) Beat The Bastards; 2) Teutonic Terror; 3) The Abyss; 4) Blood Of The Nations; 5) Shades Of Death; 6) Locked And Loaded; 7) Kill The Pain; 8) Rolling Thunder; 9) Pandemic; 10) New World Comin'; 11) No Shelter; 12) Bucket Full Of Hate; 13*) Time Machine.

 

But what is this? Fourteen years into the future, and once again Accept are riding the waves? Did anyone see this coming? Actually, maybe yes. After all, Wolf Hoffmann did not have much of a stunning career in the interim, and in between the perspective of retiring to sell Sauerkraut and staying in the big leagues with the big name, it was at least a 50-50 chance that, sooner or later, we'd see the familiar logo once again.

 

So the band is back, with a mixed line-up. Hoffmann and Baltes represent the original forefathers; surprisingly, they managed to re-recruit second guitarist Herman Frank from the Balls To The Wall lineup, but at the expense of losing the original drummer (Stefan Schwarzmann replaces Kaufman). No matter; the sound is decidedly Accept-able (har har), with all the brutal tones and jagged riffs and rigid metallic beats faithfully preserved and worshipped.

 

The biggest concern, naturally, was with the vocalist; Udo did not care to participate in the re­union this time, being fairly happy with his solo career. This time, however, the band chose their new vocalist carefully, avoiding the David Reece blunder of 1989: Udo's replacement, a little-known metal belter called Mark Tornillo, is unquestionably the closest substitute for Dirkschnei­der that they could find. His voice is a little lower, so you cannot confuse the two, but just as ras­py, provocative and powerful, enough to eliminate the cheese factor.

 

This in itself gives a transparent hint as to Hoffmann's goals: make, once again, a «quintessential­ly Accept» record, something that would faithfully recreate the form and spirit of something like Metal Heart. It works. Every single song off Blood Of The Nations sounds like 1985 all over again — not a single shred of the influence of nu-metal or any of those other silly unnecessary innova­tions that the hard-rocking kids had come up with over the last decade. Just straightforward uncompromising metal for the masses, all the way through.

 

There are problems, though. The nearly seventy-minute long duration is not one of them: the ma­terial is monotonous, yes, but also very even in quality, so you can shorten or extend it at will, or change the running order of the tracks with no loss of conceptuality. The real bad piece of news is that there is not a single riff on here that would swipe me off my feet — all the best ones we've al­ready had on one or another of their previous releases, with only the tiniest of variations, and, come to think of it, the same applies to the worst ones.

 

So what happened is that, in his respectable drive to bring back the power of Metal Heart, Hoff­mann predictably bumped in the predictable hole. When Accept were recording Metal Heart, the pervasive idea was, «Let's record some songs to kick ass with!» Here, the idea is «Let's record another Metal Heart!» — feel the difference? Many of the fans, judging by the rave reviews, ob­viously do not, but I sure do. All of these tracks — with the exception of 'Kill The Pain', a generic and severely trashable power ballad — are enjoyable, but not a single one stays home with you the same way an 'Up To The Limit' or a 'Dogs On Leads' was able to stay.

 

On the other hand, I did say that Blood Of The Nations honours not only the form of Accept, but its spirit as well. The sound is awesome, and I can totally understand the positive reception: if the collective brain of the band has not been spared by time, at least its collective brawn is firmly in place, and with a heavy metal outfit like this, you never really know which one is the more im­por­tant. For an Accept or a metal fan in general, the record is a must-have; for those who like the­ir riffage to be more inventive, however, it is passable. A brawny, not brainy, thumbs up.

 

STALINGRAD (2012)

 

1) Hung, Drawn And Quartered; 2) Stalingrad; 3) Hellfire; 4) Flash To Bang Time; 5) Shadow Soldiers; 6) Revolu­tion; 7) Against The World; 8) Twist Of Fate; 9) The Quick And The Dead; 10) Never Forget; 11) The Galley.

 

Considering the generally warm welcome for Blood Of The Nations, a quick follow-up was most like­ly inevitable, and almost as likely predictable. With its Teutonic balls, nerve, and verve so finely displayed for all to see, could they have lost it in but two years' time? They probably could, if they saw some reason to change the formula; but the early 2010s did not exactly spear­head a revolution in heavy metal values (or in any other values, for that matter), so what you get is another piece of work in full accordance with the spirit of Metal Heart.

 

The title might make one think of some conceptual «metal opera» revolving around World War II — but, in a way, the majority of German metal bands have always revolved around World War II one way or another, and the only song here that addresses the topic directly is the title track, re­plete with Hoffmann's kitschy guitar recreation of the melody of the Anthem of the Soviet Union in the coda section. Otherwise, Stalingrad is just the current code name for the general atmo­sphere of merciless brutality and the world's dog-eat-dog nature which supplies 90% of the re­quired oxygen for Accept. (Together with the album sleeve, it also looks and feels suspiciously like the packaging to some strategy-based video game — somebody in the band must have had registered for a crash course in modern marketology in the interim).

 

In terms of energy, precision, volume, instrument mix, and other technicalities it all sounds exact­ly the same as Blood Of The Nations — some fans point out that Stalingrad is somewhat more «melodic», which I decode as «it has some slower songs on it», but slow or fast, it's all heavy and brutal anyway, no pandering whatsoever to the metal balladry sector. Riff, gang chorus, riff, gang chorus, solo, gang chorus, build-up to final blow-up, repeat formula eleven times with minor vari­ations — nothing new.

 

Alas, nothing new also in the sense that the main problem stays the same: just like Blood Of The Nations, Stalingrad does not have even one fresh riff — most are minuscule variations on what already used to be. Some of the gang choruses are catchy (at least, when you look at the title of ʽHung, Drawn And Quarteredʼ or ʽAgainst The Worldʼ, you immediately remember how they went), but the melodies have not improved. The only thing that saves them is the classic crunchy Accept guitar tone — as long as Hoffmann sticks to that tone (and it looks like he will be carrying it off to Heaven, or Hell, when he goes), I cannot complain while the music is on.

 

Come to think of it, Metal Heart did not have a ton of great riffs, either — that album, too, rode primarily on the strength of its choruses, which might be the reason why Hoffmann explicitly chose it as the «role model» for this next stage in the band's career. Wrong as I may be, it seems to me that to come up with something like one little intro to ʽBalls To The Wallʼ takes far more genius than it takes to come up with an entire Stalingrad — where, so it seems, newcomer Mark Tornillo has completely taken over the function of «emotional jackhammer» from the resident guitarists. But it is also evident now that Tornillo is even more of a one-trick pony than Udo used to be — capable of functioning only in the scream register — and as good as he is at it, the show does begin to get tedious after a while.

 

As usual, speed saves, so if you want to get a rewarding taste of the record, go for the faster num­bers first — ʽHung, Drawn And Quarteredʼ, ʽFlash To Bang Timeʼ, ʽThe Quick And The Deadʼ, etc. — then check out the Soviet National Anthem for a quick laugh, and then go back to your old copy of Restless And Wild, unless you are a modern production freak (in which case, get your old copy of Restless And Wild and have it remastered). On the positive side, at least this ain't no sellout — and now we have an active countdown going on on how many more years (decades? centuries?) this band will continue to retain its holy integrity.

 

BLIND RAGE (2014)

 

1) Stampede; 2) Dying Breed; 3) Dark Side Of My Heart; 4) Fall Of The Empire; 5) Trail Of Tears; 6) Wanna Be Free; 7) 200 Years; 8) Bloodbath Mastermind; 9) From The Ashes We Rise; 10) The Curse; 11) Final Journey; 12) Thrown To The Wolves.

 

Riding high on the national stereotype wave, I would say it is a little less surprising to see such stern, brutal discipline from our German metal friends than it is from Lemmy Kilmister and his unruly gang in Motörhead. But even so, it is a little hilarious to watch 21st century Accept settle into this unwavering mode of releasing, every two years, a new album that sounds exactly like its predecessor. I guess it also saves the reviewer extra work: all I really need to say about Blind Rage is that if you liked Blood Of The Nations, and then you liked Stalingrad without paying attention to the fact that it was the same record with minor variations, you are, without the slight­est doubt, going to like Blind Rage — and, as it is now made obvious, probably every next Accept record as long as Hoffmann keeps on pushing these riffs and Tornillo keeps up his best Dirkschneider impression.

 

I don't want to talk about good songs, I don't want to talk about bad songs, I just have to confirm that the band still sounds very much like the red bull on the album cover. The guitar tones have all the crunch, the lead vocalist has all the banshee credibility, the gang choruses are firmly in place, the drummer bashes his kit like Satan's page, and the band as a whole seems to have com­plete confidence in itself and whatever it is doing. This is all true, and yet, and yet, and yet I still happen to hold empty hope that perhaps, one day, we might yet see another ʽPrincess Of The Dawnʼ from these guys — you know, from the old days when they could not only kick ass, but throw in something genuinely creative and mind-blowing from time to time.

 

As it is, just brace yourself for one more hour of ball-crushing bullpower. When you see that the first song is called ʽStampedeʼ, you just know what it is going to be — fast, furious, aggressive, quickly building up towards the big gang chorus, which is, of course, "STAMPEDE!... STAM­PEDE!..." interspersed with Tornillo's one-liners, and culminating in a lengthy Hoffmann solo. Then the second track slows down a little, and becomes a lyrical celebration of heavy metal, with references to black sabbaths, purple hazes, silver mountains, screaming with vengeance, and phrases like "the zeppelin led its voyage thru skies of purple deep", which might fairly well offend both Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore, but seems to represent a respectful tribute for these guys: "and we salute you — The Last of the Dying Breed!". Well, silly as it is, Accept themselves are the last of the dying breed: this vibe that they still brew so well belongs so utterly to the 20th century that it does sometimes amaze me how they have managed to carry it over so well into the 21st. Who cares if all the songs sound the same, really, or if they are completely incapable of coming up with another ʽBalls To The Wallʼ-level hook? It's all in the vibe, man.

 

Subsequent themes involve anti-imperialism, anti-militarism, prophecies of doom, bloodbaths, the fall of mankind, and the eternal struggle of good versus evil — you know the regular drift. Some choruses are catchier than others (ʽFrom The Ashes We Riseʼ is very singalong-able), some tempos are faster than others (ʽTrail Of Tearsʼ is probably the fastest song about the Indian plight ever written — I had no idea that the Cherokee pioneered speed metal to wreak vengeance on the white man), but writing about this in any sort of detail should be relegated to highly specialized Accept fan boards, or, at least, professional metal magazines.

 

So let me just conclude with this minor detail: it is actually worth seeking out the edition with the bonus track ʽThrown To The Wolvesʼ, since the song (an AC/DC-themed anthem of sexual hunger) begins with an overdriven, ultraloud riff that threatens to eat you alive more convincingly than any of the melodies on the «proper» album. Maybe they decided to leave it off the main body because of the theme — Blind Rage, is after all, more of a conceptual, «socially-relevant» album. But it's funny that the apex of their ferociousness is reached just as they leave behind the social topics and embark on a «fleshy» trip instead. Which just goes to show that the best heavy metal is, after all, just yer basic rock'n'roll — goes best with sex, rather than social protest.

 

RESTLESS AND LIVE (2017)

 

1) Stampede; 2) Stalingrad; 3) Hellfire; 4) London Leatherboys; 5) Living For Tonite; 6) 200 Years; 7) Demon's Night; 8) Dying Breed; 9) Final Journey; 10) From The Ashes We Rise; 11) Losers And Winners; 12) No Shelter; 13) Shadow Soldiers; 14) Midnight Mover; 15) Starlight; 16) Restless And Wild; 17) Son Of A Bitch; 18) Pandemic; 19) Dark Side Of My Heart; 20) The Curse; 21) Flash Rockin' Man; 22) Bulletproof; 23) Fall Of The Empire; 24) Fast As A Shark; 25) Metal Heart; 26) Teutonic Terror; 27) Balls To The Wall.

 

Considering how much respect this 21st century Accept has been getting in the metal community, it is probably inevitable that sooner or later they would summarize it all with a live album — but I guess nobody really expected such a gigantic package: a BluRay / DVD video of a complete per­formance from a 2015 festival in Balingen, Germany, plus a 2-CD live album with twenty seven live tracks (almost two and a half hours worth of music!) culled from different venues of the 2015 tour; amusingly, most of them are from Russia — St. Petersburg, Moscow, even Yekaterinburg... yes, we Russians love our sweaty, masculine (and somewhat gay) Teutonic metal. Then again, they did not insert a piece of the USSR anthem inside ʽStalingradʼ for nothing.

 

The track listing is almost equally spread between the songs from the Tornillo era (predictably focusing on Blind Rage) and the classics, with the proportion of the latter steadily increasing as the pieced-together show draws to a close. It should also be noted that there are some serious lineup changes: after Blind Rage, Herman Frank quit the band, replaced by Uwe Lulis (formerly of Rebellion), and this means that Hoffmann bears the largest brunt of responsibility for all the lead guitar work — not that he has any problems with this. In fact, not that anybody has any prob­lems with anything on the album: this is two and a half hours of non-stop kick ass metal with barely a single mistake produced by anybody. They just roll on like a perfectly oiled machine, charged up 100% and disciplined to a tee — ironically, the Führer would probably be proud of these boys, even if all of their songs (nominally) rail against the Führer.

 

The only tiny problem I see is that, as technically awesome as this guy Tornillo is (you just don't find 60-year old singers every day who could execute all these gruesome vocal parts night after night), his work on the classics shows that he cannot properly replace Dirkschneider — for one thing, he does not have his high vibrato, so the fabulous choruses of songs like ʽRestless And Wildʼ and ʽFlash Rockin' Manʼ come off flat, since he just roars through them instead of vibra­ting like crazy. For another thing, he does not have much of an interesting personality — like everybody else here, he tears through the material with machine-like precision, where Udo would make himself look a little more humane and even funny on occasion. But hey, this is why Udo is U.D.O., and Mark Tornillo is just... Mark Tornillo.

 

As for the setlist, I will not even begin trying to identify the highlights. Stylistically, the old shit and the new shit mesh seamlessly, especially because the old shit selections are intentionally chosen to match the new shit — so we hardly ever get any of Accept's classic «oddities» like ʽPrincess Of The Dawnʼ: this here is fist-clenching, blood-curdling rock'n'roll from start to finish. Of the new shit, ʽNo Shelterʼ features a particularly intense bass / lead guitar battle that blows away the studio equivalent; and ʽPandemicʼ matures into a modern metal classic as its fade-out is extended into a climactic-epic coda. Of the old shit, I am particularly amused that they decided to unearth ʽSon Of A Bitchʼ, which may have been the single most ridiculous thing they originally recorded with Udo ("cock suckin' motherfucker, I was right!" always goes off with a bang). And altogether, perhaps the best compliment to the album is that I actually sat through it twice (that's a whoppin' five hours of non-stop metal crunch!) and genuinely enjoyed most of it. Good old metal'n'roll entertainment — well worth a thumbs up, even without Udo.

 

ADDENDA:

 

STAYING A LIFE (1990/1985)

 

1) Metal Heart; 2) Breaker; 3) Screaming For A Love-Bite; 4) Up To The Limit; 5) Living For Tonite; 6) Princess Of The Dawn; 7) Guitar Solo; 8) Restless And Wild; 9) Son Of A Bitch; 10) London Leatherboys; 11) Love Child; 12) Flash Rockin' Man; 13) Dogs On Leads; 14) Fast As A Shark; 15) Balls To The Wall.

 

A slightly belated live album, recorded in Japan on the Metal Heart tour — although the belated­ness may have ultimately done the band a favour; since it was released almost at the same time as their wretched Udo-less dwarf of a studio effort, Eat The Heat, the world, and the band itself, were reminded of their former glory and splendor, and possibly contributed towards the success­ful reunion with Udo. (Empty, but realistic, speculation).

 

Anyway, Accept are one of those bands that have no serious need for a live album: it is hardly within human capacity to make their live show even more "restless and wild" than what they give out in the studio. You cannot play 'Fast As A Shark' faster than a shark, and if one of their songs on Metal Heart flashed the title 'Up To The Limit', you may be sure that so it was, and the limit is the limit. The primary meaning of a hard rock live album is that it cranks up the level of head­banging, usually at the expense of polish and "cleanness" of sound; but what good is a live album if it still sacrifices a bit of polish, but is unable to crank up the headbanging?

 

Well, except for the bare fact that any Accept recording in Accept's prime is worth listening to as such, Staying A Life has a few major and minor advantages. First, it functions well as a "best of" package — somewhat uncomfortably tilted towards Metal Heart, the weakest of their "immacu­late stretch" of records, but still touching on most of the major highlights of Breaker, Restless And Wild, and Balls To The Wall. Second, it'll be a special delight for Wolf Hoffmann fans, since the guy generally gets more time to stretch out (there is even a special four and a half mi­nute solo which, in a nice nod to the psychedelic tastes of the Sixties, incorporates the theme from 'Hall Of The Mountain King'). Third, 'Princess Of The Dawn' does not get cut off, but is played well to its logical end (some might prefer the odd studio ending, though).

 

Fourth, it is worth owning this recording if only for the small bit of audience participating at the beginning of 'Fast As A Shark', when Udo leads the crowd in a series of call-and-response vocals. Each "call" is longer and more complex than the previous one, but the Japanese crowd does not yield — doing its best to collectively emulate his war cries. Then he comes up with a particularly impressive ascending line, which no single living human being can emulate. The audience, how­ever, gives it their best, and is almost able to match it. But just as the people — I think — start sighing in relief, believing they were finally able to catch up with Udo at his most complex...

 

Oh well, looks like this review is getting too long anyway. The album obviously gets a thumbs up, but so would probably just about every Accept show from 1982 to 1986. The recommenda­tion, however, is not to use it as a greatest hits-type shortcut, because that way you will be mis­sing out on 'Burning', 'Starlight', 'Ahead Of The Pack', and lots of other classics. [Note: the album can also be found in a somewhat more rare, 2-CD, edition, which does have 'Burning' — exten­ded beyond need and inferior to the original — as well as a couple other songs.]

 

THE FINAL CHAPTER (1997/1998)

 

1) Starlight; 2) London Leatherboys; 3) I Don't Wanna Be Like You; 4) Breaker; 5) Slaves To Metal; 6) Princess Of The Dawn; 7) Restless And Wild; 8) Son Of A Bitch; 9) This One's For You; 10) Bulletproof; 11) Too High To Get It Right; 12) Metal Heart; 13) Fast As A Shark; 14) Balls To The Wall; 15) What Else; 16) Sodom & Gomorra; 17) The Beast Inside; 18) Bad Habits Die Hard; 19) Stone Evil; 20) Death Row.

 

Another live album, originally released as All Areas — Worldwide with 14 tracks; once it be­came known that, disappointed with the way Predator came out, the band finally decided to drop the line, it was hastily renamed The Final Chapter and re-released with 6 more tracks slapped on from the Death Row tour (the other 14 were from the Objection Overruled one).

 

This one is strictly for the fans, though; Accept live are only desirable when they're able to bare all of their teeth without the risk of exposing yellow decay or an occasional black hole or two, and while I cannot find any such flaws in Staying A Life (apart from its ungrammatical title), these late-period concerts show just enough wear to become somewhat expendable. No hard feelings — nobody is getting younger, except for those who were born old, like Neil Young — but no significant desire to revisit this particular record ever again.

 

For one thing, you will frequently hear how time has miraculously spared Udo's voice, but that is not entirely true: it is fairly obvious that he can't hit those shrill high notes any longer already on the opening track — he roars the chorus to 'Starlight' instead of wailing it, which makes the song so much more ordinary. Chunks of 'Fast As A Shark', 'Metal Heart', and 'Son Of A Bitch' are also botched, not fatally, but enough to eliminate the possibility of these versions ever becoming as much loved as the originals. In fact, he seems more confident when singing new material now, either from being somewhat bored with the oldies or simply because the new songs are better suited for his diminished vocal power. (But do not get me wrong: the basic strength of his delive­ry has not, indeed, suffered one bit).

 

For another thing, all the tracks here fall into two categories: note-for-note recreations of the stu­dio recordings (particularly the new material from Death Row, where the only difference is lack of excessive studio processing) or slightly re-arranged — almost always for the worst — oldies. The hardest blow has been dealt in the direction of 'Princess Of The Dawn', whose magnificent riff is simply GONE, replaced by a bunch of boring power chords. I don't get the joke. I don't understand the necessity of inserting a bass solo in it either (the extra two bars of bass intro to 'London Leatherboys' were quite enough). Another unpleasant moment is dropping the obligatory "audience participation" bit on the 'Für Elise' in­strumental passage in 'Metal Heart'; I do not share the feeling that getting a metalhead audience to chant Beethoven in a crowded stadium is either educational or amusing. But that's personal pre­ference, of course.

 

Still, it's a decent enough document, and a decent enough performance selection; I can't deny having had the usual headbanging fun listening to it, and it's only at the dire insistence of the brain department that I'm giving it a thumbs down. A must have for fans, though, even if I'm pretty sure there are more convincing bootleg recordings from those tours available for their plea­sure. These official «highlight selections» frequently have a reputation of having been selected by industry people born with cotton wads in their ears.

 

ADAM AND THE ANTS / ADAM ANT

DIRK WEARS WHITE SOX (1979)

 

1) Cartrouble (parts 1 & 2); 2) Digital Tenderness; 3) Nine Plan Failed; 4) The Day I Met God; 5) Tabletalk; 6) Cleopatra; 7) Catholic Day; 8) Never Trust A Man; 9) Animals And Men; 10) Family Of Noise; 11) The Idea; 12*) Zerox; 13*) Whip In My Valise; 14*) Kick.

 

With the New Wave squad fully formed by somewhere around mid-1978, Adam And The Ants caught the bus just a little too late to get their full share of the impact. Even though the band's first playing gig took place in May 1977 and their first radio show in January 1978, their first single, 'Young Parisians', was not released until much later in the year (already with a different lineup from that of the 1977 shows), and their first LP only came out in 1979, by which time this kind of sound was no longer shocking, although still trendy.

 

This little delay pretty much ensured that Stuart Leslie Goddard, a.k.a. Adam Ant, and his ori­ginal pals would be forever branded with the unpleasant tag of «second hand artists» — some­thing one might get to know, if one were so inclined, only after having done the obligatory home­work on the Cars/Talking Heads/Police/Elvis Costello etc. school of pop music. Justified, per­haps, but behind this justification we might just lose the realization that Dirk Wears White Sox sounds nothing quite like any of these individual artists.

 

What Adam Ant, another in an endless line of half-intelligent, half-wild art college dropouts, had in mind at that early stage of his career was a synthesis of all sorts of Seventies-cool. Each of the tracks on the album, if you are at least superficially acquainted with the decade, will remind you of something, but nothing will sound like a complete rip-off. If you strike out the electronic ob­sessions of New Wave artists (note that the album is almost entirely keyboards-free), there will be a rather straight and strict logical line: from the proto-punk scene — on to the heavy guitar glam scene — on to the glam-shedding punkers — on to the whacky artsy New Wavers, and there is a little bit of everything on Dirk Wears White Sox.

 

At one point, I was inclined to call this whole thing «what would happen if The Sex Pistols mis­read Talking Heads» — since way too many songs employ tricky guitar melodies played in a blunt and dirty manner, and since the weirdness of the album's words and moods comes out as hilariously goofy rather than disturbingly paranoid. The definition would not, however, cover all of its flaws and assets, plus, it would sort of imply that Adam Ant was an idiot, and that would be sort of rude. He probably just dug David Bowie more than David Byrne.

 

Certainly, as 'Cartrouble' opens the record with its successive layer addition — a simple steady drumbeat, then an oddly flirting bassline, then a choppy ringing guitar riff, then some high-pit­ched whiny overdriven vocals — it is somewhat hard to fight the feeling that someone might have simply spun 'Psycho Killer' a few times too often. But as the song progresses, switching tempos and adding bizarre falsetto vocal harmonies, it begins to find a weak voice of its own, not thoroughly convincing, but at least mildly intriguing.

 

It helps that Adam Ant could write decent melodies and hooks, keeping the intrigue alive at the start of each new song. Little touches, such as the intro riff to 'Family Of Noise', for instance, or the little «ding-ding-ding» interludes between each line of the normally hard-rocking 'Day I Met God' are innovative and cool, and, what's more, they can be found almost all over the place, you just have to look hard. The band fares pretty well in terms of atmosphere, too — the brooding overtones of 'Tabletalk' are quite impressive (although I am actually grateful to them that there is only one song of that kind on the album, because these «early Ants» were really made for rocking your ass, not hypnotizing your brain).

 

That said, intrigue and fun, as essential as they are to the success of the album, cannot quite fully compensate for its overall lack of purpose. The ridiculous title itself — allegedly referring to Sir Dirk Bogarde, who did indeed wear white socks on occasion, but who the hell cares? — already hints at the possibility that, while Adam Ant was indeed a creative young man, his creativity may have been rather, shall we say, randomized. Dirk is neither a «socially conscious» piece of pro­duct, nor is it a focused hundred-miles-an-hour drive along Absurd Highway à la Wire. There are, of course, occasional stabs at satire and character assassination ('Nine Plan Failed'), and a few tracks emphasize the gross-out factor ('Cleopatra', focusing on the queen's oral skills; sacrile­gious allusions to the size of God's knob in 'The Day I Met God'; 'Catholic Day', possibly the rudest song ever written on the JFK subject, etc.), but, for the most part, the songs just ring hollow.

 

Exciting, but devoid of substance — no big deal when you are dealing with un­pretentious pop clichés, but a little embarrassing when coming from an album that is so clearly «Art Rock». Still, time and tolerance tell us that there's something to be said for empty shiny shells as well. In the mood for some mindless headbanging, but too proud to put on a KISS album? Out for some mildly in­tricate guitar work, but too dismissive of pretentious Heads-style «weaving»? Well, you happen to be in luck — it might be just for you that Dirk decided to put his socks on. Thumbs up, with at least one-listen guarantee from both the brain and the heart.

 

Customer notice: The album comes in a whole variety of versions. The original release included 11 tracks as listed above; the 1983 re-release, supervised by Adam himself, dropped 'Catholic Day' and 'The Day I Met God' (Adam was probably attempting to smoothe out his image to acco­mmodate his armies of teenage fans), replacing them with three single-only tracks that I list as bonuses; and the 2004 remaster finally does us all justice by including everything, plus alternate single versions of some of the other tracks.

 

KINGS OF THE WILD FRONTIER (1980)

 

1) Dog Eat Dog; 2) Antmusic; 3) Los Rancheros; 4) Feed Me To The Lions; 5) Press Darlings; 6) Ants Invasion; 7) Killer In The Home; 8) Kings Of The Wild Frontier; 9) The Magnificent Five; 10) Don't Be Square; 11) Jolly Roger; 12) Physical (You're So); 13) The Human Beings.

 

Soon after the release of Dirk, at the instigation of evil genius Malcolm McLaren, «the Ants» se­gregated from Adam in order to form Bow Wow Wow. This never bothered Adam in the least, since, after all, he wrote most of the songs himself (or, at least, mostly had them credited to him­self), and besides, since when has it ever been difficult to collect any number of ants? If any­thing, his new batch was even trickier than the first, led into action by guitarist and songwriter Marco Pirroni, who had formerly played a bit with Siouxsie & The Banshees as well as a few other les­ser bands. And not only that, but he had two drummers now — and a brand new set of ideas, in­cluding African music influences that McLaren originally offered his former band, but which he had the opportunity to nick all to himself.

 

The result is Adam & The Ants' confusing masterpiece, an album that either justifies Adam Ant as a unique ant-stituion, or clearly shows the ridiculous, parasitic nature of modern art, whichever way you want to face it. «New Wave Rock Theater» would be a good call, implying that the mu­sic is very modern-sounding by the standards of 1980, but the creative ideas behind it owe far more to the absurdist/futuristic strains of early Seventies' glam rock than to the gritty streetwise ideals of the post-1976 era. Certainly Adam's picture on the front cover will make you think Da­vid Bowie, rather than Elvis Costello.

 

The «concept» behind the whole thing is rooted both in the past and in the future. It presents Adam and his buddies as «The Ant people», a.k.a. «The Sex people», a new race of humanoids who seem to take a lot of pride in their deep tribal ancestry — because they play African-influen­ced music while singing about Native American tribes — but have also chosen to resign from the norms of ordinary human life, mutating into ant form in order to achieve spiritual and sexual libe­ration. They still preserve their fierce warrior hearts, though.

 

If any of this were funny, we could say that, finally, Monty Python have met their match. Un­fortunately, it isn't; when you get around to hearing the album, all of it will sound just as stupid as it probably seems to you from reading that last paragraph. Bowie's futuristic constructions may have served as inspiration, but only a ten-year old retard, to put it mildly, could have taken this stuff seriously. Plenty of ten-year old retards in the UK did, though, sending the LP to the top of the charts and launching an «Antmania» craze, comparable in form and scope to the teenage de­lirium around Marc Bolan a decade earlier — except, of course, that, compared to Bolan, Adam Ant would hardly register on a larger-than-petty-dwarf scale.

 

But on the bright side of life, Kings Of The Wild Frontier really sounds like nothing else. Mu­sic that is equal parts punk pop, glam rock, and random surprises (from the «Burundi drum so­und» to spaghetti-western surf muzak), lyrics that alternate ridiculous slogans like «No method in our madness / Just pride about our manner / Antpeople are the warriors / Antmusic is the ban­ner!» with clever puns like «We depress the press darlings», and plenty of raw rock energy to keep things from becoming too artsy — you don't have to love this kind of creativity, but there is at least no shame in acknowledging it.

 

Plus, these songs are just damn catchy. Senseless, unfunny, but still, somehow, «fun». 'The Mag­nificent Five' is infectious punk pop, 'Don't Be Square' exploits contemporary dance rhythms but infuses them with Zappa-style craziness, 'Los Rancheros' is one of the boppiest, most memorable tributes to the cartoonish alter ego of Clint Eastwood, 'Feed Me To The Lions' finds a perfect way to voice the question "Too emotional, are we?", and so on, right down to the unforgettable chant of Indian tribe names in 'The Human Beings' (highly recommendable to everyone taking a basic course in American ethnography, for sheer mnemonic power). One should not underestimate the talents of Pirroni, either, coming up with high quality riffs at least as frequently as your average riffmeister in your average great punk rock band of the era ('Ants Invasion' may be his one single defining moment, but certainly far from the only one).

 

It is hard to say that some of Adam Ant's albums have dated worse than others — the whole con­ception of «Adam Ant» had become irrelevantly alien even before the man quit the musical bu­siness — but at least in terms of perceivable involvement, vigour, and catchy songwriting, the common opinion that Kings Of The Wild Frontier was Stuart's finest hour is hard to beat. The album is well worth getting to know, even if its inclusion in the «1001 Albums You Have To Hear» list is hardly justified: more like, «10,001 Albums» (what kind of sucker would be satisfied with a measly thousand and one records these days anyway?). Thumbs up.

 

PRINCE CHARMING (1981)

 

1) Scorpios; 2) Picasso Visita El Planeta De Los Simios; 3) Prince Charming; 4) 5 Guns West; 5) That Voodoo!; 6) Stand And Deliver; 7) Mile High Club; 8) Ant Rap; 9) Mowhok; 10) S.E.X.

 

The sequel to Kings is just your stereotypical sequel — same stuff, less inspired, more predic­table, and probably your best bet to diagnose yourself as a major fan or a passing admirer of the artist. From a slightly detached point of view, Prince Charming's main goals have even less to do with music than those of Kings, and much more with image. One need not go further than the promo video for the first single, 'Stand And Deliver', to understand that Stuart Goddard's greatest dream in life all along had been to show off in an 18th century dress before millions of people. (I have to admit that he wears it real well, though.)

 

With the abandoning of the «Burundi drum sound», the music loses a good chunk of its energy, and to my ears it also sounds like Pirroni goes lighter on interesting new riffage. After all, the al­bum's title track, another huge commercial success, has eventually been identified as a complete rip-off — not «tribute» or «imitation», but straightahead theft — of Rolf Harris' far less known 'War Canoe' from 1965 (granted, the song itself was based on a traditional rowboat theme, but that is beyond the point); who really knows what other obscure compositions may have served as backbones for the rest of these tracks? It is as if, upon gaining self-confidence after the fame of Kings, Adam had decided that not only was style superior to substance (that he knew all along), but, in fact, substance was a major obstacle to style. Write good melodies and, what do you know, people may start concentrating on them rather than on your beloved kitsch.

 

Still, as another self-indulgent exercise in humorless absurdity, Prince Charming may deserve recognition as Kings' sincerely trying, but far less gifted younger brother. For the most part, the band has dropped the «Antpeople» gimmick, locking it inside just one of the album's tracks (and also arguably the worst one: 'Ant Rap' makes the early white attempt at hip-hop sound as patheti­cally miserable as Debbie Harry, exceptionally, managed to make it sexy). But many of the other gimmicks have been successfully transplanted here as well, including The Pirate Gag ('Stand And Deliver'), The African Gag ('That Voodoo!'), The Native American Gag ('Mowhok'), and even The Spaghetti Western Gag ('5 Guns West', a latecomer in this world to feature in the soundtrack to Blazing Saddles, but firmly inside the same aesthetics nevertheless).

 

It is also quite likely that, depending on the ratio of your coolness, you will want to like and de­fend any track that goes by the name of 'Picasso Visita El Planeta De Los Simios' — not so much for its music, which is just by-the-book power pop, but for the hipness of its subject matter. Ne­ver mind that the song does not even begin to compete in emotion with 'Picasso's Last Words' or in humor with Cale and Richman's 'Pablo Picasso', but a song about Picasso! visiting the Planet of the Apes! titled in Spanish! how awesome is that?

 

Not nearly as awesome as some exercises in post-modern synthesis can be, I'm afraid. 'Stand And Deliver' is still the album's best song: Stuart is so goddamn happy to be playing the «dandy high­wayman» that the happiness is well bestowed on the music, simple as it is, and even if it is not the epitome of a great vocal melody (most of the verses are just shouted) or a great hook (the chorus hardly represents the basic philosophy of «standing and delivering» the way it should get down to you), it is at least infectious in terms of pure enthusiasm. The rest does not go that far.

 

FRIEND OR FOE (1982)

 

1) Friend Or Foe; 2) Something Girls; 3) Place In The Country; 4) Desperate But Not Serious; 5) Here Comes The Grump; 6) Hello I Love You; 7) Goody Two Shoes; 8) Crackpot History And The Right To Lie; 9) Made Of Money; 10) Cajun Twisters; 11) Try This For Sighs; 12) Man Called Marco.

 

The difference between an «Adam & The Ants» album and an «Adam Ant» album would seem to be minimal — in terms of sheer band members, there is actually more difference between Dirk and Kings, both «Ants» albums, than there is between Prince Charming and Friend Or Foe: Adam might have officially disbanded the Ants in the interim, but he did retain the writing and playing services of Marco Pirroni, the second and last major creative link in the Ants' career of 1980-81. Why the name change, then?

 

Well, I guess that the proper commemoration of the finest bunch of tunes ever assembled on a Stuart Leslie Goddard album deserves a proper name change. Kings Of The Wild Frontier may have been the most successful way of showcasing the hollow, but fun philosophy behind «The Ants»; Friend Or Foe dumps that philosophy altogether in favor of simple pop music — terrific pop music — and there is no longer any reason to pass it off for «Antmusic», since Goddard is no longer playing Bowie-like characters. Already Prince Charming didn't quite work that way, so the right thing to do was simply to try and concentrate more on the music, less on the image.

 

I strongly suspect that Pirroni was given a big chance here to write most of the music, since it re­tains most of the attractive elements of its predecessors and ditches most of its dubious ones. It is not at all easy to even call this stuff «New Wave»: it has the big bashing drum sound and echoey guitar tones that are typical for post-punk records, but the melodies owe far more to Sixties' Brit-pop, surf-rock, and rockabilly than the funky-punky stylistics of cool modern people from the late 1970s. In 1982, that wasn't exactly going against the grain — there are, for instance, clear inter­section points with the popular neo-rockabilly scene (Stray Cats, etc.) — but it wasn't the major trend, either: had Adam wanted to go fully commercial, he would, no doubt, have chosen the New Romantic image instead.

 

As it is, Friend Or Foe is an entirely unexpected case of rejuvenation after Prince Charming's slump. How could it even be possible to resist the mad thumping punch of 'Goody Two Shoes'? The combination of breakneck speed, pummeling drums, and exuberant brass fanfares may be as simplistic as a ty­pical Ramones tune, but it is also every bit as irresistible. Even if the song was not the epitome of fashion in 1982, it simply couldn't help becoming Ant's biggest hit — no one can remain indiffe­rent to this kind of thermonuclear blast.

 

The catch is that all of the album is bursting with the same kind of energy. For instance, the sequ­ence of 'Something Girls' (everyone loves a catchy power pop anthem — based on an unforget­table whistling riff, no less!), 'Place In The Country' (another breakneck brass-led piece of deli­riously poppy rock'n'roll — Ramones meet the Dave Clark Five?), and 'Desperate But Not Seri­ous' (a dark, ominous, sexy tune with Pirroni's trademark «spaghetti-western» overtones) is easi­ly one of the most breathtaking one-two-three sequences on any pop record of the decade: only the arrival of 'Here Comes The Grump', a nice, but lighter folk-rocker finally lowers the adrenaline level, serving as a breather before the upcoming senses-overkill of 'Goody Two Shoes'.

 

The second side is not nearly as consistent, with a couple less interesting, more restrained funk-rockers, but even that complaint is like a tiny glitch. The cover of Jim Morrison's 'Hello I Love You', although professionally executed, may seem superfluous — yet it is quite symbolic of the album: one of the Doors' poppiest, lightest (and, if one takes serious the Kinks rip-off accusation, least original) tunes that nevertheless contains an expected particle of the Doors' dark heart — and this is exactly what Friend Or Foe is all about, straightahead pop music with a bit of sense-deranging spice to each of the songs. Even the final number, a Pirroni instrumental conveniently titled 'Man Called Marco', contains plenty of uneasiness — think of a cross between Morricone and the Ventures, with spooky falsetto harmonies and suggestive whistling to boot.

 

Ant's obscure lyrics, making the songs' messages hard to decipher (with only a few straightfor­ward exceptions like the wife-bashing 'Made Of Money'), are the album's weak point: he is still unable to match the poetic heights of a Byrne or a Costello, yet refuses to go the «accessible» ro­ute all the same. So if these songs succeed in driving you wild, spooking, or just plain bedazzling your feelings, you may eventually find yourself wondering what the hell that bedazzling was all about. Really, though, it don't matter. Like I said, Friend Or Foe simply works on the level of a nuclear blast: by the time it hits you, it is of little use to wonder about its nature. Just a thumbs up, without much ado.

 

STRIP (1983)

 

1) Strip; 2) Baby, Let Me Scream At You; 3) Libertine; 4) Spanish Games; 5) Vanity; 6) Puss'n'Boots; 7) Playboy; 8) Montreal; 9) Navel To Neck; 10) Amazon.

 

Normally, we prefer to keep our «smart» rock music on one shelf and our «horny» rock music on the other. There is, after all, something unusually perverse about exercising one's brain and one's groin at the same time — at the very least, the two aren't supposed to enjoy direct benefits from combined interaction. Adam Ant, in 1983, decided to experiment and see if he couldn't prove that point wrong — and, in addition, make some money out of it.

 

Strip is a solidly conceptual album about getting some, dressed up as a commercially-oriented late New Wave record and seriously downplaying Ant's «rock» side: although Pirroni is still lis­ted as co-producer, co-writer, and credited with most of the guitar work, his trademark innovative riffs rarely show through, overwhelmed by both standard fare such as keyboards and electronic drums, on one side, and unusual touches such as swooping orchestration, on the other. And tons of vocal overdubs, all over the place.

 

The November 1983 date of release makes me strongly suspect that Goddard could have been influen­ced by Madonna's debut: at the very least, Strip can be very easily read as a «male an­swer» to the lady's tramp classics such as 'Burning Up'. Besides, he'd been admired by teen girls for so long for obscure reasons — wouldn't it be high time to give them a real reason? Adam Ant, The Ladies' Man?

 

Any computer running on a twenty-year old processor could have easily concluded that, for the­se reasons alone, Strip couldn't be as efficient an album as Friend Or Foe. More keyboards, less guitars, intelligence sacrificed to lustful innuendo — and, try as hard as he could, Ant could never hope to become the new Bon Scott — and, on top of that, to produce their new singles, they bro­ught Phil Collins into the studio. How could this be good? Most critics probably never even gave it a serious try.

 

Which is too bad, because the singles are hilarious. 'Strip' does work as sort of a semi-parodic an­swer to the Madonna approach: the sex drive is not so much worshipped as it is being poked fun at, and who could take seriously a song whose chorus goes "We're just following ancient history — If I strip for you, will you strip for me?" «Seriously», of course, as in «sexually seriously», be­cause music-wise, it is terrific, especially when those disco-era strings, remodelled for the new decade, emerge in the chorus. It does sound a bit like stuff from Phil Collins' solo albums, but the good one, not the boring one.

 

'Puss'n'Boots' is almost just as much fun, and if 'Strip' trashed the sex culture from within it, then this here tune assaults it from without: sticking needles in mannequin bodies of "Pussycats going to London, looking for love and love for fame" may not be a very demanding job ("I wish some­body had told her / City folks ain't the same"), but it's a very satisfying one, especially when set to such a catchy melody and that ridiculously appealing light strings arrangement.

 

In general, ideas seem to run a little thin by the end of the second side, but there is still enough to cover our basic needs. Gypsy flourishes on 'Spanish Games' — synth-pop straightforwardness on 'Playboy' ("What do you wear in bed? Some headphones on my head") — cheesy Bowie-style decadence on 'Vanity' ("She says she likes the accent, she thinks it's so polite") — and my perso­nal favourite, 'Montreal', whose melodic essence is simply undescribable: rockabilly, Brit-pop, psychedelia, and disco all rolled in one, with a harmonic chorus to die for.

 

I find no significant reasons to write the whole thing off, other than, perhaps, «not quite fitting with the times» — but this would be wrong — or «way too campy» (did that ever stop anyone from loving Bowie's Let's Dance, which is just as questionable from the artistic point as these oddball Ant records). Stock this in your «sex'n'brains» category of albums, next to all those Sparks albums, even if, arguably, Strip has dated more quickly. This prevents me none from cal­ling it underrated. Maybe it does try so hard to be smart that it ends up being silly, and for some, this sort of «silly» may fit in with their conception of «awful». I don't know. 1983? I think Rod Stewart was «awful» in 1983. Adam Ant was OK by me. Thumbs up.

 

VIVE LE ROCK (1985)

 

1) Vive Le Rock; 2) Miss Thing; 3) Razor Keen; 4) Rip Down; 5) Scorpio Rising; 6) Apollo 9; 7) Hell's Eight Acres; 8) Mohair Lockerroom Pin-Up Boys; 9) No Zap; 10) P.O.E.; 11) Apollo 9 (reprise).

 

For their next album, Ant and Pirroni were teamed with the legendary producer Tony Visconti, probably a great confidence boost to Adam given how David Bowie, one of Visconti's veterans, had always been his major idol. At that time, Visconti's reputation as a rock'n'roll producer was pretty much impeccable — serious lapses of taste would arrive only later in the decade, when, in­stead of saving The Moody Blues, he happened to only contribute to their artistic ruination. But in 1985, he was still capable of rerouting Adam's energy to the correct channel, that of smart, sar­castic rock'n'roll instead of the smart, but cheesy pop direction of Strip.

 

The result is an album much closer in spirit to Friend Or Foe, and perhaps even more consistent overall, although the individual highlights never approach the intensity level of 'Goody Two Sho­es' or 'Desperate But Not Serious'. The title track is, after all, merely a generic piece of boogie — but, throught the collective effort of Ant, Pirroni, and Visconti, elevated to the status of monster glam rock suitable for the Eighties; not the cheesy hair-metal kind of glam rock, no, just a moder­nized version of the same Bowie / Bolan vibe that owed so much to Visconti a decade earlier. Perhaps 'Vive Le Rock' is too smart for its own good to pass for a general good-time rock'n'roll anthem, but for a freak subculture rock'n'roll anthem ("Look out," cries the man, "Rockers going Star Wars!") — why not?

 

Song after song is steady, healthy, hilarious rockabilly fattened with Pirroni's post-punk guitar sound and Visconti's thick, glutinous production. They get away with nearly everything — such as ripping off Carl Perkins' descending intro riff to 'Honey Don't' for 'Hell's Eight Acres'; turning Chuck Berry's 'Memphis Tennessee' into 'Rip Down' by adding extra bite to both the melody and the now completely inscrutable lyrics; and invoking the spirits of both Gene Vincent and the en­tire lineup of Sha-Na-Na for the foot-stompin' rock'n'roll march of 'Mohair Lockerroom Pin-Up Boys'. And no serious review of the album could be complete without mentioning 'P.O.E.', argu­ably the cheerfulest, drunked-est song about the nuclear threat ever written (I'm sure there must be a reason why the song namedrops Khrushchev instead of more up-to-date Soviet leaders, but then Mr. Ant was eight years old at the time of the Caribbean Crisis, confirming the old idea that most art is stimulated by one's childhood memories).

 

The album's big single was somewhat different: 'Apollo 9', actually released one year before, was Ant's rather pretentious attempt to invent a new type of «space rock» that would merge classic rock'n'roll, New Wave, and synth pop all in one and make it all fun, in contrast with the astral gloom of the New Romantics. The record buying public was confused, and sales were low both for the single and for the ensuing LP. And this is, paradoxically, its biggest flaw: Vive Le Rock was clearly tailored for hit status, but in between its 1985 release and 1982's Friend Or Foe, pub­lic tastes had changed so much that this approach could no longer chart. Which means that only if songs like 'Apollo 9' didn't try so hard to be commercial... they could be even better!

 

However, this is all merely cold post-factum reasoning that should in no way denigrate the al­bum's pure entertainment value. The naked fact is that Vive Le Rock means little, if anything, but it brightens up your day in no less vivid a manner than, say, a good Paul McCartney solo record. Sadly, never again would an Adam Ant album be that much fun; its commercial failure threw Adam off the tracks completely, and when he returned five years later, he was never quite the same. A hearty thumbs up.

 

MANNERS & PHYSIQUE (1990)

 

1) Room At The Top; 2) Rough Stuff; 3) If You Keep On; 4) Manners & Physique; 5) Can't Set Rules About Love; 6) U.S.S.A.; 7) Bright Lights Black Leather; 8) Piccadilly; 9) Young Dumb And Full Of It; 10) Anger, Inc.

 

With the release and ultimate commercial failure of Vive Le Rock, Ant disappeared for about four years from the music stage in order to pursue an acting career — dreaming, perhaps, of bea­ting his idol, the Thin White Duke, at least in that particular area. Unfortunately, he could not even place a Man Who Fell To Earth under his belt, let alone a Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; compared to Bowie's generally pathetic filmography, Ant's list of achievements is arch-pathetic. (Cold Steel? Spellcaster? Midnight Heat? The titles alone speak for themselves). Eventually and inevitably, Mr. Goddard had little choice but to bring back Marco Pirroni and return to the world of note-splicing and leg-wiggling.

 

Fate was, however, cruel enough to assure that Ant's «comeback» album would be the absolute musical nadir of his entire career. Besides Pirroni, the third leading contributor happened to be bassist André Cymone, notable for several years of working in Prince's band, upon which he swi­tched to mostly producing records for third-rate dance-pop artists, hopelessly — and, possibly, badly — teaching them rudiments of the Prince approach. Unsurprisingly, he tried to do the same to Adam: the biggest catch of 'em all — and the most deplorable results.

 

Apart from the sardonic, modestly intelligent lyrics (which can hardly be heard anyway behind all the multi-tracking and echo), there is not much Adam Ant on this album, and, sadly, virtually no Pirroni: the crackling, oddly twisted riffs that used to distinguish Ant's pop songs from his com­petition, have been wiped out in favor of primitive dance melodies, and moreover, guitars are frequently used as merely a wall of jarring background noise behind one-finger-on-a-keyboard synthesizer patterns. 'Bright Lights, Black Leather', a lyrically sane depiction of the youth subcul­ture of West Berlin (another hi from Bowie), in the musical department sounds like Modern Tal­king — few things can be more distasteful to my ears than that Godawfully abysmal chucking keyboard sound. No album with a song like that on it deserves a positive review, be it surrounded by a dozen equivalents of 'Satisfaction' and/or 'Hey Jude' (not that such a thing is possible; there must be a mathematical proof for this somewhere).

 

Actually, some of the songs still manage to be catchy — this is, after all, a carefully crafted and marketed dance-pop album, and 'Room At The Top', with its infectious beat and whoah-whoahs, managed an expected and, from a commercial point, fully deserved dent in the UK and US charts. But it really fits in better with all those other so-called artists produced by Cymone — Pebbles, Jermaine Stewart, etc. — than the good old «Antmusic». On 'Rough Stuff', with its in-yer-face R'n'B-isms of "lagga-lagga-boom-sh-boom", Ant feels completely out of his league — it's a mi­racle they even managed to complete that take, let alone turn it into another minor (non-)hit. Not just out of his league — «pitifully replaceable» should be the right term for it.

 

In short, I recommend to reject the record on ideological grounds: this kind of music can only be enjoyed when accompanied by videos of scantily clad hot girls doing aerobics (preferably with a lot of bend-overs), and even then, probably only from a nostalgic angle. (Actually, the official video for 'Rough Stuff' more or less satisfies that requirement, so not all is lost). Sadly, there are some good lyrics here that make vicious fun of contemporary social life, all of them wasted on trash muzak that is sucking up to contemporary social life.

 

Some sources state that Manners & Phy­sique shows a heavy influence of the «Minneapolis Sound» pioneered by Prince — don't believe a word: at its best, the «Minneapolis Sound» de­pe­n­ded on first-rate musicianship, whereas on he­re there is no musicianship to speak of in the first place. Did Prince, even considering the per­manently increasing amount of filler in his po­ckets, ever release a song as awful as 'Bright Lights, Black Leather'? I don't think so. Thumbs down.

 

WONDERFUL (1995)

 

1) Won't Take That Talk; 2) Beautiful Dream; 3) Wonderful; 4) 1969 Again; 5) Yin & Yang; 6) Image Of Your­self; 7) Alien; 8) Gotta Be A Sin; 9) Vampires; 10) Angel; 11) Very Long Ride.

 

Maybe it was a good thing, after all, that by 1995 the world had all but forgotten Adam Ant and certainly had little basic need for his presence. After another five-year gap spent wasting his life on a miserable acting career that still did not take off — although maybe he enjoyed all of it, I have no real idea — and after suffering the humiliation of having an entire new record rejected by his label, he eventually reteamed with Pirroni as well as Morrissey's guitarist Boz Boorer and managed one more album, his last solo offering to date.

 

Wonderful isn't all that wonderful, but it is certainly a huge leap in sense and quality over its pre­decessor — more than that, it is a notable first for Ant: the first album on which, most of the time at least, he seems to be impersonating himself rather than somebody else. There are no attempts, be they forced or natural, to sound hip to the times or to wring out a hit record at any cost. There are no stereotypes to be adhered to, no genre conventions to respect. (Granted, much of this could have been motivated by the commercial success of new Brit-pop acts like Blur, but there are no specific «Blurrisms» that I could refer to). Even the album sleeve, first time ever, shows us simp­ly «the man» without any special attire or makeup.

 

Obviously, since Adam Ant is no Paul McCartney or Neil Young, great songs do not come to him easily, and few, if any, of these songs overwhelm other than through the mere realisation that the man has finally decided to talk to us unmasked (or, at least, pretended to be talking to us unmas­ked — you never really know with that breed of chameleons). But this new approach, which com­prises a heavy reliance on acoustic guitars, folk-pop harmonies, and bits of retro psychedelia, at least ensures that when a song's hooks are well written, the song is a marvel, and when they're badly written, it is at least enjoyable.

 

The title track still managed to hit the charts, but I do not remember it nearly as vividly as the opening number, 'Won't Take That Talk', which by all means should also have been a single, but they probably chose 'Wonderful' over it because of the danceable rhythm. Too bad, because the hooks are sharper and more emotional on 'Talk', a song that may be reflecting that one major cha­nge in Ant's attitude: "Got to stop treating people / Like they have no feelings, / Stop treating peo­ple / Like they have no meaning". An excellent folk-rocker with good acoustic and electric parts, crescendos, and that weird overall feeling of honesty that makes it such a unique opener in the history of Ant LPs: there is something in the way he softly, but firmly pronounces the line "I won't take that talk from no one" that makes you understand he really might mean it.

 

Second runner-up, and one of the finest Brit-pop creations of the decade, is '1969 Again', with a guitar sound too juicy to reject and vowel harmonies too gorgeous to forget, even if the lyrical message is not quite clear (looks like someone in the big leagues made Adam a bit unhappy). The­re is also the dreamy neo-psychedelia of 'Yin & Yang', the fast bouncy pop of 'Gotta Be A Sin', the Hunky Dory-style folk-rock exhuberance of 'Vampires', and other little things that only come to one's attention through successive listenings, quite warranted.

 

At the end of the road, Wonderful might turn out to be wonderful: it is, so far, Ant's only album whose meaningfulness may want to unravel itself slowly, an album that shows there is more to the man than just the image far better than even a compilation of his very best stuff from the «cla­ssic» years. The fact that he still has not come out with a new studio offer has more to do with accidental causes — primary among them all the psychic health problems he's been dealing with — but who knows, maybe it's better that way: Wonderful is an exquisitely tasteful and wise cho­ice for a career swan song, and in time, when the number of people for whom the name «Adam Ant» still has a musical meaning dwindles to about ten or fifteen, will be sure to hold its rightful place alongside Kings Of The Wild Frontier and Friend Or Foe as an equally worthy album. Thumbs up; track it while it's still in print.

 

ADAM ANT IS THE BLUEBLACK HUSSAR IN MARRYING THE GUNNER'S DAUGHTER (2013)

 

1) Cool Zombie; 2) Stay In The Game; 3) Marrying The Gunner's Daughter; 4) Vince Taylor; 5) Valentine's; 6) Darlin' Boy; 7) Dirty Beast; 8) Punkyoungirl; 9) Sausage; 10) Cradle Your Hatred; 11) Hard Men, Tough Blokes; 12) Shrink; 13) Vivienne's Tears; 14) Who's A Goofy Bunny; 15) How Can I Say I Miss You; 16) Bullshit; 17) How Can I Say I Miss You (reprise).

 

In a fashion somewhat atypical of «has-beens», Adam's comeback actually culminated in a new album rather than started out with it — for about three years, since early 2010, he had been re­sharpening his teeth on stage, remembering old material, polishing the new one, and generally getting back into character. Actually, he'd invented a new character — the «Blue Black Hussar», which was also the name of his new private record label — but it really only signified a return to his old fetish with 18th / early 19th century styles and uniforms. A return to his trusty old self, really, the last signs of which we had glimpsed back in 1985, with Vive Le Rock arguably being the last «genuine Adam Ant» album.

 

Now, in 2013, Adam Ant has completed the comeback, and he wants us all to take notice — not only is the album title his lengthiest ever, offering some modest competition to Tyrannosaurus Rex and Fiona Apple, but the album itself is his lengthiest ever: seventeen tracks stretched over seventy minutes, taking full advantage of the CD format in an age when the average artist seems to have already outgrown that stage (and Michael Jackson is dead). Which means that there is a lot here to digest and assimilate — and it might take some serious time, because Adam Ant is not out there to make the job easy for you. The Blueblack Hussar is hardly his worst album, and it is most likely not his best, but it is the toughest nut he has offered for us to crack so far.

 

Even after five listens, most of the songs still feel emotionally alienated, but not emotionally em­pty. This is definitely the Adam Ant of Wild Frontier and Friend Or Foe, but acting his age: the songs are taken at slower tempos and stripped of superficial wildness (tribal drumming, lunatic yel­ling, martial parade atmospheres, etc.). Adam's character impersonation routine still puts a heavy «glam stamp» on it, but on the whole, his attitude nowadays is not unlike David Bowie's — that of an aged guru, striking a careful balance between the tastefulness of the arrangements, the impressionistic / symbolic / confusing nature of the lyrics, and the retro vs. modernistic pro­duction ratio that could keep both the old fans and the occasional new listener happy.

 

Clearly, such albums run a very high risk of being flat-out boring, and for many people Adam's latest offering — especially if they put it on with ʽGoody Two Shoesʼ on their minds — may well be the epitome of boredom. The melodies (most of which, strangely enough, have a folksy acoustic guitar foundation, with the occasional exception of a heavy electric riff only proving the general rule) are fairly routine — to get note sequences of this caliber, one certainly does not need to drag a sixty-year old New Wave freak out of the closet. And the «vibe»... well, it is not even clear if those particular audiences that did not grow up on Adam's classic records will get the sarcastic/absurdist gist of it all.

 

But I think that, according to Adam's own standards, the record is a success. Where, for instance, Alice Cooper remained unable to recapture the crassy horror-show temptation of Welcome To My Nightmare with his direct sequel, Stuart Leslie Goddard has managed to demonstrate that the good old Adam Ant is still alive, sharp-witted, and stubbornly independent. To begin with, he opens the record with ʽCool Zombieʼ, which uses a swampy, slide-guitar-based arrangement to sabotage and blow up the old «Southern rock» values — "for a time I lived in Tennessee, a pretty hillbilly, a cool Zombie", says the guy, ensuring that one place where this record will never get much airplay is any random Nashville radio station. It is not «great» or «catchy» — it is «sharp», and it pretty much sets the general standard for whatever is to come.

 

The individual songs are often slow, but steady growers. ʽStay In The Gameʼ eventually comes to life as a moody younger brother of the Doors / Joy Division vibe (with a squeaky, jarring guitar sound on the Joy Division side, and catchy poppy vocals on the Doors side). ʽVince Taylorʼ is a morose, but punchy tribute to an old, forgotten rock hero (Adam Ant's worst nightmare, eh?). The mock-sexy, mock-psychedelic aah-aahs of ʽValentine'sʼ have a sad, but decadent flavor that stops exactly midway between gallant prettiness and intentional self-parody (well, at least it stopped for me and hasn't moved an inch ever since). ʽCradle Your Hatredʼ has an anthemic R&B chorus that feels almost as sincere as the metallic breath of ʽHard Men, Tough Blokesʼ.

 

All in all, by the time we get around to ʽWho's A Goofy Bunnyʼ, a song allegedly dedicated to the memory of Adam's good friend and mentor Malcolm McLaren, you might want to start asking that question on your own. Is it Adam Ant who is a goofy bunny, putting on this retro show in slow mode despite having long since outlived his time? Is it the «public taste», symbolized by the likes of McLaren and churning out demand for silly rock theater? Is it us reviewers, wasting our time trying to sort out the meaningful from the meaningless and ending up with extra frustration on our hands? Maybe we're all just a bunch of goofy bunnys ever since we separated art from its pragmatic ceremonial purposes and started pretending that it has additional meaning...

 

...in any case, one thing is for certain: a record that gets one to ask these kinds of questions cannot be a total failure. Just like Adam Ant was teasing us in the New Wave era, challenging listeners to a winless game of «guess who's smart and who's dumb», he is efficiently doing the same stuff now, only with a little more restraint and age-related corrections. In other words, this is a confu­sing record — but it is a stimulating confusing record, which is the good kind of confusing, and I give it a thumbs up even despite not being able to say if I «like it» or even «understand it». You will just have to find out on your own; all I can say is, at the very least Adam Ant is not back for nothing — he is definitely back with something, whatever the heck it is.

 

ADOLESCENTS

ADOLESCENTS (1981)

 

1) I Hate Children; 2) Who Is Who; 3) Wrecking Crew; 4) L. A. Girl; 5) Self Destruct; 6) Kids Of The Black Hole; 7) No Way; 8) Amoeba; 9) Word Attack; 10) Rip It Up; 11) Democracy; 12) No Friends; 13) Creatures; 14*) Welcome To Reality; 15*) Losing Battle; 16*) Things Start Moving.

 

The Californian hardcore punk scene has one solid advantage over most other scenes: while the kids who would later create it were growing up, their moms and dads grooved to the sounds of Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, and even though these sounds may not always be directly re­flected in their children's music, there is still a definite line connecting the two.

 

Adolescents grew out of Agent Orange, one of the first «surf-punk» bands, when Steve Soto, the bass player for the latter, decided to pursue a somewhat grittier line of work and teamed up with three former members of Social Distortion — so one might think of Adolescents as one of the first, and best, «supergroups» in hardcore. The original idea was... no, wait, there was no original idea. These guys would not go the way of the Dead Kennedys and their political agenda. The emphasis is on bare, brutal emotion dressed in the simplest, most accessible, musical forms.

 

Adolescents could play their instruments (like all good hardcore bands that managed to remain in history — the ones that didn't merely pretend to ignorance, but were truly ignorant, predictably lapsed into oblivion), particularly lead guitarist Frank Agnew, but the rhythm section of Casey Royer on drums and Steve Soto on bass was pretty hot as well. Not only do they keep up a great beat on all of the songs, but the basslines are occasionally melodic, and so are Agnew's solos. Singalong choruses, occasional «moody» interludes, throw in a talented way of creating lyrics that seem blurted out on the spot, yet are surprisingly smart when you take a look at them — no wonder Adolescents is widely considered as one of hardcore's peaks in the history books.

 

Hardcore spirit is no big friend of mine, but even I cannot deny being overwhelmed by these guys when they are at their most focused and collected. Strangely, the song length factor plays in re­ver­se here: the longer these songs are, the better they get. Longest one, 'Kids Of The Black Hole', clocks in at 5:27, a sacrilege to hardcore formula, but, after a brief ominous intro, it's five minutes of non-stop apocalyptic frenzy that uses the metaphor of 'The Black Hole' — an abandoned apart­ment somewhere in Orange County used as a punk house — to complain about how life stinks in general, and how there's not much to do for a poor boy except to contribute further to the stinki­ness. They just blaze on and on and on and on, doing a hundred and twenty on an endless high­way, transforming this simplest of grooves into a one-of-a-kind generation anthem.

 

Second longest song, 'Amoeba', is respectively second best — another, very similar, fiery groove, this time comparing us humans to one-celled creatures whose life has no purpose: ring a bell? The Adolescents offer no way out of the cage, they have simply decided that the more you thrash against its walls, the more you're able to lay your mind off the really bad thoughts. By giving kicks, no matter how pointless, you get kicks, and if you ain't kicked real hard by 'Black Hole' or 'Amoeba', all I can say is your soul might be in good need of a descaling agent.

 

Shorter tracks either create props for longer ones or serve as quirky, fun little statements in their own right: 'I Hate Children' is pretty much defined by its title (and how many people have, at one time or another, secretly wished they could join a hardcore band to gain a right to sing "Kill all children dead"?), 'No Way' adds a mean militant spirit to the Ramones-pioneered "lobotomy rock" genre, 'Democracy' is a song whose lyrical message will be appealing to kids throughout the first world for as long as it has not been washed away by the third, and then there's 'Creatures', the band's signature song which is... pretty stupid, really. But it works.

 

To «get» hardcore, I believe, one needs to swallow it in one quick gulp, vodka-like, which is why all the classic hardcore albums are so short. Once Adolescents is over and you start wondering if there ever was a peculiar, individual taste to this record, or perhaps it was just like any other hard­core album ever done, completely interchangeable, it might strike you that not a single note really rang false; that the thirty-minute wave that threatened to drown you, but eventually left you just high and dry, came on as a true force of nature rather than a mere theatrical stunt, and that its cen­ter of gravity, 'Black Hole', must have hit you as hard today as it hit kids and grown-ups thirty years earlier. And they may not have known it themselves, but there is a great feel of balance on the record — between brute force and subtle intelligence, primitive chainsaw buzz and delicate, complex soloing, brevity of the punk statement and lengthiness of the carried-away jam. For all of this, Adolescents deserves a big thumbs up, and Orange County deserves not to be nuked, after all.

 

BRATS IN BATTALIONS (1987)

 

1) Brats In Battalions; 2) I Love You; 3) The Liar; 4) Things Start Moving; 5) Do The Freddy; 6) Losing Battle; 7) House Of The Rising Sun; 8) Peasant Song; 9) Skate Babylon; 10) Welcome To Reality; 11) Marching With The Reich; 12) I Got A Right; 13) She Wolf.

 

No surprise when I say that nobody really needs to hear anything by the Adolescents other than Adolescents, for the safe, simple, predictable reason that when the Adolescents started recording their second album — a whoppin' six years, sixty member changes, and six hundred personal ca­taclysms after their first — they were no longer adolescents, and what use can one make of an Adolescents album in name but not an Adolescents album in nature?

 

Even though, somehow, for these 1986-87 sessions the band managed to get most of its original, and best, lineup, back in place (except for Frank Agnew, replaced by his no less Agnew, but much less talented brother Alfie), Brats In Battalions suffers from punk's commonest disease: the inflammatory conflict between the acute desire to grow and the gross inability of growing. By embracing various substyles and experimenting from different angles, Cadena, the Agnews and the rest of the band are clearly trying to say something. But oh how better it was back when the only thing they were trying to say was that they couldn't really say anything.

 

The whole album is summarized fairly well by their misguided cover of 'House Of The Rising Sun', which they start out as a «regular» dirty folk-blues number and then, after a couple verses, transform into hardcore. The question is — why? It doesn't sound like a meaningful reinvention; it sounds like lame self-parody, neither angry, nor funny, just dumb. And one big, dumb joke like that can actually be enough to soil the whole experience.

 

There is still enough decent material here to compensate, and it is interesting to watch the band's guitarists diversify and complicate the rhythm work, taking lessons from the thrash and speed metal scenes while still retaining a completely punkish attitude — the title track is a prime exam­p­le of that approach; if only the entire album managed to uphold the same spirit, but, alas, trouble starts seeping in already on the third track. 'The Liar' is a slab of anti-Reaganist propaganda, so crude it makes the Dead Kennedys sound like Jean-Paul Sartre in comparison ("Reagan plays the liar, power's his desire, there's nothing in the world we can do!" — how about calling on Super­man?), and only matched for embarrassment by 'Marching With The Reich', whose first chords recall Blondie's 'One Way Or Another' and whose spirit is about as frivolous as Blondie's, too, even though the message is supposed to be serious.

 

Honestly, things could have perhaps worked out better if the band just dropped the «hardcore» pretense completely and became a Black Sabbath tribute ensemble, because the best thing they could do at that point was hammer out metallic riffs, e. g. the 'Spirit Of The Universe' look-alike in 'She Wolf' (should have dropped the odd psychedelic interludes, though) and the Stooges kind of darkness-filled 'Things Start Moving'. Instead, they are caught somewhere in the middle be­twe­en becoming a real band of musicians and an amplified social manifesto, but not working hard enough to become the former and too lenient and embarrassing to justify the latter. Despite the few good songs, this is a rather obvious thumbs down.

 

BALBOA FUNZONE (1988)

 

1) Balboa Fun Zone (Riot On The Beach); 2) Just Like Before; 3) Instant Karma; 4) Alone Against The World; 5) Allen Hotel; 6) Frustra­ted; 7) Genius In Pain; 8) It's Tattoo Time; 9) Til' She Comes Down; 10) Modern Day Napoleon; 11) I'm A Victim; 12) Balboa Fun Zone (It's In Your Touch); 13*) Runaway; 14*) She Walks Alone; 15*) Surf Yogi.

 

Recorded without lead vocalist Tony Cadena; Steve Soto and Rikk Agnew share most of the vo­cal duties, and you can actually tell the difference because in between the two of them, they so­und a heck of a lot uglier than Tony used to be on his own. Not that it matters — we're not exact­ly talking La Scala out here. Hardcore music calls for hardcore values.

 

But is this really hardcore music? Without the speed, the intensivity, the youthful aggression of old? The Adolescents' third album seems to make even fewer nods to their rebellious past than its immediate predecessor. 'Riot On The Beach' starts things on the proper note (even though that main riff sounds suspiciously Anthrax-like, showing off their interest in thrash) — fast, flashy, and totally furious, but then the band, once again, starts veering off on all sorts of tangents, dig­ging into power pop, retro-metal, surf-rock, even folksy acoustic musings.

 

Upon first sight, all the nasty things that could be said about Brats In Battalions are just as easily applicable to Balboa Fun Zone, with the addition of lamer vocals. Upon second sight, this is a major improvement: the band has finally learned to add expertise and convincing force to ma­ny of their ventures in all these genres. They may not have learned to justify their existence, but at least they have made it more tolerable.

 

Thus, the obligatory unpredictable cover — this time, John Lennon's 'Instant Karma', no less — is a lot better, because they mostly stick to the original mood, melody, and tempo, without any silly attempts at «deconstruction»: it's a solid, faithful, tribute that preserves the tune's fine spirit (al­though why in the world it needs to preserve anything still remains a mystery), even if the vocalist sounds like he'd been living in a trash heap north of the Polar Circle for most of his life.

 

Some of the gritty hard-rockers are also quite good, mixing catchy choruses with well-played crunchy riffs ('Til' She Comes Down', 'Allen Hotel'); again, provided that one's nerve centers re­act well to mixing punk with metal and power-pop at the same time. Lyrically, there's nothing in­teresting going on, and few things can be more irritating than, e. g., sincere odes to the art of mu­tilating one's own bodies ('It's Tattoo Time'), but when they're played with verve and the chorus is memorable, who really cares?

 

All in all, I really think that Balboa Fun Zone does a much better job at finding its potential au­dience, but it is still hard to understand what kind of an audience that might be. The craft has been improved, the souls have matured, and the result is a well-made album that has no clear reason for having been made. Are they being serious? Ironic? Post-modern? Ante-modern? The next time you hear someone dismissing solo McCartney as «pure fluffy craft», tell him that McCart­ney, at least, knew when he was going for prime time «fluff» with a clear-cut goal of putting you into an intentionally fluffy mood. Albums like Balboa Fun Zone, on the other hand, simply do not know what it is they are going for. No matter how catchy a song like 'Allen Hotel' is, no one is ever going to make it his first choice for being in a mood for hard rock.

 

So it is a good thing, in the end, that the Adolescents' second attempt at ruling the world came to an end in the spring of 1989, when they called it a day once again. Historical interest is by far the only reason to listen to this period's output, unless you happen to be really out of hard-rocking material — but even in that case, will these middle-of-the-road studies in seneselessness bring you satisfaction?

 

OC CONFIDENTIAL (2005)

 

1) Hawks And Doves; 2) Lockdown America; 3) Where The Children Play; 4) California Son; 5) Guns Of Septem­ber; 6) Pointless Teenage Anthem; 7) Death On Friday; 8) Into The Fire; 9) Within These Walls; 10) Let It Rain; 11) OC Confidential; 12) Monsanto Hayride; 13) Find A Way.

 

For representing Orange County's pride and joy, the Adolescents have certainly earned a right to reunite anytime, anyplace and in any line-up, as long as it brings further pride and joy to concert-going headbangers. However, playing old hits live is one thing, and recording an entirely new album is another — especially considering that even their mid-1980s output wasn't too hot; what does the band have to offer us now, with most band members in their fourties?

 

Answer: the second best album to bear the name of Adolescents. No longer rough and tattered, boasting the cleanest, most distinctive production they ever had, OC Confidential reinvents the band as a semi-intelligent, highly melodic pop-punk act, comparable (and, in the reviewing cir­cles, many times compared) to the likes of Green Day but, somehow, still looking as if they'd ar­rived at this kind of sound entirely on their own.

 

In any case, regardless of how wary one might feel about pop-punk, OC Confidential is certainly not an attempt at going commercial — it's merely an attempt to sound their age without sacrifi­cing too much of the old punch. Unfortunately, Rikk Agnew is absent from this reincarnated ver­sion, but brother Frank is still in, and his chainsaw riffage has not changed one bit since 1980; improved production values, in fact, make it sound tighter and angrier than ever. Ditto for Steve Soto's bass work, and with Tony Cadena back in the band, they have overcome the singing pro­blem that was so rampant on Balboa Fun Zone.

 

Most importantly, the songs are fun! No silly misguided covers, no failure-bound experimenta­tion, just yer basic catchy-chorus-based rock'n'roll. More than half of the numbers invite you to sing along, and if it weren't for the generally lame lyrics, I'd happily go along. (Then again, I do not see any reason to condemn the record for the low poetic and primitive social level of the ly­rics — most critical assessments of punk rock usually praise the lyrics if the music is good and laugh at the lyrics if the music is awful; with a minor handful of exceptions, punk rock artists rarely scale the heights of Lou Reed, or, in fact, feel the need to).

 

A lot of effort has been put in these choruses, as well as into the surprisingly high quality of background vocals. 'California Son', 'Guns Of September', 'Lockdown America', 'Let It Rain' — all of these and more show a completely new level of songwriting. Of course, there is a downside: they actually sound like consciously planned and crafted pieces of music, rather than the God-, or Satan-driven clouds of dark energy delivered in 1980. But this is where we have to remind our­selves of the date of release: you cannot ride the same dark cloud for twenty years.

 

Last time the band tried to consciously shift its image, it ended up with the absurdity of Balboa Fun Zone. This time, they ended up with tighter, catchier, polished music that will make you smile rather than clench your fists, but what of it? (At least someone did the job better than Pink and Avril!) As long as you refrain from digging too deep into the lyrics and concentrate on just savoring the moment, OC Confidential is good one-time proof of the punk's-not-dead thingy. There's hardly any reason to savor it more than once, of course, but isn't a flash in the pan exactly what the whole idea is about? Thumbs up, over and out.

 

THE FASTEST KID ALIVE (2011)

 

1) Operation FTW; 2) Inspiration; 3) Wars Aren't Won, Wars Are Fought; 4) One Nation, Under Siege; 5) Babylon By Bomb; 6) Too Fast, Too Loud; 7) Learning To Swim; 8) Can't Change The World With A Song; 9) Orange Crush; 10) Serf City; 11) Jefferson Memorial Dance Revolution; 12) Tokyo Au Go-Go; 13) No Child Left Behind; 14) Branded; 15) Peace Don't Cost A Thing.

 

Something like five years in the making — it took the band so long to record the songs, in fact, that everybody had enough time to forget that they even existed. Where OC Confidential was met with at least some reviews and even a faint appraisal, The Fastest Kid Alive justified its title — it came and went so fast, nobody had the proper time to notice it. Which is a pity, because it is certainly no worse than its predecessor.

 

With not a single Agnew in sight, guitar duties this time are handled by Mike McKnight and Joe Harrison; never heard of either before, but they handle their duties well. As usual, people will want to complain about the way-too-clean sound, but let us just remember that it's been a long, long time since the Adolescents were really «punk»: musically, this is just good old-fashioned rock'n'roll that happens to have borrowed some chainsaw guitar for the rhythm tracks. And for that kind of music, Fastest Kid Alive is neither over- nor underproduced. Just the right amount of crunch for those who like it medium rare.

 

The cool news is that the long wait period has not decreased the songwriting capacities: Steve Soto and Tony Reflex are still baking kick-ass anthems that may have — not always, but fre­quent­ly enough — loud catchy choruses, colorful poppy solos, and sometimes, even offer fun little twists on well-known riffs. Nothing is genuinely great, but there is enough genuine energy, fast tempos, and cute hooks to keep you occupied throughout.

 

Most importantly, perhaps, you get the feeling that they really have things to sing about — the album is even heavier loaded, on the socio-political side, than OC Confidential, and the intensity of the singing and playing stays on the sincere side for most of the show. Of course, the impact is slightly muffled by the fact that most of these songs were still written in the Bush years, but, as you can understand, only slightly. This time, Tony and Steve take it out on America with such vengeance, I'd gladly offer them to emigrate to Russia, a paradise-haven of freedom and progress in comparison, if I only could. But, humor aside, acute hatred may be bad for politics, yet it is usually good in art, and here, it serves as first-rate fuel.

 

Monotonousness of the Adolescents' anti-war feelings aside, the songs are fun once again. The opening ʽOperation FTWʼ, with its four-time "Hello!" and a list of all the countries that the USA might have an issue with, might be rather flat, lyrics-wise, and quite predictable from the second verse on, but the trick sticks, with the listener getting himself a crudely hilarious basic piece of rock'n'roll to blast from the windows of his Obamanos-decorated car. And then, one by one, they flash by, always fun while they're on, not entirely forgotten when they're gone.

 

Personal favs include the aptly titled ʽCan't Change The World With A Songʼ (sure enough); the aptlier titled ʽSerf Cityʼ (with blatantly ironic elements of surf rock from Steve's Agent Orange past); the intelligently emphasized "fuck you"s of ʽJefferson Memorial Dance Revolutionʼ; and the album closer ʽPeace Don't Cost A Thingʼ, which tries very hard to recapture the breakneck ominousness of ʽKids Of The Black Holeʼ — and comes somewhat close.

 

But personal favs do not really mean anything on an album where all the songs essentially sound the same. The impor­tant things are the drive, the tasty sound, and the... well, let's call it «careful attitude towards melodic flow» or something like that. I enjoyed it. It didn't exactly revolutionize my views on American foreign policies, or on the timelessness of punk rock lyrics, but I had my­self a good time, and that's worth a bit of a thumbs up. Now you, too, can be a good boy/girl and go fight the system for about forty minutes.

 

PRESUMED INSOLENT (2013)

 

1) The Athena Decree; 2) Conquest Of The Planet Of The See Monkeys; 3) Forever Summer; 4) Riptide; 5) In This Town Everything Is Wonderful; 6) Big Rock Shock; 7) Dissatisfaction Guaranteed; 8) Presumed Insolent; 9) Broken Window; 10) 300 Cranes; 11) Snaggletooth And Nail; 12) Daisy's Revenge; 13) TicTac At The Alligator Tree.

 

Two years later, the Adolescents are back and their formula has not changed half an inch. There is a new guitar player (Dan Root) replacing an older guitar player (Joe Harrison), but who gives a damn? The Adolescents were never known for individualistic styles of guitar playing. What matters is that the album is even more monotonous than its predecessor, and offers the listener an even harsher retro-encapsulation of the band's classic sound that you thought was possible — one of the most rigidly conservative «rebel» albums I've ever heard.

 

The sound is every bit as pristine and exciting as it used to be, but this time around, the songs are really glued together — same length, same tempo, same chord patterns, same mood for each of these thirteen numbers. Worst of all, the production is muddier and more muffled than it was for Fastest Kid, so that the guitars rarely sound as «crisp», and the vocals are diffused in the mix and lack proper rousing power. The basic aural impression is a rather «sludgy» one, and no matter how much of an effort the band makes, the songs never make me want to clench my fist like ʽKids Of The Black Holeʼ used to do.

 

A few of these numbers have power-pop potential that is never properly realized — I think that ʽBroken Windowʼ, for instance, could make better use of its vocal melody, had Tony bothered to record his voice more prominently, or had one of the guitar players bothered «coloring» that tone a little differently. But the thing is, they are still operating on this «strictly spontaneous» basis, where too much seasoning is supposed to spoil the broth — a mistake, because times, brains, and attitudes have changed well enough since 1981 to allow this «spontaneity» to be tinged with genius. Within these thirty-two minutes worth of music lies a perfectly palatable power-pop EP, with a running length of 15-20 minutes; all they had to do was give themselves a little more time and a little more sophistication to get it out of their system.

 

But no, this is «hardcore punk», pretending to old glories, and now it doesn't even have the come­back excite­ment of Fastest Kid, let alone the fact that each of these songs probably took five minutes to write. The song titles look appealing — ʽTicTac At The Alligator Treeʼ is one of my favorites, regardless of what it is all about (the words are predictably undecipherable throughout, and hunting for lyrics to hardcore punk albums is not my favorite cup of tea) — but the emotional punchline is always the same, and fully predictable.

 

Consequently, as much as Fastest Kid was a pleasant surprise, so is this quickie follow-up a major relative disappointment, a stern exercise in «purism» that can only appeal to the band's original bunch of devotees — 45-year old geezers for whom the ideal adrenaline rush has been permanently defined as a concentrated blast of speedy Californian punk, regardless of how much effort or talent went into it. Alas, a thumbs down.

 

LA VENDETTA... (2014)

 

1) Monolith At The Mountlake Terrace; 2) A Dish Best Served Cold; 3) Bulletproof; 4) Double Down; 5) Fukushima Lemon Twist; 6) The Last Laugh; 7) 30 Seconds To Malibu; 8) Silent Water; 9) Talking To Myself; 10) Formula 13; 11) Rinse Cycle; 12) Ricochet Heart; 13) Nothing Left To Say; 14) Sludge; 15) Sanctuary & The High Cost Of Misery; 16) Let It Go.

 

They're speeding up in their old age — only about a year's difference now between Presumed Insolent and its follow-up: sixteen more songs, all of which not only sound completely alike, but also sound completely like the previous thirteen songs. This means that everything from the pre­vious review applies to this album as well, and we might just as well leave it at that, but crappy old blasted «reviewer's honor» demands at least one or two observations off the top of my head (if only to prove that I have actually listened to the record, which I did), so here we go:

 

— first, with a song like ʽFukushima Lemon Twistʼ they put themselves at serious risk of losing their Japanese audience (do they have a Japanese audience? actually, doesn't everybody have a Japanese audience?); the tune is ostensibly about the misuse and abuse of atomic power, but some sensitive souls with a poor understanding of Tony Cadena's pronunciation might take it the wrong way, and start nostalgizing about the days of Pearl Harbor;

 

— second, when they slow down the tempo for the first time on ʽSilent Waterʼ, it seriously helps: against the usual background, its unhurrying lead guitar growl and transition from verse to chorus are positively memorable and emotionally impressive. Just add better production that does not reduce the rhythm guitar to concrete fodder, and you get yourself a humble retro-classic;

 

— third, the same principle miraculously works on the album's second slow song, appropriately titled ʽSludgeʼ, where there is a really cool «guitar thunderbolt» thrown in during each chorus, and it makes me think the sacrilegious thought that, perhaps, the thing that most roughly prevents these late period Adolescents albums from being good is speed as such;

 

— fourth, it took me way more time to think of these three than this album deserves, so I am going to end this right here with a rigorous thumbs down, much as I respect the religious dedi­cation of the band and even enjoy their overall sound as cool background muzak.

 

MANIFEST DENSITY (2016)

 

1) Escape From Planet Fuck; 2) Hey Captain Midnight; 3) Unhappy Hour; 4) Silver And Black; 5) Nightcrawler; 6) Jacob's Ladder; 7) American Dogs In Europe; 8) Spring Break At Scar Beach; 9) Catfish; 10) Lost On Hwy 39; 11) Bubblegum Manifesto; 12) Rat Catcher; 13) Vs.

 

Two things: (1) no, that is not a typo in the album title, it's a brave, unrewarded swipe-in-the-dark at clever­ness; (2) ʽEscape From Planet Fuckʼ is a noble and understandable wish, but a fairly crude song title that would have been more appropriate in 1980 than it is in 2016. Then again, it is perfectly appropriate for a band that called itself The Adolescents in 1980 and made it a major ideological point not to change that name in 2016.

 

Other than that, I have to say that I find this record even less deserving of a discussion than La Vendetta. More than ever now, it looks like Tony Reflex and his friends have invented them­selves a long-term ice bucket challenge — how long will they be able to go on making hardcore records like this before they run out of extra dole money? And the fact that the playing is as mus­cular, the screaming as furious, and the lyrics as anti-establishment-vicious as ever, no longer plays to their advantage, because every song sounds like it wants to change the whole world, yet there is probably only a tiny smudgeon of people who even know of its existence in the first place. And this time, there's not even a single attempt at doing something out of the ordinary — song after song after song, it is the same fast tempo, the same fuck-the-system scream, the same anthe­mic refrain, the same generic melodic lead guitar, and the same 100% lack of that hardcore magic that, thirty-six years ago, set them apart from the pack.

 

Really, it's so humiliating, they even have their Manifest Density page on Wikipedia marked for potential deletion because of «lack of notability» — what a frickin' shame for a band writing songs like ʽAmerican Dogs In Europeʼ. But honestly, enough with these ever-deteriorating clones of The Fastest Kid Alive already! And see, this is why, when all other parameters are levelled out, good old hard rock like AC/DC wins over punk rock — at least the Young brothers, even in their least inspired days, still tried to come up with a slightly different riff for every song; on this record, I struggle to find even one half-decent guitar melody. Thumbs down.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE 1981 & 1986 (1981, 1986; 1989)

 

1) Amoeba; 2) Who Is Who; 3) No Friends; 4) Welcome To Reality; 5) Self Destruct; 6) Things Start Moving; 7) Word Attack; 8) Losing Battle; 9) I Got A Right; 10) No Way; 11) The Liar; 12) Rip It Up; 13) L. A. Girl; 14) Wre­cking Crew; 15) Creatures; 16) Kids Of The Black Hole.

 

Originally released as sort of a last goodbye for the band, perhaps to refreshen the memories of those who were too disillusioned with the aimless meandering of Balboa Fun Zone — to remind that, no matter what, the Adolescents ripped it up on stage both in 1981 and 1986, even if their studio avatars were widely different in those two periods.

 

The two setlists are quite intelligently trimmed, so that not a single song gets repeated; as a result, what you get is the eponymous album reproduced almost completely, plus all three songs off the accompanying EP Welcome To Reality, later re-recorded in somewhat different manners for Brats In Battalions, and just a tiny handful of original songs from Brats, so as not to darken your day by juxtaposing the majorly classic with the mildly competent.

 

Sound quality is fairly decent for club recording level (not to mention that a live hardcore perfor­mance hardly begs for a super-professional hi-fi sheen), and, of course, the band fully justifies its live reputation by playing it all even faster and uglier than it was in the studio (although in terms of pure speed, it does not look like they ever set out to beat the Ramones' record). The downside is that the vocal harmonies, on those few songs where they do matter, sound terrible ('Amoeba'), and that some of the anthemic numbers do not quite deliver the concentrated, thick, knock-over  punch that is their main purpose ('Kids Of The Black Hole').

 

But as pure neighbor-annoying musical hooliganry (not to mention priceless historical document), it works fine enough. The band intentionally tries to present itself as being much dumber than they really are (first «joke» on the 1986 performance: "Good evening, we're the Bangles!... I'm into the Bangles, Ma! I'm in love with Sue!"), which sort of ties in well with the eponymous al­bum material, but can also be irritating to those who see the Adolescents as something more than, well, ado­lescents — proceed at your own risk.

 

Whatever be, the Adolescents rock live. Guitar work is fine, up to the Agnews' usual intricacy le­vel, Tony's screaming is ideal hardcore, what else is there to say? If you're an admirer, go get it. If you're not, it won't hurt too bad to try and become one. Thumbs up.

 

RETURN TO THE BLACK HOLE (1989; 1997)

 

1) No Way; 2) Who Is Who?; 3) Word Attack; 4) Self Destruct; 5) L. A. Girl; 6) Brats In Battalions; 7) Welcome To Reality; 8) Wrecking Crew; 9) Do The Eddie; 10) I Love You; 11) Losing Battle; 12) Creatures; 13) All Day And All Of The Night; 14) Rip It Up; 15) Amoeba; 16) Kids Of The Black Hole; 17) I Got A Right.

 

If the idea of splicing two different shows from two different periods does not appeal all that much to you, then here is the Adolescents' first ever, and, possibly, last ever official recording of one full show from 1989. (Amusingly, the show was recorded in the same year that the archival Live 1981/1986 was released, and then shelved all the way until 1997 — even though they were clearly going for a record release straight away, as the audience is told sometime during the show: "We're recording this for a live album — but we won't sell out like Sham did!" So they didn't).

 

The results are not utterly spectacular, but they are as utterly satisfactory as possible. First, the record cat­ches the Adolescents in a state of primal reunion, with all the right members in all the right positions. Second, sound quality is as prime as you are ever likely to get on a live hardcore album. Third, they are concentrating, reasonably, on the classics, playing 10 out of 13 songs from the self-titled record. Fourth, the band sounds tight, well-oiled, and just as ready to incite point­less riots as it was one decade before. Fifth, they do 'All Day And All Of The Night'. The world won't fall to pieces if you never hear it, but there is always something brutally touching in ge­neral about hardcore bands paying tributes to Sixties' heroes, and something subtly intelligent about the Adolescents acknowledging their debt to Ray Davies.

 

Minuses? Not much, except for an occasional lame joke or two ("I don't care if you sing along, but don't take my mic, or I'll kill you!"), regular off-key singing on the harmonies (so 'Amoeba' is ruined one more time, big deal), way too many pauses between tracks, sometimes filled with annoying feedback noises (the band's equivalent of tuning up, no doubt), and the perennial ques­tion of the true significance of live albums as such. My answer? Just another thumbs up.

 

 

ADRIAN BELEW

LONE RHINO (1982)

 

1) Big Electric Cat; 2) The Momur; 3) Stop It; 4) The Man In The Moon; 5) Naive Guitar; 6) Hot Sun; 7) The Lone Rhinoceros; 8) Swingline; 9) Adidas In Heat; 10) Animal Grace; 11) The Final Rhino.

 

It is strange that Adrian Belew only released his first album after he'd already engaged in serious collaborations with Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Talking Heads and King Crimson — maybe it had to do with some sort of natural shyness that had to be overcome — but, on the other hand, it's also a great benefit, because his very first album shows a completely formed artist at the height of his powers. Then again, maybe not that much of a great benefit: with an album like Lone Rhino under his belt, he's always had a very hard time topping it ever since.

 

In order to enjoy Adrian Belew, you have to be a little whacko in the aural department. The man's life-long love is electric tones and special effects; sometimes you'd think he could be completely happy left alone with just his 10,000 pedals and no guitar at all. Yet he is one of the few who can actually breathe real life into all of these pedals, rather than engage in completely soulless robo­tics, because deep down inside, he's a sympathetic, friendly, pop-loving guy like most of us.

 

Only when one realizes that Adrian's insides are, in fact, not controlled by whammy bars and Electro Harmonix, will it be easier to understand, for instance, his alternate obsession with nature and its sounds. From the title of the album, to its delicious sleeve painting (Adrian entertaining a rhino with his demented riffs, or, perhaps, learning to imitate a rhino with his demented riffs?), to its song titles and lyrics, and, of course, to its actual sounds — much, maybe most, of it is his in­spired filtering of animal life and behaviour through the double sieve of his imagination and his electronic equipment. The results may not immediately bring to mind the stomping of odd-toed ungulates or the roar of Pantherinae, but they can certainly be derived from there.

 

'Big Electric Cat', for all I know, may be Adrian's masterpiece. The funky rhythm pattern, the dry crackling of high-charged guitar loads, sometimes deep frying, sometimes exploding the listener, the sexy lyrics that juxtapose femme fatale and feline beauty, and the catchy chanting of the re­frain — everything that Belew does best is captured here, on his first solo track. Experimental, but memorable; whacked-out, but meaningful; sonically dangerous, but imminently attractive, my ideal of an intelligent pop composition.

 

But there is much more; the album rocks out quite consistently, in a "Euro-funk" manner mostly, occasionally pausing in its charge with one or two moody landscapes ('Naive Guitar'; 'The Final Rhino', with Ade's four-year old daughter joining him on piano — quite impressive for that kind of age, by the way, although by now we know she eventually failed to become the nex Mozart), and dis­playing an impressive palette of atmospheres, from a little misanthropy ('The Lone Rhinoceros', where Adrian gives the best sonic impression of a rhino's moaning I've ever heard, not that I've ever heard a rhino moan) to a little humor ('The Momur') and a little social sarcasm ('Adidas In Heat', whose opening verses nod ever so slightly in the direction of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues').

 

Adrian's specific vocal tones and constant desire to add an extra layer of sonic noise may pose a problem to one's heartfelt enjoyment of this material; I know it certainly has been a problem in my case, with the brain never hesitating for once to reward the record with a decisive thumbs up but the heart always hesitating to follow suit. But Adrian's total dedication to his craft, along with his really down-to-earth nature (unlike Robert Fripp, his grumbly older partner in King Crimson, he never gives the impression of being stuck up in any way), manage to convince me that he sincerely loves these things he's doing, and that all of these whizzes and whangings are there for a real reason, not mere­ly out of a snobby desire to out-whizz and out-whang all competition.

 

TWANG BAR KING (1983)

 

1) I'm Down; 2) I Wonder; 3) Life Without A Cage; 4) Sexy Rhino; 5) Twang Bar King; 6) Another Time; 7) The Rail Song; 8) Paint The Road; 9) She Is Not Dead; 10) Fish Head; 11) The Ideal Woman; 12) Ballad For A Blue Whale.

 

Although Belew's second album came out high on the heels of Lone Rhino, and his backing band is mostly the same, it sounds strangely different — and, in my opinion, inferior. For some reason, production values have dropped down, as if the artist was too lazy to drop by a proper studio and stuck to his bedroom instead; and there is clearly more emphasis on his solo guitar playing (or, should I say, guitar strangling?) than on a band-type sound.

 

As a result, Twang Bar King neither rocks as hard as its predecessor nor manages to reach the same levels of 'moodiness'. On the first count, it does try, because technically, it features two of the most overtly rock'n'roll numbers in Adrian's life story: a maniacal cover of the Beatles' 'I'm Down' (!) and the title track, a funny marriage of the traditional "rock'n'roll hero" cliché with Ad­rian's undying love for the whammy bar. The second, however, is so short that you barely manage to acknowledge its power, and the former is... dubious — not enough of a "deconstruction", not too successful a "tribute".

 

Twang Bar King also goes heavy on MIDI technology, freshly designed a year before and — perhaps — already implemented on Lone Rhino, but, in any case, only explored properly on this particular record. And the sounds that Belew synthesizes here are questionable to my ears: very computerish and, in some respects, dated just the same way that we feel about late-Eighties MIDI music in computer games. Belew's technique is not to be questioned, of course, but no technique is worth serving to produce ugliness, and much of this sounds openly ugly.

 

Also, where Lone Rhino gave us a fairly independent Belew, Twang Bar King yields a Belew that is much more Crimson-ian in form, with the same familiar dissonances, polyrhythms, and pseudo-pop songs that we all know in better avatars on King Crimson record (where they benefit from the participation of Robert Fripp and the gang). E. g., 'Paint The Road' may sound fantastic to the uninitiated, with its off-the-wall funk and grit, but in reality it is just an inferior reworking of the King Crimson classic 'Thela Hun Ginjeet' — who needs fish without the chips when you can always have the chips?

 

Overall, considering that Belew isn't known as a prolific writer, capable of churning out five mas­terpieces over one night of heavy sleep, I'd say that he was a bit spent here, having already dona­ted his best ideas at the time to Lone Rhino and the King Crimson records; or maybe it is just the ugly MIDI tones that deviate me from savouring the genius. One truly gorgeous atmospheric piece that I would, however, heartily recommend to all those who believe that technology need not be the enemy of beauty, is 'Ballet For A Blue Whale', which is neither a ballet nor is really in­tended for blue whales, but, in your imagination, can easily be both. You do have to wait for all the computerish sounds to go away, though, as it's the very last track on the album, but in reward you'll get some otherworldly tones, moans, and groans that are, perhaps, the only piece of truly timeless shit on this collection. Thumbs down overall, but flashes of brilliance here and there.

 

DESIRE CAUGHT BY THE TAIL (1986)

 

1) Tango Zebra; 2) Laughing Man; 3) The Gypsy Zurna; 4) Portrait Of Margaret; 5) Beach Creatures Dancing Like Cranes; 6) At The Seaside Cafe; 7) Guernica; 8) "Z".

 

The most sonically audacious of Belew's albums of the decade, it's also the one that is bound to appeal the most to burnt out King Crimson fans. Fully instrumental and almost completely jetti­soning Belew's "pop" side — which would unexpectedly come back in full swing on the next four albums — it is definitely not for the faint-hearted. Nevertheless, I can hardly call it an "avant­garde" record in the full sense of the word, because its weirdness comes from Adrian's ongoing passion for bizarre tones and effects, as well as from its sonic unpredictability, rather than KC's trademark desire to break the limits of traditional harmony.

 

The album is relatively strictly demarcated in the middle: the first side is generally rhythmical, featuring "regular" melodies played in odd ways ('Tango Zebra' is a partial exception, because it's long and has multiple sections, but at its core is a relatively clear free-jazz rhythm pattern), and the second side, at least after 'Portrait Of Mar­ga­ret', is more generally "atmospheric" and, there­fore, less accessible. But there are highlights in both camps. 'Laughing Man', for instance, frivo­lously justifying its title with ugly laughing sounds from a mechanical toy, is a neo-psychedelic interpretation of an elegant, romantic waltz — before it collapses midway through, giving way to some slithery Eastern-tinged improv (but also quite neo-psychedelic in character). It's amusing and visionary at the same time.

 

Then, on the second side, it's easily matched in quality by 'Guernica', a song so obviously inspi­red by Picasso's painting that, I believe, it is even possible to get that impression without knowing its title. In a matter of two minutes, Belew gives us the roar of the Condor Legion, the detonation of the bombs, the sirens, the chaos and confusion, the cries and moans of the dead and wounded, and perhaps even some of Pablo's bull-and-horse imagery to finish the picture. I have not been able to locate anybody else's appreciation for the composition — I guess it's too short and modest a piece on a way too obscure album — but I insist upon calling this one of Adrian's most meaningful and interesting experimental creations.

 

Everything else on the album can be described, more or less, by taking these two numbers as star­ting points. Belew is, of course, "nuts", and Desire Caught By The Tail will be best appreciated by similar-minded individuals. However, Mike DeGagne of the All-Music Guide is quite right in saying that "there is a method to Belew's madness", which, I'd like to add, quite a few "sane" people might be seriously interested in deciphering. The brain is, thus, much more interested in these sonic equivalents of cubist painting than the heart, forcing a thumbs up decision, but the album is vivid and colorful enough to make me believe that this might, indeed, reflect the way Belew actually feels about the world around him rather than the way he dissects the world into crazyass guitar patterns.

 

MR. MUSIC HEAD (1989)

 

1) Oh Daddy; 2) House Of Cards; 3) One Of Those Days; 4) Coconuts; 5) Bad Days; 6) Peaceable Kingdom; 7) Hot Zoo; 8) Motor Bungalow; 9) Bumpity Bump; 10) Bird In A Box; 11) 1967; 12) Cruelty To Animals.

 

This is the first in a sequence of four records in a row on which Belew's main goal was to exor­cise his inner pop demon; from 1989 to 1994, he intentionally displaced his avantagarde Crimso­nian schtick to backstage status and tried to be all four Beatles at the same time instead. Serious fans paying serious attention to Adrian's career already knew that one day it would come to this, of course, given his pop contributions to King Crimson's albums and the playfulness of Lone Rhino, but perhaps some of them still prayed to the Great God of Weirdness about not letting it happen — to no avail.

 

Come to think of it, serious fans had probably already heard Adrian's previous two records with The Bears, their eponymous album of 1987 and Rise And Shine from 1988, both of them essen­tially a bunch of tight retro-power pop songs modernized by Belew's guitar; but The Bears could have been thought of as a lightweight side project, a little bit of "divertissement" or maybe even a red herring. That Belew would go on in the same direction after parting ways with the Bears was somewhat sensational all the same.

 

And yet, nevertheless, I have never come across any major ac­cusations of "selling out". Perhaps it's because, technically, Belew never managed to really sell out: the funny video for 'Oh Daddy' got some MTV rotation and earned him a single hit, and so did the Bowie duet for 'Pretty Pink Rose' off the next album (arguably, just because of Bowie's name attached to it), but that was it — he never made that much money from this stretch. Perhaps, also, it's because this whole stretch took place in the interim between two major rocket launches for King Crimson; you can't really accuse a guy of "selling out" if the "selling-out" is clearly sha­ped as a bit of self-indulgent hobby in between "serious work".

 

But I would say that the main reason these albums are viewed, even by Belew's strongest critics, from the "weird man overdoes the weirdness" angle, rather than the "weird man loses honour and goes straight" angle, is that, for 1989-1994, they are, when judged by their own value, decidedly uncommercial. For one thing, Beatlesque pop has ceased to be of immediate commercial value ever since the Beatles broke up — Belew did not have any more chances of firing up the public-at-large's attention than Big Star and Badfinger two decades earlier. For another thing, his records, although clearly "tributary", were still Adrian Belew records and nobody else's. His lyrics, his vocals, his rhythmics, his guitar tricks — he may not be playing in 13/8 all the time, and he may go easier on the whammy bar, but this is by no means "commonplace" pop music.

 

Most of the instruments are played by Adrian alone (Mike Barnett is credited for string bass on a couple of tracks), meaning that, as in all such cases, you will not get a "live feel" for the procee­dings; this is technically admirable, but I think the record would have seriously benefitted from a few more overdubs, as well as better drumming (I hate beat boxes, especially on non-beat-box oriented albums); the lack of smoothness detracts from being able to fully appreciate Belew's in­ventiveness and songwriting talent. This is a serious drawback, I think — but, essentially, the only one, because the songs are all very strong.

 

Some are still molded in the old "paranoid" tradition that Belew carries over from the New Wave style of 1980's King Crimson and Talking Heads — such as 'Motor Bungalow' and 'Hot Zoo'; they are, however, mixed with post-psychedelic anthems to serenity and tranquility ('Peace­able Kingdom') and fun, lightweight pop-rockers and ballads that cast Adrian in a nostalgic or sentimental mood, wearing his heart on his sleeve or at least pretending to ('One Of Those Days', where he could be mistaken for a modern day Jerry Lee Lewis; 'Bad Days', with a gorgeous vocal part). On most of these numbers guitar trickery is reduced to a minimum — you'll have to look for classier guitar work on the grittier rockers, e. g. 'Coconuts' with its bee-sting tones, or 'Bum­pity Bump', one of the more authentically Crimsonian displays of grimness on the album. But these are exceptions: Mr. Music Head will not go down in history as a guitar-lover's paradise.

 

Disregarding the CD-only bonus sonic collage ('Cruelty To Animals', only there to further satisfy Adrian's faunistic fetish), the record's two most memorable tunes are the ones that bookmark it. 'Oh Daddy' is a sweet, heart-warming, but highly sarcastic take on the "I wanna be a star" syn­drome, cleverly structured as a dialog between Adrian and his now-11-year-old daughter (who can sing backup vocals even better than she could play piano as a 5-year-old) — all the more iro­nic seeing as how this "lament" about not being able to make it to the top was the closest Belew ever came to becoming a real pop star. And the mini-symphony '1967', almost completely acous­tic, is usually recognized as cast in the vein of the Beatles' mini-sequences, although melodically I do not spot any direct Beatles influence — but it is a very interesting piece nevertheless, alter­nating between a little vaudeville and a little blues and a little folk-pop, and all the time you can't really tell whether it's got real soul or if it's just a hollow exercise in genre-hopping without chan­ging the guitar around your neck, but it's interesting all the same.

 

In short, Mr. Music Head is an album tailor-made for that little middle-of-the-road segment of the audience who like their pop music weird, and their weirdness poppy. Unfortunately, experi­ence shows that we live in an age of extremism, so that the Simple Guy will find this too jarring and twisted, and the Complex Audiophile will dismiss it as "pop-slop". Since I never subscribed to either stereotype, I happily award this a thumbs up, with the brain in the lead (marvelous, un­predictable design) and the heart catching up (on the strength of 'Oh Daddy' and 'Bad Days' as already in the bank, and quite a few other songs poised to get there eventually).

 

YOUNG LIONS (1990)

 

1) Young Lions; 2) Pretty Pink Rose; 3) Heartbeat; 4) Looking For A UFO; 5) I Am What I Am; 6) Not Alone Anymore; 7) Men In Helicopters; 8) Small World; 9) Phone Call From The Moon; 10) Gunman.

 

The sound is so much fuller on this record, you could swear Adrian finally hired a backing band of his own, but he didn't; he just seems to have figured out better ways of getting all his different parts together. Also, perhaps the impression is a bit illusionary, caused by grander diversity and the use of David Bowie as a guest star (Belew used to play for Bowie in the late Seventies, so it's only just that the famous frontman of Tin Machine return the favour).

 

Young Lions is my favourite "pop" record from Belew's backlog: better fleshed out than Mr. Music Head, yet somewhat less Beatle-worshipping than the subsequent two and, therefore, more true to Belew's own nature. The only song here where "core melody" is neglected in favour of weirdness is 'I Am What I Am', a tribal psycho-rocker featuring muffled spoken radio DJ-style vocals over a bundle of guitar pyrotechnics — fun stuff, hearkening back to the good old days when Belew would play the old game of go insane onstage with the Talking Heads. Everything else is Belew-style pop, highest category.

 

Naturalistic romanticism pulsates from every pore of the title track — real wild: 'In the guise of a lioness, the wind kisses her burning dress, you can feel her animal eyes, you can hear them cry, be the jewel around my neck, never a tear on my burning dress...' (I shiver at the thought of what Adrian's sex life must look like). With ferocious tom-tom percussion work (delivered by some Dutch percussion ensemble called Van Kampen), more guitar fireworks, this plunges you into a mixed holodeck of African jungle and Planet SoGo, but Belew's vocals also add a bit of genuine soul and tenderness (unlike, say, 'Big Electric Cat', all sci-fi and flash) and, thus, an extra layer of meaning and interest. No wonder it has become a stage favourite even in his avantgarde and experimental shows.

 

An even hotter kicker is the Belew/Bowie duet 'Pretty Pink Rose', a song David wrote for his former guitarist but liked enough to include it in his own setlists from time to time. It's a perfect match of wit, kick-ass attitude, and guitar fire — with one of the most exciting transitions from the first twenty seconds of relaxed ambient intro to the main rhythm of the song that I know. The other duet between the giants, 'Gunman', is, on the other hand, paranoid and bleek, which does not work nearly as well in the overall context of the record, but it is quite inspired all the same.

 

There's plenty of unpredictability throughout — such as Belew's decisions to remake the King Crimson standard 'Heartbeat' (solid, if not all that necessary); to cover the Traveling Wilburys' (!) 'Not Alone Anymore' (but he does give a pretty fine Roy Orbison impression); to offer just one, but a really good one, relaxed atmospheric ballad ('Phone Call From The Moon'); and to disguise his eco-sensibility as the album's fluffiest, cheeriest pop tune ('Men In Helicopters', where you really have to pay attention to the lyrics to get its actual bitterness). And it all makes Young Lions' forty minutes flash by in an instant and leave you yearning for more. Thumbs up with­out a doubt — once again, the guy manages to feed both the intellectually yearning and the emotionally demanding parts of the organism at the exact same time.

 

INNER REVOLUTION (1992)

 

1) Inner Revolution; 2) This Is What I Believe In; 3) Standing In The Shadow; 4) Big Blue Sun; 5) Only A Dream; 6) Birds; 7) I'd Rather Be Right Here; 8) The War In The Gulf Between Us; 9) I Walk Alone; 10) Everything; 11) Heaven's Bed; 12) Member Of The Tribe.

 

Inner Revolution is certainly the purest pop album Belew ever gave his increasingly befuddled fans, but not necessarily the "truest" to his inner self. This time, he does not simply include a tri­bute or two to the Beatles; he seems to have asked himself the question, "What would the Beatles sound like today if they were frozen solid around mid-1966 and, upon defrosting in 1992, put to­gether in a modern type studio?" Then he spends the rest of the time trying to answer it.

 

To be fair, only about half of the songs try to ape the Beatles, chief culprits among them being 'Everything', 'Birds', and 'Big Blue Sun'. And there is hardly any danger of one's mistaking even these for the real thing (as could be the case with, say, 'Lies' by the Knickerbockers), because Be­lew is much too idiosyncratic, and his guitar playing style is so much his know-how that he pro­bably could never play his instrument Lennon-wise or Harrison-wise even if he wanted to — de­spite the fact that, technically, he obviously trumps both at the same time. But be it as it may, he does attempt to crawl into somebody else's hide, and the results are questionable.

 

I guess I might as well say right here what it is that bugs me about Belew's pop style. He under­stands fairly well that one of the Beatles' main points of attraction was the inexhaustible cheer­fulness and optimism (at least, until drugs, mutual hatred, and Sgt. Pepper kicked in) on their early records, and on songs like the ones just mentioned above he literally jumps over his head trying to recreate that youthful, naïve, unbridled optimism. But I cannot buy it — even though I have little reason to think of Adrian Belew as, deep down inside, a depressed, sardonic, misanth­ropic sad creep, I still cannot buy it. The arrangements are shiny-happy major key ones, the sin­ging is loud and welcoming, but the word to describe it all is "overwrought".

 

Maybe he needed a big band to do this; maybe this kind of sound just does not tie in well with a man-orchestra. Maybe the songs themselves are exceptionally well written and contain all the proper hooks. But as much as I admire the craft that went into them, neither 'Big Blue Sun' nor 'Birds' bawl me over and make me feel all happy inside the way 'Good Day Sunshine' or 'I'm Happy Just To Dance With You' made me feel. I like all of them, but they contain no magic, just professionalism and good taste.

 

It clicks once: 'I Walk Alone', driven by piano instead of guitars, is a Roy Orbison impersonation that works almost as well as the real thing — Belew certainly does not have Roy's range or con­trol, but he has his feeling, and if on the previous album he has shown us that he can do honor to a great Orbison-led song ('Not Alone Anymore'), then here he can actually write and record a song well worthy of an Orbison. This one has solitaire romance in it, as well as restraint and ten­derness, and it's lovely and stately at the same time.

 

On the other hand, when Belew does have to scream his head off, it always comes off better on his own style numbers, such as the 'Three Of A Perfect Pair'-look-alike 'This Is What I Believe In' or the funky guitar blizzard of 'Member Of The Tribe', or even the rather simple title track. Here, he nails 'em every time he hits 'em.

 

Still, it is impossible for me to give this anything other than a big thumbs up. The heart may be aglow only about a third of the time, but the blessed reason points out quite correctly that all of these songs are expertly written, feature original and meaningful melodies, and serve the gene­rous purpose of keeping Sixties-style power pop alive and updated for the next decades, regard­less of how many people have actually heard this album. As for "sincerity", nobody authorised me to represent Adrian Belew's subconscious, so I'll have to pass on that one.

    

THE ACOUSTIC ADRIAN BELEW (1993)

 

1) The Lone Rhinoceros; 2) Peace On Earth; 3) The Man In The Moon; 4) The Rail Song; 5) If I Fell; 6) Burned By The Fire We Make; 7) Matte Kudasai; 8) Dream Life; 9) Old Fat Cadillac; 10) Crying; 11) Martha Adored.

 

The A Cappella Adrian Belew would be more like it. Normally, electric guitar wizards record "unplugged"-style albums as sort of an "experience in refined taste" — to let the fans know that they can create sonic wizardry without any technical gadgets just as easy as with them, that they sim­ply prefer the electric sound most of the time because it rips, but every once in a while it kind of rules to stress that everything begins with nylon, wood, and finger technique.

 

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But with The Acoustic A. B. it doesn't even begin to work, because the purpose of the album is anything but demonstrate to the listener that A. B. is an acoustic virtuoso. For the most part, he plays the simplest of chords, the most standard of rhythm accompaniments — at least, that is the way it sounds to my ears; I may not be getting the deep-hidden complexity of what and how he picks, but I am pretty sure that The Acoustic Robert Fripp would have sounded nothing like that.

 

So what's the point? Maybe he can do better than that on acoustic, but there is no sign of that here; why release the album at all? My answer is — it has little, if anything, to do with Belew the gui­tarist; it has much more to do with Belew the vocalist, Belew the lyricist, and Belew the gentle, sentimental artist. With the minimalistic, hushed playing (not only is everything indeed complete­ly acoustic, but Belew is the only player on it), the emphasis is clearly on the impression convey­ed by his singing — which is why he includes not only some of his poppiest, catchiest numbers, but also Beatles ('If I Fell') and Roy Orbison ('Crying') covers.

 

Once you come to terms with that, The Acoustic Adrian Belew ceases to be a disappointment and becomes a nice, soothing, unspectacular, record to relax to. I would never call Adrian's voice "great": it is a bit too even and devoid of personality for my tastes, but he does have a nice range and an excellent ability to creep into other people's styles — he certainly "gets" the essence of 'If I Fell' and 'Crying', even if nature has not allowed him to reproduce it vibe-for-vibe. His own songs pass off even better — they are, after all, his songs — and for some fans it will be a nice distraction to hear the intimate takes on 'The Lone Rhinoceros', 'Matte Kudasai', and 'Burned By The Fire We Make' (a preview of the upcoming material from Here) without concentrating on the guitar trickery of the "full" versions.

 

Under this light, the disappointments are minor — some of the original 'rockers', like 'Young Lions', take a lot of strain to be properly transferred into an acoustic settings; and the closing nu­m­­ber ('Martha Adored') is played backwards in its entirety, probably goading the listener into fin­ding a means to reverse it, but count me uninterested (not that it is a hard thing to do in these days of music-editing software). As a bonus, the listener gets to hear 'Old Fat Cadillac' from the cata­log of The Bears — pretty damn fine song if you ask me. Thumbs up — moderately, as this is, after all, a trifle by Adrian's standards.

 

HERE (1994)

 

1) May 1, 1990; 2) I See You; 3) Survival In The Wild; 4) Fly; 5) Never Enough; 6) Peace On Earth; 7) Burned By The Fire We Make; 8) Dream Life; 9) Here; 10) Brave New World; 11) Futurevision; 12) Postcard From Holland.

 

Here concludes Belew's quadrilogy of pop artefacts on a pretty high note — still fairly distant from the semi-experimental rocking mode of Young Lions, but equally restrained in the matter of direct Beatles imitations. In fact, I only count one, even if it is the most Beatlish of them all: 'I See You', as Merseybeaty as it gets, straightahead McCartney on the verses and Lennon on the middle-eights and Harrison on the reversed guitar solos. As usual, it is fun, catchy, and a wee bit awkward and phony. I love it.

 

Lyrically, Here is quite straightforward. All the songs are (a) about Adrian; (b) about ecology; (c) about Adrian and ecology. And if something does not fit into one of these three categories right away, it will eventually. The messages are also quite clear: (a) Adrian is in love and feeling hap­py; (b) the ecology is in a mess and getting worse; (c) Adrian's knowledge of the ecology being in a mess and getting worse will not prevent him from being in love and feeling happy. (Say, my feel­ngs exactly. Maybe I ought to record a Beatles ripoff album, too.)

 

'May 1, 1990' is Belew at his prettiest — a little research shows that this was the day he met his wife Martha — and at his sincerest, a great slab of angelic idealism painted as power pop. But highlights are around every corner: 'Burned By The Fire We Make' could win Greenpeace quite a few new converts were they to adopt it as their anthem, 'Never Enough' uses a simple droning gui­tar riff to convey the mood of 'addiction to love' to great effect, 'Dream Life' is a charming acoustic serenade that is all but impossible to dislike or ignore, and 'Fly' features far more comp­lex guitar picking techniques than all of The Acoustic Adrian Belew put together behind a small wall of psychedelic effects — funny enough, the song, despite all of its psychedelic trimmings, is essentially about fear of flying.

 

In fact, cut for cut, Here may be even stronger than Young Lions, except the highs are not nearly as high (nothing really reaches the heights of ecstasy provided by 'Pretty Pink Rose'; perhaps Be­lew should consider dragging Mr. Ziggy into the studio a bit more often). That the record, just like the previous three, went down unnoticed by the public at large and scorned by professional King Crimson fans, only goes to show what kind of an unprofessional opinion I hold on both. It is high time history butted in and carried out the proper justice; in the meantime, I can only hold my thumbs up one more time and pray that, some day before getting pie in the sky, Adrian gives himself another chance at recording something like this.

 

THE GUITAR AS ORCHESTRA (1995)

 

1) Score Without Film; 2) Portrait Of The Guitarist As Your Drum; 3) Piano Recital; 4) Laurence Harvey's Despair; 5) Piano Ballet; 6) Rings Around The Moon; 7) Seven E Flat Elephants Eating Acacia Of A C# Minor Forest; 8) If Only; 9) Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers On A Train" Starring Robert Walker; 10) Finale; 11*) Stage Fright.

 

We cannot say that we have not been warned. The album cover glows with the extended title: "Experimental Guitar Series, Vol. 1: The Guitar As Orchestra". Considering that Belew's guitar playing had always been experimental, even on his pop albums, a title like that should inevitably lead one to the question: «If this is 'Experimental Guitar Vol. 1', then do we presume that every­thing before it, in the guy's eye, was 'Non-Experimental'?»

 

Presumably. For many people, 'experimental' in music is nearly synonymous with 'unusual' or 'weird', i. e. 'a way of playing music that strays away from conventional approaches'. Which is, of course, hardly the basic meaning of the term: 'having the characteristics of experiment', i. e. 'an operation or procedure carried out under controlled conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law' (Webster). The Guitar As Orchestra fully confirms to this definition and is, as a result, utterly and intentionally unlistenable as "music".

 

But it is fairly intriguing as "experiment". Using a wide range of pedals, guitar synthesizers and processors, Belew makes his guitar sound like violins, cellos, harps, or­gans, chimes, and, above all, pianos, playing either in the "modern classical" or the "mini­malist am­bient" styles. I would say that the title is somewhat misleading: the guitar is actually very rarely used as an "orchestra" — most of the pieces are played with just one or two leading "fake instruments", so the word should rather be understood here as signifying "a whole heck of different stuff".

I do not suppose that any of these tracks have any serious musical vision behind them. Of course, just how good Adrian is at "modern classical" is something you will have to decide on your own; my organism produces no emotional response whatsoever to that kind of music, be it Varèse, Schoenberg, Zappa, or Belew. But something tells me — for instance, the near-total lack of ad­miration expressed for the record on the part of «super-cool» music aficionados — that history will probably not be placing him on the same level with the other three.

 

His ambient panoramas work somewhat better, but even here he presents no threat to great masters of the style. There is nothing on the level of his own 'Guernica' from Desire Caught By The Tail — these images, no matter how complex and twisted their titles may be, lack a language of their own. The titles are, in fact, the most telling element on here: 'Portrait Of The Guitarist As A Young Drum' is a pretty good mirror image of the guitarist, who does indeed behave as a young drum on most of the tracks.

 

As a pure experiment, though, the album achieves its goals admirably — to the point that you can always capitalize on its surprise value as long as you still have an uninitiated friend or two. Then you can invite him to your house, play him 'Alfred Hitchcock's 'Strangers On A Train'', and, once he is properly worked up to the point of shouting 'Cut it out, this Nazi guy should be shot for fuckin' butche­ring that piano!', triumphantly object 'What piano? That's no piano — that's a guitar! Don't tell me you can't tell the difference between guitar and piano!' That will certainly be one great way to assert your musical authority, and you can thank Adrian Belew for guidance. I actu­ally tried it out once. What do you know, it worked.

 

OP ZOP TOO WAH (1996)

 

1) Of Bow And Drum; 2) Word Play Drum Beat; 3) Six String; 4) Conversation Piece; 5) All Her Love Is Mine; 6) I Remember How To Forget; 7) What Do You Know? (Part 1); 8) Op Zop Too Wah; 9) A Plate Of Words; 10) Time Waits; 11) What Do You Know? (Part 2); 12) Modern Man Hurricane Blues; 13) In My Backyard; 14) A Plate Of Guitar; 15) Live In A Tree; 16) Something To Do; 17) Beautiful; 18) High Wire Guitar; 19) Sky Blue Red Bird Green House; 20) The Ruin After The Rain; 21) On.

 

To look back at the fate of this record is a little funny and a little sad. From a purely theoretical standpoint, it should be remembered as Belew's magnum opus — a long, diverse, ambitious al­bum that pursues the goal of capturing all of his sides: Belew the sci-fi freak rocker, Belew the guitar-driven, Beatlish style pop lover, Belew the avantgarde whacko explorer, Belew the incu­rable romantic loner. On practice, Op Zop Too Wah has not yielded even one 'classic' Belew track, and is usually left aside in any serious discussion of the man's music.

 

Why? The obvious answer would be that there is just so much of everything that, in the end, there is too much of nothing. But then the same argument could be flung at The White Album; if the songs are good enough, their cumulative effect would override any confusion. So maybe it's just that the songs are not good enough? But I really would not say that. Look all over the place and you will find plenty of inspirational bits in all styles. Obviously, if you jam twenty-one tracks onto one CD, some are bound to come out as (relative) failures, but what's a few one minute-long failed bits to a generally solid recording?

 

Quite a lot, as it turns out. The album oozes ugly discoherence, maybe because the connecting bits are as loud and in-yer-face as the main songs, and although the desire to transform a simple rectangle into a Möbius strip is understandable, it sacrifices the pure value of the songs to the ove­rall bizarre atmosphere that is not even totally new or particularly interesting. As a result, I find many of the individual tracks lovable once I tune in to them individually, but the album as a whole impresses me about as much as its cover: green, wobbly, and yucky.

 

My advice is to try and filter out all the short links, rearrange the remaining thirteen songs in an order that you find personally comfortable, and this will leave you with about forty-five minutes of good music. Then it becomes possible to sort out the dreamy psychedelic ballads ('All Her Love Is Mine'), the Zappa-style guitar heroics ('High Wire Guitar' — a parody, actually, on use­less guitar wanking, replete with silly "crowd cheering" as the fans admire their "idol"), the po­wer pop exercises with a little Roy Orbison flavour ('Six String', a love ode to Adrian's favourite fetish; 'I Remember How To Forget'), the sentimental acoustic idillies ('Time Waits'), the obliga­tory Beatlisms ('On', a tribute to Lennon circa Revolver; 'Something To Do', a tribute to McCart­ney circa... uh, Red Rose Speedway?) and something else I apparently forgot.

 

On the average, these songs may be slightly weaker than the average estimate of his 1989-1994 records. At least, there is nothing to make me relive the weighty stimulus of 'Young Lions' or the catchy heart-on-sleeve atmosphere of 'Burned By The Fire We Make'. But this is something that can be lived with; many of the tunes are growers. What really disrupts the continuum are all the silly links. It is as if, looking at his past efforts and also "rejuvenated" by the latest phase of King Crimson's career, Adrian, having made a fifth solid pop album, decided, at the very last minute, to spice it up for the sophisticated fan. But then the sophisticated fan, being perfectly happy with the Fripp-dominated KC, would not buy Belew's "pop stuff" in the first place.

 

So, in the long run, I doubt that Op Zop will fully and completely satisfy anyone. But brain-wise, I still give it a thumbs up because it gives me enough savory ingredients to make up my own con­coction. It is a failure only inasmuch as it aspires to be more of a success than the previous records — and ends up less. Which is not to say that 'Six String' does not rock, or that 'Time Waits' does not comfort, or that Adrian Belew is any less of a damn fine chap than usual.

 

BELEWPRINTS (1998)

 

1) Men In Helicopters; 2) Cage; 3) I Remember How To Forget; 4) Young Lions; 5) Never Enough; 6) Things You Hit With A Stick; 7) Everything; 8) Big Blue Sun; 9) Bad Days; 10) One Of Those Days; 11) Return Of The Chicken; 12) Dinosaur; 13) 1967; 14) Free As A Bird (Live At Longacre Theater); 15) Nude Wrestling With A Christmas Tree.

 

Subtitled The Acoustic Adrian Belew Volume 2, this is exactly what it is, and, from a general standpoint, a big improvement over Volume 1. The basic message is the same as before: this is not a technically-minded, virtuoso-bestowed experiment, but just a modest bunch of Adrian's pop numbers sung, played, and arranged minimalistically, friendly, and with feeling. But there are a few pleasant additional touches that are worth mentioning.

 

First, the arrangements are a bit more complex and diverse; many of the numbers have Belew ad­ding bass and drums, or switching from guitar to piano, bringing on a true "Unplugged" feeling rather than deconstructing every­thing in favour of his singing. As such, some of the songs, like 'Young Lions' and 'Never Enough', still manage to rock out even in this setting. The album also opens with a big surprise: 'Men In Helicopters' accompanied by a string quartet (the only non-Belew musical presence on the album), a very joyous touch.

Second, the song selection is perfect — apart from three pieces of musique concrète (which are actually short and fun), Adrian runs through his catchiest, pleasantest pop creations from 1989 to 1994, even reproducing the entire mini-suite '1967' which I am adoring more and more with each passing day: in this setting, with all its unpredictable, but memorable sections laid out even more transparently than in the original, it threatens to convince me of being his one true masterpiece in the psychedelic pop genre.

 

One last surprise is the live recording of Lennon's 'Free As A Bird', taken from Adrian's acoustic solo interlude during King Crimson's Broadway show. Ever the hip purist, Belew covers Len­non's original demo rather than the McCartney-enhanced version on Anthology, refusing to re­produce Macca's 'Whatever happened to...' section and sticking instead to the mumbled la-la-la's of John's old recording, and even the audience seems to be getting the point and digging it. May­be it symbolizes a sincere belief in purity and authenticity; maybe it is snubby and pretentious; but, in any case, it is one more small non-trivial move from a small non-trivial artist. A most heartfelt thumbs up, even for such a trifle.

 

SIDE ONE (2005)

 

1) Ampersand; 2) Writing On The Wall; 3) Matchless Man; 4) Madness; 5) Walk Around The World; 6) Beat Box Guitar; 7) Under The Radar; 8) Elephants; 9) Pause.

 

In 2000, Belew released a futuristic compilation seducingly called Coming Attractions — a set of «sneak previews» of tracks from records to come. Then, in an almost insulting manner, he de­layed the release of the real records for a smashing five years. Granted, he had a serious excuse: in the early 2000s, King Crimson was again on the move, and in between recording The Con­stru­Kction Of Light and The Power To Believe and touring in support of both, there was not much chance of resuscitating the solo career.

 

By 2005, however, Belewstuff was on the market again, in the form of three consecutive records, all three so short that, with a little insignificant loss, they could easily fit onto one CD — but that would leave us with no gimmick, a very boring result considering how long fans had been wai­ting for something extraordinary. So the gimmick splits Adrian's personality into three «sides» and gradually acquaints us with each over a year-long period.

 

Side One, for the most part, gives us the «futuristic pop» Belew, and for that reason is my favou­rite. Except for a few brief ambient interludes, the songs rock — in weird time signatures, as be­fits a true Crimsonian, but with honesty and passion. Particularly notable are the first three num­bers, where Adrian forms a power trio with bassist Les Claypool of Primus and drummer Danny Carey of Tool — they are not necessarily the best songs, but they are certainly covered with the juiciest flesh and the prettiest skin.

 

'Ampersand' puts a psychedelic Beatlesque vocal on top of music that is, very much indeed, equal parts King Crimson, Primus, and Tool, and, with a stron­ger dose of PR, could have been judged one of art rock's top creations of the decade. 'Writing On The Wall', although mostly vocalless, is only a tiny notch below in quality, and then the trio cools it down a bit with bongos, backward guitars, and opium den atmosphere of 'Matchless Man'. A very modernistic mix of beauty and weird­ness, catchiness and experimentation — if the world were a better place in the first quarter of 2005, this would be the perfect Top 40 material, while Mario's 'Let Me Love You' and 50 Cent's 'Candy Shop' would be justly relegated to the status of semi-legal biological weapons, inflicting permanent brain damage on alien invaders.

 

The «solo» material that follows predictably sounds a little tossed-off in comparison, and we've heard it before — 'Madness' is an apt title, but this type of paranoid, pressure-pumping, guitar thunderstorm (or, rather, a cross between a thunderstorm and a deranged beehive) was already ex­plored to the limit on Crimson's early 1980s instrumentals, and the rest of the tracks — with the exception of the intentionally trendy lo-fi sound of 'Beat Box Guitar' — are also firmly grounded in the values of Discipline and Beat. Not that it's a bad thing — these have always been exciting values — but it is a little strange to see that, after an eight-year pause, Belew is unable to offer us anything seriously fresh, unless he gets professional outside support.

 

On the other hand, one cannot invent a new fashion of the wheel with each new decade, and even a guy as permanently whacko as Adrian Belew must get old, eventually. Whatever be the case, if you do not expect a musical revolution, Side One shows that the man still has plenty of ideas, and that his sensitive soul has not entirely burned out yet, either. And it is nice to know he is still a fan of the whole wildlife shenanigan — not above giving us some more cooky elephant noises as a trifling postscriptum to the record. Thumbs up, by all means.

 

SIDE TWO (2005)

 

1) Dead Dog On Asphalt; 2) I Wish I Knew; 3) Face To Face; 4) Asleep; 5) Sex Nerve; 6) Then What; 7) Quicksand; 8) I Know Now; 9) Happiness; 10) Sunlight.

 

This is Adrian's experimental facet. There is no way to surgically separate it from his pop side, so Side One occasionally featured avantgarde bits where Side Two occasionally lets in pretty vocal melodies, but the general difference is quite clear. The power trio never shows up; Belew handles all the instrumentation himself, and, in a way, this is his starkest and least accessible offering since Desire Caught By The Tail (it would be hard to call Guitar As Orchestra an «offering» in the first place).

 

On the other hand, perhaps the word «experimental» no longer fits this kind of music. Belew has been surprising the world for so long that he has pretty much run out of surprises. So we still get non-trivial time signatures, non-trivial sonic effects, superb playing technique, and even a decent smorgasbord of tones and atmospheres... but most of this just about barely passes the grade of «Contemporary Ambient Sonics for the Seasoned Elitist».

 

There is a certified dreamy aura to the entire record; even when it rocks, the rocking sound seems to be beamed down to you from some faraway fantasy world, but there is no delight in understan­ding that — it is more like, "oh no, not another fantasy world, for God's sake". The connections of the fantasy world with the real one are not clear, either. For instance, the lead-in track, 'Dead Dog On Asphalt', is really supposed to be about a dead dog on asphalt — reflecting a recent ac­cident that happened to Belew — but the track, recycling the riff from 'Beat Box Guitar', could just as well be called 'Shooting Ducks In Outer Space'.

 

The whole experience is unsatisfying. Lazy and a bit tossed-off, almost as if Adrian ran out of fresh ideas by the time of Side One's release, yet became trapped in his own project, forced to come up with two more records despite being landlocked. So the record is just as short — in fact, it could have easily fit on the same CD with Side One — and, although the guitar solos are im­peccable (getting Belew to play badly would require professional virus software), the arrange­ments are openly crappy. Crappy beatbox percussion, crappy synthesized bass, crappy effects.

 

Maybe I am way off here, but I think a guy like Belew, with all that enormous experience behind him, can toss off a record like Side Two in just about the same half hour that it takes to sit through it. Incredible: to have fans waiting at his doorstep for a decade only to placate them with thirty minutes of first-rate music — and then follow it up with thirty minutes of boring, unimagi­native ramblings. My brain would like to challenge this man to a duel for this insult, but, seeing as how it would probably get its ass kicked in seconds (do brains have asses?), it will, instead, just cowardly slip him a thumbs down rating — and be done with it.

 

SIDE THREE (2006)

 

1) Troubles; 2) Incompetence Indifference; 3) Water Turns To Wine; 4) Crunk; 5) Drive; 6) Cinemusic; 7) Whatever; 8) Men In Helicopters V4.0; 9) Beat Box Car; 10) Truth Is; 11) The Red Bull Rides A Boomerang Across The Blue Constellation; 12) &.

 

I fully understand the desire to end Side Three with a reworked version of 'Ampersand' (here, given its far more laconic symbolic equivalent '&'); it adds a last-minute touch of coherence and conceptuality to Adrian's three-headed dragon. Less understandable is a set of new variations on 'Beat Box Guitar' ('Beat Box Car'), and completely less understandable is yet another version of 'Men In Helicopters', practically the same as on Belewprints but with the addition of a martial per­cussion overdub. That's three songs that we already know well — on an album with a running time of 38:40?

 

Unlike the poppier Side One and the weirder Side Two, this one brings on an Op Zop Too Wah style synthesis of the two sides, and the pop element of it, once again, succeeds a bit better than the odd element — for reasons already explained in the previous review. But even the pop songs seem outtakish; the funky 'Troubles' and 'Incompetence Indifference' are the best of the lot, yet neither produces any fresh impressions. And too much of this, once again, is in the guise of «links» or raw demos, enceinte with musical glory but aborting it after one minute of pregnancy (e. g. 'Truth Is', which could have been a beautiful ballad in the vein of some of Adrian's late pe­riod King Crimson songs, but ends almost before we realize it).

 

Overall, it just looks to me like Adrian wanted to get over with this as soon as possible, so as to resume touring with his hands free of studio matters, and certainly Side Three does not deserve its own lengthy review. As a coda, it works well; but my final opinion is that releasing all of these songs as three separate albums has been the worst art-structure decision ever since, at the very least, the dissection of Kill Bill. On its own, Side Three is decidedly a thumbs down; but there is simply no reason to judge it on its own.

 

SIDE FOUR (2007)

 

1) Writing On The Wall; 2) Dinosaur; 3) Ampersand; 4) Young Lions; 5) Beat Box Guitar; 6) Matchless Man; 7) A Little Madness; 8) Drive; 9) Of Bow And Drum; 10) Big Electric Cat; 11) (Thanks); 12) Three Of A Perfect Pair; 13) Thela Hun Ginjeet.

 

Like every true Crimsonian, Adrian Belew prefers working in the Power Trio format — that is, whenever his social instincts call for a change of the Power Solo format — and by 2006, he has finally procured himself a more or less permanent backup, consisting of brother Eric Slick on drums and sister Julie Slick on bass. Both siblings had been picked up on Adrian's inspection of «Paul Green's School of Rock», a place where one actually pays money to be taught how to play Bon Jovi guitar solos; but the teachers definitely know their trade, because the Slicks are, indeed, at a level of competence where they can at least stand up to Belew's level.

 

Stand up, but never pose a threat, that is: Adrian has been smart enough to pick a team with which he need not be ashamed to mount the stage, but also one that will never be able to blow him off it. There are no signs of battling it out: when they play live, Belew is the star throughout — and the Slicks are a nice pair of youngsters, blessed by Fortune with the ability to bask in the glory rays of the beautiful (if balding), super-dexterous (if predictable) Guitar God.

 

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Side Four is the unexpected «even» conclusion to Ad­rian's outburst of creativity, topping it off with the recording of a live performance (at Canal Street Tavern in Dayton, Ohio, no less) — Belew's first «proper» solo live album, discounting the live acoustic parts of the 1993 and 1998 records. The setlist mixes new stuff, oldies, and a few King Crimson hits, and focuses on songs rather than improvisation, possibly because the Adrian Belew Power Trio did not improvise all that much on the tour. Where there is improvisation, it is all centered on Adrian: for 'Drive', he lets the siblings take a break and indulges in seven minutes of pure guitar fun, even incorporating a razor-sharp psychedelic solo that faithfully reproduces the melody of 'Within You Without You' (!). The only other lengthy, semi-improvisational suite is 'Beat Box Guitar', extended, partially de­constructed and incorporating bits of 'Discipline' and some other stuff I do not recognize.

 

Belew is, as usual, in great form — has there been one single instance when he was not? — and the whole experience is a lot of fun, including seeing him refresh and rejuvenate real old classics like 'Big Electric Cat' and 'Young Lions', or dragging out some obscurities like 'Of Bow And Drum' off the pretty much forgotten Op Zop Too Wah album. Note, also, that I was perfectly right about Side One representing the «proper» Belew and Two and Three representing a frust­rated Belew, struggling to keep his promise: 'Drive' is the only track from either of these two sides, whereas Side One is represented by no less than five different performances.

 

The only drawback here is the usual stale sense of predictability — and even that is softened with all the reinventions, as well as the curiosity of seeing the «Adrian Belew School of Rock» in ac­tion. May it be hoped, eventually, for an official video with professional camerawork, because that Julie Slick is kinda h... uh, is a great master of the fretboard.

 

E (2009)

 

1) A; 2) A2; 3) A3; 4) B; 5) B2; 6) B3; 7) C; 8) D; 9) D2; 10) E; 11) E2.

 

The contents of the first official studio release by the Adrian Belew Power Trio — Adrian & The Slicks — are easily guessed by anyone who has combined an acquaintance with the general Crim­sonian attitude with a quick glance at the «songs»' titles, or at the modern geometrical design of the album cover.

 

Namely, it is a rigid exercise in math-rock: complex, angular riffs played over complex, angular bass runs, leaning on complex, angular drum patterns. Technically, this is a very impressive show, particularly for the Slicks, who have it far more rough and demanding here than they had on the live album, where, after all, the emphasis was on Adrian's more accessible side. Of course, as official «disciples» of a new generation, they lack the freshness and inventiveness of such former rhythm section giants as Bruford and Levin, but it seems they do not only match the dexterity, but also understand the spirit. Basically, Adrian puts them to the test, and they pass it with flying colors — delight!

 

On the other hand, it is hard to get rid of the feeling that this is exactly what it is: a test for Be­lew's fresh rhythm section. The music itself has been radiating weirdness for so long — thirty years now — that the novelty has worn off; and how could it not have been, when most of these riffs and themes keep reminding me of Adrian's previous exploits? Making matters worse, E is frustratingly non-diverse (in fact, it helps if you just think about it as one continuous suite rather than a set of different compositions — which, to be honest, is more or less the way Belew adver­tised it): most of the parts are centered around looping arpeggios and meticulous scale runs, with my best impression of it summarized as «continuously climbing the many sides of a rotating polygon» — with no end in sight.

 

In E's defense, I will say that it could have made a great soundtrack to some pretentious art-house movie (preferably, with a crazy, but visionary mathematical genius as the protagonist, and The Pink Panther as an indirect influence); also, I will say that it is far more listenable than some of King Crimson's exercises in terraforming dissonance. But there is also something very sad and dis­ap­pointing about the whole concept of «predictable weirdness». In the end, I can only recom­mend it for Belew diehards — or for old fogeys who think of the newer generations as a well-trained, strictly disciplined army of lazy good-for-nothings. In the latter respect, E is pleasantly instructive.

 

ADDENDA: THE BEARS

 

THE BEARS (1987)

 

1) None Of The Above; 2) Fear Is Never Boring; 3) Honey Bee; 4) Man Behind The Curtain; 5) Wavelength; 6) Trust; 7) Raining; 8) Superboy; 9) Meet Me In The Dark; 10) Figure It Out.

 

Stuck somewhere in the cracks between Adrian Belew's tenure in King Crimson and his mildly successful solo career is that particular part of his life which was spent as a member of The Bears — not a very small part, either, considering that they managed to put out four studio albums, one live record, and dedicate quite a bit of their lives to touring. Unfortunately, they generated next to no publicity: apparently, people were more prone to perking up at the words «Adrian Belew» than willing to listen to a band called «The Bears».

 

Too bad, because there is some delightful pop music to be found on these records. As it turns out, The Bears were the first proper polygon upon which Adrian dared to test out his pop instincts. Originally, they were not The Bears, but «The Raisins», a Cincinnati-based pop group that in­cluded Rob Fetters on guitar, Bob Nyswonger on bass, and a couple other guys who didn't make it further: Adrian, who was at the time still an active part of the KC lineup and also fiddled around with the first, half-pop, half-avantgarde stage of his solo career, befriended them and produced their first and last LP in 1983. After it flopped, the band fell apart, and out of the ashes of The Raisins, with the addition of drummer Chris Arduser, rose The Bears — a band in which Adrian Belew, the famous inventive-progressive guitar-wiz kid, would feel right at home going «all-out pop» without the fans snickering or spewing behind his back.

 

Now there is nothing all that special about this particular brand of guitar-based pop that The Bears profess — but let me tell you that these songs, all ten of them, are every bit as solid as any random lost-genius «power pop» band from the Eighties, mussed and sused over by the retro-hipster crowds. In fact, it might even be better than most, considering how consistently strong the hooks are: the vocal melodies, provided by Adrian and Rob Fetters, always latch on to some emotional center or other, and although they are rarely supported by equally strong instrumental hooks, the overall guitar sound, produced by the regular Adrian Belew Sound Factory, is always tasteful and creative.

 

More than that, The Bears pride themselves on writing mildly intelligent, easily understandable, decidedly «un-artsy» lyrics, usually with a social message, and delivering them in an easy, down-to-earth manner that should be quite seductive for all those who fidget at the sight of pretentious­ness or «intentional inaccessibility». The very first song, ʽNone Of The Aboveʼ, is a manifesto of sorts: "Top ten well dressed men... epitome of taste... always willing, always hot, all these things I am not". Fetters' thin-voiced "none of the above, none of the above...", wimpy and sarcastic at the same time, echoed by Belew's equally thin and evilly cackling guitar line, reminds me of some of Pete Townshend's solo material, except The Bears, by definition, are unable to convey the same heartfelt pessimism and bitterness as Pete does — they're too cheery by nature to do that, and even their anger always comes with a smile.

 

Instrumentally, they are gifted enough to set up a friendly funky groove, as on ʽFear Is Never Boringʼ (a re-recording of a mini-minor hit they had in 1983 as The Raisins), and sometimes add a brass section to fatten up the sound (ʽHoney Beeʼ, ʽFigure It Outʼ), perhaps as a tribute to the long-gone glam-rock era or because somebody just wanted to play some sax, I dunno. If Adrian wants to, he can provide plenty of guitar overdubs for an «epic» sound (as he does in the intro­duction to ʽTrustʼ), but ultimately, the idea is to depart from «pop» as rarely as possible — and when they do it, it is usually in order to indulge in Ade's psychedelic soloing (said ʽTrustʼ inclu­des a lengthy and quite melodic passage constructed out of backward-recorded notes).

 

Ultimately, the one thing that separates The Bears from Adrian's solo career is that most of the choruses, and even many of the verses are sung by Belew and Fetters in unison, and sometimes they are also joined by the drummer (and sometimes there may only be one of them, but he's double-tracked anyway). This seems to be intentionally done in order to give the album a more «group» feeling, à la early Beatles and all, but the two gentlemen are not as expertly synchro­nized in tone and mood as Lennon and McCartney, and the combination of their overtones does not result in anything noticeably better than their individual tones. Had they worked more crea­tively on their vocals, this might have given the record a kick in the diversity area — as it is, its economic 34 minutes paradoxically feel much longer, a problem not atypical of the usual retro-pop approach, in the Eighties or at any later date, but one which a guy of Belew's level of intellect and giftedness might have easily avoided. Then again, he probably did not want to avoid it: The Bears were set up as a bona fide «niche band», and The Bears is appropriately a «niche album», and you have to take it or leave it, and under these circumstances I most certainly take it, and gratefully award it a friendly thumbs up.

 

RISE AND SHINE (1988)

 

1) Aches And Pains; 2) Save Me; 3) Robobo's Beef; 4) Not Worlds Apart; 5) Nobody's Fool; 6) Highway 2; 7) Little Blue River; 8) Rabbit Manor; 9) Holy Mack; 10) Complicated Potatoes; 11) You Can Buy Friends; 12) Best Laid Plans; 13) Old Fat Cadillac; 14) Girl With Clouds.

 

Although this album is a little longer than the first one, it gives the impression of being even more formulaic. No attempts at walls of sound, no brass section anywhere, just a very basic, very tight pop-rock sound. Two guitars, one bass, and a drumset. Of course, with Adrian Belew con­stantly honing his skills as a «guitar-orchestra person», this means that there will be numerous overdubs where his six-string will sound like a one-string, a two-string, a no-string, or a little bird twirping away high up in a tree, but eventually, you get used to the predictability of it, too.

 

The first five songs here really just go past through me like a knife through warm butter — mood-wise, there is nothing to tell them apart, and when all of your hooks look like they've been passed out from the assembly line, there is no reason to call them «hooks» as such. Pleasant, same-sounding midtempo pop with buzzing or meaouwing guitars (sometimes buzzing and meaouwing at the same time, courtesy of Adrian's never-ending tone variation effects) and friendly choruses. The album does not even try to begin to steer a different course until ʽLittle Blue Riverʼ, which slows down the tempo, adds a pinch of tender folksy harmonies, and tops it off with a psychede­lic coloring for the lead guitar part.

 

Further on, things become more interesting with ʽRabbit Manorʼ, a quirky avantgarde-funk work­out with a feel of not-too-dangerous suspense and a touch of classic Belew paranoia; ʽComplica­ted Potatoesʼ, with Belew (or is that Fetters?) adding some distortion to his sound; and ʽBest Laid Plansʼ, with a mystical-hypnotic guitar line dominating the verse (for the chorus with its ques­tionable pun — "the best laid plans never get laid" — they shift to the usual power-pop mood). But arguably the best song, and the only one that made it over to Adrian's solo career (you can find a live version on 1993's The Acoustic Adrian Belew) is ʽOld Fat Cadillacʼ, for which he came up with a more «New Wave»-y guitar pattern and a memorable riff.

 

The overall arrange­ment and performance of ʽCadillacʼ does suggest that this is more of an «intimate Adrian Belew moment» than a collective Bears tune, and this, in turn, suggests that there was a certain reason why The Bears were put on hold after Rise And Shine, like its pre­decessor, failed to interest the public: namely, because the most interesting songs on here are the ones where «the band» is not intentionally striving to sound like «a band», but more like «a back­ing band» for the chief personality. When it's de-personalized rhythm guitar and group harmonies, they are neither the epitome of heavenly beauty nor a wallop of unstoppable energy — but on ʽOld Fat Cadillacʼ, Belew's individual emotionalism comes shining through.

 

Besides, the original novelty and excitement of it all had worn off, and now they sound a bit too much like a relatively mindless pop factory (good taste and all) where songs like ʽMeet Me In The Darkʼ and ʽNone Of The Aboveʼ were honestly more fun. Style-wise, I have no problem with the record, but it just feels too much like one of those «let us get together and make a guitar-based pop-rock album with no purpose other than showing how much we like guitar-based pop-rock» ventures, and we've probably all had our fair share of these already. And what's up with that big old hinomaru on the album cover? Was that a surreptitious attempt at sucking up to the Japanese market? Bizarre, but I'm not even sure the album got a Japanese release in the first place (much as the Japanese love to release and re-release everything, especially if it got bonus tracks).

 

CAR CAUGHT FIRE (2001)

 

1) Life In A Nutshell; 2) Under The Volcano; 3) When She Moves; 4) Mr. Bonaparte; 5) What's The Good Of Knowing; 6) Dave; 7) Caveman; 8) Waiting Room; 9) 117 Valley Drive; 10) Safe In Hell; 11) Success; 12) Sooner Or Later; 13) As You Are.

 

As Adrian's solo career finally took off and he found himself enjoying moderate success on his own, The Bears were put on hold while he was too busy dividing most of his time between his solo status and King Crimson. However, the split was not inimical, and throughout the 1990s, members of The Bears would frequently back him on his records and solo tours, while at the same time pursuing their own lines of work (for instance, dubbing themselves «the psychodots», with lowercase p, and even releasing an album with the same title).

 

By the time the 2000s rolled about, though, Adrian either got bored playing on his own, or he decided that, after all, «pure pop» was something that could be better created and enjoyed in the company of friends, whereas his solo ventures should be more experimental and «whacko». This hypothesis is indirectly supported by the fact that his Side One, etc. projects of 2004-05 would all be seriously avantgarde — whereas the resuscitated Bears' third album, Car Caught Fire, is every bit as pop-based as the first two. More interestingly, it is also better than the first two: in fact, it is easily the one Bears album to own if you want to quickly learn everything that this band is capable of.

 

Car Caught Fire does not sound very much like the Bears' first two albums with their «New Wave pop» sheen, «King-Crimson-made-accessible-to-the-masses» approach. Nor does it sound much like Belew's solo pop career from Mr. Music Head to Here, which was seriously retro-oriented. Instead, it sounds a little timeless (as, indeed, do quite a few, if not most, albums from the last decade and a half), borrowing a little from every decade and every style as long as it allows to write and record a decent, catchy, pretty pop song.

 

ʽLife In A Nutshellʼ, for instance, opens the album with a typically Belew-style twangy guitar riff, only to have it backed, within a few seconds, by an out-of-nowhere «swampy» harmonica part, and then sweetened up with an old-fashioned pop vocal melody. ʽUnder The Volcanoʼ, with Fet­ters (I think) on lead vocals, sounds like something Phil Collins could have done if he were into steady, rhythmic, guitar-based pop instead of drum machines and synthesizers, and, in addition, Belew wrings out a screechy, scratchy guitar solo that sounds more like John Cale's viola experi­ments on the Velvet Underground's first album than anything more human in nature. ʽWhen She Movesʼ sounds like... Tom Petty? All except the song's main seven-note riff, which seems taken from some quirky New Wave-era keyboard rock hit or something. And so on.

 

In other words, eclecticism is the norm — Car Caught Fire is as diverse as Rise And Shine was monotonous, and a detailed analysis of these songs would have me listing their possible influen­ces from dawn till dusk. At the same time, it is all expertly and contemporarily produced, so that the album sounds no less modern than at least your Strokes or your Ash or whatever was popular in those days. Even if you want yourself some basic rock'n'roll with just a small touch of weird­ness, you have your ʽCavemanʼ — a song about how we all really behave like cavemen (Belew's favorite subject) appropriately set to a grumbly, distorted hard rock riff, and with a specially designed chorus so we could all gleefully join the band singing "I'm a caveman, I'm a caveman!" without realising that the joke is on us.

 

It should probably be noted that Belew is by no means the primary songwriter: ʽCavemanʼ, for instance, is credited to Nyswonger, and on the whole, songwriting is more or less equally split between all of the band's members — and almost all of the songs have something to offer. It is hard to speak about individual styles: ʽLife In A Nutshellʼ, ʽMr. Bonaparteʼ, and ʽ117 Valley Driveʼ are probably identifiable as Belew songs by being based on unorthodox riffs, but the rest trade their various influences and quotations quite freely between different songwriters, which is absolutely no problem at all. Well, maybe a little bit of a problem, when acoustically based songs such as ʽDaveʼ bring their sound too perilously close to the sentimental side of the Barenaked Ladies — then again, this is almost inevitable with «nerdy» music like this when the authors decide that it is time for a little sentimentality.

 

That said, it is not much easier to write up a meaningful assessment of Car Caught Fire than it was the case for the previous albums — even while raising the stakes so high in terms of intel­ligence and pure entertainment, it still feels a little «empty». You cannot blame the lyrics, which are consistently decent and deal with real problems (internal and external), and you cannot blame the players, who seem genuinely driven by a desire to say something, and, formally speaking, they do. Still, something seems to be missing, and I cannot for the life of me determine what it is. Maybe it's some sort of «willingness to go all the way» or something: with all their variety and creativity, the songs seem to be holding themselves back, as if there were some kind of conflict here between the will to entertain and the will to do it in a cliché-avoiding manner. This may also be responsible for the fact that I have no idea what would be the «highlights» on here — not able to pinpoint even one absolute «favorite». Maybe ʽCavemanʼ, but that would be just because its hard rock riff separates it from the rest.

 

Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because the same kind of complaint could be addressed at just about anybody (hell, some people accuse The White Album of being a soulless mish-mash, too). As a pop album, it is at least better than any single Barenaked Ladies record, so that alone guaran­tees a thumbs up rating already (and I do like the Ladies when they are being fun and quirky, rather than trying to pump up seriousness).

 

LIVE (2002)

 

1) Honey Bee; 2) What's The Good Of Knowing; 3) Dave; 4) Robobo's Beef; 5) Mr. Bonaparte; 6) Under The Volcano; 7) Success; 8) Little Blue River; 9) As You Are; 10) Trust; 11) Complicated Potatoes; 12) Figure It Out; 13) Caveman; 14) Man Behind The Curtain.

 

This album, recorded live at some small club in some irrelevant location on the underbelly of the universe, makes me happy with its tracklist — the three studio Bears albums are given the exact same priorities that I have defined for myself: 7 songs from the best one, Car Caught Fire, 4 songs from the second best (The Bears), and only 3 from the worst (Rise And Shine). Of course, 4 against 3 may not seem like much, statistically speaking, but remember the proportions, too: Rise And Shine was about ten minutes longer than The Bears, so the figures are valid. Also, one might object that the band was simply promoting Car Caught Fire at the time, but, you know, that'd be just guesswork, while here we have a strong factual correlation and all.

 

Anyway, it is not very significant. What is significant is to understand that the difference between a Bears studio album and a Bears live album is in no way similar to the difference between, say, a King Crimson studio vs. live album. The Bears have pledged to be a pop band — not an experi­mental avantgarde one or even a rock'n'roll one — and they do not see themselves obliged to «rip it up» on stage the way King Crimson could, when they showed the world how this strange, otherworldly, New Wave-influenced music on their early 1980s records could be brought to a boiling point (and bring your brains to the same point in the process). The Bears take things much lighter, and simply give their little fan club a good time.

 

It is not uninteresting, though, to hear these songs without the heavy «studio tinkering» they had been given, particularly to compare the real old ones with the new arrangements — ʽHoney Beeʼ without all the «twang» effects on the guitars and vocals, for instance; or ʽTrustʼ, which is strip­ped clean of its feedback blasts and given a largely acoustic setting; or ʽFigure It Outʼ, which, due to the band's limited budget, is deprived of its brass section, but Belew and Fetters compensate for this with some wild guitar sparring (with respect for each other's styles — I mean, Belew can probably slaughter anyone in a sparring match, but they make it work instead).

 

On the whole, there are few major departures from the original structures or moods: other than the acoustic takes on ʽTrustʼ and ʽAs You Areʼ, I have noticed an extended psycho-coda to ʽSuccessʼ — the only place on the album where Belew engages in some serious guitar pyrotechnics, probably to ap­pease those people who only came to the show in hopes to catch a glimpse of the famous mad guitarist — and that's about it. I am also not completely satisfied with the setlist: instead of the sulky ʽDaveʼ, I'd rather have ʽOld Fat Cadillacʼ or any other spritelier number, but they probably had to support the delicate balance between all the songwriters and singers. Still, good songs, good vibe, the audience goes wild (enough to roar in ecstasy, as if this were a stadium show, before the encore, and chant "Bears! Bears! Bears!" after the encore), and the songs are let free to roam outside of their tight studio shells — reason enough to give it a try. "Pop music is not dead!" one of the band members declares as they slip out of ʽMr. Bonaparteʼ, and even though, on a global scale, this is a debatable statement, at least The Bears offer here much more than just empty words in its defense. Thumbs up.

 

EUREKA! (2007)

 

1) Zelda Fitzgerald; 2) Veneer; 3) On; 4) Troubled Beauty; 5) Normal; 6) We Never Close; 7) Think; 8) Keep Your Own Counsel; 9) Idiot In The Sky; 10) Doodle; 11) Comin' Round The Mountain.

 

This must be some sort of tradition for The Bears now — alternate the release of one really fun pop album with the subsequent release of a really lacklustre one. You'd think that in between the six years that separate Eureka! from Car Caught Fire, the band members would have had the strength to come up with another fine batch of tunes — instead, what you get is about thirty minutes worth of something seriously undercooked, unmemorable, and just plain boring.

 

I have no idea what happened, but these ten songs (eleven, if you count the pretty, but fully dispensable cover of ʽComin' Round The Mountainʼ) do not move me in the least. The band is still there in its proper incarnation, with all four members dutifully supplying more or less equal shares of songs as they did on Car Caught Fire, but they are really boring, and I do mean really. This time, it all sounds like one of those yawn-inducing moralistic records by the Barenaked Ladies — every single song. Even Belew's three songs are generally subpar: ʽDoodleʼ has some funny falsetto harmonies, but is melodically repetitive, just a lazy vamp on a single jumpy-jerky distorted riff, and the other two sound like outtakes from some uninspired King Crimson session.

 

Most importantly, it's as if the fun factor was never there in the first place. This is serious-faced «intellectual pop» with a social / environmental message, mostly, but if it's intellectual, then where is the intellectual wish to come up with something new? For each of these songs, there are two or three Bears songs alone that say the same thing, let alone the output of other artists, and say it with more verve and energy. Eureka!? Really? As far as I understand, the exclamation that adequately conveys the atmosphere of the record is Oh, Shhhiiii...

 

It's not too tasteless or anything — it's vintage Bears, featuring all their trademarks, just none of their spontaneous wit and charm. In such situations, it is very hard to even begin to explain why one record is good and another one is bad, and I am not sure it is worth my time to really strain myself over the issue, so you'll have to just take my word on this. If you like The Bears for their overall style, you will probably want to disagree with me — if you are relatively indifferent to­wards their style, but care about their hooks, you probably won't. It is objectively telling, though, that (a) this record is so very short (so, obviously, they did not have too many ideas when they got together in 2007) and (b) the Bears have not reconvened ever since, even after Belew had finally been fired from King Crimson and gained as much free time on his hands as possible. After all, funny friendly lightning did strike twice on their behalf already, but now it seems like the game is finally over. No hard feelings whatsoever, but a thumbs down all the same.

 

 

 

THE ADVERTS

CROSSING THE RED SEA WITH THE ADVERTS (1978)

 

1) One Chord Wonders; 2) Bored Teenagers; 3) New Church; 4) On The Roof; 5) Newboys; 6) Gary Gilmore's Eyes; 7) Bombsite Boy; 8) No Time To Be 21; 9) Safety In Numbers; 10) New Day Dawns; 11) Drowning Men; 12) On Wheels; 13) Great British Mistake.

 

Arriving on the scene just a little too late to upstage the Sex Pistols, disbanding way too early to scale the epic heights of the Clash, The Adverts are relatively rarely remembered these days among the general public. Still, their debut LP had almost immediately gained huge critical suc­cess, and has never been off the critical lists since then; nobody with even a faint interest in the first wave of the British punk movement can pretend to have never heard about it.

 

And the critics are damn right — Crossing The Red Sea, an album whose very title is a perfect reflection of its ambitious drive, is not just one of the best 1970s punk rock albums; it is one of the best 1970s albums, period. These thirteen songs (eleven on the original release, which omits one crucial hit single), all penned by band leader and vocalist T. V. (Tim) Smith, encapsulate eve­rything that was good about the punk movement, omit most of what could be bad about it, and, actually, go way beyond the stereotypical punk formula.

 

From a certain point of view, this isn't even «punk»: the guitars are not inclined towards chainsaw buzz, which sets them way apart from the Ramones, and the vocalist tends to actually sing rather than bark, which sets them even more apart from the Pistols and the Clash. The band had been formed in 1976, and their idea must have been to continue the noble work of Sixties garage and «proto-punk» acts rather than to try and invent some radically new sound. This sort of «traditio­nalism» is indirectly supported by the sarcastic lyrics of 'Safety In Numbers': "What are you go­ing to do with your new wave?.. Here we all are in the latest craze, stick with the crowd, hope it's not a passing phase... what about the new wave? did you think it would change things?"

 

This sceptical atmosphere is completely balanced by The Adverts' approach. They are here to do two things: write aggressive rock songs and voice relevant complaints on life's various injustices — actually, you could say it's all just one thing. No toying with reggae or electronics, no arrogant post-modern minimalism à la Wire, just simple, direct, accessible statements. Had T. V. Smith happened to suffer from melodic cluelessness, or had his band been one ounce less committed to the idea, Crossing The Red Sea would — today, at least, with the floodgates chugging in tons of old albums by justly forgotten bands every day — be a disaster. As it is, it's a masterpiece.

 

Even though most of the songs feature the same formula (loud, fast, usually too lazy to even in­troduce a proper bridge section), each one has an irresistible vocal hook, hammering in a specific crazy feeling. 'One Chord Wonders', from the very start, bares their self-conscious attitude, slyly goading the listener into a state of shame — as T. V. Smith, in a Christ-like pose, proclaims how outcast his amateurish band is going to be among the audiences, yet "The wonders don't care — we don't give a damn!", one can't help but admire the self-sacrifice. 'Bored Teenagers' has Smith playing his own psychoanalyst and, in passing, producing one of the year's most sing-along an­thems for the young 'uns. 'No Time To Be 21' is fun to interpret as a follow-up to Cooper's 'I'm 18': the confused, disoriented teenager now adding violence and indignation to his emotional spectrum, just the kind of thing you'd expect to happen in three years' time.

 

Although guitarist Howard Pickup and drummer Laurie Driver are merely «competent» on their instruments (which they could certainly play with the required energy and dedication, and who are we to demand more?), second important Advert after Smith is unquestionably his girlfriend Gaye Black or Gaye Advert on bass — not only the first ever successful female punk star, but, seemingly, the one band member who bore the biggest brunt of shaping Smith's ideas into musi­cal form. This is why, out of all the possible paths to take when trying to expand on the «punk» image, the band usually chooses the doom-and-gloom thing: 'On Wheels' begins with several bars of a near-Gothic melody played solely on bass, which is still dominating the song even after the guitar and drums have kicked in. (With an atmosphere, by the way, that is way more reminiscent of classic Alice Cooper circa Killer time than any of the band's contemporary competition).

 

This «evil» streak, just a tiny bit theatrical, but quite realistic all the same, works ever so well with 'Gary Gilmore's Eyes', depicting an imaginary situation in which the protagonist has been transplanted the eyes of a murderer — but the chorus, spat out at the listener in a shower of des­cending notes played and sung by Gaye and Smith in unison, is delivered as a punkish message, so you are forced to read this as some sort of social metaphor — not an easy thing to do — so bi­zarre and challenging — quite an efficient trick to pull it up on the charts. Although far less fa­mous, the «evil» and «angry» sides of the band are just as marvelously matched on 'Bombsite Boy'. Few, if any, people in the history of rock music could deliver the line "Thank God I never compromised" with more power than these lovable whippersnappers.

 

The CD reissue of the album remasters the original admirably — Gaye's imaginative basslines and Smith's passionate vocals never wash out each other, and the whole thing (produced by a still young John Leckie, later famous for his work with The Stone Roses) is among the crispest re­cords of the year 1978. The bonus tracks, unfortunately, are not up to par — mostly single ver­sions of LP tracks, and a bunch of live performances taped in horrendous quality, a real cold sho­wer after the perfect studio sound. None of which has anything to do with the fact that this album is to be owned, propagated, and, of course, played very, very loud. Thumbs up!

 

CAST OF THOUSANDS (1979)

 

1) Cast Of Thousands; 2) The Adverts; 3) My Place; 4) Male Assault; 5) Television's Over; 6) Fate Of Criminals; 7) Love Songs; 8) I Surrender; 9) I Looked At The Sun; 10) I Will Walk You Home; 11*) Television's Over (single ver­sion); 12*) Back From The Dead.

 

More or less conventional wisdom has it this way: Just like so many great punk bands, The Ad­verts had only one great album in them. Having said everything they had to say on Crossing The Red Sea, they tried to say the same stuff in a radically different way on their second album — sa­crificing most of their strengths and turning out forgettable cheesy shit. Consequently, out of the two sole choices available to all Great Punk Bands — go on dragging through the dirt for decades or disband — they chose the latter. Curtains.

 

This story you usually get from people happy with conventional, simplistic models. Reality, how­ever, shows that, as convincing as these models look in theory, there is, in fact, very little evi­dence to back them up each time you pick a particular case. For one thing, The Adverts did not dis­band because they felt embarrassed about this album — quite on the contrary, T. V. Smith al­ways talked about how Cast Of Thousands was a good record misunderstood by the masses — and they did not disband because they no longer believed in The Idea Of The Adverts or any such crap. For another thing, there is nothing inherently wrong with Cast Of Thousands.

 

Sure, it does not rock with the same explosive force as the band's debut — the same could be said about a million other bands, raising hell in the early days and calming down as time went by, and there is no unbreakable law about preferring one side over the other: surely a guy like Van Morri­son, for instance, is not a primary object of reverence these days because of his garage output with Them, no matter how scorching that output could be. And yes, it somewhat downplays the talents of the band's lovely bass player: one reason, perhaps, why The Adverts eventually went their own ways — T. V. Smith towers over his bandmates on this album in a way that is decided­ly un-brotherlike. Well, it never hurt Jethro Tull, so why quibble before listening?

 

Somewhat more biting are accusations of musical degradation. Fans did not quite see the deep meaning of placing the production in the hands of Tom Newman, a one-time session guitarist for Mike Oldfield, and of his burdening the band with the piano playing of Tim Cross, another Old­field veteran — watch his slightly dorky appearance on Mike's recently released Live At Mon­t­reux 1981 video to understand that his compatibility with the rough-tough Adverts can hardly be taken as a given.

 

Nor is it necessarily a good thing to see so many good old-fashioned concentra­ted rapid-fire gui­tar assaults replaced by near-operatic bombast: big, burly, overdubbed arrange­ments that, from time to time, gravitate towards the E Street Band, or even — God forbid! — the likes of Meatloaf. Cast one thought in the wrong direction and you may get the evil idea that T. V. Smith is trying to become a commercial arena-rock hero. It is not that the band seems to be «betraying» the punk ae­sthetics — quite a few great bands, from the Clash to the Police, couldn't help but be bored with upholding that aesthetics for more than one or two records — it is simply that, unlike those others, they seem to have taken quite the wrong road to betrayal.

 

But if Cast Of Thousands let down expectations back in 1979, there is no reason why it should still be judged according to those expectations of a long-gone era. In retrospect, it is simply less of a bare-bones rock'n'roll album. Yet T. V. Smith's gift for songwriting is still there, and so is his artistic dedication. The whole thing is a bit more tragic, a desperate lament to the disillusionment of the punk movement, some say, but every bit as sincere and emotionally ravaging. Tim Cross is actually an excellent addition, contributing lovely «sub-melodies» throughout. And as for the cheapening of the guitar sound, well, Howard Pickup was never all that hot as a player to begin with. It's the de-emphasis of the bass, really, that saddens me the most.

 

The title track and 'I Looked At The Sun' are the two staggering highlights — total punkish aban­don given an almost Phil Spector sheen, pompous, but also ass-kicking and catchy anthems on which even the synthesizer parts feel completely at home (but their somewhat «progressive» in­clinations, of course, must have provoked quite a few spasms of rage among British teenagers). The lead single, 'Television's Over', puts the same Big Gloss mantle on the band's Gothic ways of expression (with doom-laden harmonies on the chorus and Cross' keyboards imitating funeral bells). More straightahead punk statements preserve the poppy melodicity of old, reminding those who are willing to be reminded that The Adverts were never the quintessential 1977-style punk band in the first place ('Male Assault', 'Love Songs' — the latter almost completely sounds like one of those sleazy barroom-issued New York Dolls numbers). And the closing number, 'I Will Walk You Home', is probably the gloomiest song ever recorded about walking someone home. (Would make a terrific contrastive flip to somebody covering Fats Domino' 'I Want To Walk You Home' on the A-side).

 

Thus, while it may be too much of a fuss to call Cast Of Thousands a criminally underrated clas­sic, it is fairly obvious, at this time, that it should be at least considered the legitimate second half of The Adverts' story, rather than a misguided, forgettable footnote, and that, historically, The Adverts may have been a «one-album band», but artistically, they qualify quite fully for a «two-album band». The only difference is — to love Crossing The Red Sea, all you have to do is to have an appreciation for the punk rock spirit. To love Cast Of Thousands, you have to have a separate appreciation for the spirit of T. V. Smith. But then again, for some people, it may be easier to un­derstand and love the spirit of one particular person than that of an abstract, never clearly defined, some say musical, some say social, some say cultural, some say spiritual move­ment. And furthermore, if you hate generalizations and over-analysis, Cast Of Thousands is sim­ply one more collection of well-written, memorable, butt-kicking music bits. Thumbs up.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE AT THE ROXY CLUB (1977; 1990)

 

1) Safety In Numbers; 2) Newboys; 3) One Chord Wonders; 4) On The Roof; 5) New Day Dawning; 6) Great British Mistake; 7) Bombsite Boy; 8) No Time To Be 21; 9) Quick Step; 10) New Church; 11) Bored Teenagers; 12) Gary Gilmore's Eyes.

 

Given the legendary (cult) status of The Adverts, it is almost surprising that the number of post­mortem releases on their part is so embarrassingly small — just this one live album, released on the Receiver label, and a bunch of radio performances or something. The Adverts were quite well known for the ferocity of their live shows, true to the core of the punk spirit and all, so it makes total sense to have them commemorated with this early and relatively intimate (but wild) club session that took place at the Roxy Club before the first album was even recorded. Fortunately, the sound quality, while far from perfect, is satisfactory enough to both enjoy the show in its «totality» and to pay attention to all the individual contributions.

 

Setlist-wise, you can predict that this is going to be Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts Live, and it is — they play 11 out of 13 songs live, adding the B-side ʽQuick Stepʼ and offering no particularly new melodic insights into the legend. However, you can also very easily see that they still share the old rock aesthetics of keeping it «dirtier» on stage and «cleaning it up» in the studio. The studio recordings, underneath all the heaviness, could have an acoustic underbelly, or at least some colorful electric «jangle» — live in 1977, everything is plastered with chainsaw buzz. Understandably, this undermines the songs' melodic potential, but adds tons of power, and if even subtle artists like The Who understood the payoffs, why shouldn't The Adverts? Howard Pickup, Gaye Black, and T. V. Smith are seen here as a simple, straightforward, and totally focu­sed three-head beast who know exactly what they want — state that they do not know what they want in a laconic set of bash-your-head-over movements.

 

I do not really have much to say here except that this is one of the best live documents from the early punk era — raw, lo-fi (but listenable), replete with the idealism of 1977 when certain young people once again got the idea that they could somehow change the world, or at least shake it out of its general indifference and somnambulance. For all the notes that T. V. Smith flubs in this performance (compared to the much better rehearsed and engineered singing on the studio record), there is that spontaneous, taken-over-by-spirits yearning in his voice that convinces you even today — this whole enterprise may be futile, but it certainly is not fake. Nor is his reluctance to communicate with the audience, as all the songs are introduced with a brief "this is..." and some­times concluded with an even briefer "yeah!" (not a single «thank you», I believe, even though the audience sounds quite enthusiastic throughout).

 

It does have to be remarked that, for a band that almost prided itself on knowing exactly one chord (figuratively speaking), The Adverts are remarkably tight live; the drummer may be their weakest spot on the whole (though he's at least competent enough not to let the rhythm slide), but the bass/guitar duo always keep up the tempos and are well coordinated with each other, leaving the singer free to roam on his own. Nothing exceptional, but once again, the legend of proper punk bands «not knowing how to play» is put to rest — restricting yourself to the bare musical minimum is certainly not the equivalent of not knowing how to play that minimum. Check out ʽNo Time To Be 21ʼ as proof — there's a relatively lengthy instrumental part there where Gaye and Howard are musically flirting with each other, she playing simple, but fun bass figures around his sea of distortion and he eventually leading his guitar towards a set of orgasmic scree­ches (okay, this reads sexier than it sounds, but now that I wrote it, I am beginning to feel that it is actually starting to sound sexier than it reads).

 

On the whole, a well-assured thumbs up here — if the studio albums convinced you that The Adverts were much more than a mere footnote in the early punk movement, Live At The Roxy is an essential addition to the legacy, rather than a footnote to a footnote. From what I read, its title may be an unfortunate lie (as the album is now said to have been recorded at Nottingham's Rock City), but everything else is the truth, and a good source of youthful inspiration even when you're listening to it at the age of 50.

 

AGENT ORANGE

LIVING IN DARKNESS (1981)

 

1) Too Young To Die; 2) Everything Turns Grey; 3) Miserlou; 4) The Last Goodbye; 5) No Such Thing; 6) A Cry For Help In A World Gone Mad; 7) Bloodstains; 8) Living In Darkness; 9*) Pipeline; 10*) Breakdown; 11*) Mr. Moto.

 

Agent Orange's Living In Darkness might be the perfect place for the quintessential hardcore punk skepticist (or any punk skepticist, for the matter) to start shattering that skepticism. Like every respectable hardcore punk band, Agent Orange only released one perfect album, clocking in at about twenty minutes without the bonus tracks; unlike most of the standard hardcore punk perfect albums, though, Living In Darkness took just as much from surf-rock and power-pop as it did from the Clash, and the resulting album happened to be just as melodic as it was ripping — an awesome rarity from the white trash crowd of Orange County, CA.

 

The band's major driving force is Mike Palm. He writes all of the songs (except for the surf-rock covers, of course); sings most of the vocals — in a manner that is more reminiscent of rough, but note-respecting garage-rock vocalizing than the unmannered barking of the post-Sex Pistols era; and plays respectable guitar that places high emphasis on speed, volume, and crunch, but also on precision and melodic phrasing. In short, the guy is as punk as it gets, but always strives to tem­per the punkishness with a little finesse and a little nostalgia.

 

It goes without saying that, under such a strong leadership, the rest of the band has to conform, and the rhythm section of Scott Miller on drums and James Levesque on bass provides Palm's style with all the required tightness and ferociousness. Their collective performance on 'Miser­lou' is like a second mini-revolution: just as in the early Sixties this Middle Eastern/Greek ditty sud­denly started to sound like it was the embodiment of surf-rock itself, so do they effortlessly trans­form it here into a frickin' hardcore standard.

 

But, although the band's interest in merging surf with punk is well-pronounced (and 'Pipeline', appended here as a bonus track from a 1982 EP, is even more crunchy and brutal, with an almost proto-Metallica guitar tone), they are certainly not just a band of merry teenagers inspired by the same Californian vibes that gave us Brian Wilson twenty years earlier. Most of the songs are ty­pically early Eighties punk in spirit — mean, cynical, desperate anthems to how fuckin' bleak it all looks in the near perspective. Just look at the title tracks.

 

It is, however, the fact that this run-of-the-mill punk spirit is so neatly packaged in instrumental and vocal hooks that makes Agent Orange's debut so special. 'Everything Turns Grey' is simply one of the hardest rocking and simultaneously grandest and stateliest rock songs of the early 1980s, with its cascading, unescapable guitar machine-gunning, self-oblivious vocal runs that tumble over the edge with each refrain of "No matter what you think or do or say, everything turns gray", and the climax — a guitar solo crescendo that is so brilliantly executed, it's a wonder the local hardcore union did not sue the band for unprofessional behavior.

 

'Everything Turns Grey' is just one major standout — 'The Last Goodbye' is, in a way, even more apocalyptic; 'No Such Thing' denies the reality of love as decisively as the other songs deny the reality of social happiness; 'Bloodstains' is one of the sharpest-biting songs against the temptation of cheap thrills ever recorded (should be required listening for every aspiring rock star preparing to earn his first million); and the title track manages to convey an atmosphere of personal fear and sadness even through all the loudcracking.

 

In short, these twenty minutes are real killer stuff — the Adolescents and the Angry Samoans may have been more proverbially «hardcore», but I could not really claim that their classic debuts, free of Sixties' nostalgia and concentrating more on the feeling than on song quality, really reflect the tormented spirit of the times better than Living In Darkness. This here is just an attempt to tell the same story in a wee bit more traditionally-oriented way, while at the same time making ideal use of all the sonic achievements of the hardcore movement. By the rules in me little red book, that's cooler than cool, and almost automatically commands a thumbs up. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), nothing else in the band's catalog sounds quite like this masterpiece.

 

THIS IS THE VOICE (1986)

 

1) Voices (In The Night); 2) It's In Your Head; 3) Say It Isn't True; 4) Fire In The Rain; 5) In Your Dreams Tonight; 6) Tearing Me Apart; 7) So Strange; 8) Bie The Hand That Feeds (pt. 1); 9) I Kill Spies; 10) This Is Not The End.

 

Curiously, some reviewers still see it fit to employ the term «surf-punk» while describing bits and pieces of Agent Orange's second album, but this must stem from a common desire to look deeper than the soil (and find bare rock). Because, from a purely sensual standpoint, this is «apocalypse punk», darker, bleaker, much less friendly and much more pretentious than Living In Darkness. Retaining the melodicity and retro spirit of the original, the band moves further away from hard­core territory and somewhat more into artsy hard rock — a good decision, since it helps them to avoid the pitfall of «sophomore hardcore».

 

Because, come to think of it, normally it is hard to imagine a hardcore punk performer advocating you to "intensify the feel, the sound, the sight — I promise I'll be in your dreams tonight". You could expect this from a David Bowie, a Bryan Ferry, perhaps even a Sting, but from an Orange County whippersnapper? And yet it works, because the band keeps the hardcore crunch while let­ting go of the hardcore ethics. More than half of these songs smell of creepy mysticism; parts of this impression are due to awful production (the singer sounds like he's been placed in a bucket and lowered down a hundred feet-deep well, and all the instruments seem re-recorded by placing two cassette players next to each other), but even the awfulness of production, I believe, was, to a certain degree, deliberate.

 

That This Is The Voice somehow failed to become a bona fide Eighties' classic is something I'd like to ascribe to an unfortunate coincidence. Every single song here is memorable and «message­able», to coin an appropriate term on the spot. How can anyone with at least a passing interest in conspiracy theories or film noir, not love 'I Kill Spies'? How could 'Fire In The Rain' avoid being hailed as an epoch-defining anthem for its generation? Any possible explanations, such as lame production, defied expectations (people possibly wanted for the band to keep on delivering up­dates of surf classics), or lack of proper publicity, should by now be judged obsolete.

 

Even when the band slows down, almost descending into «goth-rock» on the doom-drenched 'Bite The Hand That Feeds' that echoes Joy Division, they still sound impressive: Palm rings, ra­ther than rocks, his guitar like a set of hell's bells, and the rhythm section switch from breakneck pummeling into a stern metronomic mode as if it were no problem for them at all. Minimalistic arrangement is sort of crude for this attitude, of course, but it's not like in the Eighties you had to be a workaholic-master-technician like Robert Smith in order to get respect for your artistic drive — London Calling was done just as crudely, and look where that got it.

 

I have to admit, though, that This Is The Voice, if heard immediately after Living In Darkness, can be fairly off-putting. «Surf-punk» just somehow seems like an overall nicer idea than «apo­calypse punk» whose new motto is to wail and to threaten rather than to bark and to hate. You have to give it plenty of time to grow and plenty of chances to convince you that «maturation from hardcore» can actually be finalized with success. Living In Darkness still wins out as the band's brightest hour because of its freshness, uniqueness, and energy combined, but here we have ten more songs every bit as valuable, if a lot different. Thumbs up.

 

REAL LIVE SOUND (1991)

 

1) Fire In The Rain; 2) Everything Turns Grey; 3) Tearing Me Apart; 4) Too Young To Die; 5) It's In Your Head; 6) I Kill Spies; 7) Bite The Hand That Feeds (pt. 1); 8) Somebody To Love; 9) No Such Thing; 10) Say It Isn't True; 11) Bloodstains; 12) Pipeline; 13) The Last Goodbye; 14) Police Truck; 15) This Is Not The End; 16) Shakin' All Over.

 

Agent Orange's only live album tends to get occasional flack from fans, mostly for ideological rea­sons: it was not entirely «real live», not because the playing was «doctored», but because, apparently, the producers threw in extra audience cheer, making the band's show at the Roxy in L.A. seem like a concurrent pop metal stadium show. The horror!

 

Fact is, this does not bother me personally one little bit. Already on their second album, Agent Orange were a big-sound-oriented rock band rather than a compact hardcore punk outfit, and their material may be as well suited to the needs of arena-rock as it may be compatible with smaller clubs. If there is a little too much audience screaming in the background, this is, at worst, stupid (The Beatles Live At The Hollywood Bowl is not the kind of experience one needs to associate with an Agent Orange show), but who really cares if all the instruments are captured reasonably well? At least the shouting miraculously goes away during most of the solos.

 

For the record, Mike Palm is the only surviving original member on here; Brent Liles, originally from Social Distortion, handles the bass duties and Derek O'Brien, originally... also from Social Distortion, is on drums. They are fairly good, though, perhaps, a little less trained in surf-style playing than their predecessors (as can be ascertained by comparing the live version of 'Pipeline' with the studio original — then again, a live setting is a live setting). Palm himself is in fine form, never neglecting the vocal hooks and taking good care to preserve all the captivating build-up tricks in his solos (the solo on 'Everything Turns Gray' is only marginally less breathtaking than in the stu­dio).

 

Setlist predictably draws heavily on the two studio albums, with nice alternations between the rapid-fire attacks of Living In Darkness and the gloomy creepers of This Is The Voice. We also get two tracks off the 1984 EP, When You Least Expect It..., both of them classic covers betray­ing the band's fanatic embracement of the Sixties — the Airplane's 'Somebody To Love' is re­worked as an «old school punk» number, and for the Pirates/the Who's 'Shakin' All Over' there is not even any true reworking to be done, but both are also stretched out with relatively lengthy solos from Palm — both of which totally rip, by the way.

 

In short, the album is a must for the A.O. fan and a solid recommendation for anyone interested in seeing the band, or the Mike Palm Project, whatever, as not just a one- or two-album wonder, but as a god-honest representative of the good old force of rock'n'roll: come to think of it, not many other bands around 1990 could sound as close to that force as the Mike Palm Project. Me, I'm perfectly happy with a regular thumbs up. I mean, with the first track being 'Fire In The Rain', and the second being 'Everything Turns Gray' — two of the sharpest-delivered shots of the de­cade — how could anyone complain?

 

VIRTUALLY INDESTRUCTIBLE (1996)

 

1) This Is All I Need; 2) Make Up Your Mind And Do What You Want To Do; 3) Electric Storm; 4) Wouldn't Last A Day; 5) Let It Burn; 6) Broken Dreams; 7) Unsafe At Any Speed; 8) So Close And Yet So Far; 9) The Truth Should Never Be Concealed; 10) You Belong To Me; 11) Just Can't Seem To Get Enough; 12) Tiki Ti.

 

Well, obviously, your band will be «virtually indestructible» when you reserve the right to rotate band members at will around your sole exclusive personality. The rhythm section here is Sam Bolle on bass and Charles Quintana on drums and there is nothing of note that could be said about them except that they probably wouldn't be there in Palm's band if they didn't know how to keep the beat and steer the groove. But there they are.

 

Considering that Agent Orange, a.k.a. The Mike Palm Project, had only released three original studio LPs in twenty years, it would be understandable and forgivable if they all sounded the same; miraculously, they all sound seriously different. On Indestructible, Palm pretty much lo­ses the last traces of «punk», everything bar the angry spirit (which is, after all, diagnostic of any good rock'n'roll, not just the Ramones/Pistols-twisted variant of it). This is more like «garage metal». Or «hard pop-rock». Or... well, you can come up with your own favorite synthetic term.

 

The major difference is the guitar sound: here, it is big, fat, sonically overwhelming, deeper, den­ser, lower, and more distorted than it used to be, which normally does suggest moving away from «punk» into «pop metal» territory («pop», because former punksters usually lack the chops to begin competing with true speeders and thrashers). On practice, this often leads to awful results — lotsa head-splitting noise with no positive side effects — but Mike Palm is a smart guy. Most of the songs here are either (a) anthemic, meaning that the noise is compensated by catchy sing­along and fight-along vocal melodies, or (b) riffalicious, meaning that the noise is somehow mol­ded into a series of distinct notes, out of which there sometimes emerges a tremendous hook.

 

Both categories are best illustrated by the opening tracks. 'This Is All I Need' is a perfect rip-roa­rer, on which a hundred-percent sincere Palm asserts that "I'll never stop until the music takes con­trol" to a breakneck-speed-beat. Normally, I'd expect this kind of song to open one of those dinosauric comeback albums that need a one-two-three kick-start punch to convince the listener on the spot — Aerosmith really need to consider covering this — but since, with Agent Orange, it is hard to speak of «comebacks» («Halley's comet» is rather the term that springs to mind), it is sad that such a classy punch will basically be wasted into thin air. 'Make Up Your Mind', on the other hand, is just a catchy hard-rocker that could as well come from the hands and minds of, say, Accept — its chorus, whose simplistic message seems to have been decoded from a 1967-launched time capsule, is also anthemic, but it is nowhere near as at­tractive as the metallic riff used for the verses.

 

From then on, the two approaches — anthems with fat tones and riff-rockers with subtler me­lodies — alternate between each other in compa­rable quantities, with only one or two notable exceptions: 'Broken Dreams' is an almost sunny power pop number, and 'Tiki Ti', coming at the end, is like a sudden remembrance that, decades ago, this band had a reason to be labeled «surf punk», and this saddles it with a reputation that needs to be upheld.

 

Overall, as you may have guessed, the album is far from a masterpiece, and will never threaten to upstage Living In Darkness as the reason to remember Agent Orange, but it is still a decent col­lection that rocks much better than you'd expect a former hardcore band to rock fifteen years after its bursting-out masterpiece. Thumbs up, modestly.

 

GREATEST & LATEST: THIS, THAT-N-THE OTHER THING (2000)

 

1) It's All A Blur; 2) Say It Isn't True; 3) Breakdown; 4) Wouldn't Last A Day; 5) Everything Turns Grey; 6) Mes­sage From The Underworld; 7) Eldorado; 8) Tearing Me Apart; 9) Cry For Help In A World Gone Mad; 10) I Kill Spies; 11) Bloodstains; 12) What's The Combination?; 13) Bite The Hand That Feeds.

 

No one knows why this record exists. It's not like the band owed anybody any contractual obliga­tions. There are three new songs here: the originals 'It's All A Blur' and 'What's The Combina­tion?' are decent, crunchy, speedy riff-rockers in the vein of Virtually Indestructible, and 'Mes­sage From The Underworld' is a cover version, recorded as tribute to a nearly-forgotten, but quite pioneering punk band from the West Coast — the Weirdos. That's all fine, but...

 

...the rest is just a bunch of re-recorded versions of Mike Palm's favourite songs — a career retro­spective with a penchant for unnecessary modernization, as if Palm were some sort of «George Lucas of hardcore», unhappy with the thin guitar tones and lo-fi production of the originals. I don't know, sounded quite adequate to me the first time around. Not that the re-recordings are de­void of spirit, feeling, passion, or technique, the guy still recreates the laser-like solo on 'Every­thing Turns Grey' as if he were presenting the song to us for the very first time. But couldn't they at least do like all good people do and release this as a live album? We can all be smartasses and state that there is really no big difference between Greatest Hits Live In The Studio and Grea­test Hits Live Before A Bunch Of Passed Out Riff-Raff In A Downtown Bar, but somehow tradition has it that even a very small bunch of passed out riff-raff lends authenticity to the spon­taneity — it's a whole different thing when you're playing into a glass wall.

 

Anyway, the good news is that, as of 2011, Agent Orange still exist and tour, meaning that this weird bastard recording may not be their very last — although, considering that more than a de­cade has already passed by without a new Agent Orange record, chances are getting slimmer with each new day. In the meantime, 'It's All A Blur' is worth hearing, it's like a brief confirmation that the Force still remains with these guys — oh no, not another Star Wars reference — and that, perhaps, it is better to have this teeny-weeny bit of a new millennium welcome from them than a whole new album of mediocre washed-upness. Clearly, though, spending money on this CD is only worth it if you want to set an example as the President of the Make Mike Palm A Millionna­ire For Chrissake Foundation.

AGNOSTIC FRONT

VICTIM IN PAIN (1984)

 

1) Victim In Pain; 2) Remind Them; 3) Blind Justice; 4) Last Warning; 5) United & Strong; 6) Power; 7) Hiding In­side; 8) Fascist Attitudes; 9) Society Sucker; 10) Your Mistake; 11) With Time.

 

The term «hardcore punk», to me, has often seemed somewhat misleading. To put bands like Ag­nostic Front and, for instance, Agent Orange into the same subgenre category, de-emphasizing the differences between the two, is just so wrong it's even hard to find the right words to explain why it is so wrong. Basically, the dividing line is just chronological. Punk bands that came before Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys are just «punk» — starting from the early 1980s, if you were «punk», you were almost automatically «hardcore». So why not just simply talk about «early punk» and «late punk» instead?

 

Obviously, there are substantial differences as well. These later bands, for the most part, played faster and more brutal, raised the viciousness quota in the lyrics sky-high, and tended to forget that such a refined activity as «singing» was ever invented by humanity (or, rather, by that par­ti­cu­lar part of humanity whose chief duty was to distract the exploited masses from issues of op­pres­sion and inequality with fake, misleading, but seductive illusions of «beauty» and «art»). Yet even among those bands, the degree of respect for musicality varied immensely.

 

Agnostic Front will do nicely as a prime example of a band that justifies the «hardcore» label to utter perfection — especially considering my basic reaction to their «seminal» debut, Victim In Pain. Although I felt no real pain while listening to it (at this point in life, my ears have been po­lished by so many different sounds that I consider myself almost immune to «painful» music — heck, I even sat through a Justin Bieber song once), there was hardly any pleasure, either — yet, at the same time, there was also no temptation to write these guys off as a bizarre absurdist joke, as it usually happens with me and the «grindcore» extension of this sound.

 

Anyway, Agnostic Front were a bunch of hateful, but idealistic skinheads that came together in 1980, went through a series of member changes in order to pick out the filthiest possible candida­tures, and finally stabilized around the «core duo» of guitarist Vinnie Stigma and lead sin... er, voc... uhm, voice provider Roger Miret. The rhythm section for Victim In Pain was Rob Kabula on bass and Dave Jones on drums, but you are not supposed to memorize these names, since they did not hang around for too long. (I don't blame them). Note, also, that «filthiest» does not mean «least experienced»: all of the musicians know how to play their instruments. (Had Vinnie Stigma not been really fluent in wielding his axe, there is no way these guys could have later made the crossover into more «metallic» territory).

 

Now this must be told — if, above everything else, «hardcore» is about getting your rocks off in the most aggressive, spontaneous, chaotic way possible, Victim In Pain is the ultimate hardcore experience. Its only ties to the generic understanding of «music» is a tight rhythmic structure that is, throughout the record, well-respected by all three players (not sure about the voice provider, though). Other than that, it is eleven yelps of hate, anger, and desperation that flash before one's eyes in fifteen brief minutes.

 

Of course, there is no telling one song from the other. Stigma's riffs are just familiar variations on trivial chord sequences that had already been overused to death by the previous six or seven years of the punk reign, and the band's understanding of «diversity of approach» seems limited to play­ing it real fast and then playing it real slow — or, more often, vice versa, since quite a few of the songs begin with a «mood-setting», bass-heavy slow intro, then, twenty seconds later, rip into lightning speed mode (with the exception of 'With Time', which, for some reason, they forgot to speed up at all — making it the album's longest number at an overwhelming 2:15). As for Roger Miret, his task is to scream his way through just as the anti-social moronic idiot that he is suppo­sed to represent is supposed to behave. That particular task he is well up to.

 

In stark contrast to other representatives of «hardcore», the lyrics of Agnostic Front intentionally avoid displaying even the slightest hints at intelligence. Miret does not mince words, nor is he a good friend of the metaphor. "People say that I'm insane / A society's victim just in pain / Socie­ty's rules have made me cruel / I'm just the opposite, ain't no fool" pretty much sets the standard for the entire record. But hey — think of all those thousands of NYC slum kids whose brain po­wer was not developed well enough to get in tune with even the likes of Greg Ginn or Jello Biaf­ra. Here was a band right up their alley — too bad most of these kids probably didn't have the faint­est idea of whether «Agnostic» was the name of some shit country or an STD.

 

Still, where I certainly agree with the critics is in admitting that Victim In Pain is a terrific histo­rical document of late 1970s / early 1980s New York in its Taxi Driver incarnation — a place fil­led with brutal violence and primal stupidity, mixed in explosive proportions. (But what excite­ment! What thrills!) In California, after all, there always exists this temptation to «soak up some sun» — even the roughest Orange County bands couldn't resist paying off a debt or two to the teen pop of their childhood. Agnostic Front, on the other hand, could only blossom in the specific conditions of the NYC climate. The very existence of such an album should be enough to alert authorities — provided the authorities are equipped with the proper cerebral mechanisms — to the fact that something may be steadily going the wrong way on their turf.

 

Ten years ago, I would have chucked the album away as fifteen minutes of unlistenable crap, but these days my mind is ripe enough to take it as fifteen minutes of listenable crap — way too ridi­culous and way too dumb to provoke fist-clenching reflexes, but still a fascinating element of un­der­­ground culture that, in its time, actually provided a source of inspiration for people from all walks of life. And I mean «all» — how many respectable Wall Street brokers, terminally bored with «broking», would skedaddle over to the Village after work to scoop up a copy of Victim In Pain? No wonder the C.I.A. ranks that information as classified, so we'll never know.

 

CAUSE FOR ALARM (1986)

 

1) The Eliminator; 2) Existence Of Hate; 3) Time Will Come; 4) Growing Concern; 5) Your Mistake; 6) Out For Blood; 7) Toxic Shock; 8) Bomber Zee; 9) Public Assistance; 10) Shoot His Load.

 

More chronicles of big city life from New York's trustiest slum kid advocates. Fortunately, there are some changes made, or else I wouldn't know how to write one extra word on Agnostic Front's sophomore release. Musically, they are moving a little bit closer to the metal side of things and — dare I say it? — even a little bit closer to a melodic sound, mostly due to the addition of second guitarist Alex Kinon. «A little bit» in that a few of the riffs are discernible, and some of the solos run up and down the scales just like they are supposed to for heavy metal players.

 

Add to this that Roger Miret occasionally delivers the lyrics with mildly careful enunciation —after all, if you want to share your tales of street ugliness with the fans, you might as well ensure that the fans understand at least a tenth part of what is being told — throw on some kickass me­tal­lic «gang choruses», and you get as close as this band would ever get to a song-based «album» instead of simply a twenty-minute slab of sonic brutality. Not that Cause For Alarm really isn't a slab of sonic brutality — it most definitely is — but by the average standards of A.F., it almost sounds like a «sissy» album.

 

Not in its lyrics, though, which scale new levels of animal hatred (either genuine or ironically si­mulated, depending on your own endorsement of hatred and/or irony). "Killing's my business and business is fine" is the line that opens the record — clearly, someone in the band had just turned a big Megadeth fan (Killing Is My Business came out one year before), and another song that «neu­trally» — no subjective evaluation offered whatsoever, except for a couple inconclusive apo­lo­getic remarks — describes the infamous Bernhard Goetz incident ('Shoot His Load') is the album-closer. In between, there's paranoid thought, apo­calyptic thought, anti-religious thought, anti-social thought, and lotsa talk of death and killing.

 

In an unusual twist, one song — 'Public Assistance' — openly turns against welfare suckers, as if to prove that Agnostic Front are no close-minded, reality-ignoring leftists; politically speaking, this earns them a few extra points for the ability to assess the situation from different angles, but then, discussing the «ideology» of Roger Miret and his friends on a serious level is much like dis­cussing the impact of 'All You Need Is Love' on world struggle for peace. (For the record, I do not deny that there has been an impact — it's just that one needs to embark on a serious quest in order to locate the ones impacted).

 

Although, for the most part, the band still clings to laconicity, size no longer matters as much to them as it did before. There is even one four-minute song here ('Growing Concern'), with a near-epic structure — a grim drum-and-feedback fade-in, a «long» solo passage, and a slow «despe­rate» coda; it only remained to make the main riff a bit more distinctive, and they could have en­ded up with an all-time hardcore classic. But, on the other hand, that could tempt somebody into ripping one of the songs out of its context — and, just like their debut, Cause For Alarm is an al­bum to be engulfed altogether, in one sitting.

 

In the «recommendation» department, Cause For Alarm is a better proposition for «non-hard­core fans of hardcore» than Victim In Pain — more lyrically and instrumentally diverse, more tolerable in terms of singing, and the colorful album cover contains no elements of distasteful hy­perbole (after all, no matter how hard and dangerous NYC life could be in the early 1980s, I doubt that anybody out there would volunteer to exchange it for even one year of vacation in the Eastern Europe of 1939-45). On the other hand, supposedly all fans of hardcore are hardcore, so it's hard to see how any of them could view this transition in a positive light. Which, allegedly, ex­plains the next permutation of Agnostic Front.

 

LIBERTY & JUSTICE FOR... (1987)

 

1) Liberty & Justice For...; 2) Crucial Moment; 3) Strength; 4) Genesis; 5) Anthem; 6) Another Side; 7) Happened Yesterday; 8) Lost; 9) Hypocrisy; 10) Crucified; 11) Censored.

 

Ugliness is supposed to be at the heart of hardcore — re­flecting the ugliness of reality — but dumb-sounding ugliness risks missing its mark, and boy, does the band's leader sound ever so ut­terly dumb on this album. This is neither singing nor shouting, it's more like frantic, agonizing attempts at gulping for air, song after song after song: the lyrics lose any sort of relevance, since they are vomited in the listener's direction in slime-covered, stinky, disjointed pieces.

 

The album was engineered by the guy who worked with Anthrax at the time, meaning that the thrash metal elements, introduced on Cause For Alarm, are in full flight, although this time they are also delivered by an entirely new lineup: the core of Miret and Stigma is augmented by Steve Martin on guitar (no, not that Steve Martin, although doing a gig with a hardcore punk band for diversity's sake probably would not be totally out of question), Alan Peters on bass and Will She­p­ler on drums. The guitar solos do sound a bit flashier and thrashier than they used to be.

 

I can't remember any of the songs, though, even if opening the record with a bunch of zombiefied schoolchildren pledging allegiance to the flag is a neat trick, and the cover of hardcore brothers' Iron Cross's best-known song 'Crucified' has a catchy chorus. But obviously, that is not the point. The point was that Agnostic Front wanted to become even more wild than on their first two al­bums, and to do that, the guitarists had to further metallize their sound and the vocalist had to consume three pounds of rotten fish before each session. Oh well. At least the lyrics still offer profound, intelligent social critique.

 

LIVE AT CBGB (1989)

 

1) Victim In Pain; 2) Public Assistance; 3) United Blood; 4) Friend Or Foe; 5) Strength; 6) Blind Justice; 7) Last Warning; 8) Toxic Shock; 9) United & Strong; 10) Crucified; 11) Liberty & Justice; 12) Discriminate Me; 13) Your Mistake; 14) Anthem; 15) With Time; 16) Genesis; 17) The Pain Song; 18) Fascist Attitudes; 19) The Eliminator.

 

Yes, it is indeed a live album from Agnostic Front, playing their hearts out in a place that was once sacred to American music history (until they raised the rent). And it is nice to know that, al­though a live setting usually gives one a good chance to loosen up and go for extra chaos, Miret, Stigma & Co. are as tight and concentrated live as they are in the studio. Which does not make Live At CBGB a necessary addition to your hardcore catalog — but justifies getting it instead of the three original studio albums if, like me, it takes you a really long time to figure out all the dif­ferences between the individual tracks.

 

Or perhaps not, considering how Miret now sticks to his Liberty & Justice vocals on pretty much every single track. Granted, singing it live, without the benefit of extra session time and ex­tra takes that stupidify the lungs to the required extreme, is a bit of a relief. You can even make out a few words in the English language every now and then. But overall, all the vocals are re­done according to AF's latest pattern — and some of the song choruses have been recast in the «gang» model (e. g. 'Victim In Pain', whose "why... am I..." etc. is now barked out loud by the entire band rather than Roger solo).

 

Other than that sad little turn of events, there's nothing to dislike about Live At CBGB that we didn't already dislike. There is a small amount of banter to variegate the pot, but it is not very in­teresting and generally predictable (Miret dedicating songs to the NYPD etc.); in an amusing twist, Roger also makes the audience take the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of 'Liberty & Jus­tice For...' in the place of the studio original's kiddie introduction (curious how many people at the bar actually remember the silly words). That's about all there is to say, really. Except for a trivia bit — I may be wrong about it, but I think it was the very first official live album actually recorded at CBGB, or, at the very least, the very first album titled Live At CBGB. Kinda odd, considering how CBGB's main claim to fame is in breeding and nurturing the 1975-77 crowds, not the hardcore mutants that started sprouting several years later. Of course, the band had always had a very special relation with the club — which reminds me to remind you not to confuse the original Live At CBGB with the entirely different 2006 release sporting the same name, from a period when Agnostic Front and others were trying (unsuccessfully) to prevent the place from shutting down.

 

ONE VOICE (1992)

 

1) New Jack; 2) One Voice; 3) Infiltrate; 4) The Tombs; 5) Your Fall; 6) Over The Edge; 7) Undertow; 8) Now & Then; 9) Crime Without Sin; 10) Retaliate; 11) Force Feed; 12) Bastard.

 

Two years in jail had not quenched Miret's rebellious spirit, but they certainly seem to have thrown him off the track. Clearly, his new-gained experience provided him with new inspiration. 'New Jack' opens Agnostic Front's new album with prison sounds — chain rattles and some pas­sionate mo­nologue about "telling the world what goes on behind these bars", that might have been extra­c­ted from some movie I cannot identify — and the lyrics are telling: "You thought in the streets that your life was so unfair and cruel / Make one careless mistake here boy and you'll drown in your own pool".

 

It's too bad the band was unable to make proper use of that inspiration. Part of the blame lies on Roger himself, still gurgling out the words in his Liberty & Justice manner. But most of the ac­tual songs are co-credited to Miret and the new lead guitarist, Matt Henderson — curiously, the only line-up change since the pre-jail period (apparently Stigma, ever the loyal consigliere, play­ed the major part in stringing the band together, patiently waiting for Miret's reappearance), but a most significant one.

 

Because One Voice moves ever closer and with ever more aggressive defiance into heavy metal territory. Few people would identify it as «hardcore punk» — the guitars are low, crunchy, and, for the most part, slow: even on the fast-tempo numbers, such as the title track, the guitarists play half-notes rather than quarter-notes (or something like that), so that feeling of over-the-top insa­nity that you get from hardcore is replaced by cold metallic calculation.

 

In metal, this can, and will, work if the riffs are good — but these guys here are no Sabbath or Metallica; in their entire career, Agnostic Front have not produced one single riff that could com­pete with any of the metal greats. Hence, the twelve tracks just float by as a predictable single lump of boring metallic mush. Lots of chugga-chugga-chugga, growling power chords, but not even any kind of novelty value. I can vouch for the fact that the riffs are different from each other — but that still does not make them any different from each other, if you get my drift.

 

Professio­nally trained metalheads, perhaps, will be able to squeeze out some enjoyment, but I don't see why the heck anyone should listen to this instead of Slayer. Maybe because the lyrics are less dumb and more down-to-earth? But, first of all, you can't make out the lyrics without a piece of paper anyway (and what sort of idiot would listen to a hardcore or thrash metal album with a lyrics sheet on his knee?), and, second, we already know just about everything Roger Mi­ret has to say. I mean, I'm sorry for the guy's prison term and all (although it's not as if he did not de­serve it — as far as I know, nobody ever said the drug charges were trumped up), but it is hard to claim that he had had some sort of grand poetic revelation grow out of his personal problems. If you insist that life sucks, then life sucks, period — regardless of whether you're in the streets or in jail. Nothing else to it. Thumbs down. Very boring stuff.

 

LAST WARNING (1993)

 

1) Undertow; 2) Your Mistake / Victim In Pain; 3) One Voice; 4) Infiltrate / Strength; 5) United Blood; 6) Public As­sis­tance / Over The Edge; 7) Blind Justice / Last Warning; 8) Crucified; 9) Toxic Shock / United & Strong; 10) Fascist Attitudes; 11) Anthem / The Eliminator; 12) No One Rules; 13) Final War; 14) Last Warning; 15) Traitor; 16) Friend Or Foe; 17) United Blood; 18) Fight; 19) Discriminate Me; 20) In Control; 21) Crucial Changes.

 

I like this, but let us keep it brief and up to the point. This is yet another live album recorded at CBGB, in December 1992. Although there are 11 tracks altogether, they frequently splice two songs in one whole (perhaps keeping up that way with their newfound metallic image and distan­cing a little from classic hardcore), which brings the total up to 17. The setlist depends quite hea­vily on material from One Voice, apparently quite a treat for fans of all of their stages, because they seem to have been downplaying that period after the next reunion. However, all of the three «classic period» albums are also sampled with proper respect.

 

As usual, everything blurs together, but I like the overall sound they have going. Metallizing the «classics» transforms the band from a formerly drunk, blundering Godzilla, pulverizing skyscra­pers at random, into a stone cold sober and meticulous Godzilla, demolishing the neighbourhood according to a carefully structured plan. Chaos and confusion remains to be sown by Miret and his usual trachea-style vocalization. In a few million years, I could even learn to love this.

 

Until that time has arrived, I will just remark that the mix here is totally excellent. The crunch of the rhythm guitar pours out of the speakers, and the speed metal leads wail and whine on top of that in such crisp, clean tones you'd think this was so doctored in the studio... hey wait a minute... oh never mind, I don't even wanna know. Also, this is the first time on record that we hear Miret give out long rants — and his spoken voice is actually quite nice, especially when he talks about helping «abandoned children with AIDS and other terminal diseases» etc. (For some reason, such announcements coming from Agnostic Front sound nowhere near as annoying as when you hear them from Bob Geldof or Bono. Maybe it's just the rich man / poor man effect).

 

As a bonus, you get to hear, in its entirety, United Blood, the band's debut EP from 1983. For the info, the entire EP consisted of songs that rarely exceeded one minute in length ('Fight' is over in 15 seconds) and is, consequently, considered a lost classic. But if you ask me, there was a reason they still decided to switch to two-minute length on their LPs. For die-hard-core fans only, and historians of the genre.

 

SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE (1998)

 

1) Something's Gotta Give; 2) Believe; 3) Gotta Go; 4) Before My Eyes; 5) No Fear; 6) Blinded; 7) Voices; 8) Do Or Die; 9) My War; 10) Bloodsucker; 11) The Blame; 12) Today, Tomorrow, Forever; 13) Rage; 14) Pauly The Dog; 15) Crucified.

 

Another surprise! After three or four years of lay-off, Agnostic Front are back — with a venge­ance, some might say, but it is too hard for me to separate hardcore vengeance from hardcore of­fense. With the position of second guitarist officially unoccupied (inofficially filled in by fellow punker Brad Logan, but only on some of the tracks), and Vinnie Stigma's chops on their own lea­ving much to be desired, the band has now completely dropped all metal influences and retreated back into familiar territory. Almost as if starting from scratch, they now make a record that, tech­nically at least, sounds closer to Victim In Pain than anything they ever did since then.

 

Not that this makes me happy, in any way, because, being so loyal to their legacy, they also re­tain the condition that no two songs should sound different from each other, and no one song should sound different from tuneless, if rhythmic, noise. The condition is broken on but two occasions. 'Gotta Go' is a curiously well-composed singalong «revolutionary» anthem with a real vocal me­lody to sing along to. Obstinately repetitive, simplistic, but it does work as yer basic call to arms when your goal is to enlist those who can't read or write. And then there is that unexpected, sho­cking break into folk territory with 'Pauly The (Beer Drinking) Dog'. Just to show the world that these guys sometimes like to play the fool without resorting to insane speed and distortion. Other­wise, it is not even particularly funny.

 

The only ittsy-bittsy smidge of consolation is that Miret's vocals have de-evolved back to the le­vel of gruff barking, so that he no longer comes across as a village idiot with a chicken bone in his throat who just won the charity lottery to become Slayer's next vocalist. Had he continued to expectorate in the style of the preceding decade, this, coupled with the near-complete lack of songwriting and/or interesting playing, would have made the album completely unlistenable. As such, it is simply generic hardcore, palatable for lovers of the genre, but not yours truly. In a way, it is admirable that the band still packs plenty of punch after more than a decade of tribulations, but the songs have no lasting value whatsoever. Thumbs down.

 

RIOT, RIOT, UPSTART (1999)

 

1) Police State; 2) I Had Enough; 3) Riot Riot Upstart; 4) Sit And Watch; 5) Blood, Death & Taxes; 6) Frustration; 7) Sickness; 8) Shadows; 9) Nowhere To Go; 10) Trust; 11) My Life; 12) It's Time; 13) Rock Star; 14) Nothing's Free; 15) Price You Pay; 16) Jailbreak; 17) Bullet On Mott St.

 

If you ask me to name three different things between this album and the previous one, I will name them — their titles each consist of three different words. If you ask me to name ten different things between this album and the previous one, I will name three, and the rest you'll just have to figure out by induction.

 

But I also admit I did not give the album more than the prescription-required three listens, during all of which I only had one potentially productive idea — namely, that somehow Mötörhead have now joined the list of influences on this band, something that should have decidedly happened a long time ago (or maybe it did, and I only just noticed). Check out the vocal melody on 'Sickness' (yes, I said vocal melody) — isn't it lifted straight off 'Mötörhead' (the song)? At least, until the chorus starts and turns it into a New Wave-style power-pop thing?

 

Overall, the whole thing may be a tad more melodic and, if you so wish, even memorable than Something's Gotta Give. Certainly 'Police State' is memorable, consisting of nothing but the li­nes "New York, Police State! / New York we hate you! / Giuliani Giuliani Giuliani fuck you!" shouted over and over again for one minute — and it may help you memorize the name of NYC's former mayor where all else fails. (On the other hand, it also dates the song — inserting 'Bloom­berg' instead would be fairly difficult in rhythmic terms, not to mention garnering anti-Semitic connotations). The title track is also a fairly inspiring rebellious anthem, but, like everything else here, it would require a more cleverly thought out rhythm guitar part to become truly special.

 

In general, all complaints remain the same: the songs are direct, honest, brutal, completely devoid of MTV-punk gloss, but individual tunes rarely stand out, and when they do, it is mostly due to a gang chorus repeated sixty times over a hundred and twenty second ('My Life'). Agnostic Front do not have the Ramones' supernatural ability to turn simplicity into genius — their simplicity, sooner or later, degenerates into boredom, and most of the songs are as boring as their titles, near­ly each of which I remember associated with a much better song.

 

'I Had Enough'? Paul «Ag­nostic Front Suck Because They Kill Animals» McCart­ney. Better. '(It's) My Life'? Eric «Agnostic Front Will Never Be More Punk Than Me When I'm Drunk» Burdon & The Animals. Much better. 'Trust'? Elvis «It Was I Who Created Agnostic Front And Everyone Else With The Sheer Strength Of My Intellect» Costello. Much much better. 'Nothing's Free'? Alice «If That Miret Guy Likes To Shock Some Much, Where The Fuck Is The Guillotine?» Cooper. Much much much better. 'Jailbreak'? Phil «Don't Tell Me About The Evils Of Growing Up In The Streets» Lynott & Thin Lizzy — much much much much better. And we could go on like that all night — there's a whole seventeen tracks here, the only good news being that the al­bum still clocks in at less than 29 minutes.

 

But from what my gut instincts tell me, by the average standards of average hardcore, this is still damn good average hardcore. For lovers of the genre, this should register just about on the same level as, say, one of those late period B. B. King albums should register for blues lovers.

 

DEAD YUPPIES (2001)

 

1) I Wanna Know; 2) Out Of Reach; 3) Everybody's A Critic; 4) Liberty; 5) Club Girl; 6) Uncle Sam; 7) Urban De­ca­dence; 8) Love To Be Hated; 9) No Mercy; 10) Politician; 11) Pedophile; 12) Alright; 13) Dead Yuppies; 14) Stan­ding On My Own.

 

Recorded with Mike Gallo on bass this time, and I almost think I can hear the difference — some damn fine basslines on occasion, particularly on 'Pedophile' (no implications meant). It is also one of those 2001 releases that got in accidental trouble for you-know-what: the title Dead Yuppies was generated before 9/11, and the album sleeves were most likely printed before that date, too, or else the band would have probably changed the title. As it was, all they could do was delay the release by a few weeks — and then slap an annoying sticker on each copy, explaining how deep­ly they feel about the plight of, er, all them «dead yuppies». Cowards, I say. Hypocrites.

 

But you know what? The album itself is decidedly not half-bad. In fact — in response to surpri­sed complaints about why I should spend time reviewing the entire lengthy career of a band I so obviously do not give a damn about — it was almost worth it sitting through Agnostic Front's shitty efforts to arrive at something like Dead Yuppies. To me, it sounds like the culmination, and the most sensible product of the band's second pure-hardcore phase of existence.

 

Basically, the songs are a wee bit slower, a tad less noisy, a trifle more disciplined, and a tiny touch more melodic than on the previous two albums. Without sacrificing the spirit, they have somewhat improved on the form. At its best, Dead Yuppies sounds like it actually is carrying on the tradition of early 1980s accessible hardcore — the one that was more concerned with tough­en­ing up the achievements of «pop punk» rather than with breaking the barriers between punk and pure noise.

 

Among other things, Dead Yuppies contains my absolutely favorite Agnostic Front song — 'Li­berty', an anthem as straightforward as any they have ever written, but completely noise-free and with a catchy singalong chorus to boot. It is almost amazing how a phrase as trite as "give me li­berty or give me death" can still sound so inspiring in the year 2001, but somehow, it does. This is the magic of Agnostic Front: they may have very little musical talent (or so it would seem), and their metal yearnings may more often lead them away from the path of righteousness than onto it, but when they're on, they're ON — there is no doubting the genuine heat of the fire that is work­ing out their steampower.

 

I am also amused by 'Love To Be Hated', featuring the hilarious phrase "well I know somebody somewhere is gonna FUCK ME!" delivered in an utterly hilarious way; by the above-mentioned 'Pedophile', whose shift between the loud chainsaw-buzz sections and the quiet, bass-driven parts is certainly more of an achievement than the chorus ("Kill yourself, suicide, it's about time you fuckin' die" — Miret's paternal advice to the protagonist); and by 'Standing On My Own', another fairly convincing anthem. Actually, it may be so that the chief attraction of Dead Yuppies are its gang choruses and, uh, «vocal harmonies», adding melody, structure, and individual hooks to the band's usual pile of similar-sounding energy blasts. But why not?

 

Even if most of the other songs still fall short of occupying the proper memory cells, it is impor­tant to understand — here is an album recorded in 2001 that sounds exactly like it could have be­en recorded in 1981, not a year later. For comparison, could the Rolling Stones circa 1983 record an album that'd sound totally 1963? And not just from a purely technical standpoint, but actually conveying the same spirit? I'd say this alone is a fine achievement on the part of these guys, and merits at least an «intellectual» thumbs up, if not necessarily an emotional one. Especially con­sidering all the evolution (= degradation) of the punk scene over that 20-year period.

 

ANOTHER VOICE (2004)

 

1) Still Here; 2) All Is Not Forgotten; 3) Fall Of The Parasite; 4) Pride, Faith, Respect; 5) So Pure To Me; 6) De­di­ca­tion; 7) Peace; 8) Take Me Back; 9) Hardcore! (The Definition); 10) Casuality Of The Times; 11) I Live It;  12) It's For Life; 13) Another Voice.

 

Oh fuck NO. Just as these guys were almost about to turn into a marginally interesting band in the context of the new first decade, Matt «Metal God» Henderson is back, and with him, the drea­ded «crossover» sound. Even if you are in the dumb half of Agnostic Front fans, the very title of the album will remind you of One Voice — and, unless you are in the very dumb half of the dumb half of Agnostic Front fans, will teach you to steer clear of the record.

 

Once again, Miret is through with shouting and/or singing, and picks up the practice of, uh, let's call it expectorating. Only this time, with much cleaner and crisper production, his vocals are ne­ver lost in the metal guitar growl, and now, to quote Ian Anderson, he is «spitting out the pieces of his broken lungs» right in your face, so arm yourself with napkins a-plenty before turning on the music. I have no idea what kind of world this person must be living in if there were even two or three people who supported him on taking up this vocal approach. «Right on, Roger! Be the envy of professional wrestlers worldwide!»

 

The utter stupidity of the vocals is hardly helped by the fact that Matt Henderson loyally conti­nues dis-providing fresh riffs — most of the current batch seems like regurgitated old stock foo­tage, stolen out of the vaults of everybody from Sabbath to Slayer — and that I did not even no­tice any guitar solo passages whatsoever. Not that solos would have seriously helped, of course, but, in order to be at least briefly relieved of the endless, monotonous, gray-tone chugga-chugga, I would have welcomed even Yngwie Malmsteen as a guest star on a couple of tracks.

 

The only dubiously redeeming quality of this bunch of metalcore garbage is that the band still seems to have plenty of dedication to whatever they are doing — in fact, 'Dedication' is even the name of one of the tracks — and that they are still running high on genuine testosterone. Unfortu­nately, pure, undiluted testosterone only makes me puke. Thumbs down.

 

WARRIORS (2007)

 

1) Addiction; 2) Dead To Me; 3) Outraged; 4) Warriors; 5) Black And Blue; 6) Change Your Ways; 7) For My Fa­mi­ly; 8) No Regrets; 9) Revenge; 10) We Want The Truth; 11) By My Side; 12) Come Alive; 13) All These Years; 14) Forgive Me Mother; 15) Break The Chains.

 

Matt Henderson is out again, but the «metalcore» stuff is still in, nurtured by new guitarist Joseph James, whose playing is able to keep the band at a respectable level, but does not bring in any in­teresting individuality. They may have earned the right to call themselves «warriors», but, the way my ears perceive them, they still keep fighting in the 3rd Clone Division.

 

But this time around, they are also nostalgic clones. The single 'For My Family' does nothing if not tug at the feelings of the hardcore crowds around 1982, targeted at those few survivors who are still able to recall those days of hard drink, heavy sweat, grizzly tattoos, and pulsating hatred for The Oppressors with fondness rather than embarrassment. Musically, it is every bit as forget­table as everything else on here, but at least its silliness is somewhat touching — in a way, almost sentimental, with the appropriate correction as to what may constitute «sentiment» when we're talking Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma.

 

Other than that, Miret's vocals are a little less rough this time. For Another Voice, he had made every effort to sing like a retarded piece of scum with serious larynx problems; on Warriors, he sounds like a retarded piece of scum who has just undergone successful clinical treatment for la­ryngitis. (To prevent libel suits, I am not insinuating or implying anything, merely laying out sub­jective impressions in the exact particular order that they are overflowing my mind). Unfortunate­ly, he still is not singing, screaming, or spitting out anything I'd ever like to hear again.

 

No change in musical values, either. No solos, no unexpected musical trickery, just textbook me­tallic riffage that may only sound enticing to those who believe that thrash metal was invented by Municipal Waste — or to those who piss their pants from happiness every time they hear a metal line, no matter how old, simple, or «hollow», flash past their senses at jet plane speed. Thumbs down for all that — and for the stupid album sleeve in particular. (I'm not saying I feel any hap­pier about all those Nazi-themed covers from yesteryears, though, but at least they were direct and intentional offenses against taste — Warriors-style imagery is simply cheap).

 

MY LIFE MY WAY (2011)

 

1) City Streets; 2) More Than A Memory; 3) Us Against The World; 4) My Life My Way; 5) That's Life; 6) Self Pride; 7) Until The Day I Die; 8) Now And Forever; 9) The Sacrifice; 10) A Mi Manera; 11) Your Worst Enemy; 12) Em­p­ty Dreams; 13) Time Has Come.

 

Over the first three or four songs on this record, my nose seemed to smell out a bit more «vocal harmonies» and «catchy choruses» than on Warriors, so, for about five minutes, I was sort of en­tertaining the thoughts that, perhaps, this would be an attempt at fusing together the band's hope­less «crossover» thing with the old pure-hardcore schtick that worked so much better on Dead Yuppies. That way, I could at least feebly recommend the album, be done with it, and get on with life's more precious chores.

 

Alas, pretty soon it turned out that I was completely wrong. Joseph James is still in the band, and the overall sound is almost exactly the same as it was on Warriors. The album blurb on their of­ficial record label, Nuclear Blast, proudly states that "...the title of their tenth studio album “My Life My Way” underlines perfectly what Hardcore means to Stigma and his bandmates: It’s not just music, it’s an attitude to life!" They almost got it right — simply scrap that "just", and the motto will be word-perfect. (For the record, the same blurb states that Miret considers this to be "our catchiest record to date", so don't go complaining how I only present my opinion on all these albums and nobody else's. Now you know how the band's frontman sincerely feels about his la­test record. And he probably felt that way about the previous one, too, and the one before that, and each and every time he must have been completely sincere, and one cannot blame him).

 

In a brief news release, here is what they do on this album:

 

(a) first time ever (I think) sing in Spa­nish ('A Mi Manera'), to broaden their fanbase among illegal Mexican and Puerto Rican im­mi­grants, after a recent statistics poll has shown that these people are chiefly motivated to leave their families and risk their freedom and safety by the en­ticing opportunities to access indie record stores in L.A., N.Y.C., and other major metropolises;

 

(b) sing about themselves in the past tense ("It was us against the world... we fought to survive"), apparently, from out of the geriatric refuge of their rocking chairs, enlightening the younger ge­neration, who might otherwise erroneously suppose that it has always been Pink to fight aga­inst the world — too bad the nationwide coverage is so reluctant to pick that up;

 

(c) then suddenly declare that "TIME HAS COME... to show the world this revolution HAS BE­GUN" on the last track. Considering the timeline, I can only assume they are referring to the Arab Spring here, which makes me wonder why the song has not been explicitly dedicated to «our blood bro­thers and sisters in Libya and Egypt» (including The Society of The Muslim Brothers and other merry gentlemen who would gladly watch the N.Y.C. hardcore scene sink to the bot­tom of the ocean, along with the rest of N.Y.C.).

 

Actually, though, it's all in the line of work. You can close your eyes, forget all about the cultural and temporal con­text, and simply kick out the jams with these guys. If there is anything at all ad­mirable, it is how their stamina level never ever decreases through all these years — the only pos­sible motive that could drive me to still pick up their albums when they are in their seventies and eighties, and be happy to learn that the revolution never ever ceases to begin on each subsequent one. Which will hardly prevent each of these albums (unless they decide to drop the metal schtick once again, with Miret reverting to a normal kind of voice) from getting a thumbs down — this one is no exception.

 

THE AMERICAN DREAM DIED (2015)

 

1) Intro; 2) The American Dream Died; 3) Police Violence; 4) Only In America; 5) Test Of Time; 6) We Walk The Line; 7) Never Walk Alone; 8) Enough Is Enough; 9) I Can't Relate; 10) Old New York; 11) Social Justice; 12) Reasonable Doubt; 13) No War Fuck You; 14) Attack!; 15) A Wise Man; 16) Just Like Yesterday.

 

Yes, in case you weren't aware, the American dream just died, but you probably wouldn't believe this anyway unless you were told about this by someone who sounds exactly like a 300-pound Neanderthal who just sat down with his bare ass on a hornets nest. In other words, yes, ten years after the fact, Roger Miret still shows no signs of getting weary from his Another Voice — may­be the idea is that in a few decades we will finally get used to it, and once that happens, Agnostic Front will finally get a chance to rule the world. All you have to do is be tenacious.

 

I do respect that attitude, but I think that I respect the idea of keeping it short (this record barely goes over 27 minutes) even more. If I understand this right, the album once again moves away from metal and towards the good old hardcore — not just because of the song lengths (several of these are well under one minute in duration), but also due to another lineup shift, with Craig Sil­verman replacing Joseph James on second guitar and the music embracing «noise» and «grind» over relatively complex metal riffs or solos. What with all the nostalgia and everything,  they may think they are channelling the spirit of Victim In Pain here. But not with that «gorilla in heat» voice they aren't, never in a million years.

 

As usual, there are no problems with the overall energy level or the conviction with which the testosteronic riffs and the anti-establishment lyrics are delivered. Just as usual, there is nothing whatsoever worth discussing in the melody department, and the «gimmicks» this time around con­sist of a two-minute intro with police sirens and news flashes on the crimes of and ruptures within the evil capitalist system, and of a brief quotation from Taxi Driver at the beginning of ʽOld New Yorkʼ, in which Miret complains about "the Bowery slums turned into fashion bou­tiques" and the lack of drug dealers and freaks on the street. Uh... okay. I'm not sure I really want to comment on that particular attitude.

 

Other than this brief piece of information, all you really need to do is to look closely at the song titles — then understand for yourself whether you may or may not need this in your life (depen­ding, among other things, on whether you have «occupation of Wall Street» coming up on your calendar any time soon). The best I can do is not give the album a thumbs down — because, somehow, I am marginally impressed at how those old punkers seem to draw even more energy out of their frustration at growing old (and irrelevant) than they used to. I mean, the music is shit in any case, but as they get older, they learn to fling it with increased force and accuracy, even if nobody seems to care any more. Besides, it's not as if a whole lot of young artists these days cared much singing about social problems — so, perhaps, there is still some niche space left for the good old hardcore warriors.

A-HA

HUNTING HIGH AND LOW (1985)

 

1) Take On Me; 2) Train Of Thought; 3) Hunting High And Low; 4) The Blue Sky; 5) Living A Boy's Adventure; 6) The Sun Always Shines On T.V.; 7) And You Tell Me; 8) Love Is Reason; 9) I Dream Myself Alive; 10) Here I Stand And Face The Rain.

 

For some reason, it is quite psychologically daunting to look back on the Golden Age of Synth-Pop and make a conscious attempt to stratify the chaff and the wheat. Somehow the gap between the likes of, say, Depeche Mode, with their clear interest in expanding the borders of the genre and using it to explore man's dark side, and, for instance, Modern Talking (a.k.a. «The Black Pla­gue of Eastern Europe» in the 1980s) always seems narrower and more bridgeable than a super­ficially similar gap between the likes of the Beatles and the Dave Clark 5, or Thin Lizzy and Fo­rei­g­ner, or Mötley Crüe and Guns'n'Roses.

 

Perhaps it has something to do with the instrumental minimalism displayed by all parties con­cerned (just how many classic synth pop melodies sound as if it took one cheap key­board and one finger to play them?), or by the common shared ugliness of the genre's obligatory requirements, such as electronic percussion etc. Most likely, people raised and reared on the genre will not ag­ree, but their generation (my generation, to be sure) is a cursed one in any case, and their opinions on the matter value about as much as an oil magnate's opinions on alternate sources of energy.

 

A-Ha (more correctly, a-ha with no capitals, but this looks horrid in printed text, so I will allow myself the sacrilege of capitalization) — Norway's pride and joy, and one of the major factors in the prolongation of the average lifespan of Norwegian population — probably symbolize the art of unpretentious synth-pop better than any other 1980s band. Without infringing on the gloomy Freudian territory of Depeche Mode, or on the decadent cosmic synth-rock turf of Duran Duran, they still manage to sound similar to both — and present a viable alternative for those who want their dance beats simple and stupid, and their mood elegant and romantic with no oddities. Is this awful? Is this beautiful? I don't know.

 

The music is definitely not very exciting. The trio of A-Ha does include a guitarist, Paul Waak­taar, but Hunting High And Low, the band's debut, does not ever let us hear him in full flight, since he seems to mostly be busy providing acoustic backdrops that are «felt rather than heard». He is, however, the principal songwriter for the band, which makes him the principal accused. Keyboardist Mags Furuholmen is responsible for the overall sound — one finger on the keyboard, remember — and then there is the band's biggest surface attraction, singer Morten Harket, the one destined to reap the biggest female harvest.

 

In all honesty, Harket is a great singer. Listen to 'Train Of Thought' and you might think, like me: 'Gee, I had no idea David Bowie could sell out to that extent!' But then listen to 'Take On Me' and you will think: 'Say, since when did James Taylor develop that kind of falsetto?' And it is not like Morten is consciously imitating anyone: he simply has an excellent range and is in perfect com­mand of his cords, and all the different moods go off quite smoothly. In conjunction with strong melodic hooks (vocal hooks) of Take On Me', 'The Blue Sky', 'Living A Boy's Adventure' and a few other songs, this definitely gives A-Ha an edge, and explains their huge commercial success better than any other reason. I freely and openly admit that some of these songs are prime exam­ples of the most gorgeous singing in synth-pop history.

 

Alas, if only the music were up to par. There is not a single track on the record that would whis­per "hey, what an interesting, original musical decision" in my ear. Without Harket's contributi­ons, all of this would go down the drain immediately: no complex riffs, no non-trivial arrange­ment touches, just a bunch of generic keyboard loops, drum machines, and «heavenly» keyboard effects to prove that Harket, like a true knight of the synth-pop order, is singing down to his wor­shippers from the faraway Electronic Temple on Casio Mountain. Predictable.

 

So, apparently, Hunting High And Low will not be appreciated in years to come as much as it has been appreciated upon immediate release, making the band a permanent chart presence and MTV's prime time darlings. But it still works well as an inspiring testament to the abilities of the human voice, and, for that reason, I give it neither a definitive thumbs up nor a decisive thumbs down — this would depend on whether I am in the mood for some great singing, or for some very, very crappy synthesizer loops.

 

SCOUNDREL DAYS (1986)

 

1) Scoundrel Days; 2) The Swing Of Things; 3) I've Been Losing You; 4) October; 5) Manhattan Skyline; 6) Cry Wolf; 7) We're Looking For The Whales; 8) The Weight Of The Wind; 9) Maybe, Maybe; 10) Soft Rains Of April.

 

Regardless of one's overall feelings for synth pop, A-Ha's second album is a major improvement over their first in every department I can think of. The melodies are tighter and more emotional, the singing even more diverse, and, most important, the instrumentation is livelier — no longer are we pursued by synth loops on every corner, as real guitars steal part of their thunder, real strings arrangements sometimes arrogantly tread upon the sacred turf of «heavenly synths», and real, non-robotic drumming from actual drummers nurtures our souls on no less than four out of ten tracks! Now this is what I call good news.

 

In all honesty, Scoundrel Days is one of the highest points of the «New Romantic» movement. Its closing song may be erroneously called 'Soft Rains Of April', but its overall mood is decidedly autumnal (plenty of rain, though): a shade of elegant depression and desperation spread over ur­banistic landscapes. 'Manhattan Skyline' is a great title — most of the time, Harket truly sounds like he is singing from the top of a skyscraper, spreading his vibes throughout the city. But the safety harness is in its due place: A-Ha are not the Cure, and the sadness they sow is never suici­dal: you know for sure that, once the show is over, Harket is not jumping, but taking the elevator back to the ground floor's restaurant, for some champagne and caviar to soothe the aching heart.

 

With that reservation in mind, it is still not a crime to enjoy this mood and at least some of the songs that go along with it. On the title track, Harket goes into full-blown Bryan Ferry mode, and if only he had a clone of Eno and another of Manzanera to go along, together they could have re­created the magic of Roxy Music's Avalon; as things stand, this is a cruder, but still dramatic ex­perience, and the strings are a beautiful antidote for the generic keyboards. So is the melancholic brass backing for 'October', which, along with Harket's hushed vocals, makes me forget the silly pssht-pssht of the accompanying electronic percussion.

 

The upbeat, danceable singles — 'The Swing Of Things' and 'Cry Wolf' — are at least hardly any worse than concurrent Duran Duran hits; in fact, 'Cry Wolf' is probably the greatest hit Duran Du­ran ever missed writing, and 'The Swing' places Harket squarely back into David Bowie mood, with excellent results. The only serious misstep here is the overtly cutesy, ska-influenced 'May­be, Maybe' — two minutes of unnecessary schoolgirl sissiness that nearly ruins the atmosphere they had been so carefully constructing for the previous eight songs.

 

Fortunately, they then come back to their senses and end the record with one of their very best ballads — 'Soft Rains Of April', every second of which is meticulously calculated, but to great effect. Synth loops are almost drowned out by ominously synthesized orchestration, and Harket is hero again, going from a dreamy, «progressive» delivery on the vocals to a poppier chorus before abruptly ending it all with a gorgeous breathy 'over!' that sort of leaves you wishing it weren't over so soon. Not the kind of wish I would normally expect from an A-Ha album, but there it is.

 

It is only too sad that, today, most people will probably dismiss Scoundrel Days as just one more generic synth pop atavism, without giving its sophisticated textures the proper attention they de­serve. Hardly fair; there is no reason for a world that worships Frank Sinatra to forget about Mor­ten Harket. Or is there? Follow my thumbs up and then decide for yourself.

 

STAY ON THESE ROADS (1988)

 

1) Stay On These Roads; 2) The Blood That Moves The Body; 3) Touchy!; 4) This Alone Is Love; 5) Hurry Home; 6) The Living Daylights; 7) There's Never A Forever Thing; 8) Out Of Blue Comes Green; 9) You Are The One; 10) You'll End Up Crying.

 

A couple listens into A-Ha's third album, I have decided to convince myself that 'Stay On These Roads' is one of the most gorgeous synth-pop ballads ever written, and one of the best pieces of evidence for the genre not being so utterly worthless. However, I do not quite understand the rea­sons that drove me to such action, and I am not even sure that I have the proper strength to per­form it.

 

For one thing, the «synth-pop» aspect of this song totally sucks: there have been cases when Ei­gh­ties-style adult contemporary arrangements managed to contribute to a true atmosphere of lush­ness and beauty (Enya!!!), but, by the time A-Ha's third effort rolled along, it should have been perfectly clear that their music gets progressively better when these arrangements are muted and muffled in favor of real instruments, and vice versa. 'Stay On These Roads' is no exception.

 

But what does work in its favor is the utterly gorgeous vocal delivery. Harket literally pulls all the stops: there is the tender falsetto, there is the towering scream, there are the hushy interludes, and there are just about all the transitional states there could be. Over and over again I wish they'd re­corded the whole thing completely acappella, or in a more «classical» style, never feeling entirely secure that the song would have benefited from that, but secretly hoping it would. My senses are too jaded and withered for the song to completely re-awaken the idealistic romantic in me, but maybe there is still some hope for those whose favourite Sixties' artist is Scott Walker (not that I dare to compare the genius of Scott with the machinery of A-Ha, but this is the exact reason why I like so much to concentrate on the vocal gift of Harket while trying very, very hard to sonically erase the surround sound from the accompanying acoustic waves).

 

Other than the title track, though, there is little to praise about the album. Most people know 'The Living Daylights', a fairly common synth-popper used as the title theme to one of the least suc­cessful James Bond movies ever (probably not due to A-Ha's involvement in it, but one can never tell), and some may know the other two singles — 'The Blood That Moves The Body', mid-tempo and boring, and 'Touchy!', fast and ugly. Back in 1988, they coped with their duty of stimulating the average white male's biorhythms fairly well, but today, they have been replaced with other (not always better) ways of stimulation, and seem completely useless.

 

Two moodier, less psychologically comfortable tracks arguably stand a better chance: 'Hurry Home' is a relatively convincing portrayal of a prodigal husband aching to make things right once again, and, likewise, the epic 'Out Of Blue Comes Green' also puts Harket in a hysterically con­fessional mood and somehow works, despite the length. Overall, I would say that «Harket the Repenting Sinner» appeals to me better than «Harket the Disney Lover» — not only because that role is less clichéd in general, but also because Harket himself seems to get into his tormented mood with more spi­rit and dedication than into his sweet and soothing one. Somehow I would not want to take a peep at the hidden corners of his soul, even if an offer were made, not even out of pure curiosity.

 

Thumbs down: too little of this solid enough melodically to get the same attention as Scoundrel Days, and on my Top Ten Thousand, 'Stay On These Roads' probably hits something like #9,876, if we are to strive for useless accuracy. Still, like almost every A-Ha album, it is at least listenable and shows that the band still cares for a certain degree of artistic integrity to go along with the big bucks (and even the bucks were not that big in 1988, to tell the truth).  

 

EAST OF THE SUN, WEST OF THE MOON (1990)

 

1) Crying In The Rain; 2) Early Morning; 3) I Call Your Name; 4) Slender Frame; 5) East Of The Sun; 6) Sycamore Leaves; 7) Waiting For Her; 8) Cold River; 9) The Way We Talk; 10) Rolling Thunder; 11) (Seemingly) Nonstop July.

 

This is good shit. It does not exactly light my fire, but it does not annoy me, either, and that is no mean feat for a mainstream pop album from 1990. This is where A-Ha first tried to become a «real» band, trading in some of their rusted synth gear for more traditional instruments — guitars, pianos, drums, even some brass and some strings. Electronica still provides the atmospheric back­grounds, but overall, this is definitely not «synth pop». Ironically, it also marked the start of their commercial decline — apparently, some of the old fans felt betrayed (indeed, what could ever be a more awful downer than hearing an actual boring old piano instead of a brand new Casio?), and new fans would rather dig in to groovier, trendier stuff emanating from the likes of Manchester.

 

But for me, this might just be the ultimate A-Ha experience. They may have betrayed the child­hood dreams of their oldest admirers, but they certainly have not abandoned the quintessence of their style. As usual, there is plenty of cool grace flying around, plenty of autumnal depression, plenty of old-style romanticizing, and plenty of pop hooks. And, in fact, the switch to traditional instruments makes them work harder for it: the arrangements have to be more complex, the melo­dies slightly less predictable, the singing more upfront. Like it or not, East Of The Sun is quite a masterful construction.

 

Some tracks are very easy to deride, particularly the ones where the band try to «rock out». Upon first listen, something like 'Cold River' feels like a highly stupid attempt at a «tough» sound that does not at all fit in with the band's personality. The obvious Beatles reference at the beginning ('Asked a girl if she needed a ride, she said, "sure babe, but I wanna drive"') may also seem irrita­tingly flat. But then you could throw the same accusation at the Beatles themselves, couldn't you? Wasn't 'Drive My Car' a stupid attempt at a «tough» sound? Hardly — it was a well-conceived pop-rocker that stopped at the exact borderline between «strong and catchy», something the Bea­tles did well, and «tough and aggressive», something they did not believe in with the same ease and, therefore, could not transmit all that well.

 

The same happens to A-Ha: they never overstep their boundaries, and even 'Cold River', with its thumping bass, bashing drums, flat lyrics, and Harket singing in a more rock'n'rollish manner than usual, is tolerable fun. Although, to be sure, I like the doom-laden 'Sycamore Leaves' a hell of a lot more — nothing beats its funereal organ rhythm and solo. Add an extra few dozen layers of gui­tars and keyboards, and one could pass it off for a lost Cure classic.

 

Most of the album's material continues, however, in a softer vein. 'Crying In The Rain' is their first attempt at covering outside material — and the selection of a Carole King/Everly Brothers number is more than appropriate and in very good taste, not to mention the symbolic gesture of placing it at the start of the album, as if to stress the straight line of development from the Everlys right down to A-Ha: sacrilegious for some, perhaps, but factually true. 'Early Morning' and 'Slen­der Frame' are minimalistic, catchy, inoffensive adult contemporary, elegantly woven around the denser, more evocative mini-worlds of the pompous 'I Call Your Name' and the dreary title track. And then, finally, the unpredictable ending: an intimate ballad, just a little acoustic guitar and a piano, with Harket crooning out the lyrics as sweetly and nonchalantly as possible.

 

Who knows: once the novelty of A-Ha's «classic» synth-pop era albums finally fades away along with my nostalgia-ridden generation of the Eighties, East Of The Sun may take its rightful place as the album to remember these guys by — it already sounds far more timeless than Hunting High And Low and even Scoundrel Days. In the meantime, I will do my own tiny part by adver­tising it with a straightahead thumbs up. Good, good stuff.

 

MEMORIAL BEACH (1992)

 

1) Dark Is The Night For All; 2) Move To Memphis; 3) Cold As Stone; 4) Angel In The Snow; 5) Locust; 6) Lie Down In Darkness; 7) How Sweet It Was; 8) Lamb To The Slaughter; 9) Between Your Mama And Yourself; 10) Memorial Beach.

 

A-Ha's last album before calling it quits for the rest of the decade is sort of a mixed bag — a fai­lure by most objective standards, but very possibly a success by certain subjective ones. The big­gest problem is that, having lost their original face, they were still experiencing difficulties about finding a new one. On East Of The Sun, they at least tried several possible directions, and came out with a relatively diverse and talented collection. Memorial Beach, on the other hand, seems to pool most of the band's resources into a fierce competitive effort with the 'Madchester' scene — not only about two years too late (by 1992, the Stone Roses were no longer the hottest thing around), but also with no hope whatsoever.

 

Could anybody ever hope to believe that the sweet teen idols of yesterday would be able to stand their ground next to the biggest, weightiest «alt-dance» bands of the era? That Mor­ten Harket could come off as cool as Ian Brown? Obviously not. For a bunch of Norwegian nearly-has-beens to make a serious new impact on the British dance scene, the music had to be a real rocket; Me­morial Beach is more likely to be compared to an antique choo-choo train, slowly grumbling its way through the night.

 

Critics hated it, the public ignored it, and it was pretty obvious that the world simply had no need for more A-Ha product unless it ceased to be A-Ha product and became something else. A predi­ctable disaster. But the more we look back on Memorial Beach, the more it turns into a veritable memorial beach, one that may be worth paying a lonely visit for no particular purpose, but abso­lutely risk-free.

 

A-Ha's brand of modern funk is, of course, tremendously derivative, but the songs themselves are not altogether boring or pointless — 'Move To Memphis' has a catchy chorus; the eight-minute monster 'Cold As Stone' puts its two cents on «atmosphere» and more or less pockets a solid win­ning; 'Lie Down In Darkness' has swell vocal harmonies; and on 'How Sweet It Was', Harket lays down his best vocal performance on the album. No masterpieces, but still a soft touch of class on each of these things (and from a purely technical point, they are unassailable — these guys may not have the inventiveness or the freshness of the fathers of 'Madchester', but they have definitely studied the scene to perfection).

 

The ballads are shakier, as the band descends deeper into the pits of adult contemporary, with the required lack of focus, cheesy harmonies, and lyrical triteness — but there is no denying the sin­cerity of 'Angel In The Snow' (or the nice fact that its keyboard accompaniment is provided by a snowy winter electric organ) or the unusual otherworldliness of 'Locust', the band's only song written in «hypnotic lullaby» mood and deserving it. The choice of the album opener 'Dark Is The Night For All', which some critics have sneeringly compared to U2, for the single, was, however, unhappy — its anthemic strife is not well supported by its hooks, and its exaggerated idealism is an entirely false preview of the things that follow, which are really much better, but which may seem like a bored disappointment after the grand sweep of 'Dark Is The Night'.

 

Do not believe the one-star reviews when you meet them: no sane person had a good reason to listen to this record when it came out, but today, when no sane person has a good reason to listen to music at all, and what we are left with is either insane people or bad reasons, one-star re­views like these are hopelessly obsolete. A little bit of thumbs up is in order here, and if you are intere­sted at all in seeing A-Ha's career as reflecting the inner emotional journey of Morten Harket and his vocal tract, Memorial Beach is indispensable, if only to hear him sing 'The mirror sees you — so alone — cold as stone... yeah!' and still be able to admire his cool.

 

MINOR EARTH MAJOR SKY (2000)

 

1) Minor Earth Major Sky; 2) Little Black Heart; 3) Velvet; 4) Summer Moved On; 5) The Sun Never Shone That Day; 6) To Let You Win; 7) The Company Man; 8) Thought That It Was You; 9) I Wish I Cared; 10) Barely Han­ging On; 11) You'll Never Get Over Me; 12) I Won't Forget Her; 13) Mary Ellen Makes The Moment Count.

 

There is probably no harm in speculating on the idea that A-Ha's comeback could have been trig­gered by the popularity of the new wave of vocal groups, such as the Backstreet Boys — after almost a decade's worth of grunge, Brit-pop, and R'n'B dominating the charts, sexy teen idols ini­tiated their revenge, and, considering that Morten could still qualify as such (apparently, he is very careful about his diet, which works wonders for both his voice and his good looks), A-Ha agreed to give it one more chance.

 

It all started with 'Summer Moved On', of course; the resting band was conjured to reconvene at the Nobel Peace Prize Contest in 1998, for which occasion Paul wrote a new song — and every­one liked it. I like it, too. It features the well-recognized gimmick of having the longest note held (in a hit song, at least) — during the bridge, Morten drags the line 'there's just one thing left to ask...' for over twenty seconds (and has, in fact, done this ever since in most of the band's live shows). But even without this bit of Guinness trivia, it is still a golden stan­dard to which every writer and arranger of mainstream adult contemporary ballads should aspire. Rarely, if ever, does this genre feature anything close to Morten's falsetto interaction with the thunderous strings that give it a quasi-Beethovenish punch, although they take great care to preserve the general autum­nal mood that accompanies most of their hits.

 

With such an obvious success under their belts, it was clear that more activity would follow. Mi­nor Earth Major Sky put them back on the European charts, but failed to make a significant im­pression on the critics. Yet, again, in retrospect it definitely trumps the Backstreet Boys, even though much of it updates the A-Ha sound in an officially «late Nineties» way. Waaktaar-Savoy gets most of the credit: as good as Morten is throughout, it is his minor hooks that ensure listen­ability and, sometimes, even depth. And it is worth waiting for them — at first, the tunes might just seem the usual middle-of-the-road pop stuff with standard mid-tempo dance rhythms, «safe» acoustic backing tracks, predictable structures etc. But with a gifted songwriter and a tasteful sin­ger, A-Ha have broken through the synth-pop of the mid-Eighties and subdued the funk-pop of the early Nineties; what problem could they have with taming the teen-pop of the turn of the mil­lennium? Denying the beauty of Minor Earth is like denying the beauty of a Marilyn or a Sophia Loren — it's possible, it may be tempting, but don't you have anything better to do?

 

There are misfires. 'I Won't Forget Her' is very catchy, but songs that combine mid-tempo ska-ish rhythms with bubbly synthesizer tones are an official disgrace that should be forever reserved to third-grade pop acts in developing countries; I am astonished that the tune finds a spot on the same CD as 'Summer Moved On', almost to the point of writing a petition. There are a few more songs, nowhere near as offensive, but which simply fail to register. Yet so much is good! The title track, with its cloudy atmosphere, gritty bassline, and genuinely psychedelic chorus. 'Velvet', whose ethereal female harmonies remind me of AIR. The humility of 'To Let You Win', which just floats by at first, but then grabs you by being the only song on the album that absolutely re­fuses to grab you. The odd melancholy of 'You'll Never Get Over Me': it is hard to imagine a con­text for the lines 'you'll never get over me, I'll never get under you' that would not be humorous, but the music leaves no place for humour, only elegant sorrow.

 

If these little shards of compliments do not sound convincing, how about the band dragging out a friggin' Mellotron for the conclusion — the strange, haunting ballad 'Mary Ellen Makes The Mo­ment Count'? Supposedly it is the band's personal take on the subject of 'Eleanor Rigby', with the depiction of a somewhat similar character, and I would not deem it out of place on any classic late Sixties' art-rock album. It may have been a bit pretentious of them to close the record that way — «look at us, we play it straight and simple, but we will go out with an art-pop song so your last memory will be of us as relevant, responsible, and refined artists» — but the key point here is that they qualify as such, if only with one or two songs, and this raises the overall score. It also delights the brain, a much-needed shot in the arm after the deadly mistake of 'I Won't Forget Her'; and the heart — the heart has long since pledged its support to Morten if he works hard eno­ugh to deserve it, and his is one of the most hard-working (not to mention hairless) bare chests in existence. Thumbs up for a respectable comeback.

 

LIFELINES (2002)

 

1) Lifelines; 2) You Wanted More; 3) Forever Not Yours; 4) There's A Reason For It; 5) Time And Again; 6) Did Anyone Approach You?; 7) Afternoon High; 8) Oranges On Appletrees; 9) A Little Bit; 10) Less Than Pure; 11) Turn The Lights Down; 12) Cannot Hide; 13) White Canvas; 14) Dragonfly; 15) Solace.

 

A whole team of different, but equally respectable producers helped the band out on this one. You'd think the result should have been a mess, and you'd be right: Lifelines is a mess. Sur­prisingly, though, it is not an exciting mess of breathtaking successes and misguided failures. It is simply a lightweight, va­pid, fake-sounding mess. A mess such as would naturally result from the band's expressing a serious desire... to become the new Backstreet Boys. Did they really? I hope they did not. But reason tells me they really did.

 

These are horrible arrangements. Horrible. The instruments have lost all life, the rhythm section reduced to stereotypical bad movie soundtrack pulsations, the melodies relying on clichés, the lyrics being clichés. Good moments — moments — abound throughout, but they are almost im­mediately washed away by rivers of syrup, streams of corn, and oceans of cheese. How the heck could this be possible, so soon after the inventive dark maturity of Minor Earth? Who told them to return to the primitive teen aesthetics of 1986, accomodating it to the needs of the new millen­nium? At least in 1986 they were pretty much teens themselves. But in 2002?..

 

The only song that qualifies as a relatively solid bit — the only one — is the title track, whose dreamy sequence of 'What do you see, what do you know? One sign, what do I do?..' recreates the treasurable part of the A-Ha spirit in a believable manner. Its «adult contemporary» sound seems to have a wee bit of depth that the rest of the songs does not. But the other hits do not even begin to reach it: 'Forever Not Yours' is American Idol-style pablum, miserably failing to put Morten's singing to good use (the way he bleats out the chorus is just painful), and 'Did Anyone Approach You?' is clearly just a marketing ploy, concocting a «mysterious» atmosphere around a very flat dance melody that is really no fun whatsoever.

 

'Less Than Pure' is just about the only song on the album that preserves faint traces of aggressive desperation, the same emotion whose puncturing made previous records so enjoyable. But even that song is definitely «less than pure». Everything else is simply too shallow, too happy, too dis­gustingly clean. Clearly, the experiment did not work. Thumbs down for a record that the band members, if they are really smart, should have long ago disowned, putting the blame on their pro­ducers. Amazing, though, considering that one of the producers used to produce for the Pet Shop Boys, and the other two used to produce for Elvis Costello. Was this a subtle revenge on their part, getting even with their protegés' commercial competition in the Eighties?

 

HOW CAN I SLEEP WITH YOUR VOICE IN MY HEAD (2003)

 

1) Forever Not Yours; 2) Minor Earth Major Sky; 3) Manhattan Skyline; 4) I've Been Losing You; 5) Crying In The Rain; 6) The Sun Always Shines On TV; 7) Did Anyone Approach You; 8) The Swing Of Things; 9) Lifelines; 10) Stay On These Roads; 11) Hunting High And Low; 12) Take On Me; 13) The Living Daylights; 14) Summer Moved On; 15*) Scoundrel Days; 16*) Oranges On Appletrees; 17*) Cry Wolf; 18*) Dragonfly; 19*) Time And Again; 20*) Sycamore Leaves.

 

Glossy pop bands do not generally need live albums — it's not like they often feel the need to improvise or pull weird artsy rarities out of their backlog — but this particular proposition from our Norwegian charmers may be worth your attention, anyway. The bad news is that it was recor­ded on the Lifelines tour, and, consequently, feels obliged to include a pinch of dreck from that disaster. The good news is — just about everything else.

 

Actually, the two important questions here are as follows: (a) will Morten be able to sing all his complex parts live as effectively as he does them in the studio?; (b) will the band's overall sound tend to rock out more — will they, in fact, be able to sound like an actual band? If the answer to even one of these questions were to be «no», the album would have a very good reason not to ex­ist. And with a band as wobbly as A-Ha, you never can predict anything: they are just as capable of ugly blunders as they are of explosions of genius.

 

Yet it turns out that fortune is on our (and their) side this time. Harket is in great form; not a sin­gle one of these performances has a thing to be ashamed of, and if this is a typical night for A-Ha, he should be welcome to the ranks of the hardest-working live performers in show-biz. Twenty years of performing have not worn him out one bit. I am pretty sure that, today, he curses Waak­taar to high heaven for setting him up with that twenty-second long note on 'Summer Moved On' — but in 2003, at least, he was still able to handle it perfectly (although notice that it does leave him briefly out of breath for the next lines).

 

As for the overall sound, yes, it is very sensible. Synth pop fans may quibble and complain, but they do some, if not most, of the old numbers with less emphasis on the keyboards and more em­phasis on Paul's guitar riffs, cranking up the volume and churning up a whiff of distortion; check out the difference between the original 'I've Been Losing You', for instance, and this new treat­ment, with the song seriously funkified and enlivened. Even 'Take On Me', while still true to its roots, keeps boiling and boiling and, although the main recognizable synthesizer melody remains intact, Paul eventually takes over and turns it into a power-pop guitar anthem.

 

Not everyone will be happy about 'The Living Daylights' — a James Bond theme song arranged as the centerpiece of the show, with the audience forced to sing the chorus and a reggae interlude? But I guess a hit is a hit, and this is, after all, A-Ha's most well-known tune (remember that 'Take On Me' is only familiar with the Eighties generation, while 'The Living Daylights' is being regu­la­rly consumed by everyone watching the Bond TV marathons).

 

If you have the chance, go for the 2-CD edition; the bonus disc offers note-perfect renditions of 'Scoundrel Days' and 'Cry Wolf', a pretty sentimental performance of 'Dragonfly', and Paul taking lead vocals on my personal favourite, 'Sycamore Leaves' — which forms a far more interesting and tasty conclusion to the whole experience than the awesome, but predictable 'Summer Moved On'. (But why have they removed the organ riff? That was the creepiest part!)

 

How Can I Sleep is not the only live album by A-Ha (the recently released Live At Valhall, from an earlier performance in 2001, is another solid offering), but I do not think there exists a serious reason to own more than one: once you know what their live show looks like, you can sa­fely go back to the studio offerings. Still, if you are still in doubt about the overall validity of this band, I think that it is definitely a shot in the arm to their reputation rather than a kick in the guts. A hearty thumbs up.

 

ANALOGUE (2005)

 

1) Celice; 2) Don't Do Me Any Favours; 3) Cosy Prisons; 4) Analogue; 5) Birthright; 6) Holy Ground; 7) Over The Treetops; 8) Halfway Through The Tour; 9) A Fine Blue Line; 10) Keeper Of The Flame; 11) Make It Soon; 12) White Dwarf; 13) The Summers Of Our Youth.

 

East Of The Sun may have been the ultimate A-Ha experience, but Analogue is simply the best A-Ha album — even though, for the most part, it sounds not one bit like A-Ha. It got some mild critical praise, yielded a couple briefly high-charting singles for the European market, and then got washed away for good, failing to shift the general memory of A-Ha as the «'Take On Me' group with the sexy singer». Why should it?

 

Well, there are some good reasons. Almost as if Lifelines never happened, the boys make a sharp stylistic turn, completely jettisoning modernistic trappings and making a record that hearkens back — way beyond Eighties synth-pop, aiming straight at the heart of the art-pop movement of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Of course, they always had that tendency — but this is the first (and last) time they made a record that does not sound ashamed of it, but, on the contrary, proudly throws its retro-ishness in your face.

 

With too much force, perhaps: I was all but astonished at reading people condemning the beauty of Analogue on various fora, until it dawned on me that most of these people must have grown up listening to 'Take On Me' and 'The Living Daylights', and that this is what they still expect from Harket and Waaktar-Savoy — whereas people who could care less about Norwegian teen idols in the 1980s hardly have a big reason to care more about them today. In other words, the good old tragedy of clumsy niche-jumping.

 

But am I ever glad they made that jump. It was obvious, almost from the start, that Analogue is a record these guys always had in them, what with all the talent; that it took them twenty years to finally get around to it is nothing compared to the fact that it is finally here. Plus, age has certain­ly wisened them up, opened new horizons, raised new issues, and made them independent enough to produce the record in exactly the right way.

 

What are the album's influences? Well, I hear a little McCartney, a little Elton John, a little Neil Young, a little Badfinger, a little Moody Blues, and if I listen to it some more, I will most certain­ly double the list. One might say that, behind all these influences, we do not get to hear much A-Ha, but there never was one particular, immutable brand of A-Ha; the main virtue of these guys is that they are musical chameleons, whose only near-constant assets are hooky songwriting and Harket's angel voice. This you certainly get on Analogue, in spades.

 

Thirteen tracks that range from «nice» to «gorgeous», each song meaningful (even if the meaning never goes too deep) and evocative. We have some synths, but generally the album is dominated by (in descending order) piano, acoustic and electric guitars, the latter with a heavy psychedelic sheen sometimes. For instance, on 'Over The Treetops' Harket gets helped out from Mr. Graham Nash in per­son on backing vocals — and the two end up sounding like... Neil Young (!) on some of his early records, although the song's vibe is more akin to LSD-fuelled artists of the decade.

 

'Halfway Through The Tour' is another clear highlight — a gloriously anthemic Beatlesque pop-rocker for the first three minutes, a folk-ambient Brian Eno-ish instrumental for the last four; the two parts creak at the seams a little bit, but are equally uplifting. For a band that never did instru­mental compositions before, that four-minute coda is a true marvel of sound. Also, the lyrics, vaguely dealing with the issues on life of the road, do not fit the melody very well (too earthly for its hea­venly aspirations), but no one forces you to take them literally; think of the «tour» as a me­taphor for a journey through parallel realities and it all falls together.

 

"Give it up for rock'n'roll, give it up for how it made you feel", Harket sings on 'Keeper Of The Flame', and one might think of the song as cheap nostalgia for the good old days — but the em­phasis is not on giving it up for rock'n'roll, the emphasis is on giving it up, period; it is a beautiful ballad of mourning for things that never came to be: "Monumental monuments, sentimental sen­timents, you could have been the keeper of the flame". A strange song, but as gorgeous a piano pop ballad as they ever write them.

 

None of these were singles, though. The ones that were are a little less obviously retro. 'Celice' is a kick-ass pop-rocker, pushed forward by a simple, persistent, undetachable guitar riff and paying tribute to Cocteau Twins in the background, where Paul concocts a wall-of-sound of guitar trills and spacey effects. The title track is a kick-ass pop-rocker, pushed forward by a simple, persistent, undetachable piano riff and paying tribute to no one in particular in the background, where Paul, nevertheless, still concocts a wall-of-sound of guitar trills and spacey effects. And 'Cosy Prisons' sounds like contemporary Paul McCartney. A bit.

 

Where the record is not proverbially gorgeous, it is, at the least, engaging by being utterly unpre­dictable. 'Make It Soon', for instance, begins as a bare-bones acoustic ballad, with only the slight­est touch of a hint at its being able to «explode» — and even so, no one can guess that, when it does explode, it does so through a wildly distorted psychedelic guitar solo, before settling back into its dangerously romantic vibe once more.

 

There is little doubt in my mind that, had this not been an official A-Ha album, but an obscure in­die record by an obscure indie band released on an obscure indie label, the people from Pitchfork and similar places would have been falling all over it, putting it on Top 10 lists and writing about it defining the sound of the new millennium. As it is, no one is supposed to listen to former teen idols in the new millennium, and few will be convinced that this is not merely an intricate reor­ganization of the 'Take On Me' approach. Their loss, brother. Thumbs up from the brain, amazed at how much work went into this thing, and same from the heart that has, by now, learned to look past Morten Harket's bare chest and sleazy haircuts — in fact, to hell with all that image stuff al­toge­ther, let us just enjoy the music while we can.

 

FOOT OF THE MOUNTAIN (2009)

 

1) The Bandstand; 2) Riding The Crest; 3) What There Is; 4) Foot Of The Mountain; 5) Real Meaning; 6) Shadow­side; 7) Nothing Is Keeping You Here; 8) Mother Nature Goes To Heaven; 9) Sunny Mystery; 10) Start The Simulator..

 

Yes, I do believe that only a serious decision to split up for good could have redeemed the release of Foot Of The Mountain. It does not happen too often when an artist releases his weakest effort right after his strongest one, and it is an even more rare case when it is so very easy to precisely pin­point what the hell went wrong, and so very hard to understand why it went so wrong.

 

The melodies are okay. All the songs are originals, and expert songwriters like Paul and Magne do not simply shed their pop skills overnight. This is A-Ha all right, simple, but effective key­board chord changes and Morten «Penthouse Romance» Harket's angelic croon all over them. But for some devilish reason, someone in the devil's personal pay suggested that it would be nice to revisit the band's original synth-pop style. After all, Sixties' nostalgia does not pay off so well any more — whoever buys records when they're over sixty? But Eighties' nostalgia — now we're tal­king. Lots of hungry forty-year olds out there, yearning for another 'Take On Me'. And even those old hairstyles, ridiculed and seemingly forgotten a long time ago, are on the verge of beco­ming fashionable once more.

 

And so Foot Of The Mountain takes the plunge; but these guys are not adolescents any more, they could not really produce another 'Take On Me' even under the threat of having their entire catalog pulled off the shelves. The final result sounds like a clumsy cross between the cheesy, but explosive synth-pop of Hunting High And Low and the boring, overproduced, meaninglessly modernistic pap of Life(less)lines. If there are good songs buried here — and I freely admit this possibility — they are not merely buried, but nailed tight to their coffin with the finest in elec­tronic stakes.

 

The synth tones that Magne is choosing do sound fairly close to what it used to be, but they do not, cannot, need not, must not convey any real emotion. Listen to the ten seconds that open the album ('The Bandstand'): this is what it all sounds like, more or less. Silly techno sounds, but this time around, without the youthful drive that somehow redeemed them in the past. Just silly, for­get­table techno sounds.

 

I refuse to name individual songs or discuss them. Re-record them with guitars and pianos and we might resume this discussion. (Actually, the title track that is dominated by a piano melody, is the closest it ever gets to an effective song). As it is, I personally will prefer to think that the true swan song of A-Ha sounded four years earlier, with Analog. Foot Of The Mountain is merely an afterthought, a misguided, clueless «gift» to their oldest fans. Quite likely, some of the oldest fans may have been pleased with it. More power to them! I give it a thumbs down. And — how dare they even say 'Riding The Crest' has been inspired by Arcade Fire's Neon Bible!

 

ENDING ON A HIGH NOTE (2011)

 

1) The Sun Always Shines On TV; 2) Move To Memphis; 3) The Blood That Moves The Body; 4) Scoundrel Days; 5) The Swing Of Things; 6) Forever Not Yours; 7) Stay On These Roads; 8) Manhattan Skyline; 9) Hunting High And Low; 10) We're Looking For The Whales; 11) Butterfly, Butterfly; 12) Crying In The Rain; 13) Minor Earth, Major Sky; 14) Summer Moved On; 15) I've Been Losing You; 16) Foot Of The Mountain; 17) Cry Wolf; 18) Ana­logue; 19) The Living Daylights; 20) Take On Me.

 

Fairly literally so: the famous high E that concludes the chorus to ʽTake On Meʼ is the last note taken on by Morten at the end of the show. Now in all fairness, this live album (available in CD as well as DVD format) is only there for the ultimate fan — approximately three quarters of the setlist are exactly the same tunes as had already been released less than a decade earlier on How Can I Sleep..., so the primary purpose here is clearly to provide documental proof of what, in 2011 at least, was presented to the public as the very, very, very last show A-Ha would ever play as A-Ha. (But set your watches up for a Silver Jubilee Reunion anyway).

 

The exact date of the last show was December 4, 2010, and it was reverentially played at home, at the Oslo Spektrum; the 2-CD concert includes all but two songs played that night, and it is intere­sting to note what was excluded: (a) ʽBowling Greenʼ, an Everley Bros. cover that they probably cut because they thought two Everley Bros. covers on one live album would seem like overkill — and how can there be an A-Ha live album without ʽCrying In The Rainʼ?; (b) ʽThe Bandstandʼ — the opening number on Foot Of The Mountain, an album they were sort of supposed to promote with that tour, but which, in the end, turned out to be represented by just the title track. Not that we should feel sorry — at the very least, it is reassuring to know that the band did not regard its last album as a masterpiece.

 

Anyway, the general quality of an A-Ha live show usually seems to be in direct proportion to the state of their lead singer's voice, and I see no problem here: be it the enchanted falsetto of ʽTake On Meʼ or the lengthiest-soundwave-on-Earth of ʽSummer Moves Onʼ (diversified here by ad­ding just a tiny touch of non-irritating melisma), he remains in fine form from start to finish —  one can only hope that this is indeed the end of A-Ha, and that general listeners will not have to endure the suffering as Harket's pitch inevitably deteriorates over the years à la Ian Gillan or (even worse) Art Garfunkel.

 

If there is a general problem with the show, it is only that the band has set itself up, in accordance with its reputation, as more of a «synth-pop» ensemble than a «rock» one — in other words, the «purification» of their image, introduced on Foot Of The Mountain, is carried over to the live show, with keyboards taking a generally more active part than guitars. This exerts a negative in­fluence on songs like ʽMove To Memphisʼ (whose teeth-grinding funky rhythm is smothered by wishy-washy synths and limp percussion) and ʽMinor Earth, Major Skyʼ, where the cosmic-psy­chedelic atmosphere of the original also seems cheapened by the keyboards. Still, most of the songs performed, want it or not, are in the synth-pop aesthetics, so why complain?

 

The setlist, as can be seen, covers the band's entire career, leaving no stone unturned though pre­dictably concentrating on the hits, but it is nice to see them not leaving out Analogue (alas, only the title track gets performed, but then it would have been too much to expect them sing ʽHalf­way Through The Tourʼ when they are already done with the tour), and they also do ʽButterfly, But­ter­flyʼ, the last studio recording they released as a single — a pleasant, if not too memorable, ballad, backed by regular pianos and acoustic guitars.

 

I suppose that most of the fans went home fully satisfied that night, and it is only in (slight) retrospect that we realize the show is not fully representative of the band's true potential, being too heavily skewed in the ʽTake On Meʼ direc­tion. But then there are very few people in the world in the first place who would agree to thinking of A-Ha as something more than just a sweet boy band with a digital fixation, one more gross relic of the funny hair decade, and Harket and co. may be excused for not specifically pandering for that minor subset of their fanbase. And on the whole, I really enjoyed this, so what's to stop us from one more final thumbs up?..

 

CAST IN STEEL (2015)

 

1) Cast In Steel; 2) Under The Makeup; 3) The Wake; 4) Forest Fire; 5) Objects In The Mirror; 6) Door Ajar; 7) Living At The End Of The World; 8) Mythomania; 9) She's Humming A Tune; 10) Shadow Endeavors; 11) Giving Up The Ghost; 12) Goodbye Thompson.

 

I honestly do not understand why they need to do this. Morten Harket has a perfectly fine solo career going on, and now this is what, the third A-Ha reunion in history? Fourth? Fifth? What do we do with Ending On A High Note, rename it to save face or pretend it never existed? «Final tour», my ass. If you're gonna go, go in style. Take an example from the frickin' Beatles.

 

Besides, the new album does little to quench the indignation, and so I would like to keep it short. Not only is this no Analogue (and God knows I've secretly always hoped for them to make one more Analogue), this isn't even a Minor Earth Major Sky. Instead, it is a completely by-the-book, song-by-song-predictable «A-Ha-ish» album: fragile, bittersweet romance non-stop, with each song setting exactly the same mood as the previous one and we all know very well what that mood is. A dozen updates on ʽSummer Moved Onʼ, without even one single song of the same epic caliber. Rumor has it that many of these were actually outtakes and quick polish jobs on old ideas, and I believe this — just a quickie to serve as an incentive for more touring.

 

Supportive fans will want to argue that this is what the band does best, or point out the awesome shape in which Harket's voice still finds itself, or at least state that, you know, this is an improve­ment on Foot Of The Mountain. And yes, the songs are a little less embarrassing. But at least Foot set up a curious goal — recapture the inspired innocence of the band's early synth-pop be­ginnings — and it was instructive to see it fail. Cast In Steel sets itself no goals: it is just a bunch of tolerable, unimpressive, unambitious adult contemporary pop songs that all sound the same. I mean, believe it or not, the exceptional status of A-Ha was due to their not being a one-trick pony: over that ʽSummer Moved Onʼ vibe, they could always drop a touch of hard rock, or a splosh of colorful psychedelia, or a rousing anthemic call. Nothing like that here.

 

Of course, there are melodies, and sometimes briefly memorable vocal hooks, and yes, Harket is still a fine singer, though, creepy as it is, he seems to have almost completely lost (or discarded) his lower range as he grew older. Long-time fans who just want to have more of the same will not be disappointed. Me, I can't even bring myself to writing a few words about even one single indi­vidual song on here. Just keep touring, guys, as long as you're still able to wring some emotion out of the old classics — the new ones are as thumbs down-worthy as they come.

 

 

 

ALCATRAZZ

NO PAROLE FROM ROCK'N'ROLL (1983)

 

1) Island In The Sun; 2) General Hospital; 3) Jet To Jet; 4) Hiroshima Mon Amour; 5) Kree Nakoorie; 6) Incubus; 7) Too Young To Die, Too Drunk To Live; 8) Big Foot; 9) Starcarr Lane; 10) Suffer Me.

 

No account of 1980's rock would be complete without a proper lambasting of the impressive Tower Of Cheese that was Alcatrazz, the launching pad for Yngwie J. «Release The Fuckin' Fu­ry» Malmsteen's career. Suffice it to say, it is hardly possible to truly appreciate the greatness of bands like Accept or Judas Priest if they are not seen in comparison with the likes of this band, a few songs of which still occasionally pollute the airwaves of cheap hard rock stations.

 

Alcatrazz was put together by Graham Bonnet, ex-lead singer of Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow; this alone should have raised suspicions, since Bonnet was pretty much a so-so singer in compa­rison with his predecessor, the illustrious Ronnie James Dio, not to mention coming from a pri­marily R'n'B background — not exactly the best pedigree to serve as the basis for a new hard rock group. On the other hand, his sole album with Rainbow, Down To Earth, was a best-seller, and it could be hoped that Alcatrazz would be at least a commercially, if not artistically, successful pro­position. (Un)fortunately, it wasn't.

 

Most of the songs are credited to Bonnet and his young guitarist, Swedish prodigy Yngwie Mal­m­steen; supposedly, Bonnet takes care of the lyrics, while Yngwie is responsible for most of the musical side. There are only two problems to this arrangement: (a) although Bonnet has a fine singing voice, he is a thoroughly pathe­tic lyricist, and (b) although Malmsteen is as technically ac­complished as his legend goes, he is about as good at songwriting as Ed Wood at directing. Other than that, No Parole From Rock'n'Roll is a damn fine record.

 

At this point, I have to confess an allergy: I belong to the category of people that finds it almost impossible to find any sort of personal pleasure or overall artistic merit in combining «hard rock» or «heavy metal» with «soul». To me, the combination is rotten a priori. Hard rock should put you in an aggressive mood; soul music should mellow you out. How is it possible to be mellow and aggressive at the same time? Imagine saying, "I'll assfuck any bastard that even dares to suggest I'm gay" — think on this for a while — then come back to this album.

 

Occasionally, the combination might still work somehow — but only if accompanied by meanin­gful melodies. The ones that Malmsteen writes, however, do not have any meaning that I can dis­cern, other than the general idea of «look at me, here I am soaring towards the sky, but God help me if I know why I'm actually doing it». And whenever he does succeed at finding a groove preg­nant with a sincere impression (usually stolen, e. g. 'Hiroshima Mon Amour', which pockets the riff of 'You Really Got Me'), up comes Bonnet with his silly, pompous vocal tone to run it into the ground — and then Yngwie plays a hollow set of flashy solo licks to bury it once and for all. And have I mentioned the corny early-Eighties keyboard sound yet?

 

There is not one single track on this record, be it a fast thrasher, a mid-tempo rocker, or a slow bal­lad, that would tug at one single string inside me — a rare occasion indeed. All the more sur­prising, since the closest thing this Alcatrazz sound can remind one of are similarly structured Gary Moore records of the early Eighties, and those definitely had their share of excellent songs next to absolute stinkers, even though Gary followed the exact same formula: leaden, moderately complex riffs, finger-flashing solos, soulful vocals. (It is hardly a coincidence, by the way, that, concerning the above mentioned 'Hiroshima Mon Amour', Gary had recorded his own 'Hiroshima' a couple years earlier; apparently, the metal-pathos vibe they were getting seemed equal­ly ap­prop­riate to both to be interpreted as a sort of «musical Hiroshima». Well... it was a mu­sical Hiroshima all right, if not exactly in the sense they envisaged it. At least Gary Moore had the good taste of not drawing poor innocent Alain Resnais into the picture).

 

Well, only thing left to suppose is that Mr. Moore just had a bit of God's gift in him, or, to be precise, invested some of that gift into the art of song­writing; Mr. Malmsteen, unfortunately, put all of it on the Zero of technical accomplish­ment — and won, to the world's utmost sorrow. No Parole From Rock'n'Roll? Come on, guys, this isn't even a good internal rhyme. And this isn't rock­'n'roll, either. Thumbs down.

 

LIVE SENTENCE (1984)

 

1) Too Young To Die, Too Drunk To Live; 2) Hiroshima Mon Amour; 3) Night Games; 4) Island In The Sun; 5) Kree Nakoorie; 6) Coming Bach; 7) Since You've Been Gone; 8) Evil Eye; 9) All Night Long.

 

Of the two Alcatrazz albums with Malmsteen on board, this live performance, recorded on their 1984 tour of Japan, is unquestionably the better proposition, for at least two reasons. First, if you are going to sacrifice good taste, do it all the way — a «ridiculous» album is bad enough, but a «boring ridiculous» album will not even find its way to the currently in-print EBT (Ency­clo­paedia of Bad Taste). And Live Sentence certainly goes all the way, by putting Yngwie directly into the spotlight, as he plays even more notes than on the studio records, extends his solos, and gets a couple numbers all to himself, including an obligatory Bach guitar arrangement with an ob­ligatory awful pun for a title ('Coming Bach').

 

I do not want to mindlessly succumb to the idea of Yngwie Malmsteen as the prototypical heart­less finger-flasher who, with no understanding at all of the essence of music, had somehow put it in his head that speed is all that matters. His solo career has its ups and downs — mostly downs, but let us not entirely discard the ups — and he can play with feeling when he gets his hormones under control. Unfortunately, during his stint with Alcatrazz, it was all about the hormones. Bon­net sings with feeling; his singing does not mesh well with the music, and the songs are mostly rotten, but at least the record makes clear that he really came to Japan so as to share his emotions with some of the mystifying people from that mystifying land. (It is a little awkward, though, for a guy from Lincolnshire to sing about Hiroshima to the Japanese — not to mention finishing the song with a sloganish "don't forget Hiroshima! No more war!" as if it were only his, Graham Bonnet's presence, that could save the poor people of Japan from forgetting about one of their greatest national tragedies).

 

Malmsteen, however, came to Japan with one major goal in mind: to show how he can play faster than Eddie Van Halen. If some of the riffs manage to make sense, none of the solos do. Take your musical space, chop it up in an astronomical number of even spaces, fill each one up with a ran­dom note, and you basically get the scale equivalent of white noise; most of these performances could have been filled with static and the effect would be comparable. Granted, seeing and hear­ing this in a proper live setting may pass for a special psychotropic treatment, but one that has only superficial resemblance to «music as art». On the other hand, young Yngwie's aim is not to make art; it is to make PR, and he achieved that aim splendidly.

 

There is a second reason, though, why Live Sentence is mildly superior: although the majority of the songs are predictably pulled from their only studio album up to date, they also do a couple of Rainbow numbers from 1979's Down To Earth, and much as I dislike that record in comparison to classic Dio-era material from 1975-78, at least the songs there were all written by Blackmore and Glover: in this setting, 'Since You've Been Gone' and particularly the big radio hit 'All Night Long' tower over the rest of this material like a couple of jötunn giants over a pack of dwarves. Even Yngwie calms down a bit, sticking mainly to melody. Decent stuff. There is no escaping the obligatory thumbs down, of course, but if you are interested in a bad vibe with elements of en­tertainment rather than a bad vibe with no redeeming qualities at all, Live Sentence is the place where you start with Alcatrazz.

 

DISTURBING THE PEACE (1985)

 

1) God Blessed Video; 2) Mercy; 3) Will You Be Home Tonight; 4) Wire And Wood; 5) Desert Diamond; 6) Strip­per; 7) Painted Lover; 8) Lighter Shade Of Green; 9) Sons And Lovers; 10) Skyfire; 11) Breaking The Heart Of The City.

 

As the 1984 tour drew to a close, Yngwie left Alcatrazz for his solo career — a reasonable deci­sion, because, whatever one thinks of Malmsteen's solo albums, it is, almost by default, better to experience his musical masturbation on its own than as a background for the puffed-up pathos of Graham Bonnet. In his place the latter recruited a different guitar wiz — Steve Vai.

 

Weird pairings, like B. J. Wilson of Procol Harum fame drumming on AC/DC's Flick Of The Switch (even if only on non-final track versions), do not happen every day in the world of rock'n'roll, and, for the sake of pure knowledge, it may be interesting to hear the results of one such pairing between the thoroughly mainstream, anthemic R'n'B belter Graham Bonnet and the deeply experimental, near-avantgarde guitarist Steve Vai. One might even think that, although the results would almost certainly be dreadful, they'd at least be intriguing.

 

Unfortunately, they are not. It is hard to guess Vai's logic for enlisting in Alcatrazz; perhaps, after several years of playing with Zappa and an obscure (if perversely brilliant) solo tryout with Flex-Able, he finally succumbed to the temptation of finance and fame. Why Bonnet? Why Alcatrazz? Well, the band did have some sort of reputation, and, besides, he'd be writing all the music any­way; as long as it was good, who'd care about the singer?

 

But it was not good. As interesting as Vai can be in the studio when he creates experimental ma­terial, influenced by his long-term Zappa association, he is completely bland when it comes to applying his talents to macho arena rock. Disturbing The Peace, like any good old Alcatrazz al­bum, has plenty of loud, rip-roaring anthems, but not a single meaningful riff. Apparently, Steve just cannot work right in this kind of setting (not that I blame him — it'd be a tough break for any­one to inject life into Alcatrazz). Sometimes, he really tries, like for the first few bars of 'Sons And Lovers', where he plays a funny little melody quite in the vein of Flex-Able; but then Bonnet kicks in with the vocals, and we are back to rote corporate faux-rocking.

 

Nothing helps. Not even provocative titles ('God Blessed Video', which, thank God, is ironic — but you will really have to listen to the lyrics to understand that), nor occasional attempts to emu­late the sarcastic style of Van Halen (on 'Painted Lover', Bonnet goes for a bit of snickering cha­racter assassination à la David Lee Roth), nor brief folk-art-rock passages ('Lighter Shade Of Gre­en', forty seconds of a decent instrumental that begins like an Arcadian idilly, continues as a barrage of psychedelic shredding, and belongs nowhere on this record).

 

It is possible that, had Zappa himself volunteered to fill in the boots of Alcatrazz' guitar player, he, likewise, would have been unable to write any good songs for the band. The catch is, in order to write dumb songs for a dumb band, one has to be a dumb songwriter; this is, more or less, the on­ly way to make the final result into something exciting. Few things are more irritating, or more easily forgettable, than a clever songwriter, much less an experimental songwriter, writing an in­tentionally dumb song (and I do not mean «parody» — Zappa has written plenty of clever paro­dies on dumb songs); Disturbing The Peace is a perfect example, a record where everything went wrong because the laws of nature predicted that it would go wrong — and, in order to defy the laws of nature, you'd at least have to be Michael Jackson (not that I'd wish that to anyone). Thumbs down once again.

 

DANGEROUS GAMES (1986)

 

1) It's My Life; 2) Undercover; 3) That Ain't Nothin'; 4) No Imagination; 5) Ohayo Tokyo; 6) Dangerous Games; 7) Blue Boar; 8) Only One Woman; 9) The Witchwood; 10) Double Man; 11) Night Of The Shooting Star.

 

As Steve Vai must have realized the error of his ways, he reasonably quit, and, in a last attempt to keep the band going, Bonnett hired Danny Johnson in his place, whose main credits up to then included playing on several Rick Derringer records, as well as Rod Stewart's Tonight I'm Yours and Alice Cooper's Special Forces. This suggests several possibilities, some good, some bad; the reality is such that, in Johnson's hands, Alcatrazz' last album sounds like a cross between what it used to be and Rod Stewart: a mix of dumb hard rock and equally dumb electronic pop.

 

But even under these conditions, it is still the best album Alcatrazz have ever released, although I am voicing an opinion here that is entirely my own. The usual consensus over Alcatrazz is that the band pretty much said it all with No Parole, then misfired twice, once by including Vai who was too good for the band, twice by including Johnson who was too bad for it. (An alternate con­sensus, of course, is that Alcatrazz only misfired once, by forming). I believe, however, that such a consensus is most likely to emerge from people who either have not listened to the records in the first place, or those who scooped them up in «genre-expecting» mode — bracing themselves for crunchy metal when what they got was Eighties' pop.

 

As far as Eighties' pop goes, we have all heard worse. Yes, Dangerous Games blandly exploits all of the decade's clichés, adding lifeless keyboards and familiar simplistic dance beats to audi­ence-friendly, harmless metal guitars and Bonnet's macho yelling. In that respect, it is horrible. But the songs are better: Johnson, as opposed to both of the wizards whose shoes he was filling, writes the music in an attempt to produce decent tunes rather than serve as launchpads for his sonic rocketships. Not that he cannot play — he has got plenty of technique — but there is only a very small bunch of ecstatic solos here, meaning that, in all likelihood, he was consciously trying to shift the band's image from «Mad Guitarist Sanitarium» to something more modest.

 

It is all best illustrated by their choice of a cover tune: the Animals' 'It's My Life' is given a pre­dictably bleary arrangement, with the main riff sounding thrice as loud and monstruous as it used to be in 1965, but thrice as less threatening — yet the song itself has never lost any of its great­ness, and to hear it even in this arrangement (which is at least true to the original melody) is pre­ferable to wasting time on four minutes of Malmsteen's rucus.

 

To cut a long story short, rockers like 'That Ain't Nothin', 'Blue Boar', and the title track, pop songs like 'Under­cover', and even soul ballads like 'Only One Woman' all have modest hooks that deserve being tried out with better arrangements (and perhaps a different singer). Not that it really matters: saying that Dangerous Games displays a higher level of songwriting than Disturbing The Peace is, above all, just pedantic, and, like all other Alcatrazz records, it cannot hope for anything other than a thumbs down rating. But if mainstream pop-rock in big frizzy Eighties fa­shion does get your juices flowing, go for this — you will get all the muscles and all the big hair without all the guitar masturbation. It is a different sort of lack of taste.

ANGRY SAMOANS

INSIDE MY BRAIN (1980)

 

1) Right Side Of My Mind; 2) Gimme Sopor; 3) Hot Cars; 4) Inside My Brain; 5) You Stupid Asshole; 6) Get Off The Air; 7*) My Old Man's A Fatso; 8*) Carson Girls (demo); 9*) I'm A Pig (demo); 10*) Too Animalistic (live); 11*) Right Side Of My Mind (live).

 

Hardcore punk, when done properly, is a delight for the thinking man — in fact, much of hard­core punk came from the hands and brains of thinking men. Dig into the individual biographies of the Angry Samoans and you will find out that founding father # 1, Mike Saunders, used to write for Rolling Stone (he is often credited as the inventor of the term «heavy metal», no less, which earned him the nickname of «Metal Mike»), while founding father # 2, Gregg Turner, used to write for Creem and is now a distinguished math professor (!).

 

It is quite transparent, then, that only men endowed with vast intellectual powers, able to come up with revolutionary musical ideas synthesized through intense brain activity rather than picked up from God on a purely intuitive and irrational basis, could have materialized the sound of the Ang­ry Samoans. The band's debut EP, Inside My Brain, burns with hardcore passion, but each and every second of that fiery burning is achieved through very cold fusion. The basic aesthetics, the way it seems most obvious to pick it out, is as follows:

 

A) Brevity is the sister of wit, and these guys go as far as to place the two in an incestuous re­la­ti­on­ship. The whole thing is over in less than ten minutes (although future re-releases with bonus tracks double the running length), and individual songs usually make their points in less than two ('Hot Cars' says it all in thirty seconds). Lesson taken from the likes of Wire, but in terms of over­all conciseness, they flat out bust their teachers.

 

B) Verses and choruses are for sissies who wank to old-fashioned shit like the Ramones. Truly clever, truly rebellious punk rock does not pander to commercial formula.

 

C) Offense is golden. To explain why you are offending someone is way beyond the dignity of the artist — in fact, it insults the intelligence of your audience, the only thing worthy of respect. Say «fuck you» first, ask questions later, or, in fact, don't ask questions at all. Patronizing DJs get it first ('Get Off The Air', directed against influential music biz guy Rodney Bingenheimer, an ex­tremely important Kulturträger of the day whom the band, perhaps correctly, accused of dictato­rial aspirations), but neither queers, nor girls, nor, in fact, anyone else escape the swing of the blades when the shit hits the fan.

 

D) Above all, the necessity of the illusion that all of this is just a semi-articulate stream of con­scious. Ragged shreds of angst, anger, and violence — blurts on insanity and murder that are sup­posed to carve out the proper image of the vicious young man with no hopes of ever finding the right direction (even such a delight as pussy no longer means anything, as is clearly seen in 'You Stupid Asshole': "You took your clothes off / I started to laugh / That's when I knew it was thro­ugh / I guess I'll go take a bath").

 

Oh, and what about the music? Well, these guys can certainly play; even though by 1980 we had already heard the absolute majority of these riffs, for a bunch of rock critics, they raise plenty of hell. It is not thoroughly uniform; the expanded reissue at least shows that Saunders and Turner had a good ear for pop (check out the introductory riff to 'Carson Girls'), and, instead of hiding beneath bunches of sloppy power chords, they instead take their cues from classic heroes — the Who are clearly echoed on at least a couple of the tracks, and Link Wray on at least a couple of others ('Hot Cars', eh?).

 

The overall result is not exactly «hilarious», but it achieves its ultimate goal — making the Ra­mo­nes' debut sound like Quadrophenia in comparison. Of course, all of this ongoing struggle against the stale conventions of the pop formula also ensure that Inside My Brain, along with the rest of the Samoans' catalog, will never be as gut-enjoyable as earlier, «conventional» punk classics, but it is fun all the same to witness these guys' interpretation of the quintessential rock aesthetics, even if it's all just a bit of modernistic theater. Thumbs up.

 

BACK FROM SAMOA (1982)

 

1) Gas Chamber; 2) The Todd Killings; 3) Lights Out; 4) My Old Man's A Fatso; 5) Time Has Come Today; 6) They Saved Hitler's Cock; 7) Homosexual; 8) Steak Knife; 9) Haizman's Brain Is Calling; 10) Tuna Taco; 11) Coffin Case; 12) You Stupid Jerk; 13) Ballad Of Jerry Curlan; 14) Not Of This Earth.

 

The proper LP debut of the Samoans runs all of a glorious seventeen minutes and honourably fulfills the promise of being the most skilfully offensive record of 1982. Or does it? A brief glim­pse at the lyrics, odd enough, shows that, apart from such predictable target groups as parents, Jews, and gays, most of the insults are hurled either against a vacuum — stuff like 'You Stupid Jerk' barks and spits at no one in particular — or against the band itself.

 

Musically, there is not much change, except for generally faster tempos (which is why 'You Stu­pid Jerk' is able to make all of its points in exactly twenty seconds) and a very cohesive, uniform hardcore sound that meticulously wipes out all outside influences: no power pop hints anywhere in sight. For a 17-minute running time, though, this is quite all right.

 

Whether the stuff they are doing is «funny» or «humorous» is a matter of personal taste, debate, and street fighting. Some people will doubtlessly find lyrics like "They saved Hitler's cock, they hid it under a rock... if Hitler's cock could choose its mate, it would ask for Sharon Tate!" hilari­ous; others — unusual, but stupid; still others — offensive without a good reason to be so. But in any case, it seems that humour was not among the Samoans' primary goals here; if some of the tunes come across as funny, it is rather a side effect of trying to be innovative in the art of defying mainstream standards of «taste».

 

Of course, though, the finer these guys achieve their goals, the more they fail in them. At least half of the songs are furious odes to the art of being braindead and liking it — in 'Lights Out', we are admonished to poke our eyes out, 'Steak Knife' is a further elaboration on all the lobotomy-re­lated topics of the Ramones, etc. But not a single one of these songs could have ever been written by a true braindead punker; on the contrary, it is hard to imagine anyone other than a bunch of for­mer rock critics to devise them. In the long run, Back From Samoa is nothing but a hyper-in­tellectual art-rock album.

 

In the short run, it is necessary to add that, although I do not believe the band members have really «written» a single one of these riffs, they choose good ones from the standard punk reper­toire, and the choruses are fairly catchy — and where there are no riffs or choruses to speak of, some tunes get by on the strength of gimmicks alone, like the contrastive 'Ballad Of Jerry Curlan', where they seriously take it out on a stereotypical «success story guy» (with a real historical pro­totype, no less) by alternating soft «ballad»-style compliments with every hardcore insult they are able to come up with.

 

This light entertainment value is what keeps Back From Samoa still somewhat viable today — its offensive power long since withered and tattered by changes in morality standards. Plus the usual level of technique: 'My Old Man's A Fatso', reduced here to ninety seconds of pure flame, combines genuine rock'n'roll drive with a level of precision worthy of a first-rate (okay, second-rate) thrash metal band. To sum up, Back From Samoa is what gives hardcore its good name, and for that, deserves an expected thumbs up.

 

STP NOT LSD (1988)

 

1) I Lost (My Mind); 2) Wild Hog Rhyde; 3) Laughing At Me; 4) STP Not LSD; 5) Starring At The Sun; 6) Death Of Beewak; 7) Egyptomania; 8) Attack Of The Mushroom People; 9) Feet On The Ground; 10) Garbage Pit; 11) (I'll Drink To This) Love Song; 12) Lost Highway.

 

Perhaps Back From Samoa did have a «revolutionary» quality to it. But the Samoan rock critics did not really set out to revolutionize music; their goals were more modest and, at the same time, far more complex — distillation, bottling, and distribution of the quintessential «rock spirit», the Holy Grail of every rock critic. And, much as the punk movement in its original phase claimed the same goals, continuing to move in the «hardcore» direction would, in the end, only displace, if not actually profanate them.

 

So, instead, the Samoans fell back on their roots — garage proto-punk and irrevent psych-folk of the mid-Sixties. The 1987 EP Yesterday Started Tomorrow introduced the retro styles in ear­nest, culminating in a Jefferson Airplane cover, and by 1988, it was clear that these guys had tota­l­ly switched to recreating (with only minor updates) the visions of The Sonics and The Holy Mo­dal Rounders, with a bit of Velvet Underground for good measure.

 

Nobody really got it, and very few were happy about it. Who needs the Angry Samoans when they are not all that angry any more? Speed is reduced, cussing is cut down, and what about all these acoustic folk songs making fun of backwoods dwellers? What is this, Greenwich Village? Where is anything even vaguely on the level of 'Right Side Of My Mind'?

 

But let us take a peep at the bright side. STP Not LSD is anything but non-creative. If you like the classic garage aesthetics, there is every reason to enjoy the Samoans' take on it. If people see a reason for the existing of Brian Setzer and Dave Edmunds, and are willing to argue that these guys are not totally expendable even if you have proper access to all the treasure groves of classic rockabilly, then the same case can be argued for the Samoans.

 

All I know is that STP Not LSD is fun. The band still holds together tighter than a buttplug, the lyrics, if not as obnoxiously obsessive, are on the same demented level, and even if all the riffs are pilfered from old garage classics (which they may or may not be), they're good riffs, and the sources are not always easily identifiable. Plus, there is diversity a-plenty: for instance, Metal Mike employs just about every single nasty, crunchy guitar tone ever recorded in the Sixties log­book and beyond. (My favourite is the introduction to 'Death Of Beewak' — hello, San Fran­cisco!) Switches to acoustic, too, every now and then.

 

Certainly no amount of consolation is ever going to turn the record into the kind of trailblazing classic that Back From Samoa will be considered for as long as the trails do not become over­grown; but the subgenre of «hardcore punks doing retro shit» is not tremendously large in itself, which means STP Not LSD might deserve a bit of space in your collection, too. Give it a modest thumbs up, and don't be afraid to play it, say, once a year — it's only twenty-three minutes.

 

RETURN TO SAMOA (1990)

 

1) Are You A Square? 2) Permanent Damage; 3) D For The Dead; 4) 1981 (Trip Or Freak); 5) Matchstick Men; 6) Radio Ad; 7) Posh Boy’s Cock; 8) Time To Fuck; 9) Wild Thing; 10) Somebody To Love.

 

A bunch of outtakes from I'm not exactly sure when; the album itself was sort of semi-official and is likely impossible to find in non-bootlegged form. My own bootlegged copy comes with a healthy addition of more than 15 live tracks played in some lousy NYC joint around 1981, which gives a fairly decent picture of what the band was really all about at its dubious peak. But the al­bum «proper» is just ten tracks that run the typically Samoan length of 20 minutes.

 

The songs mostly catch the Samoans in a transitional state here, fresh off the humorous/mental hardcore of Back From Samoa and starting to pick up with the retro-garage thing. There is a very, very intentionally lame cover of 'Somebody To Love', exactly the way a retired rock critic and an upcoming PhD in math would be covering it while being drunk or while pretending to be drunk; and a much tighter, but still lame version of 'Wild Thing' with improvised ad-libbed vocals that break all possible taboos in the crudest ways (best moment: an impassioned "put your face in my p...", then, suddenly aware of unwanted and­rogynous connotations, "my p... penis!"). There is even a rendition of Status Quo's 'Matchstick Men' that starts off very faithful to the famous psy­chedelic drone of the original before launching off into hardcore heaven.

 

'D For The Dead' may be of interest to B-culture addicts, the Samoans' only anthem to zombie flicks; '1981', both with its title and with its melody, is a clear, and not very exciting, evocation of the Stooges' '1969'; and there might be lots of other references that I'm too lazy to write about. The real good news, however, is that in sloppy outtake form, the Samoans may be even better than they are in the final version — because Saunders' and Turner's ideology is faithfully reflec­ted on albums like Back From Samoa in all but one respect: the required spontaneity feels arti­ficial and staged. With the likes of "put your face in my penis", though, it's all too real. Return To Samoa proves, once and for all, that these guys were quite willing to live out their rock'n'roll alter egos at least in the studio, if not always in real life.

 

On stage, too, if you take into account the live bonus tracks from 1981, where they play most of the stuff from their first two albums and then aimlessly meander and dick around in between the tracks, shooting off their mouths, inserting quotes from 'Matchstick Men' and 'Smoke On The Wa­­ter' and cool-heartedly remarking that "this must be the third amp we've killed tonight" along the way. Piss-poor sound quality and thin applause from a colossal audience of about five or six people complete the perfection of the picture. Thumbs up, of course. What other choice?

THE 90'S SUCK AND SO DO YOU (1998)

 

1) I'd Rather Do The Dog; 2) Letter From Uncle Sam; 3) Suzy's A Loser; 4) In And Out Of Luv; 5) Mister M. D.; 6) My Baby's Gone Gone Gone; 7) Beat Your Heart Out; 8) Don't Change My Head.

 

By the mid-Nineties, little was left of the Angry Samoans but Metal Mike who, for some reason, was still in love with the name, mildly justifying it, perhaps, by the continuing presence of ori­ginal drum­mer Bill Vockeroth. The only studio memento of that incarnation was this predictably laconic, unpredictably boring eight-song disc, the best thing about which might have been its title — ringing truer than any given piece of its content, even though one can just as easily replace «The 90's» with any other decade.

 

The album is, overall, heavier than STP, but even less deserving of getting aligned with the rest of the Samoans' legacy. Basically, it's just minimalistic, heavily distorted power pop, reading like a sincere, but uninspired tribute to the Ramones — which means that we would all be much better off simply listening to the Ramones instead, since even their worst, most heavily derivative al­bums contain more excitement than this leaden platter.

 

There is absolutely no «band presence» here; the credits do list two extra bass players and one ad­ditional guitarist (Alison Victor), but ninety percent of the mix are occupied by Saunders' fuzzy, always same-sounding riffs and blubbery nasal vocals. This is bad: punky-pop needs band pre­sence to convince and satisfy. The riffs are technically well played, but most have been regurgi­tated so many times already over the past twenty years that they can only generate emotion in a newborn baby. The vocals totally suck — Saunders sings everything in a daze, as if they'd thrust that microphone under his nose just as he was slipping out of some narcosis. Maybe that was his idea of imitating the rough tenderness of Joey Ramone's love ballads, but it's a total failure: Joey could generate innocent sentimentalism in a jiffy, whereas when Metal Mike sings that "all the girls are after me", the effect is not even funny, it's that of a big question mark.

 

The bottomline is that it is really unnecessary to pursue the band's career after Back From Sa­moa; in fact, it would make much better sense to pretend that the band never really existed after 1982, an assumption that would make them the perfect hardcore band — one that said everything it had to say in the appropriate 20 minutes it took to say it, and then was no more, which might be an even greater artistic achievement. The idea that even now, in the XXIst century, there is still a band called the Angry Samoans, playing assorted West Coast pubs to whatever unlucky souls they might find there, is, in fact, so absurdly preposterous, that I simply refuse to believe it. As for the album, I'd theoretically like to give it a thumbs down, but the right side of my mind tells me that it is just a phantom — like the Amityville Horror or something, so why bother?

 

 

ANTHRAX

FISTFUL OF METAL (1984)

 

1) Death Rider; 2) Metal Thrashing Mad; 3) I'm Eighteen; 4) Panic; 5) Subjugator; 6) Soldiers Of Metal; 7) Death From Above; 8) Anthrax; 9) Across The River; 9) Howling Furies.

 

The East Coast response to the Californian thrash explosion of 1983 starts here — and, frankly speaking, I have a hard time understanding how to compare Fistful Of Metal with the likes of Kill 'Em All or Show No Mercy, except that people seem to generally like the latter two but pan the former because it, uh, is too heavy on the Judas Priest influence. Or something. Sure it is — anyone who names one of his songs 'Subjugator' already has a royalty debt to Rob Halford.

 

It does, however, look that Anthrax's first album rides the coattails of the new storm rather than participate in its creation. All the ingredients have been studied and replicated perfectly. Rhythm guitarist Ian Scott emits steadily pulsating riffs which, when slow, are indeed similar to the sharp polygonal figures of Judas Priest, and, when fast, display technique that is fully on the level with Metallica and Slayer. Lead guitarist Dan Spitz yields speedy melodic solos quite on par with Iron Maiden. Vocalist Neil Turbin bawls, screams, and roars like any good disciple of the Ian Gillan School of Bawl, Scream, and Roar should. And the rhythm section — Danny Lilker on bass, Cha­rlie Benante on drums — do just the kind of things a rhythm section is expected to do in a thrash metal band; no more, and most certainly no less.

 

But if there is any real reason to why Fistful Of Metal gets a bad rap, it may be understood by simply glancing at the song titles. Few people who name one of their songs 'Metal Thrashing Mad' can count upon immediate recognition — unless they at least give it the spirit of a 'For Whom The Bell Tolls', or the riff of an 'Enter Sandman' or something. All of these tunes are de­cent, middle-of-the-road thrash which, however, almost always promises more than it delivers. If I am given 'Howling Furies', I expect the song to sound like howling furies; if, however, it only sounds like a basic headbanging experience, I am bound to be disappointed.

 

The album's big surprise is a cover of Alice Cooper's 'I'm Eighteen', which, according to legend, took an entire two days to record because bassist Dan Lilker could not get into the right mood. Its original spirit is completely incompatible with the rest of the record, and Neil Turbin's rendition is totally rotten: he just screams it out like everything else, leaving all the confusion and despera­tion of the protagonist behind the door. Why they were so intent on paying this particular tribute is beyond me; metal bands do owe a lot to the original Alice Cooper band, whether they like it or not, but the song would have worked far better on one of those collective tribute albums (that no one listens to anyway) than wedged in between their apocalyptic metal fantasies.

 

Still, come what may, 'Deathrider' and the title track at least deserve to be recognized as classic, if not ultimate, thrash anthems that, at the very least, prove that Anthrax have gradu­ated from the Academy of Metal with perfect marks, and set the stage for further drilling into the hard-to-pene­trate soils of the heavy metal genre. My judgement is neutral: well-performed, but generic, thrash is about as much use as well-performed, but generic, blues — gives you a bit of fun time without being as spiritually repulsive as, say, generic prog-metal — and is, therefore, quite recommen­dable to headbangers all over the planet.

 

SPREADING THE DISEASE (1985)

 

1) A.I.R.; 2) Lone Justice; 3) Madhouse; 4) S.S.C./Stand Or Fall; 5) The Enemy; 6) Aftershock; 7) Armed And Dan­gerous; 8) Medusa; 9) Gung-Ho.

 

Big changes all around. New bass player Frank Bello may or may not be as good at his weapon as Dan Lilker, but he is certainly more disciplined. More importantly, new vocalist Joey Belladonna (real name of Bellardini) provides the band with an entirely new image. Unlike Neil Turbin, Joey is not a screamer (he can scream, as is clearly demonstrated on 'Medusa' and a few other songs, but clearly does not want to capitalize on that); most of the time he sounds like a normal, sweaty, friendly working class guy that, for some to­tally unclear reason, ended up in a thrash metal band without belonging either to the banshee or the Cookie Monster variety.

 

The contrast works, if only due to the surprise factor. So when you listen to the big hit 'Mad­house', it is fun to interpret lines like 'Trapped in this nightmare, I wish I'd wake' and 'It's a mad­house, or so they claim, it's a madhouse, am I insane?' as sincere psychosis on the part of the sin­ger who, in a perfect world, would rather find his place in REO Speedwagon than a thrash band. But then these are hard times, calling for heavy answers, and even normal guys like Joey Bella­donna have to join Anthrax instead of Grand Funk. What is thrash metal, after all, if not a suita­ble reflection of all the evils and wrongdoings of society? And why does it have to be dominated by grotesque singing personalities, if it's all about the common guy anyway?

 

But if the image has changed, the music has not. They slowed down a bit; fewer songs are taken at ultra-speed than before, and the excessive Judas Priest influence, of which they had been accu­sed the previous year, is nowhere any more obvious than on 'Madhouse' itself. The riffs are just as moderately memorable, to be admired for their precision and power rather than specific emotions stirred up differently on different songs. The choruses are not too catchy. In short, I fail to see how the band's songwriting — always their weakest side — has managed to improve with the de­parture of Lilker and Turbin.

 

The important thing is, they are trying to get rid of the cartoonish factor, or, rather, the stupid car­toonish factor. The songs still deal with all the traditional themes of thrash metal, but with the earthlier singing and slightly less clichéd lyrics, the intelligence bar rises, and with it — the level of critical respect. With Spreading The Disease, Anthrax managed to find themselves new, more demanding fans, without losing the old ones. The difference is clearly seen if you compare the bulk of the album with the last song, 'Gung-Ho', a leftover from the Neil Turbin days. Belladonna still tries to save it with his humanly presence, but, overall, the insane tempo multiplied by idiot lyrics about the evils of army service condemns the song to the realm of silly excesses.

 

My favourite numbers are the simply titled 'Madhouse' and 'Medusa'; the former — because it is the perfect summary of everything that Anthrax are about at this time, thrash riffage and grit and a bit of anti-social punch, and the latter — because it is a cool epic metal song about a mythologi­cal monster... 'nuff said. But, of course, I wouldn't know how or what to write about them indivi­dually. The important question is: does this stuff kick plenty of ass without making one feel like a third-grader? The answer, I think, is yes, but then I have missed the third grade for so long that I cannot feel too sure already.

 

Definitely a thumbs up: emotions-wise, the senses perk up each time Belladonna clashes his jaws behind a mighty Ian Scott riff, and brain-wise, I understand how this is heads and tails above the «average» thrash product (or maybe I don't — truth is, real thrash metal requires so much ef­fort on the part of the player that the brain is almost bound to be impressed). But hardly all the way up — I don't remember much except the two 'M'-songs once the experience is over, and if I were to train my brain to melt in the face of each well-trained, well-armed band, there'd be very little of it left in no time.

 

AMONG THE LIVING (1987)

 

1) Among The Living; 2) Caught In A Mosh; 3) I Am The Law; 4) Efilnikufesin; 5) A Skeleton In The Closet; 6) In­dians; 7) One World; 8) A.D.I./Horror Of It All; 9) Imitation Of Life.

 

Some random guy on some random website called this «happy metal», and said he'd rather stick to blacker stuff. I don't know; I think it would take an absolute musical genius to make such an over-the-top genre as thrash metal truly «black». Do Slayer really scare you? Does Megadeth make you want to hide under the bed? Perhaps Metallica does have a way of crawling under one's skin in an uncomfortable way — but they are also the least «generic thrash» of all such bands; su­rely not coincidentally.

 

So Among The Living finds Anthrax moving further away from «unintentionally funny» (= aw­ful) to «intentionally funny» (= awesome). Letting the band members' infatuation with Stephen King and comic books burst through, they now lend their steel riffs to songs about Judge Dredd and Randall Flagg. Certainly a novel approach, but one that lets them find their own face in the tiny confines of the thrash cell block: a grotesque marriage of speed metal and pop cul­ture. And it does not even matter much that far from everyone in the world is acquainted with these characters: particular names come and go, but the popcorn stays forever.

 

Of course, if a song like 'I Am The Law' were written in all seriousness... but surely it is intended to be half-admiration, half-irony, a brief role game to make life more exciting. It is more difficult to say just how serious they are when writing about more earthly, socially conscious issues ('Indi­ans', about Indians; 'One World', about fighting for peace) — the lyrics are far more trite, and it is not easy to spread good morals together with headbanging riffs; as we see, some people even get offended with the «happy metal» vibe.

 

But the band is at its most intelligent and snappy not when singing about comic book heroes or about politics, but when they turn on their own audiences, as in the classic 'Caught In A Mosh', which I freely consider one of the greatest thrash anthems ever written. The main riff is one of the few Anthrax riffs that are truly unforgettable — all beastly power and speed — and the song of­fers the audience a chance to let off major steam while at the same time (provided you pay atten­tion to the lyrics) understanding how ridiculous they look when doing it: "Cold sweat, my fists are clenching, stomp, stomp, stomp, the idiot convention". Does the song approve of the practice of moshing or does it condemn it? This band is clever enough to avoid a straight answer.

 

Overall, the riffs they come up with seem to have slightly increased in both complexity and me­morability, but not enough to make them more discussable than their lyrical subjects or basic at­titude. The important point is that they have learned how to imbue these riffs with — for lack of a more suitable expression — somewhat intellectual content, earning the thrash genre extra points in respectability. If you are the moshing sort, you will adore all fifty minutes of this; if you are not, you are still welcome to recognize the craft and care and even humour that went into it, like I certainly do, even though my own headbanging instincts were only seriously triggered once (as the awesome bass riff of 'Caught In A Mosh' creeps in and blows you away). Thumbs up from the brain; the album's «classic» status is understood and deserved.

 

STATE OF EUPHORIA (1988)

 

1) Be All, End All; 2) Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind; 3) Make Me Laugh; 4) Antisocial; 5) Who Cares Wins; 6) Now It's Dark; 7) Schism; 8) Misery Loves Company; 9) 13; 10) Finale; 11*) I'm The Man.

 

This was preceded by what is today recognized as one of Anthrax's highest points — the EP I'm A Man, whose lead-off track can be found on some editions of State Of Euphoria as a bonus; it is one of the earliest examples of straightforward «rap metal», a crossover that, hard as it is to be­lieve today, was fairly jaw-dropping back in 1987. But it is still moderately funny, lashing out at idiot stereotypes and employing the barely discernible 'Hava Nagila' riff in the chorus.

 

Then something changed, a dark cloud rolled through the evening sky, and all of a sudden Anth­rax were not funny any more. State Of Euphoria was not only their heaviest, but also their blea­kest album up to that point — never mind the misleading title. Dropping the comic book aspect entirely or almost entirely, the boys concentrate on rebellion topics and social criticism, all taken very, very seriously. Even the riffs are blacker, although that may be just an intuitive impression triggered by the lyrical gloom.

 

The critics, who were secretly hoping for more popcorn and more Judge Dredd, responded by ha­ting the record. Obviously, since these guys do not have Metallica's chops — they're good old rock'n'rollers in thrashers' clothes, not some sort of reverend prophet-artists of the apocalypse — they should leave the darkness and the holy anger to those who can make good use of it. Here they had a terrific niche carved out for themselves, and then to go and lose it all of their own free will? Is that proverbially stupid or what?

 

Indeed, State Of Euphoria sounds much more «generic thrash» than their previous two albums. But it is more polite to compare it to the generic thrash of Fistful Of Metal — and see just how much these guys have grown since then. The riffage has improved a ton, with each song at least sporting one or two meticulously constructed melodies, even if far from all of them are heart-breaking; and the attitude has shifted from balls-to-the-wall, brains-against-the-wall exaggerated aggression to things that make much more sense. Not that I am deeply moved by their pre­aching, which, in lyrical terms, rarely moves beyond leftist propaganda for first-graders ('Schism'), but it is nowhere near as off-putting as the caricature image they began with four years earlier.

 

Technically, then, there is no problem with State Of Euphoria. It is respectable, intelligently (if the word is applicable to the genre at all) conceived thrash, with occasional original flourishes — like the surprise cello line that announces 'Be All, End All' and then mutates into its evil guitar riff — and, in places, a punkish spirit, e. g. on the Trust cover 'Antisocial'. The album may be for­mulaic and unoriginal, but the band definitely sounds inspired to me, quite sure of what they are doing and shifting their focus from cheesy pop culture to darker matters not because someone forced them to, but because they really felt like doing it.

 

Describing the songs is pointless — how many different words can one come up with to depict a thrash metal riff? — so I can only say, once more, that I think this to be a decent thrash offering, not exceptional, but well acceptable to any fan of the genre, which I am not, so the thumbs up thing comes from the brain side exclusively.

 

PERSISTENCE OF TIME (1990)

 

1) Time; 2) Blood; 3) Keep In The Family; 4) In My World; 5) Gridlock; 6) Intro To Reality; 7) Belly Of The Beast; 8) Got The Time; 9) H8 Red; 10) One Man Stands; 11) Discharge.

 

Anthrax's last album with Belladonna raises the stakes introduced on State Of Euphoria even further, leaving behind all humour and concentrating almost exclusively on human rights, per­sonal freedoms, and the meanest ima­ginable thrash riffs to have ever supported democracy and progress. By overriding the speed limits, they had won back some critical support, and in general statistical terms Persistence seems to have earned itself more points than its predecessor.

 

This is understandable; the band quite transparently throws itself at the listener this time, despe­rate to make a rousing statement — more than half of the songs are rebellious anthems, thrashy in form, punkish in spirit. Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Hate! Do you know that at least five out of ten songs on here have the word 'hate', and, quite frequently, more than once? The last time they had so much hatred packed into a record was on Fistful Of Metal, but they were little kids back then, scribbling dirty words on their teacher's chair when he wasn't looking. Now they have an official party agenda about it.

 

Even the lead-off single, a surprising cover of Joe Jackson's relatively inoffensive 'Got The Time', has been transformed into a fit of mad rage from an immediate lobotomy candidate. (Punk rock­ers might find it their favorite Anthrax tune — it sounds almost exactly like the Ramones, only freshly taught to actually play their instruments). But 'Got The Time' is simply a frustrated com­plaint at being overloaded with all the little nuisances of life; imagine, then, what happens when the band finds itself a more personified victim? The greatest concentration of bile and dynamite is packed into 'Keep It In The Family', a seven-minute rant against «sheep mentality» that never was a single but still became a fan favorite purely on the strength of its intensity and dedication ('this one's the happiest one on the album', Joey would sometimes announce in concert); but most other songs are not far behind it in said intensity.

 

I do not know if it is the extra injected testosterone or closer attention to songwriting that is re­s­ponsible for the impression that the songs are generally more memorable. There are interesting hooks — the Sabbath-esque guitar twist on the "paranoia, amped and wired" chorus of 'Time'; the chest-baring, inspirational "I'm not afraid, I'm a walking razor blade" refrain of 'In My World'; the apocalyptic atmosphere of "it's a long time, long time comin'" on 'Gridlock', and others. Not my style, never my style, but theoretically quite attractive all the same.

 

Thus, in a year most rife on classics of the thrash genre — The Black Album, Seasons In The Abyss, Rust In Peace etc. — Anthrax seem to have held their own against all the big brothers, and certainly came out as the most socially active of all, be it just an act of posing or not. Few hold it as their very best (no Judge Dredd, see), but many hold it as their last bout of greatness, and my own brain tends to agree on that and confirm it with a thumbs up.

 

ATTACK OF THE KILLER B'S (1991)

 

1) Milk; 2) Bring The Noise; 3) Keep It In The Family (live); 4) Startin' Up A Posse; 5) Protest And Survive; 6) Chro­matic Death; 7) I'm The Man '91; 8) Parasite; 9) Pipeline; 10) Sects; 11) Belly Of The Beast (live); 12) N.F.B. (Dallab­nikufesin).

 

This pun-heralded collection of B-sides and rarities, spanning from around 1987 to 1991, would normally belong in the «Addenda» section, but not only is owning it an absolute must for anyone even remotely interested in Anthrax, I would even go as far as to state that this is the one Anthrax album to own if you decide to only own one (a rather natural wish, actually).

 

To be more precise, it is one of those rare cases when a rag-taggy bunch of an artist's throwaways and temporary distractions may turn out to be more involving than his «regular» stuff. Everything that we know and love (hate) about the band is here, along with quite a few new facts in their bio­graphy, and the diversity is very refreshing if you like your thrash slightly watered down with extraneous influences.

 

The album opens quite conveniently with 'Milk', a solid, predictable thrasher originally recorded by the Anthrax side project S.O.D., but after that the only standard thrash metal tunes are live renditions of 'Keep It In The Family' and 'Belly Of The Beast'. The rest can simply be defined as «Anthrax Meets...», with the object position filled in in either a literal or figurative way, e. g.:

 

—    «...Public Enemy»: 'Bring The Noise', sometimes viewed as the second most historically im­portant rap-rock colla­boration after 'Walk This Way' by Aerosmith/Run-D.M.C., although the main riff can hardly stand competition with Joe Perry;

—    «...Hardcore Punk»: the cover of 'Protest And Survive' by British punk rockers Discharge is one of their strongest injections of punk aesthetics inside the thrash riffs;

—    «...The Simple & Stupid»: their take on KISS' 'Parasite' is tons more accomplished in the technical sense than the original (this can be easily guessed without even hearing the song), but the band's «street feeling» makes them succeed in not losing the dumb fun factor of the original, either;

—    «...The PMRC»: 'Startin' Up A Posse' sews together speed metal and cowboy muzak (!) to deliver an adequate answer to Tipper Gore's initiative. It may not be as funny as intended (the lyrics are too straightforward, and the inclusion of each single specimen of «strong language» that they could think of is too predictable), but it works, and whatever works in the war against censorship should pass each and every seal of approval;

—    «...surf rock» (!!) — a phenomenal idea to dress up the head-whirling speed entertainment of the genre in metal guitar clothing, illustrated by their hearty rendition of The Chantays' 'Pipeline'. So when is that thrash metal album by The Ventures coming out in response?;

—    «...corny Americana balladeering»: 'N.F.B.' is the album's only bit of genuine parody with no additional meaning, and, as such, a suitably unforgettable final flourish to the record. Not in a million years could one guess that the last phrase on an Anthrax album would be "Joey, give me some tissue".

 

Among The Living may have been Anthrax's greatest contribution to this world, but, frankly speaking, it was not until I had thoroughly assimilated Killer B's that the true — and usually care­fully concealed — scope of the band's talent became understandable. Why they felt it neces­sary to confine their wild genre experimentation to such hard-to-find periphery and streamline most of the LPs in a far more generic manner, we will never understand; the likeliest answer is that they felt a spiritual/financial obligation to all the «moshers», too dumb to accept anything beyond the basic headbanging pattern — but, on the other hand, it's not like they ever made it all that high on the charts (certainly never higher than someone like Faith No More, who had no pro­blems whatsoever about merging intelligence with moderate commercial success). So there is really no ground for speculations. Thumbs up, and a hearty recommendation for even non-metal fans as long as they are ready to appreciate the power of invention in popular music.

 

SOUND OF WHITE NOISE (1993)

 

1) Potters Field; 2) Only; 3) Room For One More; 4) Packaged Rebellion; 5) Hy Pro Glo; 6) Invisible; 7) 1000 Points Of Hate; 8) Black Lodge; 9) C11H17N2O2SNa; 10) Burst; 11) This Is Not An Exit.

 

Some things never change, but this is not one of them. Suddenly, Anthrax no longer sound like Anthrax — they sound like Alice In Chains! Where is the irony? Where is the healthy, sanitary aggression? Where are the generic shredding thrash rhythms? Why is the new vocalist singing through his nose like a grunge queen? Why are all the songs so depressing? What in the world made them think this was what the fans needed?

 

Well, see, first they lost Joey Belladonna due to some internal conflicts that did not get a lot of publicity, and replaced him with John Bush, essentially an «old school metal» singer, formerly of Armored Saint, one of America's biggest non-thrash (and non-glam, for that matter) metal bands in the early Eighties. Second, they signed up with a new label (Elektra Records). Third, right on the heels of his work with Bush on the last LP for Armored Saint, they teamed up with Dave Jer­den — who, as it turned out, just happened to be the producer of Alice In Chains! With all these new developments, the reformed Anthrax were only too happy to incorporate cer­tain grunge elements inside their sound and see how it work out.

 

How? Perfectly! The worst thing I can say of Sound Of White Noise is that, unlike Among The Living, it does not have a unique identity of its own; by throwing in extra darkness and serious­ness at the expense of «moshing», Anthrax have aligned themselves with the main pack of the grunge warriors, allowing themselves to be pigeonholed far more easily. But this has little bea­ring on the fact that so many songs on here rule not only without mercy, but also with a modicum of added intelligence that we never saw during the Belladonna era.

 

There are some totally amazing, unbelievably strong riffs on the album, as if the band woke up overnight with a ten times more intense belief in the impending Coming Of The End than it ever shared. Case in point: the main riff for 'Invisible' that enters the stage around 0:56 — brutality that ranks up there with the best of Sabbath and Metallica. The relentless pounding of 'Only', 'Room For One More', and 'Packaged Rebellion' may be the most terrifying trio sequence in An­thrax history, and it does not even matter what words John Bush is pronouncing (although, for that matter, the rant against «packaged rebellion» is one of the cleverest things they ever produ­ced, all the more ironic because so much of Belladonna-era Anthrax is «packaged rebellion» in itself), as long as they stream out to some of the most melodic, and, at the same time, grim-reape­rish passages from Scott Ian and Dan Spitz.

 

At a certain point, the record takes a strange turn, as the band members declare themselves fans of Twin Peaks and collaborate with the series' composer Angelo Badalamenti on the dark ballad 'Black Lodge', which, frankly speaking, sounds very little like either Badalamenti himself (he contributes some of his trademark synth moods, but they are rather deep in the background) or like Anthrax in any of their incarnations; more like a cross between Dada-era Alice Cooper and any-era Rush, if you ask me, but curious all the same. And then, starting with their punkish, but not highly memorable, anthem to sodium pentathol, they move in closer to the old thrashy sound, as if having run out of grunge-metal ideas, somewhat diluting and spoiling the effect of the grin­ding first half, before coming back to their senses on the most Alice In Chains-ish song of them all, the terrifying 'This Is Not An Exit'.

 

Yes, at this moment in their lives, everything was going as right as it could — the band desperate­ly needed a reinvention and it chose the best possible model. Why that model did not manage to last very long is anybody's guess; in the meantime, a brutally honest thumbs up, and a hearty re­commendation to everyone who loves their metal grumbly, gruffy, and melodic. Of course, it is also easy to understand the old guard fans who felt betrayed by the band's stylistic jump — but, as John Lennon used to say, "you have all the old records there if you want something round and hard up your butt". Or something along those lines. You get the general idea.

 

LIVE: THE ISLAND YEARS (1994)

 

1) N.F.L.; 2) A.I.R.; 3) Parasite; 4) Keep It In The Family; 5) Caught In A Mosh; 6) Indians; 7) Antisocial; 8) Bring The Noise; 9) I Am The Law; 10) Metal Thrashing Mad; 11) In My World; 12) Now It’s Dark.

 

It is hard to imagine the Anthrax live sound significantly different from the Anthrax studio sound, unless, in a paroxism of cool, they’d want to baffle their fans by playing nothing but symphonic rearrangements of Phil Collins hits. This weakness of imagination, unfortunately, is in full agree­ment with reality, so the only problem of this live retrospective is that one who has already stu­died the studio albums needs it not.

 

Brief factual notes: all the tracks are from two shows with Belladonna still at the wheel, one in 1991, one in 1992; major emphasis is on the hits, although there are a couple surprises. e. g. ‘Me­tal Thrashing Mad'’from the early Neil Turbin era; and a joint performance of ‘Bring The Noise’ with Public Enemy is included, the only number to be seriously reworked from the original, but, as far as I can tell, seriously less focused and more chaotic.

 

Brief critical opinion: essential for slavery-bound fans and completists, but hardly worth the bo­ther for those without significant brain damage. To be «caught in a mosh» during an Anthrax show is, in all likelihood, an unforgettable experience (and one that I would not wish for myself even in exchange for world peace), but listening to such a show on record inevitably brings for­wards all the flubs and off-key singing, which, in a genre as demanding as thrash, are unpardo­nable. ‘Caught In A Mosh’ itself, for instance, starts off decent, but they totally ruin the chorus by failing to synchronize the vocals.

 

At its best, Live succeeds in replicating the power of the studio albums without augmenting it; at its worst, it shows how much care and rehearsal must have gone into the studio recordings, beca­use spontaneity is definitely not on these guys’ side. Not exactly a thumbs down, but it is hard to praise live albums whose main point is to certify that the artist did not suffer from stage fright.

 

STOMP 442 (1995)

 

1) Random Acts Of Senseless Violence; 2) Fueled; 3) King Size; 4) Riding Shotgun; 5) Perpetual Motion; 6) In A Zone; 7) Nothing; 8) American Pompeii; 9) Drop The Ball; 10) Tester; 11) Bare.

 

This is where the band officially turns to shit. No one knows why exactly, but three factors may be of importance: (a) Scott Ian has crossed the 40-year mark, automatically putting him into the «Metal MILF» category, an acquired taste if there ever was one; (b) lead guitarist Dan Spitz, a major pillar of melody for the band in the past, abandoned his comrades, unofficially replaced by his former guitar technician (!) ominously named Paul Crook; (c) most importantly, even though the band in­sists on more or less continuing in the same doom-laden, smile-free style they had on White Noise, they went from producer Dave Jerden — who knew how to get that style right — to a brand new veteran producer duo, who quite obviously do not know how to get it right. They call themselves The Butcher Bros., and that's just about right.

 

The riffs have lost all sensitivity; still brutal and venomous, but no longer communicating with the listener. So much so not communicating, in fact, that, first time ever, I find the best song on here to be the acoustic ballad 'Bare', graciously offering a last-minute respite to those brave few who have withstood the metallic pressure to the end; and even then, there is hardly anything spe­cial about that number. It merely reminds you of the long-forgotten fact that music may have ac­tually been designed by its original creators to nurture your senses, not torture them.

 

There is nothing informative or meaningful I can say about these songs. The band complained that Elektra Records had let them down by refusing to promote the album, but, for once, I see the record company's point very clearly — what was there to promote? There is not even a single song that could qualify as a stand-out single. It's all about the branding-iron guitar tones and the clen­ched teeth vocals from a totally misused John Bush.

 

Earlier on, I mentioned how State Of Euphoria may not have a lot of outstanding tunes, but sort of gets by through conviction and passion alone. The idea does not, however, work with Stomp 442. As hateful and aggressive as it is, the band has completely lost direction — it is hateful and agg­ressive because that's what the fans expect out of them, not because they want to experiment with the emotion of hatred. The results are predictable and boring, and there are few things in the world more threatening to one's love of music than having to sit through a boring metal album. Thumbs down; stay away unless you're into dental extraction.

 

VOLUME 8: THE THREAT IS REAL (1998)

 

1) Crush; 2) Catharsis; 3) Inside Out; 4) Piss 'N' Vinegar; 5) 604; 6) Toast To The Extras; 7) Born Again Idiot; 8) Killing Box; 9) Harms Way; 10) Hog Tied; 11) Big Fat; 12) Cupajoe; 13) Alpha Male; 14) Stealing From A Thief.

 

Self-produced, fortunately, and immediately a big improvement over the unfortunate Stomp. By now, we have a fairly good idea of what to expect from a Bush & Ian-led Anthrax: a series of kill 'em all style Panzer attacks (or was that Pantera attacks, given the near-complete merger of the two bands' styles?), a few alt-rock style acoustic ballads, and a couple ridiculous, but engaging comic links to dress it all up. The only question is whether it works or it sinks.

 

I certainly had a better time trying to groove along to the sounds of Volume 8 than its predeces­sor. Either Paul Crook has succeeded in adapting to the band's mentality, or they simply spent more time sifting out the insipid, but both the riffs and the vocal hooks go at least one notch up. Here be just a brief going-over through the good moments: "Won't you crush on me, crush on me" from 'Crush', followed by some first-rate headbanging; "Angels in my heart, devils in my eyes" from 'Catharsis', steady good rocking tonight; "From on top of the world, I'll throw you down a rope" from 'Hog Tied'; "Carrying the weight of the world in my hands!" from 'Big Fat' — these are well-designed, melodic, meaningful hooks.

 

The funny country rocker (!) 'Toast To The Extras' and the closing ballad 'Pieces' (a «hidden track») rule by nature of being throwaways — if you heard these songs on, say, a post-reunion Lynyrd Skynyrd album, you'd probably throw up, but in the context of the usual Anthrax grinder, they bring in an element of coziness that may win you over.

 

All in all, they seem to be retreating back to the grungy atmospherics of White Noise, even if there is fat chance they will ever be able to completely reiterate its success. Still, switching back and forth between the tracks of the 1998 and the 1995 album, I can't help but be surprised at how consistently better they managed to sound this time. Really, most of it is about the guitar sound: on Stomp 442, loud as it was, it came across as muffled and muzzled — here, it's as if The But­cher Bros. left and took the muzzle along, so you not only get to hear all the snarling in the pro­per tone, you get to experience some real tearing at the throat. BLOOD! That's what you want when listening to post-Belladonna Anthrax, and on Volume 8, you do get some, though perhaps not as fresh and smokin' as a true metalhead usually likes it.

 

WE'VE COME FOR YOU ALL (2003)

 

1) Contact; 2) What Doesn't Die; 3) Superhero; 4) Refuse To Be Denied; 5) Safe Home; 6) Any Place But Here; 7) Nobody Knows Anything; 8) Strap It On; 9) Black Dahlia; 10) Cadillac Rock Box; 11) Taking The Music Back; 12) Crash; 13) Think About An End; 14) W.C.F.Y.A.; 15*) Safe Home (acoustic); 16*) We're A Happy Family.

 

The album title is, more likely than not, a gruesomely black-humored nod to the «anthrax scare» of the psychologically unstable post-9/11 period, and, be that in bad taste or not, it is easy to un­derstand the desire to capitalize on the stroke of luck that befell the band when every person in America inadvertendly added one more Greek word to his/her lexicon.

 

Of course, Anthrax the band came for «all» no more than any of those letters with white powder: on the contrary, the band's ninth album is their most rigidly thrash-dedicated in years, as they ei­ther purge out outside influences or assimilate them and their carriers. Can you tell, without loo­king, that none other than Roger Daltrey himself guest stars as second vocalist on 'Taking The Music Back'? The song is certainly a little poppier than on the average, but Daltrey's contribution to it, for the most part, sounds like John Bush's echo — and it is only the 'Won't Get Fooled Again'-style scream at 2:29 into the song that gives him away, and only if you are listening to the song with the utmost attention because you happen to be writing a thesis on the album.

 

Nevertheless, the conservatism works well; Volume 8 had some catchy material, for sure, but here, with the addition of new lead guitarist Rob Caggiano, they also tighten up the accompany­ing sound. The guitars never manage to reach the fearsome heights of White Noise, but neither do they all blend together in a boring sludge mess. No single riff is worth a special description, no single chorus is worth particular admiration, no single piece of lyrics deserves its own praise, but the overall impression is positive all the way through. Yes, a few of these choruses may veer too close to «nu-metal» ('Superhero'), but that is no immediate reason to anathemize them — Anthrax have too deep and honorable a pedigree to debase themselves to the shallow extremes of this un­happy sub-genre.

 

With nothing but metal purism in mind, there are no ballads here, but the lead single, 'Safe Home', was actually the closest they got to unabashed sentimentalism on the album, and, although some metalheads were disappointed, I think it is no crime to buy into this — Bush is quite capable of carrying on a straightforward Love Anthem, plus Caggione comes up with a tremendous, flaming solo that is definitely the album's highlight. (Some editions of the album also add an early acous­tic demo of the song as a bonus track where it is a ballad, and a good one).

 

What with heavy metal's unfortunate tendency to degenerate into sludgy boredom or shameful self-parody, these days, if a non-groundbreaking metal album manages to avoid both, it's already a terrific achievement — one that We've Come For You All definitely achieves. (John) Bush-tolerant Anthrax fans will love it; (George W.) Bush-tolerant Republican fans will hate it; non-metalheads like me might listen to it with moderate interest. These three points merit some sort of conditional thumbs up, I suppose.

 

MUSIC OF MASS DESTRUCTION (2004)

 

1) What Doesn't Die; 2) Got The Time; 3) Caught In A Mosh; 4) Safe Home; 5) Room For One More; 6) Antisocial; 7) Nobody Knows Anything; 8) Fueled; 9) Inside Out; 10) Refuse To Be Denied; 11) I Am The Law; 12) Only.

 

Pretty damn good live album (packaged as one-half CD, one-half DVD; my review only applies to the CD portion), provided you approve of John Bush's frontman image; the live banter is actu­ally quite consistent with his studio spirit — «tough guy with a slightly bigger brain than that of most tough guys». His dedication to patching up the band's uneven history is clearly seen in the intro to 'Antisocial': "How many old schoolers are there in the audience? How many new schoo­lers are out there? How many people don't give a flying fuck about school?" — this should be ta­ken as a veiled excuse for singing old Belladonna classics, I guess, but it is pretty smart put all the same. Why should we, indeed, give a flying fuck about school?

 

Besides, he does sing the old classics fairly well; what the guy lacks in swaggering charisma, he easily compensates with sincere workmanhood and stamina. Under his lead, 'Caught In A Mosh', for instance, becomes tighter and more grueling than we heard it on The Island Years — no lon­ger does the chorus fall to pieces. And with all the extra iron in his voice, 'I Am The Law' acqui­res an extra amount of seriousness that makes the «old school» more in line with the «new scho­ol», whether one likes it or not.

 

The setlist is consistently great — with the exception of, at most, a couple duds from the slipaway period of Stomp and Volume 8, they concentrate on all the right material, including ripping ren­ditions of 'Room For One More' and 'Only' from Bush's best record; and 'Safe Home' is one num­ber to actively benefit from audience participation (it is an anthem, after all), yet the crowd roar is not loud enough to overbear the perfect reproduction of the flaming guitar solo.

 

It is ironic, of course, that the album, summarizing Bush's decade-long presence in the band, would turn out to be his last — even as Music Of Mass Destruction seems to prove that Anthrax have found a perfect compromise between their early classic humorous image and the later trans­formation into a deadly serious grunge-o-metal monster, pretty soon it became clear that no one was really happy about that compromise. Still, the album shows that the decade was not a comp­lete waste at all, and I suppose metal history will be sort of lonelier, decide we to erase the Bush years out of our collective memory. Thumbs up.

 

ALIVE 2 (2005)

 

1) Among The Living; 2) Caught In A Mosh; 3) A.I.R.; 4) Antisocial; 5) Lone Justice; 6) Efilnikufesin (N.F.L.); 7) Deathrider; 8) Medusa; 9) In My World; 10) Indians; 11) Time; 12) Be All, End All; 13) I Am The Law.

 

Here is touchable proof that Anthrax did give a flying fuck about school. Nobody saw this reu­ni­on coming, yet it still came out of nowhere: the original lineup, with both Belladonna and Dan Spitz reembracing with Scott Ian for a full-scale concert tour. And John Bush? Quietly given the sack as if he were nothing but a sack himself.

 

The resulting album and DVD is, in all honesty, Alive 3, if we count The Island Years — and we should — but it ties in perfectly with forgetting all about the John Bush era. Apparently, it was all right for Bush to sing old Belladonna material, but there was no way Belladonna would be singing «new school» stuff. No 'Room For One More' for this guy: the setlist freezes strictly at 1990. They still sing the pre-Belladonna material ('Deathrider'), though.

 

The performance is rock solid, to be sure: Belladonna's voice got a little bit deeper with age, but essentially unspoilt through the rock'n'roll lifestyle, and, in comparison to The Island Years, the band generally spends less time dicking around and is more concerned about getting the sound right ('Caught In A Mosh', in comparison with the old version, is pulled off brilliantly). Stage ban­ter is reduced to an absolute minimum, although audience participation in the singing of 'An­tisocial', 'Indians', and other tracks is still a must.

 

As for the setlist, on the tour they would frequently perform Among The Living in its entirety (this is reflected in the accompanying DVD), with Spreading The Disease taking honourable se­cond place; anyway, no complaints can be voiced, and purists may rejoice in seeing that 'Bring The Noise' has been omitted from the CD tracklist, so that everything is pure, stark, blistering thrash from top to bottom.

 

Anthrax's career after the reunion has been somewhat of a crude mess, though. The Belladonna reunion was short-lived, and produced no new studio material. Then it was followed by two years with Dan Nelson as the band's new vocalist — no new studio material, again, even though the band did hold studio sessions, laying the basis for a new record. Then they fired Nelson and, for another year, reunited with John Bush — no new studio material. Then they fired John Bush aga­in and reaccepted Belladonna (!!) — so far, no new studio material. All that is left for us to do is restock our popcorn and wait for the next episode. When is the reunion with Neil Turbin?

 

WORSHIP MUSIC (2011)

 

1) Worship (Intro); 2) Earth On Hell; 3) The Devil You Know; 4) Fight 'Em 'Til You Can't; 5) I'm Alive; 6) Hymn 1; 7) In The End; 8) The Giant; 9) Hymn 2; 10) Judas Priest; 11) Crawl; 12) The Constant; 13) Revolution Screams.

 

Okay then. Eight years into their personal history, Anthrax have finally reemerged with a new stu­dio album. The birth process was long and painful: many of these songs had been recorded as early as 2009, with Dan Nelson on vocals, but after Nelson quit the band, the results were shelved indefinitely. Re-enter John Bush, for a little while, but, feeling somewhat odd about overdubbing his vocals on material with which he had not been engaged previously, re-exit John Bush and re-enter Joey Belladonna — who had no such qualms, apparently, although some of the songs still had to be re-recorded, and a few completely new ones added.

 

Anyway, Worship Music is a genuine Anthrax album with an authentic Anthrax lineup; not a «reunion», since the band had been active all these years, and definitely not a «nostalgia trip», because there are no conscious attempts here to emulate the sound of any particular «classic» al­bum, be it Among The Living or Sound Of White Noise. Nor is it a trendy, «modernized» re­cord that could try to suck up to nu-metal fans or some other crowd. It is 100% Anthrax — which explains the mostly positive reviews that critics gave it (and most of the critics that gave it posi­tive reviews were Anthrax fans to begin with).

 

Unfortunately, I cannot join in, no matter how hard I try. Technically, everything is done right. We have crunchy riffs, wild solos, a strong vocalist who has not yet lost any of his youthful sta­mina, and a stab at «relevance» — Worship Music? More like Warship Music, as every second song on here is an aggressive battle cry, proving to the world that these days, it may need a thump on the head from the likes of Anthrax more than ever before. With that, I might even concur.

 

It's just that the material is weak. First, Belladonna's return does not imply the return of sarcasm and irony of the band's classic period. All of the songs are as dead serious and self-important as everything Anthrax ever did since John Bush led them into a firmly-clenched-teeth direction. And as good as Joey can be, he is much better off adding a comic, tongue-in-cheek whiff to the proce­e­dings, than playing a heart-on-the-sleeve street hero.

 

Worse, the riffs are uninteresting. Now we know for sure that John Bush was not the problem — the problem was that, ten years into their career, Anthrax had thoroughly exhausted the small pack of ter-riff-ic chord sequences yielded by the supernatural forces. I see how, on many of these songs, they consciously try to come up with creative melodies — as the riffs get longer and more complex — but there is no individuality to any of these songs. The only thing that remains is pure brawn. 'Fight 'Em Til You Can't' is clearly the centerpiece here, and if you want to adopt it as your everyday anti-establishment anthem, you are welcome, but I find the main riff emotionally hollow, and the vocal melody only «vaguely» catchy. Maybe it's my personal problem — but then how the heck do we explain the entirely different reaction to Sound Of White Noise?

 

Most of the songs, with the exception of several brief instrumental links, follow the exact same formula — fast thrash rockers (only 'Crawl', true to its title, slows the tempo down a bit), many of them with the exact same Martial Punch, which might be a good thing to lift up the spirits of a pack of Freedom Fighters on a particularly long march, but is fairly boring if you are just sitting in your room, imagining the Fight for Freedom in the confines of your mind. I was hoping that at least a song called 'Judas Priest' would turn out to be more inspired than the rest — on the contra­ry, it is one of the album's lowest points, an empty mess of aggression with not a single unusual ear-catch­ing moment.

 

If this is the best that Scott Ian and co. can come up with in eight years, both of my hands, thumbs and all, openly vote for the band to call it a day — or, at least, become a certified «oldies act», particularly now that they are together with Belladonna again. Go back, relisten to Among The Living or Persistence Of Time and remember them when they were so much more experimental, diverse, catchy, and funny. Actually, that might be their only chance — try and get some fun back into the music. Trying to get somewhere on the strength of «fight the power» alone will get them about as far as it gets every one-trick heavy rock band. The gutter.

 

Thumbs down, even though I may be alone on this, judging by the near-universal acclaim — but I'd still like to explain it by the mere fact of fan hunger for new material. I mean, it's a new Anth­rax album! Loud! Crunchy! Aggressive! Joey on vocals! A headbanger's paradise! Under those circumstances — who the hell needs creative songwriting?

 

ANTHEMS (2013)

 

1) Anthem; 2) T.N.T.; 3) Smokin'; 4) Keep On Runnin'; 5) Big Eyes; 6) Jailbreak; 7) Crawl; 8) Crawl [remix].

 

A fun footnote in Anthrax's catalog, this one: a short EP of songs that pay tribute to the band's childhood heroes — the testosterone-worshipping, sweat-grinding, crunch-rockin' dudes of «The Me Decade». «Tribute albums» like these seem to become the norm of day in the 21st century (as more and more people begin to realize that they can do no better than the dinosaurs, after all), but usually the tribute-payer in question is trying to present this in sort of a «Me and Mr. Amadeus» manner, recasting the original in his/her/their own image and, more often than not, butchering the classic and embarrassing the reputation.

 

In contrast, Anthrax do not go for that kind of shit. The six songs they cover are played as closely to the original as possible — the only difference being that the guitar melodies are dutifully ap­proached from the thrash angle. Even Joey Belladonna tries, as far as possible, to imitate the styles of the original singers — no mean feat, considering they run all the gamut from Geddy Lee to Phil Lynott. And I would say the results are not only fun, but even a little moving: you don't really need to listen to the whole thing more than once, but you do get the feeling that they really really love music in general, and these old bands in particular. (We leave aside the fact that, in 2013, there is not that significant an age difference between any of them and Anthrax themselves — chronologically, the last song covered is Journey's ʽKeep On Runnin'ʼ, released the same year that Anthrax was formed in the first place).

 

Anyway, the band's tastes are pretty much what you'd expect: they have been fans of anthemic hard rock of all directions, be it ironic sleazy stuff (AC/DC), socially-conscious «street intellec­tual» stuff (Thin Lizzy), melodic power-pop (Cheap Trick), bombastic arena material (Boston, Journey), or «progressively» oriented composition (Rush). The only important links that tie all of these together are loudness, power, and crunchy riffs, which is what Scott Ian and the boys latch on to and never let go. I think they capture the essence of each of these songs perfectly, except I am not really sure that it was such a good decision for Joey to concentrate so exclusively on get­ting those vocal styles right — he spends too much time guarding his voice's modulation to re­member about the clownish irony of Bon Scott's ʽT.N.T.ʼ performance, not to mention the subtle Weltschmerz in Lynott's ʽJailbreakʼ (Joey's "hey you good lookin' female, come here!" is taken quite literally, when in Thin Lizzy's original it was more like a... well, let's say «reluctant ack­now­ledgement of nature's calls»).

 

Authenticity is occasionally provided by adding guest musicians, such as Fred Mandel to play the «smokin'» keyboard parts on ʽSmokin'ʼ, or Motörhead's Phil Campbell to play the guitar break on ʽJailbreakʼ — not that Rob Caggiano couldn't have handled that one on his own, but apparently they thought they needed somebody «extra dirty» to do that part. But for the most part, they don't really need anybody else — all of this stuff is really in their blood, and it is useful to be thus re­minded that it's all really part of the same chain, especially for those who only listen to thrash metal and those who never listen to it.

 

I wouldn't even have minded sitting through more: it wouldn't be tough for them, I guess, to come up with at least a couple extra covers instead of inexplicably finishing the EP with the original version of ʽCrawlʼ (which was already present on their last album) and another remix of the same song with keyboards, orchestration, and backup vocals. The remix is fairly creative, and Anthrax with strings works surprisingly better than one could have thought, but why? the song has nothing to do with the general concept. They could have covered us some Sabbath or Slade instead.

 

In any case, this is one of those albums that does not require a rating — calling it «good» would suggest calling for more of the same (not recommendable), and calling it «bad» would mean they didn't do a good job with it, which they did. I'd say this: if Anthems manages to get even one Anthrax fan into Cheap Trick, it's a success. If all it does, though, is get more Anthrax fans into Journey — now that would be lamentable.

 

FOR ALL KINGS (2016)

 

1) Impaled; 2) You Gotta Believe; 3) Monster At The End; 4) For All Kings; 5) Breathing Lightning; 6) Breathing Out; 7) Suzerain; 8) Evil Twin; 9) Blood Eagle Wings; 10) Defend/Avenge; 11) All Of Them Thieves; 12) This Battle Chose Us; 13) Zero Tolerance.

 

As the legendary thrash heroes grow older and older, each new album becomes a test of will­power and endurance: can they still make it? won't it feel too embarrassing? is tinnitus finally setting in? It's not as if a band like Anthrax really has a choice of switching to acoustic folk or didgeridoo music, even if an ethnic reworking of ʽCaught In A Moshʼ, if done authentically enough, might be curious.

 

Anyway, the good news: Anthrax are still together, featuring more or less the classic lineup — only lead guitarist Rob Caggiano has been replaced by Jon Donais, but he was never part of the classic lineup anyway, so good luck to him in Volbeat or whatever other Scandinavian metal band he'd wish to join. Technically, the rhythm section remains tight, and Joey is still Joey, keeping a youthful spirit at the age of 55 (which we now know is not that hard to do — hey, my own memories of a 55-year old Mick Jagger make him seem like a youngster at the time). Even better, though even more subjective, news: it seems to me that this new bunch of songs is some­what better written than the disappointing Worship Music. Better riffs, catchier choruses, it all kind of makes a bit more musical sense.

 

But everything comes at a price, and one other definite feel I get (among with quite a few other critics and fans, it seems) is that For All Kings is somewhat lacking in energy. Where Worship Music tried too hard to sound like classic Anthrax, this one does not try enough (yes, I know we amateur writers are hard to please, but what can you do? Writing about Anthrax albums is almost impossible without comparing them to each other and to that one classic-ideal-immaculate An­thrax LP that they never really recorded). For starters, most of the songs are too slow: there is not a single proper brutal lightning-speed thrasher to remind you of this band's ultimate powers. Far be it from me to demand that all their songs be like that — but a couple would still have been nice. Instead, we get way too many tunes that sound like «regular» metal, or hard rock, or even pop-a-roll: not really bad or anything, but not exactly something that we need an Anthrax for.

 

Second, the older they get, the more they tend to sermonize: most of the songs here carry social or generally moralistic messages, ranging from the individuality-acclaiming title track to ʽEvil Twinʼ which condemns the Charlie Hebdo killers (because, as we all know, Anthrax are espe­cially popular among Islamist terrorists and ISIL leaders, and whatever Scott Ian tells them to do, they will execute instantly to wild cries of «Anthrax akbar!»). Again, even if there's nothing par­ticularly new that they might tell us, it wouldn't be such a problem if one didn't get the feeling that the message is occasionally more important than the execution, and also because Joey Bel­ladonna simply might not be the best voice to deliver these serious messages — even after all these years, I still keep seeing him in a sarcastic haze, playing the fool a little. To be Moses or Jonah, he'd probably need extra vocal powers sent from above, and if they didn't arrive thirty years earlier, it's useless to wait for them now.

 

That said, I honestly enjoy bits and pieces here — even stuff like ʽThis Battle Chose Usʼ, with its singalong pop chorus that arrogantly bridges the gap between Anthrax and Bon Jovi, is endowed with gutsy riffage, and I'm all in favour of the sacrilegious transition between the more thrash-like verses and the clearly pop metal chorus and backwards. The title track starts out almost accap­pella style, as if Joey, inspired by the title, were going to deliver us an epic Anglo-Saxon ballad from ye olde times — fortunately, it picks up steam very soon, but then nothing about the song really is as interesting as this contrast between the introduction and the main riff. And the riff itself is nowhere near as tough as the one on ʽBreathing Lightningʼ — now here, after a boring epic intro, we get a monstrous variation on the ʽCaught In A Moshʼ riff that almost sounds like classic Anthrax. And then it, too, gets betrayed with an epic «melodic» chorus that turns this band into something it ought not to be. Belladonna singing in an operatic tone? He's neither Rob Hal­ford nor Bruce Dickinson, why should he bother? (Oh and, by the way, note them cop the riff of ʽThe Song Remains The Sameʼ for a bit in the mid-section).

 

In short, this is Anthrax all right, but an aging Anthrax, with slightly (or maybe seriously) diminished powers of con­viction, but an ever-increasing level of social consciousness that drives them to taking themselves more seriously than ever before. But time is a bitch — as is evident, for instance, from the way less than stellar live rendition of ʽCaught In A Moshʼ that is included as a bonus track on the expanded edition of the album, with Ian messing up the classic bassline and the entire band messing up the playful call-and-response harmonies on the chorus. This per­formance might serve as an allegory for the entire new album — if you think I'm dreaming things up and this current live incarnation goes every bit as strong as it used to, you'll probably also love For All Kings, but... well, I am not suggesting that the band retire or anything, but yes, they are getting old, there's no getting around it, and I feel as if they have not chosen the ideal way to adapt to it. Although, frankly speaking, I have no idea what that ideal way would be, so it's damned if you do, damned if you don't all the way. At least the old pals are still together, and there's always something to be said about long-lasting musical friendship.

 

 

THE ART OF NOISE

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE ART OF NOISE? (1984)

 

1) A Time For Fear (Who's Afraid); 2) Beat Box (Diversion One); 3) Snapshot; 4) Close (To The Edit); 5) Who's Afraid (Of The Art Of Noise); 6) Moments In Love; 7) Momento; 8) How To Kill / Realization.

 

Today, sampling is so much part of the everyday culture — regardless of whether one loves the art for its unlimited capabilities or hates it for demeaning the whole idea of music — that albums like Who's Afraid Of The Art Of Noise are often thought of as possessing nothing but historical value. Critics with the ability to look back over their shoulder still rate it highly, but popular opi­nion no longer holds the hooliganry of Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley, and Paul Morley in any kind of high esteem. For better or for worse?

 

Obviously, this album — preceded by an EP called Into Battle With The Art Of Noise which I am not discussing separately (both of its major tracks are reproduced here) — is as much the ine­vitable offspring of the Fairlight CMI sampler as it is a creation of artistically minded humans. And, obviously, samplers have gotten much more clever since then, and humans have learned to use them in more sophisticated ways. But there is always something to be said for the joy of ini­tial discovery; and whenever I listen to Who's Afraid, I share this giggly feeling, that of a mis­chi­e­vous little kid given full reins on some exciting naughty project — in dire contrast with lots and lots of complex electronic stuff from the last two decades, whose biggest fault is taking itself way too seriously. This bunch of noise is light and exuberant, in comparison.

 

Ironically, it is the most «serious» track that has managed to retain the most appeal; 'Moments In Love', whose sexy sensual synthesized sighs still impress impressionable lovers around the world. It may be aiming a bit too squarely at the «gorgeous» target — becoming a variety of penthouse muzak for post-graduate romantics — but it is still heads and tails above most competition in the genre, and it also helps to have the full ten-minute version that leads you into several different, unexpected directions along the way.

 

But the true soul of Who's Afraid lies in those tracks that take the art of hooliganish collating to the limits: 'Beat Box', 'A Time For Fear', and, of course, the famous single 'Close (To The Ed­it)' with its infamous video of a dressed up mini-Madonna-girl smashing up musical instruments. Even after all these years, the use of a car's startup noises as the backbone for a rhythm track still excites, as well as the understanding that, no matter how many times you listen to the composi­tion, you can still never remember well what comes next — a synth horn blast? a funky bass riff? a shout of 'hey'? a bird chirping? a tra-la-la? a bunch of angelic backing vocals? and what the heck is it all supposed to mean?

 

Nothing, of course. Read all you want about it, but it is perfectly obvious that there was no con­cept, no ideology, no understanding. Just a bunch of people excited with new technologies and instruments and doing weird stuff with not the vaguest idea of where it will lead them. It is a good thing that all of them were accomplished musicians with a good ear for melody and a good foot for rhythm, because in less experienced hands such an approach would never have paid off. As it is, Who's Afraid is clearly dated, but I do not see how anybody who admits the values of sampling and electronica in the first place could pronounce that with shades of gray in his voice rather than yellow, orange, and red. It is not the actual sounds of the album — admittedly, coming across as cheaper and flatter than whatever can be produced today — that constitute its value, nor is it the alleged facelessness of the album (at that time, the band stood opposed to most compe­ti­ti­on in remaining as anonymous as possible). Instead, it's just the spirit: light, playful, humo­rous, and not giving the slightest damn about what the hell is going on. Except that the stakes are high, and that the question of "Can I say something? Can I-Can I say something?", endlessly looped on one of the tracks, would be a far more telling choice for the album title than the provoking ques­tion they put on the sleeve instead. Why else would they want to sample the Who's 'Baba O'Rei­lly', of all choices, if not to underscore that, whatever they are fiddling with here, they intend it to come across as an anthemic experience for the new generation?

 

As surprising as it may be, I think Who's Afraid is a record more for the heart than for the brain. All these collages and samples are pretty naïve indeed for today's standards, and they probably weren't all that complicated in 1984, either, not with the new sampler hanging around. But the fun part of it all, that's what's priceless. Like the end of the title track, with that echoey laugh and the girl going "Boom! Boom!" like she were just fooling around in a cave, enjoying life's options instantaneously as they come along, no second thoughts about it. That's so goddamn sym­bolic of it all. Kids at play, with creativity on the rampage. Thumbs up.

 

IN VISIBLE SILENCE (1986)

 

1) Opus 4; 2) Paranoimia; 3) Eye Of A Needle; 4) Legs/Slip Of The Tongue; 5) Backbeat; 6) Instruments Of Dark­ness; 7) Peter Gunn; 8) Camilla: The Old, Old Story; 9) The Chameleon's Dish/Backbeat; 10*) Peter Gunn (extended version).

 

Since The Art Of Noise could be easily described as electronic punks, it would have made sense if they ceased to exist as a team upon the release of their first album — which, like all true punks, they would never ever manage to beat in terms of freshness, impact, and overall fun. Instead, they tried to show the world that the hooliganish impulse that was Who's Afraid? could be transfor­med into a regular mode of living.

 

Which is why In Visible Silence, their stylishly titled follow-up, would, by all acounts, be destined to be far more boring. We know the formula now: randomly selected samples, used partly to set up a rhythmic groove, partly to pepper it with oink-oinks to keep the listener intrigued. And how difficult is it to select a random sample? Not difficult at all if you've spent some time in the electronic business. Much more difficult to convince people that this particular collocation of different samples bears that particular symbolic meaning that makes it «art» (of noise or whatever else).

 

However, In Visible Silence still places the right bet on the right factor: diversity. Where the first album combined elements of the randomizer with those of the contemporary dance floor, the fol­low-up delves into many more types of traditional musical territory, and so, if the shock value has decreased, the basic inventiveness has not. Of the three singles to herald the album, only 'Legs' sounded like an outtake from Who's Afraid? 'Paranoimia', on the other hand, rode an odd stuttery funky bass-dependent groove (the track was specially written for the AI TV character Max Headroom, still somewhat fun to watch even today), and 'Peter Gunn' — well, 'Peter Gunn' is always 'Peter Gunn'; the band even got Duane Eddy in person (probably caught in a tight cash-strapped situation) to guest on the track, reawakening public interest in his old version from 1960 and also making this one of the oddest collaborations of the decade.

 

In addition, 'Eye Of A Needle' is built upon the foundations of generic lounge jazz / elevator mu­zak, and 'Backbeat' features uplifting classically-oriented sections with synthesizer patterns that al­most seem lifted from The Who's Quadrophenia. Taken together, these five tracks are an impressive collective illustration of the power of tape-tampering, and prove that The Art Of Noise did have something left to prove after having broken the ground two years earlier.

 

Some other tracks clearly do not work so well. 'Camilla', for instance, is a rather obvious «re-write» of 'Moments In Love', going for the same type of hushed lushness, but it fails to produce a hook that would be nearly as memorable. And 'Instruments Of Darkness' relies too much on voice­overs — today, its value is nearly all historical (e. g., most of the spoken bits come from the mouth of P. W. Botha, stimulating the curious listener into doing research on the recent history of South Africa) and pretty much non-existing otherwise. But with wildly experimental albums like these, particularly from the early days of the sampling craze, inconsistency is to be expected and made mental peace with before one even puts on the record.

 

The way the initial punch of Who's Afraid? flows so seamlessly into the wider ambitions of Si­lence is somewhat astonishing, considering the band's fluctuations at the time: the three core members (Anne Dudley, J. J. Jeczalik, Gary Langan) had just torn themselves away from creative gurus Trevor Horn and Paul Morley, amd, consequently, away from Horn's ZTT label and away from the «faceless» artistic ideology that required them all wearing masks during promotion. Live activity was increased, too, with a whole show filmed for video at the Hammersmith Odeon — as weird as it is to see the band reproduce parts of their loops and samples in real time, they did this quite convincingly. Eventually, it would be this very tendency to restore a «live» feeling to their music that finally killed the project — nothing surprising about that — but in 1986, it all worked fine, and twenty-plus years after the fact, In Visible Silence still sounds bawdy and fresh, teach­ing us new ways to enjoy common sounds. Thumbs up.

 

IN NO SENSE? NONSENSE! (1987)

 

1) Galleons Of Stone; 2) Dragnet; 3) Fin Du Temps; 4) How Rapid?; 5) Opus For Four; 6) Debut; 7) E.F.L.; 8) A Day At The Races; 9) Ode To Don Jose; 10) Counterpoint; 11) Roundabout 727; 12) Ransom On The Sand; 13) Rol­ler 1; 14) Nothing Was Going To Stop Them, Anyway; 15) Crusoe; 16) One Earth.

 

On their third album, Art Of Noise decided to hit it off the deep edge. Now reduced to the core duo of Dudley and Jeczalik, no chains prevented them of making the psycho-electronic equiva­lent to Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick: a sprawling, not-obviously-coherent mess of tunes, ef­fects, and ideas whose main point is «never let the listener understand where he is going to find himself the next moment».

 

My version of this album is not actually divided into sixteen tracks; just like the original CD versions of Thick As A Brick, it only contains two, and I have never given myself the trouble of trying to understand which sections of these two correspond to the sixteen «songs» listed on some of the editions — and I am pretty sure that the dynamic duo themselves never intended for any­ of their fans to waste time on that trouble. No single track on the album truly stands on its own; it all works as a single-breath forty-minute Art Experience.

 

As usual, the saving grace, particularly for those who are not amused at the idea of art for art's sake, is «fun». Certain chunks don't go anywhere and are really quite boring (particularly the ones that go for that old «brea­thy moody» style of 'Moments In Love'), but every once in a while they bring out the brawny dance rhythms, inject them with samples of whatever they heard on TV the previous day, then interrupt and replace them with crap stuff any time they feel like it — then, as you start cursing under your breath, bring them back... for a while. In short, they cling on to their reputation as the arrogant hoodlums of sampling, and that counts.

 

The only single piece of it that stuck with audiences was, unsurprisingly, the band's rearrange­ment of the classic theme from the old TV show Dragnet (to serve as a modernized version for the 1987 movie), maybe out of sheer amazement that no significant pop artists since Ray Antho­ny in 1953 had ever wanted to ingrain it into the public conscience as much as, say, the Batman theme. The rearrangement is as fine as the theme itself (and pokes some concealed fun at the show's trappings by looping the spoken line 'I carry a badge' many times over), but sort of obscu­res the fact that much of the rest of the album also consists of music, and not only that, but music originally written by the band members themselves.

 

A thing, in itself, controversial: the album that presented Art Of Noise in their least compromi­sing, most seriously inaccessible emploi, at the same time betrayed their original purpose — to serve as spiritual guides to machine-crafted art — like no other. There's guitar solos a-plenty on the record, violins playing classical interludes, lounge jazz pieces coolly swung on electric pianos: they're almost becoming a real band. Sure it all goes away then, replaced by crowd recordings or wobbly white noise, to remind us that we are still in 1987, but then wham, you get a fresh saxo­phone solo passage or something. Want it or not, the human still shows through the machine.

 

Overall, it is the kind of album that really makes me wish Anne Dudley were born ten years earlier and had herself a little stand next to Yoko Ono's at the Indica Gallery, because In No Sense — in all senses — is that particular musical statement that 'Revolution No. 9' could have been, but never was. Of course, one big difference is that Art Of Noise, at their best, were inten­ded to be fun: laughing-smiling, celebrating life's absurdities or, at least, mocking them rather than being terrified at their sight. But then that's exactly what the Beatles' spirit was, too, isn't it, before life made them all bitter and grim? I don't know about everybody else, but this is just the way I like my modern art: self-ironic, easy-going, butterfly-style. You may hate this album, but you will almost certainly snicker at it at least once or twice, and that's enough by me. Thumbs up for all the good feelings.

 

BELOW THE WASTE (1989)

 

1) Dan Dare; 2) Yebo!; 3) Catwalk; 4) Promenade 1; 5) Dilemma; 6) Island; 7) Chang Gang; 8) Promenade 2; 9) Back To Back; 10) Flashback; 11) Spit; 12) Robinson Crusoe; 13) James Bond Theme; 14) Finale.

 

Paul Morley never had much respect for Art Of Noise and their work since he left the project in 1985. Obviously, he had a certain right to be pissed; and when his former colleagues scored their biggest commercial hit (a cover of Prince's 'Kiss') in the form of a collaboration with Tom Jones, he had himself a golden pretext to dismiss them in interviews as sellouts and novelty goons. Then out came Below The Waste, an album that showed maybe about a third of the inventiveness and maybe about a thirty-third of the humor of their glory days, and then The Art Of Noise was shot down, burned, and buried by popular and critical opinion alike. Leading them into disbanding the following year, disgruntled and confused.

 

The ultimate irony of it all, of course, is that it was exactly the Morley/Horne years when the pro­ject was a true «novelty» act. Throughout all of the four years that they spent free of their artistic gurus' domination, Dudley and Jeczalik had been trying to find the ideal middle ground between crazy cutting-floor wizardry and common appeal; ultimately, they did not succeed, and ended up with curses from hardcore fans and relative indifference from the general public. But they tried all the way, and Below The Waste, be it or not their weakest original-period album, by no means shows any slackening of the spirits.

 

It is different, and arguably the most «accessible» of all their albums, in the sense that there is al­most no «sonic hooliganry» going on anywhere. The individual tracks are melodic, semi-live, se­mi-electronic compositions, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes rocking out, and they go real ea­sy on sampling, copying, and pasting. 'Yebo!' lasts all of seven minutes, and all of them essential­ly on the same groove — a thing unheard of in the early days. Play it all at mid-level volume and even the most generically-oriented of your buddies may remain unstimulated to ask the sacred question of «what the fuck is that shit». No question about it: the original ideology of the band has been shelved. Art Of Noise? More like Art Of Nice, if you ask me.

 

All that remains is take Below The Waste on its terms and see if it helps. I have always believed that it actually does. There is moody filler, of course, but there are also compositions that have a life of their own. For one thing, this is the only spot in their career where they were trying to acti­vely toy with «world music», incorporating various ethnic elements into the usual electronic fra­mework. This is especially characteristic of the first two tracks. 'Dan Dare' has much less to do with The Pilot Of The Future than it has to do with an odd mix of African tribal chants, North In­dian war cries, Andean panflutes, and quite European classical strings arrangements (I may be ex­aggerating the diversity a bit, but that the tune is chockfull of syncretism is inarguable).

 

'Yebo!' is even better, and, I dare say, one of the ultimate classics of the entire «world music» craze. With vocals provided by Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, a world-famous Zulu band ('Yebo!' means 'yes' in Zulu, in case you wanted to know), it somehow manages to respect and send up the trend at the same time — they set up a captivating dance groove, load it with a catchy Bantu vocal melody, then loop it all up in ridiculous proportions. The most seductive thing about it is that there is none of that in-your-face kowtowing before the sacred age-deep wisdom of the Tribal Elders that makes so much of «world music» from the likes of Paul Simon or Sting such an in­tolerable bore, none of that fake reverence that prevents you from sucking in musical influences with the best of all goals — to have fun. 'Yebo!' is fun, from head to toe.

 

African and other tribal elements pop up on 'Dilemma', 'Chang Gang', and 'Spit' as well, but the assault is not as focused on these tracks as on 'Yebo!'; besides, they are heavily interspersed with pure, and somewhat fillerish, mood pieces ('Island', 'Robinson Crusoe'). The band also came un­der heavy fire for including their interpretation of the James Bond theme — five minutes of elec­tronic surf-rock that, for many listeners, seemed to have become an unpleasant overload of all things Bond-related. (It might not have been such a total coincidence that the year's Bond movie, License To Kill, is recognized as one of the least financially successful in the franchise; perhaps the same people who hated Timothy Dalton took this hatred one step further?). I would say that 'The James Bond Theme' is, indeed, the most «novelty»-like track on the album, but I still like all the weird things they did with it — for instance, how they begin with a very faithful rendition, then proceed to completely deconstruct the thing in the middle, and then make it interbreed with ele­ments of free jazz for a change.

 

Overall, Below The Waste is like totally that particular type of record that is going to be actively hated by 20% of the people, actively ignored by 78% of the people, and liked by about 2% that happen to include this here reviewer — a «compromising» album in a world mostly populated by people that don't give a shit about the complex art of compromising. 'Yebo!' alone is enough to guarantee it a heartfelt thumbs up, and then they're raised further up through reasonable analysis that states it a federal crime to condemn albums so cleverly conceived and executed.

 

THE SEDUCTION OF CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1999)

 

1) Il Pleure (At The Turn Of The Century); 2) Born On A Sunday; 3) Dreaming In Colour; 4) On Being Blue; 5) Con­tinued In Colour; 6) Rapt: In The Evening Air; 7) Metaforce; 8) The Holy Egoism Of Genius; 9) La Flute De Pan; 10) Metaphor On The Floor; 11) Approximate Mood Swing No. 2; 12) Pause; 13) Out Of This World (Version 138).

 

Perhaps The Rape Of Claude Debussy would be a more fitting title. The Art Of Noise disban­ded soon after the critical failure of Below The Waste, either seeing their noisartistic mission as complete or realizing that there was no more mission to speak of in the first place. Then, a decade later, nostalgia kicked in — and some sort of arrogant realization, on the part of several of the founding fathers, that the history of The Art Of Noise would never be enshrined if the ideas that they set out with around 1984 were not brought back to life, one more time, at the turn of the mil­lennium. For that one occasion, at least, The Art Of Noise had to be resurrected — and, if chance would have it, come up with something brilliant.

 

So Trevor Horn, Paul Morley, and Anne Dudley held hands once again, although Jeczalik and Langan stayed out of the picture (either they were wise enough not to tempt fate, or, perhaps, Horn and Morley never invited them in the first place, putting all the blame for the original cor­ruption of the Art of Noise aesthetics on these guys); instead, Lol Creme of 10CC/Godley & Cre­me fame was brought in full-time to work on the project.

 

The project's ambitious backbone was to concentrate on the life and art of Debussy, in a highly (and obviously) symbolic manner — Debussy's major art works were also created at the turn of the century, and Debussy's major art purpose was also to shock and revolutionize. Here, then, is a tribute album from pop music's biggest bunch of (self-proclaimed) hooligans to one of classical music's greatest hooligans. And just so that it all don't seem way too primitive, The Seduction must not simply sound as straightforward Debussy sampling set to Art Of Noise's usual rhythmic patterns. It must incorporate everything — from Debussy's piano work to opera to jazz to pop to techno to hip-hop, a celebration of the man's twisted legacy. Yes, there is a curve from Debussy all the way to Rakim, even if takes The Art Of Noise to prove it.

 

I cannot firmly state that such a concept was, or always will be, doomed to fail; as you understand, the statistical sampling is way low on this. I cannot say, either, if Claude Debussy, wherever he is at the moment, was indeed seduced by the album, or whether he loathed it (as I did when I first listened to it) or simply remained indifferent (as I am now). Quite a few people were seduced, and some not only consider its purpose fulfilled to a tee, but even think of it as the band's grandest and most unforgettable statement. But I would rather join a different school of thought here — I think the purpose of the record may be admirable, yet the way it is realized does little, if any, jus­tice to all parties, including Debussy, The Art Of Noise, and the target audience.

 

Debussy was, of course, a fearless modernizer, but he was also an idealist, and his impressionistic music was written for the heart of the listener, much like the impressionistic paintings of the era, however strange they might have looked to the conservative eye, were painted for the heart. In that, he succeeded admirably — no matter how different his bitonality and pentatonic experi­ments sound, even for the untrained ear, from the great composers of the XIXth century, today his output is still alarmingly «normal». But The Art Of Noise, at their best, had always preached the postmodern, sneeringly hip attitude, creating sounds that, even now, more than twenty years after their heyday, still sound sneeringly hip, blowing your mind, perhaps, but not your heart. If there is a special telephone line from Debussy to The Art Of Noise, different from the general network that connects all forms of music, I fail to see it, and The Seduction does not help me much. Other than occasional sampled sprinklings from Debussy's work, scattered here and there, The Seduc­tion bears little resemblance to the man's spirit, and pays even less respect to his legacy.

 

As a typical «Art Of Noise» album, it does not make a great mark, either. There is none of the band's usual sense of humour; steeped in modernistic pretentious reverence, it demands to be ta­ken seriously every step of the way — unless one finds humor in letting Rakim rap on a couple of tracks, or in track titles like 'Metaphor On The Floor' (at least you can always count on these guys to come up with a non-trivial pun). The seriousness is also punctuated by constantly annoying voi­ce­overs from John Hurt, reminding us of the enormous cultural status of Debussy — no shit, Sherlock. The band justified it by dubbing Seduction «the soundtrack to a non-existent movie about Debussy»; we can only thank them for not extending their vision that far.

 

The grooves, way too often, run for way too long without ha­ving too much to say — and most of them are so inobtrusive (say, a combination of soft percus­sion rolls, deep-buried repetitive piano riffs, and «heavenly» synth-orchestration) that you'd have to qualify them as «ambient» music; but since when have The Art Of Noise, one of the rudest, most hyperactive electronica-based projects of the XXth century, been reclassified as soft, inob­trusive ambient sounds to soothe the soul? And how does that tie in with the bombastic concept?

 

I cannot even label this as a «grandiose failure», because there is nothing grandiose about it, ex­cept for the original idea, given one of the lamest realizations in the history of grandiose original ideas. If you want Debussy, listen to Debussy; Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune kicks Trevor Horn's ass all the way to high heaven. If you want The Art Of Noise, listen to Who's Afraid?..., or 'Yebo!', at least. If you want a good mixture of both, get yourself a good piece of music soft­ware and revel all you want in your own freaky perversions. If you want to tell me something along the lines of: «Forget about Debussy, forget about the Art Of Noise, just close your eyes and enjoy the musical rapture», well, I tried — but every time I did, a faint whiff of either Debussy or the former Art Of Noise came along, telling me to drop all this shit and go listen to the real thing. In the end, I just had to give up. Thumbs down. Who knows, maybe some day someone will get it right.

ARTHUR RUSSELL

24→24 MUSIC (1981)

 

1) #1 (You're Gonna Be Clean On Your Bean); 2) #5 (Go Bang!); 3) #2 (No, Thank You); 4) #7; 5) #3 (In The Corn Belt); 6) #6 (Get Set).

 

Technically, this record is credited to «Dinosaur L», but that was just one of the many fleeting mo­nikers that Arthur Russell would use over his chaotic career; in reality, this is his first succes­ful attempt at putting out an LP — no mean feat, considering that he'd already been a major fix­ture on NYC's underground scene for more than half a decade by then. However, like quite a few other unfortunate souls, Russell suffered from acute perfectionism, which led to very sporadic re­leases — and, as it always happens with perfectionists, drastically imperfect ones.

 

Before this album, Arthur had already made a name for himself writing and recording several club hits in the disco vein, most notably 'Kiss Me Again' and 'Go Bang!' (the latter is actually included on the LP). The idea behind most of them was to get smart and turn disco into an art form, just like the Beatles managed to do with basic pop rock a decade earlier; in fact, another side project, «Loose Joints», headed by Russell in 1980, openly declared an intention to come up with a «disco White Album», but eventually had to eat shit —be­cause «genius», per se, does not yield amazing product.

 

Still, while I'd never go as far as to claim that Arthur Russell had true «genius», one has to admit that 24→24 Music, an experimental 30-minute LP exploring the true power of disco rhythms, is disco the way you never heard it. For starters, its title is derived from the fact that each track un­dergoes a rhythmic/melodic shift every 24 bars. To my ears, that certainly is not the case, but it certainly is true that every single track undergoes several radical shifts as they go along — in stark contrast to the usual story with club disco grooves, stretched out to eternity so as to offer all sorts of dance opportunities.

 

Not that one couldn't dance to these tracks — on the contrary, the rhythm section makes it certain that the seven/eight-minute grooves continue uninterrupted. But as the beat goes on, in the back­ground you virtually have a musical slide projector, incessantly shifting gears, from jazzy organ solos to R&B-ish brass explosions to funky, bluesy, or metallic guitar breaks, to strange and com­pletely unpredictable vocal overdubs. And, sometimes, various combinations of all those. It's an odd melange of ideas, some of them mediocre, some fabulous, but all of them rushing before your eyes and ears way too quickly.

 

As a matter of fact, most of these ideas were improvised: Russell preprogrammed the beats, and his musician friends played whatever would be playable on top. If that idea sounds odd, it might actually seem odder that nobody really thought of it before — after all, disco is just a simplified, mechanized form of funk, and for a hot bunch of musicians to go «disco jamming» would hardly be a serious problem if they set out such a goal. On the other hand, the final product, with all these shifts and cuts (Russell must have worn out several pairs of scissors assembling the LP ver­sion), sounds anything but improvised.

 

Of course, the album falls into the unhappy category of «no-man's-land-records»: real disco fans would hardly bother with it because it was so weird (not to mention being so late: was anybody even buying regular disco stuff in 1981?), and regular music intellectuals would definitely not be­come attracted to the style just because some weirdo from Oskaloosa, Iowa had found a way to express his creative artistic nature through it. And, frankly, as much as I'd love to love this record just because it sounds so totally like nothing else... well, there just might be a good reason why everything else sounds nothing like it. If I want to dance (which I don't), I'd rather just choose one of those Donna Summer grooves. But if I don't want to dance... do I really have to spend my time counting out sequences of 24 bars for thirty minutes? Now there's a good question to ask Arthur Russell, if, by any chance, you die and meet him in Heaven before the end of the day.

 

Still, a thumbs up, if only for the masterfully hellish atmosphere set up on parts of '#6 (Get Set)', especially when the dry distorted glam-rock guitars start dueting with Sly Stone-style brass fan­fares. Don't forget to turn the volume up when that bit comes along — it's as sleazy as classic mode R&B ever gets, and double sleazy if we remember that, at that very same time, Michael Jackson and Prince were dealing the final death blows to classic mode R&B.

 

TOWER OF MEANING (1983)

 

1) Tower Of Meaning; 2) Tower Of Meaning; 3) Tower Of Meaning; 4) Tower Of Meaning; 5) Tower Of Meaning; 6) Tower Of Meaning.

 

The only reason to listen to this record — once, if you can stomach it — is if you have already as­similated the oddness of 24→24 Music, and want to experience one of the most bizarre transiti­ons from album to album since Lou Reed followed up Sally Can't Dance with Metal Machine Music. «Open-minded» opinions on such albums usually imply that it is the ability to «get» such artistic statements that separate superhumans from mere mortals; I am more of the «close-min­ded» type, who just thinks it's misguided crap, so bear with me.

 

Apparently, though, it wasn't supposed to be that crappy. Tower Of Meaning, like basically all of Russell's projects, is an unfinished recording. It was supposed to become a soundtrack for an avantgarde staging of Medea, with voices and additional sound layers recorded over the cel­lo, key­board, and orchestral parts laid down by Russell. However, the composer and the director eventually parted ways because they quickly began hating each other's guts, and Arthur decided to simply put out whatever was finished, because, clearly, by the time he was fired from the pro­ject, he knew he would not have the enthusiasm to go on messing around with it.

 

In the end, Tower Of Meaning became an interminable forty-five slab of «incidental music», released on a private label run by (who else?) Philip Glass. A comprehensive description would be «Ambient Symphony for Cello and Orchestra»: most of the space is occupied by repetitive two or three note phrases drawn out to various lengths and thickened by various combinations of (mo­stly string) instruments. Sometimes it sounds like tuning up; sometimes (very rarely) it sounds like «generic» modern classical slowed down to a creep and deconstructed to the bare essence; and sometimes it sounds like a stray dog killer.

 

I can definitely agree with a reviewer who found some «gloominess» lurking inside the recording — it certainly does not convey any happiness, that's for sure. But there is really no sense in pre­tending that it somehow affects the senses on a spiritual, rather than purely physiological level. Basically, my idea of «experimental music» may be stretched out far and wide, but nowhere does it cover a gloomy lonesome guy replaying the same few notes on his cello for 45 minutes. At least when Brian Eno does that, there is no effect of somebody drawing out a hacksaw and getting to work on your poor harmless ears. Thumbs down — this is a classic example of a «failed ex­periment» if there ever was one, although, granted, Russell may only have been guilty of deciding to make the raw materials public, instead of grinding them in the trash can. (Gotta love the title, though: as ironic as irony can get).

 

WORLD OF ECHO (1986)

 

1) Tone Bone Kone; 2) Soon-To-Be Innocent Fun / Let's See; 3) Answers Me; 4) Being It; 5) Place I Know / Kid Like You; 6) She's The Star / I Take This Time; 7) Tree House; 8) See-Through; 9) Hiding Your Present From You; 10) Wax The Van; 11) All-Boy All-Girl; 12) Lucky Cloud; 13) Tower Of Meaning / Rabbit's Ear / Home Away From Home; 14) Let's Go Swimming; 15*) The Name Of The Next Song; 16*) Happy Ending; 17*) Canvas Home; 18*) Our Last Night Together.

 

If you only know about this album from the All-Music Guide review — beware, beware! The au­thor, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, tags the record as «an incredible assemblage of solo versions of this influential and unique downtown musician» and describes it as «subtle, transcendental with gentle rock beats and new music influences in patternings and textures». But then, of course, at the other end of the playground there's always Joe the Plumber, who calls World Of Echo «the biggest pile of sonic shit I've ever seen — and, believe you me, when I'm talking about seeing shit, I damn well know what I'm talking about!» With both sides of the story thus in the can, it's up to you to make your own choice.

 

If the title of Tower Of Meaning could only be perceived with irony, World Of Echo is pretty straightforward. It is mostly just Arthur and his cello, sometimes with a little extra percussion thrown in; the cello itself is either bowed in a modern-classical manner, or plucked to get a jazzy rhythm going on (so much for «new music influences»: by 1986, none of these tricks were new, although, granted, it was rather novel to hear them from a guy formerly known as an enthusiastic «intelligent disco music» activist).

 

The big difference is that, well, everything has an echo. The plucked cello, the bowed cello, the vocals, even the percussion — everything is run through echo effects of varying force. As a result, the louder you turn up your speakers, the more you get the feeling that either it is you sitting in­side a deep stone well and the cellist is performing on top, or vice versa. Some would call this ef­fect psychedelic, but, the way I see it, psychedelic music is an attempt to mimic the complex, un­predictable, and uncontrollable processes going through your brain, and this sort of effect is fully external rather than internal. If you ever experience something like World Of Echo going inside your brain, better see a doctor at once — most likely, you have a concussion or something.

 

I have seen people swear by this album as the lone forgotten masterpiece of 1986. Unfortunately, I can neither join them nor jeer at them, because every time I listen to these «tunes», or, rather, what sounds to me like raw improvisatory attempts to put together a set of tunes, I cannot under­stand if there is some compositional or artistic genius inside, or if there isn't: the damn echo keeps getting me all muddled. Content-wise, World Of Echo could be called «diverse»: there's some gentle pastoralism ('Soon-To-Be-Innocent Fun', 'She's The Star'), power-pop ('Being It'), New Wave ('Place I Know'), garage-rock ('Treehouse'), hard rock ('Wax The Van'), maybe something else, but you could just as well shift some of these tags around — that's just some spur-of-the-moment impres­sions. Formally, it's all just «echo music», and I am unable to determine if it's all a huge attempt to arrogantly mask the lack of genius by drowning it in the excessive abuse of pro­duction gadgetry, or an attempt to humbly mask the presence of genius by hiding it behind a wall of innovative production ideas. (Occasionally, I tilt towards the latter, because some of these tunes, e. g. 'Wax The Van', are alternate versions of the man's notable disco hits from previous years – but, on the other hand, not all of these tunes were that fabulous in the first place).

 

One thing is for certain: World Of Echo sounds like nothing ever done before. This sort of expe­rimentation has its firm roots in avantgarde and jazz history, as well as occasional explorations in pop music territory (I'd say Skip Spence's Oar might be one of the forefathers), but the combina­tion of length, chosen instruments, and a total lack of compromise ensures that this will always be a cult favorite, no matter how small the cult. Even for naysayers, it might be useful to listen to this stuff once, make an effort not to make «hate this useless crap» into a final verdict, and then put it away, with a possibility to return to it once more... some day. Which is exactly what we are going to do right now, and move on.

 

 PS. The most curious track is actually available now as a bonus on the new CD edition: the eight minute long 'The Name Of The Next Song', where, every few bars, Arthur stops playing and says "The name of the next song is...", then invents some crazyass title which I cannot make out be­cause of the goddamn echo (yeah, I suck at airport loudspeakers too), and goes on playing the same cello-raga with different words. It's so overwhelmingly silly, it just works.

 

ANOTHER THOUGHT (1994)

 

1) Another Thought; 2) A Little Lost; 3) Home Away From Home; 4) Lucky Cloud; 5) This Is How We Walk On The Moon; 6) Hollow Tree; 7) See Through Love; 8) Keeping Up; 9) In The Light Of The Miracle; 10) Lucky Cloud (Return); 11) Just A Blip; 12) Me For Real; 13) Losing My Taste For The Night Life; 14) My Tiger, My Timing; 15) A Sudden Chill.

 

For his legacy to live on, Arthur Russell had to die. This took place on April 4, 1992, four months after Freddie Mercury and for the exact same reason (although, hopefully, because of different partners). Since the man had allegedly left several thousand tapes worth of unfinished recordings behind him, it was only a matter of time, and personal devotion, before someone would eventual­ly get to them and reveal the hidden-iceberg part of the Tortured Genius™ to the public.

 

The first of many posthumous releases, Another Thought is basically World Of Echo without the echo (or, at least, with much less echo), which is why it will probably work best as an intro­duction to the minimalist, introspective side of Russell. Only a few of the tracks feature fuller ar­rangements, with dance beats and additional backing vocals; for the most part, it's just Arthur, his cello, and sometimes a little acoustic guitar or bass to add spice.

 

Like World Of Echo, this one is never ever about hooks. Some of the vocal lines might have staying power, but only unintentionally so. If there is a true spiritual predecessor to this kind of music, it is Tim Buckley circa Starsailor: it's all about complex, not-easy-to-memorize vocaliza­tion patterns woven around equally complex chords that mix pop, jazz, and modern classical sequences in the most unpredictable manner.

 

Although the resulting atmosphere seems to have mystery, soul, and emotion a-plenty, this is still a very tightly controlled set of tracks — certainly not your average «mad man» record. The sonic pattern of a single track may change several times over a couple of minutes, with the cello bowed, plucked, scraped, pulled, moving from dissonance to perfect harmony and back, but this is not im­provisation, these are all attempts at introducing a new type of singer-songwriter: the progres­sive experimentalist. Does it work?

 

For me, it does not. The greatest asset that my tastes can discern is Russell's singing voice: smooth, intelligent, not exactly «powerful» or «technically developed», but seductive in its in­no­cence and friendliness, along the same lines as Ray Davies. And, since the cello backings are not intentionally «ugly», but relatively well-ordered, this gives a certain unique type of pleasant, gen­t­ly rocking, «cloudy» sound that would be quite tolerable as background music for... well, for a trendy installation or happening, rather than your average evening.

 

But I do not see how this kind of sound could ever go beyond «interesting». Despite all the diver­sity, it is still too monotonous and way too self-concentrated. (Excuses that these are just «unfi­nished demos» do not really work — this album is better than World Of Echo, officially sancti­oned by Russell for release during his lifetime). Russell's cello speaks to me with a voice that I cannot understand or appreciate, and pretty much cancels out the positive effects of his voice. And as for the rhythm-based numbers, they are hardly among his best: 'My Tiger, My Timing' has too much annoying tennis-ball-style percussion and a mind-numbingly repetitive chorus, and 'In The Light Of The Miracle' features inventive vocal harmony overlays, but little else.

 

I rate this whole approach as a «failed experiment». Were this guy a real loonie, like Syd Barrett, he would have a greater appeal. Were he a master player — a pop equivalent of a Rostropovich or something — he would have an even greater appeal. But I could never praise an artist to high heaven just for the sake of his «trying to be different». Aren't we all, for Chrissake? This is boring experimental cello music with good vocals. The only «song» I really liked was 'Keeping Up', with an unknown female vocalist joining Russell to create a psychedelic, but optimistic duet that alleviates the boredom for about six minutes. The rest is not for me — if I want «sensitive» and «fragile», I'll stick with my Tim Buckley, Skip Spence, and Nick Drake. As for the final judge­ment, let's put it this way: Another Thought is way too smart a thought to be tagged as «stinky pseudo-intellectual crap», but I do not see myself getting into a fist fight with anyone else who'd like to do the ho­nors.

 

CALLING OUT OF CONTEXT (2004)

 

1) The Deer In The Forest Part 1; 2) The Platform On The Ocean; 3) You And Me Both; 4) Calling Out Of Con­text; 5) Arm Around You; 6) That's Us / Wild Combination; 7) Make 1, 2; 8) Hop On Down; 9) Get Around To It; 10) I Like You!; 11) You Can Make Me Feel Bad; 12) Calling All Kids.

 

The floodgates really opened in 2004, when some of Russell's former friends and partners, backed by the Audika Records label, struck a deal with Arthur's estate that allowed them to pre­pare and release anything of worth that could be located in his vast archives. Calling Out Of Con­­text and its follow-ups essentially opened up a second life for Russell — now, suddenly, af­ter a long period of oblivion, he would be reincarnated as a hipster idol. Smart, cool, ahead of his time, experimental, lonely, misunderstood, romantic, played the cello, toyed with disco beats, died young and abandoned — Jesus Christ, eat your heart out.

 

If we are to believe the liner notes, most of the tracks here date from mid- to late 1980s, inclu­ding selections from one fully finished, but unreleased, album, and one unfinished and, consequently, also unreleased album. Most of the playing is by Arthur himself, with the exception of live per­cussion and drum programming by Mustafa Akhmed, and synthesizer backing by Peter Zummo. And the big difference from Another Thought is that most of the tracks are danceable — beats, steady bass, and synth loops are all over the place here.

 

Melody-wise, most of it sucks. The drum machines are ugly, and memorable grooves are lacking. The overall goals are either «minimalistic» (when everything bar the drums and vocals is kept very quiet and in the background), or «expressionistic» (when cellos, guitars, and synths rumble and grumble without too much coherence, and you are supposed to school your soul into finding that coherence on your own). I cannot even tell which way I like it more, because in either case, horribly annoying 1980s percussion takes the cake.

 

As usual, the day is saved (or at least, redeemed) by whatever we have here of Russell's persona. Possibly not on purpose, most of the songs here are tied together by a lonesome romantic stretch: this is even more of a love ballad collection than Another Thought, and, as repetitive as they are, Arthur's vocal hooks on these tracks are absolutely the best thing about the album. You will have to wait for them, though, tearing through the long stretch of 'The Platform On The Ocean', whose neo-psychedelic vocal overdubs over a boring distorted guitar track are sort of pointless.

 

However, 'You And Me Both', 'Arm Around You', 'Get Around To It', and 'I Like You!' all have charming bits of falsetto gorgeousness, which, in typical Russell fashion, is lightly sprayed from your speakers across the room rather than concentrated and ejected forcefully in your face, as on a typical disco album. These are soft, melancholic, but highly friendly deliveries, the likes of which you can certainly never encounter in combination with such specific melodic backing as on an Arthur Russell album. It is almost incredible, in fact, that they were deliberately combined with this sort of music by the very same person — had I not known the details, I could have sworn that somebody just pilfered the lead vocals off some intelligent 1970s soft-rock album and spliced them over this odd mix of programmed beats.

 

Best of the lot is 'That's Us/Wild Combination', a heartwarming duet with Jennifer Warnes where, for once, the drumbeat is simply a drumbeat, unassumingly hacking away in the background and leaving the singers alone, backed just by a spare cello part. The song is, in fact, a good starting point for getting acquainted with Russell — for everyone, that is, who requires a fast initial sedu­c­tion by the artist in order to be persuaded to explore the artist's career in-depth. Here you have cello, beauty, romance, intelligence, toe-tapping, echo, and accessibility.

 

Elsewhere, you have... problems. Much of the time, they can be overridden. Sometimes, they can't. In any case, it's a good thing the record is out: as far as it is from a masterpiece, it still sal­vages for us one more piece of this strange man's soul. As long as it does not breed dozens of wannabe-Russells, all of whom just happen to «really understand» what this man was all about because they are all so very much like him, Calling Out Of Context is a worthy addition to the already extravagant puzzle of «The True Colors Of Music In The 1980s».

 

THE WORLD OF ARTHUR RUSSELL (2004)

 

1) Go Bang (Dinosaur L); 2) Wax The Van (Lola); 3) Is It All Over My Face (Loose Joints); 4) Keeping Up; 5) In The Light Of The Miracle; 6) A Little Lost; 7) Pop Your Funk (Loose Joints); 8) Let's Go Swimming; 9) In The Corn­belt (Dinosaur L); 10) Treehouse; 11) Schoolbell/Treehouse (Indian Ocean).

 

Combing the archives and separating «what looks to have been almost finished» from «what looks to have been barely started» is an entertaining occupation, but what the world really needed was a comprehensive compilation of stuff that Russell had managed to officially release back in the good old days, under a variety of different monikers — stuff that earned him his reputation in the first place. Most of it only came out as singles (highly collectible by now) or scattered tracks on «various artists» releases.

 

The aptly titled World Of Arthur Russell is not fully comprehensive; it covers most of the di­rec­­tions and projects Russell was involved in throughout the 1980s, but never exhaustively (for instance, of the three songs released by the «superproject» Loose Joints, only two are included here). Nevertheless, it is a good starting place to get to know the man in both of his most impor­tant incarnations: the «thinking man's dance-pop wizard» and the «echoey cello romantic». Some have lodged complaints about the final product sounding quite disjointed, but, heck, it's a compi­lation, not a rock opera: feel free to re-join it any way you want.

 

Rhythmic grooves dominate the record, which is not surprising, since rhythmic grooves were Rus­sell's main means of earning his living. And, starting with arguably his best-known track, 'Go Bang' (originally released as «Dinosaur L»; different mix here from the one used on 24→24 Mu­sic), and ending with the electronic bongo showcase 'Schoolbell' (a collaboration with Peter Zum­mo from around 1986), they all share more or less the same ideology, despite being very different from a technical point of view. It is as if Russell managed to see the worst flaw of disco and post-disco music — the «robotization» of sound, the replacement of the «living and breathing groove» by the formally impeccable, but spiritually meaningless mechanic techniques and technologies — and decided to turn it upside down by multiplying and diversifying his own robots.

 

I cannot even say that I like any of these tracks — but I am impressed by each and every one of them. Listen to 'Wax The Van', a 1987 collaboration between Arthur and singer Lola Blank. The rhythm section is trivial, with the bass line sounding like something you'd hear on a generic Eigh­ties Eurocrap album. The singer sounds like a parody on early Kate Bush. The cheap Casio lines are... cheap. The minimalistic electric piano solo at the end of the song has been done many times before. But taken together, all these elements mutate into one single mega-odd entity. You can think of it in a variety of ways — music of the future, ahead of its time by two thousand light years; psychological bait, paving the way for mindless kids at the disco to plunge into more com­plex music; reflection of the soul state of a deeply troubled, insecure person etc. But whichever particular way you prefer, there is no denying the bravery of this and other experiments — here was a guy who, instead of choosing a safe (but boring) career in modern classical, intentionally penetrated the dumbest of all spheres of pop, and infused it with a creative avantgarde spirit.

 

I mean, much of this sounds like «parody» (the «sleazy» 'Pop Your Funk' is the most glaring ex­ample), but I am not even sure if humor and satire were ever present on Arthur's mind while wri­ting and producing this material. «Sexy» dance-pop frequently borders on unintentional self-pa­rody by itself, and putting all these flourishes on the style cannot help but make it funny. How­ever, that is not the main point. The main point is that thirteen minutes of 'In The Light Of The Miracle' are like an insane «dance-prog» epic, where Latin percussion rhythms, ambient synth landscapes, tricky interweaving vocal harmonies à la Gentle Giant, and dissonant avantgarde cel­lo passages all coexist in a state of mathematically justified psychedelia.

 

Whenever you are ready to take a break from this befuddling mix of weirdness and banality, Rus­sell's sensitive side is here for you, with nice, accessible versions of 'Keeping Up' and 'A Little Lost' that remind us of how exactly the guy missed a successful career in romantic balladeer-ism. And the brief two-minute version of 'Treehouse' echoes World Of Echo, reminding us of how exactly the guy used to undermine all the LPs released during his lifetime with «unlistenable» production technologies, palatable only for those select few who spend half of their lives training their ears to orgasm at the sounds of Einstürzende Neubauten.

 

In brief — yep, this here is one truly eclectic collection, although it certainly does not open up the entire world of Arthur Russell. But it is definitely the place to start for the uninitiated person. If you do not get interested in anything beyond 'Go Bang' and 'Wax The Van', it is also the place to end; but if the «quiet» and «echoey» side of Arthur intrigues you as much as his dance side, by all means, go on to World Of Echo and Another Thought. In the meantime, this is the easiest, even if not at all «heart-friendly», thumbs up in his entire catalog.

 

FIRST THOUGHT BEST THOUGHT (2006)

 

1) "Instrumentals" Volume 1; 2) "Instrumentals" Volume 2; 3) Reach One; 4) Tower Of Meaning; 5) Sketch For The Face Of Helen.

 

This monster 2-CD set is not for the common man. Completely instrumental and mostly «mini­ma­list / ambient» in scope, it is a great discovery for the Giants of the Open-Minded Approach. In the meantime, I can only try to review it from the humble viewpoint of the Dwarf of the Open-Minded Approach, with all the honesty and integrity that go along with it. (Besides, it's always a great opportunity to use dirty words and get away with it).

 

The first CD includes two «volumes» of «Instrumentals» – two sets of meditative musical paint­ings, at least the first of which goes back to the mid-Seventies, when it was designed to accompa­ny some nature photos taken by a Japanese photographer (A-R-T, boys and girls!). For some rea­son, though, only the second volume saw the light of day in Russell's own lifetime (originally re­leased in 1984)...

 

...which, I think, is a great injustice, since Volume 1 is far more interesting. Listening to it syn­thesizes the idea of an «art-pop jam» in my mind, which is something fairly unique. We all know jazz jams, blues jams, psychedelic drone jams etc., but this stuff sounds a bit like... well, imagine Brian Wilson's backing band on Pet Sounds that, one of those days, suddenly decided to take a break and just kick back and improvise on some of the themes, without soloing.

 

Basically, it's a set of free-flowing rhythmic motions, with lots of instruments that behave «nor­mally», but «atmospherically», just drifting around without any apparent goal. Horns, strings (in­cluding Russell's own cello), and percussion are usually in the lead, but guitars, bass, and probab­ly numerous other instruments are also present. Technically, it is «boring», and not exactly «bea­utiful» in the conventional sense of the word, but it also does not feel one bit pretentious. Some­how, it manages to create a minimalistic impression without actually being minimalistic — with all these instruments, you'd think there'd be a lot of stuff going on, when nothing really goes on. So, if you want to really learn how to create Nothing from Lotsa Something, this here is a ten-sec­tion crash course that I find amazingly instructive.

 

'Volume 2' is where the problems start. To learn my opinion of it, please refer to the Tower Of Meaning review — not accidentally, Tower Of Meaning itself constitutes the bulk of the second disk here, flowing almost seamlessly out of the second chunk of 'Instrumentals'. Although the first track still has some percussion and extra stuff, it is dominated by cello droning, which even­tually squeezes out everything else. If you like to spend long winter evenings listening to gusts of wind howling in the pipes... ah, well, forget it.

 

To «round things out», the second disc ends with a very early experimental composition (the six­teen-minute long 'Reach One', on which Russell records a competition in minimalism between two Fender Rhodes pianos), and 'Sketch For The Face Of Helen', on which a field recording of a started-up tugboat is combined with an electronic tone generator — tons of fun for the entire fa­mily, especially if the father is an electrician at the local harbor.

 

Still, the presence of 'Instrumentals Vol. 1' makes the album a very important release in Russell's post-mortem history, maybe even a must-have for all those interested in collecting as many di­ver­si­fied approaches to music-making as possible. These are cool, melodic, thoroughly un-ugly, and yet, quite unique trills coming from your speakers, and they do a far better job of «colorizing» the guy than about 50% of his released output. (The rest, for all I know, may be exclusively for those A-R-T people whose grand­mothers were abducted by aliens).

 

SPRINGFIELD (2006)

 

1) Springfield; 2) Springfield (DFA Remix); 3) Springfield (Detail); 4) See My Brother, He's Jumping Out (Let's Go Swimming #1); 5) Corn #3; 6) Hiding Your Present From You; 7) You Have Did The Right Thing When You Put That Skylight In.

 

I do not even know why this is available in the first place. The only «autonomous» track on this mini-album is 'Springfield' itself, a track recorded some time in the late Eighties, but not late enough to serve as a tribute to Matt Groening. It is not at all different from many other «synth-prog» grooves that we already know, and, in fact, I find it deadly boring. The gimmick consists of a rigidly scraped cello looped as one of the rhythm tracks. So what? There is neither melody nor atmosphere here.

 

The rest of the record seems to have been hastily assembled around this «masterpiece», but most of the tracks are actually better. In the nearly instrumental 'DFA Remix' of 'Springfield', the subtle brass overdubs are pushed higher in the mix, so that the track gets a slight atmospheric injection. 'See My Brother, He's Jumping Out' features a somewhat more complex style of percussion pro­gramming (still way too much Eighties for me to be enjoyable) and various small sonic effects, mostly in the form of synth bleeps and cello scratches, that help it get along. And 'Hiding Your Present From You' is, at long last, an actual song, allowing Russell's otherworldly optimism echo through the contradicting layers of ambient cloudy synths and distorted noise-rock guitar.

 

Still, the only track of any true interest on the album, I think, is the last one, which sounds as if it itself had no idea of where it was coming from or going to. Basically, it is a heavy cello freakout, not unlike something in the vein of Adrian Belew, but done with a bow rather than a pick, and with far more echo and wobble than Belew would ever allow himself — to conceal the lack of technique, perhaps, as experimental players often do — but the reality is such that this sound is cool. If you have a cello, do not try this at home, though. Might as well just start pouring acid on your floorboards.

 

Considering that the well of unissued treasures had by no means yet run dry, I seriously question the purposes of this release. It may only be of interest to seriously hardcore fans of Arthur Russell, and I seriously be­lieve that all of them dwell together in a two-bedroom apartment somewhere in the Village. Thumbs down, despite some occasionally pleasant quirkiness.

 

LOVE IS OVERTAKING ME (2008)

 

1) Close My Eyes; 2) Goodbye Old Paint; 3) Maybe She; 4) Oh Fernanda Why; 5) Time Away; 6) Nobody Wants A Lonely Heart; 7) I Couldn't Say It To Your Face; 8) This Time Dad You're Wrong; 9) What It's Like; 10) Eli; 11) Hey! How Does Everybody Know; 12) I Forget And I Can't Tell (Ballad Of The Lights Pt. 1); 13) Habit Of You; 14) Janine; 15) Big Moon; 16) Your Motion Says; 17) The Letter; 18) Don't Forget About Me; 19) Love Is Overtaking Me; 20) Planted A Thought; 21) Love Comes Back.

 

This is yer friendly, cozy, homely companion to The World Of Arthur Russell: Audika's most widely celebrated and acclaimed archival release so far. It is one of the very few Russell albums to feature a clear, unaltered, and even somewhat «pastoral/cowboyish» picture of Arthur on the front sleeve — and the sleeve matches the contents, because the tracks that are assembled here, stretched over the man's entire career, are, for the most part, acoustic demos and sparsely ar­ranged live instrument recordings. Programmed beats? Fuzzy avantgarde cello? Echo-laden hyp­notic vocals? Forget it. On Love Is Overtaking Me, Arthur Russell says hello to James Taylor. To Bob Dylan. To Lou Reed. And, sometimes, to the Cars.

 

On this album, Arthur Russell is just a normal, lyrical kind of fellow. Fragile, insecure, a little romantic, a little paranoid, the works. Like a slightly less mystical and wizardly version of Nick Drake, or a slightly more coherent and down-to-earth version of Syd Barrett. He plays acoustic guitar — a lot; engages in lots of folk- and country-rock, particularly during the first half of the album; and, overall, through the careful selective work of his mediators, comes out as a soulful hero of the lo-fi style, ideal for modern hipster consumption. Released, say, somewhere around the mid-Eighties, the album would have left no trace; today, it is a mini-sensation.

 

Unfortunately, I cannot pretend to be impressed. It is a very nice, accessible, intelligent collec­tion, but I fail to see any signs of genius. Melody-wise, the folk/country-ish half of the album is not at all rich on ideas — some generic waltzing, some minimalistic minor chord constructions that re­mind me of Nick Drake's Pink Moon (an album I have always considered to be overrated exactly because of its disappointing «minimalism»), some songs that sound like outtakes from a Bob Dy­lan album circa his Planet Waves period ('I Couldn't Say It To Your Face', etc.). You really have to have a special feel for Russell's personality in order to count any of these tunes as masterpieces; myself, I prefer to just view them as a marginally impressive additional side to that personality.

 

Luckily, the more fully arranged half of the record contains quite a few good pop songs. For instance, 'Hey! How Does Everybody Know' is stylish, catchy folk-pop à la Beau Brummels; 'I Forget And I Can't Tell', with its fast tempo and positive beat, could also have been a minor hit circa 1963 or so. 'Habit Of You' is a major highlight, a tune so insecure of itself it pushes New Wave synths, country-rock slide guitars, art-rock vocal harmonies, and classic singer-songwriter's paranoia into one three-minute package. 'Big Moon', on the other hand, sounds so oddly close to a typical 1970's soft-rock hit that one begins to wonder whatever made Russell experiment with that kind of songwriting — could it be that he was actually a closet fan of Bread? The versatility hits home, though, when the very next song ('Your Motion Says') betrays him as the invisible fifth member of The Cars (same interaction between guitars and keyboards). Etc. etc.

 

Summing up, Love Is Overtaking Me is an album best taken in perspective, both in its own and within the rest of Russell's catalog. From what I have just written, one could get the impression that Arthur was just a musical chameleon, a sort of American David Bowie with even wider scope and, arguably, even less talent. This is absolutely not the case. Russell's music is driven far more by his hear-and-soul complex than by intellectual calculation, and none of these particular songs sound like conscious experiments, they simply reflect various strains of influences that this omnivorous gentleman had embedded in himself. But it is only in this whole palette of influences that an «interesting» Arthur Russell begins to take shape. Individually, none of these songs have any intrigue; collectively, they represent one of the oddest intrigues of our time, and you do not even need a hipster conscience to come to that conclusion. Thumbs up.

ASIA

ASIA (1982)

 

1) Heat Of The Moment; 2) Only Time Will Tell; 3) Sole Survivor; 4) One Step Closer; 5) Time Again; 6) Wildest Dreams; 7) Without You; 8) Cutting It Fine; 9) Here Comes The Feeling.

 

In the big book of rock music, Asia (and its follow-up, Alpha, recorded with the same lineup) must hold the re­cord spot for «Largest Amount of Wasted Talent Ever Assembled in One Spot». It took all the expertise of Family/King Crimson bassist/vocalist John Wetton, Yes guitar wiz Steve Howe, ELP drum giant Carl Palmer, and Geoff "Video Killed The Radio Star" Downes —to release the «arena pop» album to end all «arena pop» albums, and, in the process, to serve as a textbook illustration of so many things that were wrong with the Eighties.

 

Let me be heard here: I would actually love to try and see Asia re-recorded, or, at least, re-mixed from the original tapes with new overdubs. There are some genuinely strong pop melodies here. There is an atmosphere of starry-eyed idealism carried over from the Yes/ELP camp, as if the spirits of Greg Lake and Jon Anderson were silently watching over the studio. There are some really nifty guitar parts: Howe is always Howe, no matter which crazy project he is getting draf­ted into. It's just that, in the end, everything is ruined by the «heat of the moment» — namely, the commercial requirements of the time.

 

In a different age, under different stage lights, these people might have come together to record a new Close To The Edge, sharpened by a touch of Red and tempered with a dip of Brain Salad Surgery. But "now you find yourself in '82", according to what the album opener tells us, and the next two lines load and display the program: "The disco hot spots hold no charm for you / You can concern yourself with bigger things". See? How do you justify the fact that you have just gone from playing in the intellectual-est prog bands of the last decade to churning out generic are­na-pop? Simple — just put yourself in the position of «educating the masses». Yesterday, they were all grooving along to 'Jive Talking'; today, prog masters are leading them on into bigger and better things. It's The Three Tenors!!!

 

Yet I have to admit — for some reason, I really like this record. Every once in a while, it plunges into the unbearable, like the power ballad 'Without You' (a disgrace to the respectable name of the other power ballad 'Without You' — the Badfinger one); but for the most part, it is catchy, not always trivial, highly melodic stuff whose main deficiency lies in the arrangements. Chief cul­prit  is Downes, playing lifeless, predictable string-imitating Eighties keyboards. Minor culprit is Carl Palmer, not so much for the unnecessary electronic enhancement of his drums as for not really justifying his presence on the songs — most of these parts could have been performed by anyone. The lyrics are better left alone, to avoid getting burned by their mock-Byronesque seriousness. Other than that — Asia rules (on all of the rather small territory that remains).

 

My personal favorites include 'Only Time Will Tell', mainly for the excellent in-between verse breaks, punctuated by a screeching guitar part from Howe (also, imagine how much better those synth fan­fares would have sounded if played by real brass); and the first part of 'Cutting It Fine', with Wetton's vocals and Howe's guitar locking their jaws in a slightly more aggressive bite than usual. The big, anthemic hit single 'Heat Of The Moment' needs to be mentioned, but it is way too radio-oriented to remain in memory as a major highlight. Suffice it to say that the generic pop-me­tal guitar tone, so popular with the arena-rock of the times, appears on Asia in all of its ste­roid-based muscular form only on 'Heat Of The Moment'. The rest of the songs are usually rhyth­mically driven by the keyboards, whereas Howe's guitar is reserved for gentle melodic soloing (and that soloing is well worth tracking out and following throughout the album).

 

It is, I think, predictable, that four guys like that could not have created an utterly worthless al­bum. They tried their best, to be sure, but, in the end, Asia still emerges as a «survivor» — a re­cord hopelessly chained to its rather tasteless epoch, but with enough merits to compensate for the tastelessness. Put it on for your kid if you want to teach him what the «overground» used to be like in 1982. At least it beats Kim Wilde. Thumbs up, if that helps.

 

ALPHA (1983)

 

1) Don't Cry; 2) The Smile Has Left Your Eyes; 3) Never In A Million Years; 4) My Own Time (I'll Do What I Want); 5) The Heat Goes On; 6) Eye To Eye; 7) The Last To Know; 8) True Colors; 9) Midnight Sun; 10) Open Your Eyes.

 

The follow-up to Asia was much less successful, both commercially and critically. No big sur­prise there, considering that Howe and Palmer, the two acknowledged «giants» of the supergroup, are now completely missing from the credits — all of the songs are associated exclusively with the Wetton/Downes songwriting duo. Critical hatred may have engulfed «progressive rock» as a whole, and Yes and ELP as its representatives, but it was never targeted against individuals — you could be disgusted with Yes, but not its guitarist, and with ELP, but not its drummer. So, cri­tics were asking, what exactly is the point of having one of the best guitarists and one of the best drummers in the world in your «supergroup» — and relegating them to the position of easily re­placeable bit players?

 

It is true that Howe's role on Alpha is diminished even in comparison to Asia. I do not recall a single interesting or, in fact, noticeable guitar riff or solo on the entire album. But, on the other hand, it's not as if Asia's main points were about guitar work, either — and as for Palmer, he was drastically underused from the very beginning. So my bottomline is clear: if you like Asia at all, get ready to like Alpha, because they are twin brothers, concentrating on bombastic, but catchy arena pop-rock. That's about all there is to it.

 

I will not talk much about individual songs; they are fleshed out more or less in the same way, and alternate democratically between romantic balladry ('The Smile Has Left Your Eyes', Wet­ton's signature tune for years to come), upbeat happy arena-pop ('Don't Cry') and slightly harsher, grittier «rockers» ('The Heat Goes On', mood-wise = 'Cutting It Fine' from the previous record and, consequently, my personal favorite). The «progressive» spirit is only present on the coda to 'Open Your Eyes', but only in the form of a catchy and quite commercial «romantic mantra» that will emotionally convert fans of Styx and Journey rather than Yes and ELP.

 

What has always puzzled me is the question — why is it that I do not actively hate either Asia or Alpha? Both records seem to be the perfect candidates for stirring up green-tinged emotions. One key reason may be Wetton's singing voice: like Greg Lake's, it does not have that «operatic» flavor that so many arena-oriented vocalists often develop, thinking that, the closer you sound to Pavarotti on your records (and never mind the years of training — any idiot can sing opera as long as he ain't completely tonedeaf), the closer they get to Real Art. Wetton knows his limits and is always careful not to overstep them.

 

But even more important may be the fact that all of these songs are, essentially, quite well arran­ged. Lack of a distinct guitar sound may disappoint, but I would say it might have been an advan­tage — otherwise, too many of these songs could sound like Aerosmith power ballads. There is just enough guitar here to avoid the tag of «synth-pop», and the decision to generally avoid solos, or, at least, «egotistically mixed» solos, with the soloist high on top of everything else, was also correct (reducing potential threats of «pretentiousness»).

 

There may be other things at work, too, but I just want to draw attention to the fact that Asia and Alpha, of all the «dumb» arena-rock out there, are some of the «smartest» records in the genre. This does not mean that the «smartness» blows away the strong cheese smell, or that even a sin­gle of these «ecstatic» anthems merits even a single tear out of anyone's eyes (unless it's all about «how low the mighty have fallen»). But I believe this reasoning is at least enough to justify the thumbs up that I would not deny Alpha as Asia's little brother.

 

ASTRA (1985)

 

1) Go; 2) Voice Of America; 3) Hard On Me; 4) Wishing; 5) Rock And Roll Dream; 6) Countdown To Zero; 7) Love Now Till Eternity; 8) Too Late; 9) Suspicion; 10) After The War.

 

By 1985, Asia had pretty much squandered all of its critical credit (never impressive to begin with), and sales were also dropping — perhaps because that sole characteristics they were still re­taining from their «progressive» past, their stern pompous solemnity, was getting on the nerves of the MTV generation. Too adult, too boring.

 

The last straw was the departure of Howe, replaced by former Krokus guitarist Mandy Meyer. (John Wetton, too, was kicked out of the band for about a year, with Greg Lake replacing him on tour; but he managed to find his way back in before that lineup had a chance to record a new LP). The happening was more symbolic than substantial, because Howe's contributions to Alpha were minimal (at least, the ones that could be defined as «uniquely Howe-style») — but an asset is an asset, and the loss of an asset is always painful. Inspired by this misfortune, critics had a field day — and the album never even made it to the Top 50.

 

However, looking back on the entire sequence, it is really hard to tell why Astra should be «dis­appointing» after Alpha and even Asia. The only reason I would dock it half a star in comparison, were I still «starring» albums, is that it lacks a song in the style of 'Cutting It Fine' or 'The Heat Goes On', that is, a touch grittier than the rest. On Asia, Wetton functions in two modes only: (a) «exuberant» and (b) «lamenting». But, let us face it, both of those were his preferred modes on the earlier records as well.

 

Most of Astra is simply the same old catchy, shallow, but generally non-disgusting arena-pop. New guitarist Mandy Meyer does, unfortunately, bring in more of a pop-metal sound compared to Howe (most clearly evident on the lead-in single 'Go' with its steroid-muscular riffs), but, like Alpha, the music is mainly driven and dominated by Downes' keyboards, so it does not matter all that much. A few of the melodies are actually quite nice, e. g. the rhythmic ballad 'Wishing' (very close in style to The Alan Parsons Project — I'm fairly sure Alan would have arranged it far more tastefully, though); the «apocalyptic» mid-tempo rocker 'Countdown To Zero'; and the nuclear war «epic» 'After The War' (quite sincere in nature and relatively complex in execution). The on­ly pieces that really overdo the pomp thing are 'Voice Of America' — an almost Diane Warren-ish power ballad with unbearable pathos — and 'Rock And Roll Dream', which commits the ulti­mate crime of stuffing the words «rock and roll» in the title of a song that has nothing whatsoever to do with rock and roll. (Perhaps if it weren't seven minutes long...).

 

Okay, so perhaps 'Suspicion' moves the band way too close to adult contemporary and Bryan Adams, but on most of the tracks, they still ma­nage to stay one tiny step ahead of the pack, even though I can hardly prove that gut feeling.

 

I used to roll along with the critics at one time, thinking of Astra as a huge dip in quality — per­haps as the consequence of being way too appalled by the anthemic low points. But it may be ri­diculous in general to speak of the «quality» of Asia from a 2012 point of view. Their entire sound has been discredited so much that there is really no point in listening to the band at all these days, unless you are a real sucker for that Eighties keyboard sound (understandable, for me, only as a nostalgic side effect). These days, they are just a historic curio. And taken from that point of view, it does not seriously matter if your personal favorite is Asia, Alpha, or Astra. The melodies are always comparable in catchiness, and Wetton's singing is always comparable in tone and pitch — what's to worry about? The same tepid, historically stimulated thumbs up as always.

 

THEN & NOW (1990)

 

1) Only Time Will Tell; 2) Heat Of The Moment; 3) Wildest Dreams; 4) Don't Cry; 5) The Smile Has Left Your Eyes; 6) Days Like These; 7) Prayin' 4 A Miracle; 8) Am I In Love?; 9) Summer (Can't Last Too Long); 10) Voice Of America.

 

The worst sort of rip-off there is: not only was this a straightforward attempt to cheat clients out of their money with minimal effort, but the ludicrous title also added a streak of smug hypocrisy, passing this off as a «conceptual» artistic decision: «First, close your eyes and we will help you remember how Asia sounded five years ago. Now, open your eyes and you will hear how Asia sounds TODAY! Isn't this a fabulous experience? Hear the difference? No? You are absolutely correct. Neither do we. Sorry, no refunds.»

 

That was then, of course; now the financial issue is no longer so pressing, due to obvious circum­stances. But the original rip-off still remains a rip-off: Then & Now is of potential interest to the rare breed of die­hard Asia fans (yoohoo, anyone under 30?) and Roger Dean album art collectio­ners. The idea may have been to record a new album, after five years of procrastination, but if so, the well was so dry the band had to resort to cheating. In the end, they did not even fill out an en­tire side: the Then part takes up all of Side A, then gives way to four brand new «Now» tunes, then returns to wind things up with 'Voice Of America'.

 

I shouldn't even be reviewing the album as such, but it does have 'Days Like This', which I ho­nestly consider a good song, with a strong vocal part from Wetton and a relatively tasteful way of delivering its upbeat, optimistic message. The production is predictably awful: maybe someday somebody will have the brains to cover it in the style of classic Cheap Trick, with crunchy power pop guitars, and throw in a real brass section during the anthemic climactic moments. But they do nail it fairly well on the "days like these I feel like I could change the world" chorus — there is a brawny, fists-clenched aura about it without the song degenerating into hair metal or heart-shred­ding power balladry that I really like. It may not be coincidental that the song was not written by any of the band members, but by Steve Jones of the little-known roots-rock band The Unforgiven. Or it may be coincidental. After all, it's not as if Asia band members themselves never ever wrote a single good pop song. I «despise» the band like any fine, upstanding citizen of the world, and even I am not ready to make that claim.

 

Unfortunately, they do a fine job of provoking me into it on the other three songs. 'Prayin' 4 A Miracle' may have some integrity (if you like Wetton's singing at all, you have to admit that the «praying» thing in the chorus has a bit of epic touchiness to it), but, on the whole, is still rather languid and draggy. 'Summer (Can't Last Too Long)' is neither epic nor all that catchy, just a re­gular bouncy throwaway with zero meaning. And worst of the lot is 'Am I In Love?', a textbook example of «adult contemporary», but done with a touch of Diane Warren. On top of the song's creamcheese-and-corn atmosphere, the chorus "Am I in love, or is it the magic of tonight?" might just be ro­mantics' darkest hour. I have no doubt that, at one point or other, it must have been syn­dicated for Santa Barbara.

 

As for the Then part, well... the selection is fairly mediocre, focusing on the hits and additional band-cherished material on which we probably do not see eye-to-eye (I would rather prefer 'The Heat Goes On' and 'Cutting It Fine' than 'Wildest Dreams', obviously). But even if this were the best possible compilation out of a hundred choices, this wouldn't matter: Then & Now is a rotten, fake concept at the heart, and deserves nothing but a thumbs down regardless of the circumstan­ces. Not even the well-fed, glossy Pegasus, towering over all three past mascots of Asia on the front cover, can save the day with its unsubstantiated symbolism.

 

LIVE IN MOSCOW (1991)

 

1) Time Again; 2) Soul Survivor; 3) Don't Cry; 4) Geoff Downes – Keyboards; 5) Only Time Will Tell; 6) Rock And Roll Dream; 7) Starless; 8) Book Of Saturday; 9) The Smile Has Left Your Eyes; 10) The Heat Goes On; 11) Go; 12) Heat Of The Moment; 13) Open Your Eyes; 14) Kari-Anne.

 

Later in the decade, having officially settled in the elite center of Crapsville, Asia started relea­sing something like a dozen live albums per year, so that the grateful fans could savour every tiny nuance of their magnificent power ballads. But in the early 1990s, they were still focusing on the studio, which makes their first venture into live album territory worth at least a brief separate mention. Besides, as a certified Muscovite, I just couldn't ignore this one, could I?

 

The fact is, of course, that in 1990 the Soviet Union had only just opened its doors to Western acts, and each big live show from an established rock act was a major «happening». This is how old has-beens like Deep Purple and, God forgive me, Uriah Heep made their huge cult followings in Russia — they were among the first acts to probe Russian territory, and, like any efficient pio­neer, their efforts were rewarded. (I am guessing that when Ian Gillan strikes ninety and gets to be wheelchaired on the stage to rasp out the old hits in a range of exactly one note, Russia will be the last place where he will still be able to sell out a stadium).

 

I do not know whether Wetton and Co. understood, on that fateful day (November 9, 1990), that the wild screaming, coming from 40,000 members of the audience at the Olimpiyskiy complex, was not so much for them personally as it was for them as «symbols». I suppose they did, as I have no reason to doubt their human intelligence (no matter how songs like 'Kari-Anne' would like me to think otherwise). But in any case, it was reasonable enough to commemorate the event, plus Wetton probably did not want his Russian-learning efforts to go to waste (nothing special, though, everybody can be trained to say spasibo with an awful English accent).

 

In any case, this «edge» is necessary, because, taken out of context, the performance is not at all impressive. Not a single song presents any interesting developments over the studio version. Wet­ton sings well, but occasionally either flubs a note or two or steps too far away from the mike. The lack of Howe is quite noticeable: temporary replacement Pat Thrall is good at generic speed runs and Rambo-style guitar-god posturing, but he cannot even reproduce the exquisite Yes-style bits during the climactic chorus-back-to-verse transitions on 'Only Time Will Tell' (hmph). And Geoff Downes gets to have a lengthy piano/synth solo improv piece, as if he were Rick Wakeman — but last time I checked, he still wasn't.

 

These are the bad news. The good news is that, overall, the setlist is respectable — yes, they do play 'The Heat Goes On', and they even manage to make it rock with an impressively wild (for Asia standards) organ solo. I could do without the overtly sentimental hits like 'The Smile Has Left Your Eyes', but they are in the minority, and to sweeten the deal, Wetton throws on a couple of his old highlights from the King Crimson era — probably to placate the few «true» progressive rock fans in the audience while the rest are still impatiently waiting for 'Heat Of The Moment'. Strange enough, neither 'Starless' nor 'Book Of Saturday' sound way too out of place on the al­bum — probably because, without Fripp, they are somewhat effectively Asia-nized (still sound like specific hotspots for Wetton, though).

 

One new studio creation is tacked on at the end — a particularly dumb «love rocker» titled 'Kari-Anne', which, unfortunately, is not a re-spelled cover of the Hollies' 'Carrie Ann', but an entirely new song that you can dedicate to your loved one only if you are living under highly strenuous social conditions; it boldly paves the way to Payne-era Asia, and how. My advice is to just ignore it and concentrate on the live show — or, better still, not concentrate on the live show either, be­cause there is honestly no need for this record unless you do research on Western cultural influ­ence on late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. In that respect, the decibels generated by a 40,000 strong Rus­sian crowd assembled from all corners of the SU are far more important here than the ones generated by this sad memento of mainstream Eighties' spirit.

 

AQUA (1992)

 

1) Aqua, Part 1; 2) Who Will Stop The Rain?; 3) Lay Down Your Arms; 4) Heaven On Earth; 5) Someday; 6) Crime Of The Heart; 7) A Far Cry; 8) Back In Town; 9) Don't Call Me; 10) Love Under Fire; 11) The Voice Of Reason; 12) Aqua, Part 2.

 

Okay, this is where things start to get irredeemably bad. It has little to do with the loss of a crucial member: one needn't really have a problem with John Payne, who came out of nowhere and re­placed Wetton fairly well, with a similarly powerful, but, overall, intelligent manner of singing. New guitarist Al Pitrelli was already a seasoned pop-metal player who'd made a good name for himself playing with Alice Cooper in his Trash/Hey Stoopid period (where he was at least a fair­ly tolerable replacement for the «Rambo» style of the Coop's previous axman). And besides, Steve Howe agreed to guest-play on some of the tracks. Carl Palmer, too, was still an official  member when the sessions started (but left to rejoin ELP before they were over).

 

So the people are okay. What is not okay is a sense of total wretchedness. The style of the band was pathetic enough in the 1980s, but at least it was sort of en vogue at the time, and that pro­vided enough inspiration — not just in order to come up with decent melodies, but to play and sing them like there was some hope for tomorrow, if you know what I mean. By 1992, however, even mainstream tastes were changing, and only those who, for some reason, fell way too deep under the «Eighties charm», could continue enjoying this cr... uh, I mean, «eccentric-romantic» approach to music making.

 

Aqua does not give out one single bloody hint that the band even noticed the bug of the times, let alone tried to capture it. Same stuffy electronic arrangements, same booming drums, same pathos, same arena-rock choruses — still riding the old formula, and quite depleted and worn out at that. What used at least to be novel is now predictable and utterly annoying; and no matter how much «Authentic Care For The World's Problems» Payne is trying to convey with his voice, nothing works. Personally, I cannot even make myself believe that they really cared about anything at this point — it is as if someone just put the entire band in a state of trance and ordered them to plow through on auto-pilot.

 

Some of these choruses are still catchy, but why bother? I could imagine someone taking 'Crime Of The Heart' and rearranging it as a moving acoustic folk ditty, but until this is done, why in the world should we bother with the original? Simple, undeserving musical ideas are being puffed up to symphonic size here, the same way a bad scientist, having made a trivial discovery, turns it into a 500-page dissertation, with an emphasis on very long words with very little meaning. The utter banality of it all is best illustrated with the intro to the generic love ballad 'Don't Call Me' — starting, of course, with the sound of a tone dial and a female "Hello?" — you know, to set the proper mood and all. Even Jeff Lynne, with his 'Telephone Line', handled that better.

 

The more energy there seems to be, the more it seems to be fake, fake, fake. Fake rockers ('Back In Town'), fake power ballads ('Love Under Fire'), fake prophetic anthems ('Who Will Stop The Rain', cautiously titled with the full form of the auxiliary so as not to offend fans of CCR), even fake acoustic prayers ('The Voice Of Reason') and fake intro/outro «atmospheric» instrumental pieces ('Aqua') built on clichéd classical guitar figures and boring sound effects. Some fans say that Geoff Downes at least renewed and remodeled his synthesizers. But is this supposed to mean they sound any more alive than they used to? The fact that he managed to achieve the highest standards of adult contemporary is not particularly recommendable.

 

Fun fact — although Aqua, almost predictably, failed to chart in either the States or the UK, it still went all the way to No. 1 in Japan. (Then again, I suppose everything goes to No. 1 in Japan sooner or later, since they live in a parallel reality where time flows ten times slower than in the preoccupied Western world.) On that happy note, let us simply issue the expected thumbs down, and move along: the real Trail of Tears has only just begun.

 

ARIA (1994)

 

1) Anytime; 2) Are You Big Enough?; 3) Desire; 4) Summer; 5) Sad Situation; 6) Don't Cut The Wire (Brother); 7) Feels Like Love; 8) Remembrance Day; 9) Enough's Enough; 10) Military Man; 11) Aria.

 

Since most fans gave up on Asia completely with the release of Aqua, I am sure that Aria is re­membered even less — particularly since no one could deny that it simply tries to repeat the for­mula of Aqua. An odd decision — with the overall flop that Aqua was, one would have thought that the boys would take a look around and try and introduce some changes. But, horrendous rea­lization as it is, it is quite possible that they actually liked what they were doing with Aqua. Let's face it, if even a handful of the fans still liked what they were doing, why shouldn't the band be entitled to looking at their pathetic blintzes as «artistic statements»?

 

But Aria, strange as it is, slightly improves over its predecessor. Compared to Aqua, there is less sap and less power balladry: most of the «romance» is given an upbeat pop sheen, whereas the «epic» numbers tend to be presented as dark and ominous rather than heart-on-sleeve declarations. The fakeness of it all never disappears, but fakeness is always easier to digest when it is not over­cooked, and Payne's vocal hooks, crescendos, and phrasing show a tad more restrain. As a result, this is still boring, but not sickeningly so. (With the obvious exception of the Titanic-bound 'Feels Like Love', but that is just one song and I am going to pretend I forgot all about it).

 

Fans of Yes' Big Generator might even enjoy 'Are You Big Enough?' and its steroid riffs: I al­ways imagine that the question of the chorus is addressed directly to those riffs, rather than the listener, which makes it a much more fun listen than the song actually deserves. 'Don't Cut The Wire' is another salvageable track, with an impressive three-step build-up from verse to bridge to chorus — bring in a decent guitar track (something swampy, perhaps), a grand piano, remove some of the vocal overdubs, and there just might be something there.

 

Plus, some of the choruses are just damn catchy. The pathos of 'Military Man' challenges Michael Bolton, but I still cannot get that goddamn "don't come running here to find me..." bit out of my head. So is the chorus of 'Enough's Enough', which, upon close inspection, turns out to be a Mar­x­ist anthem: "Enough's enough / It's eye to eye / Enough's enough, we cry / Enough's enough of smoke and steel / Enough's enough of turning this wheel" — and now, ladies and gent­lemen, you all know the secret of why Asia were still selling something: they were positioning themselves as the working man's progressive rock act. (No wonder a few of these tracks sound like they could easily fit on some of Springsteen's late-period flops, like Human Touch).

 

According to some sources, there is an objective explanation for these feelings — namely, that Aqua was essentially made up of rejected leftovers, a quick throw-together act to solidify the band's relationship with Payne, whereas Aria was more carefully thought out and represented genuine «hard-working» collaboration between Payne and Downes. Basically, that answers the question of which album to get first — although, in a perfect world, none of us would even need to pose that question, because a perfect world has no need for either. Then again, a perfect world would give little incentive to produce art as such. Fact is, in order to have Carole King, we must also endure Diane Warren; and without an Asia, there might never have been a Yes — even if they do come in reverse chronological matter.

 

Anyway, thumbs down, but without any particularly hard feelings; more of a puzzle here — what in the world made these presumably intelligent human beings and professional musi­cians work in this mode, from album to album? This is not a Black Sabbath sort of case: in 1994, it was clear to everyone that nobody whose opinion matters would ever have a kind word to say about the album, never in a million years. Did they enjoy being called names? Did they see it as a brave defiance of current taste standards? Such a poor album, and such a lot of mystery.

 

ARENA (1996)

 

1) Into The Arena; 2) Arena; 3) Heaven; 4) Two Sides Of The Moon; 5) The Day Before The War; 6) Never; 7) Falling; 8) Words; 9) U Bring Me Down; 10) Tell Me Why; 11) Turn It Around; 12) Bella Nova.

 

One would expect Asia’s heroic ambitions, already well above and beyond their songwriting abi­lities and sonic taste, to burst right through the roof — with the release of an album titled like that; and Roger Dean’s winged lion on the sleeve is like a pre-ordered symbol of unbearable pathos. But, in a suprisingly unpredictable move, Arena turns out to be just the opposite: Asia’s most «restrained», even «down-to-earth» offering so far.

 

It must have been an intentional shift of style: the lineup is more or less the same here as on Aria, with the exception of guitar duties, for which the newly departed Pitrelli is now replaced by two players: Aziz Ibrahim, formerly of Simply Red, and Elliott Randall, formerly of whatever God wants. But there have always been two and only two instruments in Asia that really mattered: the synthesizer (still manned by Father Downes) and the drum (still kicked by Mike Sturgis). Plus the human voice, of course, still provided by John Payne. And all three have been toned down for Arena, although the most obvious change is in the drum sound — Sturgis pretty much renoun­ces the big, electronically enhanced, 1980s sound, going for a softer, more natural approach.

 

There are, in fact, congas on the opening track instead of basic drums, played by guest percus­sionist Luis Jardim, as the whole instrumental is set to more or less the Latin rhythm of Steely Dan’s ‘Do It Again’. This does not save it from sounding like unremarkable elevator muzak, but it is still the most unusual introduction to an Asia album since first we learned what a typical Asia album looks like. Experimentation? In some cases, even unsuccessful experimentation is better than continuing to sink in the same boring dreck — and since, on the whole, I ended up getting more kicks from Arena than from either of the preceding records, this must be one of those cases.

 

So as not to make the review too long, I will briefly list what it is that does not suck about Arena. The way ‘Heaven’ begins — with echoey guitars lifted directly from ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ and then the echo waves suddenly transforming into synthesizers and then the whole thing just going away into the background to give way to an upbeat pop song (which, in itself, does suck rather badly). The silly catchy chorus to ‘Two Sides Of The Moon’ which is so very un-Asia-like, more like simple generic 1980’s synth-pop (perhaps Downes was feeling ever more nostalgic about the young and innocent days of The Buggles). ‘Never’ and ‘Falling’, two more okayish pop rock contributions that do not provide much happiness but do not overreach or annoy, either. And ‘Turn It Around’ has a tiny pinch of clenched-teeth grit that always made Asia albums easier to assimilate (and an ear-catching guitar lead from Randall).

 

Basically, it’s just a livelier, slightly more diverse, and slightly less pompous proposition than it used to be. This does not excuse the nine minutes of ‘The Day Before The War’, the album’s sor­ry excuse for a «prog epic», or that the «big drums» finally start announcing their presence on tracks like ‘Words’, or, let us be frank, that the very concept of the band known as «Asia» still ex­isted in 1996. But in our quest for musical justice, we cannot not acknowledge that «…at least they tried». The title track states that “Into the arena we climb / We look to the sky” — words that might easily be interpreted as a new declaration of the right to fight for their artistic freedom and expect support from where it can least be expected.

 

Plus, an arena is the place to deal out thumbsets, isn’t it? The only problem is, when no one really gives a damn about the fight, it becomes somewhat irrelevant whether the fighters in question live or die at all. I would prefer to withdraw judgement as well — giving a thumbs up to a Payne-era Asia album is strictly prohibited by the Laws of Adequacy, but giving a thumbs down to Arena in particular would not acknowledge its honest attempt to break away from the formula, and I do not want to propagate the wrong concept that «All Asia (var.: All Payne-era Asia) sounds the same». That’d almost be like saying that all Asia looks the same, and that would be racist.

 

ARCHIVA (1996)

 

CD I: 1) Heart Of Gold; 2) Tears; 3) Fight Against The Tide; 4) We Fall Apart; 5) The Mariner's Dream; 6) Boys From Diamond City; 7) A.L.O.; 8) Reality; 9) I Can't Wait A Lifetime; 10) Dusty Road; 11) I Believe; 12) Ginger; CD II: 1) Obsession; 2) Moon Under The Water; 3) Love Like The Video; 4) Don't Come To Me; 5) The Smoke That Thunders; 6) Satelite Blues; 7) Showdown; 8) That Season; 9) Can't Tell These Walls; 10) The Higher You Climb; 11) Right To Cry; 12) Armenia.

 

Apparently, this is how this album (actually, two albums — Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 came out separate­ly, but I am no superhero to review them together) came through. One fine day in 1996, upon re­turning to their studio, the band members found out that a pipe burst through, destroying much of the equipment and, apparently, quite a few archival tapes lying around. At this moment, as I can reconstruct the situation, «oh no!», said Geoff Downes, «just imagine — all of our unreleased treasures could have been destroyed! not that we were ever going to release it, since it all sucks anyway, but imagine coming in here one day and IT'S ALL GONE! Would history ever agree to pardon us? Isn't this a sign from God and all?»

 

Well — you understand what happened next. Apparently, these frickin' bastards had tons of songs they'd recorded over the past few years, none of which originally made the grade; and now, just because a silly pipe had to blow up at an inappropriate moment, they pushed twenty-four of these on the market. Now you might think that, with such a large number of tracks, there could be sur­prises. After all, it does happen sometimes that, driven by an odd understanding of the word «co­mmercial», artists release sterile crap while keeping the real keepers under the pillow. If so, you can relax: this is clearly not the case here. Most, if not all, of these tracks were left unreleased be­cause there was a damn good reason to keep them unreleased.

 

Basically, these are all outtakes from the pre-Arena era of Payne — the worst single stretch in Asia's entire career. One single listen to one single choice of a cover track will suffice: the way this band butchers ʽShowdownʼ, one of my favourite ELO songs, is inexcusable, with an abysmal combination of plastic drumming and pop-metal riffage replacing the subtle textures of the origi­nal. And everything here is molded according to the same stylistics, be it «rocker», «ballad», or, God help me, «mood piece».

 

Every once in a while, I feel like a hypocrite here — after all, it's not as if I were ever bothered by the production style of ABBA, for instance, where other people would say exactly the same that I am saying here: «yes, there may be melodies all right, but how can one stand these arrangements? Glitzy trash!» Yet, for all its unfortunate glitziness, the music of ABBA never for one moment took itself as doggone seriously as Asia. Truly and verily, I cannot stand a song like ʽHeart Of Goldʼ because each single instrument, each single vocal note, each single second of it pretends to be Lord Fuckin' Byron, dark hair waving in the stormy wind as the Turkish guns raise hell from all four sides and the earth rumbles under the feet. Against this impression, unless your music is at least Beethoven-quality, no single pop-rock melody, no matter how good — and these me­lodies, whatever one might say, are at the very least nowhere near «genius» — will be able to come across as anything other than «moronic to the core».

 

I wish I could recommend at least one of these tracks, but as I browse through them once again, they all seem to be doing one thing — compete with each other in the single nomination of «How High Up In The Sky Can You Deliver Your Romantic Battle Cry?». Even when they try to let their hair down and just deliver some good old-fashioned rock'n'roll (ʽA.L.O.ʼ) or blues-rock (ʽSatellite Bluesʼ), the effect is the same. With these drums and guitars, you might just as well be rock'n'rolling on your PC's motherboard — and the «social» bite of ʽSatellite Bluesʼ is complete­ly lost against the same background as well. "Underground is just the place to be", howls Payne — not a bad idea, guys, why not actually try it out?

 

Overall, this is all awful: expect no random wonders, and keep a close eye on those pipes. Body waste freely floating around is fairly yucky, but at least it's natural, unlike this kind of «spiritual» waste, which has all the markings of a strong chemical weapon on it. Thumbs down, and if it were up to me, I'd slap a biohazard sign on it as well.

 

RARE (1999)

 

1) The Waterfall; 2) The Journey Begins; 3) The Seasons; 4) The Gods; 5) The Whales; 6) The Journey Continues; 7) The Reservation; 8) The Bears; 9) Under The Seas; 10) At The Graveyard; 11) Downstream; 12) The Ghosts; 13) The Sun; 14) The Moon; 15) The Sharks; 16) The Journey Ends; 17) The Indians; 18) The Angels; 19) The Horizons; 20) To The Deep; 21) The Game; 22) The Exodus.

 

Without a doubt, this is the most unusual album in the Asia catalog; and since, for Asia, the more «unusual» their music is, the better it is by definition — few things can be less exciting in this world than «usual» Asia music — Rare is not only «rare», it is also curious, and, on particular days of the week, may even be enjoyable.

 

Essentially, this is a joint combination of two different soundtracks that were commissionned for the band, or, rather, for its crucial members (only Downes and Payne were involved in the project, recording all of the parts): one for a documentary on the migrations of salmon (!), another one for a SEGA game that ended up unreleased. With the release of Archiva, the rulers of Asia had al­ready shown how much they care for their residue, so it was probably predictable that these aty­pical sessions would find their way out to the general public as well.

 

But this time, the decision was right. If anything, Rare reminds us of the fact that Geoff Downes, behind all the stiff commercial glitz, started out as an innovative professional composer, capable of stringing together interesting sequences of notes — exploring the ways of music, rather than choosing the safest, easiest way into the hearts of people whose emotional receptors do not work well on levels beyond formulaic soap operas and Broadway shows. He was never all that great at this kind of exploration — one reason, probably, why he ended up drifting towards the lowest common denominator — but he was hardly talentless, either.

 

Take these two soundtracks, for instance. They actually defy straightahead categorization. There is a lot of New Age influence here, of course, but the salmon journey is hardly generic «ambient»: there are numerous classical and pseudo-classical piano themes, there is some dissonant avant­garde, there are a few «ethnic» themes (ʽThe Reservationʼ, with Indian motives), some elevator muzak, some electronic grooves, etc., all of which can make a salmon's life pretty colorful. The themes usually match the titles — ʽThe Bearsʼ is stern and menacing, with heavy emphasis on mock-Wagnerian synth-horns; ʽThe Whalesʼ goes heavy on special effects to imitate the animals' breathing and other activities; ʽThe Sharksʼ sends the keyboards swooshing back and forth to mi­mic fast underwater travel, etc. — so I am pretty sure that whoever actually watched the docu­mentary must have walked away a deeply changed man, one who will no longer crave for salmon roe, but will instead work hard to make the world a better place. By all means, Geoff Downes and salmon were made for each other.

 

The second soundtrack is louder and more dynamic — no big wonder, since no video game deve­loper would probably want the music to be done Brian Eno-style — eventually diving into a mix of trip-hop and heavy guitar rock (ʽThe Gameʼ) and then into techno (ʽThe Exodusʼ). It is also fairly diverse, but, in general, sounds cheesier and lacking «naturalistic inspiration». Still, there are quite a few impressive musical ideas out there, be it in the heavenly synth overdubs on ʽThe Angelsʼ or in the pipes-and-guitars combination on ʽTo The Deepʼ.

 

In short, I have no problems about giving the whole thing a thumbs up. It goes without saying that it sounds remarkably fresh and even stupefying when surrounded on all sides by the ugly walls of Payne-sung non-hits (I did not explicitly mention that there is not one bit of vocals on the entire album, except for some atmospheric backing harmonies), but even out of context, it is, at the very least, a perfectly «okay» specimen of a multi-purpose soundtrack. In a better world than the one that made the existence of «Asia» possible, Geoff Downes would be spending most of his days recording projects like these — and John Payne would be there to assist him, wisely keeping his mouth shut and helping people to get more kicks out of their video games rather than spoiling their tastes with corny pomp. Of course, it also happens to be one of the few Asia albums that are now strictly out of print.

 

AURA (2001)

 

1) Awake; 2) Wherever You Are; 3) Ready To Go Home; 4) The Last Time; 5) Forgive Me; 6) Kings Of The Day; 7) On The Coldest Day In Hell; 8) Free; 9) You're The Stranger; 10) The Longest Night; 11) Aura.

 

A return to the tried and true. As on Rare, the list of steady personnel only includes Downes and Payne, but this time it is unnatural — Aura is not a side project, but a typical Asia album, and the fact that the duo either did not manage, or did not bother to assemble a steady line-up is a hint at the degree of disarray in which they had thrust their affairs. No less than five different guitarists make guest appearances (including Howe on two tracks and Arena's Elliott Randall only on two other ones; Ian Chrichton of prog band Saga and Guthrie Covan of nowhere in particular handle most of the duties), and no less than four different drummers are there to help them out (including Chris Slade of AC/DC fame and Michael Sturgis from Wishbone Ash).

 

Musically, Aura tries to carry on the aura (sorry) of Arena: rhythmic adult contemporary synth-pop with decreased emphasis on symphonic pomp and fanfares and increased emphasis on «moo­di­ness», vocal hooks, and overall danceability. The songs, however, are generally weaker, and the little odds and ends that made Arena a bit of a well-welcome surprise after the early Payne years are nowhere to be found. Alas, it says a lot about the album that, of all things, they chose a late period 10cc cover (ʽReady To Go Homeʼ) as the lead single — a big word of welcome from one dreadfully dull mainstream pop outfit to another; they might as well have covered Michael Bol­ton or Bryan Adams, to let us know for sure where their loyalties truly lay.

 

The only song here that got me interested a bit was the title track, a somewhat tepid instrumental prog-rocker that still sounds mighty energetic and inspired relative to everything else. Fast, not too spoiled by layers of production, and with plenty of aggressive soloing from Crichton that cla­shes nicely with Downes' keyboard riffs, it is intelligently designed and cheese-free. But it is the album closer, and thus, seems to represent a last-minute donation to «serious Asia fans» who are always willing to humiliate themselves by paying good money for all of the pop crap in order to get around to a few minutes of «prog lite».

 

Other songs that are probably intended to deserve mention are ʽFreeʼ, an eight minute monster with Howe throwing on some respectable licks in the instrumental section, but, otherwise, quite unremarkable; ʽAwakeʼ, an underproduced anthem to open the album that is modestly catchy but far more straightforward and generic than ʽArenaʼ; and a few tunes that also have annoyingly cat­chy vocal choruses but are disgraced by the lack of interesting chord sequences (ʽYou're The Strangerʼ, ʽLongest Nightʼ).

 

Anyway, it's all just a big bunch of mediocre supermarket muzak, easily disposable upon one or two listens. Big fans of Howe will need it for his signature presence in a couple of spots, but oth­erwise... even for generically mainstream tastes, the sound of Aura, in the 21st century, can only be appreciated on a nostalgic kick, and probably by the same people who get a nostalgic kick from The Blue Lagoon or something comparable. (Actually, we could think of at least one under­standable rea­son for The Blue Lagoon, which could definitely not be applied to Aura). Thumbs down, of course.

 

SILENT NATION (2004)

 

1) What About Love; 2) Long Way From Home; 3) Midnight; 4) Blue Moon Monday; 5) Silent Nation; 6) Ghost In The Mirror; 7) Gone Too Far; 8) I Will Be There For You; 9) Darkness Day; 10) The Prophet.

 

If I were a musician, and if my career had started at any point after 1985, I would have thought thrice about writing a song called ʽWhat About Loveʼ. Not only does the title ring stupid as such (what about love?), but it had already undermined the coolness of one formerly good band — and I am pretty sure that, in 2004, there must have been quite a few people looking at the track list and going, «oh no!... covering a Heart power ballad now?.. what next, Diane Warren?»

 

On the other hand, accusing Asia, especially in its Payne/Downes configuration, of showing in­excusable lapses of taste is like accusing Gene Simmons that his tongue is an inch too long: he can't help it, and neither can these guys. Instead, let us look on the bright side of things and admit that Silent Nation represents a brave, and not entirely unsuccessful, attempt at «rebooting the en­tire franchise», as they say. Indeed: for the first time ever, a «proper» Asia album whose title does not consist of an A...A word, and whose album sleeve is not designed by Roger Dean. An album released with a more or less stabilized lineup, without a host of extra musicians cluttering the pro­ceedings with close-to-zero efficiency. And, most importantly, an album that, for once, tries to be denser, more complex, more musical, and more «progressive» than it ever used to be — at least, in the Payne era. You have to admit that all of this at least sounds curious.

 

The overall sound has definitely changed. The songs are bigger, with more numerous and length­ier instrumental passages; guitarist Guthrie Govan gets to have a bigger impact all over the place than even Steve Howe was ever allowed; and Downes himself generally plays a normal organ (or, sometimes, a normal piano) — so consistently that, when he eventually jumps over to a cold syn­thesizer on ʽDarkness Dayʼ, this may be greeted as a welcome sign of diversity. Clearly, clearly, the band is trying to push up its status, migrating from «arena synth-pop» to «classic prog-lite for the mas­ses». Should we welcome the transition?

 

I would, except there is still one thing that bugs me — Silent Nation takes itself way too serious­ly, perhaps even more so than on the average Asia album. Most of the songs are social anthems, with one or two love ballads mixed in for «balance», and, although they raise important subjects, they usually do so in trivial ways, further losing adequacy points for oversinging and «overact­ing» — Asia bombast is, of course, easier to take when it is delivered through old-school instru­mentation than through the usual Downes-synthesizers, but it is still Asia bombast.

 

ʽWhat About Loveʼ, unlike the Heart song, is not about a power chord celebration of amorous rela­tionships between two people, but is dedicated to the entire human race — built on a catchy, brawny pop melody, but delivered without any sort of finesse: the chorus barges in with as much brute force as in the Heart song, yet its anthemic aura, as interpreted by Payne, sounds reserved and insincere. (The benchmark for such choruses is always ʽLove Reign O'er Meʼ the way it was carried out by Daltrey — at the top of his capacities and perhaps even overstepping them, which made it fully believable. Payne always keeps himself in check).

 

The «epic», multi-part compositions, such as ʽMidnightʼ and ʽBlue Moon Mondayʼ, have their share of moodiness, but still end up sounding like «prog theater». Payne is one of the culprits, but it's all in the air — the way they overdub the choral harmonies, the way they still utilize these pop-metal Eighties-style riffs, the way they pair feather-light acoustic guitars with big bashing drums (ʽGhost In The Mirrorʼ)... this band just cannot be «good», no matter how much they try, and on Silent Nation they try very hard.

 

I still give the album a light thumbs up, partly out of the general feeling of surprise (as it was with Arena, when the Payne lineup first tried to shake things up), partly because... well, you have your catchy choruses, your occasionally pleasant guitar solo, your goofy impersonation of a modern-day Gregorian chant (ʽGone Too Farʼ) — although the album is stretched over an entire hour, it does not feel overlong because of all the different tricks they try, and that is worth some respect. As for longtime fans of the band who are used to appro­aching them from a different perspective, I am sure most of them will be delighted with Silent Nation — the finest of all the­oretically possible conclusions to the Payne period.

 

FANTASIA – LIVE IN TOKYO (2007)

 

1) Time Again; 2) Wildest Dreams; 3) One Step Closer; 4) Roundabout; 5) Without You; 6) Cutting It Fine; 7) Intersection Blues; 8) Fanfare For The Common Man; 9) The Smile Has Left Your Eyes; 10) Don't Cry; 11) In The Court Of The Crimson King; 12) Here Comes The Feeling; 13) Video Killed The Radio Star; 14) The Heat Goes On; 15) Only Time Will Tell; 16) Sole Survivor; 17) Ride Easy; 18) Heat Of The Moment.

 

Most likely, it was just a matter of time before the original Asia came back — old proggers, lite or hardcore, are particularly prone to nostalgia kicks. As far as I know, the breakup between Dow­nes and Payne happened somewhat unexpectedly, and not very politely: according to one version, Downes simply «dumped» Payne once he had perceived a serious chance for the original lineup to get together once again. As a result, the insulted Payne formed his own Asia («Featuring John Payne»), and the two bands currently co-exist — although, fortunately for us all, only one of them records new studio albums.

 

Anyway, somehow the stars aligned into a position that brought all four original band members back together in 2006 — and they have never been apart since, although most of them wisely al­ternate their duties between Asia and other projects (Howe with Yes, whom the reunited Asia ac­tually supported on their tours; Palmer with occasional reunions of ELP, etc.). To celebrate the rebirth, they started out «modestly»: with this 2-CD live set recorded in... well you know. And, although I am not reviewing Asia's entire live catalog due to its hugeness, this particular live re­cord certainly deserves a mention, at least as a historical event.

 

The setlist is telling: they play Asia in its entirety (not a single song missing!), plus only a hand­ful of hits from Alpha, and nothing whatsoever not only from the Payne era, which is understan­dable, but even from Astra as well. Instead, they occupy the remaining space with songs from their progressive past — each member gets to choose one track that will represent him. Howe chooses ʽRoundaboutʼ from Yes career; Palmer chooses ʽFanfare For The Common Manʼ; and Wetton, oddest of all, chooses ʽCourt Of The Crimson Kingʼ even though he was not a part of King Crimson in 1969, and, in fact, I do not think he has even performed the number in concert during any of his shows with Fripp and company. As for Downes, he gives us a new rendition of ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ — what else? (Something from Drama could be imaginable, but the Yes hotspot is already occupied with ʽRoundaboutʼ).

 

All of this means that the reunited Asia tries hard to defend its «progressive honor» — implying that Asia was actually a serious prog effort, deserving to be mentioned on the same plane with the best of Yes and King Crimson, but also indirectly admitting that everything after it was a failure in terms of artistic integrity. We need not buy it (there is no abysmal gap whatsoever between the­ir debut and everything that followed), but it is an interesting, somewhat unexpected stance. And as the Asia songs themselves get expanded with various instrumental passages, occasionally rearranged and reinvented (ʽDon't Cryʼ, for instance, is redone as a weepy acoustic ballad), and mixed in with the old classics, the illusion almost works.

 

Concerning the way they sound, my only disappointment — but one that has to be dealt with — is the deterioration of Wetton's voice. It has not lost much in range, but it has lost a lot in sheer power and volume: an old man's voice that can no longer rise to the epic heights demanded by the material (never mind if these are «poor man's epic heights», they still need to be scaled). If you think of it from a different angle, the singing has become less pompous and more homely, but it's not as if it was a conscious choice or anything. Then again, he can still master the required grit and spite for such numbers as ʽCutting It Fineʼ and ʽThe Heat Goes Onʼ...

 

...and, furthermore, the band does everything in its power to ensure that it does not exclusively depend on superhero-style vocal hooks. The real star of the show is certainly not Wetton, nor is it the omnipresent Downes, but Howe — who, I would think, only agreed to join the band under the condition that they'd finally let him have his way. And they do; and this is the only reason, really, to own this album other than out of a sheerly documentary interest. Howe plays lots more guitar, and in a lot more prominent way, than on the original album — just listen to the wah-wah having a field day on ʽSole Survivorʼ, both for the solo and the lead flourishes between the verse lines, where formerly it used to be so reserved and shut out. He gets a brief acoustic solo spotlight all to himself (incorporating parts of ʽThe Clapʼ and something else, I think), and we also get to hear the ecstatic battle cries of the instrument during the climactic moments of ʽOnly Time Will Tellʼ that no other player was able to perfectly reproduce.

 

Thus, if the brand new Roger Dean cover is not worth the thumbs up all by itself, Howe's pre­sence nails it for me. The songs have not become any better (they do cut a fine ʽRoundaboutʼ, and Downes' Mellotron imitations on ʽCourt Of The Crimson Kingʼ come quite close to the real thing), but they are performed as close to «non-commercial mode» as possible. I have also heard com­plaints about sound quality that I do not quite understand — they do not have poor recording standards in Japan, and I, for one, can hear each of Howe's notes perfectly well, and that's pretty much all that matters here. Final judgement: «passable» for «passive» Asia fans, but a strict must-own for Steve fans. Like it or not, on those joint Asia/Yes tours he was equally committed to both projects. (And it's a pretty tough fare, to be playing both for the main and the opening act).

 

PHOENIX (2008)

 

1) Never Again; 2) Nothing's Forever; 3) Heroine; 4) Sleeping Giant / No Way Back / Reprise; 5) Alibis; 6) I Will Remember You; 7) Shadow Of A Doubt; 8) Parallel Worlds / Vortex / Déyà; 9) Wish I'd Known All Along; 10) Or­chard Of Mines; 11) Over And Over; 12) An Extraordinary Life.

 

Uh-oh. Here we go inflating the old balloon again. As you might recall, the one thing that made «late-period-Payne» Asia slightly more palatable than «early-period-Payne» Asia was that the band considerably toned down their ambitions, positioning themselves as relatively «humble» adult contemporary artists rather than the save-the-world type. Now that Payne is out and Howe, Palmer, and Wetton, the authenticated mastodonts of prog, are back in, the new old Asia's first stab at a studio album is re-brimming with ambition.

 

Yeah, let us face it, «pretentious» is a fairly appropriate word to use in the negative sense when you have to review a record that immediately greets you with such lyrics as "I saw the universe, I held it in my hand / The planets and the stars, merely grains of sand". (This seems to be an Asian translation from Yesian, which makes it more understandable for the people at large, but also more vulnerable to vitriolic critical stabs). The words come riding on the back of a Big Genera­tor-style pop-metal riff, and eventually burst out in an anthemic chorus where we learn that "Ne­ver again will I bear arms against my brother, never again will I dishonour anyone", which Wet­ton sings with such passion, bravour, and authenticity that I am actually inclined to take a cauti­ous look into his criminal record.

 

Apparently, it was decided that there was no point in making another Asia album if it did not try to take the band to the next level, rather than just being an exercise in nostalgia. As a result, this particular Phoenix seems to have risen out of anabolic ashes: almost everything is loud, big, sprawling, multi-layered, «cosmic», whatever. Unfortunately, everything is still Asia, and that means more often silly-sounding than cathartic. The illusion might be that they have reinvented their sound, and are now trying to conjure the classic «progressive» spirit — in reality, though, they are still spinning rather trivial arena-pop, whose triviality is only barely covered with layers of keyboards and guitars.

 

One thing to say, though: Steve Howe. Either they begged him, seeing the error of the old ways, or he blackmailed them, having nothing to lose either way, but more than half of the songs fea­ture fabulous guitar playing from Steve, and I don't mean the Big Generator riffs: I mean richly me­lodic, free-flowing, complex solos that the man normally reserved for Yes or his solo projects. It starts already on the second track, the happy-sad anthem ʽNothing's Foreverʼ, but peaks later. The opening to ʽAlibisʼ, for instance, is clearly reminiscent of the heavenly pedal steel playing on ʽAnd You And Iʼ, and the song's coda, where Howe duels with Downes' harpsichord, is far more imaginative and elegant than the vocal part.

 

The most depth and complexity is attained on the ʽParallel Worldsʼ suite, where the vocal part only functions as a thematic introduction ("There's a vision I see..." and the rest is self-understo­od). The voyage through a ʽVortexʼ and into the psychedelic world of ʽDeyaʼ is excellently struc­tured, going from a dynamic, swirling section that features Palmer's most energetic drumming for the day, into a paradisiac section, first with a bit of cheesy Spanish guitar, but then with an elec­tric solo that, to tell the truth, is mood-wise more Steve Hackett than Steve Howe (replete with prolonged wailing notes so typical of the other Steve), but is nevertheless quite moving.

 

Besides, Howe is the only one in the band who remembers anything about subtlety. One of my fa­vourite tracks here is ʽOrchard Of Minesʼ (no, no, it is not about Bosnia or Iraq; it is actually a cover of a song originally done by the Globus «ensemble», of Immediate Music), if only for tho­se barely audible high-pitched notes that Steve plays against Wetton howling "to know... to feel... to play me once again" during the song's climax. If you ever happen to listen to that song, don't forget to tune your ears in at around 3:45 into the song for some elite aural delight. (I'm sure there must be other moments like these on here, but I couldn't bring myself to waste time on additional listens: Howe or no Howe, this is still an Asia reunion, and there is only so much time one can allocate oneself on an Asia reunion).

 

As for the pop stuff, well... it's manageable, not too annoying arena-pop with moments of genuine catchiness. Trivial, but sincere: ʽAn Extraordinary Lifeʼ was apparently written by Wetton after a risky surgery, and reflects all the honest joy that one usually does not feel about life until after ha­ving been exposed to the risk of losing it, so, no matter how banal the sentiment, I cannot bring myself to feel too bad about it. And Wetton's aged voice actually serves him well: even a ro­mantic ballad as straightforward as ʽHeroineʼ is sung normally, without trying to rise to operatic heights (but when will these lyricists ever learn not to use the word "heroine" in a love ballad? Don't they understand that this brings an entirely new light to the line "I hold the razor blade up to my face" that begins the song?).

 

On the whole, Phoenix is probably as good as Asia could ever get at that point, and almost probably better than everyone believed it could get. The old boys handle their pomp with care, allocate plenty of time to their best musician, and get away with at least one complex prog instru­mental. Of course, trying to convince us that they are continuing the tradition of classic Seventies' progressive rock rather than their own one is useless: to do that, they would have to get rid of Geoff Downes and John Wetton and bring in Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson... could be a great band, come to think of it. But, in any case, Phoenix upholds and strengthens the modest reputa­tion of Asia. Had they simply disbanded around 1985, it would have been an old men reunion. Instead, it is a semi-successful attempt at setting things straight. Thumbs up.

 

OMEGA (2010)

 

1) Finger On The Trigger; 2) Through My Veins; 3) Holy War; 4) Ever Yours; 5) Listen Children; 6) End Of The World; 7) Light The Way; 8) Emily; 9) Still The Same; 10) There Was A Time; 11) I Believe; 12) Don't Wanna Lose You Now.

 

This would have sure made for a great title to the band's swan-song album (and makes me envisi­on the prospect of a supercool band whose very first album would be titled Alpha, with the sub­sequent catalog running through all the letters of the Greek alphabet — a priceless idea, and here I am giving it away for free). Unfortunately, no sooner had it come out that they disappointed everyone with predictably dull statements — «we thought it was just a nice word to use, it doesn't really mean anything» or something to that effect. What a turn-off.

 

It's not as if listening to Omega would make me want to scream «just retire already!». It's hardly worse than Phoenix, and in some respects, maybe better. There are no longer any conscious at­tempts to revive any «authentic prog vibe» — an impossible task for a band that never had any to begin with. All of the songs are strictly within the four-to-five minute range, and all are pinned to recurrent pop hooks, with no far-fetched ideas of massive sonic exploration or whatever, although Steve Howe is still given plenty of opportunities to shine, and his presence graces the album even more now that they are no longer willing to remind us «we are the sidekicks of Yes, we are the sidekicks of Yes» every several minutes.

 

As a result, all of this is mostly decent, well-produced, multi-layered music – never terribly exci­ting, but memorable enough to keep the head occupied and restrained enough to keep the senses un-annoyed. Occasionally, they still tend to let Geoff in the front with the big old «heavenly key­board» sound, with Wetton belting out a standing-on-the-cliff-waving-his-hair-in-the-wind power ballad against it (ʽEver Yoursʼ), but most of these tracks could be played as background music without any major embarrassment.

 

ʽFinger On The Triggerʼ may not have been the best of all possible openings, though. They intro­duce it with one of those old-school «pop-metal» riffs, as if to convince us that they still have that «kick-ass crunch», but if they didn't really have it then, why would I start believing that they have it now? It's not an awful pop-rocker — the chorus is catchy, and Steve eventually breaks away from the lumbering rhythm-work and into the realm of high-pitched melodic solos. But already the second track, ʽThrough My Veinsʼ, on which they slow down the tempo and turn the mood to «rhythmically meditative», sounds more effective, even if, technically, it is more «boring». May­be it is because, at this point, Wetton's vocals just do not work on rock-out-oriented material: he does fine enough on the «wisened old man» front.

 

From then on, it's all fairly even – some love ballads, some social statements, some end-of-the-world predictions (even a song called ʽEnd Of The Worldʼ in case you don't feel it), but nothing ever stands out. With tremendous mental effort, I am only able to single out ʽEmilyʼ as a relative high point, exclusively due to Steve's fabulous slide work which raises this mid-tempo piano pop ballad out of adult contemporary mediocrity and adds a slight ʽAnd You And Iʼ-like shade — al­ways welcome. Eventually they wave us goodbye on ʽDon't Wanna Lose You Nowʼ, which wi­sely reproduces the life-is-great optimistic conclusion of Phoenix — a fairly effective conclusion, considering that only a couple of songs before they did little but complain about the various evils and injustices of the world. But never worry — it's all gonna be okay, as long as these guys are to­gether to serve as our guiding lights. A world without Asia is, after all, a much more lonely place than a world without Europe, don't you agree?

 

(I mean the bands, naturally, not the continents).

 

XXX (2012)

 

1) Tomorrow The World; 2) Bury Me In Willow; 3) No Religion; 4) Faithful; 5) I Know How You Feel; 6) Face On The Bridge; 7) Al Gatto Nero; 8) Judas; 9) Reno (Silver And Gold); 10) Ghost Of A Chance.

 

I tried looking for some smart 'n' sleazy joke on the album title, about Asia finally ma­king it in the adult entertainment business after all these years or something like that — all in vain, because dirty jokes stick to Asia about as well as they do to a freshly cut block of ice. Who would I be kidding? Naturally, XXX is just about the thirty years of the band's existence in a world of Roman numbers, Roger Dean album covers, and Popular Romantics. In fact, you could even argue that the title of the album is simply Asia, once more — since the «xxx» is actually formed by six little fish less-than-randomly trying to escape the jaws of the now-senile, but still actively hun­ting Asia dragon. Now that might be sexually suggestive, perhaps.

 

Anyway, strange as it is, 2012 finds the reunited band still reunited — all four members still per­fectly happy to work as a team — and still turning out unmistakably «Asian» material. There are no attempts to return to the mildly progressive experiments of Phoenix: XXX is a direct sequel to Omega, a steady, balanced stream of relatively short stadium-pop songs with loud and catchy Wetton choruses and immaculately crafted backgrounds with thickly layered keyboards and choral vocal harmonies. No corny power ballads whatsoever, not a single one: a few upbeat «power anthems», perhaps (like ʽFaithfulʼ or ʽI Know How You Feelʼ), yet overall, the guys admirably act their age — it's almost maddening, but I can't think of a single insult to fling at these songs.

 

The only disappointment is that, once again, Steve's role begins to get downplayed, almost as if they were intending to replay the old story another time. He does get to solo on many (not all) of the tracks, but the solos are usually short and supportive, never at the heart of the matter — and the primary melodies are almost exclusively keyboard-driven, or founded on rather unassuming, safely generic power-pop riffage (ʽJudasʼ). That heavenly slide tone is still out there somewhere — look for it in the deliciously flowing phrasing on ʽGhost Of A Chanceʼ, for instance; but that is the problem, since you really have to look for these bits. Otherwise, they just slip by through the cracks in your attention span, dissipated among the evenly rolling waves of the Asian Sea and those singalong Wetton choruses, surfing on the surface.

 

I do have to confess that ʽBury Me In Willowʼ is touching: maybe it is the heart surgery that Wetton underwent in 2007, or simply the fact of time rolling on, but as far as introspective songs that reflect on one's mortality go, this one is fairly strong, no matter how utterly «mid-1980-ish» the drums and keyboards make it sound. Supposedly, it all has to do with one's opinion on the natural properties and the «spiritual adjustment» of the lead singer's voice — well, I, for one, think that Wetton is one of the best guys around to carry on that retro-chivalrish tragic-epic vibe, and his "this is my final day, you know I would not joke, so bury me in willow, not in oak" strikes a fine chord somehow.

 

In fact, most of the songs here do. They are all stylistically similar, extremely even in terms of lyrics and sentiments, no highlights, no lowlights — moderately intelligent, catchy «adult pop» (actually, «old geezer pop» at the moment, but hey, that's a market niche, too). Thirty years after its inception, is this late-period brand of Asia actually any worse than it was at the beginning? Certainly, they've lost the freshness of approach and a bit of energy — but they make up for this in terms of accumulated «wisdom», as they now seem to know perfectly well what works for them and what does not. And since Asia has never really been a «young man's band», it is little wonder that they can get better as they get older.

 

I think I'll go with a thumbs up here, after all. I have no idea what to say about individual songs — so totally interchangeable most of them are — but the formula still works, and the funny thing is, the less they have left to prove, the better it works. It used to be that Asia was this unwieldy, cheesy «synth-art-pop» monster, polluting popular taste with their perfectly shaped, but consis­tently stillborn anthems. Now, somehow, in some way, perhaps because they have been doing it so long that nobody gives a damn any more, their creations show tiny glimpses of life — the still­born reanimated, through increased scientific progress. It's probably a corny way of describing the situation, but that is the impression I get when looking back at this oddly corroded thirty-year history — and it could have been a much worse impression.

 

GRAVITAS (2014)

 

1) Valkyrie; 2) Gravitas; 3) The Closer I Get To You; 4) Nyctophobia; 5) Russian Dolls; 6) Heaven Help Me Now; 7) I Would Die For You; 8) Joe DiMaggio's Glove; 9) Till We Meet Again.

 

And this thing just flat out refuses to die. Even with Steve Howe out of the band again, the new old lineup of Asia carries on well beyond its 30th birthdate, replacing the founding father with Sam Coulton, whose age — 27 years — means that the band is well on its way to go on living forever, gradually replacing its grandfathers with their grandkids, as long as they honor and che­rish the big, brawny spirit of Asia. Like Sam Coulton does.

 

Is this a good album? Not really. Is this an Asia album? Very much so, and not in name only. One thing has gone again: the attempt to connect with the old «progressive» spirit, launched with Phoenix and pretty much dissipated already by the time of XXX. Gravitas consists of (super­ficially) catchy, chorus-driven pop rockers and sentimental pop ballads, almost every one of which could be a commercial hit single (except that Asia hasn't had a commercial hit single for over 20 years now, and the public is not likely to make that change). Sam Coulton is a competent player, and his fluent, melodic style of playing meets the requirements of Asia, but he is not willing to lead the band in any daring experiments (and, given the context, would probably be simply happy to apply his talents to whatever the «veterans» tell him to).

 

We do know, though, that Asia at their best can excel in the «arena-pop» sphere as well; unfor­tunately, the songs that Downes and Wetton wrote for this record are anything but excellent. Safe, predictable, and totally respectful of the «Asia formula», they are not even all that catchy, when you get down to it — numbers like ʽValkyrieʼ and ʽNyctophobiaʼ really only seem catchy because their hooks just consist of chanting the title over and over again for about five million times ("Val-kee-REEEEE! Val-kee-REEEEE!", like a drunk Wagnerian, or "NYC-TO-PHO-BEE-A! NYC-TO-PHO-BEE-A!" like a teacher at the local spelling bee). The only guitar riff worth of any note is on ʽI Would Die For Youʼ, and sources indicate that it was actually reworked from an old 1987 demo — and, frankly speaking, I think I understand why it was shelved, because the riff is so straightforward and simple that it should have been rather used as a flashy coda for some other song than as a backbone for an entire composition. But it is still better than the title track, which uses up two and a half minutes of «atmospheric» keyboards for the introduction and then becomes a sentimental bore, hopping along to the rhythm track of Judas Priest's ʽYou Got Ano­ther Thing Comingʼ.

 

The ballads, meanwhile, show a new low in the lyrics department: "How did my heart become so soft / Like Joe DiMaggio's glove?" is quite an excruciatingly extorted metaphor to use as the song's primary hook, I'd say, but it is nothing compared to the crude romance interspersed with memories of a night trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg on a track perversely called ʽRussian Dollsʼ (which really means Matryoshkas, but could just as well be taken to refer to certain ladies of the night that the band members might have picked up at the station — well, I'm sure they're all well-behaved gentlemen, but the lyrics are ambiguous). And these attempts to add an aura of depth and mystery to mundane experiences... well, it just doesn't work when all these tired old scales and production tricks have already been used a million times for that.

 

So what do we rate a record where the biggest surprise is a simple riff from 1987, and the biggest disappointment is a total lack of surprises? A thumbs down assessment seems like the obvious choice, yet, for some reason, I hesitate to think of Gravitas as a definitively «bad» record. Maybe as these guys get older, their pompous arrogance starts being perceived as some sort of melan­cholic nostalgia, one with which you could empathize easier than with youthful cockiness-à-la-synth. However cheesy and generic the arrangement for ʽValkyrieʼ may be, there is no doubt in my mind that Wetton takes his vocal part seriously and sincerely — "Peace at last, fade to grey / My war is over now / This is the price I gladly pay / Surrender to her light" is not the best verse ever written, but this is his clumsy attempt to convey some genuine feelings on aging and death (and, for that matter, it is quite easy to forget that the man is pushing 65, just because his singing voice does not seem to have aged one day since King Crimson's Lark's Tongues In Aspic), and as far as my senses tell me, they are conveyed.

 

In other words, while formally Gravitas is more «simple» and «pop-oriented» than the band's «Howe-adorned Renaissance period» albums, it is a simplicity that logically follows the departure of their most creative member, not a simplicity born out of an intentionally realised desire to be simple. There may have been slightly more sophisticated Asia albums in the past that I actually hated for their arena-oriented pretentious brutal dumbness — Gravitas, on the other hand, some­how justifies its title, being a little more «earthy», and also a little darker and bleeker-feeling, than before, and, at the very least, I am sure that old-time fans, who have aged together with the band, will find it easy to align with the band's feelings.

 

 

THE ASSOCIATES

THE AFFECTIONATE PUNCH (1980)

 

1) The Affectionate Punch; 2) Amused As Always; 3) Logan Time; 4) Paper House; 5) Transport To Central; 6) A Matter Of Gender; 7) Even Dogs In The Wild; 8) Would I… Bounce Back?; 9) Deeply Concerned; 10) A.

 

Although there were many places around the world in which a man could get unhappy in the early 1980s, Scotland would probably count as one of the top contenders. Cold climate, coal mi­ning, and bagpipes will do that to you, I guess; throw in Margaret Thatcher, and there's a good enough recipe for suicide, even if took Billy MacKenzie, the frontman of the Associates, twenty years of an up-and-down musical career to remember how it goes.

 

In 1979, the chief idol for this young aspiring creative unit, consisting of MacKenzie, multi-in­st­ru­­mentalist Alan Rankine, and whoever else would drop in at the local studio, was David Bowie; they even released his own ʽBoys Keep Swingingʼ as their debut single. Unsurprisingly, much of The Affectionate Punch actually sounds like Bowie, although, of course, on a much less pro­fes­sional and experienced level. On the other hand, it's got such factors as youth, fresh energy, and novelty on its side — and, perhaps, even a dim feeling that Billy MacKenzie might be more genu­inely «into the spirit of it all» than the lovable old con man Bowie. After all, Billy MacKenzie did end up killing himself, and the old con man is still alive. Crap argument, I know, but still worth some sick consideration.

 

Anyway, this is what they usually call «post-punk», meaning «music that punks begin to play when they get tired of being punks». Dark, angry, melancholic, aggressive, heavy on the bass, the echo, and the creepy guitar effects, low on solo instrumental passages and pretty melodies. The vocalist sounds like a slightly higher-pitched Bowie most of the time, but occasionally tries on the morbid Old Testamental solemnity of Scott Walker, and always sings with an echo, because he obviously does not like the idea of getting too close to his audience. The multi-instrumentalist clearly has more fun laying on the bass parts, which are loud, driving, catchy, and moody, and less fun adding the guitar, which he regularly plays in Andy Summers mode (i. e. the fewer notes played, the better, because the great reggae gods told us so). And, apparently, Robert Smith of The Cure adds some backing vocals — which I could not ever tell without the liner notes, but I'm thinking that his actual presence in the studio was a bigger kick for MacKenzie and Rankine than any possible contribution he could make. Because, let's face it, just one look at Robert Smith, and your depression quotient goes up five points.

 

But also, The Affectionate Punch is the band's most «rock»-oriented album, with a general live feel to all the tracks — pretty soon the duo would be moving in a synth-poppier direction. Not that this is particularly important: the Associates rocked on a moderate scale, with a bit of theat­rical restraint and somewhat limited playing technique. They fare much better on the songwriting scale: quite a few of these tracks easily stand competition with Lodger-era Bowie in terms of creative ideas, even if, to me, only one stands out as instantly memorable: ʽEven Dogs In The Wildʼ, a superbly bleak, pessimistic look at humanity, encapsuled in a grumbly bass groove, an anthemic-romantic guitar riff, and a repetitive chorus that somehow trascends its repetitiveness and grows into a mantra of despair: "Even dogs in the wild, even dogs in the wild... could do bet­ter than this". This is the one they snatched from Heaven; not so sure about the others.

 

Still, as long as the others move along at decent tempos, they manage to be tense, sharp, and pa­ranoid, just as the doctor ordered. The title track bounces on a sea of old-fashionedly distorted guitar chords and piano counterpoints, as MacKenzie and his vocal backers sing about "the affec­tionate punch" that "draws even more blood". Think about the deep meaning long enough to go crazy, and fandom will be your reward. ʽPaper Houseʼ shuffles along to a tricky tempo and a flood of wailing licks that remind of The Edge's style, but without the heroic echo effects. And on ʽWould I... Bounce Backʼ, MacKenzie wonders "if I threw myself from the ninth storey, would I levitate back to three?" against a wall of phased guitar sound that does seem to be bouncing up and down. (Don't try this at home, though).

 

Some of the slower ones really drag and require a deep admiration for MacKenzie's handsome, but not all that original operatic intonations to turn into personal favorites (ʽLogan Timeʼ; the noise-drenched ʽTransport To Centralʼ). But, since the band has a solid understanding of all their influences, and since MacKenzie rarely, if ever, goes completely over the top, and since the lyrics are appropriately obscure and ambiguous most of the time, The Affectionate Punch has no gla­ringly obvious downsides, other than failing to make it into the year's top 10 most impressive re­leases. And for all those who think that pop music really reached its zenith with Berlin-era Bowie, Joy Division, and Echo & The Bunnymen, The Affectionate Punch is required listening in any case. One could even say that the MacKenzie/Rankine duo paves the way for the much better known pairing of Morrissey and Marr — although the differences are as copious here as the re­semblances. Anyway, a modest thumbs up.

 

FOURTH DRAWER DOWN (1981)

 

1) White Car In Germany; 2) A Girl Named Property; 3) Kitchen Person; 4) Q Quarters; 5) Tell Me Easter's On Friday; 6) The Associate; 7) Message Oblique Speech; 8) An Even Whiter Car; 9*) Fearless (It Takes A Full Moon); 10*) Point Si; 11*) Straw Towels; 12*) Kissed; 13*) Blue Soap.

 

It is hard to surprise anyone by describing an early 1980s album as «dark and cold». Even the New Romantics, whose basic goals involved finding fresh new ways to get girls to sleep with them, thrived on sounding «dark and cold» — the colder you are, the hotter will be the girls that you are going to get. And, considering how much the Associates' debut was influenced by the Bo­wie/Eno team, it would be very easy to dismiss their further developments on Fourth Drawer Down as even more bandwagon-jumping.

 

But during this very brief streak, the Associates were not really jumping on the bandwagon — on the contrary, they were helping to build the bandwagon. First of all, these six singles, first relea­sed separately, then knocked together in a coherent single monster, are wildly experimental. Ran­kine and Mackenzie were not interested in simply trading in their post-punk guitar band sound for a bunch of synthesizers: nearly each of the tracks had to include various sound effects and over­lays that would all contribute to the «authentic eeriness» of the atmosphere. Second, throughout the working process Mackenzie was feeding the band his personal disturbance and paranoia — and where it did not seem enough, they were enhancing the mood with drugs (allegedly, both of the key members even had to be hospitalized at one point).

 

In terms of complexity or meticulousness of production, Fourth Drawer Down does not stand comparison with The Cure, for instance. But it does not really have to. Robert Smith's target has always been the arena — his internal anguish had to be projected over the entire world, and that, by itself, required a tremendous amount of work so as not to come out as laughable. Mackenzie, on the other hand, is not singing about the end of the world or about humanity being forever chai­ned to eternal bleakness, despair, and soul torment. Hence, this is «chamber-oriented» art-pop, not the «symphony-oriented» brand of Robert Smith; and most of the sonic waves seem oriented straight at myself, rather than at occupying the airspace around.

 

Starting, actually, with the first throbbing pulses that open ʽWhite Car In Germanyʼ. As your sub­woofer threatens to blow up under the weight of the song's massive «leaden» punch, Mackenzie pours out waves of lyrical nonsense with such keywords as "cold", "infirmary", "spies", "surgery", "premature senility", and, yes, "white car in Germany". Whether it's all about an ER vehicle or something else is irrelevant: the main aim is to get a shivery, clinically sterile, living-dead sound, a variety of «morgue muzak», if I may say so. There is no overexaggerated depression or faked in­sanity here — it's simply an anatomical deconstruction of death with no emotional evaluation attached. None needed, in fact.

 

ʽWhite Carʼ is one of the album's least guitar-dependent songs, though; a more typical formula involves some particular, relatively simple, but catchy, guitar figure, devised by Rankine and us­ed as the basic anchor — the unnerving voice of your internal doomsayer. Next come Macken­zie's ice-cold operatic waves, and finally, all the extra overdubs. It applies to ʽA Girl Named Pro­pertyʼ (where several guitars drone on, layered across each other, in a disturbingly Crimsonian manner); the faster-paced, but still living-dead ʽKitchen Personʼ; and ʽMessage Oblique Speechʼ. ʽQ Quartersʼ pushes the guitar drone into the deep background, keeping the foreground minima­listic-ambient, with a little bit of pseudo-harpsichord to ensure that the mood is still flowing. And ʽTell Me Easter's On Fridayʼ floats on a thin little keyboard riff instead, probably being the clo­sest to generic «synth-pop» that this record gets.

 

The original record only included eight songs, still managing to run for a good forty minutes be­cause of the length; however, the six bonus tracks on the CD reissue, bringing back all the nearly lost B-sides, add a brief epic touch — the extra twenty-five minutes will probably just irritate you if you find yourself incapable of «getting in the spirit», but for those who like a solid morgue-ori­ented album from time to time, ʽPoint Siʼ, with its quasi-annoying buzzing guitar groove, and ʽStraw Towelsʼ, one of the album's fastest songs, will be fine additional touches to the sonic pa­norama. (The only true misstep is the final number, ʽBlue Soapʼ, which features Mackenzie sin­ging accappella through a megaphone or something, set against a backdrop of dripping water and what sounds like a faraway orchestra rehearsal — gimmicky and quite meaningless).

 

It is thoroughly not «my kind of album» — quite inevitably, I find myself bored each time I get to the third or fourth song on it. Me, I'd rather hear one more time about the end of the world than be reminded, in such an intricate manner, of the existence of the cold-room. But if that's the point, Fourth Drawer Down definitely succeeds in making it — don't forget to throw on a sweater or something before loading the record into your CD player. Oh, and the melodies? I'd say they are on the same level as with The Affectionate Punch: modestly catchy «growers» with little, if any, «gripping» power. Oh, and the sound effects? Well, there's typewriters, coughing, singing thro­ugh vacuum cleaner hoses, probably lots of other stuff — no string quartets or nightingales, as could be guessed — it all contributes to some atmosphere, I guess. I could turn my thumbs down, theoretically, but they seem to have been frozen in the thumbs up position.

 

SULK (1982)

 

1) Arrogance Gave Him Up; 2) No; 3) Bapdelabap; 4) Gloomy Sunday; 5) Nude Spoons; 6) Skipping; 7) It's Better This Way; 8) Party Fears Two; 9) Club Country; 10) Nothinginsomethingparticular; 11*) Love Hangover; 12*) 18 Carat Love Affair; 13*) Ulcragyceptimol; 14*) And Then I Read A Book; 15*) Grecian 2000; 16*) Australia; 17*) The Room We Sat In Before.

 

Considering the noticeable increase in tempos and repetitive choruses, it is hard to refrain from the thought that Mackenzie kept pushing the band in a more commercial direction — leading, eventually, to a split with Rankine, who (not without reason) thought that he was becoming side­tracked, and left for a solo career. On the other hand, «commercial» is not an easy word to use when you are dealing with the deliriously paranoid  lifeform that is Billy Mackenzie: for every new fan that he was gaining with the band's re-orientation on the dance-pop market, he was pro­bably alienating at least one old (pissed off at all the trendy keyboard sounds) and at least one po­tential (scared of Mackenzie's hystrionics).

 

The recent CD re-release of Sulk is seventeen tracks long, and since the style generally remains the same, may be overkill. However, the expansion is due to a healthy bunch of A- and B-sides from around the same year that the LP came out, and some of them are honestly better than the stuff they put on the LP. Arguably the best way to enjoy the trip is to program out the five or six tunes that you find too boring or annoying — and believe me, everyone will have a bunch of an­noyingly boring favorites on Sulk — and be left with the catchiest, and most energetic collection of electronic dance-pop romances in the band's history.

 

The best of the lot never made it on the original LP: it is a thoroughly disloyal cover of Diana Ross' ʽLove Hangoverʼ, throttling the sweet lovey-dovey attitude of the disco original and repla­cing it with a lower, darker groove over which Mackenzie spreads out a tour-de-force perfor­mance. As a matter of fact, Diana's original never sounded much like a «hangover» — if our hangovers took on the form of her sweet ecstasy, we'd all be doomed alcoholics by now. In the hands of Mackenzie, however, the song finally justifies its title: the man plays out a real «hang­over» — it's killing, yes it is, splitting headaches and all, but, for some reason, this is the state that he'd rather remain in for life. «Love» becomes a bout of masochism here, not some sort of generic ab­stract «pleasure».

 

This idea of reinterpreting ʽLove Hangoverʼ ties in brilliantly with the band's original vision. Sulk is almost nearly a conceptual album about the psychic dangers of love — at least half of the songs, both musically and lyrically, are about suffering from its side effects. Way too dark to be able to compete with the comparatively «fluffy» Duran Duran, yet much lighter than the contem­porary Cure records, because Billy Mackenzie's ego never amounted to even half the size of Ro­bert's Smith (yet again, not that it's necessarily a good thing: Robert Smith regularly offered plen­ty of musical fat to prop up the size of his ego — and no, that is not a veiled hint at the man's weight problems).

 

I have to confess that the actual music behind this attitude is fairly routine. With Rankine as­sign­ed to synthesizer duties, spending far more time at the keys than at his guitar strings, the toughest musical link in the band at this point is bass player Michael Dempsey, who, incidentally, joined the Associates soon after quitting The Cure. Considering that Three Imaginary Boys from 1979 was one of The Cure's bass-strongest records, that hardly comes as a surprise: most of the bass grooves on Sulk are first-rate, particularly on ʽSkippingʼ and ʽParty Fears Twoʼ. The keyboard work, on the other hand, leaves much to be desired. Most of the time I just feel like Rankine is weaving little flourishes around Mackenzie's «arias» that never take our attention span away from the vocals. Proving my point, the two completely instrumental numbers that bookmark the record are both utterly forgettable — minimalistic synth patterns pinned to bouncy rhythms; you could get that kind of stuff for a dime a dozen in 1982.

 

Mackenzie himself is quite good, though. Besides ʽLove Hangoverʼ, he also reinvents the old jazz standard ʽGloomy Sundayʼ (also known as ʽHungarian Suicide Songʼ) — it is fun to listen to his version alongside Billie Holiday's, showing how much and how little has changed over the forty years that allegedly shook the world. ʽParty Fears Twoʼ remains stuck in the head as well, if only for the wall-rattling "AWAKE ME!" that serves as its climax — it's one of those tunes that is exactly 50% drunk romantic happiness and exactly 50% bleak suicidal despair, an explosive mix inherited from Roxy Music, but stripped of Bryan Ferry's salon smoothness. On the other hand, sometimes the silliness-as-seriousness is a bit too much to take — ʽBap De La Bapʼ is a dumb title, and the lyrics match its dumbness without even compensating with a bit of humour that could be expected from such a title. Dumb title, dumb lyrics, dumb «spooky» vocal delivery + annoying synthesizer sound = the Eighties forget no one.

 

Sulk is no masterpiece, and won't become one even when all the fat has been trimmed. In most retrospectives, it usually cuts off the «highly starred» period of the Associates' career, because most reviewers instinctively think that «loss of a key member» is always an objective event that the band needs to be penalized for. But Alan Rankine never was a particularly awesome guitarist, just a good one; and Sulk makes relatively little use of his talents in a relatively useful way — this is the Mackenzie show through and through, so the gap between it and the next stage of the «band» is not nearly as huge as one could believe from just browsing through the All-Music Guide. Still, it's got some good hooks, and, most importantly, when it is at its best, it's got that odd mood — how would you like to slit your veins while feeling totally happy about it? never mind, don't try that at home unless you are a Struggling Artist — that alone justifies a respectable thumbs up. I mean, I'm not sure I like that mood — in fact, I'm pretty sure I don't — but hey, a mood is a mood, and sometimes you just have to respect a mood while being detached from it. If everybody starts driving scooters into the oceans to the sounds of ʽLove Reign O'er Meʼ, that's gonna take a heavy toll on the fish population.

 

PERHAPS (1985)

 

1) Those First Impressions; 2) Waiting For The Loveboat; 3) Perhaps; 4) Schampout; 5) Helicopter Helicopter; 6) Breakfast; 7) Thirteen Feelings; 8) The Stranger In Your Voice; 9) The Best Of You; 10) Don't Give Me That I Told You So Look.

 

Post-Rankine era Associates are generally forgotten, since even the band name does not really make any sense when nobody is genuinely «associated» with Billy Mackenzie any more. Natu­rally, if your original image is built on the successful collage of «guy with guitar» and «guy with ego», critics and fans alike will not be impressed when the «guy with guitar» is gone, and you simply retain the original name for publicity purposes. Perhaps took a fairly long time to make — two years of recording only to get completely scrapped and restarted from scratch — and when it eventually came out, it fared poorly. Still reaching something like #23 on the UK charts, but it didn't stay there long, even despite the sexy suit on the front sleeve.

 

But you know what? I actually found it much more interesting than Sulk. At this point, nobody pretends any more that this has anything to do with a «rock» sound: the entire album is stereoty­pical synth-pop, with very few guitar overdubs of any importance — and, instead of having Ran­kine, a modestly inventive, but technically mediocre, player, handle the goods, Mackenzie hires expert player Stephen Betts, a.k.a. Howard Hughes, as a full-time member. The record is no lon­ger produced by Mike Hedges, too, removing and discarding most of The Cure associations; in­stead, there is a whole bunch of various synth-poppers responsible for production, and it seems to me that their chief task along the way was to steal away as much of Mackenzie's usual darkness and schizophrenia as possible. Much of it still remains — at his peak, Mackenzie was all dark­ness and schizophrenia, so you couldn't steal away everything, no matter how hard you tried — but overall, Perhaps is much less disturbing than Sulk.

 

So, it is synth-pop, it is relatively lighter and brighter than usual, it is a solo album masquerading as a band effort, a re-recording made at the record company's insistence — by all these parame­ters, it's a suckjob that doesn't even deserve its own review at the All-Music Guide. But its open­ing number, ʽThose First Impressionsʼ, happens to be the most beautiful song in Mackenzie's ca­reer. If you happen to be fond of stuff like Roxy Music's ʽMore Than Thisʼ and other Avalon-era creations, there is no way you won't be impressed by ʽImpressionsʼ — its more than tasteful mix of minimalistic piano chords, quiet horn and guitar perks, grumbly bass explosions, and, most important of all, a gorgeous vocal melody from Billy. It may not be entirely true to his personali­ty, but it is hard for me to believe that the entire performance could be «faked» when it is such a flawlessly executed vocal tour-de-force. Sweet, touching, danceable, immaculately produced (the voice is not lost in the mix even for one second, always dancing several feet above the instrumen­tal surface), a genuine gem of 1980s electronic pop.

 

None of the other tunes can keep up, but there is plenty of creativity anyway. ʽWaiting For The Loveboatʼ and the title track are hook-filled, memorable pop-rockers whose choruses can poten­tially annoy, but are definitely not senseless (ʽPerhapsʼ is at least as good as your average Depe­che Mode hit). ʽHelicopter Helicopterʼ is fast and crazy, not unlike a goofy Oingo Boingo num­ber with its robotic-funky horn and synth arrangements. ʽBreakfastʼ places its faith in a French-tinged piano and strings arrangement — it should be a particularly acquired taste, but it's interesting to see Mackenzie try out something completely different. ʽThe Best Of Youʼ has an excellent bass groove (although the vocals, courtesy of guest singer Eddi Reader, are questionable). And minor melodic attractions can be found just about anywhere.

 

All the way through, I kept pinching myself, but the truth is out: I am really, really quite impres­sed by the record. It does have one major flaw: almost all of the songs are drastically overlong — they are not that good to deserve five-to-six minute running times, so that a humble collection of just 10 numbers runs well over fifty minutes. This isn't really a «party» album to keep the guests on their feet, no matter how many technically danceable numbers there are — it is still an attempt to hew out some «art», and I would definitely feel strange dancing to songs that reference "dee­per days of quintessential innocence" and such. Hence, no need to keep the groove up and going once it has worked out its potential.

 

But other than that, it is an imaginative, diverse, and honest attempt to make a progressive synthe­sis of old school chamber pop and R'n'B with the new electronic inventory at hand. Like all such attempts done in the mid-Eighties, it remains thoroughly dated (the drum sound, in particular, is mostly horrible) — but repeated listenings let me look past that, and simply appreciate the record for all of its little inventions, the power of Mackenzie's voice, and the undeniable beauty of ʽThose First Impressionsʼ. Thumbs up.

 

THE GLAMOUR CHASE (1988)

 

1) Reach The Top; 2) Heart Of Glass; 3) Terrorbeat; 4) Set Me Up; 5) Country Boy; 6) Because You Love; 7) The Rhythm Divine; 8) Snowball; 9) You'd Be The One; 10) Empires Of Your Heart; 11) In Windows All; 12) Heaven's Blue; 13) Take Me To The Girl.

 

Even the record company failed to find enough trust in this album: upon completion, it was re­jec­ted by the label and remained unreleased until 2003, when it was finally given the green light du­ring a general campaign to remaster and re-release the entire Associates catalog. The only diffe­rence is that the label did not see the album as «commercial»; me, I just don't see it as «interes­ting» or «inspired». Or could that be the same thing? Sometimes, at least?..

 

It is odd, because some of the ingredients are still there. Mackenzie still got his voice, his perso­nal problems and sentiments, and some desire to experiment. The whole thing is not «just» ano­ther synth-pop crapfest. But when your work happens to be within the synth-pop idiom, tremen­dously strong vitaminization is required to make stuff work. Perhaps still had plenty of exciting ingredients. The Glamour Chase has next to none.

 

ʽReach The Topʼ, for instance, is the worst start-off number in Associates history so far: other than the chorus vocals, it has nothing even vaguely reminiscent of a hook, and even the vocals are delivered in a flat, lifeless way, without making use of Mackenzie's impressive potential. Basical­ly, it is just a song that could have been done by any generic act of the era — possibly an attempt on Billie's part to really go «commercial» and give the club kids a fresh butt-wiggler. The shame, the awful shame.

 

Likewise, what was the point of covering Blondie's ʽHeart Of Glassʼ? It's not just that the original already was pure disco perfection; it's that the song cannot possibly benefit from a Mackenzie touch, unlike, say, ʽLove Hangoverʼ — its superficially happy sarcasm cannot be re-molded into an Associates-type pattern, and it isn't. It's just a stupid, overlong, completely unnecessary cover, probably feeding off the assumption that people may need to be reminded of how cool it was to dance to disco-Blondie in a past era. A tenth anniversary tribute to the song or something.

 

The only tunes here that are at least marginally interesting are those that try to cross synth-pop with older genres. ʽCountry Boyʼ turns the chorus into a «traditional» crooner-fest; and ʽSnow­ballʼ dives into cabaret territory (a thing that Robert Smith, however, had already done much better with ʽLovecatsʼ). But even these little tactical victories are nullified when seven-minute long monsters like ʽIn Windows Allʼ come along and bore you with slow, draggy, pompous syn­thesizer minimalism — few things are more evil than a solemn synth-pop epic devoid of mind-blowing chord sequences to justify the size.

 

In the end, all that remains is just a small bunch of cherries — a cool violin twist here, a juicy bass pluck there, and some vocal parts that will be definitely appreciated by Billy fans (ʽThe Rhythm Divineʼ is fairly soulful — if only the music were in the least bit interesting as well). In general, though, the well is running dry; had the album remained in the vaults forever, the world would hardly have missed a chance to become a better place than it already is. Thumbs down, although, if Billy Mackenzie is your soul brother, you will probably still want to scrape some soul off the bottom of this barrel as well.

 

WILD AND LONELY (1990)

 

1) Fire To Ice; 2) Fever; 3) People We Meet; 4) Just Can't Say Goodbye; 5) Calling All Around The World; 6) The Glamour Chase; 7) Where There's Love; 8) Something's Got To Give; 9) Strasbourg Square; 10) Ever Since That Day; 11) Wild And Lonely; 12) Fever In The Shadows.

 

I do not understand why The Glamour Chase was rejected and Wild & Lonely was accepted. Or, rather, I do: because Billy was dropped by WEA and went to some obscure minor label in­stead. Which had nothing to do with the music on the record — most of which was awful. At least The Glamour Chase was a disappointing failure; Wild & Lonely is just an annoying pim­ple on the pop music surface.

 

Two things are certain: (a) Billy Mackenzie still got his pretty voice; (b) most of these songs are danceable. This is more or less all the accolades I can screw out of my brain. It is hardly possible to discuss individual songs, because how do you tell bubbly synth patterns one from another? I doubt anyone will ever be interested in the tablature for any of these songs.

 

Initially, there is serious temptation to trash the whole thing as primitively disgusting «Euro­dance». It takes several listens to even begin to understand that Billy actually did take some care of the ar­rangements. For instance, ʽFeverʼ, in addition to the basic chugging synth bass part, has layers of pianos, (synthesized) strings, and (synthesized) harps, all of which could theoretically add up to something distinctive. But they don't, because none of the parts make any sense other than a «oh, that sounds too naked, let me throw on some "artsiness" here».

 

Worse, it takes serious digging to clear a way to Billy's heart — most of the songs are so utterly faceless, it's as if he'd completely lost all sense of purpose. Why the heck does a thing like ʽCal­ling Around The Worldʼ even exist? Its horn-driven theme is cheesy, its «happy« vocals are pho­ny, its chorus is unmemorable. Where are the angst and the anguish? The despair and the disen­chantment? The gloom and the glamour? Shame, shame, shame.

 

If you suffer long enough, you may get a mild, inadequate reward in the guise of the title track, which completes the record in a soft-jazz / adult-contemporary mode. As the electronic drum­ming gets softer and slightly «Latinized», the synth bass dies down to an echo, and minimalistic piano chords and strings take center stage, Billy gives a tragic-romantic delivery in the grand tra­dition of a Scott Walker (or a David Bowie, if you prefer someone with advanced star power). Does it help much? No. It's just one last song, and it isn't very memorable, and there is no way it would save the album from an inevitable thumbs down. But at least it sounds natural, which is the last word I would want to associate with the rest of this record.

 

After the predictable, and justifiable, flop of the album — it might have helped if Billy were a hot young teenage girl in a leotard, but no guarantee — Mackenzie finally had the good sense to re­tire the «Associates» brand, a thing that he should have done at least three years earlier (Perhaps can still be qualified as an «Associates» record in spirit). As far as I know, having only listened to brief snippets, his last solo album, Beyond The Sun, released just before or just after his suicide in 1997, somewhat reinstates his standing, moving away from generic dance-pop, but I have no plans for a detailed review of Billy's solo career. It's too bad, though, how the Associates thing ended — what began as an inspiring combination of elements ended up ground and chewn in the stupid pop cliché machine: one more victim of the mercyless Eighties.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE RADIO ONE SESSIONS VOL. 1 (1981-1983; 2003)

 

1) Me, Myself, And The Tragic Story; 2) Nude Spoons; 3) A Matter Of Gender; 4) It's Better This Way; 5) Ulcra­gy­cep­timol; 6) Waiting For The Love Boat; 7) Australia; 8) Love Hangover; 9) A Severe Bout Of Career Insecurity; 10) God Bless The Child; 11) This Flame; 12) Helicopter, Helicopter; 13) Theme From Perhaps; 14) Perhaps (schizo­phrenic version); 15) Don't Give Me That I Told You So Look; 16) Breakfast.

 

Due to the briefness of their shooting star, the original Associates never left behind a proper live album; nor, perhaps, did they really need one, because their sound relied much more on studio craft than explosive live-by-the-moment energetics. For this reason, you might well think, just like I did, that their live radio sessions, released seriously postfactum from the BBC archives, may be ignored without serious consequences. Don't make that mistake! Every once in a while, obsessive completism pays off properly.

 

The first nine songs on this collection, recorded on April 28, 1981 and March 6, 1982, respective­ly, not only feature Rankine on guitar, playing some of the band's best material: they present the best sound that you will ever get out of the Associates. Recorded live in the BBC studio, the songs only allow that much excessive Eighties gloss to be spoiled with. Real live drumming; a minimum of keyboard layers; and, most importantly, guitar a-plenty, guitar that screams and wails as much as it wants to, instead of being subject to rude discrimination. But at the same time, it's still the Associates — moody, echoey music, hysterical vocals and all.

 

Take ʽA Matter Of Genderʼ, for instance. The original was an atmospheric rocker, whose spark was ignited by rubbing together a heavy funky bass line and a slight, shrill, «see-saw-y» guitar riff. Live, the guitar minimalism is expanded to become a veritable banshee celebration of the in­strument — it does not exactly become better, but it sacrifices a little bit of «mystery» in order to gain the guise of a tempest. The pseudo-Eastern riff that opens ʽIt's Better This Wayʼ is played out with twice as more muscle, and the vocals do not creep out like a swampy echo from behind the generic electronic drums, but are delivered straight in your face. And ʽNude Spoonsʼ? The guitar buzzes and stings like a swarm of bees on speed, where on the Sulk studio original it just left a dirty trail of sonic slime in the back of your speakers. Cool!

 

In addition, there are a few tracks that never got album release — the instrumental ʽMe, Myself And The Tragic Storyʼ is another brawny, flashy, inspiring composition, if not particularly me­morable; and ʽA Severe Bout Of Career Insecurityʼ probably has the best pure piano melody on any Associates record of the Rankine era. Also, ʽLove Hangoverʼ gets a long near-accappella in­troduction (with just a few piano notes to back McKenzie), a must-hear for everyone who just sits there waiting for one more chance to go crazy over McKenzie's tonal magic.

 

The remaining seven songs are from 1983 and already feature several early versions of McKen­zie's Perhaps compositions. These are less exciting, because there are fewer differences from the final takes, and with Rankine's departure, the new band was no longer interested in emphasizing the «live» nature of the sound. Still, there is an interesting take on the Billie Holiday classic ʽGod Bless The Childʼ — I abhor it, currently, but just because I cannot see anyone improving on the original; Billy really does a fine job in his style.

 

In any case, the first nine tracks alone merit a rock-solid thumbs up: one of those indisputable cases, I think, which fully justify the existence of the BBC Archives — they may have put out a huge lot of redundant, hardcore-fan-only «pale-shadows», but this is one of the major exceptions. It's too bad they didn't record their entire catalog that way — or I'd have no problem recommen­ding to just go for the BBC stuff, and forget about regular studio work.

 

THE RADIO ONE SESSIONS VOL. 2 (1984-1985; 2003)

 

1) A Matter Of Gender; 2) Message Oblique Speech; 3) The Affectionate Punch; 4) Kites; 5) The Crying Game; 6) Even Dogs In The Wild; 7) Gloomy Sunday; 8) Heart Of Glass; 9) Obsession Magnificent; 10) Take Me To The Girl; 11) Give; 12) Helicopter Helicopter; 13) Breakfast; 14) Perhaps.

 

The second volume of The Radio Sessions covers the first years of the «Associates» without Rankine — which is already disheartening — during which McKenzie was still more concerned about aesthetics than about choreography — which is a little better. It is no way as overwhelmingly strong a collection as the first volume, which goes as far as to present the band in a certain light that is unshed by their studio catalog. But it is still more of a must-own for McKenzie fans than The Glamour Chase or Wild And Lonely.

 

Curiously, the 1984-85 sessions that McKenzie's «Mark II» Associates did for Radio 1 were not at all centered around tracks for the upcoming Perhaps. Three tunes from that album that are tacked onto the end of the CD are not live at all: they represent either alternate mixes or simply the exact same tracks (I don't have the time or will to check it out more accurately) as Perhaps it­self — padding out the running length without any clear reason. The real live tracks all date back to The Affectionate Punch / Sulk era, and represent McKenzie's attempts at somehow prolon­ging these songs' breathing period by reinventing them.

 

The first four tracks give us a more disciplined, a more tightly buttoned Associates brand, where the drummer looks more like a robot than a punk on fire, the guitarist shuns unpredictable synco­pation or flourishes like plague, and the wall-of-sound, if present, seems static rather than «con­stantly evolving». However, they still sound like an actual band, perhaps moving closer to The Cure in spirit, and this means that, for instance, ʽA Matter Of Genderʼ gets one more life here — the original studio take, the Rankine-era live version, and the post-Rankine rendition all sound like different statements. And ʽMessage Oblique Speechʼ, a track I never noticed much on Fourth Drawer Down, is seriously sped up, given a repetitive, but catchy new synth-riff, and be­comes a hysterical anthem instead of a meditative bore.

 

The second session yields three stripped-down performances, centered around McKenzie's sin­ging and a lonesome piano: a torching rendition of Dave Berry's ʽThe Crying Gameʼ, plus beau­tiful takes on ʽEven Dogs In The Wildʼ (the song works great with a bass/piano/finger-clicking accompaniment — and that chord sequence in the chorus, probably the deepest, most inspired thing these guys ever came up with, sounds even more stunning on solo piano than in its original electric guitar arrangement) and ʽGloomy Sundayʼ — it all sounds surprisingly fresh and lively compared to the stuffed synth-pop aura of all the post-Rankine productions.

 

The final section has a couple tracks that are unavailable elsewhere (ʽObsession Magnificentʼ, ʽGiveʼ), as well as an early take on ʽHeart Of Glassʼ that is much better than the «finished» ver­sion on Glamour Chase, with more of a live than computer feeling — at the very least, it sounds inoffensive enough to actually let you start thinking of the possible benefits that a replacement of Debbie Harry by Billy McKenzie could accrue in this context. Or maybe not. But it does sound inoffensive enough — real guitars instead of synth loops are a good guarantee.

 

Overall, if you decide to own Vol. 1, there is no reason to stay away from Vol. 2, but you got to be prepared for its being a little different. It is a good travel companion to Perhaps, despite focu­sing on earlier (or later!) material — and an invitation to feed some more on the bleeding heart of Billy McKenzie that should be taken quite seriously by all of his vampire admirers. My own fangs are a bit short, but a thumbs up is still guaranteed.

AZTEC CAMERA

HIGH LAND, HARD RAIN (1983)

 

1) Oblivious; 2) The Boy Wonders; 3) Walk Out To Winter; 4) The Bugle Sounds Again; 5) We Could Send Letters; 6) Pillar To Post; 7) Release; 8) Lost Outside The Tunnel; 9) Back On Board; 10) Down The Dip; 11*) Haywire; 12*) Orchid Girl; 13*) Queen's Tattoos.

 

Every time I listen to New Wave pop from the early 1980s, all these fresh new faces wishing to leave their mark on musical history and all, I can't help wondering whether all that stuff would be more enjoyable without all the electronics. Leave in the smarter brands of lyrics, the R'n'B, reggae, and «world music» influences, the commercial hooks, but leave out the digitalization — would that make the songs more durable and intelligent-sounding?

 

Well, look no further than the Aztec Camera debut record to answer that question. The opening track, ʽObliviousʼ, greets you with a funky drum beat rather typical of the time — but the rhythm part is pure acoustic guitar, and, apart from a thin electric organ part that comes in later, that's all the instrumentation you get. A danceable pop song composed and performed in a contemporary manner, but rigorously set to a stark acoustic guitar backing — who else did that in 1983? Mind you, we are not talking «college rock» à la R.E.M. here: Roddy Frame, the 19-year old Scottish mastermind behind Aztec Camera, was clearly aiming for the charts.

 

And ʽObliviousʼ did hit the UK charts, eventually going as high as #18, which is fairly high for an acoustic pop hit at the time. But then again, it's not just the instrumentation. It's Roddy's voice — free of mannerisms or extra pathos; Roddy's lyrics — freshly intricate and thought-provoking in the verses ("they'll call us lonely when we're really just alone" is quite a nice line), seductively straightforward in the chorus; Roddy's hooks — the chorus has just enough chord changes and is reprised just the exact number of times to stick firmly. It's not a jaw-droppingly great song, but it oozes quality and inspiration all over, and it is particularly excellent in a 1983 context.

 

Acoustic guitar is not the only leading instrument on Aztec Camera's debut, but the only other leading instrument is the electric guitar, and I have only been able to spot electronic percussion ef­fects in a few places where they never spoil the impression. As for the music, Roddy does not subscribe fully to the «new school» of musical thought. He is clearly influenced just as much by the likes of Phil Spector (check out the «wall-of-sound» chorus on ʽWe Could Send Lettersʼ), smooth jazz (ʽReleaseʼ), even gospel-tinged R'n'B (ʽBack On Boardʼ), not to mention just about every school of pop from the Beatles to ABBA.

 

The only thing that prevents High Land from reaching «total masterpiece» status is a certain mo­notonousness in the arrangements. It is nice that Roddy and his backers can install the wall-of-sound with just a bunch of acoustic guitars and a few harmony overdubs, but overall, the minima­listic approach to arrangements gets a bit samey: at the very least, it prevents the listener from immediately dropping down dead in amazement — you have to let the songs gradually establish their individuality, get used to the difference in messages and atmospheres that is conveyed most­ly through different chord structures.

 

But when you do, the album can overwhelm you with a wow!-effect when you least expect it, be­cause the songs are worth it. "Walk out to winter, swear I'll be there" is tremendously uplifting and chivalrous without fake sentimentality. ʽThe Bugle Sounds Againʼ uses a clever military me­taphor and ironically-pathetic martial atmosphere, influenced by Scottish folk, to talk about good old love some more. The "Once I was happy in happy extremes..." chorus of ʽPillar To Postʼ ea­sily matches the emotional impact of any of Elvis Costello's greatest songs (not to mention that Roddy has an advantage here — no one has to undergo the fussy procedure of getting used to the pitch and tone of his voice).

 

The whole thing is wildly optimistic in spirit: no syrup and a constant readiness to confess pro­blems and pain, but always with hopes of redemption and an outlook to a better future. Every­thing sounds intelligent and sincere, including the more intimate songs like ʽReleaseʼ where Rod­dy complains that "I wanted the world, and all I could get to was a gun or a girl" — yes, its past tense is almost believable, despite the guy being all of 19 years old at the time (and the song may have been composed even earlier: Aztec Camera released their first single when he was 16). The album itself, having started out with a fully rhythmic pop hit, ends on a humble note with just Roddy and his guitar, trying out a simple folk ditty (ʽDown The Dipʼ) that's equal parts Bob Dy­lan and Willie Nelson. "I put all the love and beauty in the spirit of the night / And I'm holding my ticket tight / Stupidity and suffering are on that ticket, too / And I'm going down the dip with you" is a chorus I like so much I even took the time to retype it.

 

It is this combination of intelligence and optimism that distinguishes High Land from so much dreck around it — intelligent songwriters at the time tended to veer towards bleakness and depre­s­sion, leaving hope and romance for commercial hacks. Roddy Frame was one of the few excep­tions who tried to kick the ground from under the feet of commercial hacks, beating them at their own game. He did not succeed, but the legacy of High Land is one of those blessings that helps seek out and destroy stereotypes. As far as I'm concerned, the album should be in any «Top 20» for 1983, and even higher if we want the list to be maximally diverse. And a respectable / admi­ring thumbs up from both sides of human nature.

 

KNIFE (1984)

 

1) Still On Fire; 2) Just Like The USA; 3) Head Is Happy (Heart's Insane); 4) The Back Door To Heaven; 5) All I Need Is Everything; 6) Backwards And Forwards; 7) The Birth Of The True; 8) Knife.

 

«Atmosphere». Why do people sometimes think that, once they got «atmosphere», they got eve­ry­­thing? Why do they sometimes think that, just because they have gained access to electronic equipment, the «atmosphere» that they create with it will be properly expressing their hearts' de­sires and sentiments? Why did Knife put a quick and humiliating end to Roddy Frame's conquest of the world? Fuckin' atmosphere.

 

Oh, I'm not talking about short-term commercial success. In the UK, it charted all right, on the heels of the high reputation of its predecessor and further boosted by the choice of Mark Knopfler as producer (and some members of Dire Straits guest-starring in the studio as well). However, it only yielded one single, ʽAll I Need Is Everythingʼ, which failed to repeat the success of ʽOblivi­ousʼ, and overall, it was clear that Frame did not intend Knife to be a singles-oriented collection at all. Instead, he probably intended for it to show more maturity, seriousness, and psychological depth: the 20-year old songwriter was already getting too old for simplistic dance music, the new charge had to show a sophisticatedly intelligent glow to it. The band didn't simply choose Mark Knopfler because of his fame — they went after his image as a wise old young man. They forgot that, as a side effect, the man could also be deadly boring, and inflict his boredom on others at will. That is exactly what happened.

 

First and foremost, Knife sounds nothing like its predecessor. The first album was completely dominated by acoustic and, less frequently, electric guitar. On Knife, keyboards, played by Guy Fletcher, climb to the top of the mountain from the very start and very, very rarely get down from there. This alone makes the whole thing rather unexceptional as far as commercial music from 1984 is concerned. Second, placing most of his effort in the lyrics, Roddy seems nowhere near as concerned about the musical hooks as he used to be. I don't know, maybe he thought Knopfler would be providing the hooks somehow, with his production. Wait a bit... Knopfler providing the hooks? All Dire Straits fans like myself are supposed to see the irony in this.

 

There are a couple of songs, for sure, that feature occasional pretty / bouncy guitar lines. ʽAll I Need Is Everythingʼ is actually one of them, and is close in mood to matching the intelligent ro­mantic optimism of High Land. But ooh, these rotten keyboards, «atmospherically» sighing in the background and casio-chuckling in the foreground. And the generic Spanish guitar solo at the end? Who needs that? Atmosphere strikes again. ʽJust Like The USAʼ, a song that has nothing to do with the USA and everything to do with Roddy's attempts to evaluate his place in the world, is actually much better — it's the only song on the album where the guitar remains charming and playful throughout. Nowhere else is the poor instrument allowed that much freedom.

 

Most of the compositions actually roll along at a steady, unnerving, unchanging, flat mid-tempo, serving as carriers for Roddy's poems. They are interesting poems, for sure, ambiguous, open to various interpretations, but who is really going to wreck his brain trying to decipher the intellec­tual message of something like ʽThe Back Door To Heavenʼ? "My eyes are stuck on sleepless dreams / The world is never what it seems / We've sold it short, it's what we're taught / Lost it in the living" — okay there, Roddy, it's an acceptable, if familiar, message, but why accompany it with such insipid music? This way, you will never in a million years convince anybody that "the back door to heaven is open wide to me". If the back door to heaven is anything like this generic set of flourishes, I'd much rather use the front.

 

The nadir is left for the end. The title track is not a cover of the classic Genesis composition (not that there could really be any hope), but a nine-minute original, dragging along at a snail's pace, intended to become Frame's ultimate confession, but set back by a complete lack of melody — nothing but atmosphere, created in the same predictable way. Serious minor chords on the piano, philosophically colored repetitive guitar lines, a one or two-note bassline dripping along like a broken faucet, and vocals that plead, sigh, and complain instead of singing. Of course, every one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand people, or whatever, will find the effect mesmerizing and heartbreaking. Try it out — you may be one of the few lucky ones. I happen to find every single component of the composition unoriginal, un-individual, and devoid of sensual or intellectual stimulation. In other words, it's a horrific bore.

 

I really hate it when a magnificent first album gives way to a heavily disappointing second one, and in each such case, I would really, really like to think that the problem is somehow only in me, not in the music. But then, what can I do? Me and High Land took to each other rather quickly; me and Knife feel no mutual empathy whatsoever. Maybe it's just because I like bouncy acoustic guitar more than I like crawling electronic keyboards. Maybe it's more complicated than that. Maybe I'm not getting this whole «maturity» thing. Maybe I instinctively hate Mark Knopfler, whose second album was also a major disappointment after the first one, and who may have, since then, inflicted the same damage on everybody he produced. But I gotta say this — Brothers In Arms, whatever be, was a much better album than Knife. Which gets me thinking that Roddy Frame might have managed a great cover of ʽWalk Of Lifeʼ. But not ʽMoney For Nothingʼ. He doesn't have enough spite in him to cover ʽMoney For Nothingʼ. Thumbs down.

 

PS. The album sleeve is unquestionably the coolest thing about it, but it does not match the con­tents one bit. Take my warning.

 

LOVE (1987)

 

1) Deep & Wide & Tall; 2) How Men Are; 3) Everybody Is A Number One; 4) More Than A Law; 5) Somewhere In My Heart; 6) Working In A Goldmine; 7) One And One; 8) Paradise; 9) Killermont Street.

 

One thing that is hard to deny about Roddy Frame: the guy definitely had no big love for standing in the same spot long enough to slip into formula. High Land was a fusion of classic pop with New Wave attitudes, and it worked. Knife was a fusion of classic «singer-songwriterism» with Eighties-type Knopflerisms, and it didn't work. And now, three years later, comes Love, a fusion of dance-pop with adult contemporary. Predictions, anyone?..

 

Predictions can be wrong, though. While, upon first listen, this sounded awful, subsequent im­mersion showed that the «sellout» actually helped Roddy with his creative juices. And, technical­ly speaking, this was a major sellout: no less than six different producers, most of them coming from mainstream markets, worked on the project, which also featured a completely different ses­sion band, with a host of musicians hired specially for the sessions and then going their separate ways again. The songs, however, were still written exclusively by Roddy: this is one area where the corporate machine was strictly forbidden to enter.

 

Because of its dependence on generic dance rhythms and fairly bland musical arrangements, Love generally tends to get flack from fans. But remember the contrast between High Land and Knife and realize that, whatever the side effects, Roddy generally works better when the songs are upbeat and rhythmically stimulating; drag him down into the world of slow tempos and heavy moods and he will quickly lose his focus and forget about everything but the lyrics.

 

Even assuming that most of these songs are bad (which they are not), Knife certainly did not have anything of the caliber of ʽSomewhere In My Heartʼ, a certified Aztec Camera classic that justi­fiedly hit #3 on the UK charts, going much higher than the far more «contemporarily-arranged» singles from Love, because sometimes people actually go for intensity of delivery instead of the production trinkets — and Roddy's "somewhere in my heart there is a star that shines for you..." is pretty intense. The arrangement, with its simple synth patterns and sax blasts, is nothing special, but it never detracts from the hooks. It's a simple, but intelligent, solid, powerful love song that should be able to proudly walk into anybody's pop collection.

 

As for the rest of this stuff, well, it depends on where one draws the line between catchiness and tastelessness. For instance, ʽEverybody Is A Number Oneʼ and ʽOne And Oneʼ certainly have infectious choruses, but whether these are benevolent or malicious infections is hard to deter­mine. Both songs try so doggone hard to get you «on your feet» with their artificial party atmosphere that it quickly becomes irritating — particularly on ʽOne And Oneʼ, with its call-and-response vocals. I do like the arrangement on ʽEverybody...ʼ, with its funky guitars, horns, and «synth-vib­raphones» meshing quite colorfully, but it still might be a bit too overtly «joyful» — on the other hand, it seems as if Roddy were consciously going for a power-to-the-people-ish Lennon vibe on this number, sacrificing a bit of good taste to keep the blood boiling, and I respect that.

 

It is the slower-moving ballads on which «Roddy the Aztec» seems to be really losing his grip, slipping into adult contemporary clichés, or, at least, writing melodies that are hard to distinguish from such clichés. Stuff like ʽHow Men Areʼ and ʽParadiseʼ tries to create a brand of Roddy-soul that requires very close inspection to distinguish it from contemporary R'n'B-ism. There are some acoustic guitars to keep the live-sound lovers happy, but overall, the synthesizers are overbearing, the hooks are mediocre, and the ideas behind the songs do not warrant the presence of an indivi­dual singer-songwriter. If there is something that makes Roddy Frame different from George Mi­chael — and there must be! — it is not immediately obvious on these songs.

 

Even so, it does not prevent him from ending the album on a very high note — ʽKillermont Streetʼ, along with ʽSomewhere In My Heartʼ, is the only other reason to own and cherish Love. Ironically, it is also slow and draggy; but the acoustic guitars are uncluttered by cheesy synth overdubs, and it succeeds very well where ʽKnifeʼ failed — by being a lot shorter, a little faster, a tad catchier, with a nice vocal melody resolution, and seriously more optimistic.

 

These two songs are «classic Aztec Camera», the perfect embodiment of Roddy's «well-tempered op­timism» that ties together suffering and hope through awesome vocal work where you don't even need to learn the lyrics to get the message. No matter how weak or atmospherically cor­rupted the rest of the tunes are, these two are the anchors that manage to color the whole experi­ence, and, since my brain loves them both and refuses to get irritated by the rest of this stuff, al­together, Love demands a modest thumbs up. Which is good, because where would we be if we all started giving love our thumbs down? Aww.

 

STRAY (1990)

 

1) Stray; 2) The Crying Scene; 3) Get Outta London; 4) Over My Head; 5) Good Morning Britain; 6) How It Is; 7) The Gentle Kind; 8) Notting Hill Blues; 9) Song For A Friend.

 

Along with High Land, Stray is considered one of the two key cornerstones of the Roddy Frame legacy, and I concur. Nothing beats the startling originality of High Land, but Stray takes Rod­dy on an entirely different goal — it is his take on The White Album, an ambitious stab at covering everything in sight and sound, and one that nobody really saw coming, certainly not after the Knopflerisms of Knife and the dance-pop-a-roll of Love.

 

Mainly self-produced, with an entirely new backing band (as usual) and a welcome guest spot from ex-Clash guitarist Mick Jones, Stray does exactly what it is supposed to do: it strays. In all sorts of directions. Pop rock, folk rock, smooth jazz, rhythm and blues, and just a pinch of adult contem­porary for dessert — as much as one lonesome artist is able to cover in about forty mi­nutes. Fortunately, he also happens to be a talented artist, which he almost made us forget about on the more unbearably tedious moments of Knife and the cornier tricks of Love.

 

First off the bat, the two upbeat pop singles released from the album are two of Roddy's best ever pop songs — ʽThe Crying Sceneʼ is a masterpiece from top to bottom, be it the beat, the jangle, the lyrics, or the structure of the chorus vocal melody; of all the pop songs to hit the mainstream in 1990, this was the most perfect mixture of modern sentimentality with retro flavours, and "Life's a one take movie and I don't care what it means / I'm saving up my tears for the crying scene" is a fantastic two-liner if there ever was one. ʽGood Morning Britainʼ, due to Mick Jones' presence, does have a whiff of classic Clash arrogance to it, but the carefully engineered melodic flow of the chorus is still one hundred percent Roddy. The only minus is that there are two many keyboards on the song and not nearly enough guitar interplay between the two.

 

The non-hit rockers are not much worse — predictably, they are just a little less hooky, but ʽGet Outta Londonʼ is a nice companion to ʽGood Morning Britainʼ, more vicious in its verbal attack ("down where the streets are paved with sick schemes, the river's running like a snake through a dream" — how come the great god of the Thames hasn't swallowed him up yet in retaliation?), somewhat less inventive in terms of hooks; and on ʽHow It Isʼ, Roddy immerses himself in lyri­cal and, especially, vocal Dylanisms, sort of trying to recapture the man's radioactive sneer of old and stuff it into a brand new 1990 bottle. Effective.

 

I am less impressed by the softer numbers — the gentle guitar/piano acoustic flow of the title track, the Chet Baker-influenced vocal jazz of ʽOver My Headʼ, the roots-/synth-pop fusion of ʽThe Gentle Kindʼ. But, unlike the fast stuff that latches on almost immediately, these things are growers. The most difficult situation concerns ʽNotting Hill Bluesʼ, whose seven-minute-long sprawl clearly marks it as a climactic point, and it does feel like the most personal and directly felt number of the lot — it is simply not too interesting from a musical standpoint. Banal as it may sound, Roddy's confessionals strike hard only when they are catchy. Without his pop ins­tincts, he ain't no Van Morrison to work you up with just the power of his voice — something that Knife already showed well, yet, for some reason, here he is falling for the same problem just as Stray was heading for complete perfection.

 

Nevertheless, occasional flaws and fillerisms aside, the album is a major success, and I am sur­prised that it seems to have all but vanished from the radars — in 1990, Britpop simply did not get much better than this. (In fact, what with the time gap between the Smiths and Blur/Oasis, Brit­pop as such almost did not exist in 1990. And, for the record, we are using a broader de­fi­ni­tion of Britpop here than the one that pins down Blur and Oasis as founders of the genre). A thumbs up all the way: the very fact that Roddy did not collapse under this burden of diversity, but bravely bore it out, only slipping a bit towards the end, deserves respect.

 

DREAMLAND (1993)

 

1) Birds; 2) Safe In Sorrow; 3) Black Lucia; 4) Let Your Love Decide; 5) Spanish Horses; 6) Dream Sweet Dreams; 7) Pianos And Clocks; 8) Sister Ann; 9) Vertigo; 10) Valium Summer; 11) The Belle Of The Ball.

 

After the diversity and energy of Stray, this follow-up initially feels like a big disappointment. Instead of drawing upon the success of ʽCrying Sceneʼ and ʽGood Morning Britainʼ, Roddy de­cided against being pigeonholed, and intentionally made a record that tries to be everything that its parent was not. Soft, monotonous, slow-to-mid-tempoish, with «moodmeister extraordinaire» Ryuichi Sakamoto as the general overseer. At times, this is more Sade than Aztec Camera, and the first couple of listens are beset with the temptation to just let it go.

 

But my advice is, just keep on listening; eventually, it turns out that Dreamland is not that far removed from Stray, after all. Sakamoto's production, predictably heavy on atmospheric key­boards, dates the music, but does not destroy or even obscure it. The synths, strings, and angel-clad back vocalists just sort of dangle in the background, and some of the back vocals are actually quite pretty (for instance, the "dream sweet dreams" harmony bit in the chorus of the same-titled song). The real catch is whether, this time around, Roddy's vocal melodies, subtle guitar phrasing, and «intelligently idealistic» attitudes will work their charm on you. After all, there is always the danger of repeating the mistakes of Knife — leave it to another professional (be it Knopfler or Sakamoto) to supply the «mood» and just follow it up with words, words, words.

 

Fortunately, in Dreamland words, moods, and subtle melodies mesh together in a less forgettable way. ʽLet Your Love Decideʼ is a good example — the introductory twenty seconds of simple synthesizer patterns seem like prime-time generic adult contemporary, but then the song begins to grow. Minimalistic pianos, quiet guitar jangle, a little smooth jazz trumpet solo, a thoughtful vo­cal buildup to the chorus, Roddy's genuinely seductive voice, a cute little violin solo at the end — this is not only «too much» for «generic adult contemporary», this is what separates a genuinely heartfelt, touching «mood ballad» from a hollow commercial fake. So it seems to me.

 

Roddy was only 29 when the album came out, but we all know what sort of an overgrown kid he was from the beginning — so it probably shouldn't be surprising that Dreamland gives the feel­ing of being written from the point of view of a 35-40-year old. There is a kind of maturity here that seems aimed at tempering all the excesses, building up a highly proportional mix of melan­choly, optimism, disillusionment, idealism, humility, and solemnity.

 

Listen to ʽBirdsʼ — it's a sty­listic enigma. It could have been just a slow-moving, static, boring piece of radio fodder, but instead, you are left wondering whether the protagonist is really complaining about «lost joy» or if he never knew that joy in the first place. It's a song that sets a goal similar to ABBA's ʽEagleʼ, with better words and far slighter hooks, but more mystery and subtlety. Or ʽValium Summerʼ — here is a song we should all probably hate for its choice of instrumentation and mixing job, but it's got the same enigmatic shroud around it. Why "valium"? Why the «alarm», so clearly discernible in the backing vocals? Do the «penthouse jazz» over­tones supplied by the bass and keyboards agree with the mixed emotions of the lyrics, or are they just an extra flourish to add cheap «class»? I don't know, but I do like the song.

 

A couple of the songs are sung with somewhat more tightly clenched fists — I am quite partial to the lonesome romanticism of ʽSafe In Sor­rowʼ and its well-placed old-school electric guitar solos, and especially to ʽVertigoʼ, which has one of the strongest vocal lines that Roddy ever came up with ("...so I feel it and I heed it and I need it then I let it be done" and later variations), and, of course, to ʽDream Sweet Dreamsʼ, which is the most retro-oriented song here (guitar jangle right out of the Byrds' parlour + chorus partially extracted and rebuilt from ʽGolden Slumbersʼ = deri­vative pop bliss), but there are really no «weak» points at all; each song has a point to make.

 

I do reiterate — on every formal level, Dreamland can only be classified as «adult contempora­ry», and if the thought of building up an emotional response to soft-and-silky keyboards, wimpy percussion (or, on the contrary, big, bashing, electronically enhanced drums), and endless «whi­ning» already turns you off, stay away from the record. For now, at least; pack it off until you hit the same mental age as Roddy did at 29 (poor guy). Thumbs up — like Sade at her best, this is the ideal way to record and market this kind of music (if there ever was an ideal way to record it: deep down at the bottom, it is still quite soporific).

 

FRESTONIA (1995)

 

1) Rainy Season; 2) Sun; 3) Crazy; 4) On The Avenue; 5) Imperfectly; 6) Debutante; 7) Beautiful Girl; 8) Phenome­nal World; 9) Method Of Love; 10) Sunset.

 

The last album to be released under the name of Aztec Camera (although, truth be told, it is not clear what exactly separates an «Aztec Camera» record from a Roddy Frame solo record) con­tains a small batch of terrific songs — which literally begs for the question: why is it so small? The basic impression is that Roddy underwent a momentary fit of inspiration, then, happy as hell, rushed into the studio, put down the moments of inspiration, found out there were still thirty mi­nutes to fill out, and then...

 

...but everything in its due order. ʽRainy Seasonʼ is probably the most cathartic song Roddy ever wrote. Do not dig in too deep in its lyrics, or you might strike disturbing misogyny in there (or maybe not; like every experienced misogynist, Roddy likes to put a heavy mask on that status); just relax in the powerful beauty of its simplistically effective piano line, its invigorating build-up right up to the “well, baby I never said I was gonna be Jesus” climax, or the way it picks itself up once again for an all-out rip-roaring coda. One of the best «singer/songwriter pop music» crea­tions of the decade — right up there with Aimee Mann and whoever else in the same confessional vein you might think of.

 

Then there is ʽSunʼ — kicking into high gear so quickly that you begin to suspect Frestonia is quickly gearing up to become the pinnacle of Aztec Camera. Everything about the song is beau­tiful: the folk-pop guitar jangle (generic, but pretty, and besides, it only serves as the basic foun­dation), the psychedelic guitar tones, the upbeat tempos, the way Roddy is able to dress a rather simple lyrical metaphor (“I’m just like anyone, I wanna see the sun”) in such additional wordy clothes that it does not come across as too trivial. And the fabulous race to the end — by the time he gets around to “I wanna see the sun, I wanna see the moon, I wanna see the stars, I wanna see them shine” there can be no doubt that this is exactly what he wants to do. Figuratively, of course. Just the kind of intellectual idealism that every good person needs.

 

And then the album takes a plunge. No, it’s not a «mood piece» like Dreamland, and it cannot be pigeonholed as either a synth-pop or an «adult contemporary» record. It’s all quite consistently guitar-driven (sometimes piano-driven) pop. But where the first two songs hit hard with a careful attitude towards hooks, build-ups, and come-downs, little else stands competition. For instance, there is no reason for ʽDebutanteʼ to run nearly seven minutes when it never creeps above «pret­ty». It is tastefully arranged — everything here is in Roddy’s usually exceptional taste — but it just sort of rolls and rolls and rolls along, slowly and humbly, without any dynamic range (the transition from bridge to chorus, where you could expect something exceptional, is in fact disap­pointing). ʽCrazyʼ and ʽImperfectlyʼ, although shorter, follow more or less the same pattern; ʽBe­autiful Girlʼ is cutely upbeat but oddly unfocused; and ʽPhenomenal Worldʼ never quite lives up to the lively distorted croaking of its opening riff.

 

In short, with the brief, hard-to-notice exception of ʽOn The Avenueʼ, a beautiful, tears-in-yer-eyes little piano-and-acoustic lament, Frestonia seriously sags in the middle, all the way to ʽSun­setʼ, a reprise of ʽSunʼ in a different arrangement, with more emphasis on acoustic guitar, or­gan and strings — maybe there is a slight structural nod to Harrison’s ʽIsn’t It A Pityʼ here, especially since, just as it used to be with George, it is not immediately clear which of the two arrangements is better. ʽSunsetʼ has no separate coda, though.

 

Still, even if Frestonia may not have all the best Aztec Camera songs — although ʽRainy Sea­sonʼ, ʽSunʼ, and ʽOn The Avenueʼ are timeless and should be heard by everyone — the entire al­bum gets a surefire thumbs up, if only because it simply sounds so terrific. Every time Roddy put out an album, its sound was either «quirky» (High Land), or a bit alien to his personality (Knife, Love), or a bit too heavy on trendy production, smooth jazz, and electronic stuff. Fresto­nia, on the other hand, is all about cleanly recorded, reasonably mixed basics — acoustic and electric guitars, real, fresh pianos, genuine string arrangements, and vocals that clearly care even if the accompanying melody is a little below par.

 

The symbolism of the album title — «Frestonia» was the name of a short-lived «independent state» formed by a small London community in 1977 — comes across as a bit too bold: neither Roddy himself nor his music are that special to have a right to claim complete independence from the musical world. On the other hand, it might be just right if we consider the irony — the real «Fres­tonia» only had as much independence as it had imagination and self-illusion, and the overall sad­ness of the LP tone is more like the melancholy of an inmate longing for freedom than an ode to joy from one who has already found it. Fact is, the whole existence of Aztec Camera has not al­lowed Roddy Frame to “see the sun”; and his retirement of the band name after the release of Fre­stonia might just as well imply admittance of defeat over an idealistic struggle. But don’t you worry, Roddy — others will always be there to take your hopeless place.

THE B-52'S

THE B-52'S (1979)

 

1) Planet Claire; 2) 52 Girls; 3) Dance This Mess Around; 4) Rock Lobster; 5) Lava; 6) There's A Moon In The Sky (Called The Moon); 7) Hero Worship; 8) 6060-842; 9) Downtown.

 

For all of punk and New Wave's pretense to «alleviating» the heavy, stuffy atmosphere in which prog-rock and arena-rock acts had plunged popular music in the first half of the 1970s, most punk and New Wave acts were fairly stuffy themselves. The songs were either too rabid and angry or too intellectualized, the sound was too quirkily non-traditional, the whole «new school» approach required some getting used to (and many never really got used to it anyway). The Ramones could claim a serious teen pop influence, but they were still punks first and foremost. Only Blondie could be seen as a «fluffy» act, perhaps, but one might question whether Blondie had much to do with «New Wave» at all — mainly in appearance, much less in the music itself.

 

So when the B-52's came along, and they stuck around for two years at least before landing a se­rious recording contract, the niche they decided to occupy was practically empty — even if, of all the available niches, it was one of the most glaring: combine all these quirky New Wave influen­ces with kitsch, bubblegum, pop culture fetishism, and see what happens. The album cover alone, with its flashy colors, oversize wigs, and fashions that seem stuck somewhere in between the 1960s and 1970s, speaks volumes about what this record might turn out to be: lots of vapor-hea­ded fun with a healthy dose of self-irony, annoying «serious» music lovers, but delighting nerdy college students all over the college world.

 

Or it could be just a dumb, unmemorable, chaotic load of cretinous kitsch. Fortunately, already the opening track, ʽPlanet Claireʼ, confirms the positive impression. Riding on a grim, but seduc­tive surf-rock / James-Bond riff (they eventually had to co-credit the song to Henry Mancini because of its similarity to the Peter Gunn theme) combined with a robotic organ part that the band might have just as well picked up from Kraftwerk, it's a stylish, thrilling, and completely meaningless dance ride. But by combining the word "planet", invoking psychedelic associations, with the French name Claire, invoking Eric Rohmer and stylish European retro-modern à la 1960s, the B-52's create an illusion that the song is about something — maybe about the seduc­tive magic of fads? — and the guitar/organ duet on the tune still remains one of the most memo­rable flashes of the decade's end.

 

However, the first time that the B-52's had really caught the public eye was with ʽRock Lobsterʼ, a track that has all the same ingredients as ʽPlanet Claireʼ but keeps them going for a longer peri­od of time, and, more importantly, makes better use of all the vocal talent aboard — Fred Schnei­der sings the absurd lyrics about catching rock lobsters in his best stern Krautrock impersonation, while the band's ladies, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, surround him with single and double harmonies, calls-and-responses that tremble, bleat, wheeze, and bounce off each other like a set of pop harmony clichés that, all of a sudden, felt itself bad in the head and had to be straightjacke­ted. Here is the song that killed John Lennon — according to his own words, ʽRock Lobsterʼ was one of the main reasons he returned to an active music career, since it reminded him of what he and Yoko were doing in the early days of Plastic Ono Band. (And, it is true, some of the girls' vocalizing does owe a good deal to Yoko's brand of avantgarde «Nip-pop»).

 

The formula mostly stays the same throughout the album — sparkling surf-pop or power-pop riffs dressed in New Wave organs, B-movie-influenced lyrics, and inventive vocal arrangements that pin Schneider's overzealous nerdiness against the ladies' «pseudo-bimbo» lines that want to be Yoko Ono one minute and the Shangri-Las the next one. And this is not mentioning that most of the songs are crazily catchy — ʽThere's A Moon In The Skyʼ and ʽ52 Girlsʼ are de­licious swin­ging vignettes; ʽLavaʼ rocks as hard as its relatively wimpy arrangement allows a song whose ly­rics involve lines like "My heart's cracking like a Krakatoa"; ʽ6060-842ʼ is an obvious throwback to young and innocent days when sympathetic, sexy R&B performers could turn phone numbers into hits (ʽBeechwood 4-5789ʼ) — hey, what's a bona fide pop album without a good phone call song?; and the cover of Petula Clark's ʽDowntownʼ dissipates any final doubts about the record's major influences, if you still had any by the time the last track comes along.

 

In short, thirty years before the Pipettes, there were the B-52's, who showed the world what it really means to preserve the bubblegum legacy without falling into the trap of generic nostalgia — the best way to preserve old stuff is to carefully mix it with the new stuff. And this mix, al­most completely unique for 1979, is really what raises The B-52's status of «dumb catchy pop» to «landmark recording» — and also what makes it so timeless, because it still sounds just as lo­vingly bizarre, and endearing, today as it did back in the age of leisure suits and walrus mous­taches. Thumbs up, of course.

 

WILD PLANET (1980)

 

1) Party Out Of Bounds; 2) Dirty Back Road; 3) Runnin' Around; 4) Give Me Back My Man; 5) Private Idaho; 6) Devil In My Car; 7) Quiche Lorraine; 8) Strobe Light; 9) 53 Miles West Of Venus.

 

This sophomore offspring is by no means a «slump» — it just lacks the novelty and immediacy of its predecessor. The B-52's hit upon a winning formula, and they were not willing to let it go too quickly. Same lineup, same ideology, even the same recording studio (Compass Point at Nas­sau, Bahamas — a perfectly fine place to record wild party albums), even some of the songs were really old standards that they had played live since 1977. And the public had enough time to catch on as well — Wild Planet fared much better on the charts, since the band was by then a well-es­tablished phenomenon.

 

That said, even if we do know now what exactly to expect from the B-52's, and this friction slows down the excitement force a little bit, the tunes themselves are still consistently strong. Guitar riffs, vocal hooks, energetic tempos are all there, and, most importantly, so is the general «bite» of the band — if anything, they are getting snappier, ridiculing social conventions by the dozen with most people probably not even noticing that they are getting ridiculed.

 

The punk roots of the band show best of all on ʽPrivate Idahoʼ, which has the sharpest, stingiest «rockabilly-punk» riff of them all (reminiscent of ʽBrand New Cadillacʼ by the Clash) and obscure character assassination lyrics that may just as well be assassinating sociopaths and socialites alike (well, the line "you're living in your own Private Idaho" could easily be taken both ways). The inclusion of the song is a great move — since most of the other tunes are either about partying or about surrealistic kitsch, it sort of sets the band straight for those who would like to dismiss Wild Planet as simply one more bunch of meaningless decadent fluff.

 

But it's not like that at all, really. The opening single ʽParty Out Of Boundsʼ is not just hilarious — it is also thought-provoking, a wild romp where Schneider and Pierson lambast the party cul­ture to bits (which never prevented the song from becoming a cult party anthem, of course), and the culmination, with the girls chanting "party gone out of bounds, party gone out of bounds" is so symbolic of the B-52's entire existence that Schneider eventually ended up using the song title for his own radio show. ʽStrobe Lightʼ is an irresistibly fast R'n'B dance number, first and fore­most, but also a clear-cut hyperbolic satire on club culture excesses ("wanna make love to you under the strobe light" — yeah, right), featuring the immortal original innuendo "then I'm gonna kiss your... pineapple!" And ʽQuiche Lorraineʼ — now here is an anti-socialite rant if there ever was one, masked in a heart-rending story about the relations between a poodle and her owner.

 

While there are no melodies on the record that are as instantaneously seductive as the guitar / or­gan interplay of ʽPlanet Claireʼ, every song has at least something going for it in the line of vocal hooks (these usually consist of the girls chanting the song's title or whoo-hoo-hooing), and the keyboards rarely get in the way of pop guitars. That, in fact, is the main problem for the reviewer: the formula is so diligently observed on each of the songs that, mood-wise, there is almost no dif­ference between them, and there is no point in trying to discuss minuscule stuff like the slightly bigger emphasis on paranoia in ʽRunnin' Aroundʼ versus the touch stronger accent on obsessive-compulsive disorder on ʽGive Me Back My Manʼ.

 

Overall, Wild Planet is a modest success that should be swallowed in one gulp — you could try and take away individualistic highlights (starting with ʽPrivate Idahoʼ), but why? The songs are relatively short, the whole album only runs 35 minutes, and everything is linked together thema­tically as one large, hyperbolic send-up of all the ridiculous things that make people part of the same society. Funny, catchy, kitschy, and smart, there is no way that the album does not deserve an almost equally heartfelt thumbs up as its predecessor.

 

MESOPOTAMIA (1982)

 

1) Loveland; 2) Deep Sleep; 3) Mesopotamia; 4) Cake; 5) Throw That Beat In The Garbage Can; 6) Nip It In The Bud.

 

This six-song EP, an important turning point in the B-52's career, frequently gets a bad rap from critics and fans alike. Not too happy, perhaps, with the perspective of recording the same album third time in a row, and also looking for a little «artistic maturity», the band eagerly took up the offer of teaming up with David Byrne to produce their next album — a heavenly match, one might think, given the many intersection points between the B-52's and the Talking Heads; in a way, one could even think of classic-era B-52's as «Talking Heads for kiddos».

 

For some reason, the relationship turned out sour: the parties ended up disagreeing on the final mixes, and this, together with excessive pressure on the part of the record label, brought the ses­sions to an early halt — what was conceived as a full LP came out as a six-song EP (although three other songs from the sessions were later re-recorded for Whammy!). And when it did come out, people were disappointed. Gone was the humor and the young teenish rave-up atmosphere that ruled supreme on The B-52's and Wild Planet. Instead, we found cold wobbly-funky Heads-styles riffs, a Byrnish atmosphere of absurdist paranoia, and synth/horn arrangements that would rather suit boring parties than awesome ones.

 

But in all honesty, I fail to see what exactly is wrong with that. Yes, Mesopotamia is all that and more, but it works fairly well as a «second-rate Talking Heads» experience with a few shades of classic B-52's carried over and a few extra influences thrown in the mix as well. This is not so much a «loss of direction» as a conscious attempt to give it a slight change, and the actual songs — credited, by the way, exclusively to the band members, never to Byrne — do not sound at all like they didn't believe in what they were doing: the music, as usual, is rather calculated and de­tached, but the singing, especially when the girls join in, is fab. All in all, Mesopotamia really does sound like the «grown-up» version of Wild Planet. Those sharing the preconception that a band like The B-52's cannot possibly grow up, but can only explode trying, should stay away. Others may, and hopefully will, find a lot to like.

 

The title track is the clear highlight — it takes a huge risk starting off with exactly one minute and five seconds of a repetitive groove that does sound like second-rate Talking Heads (I perso­nally get a splitting headache from the jungle-jangle around the twentieth second), but then turns into a cool mix of robotic dumbness. "I ain't no student of ancient culture", Schneider sings, "be­fore I talk, I should read a book", and he's not joking about that one: trying to locate "the third pyramid" in Mesopotamia, of all places, hardly makes any more sense than inviting us to "turn your watch back about a hundred thousand years", but that is just the point — the song is not about Mesopotamia as such (bring on somebody like Al Stewart for historic accuracy), it's about the distorted pers­pective on things that can fasten itself to anybody's mind, and the dogmatic «rectangular» guitar lines and half-zombified, half-somnambulized back vocals from the girls only enforce the feeling. Could the Heads have done it better? Not sure. Byrne would probably have gone hysterical at some point, and that would not be what the song requires.

 

Cindy Wilson bakes up terrific performances on ʽLovelandʼ, which opens the EP, and ʽNip It In The Budʼ, which closes it — the songs may not be built on the best grooves in the world, but the girl is capable of sexy solemnity on the former, and of cocky impertinence on the latter. Actually, ʽNip It In The Budʼ and ʽThrow That Beat In The Garbage Canʼ are the only two songs on here to conjure an atmosphere of moderate hooliganry, reminiscent of the days of old — except now they use synth loops and horn overdubs to back it (but it still works).

 

On the other hand, ʽCakeʼ is something they never did before — a rather straightforward dance number so full of GROSS sexual innuendos that it could make Prince blush (speaking of Prince, the dialog that Kate and Cindy get going in the mid-section is basically proto-Wendy-and-Lisa stuff. "It says in this cookbook it takes a long time to rise...", yeah, right). But it is a fun, sexy number, if not exactly fit for a nice little college party. ʽDeep Sleepʼ, a slow mood number, may perhaps be the one true weak link in the chain, but it does have an attractively melancholic piano hook, and even on a six-pack like this, one slightly saggy slow-burner is not enough to drag down the overall impression.

 

Mesopotamia is available in several guises these days, including a UK version with extended mixes of several of the tracks, and a new remix from 1991, released on CD together with Party Mix! (originally an EP of remixes of the band's «classic» tunes from 1981). Too much honor for an album that almost destroyed the B-52's reputation, some critics would grudgingly say; but I have the pleasure of disagreeing, and happily award the record a thumbs up. In all fairness, I cannot even say how much Byrne himself was responsible for this shift of direction — but if he was, after all, it's a pity they didn't get to spend even more time together.

 

WHAMMY! (1983)

 

1) Legal Tender; 2) Whammy Kiss; 3) Song For A Future Generation; 4) Butterbean; 5) Trism; 6) Queen Of Las Vegas; 7) Moon 83; 8) Big Bird; 9) Work That Skirt.

 

Goodbye David Byrne, hello electronic age. The B-52's have tasted maturity and found it some­what unpalatable, so Whammy! is all about rolling back into nerdy adolescence, but with proper respect to changing musical tastes. The biggest technical change is that this time around, only two out of five members are credited for actually playing any instruments — Strickland and Wilson handle all the guitars, bass, keyboards, and percussion duties, with synthesizers and drum machi­nes being far more notable than anything else (there is also a small brass section guesting on ʽBig Birdʼ), whereas Schneider and the girls only contribute their vocal talents — that is, besides wri­ting most of the material.

 

The discrimination of guitars in favor of electronics was trendy at the time, but, like most of such decisions, turned out to be «artistically incorrect» in the long run. «Live» instrumentation was an essential part of the early B-52's, and their quirky guitar riffs were just as important in creating their nerd party atmosphere as the vocals. The electronic arrangements are not as good an alterna­tive to go along with that atmosphere, although, to be honest, there is still plenty of guitar parts scattered around, and the synth melodies try, as best they can, to generate the same cheesy mix of mystery and hilariousness as the earlier stuff, so my main beef is probably with the drum machi­nes — most of the drum machine parts do not offer us a good reason for being there. Peter Gab­riel could handle them meaningfully, but the B-52's just used them because everybody else did at the time, with hordes of angry hungry drummers in line for the soup kitchen.

 

On the good side of things, the B-52's had not yet traveled a sufficiently long way with Byrne so as to be unable to slip back into their old hooliganish skins. Four years deep into their recording career, they can still easily plunge you into the same old world of New Wave-processed pop culture — best illustrated on the album's two «shiniest» tracks, ʽSong For A Future Generationʼ and ʽButterbeanʼ. The former was released as a single and remains one of the band's most de­fining anthems — every member voices his or her Zodiac sign and all the band joins together in listing every pop cliché they can recollect ("wanna be the captain of the Enterprise / wanna be the king of the Zulus / let's meet and have a baby now!"). And everybody gets so involved that it is al­most tempting to forget the irony. Fortunately, tempting, but impossible.

 

The rest of the songs cling to more particular mini-subjects: the lyrics usually stick together in little storylines, such as a tale of successful counterfeiters in ʽLegal Tenderʼ, or an account of a successful gambling strategy in ʽQueen Of Las Vegasʼ, or an ode to sci-fi means of transportation in ʽTrismʼ, or ʽBig Birdʼ, which, as amazing as it is, is really a song about a big bird. These are all fairly straightforward subjects, and the real charm of all these songs is in how vehemently, with complete devotion and abandon, Fred and the girls launch into the respective deliveries — which is where it all turns from triviality into high-class absurd.

 

Mind you — not nearly as high-class as in the «old days», when the lyrics used to be more unde­cipherable and the guitar passages took active part in the formation of silly mysteries. Whammy!, from an overall part of view, is more straightforward and accessible. In addition, ʽMoon 83ʼ is a somewhat unnecessary electronic remake of the earlier ʽThere's A Moon In The Skyʼ (as it now stands — replacing the track on the original LP, which was a cover of Yoko Ono's ʽDon't Worry Kyokoʼ, later taken off for legal reasons), and the final instrumental ʽWork That Skirtʼ is a rather bland bit of «electronic boogie» that could really use some vocal hooks.

 

All of which makes Whammy! much less than perfect — yet it is still a bona fide B-52's album, capturing the band in a youthful, experimental (maybe a bit too experimental for their own good), and razor-sharp state of mind. Look past some of its dated aspects and who knows, you might be chanting "come on mammy, give me that whammy" in no time. Thumbs up.

 

BOUNCING OFF THE SATELLITES (1986)

 

1) Summer Of Love; 2) Girl From Ipanema Goes To Greenland; 3) Housework; 4) Detour Thru Your Mind; 5) Wig; 6) Theme For A Nude Beach; 7) Ain't It A Shame; 8) Juicy Jungle; 9) Communicate; 10) She Brakes For Rainbows.

 

Goodbye Ricky Wilson, hello 1986. Had we not known the circumstances, it would be tempting to speculate that Ricky Wilson took his own life so as to be free of the terror of witnessing the worst year in musical history, but in reality, of course, he died of AIDS several months after the initial sessions for this record were completed. Predictably, the band plunged into depression, distractedly patched up the final product, released it with relatively little promotion, did not go on tour, and eventually just took a long, long hiatus.

 

But the main problem with this album is certainly not Ricky's death, since, after all, most of it was written and much of it was recorded while he was still alive, and carefully concealing his ill­ness from his friends and relatives. The main problem... wait, there are two main problems, actu­ally. First, that musically they have practically completed the transition to regular synth-pop. Not all of the record is electronic, but when the opening number populates the entire first minute with nothing but drum machines and synths, you know where the priorities lie.

 

Second, and even worse, is the realization that the band's ship finally collided with the reef of seriousness, and it isn't the reef that's going down. From top to bottom, Bouncing Off The Satellites is loaded with quasi-sincere romanticism (ʽSummer Of Loveʼ, ʽShe Brakes For Rain­bowsʼ), social messagism (ʽCommunicateʼ), eco-friendly anthemism (ʽJuicy Jungleʼ), and stone-faced absurdism (ʽGirl From Ipanema Goes To Greenlandʼ, a straightforward synth-rocker whose title is far more interesting than its contents).

 

There is only one number on the entire album that tries to recreate the old party atmosphere, and in doing that, it goes over the top — ʽWigʼ, celebrating the principal visual fetish of the band's en­tire career, ultimately sounds like somebody's rather flat parody on the B-52's, filled with cheap «wig humor» and minimal lyrics. And in the context of the album its absurdly fast tempos, «ex­uberant» group harmonies, and repetitive mantras ("wigs on fire, wigs on fire!") sound like some­thing they forced on themselves at the last minute ("hey guys, this thing's coming out too morose, let's make the silliest song in the universe or something").

 

It is not utterly without redeem. The band still remembers the craft of vocal hooks, the girls and Fred are still in fine voice, and they still know how to weave a good mood, even if the thread now consists of about 80% electronic fiber. ʽShe Brakes For Rainbowsʼ, in particular, is a very pretty conclusion, which could, in a way, be seen as Cindy's paradise-evoking eulogy for her brother: considering the circumstances, Bouncing Off The Satellites could be justified to end on a color­ful, melancholic-romantic note. Pierson's ʽHouseworkʼ is hilarious — a wicked send-up of the «tough girl» image of 1980's pop culture that you could read literally, ironically, or both ("don't need a man to make me mean / I need a man to help me clean"). And ʽDetour Through Your Mindʼ, Fred's stream-of-conscious collage of sci-fi, psychedelia, and social critique run through a simple, but not too annoying dance track and the girls' cloudy harmonies, merits additional listens (including a backwards one, in order to decode the spoken message at the end — which, unlike Wiki­pedia, I won't ruin for you).

 

I have also learned to near-enjoy ʽJuicy Jungleʼ, despite its straightforward environmentalism (nothing wrong with environmentalism, but when I want to hear about jungle preservation, I don't think Fred Schneider should be the first person I'd have in mind) — the «stern» chorus is just too catchy. On the other hand, ʽSummer Of Loveʼ and ʽGirl From Ipanemaʼ let their synth-pop arran­gements overshadow the vocals, vibes, and lyrics; and ʽTheme For A Nude Beachʼ is literally the worst B-52's song up to date — it gets easier to swallow if you keep reminding yourself that it is really a parody on the decade's epitome-of-tastelessness «beach romance dance numbers», but it's still hard to do because the song itself, every now and then, seems to forget that it's a parody and takes on a quasi-serious life of its own.

 

Overall, I'm on the fence here — initial pure hatred for this record has slowly dissipated once the hooks and some intelligence came through, so, in the end, I would just regard it as an ill-fated product of its epoch, infected by its most frequent viruses. All of these songs could have been written and recorded in 1979, with a completely different effect. One should hardly force oneself to like Bouncing Off The Satellites, but to me, it is clearly a product of a «misguided» band here rather than that of a «washed up» one. In retrospect, we can probably forgive and ignore the flaws — in a way, it's a wonder that, given the circumstances, they still managed to come up with something listenable in the first place — and concentrate on the strengths.

 

COSMIC THING (1989)

 

1) Cosmic Thing; 2) Dry County; 3) Deadbeat Club; 4) Love Shack; 5) Junebug; 6) Roam; 7) Bushfire; 8) Channel Z; 9) Topaz; 10) Follow Your Bliss.

 

Three years into Ricky's death, with Keith Strickland switching to guitars and keyboards from drums, the B-52's once again appeared on the scene. Three years can be a long time, though, and this is not quite the same old B-52's we used to know. If there is an objective proof for that, it would be the almost unexpected commercial success — Cosmic Thing went quadruple platinum, spawned a whole bunch of hugely popular singles, and turned the band from semi-underground club favorites into a mainstream attraction. The closest analogy to this whole situation that I can think of is the 1987 «comeback» of Aerosmith.

 

The good news is that the B-52's did not have to sink to the same bottom of the tastelessness pond that Aerosmith chose to: Cosmic Thing preserves a large chunk of the old spirit, humor, sarcasm, and wittiness. But things have changed. All of the songs here sound extremely polished — calcu­lated, measured, rehearsed, with no space at all left to the delightfully unpredictable «hooliganry» of old. This becomes less surprising when one learns that the album was produced by Nile Rod­gers, the slickness master behind Chic, Bowie's Let's Dance, Madonna's Like A Virgin, and, most notably, Mick Jagger's seminal masterpiece She's The Boss; but that does not make the con­trast between Wilson-era and post-Wilson-era B-52's any less jarring.

 

Still, it makes little sense to complain. It is clear that after the shock of 1986, the B-52's could no longer be quite the same, and, besides, they were ten years older than when they started — and had every right to polish up their sound, adjusting it to their current age. At least none of these songs sound «unnatural» or, God forbid, «nostalgic». And, furthermore, at the end of the day what really matters is whether these songs have hooks (they have), show intelligence (they do), and manage to cleverly bypass or tone down the sonic clichés of late 1980s pop.

 

The latter is actually quite important: the music relies on a healthy mix of real drums, guitars, and keyboards (most of them supplied by a host of session musicians; Strickland is the only band member credited with a lot of instrumental work). It is sometimes mildly spoiled with electronic en­hancement, but, on the whole, Cosmic Thing does not come across as something tightly tied to the year of 1989 — most of it could have been recorded, say, in 1981. Only one track, ʽChannel Zʼ, bears the «experimental» trademarks of generic late-Eighties dance-pop, and might therefore polarize audiences; I think it actually works, and the robotic dance-pop arrangement fits in well with the song's thematic message ("I am livin' on Channel Z, getting nothing but static, static in my attic from Channel Z"), but any band that goes all the way from ʽRock Lobsterʼ to ʽChannel Zʼ goes a long way indeed, and once you remember that, it gets a little disturbing.

 

The big hits — ʽLove Shackʼ, ʽRoamʼ, ʽDeadbeat Clubʼ — are all catchy, pleasant enough pop tunes, and now they mostly work on the contrast between Fred Schneider's eternally nerdy vocals (one thing that hasn't changed a bit since the early days) and Kate and Cindy's now-well-disciplined singing. The reason why they became so popular probably has to do with the «party atmosphere», particularly on ʽLove Shackʼ, which one could almost see coming from the likes of Prince — of course, as usual, the new generation of fans mostly missed the irony. It would be much harder to miss it on ʽDeadbeat Clubʼ, one of the most sentimental tributes to wasting one's life away in the history of pop music, but I suppose that it can be done, too — there are, after all, quite a lot of people who are genuinely happy to belong to the «Deadbeat Club».

 

Meanwhile, ʽJunebugʼ and ʽBushfireʼ are fast-tempo pop-rockers that mostly get by on the strength of their vocal hooks (wonderful arrangements of the girls' vocals on ʽBushfireʼ, in parti­cular); ʽTopazʼ is a lightly anthemic bit of musical utopia with an atmosphere of disarming inno­cence; and the final instrumental ʽFollow Your Blissʼ is romantic surf-pop with electronic over­tones that certainly makes much more sense than ʽWork That Skirtʼ, for instance.

 

Essentially, I cannot fault any of these songs — not a single one of them ever drifts towards adult contemporary (an easy temptation) or completely generic dance-pop that places most of its faith in the beat rather than the melody; and I am certainly less troubled about the commercial win of Cosmic Thing than about the insane popularity of late-era Aerosmith, and join the fray with an assured thumbs up. But nobody who wants to understand what the B-52's were «all about» should ever begin with Cosmic Thing, because this here party is set up according to strict rules, whereas classic era B-52's rarely ever gave a damn about rules in the first place.

 

GOOD STUFF (1992)

 

1) Tell It Like It T-I-Is; 2) Hot Pants Explosion; 3) Good Stuff; 4) Revolution Earth; 5) Dreamland; 6) Is That You Mo-Dean?; 7) The World's Green Laughter; 8) Vision Of A Kiss; 9) Breezin'; 10) Bad Influence.

 

You'd think that, perhaps, a band as nerdy-hip as the B-52's would know better than to respect the law of «never change a winning formula». But apparently, the temptation was too heavy: three years after the successful «sellout» of Cosmic Thing, Freddie «Slick» Schneider and his gang are back, still goaded by Nile Rodgers to do more of the same. Cindy Wilson, however, took some time off, and thus avoided directly involving her name in this project — arguably the silliest and slumpiest in the band's entire career.

 

Essentially, Good Stuff is just a laughably pale copy of its predecessor. The overall sound is just as generic and just as «non-awful», but the «risqué» songs sound more silly and the «serious» songs sound more boring. The three opening numbers have plenty of energy, but much of it goes to waste already on ʽTell It Like It T-I-Isʼ, which holds a flat boogie pattern over five minutes to inform us that the band wants to «tell it like it is» without saying a word about the «it» in ques­tion — faintly funny for about two minutes, then starts getting repetitive and annoying as heck. ʽHot Pants Explosionʼ puts us shin-deep in sexual territory, blankly firing with some of the stupi­dest lines to grace a B-52's record ("If you would be so kind / Put on those red hot pants and take a stroll through my mind" — what?). And the title track is a certified exercise in double entendres — "gonna wallow in your lovin' hollow", yeah right.

 

But at least, if all these tracks do make it seem like the band has completely forgotten its magic touch where words are concerned, the dance grooves and Kate Pierson's vocal flourishes on all three are still enough to redeem the sinners. Particularly the flourishes — the lady works authen­tic magic with the aiyee-aiyeehs on ʽTell Itʼ, the whoah-whoahs on ʽHot Pantsʼ, and the bom-bom bom-boms on ʽGood Stuffʼ so fervently that I find all three cases irresistible. Schneider has the unfortunate disadvantage of always sporting the same robotic-nerdy personality that does not al­low for a lot of variation (a robot is a robot) — Kate, with her reckless party gal stance, always gets to be more versatile and expressive.

 

Once the album starts getting bogged down in less gimmicky compositions, however, not even the vocals help much longer. ʽDreamlandʼ sacrifices seven and a half minutes in an attempt to join dance-pop and psychedelia on a groove that never seems to change upon initial installation and, overall, sounds like it needs many more overdubs and attention to detail in order to achieve its goals. ʽThe World's Green Laughterʼ manages to be a quirky, completely instrumental eco-an­them, but it states its point in thirty seconds and then wastes my time for another hundred and fifty. Finally, ʽVision Of A Kissʼ pushes us into completely generic territory — is this song at all worthy of the B-52's signature? Doesn't it belong in the world of Whitney Houston?..

 

In this pathetic, undeserving «sequel» attempt to cash in on their newly found fortune, the band seems to have finally «jumped the shark» — taken completely out of context, Good Stuff is a semi-decent dance-pop exercise, but as a conclusion to a fifteen-year old career, it is embarras­sing. Even the sci-fi references (ʽIs That You Mo-Dean?ʼ) now sound wedged in between cliché and nostalgia. And if we can tolerate some tastelessness on the part of these guys — they are too smart, after all, to be disgustingly tasteless — tolerating boredom is something we should not be doing in anybody's case, much less a band that used to regularly infuse their grooves with surpri­singly emotional content.

 

Yes, Good Stuff is about as exciting as you'd expect any album with such a title to be — if you knew your record was going to be a masterpiece, a title like Good Stuff would hardly be on your list of serious candidates. I am not giving it a thumbs down for only one reason: I am totally in awe over how such an obviously, blatantly fail-oriented record still manages to have occasionally catchy hooks and devote enough care to convincing us that all those thirty or so session musicians  credited in the liner notes actually did play on it. In other words, Good Stuff should have been awful stuff — through some miracle of the human brain, it is actually mediocre stuff. But there is still a long distance to be covered from mediocre to good — or, rather, from merely existing as a band to the stage where that existence continues to be justified. In 1992, there seems to have been little justification for the continuing existence of the B-52's.

 

FUNPLEX (2008)

 

1) Pump; 2) Hot Corner; 3) Ultraviolet; 4) Juliet Of The Spirits; 5) Funplex; 6) Eyes Wide Open; 7) Love In The Year 3000; 8) Deviant Ingredient; 9) Too Much To Think About; 10) Dancing Now; 11) Keep This Party Going.

 

So here is the question. Is it at all possible for the once greatest nerd-party band of all time to still put out something even vaguely credible once its members are all pushing past fifty? (Kate Pier­son, the eldest of the lot, actually turned 60 in 2008). Yes, in the past two decades we have all learned to cope with the «too old to rock'n'roll, too young to die» mentality, and some of us have even been able to come to terms with Grandpa Mick still wiggling his bellybutton with an oxygen tank waiting backstage. But the B-52's — well, there is something different here. Despite Meso­potamia and David Byrne, despite Ricky Wilson's tragic experience, despite all of the ups and downs and changing fashions, they never really managed to grow out of the «college party sound­track» genre — they just reshaped its angles from time to time.

 

And now, here is one more record from the B-52's — more than fifteen years after the success of Cosmic Thing and Good Stuff gave them enough moolah to finally have the guts to call it a day and retire... for a while. Well, actually, they did not retire as such: they just banned themselves from the studio (only recording a couple new tracks for the 1998 Time Capsule anthology) and cut down on live appearances, but still regularly appeared on public every now and then. Until, it is said, Keith Strickland heard New Order's Get Ready and decided that here was just the kind of sound that the band could turn to their advantage in the 21st century. So they grabbed New Or­der's producer and went into the studio. And?...

 

Well... I like it. It is advisable to forget about the age problem, or else the vision of a 60-year old Kate Pierson (or is that Cindy? I still have some occasional trouble telling one from the other, not that it seriously matters) opening the show with "I look at you and I'm ready to pump" might be a gross turn­off (unless you're into cougarism, that is). But reality is such that, even after all these years, both Kate and Cindy sound almost exactly the same way they sounded in 1979 — more experienced, perhaps, more professional, disciplined, and taking a little extra care so as not to over-exert themselves, but essentially just ringing out with the same clarity and youthful audacity as they always did. So does Schneider, although this is less of a surprise: his «nerdy-talky» vocal style obviously takes less effort to preserve through the years. Let's take a look at him when he's pushing ninety, and then start expressing admiration.

 

Also, this new sound works very well. An excellent balance between some new-fangled electro­nics and old-school guitar rock, masterminded by Strickland — everything sounds modern and trendy, yet, at the same time, is quite consistent with the basic legacy of the B-52's. The melodies themselves are not particularly memorable or original, since the main effort, as always, is inves­ted in the pop choruses, but they sound swell: the guitars either pack a good deal of distorted crunch or play funny funky riffs, and the synthesizers throw on a huge variety of tones and modes, imitating organs, electric pianos, strings, jumping from sci-fi to techno to ambient colors with each next number. Yes, everything is way too polished and calculated to hope to match the old glories, but nothing else could be expected anyway ever since Cosmic Thing convinced the band that «polish» is one of the major keys to success. Besides, being reckless and chaotic is fun for the young ones. As you grow older, it is quite natural to calculate your fun in advance.

 

And these «calculated» songs are all excellent samples of the calculated approach. The first three songs are all fast-paced variations on the same single topic, but they are all exciting variations, and I have no idea which one I like better — "pump it up, give it up, turn up the track!", "shake it to the last round, shimmy in a Lurex gown!", or "lovin' it, lovin' it... ultraviolet!" Maybe the se­cond one, with its echoes of 1960s dance-pop. You might prefer the much more modern ʽUltra­violetʼ. Who cares? "Keep doin' what you're doin' cause you're doin' it right", Schneider says in ʽUltravioletʼ, and that's the ticket indeed.

 

They actually break away — just a little bit — from the formula only once, on the (still danceable) neo-disco ballad ʽJuliet Of The Spiritsʼ, a surprisingly adequate adaptation of the subject of a Fellini movie (mid-aged matron daring to open up and discover the «sensual world») to the cur­rent B-52's aesthetics (mid-aged perennial nerds still justifying their own seclusion in that same world). The arrangement is a little dumb, especially considering that, while still in their prime, the B-52's normally shunned disco (also in its prime), but the catchy vocal hooks and the reasonable sentiments are still attractive. (And if the song urges somebody to go see Juliet Of The Spirits — well, it ain't one of Fellini's best, for my money, but a little enlightenment never hurt anybody).

 

After that, the «party» formula reasserts itself in dictatorial mode. "It's a shallow existence, but oh yeah... I need it, I want it, I got to have it" — these words, spoken in breathy, sensual mode (ʽDe­viant Ingredientʼ) pretty much say it all, as usual: superficial shallowness, seriously deepened by some acid irony, which might go unnoticed by those listeners who only saw the B-52's as «party animals», without paying attention to the «nerdy» part of the formula. But even without the irony, these songs have a fine rock sound, lively, pulsating grooves and brilliantly worked out vocal hooks, so what's not to like?

 

Once it all ends with the aptly titled «message» song ʽKeep This Party Goingʼ ("we've gotta be part of the universe, keep this party going all night long"), you would expect to be tired and worn out from the monotousness — just how many mid-to-fast-tempo party-pop-rockers can one's organism stand without overdosing? — but I never felt any tiredness, certainly not with these sharp brain-needles (like the girls' frenzied "things are getting dirty down in Washing-TOON!...") strategically inserted at all the right spots.

 

In the end, although, overall, this is a «typically late-period» B-52's record, I'd say that it knocks down Good Stuff with a vengeance, and that it is slightly less embarrassing than Cosmic Thing — and more consistent, too: there are no particular high points here, but this is only because it is hard to imagine how any of these songs, all based upon the same winning formula, could be much better than others. The very fact that the album managed to reach #11 on the US charts — after fifteen years of silence, coming from a band of old nerdy farts, and on a fiercely competitive mar­ket at that — shows how much seductive power this Funplex has, and my own experience does not deny that power, so a thumbs up by all means. Plus, check out their videos from circa around 2008 — hard to believe, yes, but they still look cool (or hot, whichever you prefer).

 

WITH THE WILD CROWD: LIVE IN ATHENS, GA (2011)

 

1) Pump; 2) Private Idaho; 3) Mesopotamia; 4) Ultraviolet; 5) Give Me Back My Man; 6) Funplex; 7) Whammy; 8) Roam; 9) 52 Girls; 10) Party Out Of Bounds; 11) Love In The Year 3000; 12) Cosmic Thing; 13) Hot Corner; 14) Band Intros; 15) Love Shack; 16) Wig; 17) Planet Claire; 18) Rock Lobster.

 

«Classic era» B-52's never put out a live album, which does not mean they couldn't put on a great live show: most likely, they saw no real need for this, since they allowed themselves so much freedom of action on their studio albums already — and the concerts were more remarkable in terms of show-biz flashiness and visuals (aw, those wigs!!!) than music, which mainly just strived to reproduce the whirlwind hooliganry and extravagance.

 

If so, why put out a live album when you're old and gray? Well, for one thing, it somehow seems easier to put things out in our modern era of overproducing everything. For another thing, this live CD is technically just an appendage to the live DVD — recording an entire show that the band did for their 34th anniversary at the Classic Center in Athens, GA. Hence, it does not really make much sense to hunt for the audio separate from the video, even if the level of energy and the sheer ratio of crazy things done onstage is predictably nowhere near the stuff one can see in the band's early, sketchy, skimpy camera relics.

 

But, with all the necessary age-related corrections introduced, the band still looks and sounds great. Somehow, Kate and Cindy manage not to come across as freaky grandmas, and it has far less to do with the wonders of plastic surgery than with the amazing fact that their vocal powers have remained practically intact. Well, almost — it is a fact that they can no longer hit the high­est notes on the "wigs on fire, fire, fire, fire" bit, but the scale is still scaled to an impressive height all the same. And Fred... well, Fred will always be Fred, even after they freeze him out of the storage locker in ten billion years' time.

 

The «anniversary setlist» is a little disappointing — you'd expect it to be a more representative career overview, but instead, they focus too closely on Funplex material, as if, three years into its release, there'd still be people around needing to be convinced to buy it. Five out of eleven songs is definitely a bit of an overkill. Although, granted, the live performance of these numbers scrapes away some of the stuffy production polish — ʽLove In The Year 3000ʼ, in particular, benefits heavily from a little less electronics and a bit more liveliness from the rhythm section.

 

The «oldies», meanwhile, are quite predictable: most of the big hits are here, with just a few no­table exceptions like ʽDeadbeat Clubʼ, and the only album that gets completely snuffed is Good Stuff — probably not because it is their worst offering, but because it lacked Cindy's input, and she might have been unwilling to add her parts to the likes of ʽHot Pants Explosionʼ (and I can so totally understand it). The only unexpected, and much welcome, inclusion is ʽ52 Girlsʼ from the debut album; elsewhere, you just know that the setlist has to end with ʽLove Shackʼ (for all the young hedonists), ʽPlanet Claireʼ, and ʽRock Lobsterʼ (for the certified veterans).

 

What else is there to say? The sound quality is expectedly perfect, the stage banter is limi­ted (even the entire band introduction, what with all the extra players, is performed in a matter of about forty seconds), and the professionalism is undeniable — they still put on an energetic, funny, and intelligent live show, and all it takes is about thirty seconds' worth of ʽPrivate Idahoʼ to understand this (you try reproducing all these woo-hoo-hoos without erring as you hit sixty). If With The Wild Crowd is destined to become the last bit of semi-original product from The B-52's — although they might easily have another Funplex-level album somewhere deep inside their systems — it's a nice, well-rounded swan song. And am I really glad they did not forget about ʽMesopotamiaʼ: this live version is a real atmospheric super-killer even compared to the studio version, which was no slouch either. Thumbs up.

BAD BRAINS

BAD BRAINS (1982)

 

1) Sailin' On; 2) Don't Need It; 3) Attitude; 4) The Regulator; 5) Banned In D.C.; 6) Jah Calling; 7) Supertouch/Shitfit; 8) Leaving Babylon; 9) F.V.K.; 10) I; 11) Big Take Over; 12) Pay To Cum; 13) Right Brigade; 14) I Luv I Jah; 15) Intro.

 

So, as it turns out, «hardcore» is yet another genre that white suckers shamelessly stole from their black brethren — or did they? Bad Brains' debut came out in crappy cassette form in 1982, much later than the first LPs by the Dead Kennedys, the Angry Samoans, the Circle Jerks, whatever, but the band began playing their stuff as early as 1977, and at that time, did it faster than any imaginable competition — their advantage being that they actually began life as a jazz-fusion ensemble circa 1975, converting to the loud, the rough, and the obscene two years later under the influence of the newly-emerged «slow» punk scene.

 

This unusual status — a formerly «intellectualized genre» combo switching to hardcore, and an all-black one at that — impressed the band's peers and fans so much that every once in a while someone will acknowledge Bad Brains as the best hardcore band of all time, or Bad Brains (the album) as their favorite album of all time (actually, the CD reissues all come with an endorse­ment from the Beastie Boys who do just that). But beyond the race, pedigree, and who-did-what-first issues, I really have very few clues as to what should be the standards to judge «hardcore». Cat­chiness? Ridiculous. Speed? What do you want me to do, hold a speedometer? Technique? At those speeds, it takes really special ears to measure the subtleties. Social relevance? You play it like that, you are socially relevant by definition even if you only sing about having gay sex. (Ac­tually, you reach the peak of social relevance if you sing about having gay sex, but that is sort of a different story).

 

In any case, Bad Brains do have some specificity beyond all that. All four members — H.R. on vocals, Darryl Jenifer on bass, Earl Hudson on drums, and the de-facto band leader Dr. Know on guitar — are open Rastafaris, and like every respectable late 1970s act, their major passion, be­sides speedy punk runs, is classic reggae à la Bob Marley; hence, the odd wonder of this album is that every now and then, in between the brief one-two-minute slash races, they bring the process to a state of chilled-out relaxation with a longer, and utterly un-ironic, reggae groove (and the grooves actually get longer and longer as time goes by — first one is 2:31, second one is 4:10, third one is 6:23 — and you can probably guess which ones are the reggae ones quite easily by scrutinizing the titles without listening).

 

The band's background is best seen on some of the instrumental passages — for instance, the intro to ʽDon't Need Itʼ, where Dr. Know lets rip with a swirling «jazz-metal» pattern rather than the usual chainsaw; later on, right after the solo, there is also a bit of idea exchange between the drums and the guitars that they must have incorporated from their «artsy» past. H.R.'s «spoken-spluttered» parts are generally much less impressive, although his nasal-wheezy-sneery tone could be a refreshing alternative to the typical «growl» or «bark» of the average hardcore punk­ster — but they aren't powerful enough to match the volume and intensity of the instrumentalists, and thus, detract from the music rather than add to it.

 

As could be expected, the quality of the original recording is abysmal: calling this stuff «lo-fi» would be dishonoring the lo-fi genre. Victim # 1 is Darryl Jenifer, whose basslines are actually just as nifty as and sometimes niftier than Dr. Know's riffs, but for the most part, they are «felt» rather than «heard» (except for the reggae parts, where he is saved by all the syncopation, but that is also when he is at his least interesting). Yet the guitar lines, too, could have benefited from a cleaner mix — after all, if you are going to surprise us by introducing fusion-gained technique into punk aesthetics, this could have been done by means of an album that doesn't sound like it was recorded in somebody's flooded basement with the mikes placed on the roof.

 

Still, a plan is a plan, I guess: whosoever decides his music should sound like shit, be it in his perfect right to carry out the decision. Personally, I think that thirty-six minutes is a bit of an over­kill for this stuff, as they really say it all in about, well, ten minutes at the max, and then just duplicate it all for no reason. ʽSailin' Onʼ is an impressive intro with a «pop» slant to it (they even try out some cheesy falsetto backing harmonies, without letting the tempo down for a se­cond); ʽDon't Need Itʼ has that non-trivial set of guitar runs that lets you know these guys are ultimately deconstructionists rather than good-for-nothings; ʽThe Regulatorʼ is Jenifer's ideal bass spotlight; ʽBanned In D.C.ʼ is an important autobiographical statement (the band was indeed banned in D.C., their hometown, for a while); ʽJah Callingʼ is the first, shortest, and best of the reggae numbers — an instrumental with the emphasis on Dr. Know's trippy atmospheric playing rather than all the vocal clichés of the genre. After that — whoever did not get enough, there is more of the same for you. 10-15 minutes is quite all right for me, well sufficient to issue out a receptive thumbs up, and then I pretend I just accidentally hit the «repeat» button.

 

ROCK FOR LIGHT (1983)

 

1) Coptic Times; 2) Attitude; 3) We Will Not; 4) Sailin' On; 5) Rally 'Round Jah Throne; 6) Right Brigade; 7) F.V.K.; 8) Riot Squad; 9) The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth; 10) Joshua's Song; 11) Banned In D.C.; 12) How Low Can A Punk Get; 13) Big Takeover; 14) I And I Survive; 15) Destroy Babylon; 16) Rock For Light; 17) At The Movies.

 

This is basically a «do-it-right-this-time» upgrade of Bad Brains. Same line-up, same style, same ideology, same technique, even a bunch of the same songs — but this time, recorded in a proper studio, released on a proper label (PVC), and produced by a guy with credentials, namely, Ric Ocasek of The Cars... Ric Ocasek???!!! ...but no, no worries, Rock For Light sounds nothing like The Cars — there isn't a synthesizer anywhere in sight, and the only rudiments of «pop hooks» are occasional melodic patterns in Dr. Know's riffs which were there all along, you just couldn't hear them too well.

 

Actually, if there is any substantial improvement, it mostly concerns the reggae numbers. Not co­incidentally, perhaps, none of the reggae tunes from Bad Brains were chosen to be re-recorded — instead, they wrote some new ones, tighter, more focused, and more catchy than the old ones. Reggae really only amounts to something bigger than local hoodlum ganja fun when it starts hun­ting for that Old Testament spirit, becoming downright uplifting for some and downright scary for others. And ʽThe Meek Shall Inherit The Earthʼ, for instance, definitely has a particle of that spirit (along with some powerhouse percussion work) — H.R. sings the lyrics, for once, instead of barking or growling, and the band's beliefs and convictions come forth as credible (even if the Rastafari religion as such seems like a bunch of baloney to you — heck, it probably is baloney, but if it makes these guys' lives happier, let 'em have it, "in the way of our lord JAH!").

 

As for the speedy punk songs, they continue to be properly undescribable — now that the pro­duction is so much clearer, we should simply enjoy them the way they are: disjointed quanta of one big whole, brief punk blasts whose main attraction lies in their being sped up to ridiculous tempos. Play this any slower and it will be quite boring, even with the technical skills of the band members — it is not as if Dr. Know is delivering any amazing, hitherto unknown chord se­quences... actually, except when he is off to churn out one more finger-flashing solo, he is not even playing it too fast: the main punch is delivered by the rhythm section.

 

H.R.'s ecstatic sneer on the fast punk numbers tends to be overrated by reviewers, maybe for exo­tic reasons — after all, you do not usually see this sort of style from black vocalists — but I really prefer what he is doing on the reggae rather than the hardcore numbers, where the tone is just a tad too hysterical to properly match the instrumental crunch. As for the Rastafari influence on the lyrics of ʽCoptic Timesʼ, ʽJoshua's Songʼ, and others, it is certainly novel, but it would be more fun to somehow manage to see a musical combination of reggae and hardcore rather than a lyrical one, and of that, the band is not capable (not that anybody could blame them — «hardcore reggae» is sort of an oxymoron, since combining pot with speed is usually not recommendable).

 

Overall, the only two reasons I still go with a thumbs up here are (a) the improved reggae num­bers and (b) the improved production — both of which sort of permit Rock For Light to count as a successful update of the Bad Brains sound for the audiophile. However, a second (third?) al­bum with the same sound and style would have been untenable — Bad Brains would end up mu­tating into somebody like Agnostic Front. To their credit, the band realized that: we may debate whether their subsequent changes were amazing or disappointing, but regardless, it is actually a good thing that they only made one Rock For Light, without dissipating its legend over the course of a thousand faceless clones.

 

I AGAINST I (1986)

 

1) Intro; 2) I Against I; 3) House Of Suffering; 4) Re-Ignition; 5) Secret 77; 6) Let Me Help; 7) She's Calling You; 8) Sacred Love; 9) Hired Gun; 10) Return To Heaven.

 

While it may be a good thing that Bad Brains' second «properly» recorded album does not have it in mind to repeat the formula of Rock For Light — after all, the best hardcore bands are those with just one hardcore album, «THAT» album — I absolutely fail to see the reasons why this fol­low-up gets its near-immaculate critical reputation. It was the band's best-selling album, for sure, but this is hardly a point worth noting when one is, essentially, dealing with a cult underground act for which a few thousand sold copies is already an «achievement». Must be the lyrical im­pact, as usual — Rastafari lyrics are always in high demand on the critical market.

 

The speed, with a couple exceptions, is gone, and with it, the one reason to keep a Bad Brains al­bum going regardless of individual song quality. In its place, the band introduces relative diver­sity — as long as the guitar tones remain dark and crunchy, they can play «slow tempo punk», heavy metal, or funkified post-New Wave rock, with the minimum goal of not boring their liste­ner to death and the maximum goal of achieving some sort of synthesis between all these things and their jazz-fusion pedigree. Sounds good, doesn't it?

 

Problem is, I Against I is still boring, and the synthesis does not produce decent results. For in­stance, the chief metal inspiration for the band does not seem to be either the old school Sabbath or the new school Metallica — some of this stuff sounds dangerously close to the inoffensive, pop-oriented «hair metal» schlock o' the day. ʽSacred Loveʼ, with its Rambo-style power chords and syncopated echoey riffage, epitomizes pseudo-toughness, and H.R.'s megaphone-processed vocals lose any sort of mystery they could have possessed against this stiff background. ʽShe's Calling Youʼ could just as well have been recorded for Alice Cooper's Constrictor from the same year (except that Alice's stuff was at least catchy, whereas this song has no vocal hooks whatsoever, and its chief melodic guitar riff is hopelessly damaged by the «muscular» effects on the recording). And ʽHouse Of Sufferingʼ is notable only for making a reference to «Jah love» within the frames of a song that, melodically, owes much more to Sabbath's ʽSymptom Of The Universeʼ than to anything ever associated with Bob Marley. And it is pretty fast, for once.

 

The album's more traditionally oriented punk material (ʽLet Me Helpʼ) rolls along on autopilot, and the «funky» stuff (ʽSecret 77ʼ, ʽHired Gunʼ) is sheer atmosphere. At this point, in fact, H.R. seems to be the only band member who is genuinely excited about what they are doing — his street poetry is intended for rabble-rousing, and his psychologically thought-out choruses ("hired gun / he's on the run / better watch out, boy / cause he don't know fun") certainly have their ap­peal for those in the know. But if you have trouble with your English, or if you have trouble ac­cepting this stuff as something that goes beyond «trite», I have no idea whatsoever what it is about I Against I that should be supposed to make it a good album, let alone a «classic».

 

Because this time around, it is impossible to just applaud the results as a «megablast of energy with a strong social undercurrent» or something like that. That «megablast», for Bad Brains, was Rock For Light (or the eponymous album if you prefer your megablasts with a wallop of shitty production on the side). This stuff aspires to something beyond kicking the old, wrinkled, but still durable ass of the Establishment: it obviously has some «pure» musical ambitions as well — but all I can hear is a bunch of dudes learning to succeed in the fields of New Wave and heavy metal, and failing in the attempt. This ain't nowhere near the Cure if you want intellectual, meticulously «researched» musical textures, and it ain't nowhere near Metallica if you want headbanging crunch. Thumbs down — try it out if you really want to, but don't buy the hype.

 

LIVE (1988)

 

1) I; 2) At The Movies; 3) The Regulator; 4) Right Brigade; 5) I Against I; 6) I And I Survive; 7) House Of Suffering; 8) Re-Igniti­on; 9) Sacred Love; 10) She's Calling You; 11) Coptic Times; 12) F.V.K.; 13) Secret 77.

 

Since the studio sessions for Bad Brains were never really carried out in the Sgt. Pepper vein, the differences between Bad Brains in the studio and Bad Brains onstage are in the cosmetic sphere. The only significant point is the status of H.R. — onstage, he tends to get a bit further off his rocker, leering, grinning, screeching, and, overall, putting on more of an Exorcism Show than when recording without an actual audience. Whether this is good or bad is up to you to decide — personally, I grow tired of this monkeying around rather quickly. It is one thing to watch the guy — com­plete with full body vibration and his trademark back-flips — and another thing to listen without seeing (a similar dissatisfaction concerns, e.g., Mick Jagger in his «less harmony, more bark» period, when hitting the notes took a backseat to hitting the stage). Oh well, at least the vocals for ʽSacred Loveʼ are no longer recorded over the telephone.

 

Recorded at various dates played in 1987-88, Live predictably focuses on material from I Aga­inst I (six out of nine songs are faithfully reproduced), occasionally diversifying it with older stuff — to a rather faint effect, since the «oldies» are naturally much shorter on the average, and some of the choices, or, rather, some of the omissions are sort of odd. For instance, there is only one reggae number altogether — ʽI And I Surviveʼ, although, in generous compensation, it is sli­ghtly extended — and neither ʽRock For Lightʼ nor ʽBanned In D.C.ʼ are played (or seen fit for inclusion on the album, at least), despite being some of the more highly «marked» tunes from the old days of blazing hardcore. Maybe it is just a coincidence, but, overall, Live does not convey the impression that the band actually cares for its established image of «speed-punk pioneers do­ing it in the name of Jah» — that they are much happier now with their punk-metal fusion. Who could tell back then, in 1987, that the speed-punk pioneering would stay forever young, and the punk-metal fusion would quickly go senile?

 

If it helps any, the sound quality is pretty damn good — now you get to hear ʽThe Regulatorʼ and ʽAt The Moviesʼ in all their raging glory without all the (in)glorious lo-fi in yer face, and H.R. is mixed in well above the guitar roar, so that you can properly assess the degree of his irreplaceabi­lity in the band. And it's all strictly business: no stage banter, no lengthy pauses between songs, no cheaply directed audience interaction — forty minutes of non-stop headbanging. (Some later CD editions are further extended by including a cover of the Beatles' ʽDay Tripperʼ, which is nice — an unexpected surprise never hurts on an album like this).

 

Overall, though, recommended only for, and by, major fans of the band, such as the reviewer at the All-Music Guide who had no qualms about calling Bad Brains «the greatest live rock & roll band» (really? isn't that taking liberal guilt a bit too far?) and warning us to «watch out for flies and swirling debris while your mouth is hanging open for a half hour». (For the record, his name was «Jack Rabid», and it looked fairly appropriate for the occasion.) As for myself, I cannot deny the energy and passion, but these are still mediocre songs, and a mediocre song delivered with redhot passion only makes me feel sorry about the ultimate waste of redhot passion.

 

QUICKNESS (1989)

 

1) Soul Craft; 2) Voyage Into Infinity; 3) The Messengers; 4) With The Quickness; 5) Gene Machine/Don't Bother Me; 6) Don't Blow Bubbles; 7) Sheba; 8) Yout' Juice; 9) No Conditions; 10) Silent Tears; 11) The Prophet's Eye; 12) Endtro.

 

What we have here is a rather blatantly obvious sequel to I Against I. Recorded in a rather fussy manner: H.R. quit the band in 1986, then returned already after their next recording had been completed — with the band so happy about it that they agreed to erase the vocals by Taj Single­ton (who filled in for H.R. on their 1988 tour) and redo it all over again. By this time, though, H.R. seems to have completely gone off his rocker, so much so that the lyrics on Quickness keep veering somewhere in between Rastafarianism, Pastafarianism, Satanism, and plain old schizo­phasia — and the vocals mostly comply.

 

All of which actually gives the record a certain unique flavor — I mean, it may be politically in­correct (even for the time) to blame the spread of AIDS on gay people, imploring them to "ask Jah and he'll make the change" (ʽDon't Blow Bubblesʼ), but at least it is less boring than having to sit through just another bit of generic Rasta preaching. And, in general, having H.R. play the «holy fool», with syntactically disconnected splinters of phrases covered in smoke, spit, Spi­rit, and, most importantly, tons and tons of spite, is quite an experience.

 

Unfortunately, all of it is completely wasted on a set of songs that make even less sense than the ones on I Against I. Just as before, these are «metal punk» melodies, too slow and too complex in structure to satisfy the demands for good punk, yet too deformed and too loose to constitute good metal. At least ʽSacred Loveʼ and ʽShe's Calling Youʼ, much as I dislike their «vibe», had some basic melodic impact. On Quickness, the riffs cease to make any sense whatsoever: loud, somewhat math-rockish (but way too noisy and poorly mixed to impress with any sort of preci­sion or head-spinning chord changes), and thoroughly unmemorable.

 

Even worse, it seems as if every second song or so has the exact same riff patern on repeat — at the very least, ʽVoyage Into Infinityʼ and ʽGene Machineʼ are definitely the same song, happily chug-chug-chug-chugging away like nobody would mind. Sometimes it gets faster, sometimes it gets slower, but in the end, it's all the same — this is an album written on complete autopilot, and a thorough waste of Dr. Know's talents (and at this time, it is beginning to be permissible to actu­ally start doubting that there was any talent in the first place — at the very least, not in the song­writing department, that is for sure).

 

The «slower metal / faster metal» formula is betrayed only once, when at the very end the band unexpectedly returns to explore its reggae roots with ʽThe Prophet's Eyeʼ — reflecting H.R.'s state-of-the-art dementia this time, the song sounds more like a parody on what they used to do than anything genuinely serious. As disappointing as the rest of the record.

 

Technical note: although Earl Hudson is officially credited for percussion work, the real drum­ming here belonged to session player Mackie Jayson. Not that this changes anything: the best drummer in the world could not save this utterly uninspired puddle of muddle. Of course, if you experience uncontrollable spasms of joy at any random thrash riff addressing you from your spea­kers — Quickness is highly recommendable. But honestly, I'd rather just get me some Slayer in­stead: I am honestly not interested in trying to metabolize this fodder into efficient vitamins for the body and the soul, even with the help of H.R.'s eccentric behavior. Thumbs down.

 

THE YOUTH ARE GETTING RESTLESS (1990)

 

1) I; 2) Rock For Light; 3) Right Brigade; 4) House Of Suffering; 5) Day Tripper / She's A Rainbow; 6) Coptic Times; 7) Sacred Love; 8) Re-Ignition; 9) Let Me Help; 10) The Youth Are Getting Restless; 11) Banned In D.C.; 12) Sailin' On; 13) Fearless Vam­pire Killer; 14) At The Movies; 15) Revolution (dub); 16) Pay To Cum; 17) Big Takeover.

 

A good setlist can work wonders. This is not brand new stuff — the recordings were taken from the same support tour for I Against I that gave us the Live album (recorded just a wee bit earlier), so it could formally qualify for «archival» status, except in this case, it worked more like a stop­gap while the band was busy sorting it out with H.R. — eventually replacing him with Chuck Mosley from Faith No More. Hilariously, the «stopgap» turned out to be far better than the origi­nal official live album, though...

 

...for an obvious reason — the setlist here is more intentionally targeted at the band's punk legacy than the metal one. Only three out of seventeen songs are from I Against I. The rest generally stem from their two first and best studio albums, which means speed, excitement, and, overall, a better application of their crunch than the slow, lumbering, and generally wasted metal riffage on that album. Furthermore, the recording quality at that particular show at the Paradiso Theater in Amsterdam was well on the level, and so was the inspiration.

 

Obscurities include the title track — a reggae number that did not make it on any studio album and is well worth knowing, mainly because of its clever integration of a smooth funky bassline into the general reggae structure, so that you never really know what it is you are listening to; and the unexpected synthesis of Beatles and Stones — a reggaeified medley sewn together from bits of ʽDay Tripperʼ and ʽShe's A Rainbowʼ, with additional lyrics from H.R. By all accounts, this is a novelty number, but the very fact of making a reggae medley of a Beatles and a Stones song counts as a novelty number that may just as well turn out to be unforgettable — even if, ultimate­ly, you just find it a stupid idea.

 

And overall, since we do have fabulous live versions of ʽRock For Lightʼ and ʽBanned In D.C.ʼ this time around, The Youth Are Getting Restless, with its high production quality and energy levels, may be a pretty damn good introduction to the band. What else is there to say? Absolutely nothing, so a fast, but firm thumbs up to it and let us move along.

 

RISE (1993)

 

1) Rise; 2) Miss Freedom; 3) Unidentified; 4) Love Is The Answer; 5) Free; 6) Hair; 7) Coming In Numbers; 8) Yes Jah; 9) Take Your Time; 10) Peace Of Mind; 11) Without You/Outro.

 

No, no, and no. I am nowhere near H.R.'s biggest fan — his hypnotic powers were never matched by sufficient singing or «voice acting» ability, as far as I am concerned — but I do acknowledge that there is a unique Bad Brains vibe, and that vibe consists of H.R. vs. Dr. Know much the same way as the Rolling Stones vibe consists of Jagger vs. Richards. A Bad Brains without H.R.? It would take a proper Jah miracle to make it work.

 

The new vocals guy, called «Israel Joseph I», if you can really believe it, is not a bad singer — in fact, he seems to have a stronger, tougher, more disciplined set of pipes than H.R. — but that is just the problem. Rise simply has too much discipline. It is a professionally constructed mix of about 15% hardcore, 15% grunge, and 70% mid-tempo thrash metal, with a couple reggae tunes thrown in for good measure — and in between all the calculations, they seem to have completely lost the emotional aspect. Of course, it had already started on Quickness, but even that album had a few songs that did not seem written merely for the sake of keeping themselves busy.

 

I have nothing to say about these songs. Much emphasis is placed on crunchy brutality — Dr. Know's guitar tones and Israel's snarls are more often in the «evil» department than elsewhere, but it is never convincing: the riffs are highly derivative and uninspired, and the vocals are way too theatrical. Maybe it would help to be able to evaluate the record completely outside of its context — as it is, one cannot help but inevitably compare the «thinner», but genuinely insane vocalizations of H.R. with the «fully-in-control» attitude of this guy. They simply belong in dif­ferent worlds (think a Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett replaced by Alan Parsons, or any other such analogy).

 

The last track is particularly surprising — ʽWithout Youʼ is a funky, but intentionally sentimental ballad, the clo­sest they had ever come to a properly «sell-out» track thus far. It neither lies in solid Bad Brains territory, nor is it in any way a good track: and who were they willing to fool with a goddamn love song? You do not shed tears to Bad Brains material — might just as well start expecting a symph-rock suite from the likes of AC/DC.

 

Yes, Dr. Know and his cronies (including drummer Mackie Jayson, now as a full-term member) are professionals, and this means there will always be people thinking that there is no such thing as a Good Brains (= «bad Bad Brains») album, and if you really want to, you can headbang along to some of these songs quite nicely — ʽUnidentifiedʼ is fast as hell, and ʽTake Your Timeʼ grinds and howls with all the mercilessness (if none of the charm) of an Alice In Chains track. But why would you want to, when the world has so much more, and so much better, in store for you? Trust the critics on this one — it holds no revelations or epiphanies, other than the revelation that some­one can live with a name like «Israel Joseph I». Thumbs down.

 

GOD OF LOVE (1995)

 

1) Cool Mountaineer; 2) Justice Keepers; 3) Long Time; 4) Rights Of A Child; 5) God Of Love; 6) Overs The Water; 7) Tongue Tee Tie; 8) Darling I Need You; 9) To The Heavens; 10) Thank Jah; 11) Big Fun; 12) How I Love Thee.

 

Good news: H.R. is back (again), giving the band a chance to remind us of why we ever bothered reserving a separate line for them in the first place. Bad news: what good is being given a chance if you are completely disinterested in taking it?

 

In a way, actually, this is even worse than Rise. That album may have been generic and negli­gible, of marginal interest for meticulous thrash collectors, at best, but at least it was consistent: «Israel Joseph I» was willing to adapt to whatever Dr. Know was playing, and if they did not succeed in too well in tapping into one's emotions, at least they tried. But with H.R. back in the band, it seems as if the two main participants pay as little attention to each other as possible. The guitar player is still punching out second- and third-hand metal riffs — and the singer is whining or barking against them in an ugly nasal manner that does not agree with the style at all.

 

The result is a lengthy string of songs that lack any sort of purpose. There are good and bad al­bums out there, tasteful or corny, innovative or formulaic, catchy or unmemorable, but records like these, in a way, are the worst of the lot because I honestly cannot figure out why they exist at all. To keep up conveying H.R.'s personal take on the Rasta stuff? But how does this personal take agree with the all-too familiar power chords and metal arpeggios from Dr. Know's fingers? To kick ass? But how do you properly kick ass with such a mentally unstable guy at the wheel? To prove that Jah loves metal no less than he loves reggae? But they already did that on I Against I, and it must have been obvious to everybody except for the most obstinate ones that it only got less and less and less convincing from then on. It is not simply a dead horse they are flogging here — it is a horse in the last stages of decomposing.

 

Not a single interesting riff, not a single melody worth remembering or discussing, not a single moment of being «impressed». Out of sheer curiosity, you might try the opener, ʽCool Moun­taineerʼ — it is quite typical of the entire album: a roaring mid-tempo mess of power chords, auto-piloted «ecstatic» solos, and a misplaced H.R. gleefully cackling some nonsense about how "like a bird in the tree, Cool Mountaineers shall be free". If you find something in there that I have not been able to, more power to you — not that I was trying real hard, but then again, it is supposed to be somewhat of a quid-pro-quo process, and there was no initial act of giving. Nary a tiny hint that someday, someway, ʽCool Mountaineerʼ might turn out to have something of value.

 

The reggae numbers are back with a vengeance, too, no less than three or four of them, and even if reggae, unlike metal, is the motherland for Bad Brains, they are hardly working its fields pro­perly — at best, Dr. Know is having himself some «fun» with various electronic effects (ʽTo The Heavensʼ), and at worst, it he is not doing anything at all (ʽOver The Waterʼ, generally unlistena­ble as H.R. is practicing his vibrato — regular nasal whine is bad enough, but vibrating nasal whine is a Nazi-worthy device).

 

And it is all wrapped up with ʽHow I Love Theeʼ, which is not even as much reggae as it is a combination of sterile modern R&B and adult contemporary — the band tries to end things on a tenderly sentimental note, and you can rather safely predict that it will be just as bad as every­thing else, and maybe worse, because «sentimentality» is one thing that could never be associated with Bad Brains when they were at their peak.

 

As is usual for this stage in their career, the personal and communal life of Bad Brains at this jun­cture was far more exciting than their musical development — the laziness and ineffectiveness of these songs rather surprisingly contrasts with H.R.'s ongoing erratic behavior, including fights with skinheads, security guards, and managers while touring, and eventually, getting kicked out of the band once again. Might make for some exciting reading if you're into tabloid stuff — but it has nothing to do with the disgusted thumbs down awarded to the accompanying pablum.

 

I & I SURVIVED (2002)

 

1) Jah Love; 2) Overdub; 3) How Low Can A Punk Get; 4) I & I Survive; 5) Cowboy; 6) Gene Machine; 7) Ghetto; 8) Rally; 9) September; 10) Ragga Dub; 11) Gene Machine (remix); 12) I & I Survive (Shiner massive mix).

 

Yes, you know a band is real deep in trouble when its best album in at least fifteen years turns out to be a throwaway, most probably recorded on the whiffy spur of one moment — in this case, a pack of instrumental reggae (a.k.a. dub) re-workings of their past compositions, both originally reggae ones and hardcore ones. The fans were mostly outraged, judging by the average «popular» reviews of the album; the critics remained indifferent or mildly amused; H.R. remained uninvol­ved (I am not even sure if he was with the band in 2002); and overall, this generally counts as a minor footnote in their discography — but, as it happens, footnotes sometimes turn out to be more informative and insightful than the main body of the work.

 

The thing is, these are not just reggae or «reggae-squared» reworkings of older material — these are atmospheric and, at the same time, technically impressive variations, with more creativity and diversity in­volved here than on any previously released Bad Brains record. This creativity does not always make sense; the reggae rhythmics occasionally gets tiresome for those who have not been particularly graced by Jah; and, clearly, this has nothing to do either with H.R.'s personal ae­sthetics or the hard rock pedigree of Bad Brains with which we associate the band. But are these really flaws? Just look at this:

 

— ʽJah Loveʼ eschews guitar heroics in favor of a jazzy horn section, playing big, but mournful brass riffs over minimalistic echoey backing; the brass parts return later several times, most no­tably on ʽI & I Surviveʼ where they mimick H.R.'s vocals (to much stronger effect than the origi­nal, I must say);

 

— ʽOverdubʼ is carried by a mildly ominous bassline, over which Darryl Jennifer dubs lamenting melodica parts, and Dr. Know throws in some electric organ flourishes for extra effect; the whole thing feels like a short walk through uncharted, slightly dangerous and unpredictable, jungle;

 

— ʽHow Low Can A Punk Getʼ finally introduces heavy riffage and arpeggiated metallic soloing which then goes away, replaced by a trip-hop section with more horns and strange electronic hoots with even more of that odd «nighttime» atmosphere;

 

— ʽCowboyʼ features a quirky ska arrangement where bass, guitars, organs, and chimes weave pretty tiny rings around each other (sometimes even an occasional mandolin breaks through and tries to turn the whole thing into a Spanish folk song, then fails, excuses itself and goes to the bathroom) for a rather mysterious, humble, and quiet four minutes...

 

...and so on, right down to ʽRagga Dubʼ whose title hints at an Indian synthesis, and that is exact­ly what it is. As weird as this thought seems on paper, Dr. Know seems to have selected this al­bum, and no other, to test out all the ideas that he had been storing in his head for over a decade, without daring to let them out on Bad Brains' «regular» albums. By the time we come to the se­cond half of the record, some of these ideas start repeating themselves (for instance, ʽSeptemberʼ adds relatively little to ʽGhettoʼ), but in light of the band's usual fuck-diversity attitude, this does not even begin to feel like a problem.

 

The regular problem with reggae, like blues, is that it «all sounds the same», but once you start thinking of blues and reggae basics as simply a formulaic foundation (after all, there are no limits to architectural variation, even if most of the buildings are based on the same skeletal principles), this problem can be easily annihilated — and with all the electronic tinkering, horns sections, ex­perimental basslines, and fifty different modes of guitar playing, I & I Survived is... if not exact­ly a «masterpiece», at least a very pleasant surprise from these guys, despite not kicking the usual (wrinkled) ass and not serving as a polygon for H.R.'s (pathetic) madness. Thumbs up — these particular Bad Brains seem quite good to my tastes.

 

BUILD A NATION (2007)

 

1) Give Thanks And Praises; 2) Jah People Make The World Go Round; 3) Pure Love; 4) Natty Dreadlocks 'Pon The Mountain Top; 5) Build A Nation; 6) Expand Your Soul; 7) Jah Love; 8) Let There Be Angels (Just Like You); 9) Universal Peace; 10) Roll On; 11) Until Kingdom Comes; 12) In The Beginning; 13) Send You No More Flowers; 14) Peace Be Unto Thee.

 

Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys produced this one, and his young grateful-apprentice influence on the old masters cannot be underestimated: Build A Nation promptly returns Bad Brains to their classic reggae-meets-hardcore formula and, for the most part, keeps them there, for better or for worse. Unfortunately, I sort of get the feeling that Yauch must have been the happiest partici­pant of the sessions — maybe Dr. Know did not really mind being steered back to the styles that started it all, but I do not sense much enthusiasm, either.

 

H.R. might be the one to blame: no longer having the drive or energy to sound like the slobbering madman of old, he prefers to go for a calmer, hazy-mysticism-soaked vocal style on pretty much every song, be it fast or slow, loud or quiet, but his nasal overtones make the overall effect irrita­ting rather than mesmerizing. On the other hand, it's not as if Dr. Know was sending him tons of freshly baked awesome riffs to undermine — as expected, no songs here suffer from excessive memorability, so to speak. If this is the best original material they could come up with in twelve years, it can only mean that they did not really bother coming up with anything — just went into the studio and bashed all of this out on the spot, with Yauch's stylistic guidance as the only point of potential attraction.

 

Yes, it is a «comeback» of sorts — for one thing, there are some super-fast tracks here, first time in God knows when; however, if you compare these new quickie-speedy one-minute recordings like ʽPure Loveʼ and the title track with anything from the Rock For Light era, you will see that these ones are tighter, cleaner, better structured than the exuberant noisefests of old. A professio­nal's dream, perhaps, but the whole point of Bad Brains used to be in how anthemically mad they were — Build A Nation, in contrast, is much too calculated and stiff, a problem it certainly shares with the absolute majority of 21st century music, but that is no reason to be forgiving.

 

As for the reggae numbers, too much of this stuff comes in direct prayer form — the album opens with the partially acappella ʽGive Thanks And Praisesʼ, continues with ʽJah Loveʼ, and ends with ʽPeace Be Unto Theeʼ. Rasta people might, perhaps, be wooed, but none of these songs, really, is ʽMy Sweet Lordʼ-caliber: just ordinary reggae prayers for regular reggae crowds. Not even a single juicy apocalyptic ride on the waves of syncopation.

 

By all means, this is Bad Brains' best album since at least 1986 (not counting the surprisingly creative dub work on I & I Survived), and, if you, too, dislike the band's transition from hardcore to metal, even since Rock For Light — but this simply isn't saying much, given the generally abysmal quality of their studio stuff ever since they first asked themselves the fatal question, «what next?». An almost surefire delight for hardcore fans; a mostly predictable disappointment, I guess, for everyone else, although, out of sheer respect for the collaboration between Yauch and the old boys, it might be best to refrain from a direct thumbs down this time around. But it goes without saying that you won't ever build a nation with this brand of brickwork.

 

INTO THE FUTURE (2012)

 

1) Into The Future; 2) Popcorn; 3) We Belong Together; 4) Youth Of Today; 5) RubADub Love; 6) Yes I; 7) Suck Sess; 8) Jah Love; 9) Earnest Love; 10) Come Down; 11) Fun; 12) Maybe A Joyful Noise; 13) MCA Dub.

 

Unfortunately, Adam Yauch was prevented from producing the next Bad Brains album by his death from cancer in 2012. Consequently, the band produced the album on their own — exactly the same way as Adam would have produced it, or so they thought, dedicating the record to his memory. Supposedly, Into The Future refers to the future of the Beastie Boys' legacy, and may­be to Yauch's future life and achievements in Heaven, than to Bad Brains' own future — which, by the looks of this album, does not seem too different from their past.

 

In fact, by this time we pretty much have a stable understanding of what a «late period Bad Brains album» is supposed to sound like: a loud, clean, meticulously sanitized mix of hardcore, metal, and reggae with a middle-age spiritual undercurrent. The latter bit seems ineffective — I am not sure how many people there still remain to seriously care about H.R.'s preaching: if lines like "The youth of today / Is the man of tomorrow / They don't live in tears / Beg, steal or bor­row" seem promising to you on paper, H.R.'s grinning joker-tone may add to the promise, but then again, it might not — by now, it is so completely predictable in its theatrical poise that the original «mystique» is in danger of mutating to «irritation».

 

The thing is — as long as Bad Brains were young and keen on following their basic instincts, and also as long as they were playing beyond top speed and on the verge of chaos, they had intrigue: even if you were not wooed over by their playing style, there definitely was something intellectu­ally incomprehensible about their music. But now, just take a listen to the title track. Its melody is deliberately stuck somewhere between old school garage rock and new school hardcore, each chord polished and dusted off as if this was an introduction to the friggin' «Well-Tempered Elec­tric Guitar». Except that the chord sequences hardly display any freshness or originality: this is discipline without verve, a soul-free pro job that no longer has any musical meaning.

 

Perhaps this point might be even better illustrated by a song named ʽFunʼ — although it is about as far from any real fun as a Celine Dion ballad. Generic thrash metal chugging alternating with languid distorted power chords, set to a rather silly mantra ("Let's have fun, we all need fun, and this music is fun, school is fun, love is fun") — unless they actually think it's ironic, which it is not, this is one of the least appropriate anthems to fun-making that I have ever heard. If you listen to it long enough, it may begin to seem catchy, but the trick is that a properly catchy song has to catch you with an emotion, not with repetition. And what is that emotion?

 

Overall, I refrain from any judgements on this record, just like I did with its predecessor. It is for­mally listenable, even the posh reggae numbers with amazing titles like ʽJah Loveʼ, but emotio­nally and intellectually, it is basically just a blank, and both of the key members are to blame — Dr. Know just seems content to sit on his legacy, and H.R., having said goodbye to his old mad­man image... is really just a Paul D. Hudson like any other Paul D. Hudson in the London area.

 

ADDENDA:

 

BLACK DOTS (1979/1996)

 

1) Don't Need It; 2) At The Atlantis; 3) Pay To Cum; 4) Supertouch/Shitfit; 5) Regulator; 6) You're A Migraine; 7) Don't Bother Me; 8) Banned In D.C.; 9) Why'd You Have To Go; 10) The Man Won't Annoy Ya; 11) Redbone In The City; 12) Black Dots; 13) How Low Can A Punk Get; 14) Just Another Damn Song; 15) Attitude; 16) Send You No Flowers.

 

This set of demos, recorded by the band as early as 1979 at the soon-to-be-famous Inner Ear Stu­dios in Arlington (at that time, located in the basement of recording engineer Don Zientara), had long since passed into legend before it was officially released as an archival treasure in 1996. Quite a few fans still worship it as Bad Brains' finest hour — which is hardly a major surprise for a hardcore act, where «first» frequently equals «best» just because nobody needs a «second». And even though acknowledging this means being really mean to Bad Brains and Rock For Light — after all, there must have been a reason why they did not want to make these tapes pub­lic in the first place — after a few listens, I feel almost ready to concur.

 

The trick is that in 1979, the «classic» sound of Bad Brains was not quite ready yet. Most impor­tantly, the band had not yet developed their insanely fast tempos: ʽPay To Cumʼ clocks in at 2:02 here, compared to 1:25 on Bad Brains, and the proportions for the rest are quite similar. This certainly does not mean that these tempos are «slow» — they do take a bite out of the band's alle­ged uniqueness, but let's face it, there is a certain point where acceleration starts bordering on the ridiculous — or, at least, the rhythm section parts start blurring together like telegraph posts out the win­dows of an express train, creating the illusion (or, sometimes, the reality) of sloppiness and out-of-control chaos. On Black Dots, the band takes care not to cross that border — they are being very fast and very aggressive, but never go over the top.

 

On the other hand, in 1979 Bad Brains had not yet fully worked out their reggae schtick: there is only one reggae number on the record, ʽThe Man Won't Annoy Yaʼ, and even that is more of a tentative reggae/rhumba hybrid than a proverbially solid Rasta prayer from H.R. and the gang. Everything else is straightforward, monolithic, ultra-vicious punk stuff — no prisoners taken, no mercy granted, and H.R. is still singing it in a somewhat traditional punkish bark: snarling and vengeful, but not yet schizophrenic.

 

The only thing that is mildly merciful are the tempos, which allow you to better appreciate Dr. Know's creaitivty: for instance, the intro riff to ʽDon't Need Itʼ turns out to be a cool, well thought out rock'n'roll riff, which I never noticed once it had been sped up into an incomprehensible wobbly mumble on Bad Brains. Additionally, the band's sense of humor is more overt here than it would be once their Rasta fixation got the better of them — ʽJust Another Damn Songʼ, for instance, feels like a subtle sendup of the very hardcore / minimalist values the band allegedly set out to promote, since lyrically, musically, and mood-wise it is just another damn song.

 

There is even a sort of equivalent of a «love ballad» here — ʽWhy D'You Have To Goʼ sounds like an (intentional?) parody on old-school sentimental garage rock (music) and blue-eyed soul (H.R.'s breaking down vocal): hardly a «good song» in any sense, and they would never ever try this again, but actually, in the absence of proper reggae counterbalance, it is good to have an oc­casional breakaway from the «rock'n'roll speedboat pattern».

 

Overall, the album fully deserves its reputation. The sound quality is actually higher here than it would be on Bad Brains, so there is no reason to shy away from the «demos» sticker. And even if the individual songs still do not stand out as brightly shaped as one could hope, given the slight decrease in tempo, Bad Brains were still one of the speediest bands around in 1979, and the H.R./Dr. Know duo — one of the most badass duos of the year.

 

It all conforms to the observation that hardcore bands generally «blow their wad» over the first 20 or so months of their existence — Bad Brains just spent too much time without a proper record contract on their hands: by the time they released Rock For Light, their first properly recorded and engineered record, they'd already spent six long years in hard­core mode, so no wonder Black Dots gets so much respect. Rock For Light may still remain the definitive «mature» Bad Brains album to play off both their aggression and spirituality, but Black Dots reminds us more properly of how they made their name in the first place — a naturally inevitable thumbs up here if we agree to care about this band at all.

 

LIVE AT CBGB 1982 (1982/2006)

 

1) Big Takeover; 2) I; 3) Jah The Conqueror; 4) Supertouch/Shitfit; 5) Rally Round Ja's Throne; 6) Right Brigade; 7) FVK; 8) I And I Survive; 9) Destroy Babylon; 10) Joshua's Song; 11) Unity Dub; 12) The Meek; 13) Banned In D.C.; 14) How Low Can A Punk Get; 15) Riot Squad; 16) I And I Rasta; 17) We Will Not; 18) The Regulator; 19) All Rise To Meet Jah.

 

And, I suppose, a representative account of Bad Brains would not be quite complete without a few words on this archive release — the only official live album that captures Bad Brains at their glory day peak, sometime in December 1982, playing their guts out to an enthusiastic CBGB crowd with Rock For Light still to come and the unfortunate metallic reinvention of I And I still way beyond the horizon.

 

The immediate bad news is that the sound quality, particularly on the hardcore ultra-fast stuff (the reggae grooves end up a little less blurry) is abysmal. Allegedly, the recording was pro­fessional, since Bad Brains were also captured on several cameras that evening — the official re­lease is doubly precious, since it comes in both audio and video form. But either they used really cheap audio equipment, or the mikes were set up all wrong, in any case, the sound is so seriously messy that I would never have guessed on my own that it did not originate from an «audience quality» bootleg tape. So heed this warning.

 

The other news is that there are no news — as I already said in the review of Live, at their most revved up, Bad Brains offer little difference between the psychopathic thunderstorm in the studio and the psychopathic thunderstorm on stage. Watching the spectacle is an entirely different matter, although not necessarily a pleasant one (I, for one, would definitely not want to find myself at CBGB on that particular evening, judging by the erratic behaviour of some of the audience) — but listening to it post-factum in garbage-pail sound quality is sort of superfluous, at best.

 

You do get to hear them play more classic super-fast shit and more of their good reggae numbers than on any other live release, and there are a few tracks here that did not make it on any studio record, either (mostly also reggae stuff like ʽJah The Conquerorʼ). But these are tasty bits for big fans: overall, Live At CBGB is more of an important historical document — and, for some people, also a potential energy / vitality-charged battery, if they get it together with the ac­com­panying DVD. As a piece of music, it is nearly worthless; as a source of inspiration for those who agree that H.R. and Dr. Know did embody the genuine spirit of 1982 — it may be priceless.

 

 

 

BAD RELIGION

HOW COULD HELL BE ANY WORSE? (1981)

 

1) We're Only Gonna Die; 2) Latch Key Kids; 3) Part III; 4) Faith In God; 5) Fuck Armageddon... This Is Hell; 6) Pity; 7) Into The Night; 8) Damned To Be Free; 9) White Trash (2nd Generation); 10) American Dream; 11) Eat Your Dog; 12) Voice Of God Is Government; 13) Oligarchy; 14) Doing Time.

 

One might think that competition among hardcore punk acts is somewhat like competition in be­tween a pack of wild buffalo — thriving, aggressive, life-asserting, but ultimately they all look alike anyway. Which is why, even though early Bad Religion were by all means a worthy com­petitor, it makes lots of sense that they only released one full-length, «generic» hardcore album before embarking on a complex quest to find their own identity.

 

«Generic» does not necessarily mean «stupid and boring», though. From the early start, Bad Re­li­gion put serious emphasis on technicality (as opposed to «virtuosity») and melodicity, although in terms of melody they would rather veer off into metallic territory rather than power-pop, as did many of their LA colleagues. In the rhythm section, bassist Jay Bentley frequently benefits from moments of silence that allow him to throw in some nicely thought out, quiet lines (check the coda to ʽInto The Nightʼ). Guitarist Brett Gurewitz throws out riff after riff after riff, mostly vari­ations on standard Ramones fare but with an occasional nod to Sabbath as well — and then he overdubs flashy, wailing, melodic solos in the brave rock'n'roll spirit of Mötörhead. (On one of the songs, ʽPart IIIʼ, the solos are played by Greg Hetson, who would soon become an integral part of the band's sound). And the vocals?

 

Well, it is true that Greg Graffin had not yet found a distinct vocal style. But it is already quite clear, if you ask me, that he is heading for one, just as lyrics like "Early man walked away as mo­dern man took control", not exactly standard fare for yer average illiterate punker, already seem to presage his future academic career. He does not sing much, or else he would be violating the hardcore aesthetics, but neither does he go for straightforward toneless barking — his is a more restrained approach, sort of a hoarse snobby sneer that allows for slightly more distinctive articu­lation: what use, after all, is heavy investing in your lyrics if no one understands them anyway? This might not make How Could Hell Be Any Worse? an «intellectual's dream» by itself, but this is one instance where words actually do matter, since many of them go way beyond the gene­ric «my girl's a bitch, fuck the system» thematics.

 

Graffin does favor fucking the system, of course, but he frequently sets his sights higher — for instance, Bad Religion's ʽPityʼ shares pretty much the same message with George Harrison's ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ; it is only the speed and the tone of delivery that are different, and the terser, more so­ciological phrasing — "if we endure the aggression that's inside all of us, we'll wipe out our own species... pity on the masses of ignorant people, on the future centuries to come". How the emo­tion of «pity» can be yoked together with the musical aesthetics of hardcore is not easy to under­stand — but, apparently, that is the essence of early Bad Religion: take a detailed, if not exactly original, philosophy of society and convey it to the hardcore crowds. Better us future university professors than ignorant skinheads, right?

 

Memorability is a touchy issue with these songs: a few of the choruses are catchy enough, either as «shout-along» slogans (ʽFuck Armageddon, This Is Hellʼ, in which the «this» should come in italics, I guess; ʽWhite Trash, Second Generationʼ) or simply as agonizing outbursts (ʽInto The Nightʼ), but the riffs all drift together after a brief while, so that generally, the songs are only distinguishable when they are adorned with some particular gimmick — such as the sarcastic «Christian» speech in ʽVoice Of God Is Governmentʼ, the classic garage-rock soloing on ʽLatch Key Kidsʼ, or the almost psychedelic guitar tone that appears on ʽDoing Timeʼ to conclude the album. But such tricks are quite rare.

 

Overall, this is definitely a must for every fan / historian of hardcore, but those who like to asso­ciate their hardcore with explicitly youthful rebellion might be disappointed: Greg Graffin does not care all that much whether you are young or old, socially rewarded or socially discriminated — his pity is for all of us, whether we want to take it or not. "You're just gonna die anyway", goes the last line of the album, and who could disagree? Pretty powerful statement here. I give the whole thing a modestly curious thumbs up — modestly, because (a) I'm not much of a hardcore fan myself, and (b) I prefer the Adolescents, and maybe even the Dead Kennedys. But in general, a hardcore record must be judged according to whether it sounds dumb or smart, and this one sounds quite smart, if not, perhaps, quite deserving of a UCLA professor. But then again, Greg wasn't quite a UCLA professor yet. For a 17-year old, this is quite impressive.

 

INTO THE UNKNOWN (1983)

 

1) It's Only Over When...; 2) Chasing The Wild Goose; 3) Billy Gnosis; 4) Time And Disregard; 5) The Dichotomy; 6) Million Days; 7) Losing Generation; 8) ...You Give Up.

 

Apart from being one of the most bizarre releases in the history of hardcore, Into The Unknown is not particularly enlightening, interesting, or exciting. It is usually quoted as «that unfortunate prog experiment by Bad Religion», which is not very accurate, I think; the word «progressive» only appears in conjunction with the main band members (Graffin and Gurewitz) having once proclaimed to have had a crush on progressive rock acts. There is, at most, one track here that bears a direct influence of classic 1970s prog — the seven-minute, multi-part epic ʽTime And Disregardʼ — but everything else is more like «anthemic power-pop with a heavy keyboard fe­tish». And totally godawful production values.

 

Bad Religion's entire rhythm section quit in protest over this unexpected change of direction, and they can be understood: just as the band was starting to make headlines with their brand of «intel­ligent hardcore», lo and behold, Greg Graffin drags a keyboard out of the bushes and learns to sing instead of... well, you know. The new look band's live shows were reported to be abandoned by fans in droves at the first sight of the synthesizer. In the end, they just had to acknowledge that the whole thing was a silly mistake. As far as I know, the entire album has never even been relea­sed on CD so far (although, curiously enough, it has been re-released on vinyl for the 30 Year Anniversary Box Set — go figure!).

 

The album does suck, for sure, but not because of the «switch» — I'm always happy to witness a switch when it works. The biggest problem is that the songs are just no good. It is quickly evident what has been lost — the speed, the energy, the sneering, the standard punk riffage variations that become appreciable once you get to know them — but it is not immediately clear what it is they have gained. As a «pop» or «prog» singer, Graffin has no distinct personality; as a guitar player in either one of these genres, Gurewitz has little credibility; and the keyboards really, really suck, as if they only had saved up for the cheapest available model — oh, these tones, not even worthy of a late-period Genesis. Even those few songs that preserve a bit of rock'n'roll crunch are seri­ously cheesified by them (ʽLosing Generationʼ).

 

And, since we are no longer hardcore, what we need here is outstanding melodies. Instead, we get flat, faceless «martial» rhythms or boogie lines, where the role of rhythm guitar is limited to put­ting down a bedrock of power chords (some of the solos are sufficiently melodic, to be fair, but are we really supposed to simply wait for the solo each time? Gurewitz ain't no Clapton anyway). ʽChasing The Wild Gooseʼ alone tries to open with something that resembles a catchy riff, then realizes it sounds a bit too close to ʽZiggy Stardustʼ (thanks to Mark Prindle for pointing that out) and quickly shifts to a one-chord mid-tempo melody with rotten vocals.

 

Lyrically, the album moves away from hardcore bluntness and into the realm of obscure meta­phors and ellipses that still seem to be dealing with the same major topic («society rot»). Seeing the lines to ʽTime And Disregardʼ on paper, I could perfectly well picture them sung by the likes of Peter Hammill — someone whose average care for melodic memorability was more or less on the same level as Graffin's, but whose ability to credibly «get into character» was quite unsurpas­sed, whereas Graffin here does not even begin to try.

 

Overall, it just looks they did not pack enough supplies and undergo the proper physical training to justify a serious cosmic journey Into The Unknown. The braveness — nay, the craziness — of the gesture may be appreciated, of course (much like the «braveness» of jumping off the 20th floor to see what happens), but the results are, at worst, disastrous (each time the keyboards start staging a particularly ferocious assault on the senses) and, at best, just boring. Even if ʽLosing Generati­onʼ chugs along at a fine speed, I'd rather re-enjoy the same chug on something like, say, The Amboy Dukes' ʽJourney To The Center Of The Mindʼ. Thumbs down.

 

BACK TO THE KNOWN (1985)

 

1) Yesterday; 2) Frogger; 3) Bad Religion; 4) Along The Way; 5) New Leaf.

 

I do not normally review brief EPs — as important as the format used to be for most of the «un­derground» artists with no opportunity for / an aversion to serious record contracts, it usually pro­vides very limited grounds for a full-fledged review. But every now and then there are vital ex­ceptions. This particular release, for instance, although it clocks in at a measly ten minutes (alle­gedly, Side A of the EP was left mirror-blank for obscure artistic purposes), is one of the most important albums in the Bad Religion catalog — and besides, isn't ten minutes sort of the ideal format for a self-respecting hardcore artist?

 

Basically, it is a bit odd to be reviewing Into The Unknown without saying a few words on its quintessential antipode — Back To The Known, released a year later and firmly returning Bad Religion to its feet on familiar territory. Not only that, though: «back to the known» it may be, but the songs do not sound much like the ones on Hell. In fact, they are seriously better.

 

First of all, they got themselves a cleaner production style. All the guitars now sound like they be­long on a major label speed metal album rather than on some lousy bedroom tape. Does that com­promise the spirit? Hardly — because everything else, the speed, the riffage, the lyrics, the vocal aggression all remain at the same level; should we blame the recording engineer for a simple hu­man wish to capture more of the frequencies and cut down on the noise levels? Second, all of the tunes have clearly been designed as «melodic songs» rather than «punkish rants» — not only do they try to make the riffs more distinctive, but Graffin actually tries to sing, including attempts to sing poppy hooks, some (most? all?) of which actually work. No limits to miracles!

 

In addition, there have been important lineup modifications: in particular, Circle Jerks guitarist Greg Hetson re­pla­ces Gurewitz as the new-look band's chief guitarist (although Brett is still credited as the album's co-producer), and new bass player Tim Gallegos replaces Paul Dedona. Not sure just how much of an influence these particular shifts had on the overall sound, though, so let us just turn to the actual songs.

 

ʽYesterdayʼ, far from being a hardcore deconstruction of Paul McCartney, could have easily been written by the likes of The Easybeats two decades earlier — but it wouldn't have kicked so much ass without this raging bull of a guitar sound, nor would it be allowed to contain the classic line "kiss your ass goodbye with a shadow dream of yesterday". ʽFroggerʼ inserts a fun lyrical and mu­sical reference to the 1981 arcade game as a one-minute metaphor for life in general. The title track is a «cleaner» remake of the band's anthem, originally released on their first EP (Bad Reli­gion) in 1981 — and I think it improves on the early take, due to a clever use of the stop-and-start technique and somewhat more restrained (and hence, more subtly dangerous) vocals.

 

ʽAlong The Wayʼ slows down the tempo for a «hard-folk» anthemic march, spiced up with a healthy dose of wah-wah blabber and a less healthy dose of moralizing, including Tommy, of all things, as its point of reference ("Like Tommy, you are free, and you will not follow me"). Finally, ʽNew Leafʼ goes as far as to feature some wannabe-melodic backup vocals (and a barely audible guitar solo to wrap things up). Neither of these two songs is a real smasher like the title track or ʽYesterdayʼ, but they do inject a nice shot of diversity.

 

Not all the fans loved this — most were pleased to see the band drop its heretical «progressive» attitudes, but many would have loved to see them really get back to the actual «known», that is, release a clone of Hell: these five songs, in contrast, were seen as too «tidy» and poppy. But, like I said, the whole thing still sounds completely authentic and credible, and it takes talent and hard work to make a «clean hardcore» record, kicking your ass in not just a brutal, but a subtly brutal manner. I wouldn't hesitate to count this among their very best offerings, and a thumbs up is firmly gua­ranteed.

 

SUFFER (1988)

 

1) You Are (The Government); 2) 1000 More Fools; 3) How Much Is Enough?; 4) When?; 5) Give You Nothing; 6) Land Of Competition; 7) Forbidden Beat; 8) Best For You; 9) Suffer; 10) Delirium Of Disorder; 11) Part II (The Numbers Game); 12) What Can You Do?; 13) Do What You Want; 14) Part IV (The Index Fossil); 15) Pessimistic Lines.

 

Imagine Woody Guthrie taking a crash course in modern sociology, plugging in, speeding up, and throwing on some distortion, and there you have it — one of the most famous hardcore albums of 1988. For Suffer, Graffin and Gurewitz, coming back together, managed to squeeze out the last traces of the Clash and the Ramones; this here is a natural «folk-punk» album, turned into hard­core only on a formal level. Behind all the fuzz, loudness, and vocal barking really lies the equi­valent of ʽThis Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Landʼ.

 

It is sort of fun to realize this, enough to forgive the stark, mercyless monotonousness of the fif­teen songs on here — ultra-short as they may be, the riffs, tempos, and moods are so similar that there is genuinely less diversity here than on Back To The Known, which was a five-song EP, if you remember. No guitar solos, no stops and starts, only a couple songs at best that sew together faster and slower sections, and permanent bombardment by «socially relevant» lyrics that occa­sionally sound like a complicated philosophical thesis set to rudiments of music. Prepare your­self for embracing some bombastic minimalism.

 

Normally, I should be hating an album of this kind, but, surprisingly, I enjoy Suffer quite a bit. Most of the thanks go to Graffin. By now, he is able to establish just the perfect balance between punkish bark, intellectual sneer, and — most importantly — distinct enunciation, and even if his lyrics add very little to what we already know about the flaws of society, they still cut a little dee­per than yer average leftist propaganda. (Besides, one thing that all the hardcore movement has always sorely needed , were good lyricists, capable of ennobling the genre). And it is mostly his singing that helps — not always, but often enough — to draw differentiating lines between songs. After a few listens, ʽ1000 More Foolsʼ, ʽGive You Nothingʼ, and the title track finally sink in as songs that actually have vocal melodies — rising and falling, falling and rising, sometimes resol­ved in a fascinatingly slap-in-yer-face way ("I give you me, I give you nothing!", to me, sounds like the album's absolute peak here).

 

The band's two guitarists, old warhorse Gurewitz and not-yet-veteran Hetson, mostly play in uni­son, without straying far from the base; this is probably not the easiest thing in the world to do even when you are playing these simple riffs — but at what speed! — and it gives the music a thickly scrumptuous coating, the notes under which still manage to sound distinct: you can hum these riffs quite easily (unlike, say, something by Agnostic Front) — not that you'd probably want to, but it is possible.

 

The record takes an almost fascist approach to «gimmickry»: the only «out-of-line» bit on the en­tire album is a distorted, slowed-down recording of Graffin (or somebody else) robotically into­ning "delirium of disorder, delirium of disorder" at the beginning of said track. Consequently, there is no sense in extending this review — describe one song and you have betrayed 'em all — but it might be useful to stress, once again, the main reason why I am giving it a thumbs up when, normally, records of this kind get negative ratings.

 

Basically, Suffer is a hardcore album that respects all the formal requirements of hardcore (short length, fast tempo, distorted heavy rif­fage, angry anti-social mood, etc.), yet dispenses with the true spirit of hardcore — playing the whole thing out with much more precision, collectedness, melodicity, and lyrical complexity than one usually expects from the genre. Even set against How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, Suffer is the well-printed hardcover equivalent of the former's ex­citing, but carelessly glued paperback. Monotonous, repetitive, not at all inventive, it's far from a «masterpiece for the ages», but the limited task that it sets out to accomplish — that one it accom­plishes to complete perfection. And, for that matter, where else on a hardcore album are you go­ing to meet brave lines like "When will you try to change the logarithmic face of kissing things good-bye?" Oh, you just wouldn't believe all those tricky things we do to impregnate all those young punks' minds with the joy of mathe­matics...

 

NO CONTROL (1989)

 

1) Change Of Ideas; 2) Big Bang; 3) No Control; 4) Sometimes I Feel Like; 5) Automatic Man; 6) I Want To Conquer The World; 7) Sanity; 8) Henchman; 9) It Must Feel Pretty Appealing; 10) You; 11) Progress; 12) I Want Something More; 13) Anxiety; 14) Billy; 15) The World Won't Stop.

 

As awkward as it is to say, No Control is only the very first Bad Religion album in the Bad Reli­gion catalog that sounds exactly like its predecessor — meaning, apparently, that for the first time in their life Bad Religion hit upon a formula that they really, really liked. Or maybe they were just so proud that Suffer managed to sell a few thousand copies, it seemed like a good idea to try and do the same thing all over again. Surprisingly, it worked, and the next album already sold a few dozen thousand copies — an amazingly high record for a record that places its listener in be­tween packs of pummeling, breakneck speed punk riffs and lyrics that can be quali­fied as poetic adaptations of everything from existentialism to neo-Marxism for the middle school level.

 

There is no way that a review of a 25-minute long album that sounds exactly like its 35-minute long predecessor could be longer than a few paragraphs, so here are just a few scattered observa­tions on individual songs:

 

— ʽI Want Something Moreʼ runs for a record-short 0:47, of which the last eight seconds are brilliantly shaped into a one-breath coda. All of B.R.'s songs are «anthems», one way or another, but this one takes the cake as the greatest use of laconicity on a B.R. record, period;

 

— ʽSometimes I Feel Like...ʼ leaves the last slot in its title conspicuously open, to be occupied within the song itself by the album's only straightforward moment of musical gimmickry, and it does seem possible that Graffin sometimes feels himself like that, because, heck, don't we all?;

 

— ʽSanityʼ and the beginning of ʽProgressʼ slow down the tempo (although the latter quickly picks it up again) for no reason in particular, but the Gurewitz-Hetson guitar tone retains its nasty crunch regardless of the number of beats per second;

 

— ʽThe World Won't Stopʼ has the only example of the adverb phylogenetically that I can think of in a lyrical piece — and it is not that easy to pronounce it at that kind of speed, mind you. The song itself, melody-wise, is as non-descript as they come, but "Your achievements are unsurpas­sed / You are highly-ordered mass / But you can bet your ass / Your free energy will dissipate / Two billion years thus far / Now mister here you are / An element in a sea of enthalpic organic compounds" — boy, that's gotta count for something. We sure have come a long way here from "And I wanna move the town to the Clash city rocker, you need a little jump of electrical sho­cker", not to mention "beat on the brat with a baseball bat" — each of these lyrical approaches has its value and its effects, but Graffin's professorial verbosity seems unprecedented, regardless of whether one likes it or not.

 

Most importantly, No Control rocks with the exact same frenzy and conviction as Suffer. Pena­lizing it for recycling the already worn-out riffs would be silly — the whole idea here is to ask themselves the question: «Gee, that worked so well, can we do it again, but faster, tougher, even more focused and compact?..» and answer in the positive. Unoriginal, yes, but sometimes all you need is a little inspiration, a little fire, a little intelligence, and (last, but not least) a reasonably short running time, and you got yourself a certified thumbs up.

 

AGAINST THE GRAIN (1990)

 

1) Modern Man; 2) Turn On The Light; 3) Get Off; 4) Blenderhead; 5) The Positive Aspect Of Negative Thinking; 6) Anesthesia; 7) Flat Earth Society; 8) Faith Alone; 9) Entropy; 10) Against The Grain; 11) Operation Rescue; 12) God Song; 13) 21st Century (Digital Boy); 14) Misery And Famine; 15) Unacceptable; 16) Quality Or Quantity; 17) Walk Away.

 

The last album in Bad Religion's classic trilogy — for some fans, the best, and for some the worst of the lot, although, personally, the only big difference that I can see is that the guitar solos are back, in a big, easily noticeable way. More than ever before, the band now sounds like a slightly «cleaner» version of Mötörhead — «cleaner» only because Jay Bentley is just a bass player, with no ambitions of turning his instrument into Hell's own jackhammer like Lemmy does. In all other respects now, this goes beyond a simplistic headbanger's dream and heads for the pleasure centers of the raving fan of the air guitar.

 

The only other flash of individuality is that this is the album that has ʽ21st Century (Digital Boy)ʼ on it. Slower than the rest, with more overtly melodic vocals and a downright «poppy», sing-along chorus, it stirs some fans the wrong way — especially since it has gone on to become Bad Religion's most famous number, despite not being ideally typical of their sound (sort of like Blon­die with ʽHeart Of Glassʼ, which still makes many people erroneously remember them as a disco band). Still, the riffs are anything but pop, and the chorus is not just simplistically catchy, but rings out loud and proud with Bad Religion's usual spirit.

 

Besides, goddammit, those catchy lyrics are wond'rously prophetic: "'Cause I'm a 21st century digital boy / I don't know how to live but I got a lot of toys / My daddy's a lazy middle class intel­lectual / My mommy's on valium, so ineffectual" may have already been partially true in 1990, when it was written, but now that the 21st century is finally here, the song is ten times as relevant as it used to be. The epitome of irony is that, during the fade-out, Graffin hums a cross-reference from King Crimson's ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ — "cat's food, iron claw, neuro-surgeons screamed for more, innocents raped with napalm fire" — perhaps hinting at just how silly these visions of World War III, nuclear apocalypses, ultra-fascist dictatures etc. have turned out to be next to the real danger to society, eh?..

 

Of the other songs, which mostly just soldier on and on in nearly identical uniforms, the title track, with its shrill seven-note riff and easily imprintable sloganeering ("against the grain, that's where I'll stay") is a clear standout, as is ʽModern Manʼ (who happens to be a "pathetic example of earth's organic heritage", and try singing that in two and a half seconds without losing the mes­sage), and ʽThe Positive Aspect Of Negative Thinkingʼ — typing in its title takes almost as much time for the slow-moving typist as it runs (0:57), but it still manages to incorporate a «boogie» and a «grindcore» section and a large political, philosophical, and even linguistic ("syntactic is our elegance"?) manifesto.

 

The whole package is longer than No Control (seventeen tracks in all), but with all these ecsta­tic, anger-choked guitars, tiny injections of poppiness, and even cleverer slogans than before, may be even easier to tolerate and assimilate for the non-hardcore customer in the hardcore store. Hence, another thumbs up — yes, there would be a moment when Graffin and co. would finally start a downhill slide, but Against The Grain still finds them dashing along a straight line.

 

GENERATOR (1992)

 

1) Generator; 2) Too Much To Ask; 3) No Direction; 4) Tomorrow; 5) Two Babies In The Dark; 6) Heaven Is Falling; 7) Atomic Garden; 8) The Answer; 9) Fertile Crescent; 10) Chimaera; 11) Only Entertainment.

 

Enough subtle changes here to introduce a demarcation line between the earlier trilogy and this new period in Bad Religion's life, as the band grows older, «wiser», and a little more concerned with the melodic side of its art than sheer energy levels. Unfortunately, it is a bit too late to care about melody if you haven't already done that in your formative years — and, as a result, Ge­nera­tor is just a little bit more limp and lax than its predecessors, without necessarily being more memorable or emotionally complex.

 

Alarmingly, the title track opens things with what sounds like sped-up alt-rock rather than hard­core, especially due to the vocal melody, openly sung, rather than recited, by Griffin, and the gui­tar interplay, which wouldn't be out of place on an Ash record. This is not awful or ominous per se, but it takes a large bite out of the reasons why Bad Religion would need to exist in the first place — not as a footstool to accommodate Graffin's poetry, but as a monstrous locomotive to pro­pel it along. Reduce the speed by 10 mph, and where does that get you?

 

What remains is the conviction: ʽGeneratorʼ, with its universal anger, and the more specifically targeted ʽHeaven Is Fallingʼ (anti-war) and ʽOnly Entertainmentʼ (anti-TV) are tradition-respec­ting anthems that word their concerns cleverly and sloganize their choruses accordingly: chanting these titles along with the band ensures close emotional unity, and, possibly, a willingness to break the neck of anybody who'd dare claim that all these songs are kinda monotonous.

 

Breaking that monotonousness are the slower numbers — such as ʽTwo Babies In The Darkʼ, the best thing about which are the wailing «woman-tone» guitar breaks, and ʽThe Answerʼ, structured as a guruistic parable with a logical conclusion ("everyone's begging for an answer without re­gard to validity" — something that every true scientist should always bear in mind), but so much bent on its dogmatic aspect that it almost forgets to rock. And the day when we have to accept Greg Graffin as our spiritual leader, based simply on the words he speaks, is the day when we no longer have to accept Bad Religion as a band worth a pound of dogshit.

 

If pressed hard to name one major highlight, I would probably have to stop at ʽAtomic Gardenʼ. Nicely found simplistic, elegantly looped riff, cool whiny, psychedelic guitar tone for the leads, non-preachy lyrics that probably deal with nuclear issues but you wouldn't want to wager on that (and namedrop Gorbachev one year after the man's resignation — get your relevance level right, you guys!), and, overall, some nice old school garage rock influence here, rather than the usual hardcore jackhammer or, worse, a smoothed-over alt-rock approach.

 

But overall, you'd really have to be a major admirer of Graffin's views on world issues and abili­ty to express them in order to love Generator as much as its predecessors. The grip has been re­laxed, stylistic concessions have been made, and the band seems ready to begin considering mo­ving into the realm of «elder statesmen». Thumbs up anyway, because nothing here really rubs me the wrong way — however, do remember that «fresh» Bad Religion starts morphing into «yesterday's papers» somewhere around here.

 

RECIPE FOR HATE (1993)

 

1) Recipe For Hate; 2) Kerosene; 3) American Jesus; 4) Portrait Of Authority; 5) Man With A Mission; 6) All Good Soldiers; 7) Watch It Die; 8) Struck A Nerve; 9) My Poor Friend Me; 10) Lookin' In; 11) Don't Pray On Me; 12) Modern Day Catastrophists; 13) Skyscraper; 14) Stealth.

 

Unfortunately, the degeneration continues, and on Recipe For Hate starts getting seriously noti­ce­able. While musical change is certainly welcome per se, the reasons behind this kind of change had more to do with Graffin's growing self-importance than any sort of desire to explore new mu­sical ground. As the mean punch grows weaker, the pathos gets stronger, and the album hardly even begins living up to its name — by now, influences from pop, country, folk, and the newly nascent grunge scene (Eddie Vedder even contributes guest backing vocals to one of the songs) have seriously eroded Bad Religion's ability to generate pure, raffinated hatred.

 

To be fair, the title track works well in the old style (except for the bridge, which slows down the tempo and turns the song from hardcore into grunge), but already ʽKeroseneʼ, with its sing-along, melodic chorus shows that Bad Religion have made a serious investment in the pathos market, and it only gets worse from there. Now we have an abundance of slow tempos, melodies drowned in buzz and distortion, and vocals that invite us to sing along with anthemic pride. Yes, the lyrics are still decent enough, but it's not as if things have changed much, or Graffin has found any new subjects to sing about, in the past few years — just a bunch of verbal modifications to describe the PSS (Permanent State of Shit) in which happy America finds itself.

 

Even though I will have a hard time remembering them, the best songs here are the ones that would fit in well on Against The Grain — speedy, bitey, with flashy solos and fast-fleeting vo­cals, like the title track, ʽMy Poor Friend Meʼ, and ʽLookin' Inʼ. I couldn't care less about ʽMan With A Missionʼ, which tries to spice things up with a slide guitar part and «soulful» vocals that sound like a cross between Eddie Vedder, Bono, and John Doe from downtown (Eddie wins, be­cause in the end it does sound just like a sped up Pearl Jam with some country guitar on top). Nor do I give a damn about the «martial» overtones of ʽAll Good Soldiersʼ, or about the pub-folk vibe of ʽWatch It Dieʼ, no matter how vehemently it keeps on preaching the apocalypse.

 

Apparently, at this moment the apex of Bad Religion's creativity is supposed to be ensconced in a track like ʽStealthʼ — a forty-second splicing of excerpts from George Bush's Union Address, making him say stuff like "this weekend I will spend over 800 million dollars on drugs" and "I will continue pushing free narcotics for all low income people". Umm... what? Is that considered to be funny, or instructive, or inspirational? Okay, so it is just a silly joke tucked on to the end of the album, but somehow I've always preferred "her Majesty's a pretty nice girl".

 

It's fairly indicative of the overall spirit, though — as «socially relevant» lyrics and statements to­tally get the better of the band, they simply become... boring. I mean, why write new and worse songs about the same old shit if you can just keep on singing the old and better ones? Recipe For Hate, you say? Well, I prefer my hate to be cooked without any fucking recipes. Good title, good album cover, fairly sorrowful content-to-form match — even if it was their best-selling album to date, but that's just because people usually do not like to take their medicine at break­neck speed: with Bad Religion taking more and more cues from the grunge movement, their commercial po­tential keeps growing at an exponential.

 

STRANGER THAN FICTION (1994)

 

1) Incomplete; 2) Leave Mine To Me; 3) Stranger Than Fiction; 4) Tiny Voices; 5) The Handshake; 6) Better Off Dead; 7) In­fected; 8) Television; 9) Individual; 10) Hooray For Me...; 11) Slumber; 12) Marked; 13) Inner Logic; 14) What It Is; 15) 21st Century (Digital Boy); 16*) News From The Front; 17*) Markovian Process.

 

Another year... The only generalization that can be generalized about this record has already been made in the All-Music Guide review: Bad Religion sign up with a major record label and, in or­der to convince the fanbase that this is not a sellout, try their best to come up with an «authentic» BR record, dumping all the variety of the previous two albums. That is as correct as they come: Stranger Than Fiction is all tense, all fast, almost all a stylistic clone of Suffer. Whether this is good, bad, or who-the-heck-cares is a different thing. In a way, Bad Religion might be like AC/DC — it's very easy to get sick of the formula, but nothing else seems to work as efficiently. Change and perish, always stay the same and prosper.

 

For tactical reasons, the band re-recorded ʽ21st Century Digital Boyʼ for this album — now that they had a larger distribution base, re-releasing their most famous song seemed like the right thing to do. According to one of the versions, they were forced to do this by the people at Atlantic who wanted a hit single and saw no potential in the rest of the songs. Were they right or were they wrong? Well, let's just take a look at these other singles.

 

ʽInfectedʼ, the album's slowest and «grandest» number, starts off with a few blasts of feedback that almost sound like a pompous brass intro­duction — then chuggishly builds up towards a look-at-me-suffer chorus. It is the only song here that would not seem fit for their late 1980s albums, and for a good reason: it sounds like a boring post-grunge teen-angst anthem — not even graced with another set of Graffin's intellectualized lyrics: "You affect me / You infect me / I'm afflicted / I'm addicted / You and me" is not exactly the most inspiring chorus in BR history.

 

Third single was the title track: London Calling-style punk-power-pop here, upbeat, martial, lyrically rich — and not catchy in the least. You know something's not right when the song's idea of «catchiness» is to insert the word "obituary" in the empty musical space between the chorus and the next verse. It's not even shocking. And the fact that "Life is the crummiest book I ever read / There isn't a hook, just a lot of cheap shots" is not something I'd be willing to take for an excuse. Even if that is true, it does not mean that art has to follow life in everything. I, for one, did not start listening to Bad Religion for any «cheap shots».

 

That leaves us with the fourth single, and it is the only one worthy of close attention: ʽIncom­pleteʼ is probably the best song on the album, just because the tough, passionate start — "Mother! father! look at your little monster, I'm a hero, I'm a zero, I'm the butt of the worst joke in history" — is overwhelming, the best shot of inspiration on the album. This is classic Bad Religion stuff: anti-social ranting, well constructed lyrics, speed, fury, hatred, madness, and wisdom.

 

There are quite a few other songs like that on Stranger Than Fiction, scattered here and there — ʽTiny Voicesʼ, ʽThe Handshakeʼ, ʽIndividualʼ, etc. — but there is also quite a bit of stuff that goes easy on the hatred, or the lyrics, or the speed, or the fury, and that's bad, because it does not add much to the album's general feel of diversity, yet makes it less intense and cutting-edge than the Suffer-era trilogy. And the very fact that they had to re-record a much earlier song to stimulate interest in the album is quite telling.

 

THE GRAY RACE (1996)

 

1) The Gray Race; 2) Them And Us; 3) A Walk; 4) Parallel; 5) Punk Rock Song; 6) Empty Causes; 7) Nobody Listens; 8) Pity The Dead; 9) Spirit Shine; 10) The Streets Of America; 11) Ten In 2010; 12) Victory; 13) Drunk Sincerity; 14) Come Join Us; 15) Cease; 16*) Punk Rock Song (German version).

 

Still with Atlantic, but with some major changes in personnel: (a) this is the band's first record with­out Gurewitz, who left for a variety of reasons (he himself quoted the need to concentrate on managerial work at Epitaph Records, whereas Graffin would hint at increased drug use); (b) this is their first — and only — record produced by none other than Ric Ocasek of The Cars. Both of these factors could finally hint at a fresh change in the overall sound, for better or for worse. And? Take a guess?...

 

...you are absolutely correct, The Gray Race sounds exactly like Stranger Than Fiction. New guitarist Brian Baker, formerly of Samhain, Government Issue, Junkyard, Minor Threat, The Meat­men, Dag Nasty, Doggy Style, and probably a host of other hardcore outfits that only the most hardcore fans have heard about, is not seriously distinguishable from Brett; and as for the production, unless Ocasek saddled this band with synthesizers — which was probably out of the question — would have to remain the same anyway.

 

So, here is another set of mostly interchangeable and rather generic «melodic hardcore» from the world's leading combo of human rights activists who happen to like speed, distortion, rock poetry, and moralizing at the same time. At this point, their mid-tempo stuff is already close to unbea­rable — I have no business listening to metronomic crap like 'The Streets Of Americaʼ, no matter how anthemic Graffin always makes it sound; and, unfortunately, quite a few of the fast songs start sounding just as boring and clichéd as the slow ones — ʽDrunk Sincerityʼ, for instance, just seems like they threw on an extra drum part as an afterthought.

 

The lead singles were ʽA Walkʼ, which is not a bad song (at least there is a nice, tense buildup from verse to chorus, as the rising bassline takes your spirit higher); and ʽPunk Rock Songʼ, which is just too clean, poppy, and politically correct to merit the title — yes, it is a punk rock song in general form and structure, but there is nothing in the world to justify it as an exemplary punk rock song, which it isn't, and re-recording it in German (this extra version is appended as a bonus track) does not help much to elevate its status.

 

Since, other than ʽA Walkʼ, there is not a single song here that commands my attention (not even the title track this time can boast a strong hook), this is the first Bad Religion album since Into The Unknown that demands a certified thumbs down. As long as the verve and inspiration were there somehow, I could respect the style enough to acknowledge its existence. But with Gray Race, Bad Religion seem to finally cross that line — for me, at least — where «respectfully tole­rable» finally morphs into «unbearably dull». For other people, that line might have come signi­ficantly earlier, or somewhat later, but it is clear that somewhere, somehow one simply has to draw that line. My tired buck, sick of recycled punk riffs and idealistic sentiments rekindled like burnt out matches, sort of stops here. And I am sure that this has even nothing to do with the de­parture of Gurewitz. It's just a question of time.

 

TESTED (1997)

 

1) Operation Rescue; 2) Punk Rock Song; 3) Tomorrow; 4) A Walk; 5) God Song; 6) Pity The Dead; 7) One Thousand More Fools; 8) Drunk Sincerity; 9) Generator; 10) Change Of Ideas; 11) Portrait Of Authority; 12) What It Is; 13) Dream Of Unity; 14) Sanity; 15) American Jesus; 16) Do What You Want; 17) Part III; 18) 10 In 2010; 19) No Direction; 20) Along The Way; 21) Recipe For Hate; 22) Fuck Armageddon; 23) It's Reciprocal; 24) Struck A Nerve; 25) Leave Mine To Me; 26) Tested; 27) No Control.

 

Get out the calculators. 3 completely new, previously unissued songs; 5 songs from The Gray Race (1996); 2 songs from Stranger Than Fiction (1994); 4 songs from Recipe For Hate (1993); 3 songs from Generator (1992); 2 songs from Against The Grain (1990); 3 songs from No Control (1989); 2 songs from Suffer (1988); 1 song from Back To The Known (1984); 2 songs from How Could Hell Be Any Worse (1982). Boy, do these guys have a large disco­graphy — and boy, do they love to love it. All except Into The Unknown, that is, which is im­portant, because it is the only clue we have here that Greg Graffin can actually accept a few mis­takes (or at least one mistake) in his life.

 

If there could ever be a point in a Bad Religion live album, then Graffin and Co. make everything in their power to avoid it. First, a real good live punk rock show should last about the same as a real good punk rock album — no more than half an hour at best; Tested spills over an hour-long vessel, and listening to Bad Religion for more than sixty minutes is only recommendable for real strong guys with lots of frustration to vent, more than I could ever imagine (and I'm feeling pretty pissed off right now myself). Second, even in punk rock, it does help if you try and make your material a little bit different from the studio originals — even if you just speed it up a bit, like the Ramones — and this might be the main reason why punk bands do not frequently bother with live recordings, since most of them already have a live-in-the-studio sound.

 

Third and most important, Graffin chose a very strange approach here: instead of doing like eve­ry­body else and «miking the stage», he simply directed all the instruments straight into the recor­ding console. This allowed the sound to be captured as faithfully and cleanly as possible, and the reasonable point to be lost completely. The new, crazy point is to answer the question: «How fuckin' good — technically — are Bad Religion when they go onstage and play their material?» The normal answer to that question, in a logical world, would be: «Who fuckin' cares?» Only a band with a very puffed up sense of self-importance would demand a different one.

 

In addition, the actual recordings were all taken from different shows and selected with great care out of a pile of look-alikes — you'd think it was Glenn Gould here sorting through the tapes, not the leader of a generic hardcore outfit regularly operating at a three-chord level. With no conti­nuity whatsoever to the proceedings, they don't even formally qualify as a «live punk rock show». What's the actual sense, then? Just try to assert your intellectual superiority over all competition by «doing something different»? How about some humility here? Would be nice for a band whose workbag of musical ideas is kinda skinny, to put it mildly.

 

Not that the whole thing is utterly bland, uninspired, disgusting, or anything. The song selection is all right — at this point, it is fairly difficult even to remember what were the «highlights» and the «lowlights» on the band's original albums anyway — and of the new songs, only the super-slow, ultra-pathetic ʽDream Of Unityʼ goes over the top in an adequacy-defying manner. As a general retrospective, it isn't too bad (although one wonders why they didn't arrange the songs in chronological order, if they are fading out after each track anyway). But high up above the simple «like it or hate it» level, most live albums set out to prove a purpose — and Tested seems to prove all the wrong ones. Thumbs down, simply because I doubt I'll ever listen to it again. In fact, I have similar doubts about plenty of other BR albums, but if there is anything in particular that the title of Tested refers to — it's patience, yours and mine. In any case, buying the album won't solve the world's problems, as Graffin would have you do. You might just as well donate your money to a financial pyramid.

 

NO SUBSTANCE (1998)

 

1) Hear It; 2) Shades Of Truth; 3) All Fantastic Images; 4) The Biggest Killer In American History; 5) No Substance; 6) Raise Your Voice!; 7) Sowing The Seeds Of Utopia; 8) The Hippy Killers; 9) The State Of The End Of The Millenium Address; 10) The Voracious March Of Godliness; 11) Mediocre Minds; 12) Victims Of The Revolution; 13) Strange Denial; 14) At The Mercy Of Imbeciles; 15) The Same Person; 16) In So Many Ways.

 

If I were Greg Graffin, I would think twice before calling one of my albums No Substance. Not only do you have to wait until track no. 5 before certifying that he means America as a whole and not just himself as part of it, you have to find a way to convince yourself that this next batch of same-sounding, completely predictable, and, by now, thoroughly toothless Bad Religion slogans somehow pretends to having more substance than, oh I dunno, the Bill Clinton government, to give but one of the many examples.

 

The thing is, No Substance probably represents the highest peak of Graffin's political activism — at this point, he is not merely the «hardcore equivalent» of Noam Chomsky, he is making every single effort he can to shove that fact into our faces. Yes, there is nothing inherently wrong with politics in music, and yes, Noam Chomsky has just as many rights to owning a personal musical agent as Rush Limbaugh, but at this point, there is so little that is truly «musical» about Bad Re­ligion that I have no idea about the size of the potential dividends.

 

The transparent culprit is clearly ʽThe State Of The End Of The Millenium Addressʼ (yes, «mil­lenium» explicitly printed with one ʽnʼ — what else do you expect from the rotten imperialist swine at Atlantic Records? guess they had to derail the message any stinky subversive way they could, embarrassing Mr. Graffin before all of his educated college audiences): over a threatening wall of feedback, you get to hear about how "The Internet has expanded our ability to pacify ave­rage Americans better than ever by offering fantastical adventures to every corner of the imagi­nation", etc. etc. Perfectly convincing, but the only nagging suspicion is — if just about every­thing is part of The Plot, how about Bad Religion themselves? Where do they come in?

 

Honestly, I have no idea, except that three required listens to No Substance have drained me of 135 minutes of time that might have been more effectively spent planting bombs in the headquar­ters of The World's Most Evil Government, wherever that one is. As usual, there are a few catchy choruses — there always are at least a few catchy choruses on a Bad Religion album — but some of them are hicky almost beyond belief, such as "fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa, raise your voice!": are we now relying on Sha Na Na methodology to convey the message? Others are just stupid (ʽThe Biggest Killer In American Historyʼ; ʽThe Hippy Killersʼ — both songs designed simply to make the listener sing along to the title), and I can only quote Mark Prindle on ʽMedi­ocre Mindsʼ: "Next time Greg wants to bitch about somebody with a «mediocre mind»" I'll ask him to kindly not rip off the melody of ʽYummy Yummy Yummy, I've Got Love In My Tummyʼ in doing so". Pretty much summarizes my idea of the album, too.

 

Basically, what makes the difference between a Suffer-type album and a No Substance-type album is that the former somehow tried to express frustration in the music, while the latter invests 90% of the funds in the lyrics. All of these riffs, rhythms, and solos are punched out on total auto­pilot — although you cannot get this feeling by just comparing individual songs (Bad Religion does not operate in terms of songs), you have to listen to the albums from start to finish. There is no reason to doubt Graffin's sincerity, but that is the typical problem of «The Disillusioned Idea­list»: the fewer people you see following your sermons, the more bitter you get about it, until, at some point, you simply start living for these sermons, dumping everything else. Well — if I want a sermon, I'll just download myself an audio book from Noam in person, rather than listen to his «musical» lackeys. Thumbs down, all you brothers and sisters under oppression.

 

THE NEW AMERICA (2000)

 

1) You've Got A Chance; 2) It's A Long Way To The Promise Land; 3) A World Without Melody; 4) New America; 5) 1000 Memories; 6) A Streetkid Named Desire; 7) Whisper In Time; 8) Believe It; 9) I Love My Computer; 10) The Hopeless House­wife; 11) There Will Be A Way; 12) Let It Burn; 13) Don't Sell Me Short.

 

A bit of a change here, and an overall improvement. First, none other than pop master-craftsman Todd Rundgren himself was brought in as producer — and, although working relationships be­tween Graffin and the «True Star» were said to be rather tense, Todd still managed to leave a very strong power pop stamp on the proceedings: quite obviously, he did not give a damn about Bad Religion's hardcore reputation, and did everything he could to slow down the freaky tempos, add extra ring and color to the guitars, smother the melodies in choral harmonies, and, overall, try to have the band play four chords wherever they would previously settle for three.

 

In short, even though Graffin is still listed as sole writer on most of the tracks, it is probably not a coincidence that it is exactly this Rundgren-produced album to feature a song that begins with the words "I don't want to live in a world without melody / Sometimes the rhythmic din of society is too much for me" — substitute «society» for «Bad Religion» and you will see just how much «The Wi­zard» was able to hypnotize Graffin. Of course, even without Todd, the band was alre­ady moving from «hardcore» to «popcore» for quite a bit of time, so the seeds fell on fertile soil. The problem is — what are we planting, exactly?

 

And here comes the second first: the album is a huge lyrical improvement over No Substance as well. Although the main focus is on society perspectives as usual, there is a three-song «suite» stuck in the middle focused on far more personal affairs: ʽ1000 Memoriesʼ is about Graffin's re­cent divorce, while ʽA Streetkid Named Desireʼ and ʽWhisper In Timeʼ deal with past memories and, basically, add a little bit of introspection — ever wanted to know how come Greg Graffin became what he is? well, here is your chance to get a glance at the man behind The Man.

 

But the rest of the songs, too, are delivered in a somewhat different key, shifting the emphasis from Chomsky-style radical hatred and propaganda to visionary sermons: with track names like ʽYou've Got A Chanceʼ, ʽIt's A Long Way To The Promise Landʼ, and ʽThere Will Be A Wayʼ, you can see that there is — just for a change — an attempt to stir up some positive emotions, and do it in a way that is not necessarily linked to the right here and the right now, but at least purely formally aspires to the timelessness of the message. Not that the message itself is new or anything — and the lyrics are definitely not among Greg's best ("Shut your eyes, see the future's distant shore / March ahead more enlightened than before / And there's sure to be bumps and distractions / But I know we'll get through / There will be me, there will be you" — yes, years of radicalism and hardcore musicianship may inflict heavy damage even on a university professor). But at least you no longer feel yourself stuck in the middle of a narrow-minded  political rally, behind locked and barred doors, and that is a big relief.

 

All this leads to an overall increase in memorability — with the choruses bent just a bit more on melody and just a bit less on indoctrination, they are occasionally fun to sing along (unless they become too anthemic, as on the title track). There is even an «experimental» track — ʽI Love My Computerʼ, the next installment in Greg's ongoing saga of «How Electronics Helps Ruin Our Lives And Turn Us Into Mindless Puppets», this time with a mock-subliminal message of "click me, click me" built in and little electronic burps and blurbs adding up to the atmosphere. Hilari­ous, but the chorus of "I just click and you just go away" is the catchiest bit on the album. And highly instructive, too. For instance, I just clicked — and Bad Religion just went away. Amazing, isn't it? The wonderful world of technology.

 

On a technical note, The New America sees Gurewitz briefly returning to the fold — co-writing one of the songs, ʽBelieve Itʼ, and playing guitar on it, presaging his eventual permanent return on the next album. Curiously, it is one of the poppiest, jangliest numbers on the album, even though Gurewitz was never the primary pop engine in the band — well, blame it all on Todd, I guess.

 

Anyway, just for a change, I give this album a thumbs up in recognition of its rather unusual status in BR's catalog, and most importantly, in the overall context — it is such a huge improve­ment on the pathetic loaded boredom of No Substance that this simply has to be somehow reflec­ted in the overall chronology. Do keep in mind, though, that it is far from a fan favorite: even those who are accustomed to the «popcore» direction often have a hard time acknowledging Todd Rundgren's right to put his nose in the genre.

 

THE PROCESS OF BELIEF (2002)

 

1) Supersonic; 2) Prove It; 3) Can't Stop It; 4) Broken; 5) Destined For Nothing; 6) Materialist; 7) Kyoto Now; 8) Sorrow; 9) Epi­phany; 10) Evangeline; 11) The Defense; 12) The Lie; 13) You Don't Belong; 14) Bored And Extremely Dangerous; 15*) Shat­te­red Faith.

 

No more Todd Rundgren, but a whole lot more Brett Gurewitz, back full time not only as guitar player, but also as one of the two chief songwriters — although, frankly speaking, decades of li­ving either under or in the shadow of the Bad Religion banner has pretty much neutralized the styles of the two: I am not strong enough to easily discern between Brett's and Greg's signatures. Lyrics-wise, Graffin tends to be more issue-specific than Gurewitz and more prominently show off his educated intellectualism in his radicalism, but musically, these melodies are almost totally interchangeable between brothers-in-arms.

 

Anyway, the reunion, the sacking of Rundgren, and the label move from Atlantic to Epitaph re­sulted in some predictable nano-changes. The ensuing album is a little less pop, a little faster, and a little crunchier in terms of guitar tones. Select opinions — and with each passing year, opinions on Bad Religion's new albums become more and more «select» — suggested that here was a deli­berate move in the backwards direction of Suffer. Who can really tell without a microscope? All I know is, the production still sounds 2002 rather than 1988, with the guitars all muffled rather than «trebly», and what other difference could there be?

 

As usual, let us talk in terms of singles. ʽSorrowʼ managed to become a minor hit, but the only interesting thing about it is that it starts out as a reggae number — the band's first foray into the genre thus far — before quickly shifting gears and launching into the usual «folk-punk» mode à la «Woody Guthrie goes hardcore». ʽBrokenʼ is a tune about human relationship between actual humans (no shit!) that switches to near-complete acoustic backing for the verses — another first? Not too memorable otherwise. ʽSupersonicʼ is classic quintessential Bad Religion: as fast as the title suggests, energetic, and kinda meaningless: "I gotta go faster, keep up the pace / Just to stay in the human race" — is that why they keep on releasing a new album every two years?

 

Best of the bunch is probably ʽThe Defenseʼ, for which the band cooked up a little atmosphere: backward guitars, Mid-Eastern / symph-metal chord changes (well, maybe not quite), a far more tricky than usual vocal architectonic structure, and a suitably apocalyptic set of lyrics. Without over­rating its complexity or effectiveness, I could safely say, at the very least, that it is just a good song, and that it stands out on its own — something that you very, very rarely get on any given BR album (I mean, unless you are a religiously devoted fan, how many different BR songs can you actually single out from the rest and remember as individual entities?).

 

Curiously, all four singles were credited to Gurewitz — maybe in a fit of gratitude on Graffin's part. In fact, the songwriting is evenly split in half, but out of Graffin's material, I could only say something about ʽBored And Extremely Dangerousʼ ("With nothing better to do / I woefully con­clude / To take it out on you" — aw come now, Greg, you have been taking it out on us for twen­ty years now), which has a few seconds of «non-music sounds» interrupting the flow to further impress us with how bored everyone really is; and about ʽKyoto Nowʼ, which is the only straight­forward pro-Pro­tocol piece of propaganda dressed in the form of popcore that I know of (there must be others, I guess), but has no other merits to speak of.

 

Okay, so that's about it. Faster, louder, crunchier than they used to be over the past several years, so if you're only in it for the ass-kicking, The Process Of Belief might be right up your alley. But the usual problems won't go anywhere any time soon, either, and now that they have entered the middle age of dynamic compression, this is not going to be the Bad Religion of old. So yes, it does matter whether you are buying The Process Of Belief or Against The Grain as your intro­duction to America's chomskiest rock band.

 

THE EMPIRE STRIKES FIRST (2004)

 

1) Overture; 2) Sinister Rouge; 3) Social Suicide; 4) Atheist Peace; 5) All There Is; 6) Los Angeles Is Burning; 7) Let Them Eat War; 8) God's Love; 9) To Another Abyss; 10) The Quickening; 11) The Empire Strikes First; 12) Beyond Electric Dreams; 13) Boot Stamping On A Human Face Forever; 14) Live Again (The Fall Of Man).

 

Perhaps, after the initial period of happiness at Gurewitz's return had ended, Bad Religion would have withered and died down again — but, as fate would have it, soon after The Process Of Belief came the Iraq war, and along with it, the Bush doctrine of preventive strikes; and there is nothing more effective than a little imperialist warfare to get the old flames reignited up to high heavens when it comes to Bad Religion. Of course, when you are as radically left as these guys, you will always have enough reasons to fuel your fire (at least, until communism comes and your music gets officially banned by the local Party secretary), but still, radical protest under Clinton is one thing, and under George W. is quite another. Suddenly, for a while, everything starts making better sense than it used to, and you might even find grounds for true inspiration.

 

There are actually a couple of genuine popcore classics here, both contributed by Gurewitz. ʽThe Quickeningʼ ranks with the best they ever did — the speed, the infectious chorus of "to come alive, to come alive", the good old Mötörhead-style guitar solo, all of that stuff is really catchy, fun, and «igniting». And the title track, although much slower, shows great skill in the vocal ar­ranging of the band's major political declaration — "don't wanna live, don't wanna give, don't wanna be E-M-P-I-R-E" with several lines of overdubbed pleading vocals, convincingly striking out a note of utmost black despair.

 

ʽLos Angeles Is Burningʼ was the single — maybe they calculated that any track titled «[Insert Major City Name Here] Burning», once The Clash set the initial trend, would automatically be a hit, but this one wasn't much of one, and for a good reason: a bitt too slow and lumbering for a proper anthem, and, for some reason, stealing the main riff from the Ramones' ʽBeat On The Bratʼ for the major hookline. (Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & The Heartbeakers' fame adds some guest star guitar for a change, but it does not help much).

 

Still, cute little hooks can be dug up in other spots as well — they come up with a good chorus for ʽAll There Isʼ, add a strange lo-fi guitar coda to ʽAtheist Peaceʼ, get a fine anthemic triple guitar intro for ʽLet Them Eat Warʼ, invent a gruff dirge-like riff for ʽBoot Stampingʼ... overall, it looks like Gurewitz's return has achieved the impossible — for a brief while, the band seems to be caring about the sonic side of their business almost as much as it continues caring for their public image. Like Alice Cooper says, "it's just the little things that drive me wild", and, surprise surprise, there are enough of these little things on The Empire to make it into Bad Religion's most interesting album of the 2000s, even though — mind you! — this is not saying much. But at least it is enough to fish them out another thumbs up.

 

NEW MAPS OF HELL (2007)

 

1) 52 Seconds; 2) Heroes & Martyrs; 3) Germs Of Perfection; 4) New Dark Ages; 5) Requiem For Dissent; 6) Before You Die; 7) Honest Goodbye; 8) Dearly Beloved; 9) Grains Of Wrath; 10) Murder; 11) Scrutiny; 12) Prodigal Son; 13) The Grand Delusion; 14) Lost Pilgrim; 15) Submission Complete; 16) Fields Of Mars.

 

Nothing I can say, write, or even think of will seem fresh, relevant, or startling when it comes to New Maps Of Hell, Bad Religion's 14th studio album that could just as well be 5th, 12th, 16th, or 667th. By now, it is clear that there are only two types of Bad Religion albums: those that are fast, aggressive, and kick-ass, and those that are slower, feebler, and duller. With Gurewitz still in the band, and Hetson and Baker still sticking to second and third guitar respectively, and — most importantly — the George W. Bush administration still in power, you may make a safe bet that this album will rather fall in the first than the second category. And that's about all that may mat­ter to anyone who ever cared about Bad Religion.

 

Well, on second thought, let us be fair: Gurewitz and Graffin are still trying to come up with new chord sequences and new patterns of guitar interplay. As simple as the basic formula is, any mu­sicologist will tell you that its raw potential is not that limited — particularly when you have three guitars at your disposal and a permission to work poppy vocal hooks into your choruses. ʽHeroes & Martyrsʼ may be indistinguishable from ʽGerms Of Perfectionʼ upon first listen, going for the same mood at the same speed with the same guitar tones, but the main riffs are different — first one a little more syncopated and metallic, second one a little more «folk-punkish» (first one credited to Gurewitz, second to Graffin: feel the difference?).

 

And goddamnit, but they do sound great on ʽNew Dark Agesʼ — an even better anthem than ʽThe Empire Strikes Firstʼ, especially for those ready to believe that the «new dark ages» are indeed upon us (living in Putin's Russia helps plenty, but is hardly an obligatory condition). The scrat­chy choo-choo train riffage, the well-crafted vocal buildup to the chorus, the desperate release of "these are the new dark ages and the world may end tonight" — all that's lacking is one of these bursting-with-madness Mötörhead-ish guitar solos.

 

What this means is, if there is at least one great track on a Bad Religion album that one feels pressed to mention, this is already a positive sign — there actually may be others. You just have to grope around a bit; I do not have much time for that, so I can only say that ʽFields Of Marsʼ has a brief piano intro (which then returns for an interlude), and that ʽProdigal Sonʼ features a blunt lyrical reference to Fogerty's ʽFortunate Sonʼ (just for the sake of being able to sing "I ain't no prodigal son" instead of "fortunate son" — intertextuality ahoy!).

 

In the end, we will just let it be with another thumbs up — maybe the songs, overall, are a trifle less inventive than the ones on Empire, but the motivation, the fire, and the hooks are all there, even if albums like these are like a wave of reviewer's nightmares.

 

30 YEARS LIVE (2010)

 

1) Fuck Armageddon, This Is Hell; 2) Dearly Beloved; 3) Suffer; 4) Man With A Mission; 5) New Dark Ages; 6) Germs Of Perfection; 7) Marked; 8) A Walk; 9) Flat Earth Society; 10) Resist Stance; 11) American Jesus; 12) Social Suicide; 13) Atheist Peace; 14) Tomorrow; 15) Won't Somebody; 16) Los Angeles Is Burning; 17) We're Only Gonna Die.

 

I suppose that every band that has managed to last for 30 years — yes, even Chicago! — is en­titled to a live album commemorating such a jubilee, particularly if it is offered as a free down­load, so that nobody has any official reason to complain: if you don't want it, pretend it never existed, and don't worry about your refunds. And besides — honestly, not every rock'n'roll band will last 30 years without losing a single vibration of their original sound. Of course, sticking to hardcore regulations helps a lot: unlike, say, The Rolling Stones, you have to keep yourself in super-tight shape at all times to match the format. No matter how many chords are involved — throw yourself off the rhythm once or twice and you're dead. From that point of view, 30 years on, Bad Religion are, indeed, very much alive.

 

Most sources state that the 30-year jubilee tour went a notch higher in pomposity than usual: every night, the band would play exactly 30 songs, which extended the preferable length of the show to about twice as long as required by everybody's understanding of the norms of hardcore. (For some reason, they only played about 20 dates, though, which drags down the symbolic value of the tour). Furthermore, no single setlist repeated itself more than once, assuring us all that Bad Religion are capable of such endearing silliness as memorizing their entire catalog (not that it should require a particularly large stock of memory cells, but Graffin does have to remember all the words, not to mention spitting 'em out at rapid-fire rates — that university degree has got to count for something, after all).

 

Disappointingly, the resulting album only has 17 songs, clocking in at a measly 41 minutes — a strange decision, since a 70-minute download with thirty songs in 2010 would hardly result in overclocking anybody's bandwidth. The «defective» setlist consequently overlooks several key albums — nothing from No Control or The New America, for instance — and is heavily biased towards the «new shit», with around three songs each for the new albums and even a preview of a couple numbers from the upcoming Dissent Of Man. Obviously, this is supposed to mean that even thirty years into their career, Bad Religion are still as relevant for the world as they used to be — and even though we might be sick to death of them already, we still have to admit that, in a way, this is absolutely true.

 

Rating this album feels useless: the performances are predictably top-notch and just as predic­tably predictable, with both sides canceling out each other's excitement and boredom. The setlist does tilt somewhat into the «non-hit» direction: many of the oldies and most of the «newies» are either second-row singles or non-singles, so you get a chance to refresh stuff like ʽMarkedʼ or ʽTomorrowʼ in your memories. And, conspicuously, the album both opens and closes with a num­ber from How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, implying that, perhaps, after all, the band does acknowledge that it already had said it all on their first LP — and that everything that followed was just for the pinheads who didn't get it straight the first time. Other than that, there is really nothing else to prompt any serious mental activity on the part of the reviewer.

 

THE DISSENT OF MAN (2010)

 

1) The Day That The Earth Stalled; 2) Only Rain; 3) The Resist Stance; 4) Won't Somebody; 5) The Devil In Stitches; 6) Pride And The Pallor; 7) Wrong Way Kids; 8) Meeting Of The Minds; 9) Someone To Believe; 10) Avalon; 11) Cyanide; 12) Turn Your Back On Me; 13) Ad Hominem; 14) Where The Fun Is; 15) I Won't Say Anything.

 

Everybody is free to choose the breaking point at which the next review of a Bad Religion album consists of a single phrase — «Yes, this is another Bad Religion album that sounds just like a Bad Religion album». Most of the non-obsessed people would probably experience that breaking point somewhere around Suffer or, at most, Against The Grain: obsessed as I am, I managed to struggle my way almost to the very end, although none of these reviews could probably count as particularly insightful.

 

With The Dissent Of Man, I finally wash my hands. Yes, this is another Bad Religion album that sounds just like a Bad Religion album. But I will still add that the current highlights are Graffin's power-poppy ʽSomeone To Believeʼ, with a colorful guitar solo, and Gurewitz's ʽTurn Your Back On Meʼ (unusually sentimental for a Bad Religion song, despite the usual crunchy backing). 

 

Actually, wait, there is something to add. Compared to most of the previous releases, The Dis­sent Of Man is almost scandalously apolitical. There are love songs, nostalgic memoirs, charac­ter portraits — and only a tiny handful of songs that explicitly mention Afghanistan (ʽAd Homi­nemʼ) or descend into moralizing, with more of a Biblical flavor sometimes than a Chomsky one ("well I know what's wrong, and I know what's right, and I know that evil exists sure as day turns into night" — a simplistic, but damn well constructed couple of lines, actually).

 

This is either a sign that the band is getting old, after all, and getting ready to pass on the torch, or perhaps it is just a side effect of the Obama factor, but in any case, it works well in terms of the general atmosphere — there is nothing on here that could be filed under «cringeworthy banality», although there is nothing that comes close to the apocalyptic fervor of ʽNew Dark Agesʼ, either. All that remains is give this stuff another thumbs up. Which, at this point, merely indicates that «Bad Religion have not lost it yet», although, presumably, only death itself — or three severe cases of either finger arthritis or Alzheimer's —  will break this interminable chain, because wri­ting and recording songs like these is theoretically a process without any boundaries whatsoever.

 

TRUE NORTH (2013)

 

1) True North; 2) Past Is Dead; 3) Robin Hood In Reverse; 4) Land Of Endless Greed; 5) Fuck You; 6) Dharma And The Bomb; 7) Hello Cruel World; 8) Vanity; 9) In Their Hearts Is Right; 10) Crisis Time; 11) Dept. Of False Hope; 12) Nothing To Dismay; 13) Popular Consensus; 14) My Head Is Full Of Ghosts; 15) The Island; 16) Changing Tide.

 

Each of us is at liberty to select the final stage when the ensuing judgement for a Bad Religion record is made of just one statement — «Verily, here is one more Bad Religion record that feels exactly the same way as any Bad Religion record». The majority of the not-giving-a-damn public would have been likely to go through that final stage circa the release of No Control or, at the latest, Generator. I did give a damn, and eventually succeeded in making it right to the finals, even if nary a single of those album descriptions could qualify as somewhat instructive.

 

With True North, I end up throwing in the towel. All right, so here is one more Bad Religion record that feels exactly the same way as any Bad Religion record. I only have to mention that the prominent tracks include Graffin's power-poppy ʽCrisis Timeʼ, with a colorful guitar solo, and Gurewitz's ʽDharma And The Bombʼ (unusually titled for a Bad Religion song, despite the usual antiwar sentiments of the lyrics). 

 

If these two paragraphs feel stylistically close to the beginning of the previous review, this is un­derstandable — reviews have to reflect their object, and what better way is there to reflect two near-identical objects than writing two near-identical reviews? Especially considering that, under standard conditions, Bad Religion are immune to most criticism. Here is how the average critic is expected to act: [A] Listen to the latest Bad Religion album; [B] Admire how fast, energetic, socially conscious, and deeply sincere all the songs are; [C] Write a review, beginning with "[N] years into their career, Bad Religion are still at it / going strong / rocking their heads off / tearing down walls / kicking establishment's ass / ... / ..."; [D] Forget every single thing about the album three seconds after the review has been submitted; [E] Go out there, have a life, meet your lifemate, have a kid, marry, settle down, wait 2-3 years; [F] Loop back to [A], repeat process. (Okay, so it doesn't really mean you should have a new kid every 2-3 years, but you do get the overall message, I hope).

 

It all works perfectly unless you make the haywire decision of reviewing all the Bad Religion albums at the same time — and just as I put a final stop to the pseudo-review of Dissent Of Man, lo and behold, here comes another Bad Religion. Fresh from the oven, sixteen songs in thirty-five minutes, half Graffin, half Gurewitz, a few slow ones, mostly fast ones, and each one is either predicting the apocalypse or hinting that it might already be here, we are all simply too dumb and zombified to notice. The most introspective that Graffin gets here is when he is trying to explain to us why he likes saying «fuck you» so much (ʽFuck Youʼ) — apparently, because "sometimes just a word is the most satisfying sound". Well, uh, yes, whatever. He probably wrote that one for his university colleagues or something.

 

But I have spent too much time with these guys to even pretend to feel bored about it — I know perfectly well what to expect, and I sort of... expect it. In fact, I'm probably going to feel a little something missing from my life once Bad Religion finally breaks up for good — except I suspect that they are going to outlive me eventually, because Greg Graffin ain't gonna stop until The Man is down and The People are totally enlightened, so get ready for repea­ting the Bad Religion ritual in a couple more years.

BANGLES

ALL OVER THE PLACE (1984)

 

1) Hero Takes A Fall; 2) Live; 3) James; 4) All About You; 5) Dover Beach; 6) Tell Me; 7) Restless; 8) Going Down To Liver­pool; 9) He's Got A Secret; 10) Silent Treatment; 11) More Than Meets The Eye.

 

We will not be remembering them for ʽEternal Flameʼ — we will remember them for this album, one of the finest treasures to come out of the «Paisley Underground» and a fine reminder for every­one that it is possible to be retro and innovative, old-fashioned and new-fangled, style-cen­tered and catchy, formulaic and emotional at the same time. Of course, its national and interna­tional fame did not really come until Prince arrived on the scene and turned them into gilt-bronze two years later, but who's to be surprised? They don't call it underground for nothing.

 

All Over The Place was not the Bangles' first release: two years earlier, it was preceded by a five-song self-titled EP, which some critics predictably hail as the Bangles record to abide by — not because it still features original founding mother Annette Zilinskas on bass (soon to be repla­ced by Michael Steele), but because it is still delightfully lo-fi, released on the aptly titled indie label «Faulty Products» instead of Columbia. However, other than better production, All Over The Place does not really represent any fallbacks from the aesthetics of Bangles — both the EP and the LP even share exactly one cover of an old garage «nugget» (The La De Da's ʽHow Is The Air Up There?ʼ and the Merry Go-Rounds' ʽLiveʼ, respectively), and are best taken together, which would only bring the total length to 44 minutes anyway.

 

So what's good about these Bangles? First, they really love their guitars: both Susanna Hoffs on rhythm and Vicki Peterson on lead have rich, thick, powerful, and colorful power-pop tones. They like to jangle that stuff (ʽLiveʼ), but they can just as well use it for crunchy purposes (ʽRest­lessʼ), or throw in wailing pop riffs that rival their idols, Big Star (ʽGoing Down To Liverpoolʼ). The two have just enough technique to think of various interesting things to do over the instru­mental breaks (like the Nashville-influenced guitar break on ʽAll About Youʼ; or the way ʽJamesʼ starts out deceptively as a funk-rocker, only to take a completely different turn ten seconds later and never go back again) — but not enough to engage in empty flash. As light and insubstantial as most of these songs are, these ladies are musicians, not «babes with guitars».

 

Second and most important, they are excellent B-rate songwriters: B-rate, because all the ele­ments are familiar, and they do not even try to conceal it (ʽI'm In Lineʼ off the EP is built on the ʽTaxmanʼ riff, and God knows how many Beatles or Big Star chord sequences are less openly in­volved in the other numbers), but excellent, because it never really bothers me — the ingredients are reshuffled expertly and with feeling, the tempos are lively and exciting, and the singing is... well, always nice to hear some simple, happy, ringing, innocent-sounding tones in an era when the female intellectual ideal was defined by the likes of Kate Bush or Siouxsie Sioux — not that I have anything against either, but there is always room for a Susanna Hoffs as well.

 

Highlights include... just about everything. ʽHero Takes A Fallʼ and ʽJamesʼ are probably the most anthemic and easily memorizable / recognizable songs, although the album as such is more frequently identified with a cover of Katrina and The Waves' ʽGoing Down To Liverpoolʼ — a song that the Bangles took up, colored up with less distortion and more treble, made a little less angry with more melodic singing (drummer Debbi Peterson carries the lead), and they still ended up with a credible rocking attitude. ʽRest­lessʼ is more in the blues-rock idiom (with the lead vocal going to the lower-pitched Vicki Peter­son here), but pulled off quite credibly; and their janglier, or their country-western-er sides (ʽDo­ver Beachʼ; ʽTell Meʼ) are also delightful.

 

It all works, because there is not only unbridled love for guitar-based pop rock, expressed here so freely in an age of dance beats and synthesizers, but there is also one thing that prohibits most of to­day's bands from recreating the Bangles' success: a total lack of fear of being judged too «silly», too «lightweight», too «fluffy» — these songs are innocent and simple in mood and execution, and they have no double bottom or any other secrets to slowly unravel over repeated listenings. But neither does any of this sound like an expertly calculated retro-affair — the girls have been raised on a punk bedrock, after all, and overall, an album like this would have been impossible in the pre-Ramones, or, more accurately, the pre-Patti Smith era: as retro as it is, in terms of cha­racter toughness displayed, it clearly belongs to their time.

 

Actually, come to think of it, All Over The Place is simply timeless — unpretentious high-qua­lity entertainment for the ages, even topped off with a little bit of chamber pop: ʽMore Than Meets The Eyeʼ is a good title to introduce the accappella opening, the Merseybeat-style har­monies, and the modest string quartet that form the album's coda, and show an additional side to the girls' versatility — they not only know their ʽTaxmanʼ but their ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ as well. Naturally, it's all «fluff» — no deep insights are to be gained or previously unexplored paths un­locked from listening to the Bangles even at their best — but in 1984, it took brains, brawns, and guts to produce this particular kind of fluff. Thumbs up.

 

DIFFERENT LIGHT (1986)

 

1) Manic Monday; 2) In A Different Light; 3) Walking Down Your Street; 4) Walk Like An Egyptian; 5) Standing In The Hall­way; 6) Return Post; 7) If She Knew What She Wants; 8) Let It Go; 9) September Gurls; 10) Angels Don't Fall In Love; 11) Following; 12) Not Like You.

 

Almost everybody who cares about the Bangles more than about the history of MTV usually speaks of Different Light as a serious step down in overall quality for the band. However, this is «symbolically» true rather than «truly» true. The moderate success of All Over The Place had opened the doors to fame and fortune, and the girls were definitely not above trying it out — they agreed to tour with Cyndi Lauper and eventually attracted the attention of Prince himself, never the one to nonchalantly skip over such a «tasty treat». And this encounter pretty much sealed their fate: once you start taking orders (or even recommendations) from Prince, there is no turning back — besides, considering how niftily Prince managed to remain his own master while at the same time drawing in the big bucks, taking advice from the guy naturally seemed like a big win.

 

So we have ʽManic Mondayʼ, written by The Artist specifically for the Bangles and released as the first single from their second LP. Is it a good pop song? You bet it is. The little baroque key­board riff that functions as the main melodic hook is unforgettable, as is the vocal melody of the chorus (and if you think that "it's just another manic Monday, I wish it was Sunday, 'cause that's my fun day" is a lame lyric, you probably come from way before the era of Rebecca Black). Is it «an important, progressive development» in the history of Bangles sound? No, it isn't, since it shifts the emphasis away from the poppy, but bite-y electric guitars and the sarcastically intelli­gent atmosphere of that sound — and moves into the kind of territory inhabited by... not even so much by Prince as by Madonna: the "all of my nights..." midsection could very easily be pictured sitting somewhere in the middle of True Blue. Moreover, Susanna Hoffs does her best to sex up her vocals, developing a «bedroom voice» that does sound suspiciously close to Madonna's.

 

Most albums are usually judged on the strength of their lead single — in this particular case, ʽManic Mondayʼ is not very representative of the rest of the album. First, most of the songs are still originals, composed by Hoffs and the Petersons, or covers of artists you'd expect them to co­ver (Big Star, Jules Shear). Second, the guitars make a loud return on the second track already, and rarely let us down afterwards — and they are good, trusty, jangly Bangl-y guitars, not the ge­neric pop metal crap that ruled over mainstream rock releases in 1986. What does unite these songs with ʽManic Mondayʼ is (a) the production, which feels slicker and more technology-de­pendent than before, and (b) the overall feel — where All Over The Place kicked ass and felt strong and self-assured, Different Light comes across as a spiritual surrender... «...in which the ladies embrace their feminine side and purge their pretty heads of superfluous ideas».

 

Not totally, of course. New bass player Michael Steele, for instance, gets to contribute ʽFollo­wingʼ, a sparse acoustic ballad (which could have been even more effective, I think, without the unnecessary synthesizer hum in the background) that could serve as a blueprint for most of Ani DiFranco's career: punchy jazz/folk chords, strong, independent vocals, harsh post-breakup lyrics etc. It is not as immediately overwhelming as the big pop hits, but in time, it gets its warranted status of overlooked highlight.

 

But on the other side of the deal, you have ʽWalk Like An Egyptianʼ — written by Liam Stern­berg, the song is musically innovative (it sounds like a light calypso number turned into a speedy rock anthem at the last moment) and lyrically fun, yet ultimately quite light-headed and trifling: naturally, it ended up becoming one of their largest hit singles, if not the trademark song to be remembered by (particularly since everyone except for Debbi trades lead vocals across the dif­ferent verses). Great stuff for parties, but if you ain't much of a party goer, chances are you will get tired of these friendly hooks fairly quickly.

 

Nevertheless, far be it from me to call Different Light a «bad» album — «disappointing», yes, but if all «disappointing» albums had this kind of quality, we would have to rethink the meaning of the word itself. Frankly speaking, there are no bad songs here. The Jules Shear cover is irresis­tible, even if the main guitar riff is made to sound like ABBA and Hoffs' vocals are once again done Madonna-style. The interpretation of Big Star's ʽSeptember Gurlsʼ, once again with Steele on vocals, is respectful and well executed (and was quite instrumental, by the way, in restoring Big Star's reputation and earning the struggling Alex Chilton quite a bit in royalties). ʽStanding In The Hallwayʼ, ʽReturn Postʼ, ʽNot Like Youʼ — all of them catchy, fun, enjoyable numbers. Cal­ling them «slick» is probably justified, but if we only get to remember what was really slick in 1986, one of the worst years in mainstream pop music history, Different Light will have no choice but to, well, be seen in a different light.

 

In other words, the album is nowhere near close to a catastrophe on its own — it sets the girls up for a fall, indicating the inevitably downwards direction their career would take from that point, but the LP itself is well above any devastating criticism, and still a must-have for all lovers of good pop music, though probably not for the average «girl power» fan. Isn't it ironic, really, that Prince was so impressed by one of the girls' punkiest songs (ʽHero Takes A Fallʼ), that it stimula­ted him to write them one of their «girliest» songs — one that they accepted and swallowed up without a hitch? Isn't that much better proof of the man's Mephistophelian powers than whatever Tipper Gore ever spotted in his silly sexist lyrics?.. Oh well, never mind. Sexist, feminist, slutty, or punkish, or both, this is a certified thumbs up in any case.  

 

EVERYTHING (1988)

 

1) In Your Room; 2) Complicated Girl; 3) Bell Jar; 4) Something To Believe In; 5) Eternal Flame; 6) Be With You; 7) Glitter Years; 8) I'll Set You Free; 9) Watching The Sky; 10) Some Dreams Come True; 11) Make A Play For Her Now; 12) Waiting For You; 13) Crash And Burn.

 

There are two things that make Everything feel like an artistic embarrassment: the album cover and ʽEternal Flameʼ. The album cover, because it pictures the Bangles in typical late-Eighties glamor fashion, quite a far cry from the sharp looks earlier in the decade; and ʽEternal Flameʼ, because it is the song on the album to go along with that look. If it weren't to become the girls' greatest commercial achievement, it wouldn't be so heartbreaking. But it was, and it would.

 

As far as power ballads go, ʽEternal Flameʼ is hardly the worst example. Not only was it not written by Diane Warren (instead, Susanna Hoffs is aided here by the corporate songwriting team of Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly), it doesn't even begin to properly pick up «power» until half of the song is over, and its vocal melody is at least mildly imaginative; plus, it is actually a nice showcase for Hoffs' vocal range — she is not much of a mighty «belter», but it is technically im­pressive, at least, how she inflects the chorus in so many varieties.

 

None of which matters when we take the song in its context. This is not Whitney Houston we are dealing with here — these are the Bangles, America's pride and joy in the realm of colorful gui­tar-based power pop, and to sing a song like ʽEternal Flameʼ for them means musical prostitution, fair and square. Yes, one could say that the loss of innocence had occurred long before, with the coming of Prince, or maybe even prior to that, with the girlie looks, the make-up, and the coquet­terie they had sported from the start, but there are «problems on the way», and then there is the «point of no return», and there is a crucial difference between the two. With ʽEternal Flameʼ, the group commits a travesty that is not easily forgotten — kind of like a vegan accidentally being caught munching on a lamb chop.

 

It does not even matter that the rest of the album, for the most part, does not even remotely re­semble the style of ʽEternal Flameʼ. Although the band relies more heavily on synthesizers than they used to, and, in accordance with the times, goes along with the electronic coating on the drums and a metallized sheen on formerly «clean» guitars, the songs are still mostly in the pop-rock idiom, not too different from the ideology of Different Light or even All Over The Place. After all, the album does not open with ʽEternal Flameʼ — it opens with ʽIn Your Roomʼ, a fun, fast, vivacious, love-struck rocker, and with a psychedelic coda to boot (mid-Eastern flavor for the synths and Revolver-style acid harmonies — whee!). And the rest of the songs generally fol­low ʽIn Your Roomʼ rather than ʽEternal Flameʼ, just as well.

 

Michael Steele contributes two jangle-pop numbers, of which ʽComplicated Girlʼ is the lighter one, a fun pop nugget, and ʽGlitter Yearsʼ is the bitter one, with a bit of misplaced nostalgia ("I don't really know how we survived the glitter years" — come now, 1988 was hardly any less «glitter» in essence than 1973). The Petersons rock their hearts out on ʽBell Jarʼ, a song that could have been an easy highlight on an early Blondie album — the chorus is very accurately written in classic Debbie Harry language. Occasionally, songs are quite seriously spoiled by cheesy arran­gements (ʽBe With Youʼ), but the catchiness still cannot be denied.

 

In fact, the only other ballad on the entire album is ʽSomething To Believe Inʼ, whose adult con­temporary nature and lack of proper hook (the main melody sounds like an impoverished varia­tion on Paul McCartney's ʽListen To What The Man Saidʼ) only proves further that the Bangles, fortunately for us all, are simply incapable of writing ballads, period. And even more fortunately for us, they do not really try — 11 pop rockers vs. 2 ballads is a ratio that I quite approve of, even if it would have been much better for us all if they'd at least waited until the «grunge revolution» to release these.

 

My original review for Everything gave it a really low score and complained about the lack of songwriting — presumably, the combined treachery of ʽEternal Flameʼ, hideous hairstyles, and sickening production values went to my unexperienced head: nowadays, it seems that the core structures of these songs do not generally fall behind what used to be. And yet, this does not, per se, make Everything any less of a sellout. Unlike some other artists, the Bangles did not enslave themselves to the industry bosses, but they agreed to a humiliating compromise — with a short-term gain and long-term loss, since the working relationships within the band broke down com­pletely as a result, and the girls parted ways soon after the album's release.

 

Actually, most of these songs (expectedly) sound much better when they are played live (es­pe­cially when they make it to the setlists of the reunited Bangles in the 21st century), so, in the end, let us be generous and blame it all on the times, not on the artists. Interestingly enough, the band's big hit from 1987, a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's ʽHazy Shade Of Winterʼ that they recorded for the soundtrack of Less Than Zero, did not make it onto Everything — maybe because they intu­i­tively felt how pathetic all of their songs would sound next to the genius of Paul Simon? (Actual­ly, I guess Susanna Hoffs' own biggest hit from 1987 was her underwear dance stint in The All­nighter, but since it was done to the sounds of Aretha Franklin rather than her own songs, there was no place for it on Every­thing, either. Still gets millions of Youtube views, by the way — true art never dies!).

 

Anyway, seeing as how I honestly enjoy most of these songs now, I give the album a thumbs up today — a humiliating compromise it is, perhaps, but play it back-to-back with, say, something from late 1980s Heart to see what truly constitutes a genuine nosedive in this sphere: even ʽEter­nal Flameʼ is miles ahead of ʽWhat About Loveʼ in the taste department.

 

DOLL REVOLUTION (2003)

 

1) Tear Off Your Own Head; 2) Stealing Rosemary; 3) Something That You Said; 4) Ask Me No Questions; 5) The Rain Song; 6) Nickel Romeo; 7) Ride The Ride; 8) I Will Take Care Of You; 9) Here Right Now; 10) Single By Choice; 11) Lost At Sea; 12) Song For A Good Son; 13) Mixed Messages; 14) Between The Two; 15) Grateful.

 

Unfortunately, this is not quite the comeback one could hope for. You know how it sometimes works: good band digs up fine formula, then sells out to silly cheesy trends and fads, then breaks up, then comes back again with a cleared-up head, ready to tackle fine formula once again with extra added maturity and professionalism at the expense of youthful excitement and freshness — solid four stars as compared to the original five.

 

Doll Revolution, too, could be expected to work that way. Surely, if the Bangles had any reason to overcome their personal problems and reconvene, it wouldn't be to recreate their glossy mid-to-late Eighties sound — not now, not in the early 2000s, with the garage rock revival in full swing? And since they never really lost their songwriting skills, not even on Everything — they simply yielded to external pressure that required mainstream-oriented acts to rely on corporate writers — couldn't we hope for yet another ʽHero Takes A Fallʼ, twenty years on?

 

Unfortunately, no. The first song on the album inspires confidence: energetic mid-tempo, pul­sa­ting bass, nicely distorted garage guitars, catchy vocals, aggressive bite-me delivery, and clever lyrics. Then it turns out that the song is actually an Elvis Costello cover, taken from his When I Was Cruel album from the preceding year. That in itself is not a problem — better Elvis Costello than Prince, at least if you're a Bangle. The problem is that nothing else on Doll Revolution even begins to come close in matching that level of energy and vivaciousness.

 

The first single off the album, and the only one that made even the tiniest ripple on some Euro­pean charts (but not in the US), was ʽSomething That You Saidʼ — a nostalgic trip to the realm of 1980s synth-pop, with Hoffs' creaky, but still sexy, vocals adorned by drum machines and elec­tronics a-plenty; no «power ballad» aspects here as there were on ʽEternal Flameʼ, but melodical­ly and mood-wise, the song is even cornier. Again, there is nothing else here that sounds the same way, yet the commercial calculation is clear — the song was designed to appeal to contemporary dance-pop and soft-rock radio stations, almost as if someone really thought there might be a good reason for somebody to be interested in this shit coming from such a relic of the past.

 

Everything else here is stuck in between the two extremes — nothing is either as fun as the rol­licking, snappy title track or as irritating as the barren romance of the synth-pop non-hit. The songs generally fluctuate between smooth-flowing, even, not too exciting jangle-pop (much of which is sung by Debbi and Vicki) and slower, not too exciting ballads (many of them sung by Susanna). The level of spice-and-spunk is so low, really, that some of the tunes may easily be mistaken for a Christine McVie solo project (ʽHere Right Nowʼ) — nothing awful about it, but hardly the rightest choice for the Bangles, who, at their best, always had some sharp claws hidden behind the furry-purry surface.

 

Lyrics-wise, most of the songs are equally «plain» — simple love messages, sometimes with a little bit of flailing of the male hero, sometimes with a few tears over some faraway breakup; one tune, ʽSingle By Choiceʼ, credited solely to Vicki, comes across as very strange — the con­fi­dent­ly delivered message ("single by choice, never marry, never ever divorce") sounds a bit weird in the context of our knowledge that "Peterson married musician John Cowsill on 25 October 2003" (i. e. less than two months after the release of the album). Unless the whole thing is supposed to be ironic, but it honestly doesn't come off that way. Weird.

 

Overall, the whole thing sounds... nice, which is certainly not enough of a reason to justify this comeback, because the jangle-pop market in the 2000s is so huge anyway. Sure, the production (other than on ʽSomething That You Saidʼ) is tasteful, the girls' voices still sound vibrant (although Su­sanna's has thinned out a wee bit), and the songs are not too poorly written. But the album is also overlong — at sixty minutes, it could have certainly used some trimming — and monotonous: as far as unpredictability is concerned, I miss a ʽWalk Like An Egyptianʼ or some such adorable genre twist in between all the jangly sweetness.

 

On the other hand, there is no question that it could have been much, much worse, and that true Bangles fans will not be disappointed — at least, not completely disappointed — by what has been offered. And an album that loyally preserves a firm link to the legacy of Big Star and Fleet­wood Mac cannot be a complete failure in any case. Just don't call it Doll Revolution — Doll Mummification would probably be closer to the truth.

 

SWEETHEART OF THE SUN (2011)

 

1) Anna Lee (Sweetheart Of The Sun); 2) Under A Cloud; 3) Ball 'n' Chain; 4) I'll Never Be Through With You; 5) Mesmerized; 6) Circles In The Sky; 7) Sweet And Tender Romance; 8) Lay Yourself Down; 9) One Of Two; 10) What A Life; 11) Through Your Eyes; 12) Open My Eyes.

 

If you liked Doll Revolution more than I did, this slow-on-the-move follow-up will probably en­chant you even further. If, however, you were left somewhat unimpressed, then beware — most of the problems are still here, and as the Bangles get older and their marrow gets stiffer (although they still manage to remain visually attractive), chances are that this level is as good as it is ever going to get. Father Time is a pretty hard guy to beat.

 

Still, at least this time around there is a sense of tasteful purity here, filtering out any production excesses on the level of ʽSomething That You Saidʼ — no attempts whatsoever to appeal to the current mainstream tastes in pop music, easy as it could have been for them to try on the pitiable red-dress / white-horse glamor of Taylor Swift. All the guitar melodies and vocal harmonies bear the time-approved stamp of the Paisley Underground (and, by induction, that of the Byrds-and-Beatles brands of jangle-pop); all the rhythm sections are in strictly manual mode, with no signs of being tampered with in the final production stage; all the lyrics are as far away from modern day problems as possible — in short, just a good sip of that old-timey California sun essence.

 

It all sounds wonderful: from the opening riffs of ʽAnna Leeʼ (a song that inexplicably shares the name of its imaginary protagonist with an old Beach Boys song, yet borrows its chief chord pro­gression from the overture to Tommy) and right down to the respectfully performed cover of Todd Rundgren's ʽOpen My Eyesʼ, there are no formal complaints to be lodged. The album was carefully planned — some of the songs, according to the liner notes, had a fairly long history of development, and ʽOpen My Eyesʼ was remembered as one of the first songs the girls liked to perform live in the early days — and just as carefully executed, even despite the fact that Michael Steele is no longer in the band, so the songwriting was more or less evenly distributed between Susanna, Vicki, and Debbi.

 

But the problem of Doll Revolution remains — all of these songs are strictly second-rate, a nos­talgia trip for lovers of nostalgia trips, with the words NOSTALGIA TRIP imprinted in large blinking golden letters all over the place. Speaking of which, All Over The Place, too, could certainly be accused of being nostalgic and derivative — but it was conceived and realised at a time when its «unhip» nostalgia clashed so fiercely with the futuristic sheen of mainstream pop that it created an exciting cultural wormhole; plus, the girls were young, fresh, snappy, snazzy, punchy, and aggressive. Sweetheart Of The Sun, in comparison, has very little «punch» to it: a song like ʽBall 'n' Chainʼ, put forward by Debbi, is a rock'n'roll number alright, but its sound is stiff and formulaic, way too clean, polished, and calculated, not to mention utterly derivative, to make the song matter even the slightest bit once it's over.

 

I will be the first to admit that there are a few numbers here where the harmonies are really, really lovely. Hoffs' ʽUnder A Cloudʼ, for instance, is a steady grower and has her working that «head in a cloud» lovestruck charm to perfection. ʽMesmerizedʼ does not quite match its title, but still comes up with a fairly emotional nursery-rhyme type Brit-pop chorus. And it wouldn't hurt if Vicki's acoustic ballad ʽCircles In The Skyʼ someday managed to replace ʽEternal Flameʼ in the public conscience (well, at least we are allowed to dream). But for every such grower, which still requires about two or three listens to cast its spell, there is one or two inferior copies of it — and the overall monotonousness of the proceedings is inavoidable.

 

In short, if I am mistaken about the Bangles making age-based concessions (and I would love to be wrong), the only alternative critique would be that they simply go way too far in the «sunny» direction. Perhaps, like most normal people, they have simply settled down, found inner peace, and only sing about whatever it is that they really have in their hearts these days — music for honest, hip, and time-honoured family entertainment. If so, I am very happy for them, and I cer­tainly do not regret spending time on listening to their happy songs of the new millennium. But even John Lennon, in his happiest hour that was so ominously cut short, was not above adding a drop of honestly experienced (or, at least, magnificently simulated) doom and gloom (ʽI'm Losing Youʼ) to his happiest record (Double Fantasy) — so here is one more reminder that the Bangles are not the Beatles. An album can only have that much value if it gives you songwriting compe­tence and emotional fluff instead of songwriting genius and emotional depth, and Sweetheart Of The Sun goes as far as it can go with its limitations, but alas, that just ain't far enough.

BATHORY

BATHORY (1984)

 

1) Storm Of Damnation; 2) Hades; 3) Reaper; 4) Necromansy; 5) Sacrifice; 6) In Conspiracy With Satan; 7) Arma­geddon; 8) Raise The Dead; 9) War; 10) Outro.

 

Whatever you think of the whole «black metal» schtick, it has to be acknowledged that, for an 18-year old, Bathory is quite a stunning achievement. There is one thing I am not sure of, and that is the whole «lo-fi» approach. On one hand, it is quite consistent with the general ideology of this band that their output should sound as if it were recorded inside a tightly packed garbage can. On the other hand, even the Devil himself probably likes to ride in style, rather than appear in the image of Freddy Krueger, the only guy who would have probably found the production standards of Bathory completely to the liking of his charred guts.

 

Which is too bad, because this record, even sharing as it does most of the clichés associated with «extreme» musical genres, is genuinely innovative (for its time) and impressive (for ours). The music is basically a cross between Venom and Slayer, with the grinning hellish carnival attitude of the former set to the thrash metal punch of the latter. Venom serve as the primary inspiration: not only is the goat picture on the front sleeve conceived as a tribute to the front cover of Black Metal, but even several of the songs share the same titles (ʽSacrificeʼ, ʽRaise The Deadʼ). But the music is faster, angrier, «punkier» than Venom ever got, and clearly reflects the influence of the thrash scene — as far as Bathory's opinion is concerned, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride fast and hard, and the music has to reflect that fact.

 

Most importantly, though, the music reflects the unquestionable talents of Thomas Börje Fors­berg, usually known by the name of Quorthon, who, by the tender age of 18 years, had not only mastered the high level of guitar technique required to qualify for «metal master», but also deve­loped a taste for complex and interesting riffage. Sure, it takes time and patience to rip through the awful production barrier (the whole album was slap-dashed together in a garage, converted to a recording studio), but after a couple of listens — which go by fairly fast, as the entire album clocks in at a very wise 26:52 — the riffs come through, and they are all similar, but different enough to distinguish one part of this twenty-six minute suite of death and destruction from ano­ther. Which is all that is required of them; the rest consists of a sworn dedication to kick ass at top speed (only ʽRaise The Deadʼ slows the tempo down a little bit, probably because the dead are not accustomed to rise as quickly as the Four Horsemen are accustomed to ride).

 

Quorthon's vocals, at this point, are strictly locked in the «evil scream» mode — a bit less laugh­able than typical «growling» vocals, just as his lyrics are a bit less laughable than the average black metal lyric, especially considering that they come from the mind of an 18-year old Swedish guy. (Well, they are laughable, but for the most part, the words are strung together without offen­ding style or grammar). Just how serious the guy was exactly is hard to tell — as far as I know, nobody ever caught Quorthon in the act of burning down a church or feasting on the flesh of freshly baptised Christian babies, but, of course, stuff like "The lies of Christ will lose / The ways of Hell I choose / I drink the floating blood / Defy the fury of God" (ʽIn Conspiracy With Satanʼ) shows character — and helps build plenty of it.

 

Anyway, even though I cannot, for the life of me, award an explicit thumbs up to anything with this kind of production (if cleverly constructed riffs are your main forté, I can find no acceptable excuse to insult these riffs with cheap equipment), and, besides, Bathory would move on to much higher ground in the future, this self-titled debut is a fairly amusing listen — could even be one for open-min­ded Christians, who are not above a smirk or two at a caricaturesque, but professio­nal musical depiction of the Antichrist. Rumour has it that Quorthon expressed surprise and dis­tress when, upon the release of the album, the band started receiving blood-written letters and dead animals in the mail — then again, it only means that he managed to get into character all too well. (But a funny trivia bit: apparently, Quorthon's father was the head of a Swedish record label, and helped the kid out with recording and distribution during the early days of his career. So either we have to conclude that the band was a completely phony act from the beginning, or they got pretty liberal record label heads out there in Sweden).

 

THE RETURN... (1985)

 

1) Revelation Of Doom / Total Destruction; 2) Born For Burning; 3) The Wind Of Mayhem; 4) Bestial Lust; 5) Possessed; 6) The Rite Of Darkness / Reap Of Evil; 7) Son Of The Damned; 8) Sadist; 9) The Return Of The Dark­ness And Evil; 10) Outro.

 

It would be unwise to expect a sophomore album, titled Return, to be seriously different from its predecessor. There are a few changes, though. First, the production is a little better: Quorthon's guitars no longer sound like the echo of a drilling machine three miles away — they actually sound like real guitars, if still a little farther away from the mike than would be recommendable. Second, as impossible as it sounds, the album is even more «consistent» than its predecessor — everything, apart from the dark-weathered «satanic-ambient» intro, is brutally fast (Bathory, at the very least, slowed down for ʽRaise The Deadʼ).

 

Unfortunately, the consistency and dedication also means that musically, this is a step down: second time around, it is clear that brutality, «darkness and evil» are far more important for Quorthon than musicality. Most of the riffs are now interchangeable — based on rather standard chord sequences, typical for hardcore and thrash artists. Quorthon's solos are, in fact, more com­mendable than the riffs: he does not indulge in them on every track (an interesting link between Bathory and the hardcore punk attitude here, rather than their metal brethren), but when he does, they are not so much empty technical feats of finger-flashing as a device to heat up the atmos­phere: he plays fast, but (as I suppose) relatively simple flurries of «angry» licks, sometimes with heavy echo effects, that have virtually no dynamics of their own (start in one place, go visit ano­ther, finally end up in a third one or where you started out, that sort of thing), but all rather sound like the musical equivalent of flashing lightning to the rhythm section's roaring thunder.

 

Quorthon's vocals are also clearer in the mix now, and incorporate more growling than they used to, even if it is still hardly possible to describe them as classic «growling» — more like «hoarse screeching» on the part of the protagonist whose larynx has just been shredded by the lances of all the Four Horsemen, and now Lucifer in person is doing a little tap dance on the bloody bits. Bad news — still not scary at all, Mr. Forsberg. Consistent, though.

 

Individual songs are hardly worth commenting upon, particularly since I have no favourite riffs on here, and vocal «melodies» are non-existent in the first place. Recurrent listens do show that the album has various influences — for instance, ʽBorn For Burningʼ is based on a very familiar «New Wave of Heavy Metal» kind of pattern, with a riff that would sound perfectly in place on a Judas Priest album. On the other hand, the basic pattern of ʽRite Of Darknessʼ is much more simple and straightforward, and with a slight tonality change most likely would have become a Ramones number. Some reviewers have, in fact, noted that, at the time, Bathory were really much more about the atmosphere than the technical accuracy and complexity normally demanded of metal bands — in fact, the limited time they had for their studio sessions leads to occasional mis­takes on the part of the rhythm section, something that would be unbelievable for a «true» metal band. But, of course, the atmosphere itself, with its carnivalesque Satanism, has nothing to do with the «hardcore» attitudes.

 

For some Bathory fans, The Return... and its follow-up are the quintessential Bathory albums, and I understand this: the take-no-prisoners, show-no-mercy approach is demonstrated here with 100% efficiency, if that is what you want from your grotesque genre of black metal. A compact, quickly passing thirty-six minutes of speed, thrash, and Dr. Evil riding on the coattails of The Horned One. But, of course, if you are just an innocent by-passer with a bit of curiosity to spare, any one of these songs will do for a brief taster — try the title track, for instance.

 

UNDER THE SIGN OF THE BLACK MARK (1987)

 

1) Nocturnal Obeisance; 2) Massacre; 3) Woman Of Dark Desires; 4) Call From The Grave; 5) Equimanthorn; 6) Enter The Eternal Fire; 7) Chariots Of Fire; 8) 13 Candles; 9) Of Doom; 10) Outro.

 

As «good» as their second album was, it is Under The Sign Of The Black Mark that is usually extolled by fans as the absolutely quintessential and mind-blowing Bathory release from Quor­thon's hyper-aggressive youth. Frankly, I do not see much difference except for, once again, slightly improved production (or maybe I am just getting used to it), and... well, let's call it the «gradual getting into character» aspect: third time around, Quorthon feels so confident about im­personating Countess Bathory's loyal henchman that he finds the time for additional flourishes, occasional experiments with tempos, more varied lyrics, and, overall, lets us know that even the Prince of Darkness himself sometimes gets bored with the rigidity of the formula.

 

Light-speed thrashers do serve as both the lead-in (ʽMassacreʼ) and lead-out (ʽOf Doomʼ, special­ly addressed to the band's growing fanbase and proclaiming how the fans are really one with the band — no free Christian blood offered, though) tracks; musically, they are all but indistinguishable from ʽChariots Of Fireʼ and ʽEquimanthornʼ — the latter does start out quite promisingly, with a poisonously cool fuzz bassline, but it almost immediately disappears under the usual on­slaught of thrash metal guitar. However, ʽWoman Of Dark Desiresʼ (an anthem to Elizabeth Ba­thory in person) is different, mainly because of the insane jackhammer drumming pattern — they make it sound a little Mötörhead-ish by saving on the beats, and somehow come out with an ab­solute black metal classic (if you disregard Quorthon's attitude towards «singing»).

 

But about half of the songs do not pay that much importance to the tempo — the album's central point, ʽEnter The Eternal Fireʼ, is played at least twice as slow as usual, and ʽCall From The Graveʼ also prefers to be ominous and threatening in its gradual onslaught rather than all-out psychopathic. Supposedly, these tunes now have more of a historical than any other kind of im­portance — back in 1987, few people were willing to go that far in their theatrical recreations of evil and destruction, and certainly, compared to the hair metal vaudeville of the time, these tunes, with their shitty production that only emphasized the bloody guitar distortion, and with Quor­thon's defiantly anti-musical wild beast roaring on top, could send a genuine shiver or two down yer spine. These days, it is much harder to understand just what all the fuss was about, consi­dering how many people have done the same thing since then with improved production, musi­cianship, lyrics, and vocals. But, as is the usual thing with all such pioneering efforts, the trick is in using your sixth sense to locate the «bravery angle» in this stuff — the excitement of daring to be among the first to go all the way that is somewhere in there.

 

That said, my opinion on the album is that it represents a bit of a stagnation point: subsequent history shows that Quorthon, unlike many of his colleagues, did worry about being stuck in the jaws of one rigid formula, and it is not by sheer coincidence that his stylistics started to change most seriously, beginning from the next album — he must have sensed, too, that Under The Sign Of The Black Mark did not manage to say much that had not already been said on the self-titled debut. As such, it may be the best-sounding record in the early trilogy (although the use of the word «best» should not offer any false hopes), but it does not even have the best riffs. Well, it may have the best attitude. But that is only if your spirit is properly prepared to tremble before the hellfire bolts of the mighty Quorthon. If — like me — you think black metal at its best is ridi­cu­lous, corny, B-movie-level fun, then attitude alone is not going to carry you through the experi­ence, safe, sound, and happy: there's got to be some plotline substance to be interested in, and the sheer music throughout Black Mark does not quite cut it.

 

BLOOD FIRE DEATH (1988)

 

1) Odens Ride Over Nordland; 2) A Fine Day To Die; 3) The Golden Walls Of Heaven; 4) Pace 'Til Death; 5) Holo­caust; 6) For All Those Who Died; 7) Dies Irae; 8) Blood Fire Death.

 

According to false rumors, the original title was to be Wine, Women, And Loud Happy Songs, but this was ultimately deemed way too scary for Bathory's target audience, so they settled on the far more cozy and conventional Blood Fire Death instead. After all, it was just another quiet, uneventful, peaceful, friendly, sunny day in the Bathory neighborhood when Quorthon and his trusty companions with easily pronounceable names, Vvornth on drums and Kothaar on bass, set out to record what some would later call «the first true example of Viking metal».

 

Actually, this is a prime example of a «transition» album: predating the full turnaround of Ham­merheart, Bathory's fourth record introduces multiple new elements — epic intros, slower tem­pos, acoustic guitars, occasionally «clean» vocals — but still largely rests upon the same old vicious, «sincerely evil» thrashing style. The ideological change from «Black Metal» to «Viking Metal» does begin here, though. Maturation takes on specific forms in specific people, and for Quorthon, it meant moving away from Satanic posturing (which, no matter how sincerely he tried to get into it, still retained the status of posturing... fortunately for him and for us all) and, pre­dictably enough, embracing his mythical Scandinavian heritage.

 

So, instead of yet another concept album about the next coming of the Antichrist, we are now invited to look back into the past rather than the future, with a concept album about... on second thought, the most «Viking» thing about the album is the title of the opening ambient instrumental: ʽOden's Ride Over Nordlandʼ (I do presume Quorthon, whose spelling skills are not clear enough to me, means Odin, and not a Japanese winter dish consisting of several ingredients such as boiled eggs, daikon radish, konnyaku, and processed fish cakes stewed in a light, soy-flavoured dashi broth) is little more than some medieval choral harmonies mixed with very distant thunder and not so very distant vigorous horse neighing. But it does set up a better atmosphere than any other previous Bathory intro.

 

Then, ʽA Fine Day To Dieʼ starts out with a dark acoustic pattern — already an acknowledged instrument for «artsy» metal bands, but feeling almost like a sellout signal for Quorthon, who had never before stooped to anything softer than a viciously distorted, blacker-'n'-night guitar tone. But unlike many other metal epics, this one makes a genuine point with its acoustic intro: setting a deceptive "orgy of silence, conspiracy of peace" tone for the coming onslaught. The acoustic guitars and church harmonies will be returning later, but the bulk of the song is given over to carefully thought out and terrifiedly played «martial» black metal riffs (with a strong Metallica influence, I suspect, but it is not likely that Quorthon's proud Scandinavian nature would ever let him admit being influenced by a bunch of Californian sissies).

 

Barring the intro, the record is bookmarked by two epic length songs: ʽA Fine Day To Dieʼ has enough potential for eight and a half minutes, while the title track, which essentially picks up where the other one left off, clocks in at 10:29. Actually, it is not quite true that they have enough potential: each one is dominated by one riff only, and there is not enough dynamic rising and falling, particularly with Bathory's limited instrumentarium, to rise above the «mesmerism for headbangers» level. But it is also true that each of the riffs is great to headbang to, and Quorthon is also improving as a lead player — his solos are now becoming highly melodic without having to depen­d on any Van Halenesque displays of technicality.

 

On the other hand, Blood Fire Death is not at all free from «old-school» speedy thrash blasts: ʽGolden Walls Of Heavenʼ and pretty much everything else in between the two epics are taken at same old breakneck tempos (although some of the songs, like ʽDies Iraeʼ, consist of alternating fast and slow sections), and, considering how much the production has improved here — in fact, Blood Fire Death marks Bathory's assured transition from lo-fi to hi-fi — these songs are pro­bably your best bet if you want to hear classic Bathory speed/thrash metal in decent sound quality. Whether these tracks are good examples of thrash songwriting is another matter — as far as my ears are concerned, they are all interchangeable, with the exception of the slightly slower and even dumber-sounding ʽFor All Those Who Diedʼ (this track also has the unfortunate distinction of trying to make a «hook» of Quorthon's accappella laryngeal screaming in the chorus — not a good idea if one is aiming at a genuinely shivery atmosphere).

 

Moreover, even the lyrics for those «thrashers», many of which are written in the old «Satanist» manner, show that the crossover might actually have begun not prior to, but during the sessions for the album — with the two «battlefield epics», presaging the sonic scapes of Hammerheart, framing the traditionally-oriented material simply because Quorthon was just testing the waters, and still had a bunch of old unused stuff lying around. As it is, Blood Fire Death is either a good choice for a Bathory beginner — getting to know Quorthon as «Satan's sidekick» and «Epic war­rior» at the same time — or an obligatory choice for a Bathory completist, but for those people (like myself), who can really only appreciate a band like Bathory when it is at its very, very best and «quintessential», Blood Fire Death may seem like a historically important, but artistically clumsy com­promise. So, no thumbs up here, but a significant promise that will be honestly capi­talized upon in the next installment.

 

 

HAMMERHEART (1990)

 

1) Shores In Flames; 2) Valhalla; 3) Baptised In Fire And Ice; 4) Father To Son; 5) Song To Hall Up High; 6) Home Of Once Brave; 7) One Rode To Asa Bay; 8) Outro.

 

Bathory's one true masterpiece. Yes, it may be a bit hard for those who are not innate fans of the formulaic «epic fantasy» genre to acknowledge this — that a pompous, thoroughly un-ironic, crudely recorded metal album about the forceful conversion of one's Viking ancestors to Chris­tianity could ever deserve being called a masterpiece. It has not been easy for me, either. But I did get over it, eventually, and now am confidently re-stating this: Bathory's Hammerheart is a masterpiece, and probably the one «Viking Metal» album to get if you only plan to get one. Un­less you have vikingophobia or something.

 

So what is the key to Quorthon's secret here? The key is quite simple — in fact, simple is the key. Where the general trend among power metal and progressive metal bands was to make the music more complex, by adding more and more notes to the riffs, more and more sections to the songs, more and more influences to the styles, etc., Quorthon, having temporarily jettisoned the «evil speed metal» warhorse, has retained the overall idea of keeping his melodic base as simple and repetitive as possible. Had the guy been utterly talentless, this would probably have been the end of him. But as it is, the slowing down reveals his genuine knack for «basic» heavy melodies with a strong emotional undercurrent. Be it the old pagan gods that inspired him for this one, or some other unknown factor, these here riffs work, and work admirably.

 

Naturally, the album is not «authentic». No matter how bloodthirsty / pure at heart / worthy of adoration / awesome in every way Quorthon's Northern ancestors might have been, they did not entertain each other with heavy distorted riffs and heavy artillery-style drumming. Nor was the process of converting to Christianity always as dramatic and tragic as Quorthon paints it to be in ʽOne Rode To Asa Bayʼ (even if violence was indeed involved in many a particular occasion). But, like most Viking metal, going all the way back to Led Zeppelin's ʽNo Quarterʼ, this is not a case of «history in music» — this is musical mythology, standing with one toe in facts and the rest in inflamed imagination, and the value of Hammerheart is not in educating the listener, but in spreading the inflammation.

 

ʽShores In Flamesʼ and ʽOne Rode To Asa Bayʼ are the two major epic pieces that open and close the album — the former presenting the «Viking» world at its apogee (a tale of raiding and rava­ging, of course) and the latter at its nadir, with Christianity taking its revenge and burying the old pagan pride and warpower six feet under. ʽShores In Flamesʼ has all the required scenery: sound effects (steady rowing at the beginning, burning embers at the end); eerie build-up (acoustic intro with faraway vocals, gradually unfurling into fire and fury); anthemic sing-along battle march de­livered in tandem with the riff, early Black Sabbath-style; and some of the most bloodthirsty, banshee-wailing soloing ever delivered by mortal man. Special honorable mention goes to the percussion onslaught of «Vvornth» — nothing particularly complex, but the guy was clearly pic­turing himself in the guise of a mighty fur-clad warrior, with each beat falling like a heavy blow from a mighty warhammer. Evocative!

 

My personal favorite number, however, is ʽBaptised In Fire And Iceʼ — this one wastes no time with no sissy intros, but plunges headfirst into one of the most beastly-brutal riffs in Bathory his­tory... wait, there are at least three different riffs here: the verses are driven by a simplistic, one-chord pattern that might as well have a punkish origin, then the bridge is turned over to one of those «deep sea metal» riffs invented by Toni Iommi, and then the "baptised in fire and ice!" cho­rus is accompanied by something in between the two extremes (and sounding fairly grungy, or alt-rockish, whichever you prefer). Against this background, Quorthon's «singing», now mostly free of growling and throaty screeching, is perfectly credible — the guy may have no range or subtlety, but neither would we expect it of an idealized duty-bound Nordic warrior, whose spirit this guy is channelling so successfully. In fact, it is a good thing that Quorthon does not have a very powerful voice: it adds a bit of realism to the proceedings — otherwise, the whole thing would have taken on a cartoonish, Manowar-style aura, and that would be the end of Hammer­heart as we know it.

 

Because, indeed, the most amazing thing about the album is that it does not feel «cheesy», not to me, at least. Its subject matter is anything but new, and rather banal in theory; its English lyrics, though surprisingly literate and well-articulated for a Norwegian guy with a fantasy fetish, are still nothing to write home about; its instrumentation is minimalistic, and its music repetitive (ʽOne Rode To Asa Bayʼ is like an endless droning saga, going on and on and on until you are finally forced to believe in its utmost importance through sheer length alone). But, having lost the crazy speed and the aggressive Satanism of his early years, Quorthon still preserves the essence of Bathory — an uncanny ability to substitute the boring «institutional» pathos of power metal for a snappy, snarling, attacking style of delivery, so that even at his most pompous, he is still directly kicking the listener's ass instead of roaring away pointlessly somewhere high up in the sky. The balance between mediocre production, sparse, but loud arrangements, good riffs, and genuine inspiration is pretty much unique here — so much so that, despite the superficial simpli­city of the formula, even Quorthon himself was never again able to capture it quite so well.

 

It goes without saying that for some of Bathory's veteran fans the stylistic change was a bit too much — those who were won over by the original trilogy could not pardon Quorthon for relea­sing a record so completely devoid of crazyass Satanic thrashing. And for others, Blood Fire Death, with its compromise mix of the old and the new, remains the definitive Bathory album for ages to come. But personally, I hold the opinion that it is only on Hammerheart that the guy achieved his purpose on Earth, and came as close to fully realising his true potential as possible, even if, technically, the album is less diverse than its predecessor — then again, was there ever a time in music history when a heavy metal band could be seriously criticized for lack of diversity? Thumbs up, Viking brothers and sisters. But don't you go burning any Christian churches — for the record, please note that Hammerheart provokes anything of that sort no more than ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ provokes anti-Yankee partisan action.

 

TWILIGHT OF THE GODS (1991)

 

1) Twilight Of The Gods; 2) Through Blood By Thunder; 3) Blood And Iron; 4) Under The Runes; 5) To Enter Your Mountain; 6) Bond Of Blood; 7) Hammerheart.

 

This thematic follow-up to Hammerheart is even more epic and ambitious in nature than its pre­decessor — starting out with the mere fact that it runs close to an hour, something that was utterly unthinkable in Bathory's early speed metal days, and even Hammerheart itself stated its point in about forty minutes. The subject matter stays the same (the album title could not be more trans­parent), but the balloon has been inflated to the limit. Lengthier, moodier intros; darker, ever more shadowy backing vocals; singalong anthemic choruses; and, most importantly — this is probably the farthest that Quorthon ever ventured away from stereotypical metal aesthetics. For­mally, this is still heavy metal («power metal», «Viking metal», whatever), but it does not feel much like heavy metal — more like a heavy rock opera with a dark folk basis.

 

There is nothing wrong in this per se, of course, but one big reason why Hammerheart worked so well were its undoubtedly metallic, undoubtedly killer riffs — outbalancing and justifying the relatively shallow pathos. It may or may not have given us a distinct musical vision of pre-Chris­tian Scandinavia, but at least it was a true blood-boiler. Twilight Of The Gods, in comparison, places far more faith in atmospherics — slow, leaden, repetitive, epic monsters, progressing in a regime stuck between stoner rock and snail rock. There is some sense of impending doom, yes, but it tends to quickly dissipate in the head once the tunes are over — which, it seems to me, is a sign of somewhat inefficient musicality.

 

The title track picks up right from where we were previously left with ʽOne Rode To Asa Bayʼ: twelve minutes of bitter ranting against the perils of monotheism (Quorthon even lashes out at «TV preachers» and such, implying that the «loss of innocence» described in Hammerheart is anything but simply ancient history, still influencing our lives on an everyday basis — and who could actually argue?), with a deeply repetitive structure, but ultimately feeling like the «smoul­de­ring ashes» sequel to the raging fire of ʽAsa Bayʼ. It is moody, and its simplistic dirge-like melody is convincing, but still overlong, not to mention the rather excessive acoustic intro and outro (with Quorthon's lack of overpowering playing technique or unpredictable inventiveness, it does not seem right for him to allocate so much space to pedestrian acoustic plucking).

 

Everything else follows the same formula: slow tempos, monotonous rhythms, stern Gregorian back vocals, and Quorthon himself epically wailing about what the loss of Thor's hammer and other such gadgets cost humanity in the race for survival. The best riff is probably saved for ʽBlood And Ironʼ — that particular chord sequence seems alive with the spirit of classic Black Sabbath and conveys the necessary atmosphere of sheer ravaging brutality: ʽTo Enter Your Mountainʼ, very similar in tone and structure, is already a little less efficient, and so on.

 

An attempt to come up with something completely different is saved for last: ʽHammerheartʼ (another of those strange cases where the would-be title track for an LP is suddenly carried over to the next LP) is nothing less than a rearrangement of Holst's Jupiter with an extra vocal part writ­ten by Quorthon and delivered in his best imitation of a «folk-operatic» voice (surprisingly tolerable for a guy who was previously known mostly for spasmodic guttural shrieking). Not par­ticularly awful for a solemn, stand-up-and-join-together coda hymn, but naturally amateurish: King Crimson might have the guts to tackle Holst, or, at least, some well-oiled, well-experienced symph metal machine like Opeth — Quorthon alone isn't quite fit to handle the weight.

 

Still, while it is almost inevitable that Twilight Of The Gods largely sinks under the heaviness of its titanic ambitions, the final result could have been much worse. The difference is that it is quite clear that this whole stuff really means a lot to Quorthon — the album's lack of gloss, the ela­bo­rate (if not particularly original) lyrics, the snap and snarl in Quorthon's intonations, the relentless energy expended for the repetitive punching out of the simple riffs, it all has a positive effect. It's just that you either give your listeners a heavy metal album — and in that case, Twilight Of The Gods suffers from a lack of classy riffs — or a «heavy-art» album, in which case, it suffers from extreme monotonousness and straightforwardness of approach.

 

For all the bravery and an overall lack of embarrassing moments (even ʽHammerheartʼ, amateu­rish as it is, does not qualify as «offensive» in my book), Twilight Of The Gods deserves a thumbs up alright. But in retrospect, it seems like a wrong move, a case of overstepping into alien territory, and, although few people can be said to have been well acquainted with the odd workings of Quorthon's mind, it may well be that the man was disappointed with the final product himself — sufficiently disappointed to plunge head first, as a misguided counteract, into the corniest phase of his lonesome career.

 

REQUIEM (1994)

 

1) Requiem; 2) Crosstitution; 3) Necroticus; 4) War Machine; 5) Blood And Soil; 6) Pax Vobiscum; 7) Suffocate; 8) Distinguish To Kill; 9) Apocalypse.

 

This has got to be one of the most bizarre twists not just in Bathory history, but in the entire his­tory of heavy metal. Nobody could have expected that — all of a sudden, after one suitably tran­sitional, one fully established, and one somewhat stagnant, but still understandable stylistic fol­low-up, Quorthon completely jettisons the whole «Viking metal» angle, and puts out a bona fide thrash metal album, conforming to all the laws of the genre. Insane tempos, jackhammer riffs, growling vocals, complete disregard for variety, and a running length of 33 minutes.

 

Now, considering that this was Quorthon, after all, the guy that moved from speedy black-metal satanism to the sacred hammer of Thor in less than half a decade, something radical could have been predicted, but hardly this, an album that shows no traces whatsoever of anything that made Hammerheart so unique. And the really bad news is that there is nothing whatsoever that would make Requiem comparably unique. It has been reported that Quorthon's goal here was simply to pay a brief tribute to some of his early metal influences — to take a break from rolling the epic stone and do something just for the momentary fun of it. Perhaps so, but this neither explains why the trend continued on his next albums, nor makes the whole experience gain in intelligence.

 

Two things somewhat redeem this strange decision. One, the production continues to be miles ahead of Bathory's early stuff, and Quorthon's guitars produce meticulously differentiated strings of metallic notes rather than the thick black goo of the first three albums. Second, strange as it is, many of the thrash riffs that he knocks together for these songs are fun — slow them down a bit, paint them less black, and you can get a pretty memorable hard rock album. With everything ta­ken at the same tempo (except for the mood-setting intros, which tend to be slow and sludgy), the riffs are very similar in structure and mood, but each single song does have its own riff, with slight variations, and after a couple listens you might even start appreciating the melodic com­ponent — at any rate, these songs are not ultra-quick knock-offs, because you would have to be a musical genius to knock 'em off in a couple of minutes, and Quorthon is hardly a musical genius, but he sure was a hard worker.

 

So it is not the riffs (which are quite fine for a generic thrash record), nor the solos (which, I do be­lieve, show further improvement in Quorthon's technique) that irritate. Irritating factors involve (a) the drumming: «Vvornth» was fine and dandy working with the slow epic stuff, but with the fast stuff, most of the time he is just too busy trying to stay on time so as to try something intere­s­ting — a regular bane with both thrash and hardcore, making the drumming patterns sound moro­nic instead of properly aggressive; (b) the singing: gone altogether are Quorthon's clean vocals, replaced by sore-throat growling that is not even banshee-style evil like on the early records, just sounds like a freshly excavated zombie from a zombie-trash style movie.

 

Lyrics-wise, Quorthon moves back to images of gore, violence, and Satanism, occasionally going to such extremes that, once the lyrics sheet is finally pulled out and examined, the parodic status of the album may no longer be doubted — I mean, "the altar covered in lifegiving cum / the smell of forever running wet cunts"? that's not even close to the style of the first three albums, more like Cannibal Corpse or something. But I seriously doubt that somebody will ever want to look at those lyrics with a magnifying glass — in general, my only wish is for this album to have been presented as completely instrumental, in which case we could simply take all these riffs home and stay safe, sound, and undamaged by the expelled shards of Quorthon's Miraculously Self-Regene­rating Larynx.

 

Thumbs up for the brave decision for a radical change — already the second one in Bathory's his­tory, propelling Quorthon's team to further levels of uniqueness — but much as I like some of these riffs, the experience as a whole is so ridiculous that the same gesture can hardly be applied to the music. Still, nowhere near as bad, mind you, as some of Bathory's disappointed fans, year­ning for another meeting with the Scandinavian pantheon, would have you believe.

 

OCTAGON (1995)

 

1) Immaculate Pinetreeroad #930; 2) Born To Die; 3) Psychopath; 4) Sociopath; 5) Grey; 6) Century; 7) 33 Some­thing; 8) War Supply; 9) Schizianity; 10) Judgement Of Posterity; 11) Deuce.

 

This is where we hit total rock bottom: think Requiem, but without all the good riffs. Keeping the tempos, Quorthon completely jettisons any attempts at decent songwriting — most of this stuff is headed straight for the moshing pit and nowhere else. Perhaps the idea was that Requiem did not manage to be nearly as extreme as Quorthon envisaged it, so he gave us something even more blunt, minimalistic, and «parodic» in the bad sense of the word.

 

If it can be any consolation, the vocals are cleaner this time, closer in execution and effect to classic early Bathory than the «gargling-one's-own-vomit» approach of Requiem. On the other hand, the lyrics have deteriorated beyond repair: ʽ33 Somethingʼ is Quorthon's «tribute» to the execution of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, about which he must have read in the papers circa 1994, and if the «song» is supposed to make one experience disgust towards the killer, it fails — by offering neither a hint at melody nor a glimpse of truly scary imagery. "Blooded hole, twisted soul, eat my shit, suck my dick", goes the refrain. Okay then.

 

One does not have to go much farther than the song titles — ʽPsychopathʼ, ʽSociopathʼ (back to back!), ʽSchizianityʼ — to understand what it is all about: a dumb experiment in going to sonic and verbal extremes, perhaps (who knows?) consciously aimed at offending and alienating Quor­thon's heavily expanded fanbase. In the process, lines are completely blurred between heavy me­tal and hardcore (much of this record could have very easily come from the hands of, say, Agno­stic Front), but not in a triumphant synthesis of the genres, rather in a catastrophic meltdown of both. A few of the songs slow down the tempos (ʽCenturyʼ, ʽSchizianityʼ), but then they end up sounding like derivative and cumbersome attempts to revive the old New Wave of British heavy metal — not as utterly dumb, perhaps, but just as forgettable.

 

Biggest surprise, and most decent entry on the album, is a cover of ʽDeuceʼ — yes, the KISS song, possibly thought of as another ironic slap in the face to the fans: Bathory's evil / brutal sound used to be as far removed from the glam-rock theater of KISS as possible, yet here is Quorthon coming out of the closet, confessing his loyalty not only to the old-school thrash masters (which could be understood), but to the make-up wearing poseurs as well. As an expectation-breaker, the gesture could actually be adorable — if not for the fact that the cover is all too faithful, yet all too per­functory, carrying over neither the caveman cockiness of Gene Simmons, nor the garage crude­ness of early KISS guitars (for that matter, cold as I usually am towards KISS, ʽDeuceʼ is one of their greatest songs, and nobody has ever played it quite like those guys).

 

In short, another failure — experimental failure, to be precise, not a corny «sell-out» or anything, just firm final proof that not everything Quorthon tried to do turned to gold. Black metal, yes; Viking metal, for sure; but troglodytish thrashing — no. (I almost caught myself trying to type in something like "the guy was just too intelligent to properly get this style", but then realized I have way too little knowledge about Quorthon's degree of intelligence to make this into even a purely hypo­thetical statement). Thumbs down, and it would be easy to pretend that this album never actually happened — after all, «failed experiments» do not have to be considered as a natural part of the artist's general curve. 

 

BLOOD ON ICE (1996)

 

1) Intro; 2) Blood On Ice; 3) Man Of Iron; 3) One Eyed Old Man; 4) The Sword; 5) The Stallion; 6) The Wood­woman; 7) The Lake; 8) Gods Of Thunder, Of Wind And Of Rain; 9) The Ravens; 10) The Revenge Of The Blood On Ice.

 

Apparently, the story is as follows: In between the «transitional» Blood, Fire And Death and the stylistic revolution and public success of Ham­mer­heart, Quorthon had actually recorded yet another album — one that explored his newly-acquired interest in his Scandinavian heritage even farther than Hammerheart, being sort of a highly cohesive «rock oratorio». Inside was a Nor­dic fan­tasy, loosely based on the motives of Germanic mythology, but «creatively reworked» by Quorthon, presumably in order to avoid being sued by Odin's and Thor's legal representatives for copyright in­fringement — you never know when that lightning might strike you.

 

Having recorded the master tapes, Quorthon, however, had second thoughts about releasing the album for public consumption — feeling, as he admitted himself, that his fanbase was not yet ready for such a radical image reinvention. The project was therefore shelved, and Quorthon started working on Hammerheart instead. Only six years later, having accidentally leaked the information and received lots of feedback from the fans (who, by that time, were not only well accustomed to his Viking schtick, but probably also felt seriously irritated by Quorthon's subse­quent move to stupid thrash territory), he returned to the old tapes — cleaned them up, remixed them based on improved technology, and finally made them available to everyone under the title of Blood On Ice, which at least sounds a little better than «King Arthur on ice», I'd say.

 

Frankly speaking, it is not quite clear why this album, had it been out there in 1989, could have been more of a «shock» to fans than Hammerheart. It does suffer in comparison to the latter, but not because of its storyline, or any sort of extra pomposity, or anything like that: it simply does not match Hammerheart in terms of sheer quantity of good ideas. The storyline is a little corny, as is every one-man fantasy-style reworking of any mythological tradition — elegantly shaped and steadily balanced through hundreds of years of «natural selection» — and perhaps he did feel a little shy about unfurling his story of one-eyed wise men, twin-headed Beasts, and eight-legged stallions, replacing it with the superficially more impressive pseudo-historism of Hammerheart. How­ever, Quorthon's verba­city rarely stands in the way of proper music: the real reason why Blood On Ice feels a little disappointing is that, unlike Hammerheart, this one is really envisi­oned as a «musical saga», and the one flaw that could be naturally expected of a musical saga is monotonousness and repetitiveness.

 

From that angle, Blood On Ice, with its emphasis on the «never-ending riff» rather than the «awe­some riff», has more in common with Twilight Of The Gods, or those particular parts of Hammerheart that pre-announce Twilight (most notably, ʽOne Rode To Asa Bayʼ). The tracks are typically long and repetitive, only occasionally jolted by vocal gimmicks (such as the deep «iron-man» spoken passage in the middle of the title track, or the «one-eyed old man» monolog on the same-titled tune) or an acoustic interlude (ʽThe Ravensʼ; ʽMan Of Ironʼ, despite its title, is actually a crudely constructed acoustic folk ballad as well).

 

Elsewhere, the riffs are really only there to propel the song forward — martial-wise (title track; ʽThe Stallionʼ) or, sometimes, in a more blues-rocky, almost swampy mode (ʽThe Lakeʼ — did I just say «swampy»?). This is all fine and dandy for a «saga», if we are simply supposed to take this as a heavy backing to Quorthon's story, but if the story happens to be the last thing in which we might be interested on a Bathory album, the number of memorable events on Blood On Ice will not be too large. (For some reason, the only thing that still sticks with me after several listens is the juxtaposition of thumping hooves and bleating sheep — even though I have never suspec­ted myself of anything close to a pastoralist or nomadic mindset...).

 

Altogether, this one is definitely for the fans, although it goes without say­ing that it does feel a lot like a gulp of fresh, methane-free air after the previous two albums — and that the story, corny elements and all, does show a deep, sincere interest in the Scandinavian pagan tradition: there are conceptual elements in Blood On Ice that may feel clumsy or poorly stated, but there is no denying the passion and the obsessive involvement. Unfortunately, this is not quite enough to properly «reward» the album with a thumbs up.

 

DESTROYER OF WORLDS (2001)

 

1) Lake Of Fire; 2) Destroyer Of Worlds; 3) Ode; 4) Bleeding; 5) Pestilence; 6) 109; 7) Death From Above; 8) Krom; 9) Liberty & Justice; 10) Kill Kill Kill; 11) Sudden Death; 12) White Bones; 13) Day Of Wrath.

 

For all those torn between the «epic-Viking» personality of Hammerheart-era Quorthon and the «thrash-hammer» style of his Requiem/Octagon period, here is the ultimate in gift-showering: a 65 minute-long package that gives you the best of both worlds! Bombastic Scandinavian epics and mosh heaven at (almost) the same time — could anything be better in this world for an open-minded heavy metal admirer?

 

Now, considering that both the latest Viking-style and the latest thrash-style offerings from Ba­thory were, at best, questionable (Blood On Ice was somewhat dull, and Octagon was somewhat horrendous), even a very open-minded metal admirer would probably think twice before putting his trust into Destroyer Of Worlds. And, sure enough, some of the problems are carried over: the «epic» compositions are long-winded and repetitive, while the thrash stuff is marred by the same old stupid vocals that are stuck somewhere in the gutter that separates «singing» from «growling» and are more likely to irritate and offend rather than impress and entertain. This I have to say: Quorthon is always Quorthon, despite his seemingly many faces, and, although you can look to Hammerheart for near-perfection, it is more typical of the guy to stick to his formulaic guns than to try and make them look more and more refined over time.

 

That said, with all the disclaimers in place, Destroyer Of Worlds is a surprisingly good record. We start out with three songs that could have very easily fit on Twilight Of The Gods, and with a little more squirming, even on Hammerheart, although the subject matters are a mixed bag — Quorthon seems to be jumping from his favorite Satanism schtick (ʽLake Of Fireʼ) to images of nuclear apocalypse (title track) and then to Scandinavian pagan anthems (ʽOdeʼ). This means there is no and there will be no further conceptual unity to the album, but that's okay — it was clearly designed that way, as a diverse series of vignettes, and who really cares as long as the vig­nettes in question work as planned? ʽLake Of Fireʼ adds little of interest to the Bathory canon, stately and threateningly creeping along like all those medieval procession-type songs on Twi­light, but it forms a good contrast with the ensuing sturm-und-drang of the title track — and then ʽOdeʼ comes on and blows both of them away with another medieval procession, but this time set to a belligerent, muscular, angular riff.

 

Then we start moving into true thrash and speed metal territory — ʽBleedingʼ («anatomy metal» with all the expected lyrical imagery), ʽ109ʼ / ʽDeath From Aboveʼ (a nice double tribute to the powers of the Luftwaffe), ʽKromʼ (a somewhat pathetic anthem to the biker tribe), ʽKill Kill Killʼ (yoohoo, anti-establishment!), ʽSudden Deathʼ... wait, is this about somebody getting clubbed to death during a frickin' hockey match? See how this guy Quorthon is dying to show you how ver­satile and unpredictable he can be if he puts his mind to it? Vikings, Satanists, necrophiliacs, nu­clear holocausts, WWII air raiders, bikers, hockey players — suddenly, the Bathory world has stretched out to an almost ridiculously huge size, sucking in almost everything in sight, like the Vacuum Cleaner Beast in Yellow Submarine.

 

But do we get decent music to go with all that? I'd say, rather yes than no, and that covers even the thrash numbers — suddenly, many of them turn out to be endowed with riffs far more expres­sive and colorful than anything on Octagon. ʽKromʼ, for instance, does its best to mimic a bike engine roar, turning the steel machine into an animated Godzilla. ʽ109ʼ does the same from the perspective of a Messerschmitt fighter. And ʽSudden Deathʼ does honestly try to imitate the hustle and bustle of a hockey game gone wild — okay, so it does sound a bit like an imaginary soundtrack to WrestleMania or something, but Quorthon manages to make it fun anyway.

 

As the album ends with two more long compositions (ʽWhite Bonesʼ starts out in generic slow-thrash mode, then suddenly becomes a bluesy / artsy instrumental epic midway through, with Quorthon picking up a psychedelic guitar tone that he never used before; ʽDay Of Wrathʼ returns us to medieval procession mode), it sort of begins to dawn on you that more work must have gone into the construction of this whole thing than on most Bathory albums put together — all the more impressive considering that the entire record was done by Quorthon alone: he is credited for everything, including the rhythm session. At the very least, Destroyer Of Worlds may be counted as the most bizarre and baffling of all Bathory oeuvres — considering that Quorthon had always been a weird person, this judgement is not to be taken lightly.

 

Sure enough, from a purely formal / technical point of view, other than the completely unpredictable lyrical to­pics, there is not much new here — but what matters is that, for the first time ever, Quorthon has really sewn all of his ends together, and it works much better than anybody could have expected, and in much stranger ways: for instance, it took me my third listen to actually get that something was «really happening» here, so to speak — but once it did, the in­trigue never went away again. It's still there with me, so a quick thumbs up here before the en­thusiasm wanes and I start getting angry at those dumb vocals once again (or at the lyrics, which could be even worse — other than the Viking epics, most of these verses do suck).

 

NORDLAND I (2002)

 

1) Prelude; 2) Nordland; 3) Vinterblot; 4) Dragons Breath; 5) Ring Of Gold; 6) Foreverdark Woods; 7) Broken Sword; 8) Great Hall Awaits A Fallen Brother; 9) Mother Earth Father Thunder; 10) Heimfard.

 

By early 2002, the «recuperation» process was over. Time to get back to the regal / brutal majesty of Hammerheart, quoth the Quorthon, and finally make something overtly and inherently epic once again. The project to be realized had to be his most ambitious ever, spanning an astonishing four CDs worth of the vikingest music ever created by a son of Scandinavia. Unfortunately, the wicked Christian god spoiled this noble undertaking like he'd previously spoiled everything else, recalling Quorthon to his heavenly prison (or hellish torture — the pagan devotee probably would not care either way) only two albums into the project.

 

In a way, the transcendental divinity had his own good reason, because Nordland I, the first bunch of the projected four to see the light of day, is certainly no Hammerheart, and four major servings of this dish in a row might have caused serious aural diarrhea. More precisely, it tries very hard to be an improved-and-updated Hammerheart, and in doing that, loses much of the spontaneity, freshness, and «discovery-triggered excitement» of its ideal. Listen to the first song here and you will pretty much know 90% of what comes next: slow, plodding, monotonous riff-rockers cast in the mold of repetitive sagas. With stern medieval vocal harmonies; occasional pre­sence of, but more often, complete lack of build-ups and crescendos; a screechy, but not particu­larly «pretentious» guitar solo every now and then; and generally clean vocals singing something about snow, ice, swords, hammers, dragons, and the great hall in the sky.

 

Exceptions to this formula are intentionally scarce: ʽRing Of Goldʼ is a pure acoustic ballad (al­though not any less slow, plodding, or monotonous), and ʽBroken Swordʼ is a speed / power me­tal anthem that is very welcome in terms of tempo, but that's about it, and that is the way it was meant — that is the way, Quorthon must have felt, that one really goes about in honoring one's warrior ancestors, and if you don't like it, you might as well just leave it. You're not necessarily supposed to enjoy the steady, stately, «dull» flow of a medieval Icelandic poetry recital either.

 

However, with a little bit of tolerance, patience, and secret feelings for fantasy lore, Nordland quickly goes from «listenable» to «enjoyable» and even «respectable». The riffs are far from ge­nius, but they do a generally good job here of supplying proper atmospherics: similar to each other in that most of them precisely follow the rhythm, making fairly short use of half and quarter notes, but each one vigorous and meaningful in its own right. The riff of ʽNordlandʼ plows on with a decisive militaristic sweep; ʽVinterblotʼ is infected with almost «industrial» venom, beco­ming one of the heaviest tracks in Bathory's entire history; ʽDragons Breathʼ tries out yet another poisonous tone, no doubt, going for a symbolic recreation of the song's title; ʽGreat Hall Awaits A Fallen Brotherʼ goes for a «choo-choo train» playing style, as if the Great Hall in question could be reached by a heavenly railroad, and so on.

 

The downside is that, yes, most of these songs make their point over the first minute (of the song proper, discounting the noisy moody intros to some of them), and then mostly go on to reiterate these points — you really are in luck if you get to hear a brief solo, or if the song, like ʽForever­dark Woodsʼ, does indeed turn out to consist of two separate parts with two different riffs. For deep fans of Bathory's Viking style, this will be a plus; for everybody else, most likely, a minus — particularly if one starts thinking how all these vast spaces could have been filled up by some­thing much more creative. It also goes without saying that, in 2002, «art metal» bands in general were capable of immensely more creative work than this (Opeth alone would suffice, as a good example of a giant idea-generator next to Quorthon's tiny one).

 

But, as with Hammerheart, only on a smaller scale, there is still this strange, wond'rous feeling of how this guy, working completely on his own, is able to achieve so much with so little — even if this whole stuff does not necessarily feel «Nordic», it still feels authentic, with a real blazing fire roaring within these notes, and a real dragon's breath escaping from these licks when push comes to shove. I am not in love with the record, but I respect this kind of deep bite, and that alone is worth a thumbs up. Besides, even if it does lack the diversity and the surprise element of Destroyer Of Worlds, it also evades that record's low points — this is, after all, the kind of thing that Quorthon was really born to do, rather than generate strange thrash metal anthems about bedlam and bloodshed on the hockey field.

 

NORDLAND II (2003)

 

1) Fanfare; 2) Blooded Shore; 3) Sea Wolf; 4) Vinland; 5) The Land; 6) Death And Resurrection Of A Northern Son; 7) The Messenger; 8) Flash Of The Silver Hammer; 9) The Wheel Of Sun.

 

Considering how much time — around five minutes altogether — ʽThe Wheel Of Sunʼ requires to go through with its massive coda, one might have thought that Nordland II was not only de­signed to be the last Nordland installment, but was actually to be the last Bathory album ever, that last big fat chord after which Quorthon could finally retire, or remove his presence from this Christianity-soiled earth altogether. Which he actually did around June 7, 2004, allegedly dying of heart failure — so very impatient to finally honor that Valhalla reservation.

 

In reality, though, Quorthon himself had stated that there were to be four Nordland albums, and a third one was already in the works when misfortune fell. And, indeed, other than the grand coda to ʽWheel Of Sunʼ, there is nothing on Nordland II to suggest intentional account closure. Quite on the contrary, it sounds a wee bit disappointing as a follow-up to Nordland I: obviously, one could not expect any major stylistic changes, but a minor twist or two would have been nice. The only minor twist I see here is that the ultra-heavy, «industrial metal» vibe of Nordland I has all but disappeared, and that, consequently, the second volume made one small step away from bru­tal heaviness and towards «artsiness» — a tiny step that will make it seem a bit more visionary to some fans and a bit more boring to others.

 

The «fanfare» sequence that opens the album is a good illustration: three and a half minutes of stern icy synth-pomp — for my tastes, this stuff is way too crudely composed and produced to be emotionally engaging, but there will always be some Bathory fans ready to see it as a Grand Opening of the Gates to Ancient Scandinavian Consciousness. Thereupon, ʽBlooded Shoreʼ is a stately one-riff march, full of predictably martial solemnity, but it is neither heavy enough to pro­perly wake up my inner Viking, nor perfectionistic-majestic enough to disturb that old Wagnerian temptation. The song, and most of the other ones that follow, is worthy of a sleepwalking Quor­thon, not so much a Quorthon ambitious to prove that he is able to go beyond the confines of Hammerheart while playing by the rules of Hammerheart.

 

In fact, the album is surprisingly mild and slow all the way through to ʽDeath And Resurrection Of A Northern Sonʼ, where the old thrash instinct finally awakens and starts generating truly thunderous riffage: too bad that the «thunderous» sections of the song occupy less than half of its ten-minute duration. The major highlight comes a little later, in the form of the shortest song on the album: ʽFlash Of The Silver Hammerʼ (Paul McCartney and Maxwell dropped by to say hello, no doubt) is the first, if not the only, number to dispense with the stately majesty and simply bash it out in a «take-no-prisoners, show-no-mercy» style — none too soon, actually, or you might start wondering whether Quorthon really began to mellow out in his last years.

 

He did not, but overall, Nordland II is hardly an achievement to brag about: if the remaining two albums were to show the same quality, my guess is that the man would be running a serious risk of running out of fans before the saga was over, except for the usual bunch of diehards who would be happy enough if their idol released an entire album of minimal variations on ʽThe Hall Of The Mountain Kingʼ. The only saving grace of the album is the man's commitment to his mis­sion, and clear understanding of his own role in it — but it is well nigh impossible for music like this to run on commitment alone: would it have hurt too much to add some emotional variety and a slightly larger number of memorable riffs? As of today, only Odin knows the answer.

THE BATS

DADDY'S HIGHWAY (1987)

 

1) Treason; 2) Sir Queen; 3) Round And Down; 4) Take It; 5) North By North; 6) Tragedy; 7) Block Of Wood; 8) Miss These Things; 9) Mid City Team; 10) Some Peace Tonight; 11) Had To Be You; 12) Daddy's Highway; 13*) Calm Before The Storm; 14*) Candidate; 15*) Mad On You; 16*) Trouble In This Town; 17*) Made Up In Blue.

 

The Bats are Robert Scott on rhythm guitar, vocals, and songwriting duties; Kaye Woodward on lead guitar and vocals; Paul Kean on bass; Malcolm Grant on drums. The Bats formed in 1982, released their first EP in 1984, but had to wait half a decade before releasing their first LP, Daddy's Highway, in 1987, featuring twelve original compositions by Scott and also making additional use of session guest Alastair Galbraith on violin. Oh, and they are, of course, from New Zealand (from the wonderfully named city of Christchurch, to be exact).

 

These are the dry facts that no one need deny. The accompanying assumption is that The Bats loved their homoplastic relatives The Byrds, and everything that had to do with folk-pop jangle in general. Subsequently, they did not exactly invent what is informally known as «Kiwi pop», but they very much defined it and helped substantiate its stereotypic «nice and jangly» image — and they themselves were never nicer and janglier than they are on this here LP debut.

 

Few things are simpler than the Bats formula — maybe the Ramones, but then, punk thrives on simplicity, whereas folk-pop need not necessarily be as one-dimensional as Daddy's Highway. Steady, danceable rhythm, usually taken in mid- or fast tempo for optimal effect; two guitars — one with lower pitch, one providing the jangly flourishes; quiet, relaxed vocals, either solo or with doubled harmonies, always keeping fairly low in the mix; inobtrusive, usually introspective, lyrics that are not meant to be paid serious attention to. This description pretty much applies to every one of these twelve songs, as well as the five bonus tracks taken from B-sides and EPs and appended to the CD reissue.

 

If you really like this sound as such — and, for all its minimalism, it is a pretty seductive sound, and it must have been even more seductive, coming on the airwaves in the synth-pop dominated 1980s — Daddy's Highway may appear to you as an endearing sonic masterpiece. Compared to something like R.E.M. or The Smiths, the music is clearly «fluffy», but, on the other hand, it is not here to ac­company a pretentious, «artsy-fartsy» personality like Stipe or Morrissey: Robert Scott humbly stays out of the spotlight, letting the music always speak for the man. This is not an endorsement of those who hate pretentious personalities — just a reminder that there is a time for everything, including a time when the simple, pretty, monotonous music of The Bats might work more efficiently than the more demanding, but not necessarily more satisfying music of R.E.M. or The Smiths.

 

Individually, the songs are not divided into highlights or lowlights: from the opening life-asser­ting guitar dialog of ʽTreasonʼ and right down to the bass-heavy sounds of the title track, the songs are all nice, mildly memorable, and generally interchangeable. Vivacious tempos help out a lot — every time the band slows down, like on ʽMiss These Thingsʼ (with surprisingly out-of-tune guitar, which might have been intentional), they tend to lose my attention. But almost every song, at the very least, tries to generate and develop its own hook, even if it does not always suc­ceed — subsequent listens, once you've gotten past the similar atmosphere and start picking up the actual differences in melody, reveal that some songs are better written than others.

 

For instance, I would suggest that ʽTreasonʼ, with its ascending-descending riff, is better than ʽTra­gedyʼ, with its rather tired and worn-out folk chord pattern; or that ʽNorth By Northʼ, with its gritty rhythm section workout and «quasi-spooky» echoey vocal overdubs, rocks harder than the happy bounce of ʽTake Itʼ; or that the siren-esque double guitars that open ʽBlock Of Woodʼ are a much catchier introduction than the somewhat distracted strumming that opens the way-too-Smiths-like ʽSir Queenʼ. I could suggest all this and more — but then, in the end, this would all look like nit-picking, and rather belong in some parallel world, where The Bats are recognized as the greatest band of all time and armies of musicologists are paid to offer competing interpreta­tions of each chord change in each of their songs.

 

Therefore, having said all I really have to say, I leave you here with a thumbs up and an extra recommendation for the bonus-tracked edition: the last song here, ʽMade Up In Blueʼ (the title track from their 1986 EP), shows that The Bats were capable of «anthemic» choruses as well, and rocks almost as hard as ʽNorth By Northʼ.

 

THE LAW OF THINGS (1989)

 

1) Other Side Of You; 2) Law Of Things; 3) Never Said Goodbye; 4) Yawn Vibes; 5) Time To Get Ready; 6) Ten To One; 7) Mastery; 8) I Fall Away; 9) Cliff Edge; 10) Nine Days; 11) Bedlam; 12) Smoking Her Wings.

 

If there is a «law of things» according to The Bats, it is unquestionably the law of preservation — the band's second album does not introduce even a single serious change to the formula. Same lineup, same twin guitar jangle, same guest violinist, same vibes, same moods. Same crude pro­duction style, too, except that Robert Scott's lead vocals frequently get clearer in the mix and are not as often double-tracked with Woodward's, so you can get a better picture of the sonic palette of New Zealand's Roger McGuinn — if you'd like to get a better picture, of course, because his voice isn't exactly the epitome of expressivity, to put it mildly.

 

The album is rarely, if ever, described as a «sophomore slump», but critical reaction here usually follows the well-known critical principle of «If A precedes B and B = A, then A is better than B», as the band is supposed to run out of its originally accumulated cloud of inspiration and slip into a «regular workman» routine. It is a dangerous sign when it is the opening and the closing track that are usually found listed as highlights — meaning that the listener, most likely, fell asleep right after the first song and woke up towards the end — and this is more or less what happened to The Law Of Things.

 

Granted, the closing track, ʽSmoking Her Wingsʼ, which was also the single, is a little different: if anything, it sounds like the little brother of Joy Division rather than The Smiths, with a vague hint of threatening doom emanating from its droning guitar parts and with an unusually stern, al­most «ceremonial» singing tone — yes, I think the late Ian Curtis would have dug this, even if The Bats, byt their very nature, are physiologically unable to generate those dark clouds: at best, this is just a slight patch of fog, but even in this way, it stands out from the rest.

 

And the rest is the rest: average-fast pop-rockers driven by pretty, but unexceptional folk-pop melodies and singalong-style choruses, almost always in the same relaxed-idealistic emotional state. I suppose that ʽTen To Oneʼ, stuck in the middle, is also a bit of a standout — guitar and vocals pack a bit more crunch, and even Alastair Galbraith's violin screeches and scrapes like somebody just stepped on its tail, er, neck. But that's just two and a half minutes out of a half hour of overall pleasant sameness. Feel free to pick your favorites — I, for one, think that the al­bum only loses if you begin to think of it in terms of individual melodies. (For instance, the melody of ʽNever Said Goodbyeʼ borrows its first chords from McCartney's ʽListen To What The Man Saidʼ — which, subsequently, makes its last chords sound like a botched version of that song's melody. I could easily see somebody preferring the ragged, unglossed-over production of The Bats as artistically superior to McCartney's «stiffly polished» arrangement, but in terms of general melodicity and catchiness, Paul wins over this particular phrasing, hands down).

 

Still, especially in the context of its times, The Law Of Things as a whole is quite a thumbs up experience. The title ʽYawn Vibesʼ may be appropriately self-ironic, but at least these are some happy, tasteful yawn vibes we are getting provided with.

 

FEAR OF GOD (1991)

 

1) Boogey Man; 2) The Black And The Blue; 3) Dancing As The Boat Goes Down; 4) The Old Ones; 5) Hold All The Butter; 6) Fear Of God; 7) It's A Lie; 8) Straight Image; 9) Watch The Walls; 10) You Know We Shouldn't; 11) Jetsam; 12) The Looming Past.

 

On a strictly song-by-song basis, Fear Of God just might be The Bats' greatest album, narrowly beating out Daddy's Highway. The life-giving formula remains intact, but the overall impression is that they gave it their best by tightening the screws with all remaining strength — as a result, the riffs are sometimes sharper, the choruses occasionally memorable on-the-spot, and the sound, without losing any of its jangle foundation, is toughened and more «rock-bound». Some of the songs are, in fact, closer to that very early «jangle-punk» style captured on ʽMade Up In Blueʼ, and this gives the record a mildly darker tinge. And dark is good, as we know.

 

Above all, my own personal favorite Bats song is here: ʽDancing As The Boat Goes Downʼ is as «doom-laden» as this band ever got. The alarming guitar ring, the ominous viola dance (provided by guest star Alan Starrett, replacing Alastair Galbraith in the status of «our regular guest guy to do the bowing»), and the perfectly phrased deterministic chorus — what is this, Robert Scott preaching about the imminence of the end? And being fairly convincing, too, without having to resort to dark basslines and dreary gravel-voiced intonations? This is by no means «happy» music, but it is not «obnoxiously depressing» music, either. Very good stuff.

 

The only other tune on the album to share the worried grimness of ʽDancingʼ is the title track — a deeply paranoid love song, rather than having anything to do with stances on religion; this one does have a dark bassline, and a fuzzier rhythm guitar as well, but is not as effective as ʽDancingʼ because the chorus is not nearly as catchy. We couldn't really rave about a generally «serious» or «mature» tone of the album as a whole just because it happens to have the words ʽfearʼ and ʽGodʼ rather than ʽDaddyʼ in its title. Yet on the other hand, even the «lighter» songs also frequently give the impression of being more «mature», if by «mature» we mean «accomplished» or «re­quiring a little bit more time to bring them up to quality level».

 

Thus, the single ʽBoogey Manʼ opens with their purest-sounding set of twin guitar chords so far, spun in a pretty revolving loop together with the vocal verse melody, with the chorus providing, as its «counterpoint», yet another such loop in a different tonality — everything perfectly coordi­nated, if not altogether deeply emotional. The accordeon and organ flourishes on ʽThe Old Onesʼ nicely shadow the caressing vocal harmonies. On ʽStraight Imageʼ, the rhythm guitar is put in banjo mode, creating a particularly «busy» melody for the verses that contrasts with the melodic folk-pop line of the bridge — two entirely different voices co-inhabiting the same song without imposing on each other. ʽYou Know We Shouldn'tʼ does a great job of amplifying its hook by having the chorus doubled by an equally loud lead guitar line; together with the power chords that triumphantly conclude each verse, this makes it into one of the band's most efficient embodi­ments of the stereotypical «power pop» ideology.

 

As before, though, the band's weak point — though others might think it their strong point — re­mains the lack of a distinct frontman personality. ʽThe Looming Pastʼ, with its title and lyrics about the nighttime plight of the protagonist who's lost the capacity of being in love, demands to be taken seriously, but neither the music nor Scott's monotonous vocal delivery really live up to the drama. The delivery is tolerable, and the music, with its zydeco-ish accordeon echoes, is pretty, and that's it: not a whiff of drama. Ian Curtis, Morrissey, or Michael Stipe would probably have had a thing or two to say about it. But on the other hand, you might say that The Bats are just playing it safe — for every single admirer of Curtis, Morrissey, and Stipe, there is also a hater, whereas «hating Robert Scott» would be a totally absurd activity.

 

Then again, «personality bluffing» is a part of this game, too: there must be a reason why Joy Division, The Smiths, and R.E.M. are all immensely popular, while The Bats have, for the most part, remained a New Zealand phenomenon, and it doesn't exclusively have to do with the fact that the average person in the Northern hemisphere is usually unsure whether New Zealand is a part of Australia, a country in its own right, or a name for a particularly wicked cocktail. As good as Fear Of God is, it is also smooth, even, and not very inspirational. But it also works every time you are not necessarily in the mood for inspiration — and that's just the time to catch it, en­joy it, and give it a thumbs up before that old «yearning for something grander» starts to set in.

 

SILVERBEET (1991)

 

1) Courage; 2) Sighting The Sound; 3) Too Much; 4) Slow Alight; 5) Valley Floor; 6) Love Floats Two; 7) Green; 8) No Time For Your Kind; 9) Straight On Home; 10) Before The Day; 11) Stay Away; 12) Drive Me Some Boars; 13) Half Way To Nowhere.

 

The title is probably a pun on the Silver Beetles — but if this means that, in some way, The Bats are really trying to compare themselves to this early stage in the Fab Four's career, they are totally off the mark. Most likely, it just seemed like a funny wordgame to somebody, funny enough to be commemorated with an LP title.

 

And the LP itself is basically Fear Of God, Vol. 2: the same brand of «tough» folk-rock, played in a tight, disciplined manner, crisp-clearly produced, with a slightly ominous tinge and a small touch of «social consciousness» to some of the songs (ʽGreenʼ, for instance, is a commemoration of the Rainbow Warrior incident from 1985 — more firmly embedded in the minds of New Zea­landers than anyone else, since the bombing took place in their waters, but well worth remember­ing for everyone, including Bats fans around the globe). But just as The Law Of Things was a slightly less interesting minor brother of Daddy's Highway, so is Silverbeet, on the whole, a little more stale than the freshened up Fear Of God.

 

As usual, everybody here will have one's own favorites. ʽCourageʼ is often singled out because it opens the album and was its lead single as well, but I find it too repetitive (the song hangs on one simple guitar line from first to last second) and lacking a vocal hook. On the other hand, people rarely talk about ʽLove Floats Twoʼ, which I find to be one of their best love songs — guitars, lead and backing vocals all conspire to make the "you know love floats two, and there's room enough for you" chorus sound a little creepy, as if the boat in question were really floating out towards the world's end. Nor do I hear much mention of ʽNo Time For Your Kindʼ, featuring the album's most impressive chord change from verse to chorus — the lyrics are a little muddy, so it is hard to ascertain what exactly is troubling Scott on this particular occasion, but at least the main hook, a.k.a. the song title, is delivered to stern prohibitive perfection.

 

Some of the other songs place their trust in near-subliminal guitar lines, like the psychedelic elec­tric wail that appears in between the verses of ʽToo Muchʼ, or the even more desperate howling backing Scott on ʽStay Awayʼ — on the whole, the band's drift towards more and more somber melancholia, as compared to the easier-flowing, lighter-colored days of Daddy's Highway is be­coming more pronounced. But this change is neither for the good nor the bad — because Scott and Co.'s skills at writing melodies and dressing them up steadily remain at the exact same level of competence. Since the sound is unshakeably pleasant, and the humble hooks are as well hid as always, and ʽLove Floats Twoʼ is a kicker and all, Silverbeet gets another thumbs up — albeit with an ever so slowly decreasing level of enthusiasm.

 

COUCHMASTER (1995)

 

1) Outside; 2) Afternoon In Bed; 3) Around You Like Snow; 4) Work It Out; 5) Train; 6) Land 'O' Lakes; 7) Chain Home Low; 8) Supernova; 9) Shoeshine; 10) Crow Song; 11) Smorgasboard; 12) Knowledge Is Power; 13) It's Hap­pening To You; 14) Lost Weekend; 15) For The Ride; 16) Out Of Bounds; 17) Down To Me.

 

Do not let yourself be scared by the huge number of individual tracks — several represent brief instrumental interludes, consisting either of atmospheric noise (ʽOutsideʼ) or simple rhythmic drones (ʽSmorgasboardʼ), inserted for the sake of... God only knows what. If you ask me, the idea of inserting little fluffy «links» in between The Bats' songs, many, if not most, of which are fairly little and perfectly fluffy themselves, is odd. Then again, odd ideas on Bats' albums are so rare anyway that this one at least makes Couchmaster stand out in some way.

 

Actually, there is a better way. The relative quality of a Bats album is practically always measu­rable by counting out how many memorable / evocative guitar lines and catchy singalong vocal hooks they offer the listener, and on that scale Couchmaster registers impressively high; at least, my gut feeling tells me that it is an improvement over Silverbeet. Brief isolated impressions of some of the better songs are as follows:

 

ʽAfternoon In Bedʼ — nice «murmured» guitar line, quite adaptable to the idea of spending an afternoon in bed. Not exactly ʽI'm Only Sleepingʼ-quality (too fluffy and friendly, almost invi­ting, and who the heck would really invite anybody else to their bed in the afternoon?). ʽWork It Outʼ — another fine line, either «weeping» or buzzing around you like a harmless mosquito; leave it to The Bats to synthesize that «sadness-lite» flavor, not strong enough to kill yourself but long enough to guzzle a pint. ʽLand O' Lakesʼ — no particularly strong guitar parts, but one of those clever choruses that are at once singalong-style / anthemic and dreamy / personal. ʽShoeshineʼ — subtly engineered piece of melancholic dream-pop; excellent idea to put Kaye Woodward on vocals, and an exquisite swirling guitar flourish on top of everything. ʽIt's Happening To Youʼ — from somewhere deep in the woods, comes a lilting guitar tone of sheer utmost beauty; if only its voice were a little louder and cleaner! ʽFor The Rideʼ — a little faster and angrier than everything else, with a phased / wah-wah guitar accompaniment that puts «psychedelia» ahead of «folk» for the first time in this band's career, so it seems. ʽOut Of Boundsʼ — best guitar melody on the al­bum, no doubt about it; this one just seems specifically designed for situations when you are alone, depressed, and are in special need of that one friendly pat on the shoulder to chuck you out of that needless silly state.

 

I think this is pretty much all that is necessary to convince myself that they took a little extra care this time around in the songwriting department, and came out with probably the best swan song they could have theoretically come up with. Swan song, that is, because Couchmaster turned out to be the last Bats album in a decade, after which they all went their separate ways to raise their separate families — but not before offering this very fair deal for their fans, because the overall quantity of pleasant melodic ideas captured here is, I think, several times as high as on The Law Of Things; and offering one tightly-packed album in ten years is certainly preferable to offering five with one memorable spot per record. Hence, a grateful thumbs up for a particularly moody way of saying goodbye.

 

AT THE NATIONAL GRID (2005)

 

1) Western Isles; 2) Horizon; 3) Hubert; 4) Bells; 5) Single File; 6) Pre War Blues; 7) The Rays; 8) Things; 9) Mir; 10) Up To The Sky; 11) We Do Not Kick; 12) Flowers & Trees; 13*) Untitled.

 

Ten years later, The Bats are back to conquer the third millennium. But do they make any con­cessions? Do they even attempt to recognize how much has changed? Naturally they do not, or else the would not be The Bats. At The National Grid does not sound exactly the same way as Daddy's Highway, but if there are any differences in sound, they sure as heck ain't due to no sissy changes in musical trends and fashions. The Bats love their folk rock, and they couldn't care less about trends and fashions, and that obstinacy deserves respect — unless it comes from stupi­dity and lack of talent, which is not something Robert Scott could be easily accused of.

 

There is some bad news, though. With age, The Bats seem to have seriously mellowed out — not that they ever subscribed to the «rock'n'roll» idiom in the first place, but they did have a knack for  solid, steady beats and sharply focused electric jangle. At The National Grid opens with ʽWes­tern Islesʼ, a pretty, but highly fragile-sounding piece — acoustic guitars picked by elves, vocals contributed by hobbits, background vocals added by sylphids. Add the predictably monotonous mood (no dynamics or development whatsoever throughout the song's three minutes), and that essentially leaves you with three choices: (a) imagine yourself as a fairy, (b) plunge into deep sleep, (c) fail to notice that something was just played from your speakers in the first place.

 

The soporific effect is tentatively rectified already on the next track — ʽHorizonʼ adds drums, jangly rhythm guitar, and a distorted psychedelic lead guitar part. But «tentatively» is the key word, because the song is still essentially a drone (instrumentally) and a hum (vocally), the only difference from «shoegazing» lying in its fast tempo — yet whoever said that it is impossible to shoegaze with some acceleration? The whole point of this song, and this whole album, is in its at­mosphere and attitude.

 

Construction-wise, National Grid picks up exactly where Couchmaster left off — it, too, has a few of those brief instrumental interludes, usually consisting of one or two simple musical phra­ses locked in a trance-oriented cycle (ʽHubertʼ; ʽWe Do Not Kickʼ), that have no major purpose other than humbly introducing themselves to you. Hello, we are the interludes, we have no idea what we are doing here, they probably just forgot to add vocals to us, but you know, it was nice meeting you all the same, hope you have a good time out there.

 

But melody-wise, the album is not that strong because it has no such intention. The evocative lead lines of Couchmaster, such as the one that made ʽAfternoon In Bedʼ such a cute little clas­sic, are nowhere to be found — everything is melted down to acoustic strum and electric droning, with the vocals (particularly Kaye Woodward's sleepwalking performance on ʽMirʼ) floating on essentially the same frequencies all the way through. The atmosphere, as could be expected, is tasteful and friendly enough so as not to stimulate any thumbs down — in the end, The Bats are simply too good at their formula to ever make a truly bad record — but really, the album is only for diehard fanatics of this style.

 

THE GUILTY OFFICE (2008)

 

1) Countersign; 2) Crimson Enemy; 3) Broken Path; 4) Like Water In Your Hands; 5) Castle Lights; 6) Two Lines; 7) Satellites; 8) Later On That Night; 9) Steppin' Out; 10) The I Specialist; 11) The Guilty Office; 12) The Orchard.

 

A little bit more rock-oriented than its predecessor, as if Scott himself had realized that At The National Grid took things way too far in the rock-a-bye-baby direction. More electric guitar, louder drums, and even a whole new fast-tempo song (ʽSteppin' Outʼ) ensure that The Guilty Of­fice does not really intend to put you in a stupefying trance — it honestly wants you to think of it as a collection of individual pop-rock songs. With that in mind, let us see how many autonomous, self-contained, and positively stunning tunes Scott has managed to come up with this time.

 

ʽBroken Pathʼ could be one, creating an atmosphere of moderately deep gloom with its network of clean jangly, dirty distorted, and wailing psychedelic guitars. ʽTwo Linesʼ could be another, but not because of any vocal hooks — its main point of attraction is the guitar vs. strings battle in the coda, a very straightforward one, where baroque chamber atmosphere is pitted against purple haze and we may want to pick a favorite. ʽSteppin' Outʼ is not only fast, but brings back the idea of the «Moody Melancholic Melody» that the lead guitar plays in tandem with the rhythm strum, best represented on Couchmaster.

 

And this is pretty much it: even these particular descriptions are piss-poor, and the rest of the songs is thoroughly undescribable in layman terms. At this point, even switching from acoustic to electric guitars for volume, sharpness, and energy considerations does not help — the songs lack distinctiveness and may only be appreciated for the general style. I have nothing further to say.

 

FREE ALL THE MONSTERS (2011)

 

1) Long Halls; 2) Simpletons; 3) Free All The Monsters; 4) See Right Through Me; 5) It's Not The Same; 6) In The Subway; 7) Fingers Of Dwan; 8) Spacejunk; 9) On The Bank; 10) Canopy; 11) When The Day Comes; 12) Getting Over You.

 

A long-term fan of The Bats who would expect any change from the band as late as 2011 might as well expect AC/DC's Brian Johnson to star in a Broadway musical... oh wait a minute, he near­ly did star in a Broadway musical, so The Bats take first prize. Free All The Monsters continues the tradition of irregularly alternating «strong» Bats albums (cutesy folk-rock with hooks) and «weak» Bats albums (cutesy folk-rock without hooks), and it seems to me, on the whole, to be a minor improvement over Guilty Office, but with a huge stress on seems — it might just be the atmospheric pressure on the brain conditioning the judgement here.

 

Fans of Kaye Woodward might take a particular liking to such tracks as ʽSimpletonsʼ, where she sings harmony with Scott — the end result is a disarmingly charming twee pop nugget of a dis­armingly romantic nature; ʽSee Right Through Meʼ, where her role is mainly reduced to wispy ooh-oohs in the background; and, come to think of it, most of the other tracks have her vocal pre­sence as well — and when you put enough echo on Woodward's voice, it gives her the presence of an Elven Queen (it's a different question whether that automatically makes Scott an Elven King or not, but it does seem that they feed off each other, and that mixing their voices together helps soften their individual weaknesses and highlight their collective strength).

 

The instrumental parts, however, do not offer much respite — all atmospheric texture, as usual, no individuality whatsoever to the songs: even the instrumentals, like all Bats instrumentals, are predictable drones that are more likely to rock you to sleep than to rock you to any sort of action (ʽCanopyʼ). Only the title track can boast an anthemic riff, mixing tenderness with determination, but it took me three listens to single it out, lost as it is in the monotonous production jungle.

 

For the sake of objectivity, I must mention that the general critical and public opinion alike on Free All The Monsters was quite positive — however, I ascribe that primarily to a three-year long deprivation from fresh Bats material. Just another three years, just another Bats album.

 

THE DEEP SET (2017)

 

1) Rooftops; 2) Looking For Sunshine; 3) Rock And Pillars; 4) Walking Man; 5) No Trace; 6) Diamonds; 7) Antlers; 8) Busy; 9) Steeley Gaze; 10) Durkestan; 11) Shut Your Eyes; 12) Not So Good.

 

Just another six years, just another Bats album. Yes, these guys are tenacious — they really are bent on earning their «AC/DC of jangle-pop» status. Same stable lineup, same pleasant sound, and... you know, as I am listening to these songs more than three years after I'd written my last Bats review, I realize that I remember very well what the overall Bats sound used to be, but I do not remember how even a single one of those Bats songs went. Not one. Not even the very best ones that I praised in those reviews.

 

So I am going to make this very short — yes, I listened to The Deep Set thrice, and I liked it, and I can guarantee any Bats fan that if he/she is buying this record, he/she is buying an authentic Bats record and not a polka or a death metal or a modern classical version of The Bats. Conse­quently, you will get yourself some steady mid-tempo jangle-pop (ʽRooftopsʼ), some slow stut­tery jangle-pop (ʽLooking For Sunshineʼ), some bouncy Merseybeat jangle-pop (ʽRock And Pil­larsʼ), some heavily overdubbed mid-tempo jangle-pop (ʽWalking Manʼ), some fuzzy, sharp-edged jangle-pop (ʽNo Traceʼ), some slow jangle-pop with elements of electronica (ʽDiamondsʼ), some jangle-pop mixed with power chords and shit (ʽAntlersʼ), some jangle-pop with a busier lead guitar part than usual (ʽBusyʼ), some jangle-pop with dreamy overtones (ʽSteeley Gazeʼ), some politically-oriented jangle-pop (ʽDurkestanʼ), some adult-contemporary jangle-pop (ʽShut Your Eyesʼ), and some totally non-descript jangle-pop for the last number, because God forbid you take this record off with memories of an outstanding finale (ʽNot So Goodʼ).

 

Needless to say, all of this should be taken as a hearty recommendation for those Bats fans who feel themselves strong and able and are in no danger of having their stomachs pumped from an overdose of jangle-pop. Everybody else please remember that The Bats in 2017 sound exactly like The Bats in 1987, and that this is the only significant point that this record makes.

 

BAUHAUS

IN THE FLAT FIELD (1980)

 

1) Double Dare; 2) In The Flat Field; 3) God In An Alcove; 4) Dive; 5) Spy In The Cab; 6) Small Talk Stinks; 7) St. Vitus Dance; 8) Stigmata Martyr; 9) Nerves; 10*) Dark Entries; 11*) Telegram Sam; 12*) Rosegarden Funeral Of Sores; 13*) Terror Couple Kill Colonel; 14*) Scopes; 15*) Untitled; 16*) God In An Alcove; 17*) Crowds.

 

First things first: let us get the harmful genrism crap out of the way. Wherever you go to stock up on basic information about Bauhaus, you are sure to learn that they are «the fathers of goth rock» or, at least, «counted among the progenitors of gothic rock as a genre». There is only one piece of serious evidence to back up this idiotic stereotype — namely, the name of the band's first single: ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ. Naturally, every band whose first song mentions Bela Lugosi, vampires, and blood, deserves to be pigeonholed as «gothic rock», but one might just as well tag The Jimi Hendrix Experience as a «folk-rock band», since their first single was a cover of ʽHey Joeʼ. (For that matter, Bauhaus' third single was a sped-up cover of T. Rex's ʽTelegram Samʼ — about as «gothic» in essence as ʽMary Had A Little Lambʼ.)

 

Even if we do accept «goth rock» as a legit musical genre and describe it as, well, let's say, dark, gloomy, bass-heavy, minor-key music with a lyrical and atmospheric fixation on misanthropy, death, suicide, ghosts, and red blood on white sheets, In The Flat Field, the band's first and argu­ably best album, only fits certain parts of that description. Moodwise, this brainchild of Peter Murphy's is a whole lot more cheerful than Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, from which it draws much of its inspiration — not to mention certain albums by The Doors, Lou Reed, or Nico that I could mention, all of which are far more deserving of the «early goth rock» nametag than this relatively lively, tongue-in-cheek, occasionally quite funny piece of entertainment.

 

In fact, if you glance at some of the original negative reviews of the record, you can sometimes see people condemning it for not living up to their expectations — "sluggish indulgence instead of hoped for goth-ness", Dave McCullough quipped in Sounds. Indulgence — for sure; sluggish — vile slander. In 1980, there was nothing sluggish about the playing style of Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, David J, and Kevin Haskins. On the contrary, like all those fresh, young, seriously idealistic New Wave outfits, particularly those based in such centers of trendiness as London, they were determined to prove that they could combine new meaningful musical ideas with the verve and energy of their glam-rock and punk rock idols.

 

Just like the Smiths, Bauhaus' image is generated at the intersection of «the eccentric vocalist» (Peter Murphy) and «the inventive guitarist» (Daniel Ash). Of those two, Murphy is the less in­teresting component: he adds little to the accumulated legacy of Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, and Ian Curtis, and his trademark gloomy baritone has fairly little emotional range or depth. He is a com­petent singer, and his singing style matches the moods and the messages of the songs fairly well — you couldn't really imagine somebody like Elvis Costello singing these songs instead, or if you could, you shouldn't — and other than a couple cases of potentially overlong overscreaming, he never does much to irritate the listener; that's about as high as my praise can go.

 

The guitar playing of Daniel Ash, though, is an entirely different matter. Like most of the pro­minent guitarists of the New Wave era, he tends to eschew solos, but the style is by no means minimalistic — on the contrary, it is ambitiously synthetic, with little regard for any pre-estab­lished «genre rules». ʽDouble Dareʼ, for instance, opens the album with a few nasty feedback blasts, out of which quickly emerges an even nastier growling «industrial metal» riff. Then the title track, in contrast, is all based on distorted scratchy droning, in loving memory of Lou Reed, Phil Manzanera, and Tom Verlaine. ʽGod In An Alcoveʼ updates the old garage sound, where folksy arpeggios alternate with bluesy block chords and psycho trills (and to top it off, Dave J sometimes makes his bass adopt a disco pattern — what a nuthouse, eh?). On ʽSpy In The Cabʼ, he plays a depressing dirge, while the limp, but arrogant shuffle of ʽSmall Talk Stinksʼ could have easily been picked up by the likes of Marc Ribot for a Tom Waits album.

 

Nothing on Flat Field really hits harder, though, than the looped metal riff doubling the already established bass melody at 0:50 into ʽStigmata Martyrʼ. The song is a masterpiece of tongue-in-cheek «religious horror» in music — all due to the expressiveness of Ash's guitar, imitating all sorts of physical (and spiritual?) pain on an almost literal level. There is no real horror here (as in, «vivid musical projection of real life horror or the uncomfortably dark depths of one's soul»), it is all sheer theatrics, but it still perturbs the senses in some way. Even as a cheap thrill, songs like these show that Bauhaus are really onto something.

 

It may well be so that the original critics were confused — In The Flat Field is, indeed, too flashy, extravagant, and even «cheery» to genuinely convey any dread, doom, and despair (you do know for sure that Peter Murphy is no Ian Curtis, and that the rope is not a solution), but if it does not genuinely do that, what the hell is it here for in the first place? These songs make very little ideological sense; Murphy's lyrics, at best, convey a feeling of stupid adolescent decadence; and the band's being all over the place without firmly indicating where they do belong disorients the potential reviewer into a state of irritated hatred.

 

But get over it, potential reviewer. So what if these arrogant kids have reduced your precious Joy Division to the sarcastic-vaudevillian frame­work of a dark rock cabaret? Surely there might be an empty space left for this stuff somewhere on of your empty shelves. And there is really no logic in worshipping Tom Waits, who did much the same thing with his favorite types of music, and despising Bauhaus — who, at least, never took themselves too seriously. In the end, In The Flat Field may not «mean» much, but it is inventive, experimental, catchy, energetic, and fun, right down to the slow build-up (love those suspense-generating tick-tocking keyboards straight out of the local torture chamber) and massive explosion of ʽNervesʼ. Subsequently, I would like to give the album a thumbs up right now, and attempt to explain what particular major changes for the better it introduced to my life later, once I have enjoyed those changes to their fullest.

 

PS: Any newcomer to the band would do well to pick up the expanded reissue. For some reason, it does not include ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ, but it does include the rest of their early singles, inclu­ding the brilliant ʽTerror Couple Kill Colonelʼ (dedicated to the murder of Paul Bloomquist, with a delicately crafted folk-pop guitar part from Ash, and with the chorus always misheard by me as «pterodactyl kill carnal», adding even further to the mystery) and the insanely accelerated ʽTele­gram Samʼ; also, ʽCrowdsʼ is a romantic piano ballad that should be owned by every admirer of Paul Murphy's (not that I'd ever like to have a hand in convincing anybody to become an admirer of Paul Murphy's, but if you are an admirer, you do have to hear this little Peter Hammill-style depressed confessional), and ʽRosegarden Funeral Of Soresʼ is probably the only song on the entire CD that would indeed be fit for playing at a Goth-themed funeral. (Particularly if you wan­ted to raise the chances of the deceased person rising from the dead, that is — it is rather painful to have to endure Murphy's hysterical roaring at the end of the initially calm track).

 

MASK (1981)

 

1) Hair Of The Dog; 2) The Passion Of Lovers; 3) Of Lillies And Remains; 4) Dancing; 5) Hollow Hills; 6) Kick In The Eye; 7) In Fear Of Fear; 8) Muscle In Plastic; 9) The Man With X-Ray Eyes; 10) Mask.

 

This critically respected (for the most part) follow-up to Flat Fields is all right, but, for the most part, it does not add anything particularly unpredictable or even «useful» to the Bauhaus image. Formally, the band cannot be accused of slackery — they bring in occasional new instrumen­tation (keyboards, acoustic guitars, etc.), and Daniel Ash is as keen as ever to try out new guitar sounds and fuss around with studio technology. But they have a successful formula now, and they do make sure to stay well within its safe boundaries. This ensures that the album, like its prede­cessor, is cozily coherent, but there is really nothing that can be said about Mask in general that has not already been said about Flat Fields in general, so let's just chat about some of the indivi­dual songs instead — in terms of favorites and «why favorites?».

 

Especially because this time, it is fairly easy to choose a favorite — ʽHollow Hillsʼ is one of the band's best songs, and, for that matter, one of the tiny handful of bona fide «goth» songs in their catalog, a slow, creepy-crawly, atmospheric dirge, possibly inspired by an Arthur Machen story, whose mystical bass line is amusingly similar to the one used on Nirvana's ʽCome As You Areʼ (coincidence or was Bauhaus a closet love of Kurt's?). It is not any less theatrical than any other Bauhaus song, so one is not expected to shed sincere mournful tears for the abandoned magical hills even if «so sad, love lies there still» — but Ash's clever overdubs and sound effects still open the door to some sort of a different dimension. Never mind the witches and the goblins and Oberon, the sound of it all is much more meaningful than the literal sense.

 

The only other song on the album that lays more emphasis on the atmosphere than on the beat is the title track — but it is still a bit too distorted and industrialized for my tastes, especially when the fuzzy grind of the rhythm guitar gets coupled with all the backwards tapes prepared by Ash. Midway through it becomes something else, when the grind is suffocated and a paranoid medie­valistic mandolin-imitating acoustic guitar starts playing in a ʽBattle Of Evermoreʼ fashion — yet even so, it is not enough to make a satisfactory conclusion to the album, certainly not one that would overwhelm the listener like a «grand finale» is supposed to.

 

The remaining eight songs are all rockers, and, to a large extent, interchangeable — with few, if any, jaw-dropping melodic discoveries, and pretty much the same message throughout: «if you really have to dance or, at least, tap your foot to pop music, might as well make it dark, cool, and enigmatic». One of the songs is even called ʽDancingʼ, and its verbal listing of all the different ways to dance brings to mind a similar enterprise once carried out by Roxy Music with ʽDo The Strandʼ — yes, back when the odd pioneers of a new musical style were slyly taking the old pre-war genre of «let-me-introduce-you-to-a-new-dance» and adapting it to a whole new world of values. But in 1981, that world was already established, and here Bauhaus just sound like a bunch of not particularly convincing also-rans.

 

As for the songs chosen for single release, those were ʽKick In The Eyeʼ and ʽThe Passion Of Loversʼ, the former sounding like Young Americans-era funkified David Bowie with an extra touch of bass darkness laid on from the Berlin era and the latter being yet another clone of early Joy Division style; the lyrics are fairly well «gothic» ("the passion of lovers is for death" goes the refrain, after all), but the atmosphere does not even reach the creepiness level of ʽHollow Hillsʼ, let alone Joy Division themselves — Ash plays interesting guitar lines that have nothing to do with death or decay, and Murphy delivers the lyrics more like a beginning Elizabethan actor than like a person who'd really want you to consider the imminent link between love and death.

 

As you can probably already tell from the review, I am not too fond of this record. Where Flat Fields added something to the already well-formed world of «bleak post-punk», Mask actually allows to see better what that something was — a mask indeed, and a fairly sticky one. The heroes of Flat Fields revelled in their roles of sophisticated evil clowns, and their excitement at being let out on the stage was contagious, but already on the second album it looks like they are simply doing their job now, content with their wages and quietly sweating and stagnating under the makeup. If not for Ash and his bag of studio tricks, Mask would be gruesomely boring; as it is, it is still eminently listenable, just underwhelming. Brain-wise, the songs seem sufficiently fleshed out to deserve a minor thumbs up, but the heart finds no pleasure in most of this. (And just to make matters clear, yes, the album «rocks», but what sort of New Wave album with a war­ped, screechy guitar tone did not rock in 1981?).

 

THE SKY'S GONE OUT (1982)

 

1) Third Uncle; 2) Silent Hedges; 3) In The Night; 4) Swing The Heartache; 5) Spirit; 6) The Three Shadows, Part 1; 7) The Three Shadows, Part 2; 8) The Three Shadows, Part 3; 9) All We Ever Wanted Was Everything; 10) Exquisite Corpse.

 

With Bauhaus now firmly marketed as a «goth» band, their third album seems to have been seen by many critics and fans alike as straying too far away from a formula to which the band had ac­tually never ever subscribed in the first place. Essentially, The Sky's Gone Out is frequently ac­cused of being too meandering, too scattered, too unsure of where to go. But if you ask me, I much prefer this «insecurity» to the way-too-predictably-monotonous formula of Mask — just how much more «dark dance music» does one really need?

 

This is, indeed, the peak of Murphy and Ash's experimentalism: not always succeeding, perhaps, but not afraid, either, of risking an occasional miss among a bunch of successful hits. The idea to open the proceedings with a cover of Brian Eno's nearly decade-old rocker ʽThird Uncleʼ, in par­ticular, is brilliant — Bauhaus' transparent link to Joy Division had always obscured their earlier roots, but they are really much closer in spirit to the «morose glam theater» of early Roxy Music and early solo Eno, and they slice through the insanely fast drone chords of ʽThird Uncleʼ like butter: not adding much to the original, I guess, but perfectly capturing its joint vibe of lunacy and irony — and, although Ash's technique does not fully match Phil Manzanera's, this is barely noticeable, because the spirit of that original solo is reproduced to a tee.

 

None of the originals come close in terms of general frenzy, but they do not intend to: ʽThird Uncleʼ is just a benevolent warm-up, followed by one «big freeze» that comes in several different models. If you expected to be able to dance the night away, clad in black cloacks and mascara shades, you will be disappointed. But stepping away from pop rhythms allows them more space for invention — with a little patience, it becomes obvious that every song has something to offer, and a few of them have something incredible to offer.

 

Actually, when I use the term «incredible», I am mainly referring to ʽSwing The Heartacheʼ — a track like no other in the Bauhaus catalog. This is the Ash show all the way: after a long, intri­guing set-up of electronic howling, he kicks in with such a nasty loud riff that I can't help being reminded of Black Sabbath and ʽIron Manʼ — that «earth ripped apart» effect! — and from there on, the whole song becomes a test pad for all sorts of guitar madness, including a repetitive «whistling» ef­fect that may easily wreck an unstable nervous system. Altogether, there are enough cool musical ideas in this song to fuel a small album, but they all work together towards a common purpose: drive you right out of your head. (And I'm pretty sure that will happen the mi­nute you turn the volume up real loud in your headphones).

 

The band is being more merciful to the listener on such classics as ʽSilent Hedgesʼ (featuring the album's meanest bassline) and ʽIn The Nightʼ, which is lyrically a song about suicide, but musi­cally more of a pissed-off «slow punk» rocker, drastically speeding up towards the end. ʽSpiritʼ is a portentous anthem — Bauhaus' own idea of a ʽWe Will Rock Youʼ, culminating in an endless loop of "we love our audience, we love our audience!", clearly written for the fans but, conside­ring that Murphy's image does not require «loving» anybody, coming off as ironic all the same. The best thing about ʽSpiritʼ, anyway, is how they manage to combine an essentially rockabilly bass line with a folk-themed melody — somehow, it works.

 

Experimentation hits hardest on the second side of the album, especially with the three-part suite ʽThe Three Shadowsʼ, its first movement purely instrumental and atmospheric, its second one a melancholic funeral waltz, its third one a short «folk-punk» coda with a little Irish dance flavor. I guess this description alone helps understand why the «scattered» nature of the album was so con­fusing, but, really, this odd mix of different elements should hardly be any more confusing than, say, Kate Bush's much-revered suite on the second half of Hounds Of Love — it's just that the «point» of it may not be for everyone. Murphy's lyrics hardly make any sense, and sometimes seem drastically underworked ("but I... will always... exist... because... I always... exist" — nice logical chain out there), but it is the music, not the words, that matter, and there is a clear emotio­nal link between all three parts, from the somber ricocheting guitar licks of the intro right down to the slightly dissonant piano / fiddle duet on the outro.

 

What may really count as scattered is the last track — ʽExquisite Corpseʼ is more like a collection of loosely, if at all, connected snippets than anything else, as if, having recorded 35 minutes worth of material, they simply decided to cram all their remaining ideas into the other five, re­gardless of how well they could be sewn together. Indeed, the coda, especially coming right after the lovely acoustic balladeering of ʽAll We Ever Wantedʼ, is a bit anti-climactic: some of the snippets are okay, but I was really looking forward to some grand conclusion after all the freaky imagination outbursts. Still, that's a small price of disappointment to be paid for such an overall satisfactory experience.

 

In any case, do not follow the naysayers — The Sky's Gone Out still captures Bauhaus at the top of their game, and just because it refuses to conform to the clichés of «goth» does not mean that these guys do not know what they're doing. Okay, so they probably do not know what they're doing, but they're doing it fine anyway: not even on Flat Fields has Ash been more thoughtful about his instrument, or more lucky about putting those thoughts in practice.

 

PRESS THE EJECT AND GIVE ME THE TAPE (1982)

 

1) In The Flat Field; 2) Rose Garden Funeral Of Sores; 3) Dancing; 4) The Man With The X-Ray Eyes; 5) Bela Lu­gosi's Dead; 6) The Spy In The Cab; 7) Kick In The Eye; 8) In Fear Of Fear; 9) Hollow Hills; 10) Stigmata Martyr; 11) Dark Entries; 12) Terror Couple Kill Colonel*; 13) Double Dare*; 14*) In The Flat Field; 15*) Hair Of The Dog; 16*) Of Lillies And Remains; 17*) Waiting For The Man.

 

Visually, Bauhaus live were not vastly different from any other punk / post-punk act of the era — their act was much less theatrical than the music would suggest — but in terms of sound, it was primarily on the stage that they played out their «goth rock» reputation in earnest. The setlist con­centrates on the darkest songs in the catalog, and the towering centerpiece is ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ, longer, grander, and weightier than anything else on here — nine minutes of grave macabrity that Alice Cooper would probably have rejected for being too pretentious and humorless, but for Bauhaus, it is their life, as Murphy gets to get so heavily into character and Ash gets to scatter round his entire bag of guitar tricks, imitating every single variation of a bat wing flap on his in­strument and feeling quite at home.

 

On the whole, the live Bauhaus experience has little reason to be experienced outside an actual theater — the songs are not significantly modified from their studio bases, usually retaining the structures, the tempos, and the general dynamics. But yes, if you need to hear it from me, both Murphy and Ash do behave more wildly on stage: Murphy becomes a bit more of a screamer, and Ash allows himself to fool around with even more feedback effects. So if you decide that songs like ʽStigmata Martyrʼ rock harder and blow up more nerve cells here than in the studio version, I am not going to argue — I just happen to find the difference sort of negligible, and even more negligible on the short dance-oriented stuff from Mask, such as ʽDancingʼ or ʽIn Fear Of Fearʼ, where I was almost afraid at once that they'd simply put some audience noises over studio takes (well, you can't blame me for not memorizing every studio nuance of those tracks).

 

Technical notes: most of these songs were recorded in October 1981 and February 1982 in Lon­don and Liverpool, so there is predictably nothing included from The Sky's Gone Out; and, in fact, the live album itself was originally released as a bonus addition to Sky, only later gai­n­ing the status of an «autonomous» LP — initiating a rather strange tradition which eventually resul­ted in Bauhaus having as many live albums out as they have studio ones. Furthermore, the CD re-release added a bunch of extra tracks recorded at a December 1981 show in Paris, with ʽDouble Dareʼ as a particular highlight for those who love the Murphy scream, but the tracks also have significantly poorer sound quality. The most curious, and the least professionally recorded, inc­lusion is that of a Manchester performance where they join forces with Nico on a delightfully (atrociously?) chaotic rendition of the VU's ʽWaiting For The Manʼ.

 

On the whole, I would probably recommend skipping this, but apparently, the Old Vic London show from 1982 had also been videotaped, so this is a good bet to check out the young Murphy in his prime, belly-dancing and all, while Ash and his supercool mohawk are weaving guitar rings around him (really piss-poor lighting job, though, based on the bits I have seen). But as for me, I do not care much for that early 1980s visual stylistics anyway, and for those who think that Bau­haus are better heard than seen, Press The Eject will not be of much use.

 

 

BURNING FROM THE INSIDE (1983)

 

1) She's In Parties; 2) Antonin Artaud; 3) Wasp; 4) King Volcano; 5) Who Killed Mr. Moonlight; 6) Slice Of Life; 7) Honeymoon Croon; 8) Kingdom's Coming; 9) Burning From The Inside; 10) Hope.

 

Considering who we are talking about here, the phrase «nothing predicted a bleak future for Bauhaus in 1983» sounds rather silly — this is one band that could always do with some bleak future, the bleaker the better. Let me try and rephrase that: by early 1983, Bauhaus were going stronger than ever, and there is no telling how many successful results this Murphy/Ash colla­boration could yield throughout the decade. But fate commanded that, just as the band entered the studio to begin sessions for their fourth LP, Murphy fell ill with a real heavy (some say life-threa­tening) case of pneumonia — and the remaining members actually had the nerve to carry on re­cording without him, even to the point of Ash and David J singing lead vocals on several tracks. Whatever tensions between the vocalist and the instrumentalists there were up to that point were instantly magnified tenfold, and the band played their last show at the Hammersmith on July 5, one week prior to the release of Burning From The Inside.

 

Tension, dissent, and various forms of cracks within a band are not always detrimental — quite often, this actually stirs and freshens creative juices, and there is nothing like a heavy splash of healthy hatred to produce great art, anyway. Unfortunately, this is not what happened here — with the partial absence of Murphy, Bauhaus... well, it just isn't Bauhaus any more. Apart from a few trademark songs, Ash and David J push the band into softer, more «melodic» territory that draws its inspiration from dark folk and Kurt Weill rather than Joy Division. It may be tasteful and relatively interesting territory, but it puts The Bauhaus Beast to sleep (and it sometimes puts me to sleep, which is not good at all).

 

There is really only one classic number here, which accordingly opens the album and was also released as its only single — ʽShe's In Partiesʼ has everything you could expect from a Bauhaus song: dark «glam-hellish» delivery from Peter, going into a nostalgic trance for the glitz, the vanity, and the noir of the classic age of Hollywood; a simple, nasty, unforgettable riff from Ash, even­tually mutating into a series of heavily treated swoops and meltdowns, as if somebody were pouring acid on the amps; and a gloomy solo dance by the bassline for a coda. The song is so good that its very presence already sort of redeems the album, so that the ensuing disappointment is not so disappointing — then again, it is hard not to be disappointed when you slowly under­stand that nothing else here comes close to matching the dark power of its opening number.

 

Most of the Murphy-less stuff is what I'd call «for the fans». The boys mean well and have no in­tention of simply pelting us with filler: ʽWho Killed Mr. Moonlightʼ, for instance, is a carefully thought-out epitaphy to starry-eyed romance, a piano / organ-dominated melancholic ballad on how "someone shot nostalgia in the back, someone shot our innocence". Problem is... it's boring. They do not seem to be able to do anything interesting with these instruments, let alone the saxo­phone doodling that Ash is quietly arranging in the background. It's basically just five minutes of fluffy atmospheric wallowing that is neither too pretty nor too sad to activate the emotions. It's just something that is not-theirs-to-do.

 

Nor am I too impressed with the half-drunk, half-tribal waltzing of ʽKing Volcanoʼ (tries to achieve a phantasmagoric effect but fails), or with the acoustic folk balladry of ʽKingdom's Co­mingʼ (monotonous, instantly forgettable); ʽSlice Of Lifeʼ is a little better because Ash's vocals at least match the nervous tension of the instrumental melody, and this is the only track on which he succeeds in building up some maniacal paranoia — still, Murphy would have handled that so much better. Really, none of these songs has any genuine staying power. In addition, it is a little weird that, all of a sudden, without Murphy in the studio, Ash so abruptly decided to place his faith in the acoustic guitar: he is not a master picker, and his greatest talent was always in the sheer number of different effects and impressions he could derive from electricity.

 

Things do not always work out fine with Murphy, either: case in point is the title track, which starts out nice enough, with cruel, brain-melting riffs and pleasantly extremist abrupt jumps from dirge-goth to «punk-funk» and convenient lyrics about "razor weeds" that reach up to one's knees, but then somehow gets stuck in a five-minute repetitive coda that annoys rather than enchants, as if your vinyl got caught in the groove for some purely mechanical reason. Those five minutes, I doubt it not for a second, were clearly thrown in to fill up space: there must be more atmospheric ways of getting the message of "I don't see you anymore" into your listeners' heads than this.

 

Finally, what sort of a Bauhaus record finishes with a song called ʽHopeʼ? Uplifting acoustic gui­tars? Hippie-style choral vocals? "Your mornings will be brighter, break the line, tear up rules, make the most of a million times no"? Who do they think they are — Jefferson Airplane? Time to call it a day, boys; I have no more interest in hearing this from my Bauhaus than in listening to the Beach Boys doing hip-hop or to Elton John singing opera arias.

 

Of course, the album is not really a «sell out»: it is simply plagued by circumstances beyond ar­tistic control, and a failed attempt to compensate for these circumstances with a series of experi­ments that downplay the band's traditional strengths and lay open their weaknesses. Many fans are still willing to accept it, particularly since ʽShe's In Partiesʼ is such a strong opener that it does set the tone for the entire record, and that's quite alright. My point is simply that Burning From The Inside is «diluted Bauhaus», and that I'd rather go listen to R.E.M. than to ʽKingdom's Co­mingʼ, or to Peter Hammill rather than to ʽWho Killed Mr. Moonlightʼ — why settle for anything but the best, after all, when history has already provided you with such an ample choice?

 

REST IN PEACE: THE FINAL CONCERT (1983 / 1992)

 

1) Burning From The Inside; 2) In Fear Of Fear; 3) Terror Couple Kill Colonel; 4) The Spy In The Cab; 5) King­dom's Coming; 6) She's In Parties; 7) Antonin Artaud; 8) King Volcano; 9) Passion Of Lovers; 10) Slice Of Life; 11) In Heaven; 12) Dancing; 13) Hollow Hills; 14) Stigmata Martyr; 15) Kick In The Eye; 16) Dark Entries; 17) Double Dare; 18) In The Flat Field; 19) Boys; 20) God In An Alcove; 21) Hair Of The Dog; 22) Bela Lugosi's Dead.

 

This certainly cannot be a long review, since most of what needs to be said about the live avatar of Bauhaus has already been squeezed out for the review of Press The Eject... Formal info is as follows: Rest In Peace is a faithful recording of Bauhaus' last concert, played at the Hammer­smith Palais in London on July 5, 1983, one week prior to the official release of Burning From The Inside and fifteen years before all four members would play again. The show itself, al­though captured on tape, remained in the vaults for almost a decade, before it was finally released on two CDs in 1992 — and the appropriate title «rest in peace» actually reproduces the words of David J, spoken at the very end of the show, once the final echoes of ʽBela Lugosiʼ have died down: most of the fans present, unaware of the band's suicidal plans, never figured out what that properly meant until it was too late.

 

The large delay between recording and release is understandable: first, it seemed pointless at the time to put out two live albums in such a brief time interval, and second, the sound quality is highly questionable — almost as if they were taping this as a personal memento rather than a po­tential commercial product or even historical document. Studio or live, Bauhaus is one of those bands that draws its power from atmosphere and sonic nuances rather than particular chord changes, so listening to a poor-sound-quality Bauhaus album falls in the same category as wat­ching a black-and-white version of Snow White. For those who still have all the hits ringing and reverberating in their ears, subconscious will do the trick and restore the missing colors, but God forbid you ever fall upon Rest In Peace as your introduction to the band.

 

The setlist is relatively predictable: in the first part, the band largely concentrates on recent mate­rial from the still-unreleased Burning, and later on, they fall back upon the classics with a ven­geance — the encore is almost half an hour long, reminding us of just how fruitful the short ca­reer of Bauhaus was in the first place, if they need so much time to properly summarize it. On the other hand, they do need some extra time to include a few rarities: the distorted post-punk-rocker ʽBoysʼ (originally the B-side to ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ) and, oddest of all, a prayer-style, nearly accappella (accompanied only by a thin pseudo-church organ melody) rendition of David Lynch's ʽIn Heavenʼ from Eraserhead — come to think of it, Eraserhead and Bauhaus must have come out of the same womb, even if it took Murphy and Ash several years to realize that ("we got the words wrong", Murphy admits in the middle of the performance, which must imply they did not have too much time learning them).

 

Altogether, the show was certainly done on the level, but the wooden sound quality does drag it down, and the relative lack of surprises means that even hardcore fans will probably not want to sit through the whole thing more than once. Unless, that is, the hardcore fan should happen to be a major specific admirer of Burning From The Inside — this is the only live Bauhaus album where you are going to get so many non-Murphy-targeted songs in one place (this covers most of the difference from the post-reunion Gotham performance). For me, however, that's a minus.

 

GOTHAM (1999)

 

1) Double Dare; 2) In The Flat Field; 3) God In An Alcove; 4) In Fear Of Fear; 5) Hollow Hills; 6) Kick In The Eye; 7) Terror Couple Kill Colonel; 8) Silent Hedges; 9) Severance; 10) Boys; 11) She's In Parties; 12) The Passion Of Lovers; 13) Dark Entries; 14) Telegram Sam; 15) Ziggy Stardust; 16) Bela Lugosi's Dead; 17) All We Ever Wanted Was Everything; 18) Spirit; 19) Severance [studio version].

 

In 1998, Bauhaus took the world of mascara by surprise — it may have seemed to everyone that Murphy's ways were no longer compatible with the rest of the band (who were doing fine for themselves, under the name of «Love And Rockets»), but time either heals your wounds or emp­ties your pockets, or both, and, anyway, somehow in 1998 the original Bauhaus did come to­gether — and in quite an imposing manner, too. The «punny» album title may seem to indicate that they have finally agreed to settle into the appropriate pigeon hole, but on this particular occa­sion, since the concerts were indeed played in NYC (September 9-10, 1998, at the Hammerstein Ballroom), the title is really perfect for the occasion.

 

Moreover, the first few minutes of Gotham are suspenseful and breathtaking. Small nuclear blasts of bass rumble set against excited audience screams, gradually increasing in intensity until Ash properly opens up the feedback barrel and sets people flying from their seats — then David J distorts the bass riff of ʽDouble Dareʼ to living-hell status, and finally, Murphy crawls out of the shadows to sing a seriously amended set of lyrics... which is where the fun starts getting colder, since his stage antics had dwindled over two decades, and the scenic delivery is professional, technically perfect, and spirited, but not as bold or exuberant as it used to be.

 

From there on, it is hit after hit, classic after classic, expertly delivered, meticulously captured, thrilling for the audience of the Hammerstein, and, as it happens with all of Bauhaus' live recor­dings, not particularly rewarding for the casual fan. The tracklist predictably venerates the first record, respects the second, acknowledges the third, and ignores the fourth (with the equally pre­dictable exception of ʽShe's In Partiesʼ) — one not-so-surprising omission is ʽStigmata Martyrʼ, a song that always used to be the major highlight of the show, but was not performed because of its Christian overtones, since Murphy had switched to embracing Sufism by that time; and one surprising inclusion is ʽSpiritʼ, heavily rearranged and done largely as a group harmony chant, with Ash's phased acoustic guitar as the only instrument and the entire "we love our audience" part completely melodically re-written so that it now sounds much less ironic than it used to.

 

The «dark horse» of the album is a cover of ʽSeveranceʼ, a Dead Can Dance cover from 1988's The Serpent's Egg — true to the spirit of Dead Can Dance, Bauhaus, too, do this thing as an at­mospheric mood piece, but neither the live version nor the studio recording, tacked on to the end as a bonus track, manage to be as intoxicating as the band they set out to cover. It is quite natural for Bauhaus to regard Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard as their «stepchildren», what with their first album coming out next year after Bauhaus' demise, as if they inherited that spirit, but in rea­lity the two bands are extremely different, and their material does not crossbreed that easily. Still, a curious intersection here, and if it helps fans of one band to get interested in the other, we will respect the gesture for its promotional value at least.

 

Other than that, Gotham simply shows that the band had never lost it, or if it did, it found it as soon as it stated a desire to do so. As a bona fide live overview of the band's entire career, recor­ded with excellent quality and featuring the band in top form, it works very well; as a candidate for «Bauhaus' best live album», it does not hold a candle to Press The Eject, mainly be­cause of the absence of ʽStigmata Martyrʼ and because Peter Murphy is not so young and not so crazy any more; as an important historic document witnessing the «restoration of a legend», it has its unde­niable value, and even a certain amount of thrill. And it never hurts to own yet another version of ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ — the bats always seem to scurry and shuffle around the ceiling in a musi­cal configuration that is quite different from last time. If anything, it helps not to play those old Bauhaus numbers for so long — gives you an incentive for reinventing some of them a little bit in the meantime.

 

GO AWAY WHITE (2008)

 

1) Too Much 21st Century; 2) Adrenalin; 3) Undone; 4) International Bullet Proof Talent; 5) Endless Summer Of The Damned; 6) Saved; 7) Mirror Remains; 8) Black Stone Heart; 9) The Dog's A Vapour; 10) Zikir.

 

Was there any sense in Bauhaus reuniting, this one last time (or so they insist, at least), to write up and produce a brand new studio album? A reunion tour for nostalgic reasons is one thing, but the band as a creative unit was so definitively tied in to the early Eighties, it is almost impossible to imagine how they could have made up for all that lost time. It's not as if, during their relatively short career, Bauhaus showed no will for or capacity of evolving — it's just that they didn't have the time to completely break out of the stereotypes, and a 2008 album that would have had to pick up from where Burning From The Inside had left us twenty-five years earlier might easily have been a misguided embarrassment — curious, perhaps, but embarrassing all the same.

 

Indeed, when Go Away White made its first rounds, some of the reviews were mighty skeptical — comparing the band to a «stately stone mausoleum», for instance, not particularly relevant, not to mention necessary, in the 21st century. A moot argument, that, for if the 21st century did not need stately stone mausolea, all of them would have been demolished long ago anyway. In fact, the band itself takes care of that argument right away: the very first track is ʽToo Much 21st Cen­turyʼ, on which Murphy complains that "they all wanna be something better", and that there is "too much fake... too much to take". Not a particularly fresh or original complaint, but one to which I can always relate, and delivered with so much energy and conviction that the listener has to take it seriously. Bauhaus have returned to take one last look at this world, decide that it ain't worthy, and then go away forever, like the Angel of Bethesda, appropriately photographed from the back for the spooky album sleeve.

 

But when they do take that one last look, they do not take it quite the same way as they used to. Self-produced as usual, the album does make use of improvements in technology — the mix is crisper, subtler, more aurally satisfying than on any old Bauhaus record, with each of Ash's over­dubs, effects, atmospheric layers etc. perfectly discernible, and Haskins' drums retain their gothic sternness without having to depend on epoch-bound electronic enhancements (although, where they find it more to the song's benefit, the drums are still electronic, especially when they drift into mystical atmosphere, e. g. on ʽThe Dog's A Vapourʼ). Another difference is that Ash has de­veloped a taste for distortion, and many of the riffs that push the songs forward have a brawny crrrrunch that was not at all typical of early Bauhaus, with the exception of a few special show-stoppers like ʽStigmata Martyrʼ. ʽToo Much 21st Centuryʼ, in fact, kicks off with a rumbling riff that borders on heavy metal (one tone lower and that'd be it), and ʽInternational Bullet Proof Ta­lentʼ rocks as hard as if they'd let the Young brothers guest star — again, not something you'd want to directly associate with «classic» Bauhaus.

 

Comparisons aside, though, it mostly works. Murphy's voice alone, retaining all of its tombstone solemnity of yore and even lowering it just a wee bit more due to age reasons, is enough to make one suspect that these guys, or at least their frontman, are still living in the past, but they succeed in making this «peek from the grave» thing into an interesting experience. The first half of the al­bum is, in its essence, almost completely sarcastic — instead of plunging you into a phantasma­goric setting à la ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ or revving you up for breakneck dancing with the spirits à la ʽIn The Flat Fieldʼ, Murphy uses the potential of his musicians to grin and jeer at the uncon­scious evil-making of the modern world. This prevents the songs from becoming too haunting or en­snaring, but helps enhance their intelligence quotient.

 

ʽAdrenalinʼ, for instance, is far from the best song the band has ever come up with, but its superimposition of bubbling-buzzing high-pitched guitar and distorted bass over Murphy's sar­cas­tic lyrics about how «adrenaline» (in this modern world of ours) is the answer to all the problems is one of the smartest ideas in Bauhaus history. And when they throw in a one-finger-on-the-pia­no bit in the middle of the song, it is almost like a tribute to John Cale and his production of ʽI Wanna Be Your Dogʼ — a hidden (unintentional?) reference to those heroes of long ago who, too, found themselves stuck in the ambiguous position of enjoying the temptations of the modern world and hating them at the same time.

 

As the album progresses, though, the sarcastic riff-rockers become fewer in numbers and eventu­ally give way to atmospherics — beginning with the psychedelic oratorio of ʽSavedʼ (where the state of being «saved» is made equivalent with «unconscious») and reaching its culmination with the final double-punch of ʽThe Dog's A Vapourʼ and ʽZikirʼ. The first of these is unquestionably the highest point of the album, a complex, multi-layered midnight concoction with Ash and Mur­phy at their very, very best. When the sirens and banshees make their major strike at 4:12 into the song, it produces the eeriest, most jump-starting effect since ʽSwing The Heartacheʼ did some­thing similar (but on a much humbler sonic scale: ʽThe Dog's A Vapourʼ, in comparison, would be on the level of Mahlerian polyphony).

 

The fact that this is a «Bauhaus»-type record indeed, and not just a combination of whatever the individual musicians were doing at the time, may be seen from the fact that Murphy's Islamic (more precisely, Sufi) adherence is mostly saved until the last track, ʽZikirʼ, a three-minute-long atmospheric fadeout that reflects his past experiments with Turkish music, but does not fling them too abruptly in the listener's face. It is, indeed, quite impressive that, despite the huge artis­tic differences that continued to accumulate between Peter and the rest of the band, and despite some hard times that they had to endure together in the studio, they were able to bring the project to completion and release the record — a little less tolerance, and none of this would happen. As it is, Go Away White is clearly not the record by which this band will be remembered in history, but it is an adequate, respectable, and enjoyable epilog. One of the worst things about Burning From The Inside was that ʽHopeʼ as the final Bauhaus song was as confusing and fake as it could be: it had to take them a quarter century to rectify that mistake, but better late than never, and for that alone, Go Away White would already be eligible for a thumbs up. As it happens, it never once makes a false move, even if only a few of the moves it makes deserve the status of a «classic Bauhaus moment», ʽThe Dog's A Vapourʼ being transparently the No. 1 candidate.

 

PS. Funny bit of trivia: out of several indignant one-star reviews of this album on Amazon, at least one explicitly states that «this is not Bauhaus, this has more of a Love and Rockets feel to it» and at least another one states with the same forcefulness that «I have not heard Bauhaus, I have heard a Peter Murphy solo album here». Count me happy on this.

 

ADDENDA:

 

SWING THE HEARTACHE: THE BBC SESSIONS (1980-1983/1989)

 

1) God In An Alcove; 2) Telegram Sam; 3) Double Dare; 4) The Spy In The Cab; 5) In The Flat Field; 6) St. Vitus Dance; 7) In Fear Of Fear; 8) Poison Pen; 9) Party Of The First Part; 10) Departure; 11) The Three Shadows, Pt. 2; 12) Silent Hedges; 13) Swing The Heartache; 14) Third Uncle; 15) Ziggy Stardust; 16) Terror Couple Kill Colonel; 17) Night Time; 18) She's In Parties.

 

As a minor bonus to all the faithful fans, Bauhaus were honored by this archival release from the BBC — originally issued as early as 1989, when this tradition was still relatively fresh and the officially released BBC recordings were still regarded as a gap-filling remedy for those artists whose live catalog left a lot to be desired. These particular sessions, mostly recorded for John Peel's and David Jensen's broadcasts, cover the chronological entirety of Bauhaus' classic career, from 1980 to 1983, and work very well as a basic introduction to the band's work and image — pleasantly concentrating on whatever was relevant for the band at the time of performing rather than just on reproducing the commercial hits.

 

This means that the package may not pretend at being a «comprehensive anthology» (how could one have a comprehensive anthology without ʽBela Lugosi's Deadʼ or ʽHollow Hillsʼ?), but it provides several impressive snapshots of particular moments in time — for instance, on a 1982 session they play the second (waltzing) part of ʽThe Three Shadowsʼ and the non-album oddity ʽParty Of The First Partʼ, where parts of the dialog soundtrack to the cartoon ʽThe Devil And Daniel Mouseʼ (it­self a send-up of The Devil And Daniel Webster) are backed by an eerie lounge jazz exercise, a fairly atypical achievement for Bauhaus, but with an effect that is just as comical­ly creepy as their straightforward «Goth» business.

 

One does, however, have to be careful, because a few of these tracks turn out to be exactly the same as already present on studio albums — ʽThird Uncleʼ, for instance, is not a real live take, as might have been hoped, but the exact studio mix of the song as first heard on The Sky's Gone Out, and the same applies to ʽZiggy Stardustʼ (the single version). A bit of a cheat there, but at least it is compensated for by featuring the only live version of ʽSwing The Heartacheʼ in official existence — no wonder they named the entire album after it, as it is clearly the major highlight of the package, with Ash doing his best to retain and, if possible, enhance the industrial sonic night­mare of the original.

 

Other minor surprises include ʽPoison Penʼ, a muscular dark funk workout almost completely de­pendent on bass/drum interplay as Haskins and David J box each other to death in a sweaty three-minute match; and a cover of the old garage classic ʽNight Timeʼ by The Strangeloves — neither suited too well for Bauhaus' usual image nor giving them an adequate opportunity to change it, but raising the bar on unpredictability, which is always good for any band locked into a stereo­type. As for the predictable inclusions, everything is played with the expected verve, but nothing is superior to the studio versions, for reasons already discussed previously. But at least the sound quality is better than on the «regular» live albums.

 

Serious fans will need to own this if only for all the «rarities» — casual ones might want to give it an uninterrupted spin or two if only to marvel at how a band, over such a short period, can sound in so many different ways, yet always remain the same at heart. We have basic rock'n'roll, funk, lounge jazz, glam rock, post-punk, industrial, even some acoustic waltzing and old-time garage, but all of these things are given the Murphy/Ash treatment of implosive vocals and ex­plosive guitars, and it neutralizes the whole package into three years from the life of an obnoxious, but impossibly smart and perversely attractive Evil Clown. The very fact that the album offers such a perspective (well, at least I've been able to formulate it somehow) leaves me no choice but to give it a thumbs up, skeptical as I usually am about all those BBC packages. But then again, the magic may not work tomorrow. It's a quantum kind of thing.

BEAT HAPPENING

BEAT HAPPENING (1985)

 

1) Our Secret; 2) What's Important; 3) Down At The Sea; 4) I Love You; 5) Fourteen ('83); 6) Run Down The Stairs ('83); 7) Bad Seeds (live); 8) In My Memory; 9) Honey Pot; 10) The Fall; 11) Youth; 12) Don't Mix The Colors; 13) Foggy Eyes; 14) Bad Seeds; 15) I Let Him Get To Me; 16) I Spy; 17) Run Down The Stairs ('84); 18) Christmas; 19) Fourteen ('84); 20) Let's Kiss; 21) 1, 2, 3; 22) In Love With You Thing; 23) Look Around.

 

This is one of those records that usually triggers interminable and unwinnable discussions about what is music, what is art, what is taste, what is good and bad sound, and whether we're supposed to have admiration for something just because it was endorsed by Kurt Cobain, and if yes, should we also admire heroin and Remington Arms, etc. etc. In other words, a reviewer's paradise re­gard­less of how much the reviewer likes or hates the record in question.

 

The fact remains that, as evidenced by this particular recording, «singers», «songwriters», and, most comically, «multi-instrumentalists» (yes, that's the way they're encyclopaedically described) Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis, and Bret Lunsford, upon getting together, found out or confir­med that they could not sing worth a damn, that they were unable to competently play any of their instruments, and that their songwriting talents did not significantly exceed those of an average 5-year old. Additionally, they did not have access to professional studios and did not even own a drum set (they had to borrow one or build up a cardboard imitation). In other words, they were, like, the first true punk band in history, except they did not want to be punks. Instead, they just took the most brilliant decision that could be taken, given the circumstances.

 

And that decision was — if our skills and talents match the average level of a 5-year old (okay, maybe a 10-year old for accuracy), why not imitate a 10-year old? "I was walking in our town / I was walking through the store / I saw a pretty girl / She held open the door / I said ʽI like youʼ / She said that she liked me / And we could be friends / In our special stupid way". That is the way this album opens (well, the new CD edition does, anyway), and isn't that something you'd pretty much expect to be written by a 10-year old when pressed into writing «poetry»? Okay, so the word ʽstupidʼ gives it all away: no 10-year old would voluntarily describe him/herself as ʽstupidʼ. So it's not quite as perfect as it may have been. But then, they have to have some points of inter­section with their grown-up audiences — after all, Beat Happening is not advertising itself for a pre-pubescent public. I mean, another of the songs goes, "I had sex on Christmas / I had sex three times today / Three different women taught me how to be bored / In their own separate sweet little ways". So let's put it this way: this is an album written by grown-ups about grown-up issues through the prism of the mentality of a little kid, one such as could have come up with the drawing for the album cover.

 

Does it work? Well, that's a tough question to answer once you've done your duty of acknowled­ging the innovative (or, rather, «novel») nature of the overall approach. As far as I can tell, it does not work on the level of «base catchiness»: beyond the fact that the primitive chord sequences that they can master on their guitars are all taken from various classic or not-so-classic pop re­cords, they don't really know what to do with them, or, rather, they just don't care, because any extra tinkering with melodies would qualify as «polish», and a 10-year old wouldn't be supposed to care about that. It certainly doesn't work on the level of «conventional prettiness», either: vici­ously off-key singing and annoyingly out-of-tune playing are the norm of day (although some songs violate melodic conventions more than others), so don't expect to be angelically charmed. So what else is there to compensate for poor songwriting and horrible execution? (And, oh yes, awful production, but that goes without saying, since the first thing about Beat Happening that you learn in textbooks is how they were the real «pioneers of lo-fi»).

 

Well, there is a fair amount of innocent charm in all this stuff, whose fairy godmother is actually Maureen Tucker on ʽAfter Hoursʼ (yes indeed, for everything in the Seventies, Eighties and be­yond there has been a blueprint at least as early as 1969). Just the way this trio launches into this material, with such gusto and all, challenges conventional expectations — instead of upgrading themselves to the level of a very mediocre, undistinctive, third-rate guitar pop band, they have chosen to downgrade themselves, and in doing so, they have attracted our attention rather than dissipated it. The lo-fi production and poor playing, in this case, enhance the experience — we are not being shown some pretentious, idealized, «childfully angelic» world, but are drawn into the process as is, warts and all: Beat Happening do not invite us to admire them, to fall head over heels in love with their cuteness and cuddliness, but instead provoke a mix of curiosity, laughing, irritation, and, on occasion, even some intellectual stimulation.

 

There is one song here (actually, presented in two versions on the new CD edition, one of which is a barely audible live performance) that is intentionally written in a «punkish» idiom — like, what would a 10-year old scribble in his classroom after his first encounter with The Clash or The Sex Pistols? With a quasi-surf rock guitar line and a stiff vocal performance that brings up visions of the B-52's rather than Duane Eddy, ʽBad Seedsʼ is like a really really silly, really really bad punk rock anthem if you take it on its own, but placed in this general context, it's just the album's protagonist momentarily caught in a bad mood — usually, his mood is much better, when he is trying to pen something romantic and optimistic, but sometimes the world gets him like that, and all he can do is just grin back at it: "we're ba-a-a-a-d, bad bad seeds" (should be delivered with all the theatrical evil that a little harmless, inoffensive kid can possibly gather up).

 

Special prize goes to Miss Heather "Mr. Fish is having a party" Lewis here, for serving as the prototype for thousands of intellectually endowed, innocently sounding indie ladies that would start springing up at alarming rates in the 21st century — on a gut level, I feel relieved every time that she takes lead vocals, because she is either too afraid or to ashamed to sing as completely out of tune as Mr. Calvin "The best part of sex is walking home" Johnson, who is simply reveling in the pleasure of making your ears curdle. But you're supposed to take it like a man: I mean, would you really be as insensitively cruel as to tell a 10-year old who's really, really trying that your singing totally sucks, lil' buddy? Come on now. In a few years, he'll start taking serious singing lessons, and then we'll see. And these guys here, they're just growing backwards.

 

And some of the songs are genuinely funny — ʽI Love Youʼ, for instance, has nothing to do with just loving you, but everything to do with our proverbial 10-year old trying to compete with the beatniks: it's something he might have written the next day after having his mind blown by Dylan's ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ, with such deliciously bad semi-rapped lines as "Those poets grin / Who never sin / They fight with Russians / And have discussions / With the KGB / At the Baltic Sea". It actually takes something good to create something that bad, you know. It is also amusing that, although our «kid» seems familiar with sexual experiences (so let's raise that 10 figure to at least 12-13 for comfort), he always seems to downplay and denigrate them: "You got five other guys saying love me do / You know what they want from you / Me, all I ask is love / And, honey pot, my love you can trust" (ʽHoney Potʼ), or check that quotation from ʽChristmasʼ again. On the other hand, we may very well be dealing with a virgin here who's just shooting his mouth off about having sex on Christmas, so, upon second thought, bring that figure back to 10. Any more than that and we begin to have our doubts about the whole thing.

 

Overall, on a conceptual basis Beat Happening is quite endearing, hilarious, and occasionally rather unsettling, since some of these songs come very close to nailing the phenomenon of mental retardation (the Ramones used to take too much pride in passing themselves off as mental retards: Beat Happening do that humbly and quietly, and this makes it all the more unsettling). On an in­dividual song level, it is practically non-existent, though, even compared to their later records where «polish» would reduce the importance of the concept and increase the importance of sepa­rate song units. Also, the LP/CD re-issue from 1996 which added a whole bunch of bonus tracks, particularly ones taken from the later EP Three Tea Breakfast, makes the whole experience somewhat overlong (23 tracks in 45 minutes — they come close to beating Wire's record with Pink Flag!). Regardless, it totally makes sense as an artistic statement and deserves its thumbs up, although I'll have to wait until I go completely mental before I start really enjoying it on a casual everyday basis.

 

JAMBOREE (1988)

 

1) Bewitched; 2) In Between; 3) Indian Summer; 4) Hangman; 5) Jamboree; 6) Ask Me; 7) Crashing Through; 8) Cat Walk; 9) Drive Car Girl; 10) Midnight A Go-Go; 11) The This Many Boyfriends Club.

 

Second time around, the joke is not quite so funny any more. True to tradition, this is still a very short album with very short songs (making any of these go over three minutes would severely violate the Geneva convention), but there isn't much progress other than the proverbial «10-year old kid» growing some pubic hair and discovering (in a not-so-independent process) the joys of feedback, distortion, and RCR (Rebellious Caveman Rock!).

 

Seriously, if there is any way to describe the opening number ʽBewitchedʼ, it is this and only this: a product from the Build-Your-Own-Stooges-Song Set. The opening feedback, the threatening distorted riff, Calvin's nasty baritone, and those lyrics — "I see you hang in the crowd / Staring me down... / What am I to do? / I got a crush on you" — if this isn't a conscious attempt to build their own ʽDown On The Streetʼ, I don't know what it is. Except, of course, that you have to take it as completely tongue-in-cheek, or else it is just a travesty. You could make that riff thicker, throw in some supporting lead lines, add extra bite and snarl to the vocals, get a real good drum­mer, and end up with one of those proto-punk classics from either Funhouse or Raw Power, be­cause the riff is actually quite cool — but you don't do that. You just end up with this corrupted, lo-fi, off-key demo version, because that's supposed to be the point. Okay then.

 

In fact, the songs here are, if anything, even more intentionally and defiantly «demo-like» than on the 1985 album. The title track is just Calvin singing off-key to a primitive drum machine; ʽAsk Meʼ is just Heather, singing slightly more on-key to... nothing at all, although the vocals do form a cohesive and catchy pop melody that should have had a full backing... or should it, really? Who knows, maybe if they added guitars and a rhythm section, it would have been just another run-of-the-mill twee-pop number — whereas this deconstruction is... like... allegorical in form, meta­physical in content? Fifty-eight seconds of the never-ending battle between the Nacheinander and the Nebeneinander. Art imitating Life or Life imitating Art? "Five hands crawling up my back / Thump, thump, have a heart attack". Nursery rhyme in the left corner, lo-fi aesthetics in the right corner. Clinch, clinch.

 

The thing is, until we actually see these songs «completed», it is very hard to tell if they are qua­lity embryos, produced with fine, healthy genetic material, or if they're just a bunch of unferti­lized cells whose main, if not only, attraction is that very «unfertilized» look. Some of the vocal, ahem, «melodies» can stick around, largely because of their repetitiveness, and some of the tracks will stick around just due to sheer ugliness (like the last track, ʽThe This Many Boyfriends Clubʼ, apparently recorded live and featuring Calvin at his absolutely ugliest — the vocals are more hideous than a bunch of tomcats in the night, and the accompanying feedback blasts have all the proper effect of nails-on-chalkboard); «enjoyable» these songs can only be for those who also «enjoy» watching Night Of The Living Dead. (With a few exceptions, of course: whenever Hea­ther takes lead vocals, the songs take on a friendly-sweet and generally listenable air — but she does not do it too often).

 

But if you disregard the individual songs and once again just embrace the concept as a whole, the downside is that, «faux-Stooges numbers» like ʽBewitchedʼ and ʽHangmanʼ aside, the concept remains more or less the same as it was: a tongue-in-cheek look at «musical failure» as an artistic statement in itself. And second time around, it's really not that fun anymore, which is why I can­ no longer be generous enough for a thumbs up — I mean, there's no way I could recommend Jamboree to anybody with a good ear for music, and there's no reason I should recommend Jam­boree to anybody interested in music-centered artistic statements because, well, there's just one thumbs up allowed per exactly the same music-centered artistic statement if there's not much else to go along with the statement. Unless, of course, you have doctor-prescribed aural pain treat­ments, in which case ʽThe This Many Boyfriends Clubʼ is a total must. Play it once every day at top volume, and you will be totally immune to drills, jackhammers, and televangelists for the rest of your precious life.

 

BLACK CANDY (1989)

 

1) Other Side; 2) Black Candy; 3) Knick Knack; 4) Pajama Party In A Haunted Hive; 5) Gravedigger Blues; 6) Cast A Shadow; 7) Bonfire; 8) T.V. Girl; 9) Playhouse; 10) Ponytail.

 

Our 10-/12-/14-year old continues to grow up, and now he seems to be entering a mean streak — about half of the songs here have dark overtones, be it the bass riffs, Calvin's ever-lowering vo­cals, or lyrics that tend to drift into the spooky-scary corner of the absurd. Not that this is «goth» or Alice Cooper stuff, but at this point in the life of the protagonist, I'd stay away from him if you were a girl, because he is liable, you know, to drop a spider in your panties or something. "Drip my blood / Fall in love / Chew my cud / Mess my head" does not look very appetizing as a re­placement for the simplistic romancing of the first two albums.

 

I am very much tempted to write these thirty minutes off by saying that the joke finally got too old, and that's it — on the other hand, the songs continue to be moderately catchy, and this new darker vibe counts for progress, so I guess it would be more honest to admit that by 1989 Beat Happening still had not completely outlived their initial purpose. Not that I seriously want to talk about these songs. For one thing, it's frustrating that Heather only gets to sing lead once, on the twee-cutesy ʽKnick Knackʼ, whose repetitive, but seductive and optimistic refrain of "you see a ghost, I see a halo" contrasts nicely with Calvin's gloominess — it's as if she was allowed, just once, to make a retort and used this opportunity to provide a bright, reassuring, idealistic femi­nine counterpoint to Calvin's dark brooding masculinity (a yin-yang role reversal!). But one song out of ten? She may not be the technically better singer of the two, but at least she's the nice one.

 

For another thing, what is there to talk about, really? I could mention that ʽOther Sideʼ opens the album with a melody that is very similar to Zappa's ʽWowie Zowieʼ, and that this may not be a total coincidence (Freak Out! had its fair share of intentional «childishness» as well), but other than that, well, you see, it no longer has that freshness and strangeness of approach — it sounds more serious than anything they've done before, enough to dispel the aura of «innocent young teen delightfully failing in his sincere artistic inclinations», yet not serious enough to wow or stun you with its melodic potential or unique atmosphere. Honestly, I am not sure that I really need Beat Happening if I want someone to invoke me to "let's find a way to the other side" — plenty of people in the psychedelic era did this more convincingly.

 

Some stuff here is just plain misguided — the finger-click-accompanied ʽGravedigger Bluesʼ, for instance, sounds like an inane parody on Nick Cave; it could be funny if only the singing wasn't so terribly offkey, but as it is, it is not. ʽPlayhouseʼ finally adds an agenda of sexual innuendos to what used to be a much more chaste approach, and for that reason, also sounds more like a self-parody than a serious statement. The pseudo-surf rock ʽBonfireʼ and the pseudo-Stooges ʽPajama Party In A Haunted Hiveʼ sound more like frustratingly incomplete genre exercises than intellec­tual deconstructions of their respective genres — I understand that the difference is fleeting and subjective, but I just don't feel any enticing atmospherics here.

 

In other words, they are trying to make some progress without abandoning the core ideology, but there's only so much you can achieve when your starting capital consists of not knowing how to play or sing and not being afraid to use that lack of knowledge. Think of Black Candy as the band's "We wet our beds, but we want to be Jim Morrison!" record or something — maybe that'll help. At least it's nice to know that it is still no longer than thirty minutes.

 

DREAMY (1991)

 

1) Me Untamed; 2) Left Behind; 3) Hot Chocolate Boy; 4) I've Lost You; 5) Cry For A Shadow; 6) Collide; 7) Nancy Sin; 8) Fortune Cookie Prize; 9) Revolution Come And Gone; 10) Red Head Walking.

 

And the growth process goes on and on, and here is where we reach a stage where there is almost nothing left that could rekindle those old feelings of endearing cuteness. The primitive guitar melodies stay strictly primitive, while the lyrics strive towards increasingly meditative, introspec­tive, impressionistic poetry — which creates an unpleasant imbalance: you'd think that more so­phisticated wordplay exercises deserved a songwriting jolt as well, but no, these guys are just too lazy or too stubborn to come up with better melodies.

 

At least Heather gets to sing three whole songs, two of which sound exactly the same and one of which (ʽCollideʼ) sounds like an early Sonic Youth demo. Her twee-ness makes it easier to sit through Calvin's usual deconstructed surf-rock stuff, which shows no progress whatsoever from the previous album. Only one tune somehow stands out, both because it's longer than the rest and because it is the closest so far that they have come to amateur-emulating the Velvets: ʽRevolution Come And Goneʼ, a song not about any actual revolutions, but rather about a love-and-hate re­lationship with strong sexual implications — however, the rhythm guitar work and the inflection-free vocals are so mind-numbing that I'd rather have me 17 minutes of ʽSister Rayʼ than have to listen to yet another four minutes of this song.

 

In fact, fourth time around it is clear that the formula has finally «locked in», and that Dreamy is a proposition strictly for those who have already been converted. Yes, these songs are still catchy in the same way that early Beach Boy songs like ʽSurfin' Safariʼ were catchy, or Jan and Dean, or Link Wray, etc., but these are not freshly invented hooks (fans of early Sixties rock will probably find no new melodic moves whatsoever), and their execution leaves everything to be desired — so there's really nothing except for an abstract «lo-fi aesthetics» left to defend them. And there is nothing I can say about songs like ʽMe Untamedʼ, ʽHot Chocolate Boyʼ, or ʽNancy Sinʼ that I have not already said about their earlier tunes, so why say anything? My limited time subscription to this aesthetics ran out with Jamboree anyway.

 

Bottomline: if you are a fan of running once fresh, but eventually quite stale artistic jokes so deep into the ground that nobody except you can even see them anymore, Dreamy is there for you. I, however, feel more bored by its thirty minutes than if I'd had to spend all that time listening to a Grateful Dead jam. You get similar reactions from late period Ramones, but at least late period Ramones didn't have to harbor an irrational pride for shitty production, poor playing, and offkey singing. Which is too bad, because Calvin's lyrics are actually getting better — he's got quite a unique way of looking at relationships now, and with a slight change of aesthetics, I could see how something like ʽCry For A Shadowʼ might have been reworked into a really efficient, even therapeutic love song. Unfortunately, I cannot at all stomach this approach to «being different»: when your music makes Lou Reed seem like the Jascha Heifetz of electric guitar, you know you're taking huge risks, and I believe that, if you think in context, Dreamy is where they reach the end of the line. Thumbs down.

 

YOU TURN ME ON (1992)

 

1) Tiger Trap; 2) Noise; 3) Pinebox Derby; 4) Teenage Caveman; 5) Sleepy Head; 6) You Turn Me On; 7) Godsend; 8) Hey Day; 9) Bury The Hammer.

 

A tricky question here: will the Beat still be Happening if, for once — just for once — the band actually decides to record music that does not intentionally sound bad? As in, quality hi-fi pro­duction, predominantly on-key vocals, well-tuned guitars and all? The song structures may still be minimalistic as hell, restricted by 2-3 chords at max, and the atmosphere may still smell of lobotomy post-op, but the technical quality is improved to the point of there actually being some technical quality, and isn't that, like, sacrilegious for this band? Is there a point here? Didn't we really all enjoy Beat Happening just because of the aural masochism?

 

In any case, it is a good thing that they recorded this, because otherwise we'd just have empty speculations — and here is your actual chance to witness a cleaner, tighter, more overtly musical variant of Beat Happening before it's too late. Additionally, there is one more important change: the songs are much longer now on the average, varying from around 4 to 6 minutes, with ʽGod­sendʼ clocking in at an awesome-awful 9:28 — and no, this is not some sort of «progressive» tendency, because the Spartan melody stubbornly stays the same all the time. If you can listen to our shit for two minutes, you might as well listen for nine. Let the chords soak in.

 

My honest opinion is that the gamble pays off quite well. In essence, this is the same old Beat Happening — Calvin, the grumpy one, and Heather, the bright innocent one, with their guitar melodies reflecting the two different personalities — and the improved sound quality is a blessing for their vocal hooks, which, although repetitive, finally get a chance to properly materialize and solidify (particularly when they prop them up with multi-tracked vocals).

 

So you could say that the inexperienced kid of seven years ago has finally matured here, advan­cing to the level of writing some really densely encoded lyrical observations on love and death and to the level of actually mastering some professional techniques to set them to music — yet all the while remaining at about the same level of rudimentary musical talent, and retaining the twee innocence and the gloomy sarcasm of yore. Actually, one thing that you can sense fairly well is that the personality is almost completely split in two now: Heather and Calvin move in such dif­ferent directions that it almost feels uncomfortable to have something as sweet, optimistic, and encouraging as ʽSleepy Headʼ and something as grinningly ghoulish as ʽPinebox Derbyʼ (a song about hunting witches and sealing them in coffins, no less!) on the same album. Or, a minute later, have to listen to the quasi-Satanic mantra of "turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man" and then, right next to it, learn that "it's just the things you do, you make it true, you're a godsend" over the course of a friendly nine-minute mantra.

 

Indeed, approximately half of this album sounds as if it were recorded in the dead of night at your local cemetery, while the other half was recorded in broad daylight on some green lawn in Central Park. The two halves lock together on the final track, ʽBury The Hammerʼ, a relatively rare case of an actual duet between Calvin and Heather that urges to "forgive and forget, it's time to make amends", as if the previous forty minutes were spent in the state of a hostile rift, and now the creepy cemetery joker and the sunshine-loving dame are coming together in one final em­brace... yeah, I could picture something like that.

 

And yes, the vocal hooks are nice. Not very original — just nice. For the record, one bit of vocal modulation on ʽSleepy Headʼ is borrowed from the Stones' ʽAs Tears Go Byʼ, and I'm sure that most of the other parts can be traced back to their old-school pop roots as well, from Motown to the Kinks, but they are reworking, not stealing, and matching the old hooks to their modern per­sonalities. Be it the mournful "we cry alone, we cry alone" of ʽTeenage Cavemanʼ, or the ado­ring "you make it true..." bit of ʽGodsendʼ, or the nonchalantly mumbled "bury the hammer, bury the hammer" mantra, they're all a tiny tiny bit «new», and they're all meaningfully attractive.

 

Overall, this is clearly a thumbs up kind of album — I hesitate to call it the «culmination» of all things Beat Happening, since it objectively sounds very differently from everything they did pre­viously; but as the end of the journey, it is at least as important as the self-titled debut. You can easily skip the middle of the road, but it makes sense — and a little intrigue — to take a look at how they ended up if you already know how they started out. Ironically, this was not originally supposed to be Beat Happening's swan song: it is more like one of those albums that unintentio­nally come out looking like swan songs, and then subvert the band into breaking up because there's just no way they could really pick it up and continue on. Another record like that, and the spiral of mediocrity would start swirling again; but as it is, You Turn Me On remains the band's most immediately accessible and likeable record, and I'm glad they went out with it.  

 

ADDENDA:

 

MUSIC TO CLIMB THE APPLE TREE BY (1984-2000/2003)

 

1) Angels Gone; 2) Nancy Sin; 3) Sea Hunt; 4) Look Around; 5) Not A Care In The World; 6) Dreamy; 7) That Girl; 8) Secret Picnic Spot; 9) Zombie Limbo Time; 10) Foggy Eyes; 11) Knock On Any Door; 12) Sea Babies; 13) Tales Of A Brave Aphrodite; 14) Polly Pereguinn; 15) I Dig You.

 

As a very brief, but obligatory post-scriptum to the true story of Beat Happening, we should mention this collection of singles, EPs, and other rarities, spanning about fifteen years. It was first made available as one of the CDs in the Crashing Through boxset, released by K Records in 2002 and containing just about everything the band ever did; then, a year later, it was issued sepa­rately, for the benefit of those veteran fans who already had all the records.

 

As it usually happens with these things, you will not find any major surprises here, though. His­torically, I guess, the most important tracks are the last four — recorded by the band in 1988 in collaboration with another indie outfit, Screaming Trees, and containing the proto-grunge rocker ʽPolly Pereguinnʼ that was later named by Kurt Cobain as his favorite song of the 1980s. It does stand somewhere halfway between the heavy psychedelia of the late Sixties and Nirvana's somber grunge declarations of hatred for humanity, but honestly, it's not that good — not even in a bang-your-head-against-the-wall suicidal variety of «good». The sound of it, with the heavily distorted descending riff (a little derivative of Cream's ʽWhite Roomʼ, if you ask me), the deafening bass, and the stone-dead vocals, is morbidly seductive, but the hook-power is quite limited. But I guess the sound was well enough for Kurt on this occasion. Besides, it's really a Screaming Trees song, not a Beat Happening one, so why am I even discussing this?

 

Another interesting inclusion is the single ʽAngel Goneʼ, which was actually recorded during a brief reunion period in 2000 — and shows that very little had changed in the meantime, except that Calvin's baritone became even deeper, but also more controllable: he is now capable of wea­ving fluent, even slightly mesmerizing vocal melodies (over the same monotonous two-chord guitar jangle) that confirm the band did have talent, after all, no matter how efficiently they tried to hide it for all those years. And the B-side, ʽZombie Limbo Timeʼ, shows that they never lost the scary graveyard side of their personality either — although this track, to be honest, sounds like straightahead black comedy (and could also be easily mistaken for a B-52's outtake).

 

Fans of You Turn Me On will also be happy to have the single ʽSea Huntʼ, which preceded the album and presaged its style — anthemic singing, heavy echo, and just a touch of offensively out-of-tune violin to remind us that these guys were still downshifters and deconstructors, and what was good for The Velvet Underground was even better for Beat Happening. The rest of the tracks, including alternate (single) versions of ʽNancy Sinʼ and ʽDreamyʼ, just sort of pass by, though. That said, I do admit that I have not been, as of yet, able to listen to the record properly as recom­mended — namely, while in the state of climbing an apple tree — and cannot accurately guaran­tee that it will not sound completely different to the ears of someone busy grappling a tree trunk with all four limbs. Unless, of course, this is simply a veiled hint at the fact that this kind of music can only appeal to 12-year olds, or to any-year olds with the mind of a 12-year old, or to any-year olds who can efficiently simulate the mind of a 12-year old whenever they want to re­cover from the latest political scandal or personal tragedy. Beat Happening, ladies and gentlemen. Give 'em a big hand and all.

BIG BLACK

THE HAMMER PARTY (1982-1984/1986)

 

1) Steelworker; 2) Live In A Hole; 3) Dead Billy; 4) I Can Be Killed; 5) The Crack; 6) Rip; 7) Cables; 8) Pigeon Kill; 9) I'm A Mess; 10) Texas; 11) Seth; 12) Jump The Climb; 13) Racer-X; 14) Shotgun; 15) The Ugly American; 16) Deep Six; 17) Sleep!; 18) Big Payback.

 

No question about it, Steve Albini is one sick puppy. As far as I can tell, there are no credible re­cords of his going through any serious childhood traumas — unless, of course, the move from Pasadena, California to Missoula, Montana at the tender age of 12 counts as one, which may be possible — so blame it on a rogue gene or something. Of course, it is a natural thing for artists of all types to focus on the underbelly of society, but some go farther, stay longer, and breathe louder than others, and Albini is most definitely on the short list here. 

 

I have to confess that, as a rule, I do not experience any pleasure at getting my face stuffed in a toilet bowl, metaphorically speaking — not to mention that it happens all too often in real life (metaphorically speaking again!) for me to want to come home and get even more of that out of my stereo system. I do believe in freedom of expression, and think that the presence of people like G. G. Allin is a sign of healthy society / art scene, rather than the opposite (well, at least as long as the guy does not take his laxative on my front porch, that is) — but that does not mean I would ever want to waste time listening to a G. G. Allin record, God rest his soul; the guy is just an extreme example of a social activist, and has about as much to do with «music» or «art» in ge­neral as «Pussy Riot», or Abbie Hoffman, or the Holy Roman Emperor.

 

Steve Albini, on the other hand, is definitely an artist, and the «Big Black» project was founded by him in 1981 with a definite aim of producing art — socially relevant art, that is, rather than artistically irrelevant social activity. By his own account, he enjoyed the brutality and viscerality of both heavy metal and hardcore punk, but ultimately found both genres laughable, a feeling that many of us could probably empathize with: in my own case, I have to always remember to put myself in a particular frame of mind when listening either to Iron Maiden or the Dead Kennedys, otherwise it all ends in a facepalm barrage.

 

Thus, the idea behind Big Black was to make music that sounded equally loud, furious, and vis­ceral, but at the same time could really kick the shit out of the listener. Something that would be very painful, from a musical angle, but would also look real, would make sure that you are suf­fering from an actual cause, something that could turn your insides out and bulldoze them on the spot, and make you feel enlightened and grateful rather than simply offended for the sake of be­ing offended. In other words, the kind of stuff that the Nick Cave-led Birthday Party were doing at the same time — except that the Birthday Party had freakier, more abstract lyrics, and depen­ded all too much on the «musical epilepsy» of their frontman, whereas Albini placed his bet on far more straightforward, accessible lyrical imagery and a clearer, sterner head.

 

The Hammer Party, released in 1986, was not a proper album, but a compilation of Big Black's first two EPs: Lungs (1982) and Bulldozer (1983) — subsequent CD re-releases would also in­clude a third EP, Racer-X from 1984. All three, however, are essential building blocks of the Big Black legend, and nothing could be more natural than starting the story right from where it be­gins. In 1982, «Big Black» was really a one-man project, with Albini recording all the guitar, bass, and vocal parts himself, entrusting the percussion duties to a drum machine (credited as a full-time band member by the name of «Roland»!), and only occasionally letting his college friend John Bohnen help him out with saxophone parts (or, rather, «bleats»). A year later, on Bulldozer, Big Black was already a band, with Jeff Pezzati on bass and Santiago Durango on second guitar — and this was also the breaking point where Albini arrived at his trademark guitar sound, «inven­ting industrial music in the process», as some say, although, of course, a more correct answer would have been «merging industrial music with hardcore punk» (Einstürzende Neubauten had their first «industrial» album out in 1980, and the roots of the genre go way back). Thus, any nar­rative on Big Black that kicks off with Atomizer would be somewhat... headless.

 

Already on Lungs, Albini shows himself to be a master of tone, above everything else. He him­self was modest enough to all but disown the songs, either because he found the lyrics too crude or the «search process for best tone ever» far from complete, but most of the songs sound fairly great to my ears, at least. ʽSteelworkerʼ opens with a guitar part that I could only describe as «syphilitic funk» — a melody that would rather be expected on a heavy metal album, but pitched all the way to high heaven, shrill, trebly, pulling the nerves right out of your teeth, as Albini cheerfully informs us that "the only good policeman is a dead one / the only good laws aren't en­forced" and then goes on examining his deepest murder instincts. It's not exactly scary, but the experience is more disturbing, indeed, than any random heavy metal tune of the year, or decade.

 

Subsequent topics do not stray far away from the commonly unfathomable — exploring the lower depths on ʽLive In A Holeʼ, dabbling in Vietnam zombie trash on ʽDead Billyʼ, inviting suicide on ʽI Can Be Killedʼ, and so on. Melodically, the songs all follow the New Wave aesthetics, but seem more influenced by acts like Pere Ubu, Wire, Joy Division, etc., rather than Albini's punk scene competitors — which is already enough to make whatever the guy is doing more interesting for the modern listener, and that is not yet mentioning all the different guitar tones (where the «white lightning» of songs like ʽSteelworkerʼ and ʽI Can Be Killedʼ is opposed quite radically to the «black terror» of bass-heavy songs like ʽRipʼ and ʽLive In A Holeʼ).

 

The «textbook» Albini, however, only arrives on Bulldozer — for ʽCablesʼ, he invents his «clan­ky» sound by sticking sheet metal clips in his guitar picks, so that every note now sounds like the clang of a weapon against a metal shield. ʽCablesʼ still remains one of the best exponents of that sound, with a brief «teaser» introduction as a lesson on how it works (of sorts), and the cruel lyrics (inspired by personal experience with a Montana abattoir) perfectly matching the cruelty of the new sound. Not that the other lyrics lag anywhere behind — the entire EP is taken over by such delicious subjects as poisoning pigeons and buying knives, and populated by colorful cha­racters with hick, racist, and bigoted backgrounds. Just the kind of thing, in other words, that de­serves a special manner of guitar playing invented in special honor of it.

 

ʽCablesʼ has the meanest and ugliest sound, but Albini can also throw «hilarious» in the can, too, as is the case with ʽTexasʼ, which is sort of an «avant-hardcore» freakout, a series of speedy buildups and comedowns serving as a freaky background for one of the most laconic and the most vicious putdowns of the Lone Star in history — the only reason why Dallas never made a persona non grata out of Albini in return is that nobody in Dallas probably heard the record in the first place, except those few like-minded fellows who hate their own state anyway. ʽSethʼ is much darker in tone, beginning with a taped phone hotline chock-full of eloquent racial slurs bordering on the absurdist (where else will you hear Martin Luther King called a "doubly-dege­nerate, Jew-led, Red jungle bunny"? Priceless!) and building its protest rage from there. But musically, my favourite tune is ʽI'm A Messʼ, if only for the utterly terrific bass-guitar duo that unintentionally ends up sounding like a hardcore take on ʽThe Hut Of Baba Yagaʼ — in addition to everything else, let us not forget that Big Black actually cared about their melodies, rarely letting themselves get too carried away with just the rage, just the lyrics, or even just the guitar tone. There is all that, yes, but there are also interesting and serious musical ideas scattered all over the place, although they only become noticeable once the overall impression stops clouding the brain and it becomes interested in the compositional process as well.

 

Racer-X, in comparison, is not that much of a big leap forward, since the basic formula has been established on Bulldozer and the band members remain the same. Nevertheless, the title track, ʽThe Ugly Americanʼ (with John Bohnen returning on «sax bleats» to make it all sound like an early precursor to John Zorn's Bad City), and ʽSleep!ʼ are all treasurable highlights, particularly ʽRacer-Xʼ with its alternating soundscapes of grim lonesome drum machine and all-out guitar nightmare — most of the other songs have their moments, too, even if, on the whole, this third EP seems to be more of a «breather» in between Bulldozer as the moment of Big Black's true arrival and Atomizer as its first full-scale LP-length statement. But who cares about particularities? The whole package, taken together, deserves its certified thumbs up, and, to this day, remains one of the strongest musical indictments of retrograde darkness ever recorded. Yeah, yeah, I know, in reality Albini is merely exorcising his own personal demons, but there's no harm in driving them through certain areas of the American landscape along the way.

 

ATOMIZER (1986)

 

1) Jordan, Minnesota; 2) Passing Complexion; 3) Big Money; 4) Kerosene; 5) Bad Houses; 6) Fists Of Love; 7) Stinking Drunk; 8) Bazooka Joe; 9) Strange Things; 10) Cables (live).

 

When you follow Bulldozer up with Atomizer, chances are you are not really in the mood for significantly changing your formula. Indeed, the basic ingredients all remain the same: Albini's «clanging» guitar tone as the main attraction, pummeling industrialized beats and tempos as the main framework, and lyrics about perverts and perversions as the main subject of reference. Also, the entire LP runs just over half an hour, which probably is the longest possible time one could listen to this sonic nightmare without getting well-adjusted, numbed down, and bored. In fact, were it up to me, I'd probably cut it down by another five or ten minutes, because the EP format works best with the likes of Big Black.

 

With the formula set so tightly in place, the overall quality of the album depends on how many different and emotionally evocative riffs / grooves / arrangements the band can offer, and, fortu­nately, Albini's creative juices are peaking — almost every one of these nine songs delivers, one way or another. The central piece, bravely extended to a six-minute running time, is ʽKeroseneʼ; from a classificatory angle, it would probably count as «hardcore industrialized funk», with rela­tively complex (for Big Black) interplay between the bass and guitars and several crescendos that perfectly match the song's lyrical message ("never anything to do in this town... there's kerosene around, something to do... set me on fire, kerosene!"). Few songs have managed to tackle the «violence born out of boredom» topic so efficiently, as Steve's guitar goes from high-pitched, monotonous, whiny funk chords («boredom») to shrill, crackling, ascending lines — musical flames engulfing the listener. Fabulously cool and inventive.

 

The shorter songs are predictably less ambitious — just state their simple, repetitive points for a brief interval of time to give way to the next sketch in the «Panoramas of Perversion» series. ʽJor­dan, Minnesotaʼ takes on the issue of a 1983 scandal of child abuse in said little town, and I'd bet anything Albini was particularly happy that the little town was named after the holy river, throw­ing the issue of hypocrisy into the mix. The song's main riff has nothing particularly original about it, but sounds double-threatening when played Albini-style, and by the time the song has burst into complete hysteria, with insane screams of «suck daddy, suck daddy, suck daddy!» almost drowning out the guitar background, you may well be itching for a nice hot shower. Ex­ploitative to the core, yes, but effective.

 

Other, ahem, «highlights» for me would have to be ʽFists Of Loveʼ — the subject matter is easy enough to guess, and all the melodic lines have been specially selected and received the Steve Albini Stamp of Approval for Matching Physical Pain; and ʽBazooka Joeʼ, which is about as complex as your average Ramones song, but still generates a certain trance-inducing effect — Steve's «pleading-aggressive» repetitive mantra of "you don't have to be alone Joe... hang with me Joe...", recited over the song's dark rhythm pattern, may act funny on the brain.

 

The rest of the songs are difficult to describe in any other terms than the ones already used, but what really saves Atomizer from becoming «filler city», even with this short overall length, is that each song works as its own separate anecdote — you are walking here through a picture ex­hibition, glaring at child molesters, bored kids in provincial shitholes, sexual deviants, whore­house clients, corrupt policemen, alcoholics, and racial issues. It doesn't always sound different from each other, but it's one hell of a panorama, and I'd say it elevates the level of social con­sciousness far more efficiently than, say, any given sermon-riddled LP by Bad Religion. Defini­tely not just «gross for grossness' sake», Atomizer never really overcooks its slum-taste pasta, so here is another thumbs up in return.

 

SONGS ABOUT FUCKING (1987)

 

1) The Power Of Independent Trucking; 2) The Model; 3) Bad Penny; 4) L Dopa; 5) Precious Thing; 6) Colombian Necktie; 7) Kitty Empire; 8) Ergot; 9) Kasimir S. Pulaski Day; 10) Fish Fry; 11) Pavement Saw; 12) Tiny, King Of The Jews; 13) Bombastic Intro; 14) He's A Whore.

 

And by «fucking», Steve Albini, of course, conveys all the possible meanings of the word, literal as well as figurative. The album title may sound a little exploitative these days, but it fits the music, the lyrical subjects, the atmosphere fairly well — at the very least, it's a much more appro­priate title than Songs About Making Love or Songs About Sleeping Together, which wouldn't be a Big Black-ish title at all.

 

Ideologically, the record never departs far enough from the internal logic of Atomizer, the basic formula remaining the same — jarring, aurally disturbing guitar tones, deranged vocals, and sto­ries of various types of sick fucks (particularly truckers — Albini seems to have a special bone against the honest trucker, as if he'd spent all his childhood being molested on the highway). But since these stories come in all sorts of different varieties, this keeps the moods and melodies fresh and diverse enough to make up for another thirty minutes of stimulating musique-noire entertain­ment. Even though this time around, there is no central masterpiece like ʽKeroseneʼ to act as a reliable anchor, and all the dirty vignettes just roam around in a slightly disconcerting manner.

 

At least one of the creative decisions is quite bizarre, but fascinating: I have no idea how the band came around to covering Kraftwerk's ʽThe Modelʼ, a song that originally made perfect sense as a part of The Man Machine, with its electronic equation of a glamor model with a human robot — here, electronic futurism is replaced with BDSM guitars, so that the story of the submissive model ends up on the same plane of being as the story of the fornicating tru­cker and the story of the Colombian necktie. Additionally, we get good proof that Albini's «clang guitar» can be used fairly well to play pop-style lead melodies, even if the whole thing is more of an ironic experi­ment than a serious attempt to branch out.

 

Slightly more serious are some experiments on the second side of the album, which Albini would later describe as relative failures, at least in relation to the more spontaneous, free-flowing, punky songs on the first side. In particular, ʽKitty Empireʼ stomps along like some sort of arrogant «pro­gressive hardcore» epic, taking the life experience of «King Cat» as a likely allegory for some­thing less cuddly and cutesy and pinning it to a slow-moving, grinding industrial nightmare that gradually builds up in intensity, then cuts out abruptly just as you were beginning to hope for an apocalyptic climax. But as «epic» as it tries to be, the song is just too monotonous to overwhelm the senses — and no matter what they say about him, «King Cat» just does not sound like a scary enough personage to perfectly match the brutal repetitive riff pattern of the song. Maybe ʽGoblin Empireʼ might have been a better fit, but that'd be too much fantasy for these guys.

 

Much more effective, I think, is ʽFish Fryʼ, also on the second side, which contains the album's most daring piece of art news — a story of a murderer hosing his truck after chucking the dead body out in a nearby pond — and sets it to one of the album's most head-wrecking melodies, where Albini's mutilation of his high strings is like a manipulation of sharp psychedelic needles twitching in your brain; even by Big Black's usual standards, the song is an impressive bit of psychological-physiological torture. Lyrically less explicit, but musically even crazier, though, is ʽErgotʼ, where Albini is trying to provide the musical equivalent of a particularly violent on­slaught of St. Anthony's Fire — you'd have to consult an actual sufferer to understand how close he got to achieving the right effect, but if you listen to this stuff loud enough in headphones, twitching and occasional spasms are near-guaranteed.

 

That said, it is terribly hard to dedicate space, time, and opinions to individual songs on here, even if most of them do have their own individuality — like the seven deadly sins, or the indivi­dual members of the Manson Family. So let me just conclude by saying that, on the whole, the album is a little deeper, a little more ambitious, a little more image-risking than its predecessor, but possibly not quite as directly hard-hitting, either. And that's good — considering that Big Black only managed to release two original studio albums, this gives a good opportunity for the fans to live their lives fighting over which one is closer to «the true Big Black». Personally, I can­not decide, so I just give the whole album another thumbs up, despite the fact that I'd certainly refuse to answer the question «do you really like Songs About Fucking?» in a straightforward manner — it's a trick sort of question.

 

SOUND OF IMPACT (1987)

 

1) Ready Men; 2) Big Money; 3) Elephant Joke?; 4) Cables; 5) Yanomamo Indians; 6) Pigeon Kill; 7) Passing Complexion; 8) Crack Up; 9) RIP; 10) Jordan, Minnesota; 11) Firecrackers; 12) Cables; 13) Pigeon Kill; 14) Kero­sene; 15) Bad Penny; 16) Deep Six; 17) RIP; 18) Rama Rama.

 

An «un-unofficial bootleg»: the album was originally released on a UK indie label rather than Big Black's own Homestead Records, and whatever was the reason for that, legal trouble was avoided by leaving not only the band's name off the packaging (which consisted mainly of reprints of black box transcripts, hence the «title»), but even the song titles (currently restored, the 18 tracks were first denoted by completely different monikers, although retaining some con­nection with the originals — for instance, ʽCablesʼ was ʽKill The Cowʼ, and ʽPigeon Killʼ was ʽBird Thangʼ). Since then, however, the record has occasionally been re-released, and generally features as an integral part of Big Black's discography.

 

And for good reason, too, since Big Black are one of the few artists in the whole punk/post-punk pool that really deserve to be heard live. Pigpile gives a better general impression of a classic Albini show, but Sound Of Impact, recorded in two different locations (which is why some of the tracks double each other), is a bit more of a «glorious mess», a little less loud and a little more prominent on stupid, but memorable Albini jokes. Anyway, even despite the fact that they mostly play the same songs on both albums, owning both is not an exercise in redundancy.

 

The funny thing is that it takes a good listen to a live Big Black album to properly understand that the band does pay a lot of attention to proper mixing and even melodicity of sound on their studio records — in the live environment, Albini's and Durango's guitars omit or blur some of the subtle twists of the originals (e. g. ʽDeep Sixʼ), greedily going for more noise, power, and energy, just the way it befits a good old-fashioned rock'n'roll performer. But where they lose in complexity and subtlety, they expectedly gain in blowing your brains out. With a little extra distortion on the «clang» tone, the songs are transformed into walls of ferocious white fire — if the bass is at re­gular volume, as on ʽKeroseneʼ or ʽPassing Complexionʼ — or black fire, if the bass is turned all the way up, as on ʽBad Pennyʼ or the second of the two ʽPigeon Killsʼ.

 

In between the firethrower blasts, Steve entertains the not-too-grateful listeners with «shocking» stories, such as the one about the mouse with the BMW and the elephant with a big dick (ʽEle­phant Joke?ʼ), or one about certain violent and sexist customs of particular Indian tribes (ʽYano­mamo Indiansʼ), or introducing ʽBig Moneyʼ by saying "we stole it from Rush", or finding some other way to come across as a shock-oriented prankster. It does add some personality to the show, but what sort of personality is up to you to decide. I'm still trying to figure out why his unfunny jokes do not annoy me — whether it is a Monty Python sort of way, with absurdism compensa­ting for the occasional unfunniness, or maybe I'm just a covert fan of artistic rudeness.

 

Of the setlist, the only big surprise is the closing track, a cover of an obscure composition by the short-lived post-punk band Rema-Rema (mostly famous for its guitar player Marco Pirroni, who would later become a close associate of Adam Ant) — nothing special about it, and it was pro­bably played for an encore to confuse the audience even further; then again, like every respec­table indie prophet, Albini did have this hunch for dragging out obscurities (being as he was, to a large extent, an obscurity himself). But this record is not about surprises, it is about putting the «Big» back in «Black», if you get my drift, and it does that fairly well and it gets a thumbs up and you can't get it anywhere legally, not even on iTunes, so Steve Albini welcomes you to break the law in this particular case.

 

PIGPILE (1992)

 

1) Fists Of Love; 2) L Dopa; 3) Passing Complexion; 4) Dead Billy; 5) Cables; 6) Bad Penny; 7) Pavement Saw; 8) Kerosene; 9) Steelworker; 10) Pigeon Kill; 11) Fish Fry; 12) Jordan, Minnesota.

 

This is such a quintessential live Big Black recording that it is quite weird how it took them five years to release it — the actual gig was played on July 24, 1987, in London, during the band's farewell tour of Europe, and it was one of those farewell tours where the «farewell mindset» ac­tually adds to the general energy and excitement level rather than takes away from it. In addition to that, the setlist is constructed as a representative retrospective, covering all of Big Black's out­put with the exception of the Racer-X EP, and with the aid of superior sound quality, acts as a terrific and deserving conclusion to the band's career.

 

You do get the usual bad-taste jokes ("this is a song Jerry Lee Lewis wrote before he killed one of his wives"), and you also get Albini's trademark "one, two, FUCK YOU!" live intros (that were unexpectedly absent on Sound Of Impact), but none of these really matter next to, say, the com­plete recasting of ʽDead Billyʼ from its rather humble beginnings into a veritable wall of melodic white noise, or to ʽFists Of Loveʼ dropping its slightly «Gothic» production in favor of razor-blade sharp guitar playing and simulation of totally maniacal violence. As on Sound Of Impact, these live versions by no means outshine the originals or make them obsolete — they simply blast them away with heavy artillery, for better or worse.

 

The major kicker is astutely saved for last: a nearly seven-minute version of ʽJordan, Minnesotaʼ in which the unspeakable activities of the protagonists are «simulated» by the guitar in a feedback assault that yields some of the cruelest aural effects I've ever had the mispleasure of hearing. No, fortunately, this is not the audio equivalent of Salò or any such work of vomit-art, but the things Albini is doing on this track, in terms of my general barriers of tolerance, beat just about every­thing, from Throbbing Gristle to Ministry. Play it loud enough in headphones and see how much Real Man you really are — baptised through fire and brimstone rather than holy waters.

 

It is interesting that, having disbanded Big Black, Albini put the name to rest, even though the «band», from the very start, was his one-man project and he could have easily preserved the mo­niker for his future projects like Rapeman and Shellac. But all of these later incarnations are, in fact, substantially different from the «Big Black sound» that Steve had all but abandoned — the «drum machine vs. clang guitar» thing was buried for good, almost as if the man had realized that he'd taken the formula as far as it could go, and that it was high time for an image change. Much like Nick Cave on the other side of the planet, Albini would «soften» his approach (although he'd never «stoop» to soulfulness and sentimentality), but this was probably inevitable if he wanted to try and progress further — otherwise, subsequent Big Black-style albums would most likely soon degenerate into complete self-parody. As it is, the Pigpile memento provides a perfect final touch, well worth a thumbs up, both to the career of Big Black and the whole «noisy post-punk» thing, soon to be absorbed into the much more commercially successful, but nowhere near as provoca­tive, grunge and alt-rock scene.

BILLY BRAGG

LIFE'S A RIOT WITH SPY VS. SPY (1983)

 

1) The Milkman Of Human Kindness; 2) To Have And To Have Not; 3) Richard; 4) A New England; 5) The Man In The Iron Mask; 6) The Busy Girl Buys Beauty; 7) Lovers Town Revisited.

 

This might be the single most influential (or, at least, most revered) LP in the history of pop music (or, at least, UK pop music) that takes no more than sixteen minutes in total to tell you everything it needs to tell you. A much later CD edition has expanded it to more than twice its length with the addition of demos and rarities, but even then it was divided into two discs and the first one contained nothing but the original album — so you don't ever forget the importance of brevity in this line of artistic business. (I only have the record as part of the 1987 compilation Back To Basics, so I have not yet heard the additional tracks on the expanded release).

 

Now even though for Billy Bragg social activism and politics have always been every bit as im­portant as his music, Life's A Riot already clearly shows that he is a «singer-songwriter doing politics», not a «social activist pretending to be a musician in his spare time». The thing that he does here was something largely unheard of in 1983: «folk-punk» in the most literal sense of the word, where the artist is a one-man band, playing energetic, uptempo tunes on an electric guitar, but using it in the manner of a folk troubadour. Give the man a complete rhythm section to go along, and you will have something in between The Clash and Elvis Costello; as it is, what you have is a modern day Woody Guthrie, updated to reflect contemporary realities and certain ad­vances in playing, writing, and verbalizing that took place since the 1940s.

 

The way to enjoy and understand Billy Bragg is through his «persona» rather than any specific musical gift. As you see them here, these songs are neither particularly well written nor amazing­ly well performed: sure Billy can write, play, and sing, but there is nothing about these chord changes, guitar tones, or vocal inflections that has not been done better by more artists than you will have the chance to listen to in your sweet short life. However, once you put it all together — his choppy garage-rock guitar chords, his rough, earnest, Strummer-influenced voice, his deep-reaching lyrics (way above whatever you'd expect from the average leftist stereotype), and that stripped-down attitude, as if he were just recreating his usual busking on the streets of London in the studio — the whole is far more impressive than the parts.

 

Besides, at this point it is not even completely clear if social messages are more important for Billy than pure expression of emotion: after all, the album opens with ʽThe Milkman Of Human Kindnessʼ (already an awesome song title, isn't it?), which is basically just a romantic love song (unless, of course, you want to interpret the line "I will leave an extra pint" as indication that the protagonist is simply willing to make love to as many women as there are milk bottles, and that the current addressee is just one of the many. Ah well, still a romantic love song, just with an ad­ditional Don Giovanni twist then). As the song opens with loudly blasting, ass-kicking folk-rock guitar chords, you most naturally expect the opening to be followed with the band kicking in — bass, drums, second guitar, maybe Al Kooper on the organ or something — but it never does, and I still wonder just how much better the song could have worked on its own, if given a full arran­ge­ment. Not much better, perhaps, because the chorus has no well-placed hook (that "I will leave an extra pint" is merely memorable because it is a fun line delivered accappella for the whole world to hear and memorize) — but no harm in wondering.

 

Social conscience begins to kick in with the second track: ʽTo Have And To Have Notʼ is basi­cally the Clash's ʽJulie's In The Drug Squadʼ (or some other Clash song, no matter) with new ly­rics ("just because you're better than me doesn't mean I'm lazy"), but since it's more derivative, it's also catchier, and Billy's enthusiasm may even be more infectious than Strummer's, precisely because of the stripped-down arrangement. ʽA New Englandʼ makes a subtler point: "I don't want to change the world / I'm not looking for a new England / I'm just looking for another girl" could be superficially understood as reluctance to introduce changes, but in fact, it is quite clear that getting another girl is a difficult task in old England, so... anyway, the chorus here is probably the most charismatic spot on the entire record, combining a bit of melancholy, a bit of puzzled con­fusion, and a bit of optimism in the face of depressing odds. Additionally, it's a good example of Billy's way of genre-welding: "I was 21 years when I wrote this song, I'm 22 now but I won't be for long" is written and sung as if it were an old talkin' blues (close your eyes and hear Woody, or Dylan, sing this), but the accompanying guitar is doing it surf/rockabilly-style. Kinda cool.

 

The odd man out on this short record is ʽThe Man In The Iron Maskʼ, which totally eliminates all the garage/punk stylizations, slows down, and turns to dark European folk for inspiration — again, singing about torturous unrequited (or betrayed) love rather than social problems, and sin­ging surprisingly well: given Billy's well-defined, in-yer-face cockney accent all over the place, his take on the «quasi-medieval balladry» genre works out all right, as he never falters on the prolonged notes and switches from higher to lower registers to good effect. Maybe this is not exactly a Lou Reed or a Peter Hammill level of deep-reaching psychologism, but for just a guy with just a guitar, this is exceptionally well crafted stuff.

 

Nevertheless, like I said, Life's A Riot earns its thumbs up «on the whole», as a successful first-time stylistic experiment of merging the «wisdom» of old folk with the «brute force» of new punk, rather than through individual tracks — and yes, to do that, sixteen minutes are just enough (already the last two ultra-short songs bordered on «slightly tedious»). Being the people's cham­pion and all, though, Billy even made sure that you do not get overcharged: "Pay no more than £2.99 for this 7 track album", the front cover says in ineffaceable type (which still seems a bit high — that's something like £9.50 in today's prices, which is the price of a solid CD, but then again, it looks like three pounds was a fair price for a 12" release back then). Ironically, the 2-disc edition as sold on Amazon in the UK goes for £7.89 today — and the cunning bastards have erased the original small type, replacing it with the boring (but serving its purpose) tag of «30th Anniversary Edition». Apparently, there's just no getting away from capitalist swine games even for a true people's champion. Tough world.

 

BREWING UP WITH BILLY BRAGG (1984)

 

1) It Says Here; 2) Love Gets Dangerous; 3) The Myth Of Trust; 4) From A Vauxhall Velox; 5) The Saturday Boy; 6) Island Of No Return; 7) St. Swithin's Day; 8) Like Soldiers Do; 9) This Guitar Says Sorry; 10) Strange Things Hap­pen; 11) A Lover Sings; 12*) Between The Wars; 13*) The World Turned Upside Down; 14*) Which Side Are You On.

 

Compared with Life's A Riot, Billy's first full-length LP seems almost orchestrated — not only are there a few extra players spicing up the songs every now and then (Dave Woodhead on trum­pet, or Van Morrison's keyboard player Kenny Craddock on organ), but Billy's own guitar parts seem fuller, more fleshed out, more in line with the traditional understanding of what a «punk / garage rock song» should sound like. Still, I have to confess that, as much as his lonesome busker approach might have seemed revolutionary at the time, it is very hard for me to overcome the «rockist» attitude and appreciate these songs — be they well written or not — on the same emo­tional level as if they were full band productions.

 

Let's just face it, something like the bravado guitar intro to ʽFrom A Vauxhall Veloxʼ, for ins­tance, just begs for rhythm section support — it's one thing just doing this on a street corner or in your living room, but in the studio... well, on a purely intellectual-symbolic level, it's all under­standable, but on the level of pure instinct, it's all about «oh shit, too bad the guy was on such a tight budget, couldn't even afford himself a bass player». It just can't be helped, that's all, no mat­ter how much intoxicating London charisma he is sweating out while the tapes are running.

 

But yes, there are some dang good songs here — not John Lennon level, I guess, but definitely at least Elvis Costello level. Thematically, Billy goes on to develop his two major concerns: (a) fuck the system that is ruining our lives and (b) fuck the bitch that is ruining my life — and the two are so tightly intertwined that I can't help thinking, is it the system that is supposed to be responsible for the breakdown of human relationships, or is it the breakdown of human relationships that is responsible for the collapse of the system? One thing's for sure: Billy allocates the exact same amount of passion for both themes, which is ultimately good, I guess, because a two-track mind in art is always preferable to a one-track one.

 

And here comes another confession: at this point, I actually prefer Billy's love (or «anti-love») songs to his political statements. The reason might be very simple: they work better as stripped-down ballads, whereas the political songs are the ones that suffer the most from lack of additional musicians. (Although even there, once Billy starts to croon he begins to sound like Morrissey's ragged twin, and the songs start looking like early demos for Smiths ballads. But this problem is notably easier to overcome). ʽThe Myth Of Trustʼ, for instance, is not only lyrically smart (offer­ing its own interpretation of the allegory of Adam and Eve with the serpent left completely out of the picture), but also has a creepy «dark folk» twist to it — later on, Adam and Eve make a much happier comeback in the organ-backed ʽA Lover Singsʼ serenade, but they have to pass through some highly uncomfortable moments before they find out all about love.

 

Of course, though, the album will still be generally remembered not through its ruminations on the nature of sexual attraction, but through its political statements — the anti-Thatcherite ʽIt Says Hereʼ and the anti-war anthems ʽLike Soldiers Doʼ and ʽIsland Of No Returnʼ. Of these three, ʽIslandʼ packs the biggest punch and is probably the single most underworked song here: the arrogant lyrics, the furiously strummed power chords (with some funky syncopation thrown in for good measure), the way he massacres his not-too-inherently-strong voice on the line "...in his hand was a weapon that was made in Bir-ming-haaaaam!..." — these are all hallmarks of a good song... but yes, it could have been better.

 

Still, all in all there is definitely some progress. Billy's lyrics are thought-provoking both on the love front and on the social struggle front; his guitar playing skills, if anything, are demonstrated here even better; and the occasional guest instruments are selected with loving care (did I yet get a chance to mention the cute ʽPenny Laneʼ-like trumpet solos on ʽSaturday Boyʼ, placed there and nowhere else because this is, like, the tenderest song on the album?). For all these reasons, the thumbs up rating should never be placed under doubt — even if the final brew, alas, is just not strong enough for my tastes, and I cannot picture myself voluntarily returning to this record whenever I want to hear a love serenade (if we're talking about the same time period, I'll still predictably pick The Smiths) or a fuck-the-establishment state­ment (if we're talking about the same time period, I'll still predictably pick The Clash). Then again, who knows? Maybe in a few years' time rhythm sessions will become so passé, your spirit will realign to electric guitar bus­king without you knowing it, and then...

 

...anyway, on a technical note, these days this album also comes in a 2-CD edition with plenty of bonus tracks (including some Smiths and Stones covers with Johnny Marr himself guest-starring on second guitar), but I have only heard it as part of 1987's Back To Basics compilation, so my bonus tracks are three more songs from the 1985 EP Between The Wars — one of them an old cover of a pro-union song, and another one (ʽWorld Turned Upside Downʼ) is a Leon Rosselson song about the Diggers' Commune of 1649. Well... the EP was just too short a format to make space for any more love serenades, I guess.

 

TALKING WITH THE TAXMAN ABOUT POETRY (1986)

 

1) Greetings To The New Brunette; 2) Train Train; 3) The Marriage; 4) Ideology; 5) Levi Stubbs' Tears; 6) Honey, I'm A Big Boy Now; 7) There Is Power In A Union; 8) Help Save The Youth Of America; 9) Wishing The Days Away; 10) The Passion; 11) The Warmest Room; 12) The Home Front.

 

Finally, after years of hardcore studio busking, Billy Bragg relents upon us — if only a little bit. There is still a lot of minimalistic electro-busking here, but on many of the tunes, Billy agrees to use additional musicians, sometimes even including a rhythm session, with John Porter playing bass and several different percussionists, one of which happened to be Kenney Jones himself (ex-Small Faces and ex-Who), who also took upon himself the production duties. Ken Craddock on organ, Dave Woodhead on trumpet, and even Johnny Marr on guitar also make appearances, continuing their relations with Billy from where they left off on the previous album.

 

Concerning the album title, I was all set to make some clumsy joke around it when I fortunately discovered that it was actually the translation of the title of a Russian poem by Vladimir Maya­kovsky (something I would never have guessed on my own because the Russian original has the convoluted financial inspector rather than taxman — the poem was published in 1926, when the USSR had no «taxmen» to speak of) — the main idea of the poem being «defense of poet's ho­nor», stating that the profession of a poet is a legitimate occupation even in the new world, ruled with the iron fist of the proletariat dictature. Honestly, I am not quite sure how that point is to be applied to this Billy record — other than implying that he is somehow justifying himself for not working in the coal mines, back to back with The People, but rather sitting his ass off in a warm recording studio, because, well, if The People want their champion, they have no choice but to let him sit his ass off in Livingston Studios, London. I mean, he probably could take his guitar and his tape recorder and record these songs right in the coal mine, but then they'd sound... dusty. No chance of getting any hit singles that way.

 

In any case, the album seems better constructed than Brewing Up: lyrically and musically, there are more nuances here, and the record does not immediately come off as this unnatural, clumsily constructed «now I'm singing about people's rights» — «and now I'm singing about bitches» — «and now I'm singing about people's rights again» — «and now I'm singing about bitches again» monstrosity. Mind you, he is still mostly singing about people's rights and bitches, but the song titles, the melodies, the lyrical imagery become more diversified, and in fact, you know what? in the very first song, he actually combines the two aspects: "Shirley, your sexual politics left me all in a muddle / Shirley, we are joined in the ideological cuddle... Politics and pregnancy / Are de­bated as we empty our glasses...".

 

Unfortunately, even though there are more pianos, trumpets, and bass guitars on the album as be­fore, I also have to state that this comes at the expense of interesting melodies. The most obvious case is ʽIdeologiesʼ — which is simply a cover of Dylan's ʽChimes Of Freedomʼ with new, «up­dated» lyrics by Billy, and even if he is not stealing it, but honestly indicating Dylan as a co-au­thor in the credits, this is somewhat symbolic: lyrics and pure passion have completely overridden his pop writer instincts. This is not a crime — in fact, it may be a deliberate and rational decision, because the man would hate to be labeled as a «pop artist» anyway — but it still makes me sad. Intelligent political statements set to pop hooks give you so much more than just intelligent poli­tical statements (even if intelligent political statements by pop artists are by themselves much preferable to any political statements by politicians).

 

The most musically interesting songs here are the subtlest and most psychological ones: ʽThe Marriageʼ, a seemingly weak protest against the ties of society ("marriage is when we admit our parents were right", the chorus goes), is set to an interesting mish-mash of choppy jazz chords, blues lines, and flamboyant trumpets that has no direct analogy in the past — and ʽThe Passionʼ, symmetrically disposed on the second side of the album, also has a wonderful gliding waltz melody, not as original, but with a very deep and tender-sounding weave of two guitars sliding in and out of each other, as if symbolizing the now agreeing, now discordant relations between kids and parents that forms one of the lyrical topics of the song. There's also ʽLevi Stubbs' Tearsʼ, a mildly haunting portrait of an outcast whose only source of permanent comfort are The Four Tops (and suchlike) — a good example of the man's busking technique where he alternates between throttling/choking his guitar and letting it wail free: again, not particularly original, but very well suited for the character he is singing about.

 

Political stuff like ʽPower In The Unionʼ and ʽHelp Save The Youth Of Americaʼ (I do hope there was some sort of a plan to spread the song in the States — I mean, who really needed it in the UK?) is of passable interest because of the lyrics and little else. The Randy Newman-esque ʽHoney, I'm A Big Boy Nowʼ, with its shambly tack piano and nonchalant country attitude, also shows that this kind of music should better be left to musicians across the other side of the ocean; and ditto for ʽWishing The Days Awayʼ, which may be a parody on the Nashville style for all I know, but it hardly works even as a parody — more like a pack of people that decided, for no reason at all, to record a country song despite having had no experience whatsoever. Or maybe they're intentionally «deconstructing» it, I don't think it works anyway. On the other hand, ʽThe Warmest Roomʼ is an almost accomplished pop song — all it needs is a nice, memorable lead line, and this would be as close as the album comes to a potential hit (not that there was ever any thought about releasing it as a single: that honor fell to the somber ʽLevi Stubbs' Tearsʼ).

 

It would be almost impossible to say that the focal point of the albums are not its lyrics — for Billy, the meaning of what is sung is clearly more important than the manner in which it is sung (which is why serious comparisons with Dylan would be out of question), and it is good to know that, once again, his idea of «championing the people» is not so much to throw shit at The System as it is to try and pull the people themselves out of their somnambulant state, which is why we have all these character portraits of disenchanted lovers, disillusioned housewives, Mother and Father and Grandma, presented with just as much psychologism (sometimes more — after all, we're standing on the shoulders of giants and all that) as in any poem by Ray Davies or (early) Tom Waits. Still, now that the original novel shock at the sight of «electro-busking» has passed, Taxman comes across as a somewhat hesitant, and not very interesting transitional record: even all these extra musicians still do not feel like they have been properly integrated with Bragg's original solitary vision. A few nice songs, but nothing spectacular.

 

WORKERS PLAYTIME (1988)

 

1) She's Got A New Spell; 2) Must I Paint You A Picture?; 3) Tender Comrade; 4) The Price I Pay; 5) Little Time Bomb; 6) Rotting On Remand; 7) Valentine Day's Over; 8) Life With The Lions; 9) The Only One; 10) The Short Answer; 11) Waiting For The Great Leap Forward.

 

If you were a mathematical model, you'd be alarmed by now — we go from just one Billy Bragg on Life's A Riot to three additional musicians on Brewing Up to a whoppin' eleven backup sin­gers and musicians on Talking With The Taxman to, finally, an amazing nineteen people offer­ing their support (and Party mandates) to somebody who, deep in his heart, still remains the same old scruffy electro-busker and does not really need anybody in particular; yet wouldn't it be strange for a union-loving leftist to just keep on doing it all alone? I mean, what sort of example would he set for society? Solitary singer-songwriters, after all, are more like Ayn Rand fodder, when you come to think about it. If you're asking for proletarians all over the world to unite, well, at least get yourself a fuckin' rhythm section to deliver the message.

 

Then again, despite the album title and the general artistic reputation, one need not forget that only three out of eleven songs here are political — the other eight, predictably, are about how hard it is, in a million different hard ways, to forge out comfortable relations between a male and a female spirit. Ironically, the political songs are the weakest of the lot: ʽTender Comradeʼ is an accappella piece where Billy has to struggle so hard to keep in tune, he does not have much strength left to worry about emotional resonance (and the anti-war lyrics aren't that great, either), and ʽRotting On Remandʼ is just a generic prison ballad where even the lyrics do not advance that much in comparison to your average Woody Guthrie.

 

There are, however, quite a few songwriting mini-gems in the love story department, where we should probably single out ʽThe Price I Payʼ, built on a lovely piano swirl with a tinge of sweet sorrow and a catchy, if a little too repetitive, vocal hook; the uptempo ʽLife With The Lionsʼ, saved from its underdone-country fate with a playful, inspired, poppy piano part from new band member Cara Tivey (she gives the whole thing a bit of a New Orleans vibe, which is always cool to have); and, uh, I guess ʽMust I Paint You A Pictureʼ, opening with a guitar line that seems like somebody'd spent way too much time listening to Hendrix's ʽLittle Wingʼ, also has a certain subtle charm nested somewhere in between guitar, piano, and vocals, though I am still in the pro­cess of trying to come up with an adequate description for it (the charm, that is).

 

The big problem is that, as a love poet, Billy still has a huge problem coming up with his own unique perspective on things — other than the occasional melodic invention and the occasional astute or cool-sounding lyrical twist such as "between Marx and marzipan in the dictionary there was Mary", he still does not do anything here that hadn't already been done by Elvis Costello, that is, the «intellectual-psycholo­gical love ballad with poppy overtones, non-professionally sung with some half-charming, half-irritating British accent». And therefore, each time he writes (or, rather, «under-writes») a song whose hookpower is anything less than obvious, it is instantaneously for­gettable — no free, freshly painted memory cells to accommodate these unremarkable new lod­gers. Sometimes they get a very nice, very tasteful chamber-pop sound going on (ʽThe Only Oneʼ, with a lonely viola dueting with the acoustic guitar), but nothing in the song rises above mildly pleasant — the pain is only hinted at, never properly conveyed by the instrumentation.

 

In the end, love and politics come together once again, and at least do a good double job of pro­viding a satisfactory final note with the tragicomic ʽWaiting For The Great Leap Forwardʼ, the closest thing this record has to an anthem, but an ironic one: "Join the struggle while you may / The revolution is just a T-shirt away", Billy says, either urging you to dive inside a Che Guevara tricotage shell, or making fun of you for doing so — you go ahead and try to determine his level of intellectual penetration yourself. The song is bouncy, catchy, has a group chorus romp sort of thing to it, enough to forgive the album for its frequent moments of boredom and ultimately may­be even try and issue it a faint thumbs up, just because, you know, it is at least Billy's first tho­rough attempt at an actual pop-rock album, and it deserves some way of recognition.

  

THE INTERNATIONALE (1990)

 

1) The Internationale; 2) I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night; 3) The Marching Song Of The Covert Battalions; 4) Blake's Jerusalem; 5) Nicaragua Nicaraguita; 6) The Red Flag; 7) My Youngest Son Came Home Today.

 

I am afraid there is very little to be said about this album, and what little there is to be said is nearly all bad. Perhaps the best thing is Billy's new lyrics to ʽThe Internationaleʼ, which deem­pha­size the violence of the original and focus on "being inspired by like and love". Not that this really matters any more — who has really given a damn about the anthem ever since the Soviet Union abandoned it in favor of something even more pompous and imperialistic? — but sort of a nice idea, all the same. Couldn't say the same for Billy's vocal delivery or for the mariachi-style arrangement, though: looks like he's still buskin' out there, despite the increased number of play­ers, and if I happened to pass by, I doubt I would have spared a penny. Might even have to go and report them — not for communist propaganda, but just for offending good taste.

 

I guess somebody must have told Billy one day, «you know, for a guy who's supposed to use music for political purposes, you sure have a lot of songs about chicks on each of your albums», so Billy eventually decided to show his true colors and record at least a small album (an EP, in fact) that would be nothing but political: anthems and workers-rights-ballads all the way, with traditional melodies, but largely new lyrics to, like, bring them more up to date in a world still largely ruled by Thatchers and Reagan-Bushes — whether you're a fan of these rulers (not highly likely if you're an avid rock music listener) or whether you hate them as much as Billy does, it is sort of a logical fact that the most blatant way to stand out against them is sing a Marxist anthem, even if you're no Marxist yourself.

 

You do not have to do much, really, except just take a glance at the titles — I mean, ʽI Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Nightʼ, indeed? Sung accappella? At least when Joan Baez did this at Wood­stock with the original, this could make sense to fans of Joan Baez' voice, period. Are there any fans of Billy Bragg's voice out there? (As in — real fans, people who think of him as a unique, outstanding singer, that is, not just people who have no problems with his voice, like myself). If not, well, okay, this is a tolerable, but derivative memento to Phil Ochs. "And did those feet in ancient time"... — in between Greg Lake and Eric Idle, my pop-style associations of ʽJerusalemʼ find themselves exhausted already. ʽNicaragua Nicaraguitaʼ? I sympathize with the people of Nicaragua, but not necessarily with the Sandinistas, and even then, I'm sure they can get along well enough without Billy's support. ʽThe Red Flagʼ? Oh no...

 

Had this album remained as just an EP, it would have quickly been forgotten in LP-centric disco­graphies, and we would all have been better off. Unfortunately, it was re-released in 2006 as part of a 2-CD edition that also contained the 1988 EP Live & Dubious — a mix of live performances from Berlin and somewhere in the Soviet Union (Lithuania, I believe), where he must have been invited as a Representative of the People, although some of his comments must have rubbed off unpleasantly on the shoulders of Party officials (for instance, having explained why the song is called "Help Save The Youth Of America", he then states that the song might just as well have been called "Help Save The Youth Of The Soviet Union").

 

So now this thing is very much a regular part of his musical career, and it is probably the weakest link in that career — think John Lennon's Sometime In New York City, but even that album was a groundbreaking, earth-shattering masterpiece in comparison, since Lennon at least composed his own political songs, and came up with all sorts of ideas about how to maximize their effect with various instrumentation and production tricks. The Internationale is as barebones as it gets, and for all of Billy's undisputed sincerity and enthusiasm, he should have probably just released the title track as a collaboration with Pet Shop Boys — I can easily imagine a synth-pop version and a revolutionary (in both senses of the word) video, bringing the man all the way up to the top of the charts and effectively ending Conservative rule for eternity. As it is, the album just gets a thumbs down — I don't even see it having a rallying effect, much less any musical value.

 

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME (1991)

 

1) Accident Waiting To Happen; 2) Moving The Goalposts; 3) Everywhere; 4) Cindy Of A Thousand Lives; 5) You Woke Up My Neighbourhood; 6) Trust; 7) God's Footballer; 8) The Few; 9) Sexuality; 10) Mother Of The Bride; 11) Tank Park Salute; 12) Dolphins; 13) North Sea Bubble; 14) Rumours Of War; 15) Wish You Were Her; 16) Body Of Water.

 

How nice and thoughtful of the man it is — to follow up his almost inarguably worst album with what should almost inarguably be deemed his finest hour. Yes, literally so, since Don't Try This At Home, unlike Billy's earlier albums, stretches across almost sixty minutes, and contains the finest bunch of songs he had written, arranged, and performed up to that moment. Ironically, this is his most «mainstream» and accessible record up to date — nary a sign of electro-busking any­where, and the list of guest players here (which includes Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M., Johnny Marr, Mary Ramsey of John & Mary and later 10,000 Merchants, and Kirsty MacColl) reads like a solid pledge of allegiance to the folk-rock community, all union dues paid strictly on time. But the songs, man! The songs are good.

 

Maybe the full band arrangements have reduced the individuality quotient: with his fairly regular Cockney voice, Billy was never able to score too many points for uniqueness of timbre or phra­sing, and the novelty factor of «the man and his amplification» partially compensated for that. But on the other hand, as I already said, this left most of the songs in a sort of unfulfilled state, so that you found yourself looking at sketches and desperately wishing for complete paintings. And eventually, yes, that talent which was kept strictly in check for so long — well, it is really hard, I think, to listen to this record and not recognize the talent. Whatever this album may lack in dis­tinct personality, it makes up for in terms of hooks, diversity, humor, lyrical acuteness, and, last but not least, an overall sense of taste (which was so sharply lacking on Internationale).

 

It will take one or two listens to the opening track, ʽAccident Waiting To Happenʼ, to understand whether the entire record will appeal to you — this is smart, unassuming, boyishly energetic, well-played pop-rock that remains completely grounded all the time: no attempts to plunge to the mystical depths of your subconscious à la Stipe, no romantic mannerisms à la Morrissey, and no attempts to make you feel co-guilty for all the miseries of the world à la Natalie Merchant (who is, by the way, also here somewhere in the background ­— on the new CD re-release, she sings lead vocals on one of the bonus tracks). Fun lyrics about breaking up with a girl who is "a dedi­cated swallower of fascism" (a cheeky phonosemantic variation on the Ray Davies quote), nice unspectacular vocal melody leading to a climactic catchy chorus, inspiring echoey guitar jangle for a solo — perfect recipe for healthy goodness, if not greatness.

 

The only surprise that follows is the completely unexpected level of diversity, as Billy (with a little help from his high profile friends) extends into various pop subgenres, including influences from the «dreamy» side of the business (ʽCindy Of A Thousand Livesʼ, dedicated to photogra­pher Cindy Sherman and sounding very much like a gentlemanly psychedelic nugget from mid-1960s England), baroque (ʽRumours Of Warʼ), Sade-style light jazz-pop (ʽWish You Were Herʼ), and epic balladry — arguably the most unpredictable inclusion is a cover of Fred Neil's ʽDol­phinsʼ; on its own, it pales when compared to interpretations by people like Tim Buckley (whose vocal wizardry Bragg could never hope to reproduce or surpass), but in the general context of the album, it serves as a welcome drop of romantic grandioseness (but not like Morrissey, no!) in the middle of the record's overall humble inclinations.

 

Like I said, the hooks are not great, but they're good, and when they come packaged together with  intelligent lyrics and good humor, how could we complain? ʽNorth Sea Bubbleʼ is the catchiest and merriest tune about the complexity of the revolutionary process ever recorded — essentially, a «folk-twist» ditty with a beautifully spinning guitar line and somewhat sarcastic comments on both the people in Leningrad and the man's "American friends" who "don't know what to do / But they'll wait a long time for a Beverley Hills coup". That's political, but it isn't that much in your face, and emotionally, it is not too different from the fast country-pop of ʽYou Woke Up My Neighbourhoodʼ, to which Michael Stipe adds his background vocals and Mary Ramsey her danceable, but sentimental fiddle part — both songs just make you want to dance, and you can throw in your reactions to the lyrics at any later date.

 

The main single culled from the proceedings was ʽSexualityʼ, which actually managed to reach a respectable position on the UK charts and should probably be included in liberal textbooks for lines like "just because you're gay I won't turn you away" and especially singalong chorus lines like "sexuality, your laws do not apply to me... sexuality, we can be what we want to be", but musically, it is hardly a standout here — in fact, its somewhat ridiculously repetitive and badly harmonized chorus reminds me of the commercial formula behind Eighties' synth-pop. Clearly, Billy wanted some kind of easily memorable, nursery-rhyme level LGBT anthem here, and he got one, but I prefer to hunt for subtler, more insightful things, which this record actually has in spades: ʽSexualityʼ is simply the most blatant number on here.

 

Integration of the personal and the political feels fairly smooth here, because sometimes they are directly related (ʽAccident Waiting To Happenʼ is a prime example), and at other times, well, if your English skills are below par you won't even be able to tell the difference — ʽMother Of The Brideʼ, another fast catchy country-pop ditty about an unhappy separation in love, rolls along like a potential song of social protest, whereas the bitter piano-and-strings ballad ʽEverywhereʼ, about the post-Pearl Harbor mistreatment of American Japanese, could equally well be a Romeo-and-Juliet type of song. And it all ends in just a little bit of symbolic mysticism, as the closing ʽBody Of Waterʼ waves us goodbye on a speedy, determined, hard-rocking note, with Philip Wigg con­tributing an ecstatic guitar-hero solo (but it fades out rather quickly, because God forbid a genu­ine rock'n'roll solo would be given full freedom on a record like this). "I will cross this body of water / If you promise you won't try this at home", Billy tells us, implying, perhaps, that years of electro-busking can seriously boost your Jesus potential, but years of listening to electro-busking do jack shit in that department.

 

Ultimately, this is an assured thumbs up, all the more assured, that is, given how easily a record like this could slip into all sorts of ideological and bad-musical extremes and how it absolutely does not. For a folk-pop album, this stuff actually rocks harder than most R.E.M., and yet mana­ges to come across as moderately intelligent. Maybe it could benefit from at least one utter genius song (something like Billy's equivalent of ʽLosing My Religionʼ), but then again, maybe it's bet­ter this way: 16 «good» tunes in a row, with not a single one that did not at least try to be catchy, or a little different, or a bit smart — next to even one masterpiece, they'd all look dusky. And the title is actually misleading: this is the kind of style that aspiring songwriters and musicians should be trying at home, all the time. You know — simple, derivative, but tasteful music that means something. If you ain't Brian Wilson, you could very well try to be Billy Bragg.

 

WILLIAM BLOKE (1996)

 

1) From Red To Blue; 2) Upfield; 3) Everybody Loves You Babe; 4) Sugardaddy; 5) A Pict Song; 6) Brickbat; 7) The Space Race Is Over; 8) Northern Industrial Town; 9) The Fourteenth Of February; 10) King James Version; 11) Goalhanger.

 

After the relatively colossal (in comparison to everything that preceded it) Don't Try This At Home, Billy's late-coming follow-up at first feels underwhelming. Five years in the planning and making, delayed by personal life events such as the birth of his son, it is a very low-key effort, featuring none of the major guest stars from 1991 and feeling far more intimate, insecure, vulne­rable, and confused. Some reviewers took that for a bad sign, and stated that Bragg's muse must have abandoned him, at least temporarily. I don't think so, though.

 

See, this here William Bloke (a rough downgrade on William Blake) is not a return to the young and innocent days of electro-busking. Even if the arrangements are stripped, they are varied: Billy makes as much use of the acoustic guitar and piano here as he makes of the old electric, and the songs do not feel underworked and so much in desperate need of a rhythm section as they did on his first records. This is just a regular singer-songwriter album, produced in the intimate-confes­sional singer-songwriter paradigm, but with a sufficient amount of pop hooks to keep things from becoming too boring. It is true that the songs are not quite as well written and produced, but this is somehow to be expected — any record that puts the emphasis on «deeply personal» usually suffers in the hook department, since the artist tends to invest more in lyrics and vocal expression than he does in captivating chord changes.

 

The good news is that, to an extent, the investment pays off: some of the songs here, while not at all melodically great, show a level of rough sentimentality that was not yet achieved before. Per­haps it is his family life experience or something, but a song like ʽFrom Red To Blueʼ, where the protagonist is forced to either accept his partner's compromises for the Establishment or split ("should I vote red for my class or green for our children?") really does give us a confused, dis­appointed, deeply puzzled individual, who is capable of expressing all that mixed ball of emo­tions in three minutes' time, helped out by a little electric guitar and a little electric organ. If you scrutinize the lyrics too hard, you'll find the man to be judgmental ("the ideals you've opted out of, I still hold them to be true / I guess they weren't so firmly held by you"), but not nearly enough to become repelling — just scratching his head in bewilderment.

 

Elsewhere, the vaudevillian romantic-melancholic piano ballad ʽEverybody Loves You Babeʼ sounds exactly like Randy Newman (save the accent) and would probably have been much lauded had it been written by the latter. ʽSugardaddyʼ, an indictment of spoiled parents, uses melodic vocal harmonies for the chorus (even some sha-la-la's!) and sounds like a cross between 1970s McCartney and Ray Davies — which, for Billy, is at least an unpredictable novelty, and actually I think it works well. And then there's ʽBrickbatʼ, probably the most personal tune on the album, whose mournful string accompaniment reflects the song's confused introspection: "I used to want to plant bombs at the last night of the proms / But now you'll find me with the baby in the bath­room", Billy either complains of his weakness or acknowledges his maturation.

 

Anyway, it is easy to see why the critics, expecting yet another powerful anti-Establishment blast from the man, were miffled — but Billy Bragg is not crazy, he's normal, and every normal person sooner or later has to acknowledge that routine and mundane affairs are as much a part of one's life as rallies, protests, and revolutions. Besides, routine and mundane affairs as presented here are merely a natural continuation of the man's romantic side that was there all the way from the start; and it's not as if he's completely settled down, either — ʽNorthern Industrial Townʼ is a half-ironic, half-compassionate look at life you-know-where, and ʽA Pict Songʼ takes an obscure poem by Rudyard Kipling (Billy Bragg covering imperialist scum? No way!) and turns it into the album's only electro-busking anthem, with a thick distorted guitar tone and an anthemic refrain with which Billy does his best to give it a revolutionary stance.

 

Throw in a couple merry numbers like the brass-led upbeat pop tune ʽUpfieldʼ and the album clo­ser ʽGoalhangerʼ, a cleverly worded exercise in character assassination ("he hangs around like a fart in a Russian space station" is particularly expressive) set to a toe-tappy ska beat — and you get yourself a fairly assured thumbs up type album. Yes, it has to sink in a little bit after the major shakedown of Don't Try This At Home, and there are a few other ballads here that do very little for me, so we're not talking perfection or anything, but the album as a whole makes a sensible, sincere, and heartfelt soft counterpoint to its throbbing predecessor, and besides, every social activist-musician needs to sing about babies in bathrooms every once in a while — it's not as if he were shitting out little red flags every time he goes to that bathroom, anyway.

 

MERMAID AVENUE (w. Wilco) (1998)

 

1) Walt Whitman's Niece; 2) California Stars; 3) Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key; 4) Birds And Ships; 5) Hoo­doo Voodoo; 6) She Came Along To Me; 7) At My Window Sad And Lonely; 8) Ingrid Bergman; 9) Christ For Pre­sident; 10) I Guess I Planted; 11) One By One; 12) Eisler On The Go; 13) Hesitating Beauty; 14) Another Man's Done Gone; 15) The Unwelcome Guest.

 

It is, perhaps, ironic that when Nora Guthrie was deciding on the artist to whom she could en­trust her father's trove of unused lyrics, she ended up with an Englishman. Was there really nobody in the United States in the mid-Nineties who could be considered the current reincarnation of Woody Guthrie? Come on now! Not anyone? Not even Eddie Vedder?..

 

Even Billy himself was a bit scared of the honor, and agreed to set Guthrie's lyrics to music only in collaboration with somebody more authentic. Eventually, his eye fell on Wilco, and since Jeff Tweedy was born in Illinois, which is at least somewhat closer to Woody's Oklahoma than Billy's East London could ever hope to be, and also because the Uncle Tupelo/early Wilco lineage was the closest to a raggedy, authentic, but still modern-sounding rootsy sound that you could get at the moment, a musical friendship was struck — and the result was Mermaid Avenue, an album of 15 modern roots-rock tunes set to hitherto unknown lyrics by Woody Guthrie.

 

First things first — these hitherto unknown lyrics, practically all of them, have such a contempo­rary feel and are so remote from Woody Guthrie, «the Dust Bowl hero», that I would not be at all surprised to learn that the whole thing was a big scam, or that at least the lyrics were seriously doctored by Bragg and Tweedy before reaching our ears. If it is not a scam, though — and who of us would want to seriously accuse the daughter of mystifications in the name of the father? — then the «non-public» Guthrie was simply a very different figure from the «public» Guthrie: far more intimate, romantic, and complicated than his officially released man-of-the-people stuff would suggest him to be. Pending proper linguistic expertise, let us assume that this is the case (in fact, I am only writing about this concern due to surprise that nobody anywhere has expressed the smallest shadow of doubt), and anyway, it does not matter that much because we are mostly concerned with Billy Bragg here, Wilco coming second and the Guthries only third.

 

Whatever be, it's a fun, engaging, and catchy record that utilizes Billy's and Jeff's talents to the fullest — the capacity for introspection, the sense of humor, the versatility in arranging and diver­sifying the material, it's all there. The music is roughly divided in half between Bragg and Wilco (represented by either Tweedy alone or the Tweedy/Bennett duo), and, as you could expect, the Bragg half is usually more sparse and closer to the classic folk idiom, whereas the Wilco songs often sound like outtakes from Being There, and this is good, since the shuffling principle allows to keep the proceedings diverse and mildly surprising until the end.

 

Accordingly, Bragg usually chooses the more repetitive, singalong tunes to set to music — such as the opening comical piece ʽWalt Whitman's Nieceʼ, imagined by him as a rowdy chunk of pub rock with the lads presenting an anti-thesis to each line ("last night or the night before that — I won't say which night", etc., and was that in the original lyrics, too, I wonder?), or the sorrowful acoustic ballad ʽEisler On The Goʼ — a counting-rhyme song about communist leader Gerhart Eisler's tribulations in a post-WWII Western world (I reckon) that was probably not intended by the original writer to sound so mournful, but then Eisler probably wasn't dead when Woody wrote it, and now he's been dead for 30 years; sufficient cause for sorrow.

 

On two songs, Billy invites old friend Natalie Merchant: she backs him up on the playful (if still a bit sad) ʽWay Over Yonder In The Minor Keyʼ and takes over lead vocals on ʽBirds And Shipsʼ, which is probably the worst decision on the record — unlike Bragg and Tweedy, Merchant is not endowed with a sense of humor (or, if she is, she puts it under lock and key when starting off for the recording studio), and her predictably broken-hearted delivery, perfect for the expectoration of 10,000 Maniacs-style liberal guilt, feels seriously out of place on this record. Still, a friend is a friend, I guess, and she did choose a song for which those plaintive intonations would seem natu­ral outside of the general context of Mermaid Avenue.

 

Not to slight Billy, though, Wilco in general and Tweedy in particular steal the spotlight more often, starting with the very first number — ʽCalifornia Starsʼ is made into an immediate Wilco classic, what with that tricky way that Tweedy places the repetitive song title «outside» the main melody, creating the impression of one-breath continuity for his intellectual romanticism. ʽHoo­doo Voodooʼ is transformed into a ʽSubterranean Homesick Bluesʼ-type rap number (the lyrics, coming in punctuated bursts of half-folk, half-proto-beatnik imagery, do suggest that kind of treatment); ʽAt My Window Sad And Lonelyʼ is made into an epic ballad that stops just short of becoming a «power» ballad by disallowing the presence of electric guitars; and ʽChrist For Pre­sidentʼ is a delightful country stomp that Jeff delivers in an intentionally cracked, hoarse voice, but the real hero there is Jay Bennett, laying on layers of pianos and banjos, each of which sounds drunker than the other. Verily and truly, could a sober man ask for ʽChrist For Presidentʼ?

 

Mermaid Avenue is not a «great» record. Both for Bragg and for Wilco, this was a side project, and regardless of whether all the lyrics here are authentic original Guthrie or if some of them were edited, there is too little of the real Woody here to make the music (rather than the texts) of any importance to the Guthrie legacy. But it is at least as good as, say, a Traveling Wilburys re­cord — pleasant, intelligent rootsy entertainment that strikes an impressive balance between tra­dition and modernism, and throws in the intriguing novel aspect of bringing together a British electro-busker, an American revolutionizer of the folk-rock idiom, and the Dust Bowl musical pioneer who, if this is to be believed, was secretly in love with Ingrid Bergman even after she dumped her husband for Roberto Rossellini. Then again, what sort of respect for the solemnity of family values do you expect from someone who had eight kids from three wives? Thumbs up for this shameless violation of the rules of decency.

 

MERMAID AVENUE VOL. II (w. Wilco) (2000)

 

1) Airline To Heaven; 2) My Flying Saucer; 3) Feed Of Man; 4) Hot Rod Hotel; 5) I Was Born; 6) Secrets Of The Sea; 7) Stetson Kennedy; 8) Remember The Mountain Bed; 9) Blood Of The Lamb; 10) Against The Law; 11) All You Fascists; 12) Joe DiMaggio Done It Again; 13) Meanest Man; 14) Black Wind Blowing; 15) Someday Some Morning Sometime.

 

Okay, almost everyone says this one's not so good, and how could it be? Maybe the impressive success of the first volume was not enough to make them go back into the studio and record some more — but it was enough to make them release most of the stuff that did not make it onto Vol. I, and if these are outtakes, well, there must have been reasons for their being outtakes from the very beginning, right? Scraps are scraps, even if you're a giant of popular music.

 

Honestly, though, I do not share this popular opinion about the sequel being so seriously inferior. Maybe it is because I do not view the original Mermaid Avenue as a masterpiece — merely as a very pleasant, very insightful, very tasteful synthetic exercise — and without elevated expecta­tions for the sequel, the sequel just comes across as yet another such exercise. In fact, one reason why these songs were discarded originally may have been not the lack of quality, but their being generally much more distant from the standards of «folk rock» than the songs on the first album: here, Billy and Jeff really go a long way, adapting Woody's words to so many different musical styles that poor Woody must have rolled over in his grave much more than once. They may have ditched some of this first time around just so as not to have Norah scratch her head and wonder whether the decision to entrust this stuff to a couple of modernist clowns was such a good idea in the first place. But second time around... there's just no stopping them.

 

See for yourself. ʽMy Flying Saucerʼ is a folk-pop song all right... in Buddy Holly, not Woody Guthrie style (starts out ʽPeggy Sueʼ style). ʽFeed Of Manʼ is a slide guitar-heavy swamp rocker that sounds like Rory Gallagher with Brian Jones on second guitar. ʽSecrets Of The Seaʼ is an in­die pop song that is 100% Summerteeth-era Wilco. ʽAll You Fascistsʼ is speedy blues-rock with crazy guitar and harmonica romps that may have been inspired by Five Live Yardbirds. And weirdest of all is ʽMeanest Manʼ, a song with such strange lyrics that the only thing Bragg could do about it was turn it into a wannabe Tom Waits number... and sing it like Tom Waits, too. (Why didn't they try to get the real Tom Waits, I wonder? They got Natalie Merchant and Corey Harris as guest stars — Tom Waits would kick their limp folksy asses).

 

Most of the other songs, too, sound very much «appropriated» by either Tweedy or Bragg, to the extent that the album closer, ʽSomeday Some Morning Sometimeʼ, a gentle ballad with kaleido­scopic electronic overdubs, would seem like a natural predecessor to the futuristic «folktronic» soundscapes of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Most importantly, they use Woody's lyrics to create moods that go way beyond Woody's lyrics — yes, it is true that these lyrics show us a much more profound and diverse Guthrie than the Dust Bowl Poet stereotype, but these guys go further than that: ʽBlood Of The Lambʼ, for instance, is cast as a bitter, sarcastic cabaret vaudeville, where Tweedy's vocals take on an almost mocking air as he sings that "I've learnt to love my peoples / Of all colors, creeds and kinds / I'm all washed in the blood of that lamb". Was it supposed to be ironic? Maybe it was. Who the heck knows?

 

Or ʽMeanest Manʼ — okay, so Woody writes about all those evil things that he could have been, but he isn't because of the kindness of the people around him; is it right, then, to have the song delivered pirate-style, as if the protagonist were the meanest man? Or maybe he really is? Maybe this is just a tiny hint at the creepy dark side of the man?.. Oh God, perhaps Norah should have reconsidered, after all. Then again, if the original intent was to create a multi-dimensional portrait of a man equally beset by angels and demons on all sides, then this is exactly what Billy and Jeff are doing for us here. They may have largely invented this portrait, filling in all the blank spaces with bits of their own personalities (Billy the streetwise jester and Jeff the idealistic dreamer), but there probably was a little bit of each in the old Woody anyway, so no prob.

 

In any case, as far as the songwriting and the arrangements are concerned, half of these tunes are bona fide Billy Bragg tunes, the other half is first-to-second-rate Wilco, a must have for all fans of the classic Wilco sound, and as a special bonus you get another brief acoustic ditty tenderly sung by Natalie Merchant's faience shepherdess — shake it, but don't break it; it's a good thing, after all, that nobody tried to make a 10,000 Maniacs album out of this set of lyrics, «This Guitar Kills Politically Incorrect Male Chauvinists»-style. This one gets another safe, friendly thumbs up. And please note that, as of 2012, both are also available together as Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions, a sprawling boxset that adds yet a third bonus CD of even more stuff, which I have not heard so far, but I'm pretty sure that three's good company, and judging by Amazon prices, it's also quite a good bargain compared to buying all the stuff separately.

 

ENGLAND, HALF-ENGLISH (2002)

 

1) St. Monday; 2) Jane Allen; 3) Distant Shore; 4) England, Half English; 5) NPWA; 6) Some Days I See The Point; 7) Baby Faroukh; 8) Take Down The Union Jack; 9) Another Kind Of Judy; 10) He'll Go Down; 11) Dreadbelly; 12) Tears Of My Tracks.

 

Curiously, it took Billy almost twenty years to do this, together with the experience of working with Wilco and then with his own specially assembled band, The Blokes — but England, Half-English finally does the trick: here be a pretty decent «political pop» record, where the majority of songs is given over to liberal-political manifestos, and yet does not suck from a detachedly musical standpoint. Yes, that's a very rare thing in general, and almost like a first for Billy, whose best musical numbers up to now were usually of a lyrical nature.

 

This may be, of course, due to active collaboration with The Blokes, who, for this album, also included Ian McLagan of the Faces on keyboards, and Lu Edmonds of The Damned and PiL on guitar — and about half of the songs here credit them both or at least one of them as co-writers. More than that, ʽSt. Mondayʼ, the spritely record opener, is credited to Billy solo, but the cheery piano rolls that open and then dominate the tune are prime McLagan — nothing like a true vete­ran of Brit-pop-rock lending his spirit and good will to make a tune so optimistically infectious, especially for all those who, like Billy, hate working on Mondays.

 

But who did what and why is all just speculation; the pure fact is that I really like the record and think that it hits home more often than it does not. Even the title track, which, as you have pro­bably already guessed, lashes out at anti-immigrant sentiments by accentuating the perpetually mixed nature of English culture ("St. George was born in Lebanon / How he got here I don't know / And those three lions on his shirt / They never sprung from England's dirt") and could have allowed itself doing and being nothing else whatsoever (Important Social Statement being enough for liberal musical critics), is a fairly odd musical concoction that deliberately tries mixing together elements of Latin and African rhythms, with a little bit of vaudeville in between. It's danceable, it's catchy, it's got a rippin' percussion track, and it makes some good culturo­logical points — what's not to like? Unless you're a member of the Enoch Powell fan club or something. (Like Eric Clapton.) (Who would now deny it.) (But truth will out!)

 

Stuff like ʽNPWAʼ (ʽNo Power Without Accountabilityʼ) is more trivial musically — just a straightahead mid-tempo blues rocker — but it still sounds okay, as emphasis is made on the sternness, harshness of the arrangement, with all the musicians (particularly the drummer and the organ player) getting into the same accusatory spirit as Billy and hammering out these largely familiar chords with meaningful determination. And while most people will only comment on ʽBaby Faroukhʼ from an "Oh look, here's a happy song about a pretty baby written from a pro-immigration perspective!" (you never can really tell, though — it could be about Freddie Mercury, for all we know), the song actually has a fun guitar melody and a classy instrumental break, equal­ly divided between pretty acoustic and electric slide guitar licks. (The vocal harmonies are a little hicky, though — a somewhat clichéd representation of the «Oriental ladies chanting a new­born baby's praises» idea).

 

There's a couple really good songs here, too, where «good» means «deep-cutting» rather than just «satisfactory». ʽHe'll Go Downʼ, for instance, is a subtle, haunting ballad where Billy becomes Tom Petty when singing the chorus, but usually tries to be Leonard Cohen, and the organ and the guitars play little contemplative melodies off each other in spooky-midnight mode. And ʽAnother Kind Of Judyʼ, following an almost Madchester-style rhythm, might be the best fully arranged properly Eighties-style pop song Billy ever put on record — a decade too late, perhaps, but then nothing is really too late in the 21st century, where you can be anybody from Socrates to Kurt Cobain and still feel at home with at least one target audience group.

 

Anyway, by the time he gets around to the smarty-pants ʽTears Of My Tracksʼ — reverting a Smokey Robinson title to sing a lament for his freshly sold vinyl collection — the record has fulfilled its proper function and proven that yes, sincere and straightforward liberal propaganda need not be defiantly anti-musical, no matter how many hardcore artists try to convince you other­wise. A masterpiece for the ages this might not be, but it gets its thumbs up anyway. Now it's up to you, Ted Nugent, to take up the challenge!

 

MR. LOVE & JUSTICE (2008)

 

1) I Keep Faith; 2) I Almost Killed You; 3) M For Me; 4) The Beach Is Free; 5) Sing Their Souls Back Home; 6) You Make Me Brave; 7) Something Happened; 8) Mr. Love & Justice; 9) If You Ever Leave; 10) O Freedom; 11) The Johnny Carcinogenic Show; 12) Farm Boy.

 

Six years between albums is a long time even for the 21st century — you'd think that, perhaps, the artist has completely run out of new things to say (which, of course, has never prevented bad or desperate artists from putting out new music anyway, so it's actually more of a compliment than a critique in this case). And when, eventually, new things had accumulated to a proper de­gree, what we saw was an almost strangely humble and low-key Billy Bragg, almost as if he'd seen his turning fifty as a sign from God to quiet down and start acting his age. No loudness, no tension, no screaming, no anger — a wisened-up elder statesman.

 

The music is still nice, though. Sentimental, touching, with a pinch of catchiness and the usual intelligent Billy Bragg charisma, even if it is occasionally wasted on very local pieces of pro­gressive propaganda (yes, ʽThe Johnny Carcinogenic Showʼ is a rant against the advertising of tobacco companies on TV, which is a noble cause in general but makes for poor art in particular). But these pieces are not frequent — somehow, peace, love, and tranquility seem to be the album's main topics, since even the anti-Iraq war tune (ʽSing Their Souls Back Homeʼ) is more of a sin­cere prayer for the soldiers' safe return than a passionate rant against the crooked politicians who sent them there in the first place.

 

And that's all right, as it seems that Billy does honorably perform the artist's main duty — follow the tugs of the heart, wherever it happens to find itself at the moment. The tone of the record is immediately set by its opening and arguably best number, ʽI Keep Faithʼ: true to the title, the song has subtle gospel overtones (mainly reflected in the use of organ and vocal harmonies), but it is anything but traditionally religious — the artist keeps faith in humanity rather than God, and proves it with a low-key anthem where, perhaps, the greatest asset is the tone that he has chosen for his voice: cracked, worn, and weary, yet deliberately friendly, optimistic, and supportive. Nice chorus resolution, too, and a good mix of pianos, jangly guitars, and strings.

 

Everything that follows is plain, simple, unadorned, and direct, yet with enough stylistic and in­strumental diversity to be very easily sat through without getting bored. Sometimes it's just a bit of a carefree pop-rock romp at the happiness of having something that still conforms to the man's socialist ideas (ʽThe Beach Is Freeʼ, with a slightly «de-syncopated» Bo Diddley rhythm expres­sing the happiness); sometimes it's a dark folk dance acknowledging the sadness of the ultimate crash of these ideas (ʽO Freedomʼ, featuring the most paranoid, Richie Havens-worthy, acoustic backing track and the mantra "o freedom, what liberties are taken in thy name!" for the chorus); but most often, it's just a quiet love song — not a breakup song, not a bad bitch song, but an "if you ever leave me, my dear, there's nothing for me here" type of song.

 

And at the end of it all, Billy offers us a confession — as it turns out, he is "just a farm boy" and he is "just dreaming of the time when I can go home". Formally, it's just another anti-war song, but it can also be interpreted as a sort of "I'm tired" statement in general, tired especially from being pushed around by idiotic and/or oppressive decisions of, you know, the System, without really being able to do anything about it. There is no exaggerated desperation or frustration, it's all more of an "I'm old and tired, I'd just like to settle down and love my wife, but they still keep pestering me with all that shit" vibe that most of us are likely to empathize with more and more as we reach mid- and then old age. It's a reasonable vibe indeed, and it's propped up by a set of okay songs that suit it well — not too striking, but not completely unoriginal, either. And maybe it's just me, but it seems as if Billy's abilities as a singer are only improving as time goes by (and his drawn-out Cockney accent, funny enough, is also much less prominent). No great shakes, but enough love, justice, and honest songwriting on the record to guarantee a modest thumbs up.

 

TOOTH & NAIL (2013)

 

1) January Song; 2) No One Knows Nothing Anymore; 3) Handyman Blues; 4) I Ain't Got No Home; 5) Swallow My Pride; 6) Do Unto Others; 7) Over You; 8) Goodbye, Goodbye; 9) There Will Be A Reckoning; 10) Chasing Rainbows; 11) Your Name On My Tongue; 12) Tomorrow's Going To Be A Better Day.

 

Billy's latest release so far has been, if possible, even more humble and low-key than Mr. Love & Justice. This time, he is largely acoustic, with a minimal backing band, and all the songs are shushy — quiet, reserved, introspective, even introvert. Yet it all sounds so completely natural that you almost begin to wonder if this is not the real Billy Bragg, and all these years of electrobusking and political activism were merely an attempt to cure himself of a natural shyness; and now it's all coming back to him.

 

Or maybe it is simply that Woody Guthrie experience — you begin as an idealistic activist, but eventually you just get tired, say «fuck it», and become a whisperer rather than a shouter. Not that Tooth & Nail is, by any means, a cynical or a mean record: Billy is still willing to spread the good vibe, not the bitter vibe, as the song titles clearly show (ʽDo Unto Othersʼ, ʽTomorrow's Going To Be A Better Dayʼ). It is just... quiet. No grand rallying statements, just good old timey music from the living room, where you use the medium for a quickie cheer-up. Or cheer-down, because the songs here aren't exactly «cheerful». But they're not all that sad, either.

 

It is all about the vibe, and the vibe is very cool. Billy's voice has finally matured to the point of providing us with a real personality — this homey, cozy Brit guy who's worried about all the problems in the world, yet is really just a quiet family man in the depths of his heart. A song like ʽHandyman Bluesʼ, where he admits that "the screwdriver business just gets me confused / It takes me half an hour to change a fuse / I'm not your handyman!", goes all the way straight to my own heart, and so do most of the others as well. The melodies are nothing to remember — your regular old folk and country chord changes, with simple, tasteful, unadorned acoustic guitars, pedal steel, and piano to carry them out — but when taken together with the personality, they become charming and endearing.

 

Sometimes he seems to be pushing it: ʽGoodbye, Goodbyeʼ could easily be taken for a song of resignation, of closing the door on his rowdy past — which is probably not quite what is meant, seeing as how Billy did not exactly become a recluse in 2013 or anything. On the other hand, ʽTomorrow's Going To Be A Better Dayʼ concludes the album with a generally optimistic state­ment, telling you not to "become demoralized by this chorus of complaint" — even if the song it­self is so quiet and shaky that it seems as if the man himself were having trouble believing in his own words. Oh well, I guess that if a musically generic, but atmospherically charismatic record presents itself as a bundle of contradictions, it's all for the better.

 

The album's «biggest» song is arguably ʽNo One Knows Anything Anymoreʼ, played out a bit louder than everything else (at least, the drums are loud enough) and laying out Billy's general perception of things: "No one knows anything anymore / Nobody really knows the score / Since nobody knows anything / Let's break it down and start again", he suggests to a leisurely tempo and lazy country-rock backing. If this is a denial of progress, you know, he just might have some­thing there — at least, this is consistent with the album's general message: stop the crazy rush, relax, take the time to take it slow and easy (and who knows, maybe you'll also kill a little less people that way). I'm all for progress, but I'm also partial to this vibe, and so, even if the songs here are musically generic, I'm giving the record a thumbs up for all it's worth.

 

 

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

HEE HAW (1979-1980; 1988)

 

1) Mr. Clarinet; 2) Happy Birthday; 3) Hats On Wrong; 4) Guilt Parade; 5) The Friend Catcher; 6) Waving My Arms; 7) Catman; 8) Riddle House; 9) A Catholic Skin; 10) The Red Clock; 11) Faint Heart; 12) Death By Drowning; 13) The Hair Shirts.

 

Technical note first. The CD edition of Hee Haw, released long after the ashes of The Birthday Party had been scattered by the wind, actually consists of (a) The Birthday Party — the band's LP debut from 1980; and (b) Hee Haw, an EP from late 1979 which they still released under the earlier name of The Boys Next Door. Prior to that, The Boys Next Door had an even earlier LP release, appropriately titled Door, Door, but since it was poorly recorded, released on a com­plete­ly unknown minor Australian label, and Nick Cave has subsequently pretty much disowned it as a childish first attempt, we will let it pass by here. Special mention must be made of an early epoch, scattered bits of which are still preserved in Australian TV archives, when Nick Cave used to dress up for public appearances and seemed to take his primary cue from Paul Weller.

 

But forget about it, anyway. The real career of The Birthday Party starts with the move to Lon­don, by which time the five Australian boys (not all of them next door) had gotten their act together and not only knew exactly what they wanted to do, but also knew exactly how to get it done. The Birthday Party played its own version of «art-punk», a fairly unique brand of music that com­bined elements of garage rock, hardcore punk, avantgarde jazz, goth, electronica — anything goes, really, as long as the production style is hot, sweaty, and jungly, the lead singer sounds like a madhouse client imagining himself to be Tarzan, and the two major players (Rowland S. Ho­ward on guitar and Mick Harvey on just about anything) make as much noise as possible.

 

«Oh no», you'd say, «not another early Eighties' band of crazy noisemakers!» But throw on ʽMr. Clarinetʼ, and from the very outset you will find that this amounts to much more than crazy noise­making. The Birthday Party were not slackers — they learned not only how to play those instru­ments, but also how to combine them in complex, innovative ways without it all falling apart. Harvey's heavily distorted organ (substituting for an actual clarinet, I guess) plays sort of a psy­chedelic fugue, against which Nick Cave is howling and bellowing like a prime patient that's been subjected to way too many re-runs of Alban Berg operas. The abstract absurdity of the results separates them from the punks, but neither is this poppy enough to put them in the same house with Siouxsie & The Banshees, nor is it solemn-demonic enough to warrant a comparison with Joy Division. First track = first head-scratching enigma.

 

Things become a lot clearer when they get to ʽHappy Birthdayʼ, arguably the quintessential track of the album (and the one that is connected to the band's crucial name change — from the direct, but boring Boys Next Door to the symbolic Birthday Party). If ʽMr. Clarinetʼ left any doubts, ʽHappy Birthdayʼ dissipates them — this is Modern Madhouse Music at its modern maddest. In the deep past, the Stooges used to conjure this spirit, but the Stooges, being good kids of the Six­ties, accessed their psychic innards on the express train of sexual tension: Iggy channelled his aggression into physical lust, whereas The Birthday Party direct their youthful adrenaline into the brain areas responsible for maniac depression, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. Of course, there is a social basis for these disorders — it ain't much fun to play mad unless you can convincingly prove that it is your society who drove you to this brink. In the first case, you're just playing mad; in the second case, who knows? You might be producing A-R-T.

 

ʽHappy Birthdayʼ, with its spooky tale of a «wonderful dog chair... that could count right up to ten» (I wish I had one!), is the perfect example — tricky, off-putting time signature; knife-edged, ribbon-cutting bluesy/funky guitar riffage; and the perfect send-up of the happy «birthday cho­rus» where you get to hear Nick Cave woof-woof-woofing, consciously and passionately «rui­ning» an actually catchy vocal pop melody. In doing so, The Birthday Party created just the per­fect birthday song to crash, bust, and burn any birthday party that you'd wish to avoid, but can't, seeing as how it was cruelly sprung on you by circumstances beyond your control. And as far as I can tell, nobody knows anything about the woofing dog chair. Still one of those mysteries.

 

If the songs do get more «tight» and «collected», they start sounding too dangerously close to their competition — a case in point is ʽWaving My Armsʼ, which anybody could easily mistake for a lost Bauhaus outtake, what with the dark gothic bassline, the echoey jangling guitar, and the repetitive, but thoroughly disciplined chorus. None of which means it is bad — on the contrary, it is the album's most easily memorable song, rallying the band to action like a deranged set of the Four Horsemen's cousins: the line "and we won't get to sleep for fifty thousand years" will pro­bably keep ringing in your ears longer than anything else off the album (with the possible excep­tion of "woof woof woof woof woof").

 

Speaking of the Stooges comparison and the alleged «asexuality» of the songs, ʽCatmanʼ, if you just look at the lyrics, should, of course, count as an example to the contrary — "catman's coming, looking for a girl, better hide your sister, man" — but even if Nick's yelps and yowls are clearly influenced by Iggy, he still sounds like a man in a straitjacket, chained to the battery, his major problem never descending anywhere below his head; and Rowland Howard's guitar is still re­veling in droning, atonality, and complicated patterns that are way too intellectually controlled and experimental to be counted as «penis-driven». It might be best to simply ignore the lyrics (many of which, at this point, seem crude and underworked anyway) and just bang your head against the wall instead. If you get to do this on time, you get to experience the complete bliss package of The Birthday Party.

 

In conclusion, the only flaw of this package is a comparative one — in retrospect, it now looks like a masterful rehearsal before the genuine thunderstorm of Prayers On Fire — and it should by no means lessen the sincerity of the thumbs up. Nor is the average quality of the original Hee Haw EP, appended here as a bonus, any less impressive: early «jazz-goth» pieces like ʽThe Red Clockʼ and ʽFaint Heartʼ have their share of inventiveness and spookiness, too. No wonder the boys would blow all competition off the stage back in the early Melbourne days — even those who consider their early efforts too silly and immature will have to respect the level of playing and internal coordination.

 

PRAYERS ON FIRE (1981)

 

1) Zoo-Music Girl; 2) Cry; 3) Capers; 4) Nick The Stripper; 5) Ho-Ho; 6) Figure Of Fun; 7) King Ink; 8) A Dead Song; 9) Yard; 10) Dull Day; 11) Just You And Me; 12) Blundertown; 13) Kathy's Kisses.

 

Hee Haw was mighty good, but this LP and its follow-up are the real shit when we speak of The Birthday Party. For one thing, it sounds like nothing else — the band has not only found, but laid a unique claim to their own identity, impossible to confuse with Bauhaus, Joy Division, or any other single New Wave band, UK or elsewhere. For another (or maybe it's the same thing, just differently stated), the band has «unleashed the fuckin' fury», to quote an undying classic. I am not sure about any actual praying going on, but «on fire» gets it just about right.

 

For some reason, Nick Cave later admitted embarrassment about ʽZoo-Music Girlʼ (maybe be­cause of the lyrics and their objectifying the lady of Nick's dreams a bit too overtly?), but it's hard to make out the words anyway; what is important is the collective onslaught — drums, bass, or­gan, guitar, vocals: five berserk warriors zig-zagging around the compound, trampling out every­thing in their path. This is mad, mad, mad tribal music, a shamanistic whirlwind, yet with just the right amount of self-control so as to never fall apart, and be able to quickly pick itself up after each pause of its tricky stop-and-start structure. And then the brass part comes in, and hoopla, it is suddenly a schizophrenic avantgarde jazz masterpiece. What's to be embarrassed of?

 

The true power of Prayers On Fire is not in the amount of sheer ruckus it manages to generate — it is in its insanely unexpectable quantity of melodic ideas. The «songs», or, rather, dashing musical disgorgements, are chockfull with stunning Rowland S. Howard riffs, acid organ parts, and spooky basslines; at least one of these distinguishes every song, and sometimes, all three do battle with each other. On ʽCryʼ, Howard and Harvey both wield guitars, first playing against each other, then complementing Nick on the chorus with united series of arpeggios that formally represent the protagonist «crying» over his girl dumping him. But the «cry» in question, be it Nick's vocals or the two guitarists' choking trills, is not really a cry — more like a madman's agonizing gurgle, or an epileptic fit. Very naturalistic.

 

The band's «goth» angle, in the meantime, has evolved to the level of ʽNick The Stripperʼ, which makes additional use of the talents of the Melbourne jazz combo Equal Local (the album was re­corded in Australia) and, consequently, sounds a bit like «lounge jazz from hell», where Equal Local's brass section is the hot, sensual, glamorous counterpart to the black devil sound of the bass and Nick's voice, intentionally mangling "insect" and "incest" as if the change of just one sound doesn't really do a hell of a lot of difference. The ʽNickʼ of the song may refer to anybody, but in this particular context, it is clearly understood as self-referential: "Nick the Stripper, a-hi­deous to the eye, well he's a fat little insect..." — self-hatred was rarely, if ever, expressed with so much animal brutality as it is on this song.

 

Of course, the basic emotional content of all the songs is more or less the same, and this makes it hard to comment on the individual tracks. «Confusion», «frustration», «infuriation», «insanity», all of these abstractions and their closest neighbors rule on every track, generated in tandem by all of the musicians — the greatness of The Birthday Party is in the fact that everybody contributed on the level, everybody strove to add their own pinch of tightly controlled (or loosely controlled) chaos. As far as songwriting is concerned, Cave gets credited on most of the tracks, but usually in collaboration with Howard, and sometimes Howard is the only credited writer, e. g. on the ominous piano rocker ʽDull Dayʼ — in reality, though, this is very much a collective product; I could not imagine the songs having nearly the same impact if even one of the players here sud­den­ly slacked out and remained there to simply fill the required space.

 

Nick himself was particularly proud of ʽKing Inkʼ, which has possibly the creepiest bass melody on the entire album, but is not so good guitar-wise (too much noise, not enough geometrically insulting melody). Me, I prefer «Nick the demented patient» of ʽA Dead Songʼ, also not particu­larly exciting melodically, but featuring his most expressive and credible performance on the entire record — credible, as in «this really makes you believe the guy spent several weeks in the madhouse to observe and practice». But in reality, these preferences differ by split hairs: the al­bum has to be swallowed as a whole (plus the two bonus tracks on the CD edition, of which ʽKathy's Kissesʼ, a stumbling, stuttering post-punk deconstruction of Kurt Weillian cabaret, is a particular highlight), and the thumbs up rating applies in near-equal mode to all of its parts.

 

JUNKYARD (1982)

 

1) Blast Off; 2) She's Hit; 3) Dead Joe; 4) The Dim Locator; 5) Hamlet; 6) Several Sins; 7) Big-Jesus-Trash-Can; 8) Kiss Me Black; 9) 6" Gold Blade; 10) Kewpie Doll; 11) Junkyard; 12*) Dead Joe; 13*) Release The Bats.

 

This is a monster record if there ever was one. Okay, there was one: Fun House by the Stooges, released twelve years earlier. But in a whole twelve years, during which dozens of genres had come and gone, the world hadn't truly seen another monster record. Punk, post-punk, heavy metal, Goth, sheer sonic hooliganry Throbbing Gristle-style, the world had it all, but nothing really came close to the blazing, genuinely frightening musical hell of Fun House. Somebody had to match that achievement in the Eighties, and why are we not surprised that the «somebody» would be Mr. Nicholas Edward Cave from Australia?

 

The nightmarish fun begins already on the album sleeve — look at the picture closely and yes, this is more or less what the music sounds like. The color palette is a little too... colorful, perhaps (I'd rather see this in black and white), but other than that, the diversity of elements, their absur­dity, their energized appearance, and their sheer ugliness, everything driven to hyperbolic heights, totally fits in with the songs, or, rather, the nightmarish rituals that The Birthday Party has chosen to perform. And I'm assuming that the album sleeve pictures their sacred altar.

 

Interestingly enough, the original LP, which only contained ten tracks, did not start with ʽBlast Off!ʼ — it was the B-side to a concurrent single. When the album was released on CD, however, the song was not simply tacked on as a bonus track (like its A-side, ʽRelease The Batsʼ, notable for being the «Goth»-est number released by the band and allegedly much favored by Bauhaus fans); instead, they put it on top as the album's flagman, for reasons so obvious that it is now hard for me to imagine how Junkyard would have ever fared without it. Briefly put, ʽBlast Off!ʼ is a loud and proud signal for that thingamabob on the album sleeve to... blast off. This is Captain Beefheart gone berserk, a flurry of avantgarde-influenced drum rolls, bass runs, and dissonant guitar shrieks, on top of which Crazy Captain Cave announces that the band is finally moving out. Prayers On Fire showed us the mustering of the forces inside the asylum; Junkyard flings the asylum doors open, and out pours the scary army of Lunacy, Epilepsy, and Maniac Behavior.

 

Viewed from that angle, the first side of Junkyard is pretty much flawless. Most of the tunes deal with violence and death; only one, ʽThe Dim Locatorʼ, focuses primarily on pure insanity as such — the melody can be traced all the way back to Kurt Weill, but the mood is «square root of Jim Morrison multiplied by Iggy Pop», and now they have this disgustingly dirty, swampy, lo-fi, echoey production, too, that makes it all sound like it was recorded in a particularly filthy sewer. One in which a zombie-faced Nick Cave is wading, knee-dip in muck and shit, grumbling and snarling: "They call me Dim, I am the Dim Locator, loco-lomo-loco-lomo-wow-wow-wow". It ain't a pretty sight, but it sure looks realistic enough to want to take cover.

 

But a bigger bet is staked on sheer visceral brutality: ʽDead Joeʼ jackhammers your guts into your spine with Motörhead intensity, as the song tries to recreate the impression of a «car crash apoca­lypse» and the ensuing panic ("you can't tell the girls from the boys anymore"), and ʽHamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow!)ʼ does the same thing, but sadistically takes extra time to arrive at the desired effect — the «Hamlet» in question, transferred to modern times, is now the equivalent of a reli­gious psychopath ("Hamlet got a gun now, he wears a crucifix"), a hidden menace that trots around at a brisk jazzy tempo before exploding, every once in a while, in a series of snarling pow-pow-pows as «Hamlet» gets carried away.

 

On the other side of the street, ʽShe's Hitʼ andʽSeveral Sinsʼ move slowly and refrain from des­cen­ding into sheer utter epileptic madness, but then again, even the maddest madmen should take a break from rolling on the floor foaming at the mouth from time to time. And there is some genuine emotional depth here — behind all the discordant jazz-punk wailing of ʽShe's Hitʼ Nick manages to put down an atmosphere of tragic sadness, while ʽSeveral Sinsʼ counts off the begin­ning of his fire-and-brimstone streak ("I forgot to tell you several things, Ma, I forgot to tell you 'bout the seven sins"). The song is also interesting in that it announces the arrival of Barry Adam­son, temporarily replacing Tracy Pew on bass while the latter was doing a two-month term for drunk driving — Adamson would later go on to become one of the Bad Seeds. Not that ʽSeveral Sinsʼ is a particularly complex track, bass-wise, but Barry quickly gets in the general gloomy groove of the band, and helps make the song a true «dead letter tale» as it promises in its opening line. The only question is, how in the world could they all turn in such a credible performance when they barely had something like twenty-five years or so to indulge in the seven sins?

 

If there is one general flaw on Junkyard, it is the length: forty minutes may be a bit too much even for the veteran listener, especially considering that Side B of the disc does not stray too far from the same territory, and may give the impression of the band getting a little tired, or maybe it's just the listener who got tired. ʽBig Jesus Trash Canʼ walks pretty much the same turf as ʽBlast Off!ʼ, ʽKiss Me Blackʼ raises the same ruckus as ʽDead Joeʼ, the title track is a slow-bur­ning dirge that does not exceed the effects of ʽShe's Hitʼ, and so on. Individually, each song is strong, but collectively, it does begin to get a bit samey after a while, and this, I am afraid to say, cheapens the overall experience: being shocked to the bone at the sight of an epileptic shaking in convulsions is one thing — having to watch him do it for half an hour and slowly getting used to it, let alone getting bored with it, is another. Consequently, it might make sense to listen to Junk­yard one side at a time.

 

No matter what your particular preference might be, though, Junkyard remains the album that The Birthday Party was sent into this world to leave us with. Some might find it too far out, too violent, too messy, and prefer the slightly more subtle and, if I may say so, slightly more «poppy» Prayers On Fire instead, but the way I see it, if you are born into this world to be a gut-puller, then the harder you pull on those guts, the better you are fulfilling your destiny. On Junkyard, Nick and his friends are not merely engaging in senseless musical hooliganry — they are engine­ering an avantgarde masterpiece that may not be as inventive and revolutionary as Trout Mask Replica, but sounds much more meaningful to my ears. This is more than just a regular thumbs up: Junkyard should, by all means, end up on all the representative top lists for the decade.

 

MUTINY / THE BAD SEED (1982-1983; 1989)

 

1) Sonny's Burning; 2) Wildworld; 3) Fears Of Gun; 4) Deep In The Woods; 5) Jennifers Veil; 6) Six Strings That Drew Blood; 7) Say A Spell; 8) Swampland; 9) Pleasure Avalanche; 10) Mutiny In Heaven.

 

After Junkyard, The Birthday Party had no place left to go. They'd taken the formula to its abso­lute extreme — one more step in the same direction and the band would have exploded in its own madness. On the other hand, there could be no talk of stopping and stagnating, either: Nick Cave was not about to let his band turn into an endlessly self-repeating hardcore-goth-mix machine, forever releasing inferior sequels to Junkyard. There had to be some changes made, but this meant running into internal creative conflicts. Throw in some trouble with the rhythm section (drummer Phil Calvert was fired for alleged loss of competence, and bassist Tracy Pew had tem­porarily vanished from the radar due to law troubles), and the end becomes predictable.

 

The Bad Seed, an Evangelical title that Nick would eventually appropriate for his next band's name, and Mutiny were two EPs that the band released over their last troubled year of existence, later to be put together on one CD and now seen as the Birthday Party's last testament. It is very tempting to call them «transitional», a bridge between classic Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds, but that would depend on how one actually perceives the difference between B.P. and B.S. As far as I can see, the arrival of Blixa Bargeld to replace Rowland S. Howard as Nick's principal spar­ring partner was the principal change from one to the other — Howard's flashy, psychotic style of playing always took a lot of emphasis off Nick's performance, whereas Bargeld would rather play off Cave, adapting his guitar parts to attenuate the man's self-expression.

 

From that point of view, Mutiny/The Bad Seed is still a bona fide Birthday Party record, even despite the fact that Bargeld already appears on ʽMutiny In Heavenʼ, adding a distant wall of industrial clang in the background. On the general scale of «intensity», these EPs, I'd say, fall way below Junkyard, but still remain above Prayers On Fire. Only a couple of songs, like ʽSwamplandʼ, sound like they could have been outtakes from the Birthday Party's aggressive peak — the rest are either slower than usual, or more disciplined than usual, or, sometimes, more subtle and quietly spooky than usual (not in a «Bad Seeds» way, though).

 

Nothing is radically new, but the songs, particularly on the Bad Seed EP, are still perfectly written and executed. Nick's "HANDS UP WHO WANTS TO DIE?" at the beginning of ʽSon­ny's Burningʼ is as classic a Birthday Party moment as anything, and the rest of the song gallops along like a mix of hardcore epic with old style psychedelia, with the chainsaw buzz replaced by (catchy!) acid guitar riffs and mind-twirling «astral» leads. ʽFears Of Gunʼ is only a tad slower, more in a jazz/blues-rock vein, but a viciously murderous one, as bits of guitar shrapnel fly in all directions while Mr. Cave is running down the street, loudly announcing that "the fears of Gun are the fears of everyone" («Gun» is animated and personalized in this song).

 

On the opposite side of the business, ʽWildworldʼ and ʽDeep In The Woodsʼ lean towards the Goth angle, particularly the latter, all of it hanging upon a cruel descending bassline, each bar taking us deeper and deeper in the woods where "the woods eats the woman and dumps her ho­ney body in the mud", well, you can imagine the rest. I do have to say, though, that after Junk­yard, these spooky horror shows come across as a little too grotesque and theatrical: way too many DIEs, DEATHs, and DEADs rolled up in gravel for the hyperbole to work in a properly intimidating (rather than black-humorous) manner. Of course, once Rowland S. Howard cuts in with all of his «wounded mammoth» might, everything is forgiven.

 

As for the last EP, it sounds a bit too fussy and disorganised, with fairly strange rockers like ʽSix Strings That Drew Bloodʼ that never seem to properly understand whether they are headed for musical coherence or musical chaos. ʽJennifer's Veilʼ and ʽSay A Spellʼ tread the same turd as ʽWildworldʼ, but with less interesting results. Only ʽSwamplandʼ, a convict-on-the-run perfor­mance that initiates Nick's decades-long series of scum-of-the-earth impersonations, truly stands out in its relentless punch — Cave seems invigorated by the very idea that his «madman» image can be put to more realistic use, and if you thought you could do without any more throat-tearing screaming after the entirety of Junkyard, you might at least make an exception for his "down in swampland...!", delivered as if the hound dogs were already tearing at his calves, pulling him down in the filthy muck.

 

On their own, the songs are strong enough to merit an unquestionable thumbs up — in terms of the global curve, though, these EPs mark relative stagnation. Nobody questions the ability of Cave and Howard to come up with «hook after hook», vocal-wise or guitar-wise, but emotion-wise, they all sound now like variations on themes fully explored before, and while that might have kept old veteran fans of the band happy, it sure didn't keep the band members happy. New configurations were necessary, so it is only natural that ʽMutiny In Heavenʼ concludes the al­bum on a note of new partnership: Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld, meeting up in Berlin after the Birth­day Party relocated there in 1982, disappointed with the London scene. And really, we should all be happy: The Birthday Party lived the exact amount of time it was supposed to live, reaching its absolute peak and breaking up at the first signs of stagnation, its members re-emerging in fresh new formats. Good lesson for too many people who refuse to learn.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE 1981-82 (1999; 1981-1982)

 

1) Junkyard; 2) A Dead Song; 3) The Dim Locator; 4) Zoo-Music Girl; 5) Nick The Stripper; 6) Blast Off!; 7) Release The Bats; 8) Bully Bones; 9) King Ink; 10) (Sometimes) Pleasure Heads Must Burn; 11) Big-Jesus-Trash-Can; 12) Dead Joe; 13) The Friend Catcher; 14) 6" Gold Blade; 15) Hamlet; 16) She's Hit; 17) Funhouse.

 

Although The Birthday Party pretty much built up their reputation through live performance, they never released a live album while the band was still active — possibly because they felt no need, what with the studio records already letting off as much steam as any live performance could accumulate. The first «semi-official» Birthday Party live LP only came out about two years after the split — It's Still Living, capturing an Australian show from 1982, was released by their former manager without anybody's consent, and is usually chastised for vastly inferior sound quality and other problems.

 

It took almost two more decades before an archival Birthday Party live release finally appeared that could sort of serve as a proper «benchmark» for evaluating and enjoying the band's sound. Here, everything was improved — courtesy of the respectable 4AD label, the performances are well-recorded and nicely cleaned up, and the setlists offer a fine retrospective of the Party's career, focusing primarily on Prayers On Fire and Junkyard, unquestionably their two finest offerings, but also featuring some rarities and oddities. Most of the material was culled from two shows in London and Bremen; a historically important bonus piece is the recording of ʽFunhouseʼ by their spiritual forefathers, The Stooges, in Athens from September 1982, although, unfortunately, it is also the one track that suffers the most from near-bootleg sound quality.

 

I should emphatically stress, though, that The Birthday Party live do not get much wilder than The Birthday Party in the studio — frankly speaking, it would be hard to imagine how they could get much wilder than that, unless it meant dragging out random audience members on stage and cutting their hearts out in black voodoo rituals (and even then, you'd have to get this on DVD to genuinely enjoy the proceedings). But on the other hand, The Birthday Party live do not get any less wild than The Birthday Party in the studio — if this was really typical of their live sound, it means they could work themselves to exhaustion every night, and still come back for more. From the first track and right down to the last one, each single member of the band is playing at the top of his powers, and Nick's devil roar never sags, not even for a second.

 

From an audiophile point of view, these recordings could actually be preferable to some of the original takes — in the studio, the band went for too much echo and lo-fi, whereas here all the instruments are completely out front: the vicious lead guitar parts on ʽDim Locatorʼ, for instance, shoot at point blank range into your ears here, whereas on the original version they sounded rather remote. You may like or dislike it, but it does make the listening experience significantly different — a rare case of an underground band's archival live release sounding «cleaner» than what they did in the studio, and one that may offer additional insight into the art of Mick Har­vey's and Rowland Howard's guitar playing. Or compare Tracy Pew's bass on the original ʽShe's Hitʼ and the almost ʽDazed And Confusedʼ-style thick doom sounds on this version — it's like he's tugging at these strings from inside your own head. On the other hand, that studio echo did account for some extra eeriness, so that it is impossible to objectively prefer one over the other.

 

The final performance of ʽFunhouseʼ, adding guest player Jim Thirlwell on saxophone, would be a more than perfect conclusion here if the sound quality were reasonable, but even as such it is still a noisy sensation — every time the guitar, the sax, and the singer lock forces in a hysterical outburst, on the illusionary verge of totally losing control, we have Bedlam incarnate, though it is interesting to go back and listen, for comparative purposes, to Iggy doing this stuff on the original Funhouse. The Stooges were summoning the flames of Hell — the Birthday Party sound much more like your local madhouse band, celebrating the joys of clinical insanity rather than demonic possession. It may simply have something to do with Nick's «mooing» voice not having as much guttural power as Iggy, but you could also say this about Ron Asheton vs. Rowland Howland (the former makes his instrument sound like a spray hose of hellflames, the latter prefers to evoke the atmosphere of a serious nervous breakdown), so yeah, similar intentions, different spirits.

 

Finally, we are offered occasional glimpses of Nick Cave's tender side — through bits of stage banter like "thank you, I love your haircut as well", casually, but respectfully cast off towards somebody in the audience right before launching into a fiery version of ʽZoo-Music Girlʼ. As few as they are, they are important — seventy minutes of this unending assault and battery might make you feel that we are dealing with a bunch of psychopaths beyond salvation (an alternate version of GG Allin and friends), so even a single nicely spoken sentence of sanity, dropped in casually like that, can be reassuring, and further confirming the obvious thumbs up and the ob­vious recommendation to pick this up and never let it go.

 

 

 

 

BLACK FLAG

THE FIRST FOUR YEARS (1978-1981; 1983)

 

1) Nervous Breakdown; 2) Fix Me; 3) I've Had It; 4) Wasted; 5) Jealous Again; 6) Revenge; 7) White Minority; 8) No Values; 9) You Bet We've Got Something Personal Against You!; 10) Clocked In; 11) Six Pack; 12) I've Heard It Before; 13) American Waste; 14) Machine; 15) Louie Louie; 16) Damaged I.

 

I suppose that putting out three EPs with three different singers in four years is some sort of re­cord, but what really makes it a unique record is that each following singer was worse than his predecessor. Keith Morris, handling the lead vocals on 1978's Nervous Breakdown, still sings more or less in the «first wave punk» tradition, with a snappy, sneering attitude and relatively un­derstandable enunciation of the words. Sometimes he can even hit different notes and hold them, a fairly anathemous thing to do for America's quintessential hardcore band. His successor, Ron Reyes, also lovingly called «Chavo Pederast» by his fellow band members, already comes across as a profes­sional hardcore screamer on 1980's Jealous Again, but he still shows some under­standing of pitch, may function in one of several emotional states, and knows what sarcasm is (ʽWhite Minorityʼ). Finally, Dez Chavena, active on the Six Pack EP and also featured on several additional outtakes, just seems like a plain old simple street guy with an unreliable throat (it is said that he couldn't handle proper live shows, and eventually pleaded to be relegated to second guitar, once Rollins came along).

 

What binds all these short stages together is the music, credited mainly to the band leader and main guitarist, Greg Ginn, and occasionally, to the bass player Chuck Dukowski. Although, due to Greg's insistence, the band positioned itself as «professional» from the very beginning, spen­ding lots of time in rehearsal, these early songs do not yet disclose the full scope of Ginn's talents or interests. For the most part, the early EPs are more like «the Ramones taken to eleven» — ʽWhite Minorityʼ, for instance, begins like ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ and then, just a few bars later, slips into ʽBeat On The Bratʼ — but the songs are notably shorter (one to one-and-a-half minute run­ning length is common), and, most importantly, notably meaner. Black Flag has its own sense of humor, of course, but it's mostly dark, bitter humor, full of aggressive sarcasm; and most of the time, they just sound like they want to put their fist in your face, rather than party around.

 

Quality-wise, I suppose this whole disc does not really get any better than its opening track — ʽNervous Breakdownʼ tells you everything you ever wanted to know about early Black Flag, and, in fact, about early hardcore in general. Poor production; Ginn's guitar as the only properly au­dible instrument, sounding like a cross between the chainsaw buzz of Johnny Ramone and the underworld rumble of Tony Iommi (Ginn is a lifelong Black Sabbath fan, and it always shows); and a singer gradually going from pissed-off snarl to frenetic roar, as his promise of being about to have a nervous breakdown is swiftly realized over the course of the song's two minutes. The next three songs basically repeat the same message — ʽWastedʼ being a particular highlight, as it packs the required angst and anguish into a single-breath fifty seconds. It does beg the question, though: why the past tense? "I was so wasted" — is that supposed to mean that things are all right now? Everything else on the EP is in present tense, you know.

 

For Jealous Again, Ginn already implements a few stylistic changes: most importantly, the guitar playing becomes more melodic, as he adds screechy bluesy leads to the title track and ʽRevengeʼ. More questionable is the decision to address the band's own problems: ʽYou Bet We've Got Something Personal Against You!ʼ slams down the freshly departed Keith Morris, who allegedly stole the band's material for his new band, The Circle Jerks. Then again, maybe venting one's frustration against concrete people for concrete problems might be considered a more honest and authentic way to go than just spewing out another predictable anti-authority rant in general.

 

The first signs of «classic» Black Flag, however, only begin to appear closer to the Dez Cadena period, as the songs become more interesting from the compositional and arrangement-based points of view. The guitar solos on ʽClocked Inʼ become exceedingly maniacal, with elements of atonality; ʽSix Packʼ opens with thirty seconds of suspenseful bass/drum interplay and features several tempo changes and completely crazyass lead lines along the way; and ʽI've Heard It Be­foreʼ features Ginn in full swing, as his guitar imitates a fire alarm siren gone off its rocker. These are no longer examples of an «angrified Ramones» approach; this is something different.

 

Most divergent of the lot are the last three songs: ʽMachineʼ is a bass-solo-gone-noise-rock ex­periment over which Cadena screams that he is not a machine (so you could as well call it an anti-Kraftwerk protest song); the cover of ʽLouie Louieʼ, with a new set of lyrics, arguably features the most atonal guitar solo ever suggested for that song; and the original version of ʽDamagedʼ, with a relentless four-minute industrial punch to it, as Ginn suddenly finds himself getting closer to the aesthetics of Einstürzende Neubauten, is one of the most aurally brutal things they ever came up with (much heavier and uglier than what it became later with Rollins).

 

«Liking» or «loving» a collection like this is almost out of the question, I think, since it is so di­verse in functionality — I mean, if the early songs are your average teenage hormonal stuff, and should primarily fall in line with the average 17-year old as he gets his first serious whupping from Life, the later songs are already more suitable for the ear of the avantgarde lover. So this whole process is interesting, even thrilling perhaps, from an «evolutionary» point of view, but the individual parts all have their flaws — the early stuff is too derivative and formulaic, and the later stuff, weird as it is, feels a bit underdeveloped, and also suffers from Cadena's lack of personality, as the man is essentially a one-note, one-vibe character. Naturally, on the whole the collection still gets a thumbs up, but in general curve terms, it is hard for me not to perceive it as just a gra­dual build-up — a four-year training camp — for the true success still to come.

 

DAMAGED (1981)

 

1) Rise Above; 2) Spray Paint; 3) Six Pack; 4) What I See; 5) TV Party; 6) Thirsty And Miserable; 7) Police Story; 8) Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie; 9) Depression; 10) Room 13; 11) Damaged II; 12) No More; 13) Padded Cell; 14) Life Of Pain; 15) Damaged I.

 

Black Flag's first album with Henry Rollins as lead throatist has acquired a reputation that even a thoroughly negative review would not be able to smear in the least, so I won't even try. This is one of those «classic» hardcore pieces, made ever so more classic by the fact that, having gotten it out of their systems, Ginn and Rol­lins immediately started moving away from that sound and style, so it is one of a kind. Never repeated... never could be repeated without sounding like an in­ferior copy for boring lovers of sequels, for that matter.

 

That said, I suspect that the original impact of Damaged has been seriously diluted by the tidal wave of hardcore acts that followed in its wake (or competed with it originally, since most of the individual hardcore idioms had already been fully construed in L. A. clubs circa 1979). In the very early 1980s, playing an album like this against the dance-pop, New Wave, and even «clas­sic» punk records of the day could give an electric jolt like nothing else — next to Damaged, an album like London Calling would feel like a tame kitty, and even properly hardcore acts like the Adolescents or the Dead Kennedys sounded positively melodic and «poppy» in comparison. But as time went by and more and more acts started speaking the same language as Black Flag, Da­maged had little choice other than to go through an identity crisis.

 

The best way to enjoy Damaged is not to allow yourself to stop and think about it. Just as you hear that tsunami wave of distortion and speed ʽRise Aboveʼ, your best bet is to catch it and ride it all the way through to the end, where it leaves you ʽDamagedʼ, spluttering and coughing up muck on the shore. Taken that way, it's one hell of a joyride, as you get carried through layers of pissed-off protest, vicious sarcasm, maniacal despair, and revolutionary exuberance, sometimes condensed into one-breath thirty-second blasts (ʽSpray Paintʼ) and never once feeling phoney or straightforwardly dumb.

 

Once you do stop and take an analytical perspective at what you've just been through, a certain vibe of disappointment may settle in. For one thing, Henry Rollins is a serious screamer, but that is pretty much the only thing that happens here. The screaming may sound meaningful, believable, infectious, stunning, etc. — yet there is really nothing extraordinary about it, and at this time, the album does not really do much justice to the overall breadth of Mr. Rollins' talents; in fact, his only visible advantage over Dez Cadena is that he is tougher, and can handle all that visceral stuff without being left all «damaged».

 

For another thing, Ginn's riffage, as opposed to his lead playing, still mostly relies on stock phra­sing, borrowed from the repository of Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and the Ramones, lightly shaken about, sped up, and toughened with extra thick distortion. The lead playing is a different matter — whenever Greg goes into solo mode or just throws in a flash-in-the-pan countermelody, he offers us one of his offbeat atonal experiments, cleverly disguised as stereotypically punkish «inability to play». But, let's admit it, it would be a really strange thing to call Damaged, above and beyond everything else, a classic example of adventurous lead guitar playing.

 

Finally, from a purely ideological point of view, the album does not offer much insight that we were not already aware of. While I do share the common point of view that ʽTV Partyʼ is lyrically funny, I am certainly past the point where the very fact of making fun of generic TV audiences glued to their generic TV shows could automatically make me predisposed towards a song like that. What really saves the song is not its lyrics, but rather the band's decision to arrange it as a hardcore musical parody on a happy pop tune: take away the distorted guitars, change the lyrics, and that "we've got nothing better to do / than watch TV and have a couple of brews" chorus could be easily modified into a football fan anthem or a Sesame Street singalong. That's kind of funny, not the simple fact of making fun of the average (non-)working Joe.

 

But let us stop here: this is too much criticism for a record that places all its faith and focus in something completely different. Like The Clash four years earlier, Damaged is not a collection of carefully crafted songs, but a laser blast to the conscience, where form takes precedence over essence, or, more precisely, essence is dissolved in form. Damaged may have been worshipped and imitated many times over, but this is where it all started, and you can still hear the echo of these guys' excitement at what they are doing — sacrificing all known musical conventions in or­der to make way for the ultimate experience in exorcising their own demons. Make no mistake, though: Damaged is not a «dark», «vicious», «scary» record — like most of its predecessors in the «classic punk» style, it is more of an optimistic call-to-arms, and even when Rollins is imper­sonating a raving lunatic on ʽDamaged Iʼ or ʽDepressionʼ, his screams sound more like some symbolic constatation of the problem than the product of a real sick person. Black Flag have a bone to pick with the system, and it is the system that they are accusing of driving people crazy — whereas a band like The Birthday Party, for instance, was reveling in madness that went way beyond the evil activity of the powers-that-be, probing into the darkest corners of human nature as such, and that was scary as heck.

 

It is sort of symbolic that the famous album cover for Damaged was all set up — naturally, Henry Rollins never put his fist through no mirror, which, instead, was diligently smashed with a hammer as Henry's hand was being accurately covered in red ink. It would not be difficult to say that the entire album is as «fake» as its sleeve photo, but then, the entire punk movement, in all its forms, is «fake» to a certain degree: after all, you wouldn't expect Henry Rollins to go rolling on the streets, screaming "AAAARGGH! I can't see nothin', I'm blind! DAMAGED! DAMAGED!" at the top of the lungs, on a casual basis. It's all just a matter of art. For its historical importance, artistic significance, sheer focus and energy, I eagerly give the album a thumbs up — despite not managing to hold even a single separate song as an autonomous entity anywhere in my head.

 

MY WAR (1984)

 

1) My War; 2) Can't Decide; 3) Beat My Head Against The Wall; 4) I Love You; 5) Forever Time; 6) The Swinging Man; 7) Nothing Left Inside; 8) Three Nights; 9) Scream.

 

After a three-year break in recording, partially triggered by legal hassles with their record label as well as personal problems — such as losing their drummer and their bass player for different reasons — Black Flag came back with a vengeance for 1984, releasing no fewer than three new studio albums that year. But whoever was expecting another Damaged from these guys (or, bet­ter still, three more Damageds!) had to take a hike: Greg Ginn and Henry Rollins were not about to let their progressively-oriented brain machines be overridden by rigid formula.

 

The first side looked promisingly conservative. The title track breaks in at an acceptably fast tempo (not nearly as fast as ʽRise Aboveʼ, though), delivers a classic Rollins scream-hook as he spits "you're one of them! you're one of them!" right in your face, almost making you blush in embarrassed confusion, and turns Ginn's guitar into a well-oiled machine gun, as he bathes you in sonic shrapnel from behind Henry's muscular back.

 

ʽCan't Decideʼ, despite the already suspicious gargantuan running length of 5:22, is even better as a song — as its discordant sonic intro even­tually morphs into another set of machine-gun phrasing, Rollins and Ginn construct a series of verses on the issue of having to suppress one's true emotions that subtly-brutally build up towards an explosive resolution: Henry's "I can't decide, I can't decide, I can't decide ANYTHING!" may be one of the most credible expressions of total frustration since the Who's ʽI Can't Explainʼ. Why they decided to include a gazillion of dissonant guitar solos and verses is beyond me — the song would probably have worked much better as a laconic 2:30 blast — but, most likely, expanded lengths like these simply meant re­fusing to kowtow to established «hardcore standards», take it or leave it.

 

The remaining four songs on Side A do not add any extra emotional range: the energy level never drops, and Rollins' lyrics never cease scorching the earth (the first line of ʽI Love Youʼ is, after all, "I put my fist through the door" — we've come a long way from 1964), but the musical structures and moods follow the same principles, and Ginn's laudable willingness to keep experimenting with chord sequences comes at the expense of catchiness: there are some fairly monstruous and not particularly meaningful polygonal riff-monsters here, and the best thing about them is pro­bably the guitar tone — low, grumbly, distorted, but cleanly produced, with tight control exerci­sed over echo and feedback.

 

Side B, although it retains the tone, is a different proposition altogether. It is given over to some­thing quite unexpected: three lengthy, slow, draggy slabs of what could only be described as «early sludge metal», most notably derivative of Black Sabbath but nowhere near as poppy or catchy, especially when Greg throws in one of his dissonant solos whose sound I could only de­scribe as «what you'd expect to happen if Lou Reed started playing like Frank Zappa». Critical opinion on these weird creations is usually negative, with «self-indulgent» as the mildest epithet in their direction — but once you really start thinking, it seems as if it is only the tempo that truly separates them from the first half. Everything else is the same — the guitar tones, the dissonan­ces, the darkness, the lyrics, the screaming; if you took ʽI Love Youʼ and slowed it down, you'd have yourself another copy of ʽNothing Left Insideʼ. Therefore, by loving the first side and hating the second side, one essentially admits that the only reason why «hardcore» deserves to exist is its speed — a logical position, but not a very useful one, so it seems.

 

I think that the monotonous, draggy trilogy of ʽNothing Left Insideʼ, ʽThree Nightsʼ, and ʽScreamʼ is at least «kinda curious», and at most, if you let yourself ride its wobbly waves, a quasi-psychedelic rough trip that mixes early 1970s pothead-ism with modern punk to an unpre­dictable effect. ʽNothing Left Insideʼ, in particular, succeeds in generating a cool, smoky, downer atmosphere where, at times, Rollins and Ginn howl in unison like a pair of stray dogs, freshly run over by a truck. Nothing too serious, just "pain hurts my heart, nothing left inside". Oh, needless to say, eighteen minutes of this atmosphere are easily sustainable probably only if you are a pot­head, but the experience is not a total waste, and «self-indulgence» is a word I'd rather reserve for a 15-minute Kansas epic than for this brave, only partially successful attempt to invent «slow hardcore» (or «anti-hardcore», whatever).

 

All in all, the experimental nature of My War has its attractive sides, and the album captures and bottles something — at the very least, this is certainly not a case of a band with nothing to say. I am pretty sure that all of this could have been said better, maybe with some extra overdubs, or with a little more range to Rollins' character, or with a little less slobbering adoration for Tony Iommi that prevents Ginn from straying away from that one single path. But even as it is, My War still deserves a thumbs up, since its «bravery» (maybe even literal bravery — the hardcore market is already so small that most of the suppliers usually try not to alienate any parts of it) does not come at the expense of meaning, and the album has some replay value.

 

FAMILY MAN (1984)

 

1) Family Man; 2) Salt On A Slug; 3) Hollywood Diary; 4) Let Your Fingers Do The Walking; 5) Shed Reading (Rattus Norvegicus); 6) No Deposit – No Return; 7) Armageddon Man; 8) Long Lost Dog Of It; 9) I Won't Stick Any Of You; 10) Account For What.

 

Black Flag's project-number-two for the prolific year of 1984 happens to be the most universally despised Rollins-era Black Flag album, and for quite an objective reason: this is not really «Black Flag» as such, but rather two brief solo mission statements from Henry and Greg, the former re­citing unaccompanied examples of his spoken-word poetry, and the latter playing a bunch of his avantgarde punk improvisations. The two cross paths in the middle of the record with ʽArma­geddon Manʼ, but in an almost accidental manner — with Henry overdubbing his texts across Greg's «noodling» without any idea of voice-melody unity.

 

Defending Family Man would be indeed a hard task; whether you are able to like it or not will really depend on how much you like «opening your mind» to pretentious, self-consciously arro­gant «groundbreaking artistic ideas» that choose shock value, provocation, and minimalism over hard work and traditional lines of inspiration. The title track quickly sets up the scene: after Rol­lins has informed us that "I come to infect, I come to rape your women, I come to take your children into the street, I come for you, family man!", there is little left to do other than join the man in his crusade against petty bourgeois morality — or yawn in a «oh no, not another crusade against petty bourgeois morality!» kind of way. Personally, I have nothing against such crusades in general, when it comes to artistic expression; but Henry Rollins simply does not strike me as a person who has any particularly great way with words. I mean, for that matter, didn't Patti Smith already say it all almost ten years earlier?

 

Out of all the other spoken-word exercises, I vaguely remember ʽSalt On A Slugʼ (where the «slug» in question, of course, is yet another metaphor for the ugly, smelly, bloated underbelly of the bourgeois society), recorded in worse quality than everything else since it seems to have been taken from some public reading (and, consequently, accompanied by rather silly laughter out­bursts from the small audience present), and ʽLet Your Fingers Do The Walkingʼ, which largely consists of the title repeated over and over. Is this important? I have no idea.

 

As for the instrumental parts, my only comparison could be that of a headless chicken running in the yard. Many of these riffs and solos sound like they totally belong in any number of classic Black Flag tunes, but without a specific focus, usually provided by the frontman, they simply make no sense. At least the last two tracks are fast, which makes listening to them slightly less excruciating than sitting through the entire nine minutes of ʽArmageddon Manʼ (if that is what the Armageddon is supposed to look like, I am totally retiring my financial support for the Antichrist this very instant).

 

Of course, Family Man is yet another self-conscious «experiment» in the endless war against artistic stagnation, and could be partially redeemed by the good old «well, at least they're trying» argument. But the bottomline is that I cannot imagine anybody wanting to give the record a se­cond spin of their own free will — in the place of, say, giving a third spin to Damaged — and if such people do exist, it is only because they probably feel themselves wronged by the family man, and take exquisite sadistic pleasure from pouring salt on slugs, be they only metaphorical ones. My own level of bourgeoiserie still allows me full well to enjoy Damaged, but sort of starts boiling over with Family Man — if you want to poke fun at conservative conventions, at least have the intelligence to poke it in an unconventional manner. As it is, I consider the experiment a failure, and give it a retrograde thumbs down.

 

SLIP IT IN (1984)

 

1) Slip It In; 2) Black Coffee; 3) Wound Up; 4) Rat's Eyes; 5) Obliteration; 6) The Bars; 7) My Ghetto; 8) You're Not Evil.

 

Definitely an improvement over the excesses of Family Man and an overall better balanced col­lection than My War — for what it's worth, this might actually be the finest of Black Flag's re­leases in the oh-so-prolific year of 1984. Most of the tracks work as actual «songs», sometimes sillier than necessary, sometimes longer than they should be, but the important thing is, the talents of Ginn and Rollins seem once again to be put to good use.

 

Okay, so I am not altogether sure what to think of the title track, whose title is to be understood quite literally (featuring future L7 guitarist Suzi Gardner engaging in a strictly adult conversation — and simulated activity — with Rollins). From an innovative point of view, this may be the first ever attempt to use hardcore punk, rather than the more traditional genres of R&B and funk, as the musical equivalent of violent intercourse; but even with all the sex noises generated by both participants, the track does not become particularly «hot» or «sexy». As a soundtrack to having sex, it's not particularly well applicable — you probably won't be able to keep up the speed (and if you will, physical injuries to both parties are imminent). As a metaphor on the brutal under­belly of sexual relations, it may lead to uncomfortable associations and conclusions — "you say you don't want it, but then you slip it on in" is kinda risky. But, on the other hand, you don't have to admire the song — you just have to admit it's... different.

 

It is much easier to admire ʽBlack Coffeeʼ, one of the band's strongest anthems — a fantastic concentrated burst of dark energy, where Ginn's sludgy hard rock riff and Henry's chorus roar work in full unison. Like the title track, ʽBlack Coffeeʼ has nothing political about it — it is a song about the effects of jealousy — but it is extremely vivid, and conveys emotional frustration so well that it is quite easy not to notice the irony behind the cover (expressed mainly through Henry's over-exaggerated intonations, and some of the lyrics). In fact, Rollins sounds even more like a researcher, exploring various psychic types, on this album than he used to before. When he is not moralizing in a straightforward manner (ʽYou're Not Evilʼ), he is busy drilling into the soul — to understand its limitations (ʽThe Barsʼ), its mutant ugliness (ʽRat's Eyesʼ), its pretentiousness (ʽWound Upʼ), or its poverty (ʽMy Ghettoʼ). I'm not saying it all works, but it is certainly more interesting than if the band had simply decided to put out another generic batch of political rants.

 

Unfortunately, the music shows no breakthroughs (not that Ginn would have enough time for any breakthroughs, what with the frantic workpace of the band and all) — same old broken riffs and dissonant solos, with the songs distinguished mainly by their tempos and lack/presence of vocals (ʽObliterationʼ is a lengthy instrumental). If it weren't for Henry's raw passion and actor's talent, Slip It In would not have been that much different from the second side of Family Man, maybe with the exception of a couple fast and focused riff-rockers. And even Henry is not enough to justify the seven-minute running length of ʽYou're Not Evilʼ — it is fun to see them switch be­tween different tempos with such ease every few bars, but midway through, it becomes predic­table, and two-thirds into the song, annoying.

 

Still, this is such a strong rebound from the misguided experimentalism of Family Man that I give the album a thumbs up without a shred of guilt. «Existentialist hardcore» with a Freudian subtext is, after all, just the kind of thing that this band was sent down to Earth for — if they are not always as good at it as we'd like them to be, that's just because it is really hard to be constant­ly good at it. Probing the dark depths of your soul at those speeds and with that sort of vocal range can only be that much successful, and I'm perfectly okay with being impressed by about half of Slip It In (ʽBlack Coffeeʼ is classic), and letting the other half roll by on impulse. And ooh, such a suggestively blasphemous album cover, too!

 

LIVE '84 (1984)

 

1) The Process Of Weeding Out; 2) Nervous Breakdown; 3) I Can't Decide; 4) Slip It In; 5) My Ghetto; 6) Black Coffee; 7) I Won't Stick Any Of You Unless And Until I Can Stick All Of You; 8) Forever Time; 9) Fix Me; 10) Six Pack; 11) My War; 12) Jealous Again; 13) I Love You; 14) Swinging Man; 15) Three Nights; 16) Nothing Left In­side; 17) Wound Up; 18) Rat's Eyes; 19) The Bars.

 

As if three studio albums weren't enough, the hyper-prolific year of 1984 ended with Black Flag summarizing all their latest achievements with a live recording — generated in some seedy Frisco nightclub and initially released only in cassette format; the CD version dates from 1998, when Ginn remixed the album and, as the rumor goes, seriously «doctored» the sound, although you'd need the original tape to verify that piece of vile slander.

 

Unless you are a master veteran with grizzled-sizzled ears, it is probably not recommendable to listen to the entire record in one go; it takes 75 minutes to finish, and 75 minutes of the Black Flag schtick, particularly post-Damaged, is quite a heavy attack on the senses. No shit — the very first track is an extended take on the EP-only ʽProcess Of Weeding Outʼ: eight and a half minutes of Ginn's «atonal» soloing, next to which an equally extended Frank Zappa guitar jam sounds like Bacharach. This is as welcomish a welcome as this band gets, and although the run­ning lengths of inidivudual songs start dropping down after that, it hardly ever gets easier.

 

The setlist is predictably dominated by recent stuff: much, if not most, of My War and Slip It In are reproduced, with only a few nods to the first four years and, most surprising of all, almost nothing carried over from Damaged — in particular, the absence of ʽDamagedʼ itself, or of ʽRise Aboveʼ, cannot be regarded as unintentional: clearly, these guys must have known what was their fans' favorite record, and clearly, that was the one record stuff from which they were the most reluctant to play. Of course, you don't have to love it, but you gotta have respect for the gall.

 

Since most of the songs were still fresh in the players' minds, there is not a whole lot of difference between their studio and live incarnations: if anything, the biggest wonder is that they can keep it up live for such a long time, without Ginn's crazy fingers or Henry's rabid bark giving way even once, as they deliver perfectly professional facsimiles of their latest creations. The sound quality, at least on the remastered version (I have seen people seriously complaining about the original cassette), is actually very good, so that you even get to hear the subtlety of the rhythm session — no nitpicking here on my side, at least.

 

That said, I must note that Live '84 does not have the proper feel of a live album; surprisingly enough, it is the club environment (normally an ideal setting for a live record) that may be res­ponsible for this — there is almost no audible audience reaction throughout, possibly because there was only a couple of stragglers, accidentally dropping in to catch this weird band in action, and without the audience reaction, it just feels like a reduplication of studio work. In fact, I'd say that on a record like this, a few spoken word poetry fragments from Rollins would not be so much out of place as they were on Family Man — at least it'd have given the album more of an actual stage feeling (provided there would be no overdoing it).

 

On the technical side, if you are interested in checking out post-Damaged Black Flag, but abhor the idea of sitting through all of their LPs from 1984, the live album is a faithful enough «abrid­ged» introduction into the band's fantasy world around that time. You know what they say — a spoonful of Ginn a day helps keep bourgeois rot away. But no more than one spoonful, or you might get geographical displacement syndrome.

 

LOOSE NUT (1985)

 

1) Loose Nut; 2) Bastard In Love; 3) Annihilate This Week; 4) Best One Yet; 5) Modern Man; 6) This Is Good; 7) I'm The One; 8) Sinking; 9) Now She's Black.

 

Leave it to a band like Black Flag to have their most «normal» album in years to bear the title of Loose Nut — because, frankly speaking, it sounds like the nut in question has been tightened rather than loosened. The whole thing almost seems «commercial» when compared to the exces­ses and experiments of 1984. Steady beats. Relatively conventional solos. Hook-based, even cat­chy choruses. Structures. No spoken word «poetry» or unpredictable jazz-punk jams. Even a few fast, concise, focused, gang-chorus-led punk numbers that remind one of Damaged. What next — a dance duet between Henry and Madonna?..

 

Joking aside, Loose Nut seems to have received a rather tepid welcome from critics and fans alike, and I have no idea why. The most frequently voiced complaint is that the album sounds «too metallic» — but seeing as how Ginn never really placed a proper delimiter bar between «punk» and «metal», that is kind of silly, and besides, it isn't the kind of «metal» that thrashers like Metallica or Slayer were doing at the time, let alone the pop metal thing; this is Greg's stan­dard sludgy sound, thick, gruff, and grumbly, far more in line with the punk spirit than the doom-laden, hellfire-breathing tones of the thrashers.

 

And there are some really strong songs on here, a couple of which I really like, despite not being a heavy subscriber to this kind of aesthetics at all. ʽSinkingʼ, for instance, which really sums up much of the grunge spirit several years before «grunge» as a phenomenon came into being — sludgy, but catchy riffs and a depressed, near-suicidal singer. To my mind, it is one of the finest moments in Greg's and Henry's history as a team, when the former's wailing solos finally become the perfectly soulful counterpart for the latter's gangrenous growls of "it hurts to be alone, it hurts to be alone...". In 1984, it seemed way too often that the two were operating on unrelated wave­lengths, but on ʽSinkingʼ, and quite a few other songs on Loose Nut, they are finally getting back in touch with each other.

 

In a different vein, ʽBest One Yetʼ may indeed be their best one yet since Damaged — short, speedy, melodic, angry, and derisive of the band's fanbase ("you say you don't like the things I've done / you say you don't like what I've become" — well, you can preliminarily guess the verdict); again, nothing really to complain about. ʽThis Is Goodʼ latches on to a seemingly dumb, but effi­cient idea — cross Henry's lyrical masochism ("I smash my fist / Into my face / I can feel it when I close my eyes / And this is good...") with a «geometric» noise-jazz guitar pattern reduced to a minimal, repetitive set of chords, creating a special genre of «primitive blockhead music» which really is a convenient soundtrack for repeatedly punching your fists into the wall at moderate time intervals — and the repetitiveness of the chorus is all set here to numb the effect.

 

These potential highlights are nested among a slew of lesser tunes with varying degrees of like­ability, but one thing is clear — the guys are still far from spent, and the album in general feels as if they almost managed to find a good balance between formula and experiment this time around. In addition, they threw in a bit of closing intrigue, with drummer Bill Stevenson's contribution, ʽNow She's Blackʼ, inciting endless discussions about whether the song is «racist» or not — al­though, to be honest, except for the poor word ʽblackʼ itself, there is hardly anything in the song to allude to the protagonist's girlfriend racial characteristics, and, most likely, the ʽblackʼ in ques­tion has to be taken quite figuratively; and Rollins sings it from his usual desperate madman point of view, not a KKK member or anything.

 

Clearly, Loose Nut is the band's most «accessible» album since Damaged; whether it should also make it their second best or not is debatable, but even if you like your Black Flag to go out on a limb, burying you under thick, endless layers of guitar dissonance and lulling you to sleep with streetwise spoken word declamations, that in itself would be no reason to accuse these guys of «selling out» when the only thing they really did here was work out a compromising style that allowed both «stars» to work on the same emotional level at the same time. Meaning another thumbs up, even if I still tend to «respect» this stuff much more than «feel» it — but then I guess that whoever cannot get his heart strings properly afflicted by the likes of Henry Rol­lins should probably count himself a real lucky guy in this world.

 

IN MY HEAD (1985)

 

1) Paralyzed; 2) The Crazy Girl; 3) Black Love; 4) White Hot; 5) In My Head; 6) Out Of This World; 7) I Can See You; 8) Drinking And Driving; 9) Retired At 21; 10) Society's Tease; 11) It's All Up To You; 12) You Let Me Down.

 

Surprise — for the first time... ever?, here is a Black Flag album that does not sound significantly different from its predecessor. For once, the band has sort of «agreed» to the sound they had got­ten going for themselves, and settled upon refining and perfecting it rather than coming up with some new radical reinvention of image. And it works: In My Head reaches a tight, well-kept balance between jazz, pop, punk, and metal, or, if you wish, between free-form experimentation, pleasant catchiness, pissed-off frustration, and brutal crunch.

 

The album shows Rollins receding ever farther in the dark, uncomfortable corners of his subcon­scious: long gone are the days when this band still used to remember that some of the world's troubles may be directly ascribed to «The System», and now Henry is busy full-time exorcising his, my, and your demons, one by one, exposing Man (the species, that is) for the inherently ag­gressive, sexually imbalanced, mentally challenged nature freak that he (or she) has no way of not being. Curiously, the album is occasionally said to have begun life as an instrumental venture, in­tended by Ginn to be released as his first solo album. But then Henry came along, listened to the tracks, and wrote a bunch of lyrics for them — and they fit in so well that the solo career was postponed. Not for long, but we do have ourselves one more Black Flag classic.

 

Case in point: the title track, a mix of stern martial metal with sadistic experimental soloing — Ginn trying to cross Tony Iommi with Ornette Coleman one more time — over which Henry's "I WAN-na BE the BUL-let that goes RIP-ping through your SKULL..." flies like a bunch of bullets that go ripping through your skull. It's one of those songs on which everything comes together in its right place. Yes, Rollins can be an irritating personality, and Ginn's music often comes across as meaningless noise, but every once in a while, when they put their minds and not just their guts to it, they lock together like nothing else.

 

Maybe the most obvious place here where they lock together like this is ʽDrinking And Drivingʼ, probably the album's most easily noticeable song — simple, repetitive, nagging riff and a chorus of provocative imperatives help it rise above everything else, at least on first listen. They had a video done for it, too, full of car crash images and other chaotic bits, so that the song can function both as a tremendous piece of anti-drunk-driving propaganda and, if you wish, a larger metaphor for the perils brought about by erratic anti-social behavior (not exactly a prime time topic for a «hardcore punk» band, but what sort of asshole would want to pigeonhole Black Flag together with, say, Agnostic Front?). The best thing about it, though, is that Ginn's twisted, atonal solos, which he usually inserts in every song regardless of its nature and purpose, are directly symbolic in this case — musically recreating chaos and catastrophe — and work in full tandem with Henry's iron-voiced "drink! drink! don't think! drive! kill!...".

 

Some of the songs go down really deep: ʽThe Crazy Girlʼ is stuck somewhere between nympho­mania and homicidal urges as Henry fantasizes on circa-Jack the Ripper topics, and ʽBlack Loveʼ sure ain't about an innocent flirt with an Afro-American passion. Then again, you'd probably think of Jack the Ripper or even worse things, too, had you been exposed to these nasty riffs and gotten the urge to set them to appropriate lyrics. But there are also faster, simpler, «brighter» numbers that recall the old-school Black Flag of Damaged — most importantly, ʽRetired At 21ʼ, as good a slice of catchy «pop-punk» (in the good sense of the word) as the band ever came up with, and ʽIt's All Up To Youʼ, a surprisingly tight piece of production on which Bill Stevenson uses a sharper, thinner, cracklier drum tone than he usually does, making the whole thing sound atmospherically closer to classic Ramones; fans of old school punk might very well find this song to be the major highlight on the album.

 

There is still a small bunch of rather yawn-inducing duds (ʽWhite Hotʼ, I think, is five wasted minutes of pointless sludge), and, with a couple of exceptions, the individual songs are not ama­zing enough to make us forget the general black monotonousness — yet the album meets and exceeds its goals, and, on the whole, is probably the best proof that Black Flag's continued exis­tence post-Damaged was not at all meaningless. It might have been too outrageously experimen­tal, or too unnecessarily provocative, but meaningless, no. Thumbs up.

 

WHO'S GOT THE 10½? (1986)

 

1) Loose Nut; 2) I'm The One; 3) Annihilate This Week; 4) Wasted; 5) Bastard In Love; 6) Modern Man; 7) This Is Good; 8) In My Head; 9) Sinking; 10) Jam; 11) The Best One Yet; 12) My War; 13) Slip It In / Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie; 14) Drinking And Driving; 15) Louie Louie.

 

At the time when this live album was released (March 1986; the actual show was played in Port­land in August 1985), Black Flag were still a functional unit, and would remain that way until August 1986, when Ginn broke up the band: as it seems, he was simply fed up with stuff, and de­cided to explode it before genuine stagnation would set in. The scenario is well confirmed by this live album — in terms of production, energy, and tightness, if not necessarily the setlist material, it is arguably their most successful statement of live power.

 

The original single LP was later expanded to include most, if not all, of the show, so that the latest CD edition includes over an hour of material. The setlist includes nearly all of Loose Nut, with the exception of ʽNow She's Blackʼ — not because of political correctness, of course, but because the song's author, drummer Bill Stevenson, was no longer with the band at the time, re­placed by the less «brutal», but more polished Anthony Martinez. There are also a few previews from the yet unreleased In My Head (including some of its best tracks, such as ʽDrinking And Drivingʼ); a few scattered reminiscences from the 1984 albums; and virtually nothing from Da­maged, except for ʽGimmie Gimmie Gimmieʼ, reworked into a rather silly «comical» sex-based performance in which we learn that, of all people, it is Kira who got the 10½ — gender discourse in a hardcore paradigm can be a terrifying thing.

 

Not having a huge lot to say about the studio counterparts of these songs, I certainly have even less to say about the live renditions — except that the band is tight, playing most of the songs at slightly speedier tempos, with the new drummer keeping everything in good shape and Henry trying to actually sing wherever some singing is required. On a whim, I'd also say that there is a little less «sludge» to Ginn's guitar playing live than there was in the studio; this means that, if any of those albums gave you a headache, there is no harm in trying out the live equivalent with its ever so «thinner» guitar sound, if only a little bit. There is a four-minute ʽJamʼ there which is quite skippable (just Ginn trying out a bunch of ideas or what looks like ideas), but other than that and the dubious inch-measuring game played by Henry, it's just song after song of solid late pe­riod Black Flag material. And, for dessert, a Black Flag-style ʽLouie Louieʼ which you can pro­bably imagine how it goes even without hearing it.

 

In short, it isn't exactly like Loose Nut — the new drummer kicks tighter ass, and the guitars buzz and squeal instead of growling and howling, so there's no harm in comparing the two and deci­ding for yourself what kind of sound you like best. Personally, I might even prefer the live stuff, but even if not, it still deserves a thumbs up, simply for the sake of being the tightest, most fo­cused, clenched-teeth-disciplined live album from these guys ever. This is as «un-sloppy» a hard­core record as hardcore ever gets. No wonder they exploded after that — too much discipline tends to overload the engine.

 

WHAT THE... (2013)

 

1) My Heart's Pumping; 2) Down In The Dirt; 3) Blood And Ashes; 4) Now Is The Time; 5) Wallow In Despair; 6) Slow Your Ass Down; 7) It's So Absurd; 8) Shut Up; 9) This Is Hell; 10) Go Away; 11) The Bitter End; 12) The Chase; 13) I'm Sick; 14) It's Not My Time To Go-Go; 15) Lies; 16) Get Out Of My Way; 17) Outside; 18) No Teeth; 19) To Hell And Back; 20) Give Me All Your Dough; 21) You Gotta Be Joking; 22) Off My Shoulders.

 

Good title. Anyone up for a new «Black Flag» album, the band's first in 17 years, with Ron Reyes, a.k.a. «Chavo Pederast», returning to work with Greg Ginn? And no Rollins, no Kira, no Bill Stevenson, in short, nobody of particular interest, in addition? And with an album cover that could only be interpreted as a kiddie parody on the classic Raymond Pettibon artwork of old? They say that Ron Reyes designed the cover himself — wouldn't surprise me in the least. The guy's painting talents are a fairly good match for his singing ones.

 

I have no idea why, after all those years of experimentation, Ginn decided to return to the stulti­fyingly rigid approach of the «classic hardcore punk» formula. Twenty-two «songs» over forty-two minutes, mostly played at fast tempos and each one written according to the same recipé: multi-tracked guitar riff, funky bassline, and a guy howling out anti-social proclamations as if he were suffering from an acute stomachache that just won't go away. If this is an attempt to go back to the ascetic values of Damaged, it's a total stylistic and substantial failure, but I don't really think this is what it is. More likely, it is an attempt to get back to the roots of the roots — for once, Ginn has decided that he has had enough with experimentation and that, perhaps, at this particular point of time the most experimental thing to do would be to produce a deliberately non-experi­mental record.

 

Which would all be fine and dandy, if not for two things. First, these riffs are bad. I'd honestly rather have two or three good riffs, spread over long numbers, than twenty-two riffs that are im­possible to distinguish from each other — in the end, what with the short running lengths and all, it all falls together in one thick riff soup. Worse, for some reason, Ginn settles on a different, previously unfavored, guitar sound for him: double-tracked in stereo and run through some sort of wah-wah pedal that creates a constant «bubbling / perking» effect, obscuring the melody; such things might be okay for a brief climactic solo, but when they are at the very base of the sound and never leave that base, you soon begin wondering what the hell is going on.

 

Second, I can fully understand Ron Reyes' artistic decision to bawl over each single recording like your friendly beer-chuggin' neighbor with a thick skull and poor social skills — for all I know, that description might apply to «Chavo» in real life — but the truth of the matter is that, merely two or three songs into this nightmare of an album, the combination of Ron's «vomit into the microphone» and Greg's «use the guitar as a baseball bat» approaches starts giving me such a terrible headache that sitting through this muck even once becomes a heroic feat, and every at­tempt at a second or third listen only makes it worse. If the powers-that-be still accept immoral suggestions, I would certainly advise them to add the album to the National Registry of «Potential Guantanamo Torture Devices for Future Use».

 

In fact, were this an instrumental record, we'd all feel better — you could treat it as some sort of Metal Machine Music, an arrogant move to remind us that «hardcore» is really all about being unbearable, and that the aural suffering that you experience should work as shock therapy. But with the vocals in tow, «unbearable» becomes «unbearably dumb», and that is a different beast. Hearing Ron Reyes holler "shut up! shut up! just shut the fuck up!" or "get out of my way!" or any other single imperative chorus with the intonations of an unrefined street gangster is stupidi­ty's death blow to any possible signs of intelligence. The fact that Ginn employs the theremin on some of the tracks is completely irrelevant in the light of this circumstance; no ʽGood Vibrationsʼ or ʽWhole Lotta Loveʼ can come out of this mess.

 

The only «good news» is that Reyes only lasted a short time in this version of the band, being quickly ousted by Mike Vallely — but, frankly speaking, everybody is responsible for the failure, and Ginn, as the leader, should take most of the blame. A tremendous disappointment, especially for those fans who actually did wait for a new Black Flag album all these years, and let us not kid ourselves by offering the usual justificatory excuses ("they had to move on", "they dislike being pigeonholed", "this is the way the band sounds in the 21st century, deal with it", etc.): this album is just downright stupid, and I am sure that even Greg Ginn's greatest fans understand it in their hearts. One of the most assured thumbs down I've ever given out.

BLIND GUARDIAN

BATTALIONS OF FEAR (1988)

 

1) Majesty; 2) Guardian Of The Blind; 3) Trial By The Archon; 4) Wizard's Crown; 5) Run For The Night; 6) The Martyr; 7) Battalions Of Fear; 8) By The Gates Of Moria; 9*) Gandalf's Rebirth.

 

According to genre rules, the debut album by Blind Guardian is neither «thrash metal» nor «power metal», but rather «speed metal», which seems to be lodged somewhere in between the two — metal music played at extreme tempos, but with more emphasis on melodicity and «clean­ness» of sound than thrash. Oh well, whatever. The real question is: when all your songs are played at the speed of fifty billion notes per second, is there anything you can do to make any of them stand out? How do you avoid falling into the usual trap — where your whole LP sounds like one extended track with a few seconds of air inserted every now and then?

 

Well, Battalions Of Fear shows that it can be easily done: you just have to compensate with the vocals, and make sure that every individual track has its own distinctive chorus. If there is one single thing that might make these songs «stick», it is the simple, basic, anthemic bits — "OH, MAJESTY! ", "GUARDIAN, GUARDIAN, GUARDIAN OF THE BLIND!", "HALLOWEEN!", "RUN FOR THE NIGHT! BURN AWAY!", and so on. This is a tactic they may have inherited from Iron Maiden, who are easily the single hugest influence on these guys, but they need it so much more than Iron Maiden, who usually played at slower tempos and could rely on complex riffage and challenging song structures even without a vocal hook.

 

Unlike Maiden, Blind Guardian do not rely on «guitar weaving»: the two guitarists in the band seem to have their duties delineated quite properly, as Marcus Siepen concentrates on the chug­ging rhythms and André Olbrich is responsible for all the melodic lead parts. Hansi Kürsch, the frontman, is at this point still combining the double duties of the bass player and the vocalist, though clearly favoring the latter job more than the former — he's got a voice similar to Bathory's Quorthon, «snapping» rather than «barking», without any traces of corny sentimentality, perfectly suited to this type of metal-theater material. Lastly, drummer Thomas Stauch is as good as your average speed metal drummer gets, but there's not a lot to add to that description.

 

The artistic influences of Blind Guardian are completely clear: first and foremost, they are rabid Tolkien fanaticists (no less than three different songs — four, if you count the bonus track ʽGan­dalf's Rebirthʼ on the re-issue — are based on Lord Of The Rings), and second, they like all sorts of horror fantasies and occult dabblings, with Stephen King and Aleister Crowley each providing in­spiration for one of the tracks. Current events in this here mortal world only concern them as long as their global evilness begins to match fantasy visions — the title track, in particular, is about the horror of SDI, which they probably considered on par with the construction of Mor­goth's Than­gorodrim or something of the sort. This is a consistent position of theirs, and while their musical style would change significantly over the years, the «vision» would not, so please be warned that it's a little hard to get deep into Blind Guardian without having previously done your Tolkien homework, and yes, that actually means reading the books — all of them.

 

With the basic formula for this early record sort of set in stone, there is not much mood variation, and the atmosphere generated by the melodies does not always match the lyrics — for instance, ʽMajestyʼ seems to be about the last King of Arnor losing his kingdom to the forces of evil and running for cover, but the melody is neither doom-laden nor tragedy-bound, but, like all the rest, pushes forward with martial brutality and determination. The two things to look out for are the already mentioned chorus hooks — and Olbrich's solo passages, which show an honest desire to become the Paganini of the heavy metal guitar solo, combining technical virtuosity with careful attention to melodic structure. Unfortunately, my own spirit remains somewhat insensitive to this approach, but it is hard not to admire these results at least «formally».

 

Likewise, the instrumental ʽBy The Gates Of Moriaʼ hardly refers to the Gray Company relaxing in the shade of said gates, but could probably trigger an association with the bloody battle between Orcs and Dwarves that took place there much earlier — and who will now recognize, unless specially informed, that the melody actually quotes Dvořák's ʽFrom The New Worldʼ sym­phony? Everything is made to serve the same purpose: kick ass, hero-style. One of my favorite tracks is ʽTrial By The Archonʼ: it serves as a brief, concise intro to ʽWizard's Crownʼ, but has a completeness of its own, stating the theme, then consecutively offering the spotlight to the band's riffmeister and the band's lead hero. The theme is suitably ominous, the riffage is more inventive than on the vocal tracks, and the solos are brilliantly constructed, but I can only imagine your average Archon conducting his average trial in this particular manner if he had a schedule of around 300 trials to perform per day, two minutes per each — state the accusation (opening theme), take in the prosecution (riff variations), hear the defense (solos), pronounce final judge­ment (closing theme), next in line please.

 

No matter how monotonous this atmosphere is, though, the album as a whole, by metal standards, deserves an unquestionable thumbs up; in fact, its monotonousness may ultimately be its major advantage, since, not having yet established their own personal style, Blind Guardian would probably have achieved little if they tried to walk all over the metal turf — by sticking to this one particular gun, they are at least able to «mine» this speed metal formula all the way down to its logical con­clusion. In terms of songs, you'll probably only remember the epic choruses — but in terms of overall cohesiveness, you will probably retain a very precise general impression. And there is no one but J. R. R. Tolkine to blame, I guess, that in the metal world, Battalions Of Fear is altogether so less popular than Slayer's Reign In Blood, even though, for all I know, they are more or less on the same level in the «goal-achieving» department.

 

FOLLOW THE BLIND (1989)

 

1) Inquisition; 2) Banish From Sanctuary; 3) Damned For All Time; 4) Follow The Blind; 5) Hall Of The Ring; 6) Fast To Madness; 7) Beyond The Ice; 8) Valhalla; 9) Don't Break The Circle*; 10) Barbara Ann.

 

Not exactly a «sophomore slump» here — more like a temporary turn in a questionable direction. Like its predecessor, Follow The Blind is bona fide «speed metal», but distinctly less melodic than Battalions Of Fear: consistently wilder tempos, not as many catchy choruses, and, saddest of all, downgrading of Olbrich's guitar playing to rather generic shredding on most of the tracks. Apparently, the band members had developed a temporary fetish for thrash metal, and this is reflected in the extra aggression at the cost of melodicity.

 

In situations like these, it is often the case that the first couple of tracks will look like the best ones on the album, and the rest will simply bore the listener to death, regardless of the composi­tional particularities of the songs. Indeed, ʽBanish From Sanctuaryʼ is so emblematic of the entire record that you are not missing much of anything if you limit your listening experience to this one song. Faster than ʽMajestyʼ, two guitars rattling away at machine-gun speed, Herr Stauch pounding away on his cylinders with robotic precision, and, amazingly, a vocalist that can actually sing at this insane tempo rather than just growl. Great, marvelously precise sound — problem is, apart from perhaps the vocal melody of the chorus, I can hardly tell it apart from ʽDamned For All Timeʼ or, in fact, the absolute majority of the songs that follow.

 

The epic-length title track, with its acoustic intro and outro, presence of slower sections, complex structure and a slightly more interesting set of solos than usual, is the album's central point of focus, but with its lack of truly piercing riffage, seems more like a tentative Metallica imitation than an attempt to find and/or preserve their own face. Metallica influence may also be reflected in the name of the album's major instrumental composition (ʽBeyond The Iceʼ, bringing to mind ʽTrapped Under Iceʼ), but on the whole, it just sounds like one more excuse to perform some exer­cises in casual shredding.

 

Other than ʽBanished From Sanctuaryʼ, the only song here to have lingered on in the band's set­list was ʽValhallaʼ, either because you simply don't lose a song title like that, or because it's got the most seductively sing-along-ish chorus on the entire album: "VALHALLA! Deliverance, why've you ever forgotten me?", repeat ad infinitum until Thor and Odin are finally forced to expedite a return letter with some legal explanation of why they have ever forgotten you. There's also a special bridge section with Kai Hansen, of Helloween and Gamma Ray fame, contributing guest vocals that culminate with his famous high-pitched screeching at the end (but I must say I far prefer Kürsch's «roaring» approach on the live versions instead). It's a decent track, but hardly all that different from ʽHall Of The Ringʼ or ʽFast To Madnessʼ, in terms of composition or energy. Maybe it's a little more Blind Guardian-esque than the oh so Iron Maiden-esque ʽMadnessʼ or the oh so Slayer-esque ʽHall Of The Ringʼ, but who could really tell?

 

Perhaps the true spark of greatness that is placed in this record is the completely unpredictable finale — a minute-and-a-half-long rendition of ʽBarbara Annʼ with a bit of ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ thrown in, on which the band's producer Kalle Trapp sings lead vocals and plays guitar. This is just a musical joke, but arguably an indispensable one after forty minutes of incessant, mono­tonous thrashing. In fact, I sure wish there'd have been more of them — a minute-long interlude of good old surf-rock or rockabilly done heavy metal style in between all the jackhammering might have worked wonders on the senses. As it is, the lack of diversity, multiplied by this deci­sive «speed over melody» approach, will certainly limit the audience of Follow The Blind to the hardcore public. I remain fully impressed by the band's technical ability to pull it all off without a hitch, but, in the light of their future successes, this one seems to belong to their «diligently earning their credentials / raising their qualification» phase — a stop-gap effort, in other words, never really going any place special.

 

TALES FROM THE TWILIGHT WORLD (1990)

 

1) Traveler In Time; 2) Welcome To Dying; 3) Weird Dreams; 4) Lord Of The Rings; 5) Goodbye My Friend; 6) Lost In The Twilight Hall; 7) Tommyknockers; 8) Altair 4; 9) The Last Candle.

 

This is where «the legend of Blind Guardian» properly begins — although, frankly speaking, the difference between this album and Battalions Of Fear isn't nearly as huge as you'd think upon reading up on the band's evolution course. Nuance-wise, Tales features a bit more diversity, a tad more choral vocals, a trifle more epic vocals — but the «speed metal» core of the band is still intact, since the majority of these songs are taken at the usual breakneck tempos, and the melodic components are again limited to the songs' vocal melodies and Olbrich's classically influenced guitar leads. Perhaps the conventional wisdom that Tales moves away from «speed» and into «power» has to do with Kürsch's singing, as he tones down the growling elements and emphasi­zes the «tough romantic warrior» approach. Or maybe it is just the contrast with the far more «thrashing» Follow The Blind that preceded it.

 

Whatever. Genrist discussions aside, Tales is simply a very solid metal album, as solid as starry-eyed fantasy-centered metal albums ever get. This time, the band is all over the place: in addition to Tolkien and Stephen King, literary influences here include Frank Herbert and Peter Straub, not to mention that ʽGoodbye My Friendʼ is said to have been inspired by E.T. (although, frankly, the music would be more fit for Alien), and the last track has something to do with the universe of Dragonlance, something that should probably appeal to D&D fans. In short, these guys take their fantasy roots like real pros, not some chubby amateur who thinks himself a fantasy geek just because he had the nerve to include the word «goblin» in some line or other.

 

Not that it really matters, because in a world where Paul Atreides, Gandalf, and E.T. speak the exact same language, they could have just as well derived any of their stories from The Catcher In The Rye or The Penal Code Of Pakistan, whichever would be closer at hand. What does matter is that the choruses are their catchiest to date — occasionally in a dumb way, as the chorus to ʽTommyknockersʼ which recreates the nursery rhyme in King's novel ("late last night, and the night before..."), but more often, in an inspiring one.

 

ʽLost In The Twilight Hallʼ (yes, about Gandalf's wandering in between the worlds of the dead and the living) is a good example — the interaction between the band's choral vocals and Hansi's solo retorts is perfectly staged, with an unforgettable contrast in betwixt the pathos-filled "I'm lost in the twilight hall" and the final doom call of "...that's when the mirror's falling down". Just as memorable are the choruses to ʽWelcome To Dyingʼ and ʽThe Last Candleʼ — indeed, tremen­dously illustrative of what «power» can really mean within a «power metal» setting. Forget sub­tlety, forget nuance, forget emotional fluctuation, forget what all those words that they sing mean, literally or figuratively: it's all about churning out rocket-fueled anthemic slabs, with a full-on cavalry charge, blasting away with complete disregard of possible consequences. «Cheesy» or «campy» are words that have no meaning in the Blind Guardian army.

 

And, while I lack the proper qualification to write anything properly meaningful about the guitar work on this album, it is still necessary to put in at least a meaningless good word for Olbrich's melodic developments — perhaps best illustrated on tracks like ʽWeird Dreamsʼ, a short instru­mental that goes through an aggressive opening/middle/closing theme, a couple of quasi-sym­phonic interludes, and just a tiny bit of shredding in exactly 1:20 — but similar compositional ideas are found on almost all the other tracks. You can sort of see that this guy's primary rock inspiration is Brian May, but he's also kept doing his primary classical homework as well (more Paganini!) — my favorite bit might be the final solo in ʽTwilight Hallʼ, where both guitars «fall together» for the rapid-fire shredding parts and then Olbrich's guitar falls out to follow its indivi­dually twisted baroque course, but really, it's all quite consistent throughout.

 

The only disappointing track on the album is ʽLord Of The Ringsʼ — not because it is rather a vain idea to compress all of the novel into three minutes (eat that, Peter Jackson!), but because the song abandons the standard formula in favor of a medieval-esque acoustic ballad setting, and (a) they do not have the compositional genius to make it particularly memorable, (b) they do not have the arranging genius to make it particularly haunting, (c) keeping it quiet puts you at risk of actually paying attention to the lyrics, which is always a bad idea with Blind Guardian. Then again, you cannot seriously blame the band for deciding to include an acoustic «breather» in be­tween all the assault and battery going on. And besides, it's The Lord Of The Rings in three minutes, how cool is that?

 

Anyway, it is all a rather straightforward fantasy game, no particular «depth» to it, no serious possibility of allegorical readings or anything, but, as a representative of the «not-at-all-addicted-to-fantasy» camp, I will admit to still being impressed. Most importantly, Tales From The Twi­light World really only uses all those literary influences as a front to deliver music that has its own, independent value. It is fantasy music, yes, but it is Blind Guardian fantasy music, not Tolkien or Stephen King fantasy music. Can you imagine ʽLost In The Twilight Hallʼ used in the soundtrack to The Fellowship Of The Ring? Obviously not. All the more reason for an honorable thumbs up.

 

SOMEWHERE FAR BEYOND (1992)

 

1) Time What Is Time; 2) Journey Through The Dark; 3) Black Chamber; 4) Theatre Of Pain; 5) The Quest For Tanelorn; 6) Ashes To Ashes; 7) The Bard's Song: In The Forest; 8) The Bard's Song: The Hobbit; 9) The Piper's Calling; 10) Somewhere Far Beyond.

 

Not a lot of progression happened in between this album and the previous one: rather, the band just seems so happy with their perfected formula that they try it out one more time, just to see if it all really comes naturally to them now. There is a little more acoustic guitar (in fact, the album opens with an acoustic intro, which is why I remembered), a little more keyboards and additional instruments (including a whole swarm of bagpipes on ʽThe Piper's Callingʼ), but really, these are all just minor nuances: the core of the formula stays sanctified for now.

 

Under such circumstances, it only makes sense to talk about individually striking songs if they are present, and this is a little more complicated than before — after several listens, only two of them seem to naturally stick around. The ultimate highlight of the album, and one of Blind Guar­dian's greatest ever songs, is ʽAshes To Ashesʼ — ironically, the only song on the album to com­memorate a real event rather than reflect some literary fantasy, namely, the passing of Hansi Kürsch's father. Blind Guardian's major know-how now is all about ensuring a blazing transition from speedy verse to anthemic chorus, and ʽAshes To Ashesʼ totally satisfies: as the group cuts down the maniacal tempo and enters with the solemn "ashes to ashes, dust to dust..." requiem bit, the hand of doom does materialize in the mind — and Kürsch's decisive conclusion of "time... isn't here to stay!" might be one of the single fiercest accappella power metal lines sung in the history of the genre. At the very least, when it comes to power metal, I have yet to hear a more impressive ode to the mercilessness of time in this style.

 

Other than ʽAshes To Ashesʼ, one more spot where this approach (ride your flash metal train at the speed of light, then smash it right into the solid wall of a stately martial chorus) works very well is ʽThe Quest For Tanelornʼ: lyrically, the song is based on some usual nonsense from Michael Moorcock, but «physically», the transition is pretty mind-blowing, as the band almost ends up transforming itself into Yes for a few bars, before heading back to the surface and con­tinuing the mad mad ride. Unfortunately, the anthemic chorus feels sort of underdeveloped — the line "on our quest for Tanelorn..." is sung with such epic gusto that you almost feel a bit cheated when, several bars later, they just resume the chugga-chugga as if it were all just a dream. Still, the trick works, there's no denying it.

 

Arrangement-wise, the most bombastic piece on the album is ʽTheatre Of Painʼ, based on Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children — taken at a significantly slower tempo than usual, drenched in orchestra-substituting synthesizers, going through several complex sections and providing Kürsch with a suitable background to properly display all his theatrical capacities: I am still not sure of whether to laugh at the hysterical pathos of "Now I'm gone... and it seems that LIFE HAD NEVER EXISTED!..." or to bow down to its sheer energy, since, after all, I have never sworn allegiance to operatic metal delivery, but then again, this guy really does bring the dial all the way over to eleven, which at least makes this a better proposition than, say, Queensryche.

 

On the other hand, regular speed monsters such as ʽJourney Through The Darkʼ and the title track fail to do much for me except confirm that I am, indeed, listening to yet another Blind Guardian album. More interesting is the two-part experiment of ʽThe Bardʼ, where the first part is an acous­tic round-the-campfire anthem and the second part is a bombastic metal rocker and they are es­sentially set to the same melody — the experiment has not only earned the band their nickname (ʽThe Bardsʼ), but its second part is probably the heaviest song ever recorded about a hobbit. Still, as a purely musical piece, it is no great shakes, really.

 

If you get the expanded CD edition of the album, you do get an additional highlight — a magni­ficently sung cover of Queen's ʽSpread Your Wingsʼ, one of those power ballads that I've always liked, because it evokes a genuine feeling of power (and freedom) rather than a fake imitation, and the band offers a very tasteful «metallization» with Kürsch at his very best, adding a bit of guttural roar to the arrogant snappiness he takes over from Freddie's delivery. In fact, sacrilegious as it may seem, I would hardly have anything against Blind Guardian including covers on their original LPs, mixing them with their own compositions (something like that would be forth­coming on The Forgotten Tales, but that one's a compilation of a dubious nature, so it doesn't really count) — they have a good nose for catchy material that they can adapt for their own pur­poses, and the fact that they even did ʽBarbara Annʼ shows that they can be... flexible?

 

Upon careful consideration, I do give the album a thumbs up. Its passable material is never­theless energetic and listenable, and its highlights, like ʽAshes To Ashesʼ, deserve to be enshrined in the great metal treasury. That said, I have no idea what some people mean when they speak of the band's «great leap forward» — to use a suitable metal analogy, I'd say this is their Piece Of Mind coming right after their Number Of The Beast: a respectable, but not particularly amazing or surprising follow-up to a classic in the same style.

 

TOKYO TALES (1993)

 

1) Inquisition; 2) Banish From Sanctuary; 3) Journey Through The Dark; 4) Traveler In Time; 5) The Quest For Tanelorn; 6) Goodbye My Friend; 7) Time What Is Time; 8) Majesty; 9) Valhalla; 10) Welcome To Dying; 11) Lost In The Twilight Hall; 12) Barbara Ann.

 

Blind Guardian's first live album is exactly what you'd probably expect of Blind Guardian's first live album — terrific, powerful, energetic, ripping, and completely expendable unless you are capable of putting it on, turning the volume all the way up, closing your eyes, and mentally trans­porting yourself to Koseinenkin Hall in Tokyo, Japan, on the fateful night of December 4, 1992. With several thousand stark-raving-mad Japanese fans accosting you from all sides, singing all of your favorite anthemic choruses in complete unison. Power!!!

 

But my problem is predictable: there is just no way these here songs could sound more powerful played live than when recorded in the studio. So you get the same mad tempos, the same metal hero vocals, the same super-fluent, intelligently constructed metal-Paganini solos from Olbrich — yes, amazing how they can recreate all that so perfectly-flawlessly on stage and all, but hardly warranting more than one listen. Serious fans will, no doubt, discern and cling on to minor vari­a­tions, yet I have only noticed that they offer a much louder rendition of ʽLord Of The Ringsʼ — electric, with a big drum sound in the climactic finale, and it hardly makes the song any better, though, of course, it is more suitable for an arena setting that way.

 

The setlist mainly draws upon Tales and Somewhere Far Beyond, with only ʽMajestyʼ retained from the debut album and only ʽBanish From Sanctuaryʼ and ʽValhallaʼ from the second one; it's all okay, although I sort of miss ʽAshes To Ashesʼ and ʽThe Last Candleʼ. Hansi is playing the Big Barbarian Boss for the audience, occasionally encouraging them to join him in his pagan chest vocalising — the effect can be irritating, but that's how you play this game, and at the very least, he does sound like he drinks his enemies' brains right from their freshly cracked skulls at breakfast, so he's a winner at that game regardless of whether you play or not. Nothing to com­plain about in any of those departments, really.

 

Technically, the album was sewn together from bits of two different shows, so it's a little patchy with all the fade-ins and fade-outs; and the decision to include ʽBarbara Annʼ in their live show might irritate genre purists (I am not irritated, but I do have to remark that if this was a gesture of the «we are really not that serious» variety, it was still a little misplaced — I mean, normally, you either have a sense of humor, in which case it shows up rather regularly in many of the things you do, or you do not have a sense of humor: this «two extra minutes of fun for the sake of proving we can be fun» feels somewhat contrived. Anyway, somehow it worked better in the studio). So these may be minor flaws if you need any. Sound quality, however, is perfect (Tokyo factor strikes again, those Japanese accept nothing less), no flaws here. Oh, and, for the record, if I am not mistaken, the band likes double-tracking their guitars in the studio, so if you dislike that simple trick, here's at least one minor reason to seek out the live versions instead.

 

IMAGINATIONS FROM THE OTHER SIDE (1995)

 

1) Imaginations From The Other Side; 2) I'm Alive; 3) A Past And Future Secret; 4) The Script For My Requiem; 5) Mordred's Song; 6) Born In A Mourning Hall; 7) Bright Eyes; 8) Another Holy War; 9) And The Story Ends.

 

If you are not deeply entrenched in the intricacies of the various sub-varieties of heavy metal, you will probably feel that what separates Imaginations from earlier Blind Guardian can be summed up as «small details, shades, and nuances». A bit of a slower tempo here, a bit of a choral over­dub there, same old story on the larger scale. But go visit a Blind Guardian discussion board, and every now and then you will be able to come across a flame war between «speed metal fans» and «power metal fans», extolling the relative crimes against taste or leaps forward in creativity that the band has committed while making the transition to a whole new era.

 

As far as I am concerned, «ideologically» this new outburst of creative energy from the world's most ardent «don't-mess-with-my-fantasy-world» musical sect is as orthodox as orthodox can be. Nine more epic tunes, brimming with power and arrogance, each based on the already fami­liar artistic strengths of Kürsch and Olbrich, and each dealing with a fantasy theme (sometimes a thick mish-mash of fantasy themes, like the title track). Regarding the factor of speed, only three of the songs are relatively slow in their entirety: the largely acoustic ʽA Past And Future Secretʼ is more «epic folk» than metal altogether, and ʽBright Eyesʼ, along with the grand finale of ʽAnd The Story Endsʼ, could not technically be ascribed to the «speed metal» bin, unless you were cheating and playing them at 78 rpm. The rest, while they do accumulate stylistic «ruffles» that make them more palatable for the «artsy-minded» people, are quite conservative in essence.

 

If there is any serious change at all, it is to be sought in the melodic structures: even the speedier parts are getting more complex, like the brilliant introduction to ʽBorn In A Mourning Hallʼ that preserves the tempo, but replaces the usual «amelodic» chugga-chugga with a series of riffs that, you know, play actual notes and stuff. I am not quite sure that this represents compositional genius — despite increased complexity, the individual melodies are not specifically evocative — but at least it represents hard work, which, when combined with an energetic punch and sincerity of execution, should be respected.

 

Perhaps it is also to be sought out in increased ambitions. The title track may have been inten­tionally conceived to be the «ultimate» Blind Guardian visit card — lyrically, it summarizes just about every single one of the band numerous fetishes, and offers an explicit justification for their brand of escapism: "Come follow me to wonderland / And see the tale that never ends... But still I know / There is another world... / I'll break down the walls around my heart / Imaginations from the other side" — an optimistic-nostalgic ode to the «never grow up» mindset. It's like a slightly delayed explanation that they feel they owe the world — delivered to the sounds of one of their most bombastic arrangements up to date. Swirling, swooshing, wailing spirits, church bells, gothic keyboards, monstrous metal riff, operatic vocals with ghostly answers — way too heavy, one could remark, for a song whose primary points of reference are Peter Pan, Alice in Wonder­land, and the Wizard of Oz, but then, nobody said childhood was supposed to be a rose garden, and all these books have their classic moments of brutality.

 

Another super-bombastic tune is ʽThe Script For My Requiemʼ, where grandiosity begins already with the title and never lets go — "Returning of the miracles / It's my own requiem" is even more solemn than the chorus of ʽQuest For Tanelornʼ, and there is even a quick subtle quotation from Jesus Christ Superstar ("crucify, crucify!") that further raises the stakes. In most people's hands, the song would be totally laughable, but Blind Guardian are the AC/DC of power metal — if you cannot override the clichés of this genre, you can at least ride them faster, louder, and brassier than everybody else in the market, which in itself can be considered overriding.

 

The rest of the songs, as usual, are too stylistically monotonous to deserve extensive comment, so, instead of that, I will just remark that, on an interesting note, the album was produced by Flem­ming Rasmussen, the co-producer on several of Metallica's classic records of the Eighties — not that Imaginations sounds any more like Metallica than any other Blind Guardian record, but it is curious that the increase in complexity does somewhat parallel Metallica's development from bare-bones thrash to «art-metal». I am not necessarily overjoyed by this, because at a certain level, once you start putting too much «intellect» into heavy metal music, you begin killing off its vitality (Black Sabbath is and will always be the ultimate benchmark for me), but, fortunately for Kürsch and company, they are expanding their musical horizons without sacrificing their inner child — indeed, they glorify their inner child, as is obvious from the title track — and this com­bination of increased compositional smartness with endearing, seemingly honest kiddie silliness works well for Imaginations. Respectfully, a thumbs up.

 

THE FORGOTTEN TALES (1996)

 

1) Mr. Sandman; 2) Surfin' USA; 3) Bright Eyes; 4) Lord Of The Rings; 5) The Wizard; 6) Spread Your Wings; 7) Mordred's Song; 8) Black Chamber; 9) The Bard's Song (live); 10) Barbara Ann/Long Tall Sally; 11) A Past And Future Secret; 12) To France; 13) Theatre Of Pain; 14*) Hallelujah; 15*) Beyond The Realms Of Death; 16*) Don't Talk To Strangers.

 

This is a «stop-gap» album that, by all accounts, only deserves a brief mention in passing. As the band were too busy touring, or resting, or preparing for a properly epic follow-up to Imagina­tions (check all pertinent options), they put out this odds-and-sods compilation, about half of which is devoted to acoustic / orchestral rearrangements of their old material, and the other half consists of cover versions of songs by other artists (as far as I understand, collected from different recording sessions and not necessarily recorded specially for this album). Additionally, there is a live performance of ʽThe Bardʼ, the band's signature-campfire-song, on which Hansi very quickly transfers matters into the hands (throats) of the audience. A campfire is a campfire, after all.

 

There is hardly anything to say about these rearrangements — as a rule, they uncover no hidden depth to the songs, and the bombastic instrumental re-write of ʽTheatre Of Painʼ simply goes to show that Blind Guardian music without the quintessential Blind Guardian elements (heavy guitars and powerhouse vocals) is just boring, like a forgettable soundtrack to one of the Heroes Of Might And Magic installations. Besides, wasn't ʽLord Of The Ringsʼ acoustic (and not very good) in the first place? I think I'd rather prefer a re-arrangement of ʽMajestyʼ with didgeridoo and bagpipes as the sole instruments. Preferably preserving the original tempo.

 

As for the covers, they display a staggering level of variety — ranging from blatantly «joke» material to some really, really good tributes to some bizarre, but not utterly nonsensical, choices. ʽSurfin' USAʼ and a medley of ʽBarbara Annʼ with ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ clearly fall in the «joke» category (see what happens when you replace surf guitar with power metal guitar), although ʽMr. Sandmanʼ takes first prize in this department — starting out in full-fledged music hall mode, then gradually picking up steam and finally grinding it out, vocal-wise and guitar-wise, as it rushes towards the madhouse conclusion. Mike Oldfield's ʽTo Franceʼ is overproduced, and the vocals peek out from under the dense mix in a manner that pretty much kills the song (whose major hook had been provided by the clear ring of Maggie Reilly's vocal cords). ʽThe Wizardʼ, unfor­tunately, is the Uriah Heep song, not the Black Sabbath one, but you probably already guessed that (Sabbath are way too «earthy» and «grounded» for Blind Guardian to latch on to them pro­perly, unless we are talking the Dio years).

 

The single best choice is unquestionably the cover of Queen's ʽSpread Your Wingsʼ, but I have already talked about it (as a bonus track) in one of the previous reviews, so no need repeating that. Actually, Forgotten Tales has some bonus tracks, too, of which ʽHallelujahʼ pales next to the Deep Purple version: much as I like Kürsch, he is not capable of giving it the soulful, heart­breaking vibe that Ian Gillan was so capable of in his «Jesus Christ years». Much better is the cover of Dio's ʽDon't Talk To Strangersʼ, but, again, here you will have to decide according to your own preferences: Kürsch belongs to the same class of singers as Ronnie, yet to my ears, Ronnie still appears as the more versatile and «emotionally dynamic» of the two, even if he does not eat nearly as much iron as Hansi for breakfast.

 

All said, unless you are a major adept, do not pay attention to the pretty album cover, so similar to all the other pretty album covers by Blind Guardian, and do pay attention to the title: there is an actual reason to why these particular «tales» are «forgotten». And given that some of these songs are now available as bonus tracks to other releases, this decreases the incentive for owning the record separately to an even further degree. Harmless fun, though, on the whole.

 

NIGHTFALL IN MIDDLE-EARTH (1998)

 

1) War Of Wrath; 2) Into The Storm; 3) Lammoth; 4) Nightfall; 5) The Minstrel; 6) The Curse Of Feanor; 7) Cap­tured; 8) Blood Tears; 9) Mirror Mirror; 10) Face The Truth; 11) Noldor; 12) Battle Of Sudden Flame; 13) Time Stands Still; 14) The Dark Elf; 15) Thorn; 16) The Eldar; 17) Nom The Wise; 18) When Sorrow Sang; 19) Out On The Water; 20) The Steadfast; 21) A Dark Passage; 22) Final Chapter (Thus Ends...); 23) Harvest Of Sorrow.

 

Okay, brace yourself: a concept album based on nothing less than a complete (well, actually, nearly complete) version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion — as the chief protectors of the Professor's legacy, Blind Guardian accept nothing less than completeness and perfection. You can look at this as a soundtrack to an imaginary movie, or the score to a non-existent musical, but whatever it is, not since the days of Bo Hansson and his Music Inspired By The Lord Of The Rings has the Professor received such a royal treatment — and this one is almost twice as long as Bo's work, and it isn't merely inspired by the novel, it is a musical re-telling of the novel.

 

Two British actors were hired to provide the (mercifully brief) narration parts, including actual bits of impersonation of the novel's most colorful hero (Morgoth, of course, for whom Blind Guardian have a special predilection). These are packed into brief spoken links, usually accom­panied with movie-like sound effects, introducing the various songs or simply separating them, and all the songs are highly specific, relating to different events over the course of the First Age, from Morgoth's flight with the Silmarils and right down to the utter defeat of the forces of good by the forces of evil (although, funny enough, all of this is framed by the introductory track as Morgoth reminiscing of his history while standing on the verge of final defeat).

 

Fans of Blind Guardian usually stand divided over the record, which is no surprise — there are those who love these fanatical Germans for their obsession with fantasy worlds, and then there are those who just love them for all the monster riffs and virtuoso solos and general blood-pum­ping skills. For that second group, Nightfall will be a disappointment: not only does all the spoken material detract from the music, but the music itself is much less «heavy» than it used to be, now placing at least as much emphasis on stately choral harmonies and ornate mock-classical synthesizer flourishes as on heavy guitar phrasing and «brutal» vocal parts. As a symbol of this transition, Kürsch even relinquishes his position as regular bass player for the band: Oliver Holz­warth, while not officially a regular new member of Blind Guardian, joins as his regular session replacement both for studio recordings and live performances.

 

Personally, I am not quite sure what to think. To be sure, the whole experience smells of cheese, but so does the band in general, and is it even at all possible to make a rock opera based on The Silmarillion that would smell of something else? It would most likely take somebody of a Wag­nerian caliber to achieve the task, and even then it is one thing to put your own personal stamp on a thousand year old mythological tradition, and quite another one to put it on a «simulacre», no matter how high quality. What really bugs me, though, is that if we actually want to put Tolkien to music, Nightfall In Middle-Earth is very far from my personal ideal vision of it. I am not at all sure what that vision is, but it definitely is not Blind Guardian vision.

 

First and foremost, Blind Guardian are really a power metal band. They are at their best when audializing battle scenes — violence, brutality, clashing swords, stampeding Oliphaunts, what­ever. Consequently, the best realized tracks here are the militaristic ones: ʽTime Stands Still (At The Iron Hill)ʼ, for instance, is a rousing, gripping epic that does convey the spirit of personal combat of an elf warrior against the Lord of Darkness pretty well. Even better is the track that begins it all: ʽInto The Stormʼ, starting the Silmarillion tale from the moment where the bad guys initiate their conquest of Beleriand, fleeing from the light into the dark — no special build-ups or atmospheric introductions, just a straightforward plunge into aggressive frenzy that could illus­trate everything that includes speed, fire, and devastation, from the flight of Morgoth and Ungoliant to the Four Horsemen.

 

On the other hand, as they get into more psychological details (ʽThe Curse Of Feanorʼ) or into lyrical matters (ʽWhen Sorrow Sangʼ), the limitations of Blind Guardian become obvious: once again, they use exactly the same approach for everything. Eventually, you just lose sense of what is going on — where are the good guys and the bad guys (Kürsch uses pretty much the same vocal style for the Dark Lord Morgoth and the Elven Lord Fëanor, and no, this is not due to an artistic decision to blur the lines between good and evil, which would agree with Tolkien's own storyline, but simply due to the singer's limitations), where are the battles and the peaceful inter­ludes, where are the triumphs and the sufferings. Everything is neutralized.

 

And this is where the complaints of the «metal camp» fans can be heard, too: the music generally loses much of its «kick-ass» quality, without necessarily compensating for this from the «beauty» angle, because the band is not very good at incorporating medieval folk motives and exquisite baroque synthesizer passages. Their chief musical talent had always been Olbrich, and now he is almost like a bit player in a symphonic ocean, and not a terrifically inspiring at that. Even within a polyphonic production, you'd like to hear individual voices, but there is not a lot of them here. Try and go straight for ʽThe Eldarʼ, one of the few songs on the album to feature a different approach — a mournful piano ballad (with guest star Michael Schüren at the grand piano), where Hansi goes from soft, tragic falsetto to raging scream and back. If the song shakes you to the core, count yourself an altogether well-rounded, properly initiated Blind Guardian fan; but to me, there is too much melodrama, too little in the way of truly interesting melody.

 

All said, though, ambition alone... no, well, ambition alone probably wouldn't cut it, but ambition coupled with Blind Guardian's pedigree, experience, and professionalism make Nightfall In Middle-Earth a curious artefact. Curious success? Curious failure? That is up to you to decide, but my current opinion — as a Tolkien soundtrack, this is a failure, but as a Tolkien-inspired self-standing musical fantasy, it definitely has its moments. At the very least, as is the standard case for Blind Guardian, nearly each track has its own catchy chorus, so let that be one final argument for a stable thumbs up. I sure wish they'd hire some other guy to impersonate Morgoth, though. Wasn't Christopher Lee a more-than-obvious choice? Or does he dislike Blind Guardian because they're Krauts or something?

 

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (2002)

 

1) Precious Jerusalem; 2) Battlefield; 3) Under The Ice; 4) Sadly Sings Destiny; 5) The Maiden And The Minstrel Knight; 6) Wait For An Answer; 7) The Soulforged; 8) Age Of False Innocence; 9) Punishment Divine; 10) And Then There Was Silence.

 

Come to think of it, every night with Blind Guardian is like a night at the opera, isn't it? With all that wealth of grand fantasy spectacles they had accumulated by the end of the millennium, the collective repertoire could very well lay claim to its own frickin' Bayreuth Festival. And there is little use in reminding yourself of all the previous people who had used that title, either, be it Queen or the Marx Brothers, because there is no connection whatsoever other than the very idea of a «grand» effect upon the listeners. And if you thought that, perhaps, the Marx Brothers asso­ciation suggests that Blind Guardian have finally begun to take themselves with a grain of salt and a modicum of self-irony — well, Judas Priest have a classic rock recommendation for you.

 

Although there is no such serious conceptual unity this time as there was on Nightfall In Middle-Earth, for the most part, the album still revolves around a set topical field — mythology, both pagan and Christian, and, to a lesser extent, history, rather than fantasy (only ʽWait For An An­swerʼ, based on Kürsch's own fictional tale, and ʽThe Soulforgedʼ, based on Dragonlance, con­stitute exceptions). If anything, this helps justify the band's position in preserving the grand-epic style of Nightfall — once again, the emphasis is squarely put on «power» and «pomp» rather than heaviness. When it's all over for the first time, what you are going to remember is not the metal riffs, but the huger-than-life choruses, most of which explicitly remind you of the fact that «chorus» and «choir» are originally the same word after all.

 

Here is a funny trivia tidbit that is not so much typical of the record as symbolic: the very first track, ʽPrecious Jerusalemʼ (as far as I know, marking the first appearance of JC himself as the protagonist of a Blind Guardian fantasy), contains a transparent musical reference to Jesus Christ Superstar — the "risin' up from the heart of the desert, risin' up for Jerusalem" passage brings to mind both the "when do we ride into Jerusalem?" and "roll on up Jerusalem" melodic phrasings from the Andrew Lloyd Webber opera, even if the rest of the song has nothing to do with Sir Andrew, being instead cast in the usual power metal mold. Still, this obvious link with the old art of «rock opera» is quite telling. No wonder the band's original drummer, Thomas Stauch, quit after the album was completed — even within the Blind Guardian camp, not every­body was satisfied with the way things were turning out.

 

Still, the balance between keyboards, orchestrations, and choral vocals, on one hand, and heavy riffs and blazing electric guitar solos, on the other, seems quite intelligently handled to me. There are a couple «power ballads» here, like ʽThe Maiden And The Minstrel Knightʼ (how come Blackmore's Night have not covered that one yet?), where the balance predictably tilts towards the «light» instrumentation, but this is justifiable — a ballad is a ballad, after all — and besides, the song has the most memorable chorus on the entire album. In anybody else's hands, the mock-Wagnerian solemnity of the choral "will you still wait for me, will you still cry for me" and Hansi's throat-ripping retort of "come and take my haaaaaand!" would just look ridiculous, but these guys now have such a long history of «going all the way to eleven» that it is hard not to get overwhelmed by the results. (Just play 'em real loud, or else you violate the rules of the game).

 

On the other hand, songs like ʽUnder The Iceʼ, ʽSadly Sings Destinyʼ, ʽThe Soulforgedʼ, and some others formally preserve the core of the Blind Guardian sound. There is an obligatory chugga-chugga thrashing riff, and a thick, melodic, sometimes multi-tracked, often wah-wah-enhanced lead guitar part that are loud enough in the mix so as not to allow themselves to be drowned out in an ocean of keyboards, strings, or choral vocals. And it's not as if the drummer had anything to complain about on his behalf — the tempos are consistently fast and give him all the usual conditions to exercise the traditional sledgehammering style.

 

The basic problem is the usual one — monotony. After a short while, as the hilarious quotation from JCS fades into history, the songs inevitably begin blending and melding with each other, and this time around, there are no storytelling links to keep them apart. In small doses, the album is perfectly palatable, but you'd really have to be an iron man to sit through this «night at the opera» in one go and get sixty-seven minute of incessant kicks out of it. (Predicting the possible question, yes, this «opera» is far more melodically monotonous and emotionally single-routed than any good classical opera — among other things, Blind Guardian are totally unfamiliar with the principle of crescendo, which they replace with the principle of «and now... switch on THE POWER!!!!!»).

 

The worst is saved for last: a fourteen-minute epic (ʽAnd Then There Was Si­lenceʼ) about the fate of Cassandra, which somehow feels longer than the entire first act of Ber­lioz's Les Troyens — for all of its numerous melodic changes, nothing truly interesting ever happens throughout the song, and I have no idea whatsoever why it needed to be 14 minutes long in the first place. And instead of a proper bang, it ends in... a fadeout, with a corny synthesizer solo striving for orchestral gran­deur? What an embarrassment, really. Without this track, A Night At The Opera could have been poised for at least a minor thumbs up, keeping in mind the unabated energy levels and the cleverness of the instrumental mix and the sheer overwhelming strength of Hansi's vocals. With this track, A Night At The Opera moves dangerously close to a failed experiment — an attempt to outdo themselves in the «grandeur» department without being able to come up with any new substantial trick to successfully complete that attempt.

 

LIVE (2003)

 

1) War Of Wrath; 2) Into The Storm; 3) Welcome To Dying; 4) Nightfall; 5) The Script For My Requiem; 6) Harvest Of Sorrow; 7) The Soulforged; 8) Valhalla; 9) Majesty; 10) Mordred's Song; 11) Born In A Mourning Hall; 12) Under The Ice; 13) Bright Eyes; 14) Punishment Divine; 15) The Bard's Song; 16) Imaginations From The Other Side; 17) Lost In The Twilight Hall; 18) A Past And Future Secret; 19) Time Stands Still; 20) Journey Through The Dark; 21) Lord Of The Rings; 22) Mirror Mirror.

 

Tokyo Tales were clearly not enough. Released way back when (at a time when Blind Guardian were still more of a «metal» band than the resplendent kings of musical fantasy), clocking in at a measly 72 minutes, long out of print (in fact, even its original distribution was mostly limited to Japan itself and the band's native Germany)... all in all, no way to reflect the glorious legacy of the most majestic minstrels of Middle-Earth.

 

So, I guess we all saw this one coming: a mega-arch-sprawling (over 130 minutes of sound!), hyper-poly-bombastic double live album that summarizes all of Blind Guardian's best and worst sides. Actually, since Blind Guardian only really have one side, this makes it their best and worst at the same time — and there is no need to tell you that all of these performances are fairly pre­dic­table, and that the album is mainly for the fans. In fact, it is very much for the fans: in its ar­dor to loyally represent the atmosphere at a Blind Guardian, a large chunk of the content (I'd say, not less than 15-20 minutes out of 130) consists of nothing but audience noises — applause, cheering, chanting, olé-olé-ing, and singing along. Yes, you too will be impressed by the level of adoration these guys hold for Blind Guardian when you will hear them loudly echoing every single word of the Morgoth/Sauron dialog that opens the show over loudspeakers (ʽWar Of Wrathʼ) — "I RE­LEASE THEE, GO! MY SERVANT YOU'LL BE FOR ALL TIME!" Quite staggering publicity for The Silmarillion, in fact.

 

Naturally, there is also a lot of fan interaction, conducted by Hansi in different languages, since the album was recorded all over the place (Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan again, etc.), which ex­plains why he keeps confusingly switching from Italian to English and then to German for the last big chunk of the show. Other than that, the tracks are tacked together quite coherently — the al­bum does not have a particularly disjointed feel, as some other hastily cobbled together live re­cords sometimes have — but this coherence may, of course, be also explained by the simple fact that... shh... come closer... all the songs sound the same, don't they?

 

If you feel bad about orchestration on Blind Guardian studio records, you are in for a pleasant treat: other than Michael Schüren on keyboards, the band is on too limited a budget to drag a whole orchestra around the world, which forces them to concentrate more on performing their songs as tight, compact metal anthems. Additionally, back-to-back comparison shows that, in a live setting, Olbrich consistently chooses more shrill, sharp, aggressive lead guitar tones than the comparatively smoother, glossier equivalents in the studio. So I do admit that the sound is, indeed, more «raw» on the stage: for old-school fans who had pretty much given up on Blind Guardian for their betrayal of «metal roots», this can be a stimulating boost to check out the record.

 

Setlist-wise, only the band's first two albums are side-stepped (with the usual exception of setlist mainstays ʽMajestyʼ and ʽValhallaʼ, respectively) — everything else is represented quite demo­cratically, with no special emphasis on the then-currently-promoted Night At The Opera (for­tunately for us all, since I am still not convinced, even with all the extra rawness, that there is anything worth remembering about ʽPunishment Divineʼ). Of course, they could have easily crammed in two or three extra highlights at the expense of some lengthy periods of crowd noise, but it is quite likely that they included their entire setlist for the tour anyway.

 

Hansi, now free from his bass-playing duties (Oliver Holzwarth covers those, just as he now does in the studio), is in perfect vocal form throughout, although I would not say that being liberated from the extra weight of bass guitar has significantly improved his ability to stay on key or any­thing — perhaps he had simply decided that proper impersonations of Morgoth, Mordred, and More Morbid Morons come off better when the impersonator is free from the obligation to fiddle about with a musical instrument. (Then again, what kind of an instrument would the real Morgoth have played if he had to choose? Bass guitar seems like the obvious answer). Olbrich, as I said, shines throughout, free to flash his instrument high in the mix whenever he gets the chance, and the rhythm section is expectably impeccable.

 

All this is enough to hand out a surefire thumbs up rating, despite a few weak songs and these irritatingly long periods of having to listen to all them fans chant "Guar-dian! Guar-dian! Guar-dian!", as if they were a bunch of hungry prison inmates or something. But even that irritation, I guess, is in the line of duty when it comes to «metal royalty» like Blind Guardian.

 

A TWIST IN THE MYTH (2006)

 

1) This Will Never End; 2) Otherland; 3) Turn The Page; 4) Fly; 5) Carry The Blessed Home; 6) Another Stranger Me; 7) Straight Through The Mirror; 8) Lionheart; 9) Skalds & Shadows; 10) The Edge; 11) The New Order.

 

Damn those misleading, conflicting titles. Throughout the entire duration of the album, I was waiting and waiting for a «twist» — instead, I should have gotten the authentic clue from the title of the first song, ʽThis Will Never Endʼ. A Twist In The Myth is basically just A Night At The Opera, Vol. 2, and considering how monotonous the first installation was, you'd have to be in­curably idealistic to expect any major shifts from the second. If anything, it is even smoother and less involving: producer Charlie Bauerfeind, despite a strong reputation (he had been working with the band since Nightfall, and he was also responsible for producing all of Angra's best al­bums), «muffles» and overcompresses the sound more and more with each next record — not that «raw» production would help a lot in making these songs more memorable.

 

I'd say that, by this time, the most useful thing about Blind Guardian albums is the insane amount of unpredictable influences on Hansi's metallic mind — you can pretty much use them as a per­sonal guide into the complex twisted world of fantasy. For instance, the first track here was writ­ten courtesy of Walter Moers' novel A Wild Ride Through The Night, in which the author creates a mythological biography for Gustave Doré as a young boy whose task is to defy Death itself: I had no idea that anything of the sort existed, and now my knowledge is enriched by the expe­rience (not that I'm running to my local library or anything), and, well, I suppose that the song's maniacal tempo and Hansi's banshee screaming on some of the verses are in accordance with the «young hero vs. Death» motive, even if the song itself has nothing in the way of a properly memorable memory (just a generic chugga-chugga thrash theme for a basic pattern).

 

ʽFlyʼ refers to Peter Pan and Finding Neverland — not the first reference to the subject in Blind Guardian history, but the most direct one; the song's chorus is one of the album's minor highlights (there is something about Hansi's "I'll teach you how to fly then..." that, for a brief second, tricks me into thinking of him in PeterPanish terms indeed), although the main melody has as much to do with Neverland as a Wall Street contract, not to mention the silly dinky keyboards that chee­sify the proceedings even further. Why do they have to employ these stupid synthesizer paterns over and over again? Why not harps, or mandolins, or didgeridoos?.. Are they on such a tight budget, or do they mean that they really enjoy those sounds?

 

Other than an occasionally slowed down anthem with Celtic motives and bagpipes (ʽCarry The Blessed Homeʼ), or a generic medievalistic acoustic ballad (ʽSkalds & Shadowsʼ), the songs are so much interchangeable throughout that continuing this review is as painful as it is senseless. I give the record a certified thumbs down of the «eaten up by their own formula» variety, and invite you to make your own musical analysis if fantasy-based power metal is your personal cup of tea and you are prone to sudden fits of humming ʽOtherlandʼ in the shower. Myself, I'd not re­fuse a little bit of actual «progress», otherwise what incentive is there for writing album reviews in the first place?

 

AT THE EDGE OF TIME (2010)

 

1) Sacred Worlds; 2) Tanelorn; 3) Road Of No Release; 4) Ride Into Obsession; 5) Curse My Name; 6) Valkyries; 7) Control The Divine; 8) War Of The Thrones; 9) A Voice In The Dark; 10) Wheel Of Time.

 

I have little personal interest in playing Sacred 2: Fallen Angel (RPGs have never been a favorite genre of mine — adventure games were always more like it), but I guess we have to thank its de­signers all the same for giving a much needed shot in the arm to Blind Guardian. The one track they recorded for it, ʽSacred Worldsʼ, is arguably their best composition in years, if not in a whole decade or so: not just an «epic» track (all of their tracks are epic), but a full-blown power monster, replete with complex and highly dynamic orchestration — provided, for once, by a real orchestra. And it frickin' works!

 

First, the strings and horns prepare the setting in a mock-mixture of quasi-Strauss and quasi-Shostakovich, then the band gradually begins to take over with the rhythm section and the metal chugga-chugga, and then they kind of sort it out with the orchestra over the next seven minutes, in perfect balance with each other. It does not have a perfect particu­lar hook or an arch-memorable theme, but that is not necessary — all you have to do is admire how the orchestra meshes with the band. Without the orchestra, the song could have been as boring as anything on Twist In The Myth, and without the band, the orchestral parts would have been just passable imitations of the greats, but together, they truly raise the bar on epicness, and ʽSacred Worldsʼ should rank up there along with Therion as far as «symphonic metal» is concerned (and is cer­tainly better than anything Nightwish ever did).

 

Alas, the incentive was not strong enough (or, perhaps more likely, the budget was not large enough) to retain the orchestra for the entire album — it only comes back one more time to close off the album with ʽWheel Of Timeʼ, this time with a decisively Eastern twist to it (there is a lengthy instrumental passage in the middle to which you could belly-dance if you got the sudden urge), and again, quite interesting composition-wise. In between these two lengthy mini-suites, though, what you get is standard Blind Guardian fare — eight more power stompers, very little about which can be described as «innovative» in any sense of the word.

 

I do have to admit that some of them feel a bit «stronger» — for instance, even though ʽTanelornʼ is already their second song about Tanelorn, its chugging riff produces a more efficient brain­shaking wave than anything on the previous album, and the song's coda, with a mad over-the-cliff rush to the final chord, kicks ass quite explicitly. But on the other hand, I also have a nagging sus­picion that it is simply the electrification caused by ʽSacred Worldsʼ that gets inductively exten­ded onto several following tracks that gets me so excited. Who knows?

 

On a different note, one curious moment of confusion arrives when you realize that the main riff of ʽControl The Divineʼ is taken, almost note-for-note, from the Animals' classic version of ʽDon't Let Me Be Misunderstoodʼ — coincidence? subconscious adaptation? intentional rip-off? it's not as if they were running out of their own riffs, because they had been masters of unmemo­rable riffs for quite a while already, it would have been no problem to supply a bunch more. Then again, they had always been big fans of «classic rock», from the Beach Boys to Queen, so adapting a bit of the old gold is in the line of duty, and it's probably better than covering the song anyway (for a pretty cheesy metal cover, check out Gary Moore's version).

 

In any case, the opening and closing tracks alone make this whole experience such an undeniable improvement on Twist that the album has to be supported with a thumbs up, also because in all other respects it does not let you down, either — power, volume, monster riffage, and classic Hansi vocals that show no signs of age-based deterioration whatsoever. One might, of course, find the idea of «orchestrated Blind Guardian» too insulting for their brawny metallic power, but that power had long since been dissipated anyway, and if you ask me, the orchestra here helps them consolidate the power once again, rather than wipe away the last traces of it. Besides, it does not happen too often when an orchestra and a rock band manage to understand each other so perfectly (remember Deep Purple?), so count me really happy on this one.

 

BEYOND THE RED MIRROR (2015)

 

1) The Ninth Wave; 2) Twilight Of The Gods; 3) Prophecies; 4) At The Edge Of Time; 5) Ashes Of Eternity; 6) The Holy Grail; 7) The Throne; 8) Sacred Mind; 9) Miracle Machine; 10) Grand Parade.

 

Now look, this isn't even funny any more. Not only have they already used the word «beyond» in at least one of their album titles and the word «mirror» in at least several of their songs ("mirror mirror on the wall..."), but I think that every word and idiomatic combination in these titles, if not in the entire lyrics, had already been commissioned by our fantasy friends sometime in the past. Unsurprisingly, pretty much the same can be said about the music. And it took them, what, a whole five years? To come up with an album that, maybe more than anything they did in their career, sounds like a barely noticeable rearrangement of the same jigsaw puzzle?..

 

At the very, very least, they could have followed up on the success of ʽSacred Worldsʼ and ʽWheel Of Timeʼ, two tracks where the mix of guitar metal and orchestration seemed to open up a whole new world of possibilities to explore and exploit. But with Beyond The Red Mirror, it's as if those two songs were never written — as if they admitted to themselves that this was a failed experiment. What happened? Did the money run out? No, it did not, because there is an orchestra here — in fact, there are two: Hungarian Studio Orchestra Budapest and FILMHarmonic Orches­tra Prague (the latter is the same one that was used for ʽSacred Worldsʼ). Did they commission research on fanboard opinions, and come to the conclusion that use of the orchestra was «lame» and that it «sissified» their sound or something?

 

I have no idea, but the fact is, that we are generally back to square here: vocals, guitars, key­boards, pound pound pound, stern martial chorus of Elven warriors who prefer their battles over their ladies, everything mega-powerful, ultra-melodic, algorithmically predictable, and immedi­ately forgettable. If there is at least a shadow of some new idea here, it is the use of a baroque choir on the introduction to ʽThe Ninth Waveʼ — I think that previously, all of the harmonies were done by the band members themselves, but here they went for a fuller approach. Not that the use of such choirs in metal should come as a surprise, either, and with the song itself so unremar­kable on the whole, the stern religious harmonies hardly add any awesomeness.

 

According to what my ears tell me, this album does not contain a single memorable riff or a single truly impressive vocal chorus. The reasons for this could be technical: for instance, when they finally get to ʽGrand Paradeʼ, obviously intended as a grand finale, the chorus is completely ruined by flat production where the vocals, the orches­tration, and the choir merge together in a muffled, sloppy mush that feels completely mechanical and soulless, neither tragic nor joyful nor endowed with any emotion, just big-big-big. So, perhaps, bad production and dynamic overcom­pression are to blame. But this hardly settles things: even without the poor production, this is a sleepwalker's album, riding along on years and decades of accumulated experience and professio­nalism and not a drop of actual inspiration.

 

But then, who cares? I have seen so many rave re­views by newly fascinated fans that it is quite clear — they can remake the same record fifty more times and still not worry about their not-particularly-demanding fanbase. And I really al­most literally mean «remake the same record»: this here regurgitation is worse than yer basic AC/DC, because at least with the Young brothers, it is the riffs that count, and every time they set out to make a new album, they know they have to present some new «skeletal structures» (and if there are too many recycled riffs on an AC/DC album, it is by definition an unsatisfactory AC/DC album) — whereas with these Blind Guardian records, the denseness of the arrangements, the orchestrations, Hansi's mammoth vocals all mask the «skeletal structure» and make it look insignificant next to the overall style of the presentation. And that style never changes. And these are the rules of the game, I know, but I also know that not every metal band is necessarily supposed to abide by these rules, and if you do not know how to bend them or at least how to make them serve a good purpose, too bad. Thumbs down.

 

 

BLONDIE

BLONDIE (1976)

 

1) X Offender; 2) Little Girl Lies; 3) In The Flesh; 4) Look Good In Blue; 5) In The Sun; 6) A Shark In Jets Clothing; 7) Man Overboard; 8) Rip Her To Shreds; 9) Rifle Range; 10) Kung Fu Girls; 11) The Attack Of The Giant Ants; 12*) Out In The Streets; 13*) The Thin Line; 14*) Platinum Blonde.

 

Like the Renaissance began out of a fervent drive to return to the «healthy» values of Antiquity, rather than a conscious desire to create something «innovative» and «revolutionary», so did New Wave originally grow out of a desire to return to the «innocent» values of the early rock era, with a new teenage generation more influenced by Buddy Holly, pre-Pet Sounds Beach Boys, the Shadows, and Phil Spector than by Hendrix or Pink Floyd. If that ain't all of the story, it is at least an important component of the story, and I don't think any other record of the early New Wave period illustrates this any better than the self-titled debut by Blondie.

 

The songs, mostly written by guitar player Chris Stein, keyboardist Jimmy Destri, and Our Lady Deborah Harry in the flesh, were certainly no great shakes, composition-wise. For the most part, they just show how omnivorous these guys were when it came to late 1950s / early 1960s pop culture: Motown, doo-wop, light pop-rock, tango, rumba, you name it — curiously, the one thing that is nearly missing in this master scheme is «gritty» rockabilly, or anything, in fact, that would make their debut album sound «punkish». The melodies are catchy enough, but overtly derivative and, more often than not, a little «undercooked»: in fact, the entire band sounds almost defiantly, do-it-yourselfishly amateurish — Phil Spector would probably have fired them on the spot, or at least would have had to resort to one of his figurative bullwhips as a sanitary measure.

 

However, this is one of those cases where «derivative melodies» are totally redeemed with the elusive, but real «atmospheric» component. First and foremost, there's Debbie — one of the most fascinating pop characters of the epoch. Not having much of a vocal range or any particularly im­pressive singing technique, she compensates for this by an amazing ability to «get into character», and on almost each and every one of these short tunes, she plays a slightly different, and always convin­cing, type. Whether seducing a police officer in ʽX Offenderʼ, viciously putting down an image competitor in ʽRip Her To Shredsʼ, enjoying life's simple pleasures ʽIn The Sunʼ, offering sexual consolation to her lover in ʽLook Good In Blueʼ ("I could give you some head and shoulders to lie on" got to be one of the crudest double entendre's in the history of pop music, and it's all because of the word some!), or just stalking a potential lover ʽIn The Fleshʼ, she gives this kind of music exactly the kind of thing that its primary influences lacked — a realistic, believable protagonist. It's like an authentic corporate pop album without any corporate songwriting, if you know what I mean. It's all been there before, and yet it's never been quite like this.

 

Second, there is the band's uncanny ability to focus in on the essential. The production could use some gloss, the overdubs could be more inventive, the hooks could be better thought out, but this is, in a way, the same kind of exercise in absolute minimalism that Blondie's pals, the Ramones, were doing at the same time from their «punk» angle. As a rule, each song establishes a single, punchy, repetitive, obnoxious groove (the triumphant organ line in ʽX Offenderʼ, the stern tango rhythm of ʽLook Good In Blueʼ, the mock-doom-laden synthesizer riff of ʽA Shark In Jets Clothingʼ etc. etc.) and sticks to it through thick, thin, and whatever's in between — and it works, because all the songs are short enough to remain committed to one or two musical ideas and not bore the listener, particularly if Debbie Harry is staging her little life dramas across the surface. Later on, the band would hone both its songwriting skills and its instrumental chops (Clem Burke, for instance, is not yet immediately perceived as one of the top drummers of his generation), but at the cost of this obnoxiously disarming brutality.

 

Since all the songs, without a single exception, follow this relatively straightforward, but tremen­dously efficient recipé, I couldn't even talk about highlights and lowlights — although, given the record's stylistic diversity, you are almost certain to end up with your own individual personal favorites. My early ones were all cuddled together on Side A, the more sentimental and purry one: the tempting little guitar swirls on ʽLittle Girl Liesʼ, the doo-wop tenderness of ʽIn The Fleshʼ (mixed with the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing venom of its jealously competitive mid-section), the femme-fatale attitude of ʽLook Good In Blueʼ, with Debbie adding a bit of Marlene Dietrich to her personality, the not-a-care-in-the-world joyful rave-on of ʽIn The Sunʼ.

 

Next to these, Side B might originally pale in comparison, but later on you come to understand that this is where they provide an outlet for their weird side: ʽRifle Rangeʼ has a bit of a James Bond flair to it, with «mystery» organ and spooky backing harmonies and lyrics that hint at what, the protagonist being afraid of her homosexual urges? In the meantime, the last two songs seem both inspired by cheap movie thrills, including Asian martial arts (ʽKung Fu Girlsʼ) and crappy sci-fi horror (ʽAttack Of The Giant Antsʼ, utilizing a merry Rio-carnival-style melody to support pleasant lyrics like "then they eat your face, never leave a trace", and crossing it with a chaotic mid-section that lets you know what the roar of a giant ant might actually sound like).

 

However, where those two last songs are essentially novelty numbers, the mystery of ʽRifle Rangeʼ leaves a much more lasting impression, and so does ʽRip Her To Shredsʼ, which is, in a way, the quintessential Blondie song (along with ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ) — you can really tell there is nothing in the world that Debbie Harry likes quite as much as tearing up cartoonish figures, just by the way she mouthes out these words ("oh you know her, Miss Groupie Sup­reme"...). This is the only song on the album that seems more influenced by the Rolling Stones circa Aftermath and Between The Buttons than pre-1965 music, and its presence alone would have convinced me that this band really has got what it takes. Meet Debbie Harry, devil and angel bottled in the same package.

 

The remastered and expanded CD edition of the album adds some important bonus tracks — for historical reasons, it is useful to hear their cover of ʽOut In The Streetsʼ, confirming The Shangri-Las as one of their most essential spiritual mentors in the art of streetwise romancing, and ʽPla­tinum Blondeʼ, a very simple and straightforward pop tune that was the first song Harry ever wrote — straightforwardly presenting her ironic life philosophy and, funny enough, written and recorded in a «glam-rock» rather than in «New (Old) Wave» style (the demo is from 1975, when the band was just starting to find its footing). But they also confirm that, in those two years that chronologically separate Blondie's formation as a band in the heart of New York City from the release of their first LP, they'd already significantly evolved as songwriters — Blondie may be still a little raw and rough around the edges (and hey, some people would love it just for that), but it is completely self-assured, and can easily compete with their acclaimed classics from the next few years to come. Old ideas given a fresh new lease on life, funny, charming, and irreverent to the perfect degree — thumbs up without a hitch.

 

PLASTIC LETTERS (1977)

 

1) Fan Mail; 2) Denis; 3) Bermuda Triangle Blues (Flight 45); 4) Youth Nabbed As Sniper; 5) Contact In Red Square; 6) (I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear; 7) I'm On E; 8) I Didn't Have The Nerve To Say No; 9) Love At The Pier; 10) No Imagination; 11) Kidnapper; 12) Detroit 442; 13) Cautious Lip; 14*) Once I Had A Love; 15*) Scenery; 16*) Poets Problem; 17*) Detroit 442 (live).

 

Sometimes identified as a «transitional» album, wedged in between the sheer shockin' novelty of the self-titled debut and the stunning pop gloss of Parallel Lines, Blondie's sophomore effort tends to be a little overlooked these days, although back in 1977, it was a much bigger commer­cial success than Blondie, and landed the band their first big chart hit all over Europe. Ironically, that big hit was fairly atypical of the album — ʽDenisʼ was the band's cover of Randy & The Rain­bows' ʽDeniseʼ, a 1963 pop song with elements of doo-wop and Buddy Holly: Blondie more or less drop the whole doo-wop aspect and enforce the Buddy Holly aspect by freely quoting from ʽPeggy Sueʼ where the original had no such thing. The song's popularity, so it seems, was more of an American Graffitti-type of event, except it happened to be more popular in Europe than in Blondie's native US of A — go figure.

 

Anyway, even tossing ʽDenisʼ aside, had we wanted to, we could build up a very strong case for Plastic Letters as the «definitive» Blondie album, or maybe even the «best» one where these notions are correlated. Here they are still essentially a raw, untamed, unspoiled semi-underground outfit, hanging around NYC's «advanced» musical establishments, but showing an ever-increa­sing level of diversity and wildness of imagination. Arguably, some of the songs aren't quite as catchy as the ones on Blondie, but this is well compensated for by the band coming up with all sorts of «stories» and «situations» — lyrical and atmospheric subjects include mysteries, sus­pense, spy tales, catastrophes, femme fatales, and, of course, lots of character assassinations. At the same time they also stretch out and expand their musical boundaries: due largely to Jim Destri's complex keyboard palette, Plastic Letters, one way or another, covers the whole history of pop music from the late Fifties up to modern times. Doo-wop, rockabilly, Motown, and Mer­seybeat are here in symbiosis with modernistic punk, electronica, and even a bit of the «progres­sive» genre, and it all feels natural, because one thing that ties it all together is fun.

 

Well, that and Debbie Harry's hormonal activities, I guess — which take up a significant chunk of the album, ʽFan Mailʼ, ʽ(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dearʼ and ʽI Didn't Have The Nerve To Say Noʼ being the ultimate highlights. ʽPresenceʼ is the best realized of the three, and all the more fun when you understand that what they really do here is take that classic Byrds sound and turn it on its head, shedding the solemnity and stately beauty of Roger McGuinn's company and replacing it with sexy playfulness. Then again, I guess Debbie Harry could sing ʽBells Of Rhymneyʼ and make it sound exactly the same way — this is simply in their inborn nature, they can't help being playful. Even when the love thing goes drastically bad, they still deliver the news swiftly and merrily (ʽLove At The Pierʼ, not the catchiest song on the album, but who else but Blondie would finish the song with lines like "Now I go to beaches with my girlfriend / No more love splinters in my rear end"?).

 

But the Byrds are far from the only musical reference / influence on the album. ʽBermuda Triangle Bluesʼ, in contrast, takes it slow and careful, with a delicate, yet stern-and-solemn guitar weave pattern that might recall stuff in the «epic folk» vein, anything from Neil Young to Van Morrison. It feels unfinished — cutting out just as Destri really begins picking up the heat on that organ and you start thinking that maybe Chris Stein will want to join him in a furious jam or something, just to illustrate the atmospheric pressure over the Bermuda Triangle — yet I would say that a certain portion of the charm of Plastic Letters is that so many things on here sound unfinished: «we saw, we conquered, we moved on without completing». The incipient spy epic ʽContact In Red Squareʼ, for instance — had that song been conceived by such experimental jokers as 10cc (and it could), they would have turned it into a six- or seven-minute mini-opera; for Blondie, two minutes of that experiment (which, if you listen close enough, includes some elements of Russian folk dance muzak for comfort) is firmly enough.

 

As consistent as the album already is, it actually seems to be getting stronger and stronger as it moves towards its conclusion. The last three songs, in particular, sound nothing like each other, but I don't even know which of the three I like the better — ʽKidnapperʼ, with its «Debbie-as-Elvis» bit, references to Norman Bates and Ray Milland, blues-rock harmonica, and garage guitar solo; ʽDetroit 442ʼ, the heaviest song in the band's catalog (imagine what a ʽLet There Be Rockʼ-era AC/DC song would sound like with one of the Young brothers switching to piano instead of guitar!); or ʽCautious Lipʼ, the album's longest, most heavily nuanced tune that I have no idea whatsoever how to categorize — is it «electronic blues»? «psychedelic swamp-rock»? what sort of mind effect are they going for, anyway? All I know is that the song wouldn't have sounded out of place on Their Satanic Majesties' Request, you know, one of those records.

 

All in all, Plastic Letters is that one Blondie album I can never see myself getting tired of — there is simply so much going on here, in all directions, that every time you put it on, you will discover yet another splatter of creativity on your jacket. Smart, hip, playful, diverse, stimulating, not particularly profound, perhaps, but never as dumb as an unexperienced novice's first listen to ʽDenisʼ could make the band seem for a moment, either. Like all great artists growing up on «pop trash», Blondie could take that slice of culture and viciously send it up for all of its clichés, while at the same time declaring undying love for it — as expressed in the energy, inventiveness, and wild combinatorics of the music. Their pop hooks would only become genuine weapons of mass destruction with the next two albums, but they'd never again make a record as, well, witty as Plastic Letters, and for this it deserves a thumbs up rating every bit as enthusiastic.

 

PARALLEL LINES (1978)

 

1) Hanging On The Telephone; 2) One Way Or Another; 3) Picture This; 4) Fade Away And Radiate; 5) Pretty Baby; 6) I Know But I Don't Know; 7) 11:59; 8) Will Anything Happen?; 9) Sunday Girl; 10) Heart Of Glass; 11) I'm Gonna Love You Too; 12) Just Go Away; 13*) Once I Had A Love; 14*) Bang A Gong (Get It On) (live); 15*) I Know But I Don't Know (live); 16*) Hanging On The Telephone (live).

 

In which Blondie go professional, and now there is no turning back — no more «young and inno­cent days» for you once you've passed through the skilled hands of Mike Chapman, master of glossy candy packaging whose previous clients included Sweet, Smokie, Suzi Quatro, and various other acts, intensely groomed and pampered for stronger commercial effect (Sweet were actually the best of the lot — most of the rest were like 100% unlistenable). Blondie's manager convinced them to team up with Chapman, probably hoping that he would be able to hone their best pop instincts without making them completely reject their identity — and on the whole, he was right: Parallel Lines is very commercial, but it does not betray the general spirit that the band had concocted already with its very first songs.

 

Still, there may be such a thing as «too much perfection», and this complaint does apply to Parallel Lines, as the guys, the girl, and the glossy LA producer so ardently hunt for the ideal sound and forget about some of the band's legacy. Unlike Plastic Letters, Parallel Lines is all about the simple things — girl-and-guys relations, with gender roles accordingly reversed (Deb­bie as the hunter and guys as the game — hell, look at the album cover alone, where they all look like identical dorks and she looks ready to bitchslap you in a moment). That's all very well and suitable and Blondie-compatible, but I do miss all those stories of kung fu girls and giant ants and Red Square spies and youths nabbed as snipers. Where did they go? Well, it's not that easy to make hits out of such ideas, so let us turn to more basic hormonal stuff instead.

 

But how is it possible to resist temptation when the first two songs on the album are ʽHanging On The Telephoneʼ and ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ — one of the fiercest, most stunning guitar-pop attacks on the senses since the days when the Beatles roamed the planet? Debbie's a little funny in her attempt to be as sexually aggressive as possible, even going all the way to gather a little phlegm so as to roar out certain lines in both of these songs like some thunder-and-lightning black diva à la Tina Turner — but we can forgive her, because on the whole, she is being very convincing about it (or «about It», to be more accurate. Or «about Id», to be more Freudist). And then there is the music — the mad rush simulation of ʽTelephoneʼ, a perfect musical equivalent of blood boiling, and the unforgettable guitar riff of ʽOne Wayʼ, apparently written by the band's bass player, Nigel Harrison. ʽOne Wayʼ may, in fact, be one of the greatest blends of a typically hard rock riff with a typically pop structure — and, accordingly, the greatest emulation of sexual aggression paired with «pretty looks». Madonna got nothing on this, not even close — then again, who'd ever write a riff like that for the likes of Madonna?

 

The greatness never stops coming, because ʽPicture Thisʼ, while playing for the third time in a row on the same ideas (if she ain't gonna get this one, she'll get that one, or that one, or that one over there...), adopts a slightly different approach — a bit more lyrical, only gradually revving itself into overdrive, and it is every bit as effective, because sometimes subtlety works better than a straightforward assault. I've never really understood the temporal connection of the lines "I will give you my finest hour..." (future tense) "...the one I spent watching you shower" (past tense), but what sort of a regular male could resist Debbie Harry purring so tenderly reminiscing about watching him shower? Oh, yeah, well, uhm, the melody's quite catchy too, I guess.

 

All of which brings us a little bit fast-forward-style to ʽHeart Of Glassʼ, a song that actually began life as ʽOnce I Had A Loveʼ way back in 1975 or so, and which Chapman, from its early syncopated funky beginnings, developed to immaculate disco gloss. In retrospect, the song pretty much destroyed Blondie's reputation — most people who «don't care all that much» probably only associate the band with this song now, and while it certainly does capture some of the essence of Blondie fairly well, there is no way it could make you understand the whole story, or at least prevent you from mistakenly putting Blondie in the same boat with Donna Summer or any of those gazillion Eurodisco bands. But in the general context of all things Blondie-related, ʽHeart Of Glassʼ is, of course, still a masterpiece.

 

One word of warning to the neophyte, though — do avoid the relatively crappy 5:50 «disco version» with which the bandits at Chrysalis had replaced the original 3:45 cut on quite a few reprints, starting with a vinyl pressing in 1979 and ending with the remastered CD version, be­cause this is a clear case of «longer» not being «better»: all you get is a never-ending repetitive loop of na-na-na's at the end, instead of the fabulous fade-out coda of the original — fabulous, because it featured a set of Clem Burke's most inventive drumrolls in history, as if the man wanted to show us that it was, after all, possible to be an expressive, musically-talkative drummer within a disco setting. That bit is just not there in the longer version, which is a travesty. At least they do not use the bubbly keyboards to hide the guitar riff, which is in itself a masterful blend of funk and pop — and, again, a perfect match for Debbie's vocals in terms of atmosphere: cynical disillusionment at its most light-hearted and «superficially superficial» (but really quite deep).

 

These mega-monster pop hits tend to swallow up the rest of the record, which is almost a shame, but that's the way life goes — only gradually you come to realize that ʽPretty Babyʼ and ʽSunday Girlʼ may be a little lighter and wussier in style, but are really just as strong melodically as every­thing else; that ʽFade Away And Radiateʼ, with its slow tempo, psychedelic keyboards, enigmatic drum beat, acid guitar solos, and somnambulic vocals, is not the «black sheep», but rather the «white swan» of this record, a moody masterpiece that is every bit the worthy successor to ʽCautious Lipʼ; that the Buddy Holly cover injects young punk venom into the old, somewhat limp rockabilly vein; and that, ultimately, at the very end Debbie gets so sick and tired of all her male counterparts that the only natural conclusion for the album is to tell them all ʽJust Go Awayʼ — when you come to think of it, a hilariously antithetical conclusion to ʽHanging On The Tele­phoneʼ. You mean to say, all that effort wasn't really worth it? I'm speechless...

 

Comparatively, I cannot say that Parallel Lines is more «consistent» than the other Blondie albums — the one thing that it is, it is more consistently aggressive. Louder, prouder, more force­ful than the rest, with a small bunch of particularly flashy, irresistible highlights, a special chap­ter in Blondie history, but not necessarily «that one Blondie album you have to get if you only get one», because, well, just don't be stupid and get all of them. Major thumbs up, of course, and a major turning point, but Blondie existed before it and would go on to exist after it.

 

EAT TO THE BEAT (1979)

 

1) Dreaming; 2) The Hardest Part; 3) Union City Blue; 4) Shayla; 5) Eat To The Beat; 6) Accidents Never Happen; 7) Die Young Stay Pretty; 8) Slow Motion; 9) Atomic; 10) Sound-A-Sleep; 11) Victor; 12) Living In The Real World; 13*) Die Young Stay Pretty (live); 14*) Seven Rooms Of Gloom (live); 15*) Heroes (live); 16*) Ring Of Fire (live).

 

When Blondie entered the studio to record Parallel Lines, they were a bunch of quirky, unpre­dictable proto-hipsters with relatively little knowledge of what it takes to be a world class star. When one year later they returned there to record the follow-up to Parallel Lines, they were a throng of Pop Gods, with Debbie Harry as Sex Symbol Supreme and the indisputable ruling Pop Queen of the Universe, whether they wanted to or not. And knowledge and acceptance of this is all over Eat To The Beat, which is both good and bad news.

 

The good news is that there are songs here that make me kowtow on an instinctive level. The opening track, ʽDreamingʼ, and ʽUnion City Blueʼ is what I'd call «regal pop» — grand, epic scale pop compositions, borrowing their attitude from Phil Spector, throwing in a pinch of Euro­pop, and tempering it all with classic, colorful, thick electric pop riffs. This is what ABBA would sound like if the production on their records owed more to rock'n'roll than to glossy «adult pop» (if you listen closely, you will hear that Debbie's vocal moves on the bridge section of ʽDrea­mingʼ are like 100% ABBA-esque in construction). More importantly, these are just gorgeous, dazzling micro-pop-symphonies, whose combination of a steady mid-fast-tempo with deep, bombastic production and a mighty, inspirational riff (with Debbie often singing in unison with it) makes the songs soar to high heaven — in terms of romance, this is no longer the purr of a teenage vixen, more like the sensual amorous fantasies of a mature woman. "I'd build a road in gold just to have some dreaming, dreaming is free" and "power, passion, plays a double hand" are two of the most memorable lines in pop music history (of course, only if you take them together with their musical history).

 

This newly found «regality», which they could do so well, goes hand in hand with «diversity»: if Parallel Lines did indeed put them on a sky-high pop pedestal, then it is only natural that they should aim for their own version of The White Album now. Thus, in addition to this «lush» pop-rock style, Eat To The Beat has its Bowie-influenced funk-pop (ʽThe Hardest Partʼ), more tra­ditional (for Blondie, that is) New Wave-style pop (ʽAccidents Never Happenʼ), reggae (ʽDie Young Stay Prettyʼ), more disco (ʽAtomicʼ), some basic rock'n'roll (ʽLiving In The Real Worldʼ), and even a waltzing lullaby (ʽSound-A-Sleepʼ). No heavy metal or Andean music, but I guess cautious Mike Chapman just wouldn't let them go for double album format.

 

Maybe he was right, too, because not all of this works. While Side A of the album is every bit as strong as everything they made and maybe even stronger, by the time we get to Side B they begin allowing themselves an occasional dud. The usual culprit is ʽAtomicʼ, a rather blatant attempt to capitalize on the success of ʽHeart Of Glassʼ by coming up with another disco hit — but this time around, they make the big mistake of not placing Debbie Harry at the center of it: instead, much of the song is instrumental, pinned to a repetitive riff and running out of ideas long before it fades out at the 4:30 mark. It's not a «bad» riff as such, but the principal difference is that ʽHeart Of Glassʼ was just a good, fun song that was able to benefit from a disco cloak, whereas ʽAtomicʼ sounds like it was specially pre-designed to provide basic entertainment for the dancefloor, and I have no idea why they decided to go that way in the first place. Ironically, Robert Fripp, who had earlier provided eerie guitar backing for ʽFade Away And Radiateʼ, was once again invited to guest star on ʽAtomicʼ — maybe they thought they could get him to recreate the effect he had on David Bowie's ʽHeroesʼ, but they couldn't. (To compensate, they did play ʽHeroesʼ with Robert Fripp at the Hammersmith Odeon concert in 1980, a track that is included in the bonus section of the remastered CD edition of Eat To The Beat).

 

The worst song on the album, though, is not ʽAtomicʼ, but rather ʽVictorʼ, a confused and confu­sing screamfest that really sounds like it was quickly thrown together at the last moment to fill up empty space — a practice that I could not accuse the band of up to now. (The title track, while also containing elements of chaotic hooliganry, is actually much more tight, and its humorous message, condensed in the ʽEat To The Beatʼ title, is reminiscent of the band's young and inno­cent days). This is the first sign to indicate that maybe things weren't really going all that well, and pointing to the soon-to-come creative exhaustion. But on here, it's more like an unfortunate accident, one of the few that does happen, despite us being told to the contrary (ʽAccidents Never Happenʼ, another fabulous pop rocker with Debbie at her most femme-fatale-like).

 

In case you thought ʽDreamingʼ and ʽUnion City Blueʼ were the only true highlights, I'd also like to single out ʽSlow Motionʼ — a perfectly spritely tune, all pins and needles from the rhythm section and the keyboards, and especially those "slow motion!... stop!... take me back!..." jolts from the background singers (including Liza Minnelli's sister Lorna Luft) that add such stark conclusiveness and arrogance to the song. And I'd also like to single out ʽThe Hardest Partʼ: wedged in between two of the lushest soundscapes ever is this mean, lean, punkish, hard-rocking tune about robbing an armored car (hey, a good enough return to the «musical situation» style of Plastic Letters — welcome back) that goes from screechy, ugly funk verse to an even sterner disco chorus where Nigel Harrison's bass appropriately sounds like a machine gun.

 

Ultimately, discounting the silly ʽVictorʼ and the rather poor sequencing of Side B (by all means, ʽSound-A-Sleepʼ should have been the last track, an appropriate wind-down after the disco heat of ʽAtomicʼ), Eat To The Beat is only a shade less consistent than Parallel Lines, representing the band at the peak of its «mainstream commercial» powers without compromising its playful and intelligent essence (well, maybe ʽAtomicʼ does compromise it a little). It is also notable for being one of the first, if not the first, album where each song was accompanied by its own video — a costly, but curious publicity act that is still fun to watch after all these years. Most impor­tantly, it is just another great lesson in how you can pass through the grinder of the music in­dustry and still end up with great melodies and cool meanings. Major thumbs up, of course.

 

AUTOAMERICAN (1980)

 

1) Europa; 2) Live It Up; 3) Here's Looking At You; 4) The Tide Is High; 5) Angels On The Balcony; 6) Go Through It; 7) Do The Dark; 8) Rapture; 9) Faces; 10) T-Birds; 11) Walk Like Me; 12) Follow Me; 13*) Call Me; 14*) Suzy & Jeffrey.

 

Despite selling even stronger than Eat To The Beat and yielding at least one more iconic Blondie single in ʽRaptureʼ, the band's fifth album was greeted rather coldly by the press — and, in retrospect, seems to have acquired a rather suspicious reputation. Scan the average bunch of people's reactions on the Internet and, even without hearing the album, you will put together a clear picture: on Autoamerican, Blondie try to bite off more than they can chew, going off in a million different directions, but writing dull, bland songs in each one. The fun is gone, replaced by pretense and ambition. This is not the Blondie we used to know and like.

 

Indeed, it does seem as if something had happened. Judgemental statements aside, Autoamerican is a total downer of an album — in the place of exuberance, arrogance, bright humor, and de­layed-teenage happiness (some of which was still in evidence on Eat To The Beat) comes a record whose brief moments of fun-fun-fun are so brief indeed, they almost seem like ironic auto-send-ups in the overall context. They say sometimes that one of the album's pervasive subjects is cars (the title, the spoken bits in ʽEuropaʼ, ʽT-Birdsʼ, the eating cars bit in ʽRaptureʼ), but that looks more like a coincidence to me. What is really pervasive is an overall sense of gloom; not panick or depression as such, more like a dark, disturbing premonition of some hard times to come. If there is one title here that is better suited for the choice of album title, it is ʽDo The Darkʼ — much more telling than Autoamerican, which really says nothing.

 

Looking at the record this way, as a sort of «Blondie gets sick» signal, is much better than just coming to it in search of another bunch of stellar pop tunes à la ʽDreamingʼ or ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ. Diversity, as such, has never been this band's enemy: they were exploring different musical styles as early as in 1976, and if there is a little more experimentation here than usual, why should that be a problem? ʽEuropaʼ, the odd neo-classical instrumental that opens the album, will never be deemed a self-standing masterpiece, but it isn't meant to — it simply provides a suitably moody grand opening for the record. In the short run, it was a miscalculation to place it right at the start: after ʽHangin' On The Telephoneʼ and ʽDreamingʼ as classic upbeat openings, people were certainly not prepared to encounter those morose, slightly dissonant strings and that Pink Floydian guitar riff. But today, we are prepared.

 

The album's centerpiece is ʽRaptureʼ, which we all know, of course, as (a) one of the first exam­ples of rapping recorded by a white artist and (b) that song about the man from Mars who keeps on eating cars and when he's through with cars he's eating bars. What sometimes escapes our attention is the inherent bitterness in the song — no signs of delight or giddiness or happiness, and a lot of mock-irony that actually overwhelms and downplays the absurdity of the rapped lyrics. The song does not celebrate club life; its robotic pulsation and somnambulant vocals play up its dehumanizing aspects rather than anything else. ʽAtomicʼ — now that was a happy disco song. ʽRaptureʼ is dark, creepy, and much closer in spirit to ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ (come to think of it, the man from Mars might just be a different incarnation of the midnight rambler); and when Debbie seductively croons out "...in raaaaaptuuure..." at the end of the sung part, she really truly sounds like an angel. The death angel, that is.

 

Speaking of angels, ʽAngels On The Balconyʼ, written by Destri, may actually be the best song on the album — another gloomy, smoky pop song that tries to become more cheerful in the bridge section ("they can still see him singing on the corner...") but fails. Empty theater, after­glow, cold outside, fading memories, ghostly lowered voice, cold backing synthesizers, more Bauhaus than Blondie, but with much more «natural» production. The moderately fast tempo and powerful in-between-verse riff suggest that life is still going on, but there's no getting away from past shadows and closet skeletons, want it or not.

 

Even when they go retro-all-the-way on our asses and toss off a light, 1920s-influenced vaude­ville number (ʽHere's Looking At Youʼ), catchy as heck and almost hilariously authentically arranged, its mood and tone are still bitter (it's in the «drowning one's disillusionment and per­sonal grudges in a liquor glass» style of delivery). And then there is the gloomy danceable ʽLive It Upʼ ("your old lover's lying in the gutter"), the gloomy danceable ʽDo The Darkʼ (actually, it is one of the happiest songs on the album — using its darkness-evoking lyrics and snake-charming synth lines to titillate rather than to spook), the midnight jazz balladry of ʽFacesʼ, all drenched in some tragic nostalgia... need I continue?

 

Against this background, ʽThe Tide Is Highʼ, a cover of an old ska tune by The Paragons (here given a far more lush arrangement that almost turns it into a mariachi band tune), sticks out like a sore thumb. Since the people still loved their Blondie when she was happy much more than when she was feeling like shit, they had no problem pushing it all the way up to No. 1 (and, perhaps, subconsciously they were aided by the chorus line "I'm gonna be your number one" as well?), but it is not at all indicative of the overall atmosphere of the record. It's just that they needed a hit, and Mike Chapman obviously felt that the only surefire hit by Blondie is a happy hit, so here it is. It's a jolly good cover, too, but these days it feels a bit... slight, perhaps, against the general heavy weight of the record.

 

On the whole, I would go as far as agreeing that Autoamerican represents «the beginning of the end». This is an evolved band, one that has already tasted its best taste of happiness and success and is now embracing «post-maturity». This gloomy style does not come to them as naturally as the giddy style of their early records, but it isn't faked, either. The songwriting is kinda limp in places (ʽWalk Like Meʼ, for instance, sounds like a lifeless shadow of their once brashly arrogant approach), but more than half of the record is still comprised of great tunes — also, if you get the reissued remastered version, ʽCall Meʼ, the band's biggest hit single, is on there as well, one of the grandest songs of the disco-rock era, though, like all such specially commandeered songs (for the soundtrack of American Gigolo, in this case), it is rather faceless, though undeniably catchy. In any case, unlike the original band's last album, Autoamerican, whether you like it or not, is an integral and necessary-to-know part of the band's legacy. Personally, I am quite partial to its disgruntled spirit, and have no problem with a strong thumbs up rating — it's not my fault, and, come to think of it, it's not even their fault that somebody would categorically refuse to accept them in any mode other than «power pop», which this record does not even try to be.

 

THE HUNTER (1982)

 

1) Orchid Club; 2) Island Of Lost Souls; 3) Dragonfly; 4) For Your Eyes Only; 5) The Beast; 6) War Child; 7) Little Caesar; 8) Danceway; 9) (Can I) Find The Right Words (To Say); 10) English Boys; 11) The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game.

 

Blondie's last album (before the reunion) continuously gets a very bad rap from fans and critics alike, and I am pretty sure that a lot of this has to do with Debbie's wig on the front cover (yes, please relax, that is not real hair, she would'nt have had enough time to grow so much since the cover of Autoamerican) — everything about that front cover screams Eighties, and then so does the music, and not altogether in a good way, you understand.

 

Objectivity seems to be on the fans' and critics' side, too: nobody wanted all that much to do the album, plagued as the band was with all sorts of personal troubles (not the least of which were Chris Stein's health problems), but they were still contractually obligated to get one more record out to Chrysalis, so, almost over their dead bodies, they had to get back to the studio, summon Mike Chapman to the rescue, and deliver something as «contemporary» and «relevant» as that trashy collective sci-fi look on the front sleeve.

 

On its own, The Hunter is indeed rather disastrous. Too many synthesizers, too much modernis­tic production, too many moments of meandering mushiness weighted against too few song­writing ideas. In the context of Blondie's usual output, it looks even worse — the more you think about this being the same band that did ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ or ʽDreamingʼ just a few years ago, the easier that old cliché about the fall of the once mighty springs to mind. However, in the context of «Blondie's age curve» — the childhood of Blondie, the adolescence of Plastic Letters, the glorious youth of Parallel Lines, the ripe maturity of Eat To The Beat, the woe-from-wit old age premonitions of Autoamerican — the last record logically corresponds to respectable seni­lity, with a pessimistic nudge to it, and that is exactly the kind of expectation I have for it, and I am not at all being disappointed.

 

The Hunter is a moody, dark, dense album, with a bit of a «sonic jungle» feel to it, and a very natural one — you can easily tell things were not well, and there are no songs here that would try and mask this, presenting the band as something that they were not, at the time. One possible exception is ʽIsland Of Lost Soulsʼ, a superficially «happy» calypso dance tune that was released as a single, because, you know, it's frickin' Blondie, they need a «happy» single for all the happy people out there. Never mind that on the cover of the single they look just as gloomy and depres­sed as on the cover of the album (and Debbie sports a different wig), the single has to appeal to the average idiot dancer, whatever the problems. If you read deeply into the lyrics, you will see that they represent a troubled state of mind ("In Babylon / On the boulevard of broken dreams / My will power at the lowest ebb..."), but that percussion and that friendly brass section and the rambunctious whoop-whooping, that'll get you going anyway.

 

Outside of that, though, it is one picture of nightmarish decadence or anti-utopian futurism after another. On ʽOrchid Clubʼ, Debbie is cooing "where are you, where are you?" from under a dense thicket of tribal percussion, church-organ-imitating synthesizers, and groaning Fripp-style guitars; this is the first time we see the band so deeply depressed. ʽDragonflyʼ is a New Romantic-era epic rocker about some sort of futuristic drag race, with some clever guitar interplay between Chris Stein and Frank Infante as they impersonate the sci-fi racers, although the song is quite clearly stretched way beyond rational limits. And ʽFor Your Eyes Onlyʼ, following in the steps of Alice Cooper's ʽMan With The Golden Gunʼ, joins the league of «Bond Themes Rejected for Being Too Scary for the Average Idiot Viewer /Courtesy of Motion Picture Association's Opinion/» — not that it is very scary or anything, but its life-defying moody arrogance and lack of lyrical trans­parency do make it a rather suspicious choice for inclusion in the Bond spectacle.

 

All these songs really have their moments, but the two definite highlights on the album are ʽWar­childʼ and ʽEnglish Boysʼ — autobiographical tunes that might have felt more at home on any of Harry's solo albums, but ultimately, who cares? ʽEnglish Boysʼ, a nostalgic mind trip back into Debbie's adolescence, is simple, sweet, and tender, with a totally endearing chorus ("does it feel the same to you?..." is Debbie at her most seductively sentimental), whereas ʽWar Childʼ, pinned to a futuristic synth loop and electropop dance groove, turns to anger and self-defense as its basic emotional undercurrent — "I'm a war child, I'm a war baby / And that's the difference between you and me", as performed by the 1945-born Debbie Harry, sounds as authentic as it could have sounded in any type of heated argument between the protagonist and her imaginary antagonists (including, as the lyrics unflinchingly suggest, fans of the Khmer Rouge and «PLO lovers courting after the curfew» who «have the West Bank blues» — oh, what is this, rightist senti­ments in one of America's most progressive bands? crucify 'em!).

 

Additionally, the album ends on a moodier-than-moodiness-itself cover version of the Marve­lettes' ʽThe Hunter Gets Captured By The Gameʼ — as Blondie's final song for the next two de­cades, I'd like, of course, to take it double-metaphorically, reflecting not merely the imaginary story of a vamp falling in love with her victim, but the whole story of Blondie, a band catapulted by fate into an unlikely whirlwind of commercial success and public acclaim, and ultimately de­stroyed by their very own fortune. Maybe they had that additional meaning, too, which is why the song sounds so sad and poignant, clearly more important here to Debbie than it ever was for the Marvelettes themselves, or Smokey Robinson, who never dreamed about any such third layer of semantics when he wrote it.

 

Of course, there are throwaway songs here as well, like ʽThe Beastʼ or ʽDancewayʼ, of which I cannot tell you anything interesting, except that they, too, good or bad, are permeated with a sense of dreariness, tiredness, and uncertainty of where to go from here. This «dark gray» atmo­sphere, best correlated with some ugly late autumnal panorama of dirty skies and sickly slushy rain, is, I think, what turns people off this record even more than its lack of quality melodies. But in reality this musical ugliness has every reason to exist alongside the colorful rainbows of Blon­die's past — in fact, has a somewhat perversely thrilling reason to exist that-a-way — and there are still enough quality melodies here to guarantee a low, but honest thumbs up from me, im­plying that the original Blondie were so talented that they never really made a bad record per se, they just made a final one that seriously smells of antidepressants. And do not even try judging it objectively before you hit your midlife crisis or something like that.

 

NO EXIT (1999)

 

1) Screaming Skin; 2) Forgive And Forget; 3) Maria; 4) No Exit; 5) Double Take; 6) Nothing Is Real But The Girl; 7) Boom Boom In The Zoom Zoom Room; 8) Night Wind Sent; 9) Under The Gun; 10) Out In The Streets; 11) Happy Dog; 12) The Dream's Lost On Me; 13) Divine; 14) Dig Up The Conjo.

 

I must confess that, to my ears, the worst thing about post-reunion Blondie is not the quality of the music (inconsistent, but can be gotten used to), not the gloss of the production (they'd turned into a «gloss-oriented» band as early as 1978), not the questionability of the reunion itself (in an age that has essentially stopped producing musical revolutions, veteran reunions should be valued every bit as high as aspiring «new» bands — and, actually, they are) — the saddest thing is the deterioration of Debbie Harry's voice, which is just... well, sad.

 

I mean, we all age, and we all have to come to terms with the fact that only singers like Tom Waits gain in awesomeness with aging, but some of us age worse than others, and some of us adjust to aging worse than others. In those 17 years that separate The Hunter from No Exit, as one can actually witness in more detail by scrutinizing Debbie's solo career, her voice has sunk, losing a very important part of its higher range and acquiring a late-age «breathiness» — which certainly does not prevent the singer from singing on key, or even singing reasonably well, but a huge chunk of the original appeal was in the sexiness, and this loss makes it painfully obvious that here, in 1999, is a performer struggling to be «sexy», where in the past it all came so natu­rally. An aging diva throwing a pointless challenge to the unyielding hand of time.

 

Again, this is a problem that could be circumvented if they tried to make the music suitably dif­ferent (Marianne Faithfull's Broken English immediately comes to mind under such circum­stances) — but nooooo, they are Blondie, they are the supreme royalty of 1970s pop music and they want it to stay that way, besides, they never really fell apart, they just took a long break, right? They want to be picking up from exactly where they left with The Hunter, no, with Auto­american, because The Hunter was a closing-gap throwaway piece. They want to make a true Blondie album. Loud, arrogant, stylistically diverse, only technically-formally modernized for the new age, but otherwise true to the band's essence.

 

In many ways, they are still qualified. Not all of the old guys are aboard for the continuation of the ride (Nigel Harrison and Frank Infante either refused to take part or were not involved at all, and even tried to sue the others for using the «Blondie» tag — honestly, though, I don't think it makes much sense to sue Debbie Harry for the use of the word «Blondie», not until she dyes her hair pitch black), but Chris Stein, Jim Destri, and Clem Burke are, and they can still play all their instruments as good as new, and they can still write songs in different styles, covering the usual eclectic grounds: straightforward old school pop rock, mostly, but extending their reach to areas both older than that (lounge jazz and even country-pop) and younger than that (some adult con­temporary, some hip-hop).

 

Yet I have never been properly fascinated by ʽMariaʼ, the big hit single from the album that had the power to throw the band into the spotlight once again — just how many comebacks from veteran bands are accompanied with a #1 single? — but while the melody is undoubtedly catchy and infectious, the «joyful» atmosphere of the song is completely spoiled for me by Debbie's «mother­ly» tone. The tune's proper intention might simply be to describe the visionary beauty of an unnamed protagonist, but whenever the singer inquires "don't you wanna take her? wanna make her all your own?", I cannot help picturing Debbie Harry as the imposing, self-confident matron in a whorehouse, offering us some appetizing love for sale. Where this «sexiness» thing worked like a charm circa 1976-78, this time there is some sort of awful mismatch between voice, lyrics, and melody that harshly stings the brain on an instinctive level. Good pop song, sure, but it simply should be sung by somebody else.

 

At this point, I'd say Debbie comes off much better when she is singing sad songs rather than happy ones — which is why I much prefer the second single, ʽNothing Is Real But The Girlʼ. It is just as old-school-catchy as ʽMariaʼ, every single bit, but it has a deeply melancholic spirit in­stead, with vocal and instrumental melody alike targeted at «ice» rather than «fire», and in this case, the changes in Debbie's voice actually work to her advantage. Likewise, she's still great when singing songs of defiance and self-confidence — the country waltz ʽThe Dream's Lost On Meʼ, as much as I am always skeptical of country waltzes, actually turns out to be the record's most arrogant, gravity-defying number: the lady's "I come out shootin' when trouble comes kno­ckin', I greet bad news by sending it walkin'" sounds totally believable, and if you thought that the last thing you'd ever want to see was a Debbie Harry in a Nashville mood, you might rethink that thought upon hearing the song — regular, conformist, conventional country it ain't.

 

Some of the «foxy» songs are so cool anyway that the voice factor does not bother me too much — ʽHappy Dogʼ, for instance, a swaggery syncopated blues-rocker with awesome triple-guitar interplay (swampy slide tone + dry distorted «woman tone» + funky rhythm = pure awesomeness indeed!), feels a bit uneasy when she sings "I wanna wag for you baby", and the Stooges re­ference ("I wanna be your dog") is way too obvious, but the musical arrangement is just so juicy that I always want to look past the voice, to where those guitars are battling each other (way to go, Chris Stein and session guy Paul Carbonara). On the other hand, when she invites you to go ʽBoom Boom In The Zoom Zoom Roomʼ (the lounge jazz song), the results are once again... nervous, to put it mildly.

 

But anyway, personal impressions aside, a more objective judgement would say that the music on No Exit, as a rule, is quite good. Without pretending to any particular «innovations» (except on the title track, where they try to fuse Toccata In D Minor with nu-metal and a rap part from Coolio — sounds as bizarre as it reads, yes, but it might get your attention), the tracks, one by one, deliver instrumental and vocal hooks, moods, and textures. And this is not really a «Blon­die In The 1990s» album — it's just a Blonide album, period. A few of the tracks are fillerish, and the cover of the Shangri-La's ʽOut In The Streetsʼ (a song they'd originally recorded as early as 1975, so this is hyper-nostalgia catching up) is also unnecessary, and the grotesque ska pumping of ʽScreaming Skinʼ lasts about two minutes longer than it should, but leave it to Blondie to end the album on a fascinating mix of tribal music, pop melodies, and Eastern psychedelia and make you suspect that this band still «matters», after all these years (ʽDig Up The Conjoʼ — an unsuspected tribute to ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ, perhaps?).

 

In fact, I would go as far as state that Harry's, Stein's, and Destri's songwriting talents, on the whole, have managed to retain all of their original sharpness — a rare case for a comeback, and the thumbs up rating is only slightly marred by the fact that, well, they are not young any more, yet they still make music predominantly targeted at a young audience, or, perhaps, at their old audi­ence who want to feel themselves as young as the band members do. Nothing illegitimate or immoral about that, just a tiny whiff of routine fakery that I am sure we can all live with.

 

 

LIVE (1999)

 

1) Dreaming; 2) Hanging On The Telephone; 3) Screaming Skin; 4) Atomic; 5) Forgive And Forget; 6) The Tide Is High; 7) Shayla; 8) Sunday Girl; 9) Maria; 10) Call Me; 11) Under The Gun; 12) Rapture; 13) Rip Her To Shreds; 14) X Offender; 15) No Exit; 16) Heart Of Glass; 17*) One Way Or Another.

 

While in their prime, Blondie never released a live album — the «cult of the live album», so sternly supported on the prog-rock and hard-rock circuits, hardly existed at all among the punk and New Wave outfits of the late 1970s (not that there weren't exceptions, and for some bands, like Talking Heads, the art of live performance was every bit as essential to their reputation as their studio output). Bootlegs and scattered semi-official archival releases show that this was rather imprudent — Blondie could be quite an awesome live band, benefiting both from the in­strumental skills of its members (Clem Burke's drumming, for instance) and their creativity on­stage, experimenting with their own material as well as covering other great artists; not always successfully — their take on Bowie's ʽHeroesʼ, for instance, bordered on the dreadful — but when it comes to live playing, the «win some lose some» principle is always preferable to «play it safe and sound», and they practiced it regularly.

 

In the light of this, the band's decision to finally come out with their first proper live album (and live DVD as well) in the middle of their surprising comeback has to be qualified as a «cash-in». With ʽMariaʼ riding on top of the charts, sales for No Exit showing a positive balance, and the band's live shows receiving a warm welcome from fans — why not a live album to prop up the comeback and keep the news flowing? They wouldn't exactly be rushing in to write up and record a new bunch of original songs, anyway, so a live LP would be just fine.

 

Five out of sixteen songs on the recorded setlist are from No Exit, demonstrating that the album was more than just an excuse for the old guys and girls to get together — however, most fans would naturally be more interested in whether they still have it as far as the golden oldies are concerned. As you can easily see from the tracklist, they offer a rather predictable, but represen­tative retrospective, covering all the records except for The Hunter (understandable) and Plastic Letters (inexcusable — not even ʽDenis Denisʼ? come on now, that was a hit, wasn't it?), but usually concentrating on commercially successful radio standards.

 

Equally predictably, I would have no problems whatsoever with these performances — they sound sufficiently tight and energetic to ward off technical criticism — if it were not for the un­fortunate demise of Debbie Harry's voice as a magical device of the Viagra variety, and its rebirth as a dull chunk of homeopathic placebo; meaning that every now and then, you are likely to come across some dryly admiring statement like «Ms. Harry's voice, contrary to malicious rumors, is in surprisingly fine form». She is certainly more alive than dead, and she does not hit many bum notes, or flub the lyrics, or mix up the moods — it's just that there is no more magic in that voice, period. So much for drinking, smoking, and hanging out with those types from Chic.

 

In stark contrast with their struggling vocalist, the band's instrumentalists perform their required push-ups admirably. Mr. Burke is beyond reproach — just listen to his drumming alone saving ʽScreaming Skinʼ from perishing under its own five-and-a-half-minute repetitiveness, as his rolls and fills become the most individualistic and expressive part of the performance. And yes, that fabulous coda to ʽHeart Of Glassʼ is retained essentially intact, plus there is an extra coda where he gets to be Keith Moon for about thirty seconds (and I am being serious — had he really wan­ted to, he could have become the most authentic Keith Moon impersonator in the world, he can get that close to invoking Moonie's spirit). Paul Carbonara, standing in for Frank Infante on lead guitar, slavishly reproduces all the original parts with total success, and session player Leigh Foxx on bass gets a chance to shine on ʽAtomicʼ, which is here stripped of its disco gloss and made to sound more like a trance-inducing psychedelic dance extravaganza (which it might have been from the very start if not for the unfortunate circumstance of being recorded at the height of the disco era). Meanwhile, the «angry» songs like ʽRip Her To Shredsʼ receive heavier arrange­ments, with thicker, more distorted guitar tones that you'd probably expect in the post-grunge / alt-rock era — quite fine with me when you're talking live performance.

 

Ultimately, the further you can get away from the idea of «Blondie» as a backing band for the seductive pop charm of Debbie Harry and the nearer you can move towards the idea of «Blondie» as a musical band, period, the more prepared you will be to enjoy Live as a bona fide reflection of a tight, crunchy, sweaty musical show. It does have the benefit of finer production than any archival release from the old days, as well as the benefit of a strong, mostly filler-free setlist (al­though I'd much rather hear them do ʽNothing Is Real But The Girlʼ and ʽHappy Dogʼ than ʽFor­give And Forgetʼ and ʽNo Exitʼ), and do not be too offput by my putting down Debbie's vocal transformation — in the end, it's not that bad to have your attention transferred from front-lady to back-gentlemen. Who knows, they may have been waiting for this to happen for the previous 25 years, so why wouldn't we want to oblige them?

 

THE CURSE OF BLONDIE (2003)

 

1) Shakedown; 2) Good Boys; 3) Undone; 4) Golden Rod; 5) Rules For Living; 6) Background Melody; 7) Magic (Asadoya Yunta); 8) End To End; 9) Hello Joe; 10) The Tingler; 11) Last One In The World; 12) Diamond Bridge; 13) Desire Brings Me Back; 14) Songs Of Love.

 

Everybody knows what the real «curse of Blondie» is, and has always been: being mistaken for «Blondie», a male-oriented post-Marilyn, pre-Madonna pop factory churning out Viagra substi­tutes à la ʽHeart Of Glassʼ. Small wonder, then, that in the 21st century the curse gets stronger than ever — everybody needs that kind of «Blondie» when she's in her twenties or even thirties, but now that she is pushing sixty, you'd almost be getting into some sort of Harold And Maude situation, and not that there's anything wrong with that, but... well... you know...

 

...anyway, the title of the album seems to reflect irony, but it wouldn't hurt if they'd added, some­where in minuscule letters at least, «getting over...», because this is exactly what they are trying to do here. The only improvement of this album over No Exit is that, while some of the songs still reflect the old Blondie style, The Curse Of Blondie no longer toys with sexual imagery at all: there is nothing like ʽMariaʼ or ʽHappy Dogʼ or, thank God, ʽBoom Boom In The Zoom Zoom Roomʼ on this record. The lyrical and emotional tones are far more serious and, crucially, far more in line with the age-induced changes in Debbie's voice: no cognitive dissonance for me this time while undergoing the influence of her vocal timbre.

 

The flaws of this record, unfortunately, are very much in your face just as well. First and fore­most, it is overlong: simply put, they did not have enough songs to fill up the space of 60 minutes, yet, for some reason, decided to do it anyway and stretched most of the compositions out to totally unreasonable lengths. Basically, this is a set of 14 mediocre-to-good three-minute pop songs that seem to overrate themselves: 60 - (14×3) means that for about 18 minutes you will, most probably, be bored stiff out of your mind. Second, there is way too much emphasis on «sounding contemporary»: the lead (and only) single from the album, ʽGood Boysʼ, was strictly in the electronic dance-pop vein, and there are quite a bit more «commercial» throwaways like these on the album. Whatever the situation, Blondie has always been a guitar-based band, and trying to cross over thus late in their career will almost inevitably lead to embarrassments — and it does, even despite the fact that ʽGood Boysʼ has a catchy chorus.

 

And yet, despite the fact that it is so uneven, The Curse Of Blondie still contains a few melodic surprises and harmonic joys — too bad that you have to filter them out, but let me try and name a few, as a small aid. ʽGolden Rodʼ is a fine guitar pop song, on which they remember the old wailing Fripp/Belew lead tones, introduce a little bit of sped-up droning into the melody to make the atmosphere more scary, throw in a Patti Smith-like mid-section (Debbie even sounds like Patti when she is singing "my reaction, what's gonna happen, gets no help from me"), and com­plete the whole thing with lyrics that turn it into a thinly veiled anti-drug statement (or at least, that's how all these lines like "mother says it's just a weed" read out to me).

 

Later on, they do a fine job saddling Japanese pop influences on ʽMagicʼ — actually, an electric arrangement of a traditional Okinawan folk song (ʽAsadoya Yuntaʼ) where a multi-tracked Debbie sounds well in line with a high-pitched female Japanese choir, and is also well aided by psychedelic backward-recorded guitar solos: nothing earth-shaking, but a little tender innocence well integrated with a little bit of studio magic can sometimes go a long way. Perhaps it is not «true Blondie», but in 2003, it is certainly truer Blondie than ʽMariaʼ — besides, «true Blondie» has always been about reaching out into the unknown, so Okinawan folk music ties in pretty well into that category.

 

The band shows that they can still bulge those muscles, too, with a hard rock anthem that carries plenty of grit and desperation — ʽLast One In The Worldʼ — unfortunately, marred again with piss-poor production, flattening out the guitars and cluttering the mix with unnecessary extra layers of percussion and keyboards, but essentially a good song all the same. Finally, ʽSongs Of Loveʼ, though drastically overlong, is a wonderfully moody folk-jazzy conclusion, essentially in the «late night» vein, but with jangling guitars and pulsating «astral» electronic keyboards instead of the usual piano-and-bass accompaniment associated with such songs. Although Debbie does not have the proper voice for this (we'd rather need a Billie Holiday here, or at least some of the other old school jazz divas), she still does what she can, and sounds more convincing as a ro­mantic crooner than a sexy feline, forever stuck in kittenhood.

 

Much of the rest is hit-and-miss, as subjective as these judgements are: for instance, I remain completely unmoved by ʽHello Joeʼ, the band's allegedly heartfelt tribute to their long-term New York pal Joey Ramone — not only does the song's genre (a light acoustic pop-rocker) have no relation whatsoever to the Ramones, but even the song per se is melodically way too simplistic for the usual Blondie standards, as if they thought that a lyrical reference to hey-ho-let's-go would suffice in making the song work. More seriously and generally, the rhythm guitar parts on the album suck more often than not (overprocessed, overcompressed, the usual stuff), and the key­boards too often sound like a novice, frosted out after twenty years of repose and frantically trying to «catch up» with the hottest trends.

 

On the whole, though, still a thumbs up here rather than the dustbin treatment: I like the attitude, the maturity, the still-not-too-bad songwriting, the way they sometimes (alas, not too often) suc­ceed in overcoming their disadvantages in the new age, and just the basic fact that they have managed to avoid turning into complete self-parodies — one true sign of a great band, actually (retaining self-control and adequacy even after the cutting edge has long since been passed). And if somebody trimmed this whole thing down to reasonable length, re-mixed and re-produced most of the songs, and erased all their «intentional modernity» impulses, then it might have been a very strong thumbs up, for all I know.

 

As it is — who knows, maybe that curse of Blondie does exist, after all, and is way different from the way I have described it? For instance: «the curse of Blondie is that they will never be able to release a fully satisfactory record in the 21st century»... nah, too obvious. «The curse of Blondie is that they will never be able to free themselves from the illusion of being obliged to their fans to release superficially commercial singles, instead of just being true to their musical hearts». Too pretentious. «The curse of Blondie is... what kind of a stupid band calls itself Blondie, anyway?» Okay, never mind. Curtains, please.

 

PANIC OF GIRLS (2011)

 

1) D-Day; 2) What I Heard; 3) Mother; 4) The End The End; 5) Girlie Girlie; 6) Love Doesn't Frighten Me; 7) Words In My Mouth; 8) Sunday Smile; 9) Wipe Off My Sweat; 10) Le Bleu; 11) China Shoes.

 

Another chapter in the Book of the Curse of Blondie, and a confusing one — I am still not quite sure whether Panic Of Girls can be called a proper Blondie record. It comes together with a major loss in the Blondie camp: Jim Destri, who left the revamped band soon after The Curse Of Blondie due to personal problems. In his place, we have a totally new, young, trendy, flashy keyboard player (even his name, Matt Katz-Bohen, implies flashy-trendy), so seriously deter­mined to put his own stamp on this band and bring them up to date in the digital age that I would be surprised it did not come to blows with Chris Stein, had I not known that Stein actually appro­ves of the transition just as much as Debbie does.

 

More importantly, look at the credits: only one song out of eleven is credited exclusively to real Blondie members (Harry / Stein), and, not surprisingly, the album-closing ʽChina Shoesʼ is the only song that does sound like real Blondie — a dark, distorted ballad with that fabulous mix of playfulness and tragedy that used to grace tracks like ʽAngels On The Balconyʼ, though taken here at a slower, more thoughtful tempo and tied to a grumbly-grungy rhythm track that would have made Lou Reed proud.

 

Most of the other songs, however, try too hard to give Blondie that new look — and not a very good look: Katz-Bohen and producer Jeff Saltzman are helping them to turn into a fashionable, glitzy outfit, relying on stereotypical dance-pop electronics to keep the crowds interested. Some­times, when the approach is a compromise between the old and the new, the results are not that bad: ʽMotherʼ, co-written by Debbie with early producer Kato Khandwala, has a heart-tugging chorus that overrides all the silly electronics — the song is really a poignant «anti-nostalgic» look at the singer's past ("in the patent leather life I was foolish you were right...") and its frantic tempo and tenseness corresponds perfectly well to the singer's desperation at having missed something important and unrecoverable.

 

On the other hand, when they go all the way, the results can be drastic — as is the case with ʽWipe Off My Sweatʼ, which is simply the worst song ever released under the Blondie moniker. Trying to imagine that it is just a tongue-in-cheek parody on neo-Latin dance schlock (everything from J-Lo to Shakira) does not alleviate the pain — the synthesized rumba rhythms are vomit-worthy and Debbie sounds like a clinical idiot throughout (rather a normal thing for the garbage pop of today, but up to now, this band has always managed to avoid garbage — why stick their noses right in the middle of the trash heap now?). Other Katz-Bohen creations, like ʽWhat I Heardʼ, are not as directly annoying, perhaps, but I do not need my Blondie sounding like Katy Perry any more than I need them sounding like Shakira.

 

They do try to conform to lots of things at the same time, so that the reactions are always diffe­rent: for instance, they cover a recent Beirut tune (ʽSunday Smileʼ), which you will like if you like Beirut, but happen to have an alergy to Zach Condon's bleating voice — not only is the spirit of the brassy original preserved fairly well, but it suddenly reveals an eerie resemblance to the old spirit of ʽThe Tide Is Highʼ (talk about generational links and all that). The cooperation with songwriter / producer / universal artist Barb Morrison results in ʽWords In My Mouthʼ, one of the more guitar-oriented songs on the album, hard to categorize (blues-rock rhythm guitar + adult contemporary synths + aggressive character-assassinating lyrics = ?), though also somewhat hard to memorize due to the lack of outright hooks. And then there's Debbie's fascination with French pop (ʽLe Bleuʼ) — her singing in French has not much improved since the days of ʽDenis Denisʼ, but it does come as a major relief after her singing in Spanish on ʽWipe Off My Sweatʼ.

 

All in all, this is not an «awful» record as such — inconsistent, yes, and pandering way too much to mainstream pop standards of 2011 (which is way more artistically suicidal than pandering to mainstream pop standards of 1978-1979, as far as my opinion is concerned), but not uninteresting either from a culturological point of view (it is instructive to observe and analyze the many ways in which they try to chameleonize themselves) or from a Blondie-centered point of view, because songs like ʽMotherʼ, ʽWords In My Mouthʼ, and even that obscure old Sophia George cover (ʽGirlie Girlieʼ), dug out from the depths of 1985, are still very much Debbie Harry-esque. So, tread with care, but do not ignore completely — they do not yet hit pop bottom here.

 

GHOSTS OF DOWNLOAD (2014)

 

1) Sugar On The Side; 2) Rave; 3) A Rose By Any Name; 4) Winter; 5) I Want To Drag You Around; 6) I Screwed Up; 7) Relax; 8) Take Me In The Night; 9) Make A Way; 10) Mile High; 11) Euphoria; 12) Take It Back; 13) Back­room; 14*) Put Some Color On You; 15*) Can't Stop Wanting; 16*) Prism.

 

The release of this album was accompanied by a most strange marketing move: it was issued only as an integral part of a 2-CD package, collectively called Blondie 4(0) Ever and containing, in addition to the main disc with 13 new songs, a Greatest Hits Deluxe Redux disc with new studio re-recordings of 11 «classic» songs, «to commemorate the band's 40th anniversary», so it was stated in press releases. Weird way to go about it, if you ask me, but then marketing does often work in weird ways — who am I, next to an experienced marketologist, to measure the degree of weirdness to which the average buyer's mind can be professionally attuned?

 

Anyway, we will not be concentrating on these re-recordings: based on brief snippets that I have heard, they are all technically very close to the originals, Debbie's aged voice being the main differentiating factor, and I assume they just did this out of sheer fun, to check whether they still could or could not recreate their old schtick in a bookish manner. And still another possible factor is the effect of contrast — because with Ghosts Of Download, they have now moved away as far from the old schtick as is humanly possible. The only link is that they are still a pop ensemble (as opposed to, say, Napalm Death or Tokyo String Quartet), on a mission to churn out catchy pop songs. Everything else is different.

 

Logically continuing the line that was barely hinted at on The Curse and had very much solidi­fied with Panic, Ghosts Of Download is almost completely dependent on electronics; in genrist terms, it is one of those «electropop» records (I believe that «techno» is now considered uncool) that trade live instrumentation for programmed loops and beats because it shows how modern, trendy, and advanced you are (well, at least it used to — I am not that sure about the situation as of 2014). Not surprisingly, upon first listen I hated it with all the instinctive passion I could muster: everything sounded tasteless, stupid, and annoying to the max.

 

As the first nasty impressions clear away, though, I have to admit that the songs here are not really «bad» as such. The lyrics, the basic melodic hooks, the relative levels of complexity and diversity — a lot of work, and perhaps even a little inspiration, must have certainly been involved in the construction of the album. At the very least, it is incomparably more interesting than, say, Britney Spears' Femme Fatale, just as an example off the top of my head — even though it is rather a sad state of affairs when you find yourself inclined to draw a comparison between Blondie and Britney Spears in the first place.

 

Again, most of the songs feature outside songwriters, although either Harry or Stein or, usually, both of them, share the credits with outsiders. There are also plenty of guest appearances by trendy hip-hop, R&B, and LGBT people (Los Rakas, Miss Guy, Beth Ditto — thank you, Ms. Harrie, for introducing us to so many here-today-gone-tomorrow personalities!), which some­times makes sense (ʽA Rose By Any Nameʼ, featuring Beth Ditto, is a pro-gay anthem) and sometimes does not (the Spanish rap on ʽI Screwed Upʼ feels quite out of place to me), but, in any case, they are not there to make or not to make sense, but to establish a link between the older and the newer generations. Do they? Perhaps they do — the only problem is, in 50 years people will still be returning to those Blondie albums, but whether they will still be interested in Los Rakas seems much more questionable to me.

 

Only one tune on the entire record feels completely «authentic» to me: ʽWinterʼ, relatively free of the electronic coating, is a mid-tempo introspective rocker with Harrie's vocals mixed properly upfront and moving gracefully up the scale from verse to bridge to chorus as she picks on some poor soul for being too cold. It was not a single, it did not get any airplay, it does not feature any guest stars or particularly noticeable gimmicks, but to me, it feels like the absolute best that Ghosts Of Download have to offer me.

 

Still, I have no intentions of badmouthing the rest of the songs: I just don't feel like talking about them. Many of them do have the «Blondie sneer» alright, and after two or three listens, most of the choruses get properly stuck in your head — but I do not feel the ability to connect to these not-too-inventive electronic grooves. Perhaps they have been regretting, through all these years, about having disbanded way too early in the Eighties to give the world a proper synth-pop album, and now seek that extra profit, by way of the «Eighties' nostalgia wave» that seems to have swept over the population and still not dissipated? If so, how wonderful it is that they had missed that window — first, reunion albums are always easier to ignore than non-reunion albums, second, at least Ghosts has the added benefits of improved technology and a more complexly layered approach to integrating electronics with real instruments. For instance, ʽI Want To Drag You Aroundʼ has some sitars interacting with the shit-synths — probably synthesized as well, but if they went synth-pop in the Eighties, there would hardly have been a sitar break on this song at all.

 

Their retro kick still occasionally flares up in the strangest places: for instance, there is a long, multi-part version of the old hit ʽRelaxʼ (Frankie Goes To Hollywood!) — more famous for its controversial, free-all-inhibitions music video, if I remember right, than anything else. But musi­cally, the song is so trivial and repetitive (I'd even say «manipulative» if there was anything to manipulate) that the purpose of reviving it escapes me. Unless, of course, it is accompanied by a video of Chris Stein and Matt Katz-Bohen engaging in simulated anal sex, while a leather-clad Harrie puts the whip to both ("relax, don't do it, when you wanna come" is a pretty good tagline for such a special occasion).

 

On the whole, not even the hooks will prevent me from a thumbs down here. Fact is, I have always loved my Blondie for their moods — punkish and arrogant, sarcastically sexy, romanti­cally gloomy, whatever — and Ghosts Of Download have too much of a plastic coating to re­veal those moods to me. They are there, but you have to «tolerate» many elements of the production in order to enjoy them properly — elements that add nothing of significance and are really only there so that the band members can point to them and state, «see, we are not old farts, and we have some documental evidence for that». But really, Debbie and Chris, you do not need to take lessons from Lady Gaga to prove that you're still savvy about the 21st century. There's plenty of better teachers around, honest. Provided you need teachers in the first place.

BON JOVI

BON JOVI (1984)

 

1) Runaway; 2) Roulette; 3) She Don't Know Me; 4) Shot Through The Heart; 5) Love Lies; 6) Breakout; 7) Burning For Love; 8) Come Back; 9) Get Ready.

 

We often tend to define the different genres of popular music through both form and meaning — for instance, The Clash play speedy, distorted, simplistic electric guitar riffs and sing about social injustice and rebellion, so they're «punks»; Black Sabbath play more complex, lower-pitched riffs and sing about Satan, so they're «metal». Every once in a while, though, along comes such a drastic incongruity that all rules and assumptions have to be revised, or even rejected. Sometimes this is done intentionally, as an understanding «mockery» of established tradition; sometimes it is simply done, because it just seems like the times were calling for it.

 

Few bands in the history of mankind, I think, have from the very beginning put so much of every­thing on «fake» as Bon Jovi — and did it with such a natural ease at that. Normally, when we hear «pop metal» and remember The Big Hair Decade, we would think of all those bands that carried on the tradition of shocking and grossing out their audiences: Twisted Sister, Mötley Crüe, Poison, etc. Much, if not most, of the music that they produced sucked, but at least it kind of agreed with the image — «break all rules», «fuck everything that moves», that sort of thing. In comparison, Bon Jovi continuously produced music whose lyrical and emotional content was completely tame: unimaginative romantic love songs, mostly, with just a wee bit of animal sexual passion thrown in occasionally (on their debut album, ʽGet Readyʼ is the only song that explicitly deals with humping — placed right at the end, too, as if to say, «okay, getting a little tired with all that schmaltzy stuff, let's get down to some real business for a change»).

 

Tame, yes, but still retaining all the superficial «metal» trappings, starting from the band's visual image and ending with the musical arrangements — booming drums, grumbly distorted riffs, gang choruses, screechy high-pitched solos, the works. Keyboardist David Bryan is very much at the center of the sound (no small coincidence that the album opens with his nasty, primitive syn­thesizer clunking), but the guitar duo of Jon Bon Jovi (rhythm) and Richie Sambora (lead) never let the listener forget that this is Metal here, or, at least, Heavy Rock. In fact, they do not want you to think of them as soft-hearted pussies so much that there isn't even a proper «power ballad» anywhere on the album: all the songs are taken at mid- or fast tempos, and the sentimentality is restricted to Jon's (and sometimes to backup) vocals and to David's keyboards — they can wail and weep all they want, but the guitars will still sound harsh and brutal.

 

This seems like a rather jarring stylistic contradiction, but on a certain level, it works. For in­stance, people who had an instinctive attraction to the new «heavy» sounds, but were repelled by the «shock» image of the usual glam rockers, would probably see Bon Jovi as a guiding light — you can headbang to this music all you want, but you don't have to cuss, and you don't have to be afraid of embarrassing your God-fearing friends from the PMRC. And it works the other way round, too — if you come to Bon Jovi, merely out of scientific curiosity, expecting to hear the most godawful shite ever recorded, this lack of power ballads, for one thing, will be an almost pleasant surprise.

 

Still, even with all the pleasant surprises, this is some of the most godawful shite ever recorded, and the reason is simple enough: TEH DRAMA! You can almost literally feel the veins and arte­ries all over the well-exercised body of Jon Bon Jovi puff up and explode from being overworked as he piles up tons upon tons of sympathy for the protagonists of his songs (usually himself, but sometimes outsiders, too — ʽRunawayʼ is the ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ of the hair metal world, and the poor thing has become addicted to steroids since 1967). The general focus is not on how to make these primitive, if sometimes catchy, pop melodies more interesting, but on how to convey the agony and the suffering — because, you see, he's ʽBurning For Loveʼ as he calls upon her to ʽCome Backʼ, but ʽLove Liesʼ that ʽShe Don't Know Meʼ, so he's ʽShot Through The Heartʼ in an always-losing game of Russian ʽRouletteʼ. Figuratively speaking, of course. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. (Not that there's much danger of anything here bearing resemblance to any activity by a real person, of course).

 

This is why, even acknowledging the pop hooks of the band's choruses, I find them ineffective. You can find yourself out on the street, distractedly humming "ooooooh, she's a little runaway" if you are not too careful, but it's a crude, blunt, shallow chorus, devoid of any subtlety or musical point of interest, relying on the power of the "oooooh" and the stop-and-start bit of the chorus to win over the hearts of undemanding fans. Oh, and the speed, of course — the speed at which these choruses are delivered are an integral part of the album's success. And then there's more drama in group vocalizations (ʽBreakoutʼ), gang shouts ("SHOT! SHOT! SHOT!"), and, of course, Sambora's ecstatic solos all over the place.

 

Interestingly enough, the album's only (still rather minor) hit was ʽShe Don't Know Meʼ — the only song in Bon Jovi's discography not written or co-written by a member of Bon Jovi; I guess their record label, at this point, did not yet trust Jon and Ritchie's hitmaking capacities, relying on outside songwriters. Indeed, the song is the least «metal» thing on the album and the closest thing here to a power ballad (though still taken at a much faster tempo for that) — more accurately, this is the closest Jon Bon Jovi comes to sounding as if he'd been having a crying fit on the album, always a big winner for all them lady fans.

 

Everything else follows pretty much the same formula — and, to be fair, we must state that Bon Jovi pretty much invented that formula, or at least became its absolute dominators: the «Keep It Simple, Serious» formula. In other words, their music is similar to Van Halen, but composition- and realisation-wise, it is much simpler, and attitude-wise, it takes itself far more seriously, with not an ounce of humor or sarcasm in sight. An atrocious formula, to be sure, but there's also some­thing perversely attractive in its atrociousness, at least for the first time around — enough to suggest at least giving a single spin to ʽRouletteʼ or ʽShot Through The Heartʼ, probably the two best examples of Bon Jovi's «heavy metal broken heart» schtick on here. Despite the massive re­putation of Slippery When Wet, it really doesn't get much better in the future — in fact, there wouldn't be a future Bon Jovi album where they'd play so fast on the average, and speedy Bon Jovi, warts and all, is always preferable to slow Bon Jovi, no exceptions.

 

7800° FAHRENHEIT (1985)

 

1) In And Out Of Love; 2) Price Of Love; 3) Only Lonely; 4) King Of The Mountain; 5) Silent Night; 6) Tokyo Road; 7) The Hardest Part Is The Night; 8) Always Run To You; 9) (I Don't Wanna Fall) To The Fire; 10) Secret Dreams.

 

IN AND OUT OF LOVE!

 

IN AND OUT OF LOVE!

 

IN AND OUT OF LOVE!

 

IN AND OUT OF LOVE!

 

This here is, like, one of the most blatant uses of the word «love» as a metonymical euphemism for «snatch», which is itself a euphemism for... oh, never mind. Anyway, it's sort of reassuring to know that on their second album, the boys from Bon Jovi are feeling more and more at home with the next stage of sexual revolution (i. e. the infamous Eighties progression from «fuck your part­ner in the name of peace, love, and understanding» to «fuck everything that moves in the name of GOING WILD!»). If the first song on the first album (ʽRunawayʼ) was a Serious Social State­ment on parent-offspring relationships, then the first song on the second album has the prota­gonist getting to business with the little runaway in question — "she's here to make my night complete". From ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ to ʽStray Cat Bluesʼ in a jiffy.

 

The bad news is that Bon Jovi as a dick-waving band are just about as unimpressive as they are in their «serious message carrier» capacity. ʽIn And Out Of Loveʼ never evolves much beyond its opening lines, or even simply beyond the five syllables of its title, a dumb hook so blatantly ob­vious that I cannot even understand where they nicked it from — probably most other songwriters were just too ashamed to make something that simple into the be-all-end-all for a pop song (and even record buyers were sort of bashful about taking it to the top of the charts). And even so, it is arguably the best song on the album.

 

In a bout of bad news, 7800° Fahrenheit adds power ballads to the Bon Jovi setlist: ʽSilent Nightʼ, thoroughly soaked in power chords and keyboards, slows down the tempo and shifts the balance from «muscle» to «sentimentality»: an anthem to lost love that puts forward Jon Bon Jovi's vocals as the major point of attraction. While we are on it, I do have to admit that I'd rather have Jon's «street-wise», hushed, slightly croaky troubadour pipes than the mock-operatic postu­ring of power-pop-metal singers like Glenn Hughes or Dave Coverdale — meaning that even a song like ʽSilent Nightʼ would rather be described as «pointless» and «boring» rather than «utterly disgusting» and «intolerable». And, for that matter, I find Richie Sambora's guitar tone and approach to the construction of the solo on that song somewhat interesting — not altogether predictable as far as «power solos» go. But none of that justifies the very fact that, whatever «integrity» Bon Jovi had with their first album, with ʽSilent Nightʼ they have compromised it, once and for all — and now there is no turning back.

 

Besides ʽSilent Nightʼ, «muscular sentimentality» also ruins ʽOnly Lonelyʼ, ʽThe Hardest Part Is The Nightʼ, and ʽSecret Dreamsʼ, even though their tempos are quicker and the I'm-the-loneliest-guy-in-the-world vocals are not so totally upstaging everything else — not that there's much of anything else, just the same uninteresting riffs and predictable bluesy solos. Of the other tracks, ʽKing Of The Mountainʼ and ʽTokyo Roadʼ are the only ones worth some mention — ʽTokyo Roadʼ is at least unusual in its selection of a quote from a Japanese folk song for the introduction, while ʽKing Of The Mountainʼ is so ridiculously bulgy and sludgy that it stands out for that very reason, with all of its heavily accentuated beats. But yet again, «standing out» does not neces­sarily make a good song.

 

According to reports, the band itself was dissatisfied with the final results, and used that dis­satisfaction as a pretext to break up with its original producer Lance Quinn. Other than a heavier dependence on keyboards, though, I do not hear that much crucial difference between this style and Slippery When Wet — why this album was a relative flop where its successor would be a mega-million-seller remains a bit of a mystery to me. Perhaps it was due to the general dete­rioration of public taste that reached its apogee in 1986. Or perhaps it was due to the use of the talk box. Yeah, that must be it, it's all about the talk box. A little pig grunting on a hard rock track can work wonders — just ask Peter Frampton. Thumbs down, by the way.

 

SLIPPERY WHEN WET (1986)

 

1) Let It Rock; 2) You Give Love A Bad Name; 3) Livin' On A Prayer; 4) Social Disease; 5) Wanted Dead Or Alive; 6) Raise Your Hands; 7) Without Love; 8) I'd Die For You; 9) Never Say Goodbye; 10) Wild In The Streets.

 

There is one hilarious discrepancy between ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ and its accompanying video which, I think, more or less summarizes all you need to know about Bon Jovi. The lyrics and the «aural autmosphere» of the song reveal it as a dumbed-down, trivialized take on Springsteen: here's Tommy who works on the docks, there's Gina who works at the diner, times are tough, but they got each other and that's a fact, and eventually we disentangle ourselves from the scary grip of the grunting talkbox and make the transition to the optimistic, hope-inspiring chorus: musical medication for the weary souls of the working class, what's not to like?

 

But then we take a look at the video and... what the heck? It's a video about Bon Jovi, the band, rehearsing their flying-over-the-stage routines and then carrying them out in the presence of an ecstatic stadium audience. What exactly does that have to do with Tommy and Gina? Answer: nothing, and there's no reason it ever should, because the song is not about Tommy and Gina, it is about excess, escapism, and adrenaline. The bassline makes you want to dance, the talkbox makes you want to pull scary faces, and the chorus... the chorus is like Beethoven's friggin' ʽOde To Joyʼ, well, sharing the same spiritual function, I mean. It also has the word «prayer» in it, which would probably appeal to all the religious members of the audience (a lesson that would soon be learned by Madonna and God knows who else).

 

Still, the lyrics are important — Jon Bon Jovi sends out a clear signal that he is here for all the dock workers and all the diner servers in America (and the world as a whole), and certainly not for any sort of pretentious elitist snobs who value vague ideas like «complexity» and «class» over a very concrete and easily understandable idea like «instantaneous mass appeal». Joining forces with promising young producer Bruce Fairbairn and promising young corporate songwriter Des­mond Child (both of whom would soon become walking symbols of the glam metal era), Bon Jovi trim some of the excessively electronic fat from Fahrenheit, put some tighter screws on the hooks, and come out with an album that, according to popular statistics, has so far managed to sell about 28 million copies — we could add «because every dock worker and every diner server in the world got at least one», but that would be a cheap insult to two respectable professions that are really far more useful and noble than the profession of a glam metal artist.

 

The amazing commercial success of the record was not, I think, exclusively due to the «magic» of the songwriting and the production — in a large part, it was due to the fact that by 1986, the world was ready for Bon Jovi in a way in which it was not yet ready for Bon Jovi two years, or even one year earlier. And there were lots of things that had gradually prepared the world for it — not the least of them Bruce Springsteen himself, whose catchy, glossy rock bombast on Born In The U.S.A. must have been no less a major inspiration for Bon Jovi than the hedonistic pop metal of Van Halen and friends. The main point being — even if we distance ourselves from issues of «taste», «class», or «intelligence», it's not as if we see the birth of a new formula here on Slip­pery When Wet: we merely witness its acceptance by the world at large.

 

The music is now neatly divided between power rockers and power ballads, the former praising the material joys of life and the latter reminding of spiritual pleasures — curiously enough, «tits and ass» being more or less equally split here between the material and the spiritual half (this would soon be remedied on New Jersey, their most quintessential «glam» recording of all time). That said, there is really very little structural or compositional difference here between the rockers and the ballads — other than tempos and slight tweaks in Sambora's guitar tones. And why should there be, if even the two biggest hits of the album are based on the exact same bass line? ʽYou Give Love A Bad Nameʼ (itself a re-write of ʽShot Through The Heartʼ from the first album) is really almost the same song as ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ, except it doesn't have the talkbox effect, which, I guess, makes it inferior.

 

I must admit that «catchiness» applies to the absolute majority of these choruses. In records like these, what matters is whether you can look back at the song titles and reconstruct the melodies from them in your head, and yes I can: "nothing would mean nothing WITHOUT LOVE!" (double negative alert!), "NEVER SAY GOODBYE! NEVER SAY GOODBAYIEEAY!" (this one was like a blueprint for 99% of Aerosmith power ballads, wasn't it?), "we were WILD IN THE STREETS! WILD, WILD, WILD IN THE STREETS!" — hey, I get most of it, and I can totally see why 100,000,000 Bon Jovi fans couldn't be wrong. I think that only the glam-cowboy anthem ʽWanted Dead Or Aliveʼ falls foul of this formula, and should by all means be qualified as unsuccessful filler in this context: too slow and too distant from the true goals of the album (not to mention that it has a little too much syncopation in it — not a good thing, people might start spilling too much of their beers from those plastic cups).

 

To be fair, though, I was able to do that with Fahrenheit as well, so there is no reason why this record should be rated any higher in comparison; besides, we are long past 1986 and its values, even if those values have not managed to find a better defender than Bon Jovi ever since, so I cannot exclude that the album will still be listened to a hundred years from now, at least by those who find its friendly, hedonistic, excessive vibe «retrospectively refreshing» or something like that. The gut appeal of Slippery When Wet is undeniable, and there is no need to fight it if you properly un­derstand the place of this music among other types of music — the problem is that most people simply refuse to understand.

 

My thumbs down will not make any serious difference here — it will merely indicate that in this particular case, I think that the «guilty pleasure» aspects of this album do not excuse its embarrassingly manipulative nature, nor do they compensate for the very poor ratio of musical complexity to anthemic pretense. That said, I also have to admit that the moment where the talk­box guitar kicks in on ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ is one of the most psychologically efficient moments in the history of hard rock — too bad they had to go and spoil it with one more idiotic anthemic chorus, instead of simply keeping on grossing out the little old ladies and scaring the shit out of little children.

 

NEW JERSEY (1988)

 

1) Lay Your Hands On Me; 2) Bad Medicine; 3) Born To Be My Baby; 4) Living In Sin; 5) Blood On Blood; 6) Homebound Train; 7) Wild Is The Wind; 8) Ride Cowboy Ride; 9) Stick To Your Guns; 10) I'll Be There For You; 11) 99 In The Shade; 12) Love For Sale.

 

Scrutinizing the million shades of awful is kind of an ungrateful affair, but such is our trade, and therefore, I have to state that the concept of «Bon Jovi as decadent superstars» somehow feels more forgivable to me than the concept of «Bon Jovi vying for decadent superstardom». There's just something hilarious about seeing these guys work out of the understanding that they are the biggest band in the world (and have to uphold that image), rather than just diligently push for­ward in the faint, but prophetic hope of gaining that title. More than once, I have seen the word «confidence» spring up in the discussion of New Jersey — and indeed, this is Bon Jovi at their most self-confident, hairiest, glammiest, narcissistic ever. It's just that the album has no talkbox, but in every other respect it outbellies its predecessor.

 

I mean, you can hardly get any more arrogant than naming your album New Jersey (naturally, to remind your fair country that you come from the same place as The Boss, and, incidentally, would not mind claiming the same title), and you can hardly get more blasphemous than calling your first song ʽLay Your Hands On Meʼ, as if you imagined yourself to be... well, you know. With overdubbed crowd noises, overwhelming drums, martial vocal harmonies — the intro to the song states the fact that Bon Jovi are now very, very, very big and they like it that way. Throw in a church organ-imitating synthesizer and a clearly gospel chorus, and what you get is a double metaphor: evangelical clichés as a substitute for a love serenade, and a love serenade as a sub­stitute for letting you know that Bon Jovi are now bigger than Jesus Christ. (Well, at least that hair sure beats the Son of God in most of the cultural depictions.)

 

Then there's ʽBad Medicineʼ — written according to the usual hit formula, but arguably with far more swagger than any of their previous hits, as the boys feel completely loose and totally self-confident, as if the results of clinical analysis had just come in and it were now medically con­firmed that the collective length of their virility organs could girdle the Taj Mahal three times over, and not even Mötley Crüe could beat this achievement. It isn't even a particularly smutty song, lyrics-wise — it just rains so much testosterone that the effect becomes comical, especially at the end, when Jon «urges the band on» with one last chorus: "I'm not done! One more time! WITH FEELIN'!" I'd like to hate this song for the usual melodically primitive, intellectually offensive piece of glam-pop tripe that it is, but I'm just a bit too busy laughing to do that.

 

In fact, there is only one song on this album that is seriously offensive — its main offense being in taking itself too seriously. ʽBlood On Bloodʼ, a brawny sentimental reminiscence on Bon Jovi's childhood friendships, once again intrudes on Springsteen territory, as all the band members take their cues directly from the corresponding members of the E Street Band, but interpret them according to their own limited musical vision, which places loudness, pathos, and emotional simplicity above everything else. I can see myself getting entertained by Bon Jovi in an uncom­fortable dream — I could see myself getting inspired over a passionate epic anthem by Bon Jovi only in the worst of nightmares.

 

Fortunately, the next song is ʽHomebound Trainʼ, which takes us from Springsteen into the tenets of Southern rock-cum-pop-metal, toying around with a bit of me-and-the-devil imagery, but ulti­mately just a vehicle for some head-spinning sleazy-funky jamming, with a fairly long instru­mental section that may or may not have been the inspiration for Aerosmith's ʽLove In An Ele­vatorʼ (the two songs are quite similar in tone, although ʽTrainʼ is faster and more aggressive in spirit). Together with ʽBad Medicineʼ, ʽ99 In The Shadeʼ, and the closing acoustic ditty ʽLove For Saleʼ (allegedly recorded at a drunken party, but with some pretty nifty acoustic solos played out for a drunk guitarist), this all forms the «cock rock» basis for New Jersey, around which you see sprinkled the occasional bad social statement like ʽBlood On Bloodʼ and a bunch of by now inescapable power ballads like ʽI'll Be There For Youʼ that you have to be ready for in any situa­tion — nobody wants to deliberately lower his odds of getting laid, after all.

 

In brief, this is that one perfect juncture in Bon Jovi's career when they had already «gone pro», but did not yet feel the need or pressure to «mature»: New Jersey is mostly about having fun, and succeeds even better simply because by now, the band has no nervous obligation to «prove itself» (apart from demonstrating that their success was not a fluke, which is not that difficult if you keep Desmond Child and Bruce Fairbairn by your side). There is still no talk, nor will there ever be, of the band putting out a genuinely «good» record, but it only made me puke once or twice, and that's certainly something to remember.

 

KEEP THE FAITH (1992)

 

1) I Believe; 2) Keep The Faith; 3) I'll Sleep When I'm Dead; 4) In These Arms; 5) Bed Of Roses; 6) If I Was Your Mother; 7) Dry Country; 8) Woman In Love; 9) Fear; 10) I Want You; 11) Blame It On The Love Of Rock'n'Roll; 12) Little Bit Of Soul; 13*) Save A Prayer.

 

One thing you gotta give to these guys: they sure know how to adapt to the changing times. Or, perhaps, somebody knew how to adapt them to the changing times. The majority of hair metal bands could come and go and leave no trace whatsoever, but Bon Jovi were the major hostages of the system par excellence: the biggest band in the world, or something close to that, does not just come and go at will. They had to reinvent themselves and come out on top as usual, or something would be revealed as wrong with the business model.

 

In other words, in this era of triumphant grunge and «alt-rock» values, as rock'n'roll music once again seemed to be entering a «serious» age, Bon Jovi had to get serious, too. That entire "bad medicine is what I need!" schtick had to go, although there are still some traces of it here, in the form of the oh-so-flat barroom rocker ʽBlame It On The Love Of Rock'n'Rollʼ, for instance. Not that this was any sort of problem for Jon Bon Jovi, who had always, more than anything in the world, be Mr. Bono Springsteen the Third, and now it's as if Father Time himself was knocking on his door: "Two minutes to Big Social Statement Ball, Mr. Bon Jovi!"

 

The change of producer was accidental: they wanted Bruce Fairbairn on the job again, but he was busy producing guess what? — Aerosmith's Get A Grip, of course! — and so they had to settle for the next best thing: Bob Rock, who helped Mötley Crüe become a household name with Dr. Feelgood. The overall production values or sound type have not changed much, actually, except for one obvious thing — the album is much more bass-heavy, both in the guitar and keyboards department, symbolically reflecting an increase in Depth. As for the songs, the good old «power ballad» is not going anywhere, what with it already having had Depth from the beginning; but the «cock rocker» is thoroughly replaced by the «heart rocker».

 

I would guess that anybody who first saw the track listing on the new Bon Jovi album would have to go, «oh no, they're Christian rockers now!» But in fact, calling the songs ʽI Believeʼ and ʽKeep The Faithʼ was just a cozy trick to attract a part of the religious audience — lyrically, it is never made clear what it is exactly that we have to believe in, and what sort of faith should we keep: both tunes are just vague-and-vapid «spiritual anthems» of the «life-is-shit-but-we-will-pull-through» variety. There's also a song with the word «soul» in the title, and if you get the bonus-tracked edition, the last song is called ʽSave A Prayerʼ. Well — only natural, now that you have probably made love to every single young female on the planet, to save a little prayer for desert, and make us all think about our souls, if only for a little bit.

 

Now here comes the strange part: many, if not most, of these songs are fairly catchy — no matter how much more pomp they pump, the vocal hooks are still there. ʽI Believeʼ is a slavish imitation of U2, and Jon's Bono-influenced wail is wailed at just the right climactic moment in just the right intonation to convince a hundred thousand-strong stadium to sing along. ʽKeep The Faithʼ, the band's first experience with that new, trendy, funk-poppy, Madchester-style sound that keeps your body so busy, also does a good job of gradually climbing up towards the explosion. And I will even put down the grin for a moment and admit that ʽFearʼ is a good song — notwithstan­ding the open theft of the main chorus riff from Michael Jackson's ʽBeat Itʼ, its paranoid buildup has something really scary about it (it doesn't hurt, either, that the song is not as mercilessly stretched out as everything else on here, clocking in at 3:05 like a good lad).

 

Even so, they manage to overdo it every now and then. The most obvious case is ʽDry Countyʼ, a song squeezed out to Epic Proportions because Epic Points need to be justified by Epic Length. How do you know which one is a record's major artistic statement? — by the size, of course. Building up, falling down, stopping for breath, kicking the shit out of that drumstand, unwinding the most frickin' ecstatic guitar solo of your life — all of this going hand in hand with lyrics about the failure of The American Dream, be it for one person in particular or for all mankind. Are you game enough to join Jon and Richie in their eulogy for idealism? I'm not. The whole experience is way too artificial and calculated, and who really needs it if you can have Neil Young's ʽRockin' In The Free Worldʼ instead of this combination of gloss with primitivism?

 

Yet on the whole, despite all the predictably calculated aspects and despite the rather irritating length, Keep The Faith is probably the last Bon Jovi album that is consistently listenable. The songs keep their «tough» musculature and frequently rock, the choruses are well thought out, and you could trim these 70 minutes down to a reasonable 40 if you pruned out some of the power ballads (ʽBed Of Rosesʼ is just awful, and would be just as awful even if it did not contain the hilariously-unintentionally-blasphemous line "I wanna be just as close as your holy ghost is") and removed some of the verses and/or bridges from others. And yes, ʽDry Countyʼ would have to go — not because it is the worst song on the album, but simply out of principle. Quod licet Iovi, not licet Bon Jovi, as the Romans said, which freely translates into English as: «What the hell is a nine-minute song doing on a Bon Jovi record, of all possible places?»

 

THESE DAYS (1995)

 

1) Hey God; 2) Something For The Pain; 3) This Ain't A Love Song; 4) These Days; 5) Lie To Me; 6) Damned; 7) My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms; 8) (It's Hard) Letting You Go; 9) Hearts Breaking Even; 10) Something To Believe In; 11) If That's What It Takes; 12) Diamond Ring; 13) All I Want Is Everything; 14) Bitter Wine.

 

By the mid-1990s, they took it way too far. At least Keep The Faith still retained some features typical of a rock'n'roll album — These Days took its formula of ecstatic power ballads and foam-at-the-mouth social anthems to such a hardcore conclusion that even Richie Sambora's electric guitar sounds like a superfluous addition, used mainly to control the high volume levels rather than melodic potential and rock'n'roll energy. The goddamn thing is long, too — fourteen tracks that go on forever, one demonstrative stab of one's own heart after another until you just can't help but wonder, how much soul can one heart contain, physically?

 

Every song on this album is soaked in sentimentality of the most blatant order: not even ol' Bruce himself probably could cram that much in 73 minutes. The band did say that they were under heavy influence from old soul and R&B records at the time, but stylistically, they sound as if they were probably just trading influences between themselves and Aerosmith: if Permanent Vaca­tion sounded totally modelled on Slippery When Wet, then These Days takes its lessons from Get A Grip — ʽThis Ain't A Love Songʼ and ʽHearts Breaking Evenʼ in particular sound like carbon copies of ʽCrazyʼ and ʽCryingʼ, even borrowing some of Tyler's vocal moves, let alone the total similarity in arrangement and mood. Consequently, all of this sounds well tested, unimagi­native, and supported only by the sheer physical strength of these guys, as if making music were in the same department as pumping iron.

 

As always, I make no claim about tracks like ʽHey Godʼ or ʽSomething To Believe Inʼ lacking sincerity. Sincerity is so much in the eye of the beholder that it is useless to speculate on how much Jon Bon Jovi was really worried about all the evil in the world, or on whether it is at all ethical for a millionnaire rock star to sing songs about poverty and social injustice (it is hardly a coincidence though, I guess, that both These Days and Get A Grip begin with such a song: first and foremost, the world must be shown that they really care). It is not the lack of sincerity that bothers me — it is the «overcooking» of these products, whose instrumental melodies never stray away from tattered alt-rock clichés, but whose vocal execution taxes Jon's voice to an extent where he cannot pay these taxes, yet still makes us believe that he can; check out his attempt to «gurgle» and stay in key at the same time on one of the "somethiiiiiing... to believe in!" of the «climactic» chorus — anything goes to show us just how much he cares. Who gives a damn if you're a poor songwriter? Just beat your working class breast like nobody else.

 

On the other flank of the love front, the band is now trying out an additional formula: stripped-down acoustic balladry with Jon in weeping troubadour mode (ʽLetting You Goʼ, ʽDiamond Ringʼ). Its effect is exactly the same, though: the songs could pass for inoffensive, unimpressive filler if not for the DRAMA in the singer's voice that immediately converts them into unlistenable crap. Maybe somebody like Willie Nelson could uncover the true potential of ʽLetting You Goʼ, but this rendition carries an instantly lethal overdose of sweetness. Just as a song with a title as pretentious as ʽMy Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Armsʼ (a monster hybrid of ʽWhile My Guitar Gently Weepsʼ and ʽLove Lies Bleeding In My Handsʼ, I suppose) carries an instantly lethal overdose of TRAGEDY GLOOM DESPERATION KILL YOURSELF NOW NOW NOW. Also, "I can't write a love song the way I feel today", he says, but then apparently today turns into tomor­row, because the very next song is a love song. Oh well.

 

Occasional catchiness is the only redeeming factor for this wreck of a record, but this time it is not enough to get it off the hook — These Days pretends to more seriousness than any other preceding Bon Jovi album without any musical development whatsoever. Give me a straight, no-frills, no-pretense song like ʽBad Medicineʼ over ʽSomething For The Painʼ any time of day: as I already said, New Jersey had the optimal balance between ambition and potential that these guys could ever establish for themselves, and since then it's all been downhill, and These Days is the first Bon Jovi album where I cannot fix myself a positive outlook even on one single song. Total­ly thumbs down to a band that should have never outlived its big hair, really.

 

CRUSH (2000)

 

1) It's My Life; 2) Say It Isn't So; 3) Thank You For Loving Me; 4) Two Story Town; 5) Next 100 Years; 6) Just Older; 7) Mystery Train; 8) Save The World; 9) Captain Crash & The Beauty Queen From Mars; 10) She's Mystery; 11) I Got The Girl; 12) One Wild Night; 13*) I Could Make A Living Out Of Lovin' You.

 

Thirty-eight is not an age to joke about — for some people, the nostalgic pull is stronger than ever around that particular time, and Crush is the first Bon Jovi album to ride the nostalgia vibe real seriously. Textual, musical, and atmospheric references to past idols abound here — the Beatles, Bowie, James Brown, and, of course, the young Bon Jovi themselves: ʽIt's My Lifeʼ opens the record with unmistakeable references to ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ — in the reference to "Tommy and Gina", and in The Return Of The Son Of The Talkbox. On the whole, for the first time in his life, Jon seems to be looking backwards in his career rather than forward. Could this help to improve the music, considering how it had mostly been awful all the time he had been looking forward? Will the Beatles help?..

 

Not bloody likely. Given that «Bon Jovi» is really a disease, the best we can do about it is to keep it relatively harmless — sometimes even slightly enjoyable, as in a nice light warm fever when we are looking for an excuse to not get out of bed. From that point of view, Crush alternates between sickly convalescence, when the mind is no longer delirious but still too weak to pursue a serious course of action, and occasional painful relapses — whenever, for example, the band strikes up yet another «knight-in-shining-armor»-type power ballad (I am still trying to figure out which one makes for more efficient torture — ʽThank You For Loving Meʼ or ʽSave The Worldʼ; current bets are on the latter, if only for the atrocious lyrical metaphors: "I wasn't born a rich man / I ain't got no pedigree / The sweat on this old collar / That's my Ph.D.").

 

But there are some interesting lines of experimentation. The album's most ambitious undertaking is ʽNext 100 Yearsʼ, an epic anthem with grand harmonies à la ʽHey Judeʼ and swooping psyche­delic orchestration that also apes the Fab Four circa 1967 (a few string lines are lifted almost directly from ʽI Am The Walrusʼ). Although the main part of the song is rather boring, the instru­mental coda, especially when the tempo is accelerated and Sambora steps in with a harsh, but melodic solo, merging the borders between orchestral art-pop and hard rock, for a few minutes I manage to almost forget about what band it is that I am listening to. At the very least, ʽNext 100 Yearsʼ is miles above any overtly sentimental power pop ballad they ever did.

 

Another «kinda fun» track is ʽCaptain Crash & The Beauty Queen From Marsʼ, the band's tribute to the classic era of glam rock whose title by itself, as you can see, is immediately associated with Elton John and David Bowie at the same time. Nothing particularly inspiring about the generic midtempo rock melody of the song, but its nostalgic flair is surprisingly free of irritants — even the allusive line about "dressed up just like Ziggy but he couldn't play guitar" is funny, especially if you take it to be self-referential. And if I am not mistaken, ʽI Got The Girlʼ is an intentional attempt to write (and even sing!) a song in the style of Tom Petty's ʽAmerican Girlʼ or the like, and if you ask me, it's a big relief to hear it bounce and rock like that after the first verse has just threatened your life with the perspectives of yet another power ballad. In other words, if retro­grade nostalgia results in unpredictable surprises, so be it.

 

That said, three decent songs are not enough to make up for a good album — which is still being dragged down, not just by the ballads, but also by stuff like ʽIt's My Lifeʼ (where the talkbox sounds stupid rather than scary, and the chorus is even more pedestrian than the one in ʽPrayerʼ) and the neo-country-rock of ʽMystery Trainʼ (no relation to the Elvis classic). At least, with all this nostalgic flavor, they had the good sense to end the record with a throwback to the good old days of totally dumb hair metal — ʽOne Wild Nightʼ is just the kind of song that goes perfectly well hand in hand with lion manes, freaky outfits, and flying over the stage with golden sparks rattling off the sides of your guitar. So, generally speaking, Crush is an improvement over These Days — a little less pretense, a little more surprise, maybe showing a little more maturity and sensibility to the band, but the tasteless parts and the boring parts stay as tasteless and boring as they'd ever been. Hey, God bless nostalgia in the children of the 1960s and early 1970s — at least it shows how growing up on the Beatles and David Bowie was healthier for the spirit than grow­ing up on Bon Jovi.

 

ONE WILD NIGHT: LIVE 1985-2001 (2001)

 

1) It's My Life; 2) Livin' On A Prayer; 3) You Give Love A Bad Name; 4) Keep The Faith; 5) Someday I'll Be Saturday Night; 6) Rockin' In The Free World; 7) Something To Believe In; 8) Wanted Dead Or Alive; 9) Runaway; 10) In And Out Of Love; 11) I Don't Like Mondays; 12) Just Older; 13) Something For The Pain; 14) Bad Medicine; 15) One Wild Night.

 

It is very hard to decide whether a Bon Jovi live album would be better thought of as a single performance from a single show (or at least a bunch of shows from the same tour), or as a spraw­ling retrospective like this one, with performances drawn from 1985, before they even matured into major stars; 1995-96 (the height of the «rebranding» era); and the most recent tour in support of Crush. Normally, tight and compact works best for live performance, but only when the band in question is tight and compact, and can boast a fabulous live sound; with Bon Jovi, chances of their ever producing a Live At Leeds have always been negative at best.

 

As it happens, though, it really does not matter: Bon Jovi have always been a rather boring band when plopped on stage. Sure they had the looks, and the hair, and wings to fly (sometimes almost literal­ly so), but they never truly gave any of their songs any additional life on stage, beyond may­be an extended intro or two (these days, for instance, they always start off ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ with an actual simulation of a «musical prayer», which may last almost as long as the song itself — not here, fortunately, where there is just a little bit of atmospheric talkbox fun before the entire band kicks in). This is actually quite normal for a «pop» band — which they were despite all the «rock» trappings — and if one does not demand radical stage reinventions from Paul McCartney, why should one do so with Bon Jovi?

 

The problem being, of course, that Bon Jovi play Bon Jovi songs. Mostly — sometimes, when they play non-Bon Jovi songs, you wish they wouldn't: Neil Young's ʽRockin' In The Free Worldʼ loses all of its tragic flavor when stripped of Neil Young's voice and Neil Young's guitar, in the place of which we have Bon Jovi choral harmonies and hair-metallic Samborisms — melodic all right, but without any individual style. From the same 1995 tour, they also include a duet with Bob Geldof on ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ — nice song, sure enough, but why would the world need a Bon Jovi version? It's essentially a vocal-driven musical number, to which Jon cannot add any­thing that is not already present in Geldof's vocal timbre. It goes without saying that they could have done much worse (for instance, chosen an Osmonds song to cover), but these particular examples are totally uninspiring.

 

As for the originals, it's competence throughout and brilliance nowhere in sight. The talkbox sounds terrific on ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ, blown into with even more versatility than in the studio (considering that this version is from 2000, I guess you can't go wrong with more than 15 years of experience), but the vocals are consistently weaker — not out of tune or anything, just sort of feeble; with all due respect, Jon has always been more of a looker than a singer, and although in the studio he can usually work hard enough to get that «perfect take» or close to it, live you really have to see him to fall in love with him, if you're the falling-in-love kind: Mr. Tom Jones he ain't. Just compare the studio and live versions of ʽKeep The Faithʼ for proof.

 

The good news, and the only reason why the record will not be getting a thumbs down from me, is that they intentionally avoid allmost of their power ballads — how this happened, I don't know, but there's no ʽI'll Be There For Youʼ, no ʽBed Of Rosesʼ, nothing. They must have performed them, but they aren't here: the album relies almost exclusively upon «rocking» material. This is sort of an uncommercial decision, and if it was undertaken in order to make way for the retro­spective approach and make more space for old renditions of ʽRunawayʼ and ʽIn And Out Of Loveʼ, so much the better. Still, the album as a whole — and any other live Bon Jovi album — may really only be recommended to people who probably do not read these reviews.

 

And, al­though this really has nothing to do with the music, what's up with the incongruent title? Is this One Wild Night or Live 1985-2001? Or is this a subtle metaphorical point — that the entire time from 1985 to 2001 has, for this particular band, been like «one wild night»? If so, it's not as if the metaphor were seriously substantiated by these performances, whose level of «wildness» often leaves a lot to be desired. These guys aren't cavemen by no means — they are very much a product of the technological era.

 

BOUNCE (2002)

 

1) Undivided; 2) Everyday; 3) The Distance; 4) Joey; 5) Misunderstood; 6) All About Lovin' You; 7) Hook Me Up; 8) Right Side Of Wrong; 9) Love Me Back To Life; 10) You Had Me From Hello; 11) Bounce; 12) Open All Night.

 

After the «crush», comes the «bounce»... if we were talking predators, I guess the two should have been turned around, but first, Bon Jovi are no predators, and second, Bounce is supposed to deal with the issue of «bouncing back» from 9/11. Since the music business logically supposed that the American people were now in more need of spiritual guidance from established artists than ever before, there was no way Bon Jovi could not write their country an album about it — after all, Bruce Springsteen did, and even Neil Young did, even being from a different country and all, and I suppose Billy Joel would have done one, too, had he still been interested in writing pop songs rather than recasting himself as a 21st century reincarnation of Chopin.

 

In all honesty, 9/11 was a pretty clumsy pretext for writing topical anthems — perhaps because so many people rushed to use it for inspiration, and, as it often happens in such cases, most, if not all, of the results felt flat, or, at least, have not outlived their momentum (anybody still remember Paul McCartney's ʽFreedomʼ? Even ʽGive Ireland Back To The Irishʼ had more lasting value...). The Bon Jovi album is hardly an exception, but on the whole, Bounce has more or less the same feel as Crush — not knowing its context and not listening to the lyrics, you'd hardly get the im­pression that something particularly awful and life-changing had inspired its appearance. ʽUndi­videdʼ opens the record with a song of dread, hope and unity, but essentially it is just a common-sounding alt-rocker whose best part is Sambora's short and elegantly constructed guitar solo; the harmonies on the "one for love, one for truth" chorus come together in a muddy howl, singing along to which is not much fun, although, of course, if any of the band's fans want to pretend that doing so really makes them feel "united" and "undivided", it's their Jove-given right.

 

Much more efficient is the lead single that preceded the album itself — ʽEverydayʼ consists of all the same ingredients (plus a little bit of the talkbox to immediately let you know who's been slee­ping here), but it's got a credible paranoid pulse to it, with a solidly doubled bass-guitar riff and a respectable verse-bridge-chorus buildup, one of the boys' most successful pop-rock concoctions from the last millennium (and another good guitar solo, too). And it's not the only such song here: ʽHook Me Upʼ and the title track are also energetic, catchy, and not particularly suffering from overproduction. Jon's good-boyishness certainly shines through in how he does not dare go all the way with the "me, I just don't give a f-f-f-f-f..." of the bridge, but when you are dominated by the rules of the game of much of your established audience (at least, the hypocritical part of it), I guess there ain't much to do but to follow the rules.

 

In between these few rockers comes a lot of softer stuff that mostly just flies out of the window right away. As Jon grows older, he gradually turns away from imitating Springsteen to imitating Billy Joel — ʽJoeyʼ and especially ʽRight Side Of Wrongʼ sound almost note-for-note tributes to Piano Man: grand epics where pianos and strings matter more than guitars, and pathos matters more than pianos and strings. I do, however, have to admit that the orchestral arrangements on these and other songs immediately struck me as the best thing about them, so it was no surprise to learn that they were at least partially handled by David Campbell (the father of Beck and, not co­incidentally, probably the best orchestral arranger in pop of the past thirty years). The strings at least make life less miserable when you are forced to give in to the «spiritual majesty» of these tunes. Nothing, however, redeems the band's excourses into neo-country such as ʽYou Had Me From Helloʼ and ʽMisunderstoodʼ which could just as well be performed by Taylor Swift or somebody else in a sexy red dress.

 

Bottomline: once again, not «awful» — the pluses and minuses outbalance each other fairly well to come together in a «neutral» assessment — but still not enough to raise Jon and Richie to the level of «artist who actually has something worth hearing to say». I mean, okay, it begins with a few songs about 9/11, but it still ends with a song about Jon Bon Jovi's role in Ally McBeal and how it should have turned out. Far be it from me to pass judgement upon whether it is ʽUndivi­dedʼ or ʽOpen All Nightʼ that encapsulates a greater part of the man's spirit. But it could be argu­ed that the album's construction is still symbolical — no matter how horrendous the scope of your latest catastrophe may ne, when it all ends you are still going back to your soap operas, want it or not. Maybe that's what the proverbial «bounce» is all about.

 

THIS LEFT FEELS RIGHT (2003)

 

1) Livin' On A Prayer; 2) Bad Medicine; 3) It's My Life; 4) Lay Your Hands On Me; 5) You Give Love A Bad Name; 6) Bed Of Roses; 7) Everyday; 8) Born To Be My Baby; 9) Keep The Faith; 10) I'll Be There For You; 11) Always; 12) The Distance.

 

Oh my sweet Jesus. I get shivers all over trying to reconstruct, step by step, the abominable logic behind this album. Because the optimal reconstruction goes something like this:

 

«I (we) feel tremendously dissatisfied with myself (ourselves), the way the world thinks about me (us) and my (our) music. Yes, the superstardom, yes, the money, yes, the admiring fans, yes, the ability to make it onto the front cover of Rolling Stone without sarcasm. But does the world really get Bon Jovi? Does the world really feel the depth, really suck in all the potential concealed in those Bon Jovi songs? Can't it simply be that the world loves a steady rock'n'roll beat and loud distorted electric guitars? Could it be that the world dances like crazy to ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ just because it is being seduced by the talkbox effects? What about the message? The bitter inner truth? The emotional angst? The religious connotations? That ain't a world livin' on a prayer — it's a world livin' on a talkbox and a chuggy bassline. No, really, it's high time that something should be done about this! So maybe we have cut our long hair and began dressing in T-shirts and wor­king class jackets — that ain't enough. Too superficial. Something from the heart!»

 

This Left Feels Right is a wicked affair — a complete deconstruction and reconstruction of most of the band's major hits in what could only be called «Heart-On-Sleeve Remixes». Not really «unplugged» as such (although many of the guitar parts are, indeed, acoustic), the album stakes it all on the «melodicity», «emotionality», and «spirituality» of these songs, as they are rearranged with soft, sometimes electronic, drumming, folk/country guitar overdubs, mellow keyboards, and almost angelic vocal harmonies (ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ is reconceived as a Tommy/Gina duet with Mike d'Abo's daughter Olivia — curious that Jon was not able to find anybody of higher stature, but perhaps the addition of a superstar was thought of as incompatible with the «humble» ideo­logy of the project).

 

One has to admit that a lot of work went into the project: most of the time, the rearrangements are truly drastic, making the songs completely unrecognizable, especially the old-time rock hits like ʽBad Medicineʼ and ʽYou Give Love A Bad Nameʼ, both of which are redone as «country-blues-pop» numbers with slide guitars that either weep like George Harrison or go all swampy on us. The ballads, just by being ballads, stay closer to what they used to be, but with most of the elec­tricity going out of them, emphasis is also fully transferred onto the vocal harmonies.

 

The results are predictable: This Left Feels Right sets out to seduce you and leave you in a pool of sentimental tears, as the personal charisma of Jon Bon Jovi and the band's «heavenly» hooks climb into your brain and take control. If it works, it works; but with the overall triviality of the band's melodies and lyrics, if any of these songs made sense in the first place, it was only when they went over the top. Simply put, there is no other setting than its original drunken-swaggery hair-metal arrogance in which a song like ʽBad Medicineʼ would be acceptable. Whether you do it in this stripped-acoustic-bluesy manner, or whether you hire a full Wagnerian orchestra to per­form it, or whether you do an instrumental didgeridoo-only version, this left won't ever feel right to anybody who knows right from left.

 

Ultimately, This Left feels as if all the banality inherently present in Bon Jovi's work has been carefully distilled, filtered out, pressed, folded, and re-packaged for universal consumption. The basic hooks still remain (sometimes), but they have been stripped of their rocking power and relative fun quotient, and forcefully converted into «spiritual anthems». In other words — I could hardly think of a more stupid career move, that is, of course, if Bon Jovi's career ever had «musi­cally intelligent people» as part of its target audience. Much to people's honor, This Left Feels Right sold quite poorly, compared to the band's regular albums — still, the total number of sold copies is said to approximate something like a million and a half, and if this reflects the number of music buyers who are willing to take Jon Bon Jovi as their soul brother and spiritual guru, well, it may not be such a large figure, but still, walk carefully out there, and don't let just about any­body know that you, too, would award the record a thumbs down.

 

HAVE A NICE DAY (2005)

 

1) Have A Nice Day; 2) I Want To Be Loved; 3) Welcome To Wherever You Are; 4) Who Says You Can't Go Home; 5) Last Man Standing; 6) Bells Of Freedom; 7) Wildflower; 8) Last Cigarette; 9) I Am; 10) Complicated; 11) Novo­caine; 12) Story Of My Life; 13) Who Says You Can't Go Home (duet); 14*) Dirty Little Secret; 15*) Unbreakable; 16*) These Open Arms.

 

And with this friendly statement, Bon Jovi become Nickelback. Thirteen (sixteen, if you count the bonuses) tracks of non-stop, completely interchangeable, instantly forgettable, absolutely si­milar-sounding guitar drivel — just the kind of music that gives «rock» such a bad name among progressively-oriented youngsters these days. Up to now, Bon Jovi had been almost everything, from dreadfully tasteless to surprisingly effective when they had their hooks properly aligned, but never before had they been so utterly dull.

 

Whatever potential any of these songs may have (and as far as their bare-bones melodies go, I guess they aren't that much better or worse than the regular Bon Jovi fare), it is all wasted away on arrangements that put volume and pure energy (or imitation thereof) in the place of creativity, and then support them with pathos. The title track greets us with a forcedly passionate "Why you wanna tell me how to live my life?" — even though we'd think, after all these years, there would hardly be anybody left in the world to want to tell Jon Bon Jovi how to live his life. (He'd even cut his hair already, by his own free-will decision). "When the world gets in my face, I say — have a nice day!" And when was the last time it actually happened?

 

Oh, that's right — these songs aren't about (or at least, aren't for) Jon Bon Jovi, they are about and for his young (or not so young already), rebellious audiences. This ʽHave A Nice Dayʼ song — what a perfect anthem to arm yourself with, right? And shove it in the face of anyone who tries to bug you? "My daddy lived a lie, that's just the price that he paid, sacrificed his life just slaving away", but that's not me, sure enough, I ain't gonna repeat the same mistakes. (Instead of slaving away and living a lie, I'm just gonna sit around the house and play Grand Theft Auto all day). What a wonderful song — "standing on the ledge, I'll show the wind how to fly" (these generic power chords sure could teach the wind a lesson or two).

 

If you have honestly listened to and reached an opinion on ʽHave A Nice Dayʼ, and if that opi­nion happens to resemble mine in any way, feel free not to bother with the rest — like I said, all the other songs here are stylistic clones of the title track. Sometimes the tempo slows down and they dig into a source of romanticism (ʽBells Of Freedomʼ, with Desmond Child co-credited for some reason, even if there is not a single vocal or instrumental hook here that hasn't been regur­gitated from the preceding annals of pop history), sometimes the tempo speeds up and the whole song rolls along fast and smooth, a perfect soundtrack for a routine trip along the highway, but in the grand scheme of things, it's all the same all over the place.

 

It is so much the same, in fact, that for a time I didn't even notice that they did ʽWho Says You Can't Go Homeʼ twice — the second time, as a duet with Jennifer Nettles. Official sources say that the alternate version is a «country version», I suppose because, in addition to Nettles, who is herself ranked as a country artist, they add a fiddle and a slide guitar part, without amending any­thing in the basic mix. How easy it is to switch genres these days — throw in an electric guitar solo and you get the «rock version», a fiddle and a Southern gal and you get the «country ver­sion», and then they market you to all these neatly charted sectors of the market, and nothing is really as ʽComplicatedʼ as that track implies ("I'm complicated, I get frustrated, right or wrong, love or hate it") — Kurt was far more convincing, but at least there ain't no big danger of Jon blowing his brains out any of these days: for all its fakery, Have A Nice Day shows a human be­ing with a perfectly normal psychic health system.

 

Upon release, Have A Nice Day sold very well, was lauded in the mainstream rock press, got lots of air- and videoplay, and certainly pleased the dedicated fan by keeping alive the Bon Jovi spirit and sounding modern, relevant, and aware of the latest trends in rock music at the same time. Those latest trends, of course, being rather conservative: "Keep your pseudo-punk, hip-hop, pop-rock junk and your digital downloads" (ʽLast Man Standingʼ). Even disregarding the fact that I got this album as a digital download, say, Mr. Bon Jovi, I thought your career, from the very be­ginning, very much qualified as «pop-rock junk», or am I being led astray? Who are you singing about again — Robert Fripp?

 

Confused, but not amused, I give this record a thumbs down, be­cause any other decision might imply that you are telling me how to live my life. «Have a nice day».

 

LOST HIGHWAY (2007)

 

1) Lost Highway; 2) Summertime; 3) (You Want To) Make A Memory; 4) Whole Lot Of Leaving; 5) We Got It Going On; 6) Any Other Day; 7) Seat Next To You; 8) Everybody's Broken; 9) The Last Night; 10) Til We Ain't Strangers Anymore; 11) One Step Closer; 12) I Love This Town.

 

And with this dusty cliché, Bon Jovi become Taylor Swift. Twelve tracks of non-stop, completely interchangeable, instantly forgettable, absolutely si­milar-sounding guitar drivel — just the kind of music that gives «country pop» such a bad name among people who try to make life more colorful these days. Up to now, Bon Jovi had been almost everything, from dreadfully tasteless to surprisingly effective when they had their hooks properly aligned to utterly dull when they just wanted to tell you how much better they were than everybody else, but never before had they been so thoroughly embarrassing.

 

Then again, it was a long time coming: with «affairs of the heart» occupying a central place in the Bon Jovi rulebook ever since Keep The Faith transformed them from hair-clad cock-rockers into leather-clad spiritual heralds, the «Bon Jovi country album» was imminent, sooner or later, be­cause where else can your spirit really find a safe place to rest other than Mother Earth and those musical styles that grow right out of it? This album should be played loud and proud — in a corn field, preferably. With some rocks and rapids close by, so you and your loved one can wash that road dust off your sexy bodies whenever you feel the need, as that trusty Bon Jovi soundtrack serenades you with sounds that sound so natural, so organic, you'd swear the creeks and the meadows themselves wrote them just for you and your mate.

 

And I do stress «you and your mate», because the majority of these songs are romantic — ballads or pop-rockers, they are all about the protagonist's relations with that special someone, coming or going or staying or leaving. No mentions of life on welfare or social unjustice, this one's strictly for all you lovebirds out there. The exception being the tracks that bookmark the album — ʽLost Highwayʼ and ʽI Love This Townʼ are both about the will to live on this planet despite all the setbacks and troubles, so if you feel like killing yourself, Lost Highway will try to dissuade you from the task. (If you also feel like an intelligent human being — it will probably fail, though). They are also the only two genuinely catchy tunes on the album, even if the «happy» fiddle-and-banjo arrangement of the title track makes me sick, and the gang-friendly atmosphere of ʽI Love This Townʼ feels extremely contrived.

 

Oh, wait, there's one more exception — somewhere in the middle of this wheatfield wasteland comes ʽWe Got It Going Onʼ, a talkbox-adorned throwback to the good old dumb days of the 1980s if there ever was one, a song that feels so utterly dumb and so completely out of place that it had no choice but to become a highlight of the show for me, clearly reminding why New Jersey, on which this song would totally fit in, was really the pinnacle of this band's career. Okay, so it's good to know that the old boys can still dress up in gorilla furs when they feel like it. This band was born to party, not to cruise lost highways.

 

Everything else hardly seems deserving of wasting extra bytes of precious cyberspace, so I will be brief: pick out a random Taylor Swift song, replace the gorgeously packaged young blond female beauty with a gorgeously packaged not-so-young blond male hunk, and voilà, your lost highway lies right before you. And it merits a thumbs down — I mean, highways don't just get lost without a good reason, and I think this particular one got lost sooner than it was put into actual operation. 

 

THE CIRCLE (2009)

 

1) We Weren't Born To Follow; 2) When We Were Beautiful; 3) Work For The Working Man; 4) Superman Tonight; 5) Bullet; 6) Thorn In My Side; 7) Live Before You Die; 8) Brokenpromiseland; 9) Love's The Only Rule; 10) Fast Cars; 11) Happy Now; 12) Learn To Love.

 

The best I can say here is that at least they had the good sense to swerve off that cheeky country road. The Circle is, without a doubt, a «rock» album again, with bluesy electric riffs reclaiming their territory back from twangy slides, and lyrics about the world and its problems stealing our attention away from lyrics about traveling on lost highways, breaking up, patching up, breaking up again, and romancing the local ranch lady 'til the cows come home. So, at the very least, Jon and Richie are back on their natural turf where they are theoretically capable of doing something as good as... well, at least as good as a whole album of ʽWe Got It Going Onʼ.

 

Unfortunately, theory and practice rarely go hand in hand when you deal with aging rockers who were never all that awesome to begin with. In general, The Circle follows the same standards as Have A Nice Day — lots of stale rock'n'roll with worn-out hooks, lots of self-repetition and not a lot of energy. I mean, if the album really "sounds fresh", as Richie claimed in an interview (and what else could he have claimed?), why is it that the foundational bass line of ʽWork For The Working Manʼ is taken directly from ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ? Or why is it that the lead single, ʽWe Weren't Born To Followʼ, sounds like ʽBorn To Be My Babyʼ and ʽIt's My Lifeʼ at the exact same time? Whatever be the general case, The Circle, as an LP, was certainly born to follow; it is very hard for me to name even one single outstanding moment on the entire record.

 

Here is one funny bit of brainwork: I thought that, although the song itself was totally formulaic and dull, Sambora's guitar solo on ʽThorn In My Sideʼ somehow did stand out, and even managed to set the jaded spirit on fire for a few bars. How and why remained unclear, but then it dawned upon me, as that important third listen came around, that it was really simple — all he had to do was lift a few licks from Lindsey Buckingham's guitar solo on ʽGo Your Own Wayʼ. Subcon­sci­ously, perhaps, but the songs do have similar chorus beats, so it may have triggered some special mechanism. And in this way, what officially looks like a third-rate Fleetwood Mac imitation be­comes the best moment on The Circle.

 

Of course, we also have ourselves some talkbox, because a Bon Jovi album just ain't a proper Bon Jovi without some legitimate pig grunting (the completely unremarkable otherwise ʽBulletʼ); we have ourselves some de-lovely ballads (ʽLearn To Loveʼ, in case you still haven't after de­cades of professional scholarship under the guidance of Jon Bon Jovi, Ph. D.); and we do have one or two attempts at «modernizing» their sound — ʽLove's The Only Ruleʼ, with its dutifully «electronized» lead guitar, is probably the best example. I forget, though, who they are imitating here... U2? Must be U2, I guess. They probably wouldn't have heard of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Besides, they weren't born to follow, at least not those who were born after them. Following U2, chronology-wise, does not violate the rules of filial piety.

 

It's not as if they seem totally incapable of putting out another record that would at least be on the level of Crush and Bounce — they just don't seem to care all that much, or perhaps they just leave it all in the hands of the producer. On Bounce, they had the good luck of having David Campbell, a musician ten times the size of anyone in the band, write orchestrations for them; on The Circle, they put themselves at the mercy of John Shanks, whose past credits include Miley Cyrus, Take That, Jessica Simpson, the Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, and, uh, Lindsey Lohan (remember her?). (Admittedly, he also co-produced Fleetwood Mac's Say You Will, which was a fine recording, but it is hard to imagine Lindsey Buckingham not supervising his work every inch of the way). All very safe, predictable, glossy à la 2009, and completely without any surprises — hence, a natural thumbs down.

 

INSIDE OUT (2012)

 

1) Blood On Blood; 2) Lost Highway; 3) Born To Be My Baby; 4) You Give Love A Bad Name; 5) Whole Lot Of Leaving; 6) Raise Your Hands; 7) We Got It Going On; 8) Have A Nice Day; 9) It's My Life; 10) I'll Be There For You; 11) Wanted Dead Or Alive; 12) Livin' On A Prayer; 13) Keep The Faith.

 

Yes, it is 2012 and Bon Jovi can still afford a live album. No, they are not going to put any songs from their latest studio record, The Circle, on it because that album sucked and they know it, even if you have to really get them in a ditch in order to admit it. Yes, it has lots of titles that you will most likely recognize; in fact, you can probably predict two thirds of the setlist with your eyes closed. No, there is not a single reason in the world to own this record, listen to this record, or remain aware of this record's existence.

 

Let me, therefore, be very brief here and say that the «Bon Jovi spectacle» is really nothing like the «Rolling Stones spectacle», despite both of them being spectacles. At his old age, Mick Jagger may prance around the stage so much that keeping in tune becomes an impossibility, and Keith Richards may be forgetting more and more chords and harmonic rules with each passing year — a 50-year old Jon Bon Jovi and his lead guitar pal are doing their jobs far more properly, singing and playing in tune, diligently working their asses out without their superstar halos getting the better of them. But nothing can save us from the fact that Bon Jovi are boring. The band is just... no fun. They are standing there, playing their boring songs in their predictable ways. They are boring when they are serious and they are even more boring when they try to be funny. They are boring when they do stage banter, they are boring when they interact with the audience. They are professional, they are tuneful, they are pretentious, they are irritating — but first and foremost, they just make your milk curdle.

 

It may be just me, but it also seems as if they are now reducing all their songs from all their peri­ods to exactly the same «alt-rock» formula. You couldn't really tell here that ʽBorn To Me My Babyʼ or ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ were written in the Eighties, that ʽKeep The Faithʼ used to be so very Nineties, or that ʽLost Highwayʼ is from their short-lived neo-country period in the 2000s. It's just the same old gray grind all over the place. No mistakes, nothing out of tune, just a bunch of experienced rockers giving a good time to some friendly folks in an arena or two. This is how they live now — beginning ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ with an actual «prayer» in an act of trans­cendent spiritual unity between the Artist and the Audience. It's all very emotional, really. You can also get an accompanying DVD (Live At Madison Square Garden) where there are many more songs and you can actually see the heroes being... uh... heroic.

 

Anyway, better for Bon Jovi to go on ʽLivin' On A Prayerʼ than ʽLiving In Sinʼ, right?..

 

... I don't think it's a good idea to attempt to continue this review.

 

WHAT ABOUT NOW (2013)

 

1) Because We Can; 2) I'm With You; 3) What About Now; 4) Pictures Of You; 5) Amen; 6) That's What The Water Made Me; 7) What's Left Of Me; 8) Army Of One; 9) Thick As Thieves; 10) Beautiful World; 11) Room At The End Of The World; 12) The Fighter; 13*) With These Two Hands; 14*) Not Running Anymore; 15*) Old Habits Die Hard; 16*) Every Road Leads Home To You.

 

It was a little funny, I must confess, reading lots of irate reviews about how this record is not really «hard rock», is not really «Bon Jovi», represents «the beginning of the end» for the band and other equally sour reactions. Was there ever a period when this band was after anything but mass popularity? The only reason why Jon Bon Jovi has not turned into Nicki Minaj — which, if necessary and possible, he'd do in a jiffy — is because he's got, uh, T&A problems. Also, he's kinda old-fashioned and prefers to stay in that comfort zone where well-built, muscular guys rip the shit out of their guitars, at least visually. And since that kind of music still sells reasonably well today, despite all the attempts to push «classic rock» out of the spotlight, well, why change anything? Just another day, just another dollar.

 

The album did cause a rift between Jon and his loyal guitarist: Sambora was not seen all that much on the accompanying tour, throughout which he was largely replaced by session guitarist Phil X, and soon afterwards announced his departure from the band. True enough, he is only co-cre­dited for about five out of twelve songs, while on the rest Jon shares credits with such seedy figures as John Shanks and Billy Falcon; has not a single interesting or outstanding riff to contri­bute; and is seriously misused even in the lead guitar department — the absolute majority of these songs depend on nothing but vocal hooks. Oh, sorry, vocal hooks and pomp — as the years go by, Jon Bon Jovi takes himself more and more seriously each day, and on What About Now, he is much more of a preacher than an entertainer.

 

I will not deny, though, that some of these songs are hooky. The anthemic singalong chorus of ʽBecause We Canʼ, the punchy album opener, is Super Bowl material alright, though I'm pretty sure it must have been lifted wholesale from some earlier roots-rock or country tune. Same with the sentimental ʽPictures Of Youʼ, same with the heroic-romantic confession ʽThat's What The Water Made Meʼ — although I know what the water really made that guy: it made him surrepti­tiously nick the inspiring background guitar/synth melody of David Bowie's ʽHeroesʼ and appro­priate it for his own, much less original and much less subtle purposes. No, I am not being too judgemental, and I have no problems with musicians borrowing and recycling other people's ideas — it's just that this one feels way too blatant. Don't say I didn't warn you if on his next re­cord J.B.J. samples ʽRide Of The Valkyriesʼ in one of his Big Social Statements.

 

Are we being too cruel? Well then, let me just backtrack a little and redeem myself by saying that somehow, on a certain level I do feel sympathetic to ʽWhat's Left Of Meʼ — as uninteresting as the generic «banjo-rock» arrangement of that song is, its «I'm-still-standing» vibe sounds more sincere than anything else here: the guy does sound like he really means it when he says "God, I miss the smell of paper and the ink on my hands" and when he complains about how "they sold old CBGB's". Not that Bon Jovi ever had much to do with CBGB's in the first place — yet some­how it is true that, as of 2013, Bon Jovi and the old CBGB residents seem to have much more in common than they would have in the mid-1980s.

 

But that does not change the general attitude. Had ʽWhat's Left Of Meʼ and ʽBecause We Canʼ been the most pretentious songs on the album, with the rest of it given over to regular vocal-hook-based pop rock fare, life would be adequate. As it happens, these are just the tasters for the real «Celine Dion-style» gala prayers — the syrupy, orchestrated ʽAmenʼ was written twenty years too late for the Titanic soundtrack, and the "never give up, never give up!" chorus of ʽArmy Of Oneʼ is more Alicia Keys, or even more Disney, than Bon Jovi. Oops, I think I'm falling into the same trap as all those allegedly cheated fans — let me quickly correct myself: what we have here is Bon Jovi trying to naturally morph their way into a Disney cartoon.

 

The album ends on a soft acoustic note, with Jon making yet another not-so-subtle reference to some of his heroes: "I am the fighter, though not a boxer by trade". What is it, then, about ʽThe Boxerʼ that will make that song stand the test of time, while ʽThe Fighterʼ is already forgotten? It's not really the melody — it's the attitude. Even at his softest and tenderest, Jon Bon Jovi still sounds like a straightforward, predictable, cocky guy who thinks way too much of himself — and, most importantly, believes that «thinking too much of himself» is already sufficient to write a song about it and offer it to the world. And nobody told him, or nobody was ever able to convince him that such is usually the recipe for a boring song at best — an offensive song at worst. But then again, who the heck could convince him if these sometimes boring, sometimes offensive songs kept selling like hotcakes all around the world? And neither my own thumbs down here, nor anybody else's will really make a difference. For that matter, What About Now hit the top of the charts all right — even though, in the era of predictably dwindling album sales, it sold less than any previous Bon Jovi album. But yes, the guys are still popular.

 

BURNING BRIDGES (2015)

 

1) A Teardrop To The Sea; 2) We Don't Run; 3) Saturday Night Gave Me Sunday Morning; 4) We All Fall Down; 5) Blind Love; 6) Who Would You Die For; 7) Fingerprints; 8) Life Is Beautiful; 9) I'm Your Man; 10) Burning Brid­ges; 11*) Take Back The Night.

 

The title of this album refers not to the split between Jon and Richie Sambora, as could have been easily suggested, but to the split between Bon Jovi and Mercury Records, the label with which the band had been associated from the very beginning. Apparently, their long-term contract ran out, and both sides agreed not to renew it — and, well, I can sort of understand Mercury Records, be­cause what do you do with a band that so decidedly does not belong in the 21st century, not to mention one that hasn't produced even a semi-decent record in more than a decade? And, on a more objective note, whose sales have been on a steady decline ever since the world discovered Britney Spears? (Not that there's any direct connection... or is there?).

 

Anyway, I'd like to say that Burning Bridges is their worst album in a long, long while, but in a way, it is not even an album — it is a hasty assemblage of songs culled from various vaults, with just one or two new numbers, released as a contractual obligation to facilitate the band's transition to a new label. This probably explains the presence of Sambora on the credits to at least one song (the bouncy pop rocker ʽSaturday Night Gave Me Sunday Morningʼ) and the lack of Desmond Child on any other credits, because everything written with Child was released on the spot (okay, not really, but whatever Child-cowritten outtakes they had were already issued on the 2004 box­set). This is also a gallant explanation for why almost everything on here is so shitty, and why you needn't even be aware of this album's existence unless you are forty-three years old and still remember that fateful day when your elder sister took you along to your first...

 

...okay, never mind. In terms of upbeatness and catchiness, there are two songs here with so-so hooks — the already mentioned ʽSaturday Nightʼ (disco meets alt-rock and fuses with it to be­come arena-era Taylor Swift as sung by Jon Bon Jovi; I don't think you'll meet a more precise description of this anywhere) and ʽI'm Your Manʼ, because falsetto woo-woos are a terrible wea­pon even in the wrong hands. The title track, an acoustic-and-accordeon dance number, is a rather rude goodbye to Mercury Records, but since it does not mention Mercury Records by name, they apparently had no choice but to let it go. It's at least mildly amusing if you know the context.

 

Everything else is mainly just power ballads, with the usual Bon Jovi aplomb and pretense — soulfulness, echoes, power chords, some more fresh bleeding from a heart that's been punctured so much, it's hard to believe it could not be made out of plastic. Largely awful production, too, with synthetic guitars, heavily processed vocal harmonies, and lifeless percussion, particularly on the single ʽWe Don't Runʼ. ʽA Teardrop To The Seaʼ is at least slightly redeemed with an unusu­ally noisy, distorted, hystrionic guitar solo (played by producer John Shanks?), but later on the scales are tipped to the other side with the awful «blues de-luxe» soloing à la late Gary Moore on ʽFingerprintsʼ (remember ʽStill Got The Bluesʼ? that's what I'm talking about, the pathetic gypsy-blues style for people who have no feeling for the real blues). But yes, on the whole, it's all in quintessential Bon Jovi style, so if you're a fan, Burning Bridges will not disappoint. If you're not a fan, though, join me in my thumbs down, and don't forget to send a congratulations card to Mercury Records. Better late than never — and now they can finally reassign some of their budget to promoting Iggy Azalea.

 

THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE (2016)

 

1) This House Is Not For Sale; 2) Living With The Ghost; 3) Knockout; 4) Labor Of Love; 5) Born Again Tomorrow; 6) Roller Coaster; 7) New Year's Day; 8) The Devil's In The Temple; 9) Scars On This Guitar; 10) God Bless This Mess; 11) Reunion; 12) Come On Up To Our House; 13*) Real Love; 14*) All Hail The King; 15*) We Don't Run; 16*) I Will Drive You Home; 17*) Goodnight New York; 18*) Touch Of Grey.

 

And by "this house", I am assuming, they mean "our safe New Jersey home", because on this first proper post-Sambora album, Bon Jovi move closer to Bruce Springsteen than they ever did before — and considering how Bruce Springsteen, on his past few albums, also moved somewhat uncomfortably close to Bon Jovi, I would not be surprised to eventually hear a joint statement from the two, especially in this upcoming Trumpian universe of ours. The problem is, there is exactly one area in which Jon Bon Jovi's skills might sometimes stand up to the Boss's - the concoction of anthemic, powerful, memorable vocal hooks. Everything else, be it lyrical sophistication, or the ability to sound like a man possessed and infect the listener with a quasi-religious drive, or the massive, multi-layered, super-tight sound of the E Street Band, remains an unattainable standard of quality. So who is it that you would allow yourself to be enlightened by: a former hair metal icon who used to have the looks or a street poet who used to have a bandana? Tough choice for 2016.

 

Nevertheless, This House Is Not For Sale is Bon Jovi's best album since at least Crush. It's not a good record at all — there is nothing particularly fresh or unusually appealing about it — but it is smart enough to concentrate on the band's strongest aspect, the one I already mentioned. For the most part avoiding over-sentimentalized power ballads and rootsy country-rock excursions, and also, perhaps, striving to show that Bon Jovi's music was not all about Richie Sambora (who has not returned, and now Phil X is taking over his place on a permanent basis), Jon and the re­maining company write a set of tight, catchy, and, dare I say it, occasionally inspired pop-rock songs: traditional, musically conservative, and with an attempt at introspection rather than arena-rock swagger. Could be awful, but it's... tolerable. At the very least, in terms of class they are now fully comparable with contemporary U2 (not that big of a compliment, because it says more about U2's decline than Bon Jovi's ascent — still, ever imagine me putting Slippery When Wet and The Joshua Tree on the same shelf? By the way, speaking of U2, one of the songs here is called ʽNew Year's Dayʼ, and no, it is not a cover, but it does look like a tribute because the guitar parts are quite... edgy, if you know what I mean).

 

Most of the songs have a philosophical slant... most? Heck, all of them: even ʽLabor Of Loveʼ, the record's only patented love song, puts a poor-boy-Wagnerian slant on boy-girl relations — although leave it to Jon Bon Jovi to dig his own grave with awful lines like "if I need some sugar, I'll get it from your lips" (is it really such a long way to the local store, or does his partner suffer from sugar cravings?) and vocal modulation that places too much emphasis on his high register, by now creaky, croaky, and irritating. Apart from that song, though, it's all about coming to terms with whatever there is to come to terms with: modern times, politics, disillusionment, personal mistakes, or changing hairstyles.

 

The sound... well, if you happened to hear the title track, you've heard it all. The big rhythm guitar crunch is back, as is the thunderous «split-that-log-in-one-blow» drum sound of Tico Torres. New lead guitarist mostly plays short, reserved, traditional solos, possibly not wishing to compete with the departed Sambora, so the point is that you should headbang to these songs (drummer boy helps you out with this) and sing along. Like: "I'm coming ho-o-o-ome! Coming ho-o-o-o-ome!" Because you want to come home. Or: "I ain't living with the ghost! No future living in the past!" Because you... uh... don't want to come home. Or: "Here comes the knockout! My time is right now! I'm throwing down!" Because whether you want to come home or not, you gotta fight for the right to come home. Or not to come home. Or: "God bless this mess, this mess is mine!" Because your home actually looks like shit, but it's your shit, and if you can't be proud of your shit, then who can?

 

I don't think it would make sense to discuss any of these songs seriously: the more I do, the more cringeworthy it all becomes, so, fair moment, linger awhile and don't let me give this record a thumbs down when I actually had some fun listening to it. In fact, I will say something cringe­worthy myself: as Bon Jovi inevitably mutate into the category of «elder statesmen», Jon's output begins to show some deeply human qualities that transcend the simplicity, cheesiness, and con­servatism of the band's musical values. This here is a survivor's record, and behind the shallow catchiness, there's a glimpse of determination and power that I cannot help admiring, if only a little. I have no reason to doubt the man's sincerity, and sometimes even a simple cliché may not be so boring if it is delivered with full force. So when the man finishes the record with a formally bland gospel waltz (ʽCome On Up To Our Houseʼ — again, nothing in common with the Tom Waits song of nearly-the-same-name), I cannot not acknowledge the real emotion behind it; I do not know if "all are welcome at our table" indeed, but it does not bother me — let alone the fact that I'd never volunteer to sit at Bon Jovi's table in the first place, the real issue is why he is singing that? I'm pretty sure the man is on a good will spree this time, and that the whole record is a noble try to offer some musical consolation in a very shaky, uncertain, insecure period of our being (yes, even if the album was released several days before the presidential elections).

 

Anyway, if, to you, the pop and the power aspects of Bon Jovi had ever had some significance, do not be afraid to pick this one up (you can even go for the deluxe edition, which adds six extra songs, all in the same style). But if you've never cared about the band even one bit, and would rather accept ghost writing for Ann Coulter than having to hear ʽLiving On A Prayerʼ just one more time, then this house is very much for sale: there is absolutely no sense in getting it unless you are somewhat familiar with the band's history and are able to evaluate it in context.

 

THE BOOMTOWN RATS

THE BOOMTOWN RATS (1977)

 

1) Lookin' After No. 1; 2) Mary Of The 4th Form; 3) Close As You'll Ever Be; 4) Neon Heart; 5) Joey's On The Streets Again; 6) I Can Make It If You Can; 7) Never Bite The Hand That Feeds; 8) (She's Gonna) Do You In; 9) Kicks; 10*) Doin' It Right; 11*) My Blues Away; 12*) A Second Time; 13*) Fanzine Hero; 14*) Barefootin'.

 

For a very long time now, most people have remembered Bob Geldof as the «Give Me As Much Of Your Money As I Can Stare Out Of You» («So That Some Bureaucrats And African Dictators Can Get Richer») person who also starred as Pink in The Wall and did at least some good by get­ting the authentic Pink Floyd back together for one last performance. (Okay, seriously enough, much of that money did go to good causes, but it's always healthy to temper free-flowing idea­lism with a sharp cynical pinch). Between all that, his original musical career together with a bunch of ragged Irish punks under the name of «The Boomtown Rats» has pretty much faded out of view, other than an occasional vague reminiscence of ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ on the airwaves. There are logical reasons for that, of course — for one thing, it makes much more sense to re­member Bob Geldof as the driving force behind Live Aid than, say, George Harrison as «the guy who organised that Bangla Desh concert» — but still, this is not entirely just.

 

Although The Boomtown Rats are commonly lumped in together with the «punk» and «New Wave» movements, much of their musical career stood closer to the typical «rock and roll» sound of the early-to-mid-Seventies. On their debut album, notable influences include fellow Irishmen Thin Lizzy (same aura of «working class street toughness» and similar frontman sensitivity, al­though the Rats never had Thin Lizzy's playing chops); American «proto-punkers» and «glam-rockers» like the MC5 and the New York Dolls; Bruce Springsteen (ʽJoey's On The Streets Againʼ); and even Steppenwolf (ʽMary Of The 4th Formʼ directly lifts the gruff biker melody from the verse part of ʽBorn To Be Wildʼ).

 

As a result, The Boomtown Rats almost seems a bit sonically obsolete for the standards of 1977, and one has to keep in mind that Geldof had already written many of these songs a year or two earlier, when few had heard of The Ramones and nobody had yet heard of The Clash or The Sex Pistols. Not that this would have changed anything — Geldof may have been a «street punk» in the spirit, but not in form: classic rock'n'roll song structures and guitar tablatures suited him all right, and the band's guitarists Garry Roberts and Gerry Cott clearly saw themselves as Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders rather than chainsaw-buzzers. (In fact, the very fact that there were two of them means they didn't think that much of the typical punk-rock band format).

 

Nevertheless, despite this traditionalism, The Boomtown Rats is a pretty good rock'n'roll record, and compares very favourably with the New York Dolls or anyone like that. There is not a lot of originality in Geldof's songwriting — only just enough so that you cannot directly accuse him of stealing (only «borrowing» or «quoting», like that ʽBorn To Be Wildʼ riff) — but there is enough charisma, energy, inspiration, and general swagger to make the songs work. We need not pay much attention to the lyrics — right from the start, the lyrics all pursue the all-too-familiar «don't want to be like you» agenda of your typical punker, and Geldof's words, be they sung in a rock'n'roll song or addressed at millions of people from TV screens, have rarely ascended above self-understood banalities (not that millions of people aren't often in serious need of self-under­stood banalities). What matters more are the guitar tones, the drive, and the unsimulated passion in the young man's gruff, rather generic, but intelligent and sincere voice — it is with these in­gredients that they sent ʽLookin' After No. 1ʼ, their first single, straight up the UK charts (never did reach No. 1, though, despite the «lucky title»).

 

ʽMary Of The 4th Formʼ was less typical, and showed a sleazier, more disturbing side of the band that would subsequently decrease — you probably couldn't imagine Bob Geldof singing a song about a teacher getting turned on by a sexy schoolgirl at Live Aid, could you? Unlike The Police, though, who would later dress that concept up in an innocently light New Wave-pop arrangement, the Rats make this one into a glammy bravoura performance, with thick guitar riffs sublimating sexual tension and an almost gleefully salivating chanting of the song title in the chorus. Well, whaddaya want, this is an album made for teenage audiences, and teenage audiences want to get laid as much as they want social justice and freedom from authority. (In case you wondered, that last phrase was an intentional idealistic understatement).

 

Although this is the only genuinely «titillating» song on the record, The Boomtown Rats is still, on the whole, a nasty-sounding piece of work. Geldof wears his heart on his sleeve on only one loud rock ballad in the middle of the album (the clearly Dylan-inspired ʽI Can Make It If You Canʼ), and gets heroically sentimental only on the preceding ʽJoey's On The Streets Againʼ, for which the grand jury of Phil Lynott and Bruce Springsteen should have awarded him top prize at the local Street Anthem competition. Both songs are significantly aided by the competent piano and organ player of Johnnie Fingers, and the grand sax solo by guest player Albie Donnelly mimicks Clarence Clemons so fine it ain't even funny.

 

Everything else is good old-fashioned rock'n'roll, personal favorites including ʽ(She's Gonna) Do You Inʼ which speeds up ʽMilkcow Calf Bluesʼ and makes it a little more blunt, direct, and punky; and ʽKicksʼ, more in the power-pop department but with an AC/DC-like tone in the rhythm guitar department nevertheless. Also, be sure to get the remastered CD version, which throws on a ton of early demos and live performances from 1975 that are even more rock'n'rollish (ʽFanzine Heroʼ is the fastest of 'em all, and the cover of Robert Parker's ʽBarefootin'ʼ is smouldering).

 

Of course, all these endless references make it seem as if The Boomtown Rats is merely a sum of all its influences, and in general, it probably is — and that is, in fact, the reason why the band was never able to establish itself as an «institution» (unlike Bob Geldof himself in his «Third World Mentat» emploi). But even as just a combination of all these influences, it feels real enough, and most importantly, it's got spirit — not necessarily «its own spirit», just spirit as such. At the very least, the guys showed a good understanding of what it was that made this kind of music great, instead of simply making us understand that they liked this kind of music. To me, that's reason enough for sincere enjoyment — and a solid thumbs up to go along with it.

 

A TONIC FOR THE TROOPS (1978)

 

1) Like Clockwork; 2) Blind Date; 3) (I Never Loved) Eva Braun; 4) Living In An Island; 5) Don't Believe What You Read; 6) She's So Modern; 7) Me And Howard Hughes; 8) Can't Stop; 9) (Watch Out For) The Normal People; 10) Rat Trap.

 

Already — and not a moment too soon — they are beginning to change, shifting their sound to adapt to some of the evolving standards of New Wave, difficult as it is for a band that grew up and matured in Thin Lizzy country. It is hard to tell whether Geldof was going against his inner self on any of these songs, but in the end, it was good, because striving for «quirkiness» in their music helps A Tonic For The Troops exude enough irony, sarcasm, and playfulness to fully compensate for Bob's «social seriousness». The entire album is loaded with critical messages, but they are delivered in such a way that it is downright impossible to call its overall tone «preachy». On the whole, it is a damn fun listen.

 

Not that the musical offerings of the Boomtown Rats interest most people who write about this album — usually, they are more concerned with the storytelling aspect, and it is hard to blame them when one of the songs is called ʽI Never Loved Eva Braunʼ and is sung from the viewpoint of you-know-who, or when another of the songs is all concerned with various suicide attempts (ʽLiving On An Islandʼ), or yet another deals with euthanasia (ʽCan't Stopʼ). However, this is not «rock theater» à la 10cc — Geldof does not have the required vocal qualities (I mean, he doesn't even try to imitate a German accent on ʽEva Braunʼ and thank God for that), and the band's musi­cal trai­ning is much too basic to turn any of these songs into mini-rock operas or anything.

 

What really matters is Geldof's ability to come up with decent hooks, and the band's ability to rock out with verve and imagination. ʽLike Clockworkʼ may lyrically deal with the maddening im­possibility of liberating yourself from your biorhythm (or something like that), but more im­portant is that the song does imitate clockwork, at least as far as guitars, percussion, and backing vocals are concerned, and although it is bouncy and energetic per se, there is a certain tragic «im­possibility to escape» planted in that mechanical bounce, at least not until the alarm clock rings and stops you dead in its tracks. Or, if you do not pay much attention to the lyrics of ʽEva Braunʼ (or if you do not know who Eva Braun was in the first place), it is not the lyrical Hitlerisms of the track that will draw you in, but its overall exuberant guitar-piano coordination and the catchy "la-la-la"'s of the chorus — what else?

 

The punk chainsaw buzz, or at least a guitar sound approximately close to that, is also introduced here on songs like ʽShe's So Modernʼ, whose riff could be very easily converted to ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ if needed — the difference being that The Boomtown Rats are not consciously striving for barebones minimalism, and happily look for countermelodies, piano overdubs, relatively more complex guitar solos, and more complex vocal modulation. Ironically, the catchy singalong cho­ruses are still the most memorable ingredient in any Boomtown Rats song — in this respect at least, they are not at all different from the Ramones.

 

The big one is waiting at the end: ʽRat Trapʼ is the longest track on the LP and the most elaborate one, a streetlife anthem that should be implicitly dedicated to Phil Lynott and Bruce Springsteen, I think — what with Geldof relying on the vocal inflections of the former and the sax player having copiously studied the sax solos on the albums of the latter (as far as I understand, Bob does not play the sax himself; in a famous incident on Top of the Pops, he shoved a candelabra in his mouth to mimic a sax solo). But the song stands out on its own, with a fairly complex arrangement (I really like the way in which the guitar and piano melodies are interwoven with each other) and, of course, the unfor­gettable shotgun blast of a chorus — "it's a rat trap... and you've been CAUGHT!" is a line that should be much more tightly associated with Geldof forever and ever than his professed dislike of a parti­cular day of the week. Well, maybe it actually is, I don't know — ʽRat Trapʼ was No. 1, and they even got to tear up portraits of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John on Top of the Pops in a short moment of punkish triumph.

 

I cannot say that on the whole, Tonic For The Troops is an artistic improvement over the debut — it is a sonic departure, yes, but these Irish rowdies seem such a typically «classic rock band» at heart that it is hard for me to find a song on which they would be more convincing than ʽMary Of The 4th Formʼ. Still, they are able to accumulate these new sonic elements without sounding too imitative or rip-offey (as compared to some of the more blatant Talking-Headisms on the next album, for instance), and the best songs — ʽLike Clockworkʼ, ʽRat Trapʼ, ʽEva Braunʼ, ʽShe's So Modernʼ — are every bit as well-written and well performed, so that giving the record a proper thumbs up is fairly easy business. Come to think of it, I couldn't probably think of a reason why a record like this should be less respected than, say, Elvis Costello's This Year's Model — the real big difference being that the Attractions used squeakier keyboards. Damn these Londoners, always having the upper hand over the Irish.

 

THE FINE ART OF SURFACING (1979)

 

1) Someone's Looking At You; 2) Diamond Smiles; 3) Wind Chill Factor; 4) Having My Picture Taken; 5) Sleep (Fingers' Lullaby); 6) I Don't Like Mondays; 7) Nothing Happened Today; 8) Keep It Up; 9) Nice 'n' Neat; 10) When The Night Comes.

 

The Boomtown Rats' third album is often looked at as the highest point in their career, but it seems fairly obvious that the reputation is mainly due to the mega-success of ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ — which isn't even Geldof's best song, really, but there is no denying the nerve it must have hit in mid-1979, when the US and, apparently, the Western world in general were still re­cuperating from the shock caused by the Brenda Spencer shooting spree and, most importantly, her explanation of the shootings (the song title).

 

Ironically, ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ is as far from the original Rats sound as possible — a piano-and-strings-driven pop song that stylistically belongs in a Broadway musical rather than in a rock'n'roll album. It also gets a little creepy when you think about its stadium-level popularity and how the entire world sang along to "tell me why I don't like Mondays, I want to shoot the whole day down" during Live Aid (I wonder whether the imprisoned Brenda Spencer had a chance to watch the show from her cell?). But if you manage to disassociate the song from the context, it is hard to deny that the sound is real good — usually, when you get yourself a piano-and-strings arrangement, it results in a mushy ballad sound, whereas ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ is really a very rowdy, dynamic thing, an ironic-romantic explosion which is much more Springsteen in spirit than Carole King or the Carpenters. In any case, it is at least certain that the song's enduring po­pularity is due to much more than just its «shock» appeal.

 

Unfortunately, it also marks a certain turning point beyond which Geldof would start taking things way too seriously — and both the Boomtown Rats' and his own solo output would begin suffering from too little humor and too much anthemic pomp. Fortunately, this does not yet show up so much on The Fine Art Of Surfacing, whose problem lies elsewhere: in an attempt to catch up with the times, they have stuffed way too many of these shrill Cars-type synthesizers at the expense of rock'n'roll guitar. This is not good, because The Boomtown Rats are not The Cars, and they are even less Talking Heads (whose sound they attempt to rip off head-on in ʽNothing Hap­pened Todayʼ, with Geldof going for an all-out David Byrne imitation). Their hooks are best supported by rowdy classic rock posturing, not keyboard experimentation and theatrical vocal parts — at least, this is how my gut feeling explains it when the album is over and, other than ʽMondaysʼ, I have a serious problem remembering any of the other songs.

 

From a rational point of view, they are still being interestingly clever, though. ʽSomeone's Look­ing At Youʼ, echoing both the glam and the Berlin period of David Bowie, could be initially thought of as a picture of a love-confused teen punk, but the lyrics make it clear that it is really a song about Big Brother — it's just that it has been initially set up as a caressing, tender number, with cozy mood-setting "na-na-na's" and the first line going "on a night like this I deserve to get kissed at least once or twice" and the background synthesizers serenading you with an optimistic lead melody. Then, giving you no time to get over it, Geldof hits you over the head — gently, gently! — with a song about a glamor girl's suicide (ʽDiamond Eyesʼ), another New Wave rocker once again almost completely driven by cheery keyboards.

 

Eventually, the model gets a bit predictable — informing the listeners about the evils of the world we're living in through the medium of the world's best-crafted and most widely reaching informa­tion machine, the pop song. It all gets to the point where you start looking for a rebellious mes­sage even in an innocent complaint against insomnia (ʽSleepʼ) — I mean, no doubt about it, it must be the insane energy-sucking world of capitalist pressure that drives the protagonist to "counting fences" and "jumping sheep" and still to no avail. But on a purely emotional level, the song does not succeed very well in constructing an atmosphere of insomnia / paranoia / depres­sion / whatever, unlike, say, John Lennon's ʽI'm So Tiredʼ — it's just a moderately catchy key­board-driven pop rocker.

 

The only song that tries to recapture their original rocking sound is ʽNice 'n' Neatʼ, a speedy num­ber that brings back full guitar throttle for three minutes — good, but a little too late, and hardly supported by the closing ʽWhen The Night Comesʼ, one of their most blatant Springsteen imita­tions that could have been easily slipped inside Greetings From Asbury Park without anyone noticing. Still, much to their credits, at least they pull these imitations off convincingly — Geldof lacks the «technical endowments» of The Boss (meaning that he is not as vocally powerful, of course — I have no further basis for a physical comparison of the two), but he can set his soul on fire just as directly and unflinchingly whenever the need arises.

 

On the whole, this is a good album — ultimately, one can forget the criticism and just enjoy its still fairly tasteful and energetic sound, and I should probably add that at least the vocal harmo­nies on most of these here songs are the best on any given Rats album. Make this their «pop mas­terpiece», if you will, as compared to the «rock goodness» of the preceding two records, and think of it as a masterpiece indeed — for a band that was not at all cut out for a good «pop» album in the first place. Thumbs up.

 

MONDO BONGO (1981)

 

1) Mood Mambo; 2) Straight Up; 3) This Is My Room; 4) Another Piece Of Red; 5) Go Man Go; 6) Under Their Thumb... Is Under My Thumb; 7) Please Don't Go; 8) The Elephants Graveyard; 9) Banana Republic; 10) Don't Talk To Me; 11) Hurt Hurts; 12) Up All Night; 13) Cheerio.

 

Somewhere along the line, the Boomtown Rats just... lost it. The seams were showing already on The Fine Art Of Surfacing, but the big hit singles somehow wobbled the perspective and made the seams seem fuzzy enough to allow us to think that these were just temporary direction prob­lems. Not so with Mondo Bongo, which shares all the problems of its predecessor, but this time, without much compensation in the way of big hits: ʽBanana Republicʼ did chart high enough, yet it is obviously no ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ and definitely no ʽRat Trapʼ. In fact, it is a song that might as well have been done by UB40 — or a couple dozen more New Wave acts — and no­body would feel the difference.

 

Perhaps Geldof's sensitivity towards the world at large finally prevailed over his musical instinct, but Mondo Bongo feels like a ferociously intentional attempt to completely distance oneself from the «rock'n'roll mentality» that fueled the Rats' first couple of albums. Tribal African rhythms and cod-reggae almost totally replace guitar-based rock melodicity — and in those few spots where the band does not try to be «ethnic», this melodicity is replaced with trendy synth-pop. Most of it is done in good taste and with plenty of energy, yet somehow, most of it simply does not click. As a matter of fact, this album is just plain boring, I'm afraid.

 

Something like ʽMood Mamboʼ may seem sympathetic if any white kid attempt to sound like a bunch of nature-happy Africans seems sympathetic by definition — but it is difficult for me to grasp any other motivation behind the song, which just sounds like a bunch of congas and whoo­pees thrown together, and it doesn't help, either, that in the context of 1981 comparisons with Remain In Light are inescapable and clearly not in favor of Geldof and his boys, who have no understanding of how a proper synthesis of «world beats» and old-fashioned rock music should work. The results are neither too exciting, nor too funny, nor emotionally relevant in any way. They don't even sound «bongo crazy», those guys — just following a trend.

 

Songs like ʽStraight Upʼ are generally more successful, but putting the guitar out of the picture is not a good decision — the song is not catchy enough to be so completely governed by pianos and synthesizers, and neither is ʽGo Man Goʼ or anything else. There is a logical reason why history has been so much more benevolent to The Cars when they were doing it than The Boomtown Rats, and that reason is simple enough — The Cars paid more attention to the hooks and less attention to the seriousness of the message, whereas Geldof always try to inject «Meaning», with a capital M, into whatever he is doing. Fine and dandy, but these are goddamn pop songs, so where's the pop? (For the record — I happen to have the same problem with David Bowie quite often, but nowhere near this extent, for sure).

 

Case in point: Bob takes the Stones' classic ʽUnder My Thumbʼ, rearranges it as a modernistic electro-ska number, and replaces the song's original «misogynistic» lyrics with «social message», as the song becomes ʽUnder Their Thumbʼ and the «they» in question are... well, you know who they are. "Under their thumb / Kicked and beaten like an angry rabid dog". The reinvention is kinda fun, but also kinda self-contradictory and confusing: too happy-sounding to justify the mes­sage, too message-driven to justify the happy sound. By refusing to concentrate on one aspect over the other, Mondo Bongo becomes unsatisfactory either way.

 

The sole exception is the accidentally quite catchy ʽElephants Graveyardʼ, which shares the sty­listic makeup of all its brethren (a fast-paced keyboard-based song, almost bordering on ABBA-like Euro-pop — actually, more like Elvis Costello on the ABBA-influenced ʽOliver's Armyʼ) but redeems itself with an emotionally tugging chorus: the "you're guilty 'til proven guilty" line is surprisingly efficient, where, for once, I feel like we're riding on the same wave. Perhaps it is because of the plaintive-pleading intonation. Perhaps, come to think of it, one of Mondo's biggest flaws is not having any of those big-open songs where Geldof sings his heart out — everything is drowned in irony, but he does not know how to be properly ironic. On the other hand, I also prefer Bob Geldof in any of his aggressive moods rather than romantic ones — but on the third hand, Mondo Bongo could hardly be called an aggressive album, either, due to the already men­tioned lack of a properly attuned guitar sound.

 

In the end, the sacred heart of Mondo Bongo probably lies in the short piano piece ʽAnother Piece Of Redʼ, Geldof's passionate reflections on the disintegration of the British Empire, trig­gered by the news of the retirement of Rhodesia's Ian Smith. More of a leftist declaration than a «song» as such, it shows clearly that striving for good over evil was far more important for Bob than spending a lot of time in the world of notes, chords, and harmonies. Strictly formally, Mondo Bongo is a musical departure from — some might even say, an advance on — the Rats' previous sound; substantially, though, nobody really gave a damn. Which explains why the album could and should work, but does not.

 

V DEEP (1982)

 

1) He Watches It All; 2) Never In A Million Years; 3) Talking In Code; 4) The Bitter End; 5) The Little Death; 6) A Storm Breaks; 7) Up All Night; 8) House On Fire; 9) Charmed Lives; 10) Skin On Skin; 11) Say Hi To Mick; 12) No Hiding Place*.

 

There are at least three different versions of this album: original UK release, original US release, and a new CD reissue from 2005 with a strange choice of track reshuffling — for instance, the original opened with the bombastic, Phil Spector-ish ʽNever In A Million Yearsʼ, but on the reis­sue, the first track is the more chamberish (at least, in the first part, until the big drums kick in) ʽHe Watches It Allʼ. Go figure. Also, the first letter of the title is the Roman number five, not the letter V, alluding both to the fact of this being the band's fifth album and the fact that they were now a five-piece, as the band's guitar player Gerry Cott split off.

 

In the end, it looks like all these different trivia about the album present more food for the review­er than the music itself, which continues Geldof's gradual slide into blandness, though without exacerbating it. There is plenty to like on V Deep — just not much to rave about. In purely ob­jective terms, the album might even be preferable to its predecessor, because (a) the band embra­ces an even larger number of styles, ranging all the way from lounge jazz to synth-pop, but (b) the band does not engage in any particularly annoying embarrassments, for instance, does not try to pass for a bunch of roving Africans as they did on ʽMood Mamboʼ.

 

And yet, the overall impression is that they continue to struggle in their attempts to grab our at­tention. It is hard to understand why it is so — I mean, if you dissect the album's second single, ʽHouse On Fireʼ, it is a pretty complex and (theoretically) catchy reggae number. There's clicky percussion, quirky keyboards, jungle harmonies, a merry brass riff in the bridge, some hidden menace in the descending melody of the chorus — what's not to like? But something is clearly missing that could take the song by the hand and lead it across the bridge that separates «decently written» from «soul-inflaming». Perhaps that something is a general sense of purpose: as it often is with the Rats, I am not getting what they want me to feel and how they want me to go about it. And I do not mean the lyrics (you try and decipher what "she's cruel as a pig but we love her like a house on fire" is supposed to signify), but more like the whole thing put together. Is this an angry song? A sad song? An irony-drenched dance number? With ʽMary Of The 4th Formʼ or with ʽRat Trapʼ or with ʽI Don't Like Mondaysʼ, you wouldn't be asking these questions. With ʽHouse On Fireʼ, there's certainly more questions than answers, and I seriously doubt that even Geldof himself could answer most of these.

 

On the other hand, I still feel a bitter irony that ʽHouse On Fireʼ, when it was released, charted higher (UK No. 24) than the previous single, ʽNever In A Million Yearsʼ (UK No. 62), even though the latter is a far superior song — along with the catchier and much more melodically dense, but less serious ʽDon't Answer Meʼ by the Alan Parsons Project, it is one of the decade's better Phil Spector imitations, driven by a tremendously passionate Geldof vocal as he uses all the bombast to prop up his personal manifesto: "I know I'll never let / Those self-defeating fears / Spoil those golden years / These days that pass us by so slow". And even if the main keyboard melody of the song is fairly simplistic, by concentrating on the solemnity of the oath and the stateliness of the arrangements, they manage to pull it off fairly well. But you probably wouldn't want to dance to it — and singles are for wiggling your butt, not for standing upright and holding your hand out in a respectful salute to your idol, so the fussy, but pointless reggae bit won over the slow, ponderous, but meaningful wall-of-sound exercise.

 

Other than that, they are actually all over the place: bass-heavy, fast-paced synth-pop (ʽTalking In Codeʼ), acoustic-based, finger-poppin' light jazz entertainment (ʽLittle Deathʼ), bombastic art-funk (ʽA Storm Breaksʼ), another Talking Heads clone song (ʽCharmed Livesʼ) and so on. The only thing that ties them all together is the same puzzling effect as the one on ʽHouse On Fireʼ: it's all laid out to be good, but somehow, it isn't. The darkness ain't dark enough, the madness ain't mad enough, the humor ain't humorous enough, and all the musical parts, taken separately or col­lectively, do not transform into grappling emotional hooks. You can clearly see how much ʽCharmed Livesʼ owes to Remain In Light — but you do not sense the same «grim determina­tion» that made Remain In Light such an epoch-defining masterpiece. Perhaps it is simply the result of poor coordination within the band: where all the individual Heads were clearly able to «get» Byrne's artistic intentions, here everybody seems to be simply playing the notes, not much more. You kind of get the feeling that, just like Gerry Cott who finally had had enough, all these guys would only be too happy to go back to their «pub-rock» days of the mid-1970s and just bash away with simple, but effective rock'n'roll. But they are not given the permission.

 

In time — in a very long time — some of the songs may grow on me, and if you throw in Gel­dof's ongoing search for new feelings and occasionally irritating, but still frequently insightful lyrics, V Deep is certainly not a total failure. But neither is it a misunderstood masterpiece, and on the whole, the fact that the Boomtown Rats were rapidly losing in the great war of New Wave Innovators is pretty hard to deny: their commercial decline was not due to the fact that the music was much too complex or challenging for the general public, but actually more due to the fact that the public ceased to feel the spark. And now, more than thirty years later, I, too, have a certain difficulty locating that spark.

 

IN THE LONG GRASS (1984)

 

1) Dave; 2) Over And Over; 3) Drag Me Down; 4) A Hold Of Me; 5) Another Sad Story; 6) Tonight; 7) Hard Times; 8) Lucky; 9) An Icicle In The Sun; 10) Up Or Down.

 

And here comes the forgotten, disgraceful final chapter. Granted, Geldof's chief interest by that time had completely shifted from his veteran band to fresher and more exciting stuff — such as singing for Christmas and organising Live Aid. But what if it wouldn't? Does that mean that The Rats would then have been able to produce a record on the level of A Tonic For The Troops? Obviously not — they were way too far gone from the days when Thin Lizzy and Bruce Spring­steen were their shining stars. In this misguided urge to fit in the times, having tried out almost everything, they finally became a social-message-oriented copy of Duran Duran: a mix of guitar and synth pop, with some futuristic flair but almost completely without hooks, not to mention total atrophy of a sense of humor. Well, of course it is hard to retain your sense of humor when you are worrying over Ethiopian famine, but maybe in this context a more wise decision would have been to simply pack up and return to the studio some other day, or not return at all.

 

Here's ʽDaveʼ — a song inspired by a friend's nervous breakdown over the death of his girlfriend from overdosing. I hope the «Dave» in question was touched and maybe even relieved, and it is difficult not to feel real emotion in Geldof's voice (although, frankly speaking, by now Geldof was almost always singing in this «choking-on-tears-on-a-regular-basis» register, so you get used to it fairly quickly). But musically, the song feels like a trivial toss-off, its main «hook» being a moody jazz-fusion-esque bassline which is commonly equated today with cheap adult contem­porary — do not expect catharsis on a ʽComfortably Numbʼ level. (Ironically, the industry people had Geldof rewrite the song's lyrics and release it as ʽRainʼ rather than ʽDaveʼ for the American market — guess they weren't all that moved with the story, either).

 

Here's ʽDrag Me Downʼ, also released as a single and containing some unmistakeable harmony nods to the Beach Boys, both in the choral «dee-dee-dee-dee»'s and on the SMiLe-style "like a ship that's going under..." part. You couldn't argue that this song is completely empty of hooks. But you could argue that its attempt to build up to high heavens does not work — the electronic keyboards are too flat and corny, the overall arrangement is too muddy, and most importantly, Geldof as the singing preacher-poet just does not engage attention as much as Geldof the rowdy street punk. He's too whiny here to be Springsteen, and too range-limited and weak-voiced to be Bono. His rock poetry is probably the best aspect of these songs — at least, it is the only aspect which consistently turns out to be much less predictable than you'd expect from someone who could already be defined as «social activist» first, and «musician» second.

 

Here's... but no, I already feel depressed simply considering the fact that I'd have to try and waste time explaining why all these songs, though probably recorded with the best of intentions, have absolutely no appeal. The reasons are really the same all over. No outstanding guitar parts (most of the melodies are loaded with electronic effects, but they cannot even harness them properly, like King Crimson). Generic synthesized keyboards. Robotic, lifeless rhythm sections. Every­thing converted to tragic romance, care of Geldof's patented "I CARE!" vocals. Perfect material for an irate, disgruntled thumbs down.

 

Ironically, the more he CAREs, the more we get the impression that he really doesn't — not about the music, that is. At the very, very least it is clear that In The Long Grass is a solo album; there is abso­lutely nothing here to suggest the presence, or the necessity of an actual «rock band». Perhaps the Live Aid business was clouding Geldof's mind at the time — but with the whole affair finally over, the most sensible thing left to do was to officially let go of the band and go solo. (Actually, I think it was the last remaining members that got fed up with the thing and told Bob to go about his own business — sensible lads).

 

 

BOSTON

BOSTON (1976)

 

1) More Than A Feeling; 2) Peace Of Mind; 3) Foreplay / Long Time; 4) Rock & Roll Band; 5) Smokin'; 6) Hitch A Ride; 7) Something About You; 8) Let Me Take You Home Tonight.

 

«Good taste» rarely agrees with rock'n'roll when it becomes too bombastic, and even more rarely when it becomes happily, rather than tragically, bombastic. In choosing between Boston's debut record and, say, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, the latter will win unequivocally on the grounds of good taste, since, in essence, it is a deeply personal, troubled, heartfelt collection of fervent prayers, where the bombastic arrangements merely serve as catalysts, pulling the audi­ence inside the spiritual world of the artist rather than bombarding them with thunderous awe­someness from above. The sound of Boston, in comparison, represents superficial bombast, like a carefully orchestrated shiny parade — grand, complex, and breathtaking upon first sight, but shallow and trivial in the afterthought.

 

In other words, the music of Boston deserves our negative response if we find too many people looking to it for spiritual guidance. But if we do not, or if we manage to close our eyes on the issue, the music of Boston deserves plenty of respect and admiration. Like anything by Queen released in those years, their self-titled album represents a certain peak in the evolution of the «sym­phonic rock guitar sound», and even if the moods and individual impressions generated by these songs give little ground to judge them as «progressive», the sound that Tom Scholz and his pals engineered here had not had any direct precedent in the earlier history of prog-rock.

 

ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ is one of the most deceptive hits in history — beginning as a rather ordi­nary acoustic ballad in the California singer-songwriter vein, thirty seconds into the song it sends out this double guitar blast, almost literally lightning-and-thunder, as first comes the high-pitched melodic line, and then comes the grumbly distorted power-pop riff, and «arena-rock» as a sepa­rate genre is almost singlehandedly invented in a flash, or, at least, the ultimate formula for it appears before our eyes: loud guitar riffage in major keys, grand harmonies, catchy choruses for the entire stadium to sing along to, the perfect blend of bombast and simplicity. But not too simple — the colorful blend of «thunder» and «lightning», improved by Scholz's constant expe­rimentation with guitar tone, ensures that Boston sounded like nobody else at the time. (Brian May would be the closest analogy, and May is a much more inventive and technically endowed musician than Scholz could ever hope to be, but the self-educated Scholz still has plenty of pedal-related and mixing tricks of his own — let us not forget that he holds a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT itself. Then again, Brian May is a frickin' astrophysicist. Is it a coincidence that they both invented their own «cosmic guitar» styles?).

 

Anyway, there are two big deals with Boston. First, it is a record filled to the brim with catchy, unforgettable pop songs. Second, it is a record that has some of the juiciest electric guitar sounds to come out of the Seventies as a whole. If we have to take this in tandem with hokum lyrics, an annoying pseudo-operatic lead vocalist (Brad Delp), and a total lack of emotional depth, then so be it — but if we want to go further in our despisal and draw a straight line from here to Bon Jovi or the like, I would deem that formally impossible, because Boston's brand of arena-rock sur­mises that complex craft comes first, and bombast comes second, or, rather, that bombast should not be pushed onto the public unless it is carefully and complexly crafted. Scholz holds personal responsibility for every single note played on this album — ensuring that even the longer tracks never get boring, with all the different guitar dialogs and trialogs and quadrilogs. Boston's favo­rite formula consists of three parts — base acoustic rhythm, overlying low-pitched distorted elec­tric riff, soaring high-pitched soloing — and although these three ingredients exhaust almost all of the songs (keyboards being almost always secondary), they are combined in such different ways that all these anthems continuously hold my interest.

 

All the big hits are on Side A, and they are probably more interesting from a hook-based point of view, but even songs like ʽRock & Roll Bandʼ and ʽSmokin'ʼ, which seem to rely on traditional rock'n'roll clichés rather than original ideas, still sound exciting because of Boston's unique sound base — without inventing a single new chord combination (I think), Scholz shows a grasp of technological trickery for which most of the glam-rockers of the early 1970s would have killed. It only falters on the last track, ʽLet Me Take You Home Tonightʼ, which is mostly a sentimental acoustic ballad and shows how trite the band really is without its electric makeup — but then, Boston is supposed to be just that, a triumphal celebration of man's victory over electricity. What would that electric jellofish spaceship on the front cover be about, otherwise?

 

It is also ironic that, although today it is all to convenient to think of Boston as one of the turning events in the history of «corporate rock», due to its huge commercial success, influence on main­stream rock, and annexation of a huge segment of the radio waves on classic rock stations — in reality, the entire album was recorded in Scholz's homemade basement studio, not to mention the band spending about two years running around and offering demo tapes to disinterested music industry businessmen before finally striking a deal with Epic. ʽPeace Of Mindʼ says it all about their stance — "I understand about indecision / I don't care if I get behind / People livin' in com­petition / All I want is to have my peace of mind". Of course, this does not mean that we should be praising the band for stark humility, but it makes sense to view the album in this particular context all the same.

 

All in all, a strong thumbs up here along the same lines of intuition and reasoning as in the case of ABBA or any other successful act that can be suspected of vying for «cheap mass appeal». All that is left is shed a single tear over Boston's subsequent inability not only to top this record, but even to properly «advance» in creativity — which only goes to show that one must not place one's trust exclusively in the sphere of technology. After all, technology, unlike art, is limited, and even a degree from MIT can only help you get that far in revolutionizing musical standards.

 

DON'T LOOK BACK (1978)

 

1) Don't Look Back; 2) The Journey; 3) It's Easy; 4) A Man I'll Never Be; 5) Feelin' Satisfied; 6) Party; 7) Used To Bad News; 8) Don't Be Afraid.

 

A man like Tom Scholz I'll never be, because it is really hard to understand what all the fuss was about — Scholz lashed out at Epic Records for pressing him into releasing the next album too soon, way before he was fully ready to amaze the world for a second time, but listening to Don't Look Back gives nary a hint of any idea of how it was supposed to be anything but a slightly in­ferior carbon copy of Boston. Of course, there is nothing wrong with repeating a winning formula if it works, but other than some additional feats of technical ingenuity, most of these songs really sound as if they were written at exactly the same time as the stuff on Boston, and left out in the sun to dry, waiting for another day.

 

Or maybe not, because there is exactly one important difference: Don't Look Back is an album produced by accomplished arena-rock superstars. Most of the songs on Boston featured huge, bombastic arrangements, but at heart they were relatively personal tunes — love serenades or personal confessions. You were invited to sing along and join in the emotional turbulence all right, but they weren't really written with the collective you, our lovely stadium audience, in mind. By the time it was time to put out a sequel, the band's status had changed, and now Scholz was making songs «for the people». Again, there is nothing wrong with this in principle, but a mind­set like that can sometimes result in extra seriousness at the expense of melodicity.

 

It is hardly coincidental that the record begins and ends with prohibitive invocations — at the start, we are told not to look back, and for the finish, we are invited not to be afraid. It is definite­ly not coincidental that ʽFeelin' Satisfiedʼ informs us that "the time has come to get together" and begs us to "come on, put your hands together" and "take a chance on rock'n'roll" (as if any Boston concert goer had not already taken a chance — probably much more than one — on rock'n'roll). Throughout, the choruses get louder and louder and more repetitive, and even the most intro­spective song of them all, ʽA Man I'll Never Beʼ, has its last chorus line specially singled out so that the entire stadium could brace itself for it.

 

These are the little details that pick up my attention. As to the actual musical advances, well, I should say that Scholz's musical perfectionism refers more to the sphere of subtle overtones and frequencies than finding new sources of inspiration for his melody-making. Like Boston, this record, too, features a brief instrumental interlude (ʽThe Journeyʼ) that merges elements of folk and cosmic psychedelia, but other than that, Boston's flying saucer shows no signs of wanting to preserve its outer space identity — being perfectly happy to churn out one power-pop anthem after another for the earthly entertainment of Earthlings. Epic Records say — assimilate or perish, oh you strange aliens from the faraway planet of Boston.

 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with most of these power pop anthems. The title track has a cool funky riff (later stolen by Michael Jackson for ʽBlack And Whiteʼ, as I have only just rea­lized) that somehow agrees well enough with the song's straightforward 4/4 beat. ʽIt's Easyʼ, ʽFeelin' Satisfiedʼ, ʽPartyʼ, and ʽUsed To Bad Newsʼ are all catchy and fun pop-rockers, although rather non-descript in impressionistic terms. And although I used to seriously dislike the power balladry of ʽA Man I'll Never Beʼ, I have grown accustomed to its clever trickery of successively piling up one layer of guitars upon another until, with one triumphant thunderclash, it turns into something on a truly Gargantuan scale. (And do not miss or misjudge the piano quote from Paul McCartney's ʽMaybe I'm Amazedʼ, the wise mother of all such power ballads).

 

With all these considerations in mind and impressions in the heart, there is no reason to condemn Don't Look Back — it earns its thumbs up by not letting down our expectations if we wanted more of the same. If we didn't — if we expected this band to top Boston and push its musical boundaries further forward — Don't Look Back could only be described as disappointing, as it neither pushes forward nor takes any «sideward» risks (like, for instance, Fleetwood Mac did with Tusk around the same time). But why should we have expected anything like that? Tom Scholz has his own vision of a perfect brand of pop-rock, and he is not interested in straying too far away from it. If only his head weren't so turned with his own and the band's own «bigness», Don't Look Back could probably have been as much fun as its predecessor. As it is, it is slightly less fun and a little more stadium-preachy, but only a tad so. And the staidum audiences did bite, sending the album to the top of the charts and certifying it seven times platinum. It is, however, rather telling that ʽDon't Look Backʼ never managed to earn itself such an assured place on classic rock radio as ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ — no accident, I'd say.

 

THIRD STAGE (1986)

 

1) Amanda; 2) We're Ready; 3) The Launch; 4) Cool The Engines; 5) My Destination; 6) A New World; 7) To Be A Man; 8) I Think I Like It; 9) Can'tcha Say / Still In Love; 10) Hollyann.

 

With all his perfectionism, delayism, disrespect for deadlines, and contempt for record labels, Tom Scholz ended up waiting for the most uncomfortable time to release Boston's third album — 1986, the Doom Year for Classic Rockers (just to remind you, Alice Cooper's Constrictor and Chicago 18 came out in the exact same month). Not that this should have derailed Scholz, who rarely trusted anybody's nose but his own: yes, you can sense that the Eighties are upon us from the production, but Scholz himself was responsible for the production in many ways, not the least of which was his own self-designed Rockman guitar processor.

 

So the bad news about Third Stage is not really its year of release, but rather the stylistic choice of its maker. As some of the old guys, such as second guitarist Barry Goudreau and bass player Fran Sheehan, eventually quit because they couldn't take the waiting any more, Scholz began sliding further and further into lyricism and sentimentality — the typical song on Third Stage is not a revved-up power-pop-rocker, but rather a heartfelt ballad, power or no power. In the place of ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ and ʽDon't Look Backʼ, songs that had an aura of cheapness but could still be a great way to kick-start your day, we now have ʽAmandaʼ — a song that must have per­manently ruined the life of every single Amanda on US soil. Just imagine yourself being a 12-year or so old girl called Amanda in 1986 and having to walk to school while all the radio stations for miles around blast "I'm gonna take you by surprise and make you realize, Amanda..."... oh, the horror. Hope they all hid in the basements while the heat was on.

 

Not only ʽAmandaʼ, though, but just about every other of these ballads is almost unbelievably lame — without the thunderous riff-blasts of his rockers, Scholz is reduced on the spot to pom­pous schlock where even the trademark Boston guitar tones do not redeem the material that rides on exhausted balladeering clichés all the way through. ʽMy Destinationʼ, ʽTo Be A Manʼ, ʽHolly­annʼ — I am not even sure I can properly distinguish one from the other. The only good thing about them is the band's stubborn reluctance to use synthesizers or strings, which does give them a Boston-exclusive flavor. But the contrast between the primitively uninventive melodies and the immense atmospheric pomp is just too much to bear.

 

Unfortunately, the few rockers on the record do not redeem the situation. The album's loudest and brawniest track, ʽCool The Enginesʼ (formally the last part of a space-related trilogy), is a glam extravaganza, with Brad Delp screaming his head off and Scholz getting to play Zeus the Thun­derer. Is it my fault, though, that the final result sounds stylistically similar to Aerosmith's ʽLove In An Elevatorʼ? With the same overloud, sleazy guitar assault as everything gets driven to ele­ven? Hilariously, even if Scholz never wanted to make a pop-metal anthem, he unintentionally produced one along the same stylistic lines as Aerosmith or Bon Jovi in their big hair days. I ad­mit that it is catchy — but it is also rather silly, adding this «macho» edge to their cosmic music (yes, I know that «cooling the engines» is just a metaphor, but I don't even want to remember explicitly what for). At least ʽI Think I Like Itʼ manages to combine the album's lyrical sensitivity with a strong, but delicate pop-rock rhythm, and arguably comes out as the best track and the only one that I can currently imagine myself wanting to revisit.

 

Bottomline: tech savviness is one thing, understanding of how to juice up an already catchy hook is another thing, and a good sense of taste and measure is the little devil whose absence can mess you up even if you got the other two quite right. With Third Stage, Scholz shows us one and one thing only — namely, that he himself does not seem to quite understand what it is that used to make him so good. Yes, there are quite a few things in common between ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ and ʽAmandaʼ, but there is also a wide gap. For Scholz, what really matters is what they have in common. For myself — and I hope to be speaking for quite a few other people, too — what really matters is the gap, and I hate this particular gap. Thumbs down with a vengeance, even if, on the whole, this is quite far from the worst record of 1986.

 

WALK ON (1994)

 

1) I Need Your Love; 2) Surrender To Me; 3) Livin' For You; 4) Walkin' At Night; 5) Walk On; 6) Get Organ-ized; 7) Walk On (Some More); 8) What's Your Name; 9) Magdalene; 10) We Can Make It.

 

The temporary replacement of Brad Delp with Fran Cosmo (who, ironically enough, started out as a vocalist on Barry Goudreau's debut solo album in 1980) should not be much of a worry. Brad Delp is a deep-lung screamer, Fran Cosmo is a deep-lung screamer, the two are pretty much inter­changeable, and Boston have never been much about vocals anyway — powerful, but persona­lity-deprived arena-rock singers have never been a rarity ever since arena-rock came into exis­tence, no matter where and when you locate this moment in time.

 

What is worrying is the lack of good songs. As usual, Walk On is a collection of brawny arena-rockers and equally brawny power ballads; not as usual, I believe that this time around, not a single song has managed to stick in my mind, a fairly amazing feat for a record that's been eight years in the making. I mean, it's as if the fine art of songwriting never existed in the first place. Look at the title track — it is just a common, generic piece of ʽLa Grangeʼ-ian fast boogie. If ZZ Top played this, though, at least they'd do it with humor and snappiness: Scholz, however, with his «bigger than everybody else» attitude, just drowns it in his Gargantuan ambitions.

 

For the single, they chose a song with a truly brilliant title — ʽI Need Your Loveʼ — and an ope­ratic riff that sounds surprisingly muddy when it cuts through your speakers around 0:38, certain­ly a far cry from the immediately captivating riffage of ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ and very sur­prising in light of Scholz's usual perfectionism. The song in general is just a very basic power ballad, not as «intimate» as ʽAmandaʼ but even less memorable, apart from the rather annoyingly dumb chorus ("I NEED YOUR LOVE! I WANT YOU EVERY WAY!" — I don't even want to know what that last exhortation is supposed to mean). Most importantly, it was simply not the kind of sound to make any headlines in 1994, so the single stuck at No. 51, and for once, I guess, the public was right: 51 is a good number in this context.

 

Not that there is anything on the album that could have made a better choice. The riff of ʽSur­render To Meʼ sounds like mediocre Judas Priest with Scholz production. ʽLivin' For Youʼ is a sentimental ballad that is actually driven by electronic keyboards — so much for the old resis­tance against synthesizers — and sounds like any other generic adult contemporary ballad ever written. The lengthy ʽWalk Onʼ suite has a few moments, such as Scholz's «guitar Godzilla» experiment on ʽWalkin' At Nightʼ and bits of Emerson-ian organ hooliganry on ʽGet Organ-izedʼ, but overall, it is just too lumbering and ponderous for its own good. And there is nothing I could say about the last three songs that I have not already said about the first four.

 

The only thing to admire about Walk On is Scholz's stubborn decision to follow his own per­sonal muse, completely oblivious to everything that goes on around, which is why this «1990s» album sounds not at all different from the band's «1980s» album, despite a completely changed musical atmosphere. And I am saying this without a hint of irony — ignoring trends and fads is always a noble quality; however, it works so much better when you actually have something in­teresting to say in your fossilized style — and I am quite surprised to see this man completely concentrating on the style and forgetting that, if you're dabbling in hard rock and all, you're kinda supposed to bring along at least a handful of good riffs. Thumbs down.

 

CORPORATE AMERICA (2002)

 

1) I Had A Good Time; 2) Stare Out Your Window; 3) Corporate America; 4) With You; 5) Someone; 6) Turn It Off; 7) Cryin'; 8) Didn't Mean To Fall In Love; 9) You Gave Up On Love; 10) Livin' For You [live].

 

Everything was well with Boston at the turn of the century, so it seems. Scholz took his usual time in between albums, by which time Brad Delp had returned to the band — and not simply returned, but actually consented to a polygamous relationship with Fran Cosmo, who not only did not quit, but brought in his own son, Anthony Cosmo, as rhythm guitar player. Another addition is lady Kimberley Dahme, who used to play in a Boston cover band (yes, apparently there is, or at least was, such a thing as a Boston cover band — and I guess that any respectable Boston cover band has to play ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ ten times each show, for authenticity's sake), and now gets to play acoustic guitar and sing on her own tune ʽWith Youʼ, which does not sound like Boston at all, but hey, fresh blood.

 

And the big boys of arena rock are back at it again, tossing off a hairball of big love anthems, sappy love ballads, and just a couple of rock sermons for good measure — the grandest of 'em being the title track, which Scholz originally posted online under a pseudonym, to see how well it fit with «the younger demographics». As could be already inferred from everything we know about the band's history, it is an angry diatribe against the evils of «globalization», «maximiza­tion», and «de-evolution of the human race», clothed in a generic techno arrangement that could only have come out of the depths of Corporate America. Technophile #1 Tom Scholz ranting against technology, aided with the latest and trendiest of technology — if this ain't self-irony, it's stupidity, and if this is self-irony, it is hard to distinguish from stupidity. (Okay, okay, so they are only ranting against excessive abuse of technology, but still, shouldn't they have rather tried re­cording the song on wax cylinders, sitting with acoustic guitars around a campfire, than fiddling about with digital technologies? For the sake of credibility and all?).

 

With the possible exception of ʽI Had A Good Timeʼ — the opening rocker that at least tries to recapture some of the arena-power-pop excitement of the old days — there do not seem to be any good songs here. Sentimentality has by now completely donned the garments of adult contem­porary, with stiff, lifeless arrangements and mannequin vocals (ʽSomeoneʼ, ʽYou Gave Up On Loveʼ, etc.), and when the band tries to go for tragic-apocalyptic (ʽTurn It Offʼ), the production is so unusually muddy for Scholz's usual level of quality that it is hard to judge it as anything other than a complete failure in trying to tackle a style/mood with which the band was previously un­familiar. No, the best thing about Boston had always been their crackling, lightning-bolt-style, positive, life-asserting riffs — this attempt to be «eerie» crumbles under its own weight, with a formulaic, no longer impressive metal riff and lots and lots of noise pinning it to the ground. Bad production decisions for a non-original tune that pretends to a prophetic message — what else could go wrong with a tune like this?

 

Throw in the Kimberley Dahme song which sounds exactly like 100,000 acoustic folk-country ballads written by big-hearted folk-country stars in the 2000s alone, and you do get Corporate America in all its glory — big, well-oiled, formally efficient, but just a little bit tiresome, to say the least. I wholeheartedly concur with Tom Scholz when he gives his «corporate America» an angry thumbs down — and reciprocate by giving his Corporate America an angry thumbs down. On second thought, strike «angry». Who the heck ever gets angry about a 21st century Boston record? Might as well get angry about Sir Walter Raleigh, who was such a stupid git.

 

LIFE, LOVE & HOPE (2013)

 

1) Heaven On Earth; 2) Didn't Mean To Fall In Love; 3) Last Day Of School; 4) Sail Away; 5) Life, Love & Hope; 6) If You Were In Love; 7) Someday; 8) Love Got Away; 9) Someone; 10) You Gave Up On Love; 11) The Way You Look Tonight.

 

I suppose that the main, if not only, purpose of this album is to serve as a respectful memento mori for Brad Delp, who committed suicide on March 9, 2007, apparently in a serious state of mental depression — certainly not something you'd associate with the guy's vivaciousness on Boston's classic records, but certainly not the first time, either, when the old «beneath this mask I am wearing a frown» quotation hits home way too hard.

 

Although, as usual, Scholz took quite a bit of time getting there, so that the tribute came six years after his companion's demise, there is a lot of Brad Delp on this record — three out of ten tracks feature him singing, although all of them are re-recordings or re-masters of songs from Corpo­rate America. But before we go shooting off our mouths about what sort of idiot would want to hear musical dreck like ʽDidn't Mean To Fall In Loveʼ all over again, let us simply remember that these songs are here again for a special commemorative purpose. (And even if they are not, we will all play gallant, right, and still assume that they are, okay?).

 

That said, it is kinda useless to pretend that, as a whole, this album does not suck. With the last vestiges of songwriting instinct having slipped away from Scholz on Corporate America, there was hardly any hope of the good fairy revisiting him for the next installment in the Boston saga, and Life, Love & Hope does not disappoint: it sounds exactly like Corporate America, only worse. This time, the man has not even bothered to hire a real drummer — apparently, all the beats have been programmed to sound like «real drums», but «real» they ain't, much like every­thing else about this extremely stiff, plastic, unengaging record.

 

If you want a very quick, but efficient checkup on what Tom Scholz's musical qualification looks like these days, the two-minute instrumental ʽLast Day Of Schoolʼ will probably do the job — there you have the programmed drums, and the traditional Brian May-like «orchestral guitars», and the familiar «ka-boom!» guitar thunderbolts sewing the verse/refrain parts together, and the entire «been there, done that» feeling, as the song's formally anthemic sound is so familiar, yet so predictably uninteresting. And this is arguably the best track on the entire album — everything else will be drowned in inadequate levels of pomp and sentimentality, one big bad ballad after another until you are totally ready to «give up on love» and go for good old BDSM instead.

 

The amazing thing is that there are something like eight different lead vocalists employed by Scholz throughout — and yet I cannot tell one from the other, with the obvious exception of Kimberley Dahme on ʽIf You Were In Loveʼ. And the atmosphere of all the songs is so similar and monotonous that... well, I never thought I'd be able to wish for another nasty rant against «corporate America» on Scholz's part, but a couple of these would at least battle for my attention for a few minutes. As it is, the album is so smooth, it will probably slither through your bowels and come out whole without you even noticing. And who needs great guitar riffs anyway, when all that really matters is being able to state «all you need is love» in a dozen near-identical ways?

 

Actually, the really amazing thing is that this sorry carcass of an album still managed to rise to No. 37 on the US charts, which is even a little higher than Corporate America — given that the album came out six years after Brad Delp's death, we probably could not ascribe this to the sen­sation factor, but rather to the fact that as long as «the army of classic rock fans» still exists, any single record issued under the name of «Boston» will always have a chance of selling. Who's got the nerve to pull ʽMore Than A Feelingʼ off the airwaves, anyway? So my thumbs down will not make too much of a difference. But still, there you go — you wanted to make sure that Tom Scholz's music still sucks in the 2010s? Check. It still sucks. With luck, it'll still suck in the 2020s. There's really nothing like good old stability and tenacity when it comes to Art.

BRUFORD

FEELS GOOD TO ME (1977)

 

1) Beelzebub; 2) Back To The Beginning; 3) Seems Like A Lifetime Ago (part 1); 4) Seems Like A Lifetime Ago (part 2); 5) Sample And Hold; 6) Feels Good To Me; 7) Either End Of August; 8) If You Can't Stand The Heat; 9) Springtime In Siberia; 10) Adios A La Pasada.

 

Be it Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, or even Phil "How The Hell Did I End Up Behind A Drum Kit When I'd Always Wanted To Be The Beatles?" Collins, you do not usually hold high expecta­tions for a drummer's solo career, no matter how many bonus points he gets in the agility depart­ment. Drummers do not tend to make good songwriters, are usually terrible at singing (a few exceptions like Levon Helm just proving the rule), and have an inferiority complex because they never get laid as much as the front man or the lead guitarist. For that reason, the world did not exactly hold its breath when, after the next demise of King Crimson, the newly freed Bill Bruford announced that, after all those years of loyal servitude to Yes and Robert Fripp, he would finally start up a band of his own — simply called «Bruford» for short.

 

The good news was that he'd managed to assemble a somewhat spectacular lineup: Dave Stewart (of Canterbury's Hatfield and the North and National Health fame) on keyboards, Allan Holds­worth (of Soft Machine fame, although he only played there for a short time) on lead guitar, and former violinist Jeff Berlin on bass; additional guests on the band's first album included Brand X's John Goodsall on rhythm guitar, jazz pro Kenny Wheeler on flugelhorn, and dreamy-eccen­tric-avantgarde artist Annette Peacock on vocals. All the compositions were credited either to Bruford alone or to the Bruford/Stewart team — but it goes without saying that composition is not the most important aspect on most of these tracks.

 

The best thing that can be said about the record is that, although it is technically a «fusion» al­bum, it is by no means a generic, predictable one. It does share certain similarities with Brand X's Un­orthodox Behaviour, released a year earlier — jazz-fusion at the core, yet with numerous melo­dic overtones that reflect the drummers' earlier symphonic-prog experience. But it goes even fur­ther than Brand X, because the addition of Annette Peacock to this lineup gives the music an ex­tra romantic-philosophical-mystical dimension: the lengthy tracks on which she is given enough freedom (ʽBack To The Beginningʼ and especially the closing ʽAdios A La Pasadaʼ, which she co-wrote) are easily the best on the record. On ʽBack To The Beginningʼ, she is placed unusually high in the mix (so much so that you can easily get a jump when the vocals burst out of the speakers), and her avantgarde jazz singing is actually the least normal thing on the track — the sheer contrast between the free modulation of her voice and the strict fusion groove of the music should count as a psychedelic experience.

 

On ʽAdios A La Pasadaʼ, most of the time she does not even sing, but just delivers a half-spoken monologue, while Stewart and Holdsworth are trying to give the album a suitably grand-epic conclusion, the former emulating a symphonic orchestra and the latter trying to combine speedy technique with an expression of total joy at the perspective of riding into the unknown, if you know what I mean. However, without those vocals, this would still largely be just a tight fusion jam with symphonic overtones — Peacock's performance gives it more soul than anything else. Likewise, the first (ballad) part of ʽSeems Like A Lifetime Agoʼ, where her singing is reminis­cent of Joni Mitchell, is clearly more memorable and evocative than the second one, where the vocals go away and we are just left with the fusionists having their fusionist fun.

 

Not that it is impossible to have your fun along with them: after all, these are musicians of the highest caliber, and the rhythm section of Bruford and Berlin alone will occasionally tear you off the ground (check out, for instance, the coda of ʽIf You Can't Stand The Heatʼ, when Stewart and Berlin are playing a complex riff in unison and Bruford is gently, but firmly supporting them with a tricky time signature — it's playful, but dazzling). Also, ʽSpringtime In Siberiaʼ is largely just a melancholic jazz ballad, completely given over to the piano and the flugelhorn, sounding like something off an early Coltrane record (and yes, springtime can be a particularly lovely time in Siberia indeed, although it depends). But it is difficult for me to qualify this as an «average» or an «excellent» fusion record on the whole, as I tend to get lost in this genre a little — it always goes for «technique» and «feel» over «meaningful melody», and my bet is usually on meaningful melodies, which, unsurprisingly, here largely coincide with the presence of the lady singer.

 

The title track, I must say, feels a wee bit corny rather than good, almost as if they were trying to make a catchy, clap-along «fusion-pop» ditty here, with a silly-cheerful synth tone and with the rhythmic pattern occasionally lapsing into ska. This might irritate veteran fusion fans and prog aficionados alike, or maybe even bring to mind unnecessary associations with early Eighties' Genesis (of the Duke variety). However, the tune is not at all representative of either the real fusion or the real progressive parts of the record, and can be taken or left at will.

 

The general verdict should be positive — no, the album does not exactly shatter the anti-solo-drummer prejudice, but as a tasteful divertissement with a twist, Feels Good To Me is probably much better than it could have been, had Bruford assembled a less talented team or had he de­cided to completely subjugate himself to the fusion formula. Ironically, though, despite uniting the drummer from two of the decade's most innovative bands and the keyboardist from two of the decade's most crazyass innovative bands, the album feels totally conservative compared to all of those — then again, it was 1977, and most of the people who were on the cutting edge in the early Seventies had already blunted their powers, at the speed they were moving at. Regardless, a well-deserved thumbs up for the effort is perfectly in order.

 

ONE OF A KIND (1979)

 

1) Hell's Bells; 2) One Of A Kind (part 1); 3) One Of A Kind (part 2); 4) Travels With Myself – And Someone Else; 5) Fainting In Coils; 6) Five G; 7) The Abingdon Casp; 8) Forever Until Sunday; 9) The Sahara Of Snow (part 1); 10) The Sahara Of Snow (part 2).

 

In between Bruford's first and second album came Bill's brief participation in UK, where he was reunited with his former King Crimson pal John Wetton. However, according to the most com­mon version, that participation ended abruptly when Wetton and Eddie Jobson decided to fire Alan Holdsworth from the band — and since Bruford was the one to bring him in, in gentlemanly fashion, for queen and country and all that, he decided to leave as well. And so both of them once again found themselves in... Bruford. Back with Dave Stewart and Jeff Berlin, too, who were only too happy to oblige and throw their talents back on the wagon.

 

Unfortunately, despite some glowing accounts of this second album, this one leaves me com­pletely and utterly cold. Where Feels Good To Me was a curious blend of fusion and romantic prog-rock, courtesy of Annette Peacock and an overall desire for innovation, One Of A Kind is anything but one of a kind. Basically, it is just a generic fusion album — a high quality fusion album, to be sure, with top-notch standards and all, but completely indistinguishable in character from the average pool of similar albums produced in the mid- to late-Seventies. If you are a qua­lified pro here, one who «knows» exactly which albums from that time by Weather Report, Chick Corea, Soft Machine, Brand X, etc., bottle that spirit and which ones are simply coasting, you will be able to form a definite judgement here as well. If, like myself, you largely find them all interchangeable... okay, so this is probably not going to be a long review.

 

Like I said, the standards are high, and one major plus of the record is that Jeff Berlin continues to churn out speedy, complex basslines that suck up most of my attention. On the downside, Stewart's keyboards and Holdsworth's guitars seem to simply revel here in all possible clichés of the genre — stuffy synth tones, soulless speed runs, or (on the «ballad-type» numbers) romantic Santana-esque soloing with a bit of the roaming gypsy spirit. And Bruford himself? Although cre­dited as primary songwriter on most of these tracks, he is, after all, just the drummer, and how can a drummer make a composition interesting if everything else about it is boring?

 

The only brief departure from the formula is ʽForever Until Sundayʼ, a track originally performed by UK on their 1978 tour and still retaining here a nice, refreshing violin solo from Eddie Job­son (not exactly Oistrakh quality, you understand, but still a great relief to hear after all the unending guitar noodling). ʽFainting In Coilsʼ is also unusual in that it features a mock-theatrical staging of a small bit from Alice In Wonderland at the beginning (with Anthea Norman Taylor, later to be­come the spouse of Brian Eno, taking on the role of Alice — and the title itself is taken from the Mock Turtle's story), but what the rest of the tune actually has to do with the idea of "fainting in coils" is way beyond me; sounds just like one more forgettable fusion tune to me.

 

Maybe the worst thing, after all, are those awful keyboard tones: I mean, I could imagine a setting in which the main theme of something like ʽHell's Bellsʼ would be totally realized in its life-asser­ting optimism (notwithstanding the totally incongruent song title), but with these retro-futu­ristic fanfare synths blasting it out like a security system alarm gone mad, it's just no good — so thank you, AC/DC, for stealing the title of the song and putting it to much more adequate use the very next year (in a song that actually had some real bells in it, and kicked this record's stale in­tellectualism all over the place).

 

Or maybe the worst thing is that all these songs sound the same — not all of them are written in the same key, but all of them set exactly the same mood: not too hot, not too cold, not too sappy, not too harsh — perfect for elevators and mid-level restaurants with a poshy attitude. Anyway, as I said, major fusion fans might not want to take this seriously, but the only honest thing I can do here is award this stuff a thumbs down — what else can be done with a record where not even one tune is endowed with «staying power»?

 

THE BRUFORD TAPES (1979)

 

1) Hell's Bells; 2) Sample And Hold; 3) Fainting In Coils; 4) Travels With Myself — And Someone Else; 5) Beel­zebub; 6) The Sahara Of Snow (part 1); 7) The Sahara Of Snow (part 2); 8) One Of A Kind (part 2); 9) Five G.

 

Two studio albums into their career and these guys are already gunning for a live release — gran­ted, a limited release, for some reason restricted to the American, Canadian, and Japanese mar­kets, even though you'd think a band like Bruford could probably have fared somewhat better on the Euro­pean market. Recorded on July 12, 1979, in a New York club, this performance marked the playing debut of John Clark, a student of Holdsworth who was recommended by Allan as his replacement once he'd finally had enough — and, honestly, I cannot easily tell the difference, though this is probably just due to my indifference to much of this material.

 

As you can see from the track list, they cover One Of A Kind almost in its entirety here, while the much better debut album only gets two songs (well, actually, ʽFainting In Coilsʼ incorporates a chunk from ʽBack To The Beginningʼ, so three, technically) — and while it is rather obvious that they could hardly count on Annette Peacock to tour with them, there seems to have never been any thought about carrying their «symph-prog» side over to the live circuit. Instead, all of this here is a strictly fusion affair, and, as you can guess, everything is smooth, professional, and mostly sounds the same as the studio originals, with a few extended jamming parts here and there and enthusiastic crowd noise (yes, those batty New Yorkers do love their fusion). If this makes you feel any better, the sound quality is quite excellent for a low-key club date recording, but then could you expect anything less from the former (and future) drummer of King Crimson?

 

The obvious bottomline is that if you do not enjoy One Of A Kind, you can hardly expect to be turned around by The Bruford Tapes; and if you do enjoy One Of A Kind, you have to be a true «fusion nutso» to want to appreciate the little additional nuances that the band brings to the tables of this little New York get-together. In both cases, this is most likely a thumbs down — despite the self-understandable skill and tightness of the musicians.

 

GRADUALLY GOING TORNADO (1980)

 

1) Age Of Information; 2) Gothic 17; 3) Joe Frazier; 4) Q.E.D.; 5) The Sliding Floor; 6) Palewell Park; 7) Plans For J.D.; 8) Land's End.

 

More like Gradually Going Tormato, if you know what I mean. The current version of the Wiki­pedia page states that "this album is considered among one of the best albums in the prog­ressive rock/fusion genre", with a reference to a review in the All-Music Guide by a certain Leo Bloom, who probably knows his fusion from a fuse and his prog from a frog, but as much as I'd like to agree that Bill Bruford deserves more exposure and promotion, I'd also like to emphasize that fusion is not always nearly as boring as this record. Really, honestly, there are some truly ex­citing fusion albums out there — this one just does not happen to be one of them.

 

If you take One Of A Kind as the band's typically generic fusion album, then Gradually Going Tornado differs from it in three respects. First, it's got a less prominent guitarist than Alan Holds­worth (John Clark, who did well enough reproducing Alan's parts live on stage, but who certainly has problems coming up with similar parts on his own). Second, it toys around with the pop scene, including a few cheerful, bouncy, near-danceable fusion-pop hybrids like ʽAge Of In­formationʼ. Third, they probably thought that if they'd add vocals they'd be able to sell more copies, and so their bass player Jeff Berlin begins singing — and he is every bit as awful a voca­list as he is awesome as a bass player (and is it just me, or is he unintentionally singing in the wrong key on some of these songs?).

 

So it's like... generic fusion, only worse. Yes, the dated late 1970s synthesizer tones are still all over the place (and pardon me for the hyperbole when I say that it is these synthesizer tones that may have «killed» progressive rock far more efficiently than any amount of punk attitude), the directionless jamming is still very much in action, and few, if any, of the tunes are memorable or, in fact, meaningful. The «pop» songs are either dreadful quasi-optimistic anthems with synthe­sized fanfares (ʽAge Of Informationʼ, like the Buggles with more technique, but fewer hooks and no sense of humor), or strange «angry rockers» like ʽGothic 17ʼ, where hard rock, pop, and jazz are mixed in more or less equal dosage and you have no way of understanding what sort of reac­tion the song is supposed to elicit in the first place. The more «progressive» stuff is less embar­ras­sing, but even less memorable, so you don't have much of a choice.

 

The only thing about this album that I still find cool is Berlin's bass playing — the man is totally killing it even on the worst tracks, so every time I found the experience close to unbearable, I just had to twist my ear channels so that they blocked out everything except the basslines: fast and fluent like Jon Entwistle's, but also betraying professional jazz training (Berklee College of Mu­sic, to be accurate). Could you, please, delete everything else on the tracks and just leave that bass? I am not even impressed by Bruford's drum tracks — next to that fabulous bass, they're just... drums. But why did the guy have to ruin it all by singing over those basslines?

 

In short, while it is probably possible to gradually convince yourself that the record has its merits, I would suggest disspelling the illusion with a quick listen to Bruford's very next project — the revamped King Crimson would release Discipline just one year later, and show the world what a really inspired and innovative progressive album could sound like in the early 1980s. Compared to other run-of-the-mill fusion records, this one might be «okay», but compared to the best of Yes and King Crimson — two bands, after all, which should be the closest in kin spirit to Bruford — this is a thumbs down all the way.

 

BUGGLES

THE AGE OF PLASTIC (1980)

 

1) Living In The Plastic Age; 2) Video Killed The Radio Star; 3) Kid Dynamo; 4) I Love You (Miss Robot); 5) Clean, Clean; 6) Elstree; 7) Astroboy (And The Proles On Parade); 8) Johnny On The Monorail.

 

The very name «Buggles» should probably indicate that you are getting into something quirky at best, and stupidly irritating at worst. «The Bugs», as Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes originally wanted to call themselves, is bad enough, but Buggles? Wouldn't that kinda sorta suggest a gene­ral trajectory where pop music begins with the Beatles and ends, that is, reaches its triumphant culmination with ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ?

 

Well, in a way, it does. The Buggles were arguably the first successful pop band that achieved its success by refusing to be a band, and preferring to be a techno-mechanical unit instead. Trevor Horn, who took on the responsibilities of producing the album, took his major inspiration from Kraftwerk: total de-personalisation of the proceedings, a «robotic» attitude in all respects, begin­ning with instrumentation and ending with the lyrics and the personal image, but at the same time, with a far more poppy sound than Kraftwerk ­­­— the melodies here are inspired by ska, disco, Foreigner, and ABBA rather than stern Teutonic minimalism.

 

To say that The Age Of Plastic is «kitschy» or «gimmicky» does not even begin to do justice to these songs, which anyone with a mouth trashier than mine would most likely describe with the infamous appellation «faggy». They are so absurdly over the top, so reckless with their hooks and so arrogant with their production that Lady Gaga these days has nothing on these guys (well, at least if you adjust the comparison basis for the standards of 1980). Reviews of the album, both contemporary and retrospective, were about as split as the press used to be on Black Sabbath — some loved them openly, some hated them in public but stashed copies away in the basement anyway, until the time came when not loving Sabbath became poor taste. Yes, The Age Of Plas­tic leads you indeed into double temptation — on an intellectual level, it is tempting to trash it as an exercise in flashy stupidity, but on that damn gut level, it is just as tempting to put it on again... and again... and again...

 

Okay, the facts are simple: the eight songs that constitute this album represent some of the de­cade's catchiest pop music — all of them, not a single exception. Upon first listen, you're hooked even if you are disgusted. Upon second listen, you are entranced by the choruses. Third listen, and you pretty much got all these songs by heart. This does not mean that Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes are natural-born geniuses: the tunes were slowly and meticulously crafted over a period of several years, and never again would these guys approach this level of pop craft — neither in Yes, nor on their second album, nor in their subsequent projects (like Art of Noise or Asia). But then again, the ideology of the Buggles supposes that there are no «Trevor Horn» or «Geoff Downes»: there's only the music, and whoever is standing behind it is totally insignificant.

 

Not that this «whoever» is totally dehumanized — yet. Like Kraftwerk, Horn and Downes are fascinated with the conflict between technology and human spirit, and much, if not most, of the album relates to this idea one way or another. This is one of these self-ironic recordings where the musicians use the latest and trendiest technologies to complain about the relentless onslaught of technology: "Could this be the plastic age?", Horn asks us in desperation on the title track while at the same time ensuring, with his production, that this verily and truly be the plastic age. But where Ralf and Florian spooked people away by almost literally turning into robots, the Buggles still retain their human side — and thus give the layman a better chance to identify with their is­sues, seducing him with their hooks and ensuring a good source of revenue in the process.

 

And the hooks are unbeatable. Let's face it, we don't care that much about the saga of merciless human progress — we just love those happy-sad female vocals chanting "video killed the radio star, video killed the radio star" to that tight-as-heck bass-drum pattern that could just as well have been lifted off a Ramones song and adapted to the new realities of the synth-pop era. And does anyone realize that in between ʽEchoesʼ and Phantom Of The Opera there was ʽKid Dy­namoʼ, which uses the same descending-ascending pattern to create an atmosphere of tension and paranoia? Or that ʽI Love You (Miss Robot)ʼ already writes the book on a large part of what would later constitute the bulk of the Art of Noise legend — the techno-funk sound, the treated vocals, the multi-tracked vocal harmonies, the «cloudy» synthesizers?

 

However, in my opinion, the album does not properly begin to hit its stride until the second side, when the satirical and even snappy side of the Buggles starts to show up. ʽClean Cleanʼ, rocking out like a technofied version of Elton John's ʽSaturday Night's Alrightʼ, is actually a serious anti-violence statement, and the synthesizers on it sound as alive, angry, and punkish as any aggres­sive guitar part on any contemporary punk (even hardcore punk) record. ʽElstreeʼ, using the idea of starring in B movies as an allegory for an originally meaningless life made even more mea­ning­less, is the album's saddest track — Ray Davies in the robot age. ʽAstroboy (And The Proles On Parade)ʼ is hard to decode, but seems fairly misanthropic to me — I would imagine that some people might want to slap Horn in the face for his sneering intonation on the "let them be lonely and say you don't care" line, and who exactly are "the proles on the parade", I wonder? Even so, the intonation change from "romantic" to "sneery" on that bridge is priceless.

 

The best is saved for last: if you thought you knew everything about the Buggles after watching the ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ video, think again after hearing ʽJohnny On The Monorailʼ, a song that combines nervous tension with a fast pulse, a slight touch of country-western, some melancholic romanticism, and a general feel of being pulled somewhere from where there is no return, as Tina Charles plays the part of «the siren of doom» with her haunting background vocals and the song stubbornly defies a straightforward explanation, all for the better. Amazingly, you begin to understand that by the end of the album, the Buggles have broken out of the «kitsch» mode and put a more serious face on their collective robot — then again, maybe Side A was the robot in his childhood, but even plastic matures with age, and sometimes becomes aware of the dark side on its own, without outside help.

 

Ultimately, repeated listens to The Age Of Plastic do not make its material seem any more catchy than first time around — but they might help one understand that the integration of Horn and Downes into Yes, which took place right after they released this, was not such a thoroughly absurd move as one could think of it just by being exposed to ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ. Of course, the idea was that Horn and Downes could help the failing band regain commercial suc­cess, but they weren't hired just because they were catchy pop hitmakers — behind the flashy imagery and the production gimmicks there is a complete and largely original artistic vision, and plenty of intelligence and feeling. As of today, some of the gimmicks have become dated — in particular, Horn's passion for silly-sounding vocal overdubs (like the who-oh-oh's on ʽElstreeʼ or the chip­munkish uh-ohs on ʽVideoʼ that you usually get these days on messenger software) — but who knows, maybe I'm the only one to worry about that in the first place. In any case, a big thumbs up and a request: do not miss the perfectly human soul in this album. When I say «catchy hooks», I mean real catchy hooks here, big emotional ones. It's easy to misinterpret them or fail to grasp their meaning, but it's there alright.

 

ADVENTURES IN MODERN RECORDING (1981)

 

1) Adventures In Modern Recording; 2) Beatnik; 3) Vermillion Sands; 4) I Am A Camera; 5) On TV; 6) Inner City; 7) Lenny; 8) Rainbow Warrior; 9) Adventures In Modern Recording (reprise).

 

This one's okay, but it ain't Age Of Plastic. Yes, those nasty boys of prog rock, blew up The Buggles before they had a real chance to conquer the world, and sucked them inside the band to replace Jon Anderson — like I already said, if you listen to Age Of Plastic long enough, you will begin to see that this wasn't the most random-decided decision on earth, but fact of the matter is, Horn and Downes were no longer The Buggles, but hired gunmen to guide a bunch of old out-of-touch proggers into the new realities of a rapidly changing world (including hairstyles). And once it didn't work out... well, the biorhythms were broken, and they just couldn't really go back to being The Buggles like nothing happened. A broken family is a broken family.

 

In the end, Geoff Downes just defected away to Asia — trading the coolness, the irony, and the snarkiness of a Buggle for the stiffness, seriousness, and pomposity of an «Asian» — before the sessions for the new album had even started properly, leaving behind only some of his keyboard playing on some of the demos. So Trevor Horn cursed him all the way to adult contemporary hell and beyond, and set out to complete the record on his own, with a little help from such friends as Simon Darlow (keyboards), John Sinclair (drum programming and co-producing), and even a keyboard part from Anne Dudley on ʽBeatnikʼ (who then joined Horn for many of his projects, including The Art Of Noise).

 

The resulting album is understandably much more morose and depressed than Age Of Plastic, and this decreases its value — as long as the Buggles were happy, snappy, and punchy, the magic worked, but in this noticeably more pensive, melancholic, «downer» mood, quite a few songs tend to drag, if not suck. Case in point: ʽLennyʼ. It may or it may not refer to Lenny Bruce, and there's nothing wrong with either possibility — but its melody progresses from somewhat moro­nic to simply boring, just lots of poorly expressive synthesizers and a semi-decent vocal track which still has Horn in his «I am Jon Anderson» mode, trying to make us believe he is trying to make some sort of important point, but really just wasting three minutes of our time. And this is not the only misfire on this record.

 

Thankfully, some of that old snarkiness is still in action on about half of the record. ʽBeatnikʼ is a hilarious reinvention of the rockabilly genre for the technopop era — and graced with more Yes-style harmonies and lyrics ("all will be revealed before the next move!") on top of it all. The title track, in prime Buggles fashion, pokes fun at whatever the Buggles themselves are doing: "they're not playing, they're just having adventures in modern recording!", and it is light, sprightly, self-ironic, tends to change keys and tempos — basically, the kind of stuff that 10cc might have been doing in 1981, had they survived up to 1981 in a less crappy format than they did. And even the lengthy romantic epic ʽVermilion Sandsʼ ends in a bit of «Vegas» fun, also rearranged for the electronic age, proving that humor has not been abandoned.

 

Elsewhere, Horn tends to get too serious — apparently, even one year with Yes can rearrange your liver to such solid mental grace that the next thing you know, you're writing sci-fi mytholo­gical ballads with references to rainbow warriors or allusions to J. G. Ballard. Actually, both ʽVermilion Sandsʼ and ʽRainbow Warriorʼ seem like decent compositions, but this whole «art-synth-pop» business... I just don't know. Too simple and silly to really compete with the prog­gers — too complex and artistically pretentious to be plain kinky fun. There's no denying some creati­vity and intelligence here, but ʽJohnny On The Monorailʼ has all this stuff beat in a jiffy — that one just had plain old hooks, these ones seem to demand from you to acknowledge their depth, and I am not sure if they have any.

 

There's also a remake of ʽI Am A Cameraʼ (formerly ʽInto The Lensʼ) here, done Buggles-style rather than Yes-style, but I've never been a big fan of that song in the first place, so let's not get any ideas. Actually, one point is clear — both Downes and Horn underwent a «maturation» pro­cess while they were in Yes, so that Downes eventually got serious enough for Asia (!) and Horn got serious enough for turning Buggles into BuggYes. If this latter idea intrigues and fascinates you, go for this album at once — if you are a big fan of Drama, it is impossible that you will not find something here to please your synth-prog lover's heart. If, however, it sounds unattractive in theory, I do not believe you will find it any different in practice. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the «quirky» songs and I respect the craft of the «serious» songs, so the overall rating is still a thumbs up — them Buggles don't have more than two albums out anyway, so they might just as well get an extra pointer for that (including an advance for not releasing a Buggles album any­where near 1986, which would probably have been fatal). Also, Trevor Horn is just a good guy with a strong artistic vision, and even some of his relative failures are still interesting.

BUTTHOLE SURFERS

BUTTHOLE SURFERS (1983)

 

1) The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave; 2) Hey; 3) Something; 4) Bar-B-Q Pope; 5) Wichita Cathedral; 6) Sui­cide; 7) The Revenge Of Anus Presley.

 

Like Kurt Cobain, you just gotta respect any band that calls itself «Butthole Surfers». On one hand, the name is more «irreverently amusing» than flat-out gross (like Anal Cunt, something that requires even more imagination than the idea of a butthole surfer but ends up being disgus­ting in any case). On the other hand, the name totally and utterly precludes such a potential em­barrassment as «commercial success». Let's face it, fame and fortune are for losers — real men find satisfaction in anything but fame and fortune, and what better means are there to get them completely and permanently out of your way than calling yourself «Butthole Surfers»?

 

This debut EP was originally released in 1983 on the Dead Kennedys' label, Alternative Tentacles; apparently, Jello Biafra was so overwhelmed by the guys that he promised to release their stuff, pro­vided they could find somebody to lend them some studio time — which they did, proving that truly nothing is impossible. The band's lineup at the time included Gibby Haynes on lead vocals and saxophone; Paul Leary on guitar and occasional lead vocals; Bill Jolly on bass; and a whole set of different drummers, some of whom they probably even forgot to mention on the cre­dits. And who'd want to look at the credits, with that album art, anyway?

 

The music... okay, this is music. Basically, Butthole Surfers play «punk rock», but not «regular» or «hardcore» punk rock — rather something like absurdist or dadaist punk rock. Unlike union­ized punkers, these guys have little concern for the evil grin of The System, or the everyday sweat of The Working Man: what they are more concerned about is testing the limits of the punk idiom, whether it can incorporate humor, purely artistic offensiveness, raffinated craziness, and just about anything else you'd like to insert, at random, inside the idiom. For instance, you might want to play a bit of college-style folk-rock with psychedelic guitar overdubs (ʽHeyʼ), or some repeti­tive one-chord blues vamps (ʽSomethingʼ), and they'll all fit in with the more overtly punkish material like ʽThe Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Graveʼ (does he really?).

 

It may all seem silly, but the band gets by on the sheer strength of its imagination — their musi­cal and cultural knowledge are undeniable, and they mix small pinches of everything in such incre­dibly unimaginable combinations that it never feels like the only purpose of making this EP was to gross out the audience. So there's a lot of predictable offensiveness thrown at religion, the Pope in person (ʽBar-B-Q Popeʼ — does there exist a Sinead O'Connor cover of this anywhere?), pop icons like Hendrix and Elvis, and dead parents, but it's all funny, and some of it is even catchy: simplistic vamp or not, that "something she said to me last night" bit from ʽSomethingʼ really sticks in the brain. And speaking of surfing, there is a little bit of surf guitar on ʽWichita Cathed­ralʼ, as if they were actually influenced by Agent Orange.

 

In addition, Paul Leary is quite an in­ventive guitarist who likes to introduce just a wee bit of dissonance in his overall smooth lead guitar playing — not a lot, like Greg Ginn, but just a bit to throw you off balance. That's on the less messy songs, like ʽWichita Cathedralʼ, but then there are also intentionally messy trips — like ʽSuicideʼ, an unlikely marriage between old school rock'n'roll and free-form avantgarde music where, I suppose, rock'n'roll symbolizes "the walls of my life" and free-form avantgarde suggests suicide. Or there's just total hooliganry, like ʽThe Revenge Of Anus Presleyʼ, as full of obscenities as if it were the band's take on an underground rap ritual, while the guitars spiral around you in a psychopathic, but humorous manner. Like a comical, lighthearted take on Stooges-style madness.

 

In January 2003, the album was re-released on CD together with its follow-up EP, Live PCPPEP, recorded live (indeed) in a club in San Antonio and originally released in the fall of 1984. A sepa­rate review for this EP would be rather superfluous, especially since it mostly just reproduces Butthole Surfers in its entirety, although the show does start off with a ravenously insane take on ʽCowboy Bobʼ which is a preview of the version on their next studio album. There are a couple bonuses on the CD release, though, such as the previously unreleased blues-punk-rocker ʽGary Floydʼ, and a bass-heavy post-punk rocker ʽSinister Crayonʼ which, fairly speaking, sounds rather dull and un-ironic next to the obscene hilariousness of the trailblazing EP, and was pro­bably left off for a good reason — this kind of stuff would rather suit, say, Pere Ubu. Oh, and if your ears are sharp enough to penetrate into the stage banter, you do need this by all means — Haynes is constantly spouting insults to the public, at one point even remarking that they have managed to clear out most of the audience, as if it were a good thing...

 

In any case, both the original EP and the new, much expanded release get a thumbs up rating — it might be safe to say that in 1983, nobody took punk as un-seriously as these guys, and that is quite a refreshing thing to remember. Of course, as far as irreverent songwriting is concerned, this is not Ween-level quality, but these guys are Ween's spiritual ancestors, and we at least have to respect this, even if we don't necessarily have to enjoy all the jokes or be amazed at all the little experiments.

 

PSYCHIC... POWERLESS... ANOTHER MAN'S SAC (1984)

 

1) Concubine; 2) Eye Of The Chicken; 3) Dum Dum; 4) Woly Boly; 5) Negro Observer; 6) Butthole Surfer; 7) Lady Sniff; 8) Cherub; 9) Mexican Caravan; 10) Cowboy Bob; 11) Gary Floyd.

 

The process of creative unfurling from «probe EP» to «full-blown LP» level is always nice to watch, provided we are dealing with real, not faked, creativity — and in 1984, Butthole Surfers were on a roll, inspired and encouraged by the realisation that they were able to allow themselves just about anything. Punk attitude, offensive demeanor, dirty humor, psychedelic arrangements, and limitless intrusion into the territory of any randomly picked musical genre — these guys had the advantage of taking nothing so seriously that it would impose any unbreakable rules of musi­cal conduct on their career.

 

Commercial success not being even a distant objective, they were, nevertheless, not properly «avantgarde» — most of the melodies on this album respect regular blues conventions, and could be characterized as pop rock, blues rock, hard rock, punk rock, maybe a little heavy metal on the side, anyway, nothing particularly out of the ordinary; in any case, the band members did not have the chops to play something trickier than that (and how many bands did, anyway?). How­ever, it is not the core melodies, but the irreverent attitude towards these melodies that counts: the band prepares a package of hilarious shock value, inspired grossness, and unpredictable musical seasoning for each song, and have themselves a jolly good time as each package goes off like a shitbomb in the listeners' faces.

 

Actually, when I say «hilarious», I need to correct myself. The stuff that the Surfers do here is neither very intelligent nor very funny, and if you are even a little bit stuck up or hung up, it will be very easy to dismiss all these songs as pointless hooliganry. I mean, ʽLady Sniffʼ? Okay, some­body will be sure defend the song as a nasty parody on the redneck and/or white trash ste­reotype, replete with grunts, farts, expectorations, and verbal wonders like "lady walk that greasy gravy!", but somebody else will just as easily say that the whole thing is just a sorry excuse for finally putting some fart noises on tape, something so often used as a threatening allegory by us reviewers but, actually, so rarely encountered in real life. And here it is!

 

The hilariousness lies not in the offensiveness, though, and not in any alleged attempts at joking: the main strength is in the synthesis of various influences, or in the emotional inversion (corrup­tion!) of musical styles. For instance, ʽDum Dumʼ is really a spoof on Black Sabbath's ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ, borrowing the song's rhythm section and crossing it with trebly-wobbly, «clucky» lead guitar that sounds like a cross between Duane Eddy and Adrian Belew. ʽWoly Bolyʼ lifts the distorted descending guitar intro off some garage classic whose name escapes me at present (no, it is not ʽWooly Bullyʼ, as one might probably suggest) and reworks it into the general melody of the song, but that general melody tends to «melt» and become splattered against the wall, only to pick itself up and then be smashed again every now and then (fortunately, the rhythm section is tight enough to allow Leary to do whatever he wants). And ʽButthole Surferʼ is indeed like surf-punk, only much dirtier than your average Agent Orange.

 

If you get offended easily, the first song to be checked here is certainly not ʽLady Sniffʼ, but the six-minute plus workout ʽCherubʼ, which alternates between power-chord based sludge-metal sections and odd «astral» passages where one guitar sounds like a spaceship, plotting a complex course in an asteroid field, and the other guitars crash and bust around it like those particular asteroids, collision with which was inavoidable. And at certain intervals they even play a chord that makes you expect they will rip into Hendrix's ʽThird Stone From The Sunʼ at any moment, but they're just teasing you. This is really the kind of hilariousness I am referring to, certainly not the fact that they use the word "negro" in a song title or anything.

 

But the quintessential BS song on this album is probably ʽCowboy Bobʼ, which was already made available earlier in the live version on Live PCPPEP; here, the production is cleaner, but Haynes is delivering his lyrics through a bullhorn, so you can take your personal pick — anyway, the song has it all: silly irreverential title that has nothing to do with the lyrics or melody, a nasty, repetitive, droning hard rock bassline à la Budgie's ʽBreadfanʼ, supported with a saxophone part for contrast, wild screaming in the background (and sometimes in the foreground), psychedelic guitar soloing, and schizophrenic lyrics ("I've always got a knife in my back!", which could be a good tagline for the band's entire career). This is what you get, basically, when you cross Iggy Pop with Keith Moon — yes, that's the very essence of Butthole Surfers.

 

To call this record an overall «classic» would be an insult to the band itself, I believe: they are not here to amaze you or make you rethink your life, they are here to introduce a bit of creativity and imagi­nation into the old art of grossing-out. But in the somewhat parallel (and sometimes a wee bit perpendicular) universe of flippy-freaky, it is a classic, unquestionably deserving its own flip­py-freaky thumbs up; I am still trying to imagine how that would look on brown paper, but per­haps I have not had my proper fill of ʽCherubʼ and ʽCowboy Billʼ just yet to understand that.

 

REMBRANDT PUSSYHORSE (1986)

 

1) Creep In The Cellar; 2) Sea Ferring; 3) American Woman; 4) Waiting For Jimmy To Kick; 5) Strangers Die Every­day; 6) Perry; 7) Whirling Hall Of Knives; 8) Mark Says Alright; 9) In The Cellar; 10) Moving To Florida*; 11) Comb*; 12) To Parter*; 13) Tornadoes*.

 

On here, the Surfers are attempting to get a little more serious, though you certainly would not know it from the album title — which not even the real Rembrandt would have appreciated, I think, no matter how iconoclastic a picture is being painted of him in various urban legends. But then I guess, if you put the word «Rembrandt» in your album title, there's no getting away from at least trying to do something important. Even if it is followed by the word «pussyhorse». Okay, not that important, perhaps.

 

Most of these tracks rise high above basic street hooliganry, though not always above the level of parody — some sound like an absurdist take on Joy Division (ʽWhirling Hall Of Knivesʼ) or Nick Cave (ʽSea Ferringʼ), and some are noisy, irreverent deconstructions of classics (the Guess Who's ʽAmerican Womanʼ). The true name of the game, though, is «experimentalism», and the band tries on everything that works and some things that don't, with spontaneity and unpredictability as their chief guides.

 

One of the legends states, for instance, that they were recording ʽCreep In The Cellarʼ on a used 16-track tape without having previously erased a country-western fiddle track from one of the channels — which played something completely different, but they liked it and left it in, so here we have ourselves some dark piano pop with a merry fiddle «underdub» playing something almost straight out of the Beatles' ʽDon't Pass Me Byʼ. Does it work? Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. More important is the fact that such was Fate's decree, and if you call yourselves The Butthole Surfers, you just don't muck around with Fate.

 

Everything here is weird, largely because the Surfers have finally gotten used to the possibilities of the recording studio, and are using the whole power of effects, overdubs, loops, and samples to their benefit, if that might indeed be the right word for it. Some basic knowledge of American pop culture, as usual, wouldn't hurt to appreciate the record deep enough, but is hardly necessary: perhaps knowing that ʽMark Says Alrightʼ utilizes the growl of a pitbull named Mark Farner, in «honor» of the leader of Grand Funk Railroad (a band that could hardly be further away from the Butthole Surfers' ideal than any other — but then, at least secretly, deep down inside everybody really loves GFR), makes the track a little more hilarious — but its real charm lies in how it com­bines elements of musical suspense with musical clowning, starting off with surf guitar trills and then melting them into a sea of chiming noises and wobbly interlocking soundwaves. What's Mark Farner got to do with that, anyway?

 

But essentially, this is a record about madness, not as heavy and frightening as, say, The Birth­day Party, yet every bit as deranged — already ʽCreep In The Cellarʼ begins with the line "there's a hole in his brain where his mind should have been", an appropriate tag for everything that goes on here. If there is a problem, it lies in the fact that almost as many albums had been recorded about madness by 1986 as there had been about breakups, and the Surfers aren't giving us any previous­ly uncovered angle, although it helps that they are not being too serious about it: for instance, a surreptitious slice of social criticism is heavily disguised in ʽPerryʼ, an adaptation of the Perry Mason theme for organ, schizophrenic guitar, and distorted, barely identifiable vocals. A zombie mutant Vegas anthem, words, music, and meaning all corroded.

 

I would not go as far as to fall in love with the record, though. Like many experimental «try anything for kicks» records, this one has some brilliant musical ideas (like the flanger effect on ʽWhirling Hall Of Knivesʼ, drilling a nice see-through hole in your skull in four and a half minutes), some odd stuff that overstays its welcome (did the electro-tribal drumming on ʽAmeri­can Womanʼ really have to occupy five and a half minutes of space?), and some completely pointless tracks — for instance, the "church organ" + "bubbles" + "distant vocal noise" combina­tion of ʽStrangers Die Everydayʼ simply does nothing other than undermining the solemnity of the church organ with the silliness of the bubbles. So what was that all about again?..

 

The CD issue of the album increases its length drastically by throwing on the EP Cream Corn From The Socket Of Davis (from the previous year) as a bonus, adding three more tracks in the same (lack of) style and one, ʽMoving To Floridaʼ that would have been a better fit for Psychic..., what with its vocal lambasting of the redneck stereotype. However, I am not certain that forty nine minutes is a good span for an album like this — what with the songs tending to drag so much and the sonic weirdness of it all not always coinciding with sonic amazement, so to speak. Of course, in the overall context of 1986 («the worst year for music», as I like to call it, although mostly in reference to the major label commercial stuff), Pussyhorse is a marvel of human in­genuity. But in the overall context of human ingenuity as such, I would refrain from a thumbs up judgement: there is not much here that I openly enjoy, be it with a giggle or with a shiver, and too many tracks that are too boring to respect.

 

LOCUST ABORTION TECHNICIAN (1987)

 

1) Sweat Loaf; 2) Pittsburg To Lebanon; 3) Weber; 4) Hay; 5) Human Cannonball; 6) U.S.S.A; 7) The O-Men; 8) Kuntz; 9) Graveyard; 10) 22 Going On 23.

 

Okay, this time they're really just taking random words out of a dictionary. In fact, they're taking random stuff out of everywhere, and piling it all up as long as it sounds heavy, dark, weird, dis­turbing, and humorous at the same time. Now do not get me wrong: if something sounds heavy, dark, weird, disturbing, and humorous at the same time, that does not necessarily mean that it's good — which should be kind of obvious to anybody who ever tried emptying the entire contents of a fully stocked refrigerator into one big bowl and tasting on the contents. In fact, I am still trying to understand whether this album has any artistic merits, and it is even harder than with Rembrandt Pussyhorse, because on there, they at least tried to hook us with verbal content. On Locust Abortion Technician, there is not a lot of words in the first place, and what little there is does not even make surrealist sense.

 

«Bad acid trip» is a typical description when it comes to discussing this record, but so many pieces of music have been described as sonic equivalents of «bad acid trips», it's hardly distinc­tive any more — as well as most likely meaningless to those of us who have never had bad acid trips. «Evil clown music» is more like it, especially when you take the album sleeve into consi­deration — or, perhaps, «Zen music», if you take «Zen» not in its meditative interpre­tation, but in its aspect of «revelation through shock». Almost any of these composi­tions / sonic collages could theoretically awaken one of the many beasts inside you, as the Surfers cleverly choose «tasty» soundbites and stack them on top of each other or twirl them around each other and then invite you to step into the unknown and tell them what it is that you feel, as they deconstruct and distort musical reality.

 

I wonder what Tony Iommi would say about ʽSweet Loafʼ, a six-minute «tribute» not just to the main riff of Sabbath's ʽSweet Leafʼ, but to the basic construction principle of Master Of Reality in general — brutal-heavy parts being divided by soft acoustic interludes for the sake of sharper contrast. Silly it may be, but it definitely sounds more «trippy» than the original — which, if you remember, was actually an anthem to marijuana, and so, in a sense, you could say that the Surfers stay more true to the original spirit of the song than Sabbath themselves. And what would the ori­ginal heavy electric bluesmen from Beck to Page say about ʽPittsburg To Lebanonʼ, an exercise in distorting the 12-bar structure to the fuzziest extremes of 1987? And what would the original masters of psychedelic guitar say to ʽWeberʼ, thirty seconds of craziest, shrilliest lead guitar over­dubs ever that make Cream, Hendrix, and even the Stooges seem like studio wimps?

 

Okay, they'd all probably just laugh it off, and they'd have their reasons. But even on the least well structured numbers here, the Surfers do their best to exacerbate everything, and they do it on a highly professional level: this is not just a bunch of kids giggling with the recording controls, these are experts that crank up to 11 whatever it is that they are cranking. In fact, the album's only track that does superficially resemble a «song», the speedy rocker ʽHuman Cannonballʼ, might be the weakest link — it just sounds way too normal for this record. It could have been recorded by, I dunno, Bad Religion, for instance. Whereas something like ʽKuntzʼ — a totally bizarre mix of East European and Southeast Asian motives (including a vocal track that they dragged off some Thai pop song) — as deranged as it is, could only come from the inexhaustible trickster mind of Gibby Haynes. And Leary's guitar work on ʽGraveyardʼ showcases his serious chops as a blues guitarist (that solo would be well respected on any classic blues-rock record), but it is more im­portant how every once in a while he dissolves the notes in a puddle of hysterical noise, while Haynes is mumbling black magic incantations or something in the background.

 

It helps that the album is short (barely half an hour in length) and yet its contents are so diverse; it also helps that there is practically no toilet humor (or if there is, it's probably in Thai); and it cer­tainly helps that, deep down inside, these guys are really just good old fans of the classics — had they been worshippers of avantgarde icons like Henry Cow, this would have been «weirdness squared», but when you take Sabbath and Zeppelin as your points of entry, well, from a certain cynical point of view, these guys are just begging to be deconstructed to some such effect. Not that Locust Abortion Technician cannot be enj... uh, assimilated on its own, without any know­ledge of its derivational base. But I don't believe that Haynes himself ever wanted you to do something like that — most likely, he'd tell you to go do your psychedelic, metallic, and punkish homework first, and then get back to him later. In any case, my thumbs up here should only be relevant if one does not regard the record as a stand-alone thing, but sees it as a crooked mirror projection of its predecessors. As a stand-alone thing, I would not be qualified to judge it anyway. Besides, it's not 1987 any more — these days, what are the chances of anyone hearing ʽSweet Loafʼ before ʽSweet Leafʼ, rather than after? (Unless, of course, the anyone in question is a 12-year old with a particularly sick mind, surfing for buttholes on the Internet).

 

HAIRWAY TO STEVEN (1988)

 

1) Jimi; 2) Ricky; 3) I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas; 4) John E. Smoke; 5) Rocky; 6) Julio Iglesias; 7) Backass; 8) Fast.

 

A lot of people swear by this as the last great Butthole Surfers album, but... I'm not all that sure. I'm not even sure about the title, which is a kinky spoonerism worthy of a Mark Prindle review, but on the whole, seems just «silly» rather than «absurd» — and not even all that offensive, either, if you want to make a key point on the Butthole Surfers' importance as the ultimate Sacred Cow Irritant to be unleashed on a stuck-up world.

 

But outside of the title, the record seems like an attempt at relatively tame, even normal — for the Surfers, that is — psychedelic rock, with a heavy nod to their predecessors. It may well be so that, like many sensible people do, Gibby and Paul got tired of merely fooling around and decided to finally «make progress», «mature», or something like that (this rational assumption is almost de­stroyed to smithereens if you take the lyrics of ʽJulio Iglesiasʼ into consideration, but this screa­ming exception just proves the general rule). And this is not such a perfect idea, because the "songwriting" here is essentially centered around lengthy and/or repetitive grooves — almost  jam-like grooves, and as much as I respect Paul Leary as a guitarist, jamming is not what this band is truly about. Although, in a pinch, some Butthole Surfers jamming may be good (and, shh, don't tell anyone, but it is definitely more fun than the Grateful Dead anyway).

 

Unlike Hairway To Steven, ʽJimiʼ is a good title — this opening 12-minute epic is clearly dedi­cated to Hendrix, which is reflected both in Leary's guitar style and in the band's heavy playing around with speeding up and slowing down their vocals; together with all the astral noises and guitar meltdowns, this is highly reminiscent of the opening «alien sketch» on Axis: Bold As Love. But ʽEXPʼ was over in a couple minutes, whereas this one goes on long after it has re­vealed all its potential, and even if you built up a case that Paul Leary is a much better Hendrix interpreter than Stevie Ray Vaughan (totally possible, if you value the «psycho» aspects of Jimi's playing more than his «blues» aspects), this is cool, but not jaw-droppingly amazing/original guitar playing by the standards of 1988. The unexpected transition into acoustic folk-rock jam­ming with chirping birds and crying babies all around during the last five minutes is kinda cool, but also most definitely overlong. Take five minutes off the first part and three off the second, and you have something nice and adequate going there.

 

Once we get to the shorter songs, we experience the problem of what it is when the Surfers sound «normal». Found face to face with a psycho-folk backing (e. g. on ʽRickyʼ and ʽRockyʼ), Gibby Haines begins sounding suspiciously close to Marty Balin, whereas Leary, when he is not paying tribute to Hendrix, seems to be surreptitiously tearing pages out of the Syd Barrett riffbook (ʽRickyʼ, I believe, uses some chord progressions from ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ at least). That wouldn't be too bad if they used these influences to good effect — but much too often, it just sounds like humble tributes to their betters. I mean, it's probably good that the songs sound so timeless; remembering the sound fashions of 1988, it is nice not to see them reflected here in any way. But timelessness also comes at a price, and the price here is that this brand of groove-based, relatively humor-free psychedelia just does not seem to make a lot of self-autonomous sense.

 

The problem is, you either have great melodies or you have impressive atmosphere (if you're really lucky, you can have both), but these melodies aren't too great (at best, they're passable vari­ations on stuff we already know), and the atmosphere is confusing. ʽI Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gasʼ — is this supposed to be a parody, or is this the Butthole Surfers' twisted way of a lyrical and musical interpretation of what seems to be a routine visit to a local clinic? It's too twisted for the former, but too crude and offensive to be taken seriously. And if you pay no atten­tion to the lyrics (or even the vocals), it is just another syncopated rocker with a predictable acoustic rhythm pattern — although when Leary gets to the solo, he has a nice way of taking it high up into the stratosphere, I'll admit. But then, if we're heading into the stratosphere, we are no longer in the local clinic, so count me confused.

 

And, naturally, with tunes like ʽJulio Iglesiasʼ, where Gibby lambasts poor Julio ("Julio he had a mole / Went to the doctor with a fiery pole / Saw the nurse what did he see / Loved to watch his sister pee") to a frantic neo-rockabilly beat; or with tunes like ʽJohn E. Smokeʼ, a lengthy pseudo-live send-up of the country-western tell-tale subgenre, it is hard to take the album seriously. In the end, it's just a little frustrating: the record tries to be everything at once, and in doing so, fails rather than succeeds as a whole. Individually, there's plenty of good moments to be had — and the short coda ʽFastʼ, featuring the band packing a tight punch and Leary excelling both on rhythm and heavily processed lead guitar, might be one of their best songs ever. But as a cohesive (or even as an intentionally dis-cohesive) LP, Hairway To Steven is a first misstep that would ultimately lead to the band's losing it altogether.

 

DOUBLE LIVE (1989)

 

1) Too Parter; 2) Psychedelic Jam; 3) Ricky; 4) Rocky; 5) Gary Floyd; 6) Florida; 7) John E. Smoke; 8) Tornadoes; 9) Pittsburg To Lebanon; 10) The One I Love; 11) Hey; 12) Dum Dum; 13) No Rule; 14) U.S.S.A.; 15) Comb; 16) Graveyard; 17) Sweetloaf; 18) Backass; 19) Paranoid; 20) Fast; 21) I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas; 22) Strawberry; 23) Jimi; 24) Lou Reed; 25) Kuntz; 26) 22 Going On 23; 27) Creep In The Cellar; 28) Suicide; 29) Some­thing.

 

Double Live? What is this — the Butthole Surfers tribute to the Golden Age of Progressive Rock? By all means, the length of this monster (130 minutes, give or take a few), which has since 1990 been available as a double live CD, not LP set, actually gives ELP and Yes with their triple albums a good run for their money. And in a better world, this record might be all the Butthole Surfers your record col­lection needs — a massive run through most of their highlights, a few of their lowlights, some on-the-spot stage craziness and stage sickness, and even an R.E.M. cover and a Grand Funk Railroad cover totally out of the blue (okay, so we already new Gibby was a Mark Farner «fan», but Gibby playing Michael Stipe is something else altogether). Unfortunately, the harsh reality is so harsh that I have a hard time not letting my tongue slip about how this album totally s... okay, we are not being objective here, so stop it, tongue.

 

Fact of the matter is, what they say is that Double Live was released primarily as an anti-boot­legging measure: since the Surfers weren't making a whole lot of cash from their studio albums (gee, I wonder why?), yet somehow the tapes of their crazyass live performances were in regular demand, they decided they would finally take advantage of that — by going all the way and re­leasing what really seems like their complete repertoire on this double CD monster. The only problem was, there was not a single tape in sight on which the Surfers would be professionally recorded: most of the tracks here are only very slightly above bootleg quality, and a few are quite solidly below bootleg quality. Not to mention that this is arguably the most awfully sequenced live record I've ever heard (granted, I'm not a big expert on underground live releases) — fade outs, fade ins, ugly sonic seams from track to track as if they were just cutting and splicing the tapes with glue and scissors. But the sequencing is really just a minor nuisance next to the con­sistently awful sound to which you are going to be subjected for over two hours.

 

Of course, seasoned fans of the lo-fi sonic crimes of the 1980's underground scene will not bother about such minor nuisances as the drums sounding like tin cans and the guitars sounding as if from under a thick slab of concrete — who knows, maybe some of them might actually feel that it adds to the experience, although I am not sure that Paul Leary himself, with his good ear for crazy guitar sounds, would agree. Too bad, because a track like ʽPsychedelic Jamʼ, which used to be a staple of the band's live show, features some awesome «guitar weaving» between Haynes and Leary, with the two occasionally flying off into space with more flash than the Grateful Dead and more fun than Cream, yet the recording does not properly capture the overtones to turn this into a truly blissful headphone experience.

 

Even worse, the mind-blowing sonic textures of the last two studio records, already seriously weakened due to the band's inability to reproduce them onstage (as far as I understand, they rely on backing tapes, particularly for all the distorted sound effects on the vocals), are further dama­ged by the sound quality, making this version of ʽJimiʼ nigh near unlistenable (in the bad sense of the word; not to mention that ʽLou Reedʼ, into which it promptly segues, seems to be a messy tribute to Metal Machine Music, nine minutes of dirty, crunchy, abrasive chaos that might have sounded cool back in 1975, or even way back in 1970 when the Stooges did it on ʽLA Bluesʼ, but hardly by the standards of 1989). ʽSweatloafʼ gains nothing by having its «regret» spoken bit replaced by a creative dirty rewriting of Morrison's soliloquy in ʽThe Endʼ, and loses almost everything by not even having the riff played distinctly, let alone everything else.

 

To cut a long story short — inevitably so, because I've only managed to sit through this once and have no wish to repeat the experience — if you want a shadow of some proper appreciation of the Surfers as a live band, please refer to Live PCPPEP, which was much shorter, much better recorded, gave a more distinct portrait of Gibby Haynes as frontman, and is available as a freebie with their first EP anyway. Double Live, on the other hand, has them dealing with the problem of reproducing all that crazyass studio experimentation on the stage, and bad sound quality does not alleviate that problem. As much as I like about half of these songs (and have little against most of the other half), the record gets a thumbs down — I am certainly not spending the next several years trying to get myself to like this attempt to convert carefully crafted studio surrealism into thin, muffled, wobbly psychedelic spontaneity.

 

PIOUHGD (1990)

 

1) Revolution Part 1; 2) Revolution Part 2; 3) Lonesome Bulldog; 4) Lonesome Bulldog II; 5) The Hurdy Gurdy Man; 6) Golden Showers; 7) Lonesome Bulldog III; 8) Blindman; 9) No, I'm Iron Man; 10) Something; 11) P.S.Y.; 12) Lonesome Bulldog IV; 13*) Barking Dogs.

 

Although a lot of critics seem to think that Piouhgd (on some releases, the title is spelt Pioughd, but I seriously doubt there is a «correct» way of spelling this) shows the beginning of the decline for the Surfers, I would disagree — in fact, I'd say that, in terms of being true to the spirit of the band, this is a major imporvement over Hairway To Steven. Where the latter was almost way too normal — and, consequently, boring — here they return to all sorts of banshee excesses that may be silly, meaningless, irritating, but give this band an actual reason to exist.

 

The opening bluesy jam of ʽRevolutionʼ may seem to start this off on the same note as ʽJimiʼ, but where ʽJimiʼ was meandering and murky and eventually just dissolved in an interminable yawn-inducing acoustic coda, this stuff is faster, punchier, and has a bite. The first part is all about Leary's fuzzy riff, a distant descendant of ʽFoxy Ladyʼ, losing some of that ancestral crunch but retaining all of its mind-melting psyche-delish-ness; and during the second part, it is slightly pushed aside to make way for a simpler, folksier rhythmic pattern and some arrogant vocals, as if they were switching from Hendrix mood into Jefferson Airplane mood — then the overdubs begin to pile up, and we get synthesizers, radio static, twenty layers of screaming, moaning, and blabbering, ringing telephones, wailing sirens, and all sorts of things to suggest a ʽRevolution 9ʼ type of chaos, only everything remains steadily underpinned with a rhythmic melody. In short, seems to be much more crazy stuff going on here than there ever was on ʽJimiʼ.

 

Other highlights here include ʽGolden Showersʼ, whose cheerful Farfisa organ and distorted sax, combined with the somewhat uncomfortable lyrical topic, would probably make this track eli­gible for a Bonzo Dog Band cover; ʽNo, I'm Iron Manʼ — another in a never-ending line of Black Sabbath deconstruc­tions, although this one, I think, only borrows the opening chord of the riff (it is the cavernously distorted vocals that actually make you think of ʽIron Manʼ, rather than the melody); and the hilarious remake of their old chestnut ʽSomethingʼ in the style of Jesus And Mary Chain, for no other reason, I guess, than to show how versatile the band's powers are.

 

There are relative lowlights, too — nobody seems to think much of their country send-up ʽLone­some Bulldogʼ, but I actually think that the silly song itself is merely a pretext for three more «variations», where they play the waltz theme with three different guitar tones/styles (my guess is inspired by Brian May first time around, by Lou Reed second time around, and... uh... is that Sabbath once again they are imitating in Part IV? Downtuning the guitar and bass at the same time? Could be, couldn' it?); which counts as funny in my book. The only real lowlight is pro­bably the «cover» of Donovan's ʽHurdy Gurdy Manʼ, where the main gimmick is a wobbly tre­molo effect on the vocals that will probably make you puke if your head is not too well balanced. But that's okay, we can take it.

 

I am not a major fan of the lengthy jam ʽP.S.Y.ʼ, because, once again, too much of it sounds like an homage to the psychedelic jam bands of old, from the Grateful Dead to Can: ass-kicking, yes, jaw-dropping — no. What is totally jaw-dropping, though, is the last track, which was only made available on the 1992 reissue of the album by Capitol Records: ʽBarking Dogsʼ is one of the greatest sonic nightmares that this, or, for that matter, any band has ever produced. Pinned against an unnerving pseudo-cello electronic pattern, you get banshee-howling guitars, blasts of white noise, agitated and/or screaming vocals, occasional bursts of gunfire, and, yes, barking dogs that crop up with the frightening regularity of enemies in some particularly creepy and bloody arcade game. This is actually their answer to ʽRevolution 9ʼ, and, frankly speaking, it's better, because the various samples and overdubs are much more thoughtfully put together — so that you get a very realistic picture of making a crazy nighttime run through the streets of a city gone mad with ravaging, burning, and killing. Technically, it should probably be called an «industrial» compo­sition, but emotionally, it goes way beyond «industrial» and into the realm of «apocalyptic».

 

If the album only had ʽBarking Dogsʼ on it, it would still be worth a thumbs up; fortunately, uneven as it is, and not breaking any radically new ground, its share of minor crazy-awesome ideas is still higher than its share of silly misfires and its share of "this-is-kinda-boring-when-will-this-ever-end" moments. A pretty damn good, unjustly overlooked album in their wobbly, perverted catalog.

 

INDEPENDENT WORM SALOON (1993)

 

1) Who Was In My Room Last Night?; 2) The Wooden Song; 3) Tongue; 4) Chewin' George Lucas' Chocolate; 5) Goofy's Concern; 6) Alcohol; 7) Dog Inside Your Body; 8) Strawberry; 9) Some Dispute Over T-Shirts Sales; 10) Dancing Fool; 11) You Don't Know Me; 12) The Annoying Song; 13) Dust Devil; 14) Leave Me Alone; 15) Edgar; 16) The Ballad Of Naked Man; 17) Clean It Up; 18) Ghandi*.

 

Lookee here, Butthole Surfers go «mainstream», and all it took was the overnight success of one Kurt Cobain, which, for a strange brief moment in time, convinced major labels that people would buy all sorts of artistically independent weird shit from them, rather than just the carefully calculated and marketed crap — even stuff from a band called Butthole Surfers, who not only did not see it fit to rename themselves for their debut on Capitol, but actually insisted on the name being splattered in bright, shiny, ugly letters all over the album cover. And, considering that this is probably the friendly smiling face of a large tapeworm that we see framed by the name, now we actually know who might be the proverbial «butthole surfer».

 

But it's not as if the switch to a major label did not change the band one bit — on the contrary, Independent Worm Saloon is Haynes and Co.'s most normal, straightforward, accessible album to date, and could easily be regarded as a sellout by hardcore veterans. Produced by none other than Led Zeppelin's own John Paul Jones, this is a record of relatively conventional blues rock, hard rock, dark folk, and occasionally industrial-metal songs that may have some shocking power and may be somewhat offensive, but are in no way baffling to the mind. This is simply Butthole Surfers doing good old rock music — and seemingly enjoying it.

 

And I enjoy it, too, as it fits my observations — the best things in life often come out when we have weirdos acting normal, rather than weirdos acting weird (or normals acting normal, for that matter). The instrumental tones, the riffage, the little bits of studio overdubbing, the song titles and lyrics, the diversity of approach, the passion of delivery, the way the band so totally and reck­lessly gets into everything it does — I buy this approach completely, even if most of the riffs here are just minor variations on old hard rock, punk, and metal patterns (and what isn't?). Simply put, this is one of the most kickass albums of 1993, ladies and gentlemen.

 

Most of the songs are short, but when they're long, they frickin' deserve to be long — like ʽDust Devilʼ, which is like a rougher, crunchier, more psychedelic take on the ZZ Top rock sound, with a bit of Judas Priest thrown in, but really all of this is just an inspirational basis for Leary's love affair with the multiple avatars of his guitar, which start off simply enough, but then gradually build up — at near-top speed! — to a near-apocalyptic explosion, capitalising on the promise that was hinted at on ʽBarking Dogsʼ. On headphones, this does evil things to your brain, although even Jimi would probably suggest that the man is going over the top with this. But hey, if some­body is supposed to go over the top, let it rather be Paul Leary than, say, Joe Satriani.

 

Each and every one of the heavy, fast, «industrialized» rockers on this album rules to one degree or another — starting from the first one, ʽWho Was In My Room Last Night?ʼ, which takes an old riff from the fast part of Led Zeppelin's ʽDazed And Confusedʼ (no coincidence that John Paul was in the studio, right?) and gruffs it up to the point where you almost begin to believe that these boys actually mean business, and that meeting them in a dark alley would not be good for your health. The more punk-style ʽGoofy's Concernʼ is not nearly as serious, but it features the grumbliest guitar tone from Leary ever, and ʽDancing Foolʼ is the punchiest indictment of dance-oriented music ever written, with Haynes impersonating "a dancin' fool" and "the disco king" to  merry martial rhythms that actually have their roots in ʽThe Immigrant Songʼ rather than any­thing even remotely connected with disco, while Leary counteracts with a guitar riff that seems copped from some baroque chamber music suite. Yes, really. I know what it means, but I can't explain.

 

The more quiet tunes on the album are not as immediately striking, but eventually ʽThe Ballad Of Naked Manʼ, with its relentless acoustic guitar and banjo strumming, begins to come across as some sort of program statement — where the "naked man" in question is taken to be a symbol of Truth and Reality, scorned and shunned by the truth-fearing population ("so get the hell away from me, you goddamn naked man, go the fuck away from me back to Naked land!") — and Haynes is seen as the ragged travelin' minstrel, preaching folksy simplicity to the crowds. The problem is that the quality of the Surfers' music usually depends on the extent to which Leary's talents have been taxed, and he frankly doesn't have much to do on ʽNaked Manʼ, so I'd rather go with ʽThe Wooden Songʼ, where he does get a chance to crash through the monotonousness of its slow country waltzing with a scratchy, squiggly, quasi-atonal guitar solo.

 

But heck, I even have to confess that I love ʽThe Annoying Songʼ, despite the fact that it was al­most certainly recorded to annoy — what else are those «chipmunk» vocals for? Yet somehow, when used in the context of this novelty hard rock song, especially at the climactic screaming outbursts at the end of each verse, they sound... hilarious.

 

Of course, the Surfers are still patented jesters, and none of this should be taken too seriously, even with the vocals erased. But then, in a way, all rock music — heck, maybe all music in gene­ral — is sort of an absurd enterprise, and here the Surfers are just taking some aspects of it and driving them towards a logical height of absurdity. They do it more self-consciously than, say, AC/DC, which means that Independent Worm Saloon could never hope to achieve popularity among the masses, for whom it would still be way too weird; but I could easily see how it could be some stuffy intellectual's favorite rock'n'roll record of all time. Hell, maybe it's on the way to becoming my favorite rock'n'roll record — at least, ʽDust Devilʼ would most unquestionably land in a personal Top 1000 rock'n'roll songs or so. Thumbs up, totally.

 

ELECTRICLARRYLAND (1996)

 

1) Birds; 2) Cough Syrup; 3) Pepper; 4) Thermador; 5) Ulcer Breakout; 6) Jingle Of A Dog's Collar; 7) TV Star; 8) My Brother's Wife; 9) Ah Ha; 10) The Lord Is A Monkey; 11) Let's Talk About Cars; 12) LA; 13) Space.

 

Okay, so we are not going to play it hip here and declare that the Butthole Surfers' brightest mo­ment of commercial glory was a proverbial pile of shit — but let us also face the inevitable: de­spite the gory album cover and the Hendrix pun of the title, Electriclarryland is simply not even close to Independent Worm Saloon when it comes to good music. It may have been the toning down of the ferociousness of their sound that was responsible for the album climbing up the charts, or it may have been the factor of prolonged exposure and publicity, or perhaps the world at large was a little more adventurous in 1996 before Britney Spears swept it all away, but the fact is, Electriclarryland is decent, but not very good.

 

With Jeff Pinkus out of the group and Leary taking over bass duties (occasionally shared with Andrew Weiss of the Rollins Band), the Surfers make one more step towards «being normal», and this time, they overstep it, because in the place of aggressive snarling rock'n'roll, fueled by Leary's guitar-god performance, what we get is a bunch of mid-tempo «alt-rock» songs, heavily dependent on lyrics and vocals rather than captivating instrumental work and also influenced by some of the more modern developments in music, such as trip-hop. It seems that the band, either of its own will or, perhaps, pushed by outside provocators, is trying to adapt to contemporary trends — big, big mistake, since for all their revolutionary mind-blowing prowess, the Butthole Surfers were always at their best when guided by their past, not present influences (note: this judgement certainly does not apply to any artist, but it seems oh so true for these guys).

 

The result is stuff like ʽPepperʼ, a song that got them into the Top 40 on the singles market — a miraculous feat, I guess, but the irony of the situation is that ʽPepperʼ, at most, is just listenable when it comes to separating the band's great stuff from the band's passable stuff. Leary still does his best to get a good psychedelic lead tone going on this slow trip-hoppy cruise, but the solo seems strictly confined to a single melodic pattern, the vocals, whether it's the rapped verses or the sung chorus, are somnambulant in a prison courtyard, and the gruesome story told through the lyrics only seems there to somehow introduce an element of belated shock into the commercially intended performance. No, actually, the groove is still worthwhile — closing your eyes to it and settling into a slow rhythmic wobble can be relaxing — but in the end, this... well, sounds more like the Brian Jonestown Massacre than the Butthole Surfers. And how on Earth this got into the Top 40 in 1996, I'll never know. Did people confuse this with a new Tricky single or what?

 

Echoes of Worm Saloon's rocky explosions are still felt throughout — even the album opener ʽBirdsʼ has a fast-'n'-furious rock'n'roll punch, although it adds little to the vibe already explored on ʽWho Was In My Room?ʼ and ʽDust Devilʼ. Another fast tempo number, ʽAh Haʼ, prefers to replace distorted hard rock guitars with jangly folk rock guitars, so that they sound like a home­less, toothless version of R.E.M.; and there is at least one bona fide hardcore punk number, ʽUlcer Breakoutʼ, with the good old chainsaw and dog bark and racecar drumming. But either it is the overall context in which they are lodged, or the lack of their own individuality, yet none of these songs suffice to turn the tide in favor of the record.

 

Oddly enough, when you look at all this with just a formal look, the album remains pretty weird. There is ʽJingle Of A Dog's Collarʼ, a dark folk-pop ballad that seems to have been written from the perspective of a canine character (and ends with some genuine sniffing). There's the risqué ʽMy Brother's Wifeʼ, with heavy use of vocal sampling, loads of white noise, and extra overdubs to reflect the psychosexual commotion of the title character. There's ʽThe Lord Is A Monkeyʼ, a technically successful stab at psychedelic hip-hop with cartoonishly evil rapped vocals and ruth­less wah-wah solos. There's ʽLet's Talk About Carsʼ, featuring a classy pop riff over which people seductively speak French for a few minutes. In short, there's all it usually takes to get a classy, involving, unpredictable pop album.

 

But somehow, in the end, it just doesn't want to click. Where the mix between «normalcy» and «madness» on Worm Saloon seemed just perfect, here it is as if «normal» and «weird» keep seg­regated to two different channels and do not mix at all. So I keep getting torn between the total sensual puzzle of ʽLet's Talk About Carsʼ — and the total openness and even genericity of something like ʽTV Starʼ (a ballad whose chorus goes "Christina, la-la-la, I love you so", if you can believe it). None of the individual songs are awful, but together, they do not amount to an impressive performance. Not that I would imply that «mainstream involvement» ended up eating away the band's essence — rather, they just tried to do something different here, and could not play up to their usual strengths in the process. The record is still well worth a look, but it not only seems weak and lagging next to the band's high standards of quality, it also seems kind of dated to its time period, and Butthole Surfers feel so much greater when they are not attached to any particular time period — not so blatantly, at least.

 

WEIRD REVOLUTION (2001)

 

1) The Weird Revolution; 2) The Shame Of Life; 3) Dracula From Houston; 4) Venus; 5) Shit Like That; 6) Mexico; 7) Intelligent Guy; 8) Get Down; 9) Jet Fighter; 10) The Last Astronaut; 11) Yentel; 12) They Came In.

 

Apparently, the Butthole Surfers' little romance with mainstream popularity did not last long. Despite the relative success of ʽPepperʼ, already their next album, After The Astronaut, fully recorded and ready for pressing, did not pass the Capitol quality test and was rejected, which ul­timately cost them their contract and a lot of nerves. The band did not resurface again until 2001, with a new bass player (Nathan Calhoun), a new manager, a new (smaller) contract, and a totally new musical face — and I am not too sure about how exciting that face was.

 

Essentially, Butthole Surfers' last ever completed LP is an «alternative hip hop» album, whatever that means. And do get this right: it is not a «Butthole Surfers album with elements of hip hop», which might have been an interesting thing to witness — it is simply as if Haynes and Leary be­came so fascinated with hip-hop culture that they agreed to subject themselves to its rules, where earlier they accepted no rules whatsoever, and trade most of their identity for some collective fetish. Sure, not all of the album is hip- or trip-hop, but much, if not most, is, and those songs that do not accept the trappings of hip-hop sound like generic alt-rock, which is even worse.

 

Actually, the really worst thing is the unapologetically solemn tone that the album assumes from the very beginning — with that spoken-word announcement dubbed over a boring beat: "On be­half of Dr. Timothy Leary, in association with the legions of illuminated social rejects..." Timo­thy Leary? Timothy Leary's dead, as Ray Thomas told us long before Timothy Leary's physical death, and this whole look-at-me-I'm-so-unbearably-regally-psychedelic stylistics last made sense maybe on some Parliament/Funkadelic records in the mid-1970s. This is just bullshit, as if they are trying to stupefy us with a 30-year old circus program. And no, just because they are trying to hybridize psychedelia with hip-hop does not make this any more forgivable.

 

As if that weren't enough, the first actual song here, ʽThe Shame Of Lifeʼ, is a collaboration with Kid Rock, which is sufficient reason for criminal prosecution in some well-advanced countries. The lyrics are reasonably intelligent — this is basically a reflection on the hedonistic-excessive nature of hip-hop and its imminent arisal out of the state we're all in ("my shallow mind is just a sign of your game of life") — but the music is limited to a simplistic heavy rock riff and some sound effects scattered around for creepiness' sake. If I didn't know this was a Butthole Surfers composition, I'd never have paid it any mind in the first place. It doesn't help, either, that ʽDracula From Houstonʼ, combining rapped verses with a garage rock riff that had already been used ap­proximately 50,000 times in the past three decades (and that's just the verse — the chorus rips off ʽSmells Like Teen Spiritʼ, if you can believe), is possibly the worst song these guys ever commit­ted to tape. What's up with this commercial pop-punk shit?

 

All right, I will admit that it does get better as it goes on — ʽGet Downʼ, for instance, is funky as hell, catchy as heck, and funny: its angle comes across as parodic, and at the same time Leary gets to lay across some nice riffs and astral phased-out solos. ʽMexicoʼ, which has nothing to do with Mexico, draws some Eastern melodic overtones across a predominantly electronic arrangement, and makes fun of most of the world's major religions, past and present, in the process. A couple other tracks mix the weird and the normal in acceptable, though not necessarily mind-blowing, proportions. But for every track like that there's a ʽJet Fighterʼ, a surprisingly sincere-sounding piece of anti-war satire with a bland folk-rock arrangement, or a ʽLast Astronautʼ, which is barely listenable because of awful production (the main gimmick is a set of vocal overdubs that were apparently captured from space, and, predictably, they sound like shit).

 

The main point is: this is not «Butthole Surfers». Bands do change and evolve, sometimes turning into something you could never ever have suspected from them in the beginning — but it's all right as long as the original spirit remains alive. If there is a spirit in Weird Revolution, it is buried so deep under the ice of the synthetic, stiffening production that, for all intents and pur­poses, it may as well be dead. Not only does the record take itself way too seriously (I mean, what the heck? Just because they have embraced hip hop, they think that they now need to tiptoe through the tulips?), but it blocks their individual talents, especially Leary's, and asserts way too much discipline over a world whose main value used to lie in its undisciplined attitude. Maybe it's not awful — but it's a very, very, very disappointing metamorphosis.

 

And even if the band never officially disbanded (in fact, as a touring outfit, the Surfers were periodically quite active throughout the 2000s), the very fact that Weird Revolution was not followed by anything else is telling — I'm pretty sure that the band understood that it lost its way, creatively, and that under these conditions it would be more prudent to honestly rebrand them­selves as a nostalgia act than to continue this frustrating «modernisation». Come to think of it, the Surfers always were a nostalgic act, from the very beginning — they were always successfully busy carving out the future by peering into the past, and it is only when they began consciously peering into the future that success began to evade them.

 

ADDENDA

 

HUMPTY DUMPTY LSD (1982-1994; 2002)

 

1) Night Of The Day; 2) One Hundred Million People Dead; 3) I Love You Peggy; 4) Space I; 5) Perry Intro; 6) Day Of The Dying Alive; 7) Eindhoven Chicken Masque; 8) Just A Boy; 9) Sinister Crayon; 10) Hetero Skeleton; 11) Earthquake; 12) Ghandi; 13) I Hate My Job; 14) Space II; 15) Concubine Solo; 16) All Day; 17) Dadgad.

 

Although the Surfers never disbanded officially and, in fact, continued to exist as a touring outfit throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the release of this odds-and-ends compilation in 2002 was telling — it's like a shadowy retrospective of the band's entire career, where, for one last time, you can quickly browse through all their life stages and remind yourself what exactly it was that they brought to the table. That said, I must admit that there is pretty little here to go ga-ga over; mostly, it's just stuff for the loyal zealots and the historians, and much of it presented here in awful «home recording» sound quality, too.

 

Of minor interest are such tracks as the Rembrandt Pussyhorse outtake ʽI Love You Peggyʼ, whose title may be a not-too-subtle reference to Buddy Holly (Gibby does begin singing it in a slightly Buddy-ish hiccupy voice, but then the vocal overdubs quickly head into the realm of total insanity, and Leary's shrill folk-pop riff is the only thing that allows the song to preserve some structure); the instrumental ʽEindhoven Chicken Masqueʼ from the same sessions, with a lively mariachi brass fanfare section and a blazing guitar break from Paul; two outtakes from the Butt­hole Surfers sessions, ʽJust A Boyʼ and ʽI Hate My Jobʼ, reminding you of how this band actual­ly started out as an aggressive punk rock outfit — this stuff just sounds like frickin' Black Flag; and, all of a sudden, a cover of the 13th Floor Elevators' ʽEarthquakeʼ from the Hairway To Steven sessions — where you realize the uncanny resemblance of Gibby's voice to Roky Erick­son's — but, although Leary adds some excellent psychedelic guitar solos, I also find myself strangely missing the electric jug of the original.

 

The rest of these songs are even less memorable — some poor-quality demo recordings where the low frequencies drown out all the high ones; some chaotic noise tracks that sound just like any other chaotic noise track (ʽHetero Skeletonʼ; ʽSpace IIʼ); and some brief throwaways like an out of place thick fuzzy bass solo (ʽConcubine Soloʼ) or a «bonus track» that says hello to Napalm Death by being only six seconds long (no vocals, though). A keen musical ear may extract the beginnings of a few nifty ideas here and there, but it's all raw and unfinished. And they probably shouldn't have screwed up the sequencing — as I said, historically-minded people are more like­ly to be interested in these outtakes than those who are too lazy to care about what came after what, and this means that you'll have to re-assemble it all back together in chronological order. On the other side, you can say that Butthole Surfers never wrote music for lazy people — or, for that matter, that they never wrote music for organized people. A mess is a mess is a mess, whichever way you'd like to look at it, so here's one more chunk of mess for you.

 

BUZZCOCKS

ANOTHER MUSIC IN A DIFFERENT KITCHEN (1978)

 

1) Fast Cars; 2) No Reply; 3) You Tear Me Up; 4) Get On Our Own; 5) Love Battery; 6) Sixteen; 7) I Don't Mind; 8) Fiction Romance; 9) Autonomy; 10) I Need; 11) Moving Away From The Pulsebeat.

 

By the time the Buzzcocks got around to releasing their first LP, they'd already played together for two years, and even had time to go through a serious lineup change, dropping their original vocalist Howard Devoto (whom one still has a chance to hear on the Spiral Scratch EP — the Buzzcocks at their punkiest, one might think) and relegating vocal duties to guitarist Peter Shel­ley. And even if they began as friends of the Sex Pistols, Another Music In A Different Kit­chen shows that, ultimately, they'd rather settle on becoming the British equivalent of the Ra­mones — exchanging, perhaps, some of their Queens-based brethren's primal minimalism for a slightly higher level of musical complexity and intellectualism, but worshipping, above and beyond everything else, the (silly) pop catchiness of the music.

 

Steve Diggle's rhythm guitar playing may be fast, distorted, and superficially aggressive, but the music is not triggering a «pissed-off» reaction — it's basically teenage fun, with a Manchester twist. Shelley's vocals have that slightly haughty, but friendly nasal twang that is so common of British glam rockers, and the band has a passion for melodic vocal harmony that shows up on most of the songs — sung songs, not merely recited or screamed over a harsh beat. Likewise, his solos, while not too complex, seem carefully constructed and well rehearsed, albeit still played with maximum feeling. And the tightness of the band's rhythm section once again exposes the myth of punk rock as «non-musician music» for all it's worth — I mean, either the Buzzcocks are not punk rock at all (an open terminological possibility), or this here is some of the tightest, best played, diligently produced rock music of the late 1970s.

 

While the Buzzcocks are usually judged by their singles, these early albums are by no means dis­missable — the debut almost completely consists of well-written highlights, further aided by hilariously insightful lyrics: ʽFast Carsʼ, dominated throughout by its genius two-note guitar solo (catchy and reasonably evocative of a police siren at the same time!), is probably the first well known anti-car song in history, showing that this pop-punk band may have inherited the love for the simple rock'n'roll values of the early 1960s, but not the love for all those other values that went along with it — "they're so depressing, going around and around" makes this the ideological antipod of ʽI Get Aroundʼ. And although this is the only song about cars on the album, it does allow it to proudly fall in the «Nothing but girls and cars!» category — because, well, most, if not all, the other songs are about girls. No coal miners or soup kitchens anywhere on the horizon.

 

Honestly, though, it does not matter much what Pete Shelley thinks about girls as long as he writes these wonderful hooks about them, both vocal and instrumental. The band succeeds both with the speedy chainsaw-buzz three-chord rockers (ʽLove Batteryʼ), the slightly slower, more old-fashioned glam-rockish tunes (ʽGet On Our Ownʼ), and the sharper, moodier, artsier compo­sitions (ʽFiction Romanceʼ), showing great understanding of what it is that separates a striking riff from a meaningless one — the riff of the ʽAutonomyʼ chorus may only have two chords to it, but it cuts through to the heart in one bar, a nagging, insistent, desperate drone that fully supports Shelley's claim that "I, I want you, autonomy!" Indeed, this is nowhere near «unique» music, but it does come across as completely autonomous, sounding just like any other punk rock band and yet, at the same time, totally belonging to these guys and nobody else — probably no other punk band in Britain at the same time showed such attention to melodic detail (certainly not the Pistols or the Clash, to whom melody was only one of several factors that mattered, and probably not the most important one).

 

In fact, Another Music could have been quite valuable as an instrumental album, and it is no surprise that the last track, ʽMoving Away From The Pulsebeatʼ, based on a modernized version of the Bo Diddley beat, actually ends with several minutes of instrumental jamming — guitar solo (somewhat reminiscent of Joy Division's fabulous solo on ʽShadowplayʼ, which appeared later and, for all we know, may have been influenced by the Buzzcocks style), brief drum solo (drum solo on a punk album!), and, finally, the return of the original crunchy riff to bring it down to a grand conclusion. Shelley's solos, loyally following the rhythm rather than playing against it, are always a joy to listen to — in the end, the only song that I am not fond of is the anthem ʽ16ʼ, whose slow, repetitive, bolero-style melody and especially the little bit of chaotic free-form noise sort of disrupt the record's near-perfect flow. That said, the song does emphasize the band's ex­perimental and slightly surrealist side which was essential for them — it's just that it does not feel nearly as natural here as the follow-up, ʽI Don't Mindʼ, which is simple as a doornail but is also one of the finest pop songs the early Kinks never wrote.

 

The slightness of the album prevented it from ever featuring highly in the critical ratings when it came to assessing the legacy of the British punk movement, but I think that the moment one de­cides that «punk», in order to be «good» or «great», does not necessarily have to make a grand social statement (and the artistic value of these statements, per se, has rarely been high anyway), Another Music will immediately rise up to the top of the roster, being the exact (but idio­syncratic) British equi­valent of Ramones — and who cares now that it came out two years late? The important thing is that the music sounds catchy, invigorating, and fresh even today. And has there been a «punk» band in the 2000s, anyway, that managed to produce something as innocent, memorable, and endearing as ʽI Needʼ? This is like Sha Na Na with distorted guitars and a real, not fake-vaudevillian, sense of humor. Thumbs up, of course.

 

LOVE BITES (1978)

 

1) Real World; 2) Ever Fallen In Love; 3) Operators Manual; 4) Nostalgia; 5) Just Lust; 6) Sixteen Again; 7) Wal­king Distance; 8) Love Is Lies; 9) Nothing Left; 10) E.S.P.; 11) Late For The Train.

 

This quickie follow-up to Another Music sounds slightly disappointing to me, not because it was rushed or anything, but because the band went for a somewhat less humorous, more serious ap­proach here, and when the Buzzcocks are weighted down with too much seriousness, they seem to lose touch with their genius. However, moving one step away from perfection is not much of a crime, particularly when you are still capable of crafting first-rate pop-punk hooks by the dozen; and if you are not obsessed with the idea of drawing boundaries between Album A and Album B in the first place, you might not even understand what I'm talking about here.

 

"I'm in love with the real world / It's mutual or so it seems / 'Cos only in the real world / Do things happen like they do in my dreams", Shelley tells us in the opening manifesto of ʽReal Worldʼ — and you could interpret that first line either as the epitome of the punk revolution (music that has to do with "the real world", instead of progressive rock's fantasy universes), or, more likely, as just a statement of personal humility — and peacefulness, which sets the Buzz­cocks so far apart from the bellicose stylistics of their working class brethren. Indeed, all of the songs here are love songs — some are, in fact, romantic love songs, as ʽLove Is Liesʼ, written and sung by Steve Diggle, begins as an acoustic ballad, and by the time we get to the chorus, we are knee-deep in ʽSugar And Spiceʼ territory: "Love is lies, love is eyes, love is everything that's nice" (okay, so you can sort of see why Diggle is not trusted with writing more songs, but if you disregard that creepy "love is eyes" equation, it's actually a pretty folk-pop tune, well deserving of being professionally covered with Searchers-style vocal harmonies).

 

Then there's ʽEver Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)ʼ, often quoted as the most notable song on the album, if not the signature tune of the Buzzcocks — indeed, it is a skilful synthesis of the speedy punk song and the bitter love-lost ballad, although, with a little irony, one might suggest that the Ramones did beat them to the punch with ʽTexas Chainsaw Massacreʼ. However, it is not the instrumental melody and its clever use of minor chords, but rather the vocal hook that produces the deepest impression — Shelley has this fine talent to take an unwieldy string of prose, loop it, and convert it to a gracious musical serpent that sounds like it was born to the realm of rhythm and melody. Who else could craft such a twisted, yet natural chorus with the phrase "have you ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with?" I bet the guy was a tongue-twister champion in elementary school.

 

On the other hand, the Buzzcocks are also trying to prove that they are, first and foremost, a musical band — by including two instrumentals: the short one, ʽWalking Distanceʼ, was written by the bassist and features a nice set of speedy interlocking pop riffs, and the long one, ʽLate For The Trainʼ, is again recorded bolero-style, this time with such an insistent drumbeat, though, that poor John Maher must have ended up with even worse blisters on his fingers than Ringo ever did. The problem is, it does not have enough musical ideas for five and a half minutes: it seems like it is desperately looking for a crescendo, but finally gives up on that and just lets the drums take over completely for the coda.

 

Definitely not a work of genius, that one, and shows that the Buzzcocks are not universal masters of everything — unsurprisingly, it is the short three-minute pop-punk tunes like the cocky, heroic ʽNostalgiaʼ or the sexopathological statemenr ʽJust Lustʼ that take home first, second and all the other prizes. Or even a tune like ʽE.S.P.ʼ, which takes pride in taking one ten-note riff as the basis for all of its five minutes — and somehow it works, because normally you'd expect a riff like that to be used as the intro to the song and then go away, and the fact that it stays forever and ever makes it minimalistically funny. Blatantly annoying, yes, but funny.

 

All in all, still a satisfactory thumbs up here, despite the occasional misfires and the fact that lightweight funny Kinks-influenced ditties have largely been replaced with heavier and a bit more moralistic rockers. They did want to make a point that Love Bites, want it or not, and they made it all right — after all, partner relationships have every right to cause as much punkish frustration as social oppression does, and where your life has space for Give 'Em Enough Rope, there should be some extra space right next to it with Love Bites.

 

SINGLES GOING STEADY (1979)

 

1) Orgasm Addict; 2) What Do I Get; 3) I Don't Mind; 4) Love You More; 5) Ever Fallen In Love; 6) Promises; 7) Everybody's Happy Nowadays; 8) Harmony In My Head; 9*) You Say You Don't Love Me; 10*) Are Everything; 11*) Strange Thing; 12*) Running Free; 13) What Ever Happened To; 14) Oh Shit!; 15) Autonomy; 16) Noise Annoys; 17) Just Lust; 18) Lipstick; 19) Why Can't I Touch It; 20) Something's Gone Wrong Again; 21*) Raison D'Etre; 22*) Why She's The Girl From The Chainstore; 23*) Airwaves Dream; 24*) What Do You Know.

 

This compilation of singles was America's (rather belated, as it often happens) introduction to the noisy pop magic of the Buzzcocks, and it has since acquired such a legendary status that I can hardly add any interesting thoughts or observations to what you all already know — other than, perhaps, the curious note that I arrived at this chronologically, and this means that on a sub­con­scious level, the Buzzcocks are as much an «album band» for me as they are a «singles band»: in any case, it is certainly not true that all of their singles are pop genius, or that all of their albums are stuffed with thoughtless filler.

 

For one thing, the band's first single, ʽOrgasm Addictʼ, once its oh-so-shocking nature quickly wore down, is a really stupid song whose only point seems to be «telling it as it is», rather than coyly hiding behind innuendos, and hardly has any instrumental or vocal appeal — it just intends to strike a common chords with, you know, those of us who do have the problem upon reaching puberty. Which is, well, probably most of us, you know, but even if you never grow out of the problem, you will eventually grow out of the song at least, as it's really no great shakes. In fact, its B-side, ʽWhat Ever Happened To...ʼ, with its first appearance of the band's pop harmonies and its ironic-nostalgic mood, reminding you of the Kinks (think ʽWhere Have All The Good Times Gone?ʼ), is already vastly superior.

 

Already the second single, ʽWhat Do I Get?ʼ, however, establishes a largely unbreakable pattern: the Buzzocks are a loud pop band rather than a punk band, with a knack for simple, instantly ef­ficient hooks, second to none but the Ramones — nobody could that effectively wedge a slice of weepy sadness ("what do I get, whoah-whoah, what do I get?", with that inimitably plaintive accent on I) into a fast-moving, chainsaw-buzz-driven tune. Also, this time, they are smarter and they place the «offensive» track in B-side position: I have no idea if ʽOh Shitʼ marked the first ever appearance of the word "shit" in a song title, but it certainly must have held the local record for the number of times the word was pronounced, and yes, it does serve as the song's primary hook, which is inventive, but eventually gets a little tiresome.

 

Some of the songs inevitably overlap with tracks that were already included on previous LPs (re­member, though, that the Americans hadn't heard any of those, so this was probably their first meeting with gems like ʽI Don't Mindʼ or ʽEver Fallen In Loveʼ), but considering the overall wealth of material, that is no big tragedy, and all these songs certainly deserve additional listens. That said, in terms of diversity of approach and subtlety of hooks I would say that the Buzzcocks do not become true «monsters of sound» until 1979 comes along, by which time excellent songs just roll off the conveyer belt, but each one in its individual packaging.

 

ʽEverybody's Happy Nowadaysʼ combines a cozy folksy verse melody (amusingly similar to the one on Dylan's ʽBuckets Of Rainʼ: compare "life is sad, life is a bust" and "life's an illusion, love is a dream") with a tongue-in-cheek falsetto chorus and a ringing four-note riff that give the song an aura of frailty and fluffiness, clashing with Shelley's sly glam-vocal delivery of the verse. And then you have its B-side, ʽWhy Can't I Touch Itʼ (non-spoiler: you never get to really understand what the "it" is in question, and no, it's not the "it" you're probably thinking of at the moment), stretched out to more than six minutes despite really only having one verse and an embryonic bit of a chorus — but they probably understood that they hit upon such a fine groove, with two gui­tars and a persistent bassline conversing with each other, that they were reluctant to let it go, and it just keeps on pulsating like some enigmatic mantra — I can't properly explain the appeal, but there is definitely something trance-inducing here.

 

Finally, the Diggle-written and Diggle-sung ʽHarmony In My Headʼ happens to be Henry Rol­lins' favorite Buzzcocks song — probably not because it has the audacity to substitute the required guitar solo for a revised version of Black Sabbath's ʽParanoidʼ riff, but because of Diggle's «visi­onary» lyrics and the song's paradoxical nature, where the lyrical and musical confusion of the verses are stated to be the equivalent of the softly sung, melodically played "harmony in my head" bit of the chorus. Normally, you'd expect the chorus to explode after the already explosive verse — instead, it calms and softens things down, implying that noise is silence, confusion is stability, chaos is order, and the Buzzcocks are really the ghost of Nick Drake in disguise. But no, in reality they still take queues from the Stooges, as you can see from the B-side, ʽSomething's Gone Wrong Againʼ: doesn't that nagging one-note piano line remind you of John Cale's mini­malistic addition to ʽI Wanna Be Your Dogʼ ten years ago? They should have dedicated this one to the Stooges and the Velvets, particularly since I can so imagine Lou Reed grumbling "Tried to find my sock, no good it's lost, something's gone wrong again" on any of the 1967-69 albums.

 

The 2001 CD reissue of the record has significantly expanded it, trying to preserve the original principle (A-sides on side A, B-sides on side B) by adding one more contemporary single (to no special purpose, since both of its sides would be included on A Different Kind Of Tension) and six more A- and B-sides from their last three singles from the early 1980s, which were originally made available on the EP Parts 1, 2, 3 already in 1981. Unfortunately, those six songs are clearly inferior — not only was the band already disintegrating, suffering from a lack of focus and a sur­plus of heroin, but they were also piss-poorly produced, with an awfully tinny drum sound, plas­tic guitars, and occasional cheesy synth overdubs. There are still some hooks (ʽWhat Do You Knowʼ) and some humor (ʽWhy, She's The Girl From The Chainstoreʼ is worth it for the title alone), but overall, I'd at least suggest re-programming the album in such a way that these tracks do not rupture the near-perfect flow of the original. (You could also try to reprogram the original, for that matter, so that each A-side is paired with its B-side, but that is not crucial, you just get two chronological channels instead of one).

 

So, is this the best possible Buzzcocks album? in other words, were they a proverbial «singles band»? Honestly, I don't know — their LPs weren't all that «conceptual» in the first place, either. Singles Going Steady does have the benefit of being a compilation, even if nobody selected the material for them, and the B-sides are important, because stuff like ʽWhy Can't I Touch Itʼ and ʽSomething's Gone Wrong Againʼ goes beyond the standard pop-punk formula. Who really cares, though? Those early albums and singles all reflected the same musical philosophy, and all of this stuff is indispensable not just for those interested in the punk fashions of late 1970s Britain, but for all those interested in good music, period. Thumbs up even if you're no longer a sexually frustrated teenager, because there's no better way for even a 70-year old veteran to feel like a sexually frustrated teenager than to dig in to some of these Buzzcock singles.

 

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TENSION (1979)

 

1) Paradise; 2) Sitting Round At Home; 3) You Say You Don't Love Me; 4) You Know You Can't Help It; 5) Mad Mad Judy; 6) Raison D'Etre; 7) I Don't Know What To Do With My Life; 8) Money; 9) Hollow Inside; 10) A Diffe­rent Kind Of Tension; 11) I Believe; 12) Radio Nine.

 

Not too different, though — same band, same label, same producer, and it's not as if the Seventies were past us, anyway. On both of their previous LPs, the Buzzcocks tried to be a little more than just a «punk» or a «pop» band, and here they continue in the same vein, alternating between short, catchy, flashy statements and extended workouts that thrive on glorious monotonousness. Not everything is equally effective, but, hell, nothing can be on a record like this.

 

Indeed, the opening track, ʽParadiseʼ, despite its declarative anthemic nature, is their least re­markable lead-in number so far — no serious vocal hook, recycled riffage, and a minimalistic instrumental break that just consists of moving the same riff up and down the scale a bit, exactly the kind of stuff that used to seriously turn me off of classic era punk rock. You might think they're beginning to run out of ideas, but no, this is not the case: already the second song, ʽSitting Round At Homeʼ, runs a few small, but nice experiments with rapid tempo changes, where the slow parts are correlated with the grumbly nagging mantra "sitting round at home, sitting round at home, watching the pictures go" and the fast breaks probably correspond to the fast'n'furious brain activity of the title character. Nothing great, but fun.

 

The band's experiments with minimalism continue with ʽMad Mad Judyʼ, shot off at a break­neck tempo and, once the barking lyrics are over, left with nothing but its fast, simple bass riff for a couple minutes; they become somewhat excessive with ʽHollow Insideʼ, which is arguably their most «Goth» sounding number so far, but completely tongue-in-cheek — slow it down and get Robert Smith to sing it, and you got yourself a suicidal mantra, but at this tempo it is clearly paro­dic, more like a mocking test of how much time you can stand Shelley repeating "hollow inside, I was hollow inside". I must say that my own patience got exhausted by the second listen.

 

But honestly, the record really hits gold only with the last two tracks. The title song, with its quasi-martial use of power chords and endless list of robotically delivered nouns and imperatives, has a certain prophetic je ne sais quoi — it sounds neither too humorous nor too serious, but is easily the most insistent track in the band's catalog, knocking on your door like a merciless police raid; they also put electronic effects on some of the vocals, acknowledging the arrival of New Wave and the robotic nature of The System at the same time. And then there's ʽI Believeʼ, whose seven-minute length is justified by several different sections and an inherent contradiction — on one hand, "I believe in the workers' revolution /  And I believe in the final solution", sung in a cheerful and optimistic manner, on the other, "There is no love in this world any more", screamed out over and over like a slogan to a solitary aching chord.

 

In between all these mini- and maxi-experiments, there are some good old-timey pop-punk ditties about good love and bad love, but we're not going to talk about them because they're on the level of the «just okay» segment of Singles Going Steady, not the «really frickin' great» segment. In­stead, I'll just conclude, with a modest thumbs up for accompaniment, that the album fairly strictly follows the Buzzcocks formula — and it's already getting a wee bit tiresome on the whole and a wee bit irksome in particular places, but they still have fun ideas and have not had time to descend into self-parody. Which, of course, implies that breaking up instead of finalizing their fourth album was the perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time. Ever heard Pete Shelley's Sky Yen? Had that been released as a Buzzcocks album, that'd be one hell of a change, like an entire Beatles record with nothing but ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ clones on it. But it wouldn't get a thumbs up from me, nosiree, uh-uh.

 

TRADE TEST TRANSMISSIONS (1993)

 

1) Do It; 2) Innocent; 3) T T T; 4) Isolation; 5) Smile; 6) Last To Know; 7) When Love Turns Around; 8) Never Gonna Give It Up; 9) Energy; 10) Palm Of Your Hand; 11) Alive Tonight; 12) Who'll Help Me Forget; 13) Unthin­kable; 14) Crystal Night; 15) 369; 16*) All Over You; 17*) Inside.

 

That the Buzzcocks split up in 1981 is totally appropriate — this way, they did not have to smear their name with ten years' worth of (most likely) subpar material. That they reappeared with ano­ther album in 1993, soon after the «grunge revolution» once again changed the face of popular music and removed some of the Eighties' excess, was, consequently, quite appropriate as well. However, as usual, this 2.0 version of the band is yet another example of how, when something gets broken, the cracks and seams will show even if you try very hard to repair it.

 

These new «Buzzcocks» are really just Shelley and Diggle, with a couple extra new guys named Barber and Barker (no, really, that's their names) in the rhythm section — but it's not as if it was Barber and Barker's fault that the sound of the album is... not all that satisfactory. Namely, the guitar melodies are almost always reduced to the same gray, sludgy, grumbly tone that is heavier and more aggressive than the old «chainsaw buzz» of the Seventies, and tends to lump all the melodies together. I mean, from a certain dialectical point of view «all Buzzcocks sound the same», but when you get down to earth, their early classic albums don't — the individual melo­dies are rising out resplendently from the surface. Trade Test Transmissions just speed before your eyes and ears without bothering to shift tempo, tonality, mood, or perspective.

 

It's not particularly annoying, and we've all heard much worse: at least this guitar sound «makes sense» — fast, furious, but pop-styled songs about sex, love, and more sex, dominated by catchy choruses, go along better with this style than if they tried to go all heavy metal on their listeners (like some of the hardcore punk people did). Listen to any one of these songs at random and there will be no reason to get mad. But there's fifteen of them here, and they all sound alike — a far, far cry from those times when, if you still remember, Shelley and Diggle tried out various approa­ches. You could complain about ʽLate For The Trainʼ being overlong, but you couldn't say that it sounded just like all those other songs. Those guys were actually bringing ideas, plural, into the studio, not just one basic Idea of how you're supposed to plug in, take off, race through, sign out, and then repeat procedure 15 times in a row.

 

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend even a single song; unless you begin to pick them apart by paying attention to the lyrics (and you shouldn't, because ʽPalm Of Your Handʼ is, indeed, exactly about what you're probably thinking about at the moment), it's all just one punk-pop song with fifteen vari­ations. A happy song, with a thick distorted buzzing rhythm track and melodic lead lines, but that does not excuse it from taking such a large chunk of time out of your life. ʽT T Tʼ (the abbreviated title track, actually) is a bit grimmer than the rest, with a tough-guy AC/DC-style chord change, but you might not even notice without special warning (I certainly did not before I caught note of Mark Prindle's observation on how the song stands out a bit, and I agree).

 

So, was this reunion a complete waste of time? Well... at least it's not like they really plopped the Buzzcocks' brand into the dirt here or anything. If you are a big fan, even if you too happen to be disappointed, with time you will begin to trace the little nuances between different songs and get happier. They're silly songs, much of the time, but the Buzzcocks never took themselves too seri­ously anyway, so if Shelley sings about himself as a sexual giant on ʽDo Itʼ, you can be sure he is still being quite the tongue-in-cheek hoochie coochie man about it. I can see where time could help warm up to the songs — unfortunately, I don't have that time, and much as I like and respect the early Buzzcocks, this is not because I feel some sort of psychic connection with Shelley and Diggle, but just because those hooks jump out at me so effectively. It's an entirely different thing when you have to go hunting for the hooks yourself, and Trade Test Transmissions wants you to do all its dirty work on your own — no, thank you very much.

 

ALL SET (1996)

 

1) Totally From The Heart; 2) Without You; 3) Give It To Me; 4) Your Love; 5) Point Of No Return; 6) Hold Me Close; 7) Kiss 'n' Tell; 8) What Am I Supposed To Do; 9) Some Kinda Wonderful; 10) What You Mean To Me; 11) Playing For Time; 12) Pariah; 13) Back With You.

 

They went to Green Day's producer for this one — not particularly auspicious, but, fortunately, this was more of a nice gesture than a humiliating desire to start learning from their own disciples. Essentially, All Set is just Trade Test Transmissions Vol. 2, but a wee bit better on most ac­counts: songwriting, production, diversity — as if The Buzzcocks 2.0 were slowly, but surely coming into their own and learning to adapt and to remember what it used to be like in this much more modern world of the mid-Nineties.

 

The main problem still remains: most of the songs have the same style and the same topic — with just a few exceptions, it's all rather sterotypical power pop about love, with a very very tiny punk angle blinking red from time to time. I mean, just look at the song titles — how much lower can you get than when you go from ʽSome Kinda Wonderfulʼ to ʽWhat You Mean To Meʼ? I want some anger, goddammit! Has it really been that long since they last thought of all the women on Earth as scurvy treacherous bitches? Have they mellowed out so much that even Big Brother and The System are no longer regarded as even a minor threat? For God's sake, the album ends with a pseudo-orchestrated love anthem that's... more Styx than the Buzzcocks (ʽBack With Youʼ)! This is 1996 — who needs all these good vibrations when Y2K is approaching?

 

Just kidding, of course, but again, the serious implication is that, while the album as such has a certain face, few of the individual songs have one. They do have hooks — ʽTotally From The Heartʼ opens the proceedings on a very positive note, funnier, sweeter, and less openly stupid than ʽDo Itʼ did last time around: nice conclusive resolution with the title and all, as the song's romantic chivalry is delivered at top speed over that good old chainsaw buzz. Problem is, way too many tunes that follow are based on the same chords, moods, and subjects. They deviate from the trodden path on ʽPoint Of No Returnʼ, with metaphysical lyrics that can have multiple interpre­tations and a less-than-usual journey from threatening verses to anthemic chorus; on the I-can't-find-my-way-home complaint of ʽWhat Am I Supposed To Doʼ; and on ʽPariahʼ, which is a musical return to one of their favorite musical patterns (the bolero, this time, however, somewhat mashed together with the Bo Diddley beat), although sounds kinda ugly to me.

 

And it is a big problem — you could throw the individual hooks of these songs' choruses in my face all day long and I'd never notice when something different hit me. The thing is, no, they don't really need to go for musical diversity, but at least a little more thematic diversity would be nice, since it might have automatically led them to musical diversity as well. At their best, the Buzzcocks could shoot off in all sorts of directions — good love, bad love, no love, sexual frus­tration, social disappointment, and sometimes even plain absurdity. Here, they just continue to push in one direction, flogging that horse until it's black and blue all over. It begins okay, but eventually becomes tedious — so, perhaps, it would just be best to take this stuff one song at a time, the «time» in question being the short gap that is sufficient to make you forget the previous song ever existed. (And that, of course, applies to so much more than late era Buzzcocks).

 

MODERN (1999)

 

1) Soul On A Rock; 2) Rendezvous; 3) Speed Of Life; 4) Thunder Of Hearts; 5) Why Compromise; 6) Don't Let The Car Crash; 7) Runaround; 8) Doesn't Mean Anything; 9) Phone; 10) Under The Sun; 11) Turn Of The Screw; 12) Sneaky; 13) Stranger In Your Town; 14) Choices.

 

No, it isn't very modern, to tell the truth. Yes, it begins with an electronic loop, which makes it, I guess, about as modern as 1978 or 1979, when those things came into popular prominence — so now what, the Buzzcocks are trying to catch up with twenty-year old New Wave fashions? Is this irony or stupidity, or one trying to masquerade as the other? I am not saying that the addition of synthesizers specifically makes this music worse than it would be otherwise; actually, it just... makes no difference whatsoever.

 

Third time in a row, the new-look Buzzcocks come out with a perfectly listenable, reasonable record that is thoroughly and utterly lacking in excitement — even if they seem to be doing every­thing in their power to rectify the situation. The songs get more diverse, the melodies are being carefully and meticulously designed with attention to hooks, the choruses are supposed to be catchy, but the album as a whole is a yawnfest. I wish I could single out even one song and surround it with a paragraph of humble praise, but this stuff is so slick, every single tune just slides out of my graps like a piece of wet soap.

 

I'll take a negative example instead: ʽWhy Compromise?ʼ, a song that is supposed to pack some anger and frustration, but its stiff production — the mechanic, compressed guitar sound, the stupid electronic percussion, the nasty robotic vocals — deprives it of any signs of life, leaving a worthless corpse of a song. With the happy tunes here, the situation is not much different either: they all sound dead on arrival. As if this weren't a true Buzzcocks album, but rather an album programmed by automatons who have been machine-taught to formally imitate the Buzzcocks. Even the fast tempos no longer help. Nothing helps. Nothing!

 

Okay, so maybe the actual problem is with the vocal hooks. They just do not have the appeal of old. When Shelley howls "My soul on a rock, I know what I feel, my soul on a rock, it hurts cause it's real", he is simply being inadequate — there is no actual hurt felt in that chorus, and I am totally not sure that he really knows what he feels. At least, he has no way of letting me know what he feels. Just remember something like "what do I get? oh-whoah, what do I get?", now that was a chorus that had real emotion, and you could feel a jolt of hurt and disappointment from that simple, well-executed line. These lines have no emotional content; nor do the riffs. It's amazing, really, how fleeting this old thing called «inspiration» can be.

 

Afraid am I that, where its two predecessors at least had a few hints at former greatness, Modern is the firzt Buzzcocks album that simply deserves a plain old thumbs down. They tried throwing in additional sonic textures, some genre diversity, and they just ended up with no memorable or meaningful songs whatsoever.

 

BUZZCOCKS (2003)

 

1) Jerk; 2) Keep On; 3) Wake Up Call; 4) Friends; 5) Driving You Insane; 6) Morning After; 7) Sick City Sometimes; 8) Stars; 9) Certain Move; 10) Lester Sands; 11) Up For The Crack; 12) Useless; 13) Don't Come Back; 14) Not Gonna Take It.

 

At this point, very few people should actually care already, but for formality's sake, let us admit that this is somewhat different. Entering the 21st century with a self-titled record (usually a sym­bol of «artistic rebooting»), Buzzcocks seem clearly influenced by the «neo-garage» Strokes-led explosion, and this prompts a serious change of style — harsher, louder, dirtier, angrier, and with­out a single trace of whatever made Modern so irritating for hardcore veterans (like the cautious and largely useless toying around with electronic instruments). There's a higher level of social awareness here, too, and far fewer happy pop choruses than there used to be.

 

If that alone doesn't sound like good news already... nothing else will, I'm afraid. These new songs really aren't much better written than whatever there was on the past three albums. If any­thing, the good news are also the bad news: there are some powerful, impressive bits of riffage here, but it's mostly second- and third-hand riffage borrowed from hard rock, metal, and punk legacy of the previous two decades. And I don't just mean routine stuff like the ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ chord sequence: ʽDriving You Insaneʼ, for instance, rips off Deep Purple's ʽHighway Starʼ rather blatantly, while a few other songs sneak inside Lemmy's backyard.

 

That said, original (and good) melodies on 21st century rock albums are scarcer than hen's teeth anyway, so the question about whether Buzzcocks is of any value should be rephrased thus — are they capable of breathing any sort of new / exciting / modern life into these old melodies? Of this, I am not sure. As an example, take ʽMorning Afterʼ. Its chorus is catchy, especially if you hear it one too many times (not a difficult task: "wake up, and face the morning after" is hammered in your brain at a very steady rate). But its emotional impact is less clear — is it anger? Is it an ex­hortation? Is it humor? So it's a song about... a hangover. How exactly does a furious punk-rock tempo and an anthemic refrain connect to the idea of a hangover? Normally, when somebody shouts at you to "wake up!" in a loud rock song, it's about changing the world, feeding starving African children, booting Republicans out of the office, or at least buying the collected works of William Blake and a pair of leather pants. What sort of a jerk would do that to you if you were the victim of a "switch to double brandies"? Something does not add up here.

 

And that's just one of the many examples — these songs, by all means, should get me all riled up, but they do not, because it is hard to believe that the guys really believe in this stuff themselves. The album gets caught in a deadly gap between seriousness and parody, and there's nothing I can do about that: the songs are perfectly listenable, but boring. Maybe they're angrier, but they don't seem to have any genuine reasons for being angry. Which is why I'd rather dump this and recom­mend you some Art Brut instead — at least those guys never pretended not to be tongue-in-cheek post-modernists. Or, if you want a really old punk band that still has it (or had it), take the Ado­lescents — their anger had never abated, and resulted in a series of late period albums that weren't too great, but far more empathetic than this stuff. Bottomline: if you want to toughen it up, that's fine by me, but first you gotta find out why exactly you're toughening it up. I mean, find a god­damn reason, like the Iraq War or Britney Spears or something. Complaining about hangovers? Gee, you guys must really be getting old.

 

FLAT-PACK PHILOSOPHY (2006)

 

1) Flat-Pack Philosophy; 2) Wish I Never Loved You; 3) Sell You Everything; 4) Reconciliation; 5) I Don't Exist; 6) Soul Survivor; 7) God, What Have I Done; 8) Credit; 9) Big Brother Wheels; 10) Dreamin'; 11) Sound Of A Gun; 12) Look At You Now; 13) I've Had Enough; 14) Between Heaven And Hell.

 

Can't we just say that this is another late period Buzzcocks album and leave it at that? Please? I'm not even stating that it sucks or anything — it probably sounds as good as it can possibly sound, given Diggle's and Shelley's self-imposed limitations. I just can't think of anything interesting to say. Okay, let's try ramble-scramble mode for a bit, see where it gets us:

 

— ʽCreditʼ begins with an automated voice system instructing you to spend your virtual financial resources in the correct manner, and soon transforms into an old geezer's rant about "videophones with all the latest ringtones" that cause a "pile of debts" for nothing, because "wish I could get something I really need". Well thanks, guys, for warning us about the 2008 crisis and all two years in advance. Who knows, maybe if you had made the underlying melody more interesting, people would take heed and all trouble might have been avoided... nah;

 

— ʽSound Of A Gunʼ: hey, this is one song I really like and would not, in fact, mind taking home with me. The riff's only advantage is one single chord change, but it makes a big nasty difference, and I am not sure I've ever heard it before, simple as it is. It's probably about gun violence, or it takes gun violence as a metaphor for other kinds of violence, or it takes other kinds of violence as a metaphor for non-violence, whatever. The point is, it's short, it's tough, it's nasty, it's catchy, I wish there were more songs here like this one, but life's a bitch;

 

— ʽBetween Heaven And Hellʼ: ends the album with atmospheric electronic noises (apparently, they hold regular synthesizer sales in limbo, to make time pass quicker) and a moody vocal har­mony session where the title is being bounced around from lower to higher harmonies. This way, nobody can say that Flat-Pack Philosophy has no art-pop elements, and the Buzzcocks become eligible for The Beach Boy Hall Of Fame and The Brian Eno Hall Of Fame at the same time. If only for a few seconds, that is.

 

Then there are eleven other songs on the album, but fuck 'em. They all sound the same anyway. My biggest problem, however? I still have no idea what «flat-pack philosophy» is supposed to mean, even after re-reading the lyrics to the title track several times. If it's a hint that modern era Buzzcocks music is assembled from pre-packaged pieces, I'm in. But somehow I doubt that.

 

THE WAY (2014)

 

1) Keep On Believing; 2) People Are Strang Machines; 3) The Way; 4) In The Back; 5) Virtually Real; 6) Third Di­mension; 7) Out Of The Blue; 8) Chasing Rainbows Modern Times; 9) It's Not You; 10) Saving Yourself; 11*) Dis­appointment; 12*) Generation Suicide; 13*) Happen; 14*) Dream On Baby.

 

Look out, the cocks are buzzing once more (or should that be «the buzzes are cocking»?)! After an 8-year long break, Shelley and Diggle are back with a brand new rhythm section (Chris Rem­mington on bass, Danny Farrant on drums), a brand new producer (David M. Allen, known best of all for producing a string of records for The Cure in the 1980s), and a brand new way of re­leasing their stuff — via the PledgeMusic system, which runs on direct fan support. Apparently, the band wanted to find out if it still had any fans left — enough to finance the recording and release of yet another LP — and guess what, either there are still enough people around to want to hear a brand new Buzzcocks album, or studio fees are going down at the same rate as oil prices. In any case, all these nasty generous people have essentially stripped me of the right to begin this review with the proverbial «who the heck needs the Buzzcocks in the 21st century?» rhetoric question. They have not stripped me of the God-given right to say bad things about the Buzz­cocks, though, so brace yourselves.

 

On second thought, though... the funny thing is, The Way does not really sound all that bad. In fact, compared to the last one, two, three... five Buzzcocks albums, it sounds downright involving! First and foremost, it has the absolute best production values on a late-period Buzzcocks record, hands down. Perhaps they went easy on sound compression or something, but the guitars have a sharper, brighter, crisper sheen even when they are sticking to chainsaw buzz — and sound even better when they go for cleaner riffs or a less distorted sound in general. Maybe we have the pro­ducer to thank for that (after all, he did work on Disintegration, one of the most magnificently produced albums of all times)... who knows? all I know is that this sound comes in far more co­lors than the fifty shades of grey on all their records from the 1990s and the 2000s.

 

Second, it's got a handful of really enticing songs. ʽPeople Are Strang Machinesʼ, for instance, has nostalgically playful oh-oh-oh-oh backing vocals à la David Bowie, nice lead lines and a moody chorus — not that the song title tells us anything we didn't know before, but they tell it with plenty of conviction this time. ʽOut Of The Blueʼ expertly plays with stop-and-start struc­ture and throws in a simple, efficient, and not totally stolen garage-rock riff. ʽChaising Rainbows Modern Timesʼ often gets mentioned as the one song on here that comes most close to emulating classic-era Buzzcocks, and it does, except that I am not too happy about the main rhythm melody sticking way too close to the ʽBlitzkrieg Bopʼ pattern. And ʽSaving Yourselfʼ is probably the darkest, most uncomfortable finale to a Buzzcocks album ever — in fact, this whole record, in light of everything that we know about the band, might be their darkest ever, with way too few songs about boys and girls and way too many about surviving in a strange new world.

 

I know what you're thinking, and quite a few people out of the few people who noticed and dis­cussed the record said the same things — the Buzzcocks sound old here, older, more grizzled and tired than ever before, and like all old and tired people, they now feel more at ease whining at the horrors of «virtual reality» and all that other crap than doing what they used to do best (debating about the fifty ways to leave your lover, that is). The tiredness is indeed reflected in the tempos (slower than usual), the vocals (Shelley's range and energy has gone down), and the lyrical themes. But if we are to nitpick about nuances and subtleties, this is compensated for by the im­provement in texture and melodicity, and by the very simple fact that finally, the Buzzcocks are coming to terms with their age and acting like it — like any other veteran on the field, they have earned their right to complain about the younger generation and its values, even if the younger generation has a legal right to ignore every single word of it. (One of the bonus tracks is actually called ʽGeneration Suicideʼ, so there!).

 

I almost thought about giving the album a thumbs up, in fact, before I pinched myself back to reality (I mean, will I ever get the urge to listen to at least one of these songs again? Hardly!). However, and I do mean that honestly, this was, indeed, the only post-reunion Buzzcocks album that did not actively annoy me — an album that sounded like they really wanted to make it be­cause something in their hearts urged them to, rather than simply a mechanical requirement like «well, we're musicians, we're supposed to make records, so let's go make another record, even if we know beforehand we're not making any serious money on it». Nothing here makes me yearn for a follow-up, but it's still nice to add another bunch of aging punkers to the small collection of punkers who know how to do it well (like the Adolescents, who, today, are anything but, yet still manage to preserve their integrity).

 

 

Part 6. The New School (1989-1997)

808 STATE

NEWBUILD (1988)

 

1) Sync-Swim; 2) Flow Coma; 3) Dr. Lowfruit; 4) Headhunters; 5) Narcossa; 6) E Talk; 7) Compulsion.

 

J. S. Bach, in writing and arranging his music, had a great benefit in that most, if not necessarily all, of the classical instrument inventory had, by the XVIIIth century, reached the ideal form. Cel­los, violas, violins, woodwinds — with the exception of keyboards, not much has changed for any of those things, because nobody wants to tamper with perfection.

 

No such benefit, sadly, is available for early pioneers of artsy electronic dance music. There used to be a time when Newbuild could be considered the ultimate in freaky shit stuff, and there have been rumors (actively supported by 808 State themselves) that the album was a huge influence on none other than Mr. Richard D. James. But look for user reviews these days, and many of them will express disappointment. «It's almost as if I camped out in a Casio forest», a guy complains on Amazon, and he's far from the only unlucky camper. In retrospect, Grand Historians of Elec­tronica usually throw out the required five-star patches, but the rest of the crowds have simply moved on, discarding the past in favor of more «relevant», instantly gratifying pleasures.

 

But somehow, it makes me a little sad, even if I am by no means a fan of machine loop music, and, normally, the slightest talk about «Acid House», which 808 State allegedly helped bring around into European public consciousness or both, makes me scream in terror and run to my Bes­sie Smith recordings. Because, loops and rhythms and obsolete recording technology aside, Newbuild is really an excellent musical album. And, furthermore, I do not quite understand what all the fuss is about: to my untrained ears, Newbuild still sounds sufficiently modern. I've certain­ly heard Aphex Twin tracks that were far crappier from a straightforward sonic point of view.

 

What these three merry guys from Manchester (Graham Massey, Martin Price and Gerald Simp­son) are doing here is making house music from an alien standpoint, borrowing the basics, cros­sing them with an artistic mindset that is influenced both by the astral dreams of Tangerine Dream and the industrial nightmares of Nurse With Wound, and coming up with enough in­di­vi­dual ideas to make nearly each track a stand-out. Sure, they would probably work best as top-le­vel soundtracks for arcade games — but if you find that demeaning, you can choose «sonic equi­valents of looking out the window in a spaceship flying close to light speed». That's acid house for you all right, if you are really in need of labeling.

 

The album never relents or slows down: it is forty minutes of pounding grooves, seven different landscapes that shift form and color, but never speed, lest you lose the proper momentum. And what they lack in the ability to program a real tricky rhythm or polyrhythm, they gain in the pure art of invention. 'Sync/Swim' is all based around the bizarre interaction between the funky (but al­so quite heavy-metallic) bassline and the cute (but dangerous!) synthy double-note chomp-chomp that may represent little alien battleships speeding past that window of yours in regular formation — or, in a microcosmic manner, batches of viruses speeding up and down your arteries. 'Flow Coma' is less heavy, but equally mind-blowing, a real delight to see these synth patterns flow into and out of one another, weaving harmoniously melodic psychedelic patterns. And so on. The on­ly thing I am not sold on are the vocal loop overdubs — their presence on 'Dr. Lowfruit' and especi­ally 'Compulsion' is grating and distracting.

 

The fact that the production is sort of shallow, and the ambience has nowhere near the «depth» of feeling from later IDM masters, bothers me about as much as the production on Chuck Berry re­cords next to rhythm and blues British Invasion-style ten years later: a few minutes of getting in­to the groove, and if the groove is smart and stylish enough, you start forgetting about these dif­fer­ences. In a review such as this, they might spring up as a factual statement, but they really have no bearing on the intensity of the kaleidoscopic mind pictures you can get while listening to this stuff. They are so much fun that even the cheesy drum machine sound is forgivable (not to men­tion that, like all sorts of Eighties' cheesiness, that particular sound is guaranteed to make regular stylistic comebacks all through the 21st century). In brief — thumbs up; I'd even like to say that this is the sort of electronic dance music album that deserves hall-of-faming, but who am I to ar­gue if the genre sees itself as a Saturn, bearing children only to feed on them for further activity.

 

90 (1989)

 

1) Magical Dream; 2) Ancodia; 3) Cobra Bora; 4) Pacific 202; 5) Donkey Doctor; 6) 808080808; 7) Sunrise; 8) The Fat Shadow (Pointy Head Mix).

 

Compared to Newbuild, 90 is truly an album for sissies. Just look at the title of the first track: 'Magical Dream'? Isn't this the kind of title much better suited for the likes of Uriah Heep? And its primary attraction — faraway, hazy vocal overdubs from Vanessa Daou? Where in the world is that whole alien culture thing?

 

In many ways, 90 is quite similar to Newbuild — similar rhythms, similar equipment, similar dance orientation that preserve the project's chosen niche — but the band's second album also made it clear that these guys were not going to stick to any set formula. If Newbuild looked con­fidentially to the future, 90 makes some concessions to the past. For instance, the main «chiming» hook of 'Magical Dream' is fairly conventional, and the entire song is a magical dream, ensconced in a club setting, but more «psychedelic» than «sci-fi».

 

Likewise, the major hit, 'Pacific State' (here under the 12" mix title 'Pacific 202'), relies on pseudo-strings and, most noticeably, an almost jazzy, brass-imitating melody for its groove; there is certainly some alien-like mechanical chirping in the background, but basically it is sort of an infusion of relaxed lounge atmosphere into the usually arch-busy world of industrial electronics. 'Ancodia' is quite human-sounding, too, sampling Thelma Houston and programming in loops that could have been inspired by 1970s fusion.

 

Eventually we are shoved back into the future on much more mechanical monsters like 'Donkey Doctor' and '808080808', but even there the keyboard arrangements are generally more complex and move in more movements than on Newbuild. The sound just keeps on getting denser and denser — out of the sparsely populated astral suburbs we are now moving right into the heart of the intergalactic metropolis. Coolest illustration is perhaps 'Cobra Bora', starting out simple and unclustered, but somewhere around 1:10 turning into the soundtrack for Law & Order In A Ga­la­xy Far, Far Away.

 

In fact, most of the tracks are so well worked out as structured compositions that the closing 'Sun­rise' is immediately noticeable as a monotonous, quasi-ambient piece, supposed to close the album on a different, «prolonged» note — on Newbuild, it would have simply been one of the regular boys. So, is this «progress»? It is fairly hard to tell with electronic masterminds. Bor­rowing from «conventional» musical approaches may confuse the hardcore house goer, but also may make it easier for some to «get» acid house as real music, not just a trendy soundtrack to self-destructive teenage activities. Thumbs up for all the smart mixing.

 

EX:EL (1991)

 

1) San Francisco; 2) Spanish Heart; 3) Leo Leo; 4) Qmart; 5) Nephatiti; 6) Lift; 7) Ooops; 8) Empire; 9) In Yer Face; 10) Cubik; 11) Lambrusco Cowboy; 12) Techno Bell; 13) Olympic.

 

Although many swear by this as the ultimate 808 State experience, I am not so sure. It is certainly different, and has enough evidence of the band still willing to evolve and experiment to satisfy the Supreme Court, but the direction of that evolution on Ex:El points to hardcore techno, and this means appealing to electronic music fans alone, instead of continuing to show us skeptically minded people how Electronica could be «Art» in the good old understanding of the word.

 

The idea of bringing in guest vocalists — star vocalists — to turn some of their compositions into near-pop songs was, as far as I understand, rather novel for 1991, and earned Massey and Co. ex­tra points for innovation. But 'Spanish Heart', with Joy Division/New Order veteran Bernard Sum­ner at the wheel, is simply not a very interesting composition, just some hollow dance rhythms fed with keyboards that click very much à la Eighties' synth-pop. 'Qmart' and 'Ooops' have plenty of historical interest: they feature a fairly young and fresh Björk, still working her way up in the Sugarcubes, but already in full control of her powers — vocalizations on both of these tracks are wild and complex enough to fit in on any of her latter day excesses. Yet again, though, the musical grooves themselves are soundtrackish and not very interesting.

 

Additional historical interest requires every reviewer to mention that 'Nephatiti' features the first usage of the Willy Wonka sample "We are the music makers..." in electronic practice. Uh... okay. Whatever. I am actually more amused by the male/female voices trading enunciations of "Nepha­titi" / "Nefertiti" as if over the course of a phonetics lesson. And by the grooves, too, which are a bit more explorative this time around.

 

The album's centerpiece is a nine-minute monster called 'Cubik', a gritty techno-funk thing that at least kicks some butt, rather than just sitting there and noodling for atmosphere. It is the most spaced out, alien-ish composition on the album, and it deserves its running time completely (actu­ally, I believe the nine-minute long mix is only present on the US release; get it by all means in­stead of the brief three-minute teaser on the UK version). Ironically, it is also the most minimali­stic of all the tracks on here — no atmospheric synth veils in the background, every ounce of strength poured into the warp drive of its principal groove, but play it loud enough and it will blow your mind all the same.

 

The other tracks, somehow, just fail to impress. Much of this stuff is calmly pretty, but 808 State are at their best when they are able to conjure little green bugs zipping through space outside your illuminators, and 'Cubik' is the only track here that freely provides that pleasure. Sure, credit has to be given for everything, including toying around with hip-hop on 'San Francisco' and adult contemporary on one or two other tracks, but giving credit is one thing, and finding words that would be kind and meaningful at the same time is quite a different one.

 

GORGEOUS (1993)

 

1) Plan 9; 2) Moses; 3) Contrique; 4) 10 x 10; 5) One In Ten; 6) Europa; 7) Orbit; 8) Black Morpheus; 9) Southern Cross; 10) Nimbus; 11) Colony; 12) Timebomb; 13) Stormin Norman; 14) Sexy Dancer; 15) Sexy Synthesizer.

 

Buyer beware — despite the self-aggrandizing title (or, perhaps, because of the title) this record is frequently given the finger even by serious fans of the band. Me, I fail to see what exactly it is that makes it so much less thrilling than Ex:El, but I am no electronics wiz, and my standard judgement criterion is very simple — I just mentally rate these records by counting approxima­tely how many times a quirky, remarkable sprite jumps out at me from the general electronic buzz. That is, if the records pretend to any sort of dynamic character. If they pretend to ambience, I men­tally rate them by counting how many times a quirky, remarkable sprite does not jump out at me, docking points for each apparition.

 

Here, the sprite appears from the very first second, as 'Plan 9' greets you with the first appearance of acoustic guitar on an 808 State album. This sort of betrays the sacred formula, but gives the band extra room to variegate and diversify — not that the little Spanish melody is particularly complex or unforgettable, but it does give 'Plan 9' a new, fresh face as it plays out alongside the beats, bass lines, and keyboard loops. Besides, it is pretty much the only offense against the high art of digital technologies that Massey and Co. are committing here.

 

The habit of inviting non-electronic artists for collaboration continues with 'Moses', an electro-pop tune sung by Ian McCulloch (of Echo & the Bunnymen), a newly remixed version of UB40's 'One In Ten', and fellow Manchestrian Rachel McFarlane guesting on '10 x 10'. None of these tracks are all that good, even if 'Moses' begins with a nicely entangled web of keyboard rhythms that is almost King Crimson-ian in origin (thirty seconds later, McCulloch and the boys simply turn it into some sort of boring danceable adult contemporary).

 

One barely noticeable gem among this sea of mediocre collaborations is 'Europa', with some ut­terly outstanding vocal work from Caroline Seaman — the minute I heard it, I had «Cocteau Twins!» springing in my head, and, sure enough, Caroline Seaman is a little-known performer who was, at some point, connected with Ivo Watts-Russell's This Mortal Coil, singing on the Filigree & Shadow album in 1986. For 808 State, she brought some of 4AD's original fairy dust with her, and the band integrates it quite subtly into their swirling roller coaster. For 'Europa' alone and its charming wonderland attitude, the album justifies its title.

 

The guests say goodbye after track six, though, and from then on it's all in the hands of techno­logy. 'Black Morpheus', with little sax passages scattered along the road, is like an attempt to recreate the vibe of 'Pacific State', but the melodic bits are not as attention-demanding here. 'Co­lo­ny' and 'Timebomb' once again play with jarring industrial noise, particularly the latter, one of 808 States' most «brutal» inventions, even though a little cartoonish. And, just in case you've been wondering, 'Sexy Dancer' and 'Sexy Synthesizer' are two entirely different groove patch­works, and, although their titles are looped over the music, there is nothing particularly sexy about either. (Caroline Seaman's vocal parts, on the other hand...).

 

Overall, I do not really get what's not to like on here if electronic chowder is your kind of thing. There is plenty of diversity, some new ideas and approaches, and all of the tracks show just about the same level of care and complexity as 808 State have always upheld. Perhaps the world just got tired of the band, eventually, or perhaps such was the world's unfavorable reaction to the de­parture of one of the formative members, Martin Price, a year before the album was recorded — but, as far as I know, Price had never been the major driving force behind the music. Anyway, since nothing on here is really annoying, and since 'Europa' is simply my favorite 808 State num­ber of all time, I'm giving it a thumbs up. (Then I'm cheatingly adding 'Europa' to my «Best-of-4AD» compilation and never listening to this album again, but let us not dwell on the negative).

 

DON SOLARIS (1996)

 

1) Intro; 2) Bond; 3) Bird; 4) Azura; 5) Black Dartangnon; 6) Joyrider; 7) Lopez; 8) Balboa; 9) Kohoutek; 10) Mooz; 11) Jerusahat; 12) Banacheq.

 

Eight years into their recording career, 808 State are already the elder statesmen of a world-swam­ping market, completely stripped of their ability to blaze any more trails — not because of a lack of talent, simply due to the exponential growth of competition. At least Newbuild has the be­nefit of a textbook entry: nothing the band did after Ex:El will ever have the fortune to raise above the status of a discography blip.

 

But if I were pressed into choosing one favourite from this «just doing our regular thing» kind of period, Don Solaris would probably be it. Why? Beats me if I know. Most likely, there are just a few more tunes than usual that hit the pleasure spot. Or, to be precise, more «momentous ideas» that hit the pleasure spot. 'Banacheq', for instance — now here is a great composition. The main hook sounds like a revolving sonic effect discharged out of a magic wand, the bassline adds a strain of heavy funk, and the final crescendo is of a kind that one normally encounters in rock, not electronic music, with the whole thing becoming crazier and crazier until the inevitable fizzling out. Like a wild, wild fusion rave acted out on digital machinery.

 

That one is at the very end; in the beginning, we have an equally excellent 'Bond', nothing to do with James (although some of the industrial passages do have a spy movie atmosphere to them), but rather with some real bonds, beginning with atomic and ending with sexual. Yes, as you have correctly guessed, there are lyrics to this song, delivered by Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing, but they are insignificant next to the relentless drive of the tune, which seems to drag the listener through a complex machinery-producing factory, with one grim robotic contraption after the other beating out its own rhythm. Evocative, if not particularly innovative.

 

Other guests carrying on the tradition of humanizing 808 State albums include fellow Mancunian Lou Rhodes of Lamb on 'Azura' (not very exciting, since she seems to be imitating Björk wher­ever possible, without having the same potential); James Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers on 'Lopez', also not a highlight — a song that tries mighty strong to be sunny and optimistic and ends up kinda boring; and another Icelandic lady, Ragnhildur Gísladóttir a.k.a. "Ragga", on the also non-exciting atmospheric Björkism of 'Mooz' (although some bits of her vocalization at the end of the track have a mildly mesmerizing effect).

 

But overall, it is the non-guest stuff on Don Solaris that elevates the spirit, from the afore­mentioned 'Banacheq' to the band's continuing love affair with brass overdubs on 'Black Dartang­non' (sic), the catchy and vividly kaleidoscopic dance groove of 'Jerusahat' and the funny vocal loops on 'Bird'. At this point, all that Massey and Co. can really do is try to ensure a separate iden­tity for each of the tracks — and they succeed at least halfway, which is more than enough for a thumbs up.

 

OUTPOST TRANSMISSION (2002)

 

1) 606; 2) Chopsumwong; 3) Wheatstraw; 4) Boogieman; 5) Roundbum Mary; 6) Lemonsoul; 7) Suntower; 8) Dis­sa­dis; 9) Bent; 10) Souflex; 11) Crossword; 12) Lungfoo; 13) Slowboat; 14) YoYo.

 

808 State's only original offering in the 21st century is... well, either it simply states that the team said it all in the 20th, or, on a more global level, states that, on his 2000th birthday, the Lord Je­sus Christ declared that human art has exhausted its spiritual filling and we should all start pa­cking and getting ready for that trumpet call. It's your choice.

 

I have nothing inspiring to say about Outpost Transmission. It is just another set of electronic grooves, not bad per se, but not provoking any deep thoughts or emotional reactions. Even the vo­cal guest spots are bland. '606' is a collaboration with Simian, another electronic bunch of fellow Mancunians, with a «choral boy-band» arrangement over a synth-pop riff that does nothing for me. 'Lemonsoul', with hushed atmospheric vocals from Guy Garvey, is slightly better, but it aims at beautiful-gorgeous and then sort of misses the mark by several inches — an aging Robin Hood can invoke pity, but can he instigate admiration? Even 'Crossword', with Rob Spragg growling over dark industrial passages, feels like a feeble, steam-less copy of what this band used to pro­duce in the industrial vein years ago.

 

Entering highly subjective mode, my senses, for some reason, start radar-blipping towards the end of the record — the grooves on the last three tracks seem to at least evoke something. 'Lung­foo' has that psychedelic wobbly chiming sound that conjures various magic associations (take out the techno percussion and it's well usable in a Harry Potter soundtrack); 'Slowboat' features tons of interesting variations on another simple, but catchy magical-mysterious keyboard riff; and 'YoYo' brings things to a close on a delicately paranoid note, with visions of Big Brother emer­ging out of its troubled notes.

 

Or maybe not, and it's all just a matter of extra-clicking on random tracks in order to squeeze out a few more meaningless words. Whatever. Fact is, not even the fans seem to like this record much; and the other fact — namely, that, despite still hanging together, 808 State have not come up with a proper follow-up to Transmission in a whoppin' ten years — implies that, perhaps, Massey and Co. simply got tired of pretending to be as smart and creative as everybody used to think they were. So, thumbs down, although still a must for completists and tireless studiosos of positive-negative charge fluctuations in processor chips.

 

 

 

AALIYAH

AGE AIN'T NOTHING BUT A NUMBER (1994)

 

1) Intro; 2) Throw Your Hands Up; 3) Back And Forth; 4) Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number; 5) Down With The Clique; 6) At Your Best (You Are Love); 7) No One Knows How To Love Me Quite Like You Do; 8) I’m So Into You; 9) Street Thing; 10) Young Nation; 11) Old School; 12) I’m Down; 13) Back And Forth (Mr. Lee And R Kelly Mix).

 

Bland, musician-deprived R'n'B was certainly not invented by Aaliyah, but she did have the un­lucky fate of being born, bred, and schooled right into the middle of it. It is not clear to me how much creative control she had in the studio when recording her three albums — since she is al­most never credited for writing or arranging anything on her own, the answer is probably evident — but even the admirers usually acknowledge that her legend was, at all times, mostly in the hands of her «seconds». In this particular case, the second in question is producer/songwriter R. Kelly, and consequently, the record does not so much tell the story of «Aaliyah, The Struggling Artist» as they simply tell you what used to be considered «hot» in 1990's R'n'B.

 

The title of the album is a thinly veiled hint at Aaliyah's (14 at the time the songs were recorded) flirt (and even a short-lived illegal marriage) with R. Kelly himself, and, while I might somewhat cautiously agree with the statement in general — (then again, so might pedophiles all over the world, so let us not press things here) — in the case of Aaliyah, her age was definitely more than just a number: it ensured that she, an obviously gifted vocalist, would be exactly whatever her current mentor would want her to be. And her current mentor did not want all that much. For the most part, he just encouraged her to rap like Mary J. Blige, to sing sappy ballads like Whitney Houston, and to sport a professionally manufactured «street image».

 

Now I am not much of a Whitney Houston fan, but let me tell you this: Aaliyah seems much more convincing as a romantic balladeer than as a seasoned practitioner of street-wise funky gro­oves. Maybe it is because she never really had as much «street culture» inside her as her image makers would have us believe — she was, after all, strictly middle-class rather than «black trash», and «tough» numbers, such as ʽThrow Your Hands Upʼ just do not cut the mustard here. R. Kelly must have realized that early on: once the misguided album opener is over, he mostly keeps the «tough» stuff to himself, and, on a few numbers, plays the hip-hop counterpart to Aaliyah's more «sensitive» personality. Most of the time it sounds very stupid, but at least his parts help break up the monotonousness of the balladry.

 

The «music» here is best left in peace — if you have heard one formulaic mid-1990's R'n'B album, you have heard enough — but some of the vocal melodies have been polished to a margi­nally more pleasing state than the rest. And if there is one thing to redeem the music, it is, not surprisingly, Aaliyah's singing. Highly seductive, but without having to resort to strained cooing; melismatic to an extent, but never going overboard with the gimmick; and all of that – with an in­nocent, fresh flair that immediately puts her over so many wound-up automatons. At 14 years of age, she was able to bring a slight touch of class to this yawny material; and if she managed to make it a little interesting for me, who normally avoids contemporary R'n'B like the swine flu, one can only imagine how interesting she made it for those who were free of such allergies.

 

As it often happens, the best tracks are not the album's main singles (ʽBack And Forthʼ, a me­diocre dance groove, brandishing tired old Stevie Wonder-esque chromatic harmonica flourishes that were already beaten into the ground long ago by Stevie himself; an over-sugared cover of the Isley Brothers' ballad ʽ(At Your Best) You Are Loveʼ). Rather, they include the shadowy, mo­rally am­biguous title track; ʽStreet Thingʼ, also with harmonica, but this time, managing to cap­ture an actual bit of real Stevie Wonder spirit as well; and ʽYoung Nationʼ, the closest thing to an anthemic track on here, but in a smooth and subtle way. Did I say Mary J. Blige and Whitney Hous­ton? ʽStreet Thingʼ and ʽYoung Nationʼ are actually atmospheric in a soft-jazz Sade-style manner, and kudos to R. Kelly for trying out that approach on his protegée — it fits her more than any other one. (And it isn't nearly as irritating.)

 

So what is the resolution? An album strictly for the heart (and far from everyone's heart), not for the brain (unless you want to spend some time researching the sociological roots of lines like "young nation under a groove, keeping it smooth with a jazz attitude"), but in my case, even the heart orders a general thumbs down — for consistent incon­sistency, occasional phoney-ness, and concealed propaganda of sex with minors (because want it or not, that's what it really all boils down to). Cynical as it may be, lovely voices are a dime a dozen these days, and when your love­ly voice comes bundled with R. Kelly's mentorship, I'd prefer to spare the dime.

 

ONE IN A MILLION (1996)

 

1) Beats 4 Da Streets (Intro); 2) Hot Like Fire; 3) One In A Million; 4) A Girl Like You; 5) If Your Girl Only Knew; 6) Choosey Lover; 7) Got To Give It Up; 8) 4 Page Letter; 9) Everything's Gonna Be Alright; 10) Giving You More; 11) I Gotcha Back; 12) Never Givin' Up; 13) Heartbroken; 14) Never Comin' Back; 15) Ladies In Da House; 16) The One I Gave My Heart To; 17) Came To Give Love (Outro).

 

Like so many albums around it, One In A Million suffers from ceedeetis: it pastes its limited amount of attractions over such a vast surface that, by the end of it, I feel a strange sort of satis­faction, as if having just returned from the task of gathering the remains of a shipwreck scattered all over the beaches of a desert island.

 

But if you do gather the best tracks together and trim them down to, say, half their length (actual­ly, length of the individual songs is not a problem per se; they usually do not seriously run over four minutes, with the exception of 'Choosey Lover', which is really two songs in one), anyway, if you do this, it becomes easier to appreciate One In A Million as a high-class R'n'B album whose creators were sincerely interested in developing a new kind of groove sound rather than merely making an extra pile of bucks on the existing trends.

 

I say 'creators' because, again, it is unclear just how much Aaliyah herself was involved in all this except for just building up the required feeling. Some of the songs, in fact, are completely domi­nated by Timbaland's production, e. g. 'Hot Like Fire', where he straightjackets Aaliyah into a futuristic-robotic vocal part complementing his tricky choice of synth tones — I'm not complai­ning, because the effect is clever and inspiring, but whether Aaliyah's presence is necessary here, I have no idea about that. Could just as well be Margaret Thatcher.

 

Likewise, 'If Your Girl Only Knew' is mostly memorable for its hypnotic "post-disco" bassline, lovingly wrapped in a web of funky guitar and even electric organ (!). However, on the softer, balladeering stuff Timbaland does allow to let the girl loose, and if you are fond of her singing style, 'Heartbroken', '4 Page Letter', and the title track can all be lovely; singalong choruses and moderately tasteful arrangements don't hurt, either.

 

The best news is that there is not a single track on the record that feels really strained or 'image-carving': the forced street vibe of 'Throw Your Hands Up' has been purged completely, and pretty much every single track gives you a sentimental, fragile Aaliyah — very soft, very smooth (she used to be a big Sade fan, and it shows), ultimately, boring, but true to the soul, at least.

 

The non-Timbaland tracks are generally weaker, because there's no experiment (many of them just sound like standard Whitney Houston fare), but, odd enough, the one song that stands above everything else is a V. H. Herbert production: a terrific cover of Marvin Gaye's 'Got To Give It Up'. When Marvin recorded it in 1979, he sang it in falsetto, for understandable reasons; Aaliyah gives a very faithful rendition, down to the individual intonations of the syllables, but she sings it in her natural voice, and the effect is even more believable and seductive than on the original (one could do without the extraneous rap sections, though). They also slow down the tempo just a bit, and enhance the power of the rhythm section, so it doesn't at all sound like a retro-disco sound, but, on the contrary, looks appropriately modern.

 

Things don't work so well on the 'Old School/New School' version of the Isleys' 'Choosey Lover', because, frankly speaking, the 'old school' part, graced with hair-metal guitar, sounds very much like mainstream Eighties school (bad, bad, bad!), and the 'new school' part was not produced by Timbaland and is therefore rather generic. The only saving grace of this and every other so-so track on here is the singing. It's hard not to like the singing.

 

One In A Million has received tremendous critical praise, with people calling it one of the most epoch-defining R'n'B albums of the time and suchlike. I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't care much if it really had the kind of historical influence as is sometimes assigned to it — whether that would be a good thing is debatable. But it deserves to be heard, at least the better half of it, for combining some exciting approaches to the genre with the talents of one of the best singers in the genre, so my heart feels fine about it, surreptitiously giving the record a fast thumbs up while the brain is still collecting itself, trying to come up with some nasty cynical statement. We'll hastily leave it in this state and move on to the next one.

 

AALIYAH (2001)

 

1) We Need A Resolution; 2) Loose Rap; 3) Rock The Boat; 4) More Than A Woman; 5) Never No More; 6) I Care 4 U; 7) Extra Smooth; 8) Read Between The Lines; 9) U Got Nerve; 10) I Refuse; 11) It's Whatever; 12) I Can Be; 13) Those Were The Days; 14) What If.

 

Five years in the waiting and the final result just goes to show that in a genre like R'n'B, waiting isn't gonna do you much good. Maybe One In A Million showed some flashes of a new type of sound, but this third and, alas, last effort doesn't. It doesn't even show a lot of "maturation" — how, in fact, can one ever become more "mature" if all the artistry is placed into other people's hands? She just looks older on the album cover, that's all.

 

Maybe we needed more Missy Elliott/Timbaland cooperation on the record. It is their stuff, after all, that made One In A Million ultimately stand above competition, and it's no surprise that their only joint product on Aaliyah is easily its best track, and, in fact, easily the best thing Aaliyah was ever given in her life. She must have known that, and her vocal delivery on 'I Care 4 U' lite­rally makes my hair stand on end. It's got a smokey, sultry, dimmed-lights Seventies retro sheen to it, something in the Isaac Hayes ballpark, and although the lyrics, basically just about wanting to comfort someone who's just been dumped by his lover, are trite, the sheer effect of them is anything but. It's the best mainstream R'n'B ballad of the decade I've known so far.

 

As for the more lightweight material, some of these dance numbers are cute enough to merit a smile, but the groove isn't really all that tight or trance-like to justify the repetitiveness: 'Rock The Boat', after a short while, begins to look like an audio sex manual ('stroke it for me, stroke it for me, change position, change position'), and 'More Than A Woman', after showing initial promise with its odd Eastern rhythm, doesn't show anything else (not to mention that its title inavoidably brings on comparisons with the far superior, although, of course, entirely different, Bee Gees song). The best of these 'bouncy' numbers is arguably 'Extra Smooth', with its weird 'descending' loop that hearkens back to the days of disco and, from there, even music-hall.

 

I don't really know, though, why one should bother describing these songs. I don't get the feeling they meant a lot to Aaliyah or even those who saddled her with them. It's pretty obvious that she really only felt at home with the ballads: 'I Care 4 U' is the top number, for sure, but 'Never No More' and 'I Refuse', although far less memorable, at least give me a bit of ground to empathize with the singer. Nothing else does: she just doesn't connect. The album closer, 'What If', is a weird mess of electronic bleeps and hard riffs, maybe the "heaviest" number in her catalog, but the vocals could as well have been synthesized. Maybe they were, who knows.

 

There is a minor critical tendency to describe Aaliyah as a masterpiece, most likely influenced by her tragic death within a few months of its release. But, like I said, I see no progress, in fact, quite the contrary, I again see a talented girl fall under the supervision of hacks who'd most likely just go on sabotaging her career for the next decade. So both the heart and the brain give this a big fat thumbs down rating, not before Superman comes and rescues 'I Care 4 U', though.

 

I CARE 4 U (2002)

 

1) Back And Forth; 2) Are You That Somebody; 3) One In A Million; 4) I Care 4 U; 5) More Than A Woman; 6) Don't Know What To Tell Ya; 7) Try Again; 8) All I Need; 9) Miss You; 10) Don't Worry; 11) Come Over; 12) Erica Kane; 13) At Your Best; 14) Got To Give It Up (remix).

 

One thing the Blackground label did right was to name this compilation after Aaliyah's best song. One thing it did wrong, wrong, wrong, was to follow the hideous principle of 'best-and-lost', mixing well-known hits for neophytes with rarities and previously unreleased material for the fans. As a result, I don't see the neophyte falling head over heels in love with the late singer, and I see the fan in a thoroughly unsatisfied set of mind, yelling for more, more, more of these obscuri­ties and less of the hits that everyone already knows by heart.

 

Altogether, there are about five or six songs from Aaliyah's latest sessions that may or may not have constituted the bulk of her next album had she remained alive, a couple more B-sides and soundtrack tunes (from her starring vehicle Romeo Must Die and Dr. Dolittle), and then the hits. The hits are okay, except for 'Back And Forth' which never really suited her personality, but the new material is definitely as shoddy as the shoddiest stuff on Aaliyah.

 

Some of it is just bizarre, like the unexpected tribute to soap opera hero Erica Kane (!) which very quickly devolves into a trance-like chanting of the name and is oddly lifeless for a song supposed to express admiration for a character, even a soap opera one. Some is just dull in an adult contem­porary kind of way ('Come Over'). And some just seems to catch her uninspired, e. g. 'Miss You', which is supposed to sound about as desperate as 'I Care 4 U' but comes out very plastic, all empty, by-the-book melisma and no real feeling behind it. These auras are very hard to judge, of course, but if you play 'Miss You' back-to-back with 'I Care 4 U', you might understand my reaction better.

 

In the end, the only moderately interesting tracks are two oldies that involved the participation of Timbaland: 'Are You That Somebody?' and 'Try Again'. With Timbaland's trademark "futuristic" production, incorporating non-trivial bits of electronica, and repetitive, but not generic vocal hooks, they are two cool grooves that deserve attention. Too bad they really don't require Aali­yah's participation to make them interesting.

 

To make things worse, the compilation ends on a completely unnecessary and, I'd even say, ugly remix of 'Got To Give It Up', "toughening" up the original by inserting lots of extra clinketing noises that do nothing except take one's attention away from Aaliyah's sexy performance. (At least it's shorter than the original.) In short, I Care 4 U — much as I hate to admit it — is really just a cheap cash-in on the girl's tragedy, assembled hastily, without due respect or consideration, and presenting a far less adequate view of her achievements and talents than could have been possible. Perhaps today, several years after the fact, saying this won't be considered sacrilegious, especially since there are now much better Aaliyah compilations on the market, whereas the bulk of the "new" stuff on I Care 4 U is best relegated to history.

 

Thumbs down from all possible points of view, although let this final note on this final "album" not deter anyone from checking out her better stuff. Her death may have made her a legend far quicker and somewhat less deservedly than needed, but she obviously was a sweet, intelligent, even "classy" artist with a mild knack for innovation, and anybody with that pedigree deserves to be remembered, live or dead.


THE AFGHAN WHIGS

BIG TOP HALLOWEEN (1988)

 

1) Here Comes Jesus; 2) In My Town; 3) Priscilla's Wedding Day; 4) Push; 5) Scream; 6) But Listen; 7) Big Top Hallo­ween; 8) Life In A Day; 9) Sammy; 10) Doughball; 11) Back O' The Line; 12) Greek Is Extra.

 

The best thing that may be said about the Afghan Whigs' debut is that, for an album released in 1988, it sounds unexpectedly awful damn good. From the very beginning, the Whigs wrote, sang and played from the heart, without giving a flying fuck about joining any single musical camp. The music they play is heavy, but it is not heavy metal; punk-spirited, but is not punk; influenced by the old school of hard rock, but is not old school hard rock. It is... well, it's as if you took a lis­ten to everything there is, then picked up a guitar, shut off your brain, and just started playing. Then one of your riffs just might happen to come out like Johnny Ramone, one might happen to be like Tony Iommi, and another one might even be Dave Davies circa 1966. Cool tools!

 

For 1988, when, in a blink of an eye, you could be sucked into generic hardcore or into hair me­tal, this was a tremendous level of freedom, and although The Afghan Whigs, in that particular re­spect, did nothing that The Replacements did not do before them, one could argue that it was much ea­sier for a band like The Replacements to materialize and find an audience in the early Eighties than for a band like The Afghan Whigs to repeat the feat in the late Eighties, when the big musical revolutions were over and pigeonholing was the unavoidable word of day.

 

Unfortunately, just as it took The Replacements a bit of time to find their voice, so it took The Afghan Whigs an even longer time to find theirs. Big Top Halloween, released on the band's own la­bel Ultrasuede, was so non-impressive that the album was never reissued in any format, and can only be found (with a bit of sweat) as an occasional scratchy rip of the original LP. Not to bother unless you're a completist — there is not a single song on here that I would ever want to return to, and, frankly speaking, there is no reason for anyone to hold a second opinion here.

 

Lots of frenzied rockers here, with one sentimental guitar-and-piano ballad in the middle ('But Listen', distinguished by being the only sentimental ballad in the world to include the line "you can kiss me on my lips, or you can kiss me on my ass, it really doesn't matter"); but the arran­gements are trivial, the riffs are either stolen or not fleshed out with articu­late emotional content at all, and lead vocalist Greg Dulli is expressive, but... dull. 'Priscilla's Wedding', with its swirling descent into wah-wah madness in the chorus, and the title track, with a really driving, but defini­tely recycled melody, are minor highlights. The rest is just one lump of passionate, sincere, ag­gres­sive, yawn-inducing noise.

 

Thus, as «brave» as the Whigs were to follow their own destiny already in 1988, it is pretty ob­vious that they were far from alone in this endeavour — the difference is that they got luckier than the rest, oh, yes, and it didn't hurt that for the next stretch of several albums, they just kept getting better and better. If not for Gentlemen, no one in the world would give the damnedest bit of a damn about Big Top Halloween; thumbs down with a guarantee.

 

UP IN IT (1990)

 

1) Retarded; 2) White Trash Party; 3) Hated; 4) Southpaw; 5) Amphetamines And Coffee; 6) Hey Cuz; 7) You My Flo­wer; 8) Son Of The South; 9) I Know Your Little Secret; 10) Big Top Halloween; 11) Sammy; 12) In My Town; 13) I Am The Sticks.

 

Although the Whigs had nothing to do with Seattle as such, in 1989 they were signed to the Sub Pop label the same year that Nirvana released Bleach on it. Apparently, what they were doing more or less fell in with the consolidating grunge formula: hate yourself a lot, add rumbling me­tallic doom to your average punk playing, and Seattle, the artistic shithole of the USA, wel­comes you with open... oh never mind.

 

Of course, neither Greg Dulli, nor anyone else in the band ever hated themselves to the suicidal point. Even on their loudest songs they always stop one or two steps before the abyss: compare, for instance, 'White Trash Party' with Nirvana's 'Negative Creep' — the former is a sincere fit of rage to which any one of us may be susceptible, the latter is clearly performed by a deranged per­son who has no more than five years left to live. And they cannot truly be categorized as «grunge», either, since the punk quotient in their music still seriously outweighs the metallic qua­lities, not to mention the band's penchant for a little old school soul and R'n'B.

 

For a band that gives such a big damn about not giving any big damn when it comes to choosing one's genre camp — as long as it's loud, raw, and serious — it is a shame that they so rarely come up with interesting melodies. Up In It shows some progress from the utterly forgettable debut, but still not enough to justify the Whigs' existence (it does not help, either, that the CD edition of the album throws on a whole bunch of tracks from Big Top Halloween to beef up space).

 

The sound is loud, raw, and serious, and the guitar duo of Dulli and McCollum are playing much more than the average three chords, borrowing lots-a-licks from both the funk/R'n'B and the old school hard rock/garage repertoire, but somehow it never manages to come together. Either it is just the production (or, rather, the lack of it) that sucks, or the fact that Dulli's growling and screa­ming on top of it all has so little to do with the actual music — sometimes, rather than the well-known comparisons with Dinosaur Jr. and The Replacements, I tend to think of Birthday Party analogies, with one crucial difference: when Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard were raising blo­ody hell, they took care to pull all the stops, and the Afghan Whigs don't. Up In It is, after all, an album of songs, not musical terrorist acts.

 

'Retarded' and 'White Trash Party' start things off well, but the rest of the album is very much just a series of inferior re-runs on the same musical and lyrical topics. The lyrics, by the way, fit the sloppiness of the melodies — mostly just series of impressionistic non-sequiturs that blindly poke at the rotten nature of everything in sight. The tightest they get is on something like "Jane had a bottle of pills she kept beside her bed / She took a couple when the sky came falling down" and then we're off some place different. Dulli's vocals also make a very feeble impression: at this point, he has mastered a professional scream and an authentic rasp, but who on Earth did not have that in 1990?

 

All in all, Up In It is a step up indeed, but the band is still not in IT by any means, wherever the IT is supposed to be. Thumbs down.

 

CONGREGATION (1992)

 

1) Her Against Me; 2) I'm Her Slave; 3) Turn On The Water; 4) Conjure Me; 5) Kiss The Floor; 6) Congregation; 7) This Is My Confession; 8) Dedicate It; 9) The Temple; 10) Let Me Lie To You; 11) Tonight; 12) Miles Iz Dead.

 

This is the record that supposedly initiates the Whigs' «classic» period, critically acclaimed for the just-right ratio of grunge to R'n'B to troubled singer-songwriter content. True, it is a clear step up from the previous album, but the way I see it, the Whigs' creative growth was almost painful­ly slow — and furthermore, do not even begin to try and compare Congregation, in terms of inten­sity and poisonous flames, to same era records from Nirvana or Alice In Chains, because any such comparison will immediately strip the album of any good reasons it might have to exist.

 

Having now fully asserted his role as the band's major creative force, Greg Dulli still has not lear­ned to write interesting songs; there are many different riff parts on here, but not a single one I'd like to take to heaven or hell with me. Except 'The Temple', of course, but that's because 'The Temple' is a cover of a track from Jesus Christ Superstar — the album's most surprising move, open to various interpretations. It is a rather lame cover, but the question, of course, is not how good or bad it is, but whatever made Dulli put it there...

 

...which, logically, leads to the next question: what the hell is Congregation actually about? The album is clearly conceptual. It has a naked black woman hugging a naked white baby on the co­ver (which some interpret as a reflection of Dulli's subconscious frustration at not being born black, and others as a brief synopsis of the racial history of humanity). It has a pretentious forty second male-female introduction that begins with such lines as "Eat my imagination, taste my imaginary friend". Throughout, it features stream-of-consciousness lyrics that keep switching from male-female to individual-society relationships, with «male» and «individual» predictably featured in a more positive light than «female» and «society».

 

But none of the points are ever made explicit. Instead, there is simply a general feeling of something wrong going on in an envi­ronment where everything should be supposed to be going right. Does that have something to do with the fact that a black woman is holding a white child? What, exactly, is the problem here? Why is Greg Dulli singing 'The Temple' to us? Is it just beca­use he loved that melody so much that he'd waited ten or more years of his life to put it on his own record, or is there a deeper conceptual dig to it?

 

Considering that the album's best song, a depressed jangly dirge to Miles Davis, was thrown on as an afterthought, after one of Dulli's friends, setting up a party, left the message "Miles is dead. Don't forget the alcohol" on Greg's answering machine — there are no particular deep conceptual digs on most of the songs. In that sense, Congregation works much better if you just take it as one mid-sized blob of whirlwinding guitars and grumbly scream-singing that seems like the ideal average of a kick-ass attack and a tired, languid fit of depression.

 

It all comes perfectly together on the album's second best song, 'Tonight', which sees Dulli perform his sociophysiological functions ("follow me down to the bushes, dear, no one will know, we'll disappear") with such utter disgust ("our private little trip to hell") as if he were thinking of himself as one of Plato's immaculate ideas, for some stupid reason, trapped inside an atrocious human body. If there is one little moment for which I am bound to remember Congregation, it is the fact I have never heard no one, ever before, say the clichéd phrase "Can I walk you home to­night?" with such visible contempt for both its object and subject.

 

Other than those last two songs, though, and very occasional blips of interest on the rest of the record (well, want it or not, you don't get to hear Andrew Lloyd Webber covers on alt-rock artists' albums every other day), Congregation still does not manage to justify the Whigs' descent on our planet. You do have to admit, though, that the combination of black and white flesh looks quite classy against a red background. Too bad the music is nowhere near that colorful.

 

GENTLEMEN (1993)

 

1) If I Were Going; 2) Gentlemen; 3) Be Sweet; 4) Debonair; 5) When We Two Parted; 6) Fountain And Fairfax; 7) What Jail Is Like; 8) My Curse; 9) Now You Know; 10) I Keep Coming Back; 11) Brother Woodrow/Closing Pray­er.

 

Let an average band hang around long enough for the stars to form a lucky configuration, and soo­ner or later it will justify its existence, finally plopping out that near-masterpiece that, accor­ding to the occasional benevolent critic, it «always had in it», but was «biding its time». For The Afghan Whigs, a group grand on intentions but petty on realisations, Gentlemen was their finest hour. In all honesty, it is a record that must have come about by accident. But come about it did, and ensured them their proper place in the 1990s.

 

There is nothing particularly new or striking here conceptually; the difference is simply in that, somehow, the band pulled their act together and, for once, released a collection of musically in­teresting pieces. The general taste and smell of the band — that was well-known by 1993, and had no intention of changing. Loud, rough, screechy, confessional, obscure, not easily accessible: for an average Joe in the world of pop-art (like me, for instance), it was certainly easier to em­pathize with Kurt Cobain than Greg Dulli, who always seemed to leave the most important and direct things unexpressed. As in, try to guess the meaning of the album sleeve this time — is this a cheap-thrill-inviting allusion to underage sex, or just an allegory concerning the hard problem of stratifying gender roles in our modern world?

 

No matter. What is important is that some of the songs are good. Maybe it was a condition of the band's being picked up by a major label (Elektra Records), in the wake of industry bosses' reali­zation of how much all grunge-related people could sell — that the band's got great sound and all, but they also need to learn to write, if you know what I mean. Whatever it was, it worked.

 

The band tries out some new, interesting approaches, such as a tricky «syncopated grunge» style on the title track, or a moody, echoey, almost «artsy» atmosphere on 'When We Two Parted'. The band comes up with a couple memorable riff parts, such as the hard rock droning on 'Now You Know' (reminds of Hawkwind) and the psychedelic-mystical melody of 'Be Sweet'. And the band allows for sonic diversions — such as inviting Marcy Mays of Scrawl to take over the lead vocals on 'My Curse' (a real nice change from Dulli, who wears out the eardrums fairly quick), or clo­sing the record with yet another instrumental drone that the Velvet Underground would certainly appreciate — with guest star Happy Chichester contributing a spaced-out Mellotron part, no less.

 

All of this combined makes Gentlemen into a record worth revisiting, and, perhaps, even worth trying to understand and «assimilate». Not because of any insights it may give one into the world of male/female relationship — at the turn of the century, a mediocre band like the Whigs can har­dly expect to publish any important breakthroughs in that sphere, no, and I am not at all interested in quoting their lyrics, or admiring the subtle ways in which they turn the sentimental ballad for­mula on its head. But when I listen to the band really burning it up on 'Now You Know' or 'Debo­nair', I feel as if am that close to «getting it» — «it» being the admirable way in which the band leader's frustration is finally converted into a sound that's got direction and purpose in addition to crunch and volume. It is tough to explain, but then I'm not alone in this — pretty sure that the boy sitting on the bed out there is having a much tougher time than me in figuring what's going on, for some reason. So, a curious, unexplainable thumbs up it is.

 

P.S. But is it just me, or is 'My Curse', with its main melody and acoustic guitar/piano arrange­ment, subconsciously influenced by Clapton's acoustic reworking of 'Layla' on Unplugged (chro­nologically, quite apt, since the latter came out one year earlier)? Because that is sure a bizarre way for the subconscious to behave itself.

 

BLACK LOVE (1996)

 

1) Crime Scene, Part One; 2) My Enemy; 3) Double Day; 4) Blame, Etc.; 5) Step Into The Light; 6) Going To Town; 7) Honky's Ladder; 8) Night By Candlelight; 9) Bulletproof; 10) Summer's Kiss; 11) Faded.

 

It looks like Greg Dulli eventually decided that Congregation and Gentlemen were too melodic, on the verge of conventionally commercial; hence, Black Love's retread into more familiar terri­tory — the more I listen to it, the less I can remember about the individual songs. But yeah, artis­tic integrity and coherence and all. There are people out there who honestly consider this to be The Afghan Whigs' masterpiece, and they have their point.

 

Of course, it is impossible to «just» go back. In 1996, unlike 1991, the Whigs were a critically acclaimed, moderately popular, wisened-up outfit with a style, an agenda, and years of touring and recording expertise behind them. Thus, Black Love is a well-planned, well-calculated record on which Dulli knows fairly well where he's going. Instead of a patchy and clumsy guitar sound, the band offers a steel-wheel disciplined wall of grunge/R'n'B, one that even dares to throw such instruments as clavinets and cellos into the mix; and, likewise, the lyrics have mor­phed from pure adolescent stream-of-consciousness into a sort of «rock poetry» professionally targeted at people with severe OCD problems.

 

Unfortunately, Black Love is selling to you that style and mood alone, and it is not that unique or even individualistic to be able to convert too many people. The Whigs have gotten bigger, louder, more brutal, more invasive, but Black Love does that at the total expense of musical ideas. Apart from one or two «ballads», not a single one of which has the instrumental subtlety of 'When We Two Parted' from the last record, the whole thing is just one big blast, and it all comes down to whether you feel like identifying with it or not. I don't. Too many blasts have gone by since the dawning of the rock age for me to want to identify with them just because they happen to be blas­ting. Gimme tunes, goddammit — particularly now, when, based on the experience of Gentlemen, I know for sure that this is not an utterly impossible request.

 

Ironically, it seems that even the blasting is not done all that well. The one song that does stand out a little, the one where the band really exerts itself to the utmost, is 'Bulletproof': the guitars become almost impossibly loud, even the piano accompaniment goes for overkill, and Dulli's screaming goes to 11. This is noticeable even against a dozen similar-sounding numbers — mea­ning that normally they still restrain themselves. So it's a mood-oriented record on which the mo­od has not been worked out to perfection.

 

The long epic 'Faded', coming in at the last moment, almost tries to patch things up by cutting the formless blob of noise dead in its tracks and supporting its anthemic pretensions with an excellent slide guitar part, just about the only musical bit on the entire album that I could find worthy. Turns out that Dulli is musically more meaningful when he is in an apologetic mood ("You can believe in me, baby, can I believe in you?") than when he is in one of his fits. Unfortunately, we get to realize it way too late, when there is no time already to switch from the thumbs down posi­tion. Yes, Black Love is meaningful and sincere, but then, so are we all. And some of us, I'm not afraid to say, suffer quite comparably to Greg Dulli — and some might even suffer in more interesting ways for the general public.

 

1965 (1998)

 

1) Somethin' Hot; 2) Crazy; 3) Uptown Again; 4) Sweet Son Of A Bitch; 5) 66; 6) Citi Soleil; 7) John The Baptist; 8) The Slide Song; 9) Neglekted; 10) Omertà; 11) The Vampire Lanois.

 

At the time it was released, 1965 was not at all intended to serve as the band's swan song. On the contrary, it could have been thought of as a new beginning: after a three year break, the Whigs were picked up by one of the biggest players in the business — Columbia Records — and, as if to honor that event, Dulli and Co. made drastic changes to their sound, opening a new page in their musical history. As it turned out, the new book was to begin and end on the same page. But now this gives us a great excuse to finish it all off by saying — yes, at the end of their collective mu­sical journey the Whigs finally did turn in that one-of-a-kind record that justifies their entire ca­reer and sets up a special place for them in the alt-rock scene of the 1990s.

 

In my personal rating, 1965 is locked in a never-ending battle with Gentlemen as the Whigs' fi­nest hour. It represents a change, almost a transformation into a seriously different kind of band, which makes Gentlemen the more obvious choice to learn the essence of their usual sound. And in terms of memorable songs, both arguably contain comparable amounts of effort. But only on 1965 does Greg Dulli suddenly seem to wake up and actually start thinking about the sonic side of the business. And all of a sudden, there's an intrigue that never used to be there before.

 

As 'Somethin' Hot' bursts through your speakers, the first thing to notice is the syncopated «angu­lar» riff that brings to mind the best tracks on Gentlemen — an impressive, if not jaw-dropping, chord sequence instead of fully generic grunge/funk backgrounds on Black Love. By the time it gets to the chorus, it becomes something else: with a mix of grunge guitar, R'n'B drumming, soul-infused back­ground female vocals, and Dulli's "I wanna getcha high!" owing as much to white trash lust-as-love-as-lust sentiments as it does to Sly & The Family Stone, the Whigs have finally earned their reputation as genre-mergers.

 

Not only that, but Dulli's own personality also undergoes repairs. Instead of — always unsuc­cessfully — exorcising his de­mons, he has accepted them as an inevitable, but not particularly de­trimental evil. Jason Ankeny of the All-Music Guide has remarked that Dulli's "I got the devil in me, girl" in 'John The Baptist' is delivered almost as a pickup line, and I couldn't agree more. The song is wild and lustful, with one of three legs each in modern alt-rock, R'n'B, and 1970s glam, and not a single sign of self-hatred or desperate frustration in sight.

 

'John The Baptist' is one of the culminating moments, but the «epic» component is specially sa­ved by the band for the closing two tracks (really just one large song with a lengthy instrumental coda). 'Omertà' takes the appropriate time to unfurl, with funky bass, snowy organ, and unusually silk and sexy vocals from Dulli (did I mention yet that 1965 is the album to prove his worthiness as a singer?) leading into the storm of the chorus. But, although memories of "I got the devil" are still strong and Dulli's overdriven pleas of "surrender to me" are delivered like Voodoo spells, the­re is nothing particularly demonic or threatening to this storm. It's just that there are bright and shiny declarations of love, and then there are the dark and disturbed ones. 'Omertà' falls into the latter, much smaller and rarer, category.

 

Other than that, 1965 is just fun to listen to — for its out-of-nowhere Miles Davis-style trumpet solos, its moody background vocal arrangements, its stronger-than-usual emphasis on lyrical lead guitar lines. In a way, compared to all the rage that preceded it, it might be perceived as «shal­low» — after all, what good is an artistic statement if the artist does not bleed? That's the low art of comedy, not the high one of tragedy. But, on the other hand, I'll always take competently rea­lized comedy over inadequately puffed up tragedy. And for a guy who still has not blown his brains out or overdosed on a toilet seat, and, let us hope, has no plans of doing that in the nearest future, Dulli seems much more at home with the sentiments shown on 1965 than on any of those earlier records.

 

Then again, perhaps it is true that 1965, with its sonic evolution, is more of a Greg Dulli project than a bona fide Afghan Whigs record — and why it was the band's swan song, after all, upon which Dulli switched to a solo career (as well as a side one with The Twilight Singers, where he has far more commanding power than he had in his original band). But, to me, that would only mean that the classic Afghan Whigs period was just a first, far from the most important, step in Dulli's journey to rock adulthood. In any case, it hardly matters who gets the thumbs up — the band as a whole or the mastermind behind it.

 

DO TO THE BEAST (2014)

 

1) Parked Outside; 2) Metamoros; 3) It Kills; 4) Algiers; 5) Lost In The Woods; 6) The Lottery; 7) Can Rova; 8) Royal Cream; 9) I Am Fire; 10) These Sticks.

 

So how many people still remember Greg Dulli these days? Didn't the guy pass into predictable oblivion with the passing of the 1990s? Or wait, did he shoot himself? No, wait, that was Kurt. No, no, I think he ended up overdosing or something... oh no, silly me, that was Layne Staley. Then there used to be all these well-meaning, but impossibly boring people, you know, like Billy Corgan and Eddie Vedder and it seems they're still around, like a bunch of walking fossils from the smoky faraway era of self-loathing musical sludge, but does anyone still listen to them, other than the occasional out-of-luck rock critic? «Will review the latest Smashing Pumpkins album for food» and all that.

 

The point is, the Afghan Whigs were so Nineties that when, out of the blue, Greg Dulli reemer­ged after a fifteen-year gap with a brand new album, I'd almost be tempted to pre-laugh it off. It's not as if self-loathing and distorted depression have by now vanished off the surface of the earth (with the abundance of musical people today in search of an identity, practically nothing vanishes off the surface these days), but that whole attitude that the Whigs, in their heyday, shared with other grunge and «alt-rock» acts, seems to have largely melted away. So many demons were ex­orcised back then, it seems, that few were left for the 21st century.

 

And now, in strides Greg Dulli, back from the cold... and proceeds to exorcise yet another bunch, as if those fifteen years never frickin' happened. No, really, and I do mean it: Do To The Beast does not sound like a 2014 album — it sounds like a direct successor to Black Love and 1965, as if it were recorded the very next day, then refrigerated and stored for 500 years. Somehow, some­thing went wrong, the freon leaked out, and they simply had no choice but to release it to cus­tomers, or else it would have simply gone rotten on Dulli's ass.

 

This described scenario seems perfectly logical, yet, surprisingly, completely wrong: Do To The Beast is really a new album, prepared by Dulli, veteran bass player John Curley, and an expanded set of lead guitarists to replace Rick McCollum (who did play some gigs with the band around 2012, but later opted out). And you don't have to love it, but you gotta admire the fact that the re­cord ignores everything that happened ever since — and does it in a completely natural manner. Greg Dulli's musical character remains completely unaltered. He still sounds, essentially, as if he's doing cold turkey on a twenty-four-hour per day basis, and loving every moment of it.

 

"If time can incinerate what I was to you / Allow me to illustrate how the hand becomes the fuse". Throw in a heavy sludge riff pattern, sing this as if the fuse were stuck up your butt rather than placed in your hand, keep the tension sharp, nauseating, and unresolved for four and a half minu­tes, and you not only got yourself another minor «post-grunge» classic, but end up proving, right here and there, that you can produce thick, heavy, flaming soul of a far higher quality than any of them 21st century youngsters who really have no idea of what it really means to break down and cry. Don't be afraid to listen, Uncle Greg here is willing to teach you, though he probably does not expect you to learn anything.

 

The funky ʽMatamorosʼ opens with a bass groove not unlike the one that Andrew Lloyd Webber used almost half a century ago to open ʽHeaven On Their Mindsʼ — the same kind of distant-sounding, incoming and outgoing «bass probe» whose alarm signal gives a clear indication of «something's probably not quite right here». Soon enough, the song puts on a psychedelic cloak, with muffled falsetto harmonies, droning lead guitar riffs, even some treated strings for overall density; but this is fairly draggy, depressing psychedelia, more suitable for an opium den than an innocent love-in. It is also fabulously creative — possibly the album's best track, just for the sheer number of interesting little details taking place.

 

After these two songs, I was almost afraid that the natural course of events would be for me to conclude that Do To The Beast might be the best Afghan Whigs album, period. «Fortunately», as we go along, the songs generally become less and less memorable (also sort of a traditional trademark of Dulli's), so, on a song-by-song basis, it does not properly compare with Gentlemen or 1965. But there might not actually be any need to judge it on a song-by-song basis — it is set upon generating, preserving, and gradually dissipating a specific atmosphere, and if ʽParked Outsideʼ has already managed to get you by the balls, the sustained moodiness of songs like ʽAlgiersʼ, ʽLost In The Woodsʼ, and ʽCan Rovaʼ (dark acoustic folk!) will not let you go.

 

The real good news is that Dulli does not press the «distorted guitars issue» too heavily: few songs are as brutally crackling as ʽParkedʼ, and there are plenty of acoustic parts, slide phrases, piano flourishes, and even an occasional orchestrated part to keep up the mood. This might be a direct sequence of McCollum being out of the band, or perhaps it is a sign of old age, or a small conces­sion to the new age of music making, but whatever be the case, it works: Do To The Beast goes for depression, boredom, and beauty at the same time — and illustrates that on a grandiose scale in its last track, ʽThese Sticksʼ, which is repetitive, draggy, pessimistic, but still somehow rises to a fascinating crescendo, then gradually calms down — presumably, as the protagonist is bashing the last pieces of brain from his ex-lover, lying on the floor. "You thought me easy / You thought me prey / I've come to meet you / I've come to make you pay". If you think about it that way, it's pretty scary, too. Beautiful, depressing, boring, and scary — what a combo.

 

Who knows, maybe it is the best Afghan Whigs album, after all; at any rate, it deserves an un­questionable thumbs up — if, after a fifteen-year break, this guy is still capable of making you feel the same psychological discomfort and more, what else can you do? And note that the lyrics, as usual, are almost undecipherable, have nothing to do with the social situation or politics what­soever (most fall under the broad «me and you, dear» category, which you are then free to regard as a metaphor for God knows what) — but the lyrics really do not matter as much as the general «psychologism» of the whole thing. Suddenly, it looks like Greg Dulli is just the guy these days to give us a perfect demonstration of the real Beast Within, not some cheap post-modern fac­simile. At the very least, it's weird, and enough to recommend that the record be not forgotten.

 




 

 

AIMEE MANN

WHATEVER (1993)

 

1) I Should've Known; 2) Fifty Years After The Fair; 3) 4th Of July; 4) Could've Been Anyone; 5) Put Me On Top; 6) Stupid Thing; 7) Say Anything; 8) Jacob Marley's Chain; 9) Mr. Harris; 10) I Could Hurt You Now; 11) I Know There's A Word; 12) I've Had It; 13) Way Back When.

 

You have to truly admire a person who can take one particular experience in his/her life, no mat­ter how traumatic, and turn it into a subject matter for a zillion artistic statements. For Aimee Mann, the ex-cofounder of 'Til Tuesday, this subject matter was her breakup with fellow artist Jules Shear. (Granted, prior to that, she had a breakup with fellow artist Michael Hausman, but let us presume that that particular breakup served as her subject matter for 'Til Tuesday).

 

What this means is that I am not qualified, in any major capacity, to review Whatever. It is an album about breaking up, from top to bottom, and should have born the sticker PARTICULAR­LY RECOMMENDED FOR BROKEN HEARTS ALL OVER THE WORLD both on initial and subsequent releases. Fate has so far guided me kindly, preventing my heart from breaking, and so I am tempted to sneer at the album's emotional monotonousness rather than identify with it. But then it also makes you wonder — just how stuck up one must be to spend all of one's creative energy lamenting a three-year old breakup?

 

Oc­casionally, Mann herself acknowledges that her mind may be bent on this one problem to a some­what sharper angle than it should: 'It's one of my faults that I can't quell my past - I ought to have gotten it gone' ('4th Of July'). But the thing that irritates me most of all is the absolute self-righteousness of it all: song after song, it is the ex-partner who carries one hundred, no, one thou­sand percent of the blame. Just look at this: 'This is for the one who was false, who taught me about building walls' ('I Could Hurt You Now'); 'Oh you stupid thing, it wasn't me that you out­smarted' ('Stupid Thing'); 'I should've known you would betray me but without the kiss' ('I Should've Known'); 'Someday you'll wake up and say... now she's got the river down which I sold her' ('4th Of July'). Makes Bob Dylan and Lindsey Buckingham look like little lollipop kids. The most ironic thing of it all, of course, is that the more she tries to convince herself and the audience that 'I got rid of that ghost', the clearer you understand that 'that ghost' hardly leaves her in the shower, let alone in a recording studio.

 

Now comes the good news. In the hands of a non-talent — and the world, these days, is all but ruled by breakup-harboring non-talents armed with noisy guitars and unloved pianos — these so-so lyrics would have been set to equally so-so music, with the album relegated to the trash heap immediately upon release. But if Aimee doesn't have a world vision fit for a great artist, she certainly knows how to compose solid pop melodies. Most of these songs are memorable, with a well-found combination of early Nineties production techniques and Sixties jangle-pop values (it's no coincidence that Roger McGuinn himself guest stars on 'Fifty Years After The Fair'). If Mann's work in 'Til Tuesday today sounds somewhat dated (it was an Eighties band, after all), then Whatever, released to a world that had learned to appreciate the values of grunge, still manages to sound fresh and alive, with lovely acoustic work, colourful electric tones, and various small surprises along the way (e. g., the 'marching band' emulation on 'Jacob Marley's Chain').

 

It is these melodies and arrangements that save Whatever from drowning in its self-pity — be­cause it is very easy to distance yourself from the lyrics and just enjoy the record for its strengths. The interlocking guitars on 'Fifty Years After The Fair' epitomize the Nineties' capacity of crea­ting sheer sonical loveliness; 'Could've Been Anyone' slyly quotes the opening chords from the Byrds' 'Mr. Tambourine Man' (you have to look for it, though), and wisely opts for intelligent, complex combinations of 12-string and electric guitars instead of the three-chord slash that, say, an Avril Lavigne of today would have plopped onto it; 'Way Back When' is Kinks-derived Brit pop that borrows, not steals, from cheery vaudeville and adds but a slice of graceful melancholia; and so on, and so on.

 

In short - Miss Mann's lyrics may leave a lot to be desired (in terms of variety, at least), but her musical tastes are impeccable and her musical skills undeniable. And so, even if, like I said, I still don't feel qualified to pronounce judgement on this, I can easily relate to the music with my heart — and let it whisk the negative judgement from the brain and turn it into a positive one. Thumbs up, most definitely.

 

I'M WITH STUPID (1995)

 

1) Long Shot; 2) Choice In The Matter; 3) Sugarcoated; 4) You Could Make A Killing; 5) Superball; 6) Amateur; 7) All Over Now; 8) Par For The Course; 9) You're With Stupid Now; 10) That's Just What You Are; 11) Frankenstein; 12) Ray; 13) It's Not Safe.

 

I think lyrically, this album is a step forward because this time around there are two main lyrical themes rather than one: "I'm So Pissed Off At My Boyfriend Of Long Ago" occasionally alterna­tes with "I'm So Pissed Off At My Record Label Of Not So Long Ago". Not for one second do I believe that these particular subjects worry or should worry you, the reader, so let us treat them the way they should be treated: hollow pretexts to make moody music that has an equal probabi­lity chance of being inspiring or being fucked up. Incidentally, almost every review of this album that I've seen makes a big point of the album's first lyrical line going 'you fucked it up', but it's hard to understand what the fuss is about: this is 1995, not 1965. Maybe it's the sweet little girl aura of Aimee's and the tender tone in which it is being pronounced that befuddles the writers.

 

Overall, I'm With Stupid is Whatever Vol. 2, but with most of the sissy twelve-string jangle extricated and replaced with grungier guitars and power-enhanced chords — to sound more "mo­dern", I guess. The poor duped Roger McGuinn makes no more guest appearances, and it shows. When this album is at its worst — which, fortunately, is very rare — it's hard to distinguish the proceedings from zillions of results by billions of female artists with broken hearts and broken electric guitars wasting away taxpayers' money. Maybe no one would say that in 1995, but 'fif­teen years after the fair' it shows rather painfully, I'm afraid.

 

On the other hand, billions of female artists still don't got what Aimee's got, and that's an ability to write a soul-catching melody. After I've distanced myself from the lyrics of 'Sugarcoated' and managed to imagine the song in a more interesting arrangement, I am overwhelmed by its power and melodicity, reminiscent of Lennon's later-years style. 'Ray' is even better, its sweet melancho­lia finding perfect support from the electric piano in the background (yes, despite all the moder­nistic trappings, it is the sharp ringing of that piano that stands out as the most memorable sonic moment on the entire album). 'You're With Stupid Now' is a rare gem of an acoustic ballad here, and also a rare case when you can detach the chorus — 'what you want, you don't know, you're with stupid now, so on with the show' — from its surroundings, provide it with your own meaning, however deep you want to make it, and find it all the more beautiful.

 

Besides, my quibbles mostly lie with the rhythmic backbones of the songs: lead guitar work on most of them is as powerful as ever, with colorful solos planned and laid out just as expressively as the vocal melodies. (Sometimes they take on a slightly atonal, avantgarde manner, but only when the song might beg for it, as in the intentionally bizarre 'Frankenstein' — a metaphoric tune, of course, but ending in a truly Frankensteinish near-cacophony of street organ music crossed with free jazz at the end). I do not like the opening of 'Superball' at all, but once it unfurls all of its banners, I end caught up in the fun.

 

Who knows, maybe some day Aimee will want to re-record the album, or at least parts of it, using an approach that panders less to current trends on the market (even if those trends weren't all that bad in 1995). Then again, everything should probably stand as a document of its time; if we can enjoy those early Duran Duran records, there's no reason why simplistic grungy guitars should cause our conscience to lump a gifted songwriter like Mann with all the inferior substitutes. Thumbs up, thumbs up, by all means. The picky brain is always hard to please, but, fortunately,  the sappy heart always takes precedence over the sucker.

 

MAGNOLIA SOUNDTRACK (1999)

 

1) One; 2) Momentum; 3) Build That Wall; 4) Deathly; 5) Driving Sideways; 6) You Do; 7) Nothing Is Good Enough; 8) Wise Up; 9) Save Me; 12) Dreams [by Gabrielle]; 13) Magnolia [by Jon Brion].

 

This is that rare example of a movie soundtrack that stands well on its own terms — a fairly appropriate instance, too, since the battalions of admirers and haters of Magnolia the movie and Magnolia the soundtrack intersect, but do not overlap. I feel very fortunate, therefore, that I can safely state: I admire the movie — one of the bravest and quite hard-hitting in its bravery epic creations of the 1990's — and I think its soundtrack fits its atmosphere perfectly. Not only that, but the movie's wide-reaching goals almost certainly help Aimee overcome her own artistic limi­tations and finally match her exciting, moving music to broader themes than relationships fucked up for no apparent reason other than that relationships have to be fucked up, or else what sort of fucking relationships are they?

 

Maybe the four-year break in recording helped, too: the eight originals, plus Aimee's cover of Harry Nilsson's 'One', are all stunning — not a single melody fails to stir up feelings (one semi-exception is the instrumental 'Nothing Is Good Enough', which works much better with vocals on Bachelor No. 2 — not that the slow, hypnotic keyboard-and-strings-driven waltz isn't delightful on its own, but she must sing!).

 

Few things are more tragic to savour in the soul than one's own loneliness, and unless our genes somehow fail to elevate us to the level of Homo sapiens sapiens, we all feel this sometimes. That's what the movie was about; and this is why, not coincidentally, the soundtrack album opens with 'One' — for all I know, One could have been the title of the album. Inability to be under­stood is an integral part of a broken relationship (the other integral part of it is, of course, inabi­lity to cope with the inability of being understood), so it is quite a smooth and unbroken current that carries you from superficial whining about your messed up life into the deep sea of realizing there must be more serious, and more scary, reasons that underlie this mess. So, if Whatever and I'm With Stupid were basically bitter, but still shiny, pop, this soundtrack is gloomy and hopeless from the beginning to the end (even more hopeless than the movie, which still offered some sort of redemption from the nightmare — but that was actually its weakest part).

 

'One' is a cover that achieves perfection — it is somewhat over-arranged compared to Nilsson's intentionally minimalistic performance, but even its over-arranged details preserve the spirit of the original. 'Wise Up', reflecting a climactic moment in the movie, is one of the bitterest, most heart-breaking songs of the decade, where both the lyrics and the music basically just tell you that the only way out of your misery is to accept it as something natural and inescapable: 'it's not go­ing to stop, it's not going to stop till you wise up... so just give up'. But it isn't presented as an op­timistic conclusion — right on its heels comes 'Save Me', where Aimee implores to 'save me, save me from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they can never love anyone'. Uh?

 

Musically, the songs here completely drop the grungy wall-of-sound of the last album and are much more accessible to the "general pop audiences", which is perhaps natural since such was the intention of the movie as well, but I do not see that as a problem as long as the melodies are won­derful, and they are. Most are propelled by pianos rather than guitars, but there's still room for the usual highly melodic guitar solo on songs like 'Deathly' and 'Driving Sideways', and 'Momentum' nibbles a bit at free-form jazz before settling into normalness.

 

The only weakness of the record is that it is, after all, a soundtrack, and so, as a completely unne­cessary bonus, we get two well-known Supertramp tunes, Jon Brion's instrumental 'Magnolia' theme (yawn), and Gabrielle's 'Dreams', a song that plays an important role in the movie but is otherwise a cheap dance-pop throwaway. Also, four out of nine songs were later reused by Aimee on her next solo album, which might make the buyer loath to own both records — but that is rather a weakness of Bachelor No. 2 than its predecessor. The predecessor hits so hard that it would be unimaginable it could fail to make Aimee Mann a household name, and, of course, it did, and quite deservedly so. Thumbs up for one of the most perfect combinations of artistic growth and commercial success in recent — and generally quite pitiful — history.

 

BACHELOR NO. 2 (2000)

 

1) How Am I Different; 2) Nothing Is Good Enough; 3) Red Vines; 4) The Fall Of The World's Own Optimist; 5) Satellite; 6) Deathly; 7) Ghost World; 8) Calling It Quits; 9) Driving Sideways; 10) Just Like Anyone; 11) Susan; 12) It Takes All Kinds; 13) You Do.

 

Subtitled The Last Remains Of The Dodo, whatever that may symbolize apart from showing the lady's knowledge of paleontology and Alice In Wonderland. She may be right, too, though, if by "Dodo" she means "songwriting that incorporates melodicity, intelligence, and self-restraint", because that's what Bachelor No. 2 is all about. It may or may not be her best record, but it's the one I find hardest of all to criticize.

 

Back on the ground from the God-substituting creationism of Magnolia, Aimee returns to her self-righteous manhating business, but she has obviously "wised up", and it would be stubborn and shallow to insist she's still writing about her breakups (or breakdowns, for that matter). So, yes, it's the easiest interpretation for lines like 'what was started out with such excitement now I'd gladly end with relief', but it's not the only one possible — the lyrics become open for more than one way of interpretation, and I can't recall any laughable moments, either. She may not be stri­ving for the heights of the great poets, but she's at least on the level of an Elvis Costello — not coincidentally, the latter is credited for co-writing 'The Fall Of The World's Own Optimist'.

 

I'm not sure if it was really necessary to include three songs from the Magnolia soundtrack, but, considering that the fourth one ('Nothing Is Good Enough') is a vocal version of the instrumental tune on the soundtrack, I guess they weren't really written specifically for the film, but were ra­ther just temporarily "donated" from Aimee's main project, so this cannot serve as even a tech­nical criticism. As for the main project, its retail release was significantly delayed because, appa­rently, Aimee's record label did not deem it commercially viable and ordered her to come up with more hit singles (probably something along the lines of 'Baby One More Time', which was riding up the charts at the time?), leading her to buy out the publishing rights and distributing the record through her web site (apparently, she managed to ship 25,000 copies all by herself!). Which is all the more ridiculous particularly since Bachelor No. 2 is one of Aimee's most accessible records — certainly far more so than the bleak follow-up Lost In Space — and that just about any song on it could easily function as a single, being far more memorable and enjoyable than ninety per­cent of today's MTV garbage.

 

Musically, she continues to tone down the grungy guitar slash of I'm With Stupid and continues in the Magnolia vein — acoustic and piano-driven stuff, backed up with electric sound a-plenty, but also strings, accordeons, brass, and anything that can be shaped into a solid wall of sound whenever she feels like it. The mood is bitter throughout, but not suicidal or anything: she's not doing this for the sinister purposes of Paul Thomas Anderson, but for her own needs, and she may be pissed at the world, but that doesn't prevent her from enjoying being there; the result is a bright, but angry, inquisitive, but self-assured, record that, third or fourth time around, proves definitely that Aimee is no fluke, but rather one of the most treasurable songwriters of our times.

 

She is also making some of the prettiest use of her voice you'll ever hear — for instance, on the radically brief snippet 'Just Like Anyone'. She doesn't have a particularly strong voice, and her range isn't particularly wide, and she doesn't know much in the way of "vocal gymnastics", but, like a female Paul McCartney, she knows what it takes to get one trapped in the beauty of the human voice. Or maybe, to use a closer comparison, rather like Suzanne Vega, whose musical style she sometimes approaches on the quieter songs here — especially on the track that is, inci­dentally, titled 'Susan' (any relation?..).

 

It is joyful to realize there are still writers/performers in this world who can dress their anger into complex colorful forms — for all the fury packed in the lyrics of 'Calling It Quits', preaching against the corporate greed of record companies, it has one gloriously uplifting melody, punctua­ted by marching style brass flourishes; and the middle eight section on 'How Am I Different' flows like a luscious honey stream, but the words are, in fact, 'just a question before I pack — when you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?'

 

It is just as joyful to witness the brilliance of the God-given talent for songwriting so close up front, like on 'Red Vines', a song which could have been utterly generic pap but where, instead, the vocal melodies in both the verses and the chorus take unpredictable, but delightful and com­pletely smooth twists. If the tune is familiar to you, observe this twist on the ascending 'everyone loves you...' after the first two 'regular' lines, or how the 'cigarettes and Red Vines' chorus is not immediately followed by the rhyming 'I'll be on the sidelines', which would be decent for a so-so songwriter, but by the 'contrapunctus' of 'baby you never do know' — and how normal this sounds, original, but normal. It's all relatively simple, but something tells me it should all be your average musicologist's delight.

 

If, like me, you tend to be frequently annoyed by singer-songwriters — which is only natural, because most of the time most singer-songwriters strive to be annoying — I can only state for myself that Bachelor No. 2 is one of the least annoying annoying singer-songwriter albums I've ever had the pleasure to listen to, and this sentence alone sets it up in a class of its own. And this, in turn, guarantees a rock-hard thumbs up from the brain, whereas the heart, already accustomed to being seduced by Ms. Mann's charms, follows suit.

 

LOST IN SPACE (2002)

 

1) Humpty Dumpty; 2) High On Sunday 51; 3) Lost In Space; 4) This Is How It Goes; 5) Guys Like Me; 6) Pavlov's Bell; 7) Real Bad News; 8) Invisible Ink; 9) Today's The Day; 10) The Moth; 11) It's Not.

 

The lyrics get really dense on this album. The subjects are the same, but she's learned to present the message under a thick layer of metaphors, allusions, allegories, and red herrings — perhaps that's an inevitable result of working together with the likes of Costello. Like all of us, she is hu­man, of course, and so cannot escape an occasionally painful cliché ( 'The moth don't care when he sees the flame, he might get burned, but he's in the game' makes for a nice rhyme, but isn't it inexcusable to still go on writing about moths and flames in the XXIst century?), but most of the time, she steers her verbal ship with an ever increasing level of self-confidence.

 

But I will do Lost In Space an injustice if I concentrate on its lyrics. When you have a record that is heavy on the words and subtle on melody, it's a very natural temptation — but it has to be avoi­ded, since it gives a distorted picture of one's true impressions. Many people have commented on the album's 'maturity', not always taking it for a good sign; many have acknowledged that, as Aimee gets more and more skilled at poetry (or in 'verbosity', if you want to see it that way), she is neglecting melody — where 'melody' is understood as 'energy'. That was also my own original impression: Lost In Space took somewhat more time to sink in than anything that preceded it. Chances are this will be your impression, too. Well, fight it. Give it another chance. It isn't a fast-going record, and unless you're in a major hurry to get somewhere, you should lower your own speed so as not to get too far ahead of it where you can no longer discern its beauty.

 

It's just that Aimee Mann is a total introvert, and as she gets older and left with less and less to prove, her introvert nature takes major hold of her. You'd think that the settling of her legal and personal problems would eventually cause her to brighten and lighten up, but guess again: Lost In Space is even more somber and dreary in tone than the Magnolia soundtrack. There are no bright, shiny pop-rockers whatsoever on this album; most, if not all, of the songs are in a minor key, many feature lonesome, depressed acoustic passages, the guitar solo breaks range from omi­nous to creepy, and the only reason the whole thing does not want to make you kill yourself on the spot is that it's never intended to: for all of Aimee's bitterness and disillusionment (or, rather, "un-illusionment" — "dis-" would imply that she once had illusions, but I've always thought she had already experienced her first nervous breakdown in the womb), she's never suicidal about it.

 

Therefore, do not dive into this expecting crunchy power-pop riffs and youthful ecstasy. After all, she's almost 40 here, and no one ever saw her give the AC/DC pledge of eternal youth. Lost In Space is experienced best of all in a situation where you're really lost in space, so if you're step­ping out of your shuttle suspended on a fragile string, don't forget to pack an Ipod with this record — wonderful way to enjoy your last half-hour of living. However, in the likely event of your not being able to either reproduce or simulate this situation, a decent alternative is to save it up for a quiet evening after a whole day of nerve-wrecking problems. I happened to catch this particular situation exactly, and in the process it made me a better man, or at least I'd like to think so.

 

Now, I promised I'd be talking about the music rather than the lyrics, but it's also pretty hard. As usual, Aimee does not shower you with hooks; she has this strict ratio of one hook per good song and two hooks per masterpiece, which makes all the songs seem slightly overlong (five minutes for 'Invisible Ink'? what is this — Emerson, Lake & Palmer?), but also helps her, I think, to stay so impressively consistent over decades. That said, she does strictly adhere to this rule, and each song on the album has something to say, and I find no truly weak spots.

 

But even more impres­sive than the hooks are the arrangements and the moods they create. 'Hum­p­ty Dumpty' is warm autumn, with its growling electric guitars and acoustic jangle; the title track is winterish, with falling-snow electric organ and the deep gritty grumble of the chorus; and 'The Moth', true to its trite, but fun lyrics, gives you deep night with candles... and the rest are perhaps just different shades of the same autumnal, winterish, and nocturnal landscapes. Even the laziest songs are all soaked in this somber vision so much they're at least evocative — 'Today's The Day', for instance, has a quasi-musical box-style chiming guitar arrangement that gives it the required mystery aura.

 

Above all, you do get this feeling of being completely stranded: Lost In Space com­pletes the process of converting a lively, still very much out-of-this-world Aimee Mann into somebody from a faraway planet, unable to understand or to be understood. If you find this offensive for the tastes of humanity, feel free to draw the line. I find this honest, and far more sincere, mature, and hard-hitting than ninety nine percent of "depressing" shit-music that is being made today by youn­ger and simpler minds. And what began as an intellectual delight for the brain ends up being, if not the heart's favourite, then at least the heart's special Aimee Mann album. Thumbs up for all the beautiful melodies — and more thumbs up for all the darkness.

 

PS. If you can get it, the expanded 2-CD deluxe edition is highly recommendable; not so much for the bunch of live performances (Aimee's limitations as a live performer will be discussed in the next review) as for four B-sides and outtakes that are just as good as any of the eleven songs on the album proper, especially the baroque harpsichord-and-strings gorgeousness of 'Nightmare Girl' and the pop-rocker 'Observatory' — the latter adds a wee bit of fresh, upbeat liveliness to the rigid solemnity of it all.

 

LIVE AT ST. ANN'S WAREHOUSE (2004)

 

1) The Moth; 2) Sugarcoated; 3) Going Through The Motions; 4) Amateur; 5) Wise Up; 6) Save Me; 7) Stupid Thing; 8) That's Just What You Are; 9) Pavlov's Bell; 10) Long Shot; 11) 4th Of July; 12) King Of The Jailhouse; 13) Deathly.

 

From the few extra snippets I've seen on Youtube and other God-blessed sources, Aimee is not a "great" live performer. Her simple, realistic (or, to be more precise and more obscure, "post-neo-realistic") take on things ensures that in her live show, she carefully avoids all the elements of an actual "show". In her 'Til Tuesday and early solo days, she at least used to wiggle her behind a bit — then realized it wasn't such a pretty sight and became a major competitor for Dylan as "The Most Frozen Celebrity Onstage".

 

Not that the fans should mind — for all we know, the world is suffering from a surplus of lively stage performers, and the "frozen" attitude is arguably the best attitude for the kind of music Aimee is writing these days. More disturbing is the fact that the audio aspect of the live perfor­mance adds next to nothing to the studio experience; Mann doesn't care much for jamming, im­provising, or even slightly rearranging her old songs. Out of the thirteen songs on here, only 'Long Shot' is clearly different in that a lengthy (and good) guitar solo concludes the performance; every other difference is microscopic at best.

 

Of course, if you do not set yourself a specific major goal of capturing extra fans with your live per­formance, that's all you need to do: just go out there, stand like a statue with your eyes closed, and concentrate exclusively on delivering the goods in a faithful manner. So what's the point of releasing a joint DVD-CD edition of this experience? Make money? But it's supposed to be un­der­stood that Aimee doesn't care much for money, money can't buy her... never mind. Satisfying fan demand? She doesn't seem to be that much of a fan-loving person either.

 

Let's just settle temporarily on the idea that she wanted to have this herself, as a little souvenir of the glory days to nostalgize to twenty or thirty years on. She does look great — so thoroughly un­cool in her rigid suit and tie that it makes her the coolest being on Earth. And she sounds great — not a note out of place, actually, maybe even a wee bit more confident on oldies like 'Stupid Thing' and 'Sugarcoated' than a decade earlier. The setlist is predictably skewed in favour of the then-currently promoted Lost In Space... not, with only two songs on the CD and an extra 'Hum­pty Dumpty' on the DVD; instead, the setlist is relatively evenly scattered through all of her solo output, so much that some recommend this as a decent substitute for a best-of package — I really don't know about that, since she's so frustratingly consistent you'd have to buy all the albums anyway. As an added bonus, she also "previews" two of the best songs from her next record, The For­gotten Arm.

 

That's about all there is to say, really. The CD, I think, is expendable, a pleasant trinket to peruse once all the other records have been played a million times; the DVD, however, is well worth putting on if you, like me, are fascinated by this idea of "humble intelligent beauty", equally un­bur­dened with MTV-style trappings and militant anti-commercial supercool behaviour. It also gives you one more excuse to whine and wonder about how in the world this kind of music — so catchy, so easily accessible, so fun, and so heart-rending at the same time — could ever lose out in the public conscience to the likes of Shakira or Beyoncé. Well, don't tell me, I do know the an­swer: it's pretty hard to have a nipple slip from under that suit and tie thing.

 

THE FORGOTTEN ARM (2005)

 

1) Dear John; 2) King Of The Jailhouse; 3) Goodbye Caroline; 4) Going Through The Motions; 5) I Can't Get My Head Around It; 6) She Really Wants You; 7) Video; 8) Little Bombs; 9) That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart; 10) I Can't Help You Anymore; 11) I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up for Christmas; 12) Beautiful.

 

Every serious artist deserves a concept album, and who's more serious than Aimee Mann? The Forgotten Arm is a mini-musical (it's a bit too fragile and tender to be called a "rock opera") built around an imaginative story of an alcoholic boxer teaming up with a "white trash" girl and their futile attempts to battle their problems. The subject matter reflects Aimee's private fetishism (she's known for her own addiction to boxing), but, more importantly, it presents her as some sort of a female Bruce Springsteen, injecting herself into "other people's lives" and functioning as a self-appointed spokesman for the lower depths.

 

Whether this elevates her art or, on the contrary, makes it more cheap and superficial, is a useless question to discuss. The main problem, as far as I can see, is one that almost inevitably crops up on most concept albums: there's somewhat too much of the concept and somewhat less of crea­tive songwriting. Of course, on the "positive" side, The Forgotten Arm is a more energetic al­bum than Lost In Space: the tempos are generally faster, the guitars more prominent and crunchy, the mo­rose depression reserved for just a few of the tunes, while the others are busy building up other kinds of atmosphere relevant to the story.

 

But on the "negative" side, too many of the songs do not register on my scale even after quite a few listens, and this is coming from someone who "got" Lost In Space not earlier than the fourth time around. This time, though, the subtleties just refuse to come out. It's mostly decent folk-rock — decent, but hardly magical. Aimee sings like she really means it — and, of course, she does mean it; it's her story, her message, her impersonations — but it is hard to get rid of the nagging feeling that the story comes first and the melody comes next. It is also not insignificant that in some recent interviews she'd also stated that the idea was to intentionally emulate the atmosphere of an early 1970s roots-rock album, to make something in the vein of The Band or Tumbleweed Connection; if so, she'd clearly paid more attention to the arrangements and "vibe" of it all than to the soul power of the notes themselves. The irony, of course, is that without great melodies, roots-rock arrangements only make the whole experience blander.

 

A typical example is 'Beautiful', the closing number that is supposed to wind things up on a gene­rally optimistic note after the characters had been royally messing up their lives for the previous eleven tracks. Its chorus, as far as composition goes, is lazy: Aimee does change to her falsetto on the line 'why does it hurt me to feel so much tenderness?', but, as much as I adore her falsetto, the enchantment just doesn't work; the notes are clumsily strung together, there's no adequately har­monic effect, and nothing ends up registering in my head. Maybe it's not laziness; maybe it was an in­tentional wish to write something so discoherent (Carole King, who also had a song with the same title, not coincidentally used to write in the same manner, but somehow generally came out with better results). Yet this is pop music, after all, not opera, and I don't think we were supposed to judge The Forgotten Arm according to the criteria of Ma­dame Butterfly in the first place.

 

Even the good choruses are lazy: 'That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart', 'I Can't Help You Anymore' and 'I Was Thinking I Could Clean Up For Christmas' essentially make their points — three songs in a row! — by having their titles chanted over and over again. That's char­ming chanting, to be sure, but that's not enough for Aimee; I'm perfectly certain she could charm anyone by walking down the street and chanting random storefront signs if she wished to.

 

In the end, my favourite songs turn out to be exactly those two that had already been previewed on the live album: 'Going Through The Motions', since it's the power-poppiest number on the record, and 'King Of The Jailhouse', its direct opposite — a slow, lumbering piano ballad, densely satu­rated with fantastic vocal flourishes, maybe Aimee's greatest ever vocal performance that locks tenderness and desperation into a single tiny capsule and wedges it in the ear forever; the transition from the disturbed, panicky confession of 'Baby there's something wrong with me!..' to the quiet, submissive, but still achingly painful desperation of '...that I can't see...' literally takes my breath away every time I hear it (and it is repeated way more than just a few times, believe me). There's nothing on the album that reaches the same emotional heights even remotely. It is not excluded that these two songs were, in fact, the first that were written (given that they'd already appeared a year ear­lier) and the rest of the story "grew" around them in a progressively declining fashion.

 

Worst of all, I don't even "get" the story. I do not feel that Aimee succeeds in making these cha­racters come alive. For all she's worth, she is still being Aimee Mann, and Aimee Mann is a per­son as much removed from an alcoholic boxer and his drugged-out girlfriend as she is from an Afghani shepherd. Am I wrong? If so, she is not trying too hard to change my opinion. It may even be an interesting story — in someone else's hands — but what I see is a smart, way too se­rious, way too sentimental, intelligent woman who'd rather be reading about the misfortunes of alcoholic boxers in the latest paperback than being able to live them out herself. In the end, I pre­fer to forget altogether that there is supposed to be some sort of story here — the whole thing comes across easier when you discard the conceptual trappings wholesale.

 

So, in the end, it is not easy to consider The Forgotten Arm a great success; it is easy to believe that Aimee has overreached a bit. Not that it spoils her reputation in any way, and it is still one of the sincerest and most impressive artistic statements of 2005 — or maybe even of the entire de­cade, which has been relatively scarce on honest, simple statements from intelligent people, and for that reason, thumbs up are guaranteed. But as far as rock operas/musicals go, it's certainly no Quadrophenia. And it is perhaps not a coinci­dence that Aimee, despite a certain amount of critical praise, has so far not ventured to repeat the attempt.

 

ONE MORE DRIFTER IN THE SNOW (2006)

 

1) Whatever Happened To Christmas; 2) The Christmas Song; 3) Christmastime; 4) I'll Be Home For Christmas; 5) You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch; 6) Winter Wonderland; 7) Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas; 8) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 9) White Christmas; 10) Calling On Mary.

 

This should be as good a place as any to expound the Teleology Theory of the Christmas Album. This constantly self-regenerating beast has a nasty tendency to produce a population explosion around the end of each upcoming year, but the motivation behind the explosion is quite different from procreator to procreator. Christmas Albums fall into the following categories:

 

—    the money album, the idea behind which is for the starving artist to make a couple quick bucks from the fans (hard to blame—don't you need a new Lamborghini for Christmas?);

—    the dedication album, the idea behind which is the artist's firm conviction that there is no better gift for the fans than another Christmas album — surely, all the previous ten billion Christmas albums must become irrelevant and outdated the minute The Artist enters the studio to record a new one;

—    the money-dedication album, the idea behind which is to make a money album, but to state in every subsequent interview that the idea really was to make a dedication album. This is arguably the most common category.

 

Every now and then, however, there appears a fourth category: the intelligent Christmas Album, an extremely rare breed since it requires a complicated combination of parameters. Chief among those is the requirement that it be an album that is more about the artist than about Christmas, because, after all, there is only one Christmas and we know all about it, whereas the same cannot be said about artists.

 

Of course, fans of any particular artist will always want to argue that it is this particular artist's Christmas Album that is the most intelligent of all, even when we're very clearly dealing with a money album, but it is possible to be a bit colder and more objective about these things, especi­ally if the default emotion is to detest Christmas albums. In the light of this, I'm happy to say that I don't find anything detestable about Aimee Mann's Christmas album, One More Drifter In The Snow, because, totally true to her identity, on this record she invents (or, at least, strongly up­holds) a new sub-genre: Christmas music for loners.

 

In other words, it would be completely useless, maybe even ridiculous, to throw it on at a lively Christmas party, or, in fact, any Christmas party. It is, however, a very cool record to put on if, by any chance, you happen to be spending Christmas alone (at the most — with your other, but not too heavy on the champagne). Certainly this is not a depressed album — Aimee is not that weird — but it is an album to be played at a quiet volume in a small darkened room. Aimee herself quotes the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Christmas albums as chief inspiration, records that weren't specifically targeted towards the party spirit either, but we've come a long musical way from there, and One More Drifter dispenses with the commercialism and superficiality in an even rougher way than Frank or Dean could ever imagine way back then.

 

There are chimes, and strings, but the arrangements are chamber-like, never symphonic, and on most of the standards — 'White Christmas', 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas', 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen', etc. — Aimee's morose singing rises way up high above the mix, sugges­ting you're having a serious little conversation with the artist rather than merely having yourself another merry little Christmas. Strong surprises are few: 'You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch' from the Dr. Seuss legacy, and two originals — Michael Penn's 'Christmastime' and Aimee's own 'Calling On Mary'; the former is sort of bland, but the latter is quite strong, sounding very much like an outtake from the Forgotten Arm sessions (same rootsy style) and embodying all that is significant about the album: an odd mix of happiness and loneliness, contention and desperation.

 

Aimee's intentions are, in fact, immediately clear: the song that opens the album is not 'Jingle Bells', but rather Jimmy Webb's somewhat grim 'Whatever Happened To Christmas', so that the album is established as a protest against the cheapening and the commercialization of the holiday (or, in fact, of everything). Given that the album failed to chart on the Billboard at all, I suppose it matched its purpose fairly well. If you happen to be somehow torn between the idea of hating Christmas albums and the necessity to own one, One More Drifter In The Snow may be just what you need. If you're an admirer of Aimee's charisma, One More Drifter In The Snow is quite a must-have rather than a slight footnote. Either way, it's a thumbs up, and a good excuse to throw all your friends out on Christmas' Eve and just get drunk in the good old-fashioned way.

 

@#%&*! SMILERS (2008)

 

1) Freeway; 2) Stranger Into Starman; 3) Looking For Nothing; 4) Phoenix; 5) Borrowing Time; 6) It’s Over; 7) 31 Today; 8) The Great Beyond; 9) Medicine Wheel; 10) Columbus Avenue; 11) Little Tornado; 12) True Believer; 13) Ballantines.

 

The «conceptual» framework is gone, but the problems, unfortunately, remain. Everything on here is fairly lightweight, starting with the ironic title (apparently copped by Aimee from an In­ter­net board reflecting some guy's frustration over other people's abuse of the smiley signs) and en­ding with the fact that the record is entirely free of electric guitars. This is Aimee Mann unplug­ged, if you don't count the cheap synthesizer sound on ʽFreewayʼ and other tracks.

 

That in itself might not be difficult to take if not for the fact that the melodies are hard to be bowled over. A large part of the magic of Lost In Space, for instance, were its numerous clever ideas on how to create and dissipate atmosphere — where electric guitars were as necessary and useful as chimes and background vocals and strings and noises and subtle mix dislocations — and I'm not sure the spell would have eventually worked if it were just Aimee and her acoustic. But on Smilers, time and time over again, that's just how it goes. The only track where there's a little «sonic mystery» present is ʽThe Great Beyondʼ, whose "go, honey, go into the ocean" really manages to convey a bit of «going into the ocean», and it feels out of place.

 

And then you start noticing how there's really a lot of recycling and how — oh my goodness — maybe she really doesn't have anything more to say? What is there in the slow, dreary waltzing of ʽIt's Overʼ, for instance, that wasn't already present in the slow, dreary waltzing of ʽNothing Is Good Enoughʼ? And, to boot, that song also had a catchy chorus which this song lacks entirely. At least give us one of your trademark brethtaking falsetto lines, then. What? Still no dice?

 

The promoted track was ʽFreewayʼ, a lively pop tune that, on the surface, is about as good as any lively pop tune from Aimee, but the wailing synthesizer waves that prop up Mann's rhythm track can be passed off as cheesy, and the whole effort seems just a tad lazy to properly guarantee the song's status of Main Attraction Center. Perhaps a false impression, but it hasn't worn off; isn't that particular circular structure a bit too familiar in pop songwriting? Lazy. Lazy.

 

At this point, however, let us step back a bit and consider the circumstances. There's a song on here called ʽ31 Todayʼ (actually, it may be the best song on the album, with beautiful vocal dyna­mics, although once again we could all live without the crappy synth pattern), one of Aimee's usual odes to depression, but don't let it consciously fool you — she isn't «31 today», as she was born in 1960, and, although her amazingly good looks could still fool plenty of innocents, what we have here, in 2008, is a perfectly well established singer-songwriter with nothing whatsoever left to prove. Even her usual moroseness doesn't hit nowhere near as hard because, really, she's got nothing left to be morose about — she has a family, a decent income source, she's quite content about her small, but steady fanbase, and she has already ensured herself a firm place in the halls of fame — the real ones, well away from Cleveland.

 

And in that respect, Smilers is a lazy, pacifying, derivative album because, logically, it could hardly be understood how it could be anything else. Maybe if she were politically conscious, but she never was; she is a one hundred percent introvert who wouldn't want to pretend that she's got, oh, I dunno, environmental concerns, if she really hasn't got them. The only extrovert tune on the album is ʽBorrowing Timeʼ, which one could interpret as a heartfelt call to action — "the kings of yesterday falling, but you'll come when destiny's calling, get up, get up, you're borrowing time" — but, as she herself has explained many a time in interviews and onstage, it was a song originally written for Shrek 3 — and it didn't even manage to make it into the movie!

 

So I guess it wouldn't be either wrong or particularly painful to admit that with Smilers, Aimee finally outlives her prime. Which doesn't mean she won't be able to churn out more of these pleasant, but relatively mediocre collections in years to come, and more power to her, because I can totally see how the dedicated fan would still praise this to heaven. Heck, I am no dedicated fan, and I still give this a thumbs up, just don't make it your first purchase.

 

CHARMER (2012)

 

1) Charmer; 2) Disappeared; 3) Labrador; 4) Crazytown; 5) Soon Enough; 6) Living A Lie; 7) Slip And Roll; 8) Gumby; 9) Gamma Ray; 10) Barfly; 11) Red Flag Diver.

 

Okay, I happily admit to having been wrong. This is by no means an innovative or unpredictable record, but it definitely soars above «mediocre». Essentially, this is Smilers done right. Same laid back atmosphere, same laziness, same meditative vocals, same silly synthesizers, same humble­ness — but with more electric guitars, deeper production, and, most importantly, with better writ­ten songs. This is at least as consistent as Forgotten Arm, maybe more so, and it has a couple instant classics for all future gold compilations.

 

Since the themes of the record do not differ much from Aimee's usual bag — mainly character assassinations, varying only in degrees of abstraction — it is gracefully short, curtseying out of sight some time before the forty-minute barrier is over, and for most people, there will probably be a couple pieces of moody, but insubstantial filler, making its charms even shorter (me, I do not care for the dreary-slow waltz of ʽSlip And Rollʼ). And that is good: humble albums have to have humble lengths, even if a three year period might seem like a long enough term to write up a CD all the way to its limits.

 

Cut to the chase: ʽCharmerʼ (the title track) kicks in with a ridiculously catchy «kazoo synth» melody, attenuated by some friendly vocal humming companionship, and this makes it into the most irresistible album opener since ʽHumpty Dumptyʼ — ten years, give or take. The lyrical matter (a sarcastic jab at the quintessential charismatic leader, cleverly set for election year) does not really matter — all that matters is that silly-sweet synth pattern, drifting in and out of Aimee's free-flowing, intelligent singing. Which is what makes Aimee into a first-rate artist: she could just as well be singing about tying her bootlaces, and the song would still produce the same impres­sion — but the lyrics are quite clever anyway.

 

That strange passion for synthesizers that got rekindled with Smilers is still with her — and, ap­parently, cooks her up a good name with today's critics, some of which nostalgize quite heavily about their long-gone days of listening to 'Til Tuesday. Not that anything on Smilers or here really sounds like anything that Aimee did in her 'Til Tuesday days — that was in a different world — but it is a possibility that Aimee herself regards this new passion as a rejuvenating move. More power to her, anyway, if it helps her write songs as fine as ʽCrazytownʼ, where the synth line acts as a sorrowful counterpart to her conspicuously «light» vocals. "The girl lives in crazy town / Where craziness gets handed down / Whoever's gonna volunteer / Will only end up living here" is fairly bleek, but her intonations introduce the picture as amusing rather than tragic — and that's good old Aimee for you, always throwing on a cloak of ironic intellectualism over simple emotions, just the way we like it.

 

The best number on the album, however, is neither ʽCharmerʼ nor ʽCrazytownʼ. It is ʽSoon Enoughʼ, a noble epic in the vein of old warhorses like ʽDeathlyʼ — in fact, I could easily see it making its way onto the Magnolia soundtrack, provided P. T. Anderson still had some spare foo­tage in the vaults for a «new director's cut» or something. It is undescribable — it's all in the vo­cal hooks this time, and the hooks are mostly intonational and could only come from Aimee — but it is the perfect combination of a little melancholy, a little irony, and a little desperation on top of a bombastic arrangement (capped off with a screechy guitar solo). It's just the kind of song that Smilers so desperately needed to get to the appropriate level.

 

Other good ones include ʽLabradorʼ (sounds like a Forgotten Arm outtake with all these «tired» harmonies, but an unjustly lost one), the harder-rocking ʽGamma Rayʼ (with a sci-fi battle betwe­en the «cosmic» synthesizer and the psycho guitar, as would befit the title), and the rootsy ʽBar­flyʼ, whose guitar hook and nonchalant attitude could almost reflect a J. J. Cale influence. But honestly, most of them are good.

 

In the end, it was all well worth the wait and the non-forgetting. Aimee is not young anymore (al­though I do have to say that she generally sounds younger here than on Smilers — maybe it's be­cause the singing is «clearer», not as much loaded with deep nasal twang as it was), and her re­cession into black holes, dark corners, introspection and humility will bar her from making a Bachelor No. 3 or a Found In Space, but she still has her head on, she still rocks when she wants to, and if she can still write one great song per year on the average, that is actually more than is needed to keep her on a steady payroll. At this time, we probably couldn't expect any bet­ter — count this as a fully satisfied thumbs up, and one of 2012's best.

 

THE BOTH (w. Ted Leo) (2014)

 

1) The Gambler; 2) Milwaukee; 3) No Sir; 4) Volunteers Of America; 5) Pay For It; 6) You Can't Help Me Now; 7) The Prisoner; 8) Hummingbird; 9) Honesty Is No Excuse; 10) Bedtime Stories; 11) The Inevitable Shove.

 

Although, technically, this is not at all an «Aimee Mann» album, exactly one half of it does be­long to Aimee Mann, and the Aimee Mann spirit is so pervasive throughout that the record begs being reviewed in this section — especially because it is not highly likely that I will ever get around to writing about its second creative force, the indie rocker Ted Leo, formerly of Citizens Arrest, Chisel, The Sin-Eaters, The Spinanes, The Pharmacists, and The Whatchamacallit (a.k.a. «Gee, I've Been In So Many Bands Now, I Couldn't Remember Their Fucking Names, What Am I, Fucking Bob Dylan Or Something»)?

 

Anyway, «The Both» is indeed a 50-50 collaborative project between Aimee and Mr. Leo, who had begun with a joint concert tour in 2012, and eventually ended up in the recording studio with each other, pooling their respective talents to generate forty minutes of previously non-existent musical vibes. And I do mean pooling: both artists worked together on every bit of the material, rather than just doing it Abbey Road-style, right down to singing together on each song (in com­plete unison or, more frequently, in lead / backup mode). And it shows: while I am not too fa­miliar with Ted Leo's usual style, there is definitely an Aimee Mann musical presence inside each of the tracks. Even in the unexpected choice of ʽHonesty Is No Excuseʼ, an obscure track from Thin Lizzy's self-titled debut of 1971, as the album's only cover version.

 

Ted Leo's main role, as it seems, is in making The Both Aimee's «rockiest» album since God knows when — maybe since the days of her early solo albums, before Magnolia forever locked her in a state of introspective maturity. The arrangements are classic «indie rock» — crunchy, distorted, but not particularly heavy electric guitars playing time-honored folk-rock chord sequen­ces, with practically nothing standing between them, the vocals, and the rhythm section. The re­sult is a little monotonous, but those fans of Aimee who'd spent the last fifteen years complaining about her losing power might think of it as one big ball of compensation for all those years.

 

The songs, unfortunately, are far from spectacularly written or innovative. Emotionally, all is drenched in Aimee's usual intellectual-melancholic juices, which Leo is only too happy to share — whenever he joins her in a duet or a slice of harmony, it's like two old lovers grumbling about whether their past was any good and whether they still have a future to live out. If anything, The Both is really close in spirit to The Forgotten Arm, which, if you remember, told the story of two unhappy people, but was sung only by one of them — now that mistake has been corrected, and Leo is the out-of-luck boxer, and Aimee is his girlfriend. Something like ʽNo Sirʼ even borrows some of the chords and much of the atmosphere from ʽKing Of The Jailhouseʼ, although the final result is much more timid and less openly cathartic. And a song title like ʽYou Can't Help Me Nowʼ — well, remember ʽI Can't Help You Anymoreʼ? Quiet desperation is no longer just the English way. The bitch has spread over to the States, and is catching quickly.

 

Only one moment stands out for me: ʽHummingbirdʼ, a song that mostly sticks true to its title, leisurely humming its one-phrase way through the time passages, culminates in an ear-splitting psychedelic chord right after the final refrain ("I got a message from the hummingbird...") that suddenly, for a brief moment, pushes the song into breathtaking «astral» mode. But then it ends — instead of exploring that move further, following the hummingbird to the stars, they just sort of let it out of their hands, gone in a flash: a great moody idea cut too short for comfort.

 

Other than that, it's just a decent enough album for fans of Aimee (no idea how enjoyable it would be for fans of the other guy). We could simply admit that she is old and spent, but Char­mer had just shown that this was far from the case. More likely, it is simply that these two people are not a particularly good match for each other, and each of them should probably do his/her own schtick, without trying to work out some sort of compromised average. In my case, I'd like to hear more Aimee and less Leo (who sounds absolutely colorless as a singer to me, though I'm sure he is a good pal and a sentient human being, if the two took up together so well); others might wish for the opposite. I'd also like to have elegant melodic resolutions instead of choruses that simply run themselves into the ground to make way for memorability (ʽInevitable Shoveʼ, ʽPay For Itʼ, etc.). I do give the album a weak thumbs up, since it is honest and it was fun to hear Aimee pick up the basic dirty rock'n'roll guitar after such a long break. But it certainly isn't even close to «essential Aimee Mann» — way too lazy songwriting.

 

MENTAL ILLNESS (2017)

 

1) Goose Snow Cone; 2) Stuck In The Past; 3) You Never Loved Me; 4) Rollercoasters; 5) Lies Of Summer; 6) Patient Zero; 7) Good For Me; 8) Knock It Off; 9) Philly Sinks; 10) Simple Fix; 11) Poor Judge.

 

Bad omen #1: Aimee Mann's new album is going to be called Mental Illness. Given that Aimee Mann had pretty much been singing about various kinds of mental illness since at least her first solo album, and maybe even before that, it is not a good sign when, more than twenty years into her solo career on the whole, she puts out a record called Mental Illness. It's like The Rolling Stones putting out an album called We Like To Rock, or KISS putting out an album called Made Up Again, or The Pogues putting out an album called For Those Who Like To Drink. It does not spell tragedy, but it brings on inescapable associations with a lack of ideas.

 

Bad omen #2: the new album is going to be almost entirely acoustic-based. While in her live performances, Aimee had drifted towards quieter, less and less amplified sounds for the entire past decade, on most of her studio output the sound of the electric guitar, be it played by herself or additional members of the band, was very crucial: she always had a great ear for tone, and always knew how to make that electric guitar pick on, amplify, and send deep into space all that emotional tension that began in her singing. A completely unplugged performance from her can never have that kind of strength — it suggests whining without anger, light depression without a vortex to pull in the listener.

 

Unfortunately, all these premonitions come true when you actually put on the record and give it a loyal spin — or two spins, or three and four spins; it will not take long, since the eleven songs clock in at under forty minutes. Mental Illness, Aimee's first proper solo album in five years, is a nice-sounding record consisting of earnestly written and carefully performed material, but it never amounts to anything more than a pleasant background listen if you're in the mood for a slice of lazy, intelligent, introspective, unobtrusive melancholy. The songs simply do not stick around this time: while such highlights from Charmer as the title track, ʽSoon Enoughʼ, and ʽLabradorʼ, still keep me going and I find myself returning to them on a very regular basis, here there is never a feeling that you receive some fresh insight — for the most part, everything feels like an inferior retread of past glories.

 

Now, perhaps, it's just me. If you have never been a major admirer of Aimee and just find her stuff to be modestly pleasant, listenable, routine singer-songwriter product, then Mental Illness is just more of the same old crap, interchangeable with everything else she's done. If, however, you agree with me that she has been one of the most talented, melodic, intelligent, insightful song­writers of the 1990s and the 2000s — probably in the top five or so singer-songwriter spots from that period — then you cannot help holding unreasonably high expectations, and experiencing sharp disappointment when they are not realized. I mean, after all, she is getting on in years, older than the Stones in their Bridges To Babylon phase and McCartney in his Flaming Pie era, so it is unwise and ungenerous to expect her musical genius to keep re-flaring over and over. But then, in order to re-flare, the genius has to receive favorable conditions; and this idea of going all quiet and acoustic is not a favorable condition.

 

If you have heard the first song and the first single of the album, ʽGoose Snow Coneʼ (the name actually refers to the facial expression of an Instagram cat called Goose — see, she wastes her time on Internet kitties, too!), you know exactly what is in store for you: simple, quiet, tender, melancholic folksy melodies without any melodic adventurousness. The chords all stay close to each other, the vocal modulation is kept to a minimum, and there is basically just one melodic phrase sung throughout the entire song, with minor variations. Tasteful arrangement — acoustic guitar, a bit of chimes, a bit of a chamber effect with added strings, nice harmonic interplay with the backing vocalists — but nothing whatsoever to remind you of the fire that once used to burn bright and angry underneath all the melancholic coating.

 

It would be too easy, perhaps, to deride an artist for being ʽStuck In The Pastʼ, as she admits on the second track in a mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-derogation ("Guess I'm the last / I live in memory of vapor"), but there is nothing wrong with grass-was-greener nostalgia for old veterans as long as you got that proverbial fire heating it up; this song, however, offers very little except a lulling slow waltz tempo and a few examples of Aimee's aging, but still lovely falsetto on the chorus — even as she keeps falling back on the same old chord changes that she'd already explored many times. Rinse and repeat: this easy-flowing, insufferably-even, pleasantly forget­table current will carry you on for forty minutes before safely and carefully depositing you on some sandy bank without a single bruise or tear in your pants. It is not a matter of being different: on the contrary, it is a matter of not being able to make a proper difference, coming up with a pack of tunes that, atmosphere-wise, sound like raw demo versions for the same old classics.

 

On the adulatory side of things, she is still going very strong as a lyricist — this is, in fact, her first album where I'd definitely insist that her poetic talents took serious precedence over her musicianship, and even though the major themes of her poetry remain the same, she is capable of finding new ways to express them, ranging from simple clever lines like "falling for you was always falling up" (ʽPoor Judgeʼ) to morose character portraits like ʽPhilly Sinksʼ (if you don't listen carefully, it's about a broken guy, and if you do, it's about a conniving womanizer). And repeated listens slowly, very slowly bring out some subtly nuanced hooks, like on the chorus of the aforementioned ʽPhilly Sinksʼ, or on the accept-your-miserable-fate refrain of ʽLies Of Sum­merʼ — except that, at best, each of these hooks still sounds like a weak shadow of some of her classic hooks, and no matter how I coax myself into it, the magic never comes.

 

It is still nice, and each new release from Aimee is a bit of a present anyway, but at this point, after the mediocre work with Ted Leo (who, by the way, is still here, contributing background  vocals), it looks like she might never again rebound the way she did with Charmer — granted, it is not impossible that all she needs to do is pick up that electric guitar again, but it really seems as if her spirit might have mellowed up to the point of no return. Which is not a tragedy, because we still have all the old records, but... sad.

 

 

 

AIR

MOON SAFARI (1998)

 

1) La Femme D'Argent; 2) Sexy Boy; 3) All I Need; 4) Kelly Watch The Stars; 5) Talisman; 6) Remember; 7) You Make It Easy; 8) Ce Matin-La; 9) New Star In The Sky; 10) Le Voyage De Penelope.

 

In 2008, Moon Safari was given the royal treatment of coming out as a 3-CD 10th anniversary edition. This should be interpreted as a fact that today, it is tacitly acknowledged as a history-con­firmed classic of its genre, whatever its genre may be. But there is something uncomfortable about this — namely, the alarming speed with which the record becomes likable, and the nagging suspicion that, perhaps, this is a bit too fluffy to have gained "classic" status so quickly? Aren't you supposed to "get into" the classics?

 

Usually, Moon Safari gets pinned under either the broad category of "Electronica" or, somewhat narrower but no less vague, under the "Chillout" moniker. The latter definition, I like; Moon Sa­fari is indeed a great album to "chill out" to, regardless of whether you're doing it properly, after a laborious dance floor workout, or simply after a hard day's work. But stocking it in the "Elec­tronica" department wouldn't do it proper justice, because both before and after its release, the typical associations to go along with the word are quite far removed from what you're going to hear on this particular record.

 

It is, of course, dominated by electronic gadgets, although regular guitars, pianos, strings and even brass instruments regularly complement the picture. But it's wildly retro in its use of said gadgets; totally "anti-Kraftwerk", in the sense that we're going back from the image of Electroni­ca as this totally different, futuristic, technophilic, sci-fi oriented wave, to the earlier role of syn­thesizers as assistants in capturing various special shades of classic harmony — the way they were treated by early art-rockers, from Pete Townshend to Mike Oldfield. Yet at the same time it's different, because it makes use of all the experience in between. The early art-rockers were spacemen-to-be, testing their vehicles on Earth; AIR are spacemen-that-were, still singing their song on the same planet, but only after they'd gone and come back.

 

So, Moon Safari is really an "art-pop" album in the Oldfield tradition, but burdened with some of the newer electronic conventions (such as sampling). As such, it brings nothing new to the table except for a set of nice melodies, ranging from "simply cool" to "far out", especially if you're into mushrooms on the side. Two of the songs, featuring guest vocals from singer-songwriter Beth Hirsch, are straightforward sentimental ballads, one of which ('All I Need') they even managed to turn into a hit. The rest are cute, inoffensive, moderately complex and almost always emotionally charged sonic panoramas, each of which would make for an unforgettable accompaniment to some pretentious modern art exhibition (threatening to divert all attention to the music).

 

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about these gradually unfurling paysages is how technically immaculate all of them sound. There isn't a tremendous amount of detail, but what there is is glossed to perfection. Obviously, it is hard to expect instrumental virtuosity from a French elec­tronic duo, but even if the bass line on 'La Femme D'Argent' isn't the most complex and fluid bass line on Earth, it gives as much beauty, power, and funky coolness to the track as its more promi­nently melodic keyboard overdubs. And even if the main theme on 'Ce Matin-La' is literally heralded by a soft, friendly trumpet tone, its acoustic guitars, quietly ringing in the background, are strummed with precise attention to each note. This resplending gloss — stunning, but never annoying — almost made me think that this, perhaps, is what Steely Dan could have produced were they to ever venture out into the fields of "chillout" (well, come to think of it, late period Steely Dan are the perfect "chillout" outfit).

 

On the other hand, gloss is nothing when it gets you nowhere, and these guys certainly have a vi­sion that can get you somewhere, if not anywhere. Apart from the obvious album title itself, only the last track has a "travel" tag ('Le Voy­age De Penelope', having nothing to do with Ulysses' wife but rather with some obscure French TV show of the same name), but, really, most of the record has a "travel" mood to it, taking you from the astral plane ('Kelly Watch The Stars') to romantic rooftops ('Remember', intelligently dri­ving along to the sampled rhythm from the Beach Boys' 'Do It Again') to sunrise-lit prairies ('Ce Matin-La') to creepy nighttime forests ('Talisman') to unexplored sea depths ('Penelope'); and the most fun thing of all is that you don't need to take my word for it, but are welcome to construct a little fantasy galaxy of your own. I didn't even mention the big hit that made the boys into super­stars ('Sexy Boy'), but, truth is, I find it just one ordinary part of the album's overall charm, and maybe not even one of the best ones.

 

So, to return to my original question — no, I don't think the lush 3-CD edition was completely un­deserved (although I have no idea whether the additional material is worth looking for). Moon Safari is not a trashy Katy Perry-class attention grabber; it is a piece of light, but serious, art with a lot of soul and an even bigger lot of work invested into it, and, despite having been produ­ced at the height of the post-modern era, it hearkens back to idealistic values of yore, and being so cleverly placed at the intersection of the two, it's got that special something which I, for in­stance, have never managed to find in any Autechre album. It is impossible to deny, however, that, compared to Autechre and the like, Moon Safari is definitely "easy listening", and that it is unlikely to expect the elitist parts of the audience to worship at its altar.

 

PREMIERS SYMPTÔMES (1999)

 

1) Modular Mix; 2) Casanova 70; 3) Les Professionnels; 4) J'Ai Dormi Sous L'Eau; 5) Le Soleil Est Près De Moi; 6) Californie; 7) Brakes On.

 

From a strictly chronological perspective, this disc should have been placed first, since it's basi­cally a collection of AIR's first singles (starting with 1995's 'Modular Mix' and then all the way up to 1998). But this particular edition, reinforced with a couple newer outtakes, dates from 1999, and besides, Moon Safari is such a more comfortable opportunity to start off with, that I am ready to forgive myself this little chronological discrepancy.

 

The five large, dense mood pieces on here do, indeed, sound like very natural precursors to the pleasures of Safari. They are, however, even more "ambient" than the material from 1998: fewer jarring sounds and tones, softer rhythms, almost no vocals, and thorough stylistic unity. There is no guarantee that you'll seriously love this even if you are a fan of Safari. If the latter was an ad­venturous journey, where you had to overcome obstacles and alternate periods of tempest and tur­moil with periods of rest and repose, then Premiers Symptômes is rather like the "First Stage" of that journey — you know, the first five or six chapters from your average XVIIIth century trave­log where nothing much happens and you are simply supposed to get in the mood.

 

It does call for repeated listens, though, because eventually the hypnotic elevator ambience may dissipate and through it you'll see shades of heavenly loveliness, particularly on the somber, ma­jestic 'Le Soleil Est Près De Moi' and the... uh... somber, majestic 'J'Ai Dormi Sous L'Eau'. It doesn't hurt that they use plenty of different synth tones and non-synth instruments — the warm, gentle chivalry of the French horn on 'Soleil' and the schizo friendliness of the sitar on 'L'Eau' being just a few of the more memorable items.

 

I am not sure if the whole experience deserves its own album — maybe adding it as five "prelude-like" bonus tracks to Moon Safari would work better — but that does not prevent me from giving it a thumbs up all the same. If all elevator music sounded like this, we'd all be spend­ing much more time in elevators. Not that I'm sure it's such a good idea.

 

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (2000)

 

1) Playground Love; 2) Clouds Up; 3) Bathroom Girl; 4) Cemetary Party; 5) Dark Messages; 6) The Word 'Hurricane'; 7) Dirty Trip; 8) Highschool Lover; 9) Afternoon Sister; 10) Ghost Song; 11) Empty House; 12) Dead Bodies; 13) Suicide Underground.

 

The Virgin Suicides, if the reader is in need of a reminder, was Sofia Coppola's first film and to­day is more of a "cult" favourite among movie buffs in comparison to her major success with Lost In Translation — which, the way I see it, was a much better film, but, since its success was "major", and also since it did not concentrate on hot teenage girls, is perhaps less fondly mentio­ned among the hipster crowds. (OK, so Scarlett Johansson was a hot teenage girl, but in Virgin Suicides you had five of them, including Kirsten Dunst, and it was all about wanting and being unable to get laid anyway).

 

Still, the movie was good enough to go and get depressed to, and a major part of that had to do with the soundtrack. Now it is important to remember that there are two soundtracks, both called The Virgin Suicides: one faithfully reflecting the actual music from the movie, with extra Heart and Todd Rundgren and other inclusions, and one entirely consisting of AIR's contributions, with expanded versions of many themes that are only there in tidbit form in the actual movie. Since Heart and Todd Rundgren are pretty deserving artists on their own, I'd say getting the former ver­sion makes little sense. The latter, however, can easily qualify as not just a mere soundtrack, but as a proper AIR album in its own rights — dressed up as a concept one, at that.

 

It is more monotonous than Moon Safari; most of the tracks follow the same unhurried, rigid mid-tempo beat which, when well-fed with synthesizers and arrays of other instruments, again gives the impression of traveling — but if on Moon Safari you were given the right to visit all kinds of places, with Virgin Suicides you are hopelessly stuck on an endless Journey Through Dark Forest. The soundscapes are dim and dreary, the keys are minor, and the general mix of smokey-loungey-sax, mystical chimes, Gregorian chanting, and mid-Seventies prog rock à la Pink Floyd and/or Genesis is a great way to lower one's spirits as you understand that you will, in fact, never ever find your way through the forest. Just forget it.

 

Only one track has vocals: the opener 'Playground Love', sung (or, rather, breathily croaked) by 'Gordon Tracks' (actually — Thomas Mars from the French band Phoenix) in a semi-progressive, semi-"alternative" manner. But it might as well have none — the album needs no vocals, and even the odd bit of voiceover from the movie that pops up every now and then feels distracting from the overall experience. Individually, not all the tracks work, but at least each second one is driven by some fantastic melodic idea, and that idea may be completely unpredictable — it may be a huge electronic Eno-like swoop on 'Dirty Trip', or a McCartney-like piano melody on 'High­school Lover' (a minimalistic instrumental reworking of 'Playground Love'), or a sad funebral organ pattern on 'Empty House'. Speaking of which, it doesn't much feel like an Electronica al­bum: live instruments occupy at least as much space as the synthesizers, and some of the tracks feature sharp, expressive, vivacious drum patterns that are as far removed from the "sci-fi" sheen of the genre as possible.

 

The Virgin Suicides, in all listings of AIR albums, is never set aside into a special "soundtrack" category, and I applaud this decision. It may be less diverse than Moon Safari, and the nagging voiceovers may remind us that, want it or not, it is a soundtrack, but upon all counts it is simply another excellent impressionistic invention that should please everyone who loves good music by talented artists and the idea of young girls taking their lives so that talented artists can make some good music. Thumbs up without a doubt — along with Magnolia, this is the hardest-hitting "non-soundtrack soundtrack" of the decade.

 

10,000 HZ LEGEND (2001)

 

1) Electronic Performers; 2) How Does It Make You Feel?; 3) Radio #1; 4) The Vagabond; 5) Radian; 6) Lucky And Unhappy; 7) Sex Born Poison; 8) People In The City; 9) Wonder Milky Bitch; 10) Don't Be Light; 11) Caramel Prisoner.

 

AIR's first proper album of new material since Moon Safari pretty much bombed in the face of the critics. All of a sudden, people were realizing that these French guys weren't really breaking a hell of a lot of new ground — and, in addition to that, they were sort of getting all serious and pretentious, with a progressive attitude on which modern progressive criticism has signed the exclusive lease to Radiohead. And AIR, after all, are no Radiohead. They're French!

 

However, putting aside the odd neurobiological impulses of modern day criticism, it is still nece­ssary to admit that 10,000 Hz Legend is a different album. It is no longer structured like a jour­ney; it is relatively monolithic, saddled with many more vocal tracks, and, overall, much darker and, in fact, more Electronica-like than Moon Safari. There is still plenty of real instrumental di­versity, but more of the tracks are openly driven by the power of electronic impulses, and echoes of Kraftwerk and their robots keep ringing in the head even in the ensuing silence. It's as if the band suddenly remembered which particular hole they were pigeoned into and decided to play submissive, bringing along the whip and collar.

 

But it's good clean fun all the same. With a whole squad of guiding angels — everybody from Pink Floyd to Depeche Mode to, yes, Radiohead — behind their backs, AIR still deliver nice moo-sic (-zak?). Since keeping hip is an essential ingredient, they also recruit individual angels-in-the-flesh to spice things up: Jason Falkner, Japanese rockers Buffalo Daughter (!), and even Beck himself all make guest appearances on vocals, and a couple of members of Beck's becking, sorry, backing band offer further support on bass and keyboards.

 

Results? Nothing groundbreaking, nor do the proceedings sound as lush and dreamy as they used to be. We are moving away from pastures, forests, and oceans to the gloomier and murkier depths of the subconscious, although that move does not truly occur until track five, 'Radian', with its creepy game of hide-and-seek unfurling before our eyes between the electronic loops and the ghostly vocal echoes. Before that, things are unquestionably lighter: we have the Floydian 'How Does It Make You Feel?', acoustic, minimalistic, and quite effective (although I, for one, was quite happy when its annoying breathy vocals were so properly lampooned in its totally unexpected final lines — nice to learn the duo have plenty of self-irony), the al­bum's only "pop-rocker" 'Radio #1', and 'The Vagabond' — a harmonica-led bluesy number which really truly is as much Beck as AIR, and maybe even more Beck than AIR.

 

Then, with 'Radian', we make the descent... no, not into Hell — Godin and Dunckel are too wim­py to earn the right to build up their own private Hell — but rather into the waiting room where you suffer more from your own insecurities about the future than whatever actual torment may await you in a matter of hours. These other compositions tend to merge in one large lump — one large, highly creative, if not thoroughly highly exciting lump.

 

Come to think of it, it is easy to understand all the disappointment: people may have been expec­ting AIR to break down one more wall in the back of their minds, and, instead, got one reinsta­ted, as the band made a conscious decision to fall back on already explored ways of music-making. The basic question, however, is: whatever made people expect that AIR could have done some­thing like that? There was nothing particularly groundbreaking about Moon Safari either — ex­cept for, perhaps, just the basic shock of seeing an electronic band bring out acoustic guitars and real strings from time to time. But then they also do it here. There's just a bit more bleeping. I can't say all of it drives my imagination to new, ever more glorious heights, but thumbs up all the same, says the heart, while the brain takes a break.

 

TALKIE WALKIE (2004)

 

1) Venus; 2) Cherry Blossom Girl; 3) Run; 4) Universal Traveler; 5) Mike Mills; 6) Surfing On A Rocket; 7) Another Day; 8) Alpha Beta Gaga; 9) Biological; 10) Alone In Kyoto.

 

Talkie Walkie. The title itself suggests a certain aura of cuteness, even if its diminutive suffixes no longer serve a primarily diminutive purpose. But the contents match the title: indeed, this is a lighter, happier record than 10,000 Hz Legend, and it helped restore the duo's critical reputation at a time when they were all set to join the back rows of faceless losers. A bit of help should also be credited to producer Nigel Godrich, who always brings a bar of Refined Musical Taste with him into every studio he visits.

 

One widespread opinion, with which I mostly agree, is that the album is somewhat of a compro­mise between the "symphonic ambience" of Moon Safari and the grim electronic bleeps of Leg­end. There's quite a bit of singing, mostly by guest vocalists I do not know anything about; there's quite a bit of sonic experimentation that could throw off the casual listener, yet not a single track goes overboard with it (e. g. 'Run' is occasionally derailed by the looped electronic pulse of 'run run run run', but is otherwise 10cc-type-chorus-adorned "adult contemporary"); and, sometimes, paranoia and carelessness are joined neck-to-neck under an oxymoronous yoke, as in 'Alpha Beta Gaga', which starts out as a vivid representation of a panic attack, but then, with just one little bit of whistling, is transformed into a catchy kiddie-like wordless singalong ditty.

 

The two singles were 'Cherry Blossom Girl' and 'Surfing On A Rocket'. The former could be seen as a belated paired response to 'Sexy Boy', another evocative acoustic-electronic mantra that is, predictably, gentler and more romantic than its predecessor (however, just as memorable, even if the airy chorus is a bit too close to the clichéd "look-at-me-I'm-so-sexy" style of Mylène Farmer, France's national pride and shame). 'Surfing On A Rocket', meanwhile, is a pretty energetic (for AIR) chunk of dream-pop whose jumpy electronic riff in the chorus gives an odd idea of what the process of 'surfing on a rocket' could really look like, but any track that gets me thinking about what it's like to surf on a rocket is OK by me, anyway.

 

If the record has a flaw, it may be extra smoothness; Legend at least had a few vigorous "jerk-ups", whereas Talkie Walkie runs at more or less the same volume and adrenaline level through­out, so much so that it's very easy to miss the special "minimalistic complexity" and non-triviality of the closing mini-suite 'Alone In Kyoto' (specially written by the duo for the soundtrack to Lost In Translation, along the lines of their continuing friendship with Sofia Coppola, an addicted sucker for Euro­trash if there ever was one). Don't do it; the track alone is worth owning the re­cord, yet the record may take a few extra listens to ascend from the initial impression of relaxed, lazy elevator pap to the next level of artistic integrity. Thumbs up, heart-wise first, brain-wise slowly catching up.

 

POCKET SYMPHONY (2007)

 

1) Space Maker; 2) Once Upon A Time; 3) One Hell Of A Party; 4) Napalm Love; 5) Mayfair Song; 6) Left Bank; 7) Photograph; 8) Mer Du Japon; 9) Lost Message; 10) Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping; 11) Redhead Girl; 12) Night Sight.

 

AIR never really made two albums that sound the same; but they certainly made quite a few al­bums that sound like they sound the same. Pocket Symphony, in particular, is anything but a se­ries of remakes of Talkie Walkie songs, yet I have a very poor idea of how to write about it. It does not exactly help that, no matter how many times I listen to this record, I rest enthralled by its icy beauty, yet each time that it is over, I cannot remember a single doggone tune.

 

Pocket Symphony is very AIR-y, even for AIR. Like a prima ballerina that, while dancing, most­ly floats above the ground, taking your breath away, it eventually reaches a stage when you start secretly wishing for her/it to plummet to the ground, for once, for a change. Zephyresque synthe­sizers, heavenly chimes, dreamful vocals, swooshing asteroid percussion, Japanese folk instru­ments out of some faraway Mizoguchi movie — my feet are soaking wet for spending too much time walking in the clouds. Don't get me wrong: these are songs, with melodies and even musical development, real small little parts that truly cling together in, I guess, some sort of 'symphony' — but they're all wrapped up in such dense layers of musical cotton candy that, in the end, it hard­ly matters whether there is any sort of development or not.

 

Not even the fabulous guest stars inflict any significant deviations. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp con­tributes ly­rics and vocals to 'One Hell Of A Party', sounding more like a highly drunk, deeply depressed Mark Knopfler than Jarvis Cocker; and Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy contribu­tes lyrics and vocals to 'Somewhere Between Waking And Sleeping', sounding more like a deeply drunk, highly depressed Nick Drake than Neil Hannon. Both songs are pretty and elegant, but neither one has managed to stay with me the way 'Le Voyage De Penelope' or 'Playground Love' still does. Oh well, maybe 10,000 more listens will do the trick — it's high time I changed my ringtone anyway.

 

Giving this kind of record a "thumbs down" assessment will, however, not do, because within its own limits, it's admirable. Of course, admitting that it's admirable imminently leads to admitting that, for instance, Alan Parsons, whose music frequently sounds the same way, is also admirable, and to admit, in the XXIst century, that Alan Parsons is "admirable" immediately brands one as a soul hopelessly lost in irreality. But as a soul hopelessly lost in irreality, and speaking out to other souls hopelessly lost in irreality, I am fond of Pocket Symphony, somewhere deep down inside that is, and when the new ringtones work, my thumbs up will be fully validated.

 

LOVE 2 (2009)

 

1) Do The Joy; 2) Love; 3) So Light Is Her Footfall; 4) Be A Bee; 5) Missing The Light Of The Day; 6) Tropical Disease; 7) Heaven's Light; 8) Night Hunter; 9) Sing Sang Sung; 10) Eat My Beat; 11) You Can Tell It To Every­body; 12) African Velvet.

 

Well, this is just another AIR album, and the difficulty of writing about each following one grows almost exponentially. If the reader is already familiar with it, there won't be anything enlightening in my review — not in the smallest degree. If not, here's just a brief listing of a few small out-of-the-ordinary impulses that I have managed to log:

 

— the unexpectedly heavy opening, as 'Do The Joy' fades in over a gruff, distorted bass line and sci-fi synthesizer whooshes that suggest Hawkwind nostalgia;

 

— the almost surf-rock style (although leaning towards the "ominous" effect) of 'Be A Bee'; I can just imagine its guitar parts played by the likes of Link Wray or Nokie Edwards;

 

— the innocent happiness of 'Heaven's Light' and 'Sing Sang Sung', two of the duo's best dream-pop contributions so far; 'Sing Sang Sung', released as the single, got quite a serious amount of flack for pushing the "fluffy" side of the duo too far, but the way I see it, as long as we have true crea­tivity, no fluffiness can be excessive enough to kill off the work of art — and, besides, the "fluffiness" is quite self-ironic, as can be easily noticed by anyone who has also noticed that Dun­ckel chants 'thing thang thung' in the chorus.

 

Other than that, I noticed nothing and I noticed everything. Love 2 is no better and no worse, no different from and not the same as any other AIR album ever released. We can hate this approach if we want to, but we must keep it alive, if only for the reason that not too many bands in our days keep using the same number of instruments on their records — and still end up with their records in the "Electronic" bin. Thumbs up, even though I'm not entirely sure why.

 

LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (2012)

 

1) Astronomic Club; 2) Seven Stars; 3) Retour Sur Terre; 4) Parade; 5) Moon Fever; 6) Sonic Armada; 7) Who Am I Now?; 8) Décollage; 9) Cosmic Trip; 10) Homme Lune; 11) Lava.

 

It is interesting, come to think of it, that none of AIR's albums, up to this point, were straight­forwardly «conceptual» (discounting the S. Coppola soundtrack), even if their whole musical strategy seems to have been expressly designed for harboring «concepts». If the decision was in­tentional on their part, then 2012 is when they finally give in to temptation. Technically, the re­cord was also proclaimed to be a «soundtrack» — but to a movie that was made 110 years ago: George Méliès' landmark A Trip To The Moon, recently brushed off and remastered to the delight of cinephiles around the world. In addition, while the movie itself runs for about 14 minutes in total, the «soundtrack» is more than twice its length — which certainly makes it an independent project (or a serious challenge for all those who want to splice the two works of art together on their own — another brilliant way to kill time).

 

Comparisons with Moon Safari are inevitable, if only due to the similarity of the ideas expressed in the titles; but the two records are really quite different. Moon Safari just used the title as an ex­otic mental stimulus, since most of the compositions contained psychedelic, but not necessarily «sci-fi» elements and associations. Le Voyage Dans La Lune is a much more straightforward conceptual recording, and each of its tracks loyally serves the function of illustrating one part of a space journey. The vocals, as it usually happens on old-time AIR albums, are few, mostly consis­ting of announcements or wordless harmonies; only ʽSeven Starsʼ and ʽWho Am I Nowʼ have vo­cal melodies, the former delivered by Victoria Legrand of Beach House, the latter by the girls from Au Revoir Simone (an electronic dream-pop trio from Brooklyn) — both of them good, sui­table choices, even if the songs themselves are not particularly staggering.

 

At this point, nobody expects any sort of musical revolution from Dunckel and Godin, but within the limits of their personal fantasy world, Le Voyage might be said to occupy its own particular little corner due to its well-planned coherence. Of the individual tracks, I could single out ʽAstro­nomic Clubʼ, whose major hook is a buzzing guitar riff with ominous overtones; and ʽMoon Feverʼ, which melds a piano sonata approach with ambient and psychedelic elements (think a joint Beet­hoven / Brian Eno collaboration with both of them on acid). ʽSeven Starsʼ does sound a lot like prototypical Beach House (that is, indescribable on the individual level once you have described the general man­ner in which Beach House work), and possibly the otherworldly, cold and detached ʽWho Am I Nowʼ sounds a lot like Au Revoir Simone, even though I have never heard them (yet).

 

The point, though, is to take all this stuff collectively — not a big deal, since, even with twice the running length of the movie, it still clocks in at just over thirty minutes — and admit that it is all quite imaginative and «moon-worthy». Long-time fans of AIR, in particular, will not be dis­ap­poi­nted; on the contrary, those who might have feared the band had «sold out» with its constant movement to­wards poppier song structures and trendier guest vocalists will be reassured that the band has re­turned to a slightly more «hardcore» approach, with trippy sound effects, dark electronic grooves, Floydian melancholy, tricky time signatures, and unpredictable collocations (for instance, just what exactly is that absent-minded banjo doing, lost in the middle of the shrill and stern ʽLavaʼ?).

 

I, personally, would have preferred a balance tipped just a little bit to the side of «hooks» — had they done that, who knows, perhaps this fresh way of conceptual thinking would prompt them in­to producing another equal of Moon Safari. But even without that, Le Voyage Dans La Lune is a more ambitious project than anything the band has done since working for Coppola, and there is still plenty of inspiration left — thanks, perhaps, to the magical influence of Méliès — to justify that ambition. Hence, thumbs up. Next on the list: a new score for The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, perhaps? That one runs for seventy minutes.

 

PS. The album is available both on its own and as a CD/DVD combo, the latter part containing the restored colorized version of the movie (not to panick here: colorized after Méliès' own initial design, as he is said to have originally hand-painted each frame himself) accompanied with AIR's soundtrack elements. I do not necessarily recommend going for that version — the movie is well worth watching, of course, but the idea of combining old silent films with modern scores has ne­ver thrilled me all that much (with some notable exceptions when the scores incorporate motives and elements appropriate for the time or situation — such as Richard Einhorn's oratorio that ac­companies Dreyer's Passion Of Joan Of Arc). Still, it's only three dollars more or something — and you probably get to own a collectible.

 

ALANIS MORISSETTE

ALANIS (1991)

 

1) Feel Your Love; 2) Too Hot; 3) Plastic; 4) Walk Away; 5) On My Own; 6) Superman; 7) Jealous; 8) Human Touch; 9) Oh Yeah; 10) Pretty Boy.

 

Oh boy. It's one of THOSE albums — ones that you'd never give one thought about if they repre­sented the artist at his/her most essential. But it so happened that Alanis Morrisette, the mainst­ream goddess of Nineties' commer-fessional singer-songwriting, started out as a Canadian wanna­be Janet Jackson, and, for the sake of formality, I have to mention her first two albums — even though many of her fans remain happily unaware of their existence.

 

Technically, there could be a copout here: both of these records bill her as "Alanis" (apparently, the family name was judged way too complex for the target audience, which, as allegedly pointed out by the marketing survey team, tends to have big problems with first grade spelling bees), so, from a certain point of view, we are speaking of a different artist here. It is also important to un­derstand that, having barely turned 16 (although they try to make her look 30 in the accompany­ing videos, taking all the clues from Tracy Lords, I guess), in no way was she in control of the proceedings, letting some run-of-the-mill synth-pop hacks write and arrange the music and mold her image. She is credited as co-writer on most of the tracks, to be frank, but let us not hold it against her; supposedly the hacks had a little bit of humanity left in them and decided it would be good to let her have some extra dough.

 

Of course, if she does assume songwriting responsibility for this tripe, that's not good. All of this is generic Eighties' dance music, with one or two corny Diane Warren-style ballads thrown in for the hankies' sake. The "hits" 'Feel Your Love' and 'Too Hot' have catchy choruses, like some of the other stuff, but in more or less the same manner that you'd expect from your aerobics workout videotape: to help you better train your butt reflexes. Vocals are decent — good dance moves and a strong throat were, after all, two sine qua non conditions that got you within the world of latex and frizzed hair at the time — but there's hardly any threat to Debbie Gibson or Paula Abdul.

 

I suppose a few of the tunes offer at least lyrical glimpses at the future Alanis — e. g., the "soci­al critique" of 'Human Touch' ('I'm tired of people sellin' their sex appeal', she declares, and then instantly proceeds to do just that in her videos), or the self-defense in 'On My Own'. But these aren't very convincing lyrical glimpses, and besides, they only work if one is actually a worship­per of the future Alanis. On the other hand, I can imagine where someone who hates the A. M. of Jagged Little Pill could love this album as a guilty pleasure — very, very guilty pleasure, on par with watching an old man's sex with minors. I had a bit of fun listening to it as a curious histori­cal memento, recollecting all the worst blows that the Eighties had dealt us. Then nausea started setting in, and I had no choice but to scuttle off. Thumbs down, quite predictably.

 

NOW IS THE TIME (1992)

 

1) (Change Is) Never A Waste Of Time; 2) An Emotion Away; 3) Big Bad Love; 4) Can't Deny; 5) Give What You Got; 6) No Apologies; 7) Rain; 8) Real World; 9) The Time Of Your Life; 10) When We Meet Again.

 

Essentially Alanis Vol. 2 — there does exist a school of thought (if the term "school of thought" is applicable to generic Eighties-style dance-pop in the first place) that sees a teensy-weensy bit of evolution, but I am completely blind on this occasion. Same style, same marketing trends, same level of songwriting.

 

In terms of individual songs, there are some really ugly low points — 'Can't Deny', for instance, is the cheapest brand of pop music imaginable; you know, the one that goes 'place one finger on the keyboard and off we go', the one I thought was invented specially for East European and Rus­sian pop consumption, but apparently Canadians enjoyed crawling under that plank, too. On the other hand, 'Real World' does have a little bite to it, and it is also the first location where you will encounter the trademark Alanis Banshee Wail, guranteed to freeze you cold (and, depending on your musical tastes, make or not make your ears fall off in the process).

 

Sample lyric: 'I'm having dreams in the night of you baby / And Sigmund Freud would have thought I was crazy / I wonder why you've become an obsession / All I know is that I need to have your big bad love'. Personally, I think it's great — how come the Beatles never thought of namedropping intellectual celebrities to raise the bar on their early lyrics? Just think: 'Now you're mine, and Sigmund Freud still makes me cry / And in time, Arthur Janov'll understand the reason why / If I cry, it's not because I'm sad / It's just because Carl Jung's the greatest guy I've ever read / Ask me how / I'll say Gestalt therapy is always waiting for you'. Doesn't it make you want to go out immediately and buy an extra copy of Please Please Me for each of your friends and neighbours?..

 

Sorry, just couldn't resist. Thumbs down.

 

JAGGED LITTLE PILL (1995)

 

1) All I Really Want; 2) You Oughta Know; 3) Perfect; 4) Hand In My Pocket; 5) Right Through You; 6) Forgiven; 7) You Learn; 8) Head Over Feet; 9) Mary Jane; 10) Ironic; 11) Not The Doctor; 12) Wake Up.

 

As of 2009, thirty-three million people worldwide have purchased this album (I'm assuming, of course, that nobody bought it twice or thrice). This figure means that hype and trend alone cannot be responsible for its success; that its formula had what it takes to capture the mindset of the ave­rage music consumer in 1995 and, apparently, has not quite lost its potency even today; and that, whether we want it or not, Alanis Morissette will feature on the pages of "alternative rock" histo­ry forever, no matter how many anti-Alanis crusades we may call for.

 

And I, of course, am seriously tempted to join an old one or call for a new one. Jagged Little Pill is one of those records that is not awful per se — merely unremarkable — but whose thoroughly inadequate reception makes it into an awful mass conscience phenomenon. To illustrate, let me quote a user review from RateYourMusic which dubs Pill a "Great, Important, Revolutionary Al­bum": «When Alanis Morissette emerged... in 1995, the world quickly sat up and took notice. This was the pre-Lilith Fair era, when women weren't supposed to make a scene in music. And then there was Alanis — combining harmonicas, catchy melodies, and nearly screaming lyrics that we couldn't get out of our heads.»

 

PRE — FUCKING — LILITH FAIR ERA? I can only hope this statement is not altogether typi­cal of the thirty-three million people who bought Jagged Little Pill, but if it is and the "female musical scene" is commonly associated with Lilith Fair in the popular mind, feminism should truly pack it in, because nothing whatsoever has shifted in the dominant male perspective over the last fifty years. But forget Lilith Fair, let us ponder a more serious question: what the heck made the world "quickly sit up and take notice" of Alanis and her "near screaming lyrics" in 1995, when, for instance, just two years ago the world could have just as quickly sat up and taken notice of — to quote but one of the many possible examples — Aimee Mann's Whatever, an album that objectively rocked harder, had unquestionably better lyrics, and far more depth than all of Alanis' efforts put together?

 

Actually, it is not difficult to explain. When Alanis Morissette decided, after a long period of in­ternal and external struggle, to make the transition from third-rate dance-pop chick to honest sin­ger-songwriter — a decision that, by itself, can only be welcome — she did not have a clue about two things. First, although endowed by poetic aspiration, she hardly knew how to write complex, multi-layered lyrics that would be "on the level", let alone over it. Second, she may be responsi­ble for (some of) the basic melodies, but she has let her collaborator Glen Ballard come up with the arrangements, and he gives it all the most normal, predictable, unimaginative musical backing that you could expect in 1995 — yucky compressed guitar sound, danceable, mechanistic percus­sion, post-adult-contemporary keyboard sheen etc. etc.

 

These two flaws — corny lyrics and bland sonics — have forever banned Morissette from the predilections of sophisticated music consumers, but, of course, it is exactly these two flaws that, from the perspective of the music buyer en large, represent her greatest advantages. It does not take much effort on the part of the average Joe/Jane to get what she is singing about, and it does not take much time on his/her part to get how "modern" and "contemporary" she is, either, what with the entire production style screaming '1995!' into the ear of the time machine constructor.

 

And, just so that there could always be some space left to argue, every now and then the average Joe will fall upon a mystical line or two — for instance, 'I'm consumed by the chill of solitary, I'm like Estella, I like to reel it in and then spit it out' — and come running and shaking his fist at cri­tics: 'You think you're cool, man, talking all that trash about Alanis, let me tell you now, she really knows her classics, that gal, if not for her, I'd hardly ever guess what that South Park epi­sode no. 62 was all about!' Or: 'Before Alanis came along, I'd have to google for Webster each time someone said 'ironic'. Now I have finally memorized that 'ironic' is like rain on my wedding day, or a free ride when I've already paid! Sure I'm too dumb to ever have a wedding day or a free ride offered to me by anybody, but at least I know what that word means now! Stop bashing Ala­nis, go and fuckin' sell thirty million records yourself and then we'll see!'

 

Not to mention the harmonicas. How cool is having the album open with a folksy harmonica note — washed away in less than a second by a ge­neric power chord — harmonica battling grunge guitar — say, isn't that what true art is all about?

 

In short, Jagged Little Pill unsettles and depresses me, but not for the reasons that are supposed by its creators to unsettle and depress me — rather for its gruesome inadequacy and unjustified pretense. It is far removed, musically and lyrically, from Alanis' dance-pop efforts, but not far enough to lose any connections whatsoever: just like those two, it attempts to bite off much more than it can chew, and would have ended up being unintentionally funny, if only the number of copies it managed to sell didn't make it all so unintentionally sad.

 

But now that I got it off my chest like I am supposed to, I must approach it from a different angle and say that, taken out of its social context, Jagged Little Pill isn't all that bad. One simply has to disre­gard the trite lyrics and run-of-the-mill arrangements and concentrate on its positive sides, not the least of which is Alanis' melodic gift — yes, she does have a gift for melody, and this is one of the, if not the only one, good reason why the record shipped so many clones. The hits are catchy — 'You Oughta Know', 'Ironic', 'You Learn', etc. all have fine catchy choruses that contain some emotional essence, and although few lines can be more banal than 'You live, you learn, you love, you learn, you cry, you learn, you lose, you learn', I have not the least doubt that they are delivered with unfaked passion by someone who truly believes that she is making a big, impor­tant, personal point here. I just close my eyes and imagine she is singing in Kiswahili instead, and it brings me some odd brand of internal happiness — and it's not hard to do.

 

Alanis' singing is a major point of contention. Some have accused her of masking her lack of sin­ging talent or vocal power with yelling and screeching; this is pure libel — please refer to her dance-pop era to ascertain that she does have a great set of pipes and that she is well able to stay on key whenever she wants to. The style she chooses on Pill, where many of the emphatic mo­ments are, indeed, characterized by excessive paranoid whining and yelling, is intentional and works on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, the same way one gets around Kate Bush's horny kittycat in­tonati­ons on The Kick Inside. I take it, and, in fact, think of it as the record's major asset; at least this is its only working element that won't ever allow you to confuse Alanis Morissette with any­one else. If only that yelling were set to better lyrics than 'Is she perverted like me, would she go down on you in a theatre, does she speak eloquently and would she have your baby?', I'd have even fewer problems with it.

 

Even the music, although generally boring, is rarely disgusting. Were it oversaturated with syn­thesizers, or capitalizing on three-chord grunge riffs, like a proto-Avril Lavigne, I would have screamed bloody hell; but it is simply unremarkable rather than awful — some semi-decent riffs, lots of simple, but un-annoying folksy acoustic playing, some electric 12-string stuff, none of it has dated as badly as the synth-pop arrangements of Alanis and Now Is The Time. No revela­tions — no unexpected bathroom calls, either.

 

In the end, I am quite unsure about any final judgement. A thumbs down rating would mainly be me decrying the sad fate of mainstream music and expressing pity for thirty-three million people who hardly have any business taking it from me. A thumbs up rating, on the other hand, would compromise any remains of integrity I still might be preserving somewhere. I guess it is just one of those albums where any fence-straddling type of rating would never satisfy anyone.

 

So, instead, I will leave you baited with a little bit of funny Internet trivia I have indulged in. Appa­rently, the Great Mystery of Alanis does not even begin with her music, it begins with the way you spell her family name. Quick, close your eyes and reply: How many R's, S's, and T's are there in the name Mor(r)is(s)et(t)e?

 

Now open your eyes and check the statistics in the next review to find out whether you form part of the intellectual Google majority and have won your prize — a lifelong supply of jagged little pills and a used copy of Great Expectations.

 

 

SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE (1998)

 

1) Front Row; 2) Baba; 3) Thank U; 4) Are You Still Mad; 5) Sympathetic Character; 6) That I Would Be Good; 7) The Couch; 8) Can't Not; 9) UR; 10) I Was Hoping; 11) One; 12) Would Not Come; 13) Unsent; 14) So Pure; 15) Joining You; 16) Heart Of The House; 17) Your Congratulations.

 

So, before we proceed to discussion, here are the Google statistics as of December 12, 2009: [1] the correct way — Morissette: 1,560,000 results; [2] Morisette: 367,000; [3] Morrisette: 263,000; [4] Morrissette: 109,000; [5] Morissete: 52,000; [6] Morrisete: 29,000; [7] Morris­sete: 11,200; [8] Morisete: 19,600. (Of course, many of these are just bot copy results, but it is the relative statistics that matters, not the absolute numbers).

 

The conclusion is that about a third of people writing about A. M. do not even know how to spell her name properly. Of course, it is a rather hard name to spell (trickier even than Mississippi, where one just has to remember the «two of each» rule), but still, you'd expect a bit more attention paid to such a household item. Or, perhaps, it is just the name — misspelt — that is a household item, and not the music? How many people have written about A. M. without actually listening to her (as opposed to without hearing her, which is more or less impossible)?

 

I cannot say that Morissette's follow-up to her major commercial success is a "great" album. I cannot say that I love it, or that I will ever have a big desire to return and explore it some more. But it was Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, not Jagged Little Pill, that finally convinced me that there is artistic merit to this girl's work. For all its flaws, Pill was not a hollow forgery — but this is best evident only after listening to the next in line. It is no coincidence that Alanis ne­ver managed to surpass the "triumph" of Pill: not only are her subsequent records sounding more and more "out of date", but they are actually sounding less and less market-oriented.

 

Junkie is a tremendously long, horrendously brooding, and emphatically personal record that, first and foremost, is dedicated to growing up. Once you spot the ugly horse grin on the cover, the first thought is that you will probably be subjected to even more screeching and caterwauling than last time, but the intention is rather... 'Ironic': in fact, Alanis is much more restrained and much more oriented towards a conventional understanding of 'singing' here (from time to time, with a little Indian flavor she somehow picked up over the last three years — uh, possibly as a result of her visit to India?).

 

More importantly, she overcomes her major weakness — inane lyrics. It is still easy to sneer at all the different, yet equally obvious ways in which she blows up her rather simple emotions; it is more difficult to admit that she has at least advanced to the stage at which she is implicit rather than explicit about it. The encription is not very difficult, but it needs to be broken; certainly a chorus like 'Thank you India, thank you terror, thank you disillusionment, thank you frailty, thank you consequence...' is more deserving of notice than 'I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is giving a high five'. Or so it would seem.

 

The music is a more difficult matter. Brushing away occasionally silly critical raves ('Wow, she is writing pop songs without choruses, whoever heard of that?'), we are left with a gloomy mix of "alternative rock" with "adult contemporary", thick on atmosphere and personality, but generally thin on hooks. There are even Goth overtones on some of the numbers: Alanis is certainly intent on letting us know either that success has not gone to her head and that she has no desire to im­per­sonate a pop-rock diva, or, perhaps, more cynically, that the very success she has earned was entirely due to her neuroses, so next time around, she is happy to heap even more of those on the listener. You want trouble? You got it.

 

Just like before, the main problems are with the basics of the arrangements. Same boring funky beats, same lack of detail, same moribund guitar backing — a few of the riffs are good, but for the most part, they are just grumbling away in the background. Add to this the seventy-plus mi­nute length, and it becomes a real chore to sit through all of this, especially since midway through you clearly begin to understand that no, you are not getting much of anything else. For a long time, this effect prevented me from seeing 'Joining You' as the catchiest song on the album, or 'Heart Of The House' as the song with the best strings arrangement. Alas, she is still letting Glen Ballard have control of the situation, and these are the results: she has unquestionably grown up, but he has, most definitely, nowhere left to grow.

 

All the same, I think that 'Baba', even with all the pretentiousness and with all the grungeness, is a powerful tune; that 'That I Would Be Good' is the best Diane Warren song that Diane Warren, fortunately, never wrote (or else I would have to reluctantly pray that her approved billion years on the fry­ing pan be reduced by a few months); that the lyrical concept of 'Unsent' is pretty clever; and that I fully understand why Robert Christgau gave this record an A- as opposed to Jagged Lit­tle Pill's B+, but have no idea why he gave Aimee Mann's Lost In Space — an album that is thematically not that far removed from Junkie, but musically surpasses it in every way known to mankind — a C+.

 

My own verdict would be that the whole thing is monotonous but mildly intelligent; musically poor but perfectly honest; conventional but desperately trying to overcome conventionality, and for all these counterpoints, first time in this section, I would deal it out a cautious emotional-ratio­nal thumbs up. But prepare to be bored stiff.

 

UNPLUGGED (1999)

 

1) You Learn; 2) Joining You; 3) No Pressure Over Cappuccino; 4) That I Would Be Good; 5) Head Over Feet; 6) Princes Familiar; 7) I Was Hoping; 8) Ironic; 9) These R The Thoughts; 10) King Of Pain; 11) You Oughta Know; 12) Uninvited.

 

It is theoretically likeable, this session. Alas, it does not improve much on the biggest thing it could improve upon. Considering that Morissette's full-band rock arrangements are one of the weakest spots on her studio albums, one could hope that getting rid of dreary, boring «alt-rock» guitars and dehu­manized, depressing percussion would make her material more fresh and exciting. It does not.

 

If anything, the only reason why Unplugged could merit consideration is Alanis' curious restraint and even a bit of «delicacy» that she gives her listeners by not overscreaming, not even on such screamfests as 'You Oughta Know'. It may not always be evident that she is an excellent singer when her bratty attitude overshadows her vocal talent, but on Unplugged, there is no bratty atti­tude whatsoever. Of course, for some fans that would only make things more boring.

 

To comment on the musical aspects of this session would be missing the point — Morissette's music was never about any sort of instrumental melodies in the first place, and here, her band is only to provide a properly atmospheric setting for her seriously self-sustained seance of soul sur­vival. She only serves a small helping of hits from Pill (I could easily live without 'Ironic', but three cheers for changing the vocal melody of the formerly grating chorus), goes heavier on Jun­kie material, and introduces three entirely new songs that have passed me by completely, altho­ugh 'Princes Familiar' is supposed to be a very important tune on a personal level.

 

It's all okay, going by gently and with relatively little pretense, but in order to really enjoy this, you have to adore Alanis Morissette as an extraordinary individual with a deeply idiosyncratic vision rather than a pop performer (for the latter purpose, studio records will suffice completely). And it is very hard for some of us to do just that — certainly not with moves so blatantly obvious as choosing, for your obligatory tribute to your influences, Sting's 'King Of Pain', and even  redoing the hookline as 'I'll always be queen of pain'. She is so admirably «honest» about everything she does, I think I'm going to be sick.

 

First-rate singing, second-rate playing, thoughtful song selection, moderate hooks on every corner, tortured soul in abundance, all of this comes together in a depressing thumbs down that the brain had only just time enough to signal to the heart before lapsing in a coma. I envy you if you have a greater tolerance level for such sanitized atmosphere.

 

UNDER RUG SWEPT (2002)

 

1) 21 Things I Want In A Lover; 2) Narcissus; 3) Hands Clean; 4) Flinch; 5) So Unsexy; 6) Precious Illusions; 7) That Particular Time; 8) A Man; 9) You Owe Me Nothing In Return; 10) Surrendering; 11) Utopia.

 

There is A LOT of different words on this album. Each and every single song, from top to bottom, filled with endless, endless, endless verbosity, prolixity, garrulity, loquacity. And it is not over after the last sounds have died down, because there is about half a billion additional interviews, grandly flashing «Alanis Morissette Talks About Songs From Under Rug Swept!» at you.

 

Do not, therefore, make the big mistake of judging this album based on its lyrics, or even of dis­cussing its lyrics, no matter how this unbelievable logorrhea goads you into committing it. Con­fucius say, «Little man be guided by deep meaning in Alanis Morissette songs, big man jack off in bathroom instead». I am not saying that all the words here are necessarily awful; as a third-rate poet, Morissette is improving with each year, and by now, she can at least make sure that her words will never spoil the cumulative effect. It is just that their overall quantity and density — sometimes she almost borders on rapping, so much there is that she needs to tell you in five seconds' time — may, and will, hide the real value of the album.

 

This is her first record without Ballard's involvement, and, although I was not sure at first, after a few listens I am convinced that it works better. The arrangements still define «bland», but there are no conscious attempts at «toughening» the sound by overloading it with generic «alt-rock» trappings. It looks like she cares about the melodies, but does not give a damn about dressing them up, relying on any spontaneous combination of lead instruments and rhythm section that happens to materialize at any given moment. For a great artist, this would be suicide, but for an openly mediocre one, this is a very wise decision — one should never tell a mediocre artist that song so-and-so needs more cowbell. That is one sure way to spell disaster.

 

So the electric guitars still sound like shit, and the rhythm section still sounds like she downloa­ded most of these tracks from a South Korean musical site for $0.11 each, but the melodies — in general — are nice. '21 Things I Want In A Lover' (yes, she lists all of them) and 'You Owe Me Nothing In Return' are two of the catchiest pop-rockers she ever put up for us. 'Flinch' is her pret­tiest acoustic «ditty» so far. 'That Particular Time' is the kind of pompous, but deeply emotional ballad that Diane Warren might have written, were she a real human being instead of a devasta­ting biological weapon that somehow slipped past the Geneva convention. And her near-falsetto singing on 'Utopia' closes the record on an almost Enya-like note, awaking the romantic in those of us who are not yet completely jaded and, perhaps, not even making him regret the awakening.

 

Of course, the lead single from the album had to be one of its least impressive tracks — 'Hands Clean', probably because it has the highest density of words per second (but nothing like a truly catchy chorus). Maybe some of the critics were impressed, because it gave them so many points to latch on to, but the public clearly was not, and, anyway, with Under Rug Swept it became ob­vious that Alanis' days as a big pop star were clearly past her: the record made a very brief stay at No. 1, and, up to this day, has only been certified platinum once (compared to thrice for Junkie and sixteen times — sic! — for Jagged Little Pill).

 

I do not think, though, that the reaction came as a shock or disappointment to Alanis, and it is quite likely that the results, for her, were quite predictable. There was no huge marketing cam­paign, no conscious attempt to «rejuvenate» or «modernize» her image for the masses, not even a nationwide broadcast duet with Christina Aguilera. This is certainly mainstream, generic, and ac­cessible stuff, but it does not scream «buy me, I'm cool!» at the average market-goer, and most people probably bought it because the memories were still relatively fresh. But fade out the con­text, and you may end up like me, thinking of the album as Alanis' strongest mediocre offering to date and easily giving it a thumbs up, even despite the sadistic stream of consciousness.

 

FEAST ON SCRAPS (2002)

 

1) Fear Of Bliss; 2) Bent For You; 3) Sorry To Myself; 4) Sister Blister; 5) Offer; 6) Unprodigal Daughter; 7) Simple Together; 8) Purgatorying; 9) Hands Clean (acoustic).

 

This is a very short album-addendum; actually, a bonus EP (yes, today 40 minutes worth of music is supposed to re­pre­sent the length of an EP — so much to say, so little to learn) that accompanies Alanis' live DVD of a performance in Rotterdam from her latest tour. It may be available separa­tely, but if you are a fan, you will want the DVD anyway, and if you are not a fan, you will want to donate to the poor instead.

 

As the title explicitly states, these are «scraps» — outtakes — from the Under Rug Swept ses­sions, and this pretty much says it all. The songs mostly sound the same, convey the same fee­lings, press forward the same points, yet are generally worse written. Overall, a little bleaker, with a bit more emphasis on Alanis' Eastern fetish, bringing back dots of memories of Junkie, which is not always a bad thing (the tricky polyphonic arrangements on 'Purgatorying', for ins­stance, are just about the most musically complex thing you will ever encounter on an Alanis album, for instance).

 

But out of the eight new songs (the ninth one is an acoustic version of 'Hands Clean'), I have only latched on to 'Sister Blister', whose catchy chorus slightly transcends the clichés of alt-rock — only slightly — and 'Offer', a pretty country-pop ballad that could have been a delicate lowlight on a James Taylor album, or a smash hit on American Idol if the accompanying tits and ass were of sympathetic shape. But Alanis is no James Taylor, and as for T&A, those were out of the picture since 1992, so let dogs lie.

 

I have not watched the DVD myself — it must be a good treat for the fans, with a decent selec­tion of hits and rarities from the good years. Without the DVD, the «EP» on its own predictably gets a thumbs down — bear with me, fans and neighbors, no good man is entitled to deriving joy out of an album of outtakes by Alanis Morissette, and songs like 'Sorry To Myself' elevate her logorrhoea problem to brand new snow-covered heights of oxygen deprivation.

 

SO-CALLED CHAOS (2004)

 

1) Eight Easy Steps; 2) Out Is Through; 3) Excuses; 4) Doth I Protest Too Much; 5) Knees Of My Bees; 6) So-Called Chaos; 7) Not All Me; 8) This Grudge; 9) Spineless; 10) Everything.

 

This is only slightly weaker than Under Rug Swept, running out of hooks somewhere around the middle, but, otherwise, it is exactly what we have now come to expect from the Queen of generic alt-rock: boring arrangements, honest verbosity, and non-annoyingly catchy choruses. However, before we proceed, I must, from a transparently philological point of view, object to the title of song number four.

 

Dear Alanis: it is very nice that you know your Shakespeare, but, for your information, 'doth I protest' is seriously ungrammatical, since 'doth' is, by all means, third person singular, never first. And if you are actually aware of that, then you are either insulting the intel­ligence of your audiences, or presuming that your basic audiences are unintelligent in the first place. In the latter case, you could have considered using your songs as «edutainment». How about singing some­thing like 'Do I protest too much? Say 'doth I' and be out of touch with classic English grammar as such!' Surely this would have been very progressive and refreshing compared with inviting your audiences to take one more traditional walk in the depths of your soul.

 

Now that I have gotten that off my chest, 'Doth I Protest Too Much' is a nice song (I like how she starts relying more and more on Byrdsey guitar jangle), and so are the loud rockers 'Eight Easy Steps', 'Excuses', and 'Knees Of My Bees', particularly the latter, conti­nuing to combine grunge guitars with Eastern influences, but in a more upbeat manner than previously.

 

Later on, the album starts sagging under the weight of unfocused ballads, and the rockers start repeating the same atmospheres and even melodies — e. g., 'Spineless' does not say anything that 'Excuses' have not already said. It is also very hard to understand why the album's worst song ('Everything') had been selected as the lead-off single. The singing is passionate, the guitars shine and glisten, the atmosphere is suitably anthemic and confessional at the same time, and, presumably, the song meant a lot to Morissette, but it has no commercial value whatsoever (and the melody is weak, so it may have little artistic value either). 'Excuses' and 'Knees Of My Bees' would have worked far more convincingly.

 

It does put a stop to criticisms about Alanis' «selling out» that were occasionally voiced by main­stream reviewers, just because, on the whole, So-Called Chaos is «lighter» and «livelier» and «happier» than its predecessors — at least, that is what people used to call it, seeing as how Ala­nis had finally overcome her personal problems and settled into a (relatively) quiet family life. I am not sure. I do not see how it is at all possible for Alanis to «sell out» — unless she reverts to being the Alanis of 1992 — and I did not see that much darkness on Under Rug Swept, either. Besides, what do we care whether she releases a «dark» or a «light» album? She is just not all that interesting as a person to make me involved in her yin and yang. She does write catchy melo­dies, and she seems like a nice, honest, moderately intelligent little lady. What else is in it for me? No­thing.

 

Thumbs up, unless you insist on analyzing her lyrics — but I have made a solemn oath not to pay attention to what exactly she is going to teach me «in eight easy steps». I do like the line 'I could be an asshole of the grandest kind', though. That's one perfect way to initiate your lead-off single.

 

FLAVORS OF ENTANGLEMENT (2008)

 

1) Citizen Of The Planet; 2) Underneath; 3) Straitjacket; 4) Versions Of Violence; 5) Not As We; 6) In Praise Of The Vulnerable Man; 7) Moratorium; 8) Torch; 9) Giggling Again For No Reason; 10) Tapes; 11) Incomplete; 12*) Or­chid; 13*) The Guy Who Leaves; 14*) Madness; 15*) Limbo No More; 16*) On The Tequila.

 

After a four-year, relatively secluded, break, only interrupted by the release of Jagged Little Pill Acoustic in 2005 (which is more or less what it is, an unplugged revision of her fading moment of glory, and hardly deserves a special review), Alanis has returned to the studio in an attempt to update and polish her image. With an entirely new team of musicians, led by producer Guy Sigs­worth and «programmer guitarist» Andy Page, she is ready to strive for hipness once again.

 

Her team's understanding of hipness, however, means basically one thing: make the album a tech­nophile's dream. Half, if not more, of the songs are stuffed with «look at us, we are so sci-fi» electronic farts, and some are driven by mid-tempo techno beats — all of a sudden, Alanis decla­res that she actually loves to dance (yes, we know, Ms. Morissette, we did see you in those com­promising videos from 1992) and that no dance fan will be disappointed with her new record.

 

On paper, a combination of pretentious lyrics, confessional attitude, and techno beats coming from the likes of Alanis sounds like the proverbial recipé for disaster. Think Madonna's Ray Of Light or something in the neighbourhood. Surprise: it is perfectly okay, no better and no worse than the average A. M. offering of the past ten years. The synthesized farts and programmed loops never detract from her standard hooks, in fact, they are somewhat refreshing after the uni­form, monotonous production style of Under Rug Swept and So-Called Chaos.

 

In fact, the ugliest moment on the record is not even one centered on Electronica: it is ʽ(Bring) On The Tequilaʼ, a dreadfully silly, campy attempt to write a song in the «party pop» genre of the latest brand of idiot teen idols (Miley Cyrus, etc.) — I hope the intention was primarily parodic, but you can never tell with artists of Morissette's level, prone to chronic lapses of taste. Fortunately, it is only available as the final track on the «deluxe» 2-disc edition of the album, and need not in­furiate the tastes of the average enlightened listener.

 

As for the techno-pop, ʽStraitjacketʼ does suffer from being way too overtly commercial, but the electronification of her raga tendencies works better on ʽCitizen Of The Planetʼ, and even gets close to the level of intimidation on ʽVersions Of Violenceʼ (which I always keep hearing as ʽVir­gins Of Violenceʼ — a great title for a cutting-edge animé series, I think, and the song would do great as the title track). Her gift for vocal hooks has not gone anywhere, and the production team never tries to shadow them, no matter how many side effects they cram in the mix.

 

Note, though, that once again the singles from the album were some of the least commercial tracks. ʽUnderneathʼ does have a danceable chorus, but its trendiness is strictly limited to orna­mental electronic flourishes (that, moreover, seem to be played on an old Moog synth — trendy my ass!); ʽIn Praise Of The Vulnerable Manʼ is a catchy mid-tempo folk-rocker that failed to chart completely, maybe because of the awful title and lyrics (no man would buy a single with such a title ever, no woman who's got a man would buy such a single under the risk of losing the man, and no woman who hasn't got a man would buy it — because what's the fucking point?); and ʽNot As Weʼ is a piano ballad, and not a very good one at that (try as she might, Alanis will never be­come a Tori Amos, so why even bother?).

 

This is odd: even as we see Alanis trying to break back into the stream of public conscience, she is at the same time intentionally sabotaging her commercial fortunes. It is non-trivial, and, from a certain point of view, respectable; but my taste-o-meter still goes low on the mercury level, indi­cating that Ms. Morissette's ambitions are still the same — to be perceived as a Soul-Baring Se­rious Artist rather than the averagely pleasing pop songwriter that she really is. I cannot even reach a judgement, what with the brain and heart departments locked in a stalemate over the thumbs' position. In any case, if you are a committed fan, you will love Flavors Of Entangle­ment; if you are not, the album probably only deserves a «curio listen».

 

HAVOC AND BRIGHT LIGHTS (2012)

 

1) Guardian; 2) Woman Down; 3) 'Til You; 4) Celebrity; 5) Empathy; 6) Lens; 7) Spiral; 8) Numb; 9) Havoc; 10) Win And Win; 11) Receive; 12) Edge Of Evolution; 13*) Big Sur; 14*) Guru; 15*) Permission.

 

We all usually prefer to snobbishly dismiss sales figures as irrelevant to what we like and what we hate, but «irrelevant» is not quite the same as «meaningless». Look at Alanis and the curve of her US sales, for instance: Jagged Little Pill — over 14 mln. copies sold; Junkie — less than 3 mln.; Under Rug Swept — around 1 mln.; So-Called Chaos — less than 500,000; Flavors Of Entanglement — approximately 230,000; Havoc And Bright Lights — 54,000 copies so far. Look up «exponential behavior» in any mathematical encyclopaedia, and you will probably see a picture of Alanis grinning at you in one of her trademark toothy styles.

 

What is really funny, though, is that I actually relistened to Jagged Little Pill right before taking a plunge into Alanis' latest «commercial dwarf», just for a quick memory refresh, and God help me, I just can't hear the crucial difference. Yes, a lot of anger, tension, paranoia has been lost, dissipated, scattered over the years, which is only natural after seventeen years. But come now, haven't all those fans from 1995 — people for whom Jagged Little Pill mattered so much, all these 14 million Americans and 20 more million people worldwide? — haven't  they, too, grown older, so that they could follow their teenage idol through all of her phases and stages, breaking down when she breaks down, straightening up when she straightens up? What's up with loyalty and fidelity these days, anyway?

 

Not only that, but Havoc And Bright Lights mostly received disparaging critical reviews — seems even worse than Flavors Of Entanglement — with people complaining about almost everything. Too hookless, too happy, too overproduced, too archaic, too boring, something that I just don't get — it's as if «she used to be fine and now she sucks», when in reality there has never been any insurmountable gap between any of her albums. Screw the whole Zeitgeist thing: Alanis is not a very good artist, but she is an artist, want it or not, not just some helpless carrier of the supernatural spirit of 1995, randomly selected in some heavenly lottery.

 

And there are some good songs on this album, no more and no less than on the previous one. To be honest, the production does not bother me at all. She retains her producer from Flavors (Guy Sigsworth), but they go a little bit easier on the electronics and a little heavier on the guitars this time, and although the album doth suffer from overcompression, the sonic textures are at least varied — some of the arrangements lean towards traditional grungy alt-rock, some have ringing folk-rock patterns, some are electronically processed, some are acoustic, basically, I just don't mind: in any case, the instrumental backdrops, as usual, only serve as backgrounds for Alanis' vocal hooks, and these particular ones, at the very least, aren't annoying.

 

And what about these hooks? Well, I don't see why long-time fans of Alanis should turn away from them. Something like ʽGuardianʼ is very much Alanis — quiet soulful beginning, exploding into loud ecstasy as the chorus is being hammered into your brain, only this time, it is a little con­fusing because there is no hateful madness attached: now, screaming "I'll be your keeper for life as your guardian", she is just giving a lively oath of faith, not cursing the hell out of us all. Yes, this might disappoint those who'd rather see her rail and rant. But it's a good chorus all the same, or maybe I'm just growing old.

 

In fact, the tendency seems to be this: the more she tries to whip herself up into an aggressive posture, the more embarrassing it looks, and vice versa. ʽWoman Downʼ positions itself as a fe­minist anthem, but not only does it have some of the silliest «feminist» lyrics ever committed to tape by, er, a formerly major artist ("calling all woman haters, we've lowered the bar on the beha­vior that we will take" — what's that supposed to mean?), it is also set to an equally silly, jumpy pattern punctuated by merry synth whoops, in a befuddling nod to those early dance pop days when "I wanna feel your love!" was about as deep as this lady would go. Lesson not learned: you don't combine serious (if clumsily stated) messaging with this kind of music.

 

Another flat pancake is ʽCelebrityʼ, where the lyrics are a bit more coherent and, perhaps, could even — in theory — touch the senses of all the "tattooed sexy dancing monkeys" to whom it is addressed, but the spark is just not there: try as she might, she cannot reach the proper level of hatred or derision for all the "wheels, heels and vintage Gucci"... which might, after all, have something to do with the fact that the lady is not above a vintage Gucci herself (just google «Ala­nis Morrissette and Gucci» and look at all the nice, fine images). Hmm, hmm.

 

Anyway, cut to the chase: when she is being who she is on this record — a settled down family lady with a small kid and a happy home in Los Angeles — there are no big problems. ʽTil Youʼ is an old-school adult contemporary ballad with pretty voice modulation, soulfulness, and humi­lity; it had me even thinking of late-period ABBA for a moment out there, which may not be a coin­cidence because, for instance, the double-tracked vocals on the chorus of ʽLensʼ also sound sus­piciously Swedish in origin. ʽSpiralʼ is speedy, optimistic and catchy, even if its ringing guitars and swirling synths sort of cancel out each other in an overcompression bout — but after a couple of listens, the chorus gets head-stuck anyway.

 

And on and on and on, these songs are surprisingly even — there are very few of her «Eastern Darkness» trademarks (although ʽNumbʼ, with some of that modality and an atmospheric violin part to boot, is at least as good as anything on Junkie), for the most part it's this very even, not too pretentious semi-alt-, semi-folk-pop with stable emotions, credible sentimentality and occa­sional hooks. Not too clever — remember who we are dealing with — not too dumb. Little to love, but absolutely nothing to hate. Plus, her voice seems to be improving in clarity and range as the years go by — some of the notes hit on ʽTil Youʼ are downright gorgeous.

 

After some consideration, I go with a thumbs up, as I'd go with any not-untalented person being relatively honest with herself and her listeners (we'll agree to overlook the Gucci fiasco for once). Essentially, these days Alanis Morissette just sounds more basically human, so who the heck cares about a stale old Zeitgeist from almost two decades ago, anyway? Good for you, 54,000 loyal fans who bought this album — it is hardly likely that I will ever want to revisit it, but I cer­tainly don't regret the time spent on trying to understand why I never got around to hating it, or to getting bored out of my skull with it.

 

 

ALICE IN CHAINS

FACELIFT (1990)

 

1) We Die Young; 2) Man In The Box; 3) Sea Of Sorrow; 4) Bleed The Freak; 5) I Can't Remember; 6) Love, Hate, Love; 7) It Ain't Like That; 8) Sunshine; 9) Put You Down; 10) Confusion; 11) I Know Somethin' ('Bout You); 12) Real Thing.

 

On beginner level, one could define grunge as «pop melodies, punk attitude, Black Sabbath tone» and mostly hit it right. But Alice In Chains, despite embracing this aesthetics wholesale, actually had roots in Eighties' metal and funk — roots that went back at least four or five years — and this gave them a mature, professional edge over most competition. Vocalist Layne Staley and guitarist Jerry Cantrell were just as pissed-off and fucked-up as Kurt Cobain, just as talented, but they also knew how to throw around their skills so as to consistently come out with some of the scariest music to ever come out of the pop music scene.

 

Facelift, the band's stunning debut, is as much death metal as it is grunge — in fact, Cantrell has always stated that the band was primarily metal — but certainly not «fantasy-death» metal, not a corny dramatization of some semi-deranged artist's brain damage, rather a faithful depiction of whatever was going around, from Staley's personal drug experiences to observations on true life atrocities ('We Die Young', for instance, is said to reflect Cantrell's impressions of ten-year old drug pushers on the streets of Seattle).

 

So what happened, exactly? Nothing much. One fine day, hair metal woke up with a strange de­sire to take an honest peek behind its made-to-order screen of hedonism and irony — to look at the other side of all those carnal and spiritual pleasures it had been celebrating for so long now, it even forgot when it all started. That auspicious day, hair metal became Alice In Chains.

 

Facelift gives no respite: one heavy rocker after another, sometimes moving on slow and painful, like junkies crawling on the floor during their last moments of consciousness, sometimes relent­lessly, steadily mid-tempo, like the hand of Death reaching over the junkies — not too slow, not too fast, but just right — and inavoidably. Sometimes Cantrell softens the proceedings with ligh­ter, acoustic-based passages, but this never changes the general depressing atmosphere. As for Staley, he only knows two moods: The Growl, which will send little kids straight under their beds, and The Moan, which will send the neighbors dialing the drug squad number. Do we want more? What for? They would not be honest, and honesty is Facelift's banner.

 

With several years of previous collective experience, a fresh, original vibe, and songwriting, sin­ging, and playing talent a-plenty, it would be surprising if Facelift had plenty of bad songs to go along with it, and it does not. The three major stunners, all of which were hit singles, are tacked at the beginning — 'We Die Young', embodying all the basics of worldly evil in a compact 2:30 pa­ckage; 'Man In The Box', the song that Cantrell acknowledges as the first «true Alice In Chains» song the band wrote, and which also has the most achingly overwhelming invocation of the Lord's name I have ever heard in pop; and 'Sea Of Sorrow', whose point is essentially to proclaim that there is no stronger thing in the world than total suicidal desperation. 'I live tomorrow / You I will not follow / As you wallow / In a sea of sorrow' — strange that the song has never played a part in high school shoot-outs. Probably too smart for that.

 

If you have the strength to sit out everything, you will later on be treated to Cantrell's acoustic capacities ('I Can't Remember'), a couple tracks that sit closer to their hair metal beginnings ('Sun­shine'), and some funky numbers that are almost danceable ('Put You Down', 'I Know Some­thin'), if you like dancing with ghosts, that is. The «sleeper» of the album is its longest number, the dramatic aria of 'Love, Hate, Love', a death metal ballad with Staley giving it his all (and he is a pretty powerful singer); at first, it may be somewhat tiresome to watch it draw its weighty, poi­sonous bulk over your living room (I should certainly know — I trashed it in my original review. Silly silly), but eventually the fumes will sink in, and, for safety reasons, I would certainly re­commend them over their real-world equivalent (a 24-hour stay in an opium den or something to the same power).

 

Heavy with a flair, honest with an intelligence, Facelift is one of Seattle's finest hours, and will always remain a thumbs up record as long as there are enough thumbs to go with it. It is nothing less than amazing that they actually managed to top it with their next offering.

 

DIRT (1992)

 

1) Them Bones; 2) Dam That River; 3) Rain When I Die; 4) Down In A Hole; 5) Sickman; 6) Rooster; 7) Junkhead; 8) Dirt; 9) God Smack; 10) Untitled (Iron Gland); 11) Hate To Feel; 12) Angry Chair; 13) Would?

 

Intellect, as soon as we acquire it to a sufficient degree, tells us that the ultimate form of «scary» is «subtle»; that properly done «suspense» is far more nerve-wrecking than in-yer-face horror and brutality; and that this works for all sorts of art, from literature to movies to music. Exceptions to this rule are few and in between — particularly in the world of rock'n'roll, where one oddball al­bum by madman Syd Barrett can easily outscare the entire output of any death metal band. But exceptions do occur, and, whenever I think of them, Dirt by Alice In Chains is the one example that springs to mind quicker than any other one.

 

Digging deep under the surface of Facelift, you could still smell traces of the lightweight hedo­nism of Eighties' metal, especially in its funkier numbers. On Dirt, Cantrell and Staley wipe these out to the last tiny spot. If there is one second of «light» on this record, it is a small forty-second long interlude that now goes under the title 'Iron Gland' (it used to be altogether anonymous) — a collage of heavy riffs, shouts, and noises that sort of pays tribute to/mocks Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man'. Equally as heavy and brutal as the rest of the record, it is intentionally silly. And nothing else on Dirt is silly.

 

At the forefront of Dirt lies the drug problem: around half of the songs deal with it explicitly or implicitly, with Cantrell contributing the gloomy melodies and Staley describing his addiction with lyrics that may not be great poetry, but nor do they need to be great poetry when placed in their particular context. For instance, 'what in God's name have you done — stick your arm for some real fun!' has little poetic might all by itself, but is deeply empowered through Layne's deli­very — somehow you know he is not singing about somebody else — and Cantrell's nightmarish, «wobbly» wah-wah riff, the perfect musical impersonation of all that horrid muck circulating through your blood.

 

The most evil irony lies in how catchy all this stuff is. Twelve songs with excellent rock melodies — memorable riffs, catchy choruses, suitable song length, moderate amount of complexity. If only those were run through a different framework, Brill Building might have been glad to keep some of those. My only minor complaint is that, the farther we proceed, the more obvious is the band's way too heavy reliance on Black Sabbath and Zeppelin: the title track, for instance, bor­rows parts of its melody from 'Electric Funeral', and Staley's 'Hate To Feel' reworks the famous descending riff from 'Dazed And Confused'. Nevertheless, these are really reworkings rather than straightforward rip-offs, and what can there be against a little variation on a good theme?

 

Launching straight into battle with another short, compact (2:30) single, cheerfully entitled 'Them Bones' where Staley impressively plays the Hamlet of the grunge generation, the band proceeds to box the listener into the corner with one brutal punch after another. 'Dam That River', written by Cantrell after getting into a fight with drummer Sean Kinney, is essentially about venting one's frustration, but I would certainly hate someone venting his frustration over me with the kind of force contained in the song's riffs — this is some of the meanest, leanest, earth-rattling-est riffage ever put on record by anyone. The wah-wah riff of 'Rain When I Die' is the purest distillation of evil, and 'Sickman' was the result of Staley asking Cantrell to write him 'the sickest tune he could write' — personally, I think 'Rain When I Die' is sicker, but that is just a matter of opinion.

 

The album does have its moments of silence and subtlety that also work beautifully: 'Rooster', be­ginning with mildly psychedelic phasing on the acoustic guitars and falsetto harmonies, only gra­dually develops into a disturbed, terrifying picture of Vietnamese hell. Not that one requires to know that Cantrell wrote the song about his father's wartime experiences; it could as well refer to Staley himself, because, as he wails 'here comes The Rooster — you know he ain't gonna die!' through your speakers, it is possible to get the feeling that, perhaps, despite all the nightmarish at­mosphere, there may be hope ahead. Is he, or ain't he? But then the very next song is 'Junkhead': 'What's my drug of choice? — Well, what have you got?' No, he probably ain't.

 

Dirt may be «metal» or «grunge», but, first and foremost, it is simply one of the Nineties' greatest works of pure art, a straightforward depiction of inner torture and helplessness, an attempt at a screaming public confession that sends modesty and subtlety packing — with no regrets. Not eve­ryone is going to like it. Some will shy away from its brutality under the pretext of disliking hea­vy metal in general. Others will want to denounce its honesty as banal self-pitying. Some may say that it serves a purely pragmatic purpose of turning people off drugs; others may say that people are just as likely to be turned onto drugs, seduced by Staley's romantic torture. And they are all welcome to say it: Dirt is a record to be talked about, to be discussed for as long as possible, and the more controversy it stirs, the better it is. And yes, a big thumbs up from the very bottom of my conscience, which has never had any problems with drugs but which has been forced to relate through the sheer unprecedented power of the album.

 

JAR OF FLIES (1994)

 

1) Rotten Apple; 2) Nutshell; 3) I Stay Away; 4) No Excuses; 5) Whale & Wasp; 6) Don't Follow; 7) Swing On This.

 

As early as the fall of 1991, the band demonstrated their flexibility by recording an EP called Sap that con­tained five acoustic songs — originally intended as demos for subsequent metallization, but then deemed self-sufficient as they were. (Technically, they were not entirely acoustic, with at least some electric guitar overdubs, but all the backbones remained acoustic). After Dirt, they de­cided to return to this practice, and the next EP, Jar Of Flies, already had seven songs, some of them lengthy enough to guarantee a running length over thirty minutes. For some reason, al­though this would seem an utterly natural thing to do, Sap and Jar Of Flies have yet to see a sin­gle-CD re-release, which would most likely prompt the curious music lover into adding it to his collection and gaining a new type appreciation for the band.

 

None of the songs are as immediately striking as the blitzkrieg of Dirt, but there is no reason why they should be. This is, finally, the moment when one should put some subtlety back into the proceedings, replace nervous breakdown with melancholia, follow the terrifying epileptic fit of Dirt with the quiet recuperative depression of Jar Of Flies. Not that things will get any easier; not a chance, as the very first track, suitably called 'Rotten Apple', tells you that 'Innocence is over, ignorance is spoken, confidence is broken, sustenance is stolen, arrogance is potent'. They will just get... subtler. Think of the difference between putting a bullet through your brain and la­zily and hazily gazing as the blood drips from your freshly opened veins. Whichever scenario looks more pacifying and relaxing to you?

 

Now, to bring you back from these unsettling thoughts, Jar Of Flies may be the best spot to check out Jerry Cantrell's amazing musical versatility. Some of this sounds a hell of a lot like James Taylor (!), e. g. the soft Fido-on-the-porchstep country-western rumination of 'Don't Fol­low' (actually sung by Jerry himself instead of Layne, giving the song extra accessibility). Some sounds like lounge jazz, e. g. 'Swing On This', propelled by new bassist Mike Inez's traditionalist rhythmics — before it starts justifying the title and mutates from 'swing' to nasty hard rock in its mid-section. And some sounds like mid-Seventies British progressive rock à la Camel and the like, e. g. the instrumental 'Whale & Wasp' with its deep, painful guitar moaning.

 

'Rotten Apple', occupying more space than anything else on here and, thus, intuitively understood as the album's major piece, is itself enhanced with a talkbox effect — which is, fortunately, just as creepy as it is on Pink Floyd records and not at all as silly as it is on Peter Frampton ones — and represents the perfect example of creative collaboration between Inez, responsible for the song's morose bassline pivot, Cantrell, fleshing it out with the ugly, but eerie talkbox, dark folk acoustic rhythms, and a set of other warped electric effects, and Staley, who somehow comes up with the perfect lyrics for it all: 'Eat of the apple, so young / I'm crawling back to start'. Come to think of it, not that we know how old Adam was himself when he tasted the fruit, so perhaps it is a bit too presumptious for Layne to equate his sins with those of the forefather — but it is not as if he sounded unocnvincing or something.

 

Jar Of Flies sold pretty well upon release, but, partly due to its shortness, partly due to its «aty­pical» portrayal of the band, has not managed to accumulate the same classic status as Facelift and Dirt. No surprise: in between the flashy and the subtle, we always tend to drift towards the flashy — at first, at least. But each and every fan of good music should check it out, not to men­tion that many people who cannot stand heavy brutal rock because of blood group incompatibi­lity will find Jar Of Flies a much more natural way to appreciate and enjoy the greatness of Alice in Chains. Thumbs up from every direction — what a brave, scary, talented band.

 

ALICE IN CHAINS (1995)

 

1) Grind; 2) Brush Away; 3) Sludge Factory; 4) Heaven Beside You; 5) Head Creeps; 6) Again; 7) Shame In You; 8) God Am; 9) So Close; 10) Nothin' Song; 11) Frogs; 12) Over Now.

 

Sometimes lovingly called Tripod by the fans due to its cheerful album cover, depicting a world-weary dog with three legs on the front cover. For that matter, there is also a man with three legs on the back, but most people prefer to pay attention to the dog — probably since the dog fits in so well with the overall mood of the record, whereas the three-legged man only adds confusion.

 

And that mood cannot even be called «depressing». «Depression», after all, is a sort of human condition, an emotional state that can be transmitted from one person to another or, in exceptional cases, transmutated into an art form. The songs on Alice In Chains, on the other hand, go way be­yond this, in that they are purged of emotion, kind of like the actors in a Robert Bresson movie had been purged of acting by their director. If Facelift and particularly Dirt represented the ago­nizing stage, the victim lashing and thrashing in meaningless, but terrifying, fury, Tripod is the paralysis stage — there is still some occasional limb twitching, but mostly the victim just stares into space with beady eyes, hardly capable of caring about anything any longer.

 

Genre-wise, the record has frequently been categorized as a form of «sludge metal», an associa­tion that is hard to bypass considering that one of the songs is even called 'Sludge Factory'. I am nowhere near close to being an expert on sludge metal, but certainly Tripod bears only a superfi­cial resemblance to the likes of Eyehategod and their brethren, due to Cantrell trading in the me­tallic crunch of his essentially pop riffs for a more complex, less accessible mix of crackling, noi­sy rhythm tracks and downer vibratos. But the proverbial sludge metal I have heard, ranging from truly impressive to utterly corny, makes you want to thrash, break, and kill (in the best of cases — the very jerks who are playing it). Tripod, however, makes you want to be thrashed, broken, and killed, and the sooner the better.

 

I cannot bring myself to memorize most of the songs, even though some are quite long ('Sludge Factory' clocks in at 7:12, and 'Frogs' overdoes it by one more minute). Yet I cannot forget the overall effect. In terms of absolute heaviness, these melodies do not manage to beat Dirt; but the length, and the «droning» effect of most of them, can wreck the listener's nerves far quicker. And if the songs proper do not do their job well, the extended codas will quickly mop up whatever tra­ces of life are still preserved. The creepiest of these is the doom-drenched ending of 'Frogs', re­plete with calm, creepy, ad-libbed delirium from Staley: '...off the wall I scraped... you... I gotta wake... it comes this way... to drown this ache... hate... never gonna fuck with me again... man's own clean slate... don't fuck with me again... makes your eyes dilate... makes you shake...'

 

Actually, Layne does not even sing all that much; most of the time he just recites the lyrics, and when he does sing, he usually goes for the simplest notes and patterns, or sings in unison with Cantrell. But it is not as if he were disinvolved: on the contrary, he wrote most of the lyrics, and plays just as central a part on the record as before. He simply plays himself — the Layne Staley of this record is probably very much like the real Layne Staley who was, at the same time, enter­ing the last phase of his living nightmare. Even the few songs where he tries to raise his voice, such as the powerful 'Again', it is like witnessing the helpless anger of somebody bound hand and foot, unable to make a single movement and simply going crazy in the head.

 

Few people will want to listen to this record frequently. To be able to use it as background music, one would have to be an experienced neurosurgeon, and as for concentrated listening, once is enough to understand its power and significance, twice is enough to prove to yourself that your nervous system is working fine, but thrice will be pushing it. It does have a few «breathers» pla­ced in strategic points. The ballad 'Heaven Beside You', continuing the softer line of Cantrell's art as seen before on Jar Of Flies, is beautiful, and the album does not close with the death rattle of 'Frogs', but rather with the light, catchy pop-rock of 'Over Now', with Staley offering a half-hear­ted consolation to the listener: 'Yeah, it's over now, but I can breathe somehow... Guess it's over now, but I seem alive somehow'. Not for long, Layne, not for long.

 

Tripod does not, and should not, exist on its own; it is a fitting conclusion for the trilogy that began with the battle between life and death on Facelift, continued with death triumphant on Dirt, and now suitably ends with a detailed gloating over the coffins. But each part of the trilogy per­formed its duties as best as it could, and even if Tripod is not the most alluring part of it — how could it even hope to be? — it is the perfect conclusion, and the heart of the listener can grieve over it with the same passion with which the brain is able to rejoice at its marvelous conception and execution. Thumbs up, no question about it.

 

UNPLUGGED (1996)

 

1) Nutshell; 2) Brother; 3) No Excuses; 4) Sludge Factory; 5) Down In A Hole; 6) Angry Chair; 7) Rooster; 8) Got Me Wrong; 9) Heaven Beside You; 10) Would; 11) Frogs; 12) Over Now; 13) Killer Is Me.

 

The popular music scene presents you with plenty of opportunities to hear and watch dead people perform, but Alice In Chains' Unplugged probably takes the cake. It is a recording worth owning, but it does not produce nearly as strong an impression without the image of Layne Staley's blood-shot eyes blankly staring into space. Emotions still run wild deep within him, and his voice is as powerful at expressing them as before, but he has no ability whatsoever to display them visually, singing from within a sealed sarcophagus. That, my friends, is truly scary.

 

It is not too clear why the band agreed to do the MTV ritual in the first place. They held no tour to support Tripod — Layne was clearly indisposed — and the idea was probably that if Nirvana could have gotten away with something like that, why not Alice? Particularly since the band was no foe to acoustic music, having already released two almost completely acoustic EPs. They do, in fact, play two songs from Sap and two from Jar Of Flies — but then it would have been bo­ring and predictable had they simply decided to stick to their original acoustic material, so they try to be more creative by rearranging some heavy numbers as well.

 

It all works. The songs may lose their crunch, but not a single one loses its point. One could guess the sludge metal of Tripod would be impossible to reforge in a distortion-free manner — one would be wrong, because 'Sludge Factory' and 'Frogs' trudge along with the same sense of doom (the only problem with the former is that Layne forgets some of the lyrics and they have to end it about three minutes too early), just not as heavy on the ear. Which, by the way, makes Unplug­ged the perfect choice to introduce Alice In Chains to people with zero tolerance for heavy me­tal — not sure if it is possible to make them perform the transition to Dirt from then on, but it is at least one more opportunity to spread the word about the genius of this band.

 

The centerpoint, both chronologically and metaphorically, is, I think, the inspired performance of 'Rooster'. For the most part, they stay away from their most aggressive rockers — no 'Them Bones' or 'We Die Young' or 'Godsmack'; 'Rooster' is the closest they get to their standard heights of fury, and Layne's opening 'Ain't found a way to kill me yet...' tingles my spine every time I hear it. There goes something big and pretentious, something formally non-related to the singer's problems, but if we did not have the correct information that the song was written about Jerry Cantrell's dad's Vietnam experience, would there be a single chance of us not associating it with Layne's own plight? In fact, even now that we have the information, does it not sound like it is all about Staley? 'Seems every path leads me to nowhere'? Vietnam my ass. Watch the video, look at this guy taking it. There's death in his voice, death in his eyes — his own death. It's terrifying, and yet there is something diabolically seductive about all this. Maybe no one would like to go like Layne Staley — decomposing from overdosing — but quite a few people would subconsciously want to be like Layne Staley on that stage, hypnotically drilling the lines of 'Rooster' into the ears of a (sometimes visibly shaken) audience.

 

Correcting the balance a little, let us not forget that Staley is not the only stage presence. Cantrell plays excellent guitar throughout, with the additional help of second guitarist Scott Olson, and Mike Inez lays down strong basslines as well as injects a little humor in the proceedings: the video shows the inscription 'Friends Don't Let Friends Get Friends Haircuts' on his bass, most pro­bably an amicable stab at Metallica, and he also plays the intro to 'Enter Sandman' at one point — for no particular reason.

 

This may not be essential Alice In Chains listening, but its importance is not merely historical (as in, «the last Alice In Chains album with Staley still alive», etc.); it builds up their acoustic legacy and it gives you the band on a more intimate level, which, in the light of Staley's condition, turns into a strange twist on a spiritual séance. A deranged thumbs up.

 

BLACK GIVES WAY TO BLUE (2009)

 

1) All Secrets Known; 2) Check My Brain; 3) Last Of My Kind; 4) Your Decision; 5) A Looking In View; 6) When The Sun Rose Again; 7) Acid Bubble; 8) Lesson Learned; 9) Take Her Out; 10) Private Hell; 11) Black Gives Way To Blue.

 

Staley's tragic, but more or less predictable drug-related demise in 2002 seemed to have sealed Alice In Chains' future. Not that they really needed one: with Tripod, they had pretty much said all they had to say — and, besides, Layne had already been properly dead ever since that album's release, as can be easily seen on the video for Unplugged. Accordingly, Cantrell, still very much alive and musically active, concentrated on his own solo career. For a while.

 

A few years after Layne's death, however, it somehow turned out that the remaining band mem­bers sort of missed each other, and this led to a series of reunion concerts with various friends in­vited as temporary lead vocalists. One of these turned out to be William DuVall, singer and gui­tarist of Comes With The Fall, a minor hard rock outfit from Atlanta — and, seeing as how he was able to invoke Staley's spirit better than the rest, one thing led to another, until, at the tail end of the decade, the reformed band unexpectedly found itself in the studio releasing new material under the name of Alice of Chains.

 

Formally, I suppose, they have a right to do that. After all, Cantrell was not only one of the foun­ding members, but he wrote ninety percent of the music and a good share of the lyrics, not to mention being responsible for most of the band's musical evolution. So, if Black Gives Way To Blue does not sound anything like Dirt or Tripod, this does not imply that the first thing to do is run to the office and change the name. Besides, it does sound closer to Dirt than Sgt. Pepper sounds to Please Please Me.

 

But we all have our rights, don't we? They have a right to keep calling themselves Alice In Chains — and I have a right to proclaim that this album is a pile of dreck. Add to this your, the reader's, right to follow this up by saying that I am an idiot that should go back to his Barry Manilow collection, and we have all done a great job of asserting our individual freedom and making the world a happy, progressive place.

 

In all honesty, Black Gives Way To Blue is a fine, subtle title, but I'd rather prefer it didn't. The band does do everything possible to ensure that the record is not simply an exercise in nostalgia, nor is it a commercial trap or a dishonest cash-in on the respectable band name. The music is bru­tally heavy; from a technical point — heavier than Dirt, and undoubtedly much louder. If seen from that point of view, progression is obvious. Yet the musical structures themselves are unfo­cused, going for atmosphere rather than original melodicity. Where Jerry comes up with a really good riff, he rams it into the ground for about five or six minutes, until you start breathing it out like tobacco smoke; and where the songs are shorter, he usually does not come up with a really good riff, no matter how hard I try to convince myself that he does.

 

I think we need not go much further than the first track to have this understood. The three chords that open the song, you are going to hear a lot of them — they do not go away until the song clocks in at 4:42, and, although there is more stuff happening melodically in between, the back­bone of the performance is more boring than any single Alice In Chains song from the band's glory days. A fine way to start your new album where you are going to have something to prove!

 

If Tripod could be, with reservations, pigeonholed as «sludge metal», Black Gives Way To Blue is probably closer to «stoner rock» — hypnotic, mid-tempo songs that roll along in a loud, aggre­ssive musical haze, all deep heavy drones and wave-like power chords. That's all right, as long as the haze has a face, that is, can be distinguished from a million other similar hazes. But somehow, somewhere, Cantrell just seems to have lost it. There are occasional flashes of the old genius, but most of them have to do with punch rather than atmosphere: for instance, at 2:43 into 'Acid Bubble', when that chugging, crushing riff emerges from under the rubble and gives you a serious jolt — only to disappear back into the rubble a few seconds later.

 

The greatest, most active disappointment, however, one that I believe may be trigerring the rest of them, is the singing. To put it bluntly, there is no singing on the record. None whatsoever. None of the songs are instrumentals, and yet it would perhaps have been better, had they all been instru­mentals. Lead vocals are handled mainly by Cantrell himself, sometimes singing in unison with DuVall, but they just have zero presence. Zero. They hit the notes, get across their boring, insigni­ficant lyrical points, and disappear with no emotional response at all. What are they sin­ging about? Pain? Hatred? Disillusionment? Desperation? I have no idea, nor do I strive to get one. I only wonder if this all happens because they are so overshadowed by the loudness of the guitars — or if they intentionally hide behind that loudness to mask this emotional hollowness.

 

Maybe it differs on different songs. For 'Check My Brain', for instance, Cantrell manages to in­vent a killer riff, probably the best on the album, trickily warped and bent so as to disorient and confuse the mind, yet utterly and immediately memorable. It is a riff that deserves a great vocal melody to go along with it, but do they have one? Nope, it's as if they have not even looked for it. That is most definitely not how it used to be. On the other hand, nothing could have saved a song like 'Private Hell', the very definition of generic, formulaic grunge where loudness is pretty much the only thing that matters. We've all lived through this a thousand times already — why go on wasting our time?

 

Personally, I propose that Jerry Cantrell (a) say goodbye to this DuVall guy — no hard feelings, but the two do not really need each other; (b) go back to his solo career and, if possible, forget about things like distortion and volume, because if there are any tunes on here that have given me honest, simple pleasure, it is the bits of acoustic material: 'When The Sun Rose Again' and the title track (with no less than Elton John guest-starring on piano!) are touching melancholic bits in the vein of Jerry's «lighter» tunes on Jar Of Flies. Even the folk-rocker 'Your Decision', plumper and more saturated with instrumentation, packs the right atmosphere into the right container.

 

This is ground for optimism — Cantrell has not really run out of ideas, he has merely enslaved them under the supervision of the overall concept, namely, that this new band somehow has to live up to its old fame. The day he understands that he is, in fact, not obliged to prove anything, is the day when we will really see a nice true follow-up to the original Alice In Chains legacy. This record, unfortunately, is just a misguided dud. It's heavy all right, but so was Jon Brower Min­noch, and I am afraid the album will have an even shorter lifespan than he did. Thumbs down, except for the acoustic songs and that killer riff from 'Check My Brain'. Steal it, someone!

 

THE DEVIL PUT DINOSAURS HERE (2013)

 

1) Hollow; 2) Pretty Done; 3) Stone; 4) Voices; 5) The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here; 6) Lab Monkey; 7) Low Ceiling; 8) Breath On A Window; 9) Scalpel; 10) Phantom Limb; 11) Hung On A Hook; 12) Choke.

 

Well, so much for naïve optimism. Maybe if more critics were more critical, and more fanatics less fanatical, Cantrell would take heed and correct the formalistic mistake of the band's last al­bum — as it happens, not only is nothing corrected, but everything is worsened to the point of nauseating. Where Black Gives Way To Blue was a misstep, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here is an unfunny joke. It might have been a modestly funny joke, if it weren't so goddamn long, but at over sixty minutes, the whole damn thing is just excruciating.

 

You see, once upon a time, there was a star-struck alliance between two people — a searcher and a sufferer. The searcher was totally sincere and dedicated in his search for new types of sounds, acoustic and electric; the sufferer was equally sincere about his suffering and had a knack for credibly conveying that suffering to the people around him. The alliance produced some of the finest music of the 1990s, still every bit as impressive and resonating today, if not more so. Then the sufferer finally had his suffering cut short, and with this, it's almost as if the searcher totally lost the stimulus for continuing with his search. Honestly, the closest analogy to this situation that comes to mind is The Doors continuing without Jim Morrison. Remember Other Voices? No? Good. Most likely, you won't be remembering The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here in a couple yea... uh, weeks from now on, either.

 

There are twelve new songs on this album, running for about five-six minutes on the average. Each of the songs features a brand new Jerry Cantrell riff, usually one of the grumbly, distorted, lower-than-low ones. Each of the songs is sung by lead singer William DuVall, very frequently in dual harmony with Cantrell (actually, I think Cantrell may have some lead parts as well, but at this point, their singing tones are almost impossible to tell apart). Each of the songs sets the exact same «brooding» mood — very dark, very unhappy, very misanthropic. And not a single song has got a distinct personality of its own. The whole damn package could just as well have been computer-generated. Brutal intro, stiff verse, stiff chorus, repeat, solo, long repetitive outro, next. Sixty minutes on, when the music is finally over, you feel like you have just emerged from under a pile of rock sediments. Hopefully, the sun is shining.

 

Now none of this would be quite as painful if it weren't for two facts. First, this «give the people what they want» principle has completely ruined Cantrell as a riff-writer. Every once in a while, through a happy accident, he is still able to fall upon an auspicious note/tone combination — like the riff of ʽStoneʼ, where there is a strategically placed Iommi-style bend that gives the whole thing a «giant-from-under-the-mountain» feel. But most of the time, we have to tolerate meaning­less strings of heavy notes that are neither emotionally loaded nor technically complex (ʽPhantom Limbʼ, ʽPretty Doneʼ, title track, you name it). If you feel like disagreeing, just put this back to back with ʽRain When I Dieʼ or ʽRoosterʼ to remind yourself how low the once mighty has fallen. And the reason? Simple enough, I think — the man goes to work with the set goal of «writing yet another Alice In Chains song». The most assured way to ruin potentially good art. Just ask The Rolling Stones for confirmation.

 

Second — sorry, but this DuVall person is a complete sham. The man sings every bit of this material as if he were a pre-programmed robot. Layne may have been a somewhat «typical» sin­ger for the grunge era, but he actually sang like a human being. A permanently depressed human being, sure, but still one capable of emotional range, quiet, loud, brooding, angry, sentimental, offensive, whatever. The vocals on this album are totally blurry. Just some random guy mum­bling «dark» stuff, sometimes raising or lowering his voice when the algorithm tells him to. No personality whatsoever. We may be happy for him that he doesn't do drugs (well, at least I think he doesn't), but he pretty much relates to Staley like an authentic Gucci bag or something like that relates to a cheap counterfeit. I feel really baffled when reading anonymous Internet assessments like: «...William DuVall's vocals don't necessarily deliver the same sort of pained, shuddering punch that Staley's were able to give, but he continues to prove himself as a worthy successor as the band's new singer...» ...what? And who the heck needs this self-conscious attempt to synthe­size another Alice In Chains album without the «pained, shuddering punch»? I want the «pained, shuddering punch», goddammit. If you cannot deliver — get the hell out of here.

 

Or, alternately, deliver some­thing else and don't call yourself Alice In Chains. Because, frankly, if we forget all about the prehistory of this particular band, The Devil has even fewer reasons to exist. When twelve draggy, overlong, gray-toned, poorly-riffed, emotionally monotonous com­positions irritate your senses instead of penetrating them, nor is there a single bit of innovative thinking anywhere in sight, just droning sludge for the sake of being sludgy, what in the world could motivate you to defend this music other than nostalgic fandom? All right, if Cantrell ma­nages to make a profit on this sludge, I'm happy for him — for his immense contribution to the world of music, he deserves everything he can get — but that does not make the record any less of a cheap rip-off. There's just too much of a «big lie» aura around it — they make this «formally depressing» music without actually feeling depressed. A fake, phoney album, and it makes me sad that quite a few people still ended up mistaking it for the real thing. Out of love and respect for «classic era» Alice In Chains, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here gets as low a thumbs down as it can possibly get, and here's hoping the guys just stick to touring from now on.

 

ADDENDA:

 

LIVE (1990-1996; 2000)

1) Bleed The Freak; 2) Queen Of The Rodeo; 3) Angry Chair; 4) Man In The Box; 5) Love, Hate, Love; 6) Rooster; 7) Would?; 8) Junkhead; 9) Dirt; 10) Them Bones; 11) God Am; 12) Again; 13) A Little Bitter; 14) Dam That River.

During the long waiting period that followed Tripod — the period when Columbia Records ex­pected Layne Staley to pull himself together, yet he pulled a fast one on them and pulled himself apart instead — slaves were put to the hard task of searching the vaults for more Alice In Chains stuff to satisfy the presumably hungry public. Results consisted of a large boxset, Music Bank, which I do not give a special review because the content of previously unavailable material was quite low (and also for adhering to sinful compiling practices, such as including Dirt in its entire­ty but replacing the final recording of 'Junkhead' with a demo version so that the true fan would have to buy the album separately); and this live album, with recordings culled from a variety of shows, including five songs from their very last two gigs with Staley.

 

Unlike Music Bank, the live album is well worth your money if you love the band; it is nice, af­ter all, to have a proper document of their live show that is not Unplugged — it certainly feels weird to have one of the loudest and crunchiest bands of the decades represented exclusively through their acoustic out­put when it comes to live shows. Live corrects that problem; technically, its existence is a necessity.

 

Two things dampen the joy, though. First, the sound quality is very much so-so; not bootleg level, but something tells me these recordings were not originally intended for commercial release. Vo­cals are captured poorly, guitars are not properly separated from crowd noises, and drums can sometimes be very tinny. In comparison with the band's tight-as-hell production standards in the studio, Live almost feels... limp? Which brings us to the second problem: the songs were so per­fect in the first place — brutal, ass-kicking, and simultaneously polished to the highest level of catchiness and expressivity — that improving upon them in a live setting is virtually impossible. Face it: your guitar sound will be sloppier, your vocalist will imminently miss some notes, all the cool tricks you used in the studio to spice up the atmosphere will be irreproductible, and what do you get in return? The mystical, untappable live feel?..

 

Track-wise, there are only a couple minor surprises: one of the band's two contributions to the soundtrack of Last Action Hero, 'A Little Bitter' (decent, but unspectacular funk-rocker), and pro­bably the oddest song the band ever did but never released in a studio version: 'Queen Of The Rodeo', an explosive mix of country-rock and thrash metal (!) that sends up both genres as rough­ly as possible (particularly the former, with telling lines like 'I ain't no queer, go fuck a steer'). If you have to know what Alice In Chains' understanding of humour amounts to, you will have to get acquainted with the record.

 

As for the regular material, not a single song opens itself up from any unexpected sides; it is ge­nerally just a question of how well they can reproduce the power of the originals on stage. Props have to be given to Layne, who, despite all the reputed assholishness of his character, works real­ly hard to give the people what they want. But, let's admit it, he is still better in the studio. There is no improvisation, either, or surprising rearrangements of any of the songs — which is under­standable, since most of them are performed here within months or so of the studio release. All in all, Live is certainly truer to the true face of Alice In Chains than Unplugged ever hoped to be — yet, out of the two, Unplugged is certainly the more interesting project.

 

ANGRA

ANGELS CRY (1993)

 

1) Unfinished Allegro; 2) Carry On; 3) Time; 4) Angels Cry; 5) Stand Away; 6) Never Understand; 7) Wuthering Heights; 8) Streets Of Tomorrow; 9) Evil Warning; 10) Lasting Child.

 

Getting into symphonic metal is comparable to adopting a ferret: there is little doubt that it can be done, but what exactly is to be gained, except for a vague feel of self-importance, and wouldn't you be easier off with a pussycat? Likewise, we are cool when it comes to symphonic music, and we are hot when it comes to metal, but can we be sure that putting them together will not throw the temperature off balance, for good?

 

Brazilian band Angra were only one out of a thousand groups formed with the purpose of proving the worth of this synthesis — but they succeeded better than most, and came pretty close to ma­king «power metal» sound inspiring instead of ridiculous. At the very least, their debut album, Angels Cry, is a textbook example on how this thing should be done; I cannot imagine a power metal fan not being overwhelmed by its music, and, conversely, if you do not dig it, classically influenced heavy metal music will never be your spoonful of tea.

 

First, Angra's music is not emotionally heavy; no matter how fast, metallic, and crunchy their gui­tar riffs may seem, these guys are hopeless romantics, and it shows on every track. Their classical cues are taken from Beethoven rather than Bach or Wagner (spot the 9th Symphony echoes at the start of 'Evil Warning') — and what proper metal band would be bizarre enough to cover Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' on its debut album? Add to this the endless catchy power pop melo­dies in the chorus, and «metal» will only remain as the rhythmic guitar/bass backbone to the pro­ceedings. After all, the album's title is Angels Cry, not Demons Howl.

 

Second, at this stage — first and best in the band's career — the driving force is Andre Coelho Matos, who is responsible for more than half of the songwriting, for the band's keyboard sound, and for the singing. The guy's talents are not to be denied: he is a solid songwriter, an accompli­shed, if not virtuoso, pianist, and a highly competitive screamer with a good range. At the same time, he gets equally professional help from guitarist Raphael Bettencourt, supporting the occasi­onally corny lyrics (well, if you are such a straight-faced romantic, you have no choice but to tolerate that epithet) with complex ass-kicking riffs that dissolve wordy banality whenever the need arises. Finally, Bettencourt, with his classical training (he even has a degree in conducting), is perfectly complemented by the more rock-oriented Kiko Loureiro on second guitar. (Yes, they do know how to play all these things in Brazil.)

 

In short, all conditions are met for proving the validity of symphonic metal. Technically, the only complaint is that, on quite a few of these tracks, Matos' synthesizers sound somewhat cheap, and the songs could definitely benefit from some real strings rather than tinny imitations — but, I guess, due to budget limitations that was out of the question at the time. Another nagging prob­lem is that the songs tend to blend with each other; but this is really only a problem if you consi­der them from a «pop» perspective — in reality, Angels Cry is structured more like a true sym­phony, consisting of several different, but similar movements, and from that perspective, when 'Wuthering Heights' comes along, it does not so much bring in an element of refreshing diversity as oddly disrupts the general flow of the album. (Not to mention that there will always be some­thing ridiculous about the idea of a guy singing 'Heathcliff, it's me, Kathy!', regardless of how high his pitch manages to be).

 

And, what is that flow? Essentially, it is fifty-five minutes of energetic prayer to some sort of su­pernatural force (no specific presence of the Christian god, rather a vague shamanistic spiritual vibe instead that would be increased tenfold on the next album). Sometimes it speeds up, with Matos delivering as many baroque flourishes on his keyboards as the guitarists are offering speed metal solos (the album, by the way, is not a finger-flashing solo-fest: such passages are highly re­stricted); sometimes it slows down, with acoustic interludes and power ballad simulations; but it never bogs down in sleepy melancholia. By the time the last song comes along, the listener may be exhausted, not just from the heaviness (which, as I said, is only technical and superficial), but from the never-ending punchiness of it all, as in «don't these guys ever feel the need to relax for a small moment?» They do not — relax and you will lose the link to the Supernatural. Once you have started, you have to go all the way.

 

Catchy pop choruses grace speedfreak songs such as 'Carry On' and 'Evil Warning', as well as multipart cre­ations such as 'Streets Of Tomorrow' and the title track (which also gives you a little Paganini in the middle). But it is not the kind of choruses that one is likely to hum in the shower; in the general context of the album, they hide behind the puffed-up atmosphere. The atmosphere is worth describing and analyzing; the individual hooks are not.

 

It is hard for me to imagine people loving Angra's music to the point of tear-shedding; I cannot help but regard sympho­nic metal as a musical curio, entertaining and thought-provoking at best, pompous and moronic at worst. But Angels Cry is certainly one of the staunchest examples of «at best» I have ever wit­nessed from the genre. And if its romantically-spiritual aspect does not «get to» me, its kick-ass aspect most certainly does. Pure mathematical interest in how they go around constructing this vibe + sincere toe-tapping reaction = thumbs up.

 

HOLY LAND (1996)

 

1) Crossing; 2) Nothing To Say; 3) Silence And Distance; 4) Carolina IV; 5) Holy Land; 6) The Shaman; 7) Make Believe; 8) Z.I.T.O.; 9) Deep Blue; 10) Lullaby For Lucifer.

 

Angra's masterpiece — the album they are going to be remembered by if they are to be remem­bered at all — Holy Land is a conceptual creation, dedicated to the lives and fates of people in the Holy Land (which, for these Brazilian guys, has nothing to do with the one in the Torah) be­fore the latter became defiled by European invaders; think Neil Young's 'Cortez The Killer' ex­panded to the form of a symphonic metal opera.

 

Actually, my description is somewhat off, influenced by what is usually written about the album. Upon close inspection, it turns out that the record is not so much about the native people of Ame­rica as it is about the people arriving there — dealing with their own dreams, hopes, impressions and conclusions. This also explains why the Indian folk motives, whose incorporation into the record has been so much lauded by critics, are, in practice, limited to at most a couple songs, most notably the «tribal drumming» of 'Carolina IV': what else should one expect from an album about Europeans? After all, there is a reason why it does not begin with an Indian folk chant, but rather with a rearrangement of one of Palestrina's mass pieces ('Crossing' — quite likely, some­thing that a bunch of conquistadores may have actually been listening to on the eve of their jour­ney). It is not about Indians.

 

Nor is it about cruel, heartless, racist European guys slaughtering innocent, peaceful Children of Nature. That side of the business is altogether left alone. Instead, we have a dense musical land­scape trying to accompany, if not represent the mixed, bewildered feelings one experiences when clashing with a new, unpredictable, virginal world. This can be done in many different ways, and from an apriori position, I would think that power metal is hardly the best one. When you try to convey a complex, constantly shifting emotional state through speedy distorted guitars and a strong-throated guy per­manently screaming his lungs off, results are almost certainly bound to be catastrophic. Yet Holy Land somehow manages to make it.

 

On their own, the individual songs are decent; just as before, some of the riffs are memorable, some of the choruses are easy to sing along, and there is plenty of punch as the guitarists and the vocalist compete for your attention. But it is the concept that strings them together and brings a unifying meaning to the thrash patterns and ear-bursting wailing; the pathos and ecstasy are given a good reason, and the medieval and baroque classical influences are no longer there just because someone happened to like baroque music. A mystical journey, but grounded in reality, and justi­fied by well-handled musical planning.

 

The centerpiece is 'Carolina IV', a ten-minute epic illustrating the ships' majestic sailing through uncharted waters and their eventual arrival (or, perhaps, imaginary arrival; or, perhaps, no arrival, since there are also vague references to shipwreck throughout). In condensed form, it has it all: folk-influenced percussion beats, gorgeous dreamy vocal parts (the "So, won't you come with me my friend?.." bit is, as far as I can tell, the most beautiful moment in the band's entire catalog), the insane speed-metal part with catchy choruses, the keyboard-orchestral interlude, a finger-fla­shing solo that takes the dexterity of Iron Maiden for granted and proceeds to improve upon it, and a long pompous coda. One can hate each, or all, of these moments, but I feel a vision here — a brave, pretentious message from people who truly have something original to say.

 

In the overall context of the album, even songs that I would otherwise hate — the «power ballads» 'Make Believe' and 'Deep Blue' — play an integral part, and contribute to the overtly tra­gic feeling of it all. Why tragic? Because Matos leaves no space whatsoever for joy. There is fru­stration caused by a beautiful dream gone horrendously wrong ('Nothing To Say'); there is quiet amazement, mixed with fear and uncertainty, at realizing one's own role in changing history ('Ho­ly Land'); there is spiritual confusion brought on by an encounter with pagan religion ('The Sha­man') — but no joy. The closest thing to joy is the speed-rocker 'Z.I.T.O.', because the chorus says "Mother nature brings to me in fantastic purity everything I need... like a teenage discovery what's more delightful than this?", but coming as it does towards the end of the album, and loaded with hard-to-decipher ironic subtexts, it is not enough to shift the mood upwards.

 

In many ways, Holy Land is still a puzzle, which is terrific since there are few things more bor­ing and less adequate than «easily read» art-metal conceptual albums. It helps to swallow it toge­ther with its concept, but even if we knew nothing about the subject idea behind it, its somber tra­velog style could still come through. A perfectly constructed masterpiece of 1990s metal, and the only Angra album with the capacity of inflaming my usually metalproof heart — thumbs up by any possible account.

 

HOLY LIVE (1997)

 

1) Crossing; 2) Nothing To Say; 3) Z.I.T.O.; 4) Carolina IV; 5) Unfinished Allegro; 6) Carry On.

 

Live, recorded at some Paris venue in 1996 — easy to tell if you know enough French to at least under­stand Matos' exploding "BONSOIR PARIS!" in between tracks. His French is not entirely accent-free, by the way, but quite extraordinary for the average level of a foreign musical perfor­mer; if there is anything that may bug a sensitive ear, it is the arena-rock intonations of his stage banter that, in my opinion, do not fit the elegance of Angra's music. Yes, it is heavy, but it is still «progressive» rather than «party» music, and Angra's anthems do not need any additional goa­ding to drive the listeners crazy.

 

Other than that, Holy Live is an excellent snap of Angra at their peak, and a very fortunate one considering just how short that peak turned out to be. The songs are not at all different from their studio incarnations, but the band members still manage to insert just a wee touch of extra live po­wer that makes the experience individually worthwhile. Thus, they have no way of replicating all the complex percussion parts of the «tribal» part of 'Carolina IV', but they compensate for it by making the underlying guitar riffage more loud and crunchy (and hats off to Matos for carrying over the chill-sending effect of "So, won't you come with me my friend..." to perfection).

 

We can only regret that the album is so shamefully short — it is, in fact, in EP format, barely run­ning over 35 minutes, and, in all honesty, containing only four actual songs ('Crossing' and 'Un­finished Allegro' are intros rather than full-bodied independent entities). Apparently, there were certain technical difficulties in recording more material, and these precious shards are all we're left with (at least the sound quality is untouchable). The band would remedy this five years later, with Rebirth World Tour, but, alas, by that time its creative engine would already be spent.

 

FIREWORKS (1998)

 

1) Wings Of Reality; 2) Petrified Eyes; 3) Lisbon; 4) Metal Icarus; 5) Paradise; 6) Mystery Machine; 7) Fireworks; 8) Extreme Dream; 9) Gentle Change; 10) Speed; 11*) Rainy Nights.

 

Anyone who hears Fireworks directly after Holy Land is bound to be disappointed — it is quite clearly a regressive album, abandoning the conceptual and extraneous elements in favour of a more straightforward all-out metal attack. No one has ever been able to explain why this happen­ed: no sooner had these guys opened up the doors of power metal to outside influences than some mystical force made them step back inside and bar the gates once and for all. Why?..

 

Once the initial disappointment fades away, though, it becomes possible to set out a different per­spective. So Holy Land seemed progressive and, on the limited scale of heavy metal, revolutio­nary, but it was mainly because of occasional sprinklings of elements that we do not expect to meet in heavy metal — such as the «tribal pecussion» of 'Carolina IV' — not because this was some radically groundbreaking synthesis of hugely different styles. Take these occasional sprink­lings out, and the distance from Holy Land to Fireworks is easily crossed.

 

And Fireworks isn't a bad metal album. Yes, the band does feel a bit stalled and confused, but definitely not washed up, and not giving up on their artistic influences, either. The opening thun­der of 'Wings Of Reality' cannot compete with the memorability of 'Carry On', but its symphonic vibe, with a nod or two to Beethoven, is still believable, and capable of taking the listener to all the required heights. The anthemic chorus of 'Lisbon' ("Oh, skies are falling down...") possesses the quintessential Angra stateliness; the seven-minute epic 'Paradise' could have used a little trim­ming, but otherwise its evilly distorted guitars and Matos' ironic delivery make up for a delightful Alice Cooper-ish sendup of fake morality.

 

It is also fun to find out that the fastest song on the album is, in fact, called 'Speed', and that its ly­rics justify the use of speed of searching for enlightenment, because "faster than light we will find a way out of the conscience" — so now we know the precious secret of speed metal, and why these guys are so fond of it. Play fast enough, and, in time, this will get you places you've never even suspected of existing. Of course, in this particular case, the insanely velocious 'Speed' only gets you to the end of the record (is that irony?), but who knows what you're getting next time?

 

I do believe that Fireworks deserves a thumbs up on the rational plane, and may even become a metal favourite on repeated listens — although, unlike Holy Land, it is hard to recommend it to anyone suspicious of power metal. It is unfortunate that it became the swan song of the original band, ending their union in a downward rather than upward movement; but, in the end, it is sort of nice to know it exists, because it is not a total waste of effort.

 

REBIRTH (2001)

 

1) In Excelsis; 2) Nova Era; 3) Millennium Sun; 4) Acid Rain; 5) Heroes Of Sand; 6) Unholy Wars; 7) Rebirth; 8) Judgement Day; 9) Running Alone; 10) Visions Prelude.

 

Conflicts of egos suck, but where there are egos, eventually unavoidable. And it so turned out that the ego of frontman, vocalist, and keyboardist André Matos lost to the egos of guitar players Rafael Bittencourt and Kiko Loureiro. The rhythm section, apparently, sided with Matos, since they jumped ship together to form Shaaman; but three non-guitarists are a poor match for two guitarists, and the name of Angra remained with Rafael and Kiko.

 

Quickly recruiting a batch of new members — Felipe Andreoli on bass, Aquiles Priester on drums, and Eduardo Falaschi on vocals (whose principal prior claim to fame was that he almost became Iron Maiden's lead singer in 1994) — the mighty guitarists finally achieved their goal: transforming the once adventurous and experimental band into a thoroughly generic, stereotypical power metal outfit. Hooray for living by the rules.

 

As a generic power metal album, Rebirth would probably be decent enough if it did not call it­self Rebirth. Struck by the Three-Zeroes-Curse, the band decided that they were, in fact, among the chosen ones to whom God has personally entrusted the musical celebration of the upcoming new era; and thus, while there is no easily-defined «concept» to the album, its main vibe is a con­secrative one. Metal fans all over the world are invited to join Angra in a metal mass for the well-being of humanity. The basic idea is easily understood just by glancing at the song titles.

 

Usually, generic power metal consists of ripping off classical melodies, translating them into the language of metal guitars, and passing them for your own, only occasionally crediting the source in order for the average fan to accumulate some respect. Rebirth behaves suspiciously close to this model: 'Visions Prelude' is acknowledged to be «adapted from Chopin's Op. 24 in C minor» (actually, Chopin's Op. 24 is a set of mazurkas; what is meant is probably Prelude No. 20 in C minor, of the 24 Preludes), but God only knows how many of these other melodies have been pil­fered from Beethoven or Brahms or whatever lesser composer these guys must have studied. Re­gardless, some of these melodies might sound pleasant in a true symphonic arrangement — but set to an endless barrage of machine-gun chords and same-tone-using solo guitars, they make no impression whatsoever.

 

The new vocalist, unfortunately, fares even worse. Falaschi belongs to the old school of hard rock belters — his idols must have, at best, been Lou Gramm and Graham Bonnet, at worst, David Coverdale or Glenn Hughes. Or maybe not, but his vocal range and manner of using it falls in the same camp. Where Matos' shrill, thin, vulnerable, and at the same time loud and piercing delivery had lots of individual character, Falaschi is just big, fat, and flat. He does not particularly spoil the tunes he is assigned, but he could never hope to salvage a bad or mediocre tune by adding his own parts to it.

 

Predictably loud, thoroughly professional, inadequately pompous, Rebirth does not have one single song that I could write something useful about. If you like the simple waves of power me­tal, if you like them the same way that someone likes the vibes of classic symphonic music with­out being able to keep its themes in his head afterwards, Rebirth is for you. But if we insist that power metal, like any other metal or pop music in general, has its share of standouts and its share of flops, then Rebirth is, by all means, a flop. Thumbs down, says the brain; and I haven't even mentioned the lyrics — flatter than the flattest offerings from Matos. "New day shines, fallen an­gels will arise, Nova Era brings the ashes back to life; all over now, all the pain and awful lies, angels will arise back to life!" I am pretty sure I have even heard characters from Heroes Of Might And Magic speak lines with less clichéd wordings.

 

TEMPLE OF SHADOWS (2004)

 

1) Deus Le Volt!; 2) Spread Your Fire; 3) Angels And Demons; 4) Waiting Silence; 5) Wishing Well; 6) The Temple Of Hate; 7) The Shadow Hunter; 8) No Pain For The Dead; 9) Winds Of Destination; 10) Sprouts Of Time; 11) Mor­ning Star; 12) Late Redemption; 13) Gate XIII.

 

Sometimes the simple bigness of the banality can transcend its flaws and turn certified crap into dubitable art. Of course, it is hard to imagine that the Falaschi-led Angra ever understood its own production as certified crap — but not at all hard to hypothesize that they were not too satisfied with their Rebirth, and thought that, just like Holy Land, with its pretense and mighty sway, was able to blow away the mild results of Angels Cry, so would the «rebirth» only be complete with yet another pretentious, monumental concept album.

 

All I can say, however, is that the concept blows — completely — and, by blowing, places Tem­ple Of Shadows squarely into the group of medieval-crazed metal albums that continues to feed the genre's poor reputation. I will not waste space on a detailed description, easily attainable elsewhere; instead, here is just a list of key­words. Spot the odd one out.

 

Crusades. Crusaders. Catholic Church. Atrocities. Genocide. Jerusalem. The Dead Sea. The Tem­ple of Solomon. Lost scrolls of wisdom. Jews. Muslims. Tits. Past, present, and future. Body and soul. Redemption. The Morning Star (not the newspaper). The Angel of Death.

 

The protagonist, notably, is called «The Shadow Hunter», which, along with all the references to the Temple of Solomon, seriously makes me wonder whether someone in the Angra camp had been previously indulging in Gabriel Knight 3: Blood Of The Sacred, Blood Of The Damned. But, regardless of whether this is just a coincidence, for me as a listener the concept goes nowhere, because, in order to figure out if it goes anywhere, I'd have to spend time analyzing it, and I have lots of better things to do.

 

As for the music, again, it is probably okay as far as generic power metal goes. They inject a little diversity — apart from the obligatory classical influences, there is some flamenco guitar (e. g. on 'Sprouts Of Time') and some mainstreamish balladeering ('Wishing Well'). There is plenty of the expected violent thrashing, and quite a few multi-part epics. But never once could I get rid of the feeling that all of this has been made on order. The fans want loud guitars, screeching singers, pathos, fist-pumping, mystical medieval imagery, and long songs that create the illusion of seri­ous art. That is exactly what they get. You a fan? You'll love this. I prefer to replay my Gabriel Knight — at least that experience allows for immersion, whereas the gates of Temple Of Sha­dows do not even give a hint of the possibility of opening. Thumbs (yawn) down.

 

AURORA CONSURGENS (2006)

 

1) The Course Of Nature; 2) The Voice Commanding You; 4) Ego Painted Grey; 5) Breaking Ties; 6) Salvation Sui­cide; 7) Window To Nowhere; 8) So Near So Far; 9) Passing By; 10) Scream Your Heart Out; 11) Abandoned Fate; 12*) Out Of This World.

 

One encouraging thing about all those Angra albums is that the further they go, the more esoteric subjects they choose for the underlying concept — right to the point that it becomes far more in­teresting and productive to talk about the genesis of those albums than it is to actually talk about the music they contain.

 

Aurora Consurgens, in particular, draws its title from a late Medieval alchemical treatise, pre­served in the form of an illuminated manuscript with all sorts of bizarre, proto-Bosch, pre-proto-psychedelic watercolour miniatures. But it goes somewhat beyond the predictable obsession that metal bands have with mystical medieval subjects — here, the middleman between the treatise and the album is Carl Jung, one of whose interests was finding the relations between alchemy and psychology; among other things, he used the imagery of Aurora to explore the «dreams : mental states» connection. And it is really Herr Jung to whom the album owes its existence, rather than the «pseudo-Aquinas» responsible for the original writing.

 

I have to admit the boys pulled a sly one on us here: without sacrificing the medievalistic candy-wrapper (album title and sleeve), they still managed to put out a record whose lyrics and general atmosphere cannot at all be called «laughable». The cliché-ridden, chaotic, fantasy-land concept of Temple Of Shadows does not really invite the jaded listener to scrutinize its inner depths; in the case of Aurora, however, I was at least intrigued enough to take a look at the lyrics — and, what do you know, they are quite tolerable.

 

As is much of the music, actually. Third album in a row shows this band will never surpass the level of Holy Land (unless a miracle brings Matos back), but, regardless, there is at least an ever so slight increase in the quality of brutal riffs on the rocking numbers and vocal hooks on the po­wer ballads. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that they are exploring more under­standable and more relatable topics: as exciting as it may have been to record a whole album about the mysterious «Shadow Hunter», did Falaschi, Loureiro, and Bittencourt actually feel their character, or was he just another cardboard figurine? But here, on 'Salvation Suicide', as they sing about a real guy contemplating this particular measure as a possible solution to all his problems, they definitely hit closer to home.

 

Some fans view Aurora as some sort of a minor sell-out after the stark conceptuality of Temple, quoting, among other things, a «softer» approach — there are, overall, more ballads and acoustic parts — and little things like the sudden outburst of completely non-metallic flamenco in the middle of 'So Near So Far'. I would view this, instead, as signs of hope, showing that the band at least give some thought, occasionally, to the idea of overthrowing the formula, even if, at this point, it has enslaved them on Ancient Rome level. This is still a thumbs down; but at least it is an album whose initial premise may prompt the non-hardcore metal fan to give it a second listen, and who knows what may happen then. Plus, I now know something about Aurora Consurgens — so far be it from me to say that Angra have no educational value. Do check out those minia­tures, by the way; Frank Miller sure got nothing on them.

 

AQUA (2010)

 

1) Viderunt Te Aquae; 2) Arising Thunder; 3) Awake From Darkness; 4) Lease Of Life; 5) The Rage Of The Waters; 6) Spirit Of The Air; 7) Hollow; 8) A Monster In Her Eyes; 9) Weakness Of A Man; 10) Ashes; 11*) Lease Of Life (remixed version).

 

Hmm. Either I am finally getting used to this, or Aqua is an improvement over the band's last trio of power slabs — or, at least, reflects some changes that appeal to me, the non-power-metalhead who, nevertheless, has managed to enjoy large parts of the record.

 

So let us see what's new and what's old. The fact that Angra have adopted the Asia-style gimmick of naming their albums is new (unless you disregard the word Consurgens from their previous offering) — but certainly not encouraging. More encouraging is having their old drummer, Ricar­do Confessori, make his prodigal son return after his co-project with Matos, Shaaman, had pretty much burnt down to the ground.

 

But the absolute best thing that has happened to this band on an objective scale is, I think, their saying goodbye to Dennis Ward, the producer behind all of their 2001-2006 output. Why? Just make yourself a random playlist from these three albums, throw in Aqua, and admire the diffe­rence. In comparison, the old sound is simply awful. The drums are drowned in hiss, the guitar riffs glue the notes together in a noisy roar, and the singer is almost reduced to the painful task of outshouting both. For Aqua, the band, instead of the hotly credited Ward, turned to lesser names (I have no idea who Branden Duffy and Adriano Daga are) and co-produced themselves — and the result is their best sound in ages, maybe ever (even Holy Land had its production problems, which were, of course, compensated by the amazing quality of the material).

 

Case in point: 'Arising Thunder', which bursts out of your speakers much like the title suggests, with a magnificent, juicy guitar sound in which the heavy rhythm work never overshadows the finger-flashing melodic scale playing, the insanely fast drums feel refreshingly humanoid, and Fa­laschi's pompous singing feels like singing, not shouting. It kicks ass, it's melodic, it's complex, and it never for once ruins the ears — what more is there to ask?

 

So the band, conceptually, is still deeply mired in their mystical shit. This particular concept is centered around — three guesses! — water and its, uh, general influence on the life of man. Not in the issue of sewer maintenance, of course, but rather the way it is hinted at in Shakespeare's Tempest, which, so we are told, forms the loose (very loose) basis of the album. Simply put, Aqua tells you that Water Is Important — in more ways than you normally imagine it to be. If you got that, we can now move on to the music.

 

Much of which is fine, although I still cannot always tell whether it is merely due to a combina­tion of their refined production and my improved imagination, or if the band really sat down with a firm decision to write a bunch of better power metal tunes than usual. But I'll be damned if that opening one-two punch of 'Arising Thunder' and 'Awake From Darkness' is not recognized as the band's killing-est consecutive blast since the good old days of 'Nothing To Say'. Even when, mid­way through 'Awake', they cut out the metal and indulge in a brief piano-and-strings mid-section, it feels like an interesting gesture rather than a conventional gimmick. And I even get a chance to be amazed at some particular riffs — such as the awesome descending bumble-bee thing that cuts in around 2:32 into the song.

 

Third good song in a row, the piano epic 'Lease Of Life' threatens to become a rotten power ballad from time to time, but never capitalizes on that promise — instead, they just bring in den­ser layers of sound, such as dreamy female background vocals, diversify it with a rocking mid-section, and, overall, go for a more progressive stance of things than cheap-operatic. It works! Not on any tear-jerking level, of course, but there is a feel of overall solidity that never goes away.

 

For sure, once you get past the mid-album mark, they cannot help but start repeating themselves — the same speed-metal and prog-metal elements cast in only slightly changing ways. But with this crystal clear production and refined sense of taste, this is not a big problem. Even Falaschi's singing is not such a big bother: he is, after all, merely respecting the genre's conventions, and it is always easy to pass him by and just concentrate on the guitar melodies, or even on the monster rhythm section if you feel more like it.

 

As tempting as it would be to end this on a «Welcome back, Angra!» note, I would still refrain from too much excitement. For one thing, this constant insistance on Big Concept Statements is not a wise thing — it just keeps on interfering with concentrating on writing the riffs. For another thing, if the band's sound depends so much on the guy behind the mixing controls, it puts them in­to a state of constant jeopardy. For a third thing, it's frickin' power metal — Wagner for the 21st Century Lunk­head Man. Nevertheless, my internal lunkhead is still influential enough to lobby out a secure thumbs up for Aqua. Is yours influential enough to join in the fun?

 

SECRET GARDEN (2014)

 

1) Newborn Me; 2) Black Hearted Soul; 3) Final Light; 4) Storm Of Emotions; 5) Violet Sky; 6) Secret Garden; 7) Upper Levels; 8) Crushing Room; 9) Perfect Symmetry; 10) Silent Call.

 

Another four years, another «Angra» album, and again, the only remaining original members are the guitar duo of Loureiro and Bettencourt, and now they have even gone as far as to change the lead vocalist again — instead of Edu Falaschi, welcome Fabio Lione, a native of the fair town of Pisa who now shares lead vocalist duties in no less than three different prog-metal bands, in­cluding the Italian outfits Rhapsody Of Fire and Vision Divine, though, of course, Angra must be his biggest gambit so far. The guy must be in serious demand — frankly, however, I do not notice any crucial difference between his and Falaschi's singing. His pitch is a little shriller and higher, perhaps bringing the style a bit closer to the original Matos «lyricism», but do not take this as a nostalgic sing — Secret Garden ain't no Holy Land and never will be.

 

Instead, it continues the modest revival of Aqua, drifting a bit closer to «symphonic» and «progressive» metal, as is evident by the band's choice of producer (Jens Bogren, who has previously worked with everyone from Opeth to Symphony X) and additional guest vocalists. Excellent production values, inspired playing, serious care for melody and harmony, an emphasis on sheer power, as every second riff strives to imitate a minor earthquake — technically, Secret Garden is beyond reproach. Substan­tially, I have long since given up on Angra's possibility to amaze and delight anyone outside the regular heavy metal legion of fans, but as long as they keep up this level of energy and this high quality of sound, it will not make any sense whatsoever to condemn this music.

 

Once again, it seems as if there exists some sort of concept here — perhaps having to do with «the other world» and the passing from one plane of existence into the other, judging by the song titles and some of the lyrics — but do not waste your time trying to ascertain the details, it's not as if Bittencourt, who wrote most of the songs, could really enlighten you in this respect with any fascinating new insights. (The bonus track on some of the editions, by the way, is the band's cover of ʽSynchronicity IIʼ, which sort of upholds this idea of different worlds). More important is the fact that the heavy metal core of the album is now heavily interspersed with everything from flamenco to dark folk to progressive balladry (the title track, written by Finnish keyboardist Maria Ilmoniemi, is here sung by guest vocalist Simone Simons, normally with Dutch symph-metal band Epica — and it is sort of pretty, actually).

 

There is a jazzy touch every now and then, too — for instance, ʽUpper Levelsʼ starts out with some heavily busy basslines and scattered piano improvisations, before eventually gorging itself on these sounds so as to grow up into another power metal outing, and then, midway through, some of the guitar solos are played in a decidedly «fusion» manner, invoking memories of John McLaughlin and Allan Holdsworth more than any regular power metal stylistics. In brief, when Loureiro said that the new album «would be different», he wasn't merely bullshitting us like they all tend to do — they are really trying to explore different side alleys, though without losing the classic Angra flavor, of course.

 

I give the album a thumbs up without any second thoughts. Angra's attempts at scaring the day­lights out of us with horrific sonic pictures (ʽCrushing Roomʼ, with Doro Pesch of Warlock featured as yet another guest star) or at inspiring me with optimistic power choruses (ʽStorm Of Emotionsʼ) do not work too well, relying as they do on well-tested musical methods, but they are handled with enough restraint, technicality, and respectable work ethics that even at its worst, Secret Garden may be tolerated, and at its best, shows that the pool of power metal ideas, even if you can now clearly see all the way to the bottom, is not yet com­pletely exhausted. Well, something like that. Big thank you to producer Jens Bogren, too, for bringing out the best in these guys' guitar sound.

 

 

ANI DIFRANCO

ANI DIFRANCO (1990)

 

1) Both Hands; 2) Talk To Me Now; 3) The Slant; 4) Work Your Way Out; 5) Dog Coffee; 6) Lost Woman Song; 7) Pale Purple; 8) Rush Hour; 9) Fire Door; 10) The Story; 11) Every Angle; 12) Out Of Habit; 13) Letting The Tele­phone Ring.

 

Ani DiFranco is a poet. This is not surprising: few people in the state of New York aren't. It would be far more surprising if she were a stunningly original poet, a lyrical innovator capable of turning the entire decade upside down. At least, normally, when you release an entire album of original songs, heavy on the lyrics and light on instrumentation — nothing but her and her acou­stic guitar all the way through — you'd have to be stunningly original if you wished for one rea­son for such an album to be remembered one month after being released.

 

However, there is nothing stunningly original about Ani DiFranco's poetry. It is a fairly expecta­ble product of its times: an unpresuming offshoot of the beat genre that, at its best, adds little to the legacy of Suzanne Vega (which, in itself, was no gold mine) and, at its worst, is just... well, bad poetry. Most of the songs are about relationships, delivered from the obvious viewpoint — «the fact that I am a woman does not mean my inner world is in any way poorer than yours» — and dedicated to offering as many different proofs of this single fact as possible. Which means that reading the lyrics is sort of fun for the first song, sort of disappointing for the second song, sort of irritating for the third song, and sort of completely pointless from then on.

 

Which is entirely unrelated, by the way, to the fact that you do meet interesting concatenations of lexemes from time to time, such as 'I opened the fire door to four lips, none of which were mine', or 'Perpetrating counter-culture she is walking through the park', or 'It's not important to be defined, it's only important to use your time well' — here is a fine line for high school students to use as an epigraph for their generic essays — or 'I wonder what you look like under your T-shirt'... uh, okay, forget that last one. Although Ani's army of fans will probably rally with much more fer­vor around the doctrinal lines, such as 'I'm not going to sacrifice my freedom of choice' (about her abortion, of course) or 'When I'm approached in a dark alley, I don't lift my skirt' ('Talk To Me Now', the album's feminist anthem par excellence).

 

Nevertheless, if all there was to Ani DiFranco's debut record, self-released on her aptly titled «Righteous Babe» label, was mediocre poetry and by-the-book feminism, I would hardly bother to write about it. The real reason to listen to her records, even fully acoustic like this one, is the music. The songs, as «songs» in a traditional sense, do not really exist — they are bits of poetry that she does not so much sing as recite — but they are set to truly brilliant playing. This is not pop and not blues and not folk, but rather a weird, unpredictable amalgam of all kinds of styles, showing off a mindset unhampered by formulae, barriers, or conventions.

 

Well, probably the two big forces behind this are free-form jazz and dark folk, with a heavy pen­chant for staccato (to communicate the idea of this woman's «toughness», I guess), but, since they are both tamed into forming a light, rhythmic background for her recitals, they never come across as self-conscious genre exercises. Everything flows sort of naturally and unpretentiously, despite the use of «pretentious chords». And much of this is gracile and beautiful, like the thin, vulne­rable line that drives 'Talk To Me Now' (in strange contrast to the anthemic lyrics), or the nervous, ominous picking of 'Lost Woman Song'. Come to think of it, these two songs represent the two main patterns: light, pretty, nonchalant ('Pale Purple', 'Fire Door', 'Every Angle', 'Out Of Habit') and dark, paranoid, depressing ('Work Your Way Out', 'Letting The Telephone Ring'). But the actual melodies are different enough to count all these entities as different songs, and the overall result is so pleasing to the ear that it does not take long before you simply forget that the words she pronounces are supposed to make sense and just get carried away by the song waves. If you are into all that singer-songwriting-acoustic-playing shit at all, of course.

 

The only track that has to be pulped into oblivion is 'The Slant' — a recital that has no music at all. It is encountered at a very wrong moment, just as the ear settles down into the appropriate mo­de of converting the human voice into a musical instrument with all the semantics stripped away, yet 'The Slant' demands to get the semantics back, and, unless you are a fan of «serious modern poetry» in general and DiFranco's in particular, I would recommend throwing it out of the playlist at the insistence of The Committee To Prevent Unhealthy Disruption Effects. If you are a fan, of course, this one's for you, and, moreover, you are likely to get twice as much spiritu­al ecstasy from listening to Ani DiFranco as I am. Besides, I guess it's not such bad poetry, after all. Maybe it is just the lack of six-syllable words that bugs me. Thumbs up for the music, any­way.

 

NOT SO SOFT (1991)

 

1) Anticipate; 2) Rockabye; 3) She Says; 4) Make Me Stay; 5) On Every Corner; 6) Small World; 7) Not So Soft; 8) Roll With It; 9) Itch; 10) Gratitude; 11) The Whole Night; 12) The Next Big Thing; 13) Brief Bus Stop; 14) Looking For The Holes.

 

Perhaps this is just my problem, but, for as long as I can remember, I have always felt a strong alergy towards those brands of art that place agenda and propaganda above the force and style of artistic expression. (Growing up in the Soviet Union did not exactly help relieve that alergy, too). There is nothing inherently wrong about the mere presence of agenda in one's art, because, well, if you strongly believe in something, you'd have to be a superhuman not to share those beliefs with non-believers in your art. But if the agenda starts overwhelming you, you're in trouble.

 

Not So Soft is different from Ani DiFranco in two crucial respects. First: the music, at least the way I seem to discern it, is generally simpler, folkier, and more predictable than it used to be. Se­cond: the lyrics are about five or six times as socially charged as we heard them last time. On Ani DiFranco, the artist concocted hypnotizing sonic waves, occasionally stuffing them with thin slices of «fight-for-your-right» that performed their job on an almost subconscious level. Not So Soft is totally true to its title: the stuffing has burst through the skin and corrupted the sonic wa­ves to the point where I, for one, cannot possibly enjoy them at all.

 

Some day, when all of humanity has reached some sort of advanced, StarTrek-ian conscience le­vel, people will look back at this and wonder what it was all about. «So», they will say, «this wo­man wanted men to treat her like a human being instead of a sexual object. So she liked to insist upon her right to freedom of creative expression. So she dropped direct hints about there being nothing wrong whatsoever about being bisexual. So why not just put up a memorial plaque on the street where she lived, and go listen to some Ted Nugent instead? Hey, at least that guy kicked some solid ass back in those days! And he was FUNNY, too!»

 

I totally solidarize with Ani's feelings, and admit that the songs on Not So Soft work pretty damn good as ballsy feminist propaganda. The words cut, the voice bursts out of the chest, the guitar strings twist, ring and creak as if they were needles driven with full force under the fingernails of the lady's male adversaries. For instance, on 'Itch', she squeezes the line 'I am scratching at my con­sciousness like a bitch with fleas' from between her teeth as if she were a bitch with fleas, and the admirable touch of imitating real scratching with a little percussion effect as she chants the refrain 'Yours was the hardest itch to relieve' throws even more fuel on the fire.

 

But why must I discuss this stuff, and what should I say? «Uh, yeah, nice work asserting that bi­sexuality on 'The Whole Night' — quite a slap in the face of them bigots and chauvinists». I am far more worried about the fact that the music behind this only exists to give her a rhythmic back­ground, nothing else. In fact, there is only one song here that I would consider «musically intere­sting» — 'Anticipate', boldly rolling along on a strong bluesy loop. The rest are, at best, retreads of chord structures already explored the previous year, and, at worst, a waste of finger tissue.

 

Oh, it is true, as William Ruhlmann of the All-Music Guide reminds us, that some things are new, like the (overdubbed) vocal harmonies on some choruses and «the occasional bit of percussion» (wow, that is some musical growth). He also says that Ani «plays her guitar more fluidly»; I am not sure what this means, but «fluidly» is a nice word, and, evidently, a serious artist is supposed to be playing his/her guitar more and more «fluidly» with each new album, at least until he/she has finally jumped the shark and lost the ability to receive more than two stars from the All-Mu­sic Guide. Maybe, in this particular case, «fluidly» is supposed to mean that she makes much less use of the stop-and-start broken structure that was so frequent on Ani DiFranco, and does not rely as heavily on her nervous, jagged, staccato style. Well, goddammit, I liked that style. Most of the songs on here sound like boring folk demos instead.

 

That's just me, and just my thumbs down, of course. Perhaps it is simply the sudden outgrowth of the FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT schtick that got me down and hid Ani's true musical advances from my ears. But it is also not excluded that, for some people, it is exactly that schtick that counts as a true musical advance. I don't know about that. Next thing you know, she's a great musician be­cause she got a tattoo on her breastplate. That's gotta count for something, too, right?

 

IMPERFECTLY (1992)

 

1) What If No One's Watching; 2) Fixing Her Hair; 3) In Or Out; 4) Every State Line; 5) Circle Of Light; 6) If It Isn't Her; 7) Good, Bad, Ugly; 8) I'm No Heroine; 9) Coming Up; 10) Make Them Apologize; 11) The Waiting Song; 12) Served Faithfully; 13) Imperfectly.

 

She has done it this time. Third time around, here is an album that is completely and absolute­ly impossible to discuss in terms of any other subjects but lyrics. Technically, the sound is a little fuller here, due to the addition of occasional bass and percussion ('Make Them Apologize'), occasional mandolin ('Fixing Her Hair'), occasional backing harmonies, even mock-operatic ones ('I'm No Heroine'), and even occasional jazz trombone ('Circle Of Light'), but the extra touches never ever take the central attention from her vocals and acoustic guitar anyway, so no reason to think of them as indicative of some major style shift.

 

Meanwhile, the melodies, once again, do not stand up to the freshness and innovative punch of the self-titled debut: the formula gets old pretty fast. And so, all that's left is just stand there and think — do these songs reflect creative and intellectual growth, or do they simply reflect the ideo­logy of «don't-stop-'til-you-drop»? Do they continue to teach us new brands of ethical considera­tions or is it merely the same old song and dance? Is this woman a constantly expanding genius or just a predictable feminist hack?

 

Frankly, I do not have the time or desire to find it out with this kind of material. I have tried one possible shortcut — make an attempt at locating the album's centerpiece and try to inject it seve­ral times in a row. That centerpiece, supposedly located in the center (where else?), to me, seems to be 'I'm No Heroine', where the lady makes a hardly predictable twist by trying to make us be­lieve she is not really as tough as we want to imagine her: "You think I'm usually wearing the pants just 'cause I rarely wear a dress... you think I stand so firm, you think I sit so high on my trusty steed, let me tell you — I'm usually face down on the ground when there's a stampede; I'm no heroine, at least, not last time I checked, I'm too easy to roll over, I'm too easy to wreck..."

 

Nice try, Ms. DiFranco, but no dice. If you are no heroine indeed, show us, for once, your truly vulne­rable side. Or, actually, «for once» would be no good, because everyone can fake somebody else pretty successfully at least once in their life; preferably, I'd like to have both sides of the sto­ry living side by side on each record. But if you really are "too easy to wreck", how come for the rest of the album you are mostly singing about how you and your sisters should get on with your anti-male crusades ('Make Them Apologize'), or how the system only cares about your ass ('The Waiting Song'), or about girl-girl and girl-boy relations in which you never, ever back down (al­most everything else)?

 

It is this weird, disconcerting paradox — 'I'm heroically fighting to defend my right to be no hero' — so typical of so many liberal artistic statements, that is initially frustrating, later annoying, and, in the end, merely curious as a culturally dependent psychological trend, but not really translating so much to great art as it is to post-Freudian study material. These are intelligent lyrics, sung in a refined and, for what it's worth, perfectly sincere manner, but she is an unconscious slave of a particular paradigm, an agenda that is no less limiting than «sex and drugs and rock'n'roll». What else can I say about a record the most memorable thing about which is supposed to be the lethal voltage of a "fuck you very much" sung acappella ('Every State Line')? Just count me shocked to death, then, and unable to twirl my thumbs in any direction. (Although, for the record, I never ever put the question "baby, do you like to fool around" to anyone; and if neither have you, Mr. Average Male Reader, you will, most likely, be a piss-poor conductor for this kind of electricity).

 

PUDDLE DIVE (1993)

 

1) Names And Dates And Times; 2) Anyday; 3) 4th Of July; 4) Willing To Fight; 5) Egos Like Hairdos; 6) Back Around; 7) Blood In The Boardroom; 8) Born A Lion; 9) My IQ; 10) Used To You; 11) Pick Yer Nose; 12) God's Country.

 

Perfectly Imperfectly Vol. 2: same approach to melody, same approach to using words as bullets, looking more and more like they are coming off one and the same endless ammunition belt, same approach to arrangements — mostly acoustic, with a bit of this and a bit of that to keep down the boredom factor. Granted, the bits are numerous: she expands her acceptance of outside help, and the songs are now continuously embellished by violins ('4th Of July'), harmonicas ('Egos Like Hairdos', 'God's Country'), and bluesy pianos ('Back Around').

 

As far as I am concerned, however, Puddle Dive is Ani's lowest point at this stage in her career. Embellishments are fine, but she had pushed the formula as far as it could go already on her first album, and this is yet another retread, with nary a single song that would make a really fresh im­pression. Not a single account of the album that I have seen focuses on the music; the writers have little choice but to accept her channelling them into discussing her lyrical provocations, e. g. «wow, she sings about menstruation, not once, but twice!» She also sings about the freedom to pick one's nose (I'm a born nose-picker, myself, so I'm with her on that one, too), and, oh, yes, about the freedom to pick as many male (or female) partners as she wants, which is, by and large, the exact same thing, I guess.

 

There is also a lot of singing about life on the road and, consequently, about the inevitability of change and flash-in-the-pan impressions, and this all fits in well with the herky-jerky mood she creates by ripping into her guitar, but, unfortunately, it does not detract from the feeling that all of these songs were written just as herky-jerkily, on the spur of the moment, sometimes on a rather silly spur (e. g. the lullaby-style "na-na-na" chorus of 'Egos'). If you can catch that wave, or if you like songs about menstrual blood, or if you love her lambasting of the IQ test ("they taught me dif­ferent is wrong") in one of her spoken-word pieces, or if you simply cannot get enough of rou­sing feminist/human rights anthems and need a new one each morning at breakfast, Puddle Dive will satisfy; but the way I see this chronological stretch, it was a genuine puddle dive, and she would only start recovering on the next album. Thumbs down.

 

OUT OF RANGE (1994)

 

1) Buildings And Bridges; 2) Out Of Range (acoustic); 3) Letter To A John; 4) Hell Yeah; 5) How Have You Been; 6) Overlap; 7) Face Up And Sing; 8) Failing Is Like This; 9) Out Of Range (electric); 10) You Had Time; 11) If He Tries Anything; 12) Diner.

 

I did not notice any new lyrical subjects of any significance on this record; this would mean that either there are none indeed or that one needs to be a professional Francoist to prove this wrong. However, on the musical plane Out Of Range is a little more diversified than Puddle Dive, brin­ging back occasional rhythm sections, occasional brass and accordeon, occasional piano, and, first time ever, even an electric guitar arrangement — on the title track, which was deemed im­por­tant enough to state its point twice, acoustic first, electric later.

 

Since we get to compare, it is funny how the electric track is, expectedly, punchier than the acou­stic one, but how it also downplays Ani's technique — the fast-picked notes, very distinct and ed­gy and evocative (think tiny little brain impulses flashing on and off) at the unplugged stage, all mingle together in one jangly blur when amplified, pretty much throwing the listener's attention off the melody altogether. Which does not mean that the electric version is superfluous or cheap — it has its own goals of an anthemic nature.

 

On a couple of tracks, she goes for a smokier, jazzier atmosphere ('How Have You Been', 'Diner'), and it works out fine; her playing and singing styles are, after all, very much jazz in nature, and mixing them with suitable arrangements is quite stylish. But the backbone of the album is still acoustic balladeering, which is, at this point, really only for the dedicated Francoist; there is no­thing I have to say about these songs that do not move me in the least because each one is so god­damn predictable.

 

Oh, I said there are no new lyrical subjects — actually, I was a little off there, because, with 'Di­ner', I think that Ani has written her first song in which she has actually confessed to — get this — liking a human being of the opposite sex. In her own inimitable way, of course ("I think you're the least fucked up person I've ever met, and that may be as close to the real thing as I'm ever go­nna get"), and with her usually bleeding honest — a.k.a. «physiologically obsessed» — style of complimenting ("I miss listening to you in the bathroom, flushing the toilet, blowing your nose"), but still, a positive reference to a son of Adam that almost made me see some hope for myself at the end of the tunnel. Then the song ended on the cheerful note of "Is that a dick in your pocket or are you trying to record me?", and the ray of light was gone. But still, it was nice while it lasted.

 

It seems like the «classic» number from the record is 'Buildings And Bridges', most frequently played in concert and making it to compilations. It does sound, along with the title track, like it is making a grand sweeping statement, but the message is absolutely the same as in 'I'm No Heroine': "What doesn't bend, breaks". Well... if it is all about bending, where is the big MTV video hit, Ms. DiFranco? Rings as hollow to me as everything else on the same subject. When you build your­self up to this tough self-assertive personality status, no one is going to believe in your vulnera­bility. Just have your pie and be done with it. Thumbs down, except for the funky-jazzy stuff, which suffices to beat Puddle Dive, but is too scarce to «bend» the impression nevertheless.

 

NOT A PRETTY GIRL (1995)

 

1) Worthy; 2) Tip Toe; 3) Cradle And All; 4) Shy; 5) Sorry I Am; 6) Light Of Some Kind; 7) Not A Pretty Girl; 8) The Million You Never Made; 8) Hour Follows Hour; 9) 32 Flavors; 10) Asking Too Much; 11) This Bouquet; 12) Crime For Crime; 13) Coming Up.

 

Let us remark, in passing, that Not A Pretty Girl was DiFranco's sixth album in six years. Those were not the 1960s, and extremely few artists would dare to keep their productivity at such a level and for a good reason: fresh musical ideas were much harder to come by. No better proof for this than a cursory look at Ani's conveyor belt: one or two significantly attractive songs per album, surrounded by a sea of regurgitated ideas whose only strong point is the spiritual voltage with which they are delivered. Is that a real bonus, though? A chunk of snot launched from one's nos­dril with bullet speed hardly paints a more exciting picture than the same chunk stuck to your coat sleeve. (A brutal metaphor, I admit, but well in touch with Ani's own lyrical style. Read 'Tip Toe' and your breakfast will make its reappearance much faster).

 

This time, she is back to the minimalistic idiom again: herself, her acoustic, and a lonesome Andy Stochansky on percussion (sometimes). It is not as bad as it sounds; at least, this way our chances of hearing her inimitable playing style are realized far more frequently — except that, of course, by 1995 her inimitable playing style was as much yesterday's news as her image. But approach Not A Pretty Girl from a newcomer's point of view and you will find as much joy in it as the wea­thered follower used to find in Ani DiFranco.

 

 It is extremely easy to miss an important turn here, though: the album is genuinely less geared to­wards her usual agenda than its title would suggest. In fact, to provide a good impression, it only really needs to discard two obligatorily ugly pieces of shit stuck in the middle of the record — the title track, a collection of bland banalities for the braindead segment of the feminist crowd ("I am a patriot, I have been fighting the good fight" and all that crap), and the immediately following 'The Million You Never Made', another empty rant at the ghosts of the record industry ("I wou­l­dn't work for you no matter what you paid, but I could be the million that you never made" — gee, no wonder the big bosses at UMG and EMI have been losing so much sleep these last fifteen years. What's illegal downloading next to the total catastrophe of being unable to sign up Ani DiFranco?).

 

But on most of the other songs she seems to intentionally step away from her preferred subjects — "I am a strong (shit fuck piss) sexless citizen of the world" and "I am an emotionally im­balanced (cunt dick tits) human who needs as much love, care, and respect as any strong (shit fuck piss) sexless citizen of the world" — and broaden the range by singing about... well, by sim­ply floating on the wind and let her own brand of impressionism carry her away. Some of the ly­rics might even need decoding, and some may not mean much, or anything, at all; for Ani, this is as huge a level of progress as she could ever aspire to.

 

On 'Sorry I Am', she simply sings a moderately pretty song of apology to a deserted lover. Yes, we can finish the picture in our minds and understand that this is the kind of song that a man usu­ally addresses to a woman ("I guess I never loved you quite as well as the way you loved me"), so, in reversing the roles, DiFranco still creates a vehicle for her social ideology, but the big diffe­rence is, she does not say this — you can imply it, but the song itself is no more a boring repre­sentative of «acute feminist position» than, say, 'Go Your Own Way' is a philosophical justifica­tion of shameless male chauvinism. It is just a pretty sad confessional lost love song, albeit not a very good one (not a surprise, because there are no very good ones altogether).

 

'Cradle And All' is the most uppity creation on here, fast and bouncy in a free-ride, freedom-ob­sessed Greenwich Village way, using the bleak old lullaby as a setup for telling tales of swinging from one place and relation to another with no backthoughts. The point, if there is one, is once again implied rather than spelt out letter by letter. The technically demanding 'Light Of Some Kind', with its dry, choking guitar scrape seems to be Ani making some sort of excuse to her boy­friend for not hiding her bisexuality — well, at least she openly admits that some things make some people uncomfortable, which is refreshing.

 

Overall, Not A Pretty Girl just makes a damn good job at presenting the lady's human side — not a perfect job, because a perfect job would require at least a lobotomy, but sufficient to make one relax and listen to this as a piece of music rather than sit at one's desk with a textbook on third-wave feminism and seek out all the links and paraphrases. My only problem with the album is that she must have thought up all the melodies the day before walking into the studio. So, it is thought-provoking music rather than just thought-provoking, but most of the provoked thoughts were awful anyway. Thumbs down.

 

DILATE (1996)

 

1) Untouchable Face; 2) Outta Me Onto You; 3) Superhero; 4) Dilate; 5) Amazing Grace; 6) Napoleon; 7) Shame­less; 8) Done Wrong; 9) Going Down; 10) Adam And Eve; 11) Joyful Girl.

 

Dilate put Ani on the mainstream charts, the low-to-mid ranges of which she has never left since, but just how much of her own merit went into this is debatable; the main reason for this increa­sed popularity is, I believe, that she simply fell in with the wave of interest towards the «Angry Young Female Singer-Songwriter» crowds popularized by Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill just a few months before Dilate hit the stores. In fact, quite a few people have gone on record comparing Ani's confessional blurts on here with Alanis' style — "isn't it ironic" (to quote Alanis herself), considering that DiFranco had been doing that schtick for half a decade already?

 

It helps that Dilate, again, returns to a fuller sound, with Ani herself handling electric guitar du­ties, and also adding bass, synthesizers, and organs where she sees fit. This makes her 'Napoleon' sound a little bit Neil Young-ish (the dry guitar crackle is not unlike the one that sets up the mood for 'Down By The River'), and her 'Going Down' a little bit psychedelic — the lyrics may suggest that it is merely a song about being dumped by yet another male chauvinist pig, but the carefully measured effects do really create an aura of slowly descending into a bottomless shaft, and the more you listen to it, the more you are prone to creeping yourself out.

 

So, either it is the reentrance of variegated arrangements, or there are some real improvements on the melody side (with Ani, it is always hard to tell), but, in my view, Dilate brings back some confidence in her use as an artist, much as this view is opposite to those that think DiFranco is al­ways at her best when it's just her, her guitar, and the latest version of her agenda. Her interpreta­tion of 'Amazing Grace', contrasting the actual singing with somebody reciting the verses in a dull, disinterested manner over the phone, is fresh and thought-provoking, despite being horrendously drawn out (not even the President of the United States could stand seven minutes of it, let alone the mere mortals). Her singing on 'Done Wrong' nears beautiful. And her trademark "fuck you" on 'Untouchable Face' must have taken quite a bit of polishing during rehearsals — it perfectly cap­tures the presupposition of «I used to be patient with you, but even the strongest kind of pa­tience has its limits, so I have no choice but to take a shortcut here» that one witnesses quite of­ten in movies, but, for some strange reason, almost never in music.

 

To make things even brighter, Dilate heavily cuts down both on anthemic statements and shock­ing verbal imagery — certainly not because she is selling out to the Alanis Morissette crowd (for that matter, Jagged Little Pill was all about anthemic statements and ugly impressions), but be­cause she is... growing up? Note that, with the understandable exception of 'Amazing Grace', each song on the album has a «YOU», and that «YOU» is mostly in the singular; as much as I feel un­comfortable about spying on other people's relationships, I'd rather prefer to be let in on these se­crets of the soul than listen to yet another not-a-pretty-girl kind of rallying. Besides, these respon­seless dialogs become less and less annoying with each new album — and the lyrics for some­thing like 'Adam And Eve' are downright complex and open for quite a variety of interpretations, e. g. such lines as "I just happen to like apples / And I am not afraid of snakes" put a new twist on the Genesis morals that is well worth considering.

 

As per custom, from about one third to one half of the album is fillerish, but if we «stoop to her level», like the anti-hero of 'Adam And Eve', the fresh, interesting part still guarantees a thumbs up. Serious critics may, and will, sneer at the general public that only opened its eyes to DiFranco after having been goaded by the inferior presence of Alanis, but at least Dilate proudly deserves each and every one of its 480,000 sold copies, which I could hardly say about Pill's 33 million.

 

LIVING IN CLIP (1997)

 

1) Whatever; 2) Wherever; 3) Gravel; 4) Shy; 5) Joyful Girl; 6) Hide And Seek; 7) Napoleon; 8) I’m No Heroine; 9) Amazing Grace; 10) Anticipate; 11) Tiptoe; 12) Sorry I Am; 13) The Diner/The Slant; 14) 32 Flavors; 15) Out Of Range; 16) Untouchable Face; 17) Shameless; 18) Distracted; 19) Adam And Eve; 20) Firedoor; 21) Both Hands; 22) Out Of Habit; 23) Every State Line; 24) Not So Soft; 25) Travel Tips; 26) Wrong With Me; 27) In Or Out; 28) We’re All Gonna Blow; 29) Letter To A John; 30) Overlap.

 

Ani’s prolific nature easily spreads over to the live setting: she has a never-ending «Official Boot­leg» series second in scope only to Pearl Jam (and third only to the Grateful Dead) — artistic commitment at its most maddening for completists. Non-completists, though, will most likely only want one sample of the lady’s stage creativity, and Living In Clip, essentially a 1990-96 career retrospective masking as a live 2-CD set, will do nicely.

 

Despite the unsettling length of this thing, its selection of songs, going heavy on recent material from Dilate but not really ignoring any of her other albums, is a great reminder of the fact that Ani DiFranco is, in fact, an accomplished songwriter (not to mention a fabulous picker) — one that she has an ugly knack of making us forget through massive overproduction. And since she honestly works her ass off in concert, playing with the same level of complexity that she shows in the studio, this passes off quite easily for a legit best-of compilation.

 

Most of the tracks feature her flexible power trio — herself, percussionist extraordinaire Andy Stochansky and Sara Lee on bass; ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Both Hands’, however, get unexpected symphonic arrangements from the Buffalo Philharmonic (which sort of happened to turn up at the right time in the right place) that work brilliantly in the case of the former, which gets a sort of Ravel-style bravado sheen, and not so brilliantly in the case of the latter, which gets a sort of En­nio Morricone-style heroic intro and outro for no particular reason.

 

Discussing all the subtle changes that are supposed to justify separate ownership of the album would make me look like an Ani fan, so let us skip directly to the nasty part. There is almost ab­solutely nothing seriously wrong with the record bar one thing: the banter. Stage banter is an art (at least when you bother to include it on live albums), and Ani is, honestly, one of the clumsiest banterers that ever ventured out under the spotlight. Simply put, her «stage persona», to me at least, sounds exaggerated and artificial. All over the place, she drops tons of giggling, silly jokes and puns, life-on-the-road anecdotes and casual blabbering with Stochansky — stuff that would sound totally okay when shared with a bunch of friends at a local barbecue, but is extremely con­trived during a live show. I know, it is supposed to signify Friendship With The Audience, but these people in the audience are not her friends, and it all gives off some strange effect, as if she were saying, «hey I’m as human as all you guys out there, so I’ll laugh till you drop and tell jokes till you cry because how else are you gonna believe it?»

 

In short, it would have been far more effective if she’d bothered to insert her «humor» in the actual songs rather than in between them; as it is, this occasional transformation into Jerry Sein­feld’s sis­ter only detracts from the power of her strongest numbers. Fortunately, some of the lon­ger bits are segregated into separate tracks (‘Travel Tips’, etc.) that can be easily programmed out. With that little bit of personal alteration behind us, Living In Clip is another easy thumbs up for the lady, and an excellent, definitive full-stop to the first part of her career. Bring on the next one.

 

LITTLE PLASTIC CASTLE (1998)

 

1) Little Plastic Castles; 2) Fuel; 3) Gravel; 4) As Is; 5) Two Little Girls; 6) Deep Dish; 7) Loom; 8) Pixie; 9) Swan Dive; 10) Glass House; 11) Independence Day; 12) Pulse.

 

Welcome to the world of soft jazz. It is almost frightening how consistently mellow this album is — almost bordering on «adult contemporary» in a few spots, and completely jettisoning the in­die-rock flourishes of Dilate as if they never existed. Maybe she was feeling «trapped» in that ae­sthetics, or perhaps everything is much simpler: a couple friendly drinks at the bar with a few lo­cal jazz musicians and presto, all of a sudden your affection for the trombone has grown three hundred percent overnight.

 

Regardless, for Ani's level, this is her «easy listening» album. Unfortunately, in the light of her modest songwriting talents, it translates as «possessing very little staying power». Dilate was go­od when it was flashing out its sharp edges, song after song; Plastic Castle patiently smoothes out all these edges until the whole environment becomes thoroughly child-safe — and unpala­table to those with more capricious tastes.

 

The album's major piece is, of course, 'Pulse'. Starts off as a tender, caring ballad (one of those rare displays of pure human emotion untainted by feminist reasoning), then, several minutes later, becomes a late-night jazz jam / lullaby with guest star Jon Hassell contributing a lengthy trom­bone solo. The music sits firmly three feet away from the line that separates «pretty» from «gor­geous», but there is a modestly introspective quality about it that would immediately brand any­one who'd try to dismiss the whole thing with the seal of cynicism. Technically, Ani's band does a great job on the piece, so much so that they almost threaten to turn her into but one of the essen­tial components of the whole thing. (Not that I would mind).

 

As for the actual songs — there is the faraway nastiness of the acoustic riff on 'Pixie', and the zy­deco flourishes on the title track are pleasant when they arrive to drag this ballad out of its lan­guishing mediocrity, and the studio version of 'Gravel' is as sharply staccato-driven as the live version; but, of course, her Grammy Award nomination came for 'Glass House', the album's ful­lest-sounding song and also one of the blandest, a generic indie-rock angst number. (Guess it was at least loud enough for the Grammy people to notice). Really, what's to discuss? This is just Ani, a little calmer than usual. But still coming up with the regular verbal bliss: "May their souls rest easy now that lynching has been frowned upon / And we've moved to the electric chair".

 

Feel free to give it a thumbs up if you are one of those late-night wine-glass candle-light soft-porn types, with 'Pulse' right up your alley, of if you are one of those types who think that guitar distor­tion is nothing but pretentious uglification and that the sax-and-brushes thing is really where it's at. From my own point of view, I'd rather abstain.

 

UP UP UP UP UP UP (1999)

 

1) 'Tis Of Thee; 2) Virtue; 3) Come Away From It; 4) Jukebox; 5) Angel Food; 6) Angry Any More; 7) Everest; 8) Up Up Up Up Up Up; 9) Know Now Then; 10) Trickle Down; 11) Hat Shaped Hat.

 

"I'm not angry any more", she says, "we learn like the trees how to bend". The song, 'Angry Any More', is a fairly important piece — if it is not tricking us, then it allows us to take a peek at whe­re all of the aggression and suffering come from. (Freud, of course, would have a field day). But even more significantly, it has to be taken as a sort of manifesto, that the uncontrolled angst and rage have been gotten over and from now on we are going to see intelligence tempering hot emo­tions instead of being yoked by them. At least, that's what we are promised; it would be unreaso­nable to expect someone like Ani to keep those promises, though.

 

Musically, this is not much different from Little Plastic Castle: partly soft acoustic stuff, partly quiet jazz stuff that veers between lounge and avantgarde without bothering to spell out the dif­ference in a distinct way. The soft acoustic stuff is predictably elegant, sometimes begging to be nominated for the category of "cathartic", like 'Everest', a delicate midnight waltz with DiFranco's guitar and new band member Jason Mercer's bass swaying round each other like old-fashioned dance partners — but the overall sound is a bit too stifled and, at the same time, too roughly un­derproduced to really qualify as a masterpiece.

 

And pretty much the same words apply to everything else. My fond feeling for the album is not because of jaw-dropping melodies or terrific playing, but because it drives us into unexpectedly sadder territory — many of the songs sound like laments that, indeed, contain no anger, but only pure sorrow and a touch of bitterness. Eight minutes of 'Come Away From It' may seem way too much on paper, but they have a point: it is eight minutes of begging that, in effect, symbolize eight hundred, eight thousand, eight million minutes of begging, as much as it takes to get the point of your begging across. What is she begging for, though? "What makes you so lavish that you can afford to spend every sober moment feeling angry and bored?... Are you trying to tell me this world just isn't beautiful enough?.." One could say that the song's antagonist is Ani herself — the Ani of Not So Soft and Not A Pretty Girl — rather than some unnamed lover that we hones­tly don't give two shits about.

 

With each new album, the percentage of enigmatic songs is steadily increasing — I don't know if this can be interpreted as squeezing out the Buffalonian and soaking in the New Yorker, but it de­finitely makes it harder and harder to dismiss the tunes as simplistic and generic. The soft dark growl of 'Angel Food', for instance, with its funky waves and out-of-nowhere aboriginal hunt calls and its pre-post-beatnik lyrics, is a purely impressionistic matter. So is 'Know Now Then', whose lyrics vaguely refer to some other sort of girl-girl relationship but whose «astral jazz» tex­tures almost might suggest the relationship is taking place on Mars. And Mars is actually referred to during the thirteen minutes of 'Hat-Shaped Hat', a whacky funky jam decidedly about nothing — actually, the weakest spot on the record, because Ani's outfit does not possess true jam power, and this time around, there are no atmospheric currents to hold the listener's attention, so if this is not a «space-padder» par excellence, I do not know what is.

 

Oh, I would really have liked to give the record a thumbs up, but now that I remember the album title, it seems impossible to do so — it would feel like I were being manipulated into the rating. On the other hand, the converse rating would also be wrong; as much as tracks like 'Hat-Shaped Hat' suggest that the lady should try getting into needlework, and as much as I miss her awesome guitar chops that are, for the most part, concealed either due to an outgrowth of modesty or an outgrowth of blisters, they are not enough to neutralize the honestly good moments of the record. Partly point­less, partly pretty, and we harbor enough liberal guilt to let it go with a word of kindness.

 

TO THE TEETH (1999)

 

1) To The Teeth; 2) Soft Shoulder; 3) Wish I May; 4) Freakshow; 5) Going Once; 6) Hello Birmingham; 7) Back Back Back; 8) Swing; 9) Carry You Around; 10) Cloud Blood; 11) The Arrivals Gate; 12) Providence; 13) I Know This Bar.

 

God, this is horrible. One certainly does not expect an intelligent folk-rock masterpiece from an album that is the artist's second-within-the-year to overflow the sixty-minute mark (actually, this one runs over seventy), but a few decent numbers here and there from someone of DiFranco's ca­liber could still be welcome.

 

Instead, To The Teeth gives us seventy minutes of plodding, insanely boring, unimaginably un­derwritten mid-tempo rhythms that sound like they were conceived in a disfocused, debilitated cannabis haze. I would venture a guess that no one but the deepest, dangerous, society-threa­tening fanatic, whose wildest dre­am is to open a tattoo parlor next to Ani DiFranco's place of residence, could willingly listen to this more than one time.

 

For one thing, not a single of these songs should be legally allowed to run more than three minu­tes, yet many of them cross the six or seven minute mark as if each aspired to be a frickin' 'Deso­lation Row' or something. In a few cases, this could be understood if she were intent on driving her little backing jazz-funk band into jam mode; but whoever these guys are and whatever their talents may be, they are strictly prohibited from displaying band. It could also be pardoned had she remembered how to play those cool choppy rhythms like she used to when she had no band at all; but there is not a single song all across these seventy minutes on which the guitar playing would rise above rudimentary (at least, by her own standards).

 

Then there are the politics. She returns to the battleground fully armed — «to the teeth», indeed — and, from the first minutes, engages in a ghost battle with shadows of MTV, NBC, CBS, NRA and tells us to «open fire on each weapon manufacturer while he's giving head to some republi­can senator». Apparently, the song — and, most likely, the entire album as such — was inspired by the Columbine massacre, but righteous anger is no excuse for writing lame lyrics, setting them to non-existent melodies and letting the blood drip for eight awful minutes. Further down the line, Woody Guthrie and Martin Luther King have guest appearances as well; Angela Davis might have been on the list of invitations, too, but the catch is, she's not dead yet.

 

Then there are the awful embarrassments. 'Freakshow' sounds one, nay, two hundred percent like an Alanis Morissette outtake from the Little Pill era; Ani goes as far as to modulate her singing according to the Morisette pattern — what the hell? The main reason we may be interested in her in the first place is that she presents an embraceable alternative to Alanis, and now this? Then there is 'Swing', on which she acknowledges her respect for hip-hop culture by sharing the spot­light with Corey Parker, improvising a little rap about her. The effect will probably seem pitiful even to supporters of the culture, let alone the doomed bigots who prefer real music.

 

Then there is the overall rating. Need I even spell it out? Even Robert Christgau hated the record, and no other prominent critic raved more about DiFranco than the enigmatic old goat.

 

REVELLING / RECKONING (2001)

 

CD I: 1) Ain't That The Way; 2) O.K.; 3) Garden Of Simple; 4) Tamburitza Lingua; 5) Marrow; 6) Heartbreak Even; 7) Harvest; 8) Kazoointoit; 9) Whatall Is Nice; 10) What How When Where; 11) Fierce Flawless; 12) Rock Paper Scissors; 13) Beautiful Night; CD II: 1) Your Next Bold Move; 2) This Box Contains; 3) Reckoning; 4) So What; 5) Prison Prism; 6) Imagine That; 7) Flood Waters; 8) Grey; 9) Subdivision; 10) Old Old Song; 11) Sick Of Me; 12) Don't Nobody Know; 13) School Night; 14) That Was My Love; 15) Revelling; 16) In Here.

 

No one understood why Ani forgot to release a new studio album in 2000. An intentional refusal to join the happy crowds of artists cashing in on the «turn-of-the-millennium» chance? Or just one of nature's unpredictable errors? Fortunately, already the next year gave a clear answer: she was simply hoarding up material for a double release. Revelling/Reckoning is one hundred and twenty minutes of prime time Ani DiFranco, give or take a few.

 

The two parts are neatly divided into the Revelling and Reckoning parts (although, for some rea­son, both title tracks are asymmetrically placed in the second half). We'll get to the Revelling part a little later; afore everything, it needs to be said that your love and admiration for DiFranco will be put to the sorest, grizzliest test ever with Reckoning — one hour of arch-lazy, rambling, un­memorable acoustic tunes that aren't even so much tunes as raw mood pieces, envelopping end­less streams of the lady's poetry.

 

It is time to confess here that I am not much of a poetry fan, with my own admiration strictly re­served to a handful of well-known greats; but I do concede that sometimes clever poetry, set to rudimentary muzak, can strike a deep chord — e. g., Leonard Cohen. Yet even Cohen allowed himself to stoop to the level of us mortals by molding his poetry in a pop music format, which ne­ver ever hurt it, but, instead, made it more poignant. And, occasionally, so did DiFranco. But not here. Play 'Both Hands' next to any of these musical embryos — embryos? nay, blastulae rather — and if this is «maturation» or «artistic progression», I renounce «art» forever.

 

"How sick of me must you be by now?" asks she the provocative question midway through the acoustic bog. Of course, it's a personal, one-to-one song about relationships rather than a taunt to potential or disenchanted fans, but we are all in this game, and, personally, Reckoning makes me pretty sick. «You have to be in the proper mood for it», the fans say in their reviews, but I cannot envision a mood in which I'd ever want to put on this record instead of Ani's magnificent — in comparison — debut album, let alone miriads of more passionate, more cleverly designed, more musical acoustic experiences from singer-songwriters all over the globe. Balderdash.

 

The first half of the album is, however, a different story. It is much more fleshed out, less mini­malistic, and continues more in the vein of unpretentious folk-jazz-fusion of Little Plastic Castle than the formulaic «liberal gung-ho» trash of To The Teeth. There is even a mildly funny musi­cal joke number ('What How When Where'), whose funny looping of every monosyllabic ques­tion word found in the English language may make you smile and whose friendly acoustic / brass interplay will reassure you that she still knows how to write real songs, even though the liberal arts devil is permanently swaying her off the right track.

 

Upbeat constructions like 'Ain't That The Way', 'O.K.', and 'Fierce Flawless' are nothing to write home about, but nice and listenable; mood pieces like 'Tamburitza Lingua' are much better deve­loped than any of the mood pieces on Reckoning (as simple as its acoustic melody is, it's a fri­ckin' melody, well assisted by creepy sci-fi whoooosh! blasts in the background); and only a few of the numbers match the yawn power of Reckoning ('Marrow', 'Garden Of Simple'). In short, Revelling gives the impression of a real, if somewhat stagnated, album, while Reckoning gives the impression of an afterthought... «oh, wait a minute guys, I still got those two poetry-filled notebooks, if I don't do something with them right now, the world's spiritual heritage may not be deemed complete by the next generation... how much studio time have we got left, anyway?»

 

Plus, I intentionally refuse to comment on any of the lyrics on here — if only for the reason that, for every subject and statement, you can already find an earlier one that is at least equally well, if not better, expressed. Political and social statements; psychological one-sided conversations with boyfriends and girlfriends; random life observations converted into cosmic metaphors, you know the drift. At this point, I am no longer able to take all that verbosity seriously.

 

To sum up, if Little Plastic Castle showed some musical promise, what with all the cautious jazz-funk experimentation and stuff, Revelling, at best, runs on inertia, and, at worst, drives into a wall; whereas Reckoning is easily the least rewarding DiFranco listening experience up to this point — at least To The Teeth has its pragmatic use at propaganda rallies. Overall, a predictable thumbs down, although 'What How When Where' is one of her funnest creations. (And if you are an admirer, determined to scorn me for choosing this lengthy album's one joke tune as the best song on it, hey, that's hardly my fault. Blame the author, I say).

 

SO MUCH SHOUTING, SO MUCH LAUGHTER (2002)

 

CD I: 1) Swan Dive; 2) Letter To A John / Tambouritza Lingua; 3) Grey; 4) Cradle And All; 5) Whatall Is Nice; 6) What How When Where; 7) To The Teeth; 8) Revelling; 9) Napoleon; 10) Shrug; 11) Welcome To; CD II: 1) Comes A Time; 2) Ain't That The Way; 3) Dilate; 4) Gratitude; 5) 32 Flavors; 6) Loom / Pulse; 7) Not A Pretty Girl; 8) Self Evident; 9) Reckoning; 10) My IQ; 11) Jukebox; 12) You Had Time; 13) Rock Paper Scissors.

 

To summarize the lacklustre fizzle-out of the second stage of Ani's career, up comes a fittingly lacklustre live album whose main purpose is to show that the lady has learned to be just as obno­xious and boring onstage as she is in the studio — even if she herself has always said that she felt far more comfortable playing live than recording.

 

"I don't know why the fuck I play acoustic guitar, I hate that acoustic guitar sound", she greets us on the very first track, producing a louder-than-necessary first chord. A funny, innocent joke, but gruesomely symbolic: many people, no doubt, will want to ask the same question upon compa­ring the bland minimalist acoustic blabber of her XXIst century sound with the awesome style that she used to have years ago and that is still, in bits and pieces, evident on Living In Clip. The setlist for this particular show conveniently drops everything prior to 1994 (with the lonesome ex­ception of 'Gratitude' from Not So Soft, only proving the rule), and focuses intently upon her last three albums, with the top share of the cake going to Reckoning / Revelling.

 

Ani's little jazz-funk band does a faithful job of keeping up, and they may even be enjoying the proceedings, but it is hard to guess, because the emphasis is on staying fairly close to the quiet, restrained arrangements on the originals, with next to no jamming or improvisation pieces at all. Actually, it doesn't look like she is in great need of the band at all. Most of the songs from the la­test album, for instance, come from the Revelling part, i. e. introspective underwritten acoustic ballads that find little use for the talents of Ravi Best, trumpet, Shane Endsley, trumpet, Todd Horton, trumpet, Daren Hahn, drums, Jason Mercer, bass, Hans Teuber, clarinet, Julie Wolf, keyboards, vocals. (Ani's interaction with Julie is supposed to form some integral artistic part in the structuring of the second CD, subtitled Girls' Singing Night, but the whole thing never really goys far beyond a little dueting, a trifle backing vocals, and some mildly humorous banter).

 

To put it bluntly, the good tunes have nothing more to say than they did in the confines of the stu­dio, and sometimes less ('Napoleon' and 'What How When Where', in particular, suffer greatly from the lack of studio gimmickry that used to make one pay any attention to them in the first place). Then there are the bad tunes, of which there are many; I find the setlist quite depressing, to be honest — and previewing some numbers off the upcoming Evolve is hardly a profitable bu­siness, either, given the ever-continuing nosedive on that album as well.

 

But none of this sucks as much as the decision to dedicate a large chunk of the record to nausea­ting political propaganda. It is not enough that she recreates the seven-and-a-half minute torture of 'To The Teeth' in its entirety; one of the new numbers ('Self Evident') is a nine-minute rant on the evils of American politics, spewed off in a quasi-improvised (actually, quite carefully rehear­sed, I think) manner to a boring lounge jazz background.

 

Let us get this straight: I am aware, and everyone should be, that the lady's schtick is to combine music with social work, and that, if, like Alice Cooper, you believe music and politics should ne­ver mingle, you should stay away from artists like Ani altogether. I do not share that belief; I have no problem with John Lennon singing 'Power To The People' or with people like John Fo­gerty or Robert Smith or Neil Young writing anti-Bush diatribes and setting them to music. After all, music is feelings, and, if you make good music, why should you be confining your feelings to girls, cars, and transcendental meditation instead of expressing your position on relevant issues?

 

But it is a different thing altogether if you sacrifice music in favor of political propaganda. If the lady believes her true mission is to go out there on stage and enflame people's hearts against the NRA and George W. Bush and the whored-out media etc. etc., that's fine; declare this a political rally and leave your guitar at home. 'Self Evident' is not even poetry — it starts out innocently enough ("Us people are just poems, we are 90% metaphor..."), but pretty soon derails into a series of platitudes with the legions of supporters howling in unison in all the appropriate stops. I will ad­mit, though, that some of the lines, e. g. "Take away our playstations and we are a third world nation", are brilliant. That is the most I can admit.

 

In toto, re: the album title, there is, indeed, plenty of shouting — on behalf of all the hardcore De­mocrats in the audience that merely dropped in to check if the sun were still shining, or whether DiFranco was still going strong against the NRA, which is approximately the same thing — and there is plenty of laughter, too, mostly on behalf of Ani herself, who is occasionally trying to de­flate the ser­mon aspect of it all by giggling like the quintessential schoolgirl (I find the contrast cringeworthy, but that's just me). What is seriously lacking in between all the shouting and all the laughter is any sort of viable reason why the heck this woman is still being defined as a «singer, guitarist, and songwriter», when she is doing her best to effectively sabotage all three of these aspects. Thumbs down, egads. At this stage, apparently even Robert Christgau gave up on her (formerly a major fan, he hasn't written one single review of any of her albums since 2002).

 

EVOLVE (2003)

 

1) Promised Land; 2) In The Way; 3) Icarus; 4) Slide; 5) O My My; 6) Evolve; 7) Shrug; 8) Phase; 9) Here For Now; 10) Second Intermission; 11) Serpentine; 12) Welcome To.

 

The album won Ani DiFranco a Grammy Award in 2004... for Best Recording Package. Reading this of­ficial information on Wikipedia or in any other source after you have heard the album gives a clear impression of bitter irony, if not indirect insult. First, it is hard to imagine somebody as right­eous as Ani to care one second about the Grammy people in the first place. Second, it is even harder to ima­gine the Grammy people actually taking the time to listen to an Ani DiFranco album. Third, in spite of both the first and the second, this Grammy decision summarizes my feelings about Evolve to near-perfection.

 

Since it can be easily shown that Ms. DiFranco knows how to create interesting melodies, the ob­vious reasoning is that, by the time Reckoning and Revelling came along, she had developed the notion that «interesting melodies» are an insult to honest artistry and intellectual audiences. Thus, her newly-established motto can be briefly summarized as «Hooks are for NRA members». In the place of hooks, we proceed to get Messages and Free Jazz, DiFranco-style.

 

Granted, after the «time-suspended» illusion of Revelling, Evolve has more rhythm to it, and some of the ideas are moderately interesting. 'In The Way', in particular, gets a quirky little funky riff with hypnotizing potential not unlike the one exploited to the max by James Brown on 'Sex Machine' — except that, of course, Ani is no James Brown, and even when she tries to get into overdrive, she cannot sustain the tension for five minutes, meaning that the riff is essentially was­ted. Another classy, sardonic riff, acoustic this time, is lost on the title track, which has nothing else to go for it.

 

The whole thing just screams out «lazy, lazy, lazy...» louder than almost any other DiFranco al­bum up to that point. The only song on the entire album that is anywhere close to «completeness» is 'Here For Now', which takes half a minute to find its groove, introduces said groove as a quiet little Latin dance number, variegates it with a quiet, arythmic chorus, and locks the door behind it in an economic three minutes time — whereas most of the raw, blurry, impressionistic numbers overstay their welcome for at least four or five.

 

The nadir, quite predictably, is 'Serpentine', a ten-minute rant on civil liberties and other related shit that is the younger, but even more obnoxious, brother of 'Self Evident' from the last record. "The difference between you and me, baby, is I get fucked up when I'm alone", she states midway through; yep, she must have been particularly lonesome when recording this album.

 

One thing that is not quite clear to me is why anyone would really want to bother falling for Ani's amateurish experimentation in the realm of modern jazz. Considering just how many superior jazz musicians, ancient and modern, there are in each and every aspect of the genre, Evolve could only hope to work if she'd found a decent way of integrating the new influences into her old style, for instance, start playing the guitar the way she did on her first album, while all the brass players and percussionists around her supplied the external arrangements. Instead, she somehow convin­ced herself that once you set up some thin, bland, unevocative groove, all you have left to do is support it with another meandering poem sung from the bottom of the heart.

 

Not recommended for anyone except the staunchest Ani adepts, with the possible exception of 'Here For Now'; in fact, a track like 'Serpentine', unless you happen to be an innate serial killer mas­cherading as a braindead ultra-liberal activist, can turn sane people off the dame forever. To be honest, there is quite a bit of decent poetry on here, too ('Icarus', 'Second Intermission') — my wild guess is that she only writes stuff like 'Serpentine' and 'Self Evident' when she's having her period or some­thing. Thumbs down, all the same; good poetry is Pulitzer Prize stuff — without a half-decent melody to accompany it, all you can hope for is a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package.

 

EDUCATED GUESS (2004)

 

1) Platforms; 2) Swim; 3) Educated Guess; 4) Origami; 5) Bliss Like This; 6) The True Story Of What Was; 7) Bo­dily; 8) You Each Time; 9) Animal; 10) Grand Canyon; 11) Company; 12) Rain Check; 13) Akimbo; 14) Bubble.

 

One may easily deduce whether this here reviewer was enthralled or not by Educated Guess, so­cially conscious singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco 3,456th studio album, from the fact that it took him three listens and a couple read-ups on other people's reviews and descriptions to understand that it is, in fact, hugely different from her previous release, Evolve, in that it completely drops her soft-jazz band and, once again, reverts the artist to fully acoustic, fully individual mode.

 

Honestly, I did not even notice that. And as far as I am concerned, this only means that it makes no goddamn difference any more. Just fifty more minutes of time wasted on melodies, words, and feelings that bring nothing new — or nothing good, for that matter — to the table. In fact, that statement is pretty much definitive: there is not a single track here that could even begin to be de­scribed as a «highlight». «Lowlights», yes, not the least of them her usually flat beatnik rant 'Grand Canyon' where she proclaims that "People, we are standing at ground zero of the feminist revolution... coolest F-word ever deserves a fucking shout! I mean, why can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists, out of respect for those who fought for this?" Gimme a fuckin' break there, lady.

 

The saddest realization of all is, of course, that by now she has completely resigned to preaching to the choir. Long-term fans cannot go wrong with this or anything else, but how can you expect to make new converts if all you're offering them is a bunch of on-the-spot constructed, sloppy, dissonant chord sequences worthy of just about every guitar player on this planet with two or three years of playing experience? How do you expect intelligent people to follow you if each of your songs places such dreadful importance on the lyrics (more spoken than sung), yet, for all we know, there are only two topics concerned: «Treat me like a human being instead of like a fuck­hole, and then we'll go on talking» and «Fight the machine, fight the machine». Do butterflies and coloured rainbows even exist for this woman? Thumbs down. At this point, the only remedy that can be prescribed for the patient is an album of surf rock covers.

 

KNUCKLE DOWN (2005)

 

1) Knuckle Down; 2) Studying Stones; 3) Manhole; 4) Sunday Morning; 5) Modulation; 6) Seeing Eye Dog; 7) Lag Time; 8) Parameters; 9) Callous; 10) Paradigm; 11) Minerva; 12) Recoil.

 

For some reason, Ani has reverted back to writing songs instead of creating them, if you get my meaning. Formally, the only change is that she has amply shared production duties with fellow singer-songwriter Joe Henry, and that a bunch of new hands are guesting on the album, not the least among them violin maestro Andrew Bird in person. Informally, this is simply her best effort since... let's see... gosh, how far do we have to scroll up?... since Up Up Up Up Up, definitely, or even since Dilate, not so definitely.

 

For one thing, it is hard to remember the last time she recorded something as tender and poignant as 'Studying Stones' — not only are the lyrics, advertising restraint and calm, suggesting that she may be trying to exorcise the deamon of cheap social activism, but she sings it real pretty, and meshes well with Bird's trademark morose violin part. Then, a few steps down the block comes 'Modulation', combining a steady rhythm, a gloomy production, and a catchy vocal melody — and a mention of death to boot. For the record, she almost never mentioned death before — in fact, it is rather hard to imagine a more life-oriented singer-songwriter than DiFranco. Coinciden­tally — or not? — in between Educated Guess and this record, she did suffer the demise of her father, and this may be the explanation between quite a few humane and moving twists that you will encounter on Knuckle Down.

 

Of course, there is still the obligatory piece of spoken poetry to sit through ('Parameters'), but ev­en that one is possible to forgive, since (a) it is set to a slightly hypnotizing piece of mind-blow­ing ambient sonics, sort of a cross between Brian Eno and Lou Reed, and (b) it is not politically oriented. Also, as usual, this is a long record, and, sooner or later, the expected amorphous acoustic pat­ches of deep-sounding nothing start to accumulate and gnaw on the brain. But every­thing is spread out quite evenly, and it does make sense to sit through the whole thing since the very last track, 'Recoil', is the third best on the album. Slide guitars and violins rule the day, and at the very end, she admits that "I'm just sitting here in this sty, strewn with half written songs, taking one breath at a time — nothing much going on". Ten years at least have we been waiting for this sort of confession; how ironic that she actually pronounces it within one of her few songs that is, by contrast, written to near-perfection.

 

Some have expressly called Knuckle Down one of her most accessible records, and, no doubt, some of the more fanatical activists would even brand it a folk-pop sellout after the brave soul-baring that were Evolve and Educated Guess. Well, I'll bite: I prefer to have my soul-baring coupled with an interesting riff or chorus, and I'll take the «accessible» DiFranco over the «inac­cessible» DiFranco (or, rather, over the «pathetically boring» DiFranco, since there is really no­thing particularly «inaccessible» about her «inaccessible» records) any time of day.

 

On a sidenote, I happened to come across an interesting conference talk title the other day. The session was American Studies, the speaker was, of course, a lady (student), and the title was: «Why Do Men Hate Ani DiFranco? The Connection Between Women Rock Musicians and the Image of Feminism». This made me wonder, so I Googled «I hate Ani DiFranco» — and, what do you know, it looks like there is hardly what you could call a correlation between masculine sex and hatred for Ani DiFranco. (Of course, I could also mention that the absolute majority of male posters hate Ani DiFranco because she is boring and obnoxious, not because she has any connec­tion to the image of feminism, but then we all know they're lying, don't we? Men hate Ani Di­Franco because she is a woman. Women hate Ani DiFranco because... uh, because she is bisexual. Or because she got pregnant. Or something like that. Nobody hates anybody because their music is shitty. That'd be so uncool).

 

Anyway, I do not hate Ani DiFranco, but I do hate the fact that for every good record, she puts out three piles of nasal acoustic wasteland. Knuckle Down is a fairly good one, though. Thumbs up, for a change.

 

REPRIEVE (2006)

 

1) Hypnotized; 2) Subconscious; 3) In The Margins; 4) Nicotine; 5) Decree; 6) 78% H20; 7) Millennium Theater; 8) Half-Assed; 9) Reprieve; 10) A Spade; 11) Unrequited; 12) Shroud; 13) Reprise.

 

If, for some reason, your subconscious decrees to be hypnotized by Reprieve, a half-assed per­formance of Ani DiFranco's millen­nium theater that is 78% H20 and 22% shroud of nicotine, then it is well in the margins of remaining unrequited. That sentence takes care of all the songs on this album, with the exception of 'A Spade' which is exactly what this album is. A spade.

 

Since I am no longer capable of taking the lead while talking about Ani albums, let me restrict myself to a few personal, subjective, and — I confess — vindictive comments on this not-so-much informative as panegyric description from the site of Righteous Babe Records (who says Ani and her associates have not stooped to studying the tactics of The Enemy?):

 

"Every new album from singer/songwriter/guitarist Ani DiFranco gives listeners a reason to get excited about music all over again (well, I certainly AM excited about the number of times one single artist can fuck things up — G. S.), and Reprieve is certainly no exception. Across 12 tracks, DiFranco ignites more of her signature blend of poetry, politics and musicianship. (Yep, she ignites it all right, but how can anything that drenched with repetition, predictability, and lack of invention ever burn? — G. S.).

 

"Ani and touring bassist Todd Sickafoose (the guy's name is almost begging for some lame pun, but let us refrain from cheapness — G. S.) are the only two players on the new album — some­thing you'd never guess from its rich and detailed sound (almost an understatement in regards to a record on which about half of the songs feature nothing but acoustic guitar and vocals — G. S.). In addition to the usual array of acoustic and electric guitars for which she is justly noted, Ani can be heard on keyboards, drums, and other instruments ('can be heard' is right — you really have to work for it; I did spot some piano keys lightly pressed on a couple introductions, but I'm still looking for those goddamn drums — G. S.), while Todd contributes not only bass but wur­litzer, pump organ, piano and "fakey-bakey" trumpet and strings (Yes, I DID wonder about whose idea it was to embellish the signature acoustic boredom with all sorts of "fakey-bakey" toilet noises. Maybe the puns SHOULD start coming, after all — G. S.).

 

"The album was tracked in her New Orleans studio in early 2005 during a break in her usually heavy touring schedule. Forced to leave the master recordings behind when she evacuated before Hurricane Katrina, she drove back into the city to retrieve them just three days after the levees broke. (In a self-sacrificial act of political bravery, no doubt. Goddammit, here is ONE good thing that could have come out from Hurricane Katrina and — obviously, the pun mood is upon me — she just blew it — G. S.). From there she headed back to overdub in her hometown of Buf­falo with whatever instruments happened to be on hand. Chief among them a vintage omnichord and a modern "cheesy synthesizer" which entailed "trying to use uncool sounds in cool ways," as she puts it (Come now, Ms. DiFranco, why don't you leave "cheesy synthesizers" and "vintage omnichords" to the likes of Animal Collective. You generally have big trouble using cool sounds in cool ways, as you have showed time and time over again with your jazz career; what makes you think 'uncool' sounds will fare any better? — G. S.).

 

"Between the forced evacuation and the time off on the road, Ani found herself concentrating on the process of recording to a degree she had never done before, and the resulting album is the clearest demonstration yet of her talents as a producer (Who the heck had the nerve to write this crap? Her "talents as a producer" — are you kidding me? Since when does overdubbing a few electronic farts over an acoustic melody count as "producing"? — G. S.). Unconstrained by the pressures of touring, she was able to take her time with the record, and the end result is an overall sound that is as clear and succinct as her lyrics have always been (I like the "unconstrained" bit — as if somebody were actually constraining the lady into touring. She is her own boss, isn't she? And I seriously doubt that even a vintage fan will clearly perceive Reprieve as 'that particular re­cord that she, like, REALLY took her time with' — G. S.).

 

"While not intended to be taken as a concept album in any way, the songs on Reprieve do pro­vide a cohesive picture of what’s been on Ani’s mind lately during turbulent times on the per­so­nal, cultural, and global front (With Ani, times are always turbulent, and usually turbulent in the exact same ways; this sentence easily applies to any given album in her career — G. S.).  From the opening encounter of “Hypnotized” to the call to action against patriarchy in the spoken-word title track to the conflict between “the house of conformity” and the ability to make art in the final song, “Shroud,” this is classic Ani territory (Indeed, and she sticks to it faithfully. I do realize that the question 'how many more calls to action against patriarchy does one person need from another one?' provokes the obligatory answer 'as many as it takes to finally goad one into action', but surely something is not working too well if so many calls to action have provoked so little response? Maybe it's the wrong playground? Maybe she ought to have a run at the Senate, already? — G. S.). It’s a place where individual songs can’t be easily separated into “personal” and “political” categories, because those concerns inevitably overlap in complex and nuanced ways (Obviously, if you let politics into your personal life, the two will overlap. But it usually makes for rather bad art, not to mention increasing the risk of psychiatric problems — G. S.).

 

"Ani describes Reprieve as rooted in the Crescent City (This woman really works in strange and mysterious ways. But maybe she meant Crescent City, Illinois? According to the latest census, it has 631 inhabitants, and, since this must be just about the total number of people that would love this album, a connection is possible — G. S.), and it so happens that there’s a single direct re­fe­rence to that town in the album’s centerpiece, “Millennium Theater.” The line “New Orleans bi­des her time” in the middle of this scathing critique of the current Republican regime might sound like a response to Hurricane Katrina, but in fact the song was written well before the disaster that has devastated the city, about a crisis that took no one but the presidential ad­ministration by sur­prise (How fortunate, a cute little coincidence that gives one something to write about when there is nothing to write about. 'The album's centerpiece'? I honestly thought it was one of the blandest throwaways — G. S.). Like just about everything else on Reprieve, “Millennium Theater” finds Ani speaking her mind, singing from her heart, and playing music like her life — like all of our lives — depended on it (Look, I have nothing against Ani speaking her mind, singing from her heart, and playing like her life depended on it, but leave ME out of this, won't you? If my life de­pended on an album like this, I'd have to be committed — G. S.).

 

Well, at least you, the reader, cannot complain now: you've heard it from both sides. Make your choice now or forever hold your peace. Mine, of course, is a decisive thumbs down. In fact, against my rules, I honestly could not stand more than two listens. Somebody sign this woman to Hollywood Records, please. Make Diane Warren write her songs for her.

 

RED LETTER YEAR (2008)

 

1) Red Letter Year; 2) Alla This; 3) Present/Infant; 4) Smiling Underneath; 5) Way Tight; 6) Emancipated Minor; 7) Good Luck; 8) The Atom; 9) Round A Pole; 10) Landing Gear; 11) Star Matter; 12) Red Letter Year Reprise.

 

2008 may have been a red letter year for Ani's country, which is what the album title is «subtly» trying to tell us, but for Ani herself that year was 2007, when she had her first baby. With less free time on her hands than usual, yet still not willing to forsake the one-album-per-year routine (God knows what this world will come to if it forgets about her existence for three hundred and sixty five days), she released her first official retrospective package, titled Canon and picturing a cannon (puns! puns! puns!). Despite some predictably lame selections mixed in with the classics, on the general art plane it must have been a good move — not only did the world get to re­mem­ber what Ms. DiFranco used to be in the good old days, when she would still stoop to using the guitar as an ins­trument rather than a sonic prop, but it also gave her some breathing space to put a little more work than usual in the next record.

 

Meaning that Red Letter Year, although not quite reaching up to the pleasantly-mediocre level of Knuckle Down, is at least less generally irritating than Reprieve. With mother cares at hand, she does not have that good an opportunity to focus on her political anger; and with a full band in the studio once again, chances are that not every song is centered around an uninspired, meaning­less pummelling of her acoustic six-string. This is not to say that I honestly liked any of the songs. But at least I was honestly indifferent to them rather than honestly desiring to shove them down the songwriter's throat.

 

The most prominent political curses come at the beginning, but the predictable anti-Bush jabs and troop condolences lose much of their potential obnoxiousness by hiding behind dense arrange­ments: reverb, echo, chimes, and New Age effects on the title track, U2-ish rebounding guitars on 'Alla This'. After that, the band sincerely tries to introduce teensy bits of diversity on each new track; they never succeed properly, but they do take away Ani's ability to torture the listener. The best song is probably 'The Atom', if you listen to it long enough to appreciate the professionalism of the build-up from minimalistic acoustic mantra to psychedelic freakout — somebody must have been a good fan of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

 

For me, the best thing about it all is 'Red Letter Year Reprise', which is not so much a reprise as a friendly, loose jazz jam between all concerned. In general, it's just six minutes of poorly coordi­nated free-form horn noise, but it contains a paradox — it just feels so much more liberating in es­sence than any single word-containing song on this album, recorded by an artist that is suppo­sed to be the biggest liberator of them all. For this nice, unexpected touch Red Letter Year de­ser­ves a hateless thumbs down rather than a hateful one. Also, amazingly, the entire year of 2009 went on by without a new DiFranco album, suggesting that perhaps her newly-found family life is steering her into the right direction, after all.

 

¿WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? (2012)

 

1) Life Boat; 2) Unworry; 3) ¿Which Side Are You On?; 4) Splinter; 5) Promiscuity; 6) Albacore; 7) J; 8) If YR Not; 9) Hearse; 10) Mariachi; 11) Amendment; 12) Zoo.

 

 

A four-year gap in productivity is not something we have come to expect from Ani DiFranco. But kids are kids, and even the icon-est icon of feminism is ironically bound to get stuck with being a mother once she actually becomes a mother — apparently, the long delay was caused by the lady having to dedicate more time to family matters (family? ooh, what a disgustingly obsolete con­cept for the genuinely progressive mind).

 

The consequences of this are both positive and negative. Positive, because this means more time to flesh out the compositions — for a thoroughly non-genius songwriter, it is a serious advantage, and, although there is not a single song on here that managed to genuinely strike a chord with me, some of the tunes seemed more notable than just about anything off her previous two records. But negative, because the delay seems to have made her lose her biters — or, at least, dull them to the point where I find it hard to believe that even a single intelligent person on Earth would want to be moved by her sociopolitical stance.

 

Want it or not, Ani DiFranco used to be a poet — good poet, bad poet, innovative poet, banal poet, whatever, the subject is up for discussion. Even when she used to mix liberal preaching with poetry, she usually took care to preserve some sort of balance between the two. But now we have stuff like ʽAmendmentʼ, which begins as follows: "Wouldn't it be nice if we had an amendment to give civil rights to women, to once and for all just really lay it down from a point of view of wo­men..." and goes on more or less the same way for six and a half minutes. ("It's a song that's got a lot of those words in it that are hard to sing", our protagonist says in one of the filmed introduc­tions to her performing the song live, and yeah, I concur: it is fairly hard to put the Communist Party Manifesto to music as well, no matter how much time Friedrich Engels would spend trying to find the right guitar chords to Karl Marx' lyrics).

 

The saddest thing of all is, she does not even sound convincing when she delivers this stuff — nor when she delivers the «hit of the season» in the guise of the title track, an old chestnut by fellow feminist icon Florence Reece, with a new set of updated lyrics and a ninety-year old Pete Seeger himself accompanying the recording on banjo and backup vocals. It is supposed to be big, power­ful, inspirational, and anthemic, but it sounds a little tired to me; tired, monotonous, and particu­larly ineffective from the point of view of the current situation. The lyrics themselves are caught in contradictions — first admitting that "now there’s folks in Washington that care what’s on our minds", then going off in all directions: Reaganomics, consumerism, poverty, starving Africa, patriarchy, environmentalism, you name the rest.

 

Risking further curses from the (rapidly decreasing, I am afraid) legions of Ani fans, I would dare to suggest: the fact that these lyrics look ever less and less like poetry and ever more and more like a particularly trivial brand of leftist propaganda must mean that the lady herself is not altoge­ther interested any more. That old flame, which could at least occasionally take on curious sha­pes and reach scorching temperatures, has shrunk to yer good old predictable quiet crackle of a log in the living-room fireplace.

 

It is even more evident if we consider the simplest rule of this album: the more personal and quiet any particular song is, the less annoying and silly it stands out to the senses. ʽIf Yr Notʼ is built around a technically dark, distorted bluesy riff, but the message is: "If you're not getting happier as you get older, then you're fucking up", and even if she sings it in her trademark «grim» man­ner, there is not so much irony here as stern, solid truth. On ʽLife Boatʼ, she almost seems to be apologizing to her fans: "...and I didn’t really want a baby, and I guess that I had a choice, but I just let it grow inside me, that persistent little voice..." — and the song is not very memorable, but it has a nice ring and attitude to it. And then there is ʽAlbacoreʼ, which is just a simple love song, minimalistic, sweet, and quite hard-to-hate.

 

Musically, Which Side Are You On is, of course, an ongoing disaster — most of it is acoustic, without a single trace of what an individualistic and even inimitable player Ani used to be a cou­ple of decades ago. But at least there is no more pretending of being a «serious jazz-pop artist»: despite a plethora of backing musicians, most of the backing is either in the background or used primarily for «side effect» purposes (only the title track, in accordance with anthem requirements, is given a near-symphonic arrangement, with a full children's choir and an entire New Orleans student brass band involved). The sound, overall, is quite unpretentious and decent; it's just that there are no interesting melodies. But we have already come to expect that.

 

What we did not come to expect is this spiritual transformation — one that she herself may not be fully aware of, but, hopefully, as time goes by, things will be getting more and more introspective and less and less concerned with politics. Do not get me wrong: politically-inclined art is a neces­sity of life, and it can be and sometimes is great, but there is no more powder left in this particular keg. You have paid your patriotic dues more than anyone else, Ms. DiFranco — time to pass the baton, listen to your heart, and sing about your family, because, so it seems to me, that seems to be your chief concern these days. Leave the protest songs to the younger generation — people like Pete Seeger, for instance.

 

ALLERGIC TO WATER (2014)

 

1) Dithering; 2) See See See See; 3) Woe Be Gone; 4) Careless Words; 5) Allergic To Water; 6) Harder Than It Needs To Be; 7) Genie; 8) Happy All The Time; 9) Yeah Yr Right; 10) TR'W; 11) Still My Heart; 12) Rainy Parade.

 

Sometimes I feel as if the two different sides of Ani DiFranco — the «musician» side and the «make a statement» side — are two mortal enemies: they can never reach a compromise or es­tablish any neutral balance, but in the case of each particular record, one simply has to win over the other. Most of the time, the «statement» side has the upper hand, and we have to tolerate her rudimentary acoustic squibbling while getting educated on social, political, and gender issues. But every once in a while, the «musician» shines through a little, and the better the music gets, the less emphasis there is on the lyrics.

 

Not that the words do not matter much on Allergic To Water: as you can probably guess from the title, this is an album whose subjects deal with displeasures, premonitions, imbalances, and inadequacies — sort of a natural with Ms. DiFranco, and even peaceful family life could not re­medy the issue completely — but, unlike the previous record, this one is nowhere near as belli­gerent, and comes across as a much more natural, credible, and «pessimistically-peaceful» offe­ring that, for once, gives her the occasion to express her moods and fears more through music than through words.

 

ʽDitheringʼ opens the record with a few playfully quirky jazzy chords, then quickly turns into a dark acoustic funky groove — a dense, slightly creepy arrangement that recalls her best compo­sitions from about two decades ago. It does not blow the roof off or anything: just a solid groove that perfectly conveys a worried, if not desperate, state of mind, and it sets a perfect tone for the rest of the album: troubled, concerned with the now and the future, tightly focused, but not hys­terical or hyper­active. Mature enough, but not too lazy or too rambling — the perfect state in which I am ready not only to tolerate DiFranco, but sometimes even to embrace her (figuratively, of course: a literal embrace would probably get you a kick in the groin from the lady).

 

Although she will probably never again return to the technically complex acoustic playing of her debut album, Allergic To Water has plenty of pleasant little acoustic melodies — ʽSee See See Seeʼ hops along to another simple, but endearing jazzy sequence; later on, ʽYeah Yr Rightʼ has some flashy fingerpicking, and the concluding ʽRainy Paradeʼ bids goodbye with a magical tone (well attenuated by the accompanying chimes). Furthermore, there are some vocal hooks here and there — ʽYeah Yr Rightʼ has an excellent harmony arrangement, and each verse of ʽCareless Wordsʼ ends in a touch of implied tragedy that she paints in a surprisingly believable manner.

 

Lyrics-wise, the one track that will probably stick out is ʽHappy All The Timeʼ, because its mini­malistic arrangement (just guitar and some friendly, but ghostly harmonies in the back­ground) helps concentrate on the chorus — which one has to take ironically, because one thing Allergic To Water is definitely not is an album about a happy person. Normally, I hate these songs, but since it is the only such track on the entire record, it gets salvaged by its context, and I can appre­ciate the message, provided I get it right (the illusionary «safety» of the modern cuddled person next to half-mythical tales of heroic suffering).

 

All in all, believe it or not, this is DiFranco's best album since at least Knuckle Down, and, truth be told, maybe even her best since Dilate — in eighteen years, that is, which just goes to show how much of a pleasant surprise the experience has been. See, in those eighteen years, her biggest know-how was irritation: lyrical irritation, melodic (or «anti-melodic» irritation), atmospheric irritation, all sorts of things that had me (and many others, I'm sure) going «why the heck am I wasting time on this crap?» But on Allergic To Water, she shows that she has not completely forgotten how to be musically inventive and lyrically intelligent without being irritating (in the bad sense of that word, not the artistically relevant one). There's a meaningful moodiness here, and just enough personal restraint and humility to earn my trust; I would never have believed it, but yes, here I am in 2014 issuing a thumbs up for an Ani DiFranco album. Next on the list: start believing in world peace and spiritual progress once more.

 

AMON TOBIN

ADVENTURES IN FOAM (1996)

 

1) Adventures In Foam Intro; 2) Cat People; 3) Northstar; 4) Fat Ass Joint; 5) Ol' Bunkhouse; 6) Paris / Streatham; 7) A Vida; 8) Traffic; 9) Reffs Edge (Interval); 10) The Sighting; 11) Break Charmer; 12) The Method; 13) On The Track; 14) Cruzer.

 

The full-length debut album of the artist currently known under the noble Númenorean name of Amon Tobin was his only one to be released under the routine Portuguese name of Cujo (mea­ning «whose?» — in my opinion, quite a fine path to travel: you hide behind a no-name when you are a nobody, and you change it to a mega-name once you are everything). Actually, «Nú­menorean» is a happy coincidence: the man's real name is Amon Adonai Santos de Araújo Tobin, he is of Brazilian descent, his childhood since 2 was spent moving from one cool West European city to another, and he makes drum 'n' bass records. A hell of a real cool cat for his time.

 

So, what's up with Adventures In Foam? First of all, everyone you meet will tell you it's one of those records for which the term «revolutionary» may almost be used without having to look back over your shoulder. I am not a big fan of free-form jazz, and an even lesser one of drum'n'bass, but even I have to admit that synthesizing the two was a terrific idea. Take a music form that has long since lost its actuality (let us admit it, by 1996 Miles Davis-style jazz was practically as much a thing «of the past» as academic classical music), take another, brand new, but compara­tively poor — at the very least, because of its prescribed minimalism — musical form, and hoop­la, here is extra development potential for both.

 

Second, it is delightful that this «marriage» gives you an opportunity to view the record in several entirely different lights. You can go like, «Hey, this guy loves electronic percussion craziness, but he clearly hates the boredom aspects of it, so he keeps looking for pepper and spice». Or you can go, «I know, he's a professional deconstructor, he makes fun of snub-nosed elitist jazz music by setting it to silly hipster club rhythms». Or it's along the lines of, «He's a professional educator! He wants to intellectualize the masses! Adventures In Foam today, Eric Dolphy tomorrow — he's like the Vanessa Mae of post-bop jazz without the Vanessa Mae trashiness». Just do not try to think of him from all these perspectives at the same time — if you do, he's just another dull post-modernist type trying to confuse your traditionalist senses just as the doctor ordered.

 

To be more precise, Adventures In Foam has its own diversity profile. Drum machines and syn­thesized bass lines are everywhere, with varying degrees of complexity, but the accompanying tracks range from pure ambient «whale-sigh»-type atmospherics ('The Light') to more clearly spelled out electronic loops ('The Sighting') to minimalist jazz-fusion ('Fat Ass Joint') to brass-led soft jazz ('Break Charmer') to pro­verbial dissonant freak-out piano rolls ('The Sequel') to moody vague-Eastern patterns ('Northstar'), and these are only my first impressions of less than half of the tracks — the absolute majority differ from each other in texture and mood.

 

My own current favourites are 'Cat People', with a killer bass groove draped in sexy loungishness, and the closing 'Cruzer', for which the sub-title "Music Inspired By Deep Purple's 'Space Tru­ckin'" would work real great, except it would not be the truth (but who cares). This may change tomorrow or the day after, though, so it is nowhere near as important as the general fact that, be­hind all the revolutionizing, if there ever was any revolutionizing, lies an elegantly atmospheric record that transcends the technical trappings of all of its genres and can simply be enjoyed as cool music. Or, rather, kool muzak, but that works well, too. Thumbs up.

 

P.S. For the record, I must confess that my copy is the «unapproved» US release on Shadow Re­cords from 1997 (hastily put out already after the man had gained international stardom as Amon Tobin), with differing artwork and, more importantly, an alternate track order with several of the compositions mistitled (e. g., 'The Sequel' is really 'Clockwork', etc.). In any case, that old edition is currently out of print, so you only need worry if you go hunting for the album in used bins — and these days, you probably won't.

 

BRICOLAGE (1997)

 

1) Stoney Street; 2) Easy Muffin; 3) Yasawas; 4) Creatures; 5) Chomp Samba; 6) The New York Editor; 7) Defocus; 8) The Nasty; 9) Bitter & Twisted; 10) Wires & Snakes; 11) One Day In My Garden; 12) Dream Sequence; 13) One Small Step; 14) Mission.

 

Released under his own name this time, and on a proper independent electronic label (Ninja Tune) — with Adventures In Foam amassing positive reviews and cult followings, there were no more reasons to conceal a direct descent from Aragorn (sorry, couldn't resist).

 

If there have been any groundbreaking changes from Foam to Bricolage, I am hardly the right person to point them out, because, to my ears, the main point is still the same: merge together jazz and electronics, collect royalties on results. The difference is in quantity, not in quality: Bricolage straightens out the balance in favor of more jazz, less -tronics — especially on the early tracks, with jungle rhythms and synth backgrounds becoming more and more prominent as the record progresses. Basically, you begin with «electronic jazz» and end with «jazz-tinged drum 'n' bass».

 

As tightly crafted and inventive as it all sounds, the first few tracks do not involve me all that much. 'Stoney Street' has next to no «electronic flavor» whatsoever, merely adding some key­board flouri­shes to its soft lounge jazz pitter-patter, and the next two tracks are minor atmosphe­ric paintings, hardly worth a second visit.

 

It isn't until 'Creatures' that a sense of actual purpose, and some genuine interest, finally starts emerging. The rhythmless intro consists of multiple «chiming» overdubs, making you feel inside some sort of giant clock; and then, after a short while, the clock is set in rapid movement, with a fast bop rhythm section that completely blurs the distinction between jazz drumming and pre-pro­grammed jungle beats, and occasional piano runs that pay tribute to the likes of Art Tatum. This sort of thing is more than just «atmosphere» — it's a bizarre, unique concoction that really brings together the best of both worlds, spinning a traditional hot groove out of new ingredients.

 

From there and onwards, bizarre concoctions spring on at least every second track. On 'Chomp Sam­ba', Tobin programs a grim tribal dance-style beat: this is exactly the kind of music we'd end up with, had the white slave traders been placating African chiefs with samplers instead of guns and firewater. 'The Nasty' is spicy, sleazy acid jazz taken to the max, with each played or simula­ted instrument eating deep within your brain — don't forget to rinse the inside with an alkaline solution every five seconds. 'Bitter & Twisted' is based on a sample that first sounds like an annoying fly that got inside your ear, then like an Middle Eastern melody. 'One Day In My Gar­den' drives into ska and bossanova territory, only to fall out in total percussion chaos and then pick it up again and end the proceedings with the same soft guitar chuckle on which it had started. And so on.

 

Essentially, the album title is right. You buy and enjoy Bricolage not just because it fuses jazz and jungle, but because it is a «bricolage» — like Aphex Twin, this guy is searching for inspira­tion everywhere, and if it does not always work, he is not to blame, because that is what experi­mentation is all about. (One could object that, if it does not work, it should not be released — but on an experimental jazz-jungle record, who's to know what really works and what doesn't? I can hardly imagine even two people agreeing on all the highlights and lowlights of this record. If you ever see them, report them to the nearest genetics lab, they're treasurable research material). I could never love something like this, but I certainly respect it a lot. Normally, taking a jazz melo­dy and putting an electronic spin on it would result in something cheap and repulsing; the fact that Tobin knows how to make it sound intelligent, even «intellectual», instead, is alone worth a solid place in the annals of electronic music. Thumbs up.

 

PERMUTATION (1998)

 

1) Like Regular Chickens; 2) Bridge; 3) Reanimator; 4) Sordid; 5) Nightlife; 6) Escape; 7) Switch; 8) People Like Frank; 9) Sultan Drops; 10) Fast Eddie; 11) Toys; 12) Nova.

 

You really need a jazz expert to explain everything that gets permutated on Permutation. Me, I suck pretty bad even when playing the hated game of «guess that sample» for electronic tracks that feed off well-known pop hits; what could you expect from samples drawn from the vast back­log of jazz, particularly when the backlogging guy clearly has no problem about drawing upon any sorts of influences. There may be Coltrane, and there may be Miles Davis here, and there may be some Arstrong — hey, I would not be surprised to discover The Original Dixieland Jass Band hiding in Mr. Tobin's closet overnight.

 

My only consolation is that the absolute majority of people, including hardcore fans of the guy, cannot identify the exact sources either (at least, I have not been able to come across any such identifications), with the sole exception of 'People Like Frank', where some recognize the bass line as being taken out of the soundtrack to Blue Velvet — obviously, through the title association, or no one would ever have guessed. Yet, does it bother anybody? Hardly, since Tobin's talent is to get people to admit that this gluing together of jazz samples, bits of original melodies, and jungle beats is well worth emotionally taking on its own, not just being treated as an intellectual puzzle. You may know shit about Miles Davis — and still get happily lost in the record.

 

There are no major breakthroughs here: essentially, it is just an attempt to repeat the success of Bricolage. If one makes an effort to synthesize a «collective» feeling here, Permutation may come across as a generally heavier album, and, at the same time, generally even more «retro-ish» than its predecessor. The heaviness effect is achieved by traditional means — put some extra dis­tortion on the bass, and make your drums occasionally bash, crash, and roll over John Bonham-style, rather than simply reproduce the thin, wimpy chucka-chucka patterns of «generic» drum­'n'­bass recordings. Hear 'Sordid' to know what I'm talking about — now here's a drum groove that even a hardened rocker would have no problem to headbang to.

 

On the other hand, 'Nightlife' starts out as an innocent lounge tune from, say, the 1930s, and ends up the same way, with a bold transition to modern style in the middle. And 'Switch' is just classic swingers' swing from top to bottom, if you don't mind the screeching electric drill that opens the tune and sometimes returns to haunt you several more times. And 'Nova' ends the record with a soft Brazilian farewell that could even break its way into luxury penthouses. And the hypnotic chimes on 'Like Regular Chickens'... well, that's actually fairly modern-sounding (I bet Patricia Barber would love that track).

 

Pleasant, intriguing, and clever as always, yet, perhaps, also a bit boring around the edges if you intend on paying lots of attention to the music, instead of using it as a soundtrack to the process of writing a fantasy novel or seducing a progressive-minded chick. (In the latter case, be sure to program out at least 'Reanimator' and 'Fast Eddie' — neither the music nor the titles might work to your mutual benefit). Thus, the thumbs up which a predictable brain reaction forces me to give out to the album is still somewhat perfunctory.

 

SUPERMODIFIED (2000)

 

1) Get Your Snack On; 2) Four Ton Mantis; 3) Slowly; 4) Marine Machines; 5) Golfer Vrs Boxer; 6) Deo; 7) Precursor (feat. Quadraceptor); 8) Saboteur; 9) Chocolate Lovely; 10) Rhino Jockey; 11) Keepin' It Steel (The Anvil Track); 12) Natureland.

 

This is the best Amon Tobin there is. To me, the pricky conservative, the best praise that can be given to an electronic album is that, for once, the album makes me forget about its electronic na­ture and just enjoy it as music — atmospheric, static, whatever. From the very start, it was cool to hear Tobin blend jazz with jungle, but that's what it was: cool, not stunning. Cool records come and go, and these days, can be heaped on the racks a dime a dozen (actually, skip the dime), but a stun is a stun — it is bound to leave an impression.

 

So what do we have up here? Some of the critics have called Supermodified Tobin's most acces­sible album, which, in these days, often translates to «the crappy one» (a.k.a. «the one with guest contributions from Lenny Kravitz and Mary J. Blige»), but, fortu­nately, this does not apply here. It's accessible because it's (a) heavier than before, (b) catchier than before, (c) more diverse than before, (d) whatever. Oh, wait. It's fun.

 

Where do we begin? The main message has not changed much. We are still living in our own private lounge with velvet curtains and hi-tech drape runners, a sort of David Lynch-ian paradise if I might say so. But it is now getting rougher and darker (apparently, BOB is in the building?), as 'Get Your Snack On' announces the new record on a gruffer note than ever before. Big cra­shing drums, a nagging minimalistic riff that almost sounds sampled from some old John Lee Ho­oker tune, lush gospel organ and vocals brewing a 'Gimmie Shelter'-type apocalypse in the back­ground, paranoid funk guitars scratching their way in and out, it's one heck of a tune.

 

From there on, just about every tune is hook-based. 'Four Ton Mantis' might sound appropriate for a real four ton mantis: even though the basic melody stomps along at a generic blues-rock pace, the drums and bass soon start pummeling the pavement, and the typewriter-mannered key­boards clatter along like some parasitic retinue to the beast. It doesn't get too way out of itself, but if played at top volume, it's quite an impressive «anti-utopian» chunk of atmosphere.

 

After the first two heavy hammers, the atmosphere becomes subtler – kick-ass panoramas begin to alternate with sexier / sleazier stuff, with an occasional touch of romance ('Slowly' is Tobin's most perfect attempt at conjuring a femme fatale vision) or, vice versa, of industrial doom ('Ma­rine Machines', which manages to combine the rhythmic robotic clanging of a power plant with vague bits of Eastern melodicity — as in, Genie, I want to run a Panzer tank factory). Skipping far ahead, there's a really rough space journey on 'Rhino Jockey', which will make you earn far more bumps and blisters than any Aphex Twin trip; and a smooth, well-planned slide-off, first with the upbeat, catchy, almost singalong-able Latin beat of 'Keepin' It Steel', and then the dim cabaret lights of 'Natureland' — that last ballad which you can allow yourself because all the rough ones are already under the tables, or kicked out.

 

Truly, Supermodified is one album that deserves its title — this is where it all comes together and you really see that all that blending on the previous records wasn't done for nothing. Here, it's not simply something like «okay, let's see what happens when we put some Miles Davis over some of those drum'n'bass tracks» (although even that, per se, could be amusing). They some­times use the word decadent to describe this sound, but I'm not sure it fits: real decadence has to be pessimistic, get some end-of-the-world Bryan-Ferry-sobbing thing going for it, whereas Su­per­­modified is quite content to be threatening, ominous, and seductive without having to feel sor­ry for itself. But, on the other hand, there is a fair amount of the Devil's work going on here, that's for certain. And since we're all closet Satanists here way back from the days of Robert Johnson, how could this not deserve a thumbs up?

 

OUT FROM OUT WHERE (2002)

 

1) Back From Space; 2) Verbal; 3) Chronic Tronic; 4) Searchers; 5) Hey Blondie; 6) Rosies; 7) Cosmo Retro Intro Outro; 8) Triple Science; 9) El Wraith; 10) Proper Hoodidge; 11) Mighty Micro People.

 

For his next release, Tobin rather drastically cut down on all the «retro» influences. You still get them, but you have to look for them, and if you didn't know about this guy as the jazz-jungle mix whiz of his generation, you probably wouldn't even know where to begin looking. This must be the reason why some people claim that Out From Out Where works better as a tightly focused, single-purpose, ultra-coherent record. Maybe it does, but to me, that's hardly good news.

 

The energy and occasional ferocity of Supermodified is still here: the programmed beats conti­nue to impress as a musical equivalent of 32 kinds of Chinese torture involving bamboo sticks, iron bars, and a vast array of other long hard objects. (Check out the innocently titled 'Rosies' for an «Anti-Utopian Industrial Factory, Advanced Level 3» kind of feeling). But the diversity is all but gone. The few «live» samples that are still distinguishable are straightforwardly treated as no­thing but samples, subjugated to the jungle rhythms and additional electronic loops; and the whole record is his most mechanized, industrialized bunch of compositions so far.

 

«Notable» points would include the «novelty» number 'Verbal (Featuring MC Decimal R.)', an odd (possibly ironic) take on hip-hop, in which a chipmunkified «electronic DJ» raps incom­pre­hen­­sibly over acoustic guitar, industrial beats, and stoned pseudo-Eastern backing vocals; 'Triple Science', an attempt to beat Aphex Twin at Star Force by shooting fifty instead of five enemies per second (warning: never play this loud in headphones unless you're the «you haven't lived un­til you have tried out everything» type); and the grand epic number 'Searchers', which, at times, sounds like The Moody Blues gone completely electronic — intergalactic star travel with string-imitating synth tones that sometimes swoop up into the sky like they used to do it way back when, with the aid of a Mellotron.

 

Out of the «non-notable» points, 'Hey Blondie' is sort of OK, an electronic equivalent of a gloo­my blues dirge, sometimes breaking out in minor key piano sonata convulsions; 'Proper Hoodi­dge' is the younger, slightly more inane brother of 'Marine Machines', whose main hook is a repe­titive whale-style moan; and 'Mighty Micro People' closes off the entire experience with a whiny guitar sample, to emphasize the hopelessness of it all. In fact, a thorough lack of optimism and complete cheerlessness are the record's major characteristics. Not that Tobin was ever known for making happy music, but on here he may be crossing the line from «creepy» to «depressing», and not just because the compositions are getting worse.

 

It isn't a «thumbs» down as such, but I would say it's definitely a «step» down. Hardcore fans will not notice it, though, because whoever has been granted the ability to happily lose oneself in the generic world of repetitive samples and trickily programmed percussion, will find plenty of stuff to enjoy. Me, I can only really appreciate this stuff when I smell special, and it grieves me to have found such a strong decline of «special» on Out From Out Where from Supermodified.

 

RECORDED LIVE (2004)

 

1) Intro; 2) Chronic Tronic / Dark Lady (DJ Food); 3) Twister (Tipper); 4) Verbal; 5) Remix By AFX (AFX); 6) Got Numb (Mob Nation); 7) Pressure Cooker (Cherrystones); 8) Soul Soul Soul (As One); 9) Science Fu Part 1 (Danny Breaks); 10) Marine Machines; 11) You's A Jaco Pastorious Looking Motherfucker; 12) Schmalla (Facs & Scythe); 13) Couger Merkin; 14) Higher Rates (Silent Witness & Break); 15) Cuba (Original) (T Power); 16) Moon Palace (Icarus); 17) Reactionary (Controller 7); 18) Nakatali (Topogigio); 19) Yasawas / Night Life / Fear; 20) Es­cape / Deep Impact (Future Prophecies); 21) Spanner In The Worx (Exile); 22) Allergic (Deep Roots); 23) Com­ple­te­ly Real (Suspicious Circumstance); 24) Total Recall (Silent Witness & Break); 25) Sittin Here (Dizzee Rascal); 26) Proper Hoodidge; 27) Four Ton Mantis / Hey Blondie; 28) Venus In Furs (The Velvet Underground).

 

I will try to be brief on this one. The full name is actually Solid Steel Presents: Amon Tobin Re­­corded Live, and those who are not already «in» with the electronic people will need to know that «Solid Steel» refers to a set of DJ mixes assembled and released by a bunch of guys from the Ninja Tune label (formerly beginning as a radio show, then invading the CD market with a series of albums from around 2001 to around 2007). Since Amon Tobin was signed to Ninja Tune him­self, and since DJ mixing was one of his hobbies, it was only a matter of time before he would get a chance to have an album like that all to himself.

 

This one was indeed recorded «live», with the aid of a nifty piece of software called Final Scratch that is basically a digital emulator of the vinyl turntable (that is to say, you still play vinyl records on a turntable, but all the encoded and decoded signals are digital), somewhere in Melbourne on Tobin's Australian tour in 2003. The hour-long mix itself consists of just a few Tobin originals (mainly from the last two albums) interspersed with much, much, much stuff from all sorts of big and small names in the world of breakbeats and IDM, most of them from various hip sub-scenes in London and other posh British places.

 

The record might actually do some good if you want to get a decent, representative sample of who is who in that particular corner of today's market: comparison with the originals shows that Tobin does not tamper too much with the mixes. But if you really need to do that, you are proba­bly like myself — an electronic ignoramus, familiar only with the tip of the iceberg — and then you will probably remain unmoved by most of this rucus. If, on the other side, you are a pro in the business, I really have no idea why you would need to own this in your collection when you would be much happier with the originals.

 

Essentially, the idea of a «live DJ mix» is stupid. It's one thing to be an actual participant in a club environment, and a whole other thing to want to experience that participation on record. What is it, exactly, that makes this «live» experience in any way different from a regular mix? Muffled crowd cheers in between the brief breaks? Elements of inspired improvisation in the use of the Final Scratch software? Innovative mixing practices that require an actual club environ­ment to reach full effect? Whatever.

 

For that matter, I wouldn't give a major damn even about studio-recorded DJ mixes, unless they really are highly creative re-mixes (as in Aphex Twin's 26 Mixes For Cash, sort of a true classic of the art). Most of these particular tracks are fairly generic and boring, with all of the «covers» feeling pale and wimpy in the presence of such mighty high originals as 'Four Ton Mantis' and 'Marine Machines'. But there is no need to enjoy the originals anywhere other than the respective original LPs. 'Nuff said.

 

The album's only joke-type surprise comes at the tail end, with a heavily industrialized reworking of the Velvet Underground's 'Venus In Furs'. Unfortunately, the surprise is unimpressive and un­funny. As is this entire album, completely incompatible with whatever values this particular re­viewer thinks of as valuable — thumbs down.

 

CHAOS THEORY (2005)

 

1) The Lighthouse; 2) Ruthless; 3) Theme From Battery; 4) Kokubo Sosho Stealth; 5) El Cargo; 6) Displaced; 7) Ruthless (Reprise); 8) Kokubo Sosho Battle (adapted from Cougar Merkin); 9) Hokkaido; 10) The Clean Up.

 

Sometimes I wish I could say something good about this record — or, at least, something useful — but then the very next moment I wish I didn't wish that. Basically, this is just a soundtrack to a «stealth» video game (Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory), and, as such, already a rather, er, suspicious entry in the artist's discography. However, lest the review turn into an angry rant about the abysmal effect of the Xbox on our generation, I must honestly state that Chaos Theory does work on its own as a «fully autonomous» electronic album, and that there is no obligatory need to waste hours / days / weeks of your precious life on generic virtual reality in order to fully assess its musical merits.

 

Which, honestly, do not seem at all comparable to me with the merits of Tobin's classic stuff. This is ten tracks worth of rather routine grooving, weaving the same sci-fi-meets-industrial at­mosphere that Out From Out Where gave us three years before, but with a slight drop down in creativity. On an individual level, each track is crafted with Tobin's trademark professionalism, and almost everything is multi-part, either in «build-up» mode or going through several distinct rhythmic sections. Collectively, though, it's all a big bore.

 

'Kokubo Sosho Stealth' has some moody bits ranging on true eeriness, and is the only piece on here that could, perhaps, count as «electronic simulation of fusion» (Miles Davis might have ap­preciated the percussion). 'El Cargo', with its astral guitar riff and choral vocals, has an impres­sive beginning, but halfway through is overwhelmed by the obligatory percussion onslaught. And that's about all my brain is capable of coming up with in terms of individual track assessment: pa­thetic, but we could just blame the Xbox on that. Thumbs down, and the moral of this story is — if you are commissioned to write a video game soundtrack, just get the damn money, do not in­sist on having it included in your official discography.

 

FOLEY ROOM (2007)

 

1) Bloodstone; 2) Esther's; 3) Keep Your Distance; 4) The Killer's Vanilla; 5) Kitchen Sink; 6) Horsefish; 7) Foley Room; 8) Big Furry Head; 9) Ever Falling; 10) Always; 11) Straight Psyche; 12) At The End Of The Day.

 

And now for something not completely, but significantly different. Dispensing with the practice of sampling old vinyl (and not a moment too soon), Tobin shifts his attention to «field recor­dings». While Foley Room is by no means revolutionary in that regard — electronic artists had been venturing into the streets to capture live sounds of lively life for quite a long time — it may be the first, or among the first, albums to make a religion out of the principle. Just about every track includes «real-life» sound samples, used either for the rhythmic basis itself or as special ef­fects-«flourishes» (sometimes as both).

 

Includes, yes, but is not confined to them. I have seen some complaints as to how, with Foley Room, Tobin crossed over into the world of the avantagarde and all but betrayed his original pur­pose of existence. This is not really just. Even at this stage of his career, Tobin is not strictly an «avantgarde» music maker, because Foley Room does not exactly rebel against the commonly observed principles of melody and harmony; at the very least, not against those principles that the guy used to follow on his earlier records.

 

After all, in a symbolic gesture, the very first track here does not sample motorbikes or kitchen sinks: it samples the Kronos Quartet, whom Tobin actually recorded live in his «foley room». I understand that «commonly observed principles of melody and harmony» are expected to go to hell when we deal with someone as reckless as the Kronos Quartet, but, in actuality, 'Bloodstone' is a fairly normal composition: a little ominous, a little terrifying, with all of its Schnittke influen­ces firmly in place, but completely accessible.

 

The same goes for most of the other tracks. Naturally, there are no «memorable melodies»: the ef­fect is purely atmospheric. And that effect, more often than not, is rather dry. The patterns that Tobin constructs in between his field recordings and the overlays of percussion and synthesizers have more to do with complex mathematics than intuitive spirit work. But we would be fooling ourselves if we started to argue about how A.T. used to be such an overwhelming spiritual mes­siah of the electronic world in the past, and how he has so unpleasantly shifted to soulless experi­mental textures — like, «jungle-jazz» is so cathartic, and «jungle-kitchen sink» is so technical. It really does not work that way.

 

Because the overall effect of Foley Room is not that far removed from the effect of Tobin's pre­vious efforts. This is still the same old dark, otherworldly music, coming from some post-apoca­lyptic world in which green grass has been completely replaced by robo-factories and wannabe Darth Va­ders stand in lines for the soup kitchen. This world has its brighter spots (e. g. on 'Horse­fish', constructed along a pretty harp melody played by Sarah Page; 'Always', the «poppiest» track on here, including several disjointed guitar parts drawn from folk-rock, post-punk, and what-not, along with psychedelic female vocals), but, as it always goes, they are in a minority, merely offering brief respite from the harshness of this brand of virtual life.

 

It is just that this harshness, when all the field recordings are thrown in, becomes overtly «experi­mental». 'Big Furry Head', for instance, sounds very similar to some of his earlier «sickening shuffles», but, instead of going «wow, this is really heavy, makes my stomach churn», the lis­te­ner is supposed to go «wow, he stuck the sounds of a roaring tiger on here, how cool is that?» (and most of the critics did go that way). Not that it really means anything, or that anybody could actually explain what is so particularly exciting about a sampled tiger roar. But it's an experiment. It could work — and then again, it could not work. You are supposed to find that out for yourself.

 

I respect experiment, especially when the experiment in question involves performing lots of hard work (and on Foley Room, with its miriads of samples interconnected in miriads of ways, Tobin seems to have done more hard work than ever before), and, on a sheerly intellectual level, the al­bum is a mega-achievement, worth all the thumbs up that it can get. Unfortunately, on an emoti­onal level, it, at best, gives that «same old same old» feeling, and, at worst, whispers that the feel­ing used to be stronger and sharper in the past.

 

Thus, technically, the experiment succeeds; but it looks like we are still a long way from reaching that stage when «sounds of the street» will be­come so naturally integrated in music-making that we'd start thinking of all the earlier music as hopelessly outdated. And I am all for replacing gui­tars, violins, and pianos with kitchen sinks and tiger roars — provided they can assume all of the functions of guitars, violins, and pianos, without losing their own. Until then, albums like Foley Room will always be «interesting», never «cathartic».

 

ISAM (2011)

 

1) Journeyman; 2) Piece Of Paper; 3) Goto 10; 4) Surge; 5) Lost & Found; 6) Wooden Toy; 7) Mass & Spring; 8) Calculate; 9) Kitty Cat; 10) Bedtime Stories; 11) Night Swim; 12) Dropped From The Sky.

 

«Off the deep end» is, of course, a very relative notion — many people will find even the most «accessible» albums in Tobin's backpack to be bizarre and frightening mind-bending concoctions — but, on the artist's own scale, I would say that ISAM is clearly the breaking point, at which even some of the man's staunchest fans will be presented with a take-it-or-leave-it dilemma.

 

Even Foley Room was, with certain reservations, a musically-oriented record. Its followup, al­though it formally continues to build upon that foundation, makes a firm transition into the sonically-oriented field. Most of the tracks still have some sort of rhythmic basis, but essentially they are collages, stuck together from a variety of field recordings, tiny musical beats, and elec­tronic treatments. Cujo himself called this a «sound sculpture» — who are we to contradict him?

 

Unfortunately, the sculpture is mostly undescribable. A detailed listing of all the sounds that con­stitute a track like 'Journeyman', accompanied by an evaluation of all the transition effects, would take hours, if not days, to put together — and the payoff? my guess it would simply look dumb. All that remains in the reviewer's power is simply to state that yes, it is an electronically based rhythmic sound collage, and, once you have taken the time to listen to it, you may or may not ag­ree with the reviewer's position: it is curious, but emotionally vague, like so many other experi­mental sound collages going all the way back to the days of 'Revolution #9'.

 

On the positive side, there are some interesting links between «song» titles and the «music», particularly on the second half of the album. 'Bedtime Stories', for instance, starts out with kiddie chimes that usually prepare the listener for some soothing Christmas experience, but then turns into a heavy bass / deep fuzz / treated vocal extravaganza — the sort of «bedtime story» that will, perhaps, be narrated by Mother Robot to her kids once humanity is finally wiped out by artifical intelligence. 'Night Swim', dominated by slightly dissonant harp strumming and Milky-Way-ish synthesizer swirls, likewise, creates an atmosphere that is associable with the title.

 

There are a few vocal tracks here, too, on which it seems that Tobin may be taking some cues from the Animal Collective (only, as befits the gentleman, his songs are always darker): 'Kitty Cat', for instance, which, at a certain point, threatens to go upbeat Brit-pop on us, with a bouncy music-hall rhythm, while still retaining its kaleidoscopic electronic skin and warped psychedelic voices; or 'Wooden Toy', which actually sounds like a possible outtake from one of Animal Col­lective's earlier albums. However, these concise, somewhat song-like creations, are more of an exception than the rule here.

 

As questionable as it may sound, I would still go ahead and say this: the more «experimental» this guy keeps getting, the less «innovative» and «interesting» his art actually becomes. By 2011, the world has already had its multi-ton share of sonic collages of all sorts, shapes, and flavors. So what exactly is it that could make ISAM into a new musical sensation? Just the fact that this is, let's say, «Amon Tobin mixed with Autechre»? The adventurous spirit is admirable, but we are long, long past the time when it was simply sufficient for the spirit to be adventurous in order to gain critical respect and a cult following. As far as my ears and brain neurons are concerned, ISAM has neither meaning nor direct emotional impact. On the other hand, it still has a certain aura of «coolness», and it was a sort of abstract «fun» to listen to it for the first time. But I still hope, very much so, that one of these days Mr. Cujo will decide to go back to «simplistic» music-making. Otherwise, he will simply drown in the same old sea corner whose «deep end» has alrea­dy attracted so many other talented people.

 

 

 

AMORPHIS

THE KARELIAN ISTHMUS (1992)

 

1) Karelia; 2) The Gathering; 3) Grail's Mysteries; 4) Warriors Trial; 5) Black Embrace; 6) The Exile Of The Sons Of Uisliu; 7) The Lost Name Of God; 8) The Pilgrimage; 9) Misery Path; 10) Sign From The North Side; 11*) Vul­gar Necrolatry.

 

Let us get this out of the way first: I do not «get» the appeal of death metal vocals at all. I admire people who are capable of firing up their larynxes that way without having to be rushed to the hos­pital fifteen minutes into one of their shows or recording sessions, and I even admit that an oc­casional usage — in particularly appropriate spots, like on 'Boris The Spider' — of the death me­tal growl may be warranted. But, for all I know, death metal vocalists growl the entire way thro­ugh their LPs simply out of sheer embarrassment that someone might, like, actually make out the lyrics — because, let us admit it, if there is one thing in death metal that may easily compete with the silliness of the ubiquitous chorus of "HHHRRRWWWAAAARRRGHH", it can only be the texts that go along with it.

 

Of course, Amorphis must be given some leeway in the matter, considering that they come from Finland, where the snow falls heavy and the language belongs to a different family (not that Nor­wegian death metal poems are any better, though, and Norwegians have no linguistic excuse). At the heart of the band is rhythm guitarist/vocalist Tomi Koivusaari, who also writes much of the music, and lead guitarist Esa Holopainen, who writes the rest of the music and bears primary res­ponsibility for the lyrics. Then there's a rhythm section that will remain nameless — and, at this time in their life, there is no keyboard player in the band.

 

Which, basically, ensures that The Karelian Isthmus is as generic a death metal record as they come. Forty-five seconds of medieval acoustic intro, followed by ten virtually indistinguishable slabs of metallic doom. (By «virtually» I mean that pretty much every song begins with the same type of crushing power chord — experienced fans, later on, will obviously pick out the differen­ces). The band's style relies primarily on riffage: solo passages are scarce and brief compared to meticulously calculated rhythmic figures, which always come under one of two sauces — «bru­tal low» and «melodic high», with each song usually sharing at least one sub-section of each. The other typical convention of death metal — alternating between slow/ominous and fast/apocalyp­tic — is also well respected throughout.

 

The album frequently provokes opinion battles: regular death metal fans may swear by it as Amor­phis' finest moment, angry at the band for an early betrayal of the strict form, whereas prog-metal admirers tend to think of it as little other than an early initiation ritual, upon the perfor­mance of which Koivusaari and Holopainen were free to expand their vision. All I can say here is that death metal, ridiculous vocals and teen fantasy lyrics aside, is a fairly difficult thing to mas­ter, and it is somewhat of a dim pleasure to watch the band wind its way through the complex mazes of their riffage regardless of any other considerations. But, for one thing, it's impossible to con­vey or justify this pleasure in a simple, hastily slapped together review; for another, I wouldn't feel like doing it even if I could do it.

 

Oh yes, if you are really interested, this is also one Amorphis album that deals slightly less with the band's cherished Finnish legacy and slightly more with Celtic and Germanic motives (which may explain the more conventional whiff of their music-making as well; and don't expect me to quote any of the lyrics). And it also gets a thumbs down — respect for the riffage notwithstand­ing, I think I'll still be going along with the prog-metalheads on this one. Generic death metal just ain't my cup of tea — and, for that matter, it is rather Lady Gaga that is the officially anointed prophet of the Apocalypse, than any death metal band in existence.

 

TALES FROM THE THOUSAND LAKES (1993)

 

1) Thousand Lakes; 2) Into Hiding; 3) The Castaway; 4) First Doom; 5) Black Winter Day; 6) Drowned Maid; 7) In The Beginning; 8) Forgotten Sunrise; 9) To Father's Cabin; 10) Magic And Mayhem; 11*) Folk Of The North; 12*) Moon And Sun; 13*) Moon And Sun Part II; 14*) Light My Fire.

 

On this record, the Finns made a bet for something bigger — going from generic death metal to something that could, in all honesty, be called «progressive death metal». But have no fear! This does not, by any means, imply that they simply started omitting breaks between compositions. On the contrary — the emphasis is on making the whole thing slightly more palatable to general au­diences by smoothing out the excesses of the «death» approach, and adding diversity.

 

Formally, the changes are embodied in the addition of a new member, Kasper Mårtenson on key­boards, whose presence influences almost every song and who also contributes one of the band's trustiest live standards ('Black Winter Day'). Another shift is reflected in the credits: primary gro­wler Tomi Koivusaari has all but withdrawn from compositional work, leaving most of the song­writing to lead guitarist Esa Holopainen — resulting in a much more melodic sound overall. Fi­nally, the band even adds a bit of clean vocals (delivered by guest star Ville Tuomi), although clearly as an «experiment» (what do you know, they told us there is this bizarre thing called «sin­ging» and we just wanted to try it out — no idea if it will catch on — probably just a passing fad, but who knows...).

 

It all works. Suddenly, the riffs start becoming memorable and even impressive! 'Magic And May­hem', for instance, begins like a progressive anthem, with a romantic lead guitar line backed by snowy organ — then pushes into Sabbath territory with a monster riff that sounds as if it came straight off Sabotage — then, two minutes into the song, shifts gears once again into a more thrashy direction, and then, before it all ends, still has enough space to insert a bizarre synth solo that almost seems to be coming from the acid house planet.

 

Neither there nor anywhere else do Mårtenson's keyboards ever become aggressively annoying — a usual misstep with metal keyboardists, who tend to spoil the fun by either engaging in boring and lifeless solos or dissolving the heavy guitar crunch in a chemical atmosphere of Yamaha Magic and Mystery. Kasper uses his instruments to lay down concise, melodic lines, and he al­ways knows when to fade away into the deep background or even completely shut down to let the guitars take over. Check out 'The Castaway', for instance,  where, once the main riff sets in, the keyboards are buried deep, adding an extra dimension but never overwhelming everything.

 

If anything, the difference is felt if you simply play the first five seconds of each song — where every song used to begin with a crashing power chord, the band now adds melodic guitar intros ('Castaway'), melodic twin piano/synth intros ('Black Winter Day'), or just plunges straightahead into «chugging» riffage ('To Father's Cabin'). The result is a record which, while still heavily mo­notonous in tone, has no intention of passing itself off as an overlong musical joke, so typical of over-the-top genres of which death metal is clearly one. Whether it really suits the spirit of the Kalevala, from whose stories most of the lyrics are drawn, is for everyone to decide, although it is likely that most of Amorphis' fans outside of Finland have no idea of what the Kalevala even is — here is a great chance to find out. Thumbs up.

 

The CD edition also adds four bonus tracks from the Black Winter Day EP which came out two years later: the two-part 'Moon And Sun' is an okay epic, much in the vein of the album itself, but the real clinker is, of course, the death metal version of the Doors' 'Light My Fire', growling vo­cals included. I must say, though, that, other than the vocals, the song lends itself pretty well to death metal interpretation.

 

ELEGY (1996)

 

1) Better Unborn; 2) Against Widows; 3) The Orphan; 4) On Rich And Poor; 5) My Kantele; 6) Cares; 7) Song Of The Troubled One; 8) Weeper On The Shore; 9) Elegy; 10) Relief; 11) My Kantele (acoustic version).

 

More line-up changes. The old keyboard player is out, replaced by Kim Rantala (on piano and... accordion?); and a new «clean» vocalist, Pasi Koskinen, is admitted as a permanent member. Koivusaari's growling is not out, however; «romantic hero» and «Cookie Monster» type vocals are shared in a 50-50 ratio (and, frankly, I wouldn't be too hasty to claim that Pasi's epic vocali­zing style is always and necessarily a relief after Tomi's growls).

 

It is not just the usual band member rotation, though, but the entire spirit that keeps evolving. If Tales was still essentially a «death metal» album with artsy/progressive inclinations, then Elegy is almost completely «prog-metal», with very few reminiscences (other than the growling) of how it once used to be. In fact, even the «metal» aspect is sometimes downplayed, with acoustic gui­tars, synthesizers, and unpredictable excursions into alien territory diversifying the playground.

 

No song embodies all the change better than 'Better Unborn', with its Eastern overtones and fake sitar bits setting the scene and then, a minute into the song, the album's hugest and most memora­ble riff taking over, as if the band wanted to create their equivalent of Led Zep's 'Kashmir'. The song rides a bombastic, but believable apocalyptic groove, within which even the growling, alter­nating with Pasi's «normal» vocals, has its proper place. You can grovel before its power, or you can just go down the road whistling out the tune — a notable rarity for prog-metal anthems.

 

Or, perhaps, the most memorable (if not so «huge») riff is, after all, to be found in the middle of 'On Rich And Poor' — the terrific melody that starts around 1:43 into the song, then gets double tracked and sticks in your head the same way a certain classical theme could do it (and there must have been lots of classical theme influences behind this album). Melodicity is also at the heart of 'My Kantele', on which old-fashioned Moog-ish synthesizers rule the day, and on 'Song Of The Troubled One', where the wall of sound thinly veils something like an old Celtic dance tune.

 

The riskiest track on the entire album is 'Cares'. Starting out innocently, in the fashion of a good old thrash number (but still embellished by keyboards), and proceeding through a couple signa­ture changes, it suddenly breaks into what, by all accounts, sounds like several bars of Cossack dancing, accompanied by Hawaiian guitars (!) — then goes back to «normal» — then segues into another interlude, this time built on a hardcore techno beat, synth loops and all, and some pseudo-industrial-electronic scraping that may or may not be simulated on one of the guitars. The most bizarre thing about this crazyass synthesis is that, somehow, it does not feel like total kitsch — the first break is just too weird for the listener to determine whether it fits in or not, and the se­cond one is gradually shifted from total techno to a bit of techno-funk and then back into the re­gular metallic fold, so that you don't really get the impression of a hostile radio station having just tuned in on you for a couple dozen seconds.

 

'Cares' is reason enough for the curious music lover to pay attention to Elegy, but, honestly, there is not a single bad track on here: if anything, the album could be lovingly dedicated to the great progressive rock heroes of the early 1970s — of course, it does not have nearly as many innova­tive or downright exciting ideas, but it's got the benefit of the «death metal experience», meaning these guys know how to get a big sound with plenty of crunch and edge. For the record, this time around most of the lyrical subjects and atmospheric inspiration are drawn from the Kanteletar, the chief Finnish competitor to Kalevala, but that certainly does not mean that anyone has to go through a crash course in the literary reinvention of Finnish mythology in order to gain a deeper, more spiritually adequate understanding of how Elegy works. Just pretend it's all about dungeons & dragons, even if that's not really true. Nothing is wrong with dungeons & dragons, anyway, if they are being personified with such an intelligent balance of melodicity and headbanging. Clear­ly a thumbs up here from all points of view.

 

TUONELA (1999)

 

1) The Way; 2) Morning Star; 3) Nightfall; 4) Tuonela; 5) Greed; 6) Divinity; 7) Shining; 8) Withered; 9) Rusty Moon; 10) Summer's End.

 

Once again, no regular keyboard player here, although guest musician Santeri Kallio does contri­bute a limited amount of synths and what-not. This indicates another change of style, but the band definitely does not plan upon returning to its death metal past. Only one song ('Greed') still em­ploys growling vocals, and, as an exception in a particularly evil-tinged composition, they feel very much in place. And the music moves closer to noise- and stoner-metal this time, with care­fully carved out riffs often replaced by oceans of metallic jangle.

 

Which indicates that they really wanted to make Tuonela a «mood» album. The word itself is the Finnish equivalent of the Underworld, literally «death place» — and Finnish ideas on that place do not differ that much from Germanic-Scandinavian representations (in fact, the very word tuo­ni 'death' is ultimately of Scandinavian origin) — and that begs for one hell of a grim mood, which the band tries to conjure with the power of multiple overdubs and droning guitar melodies. The latter aren't particularly original, but they do yield the proper atmosphere.

 

Nothing better than 'The Way', though. Quite unexpectedly, it starts off in bursts of New Wave-style funky licks that bring to mind King Crimson or U2 rather than any metal or old-school prog band — then, although a metallic rhythm track is added for crunch, eventually delves into classic rock mode, adding ecstatic 1970s-style solos, while Koskinen seems to sing with increased con­fidence: he is now loud, proud, epic, but has that acid-angry strain in his voice whose presence always separates cool-sounding metal dudes from dorky-sounding ones (think someone like Ron­nie James Dio, even though Koskinen has nowhere near the sonic power). The lyrics are corny — "since the stars have shone, the devil has shown me way" is just a tad too obvious — but that's the only thing that prevents 'The Way' from becoming a total musical masterpiece; I find no other complaints about any other part of the song. They even bring in scorching wah-wah guitars to kick the flames ever higher. That's right — what sort of an album about Hell could do without a well-placed wah-wah growl from time to time?

 

I cannot say that any individual tracks after that one rope me in with as much security, but I really like the overall sound the guys got here. Second track, 'Morning Star', comes across as basic sto­ner noise upon first listen, but after a while, its melodic groove sets in firmly, and then there's al­so simple respect for how masterfully the aural effect has been set up — with all these overdubs, subtle tension build-ups, and an inspired, teeth-clenched drive to the very end, it all sounds damn serious. The only great, Sabbath-worthy riff is on 'Greed', but the record is not really about riffage. It wants to bury you under it, which is reasonable considering it's all about a journey to Hades, and I can at least vouch for myself that I did spend some time climbing from under it.

 

It could become a tad too monotonous, eventually, despite only running for 46 minutes, but the band does not forget about little diversifying touches — the Mid-Eastern motives in 'Nightfall', the sax and piano coda in the title track, the electric organ solo on 'Divinity', the odd garage-like stop-and-start structure of 'Shining', the flute (!) arrangements on 'Rusty Moon'... hmm, until now I never realized myself there were so many of these flourishes on the record. But there they are. So it's not their best «metal» album, and far from their best «progressive» outfit (certainly not as daring as Elegy), but it serves its purpose. Welcome to our local branch of the Underworld — you don't have to buy anything if you don't want to, but a thumbs up would be nice.

 

AM UNIVERSUM (2001)

 

1) Alone; 2) Goddess (Of The Sad Man); 3) The Night Is Over; 4) Shatters Within; 5) Crimson Wave; 6) Drifting Memories; 7) Forever More; 8) Veil Of Sin; 9) Captured State; 10) Grieve Stricken Heart.

 

Not only is this no longer «death metal», it is no longer «metal» at all, period. The new sound de­veloped on Tuonela stuck, and Am Universum adopts it for almost all of its tunes. Gone comp­letely are the death metal vocals, along with those deep hewn, pitch black riffs that could some­times challenge Tony Iommi, replaced throughout with Koskinen's sharp-edged singing and rif­fage that mixes New Wave-style echo-based phrasing with the alt-rock drone. And that's how it is, song after song after song.

 

Two things save Am Universum from sucking. First, although the guitar tones are extremely si­milar, the band varies the arrangements by bringing in saxophones (contributed by Sakari Kukko on about half of the tracks), diverse types of keyboards (the keyboardist spot is once again occu­pied by a new arrival, Santeri Kallio), and even a musical saw on one of the songs. Repeated lis­tens bring out these nuances fair well enough.

 

Second, the progressive melodies are still okay. Somehow, almost without noticing, as the band progressed from growling to singing, they became quite good at writing catchy vocal parts. Try to deconstruct the sonic layers of 'Alone', and behind all the roar lies a fairly decent prog-pop song with dark overtones (well, the day Amorphis start writing songs with light overtones is probably the day they start growing bananas in Finland). So it may begin a bit too uncomfortably close to Pink Floyd's 'Run Like Hell', but then it meets up with the heavy guitars and with the power cho­rus and with the psychedelic guitar solo and... well, it's not really as dull as the first paragraph of this review could possibly hint.

 

I am also a big fan of 'The Night Is Over', where it is not even clear which of the two is more res­ponsible for the song's deadly snarl — the overdriven wah-wah guitars or the apocalyptic organ. The heart-crushing shifts between the more «romantic» middle eights, replete with dreamy slide guitars and stuff, and the crashing power chords of the main verse/chorus melody have a char­ming retro spirit to them, as in several guys getting together and deciding to simply put out a good old art-rock song in the old, time-tested way. Cute!

 

Now that I keep relistening to bits and pieces of this for the sake of nurturing extra ideas, I keep liking the songs more and more, almost to my amazement, considering how much I normally de­test generic alt-rock lashing, of which there is so much on this album. It's just that every song has tons of layers in it. So I never paid any attention to 'Captured State' first or second time around — just seemed like a so-so mid-tempo piece of rock ballast to me. But in reality, even at its most deafening, the song has at least one or two extra melodic lead parts tucked away in the speakers. And the keyboard accompaniment is a Hammond organ (or something), so far removed from the usual cold-blooded synthesizers. And it is still easily the weakest, or one of the weakest, contri­butions on the entire album.

 

I just like this groove the band has developed — it does not work wonders for catchy melodies, but it's perfectly adequate, and the album grows and grows in stature with each new listen. Oh, and its subject themes? Uh, lost love, loved loss, failed memories, memorized failures, whatever. It's dark, but too melodic and dynamic to be significantly depressing. Angry, wrathful, epic, ro­mantic, but never foolish enough to pester you with its overbearingly fake emotions. Good stuff — a step down from Tuonela, perhaps, but with so much experience and success behind their backs, Amorphis could allow themselves a few steps down before hitting dirt.

 

FAR FROM THE SUN (2003)

 

1) Day Of Your Beliefs; 2) Planetary Misfortune; 3) Evil Inside; 4) Mourning Soil; 5) Far From The Sun; 6) Etheral Solitude; 7) Killing Goodness; 8) God Of Deception; 9) Higher Ground; 10) Smithereens.

 

But as much as the combination of ingredients worked out for Tuonela and Am Universum ma­naged to work out, there has to be an end somewhere. Even as a musical genius, you cannot go on forever at the same routine settings without blanding out, and the guys behind Amorphis had al­ways been serious working men, rarely, if ever, attested in the state of flying towards sources of divine inspiration.

 

Basically I'm just trying to set up a stage here for explaining why Am Universum might just be a goddamn fine record, where its successor sucked so bad that I almost literally had to wash the sludge out of my ears after each new listen (and I did manage several — I so paid my dues to Fin­land in full, these guys can no longer lay proper claim to the Karelian Isthmus) — even if, upon first sight, there does not seem to have been a lot of change from one to another.

 

And yet, that's just it. Far From The Sun catches the band in a relaxed, lazier-than-usual, transi­tion state, as they simply venture into the studio, crank out another bunch of tunes in the already familiar alt-rock/metal style... then forget, completely, to make this bunch interesting. In fact, they seem to have forgotten everything, right down to waking up the sound engineer: Far From The Sun is atrociously recorded, as if all the instruments and vocals were processed through one chan­nel. Just as Pasi finally earned his «Prog-Metal Vocalist That Is Relatively Tough To Make Fun Of» diploma (one of the top distinctions in the genre) for the last couple of albums, they put his voice behind a radioactive metal curtain — you can hear it all right, but there is no way you can enjoy it without opening your ears to fatal dosage.

 

Occasional praise could be heard on the part of those who were happy that the band had dropped much of its artsy pretentiousness, along with the retro keyboards and saxes and flutes and what-not, and went back to its metal roots. Unfortunate fools! Even if that were somehow a good thing per se, Far From The Sun still sounds nothing like Thousand Lakes — instead of clear-cut black metal riffs, you are still getting alt-metal sludge. Only this time there is no delicious fros­ting on the cake to compensate for the dull taste of the dough — just sludge. One thick layer after another, ten songs in a row. Turn it on at any random second, chances are you will be getting the exact same grumble-grumble all over the place. And who the heck needs it these days, now that we have And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead offering the same approach on a 24/7 basis?

 

If the entire album consisted of its opening number, 'Day Of Your Beliefs', we could count our­selves happy. It's got a marginally bigger hook, a marginally doomier atmosphere, and a margina­l­ly catchier chorus. At least five or six of the other songs sound like marginal variations on the same topic, only duller. The sludge recedes only once — on 'Etheral Solitude', driven forward by what sounds like reggae chords (!), but still not a particularly good song. Some numbers start out promisingly, like the distorted martial punch of the opening to 'Killing Goodness', only to get en­gulfed in even more sludge as time goes by.

 

I cannot blame Pasi for quitting the band after this album. Probably, this had less to do with its overall quality, or with the fact that just about any singer, including a tonedeaf one, could have performed on it with pretty much the same effect, than with personal reasons of a non-musical nature — as it always happens. But he could also sense that, with the band continuing to go — or, rather, to limp — in this direction, he had no creative future in it whatsoever. «Far from the sun» indeed: a firm, stern thumbs down.

 

ECLIPSE (2006)

 

1) Two Moons; 2) House Of Sleep; 3) Leaves Scar; 4) Born From Fire; 5) Under A Soil And Black Stone; 6) Perkele (The God Of Fire); 7) The Smoke; 8) Same Flesh; 9) Brother Moon; 10) Empty Opening.

 

Unquestionably a jump back to better form here. For some reason, with Koskinen's departure, the music is once again credited to individual members of the band rather than the collective «Amor­phis» — with the lion's share distributed between Holopainen and keyboardist Santeri Kallio. The lyrics, once again returning us to motives from the Kalevala, are all properly credited to new vo­calist Tomi Joutsen, on whose issue I am undecided. The trick is that his normal singing voice is not very interesting, lacking the sharpness and perkiness of Koskinen; but he also does some growling, and does it damn well — he actually manages to sing while growling, with real vocal modulation. Besides, he switches to growling only in the appropriate spots, justifying the practice as a normal artistic trick rather than a silly obligatory trademark.

 

Musically, Eclipse tries to reintroduce progressive elements that had been so completely squan­dered on Far From The Sun in favor of noise, noise, and more noise. Unfortunately, «tries» is an appropriate description, because the final result is still very far removed from the level of ad­venturousness that characterized Elegy and even Tuonela. Those albums had nothing approa­ch­ing the flatness of such numbers as 'Born From Fire', which just drags on like a dead weight — until, at the very end, the boys get a bright idea to overdub a folk dance-style lead part on top of the boring rhythm chords. Which is something like thirty seconds out of a four-minute tune. And this pretty much summarizes my entire feelings about the record.

 

Essentially, the quieter these songs are, the better they work: my favorite is 'The Smoke', built around a simple, but impressive seven-note piano riff from Kallio — but it remains exciting only as long as the guitars are kept low enough to let you hear the riff, or the song degenerates into boring noise. 'Leaves Scar' has a fine, poetic intro, then steps into martial noise territory, of which there is simply too much on the song for me to lump it into the «high creativity» category. And so on and on: change is very much welcome, but way too much sludge remains for the change to bear significant importance.

 

Worst of all, Eclipse does not have either a convincing beginning or a convincing ending. 'Two Moons' may be carried by one of the most complex riff patterns on the entire record, but it is nei­ther as memorable or as properly epic as 'Day Of Your Beliefs'. And the sadness and despair of 'Empty Opening' is way too mild — it is simply not enough to choose a minor tonality and then decide that your instruments will do all the work on their own. What's up with all that bland phra­sing? What's up with all the slushy power chords? We know this band is capable of perfectly well strung note sequences — is it just a matter of well strung note sequences not sounding loud enough? What about that search for identity?

 

Thus, at its best, Eclipse seems like an honest attempt to pull themselves out of the rut, successful in spots but, overall, a disappointment. The change of vocalist gives only a marginally fresh angle (at least, it could have been worse), and none of the individual songs reach classic status (well, maybe with the lone exception of the album's most aggressive tune — 'Perkele', on which they manage to hit upon a winning combination of growling vocals and ultra-black guitar). The only ray of light comes from realizing that they haven't given up on trying to recapture the magic — although, the way I see it, an obvious first step would be to start writing riff-based rather than sludge- and drone-based music again. Thumbs down. Keep in mind, however, that many fans regard Eclipse as an awesome master-comeback, something I don't hear at all — but that's just me, your local promoter of American Idol.

 

SILENT WATERS (2007)

 

1) Weaving The Incantation; 2) A Servant; 3) Silent Waters; 4) Towards And Against; 5) I Of Crimson Blood; 6) Her Alone; 7) Enigma; 8) Shaman; 9) The White Swan; 10) Black River; 11*) Sign.

 

Here is what I think happened. The mainstream metal press liked the direction that Amorphis took with Eclipse and spewed forth lots of positive reviews. The band members liked the direc­tion that the mainstream metal press took with their reviews, and spewed forth Eclipse Vol. 2, without changing a doggone thing. For only the second time in their career, the band gave us two albums that sounded completely identical. But at least Tuonela and Ad Universum had all their little musical flourishes that made each album enjoyable.

 

Silent Waters, on the other hand, shares all the flaws of Eclipse without ever trying to improve on them. Yes, lovers of Finnish folklore may be interested in following the songs, because, once again, they draw their atmospheric and textual inspiration from the Kalevala, this time writing a song cycle centered around the story of the death and resurrection of Lemminkäinen, the big Her­cules-type hero of the epic poem. It's a fine story in its own rights, but one that, the way I see it, deserves to be set to much more interesting music.

 

I admit, however, that it may not so much be the actual melodies here that I dislike so much as the overall setting. Several of the songs still feature well-crafted riffs; but they are all encrusted into this awful noise setting which is supposed to add power, but, in my case at least, adds nothing but distraction — and an occasional headache. Somehow, in the past, these guys were able to get by on riffpower alone; what the heck made them think every goddamn song must have this intermi­nable bland «roaring» at its foundation?

 

Also, as much as Kallio tries to help by adding classical piano passages to songs, it does not work, because the piano only very rarely acts as an integral component of the song. At best, e. g. on the title track, we start out with a nice minor key intro, then, with the guitars breaking their way in, the piano recedes into the background and becomes just a moody echo effect to all the roaring. At worst, you just cannot hear the piano at all, even when it's actually there. And are there any other keyboards played? If there were, I don't remember.

 

A few songs sort of «stand out» by employing user-friendlier production techniques. On 'Towards Ang Against', for instance, the band toys with electronics and danceable drum beats, but the ef­fect is, to put it mildly, rather questionable. Not sure if these things work so well with the song's dark riff and growling vocals. For some reason, «Rob Zombie» and similar silly commercialized crap comes to mind. Not the most correct association, perhaps, but there it is, and it is not wel­come. 'Enigma' is the only song on the album to be carried throughout on a folksy acoustic pat­tern, but for some reason it also bores the hell out of me — maybe it's because I've heard that pat­tern a thousand times already?

 

Thumbs down. At this juncture, it almost looks like Amorphis have just passed the point of no return: a band that, at one time, almost invented an entirely new type of music, now content them­selves with recycling a dull, predictable formula. If anything, it belies and belittles their own fri­ckin' name. I'd suggest a rechristening as Cacomorphis, and choosing Captain Hook as their mas­cot, but it's not as if I'm getting paid for this, so whatever.

 

P.S. If you are a metalhead, don't take my word on the album by any means — apparently, most fans just love the record. Perhaps years of listening to heavy music result in one's ears naturally develo­ping some sort of sludge filter. Me, I'm still in training.

 

SKYFORGER (2009)

 

1) Sampo; 2) Silver Bride; 3) From The Heaven Of My Heart; 4) Sky Is Mine; 5) Majestic Beast; 6) My Sun; 7) Highest Star; 8) Skyforger; 9) Course Of Fate; 10) From Earth I Rose.

 

This third volume of Eclipse is marginally more interesting — because the level of sludge has been slightly lowered in favor of slightly more distinguishable melodicity. In fact, 'Sampo' begins the record with a serious promise. A spiraling piano riff, a sharp guitar tone doubling the melody, and suddenly even the obligatory crackling of the thunderstormy metallic accompaniment be­comes more tolerable, although I could still live without it.

 

From there and onwards, though, there are no surprises. Except, perhaps, a more significant em­phasis on growling vocals — which is unfortunate, because, at this point, Tomi Joutsen does not merely sound like our friend the Cookie Monster: he sounds like Cookie Monster with acute la­rynx inflammation, and, considering that these vocal parts usually arrive at «climactic» (heaviest) moments of each given song, the effect is unintentionally hilarious. (As much as I have trained myself to accept death metal vocals as part of the game, the training is still only effective when [a] the music is not deadly boring and [b] the death metal vocals really tend to sound like death, com­pletely pitchless. Skyforger offers no such deal).

 

At one point, I intentionally embarked upon the quest to find something worth writing about — my prize was discovering a little bit of flute melody on 'Highest Star', like a pale shadow of what it used to be on 'Rusty Moon' from Tuonela, because this time it sounds fairly wimpy even du­ring the quiet parts, and fades out completely on the loud, sludgy ones. Nothing else. There is no­thing else to write about. Yes, there are some good riffs, but the godawful production simply mas­sa­cres them. If this is metal, I expect at least one or two songs that kick butt like it used to be with 'Better Unborn', without the muffling noise. If this is progressive stuff, bring back the flutes and the Mellotrons and the whatnot, give me some frickin' diversity.

 

Unfortunately, at this point, what with the small, but surprisingly loyal, bunch of Tomi Joutsen's fans, throwing their thumbs up every time Amorphis gets loud, it already looks like the formula stuck pretty hard: the band that, for a brief moment, was on the front line of merging extreme forms of metal with prog, has opted to retreat to a safer place, one in which all the songs are free­ly interchangeable, but which is cozy enough to offer the necessary protection. If you loved Si­lent Waters, you will love Skyforger (good luck telling the songs apart, though); otherwise, do not even begin to bother. Thumbs down.

 

THE BEGINNING OF TIMES (2011)

 

1) Battle For Light; 2) Mermaid; 3) My Enemy; 4) You I Need; 5) Song Of The Sage; 6) Three Words; 7) Re­for­ma­tion; 8) Soothsayer; 9) On A Stranded Shore; 10) Escape; 11) Crack In A Stone; 12) Beginning Of Time.

 

This fourth volume of Eclipse is marginally more interesting than Skyforger (mumbled the un­comfortable reviewer, as much in need of new words as he was in need of new emotions), for the following two reasons:

 

(1) approximately one minute into ʽSong Of The Sageʼ, the good old sludge is cut down, and in­ its place we see a nice little flute-driven passage, one that is not so much influenced by classic Jethro Tull as it is directly or almost directly lifted from some Tull song — but it still sounds nice enough on its own, next to all the growling vocals and shit;

 

(2) ʽThree Wordsʼ, I think, is as close to a really good song as this band ever got to in the last ten years of its existence. The stop-and-start structure of the melody, with its thumping («earth-bur­rowing») riff, is attractive, as is the modestly catchy, singalong chorus, even though the latter may sound a bit too commercial and slick to the demanding listener.

 

Other than that, I am still not able to warm up to the band's post-Ad Universum sound. All I can say is that, with each new album since 2003, they have been trying to improve upon the melo­dicity of the content, so that, with The Beginning Of Times, I am beginning to think I could al­most end up liking some of it, had they bothered to return their production values to what they used to be around the times of Elegy. No dice. A big thank you to Iikka Kahri for providing oc­casional flute and sax support, and to Netta Dahlberg for adding female vocal harmonies in a few spots, but this just isn't enough.

 

So let me simply pass the mike over to an anonymous reviewer at Amazon, whose admiration for the album was so uncontainable, it had to spill over in poetic form: "Skyforger blew me away / I can listen to it all day / But it was time for something new / The Beginning Of Times is Sky­forger Part 2". The innocence and, at the same time, inevitability of the oxymoron in the last two lines, I must say, «blew me away» far more than anything on this record. Still, it did not suffice to save the album from the usual thumbs down. Bring on more flute!

 

CIRCLE (2013)

 

1) Shades Of Gray; 2) Mission; 3) The Wanderer; 4) Narrow Path; 5) Hopeless Days; 6) Nightbird's Song; 7) Into The Abyss; 8) Enchanted By The Moon; 9) A New Day; 10*) Dead Man's Dream.

 

Apparently, Amorphis work around the clock now — their internal algorithm is programmed to print out the results every two years, and thus, here is yet another set of melodic death metal an­thems that sounds every bit as loud, proud, and doom-laden as every other set of melodic death metal anthems they had released since... well, you know.

 

One thing that I have noticed is that, by this time, even some of the veteran fans on Internet message boards started to sort of fiddle around and grumble about how preciously few new sen­sations they were offered. This may have to do with an important change in style, which might not be noticeable immediately, but whose surreptitious effects may be harming the listener's sys­tem from the very start — the album is extremely hot on guitars and quite modest on keyboards. Most of the songs drop the «wimpy» keyboard intros that were quite prominent, for instance, on The Beginning Of Times, and dive straight into battle. Santeri Kallio is still there alright, but he is intentionally pushed into the background, as if Amorphis decided to make a «hardcore» album all of a sudden.

 

But the decision does not do much good. Essentially, all the songs simply sound even more like each other now than they did before — dissipate your attention a bit and you will never know which one is which. Granted, some of the riffs are more memorable than others... and some are less memorable than others... and... and... okay, the flute is back in ʽNarrow Pathʼ, so prominent­ly, in fact, that one could take the song for a Jethro Tull circa Songs From The Wood outtake, re­done in a grinding heavy metal arrangement. (There is even more flute — in fact, a whole delirious Ian Anderson-style solo — in the middle of ʽNightbird's Songʼ as well).

 

Other than that, as usual, the album is undescribable in non-technical terms, because each single riff aims more or less at the same emotional goals that Amorphis have pursued since the dawn of time. Mind you, they aren't bad riffs: on the whole, this is not the dullest Amorphis album ever — Skyforger is probably worse — but if the band's concept of rethinking their sound is really con­fined to ideas like «let's cut down on the keyboards a little bit», this is not even funny, and just goes to show how deep the rut is.

 

I actually wish more of the tracks here were like the bonus inclusion: ʽDead Man's Dreamʼ breaks in with a top-notch death metal riff, growling vocals, and speed — something that is completely lacking on the main body of the album (which is probably why they relegated it to bonus status, so as not to disrupt the conceptuality). ʽNarrow Pathʼ, with its Celtic dance focus, and this thing, with its speedy thump, are pretty much the only mood-breakers on the record. But yeah, at least these guys can still play, that is for certain.

 

An interesting technical note is that this is pretty much the band's first album (in a long time, at least) not to draw its lyri­cal inspiration directly from Kalevala — this time, there is some sort of «original» concept about a struggling loser empowered by a spiritual guide and, well, whatever. In reality, this makes about as much difference as the downtoning of the keyboards — big-time fans will take notice, and as for the rest of us, who really cares these days? The good thing is, with these guys still steering the ship with firm hands and iron vocal cords, good old Finland probably has nothing to fear but fear itself.

 

UNDER THE RED CLOUD (2015)

 

1) Under The Red Cloud; 2) The Four Wise Ones; 3) Bad Blood; 4) The Skull; 5) Death Of A King; 6) Sacrifice; 7) Dark Path; 8) Enemy At The Gates; 9) Tree Of Ages; 10) White Night; 11*) Come The Spring; 12*) Winter's Sleep.

 

Yes, the clock is still ticking! It's 2015 now, and here is another Amorphis album that sounds like any other Amorphis album. And you know what? I'm kind of tired to issuing one thumbs down after another rating to all these records — on one hand, blue color is expensive, and on the other, there's something to be said about sheer tenacity. When we are gone, every last bit of us, and even Keith Richards finally bites the dust, there'll still be a two-year waiting period for the next Amorphis album. Finland forever! Uralic peoples rule.

 

To keep matters short, here's a brief splotch of information. Under The Red Cloud was pro­duced by «legendary» producer Jens Bogren, who used to work with all sorts of progressive and fantasy metal bands, from Opeth to Amon Amarth and beyond. The record places a little more emphasis on growling death metal vocals than the previous few, but still features plenty of clean singing, including even a guest contribution from female guest performer Aleah Stanbridge on the last track. There is one hybrid between melodic death metal and flute-led Celtic dance track (ʽTree Of Agesʼ), one mid-East-influenced song (ʽEnemy At The Gatesʼ), one song dominated by a piano melody behind all the guitar distortion and growling (ʽDark Pathʼ), and one Taylor Swift cover (ʽBad Bloodʼ). Okay, that last bit is not really true. And I'm not even sure if it were fun if it were true, but I'm really desperate here.

 

Very likely, there are some «new» riffs here, but to me, it just feels like I've already heard each of these songs about a dozen times, and even the little specific details singled out above are not particularly impressive — it's just that all the other songs are even less distinctive. Get this if your admiration for Circle matches your adulation of The Beginning Of Times and your adoration of Skyforger. To me, it's all equally interchangeable and forgettable, a pathetic overblown formula that ran out of sense already in the previous century.

ANATHEMA

SERENADES (1993)

 

1) Lovelorn Rhapsody; 2) Sweet Tears; 3) J'Ai Fait Une Promesse; 4) They (Will Always) Die; 5) Sleepless; 6) Sleep In Sanity; 7) Scars Of The Old Stream; 8) Under A Veil (Of Black Lace); 9) Where Shadows Dance; 10) Dreaming: The Romance.

 

Unless you always take your morning coffee with three new lumps of doom metal, there is not much to praise about the debut album of Anathema. The songs are slow, sluggish, monotonous, and topped off with the growling vocals of lead singer Darren White — who, much too often, sounds like the victim of a really bad throat virus rather than a professional demon from Hell (granted, such is the fate of about 80% of «growlers», but it is possible for a really good growler to send shivers down one's spine: all it takes is make yourself sound genuinely aggressive and pissed-off, which is not something this guy White is capable of).

 

Nevertheless, brothers Vincent and Danny Cavanagh, handling guitar duties, are already showing some signs of being more interested in a «sensitive», progressive sound rather than simply com­posing the soundtrack for a routine zombie apocalypse. The most heavily promoted track, ʽSweet Tearsʼ, apart from being driven by a curiously «curved» riff, is accompanied throughout with a melodic lead line that occasionally bursts apart in some psychedelic overdubbed fireworks, not to mention the quiet, bass-driven bridge with clean, prayer-like vocals giving you a break from the growl. None of that makes it a great song, because the growling kills one part of the excitement and the repetitiveness finishes off the other, but it does give a hint that these guys really know how to use their guitars, and that all it takes for them to embark on the road for greatness is to get rid of the most annoying clichés of the genre.

 

There is one song here among the thick pools of sludge that sounds completely different: ʽSleep­lessʼ, strange enough, begins like a genuine early Eighties New Wave track, with Cure-like guitars introducing a cold, melancholic mood (and even the tempo being slightly sped up to shake off any doom metal associations), before true metal guitars and growling enter the picture for stylistic correction (and even then they keep moving in and out to keep things interesting). (There is also a short accappella track, sung in French by a female guest vocalist, that introduces an ap­propriate «dark folk» overtone, but it is too short and interlude-like to be of any serious interest). Everything else, however, is fairly stereotypical and, after a while, just blurs together in a mess that is neither too threatening nor too emotionally resonant — certainly nowhere near as emotio­nally resonant as the lyrics, all of which deal with loss, tragedy, death, coffins, mourning, end­less dreams, etc., would seem to suggest. Not that you could make any of them out with those vocals.

 

The biggest surprise comes last: pinned to the end of the record is ʽDreaming: The Romanceʼ, a 23-minute long ambient soundscape that sounds like it grew out of the final chord of ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ — just a minimalistic keyboard melody super-slowly unveiling against an oscillating hum in the background. I have no idea why they wanted to go in that direction and play God, that is, Brian Eno after exhausting their current pool of metal riffs, but that's the way it is. Maybe some people do need 23 minutes of New Age sonic textures to relax after 42 minutes of jarring doom metal, except most of them probably do not know it.

 

All in all, a rather inauspicious start, but I guess they had to start somewhere: Peaceville Records had just picked them up on the strength of their doom metal demos, and they did have to pander to a stereo­typical audience for a while. I'm sure a fan of «classic» Anathema could learn to live with Serenades or even love it, but even in a genre as formula-dominated as doom metal there may be standouts, and this one definitely is not, so a thumbs down it is.

 

THE SILENT ENIGMA (1995)

 

1) Restless Oblivion; 2) Shroud Of Frost; 3) ...Alone; 4) Sunset Of The Age; 5) Nocturnal Emission; 6) Cerulean Twilight; 7) The Silent Enigma; 8) A Dying Wish; 9) Black Orchid.

 

And here we have it — a big step forward, as the band gets rid of its lead vocalist and opts for a less clichéd, more ambitious sound. Technically, The Silent Enigma may still be labeled as doom metal, but now it has a significant soft component as well; and guitarist Vincent Cavanagh, taking over the vocal duties, largely dumps the cartoonish guttural growling (possibly just be­cause he was not able to master the technique, but thank God for that anyway) and sings in a vari­ety of tones that range from stone-cold, half-spoken recitals to snarling screaming: still theatrical­ly exaggerated, but at least somewhat relatable, if you make a strong effort to believe that here before you stands a demonically possessed lyrical hero from the Middle Ages.

 

Not that I am advocating to take this album too seriously: like almost any doom metal, what we have here is an elaborately staged «black mass» performance whose formal aspects (guitar tones, melodic structure, production, overdubbed effects, etc.) are far more alluring than any direct emotional impact. But this particularity only has to be stated once and then discarded as some­thing self-evident — if an album like this truly «rocks your world» and makes you empathize with the protagonist, all I can say is take it easy, brother, we're not quite on the threshold of the Apocalypse yet, and life goes on even after your beautiful long-haired bride, to whom you were going to get married on a lovely, jasmine-scented Sunday morning, expired from bubonic plague while still wearing her wedding dress, and left you forever cursing God's name because that's what everybody does in a situation like this. "My paralysed heart is bleeding", "condemned to misery, restless oblivion forever", "lost deity betrayed my faith", you know the drill.

 

We'll just push all of that right out of the way and try and concentrate on the music (because, honestly, the album would have worked much better in fully instrumental form). This is where the Cavanaghs begin to develop and exploit some really enticing ideas — ʽRestless Oblivionʼ, for instance, begins with a minute-long soft exposition (a modest and lovely folk-pop guitar melody dominating the waves), then smoothly, but firmly slips into a crushing «ninth-wave-style» metal riff, and then, adopting a weird time signature, begins riding a curious double-tracked guitar sinu­soid that has a certain hypnotic quality to it. With all the interludes and all the alternations be­tween melodic and metallic bits, it's a fairly solid piece of music, with only the silly lyrics and the «possessed» vocals presenting them spoiling the picture (frankly, I'd say that the music on its own does not even properly convey the feeling of bleek despair that the words keep talking about — the melody is disturbing, tempestuous, but not dirge-like, and I'd rather have it left open for free interpretation rather than follow the words directly).

 

Since the intended mood is quite uniform for all the tracks here, they largely fall into two (and even then, somewhat overlapping) categories — «rowdier» numbers, based on more precisely fleshed-out guitar and bass riffs, and «moodier» numbers, relying more on the atmospherics of multiple sustained notes than on headbanging tricks. Thus, ʽShroud Of Frostʼ is basically just one prolonged guitar wail, with minimal melody and protracted notes that sometimes seem to go on until the amplifier runs out of battery support; unfortunately, since the basic chord sequence is not exactly an emotional rollercoaster, I find the whole thing rather tedious to sit through, and would rather prefer ʽA Dying Wishʼ, which moves along at a higher speed and features a solid chugging riff at its heart (a rather generic one, though, I'm afraid). On the other hand, ʽNocturnal Emissionʼ combines the two aspects well — there's a mournful and menacing bass riff at its core, which is good enough for them to leave it on constant repeat for the last minute of the song as it slowly fades away, but it's not a headbanging riff, more like a hand-of-doom riff.

 

But on the whole, instrumental and stylistic difference between the various songs is still kept to a minimum, and such little touches of extra color as female dark folk vocals on ʽ...Aloneʼ (the Dear Departed was relieved from post-mortem duty for a bit to make one last phone call to the prota­goinst), or a bass/synth-dominated wordless funeral march on the closing ʽBlack Orchidʼ, do little to change the fact that The Silent Enigma still has tremendous potential to bore you stiff unless you're really really really into the my-dying-bride thing. Consequently, I refrain from giving the record a thumbs up, despite all the good words about certain individual riffs and textures; let us simply agree to call this the band's «teenage» phase, legitimately succeeding its «childhood» phase on Serenades, and then see where it leads to in the future.

 

ETERNITY (1996)

 

1) Sentient; 2) Angelica; 3) The Beloved; 4) Eternity Part I; 5) Eternity Part II; 6) Hope; 7) Suicide Veil; 8) Radiance; 9) Far Away; 10) Eternity Part III; 11) Cries On The Wind; 12) Ascension.

 

«Inspired» (is this the right word here?) by the illness and death of the Cavanaghs' mother, Eter­nity is the first Anathema album that is quite hard to technically classify as heavy metal at all, even if I wouldn't go as far as to label it «progressive rock» instead. Rather, they preserve and amplify all the soft elements that may be typical of artistically inclined metal bands — the dark folk atmospheres, the acoustic guitars, the mournful vocals, the quiet gloom — while at the same time downplaying the deep-black distorted rumble of the metal guitars, in the place of which you will here frequently find a guitar sound much closer to grunge and alt-rock. So it's more like «de-metallized metal» than a 180-degree transition to some other genre — and, of course, the one thing that stays completely the same is the band's total commitment to the bleakness and depres­sion of their vision. The mark of Cain is not to be washed off that easy.

 

This is not necessarily bad — imagine, say, Black Sabbath releasing an entire LP of ʽPlanet Caravansʼ, ʽSolitudesʼ, and ʽLaguna Sunrisesʼ with just a couple of ʽWheels Of Confusionʼ in between — but on their first try, Anathema do not seem to be doing a very good job with it. In terms of pure atmosphere, Eternity is indeed a major step forward, and the lack of growling vocals makes it possible to put it on in the neghbors' presence without excessive blushing. But as far as memorable themes or unique personality is concerned, the album is fairly boring. The textures are easily comprehensible — some minor bass chords, some dark acoustic strum, some overdubs with wailing-weeping electric guitars and some distorted feedback for background canvas — but the songs, subsequently, are largely indistinguishable from each other.

 

The only exception is ʽHopeʼ, sounding more like a righteous prayer than a depressed lament and having the good sense to arm itself with some cool riffs, including a shrill siren-like four-note electric sequence that provides the song with a stronger, calcium-enriched skeleton. Ironically, this is the only song not written by the band — it's a Roy Harper cover, with Harper himself appearing as a guest star with some spoken narration in the intro, which pretty much tells us all we want to know. And speaking of the Harper / Pink Floyd connection (ʽHopeʼ itself was co-written by Harper with Gilmour), yes, Eternity is the first of many Anathema albums where Floyd influence becomes very clearly visible, but it is one thing to be influenced by your prede­cessors, and quite another thing to show that you yourself are worthy of being influenced by them. As it is, I have not found any particular musical touches on this record that would even begin to approach the melodic genius of Floyd.

 

They do have the best of intentions, but neither brother Vince's vocals (too dusky and mid-rangey to compete with a Robert Smith, too autumnal and sentimental to have the grip of a Roger Waters) nor brother Danny's guitars (too often relying on metal / alt-rock / ambient-prog clichés) are stun­ning on their own, and multiplying one so-so by another in this world violates the laws of math: instead of so-so squared, you get the square root of so-so squared. Except in specific cases like the truly awful ʽSuicide Veilʼ, where you put brother Vince totally upfront, so that for most of the time, he just bleeds out of your speakers on a pallet of hushed symph-synths and minimalistic bass — here we have the square root of so-so, period, and a desire to rush him off to the ER as fast as you can, before his veins run empty due to theatrical overcalculation. Elsewhere, he at least operates under a more respectable musical cover (over-emoting on your guitar, for some reason, is always less of a crime than over-emoting on your vocal pipes), but still, that does not make any of these songs easier to describe and identify as specific meaningful entities. The good news is, they would learn to do better in the future; the bad news is, in between their brief wobble on the stepping stone of Silent Enigma and their landing on the relatively safe coast of Alterna­tive 4, they had to make the plunge, and Eternity is it — thumbs down, unless you just happen to be an instant fan of every song that propagates some form of suicide.

 

P.S. Oh, and, by the way, the producer on this album was Tony Platt — incidentally, the very same guy who was responsible for producing Cheap Trick's The Doctor back in 1986. Coinci­dence? Not what I'd like to believe, no.

 

ALTERNATIVE 4 (1998)

 

1) Shroud Of False; 2) Fragile Dreams; 3) Empty; 4) Lost Control; 5) Re-connect; 6) Inner Silence; 7) Alternative 4; 8) Regret; 9) Feel; 10) Destiny.

 

ʽShroud Of Falseʼ — a pretty good name not just for the short introduction to Anathema's fourth album, but maybe for the album as a whole, or even for the entire band, for that matter. As deep and solemn as this whole thing pretends to be, it is thoroughly impossible for me to take the record that seriously. That piano intro, for instance. It aspires to a sort of bluesified Chopin, but the way the melody slowly unfolds and gains in blunt power, you'd almost expect Bruce Spring­steen to be joining Roy Bittan any time now and crashing into ʽThunder Roadʼ. Then the vocals come in, and the illusion is gone, but these words? "We are just a moment in time, a blink of an eye, a dream for the blind, visions from a dying brain" — hello, ʽDust In The Windʼ. I can still try and imagine them with the grinning sneer of a Roger Waters, and it'd be okay; but irony, sarcasm, and humor of any sort, even the blackest one, is as strictly prohibited in Anathema records as catching Pokemons is in Russian churches. One laugh and you're fired.

 

This is why, even if, as far as I'm concerned, Alternative 4 is a pretty good record and probably the best Anathema that can be bought for your money (and if you want Anathema for free, pre­pare to be excommunicated, heh, heh), even so, I can never see myself or those who take their progressive rock seriously to be swamped by it. It is not even that the album remains chock full of «goth» clichés — it is that the band lacks the power to either subvert these clichés or, on the con­trary, drown in them so utterly and devotedly that their mere fanatical devotion would bring on involuntary respect. Their work is clean, elegant, and polite, and that's not the kind of approach that gives the best results when applied to a clichéd formula. To become real classy and comman­ding prog rock artists, they lack qualification; to become masters of the theatrical approach, they lack sincerity — and, to top it all, their melodies remain questionable at best.

 

Nevertheless, having said all that, I am amazed at how good Alternative 4 still turns out to be. The leap of quality from Eternity is astonishing — in terms of hooks, almost every song has something to offer, so that, if it does not succeed in subduing my soul, it at least baits my curio­sity. The very first song, ʽFragile Dreamsʼ, opening with a gentle guitar strum, is then joined by a slightly gypsy-esque violin line (from guest musician George Rucci), and finally settles on the album's best riff — simple, insistent, nagging, hard to forget, and, coolest of all, actually intro­duced by that violin. The first two minutes of the song, completely instrumental, are the best musical sequence on the record; once the vocals come in, we are in Cure-lite territory once again ("countless times I trusted you, I let you back in..." — don't tell me Robert Smith did not actually write these lyrics for them), but it's okay, it's not too problematic, and eventually the cool riff will be back, leading the song to its over-the-cliff suicide. Yes, they could probably do more with the instrumental part than just playing the riff over and over, but Anathema don't do mad soloing, it's disrespectful towards their target audience (the dead, that is).

 

ʽEmptyʼ starts out with half-spoken vocals backed with lonely, «black» synthesizer chords — you know it's just a premonition for something louder to come, and when the rhythm section and the main melody kicks in, lo and behold, you have another cool riff, and even the melodramatic singing is easier to stand, as it comes equipped with a very humane-sounding snarl (still no sense of irony, but when he goes "I abhor you, I condemn you...", I have to say, that's dangerously close to sounding like a very realistic curse). Unfortunately, ʽLost Controlʼ then reminds us of how terribly clichéd this band is, after all — somewhere deep inside the song hides itself a real cool groove with a surprisingly funky bassline and some neat acoustic picking, but on the whole it is way too derivative of the spirit of The Wall to ring true. Just one more of those «funeral marches for myself», albeit nicely arranged. The key moment is when the melody dies down to let the singer ask the principal question, "Have I really lost control?" If, at that moment, your heart feels wrought with pity and your eyes swell with tears... welcome to the club where I am not welcome. If not, congratulations for knowing the exquisite difference between Vincent Cavanagh and Peter Hammill. But even I have to admit that there is something to be said about the dynamic shifts on that tune, and that not a lot of goth-themed metal bands would be ready to work on such a fine balance between heavy distorted guitars, pianos, and acoustic guitars.

 

Actually, at this point Anathema cannot even be defined as a metal band — there's no more «metal» here than there is on a classic Rush album (or, to make a somewhat more accurate ana­logy in terms of cheese-to-substance correlation, Eloy). They're doing stone-faced goth theater, and if this needs a metal riff inserted at some point, so be it; but even on the most doom-laden tracks, such as the title one, the pitches are higher than on your average doom metal composition. It might have helped if there was less emphasis on the vocals altogether: speaking of the title track, the album's one truly cringeworthy moment is when the singer suddenly adopts a Tiny-Tim-meets-Shakesperian-artist intonation to deliver the "I'll dance with the angels to celebrate the Holocaust" verse (ooh, shocking!). On the other hand, no vocals at all would make the album more boring, because the «progressive» melodies lack sufficient complexity, and are more about creating an overall atmosphere than taking the listener through dazzling shifts of time signatures, tonalities, moods, and messages.

 

All in all, I give the record a thumbs up — not because it supports and consoles me in my hour of desperation, but because I am willing to recognize the creativity and talent, and adjust to the theatrical conventions of the record. I mean, maybe somewhere deep down inside there's a second bottom to it — they did name it after Alternative 3, after all, which was a classic UK conspiracy theory hoax — but even if you stick to this deadly seriousness all the way, Alternative 4 is much more fun than the average doom-and-gloom concoction from gazillions of pretentious mediocri­ties all over the world.

 

JUDGEMENT (1999)

 

1) Deep; 2) Pitiless; 3) Forgotten Hopes; 4) Destiny Is Dead; 5) Make It Right (F.F.S.); 6) One Last Goodbye; 7) Parisienne Moonlight; 8) Judgement; 9) Don't Look Too Far; 10) Emotional Winter; 11) Wings Of God; 12) Anyone, Anywhere; 13) 2000 & Gone; 14) Transacoustic*.

 

Okay, this one's no fun at all. The band's original bass player and one of its chief songwriters, Duncan Patterson, is out of the band to focus on his personal projects (the latest of which, ironi­cally, takes its name from Patterson's finest moment with Anathema — Alternative 4); and his replacement, Dave Pybus, is just a bass player, albeit a pretty good one, with a flair for Gothic vaudevillian lines (the one that drives the short instrumental ʽDestiny Is Deadʼ almost sounds like a tribute to Alice Cooper's ʽWelcome To My Nightmareʼ). This leaves Danny Cavanagh as prin­cipal songwriter, and he takes the band into even less metallic territory that they covered on Al­ternative 4 — if the latter could still be called «heavy progressive rock» with some metal influen­ces, Judgement is more like «dark Goth-folk» with occasional moments of heaviness.

 

Unfortunately, in the process most of the sharp edges have been smoothed out, and the theatrical suspense that made Alternative 4, at the very least, curious, has all but disappeared. In its place is a hazy, light, stable atmosphere of soft postmortem depression, largely generated by medievalis­tic folk acoustic guitars, wrapped in thin cloaks of synthesizer textures — and hardly spoiled when­ever they decide to pump in a little adrenaline by turning into a more or less generic alt-rock band and churning out those faceless three-chord distorted riffs, because this is just a temporary trick for them now; all these chuggin'-heavy interludes are only there so that the album wouldn't all blur together in one huge cloud of dark-folk.

 

There's enough good taste retained for none of this to sound too irritating. Brother Vincent, now singing with clean vocals exclusively, prefers to be quiet and mournful rather than try to scale operatic heights. Synthesizers are used sparingly and almost never overshadow the «natural» flow of acoustic and electric guitars (and even when they do, it is only to offer a memorable musical theme — ʽMake It Rightʼ). The Pink Floyd influence continues to grow (ʽWings Of Godʼ), but is never strong enough to push the brothers off their own path. And yet, not even a single one of the tracks manages to come close to the intensity of ʽFragile Dreamsʼ.

 

One track that does stand out from the rest is ʽParisienne Moonlightʼ, continuing their tradition of inserting a bit of womanly sorrow and gentleness into their sagas of male grief — here, Danny Cavanagh sings a brief piano-backed duet with Lee Douglas that does have a bit of French flair to it, but mostly, you know, since all of their albums are about the living male grieving about the loss of his female companion, they need to hold at least one seance with the participation of the dearly departed female companion, and Lee Douglas makes a cool ghostly apparition for two minutes, really getting into the act. "You cried with me, you would die for me", she soothingly consoles our hero, but he'd not, really, he'd much rather sing for her until the end of the world.

 

Maybe the title track, which comes right after, should be considered another standout — it begins like almost everything else, another acoustic dirge, but eventually there's a crescendo of sorts, the song picks up a faster tempo and, two minutes into the song, we get a fast, agitated, rocking part with almost punkish energy. Problem, though: it is a mind-numbingly repetitive part, with the same rhythm pattern flogged on and on and on for more than two minutes. Not even a solo! Not even an unpredictable key change! Just on and on and on — and that, perhaps, is what bugs me the most about this music in general: it is far too unadventurous and far too «ambient-oriented» to involve my attention rather than involuntarily shut it off at about one minute into each and every one of these songs.

 

In the end, Judgement is what it is: a poor man's Pink Floyd as seen through the eyes of a formal doom metal band, just deprived of (possibly) its most inventive creative member. Totally liste­nable, but the music neither manages to properly daze and confuse me nor shatter my emotions, and I have no choice but to consider it a serious step down after the ear-bitter-candy elements of Alternative 4. But I do admit that, conceptually, it is quite loyally executed and certainly has a lot of appeal for those who take this style really seriously. The very fact that you can record an hour-long album channelling the spirits of all the Gothic pulp novel writers who ever lived and get away with it without too much embarrassment confirms that there just might be something there — it's just not a kind of something that's strong enough to stir anything within me.

 

A FINE DAY TO EXIT (2001)

 

1) Pressure; 2) Release; 3) Looking Outside Inside; 4) Leave No Trace; 5) Underworld; 6) (Breaking Over The) Barriers; 7) Panic; 8) A Fine Day To Exit; 9) Temporary Peace.

 

Normally, an album titled A Fine Day To Exit would probably be expected from a band that de­cides to call it a day — but we are dealing with Anathema here, a band for whom calling it a day is pretty much a profession, except they're calling it a day for humanity as a whole, rather than just their own sorry asses. So no, they are not disbanding: this is merely the next installation in the ongoing series of «numb and number», and, unfortunately, not an improvement on the flaws of Judgement, but rather an exacerbation of said flows.

 

By this time, it seems like they might be taking their clues from Radiohead rather than Pink Floyd, with most of the songs showing a quiet, tired, enfeebled type of depression and disillusionment, as conveyed by weighted-down vocals, morose piano lines, and atmospheric use of electronics, although not enough of the latter to suggest interference with Kid A: rather, it is the alt-rock Bends version and the art-rock OK Computer version of Radiohead that serve as primary cue-setters. Slow, atmospheric, depressing songs, only occasionally livened up by faster tempos that still preserve the same atmosphere (ʽPanicʼ) and always suggesting being trapped without any hope of escape in the deep, dark well of one's own subconscious, except that, unlike Radiohead, lyrics-wise they are still unable to escape the «always talking with the ghost of my brutally muti­lated lover» cliché.

 

That cliché is, however, far from the worst problem of the album — the worst problem is that most of the songs are honestly no good. Like that Radiohead atmosphere or not, it was always supported by radical, challenging, or at least instantly memorable musical ideas. Here, though, as the Cavanagh brothers are assisted by drummer John Douglas in their songwriting duties, I fail to find anything that would sound genuinely unusual or memorable. The songs take too much time to do too few interesting things. The pianos and acoustic guitars sound nice, but do not take any serious chances outside of the predictably comfortable zones of adult-pop balladeering and dark (or not too dark) folk strumming. And the electric guitars, when they do come in, largely sound like any average alt-rock band would sound — basic grungy patterns that even Radiohead had largely left behind by 1995.

 

The very first song on the album, ʽPressureʼ, which was also released as a single, begins in full-out ʽKarma Policeʼ mode, jamming your ears in between big echoey drums and forcefully hit piano chords, but this all just seems like a moody setup for the vocal melody, and the vocal melody seems like just a setup for the chorus, with all the stakes placed on the culmination of "I don't care where you go, you won't get away from me", and, frankly, it's not much of a culmina­tion — the singer sounds so bored with himself, these words resonate like an empty threat. If there is any pressure, it's hardly above permissible levels. I can understand why the vocals never shoot past the murmur level, or why there is no shrill guitar solo to juice up the crescendo, but see, these are fairly ordinary musical moves that they use to create the atmosphere, and if you're ma­king an ordinary song, you are at least entitled to juice it up with ordinary, but efficient musical clichés. «Tastelessly exciting» takes preference over «tastefully boring», and it's not even all that tasteful to begin with (though it cannot be said that they are embarrassing themselves with this attitude, either, like they often did on the early albums).

 

And if that's ʽPressureʼ for us, then what about ʽReleaseʼ? Surely this title should be concealing some climactic denouement of its predecessor? Reveal a shattering musical explosion? It begins promising enough — a thin, sharp acoustic guitar tone, lightly attenuated with a simmering electronic pattern; eventually, more and more synth overdubs start piling up in anticipation of the climax... and that climax? A weak, monotonous texture of funky electric guitar overdubs merging in a generic alt-rock grind. Well... like "pressure", like "release".

 

The record continues in the same mediocre manner, alternating heavier and lighter moments in such a smooth and polite manner that you hardly ever notice the transitions, and offering us vocal parts that are so gentlemanly refined that I almost begin to wonder — couldn't it have been more effective for them to go back to growling vocals? Probably not, but this is just way too soporific for my aural nerves. And almost as if they wanted to really rub it in, the last track (ʽTemporary Peaceʼ) seems like a bad parody on a conceptual post-rock suite: a moody, hookless Gothic ballad part, followed by a couple minutes of seawaves crashing upon the shore (wait, did I say "cra­shing?"... nothing on this album is "crashing"... more like "swishing"...), followed by a couple more minutes of gravel-crushing footsteps on the shore and disjoint pieces of recorded conver­sation, followed by a few minutes of total silence, and then followed with a two-chord acoustic ditty with seemingly improvised «comical» lyrics ("Morten Harket's brand new go cart / Foul mouthed and smelling of onions"). Actually, the acoustic ditty might be the best part of the album because it is at least the only thing about it that is not so totally safe and predictable.

 

So, unfortunately, a thumbs down — even if this is not a stereotypically «bad» record, this is one of those cases where I'd rather sit through Aerosmith's Pump or Britney Spears' In The Zone, be­cause those records, bad as they are, at least give you food for thought and impressions to keep. A Fine Day To Exit, on the contrary, shows that the boys mean good (they are actually trying to find some serious justification for being so depressed), but they don't really have the means, such as brilliant songwriting and inventive arrangements, to do good.

 

A NATURAL DISASTER (2003)

 

1) Harmonium; 2) Balance; 3) Closer; 4) Are You There?; 5) Childhood Dream; 6) Pulled Under At 2000 Metres A Second; 7) A Natural Disaster; 8) Flying; 9) Electricity; 10) Violence.

 

This is the first Anathema album to feature three Cavanaghs at the same time: Vincent and Danny are joined by third brother Jamie on bass — who, as it turns out, did play with them in the earliest incarnation of the band, but left it prior to any serious recording engagements. Now this is so much of a family affair that drummer John Douglas humbly retreats back to his drums, leaving the songwriting almost completely in the hands of the brothers; actually, Danny takes almost ex­clusive credits for everything. (Which is all the more odd, considering that he briefly left the band in 2002, joining Antimatter — and then returned and became its dictatorial songwriter).

 

With Douglas out of the creative picture, the songs begin leaving somewhat more of an impres­sion; yet, at the same time, the band really mellows out now — even when the guitars are techni­cally heavy, they are still tuned high as hell, and cold, soft, static atmospheres, driven by acoustic guitars and electronics, now serve as the default weapon at Anathema's disposal, with heavy passages only introduced as quasi-climactic red lights, occasionally. Vincent's vocals also con­tinue to mellow out — by this time, memories of those days when he tried to sound like a blee­ding demon kid, pushed into a corner by squads of angels, are worn pretty thin, and most of the time he just oozes eternal sadness without any traces of anger or menace.

 

The good news is that they remember to try and keep things spiced up. Thus, ʽBalance / Closerʼ (two separate tracks, but united by a common theme) sees them taking lessons from Kid A, with multiple vocal overdubs and samples that create a complex mosaic out of falsettos and breathy murmurs, and plenty of electronics to place it in the middle of a cold, robotic atmosphere. ʽChild­hood Dreamʼ is a half-ambient, half-Gothic interlude with echoes of babies rising out of a deep memory well. ʽPulled Under At 2000 Metres A Secondʼ is a speedy disaster-rocker, bringing in a brief respite from all the slow psychological moodiness — and, not surprisingly, sounding a hell of a lot like Pink Floyd's ʽSheepʼ in the process. The title track is a doom-laden waltz sung by guest star Anna Livingstone — and, with her high-pitched, trembling, fear-stricken vocals and a particularly depressing set of keyboard and wah-wah guitar overdubs, not surprisingly, sounding quite a bit like classic Portishead.

 

Finally, by the time we reach the end — a ten-minute suite called ʽViolenceʼ whose only real bit of (musical) violence is a relatively brief and loud rocking passage in the middle — we are out of art-rock and deep into post-rock territory, heck, we might even be in frickin' Angelo Badalamenti territory, considering how much that romantic piano melody in the final movement reminds me of the Twin Peaks theme. It's not at all bad, though, and, in all honesty, at this point I am far more glad to get a «heavenly» finale, where peace and graceful optimism is mixed with only a faint trace of sadness, from these guys, rather than yet another reminder of how life sucks and how the very fact of one's being here on Earth should already be regarded as punishment. Actually, you could very well interpret ʽViolenceʼ as representing a bit of Armageddon, after which everybody relaxes and enjoys eternal heavenly bliss, but that's okay, too — in this case, they are at least willing to look into the eternally blissful future, rather than remain forever cursed in the present, like a bunch of Wandering Jews or something.

 

As a whole, the record has quite a decent feel to it — all the stylistic twists and imitations of various styles at least seem to guarantee that you probably will not be bored. That said, there is no bypassing the usual limitation: every single one of these twists happens to have already had far superior antecedents, and I do not see myself revisiting this stuff much in the future as long as I still have access to all those Floyd, Radiohead, and Portishead albums (or as long as I can still watch Twin Peaks, for that matter). The problem with sadness and tragedy is that they only really work if they are capable of pulling you way, way deep under the surface, but this here is more like A Really Lightweight Disaster — all the songs are so smooth, restrained, inobtrusive, care­fully shorn of any brusque rises or falls, that I cannot imagine the album working on any other level than a simple sonic background. On the other hand, I guess if you are holding a wake or something like that, it might make for a decent soundtrack: not particularly cheesy and not parti­cularly involving.

 

HINDSIGHT (2008)

 

1) Fragile Dreams; 2) Leave No Trace; 3) Inner Silence; 4) One Last Goodbye; 5) Are You There?; 6) Angelica; 7) A Natural Disaster; 8) Temporary Peace; 9) Flying; 10) Unchained (Tales Of The Unexpected).

 

After the release of A Natural Disaster, Anathema took a long break from releasing new LPs, but this seems to have been largely caused by technical reasons — such as the closing down of their record label, Music For Nations, upon which they found it hard to negotiate another contract, seeing as how their albums had always had only a minor cult following, and even all that gloomy Floyd/Radiohead vibe did not manage to attract a sufficient number of Thom Yorke devotees. (Should have known better than to establish their initial reputation as a death metal band — it's like a porn actor's struggle to start a new life in mainstream cinema). They even had to resort to Internet publishing at one time, recording and promoting occasional songs on a minor basis, but eventually managed to capture the attention of Kscope, a small label originally established by Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree and largely used to promote «neo-prog» artists, a role for which the new weep-and-moan-based Anathema fully qualified.

 

Their first project for the new label was, however, quite tentative: a compilation of re-recorded older «classics» in de-electrified versions — acoustic guitars, pianos, strings (including heavy participation of the band's friend Dave Wesling on cello). A symbolic move on their part, it was clearly supposed to confirm and strengthen their conversion to symph-prog values, focusing all our attention on the Ethereal Beauty of the world-weary melodies instead of the power roar of the metal guitars — sure it was highly restricted on the past two or three records already, but this is the first time that they have completely eliminated anything that could even vaguely remind us of their metallic past. Here, you are simply expected to sit back, relax, wallow in the sorrow, and appreciate them for the tragic romantic melodicists that they are.

 

Unfortunately, I cannot say that the elimination of electric distortion has resulted in making their songs better or worse, with one exception — I am fairly certain that I would have thought much less of ʽFragile Dreamsʼ, had I first heard it in this toothless arrangement. Wesling captures the spirit of the original riff just fine on his cello, but it was the power onslaught of guitars and drums that truly made it work, and this pensive, indecisive reimagination of the theme just guts it out: when we begin working in «piano trio» mode or something like that, you expect far more depth and melodic complexity, and that is hardly Anathema's forte.

 

Everything else, despite all the rearrangement work, is just about as good or bad as its former electric counterparts — I cannot say that Wesling's cello or anything else brings out any particu­larly subtle / hidden nuances in the tracks. Actually, it is puzzling why they decided to concen­trate on relatively recent material from the past two albums, what with its being «soft» in the first place: this version of ʽA Natural Disasterʼ, for instance, is practically indistinguishable from the original, and the fact that ʽAre You There?ʼ now has a prominent acoustic guitar part replacing cloudy synthesizers changes nothing about the basic emotional perception of the ballad. It would have been far more fun if they'd returned all the way back to Serenades, and offered us some recreations of their heaviest melodies — but the earliest reinvented song here is ʽAngelicaʼ from Eternity, which already heralded their transformation.

 

As is usual in such cases, the album does feature exactly one new song, to give a bit of an incen­tive for veteran fans — ʽUnchainedʼ is another acoustic guitar / piano / cello ballad with an over­all pretty sound, but hardly worth getting particularly excited about. And speaking in general, I am not really disappointed, because everything is executed in Anathema's usual good taste. Clever mixing, giving each instrument its own voice; restrained, pleasant lead vocals with a touch of nobility and no signs of crude emotional manipulation; excellent string parts — all in all, this is yet another high-quality mood soundtrack to that never ending funeral party. It's just that, plugged or unplugged, Anathema have always been and will probably forever be a band that is way too trapped by formula and way too unencumbered by artistic imagination.

 

WE’RE HERE BECAUSE WE’RE HERE (2010)

 

1) Thin Air; 2) Summernight Horizon; 3) Dreaming Light; 4) Everything; 5) Angels Walk Among Us; 6) Presence; 7) A Simple Mistake; 8) Get Off, Get Out; 9) Universal; 10) Hindsight.

 

Seven years, apparently, is what it takes to come back to the light — a spiritual journey under­taken in order to finally find an answer to the question that had been bugging the Cavanaghs ever since they began to think of themselves as artists: «what the hell are we doing here at all?» And now, in 2010, that answer is staring right at you from the front cover. No, they did not exactly find Jesus (although that, too, could be suspected because of the walking-on-water image), but at least they found Steven Wilson, who is a much better mixer than Jesus ever was, and who could steer them in the blessed direction more efficiently than any religious guru.

 

I gotta say, I can't help admiring these guys for making the transition. Nothing is easier these days than cling to an established formula to the death, and there will always be a market for new and new albums about disillusionment, desperation, and dead brides as long as there remains a market for anything musical at all. But somehow, upon completing A Natural Disaster, the Cavanaghs decided that it was time to break the circle, and begin looking for positive answers, no matter how deeply entrenched they'd become in transcendental misery. The prevailing mood still retains a tinge of sadness, but now it comes mixed with a «glorious» feel that begins with the album's title, song names like ʽAngels Walk Among Usʼ, and music that borrows more from the post-rock idiom of Godspeed You! Black Emperor than the dark musings of Floyd and Radiohead, albeit still very much dependent on vocal work (especially now that drummer John Douglas' sister, Lee Douglas, joins the band as a permanent new member — more often double-tracking or backing up Vincent's vocals for extra angelic effect rather than singing lead).

 

Steven Wilson, who was already beginning to make headlines as the remixing wonder of the century (producing remixes of classic Caravan, King Crimson, and Jethro Tull albums, among other things), operates in George Martin capacity for this record — his mix ensures that none of the instruments, including plenty of acoustic and electric guitar overdubs as well as grand pianos and electronic strings, merge together in one big sonic glop, which is a fairly common bane for many neo-prog artists. The underlying idea was to make a record that, through sheer sonic bliss, would remind one of the Eternal Bliss, and, technically speaking, that goal was achieved. On the very first track, ʽThin Airʼ, the band presents an impressive cobweb of sound, or, should I rather say, a mighty racetrack of sound, with guitars, keyboards, and vocals all racing parallel to each other, gradually rising in a powerful crescendo — and the song's lyrics complete the rebirth-in-death of the Anathema protagonist, who is now only too happy to join his beloved in death under «a promise of heaven».

 

So much for the good stuff: We're Here represents a brave new beginning, and its concept is immaculately planned and executed. The problem is that, unfortunately, not even Steven Wilson is capable of turning the Cavanaghs into exciting and/or inspiring songwriters. The keys and moods may have changed, but the basic premise remains the same: each of the songs is built around one (sometimes two, if the track is long enough to allow for a key change midway through) base chord sequence, which is then milked for trance-inducing emotional splendor, usually by having it played by three or four instruments at once. These songs are quite lengthy (5 to 7 minutes on average), and the only dynamic development that one usually gets out of them is the crescendo effect (on about half of the songs, but reaching a proverbial climax on ʽUniversalʼ). Ironically, though, once again they sound in this like a poorboy equivalent of somebody else — for instance, the above-mentioned GY!BE, who must have undoubtedly been one of the crucial influences on the album (even in its purely ambient-atmospheric interludes with spoken philo­sophical overdubs, like ʽPresenceʼ, featuring a metaphysical lesson from Stan Ambrose).

 

I understand what it is they are trying to do, and, once again, can bring myself to respect it (espe­cially because they do not stoop to, say, generic Christian rock), but not a single one of these songs is capable of actually moving me the way that, say, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass can — in fact, whenever I try to stay focused on any of this stuff, I get proverbially bored, just because each new song becomes fully predictable in a matter of seconds. At least GY!BE had a knack for seeking out truly excellent chord sequences and then giving them the full royal treatment: the Cavanaghs, in comparison, settle for palliatives (that Chopinesque piano riff on ʽUniversalʼ sounds nice, but it never really goes anywhere or resolves itself into anything worthy of attention) and make blissful muzak that never reaches the epic heights of GY!BE and is even less capable of competing with classic prog.

 

I realize that such is their schtick, and that, having spent all their previous career building up largely static sound panoramas, they have no reason to change that approach to something more dynamic even now that they have seen the light. But that does not mean that we really have to settle for anything less than the best there is, and the only thing that is truly «best» about this new "life is eternal!" approach of theirs is Steven Wilson's mix. It also goes without saying that this whole new metaphysical twist is every bit as unoriginal and clichéd as their «dying bride»-era creations. Last spoken lines of the album: "And if you could love enough, you would be the hap­piest and most powerful person in the world" — excuse me?.. Okay, okay, so they have this «you can never say too much about the need for love» agenda now, but couldn't they at least say it in a slightly more elaborate musical language?

 

FALLING DEEPER (2011)

 

1) Crestfallen; 2) Sleep In Sanity; 3) Kingdom; 4) They Die; 5) Everwake; 6) J'Ai Fait Une Promesse; 7) Alone; 8) We The Gods; 9) Sunset Of Age.

 

Another attempt at re-writing their legacy (as if somebody really cared), this relatively short album finally finds Anathema doing exactly the kind of thing they should have done much earlier: going all the way back to their beginnings as a doom metal band and reinventing those old black tunes in the vein of their new neo-symph-prog image. And although Steven Wilson is no longer with them to lend a helping hand directly, they retain the affiliation with the Kscope label; also, their new engineer is Andrea Wright, who'd had a long history of work with everybody from Black Sabbath to Marillion to Clinic to Coldplay, and could certainly get the job done well on an album that places its entire trust in atmosphere.

 

To complete the picture, the band secures the services of veteran progger Dave Stewart, formerly of Egg, Hatfield & The North, National Health, and Bruford fame — the man used to play key­boards for some of the most twisted and adventurous prog bands in the Golden Age, but the 21st century largely sees him as a strings arranger for various neo-prog outfits, including, of course, Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson, from whom he was «passed down» to Anathema. Actually, he'd already worked for them on We're Here, but on that album, the strings were nowhere near as prominent as they are on these remakes — you might as well credit the record to «Anathema Feat. Dave Stewart», or you might even reverse that order.

 

The result... well, the result could have been great if the songs we are talking about were great songs in the first place, but they weren't, so it couldn't. Atmospheric background remains atmos­pheric background, no matter whether you are constructing it with heavy metal guitars or pianos and strings, and I cannot say that, having been transferred to a new medium, they managed to uncover previously concealed plains of spirituality or valleys of bliss. (For the record, only a few of the tunes come from LPs like Serenades or The Silent Enigma; most are taken over from even more obscure early EPs that I have not talked about or even heard, so it is perfectly possible that some of the songs began life as embarrassing trash heaps, before they were all recast in this single mold. I doubt it, though).

 

It's not as if these are lazy recreations or anything: no, the songs are completely reworked, and the new arrangements are often more complex and sprawling than they used to be — ʽJ'Ai Fait Une Promesseʼ, for instance, which used to be a brief non-metal acoustic interlude, is stripped of its original vocal (by one of the band's lady friends called Ruth) and recast as a pseudo-baroque chamber orchestra performance; and ʽAloneʼ from The Silent Enigma gains at least a couple extra levels of sonic depth, even if you only consider the resplendent, deeply resonant production on the acoustic guitar sound alone — not to mention all the rich overlays. Next to these recrea­tions, the originals sound like pale sketches, and then, on top of the cake, you get the heavenly vocals of Anneke van Giersbergen (fresh out of The Gathering and ready to grace some former fellow competitors with her cordial presence) on two of the tracks.

 

This should all be very rich and rewarding, yet, as it happens with Anathema so much more often than I'd like to, it still ends up plain and «pretty» from a textbookish point of view, enough to make for some tasteful background muzak, but never memorable in the least, since everything flows so smoothly. The only track where I am ready to accept that they did a stellar job is the album closer, ʽSunset Of Ageʼ, extracted from its original metal sheen and recast as a slightly Eastern-influenced mix of turbulent strings and wildly unleashed colorful electric guitars: the coda is a supercool bit of sturm-und-drang that will at least perform the good deed of kicking you awake from the slumber in which you have most likely been finding yourself for the previous half hour. Nothing else even begins to approach this performance's intensity.

 

One curious feeling I have noticed is that the songs have largely been remade in keeping with the band's new-found spirit of calm, sad optimism — even tracks like ʽCrestfallenʼ, beginning with telling lyrics such as "I cry a tear of hope but it is lost in helplessness, the darkness eats away at the very embers of my blah blah blah", use tonalities and timbres that suggest a streak of light ahead, and the formerly growling vocals have been replaced by high-pitched «whisper vocals» (reminiscent of recent post-blackgaze artists like Alcest) that clearly suggest a change of scenery: used to be Mordor, now it's more like Lothlorien. Problem is, your everyday routine in Lothlorien is hardly more of an adventure than said routine in Mordor — you just do your whining and com­plaining in a more gallant manner, but who ever said that a melancholic elf is more of a show-maker by definition than a pissed-off goblin? In a contest of mediocre songwriting, I'd probably find myself pining for the goblin anyway.

 

WEATHER SYSTEMS (2012)

 

1) Untouchable, Part 1; 2) Untouchable, Part 2; 3) The Gathering Of The Clouds; 4) Lightning Song; 5) Sunlight; 6) The Storm Before The Calm; 7) The Beginning And The End; 8) The Lost Child; 9) Internal Landscapes.

 

We got the point last time, but perhaps we were not fully convinced, so here are the born-again Cavanaghs with yet another heavenly oratorio on your front lawn — and this time they unleash the full force of the Light upon your unholy skeptical ass. From beginning to end, Weather Systems is as straightforward an album about the temporary nature of earthly life and the imma­nent nature of heavenly existence as they come: and if you needed scientific proof of that, they even enlist Joe Geraci, an original survivor with a near-death experience, for a brief recital on the last track. It's a more or less routine story of experiencing white light and transcendental beauty before being brought back to life, and the only thing it does is to reinforce the impression that the Cavanaghs are no longer content with constructing the musical equivalent of Eternal Bliss, but that they actively believe in it and want you to believe in it, too.

 

The problem is, it would be easier for me to get manipulated into this if it weren't for that subtle, but pervasive aspect of cheapness that has always accompanied every single Anathema album, from the early doom metal days all the way to this «let the light eternal chase away the darkness supreme!» transformation. In their zealous verve to make us all fall on our knees and pray to the Great White, even if its name is Nameless rather than Jesus, they forgot — or, rather, they pro­bably did not even begin to remember — that the best recruiters are those that work over their prey in indirect ways, rather than going for one frontal assault after another. Thus, although they still take plenty of cues from the post-rock movement and they might be technically getting better at this with each new record, I still find far more genuine spirituality in the ambiguous sound­scapes of Sigur Rós or Godspeed You! Black Emperor than in Anathema's pompous chorales ("Love is the life breath of all I see / Love is true life inside of me").

 

Musically, we are still on the same level — largely static compositions, revolving around one endlessly repeated phrase, often with a crescendo effect achieved in the same manner as GY!BE do this, but with less diverse instrumentation. This time, the emphasis seems to be more firmly placed on swift, perfectly picked acoustic arpeggiated chords, starting with the very first track (ʽUntouchable, Part 1ʼ) and reappearing quite frequently: a good sound, but neither innovative in any manner nor responsible for any particularly memorable themes. Piano-based songs (ʽThe Beginning And The Endʼ) are more rare, but that does not in any way improve their quality (all the piano playing is extremely simplistic and, more than usual, seems to be getting in our face: «see? we're playing piano! not any of these darn Casios! accept no substitutes for classically-approved heavenly beauty!»).

 

I count precisely one track whose musical features managed to attract my attention: ʽThe Storm Before The Calmʼ, allegedly an allegory of the death experience, after a tense, cold introduction transforms into an instrumental jam with a cool use of electronics, as the main piano/bass/drums track is enhanced with buzzing electro-static tones and wind-imitating white noise. Midway into the song, it goes away and is replaced with the usual boring attempt at an orgasmic crescendo, but that three-minute part in the middle is arguably more sonically inventive than any other piece of music created by Anathema in the I-saw-the-light period: as a musical analogy of a «storm», it is quite original, making you feel trapped in an electric field that just went crazy on you.

 

Other than that, it's just spiritual business as usual. Interestingly, they let Lee Douglas take more lead vocals than usual: she even takes solo lead vocal on ʽLightning Songʼ, and is generally more audible on tracks where she duets with Vincent — strange that they did not do this before, since her vocal tone certainly correlates better with «heavenly» than Vincent's (she is no Sandy Denny, though, and she usually stays in a lower range that is perfect for folk-rock, but probably not for Heavenly Exaltation). This, and the increased function of acoustic picking, and the occasionally inventive use of electronics all suggest that the band is still searching, which is a good thing: I do retain the right to be generally unimpressed by their methods of search, or the territory to which the search is confined — but I also have to admit that, by their own standards, Weather Systems is a small step forward rather than a clear-cut case of creative stagnation, so if you are already a fan, and if textbookish images of Paradise™ suit your feelings just fine, this record will be as in­dispensable to you as, say, Time Out Of Mind would be to a Dylan fan.

 

UNIVERSAL (2013)

 

1) Untouchable, Part 1; 2) Untouchable, Part 2; 3) Thin Air; 4) Dreaming Light; 5) Lightning Song; 6) The Storm Before The Calm; 7) Everything; 8) A Simple Mistake; 9) The Beginning And The End; 10) Universal; 11) Closer; 12) A Natural Disaster; 13) Deep; 14) One Last Goodbye; 15) Flying; 16) Fragile Dreams; 17) Panic; 18) Emotional Winter / Wings Of God; 19) Internal Landscapes; 20) Fragile Dreams 2.

 

The title and track listing for Anathema's first live album may be a little confusing. Apparently, it was first released under the title Untouchable, on four sides of vinyl, with 12 tracks in all. Later, the entire concert, recorded at the Theatre of Philippopolis in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (don't ask me why, but I guess it has something to do with traditional Eastern European and Soviet enthusiasm for mass-marketed Crunchy Spiritual Rock), was released on DVD and Blu-ray under the title of Universal — and some of the video editions also featured the entire audio of the concert, which comes up to a whoppin' two hours and sixteen minutes of Anathema bliss. This is the edition I will be talking about: I couldn't bear watch the entire show (spirituality overload!), but I did listen to the entire concert, though, frankly, I'm not sure why.

 

Because even with the Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra accompanying these guys, their live shows (at this point, at least — I have no idea about the early doom metal days) merely recreate the studio originals, as close as possible, which is still not close enough if you remember that they have no Steven Wilson with them on stage. Some of the trickiest studio overdubs cannot be recre­ated at all (for instance, the «electric storm» in ʽThe Storm Before The Calmʼ, here pretty much shorn of the electronics that made that instrumental interlude so great), and those that can... well, since this is not about improvisation, or about toughening up the original sound, or about giving the songs additional dimensions, all you can say is, "gee, well, at least here's proof that somebody actually loves Anathema!" Because the audience does go wild.

 

At the very least, they could have arranged an interesting setlist — seeing as how Anathema's entire career gradually and logically went from «pitch black» to «moody dark» to «light angelic», it would have been a great idea to arrange the whole show in precisely that order: start off with some early metal, then gradually lighten up and land the show with ʽUniversalʼ or any of those other anthemic we-saw-the-light tracks. Instead, they do exactly the opposite: the first half of the show consists of almost nothing but songs from the last two albums, and the second half consists of a bunch of earlier hits, so that you start out with hope and finish with despair — how rational is that, given that the band's current agenda is to give hope rather than take it away? I admit that there are no reasons whatsoever to expect particularly intelligent decisions about musical logis­tics from a band as naively idealistic as Anathema, but come on guys — do not undermine your own artistic ideology at least.

 

No comments on individual songs whatsoever, but I am glad that the album is an official ack­nowledgement of the fact that ʽFragile Dreamsʼ is this band's quintessential signature song for all times: not only do they finish the show with it, but they play two versions of it (first the reworked soft one and then the original hard one). Allegedly the fans were quite happy about it. Everything was nice, the vibes were great, the band members were very polite and friendly, we all went to Heaven and back, and the degree of spiritual enlightenment in the country of Bulgaria tempora­rily went through the roof, even though the ancient Theatre of Philippopolis probably does not have a roof, which makes things even easier. Bottomline: you probably had to be there to make the experience worthwhile, but then why on Earth should anyone bother going to an Anathema con­cert? They don't even provide space for a mosh pit or anything.

 

DISTANT SATELLITES (2014)

 

1) The Lost Song, Pt. 1; 2) The Lost Song, Pt. 2; 3) Dusk (Dark Is Descending); 4) Ariel; 5) The Lost Song, Pt. 3; 6) Anathema; 7) You're Not Alone; 8) Firelight; 9) Distant Satellites; 10) Take Shelter.

 

From the band's own statement on their latest studio offering: "Distant Satellites is the culmination of everything Anathema has been working up to so far in our musical path. It contains almost every conceivable element of the heartbeat of Anathema music that it is possible to have. There is beauty, intensity, drama, quietude, and extra musical dimensions that the band have previously only hinted at".

 

Do you smell bullshit? I'm pretty sure I smell bullshit. While I do admit that Anathema's journey from black doom prophets to harbingers of heavenly bliss has its elements of uniqueness, «extra musical dimensions» is really not the kind of phrase that I would ever allow myself to use in order to describe their music. And considering that Weather Systems was, after all, mostly treading the same path that they had already chosen with We're Here, I have very grave prior doubts that they might have seriously expanded on that atmosphere and musical message, unless they'd once again decided upon changing it to something completely different.

 

They did not, though, and basically, Distant Satellites is just an echo of Weather Systems — and a fairly boring one at that. I mean, how could it not be, if even its title has the same structure and associations (aren't «distant satellites» used to monitor «weather systems»?), and its first song comes in two parts (okay, three, but the third one is far removed), and the first part is all loud and epic and the second part is all romantic and sentimental? The only reason to make a record like this is if, somehow, you were dissatisfied with its predecessor — and wanted to correct its mis­takes. But I did not notice much correction going on here; on the contrary, this time they managed to make an album completely devoid of any particularly interesting moments. The whole thing is «mature-Anathema-by-numbers», completely safe and predictable.

 

There may be a bit more electronic elements here than usual, particularly in the second half of the album (ʽYou're Not Aloneʼ, title track), implying that they are still being spiritually dominated by Radiohead — Kid A and In Rainbows both come strongly to mind. But the digital sounds are neither used in an innovative manner nor do they make any obvious artistic sense, other than to confirm that this band does live in the 21st century and that God has not, as of yet, indicated his opposition to the use of integrated circuits to sing His glory. And the rest is the rest — romantic piano, lush powerful strings, exalted vocals from the Cavanaghs and lyrical vocals from Lee Douglas, and praise of Love Eternal that has no choice but to shine through the darkness, espe­cially if you've been living on Prozac for the past ten years or so.

 

Now I know that fans of the band could easily accuse me of being unfairly biased here — after all, even if the record lacks innovation, that does not mean that the Cavanaghs have not written a new set of melodies, completed a new set of arrangements for them, and, after all, if I can give high ratings to three same-sounding AC/DC records in a row, or three same-sounding power-pop albums in a row, what is so wrong about Anathema doing the same thing? The answer, my friends, is wobbling in the wind: Anathema is a band that pursues far more lofty ideals and de­mands for far deeper emotional reactions than AC/DC or Cheap Trick or The Bats — every single Anathema album is supposed to either plunge in you the depths of utmost despair, or to raise you up to the heights of spiritual catharsis and bliss. And when you see lofty goals like these pursued with blatantly lazy, unchanging, predictable means, album after album after album, the result is anything but a series of profound epiphanies — more like having to go to confession and enduring yet another predictable session with your local priest, who keeps asking you the same questions and giving you the same answers. It ain't fun, it ain't useful, all in all, it's just another brick in the wall.

 

Unfortunately, from the looks of it, this seems like a formula which Anathema have found addic­tive — with the band already past twenty years of existence, and most of its members way past 40, I would be extremely surprised to see them turn away and explore a genuinely new direction any time soon (especially considering that, in all fairness, they have already come a very long way from where they started). Those who have honestly admired and loved this new style will have plenty more delightful fruits to reap in the coming years, but I give the album a thumbs down and will give any following album that sounds like this a thumbs down as well — I sort of see the two opposing musical poles of religious ectasy as represented by St Matthew Passion and All Things Must Pass, respectively, and records that try to sound like a hybrid between the two usually end up compromising and embarrassing the ideals of either, so no more, thank you.

 

ÄNGLAGÅRD

HYBRIS (1992)

 

1) Jordrök; 2) Vandringar I Vilsenhet; 3) Ifrån Klarhet Til Klarhet; 4) Kung Bore; 5*) Gånglåt Från Knapptible.

 

Progressive rock. Wise men say that the thing died sometime around 1976 or 1977; that the thing was no real good even while being at the peak of its reputation; and that the thing enjoyed some sort of semi-intelligent rebirth, its arrogant ambitions tempered by humility and common sense, with the arrival of bands like Radiohead. All the same, a stark collection of unabashed veterans will be ever so ready to insist that prog never died, but continued to develop steadily from the late Seventies up to the present time — simply going underground, out of the reach of both popular taste and critical anger.

 

Technically, they are correct. Bands like Gentle Giant, Yes, and King Crimson either petered out like the first, joined the oldies circuit like the second, or adapted to newer times like the third. Then there was the «neo-prog» thing of the 1980s, with bands like Marillion trying to put a more modern sheen on old values, attracting some old guard prog fans and repulsing others. But then there were also people who, quite honestly, did not understand what the hell was so wrong with the classic prog sound in the first place. So the critics trampled upon Tales From Topographic Oceans — big deal. If there is at least a couple dozen thousand fans all over the world who like it, where the heck is the sequel? What's keeping 'em up?

 

Then the Eighties began to dissipate, with frizzed coiffures and synth guitars and electronic drums out­wearing their novelty-based attractiveness, and some began to realize that — you know what? — music in the 1970s might have actually been a whole lot better than ninety percent of the radio crap from the big hair decade. And, for all we know, it might not have been a total mat­ter of sheer coincidence that Änglagård, a bunch of young, aspiring Swedish musicians, released their debut LP, honoring the legacy of 1970's prog masters, not long after Nirvana released Ne­ver­mind, symbolizing, likewise, a conscious retread to older musical values.

 

In stark contrast with the likes of Marillion and IQ, Änglagård play «retro-prog», not «neo-prog». Having listened to Hybris from first to last second, it is, of course, possible to suspect that the LP was not recorded in 1976, but hardly possible to understand when it was recorded as such. Listen to small chunks one at a time, though, and, unless you are a historical expert on the giants of prog, you will think that you are hearing obscure outtakes from Genesis, Jethro Tull, and Caravan re­cords. Not only do these Swedes trustily re-enact ye olde melodic structures, they also brush the dust off ye olde guitar pedals, Moogs and Mellotrons, boosting the local pawn shop business and bringing to orgasm all the old fogeys who'd renounced all hope of ever getting it up again at least ten years prior to the fact.

 

The LP consists of four (five, counting the bonus track on the CD re-issue) eight-to-twelve minute multi-part suites, mostly instrumental (they do sing, but none of the band members were vocally endowed, so, wisely, they keep it to a mini­mum) and generally not too heavy on hooks, as would befit a proper progressive composition. The mo­od, overall, is the same: mysterious, medievalistic, dark, and foreboding — think of Genesis' 'Supper's Ready' as the chief inspiration (but withhold all of Peter Gabriel's flowerish tomfoolery; these guys do not really believe that humor belongs in music, not in their music, anyway). The idea is to cram in as many different instruments and melodies as a ten-minute length will allow; all of the players are professionals (a point that must be particularly stressed in the light of the players' young age; Mattias Olsson, the percussionist, was 17 at the time!), but none are solo vir­tuosos, and they far prefer the art of smooth collective playing to individual showmanship.

 

What this kind of music clearly offers over uninspired third- and fourth-degree prog exercises à la Kansas is a complete lack of cheap pathos; the sonic landscapes that these guys create are all out there for you, the listener, to accommodate to your own dreams and values, not for some pre­tentious idiot singer to tell you that his music must make you sympathize with the plight of the Indians or ponder upon the vanity of your existence. (It does not hurt, either, that the few lyrics there are are all in Swedish — might have been even better if they were in Kobaian or Klingon).

 

What this kind of music does not offer is a real valid point, other than «we love, love, love what these awesome British guys were doing twenty years ago, and we wanna be just like them». Quite a few people whose opinions on this album you can check out on the Web state that Änglagård have their own, unique take on prog, being more than the sum of their influences — no one I ever saw being able to explain or even hint what that take is. Of course, they think of their own melo­dies (at least, I think they try to; noticing and putting down mutual rip-offs between prog bands is a special art that should be taught in post-graduate studies), and they combine their influences in complex ways, so that a suite might begin like King Crimson, go on like Gentle Giant, and end up like Tull; but surely true «individuality» must mean more than that.

 

Obviously, Hybris is a must-listen for any self-respecting fan of the classic progressive style, if only because (a) all such fans are always clamoring for more and (b) it is at least interesting and instructive to see how such an honest and, essentially, working replica could have been made in 1992. For those who are quite happy with their Foxtrot and Red, though, Hybris will probably not be necessary. As a serious, loving tribute to them good old days, though, it is an experiment that works 100%, and for that, deserves a thumbs up; I, for one, enjoyed it all the way through. But now that it's over, I want my MTV, uh, I mean, my Tarkus.

 

EPILOG (1994)

 

1) Prolog; 2) Höstsejd; 3) Rosten; 4) Skogsranden; 5) Sista Somrar; 6) Saknadens Fullhet.

 

Perhaps if Änglagård continued to carry on well unto the 21st century, even their biggest fans would eventually get bored, leaving them to preserve the purity of their progressive spirit in local progressive strip bars. But they were smart enough to go their own ways upon recording their second LP, which they unambiguously titled Epilog — and thus, ensure at least minor legendary status. «Remember those mysterious Swedish guys going against the grain in the early Nineties? They're, like, so cult, you just got to know them! Prog Annals sacrifice to their memory on a re­gular basis! Sure the music is derivative and crappy, but just listen to that name — Änglagård! Any idea on how to read that funny circle above the third a? Funny chaps, those Swedes!»

 

Strictly speaking, the music is good, though. In fact, Epilog is objectively better than Hybris at least in one respect: nobody sings — which is a major advantage, since nobody in the band can sing (guitarist Tord Lindman's several attempts at mimicking the trade almost killed off the po­ten­tial of at least two of Hybris' best numbers). The three lengthy suites that comprise the bulk of the record (the rest are just brief minimalistic links) are completely instrumental and focus exclu­sively on band interplay, which is this band's major — and only — claim to fame.

 

This and a few other factors contribute to Epilog's slightly more somber mood, although «som­ber» by no means implies «heavy»: the electric guitar is here more than ever subdued to the im­pact of keyboards (Hammonds and Mellotrons, mostly) and especially Anna Holmgren's flute playing, very prominent on all three compositions (those at least as perceptive as myself will easi­ly spot the variation on Peter Gabriel's 'Firth Of Fifth' flute solo in 'Sista Somrar', and those who are more perceptive will probably name several other variations that I have not been able to de­tect). With a few notably aggressive passages cut out, the whole record would form the perfect soundtrack for a funeral service — solemn and sad, but never depressing and desperate.

 

The bad news is that, just like Hybris, this is all too manneristic. The three suites are located as three separate tracks under three separate titles, but they do not correspond to three different indi­vidualities or purposes — you can easily cut a large chunk out of 'Sista Somrar' and paste it into the middle of 'Höstsejd' and nobody will give a damn, since each of the three is a bunch of copy-pastes in the first place. Build-ups, fade-outs, tender interludes, stormy jams are interspersed with each other almost at random; perhaps a dedicated fan could find perfect Apollonic harmony in all this stuff, but most, I fear, will lack this capacity. Professionalism, intelligence, and sincere dedi­cation combine to make it all perfectly listenable and respectable, but there is no high purpose to Epilog, whatever such a purpose might have surmised.

 

As a «low-purpose» record, though, it deserves its thumbs up: I mean, it is named Epilog, after all, and it certainly sounds like an epilog — what more can one ask for? Curiously, it is probably the only record in the world named Epilog whose first track is named 'Prolog'. So if you hate its guts, you might still want to own it as a cult and curio piece.

 

BURIED ALIVE (1996)

 

1) Prolog; 2) Jordrök; 3) Höstsejd; 4) Ifrån Klarhet Til Klarhet; 5) Vandringar I Vilsenhet; 6) Sista Somrar; 7) Kung Bore.

 

A prog band just ain't a true prog band without an eighty-minute live LP under its belt; and even if Buried Alive was released as an afterthought, with the band already defunct for two years (the actual performance is from 1994's Progfest in Los Angeles), that does not make it any less of a «destiny fulfilled» symbol for the Swedish revivalists.

 

The track list is unmercifully stern: they reproduce all of Hybris, most of Epilog, and none of the cover tunes from their idols they occasionally allowed themselves to perform live (such as Ge­nesis' 'Musical Box', for in­stance) — come to think of it, that must have been a wise decision, be­cause the band's singing sucks even worse live than it does in the studio (this particular version of 'Klarhet' features some of the lamest off-key notes I've ever heard on any prog rock record, peri­od), and the sooner the world forgets about Tord Lindman's impersonation of Peter Gabriel, the better. Buried Alive sticks to its own guns, and let it stay that way.

 

Of course, it also means that, like all traditional prog bands leaning over to the symphonic rather than free-style ideology, the sole point of Buried Alive as an album is to prove that Änglagård's complexity can be and has been reproduced in a live setting with the exact same precision as it showed in the studio. The sound quality, I believe, could be slightly better — volume levels are not always properly adjusted, some instruments sometimes come out muffled, etc. — but overall, the quibbling is minor, so if your CD copy of Hybris ever rots down, rest assured that Buried Alive will still give you the same satisfaction.

 

On a sidenote, it is hard to refrain from noting that the «Progfest» in question, judging from the volume of the applause, must have been delighting an immense army of music lovers — no less than twenty, I'd say, and perhaps even all of a whoppin' fifty. Considering that, according to pub­licity descriptions, the LA Progfest draws progressive rock lovers from all over the world, I would guess that, be it «neo-prog», «retro-prog», or «prog-o'-the-prog», all of these new-fangled bands put together still would not match the popularity of a single classic Yes, Genesis, or Jethro Tull album — that most music lovers today would rather relisten to their stiff, preserved copies of Fragiles and Foxtrots than pay money to witness the living, breathing sounds of Echolyn, Anek­doten, and Minimum Vital. Which, as far as I'm concerned, should not make anyone sad — on the contrary, the more it stays this way, the more it helps ensure the status of Fragiles and Fox­trots as the stone cold classics they are, and I, for one, am a hopeless sucker for stone cold clas­sics. And what about Änglagård? They're all right, for about sixty minutes per year.

 

VILJANS ÖGA (2012)

 

1) Ur Vilande; 2) Sorgmantel; 3) Snårdom; 4) Längtans Klocka.

 

«The Return of Änglagård» does not exactly bear the same stunning force as «The Return of The Beatles» (or «The Return of Jimi», for that matter), but for those in the know it will be a pleasant surprise nonetheless. Furthermore, there would be little sense for the original lineup to get to­ge­ther in order to try out something completely different — whatever little fan support this band had in the first place was all due to the «Änglagård brand», and now, eighteen years after their second and last studio LP, the retro-oriented Swedes come back together to prove to the fans that the brand is still in place.

 

If anything, Viljans Öga (Eye Of The Will) is not just mere proof that Mattias Olsson, Anna Holmgren, and the rest of them «have not lost it» — it is an almost mathematically accurate proof. Play this back-to-back with Epilog and there will not be a single seam: the album is a direct time machine back to 1994 (and, considering that the band's original albums were almost like a time machine back to 1973 or something, we are now battling chronospace with even more verve and efficacy than before). And, in a certain way, the very appearance of such an album in 2012 is even more of a «miracle» than it was back then. At least the early Nineties were sort of an age of musical turmoil, with both the mainstream and the underground currents at a crossroads — in that context, even the conservative / «unhip» retro-proggism of Änglagård somehow had its place. But in 2012, with most of the musical directions either stiff and rigid, or fragmented to minuscule bits, it must require even more bravery to put out this kind of record.

 

Four tracks, running from twelve to sixteen minutes each. No singing (for Änglagård, we already know that is a plus). No English titles (good reason to brush up on your Swedish). A symphonic structure, overall — the tracks definitely feel like four separate, but atmospherically unified move­ments of one hour-long whole. Medieval folk acoustic guitars, processed psychedelic elec­tric guitars, faraway Mellotrons, and pastoral flutes as dominant forces. Tricky time signatures. Key and tempo changes every minute. Moody autumnal main themes. Yup, this is Änglagård all right. And they have not been influenced by Radiohead or The Flaming Lips or The Animal Col­lective in the meantime. In fact, it certainly looks like they haven't even heard of any of these guys. In fact, it looks as if they spent those eighteen years safely resting in their coffins. (Come to think of it, some of these parts could have made a great soundtrack to a movie on aging vampires and their existentialist problems).

 

Some of the reviews I have read (and there have been very few reviews, apart from prog-specific resources) were highly critical of it all — what is the very point of a «progressive» band with no «progress», they said? Naturally, they had a point, but, come to think of it, Änglagård were al­ways a «regressive» band rather than a «progressive» one. They loved their King Crimson, their Yes, and their Genesis, and wanted to keep that old spirit alive in their own vessel. They offered no genuine «innovation» — they wrote their own melodies, but strictly according to the old reci­pes, and they never had any inclination to come up with something radically new. They did it rather well, too, and in these circumstances, there is something admirable about this iron-will obstinacy. Something three-hundred-Spartanic, if you know what I mean.

 

A different problem is whether Viljans Öga is altogether more «boring» or more «academically stiff» than its predecessors. The fact that all of its four parts are roughly the same length, roughly feature the same instrumentation (with minor variations, such as the presence of a guest cello on one or two tracks, etc.), and roughly follow similar symphonic patterns — alternating quiet and loud parts, climactic build-ups and fall-downs, etc. — might, indeed, suggest unnecessary rigidi­ty. At least Epilog had those little interludes that varied the flow. On the other side, lack of self-dis­cipline and the entire «break-all-the-rules» routine, which has been the norm for intellectually oriented pop music for so long, is so all-pervasive anyway that, from time to time, it is actually interesting to see musicians lock themselves into a pre-set ball-and-chain structural pattern, espe­cially when nobody actually forces them to do it. (I would say that the only occasion here on which they break out of the formula is the «mad» coda to the album — where, once the main theme has been played out, some free-form noise is followed by an eerie circus music part. Open to creative interpretation for everyone!)

 

Hence, Viljans Öga is not so much the «Eye Of The Will» as it is the «Triumph Of The Will» — a severe, ultra-academic, disciplined, somber tour-de-force. But it is not entirely mechanistic or man­neristic — Änglagård is a band born out of sincere love for certain forms of music, and their skill at creating musical landscapes of morose, melancholic autumnal beauty, alternating with «battle­scapes» inspired by ʽLarks' Tongues In Aspicʼ or ʽThe Gates Of Deliriumʼ, is... well, I wouldn't dare to say «unmatched», not being all that familiar with the neo-prog scene of the last twenty years, but let's just say that, even without a serious effort, Viljans Öga can easily induce visions, and that is what separates «progressive» music that lives and functions from «pro­gres­sive» music that, impressively constructed as it is, seems to lack the «power on» button.

 

None of which is to say that this is «great» music. The main themes are imbued with epic state­liness (ʽLängtans Klockaʼ), or repetitive melancholy (ʽSorgmantelʼ), or both (ʽUr Vilandeʼ), but the melodies are not sharp, shrill, or «deep» enough to arouse any emotions above «pleasant» — exactly the same way it has always been with Änglagård, so no big surprise here, either. But, on the other hand, this is where undefendable subjectivism comes in — so you might just want to skip this part where I award the album a «mild» thumbs up, approximately three-fourths respect and one-fourth heart's content, and just look it up for yourself, particularly if somber, stubborn, slightly somnambulous, but sympathetic Swedes soothe your senses and sweeten your spice.

 

APHEX TWIN

SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS 85-92 (1992)

 

1) Xtal; 2) Tha; 3) Pulsewidth; 4) Ageispolis; 5) I; 6) Green Calx; 7) Heliosphan; 8) We Are The Music Makers; 9) Schottkey 7th Path; 10) Ptolemy; 11) Hedphelym; 12) Delphium; 13) Actium.

 

Musical genre names do not get much sillier than «IDM». Where does one draw the line between «intelligence» and its opposite (say, «dumbness») in dance music? So let us assume that the ave­rage nameless techno rave at your local club, say, three or four notes looped ad infinitum with a minimum of pitch and tone mutations counting as «development» is «dumb dance music», as op­posed to the «intelligent» works of Richard D. James. But just where exactly do we draw the line? And what about history? How come we apply the moniker of IDM to Nineties' electronica? Isn't Prince supposed to be IDM? The early Beatles? Chuck Berry? Johann Strauss, Sr.?..

 

Pangaeian reverence does not get much stranger than the pedestal established for Aphex Twin and, in particular, this album, critically acknowledged as his masterwork. If anything, it mostly goes to show how deep in the ground all the talentless people had managed to bury the classic achievements of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, and Klaus Schulze by the end of the Eighties that it took somebody like Richard D. James to dig 'em up, give 'em a good dusting, mo­dernize them with techno beats and, in the process, become a worshipped trendsetter.

 

Now it has to be made clear that, by any possible standard established in the vast jungle world of Electronica, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is a damn good album. The title seems a bit suspi­cious, not just for the well-noted fact that, if «85-92» is to be believed, James must have recorded some of these tracks when he was 13 years old (he is not trumping W. A. Mozart in any case), but also for the fact that the whole record does not at all sound like a collection of disjointed outtakes — on the contrary, it has a conceptual solidity, meaning that he either had the whole idea already fleshed out in 1985, or just hoaxed us all. (It is also very notably different from his first EP, Dige­ridoo, released only a year before and focusing far more on hardcore techno and synth fart noi­ses — not recommendable unless you're one of those hopeless electronica freaks who regards elec­tric guitars on the same plane with stone choppers).

 

The «melodies» of Aphex Twin are by no means as «intelligent» as the odd label of IDM would suggest. Take a minimalistic keyboard pattern, along the lines of one of Brian Eno's typical ambi­ent records, add a few equally minimalistic «noisy» synth backgrounds, and you've got it made; the only thing that remains is to make it rhythmic (and here, actually, James has to be given credit: his percussion textures, even if mostly following the four-on-the-floor principle, are pretty di­verse, with no two tracks given the exact same rhythm contour). Selected Ambient Works is not a «deceptively simple» album: it is a simple album, period. By the standards of Klaus Schulze, this guy would be like a three-year-old trying to bang out 'Chopsticks' on a piano.

 

But these are, after all, selected ambient works, not a sprawling electronic symphony honouring King Ludwig of Bavaria. «Ambient» works if and only if it is truly ambient, that is, manages to set up an ambience. And that's one task for which Aphex Twin is quite qualified. From the warm ope­ning sound waves and mysterious, faintly heard shadows of human voices that ride them on 'Xtal', and right down to the ridiculously simple, but captivating interaction of the nine-note key­board riff and the stern funky bassline on 'Actium', these tracks establish, build up, and substanti­alize an individual — not to abuse the term «unique» — universe. You can fantasize about it on the macrocosmic level (asteroids bopping around in space, galaxies forming etc. etc.), or on the microcosmic level (hemoglobin cells traveling through the organism and shit), or on any level you like, it's all open to and well tunable for all interpretations.

 

Even so, to my ears, James' seventy minutes of techno/house-filtered ambience is just another fine addition to the already huge canon of minimalist music. Its huge influence on the house scene is not something I could be informed enough on to contend, the talent of its maker not some­thing I could be arrogant enough to deny. But the immenseness of its popularity seems to at least have as much to do with the intangible «Zeitgeist» as with its own context-free value. If one were, for instance, to play all of Tangerine Dream's hundred-plus album discography in chrono­logical order, surreptitiously inserting Select Ambient Works around 1992, would it still be able to produce a shock effect on the listener? In other words, just how many people have hailed it as a classic simply because it, along with several other «seminal» works in the same genre, managed to «reboot» the electronica franchise in the early Nineties, serving as a gateway into that par­ticular world for impatient listeners who refused to trust anyone over thirty?

 

"Selected Ambient Works 85-92", writes a glowing David M. Pecoraro from Pitchfork, "...was the very first elec­tronic music I ever bought, and certainly the first I ever heard over and over again... back then, Aphex Twin was making music like nothing I'd ever heard before... What's become apparent since is that I probably wasn't the only one affected." Then he proceeds to give it a 9.4/10 rating. Sure enough, if you compare it to Nirvana or MTV-era Aerosmith, it definitely sounds like nothing you'd heard before. But if... (see above)?

 

These are questions that, for some reason, no one ever seems to pose when raving, or not raving, about the album; everybody wants to discuss it on its own, probably because for so many people Aphex Twin was indeed their introduction to the world of electronic music, or, better still, to the world of intelligent electronic music. But I have a nagging feeling that eventually, in between all the major electronic pioneers of the Seventies and all the gradual advances that have been made in the genre ever since, the importance of Selected Ambient Works will fade away, exposing it for what it is: a pleasant otherworldly mood-setter to brighten your evening, no better and no worse than any other pleasant otherworldly mood-setter.

 

Then again, it should also be noted that Selected Ambient Works need not necessarily be taken as the album that defines Aphex Twin; by no means does it cover all of Richard D. James' versa­tility, importance, and all-around awesomeness. After all, he may have been 13 years old when he created these tracks — and if you can do likewise when you are 13 years old, congratulations, you fall under the same category of dementia.

 

SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME II (1994)

 

1-12, 14-24) Untitled; 13) Blue Calx.

 

Now this is what I call ambient — or, more strictly, this is exactly the kind of m... sonic produc­tion for which Brian Eno had coined the term «ambient» once he had felt himself self-assured enough to coin terms. Prior to this, most of Richard D. James' output was grounded in rhythm: not just 85-92, but also the EPs, including the ones recorded under the alias of AFX. His second «proper» long-playing album, then, came off as a big surprise: texture, texture, and again texture way above rhythm, in fact, you might forget about rhythm altogether. According to the genius in his own words, «It's like standing in a power station on acid». Too true. Way too true. (He also claimed that the tracks came to him as lucid dreams, which is harder to believe — just how often does the man have lucid dreams?).

 

Altogether, there is over 150 minutes of sound on these two CDs, and, like all proper ambient al­bums, this is music to dig into on rare occasions and crash out to on frequent ones. To pretend that I love it would be ridiculous, and to pretend that I solemnly revere it as Art would be... well, pretentious. But it definitely has its own face within the way-often-blurry world of ambient: de­spite most of the tracks leisurely taking their allotted time of six to ten minutes, there's so many of them that the album gets a surprising amount of diversity. Not every «composition» has its own individual tale to tell, but the moods vary greatly, from stately-heavenly to industrially-gro­w­ly to sci-fi-asteroidly. If this is a power station, it's definitely a futuristic one, with power pro­duced in many different ways from many different materials.

 

Let's illustrate. The first track (by the way, none of the tracks bar 'Blue Calx' are named; each one is simply ac­companied by an image, later transformed conventionally into a spoken/written name by fan con­sensus; first track is 'Cliffs') would not be out of place on a (decent) soundtrack to a (bad) Steven King movie — lightweight, but still menace-containing loops with an odd «child babble» accompaniment. From there, we move to 'Radiator', with monotonous torturous chimes recorded over pssht-pssht noises. Bleeding and infuriating. 'Rhubarb' is J. S. Bach meeting Brian Eno and Richard D. James attempting to decipher stuff from their wastebasket. 'Hankie' is indus­trial pre-catastrophe stuff. Then 'Grass' welcomes you with the first hints of percussion and a general feeling of walking through the empty streets of a post-nuclear city.

 

As you see, it does not all come together very well, but none of it feels too disjointed, either; as diverse as the moods are, the «ambient» promise is fulfilled — not once does Aphex Twin break out the techno beats. The decision for you as a record buyer is really very easy: if Electronica, for you, is music to move to, this is the most expendable item in the Twin's catalog, but if you appre­ciate it for its power of static ambience, this is the one album to go for.

 

It is sort of funny to realize that, about a year from then, Richard D. James would have a media­ted opinion exchange with Stockhausen; the latter was asked to listen to an Aphex Twin tape and complained about «post-African repetitions», urging the man to «look for changing tempi and rhythms», upon which the respectable Twin retorted that «he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine, then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to». Obviously, what Karl­heinz was sent was not an excerpt from Ambient Works Volume II — an album that has plenty of repetitions which are, nevertheless, anything but «post-African». Not that the 67-year old com­poser would be capable of «getting» this new generation of machine-prodding whippersnappers, but one thing is for certain: this album puts Mr. James as close to the «old school» of the electro­nic masters as possible.

 

So close, in fact, that quite a few fans still view it as an arrogant joke, along the ideological (if not sonic) lines of Metal Machine Music. I don't think it was a joke — more like a conscious, maybe even narcissistic, attempt at decidedly singling oneself out of the crowds. Like, how many techno and house artists have ever released a 150-minute collection of rhythmless bleeps and bloops? The staggering audacity of the move by itself is guaranteed to generate extra spice — and then there is always the remote possibility that someone will see God shooting craps within some of these tracks. Or, if not, at least use it as a practical sleeping device.

 

...I CARE BECAUSE YOU DO (1995)

 

1) Acrid Avid Jam Shred; 2) The Waxen Pith; 3) Wax The Nip; 4) Icct Hedral (edit); 5) Ventolin (video version); 6) Come On You Slags!; 7) Start As You Mean To Go On; 8) Wet Tip Hen Ax; 9) Mookid; 10) Alberto Balsalm; 11) Cow Cud Is A Twin; 12) Next Heap With.

 

I don't really know if I care, but even I can tell that Richard D. James' third full album feels like the man is finally bre­a­king through the sea of conventions, and trying to take the world of elec­tronic music some place it has rarely, if ever, seen before. This is no longer music you should, or, in fact, could dance to, nor does it humbly follow the well-established standards of the ambient genre. This is where the Aphex starts to reach the apex.

 

Most of the rhythm loops are complex here, ranging from funky trip-hop beats to fairly extreme avantgarde patterns; and on almost every track, the «percussion» sounds different, reflecting Ri­chard's obsessed love for the phenomenon of sound per se. But the main purpose of this comple­xity still seems technical, aimed at disorienting the crowds looking for dance fodder and provi­ding an intelligent background for the music, which is no longer fully «backgroundish», but rather just formally minimalist.

 

At the arguable exception of 'Ventolin', a track destined strictly for the strong of hearing (with its ultra-sonic shrill beeping frequency, the tune is rendered well near unlistenable), ...I Care is very «normal», an album that might even endear the artist to the art-rock crowd. With a little effort, you can even separate the tunes into «rockers» and «ballads», choosing your favourites and skip­ping the «filler». On some tracks, keyboards are being augmented by (real?) orchestration; on others, they are made to sound like medieval church music; and occasionally, they even play the­mes that show melodic development, rendering it impossible to treat the compositions like we are supposed to treat ambient (i. e. every given snippet of the track is the equivalent of the whole).

 

If you are a fan of the «disturbing» aspect of electronic music — creepy underworldly sounds with a claim to predicting the apocalypse — I recommend 'Icct Hedral' ('ICCt' is short for either International Catamaran Challenge Trophy or International Criminal Court, whichever you pre­fer, but the music does not remind me much of catamarans) and particularly the last track, 'Next Heap With...', where James' cloudy synths are periodically torn apart by orchestral strings and horns that at once seem to announce some sort of new day dawning and make you, the listener, afraid to face it. If, however, you prefer just to be becalmed, 'Alberto Balsalm' is one of the Twin's most touching minimalist melodies, and deserves full imersion.

 

To summarize, it's almost as if ...I Care were a synthesis of the energy of Ambient Works I with the calm of Ambient Works II — two opposites working against each other and somehow fus­ing into something with a non-zero charge all the same. Not all such mixes work, but this one seems to have succeeded; at the very least, it is an individualistic and uniquely imaginative piece of sh... uh, work of art. Obviously, it would be insulting on the part of the brain to refrain from issuing it a thumbs up — the whole thing is almost scientifically targeted at hitting each of its individual neurons, ra­ther than some collective abstract «rational conscience».

RICHARD D. JAMES ALBUM (1996)

 

1) 4; 2) Cornish Acid; 3) Peek 824545201; 4) Fingerbib; 5) Carn Marth; 6) To Cure A Weakling Child; 7) Goon Gumpas; 8) Yellow Calx; 9) Girl/Boy Song; 10) Logon Rock Witch.

 

Scientists are prejudiced. Due to certain outdated social conventions and academic pressure, their musical interests normally revolve around classical forms, maybe with a few «world music» ele­ments thrown in here and there for diversity's sake. In reality, of course, there is nothing like a good helping of «in­tellectual» electronic music to accompany the work of a true scientist, be it experimental or theoretical.

 

Let me put it this way. Every time I try to approach the output of Richard D. James from a «basic human perspective», the result is a total fail. «This stuff kicks ass», «these sounds are gorgeous», «this is damn catchy music», «this tune almost makes me cry» etc. are clichéd definitions that are about as applicable to the output of Aphex Twin as to the output of a seashell when you press it against your ear and start wiggling it around a bit. But once I get to thinkin' things like «Hey, this shit sounds not unlike something you'd expect from coronary flow in the subendocardial vessels during contraction of the ventricular myocardium!», or, «this is just the kind of soundtrack we'd want for that documentary on two non-zero mass neutrino double-beta decay, to drive home the point that the Majorana fermion is its own anti-particle!», it all clicks beautifully.

 

The thing is, Richard D. Ja­mes does not care all that much for your soul. It is too superficial for him. He goes straight to the elementary particles, and there is no better conductor for that artistic research than the art of music programming, which is, after all, in itself based on a harnessing of particle power. And on the Richard D. James Album, a surprisingly short, parsimonious venture, he has arguably reached the highest point of that harnessing.

 

The record is frequently classified as "drum 'n' bass", which, in the world of James, means only that the percussion programming has gone real crazy: the beats on 'Carn Marth' and 'To Cure A Weakling Child' are not just complex, they take pride in constantly shifting, reaching a culmina­tion in the middle of the latter track where they can, indeed, only be described in terms of sub-ato­mic bombardment. On 'Yellow Calx', percussion ceases to be a rhythm basis altogether and al­ternates between a wild alien animal breaking out of its confinement, and a creaky iron bridge trembling against the wind, threatening to fall apart at any minute. And on 'Peek', the percussion plays the part of a master gamer blasting packs of spaceships from his vantage point. If anything, this kind of raging creativity begs to forget about labels like "drum 'n' bass" rather than remem­ber them, in a vain attempt to pigeonhole the record.

 

Still, behind the sci-fi percussion, Aphex Twin still manages to imply the existence of spiritual cur­rents. 'Goon Gumpas', for instance, has no beat at all, just a positive synth-harp melody and heavenly strings — there may even be a concealed nod to the Beach Boys' 'Wouldn't It Be Nice'. 'Girl/Boy Song' indicates that there might be elements of romance involved, and, indeed, more harps and chimes drive the song forward, along with such amusing touches as a single flute note, followed by a single bassoon note, never ever to reappear. There's your girl, there's your boy. The rest is deeply buried under twisted beats.

 

Despite a half-hour running length, the record packs more ideas than all of Selected Ambient Works put together. The creaky iron bridge of 'Yellow Calx', the spooky kiddie talk loops on 'Weakling Child', the whistles / spring bounce / church organ combo of 'Logon Rock Witch', the violin sentimentality of '4', things very rarely get boring. At the same time, it is also quite accessible, without any offensive experi­ments with ultrasounds, and with no elements of hardcore techno that could turn off those not en­tirely in awe of any forms of electronica. Still, the best way to enjoy it is on the sub-cellular level: you will know that the music has worked only once you have felt the atoms inside your brain ion­ized by these sounds.

 

Timidly hoping that the process does not cause carcinogenesis, my own brain says it is a thumbs up, even though the heart is predictably unaffected — despite moments that do approach conven­tional «beauty» on '4' and 'Goon Gumpas'. Probably, though, Richard would have been offended if we started pressing him for conventional beauty. We'll always have Cher for that.

 

COME TO DADDY (1997)

 

1) Come To Daddy, Pappy Mix; 2) Flim; 3) Come To Daddy, Little Lord Fauntleroy Mix; 4) Bucephalus Bouncing Ball; 5) To Cure A Weakling Child, Contour Regard; 6) Funny Little Man; 7) Come To Daddy, Mummy Mix; 8) IZ-US.

 

This would be a fine place to mention that, in addition to his relatively small number of long-pla­y­ing records, Richard D. James has had immense streaks of EPs and singles released over the past twenty years, describing all of which individually would take forever — yet it would not always be a waste of time, since much of the man's tastiest meat is to be found on these petty pieces of product. All I can say in general is that they are generally worth checking out, and, as an excep­tion, say a few words about one of his lengthiest EPs: Come To Daddy runs over thirty minutes and, therefore, almost qualifies as a full album (actually, Richard D. James Album only excee­ded it by about five minutes, completely blurring the distinction between album types — which, come to think of it, is only natural considering that these days they all come on the same pieces of plastic with the same diameter).

 

Come To Daddy is likely to qualify as Aphex Twin's eclectic peak; with a little bit of every­thing and more contained inside, I might even recommend it as a most useful introduction to the chara­cter in general. If you want to see where exactly one talented artist stands on beauty, evil, fun, absurdism, and musical geometry, each single track on this release will answer at least one of these questions, and sometimes more. Plus, together with Album, this is the finest proof available of the idea that Richard D. James is not merely making music with electronic equipment; he has, in fact, become one undetachable whole with his electronic equipment — much like for Jimi Hendrix it could be seen that the guitar was just another, extremely vital, organ of his body, here it seems that sounds like these could only have come from an operative cyborg.

 

'Come To Daddy (Pappy Mix)' is the most famous number here, mostly due to the promo video, from which the world got tricked into thinking that Richard D. James is, in fact, a mutant hell-raising demon born out of an old TV set in­seminated with dog pee. Musically, however, the track is one of the simplest and least interesting numbers on the EP, a jarring industrial techno parody on all sorts of «evil music», from Ministry to Prodigy to death metal, that is rather one-dimen­sional, unless you want to throw on some points for the mock-creepy «demon vocal» overdubs of "Come to Daddy, come to Daddy!" and "I WILL EAT YOUR SOUL!"

 

But the big general plus of the EP is that it is intended to be more than a sum of its parts, and the hyperbolic evil of 'Pappy Mix' does not reach its full effect until, one track later, you reach the 'Little Lord Faulteroy Mix', whose only common link with the 'Pappy Mix' is the main title — in all other respects, it is an entirely different experience, with underwaterish chimes and little green man vocals taking the place of metallic grind and Lucifer roar. And then, still later, there is the 'Mu­m­my Mix', which is even less similar — mostly percussion-driven with a few ambient tones in the background and next to no vocals at all (just a little high-pitched screaming).

 

Why are they all 'Come To Daddy'? Probably just to reflect the man's provocative spirit. The unsettling titles, the evil grin staring out of the dog-pee-stained TV set in the video, the unusually high percentage of warped vocal overdubs, all of this has the stamp of the «man-machine» over it, as if all these long years of tampering with the spirit armies of chips and transistors finally did transform the man into the «Analord», as he would, in a few years, start christening a whole se­ries of his new records. Scary — but certainly exciting.

 

Tucked inside the three «mixes» are lesser known tracks that are, however, no less deserving. 'Flim' represents one of his most pleasant minimalistic melodies, a rhytmic melange of almost jazzy synth patterns, completely devoid of any ironic aspects. 'Bucephalus Bouncing Ball' starts out as a crazy, superhuman break-dance track before completely chucking rhythm out the win­dow and concentrating instead on tracing the virtual trajectory of a virtual set of bouncing balls: imagine a bunch of Olympic gods setting up a pinball championship and you'll end up some­where in the vicinity (I cannot even begin to imagine the work it took to program all that). And 'Funny Little Man', the more I listen to it, the more it comes across as some gruesomely political­ly incorrect musical joke, which is fabulous, because who the heck wants to see a world stripped of the art of intelligent provocation?

 

Where Come To Daddy can seem a step below the Richard D. James Album is in the «melo­dy» department — without any strings arrangements or Beach Boys influences, but with boun­cing balls and goofy vocal tricks, it is more about «sonics» as a whole than about traditionally valued note sequences. But the inclusion of tracks like 'Flim' clearly shows that, like every talen­ted electronica / avantgarde composer, James simply views «traditionally valued note sequences» as but one of the important ways to realize his maniacal sonic drive, and the good news is, he is fully capable of realizing it in ways that are complex, exciting, and impressionistic, which sets him apart from armies of poseurs. If nothing else, Come To Daddy is simply one of those magnificent treatments for the tympanic membrane that builds up one's sense of perception, ge­neral experience, and, well, character. Thumbs up.

 

DRUKQS (2001)

 

1) Jynweythek; 2) Vordhosbn; 3) Kladfvgbung Micshk; 4) Omgyjya-Switch; 5) Strotha Tynhe; 6) Gwely Mernans; 7) Bbydhy­on­chord; 8) Cock/Ver-10; 9) Avril 14th; 10) Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount; 11) Gwarek 2; 12) Orban Eq Trx 4; 13) Aussois; 14) Hy A Scullyas Lyf A Dhagrow; 15) Kesson Dalef; 16) Cymru Beats; 17) Btoum-Roumada; 18) Lornaderek; 19) QKthr; 20) Meltphace 6; 21) Bit 4; 22) Prep Gwarlek 36; 23) Father; 24) Taking Control; 25) Petiatil Cx Htdui; 26) Ruglen Holon; 27) Afx 237 V.7; 28) Ziggomatic; 29) Beskhu3epnm; 30) Nanou 2.

 

This goddamn thing is just too long, which is not so much a complaint as a lament: even if there are any bright new spots here that suffice to advance Richard D. James to the next level, three or four listens are not going to get you to follow him there. Really, for a guy much of whose reputa­tion was based around short, up-to-the-point EPs and singles — such as, e. g., the famous 'Win­dowlicker' from 1999 — to throw out one hundred minutes of continuous electronic noise on the market sort of understates the meaning of «overkill».

 

There have been cautious, sceptical, and even overtly negative reviews of DrukQs, which is un­derstandable since even serious admirers of Aphex Twin might not want to spend their time sor­ting the wheat out of the chaff; and since Aphex Twin is merely God in disguise, and His know­ledge of the Universe does not go much further than a detailed understanding of superstring the­ory, which He invented, and the Big Bang, which He supervised — it is obvious that the 2 CDs of DrukQs are going to contain crappy filler, like it or not.

 

In all honesty, I would call this a «coasting» experience, and an intentional one at that; DrukQs is a big, sprawling summary of most, if not all, of James' interests in the world of sound. The tracks meticulously alternate between (a) techno / drum'n'bass dance numbers with psycho-futuristic me­­lodic un­der­bel­lies, along the lines of Ambient Works 85-92; (b) rhythm-less, minimalistic, mostly minor key piano or string compositions, along the lines of Ambient Works II; (c) stern industrial clots of noise, such as can be found on his mid-Nineties albums; (d) brief musical or non-musical jokes (e. g. a phone message from his parents congratulating him on his birthday). There is no «hard techno» à la 'Come To Daddy', and no orchestrated arrangements, but other than that, it is all fairly representative.

 

And fairly ehh: not a single track truly stands out. Despite all the superficial diversity, they blend into each other much like their unpronounceable, unmemorizable titles (which range from com­plete orthographic gibberish to long words or short phrases in Cornish, certainly indistinguishable from said gibberish for any layman without a Celtic fetish). The melody-carrying synths be­hind the frantic beats never burst into magic, and the beats themselves, in all honesty, are far less innovative and unusual than they used to be. It's all rather yawn-inducing even from the scientific point of view. Were elementary particles truly flashing around the way they are pictured in 'Ta­king Co­n­trol', or geological fluctuations accompanied by the sounds of 'Gwely Mermans', natu­ral science would be nothing but a chore.

 

It is not unimaginable, of course, that there is much subtle charm here that the critics missed for obvious reasons — such as its pretentious length and lack of transparently evident innovation — but, after all, it is just as easy to nosedive in electronic music as it is in, say, guitar-based music, and maybe even easier. Even when you have computers on your side to assist you with finding fresh types and combinations of sounds, your power is still limited; what is a computer, after all, but a bunch of alternating ones and zeros? And on DrukQs, these alternations simply happen to be more coarse-grained than elsewhere. Thumbs down.

 

26 MIXES FOR CASH (2003)

 

CD I: 1) Time To Find Me [AFX Fast Mix]; 2) Raising The Titanic [Big Drum Mix]; 3) Journey [Aphex Twin Care Mix]; 4) Triachus [Mix by Aphex Twin]; 5) Heroes [Aphex Twin Remix]; 6) In The Glitter Part 2 [Aphex Twin Mix]; 7) Zeros And Ones [Aphex Twin Reconstruction #2]; 8) Ziggy [Aphex Twin Mix #1]; 9) Your Head My Voice [Voix Revirement]; 10) Change [Aph­ex Twin Mix #2]; 11) Une Femme N'Est Pas Un Homme [Aphex Twin Mix]; 12) The Beauty Of Being Numb Section B [Created by Aphex Twin]; 13) Let My Fish Loose [Aphex Twin Remix]; CD II: 1) Krieger [Aphex Twin Baldhu Mix]; 2) Deep In Velvet [Aphex Twin Turnips Mix]; 3) Falling Free [Aphex Twin Remix]; 4) We Have Arrived [Aphex Twin QQT Mix]; 5) At The Heart Of It All [Created by Aphex Twin]; 6) Flow Coma [Remix by AFX]; 7) Windowlicker [Acid Edit]; 8) Normal [Helston Flora Remix by AFX]; 9) SAW2 CD1 TRK2 [Original Mix]; 10) Mindstream [The Aphex Twin Remix]; 11) You Can't Hide Your Love [Hidden Love Mix]; 12) Spotlight [Aphex Twin Mix]; 13) Debase [Soft Palate].

 

Strictly speaking, I have every «legal» right to skip this 140-minute monster, since it is not a «proper» Aphex Twin or AFX album. Not only is this a compilation, with mixing dates running the entire length of James' official career, but only two of the tracks (the remixes of 'Window­licker' and 'SAW2') begin and end with Aphex Twin himself. The rest are exactly as advertised: remixes of works by other artists — for cash. (I'm assuming RDJ doesn't accept checks).

 

However, it doesn't take a serious expert to understand that an Aphex Twin remix is not just a re­mix. «Just a remix», at best, gives you a longer version of your favourite single with more oppor­tunities to shake it up, and, at worst, serves as money bait for frustrated completists, spending the­ir time hunting for rare Japanese 12" releases when they could have been researching stem cells instead. For Richard D. James, remixing is a major way of making a living, not so much in the fi­nancial sense as in the biological one. Like an evil parasite, he attaches himself to the original product, sucks out its organic matter and injects his own venom. Or larvae. Listening to this al­bum, especially if you are familiar with the original tracks, is the musical equivalent of walking through a parasitological museum (there actually is one in Tokyo, believe it or not).

 

I am not familiar with all of the originals, nor even with all of the artists, which range from real biggies like Nine Inch Nails and Meat Beat Manifesto to local celebrities like Nobukazu Takemu­ra to all sorts of techno and trip-hop bands and DJs that may or may not have been great in their heyday (actually, if you start penetrating the world of 1990s electronic music through the big names, 26 Mixes is some serious publicity for the smaller ones). The album may — and, at a cer­tain point, should — be enjoyed on its own, independent, terms, but, of course, comparisons with the raw material will also help unfurl the secrets of Aphex Twin's creative spirit. So it's 140 mi­nutes of offbeat pleasure per se, and then, if you want, 140 ⋅ 2 minutes of instructive similization for the sake of intelligence, coolness, and merciless timekilling.

 

The Twin's basic approach is «reconstruction» rather than «deconstruction». It is as if he took one or two listens to each selection, found one or two elements of it that he liked — a beat, a bassline, maybe even a vocal part — dissolved the rest in acid, then built his own dream castle around the salvaged bits. Just one example: Takemura's 'Let My Fish Loose', a dreamy ethno-jazzo-electro­nic «bal­lad», used to be a multi-layered recording, awash in tricky time signatures and flutes and funky keyboards and bits of Spanish guitar. Of all these things, James falls in love with one: the bassline, which is indeed a very groovy jazz bassline. So he makes it loud as hell, and everything else quietly hiding behind its back — but the annoying kiddie vocals he apparently hates, so he ends up distorting them, stretching, compressing, and dehumanizing at will. It's brilliant, since it is at the same time an exhortation of the track's strong points and a mean parody of its weak ones. (At least, that's how I see it at present — but I think it's an understanding that ties in well with the common idea of «Aphex Twin = The Evil Clown of Electronica»).

 

Some of the tracks can only be qualified as cruel (but deserving) jokes. Both David Bowie and Philip Glass, for instance, take a severe beating on the remix of the Glass-orchestrated version of 'Heroes', on top of which he dubs David's original vocals — as if asking us the question, «What the hell do these two people have to do with each other?» Clearly, nothing, as the abysmal audio effect will have you realize. 'You Can't Hide Your Love', a simplistic, sterile dance track from DMX Crew is sped up, stripped of the boring overlays that conceal its worthlessness, and turned into a dance fool's paradise.

 

Most of the time, though, the source material is simply used as a bare foundation to create more of that typically-Aphex music. Mescalinum United's 'We Have Arrived', as the name tells you, used to announce alien presence: a fast-paced, pompous «astral» march with huge beats and swo­oping keyboard waves to reflect macrocosmic proportions. All of that hugeness is being ripped out, and the tune is reinvented as a jarring, almost insufferable industrial slam, with alien beats now sounding as megaton sledgehammers and galactic waves replaced by the poisonous hiss of acid-corroded metal. Like I already noted, Aphex Twin's electronics normally dislikes stars, gala­xies, and other faraway places; he is more concerned about fractals, atoms, and quarks, whose worlds are really just as limitless in themselves as those of the stars and galaxies, and there is no better way to see this than to compare the original 'We Have Arrived' with his reworking.

 

Occasionally, the remixes serve to remind you that the man's own music is not entirely sourceless, either, and that there is no inseparable rift between the electronic revolution and whatever used to exist prior to that. The second track, for instance, sounds like a decent outtake from Ambient Works II with a loud drum rhythm attached — in reality, it is his reconstruction of Gavin Bryars' 'Sinking Of The Titanic' theme from 1969 (conveniently renamed 'Raising The Titanic'). And the album ends on an almost hippiesque note with a remix of 'Debase' from the Mike Flowers Pops, a retro band mostly known for an Oasis cover and contributing to the Austin Powers soundtrack.

 

It would be cheating — and somewhat unfair — to call 26 Mixes the Twin's «best» album, but one thing is certain: the diversity of approach and abundance of ideas make this the easiest 140 minutes in a row of his music that I have ever sat through. Think of it this way: no matter how prodigious the man is, it is pretty hard for one talented person to keep on releasing double CDs full of consistently successful music (especially electronic music); DrukQs demonstrated this in all clarity. On 26 Mixes, it is as if he enlisted the help of 26 friends — imagine it as a shot in the arm on the part of talented corporate songwriters — to aid with the basic skeletons. The result is simply one of those, I am not afraid to say, seminal albums that give Electronica a good name, helping to convert the skeptically minded who think that intelligence, diversity, and entertainment could not, in theory, peacefully co-exist on an electronic album. Thumbs up.

 

CHOSEN LORDS (2006)

 

1) Fenix Funk 5; 2) Reunion 2; 3) Pitcard; 4) Crying In Your Face; 5) Klopjob; 6) Boxing Day; 7) Batline Acid; 8) Cilonen; 9) PWSteal.Ldpinch.D; 10) XMD 5a.

 

In 2005, Richard D. Twin continued his unpredictability spree by releasing, under his alternate moniker of AFX, a series of eleven vi­nyl-only EPs that he called Analord and numbered almost in successive order: first came No. 10, then Nos. 1 through 11. (Don't ask me what particular brand of algebra this represents). Those of us who are of the more common stock and do not bother so much about the vinyl vs. CD contro­versy, right down to not even owning a turntable any longer, may only enjoy the results through illegal (and, in the eyes of the Twin, most probably distasteful) digital rips — or through this par­ticular compilation from 2006, which did get a CD release and, supposedly, was almost forced on the man by his management.

 

The latter — the fact that Chosen Lords were a half-hearted release — means that there is no guarantee that you really get the best stuff. Knowing the evil mind of «Daddy Windowlicker», you might, in fact, get the worst, and may that be a punishment to you for disrespecting the power of vinyl and the holy obsession of the completist. (At least, that is exactly what most of the completists say — unless they are simply pissed off that it was them and not you spending all that time and money on scooping up the entire series). But with this kind of music, it is not easy dis­tinguishing between best and worst in the first place. And there is certainly very little sense to re­viewing all of the series and trying to find significant progressive difference between Analord 5 and Analord 11. For our purposes, Chosen Lords will do fine.

 

There is a retro scent to this music — naturally, since, true to its name, the Analord series made significant use of old analog equipment, although computer equipment was also present. Some have called it a conscious return to the good old days of «acid techno» and drew analogies with Ambient Works 85-92. Others, conversely, highlighted its innovative qualities (merging the old ways with new creative approaches etc.). Both parties are probably right. However, in my own eyes, this does not make Analord any less of a «coasting» experience than DrukQs, no matter how different the technologies involved in their preparation.

 

The overall sound is simply too dry and shallow. The best of Ambient Works were impressive sonic vortices, spurring on all of those cellular / atomic level analogies and making the listener want to reach within oneself and find echoes of these strange sounds in his/her own blood. On Analord, or, at least, on these particular selections, James mostly sticks to complex, but un-moo­dy robotic patterns that took much work to create, but not a lot of inspiration, I believe. For all of the innovation, I cannot hear any new types of sonic sensations that had not been discovered be­fore, and none of the tracks are sharp, rough, or aggressive enough to attract extra interest. Worst of all, way too often I catch myself understanding that this is hardly distinguishable from back­ground Web muzak or arcade shooter accompaniment ('Fenix Funk 5' might have been terrific in «Mario Bros. In Outer Space», but hardly anywhere else).

 

In such a situation, the most effective tracks are those where, at least, you have a lot of things happening, so it may not mean much, but it keeps you too occupied to be bored. Which means that the winner by far is 'XMD 5a' (perhaps not coincidentally, one of the two tracks on here ac­tually credited to «Aphex Twin» rather than the non-aphex evil twin «AFX»), a real oddball com­position that begins with rhythmically tolling bells, continues as a little convoluted acid dance track dubbed over an ambient-minimalist piano track, grows into a percussion-heavy funk num­ber, dissolves in the ambience of the piano, comes back in a poisonous pool of Moog-ish atmos­pherics, and finally bursts in an evil biley bubble. Nothing sensational, but still — a sonic adven­ture that contrasts rather sharply with the comparatively static nature of most other tracks.

 

The bottomline is, in the hands of a beginner this kind of stuff would command reverence, but for James, this is starting to raise the question of whether his explorations had really reached the end of the map by the year 2000. The fact that some people actually paid attention to — and almost applauded — the fact that 'PWSteal.Ldpinch.D' introduces a regular 4/4 beat, might somehow hint at the possibility that things are coming back full circle. Who knows, maybe ten years from now the Twin will be gracing us with digital deconstructions of Sinatra standards. For now, my review should serve as a cautious warning: there is no big reason to hear this stuff unless you are already a vintage Aphex nut. At least — repeat repeat — I see nothing here that makes it any better than DrukQs.

 

SYRO (2014)

 

1) Minipops 67 (Source Field mix); 2) XMAS_EVET10 (Thanaton3 mix); 3) Produk 29; 4) 4 Bit 9d Api+e+6; 5) 180db_; 6) CIRCLONT6A (Syrobonkus mix); 7) Fz Pseudotimestretch+e+3; 8) CIRCLONT14 (Shrymoming mix); 9) Syro U473t8+e (Piezoluminescence mix); 10) PAPAT4 (Pineal mix); 11) S950tx16wasr10 (Earth Portal mix); 12) Aisatsana.

 

Let us meet a few conditions. First, you are Richard D. James, a.k.a. Aphex Twin. Second, you have not had a «proper» new long-playing album out in thirteen years. Third, your latest album features you not dicking around without a head on your shoulders, but actually diligently doing your thing. Fourth, you put a receipt that details the complete production costs of your album on its front cover. With all these conditions met, how could SYRO be released to anything other than universal acclaim on the part of critics and veteran fans alike?

 

However, since this here site is known to operate under a strict «no-bull» policy, I would like to try and assess the values and virtues of this record as if that thirteen-year gap never existed. If you remember, Richard's last proper LP, DrukQs, was met with a relatively lukewarm reception — sometimes branded as too long, sometimes as too monotonous, sometimes as too unjustly focused on electronic percussion, overall, not one of his better efforts. Now what would have been the reception for SYRO, had it come out in 2002 instead of 2014? If we didn't all have to wait that long, begging The Master to please please please come back, and show us the way?

 

I had to actually go back and refresh some of the «classic» Aphex Twin numbers, from ʽGreen Calxʼ all the way down to ʽCome To Daddyʼ, in order to understand why my senses could only perceive SYRO as one large, unterminable, irritating bore. It is better than DrukQs, for sure, if only because the emphasis has been shifted away from fussy funky percussion and put back on tonal sounds — Richard D. James may be a master of his own groove, but his best work had always had a positively melodic side to it. However, calling SYRO a «melodic» album would clash way too hard with my naïve world view, and I won't do it.

 

Where some of Richard's work used to be awesomely otherworldly, and some of his other work used to be hilariously nightmarish, and some of his other work just made you stop right there and think «I have no idea what this ʽmeansʼ, but it sounds so different and so cool, why hasn't any­body else thought of that before?», SYRO does none of these things to me. Predictably, it is complex (and made even more complex by the frequent use of processed vocal overdubs), it is «intelligently danceable», and it even makes an effort to be diverse, but (a) there is really nothing here the likes of which we hadn't heard before, be it from Richard himself or from a gazillion of his electronic followers, and (b) more importantly, these tracks do a fairly poor job of converting themselves into lasting impressions, or even short-lived impressions, for that matter.

 

Perhaps it is the fault of the production, which fails to give these tunes the required depth: just as it was on DrukQs, it all just sounds like an extended soundtrack to a generic video game, and even good headphones do not particularly help out to perceive anything breathtaking about these loops and ambient flourishes. But a much more likely solution is that the man is simply no longer driven by the fresh excitement of exploring uncharted waters, which was there in the 1980s and in the 1990s. «Exploration» is now reduced to «desperation», that is to say, silly gimmicks that serve as mental bookmarks rather than anything else —  «ʽCIRCLONT14ʼ? Oh, you mean the one where they wispily chant no-so-chkeeee, no-so-chkeeee, no-so-chkeeee all the way through?» (For the record, nosochki literally means ʽlittle socksʼ in Russian, and this is hardly a phonetic coincidence, since there are other Russian phrases occasionally scattered in the mixes as well — a 25th-frame-type trick, no doubt about that; Her Majesty's Secret Service should probably start investigating whether the man has been put on Putin's secret payroll).

 

Naturally, it would be illogical to expect the man — not just after such a long break per se, but after a long break during which his electronic feats and wonders, once upon a time a jawdropping force like no other, have become a normal part of our collective conscious — it would be illogical to expect him to have the power to stun the world once more. Electronic wonders are as much of a rarity these days as any other type of wonders, and adventurousness and artistic flexibility do tend to decrease with age even if we're talking of geniuses. Yet, on the other hand, after such a long break, neither did I quite expect this former Napoleon to meet his musical Waterloo, no matter how many important critics will try their best to convince you that it is really his musical Austerlitz. Not «revolutionary», no, but gimme some emotion/impression/revelation, whatever. And no, nosochki does not count. And I don't play any video games these days, either.

 

One hour into this mess comes ʽAisatsanaʼ, the quiet ambient conclusion — a five-note piano phrase repeated over and over, sometimes with minor variations, pretending to long to be resol­ved until it finally is resolved with a couple extra chords at the end. Somehow, it seems to me to be symbolic of this entire album — a lengthy search for self-expression, pretending to be carried out on several different paths but really mainly following the same unoriginal, tired direction, and finally pretending to have reached its goal, but there never really was a goal. The whole thing is just boring, meaningless, and tedious, and if it took Mr. James thirteen years to come up with that, well, he might just spend the rest of his days growing vegetables as far as I'm concerned.

 

Seeing as how so many people give out radiant-glowing reviews to SYRO — even though I have not been able to find even a single one that would illuminate me on what exactly I have missed here — I do feel a responsibility to warn you not to take my rather vicious thumbs down at face value, and go and check it out for yourselves. Nevertheless, most of this review was written in a cool-calm-collected state and reflects my genuine feelings (or, rather, lack thereof) towards the album, so I am not just trying out a contrarian approach or anything. In the end, I guess we'll just have to wait until the Heroic Aureole wears off our hero a little bit, and see where SYRO is going to stand, say, in twenty or thirty years time, provided the world will last that long.

 

CHEETAH (2016)

 

1) CHEETAHT2 [LD Spectrum]; 2) CHEETAHT7b; 3) CHEETA1b ms800; 4) CHEETA2 ms800; 5) CIRKLON3 [Êîëõîçíàÿ mix]; 6) CIRKLON 1; 7) 2X202-ST5.

 

It is absurd, I know, and probably a coincidence, but why is it that when an Aphex Twin release only claims to be inspired by a retro device, it still turns out to be the most interesting and enga­ging release from the artist in more than a decade? The Cheetah MS800 was a digital synthesizer developed and briefly marketed by UK's Cheetah Marketing in the 1980s, and is typically called one of the worst-sounding and most complex and befuddling synths to ever exist — hence the reference, although, if I am correct, Richard D. James never goes as far as to actually haul out one of those old relics and give it a try, he just brings up the name so that every single reviewer in existence, myself included, could go, «oh, how appropriate, a title referring to one of the most bizarre electronic devices for one of the most bizarre electronic artists».

 

But somehow, really, CHEETAH is fun! An EP, technically, though still more than half an hour in length, it is radically different from the cluttered, over-spasmodic, blurry stuff we'd had from Mr. D. lately (yeah, looking at you, SYRO) — here, the man goes for a tight, tense, and mini­malistic approach instead, concentrating on the drum-'n'-bass rhythm first and adding a few extra flourishes at the last moment. The result is that much of this does indeed sound a bit like an old arcade soundtrack, but a thoughtful one, where the music is expressly written to mimic the action on screen; and by making the beats relatively simple and the bass lines loud and deep, he allows the brain to focus tighter on what's going on and, perhaps, even to store a part of it.

 

The very first track... by the way, I'm not going to retype these titles, thank you very much; I've had enough of that crap with Autechre releases — my only question, which nobody seems to have an answer for, is what the hell is meant by "Êîëõîçíàÿ mix" (track 5)? "Êîëõîçíàÿ" is the correct Cyrillic spelling for Kolkhoznaya, the name of several streets / stations in various Russian cities (derived from kolkhoz, of course), but I have no info on any electronic teams, studios, art-projects, DJs, etc., that would go by that name. Did the guy just select a random Cyrillic word from a random text or what?.. Anyway, the very first track (which is not the Êîëõîçíàÿ mix, but something else with a lot of letters and numbers) begins by establishing a good old ominous groove — relentless percussion, grim bass punches, cloud-gathering synths deep in the back­ground — against which a simple lead melody keeps making a threatening descending dive-bomb, and somehow it is immediately more effective than if he'd stuff the opening with a dozen beep-and-bleep overdubs and a mega-poly-rhythmic set of beats that only a ten-headed alien could easily identify and empathize with.

 

The second track almost sounds like some good old-fashioned electro-pop (give it to Quincy Jones for a few moments and you can have yourself a solid rhythm track, awaiting the reincarna­tion of Michael Jackson), eventually adding a mystery component with harpsichord-like «secret chamber tones» and funny tapping runs from percussive bass / bass percussion. There's an odd soothing, rather than irritating, feel about this music, probably because of the muffled, glossed-over effect on all the parts that internalizes the feeling rather than externalizes it — I really love what he's doing with the production, creating music that is much more fit for taking in at home, in an enclosed space, rather than in some action-packed dance club.

 

Later on, ideas (or at least approaches) begin repeating themselves, but the record does not over­stay its welcome — it gives you two more very short interludes (one sounds like your on-screen sprite is trying to zig-zag his way through a perilous swamp and the other finds him walking into cloudy dreamland) and three more IDM tracks, all of which have their enjoyable moments: the funky bass groove on ʽÊîëõîçíàÿ mixʼ, the quasi-jazzy «piano» «improvisations» on the next one, and yet another superb bass groove on the last track — my only wish is to hear some of these, some day, played by real jazzmen on real instruments, which would have been even more awe­some (no, I mean, really, just close your eyes and imagine that last track handled by a couple of real jazz-fusion pros on drums and bass... eh?). But then, what do I know, electronic music is still the future and all that. At the very least, I do know that the old windowlicker is not quite out of ideas yet, and that this latest attempt to go for a stripped-down sound is a much welcome change, well worth an honest thumbs up, despite the brevity.

 

 

 

 

 

APOPTYGMA BERZERK

SOLI DEO GLORIA (1993)

 

1) Like Blood From The Beloved (part 1); 2) Bitch; 3) Burnin' Heretic; 4) Stitch; 5) Walk With Me; 6) Backdraft; 7) ARP (808 Edit); 8) Spiritual Reality; 9) Skyscraping; 10) All Tomorrow's Parties; 11) The Sentinel; 12) Ashes To Ashes '93; 13) Like Blood From The Beloved (part 2).

 

It is no big secret that your average goth still preserves just enough human spirit to possess a need to dance. Neither forefathers like the Cure, nor more straightforwardly Gothic acts like Bauhaus avoided dance rhythms — as long as you could paint them dark black and pass them off as some sort of scary ritua­listic trance thing. After all, one can always take advantage of the fact that none of us are properly informed about the nightly activities of Count Dracula.

 

From a different corner of the market comes EBM, «electronic body music», a term introduced by Kraftwerk and, allegedly, rather confusing — despite the phrasing, it does not refer to any ele­c­tronic dance music, but only to those types that introduce «industrial» elements. In other words, take something like the nerve-wrecking chaotic, dissonant hammer-clanging of Einstürzende Neu­bauten, straighten it out into an easier-going rhythmic pattern, and you got yourself some EBM. (How the hell you are supposed to remember the difference between EBM and IDM is a question that no popular music theoretician will ever answer, because choosing the right words for their terminology has never been a conscience-bothering issue with these people).

 

Finally, there's Apoptygma Berzerk, basically a one-man project (formally a group, though, with permanent supporting member rotation) from the sick brain of Danish-Norwegian Stephan Groth who happened to fall upon the rich idea of combining Goth-dance with EBM and acquire the stu­dio means of carrying it out. The original idea might have been as random as the artistic name he chose for it (Apoptygma means 'fold of dress' in Greek, and Berzerk is Groth's middle name... nah, too much honor), but the delivery had plenty of gusto anyway.

 

Had I the misfortune to hear Soli Deo Gloria back in its own time, I would have probably lasted about fifteen minutes. Even today, there is a temptation to simply dismiss this as awful shit and move on to better things. But why yield? Just because of its techno-pop overtones? Let us just wrap them up in one brief disclaimer: those of us who have an innate animosity towards techno-pop will never love Apoptygma Berzerk (or, at least, their early formative period), but love is one thing, and curiosity is another. And surely Soli Deo Gloria is a curious album.

 

Imagine a Gregorian choir trading in their church organ for a bunch of sequencers and you have just begun to understand the gist of Groth's output. The «songs», interspersed with brief atmos­pheric links, are dark rhythmic grooves with heavy emphasis on life-and-death matters. Groth's vocals, alternating between «doom-laden» and «scary-evil», combine very well with the cruel-sou­n­ding electronic pulses, and most of the choruses are catchy enough to convince you that there has been some traditionally-oriented songwriting involved here. Bad news is, the traditionally-ori­ented songwriting way too frequently sounds like second-rate Depeche Mode: if there is any­thing striking about a number like 'Bitch', it is not Groth's vocal melody, but rather the constantly angle-shifting showers of electronic effects that bombard it.

 

The real meat is to be found on longer, even more adventurous tracks like 'Skyscraping', ones that can switch in between several different rhythmic patterns and noise sections. Groth's imagination runs wild on these things, even if he has a long way to go to catch up with the big names in the electronic business; for one thing, he never lets a single groove overstay its welcome, insisting that these are all particular movements of complex art pieces, not just dark ambient plains to cross while shooting up zombies and Neo-Nazis.

 

But the main issue is always the same: will you or won't you take this guy and his darkness seri­ously? Like a Jim Morrison gone techno? (Provided you take Jim Morrison seriously, but that's a different question). Will you agree that his recasting of The Velvet Underground's 'All Tomor­row's Parties' honors the spirit of the original rather than mocks or profanates it?

 

I vote a mild 'yes'. Mild, because Groth's rather obvious commercial inclinations prevent him from casting it all in a truly EVIL mold (à la Ministry). Gloomy, but not creepy; dark, but not abys­mal. Always stopping at that threshold that separates the cautious worker from the brave ka­mikaze. But, on the other hand, how is it polite to say 'no' to a record that does something unique in spirit, accumulates lots of effort, and is at least marginally memorable? Besides, this is just the beginning of Groth's bizarre musical wanderings, released at the age of 22. It needn't have done much of anything other than just showing promise. And not every record needs to show knockout potential to merit a thumbs up, anyway.

 

7 (1996)

 

1) Love Never Dies (part 1); 2) Mourn; 3) Non-Stop Violence; 4) 25 Cromwell St.; 5) Rebel; 6) Deep Red; 7) Nea­rer; 8) Half Asleep; 9) Love Never Dies (part 2); 10*) Mourn; 11*) Electricity.

 

On 7, the early «Gothic» stage of Apoptygma Berzerk reaches its peak. It gets more and more dif­ficult to stay indifferent to this sound: the temptation to dismiss Groth's techno-doom for re­pre­senting «Apo­calypse Dance Music for Silly, but Pretentious Teens» is likely to be as strong in some people as the temptation to find within it the ultimate answer to the problem of life and death will be in others.

 

My own perception will always be biased: I have a deep internal dislike for «futurepop» (the very name itself is absurdly arrogant, not to mention contradictory by nature —  and if the message is that in the future all of pop music will look like this, I'd rather have silence), I don't care much for sampling (apparently, 7 goes very heavy on the stuff, quoting everyone from the Shadows to Kurt Cobain to Red House Painters to Carmina Burana), and I cannot even find anything particularly laudable or original about Groth's lyrical skills: same old tales of sexual repression and compla­ints about human cruelty.

 

Even I, however, cannot deny that 7 is a one-of-a-kind synthesis of influences, much more than just a plain old generic techno record. Opening with a stern church organ recital; having a tribute to the passing of Kurt, sampling the riff to 'The Man Who Sold The World', as its key track; featuring songs about sadistic maniacs set to cheerful synth-pop riffs on the back of gloomy synth bass patterns; ending it all with a starry-eyed female-sung romantic ballad hearkening back to the days when art-rock ruled the world — well, even if one wants to assert that Groth has essentially failed at making it all work properly, you can never say that he didn't try real hard.

 

Techno lovers are definitely welcome to embrace 'Non-Stop Violence' and 'Half As­leep', rough, gritty tracks that easily hold their own against the likes of Prodigy — judging by their own terms, they are quite adequate as, respectively, a martial-style protest against zombi­fi­cation of the nation,  and a musi­cal recreation of a maniacal nightmare. 'Deep Red', in which the maniac actually gets a chance to act (against some angelic back-vocal harmonies, no less), is also a «highlight» of sorts, perhaps.

 

I will, however, confine myself to 'Mourn', whose main synth loop I am always trying to cut out in my mind in order to get a really pretty, sensitive tri­bute to a fallen hero; 'Rebel', an industrial (or would that be «post-industrial»?) collage that seems to be dedicated to the passing of Jesus (yes, we're that serious) and gets along on the strength of sheer weirdness; and that last ballad, not very memorable (except for the fact that it features the only bit of acoustic guitar on the entire album) but a cute conclusion all the same. A fairly small payoff for all of the album's immense ambition, but at the very least, getting to know this sort of approach is always instructive, and sometimes interesting.

 

WELCOME TO EARTH (2000)

 

1) Everything We Know Is Wrong; 2) Starsign; 3) Eclipse; 4) Help Me; 5) Kathy's Song (Come Lie Next To Me); 6) Untitled 3; 7) Moment Of Tranquility; 8) Fade To Black; 9) 64K; 10) Paranoia; 11) Soultaker; 12) LNDP3; 13) Time To Move On.

 

Big surprise for the fans: Groth's third major release sends a 90-degree push in the direction of the «atmosphere pump». All of a sudden, the sinister, blood-thirsty overtones are gone, replaced by a mellower, much more transcendental sort of vibe. Now our main focus is on the extraterres­trial — aliens, astral forces, all sorts of paranormal crap for people who prefer to get excited on the level of the Milky Way rather than the amazing structure of the blood cell.

 

For a variety of reasons, not excluding commercial ones, these new ambitions are clad from head to toe in generic techno — almost omnipresent this time, as compared to the much more rhythmi­cally diverse 7. This would not be such a big problem if the emphasis were on experimentation; unfortunately, it is not. Barring the briefer links, all based on samples and collages, there are nine full-length songs on here that behave like songs, and what you are supposed to do is dance and sing along, not clutch your head in amazement, bewildered by the vast array of tones, effects, and tricky modality changes. This is pop music, not Richard D. James.

 

As pathetically predictable as it could be, my two favourites here — and, in fact, the only two songs I don't mind hearing once again — are the ones that shy away the most from the dum-dum rhythms. 'Moment Of Tranquility' shamelessly steals the main bassline from the Twin Peaks theme (acknowledging this indirectly by quoting a bit of dialog at the beginning), then gradually becomes a «heavenly» synth-pop ballad in the vein of A-Ha, with decent vocal hooks. 'LNDP3' is even better, with a soul-piercing part sung by guest vocalist Nan Pettersen; ironically, it is the only song on the album not written or even co-written by Groth, but rather by part-time partner Vegard Blomberg.

 

Incorrect, actually: the other non-Groth song is 'Fade To Black', initiating Apoptygma's most fa­mous gimmick — EBM rearrangements of unpredictably chosen classics. (Technically, 'All To­morrow's Parties' came much earlier, but that was way before Groth's transformation into a real Eurostar). Other than the buildup on the ominous bubbling intro, however, this particular experi­ence is nothing to write home about, and it certainly does not uncover any hitherto undisclosed depth to the Metallica song (and it wasn't even that much of a Ride The Lightning highlight in the first place — but then, perhaps it's a good thing Groth didn't settle on 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' instead).

 

The album's biggest hit was 'Kathy's Song' — nothing to do with Simon & Garfunkel, and I have no idea who Kathy is (Groth's girlfriend?), but anyway, the song is fairly typical of the rest of the album: simple, unassuming keyboard loops and easily memorable tender harmonies on the end­lessly repeated chorus ("Come lie next to me...") that, in and out of themselves, do not make the song all that different from your average Euro-synth-pop with machine-generated «hits». It does not really require a giant leap to go from here to the horror of Modern Talking.

 

It is hard to call the record a «sell-out», because Groth was never above aiming for mainstream success, and there is really nothing on here that he hadn't already tried — but the sad truth is that the previous two records were far more innovative and adventurous; I would not take it upon my­self to convince anyone of the band's worthiness based on Welcome To Earth per se (let alone playing only the hit singles, without 'LNDP3' which is truly this record's saving grace), and I sup­pose that even without the anti-techno bias, this is all still somewhat flaccid. Thumbs down.

 

APBL 2000 (2001)

 

1) Intro; 2) Starsign; 3) Stitch; 4) Paranoia; 5) Eclipse; 6) Deep Red; 7) Soultaker; 8) Kathy's Song; 9) Non Stop Violence; 10) Fade To Black; 11) Mourn; 12) Beatbox; 13) Bitch.

 

This is actually Apoptygma Berzerk's (or «Apop»'s, as the band is lovingly abbreviated by fans) second live album: two years before this one, Groth released APBL98, usually castigated for hor­rendous sound quality. Well, for this second one, sound quality is certainly not a problem.

 

The problem is whether there actually is a need for an APBL experience in the first place. It is true that, when going on tour, Groth takes along some real musicians: here, we have two extra keyboard players, one extra real guitarist, and one extra live drummer. It is even possible to hear the live drumming. But does it even matter, if there is no real drive to transform Groth's studio creations into true «live music» on the stage?

 

If there is any drive at all, it is solely to wipe out any last traces of «art» there might have been left and transform all of it into a non-stop club rave where pauses between tracks are intended to give you a chance to catch your breath and nothing else. For his setlist, Groth selects only the fast techno numbers, and those few old hits that didn't used to be fast techno numbers are transformed therein ('Mourn', which I used to somewhat like before he sped it up and sucked all the gloom out of it, leaving only the danceability).

 

The only thing we may concede is that the guy does have stage presence: not only is he complete­ly up to the task of singing his parts well over all the noise, he also manages to cast a certain aura of creepiness during the announcements as well — the only case in history I know where the «Goth vibe» may be felt more acutely in between the performances than during them. Also, the live guitar playing on some of the tracks may make it easier for the non-electronica-weaned lis­tener to get into them. But why should such a listener pay any attention to «Apop» in the first place? Nope. Go see the show if you like getting your kicks this way — skip the record. Thumbs down — not that I expected much, but it is still disappointing to see inventiveness completely sa­crificed in favor of the generic party spirit.

 

HARMONIZER (2002)

 

1) More Serotonin... Please; 2) Suffer In Silence; 3) Unicorn (duet version); 4) Until The End Of The World; 5) Rol­lergirl; 6) OK Amp, Let Me Out; 7) Pikachu; 8) Spindizzy; 9) Detroit Tickets; 10) Photoshop Sucks; 11) Something I Should Know; 12) Unicorn (original version); 13) Untitled 5.

 

There is an odd curve about this record, which starts out as Apop's technopoppiest offering ever, then slowly slowly digs into more experimental territory, with the emphasis shifted from primi­tive synth hooks to industrial-ambient grooves. The first half is, in fact, so simplistic that Groth was accused of «selling out» — a meaningless complaint, because no one really knows what exa­ctly constitutes selling out or selling in to this guy. On the other hand, it is also claimed that the album is loaded with deeply personal songs, concerning his recent divorce and stuff.

 

Whatever be, I have no idea how to really enjoy songs like 'Suffer In Silence' or 'Until The End Of The World' (the latter, by the way, begins with a wicked synth riff totally swindled off 'Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da', making the song cool for about five seconds). Their lyrics are tragic, but the melo­dies sound almost happy, and the silly techno beat rules over everything, confusing the senses. To be fair, there is an awful lot of sonic stuff going on in 'Suffer' — but who is going to be noticing that? Goth ravers?

 

Things start improving once the hit single part of the album is over. 'OK Amp, Let Me Out' is a pretty cool title, under which hides a ten-minute near-completely instrumental trance composition, melodically even simpler than the hits, but, unlike the hits, it has some specific appeal, very hard to describe or pinpoint. Maybe it's just the overall «coldness» of the electronic patterns and the doom vibes — Groth's music works best when it's completely robotic, and it fits in well with the idea of an evil spirit oozing out of an amplifier. A grinning prank almost worthy of a Richard D. James treatment, although the latter would probably find much more space for many more gim­micks over these ten minutes (then again, maybe not).

 

Typical of the frustration that I experience with Apoptygma is the fact that a fun title like 'OK Amp, Let Me Out' would be found right next to a song called 'Pikachu' (!) which — I am not jo­king — is technically a «dark love ballad». Okay, so it's dedicated to his daughter, and it may be really a play on words ("It's 4 A.M., I watch you sleep" — 'Pik-ach-oo', got it?), but references to the silliest excesses of Japanese pop culture in general are not OK when you are aspiring to «art»; trend-sucking, yes, but not OK. The song, too, is nothing to write home about.

 

By the time the album takes you through a few more odd industrial twists ('Detroit Tickets') and is finally back where we started with the final pop spin of 'Something I Should Know', this frus­trated feeling makes the record anything but a true Harmonizer. The oddities are more like a way of apologizing before the old fans of the band — «look at us, we can still do this weird dark thing that you can ritualistically dance to, but for the most part, we will just do the stupid dance thing 'cause that's what the kids really like». At least Welcome To Earth, from that point of view, was more honest about its nature. Thumbs down.

 

YOU AND ME AGAINST THE WORLD (2005)

 

1) Tuning In Again; 2) In This Together; 3) Love To Blame; 4) You Keep Me From Breaking Apart; 5) Cambodia; 6) Back On Track; 7) Tuning In To The Frequency Of Your Soul; 8) Mercy Kill; 9) Lost In Translation; 10) Maze; 11) Into The Unknown; 12*) Shine On; 13*) Is Electronic Love To Blame?

 

And here comes change: an album that no one expected from Apoptygma Berzerk except for those wise few who might have suspected it — make Groth drop his techno addiction, if only for once, and he'll finally realize that dark pop masterpiece he had stuck inside himself all this time. Of course, Groth's real fans felt betrayed, because who wants to be forced to start learning new dance steps right in the middle of getting in the groove? But then who cares about a bunch of close-minded ravers anyway? Technically, they were right: You And Me was a sellout, because it sold more than any other Apop record — but all this proved was that the market for «traditio­nal rhythms» is still larger than the market for electronic dance music, and that's juicy good news for all of us nasty conservatives.

 

Anyway, You And Me is not really a «masterpiece» as such, but rather simply a collection of generally good, catchy, atmospheric pop-rock songs that mix electric guitar and keyboard sounds in well-balanced proportions. Complaints that Groth had sacrificed his vision / originality / idio­syn­crasy in favor of a generic «alternative electropop» (or whatever) sound are possible, but it's not as if the sounds of Welcome To Earth or Harmonizer were all that individualistic either. It would be a problem if all the songs had been faceless, but they aren't.

 

Some, in fact, have a new face sewn on. Kim Wilde's 1980s hit 'Cambodia' was not a totally bad song per se, but very 1980s — marrying a simplistic, ultra-repetitive hook to simplistic, cheesy keyboards. Groth and Co. took the song, enlivened and tightened up the rhythms, overlaid extra guitar and keyboard tracks, sang the whole thing with verve, and somehow made it timeless. The same applies to 'Shine On', which used to be a hit single for The House Of Love, but no more: Groth now owns the song, raising its status from, say, a measly B- to a far more assured B+, fat­tening up the sound and acting as if this were really some sort of artsy-message song. Which begs the question — why the hell bother writing original material in the first place if the best songs are complex remakes of raw Eighties' material anyway? Where's Bananarama?

 

The answer is that now Groth writes stuff which sounds exactly that-a-way: dance-pop, Eighties style, but with years of professional experience replacing the fresh aura of kitsch and self-bewil­derment at those out-of-nowhere goofy synth tones that could seduce people back in 1985 but now just sound annoyingly dated, for the most part. 'Cambodia' feels right at home next to 'You Keep Me From Breaking Apart' (a synth-rocker influenced by A-Ha, so it seems, with the guitar-heavy bridge particularly reminiscent of 'Manhattan Skyline') and 'Love To Blame', the album's third single — written in the same manner.

 

In fact, if there is any real basis for complaint, it's that the formula is almost identical for all the songs: describe one, then copy and paste. But that's how it often goes with pop-rock, and these hooks really work, as if Groth and his new bandmates were honestly inspired with the idea of re­viving generic Eighties music in a better, more meaningful setting, not just using it as a gimmick invented on the spot. And trust me, in these troubled days filled to the brim with Eighties nostal­gia, we've all heard much, much worse than You And Me Against The World. If anything, this musical philosophy may weaken a string or two in one's strung-out hate for the golden age of synth pop. Thumbs up. Oh yes, and some of the videos for the hit singles are worth watching. Groth is quite good at out-emo-ing the youngsters without ever really subscribing to proper «emo» trappings.

 

ROCKET SCIENCE (2009)

 

1) Weight Of The World; 2) Apollo (Live On Your TV); 3) Asleep Or Awake; 4) Incompatible; 5) United States Of Credit; 6) Shadow; 7) Green Queen; 8) Butterfly Defect; 9) The State Of Your Heart; 10) Rocket Calculator; 11) →; 12) Pitch Black / Heat Death; 13) Black Vs. White; 14) Trash.

 

Looking back on these reviews, I almost feel sorry for not giving Apop enough credit — because at least this one thing is for certain: Groth sure knows how to change without any of us being able, in any way whatsoever, to predict the nearest future. He clearly started out as a commercial act, but there was so much cling-clanging, bizarre organ-grinding, and rhythmic irregularities in his music that no one really knew where this would take him. Then it brought him to techno (er, sor­ry, «future-pop» in the band's language) — then, when he'd seemingly settled in with two albums in one distinct style, along comes You And Me Against The World. We may hate, love, despise or respect all or any of these albums, but the guy's chameleonistic behaviour is in a class of its own, enough to make history that is utterly independent of our tastes.

 

Now Rocket Science. Again, accompanied by many fans' claims that this is Apop at their weak­est etc. etc.; fourth time in a row, the band is seen accused of selling out and yet, somehow, ma­nages to fill up concert halls across Europe and remain in a niche all its own, away from the gla­morous environment. Again, oddity upon oddity. Technically, Rocket Science is a bit of a com­promise between the recent and the old — a step back from the dynamic, but monotonous elec­tropop of You And Me, but at the same time nowhere near a real retread towards the glossy te­chnopop of Harmonizer. The album itself does not seem to fully understand what it is, and this makes it even harder for the reviewer to come out with a judgement.

 

The bad news is that the songs hardly provoke positive comments. The hooks are scantier than on You And Me, and it is no surprise that the fattest of them are buried on 'Trash' — a Suede cover, proving one more time that Groth is much more adept at interpreting other people's material than writing his own. Even when he succeeds in finding an interesting groove (the metallic droning riff of 'Incompatible'), he either lets it run for far too long or spoils it with silly drum machines and synth tones that, in his hands, have not changed much in ten years' time.

 

Probably, though, my biggest beef with Rocket Science is that it seems emotionally stuck some­where in the neutral zone — neither dark and melancholic nor bright and optimistic, not to men­tion trying to build up an emotional axis all its own, like some visionaries, from Amon Düül II to Björk and whoever else is written with an umlaut are capable of. You And Me was sufficiently well rooted in the dark side, but here Groth has downplayed his personality and, much too often, dissolved his singing (and he is a very good singer when he feels like letting you know about it) in a sea of guitar-and-synth noise. I am afraid he does not appeal to me that-a-way, and possibly this is also the real reason for all the negative reviews — because in terms of pure melodic structure, the songwriting does not seem particularly primitive compared to what it used to be.

 

Somehow, it's all very, very boring, though. One would do much better to just skip this release and replace it with 2006's Sonic Diary, a 2-CD compilation of remixes and various cover ver­sions, including non-album rarities, that Apoptygma had cloned through the years — a much stronger proof of the fact that God didn't just play a stupid joke on us on that fateful day of Au­gust 10, 1971. Then again, considering that Apoptygma's latest DVD carries the name Imagine There's No Lennon, maybe he did, after all. Thumbs down to Rocket Science, but the overall verdict on this oddly twisted product of the turn-of-the-century crisis has to be postponed.

 

 

APPLES IN STEREO, THE

FUN TRICK NOISEMAKER (1995)

 

1) The Narrator; 2) Tidal Wave; 3) High Tide; 4) Green Machine; 5) Winter Must Be Cold; 6) She's Just Like Me / Taking Time; 7) Glowworm; 8) Dots 1-2-3; 9) Lucky Charm; 10) Innerspace; 11) Show The World; 12) Love You Alice / D; 13) Pine Away.

 

If we roughen it up real rough, and reduce it all to the two basic oppositions — Happy / Sad and Stupid / Smart — we can, sort of, get four possible combinations. Somehow, though, in the world of art, or popular music, at least, the attractive forces between «Sad» and «Smart», on one hand, and «Happy» and «Stupid», on the other, generally overpower the other two combinations. No surprise there: the same connection may be observable if you deal with people themselves, not just the art they create.

 

By the mid-Nineties, however, the grunge explosion became so infectious that «Sad» (in all of its varieties, such as «Angry», «Suicidal», «Anti-Social», etc.) became too huge to mate exclusively with «Smart». People like Courtney Love heralded the «Stupid-Sad» connection and launched it into vegetative reproduction mode. Happy music had little choice but to retreat to the most pathe­tic of the intelligence-free corners (Paula Abdul!). So perhaps it was inevitable that, sooner or la­ter, a «Happy-Smart» antidote would eventually resurface and vitaminize us all over again.

 

Such is the general scheme of things that some pop music experts force on us. Like each general scheme, it has its vulnerable spots and inconsistencies, but it does give one a better understanding of the importance of bands like The Apples In Stereo when they emerged in the mid-Nineties with their sunshine-heavy, neo-psychedelic brand of power pop. It also commands respect and admiration for their debut album, Fun Trick Noisemaker — even though it sucks.

 

The recipé for an Apples song is relatively simple, and hasn't changed that much over the centu­ries. A colorful folk-pop riff, distorted just enough to give it a rough garage sheen, but never far enough to push it into «hard rock», let alone «metal» territory; lots of overdubs to commemorate Phil Spector and drive your mind into fuzzy-wuzzy frenzy at the same time; slurrily murmured, but expertly harmonized vocals to bring back memories of the Beach Boys without pretending to achieve the same kind of glossy perfection; a few vintage synth effects to emphasize the psyche­delic effect — and then play it all on repeat for 30-40 minutes.

 

That such a brilliantly calculated, analytical mind as that of band leader Robert Schneider's (in his spare time, he researches analytic number theory, which does not surprise me in the least) could have failed in setting up that kind of sound is unthinkable. That it could have resulted in lots and lots and lots of perfectly sounding songs that mean absolutely nothing and leave a listener cold as ice, on the other hand, is quite thinkable, and I know at least one such listener (me). I love colour­ful, life-asserting power-pop as much as the next guy, yet I am still completely bedazzled how, even after five consecutive listens to Noisemaker, not a single one of these songs has managed to leave the slightest trace of impression in my head. This is not Gentle Giant or Ornette Coleman; this is simple pop music — it's supposed to make an impression now. Or never.

 

Granted, while it's playing, Fun Trick Noisemaker is fabulous. Or, at least, «cool»: just a very very awesome sound to have blasting out of your speakers as you contentedly explain to all the riff-raff around you that this music was, in fact, written and recorded in 1995, not in 1965. The one thing that does give it away is the formulaic monotonousness: even the worst garage bands in the Sixties were much more bent on trying out different kinds of sound, but the Apples cling on to that recipé described above as if they simply knew nothing about any other types of sounds. (One reason why calling this music «Beatlesque», like many people on the Web do, is misleading: not only did the Beatles never sound in such a uniform manner, they never really had this particu­lar type of sound on any of their songs at all — even if they'd wanted to, George Martin probably wouldn't let them, considering it too «dirty» for his ears).

 

But I have no problem with the monotonousness. This is the kind of sound Schneider and his pals dig, and it's all right; who am I to complain if they want to be the AC/DC of psycho-garage pop? The only problem I find is that these riffs, these vocal melodies, these arrangements do not speak to me. The Beach Boys do, the Kinks do, even Love's Arthur Lee, with all his flaws, still has so­mething to say. The Apples In Stereo tell me only one thing: they love cool-sounding happy pop music, and are ready to kill for their right to worship it. Fine! I respect them for it. Now hire a de­cent songwriter, won't you?

 

I don't know, maybe it's the vocals — Schneider's murmur is supposed to have some sort of mes­merizing effect, but not on me, I love me some good clean singing if it's pop music. Or maybe it's the intentional lo-fi production values — for all their love for Brian Wilson, the latter would pro­bably prefer to fall back on his drug habit than to sanction his production stamp on this mess.

 

But in the end, I still guess that it's mainly the songwriting. One hint: the only song on here that I honestly loved upon first (okay, second) listen was 'Winter Must Be Cold', written and sung by drummer Hilarie Sidney rather than Schneider. There is something to the mildly epic riff of that song that I don't find on the other tracks, and, by all means, Sidney is a much better vocalist than Schneider (I do not say «singer» because, in order to appreciate someone as a singer, you need to hear them clearly, and the basic approach on Noisemaker is that all the vocals must sound as if recorded through a set of three heavy pillows).

 

The only other thing I remember is the main riff to 'Tidal Wave', the album opener, although I am pretty sure it was just a slight variation on one of the Nuggets classics (don't remember which one exactly). To me, that's telling — alas, it only further confirms those deep suspicions that say that the best kind of pop songs are written by «street trash» who don't give a damn, rather than deep-thinking, analytically minded college kids who want to materialize their picture-perfect vi­sions of what that Ideal Pop Art Object should look / sound like.

 

It is very easy to be seduced and lulled by the sound, though, which may explain all the rave im­pressions. And obviously, a «thumbs down» rating would be out of the question — not only be­cause the band evetually got somewhat better, but also because the infuriated brain would never allow the disappointed heart to take precedence in the case of an album so smartly crafted, so res­pectful of first-rate influences, and so revolutionary and influential in its approach. It should be kept in mind that the «Elephant Six» brand of music and related artists, who did produce their fair share of contemporary classics, certainly do not end with The Apples In Stereo — but they did begin with The Apples In Stereo. And there is every reason to insist that you do hear Fun Trick Noisemaker, if you haven't already done so — not just out of historical importance, but because it really sounds fine while it's on. Who knows, perhaps it will still make your list of all-time clas­sics, provided you do not make the mistake of giving it a second thought, or trying to replay these songs in your mind once the record is over.

 

TONE SOUL EVOLUTION (1997)

 

1) Seems So; 2) What’s The #; 3) About Your Fame; 4) Shine A Light; 5) Silver Chain; 6) Get There Fine; 7) The Silvery Light Of A Dream; 8) The Silvery Light Of A Dream (Part Two); 9) We’ll Come To Be; 10) Tin Pan Alley; 11) You Said That Last Night; 12) Try To Remember; 13) Find Our Way; 14) Coda.

 

Well, the good news is they are at least evolving. The second album sounds everything and noth­ing like the first — everything, because they are still The Apples, not The Oranges, and nothing, because they have changed (a) the production — the crackly, fuzzy lo-fi has been replaced by a cleaner, more discernible sound that actually evokes the band’s favourite music more faithfully (the original Beach Boys would have series of non-stop individual fits listening to the castrated guitar of Noisemaker); (b) the vocals — now we all know that Robert Schneider can really pro­duce a cool, mildly nasal, mildly raspy, ultimately sweet tone somewhere in between Ray Davies and John Lennon; (c) the attitude — this is now much more jangly pop than trippy psycho, with synthesizer effects, overall, discarded for lack of need, and guitars colored in far yellower and oranger tones than they used to be.

 

Most importantly, Schneider took the time to finally deliver some good songs. Filler still abounds, but now it takes on the form of multiple graciously pleasant fall-offs of tangible peaks. Thus, ‘Shine A Light’ will never bring a tear to my eye the way the Rolling Stones can subdue me with their ‘Shine A Light’ (yes, I know, there is no comparing the two, but the blame falls on Schnei­der — nobody forced him to name the song the way he did), but it opens up with a terrific, inspiring power pop riff, and the vocal melody successfully catches that inspiration and runs along with it, making it the band’s finest effort in life assertion. Then there is ‘Tin Pan Alley’, combining a happy ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ ska punch with Birds-like jangle and another catchy bit of singing — also a fav, well deserving of its name this time around (the real Tin Pan Alley guys might not have refused to take in that one... then again, it’s not really TPA style, but who cares).

 

Some of the songs, like ‘Try To Remember’ and ‘We’ll Come To Be’, this time around, truly ma­ke a bite at capturing the Beatles'’spirit circa Revolver time — they are not so well written, and do not linger long, but they are better at pure jangly pop than psycho; this is passable. The rule of thumb, though, is that generally, the happier they sound, the more rainbow-ish their riffs are, the more chances they stand at making this music last longer than a day. Conversely, when they be­gin the song with a hard-rock riff — ‘What’s The #’ is the earliest and the blandest example of that — they sound like a bunch of diabetics trying to replicate ‘Louie Louie’ at the local karaoke bar. Their acoustic stuff is hardly better: ‘About Your Fame’, a flabby two-minute acoustic and accordeon ballad, only starts getting cool with the introduction of that electric slide one minute into the song (meaning one minute of waiting for goodness and one minute of actual goodness).

 

So, in the end, this is still hardly Hall of Fame material, but it did show two important things: (a) The Apples were willing to learn, evolve, progress, and grow fins or wings depending on the situ­ation; (b) their chief songwriter did have a certain amount of talent to burn in addition to all that impec­cable taste in influences. It still didn’t quite show why they had to drag along that «In Ste­reo» tag, but that would eventually be explained, too. In the meantime, a very modest thumbs up for all the extra seductive sounds without a solid substance.

 

HER WALLPAPER REVERIE (1999)

 

1) I. Her Room Is A Rainy Garden; 2) II. Morning Breaks (And Roosters Complain); 3) The Shiney Sea; 4) III. The Significance Of A Floral Print; 5) Strawberryfire; 6) IV. From Outside, In Floats A Musical Box; 7) Ruby; 8) V. She Looks Through Empty Windows; 9) Questions And Answers; 10) VI. Drifting Patterns; 11) Y2K; 12) VII. Les Ama­nts; 13) Benefits Of Lying (With Your Friend); 14) Ruby, Tell Me; 15) VIII. Together They Dream Into The Evening.

 

Once again, a sharp turn onto the psychedelic lane, as the special effects make a grand return, and along with them comes the idea of having lots of brief (and one long) interludes that sort of make you believe the actual songs are breaking their way out of an enchanted musical box. You see, there is a she, and she has apparently glued her wallpaper onto her wall with the aid of a sticky hallucinogenic substance, and when the visual effect of the wallpaper, the olfactory reaction of the substance, and the aural factor of musical box come together...

 

...what you get is about twenty minutes of decent psychedelic songs and about seven more minu­tes of «links» whose names take more time to type than their sounds take time to roll through your channels. To judge them is easy enough: if The Apples In Stereo, as a supernatural concept, blow your mind and send its smithereens to outer space, you will adore these bits, ranging from minimalistic musical box tinkle-winkles to little bursts of free-form jazz to primitive electronic drones ('Drifting Patterns'), because we have to respect our gods for whatever they send us, no matter how understandable the «whatever» is. If, however, you like them more for either their me­lodies or those particular ways they trick you into loving the sound of these melodies, the links are totally unnecessary and skippable.

 

Of the actual songs, 'Ruby' is a modern pop classic, easily as good as one of those shiny bright Hollies hits like 'Bus Stop' or 'Sorry Suzanne' (much more poorly produced, though, as if they were still afraid that hi-fi values might somehow compromise their vision), and 'Y2K' combines Kinks-style music-hall with the turn-of-the-century problem in a way that's novel, funny, and smile-inducing. Once they get off the bouncy-boppy rhythms, though, they start losing attention again — 'Strawberryfire', for instance, is only memorable for its obvious allusion, both lyrical and musical, to 'Strawberry Fields Forever', and 'Benefits Of Lying' is so busy turning each separate instrument and each vocal overdub into a cute little pink cloud that eventually, nothing is left but The Big Pink — and this isn't even music from it, if you get my meaning.

 

The album is over in such a ridiculously short while that I don't even have time to position the thumbs — probably, they're stuck somewhere in between high and low, because, even if The Ap­ples cannot produce a bad album almost by definition (unless they start covering Bon Jovi or something like that), this whole thing smells like a quick throwaway, a mini-stylization to keep the fans happy while the band sorts out its image problems. But it did goad them into putting out 'Ruby', fattening classic Brit-pop with at least one more first-rate melody.

 

THE DISCOVERY OF A WORLD INSIDE THE MOONE (2000)

 

1) Go; 2) The Rainbow; 3) Stream Running Over; 4) 20 Cases Suggestive Of...; 5) Look Away; 6) What Happened Then; 7) I Can't Believe; 8) Submarine Dream; 9) Allright / Not Quite; 10) The Bird That You Can't See; 11) Stay Gold; 12) The Afternoon.

 

At this point, it might seem as if the Apples' career were obeying some invisible sine wave: psy­cho album — pop album — psycho album — pop album, and so on. The title of the LP is borro­wed from the title of the first book written by the Rev. John Wilkins (1614-1672, published 1638, when he was 24 years old, the age of Robert Schneider at the release of the Apples' first LP: funny coincidence, isn't it?), and, although it might read as psychedelic to the fresh eye, there is hardly any more trippiness here than in the works of Wilkins himself, a strictly scientific mind according to XVIIth century standards.

 

Instead, The Discovery is the band's party-time album. 'Go' sets the tone, a brawny, carnivales­que mix of happy guitars, trombones, and piccolos, crowned with the happiest of all messages: "You'­re such a pretty pretty little girl / Let's blow this ugly ugly little world". The fat trombone riff adorning the refrain is a marvelous touch, making this one of the band's most memo­rable tu­nes and creating a friendly circus atmosphere. Like, when they say "blow", you don't get visions of T.N.T. or Arnold Schwarzenegger — you get visions of balloon packs.

 

Since a «party» is a more intimate affair than a «teenage symphony» à la Beach Boys or Phil Spector, on Discovery Schneider relies less on overdubs (guitar overdubs, at least; there is quite a bit of instrumental diversity throughout) and more on hooks, with immediately successful results — songs like 'The Rainbow' and 'Stream Running Over' take far less time to unlock my doors of perception than just about anything on the first album, even if, technically, they may be less ad­venturous. But they're solid power pop compositions with happy pop hooks.

 

The psychedelic dreamworld still breaks through every now and then, most blatantly, perhaps, on 'Submarine Dream', where it looks like the band is preoccupied with the idea of making every in­strument sound in waves — guitars, chimes, phasing and wah-wah effects a-plenty, so be careful or you'll feel like your own conscience, too, has been transformed into an FM wave (there's a grumbly distorted guitar line that comes in midway through and makes things easier, though). But for the most part, it is just pop hook after pop hook, interspersed with one or two formulaically gorgeous acoustic ballads for the sake of catching your breath.

 

Very nice album. 'Go' almost that the band has almost begun to find its own face; 'The Bird That You Can't See' shows that it has almost mastered the art of creating the perfect pop structure; and 'The Afternoon' shows that it has almost learned how to sound spiritually touching. The factor of the songs willingly evacuating your mind after the music's over still remains, but I find it intuiti­vely obvious that five years of honing their craft have not gone unrewarded — also, they should be using those brass instruments more often, for some reason, their trombone riffs ('Go', 'Look Away') sound more emotional than their guitar ones. Thumbs up.

 

VELOCITY OF SOUND (2002)

 

1) Please; 2) Rainfall; 3) That's Something I Do; 4) Do You Understand; 5) Where We Meet; 6) Yore Days; 7) Bet­ter Days; 8) I Want; 9) Mystery; 10) Baroque; 11*) She's Telling Lies.

 

Uh-oh. Things do not bode well here. All of a sudden, Schneider has decided to dropkick psyche­delia in favour of lots and lots of fat distorted guitars. Perhaps he just secretly envied the success of the Strokes, but the trouble is, with his rose-coloured vision of the world, the final result of toughening up his sound could only have sounded like Weezer. And, what do you know — it does sound like Weezer. And there is no good reason to completely dismiss Weezer, but who ne­eds two Weezers when we could have one Weezer and one Apples In Stereo instead?

 

The pain really kicks in when it starts dawning on you that some of these songs are well-written pop numbers, and that in terms of melodies and hooks they are easily on the level of World In­side The Moone. 'Baroque', for instance, is a tenderly gorgeous Brit-pop anthem that should be encapsulated and flung backwards in time to be recorded by the Kinks circa 1966-67. How on Earth did they decide that, to reach perfection, it needed to be drenched in a dirty, deafening wall of garage-rock sound? Did they think it gave them extra «artistic credibility», or some other crap like that? Mind you, we are actually talking here about a band that, eight years before, surprised the world by renouncing heavy guitar arrangements as an obligatory way of acquiring intellectual respect. Now, out of the blue, they are bringing them back for seemingly no other purpose than to «fit in», with whom or what — I'm not exactly sure.

 

As on almost every Apples album, lucky findings are heavily interspersed here with passable fil­ler: Sidney's 'Rainfall' is a charming, romantic, fast-moving pop rocker for which they invented a catchy guitar line, while 'Where We Meet' is another uninspired, languid attempt at imitating the spirit of Lennon's 'Rain', but both are given the exact same crackling, grumbling coat, and it is technically easier to just dismiss both before giving them each a fair chance.

 

Five or six listens in­to the record, I can safely say that I also like 'Better Days' (that galloping pace is one of the best things to come out of 1960s Britain, and the more songs are done like that, the better) and the fun chorus to 'That's Something I Do', where Schneider tells us that "your fri­ends hate my guts... 'cause I don't have a pedigree" — nice acting, sir, but you don't really fool us, your pedigree is better than most — and then, perhaps, something else might come up once I de­clog my ears from all the sludge. But for the moment, despite individual hooks, the album deser­ves a strict thumbs down. If, for some reason, you get extra kicks looking at an old Flemish mas­terpiece after it's been heavily sprinkled with sulfuric acid — for instance, under the pretext that it leaves more space for imagination — then Velocity Of Sound is for you. Me, I'd rather wait un­til they eventually release the demo versions.

 

NEW MAGNETIC WONDER (2007)

 

1) Can You Feel It?; 2) Skyway; 3) Mellotron 1; 4) Energy; 5) Same Old Drag; 6) Joanie Don't U Worry; 7) Sunndal Song; 8) Droplet; 9) Play Tough; 10) Sun Is Out; 11) Non-Pythagorean Composition 1; 12) Hello Lola; 13) 7 Stars; 14) Mellotron 2; 15) Sunday Sounds; 16) Open Eyes; 17) Crimson; 18) Pre-Crimson; 19) Vocoder Ba Ba; 20) Radia­tion; 21) Beautiful Machine Parts 1-2; 22) Beautiful Machine Parts 3-4; 23) My Pretend; 24) Non-Pythagorean Com­position 3.

 

After the embarrassing failure of Velocity Of Sound, the Apples promptly disappeared from the studio for about four years, only serving to further confirm how much of an embarrassing failure that album really was. In the interim, Schneider diverted himself by applying his immense mathe­matical skills to the creation of a brand new «Non-Pythagorean» musical scale based on natural logarithms, resulting in a whoppin' eighty seconds of truly revolutionary keyboard tones demon­strated on the album under review (apparently, this should mean that Pythagoras is not in any im­mediate danger); and Hilarie Sydney, the band's second biggest talent that was never given a pro­per chance to become its first, finally decided that to bear the tyranny of a bald man in glasses is a perverted form of self-humiliation, and announced her departure from the band. Fortunately, not before she got to bang more of those drums on New Magnetic Wonder, as well as contribute two of the best songs (or, frankly speaking, one, because 'Sunndal Song' and 'Sunday Sounds' are pret­ty much the exact same tune).

 

More importantly, they had enough time to correct the silly mistake they made on Velocity — ac­cidentally mutating into a generic alternative rock band, even if that was never the intention — and, this time, reinvent their sound in a way that is much more deserving of the Apples In Stereo­typical ideology. Sunny pop and psychedelia are back, in a big way, and now they are more tech­nological and futuristic than ever before. More than ten years, after all, have passed since their humble beginnings, and it is only too reasonable, chronologically, that they no longer salivate and slobber over Revolver, but rather over Electric Light Orchestra's A New World Record: the har­monies, the melodic moves, the big wall of sound, the sweet atmosphere of the Mellotrons and slide guitars, all of these things now treasure the Jeff Lynn legacy rather than John Lennon's.

 

It's a smart and seductive move, and it works. In conjunction with Schneider's songwriting skills that only seem to mature with age, it makes Magnetic Wonder one of the most instantly likeable Apples albums. Of course, nothing is perfect: for egotistic reasons, Schneider still had to fill it up with a set of brief «interludes», ranging from the already mentioned experiments in whuppin' Py­thagoras' ass to little bits of electronically encoded vocalizing and littler bits of dissonant piano playing. The result is a huge massive of 24 tracks, spread across two discs (even though the total running length is only slightly above 50 minutes), masking a group of tall-growing, healthy, but scattered trees under the guise of a dense, overwhelming forest.

 

Once you take out the scissors, though, and circumcise Schneider's big ego by throwing out all the fancy-wancy «artsiness», nothing is to detract you from just enjoying the music. The answer to 'Can You Feel It?' is by all means positive — the band opens the album with a frantic battle summon to "turn up your stereo", and even though the song still lets you feel the unpleasant echo­es of Velocity with its primitive grungy rhythm track, its melodic wah-wah lines and Schneider's insanely supplicating vocal melody more than compensate for it.

 

From then on, songs — as opposed to links — rarely let down. 'Energy' promises that "we're gon­na see sunlight" and, with but one verse repeated over and over again, is like a power pop mantra whose message could be annoying because of its repetitiveness if it weren't so goddamn true, not to mention catchy-friendly. 'Play Tough' finally gets it right about combining romantic atmosphe­re with memorable melodic lines — here is a song that is played, sung, and arranged in such a way that it could have fit in perfectly on the Kinks' Something Else (it even seems to borrow a few melodic moves from Ray Davies, including the descending scale of 'Sunday Afternoon'). Fi­nally, the line "you gotta get back to the place that you know you're gonna see your friends again" ('Radiation') gets my vote for «highest correlation of beauty and underratedness» in the band's en­tire catalog, if you know what I mean.

 

On a funny, but probably coincidental note, it is the band's most explicit Jeff Lynne imitation — 'Beautiful Machine, Parts 3-4' — that leaves me the coldest: injecting a lot of effort into the con­struction of an ELOesque sound wall, over which a distinct, shrill, Lynnesque nasal twang lays the vocals, they forget to add a pinch of feeling, and the song feels as hollow as their early Beat­les tributes, making the «Grande finale» a bit of a letdown after such a good set overall. But, heck, this is simply to remind us one more time, lest we forget, that The Apples In Stereo are not the Beatles, not the Kinks, and not even the new Electric Light Orchestra. Were they all of these things combined, would we have any incentive at all to go back to dusty «irrelevant» oldies? As it is, the pleasure is all mine to say it one more time: «Yes, Robert Schneider is a brilliant guy, in his own way, but if you like The Apples, all the more reason for you to take a true time machine, rather than a first-rate simulation». An honest thumbs up all the same, though, because, after all, real time machines work both ways.

 

TRAVELLERS IN SPACE AND TIME (2010)

 

1) The Code; 2) Dream About The Future; 3) Hey Elevator; 4) Strange Solar System; 5) Dance Floor; 6) C.P.U.; 7) No One In The World; 8) Dignified Dignitary; 9) No Vacation; 10) Told You Once; 11) It's All Right; 12) Next Year At About The Same Time; 13) Floating In Space; 14) Nobody But You; 15) Wings Away; 16) Time Pilot.

 

Three years and a couple of new band members later, the transformation into Xanadu-era ELO is finally complete. If, in the late Seventies, or from a late Seventies perspective, you hated Jeff Lyn­ne for selling out the idea of «Beatles on strings», chances are you will also hate Robert Schne­ider for selling out the idea of Jeff Lynne selling out the idea of «Beatles on strings» — at least, that's the first meta-critical idea that staggers inside the critical head.

 

It is also, I think, a downright wrong idea. I am a stark supporter of ELO through all the ages (ex­cluding the self-castrated Part II era), and even then, have to take a deep breath before introdu­cing anyone to the guilty pleasures of 'Sweet Talking Woman' — because, in those few nervous seconds it takes people to tell this kind of music from the Bay City Rollers, my life and reputation may be in serious danger. With Travellers In Space And Time, there is no such fear. It is clearly a record that has been recorded in our space and time, and the first reaction of people submitted to Schneider's newest experiment will be amusement rather than indignation.

 

Amusement, that is, at how niftily he borrows all the starry-eyed elements of that epoch's «sci-fi pop» — the synthesizer bleeps, the electronically encoded vocals, the sub-moronic disco rhythms, the nagging, repetitive hooks, the irritating naïve sentimentality, the disproportionate bombast — and converts them into a hilariously post-modernistic format, in which a «hook» ceases to be a magnet for your emotions and becomes a ridiculously absolute triumph of empty form.

 

"Before we begin our lessons, I would like to speak to you briefly on what you should know abo­ut how to learn the code", someone tells us a few seconds before we begin hearing the music. No question about it: The Apples have definitely mastered "The Code", whatever it is. Of the twelve or so fully fledged songs on the album, I count zero as «filler». Schneider's pop structures have reached their zenith, not least because he is now concentrating only on the things he does best: rhythmic, relatively fast-moving pop-rockers with complex vocal harmonies. No noise, no non­sense, and no languid folk balladry. Nothing in which soul has to be an essential component.

 

This is not to be taken as a complaint. Singing these here songs with soul could only have spoilt them — could only make people turn away from them as they were liable to turn away from ELO records, because Jeff Lynne, the old bastard, seemed to be trying to convince you that his silly odes to imaginary worlds and idealized females, like, had meaning. What does Schneider say, though? "Elevator, take me straight to your bed, when I look around, it distracts me", he tells us, in one of the album's most memorable killer hooks. Not really a Lynn line, if you ask me, altho­ugh the melody, sure as hell, could have been written by ELO; yet they would neither arrange it nor sing it quite that way.

 

If it looks like I'm talking bullshit, we can always go another way: for instance, say that the gene­ral message of Travellers In Space And Time is that there is no message, or, at least, you can never figure out the message because things keep changing back and forth, sort of like the App­les' own musical predilections. The album's first single, "Dance Floor", sort of implies that ("The dance floor isn't there no more, but my body's still movin' / Tell me, do you know, where are we to go, when our world is so confusing?"), plus, it provides Schneider with a great excuse to shake his big bulk and wave his professorial beard before the mike in the song's video, like a neighbor­hood karaoke bar impersonator of Barry Gibb — this kind of nihilistic musical philosophy is pro­bably the only way to let the man get away with embarrassments like these. (For the record, Eli­jah Baggins is in the video because the band is actually signed to his label, so I guess if he ain't able to make money on them, at least they're a good sport to hang around while goofing off).

 

Altogether, this is a derivative, absurd, and ultra-rationally hyper-irrational album. Highlights in­clude everything — every song has an attractive structure, although my current favourites are probably the ones that seem like they've been stolen directly out of the wastebaskets of Jeff Lyn­ne ('Nobody But You', beginning like a clone of 'Showdown' and then piling up the cellos and sweet background vocals with such faithfulness they almost seem to be inviting a lawsuit) and Roy Wood ('No Vacation', which sounds like some old Wizzard tune I forgot the name of).

 

With Schneider's concept of total relativity afloat all of the time, the whole thing is frustratingly water­proof: what good is there to complain that 'No One In The World' is musically simplistic and lyrically primitive? It states its point, doesn't it? It simply got itself allocated its own stance in space and time. Actually, the album does offer the best two lines of text in the Apples' entire his­tory: "You know you feel blue / When you're out of sync with your CPU", Schneider tells us among a sea of melodic bleeps and beeps (quite Pythagorean in scale, I'd say) on 'CPU', the al­bum's least retro-ish track (or, perhaps, most retro-ish, if you trace its origins to the likes of the Silver Apples and USA and their electronic hooliganry).

 

The only downside is that, as it still happens with the Apples even after all this time, lack of ho­nest emotionality undermines both memorability and attractive force: once the album is over for the fifth time or so, I still do not find myself remembering most songs, or, which is even worse, feeling a strong desire to return to the ones I do remember (like 'Hey Elevator' or the ridiculously outer-space-cheerful 'Told You Once'). Maybe, when all has been said and done and then re-said and re-done again, pot-bellied, bald, and bearded nerd intellectuals should still stick to advanced Linux programming, and leave pop music to young street trash. Or maybe I'm just spewing filthy discriminationalist talk here, but at least don't blame me before you've watched the 'Dance Floor' video on your own. Thumbs up, though, regardless of any worries.

 

ADDENDA:

 

SCIENCE FAIRE (1993-1995; 1996)

 

1) Tidal Wave; 2) Motorcar; 3) Turncoat Indian; 4) Haley; 5) Not The Same; 6) Stop Along The Way; 7) Running In Circles; 8) Hypnotic Suggestion; 9) Touch The Water; 10) Glowworm; 11) To Love The Vibration Of The Bulb; 12) Time For Bed/I Know You'll Do Well; 13) Rocket Pad.

 

Prior to firmly proving their worthiness with Fun Trick Noisemaker, the Apples (not yet In Ste­reo) entered the market with two EPs, Tidal Wave (1993) and Hypnotic Suggestion (1994), nei­ther of which caused any big fuss. Two years later, out of an obsessive impulse to tidy up (I can relate), they re-released both on one CD, adding three more rarities from various sources to com­plete the picture. The result is Science Faire, an informative, but otherwise useless memento of the band's early days that I mention and discuss out of principle rather than admiration.

 

If, like mine, your main problem with Fun Trick Noisemaker was the lack of emotion-brewing hooks behind the thick, juicy, happy «applish» guitar sound of the songs, then on these early EPs the problem is squared: the hooks are just as lacking, but the sound is disappointing as well. Not a single whiff of sweet psychedelia, apart from maybe a small bunch of «woman-tone»-based solos; it's all generic distorted indie rock, grovelling before the D.I.Y. altar — and what has that to do with the Apples' consummate professionalism, the only real reason to listen to them?

 

It is a good thing they only re-recorded two of these songs for the LP, because if all of the songs sounded like tin can demo versions, even the hardcore Apples fan would have to feel cheated. As it is, you can at least concentrate on the modestly interesting process of watching the band grow and mature, from the very lumpy, crude brute-riffs of Tidal Wave to the slightly more exquisite melody shaping and sci-fi touches on Hypnotic Suggestion. The previously unreleased instru­mental 'To Love The Vibration Of The Bulb' is even more interesting — imagine a garage band's first (failed) take on 'King Of The Mountain Hall' or 'Astronomy Domine' with a chunk of 'Misir­lou' inside: I mean, even spirits and aliens must enjoy surfing, mustn't they? And then, finally, one big slab of full-blown psychedelia on the two-part 'Time For Bed', which sounds exactly like one of those lovely multi-part McCartney kiddie-psycho-suites circa 1973, except without even a tenth part of McCartney's musical genius. Never mind, they were still learning.

 

Without trying to concentrate on the spot-the-changes year-by-year game, though, Science Faire is plain old boring. Maybe the EPs needed more input from original bassist Jim McIntyre, whose 'Touch The Water' is the lightest bit of nostalgic psycho-folk on the album, going easier on the sludge than most other songs (McIntyre is also credited for 'Vibration Of The Bulb'; he split be­fore the band started making it big in order to rule over his own, much less famous, Elephant 6 project Von Hemmling). Or, perhaps, not. But at least it is nice to know that The Apples In Stereo have always been «shiny happy people», even if it took them some time to realize that, if you really want to come across as shiny and happy, it doesn't help much if you borrow your guitars from the Meat Puppets. Thumbs down.

 

ELECTRONIC PROJECTS FOR MUSICIANS (1995-2008; 2008)

 

1) Shine (In Your Mind); 2) Thank You Very Much; 3) Onto Something; 4) Man You Gotta Get Up; 5) The Golden Flower; 6) Avril En Mai; 7) Hold On To This Day; 8) The Oasis; 9) On Your Own; 10) Other; 11) So Far Away; 12) The Apples Theme Song; 13) Stephen Stephen; 14) Dreams.

 

This, however, is an entirely different matter. Even more than Science Faire, this is a typical col­lection of «odds and sods» — bonus tracks from Japanese editions, promos, B-sides, soundtracks, etc. — but the major advantage is that all of these songs were recorded already after The Apples In Stereo started to «click» as a real band with a voice of its own, and so, Electronic Projects For Musicians (a name that, out of all cheerful pop outfit leaders, only Schneider could have come up with) is a credible addition to any fan collection.

 

Frankly speaking, though, any fan would do better to take the album apart, throw out the 1/3 or so ridiculous filler, and distribute the rest of the tracks as bonuses to their respective LPs: any collec­tion like this is an insult to the art of coherence. The first two tracks are sufficient proof. 'Shine (In Your Mind)' is a gorgeous psycho-rocker that has a better chance of making you see the stars than almost anything on Fun Trick Noisemaker — polyphonic harmonies, chimes, acid slide guitar, the works. So what can be more awesome than following it up with one minute of than­king their Japanese fans for buying their records, backed by a piano lesson for a three-year old?

 

Additional embarrassments include 'The Apples Theme Song', said to be the introductory song for the band's official website — sufficient pretext, I believe, to justify a strict boycott. At least 'The Monkees Theme' was, like, a real song; this particular jingle is not even funny. And if 'Ste­phen Stephen', an ode to Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, is to be understood as an at­tempt on Schneider's part to one-up Brian Wilson and his 'Johnny Carson'... well, the attempt is botched, to say the least. A big part of the problem is that The Apples In Stereo are sort of... unfunny. The­re are many things to like about Schneider — but not his sense of humor. (That's what you get, probably, for spending the first six years of your life in Cape Town).

 

As for the actual songs, well, for the most part, they agree in quality with the time periods in which they were recorded. Tone Soul Evolution add-ons are trippy-pretty, but forgettable; Dis­co­very Of A World outtakes are a couple of attractive ballads, particularly the freak-folkish ' Oa­sis'; the Velocity Of Sound outtake is predictably overloud and ugly; and 'So Far Away' is an at­tempt at an anthemic psycho-drone that is interesting — some will inarguably find the marriage of its guitar jangle with a cute pastoral phrase played over and over on a recorder (I think?) trance inducing, although I just go for «atmospheric».

 

There may be no great shakes on here, but the same could, with occasional reservations, be said about the Apples' career in general. No problem issuing a thumbs up here — beware, though, lest you actually mistake this for a serious LP of new material or something, particularly since the title is so utterly misleading.

ARAB STRAP

THE WEEK NEVER STARTS ROUND HERE (1996)

 

1) Coming Down; 2) The Clearing; 3) Driving; 4) Gourmet; 5) I Work In A Saloon; 6) Wasting; 7) General Plea To A Girlfriend; 8) The First Big Weekend; 9) Kate Moss; 10) Little Girls; 11) Phone Me Tonight; 12) Blood; 13) Deeper.

 

Nor does anything else, for that matter. Arab Strap, a couple of wasted twenty-three year olds from Falkirk, Scotland (Aidan Moffet on vocals and occasional keyboards, Malcolm Middleton on everything else), certainly did not have any such specific thing as «songwriting» on their minds when, still under the influence of another nasty hangover, I'd warrant, they left the tapes rolling and recorded their unintentionally uninhibited masterpiece (at least, that's more or less what Middleton himself has later said about this record).

 

The sound of Arab Strap is frequently described as «depressing». Because, you know, the songs are melodically dark and minor-keyed and droney and the si... uh, the wordist keeps talking about all the girls that he has fucked in so many ways and how goddamn unhappy it makes him. (See, told you, sex isn't everything). But it is really no fun to just separate all «negative atmosphere» music into «aggressive» and «depressive». Surely the human spirit is much more complicated than that. To me, The Cure and Portishead sound depressive; Nick Drake and Lou Reed don't (or, at least, very rarely do). Put them all in the same category and it's as if you invite people to view them as interchangeable, but are they?

 

Anyway, «depression» in music, to me, is a very conscious state of affairs; it almost necessarily involves a little philosophic activity. Jim Morrison and Robert Smith seem to have decided, in choosing between several possibilities, that the world is a rotten place, and their musical goal is to join spirits with the faithful and convince the doubtful. Arab Strap do not create that atmosphere — they just leave the tapes rolling, and everything else is a stunned, hazey, drugged-out stupor. It's as if someone blackjacked both of them real good, exactly two seconds prior to the recording, or, from a less violent standpoint, mesmerized the two, dissipating a large part of their humanity. One thing's for certain: if either of them walked into their local bar in the kind of state they dis­play here, only the cruellest of bartenders would refrain from calling an ambulance.

 

Melodies: mostly generic «dark folk» chord sequences, played on acoustic guitars (cellos, pianos, etc., sometimes beef up the sound, but not all that often, and always in the same muddy lo-fi man­ner). Very, Very, Very heavy on bass: be careful about setting up your amps, or stuff like 'Coming Down' will induce permanent damage of the eardrums — or, at least, the flooring. (This is not exactly «depressing» — but quite representative of a real tough hangover). Drumming is mostly done by machines, just to show how little a fuck they give about «good sound». But this, at least, is sort of a generic indie thing.

 

Lyrics: ranging from "Don't try and tell me Kate Moss ain't pretty" to "Phone me tomorrow when you're sober" to the totally erotocalyptic "I lick her slit, as it tightens its grip". Overall message is something like: «Trapped between drinking and fucking, trying hard to get the transcendental significance of both of these things, but too much of a stoned brainless moron to succeed».

 

Vocals: No idea if Moffat cannot sing, because he honestly never even tries (with the exception of 'General Plea To A Girlfriend', on which the vocals are atrocious, but there is every reason to believe this is intentional, what with the «song» recorded in worse sonic quality than an early Pa­ramount recording of Blind Blake pissed on by a pack of wild dogs). But this isn't required. On most of the songs, he just tells these stories — getting soaked, meeting a chick, proceeding to the habitual, making some sarcastic or self-deprecating or others-deprecating comments about it, then play on repeat. 'Deeper' goes on for seven and a half minutes that way, and it's just a story about skinny-dipping with a 19-year old (not even underage, boo).

 

So what exactly is the artistic merit of Arab Strap's debut? Well, the themes and tricks are nothing new for 1996, but the combinations, as usual, are somewhat novel, Moffat's wasted Scottish ac­cent by far not the least of them. If this is about depression and misery, after all, then Arab Strap are the first band to approach that theme from a perspective at once trashy and humble: there are no attempts here to make the whole experience grandiose or epic or prophetic, to stroke egos in a «look at us, we've figured out the rotten core of the world better than all those blind men around us» kind of way. But, repeating myself, I don't see the «depression», at least not in the music it­self. I see an adequate transmission of how one feels after having drunk and fucked too much, with a vague realization, perhaps, that there may be other sides to this life but without any clear idea what they might really be. In that way, the album works for me — despite the fact that talk­ing about it as «music» makes about as much sense as talking about Metal Machine Music as such.

 

PHILOPHOBIA (1998)

 

1) Packs Of Three; 2) (Afternoon) Soaps; 3) Here We Go; 4) New Birds; 5) One Day, After School; 6) Islands; 7) The Night Before The Funeral; 8) Not Quite A Yes; 9) Piglet; 10) Afterwards; 11) My Favourite Muse; 12) I Would've Liked Me A Lot; 13) The First Time You're Unfaithful.

 

There is a giant, if stealthy, leap from Arab Strap's first album to the «sophomore» follow-up. What began as a vague, flimsily executed gimmick, unsure of its future, managed to get nursed and nurtured into a full-blown musical philosophy. Which, funny enough, has the same first Greek root as Philophobia — funny, but not entirely a coincidence, because the album title is clearly an intentional indication that Moffat and Middleton demand to be taken seriously.

 

This is a distinct possibility, especially now that they have taken a small step away from the tem­p­tations of the lo-fi approach, enough to make us clearly see that they are certainly making music, not just ambient noise as a backdrop for stoned memories of booze and sex. In fact, Philophobia can pretty well be enjoyed even without knowing that there is anything in there about booze and sex — although that's pretty hard considering how much Moffat's lyrics are always in your face (the first lines of the first song were specially designed to be quoted in every review of the album, and so they were; I'll be different for difference sake and not play along, you'll just have to hear 'Packs Of Three' for yourself).

 

It's not as if the words are consistently poor, they just become predictable after a while, with al­most each song structured along the same formula: «Now I'll be very introspective and romantic and spiritual / And now I'll gross the nice ladies out with some awfully blunt dirty remark / And then I'll get all deep and psychological on you again / Yeah, I watched one too many Bergman films at the local arthouse venue, you have a problem with that?» As thirteen well-polished chap­ters for the Book of Arab Strap of the Old Testament for Hipsters, it's all fine, but getting through all of them in one sitting is a bit like trying to swallow up Leviticus in a similar way.

 

Anyway, the music itself, without the vocals spewing out their niceties and their turds in regular turn, has grown into something idiosyncratic. Now they are taking their cues from the likes of Joy Division, more precisely, stuff like 'Eternal' — slow, lazy, but rhythmic songs with deep, echoey overdubs gnawing away at your subconscious while in the forefront, there is something innocent­ly generic going on, most often, one of their derivative folksy acoustic chord sequences. Only oc­casionally the roles are reversed, as on 'I Would've Liked Me A Lot', a seven-minute dirge driven by a minimal piano melody while the background is occupied with creaky guitars and sound ef­fects. Real moody melody, too.

 

What's more important, neither that melody nor any of the others really feel overlong, because, frankly speaking, the idea of time sort of feels ri­diculous with these guys. Space and time nor­mally merge when you are under the influence of substances, but Arab Strap test that particular idiom when you don't even need substances to get rid of those contexts. They have turned into professional mesmerizers, and this time, not even something like 'General Plea To A Girlfriend' can get around to rip you out of this numbed state — tune after tune just slithers up to you like one more coil of a constrictor snake. Crappy, but creepy.

 

Technically, it is hard to accuse Philophobia of absolute sameness: there is a wide range of ins­truments tested out, from brass to organs to cellos, there is even a girl vocalist guest starring on 'Afterwards' (Adele Bethel, soon-to-be of Sons And Daughters, another indie act from the Glas­gow scene), but if the overall sound has proved its independence and individuality, the songs cer­tainly have not and do not deserve to be discussed on their own. The important question is: does the album invoke real «philophobia», or is it a cure for one? Or is it, perhaps, supposed to reflect the troubled feelings of our confused generation that keeps looking for love but only finds cheap sex instead? (Probably not, or else the album would have gone platinum faster than one could pronounce the word "philophobia"). Until the answers are found, I'd rather not even rate this sort of music. It simply refuses to react with my thumbs.

 

MAD FOR SADNESS (1999)

 

1) Intro/My Favourite Muse; 2) Packs Of Three; 3) New Birds; 4) Toy Fights; 5) Here We Go; 6) Phone Me Tomor­row; 7) Girls Of Summer; 8) Piglet; 9) Blood; 10) Afterwards.

 

«Arab Strap Live» is somewhat of an oxymoron; having made a point of always sounding dead in the studio, it is a priori unclear what sort of nice change a transfer to the live setting could make. Nor does it seem like a good sign when you look upon the track listing — with six songs out of ten reprising freshly released material from Philophobia with more or less the same time length for each of the numbers (the actual show was recorded September 21st, 1998, at the Queen Eliza­beth Hall in London).

 

Confusingly, Mad For Sadness is Arab Strap's best album from the «formative» period. Which is not to say it is generally accessible or shows you any of the band's sides you are not already fa­miliar with. But if a magician were given a copy of Philophobia and told, «Do whatever is in your power to improve upon the convincing force and coolness factor of this stuff without ma­king it sound like somebody else», Mad For Sadness would be the eventual result, no doubt.

 

First, their live sound is recorded better than its studio equivalent. Maybe it's the added bonus of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, but somehow the instruments start reclaiming territory that, in the stu­dio, used to be dominated exclusively by Moffat's incessant grumbling. From the very start, check out Middleton's guitar work on 'My Favourite Muse'. The instrument plays, resonates, rings, echoes, generates mood and tension, whereas in the studio all that really got through was the god­damn bass. Sure, it's not a Jimmy Page-type landscape or even The Edge-style we're talking here, but not before taking a good sniff of this record would you believe that these guys have any sort of use for the guitar other than providing monotonous old tradition-grounded accompaniment.

 

Second, out of no other feeling, I believe, than pity for the audiences they vary the volume levels a bit. 'New Birds', as it turns out, had a jarring grunge-like section on the original release as well, but I didn't even remember this when the transition hit me rock-hard on Sadness — because they did hit it harder, and, again, where the original was mostly just deafening bass and power chords, here there is an extra psychedelic guitar melody played in the background (not sure how they manage two guitars, but a fellow named Gary Miller is credited as responsible for bass and David Gow for drums). All of a sudden... they rock! Oddly attractive.

 

This sudden embracing of dynamics reaches its peak with the eight-minute reworking of an old EP-only track, 'Girls Of Summer', which starts out as a morose stoner jam, but then suddenly gets transformed into a Cure-style dance-of-death thing, going from ringing echoey loops to grunge and back, then eventually picking up speed and metamorphosing into an almost techno style — and Moffat's «singing» lasts only for the first two minutes.

 

In addition, the setlist is about as strong as it could ever be (concentrating on stuff like 'Here We Go', whose lonely piano drip-drip-drips at the end are a classic Arab Strap-style hook), Adele Be­thel reprises her guest vocal spot on 'Afterwards', and the live drumming is a real heart-warmer after the intellectually annoying drum machines of the studio recordings (although even during the live show they occasionally turn on the tapes). All of this adds up to the first unequivocal thumbs up in this band's history — not a big big deal, but if they really have transcended generic indie values in this setting, and I think they have, a bigger one than most of us would think.

 

ELEPHANT SHOE (1999)

 

1) Cherubs; 2) One Four Seven One; 3) Pyjamas; 4) Autumnal; 5) Leave The Day Free; 6) Direction Of Strong Man; 7) Tanned; 8) Aries The Ram; 9) The Drinking Eye; 10) Pro-(Your) Life; 11) Hello Daylight.

 

This is where the formula starts to get seriously annoying; not coincidentally, Elephant Shoe is occasionally hailed as Arab Strap's masterpiece, because one man's serious inflammation of all points of annoyance is another man's acute stimulation of all points of exuberance. People from all sorts of circles were more than happy to rave about the record simply because, from an ideo­logical point, it was such an attractive hipster's paradise.

 

In other words, if your standard model of behaviour involves permanently getting sloshed at the local pub (nightclub / bar / gay bar / subway station, depending on areal circumstances), coming home no earlier than 4 a.m., conducting all other-sex relationships from a purely physiological point of view (fuck love anyway, since love demands kindness and to be kind is uncool), and li­miting your human functions to poorly articulated blabber that tries to mold together some sort of «soul» out of sheer animal instinct — then Elephant Shoe is the next chapter in your personal Bible. Different from the previous one only in that there is just a wee bit less brutal sexual image­ry and just a wee bit more vague thoughts about the future (e. g. 'Autumnal', on which Moffat's /anti-/hero even considers having children — "we've already named the seeds I'll be sowing" — but then again no, what with 'Pro-(Your) Life' certifying that "the time's not right" and that "you just have to accept mistakes happen". Which is all too well: I shudder to think of the poor fate that would befall the anti-hero's children... not that it ain't happening in real life all too often).

 

I cannot state that this attitude is not conveyed well enough. It must be, since it has captivated so many people who can relate to it, or, rather, who wish they could relate to it. But it is not convey­ed well enough to convert me the way, for instance, a 'My Sweet Lord' is able to awaken my in­ner churchgoer (sure he goes back to sleep right after the song is over, but while it's on, it's a doggone wonderful feeling all the same). And from this I assume that either I really, really, really passionately hate this attitude with a vengy-vengeance — or that Elephant Shoe's side effect of boredom is simply too overwhelming to help that other little guy come awake.

 

Because, back in the studio again, Moffat and Middleton are back to their old tricks. Five, six, seven-minute long songs basically run on one, at best two, looped musical ideas with not even a single atmospheric build-up in sight. And they aren't even beautiful musical ideas, like, for in­stance, the co­da to the Beatles' 'I Want You' whose chords puncture my depression centers all the time. They're... okay musical ideas. Ambient, dreamy, but not genius. Besides, I think that even the Beatles, had they suddenly come up with the bizarre idea of recording a whole LP of 'I Want You'-like songs, would not manage to sustain anybody's interest for one whole hour.

 

The best I can say about Elephant Shoe is it ain't too frustrating if you just take it as background accompaniment. Quiet, relaxing, inobtrusive sonic stuff that sets a good mood for killing some time while surfing on the Internet or playing Minesweeper or even working. And that's also what helps you to miss out on all of its stoned cultural philosophy — and consider all those Pitchfork and AMG reviews as manifestations of pretentious idiocy — and, eventually, contribute towards building a bright new world for all tomorrow's children. Delighted to give this a thumbs down.

 

THE RED THREAD (2001)

 

1) Amor Veneris; 2) Last Orders; 3) Scenery; 4) The Devil-Tips; 5) The Long Sea; 6) Love Detective; 7) Infrared; 8) Screaming In The Trees; 9) Haunt Me; 10) Turbulence.

 

It is always inspiring to find a juicy bit of somebody else's phrasing to pick and tear at the start of a critical review, and damn corporate ethics to hell. So this time I will unscrupulously pick on an old fellow reviewer, who once praised The Red Thread as follows: «...only those with working hearts will appreciate or understand this awesome mix of emotion, disenchantment, and melody».

 

Despite all the respect that said reviewer usually commands on my part, my guess here is that, perhaps, a working heart is a necessary but not sufficient condition to appreciate or understand this... whatever he said, anyway. At least, certainly not sufficient if you view The Red Thread in context rather than on its own. On its own, Arab Strap's usual unusualness may paralyze you the way it must have paralyzed latecomers in 2001; in context, it's just more of the same old same old from Scotland's famous propagators of the dazed and confused.

 

Except it's even worse than the already overrated Elephant Shoe. If you do not approach it as purely background muzak — and why should you? if you want background muzak, just throw on some Tangerine Dream — it is simply excruciatingly long. Each song, on the average, occupies around five or six minutes of sonic space so as to implant exactly one (1) musical idea (usually, not a very awesome one) in your brain.

 

'Screaming In The Trees', for instance, opens with a mo­derately complex guitar phrase à la Lou Reed that must have taken approximately as much time to write as it took to strum it out for the first time. That is, about seven seconds. After that, nothing else happens except for a few murky «lost-in-the-woods» keyboard whooshes and hushes... for six minutes. Hypnotic? Mesmerizing? Spellbinding? My goodness, and to think that in my innocent teenage days I used to think of 'The End' as «boring». Jim Morrison's ramblings, next to this exercise in bland minimalism, have all the strength of a titanic Wagner finale.

 

Perhaps if each and every song on here were cut in half (and the really long ones cropped by one third), I would be more sympathetic. Middleton's musical creativity is never stunning, but it is ra­rely altogether worthless. 'Turbulence', for the first couple of minutes, is convincingly moody — an odd splicing of a near-techno rhythm with dark, misanthropic bass and a quirky use of scratch instead of a real guitar melody. Any working heart could appreciate that. But for eight minutes? With nothing but another batch of speeding ghost keyboard overdubs for extra entertainment? Do they really think that only that sort of length makes the whole thing artistic? Is it supposed to help those who long to prolong a special sort of trance? If it is supposed to be trance-inducing, why do they bother to come up with lyrics in the first place?..

 

Speaking of lyrics, as usual, Moffat comes up with another ingenious bunch of drink-fueled ima­gery, but, just like the music, the words, too, are getting old. The poet cuts down a bit on crude­ness and sheer shock value, which is laudable, but this does not mean that the Holy Duality of Booze and Sex is in danger of being replaced by any other central themes. 'Love Detective' is the one people quote the most, only because it sort of tells an almost explicit story about rummaging through your loved one's diaries and learning about her secret affairs. But, uh, so what? The song itself is as mind-numbing as everything else on here.

 

In short, The Red Thread is simply the epitome of everything that can go wrong with a mood-oriented album even when it's run by a couple of not-untalented musicians. As much as I am dis­gusted by Arab Strap's general philosophy, I concede that it can be done skilfully, and has been done by them skilfully both before and after this record. This, however, I cannot even accept as background music; with each and every good idea on the record degenerating into crap less than midway through, it's easily the firmest thumbs down I could ever show these guys.

 

MONDAY AT THE HUG & PINT (2003)

 

1) The Shy Retirer; 2) Meanwhile, At The Bar, A Drunkard Muses; 3) Fucking Little Bastards; 4) Peep-Peep; 5) Flirt; 6) Who Named The Days; 7) Loch Leven Intro; 8) Loch Leven; 9) Glue; 10) Act Of War; 11) Serenade; 12) The We­ek Never Starts Around Here; 13) Pica Luna.

 

If there is one album from Arab Strap that I could see myself willingly returning to in the future, it is Mad For Sadness. If there is one album from Arab Strap that I could see myself unwillingly returning to in the future — for instance, being held at gunpoint by one of the band's homicidal fans — it will be Monday At The Hug & Pint. Not because I could ever see it as a potential masterpiece; it just sort of sets the wheels in motion where most of their other records clog them into eternal peace.

 

A couple years off and a couple side solo projects later, as the static duo comes back together, there is a slight change in style and attitude that makes the next batch of results easier to bear and a bit more captivating. Nothing revolutionary, of course, but it is a bit ironic that the album title, so perfectly suitable to describe all of their early years, feels a bit obsolete when it is wrapping up their new material. Because there is a very vague sense of growing up here, of moving beyond the primitive barstool philosophy and the monotonous musical exploration of one single emotional state. Not «diversity» as such, you understand, but a bit of branching out.

 

Almost everybody's favourite from the record is 'The Shy Retirer', and I agree: it is as perfect an opener for an Arab Strap record as could ever be hoped for, setting a light, modestly active, and very musical tone for the entire record. The pseudo-techno dance rhythm is not the main point (in the past, Arab Strap had many times proved that they could be dead boring at any chosen tempo); the main point is the handsome chamber pop arrangement, with guitar and strings locked onto each other in an almost soaring (for Arab Strap's standards, that is) embrace — and it does not hurt that the lyrics, for once, drop all the shock value and simply concentrate on the feelings — and there is, what, optimism in the air?

 

No, it is not as if Moffat and Middleton, all of a sudden, decided to let go of the darkness: it rears its wings already on the third track, blatantly called 'Fucking Little Bastards' and jarring the en­vironment with distortion, feedback, and fragile violins lost in a white noise tsunami. But there is more balance between dark and light here than ever before, and that may indicate that they are finally on their way to renounce caveman teenage excess in favour of something more reaso­nable... for instance, a tacit recognition of the fact that life as such is not reducible to side effects of one's ingrained booze and sex program?

 

It is for these little rays of light that some hardcore fans anathemized the album and ran back to their old scratched copies of The Red Thread. In the process, they missed the obvious (to me, at least) fact that Moffat and Middleton have become more interested in writing music. 'Flirt', for instance, whose main acoustic riff + spooky slide overtones is a terrific combination. The gor­geous violin solo on 'Who Named The Days'. A sudden decision to embrace their Scottish legacy with the bagpipe intro to 'Loch Leven'. The oddly Dylan-esque flavour of 'The Week Never Starts Around Here'. There is plenty to enjoy on here in a sober mood — unfortunately, most people had already acquired a Pavlov reflex that associates the first note on an Arab Strap album with the uncorking of a bottle of brandy. Not that it's anybody's fault but Arab Strap's own, of course.

 

And not that Monday At The Hug & Pint is all that great an album, either: the second half in particular revolves almost entirely around slow-tempo tunes heavily dominated by pretty, but ve­ry similar violin patterns. 'Who Named The Days' seems particularly inspired to me, but the rest gets fairly lost against its superiority and, once again, eventually settles into background muzak. Still, it has its share of surprises, which is particularly surprising for such a totally surpriseless band as Arab Strap used to be; and the lyrics, for once, are well worth studying ("sex without love is a good ride worth trying, but love without sex is second only to dying" should probably make it into history books). Thumbs up. Honest.

 

THE LAST ROMANCE (2005)

 

1) Stink; 2) (If There's) No Hope For Us; 3) Chat In Amsterdam, Winter 2003; 4) Don't Ask Me To Dance; 5) Con­fessions Of A Big Brother; 6) Come Round And Love Me; 7) Speed-Date; 8) Dream Sequence; 9) Fine Tuning; 10) There Is No Ending; 11*) El Paso Song; 12*) Go Back To The Sea.

 

Arab Strap may not have been the best band in the world, or even the best band in Scotland, but the general outlook of their output is bizarre enough to guarantee them a free ride on the musical history train all by itself. For instance, how does one really explain the fact that it took them ten years of essentially re-writing the same old dirge in order to get around to an album significantly different from the rest — and then disband, as if that were their ultimate goal, and now that the goal has been achieved, we can all happily go home?

 

No drum machines — at all. Plenty of fast, driving tempos to break up the funeral procession style every time it threatens to annul the differences between songs. Aidan Moffat's occasional at­tempts to modulate his voice into a sonic flow that, with a bit of a stretch, could be called «sin­ging» (and generally on-key at that). Even some sort of moderately optimistic vibe, most clearly evident on the fanfare-driven album closer 'There Is No Ending'. And yet, at the same time, the original spirit of Arab Strap is fully preserved: any accusations of «falling in with the alt-rock crowd» would be completely ridiculous, because the trademarks — mantra-folk acoustic riffs, somber violin counter-melodies, dark lyrical topics revolving around alcohol intake and anima­listic copula­tion, etc. — are all there.

 

More importantly, after a few listens, the album does come across as the final stage of a journey through various stages of one's self-consciousness. As boring as it may be for some of the young 'uns, a thing called responsibility enters the picture: responsibility both from a musical point of view, as the album is made more generally accessible without sacrificing artistic integrity, and a general-artistic point of view as well. To put it simply, the point of The Last Romance is to show that Moffat and Middleton nowadays do give a fuck about what's going on, contrary to all those early years when they not only didn't, but considered it cool to let all their fans love them exactly for the fact that they didn't.

 

Hence, 'Confessions Of A Big Brother', which, in a way, may be the duo's masterpiece: a cleanly, near-gorgeously recorded acoustic ballad, with Moffat's lines occasionally echoed by a «baroque» cello part — beginning with the line "I used to be so proud of thinking I was such a liar", but en­ding with the realization that "I don't want to spoil your fun, but you don't have to hurt someone". And somehow it makes you feel that, perhaps, from time to time, there does arise a need to spurt out a morally positive truism instead of a morally neutral, or shock-value morally negative, geni­us-quality innovative string of words.

 

'Dream Sequence', despite the need to incorporate some obligatory dirty imagery (even pure ro­mantic love for these guys is undetachable from golden showers), is essentially a sentimental ly­rical anthem, whose main piano melody line is stately rather than sad, uplifting rather than de­pressing. On 'Fine Tuning', another pleasant acoustic ballad, Moffat openly admits that "You're useless at drinking, but these days I've been thinking I doubt we're going to need it" — abstinence detected! And then, as the guitars, organs, and mighty brass of 'There Is No Ending' weave out a near-symphonic melody, each few bars of which descend into a satisfyingly conclusive mood, what we hear is: "Not everything must end, not every romance must descend, not every lover's pact decays, not every sad mistake replays". Now that's even more optimistic than what the late George Harrison used to tell us about all the things that must pass, and the late George Harrison, in the long run, was a fairly optimistic kind of fellow.

 

Whether it is Arab Strap's friendship with Mogwai (whose keyboard player Barry Burns actually guests on the album), or just the basic process of growing up that is responsible for this change of attitude is nowhere near as important as the fact that The Last Romance does work terribly well as a swan song, and that even some of the band's most unbearable albums, conceptually, gain from its existence — with this last thread, they are all joined together in one meaningful whole. But do not take this as an advice to begin your acquaintance with these guys with this record: no matter how accessible it is, it really only makes sense within the overall context. In order to like The Last Romance, I had first to hate The Red Thread.

 

Of course, if you happen to like The Red Thread, you will have to wait your turn to grow up to like The Last Romance — otherwise, it will be too sissy-pissy for your hipster tastes. But as for me, I happily award a thumbs up both to the record, and, with it, to the entire career of these two awful Scots. And, for the record, since their parting ways, both have had solo careers, of which Malcolm Middleton's seems not only to have been the more productive, but also the more worthy in general: his solo albums pick up quite well from the «freshly grown-up» stage of The Last Ro­mance and proceed from there — highly recommended, although I have no idea if these here reviews will ever get around to them.

ARCH ENEMY

BLACK EARTH (1996)

 

1) Bury Me An Angel; 2) Dark Insanity; 3) Eureka; 4) Idolatress; 5) Cosmic Retribution; 6) Demoniality; 7) Trans­migration Macabre; 8) Time Capsule; 9) Fields Of Desolation.

 

Death is really quite a brawny fellow — it likes to kick ass all over the place. This is the basic message of Arch Enemy, the AC/DC of death metal, Sweden's pride and joy. Slow, moody, «art­sy», creepy-crawly atmospheric suites are not for these guys. Brothers Michael and Christopher Amott, bass player Johan Liiva, and drummer Daniel Erlandsson are here to punch your eardrums into oblivion and race your heart to total exhaustion, if you are ready to accept their faith.

 

However, despite the fact that most of the players already came with established pedigrees (Mi­chael Amott, in particular, played with «goregrind» pioneers Carcass), so that Arch Enemy was dubbed a «supergroup» upon formation, this debut album is not particularly impressive. (Sure it got rave reviews in metal-oriented press, but the day I start rating metal albums by the standards of dedicated metal fans is the day I stop rating any non-metal albums by any standards). It is not laughable, and that is already a compliment; but this here section is definitely not granted to Arch Enemy because of Black Earth.

 

Basically, this is rather standard-fare «melodic» death metal — with rather rotten melodies, for that matter. Lots of fast demonic riff-driven rockers, but the riffs themselves are only so-so, and even when they are slightly over so-so, drummer Daniel Erlandsson hits his skins so hard that the twin guitar attack is almost completely muffled. Fast, loud, aggressive, monotonous, and, for the most part, utterly unmemorable. It does not help matters much that one (1) of the songs has a brief genre-allowed acoustic interlude ('Cosmic Retribution'), and that two (2) of the tracks repre­sent brief instrumental overludes (one brutal-metallic and one other acoustic). None of these are particularly interesting either.

 

All the vocals are handled exclusively by bassist Johan Liiva, and this is both good and bad. Bad, because his «growling» is not very distinctive: he can handle it, but nothing more. Good, because his weak growls tend to get lost among all the rucus, without distracting the listener from the mu­sic — provided the listener does not want to be distracted. Basically, I just treat Liiva's growling as a slightly annoying background noise that can be overlooked. A lamentable side effect.

 

Still, what cannot be overlooked is the fact Black Earth is just a seriously professional, yet utterly generic record. It would take some time for Arch Enemy to find their own voice. But we are not quite there yet; thumbs down for the moment. (PS: The re-issue version has a bunch of bonus tracks, including a cover of Iron Maiden's 'Aces High' — nice gesture, respectable homage, but nothing particularly eyebrow-raising either).

 

STIGMATA (1998)

 

1) Beast Of Man; 2) Stigmata; 3) Sinister Mephisto; 4) Dark Of The Sun; 5) Let The Killing Begin; 6) Black Earth; 7) Tears Of The Dead; 8) Vox Stellarum; 9) Bridge Of Destiny.

 

Everyone agrees that the band's sophomore effort, Stigmata, essentially sounds the same as the debut. From there, people fall into two camps — those who think it sounds better, and those that think the opposite. I do not think the opposite. In fact, strange as it may seem, I liked it in most of the same «places» in which I actively disliked Black Earth.

 

I may be mistaken, but if you play the openers ('Bury Me An Angel' and 'Beast Of Man', respec­tively) back to back, it seems that the tag «melodic death metal» clings much firmer to the latter. Black Earth had too much generic hardcore/thrash influence in it: all low notes and careless bru­tality. 'Beast Of Man' is far more interesting, alternating speedy thrash runs with genuinely melo­dic lines, with a clever mix that allows the «melodic» lead guitar and the thrash riffs to comple­ment each other rather than mesh into one turgid mess.

 

The same is true of at least three or four other monster rockers on the album. The production throughout is much clearer, showing that the Sabbath/Metallica influences were not wasted, after all (particularly on 'Sinister Mephisto' and the title track). Instead of generic acoustic interludes, we now get a stranger, more curious trick of inserting brief «not-belonging» bits of a totally dif­ferent melody in between the «regular» bars — e. g. on 'Let The Killing Begin', whose second part, as a result, acquires a «progressive» sheen, to good effect. And the brief instrumental links themselves are either pleasantly symphonic in scope (the title track) or arena-rockish in a fairly tasteful manner ('Vox Stellarum').

 

Unlike Black Earth, Stigmata is worth additional listens — behind the predictably and expec­tedly monotonous approach, there is some very strong songwriting here, as no single song moves through fewer than three or four different alternating sections, and the Amott brothers show them­selves well worthy of their twin guitar teachers from Iron Maiden. And, on a final note, 'Bridge Of Destiny' ends with a moody «epic» instrumental section that will be greeted heartily by any classic rock fan, no matter what his attitude towards death metal might be.

 

The weak point is still the vocalist, but, frankly, I do not even hear Liiva's voice all that much: it's just some disconcerting grumble somewhere in the back part of the speaker, and it doesn't even manage to disconcert all that much — so I'd love to say something like, «this would have worked out so much better as a completely instrumental album», but the fact is that my ears themselves already perceive it as a completely instrumental album. Also, for the record, most of the drum parts here were recorded not by the band's regular player, Daniel Erlandsson, but by session guy Peter Wildoer (don't ask why); and new member Martin Bengtsson relieves Liiva from his bass playing duties so that he can now concentrate on the singing (money wasted on the wind, if you ask me). Also, it's a modest thumbs up — modest, because we're not quite there yet.

 

BURNING BRIDGES (1999)

 

1) The Immortal; 2) Dead Inside; 3) Pilgrim; 4) Silverwing; 5) Demonic Science; 6) Seed Of Hate; 7) Angelclaw; 8) Burning Bridges; 9) Diva Satanica; 10) Hydra.

 

The final album with Liiva on vocals – surprisingly, this is the turning point where Arch Enemy becomes an unstoppable machine for the production of some of the catchiest musical brutality ever offered to human ears. Substance-wise, there is no big difference from Stigmata; the differ­ence is in the details — the riffs become more complex, more interesting, and there's, like, two or three of them within the average song on Burning Bridges.

 

Since I am quite far removed from a metalhead, it took me several listens to «get» the greatness of this stuff. You still have to ignore the vocals (Liiva can hardly even «growl» on here at all; most of the time, the «singing» just degenerates into tuneless hardcore screeching), and get used to the fact that these guys are not going to lead you astray by arranging a meeting with the spirits of Art, Depth, and Intellectual Relevance. But in the end, most of these tunes are artsy, deep, and even «intellectually relevant» in their own crazy way.

 

The best thing about Bridges is the absolute lack of slack. Seven out of eight songs originally in­cluded on the album push forward at either simply fast, or ultra-fast tempos; only the title track ends the record on a «monstruously slow» note, with a long «operatic» coda that is its only direct nod to classical influences — the album ends on nothing less than a piano-and-Mellotron (!) dri­ven passage which is, I guess, supposed to hint at the existence (somewhere really far away) of Paradise, in addition to the all-pervading Hell. (For the record, the keyboards are played by guest musician Per Wiberg, who would go on to play with the band on their next albums, as well as spend six years with Opeth as full-time member).

 

But, like I said, that is a tiny exception. As for the loud, fast, riff-heavy rockers, it is useless to discuss them individually. After a while, the individuality of the tracks does begin to step out of the general din, and I would say that the best riffs are on 'Seed Of Hate' (I like the Entwistl-ian «gurgling» descending bass/guitar runs competing with the lead riff), 'The Immortal' (still plenty of thrash influence, but even the trash riffs are easily discernible note-for-note here), and 'Silver­wing' (that opening riff must have been ripped off some classical piece) — and you could say that these are the worst riffs, and pick 'Pilgrim' or 'Angelclaw' instead, and I wouldn't give a damn.

 

Simply put, it's a kick-ass metalfest all the way, and that's the way it should be — if you are intent on maintaining one very limited style over forty minutes, you might as well grind it up to the max; and I am always ready to take off my hat before anyone who is able to grind it up to the max, regardless of mood, attitude, or genre. From that point of view, Burning Bridges is a flaw­less masterpiece of «melodic death-thrash-metal». From other points of view, it may be samey, boring, and lyrically / substantially idiotic. But, as it just happens, these are not included in my thumbs up.

 

BURNING JAPAN LIVE (2000)

 

1) The Immortal; 2) Dark Insanity; 3) Dead Inside; 4) Diva Satanica; 5) Pilgrim; 6) Silverwing; 7) Beast Of Man; 8) Bass Intro/Tears Of The Dead; 9) Bridge Of Destiny; 10) Transmigration Macabre; 11) Angelclaw.

 

It's a lucky thing I have to review this on New Year's Eve — too many things to wrap up, too little energy to spend on music writing, and here comes a live album that is absolutely impossible to write about in long, scrutinizing detail anyway.

 

So, briefly and up to the point. These recordings were made in October/November 1999, during se­veral shows in Tokyo. The line-up is the same as on Burning Bridges, meaning that this is the officially last album to feature Liiva as vocalist. The setlist is predictably heavily tilted towards Burning Bridges, with Stigmata only represented by three songs and Black Earth by two. The performances are practically indistinguishable from the studio originals. And the audience is ab­solutely in­audible, except in between tracks. Happy New Year!

 

PS. Liiva's vocals are actually far more «shiver-inducing» during his stage announcements than when he is singing. So shiver-inducing, in fact, that I am embarrassed to play this album in front of any person of any level of intelligence without first submitting the person in question to a long lecture about artistic conventionalities, traditions, customs, and rituals. Want to increase your to­lerance levels? Try death metal. Beats modern art and bestiality all to hell.

 

PPS. No, but seriously, it is a good album, if only you take your expectations off the «live» regis­ter (it is admirable that they can play with such speed and complexity on stage, but, presumably, much of their studio output was recorded «live in the studio» as well, so no outstanding feats of originality here). Excellent production — certainly better than on Black Earth, which is why 'Dark Insanity' is more of a success here than it was over there — and a strong setlist. And yet, completely unnecessary for non-fans.

 

WAGES OF SIN (2001)

 

1) Enemy Within; 2) Burning Angel; 3) Heart Of Darkness; 4) Ravenous; 5) Savage Messiah; 6) Dead Bury Their Dead; 7) Web Of Lies; 8) The First Deadly Sin; 9) Behind The Smile; 10) Snow Bound; 11) Shadows And Dust.

 

«Commercial death metal» may sound like an odd oxymoron, but if there ever was such a thing in the first place, Wages Of Sin would be the perfect candidate for the top spot. Apparently, the band changed their standard tuning for the record, switching to the key of C, and this (or some­thing else; I'm no musicologist) resulted in a slightly less grueling, perhaps even «poppier» sound — the darkness and brutality remains, but the insane aggression is somewhat tamed; and the lead guitar lines acquire a more classically-influenced sheen, as if someone were secretly throwing in transcriptions of XIXth century symphonic phrasing, from time to time. (A usual thing for «po­wer metal», but one which true death-grinders tend to avoid, lest they be perceived as way too in­congru­ously happy, for their own good).

 

But obviously, the most «commercial» trick they have played on us all here is replacing Johan Liiva with a new female vocalist — the «blonde bombshell of metal», Angela Nathalie Gossow. Now I have no idea how widespread death metal growling is among women these days, once the role model has been set up, but fact is, in 2001 the Cookie Monster could hardly boast any signi­ficant amount of female offspring. Gossow might not have been there first, but she was clearly the best, and this could not help but bump up general interest in the band.

 

Without a doubt, Gossow is fabulous; the only argument that fans of Liiva might have against her is that she has the audacity of pulling the listener's attention too far away from the actual music onto herself, whereas Liiva never did. So she clearly has much more of an ego, and there is no­thing wrong with that: the lady deserves all that attention. Unlike Liiva, she actually manages to tune her growling, and come the closest to «singing» in that voice that I have ever heard from any other growler. Obviously, the singing range is limited by definition by those registers, but it still makes her sound like a «natural» — usually, the effect from «death vocals» is simply comical; Gossow sounds like she was born that way, and I actually had to calm myself down by locating a couple interviews with the dame in which she speaks with her normal voice, just to make certain that Rosemary's Baby truly is a piece of fiction.

 

What about the songs, then? This is where one may find the heart of discontent. They are general­ly not as impressive or memorable as the ones on Burning Bridges. The only riff that stayed home with me after three listens was 'Dead Bury Their Dead', due to an odd resemblance to the main theme of 'The 39 Lashes' from Jesus Christ Superstar (! — yes, stranger things have hap­pened). The syncopated passages on 'Ravenous' were also impressive, but the main melody there seems to be merely a variation on the earlier 'Diva Satanica'. And there is a terrific «growling» guitar lick woven into the texture of 'Behind The Smile', lifted from the intro to Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man', but that's hardly enough to raise the song to five-star status.

 

One could also mention some minor details — the album opens with an icy, echoey piano intro, the only moment of relative tenderness, but still ominous from the very first second; 'Savage Mes­siah' is the only song to feature some sort of a «build-up», steadily growing from a menacing guitar-and-harmonica intro to the usual all-out fury; and 'Snow Bound' is a brief power-metal style instru­mental. The rest is Jackhammer Incarnate. Thumbs up: even if individual songs may be disappointing, Gossow's presence glues them all together in one unforgettable Satanic feast. Not for the faint of heart, though — and do not try this at home, unless you intend to make Twit­ter your only means of communication to the end of your days.

 

ANTHEMS OF REBELLION (2003)

 

1) Tear Down The Walls; 2) Silent Wars; 3) We Will Rise; 4) Dead Eyes See No Future; 5) Instinct; 6) Leader Of The Rats; 7) Exist To Exit; 8) Marching On A Dead End Road; 9) Despicable Heroes; 10) End Of The Line; 11) Dehumanization; 12) Anthems; 13) Saints And Sinners.

 

At this point, Arch Enemy's albums become more or less interchangeable. With Gossow perfectly filling up the last gap in the puzzle, the formula was completed, and the Amott brothers adopted the «AC/DC mentality». As long as their fingers could keep up the speed, their brains – supply a steady stream of new riffs, and the blonde lady's larynx – serve as Lucifer's personal megaphone, why change anything? Just keep the fan happy.

 

Thus, whether a particular post-Wages Of Sin record sounds good or bad essentially depends on how many memorable riffs it yields — a fairly old story, that one — unless one just digs their established gro­ove all by itself, in which case every record since Wages Of Sin is an inevitable must-hear. I am impressed by the groove — the guitarists and the devil-girl mesh together in a generic, but still somewhat unique manner — yet, of course, I'd also like me a memorable riff or two, or else I'd rather just keep relistening to the same Back In Black.

 

Fortunately, Anthems Of Rebellion has just enough of these to keep the customer satisfied. Al­though the title is constructed as the same kind of noun phrase as Wages Of Sin, it does a good job of reminding us that these guys are not so much your run-of-the-mill scary-satanists as they are (ohmygod whodathunkthat) Anti-Establishment and Anti-Conformism, and, other than the album title, they have a fairly good song here to remind us of it — 'We Will Rise' is certainly an anthem, and of the good kind at that, preferring to kick ass rather than strew pathos.

 

It does not hurt that the way Angela growls out "we will rise" brings on images of zombies rising from gra­ves – even if, formally, the lyrics simply deal with rebelling against stereotypes. It does not hurt, either, that the trill-based anthemic melody of the chorus alternates well with the lean metallic riffage of the verses and an excellent buildup on the solos. It is, in fact, such a good song I could almost forget that I never take «growling numbers» seriously — besides, it is hard to ima­gine it sung with «clean» vocals.

 

Other than that, cool riffs may be found in the intro to 'Dead Eyes See No Future', in the chorus to 'Instinct', and on the bridge of 'Leader Of The Rats'. (None of these songs seems to be a complete masterpiece, though). 'Despicable Heroes' opens with an earth-shaking roar and plays out at the good old breakneck speed. On 'End Of The Line', one of the Amotts establishes a counterpoint to Gossow by chanting the chorus using clean vocals – strange, but it does produce a curiously moo­dy effort (or does it strike me simply by being so unusual?). And the final riff of 'Saints And Sin­ners' is so nice in its warped evilness that the brothers cannot even resist the temptation to spin it for a few more bars, fading it out after all the other instruments have already finished playing.

 

In short, Anthems Of Rebellion has its modest supply of catchy goodies for those who were not disappointed in Wages Of Sin. Just ignore the laughable stream of lyrical clichés (although «re­bellious» lyrical clichés are still a good notch ahead of totally corny «satanic» clichés), which is not that hard to do anyway, unless your brain has a pre-installed «growl-to-English» translator chip; and who knows, this might even fall into the «seriously impressive» category, as opposed to the «amusing metallic weirdos» section. On the whole, though, the ratio of good-to-mediocre rif­fage is ever so slightly lower than on Wages Of Sin; yet this should not be taken as a sign of the band's decline — with situations like these, it's always a game of chance.

 

DOOMSDAY MACHINE (2005)

 

1) Enter The Machine; 2) Taking Back My Soul; 3) Nemesis; 4) My Apocalypse; 5) Carry The Cross; 6) I Am Le­gend / Out For Blood; 7) Skeleton Dance; 8) Hybrids Of Steel; 9) Mechanic God Creation; 10) Machtkampf; 11) Slaves Of Yesterday.

 

No changes in the formula whatsoever, but the band is still going strong — at least, in the early sections of the record. We kick off with a somewhat false start: the instrumental 'Enter The Ma­chine' should, by all means, be setting up a suitably ominous atmosphere, but the lead lines played over the ironclad rhythm sequences are inexplicably set in a «stadium rock» pattern — re­duce the heaviness a little bit and you could safely use the result to start off an Asia concert. Se­ems like someone took the «melodic» of «melodic death metal» a bit too literally this time.

 

The situation is immediately corrected on the next three tracks, which pretty much tell us every­thing we need to know about the then-current state of the band. First, 'Taking Back My Soul' pre­pares the stage with a nice rollicking art-metal melody. Then it's time for adrenaline spraying — 'Nemesis' is one of the band's fastest and, at the same time, tightest-controlled speed-metal runs, sort of the obligatory 'Highway Star' in the band's catalog. The nasty thing does try to transform itself into a sing-along martial anthem in the chorus, but at least the thrash-influenced verses return often enough to forget the bits of pomp.

 

The centerpiece of the album, however, is track number four, to my surprise, relatively rarely prai­sed by metalheads — but I think 'My Apocalypse' is the clear standout on the album and, in fact, the band's entire catalog. The thunderous, well-sequenced intro recalls Metallica at their best (and I love the spooky «whooo»-shing ghost-like noises introducing some of the bars, although I have no idea what they are); and the verses rely on an oddly math-rock-style syncopated melody that is a Black Sabbath-y devilish wobble for one second and a King Crimson-ian choppy pattern the very next. Against this stop-and-start background, Gossow's growling is ever more potent, and by the time it all culminates in the chorus — "my apocalypse is near!" — the song becomes one of those very few Arch Enemy tunes whose «doomsday» aura is possible to take seriously. A genuine breakthrough here, I would say.

 

Unfortunately, the band seems to have missed that impression themselves: after 'My Apocalypse', the album takes a steady turn for the predictable and the mediocre. The songs are too slow (with the exception of 'Out For Blood', the only other thrashy piece on the record), too soft ('Carry The Cross', with its echoey guitar jangle, is almost wimpy by this band's standards), and too anticli­mactic (the decision to fade out the last track, 'Slaves Of Yesterday', rather than end it with a bang, was clearly a mistake). Repeated listens bring out craft, but not invention — and even a rigidly formulaic band needs to invent, or else it will degenerate into endless re-proving of their point, which has already been proven too many times.

 

Still, on the strength of those opening numbers and on the lack of any awful failures, Doomsday Machine holds up as a decent achievement of the melodic death genre, and deserves its thumbs up. I just wish that, as a whole, the LP lived up more to its title — as it is, only 'My Apocalypse' forms the perfect gift to all fans of December 2012.

 

RISE OF THE TYRANT (2007)

 

1) Blood On Your Hands; 2) The Last Enemy; 3) I Will Live Again; 4) In This Shallow Grave; 5) Revolution Begins; 6) Rise Of The Tyrant; 7) The Day You Died; 8) Intermezzo Liberté; 9) Night Falls Fast; 10) The Great Darkness; 11) Vultures.

 

If I am not mistaken, the average metal-fan response to Rise Of The Tyrant was generally more positive than to Doomsday Machine. The album does pack quite a punch, going ever and ever heavier on brutality. «Artsy» touches are reduced to an absolute minimum — this time, 'Blood On Your Hands' opens the session without any atmospheric buildups, getting straight to the point in about five seconds. Acoustic interludes have been flushed out of existence, and the tempos are very steadily balanced between «fast» and «lightning fast».

 

In addition, there is no more double-tracking on Gossow's vocal parts: all of the growling is re­corded «live», in an attempt to match the unmediated onslaught of a genuine Arch Enemy show. I am not sure if that was a good decision, though — the double-tracking gave that awesome growl a surrealistic sheen, as if actual demons were genuinely swooshing around the room, whereas the «pure» growling on Tyrant, especially when it rises high above the instrumental din (or during the brief accappella moments, e.g. "REMEMBER!" on 'Blood On Your Hands'), is thinner, and thus, more ghost-like; besides, you get to hear better what the woman is really doing to her throat, and that makes me a little nervous.

 

Finally, more than ever before, the lyrics and moods have focused on issues of freedom-fighting and stuff. The title track is introduced with a rather lengthy quotation of dialog from Caligula (the scene in which McDowell demands that the Senate proclaim him God) — and the entire album is permeated with the hyperbolic feeling of an impending threat of you-know-what. Occasionally, Gossow turns to «lyrical» subjects ('The Day You Died', a simple goth tale), and at least one song could be qualified as «straightforwardly suicidal» ('I Will Live Again'), but overall, it's the same old story: the tyrant rise, the meek shall fall, revolution is imminent, and, of course, plenty of blood and guts to go 'round. Same old story, whipped to swirling frenzy.

 

The only thing that seems to be completely missing from Rise Of The Tyrant is interesting song­writing. The basic formula works in the old way, but only 'Blood On Your Hands', I think, has a decent structure and melodic, evocative lead lines. Everything else is just supertight generic speed runs that merge with one another in a manner so irritating I do not think I have ever been so much irritated since listening to Black Earth. There is nothing here even remotely approaching the creep-of-doom of 'My Apocalypse': as I said, «atmosphere» has been flushed out, and so have atmospheric riffs, replaced by finger-flashing. Even on tracks like 'The Great Darkness', mildly enlivened with bits of «medieval» Latin chanting, the guitar melodies fail to grab.

 

I mean, for God's sake, if this is called «melodic death metal», we are at least entitled to hearing some new melodies on each ensuing album, right or wrong? Up until Doomsday Machine, such was the case, but here, it isn't even that there is no «progression» – it seems to be one of those ca­ses in which a formerly inventive band suddenly gets this ridiculous urge to «get back to basics», and produce a very «basic» – and a very boring – piece, whose only achievement is in showing us listeners that it is really hopeless to go against the flow, and hinder your own development. Well, it is my free right to disrespect this attitude, and so, in a state of total disrespect, a thumbs down for Rise Of The Tyrant. It doesn't help, either, that I do not know of any actual tyrants having ri­sen in 2007. Unless they somehow mean the release of the last Harry Potter book.

 

TYRANTS OF THE RISING SUN (2008)

 

1) Intro / Blood On Your Hands; 2) Ravenous; 3) Taking Back My Soul; 4) Dead Eyes See No Future; 5) Dark In­sa­ni­ty; 6) The Day You Died; 7) Christopher Solo; 8) Silverwing; 9) Night Falls Fast; 10) Daniel Solo; 11) Bur­n­ing Angel; 12) Michael Solo; 13) Dead Bury Their Dead; 14) Vultures; 15) Enemy Within; 16) Snowbound; 17) Sha­d­ows And Dust; 18) Nemesis; 19) We Will Rise; 20) Fields Of Desolation / Outro.

 

If there is anything the world really needs in a time of economic crisis and universal depression, it is another live album from a formulaic heavy metal band, recorded in Japan. For Arch Enemy, it was already the second one, but this time, the scope was different — two CDs fully matched with a DVD, making it easier to headbang to the tunes in all the proper places, and making you won­der at the cultural significance of Ms. Gossow's makeup.

 

Although Rise Of The Tyrant gave them a «punny» clue about how to title this new recording, it is somewhat unfortunate that they did not release it an album earlier — this way, the setlist is predictably tilted towards their latest promoted effort, and I would much rather have them play 'My Apocalypse' and 'Out For Blood' than 'Night Falls Fast' and 'Vultures'. But what the heck, at the bottom of it all, Arch Enemy always play the same way, so it's either complaining about the total futility of the record — or just enjoying it for its power, precision, and dedication (the latter especially: even at their most boring and predictable, Arch Enemy are so dedicated to their craft that this can sometimes help overlook the lack of hooks).

 

What you do get to hear is a little bit of Angela's «natural» voice — yes, she does have one — as the frontlady is responsible for most of the banter. Whether you would like to hear her sing in that voice is a different matter — after all, that would make her sound no different from anyone. You also get to hear Michael and Christopher Amott with solo improvisations (brother Chris, playing in an echo-laden, Gilmour-style manner, gets my preference over brother Michael and his power metal pathos), and the drummer guy gets a nice brief rhythmic turn as well.

 

Highlights would include the opening number ('Blood On Your Hands' actually gains extra power by An­gela letting the audience chant the "REMEMBER!" bit); the show-closing double punch of 'Nemesis' and 'We Will Rise'; and the old Liiva-era material, like 'Silverwing', that Gossow pre­dictably delivers with as much confidence as she handles everything else. But apart from that, there is little, if anything, to tell. None of the live versions fall flat next to studio performances, but the setlist is questionable, which is why the album will probably not work as a reliable intro­duction to all the strong sides of the band. Bloodthirsty fans, though, will not want to miss it.

 

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL (2009)

 

1) The Root Of All Evil (Intro); 2) Beast Of Man; 3) The Immortal; 4) Diva Satanica; 5) Demonic Science; 6) Bury Me An Angel; 7) Dead Inside; 8) Dark Insanity; 9) Pilgrim; 10) Demoniality; 11) Transmigration Macabre; 12) Silverwing; 13) Bridge Of Destiny.

 

Uh… well, this certainly does not sound bad, but the point of this record must have either been to simply buy some time in preparation for «bigger things», or to show the world, once and for all, just how much they really care about their old vocalist. Apart from the short atmospheric intro, all of the tracks are re-recordings from the Liiva era, naturally, with Angela on vocals instead; an idea possibly triggered by the successful inclusion of Liiva-era material on the band’s latest live album as well, where, under Angela’s command, it sounded well in harmony with the rest.

 

Predictably, all of the songs are very well played (seasoned fans will tell the minute differences, but my own taste buds have not been so finely developed for the likes of death metal), the track selection is strong (concentrating on Burning Bridges for obvious reasons), the production is far cleaner and clearer than whatever they used to achieve ten years before, and Gossow does all the songs justice in her gossowian way.

 

Still, the idea strikes me as somewhat unethical. I never cared much for Liiva as a vocalist, and thus, have no reason to be on the same level of ire as «hardcore» fans who think Arch Enemy «sold out» when they «hired that chick», but these songs were as much his as they are of the Amotts (and much more his than Angela’s). It is one thing to go on singing them in concert — that’s what the fans want, after all — it is quite another to re-record them in the studio, a gesture that could easily be interpreted as an invitation to throw the band’s pre-Angela past out of the window, leaving a few echos as souvenirs. Forget about Greedo shooting first — this is like a new edition of Star Wars in which all of Alec Guinness’ scenes have been completely replaced by re-shot sequences with a much-aged Ewan McGregor, «for the sakes of coherence, continuity, and credibility throughout the series».

 

Of course, the analogy is poor if you agree with me that Gossow is a much more interesting vo­calist than Liiva could ever have hoped to be; so did they really need to rub it in the noses of the fans, instead of letting bygones be bygones? I do not think I get the point of this album, and if I do, then it might indeed be «the root of all evil», and, in any case, I give it a perfect thumbs down — for moral reasons, probably the first time ever in a heavy metal band review. Let’s just pretend it never existed and move on.

 

KHAOS LEGIONS (2011)

 

1) Khaos Overture; 2) Yesterday Is Dead And Gone; 3) Bloodstained Cross; 4) Under Black Flags We March; 5) No Gods, No Masters; 6) City Of The Dead; 7) Through The Eyes Of A Raven; 8) Cruelty Without Beauty; 9) We Are A Godless Entity; 10) Cult Of Chaos; 11) Thorns In My Flesh; 12) Turn To Dust; 13) Vengeance Is Mine; 14) Secrets.

 

Each formula can only live for so long before its manufacturers run out of oxygen. Technically, Khaos Legions finds Arch Enemy at their ballsiest — loud, brutal, evil — but no matter where I look, there does not seem to be a single new idea, and that does not just concern the lack of expe­rimental moments: much worse than that, there is not one single riff on here that would seem as if I have never heard it before. And even if I acknowledge some of these riffs as variations on past successes — after all, each composer is entitled to variations on his own compositions — they are dull, un-evocative variations.

 

One direction in which they could have headed at this time, with a small bit of hope of getting out of the rut, is «moody». ʽNo Gods, No Mastersʼ, with its stern mid-tempo and genuinely melodic guitar and keyboard lead lines, actually ends up more memorable than the «thrashy» anthems on here. The Amott brothers are talented enough to master «subtle» if they really feel the need for it, and I am fairly sure that Angela could accommodate her by-now all-too-familiar growling style to fit that subtleness. But, by and large, this does not happen on Khaos Legions.

 

Instead, what we get is lots and lots of fast tracks, normally a plus for hard-rocking albums, but in this case they just merge into one lumpy blur, with nothing to distinguish ʽYesterday Is Dead And Goneʼ (album opener) from ʽSecretsʼ (album closer). In the end, the most successful track is pro­bably ʽWe're A Godless Entityʼ, due to the provocative title and some nice ominous minimalistic bass plinking from Sharlee D'Angelo. That's just one and a half minutes, though.

 

In short, this is a serious step down even from the level of Rise Of The Tyrant, and that record was no great shakes, either; but at least it had one stone cold death metal classic (ʽBlood On Your Handsʼ), whereas this album will, most probably, just go down stone cold; I cannot imagine any of its songs surviving for long even in the heads of the most devoted metal forgers. Curiously, the album is said to have sold more copies (in the US at least) than any previous Arch Enemy record; but I will put that down to the band's general workhorse attitude — keep it up for long enough, and eventually you'll get what's coming to you. Besides, who would mind the guys finally making a little bit of money after all these years of finger-tearing and throat-wearing?

 

In any case, my thumbs down will hardly make a difference: hardcore fans will thrive on this stuff as usual, and bypassers do not need to hear more than one or two albums by this band any­way. Just out of curiosity, I actually browsed through a half-dozen reviews of Khaos Legions on various metal-related sites — just to let you know that we probably are in trouble when the re­view in question (and most of those were like it) simply gives you some back story («this is the first album of original material in five years...»), a list of the players and producers, some­thing along the lines of «to all those who think they lost it, well, they still kick ass», and a heavy splat­tering of terms like «sharp riffs», «clear sound», «melodic shredding», and «power growl». Yeah, it's all here, I guarantee you that. For some reason, though, none of these reviewers ever ask themsel­ves the obvious question: «And what next?».

 

WAR ETERNAL (2014)

 

1) Tempore Nihil Sanat; 2) Never Forgive, Never Forget; 3) War Eternal; 4) As The Pages Burn; 5) No More Regrets; 6) You Will Know My Name; 7) Graveyard Of Dreams; 8) Stolen Life; 9) Time Is Black; 10) On And On; 11) Avalanche; 12) Down To Nothing; 13) Not Long For This World.

 

As our favorite pop pranksters, the Mael brothers of Sparks, once said, "Just like everything else in this world, time wreaks havoc on every girl. What do you do? Throw her away and get a new one!" Now I have no idea whether Michael Amott is a big Sparks fan, but he took the Maels' advice quite seriously. In the light of Arch Enemy's continuing descent into stagnation, Angela Gossow announced her departure from the band (apparently, an amicable one, as she stayed on as their business manager), and welcomed her replacement — Alissa White-Gluz (what a name!), former lead vocalist of The Agonist, up to now Canada's chief competition for Arch Enemy, but apparently no longer so.

 

With all due respect to Ms. Gossow and her decade with the band, this was a good decision, and not simply for reasons of physical health (growling does take its toll even among professionals), but also because, well, no offense intended, growling only takes you that far in your life: Wages Of Sin was a fun ride, but we'd learned everything we needed to know about Angela Gossow on that album and we really haven't learned anything new ever since — at a certain point, in this sort of genre, the singer ceases to be a personality and becomes a generic, predictable piece of para­phernalia, merely accompanying the different riffs and solos.

 

The catch is that the replacement would have to be worthy of the predecessor, and it is not every day that a growler of Angela Gossow caliber comes along. But as much as I am skeptical of the profession in the first place (and who wouldn't be?), White-Gluz turns out to be God's unexpect­edly generous gift to this band. Where Gossow's growling was almost genuinely scary in its car­toonish cackling taken to the extremest of extremes, this Alissa gal approaches the task in a simi­lar, but different manner — I'd probably define her growling voice as just a tad «sharper» than Gossow's, and more distinct, to the point where you can occasionally even make out some of the actual words she is «singing». She seems to have a drop of the punk spirit in her, too (not sur­prisingly, she is said to be in a relationship with Doyle of The Misfits), and there is a «pissed-off / violent» flavor to her growling, rather than the «infernal / doomsday» attitude of Gossow, which can help take it more seriously than usual.

 

Most importantly, though, the introduction of White-Gluz helps rekindle the band's collective spirit as well. I certainly cannot vouch that with War Eternal, Amott and Co. have given us the finest collection of riffs and classically-influenced melodic passages in 5, 7, or 10 years, since the melodic basis behind Arch Enemy's work has always been so similar (to say the least). But every once in a while, you'd have yourself an album that sounded «fresher» — Wages Of Sin being the most obvious example — and War Eternal, despite having the same superficial features as any Arch Enemy album, also has that «new-beginning» look to it, and not just because of a new sin­ger, but also because the new singer triggers a new desire to excel in what they do.

 

That desire does not translate (at least, not upon my initial attempts to discover them) into writing any exceptional, «where-the-hell-have-you-been-all-my-life» bits of riffage, but the band's over­all melodic drive seems to have improved, with a large number of symphonic themes interwoven among the brutal sledgehammering, including no less than three atmospheric interludes, the last of which, ʽNot Long For This Worldʼ, provides the album's most memorable and stylishly «heavy requiem»-like theme, building up crescendo-style and then fading out with a ghostly piano coda that, gratifyingly, leaves no hope whatsoever for the doomed humanity. The synthesizer tone re­s­ponsible for those symphonic elements is certainly cheesier than if they'd thought of adding real strings (ʽAvalancheʼ is a good example), but at least it supplies some variety.

 

Still, the band is really at the top of their game only when they are at their speediest, their angriest here — which is where Alissa's infuriated vocals really connect, and you get not too memorable melodically, but quite impressive stylistically tunes like ʽNever Forgive, Never Forgetʼ (give it a better set of riffs and it would not be out of place on an Iron Maiden album) or ʽAs The Pages Burnʼ. When they slow down, the whole thing occasionally starts dragging, but even there you have things like the title track, which is like... like a Foreigner arena-rocker derailed and turned into a death metal anthem. Yes, it's actually hilarious when you think about it this way.

 

Fans of White-Gluz' past karma have dared to complain that she is not given an opportunity to use her clean vocals on the record (other than a tiny bit of background overdubs on ʽAvalancheʼ), but this may not have necessarily been due to the band's stubborn conservatism, but rather to the fact that much, if not most, of the songs were written with a «growling» delivery in mind before the lineup change — a hypothesis that will be tested once the band returns to the studio once again. In the meantime, I am about as heavily excited by War Eternal as I could find myself excited about a present-day «melodic death metal» album written and executed in strict accor­dance with the genre's Procrustean formula. And that translates to a mild thumbs up, even though far be it from me to recommend spending too much time on a record like this, or on mo­dern heavy metal in general, for that matter.

 

ARCHERS OF LOAF

ICKY METTLE (1993)

 

1) Web In Front; 2) Last Word; 3) Wrong; 4) You And Me; 5) Might; 6) Hate Paste; 7) Fat; 8) Plumb Line; 9) Learo, You're A Hole; 10) Sickfile; 11) Toast; 12) Backwash; 13) Slow Worm.

 

«What makes this sound so compelling is the way it explores the full spectrum of guitar-centric rock, pulling together the blunt and abrasive with the thoughtful in the musical equivalent of a shotgun wedding with the bride and groom doing everything in their power to hold it together while the family is watching in uneasy silence». -- Gregory Heaney, All-Music Guide.

 

Damn, I wish I could write that way — it takes so much time to realize how entirely devoid of sense this phrase is that no one will probably even bother, leaving the page in a dazed, confu­sed, and, perhaps, even mystified state of mind. On the other hand, I could not say that this band's  lyrics — or even the title of their debut album — or even their own name, for that matter — do a good job of surpassing Mr. Heaney in terms of clarity. "All I ever wanted was to be your spine / Lost your friction and you slid for a mile" (ʽWeb In Frontʼ) is a fairly diagnostic couple of lines, and almost each song yields more of the same stuff.

 

Anyway, Archers Of Loaf stem from Chapel Hill, NC, and, in true indie-rock fashion, consist of 2 guitars, 1 bass, 1 set of drums, and 1 soulful, but rangeless vocal coupled with one of the guitars (Eric Bachmann, no relation to Randy Bachman whatsoever, not to mention the extra n). Since they formed in the year of Nevermind, there is some temptation to pigeonhole them as «grun­gers», which they are not if, by «grunge», we mean the narrow spectrum from Nirvana to Alice In Chains to Pearl Jam and the like. The three differences are in that Archers Of Loaf are:

 

— nowhere near as heavy: they like low notes and power chords as much as the next guy, but it is clear that Black Sabbath is not a big influence. Sonic Youth, perhaps, but not Sabbath;

 

— absolutely not «depressed» or «depressing». Most of the music is energetic and angry, but the­re is no suicidal or end-of-the-world-ish ring in Bachmann's voice at all. Only once does he at­tempt to descend into autistic melancholy (ʽYou And Meʼ), but, set against all the other songs, it almost feels like a theatrical gesture for diversity's sake. Spiritual darkness as an essential compo­nent of grunge is completely lacking here;

 

— simply put, a «post-modern» band: much like Pavement and the Pixies, they inject their tunes with absurdism, irony, and nihilism, although the music is never as experimental as that of Pave­ment, and the band is also affected by a near-complete lack of sense of humor, which makes their post-modernism very, very strange (since we usually sense po-mo the best through the artist's abi­lity to laugh off and ridicule all of the cultural conventions of the past).

 

All of this puts an individual spin on Icky Mettle, which is a great advantage, considering that the actual songs kinda suck. Well, not «suck», perhaps, but whoever claims that Bachmann and the other guitarist, Eric Johnson, are accomplished riffmeisters must be fairly new to this whole «rock» idea: fifty percent of the time at least, the chord sequences are generic indie fare that you can just as easily encounter on an Avril Lavigne record. The other fifty percent show a little bit more inventiveness: ʽWrongʼ, for instance, opens with a simple, but fresh «scratchy» pattern (for some reason, complemented by an odd «cuckoo» tone from the second guitar — absurdism on the prawl!); ʽLearo, You're A Holeʼ comes replete with a head-splitting overdub of several dro­ning parts that paint the air in aggressively psychedelic colours; and the beginning of ʽToastʼ is like a lo-fi take on the mysterious otherwordliness of The Cure, before the proceedings calm down to give us a nice contrast between a thin, friendly, fun-sounding riff and an all-out scream-fest ("There's something wrong with my toast!" — go figure).

 

Repeated listens bring out the small details that should, perhaps, be the Archers' major claim to fame. For instance, the main guitar line of ʽWeb In Frontʼ is loud, but totally uninteresting — just a standard «chugga-chugga» recorded for the millionth time. Listen closely and you will notice a thin, almost harp-like, «ethereal» guitar playing a much more complicated role in the adjacent speaker, growing a bit more audacious by the end of the song but still not competitive enough to properly grab your attention until you've listened to this for a second time... and a third one... and a fourth one... by then, the main riff will finally fade away and the nice ringing guitar-harp will be all over your ears. (Stupid question: why not get rid of the main riff altogether?).

 

ʽPlumb Lineʼ is the slyest of the lot, giving Bachmann enough microphone space to deliver the catch phrase "She's an indie rocker / And nothing's gonna stop her / Her fashion fits" loud and distinct, over a proverbial indie-rock melody if there ever was one — and thus, ensure the band a firm position on college radio and in certain critical minds. But the idea of Icky Mettle is not to glorify indie rock, or propagate teenage rebellion, or even vent one's frustration over failed re­la­tion­ships — there is a little bit of everything, which all melds together in one big fat nothing, and that is the idea of Icky Mettle: to make a modern rock album about nothing. Of course, it would have helped, if, like Seinfeld, these guys at least had a sense of humor to compensate. In its place, they put loudness, brawn, and elements of weirdness, still rather random on this record (but they would grow in numbers by the time they got around to the follow-up).

 

Today, in knowledgeable circles, Icky Mettle is deemed as sort of a minor classic of the decade. I am not sure if it will hold up as well as the best grunge, indie, and pop-rock records from its era, because the songwriting seems fairly mediocre to me, even if the songs gain a lot through extra touches and flourishes once they are realized on tape. (Same problems as with the Afghan Whigs — another band vastly overrated by connoisseurs and reasonably forgotten by the masses). But there is certainly an enigmatic aura about the album — after all, not every piece of music will prompt the reviewer to describe it with the sort of quotation that I used to preview my own text. Trying it out will not hurt, and, want it or not, these Chapel Hill fellas were an integral part of the indie movement back in the day — gotta know our history.

 

VEE VEE (1995)

 

1) Step Into The Light; 2) Harnessed In Slums; 3) Nevermind The Enemy; 4) Greatest Of All Times; 5) Underdogs Of Nipomo; 6) Floating Friends; 7) 1985; 8) Fabricoh; 9) Nostalgia; 10) Let The Loser Melt; 11) Death In The Park; 12) The Worst Has Yet To Come; 13) Underachievers March And Fight Song.

 

Although Icky Mettle usually gets all the hoopla, I personally find the follow-up, Vee Vee, to be far more interesting. As it often happens, the sophomore effort is a little less aggressive, a little more experimental, a touch more oriented at subtleties and a touch less at basic punch. But if The Archers Of Loaf were to find their own place in the already huge and still growing world of in­die rock, they had to rely more on subtleties and less on punch — because, want it or not, we gene­rally punch more or less in the same way, whereas our subtleties are all vastly individual.

 

The subtle side of Eric Bachmann, in particular, led him to exploring the capacities of the drone, the trill, and the jangle. There is a lot of exciting dual guitar playing here, and a lot less boring generic noise than on Icky Mettle. Check out ʽUnderdogs Of Nipomoʼ, where one low-pitched gui­tar begins playing the song like a jerky mid-tempo blues-rocker, then a different, higher-pit­ched, one joins it in a weeping psy­chedelic manner and prevents the song from being «just an­other» alt-rocker. And that happens all over the place on this album.

 

Additionally, there is a little more emphasis placed on the accessibility of the lyrics — the surre­alism is still there, but the «key phrases», like root notes, are more firmly accentuated to set cer­tain moods for certain songs. Thus, "all of my friends have floated away", sung in a croaking, al­most breaking voice, immediately sets a lament-like sort of mood for ʽFloating Friendsʼ, and even if the rest of the lyrics seem to insist that the phrase be taken literally (because "they clog up the valley and drift up to outer space"), you know that's not really it. It's just a sad song, if not a par­ticularly great one in terms of melody.

 

In terms of melody, most of the really cool stuff happens early on. ʽStep Into The Lightʼ is a swir­ling kaleidoscope of droning and jangling guitars, much more early Velvet Underground in style than Nirvana or even Pavement. So is ʽHarnessed In Slumsʼ, except it is much faster: if you really let yourself go, the contrast between the masculine and feminine guitars spinning round and round will suck you right inside the circle. Yet it isn't a happy psychedelic merry-go-round — it is a grim circle, maybe more like an inescapable vortex, not overtly pessimistic and suicidal like The Cure, but with a strong whiff of negativity all the same. If it looks like I am babbling, it is simply the result of having to listen to these songs too many times in order to get their appeal.

 

Words, intonations, notes, overdubs, structures, everything seems to come together here in a ge­ne­ral message that is perhaps best summed up in the next to last song, ʽDeath In The Parkʼ: "It's always the same people / Pissing the same people off". The surrealism and psychedelia with which Bachmann and Johnson are toying around is just a mild attempt to break the circle of de­pressing boredom and routine, predictable happenings of life. The grim guitar drone symbolizes the boredom, and the high whining guitar... the pain? Whatever. Anyway, it is not about the sin­gle ingredients, it's about the whole package — it works, although it also takes quite a bit of time to sink in. But concentrate on understanding that these two guys swirl their guitars like few other couples of guys ever swirled them, and that is the first step towards feeling the coolness of Vee Vee rather than just stating it.

 

Ironically, the record ends on a completely unpredictable note: after the depression reaches a climax of sorts on the aptly titled ʽThe Worst Has Yes To Comeʼ, the band launches into an al­most carnivalesque «ditty», replete with kiddie-style whistling, simplistic banjo strum, and stupid horns — ʽUnderachievers March And Fight Songʼ, indeed. "Underachievers / Total domination / Kill a billion years / Of total frustration" — hey there hordes of people all over the world, The Archers Of Loaf have written the perfect anthem for you to wake up to every morning, and most of you probably don't even know about it. Oh well, here's one little thumbs up to help with the promotion, even if it's coming about fifteen years too late.

 

ALL THE NATIONS AIRPORTS (1996)

 

1) Strangled By The Stereo Wire; 2) All The Nations Airports; 3) Scenic Pastures; 4) Worst Defense; 5) Attack Of The Killer Bees; 6) Rental Sting; 7) Assassination On X-mas Eve; 8) Chumming The Ocean; 9) Vocal Shrapnel; 10) Bones Of Her Hands; 11) Bumpo; 12) Form And File; 13) Acromegaly; 14) Distance Comes In Droves; 15) Bombs Away.

 

For their third release, the Archers got picked up by a major label — Elektra — but the fact pro­duced far more fuss in the press than change in the sound. Not that there isn't any change in the sound from Vee Vee to All The Nations Airports. There is. But it has nothing to do with labels. And yes, it is a sucky sort of change.

 

Essentially, to me this sort of change suggests that Vee Vee, after all, was a fluke. Somehow, on that album, the band managed to align their mutual configuration in the only possible, and very subtle way, that could make them stand out. They probably did not pay too much attention to this lucky turn of events — and, when it was time to reconvene for the third album, fell back on the old configuration of Icky Mettle. Only now they lack even that initial punch of freshness which can sometimes elevate mediocrity to illusionary heights. Results? Boring. Dull as hell.

 

Instead of good music, Bachmann now concentrates almost exclusively on the lyrics, which get increasingly «serious» and «messagy», without telling us explicitly what it is about them that could make Bachmann an individual presence on the «rock poet» scene. "Rental sting / The cus­tomer is king / Waste your life, waste your life / Little things can cost you everything" — here is a particularly telling example of what it's all about. If it clicks with you on paper, it will click with you on your stereo. If it does not click on paper, I have a hard time imagining how All The Nations Airports could ever occupy a special place in your heart.

 

That the individual guitar parts are rather dull is no surprise; the surprise is that they seem to have lost the ability to turn their twin guitar interplay into something larger than the sum of its parts. It is most evident on such lumbering instrumental monsters as ʽAttack Of The Killer Beesʼ, which, by all means, should have been titled ʽAttack Of The Killer Slothsʼ instead — one of the guitars does produce a bee-like buzz all the way through (wailing like crazy on one note while your ears are slowly and painfully being electrocuted), but the others are just droning stoner grunge chords over and over again in an «atmospheric» manner that is neither pleasant, nor even novel.

 

They are still capable of occasionally coming across mildly interesting themes, when they get off their main saddle horse: ʽBumpoʼ is a fun instrumental, built upon a dark psycho-folk theme that is half-Jefferson Airplane, half-James Bond theme (although even ʽBumpoʼ gets less attractive and more generic once the volume levels are pushed up and the minimalistic folk guitar becomes drone-oriented). And there are tiny bits and pieces that suggest ways of greatness — for instance, the way the self-titled track begins, with its siren-like bass notes and pick scraping frenzy, before it embarrassingly turns into just another Bachmann sermon.

 

But tiny bits are one thing, and preaching, lying at the heart of 75% of the songs on here, is ano­ther. ʽAssassination On X-mas Eveʼ, for instance, simply continues the theme of ʽDeath In The Parkʼ — «bad shit is going on, and nobody genuinely gives a damn». There is no harm in flog­ging that old horse to death, particularly since the horse is immortal, but wouldn't it be nice if the accompanying music were even the least bit memorable? Or, at least, exciting? Come on now, this shit is just excruciatingly dull. I can't even hear that second «feminine» guitar all that well, bring it higher up in the mix or something (not that it looks as if it were doing anything even re­motely approaching the occasional explosiveness on Vee Vee).

 

As ʽBombs Awayʼ, a minimalistic two-finger piano instrumental, closes the record, I cannot help but wonder how these things happen exactly — what are the factors that determine such jumps in quality between albums that are essentially based on the same styles and values. The number of cups of coffee drunk before the morning sessions? Toothaches? Undetected radioactivity ex­po­sure? Talent drain, where «talent» = an objectively measurable internal fluid? Whatever. Regard­less of the answer, All The Nations Airports is a significant departure from Vee Vee, and, in my head, the vector is strictly downwards, so thumbs down accordingly.

 

WHITE TRASH HEROES (1998)

 

1) Fashion Bleeds; 2) Dead Red Eyes; 3) I.N.S.; 4) Perfect Time; 5) Slick Tricks And Bright Lights; 6) One Slight Wrong Move; 7) Banging On A Dead Drum; 8) Smokers In Love; 9) After The Last Laugh; 10) White Trash Heroes.

 

Reportedly, the Archers Of Loaf found themselves artistically blocked after touring in support of Airports, and I easily believe that — I mean, who wouldn't, after having to play songs from the dullest record of one's career over and over again? Eventually, it was decided that, if the band were to go on, it would have to change. The heavy fate of the Artist who did not, from the out­set, list «stability of sound» as one of the major goals in his career: either you change, or you lose the right to that capital A, not to mention an A+ in Robert Christgau’s next blurb.

 

The exact change from Airports to White Trash Heroes is not easy to describe, though. Every­one acknowledges it, and the band actually lost some of the fan support because of it, but nobody can really summarize it in one or two sentences. It's not as if they brought in a host of guest mu­sicians or a symphonic orchestra, started writing twenty-minute long suites, or covering Frank Sinatra on authentic XVIIth century instruments. Individually, many of the songs are not that dif­ferent from the classic Archers sound. But altogether, White Trash Heroes definitely constitutes one of their finest offerings, and I'd probably rate it second in my personal ranking for today.

 

What do you do when you understand your own mediocrity as a God-sent troubadour, yet cannot resist the temptation of making, in the simple hope that you’ll maybe get lucky next time? Easy — you turn upon yourself in all your wretched mediocrity, and intensify the only thing you're sure of. (I realize I have by now offended every devoted Archers fan on the planet, but, as a fair­ly mediocre writer myself, I somehow feel a bond between myself and the band, to be honored by admitting it). Who are the «White Trash Heroes»? Take a wild guess.

 

The seven-minute long title track is structured as a long, repetitive, part-time Bob Dylan, part-time Lou Reed visionary epic, pinned to the simplest of hooks for heavier effect. It drags on slowly and drearily, on the wings of a simple synth line and a sea of anthemic feedback, until the voice finally fades out and all that is left is the murky electric guitar pushing the theme forward for an extra two minutes. It is the most perfect conclusion to the Archers' career that could ever be desired: a song that declares the ugliness of it all through a long series of half-baked, hu­mor­less poetic metaphors, being ugly as hell, but somewhat mesmerizing, in itself.

 

Even before you get to it, though, you have to endure a sea of industrial bleakness. ʽFashion Bleedsʼ would be just another grungy slab of grunge, if not for the annoying, ear-piercing electro­nic bleep sub-melody that eventually generates itself out of the muck, claiming your attention so that it can tamper with your digestion system. On ʽDead Red Eyesʼ, all singing is done in a whiny, high-pitched manner, reminiscent of Neil Young and his endless complaints about life's miseries. On ʽPerfect Timeʼ, the lead guitar line is set to «dirge mode» almost continuously — now we can finally understand the fans, who were waiting for some punch-the-wall attitude and got some lie-down-and-die attitude instead. ʽOne Slight Wrong Moveʼ justifies the «industrial» tag explicitly: it starts off with factory-style banging and clanging, and culminates in the electronically encoded refrain ("a hundred million could be wrong") that, again, could serve as an irritant in the eyes of all the admirers of Archers as a «live» band, but is actually well in line with the overall moods and temperatures on the record.

 

In the middle of it all, it is easy to lose trace of ʽSmokers In Loveʼ, a brief instrumental track that should actually be counted among their finest creations — a bit of melodic «art-grunge» which shows excellent teamwork and expression. Your best chance of remembering it is probably thro­ugh the fat distorted opening riff, but the guitar- and even basswork on the main section are noti­ceable as well. By now, the Archers can not only «weave» their trademark double/triple-guitar patterns, they can do this with a stern, robotic air (must have been listening to lots of Krautrock), making the same kind of progress here that one usually sees in the evolution from «punk» to «post-punk». It's not entirely new, but with these guys, it works.

 

Overall, White Trash Heroes could really signify a transition to something more... purposeful, I guess, than the early Archers albums. It is that close to turning Bachmann into one of those «ge­neration spokesmen» — with all the debt that the title track owes to previous generation spokes­men, it belongs in the 1990s, a decade that did not really have its own Bob Dylan or Neil Young or Lou Reed, except for the original old ones. But maybe it was exactly this «looking back» thing that did not work out, I don't know. In any case, even if White Trash Heroes was an artistic dead end — and the band did not survive it — it still remains a curious and touching artistic dead end to revisit, and the title track is as good a «self-destructive goodbye note» as any. Thumbs up.

 

SECONDS BEFORE THE ACCIDENT (2000)

 

1) Dead Red Eyes; 2) Fabricoh; 3) Vocal Shrapnel; 4) Web In Front; 5) Let The Loser Melt; 6) Strangled By The Stereo Wire; 7) Fashion Bleeds; 8) You And Me; 9) Might; 10) Revenge; 11) South Carolina; 12) Lowest Part Is Free; 13) Plumbline; 14) Wrong; 15) White Trash Heroes; 16) Chumming The Oceans.

 

A last-minute souvenir from the Archers' final tour, this was all recorded in November 1998 at some small joint in Chapel Hill. This was not the band's first live recording: an EP called Vitus Tinnitus had already appeared in 1997, but it was rather short and went out of print fairly quickly. This one, on the other hand, is much longer, and, rather democratically, includes comparable shares of selections from all of the band's four studio albums (as well as two tracks from a rare studio EP released in 1994) — a decent, deserving live retro­spective that should be in every serious fan collection.

 

There are, however, serious problems as well, that go way beyond track selection (which I per­sonally could live with, even if I like the Archers' evens far more than their odds). First, the stu­dio arrangements on the original albums were often interesting in terms of overdubs, with three- or four-part guitar melodies contributing to the sound; obviously, when playing live, these com­plex textures are reduced to barer basics, and, since sometimes these overdubs were almost like the main selling point of the song, the effect is predictable. Second, even those instruments that are played on stage are recorded atrociously. Play any single one of them next to the studio ori­ginal and see the difference at once. The «melodic» guitar that is supposed to whine, chirp, and jangle next to the grungy chord guitar bears the heaviest brunt — definitely out there, but barely audible most of the time. But even the heavy guitar is unpleasantly muffled.

 

With these obvious and rather glaring defects, are there any compensating benefits? Certainly not from a surplus of energy: it's been a long, long time since well-behaved rock bands restrained their passion in the studio, only unleashing the full fury onstage. Chapel Hill did not get it that much louder or more dynamic than the recording studios did. Nor are there any interesting chan­ges (other than simplified arrangements) to any of the songs. Nor do the band members show a particularly clever or original sense of humor (such bits of banter as "we have an alien on stage" or "if I have an aneurysm tonight, it's out of gratitude" are more or less their peak). Nor does the audience help lighten up the spirits — the crowd must have consisted of long-term fans, some of whom seem to have already sung all the lyrics to ʽYou And Meʼ way before its lengthy, ear-killer bass intro gives way to the vocals, but the Archers' music is not arena-rock and has very little to do with crowd-pleasing in general.

 

Come to think of it, it really beats me why I am tempted to give the album a thumbs up, despite there being nothing objectively redeemable about it. Maybe it is because the most important ele­ment of White Trash Heroes managed to blow over here more or less untouched: its autumnal sadness and a certain sense of «when the music's over, turn off the light... and go back to your boring function-fulfilling in this world, whatever it may be». Even the earlier songs from Icky Mettle and Vee Vee seem to have been slightly irradiated with this quiet, unassuming depression. I almost think I might be giving this positive judgement out of sheer pity, regardless of whether anyone needs it — here's to a band that tried to make it, and then spent their last two years co­ming to terms with their own doom. And, maybe, the world's as well.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE SPEED OF CATTLE (1996)

 

1) Wrong; 2) South Carolina; 3) Web In Front; 4) Bathroom; 5) Tatyana; 6) What Did You Expect?; 7) Ethel Merman; 8) Funnelhead; 9) Quinn Beast; 10) Telepathic Traffic; 11) Don't Believe The Good News; 12) Smokin' Pot In The Hot City; 13) Mutes In The Steeple; 14) Revenge; 15) Bacteria; 16) Freezing Point; 17) Powerwalker; 18) Backwash.

 

I would never say that Archers Of Loaf are the great lost gem of the mid-Nineties, much more de­serving of the attention of every self-respecting Homo sapiens than the publicity-puffed Nirvana. Nevertheless, they certainly deserve to at least be placed in the «lost and found» locker, and their career has been consistent enough to make me want to try out, as a postscriptum of sorts, this ear­ly collection of odds and ends, originally released in between the success of Vee Vee and the re­lative creative stagnation of Airports.

 

For all the good fans, this is an essential purchase, since there are no overlaps with the band's re­gular studio albums. Instead, Speed Of Cattle collects a bunch of early singles (including single versions of ʽWrongʼ and ʽWeb In Frontʼ, different from LP versions), two tracks from the rare EP Vs. The Greatest Of All Time, and some studio outtakes that cannot be found anywhere else. The question is — does anybody other than the truly devoted fan need it?

 

Frankly, I don't think so. One thing is certain: Speed Of Cattle will not open your eyes on any aspect of the Archers that you do not already know about. All of the songs are in the band's usual style, but very few of them accentuate the famous «guitar weaving» style. For instance, ʽSouth Carolinaʼ is occasionally considered somewhat of a lost semi-classic, but all I hear is generic, bombastic alt-rock, thoroughly boring for three out of three and a half minutes (a «woman tone» guitar enters the stage towards the end and makes things a little more colorful, but I am just men­tioning this for honesty's sake).

 

Special cases include ʽBathroomʼ, one of the band's fastest tunes, probably the closest they ever came to «hardcore», but with a nifty psychedelic guitar break; ʽQuinn Beastʼ, where the second guitar somehow falls under a Duane Eddy influence, playing surf-like chords against the usual sea of distortion; and the instrumental ʽSmokin' Pot In The Hot Cityʼ, which begins with a cozy little country-rock riff and then goes on being relatively gentle and melodic throughout.

 

Everything else sticks together in the same sort of mush as All The Nation's Airports: some­times a bit slower, sometimes a bit faster, sometimes yelly-screamy, sometimes quiet-melancho­lic-like. Listening to this record, in fact, gives away the Archers Of Loaf's fatal mistake — they should never have stuck to this image of «hard rocking» people, because they are too pensive for that. I can tolerate sixty minutes of leaden, by-the-book distorted «rock» chords from the Ramo­nes (even late-period Ramones), because it is their lifeblood. But nobody will convince me that these chords are the lifeblood of Eric Bachmann and Eric Johnson, because they could never rock as hard as Nirvana or Alice In Chains — and when you cannot rock out as hard as your competi­tion, it is better not to rock out at all. Otherwise, you'll just be moving along at the «speed of cat­tle», and why should anyone want that? Thumbs down.

ASH

TRAILER (1994)

 

1) Season; 2) Jack Names The Planets; 3) Intense Thing; 4) Uncle Pat; 5) Get Out; 6) Petrol; 7) Obscure Thing; 8*) Hulk Hogan Bubblebath; 9*) Different Today; 10*) Punk Boy.

 

Apparently, before recruiting drummer Rick McMurray and settling upon «Ash» as a suitable name for their future «best-rock'n'roll-band-in-the-world (to ever come from Ireland, since you are all sick of U2 by now anyway)», guitarist Tim Wheeler and bassist Mark Hamilton had done time in an Iron Maiden cover band, no less. Traces of this can be heard quite distinctly in their early sound (ʽHulk Hogan Bubblebathʼ starts out as sheer heavy metal, before melting down into zombie-flavored stoner rock), but it is most probable that they sucked at this venture — Wheeler is a good guitar player, but hardly on the level of Iron Maiden's axe gods, un­less technique and complexity were intentionally sacrificed once the new band rerouted its inte­rests into the direction of «alternative rock».

 

Trailer, their first EP/mini-LP, was built around ʽJack Names The Planetsʼ, the band's first single of any popular importance, and originally contained just seven songs (a few more were thrown on later for comprehensiveness' sake). None of them are very good, but one fine aspect of Ash alrea­dy on display is that their guitar-based sound is just a tad different from the generic «punk sloppi­ness meets pop toothlessness» manner of the alt-rock crowds of the mid-Nineties. Maybe it is the Iron Maiden tribute period that we have to thank, but, in any case, Wheeler's guitars usually have a lower grumble and a fuzzier crunch to them than the genre prescribes, and the lead parts feature a variety of tones, from high-pitched to wah-wah, and are consistently more melodic and less pre­dictable than one would expect.

 

That does come in handy when you realize that there is not a single melody to die for on Trailer. ʽJack Names The Planetsʼ is sort of likeable, with its fast tempos, Wheeler's friendly, non-screa­my vocals, and a brave attempt at marrying punk, hard rock, and Brit-pop, but the melodic flow is extremely even, and the hooks are non-existent — what, did they really think that simply re­peating the track title three times in a row is enough to make a respectable pop single? The se­cond attempt, ʽPetrolʼ, essentially following the same songwriting formula, managed to be a little better — at least this time, there is an attention-drawing climactic burst at the end of each verse as Wheeler's echoey scream kicks off an extra layer of distortion and sets the song's main melodic riff in action. Not that it's a lot, either — any professional songwriter would have chuckled at how little is really done to gain the listener's trust.

 

I hardly remember anything about the other songs, except for ʽUncle Patʼ, where the tempos are slowed down a wee bit, and the whole song, replete with Wheeler's friendly vocal overtones, ends up sounding somewhat like (very) late period Kinks (Think Visual or something like that). On the ultra-short ʽGet Outʼ, the band tries to go for a «polished metalcore» type of sound — very fast, aggressive, but also quite technical — but the melody is too brutal to be melodic, yet too re­strained to win points just for the hardcore smell of it all.

 

In the end, the most memorable tune on the album is... the band's cover of Helen Love's ʽPunk Boyʼ, quite a telling fact all by itself. (Even more telling is the recommendation to listen to the original instead — Helen Love have quite an odd, if very silly-sounding, approach to bubblegum-pop that sounded far more original in the mid-1990s than Ash's approach to Helen Love material). The good news is that the bubblegum pop influence may have helped these guys to lighten up — and become a little bit better in the future. With Iron Maiden and Helen Love playing dice in your subconscious, chances of your musical output amounting to pure, undiluted crap can be expected to decrease rather sharply. It does take time, though, and for the moment, Trailer gets a thumbs down, if only for not being diagnostic of the subsequent movie that it allegedly advertises.

 

1977 (1996)

 

1) Lose Control; 2) Goldfinger; 3) Girl From Mars; 4) I'd Give You Anything; 5) Gone The Dream; 6) Kung Fu; 7) Oh Yeah; 8) Let It Flow; 9) Innocent Smile; 10) Angel Interceptor; 11) Lost In You; 12) Darkside Lightside.

 

Listening to «alt-rock» almost always produces a poisonous effect on me — there is something innately sick about that sludgy sound, something very, very uncomfortable. When all is said and done, pop is pop, and metal is metal: you cannot assure a healthy, stable marriage between the two (which makes me all the more admire those few lucky bastards, like Kurt, who did manage a temporary union; on the other hand, he did that at an expense that might be too heavy for the rest of us). Ash, even at their very best, never strived to be the exception from the rule. Therefore, all of the music that Ash ever produced makes me sick, period.

 

But a more interesting subject to discuss would be the reason why 1977, the band's first proper LP, propelled them into the limelight like crazy — by 1996, the album was hot enough to push Jagged Little Pill off from the top spot on the charts, and, although both records certainly qualify as «alt-rock» to whoever uses «alt-rock» as a bad word, they are certainly different enough to acknowledge that 1977 gained its popularity somewhat on its own, not just because it was the trendy thing to do (even if it was).

 

One thing is for certain: 1977 is more than just a «three guys play tinny rawk» album. Certainly Tim Whee­­ler is not the easiest person in the world to pigeonhole. The songs here blast off a whole wide variety of influences — of which classic Ramones/Clash-era punk, heralded by the album title, is but one, and not necessarily the strongest (in fact, it is claimed that the title simply refers to the birth year of two of the band members, and is also a subtle Star Wars reference — ʽDarkside Lightsideʼ ring a bell?). But there is also regular Oasis/Blur-derived Britpop, gruff re­tro-1970s metal, Springsteen-muscle-powered «urban rock», shades of Hawkwind psychedelia, and... you fill in the rest, I'm sure I've missed something along the way.

 

It is too bad that Wheeler's imagination is blocked on subsequent steps — he seems to be doing his best to take all these various ingredients and reduce them to the same formula, compressing chords, tones, and moods into one big headbang-fest. 1977 may have been God's gift to modern rock radio stations — here was something you could disseminate at top volume from your creaky car stereo without spooking off the environment — but we will never know why he chose as his mediator this particularly odd guy, taking off on a major highway and then ending up on a one-track dirt road. It doesn't help that he can't sing, either. One genuinely bugging aspect of 1977 is that nearly all of the vocals are... murmured?

 

Still, even with all the aspects of this record that one could detest, 1977 is likeable, to a degree. It has a mild sense of humor and hipness — not everybody could have come up with the idea of using a Ramones-inspired (with an explicit lyrical reference to «teenage lobotomy») two-minute pop-punk tongue-in-cheek anthem to ʽKung Fuʼ as the lead-off single. In fact, had the Ramones recorded the song themselves, it could have been a minor classic — as it is, Wheeler's muffled guitar sound and boring vocals (that try to simulate excitement but fail) make it more of a bark than a bite. A pleasant bark, nonetheless — cheap swipes at pop culture will never die.

 

The other big single, ʽGirl From Marsʼ, rolls along on what seems like the laziest chord set in the world, but is somewhat redeemed by Wheeler's attempt to channel the spirit of Ray Davies, even attempting to trade the whiny murmur in for a higher-pitched, naïve-romantic delivery (which certainly works better for him than any attempts to raise the aggression bar). The melodic wah-wah solo in the middle is also attention-worthy: in fact, Wheeler's lead playing is quite superb throughout the record — crisp, fluent, technical, and with plenty of love for various pedals and stuff. What this band really needed was a fourth member, one that could take away his rhythm playing and especially singing duties.

 

Some of the stuff is quite below par, though. The lumpy, leaden take on 1970s metal, ʽI'd Give You Anythingʼ, really plays out like an inferior variation on Black Sabbath's ʽN.I.B.ʼ with all the cool Satanism taken out and replaced by... never mind, it's impossible to make out anything from that murmur anyway. ʽGoldfingerʼ somehow became the single that truly put them on the map for the world to see, but it is the weakest of 'em all — a rather transparent take on the basic Oasis style, yet without a mighty hook to boot. But that's probably the exact reason why people were buying it at the time. Does anybody even remember it any more these days, though?

 

Overall, 1977 is a firm chunk of 1990's musical history now, and should probably be listened to by all those who are interested in learning more about the «spirit of 1996» — and also by every­one who wants to know how a melting pot of superior influences should not be brewed. But hey, these guys just didn't want to stick to the underground — they wanted to make it big, and in 1996, if you wanted to make it big, you didn't invent the rules, you stuck to them. They even had to go to Oasis' producer for this album, for God's sake. Sorrowful, but understandable.

 

NU-CLEAR SOUNDS (1998)

 

1) Projects; 2) Low Ebb; 3) Jesus Says; 4) Wildsurf; 5) Death Trip; 6) Folk Song; 7) Numbskull; 8) Burn Out; 9) Aphrodite; 10) Fortune Teller; 11) I'm Gonna Fall.

 

Girl presence detected! Or not detected, because new band member Charlotte Hatherley had been hired primarily for her guitar playing skills, thickening the sound during live performances and saving time for extra overdubs in the studio. She does add some backing vocals as well, but as far as I can tell, she does not get to sing lead at all (unless she can pose as Wheeler's double).

 

Nor does the lineup expansion result in any mind-blowing stylistic turn-arounds. Nu-Clear Sounds (a really awful title, if I might add; nothing that begins with «nu-» has ever proven to be good) starts off horrendously, with a bunch of songs that go, «Hey! We bring you the excitement of power pop baked in grunge guitar tones! Uncumbered with original chord changes — no more dan­ger of getting sidetracked by silly inventions like ʽmelodyʼ! Go with the flow, and the Force will always be with you!» The fast-kicking «rock» of ʽProjectsʼ, the slow-moving «meditative rhythmic balladry» of ʽLow Ebbʼ, and the third-rate Iggy Poppisms of ʽJesus Saysʼ are the kind of total garbage past which so many of the critics simply couldn't make it — which explains the overall cold reception in comparison with 1977. Dark, morose, nasty, and boring: an unbeatable combination for anyone desiring to sully the good name of rock'n'roll.

 

It does get somewhat better from there on. ʽWild Surfʼ is another in Ash's series of Ramones-in­spired bubblegum anthems, and even though it should have been played twice as fast for optimal effect, at least it has a friendly, funny, catchy chorus that slightly deflates the deadly, exaggerated seriousness of the first three numbers. Then they step back, regroup, take a deep breath, and let rip with ʽDeath Trip 21ʼ, which is probably the closest this album really gets to nu-metal, but at least it's faster, sharper, and flashier than ʽProjectsʼ.

 

But, as curious as it could be, Nu-Clear Sounds is at its best when Wheeler quiets the band down in order to inject some sentimentalism. The basic guitar picking of ʽFolk Songʼ, supported by a bunch of pseudo-strings in the background, is no more out­standing than anything else here, but, all of a sudden, Wheeler puts together a soft, cozy, naturally-sweet sounding vocal and applies it to a catchy chorus — his "springtime slipping away, my love, springtime slipping away" is just about the only moment on the album that has pledged to stay with me at least until the next mor­ning. Two tracks later, the trick is repeated with ʽAphroditeʼ, and it almost works, except that this time, they resort to the usual trick of «make that chorus louder! It's the CHORUS, goddammit!», and spoil much of the effect of the "all I know 'bout is desire baby" refrain with the same power chords that we have already had the chance to chew up, swallow, shit out, scoop up, repeat pro­cess etc. so many times.

 

In between these and other ballads, however, we still keep getting regurgitated trash like ʽFortune Tellerʼ, which has no instrumental melody that I am aware of, borrows its verse vocal melody from some other song that I am fairly sure I have heard many times before, and is not ashamed to actually quote from the other, much better known, ʽFortune Tellerʼ (Benny Spellman / Rolling Stones / Who, etc.) in the first line of its chorus vocal melody. I mean — come on, really, that is not how one is supposed to come up with new rock'n'roll songs, even if they have an explicit retro orientation. Really!

 

Clearly a thumbs down here overall: for a band that gets most of its acclaim for distorted guitar-driven rock thunderstorms, Nu-Clear Sounds produces a way too suspicious impression of an album written by an aspiring folk songwriter, a wannabe 1990s Donovan, cruelly mishandled by Fate and thrown into the lion den of rock'n'rollers with a stern order to prove yourself or die try­ing. And that's me attempting to put it in an interesting framework — when, really, the album is so dead boring that I am frankly amazed at my own self with that phrasing.

 

FREE ALL ANGELS (2001)

 

1) Walking Barefoot; 2) Shining Light; 3) Burn Baby Burn; 4) Candy; 5) Cherry Bomb; 6) Submission; 7) Someday; 8) Pacific Palisades; 9) Shark; 10) Sometimes; 11) Nicole; 12) There's A Star; 13) World Domination.

 

Lighter, faster, less folksy, but more actively rock'n'rollish than Nu-Clear Sounds — I have al­most taken a liking to this album, despite the obvious fact that this is still very much an Ash al­bum, and that Tim Wheeler is not the Pete Townshend of his generation and will never be. How­ever, each time that his inner «Heavy Lead Monster» goes to sleep and the «Light Magnesium Elf» takes over the watch, the sickness wanes and the music becomes listenable — and, in places, even highly enjoyable. This is one of the better samples.

 

The early parts are not particularly promising. ʽWalking Barefootʼ starts things off on a happy pop-punk note — fast, frivolously romantic, but generally hookless and flat; and the five-minute long ʽShining Lightʼ is optimistic enough not to get condemned as generic depressed alt-rock crap, but just as flat and predictable («now we are relatively quiet... now we SUDDENLY be­come loud as heck... what else do you need to get it shoved down your throat?»).

 

However, already the third track, ʽBurn Baby Burnʼ, lights up a little candle. A nice picking pat­tern, a fast rumbling bass line, a «choppier», livelier rhythm, a slightly less trivial chorus, a classy trill-based solo — is this an attempt to put the fun back where it belongs, or what? ʽSubmissionʼ builds up a hot funky groove whose principal hook (an electronically treated "you turn me on...") may irritate you, but that wouldn't make it any less of a hook. ʽPacific Palisadesʼ is the next entry in the ongoing series of Beach Boys / Ramones tributes, and arguably the best one so far —lyrics like "I lie with candles by my bed / Brian Wilson in my head" may be a bit too obvious, but the chorus resolution is still tremendously uplifting. ʽSharkʼ brings back the aggression in the form of a deep guitar tone, pitch-torturing effects, and vocals pressed into an ugly sneer on the "violent mind, violent mind" chorus. And so on.

 

The sentimental domain of the album generally comes in the form of loud, but not particularly «power-loud» ballads, usually acoustic or joint acoustic-electric in form and more often than not backed up with a thick layer of fake strings — sometimes emulating actual strings and sometimes bringing back Mellotron memories (ʽCandyʼ). I cannot see any great discoveries, but, considering that ballads are a dangerous thing altogether, Wheeler gets off all right this time. The "was it a dream I had..." bit on ʽSomedayʼ even manages to have a special ring to it. ʽSometimesʼ sounds like Blur on a cloudy day, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

A decent affair altogether, and it succeeds in lifting a small corner of the «alt-rock curse» which lay heavily all over Ash all through the 1990s: on more than one song here, they let in a little bit of sunshine, and do not seem so genuinely eager to honor the limited array of distorted rock guitar clichés of  the genre. Of course, it also has to do with all sorts of other honorings: from the Beach Boys to the Jesus and Mary Chain, almost every one of these songs could be deciphered as a sum of several influences. But if you ask me, it's better to be inspired by the Beach Boys than the Stone Temple Pilots, regardless of who you are and where you stand.

 

A touch of experimentation, a drop of diversity, a smudge of lightness and poppy optimism, and Free All Angels may even be a better album than 1977, if not as histo­rically important — but then again, is there anything about Ash that will seriously look «histori­cally important» ten years from now? Thumbs up, in the meantime.

 

MELTDOWN (2005)

 

1) Meltdown; 2) Orpheus; 3) Evil Eye; 4) Clones; 5) Star-Crossed; 6) Out Of The Blue; 7) Renegade Cavalcade; 8) Detonator; 9) On A Wave; 10) Won't Be Saved; 11) Vampire Love; 12*) Shockwave; 13*) Solace; 14*) Cool It Down.

 

Wrong move. Some stupid jerk must have complained that Free All Angels was way too «hap­py» and «sissy» to match the honor of the proud sons of Ireland, and incidentally shamed Whee­ler into returning to the tough standards of Nu-Clear Sounds. The title alone says it all: after «nuclear sounds», comes the «meltdown». An exaggeration, for sure, but it does feel like the si­ckening radiation effects of the 1998 album are back. Be sure to check your hairs after listening, or, better still, wrap yourself in aluminium foil before listening.

 

Something like nine out of eleven tracks on here are moderately fast heavy rockers, most of them in such idioms as «pop-punk», «electro-funk», «slam-dunk», and «stinky-skunk». Their emotio­nal pattern is formally «aggressive», but with a heavy mix of sarcasm: as the title track breaks in with "revolution, we're the solution, we're gonna take it to the overload", Wheeler's sneer makes it clear that the aggression is as much directed at the simplistic system-bashers as it is at the system itself. That's fine by me — intelligence and sarcasm are always welcome in pop music.

 

What is not fine is that the music has once again dissolved in a sea of well-coordinated, but deadly boring noise. Guitar parts on ʽMeltdownʼ grumble, but never crunch, or form a distinctive, individual riff. Repeat same phrase nine times, substituting other track names, and you get an overall portrait of the album. The vocal parts are slightly better, but still lazy — "I think my head is gonna explode, I think my head is gonna overload" is a tense, but all too familiar angsty trick, and it lacks gusto.

 

If the mood occasionally lightens up, it is still not enough to pierce through the lazy haze. ʽOr­pheusʼ, for instance, goes from a gruff metallic verse to a «sunnier» power-pop chorus, but it's a generic alt-rock chorus all the same — no particular inspiration detected. ʽStarcrossedʼ is a parti­cular shameful affair: the album's only slow-paced ballad, sternly deprived of Wheeler's soft folk­sy hooks and turned into a bland «power» show-off.

 

I wish I could concentrate more effectively on some of these rockers and sort out the «hookless» and the «weakly-hooked» ones, but it would just waste everybody's time, so let's just go straight to the bottomline: Meltdown sacrifices diversity and melodicity for a «kick-ass» approach, and the results can be predicted accurately, because Tim Wheeler is about as good at kicking ass as Meat Loaf is at singing opera. As in «it can be done, but why?...». Thumbs down.

 

P.S. Acquaintance with alternate reviews shows that ʽClonesʼ is regularly being extolled as a particularly vengeful, raucous highlight, if not even one of the best songs in the Ash repertoire. I beg to differ. Flat lyrics like "Shame, that everyone's the same / I thought you stood alone / We're different from the clones" are primitively bad on their own, but it hurts twice as bad when they are set to a pedestrian funk metal melody, further weakened by a muffled, overcompressed guitar tone. (Even the Red Hot Chili Peppers could have given the song more liveliness). Take a hint, people: if you want to write a song about loss of individuality, either drown your lyrical content in Dylanisms or at least bother writing a melody which only a ruthless troll could put down as a boring copy-paste affair.

 

TWILIGHT OF THE INNOCENTS (2007)

 

1) I Started A Fire; 2) You Can't Have It All; 3) Blacklisted; 4) Polaris; 5) Palace Of Excess; 6) End Of The World; 7) Ritual; 8) Shadows; 9) Princess Six; 10) Dark And Stormy; 11) Shattered Glass; 12) Twilight Of The Innocents.

 

In my highly subjective, one-in-a-billion, opinion, completely irrelevant in the face of the uni­verse and its struggle for perfection, peace, and justice — Twilight Of The Innocents, pre­sumably the last ever LP-format release in Ash history, is a pile of bland, instantly forgettable, proverbially generic, emotionally disappointing, intellectually insulting, historically insignificant, culturally repugnant airwave stimulants, with a passable superficial similarity to a certain style of art they used to call «music».

 

To soften the blow, I hasten to confirm that the exact same definition could be slapped on a mil­lion other records, including complete discographies of certain artists we could (but won't) name — and also express a certain amount of satisfaction. For more than a decade, Ash seemed like the perfect band to release a primetime suckjob of an album, but something always stopped them at the last moment: a cool vocal hook or two, a passable funky groove, a well-thought out guitar so­lo, a heartfully delivered folksy melody, something like that. Now, with Charlotte Hatherley once again out of the band, the classic trio finally feels free to fire their worst shot.

 

Apparently, the intention here was to play it more «raw», less «polished» – a statement that, co­ming from the mouths of most modern bands, is usually translatable to «run for the hills», be­cause, nine times out of ten, dropping the «polish» also means abandoning any attempts at wri­ting non-trivial melodies. Which is really logical: «raw», «unpolished», «with a live feel to it» is frequently understood as «go into the studio and hammer out anything that just blunders into your head. Don't worry, you're a pro, you're bound to sweat out some inspiration».

 

None of these guys happens to be Thelonious Monk or Keith Jarrett, though, and even if these songs were all written on the spur of the moment, that does not excuse their existence (and if they weren't, that's even worse). Everything here is written in the genre of... «rock music» (shudder), where one guy plays the drums, another one plucks the bass, and a third one picks distorted notes on the electric guitar. Ever heard of that? Oh yes, they do it rhythmically, so you can punch a couple of holes in the floor if you got spikes on your shoes.

 

There is not a single memorable riff here, nowhere in sight. There are claims at catchy choruses that rarely go beyond shouting the same line over and over again (ʽYou Can't Have It Allʼ). There is one slightly more than hopeless, but still quite pathetic attempt at coming up with an anthemic, «soulful» Brit-pop ballad (ʽEnd Of The Worldʼ), a last humiliating lick at the lollipop already consumed by the likes of Oasis – how does it taste licking a wooden stick? There are a few at­tempts at guitar jangle-laden power pop that don't even manage to step outside the door, because the jangle is compressed into sonic muck (ʽShadowsʼ) . There is an «epic» conclusion (title track) laced with falsetto and a bunch of strings rolling over Beethoven. None of it works. There may be craft, but there is no sign of genius.

 

It is true that there is less noise here than on Meltdown — the nu-metal legacy is almost out, re­placed by nostalgia for the «1990s nostalgizing for the 1970s». But this is neither good nor bad in itself. And Twilight does not even feel like a sweeping nostalgic gesture: it does everything in half-terms, and ends up sagging rather than bulging in between its countdown points. Goshdarn it, there are only two things that Tim Wheeler can sometimes do really well — bash out sunny-hap­py Ramones rip-offs and sing sentimental folksy ballads — and this record just goes on to prove it by featuring neither. Thumbs down, violently.

 

A-Z VOL. 1 (2010)

 

1) Return Of White Rabbit; 2) True Love 1980; 3) Joy Kicks Darkness; 4) Arcadia; 5) Tracers; 6) The Dead Dis­ciples; 7) Pripyat; 8) Ichiban; 9) Space Shot; 10) Neon; 11) Command; 12) Song Of Your Desire; 13) Dionysian Urge; 14) War With Me; 15) Coming Around Again; 16) The Creeps; 17) CTRL-ALT-DEL; 18) Do You Feel It?; 19*) Kamakura.

 

Apparently, Wheeler himself quoted two main reasons for the band abandoning the LP format after Twilight Of The Innocents. Reason number one: disappointment with the record label that allegedly did nothing to promote an album that cost them so much time and effort. Reason num­ber two: «LPs are on their way out» due to the spread of digital downloads that have once again taken the emphasis off lengthy, coherent musical statements and put it on individual songs. Roll over Sgt. Pepper, we're back to good old Sun Sessions days.

 

I am not sure either of these considerations stands criticism, though. For one thing, Twilight Of The Innocents was a miserable piece of shit; no responsible record executive should have consi­dered releasing it on the market in the first place, let alone wasting time trying to promote it. For another, the rise of digital downloads still has not eliminated the need for LPs: few, if any, bands have followed the example of Ash, provided they have a record contract and a serious distributor in the first place. It is far more likely that the decision to switch to singles format was just a gim­mick — a last minute trick to draw some press attention and, perhaps, re-carve a unique niche for the band. If they could not retain musical individuality, they could at least take pride in an in­di­vi­duality of for­mat.

 

Ironically, Father Time has already judged that, if any of these singles are going to be listened to in the future, they will be downloaded as collections, particularly because Ash themselves even­tually succumbed to the temptation and released the A-Z series of singles in two volumes as early as 2010. The title itself, where each single is assigned an individual letter and an individual color, is another gimmick (Tim Wheeler swears to God that he really sees each of these songs in a dif­ferent color, but we won't know for sure until he donates his body to Science). So was there ever a point in making a big fuss of it in the first place?

 

In terms of a «greater good» or «innovativeness» — definitely not. But, amusingly, in terms of Ash's own musical integrity and career, definitely yes. The songs assembled on A-Z Vol. 1 are, overall, a huge improvement over the monumental boredom of Ash's last several studio albums. Releasing a new song every two weeks really helped them concentrate on the material: there is no issue of «filler», since every track is its own focus, and there may be more pop hooks here alto­gether than there have been over the entire course of the band's career, bar one or two better re­cords like Free All Angels.

 

There are no attempts at serious musical change, except for a slight occasional nod to electronics (most evidently visible in the opening track, ʽReturn Of White Rabbitʼ), but all these singles are mostly just power pop — you don't need much except catchy hooks and a little bit of emotion to make this stuff work. And much of this stuff does work — as incredible as it may seem to those who, like me, have been so thoroughly disappointed in Ash's last couple of albums at least, if not their entire career and meaning of existence.

 

For instance, ʽReturn Of White Rabbitʼ is really a fun track. The synth loops that bubble beneath the surface are only really there for wall-of-sound purposes; the song in general hangs upon its R'n'B-ish bassline and catchy-as-hell chorus ("is this the end of the line my friend..."). There is even a little bit of paranoid atmosphere to match the lyrics ("I followed the rabbit and now I am lost and alone... locked in a nightmare that's all closing in on me") — not a lot, but enough to complete the hooklines and turn the whole thing into one of the more respectable «mainstream-oriented» hits of 2009. Nasty critics whined about the band transforming into a clone of Franz Ferdinand with this release, but at this point, nobody should really give a damn: Ash are now on­ly as good as their pop hooks are, and these pop hooks may be in anybody's style, be it Franz Ferdinand, the Bay City Rollers, or Johann Strauss Jr.

 

I cannot admit to falling in real love with any of these numbers, but I could possibly see myself doing that, had I been a pathological fan of derivative power-pop, ready to listen to the whole thing thirty rather than the required three times in a row. Let's see... examples? All right. ʽArca­diaʼ, with its clouds-oriented chorus of uplifting piano chords and high-pitched whoah-whoah harmonies, is an attempt to write something in Arcade Fire style: shallower, but vivacious and friendly enough for us to look past that. ʽIchibanʼ is more of a classic Cheap Trick send-up, built on the same basic rhythms as ʽI Want You To Want Meʼ, but more anthemic. ʽWar With Meʼ is a tasteful mix of simple piano riffs, simple piano flourishes, and simple vocal harmonies that is al­most impossible to resist. ʽThe Creepsʼ is funny pop-punk that manages to be accessible, inoffen­sive, and sincere-sounding at the same time. And so on.

 

Very few of the songs are in ballad mode, which is understandable, because you do not usually put out ballads as singles; the ones that veer towards balladry mode through slower tempos and increased sentimentality are usually my least favorite ones (ʽPripyatʼ, ʽSong Of Your Desireʼ), but they are not awful or anything — they just do not exploit Wheeler's strong sides, and should have been done as less heavily arranged folksy ditties instead. But most of these eighteen tracks are in fully dynamic mode.

 

In the end, the gimmick worked — not because of the gimmickry itself, but because it gave the guys a chance to clear their heads and get rid of the «filler bug». It is not very interesting to write about these individual tracks, whose only strength lies in a careful selection of chords, but that is a typical reviewer problem when it comes to simple, unpretentious pop rock. What is truly impor­tant is that there has been a genuine rebound, and with these songs Ash have propped up their, still highly dubious, body of work on extremely solid support. They haven't been that good for al­most a decade — and these singles have legitimately established a point at which no artist can any longer be considered a «fluke». Maybe it ain't genius, but it's durable craftsmanship, and durable craftsmanship always gets a thumbs up from me.

 

A-Z VOL. 2 (2010)

 

1) Dare To Dream; 2) Mind Control; 3) Insects; 4) Binary; 5) Physical World; 6) Spheres; 7) Instinct; 8) Summer Snow; 9) Carnal Love; 10) Embers; 11) Change Your Name; 12) Sky Burial; 13) There Is Hope Again; 14) Teenage Wildlife; 15) Spellbound; 16) Nightfall.

 

The second volume in the series seems slightly less engaging than the first. There is a little bit more electronics, a little bit less hooks, and a nagging feeling that this formula simply cannot go on forever, or, at least, that the English alphabet simply has too many letters in it to adequately fit Tim Wheeler's purposes. But overall, if you already own — and like — the first half of the series, there is no reason not to own and like the second half.

 

The review will be brief, because most of the general remarks have already been made for Vol. 1, and specific remarks are hard to come by — this is Ash, after all, not the Beach Boys or the Beatles, there is not a lot to latch onto. Catchiest tunes so far are ʽPhysical Worldʼ, one of their trademark fast-paced pop-punk ravers with a message we can all identify with: ("Come back to the physical world, you're lost in the digital world" — tell me about it); ʽInstinctʼ, whose lyrics ("I'm animal, I'm not machine") strangely contrast with heavy use of Cold Synth Harbor; and the anthemic six-minute performance of ʽTeenage Wildlifeʼ, a great, inspiring tune if there ever was one... oh wait, it's a David Bowie song. Bummer.

 

I have to admit that even the electronic dance stuff is sometimes linked to vocal hooks the likes of which this band rarely, if ever, knew before. There is nothing surprising or particularly likeable about the likes of ʽBinaryʼ, but the chorus truly sounds amazing, with a set of "alright, alright"s in the background that can even remedy a sinking mood — try it out. On the other hand, their at­tempts at mimicking the Arcade Fire sound do not work so well: ʽDare To Dreamʼ builds up a wall of sound all right, but Arcade Fire, at their best, make the song sound big/sprawling/anthe­mic and personal/confessional at the same time. Wheeler, on the other hand, manages the spraw­ling thing well enough, but there's nothing intimate about it.

 

Arguably the best thing on the entire record, however, is ʽSky Burialʼ — in fact, it might just be the most daring thing Ash ever attempted in their lifetime, and they get away with it: a ten-minute long, almost «progressive», instrumental whose purpose it is to take you to the skies (don't really know about the burial, though — there is nothing funebral here whatsoever). A ten-minute «jam» like that from a band known for its generic alt-rock inclinations should be awful, but this isn't really a jam: it's a well-structured, progressively developing composition, moving along at a brisk, energetic pace (apart from a slowed down, minimalistic-atmospheric midsection), alternating riffs, trills, pretty slide guitar trips, bombastic power sections, wailing blues-rock solos, and a big wah-wah fury in the final section.

 

The whole thing arrives completely unexpected: you don't normally expect a lack of vocals or a ten-minute length on a single, and Ash are not usually known for taking these sorts of risks. I am not even sure that I really like it so much on its own, not simply for the reason that it stands out so much. But more likely, it just confirms the old suspicion once again: in a different age, Tim Wheeler would not have been saddled with bland mainstream «rock» conventions of his era, and could be continuously doing stuff like that — painting complex semi-psychedelic pictures that begin in Allman Brothers territory and end up on Hawkwind turf. It would have been derivative and not always amazing, but it could have been consistently entertaining. In any case, I am glad that this whole «singles» idea worked, and that, somehow, it gave the band a chance to stretch out and do stuff beyond their usual image. Thumbs up, and it would be curious to know where they will be headed from here in the future: for the next two years, Wheeler kept a fairly low profile.

 

KABLAMMO! (2015)

 

1) Cocoon; 2) Let's Ride; 3) Machinery; 4) Free; 5) Go! Fight! Win!; 6) Moondust; 7) Evil Knievel; 8) Hedonism; 9) Dispatch; 10) Shutdown; 11) For Eternity; 12) Bring Back The Summer.

 

Well, it looks as if the LP is here to stay, after all: after all these years of rationalizing about how the format has outlived itself, and how they are going to stick to the single-song routine from now on, Tim Wheeler surreptitiously returns to the tried and true — a monolithic collection of twelve new songs, tied together with a comic-book-derived title that suggests... huge impact? Well, you wish. According to the world at large, Ash had had their three-five-ten seconds of fame twenty years ago, and you might just as well be listening to Gilles Binchois these days — in fact, I am fairly certain that early medieval composers have a more loyal fanbase today than slowly aging alt-rockers from the 1990s. Had they had the most wittily composed and memorable melodies in a decade, even then this record would hardly cause a ripple. Yes, if you accumulate enough im­pulse, like the Stones or Madonna, you're pretty much set for life — but if you just had a small bunch of alt-rock radio hits twenty years ago, who gives a damn? You're not even yesterday's news, pal, you're more like an unknown quantum state.

 

Why am I bitching about this? Because, believe it or not, I get the feeling that with Kablammo!, Wheeler and Co. have produced their finest album in... oh wait... maybe, like, ever. It was curious how that A-Z run of singles actually helped Wheeler pay more attention to his melodies and avoid too much filler, but it seems as if the long-term effects, too, have been beneficial, and these days, Ash just go on writing good songs — not great, earth-shattering, innovative songs, but just regular power-pop and art-pop songs that sound... nice. No big pretense, no attempts to change the world, just half an hour of emotionally charged music.

 

The lead single and the opening track is ʽCocoonʼ, and you will not fail to notice that it consists almost exclusively of clichés — opening with the ʽHard Day's Nightʼ power chord, then laun­ching into the introduction with some powerhouse Blondie-style drumming, then superimposing simple falsetto chorus harmonies over chainsaw guitar riffage (Ramones or My Bloody Valen­tine?), but it all works out, and there is even an uplifting, high-pitched power-pop lead line pop­ping up from time to time if you needed an extra hook. The lyrics? They have no significance, it's just fun to sing along with "cocoo-oo-waa-oon, cocoo-oo-waa-oon", especially if you have no problem hitting the falsetto range. Cool song, me likey.

 

Then comes song number two, which wasn't even a single: ʽLet's Rideʼ. Guitar fanfare for the announcement, drum bash, a jagged glam-style guitar riff... the chorus could perhaps use less reliance on grumbly power chords, but then they rectify things with an added hard rock melody for the bridge (that's what, two different riffs in a 2015 pop song? what a reckless waste of mate­rial!) and an ecstatic blubbering solo. No complaining from me.

 

Okay, that's a little too much Smiths influence at the beginning of track three, ʽMachineryʼ. But then the Smiths usually favored slower tempos, and anyway, Wheeler is neither a master of true guitar jangle nor a fan of theatrical vocal deliveries, so by the time they rise to the top of that cho­rus, everything is forgiven. Again, good song. But now comes the big quest — a ballad! With ʽFreeʼ, you still have a relatively fast rhythm, echoey psychedelic guitar tones, and another catchy chorus, quietly burning with longing, yearning, whatever it takes to justify the song title, and then towards the end you get a restrained, but focused intrusion from some strings and cellos: another nice touch that was completely unnecessary, but it feels so good to have it here.

 

And now comes the really odd part: it's all more or less like that right to the very end. Nicely constructed, pleasantly executed songs of love, hope, frustration, and a little nostalgia, one after another. Nothing is particularly awe-inspiring, but nothing is particularly stupid, either. The two big orchestrated ballads (ʽMoondustʼ and ʽFor Eternityʼ) echo John Lennon, Elton John, and ELO rather than Eighties' and post-Eighties power ballads, with more emphasis on cellos and acoustic guitars than violins and electric guitars (that's always a good sign); the instrumental ʽEvil Knie­velʼ is like a joint tribute to James Bond themes, spaghetti-western overtures, and Ritchie Black­more at the same time; and ʽBring Back The Summerʼ finishes the album on a Beach Boyish note, so endearing that we can even forget them the inscrutable decision to use a drum machine. Maybe drum machines are well known for their ability to bring back the summer.

 

To put an unnecessarily long story short, Kablammo! keeps it short, simple, but smart, and I sup­pose that might just be the only way to go about it in an era where 99% of conscious attempts to «innovate» just pathetically end up reinventing the wheel. At any rate, I wouldn't be surprised if it ultimately turned out to be one of the best rock albums of 2015 — at least, I certainly wouldn't object to this becoming a reality. Congratulations, Mr. Wheeler, all you really had to do was open your mind to as many clichés as possible — not just Nineties clichés, but all the way to the Se­venties and Six­ties — and then your mind was able to reshuffle and recombine them in such a surprisingly refreshing manner. If this is mediocrity, well, gimme more; for now, just a very grate­ful thumbs up, because it is albums like these that show how my obsession with complete discographies is not always a total OCD-related waste.

 

AT THE DRIVE-IN

ACROBATIC TENEMENT (1996)

 

1) Star Slight; 2) Schaffino; 3) Ebroglio; 4) Initiation; 5) Communication Drive-In; 6) Skips On The Record; 7) Paid Vacation Time; 8) Ticklish; 9) Blue Tag; 10) Coating Of Arms; 11) Porfirio Diaz.

 

«Early Texan post-hardcore». Don't you just love it when it's that easy to pigeonhole? It's really the next step that is far more difficult to take. For instance, what is post-hardcore? If it really is something, is there any real need for it? Are there any generic traits of Texan post-hardcore that distinguish it from LA post-hardcore? Is this band good, or what?

 

So, instead of answering all these questions and drowning the review in terminology debates, let me just try to explain what the whole thing is like. Two interlocking guitars playing drones and jazz-influenced lead lines — an approach that reminds one of Television, only these guys are pre­dictably louder and wilder. A lead vocalist with a heavy nasal twang who considers singing an af­front to good taste, but is not strong enough for proper barking. Songs that are utterly unmemo­rable and often indistinguishable from each other, but still have invigorating potential. Impres­sionistic lyrics that never make the slightest sense, but still spit out the collective unconscious. And — poor, but not awful, production values (not bad for $600, I'd say).

 

Such is Acrobatic Tenement, an album that is usually said to capture At The Drive-In still in their formative phase. But since they eventually spent more time in the formative phase than in the fully formed one, we might just as well consider it their first «masterpiece», as far as this par­ticular style of making music is concerned.

 

The problem with reviewing this style is that it does nothing for me. Except for the slower, bass-heavier, moodier «ballad» ʽInitiationʼ, where Bixler's vocals occasionally try to turn to falsetto, everything else sticks together in a shapeless mess. It is not a noisy mess: the guitars favor the drone over the chainsaw buzz, and the collective effect frequently lands in the same ballpark with Velvet Underground jams or even avantgarde jazz stuff. But there is nothing particularly fresh, startling, or interesting about this drone. The guitars don't play anything that you haven't already heard from the Velvets, Television, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, or some other bunch of smelly jerks; and Bixler seems capable of one single vocal intonation, which sounds invigorating on the first track, familiar on the second, predictable on the third, annoying on the fourth, irritating on the fifth, and from then on it's just KILL KILL KILL.

 

If you want a good sampling of what these guys can do best when they are «weaving» their gui­tars, check out ʽSkips On The Recordʼ with its mix of drones and wobbles; or ʽTicklishʼ, which has some nice speedy picking there — but only if you already have a propensity for this kind of music, because if you are not already genetically engineered to adore «post-hardcore», Acrobatic Tene­ment will probably not convince you. If you want to see these guys at their most obviously «heartfelt», check out ʽEbroglioʼ, dedicated to a close friend who committed suicide that year: perhaps Jim Ward's and Adam Amparan's guitars will inflict catharsis, and Bixler's singing will make the stars shine bright on a cloudy day.

 

But if you do not want anything by yourself, I am certainly not going to insist that you rush out and hear the album at all. At best, it is better than a lot of noisy, flash-in-the-pan hardcore that it grew out of. Can that be a compliment? Nope. In reality, At The Drive-In only recorded one good LP in their brief lifetime, and this one's not it. Thumbs down.

 

IN/CASINO/OUT (1998)

 

1) Alpha Centauri; 2) Chanbara; 3) Hulahoop Wounds; 4) Napoleon Solo; 5) Pickpocket; 6) For Now... We Toast; 7) A Devil Among The Tailors; 8) Shaking Hand Incision; 9) Lopsided; 10) Hourglass; 11) Transatlantic Foe.

 

Big lineup changes here: former bassist Omar Rodríguez switches to second guitar, with Paul Hi­nojos taking his place, and drummer Ryan Sawyer is replaced by Tony Hajjar. Are these shuffles responsible for a change in sound? No idea, but there is a change in sound, and not necessarily a good one, as far as my ears can tell.

 

The album was issued under a rather standard ideological sauce: «we want to come close to re­producing our live sound in the studio». This idea never worked for the Who, who pretty much abandoned it after several unsuccessful attempts; why it should have worked for At The Drive-In is never made clear. What it all comes down to is sacrificing the basic studio sound of Acrobatic Tene­ment — a sort of «Television updated for the 1990s» — and plunging deep into the world of loudness, distortion, power chords, screaming, and other charming attributes of noise-rock.

 

At this point, Cedric Bixler certainly sounds like one of the illegitimate sons of Captain Beefheart: the songs never distinguish properly between verse and chorus, the lyrics are an endless stream of consciousness that never makes literal sense but sometimes creates a «mood», the vocals are lite­rally «on the edge», and the music is intentionally ugly and non-catchy. The only problem is, In/ Casino/Out is no Trout Mask Replica. The lyrics have too few intriguing lines, and the words are mostly indiscernible anyway; Bixler's screaming is no better or worse than the acoustic waves sent out by millions of punk guys across the world; and the music...

 

...well, a few songs are genuinely interesting in one way or another. ʽPickpocketʼ is fast, concise, collected, and riding on a set of wobbly, quasi-psychedelic guitar lines that are at least amusing, and at best, inspirational. That is an example of an actual song with an idea behind it. Then comes ʽFor Now... We Toastʼ, where the same type of wobbly line makes an occasional appearance — but most of the time the musical background remains just a background, loud, but bland.

 

Many of the songs use a broken, stop-and-start structure (ʽA Devil Among The Tailorsʼ), pre­ten­ding to some sort of «avantgarde» structure — and despite the band's loyalty to the usual soft-verse-vs.-loud-chorus trick (except, as I said, there is no verse/chorus distinction here, un­less the «getting louder» part always counts as the chorus), anyway, despite that, yes, quite a few chord and rhythm changes here are relatively unpredictable. The only problem is, this group is smart, but taken together, they aren't exactly the Mothers of Invention or the Magic Band. They handle their instruments on the same level as any modestly capable punk band, no more and no less. And when you do not play your instruments in a particularly complex or unusual way, «ex­peri­men­tation» is usually a dead end.

 

To be fair, the album finds quite a warm reception in certain circles; I have seen terms like «ama­zing songwriting» and «unparalleled musicianship» applied to such songs as ʽAlpha Centauriʼ and ʽLopsidedʼ far more often than I'd like or even expect to. Therefore, I have a diplomatic duty to acknowledge that, perhaps, I am not «getting» something here. As far as musicianship goes, there is, at best, a bit of «nice» jangly / drony interplay between the two guitars (far less interes­ting than, for instance, the Bachmann/Johnson duets on Archers of Loaf albums), and the song­writing never advances beyond well-trodden paths of proto-punk and post-punk artists.

 

But my biggest concern is probably with Bixler, who is simply unbearable here — a naturally whiny guy trying to scream his lungs out is far more annoying than just a natural-born screamer. Eleven songs in a row try to convey a sharp personal tragedy of desperation and disillusionment, spat out in a schizophrenic stream of non sequiturs, and all I can discern is a sociopathic guy in bad need of professional help. (Side note for those who understand: while At The Drive-In could be seen as sort of a «Birth­day Party» prequel to the «Bad Seeds» of The Mars Volta, the compa­rison would never be secure, since Bixler never really «found himself» with his first band, where­as Nick Cave was already perfectly well within his element on the first Birthday Party albums).

 

Bottomline: if you like your N-O-I-S-E clumsily stuffed into a relatively conventional song for­mat, and your punky music dressed with «modern improvisational poetry», In/Casino/Out may well be for you. But not for me — I think that, unlike the first and third LP from this band, this one has almost nothing redeemable about its thumbs down.

 

VAYA (1999)

 

1) Rascuache; 2) Proxima Centauri; 3) Ursa Minor; 4) Heliotrope; 5) Metronome Arthritis; 6) 300 MHz; 7) 198d.

 

Not the first, but the longest EP released by these guys, it deserves its own brief review because it is generally considered to be an important transitional step — sort of a threshold where they fi­nally stopped seeing their noisy schtick as a thing-in-itself, and started using it as a foundation upon which something bigger could eventually be built up. What would be built up is another matter, and I am still not sure that either Vaya or its lumpier full-length successor are «awesome» records in the way that they are revered by the fans, but...

 

...there's a change in the air, and it is a change for the good. Vaya cuts down on the straightfor­ward noisemaking of In/Casino/Out, brings back some of the twisted guitar geometry of Acro­batic Tenement, and throws in a few new ingredients, mainly, a huge emphasis on «dirge-like» bass and guitar chords. As a result, Vaya gels together as a sort of twenty-minute long punk re­qui­em — appropriate enough for a record whose last song is said to be dedicated to the drum­mer's grandmother, buried in a mass grave in Lebanon (Tony Hajjar's family actually fled to the States from the Civil War in the 1970s).

 

It is, in fact, only when I started looking at Vaya this way that something clicked (and I tried re­listening to the earlier albums this way, too, and it did not help). This is a carefully — much more carefully than before — constructed projection of human madness and its consequences, preten­ding to far more importance than you'd initially assume it to. The lyrics still flow in seemingly random streams of conscience, but as the music that backs them becomes loaded with a sense of purpose, the words no longer irritate at random — important signals are let out at regular intervals: "mastadon infantry radiate this frequency"... "civilization tastes so good, Nero has conquered the stars..." "they will come and get you tonight, so I guess this is goodnight..." "it's as if someone raised the price of dying to maximum vend again..." "what if forensics finds the answers, what if they stole my fingerprints?.." "amnesia proletariat, coughing up the coffins..." "you speak in ton­gues, tremors that warn us of ourselves..." ...see, it's starting to come together somehow.

 

As for the music, it is still anything but memorable, but now they know how to make atmosphere — by putting more fuzz on the bass and letting it roam along the premises louder and prouder than they used to, by alternating quiet and loud sections with more suspense than they were ca­pable of mustering, by bringing back the «guitar-weaving» techniques, by toying around with echoes and bits of electronics, by... well, I don't want to create the impression that these songs are very «diverse», because they are not, but the end result is a complex, intelligent, and, of course, hard-rocking grimness that warrants repeated listens until something sinks in.

 

Because this is so short, there are no high- or lowlights. ʽHeliotropeʼ is one of their fastest and craziest numbers; ʽMetronome Arthritisʼ is an attempt at «dark soul» that culminates in the "what if forensics..." line, the grandest gesture of paranoia in the band's career; ʽ300 Mhzʼ is the album's humble simulation of a worldwide nuclear meltdown; and ʽ198dʼ sometimes quietly, sometimes all-out loudly wails over the consequences. They do not really work apart from each other, and it takes a few listens and a bit of an effort to even make them work together, but once the effort is made, it is hard not to acknowledge that, finally, At The Drive-In managed to transform their «edu­cated brutality» into a form of, ho hum, modern art. Thumbs up, right?

 

RELATIONSHIP OF COMMAND (2000)

 

1) Arcarsenal; 2) Pattern Against User; 3) One Armed Scissor; 4) Sleepwalk Capsules; 5) Invalid Litter Dept.; 6) Mannequin Republic; 7) Enfilade; 8) Rolodex Propaganda; 9) Quarantined; 10) Cosmonaut; 11) Non-Zero Possibili­ty; 12*) Catacombs.

 

Vaya on a larger scale — this is the record that finally made the band into a household name (at least, in that kind of households), entered all sorts of critical shortlists and rock textbooks, and gave them a chance to turn the ensuing break-up (or, rather, «indefinite hiatus») into an act of sense and purpose. Meaning that, rather than breaking up in disappointment and going back to the plough, they could break up with satisfaction and go on to become The Mars Volta.

 

Once again, I am not going to lie about how deeply I love and feel for the album. There is really nothing that can be done with this problem: hysterical leftism, hidden under walls of improvisa­tional lyrical metaphors and half-punk, half-math-rock-ish musical constructions, just does not happen to be one of my personal cups of tea. But on the other hand — hey, it took me at least 15 words connected in an unusual manner to attempt to describe what the band is doing here, and this means that Relationship Of Command is hardly a record that you should allow yourself to just shake off your shoulders and be done with it.

 

Parts of this album are still «post-hardcore», burning on mad percussion and fast guitar noise, with the artsy overdubs and convoluted, if not convulsive lyrics providing the «post» part of the deal. But there is just too much atmosphere, vocal harmonies, and sometimes even melodicity for us to simply tag Relationship Of Command as «post-hardcore» and be done with it. What has ʽInvalid Litter Dept.ʼ to do with «hardcore» at all? The backbone of the verse melody is «geo­metric rock» à la 1980's King Crimson, but humanized through the intervention of piano flouri­shes, heavenly slide guitars, and mournful angels chanting about "dancing on the corpses' ashes" (the song is said to be dedicated to the memory of the infamous Juárez murder victims). Hint: subtlety frequently, maybe even almost always, works better than straightforward anger — ʽIn­valid Litter Dept.ʼ is angry enough, but it is the soft flourishes that emphasize the eerie effect, not the "nails broke and fell into the wishing well" chorus, thrown out by Cedric in his usual manner.

 

And there are lots of these neat little touches on Relationship Of Command — the band here is clearly in a state where «formula», no matter how strict or trendy, does not satisfy them any lon­ger. On ʽEnfiladeʼ, for instance, guest star Iggy Pop opens the song with a hushed kidnapper phone monolog — immortalizing the line "Hello, mother leopard. I have your cub!"; the vocals are run through an «underwater» effect; no less than three guitars are interweaving different me­lodies  (a distorted heavy psychedelic pattern, a shrill set of light psychedelic trills, and I'm pretty sure there's a third part there, buried so low in the mix that I can't quite lay my finger on it); and the mid-section breaks into a... lambada? Whatever.

 

This is just what I'm talking about. These melodies still aren't all that memorable, but the album as a whole leaves a great aftertaste — you might not fully understand what you have just sat through, but the creativity, the wish to expand their musical world to make this confused, apoca­lyptic vision of the universe even more evocative, it's all there. Guitar World put the record as No. 94 on its list of 100 most influential guitar albums of all time — I certainly cannot verify the «in­fluential» tag, and I would definitely rate it lower on my personal list, but I do admit that there is a huge, huge, huge mélange of guitar stuff here: pop, punk, New Wave, prog, metal, everything is mixed, and frequently at the same time (ʽOne Armed Scissorʼ shuffles power chords, jazz, acid rock wah-wah soloing and God knows what else). Maybe none of these ingredients are all that in­novative, interesting, or inspiring on their own, but taken together — in the year 2000 — for a kid who never had the chance to learn the history of rock guitar — even for some grown-ups who did — this approach is a real blast of fury.

 

And it all ends with the band's successful attempt at a sort of a «noise requiem»: ʽNon-Zero Pos­sibilityʼ, the last song on their last LP, might be their masterpiece. "Contusion is hungry / They still eat their young / Proto-culture null and void" might be too blunt and hyperbolic, but the song's mix of mournful electric pianos, guitar-produced «bee stings», and noisy electronics in the background, is neither. This is already not so much «classic At The Drive-In» as it is «early pro­to-Mars Volta», announcing a radical shift in perspective, but who cares about the tags? Here they take our world troubles and put a unique dress on them. It may not be the most stunning dress in the world, but it is still a hell of a way to participate in the end-of-the-century «We Are Still A Very Evil Planet» festival. And a fine way to end a highly uneven, questionable, but ulti­mately self-redeeming career — thumbs up by way of listening and reasoning, if not necessarily so by way of hearing and feeling.

ATHEIST

PIECE OF TIME (1989)

 

1) Piece Of Time; 2) Unholy War; 3) Room With A View; 4) On They Slay; 5) Beyond; 6) I Deny; 7) Why Bother?; 8) Life; 9) No Truth.

 

«Technical death metal» is a subgenre forever trapped in its «sub» aspect. What does one really get by combining breakneck speed / ultraheavy riffage / growling vocals / mock-Satanic lyrics with complex time signatures / unpredictable song structures / elements of free-form jazz and ato­nality? Instead of attracting a joint herd of metalheads and prog nuts, bridging the gaps between the two, this kind of music is more likely to alienate both — prog nuts will either be terrified of the death metal clichés or tend to laugh them off, while metalheads will find it a bit difficult to move around the mosh pit when that rhythmic pattern is prone to metamorphosing at unpredic­table intervals. (Not that there are any genuine limits to the power of moshing for the well-sea­so­ned mosher). Which basically explains why Slayer and Rush are superstars while Atheist, whose idea was to combine the virtues of both, are not.

 

But not for lack of trying, of course. On the technical side, these guys are fairly hard to criticize. Lead vocalist Kelly Shaefer does not so much «growl» as he «snaps» and «barks», bringing the style a bit closer to hardcore punk than to regular death metal. Guitar work, shared between Kelly and Rand Burkey, is up to the highest standards of the genre (not much of a surprise, though: if you’re into death metal, your technique is either superb or you’re not into death metal); bassist Roger Patterson takes his cues from Chris Squire rather than Cliff Burton, and drummer Steve Flynn is a big lover of polyrhythms, hands and feet flying in every direction in a state of brother­ly democracy for each limb.

 

In addition, Atheist, as prime representatives of the intellectual pride of Florida, are not content with the usual formulaic guts-and-gore lyricism: in interviews, Schaefer remembers the lyrics of early stuff like ʽLifeʼ (“If chainsaws are your fantasy, I’ll cut your body into three”) with horri­fied embarrassment. It’s not as if they are divine masters of the word — they simply come up with a plain agenda of promoting freedom, individualism, «brainism», and, of course, atheism that is no better or worse than anyone else’s, and, again, this brings them closer to the «hardcore» spirit than the cheese-stained Breath Of The Apocalypse. Of course, in this setting, the regular bowel-cleansing «wwweeeeaaaaarrrgggh!» that Shaefer lets out in between all the preaching do come across as somewhat unnecessary. Maybe they are supposed to represent the protagonist re­gurgitating all the religious shit crammed in his bowels by a three-thousand year old tradition.

 

This is as far as I can go with the appraisal, though. Problems start at the usual point of entry: when you realize that it is all but impossible to tell one song from the other. Not even the slow-to-fast ratio of the tempos is any good indication — Atheist are too smart to let you catch them like that, and almost every tune includes transitions from slow to fast and back again, the «fast» usual­ly in the more faithful speed metal pattern, the «slower» going heavy on the polyrhythms and syn­copation and jazzy jumping (but always with the same metallic guitar tones).

 

The riffs are way too speedy and too complex anyway to allow individual notes and chords to trace an emotional pattern; the vocals create atmosphere, but not hooks; and the finger-flashing metal solos are the least interesting element of the lot — they sound like any other speed metal solo ever played. The overall sound is highly unusual, for sure, but this unusualness comes at the expense of completely forsaking individuality of the tracks, apart from the fact that one or two of them open with «moody» little bits of doom-laden electronic effects. Not that this is so much dif­ferent for many of the serious jazz albums from which Shaefer and the boys drew parts of their inspiration — but at least the best of those albums always knew how to introduce a memorable theme before veering off into a world of shapeless improvisation. These boys riff and riff like there was no tomorrow on their anti-religious propaganda pieces, yet they might just as well have left out the in-between song breaks. One continuous forty-minute long «progressive death metal symphony» would seem more honest in this context.

 

As it is, I can only talk about the overall sound of this thing: technically mind-blowing, emotio­nally rousing if you like to headbang to weird time signatures, and, most importantly, hard to laugh off, except over those brief intervals where Shaefer is getting electrocuted by his own vo­mit all over the microphone. But «hard to laugh off» does not automatically mean «spiritually overwhelming». On their next album, the band would move a little further away from the strict regulations of the genre; Piece Of Time is, however, very rigid in its metal guitar-metal bass-monster drums-growler pipes formula. I give it an «intellectual» thumbs up for recognizing the effort to lift the genre into another dimension, but I am not going to jump for joy just because somebody, somehow, out of nowhere, invented «metal-fusion» one day — I’d like to see a good reason for that invention, which Piece Of Time does not really offer.

 

UNQUESTIONABLE PRESENCE (1991)

 

1) Mother Man; 2) Unquestionable Presence; 3) Retribution; 4) Enthralled In Essence; 5) An Incarnation's Dream; 6) The Formative Years; 7) Brains; 8) And The Psychic Saw.

 

This follow-up to Piece Of Time is usually hailed as the «ultimate» Atheist experience, despite (or, perhaps, due to?) being only thirty minutes long, and also despite having been recorded in the wake of the tragic death of the band's bass player Roger Patterson in a touring van accident; those who really care can always check out the demo versions of the songs, which make up for the en­tire second half of the current CD and feature Patterson's playing. His replacement, Tony Choy, is competent enough to handle his lines, although my brief impression is that, as a result, the album is not as heavy on the bass as its predecessor (at the very least, there aren't quite as many bass so­lo passages this time).

 

The reason why Unquestionable Presence gets all the acclaim is that the band moves even far­ther away from the death metal formula and ever closer to the intricacies of hard bop and free-form jazz. Of course, to fully understand this, you have to replace the metal guitars in your mind with pianos and saxes, and then, perhaps, a distorted vision of Eric Dolphy will fly by in a trans­cendental haze. If the vision remains inconjurable, just think of it as really, really fucked-up death metal. Well — if death itself is a major fuck-up, why shouldn't death metal be one?

 

Unfortunately, I still have a hard time telling one song from the other. But at least this time aro­und, there are occasional interludes that go somewhat beyond fifteen seconds of atmospheric syn­thesizer fiddling. ʽMother Manʼ, for instance, incorporates a few lyrical bits of bass / melodic gui­tar interplay, sprinkled with chirping birds to remind us of the beauty of nature, so hopelessly spoiled by industrialization, pollution, and detrimental sonic waves generated by death metal gui­tars that dominate the other parts of the song. ʽAn Incarnation's Dreamʼ starts off with a folksy acous­tic passage (this can be seen as a humble tribute to «regular» metal). And most of the other tracks, this way or another, incorporate extra melodic guitar bits, albeit usually short ones, wed­ged somewhere in the thin cracks of the stop-and-start passages; of the fully incorporated solos, the one that begins at around 2:00 on ʽRetributionʼ is of particular note — if only it were attached to a more memorable riff!...

 

Lyrically, it's the same old shit all over again ("man prepares to meet his destiny", as Ozzy once sang and since then ninety percent of death metal bands have been doing nothing but commenting on the issue), but vocally, it seems like Shaefer has given up on trying to «growl» and comfortab­ly settled in the «snapping» mode, which is good, since it allows us to take stuff more seriously — especially since its combination of breakneck speed with mind-bending chord changes is it­self more in the «post-hardcore» ballpark than in the death metal one. But overall, there is no trying to pretend that any of these songs have different identities: even their structures are generally simi­lar, with a regular alternation of «funky», «signature-mocking», and «speed metal» parts — one could try and build a working model for this shit, if one cared enough.

 

Hence, another «intellectualized thumbs up» coming on here, but really, writing a useful review for such an album would be a feat of the mind comparable to writing a good review for an Or­nette Coleman record, and I have never read one. Where riffs trigger particular emotions or paint particular impressions, talking about them is easy. Where they just produce a «wow, that's, uh, clever» feeling, you need a good musicologist, and most of them are busy dissecting Glenn Gould rather than Atheist anyway.

 

ELEMENTS (1993)

 

1) Green; 2) Water; 3) Samba Briza; 4) Air; 5) Displacement; 6) Animal; 7) Mineral; 8) Fire; 9) Fractal Point; 10) Earth; 11) See You Again; 12) Elements.

 

According to some sources, we owe the existence of Elements only to the band's contractual ob­ligations: having disbanded in 1992, Atheist came together one last time (or so it seemed at the moment) only to put this album together so that they could get out of their contract with Metal Blade records without a serious headache. In addition, Kelly Shaefer had developed carpal tunnel syndrome and was unable to play lead guitar, so the band had to recruit a third guitarist, Frank Emmi, to take over fifty percent of lead playing duties. Hence, conditions for creativity flow were definitely less than ideal.

 

That said, Elements sounds quite far removed from a generic, disinterested contractual obligation. As may be noticed by just glancing at the song titles, it is a concept album — other than songs de­dicated to each element in particular and all of them at once, the band throws the notions of «ani­mal» and «mineral» into the mix, and starts things out with a general eco-anthem (ʽGreenʼ), although, actually, the majority of the songs here have an ecological undercurrent: it would be fairly hard to find someone representing the interests of Greenpeace more accurately than this bunch of death metal warriors. One notch scored for dedication.

 

Second, of the three «classic era» Atheist albums, Elements represents the biggest departure from the formula — a disappointment for those stark fans who'd want more of the same, but a bit of a relief for the reviewer, who finally has to withdraw the most troublesome criticism: that of all the songs merging together into one big, unsegmentable lump. This problem is now overcome in a simple, but working way: many of the songs are separated by small interludes that show the band branching out in different directions — ʽSamba Brizaʼ features the band's dexterous rhythm sec­ti­on backed by guest pianist David Smadbeck; ʽDisplacementʼ and ʽFractal Pointʼ present a couple of deeply-distorted, but ly­rical slow guitar solos; and ʽSee You Againʼ has some pretty, echo-la­den acoustic picking. Nothing too amazing, but yes, we do need these delimiters.

 

As for the songs themselves, most of the textbook thrash attitude has by now dissipated complete­ly. Where, in the past, they would alternate jazzy time signatures with breakneck chugga-chugga passages, they now consistently keep the odd signatures throughout the pieces — never a dull moment for the drummer boy. «Catchiness» still hardly appears on the menu, and, for that reason, the new approach is not necessarily better than the old one: the themes are still quite hard to me­morize, and the emotional effect is completely uniform regardless of whether they are singing about water, air, fire, or earth — this is probably the biggest conceptual mistake of this conceptu­al album. Then again, they are not singing of the nice spiritual properties of these elements, but rather of various catastrophes, man-made or natural, associated with them, and catastrophes are al­ways catastrophes, be they floods, quakes, or fires, so that could be one possible cop-out.

 

We do have more individual markers placed on the songs than we used to. The Latin acoustic part in ʽWaterʼ, for instance, which does not so much replace the metal basis of the song as it flows in and out of it (flows, hear that?). The odd little guitar-led merry-go-round in the bridge section of ʽWindʼ, whirling around the speakers (whirling, mind you). The «siren»-mode guitar playing on ʽFireʼ; the monkey laugh guitar imitation on ʽAnimalʼ — these are all mostly just minor flouri­shes, but they are at least worth a mention. The best guitar leads, by the way, are on ʽMineralʼ, where each solo is introduced by a gorgeously ominous set of trills that I'm only too happy to add to my very small collection of «finger-flashing bits with genuine evocative power». Granted, I am not too sure what it is exactly that they evoke, but does it really matter? That's why we have the word «evocative» in the lexicon in the first place.

 

It is hardly a big surprise that, overall, Elements tends to be rated poorer than its predecessors, but that is just because it is a little harder to headbang to it — you have to learn quite specific headbanging moves, and it can take a long time. The band members, judging by the live backlog they would perform upon the later reunion, never thought all that much of it, either — perhaps they, too, were sorry about going so far in the «Latin / jazz» direction that the «thrash» sign all but disappeared from the horizon. But on the large scale of things, these arguments seem rather petty — after all, just because the speed rates are slightly lower and the drum parts slightly more syncopated does not mean that Elements does not rock just as hard. I give it the same thumbs up as everything else, and I appreciate the will to change, particularly when it is manifested on an al­bum they did not even intend to make in the first place.

 

UNQUESTIONABLE PRESENCE: LIVE AT WACKEN (2009)

 

1) Unquestionable Presence; 2) On They Slay; 3) Unholy War; 4) Your Life's Retribution; 5) An Incarnation's Dream; 6) Mother Man; 7) And The Psychic Saw; 8) Piece Of Time.

 

Thirteen years passed in a flash and finally Atheist are back! Well, sort of. This lineup, assembled for some rejuvenating touring in 2006, includes Kelly Schaefer (vocals and rhythm guitar only, still suffering from the carpal tunnel thing), old time drummer Steve Flynn — the band's major source of pride and joy, bassist Tony Choy, and two more completely new guitarists coming from Gnostic (there should be a clever pun on the importance of going from «Gnostic» to «Atheist», but I don't have the time to come up with one).

 

To commemorate the glorious fact of the reunion and gain extra time while trying to assemble a new studio album, Schaefer and the kids released this «experience», which is really a 2-CD pack­age: the first CD records a complete live performance at Wacken Open Air in 2006, and the se­cond CD is just a «best-of» compilation, in case the veteran fans already wore out their old al­bums a de­cade ago and the new crowds need a quick introduction to the art of merging the un­mergeable (death metal and avantgarde jazz) in an age when heavy players usually preferred to merge the mergeable (blues metal and mainstream pop).

 

Anyway, the result is an obvious rip-off: the compilation does not have any outtakes or rarities, and the concert CD is just eight songs that clock in under a measly 35 minutes. Considering that Atheist never released an official live album in their prime, one might think it initially useful. However, it is largely superseded now by the bonus tracks attached to the CD edition of Ele­ments — a set of six songs recorded for a radio broadcast in 1992, in very good quality and, fun­ny enough, featuring a relatively shy and quiet style of introducing the tracks, instead of the pre­dictable stadium-geared roar on Live At Wacken. (Probably the only good argument in favor of live radio broadcasts over «proper» live albums).

 

The entire setlist is based on the first two albums, completely ignoring Elements, although this may be due to the fact that Steve Flynn, the drummer, did not play on that one and did not want to learn the parts of his replacement, rather than a general «denial» of its existence. But that is not really a problem. What might be a problem is that the new guitarists do not have quite the same set of tones that made the original records so crisp. Here, the guitar sound veers towards extra dis­tortion, coming at the expense of brutal heaviness, and the results kick plenty of ass, but much less of the brain, if you know what I mean. (Actually, this is a rather typical flaw of live metal al­bums — for some reason, either metal guitarists do not bother to reproduce their «perfect» studio tones live or this is just a technical impossibility — but some situations are worse than others, and Live At Wacken falls into the «some» rather than the «others» category).

 

On the other hand, you do have Steve Flynn, whose technique and energy have not changed one bit in the fifteen years that he had not played with Atheist — and you have all these songs that still carry the same badass attitude, so why complain? If you are already an Atheist fan and can get this stuff cheap enough, go ahead. But if you are not yet convinced, don't let this be your in­troduction. You need those old-time guitar tones if you are determined to develop a taste for this band. Although, on the other hand, getting the whole package also makes sense — most people will probably prefer an Atheist compilation over the entire three albums.

 

JUPITER (2010)

 

1) Second To Sun; 2) Fictitious Glide; 3) Fraudulent Cloth; 4) Live And Live Again; 5) Faux King Christ; 6) Tor­toise The Titan; 7) When The Beast; 8) Third Person.

 

Honestly, I am not quite sure that what the world needed most in 2010 was another Atheist album. The relatively small fanbase that these guys had in their prime had almost certainly dissipated, and a seventeen-year break between studio recordings could only mean two things: either this would be a formally nostalgic venture, or they would try to «modernize» the old sound by taking hints from the modern metal scene. Neither of the two perspectives sounds particularly thrilling, especially when you're talking about a «tech death metal» band whose old bag of tricks used a million different ways to always puncture the exact same emotional nerve and no other.

 

Additionally, even on a formal level this is quite a different band from the old Atheist. The only constant link holding most of the discography (bar Elements) together is drummer Steve Flynn, whose style and enthusiasm have not shifted a bit: fills, rolls, and punches still keep flying in all directions, capable of shifting from thrash to progressive polyrhythms and back in the blink of an eye. Shaefer, on the other hand, is no longer playing even rhythm guitar; his participation is limi­ted to songwriting and «singing», and the «singing» suffers quite a bit from the demands of mo­dern production — it is less echoey and much more upfront now, so it rather feels like a rabid guy is just spitting directly in your face, without a single whiff of «demonic presence» or whatever it is that textbook death metal vocals are supposed to convey.

 

With two completely new guys handling guitar and bass duties, Jupiter has its Atheist creden­tials somewhat diluted from the very beginning. Of course, there can be little doubt about the ba­sics: it is going to be a heavy, brutal, loud, professionally played and recorded metal album, al­though, curiously, quite short at that (running just over half an hour; not that «classic» Atheist al­bums were much longer, but one could expect a shift here, considering that the record was almost five years in the making — or, at least, in the planning). But take one step beyond the basics, and disappointment might set in pretty soon.

 

First and foremost, there is no bass on this thing. Well, technically speaking, there is, but, appa­rently, Jonathan Thompson was so busy laying on additional layers of guitars over the regular guitar guy (Chris Baker) that he all but forgot about his primary duties. For a band whose bass­lines were always just as important as the regular guitar parts — it was always the rhythm section, after all, that provided most of the jazz links — this is a staggering setback; if this was some sort of deli­berate move (to make the album sound «different»?), it was a stupid one.

 

Second, the guitar sound also suffers from «purified» modern production. Where the guitars once used to be hellishly low and deep (not a unique trait of Atheist, of course, but a solid trademark of ye goode olde metal), now the pitch is higher and the sound waves seem shallower, never enough to drag you down to the depths of Hell with them. And Baker and Thompson represent this rather ty­pical breed of modern guitar players: each note played to utter perfection, all the fast and com­plex parts performed to the unanimous-jury grade of 10.0, but without any inborn ability to create meaningful atmosphere.

 

Add to this a complete lack of diversity — not only is the album completely devoid of any styli­stic twists (acoustic interludes, keyboard flourishes, etc.), but almost each song follows exactly the same pattern: double-tracked guitars hammering out some complex, unmemorable riff, eventual­ly drifting away into generic thrash territory, then going through one or two time signature changes just to remind us of the band's legacy. In short, more or less the same they were doing in 1989 on Piece Of Time, but with the «benefits» of sanitized production, bass elimination, and an even more annoying vocal presence.

 

Basically, there is just no need for this album these days, not when the «intellectually-oriented» crowds have all the comforts of heavy math-rock like BATS, and the easier-going metalheads have... uh, I won't even be starting on that list. The not-so-sad truth, the way I see it, is that Athe­ist had their brief three seconds of glory in the early 1990s, but now it's just too late — for Jupi­ter to be credible, respectable, or enjoyable in an above-the-ordinary way, we'd have to have a miracle on display, and heavy metal bands are generally slow on miracles once they have already established their thang. Thumbs down — although, if «tech-thrash metal» is the one wavelength that truly sets you spinning, feel free to disagree with that rating, because, in the end, it just reflects my opinion that Jupiter has no soul to it, and how could we ever prove that?

AUTECHRE

INCUNABULA (1993)

 

1) Kalpol Introl; 2) Bike; 3) Autriche; 4) Bronchus 2; 5) Basscadet; 6) Eggshell; 7) Doctrine; 8) Maetl; 9) Windwind; 10) Lowride; 11) 444.

 

Welcome to the world of Rob Brown and Sean Booth, two adventurous Mancunians that, in the late 1980s, joined the sturdy Mancunian army of Electronic Dancing Soldiers, and quickly ad­vanced to the rank of generals, pushing borders, expanding limits, setting records, and pulverizing stereotypes. They call themselves Autechre and no one has learned yet how to pronounce that properly, but that is not the biggest problem about reviewing their output.

 

The biggest problem is that I have always hated «technical» descriptions of electronic music albums targeted at the general (that is, not really techno-savvy) public. What do phrases like "a sharp blend of minimal but effective beats and bass combined with a variety of keyboard textures and understated melodies" (from the All-Music Guide review of Incunabula) really tell you about ʽKalpol Introlʼ or any other track on the album? Millions of electronic tracks have «mini­mal beats» (whether they are «effective» or not depends, of course, on your subjective judge­ment), and most of them are combined with a «variety of keyboard textures» (unless there is just one keyboard texture, in which case the whole track is minimalist); and what does «understated melodies» really mean? If you put three muffled synth notes deep in the background and loop them to infinity, is that an «understated melody»? Or a waste of prepaid studio time?

 

The fact is, in a world oversaturated several times over with electronic music, it is simply impos­sible, at least for somebody whose main (if not only) area of expertise is electronic music, to tell what really makes the sonic world of Autechre, or, more specifically, the sonic world of Autech­re's early efforts, stand out from the rest. Especially time has done these guys a great disservice — in 1993, these techno experiments were still relatively fresh and curious, but today they have pretty much dissolved in a sea of similar-sounding experiments, or so it seems.

 

So it's probably best, when writing about Incunabula, to just toss out the context and try to judge it on... no, not on its own terms, which are unclear, but rather on a subjective answer to the ques­tion: «Is there a self-sufficient, autonomous little universe in here, or is this just a bunch of technophile bleeps, whooshes, and beats?»

 

Let's begin by mentioning that Autechre are sometimes associated with IDM («Intelligent Dance Music»), yet, although there are plenty of rhythmic, danceable beats on Incunabula, it can hardly qualify as typical club music. For that purpose, it would at least need to be louder, not quite as icy cold, and focused more on the beats. Instead, Autechre create an ambience that essentially sounds like Brian Eno crossed with industrial music — stern minimalistic chord sequences and patterns locked in metallic cages of clanging, banging, puffing, huffing, bursting, and exploding.

 

The actual chord sequences range from dark and foreboding (ʽAutricheʼ) to sprinkly-fussy (ʽBikeʼ) to emotionless-robotic (ʽBasscadetʼ) to a mixture of mystery-and-beauty (ʽEggshellʼ) to nearly epic minimalist-sympho­ny parts (ʽWindwindʼ, which sort of overstays its welcome at over eleven minutes, but then there are no time rules when it comes to any kinds of ambient music, right?): maybe the best thing that can be mentioned is that no two tracks produce a completely identical emotional effect (provided one feels any emotional effect at all from such music).

 

People sometimes point out the lack of in­tegrity and coherence, deducing this from knowing that Incunabula was really a compilation of stuff that the duo recorded over several years. But I think that the album is quite coherent — yes, it might have used a more effective closer than ʽ444ʼ, which neither contains the most solid «hooks» on the album nor creates any super-epic panorama to let the curtains fall in a grand manner. But other than that, my overall characteristics of the sound of the album applies to all of its tracks, and they do form a single impressive entity — like walking through some large underground sci-fi factory, dazzling the viewer with its white, clini­cal sterility and yet at the same time pumping out hi-tech product for world domination.

 

Like many other electronic albums, it takes full advantage of CD size, clocking in at over seventy eight minutes, although, predictably, most of the compositions fully state their point by the time they reach one-third of their actual length — chalk that up to club requirements and feel free to trim them down with your own scissors, if you wish, but that's the basic paradox of ambient: the fewer notes you play, the longer you have to make your composition last. The major question is — how about that universe, is it there, in place, or is it not? And if it is, can you give it a name? Well, how about «ice factory»? And a frozen thumbs up?

 

AMBER (1994)

 

1) Foil; 2) Montreal; 3) Silverside; 4) Slip; 5) Glitch; 6) Piezo; 7) Nine; 8) Further; 9) Yulquen; 10) Nil; 11) Teartear.

 

This is Autechre's first «real» album, written and recorded coherently over a period of six months — and there are two ways to think about it. First, if you are obsessed with tracing the artistic evo­lution of Autechre, and with the concept that «no Autechre album sounds like any other Autechre album», you can follow the line of the All-Music Guide review. Essentially, it states that on Am­ber Autechre are beginning to drift away from «IDM» and into the realms of the unknown, un­explored, unpredictable, and, perhaps, even unpalatable — for those who prefer their electronic music to soothe the body rather than the soul.

 

But if you are not that adamant about finding ten major differences between Incunabula and Am­ber, you might end up not finding even one. From a sheer statistical point of view, the tracks on Amber do seem to rely a little less on loud rhythmic beats than those on Incunabula — once you have bothered with an actual countdown, that is. But in general, the album's «aura» does not seem to have changed at all: the same all-pervading mood of the «ice factory» is still the major at­traction, and, at the same time, there are only about two or three tracks on the entire album that are not «danceable» from a purely technical point of view.

 

If there is a difference, the way I see it, it is mostly in that the keyboard parts for Amber seem to be generally more «non-descript» than those on Incunabula — reflecting, perhaps, the relative hastiness, with which the album was made, or maybe a conscious desire to move one step closer to pure «ambient». ʽSilversideʼ, with its synth-strings playing out like a soundtrack to a voyage in deep space, is probably the best example; but many other tracks really behave in the same way, except that the soft and static atmospheric waves of the synths clash with hard layers of electronic percussion (ʽFurtherʼ — ten minutes of mild techno beats over a shallow sea of hums, whooshes, and whispers); unfortunately, these waves are simply not evocative enough to stimulate creative writing. It does not help, either, that, much too often, Brown and Booth seem to be stuck in an overtly happy mood: tracks like ʽSlipʼ and ʽNineʼ prompt you to simply jump into a state of trouble-free coma and stay there frozen for all of their duration. It's a funny feeling, but not with­out a side effect of silly boredom.

 

For me personally, Amber never manages to build up on the strength of the opening number. ʽFoilʼ is all based around one simple trick — the recurrent raising and lowering of the pitch of «tuned percussion» — and it is one of those great effects that really makes you feel inside a giant sci-fi factory, helpless, miserable, and overwhelmed by the industrial might. (Actually, it is the sort of factory where most of the action is hidden from direct view — only the repetitive percus­sive noises make you aware of the billions of operations per second that are going on). Although it is one of the most minimalistic tracks on the album, it is the only one that has an atmosphere of «cold & cruel» grandiosity; everything else is quite playful, even «cute» in comparison.

 

Instinctively, I feel compelled to label Amber as a quick, not very interesting toss-off, not offer­ing much in terms of either innovation or emotionality that the assembled tracks on Incunabula did not already have. It really comes very close to being «just boring» a lot of times — a problem that weighs much more heavily on electronic music than on «live» music — and, overall, it just seems like a space-filler, in no way predicting the radical twists that Autechre would undertake already on the next record. Maybe not exactly a «sophomore slump», as they say (is that termino­logy even applicable for IDM releases?), but a thumbs down all the same.

 

TRI REPETAE (1995)

 

1) Dael; 2) Clipper; 3) Leterel; 4) Rotar; 5) Stud; 6) Eutow; 7) C/Pach; 8) Gnit; 9) Overand; 10) Rsdio.

 

This is where it all changes. Love Tri Repetae or hate Tri Repetae, this is where Autechre be­comes a thing-in-itself, so that comparisons with Aphex Twin and other electronic greats become shallow and meaningless. Not that Tri Repetae cannot be derived from Amber. It can. You just have to subtract «minimal keyboard melody» from the equation and replace it with... say, «amp­lified transistor noises and radiowaves». Yeah, that could do the job.

 

Moody keyboard sounds have survived the slaughter in a few patches here and there, but not with­out mutating themselves — ʽEutowʼ begins with an onslaught of looped synth strings that re­calls the old times, but once the percussive rhythms join the fray, the strings are deconstructed, with each loop ending in a «nervous meltdown» that kicks your ears off the path they'd like to follow. And on ʽOverandʼ, frequencies of the notes are manipulated in such a way that the effect goes way past regular «ambient» — listening to this in headphones might yield the feeling that these waves are emitted directly by your own brain.

 

But neither of these two tracks is typical of the album's overall sound, the major inspiration be­tween which seems to have been hours of happy listening to hoarse radio static — which Booth and Brown decided to tame, subdue, and control in about the same way that Jimi Hendrix once decided to tame, subdue, and control guitar feedback. The process reaches its culmination in the ten minutes of the last track — whose pseudo-accidentally misspelled title leaves little space for doubt — but really, the whole record is permeated with the idea. Hiss, pop, crackle, and some sub­ato­mic-level bleep-and-whistle for good measure rule the day on Tri Repetae. Yet this is not sheer «noise» for the sake of noise — this is rhythmic noise, patterned noise, and, occasionally, even «melodic» noise, although it takes a little risk and bravery to arrive at that conclusion.

 

The ice factory is all but gone; to get that effect, Autechre would require a bit more banging and clanging, not to mention all the freezy keyboard parts. The percussive rhythms still lock together according to the laws of industrial music, but now they seem to belong to the world of microchips and miniaturization, not that of giant synthetic structures rising miles high into the sky. Getting some sort of «emotional high» from this experience is, most likely, out of the question; rather, one should try combining it with reading a Stephen Hawking book — who knows, it might better attune the brain to grasping the essence of the universe or something.

 

The microchips do exhibit different ways of behavior, though. On ʽDaelʼ, they fuss and grumble, imitating busy activity. On ʽLeterelʼ, they slowly hiss and punch, in a state of relative relaxation. On ʽStudʼ, they hustle and bustle almost in some sort of state of electronic tenderness. On ʽGnitʼ, they communicate with each other; and on ʽRsdioʼ, they sound dying — tossed in a garbage heap, gradually losing their last bits of charge. A sad story, really, if you agree to look at it that way; and I cannot think of any other way if I am to hope that an album like Tri Repetae can actually pique somebody's interest.

 

Of course, the greatest irony is that, in our completely electronified age, Tri Repetae should have been its major anthemic soundtrack — yet the same people who can no longer imagine their life without electronic devices would rarely agree to make their daily soundtrack include any of this «nano-music»: even the regular listeners of «electronica» will generally prefer something more straightforward — in the world of rave, techno, and IDM, Tri Repetae occupies the place of Jackson Pollock in the world of painting art. But, just like Pollock's paintings, the album is here mostly so that we could ask interesting questions, and then select from a range of equally unsatis­fying answers for as long a period of time as we have available to kill.

 

CHIASTIC SLIDE (1997)

 

1) Cipater; 2) Rettic AC; 3) Tewe; 4) Cichli; 5) Hub; 6) Calibruc; 7) Recury; 8) Pule; 9) Nuane.

 

If you think about it, a «chiastic slide» cannot really be a true slide, because anything chiastic in nature would have to revert to its original position in the end. If you slide down, you have to slide back up by means of a counterforce. That's an odd idea, to be sure, but what exactly does it have to do with Autechre's fourth LP? Unfortunately, nothing. It all makes about as much sense as the track titles which, by now, have completely lost connection with linguistic reality.

 

Critical opinion tends to veer towards disappointment for this one, probably for a simple reason: Chiastic Slide offers no advances over Tri Repetae, and, in some ways, sounds like a slightly less inspired copy of its predecessor, sometimes even seemingly retreating — parts of it are con­ventionally more «ambient-melodic», so that it cannot be considered a true sequel to «One Day In The Life Of A Curious Microchip». Worse, the long tracks sometimes sound disturbingly repeti­tive — something like ʽRecuryʼ goes on for ages without any tiny fluctuating subtleties that made the band's earlier attention-probers full of intrigue.

 

Of course, it is very much up to your imagination how forgiving you will be in the end. For in­stance, having listened to some of the tracks from both albums back-to-back, I was sort of set on imagining that Tri Repetae was all about a perfectly balanced world of friendly elementary par­ticles, whereas Chiastic Slide is about perfect patterns being broken down and severely jostled into a state of partial disfunctionality. As evidenced most transparently on the static hiss blasts in ʽRettic ACʼ, the crazy percussion rhythms on ʽCichliʼ, the crackles and sparking off of dead equipment on ʽHubʼ, and the mini-explosions on ʽCalibrucʼ.

 

But then this scheme totally breaks down on tracks like ʽCipaterʼ, where the cogs grind in good harmony and the faraway melancholic synthesizers beep and bleep in solemn dirge mode, or ʽPuleʼ, where the percussion dissipates completely and all that is left is a large cloud of foggy chimes interlocking with each other at predictable intervals. Here the personal concept for which you have wrecked your brain for so long explodes, and you are left with the sad truth: Chiastic Slide is just a random collection of «some more of our shit». Not much better and not much worse — but with Tri Repetae, Autechre effectively locked themselves into «The Innovator's Trap»: every new album of theirs is expected to break new ground, and when it doesn't, your friendly synthesizer dies from a broken heart.

 

In the end, I feel like joining with those critics that gave the album a thumbs down, rather than those hardcore fans who seek religious epiphanies in each hiss and crackle ever hissed and crackled by Booth and Brown. None of the individual tracks honestly stand out — nor does the entire album cling well together as a single concentrated assault on the senses. And almost each of these tracks could be twice as short without losing its point. And are those three minutes of pure static at the end of ʽNuaneʼ really necessary?..

 

LP5 (1998)

 

1) Acroyear2; 2) 777; 3) Rae; 4) Melve; 5) Vose In; 6) Fold4, Wrap5; 7) Under BOAC; 8) Corc; 9) Caliper Remote; 10) Arch Carrier; 11) Drane2.

 

If you do not greet the next Autechre album with the question «So, what's new?», let me know your microchip family name so that I can address you with the correct title — yes, people who listen to Autechre because they enjoy their music emotionally freak me out that much. (Fortuna­tely, I have yet to meet one in person). But if, like me, you have successfully rerouted your brain wires for the «surprise-processing» center whenever you listen to Autechre, LP5 is probably going to be a blast after the bleak mopiness of Chiastic Slide.

 

At this point, it feels like these guys are almost ready to leave the very concept of a «musical note» behind them, and concentrate on the amazing diversity of thumping, clomping, stomping, exploding, hissing, boiling, and bubbling patterns that illustrate the average day in the life of an electronic entity. They are not quite there yet — total percussion nirvana wouldn't arrive until Confield — but they are getting extremely close. At the very least, it would take quite a serious amount of substances to be able to dance one's head off to the merry sounds of The Electronic Shaman emanating from ʽ777ʼ or the busy quarks playing table tennis with each other throughout ʽUnder BOACʼ.

 

On the other hand, the faint little shades of «melody» that still remain can be more evocative than the fuller sound of Chiastic Slide — ʽRaeʼ, for instance, has a melancholic, dungeon-like attitude, as if the sad, drawn out synth notes were luckless prisoners held inside the force field of the pul­sating percussion beats, hopelessly pleading to get out. And on ʽDrane2ʼ, the notes twinkle, roll over, and fizzle out spasmodically as if some sort of semi-intelligent robot were trying to imitate elements of an Indian droning raga, without much success but with quite a bit of persistence.

 

That said, I cannot help but feel that all of this is not quite as breathtaking as it is implied to be. The tracks have cautiously been trimmed down to reasonable length, are dutifully provided with individual identities, and officially represent a «step forward», no doubt. But the record still does not quite live up to the first two tracks: ʽAcroyear2ʼ and ʽ777ʼ push this percussion-heavy thing almost to its limits, almost as if the idea were to make you feel stuck in the middle of the Hadron Collider, and then the intensity recedes and everything else feels sort of anticlimactic. Say what you will, but at least ʽVose Inʼ and ʽFold4ʼ can qualify as «filler», and probably other tracks as well. Not every idea of the Booth and Brown brothers is supposed to work, you know.

 

One interesting idea I have encountered several times is that albums like LP5 may be supposed to make the listener feel pity for the machines — actually, this is quite close to the feeling I got my­self when listening to ʽRaeʼ. I am not sure if Booth and Brown themselves go that far; I do not think they have any strong personal philosophy attached to their fingers when they are pushing the but­tons. But they certainly are inventors of a machine-centered sonic language, which they may not quite well understand themselves, and if so, the first two tracks and a few others on LP5 are like the perfect introductory units in that language's textbook for beginners. As silly as that analogy might be, at least it earns the album a thumbs up, and never mind the filler. Since each Autechre album, on average, runs for about seventy minutes, you can easily subtract thirty mi­nutes of whatever you think fillerish from each — and that'll be just enough, since who can take in seventy minutes of Autechre without interruption, anyway? Nobody here but us, slaves of the mercyless record reviewing industry.

 

PS: The real question, of course, is this: did the Malevich family have to sue the creative duo for copy­right infringement? The album cover comes in black or white, for that matter, depending on the edition.

 

EP7 (1999)

 

1) Rpeg; 2) Ccec; 3) Squeller; 4) Left Blank; 5) Outpt; 6) Dropp; 7) Liccflii; 8) Maphive 6.1; 9) Zeiss Contarex; 10) Netlon Sentinel; 11) Pir.

 

As you may have noticed, I generally leave Autechre's EPs unreviewed — most of them can be viewed as little satellites of the accompanying LPs, and dedicating separate space to them would be a waste of time more often than not — but this particular release is actually a combination of two EPs, released separately as EP1 and EP2, and, in between them, running for about an hour. Since there is no principal thematic difference between the two anyway, it is easier to simply think about the whole thing as one more large opus, and tackle it that way.

 

Not that there is any grand new world to tackle here. Both EPs seem like temporary stopgaps to me, continuing the generally stable Autechre pattern: «one conceptual breakthrough» — «one well-crafted, but lazy follow-up, fed by the old formulae». The only curious thing about EP7, in that respect, is that it is the first (or at least the first large-size) Autechre release to feature a limi­ted amount of vocal samples (on ʽCoecʼ and ʽZeiss Contarexʼ). If there is any effect to it, it's most likely to be «disorientation» — all the vocals are garbled and run through Booth and Brown's precious waves of static, so that you get impressions of degraded biopatterns stuck in Star Trek transporters or something like that.

 

Static, by the way, heavily dominates these EPs, even if, altogether, there may again be more traces of ambient-ish melodicity here than on LP5. The seven minutes of the appropriately titled ʽLeft Blankʼ, for instance, is simply all static mixed with PC speaker bleeps, plinks, and plonks that remind me of old arcade games circa 1985 or so. On ʽOutptʼ, they try to tune that static and maybe even make it rock — good idea, because every microprocessor with the tiniest bit of self-respect needs to learn to rock'n'roll sooner or later. On ʽLiccfliiʼ, they seem to be giving the static a lesson in hip-hop, but the way I see it, static waves are just too stubborn to assimilate that much learning over such a brief time period.

 

The only track that seemed relatively unpredictable to me here was ʽMaphive 6.1ʼ, where both the static and the «microchip percussion» suddenly disappeared, replaced by a mesh of keyboard patterns (some pseudo-electric pianos, some pseudo-organs, some pseudo-harpsichords, some pseudo-chimes, even some pseudo-glass harps and vibraphones, whatever) and «normal» electro­nic percussion that comes and goes at will. Not only does the whole thing create a mood that is almost critically «non-Autechre», but its overall degree of complexity seems staggeringly high for these guys, who usually prefer minimalistic layering. On the other hand, I am not really sure what exactly it is doing here, locked in a cage of static waves and clicks on all sides.

 

The most individualistic thing I can say about EP7 is that much of it does a damn good job of dispensing with «tone» as some sort of prerequisite in music. Just turn on your radio and choose whichever configuration of static agrees the most with your biorhythms. Yes, ʽMaphive 6.1ʼ seems to go against that idea, but that's the trick with Autechre — they never hit you in the face with their philosophies. There's always a red herring in the woodpile, if you know what I mean. But then, if not for that track, I would not have hesitated about a thumbs down, probably.

 

CONFIELD (2001)

 

1) VI Scose Poise; 2) Cfern; 3) Pen Expers; 4) Sim Gishel; 5) Parhelic Triangle; 6) Bine; 7) Eidetic Casein; 8) Uviol; 9) Lentic Catachresis.

 

«An album, to respect, not to enjoy», quoth the All-Music Guide. Well, according to my personal philosophy, Autechre is altogether an artistic unit to respect rather than enjoy — remembering this all the time helps me warm up to their output like nothing else. And Confield is nothing but an expectable, if not to say predictable, apex of this «respectability»: after spending years on ma­king music that seemed to be generated by artificial intelligence, Booth and Brown finally put out an album that actually was generated by artificial intelligence.

 

Well, sort of, that is. In preparing Confield, the robotic duo relied heavily on Max software, with the basis for most tracks electronically generated from input clues. This does not mean that the in­put clues were completely random, or that the results did not undergo heavy selection and were not seriously doctored, pampered, and trussed up before release. But overall, this is, indeed, as close as Autechre ever got to letting the machines take over; and this time, even the heroes had to admit that, perhaps, this music was not quite suitable for a club environment.

 

Do the results bode well for a new age of machine-generated music? Well... supposedly we still need time to understand that, even now that a whole decade has elapsed since Confield made the headlines. The machines certainly prefer percussive sound waves to playing with tones and the pitches, that is for certain; and oh the variety! ʽVI Scose Poiseʼ sounds like a spinning top laun­ched in the bottom of a metal tub, travelling all over the perimeter at varying angles and speeds. ʽCfernʼ is a spike-heeled mosquito tap-dancing atop a malfunctioning jackhammer. ʽPen Expersʼ is Commander Data rehearsing a Jackie Chan routine, receiving his instructions from a sped-up movie projection. ʽSim Gishelʼ is a Geiger counter on overload, and so on (there's only so many metaphoric descriptions one can generate for an Autechre review without overheating).

 

The tonal stuff is much less interesting, to be frank. There are actual notes on all the tracks, but on some of them they are barely noticeable (ʽPen Expersʼ), and most of the time, they represent rather unassuming minimalistic patterns that mainly act as ear tampons, or otherwise the percus­sion dynamo could eventually cause irreversible damage. «Music» gets a bit louder on ʽEidetic Caseinʼ, where discordant, chaotic, ominous cascades of violin-organ-esque notes competes for attention with the crackling rhythms on an almost equal basis. Everywhere else it simply provides a static background to the active pulsating life of the rhythms.

 

As a self-certified human being (I hope!), one of those billions of ultra-complex sets of machi­nery evolved over the past several billion years, I find it even harder to attune my senses to these waves than with any preceding Autechre record. I can survive, temporarily, on a bit of percussion if it's an actual, well-improvised drum solo, but for hour-long stretches of time I need more than that, no matter how weird or witty all the clicks, cracks, and clangs may be sounding. But as a particularly bold intellectual experiment, the meaning of Confield, I suppose, is just to set you a-thinking. For instance, how close — even if only by accident — could they have come to tapping into the emotional instincts of... err... insects? Or tapeworms? Or single-cellular organisms? May­be, without knowing it, they have recreated some of the favorite dance tunes of Micronuclearia podoventralis, to name just one potentially grateful listener in my tummy. It might take us years, or ages, to find out, of course, but we'll get there eventually.

 

From this or any similar point of view, Confield is a delight. From most others, it is a nightmare, and even many of the critics halted in befuddlement before spitting out a rating and a judgement. My original instinct was to give in to hate and ramble about how people who do this should be dragged out into the square and publicly, and humiliatingly de-artistified. But, honestly, justifying this hatred requires a lengthy, elaborate philosophy of art and a lengthy, elaborate pamphlet on why we could only live happily ever after once we have all subscribed to that philosophy. To hell with it. I don't really like Confield, I don't hate Confield, I don't want to listen to any more Con­field, but I do feel as if the actual experience extended some of the mind borders. Plus, I have serious doubts about the album ever making it onto the «golden masterpieces» shelf, but it could, in theory, point the way to something entirely different... coming up in about five hundred years or so. With an emotionally-driven thumbs down and an intellectually-fueled thumbs up cancelling out each other, welcome to the big question mark that is Autechre's most openly audacious, soul-challenging re­lease ever.

 

DRAFT 7.30 (2003)

 

1) Xylin Room; 2) IV VV IV VV VIII; 3) 6IE.CR; 4) TAPR; 5) Surripere; 6) Theme Of Sudden Roundabout; 7) VL AL 5; 8) P.:NTIL; 9) V-PROC; 10) Reniform Puls.

 

The most revolutionary thing about Autechre's seventh LP is probably the song titles. Where they used to read like ordinary words garbled through electronic malfunctioning, these already look more like random strings extracted from sequences of machine code. And yet, at the same time, lo and behold, one of the titles is a noun phrase in ye good old plain Aenglisc, even though the sonics behind it sound no different from everything else. Ah, say what you will, but this duo simply re­fuses to be pigeonholed. Predictable stereotypes? Leave them for unimaginative suckers like the Beatles or Frank Zappa.

 

Other than the letters, though, Draft 7.30 should not come across as a major revelation to those who already know the whole story. It regresses a bit from the standards of Confield — once again, notes, tones, and hums get louder and fussier, drawing attention slightly away from the beats, as if they'd realized themselves that with the percussion paradise of Confield, they let their boldness carry them a bit too far. But in doing that, they are really «going back», losing their grip on the art of radical innovation. Scramble these tracks and the ones from LP5, and the only im­mediately felt difference is that Draft 7.30, like Confield, is «hoarser» and «hissier», generating a strictly «computer» ambience rather than trying to expand into outer space.

 

And I am afraid that difference no longer plays into the hands of Booth and Brown. There is only so much whooshing, scraping, dialing, ringing, pinging, and plinging that one can eat up before the inevitable question — «and...?» If Confield could have got you a-thinking about whether or not this could be the music of tomorrow in an alternate, post-Heat Death reality, Draft 7.30 will only get you a-thinking once more about what you have already a-thought before, presumably more than once. Where are the new sensations? Bring on the new sensations already! Why should it take us more than a decade to study this sub-atomic zoo?

 

In all honesty, this album is neither emotionally seductive nor intellectually provocative: it is sim­ply boring. Yes, the rhythms are still complex and diverse, but you'd think that, with the kind of creative experience these guys have accumulated, they'd be able to come up with a bunch of those in a matter of several hours or so. Worst thing about it, the individual tracks no longer have any individuality — lower your attention a bit, and you won't be able to tell where one stops and the next one begins, except for maybe a jarring change of rhythmics from time to time. They all just sort of roll along, at the same tempos, with the same gloomy attitude. Ever been a fan of standing in front of a large anthill and stubbornly watching them ants run along in all directions? Well, just replace the ants with electrons, and you have yourself your Draft 7.30.

 

Not that there is anything criminal about that — it was fairly clear that it would be tremendously hard to follow Confield with something equally puzzling or provoking. As usual, long-term fans with appropriately wired brains and a good deal of loyal patience will find plenty of opportunities here. But for those of us who would rather like to nibble on different pebbles of the musical kaleido­scope, Draft 7.30 might be easy to skip. Thumbs down for a lack of imaginativeness, which, I think, is the most offensive accusation one can throw at Autechre (I tried!).

 

UNTILTED (2005)

 

1) LCC; 2) Ipacial Section; 3) Pro Radii; 4) Augmatic Disport; 5) Iera; 6) Fermium; 7) The Trees; 8) Sublimit.

 

No news may be good news, but not for the unhappy reviewer. How am I supposed to stress this record's individuality over that of Draft 7.30? Am I really supposed to make good friends with these beats, measure their individual pulses, check their individual temperatures, and tuck each one inside his individual bed of a one-two phrase description? This is definitely not something I remember myself signing for on that unhappy day when I broke my «no electronics!» vow by acquiring the entire Tangerine Dream catalog.

 

All I can really say is that Untilted is, once again, closer in spirit to Confield: with Draft 7.30, it might have looked like Booth and Brown were taking one step back and reintegrating some mini­malistic melodicity into the package, but now the domain of the computer blip has won this next battle, so prepare yourself for seventy more minutes from the life of the microchip. And it does not even look like the microchip is leading an interesting life these days. No, just the same old routine — get up at 7:00 AM, a bath, a shave, some quick breakfast with the wife, commute to work, get installed, operate, calculate, lunch break, back to work again... everything happening in a rather fussy way, of course, but it's all normal, predictable, everyday fuss.

 

On second thought, some of these beats are indeed programmed in almost ridiculously complex ways. Something like ʽIpacial Sectionʼ or ʽAugmatic Disportʼ could never even remotely be app­roached by a human being — the same way no human being could ever beat the machine at coun­ting out chess move combinations. But this does raise the question of whether electronic music that may not be replicated or interpreted by a human being can actually be enjoyed by one. These robotic pulsations neither follow our natural rhythms (be it any standard pattern of the 4/4 or 3/4 types), nor do they provide sick deviations to which, after a bit of training, we can attune our rhythms (in a Captain Beefheart fashion). They are simply too much for the nervous system to handle — and end up as «curious intellectual achievements» with no purpose other than showing off one's professionalism.

 

The only track here which barely hints at a human touch is ʽFermiumʼ, where the beats suddenly become less complex and a little more «trance-inducing» in the good old sense of the word (al­though it still gets way too messy towards the end). And I only write this because, once its cycles started rolling in, it was the only moment on the album that actually made a brief swipe at my at­tention center. Everything else was just totally non-descript. What used to be «magical» is now perfunctory and boring; what used to be «curious» is now predictable.

 

Hence, one more thumbs down. I used to wonder how the heck these kinds of albums mostly get 5-star ratings and rave reviews on Amazon and other such sites — before realizing, of course, that nobody will ever get interested in a new Autechre album outside of the duo's hardened, de­voted, but very, very small handful of admirers, those who have done a fine job of rewiring their brains towards «The Future» or «The Alternate Reality», as they see it. For me, though, the big­gest problem is that this alternate reality, once you have already broken through, unpacked your tent, and are now beginning to hang your family's portraits on the wall, is pretty damn hard to keep yourself excited about.

 

QUARISTICE (2008)

 

1) Altibzz; 2) The Plc; 3) IO; 4) plyPhon; 5) Perlence; 6) SonDEremawe; 7) Simmm; 8) paralel Suns; 9) Steels; 10) Tankakern; 11) rale; 12) Fol3; 13) fwzE; 14) 90101-5l-l; 15) bnc Castl; 16) Theswere; 17) WNSN; 18) chenc9; 19) Notwo; 20) Outh9X.

 

Finally, time for some change... cosmetic change, that is. Quaristice is said to have grown out of a lengthy, spontaneous «jam session» by Booth and Brown, over which they managed to over­load their fantasies and create in­numerable sequences of sequences. Consequently the sequences were sequenced into somewhat inconsequential subsequences, so that Quaristice consists of a record-setting twenty tracks, few of them running over four minutes — rather a rude violation of Autech­re's normal work philosophy, I'd say.

 

Those who are particularly disturbed by this rudeness will probably want to own the limited edi­tion 2-CD version of the album; the second CD consisted of several alternate versions, presented closer to their original incarnations and our usual expectations of Autechre. Basically, you not only get to see the idea as such — you get to see its birth, growth, maturation, gradual and painful realization of its utter meaninglessness / uselessness, and, finally, its slow death from natural causes or a quickly staged suicide.

 

The main LP generally focuses on the idea itself — one of Autechre's usual grooves, reduced to mini-size. Supposedly, this should give Quaristice a more dynamic aspect: instead of just chillin' out to long patches of ambient waves or sweetly purring microchips, you get to see rapid changes of texture that may or may not form a musical story. Who knows, you might even start making predictions about what's it's gonna be like five minutes from now — a situation formerly unthin­kable with Autechre (because the most likely outcome is — «five minutes from now, it's going to be exactly as it is right now, plus a jackhammer»).

 

Problem is, apart from shorter track lengths, the only shift is backwards: they are continuing the subtle regression to the «icy» atmosphere of their early albums. Most of the percussion parts are heavier, once again with an industrial flavor, and the accompanying minimalistic keyboard parts speak either of the hand of doom or of the face of eternity. The opening track is so deceptively serene you'd think they were covering a Brian Eno sonic painting — but once ʽThe Plcʼ breaks through with its jiggly beats, paranoid pseudo-record-scratching noises and cold blasts of MIDI winds, it's back to old school again. Very old, as a matter of fact.

 

On the other hand, I fully admit that «atmospherics» is back here, in a big, big way. The whole thing should be played loud, in headphones, preferably in a dark room, and eventually these so­nic waves will flush you out in outer space, rather than cram you inside your dusty computer proces­sor. But the «individual» tracks, short or long, do not really work as individual tracks — at best, they work as one more soundtrack to the art of running along the streets of an alien world. Each street has a finite length, yet few, if any, have an unforgettable face of their own.

 

Cutting a long digression in half, Quaristice is a fairly «normal» record compared to everything post- and including Confield, and it will probably stimulate an easier and clearer emotional res­ponse than the pretentious conundrums of its predecessors. There is nothing too radically innova­tive about it, though, and the emotional response itself smells a little moldy, so you will just have to decide for yourselves. Nothing unlistenable here, but still recommended only for absolute be­ginners or total experts.

 

OVERSTEPS (2010)

 

1) r ess; 2) ilanders; 3) known(1); 4) pt2ph8; 5) qplay; 6) see on see; 7) Treale; 8) os veix3; 9) O=0; 10) d-sho qub; 11) st epreo; 12) redfall; 13) krYlon; 14) Yuop.

 

Finally, a real change of pace — overcoming the «Confield block» once and for all, Autechre release their freshest release in a decade. Some have suggested a return to the icy ambience of Amber, but in reality this is more like a democratic synthesis of Amber and Confield, almost to the point where you'd think they were dubbing a 1994-flavored track over a 2000-flavored one and then smoothing away the rough edges.

 

Actually, the whole «return to Amber» thing was probably invented by people who never got further than the first track: ʽr essʼ (oh God, those hideous titles...) is, indeed, one of those freezing cold synthesizer whirlwinds the art of which these guys had mastered ages ago. Atmospheric and not overtly exciting, but a surprising start nevertheless — no beats! no microchips! no static! just the good old icy stateliness.

 

But over the next few tracks, gradually, yet knowingly, they are once again building something new. The beats, the chips, and the static will be making frequent visits, for sure, but the primary emphasis is on synthesizing «old-fashioned» sounds: harpsichord hammers, xylophones, little bells and musical boxes, so that more than half of the compositions weave the pattern of a giant, tremendously complex electronic clock — one that you have accidentally locked yourself within. The music does not so much «resonate» here as it simply «scatters» all around, in one large sea of ringing, springing, tinkling, dazzling, whatever.

 

The actual selected chords are never happy — as we all know, musical boxes help create cuddly magical worlds for little boys and girls, but these ones, like everything else Autechre does, are just completely emotionally neutral, yet still vibrant and active «signs of life». After all, a musi­cal box, or a giant clock, or a primitive (or not so primitive) life-form is emotionally neutral by defi­nition — you can get totally amazed at the complex internal structure of all these things, but it's not as if they would be infecting you with their own amazement, which they do not have. And so, just sit back and enjoy another... umm, documentary by Booth and Brown, this time one from the life of large mechanical concoctions punching each other and exploding in miriads of ringtones, cadences, and dissonances.

 

Individual highlights are practically non-existent: the only difference is between the «major chi­mers» (ʽknown(1)ʼ, ʽpt2ph8ʼ, ʽsee on seeʼ, etc.) and the more old-fashioned beats-and-bleeps that could have belonged on Draft 7.30 or any other of all those «Confield clones for dummies» (ʽilandersʼ, ʽqplayʼ, etc.). The album does get nicely bookmarked — with retro-brushed ambience of ʽr essʼ at the beginning, and then the same ambience criss-crossed with the kaleidoscopic chi­mes on the last track ʽYuopʼ. Actually, ʽYuopʼ is a bit different in that all of its «sprinkly» sound seems to be radiating into outer space, resonating at us from far, far away (or maybe it's the other way around — cosmic rays breaking through the atmosphere? whatever), so it's an appropriate­ly «universalist» coda for the whole album.

 

Altogether, the approach is simple in theory and not too awesome in the sheer number of new ideas involved, but with the gazillions of electronic albums out on the market in 2010, even one new idea, consistently implemented in lots of different ways, is not to be taken too lightly. And I have yet to see an electronic (or a non-electronic, for that matter) album that could serve as a bet­ter textbook on all the tricks and treats of The Big Chime — I'm still picking echoes out of my buzzing ears, a tedious, but not wholly unpleasant procedure. Thumbs up.

 

MOVE OF TEN (2010)

 

1) Etchogon-S; 2) y7; 3) pce freeze 2.8i; 4)  rew(1); 5) nth Dafuseder.b; 6) iris was a pupil; 7) no border; 8) M62; 9) ylm0; 10) Cep puiqMX.

 

Okay, the good news is that, even if Oversteps and Move Of Ten were released within months of each other (technically, the latter is counted as an EP, because it «only» runs for... forty-seven minutes? yeah, fairly short, only the size of two average early Beach Boys LPs), they sound fairly different, and each one is impressive in its own way. The people at Pitchfork preferred to define the difference quite formally — pointing out that Oversteps is more ambience-oriented, whereas Move Of Ten is more sharply beat-focused. That may be so, but it does not really capture the dif­ference in sensations.

 

I would rather say that Move Of Ten is a «spooky» counterpart to the Big Unnerving Clock of Oversteps. We are not just back to the beats, we are back to the icy, snapping beats, the frosty synths, the freezing white noise — the old sights of the Autechre factory working at below zero temperatures, where each movement of the robot begins with breaking the thin crust of ice that re-forms every five seconds. Only this time the sound is mastered in a way that places you, the listener, somewhere above that factory — as if it were completely ensconced in some under­ground cavern, and you were trying to dig your way in from the top.

 

The exact technical means to ensure this echoey, cavernous sound are a mystery to me (ask a technician), but they were hardly accessible to Autechre in the 1990s — whoever claims that all Autechre sounds the same (not an unreasonable claim, but depends on the coarseness of your grain, of course) should go back to Tri Repetae and see how far they have progressed in that re­spect. Whether there is any substantial difference in the structure of the beats and the texture of the melodic patterns is another matter.

 

There does seem to be an evil, aggressive side to Move Of Ten that you do not often encounter on Autechre albums — for instance, ʽrew(1)ʼ is almost funky in its progression, with twisted, dis­torted bleeps snapping at you from under cover, making it one of the «nastiest» tunes in the entire repertoire of the duo. On stuff like ʽiris was a pupilʼ (hey, some real words!) the dark side is more subdued, reduced to several overdubs of murmuring wave patterns expressing situational dis­content with each other. But the evil presence is felt everywhere, as if, finally, all of Autechre's microchips were learning their basic emotions.

 

Which might be timely enough — if the idea here is to start elevating the consciousness of the musical AI these guys had been developed for twenty years now, I'm all for it, not only because it provides them with a bit of reason for further existence, but also because it might eventually con­vince me and other sceptics that electronic music has not gone the way of rock'n'roll, but still holds the key to the future. The important thing is to keep on bridging the gap between the human and the robot, and that might take some time. As for now, thumbs up for this one more tiny step for mankind, giant leap for monolithic integrated circuit.

 

EXAI (2013)

 

1) FLeure; 2) irlite (get 0); 3) prac-f; 4) jatevee C; 5) T ess xi; 6) vekoS; 7) Flep; 8) tuinorizn; 9) bladelores; 10) 1 1 is; 11) nodezsh; 12) runrepik; 13) spl9; 14) cloudline; 15) deco Loc; 16) recks on; 17) YJY UX.

 

The old popular saying goes that «more Autechre is better Autechre», because the only thing to beat five blows of an electronic jackhammer is fifty blows of an electronic jackhammer, and the only thing to beat fifty blows... well, you get it. From this point of view, what could be better than, finally, to have ourselves a double CD of brand new Autechre material — one hundred and twen­ty minutes of slaughtered prime time in total? And, come to think of it, how come it happened that it is only now, in 2013, twenty years into their illustrious career, that Booth and Brown have finally decided to go all the way?

 

Unfortunately, at the moment (I have only sat through twice through the whole thing — maybe a third listen could clinch it, but then you'd have to pay me), my answer is crude, simple, impolite, and nasty. All too often, one is tempted to mask the poor quality of one's creative ideas with sheer quantity. A turd is just a turd — a mausoleum of turds piled atop each other is a work of art if you manage to mold it into an imposing shape. And no, I am not going as far as to suggest that most of the tracks on Exai are «electronic turds», because I wouldn't even know what that is, much less what would one look like coming from Autechre's guts. But I am going to suggest that there is nothing of interest to look forward to on Exai, and that is that.

 

Formally, this is a retreat back from the curious synthesis of «melody», «humming tone», and «jarring noise» on Oversteps into the safer, tried and true territory of their post-Confield recor­dings. Once again, it is the confused-and-confusing sub-atomic beats that rule the day — and it is true that Booth and Brown have a seemingly infinite amount of combinations to try out, but this would be more of interest to an expert in combinatorics than a simple listener who cannot remem­ber ever pledging to decipher, catalog, and analyze every percussive pattern generated by the two geniuses. In other words, it no longer stimulates me even on a purely detached, «intellectual» le­vel — no more than a tenth generation video game targeted at the same old market.

 

Even worse, much too often it looks as if they are not trying at all. The longest track on the album (ʽbladeloresʼ) runs for twelve minutes on what seems like one and only one musical idea — a leisurely revolving «warped» noise wave, twirling mysteriously in the background while the usu­al jackhammers are put in «relaxed» autopilot mode in the foreground. There is nothing innova­tive about this, and from an atmospheric point of view, it seems so boring that I wouldn't even be able to be lulled to sleep by whatever is happening. The second largest track (ʽcloudlineʼ) is a bit more dynamic, but overall, I must say that I get more excited when pressing my ear real close to the back panel of my computer — I mean, why bother listening to the faked life of microchips when you could just as well enjoy the real thing?

 

I wish I could produce a slightly less clueless impression here, but, in all honesty, I have nothing interesting, insightful, or pleasant to say about a single one of these tracks. As far as I am concer­ned, Autechre have simply returned to the bland, uninspired «craft» of their Draft 7.30 stage, and this album, huge as it is, can only be a donation to the staunchest of fans — personally, I am not going to be bowled over by the sheer hugeness of this offering. Bottomline: if Confield is all of your life and the village green beyond it, Exai will add an extra 120 minutes of happiness — otherwise, spare yourself the misery of trying to «get it»: just think, instead of one listen to Exai you could have spent the same time on five Beach Boys albums! Just this one thought is quite sufficient to solidify the thumbs down.

 

ELSEQ 1 (2016)

 

1) feed1; 2) c16 deep tread; 3) 13x0 step; 4) pendulu hv moda; 5) curvcaten.

 

Admit it, the last thing you want in your life is to be left without a new Autechre experience every few years — because what would be the meaning of that life? How else could you even begin to penetrate the deepest mysteries of the universe? One good listen to a new Autechre al­bum — isn't that pretty much the equivalent of reading the complete works of all major figures in existentialist philosophy, or at least the equivalent of a master's degree from MIT? Could modern art truly survive without being exposed to the latest and greatest in abstract electronic noise from two geniuses who keep revolutionizing the scene every few years in ways so deep and subtle, most people don't even notice it?... If that is your way of thinking, too, then to you, 2016 will be the awesomest milestone in Autechre history, as Booth and Brown assault and overload our senses with not one, not two, not three, but five albums released on the same day: 247 minutes of brand new Autechre product, enough to keep one away from Selena Gomez and Lukas Graham for at least... uh, well, for as long as it takes for the next Autechre album to come out.

 

Technically, Elseq 1-5 is really just one album, counting as such in typical discographies and not even analyzeable in terms of separate discs, since it was only made available as a digital down­load (CD format is way beneath these guys' level now, and a vinyl release would go against the digital fetish); but even for a guy like me, who is not used at all to detailed dissections of electronic epics and prefers condensed and superficial assessments, 247 minutes is a bit too much to sit through in one go without going mental (if I listen to it on headphones) or driving every­body around mental (if I go for the speakers). And regardless of whether we hate it or love it, we have to admit the mammoth nature of the enterprise, so I suppose it does merit several reviews after all — let alone the fact that at least some of the 1-5 volumes do have their own specific features, and counting them separately wouldn't hurt.

 

Elseq 1, in particular, feels like the heaviest and most aggressive volume of the lot, mainly due to the opening blast of ʽfeed1ʼ: eleven minutes of what sounds like strong electric current run through a large set of interconnected and savagely slashed cables — sparks blasting in all direc­tions, and any organic being that dares penetrate even the remote periphery of the field created by this mess getting fried instantaneously. A simple, brutal, and strangely effective track, probably their «angriest» in years and years, and, of course, barely listenable to everybody with inborn aversion to digital feedback. However, the second lengthy epic, ʽc16 deep threadʼ, seems more interesting — not least because it is driven by a very cool rhythmic pattern, one that sounds stuck somewhere in between a huge dripping faucet, two giants playing table tennis, and a railroad man driving spikes in an underwater section of the tracks. Everything else that goes on at the same time is a mix of radio static and iron-soldering noises, rather typical of Autechre, but it is really the cool percussion tone that deserves special attention.

 

The other three tracks are marginally more melodic: thus, behind the slightly trip-hoppy rhythms of ʽ13x0 stepʼ you will find sonic patterns that sound like alien melodies, transmitted from the distance of several thousand light years and re-converted into music to the best ability of the signal-capturing device — some frequencies lost and some implied by the brain rather than actual­ly heard; ʽpendulu hv modaʼ sounds like some Brian Eno ambient track that keeps getting interrupted through poor transmission, as you twist, bend, and re-direct the poor antenna to get to hear at least something; and only ʽcurvcatenʼ returns us fully to drum-'n'-bass territory in order to end things in the same ballpark where they'd started, only on a slightly more quiet note.

 

On the whole, the energy and loudness of this stuff does make it seem like an improvement on Exai at least — and I'd be the first to admit that there are a few nifty sonic ideas here, though whether they actually «work» on some metaphysical level or if my mind just clings to them be­cause of the sheer novelty factor is unclear. And let's not even get started on whether these few nifty sonic ideas deserve to be framed in 52 minutes of running time, especially since we've only just begun with the grand experience.

 

ELSEQ 2 (2016)

 

1) elyc6 0nset; 2) chimer 1-5-1; 3) c7b2.

 

Okay, most of this second volume (just three tracks in total) is like one gigantic game of Pong, or, rather, two or three games of Pong played at the same time. The first track is 27 minutes long, and the only point of that is to start out fully fleshed out and then gradually shed them sound layers one by one, so that at the end of this sonic striptease we just have a bunch of waves of noise: the balls are gone, but their force fields still remain, and the ripples swing over one another long after their original cause is no longer visible. I think they did this stuff many times before, and it is merely the length of it that is new here — if you derive mystical pleasure from multiple bings, plings, psshts, burps, twirps, clicks, and clucks, be their guest.

 

On the up side, the first track sounds positively nice, cozy, and melodic when compared to the third track — twice as short, fortunately, but five times as irritating: think all the noisiness of the first volume, but without its sonic power: thirteen minutes of what sounds like a cross between radio static and somebody trying to bore through a concrete wall with a badly dulled and poorly powered electric drill. Some people actually pay money to be tortured by this stuff for no reason whatsoever (most likely, people who have way too much happiness in their everyday life and are looking forward to reduce it by any means possible). Bad news is, there's nothing even remotely innovative about these sounds in 2016, and without the shock factor, this is just dull in every possible manner — emotional or intellectual. And by «dull», I mean «dull as if being slowly cut apart with a very dull blade», that kind of dull.

 

In between the two, there's a short five minute interlude that arguably provides most of the enter­tainment — a percussion track that sounds as if somebody were furiously bashing his drumsticks on the surface of a thick, boggy marsh, and, appropriately, a synth pattern emulating the incessant croaking of little froggies, hiding somewhere near the surface (although, allegedly, froggies can­not really croak under the water, but I guess everything is possible in the alien worlds of Autech­re). This at least sounds like decent material, idea-wise, for a better developed conceptual track (perhaps they should send it to Björk or something), but little good does it do, sitting crammed there between two silly sonic monsters.

 

I think I almost like the way that the Pitchfork people tried to describe this volume: "If you ever wondered what it would really mean for Autechre to take an uninhibited plunge into the weirdo void, now you have your answer", they said. Most of the stuff people write about Autechre (and especially people over at Pitchfork) is meaningless and clichéd anyway (and that's not to be taken as an offense — writing something not meaningless about Autechre is almost as hard as explai­ning the Kamasutra to a Mennonite), but I like the "weirdo void" reference. A void is usually supposed to be just a void — there can be no difference between «straight void» and «weirdo void» by definition. Somehow, though, Autechre have often managed, and now they manage it again, to produce a sonic void (in the sense that there's really nothing going on) and justify its existence by the mere fact that they're weirdos. Honestly, this is mostly just annoying filler that is the electronic world's equivalent of Kenny G. Get that? Weirdo void! I am certainly not buying into it just because it's weird (and, actually, it's not even that weird any more — it's simply produced by weirdos, which is a weirdly different weirdness).

 

ELSEQ 3 (2016)

 

1) eastre; 2) TBM2; 3) mesh cinereaL.

 

I think this one's the longest of them all, even though it also only has three tracks. For the third installation in the series, I guess we're kind of going ambient — except for the second and shor­test track, whose function is to function as Mr. Rhythm, briefly entertaining you in between Mr. Atmosphere and Mr. Chaos. That said, I am not quite in the clear as to why Mr. Rhythm had to sample the «Boom-Boom-Thwack!» pattern from ʽWe Will Rock Youʼ, and why the idea of lis­tening to seven minutes of boom-boom-thwack (everything else comes in the form of nearly inaudible rhythm tracks and occasional fuse bursts) should be realized in the «breathing space» between two sonic mega-monsters.

 

The first of which basically just sounds like the wind howling in naked electric wires (for 22 minutes) — there's about three chords there, endlessly repeated over a sustained hum, and while I'm all for slowing down and taking your time to enjoy nuances in this madly rushing world of ours, this seems to be taking the idea too far. At least when Brian Eno does these never-changing soundscapes, they can be used for background accompaniment because they're pretty; using this track for background accompaniment is impossible unless you also happen to casually drink castor oil and eat skunk droppings for breakfast, and make no distinction whatsoever between Van Der Graaf Generator and Britney Spears, because they're all «pop slop» to you.

 

The third track is at least nicely chaotic: this is «Pong meets Art Rock», as the geometric-soun­ding patterns are rendered less percussive and more melodic. Again, though, the problem is that at no point (other than a weird fade-out and a quick build-up back to basics in the middle) does the track offer any development, at least not the kind that could be observed by the naked ear over a couple of casual listens. Worse still, even a short, economic sample of ʽmesh cinereaLʼ triggers no image in my head — I can't even say that this is a decent industrial soundscape, because it does not have the grimey grittiness, the merciless grind that goes along with good industrial. It's just the sound of several electric currents interacting with each other. Hello, I'm Current #1, nice to meet you. Hi, I'm Current #2, let's get married and have a short circuit. That's the story of our lives in a nutshell, and we're going to be telling it to you for 25 minutes.

 

Of course, we should be reminded that these three tracks are not standalone entities — but then again, what kind of superman would want to listen to all five Elseq volumes in a row? That's even more of a challenge than trying to read all of Ulysses in one day. The only reason why these tracks are so lengthy is that they really want you to pay attention — to understand how serious these sonic textures are, because if they weren't serious, what kind of moron would the artist have to be to stretch them out for so long? If it's big, it's important. And if it's important, it's your fault and nobody else's if you refuse to see that importance. So prepare yourself to open your mind to the transcendental artistic significance of the feedback hum of the naked electric cord, and after ten consecutive listens you will have outgrown the proletarian concept of melody and ready to face the world of music from a completely alien perspective. Or — who knows — maybe God-like perspective?..

 

ELSEQ 4 (2016)

 

1) acdwn2; 2) foldfree casual; 3) latentcall; 4) artov chain; 5) 7th slip.

 

After two highly disappointing volumes, it would be near impossible for the next one to continue the same trend — and indeed, we have a return to shorter tracks, more dynamic flows, and less arrogant minimalism here. I think that this one is the archetypal «glitch» entry in the series, since most of the tracks are dominated by various types of glitching... but I'd rather take endless glit­ching over 20-minute long crackle-and-hum sequences anyway.

 

Only one of these numbers, ʽfoldfree casualʼ, runs on softer fuel, largely free of harsh percussion (except for one brief section in the middle) and dependent on «electronic church music» sustained synth textures in the background, arguably as close as Autechre are willing to come to conventio­nal understanding of «beauty» in this entire project. But it lies between ʽacdwn2ʼ and ʽlatentcallʼ, both of which thrive on crazyass percussion loops and glitches a-plenty, and also allow for some build-up elements (which essentially means gradually adding extra synth overdubs in the back­ground, as if we were slowly zooming out into space). I cannot say that anything here surprises or astounds me in any way, but at least the tracks are structured like glitchy mini-suites, with intro­ductions, themes, bridges, and codas, rather than a single musical idea stretched out to 20 minutes because we're the first artists who ever had the artistic thought of stretching a single musical idea out to 20 minutes (not really).

 

The last two tracks are the most technically unlistenable ones, but they are also mercifully short: ʽartov chainʼ briefly returns you to the «whistling down the wire» sonic patterns of the previous record, and ʽ7th slipʼ is the ultimate in tape manipulation (sounds like somebody recorded some­thing, sped it up ten times, then slowed it down fifty times, then put it on vinyl, played it with shaky hands, and there you go — a direct line to God for six and a half minutes). That last track sure is a fresh sonic experience for me, but whether this should be cause for celebration remains a big question. But at least you cannot accuse them of being boring.

 

Even with all the «energy» here, though, it is still hard to get rid of the feeling that, somehow, there is neither any true joy of creativity behind these tracks, nor any particular meaning — it's just one of those many «woke up with a lazy desire to engage in some glitching» days. It used to be so that this music, to me, brought on images of hardworking nanites running about their busi­ness in an electronic nano-anthill; the nanites of ʽacdwn2ʼ and ʽlatentcallʼ, however, seem rather tired of life and are continuing to run about their business just because they have nothing else to do — had they had a choice, they'd much rather sit by the fireplace and read Moby Dick, but no, they are still being put to work by relentless slavedrivers. Viewed in that light, Elseq 4 might even be hilarious — Dad-Electronica! — but to do that, you'd need to listen to all of Autechre in chronological order again, and the human life span cannot come to terms with that.

 

ELSEQ 5 (2016)

 

1) pendulu casual; 2) spTh; 3) spaces how V; 4) freulaeux; 5) oneum.

 

I wish I could say that Autechre have saved the best for last, but this sort of implies that I have an idea of what is best for Autechre, and I do not. I am, however, almost ready to say that they saved the most diverse bunch of tracks for us — on this fifth volume, there is no single overriding theme, rather a little bit of everything, in a final recapitulation of all the sides of their musical philosophy that matter. Or pretend to matter.

 

So, the first track is more wind whistling down the naked electric wire, along with some more wind fluttering in the electronic sails of a ship that takes nine minutes to get nowhere in particu­lar, with each of the nine minutes completely equivalent to any other one. Then, ʽspThʼ kicks in with some rhythm, and the sonic snaps and blasts take on a slightly more melodic quality, if you can take «resonance», «reverberation», and «echo» as synonyms for «melody», that is. ʽSpaces how Vʼ, accidentally true to a part of its title, does throw you out in space, with an astral perspective represented by the usual means (canvas synth hum + quasi-randomized bleeps and beeps of passing unidentified flying objects). ʽFreulauexʼ is the liveliest track of them all, with a deconst­ructed techno rhythm that still remains marginally danceable, while in the background somebody seems to be conducting research on dynamite at a distance of about fifty miles away.

 

Finally, ʽoneumʼ could be called the «grand finale» — not only of the fifth volume, but of the entire project in general, as it is the most sonically fleshed out, loud, grand, and ominous track of them all, with a high-pitched, disturbing, but solemn electronic pattern running uninterrupted in the background and auxiliary broken up mini-patterns quickly rising to the surface and extingui­shing themselves in the foreground. Does this make it sound grand? It's not that grand, really. It's the kind of track that they could probably knock off in a couple of hours these days, given their overall expertise and stuff. But it has a familiar emotional ring, unlike so many of these Elseq sequences that have no emotional ring whatsoever.

 

All of which leads us to the final question — so was this project really worth it? Five CDs worth of new material, was this some sort of big, ambitious, rejuvenating musical statement to shatter the bounds and coils of modern electronica? Well, don't take my words at face value, given that my electronic expertise still remains limited, but I dare say bull. There are some moments on this mammoth (most of them contained on the promising, but disappointing first volume) that could rank up there with Autechre's best, but on the whole, this is simply the hugest demonstration that Confield brought the duo to a dead end — as off-putting and puzzling as that release was, not a single Autechre album since that time has truly built up on its reputation and promise, and this is just the latest and greatest in a series of attempts to jump over their own heads. A futile enter­prise, that, considering that they lost their heads with Confield. At least in 2001, this was exciting. In 2016, for the most part, this is boring — and bland. They are not pushing any boundaries for­ward; they are still working within a set formula, except we are still sometimes trapped by the illusion that there's some sort of revolution going on when there isn't. Of course, if you are one of the few for whom listening to Confield is as normal and ordinary a practice as to others it is listening to Mozart, or the Beatles, or even Miley Cyrus, that gives you an entirely different perspective; but that's a highly specialized thing, and I hate getting into that sort of nuances. I just hope they won't take five more years and come out with a 20-volume album — if this «more Autechre is better Autechre» shit ain't stopping any time soon, I'm definitely not going to bother.

 

THE AUTEURS

NEW WAVE (1993)

 

1) Showgirl; 2) Bailed Out; 3) American Guitars; 4) Junk Shop Clothes; 5) Don't Trust The Stars; 6) Starstruck; 7) How Could I Be Wrong; 8) Housebreaker; 9) Valet Parking; 10) Idiot Brother; 11) Early Years; 12) Home Again.

 

If the name of the band is «The Auteurs», and the name of the band's debut album is New Wave, it would be only logical if the first song title were ʽAnna Karinaʼ. As strongly as I have to congra­tulate myself for coming close to the truth (since one of the songs on the band's second album is actually titled ʽNew French Girlfriendʼ), all of these trappings — including the fuck-this-world black-and-white imagery on the band's early photos — only suggest a pool of reverence for the intellec­tual rebel attitude of early Sixties' Europe; the music, however, generally scoops up ins­piration from completely different waterbasins.

 

The Auteurs were really little more than a pretext for Luke Haines — the man behind, before, in the middle of, and all around the band — to adorn himself with a cool moniker. The rest of the band consisted of bass player Alice Readman, since she already was Luke's girlfriend anyway; a rotating set of not particularly outstanding drummers (Glen Collins on this particular record); and James Banbury as the band's resident cellist — probably the only distinctive element of The Au­teurs' sound and style that is not Luke Haines. That said, he does not play on every track, and the cello always stays in the background: first time I listened to New Wave in a somewhat distracted state, I did not even notice that some of the songs had a cello padding to them.

 

With these details out of the way, let us talk about the early, barely-post-pre-pubescent years of Luke Haines as bandleader, songwriter, arranger, musician, and spiritual vessel (setting aside the tacky issue of Luke Haines as a human being, commonly reported to be rather juicy, but should not really concern all of us who strive for civility).

 

Every once in a while, The Auteurs are repor­ted as one of the first, if not the first band to symbolize «Britpop», preceding by a very brief mar­gin all of those people like Blur, Oasis, etc. — a rather confusing pigeonholing, actually, because (a) «Britpop» itself is an awful word in its current usage (if The Kinks weren't the first real Brit­pop band, then who the heck was?..); (b) The Auteurs sound nothing like either Blur or Oasis; (c) The Auteurs do not, in fact, sound tremen­dously «British» at all — neither does Haines sport a particularly «trademark British» singing ac­cent, nor are the lyrical subject matters particularly UK-related, and what else is there for the mu­sic to qualify as «Britpop»? A heavy Gilbert & Sullivan influence?..

 

In reality, the very name of «The Auteurs» surmises that Luke Haines would like, if at all pos­sible, to avoid pigeonholing. He is simply a singer-songwriter who happened to see it fit, at the time, to indulge his singer-songwriting impulses in a «rock band» format, no more, no less. Mu­sic-wise, he is not a particularly pretentious or ambitious singer-songwriter, seeking for direct self-expression rather than for new and surprising formats. His melodic gift is obvious, but not tremendous, and quite conventionally realized: The Kinks may have been just as much of an influ­ence here as Love, or R.E.M., or any band, American, British, or world-wide, that could grow its own identity out of a fairly «normal» understanding of melody in folk, pop, and rock'n'roll tradi­tions. Nothing particularly eyebrow-raising here, unless you think that regular use of melodic cello overdubs in pop-rock songs was a particular stunner for 1993 (and why should it be, when Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne were merrily engaging in it twenty-five years earlier?). Nor does New Wave flash around in an eye-attracting retro parade: Haines goes just as easy on hea­vily distorted, lo-fi grunge / alt-rock guitars as he does on the acoustic strum or on the «colorful»  electric pop-rock tones — New Wave is quite clearly a product of the post-Nirvana world, de­spite its allegiance to the pre-Nirvana one.

 

The old and new schools go for a merry merge already on the first song — ʽShowgirlʼ combines a dreamy, ethereal vocal part, almost straight off some obscure psychedelic nugget from the late 1960s, with a simple, feedback-drenched guitar buzz in the chorus that was all the rage in 1993. The trick worked, though: once they'd released this melancholic, self-deprecating tale of a guy disillusioned in being married to a showgirl, it effectively clicked with the critics and eventually led to a se­rious recording contract. And how does it sound today? Well... it isn't particularly awe­some, but you do get to take a bit of a liking to Haines' artistic persona, and supposedly, that is all that's really required of the first song. Because «a bit of a liking» is quite likely to grow into a se­rious attraction, over time.

 

The «liking» that I'm talking about is hardly a kind of «I really like this guy» liking, though; it's more of a «I really like how this guy is manipulating my attention» liking. Luke Haines is a semi-decent rock lyricist, deftly hiding his childhood traumas and adolescent disillusionment under metaphors, allegories, and impressionistic chaff so thick that very quickly, you lose all hopes or wishes to decipher the message — you have to simply remain contented with the fact that he is smart, ironic, and romantic, while you, most likely, are dumb, straightforward, and deadly dull.

 

More importantly, he can also come up with some fine vocal hooks and occasionally resonant pop guitar riffs — such as the nagging dental drill driving ʽIdiot Brotherʼ, or the mean little pissed-off chord sequence at the end of each chorus to ʽEarly Yearsʼ. None of these riffs will pro­bably ever make it to the Great Textbook, but over the course of the record, they support each other in building a coherent impression: there is really not a single «useless» song on the album, each offers at least a little something to add to the general pool of depression, hatred, disenchant­ment, disillusionment, self-deprecation, social anguish, explicit and implicit envy...

 

...you'd think I'd be talking Alice In Chains here or something, but probably the one big advan­tage of Luke Haines is that he is expressing all that stuff without having to resort to clichés — such as brutal heavy riffs, jarring power chords, or hateful screaming at the top of one's lungs. Instead, he does it all through hushed, dreamy vocal hooks: lines like "bailed out, this skin is shed / bailed out, this thing is dead" or "downtown, you're burning down / I'm sick of parking cars" are delivered almost lovingly, the way others would sing of a love interest lost or found.

 

If forced to choose one song, I'd probably go along with ʽStarstruckʼ, whose lyrics cleverly walk the line between the two different meanings of the word — maybe for no other reason simply than the way he articulates the phrase "I was always starstruck" that resolves the verse-chorus build-up. Idealism and cynicism are attitudes that are pretty hard to combine within the confines of a single vessel — like matter and anti-matter, you'd expect them to cancel out each other, but Haines has the skill it takes to override the laws of the universe: this and many of the other songs are delivered from the perspective of somebody who obviously believes in something grander, yet hardly ever admits that it is reachable.

 

Overall, running slightly ahead of the events to come, I find New Wave to be The Auteurs' finest moment — Luke Haines' image and style is already fully fleshed out, the individual songs are all written at the top of his abilities, and the balance between the Sixties, the Eighties, and the Nine­ties in the arrangements and atmospheres is dang near perfect. And yes, the album is anything but flashy, and quite prone to disappearing in the cracks of the floorboards of time, so all the more reason to join me in a big juicy thumbs up here.

 

NOW I'M A COWBOY (1994)

 

1) Lenny Valentino; 2) Brainchild; 3) I'm A Rich Man's Toy; 4) New French Girlfriend; 5) The Upper Classes; 6) Chinese Bakery; 7) A Sister Like You; 8) Underground Movies; 9) Life Classes/Life Model; 10) Modern History; 11) Daughter Of A Child.

 

With a title like that, some might think The Auteurs would be quitting the cool Euro flavors of New Wave and em­bracing country-western and other rootsy directions. Others, already accus­tomed to the idea that Luke Haines' album titles have intentionally little to do with album content, might not think that — and the latter would be more correct than the former, since the only song on here that has a vaguely country-western sheen to it is the slow-waltzing ʽBrainchildʼ (whose lyrics actually include the word «cowboy», but something makes me suspect that these lyrics would hardly be welcome in Nashville anyway).

 

Altogether, Now I'm A Cowboy is a bit heavier and going for a more «rock-oriented» sound than New Wave — fewer acoustic pieces and more loud instrumental passages (such as the codas to ʽUpper Classesʼ and ʽModern Historyʼ). Cutting down on subtlety also leads to cutting down on variety and on charisma: the result is an album that is ever so slightly more crude and generic than its predecessor. But, after all, Luke Haines did want to be in a rock band, and build himself up a steady fanbase — and you can't just do that with a «brainy» sound, downplaying the «braw­ny» component. «Brainy» + «brawny» = «musical brownie», which would be a good definition for this record: tough, rich in calories, but sometimes way too heavy on the stomach.

 

Haines' lyrics have already reached that stage where objective interpretations do not exist: all that remains is just a general sarcastic feel of rejection, sometimes targeted at the well-to-do (ʽI'm A Rich Man's Toyʼ, ʽThe Upper Classesʼ), sometimes at the pseudo-intellectual elites (ʽNew French Girlfriendʼ), sometimes at celebrities (ʽLenny Valentinoʼ), and sometimes just rejection per se (ʽA Sister Like Youʼ — very sad-sounding, but nobody knows why). Fortunately, the lyrics are still nowhere near the focal point of the album, perfectly enjoyable and sympathetic even if one does not know one word of English (and even if one does, I doubt it would help much).

 

I have no personal preferences here — maybe ʽNew French Girlfriendʼ sticks out a little, with active help from James Banbury: his cello «swoops» in the intro set such a vividly sneering atmo­sphere that the song gets an initial kick-start like no other. ʽChinese Bakeryʼ is a good proposition for lovers of well-rounded Britpop vocal hooks. ʽA Sister Like Youʼ is a good proposition for Kinks fans (the fact that the song deals with the mystical trials of «two sisters» can hardly be a total coincidence; melodically, there is little resemblance, but atmosphere-wise, the song dispen­ses the same soft, lyrical melancholy as Ray Davies' ʽTwo Sistersʼ). ʽBrainchildʼ is interesting because it really takes a country vibe and translates it into the language of jangle-pop: where you'd normally expect slide guitars and fiddles, you get regular electric twang and cello, not to mention those hushed post-punk vocals.

 

The larger, «epic» compositions are questionable. Personally, I like ʽThe Upper Classesʼ, with its lightly-depressing mantraic coda (and its little guessable nod to The Beatles' ʽI Want Youʼ, or am I seeing things?), but don't care a lot about ʽModern Historyʼ, which, despite lacking a clearly fleshed out melodic line, repeats the same coda trick once again (with an even better guessable nod to the same source, even including some windy white noise for fatness' sake). It seems like, generally, if Haines does not manage to say something in three minutes, he won't be able to say anything in five or six — and the arrangements on Auteurs' albums still remain too sparse and simple (but tasteful) to hold your attention for all that time by themselves. Basically, they just ain't big enough for big songs.

 

Still, the people, always great suckers for loudness and bigness, went for it and pushed Now I'm A Cowboy higher up the charts than its predecessor — and ʽLenny Valentinoʼ made enough of a splash to have an entire dream-pop band from Poland named after it four years later (even if the song itself is anything but dream-pop; only Haines' hushed vocals could be said to have a dreamy atmosphere to them — the rest is loud, dark, punchy power-pop. By the way, most of the vocals on the album are «hushed», which sometimes gets annoying — we do know that Haines can be a proper singer, but it is almost as if he is too embarrassed to sing properly).

 

This probably makes the album sort of an «objective peak» for the band, but the way I see it, the public just didn't catch up to their quality soon enough — as it often happens, the debut album had to sink in and simmer for a while, with the prize for its awesomeness going to the inferior sophomore effort. But that's alright: like I said, the quality fluctuations are quite subtle anyway. Most of the songs here are still smart, catchy, stylish, and haven't at all lost their resonance in the modern world, as long as it still flaunts its «Lennies» and «Valentinos». Thumbs up.

 

AFTER MURDER PARK (1996)

 

1) Light Aircraft On Fire; 2) Child Brides; 3) Land Lovers; 4) New Brat In Town; 5) Everything You Say Will De­stroy You; 6) Unsolved Child Murder; 7) Married To A Lazy Lover; 8) Buddha; 9) Tombstone; 10) Fear Of Flying; 11) Dead Sea Navigators; 12) After Murder Park.

 

Supposedly this here is the station where the successfully converted adepts of Luke Haines con­tinue their merry train voyage, whereas everybody else, tired of unceasing harrassment on the part of the conductor, gets off with a feel of relief — justifying their choice by pointing out that, whatever Haines really had to say, he said on his first two records, and this... this is just After Murder Park. I mean, what else is there to «get» once you've already been murdered?

 

The record does feature at least one intriguing contrast — on one hand, it was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, the textbook symbol of clean, perfectionist production; on the other hand, the band worked with Steve Albini, the notorious guru of American lo-fi indie, as producer. That said, the contrast intrigues more on paper than through the audio channels, because there is not a whole lot of big sonic difference between what they used to have and what they have now — the whole «ringing guitars coming from a mudhole» schtick was already favored by Haines from the very beginning, and calling in Albini mainly just re-states the old fact rather than generates a new kind of sound. Beauty through dirt, dirt through beauty, you know the drift.

 

The choice one has to make is very much triggered by «The Auteurs»' continuing slide into total monotonousness. For the most part, these songs chiefly differ only in the mix balance between acoustic and electric instruments — some are louder, grungier and screechier, others a bit more soft and subtle, with Luke singing more or less in the same «poisonous» breathy snarl all over the record. But the obscurely-depressing «dark folk vibe» is at the heart of each and every song, and how does that warrant individual comments on any of them?..

 

«Flashiness» only comes through in one or two tracks, most notably ʽBuddhaʼ — because, admit it, one does not usually concern oneself with Buddha's birthday unless one is properly Buddhist, and none of us probably ever heard Buddha congratulated on his birthday in such a sneering, iro­nic tone over a musical pause, followed by an ominous organ swirl that is probably supposed to accompany Buddha's being pushed over a cliff with a sack over his head ("I hope your absence is made clear", Haines remarks, either bitterly hinting at the universal betrayal of Buddhist — or Christian, or Confucian, you name it — ideals all over the world, or just conducting a random session of shock therapy). Notable, but is it a good song? — I am still quite unsure. Too overtly gimmicky to convince my senses of the realness of this anger.

 

Everything else is rather non-descript. The lyrics continue to flow in barely controlled streams of subconscious metaphors, sometimes decipherable (ʽLand Loversʼ seems to be about Israeli occu­pation; ʽTombstoneʼ mentions the Baader-Meinhof group, later to be adopted as a moniker for a Haines side project of «musical terrorism»), more often not — but generally still revolving aro­und dark thoughts of murders, suicides, crashes, and other equally delightful subjects. (You don't even need anyone to tell you that — just look at the titles.) The instrumental melodies revel in mediocrity, and only get by through the usual Auteurs' atmosphere. The best part of it all are Haines' vocal twists and twirls, which still remain inventive — but, like I said, you'd have to be seriously in love with Haines to be bowled over by any of them.

 

It is the vocal hooks, actually, that still betray a connection to Brit-pop: for instance, the Kinksy slip into falsetto on the "everybody's gonna get it, yeah... in tombstone" line in ʽTombstoneʼ, or the lazy languid modulation on "I have no fear of dying at all" in ʽFear Of Flyingʼ, or the slides and ascents on the «romantic» chorus to ʽChild Bridesʼ. My personal opinion, though, is that all these excellent inventions — those which are the only advocates for After Murder Park's quali­fying as a «musical achievement» — deserve a different production style. There's indie lo-fi, and then there is melodic Brit-pop. Sometimes it is interesting to splice them together, but more often than not it's like putting sugar and salt in the same cup of coffee. If you ask me, I'd rather hear these songs recorded by Ray Davies — except that Ray would never agree to record them: the bitterness and cynicism in these words and moods is way too much even for Ray's permanently disillusioned and embittered (but still quite romantic and idealistic) old ass.

 

In conclusion, I will just say that my favorite song here is probably ʽMarried To A Lazy Loverʼ — not because of its great vocal hooks (there aren't any specific ones), but because it injects a little less venom than usual, replacing it with an opium-den-like atmosphere of stupefied tranquil­lity: slow, a little hazy and dreamy, a little desperate and resentful, and somehow managing to state its «there is no way out» message without too much of that self-righteous anger that, ever so often, is likely to trigger a «who the hell do you think you are?» response rather than simple ad­miration. It would probably be a surprising choice for the fans — who seem to usually go after more uptempo stuff like ʽLight Aircraft On Fireʼ — but without it, I would probably have to re­frain from the expected thumbs up. Even then, it's sort of an intermediate decision, and definitely not a love gesture: anyway, Luke Haines doesn't ask to be loved — he is far more of a «negative creep», really, than Kurt Cobain ever managed to pass himself for. (Real «negative creeps» do not shoot themselves, anyway — they gleefully watch others shooting themselves).

 

HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOOTBOYS (1999)

 

1) The Rubettes; 2) 1967; 3) How I Learned To Love The Bootboys; 4) Your Gang, Our Gang; 5) Some Changes; 6) School; 7) Johnny And The Hurricanes; 8) The South Will Rise Again; 9) Asti Spumante; 10) Sick Of Hari Krisna; 11) Lights Out; 12) Future Generation; 13) Breaking Up; 14) Getting Wrecked At Home.

 

Somebody ought to probably do a study on all the «turn of the millennium» albums released at the turn of the millennium, explaining why they all sucked. (Or, at least, why we do not heartily remember any of them as «that record that marked our transition into another epoch»). In any case, one of the most self-consciously «generational» records of that kind certainly must have be­longed to Luke Haines — for that purpose, he reassembled The Auteurs, previously put on hold while Luke was working on his «Baader Meinhof» project, and together they made their last re­cord, which may not be the best in their catalog, but definitely seems to make more sense than After Murder Park and almost as much as New Wave.

 

This is a concept album of sorts, a fuzzy look back at the past century in its numerous delights and disillusionments — with every delight a disillusionment, and vice versa. Luke Haines is too much in love with his own brain to ever let you know properly how he feels about the things he is singing about (and sometimes, simply what the hell he is singing about), but, like the proverbial early hipster, he always takes good care to pick out the least predictable topics and drape them in the most controversial moods. «Nostalgia» would be too simple, and misguided, a term to apply to these songs. Nobody could seriously be «nostalgic» about The Rubettes, an idiotic mid-1970s band that tried to merge posh Motown style with glam entourage — and even if Haines' seductive "hang up your jeans, put out your school clothes, tune in for the top ten" at the beginning of the album, multiplied by sweet soft chimes, begins with a message not unlike Lou Reed's classic "her life was saved by rock'n'­roll", very soon the irony starts to creep in. Nobody's life, after all, was saved by "sugar baby love" (here, Luke is directly quoting The Rubettes' biggest hit), and against all the chimes and angelic backing vocals, his sneering vocals are what rules the stage: "the future's made of coal, the past is made of gold... you developed late, weren't the Nineties great?" (The correct answer is: "no, they weren't, at least not for The Rubettes").

 

So, basically, this is not «nostalgia» — this is «post-nostalgia», where you still look with the usual lon­ging at the past, but simultaneously realize that most of it, all those «little things» you used to be fond of, are just as ridiculous as whatever you have in the present or expect from the future. Maybe even «anti-nostalgia», in a way — just look at these titles: ʽThe South Will Rise Againʼ (scarecrowish!), ʽSick Of Hari Krisnaʼ (no sucking up to George Harrison, that's for sure), ʽHow I Learned To Love The Bootboysʼ (the «bootboys» were an anti-hippie skinhead variety, and this title alone might have cost Luke the loyalty of quite a few potential fans), and even ʽAsti Spumanteʼ does not really look much like a positive title, if you ask me.

 

ʽ1967ʼ is not about going to San Francisco or tripping in an underground club in London: more in line with one of Luke's primary idols — The Kinks — it is sort of a snazzy-spazzy retort that simply states: for the average Joe, it does not matter much if it is 1967 or 1999 behind that win­dow, because in both cases, there is "no pop in our record collection", because "we are bedazzled, we're ordering cocktails, we act like peasants". It is actually quite funny how many people in this world, if properly explained the meaning of the song, would probably want to strangle Haines with their bare hands — but in reality, he is quite safe behind the protective wall of ellyptic and metaphorical language, not to mention the consciously chosen lack of public notoriety.

 

Musically, the album is a hodge-podge, and you should expect one if the idea of the album is to turn the past hundred (okay, more like fifty) years into an enormous Monopoly playboard and drop the dice in fourteen random spots. For instance, the title track looks back to the dark depths of post-punk, with an almost danceable «electro-pop» rhythm section peppered with space synths and echoes — but no suicidal or generally depressed notes, rather a mysteriously threatening atmosphere here (one that is probably better suited for the likes of the «bootboys», even though I seriously doubt that the average «bootboy» would ever be flattered by the song).

 

ʽYour Gang, Our Gangʼ is distorted, screamy and barky, just as the title suggests; ʽSome Chan­gesʼ is power-pop with psychedelic keyboard overtones; ʽThe South Will Rise Againʼ, on the other hand, has no true Southern overtones, but is rather «dark psych-folk»  — medieval acoustic guitar merged with electronic effects; and ʽJohnny And The Hurricanesʼ is simply non-descript — a progressive epic, deeply submerged in chimes, strings, pianos, and fuzz, the last thing you'd probably expect from a song written about Johnny and the Hurricanes. Except it was not written about Johnny and the Hurricanes — rather, it is dedicated to everyone and everything that is "born on a Monday, dead within a year", and from that point of view, its threatening strings and fuzzy rumble are perfectly appropriate for such a general eulogy.

 

Lyrically and atmospherically, really, this is a very complex album — way too complex to be properly understood in a world where we want our rock music to speak to us as fast as it can, be­cause otherwise, it will be mercilessly trampled down by all those standing next in line. And, as I said, it might have been all for the best: because How I Learned To Love The Bootboys is not a «depressing» record — it is a ruthless killer, and the deeper you dig into it, the better you under­stand all the specific peculiarities of Luke Haines' genetic material: all I can say is — thank God the man was not born with any political ambitions in mind. Three / four listens may be enough to understand that this is quite an unusual album, and appreciate some of the subtle hooks and melo­dic moves, but they will probably not be enough to understand all the incredible nastiness of the spirit behind this whole thing.

 

If you ask me, it is no wonder Alice Readman quit The Auteurs even before they officially disbanded, leaving them without a stable bass player for the subse­quent tour. It may have been one thing to record these songs in the studio, but quite a different one to sing them before live audiences — people as much indicted by this «hippie killer» album as their fathers and mothers. Not to mention ʽFuture Generationʼ, where Haines pompously — but, of course, with tongue firmly in cheek — asserts that "future generations will catch my falling star" and that "I put a pox on the seventies" (just as he put it on every other decade). Well, I suppose that this kind of brave­ry certainly warrants a thumbs up here — melodically, these songs are anything but trivial, yet it is not really the chord changes, but the arrogance and audacity, subtly hidden under a thin cover of verbal enigmas, that make Bootboys so special for that kind of «turn of the century» albums I was talking about. Some people complain about degradation, others look forward with optimism to the future — Luke Haines is the only one to tell us that all is vanity, and that numbers are just numbers. ʽSome Changesʼ, yeah, right.


AYREON

THE FINAL EXPERIMENT (1995)

 

1) Prologue; 2) The Awareness; 3) Eyes Of Time; 4) The Banishment; 5) Ye Courtyard Minstrel Boy; 6) Sail Away To Avalon; 7) Nature's Dance; 8) Computer-Reign (Game Over); 9) Waracle; 10) Listen To The Waves; 11) Magic Ride; 12) Merlin's Will; 13) The Charm Of The Seer; 14) Swan Song; 15) Ayreon's Fate.

 

Everybody get out your cheese forks, the fondue is steaming hot and waiting for you. Meet Arjen An­thony Lucassen, «Aryon» for short, a long-haired, mind-twisted Dutch guy who spent so much time reading Ursula Le Guin, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and listening to Eloy and Hawkwind that one actually wonders how in the world did he have any left to learn to play his instruments, or compose his mega-epics.

 

Actually, before going solo, he'd spent a whole decade playing in a metal band called Vengeance, which never managed to achieve success, but gave him time to hone his chops and understand that heaviness for heaviness' sake was simply not his thing. His thing, apparently, was to explore the corny side of progressive rock — finish the dubious task of merging symphonic rock with pocketbook fantasy, something that early Uriah Heep and early Rush were so deep into, but even­tually decided to advance to a more «serious» level. Fuck them pretentious, obscurantist creeps, Arjen Anthony Lucassen said: I am getting into this the right way, and I am never getting out of this once I'm in. Pledging complete allegiance and loyalty to wizards, unicorns, and damsels fair.

 

The Final Experiment, recorded in 1995 with approximately a dozen guest vocalists and a dozen session players (mostly little-known Dutch musicians), was formally credited to «Arjen Lucas­sen»: «Ayreon» was the name of the rock opera's protagonist, with whom Lucassen empathized so much he ended up borrowing his name for the rest of his life. The album was rejected by seve­ral record labels — «unicorn bands are on their way out», so they said — but Ayreon persisted in a most medieval way, eventually got what he wanted, and the world has never been the same ever since. Now let me quote:

 

This is the voice of Merlin. Listen well, for it concerns you. This chronicle commences in the year 2084 A.D. Mankind has virtually destroyed itself. Its survival depends on The Final Experi­ment. Scientists from the 21st century have developed a new computer program called ʽTime Te­lepathyʼ. By using this technique they have sent visions of humanity's decline back in time. These transmissions have been received by the mind of a blind minstrel who lives in 6th century Great Britain. His name is Ayreon... It shall be Ayreon's quest to sing of these visions and thus warn the world of its impending downfall in order to change its future into a long and prosperous one...

 

...okay, you get the drift already. Now the important thing here is neither make the mistake of trying to take it too seriously nor immediately laughing it off without giving it a decent chance. The concept itself, per se, is neither good nor bad; it is frequently dragged down by primitive ly­rics (Merlin: "Ayreon, you are an evil stranger / Ayreon, you have become a danger / Your words are all but a lie / I vow that ye shall die"), but the lyrics are entirely secondary here: Lucassen is primarily a composer. It could have helped, probably, if he'd spent some of the money wasted on guest stars to hire a proper English librettist.

 

The music, though, is surprisingly not bad. The emphasis is on a rich, diverse, fully fleshed-out sound — well, as fully fleshed-out as it can be when your budget is sort of stretched and you can­not allow yourself a decent orchestra. But in addition to synthesizers, where Lucassen comes ac­ross as a diligent, if not particularly gifted, disciple of Wakeman, there are acoustic and electric guitars, pianos, cellos, flutes, woodwinds — definitely a far cry from the monotonous «art metal» sound of bands like Queensryche. And, most importantly, the guy knows how to use them for proper atmospheric purposes.

 

All the melodies are strictly traditional. There is the expected medieval folk (ʽThe Awarenessʼ; ʽYe Courtyard Minstrel Boyʼ — sheesh!); the ʽKashmirʼ-ian mid-Eastern vibe (ʽEyes Of Timeʼ); the synthesized horn-dominated progressive anthem (ʽSail Away To Avalonʼ); the melodramatic rock opera flash with guitar pyrotechnics (ʽWaracleʼ); even a multi-part prog-rock suite going from soft acoustic to fast'n'furious rocking bits (ʽThe Banishmentʼ) — Lucassen is being quite honest with you: he is not pushing forward any boundaries or making any bold statements, just trying to put his own stamp on a whole musical direction that he clearly adores. Even the «pom­pous» message seems more like an honorary tribute to Rush than a genuine attempt on the part of «Ayreon» to warn his listeners of the impending doom.

 

And some of these melodies are quite good, really: at the very least, any fan of the whole «neo-prog» schtick should try this out — they are not nearly as complex as, say, anything by Ängla­gård, but they are generally catchier, and they all make sense within the story, as silly as the story might be. Nothing on an Ayreon album can be emotionally «gripping» for me (I can be moved by parts of Lord of the Rings, for sure, but it takes a certified Professor of English Language And Li­te­rature to achieve that effect; Arjen Lucassen is nowhere near as well-trained), but much can be curious and intriguing. It is all a bunch of high-quality B-level trashy fun. Some of the singers, including «Ayreon» himself, tend to oversing, but we are not dealing with twenty-four-hour-a-day operatic bombast here — the vocal parts are as diverse as the melodies.

 

The production is far from ideal: there is too much echo, too many electronic effects on the drums (sometimes drum machines are used altogether), and the synth-strings and synth-horns are way too strongly associated with washed-up art-rock dinosaurs so as not to sound seriously dated to­day. But there was probably no alternative to this anyway, certainly not in the mid-Nineties when «Ayreon» was still a relative nobody. Besides, not even the best studio, or the best session play­ers, or the use of the finest symphonic orchestra in the country could have removed the inevitable campy flavor. I refrain from giving the record any sort of judgement — its philosophical flaws and emotional stiffness are beyond doubt, but so is the musical boldness and professionalism that it took to put the record out. And then there is always sheer curiosity. After all, want it or not, this whole project is a weird one.

 

ACTUAL FANTASY (1996)

 

1) Actual Fantasy; 2) Abbey Of Synn; 3) The Stranger From Within; 4) Computer Eyes; 5) Beyond The Last Hori­zon; 6) Farside Of The World; 7) Back On Planet Earth; 8) Forevermore; 9) The Dawn Of Man*.

 

Lucassen's sophomore release is probably his least known of all, since it is highly atypical of the man's usual formula. It is not a single-concept «rock opera», but a conglomeration of separate songs, only loosely tied up with a general conceptual framework of the past, present, and future mysteries of the universe. It is much more heavily based on electronics than the rest of his albums (and a new, completely re-recorded version, called Actual Fantasy Revisited and released in 2004, continued and deepened that trend). And it only features the barest minimum of guest stars: two or three vocalists, a lonesome violin player (Floortje Schilt), a couple stray keyboardists, and Ayreon himself providing most of the instrumentation. And, in its original form, it only runs for about 55 minutes — ridiculous­ly short for a guy who would, since then, strictly follow the law: «If it ain't on 2 CDs, it ain't worth a green goblin's crap».

 

That said, when it comes down to the actual content, the album is no less fun than its predecessor, and in some ways is actually a huge improvement — particularly in the songwriting department. Without being constrained by the needs of operatic storytelling, Lucassen can afford to invest more effort into the search for hard-hitting, if not exactly stunning, musical themes, and present them in a less campy manner (not a «non-campy» manner, mind you, but the lyrics are generally less inane and the vocal deliveries refrain from extra pomposity).

 

ʽThe Stranger From Withinʼ, in particular, is a fine and dandy piece of lite prog-metal: rhythmic, catchy, with a good balance between the electronic effects and the electric and acoustic guitar soup, and gradually building up towards a surprisingly ferocious climax, where a quasi-Metallica «terror riff» pops out of the ground at 6:18 into the song and very soon blows it up from within. (For some reason, the coda was not made part of the shortened single version — that's the best part of the song, you silly Dutch minstrel!).

 

Length is generally a problem, of course: Arjen-Ayreon presumably deems it an insult both to his un­der­standing of Art and to his slowly growing squad of fans to record anything under six mi­nutes. On the other hand, these are prog epics, and they need to take the time to slowly come to­gether out of the blue, get fleshed out, develop some dynamics... so I wouldn't really presume to use the term «padded» without reservations. It isn't always done well, but that is a different prob­lem — whether we are ready to accept the derivative nature of these works or not.

 

As I said, the basic themes of the songs are strong foundations, guaranteeing memorability and, perhaps, even a little bit of emotion from repeated listenings — be it the spirit-raising synth fan­fares of ʽAbbey Of Synnʼ, the robotic funk-metal riffage of ʽComputer Eyesʼ, the folk-rock cho­rus melody of ʽBeyond The Last Horizonʼ (that one brings to mind Mike Oldfield in his «pop» days), or the looped Vivaldian violin-led coda of ʽForevermoreʼ. Structurally, however, all of these bits are rather plain and straightforward — I would hardly expect anything but contempt here on the part of hardcore prog fans, and would certainly refrain from praising them as marvels of contemporary songwriting. But compared to tons of other «neo-prog» records that try to battle lack of genius with studious intelligence, Actual Fantasy is, at the very least, not as overtly bo­ring, and the hooks grow hookier with each new listen.

 

In the end, I give the album a thumbs up. It is honest (the «real thing» for Lucassen himself, at the very least), far from monotonous (the balance between electronics, metal, folk, classical, and psychedelia is very even, almost calculated, I'd say), and does not really contain one single mo­ment worthy of the proverbial cringe reaction (mainly because the vocalists are so wonderfully restrained most of the time, and even for pathetic climaxes, prefer the simple «folk» mode to «mock-opera»). And the arrangements are certainly far from trivial: I believe that the way in which all the electronics are integrated with live instruments commands respect, regardless of how crude one might or might not find the major musical themes. But yeah, this is still fantasy-based neo-prog, and much of it still sounds silly, so it's not as if I didn't warn you.

 

INTO THE ELECTRIC CASTLE (1998)

 

1) Welcome To The New Dimension; 2) Isis And Osiris; 3) Amazing Flight; 4) Time Beyond Time; 5) The Decision Tree (We're Alive); 6) Tunnel Of Light; 7) Across The Rainbow Bridge; 8) Garden Of Emotions; 9) Valley Of The Queens; 10) The Castle Hall; 11) Tower Of Hope; 12) Cosmic Fusion; 13) The Mirror Haze; 14) Evil Devolution; 15) The Two Gates; 16) Forever Of The Stars; 17) Another Time, Another Space.

 

Despite — or, perhaps, because of — a slight trimming that Ayreon gave his lush campy spirit on Actual Fantasy, the album did not sell at all well. Allegedly, this prompted a gamble — on his next album, Lucassen vowed, he would virtually pull all the stops, and if this did not work, he would put the Ayreon brand under glass, once and for all. Considering that this is far from the last review of Ayreon here, we have to assume that the gamble worked — I do not have the sales fi­gures on hand, but they must have at least compensated for the impressive budget spent on the album: with no less than ten guest vocalists and about as many session musicians teaming up for the project, Arjen must have pawned his entire collection of D&D editions.

 

Into The Electric Castle finalizes and stabilizes the Magic Ayreon Formula, which has so far remained unchanged: a double-CD, approximately two-hour-long, album in the form of a «prog rock opera», featuring multiple role-playing vocalists and a cohesive sci-fi storyline, primarily in­fluenced by trashy B-movies and pulp, but not without an occasionally surprising lyrical insight. Here, the storyline is that eight different heroes from various times and social environments have to undertake a challenging and perilous journey to... well, you can always rely on good old Wikipedia for these things; suffice it to say, there have been worse storylines, and, not being an expert on sci-fi / fantasy and not even dreaming of ever becoming one, I cannot really give a good judgement from within the con­fines of the genre. From without these confines, it is exceedingly silly, but then, what isn't?

 

What about the music, then? Despite the impressive diversity of approaches — as with every self-respecting neo-prog album, the influences range from classical to medieval folk to psychedelic pop to heavy metal to electronica to whatever else I've forgotten — the music does not leave a particularly lasting impression. Once you start poking around in the textures of any given track, short or long, monotonous or multi-part, none of these textures will probably impress you with original solutions, or jolt your emotions if you are already well-versed in classic prog.

 

On the other hand, one need not necessarily expect scattered individual wonders of intellectual creativity and emotional resonance from a two-hour prog rock opera — yes, a few of them would be nice, but the most important question is whether this mammoth is «valid» as a whole. And to this, my answer is — I'm not sure, which, in almost any prog-related situation, translates to «give it time and it will either stay the same or grow better».

 

Here are the benefits. Into The Electric Castle mostly manages to avoid boredom — there are no lengthy, flashy, self-indulgent jams or solos; the melodic patterns and moods alternate with each other on a regular basis; the instrumentation is diverse enough to avoid immediate pigeonholing — and certainly, so is the singing, with all the guest vocalists representing personalities widely removed from each other, so that you have «metal-opera» guy Damian Wilson contrasted with folkie lady Sharon den Adel, or with ex-Marillion frontman Fish playing a «Highlander», or with Lucassen himself impersonating a 1960s hippie (not very credible, but amusing).

 

Into The Electric Castle manages to avoid or minimize direct rip-offs — you can see tributes and homages pulsating all over the place, but there has really been a lot of serious hard work thrust into Lucassen's composing here. A single six- or seven-minute track will always lead you through several sections — each of which, on its own, will seem like you've already heard it somewhere else (you just can never tell where), but together they will be woven in a seamless, unforced manner. Can Sixties' psychedelic pop, Seventies' jazz-fusion and Eighties' hair-metal coinhabit the same song without mortal injury to each other? Check something like ʽGarden Of Emotionsʼ and see for yourself.

 

Finally, Into The Electric Castle manages to avoid ploughing the depths of bad taste — it is not exactly «tongue-in-cheek», but most of the time, it stays within a strict «B-movie» pattern, work­ing on cheap thrills without pumping out moralizing pathos. Maybe I am wrong and Lucassen is dumb enough to think that a record like that is supposed to trigger spiritual cleansing and emotio­nal catharsis, but that is not what my intuition suggests — there is no deep «philosophy» behind this music, this ain't Yes or even Rush, this stuff calls for popcorn and a large Coke, and Arjen is simply happy to deliver the goods.

 

For a moment out there on ʽThe Mirror Hazeʼ, I almost jumped as, at one point, the man veered straight into the main theme of Phantom Of The Opera — then quickly pulled out before it would be too late — but, in a way, this is Phantom Of The Opera: pulp entertainment where it really only matters how unexpectedly and how often the creator manipulates the fabric of events, and how professionally it is all done. In other words, there has to be a course of intrigue, and there have to be grounds for respect. 'Sall.

 

Into The Electric Castle satisfies on both counts. You know more or less what to expect from the man, but you never know exactly — he may drag out a sitar player to play a little raga, or get a little flower-powerish for no apparent reason, or fall upon a cool metal riff that happens to have been underused, if not exactly genius, or go for some growling vocals when the script demands it. Yes, much of the time is dedicated to playing rather tired old Celtic / Anglo-Saxon folk scales, but this is still much better than the pompous adult contemporary motives that sometimes pass for (bad) «neo-prog» — and at least we know for sure that Lucassen is generally more inspired by Led Zep III / IV than by Journey and Styx. All in all, I can't remember a damn thing about this album — other than it was goofy fun, and if one hundred minutes of a prog rock opera can be «goofy fun», it's a thumbs up for sure.

 

UNIVERSAL MIGRATOR (2000)

 

Part I – The Dream Sequencer: 1) The Dream Sequencer; 2) My House On Mars; 3) 2084; 4) One Small Step; 5) The Shooting Company Of Captain Frans B. Cocq; 6) Dragon On The Sea; 7) Temple Of The Cat; 8) Carried By The Wind; 9) And The Druids Turn To Stone; 10) The First Man On Earth; 11) The Dream Sequencer (reprise);

Part II – Flight Of The Migrator: 1) Chaos; 2) Dawn Of A Million Souls; 3) Journey On The Waves Of Time; 4) To The Quasar; 5) Into The Black Hole; 6) Through The Wormhole; 7) Out Of The White Hole; 8) To The Solar System; 9) The New Migrator.

 

Technically, these are two albums: breaking slightly with Ayreon's standard pattern of releasing 2-CD packages, Lucassen decided to split his «prog» and «metal» sides, releasing the first half of Universal Migrator as a special treat for the «artsy types» and the second half for the «metal­heads». Consequently, on a formal basis Part I: The Dream Sequencer and Part II: Flight Of The Migrator count as separate entries in the discographies and tend to earn separate reviews. However, I see no reason to follow this tradition, since: (a) a 2-CD deal is a 2-CD deal, and no renegading will be tolerated; (b) the concept and storyline are sort of continuous, after all; (c) al­though Arjen does formally enforce the musical boundaries, what with the first album all ruled by electronic textures and acoustic guitars, and the second completely dominated by heavy electric riffage and soloing, the «B-movie spirit» that guides the man is always the same anyway. Plus, above and beyond all that, I am not sure if I have enough impressions to carry me through two different reviews here.

 

Although, on second thought, I could have, because, once you get to at least partially assimilate the expected sprawl, The Universal Migrator is no less fun than Into The Electric Castle — in fact, it is more fun, because this time, the underlying story, while still a story, functions more like a flimsy framework for a set of autonomous musical landscapes. Formally, it is a sequel / prequel / interquel / whatever (with time travel in the picture, you never know) to The Final Experiment, describing the hallucinations of the last man left alive after humanity's extinction — in The Dream Sequencer, he travels through several different historical epochs, and in Flight Of The Migrator, takes stuff to a whole different level by heading straight for the Big Bang... and never coming back, so it seems, but enough of that.

 

For the first CD, the basic inspiration was clearly Pink Floyd — the instrumental introduction brings to mind both Wish You Were Here and The Wall at the same time, and then there is this idea of musically capturing a patch of bleak desperation and loneliness, puffed up to universalist levels... ring a bell? No, it is not expressed with comparable ferocity — maybe because there is no autobiographic value in these compositions — but there is a pretty nifty fanfare theme nestled in the depths of ʽMy House On Marsʼ (although it would probably have been more effective if played with real fanfares rather than Arjen's well-worn synthesizer equipment).

 

What really won me over in the course of Disc 1 was ʽThe Shooting Company Of Captain Frans B. Cocqʼ — not only is the song named for the «authentic» title of the painting we usually know as The Night Watch, but it is actually an attempt at a «musical translation» of Rembrandt's mas­terpiece, trying to recreate with electronic textures, dark guitar solos, and psychedelic, phased vocals straight out of 1967 (courtesy of Tuesday Child's Mouse) that shadowy mystique of van Rijn's trademark style. Maybe it does not succeed, or maybe it does, but the point is — the idea itself is fairly extravagant, and totally unconventional, for a guy usually perceived as a sci-fi / D&D / B-movie freak. Besides, regardless of the context, the song simply has a catchy chorus and an impressive guitar theme to it.

 

Dancing out from that starting point, there's more — ʽDragon On The Seaʼ, with lyrical referen­ces to the fleet of Queen Elizabeth, is an exuberant folk-prog epic, overdubbing bleeping electro­nic patterns over folksy acoustic strum and making it work; ʽTemple Of The Catʼ features a love­ly vocal part from Jacqueline Govaert and samples from a Maya festival; and ʽThe First Man On Earthʼ, with vocals from Spock's Beard's Neal Morse, is a fairly friendly and upbeat song for a subject as grim as the first appearance of Homo sapiens on the planet. Diversity is the key — as the hero moves from locus to locus, the music incorporates more and more influences; the only bad news is that the instrumentation lacks the appropriate diversity — guitars and keyboards ex­press most of the moods, where sometimes mandolins or pan pipes would be more welcome. Oh well — budget is budget.

 

The second part, Flight Of The Migrator, was almost universally panned by reviewers when compared to the first part, and for a good reason: the idea to filter out the metal from Dream Se­quencer and tightly pack an entire sixty-five minute disc with it really did not work. For it to work, Arjen would need to at least be a first-rate metal-riff writer — but most of the riffs hardly strike me as being original or inspiring. Where Dream Sequencer is an imaginative neo-prog record, Migrator is, overall, rather pedestrian power metal.

 

Lucassen's personal charm did help him to engage a whole swarm of notorious metal singers — Bruce Dickinson himself, for instance, pulls ʽInto The Black Holeʼ out of the black hole of un­memorable melodies, and then there are guys from Stratovarius, Primal Fear, Helloween, Thres­hold... pretty impressive heap, unfortunately, saddled with mediocre and monotonous material (and where the monotonousness is broken, it is broken with the same synthesizer fanfares, as in ʽDawn Of A Million Sunsʼ, of which we'd already had our full share on Sequencer).

 

Only once does this rather boring journey to the beginnings of the Universe break out of its set pattern: as the hero goes ʽThrough The Wormholeʼ, the tempo picks up — they aren't, after all, called «wormholes» because you're supposed to move through them like a worm — and a merry jackhammer-ish thrash-boogie rips your speakers in half, reminding of the old trickster school running from Van Halen to Extreme. Aaaaah, kick-ass! Unfortunately, it is one of the shortest tracks on the album — a measly six minutes.

 

Still, if you are a really big fan of power metal, I guess the guest vocalists alone, who all seem to be quite seriously into this stuff, will provide sufficient reason to own the album. And by combi­ning the two parts of Universal Migrator, I have cunningly gotten rid of the necessity to award Ayreon with another thumbs down — the first half is an unquestionable thumbs up, and the se­cond half is... well, think of it as a really large bonus for the metalheads. Oh yes, and the hero dies at the end, but his soul manages to merge with the Universal in the process, restarting the cycle of life from the beginning, so, theo­retically, you will be able to listen to this record an infi­ni­tesimal number of times — might as well try to enjoy it, for lack of a better alternative.

 

THE HUMAN EQUATION (2004)

 

1) Day One: Vigil; 2) Day Two: Isolation; 3) Day Three: Pain; 4) Day Four: Mystery; 5) Day Five: Voices; 6) Day Six: Childhood; 7) Day Seven: Hope; 8) Day Eight: School; 9) Day Nine: Playground; 10) Day Ten: Memories; 11) Day Eleven: Love; 12) Day Twelve: Trauma; 13) Day Thirteen: Sign; 14) Day Fourteen: Pride; 15) Day Fifteen: Be­trayal; 16) Day Sixteen: Loser; 17) Day Seventeen: Accident?; 18) Day Eighteen: Realization; 19) Day Nineteen: Dis­closure; 20) Day Twenty: Confrontation.

 

By now, we all should know: Arjen Lucassen is really «The Flying Dutchman», that is, he is ac­tually trying to officially enshrine himself as the Wagner of rock music: writing nothing but ope­ras, using fantastic settings to reflect universalist messages, and ensuring that only the strongest, with the biggest attention spans and the most time to burn, will survive. Unfortunately, the com­parison is hard to elaborate — unlike Wagner's librettos, Lucassen's lyrics are not only preten­tious but, for the most part, childishly crafted, and he has yet to find his own Tristan chord. The main problem of Wagner's music is, however, shared with fidelity — each of the «operas» is hor­rendously pad­ded out. Music of such ambitious stature cannot deserve being spread across less than two CDs, after all. Yeah, there used to be a time when the Beatles could sum up the state of the world within the five minutes of ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ, but they were just summarizing — Ayreon is here to present you with a detailed account balance. Or, at least, such might well be Arjen Lucassen's personal philosophy.

 

What is interesting about The Human Equation is that, for once, Lucassen decided to break up the series of fantasy tales in favor of something more «mature» — a bizarre Freudian opera about psychic convalescence through a twenty-day-long period of re-experiencing one's accumulated traumas in a comatose state, or something like that. In fact, this is nothing less than Ayreon's own personal version of The Wall: here, too, you will find abusive schoolteachers, carefree parents, abandoned lovers, and a climac­tic scene of «disclosure» where... anyway, I am not going to pretend that I am unwilling to spoil the plot for you, given as how I am not sure I got it all right in the first place (and I never really bothered much about the second one).

 

Does it help make the music any better? Absolutely not. Arjen Lucassen knows not the meaning of the word «subtlety», and has never heard the expression «less is more», or, if he has, he must have understood it the other way around — this is why no Ayreon album is ever going to threaten the shelf status of The Wall, even relative to modern kids who practice the «never trust anybody any art piece over thirty» ideology. Frankly speaking, you'd only understand the deep substantial difference between Universal Migrator and Human Equation if you started checking on them armed with a lyrics sheet — and I wouldn't advise you to do that. "It's time to leave your shel­tered cage / Face your deepest fears / The world is against you / You're fighting back the tears" is about as profound as it ever gets. Oh well, could be worse.

 

Lucassen did get some top-notch vocal talent for this Psychodramatic Masterpiece, though. The protagonist («Me») is voiced by Dream Theater's own James LaBrie, one of the major anta­gonists («Fear») — by Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth, and another one («Rage») — by Devin Townsend of Strapping Young Lad: again, not much ground for practicing «subt­lety» with these steel-throat war machines, but oh the masculinity of it all! And, matching the good old Aryan, uh, I mean, Ayreon manpower are the ladies — lead singerines from the little-known bands Elfonía (Marcela Bovio) and Mostly Autumn (Heather Findlay), the latter of which, playing «Love», can go from a Sandy Denny lament to a Kate Bush purr whenever she wants to. Nifty, if not exactly breath­taking.

 

But interesting musical ideas have decidedly given way to being a bit too much focused on the operatic components. Although Lucassen is no longer segregating his «progressive» and «metal» sides — meaning that there will be no fifty-minute long unbroken stretch of bland power metal — the re-blending is sorta sour, with way too many tracks simply fusing together the grumbly chugga-chugga and the strings-supplying synthesizers (see ʽSchoolʼ, for instance): so many, in fact, that the good bits have to be fished out like dumplings from a broth, over the course of re­peated listens. This means work, and who likes being driven to work by pretentious long-haired Dutch potheads? There you are.

 

Cutting to the chase, here are some tasters that might — or might not — convince you that The Human Equation is not utterly worthless. Actually, all of them were cleverly released as singles. ʽDay Seven: Hopeʼ, re-titled for single release as ʽCome Back To Meʼ, is a somewhat touching, well-written art-pop song, carried by a catchy organ pattern. ʽDay Eleven: Loveʼ has a somewhat annoying power metal chorus, but the main melody is a surprisingly sexy waltz (the major attrac­tion here are Heather Findlay's alluring Kate Bush-isms).

 

Weirdest of all is ʽDay Sixteen: Loserʼ, which might be the first track I know of to combine the sound of an Australian didgeridoo (played by Jeroen Goossens) with that of an Irish jig — and then lay some mammoth metal riffage over both. If that is not enough for you, try waiting until the end of the song for a ridiculously over-the-top death metal rap to put the cherry on top. Oh, and how could I forget the added bonus for Uriah Heep fans? Ken Hensley himself wanders into the studio to play an old-style ʽGypsyʼ-like psychic organ solo. The oddest thing of all, it seems to work — the song is so utterly baffling that, at some point, it transcends «hilarious» and starts sending out schizophrenic waves all over the room.

 

Other than the singles, Equation has quite a respectable finale — ʽDay Twenty: Confrontationʼ builds up genuinely spooky atmospherics with cleverly piled up loads of phased and echoey gui­tars, processed organ, and «metal slide» riffs saved for the chorus. With all the vocalists coming together and the song eventually speeding up, it does seem to be headed for some sort of Wagne­rian finale — unfortunately, the abrupt ending is sort of anti-climactic, but I guess Ayreon just had to ensure himself some continuity with the rest of his oeuvres, which explains the superfluous reference to the «Dream Sequencer».

 

None of this should conceal the fact that a large, large, large chunk of the material is quite non-descript (and the problem would only get worse with the next release), and can only appeal to big fans of power metal vocalization. But then, come to think of it, such is the fate of 90% of operas ever written — not only is it impossible to keep the genius afloat for two or three hours on end, but you are not even really supposed to try. What is really bothersome is that so many of the tracks stretch out past acceptable limits, and that so many of the themes are rather monotonous variations on each other — not just «boring», but «boring in the same boring way». On the other hand, this might simply be an invitation to make your own Human Equation: I'm sure that most of us could trim this down to about forty minutes of interesting and even inspiring music. Start off with the singles, then think about whether you need the rest. The singles are good.

 

01011001 (2008)

 

1) Age Of Shadows; 2) Comatose; 3) Liquid Eternity; 4) Connect The Dots; 5) Beneath The Waves; 6) Newborn Race; 7) Ride The Comet; 8) Web Of Lies; 9) The Fifth Extinction; 10) Waking Dreams; 11) The Truth Is In Here; 12) Unnatural Selection; 13) River Of Time; 14) E = mc2; 15) The Sixth Extinction.

 

I am ashamed to say that, this time around, I did not even bother looking up the basic contours of the story. It seems to be something of a cross between the, ahem, «realism» of Human Equation and the sci-fantasy of Universal Migrator, all having to do with machines overtaking man, when everybody starts thinking and acting binary (or, at best, hexadecimal), and somehow conceptually tied in to every other Ayreon album ever released — you gotta give Lucassen some credit, his megalomania never got in the way of accurately tying together all the little loose ends.

 

The problem is, this time around the music never really stimulated me into looking up any details. If the first half of Universal Migrator worked moderately well as a «musical picture gallery» of sorts, and Human Equation, de-padded and properly filtered, had a psycho-thriller sheen to it, then this follow-up, being every bit as large and pompous, hardly offers a single fresh idea. Se­ven­teen singers in total show up for the project — at this point, it seems that contributing to an Ayreon prog-metal-opera turns into an obligatory clause in every power / symph / doom-metal band frontperson's contract, and they are all standing in line on his front porch on a daily basis. (Gotthard, Blind Guardian, and King's X are among the more notorious acts this time). And they all blow it on this mastodont, quite mediocre even for Ayreon's usually questionable standards.

 

Of course, there is no questioning the technical side of it all. Every note is in place, all the acous­tic, electric, and electronic overdubs meticulously tested and adjusted to each other, each singer and singerine wined, dined, coached and poached to perfection. We could hardly expect anything less of a guy who has never sullied a single one of his fantasies with overt sloppiness. Extract it from its context, forget about every other Ayreon record ever released (better still, forget about every other record ever released, period), and 01011001 will be a monumental achievement in its own rights. As it is, it is about as exciting as the sequence of zeroes and ones that constitutes its true title (the letter ʽYʼ, short for either YAKETY-YAK or YARDBIRD YAWN, depending on your current state of mind).

 

In utter frustration, I cannot think of a single track here worth a specific mention. It seems as if Lucassen was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of people he got to act in his next play that he subconsciously fell back on his old musical stock, recycling all of his «meat-and-potato» ideas (folk, metal, electronic) without bothering to find any new combinations. Even the presence of one or two ʽLosersʼ or ʽShooting Companiesʼ could have already made a big difference, but no, these hundred minutes run on without a single ripple on the surface.

 

Obviously, this criticism makes little sense if we are simply supposed to like Ayreon as a musi­cal phenomenon. One does not criticize something like, say, Haydn's symphonies for (frequently) soun­ding indistingui­shable from one another, so why should this be different with Lucassen? Yet, first of all, it does not hurt to remember that 01011001 is Lucassen's first, and only, musical of­fering in four years (how many symphonies could Haydn have come up with in the same inte­rim?), and even a hardcore fan could be entitled to something that did not sound exactly like a rearranged/restructured medley of past successes (and failures).

 

And second — this is where personal taste comes in — Ayreon's music has always been cheesy, humorless, padded, bloated, and emotionally monotonous. It was only during those select, happy, cherished moments where Lucassen was able to break through these walls that I felt like there was something to gain (and there really was). «Generic» Ayreon material has no reason to exist in my world («poor man's Rush» could be a good description), and I wouldn't want to recommend it for anybody else's, either. Hence, decidedly a thumbs down here, and here's hoping that the next Ayreon release will be more creative and let us learn something that we didn't already know, and wished we never knew in the first place.

 

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (2013)

 

CD I: Phase I: Singularity: 1) Prologue: The Black Board; 2) The Theory Of Everything, Part 1; 3) Patterns; 4) The Pro­di­gy's World; 5) The Teacher's Discovery; 6) Love And Envy; 7) Progressive Waves; 8) The Gift; 9) The Eleventh Dimension; 10) Inertia; 11) The Theory Of Everything; Phase II: Symmetry: 12) The Consultation; 13) Diagnosis; 14) The Argument; 15) The Rival's Dilemma; 16) Surface Tension; 17) A Reason To Live; 18) Potential; 19) Quantum Chaos; 20) Dark Medicine; 21) Alive!; 22) The Pre­dic­tion.

CD II: Phase III: Entanglement: 1) Fluctuations; 2) Transformation; 3) Collision; 4) Side Effects; 5) Frequency Mo­dulation; 6) Magnetism; 7) Quid Pro Quo; 8) String Theory; 9) Fortune?; Phase IV: Unification: 10) Mirror Of Dre­ams; 11) The Lighthouse; 12) The Argument; 13) The Parting; 14) The Visitation; 15) The Breakthrough; 16) The Note; 17) The Uncertainty Principle; 18) Dark Energy; 19) The Theory Of Everything, Part 3; 20) The Blackboard (Reprise).

 

Well, I guess that if it was inevitable for a concept album about «the theory of everything» to be produced in the first place, it might have also been inevitable that Arjen Lucassen would have to be the mastermind behind it. Let's face it, after all the Universal Migrators and Human Equa­tions there was simply nowhere left to run but to the very top of the tower. This is the album to end all albums, the ultimate in the ultimate, Ayreon's Lifehouse, Topographic Oceans, and Mahler's 9th all rolled in one. A single listen to all four sides in a row will give you the intellect of a Stephen Hawking, two listens will empower you to rule the world, and a final third run will, beyond all reasonable doubt, allow you to reweave the fabric of the universe at your whim. But remember — only supreme, absolute concentration will get you anywhere with this, and it takes intellectual skill, psychological training, and a really high degree of tolerance for kindergarten-le­vel sci-fi anecdotes to immerse yourself, freely and lovingly, in the world of Ayreon.

 

I must say, though, that I honestly admire how high the man has managed to raise the stakes. The very fact of The Theory Of Everything being yet another double-CD rock opera is not surpri­sing, but this may be the most cohesive, story-dependent, and ideologically ambitious project in Ayreon history so far, and among the usual horde of guests to help the artist bring it to fruition, there are no less than four prog veterans: Rick Wakeman plays piano throughout and has an «old school» synth solo on ʽSurface Tensionʼ, Keith Emerson has an astral Moog solo on ʽProgressive Wavesʼ, Steve Hackett adds a guitar solo on ʽThe Partingʼ, and John Wetton sings the important part of The Psychiatrist. Not to mention, of course, all the innumerable singers and players from newer, somewhat less legendary prog and metal outfits (Dream Theater, Nightwish, Lacuna Coil etc.) — ol' man Lucassen has lost none of his supernatural gravitational charisma.

 

The story itself needs no retelling and can be partially deduced from simply glancing at the song titles — speaking of which, the «songs» themselves are really just small individual parts of four lengthy suites («Singularity», «Symmetry», «Entanglement», «Unification»), with track separa­tion engineered the way it is usually done with classical operas in the CD age. The story seems to be drawing its inspiration as much from A Beautiful Mind as it does from Tommy, and has all the complexity, originality, and general appeal of a second-rate comic book. The lyrics are best left alone, and I mean it, really. Let me just give you a couple samples: "(Prodigy:) A grand design in all its majesty / Vibrating strings, quantum gravity / Why was I chosen? / What does it mean to me? / Tell me why!" Or this: "(Rival:) One day I'll show them / I am the genius / One day the whole world will know / One day I'll show them / Who he really is / One day they'll know". Per­sonally, I think there'd have been no harm in jettisoning a few of the guest musicians and using the money to hire a good librettist instead. But it's really all about the music, right?

 

Well, here comes the nasty part. The music behind all this is... sort of a very typical, very smooth, very predictable Ayreon sound. Not particularly heavy, although some tracks are well within the limits of «power metal» stylistics; highly influenced by Celtic and other folk traditions; well stocked up on electronics, since a proper, well-behaved «theory of everything» should be able to look both to the past and to the future; professionally-impeccably played and sung. But, just like on the previous Ayreon album, there are no musical ideas here that would justify the «progres­sive» tag — some of the riffs may be «new» from a purely technical point, yet the ideology be­hind them is strictly conservative. If there is any bar at all to be raised on The Theory Of Every­thing, it is only the self-satisfaction bar. It may well be so that, listening back to those tapes, Lucassen finally said to himself — «here is the album I've always aspired to make, where every­thing is in its right place and all the ingredients are mixed in just the right proportions». So now you, the listener, can simply chuck all the previous Ayreon albums out the window and satisfy yourself with this one. Heck, maybe you can chuck all your albums out the window, period — this is The Theory Of Everything, after all, isn't it?

 

My biggest problem is with the «rock opera» approach: all the pieces being so short, it is hard to get focused on any particular one. In the classical paradigm, even the most story-dependent, plot-driven operas usually have their individual overtures, arias, and interludes that stand out like par­ticularly bright brushstrokes on a monotonous canvas. Here, apart from one or two recurrent themes (like the Jethro Tull-style guitar/flute title theme), the trivial plot overshadows everything, and, since it is downright impossible to empathize with the grossly cartoonish «characters» that would probably be rejected even by Japan's cheesiest anime studios, the «extra-melodic» factors do not compensate for the auxiliary nature of the music. Which is a pity, because somehow I feel that at the core of this sprawl, lies a potentially decent 40-minute instrumental album, with frien­dly guest contributions from Wakeman, Emerson, and Hackett, a few memorable themes, and re­latively tasteful arrangements that combine impressive playing technique with moral restraint, not letting the whole thing run into an Yngwie Malmsteen flying circus extravaganza. But the «rock opera to end all rock operas» fetish just does not let me verify this.

 

It must be said, however, that finally we have a musical composition named ʽString Theoryʼ that is entirely dependent on... guess what? Yes, that's right, the entire world of science has spent half a century wondering when exactly the essence of the theory would finally be encapsulated in a ninety-second string quartet retelling. Two problems, though: (a) the track also relies on synthe­sizers, ruining the purity of the experiment; (b) where the hell is ʽSuperstring Theoryʼ, with all the guest musicians pulling out their violins and finally delivering that «lost chord» which Pete Townshend himself was unable to find?

 

Granted, I even feel a little sorry that such an ambitious project, upon completion, has largely remained limited to specialized audiences and publicity sources — even the All-Music Guide has failed to provide an appropriate review, and the record has mostly been picked up on by various metal-oriented magazines, which is not justified at all, since it is not at all a metal album. Then again, there is no use pretending, either, that a rock album called The Theory Of Everything can be perceived as anything other than (a) intentionally humorous or (b) unintentionally ridiculous, and since Ayreon is very rarely (a), that this here is most likely a case of solid (b). The only thing that, from my point of view, excuses Lucassen is that the man combines the qualities of a fana­tical whacko and a hard-working professional. And, from that angle, The Theory Of Everything is one of the whackiest and the most professional records he ever made. The kind of crap that you just don't come across on a daily basis — like a white rhino's, or something like that.

 

BABES IN TOYLAND

SPANKING MACHINE (1990)

 

1) Swamp Pussy; 2) He's My Thing; 3) Vomit Heart; 4) Never; 5) Boto(w)rap; 6) Dogg; 7) Pain In My Heart; 8) Lashes; 9) You're Right; 10) Dust Cake Boy; 11) Fork Down Throat.

 

Technically speaking, Babes In Toyland are not directly related to the «Riot Grrrl» thing — even though Kat Bjelland was originally from Oregon (what's up with those Northwestern states and dirt-rock anyway? is that simply the farthest corner where the wind ends up blowing all the «white trash», or what?). But the band itself started up in Minneapolis, around 1987, deeply up­setting the local frigid Scandinavian population — so, eventually, they just had to move to Seattle — and, more importantly, they did not have much of a political agenda. Which is not a bad thing, perhaps, when you are playing this particular kind of music.

 

In terms of popularity, they ended up losing to their chief competition — Hole (much to the leery delight of Courtney Love, I suppose, as she had actually been a «Babe In Toyland» herself in 1987, playing bass for a few weeks before being kicked out by Kat). The loss, however, was clear­ly the result of Courtney's scandalous publicity rather than the music: in most of the areas where the basic sounds of Hole and Babes In Toyland actually differ, despite all the similarities, the latter win out, hands down.

 

The band is essentially the brainchild of Kat Bjelland — drummer Lori Barbero and bassist Mi­chelle Leon are faithful henchgirls, combining sincere energy with enough technical ability to not let it all fall apart — and Bjelland's religious dedication to punk aesthetics prevents her from be­coming too much of a musician, even though it occasionally does seem to matter to her which particular chord should be chosen next. Their instrumental limitations do not allow to properly qualify the music as «grunge» à la Nirvana — they cannot generate the necessary density and heaviness, and come across more like an untrained, undisciplined, wilder version of Sonic Youth: their trashy, heavily drunk younger sisters or something. (Thurston Moore actually appreciated the unexpected kinship and had the band tour together with Sonic Youth in 1990).

 

Nevertheless, Bjelland herself has a certain rough, murderous charm (as opposed to the rather sick, poisonous charm of Courtney Love). In public, that charm was mainly due to the contrast between the «kinderwhore» image and the ferocious-hysterical vocals, making her one of the top contenders for «best wild screamer» of the decade. But even on record, without the fancy dresses and the bleached hairlocks (or is that natural blonde? who cares, though?), she comes out exactly the way she is supposed to come up — midway in between «tough street punk kid» and «rotten spoiled princess brat». Which means that the listener's emotions may easily roll between scared admiration and annoyed irritation, and the latter is a much stronger emotion than sheer boredom and indifference, which would be the worst outcome.

 

Most of the songs sound more or less the same — mid-tempo aggregations of post-punk distorted chords that cluster in rhythmic phrases as if against their will, and use every chance they get to dissolve in puddles of noise. But the guitar tones are genuinely nasty, and even if most of their song titles are quite suggestive, the honor of living up to the 100-point mark unquestionably be­longs to ʽSwamp Pussyʼ, because the song totally sounds like a «swamp pussy» — the guitar provides the swamp, and the vocals provide the... well, you know. (Allegedly, the whole album was to be titled Swamp Pussy, but apparently somebody chickened out at the last moment — never mind, though, Spanking Machine is fairly indicative as well). The first 25 seconds of the song, opening the album, are so indicative of everything that follows that it might be all the time you need to decide if you include falling in love with this band in your immediate plans, or post­pone it until your nearest lobotomy.

 

Kat Bjelland cannot sing — she makes Patti Smith look like Maria Callas in comparison — but she can conjure a mean little devil, and, more importantly, get him under her total control: she is a highly expressive and technical screamer, knowing full well where to rise and where to fall, and how to even make it sound natural. That opening "why do you make me feel so bad? why do you bother to act so sad?" is a classic example of «primal scream» — something deeply repressed for a long, long time finally coming out — and, furthermore, as much as I hate to admit it, it is sexy, perhaps even to orgasmic heights.

 

Most of the songs, as can be easily told, are about girl-guy re­lationships, where males are some­times objectified ("he's my thing, stay away from my thing, get your own one around!"), some­times humiliated ("why did you leave me when I was still inside of you?" — somebody needs anatomy lessons, Kat), sometimes adored and despised at the same time ("I do hate you, vomit my heart, pull my legs apart... but I still love you, my brain's a car­nival all aflame"). But if you do not pay much attention to the lyrics, there is no impression that this exorcism is really directed at anybody or any group in particular. This is just an exercise in blunt frustration-venting with an implied sexual motivation — and it succeeds.

 

Actually, after a couple listens, driven mainly by intrigue, you start to discern patches of melody and musical creativity — for instance, the band's first single, ʽDust Cake Boyʼ, is initially memo­rable only because of the way Kat screams out the retriplicated last syllable of each verse line, but then you might get to like the «galloping» punch of the rhythm section and how it keeps dipping in and out of the power chord mess that attenuates Kat's screaming. Or that ʽHe's My Thingʼ is actually not a bad example of primitive, but catchy garage-rock composing. (Come to think of it, one totally obvious influence I have not mentioned is the Stooges' Fun House — very similar in a miriad of ways, even if there is really no way these well-meaning babes could match the inten­sity of Iggy's hell flames. But on both albums, the scorched, smelly stumps of good melodies require taking some time to stand out through the smoke).

 

The album falters only once, but rather badly: for the slow-tempo, dirge-like ʽDoggʼ, the «honor» of singing lead vocals is ceded to drummer Lori Barbero — and she has this nasal, whiny tone that does not fit the general atmosphere at all. Just like Kat, she cannot sing properly, but neither can she scream — the result is a rather dreary, totally un-fun-like interlude, and, furthermore, the album's sequencing really sucks in the middle, with ʽDoggʼ being immediately followed by the equally slow ʽPain In My Heartʼ, a song that should have rather been given to Hole because it needs that extra rotting-corpse graveyard-punch which Courtney could have provided far more ffectively than the down-to-earth Bjelland.

 

But despite the occasional setbacks, Spanking Machine is still somewhat of a pervert master­piece of the genre, whatever that genre might be. It's loud, it's fun, it's angry, it's occasionally orgasmic, it doesn't give much of a damn whether it «succeeds» or not, it looks dumb but really isn't, it threatens to be boring but you'd have to be pretty boring yourself to honestly find it boring — in short, just a happy thumbs up and be done with it.

 

TO MOTHER (1991)

 

1) Catatonic; 2) Mad Pilot; 3) Primus; 4) Laugh My Head Off; 5) Spit To See The Shine; 6) Ripe; 7) The Quiet Room.

 

A 22-minute long EP here, worth a brief separate review not only because it is almost as long as an early Beach Boys album, but also because it is a relatively important «evolutionary step» from Spanking Machine to Fontanelle. The songs are allegedly all outtakes from the Spanking Ma­chine sessions, but they were re-recorded in the wake of the Babes' joint European tour with Sonic Youth, and some additional influence might be discernible — not a very good influence, I'm afraid, but one that guides the band into a denser jungle of subconscious libidinous metaphors and into exploring distorted noise from an «artsy» standpoint rather than just using it as a direct reflection of being pissed off.

 

Which is all right for Sonic Youth, I guess — these guys started out with just such an agenda, and gradually got better and better at it — but a little out of the league of Kat Bjelland and her assis­tants. Maybe she can write lyrics that are on par with Sonic Youth (it doesn't take a rocket scien­tist to master that style), but trying to put a «depth-and-subtlety» sheen over the one and only thing that Babes In Toyland do real good — waging post-pubescent hysteria — is an inadequate decision, to say the least. Particularly if it translates into the presence of boring arpeggiated ins­trumentals (ʽThe Quiet Roomʼ, sounding like a mediocre San Franciscan band transplanted into the 1990s), or into letting the drummer girl take another abysmal lead vocal (ʽPrimusʼ) even after the misfortune of ʽDoggʼ clearly showed the insanity of the idea.

 

There are two songs here still firmly rooted in the «old» style — loud, aggressive, demonic, hy­sterical. ʽMad Pilotʼ is somewhat spoiled by excessive reverb on some of the vo­cals, but the main brutal, simplistic riff makes up for it, and the overdubbed guitar noises actually make sense, imi­tating an airplane out of control, a fairly suitable image for the band. Even more «traditional» is ʽRipeʼ, with (almost) no overdubs, great screechy vocals and total delirium all around.

 

On the other hand, ʽCatatonicʼ is already erasing the distinctions between early Babes and early Hole, introducing elements of «doom-and-gloom» that may not be totally healthy — in fact, let the virus spread a bit and watch a normal person transform into a Lizard King. To look at it from a different side, when the opening lines to your album go "I know the sugar plum fairy / Her name is Mary / She's halfway inside my arm / Half way does great harm", this is a notably diffe­rent story from "Why do you make me feel so bad? / Why do you bother to act so sad?". And the difference in the music is quite comparable as well — minor tonalities, somber dirge moods, zombie atmospherics. I don't really want this from Bjelland.

 

That said, this is only the beginning of the change. Even ʽCatatonicʼ eventually picks up steam, and ʽLaugh My Head Offʼ gallops along to a hilarious chorus (with echoes of Siouxsie & The Banshees rather than Sonic Youth this time), so the only genuine turds on the EP are the two tracks mentioned at the beginning — the major problem is the length, making it a rather resource-ineffective proposition to go hunting for the EP.

 

FONTANELLE (1992)

 

1) Bruise Violet; 2) Right Now; 3) Bluebell; 4) Handsome & Gretel; 5) Blood; 6) Magick Flute; 7) Won't Tell; 8) Quiet Room; 9) Spun; 10) Short Song; 11) Jungle Train; 12) Pearl; 13) Real Eyes; 14) Mother; 15) Gone.

 

In general, this is To Mother expanded to full-LP status. Despite an important lineup change — important, because any change in a three-person lineup will be important, even if the third person is confined to dancing and tambourines — namely, the replacement of bassist Michelle Leon with Maureen Herman, Fontanelle continues the band's «Journey Into The Depths of Your Sexual Subconscious», under the ongoing mentorship of Sonic Youth (whose own Lee Ranaldo co-pro­duced the album with Bjelland).

 

Somehow the album managed to become their commercial peak — most likely, due to (a) heavy promotion on the part of Sonic Youth and on the part of themselves, with the band's wild, but no­vel stage act steadily gaining in prominence; (b) most importantly, the overall grunge craze — in the wake of Nevermind, this sound was bound to succeed, especially considering that Bjelland's guitar tones are now even fatter, crunchier, and dirtier than they were two years before. That «swamp pussy» sound of Spanking Machine is all but gone, replaced by the punk-o-metal doom growl that Kurt commanded us to love — and we (the people) loved it so much we ended up buy­ing 220,000 copies of Fontanelle in the United States alone.

 

And what now, in retrospect? Well, naturally, the seams are showing — whatever emotional ef­fect the album may produce on us, the reasons for that effect are immediately obvious, canceling out the desirable «creepy» vibe. Even a brief comparison of the album sleeves between 1990 and 1992 shows the unhealthy difference: from a stylish, subtly defiant photo they switched to a ra­ther dubious «Chucky-meets-Alice-Cooper» trashy aesthetics. Then there is the same thing within the album sleeve: confused quasi-Freudian imagery in the lyrics + dark, quasi-gothic guitar tones with more emphasis on how the chords are played rather than on which chords are played = a tho­roughly unnecessary pretense to «intellectualism» where, earlier, there was just some simple, brutal, basic, gut-level exorcism.

 

However, that does not mean that Fontanelle is bad — it is a firm step in a wrong direction, as far as I am concerned, but it retains enough primal punch to be consistently listenable for those who respect primal punch punched by professional primal punchers. For sure, it was wrong of them to re-record the instrumental ʽQuiet Roomʼ from To Mother (its three minutes should, at best, have been reduced to a twenty-second mood-setting intro to some other song); and the final ʽGoneʼ, with its slow tempos, feedback walls, and «atmospheric» or «symbolic» overdubs of breaking glass at the beginning, is understandable as a choice for the lead-out track, but pretty much unbearable on its own (once again — such experiments should better be left for Sonic Youth; it's not that they do them a whole lot better, but at least «it's their life», whereas Bjelland is just an uncomfortable stranger to this land).

 

And yet, when Fontanelle rocks, it really rocks. The sonic textures may be even more monoto­nous than they used to, the melodic hooks may be completely disregarded (intentionally disrega­r­ded — since the melodies here are influenced by avantgarde rather than minimalistic, but catchy garage-rock), but they still get by on the strength of Bjelland's personality. One of my favorite numbers here, ʽHandsome & Gretelʼ, managed to become a favorite simply because of the hila­rious vocal modulation, which includes everything from deep-throat roar to mock-falsetto irony — if anything, that is at least serious theatrical skill. ʽBruise Violetʼ is a great album opener, jackhammering the song's maligned victim (some suggested that the victim in question was Court­ney Love, which Bjelland naturally denied in public, in the light of lines like "you fucking bitch I hope your insides rot", etc.) into oblivion, with a few well-placed echoey calls of «liar, liar, liar!» diversifying the mood — now you're playful, now you're vengeful, and now you're down­right psychotic. This is something that needs a Kat Bjelland for comfort; nobody in Sonic Youth possessed that sort of back alley devil inside them.

 

In short, to sum it all up in a transparent hyperbolic manner, you probably haven't lived your life to the fullest if you never heard Kat scream out "YOU'RE DEAD MEAT MOTHERFUCKER YOU DON'T TRY TO RAPE A GODDESS" at the top of her lungs during the climax to ʽBlue­bellʼ — this ain't «music», really, more like «spiritual history», but it's the little things like that which make Fontanelle an important, and quite exciting, document of its epoch. Even the obli­gatory Lori Barbero vocal spotlight this time is tolerable, as the lady is playing Patti Smith's little sister on the tempo-varying ʽMagick Fluteʼ.

 

Additionally, I refrain from making any definitive comments on the actual music content here, because this would require more trained and attentive ears — I don't «get» these melodies as dis­tinct entities in their own rights, but somebody else might: this is not generic hardcore or poorly masked formulaic blues-rock, with at least some of the guitar / bass interplay quite carefully con­structed and occasionally steered in the «punk jazz» department of Primus and the like. Not that the girls are seriously / notably growing as technically skilled players or anything — the only point is that there may be more to this music than what immediately meets, and blackens, the naked eye. From that point of view, my thumbs up come both as overdue payment for Bjelland's fiery spirit — and possible advance payment for potential future revelations.

 

PAINKILLERS (1993)

 

1) He's My Thing; 2) Laredo; 3) Istigkeit; 4) Ragweed; 5) Angel Hair; 6) Fontanellette.

 

The album cover explicitly suggests some trashy immediate link to Fontanelle, which there is: no­minally, this is an EP consisting of outtakes from the Fontanelle sessions (so the two relate to each other just like Spanking Machine related To Mother, pardon the involuntary rhyming), ex­cept that they also tack on a mini-live session — ʽFontanelletteʼ, recorded at CBGB's in April 1992, contains ten selections from Fontanelle squeezed inside one 34-minute track on the CD. Altogether, that makes up for a 50-minute listening experience, so the real meaning of the «EP» tag in this particular case is «Extra Pay» (for something quite superfluous).

 

The «original outtakes» are a rather confused bunch. There is a re-recording of ʽHe's My Thingʼ with somewhat better production than on the original, and with the same wildness level, but with­out any particularly reasonable point. There is ʽLaredoʼ, a fairly punchy riff-rocker with a fun «surf-grunge» lead line throughout; it could have made a good addition to Fontanelle, replacing one of its slower, more boring numbers. ʽIstigkeitʼ, however, is one of those slow, boring num­bers, whose ethereal falsetto harmonies are just enough out of tune to confirm that Bjelland should firmly stick to roaring, never «cooing». ʽAngel Hairʼ is a bunch of unmemorable noise, as uninspired and generic as they come.

 

Biggest surprise of the bunch is the obligatory Lori Barbero vocal spotlight — as usual, I was prepared for the worst, but ʽRagweedʼ is actually a surprise: alternating broken strings of notes and percussion blasts, over which Barbero, beatnik-style, flings brief recited sequences of words, followed by a fast-paced psychedelic section with buzzing intertwined guitars and a femme-fatale style, icy chorus. Throughout, Lori does not even try to sing, and it works — her spoken-word  «domina­trix» tone is far more convincing that way. Consequently, ʽRagweedʼ vies for attention with ʽLaredoʼ, first time in Barbero history.

 

The live performance boasts decent-quality recording and, since the songs are all fresh, genuine excitement at being able to donate the vibe to a small, hip New York crowd. But since the Babes never really hold it off in the studio, there is not much hope to see them get even wilder live — and meticulous comparison of the studio Fontanelle with the live ʽFontanelletteʼ is a sport that should be restricted only for the most loyal admirers of Kat Bjelland. At least they have the good sense not to play ʽQuiet Roomʼ — the live set omits most of the «moody» numbers, concentra­ting on rip-roar. And considering that the Babes would never have that much rip-roar again, it might seem nice to have this extra souvenir.

 

NEMESISTERS (1995)

 

1) Hello; 2) Oh Yeah!; 3) Drivin'; 4) Sweet '69; 5) Surd; 6) 22; 7) Ariel; 8) Killer On The Road; 9) Middle Man; 10) Memory; 11) S.F.W.; 12) All By Myself; 13) Deep Song; 14) We Are Family.

 

By 1995, Babes In Toyland had nothing much left to say — which should come as no surprise for those who think they had nothing to say in the first place, and as a piece of sad news for those who think the band did have growth potential. But in what direction? They never wrote great me­lodies, they were sloppy instrumentalists, and their inventiveness in the studio never took them beyond simple echo effects and extra fuzz. So where to now, St. Peter?

 

To a slow, boring, painfully drawn out failure, that's where. The album title is a funny haplology, the album cover looks like something right out of the hair metal years (Ozzy must have loved it), but the music, for the most part, is as dull as the opening track — ʽHelloʼ is an uneducated Sonic Youth parody, and any respect I have for the scenic image of Kat Bjelland is severely undercut by her trying to introduce «atmospherics», «subtlety», and «modern rock intellectualism» into the picture. What she can do is rev us up by screaming and roaring at the top of her lungs while chug­ging out simple, fast-moving grunge riffs. And on Nemesisters, the longest of all Babes albums, there are only two songs that move in that direction — ʽOh Yeah!ʼ and ʽSweet '69ʼ — and only ʽSweet '69ʼ moves far enough, with a Stooges-derived riff as generic as they come, but it is the crunch that matters, not the chords.

 

Most of the other songs just drone along — sometimes with a psychedelic effect (ʽSurdʼ), some­times bordering on stoner metal (ʽDrivin'ʼ, essentially a repetitive instrumental with a «sublimi­nal message» in the background), sometimes trying to experiment with tricky time signatures (Lori Barbero goes for some unusual polyrhythms on ʽMemoryʼ — not that it matters much), but these are nuances: the band is so inexperienced in all these matters anyway that it all merges together in one big bowl of tiresome slop.

 

If the bulk of the album does not spell out «f-a-i-l-u-r-e» clearly enough for you, the final three tracks will have to do the job: three «deconstructivist» covers of songs that one might only asso­ciate with the usual likes of Babes In Toyland in a nightmare: Eric Carmen's sentimental ballad ʽAll By Myselfʼ, the old vocal jazz chestnut ʽDeep Songʼ (Billie Holiday, etc.), and the old Sister Sledge disco anthem ʽWe Are Familyʼ. The ballad, drowned in a sea of fuzzy power chords and deep-throaty roar, is unlistenable (not that it was all that listenable in its original version, but this rendition does not even have the stark novelty value of a Sid Vicious doing ʽMy Wayʼ). The jazz number is sung by Lori Barbero (who cannot sing) a cappella (so that you wouldn't have the slightest doubt that she cannot sing); I will refrain from describing the aural consequences.

 

Only the Sister Sledge cover, with a funny electric piano part distilling the guitar noise, manages to be modestly entertaining — ironic as it is to hear them all joining in a chorus of "we are family, I got all my sisters with me", considering how much time was left for the band to live — but it may simply sound refreshing and relaxing after the aural horrors we have just had to experience. Besides, it is impossible to get the point of having it here without knowing about the original — and if you care at all for the original (which was, after all, one of the high points of «B-level dis­co» back in the day), there is no reason to care about the «deconstruction».

 

Basically, you can almost see the album talk back at the ladies — telling them to pack it in and call it a day, because they have ran out of gas to create another Spanking Machine, and the tank ain't strong enough to hold higher quality fuel. For instructive purposes, Nemesisters may be worth a listen, but it is more likely that Kat Bjelland will go down in history as the breathtaking, hysterical, aggressive little blonde banshee of ʽHe's My Thingʼ than as the scruffy, capricious, annoying ghostly zombie of ʽHelloʼ or ʽSurdʼ. Not to mention that she is a heck of a lot more en­tertaining and amusing as the former than as the latter. Thumbs down — as the Babes say their goodbyes to Toyland and move out to Adult Droneland, I'd rather prefer to stay behind.

 

MINNEAPOLISM (2001)

 

1) Bruise Violet; 2) Swamp Pussy; 3) Vomit Heart; 4) Oh Yeah!; 5) Handsome And Gretel; 6) Won't Tell; 7) Drivin'; 8) Ripe; 9) Dust Cake Boy; 10) Ariel; 11) Bluebell; 12) He's My Thing; 13) Middle Man; 14) Memory; 15) Spun; 16) Spit To See The Shine; 17) Sweet '69.

 

This is not one of the many archive live releases from the vaults of the Toyland, but actually a contemporary memento of the Babes' last ever public appearance, after a few years of disin­tegrating, reconfiguring, patching up, and breaking down again, the Babes finally played their last show, with Bjelland, Barbero, and new bass player Jessie Farmer (who had actually replaced Maureen Herman in 1997). Details are obscure: reprinted sources claim that the show took place on November 21, 2001, yet at the same time the release date for the album is usually given as May 2001, so either we have some time travel involved here or some anonymous son of a bitch is falsifying history. Not that this particular history is of any tremendous importance, but accuracy is important even when dealing with a band as chaotic as the Babes.

 

Anyway, even though Minneapolism is primarily a historical document, it could have plenty of potential to become a great live record and, come to think of it, a much better farewell than the stupefied Nemesisters. Alas, nobody happened to care about sound quality — the whole thing honestly sounds like an audience-quality bootleg, albeit recorded from the first row, so all the drun­ken guffawing and hullabalooing mainly come through during the breaks between songs. Audiophiles will put this down ten seconds into the album and never pick it up again; lo-fi enthu­siasts and Kat Bjelland suitors are the only ones likely enough to want to keep it.

 

Too bad, because the show was really good. The new bass girl handles all of Michelle Leon's and Maureen Herman's tough parts fairly well, and Bjelland, despite occasional faltering and not al­ways being able to sustain the heat, still has enough spirit to whip herself up into the usual frenzy (something that you do not always expect out of «last concerts»). She seems a little out of breath on ʽHandsome And Gretelʼ (even letting the audience sing a couple of the "handsooooome!"s in­stead of herself), and misses a few of the «scream-shots» on ʽDust Cake Boyʼ — but apparently, there had always been slips like these whenever the Babes performed live, so there is no need to tie the occasional mistakes in with disillusionment, tiredness, or lack of enthusiasm.

 

The setlist, on the other hand, is near-perfect — all the classic numbers are here, with a nice fat selection from Spanking Machine, all the big «hits» from Fontanelle, and a slightly higher than necessary, but not fatal selection from Nemesisters (the weirdest inclusion is ʽDrivin'ʼ, on which Barbero is forced to chant her mantra of "where were you, I thought that I knew" for three mi­nutes without any echo or reverb on her voice — not a pleasant experience, particularly to hear her get so totally out of breath towards the end). Main focus is on kicking ass — the «moody» numbers are reduced to a minimum and act as occasional breathers (ʽWon't Tellʼ, ʽMiddle Manʼ), helping Bjelland to regain some stamina for the next monster rocker. Altogether, I think the audi­ences got what they wanted — if only somebody had bothered setting up a proper recording con­sole, us future listeners could get what we want, too, but no dice.

 

Consequently, do not hunt for this without extra necessity; ʽFontanelletteʼ on Painkillers is a sharper illustration of the girls' club power, although, of course, it is exclusively limited to pro­mo­ting Fontanelle, and The Peel Sessions have far better sound quality, although they are not genuinely «live» (not before a genuinely vibrant club audience, that is) and are also represented by a somewhat questionable setlist. Which, in the end, leaves us still wishing and hoping for that one perfect Babes In Toyland live experience where it would all come together — the clarity of the mix, the enthusiasm, the song quality — and it looks like that particular wish just ain't coming true, unless the ladies give it one more try one of these days.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE BBC JOHN PEEL SESSIONS 1990-1992 (2001)

 

1) Catatonic; 2) Ripe; 3) Primus; 4) Spit To See The Shine; 5) Pearl; 6) Dogg; 7) Laugh My Head Off; 8) Mad Pilot; 9) Handsome & Gretel; 10) Blood; 11) Mother; 12) Dirty; 13) Jungle Train; 14) Right Now; 15) Sometimes; 16) Magick Flute.

 

For a band that only lasted for half a decade, releasing but three spotty LPs and leaving behind a rather ambiguous reputation, Babes In Toyland have a rather inadequate slew of «posthumous» archive releases and compilations — including, among other things, a trilogy of live compilations creatively called Devil, Lived, and Viled, published in 2000 by some obscure indie label or other. (Only mentioning these because there is no way I am ever going to review that many live albums from this kind of band — I can only guess that one of the label executives simply had a major crush on Kat Bjelland, which may be understood).

 

In any case, only a small part of this backlog is easily available these days. One of the earliest and most important is this set of live performances recorded for John Peel, who was a major fan of Spanking Machine and did much to promote the band in the early stages of their career. In fact, the original Peel Sessions, a brief EP with only eight tracks, was released as early as 1992; this here edition from 2001 is an expanded version that adds material from a couple of later sessions, the last one already with Maureen Herman replacing Michelle Leon on bass. Given John Peel's popularity and importance, this is quite likely the way that many Euro­pean audiences heard the band in the first place — so, at the very least, The Peel Sessions have some historical importance. And at most, they are kinda fun.

 

Could have actually been much more fun, though, if not for the questionable track list: apparently, the idea behind this BBC exposure was primarily to promote the latest and freshest, and this means that (a) there is virtually no material from their first and best, Spanking Machine, except, of course, for the one worst song on that album (ʽDoggʼ); (b) the performances of songs from To Mother and Fontanelle are, in general, quite close to the studio originals, with no time to re­hearse any variations. In fact, the track lengths are so eerily close to the respective lengths for the studio versions that I had to doublecheck whether this could be some sort of ruse — but no, these are indeed alternate takes. In fact, for those who dislike their Babes wrapped in studio echo, these versions might seem preferable — guitars and vocals slap you in the face on an «immediate» le­vel, without having to break through any further mixing conventions.

 

Only two songs out of sixteen are unavailable elsewhere: ʽDirtyʼ, memorable for being based on the riff of ʽHey Bulldogʼ transposed for grunge guitar (no great fun in any other respect), and ʽSometimesʼ, built on a swift descending pattern similar to ʽRipeʼ, but disappointingly sagging in the slowed-down bridge parts. Both qualify as standard-fare, listenable Fontanelle-era songs, but not as trademark solid examples of the «Bjelland hysterics».

 

One must keep in mind that 99% of whatever the Babes recorded live, they recorded in shoddy lo-fi quality, be it a local club gig or a major festival appearance, so if you are really interested in assessing their tightness as a live unit, this is your best bet, and they were pretty tight whenever they paid attention to it — the fifteen-second intro to ʽSometimesʼ, for instance, should alone be sufficient to dispel any rumors of Bjelland's unprofessionalism and anti-musicality: I'm sure Pete Townshend would have loved that chuggy descending riff and the subtle chord variations on each bar. The downside to this fine sound quality is that you also get to hear Lori Barbero's vocals on ʽDoggʼ in all of their unbridled ugliness, but nothing comes without a price, I guess.

BARDO POND

BUFO ALVARIUS, AMEN 29:15 (1995)

 

1) Adhesive; 2) Back Porch; 3) On A Side Street; 4) Capillary River; 5) No Time To Waste; 6) Absence; 7) Vent; 8) Amen.

 

Philadelphia-based Bardo Pond do not write songs — they create ambience. That is the first thing one needs to un­derstand and acknowledge about them. Naturally, they are way, way far from the first band to use loud rock instrumentation to create ambience. Before them, there was stoner rock, and then there was shoegazing, and then there were Sonic Youth, and then there was Metal Machine Music, and then there was Faust, and then, and then... and then along came Jones, and the rest is never-ending history. Still, they did take noise-rock in a direction all their own, at least, as long as you are willing to accept that a Bardo Pond album has to be over seventy minutes long to be a true Bardo Pond album — and include no more than three or four well-discernible rhythmic phrases over the course of its duration.

 

Bufo Alvarius, the band's debut, satisfies these conditions. It is named after the psychoac­tive Co­lorado River toad (the second part of the title simply refers to the running length of the last track), and it does sound like whoever recorded it had previously spent some time cruising on 5-Me-O-DMT. Chief inhalers include brothers John and Michael Gibbons on space rock guitars (one of them is usually monotonously droning away on a riff, while the other one weaves sonic rings around); Clint Takeda on equally stoned bass; drummer Joe Culver, who, due to the songs' lethar­gic tempos, is the band's weakest link by definition; and Isobel Sollenberger on highly occasional flute and slightly more frequent vocals (although her «singing» is, in reality, at best just a modest sound effect, particularly since she, too, generally sounds stoned out of her mind).

 

All of this is very straightforward — you want psychedelia? you get its very essence, in pure mo­lecular form, no capsules or sweetening shit — and it is not so much «not for everyone» as it is «not for any time»: Bufo Alvarius does not work well as background music (because whatever you are doing to the sounds of it, you run a heavy risk of doing it backwards in a short time), nor, obviously, does it work if you are simply planning to «have a good time». However, it has the po­tential to carry you away into outer space if you feel like... well, like taking a trip that does not require any effort on your part whatsoever (like headbanging to Hawkwind's brand of space rock, for instance).

 

ʽAmenʼ, the huge half-hour drone that closes the album, is where they take this idea to its extreme. The actual length need not bother, since it can be turned off at any time (and the remainder of the album would still constitute a full-length LP, so it is possible to think of it as one enormous bonus track) — but if it happens to entrance you over the first five or six minutes, then the next twenty-four may well turn out to be blissful. The lead guitar weaves a distorted, buzzing / ringing / wah-wah-ing raga pattern throughout, while the rhythm guitar plays an echoey chiming pattern, and it is clearly the express purpose of the two to place you under hypnosis; worked in my case — at the very least, I got disfocused enough so as to forget where exactly it was that the lead guitar player started going in circles.

 

The «shorter» compositions are bookmarked by two not particularly effective slabs of grumbly noise-rock (ʽAdhesiveʼ and ʽVentʼ), but in between them there are actually some bits of stylistic variety — from the deep, heavy blues-riffage of ʽBack Porchʼ (which could have just as well be an influence on The Black Keys) to the retro-metal of ʽAbsenceʼ (which has the most memorable and almost Sabbath-worthy riff on the entire album) and the almost swamp-rock sound of ʽNo Time To Wasteʼ, with its distorted, sleazy slide guitar reminiscent of Led Zeppelin circa Physical Graffiti. (Not reminiscent enough to drag you out of the trance, though — once these guys place you into a fixed state, there is no going back, and even if ʽNo Time To Wasteʼ is just a tad faster than the rest of them, it hardly feels that way when the song remains in its context).

 

Overall, I believe I should have hated this album for the paucity of ideas and the bluntness of ap­proach — but it must have gotten to me through the sheer size of it. Remember, kids: one track like this on an album otherwise filled with catchy pop-rock is boring filler — a whole album of such tracks is a mind-melting experience. Probably the best thing about it is that the Gibbonses have such tasty combinations of guitar tones — such as a «mooing» distorted acid metal in one channel, and a high-pitched «astral» psycho siren in another: a combination that goes easier on my ears than many others (for instance, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and other newer bands prefer a combination of «buzz-noise» and «jangle» that is not nearly as effective on the senses unless it is shaped into a really strong melodic pattern).

 

On the other hand, it is also clear why Bardo Pond never transcended their cult status — they really have no interest in adhering to strict self-discipline. Even the five-minute «songs» on here are mood pieces and nothing more. This has its formal pluses — not only does this approach al­low you to record new material at extra speed, but it also helps you gain an «uncompromising» reputation and a small, but steady, ultra-loyal following. Its formal minuses are too obvious to be even worth mentioning — but not sufficient to prevent me from an enthusiastic thumbs up, pro­vided the word «enthusiastic» is compatible with this stuff in the first place: an «intoxicated» thumbs up might be a better way of putting it. Bring on the mushrooms — and don't forget the Colorado Ri­ver toad, of course.

 

AMANITA (1996)

 

1) Limerick; 2) Sentence; 3) Tantric Porno; 4) Wank; 5) The High Frequency; 6) Sometimes Words; 7) Yellow Tur­ban; 8) Rumination; 9) Be A Fish; 10) Tapir Song; 11) RM.

 

Regardless of whether the actual formula of Bufo Alvarius was a «winner» or a «crapfest», one thing is clear: whatever be, they shouldn't have changed it — this way, at the very least you can say that they «definitely got something», but suppose a shift from monotonous, half-improvised psychedelic jamming to standard-length pop songs took place? would they have survived it? what if nobody in the band had a knack for pop hooks? what if they'd only end up embarrassing them­selves? selling out for nothing?.. Nah, just ain't worth it.

 

So all the formal changes are strictly cosmetic. The album title now refers to mushrooms rather than toads (fortunately, there is still a huge generic stock of toxic organisms in store for the future — and remember, this is not an invitation to start munching on death caps); the tracks no longer include any half-hour incantations, spreading their moods more equally throughout the album (which does not mean a shorter running time, though); most importantly, production values have risen, with the band sounding a little more «clean» when they want to sound more clean, and with a better control on reverb, echo, and other effects.

 

In other words, Amanita is a minor technical improvement on Bufo Alvarius, and for quite a few of the fans, remains the definitive Bardo Pond statement. I have no idea — choosing one B.P. album over another requires unwrapping one too many cerebral DNA strands — but, obviously, this is anything but a letdown. The Bardos' formula is simple, does not pretend to much, and will not be loved by many, but they care about it, and sometimes it works even for me.

 

One thing that does not always agree well with these guys is noise and distortion. For my tastes, ʽLimerickʼ, opening the album in this scratchy/hoarse mode, should have fulfilled the quotas on distortion — for five minutes, they are capable of upholding a steady crescendo, with two guitar parts, the rhythm section, and Isobel's incomprehensible, echo-laden vocals gradually piled up on top of each other; later still, a third guitar enters the picture with high-pitched «ambient soloing» to announce the beginning of the completion of the circle. It is a hell of a disturbing introduction, but it already makes the second song, ʽSentenceʼ, seem rather anti-climactic — another ode to dis­tortion whose planning and execution seem like a mere shadow of their predecessor.

 

As before, Bardo Pond are really at their finest when they set up a dumb, behemothic hook — it always helps to have some solid Arbor Mundi tree-trunk to lean upon when drifting around in psychedelic haze. For instance, ʽWankʼ (yes, that is the title — self-irony? unbelievable!) has one of those reli­able riffs, shaped like the sonic wave from a skull drill, eating into your brain so ferociously that I found myself actually grappling my cranium at some point. When it's just noise, it never works so well — the brain circuits have to be irritated with subtlety, or they simply shut themselves down and the game is lost altogether.

 

But the major winner is probably ʽRuminationʼ, where the noise dissipates altogether and the entire song is dominated by echoing slide guitars — the kind of thing that Dave Gilmour proba­bly pionerred, yet here it is taken to one of the possible extremes. The first minute, with the rever­berating / wobbling bass intro chords, the shy acoustic guitar coyly joining in, and then the first airborne slide notes, has that simplistic, homebrewed, and still unfathomable mysticism to it that bad / generic bands are usually unable to conjure. Later on, the slide guitar will go crazy (watch out for it), but in the end, loyally obeying the formula, things will calm down again and get to where it all started to «let you down easy».

 

Only one track out of eleven has a relatively «song-ly» form — ʽBe A Fishʼ, not a particular highlight but still more than simply a generic alt-rock composition (at the very least, Isobel's mul­ti-tracked mantra of "I'd like to smell like a fish / When I go swimming in the soupy mix" is evo­cative, you'll have to admit that). Everything else represents either typical «Bardo Pond rock» (noisy, angry, stoned, super-slow) or, more rarely, «Bardo Pond balladry» (quiet, moody, stoned, super-slow — apart from ʽRuminationʼ, ʽTantric Pornoʼ also falls in that category), and further attempts at description are futile.

 

Thumbs up for raising the bar a little bit on perfection (something of the caliber of ʽRuminationʼ was still impossible on Bufo), but, naturally, do keep in mind that, according to my humble opi­nion, seventy minutes of this stuff are only listenable either in «background mode» (to what sort of activities — that one you will have to decide for yourself), or on one of those trips suggested by the album title. Serious intellectual analysis of the differences between ʽSentenceʼ, ʽYellow Tur­banʼ, and ʽTapir Songʼ should be reserved for neural scientists — or neuro patients.

 

LAPSED (1997)

 

1) Tommy Gun Angel; 2) Pick My Brain; 3) Flux; 4) Anandamide; 5) Green Man; 6) Straw Dog; 7) Aldrin.

 

Forty-seven minutes? You must be joking. A proper Bardo Pond album never lasts less than eight billion hours — forty-seven minutes is not even long enough to overcome the initial bore­dom stage, let alone the ensuing unbearable hatred stage, the languid fatigue stage, the dizzy trance stage, and the total brain shutdown coma stage. And since, roughly approximated, all Bardo Pond albums always sound the same, the drastic reduction in length is more or less the main difference between Amanita and Lapsed — a difference that many will be able to tolerate and some will even welcome, but a difference that is not quite loyal to the band's essence.

 

Actually, there is one more catch: there is a bit too much sludge and noise here for my liking — for all their love of distortion, Bardo Pond are really at their best when they tone down the tide and rock you to unconsciousness with slow, echoey, transcendental-meditation-type patterns. On Lapsed, there is only one such number — ʽAldrinʼ comes in last and does the right thing for the longest time (14:19), with a single «delayed» bass line providing the foundation and subsequent layers of Isobel's somnambulant voice and psycho guitars slowly... very slowly transform it from a threatening rumble to all-out roar. The crescendo is handled perfectly: it is only once the peak level has been attained that the tune runs out of further things to say — it should have been cut off somewhere around the twelve minutes mark, I'd say, in an ʽI Want Youʼ-type manner, but then again, what do I really know about the regulations of modern day musical shamanism...

 

As for the other tracks, well, this time around we may perceive a little extra emphasis on distorted slide guitars — they enter the picture on track two, ʽPick My Brainʼ, in delightfully «poisonous» mode (think Allman Brothers who suddenly decided to do something in Black Sabbath style), and then reappear on ʽStraw Dogʼ where they are further overloaded with a wah-wah effect. Both of these slide patterns, as predictably repetitive as they are, work far more efficiently on my brain than the simpler, cruder Neil Young-ish sludge of ʽTommy Gun Angelʼ and ʽFluxʼ, or the deeply mixed space-rock ambience of ʽGreen Manʼ — see, these guys are really quite diverse, but some­how their «pseudo-roots-rock jamming» seems more interesting here than their psychedelic drones and sheer noise excursions.

 

Nevertheless, passing individual judgements on this stuff makes about as much sense as trying to memorize all fourteen minutes of ʽAldrinʼ and then hum them to your friends. You either hate Bardo Pond as an institution, or you respect them and own exactly one of their albums (in which case Lapsed, being so short, is not it), or you love them and then they can do no wrong — even if with music like this, they could have very easily pushed out fifteen LPs per year (like their some­what ideologically similar Japanese colleagues, Acid Mothers' Temple). Then again, with this «shortened» approach they might really be trying to tell us that they do care about each single second, and that the point is that you should engulf yourself in all the tiny intricacies — so par­don me in advance if I am in too much of a hustle-bustle here, missing all the expected epiphanies and the final enlightenment.

 

SET AND SETTING (1999)

 

1) Walking Stick Man; 2) This Time (So Fucked); 3) Datura; 4) Again; 5) Lull; 6) Cross Current; 7) Crawl Away; 8) #3.

 

Listen to all the Bardo Pond albums in a row and you will know more about chemical lore than you ever bothered to ask — in this case, for instance, I was not even aware that «set and setting» was an actual Timothy Leary term for the conditions of substance intake. Somewhere along the way the band lost Joe Culver («lapsed», eh?), and now the drums are handled by John Gibbons — no big deal: considering the essence of their sound, Bardo Pond could easily do without drums altogether and no one might even notice. Still, this is not a good omen, nor is their stubborn insis­tence on preserving the short run­ning length (49 minutes — what a shameful piddle).

 

The production seems to shift a bit from «interstellar» environments in the direction of your bed­room: ʽWalking Stick Manʼ is an 11 minute-long drone that puts the fuzz straight in your ears without burdening it with echoes, reverb, or any other «distancing» effects. It also seems to lack any sort of development — once the thing is established, one minute into the song, it just keeps going in circles, like a classic-period Aerosmith «sleaze riff» stuck in mid-note. Later on, ʽAgainʼ does the same thing grunge-style, with six and a half minutes of speedy nuclear fallout without intermissions or relaxations; and then ʽCrawl Awayʼ generates nine minutes of high-pitched feed­back that never move away from the initially set point. And, naturally, Isobel and her sleep-walk­ing mumbling are all over these and more.

 

The point, apparently, is not just to remind us that «Bardo Pond» and «allegedly meaningful mono­tonousness» are freely replaceable synonyms, but to prove this equation beyond any sort of reasonable doubt — fast-forward to any random spot on any of the longer tracks and you will hear the exact same thing. Some of the fans were actually worried over this, and I share the worry, because one of the major attractions of this band at its best was its subtle ability to build up the atmosphere, adding more and more layers to the sound until the rainy pitter-patter became a thun­derstorm. This subtlety is completely omitted here, most likely on purpose, just to see what hap­pens, but — at least for somebody who is not planning to use the album as a soundtrack for an actual trip — it might well be so that nothing will actually happen, period.

 

The most unusual track is ʽCross Currentʼ, which eschews the band's usual guitars for psyche­delic violins (the sludge guitars do come in later, so you could say at least one track has some de­velopment) — good enough for a change, not good enough as a classic Bardo Pond number, since they end up sounding like a slightly less aggressive Jimmy Page with a bow, and if you are fuck­ing up your violins, at least do that aggressively, so that you do not end up fucking them up for nothing. Speaking of fucking, the best track is probably ʽThis Time (So Fucked)ʼ, not because its title is so true to the album's content, but because it is built on one of those classic simple B.P. wah-wah pat­terns that rock the mind boat so well — and, of the short tracks, the two-minute in­terlude ʽLullʼ has a rockabye-baby beauty of its own (mmm, echoey slide guitars).

 

Nevertheless, as a whole, the album is a disappointment. It does not try to do «more» for the band, nor does it try to go someplace «different»: it tries to up the stakes on «minimalism», but instead, simply gives the appearance of being lazy. And even when you have Bufo Alvarius sitting on your right and Amanita sprouting on your left, this «setting» is a poor excuse for laziness. They used to get really high, and now they are just getting stoned. Thumbs down.

 

DILATE (2001)

 

1) Two Planes; 2) Sunrise; 3) Inside; 4) Aphasia; 5) Favorite Uncle; 6) Swig; 7) Despite The Roar; 8) LB.; 9) Hum; 10) Ganges.

 

Course correction: as the tires hit the gravel on Set And Setting, somebody had enough sense to swerve the steering wheel back to where it belongs. Not only are we back to the proper running length (seventy minutes, just enough for the trip to be fruitful!), but the echoey, multi-layered production is also back, returning us to those intersecting seas of feedback that are Bardo Pond's prime reason for existence.

 

For starters, ʽTwo Planesʼ is probably the most atmospheric thing they have done since Amanita. The rhythm guitar / lead guitar / violin trio represents the ultimate in psychedelic chemistry — as the atonal, discordant violins tear into your brain like tiny scalpels, the chiming wah-wah lead phrase acts like some sort of pain-neutralizing mystical balm, while the chugging rhythm chords gradually gain in heaviness, culminating in a nightmarish acid rain — then dissipating back into the initial quiet. The whole thing has a somber autumnal mood and should probably best be heard on one of those gray, depressing days — better still if it happens to take place on a distant planet.

 

Another impressive example of the band's ever-increasing skill at building stuff up and then brin­ging it down is ʽInsideʼ — starts out as your average upbeat, rhythmic indie pop-rocker, with acoustic and electric guitars playing snippets of cuddly-cutesy melodies off each other for a few minutes before growing, slowly and gradually, into a psychonightmare. Technically, there is no­thing new here when you take it in context, but the contrast between the «innocent» beginnings and the hellish developments is even more radical than it used to be, and the tempo at which this is taken is also rather unusual for the band.

 

More questionable is the album's heavy dependence on quiet acoustic patterns — most of the songs incorporate acoustic rhythms, and some, alarmingly, never get beyond these rhythms (ʽFavorite Uncleʼ sounds like James Taylor on elephant tranquilizers; ʽSwigʼ is «formally» redee­med by incorporating raga elements, complete with tabla playing and all, but how many Western artists playing bits of Indian ragas have we already had to endure in these past forty years?). As usual, Isobel is all over the place, and now that we have so many quiet, unplugged parts to sit through, it is very much a matter of how charmed you generally are by her vocalizations — per­sonally, I happen to think that Bardo Pond's neuro-stimulation could work more acutely if some of these songs concentrated exclusively on guitar string and electronic resonance.

 

Still, these are all minor problems compared to what happens when we get to the real heavy stuff: ʽLB.ʼ is built upon sludgy Sabbath-y riffs, while ʽGangesʼ flows on with such creaking and scree­ching pain that its eleven minutes are just enough to make you eco-conscious — the song's cla­shing guitar and violin lines are just about as dirty as the great river itself. No huge surprises from either of these tracks, but both of them manipulate the listener's brain just as effectively as any given highlight on any given B.P. album.

 

In short, minor twists and defects aside, the band returns to the tried and true, puts the cherry of ʽTwo Planesʼ on top, and earns its regular thumbs up for the atmospherics, the craftsmanship, and the dedication. Oh, and superb album art, too, quite in the grand old psychedelic tradition, but with a nice modern-day scientific twist.

 

ON THE ELLIPSE (2003)

 

1) JD; 2) Every Man; 3) Dom's Lament; 4) Test; 5) Walking Clouds; 6) Night Of Frogs.

 

Six tracks? Even though the largest clocks in at 12:56, and the smallest is nearly seven minutes in length, that still brings us down to under an hour, and I still say, for a band like Bardo Pond, that's no good. We need at least twenty minutes to get on that boat, twenty more to pump our stomachs and be done with the seasickness, and then, just as you are finally ready to go with the flow... the journey's over. Psychobummer.

 

On the other hand, On The Ellipse may be just the kind of Bardo Pond album that we wouldn't want to go on forever, because this is where the band undergoes a shift of attitude. Suddenly, the psychedelic netherworld tones down its usual primordial soup bubbling, and out comes... soul. Or some psychedelic netherworld equivalent of soul, at least — the whole album is permeated with wailing, moaning, groaning, sighing, and grumbling: this is definitely one unhappy soul out there, cloaking the lava surface of the planet in universal sorrow.

 

ʽJDʼ opens the proceedings with an almost minute-long flat wave of high-pitched feedback — just enough time to clear a couple square miles around from all living souls — before adding a morose acoustic rhythm and Isobel's never-changing ghost vocals. The formula itself remains fairly standard, right down to the gradual intensification of the sea of electric noise, but the way they use this «clean feedback» on the track is new to Bardo Pond's manner of thinking, and may produce a serious depressive-demolishing effect on the brain if allowed to go on for all of its seven minutes.

 

From there, the dirgey atmosphere only keeps deepening: ʽEvery Manʼ could almost just as well be recorded by the likes of the atmospheric doom metal band Agalloch, with its interchange of melancholic acoustics and minimalistic heavy riffage (plus a safety pillow of floating flutes), and ʽDom's Lamentʼ is built upon just one sad skeletal flute / guitar mantra that nevertheless has enough depth to somehow warrant seven minutes of repetition.

 

Of the remaining three tracks, ʽWalking Cloudsʼ is the only one to completely side away from heaviness and just work on the strength of multiple echoey acoustic and vocal overdubs — and yet, somehow, the whole thing never feels as «heavy», in the technical sense, as Amanita or any other classic BP album. It has a different kind of heaviness — a heavy darkness. Bardo Pond were never a particularly «fun» band, but it wasn't until Dilate's ʽTwo Planesʼ that they started experimenting with textures that would be targeted at the listener's emotional rather than physio­logical nerve centers, and apparently, they found the idea quite promising.

 

So here we are — a whole record of typical BP-style lethargic languidness, but this time dedica­ted to the ruins of their imaginary world, after a good old bombardment has wiped out most of the organic and inorganic activity. ʽNight Of Frogsʼ indeed (and the track opens with an appropriate­ly croaky wah-wah explosion). Is it a good thing? I am not sure — almost every track does have at least one interesting and resonant idea, but the construction mechanics, by now, is so utterly predictable (start out quiet, build up sea of noise, cool it down before the end) that I feel confused — if they are trying to pick at my soul now, why do it the same way they were picking away at my cerebral cortex before? Yes, overall, On The Ellipse has its moments, but I dare say that Bardo Pond were better when they were hot, and here, they are not just simply cold, they are in­tentionally locking themselves up in a freezer — and for what it's worth, Isobel Sollenberger is a respectable lady, but she ain't no Nico.

 

TICKET CRYSTALS (2006)

 

1) Destroying Angel; 2) Isle; 3) Lost Word; 4) Cry Baby Cry; 5) Fc II; 6) Moonshine; 7) Endurance; 8) Montana Sacra II.

 

Most of the reviews of this album that I have seen went the predictable way about it — preten­ding to forget about everything that Bardo Pond did since Amanita, and comparing it directly with their earliest records. Because this at least gives you an opportunity to fill the space up with something, e. g. «it is interesting to note that the heavy psychedelic guitars take a step back in or­der to make more room for Isobel Sollenberger's flute», even though the flute presence here is not really any more overwhelming than it was on their previous two records. But we do have to find progress in everything that we listen to, right?..

 

Well, forget it. The only thing there is on Ticket Crystals that constitutes a genuine surprise is a cover of the Beatles' ʽCry Baby Cryʼ — apparently, recorded for a John Lennon tribute album (commemorating the 25th anniversary of the murder) and placed here for fear of being wasted. It is actually quite a decent, minimalistic cover for the first three minutes: acoustic guitar, percus­sion, and vocals that are very loyal to the original phrasing and intonation. Then, once the main body is done, the number finally turns into real Bardo Pond, as waves of feedback finally hit the shore, and that which was pretty singing just a few moments ago is now blurred mumbling — «The Beatles according to Bardo Pond» indeed.

 

Everything else remains steadfast and true. The funereal atmosphere of Ellipse is lightened up a bit, rolled back to earlier standards: the acoustic chords and ambient flutes of ʽIsleʼ are a little melan­cholic, but «relaxing» rather than «depressing» (and feature unusually «clean» vocals from Isobel, so that not only can one finally decipher a few of the words she is singing — not that there is any need to — but also understand that getting in key is a really difficult job for her, even if she has a nice folksy soprano tone). The heavy fuzz-and-grumble is back with a vengeance on ʽDestroying Angelʼ and ʽFc IIʼ. And the band seems to have developed a real taste for backward vocals — ʽMoonshineʼ and ʽLost Wordʼ, in particular, play around with tape direction as if it were 1966 all over again.

 

That said, on any evaluation scale that takes Bardo Pond for a curve rather than straight line, Ticket Crystals is a bit of a disappointment. The heavy stuff is not nearly as heavy as it used to be, and the light stuff is not nearly as moody. It's not that they aren't doing anything «new», it's just that doing the «old» no longer seems to arm them with excitement. Some of these drones, particularly the closing ʽMontana Sacra IIʼ, already seem to confuse «atmosphere» with «sheer tedium». For the newly grown fan, unaware of Amanita, this can still be enchanting; but I see no reason for the seasoned veteran to award Ticket Crystals any more points than one would, for instance, award to the Rolling Stones' Black And Blue over Let It Bleed. Essentially, this is the sound of a mood-oriented band past its moody prime, tenaciously clinging to the old formula, but hardly deriving any further happiness from it — even for their own selves, let alone the listeners. Hence, I do hereby give the album a thumbs down, despite a Bardo Pond-perfect running length of seventy-seven minutes... wasted length, because the mind, already addicted to Amanita-level psychedelia, needs seriously stronger stuff than this to start reeling.

 

BARDO POND (2010)

 

1) Just Once; 2) Don't Know About You; 3) Sleeping; 4) Undone; 5) Cracker Wrist; 6) The Stars Behind; 7) Wayne's Tune.

 

An eponymous album released late in an artist's career usually indicates some sort of «reboot», but in this case... actually, it isn't «eponymous»: judging by the album cover, it's «untit­led», so let us look for analogies with Led Zeppelin rather than the Beatles. But if Led Zeppelin were relea­sing their untitled album as an experiment, just to see if it'd sell fewer copies without the artist's name on it (and, of course, it didn't), with Bardo Pond, it is rather obvious that their devoted fan army is of a highly stable, yet utterly tiny nature, and it is probably futile to expect it to double just because some Bright Eyes fans might look at the sleeve picture and get the wrong idea.

 

In any case, Bardo Pond simply picks up from where Ticket Crystals left off — or, rather, «dragged off»; as usual, it is best appreciated if you forget everything you knew about Bardo Pond before listening to it. If at all possible, they seem even slower, dronier, more lethargic here than they used to: this is seventy minute of very draggy, very nerve-wrecking stoner rock. And un­fortunately, the more they seem determined to tighten the grip on the old formula, and squeeze any traces of compromising out of the system, the more boring it all eventually gets. At 21 minu­tes, ʽUndoneʼ is their longest opus so far after ʽAmenʼ, but seems to completely lack the «world-building» enthusiasm of its predecessor — its only interest is in testing the «backwards effect» on its lead guitar lines for about 12 minutes, before the predictable noisy build-up and explosion puts the track on the downward slope for the next 8 minutes.

 

One of the shorter tracks almost claims to «real song» status, but it isn't a particularly good song: ʽDon't Know About Youʼ sounds like standard fare alt-rock, drowning in sludge guitars, even if it is rendered some­what seductive by its memorable opening lines (Isobel's "Jesus is coming, but I'm willing to wait" isn't exactly on the level of "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine", but it is the first verbal line on a Bardo Pond song, in twenty years, that commands attention).

 

Of the rest, in between the heavy psychedelic boredom of ʽUndoneʼ and the light aethereal (ʽSlee­pingʼ) or swampy (ʽWayne's Tuneʼ) panoramas of acoustic / slide guitars and flutes, only one track stands out as a worthy addition to the catalog: ʽThe Stars Behindʼ has the good sense to present itself as a pompous, crashing anthem, played in waltz time and sung by Isobel as if it were some highlanders' drinking song, rearranged for a more courtly presentation. This is a fresh approach, fully deserving of receiving the standard Bardo Pond treatment (that is, with the Big Freakout Guitar Build-Up and all that goes with it). Unfortunately, its freshness is rather easy to overlook, seeing as how it is the next to last track on the album.

 

In short, a four-year break in regular album output might just as well never have happened — these guys are fantastically tenacious in clinging to their Vatican-size fanbase (a whoppin' two reviews for this 2010 album on Amazon just goes to show you who still really cares), and, if any­thing, you gotta have some admiration for this obstinacy. But at this point, they are in their «late period AC/DC» stage — doing the same thing that they used to on auto-pilot, generating second- and third-generation impressions that preserve the form but dissipate the spirit, with an occasional inspired exception every now and then.

 

Allegedly, it is possible that I have missed out on some fantastic experiences by neglecting the remainder of Bardo Pond's «semi-official» catalog: throughout the 2000s, the band has produced around 12-15 «fan-only» releases (as if anything else they do is not strictly «fan-oriented» as well) that usually contain lengthy improvised psycho jams, recorded before a live audience or in the studio (the first six, from 2000 to 2005, are simply entitled Vol. 1 ... 6, and from there on, sport individual titles). The few bits and pieces I've heard sound like Bardo Pond alright — should we really expect Duke Ellington? — but hardly as if they were saving their absolute best for improv time, so dip in at your own risk if your reverence towards this band exceeds mine.

 

I can only conclude here that Bardo Pond seem to have outlived their time — they are very much a «1990s» band, and had they simply faded away after Dilate, the world would not have become a lonelier place. But on the other hand, fifty years from now, time will compress itself, and those who come after us will probably look at this stuff from an entirely different angle — for them, the entire «Bardo Pond Collected Works» may simply be one large fifty-hour piece, split into several hundred sections like a set of preludes and fugues. Who knows?

 

PEACE ON VENUS (2013)

 

1) Kali Yuga Blues; 2) Taste; 3) Fir; 4) Chance; 5) Before The Moon.

 

«Anyone interested in the future of rock and roll should run out right now and listen to this al­bum», a hyper-excited David Maine tells us in his review of this album on PopMatters. The fu­ture of rock and roll? Just in case this information slipped through the cracks, these guys have been working on this same schtick for almost twenty frickin' years now — unless, of course, by «future» we mean «well-forgotten past». Naturally, this should not be taken as a nasty swig at the band: Bardo Pond are in a very well-defined line of business, and have every right to stay in that line until tinnitus gets the best of them. Nor is it any crime to get your first blast of Bardo Pond excitement from their ninth studio album rather than their first. But I do wonder whether review­ers in, say, 1990 were able to come up with excited judgements like «anyone interested in the future of rock and roll should run out right now and listen to AC/DC's The Razor's Edge!» — which, for that matter, was a really really good rock'n'roll record indeed.

 

Perhaps the future of rock'n'roll is in brevity: the one most unusual thing about Peace On Venus is that it is the shortest Bardo Pond LP released so far — 5 tracks, 39 minutes. As I said many times before, brevity usually works against these guys, since their voodoo needs time to brew in order to permeate your senses, and this album is no exception: it, too, lacks the truly epic gran­deur of an Amanita or a Dilate, leaving fewer chances for the evolution of initial skepticism into final mesmerism. Worse still, even though at the point of writing this review most memories of individual Bardo Pond highlights have already fled my mind, I feel quite certain that the band's gallery of musical images has not been significantly replenished with these five extra composi­tions. In fact, what with the band's experience and all, Peace On Venus sounds like it could have been composed and recorded in a single autopilot session, stretched over a couple of days at best. At any rate, it certainly does not sound like an album that had a proper 3-year gestation period.

 

The best tracks, this time, are arguably the shortest ones, where lady Isobel's flute and vocals are featured most prominently: ʽTasteʼ offers a good slice of Bardo Pond's trademark contrast be­tween the idyllic pastoral beauty on top and the deeply rumbling earth core at the bottom, where­as on ʽFirʼ the vocals are already directed high up in the sky, adding an «astral» dimension to the proceedings (so you could treat the crackling feedback as burning rocket fuel rather than streams of molten lava). Not a great deal of overdubs here, meaning it all sort of sounds like «Björk meets Crazy Horse» — which would have been one hell of a great meeting, come to think of it.

 

As for the longer tracks, their melodic qualities are fairly negligible — ʽKali Yuga Bluesʼ has Isobel murmuring instead of singing, ʽChanceʼ is completely instrumental, ʽBefore The Moonʼ only has a few traces of psychedelic vocal somnambulism, and all three are pinned to leaden, lethargic blues-rock riffs that keep predictably unfurling into guitar-effect-crazy explosions and then furling back to minimal states of existence, usually several times over the duration of one track. We've all heard that before, sometimes worse, often better; expecting any sort of «pro­gress» here is futile, and the only way to prefer this to Amanita would be by dismissing all music made prior to 2010 as «irrelevant» to the present day consumer (not that there aren't a lot of people who do behave that way).

 

I will refrain from a thumbs down this time, since ʽTasteʼ is really well done, and the short run­ning time, while it does prevent the album from «grand» status, also prevents it from becoming unbearable. But when the compositions start getting so predictable (and you have to remember that the underlying melodies are excruciatingly simple and derivative; it all depends on the force of the crescendos), it gets really hard to become excited about a record like this unless you really throw out every single memory of what preceded it — like David Maine apparently has.

 

REFULGO (2014)

 

1) Die Easy; 2) Apple Eye; 3) Dragonfly; 4) Blues Tune; 5) Trip Fuck; 6) Hummingbird Mountain; 7) New Drunks; 8) Affa; 9) Tests For New Swords; 10) Good Friday; 11) Jungle Tune; 12) Sangh Seriatim.

 

Ninety minutes of Bardo Pond! That's just about the right length for these guys, I'd think — the proper way to experience a Bardo Pond song is to be bored silly with it for the first ten minutes, only to find out that for the second ten minutes of it your body has been disintegrated and your mind has melded with the furniture. But even for a full-length album from the world's toughest pack of volcanic psychedelic jammers, ninety minutes would be too much, and indeed, Refulgo is not a brand new Brado Pond record, but rather a cleaned-up, remastered version of several of their singles, EP-only tracks and rarities from circa 1994-96. Released, for the pleasure of the truly delicate audiophile, exclusively on four sides of 140 gram Dutch vinyl — these guys take their vibes damn seriously, even if there is nothing to prevent certain filthy sonic perverts from converting the vibes' sensual beauty into soulless MP3.

 

In any case, whatever be the format or bitrate, Refulgo still feels like a cohesive album — back in 1994-96, Bardo Pond weren't exactly the epitome of diversity, and these tracks, like Amanita or any other masterpiece from that era, all sound the same way. If you are very careful, there does seem to emerge some sort of evolutionary pattern, though: some of the earliest tracks have a dis­tinct blues sheen — ʽDie Easyʼ is a Bardo Pond-style variation on ʽIn My Time Of Dyingʼ, and one of the tracks, for the lack of a better idea, is simply called ʽBlues Tuneʼ. By the time we get to ʽTrip Fuckʼ and ʽNew Drunksʼ, however, the band has already lost conscious touch with any influences and simply lets itself gets carried away on waves of noise and hallucinatory images wherever their subconscious takes them.

 

Offering newly worded descriptions for individual tracks is impossible due to severe limitations on my verbal abilities and power of imagination — better just check out my previous review of Amanita once again — but I must repeat that a 20-minute length for ʽSangh Seriatimʼ is com­pletely justified, because listening to that song is like being a participant in an accelerated terra­forming process, where the Gibbons brothers play Supernatural Building Team, transforming their guitars into excavators, drills, and welding machines, and Isobel Sollen­berger plays the Mother Earth Spirit breathing life into creation. There's a magnificent droning riff ruling over most of these 20 minutes, against which everything is taking place, and once the psychedelics grab hold of you, time pretty much ceases to exist anyway.

 

Although I am not usually in the mood of handling out limitless thumbs up to series of albums that sound the same, Bardo Pond circa 1994-96 were such an unstoppable force of alien nature that just about everything they did in those years is equally treasurable (like Can circa 1969-72), before they started running out of «natural» ideas and shortening their records for no reason. Oh, and, for the record, ʽBlues Tuneʼ pretty much sets up the blueprint for the entire career of that Black Mountain band — big fat heavy stoner blues-rock with a nod to the 1970s, but revved up to production heights of the 1990s and beyond.

 

UNDER THE PINES (2017)

 

1) Crossover; 2) Out Of Reach; 3) My Eyes Out; 4) Moment To Moment; 5) Under The Pines; 6) Effigy.

 

You don't have to take my word for it, but does it look like these guys are getting... old? Or, at least, kind of mellowing out in their own Bardo Pond kind of way. After all, they are past their 25th year of functioning as a band; if anything, they should be having a mid-life crisis these days, or, at least, doing whatever it is one has to do when one's formula has essentially stayed the same for over twenty-five years and it's time to make yourself vulnerable to critical assaults. The good news is, most of these critics weren't exactly spending their last twenty years relistening to Ama­nita every night; the bad news is, most of them have zero interest picking up an old-fashioned psychedelic album by a band that still pleads allegiance to the Nineties.

 

My impression is colored by two observations. One, that even on the longest tracks of this overall short album Bardo Pond sound somewhat less dense and even more «shallow» than they used to. Two, that all the tracks except for the last one are completely dominated by Isobel Sollenberger's vocals (and, to a lesser extent, her flute playing) — she very rarely abandons her vocalizing, giving the whole thing a far more peaceful and meditative sheen than usual. Indeed, the very title suggests the idea of meditative relaxation deep in the forest, and somehow, the textures of the album largely agree with that idea. Distortion, feedback, reverb, sludge, heavy tones, multiple overdubs, everything that makes Bardo Pond sound like themselves is still here, but instead of the feeling of a psychedelic storm, this all helps create a feeling of psychedelic calm now. I guess it mostly has to do with their selection of tones now, and with the guitarists' careful avoidance of «sharp» chord changes and chaotic sound peaks.

 

In fact, if you strip some of these jams down to the bare essentials, what you might get is... a nice little folk-and-country record! There's a thin, but very well noticeable acoustic melody underlying ʽMoment To Momentʼ which is nothing if not straightahead country-pop — along the lines of, say, mid-Seventies Dylan of the Pat Garrett variety, or Willie Nelson, if you like. Do not be fooled by the distorted woman-tone of the guitar, or all the echo layers, or how shamanistic Isobel gets towards the end of the track, it's really just an old country piece here, psychedelized for those who still prefer listening to music under chemical influence. And then the title track actually be­gins with acoustic chords, before moving into the usual territory of cross-locking distorted guitars; and even then, Isobel's voice rises quite distinctly above the din rather than being buried in it — as if they actually wanted you to make out the words, about how she's so happy to be lying down under the pines and other meditative stuff.

 

The bottomline is that, even though Bardo Pond can live about as much time without sludgy dis­tortion and heavy sustain as the average human can live without oxygen, Under The Pines is still one of their mellowest offerings to date, and I guess it's kinda cool: it properly reflects their real moods and states of mind as they gradually age. They do not want to raise the ruckus and bring down the roof any longer, just to show their tiny handful of fans that they can still kick ass the same way they did it in the mid-Nineties. Instead, they use their old bag of tricks and their accu­mulated experience to create a subtly different atmosphere — and it is pretty much irrelevant how well you, the listener, can relate to that atmosphere, because it is unlikely that they are creating this music for anybody but themselves, really. Personally, I enjoyed the experience, and happily accept the fact that tomor­row I will forget that this record ever existed — but there's nothing whatsoever to blame the band for, as it remains more than adequate to itself.

 

BARENAKED LADIES

GORDON (1992)

 

1) Hello City; 2) Enid; 3) Grade 9; 4) Brian Wilson; 5) Be My Yoko Ono; 6) Wrap Your Arms Around Me; 7) What A Good Boy; 8) The King Of Bedside Manor; 9) Box Set; 10) I Love You; 11) New Kid (On The Block); 12) Blame It On Me; 13) The Flag; 14) If I Had $1000000; 15) Crazy.

 

Leave it to a bunch of ugly-looking Canadian nerds (some of them of a predictably Jewish origin, too) to form a band called «Barenaked Ladies» — surely you would not expect a bunch of real barenaked ladies to call themselves that? No, of course not; the name should inevitably prepare us for a meeting with Steven Jay Page, a plump, curly-haired, bespectacled chump that generally looks like your local math professor; and Lloyd Edward Elwyn Robertson, a rough-built, highly masculine figure that generally looks like your local football coach. For some reason, instead of heeding nature's call, both guys sing and play guitar, keyboards, and cowbell — and write songs, some of which are funny and some of which aren't, but all of which ultimately sound like... like they might be giants, but they prefer to be barenaked ladies.

 

In other words, please welcome the quintessential «college rock for pop culture buffs» band of the 1990s. Although Page and Robertson had already released a couple of «semi-official» tapes prior to Gordon (starting with Buck Naked as early as 1989), most of the good stuff from these recordings was redone once they landed a proper contract with Sire Records — and since they had been honing their skills for about four years already, Gordon runs for almost an hour with a surprisingly scarce amount of filler (that is, for those who do not consider everything that Bare­naked Ladies ever did the encyclopaedic equivalent of filler — a position that has its fair share of defendants and one which I acknowledge, but respectfully disagree with).

 

The rest of the band formally includes brothers Jim and Andy Creeggan, on bass and keyboards respectively, and drummer Tyler Stewart, but there is a whole host of friends, relatives, syco­phants, and innocent bystanders credited on the album as well — a little surprising, actually, because Gordon never aims at a wall-of-sound impression; on the contrary, most of the songs show a singer-songwriterish nature, with acoustic guitars as the primary sound-carrier (some­times in the guise of a small jazz combo) and the singers (more often Page, less often Robertson) ten­der­ly hugging the mikes so you can assess all the minor imperfections in their work while at the same time forming a subconscious friendly bond with the guys.

 

For formal technical reasons, Barenaked Ladies have always been classified as «indie», yet the sound of Gordon owes very little, if anything, to classic «indie» influences — the main inspira­tion for Page and Robertson comes from the direction of light jazz, bossa nova, music hall, and, only very occasionally, from barebones indie pillars like Nick Drake or John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. That is, they make one more retro-step compared to the already past-oriented style of They Might Be Giants, and by digging deep into hilariously «irrelevant» brands of music, only endear themselves further to roaming bands of overweight slaves of used vinyl, bright-colored T-shirts, Star Trek, and pizza stains on the desktop keyboard.

 

The actual songs are, of course, lovable for their subject matter, atmosphere, spirit, humor, and sonic texture rather than for any awesome melodic insights — similar to Randy Newman, who must have been the real big idol for these guys, even though his music was never that closely tied to the high school / college circuit. Page and Robertson certainly know what a catchy pop hook is, and work on their choruses as carefully as they are capable of, but this here is a case where words really matter, if one wants to understand what all the fuss is about, and not get too irritated at the «look-at-us we're-so-stylishly-retro» attitude.

 

Separating the songs into highlights and «the rest» is pretty difficult, because the mind tends to make into «highlights» those songs that have the biggest verbal shock quotient. ʽHello Cityʼ, for instance, opens the album with an unexpected chorus of "hello city, you've found an enemy in me" even as one realizes that Barenaked Ladies are the quintessential city band, and would just quickly lay down and die in any other environment. ʽBrian Wilsonʼ and ʽBe My Yoko Onoʼ are placed back-to-back in an unforgettable duo of pop icon analyses — Brian Wilson himself actu­ally liked his song, enough to include it in his own setlist (you can hear a brief snippet on the Live At The Roxy album), but I am not so sure about Yoko; she might have had a tougher time appreciating a chorus like "You can be my Yoko Ono, you can follow me wherever I go".

 

Then there's ʽBox Setʼ, to the Latin rhythms of which you can shake your proverbial ass while admiring the cruel lambasting of the average mediocre artist receiving unwarranted promotion ("disc six — a dance remix, so I can catch the latest trend, and it'll make you scratch your head and wonder where my taste went"); and the ska-influenced ʽGrade 9ʼ, a potential personal anthem for way more people than we know ("I went out for the football team to prove that I'm a man / I guess I shouldn't tell them that I like Duran Duran"). And, of course, the band's calling card — the soft folksy roll of ʽIf I Had A Million Dollarsʼ, culminating in a most unpredictable lyrical apodosis that only matters after four and a half minutes' waiting time.

 

Every once and while, though, the songwriters get more serious and soulful, saving on humor and trying on the Big Thinker's hat — for instance, ʽWhat A Good Boyʼ comments on the art of social hypocrisy; ʽBlame It On Meʼ comments on the art of getting out of strained relationships (but even here, they cannot avoid the temptation of throwing on smarty-punny lines like ʽI wax poetic as you're waxing your legsʼ); and ʽThe Flagʼ tries to shift the mood from comedy to morose me­lancholia, with a melody vaguely reminiscent of ʽWorking Class Heroʼ and lyrics that could have just as well be influenced by watching Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage rather than the more predictable Wrath Of Khan (as mentioned in ʽGrade 9ʼ).

 

These tunes really put people on different sides of the fence — should Barenaked Ladies, with their general fluffiness, limited instrumental skills, and college humor, be allowed to make se­ri­ous social statements, or should they just stick to their Seinfeldian schtick? Personally, I would not grieve much if the «darker» sides of the Ladies were removed from Gordon, but then, on the other hand, I cannot deny that Page and Robertson have more talent than it usually takes to keep alive a «novelty band», and that even the novelty numbers, once the instantaneous laughs are over, actually offer genuine — and quite serious — insights into many of the factors that dominated youth culture in the early 1990s (and still dominate much of it today).

 

So, overall, I would be ready to accept the album as a whole — and give it an unflinching thumbs up. There is certainly much more going on here than just goofing off, in the good old tradition that goes all the way back to Sparks, and it all sounds just fine: the instrumental melo­dies may be nothing to write home about (although some of the acoustic guitar solos are impres­sively speedy, and fun, too), but the light, tasteful backing does just exactly what it is supposed to do: provide a mood-wise compatible «so-out-of-style» cocoon for the «so-out-of-style» prota­gonists of the band's lyrics. The real bad news is that it is all going to sound tremendously dated ten years from now (some of it already sounds quite dated as of 2013, when I am writing this assessment), but then I guess that even ten years from now, there will be out-of-time nerds feast­ing on Wrath Of Khan and dusting off old vinyl preserves of Milli Vanilli — so who'd be willing to openly claim, under pain of death, that with Gordon, Barenaked Ladies have not created a sarcastic, intellectual, deep-penetrating masterpiece for ages to come? Think twice before you do.

 

MAYBE YOU SHOULD DRIVE (1994)

 

1) Jane; 2) Intermittently; 3) These Apples; 4) You Will Be Waiting; 5) A; 6) Everything Old Is New Again; 7) Al­ternative Girlfriend; 8) Am I The Only One?; 9) Little Tiny Song; 10) Life, In A Nutshell; 11) The Wrong Man Was Convicted; 12) Great Provider.

 

I cannot imagine the Barenaked Ladies' second album not being a relative disappointment for everybody who was, one way or other, bowled over by their first one. But apparently, at this point the band was worried about its image — neither Page nor Robertson wanted to be regarded as a one-dimensional goofy comic act, and agreed upon not just toning down, but almost completely freezing their sense of college humor. Consequently, Maybe You Should Drive is still a relative­ly lightweight, but completely serious chapter in Barenaked Ladies history... in which the prota­gonists demand to be recognized as insightful singer-songwriters, providing useful spiritual guide­lines for the restless youth masses of 1994.

 

The changes actually go beyond simply saying temporary goodbye to the lyrical and musical jokes. There is also a strict limit imposed on the innumerable pop culture references of yesterday, and, worse of all, there is a clear increase of «alt-rock» elements — more electric guitar, more Pearl Jam rhythmics at the expense of vaudeville, in short, a more generally-accessible and al­together-predictable type of sound that moves one step closer to «selling out», or, at least, finding an audience outside of the smarmy college rock circuit that is generally in on the joke. The gam­ble paid off somewhat well, putting them on the lower ranges of the US charts without compro­mising any integrity. But the question of «what exactly is it that these guys have to offer?», which would sound rather silly and condescending when applied to Gordon, seems to become far more valid upon the first listens to Drive.

 

After all, the Barenaked Ladies do not set any particularly high standards for either singing, play­ing, or writing any fabulous melodies. It is only the combination of all these ingredients — plus the humorous and intelligent atmosphere — that elevates them to something of a less instantane­ously forgettable status. And although the intelligence is still there, it is not exactly clear why we really need another record chockfull of songs about various types of male-female relationships (usually tense, flawed, or unsuccessful, since these guys are not about to get accused of sissyism: ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ is definitely not in the Barenaked Ladies' idiom).

 

Several listens into the album, provided one does have the time and patience, the cohesiveness starts to come out and the atmosphere slowly begins to work out some charm. The songs may not be all that involving or innovative, but they are inoffensive, clever, and mildly catchy, reflecting a certain «average brainy Joe» spirit — no pretense at universal importance, no pomp, no self-in­dulgence or narcissism, just one little life-sketch after another. Yes, just one of those little records made for a (quoting Bob) "when you're tired of yourself and all of your creations" kind of sce­nario — in between the loudness and ecstasy of Brit-pop and Seattle-grunge, there might be a brief moment for the humble social commentary of Page and Robertson.

 

The record does not really get much better or more attention-pulling than on ʽJaneʼ — opening the album with a folksy acoustic flourish, a steady toe-tapping tempo, and some melancholy pop harmonies. The subject matter? Uh... trying to date the girl at the local beauty parlor (without success, naturally). The hook? Nothing, really, but the strange «naturalness» of the song — the way it might seduce the listener by having nothing in particular to its name. A pleasant trifle that, with its very existence, reminds us that about half of our life consists of such pleasant trifles. This is the secret of the Barenaked Ladies that all mediocre songwriters should keep in mind — if you have nothing to write about, write about nothing, and you might just have something.

 

Elsewhere, the boys subconsciously invoke the classic old spirit of the Great American Songbook and how, at its best (and there have been plenty instances of the worst), it used to exude this non­chalant elegance, made outstanding with extra verbosity. ʽIntermittentlyʼ is one such case ("some­one somewhere has unglued our epoxy / and now I'm kissing you by proxy" may be one of the most bizarre ways to express the idea of separation used in a pop song) — feather-light gigolo confession transplanted to a new age: "when immeasurably / turns to intermittently / there's no use in going on / except for fear of being wrong". Continuing a tradition initiated on the previous album, the band is said to have recorded this one naked in the studio — if this somehow means that ʽIntermittentlyʼ is their most personal statement on the album, they must be fairly nasty people in real life. Then again, most people seem to be, so...

 

Of course, even once you have grown accustomed to the album, it can still get fairly monotonous as the endless who's-sorry-now types of songs replace each other — and I am not sure, for in­stance, if the idea of sequencing them so that ʽThe Wrong Man Was Convictedʼ, the longest, slowest, bluest, dreariest number is placed almost at the end, even if the song itself is hardly guil­ty of anything, being written neither better nor worse than anything else on here.

 

If you are only interested in the bouncy, happy, catchy side of the Ladies, this album would only work as a short EP — consisting of, let's say, ʽThese Applesʼ (Robertson's falsetto that caps off each chorus is kinda cute), ʽAʼ (fabulous lyrics about the incidentally first letter of the alphabet, but not a particularly interesting melodic structure), ʽEverything Old Is New Againʼ (Ray Davies could have appreciated that one and its lazy-friendly punch), and ʽLife In A Nutshellʼ, the only more or less fast number on the album with scandalous lyrics ("when she was three, her Barbies always did it on the first date" — where are you, Tipper?). However, even these four may be singled out simply for possessing more sheer energy than the others — not for being extra funny or extra melodic or extra anything else.

 

In the end, although the review has surprisingly turned out more positive than I originally thought it would be, I cannot really dispense a thumbs up. The songs are nice and clever, but in the end, the album simply tries way too hard to convey the message of «hey guys, we can do so much more than Gordon showed us capable of», and I am still not too sure that this message is a cor­rect one. If I do ever get sure, watch out for those thumbs. But as it is now — maybe you shouldn't drive, after all, because this record is just a bit too sober for my tastes.

 

BORN ON A PIRATE SHIP (1996)

 

1) Stomach Vs. Heart; 2) Straw Hat And Old Dirty Hank; 3) I Know; 4) This Is Where It Ends; 5) When I Fall; 6) I Live With It Every Day; 7) The Old Apartment; 8) Call Me Calmly; 9) Break Your Heart; 10) Spider In My Room; 11) Same Thing; 12) Just A Toy; 13) In The Drink; 14) Shoe Box.

 

Third time around, and it's sort of a bummer. A little weakened, perhaps, by the departure of Andy Creeggan, but also seemingly a little strengthened by Page and Robertson deciding to col­laborate more tightly in the songwriting process, Born On A Pirate Ship makes the fatal mistake of being way too dark and serious way too much of the time. This state is simply not natural for these guys — they may be funny, or sarcastic, or smart, or witty, or poignant, or snobby, but singing songs of spiritual torment does not agree with these other states; most importantly, they lack the musical talent to provide the appropriate sonic backing.

 

Amusingly, it does not start out that way — ʽStomach Vs. Heartʼ, with its uppity martial punch and ironic subject matter («the material against the spiritual» and all that), even if it is not a par­ticularly great song, almost restores confidence in these guys, or, at least, seems to promise that the record is going to be a respectable sequel to Maybe You Should Drive. But then something odd happens, and the boys launch into an odd series of rather pedestrian murder ballads (ʽStraw Hat And Old Dirty Hankʼ), forcefully angry anti-bigotry rants (ʽI Knowʼ), suicidal pleads (ʽThis Is Where It Endsʼ, ʽWhen I Fallʼ), and various other raids on classic singer-songwriter territory, almost always with rather lackluster results.

 

What they now most frequently sound like is early R.E.M. with much less memorable melodies and blander, far less mysterious atmosphere — in other words, highly generic «college rock». They do work on their lyrics, and still find occasionally interesting ways of expressing the same millennia-old feelings, but it is not clear why anybody, outside of the regular 18-year old college rock audience spinning contemporary product in their dormitories way back in 1996, should care about these ways today. I mean, I can easily see how a song like ʽBreak Your Heartʼ could form a very intimate relationship with a young boy's spirit at the dawn of the great girl problem age, but when the not-so-young boy looks back on it fifteen years later... it's not as if they really wrote something here other than the lyrics, what with the song growing out of the standard Fifties' progression, borrowing a bit of its vocal melody from McCartney's ʽLet Me Roll Itʼ, and going for a «blue-eyed soul» atmosphere that is way beyond Page's vocal capacities.

 

Alas, similar observations could be made on almost every other song on here, regardless of its genre, mood, tempo, or tonality. ʽShoe Boxʼ, featured on Friends, is sort of okay, as it is the most Gordon-style of all these songs (catchy, friendly-sarcastic, and lightweight; naturally, this had to be the song that almost did not make it onto the final print of the album) — together with ʽSto­mach Vs. Heartʼ, they at least provide a credible framework for the record. The «big hit», which brought them some U.S. notoriety, was ʽThe Old Apartmentʼ, but it moves me about as much as, say, a Taylor Swift song could have — there is not a single musically interesting thing going on, and its nostalgic vibe, so firmly expressed in the lyrics, would never be evident to anybody not fluent in the language. Generic acoustic alt-rock, blah.

 

Thumbs down for this total failure of a record. Even the sleeve photo is (intentionally) ugly, not to mention its complete lack of ties to the inside contents. Although, come to think of it, when you do remember the underlying prank (that is, pronounce the title of the album making the same face that the boy is pulling on the cover), you do get the appropriately correct title for this pile of... oh well, never mind. Bottom line is: feel free to disagree with the judgement if you're mainly here for the words, but if you insist that the underlying music and atmosphere even begin to match their wittiness, well, «this is where it ends» for you and me.

 

STUNT (1998)

 

1) One Week; 2) It's All Been Done; 3) Light Up My Room; 4) I'll Be That Girl; 5) Leave; 6) Alcohol; 7) Call And Answer; 8) In The Car; 9) Never Is Enough; 10) Who Needs Sleep?; 11) Told You So; 12) Some Fantastic; 13) When You Dream.

 

Stunt indeed — with the surprising success of ʽOne Weekʼ as the album's lead single, Barenaked Ladies managed to pull the stunt of becoming major celebrities almost overnight. Apparently, all it had to take was for Robertson to start rapping: channelling the band's trademark loquacity and humor into a hip-hop riverbed proved to be the key, even if the actual music never strays away from the regular pop-rock format. The song's subject matter (an ironic look at stupid breakups over nothing) probably did not matter as much as the rapid stream of cultural references — every­thing from Snickers to Sailor Moon to Harrison Ford to Kurosawa — but overall, the whole thing just sounds funny. Heck, it is funny — reinstating the band's «smart college clowns» image on a more sophisticated level than that of ʽBe My Yoko Onoʼ.

 

The rest of the album, fortunately, drops the rap angle (one stab is okay, more than one could be interpreted as too much groveling before the altar of the Beastie Boys and such), but continues to unfurl the general approach. The tempos are faster, the moods are lighter, the lyrical matters are quirkier, the hooks are sharper — the somber mood that permeated the previous two albums is all but gone, so that even the slowest and most sentimental number (ʽCall And Answerʼ) is an opti­mistic song of future reconcilement instead of a bleak account of separation. And although, from time to time, they do walk that fine line that separates clever satire from gimmicky novelty tunes (I still cannot quite make up my mind about ʽOne Weekʼ, for that matter), Stunt on the whole does not produce the impression of a «clownish» album.

 

For instance, already the second single, ʽIt's All Been Doneʼ, is just a well-written power-pop song, with jangly folk-rock guitars, Beatlesque ooh la-la-las and whoah-whoahs, and lyrics that complain about the repetitive nature of intimate relationships without any particularly smartass verbal flourishes. If it weren't for the vocals — one more pretext to repeat that Page and Robert­son always needed a much more accomplished and versatile vocalist in the band — it might have been a late masterpiece of the genre.

 

On the other hand, the third single, ʽAlcoholʼ, does derive much of its charm from the lyrics, which certainly paint a much more likable portrait of the substance than the Kinks song with the same title. What used to be «demon Alcohol» now becomes "alcohol, your songs resolve like my life never will" and, despite the clearly tongue-in-cheek attitude, could have easily been picked up by some promotional campaign (maybe even has?). If the song's basic melody leaves something to be desired, they compensate for it by loading the track with pianos, violins, and electronics — to demonstrate, no doubt, the sheer amount of sights and colors that alcohol brings into one's life. One can only guess at the popularity ranking of the song on the college circuit when it came out.

 

Genre diversity is displayed throughout: ʽIn The Carʼ appropriates an old surf-rock pattern; ʽNe­ver Is Enoughʼ has an organ part that almost sounds lifted from an old Bob Dylan number; ʽTold You Soʼ carries on the country-pop vibe with a whiff of R.E.M. drea­miness (not one of my favourites, it does sound a bit like an outtake from the Pirate Ship sessions); ʽSome Fantasticʼ swerves into bossa nova territory. As usual, though, the album does not feel diverse, because the personality of the Ladies remains the same throughout — it just helps avoid the impression of «one long song separated by pauses».

 

It all does make me, wonder, though: why does my personal favourite song on here happen to be the least typical of the album? ʽWhen You Dreamʼ is formally placed at the end as a good night lullaby, to smoothe out the edges, but even though I generally do not care much for the heart-on-sleeve side of the Ladies, this particular tender waltz (in which one can hear distant echoes of John Sebastian and the Lovin' Spoonful, among other things) strikes such a fine balance between sentimentality and intelligence that I would place it right next to John Lennon's ʽBeautiful Boyʼ in a personal rating of «toddler tunes». At the very least, it is hard to imagine it not finding the proper resonance in the heart of each and every inexperienced parent, provided that parent is advanced enough to own a copy of Stunt.

 

In other words, ʽWhen You Dreamʼ symbolizes the ultimate victory of emotion over reason, but that does not annul the effects of the other songs — on the whole, this is not quite the return to the level of Gordon that one might have hoped for, but it is a certified «return to making sense», with the band completely in their element. Lively, fun, smart, diverse within reasonable limits — not genius, just rock-solid quality, liberally sprinkled with charisma. Thumbs up.

 

MAROON (2000)

 

1) Too Little Too Late; 2) Never Do Anything; 3) Pinch Me; 4) Go Home; 5) Falling For The First Time; 6) Conven­tioneers; 7) Sell, Sell, Sell; 8) Humor Of The Situation; 9) Baby Seat; 10) Off The Hook; 11) Helicopters; 12) To­night Is The Night I Fell Asleep At The Wheel.

 

Maroon is like A Day At The Races to Stunt's A Night At The Opera: a twin companion that makes a point of not offering anything radically new, but is simply there so that the previous re­cord would not feel too lonely — and there have been no countries so far that made it a capital crime to milk the same formula twice, especially since, every now and then, second time around the results may be even stronger (experience and all).

 

In this particular case, I would not say that Maroon «improves» on Stunt — the two are so simi­lar in style and so consistent in content that it is a matter of some very fine distinctions in taste. The important thing is that the band has lost none of the sharpness and none of the inspiration; also, the proceedings may have been influenced by keyboard player Kevin Hearn's recuperation from leukemia, as this is altogether arguably the merriest, most uplifting record by these guys ever since Gordon established them as the trendiest college clowns on the block. Except that Maroon has no «joke» songs on it whatsoever: «uplifting» does not equal «hilarious».

 

There is one big unresolved problem that is getting bigger and bigger: as per «the world accor­ding to the Barenaked Ladies» at this moment, it (the world) revolves almost entirely and exclu­sively around the issue of broken relationships and how to fix them. Now this is, most definitive­ly, one of the most important problems for the average college student stumbling through life and learning to learn on his / her mistakes — and is therefore guaranteed to provide fame and admira­tion to whoever tackles it with intelligence and originality, as the Ladies do. But still, the amount of «he vs. she»-themed songs, already huge on Stunt, begins to feel irritating. With a couple of exceptions that aim at more global themes (ʽSell, Sell, Sellʼ — no need to comment; the anti-war lament of ʽHelicoptersʼ), Maroon is all about Mr. Page on the couch and Dr. Robertson in the armchair, or vice versa, and this gives a fairly monotonous coating to all of the songs, no matter how many different tempos, tonalities, styles, or tributes they are based on.

 

Technically, most of the songs are fine, concentrating once more on the aesthetics of classic po­wer pop, but also with some «alt-rock» elements thrown in every now and then (the jiggly, syn­copated ʽNever Do Anythingʼ could just as easily be done by the likes of Avril Lavigne, even if her version probably could not have contained lines like "let's play tic tac toe, I'll play X, you can be the O"). Those who love the Ladies primarily for their ability to merge old-style electric pop riffs with contemporary sentiments will particularly enjoy ʽToo Little Too Lateʼ with its swirling merry-go-round pattern; ʽGo Homeʼ, reminiscent of the «dance-folk» vibe espoused by some of the Nuggets-era bands; ʽHumor Of The Situationʼ, where the band plays at top volume, aiming for a musical explosion (which, unfortunately, never really comes, due to the innate limitations of their skills as vocalists and arrangers); and the catchy, but somewhat lumbering ʽBaby Seatʼ.

 

For some reason, none of these songs were chosen for the honor of lead single — the honor went to ʽPinch Meʼ, maybe because they thought it had a more contemporary sound, with the drum loop, a rap in the chorus, and harmonies that suspiciously sound as if they were influenced by boy bands. Similarity with ʽOne Weekʼ is rather glaring, and if the song was deliberately written as a commercial follow-up, this explains where it fundamentally fails where its predecessor funda­mentally succeeded — through happy songwriter accident.

 

However, I am not going to pretend that Maroon is not a great album simply because it makes such serious concessions to trends and fads. The Barenaked Ladies are much too well aware of their own strengths and weaknesses to understand that «selling out» would be the death of them, anyway — who would they be going to compete with, the Backstreet Boys? Maroon is a very good, but not a great album not because there are too few songs here like ʽToo Little Too Lateʼ, but because there are too many of them: well-done and well-meaning, but not quite hitting the spot, if you know what I mean. Probably just because the music, the lyrics, and the vocals do not find the perfect way to gel — as «shallow» as it is, one ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ is still worth an entire Maroon to me.

 

But let me tell you where it does gel a bit. It does gel when, on ʽHelicoptersʼ, they go for a gran­der subject and strengthen the effects with a simple, but powerful theme (doubled on violin and something else, I think). And, amazingly, it does gel at the very end — there is a hidden track here called ʽHidden Sunʼ, written and sung by the miraculously cured Kevin Hearn, and it is a gorgeously atmospheric dream-pop piano ballad that I will take over anything else on this album, since there is nothing about its sweet sentimentality that rubs me the wrong way, and even Hearn's shaky, unassured vocal is more credible than Page's.

 

That said, we must not forget about the mind, either, and on a purely rational basis, Maroon de­serves its rightful thumbs up — the lyrics are hard to assail, as are the band's musical tastes and creative decisions. And, for that matter, ʽTonight Is The Night I Fell Asleep At The Wheelʼ is probably the silliest send-up of those country sounds since the days of the Stones' ʽDear Doctorʼ and ʽFar Away Eyesʼ, and a fine enough conclusion to the main (unhidden) body of the album to wrestle out a positive decision at the end of the day. Anyway, it's all really a matter of owning the key to this particular aesthetics — I seem to have lost mine somewhere along the way, or maybe I never had one in the first place, but you, the reader, are always welcome to try. (But it does se­riously help if you're 19 years old and enrolled in Berkeley or something).

 

EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE (2003)

 

1) Celebrity; 2) Maybe Katie; 3) Another Postcard; 4) Next Time; 5) For You; 6) Shopping; 7) Testing 1, 2, 3; 8) Upside Down; 9) War On Drugs; 10) Aluminum; 11) Unfinished; 12) Second Best; 13) Take It Outside; 14) Have You Seen My Love?

 

If Stunt established the formula and Maroon consolidated it, then Everything To Everyone re­presents the lo­gical slide into boredom once everything that could actually be said to everyone had already been said. The biggest difference is that the album was recorded in a post-9/11 world, and, apparently, The Barenaked Ladies thought the time had come to become more serious, ma­ture, and responsible. Well, on one hand, it does significantly reduce the number of «him vs. her» psycho-studies that made Maroon seem so repetitive. But on the other hand, I am not sure that I would like to adopt these guys as my spiritual gurus — and pardon them this decreased attention towards hooks, even when compensated with a more profound social perspective.

 

Not that one could ever guess anything about profundity when presented with the album's lead single: ʽAnother Postcardʼ does feature a rappy vocal that makes it obvious the guys were trying to repeat the formula of ʽOne Weekʼ one more time, but on the whole, it is a repetitive and, I am not afraid to say, somewhat cretinous-sounding tale of... an anonymous admirer sending the pro­tagonist an endless series of postcards of chimpanzees. «Cretinous» does not refer nearly as much to the storyline, though, as it does to the music — the idea may have been to indulge in a little bit of silly whimsy, but it isn't even funny, just repetitive and stupid.

 

The second single, ʽTesting 1, 2, 3ʼ, is not that much better, but at least it does not set out to irri­tate — being merely a forgettable soft-alt-rock tune; and the third single, ʽFor Youʼ, is an equally forgettable country-pop composition, not much different from millions of similar tunes flooding the airwaves. All of which is incredibly surprising, because neither of these songs even pretends to being «outstanding» in any way: it is almost as if the band was consciously discrediting itself as a singles act (come to think of it, that may have been the truth — I cannot fathom an intelligent human being having just written something like ʽAnother Postcardʼ and going «oh, this is going to be our next hit single, boy are those kids gonna love it! I mean, it's just gotta be a hit if it's about chimpanzees, right? Everybody loves a good song about chimps!»).

 

Anyway, the highlights section of Everything To Everyone, as far as I am concerned, have nothing to do with these songs. ʽCelebrityʼ has the album's juiciest piano hook, decent fame-con­demning lyrics, and a cute combination of ELO-ish strings and Beatlesque harmonies in the ar­rangement. ʽMaybe Katieʼ is stomping power-pop in classic Weezer / Fountains Of Wayne fa­shion and an unforgettable tagline ("what's so maybe about Katie?" is more of a fun line than "another postcard with chimpanzees", after all).

 

ʽShoppingʼ sounds like late period Apples In Stereo, combining elements of techno with old-style kiddie pop, and even though it is recorded in an even more openly puerile fashion than ʽAnother Postcardʼ, it clearly presents itself as a light­weight parody, ridiculing both the concept of shopping spree and certain musical trends at the same time, so it is openly funny. Finally, ʽUnfinishedʼ (which, if you listen closely, begins with more than a direct homage to the Beatles' ʽGetting Bet­terʼ) and ʽSecond Bestʼ have a good amount of energy, if not necessarily a barrel-load of hooks, and would have both made better singles than the band's actual choices.

 

I am not at all sure, though, about the most serious songs on the album — such as ʽWar On Drugsʼ and ʽNext Timeʼ, used as vehicles to express the Ladies' concern with the state of humanity at large. ʽWar On Drugsʼ in particular, expanded to five and a half minutes in a clear bid for the status of the album's magnum opus, hearkens back to the tedious languidness of Born Under A Pirate Ship, and no amount of string quartets, pianos, and bombastic buildups can hide the fact that the song is essentially just a formulaic folk ballad, mostly consisting of attitude, and even the attitude is mediocre (considering the ordinariness of Page's vocals).

 

Curiously, most of the songs I find emotionally acceptable on here have Kevin Hearn credited as co-writer along with Page and Robertson (or Jim Creeggan, on ʽMaybe Katieʼ), which leads to uncomfortable suggestions that will not be voiced openly. Whatever might have been the case, it seems abundantly clear to me that, once again, The Barenaked Ladies have committed the mis­take of overloading their boat — with stuff they neither know how to handle nor have any serious need of, in the first place. Not a «thumbs down» as such, since the good material manages to out­balance the bad one, but really nothing to get excited about: just another college rock record that is not very likely to make musical history, no matter how arrogantly grandiose its title, or even its front sleeve, have been designed to look.

 

BARENAKED FOR THE HOLIDAYS (2004)

 

1) Jingle Bells; 2) Green Christmas; 3) I Saw Three Ships; 4) Hanukkah Blessings; 5) O Holy Night; 6) Elf's Lament; 7) Snowman; 8) Do They Know It's Christmas; 9) Hanukkah Oh Hanukkah; 10) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 11) Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer; 12) Carol Of The Bells; 13) Footprints; 14) Deck The Stills; 15) Christmastime (Oh Yeah); 16) Sleigh Ride; 17) Christmas Pics; 18) I Have A Little Dreidel; 19) Wonderful Christmastime; 20) Auld Lang Syne.

 

I reserve the usual right to keep reviews of Christmas albums as short as possible, but the farther we get on with this practice, the more this traditional Christmas album format tends to be subjec­ted to various alchemic practices and postmodern deconstructions — and despite all their at­tempts at being judged as a «normal» band, it would never make sense for the Barenaked Ladies to release a «normal» Christmas album. So this one has a few points of interest that might be worth listing for those who think that the «Christmas album» is just a kind of discography var­mint, to be exterminated or at least boycotted wherever possible.

 

First, about a third of these songs are original compositions — ranging from fluffy ditties about having to celebrate Christmas in the wrong part of the world (ʽGreen Christmasʼ, the Ladies' con­scious addition to the stock of ʽWhite Christmasesʼ and ʽBlue Christmasesʼ) to Page's merry Brit-pop celebration of his Jewish heritage (ʽHanukkah Blessingsʼ) to some really weird stuff (ʽElf's Lamentʼ — lyrically, I mean) to another heartfelt ballad from Kevin Hearn (ʽChristmastimeʼ, with nary a hint at any irony behind the sentimentalism). Naturally, the restrictiveness of the topic is an obstacle to any of these songs being masterpieces, but there is plenty of original songwriting, enough for all the regular fans to sit up and take notice.

 

Second, the choice of covers is certainly not all that predictable. There is not a lot of traditional Christmas chestnuts, and those that they do feel obliged to include are usually turned on their heads: ʽJingle Bellsʼ, for instance, consists of a hyper-slow «introspective» part and an absurdly sped-up «village idiot» section. Themes for ʽO Holy Nightʼ and ʽRudolphʼ are given over to organs and drum machines, stripped of vocals and made to run exactly one minute each. And ʽCarol Of The Bellsʼ features a spooky electronic chimes arrangement that could just as well be suited for the needs of Walpurgis Night, if necessary.

 

In addition, there are also takes on more recent Christmasy material — for instance, yet another one-minute instrumental electronic deconstruction deals with Paul McCartney's ʽWonderful Christmastimeʼ (serves it well, since it is arguably one of the worst songs the man has ever writ­ten), and then they run through a superficially-passionate take on Bob Geldof's Live AID monster, ʽDo They Know It's Christmas?ʼ — actually, the song sounds much better without all the Band Aid pathos of the original. Well, seems natural: if we are going to continue the lovely tradition of releasing Christmas albums long after the whole world has converted to Islam, atheism, or pasta­farianism, it does make sense to update the classic repertoire of ʽI'll Be Home For Christmasʼ, ʽHave Yourself A Merry Little Christmasʼ, etc., from time to time, even if we have to do it with bad McCartney tunes and Live Aid anthems.

 

In order to further commemorate their own legacy and assure the fans of Judaeic faith equal rights and privileges, the Ladies also quickly run through several jiggly Hanukkah tunes (ʽI Have A Little Dreidelʼ is worth getting to know if you never had any earlier pretext to get to know it — as a cultural bonus, you get to learn what a dreidel is), and, along the way, martyrize ʽDeck The Hallsʼ as ʽDeck The Stillsʼ by chanting ʽCrosby Stills Nash & Young!ʼ instead of the original words (it's funny for the first time, and then I just skip the track on subsequent listens).

 

The whole ravage ends with a straightface, no-bull finale of ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ, left holy and in­tact either because they have no courage to desecrate this one, or because something had to be left intact just for the sake of adding more colors to the record. Well, it's... ʽAuld Lang Syneʼ, it's hard to spoil it anyway. In short, this is a curious, often bizarre twist on yer average Christmas album, which is sort of what we'd expect in general from the Ladies. Whether it helps or not to add a special twist on your actual Christmas (or Hanukkah, for that matter) is up to you to decide — personally, I have never once in my life wilfully listened to a «Christmas album» on an actual Christmas or New Year, so I have no opinion on this situation.

 

For the record, it must be added that Page would later pretty much disown the record; that not a single track here was recorded by the band naked in the studio; and that ʽGreen Christmasʼ was originally recorded way back in 2000 for Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas, a movie starring Jim Carrey who also sang ʽYou're A Mean One, Mr. Grinchʼ, a song covered by many artists including Aimee Mann, who put it on her own Christmas album that would be recorded two years after Barenaked After The Holidays and would be a better album because Aimee Mann is (in my humble opinion) a better artist. See, that's why I hate trivia — when they're all piled up and disconnected, they look dumb, but once you try to chain them together, you find out that it's almost impossible to stop.

 

 

 

BARENAKED LADIES ARE ME (2006)

 

1) Adrift; 2) Bank Job; 3) Sound Of Your Voice; 4) Easy; 5) Home; 6) Bull In A China Shop; 7) Everything Had Changed; 8) Peterborough And The Kavarthas; 9) Maybe You're Right; 10) Take It Back; 11) Vanishing; 12) Rule The World With Love; 13) Wind It Up.

 

Every once in a while, the world needs to be reminded of that old adage — «quantity does not equal quality» (said the Turkish sultan, ordering his ninety-nine brothers to be put to death). For that very reason, the Barenaked Ladies held a historical recording session in early 2005, where they came up with no fewer than 30 original compositions — an impressive pile that took a fur­ther year and a half to finalize, sort out, and release in several variants, eventually settling upon the «white album» and «whiter album» recipe that The Beatles never followed: Barenaked Ladies Are Me, with 13 songs on it, came out in September 2006, and Barenaked Ladies Are Men, containing the rest, followed half a year later.

 

Had these guys been songwriting geniuses, the story would be truly intriguing. Had these guys displayed their trademark «quirky» behavior and sarcasm, there would be some hope. What hap­pened instead can only be called a blundering catastrophe: apparently, they went into the studio with the solemn goal of writing a shitpile of deadly serious, «thinking-man-introspective-singer-songwriter» pop songs, almost completely bereft of any sense of humor or lightness of approach — or clever hooks, for that matter.

 

It is not even a question of monotonousness: formally, Barenaked Ladies Are Me is fairly di­ver­se, mixing acoustic folk-pop, electric power-pop, art-pop, alt-rock, bits of electronica, bluegrass, etc., in other words, touching upon all sorts of familiar ground that the Ladies had already cove­red previously, but wouldn't mind shuffling together one more time. And yet, simultaneously, it all sounds thoroughly tedious, mind-numbing, and sort of gooey, taking the stagnation of Every­thing To Everyone to a whole new level.

 

The few songs that are pinned to loud electric riffage can be seen as relieving exceptions. The best of the lot is probably ʽWind It Upʼ — why it happens to close the album rather than opening it with its bulgy, almost Townshend-ian punch, is way beyond my limited comprehension. Of course, it does not have much to recommend it other than that swirling riff (as well as a monster psychedelic guitar solo from guest star Kim Mitchell), but a good riff and a good solo is the bare minimum required from a decent power-pop tune. Another good one is Kevin Hearn's ʽSound Of Your Voiceʼ, whose garage-influenced lead melody spends most of the time battling against the slower, blues-shuffle-style rhythm section.

 

And both of these songs were singles, all right, but for some reason, the lead single was ʽEasyʼ — a song that stands much closer in spirit to the somnambulistic bulk of the album. Like many of the Ladies' songs, it is a potentially good number — but in this case, it would have probably rea­lized its potential much better, had it been handed over to U2. Listen to it, then try to imagine the Edge's echoey style instead of the wimpy acoustic foundation used over here, and Bono wailing "make it easy, make it easy" instead of Robertson. Now that could have been something; this version, compared with the imaginary ideal, sounds like a first-stage demo.

 

And the same applies to more than half of these songs. The ballads are smooth and mushy (ʽAdriftʼ, ʽHomeʼ), the electronics are underdeveloped (ʽBank Jobʼ starts out with bleeps and beeps that still end up chewed up and swallowed by generic alt-rock guitars), and even some of the fast, supposedly energetic pop-rock numbers are thoroughly devoid of creative ideas (ʽBull In A China Shopʼ — ʽBottle Of Diet Poisonʼ would have been a better title, if they really needed a suitable «tired old metaphor» to pick from the song's lyrics). Worst of the lot might be Creeggan's ambitiously titled ʽPeterborough And The Kawarthasʼ — a neo-folk concoction that has no dyna­mics whatsoever; I would have trouble recommending it as elevator muzak.

 

In short, we are «reborn on a pirate ship» here — once again, the Ladies are offering us serious intellectual pop music, forgetting that even serious intellectual pop music has to address the emo­tional centers in order to succeed. Besides, it's not even all that intellectual: a song like ʽMaybe You're Rightʼ, with its supposedly «deep» chorus of "shall I take back everything I've ever said / and live my whole life in silence instead?", hardly suffices to make the Ladies into respectable social spokesmen for their, or any other, generation.

 

Had this been a «simple pop» album, it would have been just mediocre. But it is not — the Ladies' acute desire to release everything they came up with, in two subsequent installments; and their equally acute desire to be judged as Serious Singer-Songwriters rather than monkee enter­tainers intentionally push the plank higher than necessary. And since, the way I see it, nothing makes me hate an album more than «inadequacy of intention», Barenaked Ladies Are Me is a certified thumbs down. One more time in its stubbornly frustrating career, the band simply tries to bite off more than it can chew — or, to be more precise, bites off something that is genetically incompatible with its digestive system.

 

BARENAKED LADIES ARE MEN (2007)

 

1) Serendipity; 2) Something You'll Never Find; 3) One And Only; 4) Angry People; 5) Down To Earth; 6) Beauti­ful; 7) Running Out Of Ink; 8) Half A Heart; 9) Maybe Not; 10) I Can, I Will, I Do; 11) Fun & Games; 12) The New Sad; 13) Quality; 14) Another Spin; 15) What A Letdown.

 

The Ladies gave the green light to the release of the rest of the songs they had recor­ded during the 2005-2006 sessions so quickly that it was quite clear — the two records do not relate to each other in a «main product / outtakes & leftovers» kind of way, but are actually two equal-rights parts of one whole. Which is, really, the only way to explain that Are Men is a significant im­provement over Are Me, much to the consolation of those (like me) who were expecting to hear something even more dreadfully dull and languid than the first part.

 

The general difference is that Are Me focuses on the slower, «rootsier», more intimate / senti­mental part of The Ladies' joint personality, whereas Are Men concentrates on the quirkier, more upbeat power-pop part. This is not an unbreakable law — there are exceptions to the rule on both sides — but hardly a coincidence, either: faced with the perspective of sorting their large pile into two smaller piles, Page and Robertson must have settled on a «thematic» approach. Which, upon first sight, means that Are Men has a priori better chances to succeed, given that the Ladies have always tended to thrive in power-pop, not roots-rock environments.

 

And it does, but not quite — some of these songs do actually manage to reach the heights of Stunt / Maroon-era material, yet on the whole the album still carries the stamp of the «quantity over quality» department. For instance, sentimental acoustic soft-rock like ʽBeautifulʼ and ʽHalf A Heartʼ is the kind of generic indie material you so often hear in pretending-to-be-cool family entertainment movies that wish to ask serious questions and then answer them with cheap soapy melodrama — uninteresting melodies spiced up with «authentic» arrangements and «intelligent» vocals. Again, the vocals are the weakest parts: sentimental music cannot be effective without actual sentiments, something that neither Page nor Robertson can properly provide — you'd at least need a Paul McCartney to make this stuff work.

 

The upbeat material is altogether on another plane. Sometimes it almost feels as if they try too hard: ʽAngry Peopleʼ, with its falsetto woo-hoos, martial beats, and happy harp à la Stevie Won­der, strictly follows an old patented recipe for pop catchiness — but it is, after all, a song about correcting angry people by surrounding them with happy ones, so the form suits the message to a tee, and it would be silly to get irritated instead of just getting into the fun groove. As Robertson sings in ʽDown To Earthʼ (another one of those quirky Apples In Stereo-style pop-rockers that thrives on combining guitars with sci-fi synths), "some people are just all show / well, I don't mind that if the show's worth watching" — well, the Ladies themselves operate better when they are mostly show, or, at least, when their sincere attitude is covered with plenty of makeup.

 

For some strange reason, Are Men yielded no singles, even though at least a good third of these songs would be top-notch single material for the band. Page's ʽRunning Out Of Inkʼ would be a prime candidate, in particular — it's fast, quirky, catchy, funny, and structurally diverse, as Page goes from a comically paranoid delivery into a comically operatic mid-section and back again. ʽQualityʼ would inevitably be a hit with college audiences, as it combines the steady romantic pulse of ʽEvery Breath You Takeʼ with lyrics that subtly send up the know-it-all attitude ("my quality, biology enhanced with high technology"): the Ladies have always tended to strictly ob­serve the balance between the college punk and the college nerd, and they do have that talent for coming across as seriously educated guys without any particular showing off.

 

Yet another time, two of the best songs are contributed by Kevin Hearn: ʽSerendipityʼ has serious woo-potential in its echoey riff and, especially, clever vocal modulation — since he possesses the softest and sweetest voice in the entire band, Hearn is able to work some subtle magic with it that neither Page nor Robertson can conjure, and it is almost as if they recognize and respect that, by letting ʽSerendipityʼ open the album. Good move, or «Hearn the softie» could have been lost in the 16-song ocean: it certainly takes extra time and effort to uncover the similar charms of ʽAno­ther Spinʼ, where he keeps looking for his girl in different places (including Afghanistan, if only because it dissonantly rhymes with the song title) without any hope to find the right one, but in a state of complete vocal and instrumental serenity nevertheless.

 

I will not attempt individual descriptions / comments on all the songs — there is nothing truly ori­ginal or vehemently thought-provoking about most of them — but on the whole, this is a good listen, and although I have encountered opinions that value the first record over the second, I really have no interest in mulling and sussing and mulling and sussing over the Ladies' intro­spective side until it finally «gets to me». They have good, natural pop instincts, and they are well demonstrated — again — on Barenaked Ladies Are Men, and that is why it deserves a thumbs up, albeit a slightly less excited one than in the case of Stunt / Maroon. If anything, splitting their personalities in two just ended up as a transparent demonstration — which of the persona­lities it would be more fun to hang out with, and which one would do better if it never showed its nose out of the dormitory, not ever again.

 

 

SNACKTIME! (2008)

 

1) 7 8 9; 2) The Ninjas; 3) Pollywog In A Bog; 4) Raisins; 5) Eraser; 6) I Can Sing; 7) Louis Loon; 8) Food Party; 9) The Canadian Snacktime Trilogy: 1. Snacktime; 10) The Canadian Snacktime Trilogy: 2. Popcorn; 11) The Canadian Snacktime Trilogy: 3. Vegetable Town; 12) Drawing; 13) Humungous Tree; 14) My Big Sister; 15) Allergies; 16) I Don't Like; 17) What A Wild Tune; 18) Bad Day; 19) Things; 20) Curious; 21) A Word For That; 22) Wishing; 23) Crazy ABC's; 24) Here Come The Geese.

 

«Children's albums» recorded by adult artists more often than not turn out to be fakes — a good excuse for the artist to engage in fluffy silliness while at the same time churning out a product that most children would be, well, too child-like to properly understand and enjoy. In this respect, the Barenaked Ladies are no exception: while I do know personally a small handful of children that would probably enjoy Snacktime! and maybe even get addicted to it, most would probably find half of the record too boring, and the other half too befuddling (not to mention that there are a bit too many references to the Ladies' own childhood — I mean, Grease 2? Come on!). Adult fans of the Ladies, on the other hand, may react to the record just the way a Beatles fan reacts to ʽAll Together Nowʼ, ʽHer Majestyʼ, and ʽWild Honey Pieʼ — with a mix of mild external condescension and subtle internal amusement / excitement.

 

The idea of making a record specially for the children came from Kevin Hearn, who is respon­sible not only for an unusually huge percentage of the songs, but also for the artwork in the com­panion book. Robertson was in on the idea, but Page was not — he is credited for only five out of twenty-four numbers, and has since admitted that he was simply «along for the ride»; supposedly, his alienation from the affair was one of the factors that influenced his subsequent departure. It is interesting that one of the most «serious» numbers on the record — ʽBad Dayʼ, an introspective acoustic ballad that would have easily fit on any of their «adult» albums — is credited exclusive­ly to Page. Apparently, that was his little act of sabotage for the concept.

 

That said, as an adult who can still channel certain childhood memories and feelings, I find my­self along for the ride, too. The quirky, goofy side of the Ladies is not just activated with this pro­ject — it is put in overdrive, almost as if everything that they were holding back ever since it was decided that they should be «serious artists», not a comic act, suddenly broke through the wall and exploded it, as in the finale of a Roger Waters show. The twenty-four tracks in question run slightly less than an hour, with ideas bounced off each other in momentary splashes, and almost everything works — hilarious lyrics, replete with puns, sarcastic jabs at popular culture, and oc­casional edutainment value, set to simple, but catchy kiddie pop melodies.

 

The base reference point here is «wordplay» — already the opening number, ʽ7 8 9ʼ, illustrates that well enough ("why seven ate nine, nobody knows"), but the peak is reached on one of the last numbers: ʽCrazy ABC'sʼ pokes Bernard Shaw-esque fun at the peculiarities of English spelling and, along the way, introduces the listener, young and old, to words like ʽbdelliumʼ, ʽfohnʼ, and ʽqatʼ, knowledge of which is essential for survival in the Barenaked Ladies' world. (ʽZʼ is, of course, for ʽZed Zed Topʼ, whose music is also briefly referenced in the tune).

 

Other topics involve ninjas ("they speak Japanese, they do whatever they please and sometimes they vacation in Ireland"), raisins ("raisins come from grapes, I come from apes" — nice subtle anti-creationism indoctrination for the kiddies out there), food (ʽThe Canadian Snacktime Tri­logyʼ has a host of musicians, including Geddy Lee and Gordon Lightfoot, and their children lis­ting their favorite snacks), pencils, allergies, curiosities, wishes, in short, pretty much every single topic that an adult would like his kid to be interested in when his kid is only interested in smart­phones and video games — predictably enough, these are the exact subjects that never crop up in Snacktime!, being way too vulgar to fit in the perspective of Hearn's and Robertson's creative fantasy, stuck somewhere midway in between Lewis Carroll and Alan Milne.

 

Musically, Snacktime! mostly sounds like a typical pop-oriented Ladies album — lively acoustic strum (ʽNinjasʼ), thick power-pop riffs (ʽWishingʼ), with occasional smidgeons of synth-pop (ʽDrawingʼ), music hall (ʽPollywog In A Bogʼ), and country-western (ʽI Can Singʼ): again, this diversity is more likely to appeal to grown-ups than kids, accustomed to the monotonousness of teen-pop, but then again, we're hardly talking here about competing with the likes of the Mouse­keteers — most likely, the only toddlers to be exposed to Snacktime! must have been the little child­ren of old-time Barenaked Ladies fans.

 

In any case, goofy and silly as these songs are, they are not altogether insightless, and definitely not uninventive: whatever be, I'd rather listen to this stuff, where Robertson and Hearn are com­pletely in their element, than to Barenaked Ladies Are Me, for instance. With so many ideas to test and produce, not everything here works (I am particularly disappointed by the sentimentally anthemic album closer: ʽHere Come The Geeseʼ is too plain and repetitive to qualify for a true «grand finale», as it was probably thought of), but if everything here worked, the album would have been a downright masterpiece. As it is, it is just a very friendly thumbs up type of album.

 

ALL IN GOOD TIME (2010)

 

1) You Run Away; 2) Summertime; 3) Another Heartbreak; 4) Four Seconds; 5) On The Lookout; 6) Ordinary; 7) I Have Learned; 8) Every Subway Car; 9) Jerome; 10) How Long; 11) Golden Boy; 12) I Saw It; 13) The Love We're In; 14) Watching The Northern Lights.

 

Did the departure of Steven Page make any difference? Frankly speaking, Page and Robertson seem to have always been very much alike in form and spirit — nothing like a John/Paul or a Mick/Keith dichotomy here, which was really a weakness for The Ladies: you had to be a serious fan to understand the difference in seasoning that each of the two brought to the table. If any­thing, it was Kevin Hearn who used to be responsible for a differently colored streak, that of instantly likeable innocent sentimentality, and he was the one that didn't quit.

 

In short, the loss of Page could be expected to bring about a slight drop in quality control, at worst. Instead, it brought about the worst that could ever have happened — «MATURITY», as some of the critics called it, almost happy to notice that, finally, the Barenaked Ladies have shed off their goofy, oddball image, stopped pranking around like overgrown kids, and started writing and recording really serious, responsible, intelligent material that would probably help their fan­base mature and become serious and responsible as well.

 

Unfortunately, critics tend to have short memories — and it's hard to blame them, given the ever-growing waves of new artistic material engulfing them every day — so their basis for comparison must have been (a) the latest of the Ladies' oeuvres, which was Snacktime!; (b) ʽOne Weekʼ; and (c) maybe some of the earliest goof-off songs like ʽBe My Yoko Onoʼ, because the first cut is the deepest and suchlike. What they did not remember, as it seems, is that the Ladies' first concentra­ted attempt at achieving serious maturity was already on their very second album, and that, since then, the general tendency was rather predictable: the more serious they got, the more tedious and generic their records tended to sound (Born On A Pirate Ship? Barenaked Ladies Are Me?) — the more they indulged in their prankish side, the more smart and sympathetic they managed to come out (Stunt / Maroon, Barenaked Ladies Are Men).

 

My confession is as follows: as I reached the middle of ʽYou Run Awayʼ, I was almost ready to cry — not because the song was so emotionally moving, but because it was already more or less obvious how miserable my next fifty minutes would become. The song is not particularly awful or anti-melodic or anything: it simply bears the thickest, densest stamp of «generic indie» to ever come from these guys. It sounds like a perfect soundtrack element to a Nora Ephron movie — echoey, soul-probing pianos, confessional, slightly trembling vocals, gradual build-up towards a rock guitar explosion, the works. It is something that would be completely natural for a prover­bially mediocre outfit like the Dave Matthews Band. It is something I have no interest whatsoever in hearing from The Barenaked Ladies, and do not, for the life of me, understand why should anybody else. And this is only just the beginning.

 

In Robertson's defense, I must say that the heavy riff-rockers on the album do not usually produce the same feeling of hollowness and fakeness. ʽSummertimeʼ starts out unimpressively, but gets better as the power-pop elements start coming through; the pissed-off rant ʽI Have Learnedʼ is acceptable alt-rock, stuck somewhere in between Pearl Jam and Alanis Morissette in spirit, but with classier production (and in the Ladies' case, «classier» always means «closer in form to the band's garage / glam sources of inspiration»). The fake-o-meter usually starts convulsing on the balladeering front — ʽOrdinaryʼ, ʽThe Love We're Inʼ, all that stuff. But this does not mean that the heavy riff-rockers will want to continue to keep you company once the album is over — the riffs themselves don't have anything particularly unusual or stunning about them.

 

In disasters like these, you can usually count on Kevin Hearn to come in with something idiosyn­cratic, but not this time. ʽAnother Heartbreakʼ has a pretty vocal part (I continue to insist that Kevin has always been the most expressive vocalist of the bunch), but the song quickly descends into clichéd distorted indie-rock. ʽJeromeʼ is a somewhat visionary landscape, a melancholy tri­bute to the departed Old West that somehow ends up cluttered with too much percussion. And ʽWatching The Northern Lightsʼ is an atmospheric conclusion to the album that matches its title rather well — the repetitive, reverb-delay-filled arrangement and trance-inducing vocals really create the impression of lying on one's back and watching them Northern Lights. But, once again, this sort of lazy ambience is simply not what one expects from this kind of band. They will not be stealing any bread off of Enya's plate, anyway, so why bother?

 

In the middle of all this, there is exactly 1 (one) «goof-off» number on the entire record: ʽFour Secondsʼ is an absurdist vaudeville number that sounds like Tom Waits adapted for toddlers (an outtake from Snacktime!, perhaps?). Its uniqueness works well in terms of memorability, but it can hardly hope to turn the tide, surrounded by all that run-of-the-mill alt-rock stuff — in fact, it only makes matters worse, reminding of the true call of the Ladies. That true call is to play the smart, sarcastic, snappy fool, not to try and turn into a «guitar rock band with soul», a market niche where competition is hot and the Ladies are not welcome at all. Thumbs down.

 

GRINNING STREAK (2013)

 

1) Limits; 2) Boomerang; 3) Off His Head; 4) Gonna Walk; 5) Odds Are; 6) Keepin' It Real; 7) Give It Back To You; 8) Best Damn Friend; 9) Did I Say That Out Loud?; 10) Daydreamin'; 11) Smile; 12) Crawl.

 

With another heavy sigh, I have to admit that The Barenaked Ladies' second post-Page album of original material generates more or less the same impressions as its sleeve photo. To be more pre­cise, it has the very distinct feel of music conceived and executed by a bunch of morose, stern-looking, grayish-haired (var.: bald), suit-and-tie-clad office workers, blankly staring in no particu­lar direction, trying to express something that must have accumulated in their shirt-stuffed breasts and finding themselves completely unable to do it in the least interesting manner.

 

In other words, Grinning Streak — the title is the best thing here, since it so aptly summarizes their latest developments — proudly wrestles the laurels away from All In Good Time, offering twelve more indie-rock compositions that come and go without creating as much as a ripple. The marginal victory is possibly due to Ed Robertson now writing almost the entirety of the album — only one song goes to Kevin Hearn, and three more are co-credited to Robertson and Better Than Ezra's frontman Kevin Griffin.

 

On the other hand, Hearn's ʽDaydreamin'ʼ is far from his best: a bouncy soft-rock ditty with faint echoes of techno and psychedelia at the same time, it goes on for far too long on too little fuel, and fails to make proper use of Hearn's best side — tender, honest-sounding sentimentality. The idea here is probably to generate a credible «daydreaming» atmosphere, with a mix of laziness, nonchalance, fantasy, and repetitiveness, but there are no hooks to go along with this mix, and the heavy effects on Hearn's voice make it stupidly robotic rather than wistfully magical. In short, Hearn's minimal presence here is as disappointing as his maximal absence, so we probably should not lay all the blame on Robertson alone...

 

...as tempting as that is, because he just keeps sinking further and further into the abyss of «gene­ricity» — something like ʽBoomerangʼ, with its syncopated percussion and quiet-to-loud dyna­mics, just sounds like bad Oasis or any other old Brit-pop band who would follow the old Ben Franklin maxim of «those who try to sacrifice memorable riffs for singalong catchy choruses de­serve neither». That it happened to be the first single released from the album just goes to show how utterly directionless the band has become. (For comparison, try ABBA's song of the same name if you really need a fun, energetic pop song).

 

Of the three numbers co-written with Griffin, only ʽGonna Walkʼ stands out a little bit by being poppier and cutesier than the rest, with a mild martial punch, singalong harmonies, and a jovial atmosphere that provides some respite from the many shades of gray that dominate the record. ʽKeepin' It Realʼ is an exercise in blues-rock grittiness, a somewhat different twist for the Ladies and handled professionally, but, like everything else on here, in a sterile manner — including the «blazing» guitar solo at the end. Particularly awful is the album closer: ʽCrawlʼ is overstretched, overcooked, over-emoted adult contemporary, and you'd probably have to be Ed Robertson's wife, parent, or offspring (or you'd have to want to be any of these) to enjoy the song.

 

Perhaps if the reviews for All In Good Time had not been all that glowing — praising the band for finally trading in their clown outfits for «mature» suits and ties — Robertson might have had second thoughts about going even further in this «introspective» direction. There is nothing of­fen­sive or unintelligent, per se, in these songs about complicated relationships and personality crises: it is just one of those cases where you almost wish something were offensive or openly dumb — anything at all to break this languid, go-nowhere crust of mediocrity. Unfortunately, at this point, with Grinning Streak getting even more positive reviews from critics who seem to be completely forgetting what it used to mean to be «fun» in rock music, it does not seem likely that  Robertson will be swerving from this steady, unadventurous, concrete-laden path any time soon, so here is another thumbs down in a series that, probably, has not yet run its course.

 

SILVERBALL (2015)

 

1) Get Back Up; 2) Here Before; 3) Matter Of Time; 4) Duct Tape Heart; 5) Say What You Want; 6) Passcode; 7) Hold My Hand; 8) Narrow Streets; 9) Toe To Toe; 10) Piece Of Cake; 11) Globetrot; 12) Silverball; 13) Tired Of Fighting With You.

 

Honestly, by the time the Pageless Barenaked Ladies released their third album, I have forgotten everything about every single note off the previous two — so either I have become a softie over the last two years, or Silverball is actually a slight improvement, because this time around, I would not describe the record as a «languid, go-nowhere crust of mediocrity». It is a bit languid, sure, and it is somewhat mediocre, but it also seems as if Robertson finally got his head out of that «maturity oven» and started paying a little attention to hooks — which, really, should be your first concern if what you are making is an album of pop songs, and Silverball sure as heck ain't cosmic psychedelia or ambitious symph-rock.

 

I have no idea why they decided to kick-start the record with a Blue Öyster Cult-style hard rock riff, when in reality ʽGet Back Upʼ is just a mainstream pop-rock song in the style of pre-slutty era Miley Cyrus — a program song, in which Robertson asserts his right to solid mediocrity ("not everything is sink or swim") while at the same time, perhaps, admitting that things had indeed taken a turn for the worse over the previous years ("I'm a little bit worse for wear"). Well, okay, if a tepidly produced hard rock bridge section helps you get back up, so be it — the question is, can the rest of the album actually satisfy the pledge?

 

Well, if you accept that for the Ladies, «up» really means «rocking back and forth in a cozy rocking chair by the fireplace», then it does. Most of these songs are predictably cuddly, but they are also bouncy, fast-paced, and focused on catchy choruses — a type of unassuming domesticity that I could see as successful, sort of like a tribute album to ʽWhen I'm Sixty Fourʼ, even if none of the band members are even close to that age border at the moment. Regardless of whether the song in question is electric power-pop with an anthemic refrain (ʽHere Beforeʼ), soft toe-tappy country-pop with a cute electronic lining (ʽMatter Of Timeʼ), or a nostalgic throwback to Eighties synth-pop à la ABC or Duran Duran (ʽDuct Tape Heartʼ), they all share two things — soft intro­spective sentimentality-vulnerability and a genuinely singalong chorus, sometimes supported with strategically placed harmonies (like the woo-woos on ʽDuct Tape Heartʼ).

 

This does not cure the music of its main illness — complete lack of teeth, particularly deep biters that could tear a serious hole in your soul. This is indie on the level of, say, Badly Drawn Boy, more appropriate for a second-rate Pixar movie soundtrack or some other family entertainment franchise than for anyone who wants to experience the true power of music. But, surprisingly, song after song they succeed in populating the melodies with hooks — either a fun keyboard line, or a nice vocal twist, or an odd retro move (like that flourish at the start of ʽPiece Of Cakeʼ that seems to have been borrowed out of some ambitious disco piece circa 1978), and as they accu­mulate, it slowly leads me to the inevitable conclusion: Silverball is an album that at least has a right and reason to exist, unlike its two predecessors. As George Harrison once wrote — "When your teeth drop out / You'll get by even without taking a bite", a perfect sentence to be used as a tagline for this album and this stage of the band's career in general.

 

And the best song on the album? As much as Kevin Hearn's ʽDaydreamin'ʼ was a bore, ʽTired Of Fighting With Youʼ is a touch of humble beauty; it helps to know that the song was written during his latest bout with the freshly returned leukemia, but even without that knowledge the vocals, the lyrics, the gently descending waves of melody cut straight to the heart this time. The title of the song and the way it is stretched over the chorus might trigger faraway associations with the Kinks' ʽTired Of Waiting For Youʼ, with which the tune also shares its aura of tender melancholy, but not its subject matter — actually, I guess this might be one of the tenderest songs about a lethal illness ever written.

 

Anyway, I would like to advance the record its thumbs up: even if there is very little here that would make me want to return to the album now, I do feel like I could easily return here as I ad­vance in age — the whole thing is so homely and cuddly and insists on tackling serious problems and issues in the softest, politest, gentlest ways possible that it would make the perfect soundtrack for nursing homes. And many of us will eventually end up in nursing homes, so it's always wise to stack up a little something for future use.

 

ADDENDA:

 

STOP US IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE! (2012)

 

1) I Don't Get It Anymore; 2) Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!; 3) Half A Heart; 4) Old Apartment; 5) Shake Your Rump; 6) Same Thing; 7) One Week; 8) Teenage Wasteland; 9) Long While; 10) Second Best; 11) I Can, I Will, I Do; 12) Adrift.

 

Considering how productive Page and Robertson had shown themselves to be over the centuries, one would think it reasonable to suggest they might have a shitload more of stuff in the vaults — enough to fill out a boxset or two, and delight the fans, especially those that admire the band's «serious» side as sincerely as their «quirky» side. Moreover, some dedicated and knowledgeable fans occasionally confirm that suspicion — which makes it all the more surprising why the heck is the band's only archival CD, containing a modest 46-minutes worth amount of music, focused almost exclusively on alternate versions of already well-known tracks, always inferior ones and sometimes differing only in regard to the mix.

 

The official explanation is that the record was originally planned as a «companion» to a proper best-of package (Hits From Yesterday & The Days Before), but something went awry, the two projects could not be properly synchronized, and eventually the rarities package got delayed and was released as a separate entity one year later. Regardless, it's a fairly pointless entity. The only track that is worth some interest is the previously available single B-side ʽYes! Yes!! Yes!!!ʼ, a fun, catchy power-popster co-written by Hearn and containing one of the fuzziest riffs in Bare­naked Ladies history (although, might I add that the cheesy synthesizer line that comes in to double the riff adds a suspicious whiff of a teen-oriented summer-themed video game). Maybe it is also possible to throw together some excitement for the unfinished electric demo of ʽLong Whileʼ, but there is nothing special about it.

 

Technically, there is also some live stuff here that could be useful for fans — early performances of ʽSame Thingʼ and some pointless bore that is arrogantly titled ʽTeenage Wastelandʼ, preceded by silly jokes on the art of performing in the German language and eventually transforming itself into a subsconscious, but flaccid, tribute to Otis Redding's cover of ʽSatisfactionʼ. Yes, there is also a live run through a Beastie Boys song (ʽShake Your Rumpʼ), but I see no point in the Bare­naked Ladies covering the Beastie Boys other than informing their audience that they do, in fact, love the Beastie Boys, which we already know because of ʽOne Nightʼ etc.

 

Everything else is just demos and alternate mixes of songs that weren't that good to begin with (ʽI Can, I Will, I Doʼ), or, on the contrary, songs that were already perfect (ʽOne Nightʼ) and needed no further undisclosed variations. In short, this whole package is more for the historiographer of the Barenaked Ladies than even the loyal fan; maybe someday Robertson might learn how to get it right, but until then, you might want to trust my thumbs down on this.

BARK PSYCHOSIS

HEX (1994)

 

1) The Loom; 2) A Street Scene; 3) Absent Friend; 4) Big Shot; 5) Eyes & Smiles; 6) Fingerspit; 7) Pendulum Man.

 

Even if I hated this record and this band, it would still be worth reviewing for two things alone. First, Bark Psychosis were originally formed in 1986 as — get this — a Napalm Death cover band. Second, eight years later, when their full-length debut finally came out, their music was dubbed «post-rock» in Mojo magazine, and this is where the term, now much more commonly associated with better known acts such as GY!BE and Sigur Rós, allegedly had its true begin­nings. To go from «grindcore» to «post-rock» in less than a decade, and not for any sort of com­mercial or fashionist decision, but simply obeying the tug of one's heart — well, this is definitely something that merits respect.

 

The band itself was largely the brainchild of Graham Sutton, a smart and sensitive kid from Hackney, and Hex was far from his first offering to the world — before that, the band had pro­duced several singles and EPs, including the 21-minute long track ʽScumʼ, which gained apprai­sal in 1992: this really was their first attempt at a musical «post-rock manifesto» of sorts, and the ideas invested in that track found further development in Hex, a collection of lengthy, mean­dering, and sometimes almost purringly soft... songs? jams? textures? soundscapes? whatever. «Post-rock» was originally defined as «non-rock music played using rock instrumentation», but that is a vague definition — and although, in retrospect, the roots of «post-rock» are usually seen in the classic albums of Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis really sound nothing like Mark Hollis and the gang. They sound closer to Hollis and the gang than to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, that is for sure. But not close enough.

 

The big reason why an album like Hex is revered in certain critical circles, yet has never mana­ged to become as popular as those Talk Talk records, is most probably because it is unassuming. Listening to Spirit Of Eden, you get a very clear sense of being involved in something grand, like the early stages of some terraforming process — the compositions are wholesome, slowly unveiling before your eyes and aspiring to tremendous seriousness (you could argue whether or not they actually get where they're going, but Mark Hollis' stature as a musical prophet remains undiminished by these arguments). Sutton, on the other hand, has no such aspirations: his music is almost always subdued, its ambience is never betrayed by crescendos or climaxes, and if the listener needs to be shaken up a little, well, the harshest that Hex can get is by means of some crunchy jolt from a distorted jazzy bassline — quite a long distance, isn't it, from your everyday Napalm Death standards?

 

In all, the musical genre that Hex comes closest to, outside of «rock», is arguably lounge jazz — with slight touches of R&B, chamber/dream pop, and New Age. It is one of those works-better-at-night records that requires getting into a certain lazy, hazy, dreamy mood which can carry you away; anything other than that and most of the compositions will look extremely boring, since, you know, this is not Talk Talk; this is a record that focuses on abstract beauty without getting too emotional or overworked about it. «Musical hooks» do not exist in this place — all hints at sharpness of sound have been meticulously eradicated, replaced by smoothness and fluidity that work at a strictly subconscious level, provided they work at all. And yet, at the same time this is not just a collection of trance-inducing grooves: as a rule, these are multi-part, dynamic compo­sitions that know how to shift melodies and tempos. For instance, ʽThe Loomʼ begins as a roman­tic piano-and-strings ballad, then adds polyrhythmic percussion, then adds ambient keyboards, then drops pianos and strings, then adds a noisy coda that may or may not resemble the actual sounds produced by a power loom. ʽA Street Sceneʼ begins like a soft jazz piece with energetic percussion, adult con­temporary synths in the background and noisy feedback in the middle ground — but it ends almost without any percussion at all (just a few cymbal clicks), as a mini­malistic guitar piece with some keyboard ruffles around the edges. And this is totally typical of the rest of the album as well.

 

I must confess to a primitive sort of reaction: everything on Hex sounds «tepid» to me, too much going on for me to treat it as a quintessential ambient record, but way too little to get me genuine­ly involved and moved. Had Sutton and his backing band displayed just a tad less creativity, we could all just agree that they tried to make a generic smooth jazz album with guitars and electro­nics, and the results were predictably yawn-inducing. But the internal dynamics of the composi­tions is so utterly undeniable that I almost feel bad for not «feeling» this all the way through; the concept of the album, in fact, sounds much more exciting on paper than when you listen to this stuff in real time. In all, this is tons more creative than Sade, but if you were to make a desert island choice, you'd have to go along with ʽSmooth Operatorʼ, because Hex is just no soundtrack for survival on a desert island.

 

Nevertheless, judging from a sheerly intellectual side, the record is an undeniable thumbs up all the way through — in fact, if you have not developed sufficient respect for it by the third listen, I would advise coming back to it over and over again, just because it is so full of nuances. I mean, who knows, it might actually be one of the biggest musical riddles of the decade — in terms of how many different genres it borrows from and in terms of the final meaning of this synthesis. It is rock, it is prog, it is jazz, it is ambient, and it is also none of these, so what is it? And what exactly could, or should, it trigger in our minds once the spell finally begins to work? Count me genuinely befuddled, and I usually give out thumbs up when I'm befuddled, just to be on the safe side. Unless I prefer to abstain, but that usually happens with records that defy the notion of melody, whereas Bark Psychosis have the highest respect for melody.

 

CODENAME: DUSTSUCKER (2004)

 

1) From What Is Said To When It's Read; 2) The Black Meat; 3) Miss Abuse; 4) 400 Winters; 5) Dr. Innocuous / Retarded; 6) Burning The City; 7) Inqb8tr; 8) Shapeshifting; 9) Rose.

 

Although Graham Sutton has always been the hands, brains, guts, and sprites behind Bark Psy­chosis, «the band» and «the man» are not complete synonyms. Soon after the release of Hex and a companion EP (Blue), the band was dissolved, and Sutton moved on to other things for which the name «Bark Psychosis» was deemed inappropriate (such as the drum-and-bass project Boy­merang with former B.P. member Daniel Gish, or the experimental combo .O.rang, where he worked with several of the former members of Talk Talk). However, beginning in approximately 1999, Sutton once again started recording music «Bark Psychosis-style» — realizing, perhaps, that this sort of abstract atmospheric soundscapes came to him more natural than anything else. Or maybe he just wanted another change, and why not a nostalgic one?

 

In any case, Codename: Dustsucker (I omit the three slashes that come with the title because they're ugly), named after Sutton's own studio called DustSucker Sound, does pick up more or less from the same spot where Hex left off, or, rather, from the same wispy cloud where Hex left off, because any memories of that album are just bound to be very, very hazy. And when it comes to haziness, Dustsucker does not disappoint, either: any attempt to «lay a finger» on even one of these tracks has been futile for me. Arranging this album on the shelves of one's brain is a little like trying to cut through jelly — it's all there, and it might even be quite tasty, but good luck dissecting it and trying to differentiate between different parts.

 

Technically, the album reflects Sutton's musical education over the previous decade, and its use of electronics and sampling makes it «modern» enough, I suppose, to make it at least palatable, if not necessarily at­tractive, to all those normally skeptical of «artistic comebacks» by people whose association with the previous decade had already destroyed their credibility in this one. But the truth of the matter is, Sutton seems much less concerned with following trends and proving his «relevance» to anybody than he is with simply pursuing his elusive, twisted muse. Just like Hex, this record, too, is destined for critical respect rather than popularity — in another attempt to create an emotional masterpiece, Sutton has instead created an intellectual conundrum that some will hate, a few will love, some will pretend to love, and a few more — like yours truly — will simply be baffled about.

 

The song structures are this time, if at all possible, even more dense and complicated, and yet at the same time there is a distinct intuitive feeling that nothing whatsoever is really going on — that it's all just an endless series of variations on the «wind in the willows» theme. For instance, in the middle of the opening track, ʽFrom What Is Said To When It's Readʼ, which begins as a soothing New Age-style lullaby, all magical-enchanted droning guitars and elfish backing vocals, there comes a jarring feedback crash, as if some explosive container has just burst open, and sud­denly everything is covered in the dusty ashes of rumbly distortion. But has anything really changed? No. It's not the way it sometimes happens on black-folk-metal albums — "now we're all jangly and quiet and medieval and mystical", "and now we have POWEEEEER!" Even the ex­plosion is handled cautiously and quietly. You might not even notice that it took place. But it did, and the effect is rather... strange.

 

Another such «now you see it, now you don't» type of change is observable, for instance, on ʽMiss Abuseʼ. For the first minute and a half, it just stealthily creeps along on a diet of soft brushed percussion, some overlapping chiming rhythms, and dark hushed half-sung, half-spoken vocals. Then a menacing fuzzy bassline claims part of the territory, striking up some suspense. Then, after a brief, somewhat free-form, interlude, we seem to return to the same basic melodies, but a grumbly electronic pulse has set in, and for a few more minutes we have been locked in a groove that is, atmosphere-wise, completely different: distant and winterishly cold, rather than intimate and autumnally melancholic, where we began. Again, nothing has changed — and yet, at the same time, everything has changed.

 

This formula is not applied everywhere: sometimes tunes are allowed to end more or less the same way they started — in particular, on ʽInqb8trʼ, the album's longest and most monotonous track, where this lack of change is its main weakness: as it is, it just sounds like a rather generic exercise in smooth jazz jamming, and I have a very hard time convincing myself of its magical powers, because, you know, repetitive percussion loops and husky vocals per se are not quite sufficient in these days of real heavy competition between the many magicians of smooth jazz. But most of the time, we are indeed witnessing the process of ʽShapeshiftingʼ, as more and more tunes undergo odd transformations — on ʽShapeshiftingʼ itself, the funky shoegazing drone and the weepy vocals of guest star Rachel Dreyer eventually give way to a howling, screeching, post-Neil Young-ish burst of soloing, after which the song is stripped of melody and becomes a per­cussive stroll through a jungle of creepy electronic effects. Shapeshifting? You bet.

 

The meaning and the implied effects of all this are not altogether obvious to me; you will have to decide for yourself whether the album «works» or if it is merely «strange» (and even that only if you listen to it attentively enough — otherwise, mistaking it for a run-of-the-mill New Age offer­ing is easycakes). In any case, there is no reason to be inconsistent and not give it the same kind of respectful, but suspicious thumbs up that I already gave Hex: despite the ten years that lie be­tween the two, there is no feel of any such uncomfortable time gap. Nothing strange about that, either — Bark Psychosis is one band that seems to exist completely in its own user-defined di­mensions; the concept of «time» is hardly applicable here at all. Oh, and, just for the record, I also think this is just the kind of soundtrack that goes perfectly well with reading A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu; certainly Sutton and Proust have a thing or two in common.

 

ADDENDA:

 

INDEPENDENCY (1989-1992; 1994)

 

1) I Know; 2) Nothing Feels; 3) All Different Things; 4) By Blow; 5) Manman; 6) Blood Rush; 7) Tooled Up; 8) Scum.

 

For the serious patient of Bark Psychosis, this is an indispensable addition to the two full LPs. In­dependency is a compilation, released in 1994 (the same year as Hex) and collecting, in roughly chronological order, most of the stuff from their several singles and EPs from 1989 to 1992, altogether more than an hour of post-rock bliss in a state of growth — starting off with the early «naïve» singles (that's what Sutton called them himself) and culminating in the 21-minute ʽScumʼ, the track that literally put Bark Psychosis on the map and paved the ground for the less monu­mental, but even more elaborate compositions of Hex.

 

Indeed, the band's first single often feels as if they were just so excited with the possibility to lay down some trippy sounds in a professional studio — ʽAll Different Thingsʼ is really all about the miracle of phased guitar effects, looped and echoed off each other during the fussy free-form coda, and ʽBy Blowʼ, true to its name, explores the idea of how cool it can be when a soft, smooth, lulling New Age soundscape is gradually transformed into a messy nightmare "by blow" of the reverberating power chord, gradually gaining in intensity and frequency, until the Talk Talk-ish air is ripped apart by almost John Zorn-ian sound bombers. But it doesn't sound parti­cularly professional or grappling — in fact, Sutton later admitted that they distorted the tapes in the process and didn't even notice it until it was too late. (Not that you'd ever guess that the wobbly sound of the track came by accident, rather than artistic decision).

 

Pending their second single (ʽNothing Feelsʼ / ʽI Knowʼ, for some reason placed here before the first one), the really interesting stuff starts with the Manman EP — the heavily rhythmic title track shows a clear techno influence, but is still imbued with Sutton's usual melancholy and some astral psychedelics: the guitar-dominated parts are similar to The Cure, but then they get swapped for keyboards, and it sounds like somebody wanted to record a completely digital track, but ended up recording the synthesizer parts manually — in other words, an oddly «homebrewed» version of whatever the real pros in the techno genre were doing, but also somewhat endearing because of that factor. The most curious track of the three, though, is ʽTooled Upʼ — also rhythmic, funky, and it seems as if they sampled the bassline from Talking Heads' ʽCrosseyed And Painlessʼ for this! Hardly a coincidence, even if there is hardly anything else in common between Bark Psy­chosis and Talking Heads.

 

As for ʽScumʼ, this is indeed like a 20-minute preview of whatever Hex would soon be, and as such, somewhat superfluous — there is no serious reason for it to go over 20 minutes. In fact, there would be no serious reason for any Bark Psychosis track to go over 20 minutes, unless you accept that the nature of their music is totally static (which is not true) and you just have to treat it as background musical incense. But historically, one can easily see how this was a sort of mile­stone for «post-rock»: the freedom of a psychedelic jam combined with the vague influence of the classical symphonic form and, in the case of Sutton, also with a strong jazz vibe. There's a little bit of everything in this track, and they make an adorable job of reducing it all to Nothing (with a capital N, which means respect, if not adulation).

 

Altogether, this is not a particularly tremendous line of evolution — one would hope for one of those early Napalm Death covers, but no dice! — but it does reveal several somewhat different incarnations of the band before they settle into their classic image, and, most importantly, there is absolutely no telling whether any of these tracks might strike a hidden chord in you: I'd say there's a big chance of a random music lover connecting with at least one, which sort of justifies paying one buck for this compilation if you happen to find it for such a price. But if you're one of those rare Suttonites who think that Bark Psychosis combined breathtaking beauty and deep intel­lectualism like no other Nineties' band, Independency is the required third shard to complete the Holy Grail of Proto-Post-Rock.

 

PS. And yes, that's not a bootleg cover - apparently, the band's name was in Cyrillic letters on the cover of the original compilation. It does look suspiciously like a Russian bootleg: I wonder if the band members had access to any of those, or were they simply influenced so much by Paul McCartney's so-called Choba B CCCP? 

 

BECK

GOLDEN FEELINGS (1993)

 

1) The Fucked Up Blues; 2) Special People; 3) Magic Station Wagon; 4) No Money No Honey; 5) Trouble All My Days; 6) Bad Energy; 7) Schmoozer (Feeling Hurter); 8) Heartland Feeling; 9) Unknown; 10) Super Golden Black Sunchild; 11) Soul Sucked Dry; 12) Unknown; 13) Feelings; 14) Gettin' Home; 15) Will I Be Ignored By The Lord; 16) Bogus Soul; 17) Totally Confused; 18) Mutherfucker; 19) People Gettin' Busy.

 

All right, as far as I know, Beck himself has sort of disowned this album, especially after it was re-released by the Sonic Enemy label on CD in 1999 — so there is hardly any need to really hold its existence against him. But there is hardly any need, either, to get acquainted with it, other than out of sheer curiosity or biographic interest. Strictly speaking, this isn't even a proper case of «you got to listen to this to know that even great artists may start out with real shitty records», be­cause it only really works when you know for sure that the soon-to-be-great artist is unintentio­nal­ly starting out with a shit record. Golden Feelings, however, seems to have been very much an intentionally shitty record (cassette, to be precise).

 

Basically, in 1992-93 Beck was hanging out in L.A., fresh from a folk / anti-folk scene experi­ence in NYC, stuck with a boring dayjob at a video store (he could have, perhaps, become the next Tarantino, but what is it, really, that decides whether your brain gets hung up on music or on film?) and playing really rotten folk gigs at nightclubs where nobody would be listening to him anyway. In this kind of context, it is only to easy to make the transition from «folk» to «anti-folk» (a.k.a. «music you regurgitate back at folk audiences when they don't like you»), and from there, to sheer musical hooliganry of the ugliest kind.

 

The best thing that can be said about Golden Feelings (and I feel fairly sure the title is really a va­riation on «golden showers», even if I know I can't prove it) is that it does display a sick sense of humor. Beck takes it out on everybody — the straightahead folker, the starry-eyed Donovan kind of folker, the weathered old bluesman, the Southern country rocker, the passionate soul man, and even Bruce Springsteen. The «Beck treatment circa 1992-93» means your style being repro­duced on a battered, out-of-tune guitar, sung in a battered, out-of-tune vocal, with parodic or, in the worst of cases, dumbly repetitive lyrics — all of it done so passionately that the maliciousness overwhelms the talent, and only the most congenial intuition could probably spot tiny signs of the «Beck genius» in any of these tunes.

 

Nevertheless, far be it from me to deny that some of this stuff is quite damn funny. The accap­pella recitation of ʽSpecial Peopleʼ, for instance, is a hilarious send-up of the «list principle» in rock lyrics, where almost every second line neutralizes the first one ("special people create belief, special people steal some beef... special people are so sincere, special people got special beer") — simple, stupid, and satisfactory. ʽTrouble All My Daysʼ is something that Tom Waits could have recorded, had he been hit real hard with a hammer on the studio threshold. ʽBogus Soulʼ bills it­self exactly right, except that one doesn't even need to squint hard to see how bogus it is (which kinda takes the sense out of bogus, if you get my meaning). And ʽMutherfukerʼ sounds so much like a good old Ween tune that it would be hard for me to believe that Beck never got the Boog­nish fever while drifting around the East Coast. Not impossible, but hard.

 

Probably the best of the bunch — and also one of the few numbers here that might approach the status of a «real song» — is ʽHeartland Feelingʼ, starting out as a spoken recommendation to write songs in the style of John Cougar Mellencamp ("music of a heartland quality, just powerful straightforward music") and then turning into a playful folk rumination on losers and their lives: "He's only a person / Who doesn't know shit / Nothin' happenin' / That's about it", which is pro­bably a chorus that John Cougar Mellencamp couldn't ever afford — but, in a way, is better than every John Cougar Mellencamp chorus ever created.

 

Other «songs» on Golden Feelings may be counted on one's fingers, and, besides, they would soon be re-recorded in more polished versions on Beck's next album. ʽGettin' Homeʼ is a nice little country blues shuffle, running about three out of four minutes too long, but with a moody enough, if not too original, chord change. ʽTotally Confusedʼ also seems to take itself a pinch more seriously than the average track on here — at the very least, it could be deemed «personal», seeing as how Beck must have been totally confused at the time.

 

The guy's interest in things other than «folk» and «anti-folk» is already evident: some of the shor­ter tracks contain muffled samples, some experiment with noise (rather boringly, I'd say), but it is interesting that Beck preferred not to include the one tune that would eventually propel him into the limelight — the sarcastic hip-hop anthem ʽLoserʼ, with Beck rapping over a sampled slide guitar melody — apparently he thought of that one as totally unsuitable for the overall mood of Golden Feelings. Which could, altogether, be described as «hangover folk muzak, fresh from the toilet seat». But do help yourself if you feel like it.

 

A WESTERN HARVEST FIELD BY MOONLIGHT (1994)

 

1) Totally Confused; 2) Mayonaise Salad; 3) Gettin' Home; 4) Blackfire Choked Our Death; 5) Feel Like A Piece Of Shit (Mind Control); 6) She Is All (Gimme Something To Eat); 7) Pinefresh; 8) Lampshade; 9) Feel Like A Piece Of Shit (Crossover Potential); 10) Mango (Vader Rocks!); 11) Feel Like A Piece Of Shit (Cheetos Time!); 12) Styro­foam Chicken (Quality Time).

 

A bit too long for a proper EP, seriously too short for a proper LP, this release probably deserves only a brief mention, mostly for housing Beck's first ever decently produced composition — a new version of ʽTotally Confusedʼ, with proper acoustic guitar, bass, percussion, and even some moody (but seemingly uncredited) female backup vocals for the sake of extra richness of experi­ence. It was already one of the most meaningful tracks on Golden Feelings, and here its lazy loser vibe is expanded with a helpful wave of tenderness. Other than that, this humble EP, limi­ted to 7,000 copies upon initial release (but each with its own unique finger-painting!), consists of the following audio elements:

 

— two more acoustic folk songs: ʽGettin' Homeʼ is the exact same version as the one on Golden Feelings, and ʽLampshadeʼ is a newly written guitar-and-harmonica ode to killing time that all the Jeff Lebowskis in the world would find very easy to identify with;

 

— three versions of the same, slightly disturbing, electronic loop (ʽFeel Like A Piece Of Shitʼ) taken at different speeds in order to illustrate the differences between different feelings of dif­ferent types of pieces of shit (my personal interpretation; I'm pretty sure there might be others, but who in his right mind would really bother?);

 

— several short pieces of randomized stuffing, including what sounds like absent-minded tuning prior to launching into a Spanish serenade (ʽPinefreshʼ), what sounds like a one-minute tribute to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (ʽMayonaise Saladʼ), what sounds like an attempt at acoustic-based psychedelic folk mood piece (ʽMangoʼ), and what sounds like a never-ending noise loop (on the vinyl version) reminding you to switch off your turntable (ʽStyrofoam Chickenʼ).

 

In other words, it's just one of those «freedom-asserting» indie releases whose only function is of a reputational nature. It takes the guy exactly twenty minutes to let us know that (a) he will not be pigeonholed; (b) he will neither shy away from recording fart noises if his individuality requires such an act, nor from trying to sell them to us; (c) he does have talent, but it is entirely up to him if he wants or does not want to make use of it at any particular time. I get the message all right, but this time, I wouldn't let it fool me into declining a thumbs down reaction, even if it means lapsing back into old boring predictability. Serious Beck aficionados will need this to complete their collections — psychiatrists might need this as promising research material — the rest of us hardly need think of it even in terms of bare curiosity.

 

STEREOPATHETIC SOULMANURE (1994)

 

1) Pink Noise (Rock Me Amadeus); 2) Rowboat; 3) Thunder Peel; 4) Waitin' For A Train; 5) The Spirit Moves Me; 6) Crystal Clear (Beer); 7) No Money No Honey; 8) 8.6.82; 9) Total Soul Future (Eat It); 10) One Foot In The Grave; 11) Aphid Manure Heist; 12) Today Has Been A Fucked Up Day; 13) Cut 1/2 Blues; 14) Jagermeister Pie; 15) Ozzy; 16) Dead Wild Cat; 17) Satan Gave Me A Taco; 18) 8.4.82; 19) Tasergun; 20) Modesto; 21) Ken; 22) Bonus Noise.

 

Apparently, this was released on the independent Flipside label just one week prior to Mellow Gold — reflecting Beck's strange fluctuation between his «accessible» and «batshit» sides that kept going all through 1994. The most brilliant thing about the record is its title, which more or less adequately reflects its contents — however, this is also the perfect album to get for those who are curious about Beck's darker side, but are reluctant to engage in completism. At the very least, this piece of product is a little better structured, and certainly much better produced, than Golden Feelings. I could even understand somebody actually liking it, rather than shrugging shoulders and asking, «...is this really what we were fighting the rock'n'roll revolution for?..»...

 

...which is not to say that I like it, not in the least. The huge number of tracks is justified by their unpredictable diversity — we have everything here, from acoustic blues to country to garage rock to electronica to samples running wild, but, as usual, everything is so utterly experimental that failures, by far, outweigh successes. There is a lot of ideas — and a brave, but fatal refusal to ela­borate on any of them. As in, something like ʽOzzyʼ will start out as a moody acoustic rock piece, built around a sarcastic lambasting of the title character (yes, I suppose it is that Ozzy: one can hardly err, with lines like "there's mascara bleeding out of your eyes" and "there's a giant chicken claw above your head"), but ultimately consists of a basic strum, an echoey "Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy", and a mumbled, seemingly improvised recital. There is a tiny seed of ironic greatness somewhere in here, but it is not given any time to grow.

 

More or less finalized pieces here include two plaintive country ballads (ʽRowboatʼ, ʽModestoʼ) that sound a little like Neil Young parodies (and we could always use a good Neil Young parody, that's for sure); the Sonic Youth-style noise-rock-fest ʽTasergunʼ, rather pointless if you already know and love Sonic Youth; the pseudo-Piedmont blues of ʽCrystal Clear (Beer)ʼ; and probably the album opener, ʽPink Noiseʼ, which has really nothing in common with ʽRock Me Amadeusʼ, despite being subtitled that way, and once again plunges us into noise territory, this time arguably reminiscent more of the original Velvet Underground with its drunk guitar swoops. But even all of these «accomplished» pieces wobble between «parody», «homage», and «drunken hooliganry» rather than making some autonomous point of their own. They do sound sharper and clearer than they used to before, enhancing the illusion of «accomplishment».

 

Wrapped around these pieces are interminable snippets of acoustic (anti-)folk, harmonica and violin drones, warped vocals imitating either Tom Waits or a blind pre-war blueswailer, chain­saws, news reports, and assorted freakouts — if you really force yourself to pay attention, one or two of these bits may come across as funny, but that's just me being overtly optimistic. Further­more, as if all this random crap (or, Beckademically-speaking, «soulmanure») over the main body of the album weren't enough, there are 16 more minutes of «hidden» ʽBonus Noiseʼ tacked to the end — enjoy, and have a nice day.

 

MELLOW GOLD (1994)

 

1) Loser; 2) Pay No Mind (Snoozer); 3) Fuckin With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock); 4) Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997; 5) Soul Suckin Jerk; 6) Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat); 7) Sweet Sunshine; 8) Beercan; 9) Steal My Body Home; 10) Nitemare Hippy Girl; 11) Mutherfuker; 12) Blackhole.

 

One theory that explains the surprising commercial success of Mellow Gold is simply that its attitude appealed so much to the new generation of slackers all over the US and worldwide, they went ahead and made it into their personal Bible of 1994. There is, however, a big hole in that theory — namely, where did all those slackers get the money to buy the album? Naturally, there are a hundred thousand different ways for a slacker to solve his financial problems, but then... would not being able to afford Mellow Gold really count as a genuine financial problem, in need of an immediate solution? Who knows, really.

 

There is another theory, though — one that also acknowledges the purely musical merits of Mel­low Gold, and states that Beck's meticulous fusion of the archaic and the contemporary, achieved here in a most understandable and accessible manner, was so unprecedented and intriguing that there was simply no way it could not transform the guy into the hottest new thing around town. Let's face it: even though, once we get to the bottom of it, country blues and hip-hop ultimately stem from pretty much the same source (lower class Afro-American layer, that is), it isn't every day that somebody proposes to knock 'em back together in a single package — all the more sur­prising that it took a hunk of «pseudo-white trash» to carry out that operation.

 

Allegedly, Beck himself was of no high opinion of ʽLoserʼ, which he only reluctantly submitted to release as a single — to him, this was a mediocre experiment like many others, maybe just a little more elaborate than the majority of his «stereopathetic soulmanure» products. But he was wrong — unlike most of these products, ʽLoserʼ had the golden touch for everybody. Critics loved the unholy union of slide guitars (roots!), sitars (psycho!), and hip-hop rhythms / vocals (modern cool!), and simple fans were awestruck with the chorus: "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?" was so poignant... and «sing-along-able»: readymade national anthem for a small army at least, or maybe, who knows, even a large one.

 

As ʽLoserʼ deservedly jump-started the process of turning Beck from street rat to major star, he must have warmed up to its nature — because, frankly speaking, ideology-wise most of Mellow Gold, his proper major label (Geffen) debut, sounds like variations on the same topic: combining elements of roots-rock music, psychedelia, and «modern street rhythmics» to form a soundtrack for losers, outcasts, and downshifters the world over. «Slacker music», come to think of it, is not a very good term — Beck himself has always hated it, rightfully pointing out that he was never a «slacker» as such. «Urban loser music» is more like it, although we would also need to throw in Beck's little fetish of mysophilia as well: few records have more mentions of toilets, manure, scum, puke, etc. per square inch than Mellow Gold allows itself in forty-five minutes. Urban losers come in different sorts and sizes; Beck's version is a particularly smelly one.

 

Not that any of us should mind, since, on the whole, Mellow Gold's basic intention is never one of grossing you out — that can happen, sometimes, as an unintentional, or desirable, side effect, like it does in Pulp Fiction (to which Mellow Gold, from certain angles, relates like its musical twin from the same year), but above everything else, it is a musically interesting construction, stylistically uniform and variegated at the same time. Hip-hop rhythms, rapping, and sampling frequently make part of it, but they do not lie in the foundation — which is strictly occupied with chord sequences learned, borrowed, or based on Beck's knowledge of the rustic tradition; so, in a way, he is doing here much the same thing as Dylan was doing back in 1965, rebooting the old franchise in a manner fit for the moods and airs of thirty years forward.

 

In terms of immediate memorability, it is the loud, obnoxious numbers that steal the show — ʽLoserʼ is an impeccable opener, but then there is also ʽSoul Suckin' Jerkʼ (continuing with the analogy, "I ain't gonna work for no soul suckin' jerk, I'm gonna take it all back and I ain't sayin' jack" is the 1994 equivalent of "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more") — great combo of swampy acoustic guitar and harmonica with rudely distorted fuzz bass on that one; ʽSweet Sun­shineʼ, which fits its title very well if one interprets «sunshine» as «nuclear explosion flash» (the instrumental part is like a very bad, very perverse acid trip); and a new, improved, beefed up ver­sion of ʽMutherfukerʼ that now sounds very much like stoner rock with a screwdriver up its ass, as spontaneously as that simile is generated.

 

Then, over time, one also gets warmed to the quieter, subtler stuff — the «anti-depressed» (so called because they should be expected to sound depressing, but in reality sound like the singer has already transcended that silly, pesky emotion) acoustic ballads like ʽPay No Mindʼ, ʽNitemare Hippy Girlʼ, ʽWhiskeycloneʼ, or the solemn, quasi-Eastern album closer ʽBlackholeʼ. There is no compositional genius here, but the hooks and moods are quite efficient, without any traces of taking themselves too seriously or exercising any self-pity, but still aspiring to some importance. ʽBlackholeʼ, in particular, almost invites you to meditate to its rhythmic waves of guitars and strings, and then you realize that a large segment of the album is, indeed, meditative in nature, even some of the heavier numbers — because, after all, what is a sla... er, urban loser supposed to do other than just drift away into the depths of his subconscious and hope that he might find peace of mind is waiting there, to quote another famous «slacker»?

 

All in all, Mellow Gold is one of those records that do provoke different reactions depending on the number of times you have listened to them, the context in which you heard them, the mood in which you find yourself at the moment, and, of course, the ability to judge avantgarde artistic statements both on their own terms and on common grounds — good news for me is that I actu­ally happen to like the record not just because it is «weird» or «innovative», but because it shows a streak of very individualistic, very unusual wisdom. As a collection of great individual songs, it may not be Beck's finest hour; but as one of the most important cohesive albums of the decade, it just might be. At the very least, it more than deserves its exalted thumbs up.

 

ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE (1994)

 

1) He's A Mighty Good Leader; 2) Sleeping Bag; 3) I Get Lonesome; 4) Burnt Orange Peel; 5) Cyanide Breath Mint; 6) See Water; 7) Ziplock Bag; 8) Hollow Log; 9) Forcefield; 10) Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods; 11) Asshole; 12) I've Seen The Land Beyond; 13) Outcome; 14) Girl Dreams; 15) Painted Eyelids; 16) Atmospheric Conditions; 17) It's All In Your Mind; 18) Feather In Your Cap; 19) Whiskey Can Can.

 

Beck's last original release on an indie label is arguably the most accessible of his «experimental snippet» collections — where one can spot talent and intelligence without too much irritation. Or, to put it differently, where Beck's pissed-off «anti-folk» hooliganry, generated by one too many downers, slightly abates in favor of pensiveness and seriousness. Not to mention that it is also the best produced record in the whole group: no more of that «bedroom aura» which, in retrospect, feels so unnecessarily pretentious.

 

Which is not to say that the album is a «must hear» — this is the kind of stuff that helps you put Beck in a larger context and understand where it all comes from, but certainly not the kind of stuff that could help put the guy in any «rock'n'roll hall of fame», officially or informally. Just sixteen more snippets, ranging from acoustic blues and folk to rowdy noisefests — carrying on with the post-mo­dern take on Neil Young. The material was recorded before the release of Mel­low Gold, so it does not yet bear the seal of an emerging superstar, but it is quite possible that, at this point, Beck was still testing out several roads to follow, and, had Mellow Gold not proven to be such an overwhelming success, we could have yet witnessed the guy burying his samplers and going on to pursue this strange path of trying to update ye olde Americana for the 1990s, rather than simply get inspired by some of it.

 

The guy with the somewhat vacant stare to the left of Beck on the album sleeve is hardly one of the nobodys: Calvin Johnson, one of the seminal figures in American underground, father of Beat Happening, Go Team, Dub Narcotic Sound System, and other projects, who acted as producer for this album, provided his own label's services to release it (K Records) and also co-wrote and co-sang the final track (ʽAtmospheric Conditionsʼ) in his trade­mark bass drone. This is probably an important «legacy link», but on the whole, the album certainly does not look like an equal parts collaboration — it's the Hansen show all along.

 

I am not sure how much actual composing was involved here: quite a few of the songs are no­thing but traditional old tunes, set to new lyrics — ʽFourteen Rivers Fourteen Floodsʼ, for ins­tance, is based on the old ʽSittin' On Top Of The Worldʼ / ʽYou Gotta Moveʼ set of chords, sliding and vibrating in deliciously authentic Thirties fashion; ʽI've Seen The Land Beyondʼ is a guessable variation on the Woody Guthrie style; ʽPainted Eyelidsʼ never goes beyond a standard up-and-down rockin'-horse country rhythm, and so on. In any case, the deal is not really about finding new sounds — it's all about relocating Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, and Jimmy Rodgers away from crossroads, plantations, and railway stations to the big modern city, without improving the conditions. ʽPainted Eyelidsʼ, in typical Beck fashion, continues to tell us about trash bags, sewer drains, chemicals, and debris — only this time, with clean sound, well-tuned acoustic guitars and pleasant, dreamy singing styles.

 

Some of the tunes eventually forget about their pre-war commitments and veer off into grim indie pop territory — sometimes, with pretty cool results, as it happens on ʽAssholeʼ, a particularly good one because it has what I call the «Lennon effect»: a seemingly trivial melody that is never­theless delivered with a subtle intensity and then resolved into some sense-shocking hook, like a discharge of slowly accumulating electricity, in this case, Beck's subliminal "she'll do anything, she'll do anything..." turning round and slapping you in the face with "...to make you feel like an asshole". These turns of events are quite common on Lennon's acoustic material, and here, Beck lets us know that he can have the same touch if he just keeps focused on it.

 

The screechy / noisy numbers on the album are, in comparison, rather scant — ʽBurnt Orange Peelʼ is a fuzzy comic-rocker à la Pixies, ʽZiplock Bagʼ is ugly noise-blues with harmonica blown through Lucifer's own sonic filter... and that's about it, actually, unless we also throw in a few dissonant overdubs on ʽAtmospheric Conditionsʼ. They seem mostly to have been placed here for diversity's sake, so that the album couldn't be that easily pigeonholed. But no worry: even without the electric numbers, it is not easy to place it into any one particular category.

 

Despite all the obvious shortcomings (or, at least, all of its obvious aspects that could be easily called «shortcomings» by those who think that the real Beck begins with Mellow Gold and con­tinues straight on with Odelay), I think the record deserves a thumbs up. At the very least, it could, and maybe even should, be taken seriously. Stereopathetic Soulmanure was still «punk» in spirit — and, consequently, quite contradictory, because Beck Hansen's guts aren't really punk. This stuff, on the contrary, does seem to stem directly from the guts. Sure, it is more about an in­dividual artist's guts than about shaking up the musical world of the mid-Nineties, but it should usually be an interesting venture — peek into the guts of an artist who dared to try and shake up the musical world all around him.

 

PS: Additionally, the idea that the album must have meant much more to Beck than Golden Fee­lings or Soulmanure is indirectly confirmed by its having been re-released in 2009 in the form of a «deluxe» edition, with an overwhelming sixteen extra tracks from the same sessions — I have not heard them, and I do not really believe they could significantly swerve one's judgement into either direction, but the very fact that Beck took such good care of this part of his legacy is well worth noting.

 

ODELAY (1996)

 

1) Devil's Haircut; 2) Hotwax; 3) Lord Only Knows; 4) The New Pollution; 5) Derelict; 6) Novacane; 7) Jack-Ass; 8) Where It's At; 9) Minus; 10) Sissyneck; 11) Readymade; 12) High 5 (Rock The Catskills); 13) Ramshackle; 14*) Computer Rock.

 

Looking back on the huge amount of lavish praise that Odelay had garnered upon release — for many a critic, the album was almost like a super-symbol of the mid-1990s — the record seems to have taken more of a beating recently, still standing the test of time, but not without bloodstains and lacerations. Judging by various «amateur» opinions on the Web, what seemed trendy, auda­cious, boundary-melting, and just plain «hip» at the time slowly comes to be regarded as a tempo­rary, and somewhat silly, triumph of cool form over thin substance. As a new wave of artists, inspired by Beck's genre mish-mashing, made people get over the initial excitement, more and more of them began to realize that... yeah, cool is cool, but does Odelay really have all that re­play value? Is there, like, a message in there? How has it really enriched humanity and all?

 

Admittedly, there is nothing shameful or unethical in the want to take Odelay down a peg or two. It captured one of those rogue «Zeitgeists» which one never really knows how to treat properly — by appeasing them or flogging them away — but it does not really have the kind of emotional depth that is usually required for a de-luxe pedestal: if there ever was the slightest chance of Beck wearing the «Most Important Artist of the Decade» crown, the release of OK Computer the next year would bury it forever, branding him as one of the industry's leading tricksters instead. And now, way too often, the actual tricks seem dated and not even particularly curious.

 

But it is also unwise to go all the way to the other side of the pole — whatever be the case, Ode­lay is not just an experimental hackjob carried out by a no-goodnik with too much free time on his hands. It is a logical follow-up to Mellow Gold, carrying Beck's penchant for genre-fusing to its culmination, and it certainly does not lack emotional content — it merely conceals the troub­led singer-songwriter behind a thick wall of overdubs, and it may be a little difficult to ex­tract him from behind that wall if one is not familiar with Beck's history of trouble and toil. If anything, this is the proper use of Beck's early indie albums: they may be technically flawed on their own level, but simply being aware of them helps gain a deeper affection for Odelay.

 

And beyond all that bullshit, the album is just a fairly solid collection of inventive songs. Already ʽDevil's Haircutʼ establishes the basic standard — take an old songwriting technique, merge it with a modern beat and sampling style, throw in a pinch of Beck's own «murderous depression» image, and you got yourself a readymade contemporary classic. It does not matter that the song is way too repetitive (you don't usually put it to all those hip-hop tunes that Beck draws his influen­ces from, so how could he be guilty?) — all it takes is a jarring fuzz riff, some haughty, mur­mured vocals transplanted all the way from psychedelic 1967, and a final surprising touch of swampy harmonica. Or perhaps the final touch are the lyrics. "Everywhere I look there's a dead end waiting" — if this were Robert Smith, the accompanying music would be suicidal, but Beck is simply way too cool, calm, and collected to let his music lead you into depression. ʽDevil's Haircutʼ is loud, noisy, screamy, and impossibly urbanistic — the accompanying video, with Beck strolling through various locations in NYC with a boombox under his arm, matches the atmosphere of the tune to perfection.

 

What gradually emerges from the next few songs is... well, I'd say, a brave stab at a «new Dylan» for his generation. ʽLord Only Knowsʼ, whose mysterious final chant gave the album its title, starts off with a hoarse scream, some feedback, a false start (already a bit of Dylanish noncha­lance), then turns into upbeat country-rock, set to some angry, accusing, but generally meaning­less lyrics directed at everyone in general and no one in particular. Unfortunately, Beck is no­where near Dylan in terms of vocal performance — most of his deliveries are fairly monotonous and by-the-book, as he treats each following word exactly like the one that preceded it. Most of the work is going into spicing things up — for instance, with a little bit of Steve Vai-style guitar arpeggios instead of a «normal» bridge, and suchlike. It's unpredictable enough to keep your attention in a steady hold, but for the first listen only: later on, there is a chance that many of the «intrusions» will become obnoxious, being so out of place and all.

 

Still, the basic structures are consistently fun, no matter how derivative they are — ʽThe New Polutionʼ revives the old ʽTaxmanʼ / ʽStart!ʼ progression with an added «astral» flavor (Eastern organ, Mellotron, acid sax licks, you name it); ʽDerelictʼ is like a flat-out musical opium den, with smelly smoke rising from the speakers; ʽJack-Assʼ begins as a tough'n'tender ballad in Lou Reed style, then ends with some atonal guitar and genuine jackass noises; ʽSissyneckʼ is just simple, catchy country-rock with a hyperdriven rhythm section and a pop chorus that is every bit as unforgettable as it is bizarre ("I'm writing my will on a three dollar bill in the evening time"? he must know that a "three dollar bill" is, among other things, a euphemism for a flaming homo­sexual, right?); and so on.

 

I do not find as much joy in the more openly hip-hoppish numbers on the album — ʽHigh 5 (Rock The Catskills)ʼ and ʽWhere It's Atʼ, both of them surprisingly «normal» celebratory odes to the joys of DJing, might appeal to Beastie Boy fans, but on the whole, they seem to have more to do with The Dust Brothers (who co-produced the album with Beck) than with the musical and atmospheric personality of Mr. Hansen. I certainly prefer him when his passion for beats, samples, and rapping plays second fiddle to his passion for «Ye Olde Urbana Americana», rather than when it is thrown into the limelight — and it isn't even my anti-hip-hop bias speaking, it's just that ʽSissyneckʼ and ʽWhere It's Atʼ aren't really destined for necking on the same album.

 

But this is just a minor personal quibble, which can be easily disregarded. The major quibble is that Odelay may not be one of the greatest albums ever made — which is a quibble with the cri­tical world rather than Beck himself, who cannot be blamed for the headlines. It's just high qua­lity hipster music that will be forever representative of its own time and space: which wasn't the best of times and spaces, perhaps, but definitely not the worst, either. It may not deserve all of its reputation, but it certainly deserves its thumbs up, no reservations applied.

 

MUTATIONS (1998)

 

1) Cold Brains; 2) Nobody's Fault But My Own; 3) Lazy Flies; 4) Canceled Check; 5) We Live Again; 6) Tropicalia; 7) Dead Melodies; 8) Bottle Of Blues; 9) O Maria; 10) Sing It Again; 11) Static; 12) Diamond Bollocks; 13) Runners Dial Zero.

 

This album marks a serious turning point. Before the rise to major superstardom, Beck would fluctuate between «lo-fi anti-folk» and «hi-fi sample madness», lending his post-modernist de­cons­truction talents to the idea of commercial success, and his depressed garbageman side to indie labels, so as not to lose his standing in the underground. Thus, for every Mellow Gold you had yourself a Golden Feelings, for every Odelay — a Foot In The Grave.

 

Mutations was originally thought of, I suppose, as more of a follow-up to the latter than the for­mer: the next installment in Beck's ongoing series of «reinventing the roots», but without the samples and hip-hop beats. To that end, Beck even had an agreement with Geffen that the record, as an experimental project with no commercial appeal, would be released on an indie label. How­ever, everything changed as Radiohead took the world by storm with OK Computer. Suddenly, post-modernistic irony was out of vogue again... suddenly, there was once more a certain demand on sullen, introspective singer-songwriters... and, suddenly, Beck found himself working with Nigel Godrich, Radiohead's producer — which, for better or worse, meant that coming up with another Golden Feelings was out of the question, unless the covert idea was to make Godrich die of a heart attack and quash the competition.

 

Whatever those circumstances were, the end result of this collaboration between the «intellectual garbageman» and the «master of technophilic melancholia» is an excellent album — and a great introduction to Beck for those who may be too put off by his experimental side to notice the true talent behind the «glitzy» and the «trashy» aspects of his work alike. Mutations is a very «nor-mal»-sounding, but a complex, diverse, intelligent, emotionally rich record — and, best of all, the actual songs are nowhere near as boring as that description might suggest. Just blame it on the inadequacy of the language, or the language user.

 

Predictably, Beck and Godrich still settle on old-timey blues/folk lamentation as the departing point — and even when the melodic backbone is more akin to post-war singer-songwriters than to pre-war blueswailers, Beck still finds the time to name the song ʽNobody's Fault But My Ownʼ, with a transparent throwback to Blind Willie Johnson (and not Led Zeppelin, of course). But now, other than being different through the application of Beck's lyrics and Beck's quite-modern per­sonality, they are also different through Godrich's atmospheric production ideas — and the man adds layers of surprising depth that was hitherto inaccessible for Mr. «Feel Like A Piece Of Shit» Hansen, but now somehow feels quite native to his vision.

 

The «Radiohead touch» is immediately observable from the first seconds of ʽCold Brainsʼ, a song that, with a little extra tweaking, could have easily fit on The Bends. Wobbly wah-wahs, sub­liminal distorted riffs, astral noises burbling in the background — without all these embellish­ments, the song would have been just another acoustic guitar / harmonica-driven folk meditation, a «poor man's Neil Young» offering. Instead, we get a sensory feast of a «space-folk» panorama that belies the song's lyrics: "Cold brains / Unmoved / Untouched / Unglued / Alone at last / No thoughts / No mind / To rot / Behind / A trail of disasters...", but, apparently, even in that un­moved, untouched, unglued state there is a hell of a lot of different stuff going on within those «cold brains» — if the song is not a melodic masterpiece, it should at least be the object of every producer's wet dream.

 

For ʽNobody's Fault But My Ownʼ, Godrich invites Warren Klein, who used to play for the Stoo­ges in the early 1970s and then moved on to studying Indian music, to contribute sitar overdubs — and, once more, turns a potentially pedestrian composition into a psychedelic «sea of droning» that illustrates the protagonist's «floating» state of mind so much more vividly than it would have with just an acoustic guitar and Beck's tired, reprehensive vocals. ʽLazy Fliesʼ takes the idea of an «intellectual country waltz» and throws so much in the pot — big bass drums, harpsichords, wah-wahs, Theremin imitations, fuzzy leads, whatever — that by the time you get down to the actual chords and find out that they are quite easy, you will have already gained enough respect for the song to be properly disappointed.

 

And so on, and on — this Godrich touch ensures that something at least can be said about each song regardless of whether it strikes you on a personal level or not: a classic bait for critical praise (and the critics did not disappoint). So as not to fall in this trap of spending too much time on an album that, after all, may not quite deserve it, I will limit myself to just a small handful of additional mentions: ʽTropicaliaʼ is a terrific mix of Latin rhythms and ominous jazz chords (al­though most people will probably remember it for the sneering grin of the cuíca, tortured by per­cussionist Smokey Hormel); ʽO Mariaʼ would have been perfectly at home as part of a sound­track where a grizzled Beck is playing honky tonk piano in a smoky intergalactic space bar; and ʽDiamond Bollocksʼ (included as a hidden track on some of the album's editions) is Mutations' blistering nod to hip-cool mid-1960s Revolver-ish rock'n'roll, but only as if Syd Barrett came to guest star on one of the tracks.

 

These are just a few examples, but even though some of the songs take a little more time to get into than others, I can find no serious individual flaws — nor do I have any problems with the concept of the album in general. Of course, Beck never took himself as seriously as Thom Yorke, so there was no chance that Mutations could ever be hailed as «the Album of its generation», but on the positive side, Mutations, unlike Radiohead, does have a sense of humor. But above and beyond everything else, this is one of Nigel's finest hours — his work on Mutations really goes to show that a truly great producer is always a great producer, no matter what sort of artist he works with (as long as the artist is generally talented, of course). Despite living in the same age, Beck and Radiohead are very different — yet Godrich was able to adapt essentially the same style of production to the essence of each of them without running into serious problems. (Seven years later, he would once again work a similar, but different kind of magic on Paul McCartney's Chaos And Creation In The Backyard).

 

Do keep in mind that the «Beck/Godrich» way of working is very different from the «Beck/Dust Brothers» way of working — for practical purposes, these are almost two different Becks, where it is fairly easy to rave over one and get bored with the other, or to be enchanted by the latter and disgusted by the former, depending on whether you came here from Beastie Boys Wasteland or Radio­head Sanitarium. Then again, whatever be the situation, there is always a Blind Willie John­son, blindly peeking out from behind the backs of both — and a dark alley with a smelly garbage can. This one, however, is located somewhere on Aldebaran, which is all the more reason to give it a thumbs up, and hope someone out there has a telescope capable of detecting it.

 

MIDNITE VULTURES (1999)

 

1) Sexx Laws; 2) Nicotine & Gravy; 3) Mixed Bizness; 4) Get Real Paid; 5) Hollywood Freaks; 6) Peaches And Cream; 7) Broken Train; 8) Milk And Honey; 9) Beautiful Way; 10) Pressure Zone; 11) Debra.

 

With the dark brooding of Mutations out of the way, it's back to swing time again. A spin of the wheel, and Nigel Godrich disappears in smoke — don't worry, he will be back — as The Dust Brothers make a triumphant re-entry. This time, Beck's ambition is to make the party album to outparty all the other party albums. The samples are back, in a modest way, but for the most part, it's all about the beats, the hooks, and the arrogant, cynical, super-cool party spirit: Midnite Vul­tures is flashy, hot, and ultimately meaningless — but, like the best of those party albums, it's got enough witty, funny cynicism to it so as not to repulse the demanding listener.

 

Pretty much every song on here is fun in one way or another. They may not be deeply impressive (few «party albums» are deeply impressive in the first place, for obvious reasons), but Beck is not aiming for that — he claims to have perfectly mastered the art of, let's call it, «expensive cheap thrills», puncturing the listener's senses on a primal level without offending the brain. It's all a bunch of musical sexual acts, but, as he states himself on the very first track, "I want to defy the logic of all sex laws — let the handcuffs slip off your wrists". Midnite Vultures does have its logic, but it is its own logic indeed, not anybody else's.

 

I honestly have no idea of how many elements on the album come from Beck's own head, and how many have been taken from other places (but still reshuffled and re-glued in Beck's own head all the same). Direct influences that everyone mentions range from Prince to Grandmaster Flash to David Bowie to Kraftwerk to the Velvet Underground, and that is not mentioning minor touches like echoes of Elton John on the coda of ʽDebraʼ, or the occasional Beatlisms, or the occasional country touch here and there. In addition, some of the songs show that Beck had de­veloped a fairly impressive falsetto technique — and that, whenever he sings falsetto, he sounds eerily similar to Mick Jagger (just compare ʽDebraʼ with, let's say, ʽWorried About Youʼ). But none of that is ever a problem, because the important thing is to know how to steal, what to steal, and when to steal, and if Odelay could still be accused of an occasional abuse of power here and there, Midnite Vultures is a perfectly woven tapestry. If anything, one could perhaps shed a lo­nely tear for the pre-war blues strain — hopelessly lost in the fray this time. But at least the word "garbage" is still prominently featured in the lyrics (ʽPeaches And Creamʼ forms a delicious rhyme with "you make a gar­bage man steam", don't you think?).

 

On a song-by-song level, there are no highlights or lowlights, but, on a whim, I would particular­ly mention ʽMixed Biznessʼ as the «the shit» element of the album — certainly this sort of groove, democratically generated by guitars, brass, and vocals jumping from speaker to speaker, is as good as anything Prince ever had to offer, not to mention just as «mock-dangerous» ("I'm mixing business with leather", Beck tells us from the outset, even though the music itself contains no hints at a BDSM attitude — cybersex, perhaps, given the huge amount of electronic bleeps, but nothing that would suggest any glorification of physical pain). Then again, ʽGet Real Paidʼ might be even more fun — an almost completely electronic brouhaha that might sound like a dialog be­tween two androgynous robots in heat at first ("Teletubbies going electric", Beck used to say himself), before you understand that the lyrics are also poking fun at la dolce vita à la 1990s ("we like to ride on executive planes, we like to sit around and get real paid").

 

As the album moves on, though, the tracks get a little less beat-oriented and become ever more interesting in terms of melody and musical effects — for instance, the insane slides and bends on ʽPeaches And Creamʼ that make the song seem like Animal Farm Gone Berserk; or the psyche­delic vocal modulation ("we're out of controo-ool...") on ʽBroken Trainʼ, once again reviving the spirit of 1966; or the entirety of ʽBeautiful Wayʼ, reportedly inspired by The Velvet Underground and certainly consistent with the spirit of Loaded — slow-moving, steady, the only track on the album that moves away from head-spinning electrofunk, trip-hop, etc., but am I ever glad it's there even despite not fitting into the general atmosphere.

 

By the time we get to the «sentimental» coda of ʽDebraʼ, Vultures have already been long since balancing on the edge of parody, but ʽDebraʼ is probably the only time on the album where Beck officially makes that move — the absurdly exaggerated falsetto, the lyrics ("I met you at JC Penny, I think your nametag said Jenny..."), the exuberant brass arrangement, always happy to oblige with a mock-build-up, all of it reads like a final gesture: «Oh, by the way, if any of you here were going to take any of this stuff seriously, here's a final firm reminder to drop it». But as a good-natured parody on classic soul material, ʽDebraʼ is hilarious anyway, and a memorable and atmospheric conclusion, carefully wrapping up a non-stop-rave experience with some sit-back-and-relax laughter.

 

Of all of Beck's major label records, Midnite Vultures is probably the most «trashy», but even its title forewarns you of that — what else is to be expected from an album about «vultures»? For the most part, it's all about form, not substance, but this here is Beck at the peak of his «formal» abilities, so much so that the songs, despite being so steeply soaked in late-1990s technologies, sound as exciting and baffling in the next millennium. They really do make a garbage man steam, not to mention, more prosaically, thumbs up all the way.

 

SEA CHANGE (2002)

 

1) Golden Age; 2) Paper Tiger; 3) Guess I'm Doing Fine; 4) Lonesome Tears; 5) Lost Cause; 6) End Of The Day; 7) It's All In Your Mind; 8) Round The Bend; 9) Already Dead; 10) Sunday Sun; 11) Little One; 12) Side Of The Road.

 

«The Breakup Album». Where would we be without the concept? No Blood On The Tracks, no Rumours, no Adele, no Aimee Mann... no Tunnel Of Love or Jagged Little Pill, either, but the overall number of «efficient» breakup albums that immediately spring to mind is still larger than the amount of breakup albums with an unlucky correlation of substance and form. (Even Jagged Little Pill could have been so much better with a different musical philosophy). Even today, when it is normal for breakups to come at a dime a dozen, they may be traumatic enough to sti­mulate great art — so keep on breaking up, all you great artists, and go on behaving like male chauvinist pigs (if you're male) or like victims of male chauvinist pigs (if you're female).

 

Much to Beck's honour, though, his breakup album is fairly chivalrous. Legend has it that he caught his fiancée cheating on him with another musician, and if so, it was fairly lucky for her that her fiancé was not a Bob Dylan or a Lindsey Buckingham: Beck's «breakup album» does not put any explicit or implicit blame on anybody. In fact, for a breakup album, there are surprisingly few oppositions of «me» and «you» — most of the time it's just about «me» and the state of total misery that the «me» is experiencing. One has to watch the lyrics very closely to even understand that this is an actual breakup album. Actually, «misery» is not even the right word — «emotional numbness» is more like it, or maybe «deep-frozen soul»: Beck's intent here is to convey the feeling of confused stun and sensual paralysis that he must have undergone, and, as far as my own sensory receptors tell me, the intent is carried out fine.

 

For hardcore fans of Beck's «party face», the release of Sea Change, his bleakest, moodiest, and most genuinely serious record to that point, must have been like a bucket of ice-cold water, coming right on the heels of the non-stop-rave of Mid­nite Vultures. That did not prevent the al­bum from selling almost as well — and, of course, the critical press had a gala feast, because there's nothing like a Serious Breakup Album to give the professionally paid reviewer an easy subject to knock off a few paragraphs or pages. There were also murmurs, though, in some circles, that Beck had exceeded his artistic limitations — that «Beck the goof» was a far more valid pro­position altogether than «Beck the introspective singer-songwriter», that he lacked the proper clout, talent, lyrical gift, melodic feel, etc., for this side of the business. Both of these schools of thought still persist to the current day — so whose side should we be on?

 

My answer would be fairly simple. The songs, as such, that Beck wrote for the occasion, seem relatively pedestrian to me. Had they been issued as a collection of acoustic demos (the way they actually were recorded by Beck originally), Sea Change would probably end up deadly dull and ultimately quite inadequate to its purpose. However, the collective weight of Beck's output to that point showed well enough that putting together basic chord sequences was never a forte of Mr. Hansen — he usually preferred to «borrow» these sequences from somewhere else and then fo­cus exclusively on the form in which they were presented, together with one or more other people whose presence in the studio was vital. So why would Sea Change be an exception?

 

The plain truth is that Sea Change is not an album by Beck Hansen, the aspiring «anti-folk» ar­tist. It is an album by «Beck», a revolving-door-style conglomeration that, for the occasion, consisted of such primary members as Beck Hansen — the songwriter and vocalist; Nigel Godrich — the engineer, mixer, and producer; and David Campbell — string arranger and conductor, whose cre­dits run the unbelievable gamut from Carole King's Tapestry to Aerosmith's ʽI Don't Want To Miss A Thingʼ (people who can cause either great good or great evil on a whim are so fascinating, don't you agree?). Oh, and, for that matter, David Campbell is also Beck Hansen's father, but we will try to ignore that fact, lest unhealthy suspicions of nepotism darken our feelings.

 

Let us now take a closer look at one of the album's best numbers — ʽPaper Tigerʼ. As an «origi­nal song», it does not even begin to make the grade, resting on standard blues patterns (you can probably name half a dozen songs from J. J. Cale alone that ride the same chords). Where it does make the grade is its dynamics — the awesome tension build-up that begins from the very first second. The song starts out with Beck's dark-shaded singing, accompanied by the rhythm section only, with a very prominent bass walk. At 0:29, the electric guitar marks its grand entry with a jarring siren wail, and ten seconds later, it is joined by incoming strings. From then on, nothing really matters — not the basic sequence, not the monotonous rhythm, not even Beck's grumble, all the way to the final "there's no road back to you" — nothing but the incredible «organized freedom» with which Smokey Hormel's guitar and Campbell's strings roam all over that territory. This ain't Hollywood, this ain't the Chicago Blues Festival. This is free-feeling, unpredictable, but also completely accessible instrumental work that makes me jaw drop, and then pick up again with each new swoop of those strings.

 

Godrich's and Campbell's ideas for the use of orchestration on this album have been frequently compared to Paul Buckmaster's work for classic era Elton John, and there are some clear parallels, but on ʽPaper Tigerʼ and several other works the influences go deeper — all the way to 1967, I'd say, and the psychedelic use of strings on Beatles albums: ʽWithin You Without Youʼ, in parti­cular, and ʽI Am The Walrusʼ (in fact, I'd be very much surprised if the rising string pattern in the coda of ʽLonesome Tearsʼ were not a direct carryover from the ʽWalrusʼ coda — only on ʽWal­rusʼ, the strings were being used to blow your mind, while here they are rather used to overwhelm your mind, and yes, there is a real difference). Other analogies are possible as well, but the com­mon invariant is always the same — these are anything but «generic» arrangements. These here strings have living voices, and they want you to hear them. I think I do.

 

And it's not all about the strings, either. ʽGolden Ageʼ, opening the album, has no strings — only guitars and keyboards. But Godrich puts them at such a distance from Beck's voice, and uses such effects, that it genuinely sounds as if the man is singing to you out of a huge dungeon pit, where he has placed himself in his desperation: the voice being picked up by the wind, thrown and thrashed about the pit walls, and finally reaching the listener at the intersection of several dif­ferent air currents. Radiohead fans forgive me — but I have never once experienced this sort of effect while listening to OK Computer, not even at top volume on headphones. And consequent­ly, Beck's "these days I barely get by, I don't even try", which, under different circumstances, might have sounded self-pitying and pretentious, achieves maximum effect — not so much self-pity as mere constatation of the fact, cast to the thousand winds, giving us a man overwhelmed by fate, feeling like a bit player, caught up against his will in some impossible-to-understand sce­na­rio and not finding the strength to fight it.

 

This is just two songs, but everything on here works, one way or another. Even the most mono­tonous, static, near-ambient tracks like ʽRound The Bendʼ — where Beck's mode of singing is (probably quite intentionally) emulating the late Nick Drake — are redeemed by powerful «deep sea» orchestration, with waves of violins and cellos carrying, rather than drowning out, Beck and his minimalistic acous­tic picking. But ʽRound The Bendʼ is not typical of the record: most of the songs are actual «songs» rather than sonic panoramas — it's just that their dynamics usually takes time to unwrap. ʽSunday Sunʼ, for instance, starts out as a keyboard-and-sitar-driven art-pop song, then finishes with a noisy crash for a coda — the loudest, most abrazing moment on the entire al­bum, yet such is its overall effect that you might not even notice all the rucus, so smoothly it is integrated in the overall calm melancholic grandeur of the song and the entire record.

 

If Sea Change is not Beck's «masterpiece», it is only because there are too many different Becks out there to choose just one, not to mention all the different «Beck configurations» (on this one here, the honor belongs to Godrich and Beck Sr. as much as Beck Jr.). But as far as breakup al­bums go — and just imagine how many of them there have been in the last fifty years — this one not only sets out a unique goal to be conquered, but also does conquer it. Did the man really feel that sort of emotional numbness upon being dumped? Is he that sensitive? Could he really have written "I'm mixing business with leather, Christmas with Heather" one day and then "these days I barely get by..." the next one? None of that, of course, is important. What is important is how the music makes you feel — and, on my part, Sea Change makes me feel... well, let's call it «cold and drunk», or something like that. But not drunk enough to be unable to hold those thumbs up for one of the decade's greatest artistic successes.

 

GUERO (2005)

 

1) E-Pro; 2) Qué Onda Guero; 3) Girl; 4) Missing; 5) Black Tambourine; 6) Earthquake Weather; 7) Hell Yes; 8) Broken Drum; 9) Scarecrow; 10) Go It Alone; 11) Farewell Ride; 12) Rental Car; 13) Emergency; 14*) Send A Message To Her; 15*) Chain Reaction; 16*) Crap Hands.

 

Having exorcised the irritating breakup demon fair and square, Beck had also honored the al­ter­nation for­mula («one for the body, one for the mind»), and now it was time to get back to the hot stuff. Out with Godrich, in with The Dust Brothers: the man was becoming predictable like clock­work. Fortunately for us, the predictability only extended to the overall choice of producer and musical direction — in everything else, the man's brain was still popping out new exciting ideas like crazy. In fact, he hit his commercial peak with Guero: not a mean feat for a guy with more than ten years of an established musical career behind his back, and something that most of to­day's artists, even the «real» ones, could only hope for.

 

Some have described Guero as sort of a synthesis — another record in the wild, reckless, trendy party style of Midnite Vultures, but tempered off and sombered up with some of the moodiness and broodiness of Sea Change. This is not quite the case. Of all the songs on here, only ʽBroken Drumʼ, with its slow tempo, sad piano chords, and farewell lyrics, could have easily fit on Sea Change — but on Guero, it is more of an intruder, a «breather» providing some respite from the energetic beats and waves upon waves of noisy overdubs on the «dance» tracks. It is true that, in general, Guero goes heavier on distorted guitar riffs, grumbly vocals, and disturbing lyrics than Midnite Vultures. But none of these things demand to be taken too seriously. We really are back here to the world of «expensive cheap thrills», «trash-muzak» of the highest quality imaginable, although, in some cases, still somewhat intellectually stimulating.

 

To be sure, ʽE-Proʼ is far more of an aggressive, clenched-teeth opener than ʽSexx Lawsʼ ever was, with its funky drive and merry brass fanfare. Here, Smokey Hormel immediately kicks in with the heaviest guitar riff on the album, hearkening back to the «brawny» 1970s early metal scene, and Beck's arrogant "see me comin' to town with my soul... see me kickin' the door with my boots..." tongue-lashers almost reach out like an "I'm back in the saddle again!" sort of mes­sage, though, naturally, the man's lyrics in general never once begin to make literal or figurative sense, and it is only the choice of words that matters: "devil", "garbage" (of course! Mr. Hansen's favorite word in the English language), "rubbish", "snakes and bones", "poison", "wolves", well, you must have guessed already that giving candy to strangers with a smile on your face isn't exactly what the song is about. But on the other hand, it is also doggone catchy, in a happy pop sort of way, with all the "na na na na"'s providing the giggle factor — and, while we're at it, there is quite a bit of "na-na-nah-ing" and "la-la-lah-ing" on this, allegedly dark and broody, record (ʽGo It Aloneʼ, ʽRental Carʼ, etc.).

 

ʽGirlʼ and ʽHell Yesʼ were the other two singles, and they are quite dissimilar. ʽGirlʼ is essentially a Sixties' style sunshine pop nugget with modern production — some drum machines, some electronic bleeps, soon choked with traditional slide guitars — that cannot refrain from the temp­tation of a mildly shocking refrain ("hey, my cyanide girl", which could easily be misheard as "hey, my summer girl" or "hey, my sunny girl", but this is exactly what the lyrics sheet is for). ʽHell Yesʼ, on the other hand, represents the Dust Brothers in full flight, supplying cool hip-hop beats and samples while Beck is rapping about the delights of being serviced by a bunch of Japa­nese robots and guest star Christina Ricci is providing the occasional "please enjoy" and "sumi­masen". Yes, we have come quite a long way from Kraftwerk and The Man Machine — this sort of robotics now feels quite comfortable and housebroken. Sexy, in fact. Plus, it's always the little things — like the ability to make a working hook out of the expression "hell yes".

 

Once again, Beck's monster-like ear for intrigue and excitement ensures that there is virtually no filler on the album — everything has at least something to it, but my personal favoritism extends mainly to ʽScarecrowʼ (the ʽMixed Biznessʼ of this album, I'd say, with delicious disco bass of instantaneous toe-tapping value, and the chorus line about how "scarecrow's only scaring him­self" has become inexplicably wedged inside my brain for some reason); the aforementioned ʽBroken Drumʼ, a celebration of stately, but troubled serenity that might as well have served as the blueprint for Beach House's entire career; and ʽRental Carʼ, which is just a good fun driving song. Along the way, Beck also plunders Bo Diddley (ʽBlack Tambourineʼ), old gospel blues (ʽFarewell Rideʼ), and offers a friendly tribute to his Mexican friends (ʽQué Onda Gueroʼ), even if there is hardly anything Spanish, other than a big chunk of the lyrics, to this cool-struttin' chunk of new-school-white-bread R&B.

 

From a detached, historical point of view, Guero could count as a relative disappointment — it does not add anything «major» to Beck's legacy, just another large heap of small ideas on how to synthesize this and that and generate another squad of creepy, disfigured, but perversely attractive musical monsters, according to the practice already perfected on Midnite Vultures. But even if this is not necessarily «going up», neither it is, by any means, a downwards slide. Everything about Guero is honestly enjoyable, and the tiny added pinch of darkness also makes it less deca­dent and superficially silly than Vultures — quite in line with the general demands of the mid-2000s hipster crowds (and most of their young idols would kill for an album of such quality, any­way). Hence, the usual — a thumbs up with all due joy and reverence; and do look for the UK issue, which adds several bonus tracks that kick up even more rucus (ʽChain Reactionʼ is as crazy as the man ever got with that style, and more).

 

THE INFORMATION (2006)

 

1) Elevator Music; 2) Think I'm In Love; 3) Cellphone's Dead; 4) Strange Apparition; 5) Soldier Jane; 6) Nausea; 7) New Round; 8) Dark Star; 9) We Dance Alone; 10) No Complaints; 11) 1000bpm; 12) Motorcade; 13) The Informa­tion; 14) Movie Theme; 15) The Horrible Fanfare / Landslide / Exoskeleton.

 

Imagine yourself having lived through several years of your life, regularly exchanging a pair of bright yellow socks with blue stripes and a pair of bright red socks with white stripes to work. At first it's a shock, then it's a news item, then it becomes a running gag, and finally everyone calms down and get bored. What is the next logical step to take? Right-o — one fine day, you come to work, one foot clad in a yellow sock with blue stripes and the other one, nicely contrasting with the former, in a red sock with white stripes. All of a sudden, life has taken an interesting turn — struck out an exciting chord once again.

 

The analogy may be crudely generated and even more crudely stated, but it does convey my first impressions of The Information, an album that Beck, in accordance with the schedule, had him­self produced by Nigel Godrich, but which also, completely out of schedule, sounds like it really should have been produced by The Dust Brothers. For those of us who find it fun to derail the karmic wheel from time to time, this should sound exciting from the get-go — for those who think that some combinations should rather be left alone, The Information may become one of the most serious disappointments in Beck's career.

 

Personally, I think it works in more ways in which it fails. First, it is not to be taken too seriously — how, in fact, can you take seriously an album whose very first track is already called ʽEleva­tor Musicʼ? And if that is not enough, how about a direct clue from Mr. B. in person: "Put the eleva­tor music on / Put me back where I belong". Of course, most of his lyrics are nonsense, but every once in a while there is a hidden instruction out there, and it is our job to find it. Besides, the track does sound a little like elevator music — or, rather, like the musical imitation of an elevator in flight, with cogs grinding, ropes pulling, and little bells and whistles ringing and clanging as the floors swoosh past you in a typically Godrich-esque cosmic buzz.

 

The psychedelic strings, once again arranged by Dad, are back with a vengeance on ʽThink I'm In Loveʼ, but other than that, the song has nothing to do with Sea Change — it is fast, tight, poppy, pinned to a loud, swirling blues bassline (think Bob Dylan's ʽAs I Went Out One Morningʼ, if you need an earlier analogy), and dedicated to all the confused mindsets out there: "I think I'm in love / But it makes me kinda nervous to say so" is just another generation's way of saying "I think it's love, but I can't explain", right? They just got a little more sophisticated about it, but plus ça change... well, it's just a thought, not a criticism, the song is fun.

 

From then on, it all falls together in a synthesis that really combines the madness of Midnite Vul­tures with the dark sultriness of Sea Change in a way that Guero never attempted to. Tracks like ʽCellphone's Deadʼ, ʽNauseaʼ, and ʽ1000bpmʼ are formally «dance-oriented» (or just call it «body muzak» or something), but their emotional spectrum runs from philosophical gloominess to cynical anger — in fact, ʽNauseaʼ starts out with a stern acoustic bass rhythm that used to be a typical fixture of that highly underrated band, Morphine, and they were pretty much the epitome of late night gloominess in the 1990s. Yes, you may use this stuff as club fodder, but unless the rhythm is the only thing your ears pick up, pretty soon you will start scratching your head and wondering just what the heck is up — the party spirit is getting fucked over.

 

Of course, Beck has never been a particularly happy guy, but still, remember ʽDevil's Haircutʼ? Triumphant brass fanfares and all? Forget it. Every single song on here is morose, every single song captures that turn-of-the-century depression spirit, every single song is about some sort of bad shit or other, explicitly or implicitly, and Godrich has his hands full procuring the shit in question and stuffing it in all the empty slots between the beats (that's why it's «bad cosmic shit», not simple «bad shit»). ʽDark Starʼ, for instance, whose hip-hop essence is honestly hung out in space — Beck plays the space cowboy with some harmonica blowing as well, but it is the phased strings and keyboard arrangements that give the song its final flavor.

 

One possible problem with The Information is that it is overlong. This especially concerns its last track, a medley of melodies that run through a hip-hop section, another one that almost ap­proaches Aphex Twin-style IDM, and a final ambient piece — but even without this somewhat bloated and not too memorable ten-minute monster, the tunes share the issue of Sea Change (too much «sameyness» of the mood) without sharing its redemption factor — depth and power of raw emotion. On Sea Change, there was a feeling the man wasn't just dicking around, but was actual­ly saying something he needed to say and wanted us to hear; The Information never really seems to know whether it is making a point or is merely using a valid point (such as «this world is really coming to a sticky end») to provide Beck with a pretext for messing around.

 

In other words, ʽDark Starʼ is formally dark, but is it, say, ʽGimme Shelterʼ-dark? Cool — yes, by all means. The band, and Godrich in person, do a damn fine job fleshing out all the beats and all the beeps and bloops and gimmicks, and Beck consistently finds the right vocal hooks for most of the songs (just getting a little tired, so it seems, towards the end, or maybe it's just me getting tired). It's just that, unlike Sea Change, The Information does not have me convinced that the darkness actually expands beyond the theatrical. But that's all right. It doesn't necessarily have to. Besides, look at Radiohead — their darkness seemingly expands beyond the theatrical, and has it made a goddamn difference? Nah. Thumbs up, of course — if only for the simple, but effective producer-swapping trick that had us all fooled, and helped keep up the freshness of approach for an extra while. Oh, and good songs, too.

 

MODERN GUILT (2008)

 

1) Orphans; 2) Gamma Ray; 3) Chemtrails; 4) Modern Guilt; 5) Youthless; 6) Walls; 7) Replica; 8) Soul Of A Man; 9) Profanity Prayers; 10) Volcano.

 

Well, even the best of us eventually get themselves cornered. After Midnite Vultures and Sea Change, Beck had nothing left to prove; after Guero and The Information, he had nothing left to recombine and resynthesize. It does not seem too surprising to me that, once Modern Guilt came out, he took his lengthiest break from new solo projects so far — five years without a fresh Beck album is definitely not something that the man's fans were looking up to. But the man is smart, and knows when to give himself a much-deserved break, letting that heavily exploited soil rest in peace and restore its nutrient potential.

 

Modern Guilt is quite short; not at all flashy or «assuming»; and basically gives us a faint pic­ture of a guy at a crossroads. I mean, what else would it be, if the very first line of the very first song goes "think I'm stranded but I don't know where"? If there is at all an overriding point to this record, it is simple enough — been there, done that, now what? Then this message just keeps on going: "modern guilt, I'm stranded with nothing" (title track), "beat my bones against the wall, staring down an empty hall" (ʽSoul Of A Manʼ), "been walking on these streets so long, I don't know where they're gonna lead anymore" (ʽVolcanoʼ). Nor is this dead-end problem limited to the singer alone: "down by the sea, swallowed by evil, we've already drowned" (ʽChemtrailsʼ), "there's a bottomless pit that we've been climbing from" (ʽYouthlessʼ), "what are you gonna do when those walls are falling down on you?" (ʽWallsʼ), and the list is only just beginning.

 

The music itself isn't quite as gloomy as the lyrical message, even if most of it is in minor keys. For variety's sake, the album was produced by Danger Mouse, instead of one of Beck's regulars, and so it neither has the kaleidoscopic urban fuss of the Dust Brothers, nor the strange cosmic vibe of Godrich. Instead, it is cast very much in a mid-Sixties art-pop style, which had always been one of Beck's favorites, but he generally used to bury those influences way deep under a coating of techno beats and synth loops. Here, only a few tracks (ʽYouthlessʼ, ʽReplicaʼ) are do­minated by modernistic percussion — most, with just a few tricks of the trade, would have fit in perfectly on old school garage-pop albums, or Pink Floyd ones.

 

Which is also the root of the problem: when Beck gets «stripped down», his retro-melodies are nice enough to the ear, but do not seem to be infused with just enough melodic genius to «matter» all by themselves, without the helping hand of a master producer, and Danger Mouse is either not able or not willing to provide that helping hand: his style of work, from what I have heard on the other albums produced by him, is to leave it to the artist — and Beck is exactly the kind of artist that should not be left alone in the studio at all, and definitely not left alone when he wishes to issue a serious statement about how all of us are going to a place that is far more dull and boring than hell or purgatory could ever hope to be.

 

While the album is on, it's really on, though. ʽOrphansʼ has just a light, sweet touch of the baroque, and of the psycho-mystical (somehow, I don't know how, the start of the "if I wake up and see my maker coming..." chorus, simple as it is, manages to trigger that mode). The orches­trated «chamber-music-hall» coda to the title track gives a good shot of romantic melancholia, ʽYour Mother Should Knowʼ-style. The flute-and-fiddle dialog on ʽWallsʼ gives another, but dif­ferent, shot of the same — and maybe it does make sense that the emotion of the song is not blown all the way up to high heaven, as some other guys singing about walls have been known to treat the subject. The harder-rocking stuff gives you some nifty basslines (ʽSoul Of A Manʼ) or fuzzy guitar riffs (ʽProfanity Prayersʼ), and the keyboards/strings combo of ʽChemtrailsʼ is qua­lity tripping material. Honestly, I cannot find any filler here (and with the album's total running length of 33 minutes, I'd be really surprised to).

 

Compared, however, to the majority of Beck's major label albums, the songs on Modern Guilt have less staying power — the grooves, the hooks, the moods are too, shall we say, «restrained», and additional listens do not show much additional depth to them (as it happened, in my ex­perience, with Sea Change, where each re-run of the tracks brought to mind at least several other minor wonders of Godrich's imagination). And, most important of all, you'd think that any album entitled Modern Guilt should leave you in the end... well, feeling a little guilty, perhaps? That is the kind of sentiment that an album like Arcade Fire's Funeral, if we are talking Beck's contem­poraries, easily provokes in me, but this album, in comparison, feels lacking. Instead of making me want to go out there and help make the world a better place, it just makes me want to give the guy a hug and tell him to maybe eat more vitamins every once in a while. Oh, I guess that last sentence automatically translates to a thumbs up, anyway, but possibly this is not the correct type of thumbs up that Beck Hansen might want from a reviewer. Still, what the heck — this is another good Beck album, making it an almost record-breaking (for this period) nine positive ratings in a row, and let us not forget about that.

 

MORNING PHASE (2014)

 

1) Cycle; 2) Morning; 3) Heart Is A Drum; 4) Say Goodbye; 5) Blue Moon; 6) Unforgiven; 7) Wave; 8) Don't Let It Go; 9) Blackbird Chain; 10) Phase; 11) Turn Away; 12) Country Down; 13) Waking Light.

 

A pox upon this whole goddamn «sequel» idea. Time and time again, artists keep falling into this ridiculous temptation — «hey, that masterpiece of mine was so great, I wonder if I can do ano­ther one just like it?» — and it's not even necessarily for the money. No, more likely it is because you happen to run out of ideas, and start looking for inspiration in your own past, sort of an incestu­ous affair with your own body and soul. What good can come out of it? Was there ever a self-con­scious musical «sequel» (excluding multi-volume issues that were initially planned as such) that managed to equal, let alone surpass, the original?

 

It took Beck more than five years to give us Morning Phase, and when he did, he advertised it as a «companion piece» to Sea Change. But that album needs no companion piece. It is an album about loneliness, for Christ's sake; how can an album about loneliness require a «companion»? And even though Beck's previous records showed some signs of stagnation, not a single one was directly billed as, or emotionally felt like a straightforward attempt to repeat the moods, textures, and effects of any of its predecessors. So is this a confession that Beck is finally spent, and that from now on he will be specializing in inferior re-writes of his past glories?

 

And here are the general reasons why you could suspect inferiority even before putting on the album. First, remember that Sea Change was actually written and recorded under the shadow of internal struggle and strife — an authentic «breakup album» where the songs were fueled by real feelings. That dark fire may have been artificially fed up, but its basis was real, and you could feel it. Fast forward twelve years, though, and the only internal struggle and strife that we see is from an artist who used to be on the edge of musical progress, and now feels himself somewhat left out, without a proper understanding of how he could be in the lead once again — mixed-up and confused. That could be an emotional basis for something, but why confuse it with the «dis­illusioned recluse» image of Sea Change, then?

 

Second, for some reason, Beck decided that the album would be self-produced — even though, last time I checked, Nigel Godrich was still alive and well, and even more, this was his regular turn in the «every second album» cycle. Beck did get some of the Sea Change musicians to play on the record, and, once again, entrusted the orchestration business to his father, but Godrich was absolutely crucial to the sound of Sea Change, dressing those songs up in ways that Beck's mind could never have come up with — and yes, he is very sorely missed on Morning Phase, which feels stripped and underworked without the Godrich touch.

 

Now here is the first revelation when you actually put the album on: it shares a lot of things in common with Sea Change, but in general, it feels nothing like Sea Change. The first and pro­bably best song, ʽMorningʼ, does not strike you with a bleak, secluded view of the world that ʽGolden Ageʼ proclaimed so solemnly. Its lyrical message is completely different: "Can we start it all over again? / This morning / I've lost all my defences / This morning / Won't you show me the way it used to be? / I've gone all around / 'Til there's nothing left to say / We've worn it all down / Into something that couldn't be said". Yes, you could try and interpret it as part of a dialog with a relationship partner, but in this whole context, wouldn't you say that it's basically a song about, er, uhm... impotence? Spiritual, I mean, of course.

 

A thin whiff of melancholy emanates from the song, but no desperation — Beck is being tender (falsetto in the verses) and submissive (chorus), not particularly happy, but generally coming to terms with his lot, «letting down his defences» indeed. There might even be some sort of early pre-nir­vana calm contained in the tune, what with its angelic harmonies and soothing piano chords bringing on a bit of a «New Age flavor», musically. This will be a serious blow for people who expect strong emotions or body-bending impulses from the man all the time, but if you are prepared to give the man a chance, ʽMorningʼ, as an anthem of calming down, humility and sub­mission, actually has a real point to make.

 

The bad news is that most of the following songs struggle to make a real point — or, more pre­cisely, they do not struggle to make a real point. ʽHeart Is A Drumʼ picks up the tempo a little bit to become a simple, unassuming folk-pop ditty whose hushed vocals, obscure lyrics, and ghostly background vocals presume a dig at «depth», but I do not sense any real depth — just a guy mur­muring some barely coherent nonsense to the mellow sound of acoustic guitars and pianos. No hooks to speak of, no musical textures to be astounded at, and what is it exactly that you are trying to get across to me, Mr. Hansen? What I see is just some grayish ambience, as if you wanted to capture some light and some darkness in the same bottle and give me both, but then you accidentally shook 'em up, and now it's sort of undrinkable. No taste.

 

This is pretty much the same reaction I get from everything else: a total feel of «middle of the road» where you really keep wishing he'd stuck to this side or that. On ʽBlue Moonʼ, the first single from the album, he sings that "I'm so tired of being alone", but there is no musical indi­cation in the song that he is alone, and if he is tired, it is more like he is tired of finding great ideas for songs rather than anything else. And song after song, we get the same unmemorable acoustic patterns, the same walls covered by simplistic synthesized or orchestral carpeting, the same mock-transcendental «woo-hoos» and «aaa-haas» from the backup singers, and, guess what, not even a single example of great usage of the bass guitar (dark bass grooves were an integral part of Sea Change, but not here).

 

Oh, it all sounds suitably nice, and it may even all sound suitably adequate to Beck's current state of mind, but it makes me sad and disappointed to see him in this state of mind. Even when he opts for a «grand» closure (ʽWaking Lightʼ), the crescendo effects seem boring and predictable, and, most importantly, devoid of real tension and energy — and this is the first Beck album in my experience where, after three listens in a row, I was unable to memorize any of the songs (with ʽMorningʼ as the only exception, and even that mainly because I really love that use of falsetto on the verses). Is it the kind of album that could be expected to subtly grow on you after a miriad of listens? But we are not living in an epoch where one would have time for that. And even if we were, this is Beck Hansen we are talking about, the guy who used to be the fastest gunslinger in the West. Sure, even the fastest gunslingers eventually grow old, but I was sort of unprepared that the aging process would be so quick.

 

If we judge the record on its own merits, removed from any possible context, it is inoffensive and generally pretty. But as a part of the curve, it is a catastrophe — a pretentious statement about having nothing to say that comes from a washed-up artist who really has nothing left to say, and knows not how to say it properly. Okay, «washed-up» is a harsh and undeserved word; maybe it is just a temporary blunder, and no sooner than Beck renounces this stupid idea of a «sequel» and starts bringing back in his usual batch of wonder producers, he may be able to get back on the right track. But the signs are not at all auspicious — when an album is as empty of meaning and feeling as Morning Phase seems to be, one can't help fearing that this particular thumbs down, the first one I've ever had the mispleasure of giving Beck, will be far from the last.

 

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN

TIGERMILK (1996)

 

1) The State I Am In; 2) Expectations; 3) She's Losing It; 4) You're Just A Baby; 5) Electronic Renaissance; 6) I Could Be Dreaming; 7) We Rule The School; 8) My Wandering Days Are Over; 9) I Don't Love Anyone; 10) Mary Jo.

 

Of course, Stuart Murdoch is just the kind of «frail lonely indie kid» that gets regularly parodied by all the sarcastic wiseguys in the world. A little nerdy, a little sissy, sometimes bitter, some­times tender, a champion of the little guy and of the underdog, and what could you expect from someone who spent seven years suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, and then served seve­ral more years as a caretaker for a church hall in his spare time? Here be the proverbial musical re­cluse who always takes brain over brawn, beauty over beast, and bells over balls — a position that has been profanated over and over again since the days of Nick Drake, who could at least justify it by also being a real musician (yes, knowing how to play your instrument better than your neighbor with just a few years of musical school behind him actually helps).

 

But it is also true that some of those sad indie kids have more credibility than others, and, for­tunately, Mur­doch falls within that category. If he and his music may occasionally fall prey to certain stereotypes, then, for the sake of justice, it should also be mentioned that they also break stereotypes — for instance, the stereotype that every rock band from Scotland should be fronted by a permanently drunk ex-coal miner with an iron throat, and that its music should be the perfect soundtrack to having a good barf at the local pub. Try as I might, I just cannot imagine anybody barfing to the sweet, sensitive sounds of Belle and Sebastian, a band that was, after all, named after a children's book and TV series.

 

Besides, Murdoch chooses a near-perfect attitude for his songs, one that goes back directly to the aforementioned Nick Drake and maybe even further back to Ray Davies — frailty and tenderness without either excessive sentimentality or excessive «see me suffer, see me suffocate» type of self-pity. It's all light, breezy, «twee» (as they say today) folk-pop that at its best — when the band falls upon a fortunate vocal or melodic hook — sounds charming, and at its worst — when they drift on the waves of style and attitude alone — still sounds nice. Acoustic or jangly electric guitars, occasional cellos, violins, and trumpets, pretty vocals, intelligent lyrics, everything with plenty of throw­backs to old-school pre-Hendrix Brit-pop, what's not to like?

 

Like most B&S albums, Tigermilk does suffer from its rather limited stylistics. There is fairly little on the record that is not already contained in its opening number, ʽThe State I Am Inʼ — if you are in a big hurry, the song pretty much tells you everything about Belle and Sebastian that you must know in order to check off that little square. Simple (accessible), acoustic (immediate), upbeat (unpretentious), tells an allegorical story that should not be taken too literally but is easily decodable figuratively — "I gave myself to sin / I gave myself to Providence / And I've been there and back again / The state that I am in". Internal conflict, personality disorder, adolescent angst, maturity crisis — for those who do not like these themes accompanied by barking vocals, chainsaw guitars and death-challenging volume levels.

 

As a «poet», Murdoch is certainly operating at a more advanced level than Ray Davies (who was fairly old-fashioned even by Sixties' standards himself), but that is more or less to be expected from an indie kid. As a melody writer, unfortunately, he does not even begin to come close: most of these songs float by like fluffy clouds — five listens into the record, only ʽShe's Losing Itʼ managed to cling on to a piece of my mind's driftwood (its bouncy chorus is the most «kiddie» element on the entire album, and I am afraid that must be exactly why it is so memorable), and, of course, ʽI Could Be Dreamingʼ — probably the album's true major highlight, with its tremolo ef­fect on the electric guitar hook, its quasi-Theremin countermelody, and the odd Isobel Campell recital of «Rip Van Winkle» in the outro section.

 

But the songs still warrant repeated listens, because there is more to them than sheer melodic con­text, and I am willing to listen to Murdoch and his little under-the-bed performances. On very rare occasions, he cooks up completely unpredictable surprises — for instance, ʽElectronic Re­naissanceʼ uses shitloads of synthesizers and drum machines to... express contempt and disgust for the digital clubland revolution that was taking place in the mid-Nineties, without mincing words: "Monochrome in the 1990's / You go disco and I'll go my way", and, sure enough, al­though they do sparingly use synthesizers on some of the other tracks, all of them are quite «mo­nochrome» in comparison.

 

However, that is more or less the only straightforward piece of social criticism. Most of the time, Murdoch takes it out on himself — for instance, on ʽI Don't Love Anyoneʼ, which is probably the sweetest song about not loving anyone ever recorded: "if there's one thing that I learned when I was still a child it's to take a hiding", although the man is really so nice that he can't help adding a few disclaimers: "I don't love anyone... well, maybe my sister... maybe my baby brother too..." — doesn't he know that, once you've opened that door just a little bit, it doesn't take too long for the opening to widen? Most likely, he does, which is exactly why he sings about it.

 

Or he takes it out on himself and everyone else of his own caliber — ʽWe Rule The Schoolʼ ends with a lightly enigmatic "You know the world was made for men / Not us", as the accompanying romantic pianos and cellos bring to mind... well, I was almost going to say Dennis Wilson and Pacific Ocean Blues, but Dennis Wilson, a «man» in every sense of the word, would probably never have penned that line, even when composing in a thoroughly broken-hearted state. (Actu­ally, the best thing about the song is its understated woodwind solo bit — a beautiful little bit of phrasing there, making me wish they'd inserted more of those short solos throughout, but an indie kid's worst nightmare is always to come across as «indulgent», a risk somehow perceived in even a few bars of soloing — or, perhaps, the average indie kid is simply afraid to show off his relative incom­petence, or, most likely, both at the same time).

 

In any case, Tigermilk is one of those debut albums that promise a long, respectable, successful career where the highest point would never get out of sight of the lowest one — if you do not climb all that high, you should have no fear of falling. And it does have its own spirit, so that even long after Stuart Murdoch ceases to be a contemporary role model for Glaswegian adoles­cents, young people all around the world can still use the album in order to deduce the difference between a Nick Drake in 1972 and a «Nick Drake» in 1996. A well-pleased, if not quite as overawed as some of the attested reviews, thumbs up here.

 

 

IF YOU'RE FEELING SINISTER (1996)

 

1) The Stars Of Track And Field; 2) Seeing Other People; 3) Me And The Major; 4) Like Dylan In The Movies; 5) The Fox In The Snow; 6) Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying; 7) If You're Feeling Sinister; 8) Mayfly; 9) The Boy Done Wrong Again; 10) Judy And The Dream Of Horses.

 

Out of all the homogeneous richness of the Belle & Sebastian catalog, it was If You're Feeling Sinister that was somehow singled out for «cult» status — perhaps on the strength of the initial acclaim given to it by the then-freshly-rising Pitchforkmedia. The truth, I think, is that Murdoch, like most of his indie friends, operates on an «IV bag principle», yielding the required content on a steady, consistent, but slow and parsimonious basis, and this automatically prevents his band from having something like a «best ever» record, so it's all very much a question of putting some­thing in the right place at the right time.

 

There is no denying, though, that If You're Feeling Sinister itself is consistent, intelligent, and extremely pleasant. If possible, it is even more mellow and fragile than Tigermilk, almost com­pletely acoustic or, at least, with an almost completely acoustic feel to it, and Stuart makes no attempts what­soever to distance himself from his preferred «vulnerable sissy kid» image. But then, why should he? All of his tough bully classmates were already probably busy unloading crates in Glasgow Harbour, while he, the back seat loner, was busy reaping fame, if not necessa­rily fortune to go along with it.

 

The ten songs recorded here are very even, melody-wise, and never seriously stray from the re­cipés bequested by Rubber Soul-era Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, and their peers. All of them, as could be expected, generate pretty much the same mood, although Murdoch himself is not able to put a finger on it in his lyrics. The chorus of ʽThe Boy Done Wrong Againʼ tries to summarize the mood — "All I wanted was to sing the saddest song / And if you would sing along / I will be happy now" — but «sadness» is not the permeating state on the album: the melodies are too lively for that, and the vocals too bright. «Phlegmatic tenderness» is more like it: the protagonist of If You're Feeling Sinister is essentially that shy, socially inept, but ultimately kind and affectionate kid in the class who says "I wanna be friends with you" to his object of affection and hands her a flower, instead of trying to take a peek under the skirt or something. Oh he's all grown up now, but he hasn't changed much.

 

He does see himself fit for a major statement or two. The title track is not only the longest song on here, taking nearly a minute of fast-paced strum and piano tuning to get to the first verse and adding playground noises to the background for importance' sake, but it is also the most moralis­tic one — an anti-religious rant, essentially, where the man not only takes up arms against the Catholic Church, but goes as far as to describe a girl as being "into S&M and Bible studies / Not everyone's cup of tea, she would admit to me". The rant is fairly blunt, culminating in the «offen­sive» final refrain ("If you are feeling sinister / Go off and see a minister / Chances are you'll probably feel better / If you stayed and played with yourself") which Murdoch mumbles rather incoherently (what if a priest were passing by?) — but if you are not paying too much attention to the lyrics, you will probably not even get the «ranting» in the first place, so innocent and fleeting and cuddly is this perky little folk dance.

 

The overall similarity of the moods and the melodies almost seems to drive the reviewer like a cattle prod into concentrating on the lyrics — but the lyrics mostly just serve the moods anyway, except for a misguided line on two (ʽLike Dylan In The Moviesʼ is a particularly unlucky title: the refrain goes "If they follow you, don't look back / Like Dylan in the movies", but although it is nice to know that Murdoch is well educated on certain elements of Sixties' pop culture, there is nothing else that would be «Dylanish» about this song, or this musical approach in general — now Donovan, that might have been a much better connection, not to mention that Donovan was also captured in Don't Look Back, so why not just sing "like Donovan in the movies" instead? Oh well, never mind). Okay, here is one more example: "At the final moment, I cried / I always cry at endings". Satisfied? Moving on now.

 

Actually, there is nowhere left to move: individual descriptions of these songs would make no sense, because their melodic underbelly is quite traditional and their atmospheric value is so uni­form. But even if you do not easily memorize the melodies, it would be hard to ignore the seduc­tiveness — with its tasteful, humble, sensual combination of acoustic guitars, pianos, and strings, Murdoch's «chamber folk-pop», having filtered out those few «rockier» elements the boys were uncomfortable with on Tigermilk, reaches its highest level of perfection here. Later albums could be just as strong, or even contain better songs every once in a while, but this is where the formula sets in place, so I guess we shouldn't be too angry at Pitchfork reviewers or anybody else for ma­king their pick — after all, if you only want to get one Belle & Sebastian album, you might just as well follow my thumbs up, too, and get this one, and if you want to get more than one Belle & Sebastian album, you probably read Byron and Shelley in the evenings by candlelight, and have no further need for these reviews (especially since, sooner or later, they are inevitably bound to get more and more sarcastic).

 

THE BOY WITH THE ARAB STRAP (1998)

 

1) It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career; 2) Sleep The Clock Around; 3) Is It Wicked Not To Care?; 4) Ease Your Feet In The Sea; 5) A Summer Wasting; 6) Seymour Stein; 7) A Space Boy Dream; 8) Dirty Dream Number Two; 9) The Boy With The Arab Strap; 10) Chickfactor; 11) Simple Things; 12) The Rollercoaster Ride.

 

The biggest change here is that our «Sebastian» has finally promoted cellist Isobel Campbell to the official status of «Belle» — not only does she sing more background vocals here than ever before, she even gets a lead one (ʽIs It Wicked Not To Care?ʼ), and, although her frail girlish singing is nowhere near unique in the huge world of broken indie hearts, it still provides a perfect counterpart for Murdoch's tales of tender sorrow. Basically, this means that the «wimpiness quo­tient» has been raised one more level, so if you felt even a little uncomfortable about flinging the heartgates wide open for Feeling Sinister, you would be well advised to steer clear of the sequel, as it is even more of a celebration of universal sadness-lite.

 

The music largely remains the same, a healthy, but generally unimpressive mix of nick-drakisms, paul-simonisms, and an occasional ray-daviesism or two, with hardly a single particularly memo­rable guitar, cello, or organ line despite those three instruments being present on almost every track. Volume levels are equally steady, although ʽDirty Dream Number Twoʼ unexpectedly kicks in with a firm punch midway through — lively drums, staccato electric chords, soaring rather than crawling strings, anthemic brass, almost as if a Phil Spector had surreptitiously repla­ced Tony Doogan in the producer chair for a bit. But that's just one song, most likely stuck in the middle with the aim of waking you up for the second half in case your nervous system happened to be firmly lulled by the first seven tunes.

 

Meanwhile, Murdoch's lyrics are getting more and more sophisticated: from masochistic self-analysis he now ventures forward into painting abstractionist pictures of various real and ima­ginary members of Glasgow society, all of them eventually reduced to a single denominator at the end of the show: "Hey people, looking out the window at the city below / Hey people, looking out the window, you'll be gone tomorrow" (ʽThe Rollercoaster Rideʼ). The texts are not at all hateful, and the singing is always pretty, but there really is a lot of misanthropy here — leave it to the shushed, shunned, bullied «not-like-everybody-else» kid to be really preoccupied with the vanity and the uselessness and the transience of it all. The only reason why the kid does not commit or even propagate suicide is because it's just as vain and useless as everything else.

 

ʽIt Could Have Been A Brilliant Careerʼ greets us with the cheery accappella line "he had a stroke at the age of 24", as Murdoch launches into a strange tale of phoney artists and fake identities. ʽSleep The Clock Aroundʼ introduces quasi-psychedelic «electronic chimes» — I have no idea what for, maybe to stress the lack of importance of one's personal hustle-bustle in the face of eter­nity or something like that: in any case, the basic message of the song is "look at yourself, you're not much use to anyone". ʽEase Your Feet In The Seaʼ is a perfect story of a romance from which the romancer derives no pleasure whatsoever — there ain't no «love» here as such, only "trouble that we've used to know" which "will stay with us till we get old, will stay with us till somebody decides to go". (This is where one is usually supposed to make jokes about 30-year old virgins, but I couldn't think of a good one, and bad jokes about virgins tend to be really bad). And it goes on like that until the very end.

 

The only weird thing here that deserves further comment is the album's title — first and foremost, a reference to Arab Strap, Murdoch's Scottish competition led by Aidan Moffat, a band that had all the atmospherics and depression of Belle & Sebastian without their pop sensibilities, but then also, of course, a figurative reference to the sexual device after which that band was named. The song itself is Murdoch at his «Kinksiest», engineering the album's most upbeat, quasi-martial melody and cramming in the largest amount of social comment, not forgetting even the Asian minicab driver "with his racist clientele", but he keeps coming back, over and over again, to the «arab strap» idea (rumor has it that Moffat felt quite uncomfortable about the song, as one of its interpretations is that the protagonist actually needs an arab strap to... oh, never mind). In any case, it is one of those enigmas that is just about equally likely to contain a whole lot of deep sense or not to have any sense at all. Maybe it's just one of those Freudian things that manifest themselves so frequently in artistic work done by shushed, bullied, and reclusive kids.

 

Anyway, just like the first two albums, The Boy With The Arab Strap is very pleasant listening, but falls short on great melodies and is much better appreciated as just another radiation outburst of Murdoch's sensitive-sensible personality. Had it leaned just a tad more in the «whiny» direc­tion, I would have hated it, but, fortunately, Murdoch still keeps light on his feet and refuses to take those troubles too seriously — the message is not just a boring «life sucks», but rather a more philosophical «life sucks, but so what? you don't want to say you expected something else, did you? just relax and enjoy all the sucking». Come to think of it, maybe that's what the «arab strap» is an allegory of, in the end. A mild thumbs up overall, but only for those who love the very idea of a «whole being larger than the sum of its parts», because, well, the «parts» are really not all that impressive — in particular, Murdoch's steadfast refusal to grow as a musician begins to get a little irritating; it is exactly this attitude that breeds hundreds of little Conor Obersts all around the world and, ultimately, might spell out a death sentence for art as we know it.

 

FOLD YOUR HANDS CHILD, YOU WALK LIKE A PEASANT (2000)

 

1) I Fought In A War; 2) The Model; 3) Beyond The Sunrise; 4) Waiting For The Moon To Rise; 5) Don't Leave The Light On Baby; 6) The Wrong Girl; 7) The Chalet Lines; 8) Nice Day For A Sulk; 9) Women's Realm; 10) Family Tree; 11) There's Too Much Love.

 

If the title «music in a doll's house» hadn't already been occupied by Family thirty years earlier, it would have suited Belle and Sebastian's fourth studio LP much better than this overlong and ra­ther politically incorrect moniker. Because if you thought that the band's earliest records were the very definition of the term «mellow», you'd be downright wrong, or, at least, seriously off the mark. In a strong effort to beat their own record, the band has doubled the stakes, and now you are listening to music of such tender frailty that you feel like being inside a cleanroom.

 

The effect is achieved not only by giving ever more and more vocal parts to the ladies of the band (Sarah Martin is now singing lead along with Isobel Campbell), but also by giving more and more space to instruments other than the guitar — harpsichords, pianos, flutes, strings, anything that works towards putting the «chamber» back in «chamber pop». Everything is laid on in very thin layers, though, usually with one dominant instrument playing some hyper-tender melo­dy with a «nursery» or pastoral flair and the others gradually rallying behind the leader to add some wispy angelic atmosphere. In other words, everything so lovely you could almost puke, that is, if you ever decided to take a look at this «from the outside» — in reality, unless you are a heavy rocker who got here through some traumatic accident, you will most probably be caught up in the autistic trance and cuddling your inner child within minutes.

 

Even when Isobel Campbell sings that "I'd rather be fat than be confused / Than be me in a cage / With a bottle of rage / And a family like the mafia" (ʽFamily Treeʼ), she seems to be doing so wi­thin the confines of some alternate universe where personal conflicts are conducted in whispers and teen angst is always internalized rather than flashed at innocent bystanders. From a song like that — piano, flute, and softer-than-silk, cuddly-hushy little girl vocals — you'd rather expect an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of message than one of disappointment, disillusionment, and angry self-seclusion. When she adds that "they threw me out of school / 'Cause I swore at all the tea­chers", well, this has to be heard to be disbelieved.

 

Overall, the songs are at the same level of consistency as they used to be — maybe even with a slight increase in the overall number of hooks, because their exploration of the possibilities of various instruments seems like a big step up from the primarily acoustic guitar-based nature of what used to be. I really enjoy the harpsichord/piano/strings combination on ʽThe Modelʼ; the eerie electric piano of ʽDon't Leave The Light On, Babyʼ (a little reminiscent of Joni Mitchell's ʽWoodstockʼ and other such tunes by Murdoch's singer-songwriting idols — nothing like a tre­moloed Wurlitzer to convey a feeling of bottomless depth); the minimalistic piano/cello duet on ʽThe Chalet Linesʼ; the pretty pop violin melody of ʽWomen's Realmʼ, and other little things that give each of the songs here plenty of individuality.

 

That said, it won't be much of an understatement to say that, even if they have found some mode­rately new ways to express their feelings, the feelings themselves stay absolutely the same — the song title ʽNice Day For A Sulkʼ summarizing them perfectly, as the song itself is a «nice» piece of piano art-pop that does little other than sulk, sulk, sulk. It borrows a few of its musical moves from Kinks songs such as ʽAutumn Almanacʼ, but Ray Davies could never have written anything like this — melancholia is one thing, but this whole «dazed and stupefied» attitude would have been too much for ol' Ray. Sooner or later, you'd expect that guy to snap and throw out a ʽDead End Streetʼ or a ʽBrainwashedʼ, whereas Murdoch seems to have that particular pathway amputa­ted at birth. Ironically, the last song begins with the words "I could hang about and burn my fin­gers / I've been hanging out there waiting for something to start" — hey, so have we, and from an overall point of view, we have spent forty minutes waiting in vain. (Not that we haven't been warned or anything.)

 

The most energetic song here is ʽI Fought In A Warʼ: a little faster than the rest, slightly anthe­mic and even «pretentious» (inasmuch as Murdoch did not actually fight in no wars, so don't pass this around to actual veterans unless they have a good ear for creative metaphor), but, unfortunately, it does not move me all that much — maybe because, being arranged as a rhythm-heavy, dynami­cally built-up «folk-rock» song, it is still too cuddly, and lacks a crucial something, whatever that crucial something might be. Maybe a different vocal approach, a stronger singer? An electric gui­tar solo? The possibility to go an octave higher in the climax? I know what a «musical dream» is, and I have some understanding of anthems, but the song never seems to make up its mind whe­ther it wants to be a dream or an anthem, and a «dreamy anthem», want it or not, is an oxymoron. Or, rather, as the song shows, you can try to make one, but it has every chance to fall on deaf ears (mine) that would rather go for something more straightforward.

 

That was just a single example of many tiny problems that constantly seem to accompany Mur­doch's music, along with equally tiny victories. They shouldn't prevent me from issuing another thumbs up in a never-ending series, though, because as long as the formula is being faithfully preserved, it has about as many chances of failure as an AC/DC album.

 

STORYTELLING (2002)

 

1) Fiction; 2) Freak; 3) Dialogue: Conan, Early Letterman; 4) Fuck This Shit; 5) Night Walk; 6) Dialogue: Jersey's Where It's At; 7) Black And White Unite; 8) Consuelo; 9) Dialogue: Toby; 10) Storytelling; 11) Dialogue: Class Rank; 12) I Don't Want To Play Football; 13) Consuelo Leaving; 14) Wandering Alone; 15) Dialogue: Mandingo Cliche; 16) Scooby Driver; 17) Fiction Reprise; 18) Big John Shaft.

 

Although this album is essentially a side project, it does have its own importance in the Belle & Sebastian story. Formally, this is a soundtrack for a movie of the same name by US indie director Todd Solondz — not at all an unexpected development, as indie cinema and indie pop are so na­turally tied in together with the ubiquitous «outcast loser» mentality. However, due to various is­sues of personal communication as well as forced edits to the final version of the movie, most of the actual music composed for the project was never heard in the theater. So, big deal, Murdoch and Co. just went ahead and released all of it as a separate album, together with isolated frag­ments of movie dialog for «authenticity».

 

The occasional advantage of such an album is that soundtracks tend to be partially or mostly ins­trumental, and this makes it easier to assess the «musicality» of the artist without it getting too obscured by the frontman's personality. No matter how talented, or untalented, the members of Belle & Sebastian may be in the composing department, most of the songs were completely domi­nated by Murdoch's personal charisma. Here, the singing is kept to a minimum, and it helps answer the question — is the «Belle & Sebastian» brand actually viable when stripped of its sen­timental tales of highland loneliness?

 

And the answer is an immediate «yes», on the strength of the album's opening track: the piano theme to ʽFictionʼ, simple and unassuming as it is, is instantaneously charming, memorable, and completely true to the Belle & Sebastian ethical code without a single spoken word — fragile, delicate, tasteful, and friendly. For admirers, other than the reprise at the end of the album, there is also a special «night version» of the same theme (ʽNight Walkʼ), played at higher octaves and sending out a sharper contrast with the dark bassline. It may not be a phenomenal composing feat, but, well, at least it is a more complex bit of piano phrasing than most of Paul McCartney's feats, and every bit as catchy.

 

The ʽFictionʼ theme may be the best there is on the record (it ain't repeated thrice for nothing), but most of the other melodies have their own charm as well. ʽFreakʼ is an attractive shadowy mix of minimalist acoustic guitar, piano, Mellotron, and «ghost vocals»; ʽFuck This Shitʼ, de­fying its title, is a little romantic harmonica-driven ditty (the harmonica does keep repeating a three-note sequence that intonationally mimicks the title, though); and ʽConsueloʼ cleverly syn­the­sizes Spanish-style trumpet with «Celtic» harp.

 

Of the vocal numbers, ʽScooby Driverʼ finds the band in quite an unusual mood — playing a fast, almost raunchy Sixties-style pop-rocker, invading the turf of The Apples In Stereo or some other such band in full confidence (too bad it's only a minute-long snippet); but the title track is also upbeat, alternating friendly male / female vocals, pianos, flutes, and trombones in a Kinks-deri­ved way that was only hinted at on Fold Your Hands, but never became the norm for that album; and ʽI Don't Want To Play Footballʼ is a brief solo Murdoch-and-the-piano piece that is so inten­tionally «wimpy» it could just as well be upgraded to the state of the National Belle-And-Sebas­tian Fan Club Anthem: "I'd rather play a different sort of game / The girls are just as good as boys at playing". (One can only imagine how the poor boy must have suffered in school — this is a fifty-seven second snippet of his nerdy revenge).

 

The only full-length, fully-fledged vocal tune on the entire album is ʽBig John Shaftʼ, and it, too, shows a departure from the usual stylistics by being built around a funk-pop electric rhythm — which the band still dresses up in Christmasy pianos and strings, so as, God forbid, not to invite any accusations of a «transition to a roughness of sound». And yet, everything shows that there is some sort of transition on here — that they took up the offer, among other things, in order to get try and get themselves out of the self-imposed stylistic rut. And on here at least, the transition works: short and snippety as the record is, it is pleasantly diverse and dynamic without having to sacrifice any part of the band's artistic credo. Thumbs up, and for those in doubt, the only nega­tive side effects of the album's «soundtrack» status are (a) its shortness (some of the snippets could have easily been promoted to full-length songs) and (b) the tiny bits of dialog that are in­comprehensible without the movie and do not really make that much of a difference. Without them, the album's even shorter — but still a worthy addition to the catalog.

 

DEAR CATASTROPHE WAITRESS (2003)

 

1) Step Into My Office, Baby; 2) Dear Catastrophe Waitress; 3) If She Wants Me; 4) Piazza, New York Catcher; 5) Asleep On A Sun Beam; 6) I'm A Cuckoo; 7) You Don't Send Me; 8) Wrapped Up; 9) Lord Anthony; 10) If You Find Yourself Caught In Love; 11) Roy Walker; 12) Stay Loose.

 

Finally, Murdoch must have realized that the whole «acoustic-sulk-in-the-corner» formula had been pushed as pushingly pushy as it could be pushed — one inch more and Belle And Sebastian would have crossed the border into self-parody, or, at least, «the eternal stereotype». So what's a poor indie boy to do in such an occasion? Call Trevor Horn to the rescue, and let him produce a different album for you — one that would not only revert the band to their upbeat pop roots of Tigermilk, but raise a whole new tree out of them.

 

Essentially, Dear Catastrophe Waitress serves as a «reboot» for the B&S franchise. From the opening martial punch, rousing flutes and trumpets of ʽStep Into My Officeʼ, you know that this time, Murdoch is not just going to repeat himself, and by the time the screechy, tortured twin elec­tric guitars of ʽStay Looseʼ, reminiscent of a Neil Young circa 1969, finally fade away into the background, the new face of the band is fully fleshed out, and it's a cool new face. I only wish the melodies were a little stronger, because the utterly wonderful sound that they have going on here certainly deserves to be matched with a Ray Davies or Paul McCartney composing genius. Then again, Murdoch may not hit those kinds of highs, but at least he is always reliable.

 

The spiritual essence, of course, remains the same: really, we are still dealing with the same little boy sulking in the corner, except that he is now bored with standing, and does a little tap-dance or even a little rock'n'roll from time to time. He is also willing to share his love of «young and inno­cent days» with us more than any time before — for instance, ʽIf She Wants Meʼ, with its funky ringing guitars and tender-joyful falsettos, is pretty much an homage to Smokey Robinson, soun­ding like a long-lost Miracles outtake. But most of the other songs, no matter how much I listen to them, sound heavily influenced by all sorts of pop, folk, and blues bands of the past rather than simply ripping them off, much to Murdoch's honor.

 

Unbelievable, I know, but «diversity» is the word of the day: even though the band completely avoids «heavy» guitar tones and atmospheres, and does not strive to get too far from folk / pop / R&B territory (e. g. into free-form jazz or Indian music or Balkan dancing), the overall combina­tions of tempos, instruments, dynamic developments far surpass anything they had previously of­fered us. The «classic» Belle & Sebastian sound and style of the previous albums is not aban­doned completely: in particular, ʽLord Anthonyʼ (about a bullied school transvestite, what else?) is a traditionally sparsely arranged morose affair. But now it is only one in a diverse gallery of all sorts of different affairs.

 

One of the key lyrical messages may be found on the cute jazz-pop ditty ʽYou Send Meʼ, which begins with Murdoch non-grieving over yet another broken relationship and then proceeds to state that "every sound is tame, every group the bleedin' same / It would make you mad / What happened to the sounds that left you lying on the floor / Laughing, crying, jumping, singing / Listen honey, there is nothing you can say to astound me / Listen honey, there is nothing you can do to offend me / You don't send me anymore". A fairly fitting judgement for the 2000s, and al­most curiously clashing with the attempt to generate so many different sounds on this album — but maybe it does mean that Murdoch is desperately trying to restore the brilliant idealism of old, and, in bringing back all those values of the Beatles / Kinks / Motown / Big Star era, lend a helping hand in triggering some sort of creative Renaissance. Who knows? Behind that soft, un­pretentious facade there is certainly a huge load of ambition.

 

On the other hand, it is also a case of being too smart for his own good — something that rarely, if ever, happened to the innocent young fools back in the Sixties. ʽIf You Find Yourself Caught In Loveʼ is a wonderfully arranged upbeat tune, pianos, electric guitars, orchestration and all — but it is more of a brain-teasing philosophical treatise than a heart-tugging pop tune; most of the song's duration is really spent trying to figure out whether Stuart is being serious when he goes "If you find yourself caught in love / Say a prayer to the man above" or if it is simply a send-up of cheap religious advisers (the latter is more likely, given that Belle & Sebastian had never yet been suspected of deep religious feelings, but then it's never too late, really, to be born again, and besides, this is symbolic poetry — «the man above» could be The Highlander for all we know). No chorus, no meticulously concocted melodic hook — as pretty as the sound is, it is not highly likely to «leave you lying on the floor».

 

On the whole, not giving the record a thumbs up would be a doggone shame — it has such a perfect flow, with all the instruments played in such loving and affecting ways, that the charm is bound to hold from first to last second. If the melodies refuse to stay with you (which may not be the case — might just be a problem of my own perception), the warm memories most likely will, a good enough cause to return to the album later and try again. And Murdoch's singer-songwriter-outcast-loner-idealist personality is on top of it all, unsullied by Trevor Horn's production one bit — which should placate most of those who suspect a «sellout», as well as irritate those who like their nostalgic pop bereft of too much personal sentiment. (For the record, female lead vocals this time around are restricted to just one Sarah Martin lead on ʽAsleep On A Sun Beamʼ — apparent­ly, the girls were given the directive to remain silent as part of the overall plan to demolish the flimsy-cozy «doll's house» of Fold Your Hands. Not that Murdoch ever was a particularly «mas­culine» singer, but at least he has the ability to sing with a tougher-than-china voice).

 

THE LIFE PURSUIT (2006)

 

1) Act Of The Apostle; 2) Another Sunny Day; 3) White Collar Boy; 4) The Blues Are Still Blue; 5) Dress Up In You; 6) Sukie In The Graveyard; 7) We Are The Sleepyheads; 8) Song For Sunshine; 9) Funny Little Frog; 10) To Be Myself Completely; 11) Act Of The Apostle II; 12) For The Price Of A Cup Of Tea; 13) Mornington Crescent.

 

Dear Catastrophe Waitress was so unexpectedly fresh, attractive, and intelligent, that it was only too natural to try the same formula at least one more time. For production, Murdoch turned from Trevor Horn to Tony Hoffer, previously known for producing Supergrass and working as mixing engineer on several of Beck's records — but the particular choice probably does not mat­ter as much as the fact that Trevor Horn's shadow still lurks behind, encouraging Murdoch to add more colors and rhythmic drive to the songs.

 

To the melodies, that is, but not to the lyrics. Murdoch's agenda is now perfectly clear: his world­view has not changed a single bit, but now he is delivering his bitter lambasting of random stereo­types to «happy» melodies rather than «sad» ones, and, whaddaya know, this turns out to be even more effective, or, at least, less predictable and therefore more impressive than it used to. Be­gin with the beginning: The Life Pursuit — great title for an optimistic, hope-inspiring, life-as­ser­ting record. Then it turns out that the three faces on the album sleeve look a little suspicious: lack of smiles and an overall worried / puzzled fa­cial ex­pression from all three does not exactly agree with the idea of «pursuing life».

 

Then you hear the songs, and waves of bright-pop joyfulness start splashing all around, and sure enough, this is the mellow, but energetic sound of a genuine life pursuit. How could anyone feel anything but warmth and happiness when the Kinks-style riffage of ʽThe Blues Will Be Blueʼ invades the room, and your foot starts a-tappin' and your lips start a-chantin'? Then, after a while, only after you have already fallen in love with the song's lilting melody, you actually start a-thinkin' about what it is that you're chanting — and what you're chanting is a song about how everybody that surrounds you is either a poseur, a hypocrite, or an idiot, how the realization of this simple truth succeeds in driving you crazy, and how the only thing that is permanent is a sense of deep shit. Happy singalong, brother.

 

Naturally, Murdoch did not invent this style of doing business and, in fact, the Kinks connection is now stronger than ever in this respect as well: I do not know how well acquainted Ray Davies is with the oeuvres of Belle & Sebastian, but I am fairly sure that The Life Pursuit is the one al­bum in their catalog with which he might feel a special bond. Nevertheless, Murdoch is doing this in a manner that is fairly appropriate for 2006, much as Ray sang his happy songs about misery in a manner that was all the rage in 1966, and, most importantly, he is doing this better than any­body else in 2006. Years of experience wear out some artists, but Stuart's microgenius has aged well, and now he is cutting cool tune after cool tune — ʽThe Bluesʼ is an obvious highlight ("I left my lady in the launderette..." might just be this band's catchiest single chorus ever), but so is the funky, organ / fuzz bass-driven ʽSukie In The Graveyardʼ, or the lightly psychedelic, cloud-hopping ʽWe Are The Sleepyheadsʼ with its echoey «child angel choir» harmonies, or the brass-heavy ʽFunny Little Frogʼ, a sarcastic sendup of unconditional love whose main hook consists of wondering how the hell can Stuart forcefully make "know it", "poet", "court", and "throat" rhyme with each other, all four of them, and get away with it.

 

The most «anthemic» song is saved for next-to-last: ʽFor The Price Of A Cup Of Teaʼ has a murkier, less easily decodable, but just as worriesome message as the rest of them, and it is an absolute blast of syncopated pop perfection — the contrast between the choral declamation of the first line and Murdoch's thin, subtle counterstrike of the second does not just stick in the head, it is almost inspirational, despite the fact that what you are actually getting for the price of a cup of tea is "a line of coke", and that's just the beginning of the story. But it does not finish off the al­bum: the softer, longer, more pensive ʽMornington Crescentʼ does, a mildly haunting ballad that ends with faintly pronounced words that are all too easy to neglect but are, in fact, horrifying: "The possibilities suggest themselves to me... we're a little too free". Bingo, the kid finally hits upon the correct diagnosis. No wonder this music is so damn good — when you know what the problem is, it's all too easy to convert it into solid art.

 

I have not mentioned neither the ballads nor the hard rockers so far, of which there are several (ʽAct Of The Apostleʼ and ʽWhite Collar Boyʼ respectively illustrating both categories), but this is not where its major musical muscle seems to reside — the major muscle are the upbeat pop songs, since it is them that provide the maximum contrast between the words and the music, and where there's more contrast, there's more strife, more thrill, more Life Pursuit. Is this an improve­ment over Dear Catastrophe Waitress? Not necessarily: although the high points may be a little bit high­er, the overall consistency is about the same level. But it seems to show more confidence and self-assurance, and, above all, understanding of the fact that when you whine through laugh­ter, it is sometimes liable to produce more effect than when you whine through whining. In any case, this is clearly yet another thumbs up; and particular kudos for the boldness with which Stuart comes out to say what he has to say, much of which would be ideologically unacceptable for the average indie kid — which just goes to show that Murdoch, of all people, has managed to outgrow the indie kid complex, and step into a more exquisite, if also provocative, pair of shoes.

 

WRITE ABOUT LOVE (2010)

 

1) I Didn't See It Coming; 2) Come On Sister; 3) Calculating Bimbo; 4) I Want The World To Stop; 5) Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John; 6) Write About Love; 7) I'm Not Living In The Real World; 8) The Ghost Of Rockschool; 9) Read The Blessed Pages; 10) I Can See Your Future; 11) Sunday's Pretty Icons.

 

Like all Belle & Sebastian albums, and especially like those Belle & Sebastian albums where Murdoch's melancholic personality is not so overreaching that it eventually gets on your nerves, Write About Love is immediately likeable; so likeable that most people have probably formed their comfy opinions about it just by looking at the by-now traditional color palette and typescript of the album sleeve. In terms of general curve, though, I find this a relative disappointment after the double sunshine-through-tears pop shot of Dear Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pur­suit. It is just as easy to like, yes, but not as easy to get into on a deeper level, and, unlike its pre­decessors, Write About Love seems to suffer quite a bit from indie clichés.

 

The band has once again enlisted Tony Hoffer as producer, but this time production values are notably different — Murdoch retains the fully-arranged pop gloss of the previous records, yet strives to bring it up to date with more «contemporary» standards. Already the first twenty se­conds of ʽI Didn't See It Comingʼ arouse suspicion: a wispy electronic cloud of noise, expectable, perhaps, from any neo-psychedelic artist, but since when have Belle & Sebastian ever expressed a penchant for trippy electronics? The electronics are then joined by some decidedly modernistic beats (I'd almost say they were pre-programmed, but maybe Colburn had finally graduated from the Human Metronome school); a distant, echoey lead vocal by Sarah Martin; and, eventually, a series of synth loops and solos that have no function, as far as I can tell, other than stating: "No, no, you don't get it — there's nothing we actually have against being hip with today's kids, we just wanted to put it off until everybody were back in the synthesizer business!"

 

Like Apples In Stereo, for instance. The difference is, somehow, that Apples In Stereo, with the release of New Magnetic Wonder, managed to make their music more interesting by incorpora­ting electronic elements, as this allowed them a sort of «sprawl» they could never afford before. Murdoch, unfortunately, has incorporated those elements without accompanying them by any sig­nificant musical shifts. It used to be Belle & Sebastian, now it's «Belle & Sebastian with synths». The retro vibe is canceled (unless, like some critics, you prefer to think of it as a replacement of the Seventies' retro vibe by the Eighties' retro vibe), and, more importantly and painfully, much of the Belle & Sebastian vibe has been canceled, too. If ever you need to show to some friend what it is that makes Murdoch such a standout artist, please do not even think about enticing the victim with Write About Love — it is about as indicative of Murdoch's personality as Tunnel Of Love is of Bruce Springsteen's, to quote a random example.

 

Which is not to say the songs are bad or anything. Most of them are okay, the kind of sweet, smooth, edgeless indie pop you hear in mainstream music stores or youth cafés. They have vocal hooks, sometimes they have sympathetic instrumental passages as well. But the essence of the album is exemplified by the ballad ʽLittle Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet Jonesʼ, a duet between Mur­doch and invited guest star Norah Jones: tender, bitter, lite-ly depressed, gallantly dressed in acoustic and electric guitars and several layers of keyboards (organs rather than synths) — and sleepwalking all the way, right down to the final "what a waste, I could've been your friend", de­livered with all the obligatory husky aspiration ("...your frie-HH-ee-HH-ee-HH-ee-HHnd-HH!") you'd expect not just from Norah Jones, but from any song in this particular style. For more of the same, check ʽCalculating Bimboʼ, equally tender and equally yawny.

 

You know something's wrong when the «standout» track on the album turns out to be something as atypical as a Stevie Jackson lead vocal on ʽI'm Not Living In The Real Worldʼ, which sounds like a tribute to Manfred Mann with its harmonies, singalong choruses, and general exuberance. And even so, it is hardly one of the better tracks on the album — whether it stands out for good or for bad is quite debatable. Then again, I have no idea what those «better» tracks would actually be. ʽI Want The World To Stopʼ? Catchy, but too A-Ha-ish. I'd rather take Morten Harket in per­son than an unintentional Scottish copy. ʽI Can See Your Futureʼ? Those trombones have too much of a generic mariachi flavor, Sarah Martin does a fairly cringeworthy arranging job. Call me too picky, but with the possible exception of that first track, whose chorus hook ("but we don't have the money...") I cannot help but find stirring, there is not a single song on here I'd vote for when it comes to assembling the Golden Fund.

 

So, if taken on its own, Write About Love is nice enough, but in the overall context, it is nothing short of an embarrassing disaster. Of course, change is always risky. When Murdoch decided it was time for a change on Dear Catastrophe Waitress, he took a gamble and hit the jackpot — the combination of bitter-sneery lyrics with sunshine pop riffs and rhythms worked like a charm. Now the bell of change has struck again, and by deciding to «modernize», the man has simply capsized the ship, drowning the message and blandifying the music to nothingness. As of 2010, this is the last album of original Belle & Sebastian material released so far; we may only hope that the bell of change will ring again for Murdoch before the decade is out. In the meantime, let us hope this thumbs down exerts its rightful voodoo effect on the man.

 

GIRLS IN PEACETIME WANT TO DANCE (2015)

 

1) Nobody's Empire; 2) Allie; 3) The Party Line; 4) The Power Of Three; 5) The Cat With The Cream; 6) Enter Sylvia Plath; 7) The Everlasting Muse; 8) Perfect Couples; 9) Ever Had A Little Faith; 10) Play For Today; 11) The Book Of You; 12) Today.

 

The waiting period between Write About Love and its follow-up has been the longest so far in the history of Belle & Sebastian — not surprisingly, since slowing down with age is a natural thing on the pop/rock scene; but you might actually wish that those five years had been more beneficial to the evolution of the Belle & Sebastian sound. As it is, Girls In Peacetime is not a renouncement of the things that went wrong on Write About Love, but rather their smooth, lo­gical continuation, as we see Murdoch sink deeper and deeper into the world of electronics, dance beats, and harmless, friendly blandness.

 

Okay, that sounds a little too harsh — after all, harmlessness and friendliness have always been the band's primary trademark, and few tasks are more daunting than determining which particular Belle & Sebastian song is «bland» and which one is «surreptitiously haunting». But let us deal with the electronics first. As I listen to formally «club-oriented» tracks like ʽThe Party Lineʼ, ʽEnter Sylvia Plathʼ, or ʽPlay For Todayʼ (the latter two stretched out to seven minutes each, like all well-behaving disco numbers should), I have no idea what this approach is supposed to mean. Is it, perhaps, some sort of tricky self-centered psychotherapy? Had somebody recommended to Stuart that he make his music more «dance-friendly» in order to cure himself of introvert shyness? Is it symbolic — an implicit sign to his audience that the man cannot be pigeonholed, and that there are no specific musical forms to which his world-weary melancholy must be closely tied at all costs? Is it trendy — «Radiohead commanded us all to do electronics long ago, because guitar-based music is on its way out (again)?» Whatever it is, it don't work. It didn't work with Arcade Fire when they did Reflektor, and it don't work here.

 

The weird thing about it is, ʽThe Party Lineʼ is one of the catchiest songs Murdoch has written in a long, long time. It is so not him, from a technical standpoint, but it is well crafted, one of those disco tunes so full of self-irony that people will be forced into body language communication whether or not they realize that the lyrics are making fun of them. He should have donated it to Franz Ferdinand, though, or to Madonna if she would have it. ʽEnter Sylvia Plathʼ, as the title suggests, is a song about suicide set to a Pet Shop Boys-style rhythm track — seven minutes of planting nasty subliminal mes­sages into the head of an unsuspecting dance victim; the only saving grace is that this one seems to lack any traces of a catchy chorus whatsoever, so not much will hopefully be imprinted.

 

Best of the lot are Dum Dum Girl Dee Dee Penny's vocals on ʽPlay For Todayʼ — for a moment out there, they made me forget about the dull electronic backup. The lyrics are just a tad too pre­tentiously clichéd for Murdoch's usually respectable level ("life is a rope, death is a myth, love is a fraud, it's misunderstood" — come on now, there must be more interesting words left in the English language, right?), but when it's Dee Dee's turn, she gets to coo this out in such a «sexy angel» tone as I have yet to hear on any of her Dum Dum Girls songs I've heard. Well, at least it is good to know that a shy guy like Murdoch can bring out the best in some people.

 

Electronics aside, there's quite a few «traditional» B&S songs here as well — in fact, the album is almost uncomfortably long, mainly due to the endless stretching out of the disco tunes, but also, I guess, because even if you do not put out an album in five years, you still write songs, and a mediocre songwriter like Murdoch does not have to worry too much about sifting the exciting from the bland. Thus, strong tunes like the opening ʽNobody's Empireʼ, the Paul Simon-esque ʽAllieʼ, and the consolatory ʽEver Had A Little Faithʼ are mixed with moodily pleasant waves of sentimen­tality (ʽThe Everlasting Museʼ) and semi-successful attempts at some sort of New Age-y effect (ʽThe Cat With The Creamʼ). Or, perhaps, with a little work of the mind you could turn these judgements inside out and come out with the exactly opposite impressions — it doesn't really matter. «Take some, leave some» will probably be the prevailing opinion here.

 

On the whole, now that I am making this decision at the last moment, it would be silly to deny the album a thumbs up just because of its electronic coating. I have nothing against «dark dance music» (or I'd have to hate Depeche Mode and the like) — I just happen to think it should be left to professionals, not amateurs for whom it had never previously worked as a point of reference. On the other hand, this album does a better job of integrating the beats with Murdoch's persona­lity — the worst moments on Write About Love were accompanied with the thought of «this is not Belle & Sebastian I'm listening to here, this is a different entity — and these guys, of all people, have no artistic right to change into a different entity, so why am I even listening to this?» No such situation here: even ʽParty Lineʼ, as clumsy as it is, is yer trusty old Belle & Sebastian, forcing themselves to jump through a burning hoop for no clear reason. So, maybe their glory days are over and out, but as long as Murdoch has enough strength and personality left to press that «It's ME again!» button, let the music flow for all I care.

 

ADDENDA:

 

PUSH BARMAN TO OPEN OLD WOUNDS (1997-2001/2005)

 

CD I: 1) Dog On Wheels; 2) The State I Am In; 3) String Bean Jean; 4) Belle & Sebastian; 5) Lazy Line Painter Jane; 6) You Made Me Forget My Dreams; 7) A Century Of Elvis; 8) Photo Jenny; 9) A Century Of Fakers; 10) Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie; 11) Beautiful; 12) Put The Book Back On The Shelf/Songs For Children.

CD II: 1) This Is Just A Modern Rock Song; 2) I Know Where The Summer Goes; 3) The Gate; 4) Slow Graffiti; 5) Legal Man; 6) Judy Is A Dick Slap; 7) Winter Wooskie; 8) Jonathan David; 9) Take Your Carriage Clock And Shove It; 10) The Loneliness Of A Middle Distance Runner; 11) I'm Waking Up To Us; 12) I Love My Car; 13) Marx And Engels.

 

From an inevitably Beatlish perspective, this lengthy 2-CD retrospective is Belle & Sebastian's Past Masters Vol. 1: a compilation that does not add much to one's understanding of the band's essence if you already got all the regular LPs, but a quintessential artefact all the same if you are enough of a fan to want to own everything «important». The discs neatly and meticulously collect almost everything that Murdoch and Co. released in between the regular LPs: four EPs recorded and published in 1997-98 and three singles released in 2000-2001. In other words, the album ele­gantly reflects the first period of the band's existence — the «introspective folk-pop years», stop­ping right before the transition to the louder, more colorful pop-rock sound of Dear Catastrophe Waitress and Life Pursuit.

 

To own such a well-assembled collection is always pleasant for a reviewer, providing the oppor­tunity to avoid reviewing each little EP under its own title or ignoring them altogether — but it also makes life tough at the same time, since there is so much material here that picking out the highlights and striving not to forget to pat the «hidden gems» on the back can be a real headache. The problem is, Murdoch took as much care of and pride in his EPs and singles as everything else, and none of these songs could be described as «filler»: everything shows the same attention to detail, focus on taste, and lyrical insight as the best songs on Tigermilk and whatever followed. And just as well, at the same time, everything sounds «the same» — permeated with the mellow-morose vibe, pretty, smart, and relatively hookless.

 

So as not to get lost myself and not to lose anybody else in the process, I will offer a brief-run­down — listing each of the individual components of the retrospective and highlighting what looks like one potential highlight off each one. First on our list is Dog On Wheels, a four-song EP from May 1997, thematically linked to Tigermilk (both records even have the same Joanne Kenney on the photo, this time with a toy animal instead of a real one). The title track, with its unusually (for Murdoch) bluesy acoustic melody appeals to me on a special level, but «objective­ly» the EP is more notable for containing a song that is actually titled ʽBelle & Sebastianʼ — its lyrics finally providing the curious fans with an artistic motivation behind the choice of the band's name, rather than just the dry technical facts. Other than Murdoch singing about an octave higher than his normal range allows him without straining, it is quite a touching experience.

 

Next, we have Lazy Line Painter Jane, another 4-song EP where the highlight is clearly the title track, recorded in a church hall (too bad the organ employed is clearly not the church organ) as a duet between Murdoch and guest vocalist Monica Queen — a dense, fully arranged number ma­king good use of the echoey acoustics when it comes to the climactic crescendo, and sarcastically assassinating a «sexually liberated» protagonist along the way. The lyrics may be just a little too silly and a little too vile, but musically, the song is one of their more interesting productions of 1997, before the sonic ambitions were toned down once again.

 

Following this up with 3.. 6.. 9 Seconds Of Light, another EP where I was initially seduced by the fast-moving, wildly agitated ʽLe Pastie De La Bourgeoisieʼ, but eventually decided that it is trumped by ʽBeautifulʼ, which rolls along at a slower pace, leisurely takes its time to build up, and eventually unfurls into a majestic, but incredibly sad allegoric anthem to all the silly people, deluded by society and themselves, with strings, brass, organ, and vocal harmonies gracefully assembled together in one polyphonic lament. Again, this sort of arrangement is not at all typical of the band's early studio LPs, showing that Murdoch regarded LP expression and EP expression as two significantly different kinds of activity.

 

The fourth EP, This Is Just A Modern Rock Song, released late in 1998, does not particularly impress me with anything. Its title track drags on for seven minutes and mainly depends on its autobiographical flavor — beginning with an account of some of Stuart's girl relations and then going on to comment on the entire band ("we're four boys in corduroys, we're not terrific but we're competent"), name-dropping Dostoyevsky and ending with self-irony ("I count three, four and then we start to slow, because a song has got to stop somewhere"), but really, melodically the whole thing is too bit of a drag. Murdoch is a man of many talents, but it is not in his power to come up with his own ʽDesolation Rowʼ — his metabolism rate is too slow for that.

 

The second disc is almost completely devoted to the single format, and the songs there progres­sively keep sliding into smoother, more lethargic territory, although ʽLegal Manʼ is a psychedelic dance number, on the surface — retro-oriented at recapturing the «sunshine» of hippie happiness, under the surface — most likely, an ironic look at the ongoing revivalism of Sixties idealism, with its fairy chants of "L-O-V-E love, it's coming back, it's coming back" and appeals to the lis­tener to "get out of the city and into the sunshine". I do not think the song works at all — it is too dazed and melancholic to imitate stark raving happiness, and too stark ravingly happy to match the usual melancholic standards. Stuck somewhere in the middle with no particular place to go, and I'd rather listen to ʽJudy Is A Dick Slapʼ, which (thank God!) is actually an instrumental dri­ven by what sounds like a Moog solo (in the 2000s? Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson ahoy!).

 

Still, some of the B-sides have their little pings and clinks: ʽThe Loneliness Of A Middle Dis­tance Runnerʼ has a cool flanging effect on the guitar solo, and ʽI Love My Carʼ is quite a hila­rious martial-pop Kinkophile dream that also finds space to accommodate the Beach Boys, as "I love my car" eventually becomes "I love my Carl" and the verse is tolerantly concluded with the line "...I could even find it in my head to love Mike Love". Okay, so I admit that I always try to measure my feelings for Murdoch art without taking lyrics into consideration, but I also have to admit that the man has a good feel for phonetics, allowing sound similarity to lead him in all sorts of unpredictable directions — good bribery material for any writer with a linguistic background, that. On this note, I have no choice but to give the compilation a thumbs up and state that its first disc at least is a strong pretender to «best B&S album of the 20th century», whereas the second one, dispensing its highs and lows with a little less energy, still has its fair share of pleasures for the experienced fan. And yes, these are «old wounds» indeed, but enough of them have a significantly unusual shape for the experienced sadomasochist not to get bored.

 

THE BBC SESSIONS (1996-2001/2008)

 

CD I: 1) The State I Am In; 2) Like Dylan In The Movies; 3) Judy And The Dream Of Horses; 4) The Stars Of Track And Field; 5) I Could Be Dreaming; 6) Seymour Stein; 7) Lazy Jane; 8) Sleep The Clock Around; 9) Slow Graffitti; 10) Wrong Love; 11) Shoot The Sexual Athlete; 12) The Magic Of A Kind Word; 13) Nothing In The Silence; 14) (My Girl's Got) Miraculous Technique.

CD II: 1) Here Comes The Sun; 2) There's Too Much Love; 3) The Magic Of A Kind Word; 4) Me And The Major; 5) Wandering Alone; 6) The Model; 7) I'm Waiting For The Man; 8) The Boy With The Arab Strap; 9) The Wrong Girl; 10) Dirty Dream #2; 11) Boys Are Back In Town; 12) Legal Man.

 

Since Belle & Sebastian are a studio band, above and beyond everything else, hunting for their live albums is not a particularly rewarding challenge, and they are well aware of it: throughout their entire career, their only single-venue live experience release was a live re-recording of If You're Feeling Sinister, carried out in 2005 at the Barbican Centre in London, and available only in a limited digital format (through iTunes and other such sources) — explained by Murdoch as a necessity, since he was never pleased with the production on the original studio record and wanted to remedy that illness without sacrilegiously tampering with the old tapes.

 

As for these BBC Sessions, I have no idea how much input Murdoch himself had in the album, but the double-disc version (there is also a single CD version) seemingly contains all the live Belle & Sebastian material you'll ever need and more. The first disc puts together several radio sessions ranging from 1996 to 2001, including a John Peel session with four songs that have remained unreleased on any studio album (enough of an incentive for the fans); the second disc comes from a single show, recorded in Belfast, December 2001, and gives a very good idea of what an actual Belle & Sebastian concert really is — much of the idea being easily predictable, but with a few surprising bits and pieces to show off the band's general smartness.

 

On Disc 1, most of the performances, while carried out without any problem, come across as cosmetic variations on the originals, so I leave it up to the big fans to spot the differences and make the choices. (A major exception is ʽLazy Janeʼ, an early version of ʽLazy Line Painter Janeʼ that accentuates the folksy nature of the song rather than the studio finalization that added an ear­ly Sixties rhythm-and-blues flavor). As to the four new tracks, they are all good, but the only one that strikes me as rising above the everyday quality bar is ʽNothing In The Silenceʼ, with Isobel Campbell lending her «little girl hush-hush» voice to a haunting arrangement that arguably fea­tures the best use of harmonica on a Belle & Sebastian track ever, not to mention its interplay with the chimes and violins. It is all the more notable because Murdoch and Co. do not frequently come across as masters of the «solitary inner paradise» genre, reserved for the likes of Broadcast — this is one of their few songs that manages to combine the usual sadness with a sort of inner peace and tranquility, perhaps even a special kind of happiness.

 

Meanwhile, the Belfast concert is mostly interesting for its choice of covers, balanced around a selection of tunes from Arab Strap, Fold Your Hands, and the band's recent EPs. The show is opened with ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ, eventually proceeds to include the Velvet Underground's ʽWaiting For My Manʼ, and ends with an exaltated version of Thin Lizzy's ʽThe Boys Are Back In Townʼ. Now, clearly, the last choice was triggered by the show's location (a big Irish hit for a big Irish crowd), but surely they wouldn't have done the song if they didn't like it, and it does sound very weird to hear a thick distorted guitar tone, be it even a pop tone, on a Murdoch-led album — and the Velvets' tune, likewise, is another thing with which one would not normally as­sociate a band like this. All the covers are done quite lovingly, even if it is relatively clear that the spirit of these songs does not fully coincide with Murdoch's own spirit. Even ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ comes across as a tune whose nature and purpose they understand, but cannot appropriate for themselves — if only because Murdoch is too much of a bitter cynic to fully embrace its open-hearted idealism. He can love it, and he can simulate it, but he does not believe in it, and I can certainly understand that.

 

But anyway, regardless of whether you will be able to find a new kind of love for these perfor­mances or just file them under the «somewhat superfluous» tag, one does have to admit that, whatever the time period we are talking about, Belle & Sebastian make a very good job of sound­ing tight and professional when playing live — not a very easy job for an art-pop band that relies on multi-instrumentalism and polyphony as their primary mode of existence. The brass parts, the violin parts, the harmonies — every once in a while, you will find yourself wondering if you are really listening to a live performance or if they just dupe you into believing. Inspiration, feeling, and spontaneity are irreplaceable qualities, but all too often, indie bands tend to forget that they also have to work hard for their money, and listening to Murdoch and his friends sweat it out for the BBC proves their industriousness even more efficiently than their carefully overdubbed and mixed studio efforts. From that point of view, they sure deserve their place in the radio archives, not to mention yet another thumbs up.

 

THE THIRD EYE CENTRE (2004-2010/2013)

 

1) I'm A Cuckoo (Avalanches remix); 2) Suicide Girl; 3) Love On The March; 4) Last Trip; 5) Your Secrets; 6) Your Cover's Blown (Miaoux Miaoux remix); 7) I Took A Long Hard Look; 8) Heaven In The Afternoon; 9) Long Black Scarf; 10) The Eighth Station Of The Cross Kebab House; 11) I Didn't See It Coming (Richard X mix); 12) (I Beli­e­ve In) Travelin' Light; 13) Stop, Look And Listen; 14) Passion Fruit; 15) Desperation Made A Fool Of Me; 16) Blue Eyes Of A Millionaire; 17) Mr. Richard; 18) Meat And Potatoes; 19) The Life Pursuit.

 

Much to the fans' delight, Murdoch is quite compulsive-obsessive about his legacy. Less than a decade after Push Barman liberated them from the necessity of hunting for old, cobweb-covered EPs, The Third Eye Centre accurately dredges up most of the leftovers from the band's «up­beat pop» decade — B-sides, occasional remixes, and the EP Books from 2004. Obstinate observers did notice that the latter EP was represented only partially, and that several other rarities (mostly covers and additional remixes) were not present, either, but these are particularities, and Murdoch and Co. had his reasons. Like Barman, this album was clearly made to be listened to for enjoy­ment purposes, not just as a historical document. But is it enjoyable?

 

Well, no more and no less than the «average» B&S record. Actually, maybe just a little less, be­cause most of the remixes, curious as they are, have more to do with the tastes and habits of the mixers than with B&S. You want a bona fide techno mix of ʽI Didn't See It Comingʼ? You got it, but you might just as well enjoy the techno-Vivaldi of Vanessa Mae. The Avalanches emerge from their long-term sleep to offer their own take on ʽI'm A Cuckooʼ, replete with flutes, accor­deons, and African tribal dancing: very much what we'd expect from the Avalanches and their passion for collage, but whether this collage makes any sense is debatable. ʽYour Cover's Blownʼ, from The Books EP, is also given here in an oddly sown electro-pop coat that makes all the «modernization» of the Belle & Sebastian sound on Write About Love microscopically unno­ticeable in comparison. But do they really need all those spaceship noises?

 

Of the «proper» songs, none turn out to be revelations, which is a little sad, because I did hope for at least a few monster pop hooks of ʽThe Blues Are Still Blueʼ caliber; but these are B-sides, after all, carefully crafted and hardworkingly produced, just not inspired enough, or else they'd been A-sides, I guess. ʽTravellin' Lightʼ, for instance, was cut from Dear Catastrophe Waitress — maybe because they thought it was too light: pretty, folksy, cloudy, charming, but a little too smooth in its flow to capture the required attention. ʽStop, Look And Listenʼ is a speedy country-rocker with echoes of Ray Davies and Gram Parsons — nice, but not exactly stirring up any hitherto unknown emotions.

 

There is a fair share of humorous oddities on the album as well, such as ʽMeat And Potatoesʼ, a generic quasi-doo-wop song with S&M-oriented lyrics, or ʽMr. Richardʼ, a lyrical tribute to Keith Richard in the form of a rock'n'roll arrangement of a Jamaican folk melody (I think). Yes, these guys do have a sense of musical humor, and it is understandable that they prefer their B-sides to be its primary carrier. ʽThe Eighth Station Of The Cross Kebab Houseʼ is also an oddity, but this time, somewhat darker in tone — a brief account of love on the occupied territories, based on the band's trip to the Holy Land, but, for some reason, set to a ska melody.

 

Overall, this is another essential compilation for the fans, but if you were not head over heels in love with Barman, Third Eye Centre will be even more of a disappointment — particularly compared to the flash and dazzle of the two major LPs that cover its decade (not to mention all the Write About Love outtakes, which couldn't be too good by definition). Still, in case you get this wrong, I give it a thumbs up, because, other than the remixes, I enjoyed every minute of it. A-sides or B-sides, hooks or no hooks, who cares, as long as the band goes on loving their pre­cious instruments with that much love, it is impossible to condemn their recordings. However, they do need to stay as far away from any sorts of electronics as possible.


BEN FOLDS (FIVE)

BEN FOLDS FIVE (1995)

 

1) Jackson Cannery; 2) Philosophy; 3) Julianne; 4) Where's Summer B.; 5) Alice Childress; 6) Underground; 7) Sports & Wine; 8) Uncle Walter; 9) Best Imitation Of Myself; 10) Video; 11) The Last Polka; 12) Boxing.

 

It is usually said about Ben Folds that, during the young innocent days of his North Carolina child­hood, he was teaching himself the piano by learning Elton John and Billy Joel songs. Fast forward approximately twenty years into the future, and although the man himself bears a rather uncanny facial resemblance to a young Elton John, his musical style certainly veers closer to Billy Joel: think either of a subconscious patriotic tug, or maybe of Ben being a light, playful kind of guy, not particularly hungry for Elton's sweeping old school ambitions.

 

However, «closer» by no means signifies «identical». The first album by Ben Folds Five was re­leased in 1995, the middle of the «smart/ass/ decade» where emulating the relative intellectual simplicity of Billy Joel, no matter how much you liked him in the first place, would neither be a promising commercial move, nor a respectable artistic decision. Besides, Ben's interests and pre­ferences did extend to genres other than early 1970s piano pop — these songs show an equally strong influence of Sixties' pop, garage rock, and psychedelia, and it is no total coincidence that the album came out in the same year as the debut of The Apples In Stereo: both reflect the same de­mand for intelligent retro-pop with a modernistic update that seemed to emerge at the time as a healthy underground antidote to... well, whatever it was that irked and annoyed you about music in the early Nineties, I guess, be it Michael Jackson, Nirvana, or Mariah Carey.

 

«Ben Folds Five» is actually a trio (with Darren Jessee on drums and Robert Sledge on bass), al­though if you throw in the guest musicians (Ted Ehrhard on violin, Chris Eubank on cello), you can technically squeeze out a «five» all right, but the real reason is, Ben simply thought that «Folds Five» sounded more harmoniously than «Folds Three». Besides, when you fold, you do usually fold five, unless you're playing three card poker, but that's beyond the point. And the point is, there is no guitar whatsoever on the album — just piano, bass, and drums, with some ex­tra strings every now and then. This does not mean, however, that Ben Folds Five know not how to rock out — Sledge's distorted roaring bass, Jessee's maniacal pummeling, and Ben's aggressive punching of the keys occasionally come together in garagey barrages of rock noise that were quite unthinkable in the days of early Elton John, when he, too, still favored the piano/bass/drums «power trio» format, with optional orchestration.

 

Ben's individual talents, pulled out one by one and stretched out for all to see, are hardly jaw-dropping. As a piano player, he seems to be about as good as a self-taught hard-worker gets; as a singer, he's competent in mid-range but frequently gets off-key when climbing higher, with an ir­ritating indie knack of despising perfectionism; as a composer, he knows how to craft hooks but just as frequently leaves them frustratingly undercooked; as a lyricist, he is astute and always finds a way to get his ideas through, but not always a properly impressive literary way with words to express these ideas. But throw in a little bit of everything, and it is not difficult to understand how the man quickly got himself a reliable fanbase.

 

Actually, my biggest beef with the record is none of that, but rather the fact that the piano / bass / drums formula gets routine and predictable rather quickly. The piano melodies, regardless of whether they come from a music hall, torch ballad, or garage-rock mindset, do not have too great a range, and, anyway, the piano is really only there for Ben to provide a general backing for the voice — he does not solo all that much, and quite a few of the songs are introduced with accape­l­la singing, which immediately takes your attention off the instruments, or simply bury the piano under a vicious rhythm section onslaught altogether. In the end, while this is formally «piano pop», I did not get the impression of a love connection between Ben and his instrument — not something you could accuse either Elton or Billy of, regardless of your feelings for them.

 

But despite this, it is hard to dislike the album once you've gotten the hang of it. First, when the trio is on, they're on: the fast-flowing pop hooks of such songs as ʽJulianneʼ, ʽSports & Wineʼ, ʽUndergroundʼ are unbeatable, not to mention the intelligence. ʽUndergroundʼ has always been singled out in particular, with its derision of subcultures and stereotypes — "who's got the looks? who's got the brains? who's got everything? I've got this pain in my heart, that's all" is one of the simplest and truest send-ups of the «indie mentality» in the history of indie rock, adequately set to a completely «traditionalist», un-gimmicky melody. But a sucker for a sweet catchy chorus like me will probably put ʽJulianneʼ with its funny, catchy falsetto over its upbeat, fast tempo ahead of socially relevant thematics.

 

One thing Ben will try to seduce you with is his honesty-simplicity value complex. He bares it all already on the second track, called ʽPhilosophyʼ: "I see that there is evil / And I know that there is good / And the inbetweens I never understood / Won't you look at me, I'm crazy / But I get the job done". (Then, as if to prove that he does get the job done, he throws in a textbook Gershwin quotation in the outro). Although this is just an extract ripped from a denser, more ambiguous and allegorical context, this feeling of being relatively uncluttered by excessive, trumped-up com­ple­xity of feel and thought permeates the album — the songs are all either about personal relations with girls, friends, and the rest of the world, or little character portraits well in the old Brit-pop vein (ʽUncle Walterʼ; ʽBoxingʼ, a ballad written from the perspective of an aging Muhammad Ali that forms a surprisingly touching conclusion to the record). They are all coherent, ensuring that the album is more than just a sum of its parts, and make it easier to overlook particular problems with «under­cooking» of the melodies or occasional bum notes that Ben refuses to correct.

 

Anyway, the album does strive for a philosophy, and every time a new artist like that arrives, the correct question to ask is, «is this guy for real? should he be taken seriously?». And, well, it is difficult for me to imagine Ben Folds tugging at anybody's heart strings with the skill of a Ray Davies, or blowing anybody's mind with the weapon arsenal of a Todd Rundgren, but at least he is definitely for real, and making the best, and most graciously coordinated, use of all his talents that an «average smart Joe from North Carolina» could ever make. Quite a natural-coming thumbs up here — and, on a technical trivia note, this is probably the best ever pop debut album to be released at the not-so-tender age of twenty-nine. In a different age, the artist would only have room for one more before he'd be written off as irrelevant — that's one social disease that the Nineties, and the aging of rock music in general, have cured us from.

 

WHATEVER AND EVER AMEN (1997)

 

1) One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces; 2) Fair; 3) Brick; 4) Song For The Dumped; 5) Selfless, Cold, And Composed; 6) Kate; 7) Smoke; 8) Cigarette; 9) Steven's Last Night In Town; 10) Battle Of Who Could Care Less; 11) Missing The War; 12) Evaporated.

 

Ben Folds Five's second album does not do much except tightening the screws on an already well-built formula, but who's complaining? The songs make a little more sense, the choruses are a little catchier, the atmosphere occasionally gets a little wilder, and, above everything else, the first album never contained any hidden promises of future self-reinvention. As long as Ben Folds can come up with another bunch of lightly melancholic or lightly humorous vignettes and keep on recombining those music hall and rock'n'roll chords, he should be okay by any standards.

 

The fourth single from the album (ʽBrickʼ) actually caused some controversy: it broke the band into the charts, getting plenty of airplay and almost elevating them to «mainstream» status, which naturally upset their «underground» fanbase, jealous of losing the monopoly on the merry piano man and his companions. The fanbase had its own truth, of course, since ʽBrickʼ is really one of the weakest numbers on here — its piano melody is scattered and generic, its mood predictably sentimental, and only the vocal structure of the chorus merits special attention. But, as Ben said himself, it is an honest, well-meaning song (about waiting for his girlfriend while she is having an abortion), and the honesty, along with its mass-audience-palatable «alt-pop» arrangement, helped sell the song and gain the band some extra notability.

 

The real meat'n'potatoes of the record are the fast-moving numbers, regardless of whether they are based on pre-war dance rhythms (ʽSteve's Last Night In Townʼ), post-war jazz grooves (ʽOne Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Facesʼ), or rock'n'roll variations (ʽKateʼ, which borrows its rhyth­mic skeleton from Bo Diddley's ʽRoadrunnerʼ). This stuff is expectedly eccentric, hilarious, and exciting — ʽOne Angry Dwarfʼ is a frenetic psychodrama where Ben's piano parts, mostly jazz chords played with punkish energy, accompany a bitter story of one man's petty revenge against his childhood traumas (loosely referring to an artistic career but could just as easily be applied to some political figures we know all too well); ʽKateʼ is the only love song I know where the pro­tagonist wants to become his love interest rather than mate with her, and setting this idea to the formerly ultra-macho melody of ʽRoadrunnerʼ is a super-ironic gesture; and ʽSteven's Last Night In Townʼ simply has a great clarinet part, giving it some nice hot speakeasy attitude as Ben pokes friendly fun at one of his friends for excessive socializing.

 

It helps to pay attention to the lyrics, because the average Ben Folds song is almost always a little concrete vignette, not exactly or necessarily plot-oriented, but representing a particular point of view or recounting a particular moment of experience — ʽMissing The Warʼ, which is not about a real war but rather about a turbulent relationship; ʽCigaretteʼ, a brief chamber-pop piece on a guy divorcing his wife because she had cancer; ʽSong For The Dumpedʼ, where the protagonist rails at his ex for leaving him penniless, etc. etc. It's not as if the album provides any radically new in­sights into the human relations area, but Ben has a modestly good way with words and always finds the right music to go along with them.

 

There are occasional dubious decisions — for instance, continuous bass feedback on the first half of ʽFairʼ that gives me a headache and frankly does not do much good to the unfurling of the story, before it finally gets some rhythm and becomes a straightforward catchy power pop tune. ʽSelfless, Cold And Composedʼ is a moody old-style jazz waltz that is a bit offset with some off­key singing and runs about two minutes longer than it should. The silly parody on the «hidden track» gimmick is also... silly. But worth waiting for just once, just to see how silly one can get. Anyway, it's all just minor nitpicking. A major nitpick is that there may be a slight overdose of ballads — and it's not just about ʽBrickʼ, it's about the fact that Ben has a bit of a trouble with his «heartbroken» avatar, so that a potentially beautiful chorus like the one on ʽEvaporatedʼ comes out shakey, and a potentially devastating "God, what have I done!.." generates some tepid sym­pathy and that's about it. Subjective judgement, of course, but there is no denying that Ben's voice simply does not live up to the demands of the tricky vocal melodies he comes up with. Although the same cannot be said about the trio's vocal harmonies — on ʽFairʼ, for instance, they revel in falsetto like the next incarnation of classic ELO.

 

On the whole, though, the record is an unquestionable success: no doubts about a thumbs up, and a big load of exuberant enjoyment is freely guaranteed. The special CD edition adds a bunch of bonus tracks, including clever reinventions of the Buggles' ʽVideo Killed The Radio Starʼ and the Flaming Lips' ʽShe Don't Use Jellyʼ, and is also recommendable.

 

THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF REINHOLD MESSNER (1999)

 

1) Narcolepsy; 2) Don't Change Your Plans; 3) Mess; 4) Magic; 5) Hospital Song; 6) Army; 7) Your Redneck Past; 8) Your Most Valuable Possession; 9) Regrets; 10) Jane; 11) Lullabye.

 

I think that one glance at the album title would be enough to understand that, third time around, the boys decided on something more overtly ambitious, experimental, perhaps even «progres­sive» in scope. But first things first: if you are unaware of the true identity of Reinhold Messner, and, like myself, run to Wikipedia for a quick factual check, then it is useful to know that so were the Ben Folds Five — who simply concocted a bogus name, drawn from their drummer's memo­ries of fake IDs he used to generate while still a teenager (for whatever purposes, I don't even wanna know). Of course, for every fake name there will always be a genuine user, and the real Reinhold Messner, a famous mountaineer who was the first to climb Mount Everest without sup­plementary oxygen, was delighted, so it is said, to have such an album written in his name. Not to mention all the wealth of post-factum analogies to be drawn from the incident — you could just as well say that yes, in a way, Ben Folds is climbing his own Mount Everest with these forty minutes of pretentious music, and the lack of guitar might be compared to the lack of supplemen­tary oxygen, and... but never mind, these reviews shouldn't be bullshitting you too much.

 

There is really no overarching lyrical or ideological concept to this collection — only some sort of semi-conscious desire to stretch out, dig in, and emerge as something more than «that cute nerdy guy and his friends making cute pop songs for college entertainment». There is no certified idea of what that «more» should consist of. Anything goes. For instance, you can write a song on your emotional turmoil, associate it with ʽNarcolepsyʼ, and populate it with grandiose string ar­rangements, tidal melodic dynamics, and a piano melody that seems to owe more to mid-19th century romantics than popular vaudeville. A beautiful piano melody, by the way, and the whole song goes from one state to another just the way you'd expect a narcoleptic to jump back and forth from reality into one crazy dream after another. There's a ballad in there, some noise, some doo-wop, some Queen-worthy anthemics, and other things I've forgotten, and they all hang toge­ther quite well — this isn't just some crude pasting of random snippets.

 

There is a general feeling of sadness permeating the entire album that isn't tremendously different from the band's usual style, but Ben's decision to «aggrandize» things means that the feeling is far more acute and permeating. Sometimes it hits you right in the face — ʽRegretsʼ, for instance, is a moody fusion-style piece with nostalgic lyrics and a soft melodic hint at tragedy that eventually gets resolved in a bombastic tempo/tonality change in the finale (with Sledge unleashing the Great Distorted Bass Serpent on our asses). ʽMessʼ is even more grim: fast-moving chamber pop that leaves no hope for the protagonist as he extorts your sympathy with a whiny, mumbly per­formance that Michael Stipe would have approved (it's not exactly a ʽLosing My Religionʼ, but it shares the same message).

 

Only once, for a brief while, does the album emerge from this moody cocoon — ʽYour Redneck Pastʼ, combining sci-fi electronic noises with an old-fashioned pop melody (and somewhat pre­saging the innovations of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in the process), ditches personal issues and concentrates instead on lambasting the American stereotype. However, the song might just as well be taken in a personal manner — you could, for instance, try and interpret it in the context of Ben Folds' own impossibility to escape his "roots! the funny limbs that grow underground", and then it falls quite niftily in place. You thought he's trying to come up with new creative ways of expanding musical boundaries and conveying psychological turbulence with sonic ideas that bridge pop, jazz, and classical? Nope. That's just one of the "hundred ways to cover your redneck past". Goddamn frickin' North Carolina legacy.

 

Further highlights, too technically-grounded to discuss in details, include ʽDon't Change Your Plansʼ (particularly recommended for lovers of Ben's falsetto); ʽJaneʼ, yet another great classic era Bee Gees song that was never written by a Bee Gee (but the chorus line of "you're worried there might not be anything at all inside" is prime Barry, really); and ʽLullabyeʼ, which builds up towards a grand orchestrated jazz-classical finale that totally discredits its title, but provides the listener with a little optimistic flash of hope for the future well-being of Reinhold Messer.

 

A few bits of filler, a few songs that end up setting the same mood, and a relative lack of straight­forward hooks compared to the album's predecessor could theoretically drag the rating of Messer down for some people, but it does not take these risks needlessly — the gamble pays off, making the record one of the most credible and impressively crafted «musical character studies» in the history of 1990s pop. Folds himself has said that Messer is his favorite record, and I have no pro­blem believing this — he has pretty much drained himself in all possible senses here, going as deep in his self-analysis and as wide in his melodic explorations as his constitution allows him to. Unquestionably a thumbs up, and the album deserved much wider recognition than it got, de­spite impressive sales and a solid pop single to back them up (ʽArmyʼ, a fairly upbeat way to narrate Ben's experience of nearly failing college and considering enlisting as an alternative). Well, it's never too late to give an underrated classic another pat on the back, I guess.

 

ROCKIN' THE SUBURBS (2001)

 

1) Annie Waits; 2) Zak And Sara; 3) Still Fighting It; 4) Gone; 5) Fred Jones, Pt. 2; 6) The Ascent Of Stan; 7) Losing Lisa; 8) Carrying Cathy; 9) Not The Same; 10) Rockin' The Suburbs; 11) Fired; 12) The Luckiest.

 

Alas, it cannot be denied: solo Ben Folds is not the same thing as the Ben Folds Five. Right away, this is made evident on the twenty-sixth second of ʽAnnie Waitsʼ, as a silly «piston-style» drum machine starts counting out time, instead of the trusty frantic rolls of Darren Jessee. Later on, a real rhythm section kicks in, with all parts provided by Ben himself — but he is neither as aggres­sive or inventive a drummer as Darren, nor does he have the same knowledge of / love for the bass guitar as Robert Sledge. Bass-wise, he sometimes goes for a Paul McCartney approach (in­dependent melodicity of the instrument that does not require astute technique) — ʽLosing Lisaʼ, for instance, has a bass-piano combo not unlike the one on ʽWith A Little Help From My Friendsʼ — but his drumming is also similar to McCartney's rather than Ringo's, and that pretty much says everything about why solo Ben Folds is inferior to Ben Folds and his good friends.

 

Formally, Rockin' The Suburbs is not a «one-man project» of the Paul McCartney, Roy Wood, or Adrian Belew variety. A couple of friends help Ben out on guitars (and he himself plays some guitar as well, breaking the solemn vow of long ago), some cellos and background vocals are also contributed by outsiders, but the general idea is that Ben Folds, indeed, is planning on rockin' those suburbs on his very own. Which he does, on the title track, introduced by a distorted syn­copated pop-metal riff (said to imitate Korn and Rage Against The Machine, but I'm sure it would also get the Noel Gallagher seal of approvement), a silly whistling synth tone to com­pensate for the macho guitar tone, and appropriate lyrics: "Let me tell y'all what it's like / Being male, middle class and white".

 

The song itself is an obvious parody, from the lyrics ("just like Bon Jovi did / I'm rocking the suburbs / Except that he was talented..."; "you better look out because I'm gonna say fuck") to all the «threatening» guitar tones, and while it did help push Ben farther into the limelight, becoming his biggest solo hit, it also might have sealed his fate — stereotyping him in the same camp as The Barenaked Ladies and other «smarty-clowns» of the era. (For that matter, the Ladies were stereotyped, too, but in their case, I actually believe that their «smarty-clown» material was al­ways better than their attempts at being taken seriously; not the case for Ben Folds). The rest of the album, however, sounds nothing like the title track.

 

Instead, it sounds... well, fairly traditional. Sentimental ballads and happy-sad piano pop songs growing around various real and imagined life stories. Sometimes around life stories that claim to be real but look so hyperbolically weird that the brain refuses to acknowledge them as such (ʽNot The Sameʼ is supposedly about a friend who got drunk, climbed up a Christmas tree, and the next day climbed down a born-again Christian). Sometimes with a whiff of kid-friendly psychedelia (ʽZak And Saraʼ, with airy vocal harmonies and astral electronic effects spicing up the old music hall), sometimes with just a slight trace of light techno (ʽThe Ascent Of Stanʼ), and sometimes with an unintentional rip-off of something emotionally similar — the soul-twisting lonesome-heart ballad ʽFred Jones, Pt. 2ʼ takes a large chunk of its melody from Dylan's ʽLonesome Death Of Hattie Carrollʼ, doesn't it? Those are some emotionally tough chords out there.

 

The bad news is that some of the songs are boring, or, at least, you don't really need a Ben Folds to lay them upon you. ʽStill Fighting Itʼ, for instance, has fun lyrics, but the simple melody dres­sed in existentialist sauce could just as well come from Alanis Morissette. ʽGoneʼ is a homebrewed power ballad for which Ben does not have enough power — not even enough power to bring it down to a satisfactory melodic resolution. ʽCarrying Cathyʼ, ʽThe Luckiestʼ — all these confes­sional ballads somehow fail to bring home the bacon. Maybe the presence of a Robert Sledge could have helped, but standing as he is here on his own, Ben just doesn't have the strength to pull it off on a consistent basis.

 

The charisma is still there big time, and I couldn't actively «dislike» the album even if I forced myself to do it. But let's put it this way: no matter how talented and likeable, Ben Folds is no El­ton John, and not even Elton John ever tried to do without anybody else's help on any of his al­bums. Rockin' The Suburbs is an honest and partially successful try, but as for that other part, its success must have been doomed from the very beginning.

 

BEN FOLDS LIVE (2002)

 

1) One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces; 2) Zak And Sara; 3) Silver Street; 4) Best Imitation Of Myself; 5) Not The Same; 6) Jane; 7) One Down; 8) Fred Jones, Pt. 2; 9) Brick; 10) Narcolepsy; 11) Army; 12) The Last Polka; 13) Tiny Dancer; 14) Rock This Bitch; 15) Philosophy; 16) The Luckiest; 17) Emaline.

 

Given the good reputation of Ben Folds Five as a live performing unit, it seems a wee bit strange that Ben procrastinated so long with an official live album — long enough for the band to dis­perse. On the other hand, putting out a predictable live album is sort of a routine affair; Ben Folds Live opts for the harsher scenario, presenting Ben Folds as a very literally solo artist — just the man and his piano. With the exception of John McCrea stepping out on the stage for a sec to sing the additional vocal part on ʽFred Jonesʼ (reprising his role on the studio album), Ben and only Ben is here to hold your attention for about seventy minutes.

 

The related question seems obvious, and if you can answer it in the positive, this alone justifies the existence of the album. Few pop artists dare to venture out in the cold with nothing but their piano (even Carole King prefers to have at least a bass player and an acoustic guitarist at her side), seeing as how their audiences prefer to get a little something extra as well for their money. And, after all, Ben Folds is no Horowitz when it comes to making piano magic, so the potential for boredom could be quite high even if he only concentrated on the hooky highlights.

 

It does get a bit boring from time to time, for sure; the good news is that Ben's studio charisma freely spills over onto the stage, and he does his best to provide intelligent entertainment, mixed with enough friendliness and humor to make it all seem like a house party — one where the invi­ted piano player quite unexpectedly turned out to be so much better you'd think he'd be, he imme­diately becomes the focus of attention for the entire evening. Not only does he play and sing every bit as good as on the studio records (no slacking allowed whatsoever), but he finds time and strength to improvise, to tell stories, to lead the audience in rather non-trivial singalongs, to pay tribute to some of his idols, and even to torture his piano a little bit (fortunately, not on the brutal level of Keith Emerson, but in a more overtly melodic manner).

 

When necessary, he can rock his piano hard enough for us to forget the lack of extra stage hands — ʽOne Angry Dwarfʼ goes off like a hot set of firecrackers, and so does ʽArmyʼ in the middle of the set. But he can also be less-than-serious about it: ʽRock This Bitchʼ is a one-minute long im­provisation, taking as its base the possibly-drunk yelling of one of the fans — you can either take it as a silly, failed joke, or as a thinly veiled hint at what Ben Folds really thinks about the stereo­typical «rock'n'roll mentality». Since the joke stuck (Ben went on to improvies various versions of ʽRock This Bitchʼ on subsequent tours), he probably thought it was coolly ironic, although, much to his honor, he eventually got bored with having to go through the same stupid ritual over and over again.

 

Other non-standard points of interest include: (a) Ben leading the people in some fairly complex sing-along activities on ʽArmyʼ, where he does need someone to fill in for the brass section; (b) Ben covering Elton John's ʽTiny Dancerʼ — great song, faithful and inspired performance, but, unfortunately, it also reminds very acutely of what it is that separates a fabulous singer from a merely competent one (referring, of course, to Elton's original singing voice); (c) Ben adding a lengthy improvised section to ʽPhilosophyʼ, including using the piano as a percussive instrument, playing the piano strings directly, throwing in a bit of ʽMisirlouʼ, and culminating with a touch of ʽRhapsody In Blueʼ; (d) Ben finishing the show with ʽEmalineʼ, an obscure — but, frankly spea­king, not too memorable — tune from his early songwriting days as the leader of «Majosha», a short-lived band from 1988-89 that only managed one short album.

 

In between, you get a solid share of Ben Folds Five classics, interspersed with songs from Rockin' The Suburbs, a couple rarities, and a few anecdotes dealing with the origins of ʽNot The Sameʼ, ʽBrickʼ, and others. If you are real lucky, you can also end up with the limited edition that comes with a small DVD — where you can see for yourself that Ben Folds wears a bowler hat, plays a Baldwin, and does somewhat resemble a young Elton John (the latter point makes me a little uneasy about the future, but at least the man seems to lead a healthier lifestyle). All in all, it's not a must-have or anything, but the general quality is quite high, and there are enough of those little extra touches that guarantee a little intrigue. Thumbs up.

 

SUPERSUNNYSPEEDGRAPHIC (2003-2004; 2006)

 

[Speed Graphic]: 1) In Between Days; 2) Give Judy My Notice; 3) Protection; 4) Dog; 5) Wandering; [Sunny 16]: 1) There's Always Someone Cooler Than You; 2) Learn To Live With What You Are; 3) All U Can Eat; 4) Rockstar; 5) Songs Of Love; [Super D]: 1) Get Your Hands Off My Woman; 2) Kalamazoo; 3) Adelaide; 4) Rent A Cop; 5) Them That Got (live); [The LP]: 1*) Bitches Ain't Shit; 2*) Bruised; 3*) Still.

 

This is really a trick review. Instead of talking about Supersunnyspeedgraphic, The LP, re­leased in 2006, I would rather talk about the three individual EPs that provide the bulk of mate­rial for this album. Some of the tracks were remixed and even received new instrumental parts, but many were lopped off in the process, and three extra tracks that were not part of the original EP series were introduced. As a result, the poor fans had to scoop up everything in order to keep track of things — but we will hang on to the original EPs and nonchalantly dismiss the «LP» as superfluous self-indulgence. It does add Ben's (in)famous cover of Dr. Dre's foul-mouthed ʽBit­ches Ain't Shitʼ, redone as a sentimental piano ballad, but if you've heard it once, I have no idea why you'd want to hear it again. (Admittedly, quite a few fans liked it so much that Ben had to do it for years onstage before making a man's decision to retire the gimmick — just goes to show that popularity ain't shit).

 

Anyway, the three EPs (Speed Graphic, Sunny 16, Super D) were originally planned as such because the majority of the tunes were «throwaways» — covers of old and contemporary artists; collaborations with pals; completed versions of old (sometimes very old) demos; or, vice versa, incomplete demos that would later resurface in more polished versions (ʽGive Judy My Noticeʼ). Only a few songs do not fit in any of these categories, making it impossible to generate some­thing self-consciously important out of this mix. And perhaps for the better, because at this point in his solo career, Ben tended to drift a bit too close to «adult contemporary» standards when in the mood for something very serious. These three EPs, on the contrary, are relatively light, have a high share of simple-fun moments, and generally qualify.

 

Speed Graphic opens with a spirited cover of The Cure's ʽIn Between Daysʼ, a perfect Cure song to get re-interpreted by Ben (it's one of those rare romantic moments from Robert Smith, like ʽFriday I'm In Loveʼ, rather than his usual Goth gloom); includes ʽDogʼ, built on a fast spiralling piano riff that is at the very least one of Ben's flashiest, if not necessarily his best; and ends with ʽWanderingʼ, which takes itself very seriously and, like I just said, subsequently runs the risk of sounding too boringly self-important, but somehow he seems to get the ice-cold melancholia mood just right on that one — or maybe it's simply that the song's relaxed piano walk, fished out of the same chord can as ʽLet It Beʼ, agrees so well with the word "wandering".

 

Sunny 16, true to its title, generally sounds even more relaxed and party-oriented. The songs are fairly moralistic, but upbeat and «sunny» — ʽThere's Always Someone Cooler Than Youʼ and ʽYou've Got To Learn To Live With What You Gotʼ give their message away in the title, hammer it inside your head with the catchy chorus, but never for once let their moralizing get the best of the artist, who presents the songs as fun piano pop rockers rather than parables. Incidentally, the latter tune bears a remote resemblance to Nicky Hopkins' piano on the Stones' ʽSalt Of The Earthʼ — I won­der just how coincidental this was, especially since a couple other «rocking» passages here also bring to mind Nicky's classic style. For that matter, the melody of ʽRock Starʼ seems to quote a bit from George Harrison's ʽI Me Mineʼ (the "...baby the truth is, you need their ap­proval..." bit), one coincidence too many. That's what you get by being raised on Sixties classics, subconscious inserts a-plenty.

 

The third EP is the slightest of all, with a hilariously hysterical cover of The Darkness' ʽGet Your Hands Off My Womanʼ, a polite two-minute live tribute to Ray Charles (ʽThem That Gotʼ), a surprisingly vicious anti-police rant (ʽRent A Copʼ — now Ben only has to pray that the next cop to write him out a speeding ticket has never listened to Super D), and what could possibly be the best song on this whole mix if I ever get around to listening to it another couple hundred times: ʽKalamazooʼ has a highly non-trivial, fairly «progressive», structure, with jazz chords, stops-and-starts, tempo changes, psychedelic orchestral breaks, whatever. (Allegedly, the man wrote it at the tender age of 19, but it must have acquired some additional layers since then).

 

Because of all this diversity, the resulting package, though much longer than Rockin' The Sub­urbs, is surprisingly easier to sit through. It also helps that Ben hired some real drummers to help with the recordings (bass duties seem to have been mostly handled by himself), so much of this stuff regains the liveliness and fussiness of the Ben Folds Five days, even if we could always use some more fat distorted bass on the rockers. All in all, I would well advise to concentrate on the original EPs rather than the «best-of» single album version — particularly since the bonus songs there aren't particularly great (the six-minute epic ʽStillʼ, taken from the soundtrack to the cartoon Over The Hedge, is really just an orchestrated bore); consider these here thumbs up as a recom­mendation for ʽWanderingʼ and ʽKalamazooʼ, which were inexplicably left off the LP, over ʽBitches Ain't Shitʼ, which is really not that funny, once you've had your fun.

 

SONGS FOR SILVERMAN (2005)

 

1) Bastard; 2) You To Thank; 3) Jesusland; 4) Landed; 5) Gracie; 6) Trusted; 7) Give Judy My Notice; 8) Late; 9) Sentimental Guy; 10) Time; 11) Prison Food.

 

The album sleeve photo is so outrageously generic-hipster here that there are only three choices from the outset: either the music is going to be suitably generic boring trash, or it is going to be a masterpiece of self-parody, or it is simply going to be a masterpiece, because there's really no way that album sleeve photo could be anything but a sarcastic ruse. The third choice seems like the unlikeliest of the three — but give Songs For Silverman a few attentive listens, and you just might start veering towards No. 3 all the same.

 

My own first listen was a complete disaster: the only thing I understood was that the album con­sisted exclusively of sentimental / melancholic ballads, nary a bouncy, rhythmic pop hook in sight, let alone any possibilities of «rocking out», and that kind of monotonousness would be hard to take even from a certified genius like Paul (even before he stopped eating meat) or Elton (even before he sold all his costumes). There were no new attitudes or approaches, either, though it did look as if he took a few extra singing lessons; and the instrumentation, once again, was complete­ly dominated by solo piano, with sparsely scattered guitar or string overdubs passing by un­no­ticed unless you were really paying attention.

 

The situation only changed by the third time, when the music sank in a little bit and started dis­solving the major prejudice — namely, the one that Ben Folds is a good pop hook provider and a funny maniac on stage, but a generally rotten troubadour. The particular song that did it to me was ʽLandedʼ (and a good choice for first single from the album it was, too, even though it did not manage to get too high on the charts). Relatively simple lyrical message of transgression and redemption — but what a terrific musical build-up, from the quavering vocal of the verse aided in becoming decisive by the sharp piano chords, and right up to the "bye-bye goodbye" hook of the chorus: a well-placed falsetto note or two can work wonders, but only if it is well-placed, and I think this one deserves an A+ for well-placing.

 

Then there was ʽTimeʼ — normally, I'd suggest that artists that still go on writing songs named ʽTimeʼ should be lined up against the wall, but this one actually happens to deserve its own place of honor somewhat below, but not light-years-far-from Pink Floyd's, Bowie's, or Alan Parsons', and again, much of this has to do with the unbeatable falsetto hook, indeed delivered by Ben Folds himself, even if he is being vocally assisted on the song by none other than Weird Al Yankovic, for some reason. Not that there's anything weird about the song itself — it is just a mid-tempo adult contemporary ballad with complexly layered backing vocals, but the drama is so masterfully executed, mainly through the contrast between "in time I will fade away, in time I won't hear what you say, in time..." (strong, self-assured bit) and "...but time takes time you know" — this time, the falsetto actually means "PANIC!".

 

These two songs served as the anchor for testing a hypothesis — what if Songs For Silverman is actually a confessional masterpiece, Ben's own Plastic Ono Band, or Blue, or Blood On The Tracks, any of those things? For that matter, he would only divorce his third wife, Frally Hynes, in November 2006, but it is quite likely that things were flying out of control much earlier alrea­dy, and considering how many ladies ultimately failed to satisfy the man (he seems to be taking his cue here from big idol Billy Joel), it might be argued that Ben Folds marries and divorces mainly for the sake of getting fresh inspiration for his material. And indeed, other than the first track and ʽJesuslandʼ, just about everything here is about being alone once again and trying to find different ways to deal with the trauma, either by remembering, or by forgetting. But that is not important per se — the really important thing is, should we care?

 

I think that songs like ʽLandedʼ and ʽTimeʼ provide ample evidence that we should. Yes, he may be building here on the same territory that had already refused to yield to him several times ear­lier, but he's either been taking songwriting lessons (next to singing ones) or perhaps the feelings just got sharper, so that much — far from all, but much of the album — really cuts hard, and should be well recommendable for all non-suicidal loners who want to heal rather than hurt, or, at least, use the hurt for healing purposes.

 

It's really a brief conceptual travelog here. We begin with some general morals ("why you gotta act like you know when you don't know?") as a basic framework (ʽBastardʼ), start off at the far away be­gin­ning when things were good and connecting (ʽYou To Thankʼ, although the song is already permeated with sadness, so you know it's not going to be all that happy from now on), take a sideways stroll to think about the futility of religion (ʽJesuslandʼ), patch up our first batch of differences (ʽLandedʼ), and raise our little kid (ʽGracieʼ — quite a charming little ballad to Ben's daughter). That's the «still-okay» part of the business.

 

As we go to Side B, we discover that she's been reading our secret diary (ʽTrustedʼ), declare that "I won't be your bitch anymore" (ʽGive Judy My Noticeʼ), take another sideways stroll to say a few words in memory of the recently de­parted Elliott Smith (ʽLateʼ — but thematically, with its mournful farewell mood, the song fits in perfectly), share a few last thoughts on how we used to be so similar, but the different has won out all the same (ʽSentimental Guyʼ), make the transition to spiteful bitterness in rela­tions (ʽTimeʼ), and wrap it up with a grand finale (ʽPrison Foodʼ) where Ben's quiet wailing ("alone, alone again!") is enveloped in frantically thrown layers of percussion, piano, and steel guitar, as if the idea was to create something on the scale of ʽLove Reign O'er Meʼ. Of course, that sort of scale is quite out of reach, but a humble approximation is quite possible, and if ʽPrison Foodʼ will not be able to make you feel sorry for the man, then you are probably immune to Ben Folds as an organic character in general.

 

Some of these songs are worse than others, but the fact that it all ties up so nicely kind of levels everything up: the highlights never cease to be highlights, and the lowlights, whatever they be, are still moody enough to fit the concept. The only thing that does not fit is the title of the album — which, for that matter, was going to be dedicated to Ben's representative at Sony (Ben Gold­man), but, for reasons of confidentiality, «Goldman» ultimately got split into «Silverman» and «Goldfish» (for the accompanying live record). That, like the album photo, should be regarded as a proverbial red herring, because the personal experiences of Ben Goldman have nothing to do with the personal experiences of Ben Folds, or with the status of this album as the ultimate break­up record of... well, let's say, of the year 2005, since, after all, breaking up seems to be the quint­essential Significant Artistic Topic of the 21st century, families not being what they used to be and all that. Anyway, a hefty thumbs up, of course.

 

SONGS FOR GOLDFISH (2005)

 

1) In Between Days; 2) Gone; 3) Hiro's Song; 4) You To Thank; 5) Weather Channel Music; 6) Evaporated; 7) There's Always Someone Cooler Than You; 8) Rockin' The Suburbs; 9) Radio Jingles For Tokyo's Inter-FM; 10) Side Of The Road.

 

Since this album was originally released as a bonus disc to go along with Songs For Silverman, it does not deserve a detailed review, but is still worth a quick mention — being the only official live Ben Folds release where he is (a) actually backed by a band and (b) the band is not the Ben Folds Five, but a different trio, where Jared Reynolds replaces Robert Sledge, and Lindsay Jamie­son replaces Darren Jessee, and both try to play as close to the Five's rhythm section as possible, right down to putting all that brawny distortion on the bass for extra rock power. They do make a good job of it, for that matter, but I guess Ben wouldn't have hired them otherwise, not to mention putting the results on the public market.

 

The collection is a little rag-taggy, with the first five tracks taken from a 2005 show in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, two «rocking» tracks recorded at an L.A. show one year earlier, and an oldie left­over from the «real solo» days for complect (a piano-only run through ʽEvaporatedʼ from a 2002 NYC show). Rounding up the relatively short selection are a couple of cute, but ultimately worth­less radio jingles, and a forgettable studio outtake — a cover of Lucinda Williams' ʽSide Of The Roadʼ, which is only slightly less boring than the original, and anyway, I think it must be hard to be a deep-level fan of Ben Folds and Lucinda Williams at the same time.

 

Of the live selections, two are particularly notable: ʽWeather Channel Musicʼ is a four-minute piece of jazzy improv that starts out as an «anti-reaction» to ʽRock This Bitchʼ ("I've personally done about fifty different styles of ʽRock This Bitchʼ, there's no more styles left!") and then, much to the satisfaction of all the sane fans (rather than the ones that keep bawling "rock this bitch!" in an honestly scary manner), moves into the world of scat singing and flashy piano rolls. And the live take on ʽRockin' The Suburbsʼ, rearranged now as a piano trio, pokes even more vicious fun at the «rock mentality», extended as it is to six and a half minutes of hullabaloo, mu­si­cal and verbal hooliganry ("you better watch out cuz I'm gonna say fuck!!!" — and he does) — a respectable companion to the more restrained studio original.

 

And that's about it, actually. It's a little strange that only ʽYou To Thankʼ is carried over from Songs For Silverman itself, but supposedly Ben wanted this, too, to look like a little retrospec­tive (if you throw in ʽEvaporatedʼ, the album covers most of the phases of his career from 1997 to 2005), and this is as representative as he could make it, given the short time length. All in all, nothing essential, but a nice bonus chunk for the deeply admiring and the casual fan alike if you can get it for free or close to it. Besides, you have to have it if you wanna complete the puzzle of the genuine album title — Goldfish and Silverman can't do without each other.

 

WAY TO NORMAL (2008)

 

1) Hiroshima (B B B Benny Hit His Head); 2) Dr Yang; 3) The Frown Song; 4) You Don't Know Me; 5) Before Cologne; 6) Cologne; 7) Errant Dog; 8) Free Coffee; 9) Bitch Went Nuts; 10) Brainwascht; 11) Effington; 12) Kylie From Connecticut.

 

Really bad album title here. The lack of a second ʽoʼ in ʽtooʼ would never deter the skeptics from sneering «You don't say!», which they really do in their two-star and C+ reviews. But it's even worse if you prefer not to notice the pun — because who of us would want a «normal» Ben Folds? Any more «normal» and he'd be Vanessa Carlton. An immediate turn-off, and a particularly ridi­culous one, considering that it is also deceptive: Way To Normal is not really any more or less «normal» than any other Ben Folds record. In fact, considering its overall lightweight nature and the abundance of openly clownish moments, it might even be less normal than usual. Maybe he should have come up with that title earlier — I think that Rockin' The Suburbs is more deser­ving of it than this particular batch of tunes.

 

There is nothing surprising about the fact that Way To Normal was greeted with relative cold­ness, and the reasons behind this probably go deeper than a simple «oh no, not another forty minutes of this guy bitching about his problems» gut reaction. One of them is that thirty-five years earlier, a bespectacled eccentric called Reginald Kenneth Dwight recorded ʽBennie And The Jetsʼ, a stomping, fireworks-laden, piano-on-parade glam rocker that became one of the most symbolic and unforgettable anthems of its era — a giddy celebration of excess, decadence, and showbiz razzle-dazzle, spiced with self-irony that you could savor or ignore at your whim. Now, thirty-five years later, Ben Folds, a successful, but still somewhat aspiring singer-songwriter, opens his new album with an intentional tribute to that particular song, subtitled ʽB B B Benny Hit His Headʼ just so there would be no way whatsoever you could leave that fact unnoticed — and the song is about... falling on his head off the stage at the start of a Japanese show. "Oh oh oh, they're watching me fall", goes the chorus. Does that make you happy or what?

 

Oh, it's not a bad song at all — the chorus is suitably anthemic and catchy, and Ben pounds the keys with no less physical energy than Elton. It's a funny parody, except it came out about thirty years too late for us to properly get the joke, and, worse than that, it is one more reminder — as if we really needed one! — of why Elton John is Elton John, and Ben Folds, all pros and cons con­sidered, is still only Ben Folds. And I am not even raising the issue of how convenient it is to get this sort of song under the title ʽHiroshimaʼ, which would normally have us expect something completely different. (Then again, it might be a politically incorrect plus rather than minus — fuck atomic bombs, let's just sing about falling on our heads instead).

 

A very similar piano-punching pattern constitutes the spine of the album's lead-off single and best-known track, ʽYou Don't Know Meʼ, for which Ben enlists the help of a chamber string sec­tion and Regina Spektor, who had only just graduated from Soviet kitsch to Begin To Hope, and whose whimsical style was in perfect agreement with this song, written by Ben as a mutually ac­cusing dialog between the bastard and one of his bitches (and yes, most of the imaginary or not so imaginary protagonists on this album come across as certified bastards and bitches). The percep­tive effect of ʽYou Don't Know Meʼ, however, is different from ʽHiroshimaʼ — the whole song, both instrumentally and vocally, is built on brief stop-and-start bits of melody, which gives it a robotic feel; Ben's and Regina's vocal interaction on all the "you-don't-know-me"s, in particular, sounds so intentionally rigid and mechanical as if it were computer-generated. But both singers are so «wimpy» that, in the end, they sound like baby robots having a baby battle of the wits, and while the effect is genuinely hard to forget, you do feel like you're sitting in the middle of a cute­sy cartoon while it's on.

 

«Fluffy» moments like these abound on the record. ʽDr Yangʼ, ʽThe Frown Songʼ, ʽFree Coffeeʼ, and, of course, the infamously titled ʽBitch Went Nutsʼ — all of them giddy, lightweight, ironic, sometimes parodic pop-rockers; some of them are melodically impressive (ʽDr Yangʼ is a head-spinning piece of piano-based rock'n'roll with one of Ben's best piano tones ever captured on the instrumental solo part), but some do not seem to be making much of a point, or, worse still, are making a debatable point — the lyrics of ʽBitch Went Nutsʼ carry the «strained relationship» topic a little too far, right into the sphere of personal meanness, and the breakneck tempo of the piano melody does not allow Ben to redeem himself through efficient composition.

 

All the more surprising is the fact that, sandwiched in between these numerous samples of «storms in teacups», we do find some of Ben's most soulful ballads in ages — ʽCologneʼ and ʽKylie From Connecticutʼ both work on the most basic gut level, the former with its melancholic desperation (featuring the loneliest way to say the words "my hotel room" since Ray Davies), and the latter with its desperate melancholia, if you get the difference between the two. Both are far more emotionally loaded than ʽBrickʼ, even if their respective choruses are nowhere near that loud — apparently, as time (and more divorces) go by, it becomes easier for Folds to wallow in his misery and convert the results to heart-tugging vocal lines.

 

Overall, this is frankly a mess — but then again, so was a heavy chunk of, say, Paul McCartney's solo catalog (an analogy that probably came to my mind because both artists like to write silly songs about dogs — check ʽ3 Legsʼ against ʽErrant Dogʼ!). So, for consistency's sake, I couldn't dare condemn Way To Normal based on any «ideological» grounds, if the individual songs range from cutesy-funny to subtly-heart-wrenching. Diverse, creative, funny, and, as usual, ho­nestly fulfilling Ben Folds' destiny — converting his life experience into friendly musical anec­dotes. If, this time around, the results seem «fluffy», I guess it also merely reflects a particular piece of life experience. No problems with a thumbs up here.

 

On a side note, one year later Ben actually re-released the album as Stems And Seeds, changing the running order, adding some extra overdubs (notably additional orchestrated parts for ʽCo­logneʼ), and, most importantly, remixing all the tracks with less compression — acting on fan complaints about the poor sound quality of Way To Nor­mal, as he explained before other fans who complained about the rip-off effect. I have heard both versions, and testify that Stems does sound a wee bit fresher and «ringier», so certified audiophiles might want to go along with the new ver­sion; but on the other hand, it is not as if they were so significantly different that you could get bored with the old one and then get redeemed with the new one. However, it is worth noting that, in the authentic tradition of the «nutty artist», the actual song ʽWay To Normalʼ only makes its appearance on Stems And Seeds, but not on Way To Normal itself. Fortunately for us all, it's not a particularly good song.

 

LONELY AVENUE (2010)

 

1) A Working Day; 2) Picture Window; 3) Levi Johnston's Blues; 4) Doc Pomus; 5) Your Dogs; 6) Practical Amanda; 7) Claire's Ninth; 8) Password; 9) From Above; 10) Saskia Hamilton; 11) Belinda.

 

"Some guy on the net thinks I suck and he should know / He's got his own blog". Do you happen to have an idea whom he is referring to? I mean, surely guys with blogs have so much more im­portant things to write about than whether or not Ben Folds sucks... oh wait a minute.

 

Actually, I really hate how he put that line in the very first song on the album, because now I am confused and I do not properly understand whether this album sucks because it sucks, or whether it sucks because he just happened to piss off the reviewer right away. Well, okay, maybe not «sucks» as such, but as Ben Folds grows older, it seems to be taking more and more and more time to warm up to every next album, and time has just went up from gold to platinum these days, so I will just say this: Lonely Avenue, the result of Ben's productive collaboration with novelist Nick Hornby, is strictly one for the fans, rather than for guys with blogs.

 

First of all, the idea of pulling the author of About A Boy into the world of Ben Folds seems about as strange an idea as, say, Bob Dylan's collaboration with Jacques Levy on Desire — Folds may not be an undeniably super-great lyricist, but there was never anything particularly wrong with his lyrical expression, either, and if you weren't informed, or an analytical expert on Folds' syn­tactic preferences, you might not detect an «outsider»'s lyrical presence on here in the first place — we still get the same old slices of everyday life dragged through the same impressionist / exis­tentialist poetic filters. So it is really Nick Hornby complaining about the anonymous blogger, but it could have easily been Ben himself. So it is Nick who pokes fun at the name ʽSaskia Hamiltonʼ (I wonder if the real Saskia Hamilton, who had only just won the Guggenheim Fellowship, took any offense?), but how would an idea like that not be capable of being generated in the already corrupt, degenerate, and deeply offensive brain of Ben Folds?..

 

Although the point of this collaboration is sort of obscure, in itself, this is certainly not a problem. The problem is that the music seems to be lacking; even more than that, it seems to be somewhat lifeless. Maybe, having agreed to write the music to a different person's words, Ben was simply unable to find the right match. Maybe he wanted to have himself an «Elton and Bernie» kind of an affair that was a long time coming, but if so, he forgot that Elton never had any lyrical talent from the very beginning, and that the whole «Elton and Bernie» thing started off and developed as a coherent two-headed hybrid. Here, it's more like, «oh, another batch of words, let me quickly generate some backing for it and get into character».

 

Naturally, the overall sound is quintessential Ben Folds — the poppy piano, the soft vocals, the harmony overdubs, the occasional orchestration (and as if they needed yet another argument for my «Elton and Bernie» theory, no less than Paul Buckmaster himself, Elton's old orchestral guru, is credited for conducting and arranging strings). But most of this stuff is very by-the-book Ben Folds — sentimental ballads that range from weakly dynamic (ʽPicture Windowʼ, where string crescendos do help out some) to utterly generic and forgettable (ʽClaire's Ninthʼ — generic hook­less indie pap whose dynamics, in contrast, only help it get more mushy). Sometimes it even bor­ders on atmospheric adult contemporary (ʽPasswordʼ, whose words, or, rather, spellings sound more interesting than the lazy music).

 

In the end, the only two good things on the record are Buckmaster's orchestrations, which, ama­zingly, still sound inspiring after all those years (the album closer ʽBelindaʼ almost justifies its personal-epic pretense because of those), and ʽDoc Pomusʼ, a touching tribute to the man, one of whose songs gave name to the entire album — although I would much rather hear Ben do a cover of ʽLonely Avenueʼ than sing about half of these romantic puddles. In its defense, I can only bring up the obvious — apart from the spoiled-brat pissed-off opener, Lonely Avenue is a kind, humanistic, introspective, caressing work that will please the underdog and may offer some light additional psychotherapy to fans of Badly Drawn Boy and the like. Unfortunately, I happen to be pinching myself from falling asleep — which, in this case, is sufficient reason for a thumbs down, since it never happened before with any other Ben Folds album so far.

 

THE SOUND OF THE LIFE OF THE MIND (2012)

 

1) Erase Me; 2) Michael Praytor, Five Years Later; 3) Sky High; 4) The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind; 5) On Be­ing Frank; 6) Draw A Crowd; 7) Do It Anyway; 8) Hold That Thought; 9) Away When You Were Here; 10) Thank You For Breaking My Heart.

 

Another awful, awful disappointment. You'd think that getting back together with «The Five» would be just the right shot in the arm for Ben after his last album showed him moving ever clo­ser in the direction of limp and lifeless balladry, stuck in the middle between mainstream adult contemporary and equally boring «alternative» indie snoozefest stuff. Surely, one of the loudest, whackiest, and most creative rhythm sections of the past two decades in pop music should have put the man back on the right track?

 

Well, they do — at least on the right lead-in track: ʽErase Meʼ opens with a thunderblast, as Sledge's volcanic bassline immediately latches on to Ben's opening power chord and leads into one of the heaviest numbers in Ben Folds 21st century history. Technically, it is still a ballad, but the "erase me, so you don't have to face me" chorus almost glows with self-righteous anger, and nobody could have helped Ben in this more than his old drums 'n' bass pals. It does seem a little suspicious that the new Ben Folds Five album opens up with something «deeply psychological» rather than «head-spinningly playful», but the heaviness and energy more than make up for the lack of humor. So maybe, you think, Ben Folds has «matured» to the point of leaving fun stuff behind — is that really so bad when his old friends are back to keep him company, and use their gargantuan sound to convey the inner battles of the soul, rather than external frustration?

 

The problem is, the gargantuan sound is all but gone right after the first track is over. Once it's done, the remainder of the album, with maybe one or two exceptions at best, is given over to the same flaccid piano ballads or lightweight piano pop rockers that populated Lonely Avenue — and neither Sledge nor Jessee are able, or willing to, tighten the bolts on them. The energy level drops down, the hooks are feeble, and even after four extra listens, I have not the slightest re­mem­brance of how the other songs go. In fact, the only thing I remember is that ʽOn Being Frankʼ is built right on the chords of ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ, but wastes them in the con­text of a nominally pretty, but essentially insubstantial song.

 

What irritates me most of all is that it does not even look like he's trying. With his level of ex­perience, it seems as if each of these songs should have taken about five minutes to write (lyrics excluded), and then he was just secretly hoping that the other guys would spice it up for him, but they did not. Whenever Ben does pick up the tempo, the others seem to become interested: on ʽDo It Anywayʼ Sledge eventually gets into it so much he even delivers one of his trademark «bass lead» solos, just like in the good old days. But elsewhere, they are mostly sidemen, and could just as well have traded seats with Ben's previous rhythm sections on his solo albums.

 

As they finally drag the record to its conclusion, the crawling, weepy, yawn-inducingly sen­ti­mental ʽThank You For Breaking My Heartʼ, the process of listening becomes unbearable. Any­thing for a mood change, an unusual production idea, a treated Mellotron solo, a reggae variation on ʽRock This Bitchʼ, a fart noise — anything but this never-ending and ever-worsening series of «introspective» ballads that do nothing except rehash the same old «Ben Folds and his women» topic. At this point in his life, Ben Folds simply has nothing left to say, and it is not at all clear to me why he had to involve his friends from the era of when he did have something to say in this artistic self-humiliation. Thumbs down for one of the most pointless reunions in recent rock his­tory — for what it's worth, they should have just put out ʽErase Meʼ and maybe ʽDo It Anywayʼ on a single, and leave the rest in the dustbin for future generations to explore.

 

LIVE (2013)

 

1) Jackson Cannery; 2) Erase Me; 3) Selfless, Cold And Composed; 4) Uncle Walter; 5) Landed; 6) Sky High; 7) One Chord Blues/Billie's Bounce; 8) Do It Anyway/Overture/Heaven On Their Minds; 9) Brick; 10) Draw A Crowd; 11) Narcolepsy; 12) Underground; 13) Tom And Mary; 14) One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces; 15) Song For The Dumped.

 

Considering that the Five never got around to releasing a live album in their «classic years», maybe it is not too late to capture them in their full glory during their reunion period? After all, it's not as if Ben, Robert, and Darren were decrepit 70-year olds with burnt-out vocal cords and arthritic fingers — and it isn't that they are doing this only for the money, either, since there is not a heck of a lot of money to be made these days by being part of The Ben Folds Five. No matter how twisted the collective and individual histories of these guys may have been, when they play together, they are clearly in it for the magic chemistry.

 

Just how magical it is, however, is not altogether clear from this live album. First, it does not re­present a complete show, but is rather assembled from bits of shows played all over the world during the band's 2012-13 tour (US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan all represented). This is a bit suspicious already — could that mean they rarely had the energy to sustain a complete show? And if it is merely a consequence of Ben's perfectionism, then who needs perfectionism, rather than sheer spirit, on a live rock'n'roll album?

 

Second, perfectionism or not, I do not feel that Live gives us the very best of Ben Folds as a sin­ger. He sounds okay for the most part, but rarely better than okay, and quite often, he seems to wobble and flutter on the high notes (the falsetto on ʽErase Meʼ is almost unbearable at times). It is true that Ben has never been a technically awesome singer, and truer still that it is not at all easy to sing and play the piano at the same time, but he did sound better on Ben Folds Live and Songs For Goldfish, despite that. It is not a huge complaint, since some numbers are done better than others, and only a few songs' success completely hangs upon vocal modulation anyway, yet when you are in the market for a piano pop-based live record, every little thing counts.

 

On the positive side, the rhythm section is impeccable, particularly Sledge and his bass grooves; the crowd goes wild whenever he gets a chance to show off his distorted mini-solos (like on the closing ʽSong For The Dumpedʼ), and we finally get to hear ʽOne Angry Dwarfʼ in all of its ex­plosive glory, as opposed to Ben's solo piano live version on Ben Folds Live — reason enough to add the album to your collection if you are one of those people who identifies profoundly with the song and its message.

 

The setlist predictably concentrates on old Ben Folds Five classics — it is hardly coincidental that they chose ʽJackson Canneryʼ, the first song off their first album, as the lead-in track — as well as throws in a few numbers from their latest and not-at-all-greatest, but, fortunately, only a few, and usually the best and most energetic ones (ʽErase Meʼ, ʽDo It Anywayʼ), since none of the bal­lads from The Sound... can really match the poignancy of ʽBrickʼ or ʽNarcolepsyʼ. Ben gets to sneak in one number at least from his solo career (ʽLandedʼ), a couple of obscure rarities (ʽTom & Maryʼ), and some novelty stuff — ʽOne Chord Bluesʼ represents his trademark improvisation routine (including a resuscitated blues-style ʽRock This Bitchʼ somewhere within its depths), and ʽDo It Anywayʼ forms a medley with, of all things, ʽHeaven On Their Mindsʼ from Jesus Christ Superstar (!). Ben Folds as Judas? Don't really think so, but if you want to start looking for hidden symbolism, go ahead, by all means. (Personally, I'd guess that he simply spent the pre­vious day accidentally listening to some Andrew Lloyd Webber).

 

Bottomline: listenable and enjoyable — yes, but complete satisfaction is not guaranteed. Too many of those little things — weak vocals, questionable parts of the setlist, and, most importantly, the rag-taggy track sequencing, which would rather be expectable of some big-shot heavy-weight arena-rock hero, striving for towering heights («Bruce Springsteen Rocks The World Over!»), but hardly of our little bespectacled friend who has, perhaps, always dreamed of becoming the next Elton John, but who has always had too much taste, too much intelligence, too much depth, and too little musical genius to allow himself to become the next Elton John. I'd much, much rather hear this band do a short, tight, coherent set in a single small club setting than have them presen­ted in disjointed snippets as some sort of arena heroes — in fact, for what it's worth, it is possible to do just that by getting the old video recording Complete Sessions At West 54th, dating from 1998 and satisfying just about every need that Ben Folds Five Live may not satisfy. That was the real deal; this album, while not half-bad, is a questionable facsimile in comparison.

 

SO THERE (2015)

 

1) Capable Of Anything; 2) Not A Fan; 3) So There; 4) Long Way To Go; 5) Phone In A Pool; 6) Yes Man; 7) F10-D-A; 8) I'm Not The Man; 9-11) Concerto For Piano And Orchestra.

 

Back to solo format, or, more accurately, orchestral format — Ben Folds' latest project combines his composing, playing, and singing talents with those of the so-called «yMusic Ensemble» for a total of eight chamber pop songs, plus a bona fide piano concerto with the Nashville Symphony, probably not the hottest symphonic orchestra on the planet but a fairly qualified one, and quite proficient in playing and recording American composers from Ives and Gershwin all the way to Leonard Bernstein, which is precisely the tradition, I believe, to which Ben subscribes, combining old-school academic values with an element of lightweight (sometimes even slightly tacky) popu­lar entertainment. But we will come back to this a little later.

 

Substantially, nothing much has changed since last we saw Ben Folds as a solo artist: this is still our old friend, the little nerdy-wimpy everyday life philosopher who is to singer-songwriting what Jerry Seinfeld is to comedy, and he still writes and sings these light, fragile pop tunes about broken hearts, hurt feelings, and society pressure that could be very depressing if only they showed any pressure at all, which they do not. But the chosen format, where the man completely frees himself from the conventions of a pop-rock combo, seems to have triggered some hidden reserves in his spirit, and the eight songs that form the bulk of the record are, on the whole, his finest effort in quite some time. At the very least, it was much more delightful to listen to this stuff than either the Ben Folds Five reunion, or that draggy Nick Hornby collaboration.

 

These are pop songs, for sure, not baroque chamber music imitations, and it's not as if the format were anything new (Fiona Apple? Regina Spektor? Sufjan Stevens?), but somehow Ben gets us exactly in the right mood with the first thirty seconds of ʽCapable Of Anythingʼ, when the piano, the violin, and the soft underlying percussion start hopping at a merry tempo, and an even cuter little woodwind flourish links the bars together. That's a delicious slice of pop catchiness there, along with hope, good humor, and just a tiny pinch of melancholia to tone down the extra sweetness. The arrange­ment shoots off colors in many directions, with cellos, trumpets, and occasional explosive sound effects added at will, and ultimately it seems to not matter much what the man is singing about — in fact, it does not seem to matter if he's singing at all, because the vocal hooks are easily the least at­tractive part of the whole bouillon.

 

Another big highlight is the title track, which starts out with a promising, suspenseful set of violin and cello lines, again played at a relatively fast tempo — then quickly progresses towards a china cup thunderstorm of romantic piano and violin waves gently lashing against each other... and what is the song about? "I will not forget you / There is nothing to forget". Uhh... okay, this is another fairly good moment to state how little one could care about Ben Folds' personal problems as long as he keeps composing decent music, because those problems don't have to have anything to do with the music. In fact, even without the ambitiousness of the Concerto, these songs are all about musical experimentation with the chamber orchestra format — a background against which Ben's «little man issues» seem trite and insignificant.

 

This is why the least impressive tracks here are the slow ballads that place Ben's vocals at the center of attention — ʽNot A Fanʼ has too much of that just-a-man-and-his-piano aura that made so much of his solo work so tedious, and, in a way, seems to have been written with the sole pur­pose of ad-libbing a barely audible "...so fuck you!" in the final bar; ʽYes Manʼ has a much more sophisticated vocal melody, but its multi-tracked vocals ultimately do it a disservice, drawing attention away from the music and onto the vocals. Much more charming is such a little novelty number as ʽF10-D-Aʼ — two minutes of a song about writing a song, with Ben spelling out the various notes of the tune-under-construction as it goes by; it is charmingly theatrical and also surprisingly efficient (you'd never think that a wholesome new song can be built like that, but somehow, it is almost a wholesome new song).

 

The last twenty minutes of the album are given over to the aforementioned Concerto, and it sounds... cool. It's not great innovative classical music — it's an experiment in the old-fashioned way, combining elements of Western classical, jazz, ragtime, vaudeville, and maybe showing just the tiniest bits of modern influences; for all I know, something like this could have been written by the likes of Copland as early as the 1920s, but then I don't know that much about Copland or any other classical American composer, so I don't exactly feel qualified to judge Ben's work here as a respectable homage or a pathetic joke. All I know is, all three movements sound interesting, and Ben's piano playing, wisely not straining for virtuosity, is constantly varied and engaging (and I am still trying to understand what exactly it is that he does at the beginning of the third movement — is that a prepared piano? is he picking at the hammers directly? whatever). The orchestra seems well engaged in the process, too, although for such a grand classical opening, the final movement ends in a somewhat disappointing wisp.

 

What ultimately wins me over is the humbleness of all this stuff. Symphonic and chamber arran­gements in pop music often — in fact, the more recent, the more often — tend to come with a lot of pomp and self-aggrandizing, or extra-musical baggage that makes it all seem twice as deep as it really is (oh yes, I'm looking at you, Sufjan Stevens!); here, there is no extra-musical baggage whatsoever, just a guy who is really interested in wringing out a new set of emotions by combi­ning his piano pop experience with adventurous combinations of string instruments. Adventurous, but also strictly traditional — not a move that might bring on wide-scale critical recognition, but certainly a move that is quite true to the man's artistic essence. In short, I'm perfectly happy about this, and not even a few mediocre slow ballads can prevent a thumbs up. Definitely a record that should reserve itself a nice place in the annals of «chamber pop» history.

 

BETH ORTON

SUPERPINKYMANDY (1993)

 

1) Don't Wanna Know 'Bout Evil; 2) Yesterday's Gone; 3) When You Wake; 4) City Blue; 5) Where Do You Go?; 6) Faith Will Carry; 7) She Cries Your Name; 8) Roll The Dice; 9) The Prisoner; 10) Release Me.

 

Although Beth Orton herself has always stated that her first «proper» album was Trailerpark, and almost went as far as to disown the first stage of her recording career altogether, there is no getting away from the facts that SuperPinkyMandy was (a) a complete LP, (b) a complete LP officially released on a Japanese record label, (c) a complete LP officially released on a record label and credited to Beth Orton, along with the authorship of most of the songs. Additionally, there is no getting away from my opinion that SuperPinkyMandy, despite being completely different from the «stereotypical» Beth Orton LP, is at least as good as the very best of those LPs, and, in some ways, maybe even better. Not a «masterpiece», perhaps, but certainly an album that deserves much larger exposure than recommended by its very author.

 

Elizabeth Caroline Orton, a former Pizza Hut waitress, caterer, and amateur actor, got her first musical break when she teamed up with William Orbit, at that time still a relatively unknown man-of-the-arts who would eventually get his biggest break producing Madonna's Ray Of Light — but, frankly, his collaboration with Orton, free from the obligation to follow «strictly com­mer­cial» rules, was a far superior effort, despite largely following the same line of work: putting re­latively straightforward and traditional pop melodies in a supah-cool, trendy, futuristic electronic casing. Amazingly, the combination works to near-perfection.

 

SuperPinkyMandy does not try to mask its strict adherence to «formula». With a few minor ex­ceptions, each track here gradually or quickly sets up a danceable «trip-hoppy» groove, some­times faster, sometimes slower, against which the singer positions her vocals, usually echoey and ghostly, and almost always resolving into a repetitive, mantraic chorus. Around this chorus, even more ghostly backing vocals and various electronic or non-electronic effects cluster in unpredic­table combinations, working towards a dizzifying neo-psychedelic feel. In this context, the role of the singer is reduced (lead vocal being only one equal part of everything else), and that is good — Beth Orton is credible, but she's nowhere near as uniquely interesting, personality-wise, as Beth Gibbons, for instance (just to name another Beth from the same era), and when she allows herself to be just a part of the scenery, «less» becomes «more».

 

Orton and Orbit first tested the water with a cover version — taking John Martyn's acoustic sen­timentality ʽDon't Wanna Know 'Bout Evilʼ ("only wanna know 'bout love") and giving it the «Orbit touch». The result, with about four or five different keyboard parts, analog and digital alike, piled on top of the rhythmic groove, and Beth adding her «icy numb» vocals — suggesting that here is a woman that already has learned everything possible about evil, but nothing so far about love — is either inoffensively boring, or mildly mesmerizing, depending on the nature of your own senses, but at least the combination of ingredients is unique enough to allow for some intrigue, and then build it up from there.

 

Encouraged by the results, they then applied this formula to a bunch of self-written tracks, with Orbit taking care of the grooves and Beth supplying the mantras. Stylistically, the grooves con­tain enough diversity to last you all the way through. ʽYesterday's Goneʼ is hard, harsh, funky, and moves in the direction of hardcore techno, while Beth is singing the vocal part of Atropos the Moira, sternly warning us about "blind chances of destiny". ʽWhen You Wakeʼ buzzes and drones on with two guitars weaving around each other, like a Velvet Underground imitation. ʽFaith Will Carryʼ sounds the closest to a proto-Ray Of Light techno-pop number, but with a nice ringing guitar part helping it come across as more natural. ʽShe Cries Your Nameʼ, which would later be re-recorded for Trailerpark (in a much less impressive fashion, if you ask me), is almost bluesy, but still spiced up with suitably astral noises to add coldness and distance. And so on, with just about every song having something to offer.

 

If there is anything to criticize, it might be the rhythmic base of the grooves, which is nowhere near as experimental or just plain inventive as the layers of overdubs, or even the basslines, laid down with love and care. Most of the beat patterns are averagely funky, or mildly techno, but in the end, the similarity of the signatures of tempos may trick you into feeling that all these songs are the same, when they really aren't. Perhaps, in the end, it was the percussion that annoyed Beth so much that she'd swore she'd never want to work like this again — too bad, because, having split up with Orbit, she not only lost the beats, but also the man's talent at setting up the proper musical atmosphere for her icy melancholy. And maybe even more than that, because her ballads on the «regular» albums often sound boring, whereas a thing like ʽWhere Do You Go?ʼ, losing the beat and adding pianos and strings, is totally charming: the chorus ("where do you go when the wind doesn't blow?") contains one of her finest folksy vocal flourishes that I have not en­countered that frequently in her subsequent career.

 

Naturally, you won't like SuperPinkyMandy if you do not have a thing for «mood music», nor does it even begin to compare with the pinnacles of that genre, where «mood» borders on destruc­tive implosion (like Dummy). But if you do have a thing for «getting in the mood», and do not mind lowering your expectations a bit, you will be more than rewarded by the surprisingly unex­pected creativity of the album. And its uniqueness, provided your casual acquaintance with Beth Orton began with Trailerpark. Fortunately, these days it is much easier to get access to a long out-of-print album than it used to in the good old «print days», so you will probably have little trouble locating the tunes, so you can join me in my sincere thumbs up.

 

TRAILER PARK (1996)

 

1) She Cries Your Name; 2) Tangent; 3) Don't Need A Reason; 4) Live As You Dream; 5) Sugar Boy; 6) Touch Me With Your Love; 7) Whenever; 8) How Fair; 9) Someone's Daughter; 10) I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine; 11) Galaxy Of Emptiness.

 

The «official authorized» debut album. After her stint with Orbit, followed by a collaboration with The Chemical Brothers on Exit Planet Dust, Beth Orton decides that, after all, she is a singer-songwriter first, and a publicity agent for modern electronic sounds only second. Let all those other guys come up with their silly club rhythms — Beth Orton is an artist, and you need to sit down and listen to her artistry. Blowing your mind is a nobler option than sweeping you off your feet. Besides, with all those Orbit-style noises and echoes, she was miscast way too strongly as the «mystery lady», when in reality she is so open and sentimental.

 

The new album, produced by Victor Van Vugt (formerly responsible for several Nick Cave LPs) and DJ-cum-remixer Andrew Weatherall, is not at all free from modern rhythms — it is seriously funky and, in places, trip-hoppy. It did, in fact, earn Beth's music the tag of «folktronica», al­though it must be acknowledged that there is a lot more «folk» here than «-tronica» where it used to be vice versa during Beth's stint with Orbit. But the basic idea, a combination of folk motives, singer-songwriter imagery, and contemporary production, could work very well, if...

 

...if, well, the major problem of all of Beth's post-PinkyMandy output weren't so irritatingly simple: it is, for lack of a more original word, boring. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but ul­timately, Beth Orton's musical and general artistic image from now on would lack «that one spe­cial ingredient» (or those several special ingredients) that is necessary for an artist with his or her own say in this world. The music has a little bit of everything — respectable songwriting ideas, acceptable lyrical agenda, enjoyable singing voice, understandable taste in arrangements — but unless you make a conscious effort, the songs do not really stick. There is nothing offensive about them (as in, say, an aggressively-feminist Ani di Franco way of constructing songs from knives instead of hooks and pretending to call it «music»), but if we're talking of ways to translate human and artistic personality into musical form, I think that, off the top of my head, Suzanne Vega, for instance, comes across soun­ding way more «deep» and «interesting».

 

The main problem, I guess, is that Orton's songs sound as if her chief influence were someone like Emmylou Harris — gallantly embroidered country-folk-pop with individual sensitivity — but without the true rootsy depth required to make the songs sound alive and natural. Something like ʽWheneverʼ, which completely eschews modern rhythms and relies entirely on acoustic gui­tars and vocal harmonies to achieve its goals — a song that could have been written by just about anybody circa 1971-72 and anytime later, pleasant and professional, but instantly forgettable. Or ʽDon't Need A Reasonʼ, quietly waltzing along to an unassuming lead fiddle and then to an equa­lly unassuming orchestrated background. Nice, life-asserting, and about as dull as its basic mes­sage: "So I've been calling angels down to Earth / Because I believe we need them". If I were an angel, I'd certainly think twice before responding to such a call.

 

The basic rule of thumb about Trailer Park, as well as most of the rest of Beth's catalog, is this: the less she concentrates on «soul», «message», and «humanism» and the more she concentrates on «technicalities», be it melodic hooks or sonic tapestry, the better she gets. Case in point: the new version of ʽShe Cries Your Nameʼ, completely recast from its early «cosmic trip-hop» image with Orbit into a slightly Eastern-tinged psycho-folk shape, where acoustic rhythms are comple­mented with a droning, sliding strings arrangement that, at times, sounds almost like a tribute to George Harrison's ʽWithin You Without Youʼ. I am afraid I still prefer the original and all of its hauntingly bubbling keyboard inventions, but the reinvention is no slouch, either, and it managed to crack the singles market and put the lady on the scene, after all.

 

The «meat» of the album clings to the ribs of the longer tracks — ʽTangentʼ, ʽTouch Me With Your Loveʼ, ʽGalaxy Of Emptinessʼ, stretched out grooves with dark bass lines whose melodies are just as influenced by country-pop as anything else on here, but whose atmospherics sort of offers an «easier» alternative to the disturbing soundscapes of Portishead, replacing «suicidal bleek» with «tolerably melancholic». The bass melodies at least fulfill the function of solid an­chors to root the song to a channel in your mind, and the electronic embellishments, though no­where near as wild as Orbit's, are still more inventive than the acoustic guitar work on the more traditionally-oriented material.

 

Other than that, Beth's little penchant for upbeat pop pays off on ʽLive As You Dreamʼ, which is probably, vocal-wise, the catchiest number here, and on ʽSomeone's Daughterʼ — the combina­tion of vocal hooks with friendly funky rhythms works well enough; surprisingly, Beth's «sunny» side can actually be more impressive than her melancholic side. She also does a nice cover of the Ronettes' ʽI Wish I Never Saw The Sunshineʼ, backed by just her acoustic playing, and... well, at least she is not able to spoil an already good song.

 

So, all in all, I cannot imagine how it would be possible to fall in love with Trailer Park, but it would also be impossible to deny it its own face. The material is unquestionably diverse, the songwriting is not without its moments, and the merger of several genres into one is definitely an ongoing thing. As for the lack of «sharpness» and «spiciness», well, I can also understand how some would consider it a good thing — the humbleness, the reluctance to be too gimmicky, the ho­nest refusal of exaggerating and artifically condensing one's feelings. In any case, one thing's for certain: there is no «adult contemporary» as such in the vicinity of Trailer Park, and the fact that she's avoided that pitfall while circling so dangerously close to the pit alone is well worth a respectable thumbs up. In short — a good record to savor after you've exhausted the «flashy» mood masterpieces of the 1990s.

 

CENTRAL RESERVATION (1999)

 

1) Stolen Car; 2) Sweetest Decline; 3) Couldn't Cause Me Harm; 4) So Much More; 5) Pass In Time; 6) Central Re­servation; 7) Stars All Seem To Weep; 8) Love Like Laughter; 9) Blood Red River; 10) Devil Song; 11) Feel To Believe; 12) Central Reservation (the Then Again version).

 

This is probably Beth's critical, if not commercial, peak, as the album mostly got rave reviews and ended up on several popular best-of lists. But this seems more a matter of conjecture and op­portunity than anything else — Beth was in good form, but she'd also worked on her public ap­peal and musical world connections, and by the time the record came out, there was an intellec­tual fanbase that was ready to sit up and take note. Well, I guess you just have to get some compensation for touring with Lilith Fair, after all.

 

The album as a whole is typical «mature» Beth Orton: boring as heck the first few times you listen to it, and then, depending on your Zodiac sign or diet peculiarities, it either just goes on being boring, or it «sinks in» and you begin to appreciate the subtle magic of the vocals or the intricate, if inobtrusive, details of the arrangements. You can also begin to appreciate the artistic personality of Beth Orton, but this may be the hardest task of all — she is quite elusive, and her joys and sorrows may pretend to more depth than they actually have (which, when proven, is the worst possible crime of all, but the jury is divided on that one).

 

If you feel like you'd want to enjoy this album, but can't imagine how, here's two possible lines of advice. First, this is one Beth Orton record where she managed to put together quite a few noto­rious guest stars, and every once in a while, they help out in spicing up her songwriting craft. On ʽStolen Carʼ, the lead-in track and first single off the album, Ben Harper contributes an eerie lead guitar part with something like a backward echo effect — it fulfills more or less the same func­tion as the strings on ʽShe Cries Your Nameʼ, which opened Trailer Park, turning a regular singer-songwriting effort into an «art song». Then, on the lengthy soft waltz ʽSweetest Declineʼ, which is nothing much to write home about by itself, Dr. John sits in on piano and gives it some of his nonchalantly brilliant New Orleanian atmosphere. Then there's quite a badass bass line on the trip-hoppy groove of ʽCouldn't Cause Me Harmʼ — maybe not much else of autonomous interest, but the coolness of the bassline rubs off a little on the guitars, strings, and chimes, making it all sound a little classy. And so on, and on: most of the songs have these «little things» that will stand out in time, provided time is given.

 

Second, this time, some of the songs that are built strictly around Beth and her acoustic guitar are actually quite good — me referring in particular to ʽBlood Red Riverʼ and ʽDevil Songʼ, whose bleakness, depression, and pathos (and preachiness, in case of the former) I do not find in the least irritating, because the former has a cunningly catchy verse melody and the latter, an equally cunningly catchy chorus melody. Atmosphere-wise, they are both sung from the point of view of some present-day Mary Magdalene, and this makes you feel uneasy — I mean, God only knows what that woman is wishing to confess by saying "Devil was my angel, now I'm just not sure / To travel as my angel there's always my whore". But I can buy it, musically and lyrically, and I can believe she's got some demons of her own to exorcise, so whatever.

 

Some of this stuff never clicks with me, like the lengthy centerpiece ʽPass In Timeʼ, allegedly written in memory of her late mother — not particularly clichéd, and certainly not overblown, but too musically close to generic «alt-country», and perhaps in need of a more nuanced singing voice to make an impression (and definitely without any need to arrange it as a duet with Terry Callier, whose voice adds nothing but extra blandness to the song); or the title track, which has no melodic backbone whatsoever and consists of a New Age-y mish-mash of keyboards, guitars, and strings without any progressive development or discernible hook (a typical Enya song would feel like a Beatles single next to this).

 

But on the whole, the record is hardly any worse than Trailer Park, and although it certainly has no business being on the list of 1001 Albums To Hear Before You Die, as Wikipedia informs me in one of its «stay objective» mood swings, there is no reason to deprive it of a thumbs up, either. Essentially, what Beth Orton has managed to do here is take a proverbially uninteresting prota­gonist — and use a combination of mediocre songwriting skills, inventive producers, and sympa­thetic guest stars to breathe some new life into her, and I appreciate that. What I don't appreciate is that the album's last song, ʽFeel To Believeʼ expropriates the basic hook of Paul McCartney's ʽFor No Oneʼ to build a thoroughly inferior song on top of it — "hey, that's no way to say good­bye", as Leonard Cohen would have said. But then again, she might just be an innocent victim of the «great Beatles curse» as we know it.

 

DAYBREAKER (2002)

 

1) Paris Train; 2) Concrete Sky; 3) Mount Washington; 4) Anywhere; 5) Daybreaker; 6) Carmella; 7) God Song; 8) This One's Gonna Bruise; 9) Ted's Waltz; 10) Thinking About Tomorrow.

 

Oh, Daybreaker. Well, you know, I'd never in the world claim that it kicks as much prime time ass as The Razor's Edge, but still, I feel it is a little underrated over these years. The murderous riffage on ʽHail Caesarʼ, the maniacal apocalyptic feel of ʽBurnin' Aliveʼ, the triumphant anthe­mic ascent of the wannabe-alltime-American classic ʽHard As A Rockʼ... oh wait a minute, that was Ballbreaker, seems like we're in the wrong sort of story here.

 

Well, anyway, Ballbreaker was no timeless classic and Daybreaker is no awful embarrassment, but still, intelligence and depth aside, I know which of the two I would choose. (I almost wanted to write "artistic symbolism aside", but then realized that AC/DC music is really full of artistic symbolism to a degree that Beth Orton could only hope for. It's not very decent artistic sym­bolism, of course, but whoever said art has to be polite?). The thing is, on Daybreaker Beth sets aside such values as (a) musical innovation, (b) sonic energy, and (c) melodic hooks, and goes all the way in the «singer-songwriter with atmosphere and attitude» department. In other words, she takes herself more seriously than ever before, and you have to take it or leave it.

 

One good listen to ʽParis Trainʼ, the album opener, will probably be enough for you to know whether to bother with the rest, because most of the album sounds in a similar manner. Slow-moving, moody, melodically predictable folk-pop with «proverbially deep» lyrics that hint at never-healing personal traumas. There is even some dynamics, as the orchestral layers gradually creep up on you like gathering clouds, bursting out in a thunderstorm midway through. There is even some class to it, and nothing specifically irritating about the whole thing. But it is all so bland, so limp, so middle-of-the-road in everything, that eventually I'd almost prefer to be irrita­ted than to have to be wasting time searching for a single dent in this impeccable smoothness.

 

Song after song, we get these densely arranged, multi-layered soundscapes — I think she might have set out to rival The Cure in their famous bid for membership in Monty Python's «Royal Society For Putting Things On Top Of Other Things» — that are all so dense and stately and noble and epic and... nothing. ʽMount Washingtonʼ, true to its name, spends six and a half minutes climbing up, and up, and up, and six and a half minutes later, we're still climbing and we still do not know where or why, we just do it. I'd like to love this song, but for some reason, it does not work at all. One possible thought is that it is fairly hard to be humble and bombastic at the same time — Pete Townshend could somehow manage that, but Beth Orton does not have comparable talent, and so a song like ʽMount Washingtonʼ is way too loud and over-the-top to be truly humble, yet not loud or intense or emotional enough to be truly bombastic. Like everything else on here, it gets stuck in between — and fades out of memory as soon as it is over.

 

It might have been better if she'd just drop it and made the entire album into a solo acoustic per­formance: I think that the most quiet songs here, like ʽThis One's Gonna Bruiseʼ with its lone­some cello backup (co-written with Ryan Adams), and the fussy country-pop of ʽCarmellaʼ, are the easiest ones to take with you on a reminiscence trip. Instead, they are brief interludes, as the lady sets out to convince us that she can mesmerize audiences without much use of the electronic devices, but I am not sure about that. The songs all deal with her personal tragedies, traumas, treasons, and tribulations, yet they do not convey a sense of too much suffering — in fact, some­times the conveyed feeling borders on exaggerated self-pitying, which is probably the worst thing we'd expect from an «authentic» singer-songwriter.

 

For the sake of extra trivia, ʽConcrete Skyʼ is co-written with Johnny Marr, and, perhaps not coincidentally, it is the most upbeat and even catchy folk-pop song on here, so you might wanna check it out if you happen to collect everything Smiths-related. But it is certainly not enough to rescue the album from a disappointed thumbs down — a classic case of «biting off more than one can chew», as far as my opinion is concerned. Naturally, as far as singer-songwriters go, this is still a million times better than, say, a phenomenon like Vanessa Carlton (whose debut album came out that same year, as I still remember with a shudder), but what we have here is a real singer-songwriter that has charisma, intelligence, and talent to burn, and it makes the lifelessness of Daybreaker all the more lamentable.

 

THE OTHER SIDE OF DAYBREAK (2003)

 

1) Ooh Child; 2) Thinking About Tomorrow (PG Dub); 3) Ali's Waltz; 4) Daybreaker (Four Tet remix); 5) Bobby Gentry; 6) Carmella (Four Tet remix); 7) Beautiful World; 8) Concrete Sky (acoustic); 9) Daybreaker (Roots Manuva remix); 10) Anywhere (Two Lone Swordsmen remix vocal).

 

It is not often that an album of outtakes, remixes, and rarities outshines the mothership to which it is appended as an afterthought / bonus-for-the-fans, but, depending on how you feel about Day­breaker, this might just be the proverbial case. There is no question, at the very least, that The Other Side is a much more diverse and much less predictable compilation; so if you thought, like me, that the monotonous moodiness of Daybreaker was somewhat limp and lifeless rather than mesmerizing, welcome to the other side. It is less ambitious and completely dis-conceptual, but at least it does not make you want to go to sleep and never wake up.

 

The series of remixes offered here significantly raises the bar on the -tronica segment of «folk­tronica», which is good — ʽAnywhereʼ, for instance, is transformed from a boring jazz-pop stan­dard (bordering on adult contemporary) into something livelier, darker, and notably more psy­chedelic than it used to be, and the same goes for ʽThinking About Tomorrowʼ, which is now all awash in astral noises and more reminiscent of Massive Atack than confessional singer-songwri­ting. The most radical transformation, however, happened to ʽCarmellaʼ, which used to be a three-minute country-pop single and now is an 11-minute long extravaganza, a huge sonic soup in which Four Tet, the remixer, crams every sort of digital and analog noise imaginable (the three-minute coda should be subtitled «The Amazing Life of Giant Robot Insects», and who cares that it is completely unrelated to the original song?).

 

The electronic remixes are interspersed with a couple of really good originals — ʽBobby Gentryʼ, on which Beth lowers her voice so much that she almost sings like a modern day Nico in places, combines acoustic folk backing with pseudo-mid-Eastern string arrangements, giving the song some majesty, mystique, and a pinch of roughness that was nowhere near in sight on Daybreaker; and the tender acoustic rendition of the old soul hit ʽOoh Childʼ by The Five Stairsteps brings on that criminal thought that maybe the lady should do more covers and less originals, at least when she cannot bring the originals to boil. Finally, there is a very good acoustic rendition of ʽConcrete Skyʼ that sounds not only more intimate, but every bit as catchy as the fully arranged original — that Johnny Marr guy writes some rock-solid material, doesn't he?

 

All in all, there is not all that much to say here, as usual, but that shouldn't stop you from searching out this album if you care at all about the artist, or, for that matter, the various artists from the electronica scene that helped her produce it. If it was intended as an intentional «anti­thesis» to the weightier, more «serious» and «personal» Daybreaker, it should count as an integ­ral part of Orton's discography, because «serious» and «personal» is not really what she does best; it is the inexhaustible bag of tricks that she gradually exploits with her various partners that matters, breaking barriers between tradition and futurism like some sort of female Beck. Ah, if only she also had Beck's sense of humor as well — but I guess that would be asking for too much. Anyway, an unexpected thumbs up here, as much as I expected to hate this album.

 

COMFORT OF STRANGERS (2005)

 

1) Worms; 2) Countenance; 3) Heartland Truckstop; 4) Rectify; 5) Comfort Of Strangers; 6) Shadow Of A Doubt; 7) Conceived; 8) Absinthe; 9) A Place Inside; 10) Safe In Your Arms; 11) Shopping Trolley; 12) Feral Children; 13) Heart Of Soul; 14) Pieces Of Sky.

 

Good God, is this ever boring. On her fourth (actually, fifth, if you count SuperPinkyMandy, and you should) album, Orton goes for an even more stripped-down approach — most of the songs are in trio format, with Jim O'Rourke handling bass duties and Tim Barnes on percussion, while Beth is doing her latest best to impress us as a singer, songwriter, guitar player, artistic soul, and gracious human being. Unfortunately, of all these categories, I can only recommend «gra­cious human being» to your attention. If you are in need of a randomly chosen gracious human being this evening, Beth Orton is as good as any, and maybe even better than most.

 

The one major saving grace of these fourteen songs is that they are all short — only one crosses the four-minute mark, and some barely go over two. This means that at least your ears will not have enough time to shrivel, wither, and fall off in protest as the lady moves from one traditional folk chord sequence to another. She does try to write her own vocal melodies for the songs, but she still has not mastered the art of the hook — at best, her «hooks» are softly shouted slogans (ʽHeart Of Soulʼ), and at worst, she just adds a little touch of singing to her poetry.

 

Lyrically, as you could guess, there is a lot of suffering going on, completely inadequate to the lite-melancholic, lulling music that surrounds the vocal delivery — and the vocal delivery itself is as tepid as usual. The words are hit-and-miss — some of the imagery is thought-provoking, although it is hard to lyrically justify an album whose opening lines go "Worms don't dance / They haven't got the balls" — but in the end, they are about as uninteresting as the music. Whole songwriting factories have put out billions of songs on the side effects of the love business, and there is no way Comfort Of Strangers could stand competition with the best of 'em.

 

I count exactly one track here where an interesting musical move was suggested — ʽRectifyʼ has a sort of non-trivial transition from the fast gallop of the verses to the slow shuffle of the "if you take a drop of water from a bucket..." chorus. Both parts in themselves are pretty standard fare country-pop, but the way they alternate with each other is novel and even fun, especially com­pared to the utter facelessness of the rest.

 

It is quite possible — indeed, almost a certainty — that some of these songs could have been saved by means of more imaginative arrangements (bring back Orbit!). Not even Beth Orton's biggest fans could probably claim that she is an outstanding guitar or piano player, or endowed with some sort of idiosyncratic playing technique that puts her in her own niche. The «folk­tronica» thing was the only thing that gave her music an edge; take away the «-tronica» and you are left with nothing. There is no sense in wasting time analyzing these songs one by one. They are not «awful bad» per se, but I'd rather they be awful bad, because this demonstration of by-the-book «tasteful sensitive grace» is as head-splittingly dull as watching a Nora Ephron movie, sorry. Thumbs down.

 

SUGARING SEASON (2012)

 

1) Magpie; 2) Dawn Chorus; 3) Candles; 4) Something More Beautiful; 5) Call Me The Breeze; 6) Poison Tree; 7) See Through Blue; 8) Last Leaves Of Autumn; 9) State Of Grace; 10) Mystery.

 

Beth Orton's first new album in seven years, and seven years without an album is no laughing matter: if anything, it makes you predisposed to the idea that maybe the artist really has some­thing to say, if it took him/her seven years to say it. On the other hand, everything that we already knew about Beth Orton sort of predisposed us to the idea that it would be rash to expect a good album from somebody who'd consciously ditched her chief know-how in favor of a third-rate singer-songwriter career. All in all, an intriguing situation — at least until you tear your gaze from the pretty / intelligent profile on the sleeve cover and start playing the actual music.

 

The best thing I can say about the music is that it is at least significantly more involving than Comfort Of Strangers. The folksy arrangements are not as lethargic or minimalistic this time around; there is a decent rhythm section that can keep it steady or get in a little swing mode if necessary, there are some dynamic string arrangements, and she seems to have spent more time working out the hooks. In other words, the songs at least try to flutter and thrash around rather than just sink to the bottom in one go. Unfortunately, about half of them now end up sounding like uninventive imitations of early Joni Mitchell — and once again, I have trouble understanding what exactly about them belongs to Beth Orton, the Artist of Her Own Persuasion.

 

A whole three singles (as opposed to a maximum of two) were culled from the album, so let us try and concentrate on these. ʽSomething More Beautifulʼ is one of the slowest and «downiest» numbers on the record — a transparent sign that «commercialism» is farther from the artist's mind than ever before. Unfortunately, it is simply bad. Oversung (drenched in breathy glottal stops — "in what you belee-hh-eeve" — so we do not make a dreadful mistake thinking that the song was not recorded soon after a hysterical crying fit), overpunctuated by Pathetic String Bursts at the start of each chorus, and yet lacking anything resembling a proper hook, it's 100% atmo­sphere, pumped up after a traditional, predictable recipé.

 

ʽMagpieʼ, which was used to open the album, is a straightforward attempt at writing in the old folk style, musically and lyrically, and since it does not pretend to the status of «grand tragedy», like ʽSomething More Beautifulʼ does, it is far easier to enjoy, with a nice «depressed-but-not-suicidal» flavor to the vocals. The major hookline ("what a lie, what a lie...") sounds like it's been lifted from The Cranberries (in fact, as the years go by, Beth sounds more and more like a techni­cally weaker counterpart of Dolores O'Riordan), but when we are talking folksy singer-song­writing, such observations can never be spoken in an accusative tone anyway.

 

The third, and best, single was ʽCall Me The Breezeʼ — not a J. J. Cale cover (as fun as it would be for Beth to cover J. J. Cale), but an original composition, something of a humble pantheistic anthem ("call me the earth, call me the stars...") set to a lively folk-pop rhythm and peppered with light, ghostly, but friendly vocals. Maybe if there were more songs like this on the album, its diagnostic facial features would have finally begun to emerge — it is like a soft «country ron­deau» with a cool combination of guitars, percussion, and electric organ and without any self-aggrandizing pathos to turn off the seasoned listener.

 

Alas, such is not the case: the overall proportions of bad to mediocre to nice on Sugaring Season are more or less the same as in the singles subarray, and there is no incentive for me to talk about the rest. Essentially, we are dealing here with just another out of the miriad «neo-folk» records, which would have probably sunk like a stone if not for the artist's enduring reputation that was earned with far more interesting work — think Eric Clapton, if you wish, the difference being that the latter could at least always offer redemption for his tepid studio output on the stage, while Beth has pretty much disowned her entire «folktronica» legacy and is now insisting on persisting as a second-rate neo-folkie. Of course, seasoned lovers of this style will always find ten thousand subtle reasons why Sugaring Season has its own charm, quite different from that of Joni, Sandy, or Emmylou — but I honestly see no sense in wrecking my brain over what any of those reasons could be. As far as I'm concerned, she is simply not cut out for this line of work.

 

KIDSTICKS (2016)

 

1) Snow; 2) Moon; 3) Petals; 4) 1973; 5) Wave; 6) Dawnstar; 7) Falling; 8) Corduroy Legs; 9) Flesh And Blood; 10) Kidsticks.

 

Finally, some good sense. Realizing, perhaps, that continuing in the same neo-folk vein will never again even begin to make her work stand out, Beth Orton comes full circle and is back where she started — this is «folktronica» all over again, with electronic arrangements from top to bottom and her old trip-hop and house influences resurfacing again. This almost automatically would mean that Kidsticks is her best record in at least a decade — and, granted, since Beth Orton was never a genius artist to begin with, that ain't saying that much, but at least «unendu­rable boredom» is no longer the first association that comes to mind when listening.

 

The album is short, concise, and owes much of its flavor to Beth's collaboration with Andrew Hung of Bristol's Fuck Buttons fame — not that, at this point, turning to a digital wizard who made his claim to fame eight years ago would automatically imply that she is trying to «trend», but that is really only for the better: there's no question of trends or fashions, merely of genera­ting a new kind of sound for her, one that would best suit her romantic, naturalistic, and cosmic in­clinations. Oh, there is no real conceptuality on the album, but she does seem to be on an environ­mental kick, with song titles that constantly refer to celestial and natural objects and lyrics that constantly tie these objects to her mood swings and emotions. (Ironically, the biggest public splash that the album made was when she went out into the desert to make a video and acciden­tally — or intentionally, who really knows? she now says she thought it was dead, but who knows?... — spray-painted an old Joshua tree, getting so much flack from enviornmentalists that she eventually had to remove the video and apologize. Ted Nugent she's not, evidently). And, at long last, there is some goddamn energy on the album to account for that.

 

For one thing, it's playful. The very first track, ʽSnowʼ, aims for a light psychedelic effect, with an almost chaotic mess of quasi-tribal drumming, quasi-tribal chanting, flanged guitars snapping at each other from different speakers, and tons and tons of vocal overdubs — starting with the opening line, "I'll astrally project myself into the life of someone else", which seems like a mis­sion statement for the entire record, and ending with the repeated chant of "I'm getting high, getting high off your star". It's an odd, but strangely friendly synthesis, and it suggests that, for the rest of the album, Orton would rather prefer to explore the «bright» than the «dark» potential of electronica — and that, on the whole, she is in an agreeable mood this time of year.

 

Even when the music does get a little darker, it's a natural rather than evil darkness — ʽMoonʼ, after all, is a song about moonlit nights, so a deep dark bassline and echoey ambient keyboard wobbles in the background are in the works; but on the whole, it is a friendly techno number that just makes you want to dance, all the while wondering what the lyrics are about (limits of human cognition? all is one under the /moon and/ sun? whatever). However, the fact that the songs vary between straightforward bouncy light pop (ʽ1973ʼ, which kind of sounds like an old Cars outtake) and darker, deeper, more soulful material (ʽWaveʼ, with a heavier, almost sedated vocal perfor­mance from Beth that brings Patti Smith to mind) do much in terms of procuring diversity and keeping your attention from straying too far away. Bottomline is, this is a record with a positive, even sentimental message, but it really tries to deliver the message in many different ways.

 

A few of the tunes might even stick around in memory for a while, like the slightly jazzy ballad ʽFallingʼ (with a really pretty "I'm falling backwards, I'm falling sidewards from your arms" bit that's so tender and tragic at the same time), or the final epic ʽFlesh And Bloodʼ, also jazzy in essence and featuring a wonderfully engineered double-tracked falsetto chorus part. The bad news is that you'd have to strive for that — as pretty as Kidsticks is on the whole, neither the vocals nor the instrumental melodies ever dare to cut deep, mostly presenting you with nice, but superficial naturalistic-emotional soundscapes. And sometimes the complex arrangements almost seem wasted — cue ʽDawnstarʼ with its painstakingly built-up crescendo of harmonies, guitars, pianos, synthesizers, but since there is no single overriding mega-theme, the whole song ends up unsatisfactory and unmemorable.

 

On the whole, this is damn pleasant, but as far as Beth's synthesis of pop, folk, and electronica is concerned in general, this ain't no SuperPinkyMandy, and considering that very few people, as of 2016, even remember what Trailer Park was all about (most of the reviews of the new album I've read had to dedicate at least a couple of original paragraphs to a detailed answer to the popu­lar question «Beth Orton? Who the fuck is Beth Orton?»), nobody except for Beth's veteran fans should probably bother with the record anyway — chances are that if you do not see yourself rejoicing at the idea of Beth Orton going back from her folksy innovations to her electronic roots (does sound like an unusual idea, doesn't it?), and do not evaluate Kidsticks in the context of her overall work, the album won't probably even make much of a blip on your radar. Still, at least if she continues making records like these, and not like Sugaring Season, for the rest of her 21st century days, I'll be glad to give them a spin every now and then.

 

 

 

BETTIE SERVEERT

PALOMINE (1992)

 

1) Leg; 2) Palomine; 3) Kid's Alright; 4) Brain-Tag; 5) Tom Boy; 6) Under The Surface; 7) Balentine; 8) This Thing Nowhere; 9) Healthy Sick; 10) Sundazed To The Core; 11) Palomine (Small).

 

First things first: this band used to be quite heavily overrated by the indie community, since indie people tend to value bands for their fire, ferocity, and frustration rather than for their Pythagorean qualities, so to speak — and Bettie Serveert is a prime example of that. Nowadays, as the band's fire seems to have died down a bit, and as so many competitors with even less talent have occu­pied the same turf, that reverence has largely dissipated, yet in the early 1990s these intrepid Dutch pseudo-pioneers of post-grunge indie-rock were really hot stuff. But any band that chooses, of its own free will, at a certain point in their career to cover a Bright Eyes song (ʽLover I Don't Have To Loveʼ, in 2004), would already seem suspicious. And yes, one listen to their acclaimed debut is enough to make you understand — while the band is nowhere near as vile as the artistic persona of Conor Oberst, in theory, they are capable of empathizing with that artistic persona.

 

Bettie Serveert formed in Holland, although their lead singer and chief songwriter Carol van Dijk originally came from a Dutch family in Canada, hence her total lack of a Dutch accent (it is said, in fact, that she never managed to learn Dutch as a «second native» language after relocating to the Netherlands at the age of seven), nor are there any detectable «Hollandisms» in the lyrics or the music (and if there are, I probably wouldn't know what they would be, unless you start consi­dering «Indorock» people like Andy Tielman). The only Dutchism is contained in the band's name: «Betty serves» refers to Dutch tennis player Betty Stöve, who wrote a book with that title about her career. Apparently, judging by her record, she served all right, but won mostly in doubles — a hint at the band members' complete mutual interdependence? Nah, they probably just happened to fall upon the book title while trying to come up with a name.

 

Anyway, what is detectable is an almost slavish adoration of dirty distorted «avant-garage» rock — the three major pillars upon which Bettie Serveert try to erect their own little outpost are The Velvet Underground; Neil Young in his Crazy Horse incar­nation; and, from a more recent era, Sonic Youth. The lineup is simple and traditional. The rhythm section (Herman Bunskoeke on bass and Berend Dubbe on drums) is competent, but nothing special. The basic song structures are shaped by Carol herself, playing rhythmic patterns that she probably learned while listening to her idols — nothing special, either. The only member of the band who tries to be just a tad more creative is lead guitarist Peter Visser: his lead parts are thoroughly derivative of Lou Reed, Neil Young, and the Sonic Youth people in terms of style, but his is the responsibility for the melodic content of the songs, and every once in a while he comes up with some original ideas — thank God, or the whole thing would be a total drag.

 

Now what is it that made people actually fall in love with this bunch of slow / mid-tempo, rather sloppy, thoroughly uncatchy mixes of grungy grumble with hookless folksy chord sequences? As talented as Peter Visser is, the bulk of the band's charisma is generated by Carol — it is she, after all, who writes and delivers the lyrics, and classic-era Bettie Serveert is not a «pop» or a «hard rock» band; it is, first and foremost, a «singer-songwriter» outfit. Each song is a short (sometimes long) personal rant, usually of the «me and you» variety, full of obscure psychologism and veiled complexes — so thickly veiled, in fact, that it can be fairly hard to decode what the hell is that girl really singing about. However, my biggest problem with Carol is not her lyrics, but her per­sonality, which has so far failed to make me a convert. Her voice is fairly normal — neither too sweet-sappy-sentimental nor too arrogant-barking-punkish, just sort of a regular mezzo-soprano with a lot of mezzo and not so much soprano, if you get my drift. Her modulations and mood shifts are subtle and hard to notice, and even harder to interpret, much like the lyrics. But at the same time, there is also none of that crawl-under-your-skin mystique that sometimes infects you when listening to certain superficially unassuming vocalists.

 

At her worst (usually when she be­gins to rise up the scale in «climactic» emotional outsbursts, e.g. the "have I ever laid my hands on you before?" bit on ʽBrain-Tagʼ), she can be seriously annoy­ing. At her best, like when she gets into dreamy, subtly romantic mode on the title track, she can be mildly pleasant and listenable. But none of this, to me, seems like either great singing or even great «personality demonstration». Perhaps it just so happened that there was this acute demand for strong, intelligent female personalities emerging from behind walls of guitar distortion in the early 1990s, and Carol van Dijk happened to catch that wave — but I am willing to go on record saying that she's got nothing on Aimee Mann, and, totally sacrilegious as it may sound, I'd even say that Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill has more of that «intense female personality» than Palomine, not to mention catchier songs (admittedly far stupider lyrics, though — then again, since I do not understand most of van Dijk's lyrics, I have no way of telling exactly how stupid or intelligent they could appear to be).

 

Anyway, like I said, if it weren't for Visser, Palomine would be one of the draggiest albums I've ever heard. But already on the first track — ʽLegʼ, beginning as a rambling, directionless, irrita­tingly impressionist folk-rocker — he gradually manages to pull my attention away from Carol's ranting about "reflections in puddles and rain on the faces" and into his own world of trippy rock soloing that quotes freely from both Neil Young's and Robert Fripp's bag of tricks and eventually scales those heights of sonic ecstasy that Carol, on her own, would have no chance at even noti­cing from afar, making it well worth your while to sit through all of the song's six minutes rather than yawning off after the first couple of minutes.

 

This makes it easy for me to segregate the remaining songs — the more lead guitar they have, the better chance of survival. ʽKid's Allrightʼ is a fast rocker where even van Dijk pumps up a spoon­ful of anger, and Visser throws on lead lines and solos that are quite worthy of the annual Sonic Youth prize. ʽBalentineʼ sounds like a lost outtake from Neil Young's Ragged Glory (with a balance of idealistic romance and furious anger that recalls ʽLove And Only Loveʼ); and on ʽThis Thing Nowhereʼ, Visser thrusts his lead axe right under Carol's nose almost all the way through, and even if she has quite a pretty nose, guess who wins. On the other hand, the seven-minute epic ʽSundazed To The Coreʼ, most of it an unholy mess of distracted jangle, noise, and repetitive, hazy, half-hearted screeching, is so unbearable that I tend to end my listening experience with ʽHealthy Sickʼ (an equally sloppy noisefest, but only lasts for two minutes).

 

In short, you can see the reaction is pretty mixed here, but there is definitely no way that I could agree with the assessment of Palomine as a masterpiece of Nineties' indie-rock, or even as the band's own masterpiece. I could see where, like so many other albums, it could be embraced by «alternative»-minded college teens in search of a generational support that wouldn't be too trendy or too gimmicky, but, like most of these albums, I'd be surprised if it managed to stand the test of time. The funniest thing about this band, however, is that, the more musical they got, the less cri­tical respect they would earn for that — as if being even a pale copy of Sonic Youth was more of an achievement than trying to excel at, you know, actual songwriting. But all in due time.

 

LAMPREY (1995)

 

1) Keepsake; 2) Ray Ray Rain; 3) D. Feathers; 4) Re-Feel-It; 5) 21 Days; 6) Cybor *D; 7) Tell Me, Sad; 8) Crutches; 9) Something So Wild; 10) Totally Freaked Out; 11) Silent Spring.

 

Now this album, I am afraid to say, does not seem to have stood even a short time test at all. Po­sitively viewed upon release and still occasionally riding on the coattails of that first reputational burst, now it seems like a prime example of «generic mid-1990s indie» — lots of bravura, he­roic pos­turing, volume, distortion, and angry, self-righteous vocals, behind all of which there is no musical substance whatsoever. Reusing, perusing, and abusing musical baggage accumulated by their betters without putting their own distinct spin on it — Lamprey is the sort of album which you'd imagine a band like Sonic Youth capable of writing and recording on-the-spot, except they'd be too embarrassed to release it (and, for that matter, there is very little in this world that Sonic Youth would be embarrassed of releasing).

 

What is so much worse, through all of it Carol van Dijk wails, rants, and splutters as if she really had something to say, but all she really says is the same old "I can't explain", only dressed up in pseudo-metaphors and allegories whose sound is clumsy and whose meaning is zilch. Example: "Go down inside of me / There's still a part that sees the first time / You've opened up my eyes / Completely self absorbed / What are we waiting for / Ferociously, you never know just why" (ʽ21 Daysʼ). Feel free to correct me, but I happen to think that these are some really bad lyrics out there, don't you think? And there's more... so much more...

 

Unfortunately, this time around even Peter Visser does not help out, because way too much space is given over to verbal raving and ranting; most of the time he is just weaving his jangle or mini­malistic lead lines in and out of Carol's rhythm playing. There is an inspired guitar break at the end of ʽD. Feathersʼ, a song for which they also drag out the Mellotron (or, at least, something that imitates the Mellotron), so that its coda becomes sonically similar to early King Crimson, and a few other tracks as well feature maniacal leads from the man, so that the process of listen­ing eventually becomes the process of impatiently waiting around for whether or not Visser is given a chance to solo at the end — offering a chance at redemption — or not — condemning the song to immediate death at the stake.

 

ʽRay Ray Rainʼ is the only track here that indirectly points to a brighter and snappier future for the band: poorly produced (the vocals are muffled and strangled in between the guitar parts), but upbeat, poppy, and shiny in a cool mid-1960s fashion, as if somebody took a whiff on inspiration from Revolver in addition to all the Velvet Undergroundisms. I am also somewhat partial to the album closer ʽSilent Springʼ which is at least different — after a long string of those crunchy, but meaningless rock grinders its acoustic guitars and echoey vocals are a nice change of pace. It is also the only track on the album on which Carol actually sings in a traditional understanding of the term, and does so admirably well.

 

Everything else is pretty much awful, with the major culprits being ʽCrutchesʼ (the "let me down, let it bubble all around me!" part could succeed if the rest of the song actually worked towards that anguished emotional release, but it doesn't, and the protagonist just comes across as a phony, capricious whiner) and the interminable ʽTell Me, Sadʼ, which takes its cue from a not-so-obscure Beatles reference ("rocking horse people out on a limb..."), never really figures out what to do with it, and burdens our conscience with some sort of problem ("tell me, Sad, what's wrong with that...") whose very existence is never confirmed — five minutes of almost literally trying to pro­duce a meaningful something out of virtually nothing.

 

A more detailed scrutiny might be able to extract bits and pieces — a decent bassline here and there, a minor vocal hook somewhere on the periphery — but on the whole, Lamprey is just a waste of talent, and I have a really hard time thinking why anybody over 18 years old would ever want to listen to it once more. Then again, judging by the seemingly fading memories of it, no­body really does these days. Thumbs down.

 

DUST BUNNIES (1997)

 

1) Geek; 2) Link; 3) Musher; 4) Dust Bunny; 5) What Friends; 6) Misery Galore; 7) Story In A Nutshell; 8) Sugar The Pill; 9) Rudder; 10) Pork And Beans; 11) Fallen Foster; 12) Co-Coward; 13) Heaven.

 

Who's got the floor? The Rev. Stephen Th. Erlewine from the All-Music Guide has got the floor: «Instead of developing or refining their sound», says the Reverend in his brief, but stern assess­ment of Dust Bunnies, «Bettie Serveert stay within their self-imposed boundaries, crafting small, simple jangle-pop songs that never rock too hard or sound too soft». And hear this: «Dust Bun­nies... doesn't necessarily return the band to the heights of Palomine. Musically, Dust Bunnies is no different than its two predecessors, and the group's lack of development is a little bit eerie...» Am I the only one to be a little bit confused here? One one hand, we have «the heights of Palo­mine», implying that the band's third album is a «low» in comparison, but on the other hand, musically, it is no different than Palomine. Hmm. Given my own experience as a review writer, I'd say these hard-to-resolve self-contradictions usually get written when the writer has nothing to say whatsoever. But if it is a band like Bettie Serveert we're talking about, I would think it's only natural. Let us not judge the Reverend too harshly. He probably had approximately 50,000 re­views scheduled for that day anyway.

 

In any case, I only mentioned this since my own reaction turns out to be surprisingly different: Dust Bunnies is the very first Bettie Serveert album that I can sit through without being consis­tently bored out of my skull. Indeed, it is «lighter», and also «tighter», than its two predecessors, as if the band had finally embarked on a definite journey to becoming a normal pop-rock band, rather than retaining their carefully styled «indie kids» image. What this means in objective terms: (a) the songs become shorter, so that they are now able to cram 13 of them into 41 minutes, rather than 11 into 49 minutes, as it used to be; (b) the songs frequently pick up the tempo, meaning that even if you can't memorize one, you can at least tap your foot to it (and it is psychologically important, no matter what the serious introspective types tell you with scorn); (c) some of the songs actually have distinctive power-pop riffs — not amazingly great riffs, but actual melodic lines that, you know, explore harmonic space rather than simply exist in it.

 

So it is not at all in the musical sphere where there has been no change; rather it is in the artistic sphere, since all the songs are still subjugated to the idea that Bettie Serveert is, above everything else, a platform for Carol van Dijk to materialize her endless rants about everything that's wrong in the world today — mainly guys behaving like dumbasses, dickheads, or chickenshits, but every once in a while she also takes on the music industry (ʽRudderʼ). Unfortunately, she still makes no effort to introduce even a little character-defining personality to her singing, but since the basic approach is to be tighter than usual, at least some of the songs now feature marginally catchy chorus hooks (ʽWhat Friends?ʼ, which also has one of the album's best riffs and could therefore qualify for the «best song» competition).

 

Other quality choices include ʽSugar The Pillʼ, written and performed in Lou Reed style, a per­cussion-free «urban ballad» with a laid-back, but bitter atmosphere, and probably Carol's only exceptional bit of vocal artistry on this record; ʽPork And Beansʼ, a jangly rocker à la Pretenders that seems to be about the unhealthy relationships between highbrow stars and lowlife admirers, but we've come a long way from Ray Davies to allow ourself to be so unambiguous in our un­derstanding; and, continuing the already established tradition, ʽHeavenʼ, the album's last track, is a softer, moodier ballad that shows Carol's «vulnerable» side (or «childish» side, if you will) and is somehow more charming than all the rest of the album put together.

 

In between these songs, there is still plenty of tunes that are completely non-descript (I mean, the draggy sound of something like ʽMusherʼ fully justifies its title), but regardless of that, this is a big musical step forward for the band. If critics at the time, like the Reverend quoted above, ten­ded to shoot 'em down, it could have really been triggered by overrating them right from the start: Palomine pretended to more depth and «authenticity of feeling», and felt right at home with the indie aesthetics, but ultimately, it was unoriginal, confused, and boring, and the realization of that must have caught up with the critics right by the time of Dust Bunnies — an album that is much less boring, yet the critical mass imagined it as more boring, go figure. Anyway, a mild thumbs up here, although the band is still growing up and only beginning to cut its teeth in the standard «art-pop» format.

 

PRIVATE SUIT (2000)

 

1) Unsound; 2) Satisfied; 3) Private Suit; 4) Mariachi Souls; 5) ReCall; 6) Auf Wiedersehen; 7) Sower And Seeds; 8) White Tales; 9) John Darmy; 10) My Fallen Words; 11) Healer.

 

Finally, upon their fourth try, they manage to get it nearly right — or, at least, as right as possible for a band deprived of original vision or melodic genius. Private Suit is the first Bettie album that I would gladly recommend to anyone, regardless of one's general attitude towards the «indie spirit» of the 1990s. And not just for the sexy album cover, either, even though the sexy album cover is already a good hint at some changes to come.

 

They went to PJ Harvey's producer with this one, and whether or not this was what made the difference, the sound of Private Suit is a radical departure from the old style. Suddenly, the songs begin to come together rather than fall apart; the sound becomes softer and glossier, more «pop» than «rock», but in a pleasant, tasteful way; new instruments, like lotsa keyboards, make a welcome entrance to cheer up the sound. But most importantly — this is the album on which Carol van Dijk finally learns to sing, or, at least, decides to learn to sing. Or, even more accurate­ly, this is an album on which she adopts a slightly more feminine image (check the album cover again for immediate visual reference!) and engages in a little smooth acting, instead of simply spitting it all out like a Riot Grrrl aficionado.

 

Already the first song, ʽUnsoundʼ, shows signs of all these changes, and it would be hard to believe that we are listening to the same Bettie Serveert. Lively tempo, swirling organs, guitars that sound more like R.E.M. than Pavement, and a singing voice that is probably an octave lower than Carol's usual style — the "it's good to be unsound, uh-uh" chorus sounds like Lou Reed. No screeching or drowning the listener in pools of distortion, but still plenty of energy and conviction, even if the actual hooks as such are still rather weak (but the shrill Visser guitar solo at the end, rising above the general level of the song and unexpectedly pulling it straight up into the strato­sphere, is top-notch).

 

For ʽSatisfiedʼ, they choose a different strategy — more psychedelic, with droning guitars, mul­tiple layers of mood-setting keyboards, melancholic cellos, and a vocal delivery that aims straight for the subconscious (the «nasal-somnambulant» type, with overdubs that have Carol engaging in a dialog with herself in the chorus); again, not a «great» song, perhaps, but surely an intriguing one, worth revisiting at least to make sure exactly how much you have missed — a sentiment that was consistently lacking for the first three albums.

 

Only the third track (title one) finally sounds like good old Bettie: ragged-nervous strumming, quavery, shaking, arrogant voice, and noise-a-plenty in the outro section. In other words, the usual under-written borefest, albeit even that one is still given extra support from a string section. But guess what — it is the only trace of good old Bettie on the entire album. Everything that fol­lows once again obeys the new laws, which demand clear production, well-rehearsed singing, and musical diversity, from the acoustic folk balladry of ʽMariachi Soulsʼ to the Cure-like mope-pop of ʽReCallʼ to the music hall piano waltzing of ʽMy Fallen Wordsʼ to the ultimate conclusion of ʽHealerʼ, which has a little bit of everything (some post-punk, some rhythm & blues, some art rock) and, for once, makes «Bettie Serveert-style depression» a reality.

 

But the best song of all is ʽSower And Seedsʼ, where the lead singer even tries on a bit of world-weary falsetto for good measure, and the combination of guitar distortion, organ, and that oddly drugged-out voice comes very close to striking out some real magic. Perhaps they were going for a Portishead emulation or something — anyway, it's not tremendously original, but it sounds convincingly tragic. The puzzle of it all, of course, is that songs like ʽSatisfiedʼ, ʽSower And Seedsʼ, and ʽHealerʼ all give us a completely new artistic philosophy — Bettie does not really serve any more, but goes into depressed, deeply wounded seclusion instead, and somehow it becomes her more than when she was all raving and ranting on us. Of course, that might simply be my ugly male chauvinist side speaking up — but then again, I've never pretended liking female rock acts merely for the fact of their lead characters showing «strong personalities», since «strong» by itself never guarantees «emotionally or intellectually interesting». Private Suit, on the other hand, is Bettie Serveert's most emotionally and intellectually interesting album up to that particular moment, and it guarantees the band a far more assured and probably un-retractable thumbs up than Dust Bunnies.

 

LOG 22 (2003)

 

1) Wide Eyed Fools; 2) Smack; 3) Have A Heart; 4) Captain Of Maybe; 5) De Diva; 6) Given; 7) Not Coming Down; 8) Cut 'n' Dried; 9) Log 22; 10) White Dogs; 11) Certainlie; 12) The Ocean, My Floor; 13) The Love-In.

 

After Private Suit had changed their image, but failed to make them superstars, Bettie Serveert took a two-year break — only to return with an album that sounded almost like a retreat to their original image. Almost, because Dollo's law says that you cannot really go back to the exact same state as you were, so Log 22 is still notoriously «artsier» than Palomine, and for Bettie, this means «probably better». Its major problem may be excessive length — a whole hour — but on the other hand, some of its better songs are its longer pieces, where the real juicy pieces of musi­cal meat are to be found in the jam sections, so...

 

But all in due time. In reality, the band explores quite a few different styles here. The first song is technically one of those stream-of-consciousness rants from Carol that used to be pretty boring, but now they have mastered the art of funky rhythmics and economical, broken-up strings of notes as riffs (somebody must have been on a Television kick recently), which makes the song's verse melody more interesting than the far more generic alt-rock all-out-loud chorus (that one could just as well be produced by the likes of Avril Lavigne). Then the second song is the brief, two-minute-long explosive punch of ʽSmackʼ — distorted guitars, pop hooks, whistling, and a Weezer atti­tude that we'd never heard from this band so far. Then the third song is... well, looks like a good old draggy B.S. shuffle, but this time, all smothered in horns, in search for some sort of Van Morrison-style epicness. Not particularly inspiring, but interesting.

 

All of which means that the extended holiday period got them prepped up for «search» mode, and that is at least better than wallow in the original formula, which was boring from the start and would only get more boring when put on endless repeat. The album still sags in the middle, with ʽDe Divaʼ being particularly irritating — going from jangle to distortion and back while Carol delivers a lengthy pretentious rant on herself as "a walking inconsistency". The song wants to be a confessional, but in reality it is self-aggrandizing for no good reason, and I get no extra respect for Carol just from learning that she is supposed to be "De Diva in denial", even presuming that I have guessed correctly what is meant by that (and if I haven't, it's not my fault).

 

But somewhere around the title track, which manages to transcend generic alt-rock with some clever guitar tricks from Peter, things begin to get better, and the album arguably reaches its peak with the two jam-extended epics — ʽWhite Dogsʼ and ʽThe Ocean, My Floorʼ. The former is one of the band's most obvious tributes to the Velvet Underground (Carol once again sings in her best Lou Reed impression and plays all the right rhythm chords from the Lou Reed songbook), but it honestly sounds like the band is having good clean fun, and Visser plays his heart out on the ex­tended section, totally getting in the groove as if the spirit of Lou himself, or of Robert Quine, at the least, had suddenly descended on him.

 

As for ʽThe Oceanʼ, its final section is also an extended jam, but carried out from a completely different angle — psychedelic rather than avantgarde, with a complex pattern of overdubs that speeds past you like a multi-colored mushroom field. This is the band's first serious experiment with «trippy» music, and while it is completely unoriginal, it works surprisingly well, showing a level of hi-tech sophistication that the early albums did not even hint at. For about four minutes, the mushrooms explode and the acid flows over our heads like crazy. This could have been a fine coda to the album — but then, in a ʽHer Majestyʼ-style paroxysm of self-deflating, they prefer to round things up with a self-consciously silly retro-disco throwaway that they title ʽThe Love-Inʼ: two and a half minutes of «body muzak» for the nostalgic proto-hipster.

 

Consequently, the album deserves a thumbs up despite its more than obvious flaws — upon first listen, I hated it for the excessive length and also because it seemed to turn them back in the direc­tion of Dust Bunnies. But it is more like a synthesis of Private Suit with Dust Bunnies and a whole lot of additional approaches. It is not cohesive, it makes relatively little sense and is not at all innovative, but there's also something to be said about general smartness, unpredictability, and professionalism — particularly professionalism, which seems to have properly arrived at the band's disposal on Private Suit and is not really going anywhere, unless they all go on a heroin binge or start touring in support of local politicians.

 

ATTAGIRL (2004)

 

1) Dreamaniacs; 2) Attagirl; 3) Don't Touch That Dial!; 4) Greyhound Song; 5) You've Changed; 6) Versace; 7) 1 Off Deal; 8) Hands Off; 9) Staying Kind; 10) Lover I Don't Have To Love.

 

An irresponsible reviewer like myself should have found a very easy way to shrug off an album like this — simply by saying that no album that features a Bright Eyes cover deserves a review, period, let alone a positive review. But for the sake of self-improvement, let us assume that I am not myself today, so, in a far more responsible manner, I have to point out that ʽLover I Don't Have To Loveʼ was one of the few listenable numbers on Lifted, and that any Conor Oberst song would automatically sound better anyway if done by Carol van Dijk. Because Carol can at least play it intricately, mystery-woman-style, whereas Conor Oberst is simply a guy that deserves being put out of his misery on the spot, whenever he opens his mouth. (Okay, make it «the artistic reflection of Conor Oberst», to avoid unrequired ambiguities).

 

In any case, regardless of how artistically embarrassing it is for a band much older, better, and at least more experienced than Bright Eyes to cover Bright Eyes, that is only one last track on an album that is quite uneven, but occasionally still charming and/or catchy. Shorter and less ambi­tious than Log 22, it is another mix of «classic indie-rock» Bettie Serveert with their Private Suit incarnation, so it's got a little for everyone, but not a lot for anyone, unless you adore their guitar posturing stuff and their moody escapades equally.

 

I will probably settle for the moody escapades: ʽDreamaniacsʼ is a successful art-pop creation where bouncy rhythmics, meteor showers of electronic bleeps, and ambient strings mesh well with Carol's lyrical message — "though my feet are on the ground, my head is on a cloud", as she pleads with her imaginary lover to take it easy on her ("don't give up on me, dreamaniacs don't aim to please"). The title track is even better, with its smoky lounge atmosphere and a streak of weepiness culminating in the bitter-ironic hook of "attagirl!" We never get the details, but Carol's "it's you and me and the Devil makes three" is an uneasy line all the same, and the arrangement of the song makes it work, although arguably it works even better when totally stripped, on an acou­stic demo version that is appended as a bonus to some of the CD editions.

 

The third highlight of the album is ʽVersaceʼ, where the band falls for the latest indie trends and explores the risky world of electronic dance-pop, but with surprisingly effective results — the bass groove and various keyboard overdubs set a ghostly melancholic mood, while Carol adopts her most seductive tone (the one which allows breaking into falsetto when necessary). However, the irony and need for self-deflation are not forgotten, either: on their own, the lyrics would be just a trite collection of «broken heart» clichés, but the repetitive mantra "Versace... Versace... Versace" consolidating the hookline, the song becomes more of a self-conscious parody on the «ennui syndrome of the rich and prosperous». Pretty cool, considering that it was their first experiment with this kind of style.

 

With the addition of a couple more inventive mixes (e.g. «swampy» slide guitars with «Eastern» strings on ʽGrehound Song), Attagirl is, at the very least, entertainingly diverse, even if it has its share of forgettable throwaways as well (ʽHands Offʼ — fast, look-at-me-I'm-so-full-of-energy pop-rocker whose main purpose seems to be to remind us that they are still a «rock» band and can kick ass any time they want to; but I don't think it's really true). Since nobody really gave a damn about a bunch of aging rockers from Holland by 2004, the album got almost no press, and what little it got was fairly cruel — but I suppose such was the inevitable cost of being originally over­rated and overpraised: few things in this world can be as pitiable as a formerly overappreciated indie-rock band still trying to raise sand in a dog-eat-dog environment. But honestly, even with­out any pity or condescension, Attagirl deserves a modest thumbs up on the whole, and we will try to overlook the Bright Eyes incident because, well, everybody is entitled to a tasteless blunder every now and then. Just don't do it again.

 

BARE STRIPPED NAKED (2006)

 

1) Roadmovies; 2) Hell = Other People; 3) Love & Learn; 4) Brain-Tag; 5) Storm; 6) The Rope; 7) All The Other Fish; 8) What They Call Love; 9) Painted Word; 10) 2nd Time; 11) Hell = Other People (alt. version); 12) Certainlie.

 

I doubt that this severely ungrammatical title (should have at least put a couple commas in there to make it look like a thesaurus excerpt) brought Bettie Serveert any extra incidental popularity from porn surfers; nor does Carol's huge, decidedly non-porn face on the album sleeve count as an adequately sexy reflection of the title. Actually, I think that by this time it must have been clear to the band that nothing whatsoever would bring them extra incidental popularity from any target group. So they simply resigned their fates into Carol's hands — for all I know, Bare Stripped Naked is more like a Carol van Dyk solo album with occasional guest spots from Bettie Serveert members rather than a «proper» BS product.

 

Other than the last track, ʽCertainlieʼ, a slow indie rocker in classic Neil Young style, all the songs here are indeed «stripped naked», with little or no electric guitar, putting Carol, her singing and acoustic playing up front. Right from the start, Bettie Serveert had always vied for the title of «most introspective and psychologically oriented» indie band on the planet (or, at least, in Hol­land), but on Bare Stripped Naked, melody and harmony are officially relegated to background support — there is no way one can like the record without being a focused devotee of Carol van Dyke and her «bride of Lou Reed» femme fatale fling.

 

Actually, scrap the «Lou Reed» association; most of these songs do not sound much like Lou in any of his periods. They sound like... like some amateur's sorry attempt to make a bunch of art Lieder in the indie rock idiom, or something. Peter Hammill used to get away with this due to his poetic gift and powerful vocal presence, but Carol van Dyk is not even close to that league in any of those respects. She is not even in a particularly decent vocal form here — croaking and blee­ting her way in a completely anti-Private Suit manner, maybe in an attempt to introduce some «spontaneity» and «naturalness», but let us not forget that shitting one's pants is also an act that is both spontaneous and natural, and yet we do not usually think of such qualities of that particular act as possessing a redeeming value.

 

At most, I could comment on one of these songs, so let us make it ʽHell = Other Peopleʼ — clear­ly, it was of particular importance to Carol, since it is presented here in no less than two different versions, just like George Harrison's ʽIsn't It A Pityʼ on All Things Must Pass. Melodically, it is trite and unmemorable, and the vocal melody for the verses is taken straight from Dylan's ʽYou're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Goʼ (took me a while to extract that link from the back of my mind, but back of one's mind is where it must have come from — it's perfectly plausible that Carol would be spinning Blood On The Tracks a million times to get in the mood for this album, and you don't play jokes with your subconscious). Lyrically, it wants to enlighten us on the issue of Carol's relationship with somebody who is "a 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, sharper than a broken nail", but ends up sounding like a moron, and the singer ends up sounding like a double moron for taking up with him in the first place. And the two different arrangements vary in that the second one is... more fully produced, with harder percussion, glossier vocal mix, and more piano. Something like that. Sounds exciting? It's the best there is.

 

I cannot bring myself to hate any of the Bettie Serveert albums, because I've always respected Carol's willingness to keep it all under control and not go over the top with barf-inducing histryonics à la Conor Oberst. However, Bare Stripped Naked is such a thoroughly misguided idea that I have come quite close to a state of hatred. There is nothing wrong in stripping naked if there is something worth showing underneath; but this record, in reality, is just as much of a sty­listic put-on as any other of their albums. Take the difference between ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and there you have the real meaning of the «stripped naked» metaphor. Here, all we have is Peter Visser only getting to play a wailing elec­tric solo on the last track, when it's much too late and your mood has been hopelessly spoiled by wasting so much time on a failed effort. Thumbs down.

 

PS. For the sake of trivia, there is an acoustic remake of ʽBrain Tagʼ from Palomine, which only makes me sicker still because are we supposed to think that track was some sort of «classic» in its own right to deserve this Subtle Artistic Treatment? Goddammit, people, you have to earn the right to go «unplugged», unless you were unplugged right from the start. Acoustic versions of bad electric songs? Only in a hellish indie nightmare.

 

PHARMACY OF LOVE (2010)

 

1) Deny All; 2) Semaphore; 3) Love Lee; 4) Mossie; 5) The Pharmacy; 6) Souls Travel; 7) Calling; 8) Change4Me; 9) What They Call Love.

 

Say what you will, but it can be nice to admire the tightness of artistic bonds — absolutely no­body needs Bettie Serveert to stick around for another decade, yet on they plough, with the Vis­ser / van Dyk partnership stronger than ever; for all we know, they'll still be around by 2050, and that is when they will finally take their revenge on the musical community. In the meantime, Phar­macy Of Love at least remedies the flaw of their previous album — no more of that philosophi­cal acoustic shit, we are back to full-dressed electric arrangements, and not only that, but we've also pumped up the tempos quite a bit: Pharmacy Of Love is the band's fastest, loudest, angriest record since... ever? Maybe since ever.

 

The difference goes beyond the tempos, though, or maybe it is the tempos that are responsible for compressing the band into a much tighter format. Many of the songs, instead of relying on rela­tively free jangle-folk-pop strumming, are now either riff-based or follow punk / post-punk rhythm patterns that leave no space for rhythmic variation — I guess, from a certain point of view, you could call this «selling out», since ultimately Pharmacy Of Love has quite a few things in common with commercially oriented «pop punk» forms, groping for tightness, catchiness, and even some production gloss. (In fact, I think some fans did accuse the band of selling out, despite the fact that the album couldn't have sold more than a couple hundred copies).

 

But the issue of «selling out» is usually unrelated to the issue of actual quality, and I must say that some of the songs here seem unusually well-written for this band. The lead-in track, ʽDeny Allʼ, is a powerfully desperate rocker with expressive lead guitar work (particularly Visser's little «siren lines» in between the verses); but Peter gets to shine even better on ʽSemaphoreʼ and the title track, combining and merging all sorts of styles, from power-pop to dream-pop to acid psy­chedelia, whatever the moment calls for.

 

It is true that getting rid of the «endless imitator» status is a difficult task. It took me only a couple listens, for instance, to understand the heavy debt that ʽMossieʼ owes to ʽI Want You (She's So Heavy)ʼ, or that the "blame it on yourself, blame it on the state you're in..." part of ʽChange4Meʼ is fundamentally ripped off Radiohead's ʽBlack Starʼ ("blame it on the black star, blame it on the falling sky...")  — and I am quite convinced that a couple more equally meticu­lous listens would bring out more and more of these derivations. But the important thing is not that these songs continue to lack originality — the important thing is that they sound like crafted pop songs, not like spontaneous indie rock rants; and since Carol van Dyk is not Joni Mitchell and Peter Visser is not Van Morrison, I'd rather take crafted pop songs from them, any time of day, than raw, bleeding, boring confessions.

 

The album's centerpiece is the lengthy ʽCallingʼ, which alone occupies more than a quarter of this fairly short LP — with lengthy setups, effect-laden guitar drones, and slowest tempos all around, it wants to be some sort of anthemic-psychedelic masterpiece in the style of The Bends (which, incidentally, I have already mentioned in connection with ʽBlack Starʼ — somebody must have been on an early Radiohead kick), but there's no way Bettie Serveert would have been able to pull off a nine-minute track convincingly: Visser is their only instrumentalist to whom you might want to pay attention, and his function on this vessel, slowly sailing through the marmalade skies and tangerine oceans, is largely atmospheric.

 

Nevertheless, despite all the flaws, The Pharmacy Of Love still gets a thumbs up from me. The band's transition from «indie-ramblers» to «pop-rockers» has been carried out with style and in­telligence, and has managed to bring down the «boredom» and «pretense» parameters to tolerable levels. No, it probably will not earn Carol van Dyk any extra respect and admiration from you if you have not been able to generate that admiration earlier — but you know, if an indie rock album produced in 2010 does not cause irritation, it is already quite an achievement all by itself. And if an indie rocker makes his/her influences so utterly transparent, and it still does not cause any irritation... well, that sort of makes the album a masterpiece in its own way.

 

OH, MAYHEM! (2013)

 

1) Shake-Her; 2) Mayhem; 3) Sad Dog; 4) Had2BYou; 5) Tuf Skin; 6) Monogamous; 7) Receiver; 8) LoserTrack; 9) iPromise; 10) D.I.Y.

 

Oh, bother. All of a sudden and out of the blue, Bettie Serveert come out with yet another LP that gets a whoppin' three reviews on RYM and a mind-blowing four reviews on Amazon (as com­pared to, say, 523 for Rihanna's latest). And guess what? They have released their best record ever, and nobody gives a shit. That's what justice is all about.

 

So what's the secret, and what's the deal? Nothing could be simpler: Oh, Mayhem! is the first album in Bettie Serveert's catalog that is completely, from top to bottom, written according to the principle «pop music first, indie philosophy later». It's not that the lyrics are dumbed down or anything — it's just that guitar hooks, symmetric melodic resolutions, and carefully thought out vocal modulation consistently takes precedence over the «message», so that not even the faintest grasp of English is required to fully enjoy this stuff. The Beatles and Blondie have ushered out Lou Reed and Neil Young as primary inspiration, and while this may have pissed off some of the old guard, yearning for another Palomine, I actually view this as a self-imposed challenge: can we, after all these years, carve out a solid, non-nonsense «power pop» album or can't we?

 

One listen to ʽShake-Herʼ should be enough to inspire confidence. Visser's slightly surf-inspired fuzz riff, Carol's intentionally de-personalized vocals, locked in a carefully overproduced despe­rate groove, that "yada-yada-yada" resolution, and the economic length — all of this makes the track a serious contender for best pure pop song of the year, all the more amazing considering they never really did anything like it before: too smooth, too well-rounded, and, most important­ly, too unpretentious — Carol's cherished personality seems to have been splattered against the me­lody, a gesture which I, personally, applaud very loudly, since I've always thought that if any­thing ever prevented this band from getting real good, it was that goddamn ego.

 

That ego is not completely erased (already on the second track, ʽMayhemʼ, it perks up a bit), but even at its perkiest here it is still subjected to obeying musical purposes. ʽMayhemʼ flaunts its trivial, power chord-based riff louder and prouder than Carol flaunts her voice, which is soon drowned in the soft, subdued, folky arpeggios of the bridge — and then joins Visser's guitar in all of its intonations on the loud chorus: that "oh no, not me, oh mayhem, oh mayhem!" bit is a pretty damn good imitation of a panic attack during a sleepless night. In recognition, Visser ends the song with a totally kick-ass overdriven solo (and it ain't the only one).

 

Amazingly, almost every song out of ten has something going for it, so I will only name some major highlights. ʽHad2BYouʼ, despite the awful spelling, has some lovely Beatlesque guitar / vocal moves. ʽMonogamousʼ interrupts the formulaic pop flow of the album for a quasi-mystical chant, adorned with roaring waves of feedback and various guitar effects, sort of a «Sinead O'Connor meets Led Zeppelin» impression. ʽReceiverʼ, in terms of fury and loudness, is probably the closest they come to the old Bettie sound, but even here a catchy chorus is in order, and the necessity to rise over the din of the rhythm spurs Visser on to deliver another set of ecstatic, punch-drunk solos. And ʽD.I.Y.ʼ closes the album with the best display of lead guitar techni­que on the entire album — there is a tricky break there around 2:10 where the rhythm shifts from funky to bluesy without disrupting the flow of the song, but giving it some extra dynamics.

 

In all honesty, I never expected this. It actually takes a lot of talent these days to deliver a no-frills power pop album and get away with it, without all or most of the songs sounding like weak, un­memorable, copycat creations. But Oh, Mayhem! delivers the goods in form and in spirit — it's loud, it's crunchy, it's filled with sympathetic, life-asserting guitar moves, it's brimming with life and energy, so what's not to like? The fact that it is not quite clear what they actually want to say and where exactly they are going with this? Maybe — but on a record as bubbling with life as this one, you don't really need any straight answers. Might as well just enjoy the ride, and admire all the shiny saddle ornaments. Thumbs up.

 

BEULAH

HANDSOME WESTERN STATES (1998)

 

1) Maroon Bible; 2) Lay Low For The Letdown; 3) Disco: The Secretaries Blues; 4) The Rise And Fall Or Our Hero's Reward; 5) I Love John, She Loves Paul; 6) Slo-Mo For The Masses; 7) I've Been Broken (I've Been Fixed); 8) Queen Of The Populists; 9) Shotgun Dedication; 10) Rust With Me; 11) Delta; 12) Dig The Subatomic Holdout #2.

 

Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan worked together in an office in a San Francisco security firm. Then they decided that they would start a band, because they both loved music. Then they wrote some songs, caught the attention of Rob Schneider from The Apples In Stereo, and got signed to The Elephant 6. Then they released an EP, and then they released an LP. Sounds simple enough when you look at this sequence of events, but look how many things had to turn out right for it — the office. The partnership. The audacity. The Schneider interest. (The elbow grease?). From this heap of accidents and incidents rose Beulah and smote the world.

 

Well, actually, their first LP smote no one. In relation to what would come afterwards, it feels like their Please Please Me — a record full of «beginner's spirit»: lively, energetic, exuberant, but showing no particular depth of insight or breadth of coverage, and only the first signs of a bur­geoning songwriting talent. Of course, when the Beatles did it in 1963, it was only natural; when Beulah did it in the Nineties, a decade when artists were generally expected to blow the roof off with their first album, it threatened to put a «shallow» tag on them once and for all, no matter how many gimmicky titles they would assign to their songs.

 

The best thing about early Beulah is their sound, and even that is not all that unique — just a re­gular «Elephant 6» kind of sound, that is, sunny pop music with loud, but colorful, distorted gui­tars; vocal harmonies that owe it all to the Beach Boys; and a tight, upbeat rhythm section that keeps the band from going mushy. Well, The Apples In Stereo themselves sound that way, and many others, too. Maybe Beulah are a little more hard-rocking. Or maybe they position them­selves as a «wittier» counterpart of their protectors — with even crazier song titles and stuffier lyrics: the very first track already mentions Gideon's Bible, Ecclesiastes, astronauts on TV, and Jack the Ripper over the span of two verses and a bridge.

 

And they do come across as a bit too smart for their own good, because the songs have no clear purpose — yet they do not come across as dazzling musical enigmas, either. The means at the band's disposal are fairly well known and traditional, but it is not well understood what exactly do they use them for. Tenderness and romance emerge only occasionally (like on ʽDeltaʼ, which shifts from McCartney-like acoustic ballad mode to fiddle-driven roots-rock and back), but usually they just hide around the corner, as the band tends to sing about relationships from a more cyni­cal point of view.

 

A quintessential early Beulah song would be something like ʽI Love John, She Loves Paulʼ — the title uses the two-headed image of a long-gone pop band to illustrate why the singer is good and why his love interest is bad; the distorted, but still melodic rhythm guitar and the vocals, masked with some re­verb for extra hip-cool effect, suggest the usual nostalgic throwback to sunny, irre­verent 1966; the lyrics are full of smartypants references to various idols, some of which I get ("hey, oh, let's go" clearly invokes the Ramones, and the sneery, drawn-out "so long, so long" may be invoking the Pixies' ʽHere Comes Your Manʼ) and most of which I probably don't. No guitar solo, because guitar solos aren't cool for indie kids (who spend too much time soaking in their cultural legacy to learn how to play guitar anyway), but some moody army trumpet accom­paniment throughout from Bill Swan (who likes this instrument about as much as the late John Entwistle used to like the French horn, but seems to have spent even less time practising). If it weren't for the mild catchiness of the chorus and, most importantly, the band's sense of light humor and irony, I'd probably hate the song — and the album.

 

But this sense of light humor and irony, coupled with the tastefulness of the unprofessional arran­gements, is what makes Handsome Western States, in the end, so handsome. When the music is too slow, it tends to drag, but when they pick up a cheery tempo, as in ʽI've Been Brokenʼ or the album closer ʽDig The Subatomic Holdout #2ʼ, everything is forgiven, including the unintentio­nal toe-tapping and air guitar playing, simplistic as these rhythms and chords may be. In addition, one aspect they really paid serious attention to is the vocal harmonies — some are three-part, amounting to a lightly head-spinning psychedelic effect (ʽShotgun Dedicationʼ). So «unprofes­sional», in this understanding, does not necessarily mean «not hard-working».

 

Still, despite all of its positive qualities, I do not think the album is worth an active «thumbs up» — it is way too «manneristic» and emotionally empty, or, if you wish, «emotionally masked» (which, to me, is pretty much the same thing) for me to click with on a sensory level, and too de­rivative and half-baked to be admired from a technical point of view. Reasonably well made, sure, but definitely not one of those amazing debuts that immediately justifies the sponsor's trust in the sponsored. Let's just say that, at this point in time, they were still «finding themselves», with oc­casional glimpses of the findings to come.

 

WHEN YOUR HEARTSTRINGS BREAK (1999)

 

1) Score From Augusta; 2) Sunday Under Glass; 3) Matter Vs. Space; 4) Emma Blowgun's Last Stand; 5) Calm Go The Wild Seas; 6) Ballad Of The Lonely Argonaut; 7) Comrade's Twenty-Sixth; 8) The Aristocratic Swells; 9) Silverado Days; 10) Warmer; 11) If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart.

 

The worst thing about this album is its title. Or, wait, maybe the best thing about this album is its title — depending on your brain's first reaction to it. If it strains you into expecting a sensitive, sentimental, depressed, or melancholic set of songs (under the «cure your own heartbreak with our own heartbreak» principle), you will be sorely disappointed. But if it is «when your heart­strings break... try something light and uplifting, like our second album», then that's a different matter. On the other hand, it is still a little difficult to see what exactly this kind of music has to do with «heartstrings» in any sort of traditional understanding.

 

Glancing at the song titles, you might suspect that Beulah are growing up, and trying to shed at least a little bit of that show-off-ey indie kid aesthetics where it is much more important to put yourself and your music on a different plane of existence than to write good songs. The music, meanwhile, has been aggrandized, with 18 different session musicians used in the recording pro­cess and Bill Evans on keyboards added to the band's «stable» lineup. Nobody, least of all the band leaders themselves, would dream of wasting all that pool of talent on an ordinary «gimmi­cky» record, right? But then the question is: what sort of record is this, then?

 

My best guess is that both here and on subsequent trys, Beulah's ambition was to create their own version of SMiLE for the raging Nineties. The whimsical attitude, where spiritual yearning and grand emotional tugs peep out every now and then from superficially «fluffy» musical structures, they already had, as well as an absurdist lyrical streak and an experimental mindset. All that was left was to broaden their technical base — and by bringing in all those extra players with their in­struments, they were free to try out a more symphonic approach. There'd be as much ambition as on a Radiohead record, only it would be sunny, poppy, and a tad silly. And if they got too tired of emulating the Beach Boys, they could always go back to emulating the Kinks.

 

In fact, melody-wise, the rhythmic skeletons of these songs are consistently closer to the Kinks than to the baroque fluctuations of Brian Wilson — but the overall atmosphere of romantic ab­surdity is not something that Ray Davies, who'd always refused to get his head too high up in the clouds, would have appreciated. And it lays open the possibilities for a fruitful, exciting synthesis, which works so well, technically, that with this album, Beulah ensured some serious popularity with seasoned fans of everything Sixties-related (particularly those people who, you know, thought that music died circa 1969, and that it took The Dukes of Stratosphear to revive it).

 

Like most of these projects, though (and I am not excluding XTC, either), synthesizing various strains of the Sixties in the Nineties still has that smarmy post-modernist ring to it, and ends up being more of a quirky tribute than an album showing off an autonomous and mind-blowing artis­tic vision. The problem is always the same: Kurosky and Swan are so intent on making music «in the same vein as» their idols that they forget to concentrate on the essentials of proper pop songwriting. Something like ʽScore From Augustaʼ has a cool retro sound to it, with a tasteful and energetic mix of live instruments and vocal harmonies, but the whole mix seems to be gallo­ping forward on one note, and the most melodically inventive thing about the song is Swan's trumpet part — which is really very simple, but catchy, but repetitive, but memorable, but could be seriously annoying, should your brain suggest that this mariachi-like style of trumpet playing is incompatible with Sixties retro-pop.

 

Then ʽSunday Under Glassʼ, all awash in brass, flute, and string overdubs, comes along to drag you away into a psychedelic paradise to the sounds of a nasal vocal melody which somehow reminds me of Mike Love. It is a song that has everything... except for a decent hook, that is. Too much of everything, in fact, quickly floating before your eyes and ears like a multi-colored cloud whose various hues are too dazzling for the senses to leave a lasting impression. Actually, it's one of those songs where there seems to be too much and too little going on at the same time — too much in terms of various overdubs, too little in terms of actual melodic dynamics.

 

That said, the band seems to fare significantly better, «heartstrings-wise», when they try to evoke tender sentiments rather than tickle our fancies with psycho colors. Already ʽCalm Go The Wild Seasʼ has a properly baroque aura to it, one of sincere gallantry and delicacy; but the album's emotional peak is reached on ʽSilverado Daysʼ, whose mercilessly encoded lyrics seemingly in­voke a nostalgic feel ("I was a kid and you were my hero..."), finely matched with the piano bal­lad melody whose chords remind of McCartney but whose vocals remind more of Lennon. In fact, I think the album gets better as it progresses, reaching its humble peak of sorts on the final num­bers: ʽWarmerʼ shows signs of adorable whimsical tenderness, and ʽIf You Can Land A Man On The Moon...ʼ is redeemed through its little baroque piano passages which could just as well have been played on harpsichord for the sake of extra authenticity.

 

As difficult as it is for me to «fall in love» with an album like this — it makes too little sense for me to do that — I can easily understand how others would, and also how such records pre­pared the ground for the Beach Boys-inspired indie art-pop explosion of the 21st century in a way that few other bands at the time were capable of. At any rate, the only reason to give it a thumbs down would be active hatred for the band and their «phony», «manneristic» attempts at recreating the form, but not the spirit of pop music's greatest decade. But even if there is something stiff and artificial about the way they are doing it, there is no need to doubt the purity and nobleness of the motive, or the earnestness of the work effort that went into it. One thing that I lack most of all, apart from the lack of hooks, is a more sharply pronounced sense of humor — then I catch myself understanding that if you add hooks and humor to this band, it will turn into Ween, and we already have ourselves a Ween. So just a basic respectful thumbs up as it is would suffice.

 

THE COAST IS NEVER CLEAR (2001)

 

1) Hello Resolven; 2) A Good Man Is Easy To Kill; 3) What Will You Do When Your Suntan Fades?; 4) Gene Autry; 5) Silver Lining; 6) Popular Mechanics For Lovers; 7) Gravity's Bringing Us Down; 8) Hey Brother; 9) I'll Be Your Lampshade; 10) Cruel Minor Change; 11) Burned By The Sun; 12) Night Is The Day Turned Inside Out.

 

If this line of thinking applies to a band as intellectually twisted as Beulah at all, then this album should pro­bably count as their masterpiece. You can almost feel their brain cells writhe, sizzle, and burn up in flames, as they attempt to come up with «the perfect pop formula». Instrumenta­tion, production, hooks, moods, vocal modulations that reflect careful study of what there was before with a pinch of trying to look into what will come after — the Amazing Songwriting Labo­ratory of Dr. Kurosky at its functional peak, colored smoke rising out of the chimneys and bizarre fragrance smelled for miles around.

 

But the more they try, the more they baffle listeners such as myself (and I have also encountered the same reaction among quite a few music lovers on the Web). Every single song on The Coast sounds lovely, classy, and inspiring... while it's on. No sooner than the album is over, nothing remains in my brain — not a single goddamn note of it. And subsequent listens do not rectify the situation. This is their best album, clearly and expressly filled with pop hooks almost to the brim, but at the end of the day, they just skedaddle. Vamoose. Melt in the air like a mirage. Every single song on here has more «intelligence» and «depth» to it than ʽLucy In The Sky With Dia­mondsʼ, but Lucy is still here with us, and Beulah are not. What the hell?..

 

Let us take one single song and scrutinize it, to try and understand what's so wrong here. After the brief mood-setting intro, the first complete, self-sufficient, and technically impeccable number is ʽA Good Man Is Easy To Killʼ, whose lyrics deal with a car crash that involved Kurosky's father and prompted him to explore the proverbial father/son relationship in his art — so put this up as a plus (personal matter, adds to the song's level of sincerity and emotional involvement, etc.). The song begins with a loud, nasty fuzz riff, then expands with an agitated, Tull-style flute part and vocal harmonies, then calms down and slows down to the «baroque» verse section with strings, brass, and a pop vocal part straight out of the Beatles textbook. Short sparkling piano bridge to the chorus — a humble plea of "give up, give up your love / I promise it's not gonna kill ya" — and then back to the fuzz riff / flute / vocal harmony trio again. Repeat a couple of times, then cut to the fadeout where the brass and flutes get a little crazier and start threatening to punch each other out before the fadeout washes them all away.

 

Seems like a clever, sensible song, but something's just not fuckin' right about it. Maybe it is the disparity between the vocal and instrumental parts — the tenderness of the verse/chorus is in sharp conflict with the agitated nature of the fuzz riff bits, and the two give a «phoney» feel of being spliced for no particular reason whatsoever; there is no sense in the song fluctuating between these two states, nor does the music hint at any transition. Maybe it is the vocals — Kurosky cannot help it, of course, but his singing voice, devoid of solid range or any sort of in­dividual flavor, is bland, and does not do justice to the potential of the vocal melody. Or maybe it is the melody itself — take the fuzz riff, for instance, and try to compare it with a great fuzz riff, like ʽSatisfactionʼ, or, heck, ʽIn-A-Gadda-Da-Vidaʼ. Those ones had a bite and menace to them, but Beulah's riff just sounds thick and dumb to me. Same with the flute — if you are going to evoke Tull associations, why not learn more than just two different phrases on the instrument?

 

It would be all too simple to say that the song does not work properly just because Beulah are bad songwriters, but that would be wrong. Kurosky is a pretty good songwriter — his mistake is in that he is very far from a genius songwriter, yet he makes music that, want it or not, intrudes directly on the turf of at least half a dozen genius songwriters of the 1960s. Consequently, Beulah's masterpiece is their completion of the «triumph of form over substance» attitude — all the more ironic considering that the songs have their meanings, and reveal them to anybody who is willing to look for them. But there are meanings and meanings, and The Coast Is Clear, being full of «literal» meanings (as in, «ʽA Good Manʼ reflects the complex feelings that the author ex­perienced while his father was battling death...», etc.), has never once managed to hit me in my soft emotional spots — from which I conclude that it has no «musical» meaning, as such, as subjective as that harsh judgement may sound.

 

Still, due admiration must be expressed for all the doggone hard work that went into making the record so diverse and inventive. As long as I am writing this at the same time as the sweet sounds flow out from the speakers, ʽGene Autryʼ is a dang fine pop-rocker about the disparity between fantasy and reality (good hook — the pessimistic conclusion of "everybody drowns, sad and lonely alright" laid out on the listener in an optimistic manner); ʽPopular Mechanics For Loversʼ bops along with a clever mix of joyfulness and melancholia (and the "just because he loves you too / he would never take a bullet for you" bit might be the catchiest move on the album); ʽI'll Be Your Lampshadeʼ, whose title is probably a subtle reference to ʽI'll Be Your Mirrorʼ, mixes country and vaudeville in a very odd fashion; and they save their most ambitious and anthemic brass riffs for the album closer ʽNight Is The Day Turned Inside Outʼ to provide a suitably loud, mock-heroic, ride-out-in-the-sunset conclusion. It's all good.

 

But now the album is over, and... how did it go again? Damn, it's really irritating. No wonder, after all, that these guys were never able to find a mass market, or that retro-oriented art-pop in general stays so tightly glued to the indie community. Maybe it's just that the likeliest candidate to write the best Beatles song never written would probably be a person who's never listened to the Beatles in the first place. Or maybe it's all much simpler, and they should have found them­selves a better vocalist. In any case, I give the album one of those «intellectually-driven» thumbs up — for inventiveness, imagination, and hard labor. For everything else, please refer yourself to this band's many influences instead.

 

YOKO (2003)

 

1) A Man Like Me; 2) Landslide Baby; 3) You're Only King Once; 4) My Side Of The City; 5) Hovering; 6) Me And Jesus Don't Talk Anymore; 7) Fooled With The Wrong Guy; 8) Your Mother Loves You Son; 9) Don't Forget To Breathe; 10) Wipe Those Prints And Run.

 

Allegedly, Beulah openly threatened that if their next record did not reach gold status, they would split up — quite a heavy threat for a year in which the top-selling acts were 50 Cent, Linkin Park, Christina Aguilera, and Beyoncé, to name a few. But most importantly, who in his right mind would name an album Yoko if he really wanted it to sell a significant amount of copies? Above everything else, didn't they realize that most people probably thought that «Beulah» was the name of the album, and that «Yoko» was the artist? (Unless that was the plan all along, of course, but in that case, why Yoko and not Lennon? Ain't no copyright on the word «Lennon», either).

 

More importantly, there ain't one single reason in the world why Yoko should have sold more than The Coast Is Clear in the first place. The previous record, at least, was Beulah's diverse and sunny masterpiece. Yoko, in comparison, is gloomier, bitter-er, full of depressed, melancholic, sometimes near-suicidal messages, endless references to broken hearts, losing sides, stars re­fu­sing to shine, and all sorts of diagnostic lights indicating that Mike Kurosky is, like, totally be­coming a cheerless whiner, and is, in fact, all set to take his musical cues from Pink Floyd now rather than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. And he wants this to sell? In 2003? No fuckin' way. Not even a little.

 

Besides, despite this «refreshing» change of face, the general Beulah problem remains the same: many, if not most, of these songs still suffer from a lack of solid hooks and fail to convey the de­sired effect. Basically, the record is gloomy, but not that gloomy. The first lines of ʽDon't Forget To Breatheʼ are delivered with a «tender sneer» that reminds of Roger Waters (listen to Mike bouncing those "land-MINES hide in your LINES..." nasal bombs off the wall), but there is no burning fire, no genuine intensity to that delivery, and the entire song, with all of its carefully thought out overlays, is still painfully «lite». Nice, but underworked and unconvincing — and the same predictably applies to everything else.

 

If you take Beulah as «intellectual musical theater», some of the compositions are still interesting to follow while they are on — something like ʽMe And Jesus Don't Talk Anymoreʼ can probably serve as the basis for an entire Ph.D. thesis as you pick out all the lyrical and musical references and try to understand how it's all tied together. There's some Tin Pan Alley, some New Orleans, some Nash­ville here, some odd mood swings from anger to optimism to some sort of nonchalant acceptance of the fact that "you're going nowhere", and then there's the song title that is not re­ferred to at all in the lyrics. A bizarre potboil.

 

But the very few songs that actually make a lasting impression are those that, somehow, most likely, accidentally, capture some nerve-tingling wisps — the world-weary banjo riff of ʽFooled With The Wrong Guyʼ; the honestly catchy chorus of ʽYour Mother Loves You Sonʼ (the "last night's a loaded gun..." bit); and, most importantly, the epic finale of ʽWipe Those Prints And Runʼ, where they give it their all and manage to generate some desperate stateliness in the face of all odds. These bits and pieces seem to work all right. Yet that is what they are — bits and pieces. Not a lot to feel good about when the first five songs do not register in my mind at all.

 

Given all these feelings and impressions, I must admit that I do not lament over the passing of Beulah. «All form and no substance» would be much too arrogant and unfounded a final judge­ment, but while there can be no question about Beulah mastering and owning a certain kind of «form», the «substance», most of the time, has eluded me — like so many of these other nostal­gizing bands, Beulah, to me, seem like they were so afraid of being judged as «simplistic» that they hid their emotional side behind a veil of metaphors, similes, understatements, deconstruc­tions, and heavy overdubs. A veil heavy enough to give you the right to doubt whether they did have an emotional side in the first place. It is almost symbolic, then, that Yoko, announcing the band's end, came out in September 2003 — approximately at the same time that Arcade Fire were beginning the sessions for Funeral, an album next to which the entire «Elephant 6» scene would look like a bunch of pathetic phonies. (Not really meant as an insult, of course, just to stress how much I personally prefer «substance» over «form»; and the lack of «substance» is one general characteristic that applies to any of the Elephant 6 acts, Neutral Milk Hotel included).

BIKINI KILL

THE CD VERSION OF THE FIRST TWO RECORDS (1992; 1994)

 

1) Double Dare Ya; 2) Liar; 3) Carnival; 4) Suck My Left One; 5) Feels Blind; 6) Thurston Hearts The Who; 7) White Boy; 8) This Is Not A Test; 9) Don't Need You; 10) Jigsaw Youth; 11) Resist Psychic Death; 12) Rebel Girl; 13) Outta Me.

 

«Bikini Kill are activists, not musicians», as a passionate, but somewhat ambiguously disposed female person tells us, among other impressions of the band, in the spoken overdub on ʽThurston Hearts The Whoʼ, and, frankly speaking, I was not even sure whether it was worth tackling this band in the first place — because, well, it is pretty hard to deny that Kathleen Hanna and her band of Amazon warriors use music primarily, if not exclusively, as a «sociopolitical tool», trying as hard as possible not to stoop to thinking about it as a value in itself. But then, what the heck? They only have had a few albums out, and some of the songs are fun, and when you deal with punk music, it takes a real brain surgeon to understand where «music» ends and «activism» be­gins. And besides, in my collection they are probably the closest thing to Pussy Riot, a «band» that has even less musical substance (at least Bikini Kill have a vague understanding of how to play their instruments) but for which I have actually gotten review requests — so, since I am never ever going to review Pussy Riot, why not say a few words on Bikini Kill instead?

 

So, in a nutshell: Bikini Kill are the spearheaders of the «Riot Grrrl» movement (that's three r's, right? don't forget to check your spelling every time), an aggressive (thankfully, non-lethal so far) punk-feminist current in music and performance art which many people have heard of, but few can identify by any names of its representatives — in fact, some of the less politically minded, but more commercially popular or critically applauded bands (such as Hole or Babes In Toyland) have also been dubbed «Riot Grrrl» by the unsuspecting, deeply confused masses. Well, finally, here are Bikini Kill, and they are the real thing.

 

Describing the band's sound is not particularly difficult, since they never worked hard at putting any unique stamp on it. A standard 4-piece band with a rhythm section, one guitar player, and one vocalist. The guitar player (Billy Karren) is surprisingly male (it is not known if the other girls ever referred to him as «our bitch») and may have been hired as a political gesture (to show that «radical feminism» does not imply cessation of interaction with the other sex), or, more likely, because, deep down in their hearts, they all secretly admit that girls are pussies and that no girl can ever play a real mean PUNK RAWK guitar. (There was no Avril Lavigne back in those days, you un­derstand). Anyway, it's not as if Billy himself were all that great — he has mastered the Ramones and the Dead Kennedys bag of guitar tricks all right, but there is really nothing here, musically, that you wouldn't find on a bunch of classic punk and hardcore punk records from the previous decade and a half.

 

The vocalist is a whole other thing, but enjoying her vocals is certainly an acquired taste if there ever was one — Kathleen Hanna has one of those battle cries you'd expect to hear from a parti­cularly nasty old harpy: sharp, high-pitched, nasal, nails-on-chalkboard type that rips the living flesh right out of your ears. Her real voice, as you hear it in interviews, is kind of grating, too, but she intentionally makes it sound even nastier on record, so that it resonates with extreme «bratty» nastiness. Not a bawl or a banshee wail or a masculine epic-warrior thing, just this really ugly «nyah-nyah-nyah» soundwave to which you have to get yourself attuned real quick, or you will be climbing up the wall in no time. But Hanna's voice is the essence of Bikini Kill — in a way, that voice is the message, not to mention that you will most likely not be able to get the verbal message anyway, not without a lyrics sheet.

 

The album in question, true to the name, puts together some of the first samples of Bikini Kill's recorded output — the EP Bikini Kill and the first side of a split LP that they shared with Huggy Bear (a «para-riot-grrrl» band from the UK), both originally released in 1992. The sound, as is easy to guess, is delightfully / disgustingly lo-fi, with one exception: ʽRebel Girlʼ, the loudest, «cleanest», and arguably best-known Bikini Kill song of all time, not just because it is so easily identifiable as an anthem, but also because it is their catchiest and poppiest, where their female-Neanderthal approach takes a little grooming and the whole thing sounds like a tribute to The Troggs. As crude as the lyrics are ("they say she's a dyke, but I know she is my best friend" —what's that «but» supposed to mean???), the tune is a fun one, and at least the guitars are raw enough to count it as «the real thing». It may be silly-punk, but it ain't faux-punk.

 

As for everything else, well, if you are big on recycled, but honest, punk aesthetics, you might like most of this — Billy has a good grip on that old legacy, pilfering from punk greats for all they're worth on tracks like ʽLiarʼ and ʽResist Psychic Deathʼ, but much of the time he's just pro­viding an information-free wall of chainsaw buzz (ʽSuck My Left Oneʼ, ʽDon't Need Youʼ), which leaves us with little to do other than concentrate on Hanna and her little fits of girl-power rage. Sometimes she really goes over the top ("eat meat, hate blacks, beat your fuckin' wife — it's all connected" — not a highly scientific viewpoint, if you ask me), but at least the sincerity of her actions cannot be denied, even if the crudeness and banality of her denouncements can be a turn­off (ʽWhite Boyʼ — a point-blank range hit at sexism that, for some reason, also implicates the race issue, but how is raping a «slut rocker bitch walking down the street» an offense particularly typical of a «white boy»? Isn't that confusing the issues a little? Then again, there has rarely been a band on Earth more confused than Bikini Kill. Maybe they are musicians after all).

 

A few of the tracks are just sonic hooliganry with a sneer, such as ʽThurston Hearts The Whoʼ, where the already mentioned spoken overdub is superimposed over a noisy, mock-avantgarde track — the primary message here being: "if you think Sonic Youth is cool and you think that they think that you're not that cool, does that mean everything to you?" Ridiculing Sonic Youth is a respectable position, the problem being that it's not as if they were offering a hell of a lot in exchange. But at least it is good to know that aggressive feminism is not the only thing that Hanna and her sisters are interested in.

 

If only at least a couple more songs here were like ʽRebel Girlʼ, I might even have gone ahead with a thumbs up. As it is, the compilation is an important cultural artefact, and an acknowledged influence on «rebel girls» around the world, but too much of it is boring, and too much of it is grating on the nerves, to call it a consistently «fun» listening experience. If you find yourself in need of a spiritual awakening, be their guest. If, however, you are not one of those «white boys» casually referring to «slut rocker bitches» in your everyday life, you might want to listen to something more musically oriented instead.

 

PUSSY WHIPPED (1993)

 

1) Blood One; 2) Alien She; 3) Magnet; 4) Speed Heart; 5) Lil Red; 6) Tell Me So; 7) Sugar; 8) Star Bellied Boy; 9) Hamster Baby; 10) Rebel Girl; 11) Star Fish; 12) For Tammy Rae.

 

Since this is the band's first, loudest, and most straightforward full-fledged LP, it has become the classic point of first reference for Bikini Kill — but it is not easy to say something about it that has not already been said in the context of discussing the first EPs. In fact, Pussy Whipped plays off the idea that nobody has probably heard those EPs, because they go to the trouble of re-recor­ding ʽRebel Girlʼ — in an inferior version, I might add, with noticeably lower fidelity and with a sur­prisingly tamer guitar tone from Billy.

 

Of course, the band in general is anything but tame: Hanna's screeching has only got wilder, to the extent that it is nigh impossible to decipher the sound waves battering against the poor micro­phone. Maybe it's all for the better — it is hard not to cringe at all the «radical feminist» dribble that is delivered non-stop without the slightest hint of humor or irony ("your alphabet is spilled with my blood", "all you do is destroy", etc.). Then again, I would be lying if I said that every song on here qualifies as a straightforwardly dumb anthem; and I would also be lying if I said that songs like ʽStar Bellied Boyʼ or ʽSugarʼ, decrying brutal sexist attitudes of guys who treat girls like fuckmeat, had nothing to do with reality — for justice' sake, it would constitute a good balance to have ʽStar Bellied Boyʼ sitting next to, say, the Rolling Stones' ʽStupid Girlʼ as a call-and-answer thing on ridiculing stereotypes.

 

Anyway, the real bad news is that the music is still being treated like a bitch. All the riffs have been pilfered, as usual, from the band's favorite recordings by the Troggs, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols, so that the record rides exclusively on attitude — and the attitude never varies from song to song, depending only on whether Hanna plays it completely straight or gets a little theat­rical (on ʽSugarʼ, she spends some time mocking and parodying the «pornstar approach» towards guys, before cutting the crap and asking it straight — "why can't I ever get my sugar?"; right next to it, ʽStar Bellied Boyʼ culminates in a frantic "I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't cum!" that really shows all that dumbass guy how much of a pathetic «hero» he really is).

 

To those listeners who think that only the spirit matters, these forty minutes may seem like a single, super-concentrated energy punch, a nuclear warhead of an album that takes the feminist revolution in art to a whole new level. Myself, I don't see the principal progress over Patti Smith, who was a better poet, had a more professional musical backing, occasionally authored catchy songs, and was at least as ballsy as Hanna. But yeah, Bikini Kill make more noise, and all their riffs are thick, crunchy, and distorted to the max.

 

Oh, I forgot: the last song here breaks the trend — it is nothing less than a ballad, dedicated to Tammy Rae Carland, a lesbian artist friend of theirs who also designed the album cover. Its com­positional genius could probably be matched by a five-year old Paul McCartney, its catchiness factor drops well below zero, but the artistic statement of finishing this hyper-aggressive package with a sweet-but-not-too-sentimental confession of love (for that one person who might probably be able to finally make Kathleen cum!) cannot be beat.

 

As a final disclaimer, I have to say, of course, that I only feel somewhat qualified to dismiss Pussy Whipped as a «musical» non-entity — as to what concerns its power and authenticity as a social performance act, well, I guess that guys have about as much business discussing this stuff as propagating their views on abortion. In a way, it might be so that Hanna and her friends are simply doing here the kind of thing that should have been done a long time ago — that, as a girl band, they are simply «ideologically catching up» with the hardcore punk aesthetics. It is true that, even if musically Bikini Kill are not doing anything in 1993 that could not have already been done in 1983, or even in 1977-79, for that matter, there was no band quite like Bikini Kill (music, lyrics, image combined) circa 1977-79 or 1983, and that should get you a-thinkin'. Maybe if all these songs had been written in 1977, I would not be tempted to snicker at them so much.

 

Nevertheless, I am here primarily to opinionate on the music, not on the ideology, and from that point of view, if you come here searching for music, I have no right to recommend Pussy Whip­ped, an album whose chief target audience, so I'd think, would consist of sexually oppressed mid-to-low-class young females in need of a psychological crash course on how to defend yourself (nothing to laugh about, actually — far be it from me to deny the grave seriousness of this issue!). So remember this, ladies: next time you find yourself sexually harassed by your male chauvinist pig employer / colleague / high school «admirer», just put up ʽBlood Oneʼ or ʽStar Bellied Boyʼ as your ringtone, and watch his allegedly mighty tool wither on the spot.

 

REJECT ALL AMERICAN (1996)

 

1) Statement Of Vindication; 2) Capri Pants; 3) Jet Ski; 4) Distinct Complicity; 5) False Start; 6) R.I.P.; 7) No Back­rub; 8) Bloody Ice Cream; 9) For Only; 10) Tony Randall; 11) Reject All American; 12) Finale.

 

This is the first Bikini Kill album for which the band finally decided to try writing and per­forming some music, as opposed to «distortion-enhanced social activity» — and, incidentally, the last one as well, because the effort proved to be too much for the band, and it imploded from internal conflict. Also, most people hated the album, because nobody wanted Bikini Kill to try to grow and mature — Pussy Whipped had listeners falling on their knees and surrendering to the sheer wrath of the «songs», but Reject All American had ballads. BALLADS! How are you supposed to make a bikini kill with a frickin' ballad?

 

Logically, I suppose that we should be going along with critical opinion. Bikini Kill are not musicians, but activists. They cannot write songs, they cannot (or will not) play, they don't know how to sing, and all they got going for them is their animal passion and feminist ideals. So if they start cutting down on the animal passion without significantly compensating on other levels, who needs them? Better a doggone awful band that can't play at all than a boring mediocre band that pretends to be playing well.

 

But wait, not so fast. First of all, it is not really true that Hanna and her gang got «softened up» on this record. The very fact that their guitarist is playing a few more notes than usual, and that the barking and nagging is occasionally shaping up in the form of a vocal melody does not nece­s­sarily mean that they lost anything in terms of energy. What may have been really disappointing to some of the fans is that lyrically, Reject All American transcends the level of primitive, gut-level «riot grrrrl» slogans — in fact, there is not one single direct reference here to the evils of sexual objectification, although many of the songs deal with the evils of objectification as such, period, and sometimes in almost surprisingly smart ways.

 

The title track, even if it is superficially poppier and even «girlier» than ʽRebel Girlʼ, is arguably Bikini Kill's finest two and a half minutes — Hanna concocts a well-modulated mantra of «social activity clichés» ("regimented, designated, mass acceptance, overrated, lip synch, teen anthem, lip synch, obligation...") that her co-workers are happy to throw on the bonfire ("reject! all american! reject! all american!") with catchy glee and generic, but tasteful pop-punk riffage. Primal chaos, it is true, has been replaced by a tighter, better controlled, more disciplined (and clearer articulated, might I add) way of presenting the message — but why not, if Billy Karren is capable of playing in the style of, say, Lenny Kaye?

 

None of the other songs try so hard to imprint themselves in the listener's mind, but the overall sound — provided you have finally gotten used to Hanna's nasal wail — is still an improvement over Pussy Whipped. There is a certain immediacy and minimalism to the songs that was pre­viously lacking: most of the rockers start and finish abruptly, without any «moody» introductions (on Pussy Whipped, about half of the songs had some sort of amateurish bass intro to them), and, surprisingly, at least three or four finish abruptly twice — for some reason, the band had develo­ped a consistent taste for false endings, which creates the illusion that there are far more songs here than there really are (a nod to Wire's Pink Flag?).

 

The two «ballads», sung by Kathi and Tobi rather than Hanna, are forgettable but not particu­larly corny — they may have been written with somebody like Blondie in mind, with a mix of tenderness and inner strength that is certainly incompatible with the idea of a «girlie sellout», and, after all, there is nothing wrong about showing a little tenderness, is there? I even think that the ironically titled ʽFalse Startʼ has all the makings of a good song — pretty vocal melody and cute combination of gruff electric riffage with tinkling chimes. Just lacks that special something to put it over the top, but on the whole, it is their ʽSunday Morningʼ and ʽDreamingʼ all rolled in one, even if the result is ultimately quite amateurish.

 

In any case, my logic is simple: Reject All American is the most «musical» album these girls ever made, and ideologically, it does not betray their agenda, but extends and deepens it. With a few years more work, they might very well have matured into decent songwriters and competent players — sadly, the male chauvinist Olympic gods were all against this, and the band split up less than two years after they decided to reject all American (then again, logically, Bikini Kill is also very much American, so they had no choice but to reject themselves). Which leaves me with no choice but to award this album a very low thumbs up — for (a) not being irritating, and (b) honoring the «growth curve» and showing promise for the future. So it never came to pass, but really, what matters is the dynamics of the action, not the result.

 

THE SINGLES (1998)

 

1) New Radio; 2) Rebel Girl; 3) In Accordance To Natural Law; 4) Strawberry Julius; 5) Anti-Pleasure Dissertation; 6) Rah! Rah! Replica; 7) I Like Fucking; 8) I Hate Danger; 9) Demirep.

 

For the sake of extra accuracy, I suppose this very short compilation, consisting of several A- and B-sides, as well as a four-song EP from 1995, deserves a brief mention. ʽRebel Girlʼ has already been discussed several times above, and without that song the entire compilation is around 17 minutes long — nevertheless, it still contains songs that are abso­lutely essential for any fan of the band.

 

In a way, ʽNew Radioʼ, the original A-side of ʽRebel Girlʼ, is much more ferocious and disturbing — not only does it feature the scariest Kathleen Hanna screeching on record (she almost literally spews her lungs out in little pieces), but its lyrics, suggesting something uncomfortable, unspea­kable, and almost certainly illegal, are a very far cry from the anthemic swagger of ʽRebel Girlʼ that sounds dang near comical in comparison.

 

The EP Anti-Pleasure Dissertation, released in 1995, already shows the beginning of the tran­sition to the «softer» sounds of Reject All American — the title track has certain melodic traces both in the guitar playing and in the singing, although the ideology remains the same (as usual, the song is directed against the sterotypical macho boyfriend looking for sexual conquests — "did you win that race, did you score that point?.."). But even sad stories like that do not prevent Hanna from proclaiming that ʽI Like Fuckingʼ — "I believe in the radical possibilities of plea­sure, babe!", she states at the end of the song (if you can call it a song, that is).

 

Musically, the best song is probably ʽI Hate Dangerʼ; its melody sounds like a slightly de-synco­pated variation on AC/DC's ʽDirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheapʼ, but that particular dangerous, grow­ling sound suits Bikini Kill to a tee — in a different world, I could easily see them as the female equivalent of AC/DC, counterattacking that band's aggressive machismo with their equally fiery brand of aggressive feminism (now if only they learned how to play those instruments...). On the other hand, their recording of the ʽMary Macʼ clapping game at the beginning of ʽDemiRepʼ is a rather silly novelty whose symbolism I am not able to decode, probably because there isn't any, they just felt like letting out ther inner child for a while.

 

To conclude these reviews, I just want to state that, although I am not and will never be a big fan of Bikini Kill, I do think that, had they managed to stay together, there were some actual chances of their gradual evolution into a band that might be taken seriously even outside of ideologically charged discussions. Fire and passion in art always deserve respect, regardless of whether they are used to express radical social ideology or not, and all they needed to learn was how to control and direct that fire — something that they had almost mastered by the time of ʽI Hate Dangerʼ and Reject All American. But then, of course, it became clear that the «Bikini Kill» brand was all about ideology first and musical impression second, so that any musical growth was a direct mortal threat to the band's existence. Too bad about that. But you can always check out Hanna in Le Tigre, her subsequent and much more «musical» project in the «electroclash» genre, rather naturally evolved from Bikini Kill and certainly easier on the ears of the average music lover — the wilder they start, the softer they get, eventually.

 

BJÖRK

BJÖRK (1977)

 

1) Arabadrengurinn; 2) Búkolla; 3) Alta Mira; 4) Jóhannes Kjarval; 5) Fúsi Hreindýr; 6) Himnaför; 7) Óliver; 8)  Álfur Út Úr Hól; 9) Músastiginn; 10) Bænin.

 

12-year old Björk Guðmundsdóttir is calmly, but warily gazing at us from the album cover, wrapped up in silks and surrounded by a background that seems to be coming straight out of somebody's not-too-imaginative visual idea of 1001 Nights. As you turn on the music, the quiet sounds of crickets and night birds are soon joined by mysterious sitars and sarods, almost like at the beginning of George Harrison's ʽLove You Toʼ. «Oh that sweet enchantress Björk», you think to yourself, «such an idealistic visionary already at such a tender age... sure this is manneristic and derivative, but to dabble in Indian and Near Eastern influences while most of her schoolmates were probably up to their necks in the Osmonds or ABBA...» And then it actually begins.

 

Not a lot of people have even heard of this album, let alone heard the actual music (for obvious reasons, it has never been officially released on CD), and they have not missed much. It was re­corded almost by accident: some people at a local Icelandic record label heard the girl singing Tina Charles' ʽI Love To Loveʼ on the radio and offered her a contract for a children's album. With the aid of her stepfather and a bunch of local musicians, they scrambled together a bunch of pop songs, translated them into Icelandic, so that even local kids who didn't excel at their English lessons could get into the groove, and put them out on a market targeted at... honestly, I have no idea who the people in that market are, and I would probably be afraid and embarrassed to socia­lize with any of them, anyway.

 

Nevertheless, all great artists eventually make people interested in checking out their history, and even if it is completely worthless on its own, Björk offers some educational value. The key as­pect is the singing, of course. As these ten songs show, Björk is a perfect natural: her range and tone here are already as strong as on her «mature» albums (they didn't offer her that contract just for cuteness' sake, after all), and all that is missing is the result of training — the punk attitude had not caught up with the girl yet, nor did the avantgarde jazz stylistics, so she is simply copying the note patterns of her favorite singers and sifting them through her childish, wildish, not par­ticularly well-disciplined soprano. Subtlety does not exist as of yet, as you can most clearly see in her take on ʽThe Fool On The Hillʼ (ʽÁlfur Út Úr Hólʼ), done technically well, but «oversung»: the girl simply has a bigger voice than she can properly handle at the moment, and the cover suffers from superfluous screechiness.

 

Musically, the arrangements are all over the place, but with a permanent emphasis on cuteness: «kiddie disco», «kiddie ska», «kiddie jazz-pop», «kiddie bossa nova», etc. The lyrics are not always direct translations: for instance, ʽBúkollaʼ, despite being based on Stevie Wonder's ʽYour Kiss Is Sweetʼ, has been turned into an ode to... a magic cow ("I took a hair from your tail...." and, apparently, mixed it with a good dose of Icelandic volcanic mushrooms). The vocal delive­ries generally have that annoying «giddy-up» drive to them which is a typical attribute of most «children's albums» — which makes it all the more amazing and exciting that, in a way, Björk has managed to retain it in her «mature» years.

 

In fact, there is no way that we could ever assess Björk the same way as the average Icelandic buyer could assess it back in 1977 — for us, hearing her lively «get-up-and-jump» notes on ʽAlta Miraʼ or ʽOliverʼ will always trigger associations with, at the very least, the Björk of ʽThere's More To Life Than Thisʼ or ʽIt's Oh So Quietʼ or any of those hell-raising romps of the early part of her adult career. Even though, other than the voice itself, the only thing that her adult career has in common with this tripe is diversity and unpredictability.

 

Speaking of which, the album also has two instrumental compositions, one of which (ʽJohannes Kjarvalʼ), dedicated to an Icelandic painter, is a simple, but effective flute-led folk ditty with a fast waltz bridge, with Björk herself playing the flute — deserving, I would imagine, an admiring pat on the head from Ray Thomas, whose Moody Blues style of playing could easily serve as a source of inspiration (probably not, but then there is no reason why Björk should not have had access to classic Moody Blues records); the second one, ʽMúsastiginnʼ, is also dominated by the flute but a little bit more «martial» and Brit-poppy. Both unquestionably show the beginnings of a serious composing talent, although their chief virtue is that of providing brief respites from the girlscout vocal model.

 

Ultimately, the best thing that can probably be said about the album is that, after it actually managed to sell some copies in Iceland, Björk found the inner strength to refuse the proposal to record a second one in the same vein — instead, she used the money to get herself a piano and begin to study on a more serious level. Although it does make one wonder how the girl would have fared if they'd managed to mold her into an early Icelandic role model for Britney Spears...

 

GLING-GLÓ (1990)

 

1) Gling Gló; 2) Luktar-Gvendur; 3) Kata Rokkar; 4) Pabbi Minn; 5) Brestir Og Brak; 6) Ástartröfrar; 7) Bella Símamær; 8) Litli Tónlistarmaðurinn; 9) Það Sést Ekki Sætari Mey; 10) Bílavísur; 11) Tondeleyo; 12) Ég Veit Ei Hvað Skal Segja; 13) Í Dansi Með Þér; 14) Börnin Við Tjörnina; 15) Ruby Baby; 16) I Can't Help Loving That Man.

 

Although this album is usually regarded as a historic oddity, it deserves more than just a passing mention — and stimulates some curious thoughts, too. It was recorded by Björk somewhat «en passant», in the later stage of her serving as a member of The Sugarcubes, together with a local Icelandic jazz combo, Tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar, and is technically defined as a collaboration, but, naturally, 99.9% of the population were only aware of this album's existence in retrospect. I mean, as solid as the local Icelandic jazz scene might be, it is not highly likely that an inter­national audience might develop a strong taste for it. But Björk singing jazz? Now that actually sounds like a promising idea.

 

And indeed, this «historical curio» is a wonderful listen in its own way. Traditional jazz voca­lizing had al­ways been a big influence on Björk's style (although not nearly as direct as «avant­garde» vocalizing à la Tim Buckley), so it is quite refreshing to hear some of the oldies getting the quintessential «Björk treatment». All the material is actually being sung in Icelandic (except for two bonus tracks, taken from the rehearsal sessions and tacked on to the end), but even so, most of it is either translated from English, or is presented as «original» compositions that really just sound like variations on ye olde pre-war or early post-war material.

 

My simple and unoriginal stance on the «Great American Songbook» and its offshoots has always been that it does not matter as much whether the «song» is great in and out of itself (written by the same professional gang of songwriters, the sheet music tends to be of generally comparable quality); what matters is who sings the stuff — Billie Holiday or Barbra Streisand, that kind of thing. Now if you know Björk's classic material, you can make a pretty good guess that there is going to be a lot of breathiness, screeching, roaring, dissonant modulation, and, most importantly, high-pitched «childish» intonations. And in the context of a traditional vocal jazz setting, it all makes the material come alive like never before. «Vocal jazz» is being transformed into «vocal punk-jazz» before your very eyes.

 

The musicianship of the trio I am not prepared to judge. The pianist, whose name also labelled the entire combo, seems quite fluent and sensitive (eerily, he seems to have died just one year after the album's release), and the rhythm section swings just like the doctor ordered, but they all seem quite conservative in approach — which is good, because it allows us to fully focus on the contrast between predictable arrangements and Björk's thoroughly unorthodox behavior. There is no jamming whatsoever — a few solos here and there, but none of that usual attitude where the singer is being viewed as just one more lead instrument, and gets the same amount of time as the saxophone, or the piano, or even the bass: all the songs are relatively brief, and Björk is the shi­ning star on each and every one of them.

 

Searching for individual highlights is futile. More likely, some people will be more attracted to the slow, sensual ballads, some will fall for the kiddie Christmasy stuff like the title track; and the majority will hold on to the fast, swingin' tracks on which the little lady likes to practice her lionine roar. A couple of the songs may be too cute (like the final Icelandic number, driven by harmonica and shaped like a nursery rhyme for very small children), but that is not a big problem in the light of how vivacious, brimming with positive energy, optimism, and tasty traces of icono­clasm this whole thing is. In a way, I almost feel sad that Björk did not release something like this after achieving her «diva» status — a lightweight, unabashedly fun record like this would be a perfectly placed «breather» in between some of her heavier outings (imagine following Homoge­nic, let alone Medulla, up with such a hooliganish Irving Berlin tribute!). But certainly good or bad timing will never affect the ultimate thumbs up rating.

 

DEBUT (1993)

 

1) Human Behaviour; 2) Crying; 3) Venus As A Boy; 4) There's More To Life Than This; 5) Like Someone In Love; 6) Big Time Sensuality; 7) One Day; 8) Aeroplane; 9) Come To Me; 10) Violently Happy; 11) The Anchor Song; 12*) Play Dead.

 

"If you ever get close to a human / And human behaviour / Be ready to get confused". These lines open the properly certified solo career of Björk, honorable daughter of Guðmund, and therein pretty much lies the key to understanding her secret. You see, she may formally present herself to us as the daughter of Guðmund all right, all flesh and blood, but no true human would write lyrics like that — or make that kind of music, or engage in that kind of vocalizing. Debut establishes her very firmly as an ambassador from a distant planet, sent here as either a part of a spy network or a member of an undercover cultural exchange program.

 

And it is almost hilarious (or creepy) how many different arguments in support of that theory one can find — almost as many, in fact, as it takes to convincingly prove that Paul is dead or that Klaatu were the Beatles, after all. I am not going to bother with specificities, but sometimes it feels as if the sole nature of Debut was educational: the little alien from far away is getting busy, learning and practicing the musical fashions of the early 1990s and adapting them to her (his? its? what do we know of alien gender, anyway?) own little alien musical techniques — or vice versa. And so, while on one hand, "there's definitely no logic to human behavior", from our side, we might not see any apparent logic to the creative decisions of the little alien.

 

Why, for instance, does ʽHuman Behaviourʼ, which begins in romantically wild African jungle style (something that the late Les Baxter might have approved), see fit to conclude with a jarring, distorted, «evil» electronic solo that is closer to an «industrial» style in nature, something more fit for a Nine Inch Nails or a Ministry? Is it to reinforce one's idea of human behaviour as leading to inescapable demonstrations of evil in the end? Or is it simply a random demonstration of the little alien's preferences for matinee music? It's an odd combination in any case, but it also works, so that the song mixes elements of playfulness and creepiness in a completely unique manner.

 

A short time after that, ʽVenus As A Boyʼ blows up to smithereens our conventional understan­ding of «sexuality in music» — not that this would look like a particularly great song to make (non-alien) love to: the rhythmic base is suitable, as are the erotic lyrics (sometimes bordering on trashy romance novel clichés — "he's exploring the taste of her arousal"? ooh, gross!), but Björk's untamed passion for dissonant screaming is liable to throwing you off base at any time, so it is probably more prudent to adopt a rational approach and filter the unconventional beauty of the song, together with its half-Eastern, half-Western orchestration, through the mind as... well, as sort of an alternative to conventional beauty. It is a song of love and sex, and it is a song of real passion, not just a show of unusual technique, but one has to get used to that.

 

If you are looking for some tenderness and sentimentality from the little alien, check out ʽCome To Meʼ, which is how the aliens console and caress their loved ones while at the same time zipping through lonely space, busy string parts and minimalistic lonesome keyboard chords passing by. Or, every once in a while, the little alien might bypass rhythm completely and offer its personal interpretation of a vocal jazz oldie: I'm certain that Bing Crosby would have appre­ciated this take on ʽLike Someone In Loveʼ — eventually — but he'd have to spend some time first coming to terms with this child-like, «stumbling» delivery, ever so discordant with the con­ventionally gorgeous harp playing from jazz professional Corky Hale.

 

But on the whole, for the moment the little alien is still content enough to lose itself in the happy dance rhythms of the newly emerged European house / trip hop scene, all the rage in London where Björk had relocated to catch up with the latest and trendiest in musical fashion. Mind you, by no means does she enslave herself to this fashion — in fact, ʽThere's More To Life Than Thisʼ, part of which was allegedly recorded in the toilet (!) of a trendy night club, very clearly makes fun of the nightclubbing lifestyle: the wilder the hilariously lo-fi four-on-the-floor beat, the more ran­dom are the lady's requests to her reluctant partner to "sneak out of this party", because "we could go down to the harbour" and "see the sun come up", yeah right. (A question for the street savants out there: why in the world does she pronounce ghetto blaster as jetto blaster? That h does not just stand there for nothing, now does it?).

 

But elsewhere — ʽCryingʼ, ʽViolently Happyʼ, etc. — the dance beats are taken more seriously, and sometimes they are accompanying dark electronic grooves (ʽViolently Happyʼ) that could have easily come out of the Aphex Twin pocketbook. Are they necessary? Don't they make Debut a bit too derivative and chained to its epoch and surroundings? I'm pretty sure that is what Björk meant herself when she would later reject Debut from the top list of her favorites. It may seem, indeed, that she is relying a bit too much on the musical opinions of others, and not relying fully on her own inner voice. Then again, this is one of those solid compromises between crea­tivity, accessibility, and commercialism that allows for the production of masterpieces without getting carried too far away — in fact, it is still a toss-up for me between Debut and Post as my personal favorite Björk LP. Post would probably win due to higher highs — but there is not a single bad track on Debut, either: each song has something to say, vocally and musically, and we'd be here all day if I started focusing on everything individually.

 

Since we do not want to be here all day, I'll just say this: Debut is a perfect compromise between «cosmic alien logic» and the human mind, and the perfect way to get into Björk if you are not one of those pier divers into ice water. (If you are, just skip all this commercial crap and head straight for Medulla). And while I cannot say that I always easily «connect» with her emotionally (not having any alien blood and all), this particular thumbs up comes straight from the heart, because the songs, meticulously thought out and calculated as they are, still strive to convey understan­dable, organic feelings, rather than just some sort of abstract pantheistic drive, the first signs of which would not really appear until Homogenic. In other words, she is not only using her head, but also keeping it, which is a good thing to do when you are blessed with one of the most un­usual vocal techniques in the world.

 

POST (1995)

 

1) Army Of Me; 2) Hyper-Ballad; 3) The Modern Things; 4) It's Oh So Quiet; 5) Enjoy; 6) You've Been Flirting Again; 7) Isobel; 8) Possibly Maybe; 9) I Miss You; 10) Cover Me; 11) Headphones.

 

Listening to ʽArmy Of Meʼ, I was once again reminded why I generally feel cold about most instru­mental electronic music, but have nothing in general against the use of electronics in an «art pop» song, context, among other things. Electronic melodies / loops / samples on their own have this «inorganic» feel; they can paint a vivid, realistic picture (usually having something to do with robots, astral space, or nanotechnologies), but they cannot serve as a proper reflection of the human soul (when was the last time you actually cried to something by Aphex Twin?). However, when electronic elements are combined with human soul elements, the result can be staggeringly great — like a confrontation between the organic and the inorganic, where it does not even matter who wins (based on the outcome, the piece can qualify as comedy or tragedy).

 

ʽArmy Of Meʼ samples John Bonham (the drum part from ʽWhen The Levee Breaksʼ), throws in an almost industrial bassline, and adds swooshing synth effects — but this cold, heavy, sensually unpleasant atmosphere would just be atmosphere if not for the vocals, which seem to be fighting against the onslaught. The question is — is the music supportive of the threatening "and if you complain once more, you'll meet an army of me" chorus, or is the chorus fighting the music? I like to fondle the latter choice — that the brave little Björk is arrogantly bluffing against unsur­mountable odds, singing as she is against that bassline than in tune with it. The electronic arrangement can then be regarded as a battleground: with the aid of Nellee Hooper, Björk meticulously puts up these impressive, but lifeless paysages, and then hops across from one end of the frame to another, not to «breathe life into them», but to grace them with her own life, so to say. This song, as well as several others on this album, represents one of the finest syntheses of electronic music and «living spirit» I've ever heard.

 

If I had to choose just one album to represent «the true Björk», Post would be it. It is all over the place, it is in constant search of itself, it is relatively accessible, and, most importantly, it does not show an artist losing her head over the unexpected immensity of her talent. In fact, no better de­scription can there be of the big difference between Post and Homogenic than simply a request to compare the album covers. On Post, you see a human exploring a psychedelic world. On Homo­genic, you see a psychedelic pseudo-human exploring one of its artificial creations (a faux-Japanese environment). Both albums are fabulous, but when it comes to really loving my Björk, I prefer a human avatar, not a distant idol.

 

For one thing, that human avatar gets us such delights as ʽIt's Oh So Quietʼ (a cover of an old Horst Winter tune, best known for the 1951 Betty Hutton version) — goofy theatrical jazz with an immense joy-punch packed in; or the quiet chamber music piece ʽYou've Been Flirting Againʼ, which shows how a cello can be a girl's best friend in a psychologically difficult situation; or ʽPossibly Maybeʼ, a song that I'm sure Billie Holiday would love to have covered, given the right circumstances — such frail, elegant melancholy, perfectly integrated with the icy electronic keyboards. They are all weird, eccentric compositions, but they are also all deeply human and very easy to relate to, though not all at once (due to the great mood diversity).

 

Even when she does drift off into fantasy land, like on the «mythological» ʽIsobelʼ, a portrait of a mysterious being stuck somewhere between Sleeping Beauty and Shelob, the required effect is achieved with a catchy chorus, a lush orchestral arrangement, and vocal harmonies with just a tiny trace of dissonance. Plus, there is always this «childish» approach, so that when she sings ʽmy name Isobel, married to myselfʼ, you get a clear vision of an imaginative kid living out a complex fantasy, dancing it all the way to school to those merry trip-hop rhythms.

 

She can be cold and distant, of course, as early as on ʽEnjoyʼ, a song that rocks heavier and breathier than anything else here, while Björk's vocal inflections and the occasional brass notes make the atmosphere comparable to Portishead's second album. But it is not really typical of this particular album. Much more typical is something like ʽHyper-Balladʼ, whose lyrics pack all the important ingredients: "living on a mountain" (where else?), "little things like car-parts, bottles and cutlery" (no great artist can get by without paying homage to the little things), "I go through all this before you wake up" (because there's definitely gotta be a me and there's definitely gotta be a you), and "I imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks" (be­cause nothing helps as much to get beyond your cumbersome ego as hypothetically contem­plating suicide every once in a while). All of this delivered in the usual childlike voice and set in an electronic soup that eventually goes techno-beat-ish on us (without a particularly good reason, I'd say, but somebody must have thought it added «development»).

 

Anyway, the really big difference between Debut and Post is that the latter sheds some of the former's kiddie joy and adds some morose maturity, but it is a kind of depth that does not come (yet) at the expense of accessibility. Words like «depressed» or «somber» do not do justice to this music — Björk is still quite a party animal, it's just that she's got her own party, to which we are all invited only if we learn and accept her wacko rules. An «intraverted extravert», or something like that. When she sings "My headphones / They saved my life / Your tape / It lulled me to sleep", it looks like she really means it — basically, life begins when you put on your head­phones, not blast it all out across the street. Or maybe that's just what I'd like to think. Regardless, a big thumbs up to this colorful, meaningful, deeply creative and unusual musical world. And, most importantly, so personal and human — I'd love to love, say, the Animal Collective for their electronic wizardry with the same strength, but ultimately they just produce these heartless abstractions, so, as Ray Davies said, "you keep all your smart modern freak folks, give me Björk Guðmundsdóttir". Or something to that end, anyway.

 

TELEGRAM (1996)

 

1) Possibly Maybe (Lucy mix); 2) Hyperballad (Brodsky Quartet version); 3) Enjoy (Further Over The Edge mix); 4) My Spine; 5) I Miss You (Dobie Rub Part One, Sunshine mix); 6) Isobel (Deodato mix); 7) You've Been Flirting Again (Flirt Is A Promise mix); 8) Cover Me (Dillinja mix); 9) Army Of Me (Masseymix); 10) Headphones (Ø Remix).

 

Remixing is a special type of artistic expression — unless we're simply talking body-oriented stuff («special dance mix» that goes on for 12 minutes until you're ready to smash your head against a brick wall, etc.), formal symbolism usually matters more than any emotional reaction: you just take a song and have your own imaginative way with it, playing the part of a crooked mirror. It must be tremendous fun for the remixer, but it should rarely be much more than a curio for the listener. Nevertheless, Björk has always had a special thing for remixes: in fact, back in 1994 she'd already given the green light to an EP of remixes from Debut, with Black Dog, Sabres Of Paradise, and other artists contributing, and now, in 1996, along comes Telegram — a full-length follow-up to Post containing remixes of all but two songs from that album.

 

To be accurate, Björk herself has stated that it is not so much a «remix» album as an experiment in «deconstruction», pulling the songs apart, extracting the «core» and exaggerating it to an al­most absurdist effect. A fair enough description, but it does not work for everything. It certainly covers something like the Graham Massey «remix» of ʽArmy Of Meʼ, which essentially drops out everything except for the grumbly bassline, then samples a tiny bit of the vocals, grinds them down in a Vocoder-like environment, and mixes the results in an electronic jungle generator. But it does not work, for instance, in the case of ʽHyperballadʼ, where the original electronic instru­mentation is replaced by an entirely new modern classical arrangement, provided by The Brodsky Quartet — not a «deconstruction», not a «remix», but rather just an entirely new vision for the song, with lots of classical dissonance that might actually be a better sonic fit for Björk's heroical-hysterical delivery of the tune.

 

These two extremes demonstrate the major virtue of Telegram — diversity and unpredictability. Naturally, the «remixes» lean towards dance-oriented or trance-oriented electronic rhythms, but the remixers have been carefully selected to reflect a variety of musical styles and atmospheric approaches, and the «Björk seal of approval» is certainly not given out at random: everything has to combine in a way that would deepen and sharpen the «Björk enigma», make those Post songs that were never all that trivial in the first place pose far more questions than there could be an­swers. Of course, when you ask more questions than you give answers, you run the risk of ma­king it all seem like one grand put-on. Why do LFO think that the vocals in ʽPossibly Maybeʼ have to sound like the female equivalent of Stephen Hawking? Why is ʽEnjoyʼ being put in hard­core industrial mode, with factory machine noises as the only counterpart to the vocals? Why does ʽCover Meʼ get a fussy drum and bass arrangement, not to mention being three times as long as the original? Why do we have to listen to all this as an official Björk LP release?..

 

All these questions can have from one to infinity answers, so I am not even going to bother. In­stead, let me just mention that the only totally new track here is ʽMy Spineʼ, originally the B-side to ʽIt's Oh So Quietʼ, featuring fabled Scottish virtuoso deaf percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie on a magnificent vibraphone part (where each bar, apparently, is symbolic of one of the vertebrae in Björk's vertebral column). It's a beautiful duet whose exclusion from Post was regrettable, but at least it has not disappeared into thin air completely.

 

Ultimately, is Telegram a Björk album at all? Seeing as how she is not responsible for all the ar­rangement ideas on the original Post anyway, and that all of the songs are hers, composition-wise, and the vocals are hers, and the track selection is hers, it probably should be. «Those songs can work this way, too», she tells us, and we have the right to respect or to trash that artistic decision, whichever way we feel. Personally, I've always felt intrigued and even a little thrilled by these remixes, even though I've never been able to say that I «get» them, or the concept of the album in general. That said, Telegram is supposed to work faster than Post, so this means we probably shouldn't tarry too much on the issue. It's just a speedy curio, here today, gone tomorrow. But it does work, sort of, as an album, so do not make the mistake of ignoring it if you're really into Björk at all; have my slightly puzzled thumbs up as an extra endorsement, if need be.

 

HOMOGENIC (1997)

 

1) Hunter; 2) Jóga; 3) Unravel; 4) Bachelorette; 5) All Neon Like; 6) 5 Years; 7) Immature; 8) Alarm Call; 9) Pluto; 10) All Is Full Of Love.

 

Doctor, we're losing her. If you want to call Homogenic the pinnacle / zenith / Olympus of all things Björk-related, you can make a great case for this, but even you will have to admit that the lady is getting a little... distant, perhaps? The cunning little sprite of Debut and Post has matured into a full-blown Lady of the Mountain, who no longer wishes to be playful and innocent, or is no longer capable of it. These songs are still gorgeous, and, to some extent, still accessible, but the production, the lyrics, the singing style, everything has evolved to the state that you are not sup­posed to «enjoy» these songs — you're supposed to kowtow. I mean, how is it even possible to look at that Alexander McQueen-designed sleeve photo and not kowtow? That sure ain't no frickin' Cio-Cio San staring you down from the front cover.

 

Still, I guess it had to be done, because no other album in the world sounds quite like Homogenic — and besides, if we're talking pretentiousness justified by atmosphere, I'd rate this over OK Computer in a jiffy, my usual predilection towards guitar music over electronic music notwith­standing. It is usually said that the album was mostly a tribute from Björk to her native Iceland, but it certainly goes well beyond that, and not just because of the extra Japanese motifs on the album sleeve. The soundscapes throughout are «icy» indeed, but due to the constant pressure of electronic texture, this «iciness» is more of a sci-fi, astral nature, so when you take your first listen to ʽHunterʼ, you might get a glimpse of the singer zipping through space, or, rather, as it happens, freezing space and time all around her so that it might be easier for her to go out hunting. There is a local reference in there as well ("I thought I could organize freedom / How Scandina­vian of me"), but it is of no crucial importance, nor are the lyrics in general of any crucial impor­tance — if you try and go for a more or less literal interpretation (transformation into a hunter = gaining of personal independence and self-sufficiency), it becomes way too boring.

 

What is not boring at all is admiring all the overlays — the overdriven martial pummelling of the programmed drums, the silky psychedelic cobwebs of the electronics, the strings adding a mid-Eastern vibe, the ghostly harmonies — this is a soundtrack to something completely different, the invention of an alternate world with alternate musical (and God knows what other) values, over which Björk has crowned herself freedom-organizing queen. You probably don't want to live there unless you're seriously deranged — too cold, too spooky, too unpredictable — but you are given the option to take a look from afar, and that's plenty already.

 

The Amazing Exploding Percussion on ʽJógaʼ (don't forget the accent sign, since the song has nothing to do with yoga, being named after one of Björk's personal friends) is said to be a tribute to Icelandic volcanic activity, but, once again, nobody is forcing anybody to narrow down the vision: she is singing about "emotional landscapes", after all, not "geographical" ones, and the famous chorus — "state of emergency, is where I want to be" — can hardly be related to Iceland, a country where people are said to be rather rarely found in a state of emergency (unless one of the volcanoes does erupt, I guess). What matters is the cathartic height of that voice, the soaring strings, and the electronic base all combining in an anthemic chorus that speaks this bizarre language, combining familiar sounds in such unusual ways. «Strange beauty» indeed, a fitting spiritual anthem for the era of the quark and the quantum.

 

The epicness reaches its peak on ʽBacheloretteʼ, a song that begs for you to envision Björk on the top of a tall, narrow cliff rising into the epicenter of a snow storm, but maybe that imagery was deemed too pretentious to be incorporated in the accompanying video. It is a damn risky song, taking so many chances that it teeters on the brink of crashing under its own weight, and, in fact, every time I see Björk doing it live, I can't get rid of a funny thought like "what's a little girl like this doing, singing a huge song like that?" But it works — it chooses all the right notes, tones, and overlays to show that the ʽIsobelʼ of Post has finally transformed from some po­tentially dange­rous, but rather amusing and cuddly entity into a demonic, tragic, and presumably lethal creature — or, at least, inaccessible. Who'd want to connect or relate to "a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl", or a "path of cinders burning under your feet"? The strings wail with such desperation, and the bass keys rumble with such a sense of doom that there are only two ways to go — hate this crap as an overblown theatrical put-on, or kowtow. For now, I'm kowtowing.

 

These three big singles are probably the pivots around which we launch the smaller satellites, but the album is definitely consistent. Some of the more personal, intimate moments are to be found within its folds — ʽUnravelʼ is a song of longing and yearning, an emotional state so tailor-made for Björk's voice that one wonders why it is not generated more often; ʽ5 Yearsʼ boards us back on the train of «I hate indecision and indecisive people!», with arguably the best bit of roaring on the entire record (at least, roaring that is not electronically enhanced, as it is on ʽPlutoʼ); ʽImma­tureʼ is a self-reprisal for a moment of weakness in which — fancy that! — the protagonist makes the awful mistake of relying upon somebody else, with a masterful vocalization on the chorus, each syllable of it getting its own flourish (no melismata, though, thank God).

 

But the coda, calming us and smoothly bringing it all back home after the wild sonic ravage of ʽPlutoʼ, is still an anthem — the Beatles had ʽAll You Need Is Loveʼ, implying a certain shortage of the stuff, and Björk has ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ, implying, in a rather pantheistic twist, that one only has to know where to look. The problem is, she is not being very convincing, because so far, she's given us everything except for the understanding of whether she actually has a clue about what love really is. Is there at all a thing like a «Björk love song»? Whatever be the case, her idea of «love» and how to express it in music is so far from conventional, you'd think it wasn't really love she was talking about. The music of ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ is meditative, soothing, and hypno­tizing, but putting the listener in a transcendental state is not quite the same as conveying a sense of pleasure or interpersonal affection. Then again, you wouldn't really expect Ms. Isobel-Bachelorette to share the average person's layman interpretation of love, would you? All I am saying is that ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ will probably not leave you feeling warm and cuddly all over, but it might manipulate you into realizing that all is full of Björk (or, if you are of the cynical persuasion, that Björk is full of... never mind).

 

A great, epic album, but also a tragic one, since it is always sad to see a human being cease being a human being and begin being an alien entity of questionable organic constitution — the album title being a good indication of this: Homogenic, not Human. From here on, Björk's further career can almost be predicted, with all of its highs and lows, as her conscience set out on a journey all its own, rarely crossing paths with basic human nature. But in the long run, it was worth it — anybody can choose a cut-off point in following any particular artist, and even if one were to argue that Homogenic destroyed Björk (which is not quite true, but looks good on paper), it would still be one of the awesomest self-destructions in the history of popular music. You are basically witnessing the nirvanization of a person, as she melts into little streaks of particles and vibrations right before your eyes on the ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ finale. When she returns back from the other side, she'll never be the same again. A thumbs up rating does not even begin to do this weird pantheistic record proper justice.

 

SELMASONGS (2000)

 

1) Overture; 2) Cvalda; 3) I've Seen It All; 4) Scatterheart; 5) In The Musicals; 6) 107 Steps; 7) New World.

 

First and foremost, this review offers a great pretext for giving a good smacking to Lars von Trier, whom I have always admired for his talent and his audacity, and have always hated for all the wrong directions in which he has applied both. Dancer In The Dark, even more so than Breaking The Waves, and just about the same as Dogville, was a ridiculously staged study in personal manipulation — whose most unconventional and groundbreaking facet was its utter ridiculous­ness. I like the story about how, allegedly, Björk would begin her filming every day by saying "I despise you, Mr. von Trier", and spitting at the gent, which is probably what every intelligent person should have done in her place, were he/she under an obligation of some sort. The only question, of course, being «what the hell was she thinking in the first place?», and a possible answer being that, in the first place, she didn't think about anything, and in the second place, it was too late to back out already.

 

Not that the movie is bad in all respects: technically speaking, it's fine... other than the disgusting storyline (sort of like «Charles Dickens meets modern anti-American stereotypes») and, sub­sequently, the corny, incredibly artificial over- or under-acting of everyone involved. If you are into movies for different reasons (camera work, lighting, editing, etc.), Dancer In The Dark deserves to be seen. But mostly it just deserves to be seen in order to get a better context for Selma Songs, its accompanying soundtrack — a mini-album whose quality stands miles above the movie, so never make the mistake of bypassing it in your exploration of Björk's discography. This small bunch of songs is the finest thing to have come out of the entire project.

 

If anything, Selma Songs serves as a wonderful antidote for the distant and over-reaching effect of Homogenic — for a short time, it gives us back our Björk as a human being. Warped, crazy, totally idiosyncratic, but a human being nevertheless. The movie character, «Selma» — a helpless im­migrant mother matching near-complete blindness with a Dostoyevsky heart — may look caricaturesque in the movie (at least, the script does its best to present her as a caricature), but when it comes to painting that image with musical colors, von Trier is out of the picture and Björk is allowed complete creative freedom, and things like these are right up her alley, so she sort of transforms herself into the Who's Tommy and proceeds from there.

 

Actually, the Tommy connection can be extended: ʽOvertureʼ opens the small set with its musical theme played on the same French horn that was one of the key instruments on Tommy, courtesy of John Entwistle, setting much the same «epic / longago-and-faraway» rock-opera mood. There the superficial similarities end, and we proceed to join «Selma» in her amazing musifications of the sounds of the outside world. Selma, unlike Tommy, does not play pinball, but she likes to dance, and she constructs herself dance soundtracks out of the noises of the factory where she works (ʽCvaldaʼ), of the sounds of trains that pass her by on her way home (ʽI've Seen It Allʼ), of her personal tribulations (ʽScatterheartʼ, ʽIn The Musicalsʼ), and even out of her final moments on Earth (ʽNew Worldʼ). Most importantly, while it makes sense to be aware of the movie to under­stand what's going on, it all works much better as a song-set, without any visuals.

 

The «factory» and «train» arrangements actually happen to be some of the most reasonable and impressive justifications of the «industrial» style that I have ever heard — far more accessible than your average Einstürzende Neubauten and, for that reason, far more difficult to get right: anyone can base a musical composition upon «factory clanging», but not anyone can get the clanging to form a properly danceable skeleton, on top of which Selma's imagination then throws chimes, brass, strings, and whatever else comes into her head. And Björk's vocal style, the whole «little girl with a lion's roar and avantgarde ambitions» schtick, is perfect for the character — «little girl» agreeing with its helplessness, «lion's roar» agreeing with its determination, and «avantgarde ambitions» agreeing with its sensory uniqueness.

 

Since the movie had to be seen by, like, ordinary people (some of these still occasionally watched von Trier movies in 2000), the avantgarde ambitions are not quite so avantgarde as to completely neglect catchiness — and Björk's duet with long-time fan Thom Yorke on ʽI've Seen It Allʼ gua­rantees additional popularity, to which should be added the good news that Thom actually sings like a human being on the track, rather than in his «subterranean homesick alien» voice that he'd invented on OK Computer and which I honestly cannot stand one bit: consequently, their mournful dialog generates strange beauty and is a great illustration of «passion in the dark», ex­pressing strong feelings in muffled, semi-implied ways. ʽIn The Musicalsʼ is truly what you get when you cross Björk-style songwriting with the old cliché of «bright lights, big city gone to my baby's head» — orchestral excitement crossed with truly wild sequencing and capped off with a brilliant lyrical/vocal hook ("...and you were always there to catch me... when I'd fall").

 

The brief crescendo of ʽ107 Stepsʼ could be thought of as an unintentional answer to the ʽ39 Lashesʼ of Jesus Christ Superstar — the protagonist cruelly wound-up towards martyrdom — but, rather than being something self-sufficient, works more like an appetizing introduction to ʽNew Worldʼ, which finally realizes the theme previewed in ʽOvertureʼ and is one of the stateliest anthems to «death as liberation» in existence, and — get this — it is totally warm, friendly, and presents the «New World» as a much more familiar and cozy place than any of the «Icelandic» soundscapes of Homogenic. So if you ever needed an excuse to say "I'd rather die than go to Iceland", there you have it, clear as daylight.

 

In the end, I guess, Lars von Trier does deserve our gratitude for offering his lead such a perfect opportunity. Who knows, maybe he should have also let her handle the script — and the cast — and the directing — and the editing — and we might have a really good movie to go along with all the great music. Of course, most of the user reviews of Dancer In The Dark that I have read wrong the movie for all the wrong reasons ("such a potentially great movie about human wicked­ness and injustice, but why cast this loonie imp in the title role?"), so this could never happen, and Björk herself has said that acting is not one of her forte's, and that she only did this for the money because it was a matter of special interest. But whatever — the important thing is that we do have the soundtrack album, and that it is perfectly legitimate to simply treat it as a mini-rock opera, and give it a thumbs up, and be happily done with it.

 

VESPERTINE (2001)

 

1) Hidden Place; 2) Cocoon; 3) It's Not Up To You; 4) Undo; 5) Pagan Poetry; 6) Frosti; 7) Aurora; 8) An Echo, A Stain; 9) Sun In My Mouth; 10) Heirloom; 11) Harm Of Will; 12) Unison.

 

A paradox here — I am in the camp that generally thinks Björk was at her best as long as she still maintained some touch with reality, and that it all started going downhill with Homogenic. And yet, every once in a while I cannot get rid of the feeling that Vespertine might be her greatest album, because it captures her quintessence so damn well. It is vastly experimental, it has nothing resembling a «pop single», it has its serious detractors who correlate the album with the «swan dress» appearance and dismiss it as written at a time when the lady had already went completely gaga — but I totally «get it», and love it, despite any potential flaws.

 

One thing is for certain: Vespertine is an ideological anti-thesis to Homogenic. Where that album went on a cosmic sprawl, its sonic panoramas extended deep and wide, and its protagonist almost equating herself with The Universal Mother or something, Vespertine should have really borne the title reserved for its second track: ʽCocoonʼ. Or for its first track, for that matter: ʽHid­den Placeʼ. No, it does not matter that the album still has plenty of swooping orchestral passages, or that the entire St. Paul's Cathedral Choir is engaged to add support to the grand finale of ʽUni­sonʼ. Even these elements all fall in with the artist's masterplan: now that she's emulated the macrospirit, it is the turn of the microspirit. If Homogenic was her tribute to the Big Bang, then Vespertine is her tribute to the Miracle of the Womb.

 

"Through the warmthest cord of care your love was sent to me" — ʽHidden Placeʼ begins fairly unambiguously, accompanied by electronic heartbeat-imitating pulsation and a swarm of over­dubs, all of them mimicking the «bio-music» as could be perceived by an embryo (provided an embryo can perceive any of it... but hey, this is art, not Autechre). You could call this «preten­tious» or «silly», but the thing is, it works for Björk, and it really works for her much better than the Homogenic approach. In fact, there are obvious links to Selmasongs as well: «cocoons», «hiding», «isolation», «beauty in solitude and seclusion», «idiosyncrasies of one's inner world» — all of this fits in much more naturally with Björk's vocal style and twisted fairy-tale hero image than her attempts to embrace the whole universe with her little hands. As wrong as I might be, I think Vespertine is the album that she'd been waiting for a chance to produce all of her life; and if we have von Trier to thank for this (not very likely, but possible), well, thank you.

 

The potential downside is that the record is much less scattered and diverse than it used to be — Björk's first proverbially «conceptual» album, if you wish, and, as it usually happens with proper conceptual albums, every now and then you have to accept hooks being sacrificed for atmosphere and «ideology». But this is not to say that Vespertine is a hookless record. Gripping choruses are present on several songs like ʽHidden Placeʼ, ʽIt's Not Up To Youʼ, and ʽUnisonʼ — arguably the most immediately accessible pieces on the album. The rest run on hypnotic fuel that takes a bit of time to sink in. Texture, ambience, intonation — a song like ʽCocoonʼ has nothing in addition to these components, but doesn't it actually sound like a «musical cocoon» of sorts, where the soft electronic keyboards play the part of silk threads, subtly wrapping around the singer's voice as she equates physical romance with the «art of shutting in»? Special mention should be made of the quivering falsetto — so fragile and so determined at the same time. I wouldn't go as far as choosing the simple way and calling it «vulnerable», because Björk is not vulnerable — when she gets hurt, she just retreats back in her shell, leaving an ink jet behind — more like the content equivalent of a cat purr after a good mouse hunt, but unforgettable, really, regardless of whatever interpretation you'd care to offer.

 

Further on down the line, there is ʽUndoʼ, which is probably the closest to her own ʽSong Of The Sirenʼ that she ever got: "It's not meant to be a strife / It's not meant to be a struggle uphill" is another cat purr that injects itself surreptitiously under your skin, until you fall under its spell or, if you're a strong one, realize that it's meant to be a spell and, like Ulysses, start desperately searching for some wax to plug your ears. With its multiple vocal overdubs and wild dissonances, ʽUndoʼ is sort of like a blueprint for Björk's entire next album, but since it actually has a point ("I'm praying to be in a generous mode", she says, and that is exactly what the song is about), it is more captivating than all of Medúlla put together.

 

One of the most beautiful, and slightly overlooked, things on here is ʽAuroraʼ, featuring some of Björk's loveliest vocal moves ever — you could argue against my point, saying that here she actually breaks out of the «cocoon» to sing a solemn prayer to the goddess of the dawn, but it is a quiet, intimate prayer all the same, propped up by soft keyboards and a harp melody (speaking of which, the harp is consistently the most prominent instrument on all these songs, as if it represen­ted the delicate internal humming of the silken cocoon support — the harp and chimes, that is, which play an equally delicate role on ʽSun In My Mouthʼ, ʽHarm Of Willʼ, and elsewhere). No sprawl, no bombast, just humble beauty, delicacy, and intimacy.

 

On the other hand, Vespertine is not a hymn to isolation and narcissism: as Carole King once said, "there's room enough for two in the cocoon" (or something like that, anyway), and quite a few of these tunes are essentially love songs — including the solemn coda of ʽUnisonʼ, where she states directly that "I thrive best hermit style / With a beard and a pipe / But now I can't do this without you", and urges her counterpart to "let's unite tonight, we shouldn't fight". I mean, all of that description could make Vespertine sound like one of those depressed, masochistic odes to loneliness, which it isn't in the slightest — it is a very happy, life-asserting, even extravert album, it just shows that all of this is equally possible to achieve inside a closed space. There is no bom­bastic "tear down the wall!", uh, I mean "cocoon", conclusion to this record because it does not need one. ʽHidden Placeʼ may start out with a tinge of insecurity, even paranoia perhaps, but by the time we get to ʽUnisonʼ, everything is just handy-dandy.

 

If you consciously seek a good turn to jump off the Björk train, do not make the mistake of doing it too early and dismissing Vespertine. Even if you believe that it puts the concept before the music, you will be smart enough to understand that it is one hell of a concept, and later on, that the music isn't too bad, either. Most importantly, this is the perfect compromise between «sym­bolist artistry» and «human behavior» that you will ever hear on a Björk record. Smarter-than-thou she may be here, but she ain't holier-than-thou, and it is arguably the last time that she's sounded so alive, all these vocal parts so befitting a human being rather than an android. An un­questionable artistic peak, a respectful thumbs up, and heavily recommended for professional silkworm breeders worldwide.

 

MEDÚLLA (2004)

 

1) Pleasure Is All Mine; 2) Show Me Forgiveness; 3) Where Is The Line?; 4) Vökuró; 5) Öll Birtan; 6) Who Is It; 7) Submarine; 8) Desired Constellation; 9) Oceania; 10) Sonnets/Unrealities XI; 11) Ancestors; 12) Mouth's Cradle; 13) Miðvikudags; 14) Triumph Of A Heart.

 

Can you say «I am a huge Björk fan, but I hate this album» without running into an oxymoron? Very very clearly, Medúlla is exactly the kind of album she wanted to make in 2004, an album over which (like over everything else) she had full creative control, and an album that nobody could not call «bold» and «adventurous». So how could a huge Björk fan hate this album? Would it not be like saying «I'm a good Catholic, but I really hate Holy Communion?»...

 

To get a serious answer, let us think of it this way. There is no doubt that Björk's greatest and most unique asset is her immediately recognizable voice and the way she uses it — love it, hate it, but you will not confound it with anything else in the world: people who are only familiar with the artist on a, let's say, vaguely tangential level will always remember her as «that amazing / annoying singer» first and foremost. But this tends to overshadow her other strengths — namely, that she is also a gifted songwriter and arranger, and that she is an extremely talented «advocate of beauty», being one of the very few people in the 1990s who managed to find a completely fresh, mind-opening way to convey the sense of beauty. Mind-opening, yes, but also generally accessible — once you manage to overcome the first shock, getting to like records like Post, Homogenic, or even Vespertine is really not that hard.

 

The biggest mistake of Medúlla, I think, is in that Björk oversetimated her own talents, and de­liberately threw herself off balance. As unique as that voice is, it is a big, big question whether anybody really wants, or needs, to listen to a whole album of Björk singing close to accappella — or, in extreme cases, listen to an album of a million billion chopped-up Björks interacting with each other like a flock of drunken birds on a wire. The experience is about as weird as the cover of the album, and seems more like a deliberate provocation than a sincere experiment.

 

There is no doubt that a lot of work went into the album. Each of the tracks is very carefully put together, with multiple samples arranged in rhythmic, often symmetric patterns, while the pri­mary vocal melodies still explore relations between harmony and dissonance like they did when she was still a part of The Sugarcubes. The problem is that this is the first time in Björk history where it gets really hard to discern any substance beyond the form. The album may be brave enough to invent its own sub-genre (call it «math-vocalize» if you wish), but inventing a vital genre does amount to a little something extra than just the classic manner of «putting things on top of other things». And I struggle in vain to find that extra — and while I struggle, the vocals just grow more and more and more irritating, until we're almost in Yokoland.

 

Some of the comparatively more «normal» songs clearly indicate that talent has not abandoned the lady: ʽWho Is Itʼ, for instance, would not be out of place on Vespertine: deceptively released as the album's lead single, it is one of those intimate love songs, with a little bit of accompanying paranoia, that could well be taken with you inside the «cocoon». But most of the time is being spent bending that talent out of shape: melodies are distorted, twisted, superimposed in brutal ways that require a complete reevaluation of your musical preconceptions. Are you ready to come out with such a reevaluation, or are you not?

 

Something like ʽAncestorsʼ, one of the key tracks on the record (because Björk herself said that the album title should represent the «5,000 year-old blood that's inside us all»), may be taken as the ultimately diagnostic element. «Loving» it is hardly possible, or at least, natural — taking it as a sonically symbolic representation of the various biological and cultural strains hidden out there in our DNA and our brain tissue is possible, but if so, Medúlla becomes a «performance act», a purely brain-oriented venture that, frankly speaking, reeks of gimmickry and self-indul­gence. As far as I am concerned, all these guttural noises and dissonant notes only serve to irritate the senses — for a genuine summoning of the «beast within», you're on far more secure territory with Iggy Pop and the Stooges than these ridiculously scattered quacks, roars, and wails (for that matter, ʽColdsweatʼ by The Sugarcubes did far more to remind me of the «5,000 year-old blood» than any of these tracks).

 

The ultimate downside is that, for all of its «boldness», Medúlla gives nothing essentially new. If you took any of the classic Björk albums, stripped them naked of their instrumental melodies, and then hacked up and interspersed the vocal harmonies, that'd be Medúlla in a nutshell — the only difference being that it is Björk herself here, deconstructing her own music. Yes, I admire her iron will and her decision not to stagnate / grow old / fade away at any cost, but you know, be­hind the superficially groundbreaking textures of Medúlla there might actually lurk a subcon­scious fear of not having anything more to say.

 

Alas, the more I listen to the record, the more I am becoming convinced of this scenario: Medúlla is a certain Björk-specific way of refusing to age gracefully — her personal equivalent of the Rolling Stones' Undercover, as formally dif­ferent as those albums are. On the other hand, this also makes me feel relieved: if this album only pretends to be «bold» and «adventurous», I can still call myself a huge fan of Björk in some respect — a huge fan of her «before-jumping-the-shark» period, that is, whereas Medúlla is clearly on the other side of the shark, and receives a certified thumbs down rating from me.

 

VOLTA (2007)

 

1) Earth Intruders; 2) Wanderlust; 3) The Dull Flame Of Desire; 4) Innocence; 5) I See Who You Are; 6) Vertebrae By Vertebrae; 7) Pneumonia; 8) Hope; 9) Declare Independence; 10) My Juvenile.

 

The higher you rise, the lower you get to fall — unless you happen to die young, this rule knows very few exceptions. Coming from a nobody, Volta would be a great success; coming from Björk, it is her first album to be known as a major disappointment, sometimes even for big fans, since it clearly shows signs of stagnation. Up until Vespertine, each new album was a leap forward in some respect; Medúlla took that leaping to near-absurd heights — and in the process of leaping, it seems as if the genius finally cracked her spine.

 

If you do come to terms with the fact that Volta reveals no new amazing details about the artistic world of Björk, the record will be easier to deal with. Stepping a few steps back from the wild, unbridled experimentalism of Medúlla, she returns to the world of musical instruments and pro­grammed beats, once again with the aid of her regular producer Mark Bell, but also enlisting hip-hop/R&B producer Timbaland to add some computerized African rhythmics to the songs. Vari­ous collaborations, such as with the pipa player Min Xiao-fen on ʽI See Who You Areʼ, or the two vocal duets with Antony Hegarty, add color and diversity, and then there's ʽDeclare Indepen­denceʼ, her first big venture into the world of musical politics, whose performance in China, dedicated to Tibet, helped stir up controversy and shit. So far, so good.

 

What is hopelessly, despairingly bad is that Volta just goes nowhere. On her previous albums, Björk had showed herself to be a master of catchy hooks and a master of atmospherics — you could hum these songs till your humming machine ran out of fuel, and you could be carried away into a parallel (or perpendicular) world by almost any of them. The melodies of Volta, however, retain the influence of the experimentalism of Medúlla — with maybe just a couple of exceptions, Björk is now only interested in continuing the same «free-form» approach of singing, delivering her lines as if they came from a Shostakovich opera (or, at least, anything post-Wagnerian, to broaden the scope of comparison). The vocal melodies continue to be carefully designed, not im­provised, but the endless dissonances and lack of resolutions eventually begin to irritate — not to mention that there is really nothing new or fresh about this approach.

 

As far as atmosphere is concerned, Volta is strikingly minimalistic. In a way, so were large parts of Vespertine, but there the minimalism was essential to the album's «cocoon» image; Volta has a well-defined extrovert character, and could benefit from some more of those grandiose, imagi­native orchestrations, as on Homogenic. Instead, you get beats, beats, and more beats — some­times just beats, sometimes beats mixed with a single lead instrument, usually an exotic one (the pipa on ʽI See Who You Areʼ, or Toumani Diabaté's kora on ʽHopeʼ). The beats are relatively complex, but hardly ever defying imagination — and the lead instruments are nice, but, as it so often happens with «world music», usually devoid of individual identity. That identity should be provided by the singer — and this is exactly what does not happen.

 

Of the two «rocking» tracks, ʽEarth Intrudersʼ is arguably the better one: with a singalong chorus and a bit of cosmic humor attached, it is as good an introduction to the album as could probably have been thought of. Still, compared to ʽHunterʼ, it ends up looking like a novelty number — kiddie carnival music, incapable of burrowing deep into your subconscience, because the electro­nic textures all concentrate on tribal beats rather than psychedelic synthesizer tapestries. As for ʽDeclare Independenceʼ, it is simply not the kind of approach I could ever associate with Björk: the song is about as naturally flowing as Paul McCartney's ʽFreedomʼ, and even if you happen to share those bluntly stated sentiments ("raise your flag! start your own currency!"), the song still sounds rather dumb. Just leave the big social statements to Bono, will ya?

 

The two duets with Hegarty are disappointing: I do share the required-acquired-taste to enjoy Antony and The Johnsons, but on ʽThe Dull Flame Of Desireʼ, Antony is used more like a con­venient lackey for Björk's own purposes, which are not far removed from those of Medúlla — create a multi-layered, dissonant, confusing vocal tapestry and see where that takes you. I find the results pretentious («get two highly idiosyncratic, uniquely expressive singers for the price of one!») and superfluous — the singers do not manage to find perfect balance (contrary to, say, the duet with Thom Yorke on ʽI've Seen It Allʼ, where there was actual dialog and mutual understan­ding between the protagonists), and, at worst, the song just spills over into ear-splitting disso­nance that cancels out their mutual strength. ʽMy Juvenileʼ is a little better, but, again, I could easily do with just Björk's "down the corridor I send warmth...", discarding Antony's "intentions were pure..." bit altogether.

 

Everything else just sort of blurs together into a chaotic, generally senseless mix of beats, pipas, and songs that seem like pale shadows of something bigger and better (ʽVertebrae By Vertebraeʼ, for instance, strives to convey the sense of constant search and struggle, but the musical backing is so bland and the main vocal melody so unmemorable that it simply has no reason to exist next to something like, say, ʽHyper-Balladʼ). This is just Björk on autopilot — relying on all too fami­liar Björkisms for lack of anything more interesting. And while the lack of radically new ideas, per se, should not bother me (not even the greatest genius can generate radically new ideas for unlimited amounts of time), the lack of memorable tracks and impressive atmospherics most de­finitely does. There is not a single song on here that managed to truly woo me over, and for that, the album gets a thumbs down. Oh, and the album cover is quite ridiculous, too. More fit for some J-pop record or something.

 

BIOPHILIA (2011)

 

1) Moon; 2) Thunderbolt; 3) Crystalline; 4) Cosmogony; 5) Dark Matter; 6) Hollow; 7) Virus; 8) Sacrifice; 9) Mutual Core; 10) Solstice.

 

I think that the title of the album is somewhat misleading. Biophilia is a (relatively simple and, when you come to think of it, rather self-obvious) idea of life being attracted to life — a natural inborn empathy towards organic entities, which is why, by default, we happen to like kittens and hippos better than rocks. (Not sure if the theory also works on the Ebola virus, though). This project of Björk's, however, pursues an even loftier goal, professing love and metaphoric exploi­tation towards just about every corner of the universe, from sub-atomic particles to planet move­ment and natural electrical phenomena — so, for the sake of accuracy, she would probably have been more justified to call it Cosmophilia. Then again, she probably wants to treat everything in the universe as a living thing. How artistic-pantheistic of her, again.

 

One thing you really have to respect the lady for is how she is still managing to keep in touch with the modern world: relatively few artists manage to escape «fossilization» and condescending rejection of modern values by the time they hit 45 — yet Biophilia is, in every respect, a record that just screams «the 2010s are upon us!». Not only was most of the music, according to Björk's own statement, composed on a tablet computer, but the album itself is not just an album: it is a sprawling, arch-trendy multimedia project, accompanied with visuals, educational applications, specialized live performance, and, on the whole, first billed as a «3-D scientific musical» and then as the first ever «app album», so now it can compete with Lady Gaga and Angry Birds at the exact same time: how smart is that?

 

Very smart, but, I am afraid to say, not very engaging. Personally, I am not very much interested in «multimedia artistry», and I am definitely not interested in watching somebody who used to be a terrific musical artist try and make a transition to a state where music ceases to be the major attraction and becomes «just one side of the story». From a certain point of view, this falls under the definition of «sellout» — in order to fit in better with the times, you sacrifice some of your strengths in favor of «what the market demands». These days, the market demands dazzling interactive visuals, so we play a game of «construct your own universe from elementary particle scratch» or «build a drum machine from a combination enzymes» (no kidding, this is exactly what the app associated with ʽHollowʼ is supposed to do). Yay, nice and cute and a good way to kill time for scientifically-oriented kids who hate reading books, but there is a downside to that: the more effort you spend on these things, the less effort remains for music.

 

And the music on Biophilia is disappointing — in fact, it is so disappointing that it just does not work as a self-standing album at all. Where Volta, for a while, returned Björk to the world of «art-pop», Biophilia takes us back to the wild experimentalism of Medúlla, only using electronic textures in the place of that record's multiple vocal overdubs — and using them to paint almost completely static pictures, with very few hooks and no musical development whatsoever. The typical recipé for a Biophilia song is — set a programmed groove and let the singer rave and rant against it for three to five minutes. Considering that the grooves are not of jaw-dropping quality, and that the singer's raving and ranting is simply all too familiar, what's a poor boy to do but inescapably turn his attention to the accompanying apps? At least pushing some buttons and learning to be the Master of the Universe will keep you from getting bored.

 

Ironically, reading about the album shows that the particular songs on here contain the largest doses of meaningful musical symbolism so far present on any single Björk record. The musical cycles on ʽMoonʼ echo the shifting of lunar phases; the electronic arpeggios on ʽThunderboltʼ symbolize lightning; ʽSolsticeʼ relies on pendulums; the fussy chimes on ʽVirusʼ represent viral activities within the cell, and so on. Disentangling all these combinations of ideas is truly a nerd's paradise — and here, indeed, is a «math-rock» album where «getting» the actual math is a real possibility, rather than an exercise in frustration.

 

Oh, if only the record would have a small pinch of emotional content in it — but alas, neither within its «applicational» context nor without it can I assess it as anything other than a purely formal, rationalized, carefully crafted, but ultimately soulless piece of work. Yes, there are lyrical themes here that tap into the personal, and any major Björk fan will see that, if we restrict our­selves to the words, she is actually using all that «scientific» imagery as simple metaphors for relations and feelings — like ʽVirusʼ, for instance, is really just a plain love song: "Like a virus needs a body / As soft tissue feeds on blood / Someday I'll find you, the urge is here". But the music that she writes is not indicative of any of those feelings. The music is more in the vein of Autechre — technologically-oriented «nano-grooves» that are much better rationalized and intellectually admired than intuitively enjoyed. And this even concerns the acoustic tracks like ʽMoonʼ and ʽSolsticeʼ, where Björk's beloved harps replace the electronics, or ʽCrystallineʼ, for which she invents a new instrument, «gameleste», a cross between a gamelan and a celesta. It's a cool, «crystal» sound, for that matter, but the instrument is used for sheer symbolic atmospherics, not for any sort of breathtaking melody that you could cherish in your heart forever, like the more traditional, but oh so much better resonating strings of ʽBacheloretteʼ, for instance.

 

I respect the work that went into the album and all its surrounding hoopla, and I recommend hearing it — it was one of the major artistic events of 2011, after all — but I also give it a thumbs down, because, like Medúlla, I consider it a failed experiment that preserves the formal principles of a «Björk record» without offering any genuine substance. As an accompanying piece to some fancy-pants Apple or Microsoft or TED multi-media presentation (of the «what a wonderful world...!» variety), it will work great. As a worthy follow-up to the grandiose/subtle beauty and joy of Debut, Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine, Biophilia does not stand a single chance — not in my book, at least. Next to these triumphs, there is nothing too new here, nothing too memorable, nothing too heartbreaking or heartwarming; and, worst of all, it sort of seems like the cheap designer thrills of the 21st century have finally gotten the better of a formerly unique and independent artist. Then again, there's nothing too unpredictable about this, either.

 

VULNICURA (2015)

 

1) Stonemilker; 2) Lionsong; 3) History Of Touches; 4) Black Lake; 5) Family; 6) Notget; 7) Atom Dance; 8) Mouth Mantra; 9) Quicksand.

 

In recent years, I have adopted a very harsh rating strategy towards «breakup albums» that seem to be more than simply «all the rage» in the modern world — no, really, these days, whatever passes for a «serious» work of popular art almost necessarily has to be about The Magnificent Art Of Breaking Up. People come together, so it seems, merely for the sake of falling apart and then chronicling their suffering in their own, highly individual way. I mean, goddammit, what about starving children in Africa? The evils of offshore drilling? The questions of our purpose on this planet? The verification of the Big Bang Theory? Does it all have to be judged through the prism of «me and him/her, we're no longer together and boy does it hurt»? Additionally, if it does hurt, why the heck did you have to break up in the first place? Couldn't it be, you know, just because you're both arrogant idiots who value personality clashes and «turf battles» over compromises? And now you're using this as a pretext to paint awesome vagina-shaped wounds on your chests? Gimme a fuckin' break, already.

 

To be fair, there is no reason even in 2015 why a breakup should not be painful, or why it should not be possible to write a heartbreaking song or even an entire album about a breakup. But with breakup stories now coming at a dime a dozen (almost literally so), I am finding myself, for in­stance, more and more desensitized towards these works unless they happen to contain some truly stunning melodic inventions (Adele's 21, for instance, counts as a happy exception from the rule). And it is hardly a coincidence that Björk's personal breakup album just happens to be her least musically interesting album in ages. Where Medúlla was at least arrogantly adventurous, Volta was at least moderately catchy, and Biophilia was at least a curious exercise in «scientific music-making», Vulnicura is simply «Björk's breakup album», no more, no less.

 

With nine tracks stretched out to a whole hour's length, the lady is busy here telling us her story, using a standard form of Old Literary Björkese: lush, brooding, slightly dissonant string arrange­ments, fussy-fuzzy electronic beats, and her own trademark «operatic» singing that eschews conventional verse/chorus structures and removes any structural limitations on rhythm, rhyme, and harmonic coordination — a style that originally emerged on Homogenic but arguably reached its apex with Medúlla and, since then, pretty much became the «default» form of Björkese, a respectable establishment that no longer holds any major surprises.

 

Mood-wise, the only thing that differentiates these tracks from each other are (a) the length and (b) the occasional gimmick, such as the use of Björk's old musical friend, a vocally chopped-up Antony Hegarty, on ʽAtom Danceʼ. People have called this album «dark» and «depressing» and «brutally honest» and all sorts of other nice clichés, almost as if implying that here, first time in years if not ever, we finally get to see The Real Björk (who, as it incidentally turns out, just hap­pens to be vagina-chested as a genetic birth defect), but this is just bullshit: first, all of these songs taken together do not have a tenth part of the darkness of ʽHunterʼ or ʽBacheloretteʼ, and second, how is this «the real Björk» when this is so stylistically indistinguishable from her earlier work? Compare ʽCome Togetherʼ with ʽWorking Class Heroʼ and see «the real Lennon», or ʽJust Like Tom Thumb's Bluesʼ and ʽSimple Twist Of Fateʼ and see «the real Dylan» — these compa­risons could at least be understandable. Vulnicura is just as much of a grand symbolist spectacle as anything else the Icelandic national heroine ever put out. The question is not whether she is being «real» or not (oh, but come on now, it's a breakup album, how can a breakup album not be real, have a frickin' heart, Mr. Reviewer!): the question is — how attractive, how seductive, how captivating, how breathtaking can that spectacle be, regardless of how «real» it is?

 

For many people, so it seems, including miriads of slobbering reviewers and admiring fans, it can be all of these things and more — pages after pages of glowing discussions are dedicated to descriptions of how dissonant strings and electronics can so perfectly convey the process of «emotional healing». Maybe all these people have recently gone through breakups as well, and are able to better empathize than myself. Maybe I have really been too desensitized and biased to let the magic of musical healing flow through my own veins. But the fact of the matter is that, at best, I perceive this all as a monotonous atmospheric current of tolerable, occasionally pleasant (for those ears that had already become accustomed to Björkese), but completely unmemorable and, worse, unimpressive music, without dynamics, but with lots of pseudo-subtle subtleties that may create an illusion of «depth» and «complexity» that is really not there at all.

 

For those reasons, I will not be talking about any individual tracks. Formally, their melodies are different, their tempos have a certain range (usually from «slow» to «very slow»), their instru­mentation has some variety, but I know few words to describe these nuances, and my senses are not sharp enough to immediately and actively pick up on these varieties once they arise. You may, if you happen to «love» this album rather than just «like» it, criticize me for being too shallow and stubbornly refusing to give it a chance, but I think I know what I am talking about here — the difference between Vulnicura and, say, Homogenic for me symbolizes all the difference be­tween «quality music» in the 1990s, when intelligence, complexity, and subtlety could still carry real intellectual and emotional meaning, and «quality music» in the 2010s, where «form», as a rule, replaces «substance», and all we get are hollow, formalistic re-runs of past grandeur.

 

Ironically, I cannot even say that Björk fails here because she is now an «old fart», or because she has lost her genius, ran out of creative steam etc. etc. On the contrary, Vulnicura reflects her amazing capacity to adapt — like Madonna for the world of «cheap entertainment», Björk is very well aware of the changing surroundings, and almost every new product of hers (Volta might be a bit of an exception) is totally en vogue. No, she fails exactly because she is doing here what she is expected to be doing in 2015, as mannerisms and lack of substance are supposed to be taking the place of genuinely deep, sharp-cutting music. And everything here counts as mannerism, right down to the unforgettable "every single fuck we had together" on ʽHistory Of Touchesʼ — a sen­sual exhortation that is really as hollow and meaningless as everything else on here.

 

Naturally, this is all my personal opinion, and naturally, I cannot exclude that sometime in the future, something on this record will click — as it happens now, each subsequent listen only ended up irritating me more and more. How did that one go? "I've seen what I was and I know what I'll be, I've seen it all, there is no more to see...". Total thumbs down — I have no time, interest, or patience for such generic, by-the-book Björkese.

 

ADDENDA:

 

DEBUT LIVE (1994; 2003)

 

1) Human Behaviour; 2) One Day; 3) Venus As A Boy; 4) Come To Me; 5) Big Time Sensuality; 6) Aeroplane; 7) Like Someone In Love; 8) Crying; 9) Anchor Song; 10) Violently Happy.

 

In 2003, with pregnancy keeping her away from active creative duties, Björk diverted herself by rummaging through a ton of recorded tapes, left over from a decade of touring, and discovering enough of interest to put out a whole big chunk, modestly titled Live Box, with each of four CDs representing selections from the four tours focusing on her first (and best) four albums. Originally, the box was only available as a whole, but already the next year it was chopped up and the four live albums became available separately (for a limited while).

 

Since Björk is first and foremost a studio artist, and second, a visual entertainer, it is natural to be somewhat wary of the product — and, since it never seems to be an integral part of her disco­graphy, to forget it altogether. But once you do get access to the recordings, it becomes obvious upon the very first listen that this is a mistaken attitude. In her «violently happy» prime, Björk's seeker instincts were buzzing everywhere, in respect to everything, and live presentation of her songs gave her a great pretext to go on experimenting with them even further. Unlike so many famous «art rock» acts, a good «Björk live» experience is never construed along the lines of «how faithfully can I reproduce my music on stage?» — it is much more in line with the old Bob Dylan vibe of «how can I give my songs a second life on stage?». For that reason, while I would not go as far as to coerce anybody into collecting live bootlegs, the four discs of Live Box are really a terrific add-on, worth every penny.

 

And the first of these discs is perhaps the best illustration of what I am saying. All of the tracks on it, except for ʽVenus As A Boyʼ, are actually taken from Björk's little yellow dress perfor­mance on MTV Unplugged in 1994 — in other words, a setting that demanded, by definition, that performers rethink and re-sensify their material, and thus, almost no electronic instruments or effects are brought to the table. Instead, songs from Debut are rearranged as a curious eclectic mix of... well, whatever is found at hand.

 

For ʽHuman Behaviourʼ, for instance, at hand is found a harpsichord, which loyally takes care of not just the basic melody, but also the growling electronic solo at the end of the track — which gets you a-thinkin' that the harpsichord, come to think of it, has a pretty «electronic» sound all by itself, compared to pianos and organs. ʽOne Dayʼ is transformed into a fumbly extravaganza of tablas and chimes, completely dominated by percussion and giving the illusion of Björk perfor­ming in the middle of a busting sonic jungle. ʽCome To Meʼ suffers without the tragic orchestra­tion of the original, but the homely mix of tablas, harpsichords, and flutes is still an interesting alternate take on things. And so on — I think that of all the songs, only ʽLike Someone In Loveʼ does not differ too much, because it was a beatless harp-driven song in the first place.

 

I would never say that the rearrangements «improve» on the originals: Debut was one of the most thoughtfully and sensibly produced and arranged records in 1990s art-pop, and it is unlikely that Björk would have spent as much time coming up with this plastic surgery for a one-time MTV performance as she spent creating the songs in the first place. So, ʽOne Dayʼ will sound less poignant and desperate here, and ʽViolently Happyʼ will have less psycho-menace, and ʽCome To Meʼ will not possess as much of that dark-forest mystery, and the list goes on. But we are really supposed to think the other way here — how, even with the relatively short time elapsed between the release of Debut and this performance, she already had the ability to present the material in such a completely new light — perfectly adapted to the «cozy» setting of a concert in the Unplug­ged series. Of course, some major credit has to go to her partners as well, particularly the percussionist Talvin Singh (who would eventually go on to become a superstar in the «Asian Underground» move­ment), the keyboard player Leila Arab, and the other keyboard player Guy Sigsworth — they do some great teamwork here, loyally following the black-haired lady where­ver she wishes to go and getting into all the grooves with just the right amount of soul.

 

In a certain way, Debut Live may be the best album of the four — especially if, like me, you also consider Debut to be not just a «debut», but an album totally on par with everything Björk has done ever since. Here we still have a fresh young artist, not too spoiled by stardom, not yet having gone over the top, drunk with her own genius, and seeming more content to just enjoy her own muse rather than becoming The Great Mother of the Revolution of the Mind. Already burst­ing with creativity, but not yet overflowing with narcissism. How is this anything other than an unbearably nostalgic thumbs up?

 

POST LIVE (1995-97; 2003)

 

1) Headphones; 2) Army Of Me; 3) One Day; 4) The Modern Things; 5) Isobel; 6) Possibly Maybe; 7) Hyperballad; 8) I Go Humble; 9) Big Time Sensuality; 10) Enjoy; 11) I Miss You; 12) It's Oh So Quiet; 13) Anchor Song.

 

This one was mostly recorded at Shepherds Bush on February 27, 1997, not too far away from the release of Homogenic, meaning that all these Post songs had plenty of time to stew and settle down in the repertoire. The only exceptions are ʽPossibly Maybeʼ and ʽHyperballadʼ, recorded more than a year earlier on the Jools Holland show. As you can see, the album is indeed covered almost in its entirety, with the exception of ʽYou've Been Flirting Againʼ and ʽCover Meʼ, for unknown reasons (perhaps they didn't have a harp on tour, without which ʽCover Meʼ would be hard to imagine); in their place we have the obscure B-side ʽI Go Humbleʼ and a re-run through three tunes from Debut (ʽOne Dayʼ, ʽBig Time Sensualityʼ, and ʽAnchor Songʼ).

 

Frankly speaking, there isn't much to say here: the spectacle, at this point, still seems to have been relatively low key, and unlike the «unplugged» version of Debut, here the dame generally sticks to the original arrangements — and what changes there are do not necessarily work for the best, like way too much accordeon (or accordeon-like synthesizer, whatever). The Michel Legrand Orchestra is brought out for ʽIt's Oh So Quietʼ, which is every bit as fun as the studio arrange­ment, but this is just one of those cases of «gee, isn't it wonderful how they really managed to save all the complexities and subtleties of this song for the audience, so cool and all, and now I think I'll forget all about it and go back to my studio version».

 

Amusingly, it is the old chestnuts ʽOne Dayʼ and ʽBig Time Sensualityʼ that are given the most transformational treatment. The former, stripped of almost everything but electronic percussion, it becomes a «tribal-industrial» blend against which Björk is fighting rather than singing. I cannot call this a great idea, but at least they also had the good sense to make it twice as short as it used to be — six minutes of this clanging would have been overkill. ʽBig Time Sensualityʼ is slowed down, seriously tampered with in terms of electronic percussions and «astral» overlays, and is pinned to a nagging not-seen-there-before five-note riff that is more repetitive than awesome. As for ʽI Go Humbleʼ, it's got a quirky time signature that I'd call «limping-funk», but other than that, it's not a highlight of the show.

 

On the whole, I find myself agreeing, much to my discontent, with the Pitchforkmedia reviewer who singled this one out as the least interesting set of the four. Well-played, well-produced, en­gaging if you want to, but skippable on the whole. Which is just a little sad, since Post is one of my favorite Björk albums — then again, maybe she just didn't have the gall to mess around with perfection. Who knows.

 

HOMOGENIC LIVE (1997-98; 2003)

 

1) Vísur Vatnsenda Rósu; 2) Hunter; 3) You've Been Flirting Again; 4) Isobel; 5) All Neon Like; 6) Possibly Maybe; 7) 5 Years; 8) Come To Me; 9) Immature; 10) I Go Humble; 11) Bachelorette; 12) Human Behaviour; 13) Pluto; 14) Jóga; 15) So Broken; 16) Anchor Song.

 

With the Homogenic project all set to promote Björk as The Great Mother of All, it was obvious that the live show had to make the appropriate adjustments — and so she did, and I don't just mean a bigger light show and more costume changes, but also the musical backing. The Icelandic String Octet followed her on the tour whenever she went, and although I have no idea if the Ice­landic String Octet is a real octet (I mean, of the kind that can do Schubert's D.803 and stuff), it is real enough to work out the appropriately grand chamber backing (bordering on symphonic) to songs that were, in the studio, largely dependent on electronics.

 

This is a terrific move, and although the perfect balance between electronics, strings, and Ice­landic pixie voice would not really be reached until Vespertine (both studio and live), it can be argued that the Homogenic songs do not need such perfection in the first place. They are loud, brash, violent songs, after all, where energy and pathos are more important than subtle finesse. And it works: look, for instance, how well the slightly discordant strings compensate for the lack of Vocoder on Björk's «roaring» part in ʽPlutoʼ. There's no roar at all, but the climactic part of the song blows your mind anyway, largely due to the strings.

 

The actual performances here are culled from numerous shows, geographically stretching from Washington to Prague, and once again covering the Jools Holland show on their way, including a version of ʽJogaʼ with only strings (no beats) that, believe it or not, is every bit as powerful as the studio version — with little to detract you from the monster voice singing about how beautiful it is to be in this state of emergency. The same performance also gives us the rarity ʽSo Brokenʼ, originally the B-side to ʽJogaʼ, where instead of strings we have flamenco guitar — it's probably the closest thing to a wild Spanish ballad that the Icelandic lady has ever produced in her career, not a masterpiece, but a fun curio to hear if you ever wondered how Björk would function in «gypsy mode».

 

Even the older songs benefit from new touring conditions — for instance, ʽIsobelʼ works much better with strings than with the rather silly accordeon on the preceding tour, and ʽPossibly May­beʼ has an almost magical sound, just because the cellos add an extra psychedelic dimension to the already enchanting «musical-box» keyboards. ʽCome To Meʼ opens with a solo violin part in the style of 19th century romanticism, which would be cheesy in anybody else's hands, but not in Björk's, who knows very well how to combine «banal» elements with «controversial» ones; as long as she still sings that way, she can quote from Mendelssohn underneath her vocals, beats, and loops as long as she considers necessary.

 

Overall, this is a total success — most of the songs are at least slightly different from the studio versions, just enough to warrant an extra listen, and on top of that, Björk herself is in peak vocal form, screaming, howling, roaring, crooning, and praying her way through without a single glitch (okay, so these selections were handpicked from a vast number of tapes, so I have no idea how good she could be throughout the entire show — also, her voice does occasionally crack on ʽSo Brokenʼ, but I guess it's a predictable part of the program, given the song's title). There's an occa­sional touch of humor, too (check out the endearing "tsk-tsk-tsk" ending to the "silly girl, so silly" coda of ʽImmatureʼ), and then there's the final note she takes on the still-obligatory show closer ʽAnchor Songʼ — something utterly inhuman, causing a near-riot in the audience. A natural thumbs up — this is some prime quality live Björk at the peak of her powers.

 

VESPERTINE LIVE (2001; 2003)

 

1) Frosti; 2) Overture; 3) All Is Full Of Love; 4) Cocoon; 5) Aurora; 6) Undo; 7) Unravel; 8) I've Seen It All; 9) An Echo, A Stain; 10) Generous Palmstroke; 11) Hidden Place; 12) Pagan Poetry; 13) Harm Of Will; 14) It's Not Up To You; 15) Unison; 16) It's In Our Hands.

 

The only reason not to own this album is if you own the Live At The Royal Opera House video from 2001 instead. Although these particular performances were taken from different locations on the 2001 tour, and there are some discrepancies in the setlist (somewhat expectedly, the audio album focuses more on new material, whereas the video includes a solid selection of older hits at the end), they are more or less the same thing — and this time around, the emphasis was placed more on accurate reproduction, accompanied with some gorgeous staging, so it really really makes a lot of sense to see the show rather than just hear it.

 

Because Vespertine was, indeed, a very special album for Björk, and the accompanying tour was a very special tour. In two years time, the lady would be completely going off her rocker, trying out fifty different shades of craziness all at once and, as far as my opinion is concerned, severely crossing the line that separates meaningful art from silly, pompous kitsch. But Vespertine was a deep, thoughtful, far-reaching album, and the accompanying shows somehow managed to be glitzy and «cozy-homely» at the same time. You get just one change of clothing — Björk in a simple white virginal dress for the first half of the show, Björk in a blood-red dress for the second half — a nice chamber orchestra, a couple guys handling the electronics, and an entire female choir from Greenland, in arguably the biggest bout of promotion for lovely Inuit ladies that the world of pop music has ever seen. Then again, it doesn't take much to travel from Iceland to Greenland, so perhaps it was more a question of rehearsal logistics than of generous support for minorities, or of an artistic choice of a group of people from the coldest regions on Earth.

 

The setlist on the album includes most of Vespertine (all but two tracks) and also makes us re­member Selmasongs (the orchestra introduces the show with ʽOvertureʼ, and later on you get a solo Björk performance of ʽI've Seen It Allʼ — something of a bonus for those of us who find it harder to cope with the vocal philosophy of Thom Yorke than with that of Guthmund's daughter), plus a couple of rarities: ʽGenerous Palmstrokeʼ is a lovely B-side in the form of a heated dialog between Björk and the harp, and ʽIt's In Our Handsʼ was a special new song recorded as a bonus track for Greatest Hits — not all that great in itself, but heavily experimental, with some of the most turbulent and dense layers of electronics on any given Björk song, and it probably belongs in the collection of any serious «glitch music» lover, provided love for «glitch music» can really be called a «serious thing» (really).

 

The rarities, however, are not as important as the entire experience: both on the video and on the live album, the sound is engineered so as to maximally preserve the «cocoon-like» atmosphere of Vespertine. This was probably not an easy task, but it was accomplished perfectly — and for once, I am not complaining that the live performances are more often than not indistinguishable from studio versions, because the biggest surprise, perhaps, is that you completely forget that these are live ones, until they die down and the stunned audience bursts into applause. For a near-perfect record like Vespertine, this live perfectionism is perhaps the only way to do it justice. In fact, sometimes the live versions are even more perfect — for instance, ʽUnisonʼ, with additional crystal-clear harp parts and more prominent background vocals, sounds as if the necessary final touches to the song were only added in concert.

 

I mean, it would be one thing if the original arrangements were a piece of easy cake, but they were actually more complex than anything prior to that point — and it is amazing how everything was taken to the stage and even slightly improved upon; and I do understand that only the best live takes were hand-picked from the tour, as far as Björk's own vocals go, but the fact of the mat­ter is that she was consistently in peak form on the video as well. Hardest working lady in the business? In addition to being the most talented? I guess you could say, yes, that 2000-2001 be­longed to Björk, and the current thumbs up will refer not just to the textbook perfection of this live album, but to this album as a symbol of her creative triumph. Too bad the strain was so heavy on her that she went gaga in two years' time, and was never the same after that.

 

THE MUSIC FROM DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 (2005)

 

1) Gratitude; 2) Pearl; 3) Ambergris March; 4) Bath; 5) Hunter Vessel; 6) Shimenawa; 7) Vessel Shimenawa; 8) Storm; 9) Holographic Entrypoint; 10) Cetacea; 11) Antarctic Return.

 

Although this project is quite commonly featured in Björk discographies, it should still probably count as more of a partnership-collaboration between Björk and her (unofficial) husband Mat­thew Barney; more than anything else, the failure of the project has probably more to do with Barney than with Björk, which is why it also makes sense to put this brief review in the footnotes section. It is indeed a soundtrack that Björk fashioned and adapted to Barney's experimental film of the same name — sub-indexed 9 because it was actually part of 16 art objects that included shorter videos, drawings, and sculptures, and were all called Drawing Restraint.

 

Since the film is on Youtube, I had the opportunity to skimp through some of it, and mostly it was what I expected — a surrealist-absurdist collage, loosely based around a story of whale hun­ting and pearl diving while heavily milking all sorts of Japanese imagery in the process; in other words, a rather typical «love-it-or-hate-it» product of the modern art era. Here, now, are a few select sonic pillars with which Björk thought it appropriate to prop up the visuals.

 

Number one: Björk's own singing voice, still quite fresh from the Medúlla experience and ready to contribute some more of the same discordant polyphony for anyone who asks. Best tasted on the tracks ʽBathʼ and ʽStormʼ, to a lesser extent on ʽCetaceaʼ; on the whole, though, much of the soundtrack is instrumental or features other people's voices, since obviously Björk did not want the movie to become exclusively associated with her own personality. If you loved Medúlla, you'll love these ones, too; personally, I find ʽBathʼ too ugly, but on ʽStormʼ I do admit that she gets to totally impersonate a mythological siren, so that you might find yourself plugging your ears with wax in no time (and not necessarily for the same reason that Ulysses' companions did).

 

Number two: lots and lots of shō playing, usually quite high-pitched, because the desired effect is not for your ears to droop and wither, but to bleed and explode. Relax — you're still better off than the hunted whales or the pearl divers. Best tasted on ʽPearlʼ (where you get a whole lot of excited sighs and whoopees, produced by supernatural little furry creatures, to go along), ʽShime­nawaʼ and the closing ʽAntarctic Returnʼ. Not sure if these tracks have any value outside of the movie — not even sure if they have much value inside the movie. Then again, they are played by Mayumi Miyata, acknowledged as the world's greatest shō player and the one to successfully compose and perform contemporary classical music on it; I guess that should count as publicity. An acquired taste, nonetheless. A very stringent instrument. (The Chinese sheng, from which it is derived, actually has a slightly softer sound, but hey, we accept nothing but the extreme).

 

Number three: additional Japanese motives and wholesale Japanese music inclusions, best represented by ʽHolographic Entrypointʼ, which is basically just ten minutes of Japanese Noh singing as deli­vered by guest performer Shiro Nomura. Not sure again why you need to hear this — if you want Noh, go watch some real stuff, or, at least, train yourself to sonically difficult Japanese singing through samurai movies. I mean, Björk is a «weird» artist by Western measures, but there is no­thing weird about Noh by Japanese measures, so this juxtaposition is just silly.

 

Other than that, Will Oldham (a.k.a. «Bonnie ʽPrinceʼ Billy») makes a guest appearance on ʽGratitudeʼ, singing in Beginner Level Björkese, and there is an interesting use of brass on se­veral tracks (ʽHunter Vesselʼ) that recalls various similar experiments in modern and totally-modern classical music. These are just minor flourishes, though, whose main function is to raise the level of diversity on the album — after all, the movie is probably supposed to be about everything at the same time, so why should the soundtrack fall short of the visuals?

 

As you may have already guessed, the verdict is hardly likely to be anything other than a thumbs down. ʽBathʼ and ʽStormʼ could pass for acceptable Medúlla outtakes if you like Medúlla, but everything else feels either too un-Björkish or too toss-off-ish. If the point of the album was to raise awareness of the wonders of Japanese culture in among Björk's active fans («Björk endorses Noh!», «Björk says listening to solo shō music is good for your mind!»), then this is just a publi­city stunt in the first place; if the point was something else, I am not sure why I should be forcing myself to see it, instead of spending time on something more valuable (like watching an old Mizoguchi movie, for instance). But then again, I am totally open to the idea that one listen to Drawing Restraint 9 — better still, one sitting through the movie — may be enough for a veteran whale hunter to swear off his murderous trade for ever. If sociological research confirms this, I am totally ready to change that rating: as a responsible citizen of the world, I love and respect whales, and believe that every whale killer should be forced to sit and listen to hours and hours of Noh singing until the very idea of killing a whale no longer rests in his purified mind.

 

VOLTAÏC (2009)

 

CD I: 1) Wanderlust; 2) Hunter; 3) Pleasure Is All Mine; 4) Innocence; 5) Army Of Me; 6) I Miss You; 7) Earth Intruders; 8) All Is Full Of Love; 9) Pagan Poetry; 10) Vertebrae By Vertebrae; 11) Declare Independence.

CD II: 1) Earth Intruders (XXXChange Remix); 2) Innocence (Simian Mobile Disco Remix); 3) Declare Indepen­dence (Matthew Herbert Remix); 4) Wanderlust (Ratatat Remix); 5) The Dull Flame Of Desire (Modeselektor Remix for Girls); 6) Earth Intruders (Lexx Remix); 7) Innocence (Graeme Sinden Remix); 8) Declare Independence (Ghostigital Remix); 9) The Dull Flame Of Desire (Modeselektor Remix for Boys); 10) Innocence (Alva Noto Unitxt Remodel); 11) Declare Independence (Black Pus Remix); 12) Innocence (Simian Mobile Disco Dub Remix).

 

I would not bother with this one, honestly. Volta was not Björk at her very best, and neither is this accompanying piece, or, rather, multi-set of accompanying pieces. In its shortest incarnation, Voltaïc is just one CD, capturing a live performance recorded without a live audience at the Olympic Studios. In its longest incarnation, the set also includes a live DVD (recorded with live audiences in Paris and Reykjavik), a DVD of musical videos, and a separate CD of multiple re­mixes of Volta songs, similarly to the Telegram album but perhaps a little less conceptual and autonomous in execution. Plus artwork, of course, and all sorts of various goodies for people to argue about (crass commercialism or heartfelt gift for the fans?).

 

This brief and somewhat displeased review will discuss only the CDs. The first one, of all the wealth of live material released by the singer, is probably the least useful. It sounds like an expe­riment — would it be possible to completely trick the listener into thinking that he is dealing with a polished studio re-recording rather than a «spontaneous» live performance? Yes, it would. Now what? The Volta songs all sound almost exactly the same as their studio counterparts, and the others, even if they do modify the arrangements (for instance, using horns instead of strings on ʽHunterʼ and ʽAll Is Full Of Loveʼ), still allow for no real spontaneity. Of interest only for hard­core fans who thrive on each and every nuance.

 

The second CD, the remixes, is at least formally much more creative than the first one, but still, it ain't no Telegram. Because Telegram was an artsy experience — all sorts of people who were, you could say, on the cutting edge of «technological art» back then, gathered together to pool their vision with Björk's in a variegated and stimulating mind meld. The Volta Mixes, on the other hand, seem to pursue a much more pragmatic goal — this is a strictly club-oriented dance album, going along well with some MDMA, a light show, and a vague realization that you are being stimulated by a 44-year old pretender and you don't bloody care.

 

Most of the remixes belong to fashionable DJs (XXXChange) or electronic experimentators (Matthew Herbert) or other people, information on whom is not even available on Wikipedia, but the results are always the same — psychedelic body muzak with chopped-up, spliced and treated fragments of Björk's spirit floating in and out more like a symbolic guide-and-protector than with any serious purpose. Honestly, it would make more sense to write about all these artists than pretend that The Volta Mixes represent different views on how to show Björk songs from some unexpected side. I am not saying that the mixes «suck» — they're fairly imaginative, and diffe­rent versions of the same song often sound nothing alike — but where Telegram was like a long line of fashion designers, each dressing the girl in his/her own haute couture, The Volta Mixes produces no such impression. All they do is just sample the tracks to fit their own visions, which often have nothing whatsoever to do with the Volta vision.

 

For fairness' sake, I must say that the live DVD, of which I have caught some glimpses, is far more entertaining than the rest of this stuff — the Paris show is particularly crazy, colorful, and energetic, even if it often comes close to vulgar kitsch (not something I could ever say of the Vespertine shows). But whether you will want to splurge on the whole package will ultimately depend on whether you agree with me that post-Vespertine Björk is a messy, confused, and generally dissatisfactory experience, or prefer to think that the lady has simply become «diffe­rent», but her music still makes sense, shows depth, and/or sets trends. As far as my opinion is concerned, Voltaïc is simply the perfectly adequate companion to Volta — mediocre (downright bad in places) album, suitably mediocre paraphernalia. No big surprise there.

 

BLACK BOX RECORDER

ENGLAND MADE ME (1998)

 

1) Girl Singing In The Wreckage; 2) England Made Me; 3) New Baby Boom; 4) It's Only The End Of The World; 5) Ideal Home; 6) Child Psychology; 7) I. C. One Female; 8) Up Town Top Ranking; 9) Swinging; 10) Kidnapping An Heiress; 11) Hated Sunday.

 

One hell of a fun ride would be playing this album back-to-back with Springsteen's Born In The USA — another album that describes the uneasy relationship between the protagonist and his home country, but in a diametrically opposite manner. As someone born in the USA, the Boss is rowdy, hot, dynamic, willing to go to extremes in any given emotional state. As someone made by England, Sarah Nixey is... frozen. Black Box Recorder? More like Ice Box Recorder, if you ask me. With cockle shells and silver bells to boot.

 

Interestingly enough, the Black Box Recorder project was started up by Luke Haines before his main band, The Auteurs, folded its wings and went to sleep. In its deepest essence, the project pursued the same goals — a cynical, melancholic deconstruction of any life-asserting values that the surrounding society and culture might contain — but the execution was very different. All the songs were co-written by Haines with John Moore, formerly the drummer and guitarist for The Jesus And Mary Chain, and all the lead vocals were female, handled by the abovementioned Sarah Nixey, formerly a nobody, but as a member of Black Box Recorder — one of the most haunting figures in British indie pop. Consequently, Black Box Recorder explored a «softer», subtler, less rock-based approach than The Auteurs, and its combination of ingredients, even if it is not necessarily «better» than The Auteurs, seems much more unique.

 

The key ingredient of England Made Me are the vocal melodies that Luke and John are feeding to Sarah — and her interpretation of these melodies. Unlike, say, Beth Gibbons of Portishead, who typically sings out of a bathtub with razor blades fastened to her wrists, Sarah never lets her slightly childlike voice quiver with extreme emotion. Instead, she delivers those lyrics, usually full of gruesome, morbid, or cynically bittersweet imagery (the most often quoted line is the chorus to ʽChild Psychologyʼ — "life is unfair, kill yourself or get over it"), like a formerly sweet and delicate person that, after some particularly dreadful trauma, has pretty much lost all feeling, or fallen in an entranced state. Pinned to a background of quietly plucked guitars, inobtrusive backing vocals, occasional chimes and synthesizer strings, it makes for a great combination: simple, immediately hitting all the right nerve centers, and with no direct analogies.

 

The price to pay for this is monotonousness: the level of variation in between these 11 tunes is fairly low. But the tunes themselves are short, and each one has a little something going on to hook your attention, be it the decisiveness with which Sarah states that "my 18th birthday, I'll die of boredom" (ʽGirl Singing In The Wreckageʼ), or the gruesome conclusiveness of her "the kid is gone, he's not my son" (ʽNew Baby Boomʼ), or the freezing, ironically consolating tone of her "it's only the end of the world..." (meaning that the worst is yet to come, after all), or the depres­sing blues picking on ʽKidnapping An Heiressʼ, which leaves no hope for humanity even before the first bit of lyrics comes along.

 

The true wonder of England Made Me, though, is that it is one of those albums that does not really make you want to kill yourself — but rather to get over it. It wears its mourning clothes quite casually and stoically, neither commanding the listener to fight this gloom (because it can­not be fought against) nor, like Robert Smith or the aforementioned Beth Gibbons, inviting you to masochisti­cally gloat over it. It's only the end of the world — get it? It's not that serious. It just happens. One of the key songs, ʽIdeal Homeʼ, presents you with this mystical claustrophobic perfection ("in an ideal home, everything's safe... in an ideal home, nothing you do can go wrong..."), contrasting it with "miserable songs from the house next door, perhaps they're plan­ning to end it all" — you can take it as a blunt allegory of social segregation, of course, but you can also view it as a hymn to spiritual isolationism: the «ideal home» is a metaphor for simply locking out all feeling and barricading yourself from all the evils, disappointments, and different degrees of shit going on all over the world — an urge that may not be completely alien to quite a few of us, right? Especially when the ʽIdeal Homeʼ is set to such lovely music.

 

This is, of course, the quintessence of Luke Haines, the most cool-headed guy ever to write and sing about the world's evils, but Sarah here is a more perfect vehicle for his ideas than he himself ever was, and England Made Me, despite — or due to — painting a rather unsavory picture of England as a place where people trap spiders underneath glass and kill strangers at railway sta­tions just because people love a good murder mystery, is one of his finest contributions to the world of intelligent pop music. A humble masterpiece that deserves to be much better known, so here's hoping that this enthusiastic thumbs up might help it some.

 

THE FACTS OF LIFE (2000)

 

1) The Art Of Driving; 2) Weekend; 3) The English Motorway System; 4) May Queen; 5) Sex Life; 6) French Rock'n'Roll; 7) The Facts Of Life; 8) Straight Life; 9) Gift Horse; 10) The Deverell Twins; 11) Goodnight Kiss.

 

This is like a carbon copy of England Made Me, except this time everything is different. Well, musically the only big difference is that the band relies more on electronics — creatively prog­rammed drums and digital keyboards threaten to push the guitar sound out completely on the first few tracks, although acoustic and electric guitars still find a way to creep in through the back door, eventually. But if you thought this change in texture would make the band sound colder (as a transition to a more electronic sound often does), you couldn't be more wrong.

 

In comparison with England Made Me, The Facts Of Life is a downright optimistic, positively charged album. Not because England was such an epitome of depression, and certainly not be­cause the band now offers anything like a «happy» view of the world — no, they still sound like the same bunch of resigned shut-ins, with no intention whatsoever to come out into the sun and play the usual game of life. The difference is that, faced with the choice of "kill yourself or get over it", The Facts Of Life makes a clear decision in the direction of "getting over it" (I could not even exclude the possibility that the decision was consciously chosen so as to avoid the tag of «suicide propagandists» that some media sources were only too happy to attach to the band).

 

In a way, the differences are subtle — and how could they not be, when this is, after all, the same band, with the same distinctive, individualistic vocalist and the same idea that music should be an honest reflection of life itself? But sometimes a spade is just a spade, and when, on the tenebrous ballad ʽStraight Lifeʼ, Sarah coos "it's a beautiful morning, it's a beautiful day", it is un­reasonable to look for any hidden irony. Instead, this is a quiet, self-contained celebration of the «dream home» — separation from all the irritants ("away from alternative culture, transient people coming in and out of our lives...") and chilling out in the safeness and cuddliness of your densely woven cocoon. Irony? More like utopian escapism, if you ask me. Some people actually like to "live in a tin on top of the wardrobe", especially those that are convinced that living anywhere else exposes you to misery and suffering.

 

If there is one song that I feel reminded of while listening to this album, it is... Bob Dylan's ʽLay Lady Layʼ — the synthesized strings that open ʽThe Art Of Drivingʼ kind of echo those Nashville steel guitars that provide the soft, springy foundation for Dylan's love ballad. I daresay it is just a coincidence, but in reality, the two songs share more than just a couple of chords — both are soft, gallant pleas to the imaginary listener, begging him/her to give in, seducing and becalming the listener. From that point of view, a "stay lady stay, stay while the night is still ahead" is not that different from a "you've been driving way too fast, you've been taking things too far". The entire album is just that — a big old "slow down" message. Slow down, drop out, tuck in, get off, and stay under. There's actual beauty to be contemplated in all this.

 

To make things more convincing, Nixey shifts her singing technique, melting a few blocks of ice and transforming them to breathy steam — songs like ʽWeekendʼ are purringly sexy, even if the singer immediately issues a warning ("careful not to touch, we've drunk enough"), and few other people could make a repeated line like "Friday night, Saturday morning" sound so mysterious — is it longing? yearning? boredom? hypnotism? whatever it is, it's darkly enchanting, as is ʽThe English Motorway Systemʼ, a Buddhist anthem to the art of existing and surviving on the high­way — especially efficient if you play it back to back with Deep Purple's ʽHighway Starʼ, as an effective illustration of how the exact same object can trigger such different visions. And even if "the English motorway system is an accident waiting to happen", this is not a horrific realisation, but rather just one more of those "facts of life" that you learn in the course of "detached obser­ving". It's a highway anthem all right, yet at the same time it's a song that could have just as well be done by any qualified master of «ambient pop», like Brian Eno.

 

So as not to fall completely into the trap of discussing lyrics rather than music (and there is a lot to discuss here, believe me), I will just state what seems obvious — the chief musical instrument here is Nixey's voice, through and through; otherwise, ʽMay Queenʼ would be a mere rip-off of the Beatles' ʽDear Prudenceʼ (whose guitar chords it is quite unashamed to pilfer), and ʽGift Horseʼ would merely be a pretty instrumental, stuck somewhere in between New Age, adult contemporary, and baroque pop — it is the singing that transforms them into gorgeous fantasies of romantic escapism. Most beautiful of the lot, though, is saved for last: for ʽGoodnight Kissʼ, Sarah packs so much tenderness that by this time, I believe, every single listener should be subscribing to the Church of Black Box Recorder, buying all their records, stocking up on cereals, water, and toilet paper, and boarding up all doors and windows. "Use your imagination, we can go anywhere" — it's all in the mind, you know.

 

Of course, if I were hard pressed to only choose one, I'd still go with England Made Me, for all the extra darkness and frost. But The Facts Of Life really dwells in the same darkness and frost: all it does is shine a little light inside the darkness and get a bit of a fire going in the midst of the frost, because, well, you know, otherwise it's "kill yourself" and we don't wanna do that. So es­sentially they just constitute a solid premise and a logical sequel, and the «choice» is a fickle idea anyway — let us just simplify things and go with another thumbs up.

 

THE WORST OF BLACK BOX RECORDER (2001)

 

1) Seasons In The Sun; 2) Watch The Angel Not The Wire; 3) Jackie Sixty; 4) Start As You Mean To Go On; 5) The Facts Of Life (remix); 6) Lord Lucan Is Missing; 7) Wonderful Life; 8) Uptown Top Ranking; 9) Brutality; 10) Factory Radio; 11) Soul Boy; 12) Rock'n'Roll Suicide.

 

Much of this album has been made redundant upon being converted into bonus tracks to the new CD editions of England Made Me and Facts Of Life — no big surprise, since most of the songs were originally B-sides on singles taken from those albums. That said, this compilation still merits a separate review, since every single song on it, and that goes beyond the B-sides, rules to high heaven, and plus, only a band like Black Box Recorder could dare to slap the semi-ironic, semi-bombastic title of The Worst on a record that so clearly contains some of the best. Because for Luke Haines, the best is the worst — in the sense that, the more uncomfortable you feel about any of his songs, the better they probably are.

 

Since this is a compilation, thinking conceptual thoughts about the record would be rather point­less, but it does open up a few extra edges and links to BBR that would otherwise be missed. For instance: David Bowie liked Jacques Brel, enough to cover his songs, and on this album, BBR cover both Brel and Bowie — as long as the songs have something to do with quiet desperation and impending demise (ʽSeasons In The Sunʼ and ʽRock'n'Roll Suicideʼ both qualify). The arran­gements and particularly Sarah's vocal adaptations are almost enough to make me cherish the covers over the originals (at the very least, ʽSeasons In The Sunʼ is definitely a morbid improve­ment over the hit version by Terry Jacks — might have been even better if the band reverted to Brel's original French lyrics of ʽLe Moribondʼ, but Nixey's French might not have been good enough for that, especially since her little phonetic peculiarities are an integral part of the band's magic, and they could have suffered in the transition to a non-native language).

 

Still another cover is ʽUptown Top Rankingʼ, formerly a visiting card for the one-hit reggae wonder Althea & Donna — the original was a slightly ironic, slightly defying piece of «norm­core propaganda», as they'd say nowadays ("no pop no style, I strictly roots"); BBR extract it from their nostalgic attic, dust it off, freeze it up, and prove that they can put a little whiff of genuine Black Box Recor­der™ spirit into anything. The main difference is that the old version had life and humor in it; the new version has bleakness and claustrophobia in it, but the basic message of "no pop no style" remains the same. Consequently, it is more interesting to compare these two versions than, say, the two versions of ʽRock'n'Roll Suicideʼ, where they basically preserve Bowie's original emotions, merely cutting down the bombastic dramaticism.

 

As for the originals, well, they are instructive. For instance, I never knew anything about «Jackie 60», which was apparently one of the hottest and kinkiest New York party events in the 1990s, sort of a symbol of complete freedom of sexual identity — and here is Luke Haines writing a song about it in non-too flattering terms: ʽSave me, save me from Jackie Sixty, take me, take me to the top of the worldʼ, Sarah coos in her trademark frigid-seductive manner, as the incredibly catchy pop song, with acid political incorrectness, attacks the allegedly phoney «world of Jackie 60»: "This isn't mother nature boy / Stripped naked and frightened / The only reason that you're here / Is because you've been invited". Spelled out wicked and strong, and nobody could even use the words as a pretext for accusations of homophobia.

 

Other highlights include the short and unusually hard-rocking ʽLord Lucan Is Missingʼ (another good reason to catch up on celebrity history — apparently Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, was quite a colorful figure, well worth immortalizing in 1:49 worth of stern hard rock riffage and funereal intonations); ʽStart As You Mean To Go Onʼ, which not only has one of the catchiest basslines on the album, but should also be made required listening for all the hipster youth of today (sometimes being torn to shreds right in your face may serve as helpful shock therapy, although most people probably wouldn't get the message of lines like "topshop, doves and Glastonbury, learned to be a secretary" and "cut our losses, screw our bosses, get out while we're still young"); and ʽBrutalityʼ, a song so unnerving and so ambiguous that it alone could have made Black Box Recorder the biggest anti-hip turn-off ever since the Kinks chose to make themselves deliberately uncool in the eyes of the young generation with Village Green.

 

Please remember, though, that although the lyrics to at least half of these songs simply beg to become the chief focus of attention (we could quote and analyze till morning, easily enough), they are never delivered at the expense of hooks — verses, choruses, little guitar figures, every­thing fitting the general mood. You certainly do not need to understand one word in order to cherish the gorgeous melancholy of ʽWonderful Lifeʼ, whose lead vocals, harmonies, guitars, wintery keyboards, and music-box chimes are arguably this record's finest musical synthesis, and whose chorus mentions a "wonderful life" in the most sadly ironic manner possible.

 

Overall, no question about the rating — thumbs up a-plenty — except that I generally agree with the idea of eventually disbanding the record, as long as nothing on it ever gets lost, and fattening up the running lengths of the two «proper» albums: even despite the monotonousness of the mood, this is songwriting and performing of such high quality that I'd have no problem whatso­ever with, say, a 60-minute running length for England Made Me (well, that's pretty much how it goes on the new CD edition).

 

PASSIONOIA (2003)

 

1) The School Song; 2) GSOH Q.E.D.; 3) British Racing Green; 4) Being Number One; 5) The New Diana; 6) These Are The Things; 7) Andrew Ridgley; 8) When Britain Refused To Sing; 9) Girls Guide For The Modern Diva; 10) I Ran All The Way Home.

 

Apparently, this was never meant to be the final BBR LP — the band members were just sup­posed to take a break in order to pursue solo ventures, from which, however, they never truly re­covered. Sad, because out of their three «proper» LPs, Passionoia is clearly the weakest one. It is not at all bad — in fact, it's intriguing as hell, and not any less intelligent and biting, and I'm all for having it and savoring it, it's just that it would look much better sitting in the middle of their discography rather than playing the part of an accidental swan song.

 

The thing is, on Passionoia Haines and Co. decided that it was time to frame their satire and maddening ambiguity in an «electro-pop» setting, highly derivative of Eighties' synthpop and, in some way, quietly heralding the soon-to-come trend of rock bands embracing vintage synthe­sizers and hopping into the 21st century on the shoulders of that weird, tech-crazed, decade's electronic wizards. But Luke Haines really plays nobody's game but his own, and, as usual, it is not easy to tell whether he actually likes these dance rhythms or if he just uses them to lure in the unsuspecting listener — dance, dance, dance, before you know what really hit you.

 

What I do know is that the pounding electropop beats disturb and confuse the subtlety, so im­portant for the total success of any given Black Box Recorder song. You can't beat those lyrics, or those pop hooks, or the usual deadly loveliness of Sarah Nixey's voice, but you can corrode them a little if you go too far, and contaminate the atmosphere. Certainly songs like ʽGSOH Q.E.D.ʼ or ʽAndrew Ridgeleyʼ (a veritable tongue-in-cheek ode to synthpop, choosing Wham! as its symbo­lic start-off point) should not be used as a natural introduction to the world of Black Box Recor­der: we wouldn't want anybody to think of them as a «dance band», even if you have to be really stupid to take ʽAndrew Ridgeleyʼ at face value.

 

That said, in the overall context of BBR's career, the point is taken: Passionoia is not so much this band's lesson in nostalgia as it is a lesson in history. Haines and Moore, using Sarah as their instrument of choice, go back to their childhood days (actually, one could say they go back to her childhood days, since Sarah is the youngest member of the three and it is only her teens that were properly soaked in the Eighties) and, basically, ruminate on what it was that made Black Box Recorder what it is today. Of all three records, Passionoia is the most extraverted one — there are endless references to Britain, British history, British culture, British celebrities, British edu­cation, and even though all of them are still made from within the safe frozen confines of BBR's glass house, this time around, BBR's beady eye is staring out, not in.

 

As usual, the songs are mostly great, despite the fact that this transition to electronic rhythms way too often prompts Nixey to trade in her nuanced singing for ice-cold spoken parts or robotic choruses (which she still delivers seductively). ʽThe School Songʼ takes ye olde tradition of lam­basting the cold and cruel educational practices of The System and makes Black Box Recorder a «proud» part of it — whoever takes the time to listen to this anthem to the end, gets "a grade A from the Black Box Recorder School of Song"; along the way, Sarah successfully plays the part of the monster teacher (although, frankly speaking, I wouldn't mind getting a double detention from the likes of her!) and instructs you to "destroy your record collection, it's for your own pro­tection", which is fairly sound advice, I'd say.

 

The major highlight and, not coincidentally, the least dance-oriented tune on the album is ʽBri­tish Racing Greenʼ, probably one of the creepiest pieces in the BBR catalog: the lovelier the tone in which Sarah is describing our conservative ideal ("a little cottage by the sea, a glass of gin, a box of chocolate"), the more disturbing is that post-chorus distorted guitar riff, and the very idea of "British racing green", ending each chorus with gravity and suspense, is used as a threatening symbol of... isolation? containment? self-sufficiency? whatever. Where a Ray Davies would have probably turned the same song into a hypnotic ad for his country, Black Box Recorder have this perfect balance between paradise and nightmare — just like on the album cover, where blissful poolside relaxation is contrasted with some poor slob floating face downwards in the same pool (a visual metaphor that is almost too blatant by BBR's own standards).

 

The same song also introduces the band's big problem with Lady Di ("Now I'm living in a chat­room with the Diana fan club / They sent a virus to my dream"), more fully explored in the vicious electronic-acoustic ballad ʽNew Dianaʼ — so vicious, in fact, that it would automatically preclude Black Box Recorder from turning into the nation's favorite band, had they ever nurtured such a thought. Although, frankly speaking, it is not a very good song: musically simplistic and vocally relying on a single repetitive hook ("I want to be the new Diana!"), it has less replay value than the similarly-themed, but not name-dropping ʽGirls Guide For The Modern Divaʼ, with a trickier vocal arrangement.

 

The sarcastic mask stays on the face all through the album, until the very last number: ʽI Ran All The Way Homeʼ, nearly free of any electronic coatings, states that "The novelty has worn off / We are not amused any more / If you really love me / You'll let me go home". Go home where, exactly? It does feel like an escapist anthem, but the way Haines, Moore, and Nixey built up their philosophy, it does not exactly leave them any particular room for escape. Then again, probably what they are talking about is still that same "home" of ʽIdeal Homeʼ, the cocoon-capsule, the «black box» that shelters the protagonist from the perversities of unprotected life — the whole song is just one more metaphor for a panicky existence in the real world, into which they'd briefly ventured out with their dance rhythms and pulsating synthesizers, and which they now abhor even more completely than before. At least, that's one possible hell of an interpretation.

 

Despite its particular and general flaws, there is still no way that Passionoia could be deprived of a thumbs up, and if you were taken in by the first two records, it will, at worst, let you down only slightly (at best, if you are a synthpop / techno lover, its computerized tissue will only be a further stimulus). As I said, the only reason for sadness is that with this record, Black Box Recorder bid us all fare­well without anyone knowing it. They did come together several years later, with two more songs written and released as a single circa 2009, but no album followed, and the band officially split in 2010. Of course, it may simply have been that they felt there was nothing more to say, and I get them: pursuing the same musical and ideological agenda, album after album, must be tedious for Luke Haines, and as great as the Black Box Recorder project has been, it has been really a «one-trick pony» type of project — I mean, Sarah Nixey is a perfect type of singer for this attitude, but she is rather one-dimensional, like so many femme fatales (Nico etc.), and if Black Box Recorder carried on for too long, they would have run the risk of stepping into the realm of self-parody. The only thing we can hope for now is that these three records do not fade away into total obscurity — they may be closely linked to a particular time and a particular place, but that time and that place are really so symbolic and so extendable to other situations that they will always find a grateful audience, like so many other «dated» arte­facts of quintessentially British culture.

 

THE BLACK CROWES

SHAKE YOUR MONEY MAKER (1990)

 

1) Twice As Hard; 2) Jealous Again; 3) Sister Luck; 4) Could I've Been So Blind; 5) Seeing Things; 6) Hard To Handle; 7) Thick 'n' Thin; 8) She Talks To Angels; 9) Struttin' Blues; 10) Stare It Cold; 11*) Don't Wake Me; 12*) She Talks To Angels (acoustic); 13) Mercy, Sweet Moan.

 

I am pretty sure that in a matter of several decades the world will have forgotten about The Black Crowes entirely, because, let's face it: the only reason that Shake Your Money Maker turned them into an American sensation almost overnight was a world of hungry teenagers who needed their own Led Zeppelin / Aerosmith combo, and maybe a smaller world of conservative old dieti­tians operating on the principle «if it ain't rockin' like it used to, it ain't worth shit».

 

The best thing about the Georgia-born Robinson brothers (singer Chris and guitar player Rich) is that they had always been perfectly honest with themselves. What they wanted to play was none of that overproduced pop-metal crap — just yer old, time-honored, in-yer-face rock'n'roll, prefe­rably with a bit of a rustic flavor and, of course, soul a-plenty. Never mind that the old time-ho­nored rock'n'roll was out of fashion (then again, deep down in Georgia it probably never was), or, even worse, that zillions of 1970s bands had seemingly mined its resources down to the last speck of gold dust. The important thing is that we had a problem: «rock and roll» on the charts around 1989 consisted of Poison, Warrant, and Bon Jovi, and someone had to put an end to that.

 

Of course, in the grand scheme of things the band was not very successful, but both the LP and some of its singles did chart highly, and, most importantly, Shake Your Money Maker was really a blessing for those who wanted something fresh, raw, ballsy, and not «over-glammed» or too overtly hedonistic or too utterly stupid, like so many of those hair metal hits. From a certain point of view, the album was an instant remedy for those who'd written off the new-look Aero­smith after Permanent Vacation and Pump — these Robinson guys clearly took their lesson from Rocks and Draw The Line instead, with songs like ʽJealous Againʼ and ʽDon't Wake Meʼ (the latter is only included as a bonus track on a later CD edition) sounding like carbon copies of the 'Smiths in their prime.

 

The bad news is that The Black Crowes were a (literally) family-oriented band, and what the brothers had in terms of conviction and raw energy, they never had in any other terms — like songwriting, or performing distinctiveness. Chris Robinson is a strong, competent vocalist, and his brother is a knowledgeable rhythm player, and their early pal Jeff Cease is a reliable supplier of wailing blues-rock solos — and that's about it: collectively or individually, all of their assets are firmly «middle of the road». Nothing awful, but nothing really above winning first prize on the National Rock'n'Roll Competition every once in a while, where you are judged objectively based on how much you have practiced, not on how much talent God, or your genes, gave you and how much of it you have been able to exploit the right way.

 

All of these ten pieces — blues-rock, boogie-rock, and balladry alike — are passable and enjoy­able if you care at all for that specific sound. Swampy slide guitars, huge booming drums (but naturally booming, with none of those electronic enhancements), honky tonk piano blasting from under the guitar layers, and a rough, but friendly guy who's obviously got nothing to hide wailing on top of it all about the simple highs and lows of healthy country life. What's not to like, unless you take pride in being all stuck up and shit? Nothing. It's when you try to rewind these songs in the back of your mind, once the record is over, that the trouble starts — none of the melodies are memorable, which is only natural, since I have trouble identifying one single melody that was actually, you know, «written» specifically for this album. Maybe a few of the choruses that Chris sings across the guitar lines are technically «new», but the accompanying music is so thoroughly devoid of invention that this never really remedies the situation.

 

The not-so-subtle reference to Elmore James in the LP title may be understood both as an allego­rical way of commercial stimulation or, more likely, as an allegorical way of saying «we make blues-rock with slide guitars and we don't give a damn about being original» —  further confir­med by the fact that the band's breakout single was a cover of Otis Redding's ʽHard To Handleʼ, a song previously very much associated with the Grateful Dead but getting a new lease on life here as the Black Crowes, essentially, play it as if it were Aerosmith's ʽWalk This Wayʼ: dirtier, gruffier, scruffier — as badboyishly as they can, which is still not badboyish enough when com­pared with classic Aerosmith, though.

 

Other hits from the album included: ʽShe Talks To Angelsʼ, a sprawling country-rock ballad that seems to try to emulate the Stones circa Exile On Main Street — and fails, because the guitar work is just meandering, and the vocals lack Jagger's classic ability to strike fire out of thin air like he did on, say, ʽLoving Cupʼ; ʽJealous Againʼ, which is just barroom bravado, too politely inoffen­sive to be gloriously offensive; and the opening track, ʽTwice As Hardʼ, which is very loud indeed, but still seems like somebody imitating drunken fervor than actually being drunk.

 

All in all, I should probably hate the album and the band, but somehow the Crows manage to be smart enough to avoid any major irritants — such as direct melodic rip-offs of classics (usually imitating general style rather than particular bits of substance) or getting all pompous and cere­monial about what they do («sacrificing to the great spirit of rock'n'roll» and all that). And since, unlike quite a few people, I do not at all think that Shake Your Money Maker has to be that particular benchmark according to which the band should be judged once and for all, we could probably let them off the hook by sticking the «formative» label on top. They would never get too different — their creative, or, rather, anti-creative ego was established here from the start — but they would get a little more challenging and «hard to handle» later on.

 

THE SOUTHERN HARMONY AND MUSICAL COMPANION (1992)

 

1) Sting Me; 2) Remedy; 3) Thorn In My Pride; 4) Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye; 5) Sometimes Salvation; 6) Hotel Illness; 7) Black Moon Creeping; 8) No Speak No Slave; 9) My Morning Song; 10) Time Will Tell.

 

It is hard to argue with an album that shot four singles into the #1 «mainstream rock» chart position, and made it all the way to the top of the charts in 1992 despite neither being a hair metal album, nor a grunge album, nor a Whitney Houston album. It must be a masterpiece, right? One of those traditional rock'n'roll records that's really got it made, breathing new life into the old form and proving that rock'n'roll always smells, but never dies?

 

All right then, let's start from the beginning. ʽSting Meʼ opens the show with a nasty distorted riff, soon joined by keyboards, lead guitar (from new member Marc Ford), and a supporting female choir for extra gospel power. It's crunchy, powerful rock'n'roll, right? Well, I don't know, but no matter how many times I try to get my heart a-goin' to this song, I feel like there is some key element that is totally missing. It's odd, really — there's a riff, the lead vocalist is singing his heart out, the lead guitarist is blueswailing like crazy, the guitar tones are excellent, and yet the song still drifts by without touching a single nerve. How could that be?

 

Let's move on to ʽRemedyʼ. This little monster was an even huger hit, and it rocks with the same energy and conviction as ʽSting Meʼ, but throws in a funkier groove, so all the cool black people can join in the fun. But no dice — all I feel is that it is every bit as musically impotent as its pre­decessor. It's got all the formal qualifications, but it doesn't come alive. What the heck?..

 

My best guess is that over those two years, the Robinson brothers have evolved as arrangers and maybe even as performers, but they're still fucking shitty songwriters as far as I can see. That riff which opens ʽSting Meʼ — it seems technically all right, but it doesn't communicate any parti­cular feeling. I mean, compare it with, say, Keith Richards' riff that opens ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockin'ʼ: that one immediately gave an idea of «don't you mess with me» — free as a bird, dirty, and dangerous. The riff of ʽSting Meʼ, in the meantime, does not suggest anything except «hey, we've actually managed to come up with a riff that nobody did before» (and for a good reason). Besides, once the vocals kick in, it sinks into the background, and the average listener probably ceases paying attention to the musical elements of the song at that point.

 

Basically, this is the kind of gut reaction I get from every song on here. The rockers all sound technically great, with expert guitar playing and tasteful production. The ballads are all formally soulful, loud, screechy, but never submitting to the disgraceful «power ballad» format (power chords, strings, pompous attitude, all that shit). It should all be good, but there isn't a single «really good» song on here. I have no problems with using it as a background accompaniment, but all the songs ultimately just stick in one big greasy ball of loud distorted guitars and a guy who wails and yells his way through the songs like he's really got something to say, but he just ain't gonna get my attention that way.

 

A couple of times they come close: if pressed hard to choose one favorite tune, I'd probably go with ʽBlack Moon Creepingʼ, if only because the main distorted metal riff, the accompanying talkbox lead part, and the swampy harmonica generate a unique-sounding trio. But if the goal here was to conjure some sort of voodooistic atmosphere, what with much of the lyrics referring to black magic and stuff, it is as much of a failure as everything else. Maybe it's just the singer's fault: Chris Robinson always tends to sound like a really irritating next door neighbor, his basic emotional range limited to one (1) effect — annoy the living daylights out of you (ʽSometimes Salvationʼ is the worst culprit, a tremendously draggy ballad if there ever was one).

 

Although this album is usually regarded by fans as one of the highest points of the Crowes' career, I cannot and will not share the respect — I give it a thumbs down and state that, in my humble opinion, this is one of the phoniest, draggiest, most boring «rock and roll» albums I have ever heard in my life from a critically acclaimed «not-too-mainstream» artist (by which I just mean that the Black Crowes, like them or not, belong in an entirely different category from the likes of Bon Jovi). And the best song on the album is the closing anthem ʽTime Will Tellʼ, because it was written by Bob Marley, who, unlike the Robinson brothers, actually knew how to stuff his soul into formally captivating pieces. The rest of these tunes I really don't care if I never get to hear again. Some guy with a similar mindset to mine called them «truck driver material», but I think that by generalizing, he really offended the truck driver elite — the really cool guys that prefer to blast ʽHigh­way To Hellʼ, which is a better song than all of this drivel put together.

 

AMORICA (1994)

 

1) Gone; 2) A Conspiracy; 3) High Head Blues; 4) Cursed Diamond; 5) Nonfiction; 6) She Gave Good Sunflower; 7) P. 25 London; 8) Ballad In Urgency; 9) Wiser Time; 10) Downtown Money Waster; 11) Descending.

 

The front sleeve photo, taken from a 1976 issue of Hustler, would honestly have been a better fit for one of those late-period Aerosmith albums, or some particularly sleazy hair metal band — The Black Crowes probably have nothing against pussy or patriotism, but their music pretends to be much more about «soul» than about «flesh»: the only exception here is ʽShe Gave Good Sun­flowerʼ, brimming with lyrics like "I feel warm in your blizzard / And your flood I crave", but even those are delivered in a ballad-like context. The Robinson brothers are chivalrous Southern gentlemen, see, and they would rather sing and play their hearts out to the ladies than grope for those panties straight away.

 

If only they knew how to sing and play their hearts out in the context of a well-written song, though, Amorica could have been one hell of an album, because the band has accumulated con­fidence, experience, and is now expanding its stylistic horizons by learning how to be funky and add some life-loving swing to their day. All it'd take would be one gentle push in the proper direc­tion of making these grooves more interesting — but, unfortunately, their new producer, Jack Joseph Puig, whose credentials have since then also included No Doubt, Vanessa Carlton, John Mayer, and The Pussycat Dolls (that should give you some idea) was not the right guy to administer that push.

 

Again, let us just take a couple of songs and try and see what's so wrong about them. ʽGoneʼ, opening with some cowbells and Latin percussion in the style of Steely Dan's ʽDo It Againʼ, quickly develops a decent groove in the style of The James Gang's ʽFunk #49ʼ. But «decent» does not mean «breathtaking»: really, almost anybody can master those scratch guitar patterns, and what is really needed here is development — which is thoroughly lacking, as the band just jams around a single chord, getting some lumpy volume up for the chorus and leaving it at that. For five minutes, their funky jet attempts to get off the ground, but never manages to do much except waste fuel. The sound is thick and dense, with several low-pitched guitar parts drowning each other out, and the drummer really tries to bash his drum kit into the ground, meticulously and monotonously, but that might just be where the root of the problem lies — they are trying to be very funky and quite heavy at the same time, like a... lead zeppelin? Well, unlike the first one, which somehow managed the trick, these ones are definitely going down.

 

A song like ʽP. 25 Londonʼ, with its blues-rock chords neatly arranged in a pop hook, faintly hints that the Crowes could be proper hookmeisters had they really put their hearts to it, but in general, each new song steadfastly demonstrates, over and over again, that they are perfectly happy to stick to their usual guns as long as the public is content to love them for their style. The biggest hit from the album was ʽA Conspiracyʼ, a song whose verse melody is one of the lamest exercises in syncopation I've ever heard and whose chorus melody is practically non-existent — so how the heck did it ever manage to slide up the charts without a half-inch of grease? ʽWiser Timeʼ, the other single, sounds like contemporary Lynyrd Skynyrd — meandering slide-based country-rock with faux dramatics — and only ʽHigh Head Bluesʼ, the third single, features any­thing resembling a memorable riff, but, as usual, wastes it in a sea of sludge.

 

Once again, reading all the positive reviews and fan paeans for this album, I have to shake my head and ask myself — what exactly about this record am I not getting, when I so sincerely like most of its influences, even the Southern rock ones, everything from the Allmans to early classic Skynyrd? Why does it all seem so much like a lifeless, electrocuted corpse of genuine rock'n'roll music, which so many people are so eagerly ready to accept for a living body? Is it just because these guys emerged in the early 1990s, rather than in the 1970s, and this automatically makes me prejudiced? No, I don't really believe that. More likely, a record like Amorica will appeal to a «genrist» person — such as a blues-rock aficionado, content to admire anything as long as it com­petently satisfies the basic rules of the genre — or to somebody who caught the Crowes bug while in his teens, without prior exposure to the musical fathers of Americana. Either that, or I am really not getting something about this seemingly bland, turgid vibe.

 

Come to think of it, judging by a reader comment on Mark Prindle's site about how "P. 25 Lon­don is universally regarded as the suckiest song on this album" (I personally find it at least the most memorable song here, which might as well mean «best»), me and the world really wouldn't see eye to eye on these guys. I give Amorica a thumbs down just like its predecessor, and, with a sigh of temporary relief, unlock this tedious ball and chain from my leg for a while — that is, till the next album.

 

THREE SNAKES AND ONE CHARM (1996)

 

1) Under A Mountain; 2) Good Friday; 3) Nebakanezer; 4) One Mirror Too Many; 5) Blackberry; 6) Girl From A Pawnshop; 7) (Only) Halfway To Everywhere; 8) Bring On, Bring On; 9) How Much For Your Wings?; 10) Let Me Share The Ride; 11) Better When You're Not Alone; 12) Evil Eye.

 

Hey, hey, it is only natural that the first album on which The Black Crowes start showing the first signs of getting into a real focused groove and — horrors! — learning how to shape their chord-picking into vaguely memorable forms, should get the cold shoulder from fans and critics. A sur­prisingly large number of them seem to love the first two albums, be sympathetic or ecstatic towards Amorica, and treat Three Snakes And One Charm as «the beginning of the decline». Decline? Where? In order to «decline», you actually have to shift your position — I mean, it's not as if the Crowes went techno here, or doom metal, or drum and bass (much as I'd love to see them try out any of these things). Or you could start writing worse songs, but from that point of view, it doesn't get much worse than Amorica, really.

 

Honestly, the first song, ʽUnder A Mountainʼ, is such a traditional mess of power chords, slide guitars, and lumpy mid-tempo drum pummelling, that I was expecting the album to be a carbon copy of its predecessor. But lo and behold, there are some signs of life, beginning circa track three: ʽNebakanezerʼ (what is this, a specifically Southern realization of Nebuchadnezzar?) sub­jects itself to the implantation of a distinct, important riff (even though its authorship hardly be­longs to the Crowes — it's a rather common chord sequence for roots-rockers), and, at the very least, becomes nicely fleshed out as a heavy country-rock song with a poppy chorus.

 

Maybe this is exactly what the fans are holding against the band — that it is trying to «sell out» by writing songs that one can, you know, whistle, as opposed to simply «dig that sound». Fortu­nately for the fans, the band is only succeeding at this task part-time: about half of the album con­sists of the usual drab mush. But ʽOne Mirror Too Manyʼ, ʽLet Me Share The Rideʼ, ʽEvil Eyeʼ, and particularly my favorite — ʽBlackberryʼ, these are songs that are, like... songs. Well, maybe not all of them. Maybe some. Maybe just one or two. Still, that's, like, progress.

 

They are even trying to be weird on occasion: ʽHalfway To Everywhereʼ, opening with a nice wah-wah lead, tries to bridge the gap between funk and boogie and has the Robinson brothers mess around with their vocals, making funny noises that I hope is not their take on scat singing, but is just a way of monkeying around to break up the pattern of endless boredom. It's not much, but it's much more than it ever used to be.

 

That said, my money is still riding on that silly cock rock anthem ʽBlackberryʼ (of course, these days it would rather be perceived as an anthem to a wireless handheld device, making the line "Hey Blackberry, look at my bumblebee" somewhat incomprehensible). It is short, tight, crunchy, safely pinned to a distinct riff, makes good use of stop-and-starts, employs the organ as a «tease» device, and does not begin to overload our ears until the proper climactic part, so it's even got some development to it. Formerly, some of the songs could have one or two of these elements, but not all of them at once.

 

All in all, I'd say that the somewhat cooler ratings and reviews for the album were triggered by the world's getting tired of the Crowes — the slight change in sound may have been used as a pretext, when in reality they were only trying to get away from the «vibe-based» approach to the «hook-based» approach, if only occasionally so. The usual problems all remain, including the bland vocals of brother Chris and the total lack of genuine inspiration on softer numbers (ʽGirl From A Pawnshopʼ is a Van Morrison-worthy title, but the song wouldn't have been saved even if they got Van to sing on it — it's simply one more big fat nothing). But the good news is that, regardless of whether they keep on loving their mush or not (and I guess they do), they are not content to stay soaking in it forever, and every attempt at modifying and diversifying the formula on the part of these guys is okay with me in advance.

 

BY YOUR SIDE (1999)

 

1) Go Faster; 2) Kicking My Heart Around; 3) By Your Side; 4) Horsehead; 5) Only A Fool; 6) Heavy; 7) Welcome To The Goodtimes; 8) Go Tell The Congregation; 9) Diamond Ring; 10) Then She Said My Name; 11) Virtue And Vice.

 

This is the first ever Black Crowes album that I can enjoy through and through. One of the critical viewpoints has somehow managed to brand it as a «return to roots», successfully recapturing the vibe of the band's first two records after the temporary slump of Three Snakes — an opinion much dissipated through the critical community, but one that could have only come by traditional rock'n'roll analogy. I mean, every band has got to have something like an early peak, a mid-term slump, a «comeback», and all sorts of dynamics that create the illusion of an adventurous and intriguing career. And no shit: prior to recording By Your Side, the band actually fired their second guitarist, Marc Ford, and for what? Heroin addiction! It's like the mid-Seventies all over again. Juicy stuff for rock tabloids and all.

 

As far as my own, fairly insignificant in comparison, opinion is concerned, most of those dif­ferences are fairly cosmetic anyway. A small extra brass part in here, a bit of extra production gloss in there — really, any sort of «progress» or «development» from one Crowes album to ano­ther is negligible even in comparison to classic Aerosmith, let alone someone bigger. But while the overall style is always comparable, the substance and energy level may vary enough to make some of the songs kick ass where others simply scratch balls. So who knows, maybe those lineup changes, with a new second guitarist and a new bass player (Sven Pipien), had their beneficial effect after all? Even if the new guitarist did not play a single note on the album?..

 

Whatever be the case, By Your Side somewhat reduces the band's usual obsession with mega-over-dubbing and sonic messiness. Instead, what we have is the Crowes' most barroom-rock-oriented collection of songs to-date — with Stones, Aerosmith, and Faces/Rod Stewart influence all over the place, but strengthened up with some really thick, sticky, crunchy guitar tones; if you throw a wah-wah effect on top (ʽHorseheadʼ), the macho aura of the song becomes strong enough to melt down windows and pulverize doors. Silly, but lovable. The overall emphasis is on crunch, crunch, crunch, with repetitive chorus lines to generate some catchiness and brother Chris wailing so loud that he even manages to overcome the usual blandness of his vocal tone: still no match for Steven Tyler, but at least now he actually sounds authentically drunk, which is already something — prior to this, the Crowes almost always sounded like they were faking it, and there is nothing worse than pretending to be drunk when you've barely touched the stuff at all.

 

One of the band's main mottos now is stated right in the title of the first song — ʽGo Fasterʼ — and this is what they do on several other songs as well: ʽKicking My Heart Aroundʼ propels that anthemic slide riff forward at a respectable tempo, instead of spreading it all over the timeline, while ʽGo Tell The Congregationʼ adds moderate speed to a funky foundation, and suddenly the band's usual lumpiness fades away and out pops a really tight, but fluent outfit that allows the music to fly — not just sink into the ground. But even when they remain strictly mid-tempo, the vibe is good. The title track begins like a variational tribute to the Stones' ʽTumbling Diceʼ, but then quickly moves into Faces territory instead and does the right thing: the extra crudeness and the sheer force with which they punch, pummel, and tear at the instruments compensates for the lack of anything instantaneously memorable in melodic terms.

 

In other words, it ain't so much the songwriting (although there are a couple more riffs around the place worth collecting) as the focus that has improved. I may be wrong, but I think that a song like ʽHeavyʼ would have been unthinkable on any of the earlier records — its leaden swing would have been coated with slide guitars and keyboards, dissipated and wasted. Here, though, as un­spectacular as the melodies might be, the songs are allowed to capitalize on their potential strength; and, for the record, it also helps that balladry is kept to a minimum — in fact, there are no ballads whatsoever in the conventional sense, just a couple of these soulful R&B numbers that all gravitate towards pop-rock anyway, like ʽOnly A Foolʼ and ʽDiamond Ringʼ.

 

The wah-wah ruckus on ʽHorseheadʼ might sound like they're grossly overloading it, but that is just the point — this band only begins to make sense when they go for overload, because they sure as hell can't get break through with subtlety. This is why ʽHorseheadʼ is my favorite song off the album, a massive headbanger, tongue hanging out and saliva dripping all over the place, the musical equivalent of the thickest, most calory-choked burger on Earth — and there are other songs here that go in the same direction, too, the more, the better. To put it bluntly, the Black Crowes almost manage to be as sleazy as they are usually advertised on this record, and for this reason and no other, I give it a big greasy thumbs up, and take the liberty of saying that the band never ever got any better — or sicker, or filthier, etc. — than this. Never.

 

LIONS (2001)

 

1) Midnight From The Inside Out; 2) Lickin'; 3) Come On; 4) No Use Lying; 5) Losing My Mind; 6) Ozone Mama; 7) Greasy Grass River; 8) Soul Singing; 9) Miracle To Me; 10) Young Man, Old Man; 11) Cosmic Friend; 12) Cypress Tree; 13) Lay It All On Me.

 

By Your Side was good enough to try out a sequel, but still not robust enough to inspire the Crowes for a sequel that would be just as good. It looks like they learned a few things — how to be more tight and snappy, how to give more care to hooklines, how to cultivate a macho image without being too disgusting — but it doesn't look like they had a particularly strong memory for any of them. If the album title is supposed to refer to the Robinsons themselves, well, this is a fairly sluggish pair of lions that we have here for observation.

 

Trouble begins almost immediately, as the major attractive force of ʽMidnight From The Inside Outʼ is concentrated in its guitar tone — fat, nasty, poisonously distorted — but little else. Slow, cumbersome, tied to a really irksome, meaningless blues-rock riff and not even remotely as «dangerous» as its production should lead you to believe, it is, well, everything that the previous album opener (ʽGo Fasterʼ) was not. And with a stylistically limited band like the Black Crowes, your initial impres­sion of the first song usually colors your impression of everything else.

 

Granted, the second song and the album's first single, unscrupulously called ʽLickin'ʼ, is an im­provement: a little faster, a little lower, a little sharper, with a guitar tone that almost borders on «industrial» this time — oh, if only brother Chris didn't sound like an ugly moron on the chorus! But he does, and he does it, exercising his capacity for free will (because he can sing normally — he just consciously wants to sound «nasty», like an authentic rock'n'roll hero). As a result, the song sounds gross, stupid, and unfunny. With some good riffage wasted.

 

Amazingly, as much as I thought I'd never have to say this, Lions is the first Crowes album where the ballads are better than the rockers. ʽMiracle To Meʼ, borrowing some of its acoustic chords from both ʽStairway To Heavenʼ (intro) and ʽWish You Were Hereʼ (main melody), gradually builds up to a sensitive, sentimental chorus whose "be my lover, be my friend, be a miracle to me" seems to work better on a gut level than any of their previous efforts, ʽShe Talks To Angelsʼ included. Even better is the album closer ʽLay It All On Meʼ, whose "come on down crooked man..." finally manages to approach the lazy, post-suffering, seen-it-all, friendly power of the Stones' ballads from 1971-72 — not that it'd seriously stand competition with ʽMoonlight Mileʼ, but perhaps it could stand a few rounds. Chris modulates his voice so that it really gives the impression of a comforting shoulder, and the piano/orchestral backing multiplies the impact and provides the necessary «epic» flavor.

 

The rockers, in comparison, all tend to lose face once again. Too slow, too generically written, and too fussy — perhaps some of the blame lies with producer Don Was, to whom they may have sucked up after he'd restored the Rolling Stones to their former glory with Voodoo Lounge and Bridges To Babylon. Apparently, though, what worked for the Stones did not work so well for their followers. On By Your Side, the guitar sound was more upfront and more raw; here, the guitars are usually too smooth, too polite, and too overshadowed by the band's unimpressive vocal harmonies and the band's equally unimpressive rhythm section. Only on ʽLickin'ʼ does brother Rich's guitar immediately assault your senses — elsewhere, it tends to limp and hobble rather than directly put the meat in your fridge, if you know what I mean.

 

I would not call the album «really bad», since the ballads work all right and the songwriting does show that a lot of work went into it (if it didn't, most of this review could be spent mentioning the titles of old blues-rock numbers that the brothers are ripping off, and it wasn't), but ultimately, Lions is unrewarding, and once again makes me forget why it is exactly that somebody could still be interested in hearing the Black Crowes play as late as the 21st century. Oh, and, for that matter, one thing I really hate — other than Chris' singing on the chorus of ʽLickin'ʼ — is the fly buzzing on ʽCosmic Friendʼ: not only is it really annoying (what else would you expect from a buzzing fly?), but it is also gratuitously unnecessary. Come to think of it, «gratuitously unnecessary» is as much of a pleonastic description as the Black Crowes are a pleonastic band.

 

LIVE (2002)

 

1) Midnight From The Inside Out; 2) Sting Me; 3) Thick 'n' Thin; 4) Greasy Grass River; 5) Sometimes Salvation; 6) Cursed Diamond; 7) Miracle To Me; 8) Wiser Time; 9) Girl From A Pawnshop; 10) Cosmic Friend; 11) Black Moon Creeping; 12) High Head Blues; 13) Title Song; 14) She Talks To Angels; 15) Twice As Hard; 16) Lickin'; 17) Soul Singing; 18) Hard To Handle; 19) Remedy.

 

Upon first thought, the Black Crowes look like a band ideally suited for robust live performance. Upon second thought, it can be predicted with a high degree of reliability that their live albums will probably suck harder than their studio ones. Clumsy, cumbersome, all rock and very little roll in the presence of recording equipment and mixing consoles, there is no good reason why they should suddenly turn into a flexible, agile, perfectly oiled, high-rolling musical machine in the presence of an army of loyal fans.

 

Live, their first official full-fledged LP (actually, double CD) of concert performances (not counting Live At The Greek that they did two years before with Jimmy Page, playing Led Zep­pelin songs all night long), confirms the suspicion. The Black Crowes in concert sound just like The Black Crowes in the studio. The only difference is that brother Rich tends to add more dis­tortion to his six-string, because surely this is the shortest and most reliable way to bring down the roof without having to wreck your brain in search of a more complex solution. However, it just makes the band noisier, rather than more aggressive.

 

Then there is the setlist. The album was recorded on October 30-31, 2001, at the Orpheum in Boston, so, naturally, there is a lot of tracks from Lions, which the brothers were promoting at the time. But other than that, the setlist is almost completely dominated by songs from their first two (the most commercially and critically successful) records. The other three are, at best, repre­sented by one or two tracks — and at worst, not represented at all: By Your Side, which I per­sonally insist to be one of their best, simply does not exist. Instead, we get track after track of their slowest, sludgiest, mind-numbing-est material (ʽSometimes Salvationʼ? ʽTitle Songʼ? you gotta be kidding me!), which they play with total conviction, as if it were real hot stuff, but it only makes matters worse in the long run. I mean, maybe if I saw that they were as disinterested in this material as it is uninteresting, that would at least count for something.

 

But what makes matters worse is the stage banter — the boys (I'm assuming that it is brother Chris who does most of the talking?) alternate between platitudes, nonsense, and bad jokes as if this was as much a part of their job as the playing and singing. Example: "this is a song about the cosmos... I wanted to write a song about drag racing, but I don't know anything about it, so I wrote a song about the cosmos instead!" That's about as profound as it gets — and then, of course, they go and play ʽCosmic Friendʼ, which does contain verbal references to the cosmos, but has less to do with it musically than any given five seconds from Jimi's Electric Ladyland, just to name an off-the-top-of-my-head example of a genuine «cosmic» product.

 

Technically, the band is in fine form, with everybody doing as much as possible with this rotten material, and the recording quality is also perfectly adequate, yet I am still forced to issue a dis­appointed thumbs down, because for the life of me I cannot understand why even a big fan of the band would want to listen to these versions — there is nothing spontaneous going on here, just louder, slightly cruder recreations of the band's studio act, represented by inferior selections.

 

FREAK 'N' ROLL... INTO THE FOG (2006)

 

1) (Only) Halfway To Everything; 2) Sting Me; 3) No Speak No Slave; 4) Soul Singing; 5) Welcome To The Good­times; 6) Jealous Again; 7) Space Captain; 8) My Morning Song; 9) Sunday Night Buttermilk Waltz; 10) Cursed Diamond; 11) She Talks To Angels; 12) Wiser Time; 13) Nonfiction; 14) Seeing Things; 15) Hard To Handle; 16) Let Me Share The Ride; 17) Mellow Down Easy; 18) Remedy; 19) The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down.

 

Two live albums in a row is usually either a sign of arrogant overkill or a sign of old age, but in this particular case the situation is different: the Crowes had pretty much fallen apart in 2001, with the Robinson brothers embarking on solo careers, and it took about half a decade for them to properly get back together, also bringing back Marc Ford on second guitar and founding member Steve Gorman on drums. To commemorate this most exciting reunion, a video and audio were released at the same time, capturing a complete performance from San Francisco's Fillmore audi­torium in 2005 — more than two hours of red-hot Crowes, and this is not actually counting several «official bootlegs» in the Instant Live series, also made available throughout 2005.

 

One thing I do have to say is that Freak'n'Roll is a significant improvement over Live in just about every aspect I can think of. First, stage banter is kept to a reasonable minimum, cutting down on both the platitudes and the lame jokes. Second, the setlist is more representative and less predictable, dragging out some forgotten highlights and including covers of classics such as ʽSpace Captainʼ and ʽThe Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Downʼ. Third, they bring in a brass section (The Left Coast Horns) to thicken the sound on some of the songs, and offer some rejuvenations and reincarnations — ʽCursed Diamondʼ, for instance, works a little better in an unplugged version than it used to (because the only thing worse than a slow, draggy, repetitive ballad is a slow, draggy, repetitive ballad drowned in sludge and distortion).

 

An obvious criticism of the performance would be the length of the songs — the average length of each track is around 7 minutes, with ʽMy Morning Songʼ taking the big prize (almost 14 minu­tes!) and ʽNonfictionʼ seconding it at the ten-minute mark. However, this extension is not com­pletely «empty»: the idea is indeed to add some «freakout» spirit to the proceedings, and so ʽNon­fictionʼ is transformed from a relatively simple country ballad into a trippy voyage, with psyche­delic guitars and keyboards leading the way and avantgarde jazz brass parts joining them halfway through. Maybe this is not as inspired as your average Grateful Dead show, but it is at least an attempt to capture a more elusive, less instantaneously obvious vibe, and it shows a new side to the comeback-Crowes that was not present (or, at least, not so evident) in their early career.

 

Other songs are extended mostly for the purpose of throwing in some extra solos and jamming around, but there is no crime in that. I cannot call the guitar duet between Rich and Marc at the end of ʽHard To Handleʼ particularly evocative or emotional, but yes, it is better than simply having them reproduce the original parts — they are trying to show that the Black Crowes can make history happen here and now, not simply repeat history, and even if that history is not all that exciting, I still applaud the decision to explore uncharted waters. ʽLet Me Share The Rideʼ extended with six extra minutes of jamming, as the Left Coast Horns add big-band jazz support to accompany the slide guitar madness? ʽSoul Singingʼ adorned with a huge wah-wah solo, turning its middle section into Hendrix-ey space-rock? None of that may be new for music listeners in 2006, but it is great to see a band as formerly limited as the Crowes to blindly push forward in all these directions, and sometimes, if not always, striking out the right sparks.

 

Even the cover versions fit the mood and are done with total understanding of the source material: of course, brother Chris could never outdo Joe Cocker with the "learning to live together..." bit from ʽSpace Captainʼ, but the song was most likely selected as a symbol of the band's reunion, and feels totally at home. The decision to put ʽOl' Dixieʼ at the end is a bit more questionable, since the song's anthemic nature and straightforward lyrics seems to pigeonhole the Crowes as generic «Southern Rock», but they totally nail its emotional complexity, and even Chris's vocal delivery is technically and spiritually every bit as good as Levon Helm's.

 

Keeping all this in mind, I believe the record deserves a respectful thumbs up, and would pro­bably recommend it as the best official introduction to the Crowes' live sound, or, more accurate­ly, to what the Crowes are capable of as a live band. Despite the two-hour-plus running length, despite the obligatory inclusion of bad hits like ʽShe Talks To Angelsʼ, despite the occasional loss of direction, the bottomline is that the five-year break actually did the guys some good — in this particular here and now, they sound looser and freer on stage than they ever did.

 

WARPAINT (2008)

 

1) Goodbye Daughters Of The Revolution; 2) Walk Believer Walk; 3) Oh Josephine; 4) Evergreen; 5) We Who See The Deep; 6) Locust Street; 7) Movin' On Down The Line; 8) Wounded Bird; 9) God's Got It; 10) There's Gold In Them Hills; 11) Whoa Mule.

 

The internal construction of the word warpaint seems to suggest that when you put on this kind of paint, you are expected to go to war. Consequently, when you begin to play an album called Warpaint, you might expect to hear something that could be associated with war-like emotions. You know — aggression, bravado, ferociousness, that sort of thing. And even if you are not a big fan of The Black Crowes, you just know that they are a band well capable of all those emotions. And, in fact, once every few years or so they are even capable of hanging them on a powerful hook, which is where they are at their very best. It's not much, but it's something.

 

Alas, we have some bad news, folks. Warpaint is not a war-like album — it ain't even a proper rock'n'roll album. Instead, it's a big ol' full-o'-soul album of «Americana» — a melting pot of blues, country, and various forms of hillbilly music, played Black Crowes-style, but without the arrogant cockiness of old. Yes, it's been seven years since their previous studio experience — and in that time, the Robinson brothers have Discovered Wisdom. Now, instead of churning out over­loud headbang fodder, they offer you golden bales of hay straight from the meadows and fields — lying in one of which, with not a care in the world and a pair of headphones around your head, would probably be the perfect setting for enjoying an album like Warpaint. That is, if there actually were anything to enjoy.

 

The band had suffered further lineup changes along the way, so that by the time they came around to recording this, the newest members were relatively young musicians — children of the Seventies, younger than the Robinson brothers by about a decade: Adam MacDougall on key­boards and Luther Dickinson (of the North Mississippi Allstars) on guitar. Obviously, both are professionals, and the Robinsons went out of their way to praise Dickinson's skills to high hea­vens; problem is, to my ears he just sounds like a faithful disciple of the old school, doing his country-western schtick honestly, but without an ounce of inventiveness. Considering that brother Rich is also no great genius when it comes to composing guitar melodies, it is no big surprise that a large chunk of this album... well, perhaps it does not exactly sound like Garth Brooks, but it feels every bit as tedious and worthless as your average country-pop album.

 

Every chord sequence tried out here is tired and old. Every vocal melody begs for the single question — why am I wasting time on this? Is there at least one new emotional touch generated here, at least one fresh feeling, rather than just fifty minutes of recycled cud? Neil Young, Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allmans, Emmylou Harris, The Band, Gram Parsons — is Warpaint adding anything worthwhile to that legacy? Am I supposed to worship at the sight of Chris Ro­binson's beard just because he's aged a little bit, calmed down a bit, found his peace with the world and drowned in earthy sentimentality — or, perhaps, should that require a little more effort in the songwriting department?

 

I guess that, from a certain point of view, Warpaint could invite comparisons with Exile On Main St.: it seems to trigger the same half-lazy, right-to-the-ways-of-the-world atmosphere. But the difference is that the Stones were actually recording their album on the brink of self-destruc­tion, and its music is permeated with that feeling. Warpaint, in comparison, plays it completely safe and sound. The Black Crowes, as pictured on this record, are a generally happy, healthy, self-sufficient band of individuals who know just what it takes to make the «right» music. "Let's take it easy to avoid any snags", states the opening song, called ʽGoodbye Daughters Of The Re­volutionʼ, and in between that line, that title, and the fact that the rhythm and lead lines of the song are all great in tone and poor in expression, this tells you all you should really know about the album, unless you need your everyday fill of bland Americana like a high fiber diet.

 

If you are looking for something that «rocks», you won't find a proper choice until track 9, ʽGod's Got Itʼ, and even that one is a fairly repetitive «Christian blues-rock» number (with a touch of irony, I hope), riding on boring muffled rhythm crunch and conventional slide licks. (For that matter, I think that Paul Stacey's production style is at least partially responsible for sucking the life out of these tracks — a different mix, bringing Dickinson's slide guitar higher up, might have somewhat improved the impression). If you are looking for a real soulful, broken-voiced, salt-of-the-earth ballad, check out ʽThere's Gold In Them Hillsʼ. It does not touch my soul one bit, but who knows, it might touch yours. I think it's all a bunch of unimaginative clichés, and I don't think Chris Robinson sounds too convincing when complaining that "all I have left is this grey in my beard" (not that that ain't much — have you seen the size of that beard?), but wasting time on looking for scientific proof of that is not a good idea, so let's just assume I may be wrong.

 

Anyway, three listens into the album, and nothing ever stuck, which is why I suppose that the songs on Warpaint are fairly worthless unless they are your first exposition to the world of dusty, age-sanctified roots-rock. Then again, I also suppose this is predictable — if The Black Crowes as a young band were third-rate imitators of kick-ass Stones/Aerosmith/Led Zeppelin, then why should The Black Crowes as an old band be anything but third-rate imitators of their rootsy pre­decessors? It all fits. No big surprise here, and a friendly, light-hearted thumbs down all the way down Chris Robinson's beard.

 

WARPAINT LIVE (2009)

 

1) Goodbye Daughters Of The Revolution; 2) Walk Believer Walk; 3) Oh Josephine; 4) Evergreen; 5) We Who See The Deep; 6) Locust Street; 7) Movin' On Down The Line; 8) Wounded Bird; 9) God's Got It; 10) There's Gold In Them Hills; 11) Whoa Mule; 12) Poor Elijah – Tribute To Johnson; 13) Darling Of The Underground Press; 14) Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye; 15) Don't Know Why; 16) Torn And Frayed; 17) Hey Grandma.

 

Oh, this is just too good to be true. But it is true — so, what is the next logical move once you have just released the worst (okay, one of the worst) albums in your career, passing it off as a «mature» product? Why, simple: release a live version of it — performed in its entirety. I mean, I could at least understand it if they did this trick for Shake Your Moneymaker or Southern Har­mony: at least those albums have had enough time to pass into some sort of legend. But War­paint, really? Has it instantaneously become such a «modern classic» that the world would say a big thank you to a second version?

 

So apparently, the Crowes had some kind of deal with Eagle Rock Entertainment, one of the big­gest rock video labels out there, to provide a concert recording for them — and, apparently, the idea was that, since they already had several live albums out, this one was to be in some way «special». Maybe they all bought the critical hype, or maybe they just thought that this additional promotion would help sell a few extra copies of the real Warpaint — whatever. The sore reality is that there is this extra live package now, DVD and CD versions of it, and, apparently, it begs for its own, independent, unbiased, and open-minded assessment.

 

Ultimately, I guess, it is impossible to make a bad thing good, but it is possible to make it a little more tolerable, and from that point of view, if I ever had to, in the future, I would prefer listening to Warpaint Live than to Warpaint Dead. The brothers add on a little grit in these performances, putting a tad more distortion on the line, and occasionally extending the songs to include longer and ever more fluent solos from Luther Dickinson — for instance, he goes completely roman­tically berserk on the slide guitar at the end of ʽMovin' On Down The Lineʼ, where his wild runs proudly stand competition with Derek Trucks. The overall sound of Warpaint was good — the overall sound of it played live is, in fact, even better. But there is nothing to be done about the songs. At heart, they were boring, and they still stay boring. Nothing to do with that.

 

It gets better and worse, though, on the second disc. Better — because, as a large appended bonus, the Crowes end their performance with a bunch of covers by famous «roots rock» artists, such as Clapton in his «Delaney & Bonnie» period of 1970 (ʽPoor Elijahʼ and ʽDon't Know Whyʼ), the Stones in their Exile period (ʽTorn And Frayedʼ), and Moby Grape (ʽHey Grandmaʼ). They still sneak in a couple of their own songs (including a really long, really tedious version of ʽBad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbyeʼ), but overall it's like a respectful celebration of past glories — and this is also what makes it a little offensive. It's as if they were saying, "Hey, all the great guys had their roots-rock phase, see? We too have one!" — which would be justified if they had at least one song as emotionally resonant as ʽTorn And Frayedʼ, which is not the case. They do a good enough job on the covers, and Dickinson once again goes into full-out astral mode on the slide at the end of the Stones' song, playing things of such complexity that Mick Taylor would not have been able to reproduce — except that ʽTorn And Frayedʼ is really all about the original vocals, and brother Chris' one-dimensional delivery totally fails to recapture or play upon the smiling irony of the Stones' approach.

 

In short, if you are a fan of the modern slide, do get this record for some totally stellar examples (it is a little uncanny, though, just how much this Dickinson dude and Derek Trucks sound alike, which begs for the question — do all these young guitar virtuosos tend to blend together or am I just being unnecessarily grumpy?). If you are a fan of Chris Robinson's beard, get the video — the camera loves it. And if you are a fan of neither, but are still reading this review, you're as crazy a reader as the reviewer is a writer.

 

BEFORE THE FROST... UNTIL THE FREEZE (2009)

 

CD I: 1) Good Morning Captain; 2) Been A Long Time; 3) Appaloosa; 4) A Train Still Makes A Lonely Sound; 5) I Ain't Hiding; 6) Kept My Soul; 7) What Is Home; 8) Houston Don't Dream About Me; 9) Make Glad; 10) And The Band Played On; 11) Last Place That Love Lives;

CD II: 1) Aimless Peacock; 2) Shady Grove; 3) Garden Gate; 4) Greenhorn; 5) Shine Along; 6) Roll Old Jeremiah; 7) Lady Of Avenue A; 8) So Many Times; 9) Fork In The River.

 

This is where the band's «maturity» starts overflowing, as they grow themselves more roots than a five hundred year old oak tree, and you can almost smell the overpowering scent of freshly turned earth and steaming piles of dung on the ground. These twenty new songs weren't just put down anyway, anyhow, anywhere — all of them were recorded honest-to-goodness live before a small, but attentively respectful audience at «The Barn», Levon Helm's personal studio in Wood­stock, NY, the next best thing to The Basement, I guess.

 

Supposedly the band wrote so many new songs for this happy event that they were afraid to let go of all of them at once — the original album, Before The Frost, only contained the first 11, while the remaining 9 were made available separately as Until The Freeze, a free download from the band's website provided you bought the CD and had your personal access code. They could actually count as two different albums for stylistic reasons — the former is rowdier and more elec­tric, the second one is a little hillbillier and more acoustic — but they do form a conceptual unity, after all, so it probably makes more sense to discuss the whole package in one go.

 

Which is a bit intimidating — so many songs, for one thing, and for another, the album is a tougher nut to crack than Warpaint. Warpaint was just derivative boring. Before The Frost, on first sight, goes in the same direction — simply with more sprawl, spreading those proverbial roots across a larger chunk of territory. The principal criticism stays the same: the band may have mastered very well the standard lingo of «roots-rock», but whether they have added to that lingo, let alone started their own dialect of it, is quite debatable. However, on their respective individual levels the songs seem a little stronger, and, more importantly, less predictable.

 

What I mean is, we'd never dream of being pleasantly surprised by a disco song on any «classic» Crowes album — but a sudden encounter with ʽI Ain't Hidingʼ, with its sci-fi keyboards, funky guitars, and hopping bass, here turns out to be a revelation: a damn clever synthesis of blues-rock with old-fashioned disco, not to mention the daring nature of the move in general — accept disco as an integral, if peripheral, part of «Americana». Another surprising and effective attempt at synthesis comes near the end of the first album, as ʽAnd The Band Played Onʼ effortlessly veers between Britpoppy music hall ("let's all gather round the grand piano...") and slide-based country-blues, as the Robinsons celebrate a «homecoming» — well, I suppose the entire album is really just one big celebration.

 

Big, bombastic rock and roll makes a welcome return on ʽBeen A Long Timeʼ, with those thick, juicy riffs we hadn't heard in a long time, and with a long coda that gives all the soloists plenty of opportunities to stretch out and flex those playing muscles — the bad news is, that's just one track out of twenty, and on the whole, there is no indication whatsoever that The Crowes are still willing to rock out on a consistent basis. A couple others, like ʽGood Morning Captainʼ and ʽMake Gladʼ, are loud enough, but are either too slow or too shapeless to count as legitimate «rockers» — in fact, ʽCaptainʼ is more like a very conscious attempt to suck up to Levon Helm and write a bona fide Band imitation. I could easily picture the late Levon singing it himself, but the question is, would he want to? The melody is nowhere near the average level of Robbie Robertson's songwriting, and Chris Robinson is a very «bland» singer compared to Levon in his prime, even if it is not his fault that nature endowed him with such a dull singing tone.

 

Surprisingly, I must say that on the whole, I think that I got hit a little harder by the «hillbilly» part of the album — Until The Freeze has a higher percentage of memorable and emotional songs, such as ʽRoll On Jeremiahʼ (friendly-sad country-western travelog with a beautiful duet between piano and slide guitar), ʽLady Of Avenue Aʼ (a nod to James Taylor-era folk-pop with a convincing bitterness to Chris' delivery, even if some of the chords bring on unnecessary associ­ations with ʽDisney Girlsʼ), and, most importantly, ʽAimless Peacockʼ — another of these crazy syntheses, sort of a psychedelic country romp, with harmonica and fiddle on one side and sitar and Eastern vocal harmonies on the other, as the band spends almost seven minutes in a cloudy haze. No discernible melody to speak of, but a distinctly unusual sound combination that works, particularly if you are in a hazy mood yourself and want to align yourself better with the world around you. Experimentation has never hurt the Crowes, no really.

 

Yet at the same time, I cannot join in the happy chorus of people who not only think that this is a big improvement over Warpaint, but even that it is a downright late-period masterpiece, and opens up a whole new world before the band and their fans. For every good song and for every interesting idea here, there are at least two mediocre bores, completely devoid of original ideas. But then again, how could it be any different? Rock bands are not supposed to reach enlighten­ment and release their hitherto hidden genius after twenty years of existence. I wouldn't altoge­ther discount the possibility of a miracle, but there ain't no miracle here — just a big pile of diligently performed homework, and a few technical inventions to alleviate the charges.

 

I am almost tempted to give the album a thumbs up for its sheer scope, out of respect for all the good work, but only its second part really gives a bit of a taste of the «salt of the earth», and why should I be recommending a record that I do not properly enjoy, nor am I finding any serious intrigue in it? As far as contemporary roots-rock goes, I suppose you won't find many records better than Before The Frost — but then again, you probably won't find many contemporary good roots-rock records, period, what with 21st century people either not giving a damn about «roots» in the first place or not being able to find a proper way to access them, so that ain't much of an argument. And as far as the songs on here being, well, just good songs — take a good listen to Wilco's Being There instead. Now that was an album of good songs, period, cutting deep and hard. The Crowes here merely brush across the surface.

 

CROWEOLOGY (2010)

 

1) Jealous Again; 2) Share The Ride; 3) Remedy; 4) Non-Fiction; 5) Hotel Illness; 6) Soul Singing; 7) Ballad In Urgency; 8) Wiser Time; 9) Cold Boy Smile; 10) Under A Mountain; 11) She Talks To Angels; 12) Morning Song; 13) Downtown Money Waster; 14) Good Friday; 15) Thorn In My Pride; 16) Welcome To The Good Times; 17) Girl From A Pawnshop; 18) Sister Luck; 19) She; 20) Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye.

 

With an album title like that, I should have known better — but noooo, I just had to sit down and subject myself to it, out of professional-amateurish courtesy. Twice. Those four hours of my life I am never getting back, and since it is not highly likely that any of the Robinson brothers are offering me an apology any time soon (well, it's not like I bought the record or anything), please excuse me if the following several paragraphs sound rather bitter.

 

First, the objective facts. Croweology is the name of an album by The Black Crowes, spread over two CDs and, with the exception of one cover (ʽSheʼ from Gram Parsons' G. P.), featuring re-recordings of their older songs, mainly in «unplugged» acoustic versions, although some electric lead parts are occasionally present. All the tracks seem to have been produced «live in the studio», with a bit of audience participation at times (at least, there are a couple of small bursts of scat­tered applause on the first disc), but formally, the album is not «live» as such. And the track list concen­trates most heavily on the 1990-96 period, with only 2-3 tracks from later times and nothing at all from the Warpaint/Before The Frost era.

 

This segregation and reinvention brings a certain conceptual purpose to Croweology — seeing as how the band is now «mature» and «wisened up» and has been goin' up the country for several years with the speed of a groundhog fleeing from a tractor, it is only logical that they would de­cide to bring their old material «up to date». How do you make your peace with the world of corn fields and grass meadows and go on being ʽJealous Againʼ and needing your ʽRemedyʼ at the same time? You just dump the distortion and the loud bashing drums and you start looking for a way that would preserve the spirit and the energy of the original but would also introduce more subtlety and nuance into the performance. You begin rocking out in humble style. I mean, if Keith Richards in his prime could rock out with acoustic riffs, why not The Black Crowes in their mature, respectable years?

 

As clearly as (I think) I understand the purpose, its realisation predictably leaves a lot to be desired. Most of these songs weren't that good in the first place, and most of the changes intro­duced to convert them to this acoustic setting are in no hurry to make them any better. In brief, if you are already a fan, there is some chance that you will enjoy these reinventions, but if you «tolerated» rather than «enjoyed» the originals, you are most likely going to hate, hate, hate the way they handled them here. And that is concerning the rockers — when they start doing ballads, and they insist on dragging them out to seven, eight, nine-minute length, you'll be climbing up the frickin' walls, begging for mercy.

 

Yes, if you waste enough time on this, eventually you will begin noticing the little things they do here and there (like, for instance, making ʽGood Fridayʼ sound totally like Pink Floyd's ʽBreatheʼ in the intro part), and maybe even getting impressed by then. But why should you? Why should anybody? There is so much implicit pathetic self-aggrandizing on Croweology that it actually makes me sick. For some reason, it's as if these guys have ceremonially anointed themselves «the keepers of the flame», and each and every one of these tracks is even more self-consciously per­formed in the «All Hail The Grand Old Southern Rock Tradition Whose High Priests Are We» than their original versions. Not a shred of the slightly naughty, slightly ironic irreverence here that used to characterize even Lynyrd Skynyrd at their peak, let alone any of the better roots-rock bands out there. Not the tiniest modicum of a sense of humor.

 

If, for some reason, this happens to be the last of the band's studio LPs — a possibility, since they have not gone back into the studio in between 2010 and 2013, and have once again gone on hiatus since that period — fans will probably be pleased to treasure it as a nostalgic recapitulation or a musical testament. But to these skeptical ears, it is just one more unpleasant reminder of why The Black Crowes, at their very best, were only a «passable» band, and at their very worst, were so dreadfully boring and annoying that I'd rather listen to MTV-era Aerosmith instead: I mean, power ballads like ʽCryin'ʼ and ʽCrazyʼ are compositionally no worse than ʽShe Talks To Angelsʼ or ʽBad Luck Blue Eyesʼ, and their humble goal of describing Steve Tyler's unsatiable sex drive for hot young chicks, including his own daughter, is quite forgivable next to the unjustifiedly bloated spiritual ambitions of the Crowes. Maybe they just had the misfortune of being born into this world ten or fifteen years later than they should have, missing the right wave. Maybe. But that doesn't mean we have to go on listening to them out of chronological mercy, or that I would have to shift my thumbs down rating for this album to anything better just because this is the sound of a veteran professional band using — think of that! — acoustic guitars all the way. 

 

BLACKMORE'S NIGHT

SHADOW OF THE MOON (1997)

 

1) Shadow Of The Moon; 2) The Clock Ticks On; 3) Be Mine Tonight; 4) Play Minstrel Play; 5) Ocean Gypsy; 6) Minstrel Hall; 7) Magical World; 8) Writing On The Wall; 9) Renaissance Fair; 10) Memmingen; 11) No Second Chance; 12) Mond Tanz; 13) Spirit Of The Sea; 14) Greensleeves; 15) Wish You Were Here.

 

Ritchie Blackmore. Most people will remember him for early Deep Purple, some will for early Dio-era Rainbow, still others — shudder — for the later «hit era» Rainbow, but you know what? Listening to this album, the first in a new career and a new life, makes me absolutely convinced that it was not until this transformation from a blazing rock god into a humble minstrel that he had really found his true heart's content. And in the overall context of his life and his deeds, this finding makes me genuinely feel good for him.

 

Normally, this «neo-medieval» stylistics, the roots of which probably go all the way back to bands like Amazing Blondel in the early 1970s and maybe even further back to God knows where, is about as cringeworthy as a tacky mansion in «medieval» style, erected somewhere on the pro­perty by some tasteless nouveau riche. The melodies are stiff and manneristic, the arrangements tepidly polite, the lyrics overloaded with clichés that betray only a superficial acquaintance with the verbal art of Chaucer's, let alone King Alfred's, times. All of these flaws are vividly present on the first album by Blackmore's Night, and more — obviously produced on a modest budget, the record keeps substituting electronic replacements for genuine instruments. Synthesized trum­pets? Works wonders in the authenticity department, you know.

 

But then again, who are we kidding? Shadow Of The Moon has nothing to do with authenticity, and if you box Ritchie into a corner, or maybe even if you don't, he will probably admit that him­self. Shadow Of The Moon is simply part of his fantasy, which began with his encounter with Candice Night (Candice Lauren Isralow, to be precise), a young fan born in the year of Fireball, in 1989 — and ended with the formation of this duet, in which Blackmore plays the part of a traveling minstrel (always with his trusty boots on!) and Candice plays the part of his romantic fantasy, whichever it happens to be at the moment (empress, princess, lady in waiting, innocent peasant girl, witchy woman, gypsy, fortune teller, fairy queen — anything, as long as it has nothing to do with the real world).

 

Ever since they seriously hooked up, I think, they were living this fantasy in real life to some extent, so it was only natural that, eventually, something like this would come out. Fans were expectedly devastated: a Blackmore album without a single Blackmore electric solo? In fact, an album where his role was essentially reduced to that of songwriter and basic accompanist? Him, Ritchie Blackmore of the Huge Ego, which we all had to accept and cherish? Unbelievable, and sacrilegious. Was this Candice Night gal his Yoko Ono, putting him under her spell and making a humble slave out of the world's fiercest electric guitar hero?..

 

Not quite. There are two kinds of people who always punish Shadow Of The Moon with one-star ratings. The first kind simply wants Blackmore to go on being a guitar god — that's the silly kind, because if you don't want to be a guitar god no more, it's useless to force yourself. The second kind just cringes and calls the music tacky — which it certainly is. Except they are for­getting that every band in which Ritchie has done time has always been tacky, right from the earliest days of Deep Purple. Remember their cover of the Beatles' ʽHelp!ʼ on the debut album? Now if that ain't tacky, I don't know what is.

 

Yes, like most of this faux-Renaissance muzak, the songs, taken at face value, are stiff, boring, and corny, and not at all redeemed by the technical aspects of their execution — Blackmore's guitar playing (mostly acoustic, although he does not completely shun the electric sound) is intentionally very modest, whereas Night's vocals are pleasantly passable: she is no new Annie Haslam in terms of range or power, and no new Sandy Denny in terms of expression and spiritu­ality, she just sings in a nice tone. Not particularly irritating or memorable. Not much to hate, not a lot to love. Fine wardrobe, though.

 

Where this album, and most of its follow-ups, really succeeds is in making you understand just how much the both of them dig doing it. Forget the rock god image — this is what Blackmore has really been waiting for all his life: a fair lady companion to allow him to drown his ego in a world of dark shadows, green meadows, magic spells, crystal balls, greensleeves, and mandolins. De­spite the technically unimpressive arrangements, it is clear that they spent a shitload of time working out all the little twists on these songs. ʽMagical Worldʼ, in the middle of the record, is their personal statement of purpose: "...In our hearts / We share the same dream / Feelings so strong / We just must carry on / On to our magical world". Trivial, but true: the dedication with which they approach the construction of this «magical world» is worth admiration.

 

Most of the songs are Blackmore originals (with occasional lyrics from Candice), with two ex­ceptions: ʽOcean Gypsyʼ is a cover of an old Renaissance tune (a predictable choice), while the closing ʽWish You Were Hereʼ is a cover of... no, not Pink Floyd and certainly not Badfinger, but a 1995 single by the Swedish band Rednex, whose members were neither rednecks nor neo-medievalists, but somehow this lonesome ballad got stuck with Blackmore's Night anyway. But on the whole, listing individual highlights is a pointless endeavour — the «originals», employing mostly traditional folk phrasing, smoothly roll on without much stylistic change or musical de­velopment. You'd have to be a serious fan of baroque music to spot the differences — and then, if you were a serious fan of baroque music, you'd probably have no reason whatsoever to entertain yourself with an album like this, when you could be listening to Lully or Telemann instead.

 

None other than Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson in person makes a welcome guest appearance on ʽPlay Minstrel Playʼ, cheering up the stage with some rousing flute solos; and none other than Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in person has a cameo on ʽWriting On The Wallʼ, the corniest number on the entire record — for some reason, not only did they have the strange idea to begin it with a synthesizer quotation from Swan Lake, but they also decided to deck the rest of the ballad with a speedy disco arrangement, about as appropriate in the context of the album as a skyscraper in the middle of a Papuan village. Maybe at the last moment somebody had the bright idea that it would be wrong for the artists to stay completely out of touch with modern reality, so they threw on «one for the nightclubs» at the last moment. Not good for the vibe, and the vibe is pretty much the only reason one could care about the record in the first place.

 

Additionally, the album is just too damn long — over an hour, with most of the songs sharing the same magical-mystical mood; as happy as they must have been making it, it is not certain that the average listener would necessarily subscribe to this «let the magic never stop!» ideology. Trim­ming the record at the expense of some of its «samey» numbers might have made me pay more attention to its individual components — as it is, I'm forced to treat it as yer average fairywood mushroom muzak. I totally get this escapist vibe, and I like how it is presented with reserve and humility, but recommending this album for somebody who is not fascinated with the spirit of Ritchie Blackmore would be an impossibility. I guess Candice Night could be called «kinda hot» in recompense, but when it comes to witchy women and gypsies, I guess I'm more of a sucker for Stevie Nicks in the end. Candice just looks way too healthy for my tastes.

 

UNDER A VIOLET MOON (1999)

 

1) Under A Violet Moon; 2) Castles And Dreams; 3) Past Time With Good Company; 4) Morning Star; 5) Avalon; 6) Possum Goes To Prague; 7) Wind In The Willows; 8) Gone With The Wind; 9) Beyond The Sunset; 10) March The Heroes Home; 11) Spanish Nights (I Remember It Well); 12) Catherine Howard's Fate; 13) Fool's Gold; 14) Durch Den Wald Zum Bach Haus; 15) Now And Then; 16) Self Portrait.

 

For some reason, Ritchie likes to make these records rather long — around an hour in duration, sometimes more, taking full advantage of the CD format at a time when other performers were already getting past that stage, and slowly realizing that you don't have to stretch your record out to 70 minutes just because you can fit that much length on your current medium of choice. Be­cause of that, all of these Blackmore's Night recordings necessarily have monotonous streaks to them even if it would be wrong to say that Blackmore always purposefully sounds the same.

 

On the contrary, if you put it all together, an album like Under A Violet Moon (several points off, though, for two LPs in a row with the word «moon» in the title) features plenty of diversity. There's some medieval English music, some medieval German music, some medieval Spanish music, an acoustic reinvention of an old Rainbow song, and even a bit of Russian folk music, which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be pseudo-folk music (ʽGone With The Windʼ incor­porates the melody of Polyushko-polye, Lev Knipper's most famous contribution to his country, written in 1934), but who's supposed to know?

 

In some ways, this is a serious improvement: the production, featuring many more «authentic» instruments than before (with twice as many musicians credited in the liner notes), is fairly well cleaned from that feeling of «cheapness» — and there are no downright embarrassments like the disco pandering of ʽWriting On The Wallʼ. That's on the traditional-conservative side, but on the «fusion» side, Blackmore's fans will also like the fact that he is playing more electric guitar, in­cluding a trademark flashy solo during the coda of ʽGone With The Windʼ (very clean, though: no distortion or whammy bar hooliganry) — and that Rainbow cover, too, is a nice enough gesture, showing that Ritchie has not completely disavowed his past, but is rather willing to re­think it. After all, some of those songs did have good melodies, and ʽSelf Portraitʼ works fine in an acoustic setting.

 

Unfortunately, nothing will help Candice Night to become a more interesting singer than her inborn gift allows her to, and no matter how they try, all of these songs are, at best, «pretty» rather than «beautiful». When they come up with catchy vocal hooks, as they do on the title track, they are worth relistening — but even then, the magic that they sincerely try to work on that song is rather trite. Pretty girl singing, «mystical» echoey male harmonies flanking, gradual quickening of the tempo to turn the whole thing into a magical dance ritual, we've pretty much sat through all that in high school already: can you show us something we don't know? Okay, even if you can, you just don't want to. It's your fantasy, and you don't care just how original or individualistic it is. Fair enough. "Past time with good company / I love, and shall until I die" — what serious objec­tion could there be against ol' King Henry VIII and his still-actual credo?

 

Seriously, none at all, and there is not a single track on this album that would not be at least tepidly likable. Some have said that the album is more «poppy» where its predecessor was more «folky», but this is a matter of personal impression, I guess, especially if by «poppy» one means «catchier and/or happier tunes», which are more or less equally interspersed here with darker stuff — and it is interesting that the bleak ʽSelf Portraitʼ, with its "going down, down, down, down, down" chorus was chosen as the coda, leading the album from the collective ritualistic happiness of the opening to the personal depressed gloom of the closing. Other than that, I guess ʽGone With The Windʼ with its Russian folk backing harmonies is the most «outstanding» number here, but there is something hokey about crossing fake Russian mouzhiks with passionate Blackmore electric soloing, so there is hardly anything cathartic about the song.

 

I'd give the album a thumbs up and recommend it to Blackmore's fans as a suitable introduction into his world, populated with idealistic projections of King Henry VIIIth, Michael Praetorius, and J. S. Bach, as they all join hands and dance around the fire under a violet moon shining over a Spanish night somewhere in Avalon. But remember that, essentially, this is just a musical form of cosplay, so, instead of expecting Fairport Convention quality, just bring along your Robin Hood garments and a longbow, and on that level, it will be fairly easy to connect with the old grey minstrel and his golden-locked protegée.

 

FIRES AT MIDNIGHT (2001)

 

1) Written In The Stars; 2) The Times They Are A-Changin'; 3) I Still Remember; 4) Home Again; 5) Crowning Of The King; 6) Fayre Thee Well; 7) Fires At Midnight; 8) Hanging Tree; 9) The Storm; 10) Mid-Winter's Night; 11) All Because Of You; 12) Waiting Just For You; 13) Praetorius (Courante); 14) Benzai-Ten; 15) Village On The Sand; 16) Again Someday.

 

This is probably as good as it gets — or, at least, as diagnostic as it gets, so if you want to give Lord R. and Lady C. one lucky chance, Fires At Midnight might be your best bet. Not only is it as stylistically diverse as the duo would ever get, but it also achieves a stable balance between the «folk» and the «rock» visions of Blackmore as applied to his dabblings in past times with good companies. Which, simply speaking, translates to «it's still cheesy, but not as boringly cheesy as it used to be». There's even some bark-and-snap to it now.

 

Most importantly, Blackmore seems to have finally adapted the art of writing faux-medieval ballads to his trademark fiery style: almost as if he were a little tired of the exaggerated courteous gallantry of his previous two efforts, quite a few of these new compositions put their trust (and their thrust) in «power». ʽWritten In The Starsʼ opens the album deceptively, with some nearly accappella singing from Candice — but that is just the intro: at 1:05 into the song, the electric guitar kicks in with some heraldic chords, the martial drums and horns join in the attack, and the whole thing becomes a darkly romantic gallop, highlighted by ecstatic electric leads. No huge surprises on the whole, but this hint at «hidden menace», tragedy, and toughness is definitely something that neither ʽShadow Of The Moonʼ nor ʽUnder A Violet Moonʼ possessed.

 

Where royalty was earlier represented by Britain (Henry VIII), we now turn to Spain: the title track is credited as a reworking of a composition originally by Alfonso X of Castile, although we may safely assume that the guy was not quite as skilled at the electric guitar as Mr. Blackmore, his disciple, who turns most of the song's second part into a polygon for unleashing some long-missed amplified pyrotechnics at the listener. I am also quite unsure if Alfonso el Sabio actually made a provision for shawms in his original composition, but whatever be the case, they fit in well with this rather paganistic pandemonium. As simple and repetitive as the main melody is (which is not very surprising for a 13th century dance melody), they handle the build-up pretty well, and it does inspire Blackmore to go fairly wild on the guitar, though, of course, not full-out wild — even in a moment of ecstasy, the medieval minstrel should never forget that he does not have proper access to the whammy bar, since it has not been invented yet.

 

Other medieval heroes honored on the record include the obscure Dutch legend Tielman Susato, honored with renditions of the lyrical dance ballad ʽI Still Rememberʼ and the ceremonial, horns-driven ʽCrowning Of The Kingʼ (a little too pastoral, atmosphere-wise, but then again, we're talking 16th century here, when «pastoral» and «court» were not always that far removed); Jeremiah Clarke, whose famous ʽPrince Of Denmark's Marchʼ is adapted for a more lyrical pur­pose as ʽWaiting Just For Youʼ; the already previously honored Michael Praetorius, whose ʽCouranteʼ is played by Ritchie on basic acoustic guitar; and the long-forgotten medieval Jewish klezmer Hrodebert Zimbarman, whose woodwind-heavy gallant dance melody ʽDie Zeiten, Sie Ändern Sichʼ is usually better known to modern audiences through a corrupted neo-folk perfor­mance by one of his immigrant descendants; fortunately, we have Lord R. and Lady C. to thank for restoring the courteous authenticity of this fine, fine composition.

 

That said, unless you dig deep into the credits, it is quite impossible to distinguish the «authentic» material from the Blackmore/Night «originals» — the former pieces are always rearranged for the duo's usual style, and the latter are probably only «original» in the sense that they do not directly transpose the chord structures of the old musical pieces they are based upon... then again, con­sidering that Blackmore's collection is said to consist of about 2000 CDs of Renaissance music, I think that the man himself would not be able to tell whether a particular «original» of his has been directly lifted from somebody or influenced. So, for instance, the up-on-your-feet and dance-in-joy ʽHome Againʼ, containing either the catchiest or simply the most repetitive refrain melody on the album, is marked as a «Blackmore/Night» composition, but I couldn't believe for one moment that that melody was invented by Ritchie — it just sounds like a melody that must have been in good use in village dance traditions for at least half a millennium or so.

 

Anyway, this is not the point. The point is that, despite some inevitable filler (again, it runs over an hour, when some of the more same-sounding tracks could have been trimmed), Fires At Midnight crackle with more enthusiasm than the previous two records, and some of that enthu­siasm even rubs off on Lady C. — she sounds positively glowing on the weird Anglo-Japanese hybrid ʽBenzai-Tenʼ, an ode to a Buddhist goddess sung with Sherwood Forest harmonies (I count this as Blackmore's personal revenge on the world of J-Pop). While it would be too much to talk of stylistic revolutions or uncovered musico-semantic depths, Fires At Midnight finally fulfills the original promise, and honestly, professionally, and creatively delivers «Ersatz Enter­tainment», an embarrassingly guilty pleasure if there ever was one. Thumbs up and an overall recommendation — but do promise to at least check out Gryphon as a proper antidote for the cheap thrills offered by our little travelin' minstrel show.

 

PAST TIMES WITH GOOD COMPANY (2001)

 

1) Shadow Of The Moon; 2) Play Minstrel Play; 3) Minstrel Hall; 4) Past Times With Good Company; 5) Fires At Midnight; 6) Under A Violet Moon; 7) Soldier Of Fortune; 8) 16th Century Greensleeves; 9) Beyond The Sunset; 10) Morning Star; 11) Home Again; 12) Renaissance Faire; 13) I Still Remember; 14) Durch Den Wald Zum Bachhaus; 15) Writing On The Wall.

 

I do not have much to say about this live album, recorded at a May 2002 show in Groningen, except this: the only real reason for Blackmore's Night to exist is in its live incarnation. It's not as if their live performances were much less stiff than studio ones — it is simply that this particular type of music, all these medieval dances and feel-good ballads, are «party music» by definition. This shouldn't even be played in clubs or concert halls: this should be played in pubs, next to those long wooden tables, creaking and groaning from the weight of roast pigs, stuffed rabbits, fresh fruit, wine bottles, and whatever else there can be found on your average Brueghel painting. And nobody should be listening, of course, leaving it to the minstrel to command attention by singing it ever so loud, proud, and with boundless energy...

 

Somehow this only struck me when listening to these live renditions of songs from the duo's first three albums — performed quite faithfully to the originals, but in an even more «pseudo-authentic» setting, as Blackmore very rarely uses the electric guitar (even the outro solo on ʽFires At Midnightʼ is replaced with acoustic passages), and the listeners' attention is frequently focused on violin improvisations from one of the band's members. There is an implicit (sometimes ex­plicit) call for everyone to join in — the clapping and stomping starts with the very first perfor­mance and is then renewed on every second or third song. This is not «Folk Music» as a carrier of the Sacred Heart, or of Sanctified Traditional Wisdom, or even of Pure Beauty, as folk revivalists sometimes envision it. This is simple, robust, healthy entertainment to help that mug of ale go down easier and that leg of lamb digest with extra juice.

 

All the more respect to the band for really putting some work in this, especially Candice: she may not be a great singer, and her stage image may be too forcedly cartoonish, but what she is capable of doing, she is totally giving out 100% — no bum notes, no trying to sing outside of her range, and a very hearteningly welcome, unpretentious attitude that should disarm any criticism. As a side bonus, Ritchie re-arranges two golden oldies for her, the Deep Purple ballad ʽSoldier Of Fortuneʼ (where she is very welcome in the place of David Coverdale) and the Rainbow rocker ʽ16th Century Greensleevesʼ (where nobody can replace Ronnie James Dio, but she does not even try to compete with him on the song's ferocious "we will dance around the FIRE!" coda — al­though it is fun to see her add a little bit of snarl every now and then, so contrary to her regular image). Additionally, on ʽGreensleevesʼ Ritchie even agrees to brandish the old axe: the main melody has been funkified, and its original riff deleted (quoted just once for the song's coda, to be precise), but at least he can still deliver these maniacal leads like few others can.

 

No wonder, then, that it all culminates in ʽHome Againʼ, performed here with a far greater sense of purpose than in the studio version — even if you do not like this stylistics in general, it is hard not to get caught up in the overall merriment, so contagious is the laughter in Candice's voice. Yes, there is also a small share of «intimate» performances (ʽI Still Rememberʼ), but usually they function as «breathers» (along with several instrumentals showcasing The Master), allowing the audience to get some rest before getting them back up on their feet again. And then the show is over with a rip-roaring version of ʽWriting On The Wallʼ, stripped of its rather unsettlingly mo­dernistic production, although the disco bassline is still naggingly hanging out there.

 

Bottomline: if you have no interest in a detailed assessment of the ups and downs of the first stage of Blackmore's Night, Past Times With Good Company is your best bet. The setlist contains almost all the relevant highlights, performed at least as well as in the studio and some­times better. The band and the audience connect totally in their little medieval fantasy game. The sound quality is perfect. And if you enjoy it with a roast leg of wild boar and a keg of mead on a pleasant European evening, the experience is so complete, you'll never want to get back to the 21st century again. Thumbs up.

 

GHOST OF A ROSE (2003)

 

1) Way To Mandalay; 2) Three Black Crows; 3) Diamonds And Rust; 4) Cartouche; 5) Queen For A Day (part 1); 6) Queen For A Day (part 2); 7) Ivory Tower; 8) Nur Eine Minute; 9) Ghost Of A Rose; 10) Mr. Peagram's Morris And Sword; 11) Loreley; 12) Where Are We Going From Here; 13) Rainbow Blues; 14) All For One; 15) Dandelion Wine.

 

These are the wond'rous and enchanting surprises that await ye on the fourth studio album by Ritchard, Lord of Blackmore, and his Lady Candice of Hauppauge.

 

Number one: two of the tracks are credited solely to Lady Candice, which is a first in Black­more's Night history, and either reveals a drastic increase in self-confidence on the part of the lady, or a drastic increase in self-sacrifice on the part of the lord. Not that it makes any big dif­ference, because she used to write the lyrics anyway, and the melodies of both ʽThree Black Crowesʼ and ʽIvory Towerʼ are completely in the traditional ballpark — no serious compositional input here to speak of.

 

Number two: the album is being «modernized» by featuring cover versions that are, this time, credited not to old-time kings and baroque composers, but to Joan Baez (ʽDiamonds And Rustʼ) and Ian Anderson (ʽRainbow Bluesʼ). The former is a misstep, because it would take a bit more than Candice Night to outsing Joan Baez — and the original was so personal anyways that if we have to hear a cover version, it should rather be one of those wild wild stylistic reinventions, like the Judas Priest rendition. The latter is okay: ʽRainbow Bluesʼ was a minor folk-pop ditty for Jethro Tull in the Warchild era, and this straightforward interpretation with wailing electric leads might even trump the original in terms of energy.

 

Number three: ʽAll For Oneʼ is a tightened-up, watered-down English-language rendition of the traditional Breton drinking song ʽSon Ar Chistrʼ, which you can easily hear in a more authentic form, for instance, on the debut album of Alan Stivell (Reflêts). The shawms and electric solos help clear up some of the repetitiveness, and the tightened, «normalized» rhythmics helps make the song more catchy, although, of course, purists will want to drown the performers in their own vomit — but then again, what true purist would last long enough to still want to listen to Black­more's Night as late as 2003?

 

Number four: ʽWhere Are We Going From Hereʼ is a lonely, stately, plaintive ballad on which Lady Night asks the title question as if she wanted you to provide her with the answer. Funny thing: here we thought that the two protagonists had found their coveted happiness, by being financially and spiritually free to dress up as Robin Hood and Lady Marian and revel in their idealized reality, yet here they are complaining that "some things don't go as they're planned" and that "silence answers our cries". Unless this merely reflects a case of Blackmore's personal cobbler having messed up with the lord's favorite pair of boots, you could almost swear they were trying to make a serious social statement here.

 

Number five: the longest, grandest, and most pompous song here is ʽWay To Mandalayʼ, which was maybe inspired by Candice reading herself some Rudyard Kipling (I seriously doubt the option of Blackmore's Night ever touring in Burma), although these lyrics sure ain't no Kipling, and this melody sure don't seem particularly influenced by traditional Burmese music. Like everything else here, it is a very straightforward piece, and goes down best as inoffensive, quickly forgettable background music.

 

This just about concludes the list of possible things to say about Ghost Of A Rose. As for a ge­neral assessment, all I can say is that it is a very smooth and formulaic product — taking very few chances even compared with the previous albums. Each song is pinned to exactly one, sometimes two musical ideas; guitar solos are used sparingly, and repetition is no more simply the word of the day, but it is now quite aggressively the word of the day.

 

If Ritchie had himself a time machine and could transport back to the 16th century with all of his band and all of his amplifiers, he'd be a smash success in the little villages and the working suburbs with this stuff. As it is, «demanding» listeners will skip this «cheap­ness» in favor of sterner and more challenging folk exercises, and «simple» listeners won't give it a chance because it has no technobeats. (For some strange reason, the only place where the record charted higher than Fires At Midnight was Switzerland — even though, as far as I remember, there was no yodeling anywhere in sight. Perhaps it was just an accidental matter of a really hot night in Zurich or something.)

 

THE VILLAGE LANTERNE (2006)

 

1) 25 Years; 2) Old Village Lanterne; 3) I Guess It Doesn't Matter Anymore; 4) The Messenger; 5) World Of Stone; 6) Faerie Queen; 7) St. Theresa; 8) Village Dance; 9) Mond Tanz / Child In Time; 10) Streets Of London; 11) Just Call My Name; 12) Olde Mill Inn; 13) Windmills; 14) Street Of Dreams; 15*) Once In A Garden.

 

It is reasonable to accelerate a bit with these reviews, since Ritchie and Candice are so admirably steady in their approach that stylistic divergences between Ghost Of A Rose and The Village Lanterne (yes, with a final orthographic -e all right, although it may be worth noting that, in contrast, the presence/absence of the article the is oddly fluctuating between various releases) are kept to a barely distinguishable minimum. Perhaps the most curious addition to the lineup here is Anton Fig on percussion, the drummer from David Letterman's house band. This really gives the drums a more fluent, African style (lots of bongos, among other things), which only goes to show how much Ritchie really cares about «authenticity», but it is useful to be reminded every once in a while that this whole project is a multi-colored «fantasy», not some scientific recreation of stark medieval realities. Betcha didn't know Ritchie's boots are really made in China, did you?

 

Cover material this time around includes Ralph McTell's ʽStreets Of Londonʼ (a little over­saturated with woodwinds, but we will assume they are just trying to make it more baroque: Can­dice does a good job conveying the friendly melancholy of the original), and Joan Osborne's ʽSt. Teresaʼ, here transformed into an electric rocker with a much faster tempo, and adorned with one of the album's most blazing (though fairly unexceptional for Blackmore) solos. The most contro­versial cover, of course, will be Deep Purple's own ʽChild In Timeʼ — not only does Ritchie dare to integrate it into one whole with his own merry instrumental dance number (ʽMond Tanzʼ), but he desecrates the holy of holies by actually letting Candice assume the duties of Ian Gillan, which she is unable to do due to the natural weakness of her voice, so, wisely, she does not even try to «scream» the scream-chorus, but instead, just lets all the aah-aahs and ooh-oohs flow calmly and naturally. Even so, there is nothing particularly interesting or newly inspiring about this rearran­gement — and legions of outraged fans, even now as you are reading this, are pouring out their vitriol at its live performances on Youtube, joining the ranks of the freshly formed «Protect The Ian Gillan Legacy From Green-Clothed Ladies With Ample Bosoms» society.

 

Oh yes, there is also a cover of Rainbow's ʽStreet Of Dreamsʼ here — actually, two covers: one of the bonus tracks is an alternate version with Joe Lynn Turner himself contributing guest (host?) vocals — and this one might even be an improvement on the original, stripping it from the excesses of Eighties' production. Besides, while I'd never take Candice over classic-era Gillan, taking Candice over the cheap bathos of Joe Lynn Turner is a far more seductive proposition. In fact, re-recording the entire post-Dio Rainbow catalog with Blackmore's Night would, on the whole, be much more useful than doing the same with the old Deep Purple catalog.

 

As for the originals, there are a few catchy folk-rock creations here like the galloping ʽI Guess It Doesn't Matter Anymoreʼ and ʽJust Call My Nameʼ; a couple nicely harmonized ballads like the opening ʽ25 Yearsʼ and ʽFaerie Queenʼ, the latter with a special dance coda; a stupid-sounding drinking song (ʽOlde Mill Innʼ — where ʽAll For Oneʼ was about drinking, fighting, and dying, this one is just about drinking, drinking, and drinking some more); and some more of those pretty and thoroughly interchangeable acoustic Blackmore instrumentals. For those who have been waiting, the goods have been honestly delivered as expected. For those who have not, no reason to begin now, unless you have a fever, and the only prescription is more shawm.

 

WINTER CAROLS (2006)

 

1) Hark The Herald Angels Sing/Come All Ye Faithful; 2) I Saw Three Ships; 3) Winter (Basse Dance); 4) Ding Dong Merrily On High; 5) Ma-O-Tzur; 6) Good King Wenceslas; 7) Lord Of The Dance/Simple Gifts; 8) We Three Kings; 9) Wish You Were Here; 10) Emmanuel; 11) Christmas Eve; 12) We Wish You A Merry Christmas.

 

A Christmas album from Blackmore's Night, come to think of it, was inevitably happening, so the only relevant question in expecting its imminent forthcoming would be: «Will they or will they not be featuring a new version of ʽHighway Starʼ, with Candice Night singing, ʽNobody's gonna take my sleigh, I'm gonna race it to the North Poleʼ?»

 

Apparently not, and this here is a rather loyal, no-shock-value-whatsoever, and courteously brief collection of hymns,  carols, covers, and just a couple original numbers, in keeping with the 21st century understanding of the «Christmas album» (adding one's own individual twists rather than just keep recording new versions of ʽRudolphʼ and ʽWe Three Kingsʼ 'til eternity). So it pretty much sounds like you'd expect it to sound — Ritchie's medievalistic guitar, Candice's friendly, unexceptional vocals, and lots of baroque overdubs.

 

You do get to hear the lady sing in Hebrew, with the band paying tolerant tribute to Hanukkah (ʽMa-O-Tzurʼ — sic, instead of the required ʽMaʽoz-Tzurʼ, but Lord Blackmore ain't the one to be stopped by trifling orthography problems), but other than the lady's struggle with pronunci­ation, arrangement-wise, this is not one iota different from the rest (well, actually, the old hymn itself was written in the German rather than Near Eastern tradition, so that is hardly surprising). You also get to hear Sydney Carter's ʽLord Of The Danceʼ, which I, shamefully enough, only originally knew from the cuddly Donovan cover — even though Donovan actually transformed the song from its hymnal incarnation into an endearing kiddie tune, whereas Blackmore and Night stick to the solemn choral interpretation.

 

To fill up empty space, they also include ʽWish You Were Hereʼ from Shadow Of The Moon (not a «re-recording», as some sources incorrectly state, but the exact same version), and repeat each chorus on each song a couple dozen extra times — ʽLord Of The Danceʼ, ʽChristmas Eveʼ and others are all plagued by repetitiveness, and the short closing number ʽWe Wish You A Merry Christmasʼ is nothing but exactly that, really. And if you ever tried to insinuate that the old standard ʽDing Dong Merrily On Highʼ is really a song about sex (ding dong), drugs (on high), and rock'n'roll (merrily), well, there's nothing to confirm this in the actual execution.

 

By all means, the record is eminently skippable, but it does fill its own niche, because whoever actually bought the whole thing and, in his or her mind, had already been dwelling in Sherwood Forest and/or Nottingham Castle with Kevin Costner and/or Alan Rickman for almost a decade, now finally gets to spend Christmas in the perfect way possible — playing Winter Carols from dawn till dusk until the herald angels stop singing. For everybody else, the record will be point­less, but Blackmore's Night is not an ensemble that panders to the hoi polloi: in terms of primal enjoyment and accessibility, its intended audience is only the entire Christian (and, this time around, Jewish) world, former Christians who celebrate Christmas without believing in Christ included — just a few billion people or so, most of whom ended up not buying this record by sheer accident of providence, or so we will have to assume.

 

SECRET VOYAGE (2008)

 

1) God Save The Keg; 2) Locked Within The Crystal Ball; 3) Gilded Cage; 4) Toast To Tomorrow; 5) Prince Wal­deck's Galliard; 6) Rainbow Eyes; 7) The Circle; 8) Sister Gypsy; 9) Can't Help Falling In Love; 10) Peasant's Pro­mise; 11) Far Far Away; 12) Empty Words.

 

The only principal difference here stands out in the credits: where in the past we had at least half or more of the songs starkly credited to «Blackmore, Night», here the same convention is obser­ved only on a small handful of tracks. The rest are either listed as straightahead covers, or pre­ceded with a «traditional» disclaimer, as if, after all these years, conscience had finally caught up with Ritchie and he decided to openly admit that he did not, in fact, write all these melodies. Most people knew that already, of course — that he is much more of an arranger and «adapter» than an independent composer in his own rights — but it is nice to see him coming out with this new­found humility as the years go by. Now how about going all the way and including Vince Wallace in the author list for ʽChild In Timeʼ?..

 

Alas, humility and entertainment do not always go hand in hand, and at this juncture, Black­more's Night seems to be running out of the last puffs of steam. The best song on the album, and the only one fit for repeated listening, as far as I am concerned, is ʽLocked Within The Crystal Ballʼ, a modernized take on the old medieval song ʽStella Splendensʼ from the 14th century «Libre Ver­melle de Montserrat», one of the earliest surviving manuscripts of folk-styled hymns. Yes, people could really write awesome songs back then, and Ritchie and Candice are quite inspired by the experience of re-inventing this golden oldie for modern times — giving it a stern galloping tempo and extra vocal hooks: Candice's "...locked within the crystal ball" is a fine case of matching the «doom» of the lyrics with the «doom» of the vocal melody (although the «doom» is anything but tragic — serious, inescapable, but not catastrophic), and Ritchie's extended guitar duet with Candice has an honestly hypnotic quality to it. I only wish they'd left the song keyboard-free, because all this synthesizer crap only enhances the cheese effect — why not a good old Ham­mond organ instead, at the very least?

 

Nothing else on the record even comes close in terms of power. The straightforward covers are rotten — the old Rainbow ballad ʽRainbow Eyesʼ is grossly overproduced, and hardly works at all, devoid of the intimate setting of the original; and they do yet another gallop-tempo rendition, this time of ʽCan't Help Falling In Loveʼ — inventive, for sure, but there is a goddamn reason why this song used to be slow: the rushed tempo and bombastic onslaught of the melody make it look like a case of «love on saddleback». What's up with all the hurry? Courting is supposed to be a delicate process, and here all that's missing is the crack of the whip.

 

Except for another fast-paced Russian folk dance (ʽToast To Tomorrowʼ) that really does not fit in with Candice's vocal style, the rest of the songs just sort of diffuse in one another — ballad upon ballad, atmosphere over hooks without any unpredictable twists. This is a background against which even a corny mutilation of ʽCan't Help Falling In Loveʼ will begin to look attrac­tive, and a clear sign that the dynamic duo finally ran out of dynamics. Only the staunchest fans, seduced to the death by Candice's faux-medieval sexiness and/or willing to waste a lifetime dis­secting every Blackmore lick ever played, will embrace Secret Voyage as thoroughly as the duo's first three or four albums — the rest really need not bother beyond a brief acquaintance with ʽCrystal Ballʼ. There is almost nothing here but self-repetition and atmospherics, and I do not understand why in the world I would need to listen to Ritchie repeating himself, or to praise a record for the kind of atmosphere that I «tolerate» rather than «enjoy». Sure, they may have produced enough tracks to supply the complete alternative soundtrack to Game Of Thrones, but in the end, quantity decisively won over quality, so a thumbs down it is.

 

AUTUMN SKY (2010)

 

1) Highland; 2) Vagabond; 3) Journeyman; 4) Believe In Me; 5) Sake Of The Song; 6) Song And Dance; 7) Cellu­loid Heroes; 8) Keeper Of The Flame; 9) Night At Eggersberg; 10) Strawberry Girl; 11) All The Fun Of The Fayre; 12) Darkness; 13) Dance Of The Darkness; 14) Health To The Company; 15) Barbara Allen.

 

It looks as if Blackmore's Night are running out of inspiration for their album titles even faster than they are running out of songwriting ideas. Autumn Sky? What next, Winter Snow? Sum­mer Rain? Springtime For Hitler? Hmm, come to think of it, it might only be a matter of years before we hear a tenderheart Candice Night cover of ʽTomorrow Belongs To Meʼ — isn't that just the sort material that'd seem tailor-made for the lyrical duo?

 

Okay, that first paragraph was a bit nonsensical and maybe even in bad taste, but it is only be­cause I keep on running out of meaningful things to say about these records. And Autumn Sky is the very first LP by Blackmore's Night that does not feature even one distinguishable highlight. Of the endlessly interchangeable series of medievalesque ballads and baroque instrumentals, only ʽJourneymanʼ stands out, but in a bad way: it is a cover of a song by a Swedish folk-pop band, Nordman, borrowing their campy trick of merging a village dance melody with an electronic beat to a thoroughly embarrassing effect, almost as cringeworthy as ʽWriting On The Wallʼ on the first album. Next time we gather round the campfire, ladies and gentlemen, don't forget to bring along your trusty sampler — we don't want to give out the impression that we're still living in the Dark Ages, do we? Just imagine if Robin Hood's merry band had access to electronic drums...

 

There is yet another cover of another Swedish folk-pop band here — ʽHighlandʼ by One More Time, not as distinctively slap-in-your-face and somehow managing to evoke a bit of ABBA and a bit of stern Viking metal at the same time (the former mainly through Candice's vocal styliza­tions, and the latter through its anthemic, solemn pacing), but still fairly flat and dull, never quite fulfilling the promise of taking you up into those highlands. I suppose we should be grateful to Ritchie for digging out these obscure bands for us to deepen our knowledge, but the songs do not truly make me want to rush out and immerse myself in the contemporary Swedish folk-pop scene, or in any contemporary folk-pop scene, for that matter.

 

Even more disturbing, though, is the presence of a bunch of ballads like ʽBelieve In Meʼ, appa­rently self-written and rather modestly arranged — but their melodic foundation is that of a generic power ballad, meaning that the songs could have just as well been written by Diane Warren, and I could just see them delivered wild-and-loud on stage by a leotard-clad Cher, with smoke, fireworks, and ecstatic audience members setting each other on fire with their lighters and putting the fires out with rivers of tears. A power ballad like that is usually nauseating; but take the power out of the power ballad and what you're left with is just Dullsville.

 

Likewise, there is no doubt in my mind that Ritchie and Candice love Ray Davies' ʽCelluloid Heroesʼ — but goshdarnit, the song was never anything special as a piece of musical composition: what made it unforgettable was Ray's delivery, that hard-to-catch naïve tenderness in his voice as he managed to profoundly convey «a kid's affection» for each of the listed Hollywood heroes. Candice is friendly, too, but she just sings the words like a standard pro, and there is no special charisma here, none of that «little-man-comments-on-shadows-of-heroes» idea that made the song into one of the last Kinks classics.

 

Returning to the opening paragraph, I will let you in on a thoroughly unkept secret: they actually named the album after their daughter, Autumn Esmerelda Blackmore, born that same year and receiving her first musical gift from her happy parents three months later. That might actually explain things a bit — it is perfectly understandable that making good music was not the Black­more's first priority in 2010 — but it does not explain why they did not slap on an honest dis­claimer sticker, saying «for our adorable little offspring» and saving the common folks from yet another inevitable disappointment. Thumbs down.

 

A KNIGHT IN YORK (2012)

 

1) Locked Within The Crystal Ball; 2) Gilded Cage; 3) The Circle; 4) Journeyman; 5) World Of Stone; 6) The Peasant's Promise; 7) Toast To Tomorrow; 8) Fires At Midnight; 9) Barbara Allen; 10) Darkness; 11) Dance Of The Darkness; 12) Dandelion Wine; 13) All The Fun Of The Fayre; 14) First Of May.

 

Another live album, and about as exciting as the pun they chose for the title (not very funny even if we forget that Ritchie is, stereotypically, a «traveling minstrel» rather than a «knight»). The difference this time is that, for some reason, Ritchie and Candice seem to believe that their new stuff is of just as high a quality and in just as much demand as the old stuff. The second belief may be indirectly supported by the warm welcome that they receive from their York audience (the show was recorded in 2011 at the Opera House there), but the first belief had always been questionable, and these live renditions of selections from Secret Voyage and Autumn Sky do not really make a serious effort to confirm it. On the whole, there are just four things I'd like to say about the album, and then we'll make no effort to forget it.

 

First, there is such a thing as «too much friendliness», and the sheer amount of honey and sugar dripping off the lady's tongue and diffusing out of all the rest of her pores as she cuddles and pampers the audience quickly becomes unbearable. Perhaps they intentionally set it up in sharp contrast with Ritchie's classic image of a brutal, antisocial beast, but in that case, it would have been more fun if he periodically whacked some poor slob in the front row over the head with his mandolin, or at least put that pair of boots to good use. As it is, all we get is one end of the story, and occasionally it begins to sound as if this were your loving, caring, understanding mother talking to you from the stage rather than a performing maiden. (To be fair, Candice was a mother, and talking about her little daughter makes up for a large portion of the banter, but I'd rather prefer to congratulate her on the occasion in a separate story).

 

Second, ʽLocked Within The Crystal Ballʼ remains a great song, and so does ʽFires At Midnightʼ, the only nod to their more-than-recent past on the album that glaringly dwarves all of its sur­roundings. I understand that they did not want to duplicate and triplicate their live catalog, but still, two or three more classic oldies like ʽHome Againʼ couldn't hurt.

 

Third, ʽToast To Tomorrowʼ, the Russian dance tune from Secret Voyage, is unpredictably merged with a section off Lady GaGa's ʽBad Romanceʼ, as Candice announces that they have a «special guest from another universe» with them tonight. No, Lady GaGa does not make an actual appearance (not her caliber, apparently), and the joke seems like a silly attempt to either cash in on a modern trend or to send up a modern trend (not funny, considering how much Black­more's Night themselves are in need of being sent up), but it does remind you that at the heart of ʽBad Romanceʼ lies a rather generic gypsy dance melody, and that, in a way, everything is con­nected, and nothing is really new under the sun, and from that point of view, it even makes sense to listen to a Blackmore's Night album every once in a while.

 

Fourth, the show is concluded with a cover of the Bee Gees' ʽFirst Of Mayʼ that, if this is at all possible, is made to sound even slower, sweeter, sappier, and more sacramental than the original (and the original was one of the sappiest Bee Gees songs from their early classic period). I have no witty comment on this point — think of one yourself — but it does make me wonder if this is not some sort of veiled pass at Barry Gibb. Everything right in the family, Candice? No marital problems? Please to remember that Barry is not available at the moment, since Linda Gibb seems to be doing all right...

 

...anyway, A Knight In York is a good proposition for anybody who sees no distinction what­soever between any random studio record by Blackmore's Night (and I can see where that could be possible), but it is so far removed from my ideal vision of a live album that I have to express it formally: thumbs down, that is.

 

DANCER AND THE MOON (2013)

 

1) I Think It's Going To Rain Today; 2) Troika; 3) The Last Leaf; 4) Lady In Black; 5) Minstrels In The Hall; 6) The Temple Of The King; 7) Dancer And The Moon; 8) Galliard; 9) The Ashgrove; 10) Somewhere Over The Sea; 11) The Moon Is Shining; 12) The Spinner's Tale; 13) Carry On... Jon.

 

The truth is slowly oozing out: Blackmore's Night are going to keep on releasing albums until they have rearranged and re-recorded every single Rainbow song. And since they only do one old Rainbow song per album, on the average, their program seems to be fully set up until 2050, by which time Ritchie will be one hundred and five years old and little children will be calling him Gandalf. Candice Night, of course, will stay young and pretty forever, and be revered as yer average local elf-maiden: beautiful, stately, and boring.

 

In the meantime, Dancer And The Moon is fifty-three more minutes of treated medievalistic schmaltz, completely obedient to the formula. Just check the song titles — all the keywords are in place: "dance", "moon", "sea", "minstrel", "lady", and even "troika", continuing Ritchie's and Candice's love with a pedestrian-legendary vision of Russia, as thoroughly fake and corny if you even begin to mistake it for «the real thing» as everything else about this duo. "Where the snow lies so deep you can't even see the sun, run, my troika, run". Yeah right. When they incorporated elements of "Polyushko-pole" in their compositions, it was at least imaginative — this approach, however, warrants a giggle at best.

 

Victims of plunder now include Randy Newman (ʽI Think It's Going To Rain Todayʼ, replete with plastic synth riffage) and Uriah Heep (ʽLady In Blackʼ) — my attitude towards those guys is well known, so I don't mind them using material that was quite corny in the first place, but still, «tell me your choice in covers and I'll tell who you are». There is also a final moody «Euro-blues» instrumental called ʽCarry On... Jonʼ, whose title looks suspiciously similar to Bob Dy­lan's ʽRoll On Johnʼ from the previous year's Tempest — although this particular instrumental, melody-wise, sounds not so much as a potential tribute to John Lennon as, rather, like a poten­tial tribute to the much more recently departed Gary Moore. And it probably goes to show just how stale Ritchie has become in his choice of chords that I find myself far more interested in the brief grumbly organ solo than in Blackmore's guitar work.

 

Ultimately, the focus here is on the title track — another anthemic gypsy-dance number in the vein of ʽHome Againʼ, modestly catchy, but very clichéd with its hey-hey-heys and perusal of the same light-up-your-senses cuddle that has long since lost all taste — and on ʽSomewhere Over The Seaʼ, taken first as a slow, gallantly waltzing ballad and then immediately redone as an electronic dance number (ʽThe Moon Is Shiningʼ), so as to please grandfathers and grandchildren alike: another cheap, tasteless move on the part of a duo that seems to be losing the last shreds of decency and credibility.

 

Perhaps these paragraphs have given you the impression that Dancer And The Moon is a total embarrassing disaster next to the relative success of Shadow Of The Moon and other early records — well, not really, because that impression is much exacerbated if you listen to them all in chronological order. Taken on their own, all these albums follow more or less the same musi­cal / artistic philosophy: ultimately, they pander to the «novice attitude» of the pseudo-seeker who pretends, perhaps subconsciously, to be interested in «roots» and «history» and «world culture», but whose ideal understanding of such things is the movie 300. It used to be that, as long as we understood this, Blackmore's Night could occasionally be fun. But now it comes to the point that they have worn out their image, thinned out their ideas, and give us far more of this cheap ersatz than actual hooks, emotions, or viable syntheses of different traditions. The approach was questionable from the start, but it could work — and now it no longer can. Perhaps it is time to pack it in, and as an appropriate remedy, I suggest that Ritchie Blackmore become the resident guitar player for Lady Gaga, whereas Candice Night can earn an honest living singing backup vocals for the likes of Lana del Rey. In the meantime, this album gets a thumbs down — and, most likely, the same will apply to everything that comes next.

 

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS (2015)

 

1) All Our Yesterdays; 2) Allan Yn N Fan; 3) Darker Shade Of Black; 4) Long Long Time; 5) Moonlight Shadow; 6) I Got You Babe; 7) The Other Side; 8) Queen's Lament; 9) Where Are We Going From Here; 10) Will O' The Wisp; 11) Earth Wind And Sky; 12) Coming Home.

 

One thing you cannot take away from these guys — they sure are tenacious. Ritchie is pushing 70, and even Lady Candice is way past 45 now, making it a bit harder to impersonate The Bonnie Lass O'Fyvie, yet still they plough on at a steady pace, and without even the slightest inkling to step away from the formula. Most of their fans have probably already been hanged for poaching by the Sheriff's men, but still they have enough left to tickle the lower ranges of the pop charts (this one barely scraped the Top 100 in the UK), and you just got to admire that unbending will to keep Sherwood Forest green for as long as they live.

 

As for the music... who really cares? Once again, we have some odd cover choices: a sterile version of Mike Oldfield's ʽMoonlight Shadowʼ (Blackmore's flourish-heavy solo is nice, but no match for Mike's shrill aggression on the original, and is it worth commenting on whether it would be Candice Night or Maggie Reilly to win in a head-on competition?), and a thoroughly misguided take on Sonny & Cher's ʽI Got You Babeʼ — at least, if handled properly, this would give us a nice chance to finally hear The Man sing, but somehow the quirky detail that the song only truly makes sense as a duet passed them by (Candice is double-tracked on the chorus, or maybe there's some other lady singing harmony, but in any case it ain't quite the same thing).

 

Somehow they also seem to have run out of suitable Rainbow and Deep Purple songs to cover, so now they're doing the next best thing — covering... Blackmore's Night! Yes, there is an upbeat, dance-pop cover of ʽWhere Are We Going From Hereʼ from Ghost Of A Rose. No more slow country waltzing, we're rushing forward on the wings of synth loops now. No, it doesn't sound that awful (violins and Ritchie's usual baroque bits of electric guitar soloing rule the song more than elements of trendy production), but «pathetic» is probably a good word to use.

 

As for the new material, the only thing that caught my attention was the title of the instrumental ʽDarker Shade Of Blackʼ — the reference to ʽWhiter Shade Of Paleʼ being way too obvious to miss, and, indeed, this is a slow, stately tune with a prominent organ part that bears a passing re­semblance to the Procol Harum song without copying it directly. Not too memorable, impressive, or stylistically unusual, but at least a brief deviation from the usual fare — unlike everything else, with its standard yawny mix of Russian folk dancing (ʽAll Our Yesterdaysʼ), Celtic jigs (ʽAllan Yn N Fanʼ), acoustic ballads (ʽLong Long Timeʼ), and more of the same later on. As there's virtually nothing I could add to what has already been said about Dancer And The Moon, the only thing left to do is give the record the same rating — thumbs down. But do keep on rockin', you guys, on and on and on, till the night is gone and all that.

 

BLUR

LEISURE (1991)

 

1) She's So High; 2) Bang; 3) Slow Down; 4) Repetition; 5) Bad Day; 6) Sing; 7) There's No Other Way; 8) Fool; 9) Come Together; 10) High Cool; 11) Birthday; 12) Wear Me Down.

 

Blur's debut seems to have been firmly written down in history as one of those «early disaster» type records — like David Bowie's self-titled debut, or Genesis' From Genesis To Revelation: collections of tentative writings that «show promise», but are so utterly derivative in comparison with later, more self-assured and individualistic creations, that nobody except the most forgiving or the most analytical fans should really bother.

 

Indeed, Leisure is quite derivative, no objections here. The young London band «Seymour», formed in the late 1980s, naturally admired the latest in hip developments — primarily the «Mad­chester» scene and the «shoegazing» movement, anything that could combine intelligence, psychedelia, and dancing (replete with funky syncopation if possible) in the same package. As of 1991, they had no serious inclination to become special flag-bearers for their home country — in fact, Leisure sounds as if all they wanted to do was to become the latest incarnation of The Stone Roses, in slightly poppier and more immediately accessible clothing. With a small pinch of My Bloody Valentine added, if possible, for extra-artsy flavor. Something like that.

 

Given such a setting, it is no wonder that Damon Albarn himself had more or less disowned Leisure, and most fans and critics alike consider Modern Life Is Rubbish to have been the «proper» debut for Blur. The two singles, ʽShe's So Highʼ and ʽThere's No Other Wayʼ, are often excused from this anathema, since they were recorded earlier than the album, while the album sessions were fussy, hurried, and left no time for Albarn to properly care about the lyrics. But on a grand scale, there is nothing stylistically special about these songs that separates them from the overall mood of the LP — ʽShe's So Highʼ is the accurate son of Shoegaze, ʽThere's No Other Wayʼ is the pretty daughter of Madchester, and then there's all the rest.

 

Nevertheless, I have always been a moderate fan of Leisure, because even with all of its «second hand» nature (and who, really, is to say that all of the ensuing «Brit-pop» was not second hand, when you have all that lengthy line of predecessors, from the Kinks to the Jam, stretched over the previous three decades?), even with all of that, the album is already doing a good job at show­casing Blur's greatest skill: pop hooks. Call me crazy, but in terms of instant memorability, I actually count more hooklines on Leisure than on The Stone Roses — that doesn't necessarily make it the greater album, but I sure wouldn't mind if Ian Brown and his lads had included at least a couple of short, tight, snappy, catchy tunes like ʽBangʼ or ʽHigh Coolʼ on that record.

 

Not only that, but the individual trademarks of Blur's two most prominent members are also well on display: Damon Albarn's snubby-sounding, velar-inclined Luhnduhn style vocal delivery, and guitarist Graham Coxon's penchant for playing it rough and dirty, but very precise and distinct at the same time, with a terrific balance between «tone» and «melody» that the generic alt-rocker would always topple in favor of «tone». A great example is the funk-pop riff that opens and controls the majority of ʽThere's No Other Wayʼ — just the right amount of crackly distortion to add some «masculinity», but playful and colorful on the whole. Or that song that nobody ever talks about, ʽRepetitionʼ (maybe because the song title instantaneously puts everybody off) — there's some fantastic guitar work there, even if it is, indeed, repetitive, but that wailing, strained riff that goes from a viciously sustained note to a series of desperately shortened ones, is a perfect companion for Albarn's "all things remain the same, so why try again? try, try, try again" chorus (or vice versa, if the melody was written before the lyrics).

 

Already ʽShe's So Highʼ shows that Blur are perfectly natural when it comes to keeping it simple and stupid — a couple distorted guitar overdubs, an echo effect on double-tracked vocals singing "she's so high, she's so high, I want to crawl all over her", and suddenly you get yourself a bona fide contemporary psychedelic classic. You don't even need that mid-section break with Beatlesy backward solos and cloud-riding harmonies — that chorus alone is worth the ride. It is a little unusual to hear Albarn so utterly «spaced out», as if he were under chemical influences when recording his part, but that is the attitude that the song needs. He's just being spaced out by this girl, you see. She's so high, he wants to crawl all over her. Let's hope it doesn't work in real life.

 

There is filler, sure enough. ʽSlow Downʼ, for instance, has some really boring, uninspired grunge guitar work, a song that must have taken three minutes to write. The same goes for ʽFoolʼ and ʽCome Togetherʼ which sound like raw demos for My Bloody Valentine's Loveless without any of the atmospheric arrangement components that made that record so special. But for a 50-minute record, three or four filler tunes are nothing to be afraid of. It would have been worse if the longest track on the album were also filler — however, ʽSingʼ is anything but; instead, it is a beautifully morose, hypnotic mantra, one of the most expressive songs based on a one-note pattern ever written, like a dirge for one's mind, frozen numb and incapable of activity. Maybe it's their impression of the sort of music that must be playing on constant repeat in the cerebrum of comatose patients — anyway, it's better than most shoegaze I have heard.

 

By the time the album winds down with ʽWear Me Downʼ, another track whose title is perfectly suited to its leaden guitar riff and «stone tired» vocals, Leisure has done a fine job introducing Blur as a band that, while not being terribly original (yet), feels perfectly at home with currently cutting-edge pop styles — their Please Please Me, if you wish, a record that nobody has any reason to be ashamed of, fully deserving an assured thumbs up. As far as I'm concerned, easily the worst thing about it is the front sleeve. If I were a paid musical critic and had to endure looking at that tacky bathing cap, I'd probably feel forced to shoot it down, too.

 

MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH (1993)

 

1) For Tomorrow; 2) Advert; 3) Colin Zeal; 4) Pressure On Julian; 5) Star Shaped; 6) Blue Jeans; 7) Chemical World; 8) Sunday Sunday; 9) Oily Water; 10) Miss America; 11) Villa Rosie; 12) Coping; 13) Turn It Up; 14) Resigned; 15*) Young And Lovely; 16*) Popscene.

 

"He's a twentieth century boy / With his hands on the rails / Trying not to be sick again / And holding on for tomorrow". Compare this with Ray Davies' "I'm a twentieth century man, but I don't want to be here", and this makes it obvious what the big difference is between the Kinks and Blur — Ray Davies, sick of today, stares back into the past, whereas Damon Albarn, perhaps equally sick, is still determined to peek ahead into the future. Without this difference, Blur would never have become superstars in the 1990s: «anglophiles» they may be all right, yet their love-and-hate story with England is that of today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday.

 

Modern Life Is Rubbish came to be seen as the «true beginning» of Blur and one of the first proper «Britpop» records, although I sure as heck wish they'd at least called it «neo-Britpop» or something, because what are we going to do with the Kinks and the Small Faces otherwise? As far as the term itself is concerned, the key change would be seen as lyrical: Albarn borrows the patented Ray Davies trademark of writing small character portraits and impressions of everyday life in contemporary Great Britain, «localizing» his visions of boy-girl and protagonist-environ­ment relationships and, paradoxically, making it easier to empathize for anyone, British or non-British. But there are changes in the music, too, since the album only preserves a few scattered traces of the Madchester / baggy / shoegazing style of Leisure — as a rule, though, the band re­turns to a much more conventional pop-rock sound: traditional structures with improved produc­tion, so that the music can now appeal to their contemporaries and their parents alike.

 

The decision to «go quintessentially British» was brilliant: suddenly it became obvious that Blur had both the songwriting talent and a way to use it for some meaningful purpose. This is what makes ʽFor Tomorrowʼ one of the greatest songs of the decade — the combination of an unfor­gettable melodic hook, a certain nonchalant British cool, and a message with which so many people could identify: "...says modern life is rubbish, I'm holding on for tomorrow". Rummaging around in my mind right now, I cannot come up with any immediate examples of songs that would strike such a fine balance between present-day disillusionment and latter-day optimism. And that la-la-la chorus — simplistic as hell, but so invigorating, doesn't it actually make you want to get off your ass and go do something?

 

The only problem of Modern Life is that, at this stage, Blur are only beginning to get into that image, and they wouldn't really start to feel completely at home with it until the next album. To put it bluntly, Modern Life is just too damn long: even without any bonus tracks, it runs close to an hour, when records like these should not ever run over 45 minutes. I am almost certain that even some major fans might feel the same way — the difference being in what to cut out to re­duce the factor of occasional boredom. Personally, I would suggest ripping out the three-song streak of ʽOily Waterʼ, ʽMiss Americaʼ, and ʽVilla Rosieʼ if we had to go that way — but perhaps even better still would be to simply reduce some of the songs' running lengths. (One trace of their shoegaze legacy is that they still preserve these lengthy, tedious, «atmospheric» instrumental passages — ʽOily Waterʼ and ʽResignedʼ are the major culprits).

 

Once you have mentally condensed the record into less of a sprawl and more of a focused, eco­nomically painted landscape, the result commands total respect. The loud rockers with distorted guitars carry vicious fun — ʽAdvertʼ with its snappy "say something, say something else!" chorus (be sure to match the context and listen to it on headphones in the middle of an underground station, with a bunch of idiotic adverts staring you in the face from the other end of the platform); ʽChemical Worldʼ, its ironically swirling harsh riff, and anthemic chorus about "putting the holes in" that you gleefully sing along without the least understarding of what it is supposed to mean; ʽCopingʼ commits a little copyright crime by stealing the major hook from Argent's ʽHold Your Head Upʼ, but does that in good spirit — the hook was rather stern and gloomy for Argent's posi­tive message, and here Blur are using that riff for their psychotic purposes rather than cheer you up, so it's okay. Besides, who in 1993 remembered anything about Argent anyway?

 

Elsewhere, they go for direct imitations of the old Kinks/Small Faces style — ʽSunday Sundayʼ is essentially Ray Davies with crunchier guitars (but the same brass section), and the tender balla­dee­ring style of ʽBlue Jeansʼ, while melodically different from the usual Kinks patterns, still seems to hearken back to Ray's «child-like» musings. But just because Albarn and Coxon are both naturals, these songs never turn into copycat exercises: it's not as if Coxon spent hours and hours trying to decode the style of Dave Davies, and it's not as if Albarn mutated his voice to shift from his own natural pitch to Ray's much higher one. Maybe Ray Davies could have written the lyrics to ʽColin Zealʼ, which, after all, simply expands on the subject of ʽA Well Respected Manʼ (I am not so sure about the line "He's a modern retard, he's terminal lard", though), but he would have been more condescending and maybe even merciful to his assassinated charac­ter than these young whippersnappers. Fresh blood, you know.

 

Some of the expanded editions of the album add ʽPopsceneʼ as a bonus track — the band's single from March 1992 that basically announced the arrival of the «new Blur», but flopped and only came to be seen as historically significant in retrospect. I must say, though, that I have never understood what was the big deal with that song, other than it being fast and furious and a little teasing, but the chorus ("hey, hey, come out tonight, popscene, all right") is just plain stupid. In fact, I'd say there is nothing like that song on the album proper (even its tight rockers like ʽAd­vertʼ and ʽCopingʼ make more sense), and all the better for it, so there.

 

Ultimately, the record certainly deserves a thumbs up, but they are still educating themselves, and there is too much of an inspirational gap between ʽFor Tomorrowʼ and the rest of these songs to make it feel as smoothly accomplished as some of its follow-ups. A «stylistic leap», yes, but not nearly as much a «quantum leap in quality» in between the underrated Leisure and Modern Life Is Rubbish as people often make it out to be, I'd say. Still, the title alone is priceless, isn't it? Such a great discovery for all ages, and yet, seemingly, only been used once so far. I guess if the year 1993 had a legal representative, it'd probably sue Blur for libel.

 

PARKLIFE (1994)

 

1) Girls And Boys; 2) Tracy Jacks; 3) End Of A Century; 4) Parklife; 5) Bank Holiday; 6) Badhead; 7) The Debt Collector; 8) Far Out; 9) To The End; 10) London Loves; 11) Trouble In The Message Centre; 12) Clover Over Dover; 13) Magic America; 14) Jubilee; 15) This Is A Low; 16) Lot 105.

 

Probably the closest thing to a «definitive Britpop manifesto» to have gone down in history as such — although one wonders just how much that reputation is due to the now-classic image of the two greyhounds on the front sleeve. Speaking strictly in melodic terms, Parklife offers little progress beyond the earlier established style: the band takes most of its structural cues from the Beatles and the Kinks circa 1966-67, slightly bending them to reflect some echoes of the punk and New Wave era, improving upon the production and taking serious care that the lyrics con­form to modern, not retro, values. But the good news is that the killer hooks keep coming — and that the band itself thinks that they have something important to say with these hooks.

 

«Keep it simple, but not stupid» is the now-established motto, and there ain't a single Blur track on which it would work better than on ʽGirls And Boysʼ — probably the definitive Blur song in that it will be impossible to forget it once you've heard it, just once. The nagging two-note synth pattern which completely dominates the song is a perfect sense irritator, as is the robotic chorus (for better effect, all of it should be sung in one breath, which is quite a feat, and in perfect Mock­ney, without which it would lose much of the effect): part of your brain will tend to dismiss the song as an exercise in idiocy, part of it will bend towards its inherent catchiness, and still another part will perceive the thinly veiled irony, as Blur declare themselves supreme rulers of the hip young crowds of London and send up so many of these crowds' values at the same time, most importantly, the whole concept of sexual freedom in the New Age of Man.

 

Then the cynicism gets even hotter on the title track, whose melody goes around in simple, steady, repe­titive circles, just like the figurative park stroller whose casual life is described by the (mostly spoken, provided by actor Phil Daniels) lyrics — note that not a single phrase or word directly condemns or ridicules «parklife», but Daniels' rather comical, puffed-up attitude, and the song's musical impersonation of «simplistic arrogance» make it hard to perceive ʽParklifeʼ as some sort of positive anthem. Rather, it is one of those «deceitful» songs where you make a chorus so catchy, it is impossible for your stadium audience not to sing it as an anthem: "all the people, so many people, they all go hand in hand through their parklife" — nice words, right? But there is not-so-deeply-hidden contempt here, in that chorus, going all the way back to the jolly old tradi­tion of character assassination by Ray Davies (ʽDedicated Follower Of Fashionʼ, etc.).

 

This formula — a simple, effective guitar melody based on «toughly-popped» chords, spiced up with some sprinkly electronics and an imminent vocal hook in the chorus, and paired with sar­castic situation-observing lyrics — describes approximately half of the songs on the album; to the two big hit singles above add also ʽTracy Jacksʼ, ʽLondon Lovesʼ, ʽMagic Americaʼ (the latter pokes fun at Americaphilia rather than America itself), ʽJubileeʼ, and even the instrumental ʽDebt Collectorʼ, whose bourgeois-gallant waltzing gets a wholly unusual interpretation when you view it in the context of its title. In each of these songs, behind the «modern English cool» façade there is thoughtful, insightful content — and the musical arrangements are complex enough to prevent the possibility of boredom (keyboards, vocal harmonies, special effects): this is electric guitar-based pop rock, yes, but Blur sell their songs as complete multi-layered packages, not as bare-bones ideas fueled only by sheer enthusiasm and arrogance.

 

However, the songs that carefully lead Parklife over the threshold that separates «simply cool» records from «great» ones are those that add a slight lyrical touch — most importantly, ʽEnd Of A Centuryʼ, ʽTo The Endʼ, and ʽThis Is A Lowʼ, situated respectively near the beginning, middle, and end of the album and giving it three major «pivots» around which revolves all the snappy coolness. ʽEnd Of A Centuryʼ, in particular, is one of my absolute favorites — the greatest, pro­bably, of all of Blur's «compassionate» songs, an ode to all the bored and lonely people that once again honors the Kinks with its ʽWaterloo Sunsetʼ-ish harmonies and melancholic horn solos, and really cuts all the way down to the heart. ʽTo The Endʼ, on the contrary, dips into the influence pool of French pop (the band even involves Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab to sing in her native language), sounding not unlike something out of the soundtrack of Un homme et une femme, although still infected a bit too much with Blur's usual energy.

 

Finally, ʽThis Is A Lowʼ ends the album on a note that is as far removed from the opening sneer of ʽGirls And Boysʼ as possible — here, Blur plunge into full-scale psychedelic mode, yielding something deep, multi-layered, loud and screechy one moment and soothing the next moment, a song that is more Pink Floyd than Beatles or Kinks; a good example of a situation where «The British» and «The Astral» merge together in one cohesive whole, reminiscent indeed of Syd Barrett, but with its own Nineties' face.

 

There is no need to religiously adore Parklife or overrate it as the harbinger of the «Britpop re­volution» — at its core, it is really very unpretentious, just a humble tribute to the original Brit­pop, but paid by a bunch of really talented guys who, somehow, while essentially wishing to follow, must have found out, to their own surprise, that they were now in the lead. Which is, really, a pretty damn good situation in terms of creativity, and especially in terms of how well these records stand over time. In 1994, it was unclear whether Parklife would just represent a fad, but twenty years later, it sounds as fun and as fresh as if it were released only yesterday. In fact, I'd bet you anything that at least two or three records like Parklife were probably released yester­day (and the day before yesterday, and the day before that...), because Parklife has not lost its appeal or relevance in the least, and everything that has not lost its appeal or relevance gets cloned on a continuous basis these days, doesn't it? Major thumbs up.

 

THE GREAT ESCAPE (1995)

 

1) Stereotypes; 2) Country House; 3) Best Days; 4) Charmless Man; 5) Fade Away; 6) Top Man; 7) The Universal; 8) Mr. Robinson's Quango; 9) He Thought Of Cars; 10) It Could Be You; 11) Ernold Same; 12) Globe Alone; 13) Dan Abnormal; 14) Entertain Me; 15) Yuko & Hiro.

 

Sometimes Englishmen blame themselves a bit too much for being Englishmen, which might look downright odd to an outsider. In early 1967, Mick Jagger made Between The Buttons, an album largely influenced by the Kinks, delving into pure pop, music hall, and stereotypical por­trayals of London society — of which, in less than two years, he deeply repented, and shifted his focus once again to faraway American influences, with good, but very different, results. No mat­ter how many Stones fans keep demonstrating their love for that record, he still won't budge about performing its songs live. He really be ol' Delta bluesman, see.

 

Fast forward almost twenty years, and Blur hammers out The Great Escape, their most quint­essentially «English-esque» album to-date. Unlike the Rolling Stones, Blur already had been tightly associated with the Britpop revival, so you'd probably expect the band to be deeply satis­fied with the results. But no — Damon Albarn told everybody that it was «messy», and in less than two years, Blur would shift their focus to... faraway American influences. No matter how many Blur fans kept demonstrating their love for that record, Albarn still won't budge about per­forming its songs live (except maybe ʽThe Universalʼ). He really be hip-cool American indie rocker, see. Not to be stereotyped, no.

 

Of course, the band has some tough memories to shed about the record — released at the climax of the ridiculous «battle of the bands» between Oasis and Blur, which was really little more than a clever marketing strategy, designed to heat up interest in both groups, but some of the punches were real, and when The Great Escape lost in popularity and recognition to Oasis' Morning Glory (which does not mean that it was not popular on its own — it broke all the way to the top of the charts, and Blur still won the «singles battle» with ʽCountry Houseʼ), the band emerged from this somewhat depressed and feeling the need for a big change.

 

But really, we do not need to know all that history, do we? Twenty years on, The Great Escape, cleansed from its silly marketologist context, re-emerges simply as another fine collection of oh-so-British songs, engineered by a bunch of snub-nosed, delightfully evil, er, I mean, ironic kids with a great knack for powerful hooks, if not necessarily for masterful psychological insights. Let's face it, for all of Albarn's lyrical trickery, the words of songs like ʽCharmless Manʼ or ʽStereotypesʼ sound a bit silly — he is portraying caricatures, not real people — then again, that is the way of artistic licence, all the way from Charles Dickens to Ray Davies and then way be­yond the British Isles, too. Anyway, we are not here for the words.

 

Instead, we are here to admire the sheer craftsmanship in a song like ʽStereotypesʼ, which, to my ears, contains the most kick-ass intro on a Blur record ever (and Blur are quite the masters of the kick-ass intro) — Coxon's opening two-chord bang is like a stone smashing through your living-room window, soon followed by a steady hail of similar ones as the rest of the band joins in, and Albarn's even-intoned "the suburbs they are dreaming they're a twinkle in her eye..." sounds even more arrogantly poised than his opening lines on ʽGirls & Boysʼ. The entire song, guitars, key­boards, vocals, drums even, is just one big friggin' sneer at people who believe that "there must be more to life than stereotypes" (or at people who do not believe that, whatever), and although there are, of course, musically far more heavy songs in the Blur catalog, few match the sheer vitriolity of ʽStereotypesʼ, which might explain, of course, why the band, in their stadium age, has preferred not to perform it any more.

 

A few tracks down the line, they almost repeat the same formula with ʽCharmless Manʼ. By now, Blur know their la-la-las and na-na-nas well enough to know how much they matter in tying a certain song to your brain, but I think that the biggest melodic accomplishment of the song is still its rather tricky chorus, with the necessity of switching to and back from falsetto in one-syllable turns, and the climactic buildup towards the resolution, which then cascades away into the na-na-nas. The message here is utterly insignificant in light of the form — this is really pop mastery of the highest order, far higher, in my opinion, than anything Oasis ever had to offer. And then there is that same cockiness, of course, and all those mockney diphthongs employed in the pro­nun­ciation of the word «Beaujolais» — irritating to some, perversely charming to others.

 

There's lots more stuff like that on The Great Escape, even if most of the other «character-driven» songs do not seem to quite reach the same level of sharpness. ʽCountry Houseʼ, the big hit single, is, of course, immaculate, with its slightly off-beat, drunken, carnivalesque attitude. ʽTop Manʼ has those deep gravelly backing vocals (as if a bunch of Tibetan monks suddenly opted for British citizenship), and the echoes and the whistles and the mock-paranoia. Somewhat worse, ʽDan Abnormalʼ, describing either a random victim of the TV virus or Damon Albarn him­self (the title is an anagram), or Damon Albarn himself as a random victim, is written in the psycho-cool electric pop style of Revolver, and once again channels our attention through (somewhat less distinctive) na-na-nahs. Even more worsier, ʽMr. Robinson's Quangoʼ condemns big bosses in a rather mish-mashy, non-descript manner, with lots of punch but little in the way of actual hooks (with its rapid melodic changes, trumpets and jazzy keyboard parts, it seems more influenced by Zappa than the Kinks or the Beatles, but why should this band be influenced by Zappa in the first place?).

 

Thus we smoothly make the transition from admiration into the gray zone — truth of the matter is, The Great Escape, like most Blur albums, is just too damn long, and could easily have four or five songs hacked off for integrity's sake. I will not publish my ideal track list and/or sequencing here, but will simply note that the album, on the whole, gets more and more boring as it progres­ses, with a particularly sharp quality drop-off after ʽThe Universalʼ. Blame it on the 1990s and their drive for «CD-length» records, but it's not as if these records can shed off the extra weight all by themselves in the iCloud era — you will still have to do the trimming on your own.

 

Fortunately, there is still some stylistic diversity. ʽBest Daysʼ is a beautiful melancholic ballad, with a slightly late-night jazzy feel at first, later resolving into the album's most emotionally com­plex chorus (love, pity, and irony all meshed in one as Albarn warns that "other people wouldn't like to hear you if you said that these are the best days of our lives"). ʽThe Universalʼ, not really a personal favorite of mine, is still rightfully admired for its epic character — this is Blur at their most «progressive», with symphonic orchestration, glorious choirs, far-reaching lyrics, and a grand climax that, once it is over, gives the impression of having just resolved all the most im­portant problems of the universe, so it is a little weird that there are eight more songs after that. It should have certainly replaced ʽYuko & Hiroʼ as the last track, or, at least, should have been placed right before ʽYuko & Hiroʼ — the latter, with its humble homebrewed pseudo-Japanese charm, would then have functioned as a complementary «piccolo finale» after the «gran finale», like a ʽHer Majestyʼ or something.

 

In any case, I can never really decide about which Blur album is better than others, because they all have their great moments and their share of filler, obligatory by some unwritten Blur law, so in the end, this is just another big thumbs up with certain reservations. People sometimes oppose Parklife as «the happy, upbeat Britpop album» to Great Escape as «the vitriolic, disconsolate Britpop album», but this is a gross simplification: Blur are not a «radiant» band by definition, and even their happiest songs are infused with gall, if you peer sharply enough. Okay, so I guess there are more songs here about loneliness than on Parklife, but that's all relative.

 

Perhaps the barbs are a little sharper and a little more poisonous here — this is merely a matter of nuance; anyway, I am not really interested in Albarn and Coxon so much for their skills at social comment as I am interested in their songwriting, and from that point of view, The Great Escape is every bit as consistent (and every bit as sometimes inconsistent) as Parklife in peppering you with cool, sti­mulating «Britpop hooks», whatever that might ever mean in musical terms. Only the album title is incomprehensible — where is the escape in question? Who is escaping, and whatever from? If we are to take the «loneliness album» judgement at face value, No Escape would have made more sense.

 

BLUR (1997)

 

1) Beetlebum; 2) Song 2; 3) Country Sad Ballad Man; 4) M.O.R.; 5) On Your Own; 6) Theme From Retro; 7) You're So Great; 8) Death Of A Party; 9) Chinese Bombs; 10) I'm Just A Killer For Your Love; 11) Look Inside America; 12) Strange News From Another Star; 13) Movin' On; 14) Essex Dogs.

 

An album called Blur, released (seemingly) by a band named Blur and featuring (obviously) an authentic «blur» on the front sleeve, could be easily perceived as a debut — and, indeed, for Coxon and Albarn alike this was a career reboot. Having lost the popularity battle to Oasis, they cooled down towards «Britpop», and instead, decided to pursue what seemed like a more adven­turous road at the time, taking their new cues from contemporary American indie / lo-fi / avant­garde rock scene, with Sonic Youth and particularly Pavement usually namechecked as Coxon's primary influences at the time.

 

Since that whole scene has become a bit more jaded with the passing of time, and, I'd guess, far more praised by conservative critics than listened to by current audiences, this fact alone can cause plenty of skepticism. I mean, substituting Ray Davies for Stephen Malkmus as your chief musical guru? Not necessarily the wisest of choices and all. However, Blur do have two advan­tages on their hands. First, they are a pop band, and, regardless of whoever they choose to be their guiding light, be it Mantovani or Throbbing Gristle, they have no intention to stop being a pop band. Second, they are a good pop band — with a knack for catchy and meaningful pop melodies, so, regardless of what sort of tone, effect, or feedback they soak them in, the album is not going to be «over-the-top» experimental. (Check: Nothing against boldness, experimentation, and inno­vation — unless they are exclusively for boldness' and experimentation's own sake, which is a defect I have frequently associated with Pavement).

 

Anyway, few things in the Blur catalog are as awesomely cool as the beginning of ʽBeetlebumʼ, where Graham's guitar plays the part of a weird car engine, stalling at first, then revving up at a steady tempo. But whoever that «CHUNK-chook-chook-chook-CHUNK-chook-chook-chook» pattern was pilfered from, Albarn's vocal parts are pure Lennon — in one of his lazy-sleepy, yet wittily perceptive moods. The lyrics refer to sex, drugs, and not all that much rock'n'roll, as the arrangement eventually becomes more and more psychedelic and the song finally sort of explodes in a sonic kaleidoscope. The funny thing is, all of this is not as far removed from the values of Parklife and Great Escape as the album's descriptions so often make it seem — there is still something very much «British» about it all, not just Damon's vocals.

 

The story of ʽSong 2ʼ is well known: a brief musical joke that intended to parody the «grunge / alt-rock craze» of the 1990s, but was lost on most listeners, who embraced it seriously and turned it into Blur's signature song — «that ʽwoo-hoo!ʼ tune». In defense of the listeners', I am also always tempted to embrace it seriously, because it is one of the few examples of «happy grunge» that I know of. I mean, moshing along to ʽSmells Like Teen Spiritʼ is sort of a downer, when you really get down to it — being blown about the room as Albarn screams "WHEN I FEEL HEAVY METAL!..." is a completely different sensation. It's as if they were Ramonifying the genre, ma­king this heavy music as friendly as possible, and the feeling is contagious.

 

It is only after this opening one-two punch that Blur truly begins to intrude into some «weird» territory: ʽCountry Sad Ballad Manʼ is a fairly straightforward blues-pop tune in essence, but its production is lo-fi (making Albarn sound like a wretched bum from outer space) and its lead gui­tar parts are crooked and twisted, as Coxon tries to free himself from conventional chord sequen­ces and wants to become somebody like Marc Ribot, playing minimalistic dissonant bursts of notes that would seem normal for a wretched bum from outer space. It's not the epitome of catchi­ness, but it makes sense — an impressionistic musical portrait of an individual battered about by life one too many times.

 

From there on, they may go in any direction as long as there is something crooked and twisted about the chosen path. Some of the tracks rock out loud (ʽM.O.R.ʼ, ʽChinese Bombsʼ, ʽMovin' Onʼ), some reach out for the stars in a new coming of Syd Barrett (ʽTheme From Retroʼ, ʽStrange News From Another Starʼ), some continue the Lennon vibe (ʽYou're So Greatʼ sounds every bit like one of those heavily bootlegged «home tapes» that feature John strumming his guitar and trying out some freshly generated, raw-as-heck melody), some invoke a woozy drugged-out party spirit (ʽOn Your Ownʼ — hilariously, the drugged-out party is waved goodbye three tracks down the line, with ʽDeath Of A Partyʼ), some put on dark glasses, black leather, and descend into a smelly basement somewhere close to St. Marks' Place, in order to be tougher-than-tough and cooler-than-cool (ʽI'm Just A Killer For Your Loveʼ — doesn't that title alone make you shake in your boots?). There are no great melodic breakthroughs here, but on the whole, this is a classy way to refresh and reload the old Blur vibe.

 

The biggest uncertainty lies with the final track, ʽEssex Dogsʼ, an eight-minute piece of genuine avantgarde — ostensibly this record's ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ (or, rather, a condensed, slightly more melodic, version of Metal Machine Music), prudently tacked on to the end so that even if you dismiss it as a pretentious piece of unlistenable shit, you are still left with a perfectly legit, uninterrupted 48-minute album. Actually, I like some of the stuff that Coxon does with his guitar, particularly that opening riff which once again sounds like a vehicle winding up and down, stub­bornly refusing to start up properly — but on the whole, eight minutes of this stuff does look like overkill, especially coming from a band that had never properly specialized in the legacy of Lou Reed and John Cale. On the other hand, I guess that if something like ʽSong 2ʼ makes you a big star, you gotta have a nifty antidote like ʽEssex Dogsʼ on hand — play it for thirty minutes unin­terrupted at your stadium shows and nobody is going to confuse you with the Stone Temple Pilots any more. It's a dog-eat-dog world, you gotta be prepared for anything.

 

Honestly, I think this is a pretty damn good album poised for greatness, and that it still holds up very well after all those years — in fact, it might even hold up better than some of its influences, because, just like the Beatles, Blur have the capacity of «taming» those influences and adapting them to accessible purposes without compromising them. On Parklife and Great Escape, they sang catchy songs about the underbelly of society; on Blur, they make us sense that underbelly through the «ugly» musical moves, dissonance, and well-orchestrated chaos rather than the lyrics (which are often transformed into Joycian stream-of-consciousness rants) or the singing (which is often intentionally «downgraded» with lo-fi production). The shift was a gamble that could have very well failed, but it did not fail, and still deserves its strong thumbs up.

 

13 (1999)

 

1) Tender; 2) Bugman; 3) Coffee & TV; 4) Swamp Song; 4) B.L.U.R.E.M.I.; 5) Battle; 6) Mellow Song; 7) Trailer­park; 8) Caramel; 9) Trimm Trabb; 10) No Distance Left To Run; 11) Optigan 1.

 

It feels strange to me that the band did not simply disintegrate into little pieces after recording 13, and that, apparently, truly serious bickering between Albarn and Coxon did not begin until the beginning of the sessions for their next record — because in certain important ways, 13 has a very much Abbey Road-like aura to it. It is undeniably a Blur album by signature, but a weird, unsettling, aurally distant Blur album, one that seems to dictate its own terms and generate its own warped universe around it. It hasn't got any «normal» pop songs, or, more accurately, all of its «normal» pop songs are uniformly «de-normalized», but this time, they do not take their cues from Pavement or Sonic Youth. They take them from any instinctive wave that has subconscious­ly rattled their brain — in the process, creating their strange psychedelic masterpiece.

 

Actually, just for the pleasure of contradicting myself, I think that the beginning of ʽTenderʼ owes a little something to Floyd's ʽWish You Were Hereʼ — the same croaky, creaky, hideously lo-fi guitar sound announcing the beginning of the song «from the back entrance», before the band kicks in properly, with all the right recording equipment. But then the song itself, of course, is more like Blur's ʽHey Judeʼ... or is it? ʽHey Judeʼ is an anthem of consolation and encouragement; ʽTenderʼ is more like a layer-by-layer buildup of positive energy that desperately seeks to be spent but finds no relief. "Come on, come on, come on, get through it... I'm waiting for that fee­ling, waiting for that feeling to come... Oh my baby, oh my baby, oh why, oh my..." — now that I am looking at those lyrics, I think I am beginning to know what the song is about (hint: medical advice may be sought in situations like these).

 

Subsequently, ʽTenderʼ is (a) tender, (b) powerful, (c) catchy, (d) hilarious, (e) unusually com­plex for a Blur pop song, with no less than four distinct vocal melodies, on top of which we also have gospel-styled vocal harmonies (another first for the band). It is a song without any obvious genre characteristics, and its length, stately tempo, and penchant for seductive pomposity (par­ticularly when Damon, in full preacher mode, grandly intones "love's the greatest thing that we have") suggest that on 13, Blur are finally positioning themselves as «rock royalty», scaling epic heights and dwarving competition and listeners alike.

 

But nothing could be farther from the truth, as ʽTenderʼ turns out to be the most — in fact, the only — «normal» tune on the album. Perhaps it was essentially an Albarn creation or something, because with ʽBugmanʼ, Coxon and his guitar take over and rarely let go again. Industrial guitar tones, colorful feedback, dissonant notes, polyphonic overdubs — 13 is a «weird guitar lover»'s paradise, and one of the best examples of what could be creatively done with the instrument at the turn of the century, especially when you have a brain every bit as creative as, say, Adrian Belew's, but have not been blessed with equal technical chops.

 

Not that Graham isn't a tender-hearted pop lover himself, deep inside his soul — ʽCoffee & TVʼ, which is personally his to the point of getting a solo vocal spot, has one of Blur's simplest, pop­piest melodies and an unbeatable falsetto hook in the chorus (or, rather, the hook comes from the clever «falsetto explosion» of the tension accumulated in the several previous bars). The humbly murmured melody agrees well with his declaration of introversion ("Sociability is hard enough for me / Take me away from this big bad world and agree to marry me" — as far as I know, no­body has properly agreed so far), but then he still has to add a set of agonizing, vibrato-rattled, distorted guitar solos with elements of atonality to this perfectly nice and poppy melody, just to remind us that nothing is, or should be, as simple as it looks.

 

ʽTenderʼ and ʽCoffee & TVʼ are the two songs that stick in your mind easiest of all, due to their pop hooks, but liking them is not equal to liking 13 as an album. To do that, one has to develop a feel for material like ʽBattleʼ and ʽCaramelʼ — long, meandering, spaced out vamps that are any­thing but boring: Coxon and Albarn have never been masters of the drawn-out crescendo (like all them «post-rock» heros) — instead of that, they just wait for one idea to exhaust itself and then freshen things up with additional electronic effects, countermelodies, guitar freakouts, tempo changes, whatever comes into their whacky heads. On ʽCaramelʼ in particular, you get to hear echoes of not only Pink Floyd, but also Can and other «Krautrock» pioneers — but still there's a pop heart beating somewhere very deep inside, a melancholic, nearly-dying pop heart this time, as the vibrating guitar riff sings "caramel, caramel" and Albarn is brooding on the implicit issue of yet another breakup. Yes, better to brood than to eat your vitamins if it results in mindblowing music like this — Syd Barrett would be proud of his disciples.

 

As usual, the album is a little longer than it probably ought to be, and sometimes prompts con­fusing flashbacks — for instance, the basic melody of ʽ1992ʼ rides the same two-chord pattern as ʽSingʼ from their debut album, and could be said to represent a technical update of ʽSingʼ for the upcoming millennium; but sound-wise, it is much more advanced than ʽSingʼ anyway, so the real reason to complain is that it might be one lengthy psychedelic adventure too many for an album that also has ʽBattleʼ, ʽCaramelʼ, and ʽTrimm Trabbʼ on it. But 13 also has shorter, more energe­tic, yet equally bizarre highlights for you: ʽTrailerparkʼ, for instance, an exercise in moody trip-hop that creates a vaguely menacing nocturnal atmosphere with its «moonlight keyboards», but the lyrics go "I'm a country boy, I got no soul, I lost my girl to the Rolling Stones" — uh? come again? Unless Albarn's girl's name happens to be Lisa Fischer, we are going to have to assume a metaphoric interpretation for this catchy passage. Naturally, the entire album is in sort of a con­fused-depressed mode of existence, but somehow this little jab at the Stones in the context of those phantasmagorical keyboards feels particularly perplexing.

 

One major disappointment of mine has not managed to dissipate over the years: I have never liked ʽNo Distance Left To Runʼ and I do not feel any big change coming on here. It features one more brief return to «normal» mode at the end of the album, but it is really a rather clumsy and melodically uninteresting alt-rock ballad that seems to sacrifice «artistry» in favor of puffed-up «honesty» — Damon Albarn with his heart bleeding on his sleeve. Conceptually, it might work — after a series of brutal nightmares, the protagonist wakes up and summarizes his feelings in a final decisive aria — but on its own, the song is not at all representative of Blur's compositional genius, and broken hearts, might I add, come a dozen a dollar this time of the season: cynical as it might sound, nobody is interested in Albarn's breakups, we are only interested in how that affects his musical output. ʽCaramelʼ and ʽTrailerparkʼ — now we're talking here. ʽNo Distance Left To Runʼ — I'd rather have Beth Gibbons or Elliott Smith enlightening me on the issue of broken hearts, depression, and disillusionment, and prefer the album end on a more impressionistic note. ʽCaramelʼ as the last track would have been great, for instance.

 

Still, this is Blur, and Blur are never perfect, end of story. But 13 is as close as they have ever come to overriding all clichés and harnessing, rather than worshipping, all their influences. If Leisure subscribed to the adjoining cults of «Madchester» and «shoegaze», and the next three albums were all adepts of the Holy Church of Britpop, and Blur cowered before the Great and Terrible American Indie scene, then 13 simply refuses to follow any organized religion. It goes deep, gets mad, stays dark, and probably should not be played under the influence of chemical substances to avoid a really nasty trip. All in all, yet another winner, and a perfectly satisfactory conclusion to a slightly flawed, but altogether tremendously consistent career (and let us pretend, for just a brief moment, that Think Tank never existed) — a hearty thumbs up here.

 

THINK TANK (2003)

 

1) Ambulance; 2) Out Of Time; 3) Crazy Beat; 4) Good Song; 5) On The Way To The Club; 6) Brothers And Sisters; 7) Caravan; 8) We've Got A File On You; 9) Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club; 10) Sweet Song; 11) Jets; 12) Gene By Gene; 13) Battery In Your Leg.

 

Put it this way: Blur without Graham Coxon is like The Rolling Stones without Keith Richards. You wouldn't totally want to deny Mick Jagger the right to create good music without his druggy-dreary pal (and he did create some good music on his own), but it wouldn't be Rolling Stones music unless he'd manage to dig out Keith Richards' identical twin on guitar. As for Damon Al­barn — not only did he not bother at all about digging out Graham Coxon's identical twin, but he pretty much decided that Blur's next album would be all right with no guitar at all, or, at least, as little of it as possible. Who ever laid down the law about each new Blur album having to be guitar-based, anyway? Nothing about that in the recording contract, for sure.

 

The real problem with Think Tank, however, is not that it is not a «proper Blur album»: the real problem is that it is simply not a very good album, period. The Albarn/Coxon relationship was, in fact, very similar to the Jagger/Richards one in that the former partner brought in the «coolness» and the latter brought in the meat'n'potatoes. Now that there is no more meat'n'potatoes, it turns out, somehow, that «coolness», on its own, results in much more confusion than admiration. Think Tank may very well have been designed in a think tank indeed — it sizzles and bursts with creativity-a-plenty, nary a single track following in the shoes of any preceding one — but as «creative» as these compositions are, most of them are fairly meaningless, designed just for the purpose of sitting there and looking cool.

 

Interestingly, two out of three singles culled from the album had some of its least experimental and «tamest» songs as A-sides: ʽOut Of Timeʼ and ʽGood Songʼ are soft rhythmic ballads, show­casing Damon's tender-and-gentle side and even featuring a romantic Spanish guitar solo passage on the former. Actually, ʽOut Of Timeʼ has become one of the few songs here to endure, later to be incorporated into the regular Blur setlist with Graham returning — still I am not impressed, what with the rather primitive melody and Damon's inability to forge out a proper hook (even if the "you haven't found the time... to open up your mind" bit seems like an explicit melodic quota­tion from ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ). It is curious, though, that with all the «crazy» ideas explored on the album, the maximum promotion was allocated for its easily-accessible, sentimental bits: apparently, Albarn cares a lot about the «crooner» side of his image.

 

The second single, however, was ʽCrazy Beatʼ, and it is horrible. I used to think the guttural-elec­tronic "crazy beat, crazy beat, crazy beat yeah yeah yeah" bits were a parody on Crazy Frog, but apparently, the infantile Crazy Frog phenomenon only arose about half a year after Think Tank hit the stores, so we will have to assume it was Albarn's own folly. The song borrows the cool-arrogant-bastard attitude of Parklife and wastes it in a setting punctuated with hyper-moronic embellishments (intentionally ugly harmonies, guitars, and electronics) — I mean, at least ʽSong 2ʼ was honestly funny, and straightforwardly parodic, but ʽCrazy Beatʼ just has this "let's go CRAAAZY!" vibe, unfunny, mean, and manipulative. Without knowing for sure, I bet it must have been a real big hit in the clubs, but that does not make it any less stupid, only more harmful.

 

Most of the other tracks follow in the «crazy» footsteps of ʽCrazy Beatʼ, though, thankfully, few reach that level of annoyance. For ultra-extra-hipness, Albarn drove the band to Marrakesh, where they hooked up with local musicians to add a pinch of «world music» — something I have barely noticed upon first listen, to be honest, because it just does not feel as if all the elements of Britpop, electronica, and Eastern music mesh in naturally. Maybe it's all about the poorness of the mix, where frequently there is a lot of stuff happening in the background, but it all sounds like noisy garbage, or, at best, like distant echoes. Instead of «colorful», the entire record has this dirty-gray feel of the album cover, irritating and alienating rather than intriguing and mystifying. Some critics have called Think Tank «warm» and «inviting» — personally, I feel it's about as warm and inviting as a sheetmetal factory, but hey, some people like to be invited to sheetmetal factories. Get a taste of real life and all that.

 

Some of the grooves are nicely somber, like the R&B exercise of ʽBrothers And Sistersʼ (still spoiled by completely gratuitous electronic trickery), and some of the combinations work, like the lo-fi kiddie melody of ʽJetsʼ exchanging phrasing with its overweight, grumbly, distorted bassline (but why six minutes? why the out-of-nowhere sax solo?). In fact, as I said, almost every song has at least some creative idea in its favor, which is why I cannot bring myself to condemning the record. But on the whole, it is an absolute triumph of form over substance — as if with the de­parture of Coxon, the band pretty much lost its soul. They retained the will to experiment — in fact, they have developed a crazier drive for experimentation than ever — but they forgot that experimentation has to have a purpose, and even more so in the 21st century, when «crazy stuff for the sake of sheer craziness» has pretty much become a boring cliché. As time goes by, I feel less and less interested in Think Tank, when all the previous Blur albums still retain their fresh­ness and vitality to a certain degree. So much for «hipness» in all its glory.

 

LIVE IN HYDE PARK (2009)

 

1) She's So High; 2) Girls And Boys; 3) Tracy Jacks; 4) There's No Other Way; 5) Jubilee; 6) Badhead; 7) Beetle­bum; 8) Out Of Time; 9) Trimm Trabb; 10) Coffee And TV; 11) Tender; 12) Country House; 13) Oily Water; 14) Chemical World; 15) Sunday Sunday; 16) Parklife; 17) End Of A Century; 18) To The End; 19) This Is A Low; 20) Popscene; 21) Advert; 22) Song 2; 23) Death Of A Party; 24) For Tomorrow; 25) The Universal.

 

In their heyday, Blur never got around to releasing a live album, except for a highly limited issue of a Live At Budokan thing that has since become a discographic rarity. Once, however, the rift between Albarn and Coxon got partially remedied and the reunited band started delighting fans with occasional gigs at the end of the 2000s, a whole series of live albums ensued — most of them, surprisingly or not, recorded in the exact same spot: Hyde Park, London. Granted, this is probably the hipper one of the two centers of the world (the other one being Madison Square Garden, but that be Bruce Springsteen's and Billy Joel's royal domain, after all), but still, kind of weird to see not one, but two live albums from Hyde Park appear in mid-2009 (the July 2 and July 3 shows, respectively), and then Parklive follow up on them in 2012; the first two albums have completely identical setlists, and the one on Parklive is only slightly different.

 

I have the slightly easier available July 3 show available, and have also seen the Parklive DVD, which probably empowers me not to separate this text into three different reviews. Most impor­tantly, Blur ain't no Rolling Stones or Grateful Dead when it comes to live shows — in fact, I am that close to saying that they pretty much suck as a live band, or at least as a provider of live albums. For starters, I think they make very poor choices in mixing engineers, or perhaps this is just the inevitable curse of a huge open venue like Hyde Park: the sound is godawful on both the older audio and the newer video album. The guitar is too noisy, and the voice is drowning in the noise — what used to be brilliantly produced and packaged pop-rock songs is regularly reduced to unappealing, sloppy noise-rock, with all the hooks covered in sonic rubble, and the crowd noises placed way too high in the mix. Being one with the crowd is great and all, but I kinda sorta would like to hear my ʽGirls And Boysʼ and ʽTenderʼ from the mouth of their creator rather than 500,000 ecstatic English people.

 

On the other hand, it's not as if the mouth of their creator worked so efficiently in a live setting. Albarn does not look like a perfect natural when it comes to singing — in the studio, it seems as if he had to work hard to combine the necessary degree of emotionality with technique, and when he does not have that opportunity, things are not good. He can get off key, flub some key lines, and, most importantly, he can lose that cool-as-heck London sneer and replace it with a punkish power brawl, making the songs sound far more ordinary and boring than they really are. Coxon does a much better job, very loyally reproducing most of the guitar melodies and effects, but since he hardly ever tries to explore new possibilities, it all ultimately comes down to «how well has he nailed that?», and it's always well enough, but not perfect enough.

 

In the end, it all simply becomes a massive celebration of The Realm of Blur: we are supposed to kowtow and acknowledge their historic mission and spiritual value for dozens of thousands of people in the UK. I kowtow, and I acknowledge, and I am happy for everybody at Hyde Park in 2009 and in 2012, but the fact remains that there is not a single song here that I would either (a) enjoy more than the original studio version or (b) start perceiving from a slightly different angle from the original. Had this been my introduction to Blur, I would have remained totally unim­pressed, no matter how spectacular the setlist might look on paper. And speaking of the setlist, The Great Escape gets mighty snubbed once again. That is not cool: I want to hear live versions of ʽCharmless Manʼ and ʽStereotypesʼ, even if they will probably suck like everything else.

 

In addition, there are such issues as tremendously long pauses at the end of the show (usually edited out on non-bootlegs, but apparently they needed to justify two CDs), silly audience baits (when they get them to woo-hoo during the extended drum intro to ʽSong 2ʼ — I mean, seeing as how it has become their signature song and all, it'd at least be fun to see them turn it live into an extended jam polygon or something, like the Who did with ʽMy Generationʼ, but no dice), and an occasional enigmatic bit of Albarn banter: apparently, "Vote Dave! Vote Dave!" refers not to David Cameron (thank God!), but to Dave Rowntree, the drummer, who was trying to run for Parliament at the time (and no, it didn't help).

 

To sum it up: Blur are a great pop-rock band, but only a passable live band. Live playing is not one of their major strengths (not that the same criticism doesn't apply to the vast majo­rity of pop-rock bands from the last two decades, of course), and since, up to this point, their half-hearted reunions have only resulted in live albums, there has not really been a lot of sense in that reunion, other than heat Hyde Park up a couple degrees on a nice summer day. No thumbs down (there's so many great songs here, and they manage not to murder at least half of them), but no serious excitement, either. See them if you ever have the chance — a legend is a legend, after all — but for the ideal moving picture, choose a set of lip-synced videos instead.

 

THE MAGIC WHIP (2015)

 

1) Lonesome Street; 2) New World Towers; 3) Go Out; 4) Ice Cream Man; 5) Thought I Was A Spaceman; 6) I Broadcast; 7) My Terracotta Heart; 8) There Are Too Many Of Us; 9) Ghost Ship; 10) Pyongyang; 11) Ong Ong; 12) Mirrorball.

 

Okay. Hold your breath no longer. Blur have come back — with a «comeback» album. Who said miracles are bound to happen? They aren't. Most comeback albums are just that — «comeback albums», defined as «collections of songs produced when former bandmates come together for the sake of old times, fans, and money, without anything particularly fresh to say». This does not necessarily mean that the music is bad — it only means that the music does not let you discover anything new about the musicians, and that there was no reason whatsoever to wait for this to happen with one's fingers crossed.

 

At least Think Tank was Damon Albarn's noble-treacherous attempts to turn «Blur» into «The Trendy Damon Albarn Experience». Failing that, Damon Albarn went on to churn out trendy experiences all by himself. Now that he got a bit bored with that, too, Blur come together once more, in all the glory of their classic lineup — but no, they do not continue their journey from the stage where we last saw them with 13. That journey was long since terminated. Instead, what we see them do is deliver a «Certified Blur Album». Along the well-known lines of: «If you loved Modern Life Is Rubbish / Parklife / Great Escape / Blur, you'll like this». And if you do not, how can you call yourself a Blur fan, you silly person you?

 

I mean, just listen to that opening of ʽLonesome Streetʼ. Street noises, okay. Brief jazz guitar intro, okay. A rollickin' acoustic arpeggio, all right. But as soon as the entire band kicks in at 0:15 into the song, there's absolutely no mistaking that this is the Blur — the Blur of the early classic Brit-pop era. Gosh, those chords, I mean, you could feed the songs off Modern Life Is Rubbish inside a computer and it would spit out ʽLonesome Streetʼ for you. The only difference is that, unfortunately, ʽLonesome Streetʼ is completely uncatchy, which raises my suspicions even fur­ther — maybe they have been working on Blur-software all this time?

 

Admittedly, the opening number is not indicative of the entire album. And truth be told, The Magic Whip on the whole does not produce the impression that it was simply written as «yet another Blur album». No and no — on the contrary, the main flaw of this record is that it tries too hard (and ultimately fails, I'd say) to make a big statement, one that goes way beyond pure music and, because of that, does not pay that much attention to music. The record is well produced and, on the surface, looks complex and carefully detailed, but that is mainly technological: for instance, there is a lot of electronic overdubs, reflecting Albarn's digital fetish of the past fifteen years, yet somehow, they all feel a little... «autopilotish», if you get my drift.

 

Instead of writing awesome songs, what Albarn tries to do here is write songs that make big claims. Songs with titles like ʽThere Are Too Many Of Usʼ — that one, I think, would be parti­cularly embarrassing to perform in public, yet they do it and the public does not care, even if lines like "There are too many of us / That's plain to see / And we all believe in praying / For our im­mortality" could easily be construed as offensive to seven billion people, even if they may be somewhat true (but isn't truth offensive?). Songs about lonesome loneliness of the lonely loner: ʽLonesome Streetʼ, ʽThought I Was A Spacemanʼ. Songs about alienation, songs about love lost, songs of disillusionment, songs of misanthropy, and even a song called ʽPyongyangʼ, and guess what, it ain't a celebratory anthem in honor of The Great Leader. Rather, it is a song sung from the point of view of the deceased Great Leaders, and... they're lonely too, in a way.

 

All in all, you know now: The Magic Whip, from top to bottom, is an album about loneliness. Okay, so that could be a continuation of 13, much of which was about loneliness, too. But 13 was a much more psychedelic, and a much less serious experience — Whip, in comparison, is like a musical thesis from a mature half-poet, half-sociologist. And, by the way, where is Coxon in all of that? I have no idea. The songs are all credited to all the members of the band, in a fit of demo­cratic generosity, but Graham almost never sings, except a couple co-lead vocal parts, and his playing is very restricted: guitar solos are now presumably considered tasteless, and guitar riffs way too often seem to be there only to ensure that «Blur sound».

 

And so that's that: on one hand, the album is a «mature» musical treatise on how uncomfortable it feels to be alive in 2015, and on the other hand — it is an unconscious throwback to the hip and cocky days of 1993-99. ʽLonesome Streetʼ, ʽGo Outʼ, and ʽOng Ongʼ sound like they belong on Parklife; ʽNew World Towersʼ and ʽMy Terracotta Heartʼ are melancholic darknesses that sound like they belong on Great Escape; ʽI Broadcastʼ is a noisefest that could belong on Blur; and ʽThought I Was A Spacemanʼ and ʽPyongyangʼ are ghostly whisps that could be on 13. Well, something like that. But when you put them all together and extract the common invariant, it's all about the good man feeling bad and wanting to be somewhere else, or with someone else. It might be too much, perhaps, to state that Albarn is feeling like Kim Il-sun in his glass coffin, but hey, it's not my fault if he makes that kind of music.

 

The good news is that eventually, slowly, very slowly the songs might begin to pull you in. They are serious and they are intelligent, and if a band that was among the best of their ilk in the 1990s comes back together fifteen years later and decides to make a serious, intelligent album, well, it is not very likely that they will create a complete dump. The gloomy atmosphere is real, the lyrics are good, and there's plenty of juicy little details — well, like that little morose riff that Graham is playing in between the verses of ʽNew World Towersʼ, or like the funereal approach to surf guitar on the closing ʽMirrorballʼ.

 

The bad news is that, well, I dunno about you, but there are certain types of albums I wouldn't want to expect from certain types of bands, and as much as I acknowledge Blur's right to sound somber and pessimistic every now and then, I don't want a Blur album that just sounds like one big dirge, because Damon Albarn ain't no frickin' Robert Smith, much less a goddamn Nick Cave. The same guy who literally spent decades partying in and out of every trendy party in the UK and worldwide is now teaching us all a lesson in loneliness, reclusiveness, and misanthropy? Come on now, this just doesn't feel right. Ten minutes into the album, I just get this urge to tell the guy to cheer up, already — this all begins bordering on emo, if not Goth, and this is not what we needed Blur to reunite for. It ain't bad, but it doesn't quite sound right, either.

 

I do give the album a thumbs up. It is a slow grower, and it will eventually grow some more on me, I guess, though not that much more. And compared to some other «comebacks», this one at least tries to make some points, rather than just sound like an inefficient imitation of past glories. But ultimately, it is an inefficient imitation of past glories, and that casts an unlucky shadow on all the points it tries to make, and this is why I seriously doubt that The Magic Whip will ever be in many people's «top five», let alone «top three» Blur albums.

 

And oh yeah, by the way, what's up with the Chinese title? I know they recorded most of it in Hong Kong, but it's not as if there was any Chinese influence in the songs themselves — are we supposed to pat the Damon on the back for letting us know about his adoration of traditional Chinese characters? Or are they trying to boost sales in China? Oh well, at least now everybody knows that Blur is Mohu in Chinese. They probably used Google Translate anyway. It's not as if it were an album that offered particularly complex solutions to complex problems.

 

BOARDS OF CANADA

TWOISM (1995)

 

1) Sixtyniner; 2) Oirectine; 3) Iced Cooly; 4) Basefree; 5) Twoism; 6) Seeya Later; 7) Melissa Juice; 8) Smokes Quantity.

 

The full, unabridged discography for Boards Of Canada begins at least as early as Catalog 3, a tape-only recording produced circa 1987; Twoism, an EP released on tape and vinyl in 1995, is usually counted as the beginning of a «proper» recording career, since it was the only one of these early releases to have been later reissued in CD format. In any case, there's hardly any need to seek out those early rarities unless one is a seriously specialized fan of Michael Sandison and his slightly younger brother Marcus Eoin Sandison, and I am not, so...

 

Anyway, here is the deal. Melodically, Twoism is Brian Eno: minimalist electronic music with a deeply conservative harmonic structure — deconstructed Bach on transistors. The melodies are pretty, moody, and may create a feeling (perhaps illusionary) of serious depth with very limited means. However, the more precise genre is «chill-out», since on top of these ambient melodies we get dance beats, indicating practical club and party usage. (One of the tracks even bears the title of ʽIced Coolyʼ, as if they were inviting us to pigeonhole them). Subsequently, there are several possible responses: (a) ignore the beats and enjoy the atmospheric melodies; (b) ignore the atmospheric melodies and kick in to the beats; (c) try to kick in to the beats and enjoy the atmospheric melodies at the same time; (d) kill somebody because you find options (a) and (b) mutually exclusive and totally ruining your day.

 

Perhaps I am not all that qualified to make a comprehensive judgement here, but, honestly, I find myself closer to category (d) than the other three ones. I do not enjoy, nor really «get» the idea to combine music whose essence is so static and contemplative with programmed robotic beats whose essence is thoroughly dynamic and energetic. Contrasts and oppositions can be cool as heck in all forms of art, but this particular one I find irritating. Every once in a while, the beats disappear for a short spell, and I get to enjoy the duo's pretty (though, at this stage at least, not particularly innovative) iceberg-cold textures on their own, but very quickly, they reappear — and for a guy who has relatively little interest in dancing, well...

 

Sometimes they get a dark trip-hop groove going on, reminiscent of Portishead (ʽSeeya Laterʼ), with a deeply serious bassline giving more substance to the beat, but in those cases, the electro­nic canvas itself becomes a little more agitated, as the synthesizer loops are arranged in mini-crescen­dos and you can imagine the two background parts representing a calm sea with a host of scree­ching seabirds hovering over it. (Then the rhythm section could be your boat, calmly, but sternly crossing the waters). That's okay, but most of the time (ʽSixtyninerʼ, ʽOirectineʼ, etc.) the beats add nothing and detract from everything.

 

My favorite track on the entire record is the ultra-short ʽMelissa Juiceʼ — not only are the beats there reduced to a small, barely noticeable rhythmic tap, but it also features a quirky little pseudo-recorder melody with an empathetic, «whiny» twist that somehow feels very warm and humane next to all the cold-beauty-stateliness of the general melodic content. This should not be viewed as a reproach to the rest of the album, though — a drop of whiny warmth is exactly the correct amount that is needed to put the final touch on the album, like a tiny spot of yang in a huge swirl of yin. The beats are a reproach, though — and, I mean, it's not even as if they were any sort of special beats. Just your run-of-the-mill drum machine stuff that's been superimposed over the ambience at the last moment. If you are one of those chill-out types, though, you will probably enjoy it; me, I don't get it, and at this point in my life, I probably never will.

 

HI SCORES (1996)

 

1) Hi Scores; 2) Turquoise Hexagon Sun; 3) Nlogax; 4) June 9th; 5) Seeya Later; 6) Everything You Do Is A Balloon.

 

I'd like to say that Hi Scores is not «simply more of the same» as Twoism, but then I could probably create the distorted impression that Hi Scores is not simply more of the same as Two­ism, and since I do not work in the field of electronica, I am not used to creating distorted im­pressions. On the factual plain, however, Hi Scores is definitely distinct because it was the duo's first release on a real music label (Skam Records) — and from that point of view, we can most certainly excuse them for not advancing significantly, given that most people had never heard Twoism, or any of their other limited-edition releases, anyway. In fact, most of the compositions here were not particularly «new»: ʽSeeya Laterʼ is taken directly from Twoism, and others were featured on homemade records with titles like Boc Maxima prior to the label shift.

 

Even so, a thorough comparison with Twoism does show some subtle shifts. Although Hi Scores is bookmarked by some of the duo's most «becalmed» numbers in existence, the mid-part, in contrast, is harsher: ʽNlogaxʼ and ʽJune 9thʼ constitute a fairly gritty sequence, the former with its hard, harsh, metronomic beat, thumping bass, and schizophrenic vocal overdubs, and the latter with its fussy, space-objects-alert arrangement. This is not necessarily a good thing, because mo­ving away from that calm ambient atmosphere puts them in danger of losing their identity: if you played me ʽJune 9thʼ without a warning, for instance, I'd have said «Aphex Twin?» without blinking. On the other hand, if you don't feel like gently falling asleep to your electronica, Hi Scores is less «lulling» in that aspect than Twoism.

 

And even so, I have very little to say about the compositions in general. The two first ones have the same ideology as most of Twoism (ambient textures pinned to dance beats, or is that dance beats pinned to ambient textures?), then there's the two dynamic and flurry ones, and then there's ʽSeeya Laterʼ. And then, at the end, there's what probably counts as the magnum opus here, ʽEverything You Do Is A Balloonʼ, if only because it is longer than everything else, it has got a special two-minute beatless introduction, and it shows some melodic development as an additional «lead» melody gradually creeps up on us from out of the shadows. If you want me to admit that the tune may give an impressionist's impression of a balloon gracefully soaring in mid-air, well, it can, but usually for those occasions I tend to pull out my AIR albums instead.

 

On the whole, this is a nice enough demonstration of creativity, but these days, it is not easy to understand how come Boards of Canada managed to earn the trust of a real record label with this stuff — you'd have to remember that back in the mid-1990s, not a lot of people engaged in these activities, and I guess every label dealing with electronica was more than happy to have their own young, local, and gifted equivalent of Richard D. James on hand. Unfortunately, some of the «formative» stage records tend to date quicker than others, so if you want to understand the continuing reverence for BoC, I would not recommend these early EPs as a starting point; we are really not even properly beginning to get where we're going at this stage. Probably still works as random chillout fodder, though.

 

MUSIC HAS THE RIGHT TO CHILDREN (1998)

 

1) Wildlife Analysis; 2) An Eagle In Your Mind; 3) The Color Of The Fire; 4) Telephasic Workshop; 5) Triangles & Rhombuses; 6) Sixtyten; 7) Turquoise Hexagon Sun; 8) Kaini Industries; 9) Bocuma; 10) Roygbiv; 11) Rue The Whirl; 12) Aquarius; 13) Olson; 14) Pete Standing Alone; 15) Smokes Quantity; 16) Open The Light; 17) One Very Important Thought.

 

The title of Boards Of Canada's first full-length LP, finally released on a major label and soon made famous around the world, is not just a clever twist of phrase, as is the case with so many «experimental» releases — indeed, this is an electronic concept album, revolving around the idea of child­hood and even actual children, plenty of whom are captured here in field recordings and exploited for sinister Scottish purposes. Ambient synthesizers + soft dance grooves + kid vocal samples = Major Breakthrough in Modern Art, or something of that sort, as most fans and critics will be happy to tell you.

 

Unfortunately, not everyone is able to share the exuberant joy (of which there is much — I have seen plenty of reactions from people who declare Music... or its follow-up to be the best electro­nic album ever recorded, or, at least, their absolute personal favorite). The problems that were already evident with Twoism remain here exactly the way they were — spicing the grooves up with field samples does little in the way of making them more meaningful or aurally impressive. The landscape is still dominated by soft, inobtrusive, repetitive loops, sometimes reasonably short but often going on for 5-6 minutes without much in the way of development — and they aren't even «beautiful» loops, they seem more like «trance-inducing» loops, but most of the time they just put me to sleep (if I try to concentrate on them) or flush by unnoticed (if I do not).

 

In terms of musical innovation, I have not been able to spot anything that would make the re­cord seem «progressive» compared to Aphex Twin or Autechre or late-period Eno — sure, the bro­thers make their own loops and mix in their own samples, and sometimes they are pretty, but other than this vaguely original idea of making «static, paysage-ly ambient music that you can dance to» (and not all ideas of this kind are necessarily supposed to work — just look at Vanessa Mae putting technobeats on Vivaldi), the «theoretical» achievements of Boards of Canada are nothing much to write home about.

 

In terms of the «who cares for innovation when the music's so great?» line of thought, I just do not find the music so great. It is uniformly pleasant and almost never irritating (already a big plus for an experimental electronic release), but Michael and Marcus are not minimalist geniuses like Eno, and even when they declare open season on «beauty», with tracks like ʽOpen The Lightʼ whose several keyboard layers strive to create an «angelic» atmosphere, it still sounds more like a brain-manipulator gadget than a thing of sheer sensual purity.

 

On the other hand, we must also admit the possibility that it is that very quality — the fact that the band rejects «excesses», «build-ups», «prominent hooks», «cathartic moments» — which gives Music... its own advantage. If their aim was to construct a maximally relastic soundscape, they may well have fulfilled it to the max. Let's face it, if you find yourself walking through a snowy forest at night, or crossing some cooled-off desert sands, or floating on an iceberg through the Arctic ocean, most of the time (when you are not pursued by hailstorms, getting bitten by un­expectedly awakened rattlesnakes, or drowning in a storm) things are going to be fairly calm, uneventful, boring, and not particularly cathartic or epiphanic, despite all of nature's beauty. Same stuff here — ʽAn Eagle In Your Mindʼ simply moves from one icy synth tone to another, as the beats snort and scuffle around like a pack of busy rodents. As one reviewer wrote about the track's basic emotion, it's "somewhere on the border between anxiety, happiness, control, and evil" — even if I were to agree, it is precisely this border thing that makes it a little bit of every­thing, but not enough of anything. If this is a conscious artistic stance, I can understand it, but I cannot understand how it can make for great art. Not this way, at least.

 

I do like some of their sampling ideas — probably the most memorable track on the entire album for me was ʽThe Color Of The Fireʼ, where they take what seems to be a sample of a little kid diligently trying to spell out the phrase "I love you" and distort it in psychedelic fashion, while a set of chiming overdubs further enhances the «magic» aura of the proceedings. For some reason, this turns out to be quite charming and endearing: some have found the experience disturbing and frightening (because the treated voices sound like ghosts?), but I think it takes an intellectual leap to come to that conclusion — no matter how much you distort an originally natural vocal, it won't really sound frightening unless its intent was to frighten you in the first place. In any case, it is a pity that only a very small portion of the record is given over to that sort of experimentation, although, of course, much more of that would turn it into a pure performance act rather than a musical offering.

 

I have most likely missed out on some of the intended meanings behind these tracks — it's always easy to catch up on these by reading interviews with the brothers — but it is unlikely that any «explanation» will influence anybody's amount of love for the record. Likewise, it is easy to recognize the sheer amount of work that went into its construction (for instance, the tricky rhythms of ʽTelephasic Workshopʼ, combined from all sorts of natural sounds, including finger-poppin' and voice bits), but if the work does not translate into an instinctive marvel-for-the-senses effect, that work is simply wasted, period. My final judgement is that it's all okay, but the «special» status that this record is endowed with among so many fans remains incomprehensible; give me some Massive Attack over this stuff any time of day.

 

GEOGADDI (2002)

 

1) Ready Lets Go; 2) Music Is Math; 3) Beware The Friendly Stranger; 4) Gyroscope; 5) Dandelion; 6) Sunshine Recorder; 7) In The Annexe; 8) Julie And Candy; 9) The Smallest Weird Number; 10) 1969; 11) Energy Warning; 12) The Beach At Redpoint; 13) Opening The Mouth; 14) Alpha And Omega; 15) I Saw Drones; 16) The Devil Is In The Details; 17) A Is To B As B Is To C; 18) Over The Horizon Radar; 19) Dawn Chorus; 20) Diving Station; 21) You Could Feel The Sky; 22) Corsair; 23) Magic Window; 24) From One Source All Things Depend.

 

Most of the reviews here went like, "so yeah, they made an album that sounds almost exactly like Music Has The Right To Children, but who really cares to complain if it's so good?" A basic agreement with the first half of this statement on my part, then, would automatically presume disagreement with the presupposition of its second one. Once again, Boards Of Canada offer us a Modern Art Soundscape that will tremendously appeal to all those who have properly disclosed their minds towards Modern Art, as well as to many of those who like stuff just because it is Modern with a capital M (well, properly speaking, as of 2014 this is no longer a truly capital M, but new electronic records like these keep cropping up so often that Geogaddi might just as well have been released today and nobody would have noticed).

 

This here cranky old stubborn reviewer, though, still feels himself relatively immune to the seductive charms of the Lovin' Hums of Boards of Canada and their «ice-cold tones imbued with childish spirit(s)» ideology, no matter how many glowing counter-opinions he encounters. And this happens even despite a little more emphasis on the atmosphere here than on the beats — there are still plenty of beats, but they do not feel nearly as integral to the sound, perhaps because of numerous small beatless linking tracks, many of which sound like teenagers having fun with some decrepit, million-times-broken church organ in the ruins of a bombed church. Even so, this does not automatically move the record onto the «awesome» shelf.

 

Straining and overloading my brains, I could probably visualize the world Geogaddi as some sort of purgatory for dead children — a tense and nervous waiting room where nothing much happens except for waiting, although the room is divided into separate sections with their own acoustics and furnishings and micro-climates, and we lazily drift from one room to another for sixty-six minutes and six seconds (a running length suggested to the duo by Warp Records president Steve Beckett as a joke — although, in order to realize it, they had to include a 1:46 track of utter silence ʽMagic Windowʼ, inadvertently, but shamelessly ripping off John Cage in the process). Such a visualization helps tolerate the length and makes the process slightly more amusing, yet it is still not enough to elevate it any higher. I mean, what's the real big difference between watching real paint dry on the walls of your house, or watching imaginary paint dry on the ima­ginary walls of the purgatory office for dead children? Perhaps in the first few minutes, yes, but then the distinction begins to fade away anyway.

 

Maybe it has something to do with how «buzzy» their mourning droning is. The tones they choose are always sad, and their repetitiveness brings on associations with inescapable doom, but there is hardly any depth to this sound at all. Just to remind myself that I have not become totally insensitive to this stylistics, I put on Brian Eno's ʽSpider And Iʼ — an electronic composition written very much in that same ice-cold stylistics twenty-five years back, and, thank God, was immediately emotionally smitten and overwhelmed exactly the same way that I was smitten when I'd first heard it. In comparison, something like ʽSunshine Recorderʼ or ʽ1969ʼ here sounds bot­tomless, baseless, feather-light and instantly forgettable. Is it just a difference in technology? Is it related to the fact that the old electronic guys, with their massive circuit boards and «stone age electronics», were by the very nature of their equipment capable of wringing more depth out of it than modern electronic wizards with their triumphantly miniaturized arsenals? Or does it simply mean that Brian Eno was a genius, while Michael and Marcus are merely inventive craftsmen?

 

I have no answer to these questions, but I do know for sure that there is not a single track here that inspires me to write anything about it, substantial or not. I acknowledge the craft, I admit the inventiveness, and I am vaguely touched by the kids on the bonus track ʽFrom One Source...ʼ (where they overdub various snippets of children reciting prayers or describing God — far more emotionally endearing than the actual music, I'd say), but that's about it. No thumbs down, but no promotion of this piece as an «electronic masterpiece» or anything by no means, either: the am­bitions and pretense of Geogaddi (which begin already with its undecipherable title) rise much higher than what seems to be its genuine musical value. At the very least, do not rush to conclu­sions until you are well soaked in the electronic legacy of «The Old Masters» — against whose background Geogaddi, I am afraid, feels relatively conservative and shallow, despite all the hoopla.

 

THE CAMPFIRE HEADPHASE (2005)

 

1) Into The Rainbow Vein; 2) Chromakey Dreamcoat; 3) Satellite Anthem Icarus; 4) Peacock Tail; 5) Dayvan Cowboy; 6) A Moment Of Clarity; 7) '84 Pontiac Dream; 8) Sherbet Head; 9) Oscar See Through Red Eye; 10) Ataronchronon; 11) Hey Saturday Sun; 12) Constants Are Changing; 13) Slow This Bird Down; 14) Tears From The Compound Eye; 15) Farewell Fire.

 

By this time you must probably have realized that I am not exactly head over heels in love with Boards Of Canada — and yet this is one of those cases when assessing an artist in strict chrono­logical order turns out to have its benefits, too. After the previous two albums, the «masterpiece» legend of which I cannot agree with at all, their third full official release does sound like a genu­ine masterpiece in comparison. It may be too late for me, of course, to recognize the duo's genius, but it is never too late to tell that you have enjoyed something, and I did enjoy this.

 

The title of the album contains the word «campfire», which may bring on thoughts of folk music played on acoustic guitars, and the word «headphase», which may bring on thoughts of... well, whatever has a head phase — like a tone generator or something. Incidentally, The Animal Col­lective came out two years earlier with Campfire Songs, one of their brave attempts to fuse avantgarde, acoustic guitars, and DIY digital technology, but these guys are older and more ex­perienced, way past their crude lo-fi stage and maybe, you know, having a better idea of where it is that they may be actually going.

 

The idea involves becoming a little more «conventional» in their music-making. The old tripar­tite formula («ambient keyboards» + «IDM beats» + «field overdubs») is not going anywhere as such, but the keyboards are made livelier, sometimes moving from «ambient» to «agitated», the beats are downplayed in importance, and the «field overdubs» (all those «ghostly children» of the past) are moved aside to make way for new elements — such as acoustic guitars: processed, of course, and looped and twisted, but still a breath of fresh air when compared to the rigorous reliance on purely digital sonics of the previous records («field overdubs» notwithstanding).

 

Thus, after a brief mood-setting intro, ʽChromakey Dreamcoatʼ opens with a little acoustic riff in the old style of Donovan's folk ballads and/or ʽDear Prudenceʼ, which soon begins to serve as the center of attraction for various electronic tissues — indeed, «folksy» and «spacey» at the same time. The nagging, repetitive, but not unattractive guitar chords prevent the composition from trickling all over your brain like melted jello, and the layers of overdubs give the guitar melody an extra aura of elevated mystery — not an «amazing» combo, and certainly not a revolutionary one or anything, but it works. Then, for the coda, the rhythm disappears completely, leaving us with just a kaleidoscopic-chromatic flurry of colorful sounds, fussier and livelier than just about anything the duo had recorded up to date.

 

Even slower and statelier, ʽSatellite Anthem Icarusʼ plays out the same trick — an acoustic guitar basis for an overall «cosmic» soundscape which is anything but minimalistic: in comparison with ʽDreamcoatʼ, it is as if they allowed you to zoom in on the outside surroundings, so you get to examine the wonders of alien life floating past you at slower speeds and in greater details. The acoustic rhythm, amusingly, sounds as if it could have been the accompaniment for some moody singer-songwriter ballad à la Elliot Smith — simple, «deep», «introspective» — yet instead, the singer-songwriter shuts up and just stares in bewilderment at all the giant space amoebas busily wiggling their tails through the continuum. (I'm sure there's a potentially endless discussion on the combinatory and revelatory possibilities of Art lodged in here somewhere, but that's about as far as I'm willing to progress at this particular moment.)

 

Arguably, the «climactic peak» of the new formula comes with ʽDayvan Cowboyʼ, for which the duo had even prepared a specially atmospheric-oceanic music video (which, in turn, led to the hilarious definition of a «dayvan cowboy» in the web-based Urban Dictionary as «an individual who boldly parachutes from the stratosphere down onto a surfboard in the ocean» — !!!). Here, they switch from acoustic guitar to distorted electric, beginning with a heavy load of feedback and then changing to strummed open chords, Link Wray-style. It also helps, I must say, that the beats to all these songs are shaped more «traditionally», with elements of playful syncopation, expressive fills and rolls, etc., instead of pure mechanical robotism — it all helps to transform the duo's art from «ambient techno» into «picturesque electronic rock music».

 

As we progress further, we occasionally begin meeting purely electronic tracks once again (ʽ'84 Pontiac Dreamʼ, ʽTears From The Compound Eyeʼ, etc.), but this is not such a big problem now that the first positive impression has been made — and eventually, the record even gains the right to «slow-burn out» on a majorly minimalistic note: the stately church-organ-like phrasing of ʽFarewell Fireʼ is an exercise in the art of fading out, beginning to lose volume after the three-minute mark but evaporating completely only after the eight-minute mark. I guess this is an inno­vative move, technically speaking, but most importantly, it feels like a rather natural conclusion to a Boards Of Canada product — they drive you ever so gently through the main bulk of the album, and then they disorient you as to exactly when and how the album is supposed to end, what could be gentler than that?

 

Although this is the first BoC record to which I'd give a modest thumbs up, this does not auto­matically mean that I consider it «better» — it is pretty damn hard to talk of music like this in terms of «good» or «bad»; rather, there are just two parameters — does the music trigger some special reaction in your senses? and, does the music allow itself to be visualised in your brain? On both these counts, the music of Right To Children and Geogaddi did not amount to much: the sounds were familiar and not particularly interesting, and the sound combos were mutually disruptive and not very well adaptable to visualisation. Campfire Headphase is markedly pro­gressive on both counts — with a real good balance between «the mundane» and «the astral», colorful, occasionally beautiful, and even if the formula starts getting predictable after the first couple of tracks, it is a good enough formula to keep you going for about an hour.

 

TRANS CANADA HIGHWAY (2006)

 

1) Dayvan Cowboy; 2) Left Side Drive; 3) Heard From Telegraph Lines; 4) Skyliner; 5) Under The Coke Sign; 6) Dayvan Cowboy (Odd Nosdam remix).

 

Originally, I managed to mistake this for an actual album, even though it is really a stop-gap EP (or «maxi-single», whatever): 28 minutes, 5 of which is ʽDayvan Cowboyʼ (already included in Campfire Headphase and discussed above), 5 more of which is a remix of ʽDayvan Cowboyʼ by trendy producer Odd Nosdam, and only about 15 minutes of which actually consists of material unavailable elsewhere. Nevertheless, on the whole it is still pretty long, and a brief comment may be in order (besides, Twoism and Hi Scores were EPs, too, formally speaking).

 

The remix of ʽCowboyʼ seems like a crapola exercise to me: the major point was to take the composition's sonic subtleties and convert them to jarring, distorted noise, so that the «Link Wray guitar» parts of it now sound more like «Sonic Youth guitar» parts. Artistic license is always welcome, but Boards Of Canada have never been a «noise»-oriented band, and I do not see the point in trying to reinvent their art as some sort of «neo-shoegazing» project. That said, there's no accounting for taste, really — any combinations, reinventions, or deconstructions in this densely populated world of ours will always find some audience.

 

The two new large tracks, ʽLeft Side Driveʼ and ʽSkylinerʼ, seem to pre-announce the duo's transition to the next stage of their career, to be fully explored on Tomorrow's Harvest several years later — a return to a completely electronic sound (no acoustic guitars or any other «folk» accoutrements), but more dynamic and multi-layered than the early style: chill-out muzak for people who just want to be chilled out, rather than «symbolically stimulated». The former em­ploys digital tones that I'd call «cloudy», the latter relies on tones I'd name «steamy», but the overriding ideology is pretty much the same, and so is the general effect (lazy psychedelia — light trance — breezy hallucinations — don't drink and drive — that sort of thing). Okay, but nothing special whatsoever.

 

Finally, the short tracks are just atmospheric humming interludes: ʽHeard From Telegraph Linesʼ (and subsequently amplified, bottled, and sold) pretty much describes the essence of this minute-long bit in a nutshell, and if ʽUnder The Coke Signʼ genuinely describes whatever is happening down there, I'm pretty sure the owner is not doing a good business at all. Or maybe they just mean a billboard along some lonely highway — the Trans Canada Highway, that is. Arguably the best way to assess this EP is simply to take the highway and plop this in your stereo. Be warned, though — according to Wikipedia, the highway is approximately 4,860 miles long, so you'll have a lot of replaying to do. But if there's anything we can learn from Boards Of Canada at all, it's that the world need be in no hurry, and that slow and repetitive digestion beats fussy and varied digestion on all counts.

 

TOMORROW'S HARVEST (2013)

 

1) Gemini; 2) Reach For The Dead; 3) White Cyclosa; 4) Jacquard Causeway; 5) Telepath; 6) Cold Earth; 7) Trans­misiones Ferox; 8) Sick Times; 9) Collapse; 10) Palace Posy; 11) Split Your Infinities; 12) Uritual; 13) Nothing Is Real; 14) Sundown; 15) New Seeds; 16) Come To Dust; 17) Semena Mertvykh.

 

The first full-length album from Boards Of Canada in eight years — no wonder the electronic world went almost as crazy for this one as it would do for Aphex Twin's Syro a year later. Over­rated or not, Boards Of Canada are «official giants» from the Radiohead era, and just like Radio­head, even if they go on releasing dull crap for the rest of their lives, the hype machine has been set in such major action that the important question of «what it is, exactly, that separates great art from dull crap, particularly in the 21st century?» will seem irrelevant to the majority.

 

Alas, I remain in the minority that does give a damn, and I have to confess that I find Tomor­row's Harvest to be the duo's least impressive and most overreaching offering to date. Not that I have ever been a major fan, but at least in the past, these guys would look for odd targets to shoot at, and you could spend more time pondering over the meaning of the target than over whether they managed to hit it or not. This time, however, the target is pretty clear — as is, to me, the understanding that they missed it completely. In fact, they missed it so completely that I am even beginning to wonder if these guys really had any genuine talent to begin with.

 

The album's title, the song titles, the general atmospherics, even the hazy, ominous silhouette of Manhattan on the front cover all speak of dangerous premonitions. From the sounds of childhood and campfires, Boards Of Canada advance to the state where they, too, want to make their «post-apo­calyptic» soundscape of coldness, devastation, loneliness, and organic degradation. Which is perfectly alright: almost every electronic artist wishes to make one sooner or later. The only ques­tion is — will mine work better than yours?

 

My answer is that this is one of the least convincing, most instantly forgettable post-apocalyptic albums I have ever had the displeasure of hearing. It builds up the atmosphere based on careful selection of tones, yes, so that the sound is very consistent (and many of the tracks virtually in­distinguishable from each other), but that's about it. Just like before, the duo does not care about causing any sharp sensations: everything is smooth and glossy — elevator muzak for the last working elevator in the world left after the last World War. There is not a single track here, not one, for which I could offer any meaningful comment, because I have a distinct feeling I'd heard it all before, in better versions, worse versions, equally dull versions — not a single emotional response above the usual «well, I guess I'd rather hear this in an elevator/supermarket than Katy Perry, but then, on second thought...».

 

If we can have a specific point of counter-reference, the theme and mood of the album reminded me of certain tracks on the instrumental sides of David Bowie's Low and Heroes — stuff like ʽWarszawaʼ, ʽSubterraneansʼ, ʽSense Of Doubtʼ, compositions that used similar (even if compa­ratively «antique») techniques to create a feeling of lonely cockroach-style survival among the devastation and dreariness, but actually employed some brilliant minimalistic melodic moves to enhance and really drive home that feeling. And I no longer buy the whole «well, with Boards Of Canada it's all about continuous atmosphere, not about melodic potential» stuff — because Bowie and Eno somehow managed to have both, and now that I know that you can have atmosphere and melody at the same time, why should I settle for anything less?

 

All I can say is this: if an album like Tomorrow's Harvest, with its grand critical reception and all, is considered by anyone to represent the «state-of-the-art» of electronic music in the early 2010s, then «Electronica» must be as creatively dead as «Rock» or any other such labels, and this particular thumbs down that I am vehemently issuing for this «oh-no-not-another-dust-and-cock­roaches-art-piece» of an album turns out to be something far more serious than just a thumbs down. I do hope that is not the case here, though, and what we are really dealing with is a stereo­typical case of self-bullshitting due to somebody's legendary status.

 

THE BOO RADLEYS

ICHABOD AND I (1990)

 

1) Eleanor Everything; 2) Bodenheim Jr.; 3) Catweazle; 4) Sweet Salad Birth; 5) Hip Clown Rag; 6) Walking 5th Carnival; 7) Kaleidoscope; 8) Happens To Us All.

 

Listening to and looking at the Boo Radleys' not-too-promising debut album — shorter than half an hour and only ever released in LP format — one can hardly get rid of the feeling that these well-meaning English lads are far more literate than they are talented. Quite possibly, some kid, or maybe several kids, may have looked at the album cover and asked themselves the question: «What is a Boo Radley?» and «What the heck is an ichabod?» and consequently discover Harper Lee and Washington Irving. (Nothing wrong about a little idealistic dreaming! and I am not be­ing condescending here — hell, I should probably confess that I had no idea who was Bodenheim before stumbling upon the second track here, either).

 

The songs, however, do not offer much of interest, and the band themselves have tagged these 28 minutes as a purely formative stage, way too much influenced by contemporary noise and grunge bands to have anything close to its own identity. Lo-fi, overloud, and looking as if most of the melodies were thrown together in about two minutes each, Ichabod And I simply does not stand a chance against... well, anything, but most importantly, it explores the same territory that was already thoroughly explored by My Bloody Valentine on their debut and would be explored even more thoroughly on Loveless next year — namely, the idea of marrying «dirt» with «beauty» and turning them into an unseparable Holy Duality where one does not exist without the other.

 

The idea of combining tenderly lyrical «flower power» vocals of Sice Rowbottom with the jar­ring, crushing guitar drone of Martin Carr is not at all original, but it could work — provided they had discovered how to make the experience memorable, or at least engineered the right balance between these two extremes in the studio. The latter task is tremendously hard (and constitutes, for instance, my biggest issue with the already mentioned Loveless), but it doesn't seem as if they even began worrying about it. The guitars simply stomp in, killing everything that moves (ʽEleanor Everythingʼ and ʽHappens To Us Allʼ, bookmarking the record, are extreme examples of this approach), and the vocals are buried so deep that, by the time you have finally dug them out, your shovels will be dented and your interest dissipated. It does not help that the guitars do not play any interesting melodies and are, at best, sloppified variations on classic Black Sabbath riffs (e.g. ʽBodenheim Jr.ʼ = ʽAfter Foreverʼ, much tortured and disfigured).

 

Even if the song starts out with a nice little Sixties-style jangle-pop riff (ʽCatweazleʼ), within a matter of seconds it gets drowned in sludge; only ʽWalking 5th Carnivalʼ escapes this cruel fate by reaching a compromise — there will be a nasty-sounding, but distinctive wah-wah riff here, as well as several acoustic-based sections, apart from the regular distorted stuff; ironically, it is also the song with the most boring vocal part on the album...

 

To put it bluntly, Ichabod And I largely sucks, and the band's decision to bury it right there in Sleepy Hollow is understandable. Now that the era of the Holy Download is upon us, it is not a big problem to bring back the ghost, but there is really no need to hunt for this obscurity unless you happen to be a really big fan of the band and have a scientific interest in their roots. Well, this is one of those «roots-obsessed» high school-level debuts that deserves all the severity of a thumbs down; fortunately, the band's CD-era output would soon prove that the Boo Radleys were ready to work hard on their image, until that whole «scary on the outside / beautiful on the inside» thing actually became real.

 

EVERYTHING'S ALRIGHT FOREVER (1992)

 

1) Spaniard; 2) Towards The Light; 3) Losing It; 4) Memory Babe; 5) Skyscraper; 6) I Feel Nothing; 7) Room At The Top; 8) Does This Hurt; 9) Sparrow; 10) Smile Fades Fast; 11) Firesky; 12) Song For The Morning To Sing; 13) Lazy Day; 14) Paradise.

 

If I understand my terminology correctly, The Boo Radleys' second album should not be properly categorized as «shoegaze», something that presupposes very static, droney, (preferably) hypnotic / trance-inducing music-making. The Boos are no enemies to the drone ideology, and Sice's lulling vocals may certainly be hypnotic, but in the end, Everything's Alright is primarily a pop record — noise-pop, psycho-pop, whatever, but the songs have verses, choruses, different melo­dies, even colorful guitar solos that rise above the din to provide some climactic heights, none of which really ties in with the «atmosphere-above-all-else» guideline of generic «shoegaze».

 

The problem is different: these verses and choruses are insufficiently engaging for me to state that the album survives on its melodic potential rather than its atmospherics. Either, at this point, Carr's songwriting was still in its infancy, or perhaps the atmospherics clashes with the melodies, but very few individual moments stand out — not a good sign for a pop album. Even when stuff is quite objectively different, like ʽSpaniardʼ, an acoustic ballad that eventually explodes with a merry Castilian brass section, it still feels merely like a slightly nuanced part of one big dreamy continuum. And this, in turn, brings back the «shoegazing» associations.

 

The band's experimentation in the area of «loud vs. quiet» is unsatisfactory: the marriage between abrasive feedback and acoustic jazz chords on ʽI Feel Nothingʼ is conducted very crudely — now we're playing these soft swingin' notes and now we go BOOM! and it's My Bloody Valentine all over the floor again; anyone could do that, really. ʽMemory Babeʼ, where the build-up from all-out acoustic to buzzy-electric and then to a huge psychedelic crescendo is handled more efficient­ly, is better, but still has nothing in particular to recommend it — no single special touch that would make us easily understand what it was, exactly, that the band was bringing to the table.

 

Nothing remains, eventually, but to lower our expectations and understand that The Boo Radleys simply wanted to generously contribute their own share to the world of noise-pop, without taking any particular care about putting a «special» stamp on that share. Once expectations are lowered to that level, songs like ʽFireskyʼ and ʽParadiseʼ will appeal to all those who yearn for another Loveless or at least an inferior copy, as long as it shares similar textures. Prospectively, too, with Sice's capacity for «angelic» singing, we could say that Everything's Alright (especially on such moody-mournful compositions as ʽSmile Fades Fastʼ) predicts Radiohead, at least in their early, pre-OK Computer stage.

 

Arguably the best, most evocative and memorable, track is ʽSong For The Morning To Singʼ, where they finally come up with a solid, no-nonsense, lyrical, old-school melody, George Har­rison-style, but produced through a lo-fi psychedelic filter. In addition to the blow-your-mind attitude, this one just seems to hold a big sackful of pure love, rendering both the singer and the lead guitar player more humane and vulnerable than everything else put together. But precisely because of this, the song, short and barely noticeable in its second-to-last position on the album, is an exception to the rule — it does point the way to the band's future progress, yet nobody could really tell this back in 1992. Ultimately, Everything's Alright Forever is just a diligent exercise in studying, copying, and honing production skills.

 

LEARNING TO WALK (1993)

 

1) Kaleidoscope; 2) How I Feel; 3) Aldous; 4) Swansong; 5) The Finest Kiss; 6) Tortoiseshell; 7) Bluebird; 8) Naomi; 9) Alone Again Or; 10) Everybird; 11) Sometime Soon She Said; 12) Foster's Van; 13) Song For Up!; 14) Boo! Faith.

 

Formally this is a compilation, but it feels logical to discuss it right after Everything's Alright Forever, since it neatly summarizes and closes the door on the first part of the Boo Radleys' career. This one puts together three separate EPs that the band put out in 1990 and 1991: Kalei­doscope, Every Heaven, and Boo! Up, and throws in two covers for good measure — a Boo Radleys-style transformation of Love's classic ʽAlone Again Orʼ, and a similar re-construction of New Order's ʽTrue Faithʼ (whose title is mutated to ʽBoo! Faithʼ).

 

The first track, ʽKaleidoscopeʼ, is somewhat symbolic — it is a re-recording of one of the tracks from the unfortunate Ichabod, longer, denser, and in much better sound quality, showing how much the band really cared about «going professional» in those early days. Not only is more and better emphasis placed on Sice's «tragic hero» vocals, but the guitars are brighter and janglier as well, with several «noise patterns» intersecting with each other and genuinely attempting to create a kaleidoscopic feeling.

 

However, after that there is really very little development: most of the songs on these three EPs sound very much alike, and all the standard complaints about their brand of noise-pop apply here in equal measure, even if repeated listens eventually bring out the occasional flash of psychedelic beauty in the vocal hooks of ʽSwansongʼ or ʽBluebirdʼ. And even so, they make a big mistake by following those two early EPs up with the cover of ʽAlone Again Orʼ — this is one of Arthur Lee's best songs ever, and the tearful gorgeousness of its romantic vocal melody immediately ex­poses the Boos as incapable mediocrities in comparison. The cover is actually quite good — the noise-pop arrangement still preserves the original's melodicity, and Sice's style is ideally suited to imitating and recreating Lee's «plaintive» attitudes. But when the cover is so much better than the originals... well, you know.

 

A few first seeds of upcoming changes can be spotted on the third EP, Boo! Up. ʽEverybirdʼ places its bets not so much on the predictable noise sections as it does on the quieter, acoustic parts where they sound not unlike Pink Floyd in their post-Barrett / pre-Dark Side days; ʽSome­time Soon She Saidʼ has their tightest rhythm section up to date, with drummer Rob Cieka kicking those skins so loudly and precisely that he just might steal your audio-attention away from all the feedback; and ʽSong For Up!ʼ has a quirky instrumental section where the band's patented noisy jam schtick gradually emerges from a softer, dronier, maybe even jazzier passage. In other words, they are beginning to build up on their original foundation, cautiously testing different possible outlets — still only very cautiously, though.

 

On the whole, thanks to its chronologically diverse nature, Learning To Walk is a less difficult record to assimilate than Everything's Alright Forever, and it may give a slightly more favo­rable impression of the band — on the other hand, it still does not prepare you for the artistic transformation that they would very soon go through, and I can only heartily recommend it for all those who love their pop standards to be burnt to a crisp in carcinogenic feedback, and decline to take 'em any other way.

 

GIANT STEPS (1993)

 

1) I Hang Suspended; 2) Upon 9th And Fairchild; 3) Wish I Was Skinny; 4) Leaves And Sand; 5) Butterfly McQueen; 6) Rodney King (Song For Lenny Bruce); 7) Thinking Of Ways; 8) Barney (...And Me); 9) Spun Around; 10) If You Want It, Take It; 11) Best Lose The Fear; 12) Take The Time Around; 13) Lazarus; 14) One Is For; 15) Run My Way Runway; 16) I've Lost The Reason; 17) The White Noise Revisited.

 

A little presumptuous, wouldn't you think, to name your LP «in honor» of a genuinely trail­blazing record by one of your predecessors, especially one whose vision, professionalism, and artistic depth you have very little hope of matching. All the more strange since the music of The Boo Radleys owes fairly little to John Coltrane, at least not in any direct way. Of course, if you wanted, you could always trace a credible line of development from Coltrane-era modal and free jazz to the shoegaze movement, but, ironically, Giant Steps is The Boo Radleys' first venture well away from the canons of shoegazing and into the territory of more dynamic, concisely structured, catchy psychedelic pop. A giant step for the Boos, perhaps — a fairly tiny blip for mankind, though, I'm afraid.

 

Technically speaking, Giant Steps satisfies all the conditions for establishing an intelligent pop lover's paradise. Lovely vocal harmonies, a clever balance between acoustic and electric guitars, an even more clever balance between «melodic» and «noise» components, a delirious mishmash of Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties' influences, enough creativity to fill more than one whole hour of music, and a nice cosmopolitan flavour — no traces of the embryonic «Britpop» with its arrogant accents and hip cockiness. How could this not be recommended? You'd have to be tasteless, heartless, and illiterate not to recommend it.

 

Yet at the same time, even as Martin Carr and Sice move deeper and deeper into the spicefield of vocal and instrumental hooks, I have a nasty impression that they have relatively little talent for these hooks. Giant Steps sounds good, but the songs do not hang around for long, and it is not really a matter of the album's excessive length (though some have complained) as it seems to be their inability to come up with something that would really truly be «the Boo Radleys sound» and nobody else's. A song like ʽWish I Was Skinnyʼ sounds lovely, with its wooing fusion of acoustic rhythm, «tinkling» electric lead, atmospheric brass and organ doubling and tripling of the rhythm, Sice's seductive crooning, and a busy, steady tempo — but that's about it: «lovely», without getting under the skin by means of some truly striking device.

 

I almost feel ashamed writing this, because I really want to love Giant Steps: the lack of «theo­retical» innovation should not bother us at all, as long as the songs properly hit the proper emo­tional centers. But they do only twice, at the very beginning and then again right at the end. ʽI Hang Suspendedʼ, lyrically conceived as some sort of answer to some sort of antagonist ("ain't that just you know the facts, but you haven't got a clue about me or my life") and instrumentally presented as an energetic funk-pop rocker, is quite a rousing introduction — and ʽThe White Noise Revisitedʼ, closing the album on a gentle farewell note, has a sentimental mantra for a coda ("hey! what's that noise? do you remember?"), lushly arranged and making for a stately conclu­sion, although you eventually begin to wonder if its stateliness does not come exclusively from its repetitiveness... well, hopefully not.

 

The basic agenda of The Boo Radleys, now that the noise clouds have dissipated a bit, is clear: they are dreamers, escapists, big fans of Sgt. Pepper, and, like all those Elephant 6 bands on the other side of the ocean, they want to restore its original fifth-dimensional colours to pop music. Their basic failure is also exactly the same as in the case of most such bands — they love their influences so much, they want to make that kind of music, but everything that comes out is spi­ritually, if not technically or intellectually, inferior. As an experiment, I have listened to the song ʽBest Lose The Fearʼ, which seemed like a worthy candidate, three times in a row — all I hear is half-hearted McCartnyisms without any real understanding of how it should really work. For one thing, Sice has a beautiful vocal tone, but he doesn't do anything with it — generally staying on the exact same «pretty» frequency, almost as if such a thing as «vocal modulation» never existed. For another thing, the accompanying colorfully distorted lead guitar part never seems to pretend to anything but colorful accompaniment — the humble Martin Carr never lets it develop into a proper solo or even into a particularly flashy, noticeable riff. It's simply there for the color. It's a nice color, but the real nicety of the color always reveals itself when it's organized into a shape.

 

The big single from the album was ʽLazarusʼ, a densely arranged, epic track into which they really must have put a lot of work — but behind all the overwhelming layers of electronic noise, solemn brass, and roaring guitars, lies a very simple and not specifically attractive or innovative folk-pop melody from God knows back when. They put enough makeup on it to make it into a cosmic anthem, and sometimes, this might work, but for me, ʽLazarusʼ does not work. It seems to be trying to make some big point, and it comes out sounding as heavy psycho muzak.

 

Despite all these criticisms, I respect sincere craft as much as I worship authentic genius, and be­cause of that, Giant Steps gets a thumbs up. At the very least, it gives us a band that has mana­ged to go beyond the obvious trends and fads of its time and either decide to boldly pursue some eclectic ambitions, or discover its own true colors — or both. In my opinion, The Boo Radleys are mediocre songwriters and unimpressive visionaries, but that does not prevent them from de­veloping a potentially great, colorful, friendly sound, which must have sounded even greater, friendlier, more colorful back in 1993 than it does today, and which still remains well worth revisiting for every serious lover of «psycho-pop».

 

WAKE UP! (1995)

 

1) Wake Up Boo!; 2) Fairfax Scene; 3) It's Lulu; 4) Joel; 5) Find The Answer Within; 6) Reaching Out From Here; 7) Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock; 8) Stuck On Amber; 9) Charles Bukowski Is Dead; 10) 4AM Conversation; 11) Twinside; 12) Wilder.

 

The commercial success of this album was largely associated with the rise of «Britpop», even though Carr had gone on record many times claiming that The Boo Radleys had nothing to do with «Britpop» and never tried to jump on anybody's wagon at all. As far as the early Boo Rad­leys sound is concerned, he would be deluding himself and the public, but Wake Up!, indeed, has very little to do with either Blur or Oasis. Instead, it has everything to do with the Beatles: this is as close as the band has ever come to a fanatical show of worship, and even if the results are, as usual, much less than spectacular, the strength of the drive is so ferocious that... well, imagine if the real Beatles would have put out something in 1995... come to think of it, they did, didn't they? well, ʽFree As A Birdʼ got to No. 2 on the UK charts, and ʽWake Up Boo!ʼ got to No. 9, and that's sort of about right, numerically and aesthetically.

 

For this record, almost every trace of the band's shoegazing past has been carefully removed. While some of the tracks still feature noisy distorted guitars, they are almost never at the center of attention — it is merely to let us know that the band does not have a special intention of «going soft», and besides, it's not as if the Beatles hadn't used any noisy distorted guitars in their life, you know. But the true ambition of these guys is indeed to make you Wake Up! — to offer an album full of beautiful, optimistic, idealistic, life-asserting psychedelic pop songs, recapturing the warm colorful vibe of the 1966-69 period, when it was vibrating all the way from Revolver to Abbey Road (the latter album is even structurally alluded to, either intentionally or subconsciously, on the last track, which cuts away as unexpectedly as ʽI Want Youʼ and is then quickly followed up by an unpredictable-unrelated closing acoustic snippet like ʽHer Majestyʼ).

 

Like every single attempt to directly «cop the Beatles» that I have ever heard, be it XTC or Ad­rian Belew or Apples In Stereo, Wake Up! is ultimately a failure — predictedly and expectedly a failure, I'd add, for reasons of personal and collective psychology. But like most of these attempts, that does not render the «copies» completely useless or unenjoyable or lacking a sub-identity of their own. Nor am I saying that the «copies» actually rip off any of the Beatles' melodies — that would be much too much of an oversimplification (although there certainly are some direct quo­tations, e. g. the piano chords of ʽThe Long And Winding Roadʼ on ʽWilderʼ). No, the Boos are certainly capable of writing their own songs — and that is where the problem lies: their schooling in songwriting does not agree too well with the Sixties' vibe, or, at the very least, they often have trouble finding the right bits of that vibe to insert in their compositions.

 

Case in point: ʽFind The Answer Withinʼ is a pretty good upbeat pop song, but for some reason, they find it a good idea to load the last minute and a half with overdubs of backward-recorded vocals. You can almost imagine the studio reasoning: «hey, great tune we get going here, but not enough of that Sixties' flavor!» — «But we've already borrowed everything!» — «Well, you can never borrow everything, really, just give another spin to your copy of Past Masters!» — «Say! What about those backward vocals on ʽRainʼ, did we ever have that?» Honestly, there is no need whatsoever for such a gimmick on this track, not after its encouraging message of "The world is at your feet / Try and make something happen", but no, they had to go out and do it.

 

Beatlisms are kept to a relative miminum on the album's most commercially successful single, ʽWake Up Boo!ʼ, where they opted for a rousing, almost Eurodance-like, rhythm and a large brass section to complement the impetus of "wake up it's a beautiful morning, the sun shining for your eyes". However, its romantic joy and innocence feels a little too contrived and calculated for me — even despite being lyrically tempered with the less immediately obvious verbal conclusion of "wake up it's so beautiful, for what could be the very last time", it's really a rather silly song, you know, at least for 1995; I feel unable to give in to its mechanical happiness, even if it is very hard to explain why, for instance, ʽGood Day Sunshineʼ feels so natural and easy-going, while this sunny day anthem feels so contrived.

 

I much prefer ʽMartin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clockʼ, which also stimulates its protagonist to "get out of bed", "the world is waiting just for you", etc., but does that at a slower, more thoughtful tempo and without hammering the repetitive hook into your head. It's a gradual six-minute build-up that could have been better arranged (for one thing, the fake synthesized horns and strings at the end really deserved to be real — as it is, the wall-of-sound approach seems misplaced), but on the symbolic level at least it does a really good job of representing a person's gradual awakening (in all senses of the word), and if any track on the album ever approaches «epic» status, it would be ʽMartinʼ. Also because it is uncluttered with vocal gimmicks: so many tracks here place their complete faith in aah-aah and ooh-ooh overdubs (some of them multi-layered, some of them phased, some of them reversed etc.) that eventually it just becomes boring.

 

Where they really get their stuff together is the very last song, and even then, not from the begin­ning: for the first few minutes, ʽWilderʼ just rides on a quasi-McCartney piano melody that mimics the form but misses the spirit. However, at around 3:30 into the song, it is transformed into a calm, unhurried, «introspective» jam that unexpectedly reveals a major talent in bassist Tim Brown — ironically, if there is one good thing here that they truly managed to snatch out of the Beatles' backpack and develop further, it is McCartney's bass melodicity, which Brown un­derstands perfectly well and capitalizes upon. Technically and emotionally, the jam is remini­scent of what the Beatles did on ʽDon't Let Me Downʼ — a thoughtful, seriously-playful bass groove against which the guitars and keyboards lay down some stately, economic lines, creating a feel of some sort of «mature serenity» — but here, despite being so derivative, they are also being highly successful.

 

It is rather weird to talk about an album's existence being essentially justified by its three-minute coda, but that's just the way it is; at least it is a major argument in support of a thumbs up, because otherwise we could get seriously irritated by the inadequacy of the «wake up!» ideology of the album. I mean, it pretends to be giving you a major ʽHey Judeʼ-an kick in the butt, but it just doesn't have enough calories to make it feel like a kick, if you know what I mean. Real admi­rable intention, though, no questions about it.

 

C'MON KIDS (1996)

 

1) C'mon Kids; 2) Meltin's Worm; 3) Melodies For The Deaf (Colours For The Blind); 4) Get On The Bus; 5) Every­thing Is Sorrow; 6) Bullfrog Green; 7) What's In The Box (See Whatcha Got); 8) Four Saints; 9) New Brighton Pro­menade; 10) Fortunate Sons; 11) Shelter; 12) Ride The Tiger; 13) One Last Hurrah.

 

Browsing through the reviews and reactions on the Boo Radleys in the mid-1990's, I was more than a little amused to see that Wake Up! was constantly seen as the band's «commercial / acces­sible» album and the follow-up was seen as their «experimental / adventurous» release — some even suggested that it was an intentionally «anti-commercial» record, meant to dissipate the con­cept of the Boos as sell-outs. I mean, for God's sake, this is a band that has always stuck to its own thang, at least as soon as they shook off the shoegaze spell, and even then, they weren't really doing it for the money or for the whole bandwagon thing — they were just going with the flow for a while, nursing their chops and looking for the real Boo Radleys.

 

If ʽWake Up Boo!ʼ was a commercial success, it was so accidentally: the stars just happened to align in a way that the band's rousing gust of pseudo-optimism was understood as modernistic, well in line with all the Britpop anthems of the day. It was a misunderstanding — in reality, Wake Up! (as an album) was merely the band's way of answering the question «what would the Beatles do if they were the Boo Radleys today?», and any good attempt to answer this question has a pretty decent chance of running into some commercial success, be it 1977, 1997, or 2137. Then, quite logically, C'mon Kids was merely the band's way of answering the question «what would the Beatles do next once they'd had released an album like Wake Up?» Well, they would have probably experimented some more, right? Messing around with song structures, trying out different genres and combos, taking risks, making sure the sum would be more impressive than the parts, without forgetting about the parts, right? That's what it is all about; putting it all in «commercial» terms does not make much sense. This is not the life story of Bon Jovi, or even of older bands like Heart or Genesis, that we are concerned about here.

 

C'Mon Kids is The Boo Radleys at their most ambitious, daring, and diverse, testing their skills and strengths to the limit — which, I guess, makes it their best album, because it is still hard to acknowledge them as anything other than «craftsmen», but «craftsmen» have one big advantage over «geniuses»: unlike genius, craft can be honed and perfected, and if you hone and perfect it long enough, you might find yourself just one small step short of genius, and this is exactly the case of C'mon Kids. There is little about the album that I love, but I admire how they really stretched out on it, with the sincerest of intentions and complete unpredictability.

 

The title track greets you with some party sounds, some radio waves, a distorted alt-rock riff, and a new Sice who yells his lyrics out rather than croons them. But the message? "C'mon kids, don't do yourself down, throw out your arms for a new sound, pretty face it don't mean a thing if you look so same as your crowd" — in other words, that alt-rock riffage and shouting is not meant by the band as conformism: it just so happened that... well, coincidences happen. Not to worry — already the second song, ʽMeltin's Wormʼ, is in a completely different style, or, rather, it merges elements of completely different styles. I'd call it «grunge-prog», but that's just me, and I even have no idea whatsoever of what the song is about.

 

It would be quite tempting to describe the album on a song-by-song basis, because it is such a treasure trove for the «classic rock fan» — almost every track has at least two or three different throwbacks, with some of the most bizarre combinations you will ever encounter. For instance, ʽGet On The Busʼ begins with an acoustic line copped from John Lennon's ʽWorking Class Heroʼ, but then quickly becomes a feedback-drenched psychedelic rocker with insane banshee-wailing guitars that could rival the Stooges, then goes back to acoustic mode, but in waltz time, echoes and organs included for haunting effect. ʽFour Saintsʼ is two quarters rowdy trip-hop, one quarter distorted rock and one quarter psychedelic folk-rock. ʽWhat's In The Boxʼ is like the Bee Gees' ʽIn My Own Timeʼ crossed with... well, something much more rough than that.

 

Weirdest of 'em all is ʽNew Brighton Promenadeʼ — this one starts out as a perfect impersona­tion of Simon & Garfunkel (I daresay that if Sice replaced Art on one of those reunion tours, nobody would have noticed — or, rather, everybody would have noticed, because Art has long since lost his voice completely, so Sice is basically the new Art now), then becomes sunny pop-rock, then throws on some distortion on both guitar and vocals, and finally erupts in an aggressively friendly wah-wah solo — take that, Mr. Simon!

 

Still, I will refrain from namechecking the rest of the tracks: you already get the drift, and then there's the downside — these combos are creative and diverse, but they do not feel perfectly natu­ral to me: I do not understand why these particular songs have to be sewn together in such in­congruous ways, other than acting out of a general «try anything once» principle. The album has its share of actively rocking moments and its share of beautiful moments, for sure, but as a whole, it is ultimately less than the sum of its parts — somewhat of a mess, really. Problem is, The Boo Radleys are a band who always need to work hard to prove to us the necessity for their existence, and this whirling kaleidoscope does not help — at least when they were still shoegazing, the typical Boo Radley song shared a certain definitive atmosphere, good or bad, whereas here, at­mospheres come and go in the blink of an eye. What does it all mean? What does it all want to make me feel? It's like they try to hit all the buttons at once, and get it all wrong.

 

On the other hand, the album has growth potential — with so many different things happening, it may well be that a lot of listens are required before the initial confusion starts crystallizing into something more symmetrical and elegant. Criticisms aside, the craft alone demands a strong thumbs up: for an «indie» album circa 1996, C'mon Kids reveals a staggering amount of work, way beyond anything one could have expected from listening to the band's early albums. And I can only imagine, for instance, the reactions of some young teenager for whom this could be one of the earliest exposures to the whole art-pop-rock thing, before he started exploring all those realms from which Carr and Spice loot their influences. At the very least, I guess this is an essen­tial record to get to know for anyone with a «systemic» interest in the 1990's pop scene — and whether or not you will want to keep it under your pillow is a different matter.

 

KINGSIZE (1998)

 

1) Blue Room In Archway; 2) The Old Newsstand At Hamilton Square; 3) Free Huey; 4) Monuments For A Dead Century; 5) Heaven's At The Bottom Of This Glass; 6) Kingsize; 7) High As Monkeys; 8) Eurostar; 9) Adieu Clo Clo; 10) Jimmy Webb Is God; 11) She Is Everywhere; 12) Comb Your Hair; 13) Song From The Blueroom; 14) The Future Is Now.

 

The very last album by The Boo Radleys was recorded under tense conditions — Sice was alrea­dy disenchanted with the band and all set to leave as soon as the chance presented itself, and very soon after Kingsize came out, Carr phoned him himself and said he was pulling the plug. Nor was the reception for the album particularly welcome. People called, and continue to call it, over­long, lacking focus, and/or just plain boring and uninspired. «Official» reviewers give it as few stars as they can allocate a formerly respectable band, and regular users complain about the lack of big hit singles to serve as anchors.

 

I would have joined the crowd upon first listen — the most disappointing thing for me, other than the unwarranted length, was too much reliance on mechanical funk beats that seemed to be pre­sent in every second song and reduce the record to an unwanted-unwarranted tribute to the Stone Roses or something like that. The hooks were not immediately jumping out, either, and it seemed all too easy to join the condemning crowds. Then I remembered that, after all, the Boo Radleys always had their way through craft, not genius, and craft may require more time to be appreciated, so I prepared myself for a couple more excruciating listens...

 

...and you know what — second and particularly third time around, it clicked, or, rather, snapped in place. The critics are damn wrong about this one, and the fans — well, the fans need to have some patience. Kingsize is long, and sometimes slow, and sometimes a little lazy, but I find this now to be easily the single most inspired and convincingly crafted collection of songs in the band's entire catalog. In fact, there is nary a clunker to be found here, and for once, it all works reasonably and logically — the songs are not clumsily collated from uncollatable ideas, as they often were on C'mon Kids, but follow their own natural paths of development and, well, develop into sometimes stunningly beautiful art-pop flowers.

 

ʽMonuments For A Dead Centuryʼ is the title of one of the songs, and it could, perhaps, have been a good title for the whole album. I have not paid much attention to Carr's lyrics, as usual, and maybe I am wrong about that, but I seriously doubt that detailed analysis of the words could have added to the general emotional impression — an impression of a melancholic farewell to a dream that once seemed so real, yet has always remained out of reach. Throughout the album, they are constantly saying goodbye (ʽAdieu Clo Cloʼ), nostalgizing, drowning their troubles in drink (the wonderfully titled ʽHeaven's At The Bottom Of This Glassʼ), and utilizing a whole array of instrumental techniques, from the usual distorted guitars to lush orchestral arrangements, to create their personal gallery of monuments for a dead century.

 

There are no highlights or lowlights, so I will just give a few random taps as examples. ʽComb Your Hairʼ is the band's tribute to Phil Spector, starting out like a good Ronettes anthem should, all echoes and big drums — pretty soon, however, we get a distorted guitar rhythm track that would never be seen on a Phil Spector record, and a chorus that throbs with lonesomeness and desperation, with a gorgeous vocal melody that is quite on the level of either the Beach Boys or ABBA. ʽHigh As Monkeysʼ is a psychedelic dance-pop track that gradually builds up tension to «implode» in a near-perfect harpsichord-and-strings chorus from which a dense cello melody smoothly leads it back upwards into the psycho-dance rave. ʽShe Is Everywhereʼ starts out as a quitely subdued rhythmic ballad with jazzy guitar, then somehow manages to become loud, noisy, melodic, and romantic all at once in the chorus (always a good idea to have a melodic guitar part outbalancing your gruff noise). And ʽHeaven's At The Bottom Of This Glassʼ is, simply put, the catchiest song they ever wrote, period. Maybe not the best — but if, by the second time it comes around to say hello to your brain, you refuse to sing along with the tagline, your only excuse is if you've just returned from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

 

For some reason, they chose ʽFree Hueyʼ as the lead single for the album. It is not a bad song at all, but it is highly atypical of the record — one of its most aggressively rocking funk numbers, with heavily treated, nasty-sounding guitars, Sice screaming most of the lyrics instead of singing, and very little changing dynamics throughout the song. Either they did not give a damn, or per­haps they thought that the lead single needs to have that kick-ass quality — whatever be, this might have contributed to the general sour disposition. ʽHigh As Monkeysʼ could have made a much better choice, or at least the title track, which only was the second single, and whose "how would you like to share, how would you like to share it all with me" chorus could have made a much more warm, endearing first impression. Or perhaps they should have tried it with ʽThe Old Newsstand At Hamilton Squareʼ and its nervous, spooky, James Bond-like horns and strings? Or with the affectionate tribute to Jimmy Webb (ʽJimmy Webb Is Godʼ), which climaxes with yet another mag­nificently engineered piano-and-orchestra arrangement, conjuring up echoes of that old Paul Buckmaster grandeur? See, just about everything here really works.

 

It is frustratingly ironic that the little mischievous supernatural being finally visited them in their studio hours so late in their career — but apparently, it is possible for the sleeping genius to awaken if you probe it long enough. The thing is, they really went out on a limb here with all the extra overdubs and orchestration, and suddenly, it sort of seems that this is just the way they should have been working from the beginning, and that Carr is much better at overseeing violins, cellos, and harpsichords than noisy guitars (and there are quite a few noisy guitars here, but they almost always take second or third place in the mix). This makes it into some sort of Abbey Road experience — if you know this is probably going to be your last, summon all the spirits so that they can help you make it into your best. Admittedly, I may just be going crazy, but one thing I am not being with you is dishonest — so there must be some rational explanation to why Kingsize, alone out of all Boo Radleys records, ended up affecting my emotional centers so con­sistently, song after song after song. Thumbs up with lots of enthusiasm, although do be warned that the record may well take a couple of intense listens to warm up to — not that this ain't the case with quite a few art-pop masterpieces.

BORIS

ABSOLUTEGO (1996)

 

1) Absolutego.

 

Western musical culture sure has sown some mighty bizarre seeds on Japanese soil (I'm sure every one of us has some favorite, particularly kinky, example), and it is perhaps no accident that some of the best recognized names in the «noise» and «drone» categories, like Merzbow (Masami Akita), come from the Land of the Hallucinatory Rising Sun, where East and West meet like crazy and produce mindblowing fusion reactions. Whether you like it, hate it, admire it, or de­spise it, there is no denying the uniqueness of it, which might spring upon you in unpredictable ways — and even damage your senses beyond repair, so let's be careful here.

 

The relative uniqueness of the first album by Boris, a three-part musical (sort of) monster who may or may not take their name from that of Russia's first president, lies first and foremost in the ratio of its sheer musical content to its length. The total number of chords «played» by the band probably does not exceed three or four, while the album's single, unbroken track clocks in around the 60 minute mark (and, apparently, they thought it too brief, so that the next CD release, called Absolutego+, dragged it up to 65 — by artificially slowing down the already superslow piece). Take that length away and you have nothing: just a bit of heavy, feedback-drenched droning which, like all kinds of heavy, feedback-drenched droning, owes its existence to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, the mother-drone, without proving that the offspring has anything to add to what the mother already stated quite «expressively».

 

But oh, the length. When you have sixty minutes to set yourself up, blow it all to hell, and then step back and let the electricity run out on its own, you have no reason to compromise, do you? First, you have yourself three minutes of pure feedback — no hands, ma. Then you have your buildup: from one guitar, plucked only long enough to generate another mini-wave of feedback, to adding a second guitar that sounds like an electric box on the verge of exploding, to scattered percussion effects — the drums proper do not kick in until the twenty-fourth minute or so, where they are also joined by a little bit of mock-death metal screaming. The central part constitutes about twenty minutes of sonic whirlwinding, and finally, as the drums and one of the guitars gra­dually die out, we are left with about fifteen minutes of high-pitched looping feedback that cut off abruptly — if you have the strength to endure it, there's no better way for you to learn to appreci­ate the blessed gift of Silence.

 

I have to admit that this uncompromisingly Gargantuan approach does give the album a certain «pull». Play one chord and suck in the feedback it generates for ten seconds, and it will be cool. Do the same thing for one minute and it will get boring. Do the same thing for three minutes and it will get very boring. Do the same thing for five minutes and it will become excruciating, tortu­rous, insufferable. Do it for nine minutes and you have lost touch with surrounding reality: you now exist on a different plane, where there is just you, Boris, and a bunch of busy frequencies in between. Suddenly you realize that you are now living and breathing them, and you dimly realize that some sort of world exists somewhere far away, where the Beatles sing ob-la-di-bla-da and people talk in natural languages, but you no longer know if you will be capable of re-adapting once you get back there, and perhaps it is not safe to get back there at all... but luckily, we are still only on the eleventh minute, and there's fifty more to go, and you feed yourself on feedback like the Man From Mars who eats guitars, cars, and bars, and the howling drones are your life, and the high-pitched sheetmetal feedback is your oxygen, and then it gets cut off... NOOOOOO!

 

In other words, Absolutego is a dangerous experiment that may forever change your life if you are willing to go all the way, so do be careful. But if you are not willing to go all the way, alas, nothing will change the fact that (a) there is very little that actually gets done here, (b) most of it, if not all of it, has already been done before, and (c) electric guitar feedback simply is not the most pleasant sound ever invented by man, and unless it is properly harnessed, it can be almost as painful as a badly played violin. Not that I am saying that the chaps in Boris do not know how to harness feedback — but they ride it like a wild mustang, hanging on for sixty desperate minutes before it finally shakes them off.

 

That said, this is also only the very first album by Boris, and, like many experimental bands around the world, they, too, share the approach of making their earliest records look like hooli­ganish pranks before moving on to somewhat more complex projects — many of which would look totally conventional and mainstream next to the big brown splat of Absolutego. In the mean­time, though, here we are with what might look like the sonic equivalent of a sixty-minute long earth­quake — which is kind of a gruesome analogy, now that I think of it, considering how the album was released less than a year after the Kobe earthquake. Fortunately, this one is nowhere near as lethal — it will simply melt down your ears, and those can always be reforged.

 

AMPLIFIER WORSHIP (1998)

 

1) Huge; 2) Ganbou-Ki; 3) Hama; 4) Kuruimizu; 5) Vomitself.

 

Well, the band's second album is like an ocean of diversity compared to their first — which, of course, does not say much and could even be construed as a direct insult, because diversity is the last thing which Boris care about. Do not worry too much, though: the very first track (ʽHugeʼ), going on for nine minutes, basically sounds like a small handful of samples taken from the first albums of Black Sabbath and looped into an endless serpent-monster of a «composition». Ever wished, enchanted by Tony Iommi's tone, that any of the songs on Master Of Reality could go on forever and ever and ever, just pummeling and pummeling your senses with that merciless hellish roar? Your wish has been granted.

 

Somewhere around the middle of the second track, though, the band sort of wakes up and begins crawling out of its shell — the tempo picks up, the drums gain in complexity of pattern, and the guitar gains in color, adding some light to darkness and switching from a «psycho-metal» mood into «astral» mood, eventually quieting down and beginning to explore the benefits of subtlety. In fact, by the time we get to ʽKuruimizuʼ, Wata's multi-tracked guitars have been realigned to a «peaceful», «becalmed» way of droning, a lullaby-like mode of functioning where the listener is gently rocked to and fro in a cradle of softly gurgling guitars, suspended on a friendly, reliable bassline. Do not make the mistake of going to sleep, though, or the suitably titled ʽVomitselfʼ will wake you up with quite a bit of a nasty shock — the 17-minute «grand finale» that completes everything that ʽHugeʼ left promised, but unfulfilled, and does indeed sound like 17 minutes of a guitar that tries to «vomit itself». Not a pleasant experience, but if you let your ears get adjusted to this, the wildest of Jimi Hendrix improvisations will sound like Johann Strauss Jr. in compari­son. Always leave some space for heavy aural exercise, and you'll be war-trained in no time, ready to take on the sonics of the world like a real man.

 

Musically speaking, there is nothing whatsoever going on here that deserves specific attention: most of these feedback tricks and minimalistic guitar riffs had been in active use since the early 1970s. But since we're talking musical minimalism here, this is not relevant — what matters is that they take these little bits of Black Sabbath and Hawkwind and God knows who else, put them under the microscope, dissect them, recombine them, and stretch them out for miles and miles, assuming that it is only like that that one can really assess their true potential. Take ʽSweet Leafʼ, chop out everything but its main riff, slow it down a bit, then loop it for 15 minutes, and what you get is Boris. (Oh, they also have some screamed vocals here, but they are totally unne­cessary — every track here would work better without voices). Yes, I can actually see where it could make a certain sense.

 

On the positive side, there is a little less high-pitched metallic feedback here — only the last two minutes or so make my ears bleed, compared with about 15 minutes at the end of Absolutego, so you could say they are now taking it less heavy on the listeners. On the negative side, any attempt to compromise, even the slightest one, threatens to turn Boris from a bunch of weirdo iconoclasts into a bunch of boring wankers (who they are, deep down in essence, but the aggressively mini­malistic approach helps take the focus away from that fact). I have no idea which choice suits me better, but since I can hardly expect any particularly elevated emotional response to this band's brand of elastic psychedelia altogether, I am not exactly losing sleep over the issue.

 

FLOOD (2000)

 

1) Flood I; 2) Flood II; 3) Flood III; 4) Flood IV.

 

Guess they couldn't do it like that in the old days of shellac, could they? Flood goes on for 70 minutes, pretty much the equivalent of two complete old school LPs, yet its four tracks are no­thing like the four sides of, say, Tales From Topographic Oceans — Yes probably have more chord changes in five minutes of any single one of those tracks than Wata and his associates have on the entire album. Incidentally, both albums refer in their titles to huge masses of water, but there the similarity ends and the difference begins: Yes explore the shimmering variety of life forms and chemical compounds that constitute the ocean, whereas Boris are more interested in the uniform mass of the flood, regardless of whether the listener is observing the flood from a safe distance or is being dragged down to the bottom.

 

The major departure from earlier Boris is that on Flood, the band's monotonousness is expanded in range, and now, in addition to the already familiar tsunami waves of monster feedback, they offer us a softer, more hypnotic side of themselves. In fact, the distorted feedback does not even make a proper appearance until well into the third part of the suite — and is then almost fully ab­sent from the fourth. This could be surprising given the album's title, but if you really want to treat it as a concept album about a literal or an allegorical «flood», you will just have to admit that the «flood» is taken in context. There's the prelude to the deluge (parts 1 and 2), the catastro­phe itself (part 3), and the aftermath (part 4).

 

Both parts of the prelude, I must say, sound suspiciously Crimsonian: ʽFlood Iʼ, which consists mostly of one guitar riff, looped, delayed, and echoed for fourteen minutes, evokes memories of Discipline-era experimentation, while ʽFlood IIʼ, with its slow, atmospheric droning and free-form soloing based on high-pitched sustained notes all around, could have easily fit on Red, al­though even Robert Fripp would probably not dare subject his listeners to thirteen minutes of such rigid, rigorous minimalism (for one thing, it would not be consistent with his guitar-playing ego). Neither of the two movements triggers any specific «water» associations all by itself, but there is definitely some sense of impending doom at the end of ʽFlood Iʼ, when Atsuo comes in with an echo-laden, ear-shattering war drum onslaught — and throughout ʽFlood IIʼ, much of which flows by in a melancholic mood, eventually resolving into a rather tragic-sounding solo, just like the ones old Uncle Robert used to churn out.

 

Traditional territory is revisited on the third part — this is where, after a brief folksy drone intro (further decorated with a soothing Japanese vocal part from Takeshi), the distorted feedback (aka «the flood» in question) slowly begins to catch up with the listener: I actually like how it appears completely out of nowhere around the five minute mark, grows in power, takes about a couple of minutes to completely drown out the quiet melody — then unexpectedly disappears to let the folksy part gracefully flow to an end, and then finally takes over in one dramatic crescendo. The rest of the third part is given over to violence and destruction, as a trademark «Iommi Was Here» Wata riff swallows up everything to be swallowed. And I almost literally mean everything: the final part, ʽFlood IVʼ, basically consists of a faded bass «echo» of the main riff for its first six or seven minutes, while the rest is just a series of «swoosh - swoosh» patterns, symbolizing that nothing remains except for some giant water vortex, one that would be happy to suck in anything that moves and drag it into the depths, except there's nothing more left to suck in.

 

In other words, as a conceptual minimalistic suite, Flood makes more sense than anything Boris had released prior to that. But as an album to be enjoyed sensually, bypassing the old ratio? Well, one thing I can definitely vouch for is that Flood is their first record to deliberately avoid any moments of sheer sonic torture — there is no scraping-bleeding «metallic feedback» here, and even the loudest and growliest part of the album has a strangely melodic aura to it. Also, all four parts pursue different physiological purposes — ʽFlood Iʼ makes you dizzy, ʽFlood IIʼ rocks you to wary sleep, ʽFlood IIIʼ sends you down and under, and ʽFlood IVʼ gives you twenty minutes to recuperate and recover.

 

Are these immense lengths justified? I guess the only way to really find out would be to condense them manually and see what happens. As usual, sometimes for a repetitive groove to have the proper effect, said groove must be repeated fifty times in a row, and with Boris, you either take this repetitiveness for granted or you just leave the band alone as it is. It is not the repetitiveness of the music that bugs me — it is the overall Nipponic «grotesquery» of the band as such. But within that grotesque world of theirs, Flood occupies a position of honor. Not only must it have taken them more than five minutes to come up with the basic structure and melodic content of the album (as opposed to the two preceding and quite a few succeeding records), but for the first time here, they have demonstrated that they are more than a one-trick pony, and perhaps deserve to be taken somewhat seriously by the community at large. Thumbs up.

 

HEAVY ROCKS (2002)

 

1) Heavy Friends; 2) Korosu; 3) Dyna-Soar; 4) Wareruraido; 5) Soft Edge; 6) Rattlesnake; 7) Death Valley; 8) Koei; 9) Kane – The Bell Tower Of A Sign; 10) 1970.

 

For this album, Boris tried out a different approach — the tracks are significantly shorter than they used to be, and they are really separate compositions, not just movements in a single suite. You could probably say that this is their first «song-based» album, except the word «song» has to find itself a separate meaning in the dictionary when you use it in the same noun phrase as «Boris». Something like «mini-eruption» would probably be a better term anyway.

 

Many people will find this change refreshing, and the album as a whole easier to tolerate; how­ever, I cannot get rid of the feeling that by temporarily sacrificing their major gimmick, the band has pretty much traded away their identity. The awesome guitar tones remain, but Boris did not invent these tones; what they did invent, or at least promote with more ardor than most, was that crushing slowness — the meticulously planned and executed, gradullay unveiling, but relentless and brutal sonic onslaught. Here, not only are these tracks short, but they are also frequently taken at fast tempos (not exactly speed metal tempos, but, well, compared to Absolutego, every other heavy composition is speed metal in comparison).

 

And it does not work too well. The band's rhythmic base is solid as usual, and Wata's technique is commendable, but way too often, it sounds now... well, just like heavy metal (or «stoner rock», whatever the label is). The Black Sabbath influence is inescapable even on the compositional le­vel (ʽDeath Valleyʼ, for instance, directly quotes from the opening riff of ʽParanoidʼ), and even those tracks that do not sound explicitly like Sabbath tributes still sound like a couple dozen other heavy bands from the 1970s or from the «stoner» 1990s. That would not be too much trouble, of course, provided the band members demonstrated their capacity of putting out great riffs. Which capacity is quite debatable.

 

Regardless of the tempo or tonality, all these sludgy vamps leave behind is... a trail of sludge, all right. The feeling of heaviness is admirable, yet beyond this feeling lies nothing of particular interest or value beyond the same old retro-blues-rock chord changes, loyally downtuned and fattened with extra feedback, bashing drums, and screechy Japanese vocals from Takeshi, Atsuo, and a few wandering guests — not much, really, that wasn't already well explored by Sabbath, Mountain, Budgie, Rush, or Queen a quarter century ago. Not a single riff that would sound fresh and exciting to these jaded ears.

 

There is exactly one track here that I would not mind hearing again — the eight-minute quasi-epic ʽKaneʼ (ʽBellʼ). There are no actual bells on the track, and, in fact, it starts out in the same lacklustre manner as everything else (that is, sounding like a set of sub-Sabbath variations), but somewhere around the fourth minute they hit upon a mind-numbingly repetitive «cosmic» groove, just banging out a basic three-note bass riff while adjacent guitars are imitating the sounds of planetary spins. It is short, but it is only during these moments that I remind myself that Boris, above all else, are a «psychedelic» band, and that their main goal is to do something weird and kinky to your mind, not to prove to the world that they can come up with a better riff than Tony Iommi at his worst (which they cannot anyway).

 

Although I like solid heavy metal as much as the next solid heavy metal fan, and I like the general sound of the record — that's not nearly enough for a recommendation. If these are songs, they need to be better shaped and more original — I think I'd rather take even such flamboyantly open imitators as Black Mountain over this any day. If they are «mood pieces», they take too little time to set any particular mood. And if they are «tributes» (as the Sabbath quotations and titles like ʽ1970ʼ might suggest), then Heavy Rocks should simply count as a «tribute album», not pretending or amounting to much by its very definition.

 

AKUMA-NO UTA (2003)

 

1) Introduction; 2) Ibitsu; 3) Furi; 4) Naki Kyoku; 5) Ano Onna-no Onryu; 6) Akuma-no Uta.

 

So, may you ask, what may be the hidden meaning behind making the album's front sleeve into a transparent imitation of Nick Drake's Bryter Layter, with Takeshi and his double-neck replacing Nick and his acoustic? My guess is that not only is there no hidden meaning, but there is simply no meaning, period. They just liked the cover, and wanted to have one just like it. Alternately, you might think that the symbolism of the action is precisely in the fact that it is hard to think of two more dissimilar albums, in just about everything, than Nick Drake's Bryter Layter and Boris' Akuma-no Uta. So you have the full spectrum of possibilities where you have one at the utmost left end of the axis and the other at the utmost right, and they come around full circle and one opposite becomes the other in a symbolic visual merger...

 

...nah, they probably just loved the shoes. (Although I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere deep in this mess they actually hid some brief musical quotation from Nick's textbook, transposed to sludgy electric guitar — you never can tell with these whackos). Also, for that matter the original album cover was different: white surface with a minimalistically sketched silly four-legged bug in the top right angle. Not that any of this matters in the least, but such is the price of weirdness: make yourself too weird and your listeners will never really know what does matter and what absolutely does not.

 

Anyway, finally arriving at the music, the two obvious — in my understanding — virtues of the album is that it is short, and that it has a good balance of slowness and speed. Conspiring against them are the two equally obvious shortcomings: the album does not reveal any progression over Heavy Rocks, and the album's melodies are on the expected usual level of boredom. Once again, other than Wata's bonecrushing guitar tones, almost everything sounds like a hastily produced amalgamation of elements from Sabbath, Rush, and, this time around, perhaps also Can — the longest track on the record, ʽNaki Kyokuʼ, in certain parts sounds heavily influenced by the clas­sic jam style of Can (which, after all, is only natural if one remembers the Japanese origins of Can's most classic vocalist). It is not so much the vocals, though, on that track that sound uncan­nily-Cannily, but rather the drums — Atsuo's complex, steady, unflinchingly executed drum pattern is eerily reminiscent of Jaki Liebezeit. Not that it helps all that much.

 

The title track, which closes the album, is probably supposed to represent the climax of its Omi­nous Evilishness — it ain't called The Demon's Song for nothing, right? (Amusingly, the word Akuma ʽevil demonʼ, when re-transcribed to its modern day Chinese equivalent, will be latinized as Emo — not that I have any idea why I mentioned that). But in reality, it is simply four minutes of sludge taken at two different tempos. For the first two minutes, you tread through the sludge, cursing everything in your path, and then for the next two minutes the sludge treads over you, so that you never get the idea to badmouth sludge again. This particular demon is sure a messy, dirty, drippy one, but not in the least scary — more like a local trickster, perfectly content to merely fling its own faeces at you from behind a tree.

 

Uh... what else to say? No idea, really. Last time I checked Pitchforkmedia to get an alternate informed opinion on the album, all I got was «charging, smoke-filled, and raw» (you betcha), «fuzzy riffs and heavy rhythms» (you don't say!), «deployed in long, shivering drones or fiery, chugging blasts» (too true, too true, except that I wouldn't describe any of these drones as «shi­vering» — how can something so thick and so deep be «shivering»?). Aye, this is Boris, all right, but is this specifically Akuma-no Uta? These descriptions are applicable to the vast majority of this band's output. This album's specificity seems to be stored largely in its front sleeve. At best, ʽNaki Kyokuʼ, with its soft, arpeggiated (but rather typically doom-metal) intro and Can-style beats, might have half a face of its own. At worst, all is forgiven if you are a major fan of the Boris crunch — then you'll be only too happy to swallow whatever it is they have just crunched for your enjoyment.

 

BORIS AT LAST: FEEDBACKER (2003)

 

1) Feedbacker I; 2) Feedbacker II; 3) Feedbacker III; 4) Feedbacker IV; 5) Feedbacker V.

 

I do not understand what «at last» is supposed to mean here. «At last» an album truly worthy of Boris? «At last» an album on which Boris have properly mastered the art of feedback? «At last» an album with Wata on the front sleeve? And, for that matter, what is the symbolic meaning of the «pool of blood» in which she is reclining? Getting you to confess that yes indeed, one does occasionally get the urge to shoot the guitarist through the head in the middle of a Boris album, but if she already did that herself, so much for the better?..

 

Anyway, this is actually Boris' third continuous «suite», and their second one where the body is split in several parts, corresponding to feed-phonic «movements» that illustrate several different stages of... uh, feedback. Or something. Actually, not all of Feedbacker consists exclusively of feedback — there's some «feedfront», too, particularly in the second part which is almost melodic by Boris standards, and in the fifth part, which is basically just a brief reprise of the second. Oh, and in the third part, much of which sounds like an outtake from Heavy Rocks. But do not expect any of these parts to be a celebration of traditional harmonic values: whatever happens, Boris stick to their well-oiled guns, or they wouldn't be able to release two or three albums per year.

 

Anyway, Part I is really all feedback, wave upon wave of it, stylistically reminiscent of what Neil Young did on Dead Man — get the blast going, then step back and experience it seeping away from your body like a tidal wave while waiting in apprehension for the next one. Cool tone, but I always felt Neil's feedback solos had more thought behind them than this «ooh, I so love what I can do with electricity» schtick. Besides, if you asked me how this one is different from anything on Absolutego or Amplifier Worship... hmm...

 

Part II is probably the main reason this album exists — it is a slow «ambient blues», gradually strolling through your living room for about eight minutes, after which a massive wah-wah solo takes over and the composition reaches a «drony climax». Aside from the solo, any melodic con­tent here is purely minimalistic, and the tempo eventually gets very irritating when combined with the minimalism of the melody. Clearly, if there is a heart in this LP, it is somewhere in the middle of this 15-minute brew, but on the whole I'd say that somebody like Bardo Pond are much more impressive with this kind of heavy moody melancholia. Perhaps somebody would like to argue that Wata's gauze-like «countermelodies», little droplets of electric guitar finely sprinkled over the repetitive rhythm chords, express impressionistic beauty like a modern day Debussy or some­thing, but I don't feel much subtlety in these droplets. Besides, the album is called Feedbacker, so there is no sense pretending that anything here that doesn't have anything to do with feedback will be the album's main achievement, really.

 

So we're not really after the heart, we're after the brawn, and most of the brawn can be found in Parts I and IV — IV being the most abrasive and vomit-inducing part of the experience, with the listener tied up to a malfunctioning electric chair for about ten minutes. If you feel like you haven't lived without being tied up to a malfunctioning electric chair for about ten minutes, then Boris At Last: Feedbacker will correct that omission for you. If you feel like you could pass, Feedbacker is probably not the best starting place to get into Boris. Unless you're seriously into guro and just want to scoop this up for the album cover.

 

THE THING WHICH SOLOMON OVERLOOKED (2004)

 

1) Scene 2; 2) A Bao A Qu; 3) The Dead Angle Which It Continues Showing.

 

I guess I have to give props to these guys for releasing their most unlistenable records as «limited editions» — this one originally came out as 500 copies of colored vinyl, and probably cost a fortune, so that 500 lucky souls could reach their own personal Nirvana by subjecting themselves to forty minutes of jarring feedback, and everybody else could just happily ignore this artistic statement, left behind in a state of immature unworthiness. Unfortunately, the digital era came along pretty soon and messed up all the clever configuration.

 

Not being aware of the exact circumstances surrounding the title of the album, I, like everybody else, assume that «Solomon» here refers to King Shlomo (970-931 B.C.), known mostly for his wisdom and his large number of wives and concubines, and that, consequently, the title prompts us to give a thought as to what exactly was that one thing, that one tiny little thing that the King managed to overlook in his only slightly less than infinite, God-given wisdom. More than enough reason here, I guess, to force yourself to sit patiently through the entire forty minutes of the re­cord — I mean, who knows, maybe the answer is waiting right there in the end, and once it's all over, just think about it, you might actually be wiser than Solomon himself. Who wouldn't wil­fully give up a pair of ears to gain access to a secret that may have been unknown to the wisest man on Earth?..

 

Too bad I have to spoil this for you, but then, every once in a while this blog finds itself obliged to go out on a salvation mission. The title is just one big hoax — there is really nothing but a huge, endless sea of feedback here. The first and last track merely feed you crude, primal sludge, a ten-minute cauldron for starters and a twenty-minute barrel for the main course. Faint hints of a droning melody can still excuse ʽScene 2ʼ, but ʽThe Dead Angleʼ is probably the most extreme thing these guys came out with so far, beating out Absolutego and everything else — basically just one bass note that takes its time to burn up and fizzle out, only to be replaced by the same thing again, and again, and again.

 

In this context, ʽA Bao A Quʼ (named after one of J. L. Borges' pseudo-mythical creatures) separates the two sludge monsters like a symphonic phoenix — at least there's some development here, as the track moves from high-pitched guitar whine to hellishly overloud, overdriven howls and roars. Even so, the title is pitifully wasted this time around (fortunately, it would be reused later on for something much more distinctly musical).

 

In short, this one is «not for everybody», and by «everybody» I mean «everybody who is already a Boris admirer». It does get me to wonder, though — what if Boris did not have access to tech­nology, or even electricity, and still wanted to make this kind of «music»? What would they have done? Rubbed on a double bass with a live crocodile? Raped a tiger with a loosely tuned cello? Set the entire town on fire and walked around playing on a deliberately unstrung guitar? Actually, each of these ideas, now that I think of it, seems more exciting and innovative than what we have just heard here, and I hate being cruel to animals. Thumbs down, unless you're a big fan of limited editions on colored vinyl — they can be so cool to show off to friends, just do not forget that you won't have that many friends if you ever decide to play this for them.

 

DRONEVIL (2005)

 

1) Giddiness Throne; 2) Interference Demon; 3) Evil Wave Form; 4) The Evil One Which Sobs.

 

Okay, so apparently this is one of those fairly rare Zaireeka-type albums where you are supposed to plop in two CDs at a time and listen to them interfere. Sounds logical, since the first one is all «drone» and the second one is all «evil», er, «sludge», really. ʽGiddiness Throneʼ constructs a background that sounds like twenty minutes of deep cavernous echo; ʽInterference Demonʼ gives you twenty minutes of what sounds like an annoying siren hacked at mid-point and stuck in a single, barely changing tone; ʽEvil Wave Formʼ offers some dynamics in totally familiar shape, with Wata's usual monster guitar tones interrupted for a few minutes with calm, echoey ambience; and ʽThe Evil One Which Sobsʼ is sixteen more minutes of the same.

 

I have to confess that I have not tried juxtaposing the two, and am therefore not qualified to make opinions about the resulting sound. I freely admit that it would not have been difficult, even on a computer — just stash two media players on top of each other — but something inside me just told me no. In the back of my mind, I can see where the combination of the deep rumble of ʽGid­diness Throneʼ and the gigantic metal waves of ʽEvil Wave Formʼ would certainly make far more sense than listening to them separately, but I have no desire to waste my time on that.

 

Allegedly, as claimed by some adepts of this album, quite a bit of work did go into the synchro­nizing of the tracks, so that the «lows» and the «highs» of individual tracks correlate with each other, but you will just have to check it for yourself — a lot of one's opinions on Boris actually depends on one's preconceptions of Boris. I am afraid, though, that since ʽEvil Wave Formʼ does nothing for me on its own, it will probably not do much more when nutritioned further by the «deep», but simplistic texture of the «drone-ambient» track. It's all just a lot of boring sludgy bullshit, and clearly, the «success» of Dronevil depends on nothing but the gimmick. Give it a chance if you want, spare me the trouble — if I am really in the mood for modern day doom metal (which is rare), I'll go get me some Agalloch instead.

 

SOUNDTRACK FROM FILM MABUTA-NO URA (2005)

 

1) Theme; 2) The Middle Of The Stairs; 3) A Bao A Qu; 4) The Slow Ripple Of A Puddle; 5) Your Name; 6) White Warmth; 7) Melting Guitar; 8) Yesterday Morning; 9) Amber Bazaar; 10) Smoke Sequence; 11) Space Behind Me, Part 2; 12) The Picture Of The Wind; 13) It Touches.

 

«Imaginary film», the title should read, because no film with the title of Mabuta-no Ura («Under the Eyelids») actually exists — Boris simply stated that they imagined this film in their minds, and then wrote the soundtrack to their imagination. Now — if that ain't art, then what is? How much more artistic, spiritual, transcendental does one get than writing music to accompany visuals that appear under your eyelids, triggered by the mystical force of imagination?

 

But there's some bad news, too. As awesome as the mystical force of imagination really is, the sobering reality is that most of the time, the force makes you imagine all sorts of random crap (I bet you can agree with me on that one). Consequently, once you try writing music to imagined random crap, you are quite likely to end up consciously writing crappy music to accompany the subconscious results of your imagination. And since Boris have no songwriting talents whatso­ever (there, I've said it), and their main appeal lies in their «tones» and «minimalistic attitude», it is only logical that the final result is an absolutely pointless bore.

 

«At least the tracks are short this time», you could say, and you'd be wrong, because with long tracks, the band at least has a point — debatable, but a point nonetheless. These short bits, though, are simply meaningless. With ʽThemeʼ, you think you could possibly expect a «theme», but what you really get is a two-minute long droning alarm call in a tunnel, or so it seems. Impressionistic? Symbolic? Psychedelic? Whatever. ʽThe Middle Of The Stairsʼ follows it up with two minutes of slow acoustic/electric strumming where we are probably supposed to luxuriate in the combining humming overtones of the two instruments — hey, if you thought you knew how to appreciate the guitar sound before hearing Boris, hear Boris and think again.

 

Following up on that, the soundtrack gets more and more diverse, but that is exactly the most ter­rifying thing about that: no matter what they do, it all sounds derivative, meaningless, and dull. ʽThe Slow Ripple Of A Puddleʼ — yes, about as exciting to listen to as the slow ripple of a puddle, and I cannot even defend it on the grounds of «minimalist philosophy», because the little guitar loop that they use here has no deep emotional power of its own to warrant becoming the focus of the track. ʽYour Nameʼ features the band playing a rudimentary hard blues tune: three and a half minutes of what sounds like a 12-year old Neil Young practicing his first scales. ʽMel­ting Guitarʼ — okay, with a title like that you'd expect a massive sludge metal eruption or some­thing, instead, it is simply a little more meandering free-form droning, sort of like what you get in the mid-section of King Crimson's ʽMoonchildʼ, only much more aimless.

 

Anyway, to cut a long unnecessary story mercifully short, the only track here that merits the slightest consideration is ʽIt Touchesʼ. Closing out the album, it runs longer than the rest and has a rather cool, even hypnotic, bass/drums groove, against which all of Wata's little guitar tricks may be perceived as colorful flourishes rather than just pointless doodling. Nothing particularly great, that is, but pretty much a musical masterpiece compared to all the other small bits. Then again, the best solution is to cut the bullshit and simply ignore the album altogether. Total thumbs down — I'm so desperate, I'd rather even have me some John Frusciante than this.

 

 

PINK (2005)

 

1) Ketsubetsu; 2) Pink; 3) Sukuriin-no Onna; 4) Betsu-ni Nan Demo Nai; 5) Burakku Auto; 6) Electric; 7) Nise Bureddo; 8) Nurui Honoo; 9) Roku-o Mitsu; 10) My Machine; 11) Ore-o Sute-ta Tokoro.

 

Let us list all the references to other artists that veteran reviewer Thom Jurek has made in his review of Pink, Boris' first venture into the «accessible» territory of post-rock composition: Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Isis, Sigur Rós, Nadja, Jesu, Mono (we go to Japan now), Guitar Wolf, Iggy Pop (we go back into the past now), MC5, Sunn O)))) (okay, back to the present), and Acid Mothers Temple. That's 12. Okay, now the Pitchfork review by Brandon Stosuy, who do we have here? Sigur Rós, Isis, Jesu, Melvins, Motörhead, Olivia Tremor Control, Unwound, Drive Like Jehu... oh no, that's just 8, not counting additional historical references.

 

The question is, now that Boris have moved into this «normal» territory, cutting tracks that be­gin to re­semble «songs» every once in a while, are they still Boris, or are they merely a potpourri of all these influences, contemporary and archaic alike? Do they have an agenda, or are they just selling out? Unfortunately, as much as I would like to like Pink, if only for the usual awesome­ness of Wata's guitar tones, not even repeated listens can convince me that the record ever once rises above the level of kitsch. If this is ironic music, it is too boring to sink in deep. If it is dead serious music, it is just plain awful.

 

There's always that third possibility, of course — that this is simply fun music. Starting with the title track, it is music that bluntly invites you to headbang, and at least on one occasion it even invites you to dance (ʽElectricʼ, though, as if acknowledging the embarrassing nature of the pro­position, the track clocks in at a measly 1:45). Sludgy guitar tones, punkish tempos, screamed vocals — song after song is a mosher's paradise. Then they slow down and become your usual Black Sabbath... oh wait, I am falling into the namedropping trap myself.

 

Well then, here be the problems. First, there are more vocals here than ever before. They all seem to be delivered by Takeshi, and frankly, he is awful. His constant screeching sounds neither angry nor crazy — it is just irritating, like the nagging of a loudmouthed peddler on the street corner or something. (Actually, I believe that drummer Atsuo also has sing... er, vocalizing duties, and carries them out with approximately the same effect). Had all these songs been joined into a single track with all the vocals wiped off for good, that would have been a big plus.

 

Second, the introduction of short compositions does not mean the introduction of good riffs. Well, not entirely true. The machine-gun riff of ʽPinkʼ (belonging in what I call the ʽBreadfanʼ category for lack of a better term) is sort of mildly interesting. When you combine Wata's tone with speedy finger-flashing playing the results are fun, it would be useful to deny something as obvious. But apart from that, 99% of the riffs still sound as if they have an efficient software piece that de­constructs old Sabbath riffs and puts them back together, with predictably worse results because the software has no idea of the kind of chord sequences that really gets your goat. I mean, listen to ʽElectricʼ — it's like a cross between ʽSupernautʼ and ʽN.I.B.ʼ and... something else. Esnes on sekam ti tub looc sdnuos ti. If you know what I mean.

 

Supposedly the most important compositions on the album are the two longest numbers — ʽKetsubetsuʼ, a «regal» drone piece that really does conjure all these references in Jurek's review (yes, even Sigur Rós, with its choral harmonies and ringing rainbow-y guitar dubs over all the noise), and the closing ten-minute gallop piece which I would probably mistake for a lost And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead composition if not for the annoying Japanese vocals. On second thought, though, I probably wouldn't, because those guys would have chickened out when it came to basing a ten-minute track on exactly two musical ideas. In any case, both tracks are deadly dull — unfortunately, I cannot share the enthusiasm, so common among reviewers, over the mad fury of the opening minutes of ʽOre-o Sute...ʼ because it is hard for me to endorse something just because it is mad and furious. If it went on for sixty minutes, that would at least be an artistic statement. Since it only goes on for ten (I think there's also an extended version that throws on eight more minutes of feedback), it's just a bore.

 

On the whole, a drastic thumbs down and a radical disagreement here with tons of glowing reviews on RYM and other sites that often extol this as Boris' finest hour — much of which pro­bably has to do with the fact that it was the band's first widely distributed US album. In this humble reviewer's opinion, Pink simply shows that Boris are spiritually incapable of producing genuine «rock»-type material. One of the few dissonant reviews on RYM put it short and sweet: «Stick to drone guys». Couldn't agree more.

 

THE THING WHICH SOLOMON OVERLOOKED 2 (2006)

 

1) No Ones Grieve Part 2; 2) Dual Effusion; 3) Merciless; 4) An Another After Image.

 

The title of this and the next album should be enough to warn you that this is another experi... no, actually, let us not abuse the term, because this particular kind of art has long since ceased to be any more «experimental» than your average teen pop album. Rather, this is a warning that this is another collection of harsh, monotonous, repetitive, and not particularly ambitious noise tracks that should really be experienced under their proper Japanese titles, because the English transla­tions probably come from Wata herself (who is a notoriously bad English speaker).

 

That said, there may be something to like about ʽNo Ones Grieve Part 2ʼ: unlike everything else here, it's got some dynamics — after a ninety second pure feedback intro, the drums kick in and the music becomes a fast, wild, rip-it-to-shreds blast of psycho-metal-punk, like the Stooges' ʽL.A. Droneʼ, sped up and integrated with a weeping minor key folk guitar part on top. As hard as it is to endure the thing for six minutes, there is at least something here worth enduring. You could even visualize this as the equivalent of a funeral ritual by an alien civilization, as friends and relatives of the deceased roll around on the ground in hyperbolic despair, tearing their hair out, ripping their clothes, and howling in artificially induced anguish. Kinda cool.

 

ʽDual Effusionʼ and ʽMercilessʼ, unfortunately, are not cool — the former is a rather unima­ginative (for 2006) space drone that does nothing that has not already been done by the likes of classic Hawkwind, and ʽMercilessʼ is like ʽNo Ones Grievesʼ stripped to its feedback core, with­out the cool-sounding rock/folk guitar overdubs and the maniacal drumming, and, of course, it has to be the longest track here. Fourteen minutes of crunch for those who love nibbling the charcoal-burned tips off their French fries because if it ain't really cancerogenic, it ain't worth it. Anyone for fourteen more minutes of crispy, crunchy feedback? Help yourself, and you get a bonus reward — three minutes of lightly humming guitar ambience to patch up your ears with ʽAn Another After Imageʼ. One thing you can't say about these guys is that they're cruel to their listeners — on the contrary, they are always willing to offer you some silence as an antidote. Let's face it, they could have their CDs manufactured so that they get forever stuck in your player on tracks like ʽMercilessʼ — once you've popped it in, you might just as well start looking for another piece of hardware. This is the Land of the Rising Sun, goddammit, you gotta be ready for everything. But they're not really merciless, they just pretend to be. They're really more concerned about cleaning the mess up after Solomon. Unfortunately, they don't do a very good job here, so another thumbs down.

 

THE THING WHICH SOLOMON OVERLOOKED 3 (2006)

 

1) Leviathan; 2) Dimly Tale; 3) No Ones Grieve Part 1; 4) Sola Stone.

 

Uh.. okay. Once again, I am probably not qualified to discuss this because I listened to it in MP3 format when you're totally supposed to consume it on vinyl. Moreover, if you think you're getting away easily by consuming it on orange vinyl, having laid your hands on one of the exclusive 700 label-dis­tributed copies, think again — there is also an exclusive exclusive light blue vinyl pres­sing, of which there were only 300 copies and they were distributed by the band themselves while on tour. And maybe there's a lock of Wata's hair included in that one exclusively exclusive exclu­sive copy that is currently owned by the luckiest Boris fan in the world, but don't spread the word around too much or you'll stir up the bounty hunters.

 

Naturally, the included «music» is Satan's shite incarnate (or, rather, «immerdate», to be on the safe side of the linguistic business), but did I even need to tell you that? This is, after all, the third installation of stuff that Solomon overlooked, and this time the list of said stuff includes: (a) 17 minutes of bubbly lo-fi guitar/electronic ambience with an eventual droning crescendo that still sounds unbearably lazy (ʽLeviathanʼ); (b) two and a half minutes of surprisingly clean, but not very informa­tive bass feedback (ʽDimly Taleʼ); (c) seven minutes of very dirty, almost grimy feed­back (ʽNo Ones Grieve Part 1ʼ — of course, ʽPart 2ʼ was on the previous album, because since when were numbers meant to mean exactly what some stupid Indian jerks assigned to them thousands of years ago?); (d) thirteen minutes of equally dirty feedback, but this time overwhel­med by almost as many minutes of mad drumming (ʽSola Stoneʼ) — if this was actually a live jam, poor Atsuo probably had to collapse at the end (and no, I am not going to express any empathy here, even though I had to collapse as well).

 

Anyway, this is all such an apparent toss-off that I am not even going to compare it to Bardo Pond this time — this stuff suffers even in comparison to Boris themselves. ʽLeviathanʼ and ʽSola Stoneʼ probably have some potential, but the dynamics are so trivial that I'm guessing they pro­bably just concocted them on the spot, when in reality this kind of music requires very careful and meticulous planning (think post-Barrett, pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd, for instance). But yeah, by all means, feel free to join the exciting hunt for blue vinyl — if this is Wata's way of telling you that this is art, what choice remains to us other than kowtow and acknowledge? It's not as if my thumbs down is going to get Japan thrown out of the League of Nations again, anyway.

 

VEIN (2006)

 

1) Untitled (part 1); 2) Untitled (part 2).

 

Noise.

More noise.

 

A Russian quote from Stalker.

 

Even more noise.

 

Drums and noise.

 

Sixty-three minutes.

 

Sucks.

 

Thumbs down.

 

Blessed silence.

 

SMILE (2008)

 

1) Messeeji; 2) Buzz-In; 3) Hanate!; 4) Hana, Taiyou, Ame; 5) Tonari-no Sataan; 6) Kare Hateta Saki; 7) Kimi-wa Kasa-o Sashiteita; 8) Untitled.

 

As usual, there are about a million different versions of this album — Japanese, American, Euro­pean, CD versions, vinyl versions, orange vinyl versions, yellow vinyl versions, limited edition gift-packed 8-track polka-dot versions with sugar on top, in short, just about anything possible to emphasize the creative freedom, psychedelic spirit, and unique individuality of the music and the artistic process behind it. As far as I understand, the American editions, distributed by the Southern Lord label, are significantly different in terms of tracks, running lengths, and mixes from the Japanese Diwphalanx editions. But guess what? I'm wasting enough time already on one version (Diwphalanx); I have no desire whatsoever to learn whether the Southern Lord version improves on it in any way, or, at least, I have a certain premonition that is much stronger than any such desire.

 

This is where Boris kinda sorta «go pop», in that they use drum machines, samples, and, most importantly, sing on every track — and while Wata's guitars are still very much recognizable, the focus is never so much on noise and drone as it is on melody, or, at least, painful attempts to create something by way of melody. The band members themselves called it their «sell-out al­bum» and went on to tell everybody how it is supposed to be taken ironically, because, well, if you name one of your tracks ʽMy Neighbor Satanʼ and everybody starts thinking of it seriously, you might get in some trouble, at least once you set foot outside Japan, where cajoling around with demons is not looked upon with as much prejudice as in Christian territories.

 

Unfortunately, the «irony» is largely confined to the lyrics, which are in Japanese, and are largely devoted to in-jokes, such as describing the contents of an old live concert video by the Melvins (ʽBuzz-Inʼ). Outside of any specific context, Smile just sounds like an odd mix of styles (electro-pop, hardcore punk, industrial metal, atmospheric post-rock), all of which, in one way or other, had already been tasted by Boris before, and now they are back with this strange attempt to put it all together and make something comprehensive, cohesive, and ambitious.

 

The result is a meandering, directionless, and utterly useless mess that fails this particular re­viewer's «bullshit test» on just about any count imaginable. The only track that makes any sense is ʽMessageʼ (ʽStatementʼ) that opens the album — its combination of a «huge typewriter»-type drum machine, a scary bassline, and ʽSympathy For The Devilʼ-style falsetto ooh-oohs sets up a tense anticipation for Wata's shrieking wah-wah leads, and even though the track is still spoiled with bad singing, it takes up seven genuinely nightmarish minutes and it could point the way to something even more nightmarish, but...

 

...this is where the mess starts for real. ʽBuzz-Inʼ is two and a half minutes of boring metalcore. ʽHanate!ʼ is four minutes of ear-destructive industrial metal, followed by one minute of boring acoustic psycho-folk. ʽFlower, Sun, Rainʼ is a «beautiful» ballad that seems to be an attempt to write something in the old San Francisco vein, with phased acoustic power chords and Big Brother & The Holding Company-style passionately ugly feedback solos — all of it sounding like some particularly stupid pastiche. ʽMy Neighbor Satanʼ tries to cross Sigur Rós vocals with noise and psychedelic rock, but the singer sounds like an American Idol loser and the music sounds like all the individual instrument parts were randomly pulled out from a samples library and super­imposed over each other without any plan whatsoever. And then, as the tracks get longer and longer (culminating in the 20-minute untitled finale), the «post-rock adoration syndrome» gets wilder and wilder as they relocate from Japan to Iceland — only to find out that a tourist is still a tourist, and that Takeshi's chances at becoming Jónsi are slim at best.

 

Most importantly, it just seems to me much of the time that these guys have totally no idea of what it is that they do, what it is that they want, and what it is that they can. Quite possibly, that is the idea: get in the spirit (at least, formally) of styles and artists they like, and then just get carried away by the moment. But liking industrial music, or ambient-style post-rock, or hardcore punk, is not quite the same as understanding it, so that you can then add something of your own to it, and these guys, so it seems, understand nothing. This is not the way it's all supposed to be sung, or be played, or be combined together — it's like taking a coherent book and rearranging all the words so they no longer form grammatically correct, or at least stylistically engaging sentences. Be it in­tended as serious or ironic, an album like Smile ultimately has no meaning, and trying to «relate» to it is like trying to adapt to a useless genetic mutation. Thumbs down, of course.

 

NEW ALBUM (2011)

 

1) Flare; 2) Hope; 3) Party Boy; 4) Black Original; 5) Pardon; 6) Spoon; 7) Jackson Head; 8) Dark Guitar; 9) Tu, La La; 10) Looprider.

 

A band like Boris is not programmed to sell out, but it is programmed to shock, and what could be more shocking than selling out? There's a paradox for you. For almost three years, the former­ly prolific band kept quiet in the shadows, then blasted back into existence with a vengeance — three records in a row — and the first one of those was... a J-Pop album.

 

Okay, so it's a Boris-style J-Pop album, which means that it will be noisier and heavier than the average product on the market. But all the ingredients are there — energetic dance rhythms, elec­tronic robot loops, simplistic and repetitive earworm-type chord sequences, and over-excited, over-exuberant vocals, including, for the first time ever (or, at least, for the first time in such prominent lead quality), Wata herself providing the lead on several songs. Yes they can. In fact, they prove they can even come up with a few nagging vocal hooks, though, as in all such cases, the emotional meaning of these hooks is so dubious that eventually you begin to suspect that their only grappling power comes from being repeated so many times.

 

Seeing as how I already hate J-pop and K-pop with a vengeance (it's a long story on which we shall dwell in more detail somewhere else some day), and how my tolerance level for Boris is already quite low, the first reaction to New Album on my part was abysmal — a band with a very specific, very limited sort of talent intentionally going in the direction of utmost dreck? It's, like, drilling your thumbs down all the way into the floor or something. Later on, it dawned on me that the album may, and probably should, be taken as a cute musical joke — that the very idea of an underground psychodrone band switching to a near-degenerate style cannot be anything but a diligent exercise in post-modern synthesis. That made things easier, but still, there's only so much distance one can cover with sardonic «joining of the unjoinable» without annoying the crap out of the listener. At least, the listener who has not yet become an adept of the Temple of Kawaii.

 

Speaking of earworms, ʽParty Boyʼ, pre-released before the album, most definitely has a catchy techno chorus; shows that Wata has a nice, soft singing voice; and has a very interesting and totally unpredictable instrumental break, where, all of a sudden, they decide to play a slightly dis­sonant piano melody, clashing against the chugging beat. Alas, this is insufficient for me to be able to call it a «good song» — any good song has to have some sense of purpose, and ʽParty Boyʼ just baffles me. Other than being danceable, is it a love song? Is it a parody? Is it a psyche­delic experience? Is it sad? Is it joyful? Is it sarcastic? Is it earthly? Otherworldly? The lyrics, referring to «strobe lights», «mysterious nights», and «riding on the stardust», seem to suggest a club atmosphere that is metamorphing into some transcendental experience, but the melody and arrangement are way too sparse and formulaic to truly blow you away — after all, Boris are not known for being experienced masters of electronic arrangements.

 

The «darker» tunes here, like ʽBlack Originalʼ, work better, with cold, distorted electronic vocals that mesh aggressively with guitar and keyboard overdubs in what sounds like an endless sea of police sirens and warning signs. But they are relatively few. More often, we get odd tributes to old school synth-pop (ʽJackson Headʼ), straightahead fast pop (ʽFlareʼ) or dream-pop (ʽHopeʼ) songs, and something that probably owes its existence to classic shoegaze (ʽSpoonʼ), only sped up to a tempo that no legitimate shoegazer would probably endorse. All of them feel decidedly secondary, unsure of themselves, unclear as to their purpose, too dance-oriented to feel magical, yet too self-consciously artsy to pass for pure dance fodder. And even despite the relative loveli­ness of Wata's tone, the other singer is still crappy, and Wata herself conveys no sense of depth beyond the glam-artificial tenderness.

 

Finding myself completely disinterested in coming up with things to say about these songs, I'll just say that it is probably sort of a «fun» page in Boris history, and it will certainly leave the ave­rage Boris fan thinking about a thing or two — yet I will still take regular straight-faced techno, shoe­gaze, or electro-pop over this incoherent mess, and I have a hard time realizing why somebody with a good knowledge of these genres would want to give New Album more than one passing listen with a smirk on his face. Or perhaps this is simply a case of me being completely out of touch with modern übercoolness.

 

HEAVY ROCKS (2011)

 

1) Riot Sugar; 2) Leak (Truth, yesnoyesnoyes); 3) GALAXIANS; 4) Jackson Head; 5) Missing Pieces; 6) Key; 7) Windows Shopping; 8) Tu, La La; 9) Aileron; 10) Czechoslovakia.

 

How many bands do you know that have released two different albums with exactly the same title, and that title was not the band's name? I honestly cannot think of a single one at present, though I am almost sure that it's just my mind playing a trick on me or something. But if not, then Boris have this dubious honor of revolutionizing the musical world yet another time — and giving their already brain-ravaged fans an even harder time. Even the album covers, by the way, are com­plete­ly the same, except for the color: the first one was orange and this one is purple. Then again, Boris are well known for often releasing the exact same record with different sleeve colors, so essentially they're just trying to fuck us up here. Completely.

 

The largest irony of all, though, is that this new Heavy Rocks is... pretty dang good! In fact, it is really the closest thing to a «good» non-noise Boris album since... uh... scrolling... scrolling... scrolling... oh wait, we are already in the Boo Radleys... back... back... okay, never mind. This is a pretty dang good Boris album, period.

 

So, apparently, at the same time that they were working on their ridiculous «J-Pop» homage, they were also producing a much more hard rock/metal-oriented album, with shades of punk, indus­trial, and psychedelia, that ended up sounding more fun, more aggressive, more catchy, and ma­king much better use of the band's biggest strength (guitar tones). It is still not possible to say if they are being serious, ironic, or clueless, but at least they are definitely being less irritating, and at no times does this record begin to seem openly «stupid», which was my largest beef with New Album and its pervy vibes.

 

ʽRiot Sugarʼ opens the record with a bona fide Metallica riff, immediately followed by the shrill, multi-tracked, echoey wail of the lead guitar that is more reminiscent of old-school psychedelics, and then followed by vocals that do not openly suck — maybe because they are also echo-laden and multi-tracked, or maybe because they actually belong to Ian Astbury of The Cult, guest star­ring on this particular track. There are quite a few other guest vocalists on the album, by the way, including Aaron Turner of Isis and some Japanese people I am not familiar with, and this in itself is a good sign, perhaps indicative of the band actually willing to go out on a limb and produce something good in all respects... for a change.

 

The album is refreshingly diverse, too. ʽLeakʼ combines psychedelic falsetto choruses with dis­sonant lead guitar parts that remind you of the old Frisco scene, although the main body of the song is more reminiscent of some early New Wave act like Television. ʽGALAXIANSʼ gallops ahead with the speed and energy of a professional hardcore act, but the guitar tones and accom­panying «revving-up» electronic noises give it more of an industrial feel. The alternate version of ʽJackson Headʼ, with guitar instead of electronica, is a great reminder to me why I so much prefer guitar-based rock to electronica when we are talking energetic/aggressive music — Wata's chop­py guitar chords, backed with Atsuo's kick-heavy percussion, give the song a sharp edge that it sorely lacked in its techno mix. The difference between the two versions of ʽTu, La Laʼ is not as easily noticeable, but I also prefer this more guitar-oriented rendition to the synthesized strings of New Album, which made it kinda corny.

 

The feelings get more mixed when we get around to the two extended, atmospheric «post-rock» workouts. ʽMissing Piecesʼ seems like an attempt to outdo Godspeed You! Black Emperor, gra­dually building up from a mere trickle into an ocean of sound, with legions of trilling guitars and torrents of feedback eventually bursting through the dam; ʽAileronʼ sounds like some wailing sinner, calling to you out of the depths of hell while Wata's fried power chords and high-pitched guitar howls imitate underground volcanic activity. But both tracks go on for much too long and must have taken the band much less time to prepare than a typical GY!BE mini-symphony — as I already said, in «expanded» mode Boris have to be minimalist Nazis: anything more than «pure» feedback blasts and you begin to sense some deficiencies in their music-making.

 

Still, whether by accident or not, on the whole these «purple» Heavy Rocks nail it just right. There is no deep meaning to this album, no special social value or sharp emotional resonance — but whenever possible, it kicks ass, and it manages to do so without sounding too ridiculous, too overstated, or too overtly «shocking». I am genuinely surprised at how decent this one turned out: easily deserving of a thumbs up and recommendable to the community at large without any spe­cial reservations.

 

ATTENTION PLEASE (2011)

 

1) Attention Please; 2) Hope; 3) Party Boy; 4) See You Next Week; 5) Tokyo Wonder Land; 6) You; 7) Aileron; 8) Les Paul Custom '86; 9) Spoon; 10) Hand In Hand.

 

The point of this third album released in the same year (in fact, on the same day as Heavy Rocks) sort of escapes me. New Album was their attempt to prove themselves in the J-pop sphere, and Heavy Rocks was a reminder that production is only skin deep, and the substantial difference between J-pop and heavy metal may be much less than one thinks. In comparison, Attention Please is more scattered and less explicit — although I guess that, with a little effort, it could be categorized as their «shoegaze album», or, at least, their «dark, moody, brooding art-pop album». It is much less heavy than Heavy Rocks, much less nipponistically irritating than New Album, but, on the whole, less striking than either of those two.

 

Like Rocks, this one also shares several (three) remixed songs with New Album, but this time, the differences are mainly cosmetic — ʽHopeʼ, ʽParty Boyʼ, and ʽSpoonʼ are all stripped of some of their electronic layers and receive additional noisy guitar overdubs, bringing them closer to «shoegaze» territory, but not necessarily making them any better. Amusingly, the new fuzzy bass­line that they gave ʽParty Boyʼ has made the song rhythmically similar to Arcade Fire's ʽRe­bellion (Lies)ʼ; however, it still largely feels like a deconstructed version of the original, only open to true appreciation if you are already a fan of its ancestral technostate. The new versions of ʽHopeʼ and ʽSpoonʼ are even less different.

 

There are some decent new experiences here, though, if you are still interested. The title track is an imaginative piece of «psycho-disco», if you can get past the heavy Japanese accent on the mystically, but clumsily, chanted "attention puh-rease" — the sprinkly electronics and the slow fireplace crackle of «woman tone-guitar» in the background create some suspense, and could even be called «haunting» if you let yourself get carried away. ʽTokyo Wonder Landʼ (as if we didn't know already) has some cool industrial-propulsive percussion and a nicely thought out «chimes / funky guitar» combination running in the background for most of its time. And ʽAileronʼ, sharing its title, but not its instrumentation or mood with the huge post-rock epic from the last record, is actually a pretty, if not outstanding, acoustic folk instrumental.

 

However, one other area where Boris probably have nothing to pick up is «dream-pop»: tracks like ʽYouʼ and ʽHand In Handʼ show that Wata is getting more and more self-confidence as a singer, but I am not sure if this is deserved — she is not a strong singer technically, her voice is not high enough to work proper «dream magic», and the very fact that she is singing in the beau­ti­ful Japanese language is hardly sufficient these days to make anybody melt in overexcitement. As a result, both these tracks also produce the impression of «failed imitations», and a failure to imitate always comes across as much more embarrassing than a failure to innovate.

 

Summing up... well, three albums per year is a little too much, especially when coming from a former noise-band who could easily fill up fifty albums of noise per year if it wanted to, but for some reason decided to prove itself in a wide variety of genres all at once. What they should pro­bably have done instead would be one, and no more than one, regular heavy metal album with touches of psychedelia — a Heavy Rocks purged of its «post-rock ambitions». As it is, this filler is in some ways instructive (in the «don't do that, kids» manner) and sometimes amusing for one listen, but I honestly hope not a lot of people will want to mistake it for «art».

 

PRÄPARAT (2013)

 

1) December; 2) Elegy; 3) Evil Stack 3; 4) Monologue; 5) Method Of Error; 6) Bataille Sucre; 7) Perforated Line; 8) Castle In The Air; 9) Mirano; 10) Canvas; 11) Maeve.

 

I do not know why Boris decided to give this album a German title, considering that it was only released on vinyl in Japan. Maybe they wanted to raise their fellow countrymen's awareness of the peculiarities of German orthography — a rather superfluous task, given how most Japanese were already fans of Motörhead (oh well, at least Präparat is actually a real German word, un­like most of the orthographic perversities of the metal bands). Maybe it was a hidden tribute to their country's allies in World War II, and we should actually sue the band for hitherto undisclo­sed Nazi sympathies. But most likely, it was simply one more typically Boris act, completely devoid of any meaning other than a random blast of wind could blow into it.

 

A brief runthrough. ʽDecemberʼ is a quiet, barely noticeable «post-rock» instrumental, supposed­ly mood-setting, but it's hard to hear anything in the first place. ʽElegyʼ is like a bad And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Boris noise track, plenty of feedback, mad drumming, and hushed psychedelic vocals that never take any distinctive shape. ʽEvil Stack 3ʼ is one minute of feedback from Jimi Boris, overdubbed with aeroplane noises or something. ʽMonologueʼ (which is any­thing but, featuring quite a bit of polyphony) is Godspeed You! Black Boris rolling out a slow, steady crescendo that ultimately fails because the dominant theme contains no interesting musi­cal ideas. ʽMethod Of Errorʼ is Boris Vai and it is actually cool for the first fifteen seconds — they did not invent that particular metallic tone, but they know how to use it to swallow you whole. Problem is, they swallow you for seven minutes, and always in the same way.

 

Side two opens with ʽBataille Sucreʼ, Boris Sabbath finally pummelling out a monster metal riff that I cannot «visualise» — it does not display a whole lot of invention, though I guess the whole thing is not half bad as far as second-hand art-metal goes, and is probably the best of this entire lot. ʽPerforated Lineʼ is forty seconds of My Bloody Boris churning out melodic noise rock that appears out of nowhere and goes to about the same place. ʽCastle In The Airʼ is two and a half minutes of Badly Drawn Boris playing a distorted waltz on pump organs, digitalizing it, cor­rupting the sound track with a virus and symbolically infecting your mind as well. ʽMiranoʼ is five minutes of Radioboris where Takeshi is trying to convey the sadness, misery, and ennui of the world with an OK Computer-style delivery, and I honestly do not recommend exposing yourself to this. ʽCanvasʼ is five minutes of Lou Boris paying tribute to Metal Machine Music — certainly not for the first time. And finally, ʽMaeveʼ ends the album on a brief Kraftboris note, with electronic pulses, wind blasts, and an overall feeling that maybe these guys would like to advance the coming of the final doom in some way, but fortunately they just don't know how.

 

In other words, we're back to thumbs down territory here: even if the album is pretty diverse, most of this diversity once again downplays Boris' greatest strength (noise control) and yet still tries to be in the «artsy» / «experimental» ballpark rather than continue their semi-successful toyings with «accessible» pop and hard rock structures that made the 2011 albums tolerable. Mostly just bland, derivative, boring, and useless — «unlistenable» only when Takeshi begins to sing like Thom Yorke, but at this point, I'd rather expose myself to «unlistenable» Boris than boring Boris, because at least nasty failures give you something to talk about.

 

NOISE (2014)

 

1) Melody; 2) Vanilla; 3) Ghost Of Romance; 4) Heavy Rain; 5) Taiyo-no Baka; 6) Angel; 7) Quicksilver; 8) Siesta.

 

Press release information: «Their most all-encompassing effort to date. It is an amplification of Boris’ endless pursuit of musical extremes while moving aggressive, intense rock into new terri­tories. Here, the band masterfully intermingles sludge-rock, blistering crust punk, shimmering shoegaze, epic thunderous doom, psychedelic melodies and just about everything else they’ve ever done. In writing Noise, BORIS was intent upon condensing all that the band had explored over the years, in order to create something more bold, streamlined and powerful. And, upon completion, the band considers Noise its most defining effort.»

 

As you can already tell, the omens are not good. Usually, when a band itself declares that album so-and-so is its «most defining effort», this means a desperate PR effort to predetermine the lis­tener's attitude — surely, if the band members themselves say so, it must be right. Fortunately, I only discovered the press release after subjecting myself to several listens, throughout which I only found the record boring; had I known about these superlatives early on, I might have thought of it as hideous. To state that Noise is «moving aggressive, intense rock into new territories» makes even less sense than stating that America was discovered by Bob Dylan in his 115th dream. This is standard late-period Boris — the band that has long since moved away from its semi-ori­ginal sound and is now largely making its living with a synthesis of metal, shoegaze, noise, and ambient psychedelia, nothing whatsoever about which could be considered a «new direction». On the contrary, if anything, Boris are getting more and more «retro» with each new outing.

 

And this outing, unfortunately, is far from their best one: I have not been able to discern even one interesting track anywhere on here. As usual, there are good guitar tones, plenty of energy, and, indeed, quite a bit of stylistic variety, but nothing is done here that could even vaguely pique my interest. Take ʽQuicksilverʼ, for instance, the first track off the album to be freely streamed: seven minutes of «speedcore» whose only value is... speed. Awful singing, dull riffage, flashy soulless soloing — this music is not evil, or scary, or angry, it is just... speedy. Or ʽHeavy Rainʼ, sung much better by Wata, but utilizing such predictable «doom-laden» chords that not even the extra heaviness can save the song from... okay, I'm repeating myself.

 

This is really unbearable because I'd actually like to like this — they are obviously trying to be artsy and accessible at the same time, but this post-rock vibe is just killing them: the 18-minute ʽAngelʼ is such a blatant (and incompetent) rip-off of some Godspeed You! Black Emperor epic that it makes me want to scream out loud — for Amaterasu's sake, guys, you've been going at this for almost twenty years now, how come with each new album you are becoming less and less original? You had that thing about feedback which was more or less your own schtick — now you have completely abandoned it to focus on these third-rate imitations?

 

Everything here is just one large exercise in soulless, hookless mannerism, so it's pretty sad news (but predictable perhaps) that they would consider this their «defining effort». Naturally, you do not have to take my word for it, but please do not listen to this album without being able to place it in its proper context — you owe that much to people like GY!BE, or My Bloody Valentine, or even Radiohead (did I mention the heavy debt that ʽGhost Of Romanceʼ owes to OK Computer?) who actually defined how «artsy» music would sound in the modern age before Boris came along and decided, for some reason, that they could do just as well, and that they could be justified in not writing good melodies as long as they could combine all this into one melting pot, where you mix pickles with apple jam and goat cheese with dark chocolate. And don't even trust the album title — because this album is not Noise. It's just Nonsense, and the rating is a certified thumbs down.

 

URBAN DANCE (2015)

 

1) Un, Deux, Trois; 2) Surrender; 3) Choreographer; 4) Endless; 5) Game Of Death.

 

On May 2, 2015, a nice spring day on which both Maya Plisetskaya and Ruth Rendell left this pathetic world, Boris released three albums at once — the best thing about which was that neither of the two ladies would have even the slightest possibility of ever being exposed to them during their lifetimes. Chalk up another personal record for Boris, but at this time I do not even have to mention that «the gesture» must have inevitably taken place at the expense of such nice things in life as listenability, originality, and emotional impact. If you have any doubts, let us give a brief run through the tracks on the first one of these, Urban Dance — it won't take long, as there are only five tracks in total.

 

ʽUn, Deux, Troisʼ is 4:30 minutes of feedback crackle, largely resembling static waves from your car radio, with the volume pushed all the way up for some masochist reason. ʽSurrenderʼ is yet another of this band's failed attempts to make their own post-rock statement — failed, because this time they seem to think that a good way to add impressive dynamics to their atmospheric soundscape is to... incorporate some MORE radio static right in the middle of the track! That's like wow, a symbolic marriage of organised beauty and freaky chaos. ʽChoreographerʼ is 8:45 minutes of... you guessed it, more radio static, except now the bass knob is also turned all the way up and you got some spooky post-Fripp whooshing guitar lines flying in the background from time to time to turn your experience into a truly volcanic one. ʽEndlessʼ only actually goes on for 9:43 minutes, over which it also tries to mesmerize you with several layers of feedback, electro­nic hum, loud percussion, and very deeply buried harmony vocals, but this time it does not even begin to meet the «post-rock challenge» because everything it does, it does during its first se­conds (no attempts at building anything up whatsoever).

 

Finally, at 11:18, ʽGame Of Deathʼ is not only the longest track on the album, but also the one with the most justified title — it does sound like the soundtrack to some particularly violent, bru­tally industrialized shooter, where you not only have to splatter as many brains of your enemies as possible, but you also have to do it working under extreme sonic conditions: nothing but feed­back, industrial grind, explosions, and machine-gun rattle to lead you to that final 100% kills vic­tory. Remember, though — if you survive this at top volume just once, you render yourself immune against Islamic State torture, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and Justin Bieber ft. Nicki Minaj music videos. Sure beats cold showers anyway.

 

Summarizing: 1 attempt at an actual music piece (not highly competitive), 1 attempt at an ambi­ent conscience manipulation (does not work on me at all), 3 pieces of crap that might have worked a little better if they were all joined together — in Absolutego fashion — because one huge piece of crap is always more impressive by definition than several small pieces of crap. I mean, what would impress you more — a pile of dinosaur dung or scattered rabbit droppings over a dust road? To me, Absolutego was the musical equivalent of that dinosaur dung. Rabbit drop­pings, though, are a bit of a turndown in comparison, which is why Urban Dance, an album that, unsurprisingly, has nothing whatsoever to do with any sort of urban dancing, gets an assured thumbs down.

 

WARPATH (2015)

 

1) Midgard Schlange; 2) Dreamy Eyed Panjandrum; 3) Behind The Owl; 4) Voo-Vah.

 

ʽMidgard Schlangeʼ: 11 minutes that probably depict the daily activities of Jörmungandr, the World Serpent. Since the Twilight of the Gods has not yet arrived, these activities seem limited to breathing, snoring, and farting, all of which are depicted in a bravely monotonous form by Boris who are well-known for their stern realism in portraying the daily activities of supernatural be­ings. If you do not lose your patience midway through, there's actually a semi-cool crescendo of electronic noises that begins around the sixth minute — hey, you could imagine yourself crawling deeper and deeper into the primordial cave as you trail the serpent's length. I hate to say it, but it is far from the worst spooky, tension-building track they've ever produced.

 

ʽDreamy Eyed Panjandrumʼ: I do admit, freely and of my own will, that I had no idea of what the word "panjandrum" meant prior to hearing this track. Now that I do know, I seriously doubt that anybody in Boris knows, either, because this track is eight minutes of evenly annoying static against which somebody is playing some antiquated version of Arkanoid. That ain't my idea of a panjandrum, and that ain't my idea of spending quality time, either. Awful, not to mention mea­ningless, unless one likes handing out meanings as if they were snot balls.

 

ʽBehind The Owlʼ: What owl? What is behind the owl? Why can't I hear anything? Is it some sort of racist (actually, ornithist) hint at the alleged deafness of owls? Well, we might as well turn the volume all the way up, and guess what... more static and wind in the wires. «Psychedelic» does not even begin to describe this. Oh well, I'll just pretend that these were nine minutes of silence, so they were just covering Cage or something. Move on.

 

ʽVoo-Vahʼ: Who knows, maybe this is the first thing that Jörmungandr says when he wakes up and decides it's time to trash the world. Problem is, before he begins, he has to thrash his tail fifty times and give twenty deep yawns. That takes him ten and a half minutes, and by the time he's ready to really kick ass... hey, the record's over. Too bad, I was just getting in the mood.

 

I have no idea why they are doing this. It's not even like they were behaving like little children, discovering the joys of the studio for the first time in their life — there's nothing here that has not been done earlier, by themselves or by millions of other artists. The first track at least shows some signs of work — the other three might just as well have been recorded by the instruments without any input on the musicians' part. Yes I know, it's all «limited edition for hardcore fans only», but really, how hard does your core have to be to allow them to dick around with you to such an extreme? And even if they're just dicking around, it's not that original, either: nobody beats Lou Reed at that game. Thumbs down, obviously.

 

ASIA (2015)

 

1) Terracotta Warrior; 2) Ant Hill; 3) Talkative Lord Vs. Silence Master.

 

And here comes the third and, fortunately, last installment of the trilogy, of which the less said, the better, so here is a quick runthrough. ʽTerracotta Warriorʼ is a twenty-minute long noise ho­mage to the deeply buried unknown soldier of China's first emperor, beginning in the form of the whistling wind in the deep underground chamber and gradually layering feedback that probably represents the modern day excavators trying to get through. ʽAnt Hillʼ is ten minutes of crackling electronic pulse (how may times have we heard that already?), an allegory for the ant hill which is itself an allegory for the endless run of silly humans around their daily tasks. ʽTalkative Lord Vs. Silence Masterʼ is ten more minutes of feedback crackle, radio static-style.

 

That's all, folks. No, really. I am packing my bags now and embarking on the quest to find seven people who actually «enjoy» and «get» this album. Together, we will find a way to break the laws of gravity and quantum mechanics and advance humanity to the... next state of advancement, whatever that is. Watch out for the latest news from The Boris Samurai — until then, thumbs down, but I promise you, once we finally rule the world, that is bound to change.

 

BRAINIAC

SMACK BUNNY BABY (1993)

 

1) I, Fuzzbot; 2) Ride; 3) Smack Bunny Baby; 4) Martian Dance Invasion; 5) Cultural Zero; 6) Brat Girl; 7) Hurting Me; 8) I Could Own You; 9) Anesthesize; 10) Draag; 11) Get Away.

 

All right, so despite their name, Brainiac weren't exactly the most original band to come out of the whole underground-indie-alternative bouillon of the early 1990s. There may be a good reason, or even more than one, why their three albums have been relegated to the «connaisseur» shelf, pardon my French again, and why the memory of Sonic Youth, Pixies, Nirvana, and Radiohead will linger long after the last real brainiac has emptied his recycle bin containing Smack Bunny Baby, Bonsai Superstar, and Hissing Prigs In Static Couture. After all, not everybody can be so lucky — wherever that bus is going, the number of seats is always limited.

 

But none of that prevents me from actually liking these guys: I think their records are fun, and their creative angle is actually quite unique, even if it does not make a lot of sense. Basically, they were surrealistically aggressive punkers with an electronic coating — but a retro electronic coating at that, with the band's leader Tim Taylor playing a Moog as his instrument of choice. Now, quickly, off the top of your head, how many punk bands with Moog synths can you name? (I mean, other than Emerson, Lake & Palmer, of course?) Not too many — even though, come to think of it, the Moog can be as in-yer-face punk as any stringed electric instrument.

 

So, as the album kicks out the door, for the first twenty-five seconds you feel like you're listening to a Pixies clone — a little introductory noise and a droney guitar riff played at full throttle. But as the vocals make their appearance, they are accompanied with a series of fussy electronic noises that sound as if they've been taken from some arcade experience — hilariously deconstructing any «authentic» anger and aggression that may have been placed in the song. ʽI, Fuzzbotʼ could have worked even without these quasi-Pacman bleeps and bloops, but its frantic "GET OUT OF MY MIND!" chorus just sounds way too much like Black Francis for the band to escape being branded as copycats. Add some of these ridiculous electronics, though, and you get something seriously different — and bizarrely intriguing.

 

Most of the songs here work at the intersection of energetic and inspired, but utterly unoriginal alt-rock guitar riffage; Tim Taylor's vocal hooks in the choruses, which can be catchy, but do not differ that much from any other repetitive, screamy choruses in punk history; and the use of elec­tronics, formally «superfluous», never truly essential to the songs' basic structures, but always serving as their main identificator — after a brief period of initiation, you will never mistake a Brainiac song for anything else, because the bleeping, howling, wheezing, wailing Moogs give them away at a moment's notice.

 

Lyrically, Brainiac are also not too different from the usual punk/alt-rock territories — their songs are mostly about pain, confusion, insanity, lack/loss of self-identity, most of the topics revolving somewhere in between the dangerous anguish of Kurt Cobain and the surrealist para­noia of Black Francis. But since the tempos are consistently fast, the guitars are consistently loud, and the vocals consistently rise to a scream, you probably won't be able to make out most of the lyrics anyway, and why should you? This band is all about finding out how cool a punk-rock guitar can sound in a formerly alien context — sort of a «Mini-Sonatas for Pissed-Off Electric Guitar and Moog Synth» experiment, and quite a successful one, in my opinion, even if most of the songs seem so similar, if you discount occasional individualistic vocal gimmicks (like the creative use of the "nah-nah nah nah-nah-nah" teaser in ʽCultural Zeroʼ or the horrorific voice-and-synth sonic meld in ʽDraagʼ which gives me awful visions of a person mutating into a syn­thesizer — quite a productive idea for a musical video, I'd say).

 

Other than Tim Taylor, the band does not have any creative quasi-geniuses at this point, but guitarist Michelle Bodine ain't half-bad (since Taylor is also credited for guitar playing, I have no idea how many of the riffs are actually played by her, but she must have been the primary guitar player during the band's live shows anyway) and she has a strong Riot Grrrl-type voice as well — too bad they only let her sing lead on one track (the aptly titled ʽMartian Dance Invasionʼ, since nobody would be surprised if the Martians chose Brainiac as their favorite dance music). On the whole, definitely not bad for a first try for someone hailing from Dayton, Ohio — they may not be bursting with creativity, but their one fresh idea works well enough for 36 minutes (and do thank God that they respect the punk aesthetics enough not to let it run for 70, despite living in an age when the new CD format was poisoning everybody's brains). Thumbs up for sure.

 

BONSAI SUPERSTAR (1994)

 

1) Hot Metal Dobermans; 2) Hands Of The Genius; 3) Fucking With The Altimiter; 4) Radio Apeshot; 5) Trans­missions After Zero; 6) Juicy (On A Cadillac); 7) Flypaper; 8) Sexual Frustration; 9) To The Baby-Counter; 10) You Wrecked My Hair; 11) Meathook Manicure; 12) Status: Choke; 13) Collide.

 

With the arrival of guitarist John Schmersal in the place of Michelle Bodine, the classic Brainiac lineup falls into place... wait, no, actually, I am not sure I would have noticed the replacement without additional info. Sure there are no female vocals now, and sure no two musicians play their instrument in the exact same way, but on the whole, this is still Tim Taylor running the whole show and others are playing what they are being told, or at least the way they are being told to play. The main difference is not in the change of style, but rather in its tightening up, so much so that guitars and electronics fuse even more seamlessly, and it gets harder and harder to simply view Brainiac as a «guitar rock band with Moogs».

 

For one thing, they get more heavily involved with sampling, and pretty creatively: ʽFucking With The Altimeterʼ builds a rhythmic pattern out of spooky whispered vocals, and in several other places they play around with radio static, using it as a greasy paste from which one can mold just about anything, given patience and time. For another thing, guitars and keyboards now often either play the same melody or play small, splintered melodic bits that are tightly inter­woven around each other. Throw in Taylor's now-permanent operation in the mode of «total mu­sical madness», and here's a sound that's pretty damn hard to confuse with anything.

 

The bad news is that, the more they solidify around this thing they do best, the more one-dimen­sional they become. Although some of these songs are fast and some are slow, some are punkier and some are bluesier, some are lighter and some are heavier, the basic message of each tune is more or less the same — «the modern world and modern technology has made us nutty as hell, and we love love love it!». This is, indeed, like one particular angle borrowed from the Pixies and magnified to the proportions of a grand hall, but this is also why Brainiac could never hope to achieve the kind of recognition and popularity that the Pixies have: too focused on one single theme, too radical in their exploration of it. I really like the record, yet I cannot even write a pro­per review, because the songs leave few possibilities for individual analysis.

 

I will simply state, then, that Bonsai Superstar is one of the most credible «mad albums» of the post-punk epoch that would not be done from a sociopathic standpoint, but rather from a «harm­less» angle. One big mistake that so many «mad» artists make is that, for some rea­son, they usually think that «madness» always has to be aggressive — which it does not. Here, even when Taylor drives himself up the wall and the guitars and keyboards begin locking into a paranoid, dissonant howling (ʽYou Wrecked My Hairʼ), the feeling is that the anger is mostly internalised, that the singer is trying to knock out his demons without expectorating them. More often, though, he is simply just being playful — like on the hilarious ʽJuicy (On A Cadillac)ʼ, a basic rock'n'roll number offset by hiccupy «rubbed-glass» noises that might equally well be synthesizer tones or treated samplings of scratched records, but, regardless of this, add a touch of «dynamic idiocy» to whatever is going on. Or he is being explicitly androgynous, as on ʽFlypaperʼ, where his near-fal­setto vocals are driven so high up in the mix, it's as if he were making a pass at you or something. Okay, that might be dangerous... but nah, not really.

 

One thing to add is that, from a technical angle, I think that lovers of guitar experimentation will find plenty of interesting stuff going on here — Schmersal's passages often presage «math-rock» as we know it in the 21st century, though, of course, they are nowhere near as technically accom­plished as the average «math-rock» product these days. But they do not need to be, since the melody, as such, is always subdued here to atmosphere and energy, by definition. Had they had a Robert Fripp in the band, he would surely have introduced a tighter level of «discipline»; but then, I suppose that any band that would have Robert Fripp and Tim Taylor in it at the same time would have decayed faster than a mendelevium isotope. So let us be content with what we have here, a maniacal celebration of electronic insanity without any harmful repercussions for progres­sive humanity. In other words, a thumbs up.

 

HISSING PRIGS IN STATIC COUTURE (1996)

 

1) Indian Poker (part 3); 2) Pussyfootin'; 3) Vincent Come On Down; 4) This Little Piggy; 5) Strung; 6) Hot Seat Can't Sit Down; 7) The Vulgar Trade; 8) Beekeepers Maxim; 9) Kiss Me, U Jacked Up Jerk; 10) 70 Kg Man; 11) Indian Poker (part 2); 12) Nothing Ever Changes; 13) I Am A Cracked Machine.

 

I seriously dislike the title of this album — sounds like four unrelated words joined together through random selection. If anything, it should have been named after one of its tracks — ʽHot Seat Can't Sit Downʼ is a near-perfect description for its overall sound. Which has not changed all that much since Bonsai Superstar — but now it is even wilder, faster, uglier, and crazier, so if you liked Superstar for all these reasons, you are almost legally bound to develop an even higher appreciation for Hissing Prigs.

 

Unless you already are an experienced consumer of various sorts of noise, some of the small arch-experimental links may be hard to fathom — if the industrially distorted «pan-fried» electric guitar duo on ʽIndian Poker (part 3)ʼ does not kill you on the spot, just wait until you get to the high-pitched electronic sirens on ʽIndian Poker (part 2)ʼ (boy, am I glad they declined to end the album with ʽIndian Poker (part 1)ʼ — that would probably have been the sonic torture to out­shame all other sorts of sonic torture). Even before that, the already major crazy ʽ70 Kg Manʼ, running along at top speed to the sound of fizzed-out punk guitars and dissonant overdubbed vocal harmonies of the chorus, is interrupted midway through by a «bridge» of electronically treated barking hounds — let me tell you, there's absolutely no fun in hearing this at top volume in headphones, and oh, my name is Peter Townshend, by the way.

 

But do not make the mistake that it's all about ugliness, either. Brainiac's chief influences are still the same — main cues taken from the Pixies and, through them, from the Ramones and other punkers who value fun, catchiness, and entertainment at least as much as they value rebellious­ness, schizophrenia, and social message. Once the initiation of ʽIndian Pokerʼ has diligently driven out all the «wusses» and «pussies», ʽPussyfootinʼ really turns out to be quite a conserva­tive rock track, oddly adorned only with Tim Taylor's inimitably screechy vocal style and a series of slightly deranged babbling interludes. And no amount of hysterical electronic effects can dis­guise the fact that ʽVincent Come On Downʼ is essentially just a solid slice of classic punk-rock, with nothing particularly «avantgarde» about its basic chord structure.

 

But do not make the mistake that it's really all so simplistic. The above-mentioned ʽHot Seatʼ, for instance, starts off with quite a tricky guitar riff and an even trickier time signature, well worthy of King Crimson — matters get simplified once Tim starts to sing, but the song switches gears several times and is, on the whole, far more complex than anything ever produced by, say, Nir­vana (not that it automatically makes it better — I am merely making a case here for Brainiac as a «musician's band» rather than a «general public band»). And the guitar melodies on ʽThis Little Piggyʼ, despite the relative simplicity of each, remain ever so slightly, but steadily and intentio­nally out of sync with each other, which means they are taking their clues from the avantgarde artists, after all. There's nothing like mapping craziness through intelligence.

 

But do not make the mistake that it's really all so esoteric. Once most of this stuff has properly sunken in, the professional headbanger will headbang to it all the way through to ʽNothing Ever Changesʼ, whose combination of galloping rock rhythm with catchy electronic pulse could make it into a ʽRock Lobsterʼ for the 1990s, and the closing ʽI Am A Cracked Machineʼ, which is also a damn good title — the whole song, heck, the whole album, dammit, this whole band has made a career out of portraying the daily routine events in the life of a «cracked machine», one that might be expected to churn out «normal» electronic music, but, due to its being cracked, turns out every­thing but normal — and loves every moment of it.

 

Even if your mind will not get attached to specific songs, it would be hard not to get involved in Brainiac's rusty robotic carnival as a whole. I hold no illusions for Brainiac's future — there is no guarantee that, had Tim Taylor not perished in an unfortunate auto accident a year later, they would have retained their edginess and freshness. The several songs they still had time to record and put out as an EP (Electro-Shock For President) show that the plan for the next stage was to relinquish guitars altogether and go completely electronic for a while — not the best idea, per­haps, because the songs became completely depersonalized and were unable to capitalize on Tim's eccentric individuality. Still, that's hardly a polite pretext to say that nobody will miss Tim Taylor — over those brief, but eventful several years, he did help out to make the decade a little more colorful and crazy, and Hissing Prigs is arguably the highest point of that color-add-on, so it gets yet another thumbs up from me, and with that, the story of Brainiac is over.

THE BREEDERS

POD (1990)

 

1) Glorious; 2) Doe; 3) Happiness Is A Warm Gun; 4) Oh!; 5) Hellbound; 6) When I Was A Painter; 7) Fortunately Gone; 8) Iris; 9) Opened; 10) Only In 3's; 11) Lime House; 12) Metal Man.

 

You know, there might actually be a good reason why Black Francis rarely, if ever, let Kim Deal contribute her own tunes to Pixies' albums — she just ain't that good a songwriter. Perfect bass playing for that band, awesome vocal sidekick to Frank, charismatic personage all around, but no matter how much I listen to Pod, I just can't remember any of the goddamn songs. They sound totally awesome, for sure, but that's not really «songwriting», the way I see it, it's more like... like... like sleepwalking with a well-tuned bass in one's hands.

 

But yeah, songwriting ain't everything, and I guess an album like Pod just had to be made, be­cause it's not just «Pixies without the hooks». It's more like The Breeders were a younger brother of The Pixies — you know, the kind of small kid who has not yet had any time to match the achievements of his successful elder brother, but has that ring of endearing promising charm around him. Except that Kim Deal seems to go backwards rather than forward from the Pixies: there is a certain narrowing down of the vision here, a certain amount of deconstruction and focus on the backbone, which, I guess, is sort of natural to expect from a bass player — even if Kim actually doesn't play much bass on this album, so it seems.

 

Anyway, in 1990, The Breeders, in addition to Kim, were: Tanya Donelly, formerly of Throwing Muses, on guitar and vocals; Josephine Wiggs, on bass and vocals; Britt Walford of Slint on drums, recording under the pseudonym of Shannon Doughton; and Carrie Bradley on violin. Steve Albini, who had already produced Surfer Rosa for Pixies, was brought in to lend his usual stern helping hand — and indeed, Pod sounds closer in style to Surfer Rosa than to Doolittle, because Albini does not like a lot of overdubs, and the ones he does like are either brutally sharp or even more brutally noisy. Here, there is definitely more sharpness than noise.

 

As you know, the Beatles have a symbolic song for everybody, and the Breeders are no exception: the sole lonesome cover here is Lennon's ʽHappiness Is A Warm Gunʼ, because it symbolizes Kim's major preferences: (a) nonsensical, but evocative (under pressure) lyrics; (b) indifference towards the usual verse-chorus approach to a pop song; (c) gloomy minor keys that may or may not make the jump to major, depending on how pissed you are; (d) an overall impression of stark psychological depth though you have no way whatsoever to explain what exactly is so deep about chanting "Mother Superior jump the gun" like a mantra. Anyway, with Albini onboard this sounds all too much like a Big Black interpretation of the Beatles, and they kind of lop off and subjugate the «optimistic» conclusion of the song, stripped all the way down to broken shards of guitar, among which Kim Deal is absentmindedly strolling barefoot, humming "happiness is a warm gun" like a recently shell-shocked individual. Hmm.

 

Now, about Kim's own songs... well, Kurt Cobain apparently found them a great inspiration, but unlike Kurt, Kim Deal is not prone to uncontrollable fits of anger or self-pitying with which it would be so easy for the average record-buying teen to associate. Instead, Kim just creates herself a droning wave, straddles it and rides it anywhere it turns out to take her: ʽGloriousʼ, opening the album, sets its general tone fairly well. You get your chug-chug-chugging bass, your one- or two-chord guitar riff, a noisy lead drone, and these weird «stuck-in-adolescence» vocals whose pro­genitor was Maureen Tucker of The Velvet Underground — one of the first ladies of rock who turned the skill of not knowing how to sing into a form of high art.

 

Of course, the Breeders have much more in common with the Velvets than just the voice: their propensity for droning, their ability to induce a state of «optimistic depression» without spending too much effort, or even Bradley's John Cale-imitating violin passages on ʽOh!ʼ. In terms of repetitiveness, they sometimes go beyond their mentors — for instance, having fallen upon a really cool-sounding bassline at the end of the upbeat ʽWhen I Was A Painterʼ, instead of trying to build up, they build down: first, there's a fuzzy guitar riff going along, then the guitar just disappears and we get forty seconds of pure bass-drums groove. Somebody else would have employed that as an intro for a gritty rocker — they have it as an outro, because expectations are to be challenged and interpretations are to be sought after.

 

Then somewhere in the middle of all this befuddlement comes ʽFortunately Goneʼ, the closest thing they have here to a sweet, innocent twee-pop song — probably mighty influential, too, since you could think of it as the blueprint for all these intelligent girl-led pop bands like Allo Darlin'. It also gives away the whole concept of the album, perhaps, with its first line: "I wait for you in heaven / On this perfect string of love". Everything else makes no sense, but this "wait for you in heaven" is quite telling — you see, Kim Deal really plays this part of disembodied spirit, a solitary ghost accidentally lost somewhere in the back alleys of heavenly space, and this explains why commonplace layman emotions like «love», «anger», «sadness», or «happiness» do not really belong with The Breeders. (Nor did they belong with the Pixies, for that matter, but the Pixies were still far more «grounded» than this band.)

 

Actually, some of the common interpretations for their songs imply that there are fairly mundane subjects covered here, including some rather horrendous ones — ʽHellboundʼ is frequently re­ferred to as a song about a living abortion, allegedly acknowledged as such by Kim herself, but you would never know that without the commentary, and every time I hear that song, I prefer to interpret the "it" that "lives in folds of red and steamy air" not as an undelivered foetus but rather as... well... IT. IT lives, and IT is hellbound. To the grittiest and gloomiest guitar melody on the entire album, though even that one is not too gritty or gloomy. As the girls roll their eyes and go "hellbound hellbound hellbound hellbound hellbound", all you get is the inescapability of hell, but whether hell is such a bad place to be — well, ever since Bon Scott the question remains debatable, and one thing you are not ever going to get from the Breeders is answers. Answers are traps set by real artists for losers.

 

Although I have to confess from the start that I find myself much more personally attracted to the band's second album than their first one, its overall sound alone, just the way all the ingredients are combined and processed, guarantees a thumbs up from me. It also helps that it is merely thirty minutes long and that all the songs are so short — any more pretense and it would be in danger of becoming a Sonic Youth rip-off with sparser production and poorer playing.

 

LAST SPLASH (1993)

 

1) New Year; 2) Cannonball; 3) Invisible Man; 4) No Aloha; 5) Roi; 6) Do You Love Me Now?; 7) Flipside; 8) I Just Wanna Get Along; 9) Mad Lucas; 10) Divine Hammer; 11) S.O.S.; 12) Hag; 13) Saints; 14) Drivin' On 9; 15) Roi (reprise).

 

Sorry if this breaks any conventions, but this, not Pod, should be the Breeders' primary claim to fame. Yes, so Pod is a bit more lo-fi, off-the-cuff, stream-of-conscious-to-record kind of a thing, whereas Last Splash is rather «stereotypical indie rock» in comparison — not to mention being far closer to the regular Pixies style. But who really cares, if the songs are that good?..

 

For this album, the Breeders were: Kim Deal on vocals, guitars, and keyboards; Josephine Wiggs on bass; Jim MacPherson on drums; and, most interestingly, Kim's own twin sister Kelley Deal on second guitar, even though, prior to joining the Breeders, she did not know how to play at all (nice boost to all of you non-playing, but aspiring suckers out there). It's not as if it took a lot of skill to play anything on this record, but the Breeders are not about skill — they're your friends, the lovely gruff cavemen (actually, cavewomen mostly) with a knack for converting gruffness into romanticism with simple, but efficient melodic twists.

 

Well, at least they are now. Most of these songs are short, concise, catchy, and likeable. "We have come for light", Kim announces at the very beginning, before the tempo speeds up and over a heavy psychedelic gallop we are being told that "I am the rain, I am the new year, I am the sun". Silly people might call this approach «pretentious», but in the warped world of the Pixies and the Breeders, nothing ever gets taken too seriously. They are just having fun, opening the season with a brief shamanistic ritual for the electric guitar. Good groove.

 

The actual hooks start coming with ʽCannonballʼ, whose frolicking bassline and wobbling lead guitar flourishes form a perfect combination with the vocals, which also wobble (her "spitting in a wishing well" is adorable, the way those hushed vowels weave around the guitar) and then come together in a perfectly sunny — and totally minimalistic — chorus of "in the shade, in the shade". Here, the mystical appeal of the Pixies — as in, when you know for sure that these songs are great but you have no idea why — reappears in all its glory: I totally fail to understand why this song moves me so much or even how it moves me, but it does.

 

As does ʽInvisible Manʼ, which is already a little less mysterious — if you cleaned it up a bit from all the dirty feedback and brought the vocals a little upfront, it'd be, like, totally a song from The Velvet Underground & Nico, on the Nico side of things, of course. Kim sings it in her low register, quite similar to the way Nico told us once to beware of the femme fatale — here, though, we are told to beware of The Invisible Man, which is pretty much the same thing in a different gender role. Beautiful, evocative vocal part, nice ʽWalrusʼ-style string arrangements.

 

It's not just the vocals, though — ʽRoiʼ, which is pretty much an instrumental, is one of the best Sonic Youth songs never written by Sonic Youth, even if one of the guitarists never knew how to play guitar. A bit of dark ambience, a bit of pure noise, a clever build-up towards a rocking cli­max, even a little quotation from the ʽWhole Lotta Loveʼ riff... well, technically it's not much to speak of, but I like how it is structured like a four-minute multi-part suite that pretty much sum­marizes everything cool that was invented by DIY indie people — before it all became regurgi­tated and plagiarized so often that the DIY spirit became a parody of its former self.

 

Just two more highlights, and I'll shut up: ʽDivine Hammerʼ is a wonderfully optimistic and de­termined track — "I'm just looking for one divine hammer" is one phrase that is really tough to get out of your head, especially because of the pitch jump on "hammer" (later on, echoed by the lead line), and then, you also never know if she is being semi-serious or totally ironic (you pro­bably wouldn't think that Kim Deal is being serious when she sings "I'm just looking for a faith, waiting to be followed" — then again, what do we really know about Kim Deal? And what do we really know about the word «faith»?).

 

And, of course, there's the obligatory «Moe Tucker-style conclusion»: ʽDrivin' On 9ʼ is a gor­geous little ditty, fiddle and all, a perfect mixture of indie rock and country that is indeed a perfect, though much too short, soundtrack for a slow late night cruise, and nobody could sing it as sweetly as Kim does in her overgrown child voice. A peaceful, traditionalist, yet totally not tacky tune for us all to take a load off.

 

See, this is what happens when you just make a teensy-weensy effort to support your already burgeoning charisma. Really, the numbers on Pod were these little unfocused bursts of charis­matic energy — with Last Splash, we get something that is more conventional, but nothing can really be too conventional with these eccentric ladies. If you only go for «innovation», pure and simple (yes, and eat something new for breakfast every day, too), you might get bored. If you prefer your innovation mixed with old-fashioned pop sensibility, well... thumbs up, and let's get on with it.

 

TITLE TK (2002)

 

1) Little Fury; 2) London Song; 3) Off You; 4) The She; 5) Too Alive; 6) Son Of Three; 7) Put On A Side; 8) Full On Idle; 9) Sinister Foxx; 10) Forced To Drive; 11) T And T; 12) Huffer.

 

Almost ten years separate this one from the last Breeders LP — ten years in which lots and lots of things happened to alt-rock and indie-rock, and over which both the Pixies and the Breeders had sort of become living, but somewhat outdated legends, and not even Kurt was alive any more to give Kim and Kelley's next offering the proper praise, though I'm fairly sure he would have loved Title TK to yet another death, had he had the chance.

 

Anyway, these Breeders have everything and nothing in common with those Breeders. Every­thing, because this is very much a Breeders record in design and execution; nothing, because the Deal sisters are the only Breeders left around — neither Richard Presley (guitar), nor Mando Lopez (bass, guitar), nor Jose Medeles (drums) had anything to do with Pod or Last Splash (in fact, the former two players were recruited by Kim from the then-current lineup of L.A. hardcore punk band Fear). But you know what? For all of this record's sparseness, it might as well have been recorded by the Deal sisters alone — that is, as long as old friend Steve Albini stayed behind the engineering console. After all, Kim is credited here for «guitar, organ, drums, bass, vocals», and it's not as if you're gonna hear any flutes or harpsichords — and, if you'll pardon me this one more pun, it's Kim and only Kim that is the right deal for the Breeders.

 

In a way, Title TK was Kim's «protest album». Technically, it is sort of a cross between the less accessible Pod and the more «poppy» Last Splash — the ascetic, bare-bones nature of the songs hearkens back to Pod, but the heavy infusion of the songs with hard-to-forget pop hooks shows that mystical spontaneity was far from the only force driving the songs. What is also important, though, is that Kim insisted on analog-only recording techniques — no, this is not lo-fi here (thankfully), but this is still as raw as it gets, flubs and accidents included. Had the songs been poor at the core, this approach could be judged as unnecessarily pretentious; but with such strong hooks, the occasional «what-the-heck-was-that?» reaction only spices up the proceedings.

 

And what are these strong hooks, may you ask? Well, they usually come in the form of very brief, but strongly emphasized «clippings» — vocal or instrumental. Considering how hard it has been  to come up with short, punchy, resonant hooks ever since half of the world's population enlisted in rock and roll bands, I feel half-amused, half-amazed at how many cool phrasings there are in these short blasts. Sometimes you have to wait for them, of course: ʽLittle Furyʼ opens the album with a generic mid-tempo beat and some expectedly somnambulant, nonsensical vocals, distribu­ted between the Deal sisters in a rather chaotic pattern... it is not until 2:08 that the nasty, teasing little four-note riff starts up, and it goes away after just a few bars, but that little is enough to get the back of your mind thinking — what was that? was that really necessary? was it really a tease, or a threat, or a warning? does it have any relation to the tender chorus admonition of "hold what you've got"?.. well — "it's a living thing", as Jeff Lynne would say.

 

ʽLondon Songʼ, on the other hand, is totally vocal-dependent — dependent, in fact, on one word: as devoid of direct interpretation as "slipping through the states to find the static, yeah there's something to believe" is, using the word "believe" for the final resolution of the chorus is a bril­liant move, because it turns the entire song into a sort of intimate, camouflaged «I'm holding on» anthem. But this vocal dependency becomes even more explicit on ʽOff Youʼ, which is a ballad (I think — with this approach, the difference between tender ballad and angry rocker seems to be blurred) that totally rides on Deal's personal charisma as filtered through her vocal cord modula­tion. The dry overtones, the ability to conjure some detached innocence and «infantile wisdom» through potentially over-pompous lines like ʽI am the autumn in the scarlet / I am the make-up on your eyesʼ, the stern, but tender conclusion of each chorus with a laconic "yeah we're movin' — yeah, we're movin'" (don't forget the rising rather than falling intonation on the second movin'), it's all ascetically beautiful in a way that's doggone hard to explain.

 

Most of the album sounds «broken» — short vocal lines consisting of incomplete sentences (often put together through phonetic associations rather than any logically meaningful purpose), short guitar bursts, lots of jagged, stop-and-start sequences. An uncomfortable flow, but you get used to it eventually — a good example is ʽThe Sheʼ, one of the verses of which goes "It's my death / My rhythm / My arithmetic / I got used to / Nobody ridin' in the back", so just don't ride in the back and you'll be okay with the song's clumsy, but effective funk beat, distorted growling organ, and more of those «nasty teaser» guitar mini-riffs that are so popular this season. When the song does have an uninterrupted flow, it might happen with the aid of a loudly mixed, simple, repetitive, eerie bassline — ʽPut On A Sideʼ does just that out of one simple note and one bit of glissando — or with the aid of a sped-up tempo, like the closing ʽHufferʼ, which says goodbye with a much-needed merry nursing rhyme: "Torn, toiled and troubled... toil toil toil till I get sick, I try reverse but I'm not that quick".

 

Not every song is great — in fact, I would hesitate to call any of these songs «great», because they simply do not trigger that kind of verbal association — but leave it to Ms. Deal and her ghostly shadow of a sister to come up with an indie-rock album that does not leave even the slightest tinge of a «oh no, not another indie-rock album» reaction. Not too catchy, not too friendly, not too enigmatic, but a perfect balance of all three to give you entertainment, enjoy­ment, and intrigue. And let us not forget to thank Mr. Albini one more time — after all, he is still one of the few people around to know how not to strip indie-rock electric guitar of its ability to thrill and hypnotize. In short, an all-around excellent comeback for the Breeders, but pardon me if I just end this with a regular thumbs up instead of a detailed amateur Freudian analysis, which I am sure it deserves from somebody who is much more qualified.

 

MOUNTAIN BATTLES (2008)

 

1) Overglazed; 2) Bang On; 3) Night Of Joy; 4) We're Gonna Rise; 5) German Studies; 6) Spark; 7) Istanbul; 8) Walk It Off; 9) Regalame Esta Noche; 10) Here No More; 11) No Way; 12) It's The Love; 13) Mountain Battles.

 

Well... no mistake about it, this is yet another Breeders album, and it still got that old Pod vibe. But it is also hard to get rid of the feeling that the Deal sisters sound either a little tired, or a little uninspired. The only more or less upbeat song has to be a cover (ʽIt's The Loveʼ by the Tasties), and the rest drag — not in the curse sense of the word, but literally so. Lots of slow dirges, craw­ling, stuttering, bleeding guitars, and vocals that already go beyond «somnambulant» and move into «deadly wounded» category. Really, it makes me depressed just to have to review this stuff, let alone listen to it one more time.

 

Not that the Deal sisters themselves would agree with me, and plenty of reviewers probably wouldn't, either: they just wrote something along the lines of «this is the best Breeders album since [insert random Breeders album here]» and told us lots of things about how the Breeders usually play and record their songs, which was of no use for Breeders fans and of little help for Breeders neophytes, because one million indie-rock bands that came since the Breeders played and recorded their songs like the Breeders did. Anyway, I may be totally confused here, but I sense pain, depression, and tiredness all over these songs — never mind that they were allegedly recorded over a period of five years, at different studios and with varying band lineups.

 

Do not be deceived by titles like ʽNight Of Joyʼ and ʽWe're Gonna Riseʼ. The former rides upon a quietly threatening bass line and is actually about a night of sorrow, with vocals that stop two steps short of weeping; and ʽWe're Gonna Riseʼ is so slow and plaintive, you kind of get the feeling that it will take a lot of calories (and time, and toil, and trouble) for «us» to rise, whoever «we» are (the Deal sisters, the Breeders, all the good people in general, all the bad people in gene­ral, etc.).

 

The title track is really something — an exercise in «gutter music» if there ever was one, most of it spent by Kim excreting loosely joined phrases that give the illusion of being completely free-form, over an array of electronic pulses and feedback blasts (yes, Steve Albini is at the production wheel again, and how did you guess that?). It's another impressive way to close an album, but it ain't nothing like the humorous-vivacious ʽHufferʼ or the pretty-dreamy ʽDrivin' On 9ʼ — this one just bleeds internally, with high fever, delirium, and everything that comes along. Nothing too overtly shocking (Kim Deal is no Courtney Love, and even her juvenile phase as Kim Deal is long gone), but certainly not a pretty experience.

 

The problem is, while I can certainly respect the vibe, Mountain Battles has a bit too much in the drab, drag, limp, and stutter department about it to be treated on par with the previous two albums, or even with Pod. This can have its positive effects — it may well be one of those records that grows and grows on you, biding its time and waiting for you to get sick, old, depres-sed, confused, broody, whatever, to appreciate its subtle anti-charms, and at the present time, I am not quite there yet, though I'm getting close. But then again, even this growth requires that the songs be able to work like a lens, gathering your vibes and focusing them with the music — and this doesn't really work with songs like ʽSparkʼ, which just meander between mindless strumming and short shrieking guitar blasts and sound like first-stage demos for classic Portishead («first stage» meaning just that — the stage where you have only just begun visualizing what your song will eventually sound like).

 

Sometimes Kim is just being cute without a well-understood reason, for instance, when out of the blue she covers a Mexican song (Roberto Cristobal's ʽRegalame Esta Nocheʼ), or creates a generic country tune in her sleepwalking stylistics (ʽHere No Moreʼ). Sometimes the sisters show off their knowledge — ʽIstanbulʼ, for instance, is a «novelty» number that will please lovers of popular etymology (if it so happens that you do not get the "where you're going?" - "to the city!" call-and-response hook of the song, look up the ʽIstanbulʼ page on Wikipedia). Most of the time, though, the experience just consists of the sisters morbidly trading stern chunks of dark vocal pop to equally morbid guitar phrasing (ʽGerman Studiesʼ, ʽSparkʼ, etc.), and you really have to get in the mood to «get» the attitude, or, rather, the necessity of getting the attitude.

 

I am positively sure that some people will want to defend Mountain Battles as an essential Breeders album — perhaps even go as far as to claim that this one has the deepest mystery of 'em all. And they may be right, but under one condition: that one regards the Breeders themselves as an essential band, worth exploring from their humble «Pixies offshoot» beginning and all the way down to that as-of-yet-to-come age when an 80-year old Kim Deal and a 110-year old Bob Dylan record a duet album of Cole Porter songs. I am not quite sure that Kim Deal is that important a character — I'll take her when she rocks and invents whacko pop hooks, but when she's sulking like this, demanding that we spend too much time on all her whims (including crooning in Spanish), it's a little different.

 

Thumbs up all the same — far be it from me to put down an ety­mologically relevant record — but if this is going to be the last full-length Breeders LP (which is far from certain, as the Deals tend to really enjoy their long breaks), it's definitely a low-key exit that offers no true resolution to the saga of the Breeders. Then again, maybe that is the best resolution.

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE

SPACEGIRL AND OTHER FAVORITES (1993)

 

1) Crushed; 2) That Girl Suicide; 3) Deep In The Devil's Eye & You; 4) Kid's Garden; 5) When I Was Yesterday; 6) Spacegirl; 7) Spacegirl (Revisited); 8) After The Fall; 9) Thoughts Of You; 10) Hide And Seek; 11) Never Ever!; 12) Ashtray; 13) Fire Song.

 

Was there anything in the early classic period of the Rolling Stones that would make them the logical predecessors of «shoegazing»? Not much, I guess, though perhaps some of their longer, «dronier» tracks like ʽI'm Going Homeʼ and especially ʽSing This All Together (See What Hap­pens)ʼ could be said to be very tangentially related to the genre. However, not even ʽSing This All Togetherʼ thrived on monochrome monotonousness — even at their most daring and far out, the Stones never pretended to «minimalist artsiness». Too highbrow for those consummate hitmakers, who could afford to be weird, but couldn't afford to be «inaccessible».

 

In the light of this, it is odd to see how The Brian Jonestown Massacre, a band (actually, a band-like vehicle for supporting the songwriting, singing, and playing talents of Anton Newcombe, a deeply troubled geek from sunny California) whose veneration of pre-Beggar's Banquet era Stones is as visible from the title as their predilection for the macabre (Jonestown Massacre), be­gan life as a bona fide shoegazing outfit, albeit with a knack for chord sequences and guitar tones that have a lot to do with the mid-Sixties. Later on, Newcombe would make his Stones fanboyism much more evident, but here, it takes time to realize that, yes indeed, quite a bit of BJM's twangy guitar sound comes from the era of Aftermath. And given the album's overall quality, you might not want to waste all that time on something so inessential.

 

In fact, Newcombe himself has pretty much disowned this record, dismissing it as a tentative col­lection of early youthful experiments — which, it must be noted, did not prevent him from re-releasing it on CD anyway: the original vinyl-only release had but seven tracks, with six more added as bonuses on the 2003 edition. (No contradiction, though — it's just that this guy takes his own history seriously, as do most of us silly people). The record is sometimes labeled as a «com­pilation», which is not altogether accurate: the recordings do date from several different sessions, but none of them were previously released, and if there is one argument for why this really shouldn't be judged as a proper debut album, it is that, according to some sources, The Brian Jonestown Massacre as a band are not even properly represented here — instead, what you are witnessing is a set of lo-fi demos where Newcombe plays all the instruments himself, including (most of the time) programmed drums.

 

You can already see the talent behind the shoegazing muck: once the first minute of howling feed­back is over, ʽCrushedʼ becomes a well-coordinated twin current of one crunchy and one melodic guitar, with the melodic guitar playing a rather engaging raga line. Newcombe's vocals, however, should rather be placed somewhere in between Robert Smith and Thom Yorke here than have anything to do with Mick Jagger's sneer — and all the way through to the very end, he is playing this reclusive romantic who prefers to fantasize about transcendental love rather than just go out and get some. Which is perfectly in agreement with the ideology of your average shoegazer, but does not present Newcombe as a particularly interesting personality type in his own rights. In fact, his sticky, droning, pleading invocation of "just let me lo-o-o-o-ve you, just let me lo-o-o-o-ve you" is sort of annoying in an imbecile-teenager sort of way. Would any type of female, spacegirl or not, want to fall for this whiner?

 

That said, on the whole ʽSpacegirlʼ is an interesting experiment — five minutes into the song, the vocals disappear altogether and become replaced with a solemn, stately, marching drone, full of acoustic guitars and synthesized strings and horns that fills up your living room for eight more minutes, then fades away and then fades back in to give you five minutes more of the same. At­mospherically, it is quite similar to the final «jam» part of George Harrison's ʽIt's All Too Muchʼ: you get the feeling of being caught in the middle of some important religious ritual, an offering to the Great Sun or something like that. My only quibble is that the production is so weak, you do not get to properly savor all the small intricate details — the jam is not as monotonous as it seems, because the «strings» are actually playing a dynamic melody, but they are intentionally shoved behind the unchanging rhythmic growl. Why? Silly shoegazing ideology.

 

Speaking of the shorter tracks, many, if not most of these, would later be re-recorded in superior versions, so it makes little sense to discuss them here; and those that would not are so badly marred by the low quality of the recording that only a diehard lo-fi lover would want to revisit them on a regular basis — something like ʽWhen I Was Yesterdayʼ, for instance, could be an ex­cellent tribute to mid-Sixties psychedelic garage-rock, but the fuzzy rhythm guitar, the bluesy lead guitar, and the snappy vocals all sound like shit. Somebody be a good sport, please, and cover this one in pristine sound quality. Leave the lo-fi to the lo-fi era, please.

 

What is important, though, is that Spacegirl's limitations are primarily of a technical nature. Even through the shittiest sound, you can sense that Newcombe has a good ear for melody, a good knack for complex arrangements, and a good sense of taste, allowing him to «update» the Sixties for the Nineties without coming across as just a kitschy nostalgia act — which, in a way, may count as a genuine artistic vision. But yes, the relation of Spacegirl to «proper» BJM albums is much like the relation of the Beatles' Decca audition tape to the first recordings of the George Martin era. At the very least, if you are in a hurry, do not make the mistake of letting this record be your introduction to the band. And you don't even have to take my word for it — take Anton's. Seventy-plus minutes of lo-fi «Brian Jones drowned, forms shoegazing band in Heaven on tight budget» stuff can really turn you off very quickly, with no hopes of redemption.

 

METHODRONE (1995)

 

1) Evergreen; 2) Wisdom; 3) Crushed; 4) That Girl Suicide; 5) Wasted; 6) Everyone Says; 7) She Made Me; 8) Hyperventilation; 9) Records; 10) I Love You; 11) End Of The Day; 12) Outback; 13) She's Gone; 14) Methodrone.

 

«Not to be confused with mephedrone or methedrone», the current edition of the Wikipedia article prudently warns us, and you'd better heed that warning when you walk into any of the music stores that still remain in your neighborhood unless you have nothing against accidentally getting the heat on you. Actually, the album title is very smart — because formally, all you can say is that it is a combination of "method" and "drone", without any direct allusions to any heavy chemical substances. And indeed, there's lots of droning here, and there most certainly is a method: Anton Newcombe is one of those dangerous guys with conceptual ideas in their heads who often force you to «respect» them even if you are emotionally inclined to hate them and everything they stand for.

 

My major beef with Newcombe's ideology, however, is not the way he conceives or plays his songs, but his insistence on having us endure so many of them. Almost all of these early BJM albums are insufferably long — of course, they were made at the height of the CD era, when many people seriously thought that LPs now should run up to 70 minutes by default just because their main physical medium allows them to, but in Newcombe's case, I believe, we also have to deal with additional egomania. (Oh, technically the songs are credited to the band as a whole, and apparently Matt Hollywood, the bass player and occasional vocalist, was also very much involved in the creative process, but not quite enough to offer a distinct second identity.)

 

Methodrone, the BJM's proper official debut LP, is a perfect illustration: 71 minutes of music that should have been pared down to at most 40. Newcombe's formula is mostly the same for all these songs — slow, repetitive, melodically minimalistic, trance-oriented guitar grooves — and this makes the better realized ones get dissolved and camouflaged in the context of the inferior material, so much so that even after three or four listens, I still have memories of Methodrone as a «collective substance», a species of musical earpaste, rather than a set of songs where I could value the musical merits of each separate one. Which is not necessarily bad, but I would probably prefer a 40-minute tube of earpaste than this Jumbo package. Not being an elephant and all.

 

The departure from Spacegirl is felt here largely through improved production (as the band was now affiliated with a real indie record label, Bomp! Records, and had a couple of real producers working with them) and the lack of particularly childish material like that "let me love you" bit from ʽSpacegirlʼ itself. Other than that, the album is still answering the same question: "What would have happened if Brian Jones had lived right into the era of the Stone Roses and the early shoegazers?" Wait, scratch that. Not «Brian Jones», really, who wasn't much of a composer or musical ideologue, but «Roky Erickson» — if we have to choose one single figure that could be defined as the grandaddy of the BJM sound circa 1995, that'd be The 13th Floor Elevators with their garage-drone approach to exploding your subconscious. Take one listen to the ten swirling minutes of ʽHyperventilationʼ and you will find all the ingredients, with the notable exception of the electric jug, perhaps, but that would make it just too obvious.

 

The best song here is probably still ʽCrushedʼ, re-recorded in a much cleaner version and featu­ring an even more suicidal, Robert Smith-influenced vocal from Newcombe. (ʽThat Girl Suicideʼ  also makes a repeat appearance, but, despite the title, it sounds much less suicidal than ʽCrushedʼ: the rotating-girating Stonesy pop riff and the falsetto ooh-oohs give it the aura of a confused psychedelic carnival). As for the new songs, they should probably be categorized depending on whether they lean more to the funky Madchester side (not often here, but ʽWisdomʼ is probably at least one such song) or to the «folk drone» side (the majority of the tracks) or to the «random noise» side (like ʽRecordsʼ, which just sounds like a lot of different tape shit slowed down and played backwards). The «folk drones», in turn, can be spooky, or romantic, or spooky and roman­tic — Anton Newcombe is probably not a guy you'd want to go out with (at least, not without the cover of an entire drug squad not further than fifty feet away) — but what ties them all together is that each song is basically one idea, exposed to you right away and luring you with the promise of a mighty crescendo that rarely, if ever, comes to pass.

 

For instance, ʽI Love Youʼ is just about as straightforward as its title — two chords, one vocal line, steady percussion, light magical chimes, four minutes of monotonous serenading. Were this written circa 1966, the basic sequence might have been used by any band as a brief intro to a real song. Thirty years later, we are being implicitly told that the key to real (or, at least, modern) psychedelia is repetition, and that two chords repeated for four minutes have a better chance of putting you into a spiritual trance than five chords repeated for three minutes with a different bridge section. That may be so, but then, of course, it depends very much on which particular two chords you choose and how you present them.

 

And there you have BJM's main weakness: New­combe is not a melodic genius and he is not a master-commander of all sorts of sounds. Despite all the pretense, the BJM are just a guitar-bass-drums band, and although this rigorous approach gives them a certain sort of integrity (no synthesizers!), the sound may quickly become tedious. And the chances of its becoming tedious actually increase faster than they should, because eventually the songs start becoming larger, and ʽHyperventilationʼ with ʽShe's Goneʼ (10 and 7 minutes res­pectively) are quite likely to try your patience. Think your life moves slowly enough to waste 10 minutes of it on one riff, against which some dickhead keeps informing you that he's "sniffing glue" (as if anybody ever doubted that)? Have so few problems that you can happily drift away to the little brass loop of ʽShe's Goneʼ, losing yourself in the ether until the song abruptly ends with the man telling you that "In my life, I've seen it all"? Take a dose of Methodrone and you get just what you want.

 

Ultimately, I think it is still reasonable to view Methodrone as sort of a «boot camp» for the band, which would go on to undeniably higher heights — yet it is already an excellent illustration of their synthetic strengths and modernistic weaknesses, and you can draw upon it to both under­stand why certain underground minorities hailed Newcombe as their hero, while others failed to notice him to such an extent that the BJM did not even properly manage to become the torch-bearer for Sixties' revivalism.

 

TAKE IT FROM THE MAN! (1996)

 

1) Vacuum Boots; 2) Who?; 3) Oh Lord; 4) Caress; 5) (David Bowie I Love You) Since I Was Six; 6) Straight Up And Down; 7) Monster; 8) Take It From The Man; 9) B.S.A.; 10) Mary, Please; 11) Monkey Puzzle; 12) Fucker; 13) Dawn; 14) Cabin Fever; 15) In My Life; 16) The Be Song; 17) My Man Syd; 18) Straight Up And Down.

 

In 1996 alone, The Brian Jonestown Massacre released three LPs — one in May, one in June, and one in October. Avantgarde schizos and jazz wankers aside, the last time I can remember a thing like that was Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1969, and even then the albums were shorter and the intervals were longer. So does this mean that Anton Newcombe is the Miracle Man and the Creative Superboss of the decade?

 

Well... see, the trick is that the man takes really good care of each musical idea he comes up with. Where a «traditional» pop-rock songwriter, were he diligent enough, would make three-minute long songs where he would have to have at least one melody for the verse/chorus and one for the bridge section, Newcombe makes four-minute long songs that have one melody for everything, then slightly tweaks it around to create two or three more melodies out of it, which are then re­used for three or four other songs. As for the lengths, it is usually no problem to take care of these since the typical tempo for Brian Jonestown Massacre is «slow trot», almost literally so because the rhythm guitars are strummed over one or two chords, giving you the feel of a leisurely carriage ride through some endless English valley. Optionally — with Brian Jones himself in his fur coat riding in the back.

 

The album itself is as much influenced by the Stones as it is by the Beatles, or the Byrds, or any other mid-Sixties band with a penchant for folk, drone, jangle, and psychedelia. Produced by Larry Thrasher of Psychic TV and featuring now no less than four different guitar players, it com­pletely dispenses with the funky dance influences of Methodrone and almost completely dis­penses with the band's shoegazing past, leaving only the «repetitiveness» principle as a key stra­tagem to follow. In the meantime, Newcombe is trying to develop a garage sneer for his singing voice, which is somewhat hard for him to do — he does not look like a natural barker, snarler, or screamer, just a regular smart guy who is either incapable of or afraid of «pushing too hard».

 

The one song from here that many people may be aware of without knowing it is ʽStraight Up And Downʼ, which was chosen by Terence Winter as the main theme track for Boardwalk Em­pire — cutting out the vocal part and just retaining the intro, the guitar solo, and the coda. As far as patterns go, it is tremendously typical of the classic BJM sound — the jangle, the drone, the slow trot, the sparseness of ideas, the Sixties-style guitar tones, the little feedback howl that puts an end to the tune. But, as most of the classic BJM tunes, it is not particularly mind-blowing: just a nice, slightly manneristic, exercise in jangling that does not seem to demand any strong emo­tional reaction — or if it does, I'm not sure which one to choose.

 

If I were to choose one verse that summarizes the spirit of the album, I'd currently go with this one: "I know the difference between right and wrong / I pooled them all together and I made this song / I know the difference between night and day / Doesn't really matter what I think or say" (ʽCaressʼ). Incidentally, ʽCaressʼ is the fastest song (the only fast song) on the album, with a ner­vous tempo and freak-out blues guitar solos that remind one of Dylan's early electric sound circa Bringing It All Back Home, and the lyrics and music convey well enough the chief mood of Newcombe and BJM — confusion in the face of an alien world that is impossible to understand, decipher, or adapt to. There may be yet another link with Brian Jones here, regarding New­combe's own history of drug intake, but where drugs had destroyed Brian's originally strong (if not entirely sane) mind, in Anton's case, they seem to be just sort of a natural friend to an already deranged, or at least disoriented and heavily warped conscience.

 

Three themes, or, rather, three questions are running rampant through the record — (a) "Who the fuck am I?", (b) "What the heck have they done to me?", and (c) "gee, you're like beautiful or something, but aren't we both too batshit crazy to behave like two normal people in love?". Each of the songs addresses at least one of these questions, but sometimes two or even all three at the same time. You will very quickly get used to that and judge the songs not by their message, but by whether they have a cherry on top, in the form of a distinguishable hook — like the rather ridi­culous, but memorable falsetto holler of the title of ʽWho?ʼ, maybe the best song the actual Who never wrote, though it does ask the same question that they did. Or the gruff twangy resolution of ʽCaressʼ. Or the swampy blues vamp of the title track — which is probably the single most con­vincingly Stonesiest song on the album.

 

The not-so-sly references to additional heroes, usually wedged in the titles rather than the lyrics, may be an additional bait for reviewers, but do not think too much of them — ʽMy Man Sydʼ does have a few vocal lines that are reminiscent of Barrett, yet the song is way too «normal» for a genuine Barrett tribute, and ʽ(David Bowie I Love You) Since I Was Sixʼ does borrow the verse melody from ʽSpace Oddityʼ ("does she love you, you suppose..." = "ground control to Major Tom..."), but that's about all it does, in toto (remember about the sparseness of ideas — having two different chord sequences in the same song to Newcombe is the epitome of extravagance). It is, however, important to be able to call out all these spirits from the past, since both Bowie in his Major Tom days and Barrett in his fruitcake days are like natural brothers to Mr. Newcombe.

 

Likewise, there is no better way to prove his "pool them all together" approach in action than to offer a coda for the second, much longer and much limper version of ʽStraight Up And Downʼ, in which the man superimposes the "whoo-hoo's!" of ʽSympathy For The Devilʼ on top of the "da, da, da-da da-da da's" of ʽHey Judeʼ. Outside of context, this makes no sense, but as a symbolic gesture, it's kinda cool — a forceful, but rational merger of «good» and «evil» where one may not properly exist without the other (as well as, perhaps, an ironic answer to the stupid «Beatles or Stones?» debate in popular culture).

 

Like all BJM albums, this one, too, may have been more efficient, had it been sensibly trimmed down — after a while, the songs start to get way too repetitive not only in mood, but also in melody (I originally mistook ʽThe Be Songʼ for yet another take on ʽStraight Up And Downʼ, for instance, and it does not help that the laid-back, druggy-hazy tempos of the songs make your brains a little mushy after the first thirty or forty minutes). But taken on the level of «wholesome experience» rather than individual songs, it succeeds in letting you in on this ragged, confused vision; most importantly, no matter how transparent all the influences are, it is clearly seen that Newcombe is his own master, and that he merely uses «ancient» forms to express his own prob­lems — ultimately, they may be the same problems that Brian Jones used to have, but the trick is that Brian Jones never had the time or the capacity to express them himself. In any case, Brian Jones is more like a «spearhead» figure here, a tribal mascot, a lost twin soul, rather than a source for meaningless copy-cat activity, and this adds enough extra intrigue and suspense to a flawed, but interesting record to guarantee a thumbs up.

 

PS. I do have to add this, though: style-wise, this and the following two albums have some of the most ugly, cringeworthy covers I have ever had the misfortune of seeing — largely because of the Godawful ugly font work. I mean, what the heck is this, Microsoft Office '95 or something? Was Bomp! Records so utterly broke they couldn't hire these guys a half-decent artist?

 

THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES' SECOND REQUEST (1996)

 

1) All Around You (intro); 2) Cold To The Touch; 3) Donovan Said; 4) In India You; 5) No Come Down; 6) (Around You) Everywhere; 7) Jesus; 8) Before You; 9) Miss June '75; 10) Anemone; 11) Baby (Prepraise); 12) Fee­lers; 13) Bad Baby; 14) Cause, I Lover; 15) (Baby) Love Of My Life; 16) Slowdown (Fuck Tomorrow)/Here It Comes; 17) All Around You (outro).

 

Well, they asked for it. It always takes a concentrated effort to discuss BJM music on its own merits, without necessarily looking back on Newcombe's idols and dragging in the comparative aspect — but with an album title like this, ignoring the comparative aspect is like ignoring a pub­lic slap in the face. Clearly, this is a legacy claim. I actually know a few people whose favorite Stones album is Their Satanic Majesties' Request, just because they find the combination of the band's usual sneery/rebellious arrogance with cosmic/psychedelic ambience so decidedly one-of-a-kind, and it seems that Newcombe is one of these people — he likes his transcendental inspi­ration to come along with some snap, or vice versa. And here we are being told that it is this par­ticular vibe that he wants to cherish and develop. Well, I guess we already knew that before, but we weren't told about it so explicitly.

 

The problem is, I am neither at all sure that that particular vibe could be developed further, nor that Anton Newcombe, Matt Hollywood, and their temporary partners are the perfect team to try out this development. That the album, once again, is insanely long is only part of the problem — after all, if it works, it works, and if it succeeds in unlocking your cosmic conscience, it no longer matters how long it is because «time» as a concept becomes relative and all that. A much bigger part of the problem is that this particular mojo doesn't seem to work on me, and if I succeed in explaining why, it might become obvious that it also wouldn't work on many other people.

 

First and foremost, the record only remotely sounds like Satanic, and its differences are usually of the negative kind. It is rich in instrumentation, yes, with lots of Indian sitars and percussion, and some odd old-fashioned keyboards, but it is nowhere near as rich in melodic ideas. The majo­rity of these seventy-two minutes are almost literally spent crawling — monotonous acoustic drones, on top of which Newcombe and friends pile up all the overdubs and effects. Not even ʽSing This All Togetherʼ or ʽGomperʼ were that slow, and underneath all of its trippiness Satanic was really just a very strong pop/rock album — with great riffs (ʽCitadelʼ), stern basslines (ʽ2000 Light Years From Homeʼ), beautiful piano melodies (ʽShe's A Rainbowʼ), inventive structural shifts (ʽ2000 Manʼ), and widely varying atmospheres for different songs. In comparison — yes, in obligatory, self-triggered comparison — this «second» Request is just one dreary drone after another, where one melody usually suffices per song. If you ever wondered how in the world Newcombe could pull three albums in one year — well, I can offer a few unpleasant suggestions on where exactly he pulled them from.

 

If there is one proper way to enjoy this album, it must probably be handled on a very, very hot summer day somewhere out in the country, when your brain is already half turned to mush through climatic conditions, and you can do nothing whatsoever except suck on ice cubes and wander around or lie around in a near-vegetative state. (Alternately, there's artificial substances, but I'm hardly an expert on those). Under these conditions, the limp stroll of these tunes, one by one, one by one, might perfectly fit the environment, and help your struggling brain readapt to the circumstances, or just forget about them altogether. But do NOT make the mistake — like I did — of listening to this in a perfectly brisk and vigorous state, because it will drag you down merci­lessly, and not in a good, depressing sort of manner, either: it will just mush you up all over.

 

To understand what I am talking about, it is perfectly sufficient to listen to the first track: ʽAll Around Youʼ greets you with a slo-o-o-o-w jangle-drone, group harmonies that sound like dazed mantras, and a spoken lead vocal part where Newcombe basically just welcomes you to chill out and enjoy the experience (thus, a song that pays tribute to the opening ʽSing This All Togetherʼ and the closing ʽOn With The Showʼ at the same time, except BJM take special care to purge out any possible traces of «energy»). Gradually, there will be more guitars, keyboards, and back vocals piling up on you, but the energy level will be constantly kept at near-zero, and this is all you are going to get not just from this song — from the entire album. Nothing here, not a single song, sounds significantly different from the opener.

 

As it happens, despite the title, the Stones are not really the major influence on the album — I would probably have to say that Donovan is a bigger presence (ʽDonovan Saidʼ is actually a re­write of ʽThe Fat Angelʼ), his not-too-catchy summer psycho-folk vibe reflected here as precisely as anything; as for the melodies, Newcombe draws on the Beatles at least as much as he does on the Stones (the short acoustic ballad ʽLove Of My Lifeʼ borrows the chord progression from the beginning of ʽI'm Looking Through Youʼ, and also has a Kinks vibe to it, I think), but since most of these melodies are taken at such ridiculously slow tempos, they do not so much feel as «melo­dies» as they do as «mind-melting note sequences», and since they melt my mind rather than stick to it, how could I even begin describing this stuff?

 

I do admit there is some «songly» potential at least in those tracks where Newcombe turns to the little devil inside him, and succumbs to his blasphemous instigations — ʽJesusʼ is a desperate Jobian plea because "I gave you my love but you tore me to pieces, have mercy please Jesus", and ʽAnemoneʼ puts the blame on his girl because "you should be picking me up, instead you're dragging me down", and both are steadily and very lightly simmering with anxiety and paranoia, but neither of the two dares bring up the tempo or kick it up otherwise in the energy department, because, well, you know, it might just spoil that hot summer mood. Everything has to be slow, quiet, implied rather than felt directly, or it won't fit the rules of the game. Don't believe me? The next-to-last track is called ʽSlowdown (Fuck Tomorrow)ʼ, and it sounds like Syd Barrett had a twin brother who was even more incapacitated.

 

Despite all this, no thumbs down from me. I understand that the record has a certain purpose and a certain style, and that there are certain people and certain circumstances for which it could be much more useful than the first Satanic Majesties' Request. I do believe that the grooves could be made more interesting and less derivative, but this is, after all, an album that openly celebrates the idea of «laziness», and such an album should consist of nothing but «lazy» melodies with «lazy» arrangements, to which lazy people would listen on lazy days, hanging out their lazy tongues and staring at static skies with lazy eyes. That purpose is definitely fulfilled to some ex­tent, and so, from an objective stance, I couldn't honestly say this is a «bad» record. I could honestly say, though, that it relates to the original Satanic Majesties — as well as most of its other influences — much like Psycho II relates to the original Psycho, so do not fall for that type of legacy-claiming arrogance.

 

THANK GOD FOR MENTAL ILLNESS (1996)

 

1) Spanish Bee; 2) It Girl; 3) 13; 4) Ballad Of Jim Jones; 5) Those Memories; 6) Stars; 7) Free And Easy, Take 2; 8) Down; 9) Cause I Love Her; 10) Too Crazy To Care; 11) Talk - Action = Shit; 12) True Love; 13) Sound Of Con­fusion.

 

Okay, this one is actually more like a friendly post-scriptum to the two biggies from the same year. The first twelve tracks are mostly acoustic or acoustic-based, feature an absolute minimum of songwriting, and rarely go over three minutes — truly a record that could have been planned, written, recorded and released by someone like Anton in a matter of three days. The last track, included, I believe, mainly in accordance with the «leave no space unfilled» strategy, is a lengthy collage that features several minutes of street noises (cars, more cars, and still more cars), and then a bunch of lo-fi recordings that mostly constitute alternate versions of old songs from Space­girl and Methodrone. So yeah, just like that.

 

Actually, the first half is rather nice. At least it moves around at a larger variety of tempos than Second Request, and the short song lengths are also quite welcome. There are no highlights or lowlights — the point is largely to imitate various shades of acoustic pop and folk-rock circa 1965-66 which, at different times, will remind you of the Beatles in their Rubber Soul period, the Stones in their Aftermath period, the Kinks in their Face To Face period, the Easy­beats in their ʽFriday On My Mindʼ period, Dylan in either his Another Side or his Blonde On Blonde period, and of... uh... ʽYou Are My Sunshineʼ as sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary (ʽThose Memo­riesʼ). The only catch is that these are all Newcombe songs, and he predictably injects them with large dosages of his own bleak, romance-without-answer personality.

 

Arguably the least predictable track is the first one, ʽSpanish Beeʼ, where, to the sound of Spanish guitars and castanets, over which additional guitars drone in morose tones, Newcombe states that "This hopeless century, I've lived all alone" and that "I could have died, because of your greed". Whose greed is not exactly clear — but what is clear is that the dark Spanish style agrees with the BJM just as well as dark Anglo-Saxon folk or Afro-American blues motives. Another thing that certainly separates these acoustic tunes from all their influences is the endless pessimism and skepticism which they are soaked in — even within these thirty minutes, there is a general feel of total hopelessness that, in the Sixties, you couldn't even get from such kings of «mope rock» as The Doors (who played it on a grand theatrical level rather than on the «ordinary routine» level of Newcombe). Besides, even the Doors had some simple love songs — with Newcombe, the idea of a simple love song is always accompanied with the presupposition of «want her, need her, can never get her, not in a million years». In a philosophical sense, too — where «getting her» means much more than just a sexual liaison, and is essentially impossible in a Kantian sense.

 

One thing that seriously bugs me, though, is that once again it all smells of a self-conscious ap­proach. The LP title — Thank God For Mental Illness — seems awfully clever and uncomfor­tably true (considering how closely for comfort great art is often tied in with mental illness), but we do not regularly see actual madmen in art psychoanalyzing themselves (I mean, the above­mentioned Jim Morrison was definitely deranged, but could you see The Doors naming one of their albums this way?). This casts a shadow of self-absorption and maybe even unwarranted nar­cissism on the songs — like, who really is this Newcombe guy to appropriate songwriting and emotion-wrenching techniques from all these giants of the Sixties for his own egotistical pur­poses? Rewriting the classics is, after all, an act of arrogance, and if the arrogance is unjustified, the ship goes down fairly quickly. Oh, okay, at least the guy actually does drugs, so that's some sort of consolation-justification, I guess. He's legit... not really, no.

 

But if you don't take it too seriously, the record offers some quirky fun that is at least much easier to sit through than the endless slow drones of Second Request. I find it hard (if not useless) to discuss the individual songs — unless in terms of how they rearrange, reroute, and rewire the classics — but I found it easy fun listening to them, and in the light of this, I can disregard the awful (as usual) album cover and give the record a very lightweight thumbs up. And you can just detach and destroy the ʽSound Of Confusionʼ part — it works much better as just a thirty minute long album.

 

GIVE IT BACK! (1997)

 

1) Super-Sonic; 2) This Is Why You Love Me; 3) Satellite; 4) Malela; 5) Salaam; 6) Whoever You Are; 7) Sue; 8) (You Better Love Me) Before I Am Gone; 9) Not If You Were The Last Dandy On Earth; 10) #1 Hit Jam; 11) Servo; 12) The Devil May Care (Mom & Dad Don't); 13) Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request.

 

It's too bad there are but 365 days in a year, because Give It Back! sounds so very much like those preceding three albums, it might just as well have been written and recorded by Newcombe in a matter of just a few more days, and then The Brian Jonestown Massacre would have four re­cords released within one year and set a personal high that even Frank Zappa would find rather hard to beat. There are some new band members here, including guitarist Peter Hayes who stayed with the band but briefly and then went on to form the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, but let that not bother you, because Newcombe is the Ian Anderson of this band and he ain't never letting its identity slip away or be usurped by an intruder, no matter how many different brands of hard drugs he is on at any given particular moment.

 

Some fans actually regard this as a special high point in BJM history, swearing by Give It Back! as a masterpiece or the culmination of everything that made this band so great — a sentiment I find hard to share, because the word «culmination» indicates some sort of growth or at least some sort of «still haven't found (var.: finally have found) what I'm looking for» idea, whereas New­combe's Sixties-fueled, drug-powered brain does not really function all that much in «search» mode — it simply has its own steady rate of predetermined metabolism. I could not even begin to describe in general what separates Give It Back! from the 1996 albums — so let us just talk a bit about the individual songs instead.

 

ʽSuper-Sonicʼ has a cool groove going on, with a bluesy bassline, funky percussion, Indian sitars, and noisy shoegaze-style lead guitars in the background — a freaky, typically BJM combination of ingredients, over which Anton pours out his usual vegetative-state mumbly philosophizing about living alone and how it's alright for him and not alright for her. As predictable as the song's strengths are, its flaws are equally easy to guess — it is a bit hard to sit through a five-minute song where everything that could have happened did so over the introduction and the first few bars of the main theme. But this complaint, as usual, applies to everything here that runs over three minutes and irritates people whose attention span for this kind of music qualifies as «short» (like myself, who'd rather waste my time on something a little more energetic and dynamic than the BJM — like Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon).

 

Most of the other songs, if they are good, display this goodness in the same way: one nice melody looped in static mode. If they are not very good... they have one boring melody looped in static mode, like ʽSatelliteʼ, which simply takes the old ʽGreen Onionsʼ theme, modifies it very slightly, piles up additional acoustic and electric guitars, but does not care about making it snappy and aggressive — the whole thing limps, and if you're gonna limp all the way, at least do it in a more moody fashion. ʽSueʼ, the longest track on the album, is much better, especially in headphones where you have one folk-style lead guitar part serenading in your left ear and one heavy wah-wah blues-rock part blaring away in your right ear, but both mixed in at low volumes so as not to drown out the basic rhythm track — or else, God forbid, you might want to play air guitar or something instead of just bobbing your head up and down and sideways at the trance-inducing sound waves. But yeah, that wah-wah solo is actually quite frantic when you focus on it.

 

Of special note might be the brief jangle-rock tune ʽThis Is Why You Love Meʼ, which cannot really be anything other than a loving tribute to Gene Clark's ʽI'll Feel A Whole Lot Betterʼ — the difference being that, for some reason, the BJM track is neither played, nor sung, nor produced as nice-and-tight as any of the early Byrds material (go figure). And on the fast-paced ʽMalelaʼ, they try to play the sitar as if it were a banjo (well, sitars and banjos do have similar timbres, don't they?), even borrowing a few note sequences from ʽPaint It Blackʼ, but the end result is mildly funny rather than depressing.

 

The song ʽNot If You Were The Last Dandy On Earthʼ caused some controversy — formally, it was an obvious answer to The Dandy Warhols' ʽNot If You Were The Last Junkie On Earthʼ: apparently, the Warhols' song was a friendly reprimand of the BJM for sticking to drugs in an age when drugs are already so passé, to which Newcombe replies with a reprimand of the Warhols for sticking to «dandyism» when dandyism is already so passé, well, you know the rest. At least it helps Anton get a little angry and play some pissed-off distorted leads on a true garage rocker, although I would not describe it as a particularly good song — they just thought it necessary to hit back (not very successfully, because the Warhols' track was a commercial hit on the UK charts, whereas the BJM never charted at all).

 

The album also continues the age-honored tradition of putting your album title in one place and your song title in another — the lead-out track is ʽTheir Satanic Majesties' Second Requestʼ, a rather boring sonic collage whose only distinctive point is the sound of heavy snoring, looped all over the track and possibly sampled from the Stones' ʽIn Another Landʼ, or, at least, paying tri­bute to that song and Bill Wyman's massive lung activity. Not that the song title has anything to do with the collage, or Newcombe has anything to do with Bill Wyman, or anything has got to do with anything — all of this is on a simple take-it-or-leave-it level. I take some of it, but, as usual, I'd rather distill this album down to about 15 minutes of music rather than accept it as 55.

 

STRUNG OUT IN HEAVEN (1998)

 

1) Going To Hell; 2) Let's Pretend That It's Summer; 3) Wasting Away; 4) Jennifer; 5) Got My Eye On You; 6) Nothing To Lose; 7) Love; 8) Maybe Tomorrow; 9) Spun; 10) I've Been Waiting; 11) Dawn; 12) Lantern; 13) Wis­dom.

 

This was the band's only release on a «major minor label», as they temporarily switched from Bomp! Records to the larger TVT Records, whose biggest claim to fame up till then were the Nine Inch Nails — hardly the closest band to BJM in terms of style and attitude, but somehow the TVT people thought Newcombe and his pals had a bright commercial future before them, and signed them to a multi-record deal. The deal lasted for just one album — this one — and when it flunked, the band got dropped again, with an ever lessening chance to be one day picked up by Warner Bros. or Sony Music Entertainment.

 

Since Newcombe's dependency on heroin by this time was said to be near-complete, allegedly much of the work fell on the shoulders of Matt Hollywood, and this may be the reason why the record is slightly shorter than usual, and more dynamic — and also even more retro — than usual: although the tempos are still slow rather than fast, there are very few mind-numbing drones, and for the most part the band here just concentrates on a modest, unpretentious pop-rock and folk-rock sound, so that the absolute majority of the songs here sound like inferior imitations of mid-Sixties masterpieces. Okay, so there's nothing essentially new in this statement — it just needs to be stressed that this is the first BJM album that does not even begin to try to build upon the legacy of the elders; instead, it merely imitates that legacy.

 

Probably the most blatant imitation for those in the know will come with the second song, ʽLet's Pretend That It's Summerʼ, whose ominously melancholic beginning is transparently reminiscent of The Kinks, particularly ʽDead End Streetʼ and similar songs. Ah, but if only Newcombe and Hollywood were really endowed with the genius of a Ray Davies! As it happens, the ominous­ness of the verses is completely wasted on the limp, disappointing chorus — the "let's laugh, have fun..." part, suddenly changing tempo and tonality and borrowing its bassline from the Beatles' ʽRevolution 1ʼ (yes indeed!), dissipates, rather than explodes, the tension build-up of the verse, and, in my opinion, is a first-rate example of how not to write a pop song if you truly want to hook your listener. And since these examples could be easily multiplied, it is no wonder that even a larger label was unable to properly promote the BJM — the Sixties' stylistics might have been «classy» all right, but class without catchiness is a poor contributor to album sales.

 

ʽWasting Awayʼ is another strange creation, with generational lyrics that seem to have been in­ten­tionally written from a Sixties' perspective: "The kids today / They got nothing to say / Be­cause they taught them that way" — and the accompanying sad harmonica solo brings Neil Young to mind (was there ever a Neil Young reference in a BJM review prior to this? If no, we're making progress). Nice sound, right message, but is this an interesting song? The harmonica solo is probably the best part about it. The rest — well, the song is just too limp and lazy to properly match the aggressive accusations of the lyrics. If I were an angry young man and I heard Anton Newcombe telling me that I'm wasting my life away in this sort of relaxed, nonchalant fashion, I would probably just tell him to go fuck himself — and it just ain't clear who of us exactly would be wasting his life away, anyway.

 

Or a love song like ʽJenniferʼ — there's, like, one jangly guitar line holding the entire song to­gether, and normally you expect a line like this to serve as a building block for something bigger, but this is just nonsense: it's like coming to a fancy restaurant, getting a nice bread basket for starters and then, much to your surprise, finding out that you are going to get nothing other than nice bread baskets until the end of the day. Come on, guys! Do something! Add an extra frickin' chord, for Chrissake! This is a tribute to Sixties pop — not even Gerry and The Pacemakers would tolerate such arrogantly lazy songwriting!

 

To cut a long story short, or, rather, to excuse myself for being unable to come up with a long story, Strung Out In Heaven has a very pleasant sound that will be doubly pleasant to all those who like old school folk rock, but do not like monotonous psychedelia. It even has a few oldies re-recorded here to match their then-current understanding of an ideal sound (ʽWisdomʼ from Methodrone, which most people must have forgotten completely by 1998). There is not a single bad song — but there is not one single song here I'd ever love to hear again, either, because the melodies are derivative, the hooks are not well developed, and the production, devoid of BJM's usual layers of multi-everything, is boring. Not coincidentally, almost every other review of this record I've seen usually avoids, intentionally or not, talking about the individual songs — be­cause, well, there's just nothing to say. Good acoustic guitar tones. Not so good singing. Whatever.

 

BRAVERY, REPETITION AND NOISE (2001)

 

1) Just For Today; 2) Telegram; 3) Stolen; 4) Open Heart Surgery; 5) Nevertheless; 6) Sailor; 7) You Have Been Disconnected; 8) Leave Nothing For Sancho; 9) Let Me Stand Next To Your Flower; 10) If I Love You?; 11) (I Love You) Always; 12) If I Love You? (New European Gold Standard Secret Babylonian Brotherhood Cinema Mix).

 

Repetition — by all means. Noise — not all that much, compared to what commonly passes for «noise» in 2001. Bravery — well, I would guess that if Anton Newcombe were capable of writing better songs than these, then preferring to release this album instead would require some bravery. As it is, I don't see much bravery here. Certainly dismissing long-time partner Matt Hollywood from the band after some onstage argument does not count as «bravery». Maybe the stubborn way of sticking to the same dronified formula counts as «bravery», from some point of view. But is there any other formula to which Newcombe could switch over without saying good­bye to Brian Jonestown? Did he even have a choice at that point?..

 

The album feels like a rather natural follow-up to Strung Out In Heaven, largely avoiding lengthy spaced-out jams in favor of shorter pop tunes — and, as already predicted by the model, they are typically slow, folksy, dependent on monotonously strummed chords, and go easier than easy on the hooks. The mood is almost completely fixed in place: no fast rockers, no psychedelic freak­outs, just one slow, drowsy, dark-folk shuffle after another. The three chords that open the album (ʽJust For Todayʼ) perfectly capture the bleakness and somberness of everything that follows, but the song itself never goes anywhere once its main rhythm line is established, and that droning pattern on its own offers little redemption — and not only is Newcombe's singing mumbled as usual, but it is also awfully mixed-in this time, as if he were trying to correlate his troubled state of mind with the shittiest possible way his troubled voice could reach your troubled ears out of the troubled speakers. In short, we're in trouble.

 

I like the song ʽYou Have Been Disconnectedʼ. Once the obligatory jangly pattern has set in, the band adds a nice, memorable organ riff to it — nothing too phenomenal, but just the right touch on the way of transforming the proceedings into solid pop music, where even Newcombe's ghostly singing seems well aligned with the phantasmagoric organ tone. The organ on ʽOpen Heart Sur­geryʼ, another relative success, also sharpens and enhances the mood, and the song itself is largely free from droning, being totally focused on that organ and a gloomy bass riff. It is one of the few times, also, that Anton tries to overclock himself, which led to some reviewers happily comparing the track's style to The Cure — the big difference, of course, being that Robert Smith would probably have somebody's head on a platter for that sort of arrangement and sloppy production, and he would just keep on layering instrument after instrument so that the depth of the tragedy would be increased every several bars. But Newcombe — you know that guy, he says it all right from the start: «building up» is for pussies.

 

There is one cover here, of a predictably obscure oldie (ʽSailorʼ by The Cryan' Shames), a good song in its own right but completely lost in this general context — leave it to Anton to transform potential gorgeousness into stoned-out-of-your-mind monotonousness. ʽLet Me Stand Next To Your Flowerʼ may be a pun on the Hendrix line, but the song has nothing to do with Jimi — it is just another monotonous, martial-style pop tune that fundamentally sounds like the Beatles' ʽGood Day Sun­shineʼ with all the joy (and sunshine) surgically removed and replaced with drugged-out numbness. Same goes for ʽIf I Love You?ʼ in both its versions (a stripped-down acoustic rendi­tion) and then a much lengthier, «epic» rendition at the end of the album — a song delivered in such a frozen tone, at such a somnambulant pace, that the answer to the rhetorical question cannot be anything other than "please define love first, and we'll talk later".

 

Not that any of these tunes are artistically insincere: as usual, they seem to reflect Newcombe's proper state of mind at the time really well. The problem is that we have already known that state of mind for quite some years now, and it is hardly the most fascinating or stimulating state of mind in the world. Nor does it make much sense to woo us over by focusing on the dark shades of Jim Jarmusch (yes, that is him) on the front cover — just the mere fact that (one of) the world's trendiest arthouse directors thus endorses the creativity of the BJM should only make matters worse: in reality, the BJM rise above the usual «hipster boy» level, and hardly need to emphasize their coolness in such additional ways. (Jarmusch did use one of their songs in the soundtrack to Broken Flowers, but was there any real need to «return the favor»?).

 

On the whole, the record is like a compromise between the «trance» and the «retro pop» aspects of the band — pop music with detached pop hooks, converted into «trance» by the somewhat dehu­manized spirit of its creator. Since it achieves its goals, has a few nice songs, and features the usual classy retro sound that we always expect from Anton and his team, it would be impolite to give it a thumbs down. But will I ever listen to it again? Meaningless question — in Newcombe's world, time stands perfectly still, and there is no such thing as «again», I guess.

 

...AND THIS IS OUR MUSIC (2003)

 

1) The Wrong Way; 2) Introesque; 3) Starcleaner; 4) Here To Go; 5) When Jokers Attack; 6) Prozac Vs. Heroin; 7) Geezers; 8) Maryanne; 9) You Look Great When I'm Fucked Up; 10) Here It Comes; 11) What Did You Say?; 12) Prozac Vs. Herion Revisited; 13) A New Low In Getting High; 14) Some Things Go Without Saying; 15) Tschusse; 16) The Pregnancy Test; 17) The Right Way.

 

I almost feel sorry for this, you know, but the further on we advance along the Newcombe trail, the more it starts to resemble some lonely Arizona highway where a solitary cactus causes as much excitement as Khufu's Pyramid. No, it is not true that all of his albums sound alike. This one, for instance, sees the (re-)introduction of electronic instruments that make it seem more like a traditional/modern hybrid than any of the preceding three or four records. But to what end, if the basic approach to music making remains completely the same?

 

Probably the most innovative and amusing touch here are the intro and outro — ʽThe Wrong Wayʼ captures one of Anton's girlfriends on the answering machine, furiously complaining about how much of an asshole he has been, and ʽThe Right Wayʼ finishes off the album with another of his lady friends (Sarah Jane from The Out Crowd) with a far more friendly message. Even those tracks, however, were apparently used by Anton without explicit permission from either of the girls (so the «asshole» component actually finds confirmation), and had to be deleted from some of the later digital versions of the album — and even if they are left in, this is as much a sign of artistic invention as it is of pointless egotism.

 

When it comes to the music, though, nothing helps. You would think that at least a song titled as magnificently as ʽProzac Vs. Heroinʼ could turn out to be a musical masterpiece — instead, it is just another two-chord acoustic drone lazily adorned with minimal electric guitar solos and wispy strings, as Newcombe sings in his usual «I'm-too-stoned-to-order-my-brain-to-switch-to-a-diffe­rent-note» fashion. You come here expecting some sort of musical battle, between the dark (hero­in?) and the light (prozac?) or something, and all you find is this numb droning. Pleasant enough and tastefully produced as usual, but about as exciting as your average anesthetic. And then, once it's over, you get ʽGeezersʼ which is basically five minutes more of the same.

 

Electronics do not help. On ʽStarcleanerʼ, you have digital keyboards and drum machines, but it is still just two and a half minutes of sleepy droning. «Astral noises» on ʽYou Look Great When You're Fucked Upʼ cannot mask the fact that it is basically just the same mind-numbing acoustic guitar pattern over and over again, and the noises themselves are as lazy in coming as the rhythm track — ʽInterstellar Overdriveʼ would come across as Slayer in terms of madness and energy when compared to this yawnfest.

 

The only way to somehow enjoy this record is to completely clean your head from any possible associations — just forget that music existed prior to 2003, period. Woe is me! I cannot do that, and am forever doomed to this one reaction when I hear the beginning of ʽA New Low In Getting Highʼ: «Put Neil Young in the studio, tie a 50-pound weight to each of his limbs, inject him with a pound of laxatives, make him play ʽLove And Only Loveʼ, and this is what you get». Or to this one when I force myself to become sensitive to the Grand Tragic Finale of ʽTschusseʼ: «Put Ro­bert Smith in the studio, tie a 50-pound weight to...», okay, sorry for repeating myself, but so does this guy, and at least he gets paid for this. Well, occasionally, at least.

 

Because of all these associations, my mind may be clouded, but this time, there is not a single song here for which my brain would voluntarily agree to allocate even a single memory cell, other than within a negative force field (as in, ʽHere It Comesʼ brings on sweet memories of Neil Young's ʽOh Lonesome Meʼ, so hey, a nice pretext to go put on After The Gold Rush one more time). Is that a sign of stubborn close-mindedness? At this moment, I don't really think I care any more — so, with a sigh of relief, as Sarah Jane says her sweet goodbyes to Anton for the third time, we leave them with a thumbs down in their hazy padded cell. And God knows I'm a big fan of padded cells in general — they're great when you can let your imagination run wild and just use the walls as a canvas. But when you're just sitting there looking at your own spit slowly dribbling from the wall down to the floor... well, not quite so exciting, I'd say.

 

MY BLOODY UNDERGROUND (2008)

 

1) Bring Me The Head Of Paul McCartney On Heather Mill's Wooden Peg (Dropping Bombs On The White House); 2) Infinite Wisdom Tooth / My Last Night In Bed With You; 3) Who's Fucking Pissed In My Well?; 4) We Are The Niggers Of The World; 5) Who Cares Why; 6) Yeah Yeah; 7) Golden Frost; 8) Just Like Kicking Jesus; 9) Ljósmyndir; 10) Auto-Matic-Faggot For The People; 11) Dark-Wave-Driver / Big Drill Car; 12) Monkey Powder; 13) Black Hole Symphony.

 

Finally, a significant detour — it took almost five years to complete it, but this is probably the most major stylistic shift for Newcombe ever since he'd abandoned shoegaze and contemporary dance rhythms in favor of recreating the hypothetical mindset of post-pool era Brian Jones. The album title itself is indicative of the change: My Bloody Valentine were a larger influence on the BJM circa Methodrone rather than in the past decade, and The Velvet Underground were always a huge influence, but more formally than substantially — «drone» being a major link and all, yet up to now Newcombe had largely bypassed the Velvets' penchant for reckless, abrazive experi­mentation, «ugliness», and «nastiness».

 

Time for rethinking that abstinence. For years now, Newcombe has had his own record label, titled The Committee To Keep Music Evil, and yet neither of his previous two albums seemed like they were perfectly in touch with that name. Now, armed with some particularly hard drugs and additional stipulations (like no talking whatsoever in the studio), Newcombe seems bent on finally bringing his music in line with that name — or at least, the song titles, the first one of which alone could have earned him a wanted poster from millions of Beatle fans, had he at least a one thousandth share of recognition of Heather Mills' husband. Not that the song title has any­thing to do with the song's lyrics or the song's music — it's just a gratuitous swipe, you know, to keep the music evil.

 

Of course, the basic BJM principles have not really changed. The main modus operandi remains as simple as it used to be: one midtempo musical idea per song, looped and whipped mercilessly unto self-extinction. But now the focus is on making these ideas nasty and funky, rather than limp and somnambulant. Suddenly the junkie flips a switch, and his vibes are no longer wasted and dis­sipated somewhere in outer space, but sharpened, poisoned, and directed right at you. This still does not excuse the album's awful length (almost 80 minutes in total), but somehow it makes it easier to sit through it without swallowing your tongue or locking your eyelids than through quite a few of BJM's much shorter records.

 

The «meat» of the album lies in its dark, distorted, grumbly, repetitive epics: ʽWho Cares Whyʼ, ʽAuto-Matic-Faggot For The Peopleʼ (oh, that title), ʽDark Wave Driverʼ, and especially ʽMon­key Powderʼ with its particularly eerie rising-and-falling bass groove. If you think they sound like a cross between classic Hawkwind and classic Sonic Youth, you are most likely right: and unlike either of these bands, Newcombe is perfectly willing to disallow even minor bits of variation as the groove grooves along, what with his well-known aversion to «musical development» within any given musical track. Yet somehow, this «dark ambience» seems more tolerable and even more sensible than the «limp ambience» of past albums — maybe because of the relative fresh­ness of the approach, or maybe because the deep bass riffs of the grooves make deeper impres­sions and make you feel like you're walking along a treacherous, creepy, but vaguely exciting path, rather than just making your way through an endless irritating field of hemp.

 

Naturally, even this does not last forever: the album has its fair share of obvious missteps, such as the solo piano piece ʽWe Are The Niggers Of The Worldʼ, whose fairly strong title should at least suggest depths of sorrow or heights of anger — instead, it sounds like somebody trying to ape one of Keith Jarrett's improvisation styles (and not doing a complete suckjob, actually, but some­thing tells me this piece was far from improvised, which makes all the difference). And while the concluding piece, ʽBlack Hole Symphonyʼ, shows that Newcombe has progressed far enough in his mastery of electronics to be able to produce at least one awesome sonic loop that does remind you of black holes, looping it for ten minutes really means that he is aware that you can shut it off any second. And the funniest thing is, regardless of the outcome, Newcombe wins — if you shut it off prematurely, he has manipulated you into getting angry, and if you do not, he has manipu­lated you into getting stupid.

 

But I am still closing my eyes on this and giving the album a thumbs up, if only for one of the most genuinely weird tracks produced in the decade — by accident, no doubt, yet even so ʽLjós­myndirʼ (ʽPhotographsʼ in Icelandic) is as simple as it is baffling: a minimalistic soundscape of cold ambient synthesizers, over which are scattered echoey pieces of Icelandic babble. It does look silly on paper, yet for some reason I find it strangely more enchanting than your average BJM limp-groove, and if it is some sort of Newcombe-tribute to the magic island that gave us Björk, Sigur Rós, and Eyjafjallajökull, the man has captured its essence in one stroke. Which only makes it so much more frustrating to realize how much of that natural talent he has wasted over intellectual conceptualization and, let us be frank, conceptual castration of his ideas. Yes, the man got talent to burn — but then most of it gets burned over drugs or over intentional creative lazi­ness that gets presented as the next step in artistic vision. Go figure.

 

WHO KILLED SGT. PEPPER? (2010)

 

1) Tempo 116.7 (Reaching For Dangerous Levels Of Sobriety); 2) Þungur Hnífur; 3) Let's Go Fucking Mental; 4) White Music; 5) This Is The First Of Your Last Warnings; 6) This Is The One Thing We Did Not Want To Have Happen; 7) The One; 8) Someplace Else Unknown; 9) Detka! Detka! Detka!; 10) Super Fucked; 11) Our Time; 12) Feel It (Of Course We Fucking Do); 13) Felt Tipped-Pen Pictures Of UFOs.

 

Judging by the album cover, one might conclude that it was either Jesus who killed Sgt. Pepper, perhaps in retaliation for John Lennon's blasphemy, or, even more shockingly, that Jesus was Sgt. Pepper, in which case lines like "Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play" would take on a whole new light — in fact, the whole Sgt. Pepper would be actually a concept album about the life of Jesus, who'd love to turn you on with a little help from his friends (St. Peter, St. James, etc.), especially since it's getting better all the time, and she's leaving home to meet a man from the motor trade (shouldn't that be carpenter trade?), and ʽWhen I'm Sixty Fourʼ is, of course, about The Last Temptation Of Christ, and...

 

...sorry, well, at least that's one fine direction of thought that came from this BJM album without me hearing even one note of it. However, I am sad to say that this direction of thought has no­thing whatsoever to do with the album itself — which, incidentally, happens to be the weirdest offering from Newcombe in almost twenty years, and even if it rarely works on gut level (you'd have to have your guts made out of nylon for that), the very fact of its existence is somewhat of a consolation, since psychedelic musical surprises come so rarely these days.

 

We will proceed from the basic assumption that this album is total crap, which will make things easier for us. As usual, Newcombe dispenses his ideas with extreme frugality — hardly more than one per track — and, as usual, the album runs over seventy minutes. As usual, he appropriates and assimilates rather than invents. And he seems to have almost completely finalized the shift from «song-based» to «jam-based» music: the absolute majority of these tracks are just vamps, and if there are any words, they are repetitive mantras (as in, "let's go fuckin' mental, let's go fu­ckin' mental, la la la la, la la la la...") rather than verse-chorus constructions. And it probably took half an hour to figure out most of the album's melodic moves.

 

But the album lives, further expanding and polishing the new style of My Bloody Underground, now with twenty percent extra black venom as deep-cutting bass lines, metalic fuzz, and hard-whacking drum machines completely take over and turn the album into an endless journey through a series of harmless, but intimidating musical black holes. The band that once epitomized sonic narcolepsy has truly awoken — or, rather, entered a period of hyperactivity while still in a somnambulant state, like a narcoleptic on heavy amphetamines. And I find myself as puzzled as anybody, but much of the time it works.

 

The main part of the ride begins with the second track (the one with the Icelandic title), which is the closest Anton ever got to reproducing the classic Hawkwind vibe — a dark, brutal psycho-boogie with all sorts of astral effects, cymbal-heavy percussion, and an ugly nasal-vocal accom­paniment that we could all do without. ʽLet's Go Fucking Mentalʼ is designed as some sort of a trippy carousel ride around a dirty-sounding R'n'B guitar-and-harmonica groove with a nasty, not-give-a-damn attitude, rather than any intentions of having a good time, to it. ʽThis Is The First...ʼ has probably the best bass line on the album, emphasized with foamy-bubbly electronic effects and ridiculously pseudo-passionate Icelandic vocals, all the while chugging along at a relatively fast, very much danceable tempo — post-disco meets post-rock, or at least catches a brief envy­ing glimpse of it from a distance.

 

The real attraction of the record, though, is that it actually gets weirder and weirder as time goes by. ʽThis Is The One Thingʼ is a collage of two Joy Division songs (the "we were strangers" cho­rus from ʽI Remember Nothingʼ and the rhythm section of ʽShe's Lost Controlʼ), with additional lyrics and guitar grooves from Anton himself — the resulting atmosphere is nothing like the intimate bleakness of Joy Division, but it borrows nicely from that bleakness to add to the general «self-induced angry madness» of the album. Joy Division influence blips one more time later, on ʽSomeplace Else Unknownʼ (whose vocal melody and lyrics borrow from ʽInterzoneʼ), but the peak of the weirdness is reached on ʽDetka! Detka!ʼ (ʽBaby, Babyʼ) — an odd ska groove here with the entire song delivered in Russian, apparently by some guy from the completely unknown Russian band «Amazing Electronic Talking Cave». Absolutely no idea how they got in touch with Newcombe or why he thought that a little bit of Russian rock infusion would be a meaning­ful addition to his legacy, but there it is — for the record, the repetitive bridge section literally translates from Russian as "I will love you only after I die", which is a very Russian thing to mention in the context of a pop song, but few will ever know about that... and now you're one of those happy few who do know.

 

The final track here is neither a song nor even a groove — it is a simple ambient piece with just one soothing keyboard phrase, over which Newcombe first overdubs John Lennon's famous in­terview in which he apologizes for the "Beatles are bigger than Jesus" thing, and then some Bri­tish girl's lengthy, raving, and frantic denouncement of Lennon as a phony. This is, the way I gather, not so much a musical piece as another one of Newcombe's naughty keep-music-evil statements — as much as he clearly loves the Beatles (and who doesn't?), he finds it his duty to treat them as at least whippable, if not slayable, sacred cows, because, you know, otherwise he'll look like a fanboy rather than a respectable artist, and what will remain of The Brian Jonestown Massacre if they stop looking like respectable artists? Just monotonous grooves without a cause. The Committee To Keep Music Evil cannot allow that. Besides, if there is one single track on this album that can really drop you a clue as to who actually killed Sgt. Pepper, it is surely this one.

 

Despite some of these rather easily disclosed and predictable moves, on the whole I think that the album deserves its thumbs up — I mean, it nurtures and develops the curious direction of My Bloody Underground with extra care, so how could it be different? Maybe it is not half as «evil» as it positions itself to be, but that is still twice as «evil» as, say, your average cartoonish death metal album or whatever else passes for «evil» these days. Driven by a general unified purpose, monotonous in structure, but diverse and unpredictable in ideas, and, above all, kicking some ass in terms of sheer execution — that is at least something that should be encouraged, so let us be forgiving in details and encouraging on the general scale.

 

AUFHEBEN (2012)

 

1) Panic In Babylon; 2) Viholliseni Maalla; 3) Gaz Hilarant; 4) Illuminomi; 5) I Want To Hold Your Other Hand; 6) Face Down On The Moon; 7) The Clouds Are Lies; 8) Stairway To The Best Party In The Universe; 9) Seven Kinds Of Wonderful; 10) Waking Up To Hand Grenades; 11) Blue Order / New Monday.

 

According to Hegelian dialectics, Aufheben («picking up» or «canceling») is the process that takes place when a thesis is confronted with an anti-thesis — presumably followed by synthesis. This either invites a dialectical approach towards understanding this album by The Brian Jones­town Massacre, or it could mean that Anton Newcombe once took a German dictionary off the shelf, opened it on a random page, and let Fate decide to guide him through to a connection with Hegel — because, let's face it, Hegel was a fairly psychedelic guy, despite all the formal-logical trappings. And yes, you guessed it — Hegel could be just as boring as The Brian Jonestown Mas­sacre, and he could be just as proud of it, too.

 

If I think really, really hard, I could actually lead myself towards understanding Aufheben (the album) as a synthesis of sorts — it is, indeed, a cross between the dark groovery of the band's last two albums and their earlier, softer, limper homage to Sixties' psychedelia. A song like ʽI Want To Hold Your Other Handʼ, for instance, would be totally out of place on My Bloody Under­ground, and even though its association with the Beatles ends with its name (in the time that it takes Anton to get his point across, John Lennon would have had the time to hold your hand, hold your other hand, hold your legs, hold all the other parts of your body, and dump you for Yoko Ono), it does bring us back the old personality of Anton Newcombe, one that we'd almost forgot­ten with all that po-mo weirdness of killing Sgt. Pepper with Russian lyrics.

 

The album starts out with a couple dark, but not too bass-heavy grooves: ʽPanic In Babylonʼ is set to a cool, steady rock beat with Near Eastern woodwind overtones (a little reminiscent of old Hawkwind experiments in such mergers), and ʽViholliseni Maallaʼ has a Finnish title because the lead vocals are gallantly ceded over to Eliza Karmasalo, who must be Finnish (I suppose) and who lends the track a certain clichéd coldness, while in the background the band is entertaining us with chiming guitar leads, and occasionally a Robert Smith-style melancholic, echoey guitar line will break through the clearing as well and send you on a gloomy trip down memory lane. Both tracks sound fine, but... lightweight — like Air or some of those other atmospheric, psycho-adult-contemporary entertainers that understand beauty, but do not strive for the whole depth of it. But that's okay, we can take it. We have long since given up on the idea that Anton Newcombe could lead us into the promised land anyway.

 

From there on, we just keep drifting between these steady rock beat grooves and throwbacks to 1966 (sometimes very harsh throwbacks — ʽStairway To The Best Party In The Universeʼ, de­spite the title, steals its sitar riff from the Stones' ʽPaint It Blackʼ rather than from Led Zeppelin... ah crap, I'm getting really tired of jotting down all these combinations), but on the whole, the record does not shoot for the same kind of thoroughly unpredictable weirdness as its predecessor. There are some leisurely, «retro-progressive» (hey, nice word) flute-and-sitar instrumentals like ʽFace Down On The Moonʼ; some pastoral themes with swooping strings to disorient your brain (ʽThe Clouds Are Liesʼ); and some tracks that are seriously messed up with vocal overdubs (ʽSe­ven Kinds Of Wonderfulʼ, where they seem to be singing in French, but it is really hard to tell be­cause the polyphony is so overwhelming).

 

I like the way it all sounds — even if the weirdness and the heaviness have been toned down, the album only rarely reminds me of the irritating laziness of past BJM «masterpieces», and at least all of the grooves have their legitimate emotional interpretations, if you care enough to wait for them to come to you. But in the process, it kind of seems as if The Committee To Keep Music Evil once again started lagging behind on its primary purpose, and that the momentum gained by Newcombe with his «snarling» approach began to dissipate once more. All the same, I would like to extend a thumbs up to the album — certainly not because of its gimmicky aspects (which are negligible, anyway, compared to Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?), but... well, just because. I think I have the same type of reaction to late 1970s Hawkwind: pleasant, inoffensive, toe-tappy, mildly catchy, mildly mysterious stuff. Goes easy on the ears.

 

REVELATION (2014)

 

1) Vad Hände Med Dem?; 2) What You Isn't; 3) Unknown; 4) Memory Camp; 5) Days, Weeks And Moths; 6) Duck And Cover; 7) Food For Clouds; 8) Second Sighting; 9) Memorymix; 10) Fist Full Of Bees; 11) Nightbird; 12) Xi­balba; 13) Goodbye (Butterfly).

 

The problem with a «good formula for psychedelic music» is that, like most formulae, even this one begins to run dry after a while. Yes, the BJM did enter a new period of creativity and inspi­ration with My Bloody Underground, and managed to keep music evil for a little while — but with their fourth record from the same streak, they are beginning to repeat themselves... no, wait, scratch that, because repetition has always been a key element of the BJM ideology in the first place. They are beginning to sound like their own shadow — that would be more precise.

 

Again, Revelation is an album of repetitive psychedelic grooves, with each track usually harbor­ing one riff and one draggy vocal melody. These may be smart or dumb, emotional or bland, com­plex or simplistic, but what really sucks is that they are very close to each other in tone and spirit. Even Aufheben, calm and quiet as it was compared to Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?, seemed more diverse and less predictable than this collection of largely mid-tempo stomps with echoey bluesy riffs. I actually like some of these riffs, I really do: ʽFood For Cloudsʼ has an especially nice one, minor-melancholy-poppy in Robert Smith style, and the little bluesy flourish at the end of each verse in ʽMemory Campʼ is doggone nasty. But does it really all have to be so... even? The tracks just blend into each other, and with Newcombe's mumbly mutterings in the place of normal singing all the time, you just have no hope to carve out separate identities for the tracks. Song after song after song, it's just the same old drag.

 

The only attempts at something relatively different come in the guise of a few «rhythmically mo­dern» tunes, such as the funky ʽDuck & Coverʼ and the trancey-clubby ʽMemorymixʼ. They do not feel like obnoxious intruders, but their moods are the same — all these songs sound like the product of somebody for whom taking hard drugs is seen as an artistic obligation, rather than a source of pleasure or enlightenment. He doesn't want to, see, but he has to, or else he won't be able to churn out these tired, dusty, mentally uncomfortable grooves.

 

In the end, I just do not see the point. If I want an album of lean, mean, nasty, and unpredictably crazy BJM grooves, I will just try one more stab at Who Killed Sgt. Pepper?. If I want their de­construction of 1960s aesthetics, I will rewind the thread all the way back to 1996. Revelation, however, is just a typical going-through-the-motions effort: tasteful and cool-sounding as always, but adding nothing whatsoever to the band's legacy. Other than reminding us, perhaps, that as of 2014. Anton Newcombe is still alive and well. Relatively well, that is — I guess he's still sulking that nobody brought him Paul McCartney's head on Heather Mills' wooden peg, after all, and that may have taken a bite out of his stamina.

 

MUSIQUE DE FILM IMAGINE (2015)

 

1) Après Le Vin; 2) Philadelphie Story; 3) La Dispute; 4) L'Enfer; 5) Elle S'Echappe; 6) Le Cadeau; 7) Le Sacré Du Printemps; 8) Le Souvenir; 9) Les Trois Cloches; 10) Bonbon; 11) L'Ennui; 12) Bonbon Deux; 13) La Question; 14) Au Sommet.

 

One thing I have to say about Anton Newcombe: for a guy who largely built his reputation on a series of mind-numbingly repetitive psycho-drones, he sure comes up with the wildest of original ideas every once in a while. Forever and ever, he continues to be inspired with the Sixties — to him, probably representing the peak of the human spirit in the 20th century, or even beyond that (and he's not alone!) — yet he always manages to insert a bit of the 21st century in every tribute to that decade, with a maddening mix of slavish derivativeness and stunning originality.

 

This record, now, is also all about the Sixties (and a little Fifties), but suddenly he turns his attention away from the Beatles and the Stones and guides it over the English channel, to focus on French filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, for a change: since, apparently, the movies of Godard and Truffaut meant the same to film as the Beatles, Stones, and Velvets meant to music, it was only a matter of time before mad man Newcombe found a way to somehow incorporate that in his creativity. The only thing he forgot to make was a movie — but he did write the sound­track to it, and he claims to have actually seen the movie in his head, although I doubt that he'd ever be willing to commit it to camera, even if Warner Bros. approaches him with a million dollar deal. (And, let's face it, it would most likely be awful anyway).

 

Technically, much of the soundtrack sounds fairly traditionally for BJM: slow or, at best, mid-tempo instrumental grooves with lots of sustained notes formed into solemn guitar-based or brass-based melodies. However, most of the important tracks, written in minor keys, wrapped in serious echo, and often adorned by half-sung, quarter-spoken, and quarter-whispered vocals, have a much more romantic and doom-laden feel than Newcombe's previous work, bringing to mind both the recent French shoegazing scene (like Alcest) and, for sure, some of the sonic atmosphere of the old French New Wave — not so much Godard, though, whose movies were much too bizarre and turbulent for this, as somebody like Alain Resnais (Last Year At Marienbad could sure profit from some of these sounds) or even, goodness gracious, Claude Lelouche (some of the atmospheres are right up A Man And A Woman's alley).

 

To assist him in this uneasy, but intriguing task is a small selection of some authentic French and Italian modern talent — Stéphanie Sokolinski, better known as SoKo (since the combination of French and Slavic elements in that name is much too much for the average person to bear), musi­cal performer and actress with pop-Goth overtones, takes the lead vocal on ʽPhiladelphie Storyʼ (yes, that is the messed-up title, even if the original title of Cukor's movie in the French version was Indiscrétions); and Asia Argento, who also stars in movies and sings on LPs, although I am not sure if I have ever heard or seen anything from her (I know she's supposed to be in 1994's La Reine Margot, but that one was so terrible, I couldn't stand more than twenty minutes)... anyway, Asia Argento is featured on ʽLe Sacré Du Printempsʼ, which, as you have probably already gues­sed, has nothing whatsoever to do with Stravinsky. Is Stravinsky ever regarded as a forefather of The French New Wave? Not sure, but it's not really up to me to question Anton Newcombe's erudition — he obviously did some homework on this issue and I did not.

 

In any case, the important thing is that Musique seems to work even outside of all those con­nections — it is perfectly possible to enjoy it and even to be stimulated by it if you do not know a single thing about old French movies. Most of the grooves make sense. They can be quite mini­malistic, almost ambient (ʽBonbonʼ sounds like a digital projection of a meditative glass harmo­nica solo; ʽL'Ennuiʼ opens and closes with a simple musical box melody, over which a cello, a flute, and a Mellotron play a set of mournful chords), and they can be quite loud and bombastic (ʽL'Enferʼ, presenting a stern, but melancholic rather than terrifying picture of Hell — you know, the kind of Hell where demons keep asking themselves «to be or not to be?» before pouring boiling oil over your head), but they are all united by a sense of being stuck somewhere in limbo, as the old world has already been lost and the new one has not yet been gained — a sense that they do indeed share with some of those old movies.

 

The two sung tracks are no exception: «SoKo» sings with passion and energy on ʽPhiladelphie Storyʼ, but, true to her artistic persona, it is the passion and energy of a ghoul — "Hallelujah, chantez ma resurrection!" is the epic climax to each verse, upon which you dutifully expect a bite to the neck. And ʽLe Sacré Du Printempsʼ is kind of, like, you know, when they were all gathered to perform The Rite of Spring, but the weather turned out twenty degrees colder than expected, so they just all huddled up in their wintercoats and stayed home instead, staring out the windows and thinking real cold thoughts on the fate of the universe.

 

So, as you see, for me at least it does work, atmosphere-wise. This is the stiffest, most minimalis­tic and frozen Brian Jonestown Massacre release yet, more like a Dead Can Dance impersonating Brian Jonestown Massacre impersonating Alain Resnais with a little Antonioni DNA thrown in. It's not that good — the market has been flooded with half-ambient, winterish soundscapes like these for years anyway — but it feels solid and intriguing at least as yet another chapter in the odd journey of Anton Newcombe, which, considering his passion for chemical substances and his usual sloth-like approach to music, should have ended or, at least, transformed into a predictable straight line a long time ago. It does not, however, and for that reason alone I am happy to sup­port the record with a thumbs up and say that in a perfect world, it should have sold more copies than Adele's 25; but then again, in a perfect world like that 80% of the people would rather go watch a re-run of Last Year At Marienbad than the latest episode of Star Wars, and when you think about this real hard, the consequences can be rather scary.

 

MINI ALBUM THINGY WINGY (2015)

 

1) Pish; 2) Prší Prší; 3) Get Some; 4) Dust; 5) Leave It Alone; 6) Mandrake Handshake; 7) Here Comes The Waiting For The Sun.

 

Yes, apparently this is the correct title of Newcombe's second artistic outburst of 2015 — not ʽPishʼ, as a fairly securely stoned Brian Jones seems to be telling you from his vantage position on the front sleeve. ʽPishʼ itself is only the name of the first track, which opens with a soaked-in-Sixties echoey blues-pop riff and quickly becomes a slow, monotonous, psychedelic vamp that takes you all the way back... no, not really into 1967, but rather into 1995-1996, back to New­combe's own roots. Pretty much all of the unpredictable, bizarrely mashed-up experimentation of the band's «second golden age» that began with My Bloody Underground has been thrown out of the window — so who knows what happened? My best guess is that Anton, once again, switched his drug of preference choice.

 

The results are not too bad, especially because of the wise choice to keep this restoration of tra­ditional Brian Jones family values short and sweet — 34 minutes is indeed a «mini-album», al­beit far from Newcombe's first attempt at brevity, and he does manage to drag us through some cool ideas and textures in the meantime. The problem is... all the old problems are back, too: each of the tracks exhausts its load of ideas in about one minute, and then it all depends on whether that one minute was enough to cast its trance over you or not. Take the longest piece for an example: ʽLeave It Aloneʼ quickly sets up a tough threatening mood, constructing a double-barrel musical machine out of one fuzzy, sustained chord and a dirty one-string vamp around it (think Jorma Kaukonen trying out Neil Young's style), and it's cool, but that's all it does for six minutes, and I cannot even say that the lead guitar kicks sufficient ass to endure this. (A real Neil Young pro­bably could, but a real Neil Young would probably refuse to play like he was stoned out of his mind, and with BJM this is almost always an obligatory condition).

 

On the slightly odder side of things, ʽPrší Pršíʼ does continue the recently established tradition of odd collaborations — this time, with Vladimir Nosal, allegedly the frontman of an indie band from Slovakia named Queer Jane (judging by what little I've heard from then on Youtube, they specialize in Beatlesque pop). Curiously, even though most of Queer Jane's material is sung in English, this track is sung in Slovak, because what can be more psychedelic than the usage of a Slavic language on an American retro-psychedelic album? However, if Slavic languages do not, by their very existence, already mystify and befuddle you, the track will hardly be more than just another pleasant, quickly forgettable psychedelic pastiche.

 

Elsewhere, you find a passable, but useless cover of a bona fide psychedelic classic (ʽDustʼ by the 13th Floor Elevators, with a lovingly recreated sound of that band's infamous electric jug); ano­ther slow, pleasant, predictable vamp that seems to be here just so that Anton can use a cool title like ʽMandrake Handshakeʼ; and, corniest of all, ʽHere Comes The Waiting For The Sunʼ, which, sounds absolutely nothing like either ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ or ʽWaiting For The Sunʼ, but rather, as some reviewers have already noted, like Donovan's ʽHurdy Gurdy Manʼ. Not that good old Donovan hasn't done his fair share of waiting for the sun back in the day, but enough with the pseudo-post-modern titles already, eh?

 

Anyway, no cri­ticism whatsoever about the sound of it all, Newcombe still understands the art of classic psyche­delic guitar (and throw in a bit of sitar and Mellotron where appropriate) better than anybody else in this world. It's just that he has once again given up on the idea to advance that art, and remains perfectly content just to fiddle around with it, in his usual «glorified lazy» mode. And putting your trusted mascot, for the first time ever, right up front on that album sleeve (did he even secure the rights for the photo?), is not going to mask the fact that Mini Album Thingy Wingy does seem like an attempt to wing it, and if so, then why does it even exist? We can al­ways pull off Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request off the shelf if we're in this kind of mood — there's no big need for a third one.

 

THIRD WORLD PYRAMID (2016)

 

1) Good Mourning; 2) Government Beard; 3) Don't Get Lost; 4) Assignment Song; 5) Oh Bother; 6) Third World Pyramid; 7) Like Describing Colors To A Blind Man On Acid; 8) Lunar Surf Graveyard; 9) The Sun Ship.

 

The fourth Brian Jonestown Massacre album in three years? What, is this 1966 all over again or is this merely the compensatory energy-outburst result of coming clean? I almost feel like advi­sing Anton Newcombe to slow down, if only that did not sound so comical when addressed to a man whose favorite musical tempo has always been «hallucinating adagio». At least he seems to be sticking to the short form: this new record is only a few minutes longer than Mini Album Thingy Wingy, so that both could probably fit on a single CD if necessary — but instead of melting down our brains with one huge close-to-eighty-minutes platter, the man has mercifully agreed on two small platters instead.

 

And I don't just mean a technical gesture — the compositions on Third World Pyramid are conceived and executed in the exact same vein as those on Mini Album, despite having been recorded at different sessions (and even with different guest stars). This here is just another batch of psychedelic drones, with exactly one musical idea per song, because, you know, having two ideas in one song is not such a prudent thing to do — I mean, what if they contradict each other? What if they start to fight? What if the second one makes you forget about the first — then the first one would be, like, wasted? What if the second one is not as good as the first? What if it spoils your concentration, or breaks the hypnotic spell? What if somebody says, "I like how they are so influenced by Sixties' bands, but you know, they have way too many key changes in their songs, that's no longer influence — that's slavish plagiarism!"

 

So have no fear, Third World Pyramid is not going to swamp you with a dazzling kaleidoscope of sounds and textures. Especially now that Anton seems to have found a new muse — a young Canadian psycho-artist called Tess Parks, specializing in pretty much the same kind of music (dark, starry-eyed drones with stoned-enchanted vocals at the bottom); they ended up touring together for a while, and on this record she is handling some of the vocal duties. In between the two, they double their efforts at retrieving the atmosphere of soul-searching French movies from the 1950s/1960s, joining it with the essence of mind-opening music from London's UFO club, and presenting the results for 21st century audiences who are so desperate for something new that they will agree to revive anything old if it helps.

 

Unfortunately, the results suffer from the same problems as Mini Album. Newcombe, now a consummate professional in this business, gets a great sound going — the acoustic guitars, the Mellotrons, the woodwinds, the brass fanfares — but remains unable to push this anywhere be­yond simply having a «great sound». All the core melodies are based on the same blues-rock and folk-pop chord sequences that we have heard a million times, and it hurts particularly bad when the song length is extended for no reason — ʽAssignment Songʼ drags on for nine minutes, an interminable tribute to the likes of Donovan, survivable only if you get yourself in the mood soon enough. The second half, once the vocals have died down, is awfully mushy: no single instru­mental part stands out at the expense of others, and the result is a spineless psychedelic mess, equally polyphonous and cacophonous. (For comparison, remember the stylistically close an­themic coda to something like George Harrison's ʽIt's All Too Muchʼ — where all the multiple overdubs were clustered around a very tight melodic spine that chained you to the song's rhythm while at the same time blowing your mind with all the kaleidoscopic effects).

 

On some very rare occasions, like the title track, they increase the tempo, but it does not help much, because the bass remains barely audible, and the truly important functions are left to the humming electronics and the mystery ghost vocals. Slow or fast, the difference between these tracks and their spiritual predecessors always remains the same: Newcombe writes atmospheric mood pieces rather than songs, and that is his stated schtick that you can take or leave. As long as I have to listen to the record to give it a brief assessment, I can take it — but I am unsure why, ten years or even ten days from now, I would still want to prefer this secondary, derivative, mono­tonous material to a classic album by, say, The 13th Floor Elevators, where I can get moods and hooks and genuine original excitement. I mean, I might be on the same wavelength with New­combe — we both acknowledge the psychedelic Sixties as one of the greatest eras of music and a guiding light for one's musical tastes and hopes — but that does not imply agreeing on how we should be dealing with this musical legacy in 2016. 

 

DON'T GET LOST (2017)

 

1) Open Minds Now Close; 2) Melody's Actual Echo Chamber; 3) Resist Much Obey Little; 4) Charmed I'm Sure; 5) Groove Is In The Heart; 6) One Slow Breath; 7) Throbbing Gristle; 8) Fact 67; 9) Dropping Bombs On The Sun; 10) UFO Paycheck; 11) Geldenes Herz Menz; 12) Acid 2 Me Is No Worse Than War; 13) Nothing New To Trash Like You; 14) Ich Bin Klang.

 

At this point, I am beginning to question myself whether or not this recent explosion of BJM albums might be due to Anton Newcombe misunderstanding the meaning of the classic Latin recommendation of Festina lente. Where most people would understand it sort of figuratively, as a call to focused and efficient action tempered by prudence and accuracy, Newcombe seems to take it more literally — as an appeal to release as many new records in the upcoming years as possible, containing as many slow-moving, hyper-draggy songs as possible.

 

At least the previous three albums were all short; Don't Get Lost clocks in at approximately 72 minutes — admittedly, not a record length for Newcombe, who used to be famous for slowly and meticulously bleeding out his grooves until the CD begged for mercy; but the last time he did that was in the era of the band's artistic «rebirth» with My Bloody Underground and Who Killed Sgt. Pepper, almost a decade ago. Since then, Newcombe experienced no new rebirths, largely returning to the original style of BJM, occasionally diversified by stylistic references to groove styles past 1967, and Don't Get Lost is no exception to the rule: the fourteen tracks captured here will give you no new insights whatsoever.

 

And me, too, I find myself at a loss once again. Clearly, the only way this sloth-like guy could churn out such a huge record about four months after his previous one was by quickly working out a few grooves and sticking to them — indeed, the opening track, ʽOpen Minds Now Closeʼ, rides on for eight minutes without a single deviation from its established formula. It's like a metronomic, unnerving groove by Can, but simplified to the core and with absolutely no room left for improvisation: elevator muzak for dark psychedelic types. Naturally, with this approach it is the easiest thing in the world to stretch a potentially 30-minute long record to 70 minutes. But then again, I reserve harsh judgement, because BJM always goes best with mushrooms (this is an objective fact, scientifically verified by the band's leader), and I'm not much of a mushroom man, so I cannot verify if the textures of Newcombe are truly a perfect psychological fit with chemi­cally altered brain activity or not.

 

In the sphere of ideology, Anton is still pretending that some of his songs should function as manifestos, hence such titles as ʽResist Much Obey Littleʼ (a bit paradoxical, since the steady, cyclical, descending-ascending acoustic rhythm pattern of the song is so mind-numbing that it only makes you want to resist little and obey much, at best) and ʽAcid 2 Me Is No Worse Than Warʼ, one of the album's few excursions into soft techno, drum machines, sampled vocals, and siren-themed synthesizers. ʽDropping Bombs On The Sunʼ is another title that might trigger poli­tical associations, and yet again, the track is a slow, totally stoned groove, ruled by minimalistic brass-imitating tones and lead vocals from Tess Parks, who still retains the status of Anton's muse by managing to sound twice as stoned as he does. («And far sexier», I wanted to add before rea­lizing that having sex with Tess Parks, judging from the perspective of her musical output, would probably only be efficient in an alternate universe where one minute of their time equals one hour of ours. «Slow down, you move too fast» is definitely not about these guys).

 

In his struggle to retain his cool, Newcombe does things that I hardly understand at all — for instance, calling one of the tracks ʽThrobbing Gristleʼ, even though Throbbing Gristle themselves would probably have regarded the entire brand of BJM production as a cheap profanation of the genuine avantgarde aesthetics (the track itself is just another monotonous psychedelic groove with Parks yawning and groaning all over the place). The next-to-last track, ʽNothing New To Trash Like Youʼ, is surprisingly faster than the rest — pretty much a generic rockabilly number buried under the generic layers of BJM production, and still somehow managing to sound as lethargic as everything else. One other track, ʽGeldenes Herz Menzʼ, sounds like modern lounge jazz put through the same motions — fussy jazzy drumming and tons of soft sax overdubs, hardly a subgenre where the man might make much of an impression.

 

Overall, just another year, just another album: nothing too bad, nothing too revelatory. And brace yourselves, because the guy is not about to stop — he's gonna crawl on and on and on, because the number of same-sounding draggy grooves with tons of wobbly overdubs that he can theoreti­cally produce is infinity.

    

BUILT TO SPILL

ULTIMATE ALTERNATIVE WAVERS (1993)

 

1) The First Song; 2) Three Years Ago Today; 3) Revolution; 4) Shameful Dread; 5) Nowhere Nothin' Fuckup; 6) Get A Life; 7) Built To Spill; 8) Lie For A Lie; 9) Hazy; 10) Built Too Long (parts 1, 2 & 3).

 

The classic associations that usually spring up in any account of the story of Built To Spill are Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. — two of the major «ugly-guitar-sound» combos of the Eighties, both of which transparently influenced Built To Spill, the former in terms of freedom of sound and expe­rimental approach, the latter in terms of «dirty jamming» which, in turn, goes all the way back to Neil Young, Pete Townshend and the like (echoes of whom are also sometimes heard in the music — ironically, one of the kick-ass riffs upon which they stumble in the ʽBuilt Too Longʼ jam happens to be the riff that Pete often played live in the jam section of ʽMy Generationʼ).

 

Curiously, though, my first association with these guys concerned neither Sonic Youth nor Dino­saur Jr., but rather a somewhat more distant and less frequently quoted relative — Television! If anything, Built To Spill for the 1990s (and this is especially obvious on this first, and still very much derivative, album) were exactly what Television were for the 1970s: a small-format, but large-ambition band, with a vision expressed through a haughty, sternly determined manner of singing and all sorts of challenging guitar interplay, combining elements of folk, punk, drone, blues improvisation, and noise. In other words, grand prog-rock deconstructed to fit the limita­tions of a small guitar-based combo — something that must probably require a lot of clout and a lot of skill to do right.

 

Television did it perfectly all right; as to Built To Spill, while my respect for them even in this early incarnation is enormous, I am not too sure if Ultimate Alternative Wavers, a rather boldly self-aggrandizing title as it is, truly constitutes «great» music. There is no denying the feats of imagination that went into the construction of these songs: this is not «math-rock» as such, since the music does not demand perfect rhythmic precision at each nanosecond, and it is definitely not the «nuts-rock» of Primus, either, but the song structures are quite complex and challenging all the same. The band core, consisting of Doug Martsch on guitar/vocals and Brett Netson on se­cond guitar and/or bass, like to go from folk to rock to funk to noise and back within the same song — this is why the songs usually take quite a bit of time to develop, but this is definitely not wasted time: the only track on which the band members could be accused of a little self-indul­gence is the closing jam ʽBuilt Too Longʼ, whose title is already self-ironic, but even there we have a distinct three-way partition that indicates... well, composition.

 

On the other hand, the same approach also reveals the major weakness of Built To Spill: a lack of obvious purpose to this music. Sure you could address this criticism to the likes of King Crimson as well, but, first of all, Built To Spill do not rock as hard as King Crimson, second, they do not have as many impressive riffs as King Crimson, and third and perhaps most important, their level of technical mastery, though easily comparable to Television, hardly even begins approaching the Fripp/Belew standards, so you do not have this extra bonus of being totally dazzled by the per­formances, though you might be amused or intrigued by them. These are interesting songs, sure enough, but I have a hard time «feeling» them.

 

As an example, take the first song, conveniently titled ʽThe First Songʼ because, indeed, it is not easy to come up with a better title. It seems to be a poetic complaint about the hardships of living in a world in which the protagonist does not really belong: "How can I not believe in things that everybody else sees?" The music does seem to be tailored accordingly, with minor key folksy strumming à la Led Zep, woman-tone-heavy electric wailings, and brooding psychedelic solos weeping over each other from two or three different guitars ­— yet somehow none of this trans­lates into conventional desperation that could break your heart. I don't know, maybe it's some­thing to do with Doug's voice, which I find rather bland and «just decent», or maybe it is the lack of a well-defined core theme for the song (they seem to just be happy to move from Led Zep to Hendrix to Television to The Cure and shove in more, more, more without being afraid of dis­orienting the listener — which is exactly, I believe, what is happening), or maybe they don't get the best possible production... anyway, something just doesn't click, as formally cool as the entire experience could be called.

 

When they wind up the tempo and crank up the volume, like on ʽRevolutionʼ or ʽGet A Lifeʼ, songs whose titles, lyrics and moods «call to action», the overall effect is the same: the music is more complex than on your average Neil Young song, but the cumulative reaction is nowhere near as violent — when Neil really gets into it, it makes you want to kill (with love, of course — what else?), but when Doug and Brett get into it (like on the aggressive solo section of ʽGet A Lifeʼ), it makes you go... «wow, cool sonic overlays, dudes». Like when they solo on ʽLie For A Lieʼ, in these short little «telephonic» bursts of bubbly melody: cute and weird, but not quite as meaningful as, for instance, when Talking Heads do so on Remain In Light songs.

 

Arguably the most conventional song on the album, a leisurely ballad with a grand lead guitar melody, is ʽHazyʼ, and perhaps not surprisingly, it also has the most soulful and relatable vocal performance from Doug: "Hazy / Just because sometimes you make me crazy" actually gives us a vulnerable human being, and serves as the emotional hub of the album — too bad that it comes almost at the very end, as if they were actually ashamed of having an accessible song like that sitting next to all those feats of imaginative overdubbing.

 

Do not get me wrong: even without ʽHazyʼ, the album would still get an unquestionable thumbs up from me — just because few of the songs work instantaneously on a «gut level» does not mean that the album as a whole does not work on some other level of conscience. At the very least, in the most formal way it is a real wonder what these three guys have managed to concoct with just the most basic of instrumentation, in an age where «alt-rock» was already beginning to feel a little like a dirty word; no wonder that a cult was rather quickly formed around the band, praising them for salvaging the underground in an era when R.E.M. and Nirvana were perceived as a threat to the underground's very existence as an «underground». To do so, however, they had to produce music that was denser, less easily accessible, and less emotionally devastating — had they done otherwise, you know, they risked selling as many copies as Nirvana, and that would have been the end of small club elitism. Or maybe Doug Martsch could end up killing himself, so thank God for them small record labels.

 

THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH LOVE (1994)

 

1) In The Morning; 2) Reasons; 3) Big Dipper; 4) Car; 5) Fling; 6) Cleo; 7) The Source; 8) Twin Falls; 9) Some; 10) Distopian Dream Girl; 11) Israel's Song; 12) Stab; 13) Preview.

 

Perhaps I am not getting something, but I actually hear this record as a notable, if not blatantly notable regression from the band's debut. Naturally, there's nothing wrong with love, but there is something wrong about starting out as a small, instrumentally traditional, but decidedly experi­mental combo and then, once you have laid out a claim, retreating into safer, much better known and exploited territory. In other words, Built To Spill's sophomore effort is a more accessible, more easily understandable, more emotionally predictable, and more intellectually boring record than their debut — and it really needn't have been that way.

 

The songs, for the most part, are indeed about love, although I couldn't vouch for everything — to do that, I'd have to check the texts, and, unfortunately, Martsch's sneery, slightly Lennon-esque (but much less sharp) vocals just do not inspire me into a detailed investigation of what's under the hood. In any case, there isn't a single ballad here with the emotional grip of ʽHazyʼ — as a matter of fact, the album does not distinguish well enough between rockers and ballads anyway. It's all just an interminable hookless mess of bland syncopated alt-rock riffage; thank God that they do not at least go overboard with the grungy distortion schtick, because with just a little push they could have become an early predecessor to Nickelback.

 

I mean, the song ʽCarʼ was a goddamn single here. Speaking of singles, is there a single reason why that song should command our special attention? It has no hooklines whatsoever, the singing is completely expressionless, and the use of cello is pretty much wasted since it just blends together with the bassline. Rotten dynamics, too: both of the solos are mixed in way too low, so it all feels more like obligatory bits of jamming rather than elements of development. Nor does the melody change throughout ­— just riffing on that same chord. If this is the single, how could you expect the album to be any better? It isn't. It's all a letdown.

 

Arguably, Martsch's big mistake here was to make a «soulful» record, something like a cross be­tween a set of John Lennon bedroom guitar demos and sentimental Californian singer-songwri­ting, combining the harshness and directness of the former with the vulnerability and sweetness of the latter. Perhaps I am messing up the real influences here, but no matter: the important thing is that, in the process, the songs all got more simple, poppy, and samey, which is just not good, because Buit To Spill are not masters of the pop hook. A few nicely placed vocal lines on ʽRea­sonsʼ and maybe ʽBig Dipperʼ are still offset by the overall grayness of the arrangements, and I remember absolutely nothing about any of the other songs, not even after three or four listens.

 

Actually, I do remember one of the lines on ʽStabʼ — "I wrote a song, it was slow and long". Not all the songs here are slow and long, but most of them feel slow and long, largely because they are based on such familiar and uninteresting rhythm and lead patterns. But if it is not the innova­tive guitar work, what could it be then that could make this album work in return? The singing? Bland, if at least not over-dramatized. The arrangements? They're all the same: guitar-based, too restrained to kick your rock'n'roll ass and too brutal to have subtlety. The bare fact that this does not sound like Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins? Well, it does not. In fact, it all still sounds more «wise» than your average (or even your average famous) alt-rock band, precisely because of Martsch's restrained approach — but what can I do with myself if all this «wisdom» just deterio­rates into blandness and boredom at the blink of an eye?

 

The least boring track on the album is the final joke — ʽPreviewʼ, a spoof on bonus tracks that gives us a glimpse of the «upcoming» album by the band, with brief snippets of several «songs» (parodies on punk and power ballads) that actually sound more exciting than the album itself. Even if a few tunes have potential, they would still need to be rewritten and re-recorded to realize it fully (ʽReasonsʼ, that's the one I am especially looking at — I wonder what somebody like John Lennon could have made out of it, had it fallen into his hands? It's definitely got a «Lennon-type chord change» to it around the 1:02 mark, and later). As it is, I can only view the record as yet another of the many mid-1990s failures to bring intelligent guitar-based singer-songwriter rock back to its former standards, and sorrowfully award it a thumbs down.

 

PERFECT FROM NOW ON (1997)

 

1) Randy Described Eternity; 2) I Would Hurt A Fly; 3) Stop The Show; 4) Made-Up Dreams; 5) Velvet Waltz; 6) Out Of Site; 7) Kicked It In The Sun; 8) Untrustable/Part 2 (About Someone Else).

 

By the time Built To Spill's third and allegedly best album comes along, I think I understand what my major problem with Doug Martsch is. Simply put, the man is just not as much of a «guitar sound magician» as he tries to make us believe. Yes, there is quite a bit of experimentation with song structures, overdubs, guitar tones, and chord progressions going on, but all of it is still strict­ly written in «rock language», and when you look at all the separate parts one by one, they are rarely all that special. The melodies are far too complex to trigger immediate gut reaction à la Nirvana (I think Doug Martsch would have died of shame if he ever got caught with an ʽIn Bloomʼ-type riff on one of his songs), yet not «where-the-hell-did-this-come-from?»-sort of com­plex enough to amaze and astound you.

 

That said, Martsch at least tries to live up to the album's rashly presumptuous title — especially considering that somehow along the line he managed to secure his band a contract with nothing less than Warner Bros., while at the same time retaining the right to creative freedom. So here was an actual challenge to produce something that could be commercially viable and artistically meaningful at the same time, and, fortunately, the man's ambitions burst through the bland indie-rock shell that so thickly enveloped There's Nothing Wrong With Love and carried him to­wards anthemic, psychedelic, and noise-rich heights. This is very clearly an album that wants, oh so desperately, to be the Grandest Serious Record of the decade, and Martsch invests so much of himself in the effort that I fully understand people who like to swear by this record, particularly if they were in their world-sniffing teens at the time, and Doug Martsch was their Pete Townshend, taken to the next advanced level of conscience.

 

The songs here are lengthy — indeed, way too lengthy for a potentially commercial album re­leased on a major label — and almost always drift from one melody into a completely different one, even if the key will probably remain the same. It's not as if they really needed to do that, be­cause the permeating mood is consistently philosophical and almost meditative, rather than ad­venturous: Martsch states that in the very first song, dealing with the concept of eternity and its relation with the fleeting individual, and then never really lets go until the last minute. These are not cosmic voyages into some flowery parallel universe — they are trips inside the depth of your mind, sometimes guided by rationality, sometimes just going off the deep end without bothering too much where the stream will end up taking you. They often promise genuine depth and occa­sionally hint at real beauty, although, alas, the hint usually remains just a hint for me.

 

One problem is that, although the album is still essentially a «pop» album, Martsch's singing abilities remain unsatisfactory. Not only does he have this really limited, annoying vocal range, but his vocals are usually mixed «below» the instruments rather than «above» them, which means that your attention is supposed to be focused on the guitars (or even on the accompanying cello, deftly played by guest musician John McMahon on about half of the tracks) rather than on the singing — but that is just plain silly, considering that the biggest hooks are sometimes planted right in the vocal, not instrumental, bits (like the chorus to ʽI Would Hurt A Flyʼ, or the "and it never will, no it never will" bit on ʽMade-Up Dreamsʼ). Honestly, the man should have taken Pete Townshend's example and arm himself with a more suitable vocalist. I am fairly sure that both John Lennon and Tom Verlaine must be among Doug's chief influences when it comes to both songwriting and singing, but he simply isn't big enough to fill the britches of either one, period. I mean, if he were and if he knew it, why hide your voice behind a wall of sound?

 

Another problem is that — so sue me — much too often, I still have not the faintest idea what the songs are supposed to be about, or even what my own gut feeling should suggest to me about them. Naturally, I am not talking about straightforward lyrical interpretations — but, you know, something like ʽOut Of Siteʼ is just overflowing with grandeur, starting out like Pink Floyd and ending a bit like ʽStairway To Heavenʼ, yet I have no idea to what exactly this grandeur is being applied. There's a lot of raging interlocking guitars that switch almost at random from playful funky pop to psychedelic rock, but I do not have any emotional rapprochement with the material. It's all very clever, but it rings hollow. Or, sometimes, maybe too derivative — that funky, swampy groove that constitutes the bulk of ʽI Would Hurt A Flyʼ offers a respectable variation on the formula, what with the grinning wah-wah guitar licks and the cello complementing each other in a novel manner, yet the overall effect is still not enough to stop me from smirking, «oh, gee, Funkadelic meets Electric Light Orchestra», almost against my will.

 

One thing I will admit: this is not «bullshit rock», by any means — not just another «deep» album whose creator just wants to come across as a serious artist, without any emotional or intellectual capacities to back up the ambitions. Rather, Perfect From Now On is that «semi-successful» attempt to justify these ambitions which has something like a 50/50 chance to irritate or amaze, depending on one's DNA peculiarities or the particular context in which this album has been heard. I have listed the primary flaws which render it impotent for me — the vocals, the emotio­nal confusion, the emphasis on length and complexity of the structures rather than the individual good parts — but all of this, to a large degree, just reflects personal taste. Objectively, this is still a huge step forward from the genericity of There's Nothing Wrong With Love and, in terms of scale and ambition, from the technical experimentalism of the band's debut album, so there is no way we could leave this without a thumbs up, be it ever more «brainy» than «heartfelt».

 

KEEP IT LIKE A SECRET (1999)

 

1) The Plan; 2) Center Of The Universe; 3) Carry The Zero; 4) Sidewalk; 5) Bad Light; 6) Time Trap; 7) Else; 8) You Were Right; 9) Temporarily Blind; 10) Broken Chairs.

 

Okay, so this time the songs are shorter. But not that shorter — instead of eight, there's ten, and shortening them does not necessarily mean that they become less complex in structure or more immediately accessible. It does seem that the record is not so hotly bent on making a sweeping musical statement as its predecessor — rather, this time around it is again just a collection of pop-rock songs on various topics, all characterized by Doug Martsch's guitar-and-vocal trademarks but without letting us know that Built To Spill intend to conquer the world in the next 7 hours.

 

But ambition or no, once again I have to say that Martsch is an efficient generator of ideas in harsh need of a second partner to bring them up to speed. Case in point: the best song on the al­bum is arguably ʽElseʼ, an allegro pop-rocker with romantic vocals, psychedelic guitars, and con­voluted lyrics that seem to concern the protagonist's inability to cope with his love urges, but might as well be about physical illness — anyway, its spiralling lead guitar line and arching vocal modulations bear the stamp of beauty, nay, gorgeousness even, but neither of the two is given a strong enough presence to stand out. The vocals are buried, the lead line is never louder than the unremarkable rhythm pattern, and although the music actually develops along the way (there's a lengthy coda where Martsch tries out several guitar tricks and effects), it does not really feel as if it developed — everything is so smooth. Bluntly speaking, the guy came up with potentially sharp hooks, and then spent his time in the studio dulling them up.

 

Other than this little detail (namely, that all the songs here kinda suck), all the songs on this album are excellent. Smart guitar melodies, smart lyrics, smartly engineered seams between the different parts — and when I say «smart», I don't just mean «specializing in innovative, but emo­tionally meaningless chord changes»: I mean really evocative, emotionally charged melodies that transfer a whole variety of vibes, most of them positive and uplifting, even if the lyrics usually deal with various personal problems. Only the lengthy album closer ʽBroken Chairsʼ, slowing down to a relative crawl and awash in agonizingly distorted solos, breaks this sequence with the obvious intention of depressing you in the end — not entirely successful, because as Doug goes over the top about piling one psycho-bluesy solo on top of another during the final jam, the whole thing becomes «trippy» rather than «depressing», and you will probably emerge from the experi­ence with your eyes rolled back and your tongue hanging out, rather than with the bitter know­ledge that there is no hope whatsoever for the human race. But did you know, really, that crows are "mirrors of apprehension in the fallen sun"? I didn't. The lyrics sure as hell don't add much to that depressing effect.

 

Additional highlights — ʽCenter Of The Universeʼ, whose opening riff creates a musical vor­tex of sorts (yes, Martsch is really good at «bends and wobbles», as Robert Fripp would call them); ʽTemporarily Blindʼ, whose cobweb of ringing, sighing, sirening, and grinning guitars will con­fuse your ears before suddenly merging into one single power riff, then exploding once again into a miriad of kaleidoscopic sounds; and the song that most people talk about when they mention this record, because it is so much easier to talk about words than notes — ʽYou Were Rightʼ, in which Martsch collects as many classic rock negative clichés as possible ("all we are is dust in the wind", "we're all just bricks in the wall", "it's a hard rain's gonna fall", "this is the end") and acknowledges their truthfulness over a tired, stuttering tempo, ending the song by repeatedly asking the question "do you ever think about it?". Stupid rocker, if we never thought about it, would we even be coming up with all these trite phrases in the first place?

 

Anyway, here comes another thumbs up to another album that commands unambiguous respect, but hardly ever gives me any emotional thrills. I have no idea what it would take to make these songs really work — additional instruments beside guitars? a different vocalist? a better mix? a less impressionistic verbal style? atmospheric voiceovers from a resurrected Vincent Price? what­ever. I'd still take the simple, «trivial», but so highly efficient guitar sound of Nirvana over this by default — however, whenever you are in the mood for something that's very Nineties, very pop-rock, very far removed from the avantgarde spirit, but also somehow quite challenging and in­ventive, well... just Keep It Like A Secret, and we'll be able to carry the Built To Spill legacy, untarnished and unspoiled by excessive popularity, through the coming years.

 

ANCIENT MELODIES OF THE FUTURE (2001)

 

1) Strange; 2) The Host; 3) In Your Mind; 4) Alarmed; 5) Trimmed; 6) Happiness; 7) Don't Try; 8) You Are; 9) Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss; 10) The Weather.

 

Oh no! «The magic is gone!», a lot of fans seem to complain about this record, implying that the new millennium's cosmic rays have somehow managed to break through the skull of Doug Martsch, of all people, corrode his genius, and destabilize his vision so now Built To Spill sound like «any other generic indie-rock band». Such a shame. I do have an alternate opinion, though, seeing as how I was always dubious of that genius in the first place — maybe it's not so much the music that has changed, but simply the people, who were once listening to Built To Spill in their easily impressionable, character-forming teen years, happened to grow up... and suddenly find out that Doug Martsch never did?

 

Because, honestly, if there is one big flaw to Ancient Melodies Of The Future, it is simply that the band refuses to evolve. We have largely the same formula here — dreamy, philosophical pop songs with dense layers of guitar overdubs and monotonous vocals that have little hope of clam­bering into the open from under that thick mesh of competing guitars. In this context, how could you even begin to answer the question of which songs are «better» — the ones here or the ones on the preceding «golden trio» of BtS records? Okay, so these ones are shorter, with fewer melo­dy changes along the way than there used to be, and maybe the overall number of complex riffs has somewhat decreased, but probably not because Martsch has run out of them (a guy like Martsch can never really run out of complex riffs), but because he may have wanted a slightly more straightforward, in-yer-face approach.

 

Personally, I have never witnessed any magic on any Built To Spill album — intellectual at­tempts at credibly modeling magic, yes, but not real magic, and in that respect, I see no diffe­rence between the old shit and the new shit. A song like ʽAlarmedʼ, for instance: any true Martsch fan should just love everything about it, from the grand opening with the swooping strings whis­tling over your head like bombers, to the equally grand lyrics ("I'm alarmed and I can't help from / Crashing onto this island we've become") to the way it gradually segues into the noisy coda, where Martsch's knightly challenge of "did you make it all wrong, so wrong?" is drowned in a sea of ominous strings and nastily dissonant keyboards. I am unable to love it, for all the already known reasons (bad singing, messy production, inability to make the best melodic elements of the song take heavy precedence over the average elements, etc.), but how could anybody who does not view these reasons as a problem not love it? Beats me.

 

Or a song like ʽHappinessʼ. Slide guitar opening with an almost Sleepy John Estes sound to it! Then it kinda sorta becomes closer to the Black Crowes, but who could blame them for wanting to try and combine slide with distortion? "Happiness will only happen when it can" — yet ano­ther of those simple philosophical maxims from Mr. Martsch, no better and no worse than any such statement made previously. What's not to like? Or ʽIn Your Mindʼ — backward solos, mys­terious Eastern-flavored mellotrons, a sludgy fuzzy guitar interlude, and a psychedelic climactic puncture in the chorus ("no one can see in your MIIIIND!..." — a simple truth, delivered not for the sake of providing hitherto unknown knowledge, but for the sake of letting you know that the music of Built To Spill serves to hypothetically reflect the black box activities that take place under your skull, and is thus historically and spiritually linked to... okay, did I ever mention that Doug Martsch might be seriously influenced by John Lennon circa 1966? Just in case I didn't, ʽShe Said She Saidʼ is, like, the thickest root supporting the BtS trunk).

 

But do not get me wrong: for me at least, the album was just as unmemorable as almost every­thing that preceded it. And the reason why, this time around, I wouldn't want to give it a thumbs up is not because the music is «bad» (Doug Martsch came to me in my dreams one of these nights and told me confidentially that he never once wrote a bad song, so I have no reason to disbelieve him if he went to all this trouble to show up), but because it has become fixed and locked in «autopilot» mode. The songs still feature plenty of the band's instrumental trickery (I did not yet mention the multi-guitar storm attack on ʽTrimmed And Burningʼ, which is one of the most im­pressive musical moments on the entire record) — they just refuse to take one step beyond that trickery, or even expand the bag of already explored tricks. The formula works, but now it thrusts itself in your face — «look, we can still write new songs in the same old ways!» But what works for intelligently anti-intellectual bands like AC/DC, can hardly be said to work for arrogantly philosophical bands like Built To Spill; a philosopher, after all, can never be satisfied with his current findings, but has to constantly dig deeper and cast wider in order to even preserve, let alone expand, his reputation. Therefore, yes, somewhat of a disappointment — but only because I was never a big fan of this band in the first place. If you were, save yourself the worry: the classic Built To Spill sound remains completely intact on this short, tight, self-assured, and «creatively» construc­ted album (where the quotation marks refer to the modern, somewhat mechanistic and, I would say, rather boring understanding of the term).

 

YOU IN REVERSE (2006)

 

1) Goin' Against Your Mind; 2) Traces; 3) Liar; 4) Saturday; 5) Wherever You Go; 6) Conventional Wisdom; 7) Gone; 8) Mess With Time; 9) Just A Habit; 10) The Wait.

 

Can I come out and say that You In Reverse is the best ever Built To Spill album? No, that would be illogical and arbitrary. Besides, how can I even begin to pronounce those kinds of judge­ment on a band that I do not properly «get», whose music I have no deep feel for? And be­sides, how can a band that is more than ten years into its musical career release a «best» album? Surely that is downright impossible.

 

But let us just see what we can see about this, on a track-by-track basis, just for the first several numbers. First, ʽGoin' Against Your Mindʼ is fast. I think it's faster than anything they played before, and it helps the sound — you know, «alt-rock» in general, with its preference of mid- and slow tempos, tends to wear you down, and this is oh so true of all preceding Built To Spill re­cords. So the song is almost nine minutes long, but who cares? It's an impressive speed train, quieting down in the middle to let the drummer catch a breath, only to explode into even more aggressive action towards the end. New guitarist Jim Roth, turning the trio into a quartet, pro­bably helps out, but it is unclear if his presence is all that essential — Martsch is a master of overdubbing, and the only reason to bring in an extra guitarist would be to lend a more «live» aura to the proceedings. Hmm, maybe it actually works.

 

The second track, ʽTracesʼ, slows down the tempo, although not quite to the standard creepy-crawly level of their classic albums — more disturbing is the fact that it never changes the basic rhythm or melodic pattern from start to finish, reflecting a «less challenging» attitude towards songwriting on this record. But if it works, why not? Here, the band establishes an unbreaking, monotonously pulsating melancholic vibe, out of which eventually spirals a moody guitar solo that logically and unavoidably winds itself up to hysterical heights without ever straying away from the rhythmic restrictions of the main melody — simple, evocative, and efficient. Nowhere near as intellectually challenging as ʽRandy Described Eternityʼ, for sure. But somehow, a bit more human, the way I perceive it.

 

The basic formula will persist: song after song after song, it is usually just one melody per unit (with the notable exception of ʽMess With Timeʼ, which begins like an Oriental-influenced lite metal number and ends like a hard-rock-meets-ska hybrid), and they consistently try to make it simpler, more accessible, maybe even more commercial, but still with enough taste and creativity, and with sufficiently convoluted lyrics that still seem to deal with the meaning of life in their own twisted ways, so as not to disappoint the demanding fan or the casual listener. Some of these songs, like ʽConventional Wisdomʼ with its swirling colorful lead guitar, charging tempo, and merry attitude, are fairly atypical for the band. Others, like the slow, jangly, psycho-dreamy ʽJust A Habitʼ, are more predictable, but the one thing that unites them all is this relative simplicity.

 

Oh, and another thing might be better production: for some reason, now that they are no longer handled by Phil Ek in the studio, Martsch's vocals suddenly become more upfront, and the songs in general become much more influenced by their soulful, tender, contemplative-Proustian voca­list; even if I am hardly his biggest fan, I must say that now that he is no longer hidden behind the wall of guitars, but given an equal voice with all of them, one major factor of irritation is gone, and the album is generally easier to listen to. It has even got occasional moments of conventional beauty (to which Built To Spill were never complete strangers — remember ʽHazyʼ from the de­but album? — but which was rarely a priority): ʽThe Waitʼ, in particular, is a stately, somewhat angelic choice for the album closer, with heavenly slide guitars, echoes, dreamy harmonies, and lyrics that... well, apparently they imply that your entire life consists of nothing but waiting. Yes, in a certain way I can see that. I can also see how it would agree with Built To Spill's overall musical philosophy and its somewhat Taoist overtones.

 

Although the qualitative gaps between all these albums are really small, to the extent that you will probably either love everything by the band, hate everything by the band, or (like myself) respect everything by the band without getting infected by it, I kinda sorta think of You In Re­verse as a major turn. Better bands would lose out by simplifying and streamlining their sound, but for Martsch and his pals it might actually be a better bet to stay away from too much experi­mentalism and esotericism, and concentrate on these «single-shot» songs that lock onto a groove and ultimately, sooner or later, make it work, no matter how trivial or boring it may have sounded during its first minute. A thumbs up, then, although do keep in mind that for a band like this, it is much better to just apply one single judgement to all the albums at the same time.

 

THERE IS NO ENEMY (2009)

 

1) Aisle 13; 2) Hindsight; 3) Nowhere Lullaby; 4) Good Ol' Boredom; 5) Life's A Dream; 6) Oh Yeah; 7) Pat; 8) Done; 9) Plating Seeds; 10) Things Fall Apart; 11) Tomorrow.

 

God, how tedious. Somehow, on their seventh LP Built To Spill preserve the relative simplicity and accessibility of You In Reverse, but lose that album's momentum. No more fast rockers, no more colorful power-pop, no more tense pulsating melancholic vibes like there were in ʽTracesʼ. Instead, we get another set of largely interchangeable, monotonous mid-tempo alt-rock tunes, everything about which is predictable — if there is yet another leaf unturned in the personal log­book of Doug Martsch, There Is No Emeny ain't in no hurry to turn it over.

 

Maybe that's what Doug Martsch thinks, too, because what else would lead him to naming one of the songs ʽGood Ol' Boredomʼ? Yes, indeed, "it's nice but it's not that exciting", as he sings after the lead guitar line, curiously reminiscent of the fanfare riff in Yes' ʽAnd You And Iʼ, has been silenced to let in our friendly, slightly effeminate singer. And as if in support of that, he returns to his old favorite way of mumbling the vocals, while all the guitars are equally muted, with this irritating «muffled» mix that isn't exactly lo-fi, yet still creates the illusion of a thick screen be­tween yourself and the music, which is never a good thing, really.

 

But it is hardly the worsened production that is the record's biggest problem — no, it is the lazy, paralyzed songwriting, where you get track after track of generic folk-rock chord progressions and weakly Beatlesque vocal harmonies (ʽLife's A Dreamʼ) that feel deeply derivative, totally familiar, and mining those mines that are already completely depleted. In fact, at least half of these tracks, I am sure, exist only as sonic pads for the next in a series of Doug Martsch's Really Important Metaphysical Thoughts, such as: "And if God does exist / I am sure he will forgive / Me for doubting him / For he'd see / How unlikely he / Made himself seem". I once said some­thing like that at dinner, too, but I never thought about making it into a song — who knows, may­be I'd have been able to come up with something better than ʽOh Yeahʼ, a lumbering dinosaur strolling along a path of power chords.

 

What's even worse, this record drags on for almost an hour: eleven songs, stretched out to what seems like infinity, and all of them so similar to each other that it is no wonder most reviews of the album I've seen concentrate on the lyrics, trying to decode Martsch's cryptic messages to the world. Or maybe not so cryptic — I mean, there's nothing too cryptic about "The more you have to live for / The more you love your life / The harder it will be for you to die / And we all want dying easy". Uh, yeah, sure, whatever. I actually preferred him when he sang pure nonsense — that way, you could just not bother at all, but here, Pitchforkers all over the world just slobbered over these bits-o'-banalities (Pitchfork: "For the first time in almost 10 years, it seems that Martsch might actually have something he wants to say" — if so, maybe he shouldn't be saying anything), and forgot to think about whether the music here actually means anything.

 

I have no way of explaining what exactly went wrong in between You In Reverse and its utterly uninspired follow-up — the players are essentially the same, co-producer Dave Trumfio has a decent reputation, and according to various interviews, Martsch was in high spirits when entering the recording studio. Of course, once again do remember that essentially all Built To Spill albums sound the same, and the qualitative difference between any of their two records is negligible in the grand scheme of things. But every once in a while, they put out an album that seems to sug­gest there is yet some hope for the old gray school of Nineties' alt-rock — like You In Reverse — and then they put out an album that almost makes me swear off guitar-based rock music and go wash my ears out with a piano concerto or, pending that, with some Eurodisco. Anything but another eight-minute mid-tempo post-grunge psychosermon from Doug Martsch. This one, I think, deserves a thumbs down all the way.

 

UNTETHERED MOON (2015)

 

1) All Our Songs; 2) Living Zoo; 3) On The Way; 4) Some Other Song; 5) Never Be The Same; 6) C.R.E.B.; 7) Another Day; 8) Horizon To Cliff; 9) So; 10) When I'm Blind.

 

Six years is a long time for youngsters, but not so much for aging rockers — and anyway, the world's demand for new Built To Spill albums had been fairly low even when they were in their prime, so we can certainly excuse Doug Martsch for taking six years off to think whether he still has anything worth saying. We can also excuse him for «spilling» all of the band members and finally recording this new album with an entirely new team — because, let's face it, who but the most dedicated veterans even remember the names of the guys in the rhythm section? (Okay, I remember Scott Plouf, because «Plouf» is hilariously phonosymbolic).

 

Anyway, if you hoped that a six year break would transform Doug Martsch into some completely different musical entity — that he would take that time to learn to rap or to play in Miley Cyrus' backing band or, at least, to enroll in a Juilliard cello class — Untethered Moon will very quick­ly quash those hopes. The good news is that it is at least a major improvement on There Is No Enemy, with most of the songs showing an energy level that is quite close to You In Reverse, and a few of them even being memorable, or genuinely epic, or epic and memorable. Most im­portantly, Martsch is starting to remember how to combine intellectualism with ass-kicking, and even with hook-making every once in a while.

 

Take a song like ʽC.R.E.B.ʼ — whose title, I suppose, is short for ʽcAMP Response Element-Building Proteinʼ, and shows that Doug Martsch has a molecular biology textbook at his dis­posal and is not afraid to use it. The lyrics are about long term memory and our dependence on it, but there is a memorable (at least in the short term) riff attached to the song as well, and a strange one at that — a sort of reggae-jazz-pop mix, echoey and sharp, laying the foundation for a pretty hard-hitting track on the whole; and it's a good thing when you cannot bring yourself to decide what is more impressive — that the song is a massive ode to "your hippocampus" or that it fea­tures plenty of moody, captivating guitar tricks.

 

The fast tempos are also back, starting right off the bat with ʽAll Our Songsʼ, an explosive six-minute romp with Martsch not afraid to let his hair down and let loose with a generic, but trans­fixing rock'n'roll solo towards the end (a bit too short, unfortunately; however, the middle set of overdubs, where several guitars or guitar tones engage in a mutually offensive dia- or quadrilog, is equally impressive in its own way). Eventually, the record comes full circle when ʽWhen I'm Blindʼ brings the fast tempo back for the closing explosion — and this time, with a very lengthy and very drone-influenced lead guitar passage, almost as if in tribute to ʽSister Rayʼ, except this one is probably not all that improvised. But no matter, it's still one of the best series of passionate guitar trills I've heard in a long, long time.

 

Ultimately, the best thing about Untethered Moon is not the melodies and not the invitation to decode more of Doug Martsch's philosophical messages — it is the understanding that the man is back in his experimental mood, on the search for all sorts of new sounds that he can extract from the six-string. Or, rather, contextually bound sounds — there is a lot of that here, as, for instance, in the last two lines of ʽLiving Zooʼ, where he sings "cause we're lions in our cages / And tigers in tiny spaces" and the guitar gives out a ferociously distorted wah-wah growl right after the word "tigers" — notice that? It's hard not to notice. It's all about these minor touches of creativity these days, rather than grand breakthroughs — but God bless him for these, really.

 

Some of the songs are still fillerish, for sure, but even those that do not properly register can still be saved by one touch or other — ʽSoʼ, for instance, seems to be fairly uninspired, but the Neil Young-like hyper-distorted guitar tone makes it bone-crunching at top volume; and ʽOn The Wayʼ, a song about overpopulation as a reason for space colonization, has this odd music-hall mid-section, where Doug and his backup echoes chant "Maltesian riot, Maltesian riot" as if they were the Kinks in the middle of a devastating sociological discovery; it's a bit hilarious, but it redeems the tune which is rather lackluster otherwise.

 

So, overall, this should probably be considered an upward turn of the curve — again, with the usual disclaimer that «all Built To Spill albums sound the same» taken into account, but proving that it is too early to write Doug Martsch off as yet another spent/useless residue of the Nineties alt-rock era; at the very least, Untethered Moon is no less generally enjoyable than any «hot» new release by any aspiring young whippersnapper. Not that anybody should hold out much hope: based on the pattern established by Doug in the past 15 years, his next record should be about as exciting as contemporary Smashing Pumpkins. But that might take another decade or so to pro­duce, and in the meantime, here's a thumbs up for this particular presentation of one man's musi­cally enhanced views on the sorry state and uncertain perspectives of humanity.

 

ADDENDA:

 

THE NORMAL YEARS (1993-1995; 1996)

 

1) So & So So & So From Wherever Wherever; 2) Shortcut; 3) Car; 4) Some Things Last A Long Time; 5) Girl; 6) Joyride; 7) Some; 8) Sick & Wrong; 9) Still Flat; 10) Terrible/Perfect.

 

I will keep this very brief. Most likely, had this compilation not appeared way back in 1996, when the band was still young and fresh and a few steps away from Big Critical Recognition, it would not have appeared today — too slight, way too slight. This one really just mops up some singles, outtakes, and alternate versions of tracks from the first couple of albums, most of them being merely of historical interest. The only general argument in favor of the album might be that the sound is more «raw» and lo-fi on the whole, which is hardly surprising but also hardly intentional: these are, indeed, unpolished versions, but mainly because the band did not yet have the time or the skills to polish them.

 

Actually, I guess the only two songs worth specific mention are the two non-LP A-sides. ʽJoy­rideʼ is an unusually speedy folk-rocker in the vein of Tom Petty's ʽAmerican Girlʼ, with some nicely crunchy distorted guitar howling high above the folksy rhythm strum, a few cute stop-and-start moments, and a hilarious buzz of overdubbed lead parts in the outro — probably the closest they came in those early years (or ever, for that matter) to simplistic innocent rock'n'roll. And the oddly titled ʽSo & So So...ʼ is a good example of Martsch's experimental spirit ("so, instead of just taking this two-chord riff and recording a punk song, we will add a droning serpentine me­lody on top of it and record an art rock song"), although the gray, drab chorus with the usual "vocals coming out of the guitar's ass" principle is still a disappointment.

 

As a curio, there is a cover of a tune by madman extraordinaire Daniel Jonston (ʽSome Things Last A Long Timeʼ), where the key point is that midway through, this slow, leisurely, contempla­tive ballad is ripped apart by a tornado-like lead guitar part, yet the tempo, the general arrange­ment, and the vocals do not shift one bit, and eventually the «tornado» just whooshes away and disappears — you may take this as a symbolic reminder that "some things last a long time" in­deed, but a tornado is not one of them. There's also a track called ʽShortcutʼ that runs for just a minute and a half (which probably earned it its name) — a most unusual thing for Martsch, who was always brevity's worst enemy.

 

Overall, this one's truly only for big fans and completists. It does wrap all the odds and ends up nicely, reflecting Built To Spill's passion for meticulousness — so many indie bands are so careless, after all, about leaving their singles and EPs out of print — but accuracy per se is not enough for me to hand out a certified thumbs up here.

 

 

Part 7. Recent Developments (1998-2016)

ADEBISI SHANK

THIS IS THE ALBUM OF A BAND CALLED ADEBISI SHANK (2008)

 

1) You Me; 2) Dodr; 3) Colin Skehan; 4) Shunk; 5) Mini Rockers; 6) Agassi Shank; 7) I Answer To Doc; 8) Snake­hips.

 

There is one thing that bugs me about the debut album of this band called Adebisi Shank, titled This Is The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank, as well as the slightly earlier 4-song EP by the same band, called This Is The EP Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank (it makes sense to treat the two within the same review, considering that both are executed in the same style, and that the «Album» runs only slightly over 20 minutes anyway). The thing that bugs me is that the individual titles, breaking the established idiom, are not listed as ʽThis Is The First Composition On The Al­bum Of A Band Called Adebisi Shankʼ, ʽThis Is The Second Composition....ʼ and so on. Instead, they inexplicably adopt the old pretentious jazz tradition of assigning random combi­na­­tions of words and non-words to their instrumentals. This does not seem consistent. Then again, the very name of the band is essentially a meaningless word combination («Adebisi» is the name of a character from the Oz TV show, chosen rather randomly), so the inconsistency goes even farther than that...

 

Nevertheless, this is as far as I can go about seriously criticizing the record, because in all other respects Adebisi Shank, a power trio from Wexford, Ireland, created out of the ashes of an earlier «post-rock» project, Terrordactyl, build up one of the strongest cases for «math rock» that I have ever witnessed (although be sure to take my words with a grain of salt, since I am anything but a solid expert on these hip new genres). Their older peers, like Don Cabal­lero, and their contemporaries like Battles may have collected more fame under their belts, but this is mainly due to different marketing strategies — Battles go for a more public image, whereas Adebisi Shank mainly keep to themselves and let their music do all the talking, and I do mean all: there is no singing whatsoever, other than a few electronically processed and looped vocal bits from time to time, nor do they waste their times on music videos (although their live shows have gained an exceptionally high reputation).

 

Now, in general, «math rock» is a dubious enterprise. In their hyper-rationalistic efforts to find the «perfectly complex» combination of beats, chords, and effects even the best representatives of the genre (and it is hard to tell who the worst ones are, since math rock, by its essence, requires a mega-level of intellect, technique, and creativity) may drive themselves into the quagmire of purposelessness (well, then again, real mathematicians sometimes do that, too). So when I first heard about these guys and decided to give them a first try, I was certainly skeptical — especially since my latest math-rock experience had been with BATS, where the first three or four songs are usually awesome, and then the headaches begin.

 

But Adebisi Shank ain't anything like BATS and their «heavy metal trigonometry», or even like Battles and their chipmunk robot fantasies. The difference is that, while all those bands do the kind of «robot rock» you'd expect a robot to produce if the robot were pressed into inventing rock music, Adebisi Shank do the kind of «robot rock» you'd expect a robot to produce if the robot wanted to create his own impression of a previously experienced and «assimilated» wild rock'n'roll band, let's say, with a slice of Celtic heritage (be it AC/DC, Slade, Thin Lizzy, or U2, echoes of all of whom — and many more — may be heard throughout the album).

 

Most of the instrumentals are taken at fast, pouncing tempos. The rhythm section is almost com­pletely dependent on the powers of drummer Mick Roe, who isn't much about tricky, off-beat polyrhythms à la Bill Bruford, but sometimes sounds like a finally disciplined and harnessed avatar of Keith Moon — filling up as much space as possible with his loud and surprisingly melo­dic bashing, but all of it according to a strictly pre-planned and perfectly realized strategy. Bass guy Vinny McCreith (whose stage gimmick consists of always wearing a mask while play­ing — he says it's all about having the audience concentrate just on the music, but maybe he's just an IRA veteran on the run) usually provides the main riffs and melodic developments throughout the show: the bass is laid on in such thick, distorted swabs, that most of the time you will pro­bably be playing air bass to these tracks than air six-string.

 

Not that any of this means depriving guitar guy Larry Kaye from what is rightfully his: there is plenty of guitar riffage as well (usually doubling the bass), and when he gets around to soloing, the two-handed tapping technique, long associated with the self-indulgence of pointless «guitar wankery», displays a fuck-'em-all spirit set against the relentless jackhammer punch of the drums and the brutal bass onslaught. Larry also seems like the only player out of the three who is some­times allowed to improvise, and when he does, the guitar bursts out in splatters of punkish anger, showing that our robot has probably even spent some time in the company of the Stooges.

 

Individual tunes, be it on the EP or the LP, are all but useless to name — they are about as diffe­rent as individual tunes on an AC/DC album (actually, the guitar tone and snappy chords of the main riff to ʽMini Rockersʼ might have made Angus and Malcolm very happy): if you are truly impressed by one of these compositions, you will probably want the enchantment to last to the very end, and if you are not, you probably just don't have enough robot blood floating in your veins. I will tentatively single out ʽColin Skehanʼ as a personal favourite (mainly for the ultra-cool stop-and-start false coda), and ʽYou Meʼ as the album's deviating tune (it's got the only vocals on here, even if they only consist of the song title, distorted and looped as befits a robot freshman, recently initiated into the wonders of kick-ass rock'n'roll).

 

If you are interested, be sure not to miss the EP as well — compared to the longplay, it is even heavier, although, fortunately, that heaviness is of the neo-garage type rather than the death metal type. (ʽJump Cutʼ, with its choppy chords, is particularly telling, although the song eventually switches over to a somewhat romantic mood, becoming a suitable background for a never written Bruce Springsteen epic; they do not go for that kind of sentimentality on the LP). Limitations of their chosen genre, and its inborn deficiencies (such as the very hard task of imbuing this stuff with «soul», although the band really works wonders within the formula), obviously prevent it from the status of an all-time classic, but not from a solidly guaranteed thumbs up.

 

THIS IS THE SECOND ALBUM OF A BAND CALLED ADEBISI SHANK (2010)

 

1) International Dreambeat; 2) Masa; 3) Genki Shank; 4) Micromachines; 5) (-_-); 6) Logdrum; 7) Bones; 8) Frunk; 9) Europa; 10) Century City.

 

They did not change the principle of (not) naming their albums, but they did change the running length: second time around is almost twice as long as first time around, and this means these guys better had something important to say, or else this would be just another case of somebody tech­nically overstaying their welcome. Fortunately, this is not such a case.

 

The Second Album, on the whole, is somewhat more quiet, (sometimes) a little slower, and a little more diverse than its predecessor — a rather typical evolution for any sort of rock band: announce your presence with a bang, then realize that you won't get far by repeatedly «banging» your audience and try going somewhere else. The question is, where?

 

Well, the first track, ʽInternational Dreambeatʼ (not a typo, although there is nothing particularly dreamy about the music), already gives sort of an answer. Opening with electronic bleeps which then quickly organize themselves around a busy loop, it places its trust neither in the excessive complexity of playing nor in the plain blunt energy, but rather in structure and development — alternating quiet electronic pulsation with pompous power chord blasts, and finally ending in a grand quasi-symphonic finale.

 

This sets the tone for the rest of the album: the compositions seem to have sacrificed much of the original recklessness in favor of a more thoughtful and calculated approach — as if the math in the band's math-rock formula has gone up a step or two, so that now they are doing calculus where it just used to be quadratic equations. But it is not the actual complexity of the individual parts that has increased: rather, it is the sheer number of these parts, as well as the number of the various guitar tones used by pedal god Larry Kaye, and the number of various styles of music that the «Adebisi Shank Robot» is now supposed to assimilate and interpret.

 

If ʽMasaʼ is still very much in league with the fast, punkish stuff on the first album, then ʽGenki Shankʼ is already memorable for its broken, jagged riff themes rather than the headspinning pre­cision and speed of their previous «rockers». ʽ(-_-)ʼ (named after a Japanese emoticon) is a soft, almost «balladeering» interlude with echoey «surf-folk» guitar; ʽLogdrumʼ puts the guitar in «swooping» psychedelic mode for much of the time; and on ʽBonesʼ, it seems as if Larry is ex­perimenting with slide playing (or at least a «sliding» effect), creating a robot-folk dance pattern that every respectable old Celtic android might find likeable.

 

In terms of influence, it also seems that the band is now relying a little less on the garage / punk / pop prototypes from the 1960s and 1970s and a little more on the New Wave stylistics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. You find stuff reminiscent of U2, Television, the Heads, Discipline-era King Crimson, etc., although even here the old-fashioned hooliganry sometimes comes through: for instance, although the main theme of ʽCentury Cityʼ is a ringing echoey guitar line that sounds straight out of 1980, the mid-section is still given over to some spluttery garage soloing.

 

This is, after all, the key to Adebisi Shank's continuing success — «mathematicians» as they are, these guys just can't help being driven by an ultimately rock'n'roll heart, and although I would generally say that totally obsessed calculation and wild rock'n'roll drive are two diametrically opposed things, Adebisi Shank somehow manage to combine the two, even within a moderately softer and «artsier» setting than their debut album. Unquestionably a thumbs up.

 

THIS IS THE THIRD ALBUM OF A BAND CALLED ADEBISI SHANK (2014)

 

1) World In Harmony; 2) Big Unit; 3) Turnaround; 4) Mazel Tov; 5) Thundertruth; 6) Sensation; 7) Chaos Emeralds; 8) Voodoo Vision; 9) (Trio Always).

 

The third and the last, apparently — only one month after the record's release, Adebisi Shank announced they'd be splitting up, what with Larry Kaye being involved in several other bands at the same time (possibly as a more authoritarian bandleader, I have no idea). Perhaps the split will not be for eternity, or maybe some new phoenix will rise out of the older's ashes — all the more desirable since this third record clearly shows that they may have run out of money, or of love for each other, but definitely not out of creative ideas.

 

The album begins with a clearly intentional «band-as-orchestra» quotation of the main riff from ʽLet It Beʼ — match it with the title ʽWorld In Harmonyʼ and Lady Irony is upon us, because ten seconds into the song, Adebisi Shank are back to their usual tricks, piecing together disparate melodic strings that borrow almost chaotically from every musical genre imaginable. ʽWorld In Harmonyʼ alone is classical, pop, blues-rock, country-western, and speed metal, sometimes at the same time, as the guitar lays hard rock chords over a Beethovenish synth pattern.

 

Most importantly, though, the third album establishes its own face by going for the grand style. The overdubs get denser, more bombastic and anthemic than ever before — this is Adebisi Shank getting out of the heat of the small club and well into the open air, delivering their schizophreni­cally deconstructed Odes to Joy to the entire world. There is also less emphasis on guitar virtuo­sity and much more on composition, development, and, so to speak, «angularity» of the particular tracks — I guess that, technically, this makes Third even more of a «math-rock» record than First and Second, but, strangely enough, it does not feel that way. Maybe because the songs are catchier and the themes seem to make more emotional sense.

 

With nearly all the songs striving for this «bigness», and with the band's clever selection of the appropriate major chords, the album is segmentable into similar-themed movements rather than distinct songs, and the whole thing is like one big symphony: I did not namedrop Beethoven for nothing, and wouldn't be surprised to find him among these guys' influences — ʽVoodoo Visionʼ, the album's grand closing, may begin with what rather suspiciously sounds like Windows' stan­dard speaker test, but soon enough it will move into a grandiose, life-asserting theme that cannot even be spoiled by the silly electronically-encoded vocals (that, too, is part of the schtick, because what's a proper futuristic 21st century symphonic piece without electronic encoding?).

 

ʽBig Unitʼ is a little more personal and close-by, sounding like a big friendly monster slowly, but accurately moving through the city as crowds of observers cheer in admiration and wave the flags. ʽMazel Tovʼ adds an R&B-influenced brass component and a funky bassline for about four minutes of a soundtrack to a happy, if a bit too sternly regulated, party. Only ʽSensationʼ, with its accelerated tempo and hyper-bubbling synth patterns, sounds a bit too frenzied and nervous for the album's overall vibe, but it would still be a stretch to call the song «dark» or «aggressive» — rather, it is just a temporary detour from the anthemic happiness, a «breather» of sorts.

 

I would like to go for a little controversy here and say that, as long as we're talking about «weird», «innovative», and «meaningful» all in one, I actually prefer Third to any single album by The Animal Collective — not that this band ever had, or will have, any hopes of approaching the fame of the authors of Merriweather Post Pavillion, because they have no vocals (beyond those few instances of electronic grunts) and because their main influences seem to be outside the stereotypical hipster range (Beach Boys, etc.). But don't let that stop you from enjoying them — the one thing they do have is focus, and a respectable ambition to adapt their skills to the basic needs of humanity. I mean, exactly how many «math-rock» albums could you label as «uplifting»? Probably none, mainly because you'd have a hard time trying to label them as anything (except for «aggressively kick-ass» if the math is steeped in metal).

 

All the more irony, then, that the band may have exploded just as they'd reached, or came close to reaching, their peak — but perhaps that is what you get as punishment when you begin your record with a musical quote from ʽLet It Beʼ (in fact, we should all be happy that they did not begin it with a musical quote from ʽHighway To Hellʼ instead, or some poor guy would have already be choking upon his vomit). Then again, it is a bit hard to understand where else they could have been headed from here — if this is their Ninth Symphony in a nutshell, there isn't supposed to be a completed Tenth. I only hope this reverential thumbs up will offer at least a little help, so that the memory of Adebisi Shank does not evaporate with the passing of the band itself, under a rather natural scenario for the majority of today's artists.

 

 

ADELE

19 (2008)

 

1) Daydreamer; 2) Best For Last; 3) Chasing Pavements; 4) Cold Shoulder; 5) Crazy For You; 6) Melt My Heart To Stone; 7) First Love; 8) Right As Rain; 9) Make You Feel My Love; 10) My Same; 11) Tired; 12) Hometown Glory.

 

In 2009, Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was one of the freshest arrivals in an interminable series of young, gifted girls living in prosperous Western society and suffering from acute psychic im­balance that forces them into a life of songwriting. Nine times out of ten, there is no middle ground with these ladies: one portion of the population, large or small, falls madly in love with them, and the other one just hates them for being boring, pretentious, and basically expendable, thinking — not without reason — that the world has been oversaturated with their «soulfulness» to such a degree that the very word «soul» has become completely devalued.

 

Another reason for cool people to hate Adele is her commercial success. Which, and it is a stone cold fact, was almost mathematically calculated: the album's singles, 'Chasing Pavements' and 'Cold Shoulder', are just the kind of relatively simple, but catchy adult pop that UK charts seem to have developed a particular attraction for. (Arguably, it's these two particular songs that also sound the closest to Amy Winehouse, to whom people keep comparing Adele — generally unjustly, as she's got a much more folksy vibe to her than Amy). Of course, UK charts these days are somewhat more tolerant about decent music than US ones, but still, soulful female singer-songwriters that sell lots of records are by definition a suspicious lot.

 

I do not find the slightest reason to believe that this dame, or her music, is a fake, though. Her weak points are the lyrics, which she probably thinks original and some probably find inspira­tional — but it's just that there's a point at which trying to express the same old same old feelings in new «deep» ways becomes a cliché in itself. Today, whenever I hear a song begin with lines like "Daydreamer, sitting on the sea, soaking up the sun, he is a real lover, of making up the past and feeling up his girl like he's never felt her figure before", I can't help asking myself: «Say, what happened to the old "when I feel that something, I wanna hold your hand" routine?» Lyrically, she doesn't have anything to say that you don't already know, unless you belong to the younger gene­ration that refuses to trust anyone over 30, much less over 64 like Paul McCartney.

 

But in terms of pure meaningless (or, at least, verbal meaning-less) sound, she's a different matter. She's got a great voice — strong, just a tad raspy, stuck somewhere in between folk and jazz style — and an excellent sense of phrasing. And she doesn't merely rely on it, but makes it an integral part of her musical world, which is truly a musical world, not just some sensitive hack banging away at a grand piano (the Soft stereotype) or slashing out the same old grunge chords on a cheap electric guitar (the Hard stereotype). She writes interesting vocal, and occasionally instrumental, melodies, and arranges them in miriads of ways: starting out on solo acoustic, then shifting to retro-jazzier territory, then going all-out modern pop on the hit singles, then leaving out all but a set of chimes... the piano really arrives only on the last track, 'Hometown Glory', but, to tell the truth, the song could use any kind of arrangement as long as the vocal hooks stay.

 

So I find myself in an odd position. I honestly, sincerely do not care for Adele's inner torment. I do not care for it one instant because for a girl who is only 19 — and who insists on your knowing it — this kind of inner torment is gruesomely inadequate. 19-year old girls should, at best, be singing "come on babe, come see about me", just like 19-year old boys should be singing about wanting to hold your hand. Maybe I've grown insensitive, but blame it on the legions of Adeles, all of which strive to achieve Shakespeare-tragedy level on their debut album because these days, you've got to be «mature» to be taken seriously.

 

Yet I cannot not acknowledge the talent — the hit singles, 'Hometown Glory', 'Tired', 'Crazy For You' and some other tunes have made an impression on me, and if the heaviness of their lyrics and the self-importance were cut back to match the delightful airiness and inventiveness of their melodies, I might have warmed up to the record immediately rather than after a handful of listens it took me to go beyond the initial «oh no, not that whiny 2000-teenager crap again». So here's hoping this girl, like Benjamin Button, will be growing backwards on her next albums — because otherwise, failing to become the next Joni Mitchell, she faces the imminent threat of becoming the next, ugh, Vanessa Carlton.

 

And so, in the heart vs. brain thing, the sympathetic heart tells the indignant brain to shut off for a minute and wins the battle with a solid, if not overwhelming, thumbs up. Will the brain eventual­ly have the upper hand? Let’s wait for the next record.

 

21 (2011)

 

1) Rolling In The Deep; 2) Rumor Has It; 3) Turning Tables; 4) Don't You Remember; 5) Set Fire To The Rain; 6) He Won't Go; 7) Take It All; 8) I'll Be Waiting; 9) One And Only; 10) Lovesong; 11) Someone Like You; 12*) If It Hadn't Been For Love; 13*) Hiding My Heart; 14*) I Found A Boy.

 

Captain Obvious suggests that 21 can refer to two more years of growth and experience for Adele after her debut with 19; Captain Irony, however, argues that it really reflects the number of male human beings that managed to break Adele's heart and dump her body in the interim — the best available explanation for the fact that profanated, betrayed, and simply lost love is just about the only lyrical and emotional subject of the record. (Unless, of course, "We could have had it all, rolling in the deep" is really supposed to be sung from the perspective of Dick Cheney — or, clo­ser to home, Gordon Brown — but that's pushing philological analysis a bit too far).

 

Anyway, "rumor has it" that there has really only been one painful break-up, but she capitalized on it quickly and richly enough. Considering that approximately 99% of music that tries to com­bine «commercial orientation» with «seriousness» is about broken hearts — the only serious to­pic that is considered safe enough for our fragile brains — it would be impossible to approach 21 wi­thout prejudice. But on the other hand, in Adele's case it does represent a little bit of that «grow­ing backwards» thing I mentioned in my review of 19: cutting down on the over-acted romantic mys­ticism in favour of a little more grit and, well, honesty, pardon the expression.

 

So? On its own terms — a proverbial blue-eyed soul album about emotional pain — 21 is a mas­terpiece, definite proof that 19 was no fluke and that, together, the two records will make musical history even if they are not followed by 23, 25... 99. Yes, occasionally she still has this unsettling tendency to slip into faceless formula: 'Turning Tables', while not bad, is that kind of «sensitive girl wailing by the piano» thing that is generated by the likes of Vanessa Carlton and cloned in­cessantly on an almost daily basis; and 'He Won't Go' leans dangerously close to conventional mo­dern R'n'B, particularly the verse melody which could as well have come from Beyoncé. Well, she can't do it on her own, after all, and since this is not indie music we're speaking of, there are bound to be some concessions to the crappy standards.

 

All of them are, however, in an absolute minority next to her own songwriting and singing. It is goddamn hard to make a soul tune memorable — there is always the temptation to just hang it all on the «soul» itself, as if the very fact that you let, or pretend to let, a supernatural force possess you behind the microphone should be enough for claiming a Classic Moment in Pop Music. She does not: the songs are cleverly written, with hooks, interesting melodic twists, sometimes, exci­ting arrangement decisions ('Rumor Has It', because of the booming percussion, has an almost Tom Waits-ish Bone Machine-like quality to it), captivating build-ups and fade-outs — stuff that you rarely, if ever, expect to find in an album like this.

 

I dare anyone to challenge the technical perfection, for instance, with which the drama unfolds in 'Rolling In The Deep', a song that is like the musical equivalent of a series of uniformly acce­le­rating snowballs rolling downhill — and all of it achieved through a relatively minimal arrange­ment (guitar, piano, drums, and backing vocals arriving on the scene one after the other in a sub­tle manner). Or 'Set Fire To The Rain', with the finest chorus on the album — this time, she does it on a grand scale, but a fully adequate one; the song is anthemic and pretentious, and to justify it, she taxes her voice to the max, and hits the jackpot.

 

The album is often described as a «retro» experience — most of the time, I did not really get that feeling, unless we automatically consider any album that stays away from electronics to be «re­tro». That said, some of the songs are built on soul and R'n'B rhythms popular around the 1970s: 'Don't You Remember', 'I'll Be Waiting', 'One And Only', and, just like the best songs from that decade, each is based around a singularly impressive chorus. Ah, that good old fashioned way of naming your song after its major vocal hook — one glance at the title and you can remember how it goes in an instant.

 

It's not as if she has invented a new way of looking at breakups, of course, and it's not very likely that one will always enjoy all the songs equally (my disfavourites include 'He Won't Go', the sli­ghtly Celine Dion-ish 'Take It All', and the overlong Latinized take on The Cure's 'Lovesong', al­though it's sort of okay for the first two minutes), but the bottomline is: if you already loved 19, you can't go wrong with the next odd number, and if you were skeptical, 21 is liable to signi­ficant­ly exceed your expectations the way it exceeded mine.

 

Thumbs up — now you have one more reason to watch the videos and vent your dark impulses by commenting on the size of her cheeks along with the regular low-life forms that inhabit YouTube. For that matter, if you happen to disagree with my subjective assessment, here is an alternative review of 'Rolling In The Deep' for your pleasure taken from that particular source (whoever said that evolution rarely, if ever, works backwards?):

 

LOL this song is abslolute fucking SHIT! i thought this fat slag had fucked off and what do u know, shes back fatter and shitter than ever! fuck adele and all her shit cunt followers fuck off CUNTS!

 

LIVE AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL (2011)

 

1) Hometown Glory; 2) I'll Be Waiting; 3) Don't You Remember; 4) Turning Tables; 5) Set Fire To The Rain; 6) If It Hadn't Been For Love; 7) My Same; 8) Take It All; 9) Rumour Has It; 10) Right As Rain; 11) One And Only; 12) Lovesong; 13) Chasing Pavements; 14) I Can't Make You Love Me; 15) Make You Feel My Love; 16) Someone Like You; 17) Rolling In The Deep.

 

Not a lot of people, I would guess, get to play the Albert Hall upon releasing only two albums. To the skeptics, this would probably mean a gruesomely played out PR campaign — and to the idea­lists, it would be a confirmation that here we finally have something really great, really other­worldly, so phenomenally talented that even the tightassed music industry bosses have to kowtow before this unbelievable power of a 21-year old upstart who doesn't even have the sex appeal of a Taylor Swift. And in a way, both the skeptic and the idealist would be right.

 

The album, actually, is not a «proper» CD release: the entire concert was predictably captured on video, and comes in DVD format with all the tracks duplicated on an audio CD. However, I do feel, upon both watching and listening, that this is an important release in «The Extraordinary Story Of Adele A.», deserving of its own brief review — not to mention that it did sell around 3 million copies worldwide, and hit No. 2 on the UK charts as well, which is fairly impressive for a live album these days.

 

First of all, the setlist is a little discomforting — with only two albums behind her back, she re­produces 21 almost in its entirety, with less than half of 19 getting an honorable mention; surely at least such highlights as ʽDaydreamʼ or ʽCold Shoulderʼ deserved, well, more than a cold shoul­der. Some of the reasons could be technical — for instance, much of the material on 19 was ra­ther sparsely arranged, leaving out many members of her current touring band (which, for this particular occasion, also includes a small orchestra), or perhaps she already thought of some of those early songs as tentative or even «dated». But it wouldn't have hurt, then, to compensate maybe with some obscurities or covers, considering how she has the same knack for doing Bob Dylan or The Cure as she has for her own songs.

 

Second, the lady has an obvious stage problem — not so evident on the audio CD, which gene­rously cuts out all the banter, but very irritating on the DVD, where almost every song is intro­duced with around two to five minutes of narrative on life experience told in prime quality Tot­tenham dialect. Frankly speaking, the few bits I did manage to understand were neither too in­sightful nor particularly funny, and overall, the impression was very much the same I get from listening to Ani DiFranco live albums: the artist is trying way too hard to come across as a «real human being» — in a sense, this really comes across as a condescending gesture: trying to get the audience to relax and shed its tenseness and confusion in the presence of The Great Artist, who is really The Average Everyday Person in artistic disguise. (Also agrees with the swearing — heavy use of the F-word is one of the true features of the AEP, and so, in the good old tradition of Pete Townshend and Co., there is plenty of that there. One might ask why the heck isn't there any ac­tual swearing in the songs, then — oh, right, to avoid radio censorship.)

 

Fortunately, this talkative attitude does not seep in much into the music, other than a few evil cackles every now and then that she inserts at the end of the songs to beat down the pathos level (see ʽRumour Has Itʼ, for instance). The music is flawless — since she is no R&B queen and does not feel the need to flutter around the stage, this allows her to fully concentrate on the singing, and every single tune is done at least as well as on the original version, and occasionally maybe even better. (She does not play any instruments here, although she used to in the early days of 19 — but now that she can afford as many backup players as she needs, why bother?). The only dis­appointment is ʽRollin' In The Deepʼ, where a large chunk of the chorus vocals is given over to the audience — when the first "we could have had it all..." comes along and Adele is not in it at all, that's sort of a bummer. But I guess it must have felt different back there: audience participa­tion feels like a total gas until you get to hear it reproduced on an audio recording.

 

Anyway, returning to the beginning of the review, Live At The Royal Albert Hall really does show that the Adele phenomenon owes its success to about fifty percent genius and fifty percent meticulous image calculation — which is alright by me, since that's the way it's been since the Beatles, heck, since Mozart and Liszt, I guess. By all means, the DVD is epochal and a must-have, capturing all the strengths and weaknesses of the artist at the same time: in fact, despite the gene­rally negative feel I have about this wound-up stage image, the contrast between how she looks and sounds when chattering away and when singing one of her soulful ballads or rhythmic stom­pers is strong enough to make you appreciate «Adele the artist» even more than you did before you got the chance to «know» a little bit of her as «Adele the commoner». Thumbs up.

 

25 (2015)

 

1) Hello; 2) Send My Love (To Your New Lover); 3) I Miss You; 4) When We Were Young; 5) Remedy; 6) Water Under The Bridge; 7) River Lea; 8) Love In The Dark; 9) Million Years Ago; 10) All I Ask; 11) Sweetest Devotion.

 

"Hello. It's me. I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet, to go over everything". Kind of a humble start for a mega-star whose millions of fans have been dying for years to see just where Adele's journey of spiritual growth would take her next. And if press release stuff and Wikipedia rumors have anything to them, this journey was actually in danger of coming to a premature end — she had expressed a desire for early retirement, either due to pressures of family life or because she had an inclination that, perhaps, 21 had her at the top of her game and that it would have been so much cooler to go out on top.

 

And yes, it would. Most good stories in the 21st century tend to have crappy sequels, and with 25, our little fairy tale, too, seems to have exhausted the limits of good taste and creativity and turn into its own crooked mirror image. Honestly, I was not expecting that any follow-up to 21 could match the cohesive greatness of that record — but neither was I expecting such a direct, express jet trip to Crapsville. And what makes matters so much worse is that 21, like it or not, had a great educational value: through those songs, millions of people had access to solid melodies, real soul, and genuine instrumentation, not to mention a chance to get interested in Time Out Of Mind and Disintegration. For a brief moment out there, it seemed like here was a really strong-willed, independent woman artist that could lead the masses — or even, with a stroke of luck, dictate her own terms to the corporate music industry.

 

But no dice. Enter 25, a thoroughly disappointing, bland, formulaic record of big «adult contem­porary» ballads, produced by no less than eleven different producers, co-written by Adele with no less than the same number of different songwriters, and featuring no real spiritual growth what­soever. The only new emotional strand is that of nostalgia and forgiveness — the Adele of 21 seemed preoccupied with her current troubles, the Adele of 25 seems to be looking for artistic in­spiration largely in past troubles ("they say that time's supposed to heal you, but I ain't done much healing"); no wonder, since it does not look like she'd had a lot of troubles for the previous four years. A happy marriage, a son, a well-secured financial present and future, plenty of charity work — no wonder that now, in order to keep up the broken-hearted image, she has to turn her mind back on the past.

 

And it does not work. We could, of course, put most of the blame on the producers, who did their best to dress all of these melodies in the most generic rhythms and sonic textures; but I believe that no one is more to blame than Adele herself, who just so clearly did not need to put out this album — it is so utterly unnatural, so strenuously pushed into unnecessary existence, that the only frickin' question is: WHY? Goddammit, if you are so obviously content with your life, why do you consider yourself obligated to put out a collection of dark, morose, monotonous ballads with conventional frameworks and clichéd hooks (or «non-hooks»)? Just because you are «Adele, the Queen of the Dark Heart-Tug?» and people would not buy your records if you preferred to cover ʽBanana Boat Songʼ instead?

 

The opening piano chords of ʽHelloʼ may aspire to genius simplicity, but I wonder just how many by-the-book balladeers have already made my ears insensitive to their effect — and the «depth» that opens up when the powerhouse chorus hits you is phoney, a well-rehearsed production trick more than a genuine reflection of one's state of mind. By the time the song kicks into full gear, electronic hums and drum machines and cavernous echoes dominating the waves, you don't seem to remember the difference between Adele and Celine Dion any more. Is this it, then? That «maturity» by the age of 25 means completing your transformation into a generic «Diva»?

 

It does not get much better when the songs get upbeat, though. ʽSend My Loveʼ starts out with a quiet, but well-audible "just the guitar!" instruction, which turns out to be a ruse — fairly soon, we get a trip-hop backing track of the teenybopper variety, aerobic backing vocals à la Beyonce, and an annoying synthetic chorus — "we gotta let go of all of our ghosts, we both know we ain't kids no more", on a track that has the most kiddyish arrangement of 'em all. No wonder, that, since it was co-written with Max «I Fucked 'Em All, Figuratively Speaking» Martin, the man to whom you turn when Mephistopheles is unable to hold up his end of the bargain.

 

There is only one song on the entire album, as far as I'm concerned, that strives to break out of the plastic carcass — the gospel-influenced ʽRiver Leaʼ, produced by and co-written with Danger Mouse; although the arrangement is still spoiled by a robotic rhythm section, the organ adds a nice touch, the chorus is catchy, and the main hook is wond'rously found, with Adele hitting a compassionate note on the "blame it on the River Lea, the River Lea..." passage. Which makes me wonder if, at this point, she couldn't have made a fine 21st century Mahalia Jackson — at least singing about going back to the river seems to bring out the human in her far more effective­ly than trying to rile herself over some forgotten past lovers.

 

Alas, one such bit of success does nothing to alleviate the «dull aching pain» from listening to one forgettable ballad after another — sometimes exacerbated when the song in question is ʽMillion Years Agoʼ, a truly awful acoustic «tear-jerker» that sounds as if it's been pulled directly from one of those whip-out-yer-hanky Euro musicals like Notre Dame De Paris: listening to Adele crooning "I miss the air, I miss my friends, I miss my mother, I miss it when life was a party to be thrown..." just makes me cringe in its absolutely cheap corniness.

 

How the heck did this happen? How and when and why did the master songwriter and performer of 21 turn into this replaceable Kelly Clarkson-meets-Vanessa Carlton type plastic doll? Sure, we still have «The Voice», but it's obviously not just the voice that made 21 such an outstanding achievement. My natural guess is simply that the artist... has nothing more to say. That's just it. She said what she had to say — she made a wise decision that she would not be saying any more — she was forced to come back because she has no other profession, because the fans and the record executives cry for more, she placed herself in the hands of studio pros, she wrote those songs without properly feeling them, she delivered them because that was what she was expected to do. Oh, and she even got plenty of rave reviews — «style instead of substance» is all the rage nowadays, and when you're a big star with a properly run publicity campaign, naturally there'll be plenty of people falling over your lyrical clichés and thrice rehashed Serious Chords. But hey, you can always rely on good old Only Solitaire to cut the crap.

 

In other words, here is one more case of an artist metamorphosing into a pseudo-artistic machine. If your reaction is, "well, she was never all that good anyway", I respectfully disagree: 19 was nice and human, warts and all, and 21 was as close to a genuine, sincere masterpiece as commer­cially-oriented «serious pop music» ever gets. But this — this is as good a pretext as any to change that old adage of «never trust anybody over thirty» to «never trust anybody over twenty five», as more and more artists these days flash by like the one-album wonders (two-album won­ders at best) they are. Oh sure, there's always some fickle hope that the next album (31, if that particular arithmetic progression continues to be respected?) will make things right, but who wants to spend the next six years in fickle hopes? Thumbs down, case closed.

 

 

 

AGALLOCH

PALE FOLKLORE (1999)

 

1) She Painted Fire Across The Skyline, Pt. 1; 2) She Painted Fire Across The Skyline, Pt. 2; 3) She Painted Fire Ac­ross The Skyline, Pt. 3; 4) The Misshapen Steed; 5) Hallways Of Enchanted Ebony; 6) Dead Winter Days; 7) As Em­bers Dress The Sky; 8) The Melancholy Spirit.

 

Since The United States Of Jazz, Blues, and Country had never been a major player on the «ex­treme fantasy metal» scene — one area almost totally monopolized by Scandinavian countries — it is not difficult to understand the sometimes too heavy aura of promotion that surrounds Agal­loch, a band hailing from Portland, Oregon. These guys have dared to challenge none other than Finland's Amorphis, Norway's Ulver, and Sweden's mighty Opeth — and the very fact that they can do it without thoroughly embarrassing themselves almost automatically makes them critical darlings (for the metal press, at least).

 

There still may be a big difference, though. Pale Folklore, Agalloch's full-length debut (preceded only by some demo tapes that are said to be far more derivative), is unquestionably influenced by and constantly evokes Scandinavian metal schools, but if most of those bands perform dark metal with elements of folk, Pale Folklore is dark folk with elements of metal. Or, rather, it is what a black minstrel with laryngeal cancer would sound like if someone tuned down his lute and ran it through a distortion pe­dal.

 

For one thing, the guitarists, John Haughm and Don Anderson, almost never solo. This may be due to technical limitations (must be hard to get a proper Swedish guitar teacher in Oregon), or may be a conscious, self-restraining decision, but the fact is that Agalloch's music is riff-based something like 95% of the time (and the rest of it mainly consists of howling winds or tolling bells, or, sometimes, brief piano interludes). This can get tiresome, since the riffage is usually of the «drone» variety, and unless you pay lots and lots of attention, all of these drones tend to mer­ge together in one huge mega-drone. In this respect, Agalloch may have more in common with noise rock bands like ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead than with their Viking brothers-in-arms.

 

But if it doesn't exactly pay off in terms of memorability and even «discernibility», it works fine in the atmosphere department. Carefully avoiding most of the cheesy aspects of Nordic music (militant paganism, church-burning, horned helmets, Valhalla awaits us, all that nonsense that keeps Wagner permanently rotating in his grave), they concentrate on themes of world-weariness and round-the-corner death, the ones that go down so well with a bit of grey cloudy skies, snow-covered pine forests, and icy wind blasts. Obviously, an icy wind blast opens the record as such — what else? And the strange bagpipe-imitating drone that even­tually morphs into an even stran­ger «scratchy» pattern immediately sets the right atmosphere.

 

Except for a relatively brief, equally winterish, instrumental 'The Misshapen Steed', a rapidly shifting palette of sorrowful piano melodies, weeping woodwinds, mystical harps, and funebral or­chestration, all of the songs are heavy riff-fests, usually with one guitar providing the thick, stern dro­ne and another laying a more distinctive, note-based melody. They are all extremely si­milar, but different enough to leave a folk metal fan further interested in sorting them out and as­cribing tiny mood swings to each successive track. Tempos range from mid- to moderately fast, and the rhythm section cooks well: stuff like 'Hallways Of Enchanted Ebony' has serious head­banging potential. Of course, we are occasionally sidetracked into acoustic interludes (many of them combining sharp precision with sincere loveliness), and there are a few completely un­ex­pected surprises — U2-ish scratch-delay-patterns on 'The Melancholy Spirit', for instance — but diversity was hardly a major goal here.

 

Unfortunately, adopting various superficial trappings of their predecessors also means that most of the lyrics are delivered in a generic black metal growl; on one hand, this may be an advantage since we do not get to discern the spoken words (the album opens with "Oh dismal mourning, I open my weary eyes once again, my life has been left hollow and ashes have filled the gorge of my within" and the rest never strays too far away from that tragic realization), but, on the other hand, this is the major obstacle that can prevent one from taking this whole stuff seriously. It is one thing if the entire work of art transparently adopts Dungeons & Dragons as its ideal, but Aga­l­loch seem serious about creating a darkly beautiful musical landscape, so why should it be spoilt rotten with this «Cookie Monster caught a rhinovirus» sonic idiocy? (The other vocal trapping — little bits of female opera vocals on climactic bits of some of the tracks — works perfectly fine, in comparison).

 

Apart from that, and the fact that, from each new outburst of US critic adoration you have to sub­tract the unseen, but suspected bit of national pride bias, Pale Folklore is a pretty damn good re­cord to play. Especially if all of your relatives have died (preferably, in horrible accidents or af­ter long and painful struggles with incurable illnesses), if life has no meaning whatsoever, and if you are financially fit to go on an Alpine vacation. Don't forget to bring Pale Folklore along. The line "From which of this oak shall I hang myself?" sounds especially delicious in such a context, pro­vided you can make it out from the growls. Thumbs up.

 

THE MANTLE (2002)

 

1) A Celebration For The Death Of Man...; 2) In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion; 3) Odal; 4) I Am The Woo­den Doors; 5) The Lodge; 6) You Were But A Ghost In My Arms; 7) The Hawthorne Passage; 8) ...And The Great Cold Death Of The Earth; 9) A Desolation Song.

 

I take it as no coincidence that it is today, right on the very day that I set out to write about Aga­l­loch's most acclaimed album, that we got our first serious winter snowfall, and it is still falling out of the murky grey skies right as I type out these words. Now all we need to do is replace the boring urban window view with pine forests on mid-size hills, populate them with a bunch of world-weary, disgruntled ghosts, and then the picture and the sound will be as one.

 

The Mantle is Agalloch at their very best simply because it is the one album, so far, in their ca­reer that has them doing their thing and their thing only. Death metal clichés are reduced to an ab­solute minimum, in fact, it may not even be correct to call this thing «metal» at all — very few songs have the required crunchy heavy riffs, being driven instead by loud acoustic strum, stern and morose, but still somewhat color­ful electric leads, and, occasionally, pianos, accordeons, even mandolins. The growling vocals are still there, sometimes, but much more often give way to clean-sung lines or are presented as ominous, mood-setting whispering rather than the usual «hey, who let Ronnie James Dio gobble ten pounds of ice cream on a cold winter day?» variety.

 

One element of the band's schtick has by now crystallized to perfection, and it may not be to everyone's tastes: they display a strong passion for LAM(B?) — Long, Atmospheric, Monoto­nous (and Boring?). If an Agalloch composition crawls on for 10 or 15 minutes, do not expect an Abbey Road-style multi-part suite. There will be some key changes along the way, some alter­nations between quiet and loud, some traces of fade-outs and crescendos, but overall, what you get in the beginning is not too different from what you get in the middle, and almost absolutely the same as what you get in the end. This is an ambient approach, and you have to cope with it.

 

Not that it's unexpected. This is, after all, music for people who like taking long walks in snow-covered forests, and how is a snow-covered forest that much different at the start of your walk from the snow-covered forest at the end of it? (Unless you're lucky enough to end up swallowed by a grizzly bear, of course, which, I suspect, is like that particular ideal ending insinuated by Agal­loch on each of their records, but always remaining unrealized at the end). It is one thing when a seventy-minute long album takes that much time only in order to mask the paucity of its ideas ­— but Agalloch found a great way out of it: sure, they do not have a lot of different ideas, but the ideas they do have are the ones that, by their very nature, require a lot of running time.

 

'In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion' is arguably the perfect Agalloch number, conveying the band's essence so damn well that everything else almost ends up sounding like last-minute varia­tions on the magnum opus. There is a metallic roar running through its main melody, but it does not initiate the melody, which consists of a mournful electric drone, a simple acoustic accompani­ment, and a minimalistic medieval mandolin pattern, woven together so carefully that Mother Nature could hardly wish for a more suitable mourning anthem for itself. Vocals come as growls, as dark quasi-Gregorian harmonies, as underground demon recitative, as half-spoken bardic poet­ry, whatever suits the moment best. Guitar solos start coming in no earlier than the tenth or ele­venth minute, in the usual minimalist form. Harmonies are overdubbed with so much craft that it is hard to believe it is the same band that, just a few years ago, engaged in little vocal work other than just vomiting the words out into the microphone.

 

It's not all pure «fantasy world», either — like most of the album's tunes, the song is ecologically minded. On The Mantle, Agalloch seem to exert more care in making us believe this whole mu­sical and lyrical approach is not just the result of reading too many third-rate fantasy novels and yearning for the innocence of an era in which you could fall upon your sword in the middle of a dark forest and have a beautiful ballad written about it. They want to merge that imagery and tho­se values into the present. Think King Arthur, Siegfried, and Beowulf transported in a time mach­ine into the 21st century — then, in the words of Jim Morrison, our first eco-minded bard, «look what they've done to the Earth, look what they've done to our fair sister» etc. etc.

 

That's one aspect that doesn't really work, but it makes great fodder for the press, who now has a legitimate reason for respecting the band and tolerating the intolerable, that is, the arrogant du­ra­tion and similarity of their atmospheric pieces. Obviously, I cannot discuss them individually. If you yearn for a more openly metallic sound, 'I Am The Wooden Doors' and 'You Were But A Ghost In My Arms' will provide the heavy riffage you need, but the last twenty-five minutes are all solidly folk-based, particularly 'The Great Cold Death' with its near-gorgeous vocal part and 'A Desolation Song' with its accordeon-and-mandolin-led melody.

 

But then, honestly, it does not matter; Agalloch make a point of blurring the line between folk and metal, right down to where, at some point, you no longer feel like you are having a «folk» or «metal» experience at all, but are simply listening to some extreme form of a Requiem Mass — "Celebration For The Death Of Man", indeed. I am not going to pretend to being in some per­verse love relation with The Mantle, or even to «getting» it the way we're supposed to get it. I am not going to say it fully justifies its length (had they cut out, for instance, the eleven minutes of 'Hawthorne Passage', the album would still retain its full potential). I certainly do not insist that it cannot be accused of cheesiness — some of the lyrics are generically cringeworthy, and some of the darkness, as befits this genre, feels artificially bloated. And it is rather obvious that if you fall upon this from a purely metal background, the technical accomplishment of John Haughm and company will seem puny next to their Scandinavian forefathers.

 

But The Mantle, much more so than Folklore, makes that somewhat primitive bluntness of the band's approach into their chief advantage. Many people can run up and down all sorts of scales; how many have thought of concentrating, instead, on enveloping your living quarters in an impe­netrable atmosphere of folk-metallic ambience? 'In The Shadow...' is supposed to leave you mes­merized rather than aggressively overwhelmed, and I believe that it achieves its goal, along with most of the other songs on here. Well, it looks like it's finally stopped snowing, so I may as well just issue the expected thumbs up and let us move on from here.

 

ASHES AGAINST THE GRAIN (2006)

 

1) Limbs; 2) Falling Snow; 3) This White Mountain On Which You Will Die; 4) Fire Above, Ice Below; 5) Not Un­like The Waves; 6) Our Fortress Is Burning... I; 7) Our Fortress Is Burning... II. Bloodbirds; 8) Our Fortress Is Bur­n­ing... III. The Grain; 9*) Scars Of The Shattered Sky (Our Fortress Has Burned To The Ground).

 

Somewhat of a step down here; four years of studio non-presence, apart from a handful of not very diagnostic EPs, do not seem to have done much good for the proud Oregon disciples of Sca­ndinavian thunder and ice wizards. Not only has there been very little progress in their musical education, but Ashes even seems to trade back some of the achievements of The Mantle, and for what? Es­sentially, for a return to a much more hardcore-metallic sound — almost as if they were afraid lis­tening to The Mantle might make some of us forget the band's true pedigree.

 

The results of their cutting down on acoustic compositions and interludes, as well as clean vocals, are obvious: most of the songs sound totally alike. The basic range now is not from dark folk to heavy folk-metal, but rather from heavy folk-metal to songs that dangerously border on «old school metal»: the main riff of 'Not Unlike The Waves', for instance, is near-genuine Metallica. Haughm, in an interview, called that number "the perfect representation of Agalloch in 2006"; if that is truly so, I am not overjoyed. As for the first four tracks, I simply cannot find any new words to describe them — it suffices to conclude, from what I have just stated, that this is ge­ne­rally the same Agalloch as before, but rendered sli­gh­tly less atmospheric due to more emphasis on the heaviness and less on the subtlety.

 

For me, the album does not even begin properly until the final suite, the three-part 'Our Fortress Is Bur­ning' — where 'Our Fortress' is, of course, the predictable medieval allegory for 'Our Ho­me­world'  the burning of which we are invited to contemplate through folk-metallic eyeglasses. Most of the atmospheric highlights are concentrated in these three parts, from the gently minima­listic piano intro to the weeping drone of the first guitar-based part to the epic-romantic solo of 'Bloodbirds' to the avantgarde representation of the world's collapse in 'The Grain', where Hau­ghm's guitar strives to achieve an effect comparable to that of Hendrix's on 'Star Spangled Ban­ner' — saddle the capacities of the electric sound to make them represent man's (or, in this case, nature's) eternal suffering. Unlike the preceding tracks, this suite strives for something more gran­diose, and with Agalloch's overall qualifications, it's quite successful. It might also be useful to check out the limited expanded edition of the album, which adds a twenty-minute long coda that sounds like one of those chilly soundtracks to action games that take place in post-nuclear envi­ronments: a demolished, lonesome world whose only sounds are the ones left to us by shards of human civilization swaying in the cold wind.

 

In short, strange as it may seem, it is the non-melodic parts of this album that seem to constitute its biggest attraction, speaking out louder, more overtly, and with more meaning than the straight­forwardly metallic parts. Hardly a thrilling realisation for the typical metal fans (Haughm said that many of them considered 'The Grain' part of 'Fortress' as filler, whereas in reality the whole suite had been built around that part), but a saving grace for those who prefer the art side of the band. On 'Fortress', Agalloch really press forward, switching from a mostly «white and gray» pa­norama of The Mantle to a «gray and black» one — charred, crackling, and smoking. In the pro­cess, they retain their crown as America's kings of impending doom, but only barely. Altogether, the presence of 'Fortress' still guarantees a thumbs up, yet, in my opinion, the often-heard victo­rious wails of «another Agalloch masterpiece!» are exaggerated all the same.

 

THE WHITE (2008)

 

1) The Isle Of Summer; 2) Birch Black; 3) Hollow Stone; 4) Pantheist; 5) Birch White; 6) Sowilo Rune; 7) Summer­isle Reprise.

 

This ends up looking like an appendix, an antidote of sorts to the overdose of heaviness on Ashes: a thirty-minute EP of mostly acoustic-based compositions completely bent on atmosphere rather than crunch. (Technically, it is a «companion» to the band’s earlier The Gray EP, but that was basically just a throwaway, consisting of lengthy «deconstructed» remakes of ‘The Lodge’ and ‘Odal’, the former unnecessary and the latter awful — transformed into a wall of metal machine muzak noise. The White, on the other hand, honestly functions as a fully realized offering).

 

The opening kiddie chant (“We carry death out of the village!”), as well as bits of dialog in the end and the ‘Isle Of Summer’ motive, all stem from the band’s fascination with 1973’s cult hor­ror classic, The Wicker Man. Watching the movie, with its cartoonish nigtmarification of «Celtic» pagan practices, may help make The White more impressive, but this is not a soundtrack — the movie is pretty violent, but this here music is simply deep and dark without explicit aggression.

 

Since there is virtually nothing to headbang to, this is Agalloch’s most ambient-sounding creation so far; the only tune that seems to have been written with development and sonic travel in mind is ‘Sowilo Rune’, which incorporates some shrill, ecstatic electric guitar work and thick keyboard backgrounds to illustrate all the dangers of the letter S, from overestimating the power of the Sun God to, perhaps, its shiny representation on the uniform of a Schutzstaffel officer? Who knows. The other tracks just range from relatively simple acoustic meditations (‘Isle Of Summer’), some­times also modestly electrified in the middle (‘Birch Black’) to key­board-generated howling winds and shrieking ghosts (‘Hollow Stone’) to minimalist piano (‘Summerisle Reprise’): plea­sant, but nothing we hadn’t already experienced before.

 

In the end, what remains the most memorable aspect of the album is the incorporation of the Wi­cker Man bits — up until now, Agalloch have always behaved in a medievalistic manner, but this time around, they really push the impression that they dedicate their art to the idea of resurrecting the old beliefs, or, perhaps, the idea that this resurrection is just round the corner and that it goes hand in hand with the Apocalypse. God is dead, man is a rotten slaughterer, that sort of thing. The idea is about as old as the Christian church itself, but here they have chosen a subtle, unintrusive, «indirect» way of expressing it, and it almost works — and even if Christopher Lee’s dialog sam­ples are as embarrassingly worded as every bit of Christopher Lee’s dialog in any of his B-mo­vies, it is still frickin’ Christopher Lee. Thumbs up.

 

MARROW OF THE SPIRIT (2010)

 

1) They Escaped The Weight Of Darkness; 2) Into The Painted Grey; 3) The Watcher's Monolith; 4) Black Lake Niðstång; 5) Ghosts Of The Midwinter Fires; 6) To Drown.

 

We have cello. Why didn't we have cello before? Cello goes down real easy with Agalloch, and suits their moods just as fine as acoustic guitars and harps. Cello can be lots of things, but it is typically somber / evening / winter-autumn style, and that's Agalloch for you. The relatively brief intro is nearly all cello, and then it reappears again on the last track, the one that informs you that "They escaped the weight of darkness to drown in another".

 

Unfortunately, apart from the cello use, there is no real progress. We just fall back on more of the same black metal and folk metal compositions, five huge epic tracks in a row without any brea­thing space. Fortunately, these epic tracks do not show any drop-off in quality, either: loyal Agal­loch fans have no serious reasons for disappointment. Only loyal Agalloch reviewers may have those reasons, since, clearly, it is very hard to write anything other than «Hey, cool, these guys are still going strong!» about Marrow Of The Spirit.

 

So I will be brief, concentrating only on the fact that 'Black Lake Niðstång' is currently the long­est track in the band's catalog (beaten only by 'Our Fortress Has Burned To The Ground', but that was a special case that don't count), and this would most likely mean that it is their strongest can­didate for «That single Agalloch masterpiece to trump all other Agalloch masterpieces». I do not see it as being nearly as successful in covering all of the band's strong points as 'In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion', though — for one thing, most of the vocals are in the death metal vein, for another, there is little, if any, evidence of their mastery of the acoustic sound. Instead, there is a lot of keyboards here, from bells and chimes to distorted organs and sci-fi synths — which they put to good atmospheric use, but it's still not quite the same thing.

 

The most concise and successful thing on the album, in my opinion, is its shortest song (bar the intro), 'Ghosts Of The Midwinter Fires', which starts out similar to a suicidal Cure anthem, then gradually morphs into generic black metal mode, and finally makes the simple transition to a shrill-ecstatic prog-rock anthem with blazing guitar solos. It's nothing particularly special or even pretentious (by Agalloch standards), just a well-produced, well-meaning song that I have singled out, perhaps, exactly for the reason that there is so little to single out within it. Yet I certainly prefer its finely-tailored sound to, for instance, the sonic chaos that opens 'Into The Painted Grey'. Maybe it's a good thing these guys don't beat around the bush so much. In this land of eternal win­ter that they have created, any attempt to thaw their glaciers will mean nothing but senseless, devastating deluge.

 

THE SERPENT & THE SPHERE (2014)

 

1) Birth And Death Of The Pillars Of Creation; 2) (Serpens Caput); 3) The Astral Dialogue; 4) Dark Matter Gods; 5) Celestial Effigy; 6) Cor Serpentis; 7) Vales Beyond Dimension; 8) Plateau Of The Ages; 9) (Serpens Cauda).

 

After a four-year pause, briefly interrupted only once with the one-track EP Faustian Echoes (on which they tried combining music with an actual Goethe recital and film soundtrack samples, to no major success), Agalloch are finally back to deliver, as you might have guessed, another very much Agalloch album. This time the vague concept behind the songs is even grander than before, switching from issues of decay and extinction of the human race to the birth and death of the Uni­verse itself, apparently imagined in the shape of the Great World Serpent, so if regular cosmology is too boring or difficult for you, feel free to take a sixty-minute crash course on the basic model of the universe from these guys.

 

The problem is, if you raise the conceptual stakes so high, you should probably be prepared to extract the adequate high cards from your sleeve — and yet, so it seems, this band is still not willing to go far beyond the deuce, if you know what I mean. Four massive LPs into their career, we are now perfectly aware of all the regular trademarks of Agalloch, and The Serpent & The Sphere adds nothing whatsoever to their usual bag of tricks. On the contrary, it subtracts: for in­stance, there are no more traces of clean vocals (have they gotten death threats from serious fans or what?), the instrumentation is very basic (no strings and very few keyboards), and the song tempos, which used to range from «very slow» to «mid-tempo», all tend to drift towards «mid-tempo» now, leaving less room for the subtle, gradual unfurling of the atmospheric canvas.

 

When you contrast this mysterious self-limitation with a bombastic song title like ʽBirth And Death Of The Pillars Of Creationʼ, this sort of blows out a brain circuit. True, Agalloch never positioned themselves as a major experimental outfit, preferring to test the possibilities of a set formula rather than blow the formula itself to smithereens. Even Marrow Of The Spirit, disap­pointing as it was in general, had itself a bit of testing (the cello intro alone was an unusual move by any accounts). But The Serpent & The Sphere, despite its lyrical ambition, after a few lis­tens remains the first Agalloch album that gives a sharp impression of «regress» rather than «pro­gress», even according to Agalloch's own limited standard.

 

The bulk of the album is given over to these burly mid-tempo romps that we all know very well by now — two or three guitars woven together in droning / folksy-jangly manners, driven for­ward by a huge drum sound and occasionally accompanied by John Haughm's whispered or growled (more often, whispered and growled) vocals. Describing them is impossible and useless (they tried doing it over at Pitchfork and came out with descriptions like «flickering notes stab­bing at distended riffs and pristine tones countering sheets of distortion», which, if you stare at them long enough, could equally well apply to, say, the Rolling Stones, for example). All I can ask myself is — does any of these riffs and tones exceed the average expectations? And the an­swer is a strict no all the way.

 

The longest and probably «crucial» number on the album, the twelve-minute instrumental ʽPla­teau Of The Agesʼ, only matches its title, I think, if there was nothing much happening on that particular plateau throughout the ages (which, come to think of it, might very well be the actual fate of most plateaus). A completely predictable, safely played set of crescendos, mainly based on a series of ascending trills the likes of which have been produced a miriad times already — just compare this to something like ʽIn The Shadow Of Our Pale Companionʼ, with its memorable main theme, a series of melodic jumps that were impossible to preview, and a certain sense of exuberance from an ambitious young band that had just picked up the scent of something not completely, but noticeably different. ʽPlateau Of The Agesʼ — and everything else on here — is the same band going through the motions, seemingly bent more on creating a «metaphysical ins­tallation» than music that would continue to be interesting. No steam.

 

The songs are linked together with three short instrumentals, whose Latin titles refer to the head, heart, and tail of the Serpent — three chrono-spatial parts of the Universe? — but here, too, the curious conceptual idea is realized with three boring acoustic interludes, consisting of the same types of scales and arpeggios that Agalloch themselves and everybody else have already explored many times in the past. Come on now, wouldn't we expect just a little extra thrill from the con­secutive appea­rance of the head, heart, and tail of the Serpent? How about at least using three different instruments, or something?

 

Probably some songs are slightly more creative than others, but, honestly, I do not have the strength to drag them all under the analytical microscope. Long-term fans of the band have in­deed praised the album, and, since it swears such stark loyalty to the formula, if you really love Agalloch for the atmosphere, you will not be disappointed. If you love Agalloch for the riffs and memorable melodies, you might be a little disappointed (I didn't manage to memorize anything, but maybe it's just me). But if you love Agalloch for pushing boundaries of the genre, stay away. The only thing that will be pushed here is your patience; and mine has been pushed hard enough to get all pissed off and leave here with a mean thumbs down. Will be seeing you 'round about three years on, gentlemen, and please don't forget to bring back the cello at least.

AGNES OBEL

PHILHARMONICS (2010)

 

1) Falling, Catching; 2) Riverside; 3) Brother Sparrow; 4) Just So; 5) Beast; 6) Louretta; 7) Avenue; 8) Philhar­monics; 9) Close Watch; 10) Wallflower; 11) Over The Hill; 12) On Powdered Ground.

 

Say what you will about the coming of the electronic age, but still, no wonders of electronic program­ming can beat the smooth-but-strong ripple of a real piano, particularly when the player shows both heart and experience. The first track on this album is just a short and humble instru­mental, written (like much of the album) under the huge influence of the old impressionists (par­ticularly Satie), but there is something about the tone, about the sharp staccato playing, about the composition — starting somewhere in the middle of the keyboard and then gradually, gracefully sloping away to the high-pitched right — that has a certain immediate appeal. Piano introductions by themselves are not rare at all, but this is not the kind of generic «ooh, I like piano! Elton's my favorite!» introduction you'd hear on, say, an Alicia Keys record.

 

Agnes Obel is different — a quiet, enigmatic performer from Denmark (with an excellent com­mand of English, though) who seems to know very well just how far you can push your enigma in order to remain «artsy» without becoming irritatingly cheap. Of course, these days the market is overstocked with Femme Fatales and Mystery Women of all varieties, some of them with a very good idea of which particular brands of Mystery Lipstick and Fatalistic Drapery are better converted into YouTube views and MTV Awards (Lana Del Rey, here's looking at you). Agnes Obel is not entirely free from the «sin» of calculating her own image, either — but her calcula­tions, based on a mix of minimalism, humility, aural and visual nostalgia, and exquisite attention to minor subtle detail, are... well, simply put, these are my kinds of calculation.

 

She is quiet, moody, melancholic, somewhat (but not painfully) monotonous, and does not awa­ken any hitherto unknown emotions — from Joni Mitchell to Kate Bush to Sinead O'Connor to tons of other female performers I could come up with, we've already felt these emotions. But she has her own style of minimalistic chamber pop, more classically inspired than anybody I know, and at the same time, a good ear for pop hooks: if, upon first listen, none of these songs strike you as catchy, this will probably be due to the barebones arrangements that do not vary too much from song to song. In fact, many customer reviews I've seen for this one essentially treat Phil­harmonics as a pleasant background-listening ambient album — but it's not; each of these songs is a carefully crafted composition in its own right, you just have to warm up to them a bit, like you might have to warm up to Debussy's preludes if your previous ideal of classical solo piano was Chopin's mazurkas.

 

Perhaps the first single from the album, ʽRiversideʼ, was not fully indicative of the album's charm. It is, after all, a fairly simple folk-waltz, with nothing but a simple piano line and some multi-tracked vocal harmonies to keep you occupied; even so, it still manages to sound nothing like your average indie-folkie-singer-songwriter churning out generic heartbreaker stuff (to be used in the soundtrack to your average indie-director melodramas about uninteresting problems in the lives of everyday boring people). There's melancholy here, but no moping or whining, no self-aggrandizing and no artificial struggle to show you great, great depth — it's very light, simple, tasteful, unassuming, and unavoidably endearing just on the strength of what it is not, rather than of what it is (okay, that probably sounds dumb, but not while the actual song is playing).

 

But it actually gets better. On ʽBrother Sparrowʼ, we have a piano/guitar duet, with the two in­struments gracefully completing each other, and Obel's vocals mimicking the piano line all the way to a logical and satisfying melodic resolution — there's a sort of frosty-friendly beauty here, as if she were writing the soundtrack to the everyday life of a real flesh-and-blood Cinderella with free access to her late mother's old collection of Satie records. On ʽJust Soʼ, which I can very well imagine as a triumphant power pop anthem (here deconstructed right down to its knickers), there's a piano-and-what-sounds-like-plucked-violin duet instead, with the former gradually drow­ning out the latter.

 

On ʽBeastʼ, I don't even understand what the instrumentation is — in con­cert, she performs it as a piano/cello duet, but here the first instrument sounds more like a harp, so I guess it's more of a piano/harp duet, with one instrument blending in with the other seamlessly, until the cello comes midway through and cuts right between them; also, I'd never have guessed that a refrain with lines like "let's go tonight, let the beast run a mile" could sound haunting, but here it is delivered so coldly and casually that it is haunting. ʽAvenueʼ, another old-fashioned waltz, has a tinge of the musical box to it, but only a faint one, to better attenuate the sad chord change on the "nothing more you need to know, nothing more you need to show" refrain; then the title track is another waltz, but with an entirely different feel to it — a sad, but not broken-hearted obituary to "the only God of mine" who "died last night in grey stockings, in all might", whoever she is singing about (an old lover or an unrealized ideal).

 

For an artist who composes most of the material on her/his own, the choice of occasional covers can also be important — Obel chooses ʽClose Watchʼ, a song from John Cale's Music For A New Society, which, amusingly, she actually makes a bit more musically complex than it was in the original version, adding a tighter rhythm, some percussion, vocal overdubs, and echo: the result is tightly controlled chamber-pop perfection, compared to the looser, more rambling per­formance from John — not sure if he'd like this or not, but, anyway, it's telling that of all mem­bers of The Velvet Underground, she prefers Cale and not Lou Reed (and not even Nico, despite being a bit of a frigid Scandinavian goddess herself).

 

If the album has any sort of internal logic of development, it is best seen on the final track: ʽOn Powdered Groundʼ is just a touch grander and fuller than everything else, with a very distinctive, pleading cello track and a final bequest to all of us — "don't break your back on the track", she keeps repeating, as if she were some deeply caring Mother-of-all wishing us a safe journey through life. Indeed, the whole album gives a somewhat Taoist impression of a recluse in the middle of the forest, struggling to live in peace with the universe despite the universe threatening to shatter that peace if you ever let him. It's a perfect little album for all those who just want to stop for a while, break the vicious circle of eternal karma, lose themselves in an atmosphere of quietude and immanent beauty — okay, so a Brian Eno ambient album may be the best solution here, but if you are really not the meditative type, Philharmonics might do a great job of serving as the next best substitute. Oh, and she's got great taste in clothes, too. Thumbs up.

 

AVENTINE (2013)

 

1) Chord Left; 2) Fuel To Fire; 3) Dorian; 4) Aventine; 5) Run Cried The Crawling; 6) Tokka; 7) The Curse; 8) Pass Them By; 9) Words Are Dead; 10) Fivefold; 11) Smoke & Mirrors.

 

Unfortunately, Obel's second album firmly places her in the never-ending list of artists who may have said everything they had to say with their first shot, and then simply go on to say it again and again and again, for all those who love it when they are being told the same thing over and over as long as the speaker actually opens his/her mouth and produces fresh sound waves, instead of relying on this new-fangled «preserve it for posterity» recording technique. In other words, Aventine follows the same formula as Philharmonics, but with predictably diminished results.

 

Or, perhaps, not really «predictably»? Perhaps there are problems here that could have been avoided? For me, these problems start with the very first track. On Philharmonics, the brief impressionistic piano piece ʽFalling, Catchingʼ sounded wonderful — a perfectly captured piano tone and an engaging, subtle dynamics as the little piano riff smoothly wound its way upwards. In contrast, the opening piano instrumental on Aventine (ʽChord Leftʼ) seems to make more use of the sustain pedal, is slower, more emphatically sadder, and, on the whole, belongs far more effi­ciently on the soundtrack of some commercial melodrama than on an album vying for «piece of art» status (I wanted to write «high art», but let's keep this populist and democratic).

 

It is still okay, but it is quite reflective of the overall quality of the album, with generally less memorable and less musically interesting songwriting. Whether or not you loved ʽRiversideʼ, its waltzy structure and folksy vocal melody were at least catchy and well adapted to each other. On Aventine, the first song is ʽFuel To Fireʼ, a pure mood piece set to a two-chord piano riff and not varying at all for five minutes — still retaining the overall tastefulness, but absolutely amorphous as a composition that you'd want to possibly cherish and preserve in your head. And when it is immediately followed by ʽDorianʼ, another five-minute song that is essentially more of the same (gracefully mumbled, hookless singing set to a piano melody that even certain minimalist com­posers would probably have rejected)... you know something's gotta be wrong about that.

 

And these songs were the singles culled from this album — although the first one was ʽThe Curseʼ, a slightly better waltz piece (for some reason, the waltz tempo always seems to work better for Agnes) played by a bass / cello / piano trio and sung with some haunting vocal modula­tions; with its allegorical lyrics about a pseudo-mythical situation, it is the closest thing to a «chamber epic» on Aventine. Still, as far as songs salvageable for compilations go, I would not dwell too much on ʽThe Curseʼ — rather sticking up for the title track (another waltz, this time harp-based, with a very pretty cello / harp texture) and, perhaps, ʽRun Cried The Crawlingʼ (with a very Andrew Bird-like violin, probably played by Canadian Mika Posen, generally credited for violin on the album). And that's about it — everything else is pleasant at best, mind-numbing and somnambulant at worst.

 

What is really incredible about this is that the disappointment in no way rubs off on the positive impression I had of Philharmonics — I keep playing bits and snippets of songs from both albums back to back and I can't help but be somewhat bewildered at how her piano melodies that used to incorporate emotionally brilliant flourishes have so seriously melted into flat muzak, and at how her vocals, that used to find such a good balance between husky-dusky and subtle sharp­ness, are now almost always just husky-dusky (with the exception of a few relative highlights). Again, perhaps some people will think that naming your album after one of the seven hills of Rome and dedicating one of the songs to an Oscar Wilde character should suffice to redeem every other sin — I respectfully disagree. I do not give the album a thumbs down, because, all criticism aside, I still like the overall sound of it, which does not bother or offend me one bit; but where Philharmonics was a «subtly active» record, whose emotional charge gradually disclosed itself upon repeated listens, Aventine is a soporifically passive one. Any final recommendations? Well... to quote yet another ambitious singer-songwriter of our times who's had her ups and downs, "You better work bitch!"

 

CITIZEN OF GLASS (2016)

 

1) Stretch Your Eyes; 2) Familiar; 3) Red Virgin Soil; 4) It's Happening Again; 5) Stone; 6) Trojan Horses; 7) Citizen Of Glass; 8) Golden Green; 9) Grasshopper; 10) Mary.

 

At the very least, she deserves some credit here for finally deciding to branch out and diversify the formula. No major changes, that is, but at least this time around, it gets harder to confuse her with the average sentimental piano balladeer — if only because there's less piano around and more strings, as well as more variegated keyboards, a mix of acoustic (vibraphones, etc.) and old-fashioned electric stuff like the Mellotron and even the Trautonium, a real electronic relic hauled straight out of the 1930s. Apparently, this is the first instrument to be heard here, producing the odd siren wail in the intro to ʽStretch Your Eyesʼ and immediately setting an atmosphere of distant alarm — always distant, of course, because the protagonist of all of Obel's songs lives in a perfectly shielded bunker; as long as she confines herself to that place, she's perfectly safe from all the troubles above.

 

The title of the album apparently translates the German term gläserner bürger, and is used to define a (human) object of mass surveillance, but do not think that the lady goes into politics here, or into morbid ruminations on humanity's dystopian future (unless you really want to interpret a line like "we took a walk to the summit at night, you and I" as a documentary description of an imaginary meeting between Russian and American presidents). It is more of a hint at herself, I believe, and how she's got nothing to hide, a predictably irritating paradox in the light of the fact that she is still hiding everything that is possible to hide, because a straightforward interpretation of any of these songs remains out of the question.

 

The songs do get more complex in structure, and it gets harder to shoo any of them away as just another melancholic waltz — in fact, I suspect that somebody must have told her to lay off the waltzing, because the time signatures here tend to get less and less trivial; not challenging enough to approach avantgarde levels, but diverse and unpredictable enough to lay off any accusations of laziness. She is clearly interested in exploring the possibilities of classical and «retro-modern» instrumentation in the modern studio, and I respect that. I only wish that the songs had been as memorable as they were on Philharmonics, which is still not the case, alas.

 

Atmosphere-wise, ʽStretch Your Eyesʼ is clearly an improvement over most of Aventine. The combination of whale-like synthesizer sounds with the quietly, but firmly plucked strings and bowed cellos really gives it a sort of «walking under water» feel, a perfect backdrop for an equally glorious performance... but this is where the song falls short, because other than her usual «frozen lady of the lake» tone, Agnes does not reward the instrumental mix with any outstanding moments of vocal magic; actually, she's no better and no worse than Lana Del Rey now in this department, although I'd still take her instrumental compositions over Lana's in a whiff.

 

On ʽFamiliarʼ, she makes an awful mistake by having the chorus sung by an uncredited male performer who sounds like Antony Hegarty (oh, sorry, Anohni) with a particularly sore throat, turning the song from something that was distinctly Agnes Obel into something else that is even more distinctly not. I know it's supposed to be a you-and-I duet and all, but in her own singing, even when it is hookless, she manages to avoid theatrical mannerisms and come across as a real human being — so why is she taking a walk to the summit at night with a guy who sounds as if he wouldn't really be interested in girls in the first place? Also, the music here is getting way too dangerously close to New Age values, even for my tastes.

 

Still, I cannot get truly angry at most of these songs. The title track, for instance, has something Eno-like about it in its soothing piano and vocal harmony ambience. ʽStoneʼ does the same with acoustic guitar (and actually adds a strange vocal hook, which always sounded like "stone canopy, stone canopy" to me until I learned that it was really the artist asking herself whether she can be of stone — do not worry, Frøken Obel, you are of stone, in way... or should that be fiberglass? Citizen Of Fiberglass, yes, that would be a good title).

 

Anyway, without going into too much detail on the rest of this stuff: she is still getting a good sound of all these instruments, and, technically, she remains an above-average composer, but the new twists and expansions do not change my base impression that she has already made her single most important statement, and that she is going to spend the rest of her life just bathing us in the somewhat shapeless beauty of her impressionistic approach. Which is nice and all, but as long as she is incapable of finding any particularly heart-tugging soundwave configurations, I do not find myself interested in trying to decode her enigmatic messages, or defining the types of persons to whom her sorrowful and subtle music would appeal the most. Perhaps she should try coming out of that bunker? Or at least, exchange it for a less soft-padded one?..

 

AKRON/FAMILY

AKRON/FAMILY (2005)

 

1) Before And Again; 2) Suchness; 3) Part Of Corey; 4) Italy; 5) I'll Be On The Water; 6) Running, Returning; 7) Afford; 8) Interlude: Ak Ak Was The Boat They Sailed In On; 9) Sorrow Boy; 10) Shoes; 11) Lumen; 12) How Do I Know; 13) Franny/You're Human.

 

When our distinguished ancestor, the caveman, first invented folk music, he must have been us­ing whatever objects were the nearest at hand in order to surround his singing with atmosphere. Rocks, sticks, reeds, animal bones, you name it: total freedom of expression. It is only thousands of years later that his distinguished descendant — let us call him «the farming settler» for a chal­lenge — decided to «codify» folk mu­sic and started progressively limiting it to a given set of spe­cially designed instruments that pro­duced similarly structured, regularized musical patterns. And, eventually, this self-limitation reached its apotheosis... somewhere around Greenwich Village.

 

Guess what: Akron/Family, a rag-taggy band stemming from various «rural» parts of the United States, are here to reverse the march of time. Like the caveman, they cherish the campfire; only their equivalent of rocks, sticks, and reeds is the laptop computer — nothing wrong with that, either; surely a caveman would have made pro­per use of its sonic capacities had he been lucky to have access to it as early as fifty thousand years ago. This band's aim, more or less, is to immerse us in that kind of situation.

 

Akron/Family are generally pigeonholed as «psych folk» or «freak folk», but neither of the two labels is sufficient, because, really, both merely mean «folk music that is not played according to common standards» or, more precisely, «folk music that makes Pete Seeger go for the axe». Cer­tainly they are nothing like, for instance, the Animal Collective — the latter are a form of psych­edelic electronic carnival with folk influences, whereas Akron/Family are far more engulfed in the old-school folk idiom, which they distort in subtler, lighter ways.

 

If anything, the major influences on this self-titled debut are the psych-folk veterans of the Sixties, such as the Fugs and, most importantly, The Incredible String Band. But Akron/Family intentio­nally drop the quasi-drunk braggard attitudes of those bands; their sounds, even though they may be equally strange, are more frequently cast in the somber, introspective mood of Nick Drake, so that many times over, you catch yourself thinking «wait a minute, didn't they just try to pick my heart with that deep-reaching bit of sound?» rather than «oh no, not another ugly-sounding caco­phonization of a perfectly fine folk tune to show that music's not dead!».

 

Which does not mean that the record does not have its fair share of ugliness. Every once in a whi­le, the penchant for chaos takes over the predilection for melody, and you get stuff like 'Part Of Corey', where it takes a hundred seconds of white noise and blank synth tones to get to a brief acoustic part, or 'Ak Ak', two and a half minutes of sea, seagull, and seaboat noises. Lead singer Seth Olinsky has a String Band-inherited tendency to sing off-key — obviously, he does this as an art form, but he is not even the pioneer in this department, so it is very hard for me to appreci­ate tunes like 'Running, Returning' either on the emotional or purely intellectual level.

 

However, once we choose to treat these parts as the standard «audience-alienating» gimmick (ima­gine the horror if a record like this started to sell! this is simply the band's common way to prevent this from ever happening), the «normal»-sounding parts eventually start pulling together in a pleasant atmosphere of folksy phlegmacy. 'Before And Again' opens things up with a pretty riff and a set of deep-set sighs that could trap you into expecting some stern Gothic delivery — but there is nothing of the sort. The album never ever slips into sappiness, but it is not «dark» and «doomy», either. The best songs rather aim at some sort of neo-buddhist peacefulness, with quiet, relaxed vocal deliveries, echoey steel guitars, and nature-based sound effects ('Afford').

 

Yes, but what about the laptops? Here comes the truly bizarre part: some of the songs are «em­bellished» with rather primitive bleeps, beeps, and ch-ponks that seem to have been borrowed out of the early days of PC speaker existence. More often than not, they simply seem to be there in order to lure the critics into pondering their importance. What is the deep meaning of the click sound on 'Afford'? Why is it so necessary for the high-pitched speaker tone to be there on 'Before And Again'? The correct answers are: «none» and «no reason», but, on the other hand, a couple hundred people may have profited from this chance to fill their empty lives with vigorous mental activity. And I have written a whole extra paragraph. And who, other than Akron/Family, has ever had a song out like 'Before And Again'? Nobody. End of story.

 

In any case, the only extra noise on my personal favorite tune here are the seagulls, and they fit in perfectly with the message: "If you have to stay / I'll be on the water / Catching the next wave /
You can meet me where it breaks" ('I'll Be On The Water'). This is just a traditionally-oriented, becalming, sympathetic, and merely a trifle cruel folk ballad, arranged for guitar and background electronic ambient soundscapes. And about a half of this album behaves the same way — and that is, of course, my favorite half. The other half — the white noise, the chaos, the off-key singing, the pseudo-party atmosphere on 'Italy' — ranges from amusing to annoying, but it is also possible that, against its background, the well-constructed phlegmatic ballads shine out ever stronger.

 

All in all, this is a strange experience; perhaps not nearly as innovative as it might pretend (what is innovative in 2005, really?), but ultimately moving. Surely there must have been something in the band if the mighty Michael Gira, of Swans / Angels Of Light fame, took them under his wing himself and signed them to his label (Young God Records) — not that the band sounds a bit like Swans, mind you; if you're looking for something nicely suicidal, this is definitely the wrong place. If you're not the suicidal type, though, join me in my thumbs up.

 

AKRON/FAMILY & ANGELS OF LIGHT (2005)

 

1) Awake; 2) Moment; 3) We All Will; 4) Future Myth; 5) Dylan Part II; 6) Oceanside; 7) Raising The Sparks; 8) I Pity The Poor Immigrant; 9) The Provider; 10) One For Hope; 11) Mother/Father; 12) Come For My Woman.

 

Technically, this is one of those «split albums» that usually get recorded out of cash deficit and, just as usually, pair two worthless artists in a desperate effort to multiply zero by zero and get a non­-zero result. This particular situation, however, is slightly different, because «Angels Of Light» is just a moniker for Michael Gira and whoever comes along to back him up on his next studio session. On this studio session, he happens to be backed up by members of Akron/Family, at the chronological peak of their symbiosis. So, all in all, this is a legitimate Akron/Family rele­ase, with the first seven songs representing «pure» Akron/Family and the last five representing Akron/Family playing five cover tunes — with Gira as special guest on vocals.

 

It does matter a lot to count it as legitimate, actually, since some of A/F's best material is to be found here. Stretching out in all directions and frequently bursting out of the solitude-embracing shell of their self-titled debut, the band finally shows that it may really be nice to have them hang­ing around — even though no one's still sure exactly why.

 

They certainly go out of their way to prove they are different. Admit it: not a lot of people would open a record with a song which is called 'Awake' — and which, during all of its running time, does its best to try and put you, the listener, to sound, healthy sleep with a sound, healthy, mono­tonous acoustic folk guitar line and sound, healthy, droning vocal harmonies. Only to wake you up, after all, with a crash-boom-bang as the second track, 'Moment', opens into a wall of free-form noise that may be intended to make Eric Dolphy crawl out of his grave.

 

Upon first listen, it is these bits of shock power that you will probably remember the most: the in­sanely prolonged "aaaaaah" chant on 'Moment', the ritualistic, out-of-control scream orgy on 'Ra­i­sing The Sparks', the massive mock-tragic buildup on 'Dylan Part II' (where is Part I, and what does this all have to do with Dylan anyway?). Later on, though, melodies start to emerge on the more quiet numbers, such as the minimalistic 'Oceanside' and the first, acoustic, half of the 'Dy­lan' thing. And in the final run, the expert will appreciate all the overdubs and psycho-layers of sound on the superficially blunt, straightforward folk romps ('Future Myth', which has enough stuff going on to warrant a dozen listens before one gets used to it).

 

The good news is, they are still being interesting, and they get better at it by throwing even more ingredients into the pot — if free-form atonal craziness is not enough for you, there is also shrill, hysterical prog-rock guitar soloing ('Dylan' again), ballsy (and catchy!) rock'n'roll-ifying of vil­lage dances ('Raising The Sparks'), and, just generally so, a complete lack of understanding where their train is going to stop in a few seconds from now. The bad news is — I still don't quite get it. Not only does this constant experimentation lack any explicit point, but all of its originality feels forced, and all of its non-originality feels... well, non-original.

 

In this respect, the Angels Of Light side of the story is actually better. Veteran guy Michael Gira used to be even crazier than any of these people while being a Swan, but his craziness seemed far more legitimate to me. And now he is not so much a crazy guy any longer as simply an intelligent human being who loves to... cover Bob Dylan: the band's rendition of 'I Pity The Poor Immigrant' is not only faithful to the original, it is also wonderfully well sung. The other four songs are dark folk originals, slow growers that make a simple, but lovably melancholic antithesis to Akron/Fa­mily's emotional canvas — more complex, perhaps, but also more prone to suspicions of fakeness. Twist it too tight, and people may lose interest in disentangling it.

 

Still, I view this as an improvement. The ugly off-key singing is gone, the diversity level has gone up, the band shows some teeth and muscle in their playing, proves that it is capable of crea­ting decent melodic hooks, and, overall, restores the reputation of «freak folk» as a musical move­ment that would really like to expand the limits of «folk» rather than just serve as a pretext for pretentious goofing. And in a couple dozen years from now, we might actually come to under­stand what these guys were about — after all, there are some people out there who give Trout Mask Replica a fair chance, too. Thumbs up, on lend-lease.

 

MEEK WARRIOR (2006)

 

1) Blessing Force; 2) Gone Beyond; 3) Meek Warrior; 4) No Space In This Realm; 5) The Lightning Bolt Of Com­pas­sion; 6) The Rider (Dolphin Song); 7) Love And Space.

 

Third time around and these guys still haven't properly explained the nature of their mission on this planet. However, the transition from second album to third is already less jarring than the one before that. By now we know fairly well that Akron/Family like folk music, free-form jazz, and psychedelic sounds, and that the combination of all three of these elements in unpredictable ways is what sets them apart from potential competition. So, Meek Warrior is the first record that we can safely call «generic Akron/Family» and view as a stabilization of sorts.

 

The record is a collaboration with jazz percussionist Hamid Drake, whose skill is supposedly much admired by the band, and this prompts them to rise to the instrumental and artistic chal­lenge: 'Blessing Force', opening the album, is a colorful nine-minute melange of everything that could ever matter, from wild tribal drumming to wilder tribal chanting to blues-rock jamming to raga to, finally, total chaos and more Dolphy-style catastrophic dissonance. Unfortunately, there is simply not enough motivation. The trick, as usual, is in how well and for what purpose these individual parts shift into one another — and if the «how well» part is nothing to fear about, the «for what purpose» part rests unanswered. Much the same applies to the record's second lengthy track as well ('The Rider').

 

Annoying and frustrating — behind all these gimmicks, all of the time, there hides a perfectly de­cent folk-rock outfit with potential, prowess, and feeling. They prefer to realize this potential through repetitive mantras, but when they are not being repetitive for the sake of shocking (e. g. a looped acappella chanting of "love and space, love and space"), these are good, sensitive mantras — 'Gone Beyond', which slowly and steadily does weave out a feeling of "going completely be­yond"; 'The Lightning Bolt Of Compassion', sung dreamily and romantically in a pseudo-lan­guage probably made up on the spot; 'Love And Space', almost insulting to the «typical A/F fan» in its gospel-folk straightforwardness, that is, until that silly acappella loop begins.

 

In fact, even if that would have technically been just another gimmick, not to mention adding a serious threat of dying from monotonosis, I would have preferred an entire album of such mantras instead of these alternations with dissonant jazz and tribal howling. Akron/Family seem to be at their best when they're quietly picking the acoustic and humming along, not when they're trying to show some muscle — «Meek Warriors» indeed; sure wish that title would have been more jus­tified. As it is, the album is uneven. A bunch of well-meaning, not-untalented lads caught up in the pointless progressive drives of the XXIst century. A sad, but avoidable, fate.

 

LOVE IS SIMPLE (2007)

 

1) Love, Love, Love (Everyone); 2) Ed Is A Portal; 3) Don't Be Afraid, You're Already Dead; 4) I've Got Some Friends; 5) Lake Song / New Ceremonial Music For Moms; 6) There's So Many Colours; 7) Crickets; 8) Phenomena; 9) Pony's O.G.; 10) Of All The Things; 11) Love, Love, Love (reprise).

 

One marvelous description of this album by a user on RateYourMusic stated that it sounds «like Wilco on speed playing guitar-based cover versions of Animal Collective songs» — so complete­ly up to the point that I find it hard to add anything worth adding. But let us at least try to put it in the context of Akron/Family's previous releases. Maturity? Development? Stagnation? Identity crisis? Artistic breakthrough? Where's that curve heading to?

 

I am not going to say that we are finally beginning to see the light; but there are some welcome signs on this album that make it, if not more accessible, then at least a bit more understandable than its predecessors. For the first time, Akron/Family seem to be getting a wee bit bored with ex­perimentation for experimentation's sake, and seek to adapt their weirdness to one of many avai­lable musical/artistic philosophies. With all of their influences still influencing, no wonder the chosen model of action is the one that demands to get together and love one another right now. The fact that all of its components are filtered through Akron's madness is insignificant in compa­rison. The good news is, we are finally getting somewhere.

 

The first minute and a half, which the band spends normally playing their acoustic and electric guitars and normally singing about how "every precious human being's been a precious parent to you... what can be done? what can we do? go out and love everyone", truly sets a Crosby, Stills & Nash-like framework for the rest. All right, so the very next song is called 'Ed Is A Portal', and consists of several meandering sections that incorporate folksy banjo drones, tribal chants, psycho jangles, and echo-drenched neo-Californian vocal stylizations, so you can see not that much has really changed. But 'Love, Love, Love' has given us a vector, and in this light, everything feels a bit different.

 

The lyrics to 'Ed Is A Portal' seem like schizophrenic pseudo-scientific babble, but the guys simply try to bring together all the loose ways of human existence, from the primordially primi­tive (hence all the campfire shamanisms) to the hallucinative to those based on (at least, superfi­cially) more rational approaches to the space and time continuum theories. On 'Phenomena', one of the album's few fully-fleshed out folk-rock songs, they explain what they mean: "Things are not what they seem to be — nor are they otherwise". Another stylistically varied suite begins with a minute-and-a-half long acappella chanting of "There's so many colours — without the dirty windows". C'mon people, all those clues and we're still not getting this band?

 

It's not like their sudden urge to become more friendly, cuddly, and transparent automatically makes Love Is Simple into a masterpiece. Songs like 'Crickets' and 'Phenomena' still only ma­nage to be «pretty» rather than «gorgeous» (for all the aptness of the quoted description, they still have a long way to go to reach the melodic sensitivity of Jeff Tweedy), and each of the long meande­ring chants / ragas / ambient improvs / madhouse celebrations, on its own, has just about the same overwhelming potential as their earlier attempts. It's just that now, armed with a master­plan, the good bits seem better than similarly good bits used to sound before. You can even allow yourself to wonder at the meaning of the line "Don't be afraid, you're already dead" in the context of "Don't be afraid, it's only love — love is simple".

 

In short, John Lennon circa 1967 would probably have loved this stuff, much of which manages to pay tribute to 'All You Need Is Love' and 'I Am The Walrus' at the exact same time. It does not so much entertain as stimulate, of course, but it is arguably the first time that Akron/Family try to assault us on the heart front in addition to the mind — rather crudely hinted at by the organ's jui­cy depiction on the album sleeve. Correspondingly, it is the first time that my heart agrees, if still a bit reulctantly, to join in the thumbs up ritual together with the mind. Love Is Simple may be anything but truly simple, but, at the very least, it is now seductive.

 

SET 'EM WILD, SET 'EM FREE (2009)

 

1) Everyone Is Guilty; 2) River; 3) Creatures; 4) The Alps & Their Orange Evergreen; 5) Set 'Em Free Pt. 1; 6) Gravelly Mountains Of The Moon; 7) Many Ghosts; 8) MBF; 9) They Will Appear; 10) Sun Will Shine; 11) Last Year.

 

Lead vocalist Ryan Vanderhoof quit Akron/Family soon after the release of Love Is Simple, lea­ving the rest of the band as a trio. Solution? Why, simple: just hire a supporting team of nine extra studio musicians — and release your biggest-sounding album up to date!

 

Of course, saying that Akron/Family are trying to «branch out» on this record sounds odd, as if there ever was a time when these guys were content to strictly adhere to one rigid formula. And yet, branching out they surely are... again. If Love Is Simple took its cues from The Beta Band and The Animal Collective, this time they seem to be digging deeper, soaking in influences from the classic prog-rock scene(s): Yes, King Crimson, and particularly the Canterbury acts. In fact, already the opening track, 'Everyone Is Guilty', jumps in with the jazzy feel of a 'Roundabout', moves through a hard-rocking section technically worthy of a 'Red', and has just about the same number of signature changes per minute as yer average National Health composition.

 

But leave it to Akron/Family to stun the listener and make already the second track sound like it belonged on a kiddie album by They Might Be Giants — a bouncy, catchy, and supremely nerdy at­tempt at crossing liberal college student with sentimental hillbilly ('River'); a song that, certain­ly, neither Yes nor King Crimson nor any Canterbury-related musician would ever think of wri­ting — except, perhaps, as a lame one-time joke. Akron/Family, however, are not joking, or at least one never knows where the joke starts and where it ends.

 

Still, Set 'Em Wild, as far as it seems to me, hits the target further away from its center than Love Is Simple did. On that record, the balance between wildness, boldness, and tenderness was just about right. Here, they gravitate away from the sentimental hippie attitudes. Dug deep into the middle of the record are songs like 'Set 'Em Free Pt. 1' and 'The Alps & Their Orange Ever­green', lovely hippie-folk ballads with nothing particularly «freakish» about them; and the album ends with the big and moving anthemics of 'Sun Will Shine', very impressive until the final car­nival noise section needlessly cuts in to deflate the atmosphere.

 

But the rest, once again, reverts us to the art of dicking around with no particular place to go. Heaps of free-form noise on 'Gravelly Mountains Of The Moon', wild industrial screaming on 'MBF', sort of a New Wave-influenced folk-jazz thang on 'Creatures', replete with tricky progra­mming of the drum machine — I fail to see how exactly these performances tie in with the more «heartfelt» parts of the album. And even per se, they are not all that interesting. So much weird­ness for weirdness' sake, from all periods, epochs, and genres has already been synthesized, and Akron/Family still haven't found a proper way to make a new kind of weirdness, all their own.

 

As a result, I probably like this record for all the wrong reasons: the band's new portfolio of in­terests should be Set 'Em Wild's major selling point, but its best songs are still the ones that could easily have been written for their self-titled debut. Misguided Moment No. 1: 'Last Year', on which the band, simulating inspiration and determination, chants "Last year was a hard year for such a long time, this year's gonna be ours" against some minimal piano backing. I know they are just trying to cheer themselves up after the loss of a key member, but it is hard to get rid of the feeling that with Love Is Simple, they pulled themselves up by the hair as high as possible, and now it is really back-to-the-swamp time.

 

S/T II: THE COSMIC BIRTH AND JOURNEY OF SHINJU (2011)

 

1) Silly Bears; 2) Island; 3) A AAA O A WAY; 4) So It Goes; 5) Another Sky; 6) Light Emerges; 7) Cast A Net; 8) Tatsuya Neon Purple Walkby; 9) Fuji I; 10) Say What You Want To; 11) Fuji II; 12) Canopy; 13) Creator.

 

Okay, this is no longer tolerable. According to hearsay, this album, in its entirety, was composed near a live volcano in a cabin on Hokkaido (see front cover). Apparently the next attempt to re­vitalize and revolutionize modern music will consist of composing and arranging an entire album while suspended on a cable from a helicopter circumflying a New Guinean jungle valley. This is the kind of approach that is bound to breed 21st century Mozarts and McCartneys.

 

Amazing feeling — it is not as if the Akron/Family approach here has changed much, yet I sense more irritation brewed by this record than by all of their previous catalog put together. Doubtless, chronology is part of the reason behind this feel. For a debut album from a freshly strung experi­mental band, S/T II would have been a respectable promenade — show off one's chops, eclecti­city and open-mindedness. For a band that, after groping in the dark for several years, had some­how begun to finally justify its existence, it is a total disaster.

 

What does it all sound and seem like, this time? Imagine The Animal Collective, only without their unique electronic kaleidoscope and without their — honestly amazing — ability to create otherworldly vocal harmony waves. But with their, often pointless, mix of lazy folk vibes with tribal droning, avantgarde dissonance, and nonsensical lyrics. Now hang on; I am not saying that this is the first time ever that we are getting this stuff from A/F. But even on their least interesting records, they used to at least balance the pointless stuff with pure, unspoiled moments of beauty. I never liked Meek Warrior, but it had 'Gone Beyond' on it, reminding me of the fact that there were real people with actual human hearts out there, and one could, with relative ease, try and es­tablish a wi-fi link to them. S/T II is a closed network in itself.

 

There is plenty of energy. 'Silly Bears' jump around like crazy to a life-asserting buzz of electro­nic equipment and choral vocals, and 'Another Sky' scatters neo-psychedelic happiness all over the place. But already Seth Olinsky's quiet mumbling into his sweater undermines all the joy, and, what's worse, not a single of these sonic overlays strikes any soul chords — everything is too ste­rile, too stuffy, too over-thought and over-calculated.

 

And what once used to be prettiness has mutated into by-the-book minimalism with zero impact,  e. g. the concluding duo of 'Canopy' and 'Creator', on which introspective acoustic, angelic slide and tender, fragile singing try to combine in heavenly beauty and end up sounding like a lame pa­rody on The Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin, masterminded by a bunch of robots. I don't know — was Ryan Vanderhoof really the heart and soul of this band, confined to making this plastic kind of sound from now on, or is it simply a case of inhaling too much volcanic ash, with subsequent clogging of one's spiritual channels? Regardless of the answer — a vicious thumbs down to the most technically complex and the most excruciatingly boring Akron/Family album as of yet.

 

 

SUB VERSES (2013)

 

1) No-Room; 2) Way Up; 3) Until The Morning; 4) Sand Talk; 5) Sometimes I; 6) Holy Boredom; 7) Sand Time; 8) Whole World Is Watching; 9) When I Was Young; 10) Samurai.

 

All right, who called for another order of Animal Collective? On their sixth LP, Akron/Family step away from some of their wildest, most experimental maneuvres, and record a set of songs that would probably sound best next to an Ewokan campfire. Not that Sub Verses aren't wild and experimental — but the album seems to have more discipline, and behave in a more predictable manner than its predecessor. Nor was it recorded in a cabin on Hokkaido: the band moved to Seattle and El Paso for the sessions, which must have produced a healthy effect on their overall sense of reality.

 

As usual, the band has been praised for its diversity — the songs, in typical Akron/Family fashion, cover plenty of rootsy, artsy, and psycho ground, yet the record does not have a diverse feel, be­cause, by now, we know what a stereotypical Akron/Family treatment is: heavy tribal percussion, instrumental loops, and choral harmony chanting characterize almost all of these songs, be they «bluesy», «folksy», or «baroque» in essence. This time around, however, the shamanistic ritual that they practice seems to have been thought and carried out with more precision and, dare I say it, a larger sense of purpose than usual.

 

ʽNo-Roomʼ opens the proceedings with an almost math-rock arrangement of busy drum fills and guitar flourishes, while the vocals chant gruff quasi-Tibetan mantras about the difficulties of see­ing and breathing. The song's roll is a bit monotonous, but it actually helps that not as much is going on at the same time as is these guys' usual penchant; this is still not enough to convince the skeptic of any «serious intentions» that the song might have, but at least this makes it «quirky» rather than «confusing». The gloomy accappella part with the "we held on fast, we held on strong" vocals is, in fact, a bit shivery, an excellent achievement considering how rarely these guys manage to stir up a genuine emotional response.

 

Next comes ʽWay Upʼ — with its dialog between percussion explosions and vocal outbursts pseudo-randomly popping up from different channels, this song probably the Animal Collective rip-off on this album, but Akron/Family come from a different background: they are a rock band, after all, and their wil­ling­ness to learn from their furry electronic brothers does not go all the way — the sounds of these tribal campfire anthems are, on the whole, crunchier than those of AC.

 

Next comes everything else: as usual, Akron/Family care little about catchiness (although there are so many looped choruses here that, by and large, something is bound to catch on), but the real reason why individual songs are not worth individual commentary is that they are all part of the same lengthy ritual, and each separate part of it, taken on its own, is meaningless outside of the general context. Towards the end, they seem to get a little more sentimental on tracks like ʽWhen I Was Youngʼ and ʽSamuraiʼ (even a little nostalgic, I'd say), but that, too, sort of feels like a natural conclusion of the ritual after the «heavy» parts.

 

And some of the parts, mind you, are quite heavy — ʽSand Talkʼ, ʽSand Timeʼ, and particularly ʽHoly Boredomʼ are often drowned in deep fuzz and flattened out with percussive sledgehammers. The heaviness itself is nothing new for Akron/Family at this time, but it does not seem gratuitous­ly arbitrary (like the heavy riffage on ʽSo It Goesʼ from the preceding album) — it just highlights the energy-demanding parts of the campfire ritual.

 

None of what I have just said means that this is a «good album». Like most of the Akron/Family records, I do not properly «get» it — nothing will ever resolve this band's problem with sounding natural, not to mention «relevant» in any way. But somehow, this time around they really arran­ged their ingredients in a way that can be intriguing and stimulating for whoever needs a little extra intrigue and stimulation these days. I'd like to say that ʽHoly Boredomʼ is a good title to describe the entire album, but in reality, it's more like ʽUnholy Non-Boredomʼ — a focused, con­centrated effort to make spirits ride that ends up a fascinating misfire, where their Hokkaido ex­perience was just a pretentious mess of a misfire. At least, such is my initial impression: watch me return to this record in about three hundred years, and change this opinion.

ALABAMA SHAKES

BOYS & GIRLS (2012)

 

1) Hold On; 2) I Found You; 3) Hang Loose; 4) Rise To The Sun; 5) You Ain't Alone; 6) Goin' To The Party; 7) Heartbreaker; 8) Boys & Girls; 9) Be Mine; 10) I Ain't The Same; 11) On Your Way; 12*) Heavy Chevy.

 

I am not sure of how «band-like» the Alabama Shakes really are. There is no doubting the com­petence (if not virtuosity) of bass player Zac Cockrell, drummer Steve Johnson, and guitarist Heath Fogg, but nobody doubts that the band is primarily the brainchild of Brittany Howard, who writes the songs, sings them, plays rhythm and occasionally lead guitar, and determines just about everything that makes the band worthy of our attention. (Yet another reason here for all the com­parisons with Janis Joplin, who, too, spent the most significant years of her career hiding behind the shoulders of «Big Brother»).

 

That said, unlike «Big Brother & The Holding Co.», «Alabama Shakes» makes far more sense. «The Shakes», which was the band's original name, obeys the same retro-vibe that, a decade earlier, gave us the Strokes, the Vines, and the Hives, but comes closer to symbolizing the band's musical essence — they are rather shakey, come to think of it; and «Alabama», added later in order to give them some extra differentiation, is even more symbolic. Few places get less hip these days (or any days, for that matter) than the state of Alabama, and this only adds extra spice to the game — blatantly advertising your totally unhip roots in the process of becoming one of the most hip things on the scene.

 

The actual music written and arranged by the Shakes is no great shakes, pardon the pun. It is the kind of a mix of heavy-handed roots-rock and R&B that you are likely to encounter on dozens, if not hundreds, of albums released in between 1968 and, say, 1972-73 by various «B-level» Ame­rican and, occasionally, British acts that embraced the roots-rock revolution. Individual songs are based on chord sequences and guitar tones that remind one of everybody from the aforemen­tio­ned Big Brother to Van Morrison to Creedence (at one point, I almost took the melody of ʽHold Onʼ to be a decon­structed version of ʽDown On The Cornerʼ) to, say, Stone The Crows, or Affinity, or other such bands fronted by loudmouthed females (or, sometimes, loudmouthed males). Revival of that stylistics in the early 2010s is not at all surprising — considering that just about everything else from the same years has already been revived — but it would take some really strong musical personalities to make it in any way interesting.

 

Fortunately, Brittany Howard is that personality. Onstage, like the state of Alabama, she looks so decidedly unhip that, through shifting opposites, this makes her hipper than the hipsterest hipster. Slightly clumsy, dressed in grandma's gown, looking like a provincial primary school teacher, she cannot even begin to aspire to any of the «glamor» that is still required, at least in a modest amount, from modern critically loved R&B stars like Adele or the late Amy Winehouse. She al­most looks like she got on that stage through some technical managereal mistake. But I do hereby acknowledge that she is the real thing. Where Amy had her soul focused on decadence and self-destruction, and Adele has hers focused on heaven, this dame is all about «salt of the earth», and goes all the way down to the very tips of those roots.

 

The lead single, ʽHold Onʼ, is by definition the best song on this relatively short debut album (its shortness, by the way, works very much to its benefit, since the band's sound is ultimately quite monotonous). Brittany's "didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old" line does not ring very true — despite all the comparisons with Janis, she certainly does not share her self-destructive life philo­sophy, and would be a complete idiot if she did — but we probably should not be taking it too literally: the overall message is one of making your life worth the while despite all odds (such as being born and reared in Athens, Alabama?), and it is perfectly symbolized by her drawing out the "hooooooooooold on" chorus in several different inflections, or by the way she belts out "I don't wanna WAIT!" to the power chord crash in the bridge section.

 

Out of political correctness, perhaps, Brittany's mixed heritage (half-black, half-white) is rarely, if ever, brought up in Alabama Shakes discussions, but it definitely matters, because, curious as it is, she does sound almost exactly midway in between the traditional gospel-soul belter à la Aretha or Tina Turner, from whom she gets the power and «spiritual freedom» aspects, and the more intro­spective, fine-nuanced white singer-songwriter of the Carole King variety. The generalization is a bit rough / broad, perhaps, but it is important to get the idea — Brittany's voice and the way she uses it are special (if they aren't, there's no point in listening to the band in the first place). So the first thing everybody notices on this less-than-model-quality girl is the awesome set of pipes — then, after a while, it also makes sense to notice how she modulates it to convey such a wide va­riety of emotions.

 

The funny thing is that many of these emotions seem thoroughly antiquated by today's standards — but that's the very charm of it. Naturally, I am not implying that they have not heard of any significant musical and cultural developments in the last forty years in the state of Alabama — that would be taking the stereotypical condescendence a bit too far — yet it is hardly a coinci­dence, after all, that Boys & Girls, an album that does make me feel like no other record that these forty years never really took place, ultimately stems from somewhere near the Muscle Shoals headquarters. (The actual recording sessions, as it turns out, happened somewhere in Nashville... but that ain't too far, and besides, there is nothing even remotely Nashvillian about the album's sound, especially since the band did not rely on session players).

 

In terms of individual highlights, Boys & Girls is hard to discuss. All of its music is heavily de­rivative, and the band is probably at its least interesting when it falls back on the generic Fifties' progression and Brittany starts channelling the spirit of Otis (ʽYou Ain't Aloneʼ; title track). They are far more exciting when they start to rock out (ʽHang Looseʼ; the ecstatic bonus track ʽHeavy Chevyʼ), or when they establish a happy, life-asserting Motownish groove (ʽRise To The Sunʼ), or when things quiet down to a slow, hushed dialog of a jazzy rhythm guitar with an echoey surf lead (ʽGoin' To A Partyʼ, which sounds nothing like its actual title).

 

There are, indeed, some curious bits of musical synthesis happening every now and then, and some funny Southern-legacy incidents that one is bound to recognize (for instance, at the climac­tic musical crescendo end of ʽOn Your Wayʼ, when the heated-up lead guitarist breaks into the speed solo of Skynyrd's ʽFreebirdʼ for a few bars). But the biggest musical merit of Boys & Girls is not in individual musical ideas. It works as the promised land for those of us who thought it was no longer technically possible to revive the styles and ideals of roots-rock's Golden Age without slipping into technical boredom or, worse, suffering from utter phoneyniness. Boys & Girls may not be a masterpiece — in fact, even the most enthusiastic supporters of the band should not delude themselves with bright visions of an even grander future for Brittany Howard — but it is definitely not boring and, most importantly, not phoney. How the hell they manage to uphold and promote that vintage old-time «earthiness» without coming across as cheap third-rate imitators, loaded with trivial clichés, is not a question that can be easily answered. And any re­cord that poses questions that cannot be easily answered deserves a thumbs up almost by defini­tion. The songs may not be all that great, but the vibe, man — don't miss that vibe, particularly if you happen to be in your teens and think it way below your dignity to listen to your parents' record collections.

 

SOUND & COLOR (2015)

 

1) Sound & Color; 2) Don't Wanna Fight; 3) Dunes; 4) Future People; 5) Gimme All Your Love; 6) This Feeling; 7) Guess Who; 8) The Greatest; 9) Shoegaze; 10) Miss You; 11) Gemini; 12) Over My Head.

 

On their second album, the Alabama Shakes seem to find themselves facing a choice — cast the net wider or drill deeper? (The option of «staying exactly the same» probably not being regarded seriously by anyone). While some reviewers have allegedly implied that they went for the former, I would rather say that they went for the latter. The record sounds differently from Boys & Girls, for sure, but not because they have seriously embraced any new styles — more because Brittany Howard seems more self-assured than ever, and has seriously prepared herself to embrace the regular responsibilities of «Soul Mama #1».

 

I mean, look at the lady — she's big, decidedly unglamorous, wears grandmother's dresses, and seems ready to crash the party at will (like they did in 2013 with a terrific cover of ʽAdam Raised A Cainʼ at the MusiCares tribute to the Boss — blowing most of the others off the stage, not the least due to their choice of the darkest-dreariest song in the man's catalog). She plays «grand­mother's music», too, even if it cannot help reflecting the spirit of the indie-rock era, and that sure ain't gonna help her none in the era of Taylor Swift's crossover. She does look, though, like the kind of person who takes those «Be Yourself!» slogans seriously — not in the usual sense of «Be like any of our leading brands of the day that we have laid out for you!», but literally. And the good news is — she still has talent to burn, too.

 

Subsequently, Sound & Color is filled with slow, bluesy tunes, often creating the illusion of depth with chiming, reverberating keyboards, loud bass, and echoey vocals — arranged in such a way that the emphasis is almost always on call-and-response interplay. Yes, we are intentionally entering this «deep soul» territory, as if Boys & Girls were this innocent brand of Southern rock played on your front porch, and now we are moving into a church hall — or, at least, into a sub­terranean cave, since much of the album does sound as if it were recorded in one. But «deep soul» requires a perfect balance between brawn and subtlety, since it is more character-based than hook-based, and the question is... well, you know.

 

If you want to know whether you need to bother at all, check out the fourth track, ʽFuture Peopleʼ. Opening with a brash, heavily syncopated funky riff, it paves the road to what might be the single most soulful delivery I have heard in a long time — the way she starts out shirll and high, gradu­ally falling down to lower octaves and then rebounding back at the end of the verse (without resorting to melismatics or anything) is just piercing to the skin. Some might find it annoying, of course, but let them go back to their Beyoncés and Rihannas: this is the real deal, and it's got some pretty decent lyrics to go along with as well, though nothing particularly special in that de­partment — it's just cool that a «futuristic anthem» should be delivered this way, with a howl that you'd think more suitable for a gospel-drenched ceremony at a funeral.

 

The first single from the album was ʽGimme All Your Loveʼ, melodically recognizable as.. well, as something that could have potentially been recorded by Otis Redding, although slightly Led Zeppelin-ized (big drums and heavy power chords included in spots), but again, it is Howard's «from-a-whisper-to-a-scream» vocals that take the place of melodic hooks, and she does sound like she means it at both ends. The second single was ʽDon't Wanna Fightʼ, which is not an anti-war song but might as well be one, what with the ambiguous nature of the lyrics — no, really, it is more of a lament over having to constantly battle for territory with her other one, with a repeti­tive falsetto chorus that does not bring on disco associations, because it's more like paranoid hys­terical falsetto than tender loving falsetto.

 

Sometimes they still let their hair down — ʽThe Greatestʼ sounds more like the Velvet Under­ground (ʽWaiting For The Manʼ, to be precise) than Otis, with a fast, churning, dirty garage sound and lots of hooliganish overdubs; and ʽShoegazeʼ is titled ʽShoegazeʼ, even though it has little to do with real shoegaze, but it is a power pop offering that tends to veer off into twin guitar drone territory from time to time. These two tracks, lodged as they are close to each other, turn the album towards loud, upbeat rock'n'roll territory for a while, but they are exceptions, two brief dynamic explosions in an album that should rather be listened to under torchlight.

 

Like I said, though, they are a modern band. Few people in the era of classic deep soul would have dreamed, after one of the songs has slowly, stately, gracefully, and somewhat mysteriously strolled over your living room for four minutes, to introduce a guitar solo that would constitute of little other than howling feedback, bleeding over your carpet for over a minute. Well, maybe Big Brother & Holding Company could, since their lead guitarists were poorly trained punks and had to compensate for lack of training with a lot of noise (and what a great noise that could be, too): but Howard and Heath Fogg are certainly doing that out of conceptual reasons. (That said, I could stand the presence of a few regular guitar solos every now and then — apparently, they're not big fans of those, both because the soul/R'n'B tradition was not that hot on them, either, and because guitar solos are out of fashion these days as well. Ah well, never mind).

 

So, am I saying that Sound & Color is a great collection of songs? Nope. Without Howard's presence, most of these songs would be just old-fashioned vamps. With her presence, though, it gives us one more glimpse at a genuinely lovable character. Maybe they could write «better songs», but they seem to be afraid to do it at the expense of losing that ol' feeling, which they express so well through her alterations of powerhouse / arch-subtle vocals and through their jagged, broken-up, bleeding tune structures. And that's perfectly okay by me — in fact, I certainly was not expecting this particular direction, believing that they would either stagnate (49.5% pro­bability) or commercialize (another 49.5%). However, they chose the thin remaining path be­tween the two obvious roads, and preferred to become only what might be the leading soul band in today's music. Not bad, I'd say — certainly deserving of a thumbs up.

 

 

ALCEST

SOUVENIRS D'UN AUTRE MONDE (2007)

 

1) Printemps Emeraude; 2) Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde; 3) Les Iris; 4) Ciel Errant; 5) Sur L'Autre Rive Je T'At­ten­drai; 6) Tir Nan Og.

 

From an «everyday basis» point of view, the only shoegazing band the regular Joe really needs to hear, if only to understand what all the fuss is really about, is probably My Bloody Valentine. But even the most limited formula in the world can always opt for some freshness and individuality if you succeed in coming up with the right extra ingredients. And particularly in the 21st century, where we constantly suffer from lack of freshness, this odd need for «synthesizing the unsynthe­sizable» has revived pretty much every musical genre and sub-direction ever thought of by man, woman, quadrupede, or mineral — shoegazing included.

 

«Alcest», essentially a one-man project by French musician Stéphane Paut, better known un­der the code name «Neige» («Snow»), has its roots neither in pop nor in psychedelia, but in black metal: Neige's pedigree begins with Peste Noire, a leading French black metal outfit heavily in­fluenced by the likes of Cannibal Corpse — their discography includes such telling titles as Aryan Supremacy (an early demo where Neige was still playing drums rather than guitar) and Folkfuck Folie, among other things. If this worries you, do not be worried as far as Alcest is concerned: Neige has gone on record stating that, for him, his career in Peste Noire merely satis­fied an «urge of animal and primitive regression», and we all have our demons to exorcise.

 

Neige's black metal history does somehow influence his shaping of Alcest — no wonder this style of music is sometimes called «blackgazing» — but there is nothing particularly ugly, vile, racist, or shock-oriented about that influence. The blackness, created by the distortion and feed­back of the rhythm guitar, is only there to provide an important counterpoint for the «shoegazing» lead parts, which, on their part, are always set up in «melancholic beauty» mode. The sound is therefore reminiscent, at the same time, of such contemporaries as And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (although those guys are far more noisy and «rock»-oriented) and Agalloch (although those guys always hunt for a doom-laden effect, which is not the purpose of Alcest).

 

But Neige has one more card up his sleeve — the vocal parts, usually handled by himself, but occa­sionally by Audrey Silvain, his partner in his third project, Amesoeurs. And this is where the Frenchness comes through: strip away the thick distorted guitars, replace the shoegazing drone with some light jazz muzak, and you will have yourself a sentimental / melancholic / atmospheric French intelli-pop record circa the mid-Seventies or so. The effect that this particular synthesis has on the feelings may not, in fact, probably will not be immediate, but eventually, it does let itself be known — the triple combination of «earthiness» (black distorted fire), «transcendence» (shoegazing trills and drones), and «lonesome beauty» (distant, echoey vocal parts that always seem to be coming from somewhere under the ground) makes for some tasty escapism.

 

Alcest's stated musical philosophy is that he does not create, but re-creates the sonic and visual images of a Fairy Land that he claims to have come in contact with in his childhood (and I do not necessarily disbelieve him — it all depends on what exact kinds of fairy tales he might have read instead of doing his sums and playing football in the yard). Naturally, the musical invention of ano­ther world is not his personal know-how — from Sgt. Pepper to Amon Düül II to Cocteau Twins and whoever else, people in pop music have been doing that ever since pop music became an art. But Neige makes an explicit point of it: the album title is literally translated from French as Memories Of Another World, and, if anything, it lets you know that this is not just some sort of unpredictable experiment, but that the man really knows what it is that he is doing.

 

That world of his is not particularly diverse. The music may get softer or louder, switch from acoustic to electric and back, shift between male and female vocals, or even show some mild Cel­tic influence in ʽTir Nan Ogʼ, but the mood on all the six tracks is essentially the same. The lead parts conjure sadness, the vocals conjure elfishness, and the rhythm compensates for the elfish­ness with earthy heaviness (although, contrary to some reviews, there is nothing truly dark, sinis­ter, or threatening about any of these compositions). I do, however, wish that there were more of those pretty acoustic folksy interludes — the patterns that Neige plays are anything but complex, but each of these repetitive acoustic tapestries that he weaves is generally more memorable than the metal/shoegaze duets, which can get way too samey even with lowered expectations.

 

The repetitiveness itself is not a problem, though: the title track states that "d'où je viens le temps n'existe pas, les secondes deviennent des heures" ("where I come from time does not exist, se­conds become hours"), and the whole point of the album, indeed, is to make you lose track of the time — including subtle variations on previously played themes that make you wonder if you have not accidentally pressed the rewind button. The key thing here is that if, for you, at least fifteen or twenty seconds of this album work fine, the whole album will work fine, since its pri­mary purpose is to put you in a specific trance-like frame of mind. If you are well experienced, however, in the art of shoegazing, the trick may not work, and then you will probably be able to take no more than the aforementioned twenty seconds of it, in toto.

 

Of course, even being fond of Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde does not equal finding it a truly «magic» experience: Neige, to me, is less of a genius than a master craftsman, painstakingly learning his trade so as to be able to express his childhood dreams, much like a master pilot is diligently working on perfecting his skills so as to be able to do that fabulous loop he imagined himself doing when he was six years old. But as a first significant attempt at catching that dream, it is highly impressive — especially if you keep in mind that this is a one-man band project, with Neige himself responsible for most of the overdubs. Therefore, a certified thumbs up here, even if I cannot claim to have ever been to the same place as Neige in my own childhood. (For that matter, I'm more of an ʽI Am The Walrusʼ type of guy, myself...)

 

ECAILLES DE LUNE (2010)

 

1) Ecailles De Lune (Pt. 1); 2) Ecailles De Lune (pt. 2); 3) Percées De Lumière; 4) Abysses; 5) Solar Song; 6) Sur L'Océan Couleur De Fer.

 

On their second album, Alcest are almost a band: Neige is still credited for most of the work, but there is also a separate drummer (going under the name of «Winterhalter», which, I would say, is a rather gross intrusion of the Germanic element into Alcest's French conceptualism), and multi-instrumentalist Fursy Teyssier also contributes a brief atmospheric interlude (ʽAbyssesʼ) that mainly consists of the heaves and ho's of a huge electronic bellows, but still provides some merry company to Neige's soliloquy existence.

 

But none of this really matters if you are not into that whole trivia-seeking enterprise, because in general, Ecailles De Lune (Scales Of The Moon for those unfamiliar with Anglo-Nor­man) is not at all different from its predecessor. Actually, I would say that it is a little worse. Worried, per­haps, that his black metal roots were altogether neglected and eclipsed by the melancholia and sentimentalism of Souvenirs, Neige now takes steps to ensure that the sound be a tad heavier and gruffer, even going as far as to use growling vocals on a couple of the tracks — and in the pro­cess, something important is lost.

 

The two-part, 18-minute-long title suite that opens the album should suffice to illustrate that point. It works at the intersection of two guitar tones — a ringing, echoey, «lunar» tone for melancholia and psychedelia, and a noisy, distorted, «earthy» tone for martiality and aggression — and two vocal styles (clean / romantic in the first part, growling / apocalyptic in the second). By shifting around the dominance of one tone / style over the other, and by alternating loud and quiet parts, Neige gives the whole thing some dynamics and development. But the actual musical themes are not very interesting, and the vocal melodies are unmemorable — and overall, the impression of being transplanted into an «autre monde», this time around, is not nearly as strong as when you first put on ʽPrintemps Emeraudeʼ. And I blame the superfluous «metallization» for that: there is only so much distance you can cover, speeding along the black metal trail, before your imagery ceases to be evocative and becomes, at best, boring, and at worst, self-parodic.

 

It gets better as we move along, though: ʽSolar Songʼ tones down the metal aspects in order to make way for an inspired vocal part that sounds, indeed, like some sort of ritualistic invocation of the supernatural — with the vocals themselves «felt» from behind the thick curtains of droning guitar overdubs rather than properly heard, which is only natural, since the layman is not suppo­sed to be let inside the Holy of Holies, right? But the best track is still the last one: ʽSur L'Océan Couleur De Ferʼ completely jettisons the metal element, being built almost entirely around one repetitive, plaintive guitar figure, to which Neige then adds layer after layer of extra acoustic rhythms, electric flourishes, synthesizers, faraway percussion bursts, and New Age vocalises. The lyrics, formally interpreted, speak of massive deaths in the ocean waves — Titanic? Lusitania? whatever — but the music is unnaturally calm and quiet for such a subject, more like a small-scale requiem mass rather than a direct depiction of some gruesome tragedy.

 

On the whole, this is not bad stuff, but it does seem as if Neige had mostly emptied his bag of subconscious reminiscences on the first Alcest album, and is now forcing himself to come up with new impressions on the spot — not exactly a «sophomore slump», because it is very hard to distinguish efficient from inefficient in the case of such static, atmospheric music; but still a rela­tive disappointment. Perhaps it could have been better, if more of the tracks were similar in form and spirit to the album's subtle, lamentative coda — then again, this would have rendered it even more monotonous than it is, so let us refrain from guesswork. In any case, what with so many artists today giving their best shot on their first album and then fizzling and fading away over the course of ten more, it would probably require a miracle for Alcest to best his own Souvenirs, so just lower your expectations and be done with it.

 

LES VOYAGES DE L'AME (2012)

 

1) Autre Temps; 2) Là Ou Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvelles; 3) Les Voyages De L'Ame; 4) Nous Sommes L'Eme­raude; 5) Beings Of Light; 6) Faiseurs De Mondes; 7) Havens; 8) Summer's Glory.

 

If we (or, at least, those of us who know either French or Google Translate) concentrate on the album and song titles long enough, the first and, for now, only three records of Alcest may seem like a trilogy: Fairy Tale, Space Journey, and now, with Les Voyages De L'Ame (Soul Journeys) comes Transcendental / Religious Experience. Naturally, this is but a subjective interpretation, but it helps — when it comes to tracing the subtle differences that justify Neige's productivity.

 

In a way, the third album takes a step back: compared with its immediate predecessor, it is notice­ably less «metal» in nature, with growling vocals making only a brief appearance in ʽFaiseurs Des Mondesʼ and heavy guitar tones used sparingly and almost always as a backdrop for light-ringing melodic passages. On the other hand, far more attention is paid to vocal arrangements — ʽBeings Of Lightʼ is almost completely wordless, and the focus is on New Age-style angelic choral harmonies; other songs generally tend to veer closer to the French pop-inspired melodicity of Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde. In other words, Neige has mellowed out once more, and the territory through which the composer's (or the listener's?) soul is supposed to journey seems pretty safe for it — light, bliss, beauty, the works.

 

At this point, one thing I'd like to specifically praise about the album is the drum work by the mys­terious «Winterhalter» (going by the real name of Jean Deflandre). Take my advice — if you happen to listen to this stuff and get bored after a while because of all the shoegazing repetition, switch your attention to the drummer guy for a bit, since he is really doing an amazing job out there: nothing particularly complex, but he goes way beyond simply keeping the beat, as you'd expect from an «ambient»-oriented record. There are all sorts of rolls, flips, tricky syncopes, build-ups and releases that do not really corrupt or sway the planned atmosphere, but make the whole experience more fun — the guy just happens to be one of those swell drummers, like Blon­die's Clem Burke, who refuses to conform to limitations of the formula and keeps inventing new and new figures out of his head. It is double fun on those rare occasions when Neige agrees to speed up the tempo, at least a little bit, like on the final section of ʽLà Ou Naissent Les Couleursʼ.

 

As for the melodies themselves, they present no surprises: once again, the craft is not so much in the base melodic figures (most of which show elegant geometric precision, but do not seem to carry a lot of emotional load) as in Neige's trademark crescendos, and he has not mastered any new tricks in that department — even the guitar tones mostly remain the same. ʽBeings Of Lightʼ is arguably the most atypical of these compositions, and even that one perfectly fits inside the for­mula. ʽSummer's Gloryʼ, respecting the title, is made to look like an unusually uplifting anthem, and its vocals owe the most to the old school French «mood song».

 

But albums like these are usually remembered by their longest tracks, and the longest track here, ʽLà Ou Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvellesʼ, consisting of a slower and faster part linked through some psychedelic jangle, is not particularly impressive, other than Winterhalter's terrific drum contributions, even if the fast section is, indeed, the closest that Alcest has ever approached to «rocking» (not that «rocking» was ever on the project's pre-planned agenda). This and similar tracks only further confirm that the Alcest formula cannot be improved upon, at least not by Neige himself. The guy is an admirable master of form, but unless he begins coming up with truly stunning musical phrases or steps away from the self-imposed «drone and repetition only» constraint, his fanbase is not likely to expand.

 

 

SHELTER (2014)

 

1) Wings; 2) Opale; 3) La Nuit Marche Avec Moi; 4) Voix Sereine; 5) L'Eveil Des Muses; 6) Shelter; 7) Away; 8) Délivrance.

 

And now we finally know the truth: Neige's preoccupation with «black metal» was really but an accident, a result of an unlucky psychic derailment. It took the guy about ten years to sort that out, but he did manage to reconnect with his own true self at last: Shelter erases the last, already bare­ly visible traces of heavy music from Alcest's palette, and replaces them with heavenly lushness, as Neige and Winterhalter place themselves in the self-assured hands of Birgir Jón Birgisson, the producer of Sigur Rós — who, in his turn, teams them up with Amiina, the Icelandic chamber music / electronic ensemble, well known for working together with Sigur Rós on quite a few oc­casions. Well, if you think about it, it was probably bound to happen, sooner or later.

 

The decision was clearly a gamble, and it is not yet clear how much it cost Neige in terms of mass quantities of admiration — so far, I have read many an old fan's grumble on how the band lost its unique identity by sacrificing the «black» in favor of the «lush». Now, they say, all we have is an inferior, unnecessary, pale shadow of Sigur Rós, technically pretty, but boring and devoid of its own vision. Trying to progress and develop is all very fine, they say, but not at the expense of dissolving yourself in the ocean of imitation. This point of view is totally acceptable if you really thought that Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde was some sort of groundbreaking achievement, a fabulous milestone in the development of «blackgaze»; but if you just thought, «hmm, nice dark droning music, whatever», then it is not excluded that Shelter will please you more.

 

In any case, complaints of «selling out» are entirely missing the point, because, composition-wise, Shelter is as much a proper brainchild of Neige as everything else. Shimmery, jangly guitars in­stead of thick distorted tones and clean, pretty-melancholic vocals instead of deathly growling are simply a different kind of coating, and it's not even as if they weren't already in Neige's inventory from the very beginning, either. As for the strings of Amiina, they are mostly relegated to the background for ambience, so, in the end, it all still sounds more like old-school Alcest than clas­sic Sigur Rós, with Neige's guitar playing at the center of everything.

 

So let us just ask ourselves two consecutive questions, the only ones, in my opinion, that make sense in the context of an album like Shelter: (a) does Shelter work as enjoyable, tasteful back­ground music? and (b) does Shelter contain any moments or periods of «heavenly beauty» that would rise it above the status of background music?

 

The first question I answer in the positive, and, in fact, with the jarring «black» moments out of the picture, Shelter is unquestionably the finest «background muzak» album to come from Alcest so far. Some of the songs feature subtle dynamic build-ups (most notably the huge ten-minute grand-finale track), but they are so subtle indeed that they probably won't be able to rip you out of the process of doing whatever you're doing while listening to it. On the other hand, the general mix of the thing, where the guitars usually sound like they are lightly wobbling in space, the strings hover behind them like perfectly normal particle vibrations, and Neige is trying to mes­merize you with the latest in French lullaby craft, is a perfect soundtrack for doing something... like, oh I dunno, writing this here review, for instance.

 

The second question is trickier. It does not seem to me as if Neige were stringing together chords that weren't already well explored previously — but there are some individual moments that are sufficiently simple, yet at the same time quite deep-reaching. I am speaking particularly of the second half of ʽVoix Sereineʼ (a series of three-chord "nah nah nah"'s that gradually blossoms into an ecstatic merry-go-round); of the delay/echo effect on the guitar strings in ʽL'Eveil Des Musesʼ, which does evoke a bit of a «muse-centered» feeling; and the huge finale of ʽDelivranceʼ, whose build-up is sufficiently grand to stir up the soul... I think.

 

Still, «I think» is not quite the same as «I am sure». In reality, my feelings are quite torn between realizing that this is indeed the kind of music that Neige must be hearing in his heart even when sleeping — and then realizing that most of its effectiveness comes from clever exploitation of modern recording and mixing technology. And a song like ʽDélivranceʼ, with its ten minutes of powerful building-up and meticulous winding down, lays claim to overwhelming your emotions and flooding your senses (otherwise, it would have no reason to exist), but is there any actual ma­gic to that overwhelming, or is this just a guaranteed-to-work recipé that could be generated by a computer, with just a few parameters fed in? I really have no idea, and this shadow of doubt that refuses to go away prevents me from properly falling under the spell of Shelter, and once you have refused to fall under that spell, you can really only use it as background muzak.

 

But it's good enough to at least deserve an honest thumbs up — sufficiently different from Neige's previous work to warrant an autonomous listen, never ugly or, in fact, anything less than «pretty», and it makes you want to ask unanswerable questions, so I guess we should count that as a success story, and the idea to bring in the Sigur Rós people was relatively fruitful. Coming up: an equally productive collaboration with Godspeed You! Black Emperor? The modern world of music may be running out of creative steam for all we know, but at least the combinatory potential is on a constant rise.

 

KODAMA (2016)

 

1) Kodama; 2) Eclosion; 3) Je Suis D'Ailleurs; 4) Untouched; 5) Oiseaux De Proie; 6) Onyx; 7) Notre Sang Et Nos Pensées*.

 

Kodama means ʽtree-spiritʼ in Japanese, with the concept going back to prehistoric times, but it does not take a Japanologist to understand that Neige learned about it not from reading Japanese folklore, but rather from watching Princess Mononoke, since 99% of people get their 99% of in­formation on traditional Japanese culture from Miyazaki-san. That's OK, though, it's not like Alcest have switched to playing traditional Japanese music or anything — in fact, we could all probably see it coming: sooner or later, any blackgazer is going to have to confess that he was inspired and influenced by Japanese mixes of beauty and horror anyway, because blackgaze is all about mixing beauty with horror, and who does that better than the Japanese — Ivanka Trump?..

 

Anyway, I was quick enough in my review of Shelter to suggest that Alcest's genuinely black­gazing days are over — here, as if shaking off one type of slumber to immediately jump into another, Neige makes a focused effort to return to his «roots», and make another album straight in the vein of his first two. The downside is that you may have to go back to the first two in order to check if there's any significant differences, and even I am a little lazy to do that. The upside is that a shift of mood/vibe is almost always a good thing anyway for somebody who works in the «static» section of the musical business, and there does seem to be a little extra spark in Kodama that you sometimes observe in those types of comebacks that are not made exclusively for the money. Yet it is all subtle and subjective — and on the rougher side of the equation, what you have here is simply six more (seven more, if you count the extra track on the deluxe edition) cold, dark, snowy, statically beautiful sonic panoramas from the French master of texture.

 

Once again, as the title track kicks into gear, we find ourselves treading through heavy, but soft and un-treacherous snow, covering a dense (but not too dense) forest of pine trees on a moonlit (but not too moonlit) night — without any idea of why we are here, where are we going, and whe­ther the forest has an end or the journey has a purpose. We do know that the forest is enchan­ted, as the kodamas are sending us haunted signals with their haunted vocals, ringing in unison with the jangly and the distorted guitars, but it's not like they really care about you — you're no­thing but an impartial observer, and even when the distorted guitars take over for a while and start a power chord bombarding, there is still no impression that something is, you know, happening. Maybe just a stronger wind.

 

There's four additional tracks on here, but the vibe on each and every one of them is exactly the same — occasionally, you get some growling vocals (ʽEclosionʼ), for old times' sake, but they are neither scary nor apocalyptic. (Maybe one of the kodamas just got thirsty.) Only the last track, ʽOnyxʼ, is different, and not necessarily for the better — it's just one long drone, recorded in lo-fi for the sake of amusement and working as a «one last breath» outro that you will probably want to skip even if you happen to be sufficiently enchanted by the rest of them.

 

Honestly, I am not quite sure what to do here, but in the end, I will probably have to leave it with a modest thumbs up, because (a) I really like the vocal melodic hook on ʽKodamaʼ (closest the album gets to being genuinely haunting), (b) I think that the album shows some progress in the art of working with overdubs (Souvenirs sounds a little crude and un-subtle in comparison), (c) I've always had a soft spot for French impressionist artists influenced by Japanese culture — so, roll over Pissarro, tell Debussy the news, or something to that effect. None of which will probably ward off the inevitable — that in a few months (weeks) Kodama will be robustly wiped out of my me­mory, and then Neige can start it all over again without any serious risk of being accused of self-plagiarism in the future.

 

ALICIA KEYS

SONGS IN A MINOR (2001)

 

1) Piano & I (intro); 2) Girlfriend; 3) How Come You Don't Call Me; 4)  Fallin'; 5) Troubles; 6) Rock Wit U; 7) A Woman's Worth; 8) Jane Doe; 9) Goodbye; 10) The Life; 11) Mr. Man (duet with Jimmy Cozier); 12) Never Felt This Way (Interlude); 13) Butterflyz; 14) Why Do I Feel So Sad; 15) Caged Bird (outro); 16)  Lovin' U [unlisted track].

 

Artists who write their own material deserve respect. Before engaging in a predictable trashing of young, aspiring, sexy, thoughtful Alicia Keys' debut album, ask yourself the question: what have you actually written? Have you ever recorded a sixty-minute long album of your own songs, not to mention sung and played piano on it? If no, shut up and listen; if yes, you should probably know how hard it is in the first place.

 

If you keep repeating this mantra over and over again while listening to Songs In A Minor, chan­ces are you'll approach it with an unbiased mind and spot the few drops of goodness that are contained therein. That Alicia Keys wasn't just a nobody who turned up in a recording studio by chance, to me, is obvious. Even disregarding her delightfully marketable appearance, she, like fellow soulster Mariah Carey, was selling much more than the body (not that there's anything wrong with the body): she can sing, she can play, and she can write songs, and she probably does all three better than your average Joe from the next corner, so why not make a record?

 

The bad news: "better" does not equal "really well". Armies of MTV divas have this kind of pipe set; her piano playing is efficient but she's not even on an Elton John level and she probably knows it; and writing songs? well, it doesn't take a tremendous lot of talent to write generic R'n'B tunes, especially with a little help from one's friends in the studio. So the only hope here is to get by on a combination of all three, which is truly not something that is frequently encountered in the world of contemporary R'n'B.

 

Alas, although mainstream critics predictably fell over this combination, and although the very sound of it doesn't drive me bonkers, Songs In A Minor falls victim to the commonest crime in the world: it is very, very boring. Dull, easy grooves; dull, unconvincing hooks (if any); dull, cheap sentiments; dull everything. Maybe this is, in large part, due to the fact that R'n'B in the last decade has been even deader than rock, and that the stinky, stagnating chains of its conventions chew through every ounce of talent. But it is more likely still that Alicia just doesn't have the right quantity of ounces, if you know what I mean.

 

Two songs that give me pleasure come right after each other in the middle: they are 'Rock Wit U', an excellent tribute to 70s R'n'B right down to all the syncopation tricks and wah-wah guitars (unfortunately, it only makes me yearn for going back to 70s R'n'B instead), and 'A Woman's Worth', where, once you discard the lecturing feminist lyrics, the chorus comes through as dense, tense, and deliciously neurotic (and catchy).

 

No other songs give me pleasure, with the possible — and frightening! — exception of the elec­tric piano-and-vocal album closer 'Caged Bird', which should scare people away (teenage girls usually sing stuff like that auditioning for American Idol) but, in my case at least, skilfully tugs at some particularly misplaced nerve and makes me emotional. (Please don't tell me that 'she's so rare and beautiful' is in the least autobiographical, please).

 

The big hit single was 'Fallin'; it didn't register with me at all, but I do remember that the vocals were overdubbed in an interesting way. (Connections with 'It's A Man's Man's Man's World' have been spotted by knowledgeable people as well; not sure it's a good thing). On the "hidden" track 'Lovin' U', she (kinda sorta) tries to be like 60s-era Aretha Franklin, but the only reason you have to listen to her being Aretha Frank­lin is if you think Aretha Franklin is only worth listening to when she's young and available for auto­graphs next door. Me, I have no problem putting on some old album from 1970 instead, because, let's face it, Alicia's decibels just don't register on Aretha's scale.

 

So turn this over to Mr. Brain, who refuses to recognize "artistic integrity" in all this shenanigan (and actually threatens to sue on account of bad taste and banal "artistic" decisions, like kicking things off with a reference to 'Moonlight Sonata', of all things! where's Beethoven and where's Alicia Keys?), and then to Mr. Heart, who has just recovered from a nice nap in the corner, as both of them give the record a crunchy thumbs down. There might have been some semi-good reason to listen to this in 2001; today, any such reason has to be recovered from deep down the drain.

 

THE DIARY OF ALICIA KEYS (2003)

 

1) Harlem's Nocturne; 2) Karma; 3) Heartburn; 4) If I Was Your Woman / Walk On By; 5) You Don't Know My Name; 6) If I Ain't Got You; 7) Diary; 8) Dragon Days; 9) Wake Up; 10) So Simple; 11) When You Really Love Someone; 12) Feeling U, Feeling Me; 13) Slow Down; 14) Samsonite Man; 15) Nobody Not Really.

 

I'm getting unusually soft: I kind of like this album. It's certainly longer than a professional execu­tioner's torture rack, and it shares all the flaws of its predecessor, as well as all the flaws of R'n'B and all the flaws that the 21st century took over and carefully nurtured from the 20th one, but it turned out to be likeable anyway. I guess the reason is that in two years, Alicia Keys simply became a better songwriter than Providence should have let her become. Although I admit that reason is completely unexplainable.

 

Let me just make a brief list of songs that have solid melodic hooks: 'Karma', 'Heartburn', 'If I Ain't Got You', 'Dragon Days', 'Wake Up', 'When You Really Love Someone', 'Samsonite Man' — that's almost half of the album there. Never mind that some of this is self-consciously retro and some self-consciously Whitney Houston; her singing gets me (okay, Whitney's singing also gets me sometimes, but then she didn't sell these zillions of records just for nothing).

 

The trick is that I had to sit through this more than once. Upon first listen, Diary is even more excruciatingly boring, generic, and "soulless" than A Minor. But then something starts clicking, and from under all the slickness and corporate gloss you start picking out bits and pieces of an aspiring artist who at least understands the basic principles that underly the power of music, even if she is rarely able to properly apply them. That you not only have to have glossy arrangements, that you also got to have hooks; that hooks cannot exist without true emotional force powering them up; and that true emotional force comes not necessarily from living out your songs, but at least from feeling them as meaningful creations. Does she have that understanding? Many will say nay, but I will say yeah.

 

I really love 'Dragon Days'. As a funky 70-s sendup, it works even better than 'Rock Wit U', ditzy and sexy and catchy, good piano/guitar interplay, good harmonies — if you feel the need to drag this down with some highbrow comment on how this material makes Isaac Hayes turn over in his grave, leave me out of this. I also really love 'Wake Up': it's a strong, well-written, uplifting ballad — if all mainstream balladry were like this, humanity's chances for survival would be a notch higher than they are today.

 

Overall, it ain't worth taking a lot of time describing the rest, but at least my understanding of why the "standard" critical press took such a liking to Alicia has managed to increase a bit after I'd caught myself unexpectedly enjoying 'Dragon Days'. She's a smartie, both music-wise and image-wise, and she gives out these small bits of "class" that people, who still remember the good old days when artists used to give out large chunks of "class", are hungry to lap up.

 

But I also understand what might be the single biggest annoying factor in her music: to quote fellow review­ers Wilson & Alroy, her "fatal weakness as a soul singer" is that she has "no vulnerability". Song after song after song, her toughness just starts to get on one's nerves. Femi­nism and the 'strong woman' concept are okay by me, but soul is about feeling pain and letting others in on it, and there's absolutely no pain whatsoever here, anywhere in sight. 'If I Ain't Got You' is tense and almost epic, but that's an irrealistic "if" out there: it's perfectly obvious that she got you, and the tenseness is simply there so you should understand she ain't never gonna let you go, that egotistic bitch. :) And on 'You Don't Even Know My Name', she plays the part of a wait­ress (!) who actually initiates the call to a guy who'd been ogling her in the restaurant — it's all a matter of proper initiative, baby. Of course, maybe she's just perfectly honest about it: maybe she really doesn't feel much pain, and if you can't feel pain, better not simulate feeling it. But then it's also a much nastier accusation to fling at someone — not being able to feel pain makes you much less of a human than not letting others feel your pain in your art, after all.

 

That was probably a twistier argument than any of the melodies on Diary Of Alicia Keys, but my heart doesn't really care too much for twisty melodies, and those that are there prompt it to give out a cautious thumbs up, while the brain, of course, has permanently shut itself off on the sub­ject of recognizing the artistic genius of Alicia, and I can't blame it for that.

 

UNPLUGGED (2005)

 

1) Intro: Alicia's Prayer; 2) Karma; 3) Heartburn; 4) A Woman's Worth; 5) Unbreakable; 6) How Come You Don't Call Me; 7) If I Was Your Woman; 8) If I Ain't Got You; 9) Every Little Bit Hurts; 10) Streets Of New York (City Life); 11) Wild Horses; 12) Diary; 13) You Don't Know Me; 14) Stolen Moments; 15) Fallin'; 16) Love It Or Leave It Alone/Welcome To Jamrock.

 

It was a surprise — apparently, they're still doing these MTV Unplugged sessions long after the format has completely discredited itself. And after this album, one doesn't even need further proof. Please pardon me the offensive pun, but it's hard to help it: 'If this is Alicia Keys Unplugged, for God's sake, somebody plug her!'

 

Simply put, Unplugged is Keys' first live album, and it is very, very bad; if this is really what her average live show sounds like, my worst fears are coming true. Forget the "unplugged", actually: the lack of electric guitar is but a formality, since electric guitar only played a serious role on her retroish, funkier tunes, and she's not doing these here anyway. Other than that, you still have piano, horns, strings, electric bass, an Invincible Armada of backup singers and guests — a small, intimate session this is not. So I guess it must be quite close to her regular show.

 

So why bad? Stephen Thomas Erlewine of the All-Music Guide probably caught it best when he wrote: "This, more than either Songs In A Minor or The Diary, illustrates why Alicia Keys fits into the post-hip-hop soul world: she places groove and feel above the song'. I insist that she is not a genius songwriter, but a talented one — but you wouldn't really guess it from this never ending vamp-fest. Instead of making you feel the melody, she makes you feel the 'oohs' and 'aahs' and 'yeah, yeahs', often relegating the melody itself to backup singers.

 

And that wouldn't be so awful, perhaps, if, after submitting yourself to the studio albums, you didn't feel that this is all so terribly contrived. This whole performance is about letting people (or should we step over the chains of correctness and say "brainwashed MTV idiots"?) know just how awesomely cool you are, not about letting them in on your inner artist or even about promoting your material. This coolness is nurtured by a few "trendy" guests, e. g. a flaccid, sleep-inducing duet with Adam Levine from Maroon 5 on 'Wild Horses' and a truly hideous coda with DJs Mos Def and Common rapping about Alicia's charms to still more 'unh unhs' and 'yeah yeahs' on the latter's side, but even her own older, better standards are reduced to ugly Towers of Toughness. The one new song, 'Unbreakable', has likeable piano runs and great chorus hooks — but guess what, most of these hooks are delivered by the backup singers!

 

Perhaps the worst offender of all comes in the middle, in the shape of a Free Form Jazz / Improm­ptu Neo-Beatnik Poetry creation 'Streets Of New York (City Life)'. It stands very much at odds with all the other, fairly conventional, material, and is supposed to elevate Alicia's coolness to an entirely different level, but I just ask the question: 'If this is so hip and cool, why does everything else on here sound so bland and generic?' This pose of throwing a sonic bone to the 'musical intellectuals' and then going on to entertain the 'masses' is irritating to no end. Either you are a mainstream artist, or an avantgarde one, or you consistently propagate the compatibility of both approaches, but the idea of 'hey, I can be sophisticated every once in a while, too' stinks to high heaven of first-rate hypocrisy. And besides, some things are just NOT compatible. You cannot honestly hope to convince people when you present yourself as a tough hip-hop kid AND as an impressionistic neo-beatnik on the very same record. It's like a liberal arts professor from Berke­ley voting Republican.

 

Or perhaps the worst offender of all is that one line in 'Wild Horses' where she changed the lyrics. The original, the way the Stones did it, goes 'Let's do some living after we die'. The silly girl doesn't get it; she sings 'let's do some living before we die'. Just goes to show — the Stones will most definitely do some living after they die (well, Keith at least has obviously been dead for about twenty years now and still looks fine), but I have serious doubts about Alicia Keys in that respect. Sorry.

 

I don't even have to mention that this is a mighty thumbs down all the way, bar the minor enjoy­ability of 'Unbreakable' and the fact that 'Karma' and 'Heartburn' start things off in a generally good, rocking way before bringing the plane down in the swamp with a toothless rendition of 'Woman's Worth' and even lower from there. Unfortunately, it also kills off most hopes for Keys' artistic integrity: like so many promising, but spineless divas before her, she seems so happy with her newly established MTV-trash status that it is unlikely she is going to relinquish it any time soon.

 

AS I AM (2007)

 

1) As I Am [Intro]; 2) Go Ahead; 3) Superwoman; 4) No One; 5) Like You'll Never See Me Again; 6) Lesson Learned; 6) Wreckless Love; 7) The Thing About Love; 8) Teenage Love Affair; 9) I Need You; 10) Where Do We Go From Here; 11) Prelude To A Kiss; 12) Tell You Something (Nana's Reprise); 13) Sure Looks Good To Me.

 

Is it just funny old me, or does she always put one or two best songs at the start, only to lure us into her misty, treacherous swamp of mediocrity? Or is it just some sort of tricky aural hallucina­tion caused by certain psychological expectations?

 

Regardless, As I Am is Alicia's weakest album so far and a dangerous indication that, instead of honing and refining her skills, she is completely succumbing to trends and fashions and the bland nothingness of the '00s. It rarely, if ever, sounds awful, but it's curiously flat — for instance, she seems to be playing more piano than she did on Diary (subjective impression), but it's buried so deep in the mix that it practically doesn't matter (objective fact). She mostly eschews electronica in favour of real instruments, but the players are so utterly generic and uninspired that it doesn't matter much, either. Several reviewers stated that on As I Am, her goal is to make a 'soul-pop' album, finding a balance between groove and catchy melody, but I only see that the grooves fail to be incendiary, and the melodies aren't any catchier than they used to be.

 

This approach does work well on the album opener 'Go Ahead', one of the most cutely hateful tunes she ever did (the chorus, with its descending strings of no-no-no's, is an excellent, evocative creation); and I am almost ashamed for liking the single 'Superwoman' — despite thinking that it is in extremely bad taste to claim that you're 'Super-'anything in any of your creations, no matter how ironic or metaphorical you think you are being. (As far as I can remember, only Ringo Starr managed to get away with this when singing 'I'm The Greatest').

 

But 'Superwoman' wasn't the lead-off single. The lead-off single was the sentimental Celine Dion send-up 'No One'; and its immediate follow-up was the even more pathetic 'Like You'll Never See Me Again'; and its follow-up was the thoroughly generic dance-pop number 'Teenage Love Af­fair', all of them songs that fit well within the MTV schedule but are destined for about half an hour of shelf life at most.

 

It is hard for me to understand that — unless it is true that radio-aired singles these days are selec­ted based on unremarkability (as in, people mostly listen to the radio when driving along the highway, and they don't really need to be distracted by anything unusual under these circumstan­ces, because non-trivial chords and arrangements increase the danger of accident). It's the only explanation I can offer for why, for instance, 'Wreckless Love', unquestionably the most interes­tingly written song on the album's second half, wasn't considered for single release. This tune shows that Keys hasn't yet forgotten the power of emotion-charged vocal twists (watch out for the echoey, acappella bridge sections), but she is willing to sacrifice it... for what? She is a star al­ready, she can allow herself to concentrate on her creative side rather than her submissive side. 'Superwoman' can surely do better than this.

 

For now, alas, I only see one more instance of how a definitely talented person is slowly being devoured by the MTV-licensed lawnmower — instead of trying to shape herself into a brick that would crush its slicers, she has become invalidated by the machine herself. Maybe it's not too late, but I doubt it; few people come out alive once they've spent a few years under the gadget, and I don't sense the necessary amount of artistic stability in Keys to be able to overcome it. Too bad, because we really need an inside agent in that machine to stall it, and this means that the search for such an agent has to be begun from scratch. Thumbs down, down, down, down.

 

THE ELEMENT OF FREEDOM (2009)

 

1) Element Of Freedom (Intro); 2) Love Is Blind; 3) Doesn't Mean Anything; 4) Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart; 5) Wait 'Til You See My Smile; 6) That's How Strong My Love Is; 7) Un-thinkable (I'm Ready); 8) Love Is My Di­sease; 9) Like The Sea; 10) Put It In A Love Song; 11) This Bed; 12) Distance And Time; 13) How It Feels To Fly; 14) Empire State Of Mind (Part II) Broken Down; 15) Stolen Moments; 16) Heaven's Door; 17*) Through It All; 18*) Pray For Forgiveness.

 

"And the day came when the risk it took to remain tightly closed in the butt was more painful than the risk it took to bloom. This is the element of freedom".

 

Honestly, I thought this was one of the most innovative opening lines in existence — until I checked the lyrics sheet and it clearly said 'bud', not 'butt'. Too bad, said I, there goes a great me­ta­phor: looking at personal freedom through the viewpoint of anal sex. Most likely, the rest of the record will end up equally disappointing.

 

Of course, it did. First of all, if you ever decide to give it a try, by all means disregard the hype basted around it by Alicia herself, as well as those promoters, agents, and critics that she has on her payroll. Here is but one quote from the lady, and there are hundreds more: «The way that the songs progress are gonna take you on a natural high. I just want you to feel a sense of freedom, I want you to feel out-of-the-box, feel inspired, you're definitely going to be taken on a trip, I know you're going to be shocked.»

 

This is what happens when your first three albums all debut at #1 on the Billboard: a malicious ego tumor. It is one thing to release a mildly pleasant, generic collection of emotionally overdri­ven American Idol-style ballads and electronic dance-pop; it is an entirely different thing to pro­mote it as a grand, once-in-a-lifetime burst of spiritual enlightenment and liberation, especially when there is not a single vocal move on the record that we have not already heard before, and not a single lyrical line that rises above decades-old clichés.

 

Hollow pretentiousness is particularly on the rampage with 'Empire State Of Mind' (what an aw­ful title already), where Keys returns to her New York obsession, this time in the form of a power ballad. I love the city as much as anyone, but just how many second- and third-hand love confes­sions does it need? The fact that she was born and raised in Brooklyn should not, I repeat not, be accepted as an excuse to avoid punishment for describing the city with phrases like 'concrete jun­gle' (say, haven't I heard that somewhere before?) and 'such a melting pot' (does she get her inspi­ration from American English manuals for beginners?).

 

All that said, I still think The Element Of Freedom is a slight improvement over As I Am. If we strip it of the surrounding pomp, eliminate the worst moments and take out the most obnoxious filler (along with 'Empire State Of Mind', I vote for the artificially cute duet with Beyoncé, which basically wastes the talents of both), the rest of the songs are all tolerable. Again, the best materi­al is at the very beginning: 'Love Is Blind' is suitably sharp and angry (Alicia's most generally successful mood), and 'Doesn't Mean Anything', despite being so repetitive, has the best pure vocal hook on the album.

 

The general style of The Element Of Freedom has been compared to Prince: there are, indeed, some transparent parallels, e. g. on 'This Bed', with Princeish rhythms and Princeish falsetto vo­cals. But the record is mostly about ballads, not dance-pop, and, besides, in real life Prince's pom­posity and ego level may make Keys reveal herself as the little baby she really is, but on his re­cords, there is always irony and plenty of tongue-in-cheek atmosphere (which, in the end, is what makes it possible for us to like him); The Element Of Freedom is deadly serious, from top to bottom. If Prince was one of the primary influences, then, sorry to say, she just does not get Prince. Or maybe I have overrated Prince.

 

I do have to acknowledge one thing: if As I Am sounded like someone seriously wanted to pro­cess Alicia in MTV's meat grinder the regular, time-honoured way, The Element Of Freedom does honestly seem to sound the way she herself wants it to sound. Nobody is forcing her artistic hand on this one. It is Alicia Keys, the freedom rider, who, consciously and of her own free will, is responsible for all the bland arrangements, lyrical clichés, unsubstantiated pretentiousness, and tolerable melodies that do not, however, progress anywhere beyond the levels she had already displayed eight years ago. So which one is actually better — slavery or freedom? I'd say Ms. Keys has built up quite a strong case for the former. Thumbs down.

 

GIRL ON FIRE (2012)

 

1) De Novo Adagio (intro); 2) Brand New Me; 3) When It's All Over; 4) Listen To Your Heart; 5) New Day; 6) Girl On Fire; 7) Fire We Make; 8) Tears Always Win; 9) Not Even The King; 10) That's When I Knew; 11) Limitedless; 12) One Thing; 13) 101.

 

Wow. It has actually been a long time since I last subjected myself to an album that bad, and it almost sort of slipped my mind just how bad a «Diva»-style R&B album can get — and, honestly, it does not get much worse than this. It's almost as if Alicia's major goal here was to specifically shatter every last ray of hope one could ever have held — because, honestly, it all began in a dif­ferent way: the girl had a small, but significant stash of talent, training, intelligence, and character to break out of the muck. But instead of progressing in the right direction, she ended up wasting it all — regardless of how bad her subsequent output will be, Girl On Fire puts a certified final stop on the idea of Alicia Keys as «a serious force in R&B to be reckoned with».

 

There are just so many potshots to be taken here that I do not even know where to begin. Perhaps one could start with the album title and the front sleeve photo — that ain't a real human being out there, is it? Maybe if the record were a cyborg-based post-apocalyptic anti-utopian rock opera or something, it would have made more sense. But then, once the minute-long piano intro (rather or­dinary, but probably the best thing about the whole album) is over, we do get to hear the lady say "Don't be mad / It's just a brand new kind of me / Can't be bad / I found a brand new kind of free", and it looks like she means what she says. Not just brand-new — factory-made, shrink-wrapped, registered with a certified trademark, and ready to go.

 

The «music» is not worth a serious mention: on most of the songs, it just consists of tepid elec­tronic patterns, non-descript acoustic backing tracks, and boring drum machines. Alicia's piano skills have completely receded into the background — except for those two or three times when it is decided that the listener needs an extra shot of soul in the form of a weepy minimalistic ballad (at this point the piano is dragged out and we get a lazy atmospheric run through some scales). I think the only moment of «real life» on the entire album is at the end of ʽFire We Makeʼ, where guest star Gary Clark Jr. tries to somehow justify the title and strike out some actual sparks with his jazz-rock guitar solo. It ain't exactly Jeff Beck or John McLaughlin, but on a record so utterly devoid of life, it is that much-needed glob of oxygen that allowed me to catch my breath and ac­tually sit this out (thrice!) until the end.

 

Still worse is the singing, because, for some reason, Ms. Keys seems to have been told that 2012's requirements for «soulful» are limited to one strict formula: «breathy voice let out through the nose». Maybe that is exactly what they all do on American Idol today, but that does not make the effect any different — she honestly sounds as if under some heavy drug influence the entire time. This isn't «soul», not to mention «freedom»: this is simply conforming to the adopted formula. Again, she was never a particularly great or individualistic singer, but the frame inside which she locks herself here is downright pathetic.

 

And it is all the more pathetic given how much — even compared to the previous albums, which all revolved around this idea as well — she is extolling her «self-established» nature on here. The lyrics speak for themselves: "It took a long, long time to get here / It took a brave, brave girl to try" (ʽBrand New Meʼ) — «brave» is definitely the last word that comes to mind when thinking about this record; "She's on top of the world / Hottest of the hottest girls" (title track) — resorting to the third person is a nifty trick that can always bring down formal accusations, but we are not that easily fooled; and the mightiest of them all — "Money / Some people so poor all that they got is money... I don't care what they're offering / How much gold they bring / They can't afford what we got / Not even the king" (ʽNot Even The Kingʼ), which should be an official contender for 2012's corniest lyrical bit competition.

 

Almost everything here ranks from, at best, unmemorable and conventional (e. g. the elevator muzak of ʽWhen It's All Overʼ) to, at worst, hokey and pseudo-tough (the obligatory rap bit on the title track; the strange last-minute brush with «psychedelic» vocals and guitars on ʽLi­mi­ted­lessʼ; the «powerhouse» synth-gospel finale of the hidden last track, where she belts out halle­lujahs as if begging forgiveness for what she just put us all through). But what should you expect? When you have a well-polished android like that greeting you on the front sleeve, there are but three possible outcomes: (a) this will be a spooky Kraftwerk album, (b) this will be a decadent Roxy Music album, (c) this will be a really, really shitty modern R&B album. And since the cre­dits are right there on the sleeve as well, options (a) and (b) are out of the question.

 

Naturally, being a responsible reviewer and all, I must emphasize that this is all a matter of sub­jective opinion. For instance, it definitely does not co-represent the position of «Rolling Stone» editor Jody Rosen, who called Girl On Fire «her catchiest and subtlest album yet — and one of the best R&B records of 2012» and awarded it 4 stars out of 5. (For the record, the same Jody Rosen gave Aimee Mann's Charmer, which I consider to be one of the best records of 2012, period, 2.5 stars out of 5, complaining about lyrics that were «sagging under the weight of mixed metaphors». Yeah right, no question here — lyrics like "party people say, ah it's a new day, while they getting ready for a new day, celebrate and say ay-ay-ay-ay" definitely don't have all that much to sag under, that is for sure). So who am I to throw in my two thumbs down? Do I get my records produced by Babyface, Swizz Beats, Jeff Bhasker, Antonio Dixon, Dr. Dre, James Ho, Darkchild, @Oakwood, @PopWansel, Salaam Remi, and Jamie Smith all at the same time? Not even in my worst nightmares, I don't.

 

HERE (2016)

 

1) The Beginning (Interlude); 2) The Gospel; 3) Pawn It All; 4) Elaine Brown (interlude); 5) Kill Your Mama; 6) She Don't Really Care / 1 Luv; 7) Elevate (interlude); 8) Illusion Of Bliss; 9) Blended Family (What You Do For Love); 10) Work On It; 11) Cocoa Butter (Cross & Pic interlude); 12) Girl Can't Be Herself; 13) You Glow (interlude); 14) More Than We Know; 15) Where Do We Begin Now; 16) Holy War; 17*) Hallelujah; 18*) In Common.

 

Well now, talk about a radical image overhaul — observable as early on as your first look at the album cover, a sharp contrast with the heavily made-up fembot image of Girl On Fire (more like Gynoid On Battery Power, if you ask me). Not only is the lady not wearing any makeup, but just in case you were distracted by the huge Afro, she even sings a song about it (ʽGirl Can't Be Herselfʼ). And that is far from the only socially relevant topic being covered: Here is her most politicized and overall «tough» album ever, driven by a strong desire to break out of the «pop» stereotype and assert a stronger artistic personality than...

 

...hey, wait a minute, we are talking about Alicia freakin' Keys, so before we go on, let us bring up all the precious biases. She is a not half-bad pianist, but pretty much squandered that talent on pop clichés, because she wanted too much (or, if we are going to be kind, because all the other mean dudes wanted her) to become a soul diva. She's got songwriting talent, but has more often than not wasted it on fluffy, insubstantial material. She's never been a leader, always a follower; and she's always relied much stronger on her good looks than should be appropriate for a major artist. She always presented herself as energetic and exciting, but usually came out as your ave­rage mainstream, plodding, boring, third-rate artist. With all that in mind, can she actually pull it together to make an intelligent, provoking, stimulating record?

 

Personal opinion with bias: she cannot. Personal opinion with relaxed bias: she cannot, but she comes fairly close. There is no question in my mind that she is once again being a follower rather than a leader — riding on the relative creative explosion of Afro-American artists in the last two years, and clearly with Beyoncé as a role model (it is hardly surprising that a period of about six months separates Here from Lemonade), although there's plenty of indications that she'd been hung up on Kendrick Lamar as well. Her creativity level, unsurprisingly, has not gone up: even though she writes or at least co-writes all the material herself, the melodies remain simplistic and / or too dependent on piano pop clichés, and the lyrics suffer from predictable moralistic straight­forwardness or common places ("when a girl can't be herself no more / I just wanna cry, I just wanna cry" is a fairly typical one) — and the «nifty touches» can be overbearing and reeking of cheap symbolism. I mean, does she really have to sample the Wu-Tang Clan in order to be accepted into the Street Tough League? Gimme a break. And yet...

 

...and yet, strangely enough, once she is done with the pompous intro ("I'm Nina Simone in the park and Harlem in the dark" — I know she is impersonating the spirit of the turntable, but still it must be so cool for Alicia Keys to be able to say that she is Nina Simone, right?), anyway, once she is done with that and starts her piano-and-strings-based rap on ʽThe Gospelʼ, there is some­thing authentic in there. I'm not sure that there really are any truly painful memories here, given Alicia's relatively safe and cozy upbringing in downtown Manhattan, but perhaps there's some­thing in the blood — the piano and the voice sound more genuinely «on fire» than anything on Girl On Fire. No, she is not the ideal candidate for a truly tough, dangerous, keep-your-fuckin'-distance asserter of Black Woman Freedom (although she now knows how to use the F-word, too), but she does not come across as a total embarrassment, either.

 

Perhaps part of the reason for this is the record's decent production style — very sparse on the whole, usually just a hip-hop/R&B beat with some keyboards (usually acoustic piano, but some­times electric piano or even something a bit more exotic, like the vibraphone), maybe a little acoustic guitar on the side; no plastic synthesizer textures, no fake orchestration, no huge walls of sound to mask the lack of musical ideas. In a setting like this (perhaps also influenced by Wu-Tang Clan?) even mediocre melodies can be easily tolerated, and some actually transcend mediocre — for instance, I'm quite partial to the «blues-hop» of ʽPawn It Allʼ, where Alicia sings (and plays) in her lowest register to convince you that she is really ready to pawn all these gold and diamond rings "just so I could start my life over again". (So brace yourselves, pawn shop owners all over Manhattan!). And she enlists some first-rate talent to help her out, too — for instance, ʽShe Don't Really Careʼ features vibraphone playing from no less than Roy Ayers, the guru of the instrument, himself.

 

I do have to state, however, that if you have only heard the two singles from the album, then you do not know what it is about. Both ʽIn Commonʼ and ʽBlended Familyʼ (the latter a collaboration with rapper ASAP Rocky), stylistically, are still very much in the Girl On Fire vein — ʽIn Com­monʼ is an attempt at creating a robotic-digital equivalent of a Latin groove, with stupid bubbly keyboards and a limp beat (gotta feed that robot on something more calorific!), and ʽBlended Familyʼ is a fairly stereotypical love ballad with a beat and a predictable rap interlude. This is only too indicative of the general half-assed nature of the record: apparently, Alicia's «rougher» material must have been deemed too controversial (!) and non-commercial (!) for her established sector of the market.  So just skip the singles and go straight to something like ʽIllusion Of Blissʼ, a dark sinner-soul, Ray Charles-inspired, confession of an imaginary drug addict for the decent stuff; or, failing that, at least go for her totally stripped-down, acoustic guitar-based, performance on ʽKill Your Mamaʼ (reminiscent of Beyoncé's work on ʽDaddy Lessonsʼ — again, though, where Beyoncé's odd excursion into country is ambiguous and provoking, Alicia's song is merely a folksified traditional plea for universal salvation).

 

Bottomline is: when compared against the obvious outside competition, Here does not stand much of a chance — but when compared against Keys' own pedigree, it is probably her second strongest album on the whole since The Diary, an impressive comeback after more than ten years of utter blandness; and from a technical standpoint, it is arguably her finest album ever, and if we have Beyoncé to thank for that, well, thank you Beyoncé. Perhaps this is not so much of a great news piece for Alicia herself as it is a nice symbol of the spread of a healthy tendency in modern day black music — when even second-to-third-rate artists like Alicia can pull themselves toge­ther for a record of this quality, what does that say about first rate artists? Then again, healthy musical tenden­cies, like everything healthy, tend to come and go, so enjoy it while it lasts: for all we know, next season might bring on some vicious catastrophe of taste, and we'll be stuck with remembering Here as the last good album in the great Afro-American tradition. In the meantime, here's a modest thumbs up to freeze this moment in time.

 

ALLO DARLIN'

ALLO DARLIN' (2010)

 

1) Dreaming; 2) The Polaroid Song; 3) Silver Dollars; 4) Kiss Your Lips; 5) Heartbeat Chilli; 6) If Loneliness Was Art; 7) Woody Allen; 8) Let's Go Swimming; 9) My Heart Is A Drummer; 10) What Will Be Will Be.

 

Approximately thirty years before this day, the timeless American pop band Blondie released Eat To The Beat, one of their finest collections, not the least because it started off with 'Dreaming', a totally stunning combination of appropriately dreamy gorgeousness with a kick-ass rhythmic sec­tion. Now, in 2010, a British twee pop band, playing music about as light and quirky as Blondie used to be, and also consisting of a female frontwoman and several smarty-pants male instru­men­talists, releases its self-titled debut LP whose first song is also called 'Drea­ming'. Coincidence? Sym­bolic gesture/tribute? Or a subconsciously orchestrated trick from God's naughty brain?

 

«Twee pop», I gotta tell you this, is a strange phenomenon, somewhat akin to a bunch of grown-up mommys and daddys secretly sneaking in the kid's nursery and perusing his electric trains and tin soldiers while he's sleeping (not that there's anything wrong with that). In other words, it mi­mics the naïveté and innocence of days long gone by, when you know for a fact that no sane (or even insane) per­son in our modern world can truly share those feelings — all the really naïve hu­man beings just latch on to Miley Cyrus or take Rebecca Black's 'Friday' for serious.

 

Allo Darlin' are no exception. Australia-born Elizabeth Morris is the principal mastermind here be­hind all the songs, and she is at once overwhelmingly charismatic and utterly frustrating — for every simple, unadorned discharge of sexuality there must be a self-consciously intellectual flou­rish, for every "I'm here because I love you" or "Come over, give your heart to me" there must either be a reference to Wild Strawberries (but then, if she doesn't popularize Maestro Bergman, who will?) or a sly quotation from Johnny Cash (and God only knows what else I've missed).

 

On the other hand, intellectuals need to get laid, too, and they certainly won't be doing it to the soundtracks of American Idol. And if anything, Allo Darlin's take on the traditional love song genre (ten takes, I mean) is not without its own individual merits.

 

The grandest of which, actually, is that these ten songs are good pop songs — not simply retroish nothings clad in professional retro arrangements (although all the arrangements are in extremely good taste, and none of that lo-fi crap), but, like, real songs with interesting melodies and lots of emphasis on the instrumental side. As a vocalist, Morris is not very capable; she has this husky hushy sexy thing going on, which she can sometimes elevate to a happy childish yell ('Kiss Your Lips'), nothing else, and, perhaps because of this, her vocal melodies seem poorly thought out — no truly catchy choruses or anything (in fact, many of the lyrics are just a bunch of prose impres­sionism rudely and unconvincingly stuffed inside the song's rhythmic structure). But she and the rest of the band keep coming up with pretty pop riffs — time after time after time, the songs hook you right from the very first seconds.

 

Certainly this band's 'Dreaming' will never replace that other band's 'Dreaming', but there is still something utterly fresh and juicy about that chugging guitar line and how it is then underpinned by the ukulele rhythm and electric dream-poppy overdubs. The jumping Beatles For Sale-ish jangle of 'The Polaroid Song', the opening bassline of 'Silver Dollars', the droning style of 'Kiss Your Lips', all great starts, and although most songs never progress far beyond the greatness of the opening five or so seconds, well... you could complain likewise about Beatles For Sale, for that matter. It's only pop music, for God's sake.

 

As they find out themselves that the main choruses aren't doing their job as fine as they should be, the band isn't even afraid to throw in a few really cheap thrills — such as the "sha-la-las" on 'If Loneliness Was Art', which still plays to their advantage because it's so, you know, RETRO: who the heck wants to attract attention these days by singing "sha-la-la"? From the other side, no hip person will bypass an album with a song called 'Woody Allen' on it (yes, the one that namedrops both Annie Hall and Manhattan, and throws in the Bergman references as a bonus — all in the same innocent kiddie tone that makes matters so befuddling).

 

Still, every album like this, in order to gain its thumbs up, has to have at least one magic moment during which it is clear (to me, the thumbs-upper) that the band has IT, and the way I see it, that particular moment which makes me yearn for more from these guys arrives no earlier than at 1:40 into the next-to-last number, 'My Heart Is A Drummer' — a simple, but description-defying patch of musical bliss.

 

From here on, Elizabeth Morris and the boys may go on to bigger things (Allo Darlin' is as per­fectly humble, although not entirely «unpretentious», beginning to a modern career in pop as can be thought of), or they may stick to the same formula for decades, or they may burst and blow away next Saturday, like so many twee pop bands before them (they don't call it «twee» for no­thing, you know), but I only know that I'm perfectly sure to return to this album some day in the future, which is probably the awesomest compliment I could ever give a 21st century record.

 

EUROPE (2012)

 

1) Neil Armstrong; 2) Capricornia; 3) Europe; 4) Some People Say; 5) Northern Lights; 6) Wonderland; 7) Tallulah; 8) The Letter; 9) Still Young; 10) My Sweet Friend.

 

Damn you, Elizabeth Morris. I really, really like you. You seem like a fun person to hang out with for somebody who hates hanging out with people – with just the perfect mix of sarcasm and idealism to pass for «the real thing». Smart, but not condescending. Stylish, but not garish. Pretty, but not beautiful. Childish, but never infantile. Hipsterish, but never over-the-top outrageous. A fine, upstan­ding example for any 21st cen­tury girl who might be looking for one.

 

So why then did you have to go and make your second album... no, not a «carbon copy» of the first one, more like an endless set of variations on one particular style? Essentially, if you have al­ready heard ʽThe Polaroid Songʼ, you have heard most of Europe. If ʽThe Polaroid Songʼ is your life, afterlife, and post-Apocalypse rolled in one, Europe will bring utter satisfaction. And hey, I like it too. But when your entire LP consists of upbeat, monotonous twee-pop, stubbornly based around jangle, jangle, and even more jangle, you just get to thinking: «hey, wait a minute, I kind of thought ʽsunshine popʼ was more than just that?!..»

 

The basic sound of Allo Darlin' remains as delicious as it ever was. The jangle is vivacious and friendly, and Morris' voice is a master weapon: as long as she keeps it that way, no song released by the band will ever be utterly worthless. But that's just it: the sound. The sound totally triumphs over the songs, all of which are interchangeable. The individual bits of magic, such as the heart–breaking guitar riff on ʽMy Heart Is A Drummerʼ, are nowhere in sight. God knows I've tried looking — a miserable failure every time. Just one pretty, generic jangle pattern after another. Enough, in the end, to make you crave for some AC/DC.

 

The only exception from the formula is ʽTallulahʼ, which is just Liz and her ukulele. Feather-light, touching, pretty — problem is, the rhythmic pattern is just about the same as the one in ʽHeart­beat Chilliʼ, and the vocal melody is hookless. It's as if she's just expressively reading a little bit of her diary, accompanied by a little strumming. Is that the way you save the world? And don't tell me that Allo Darlin' aren't here to save the world. They are. They just need to stop sucking their lollipops, 'sall.

 

ʽNeil Armstrongʼ and ʽCapricorniaʼ start things off with probably the strongest jangle patterns of 'em all. In about five seconds' time, you are already acquainted with the major charms of the for­mer (a little folk-rock riff, reminding of Dylan's ʽI Don't Believe Youʼ), but you will have to wait about fifty seconds for ʽCapricorniaʼ to hit its full stride and become a full-fledged Byrds-appro­ved extravaganza from mid-1965 — all that's missing is invite ol' man Crosby to sing backup.

 

I refuse to name any more names, with the possible exception of ʽThe Letterʼ, which does ac­tually try to re­create a little of the echoey magic of ʽMy Heartʼ. It would force me to be more cri­tical, and I don't want to be any more critical. I like the sound, I like the band, I'd like to replicate millions of clones of Elizabeth Morris to replace the millions of clones of Rebecca Black, but I just cannot, for the life of me, remember any of these songs. Somebody get Sir Paul McCartney to join this goddamn band. Something should be done. A thumbs down is just not right here, yet a thumbs down is still all I have for this disaster. Don't they teach songwriting in Australia?..

 

WE COME FROM THE SAME PLACE (2014)

 

1) Heartbeat; 2) Kings And Queens; 3) We Come From The Same Place; 4) Angela; 5) Bright Eyes; 6) History Lessons; 7) Half Heart Necklace; 8) Romance And Adventure; 9) Crickets In The Rain; 10) Santa Maria Novella; 11) Another Year.

 

Monoideism. 1. Focusing of attention on a single thing, especially as a result of hypnosis; term invented by James Braid, one of the first genuine hypnotherapists of the 19th century. 2. Major cause of everything that goes wrong with music (and not just music) today, well illustrated by the example of British/Australian twee pop band Allo Darlin'.

 

Going back to their debut album in my mind, I can still distinctly remember the cute little brilliant melo­dies of ʽDreamingʼ and ʽMy Heart Is A Drummerʼ, and the sweet-subtle excitement of thinking, «wow, this is so promising, there is really a lot they could achieve from here». With the release of the band's third album comes the ultimate realization: they are not even trying to go anywhere else because they never had any such plans from the very beginning. We cannot even accuse Elizabeth Morris of turning out so much less talented than we thought her to be — be­cause she has not the slightest intention to move her talents away from the little green lawn that was carefully prepared, irrigated, and fenced on Allo Darlin'. J'y suis, j'y reste.

 

If you are already head over heels in love with the well-educated Australian girl who cuts her hair relatively short, plays the ukulele, and combines hip intellectual lyrical imagery with a streak of quasi-chil­dish idealism, and if you already wanted to sue me for all the bile spilled over Europe, this third record of theirs will be an epiphany. To be fair, I think the melodies are a wee bit stronger than on Europe, but it may be an illusion — the band is certainly not studying any new chord progressions here and not moving one step away from the twee-pop formula, so any ob­servable dif­ferences are limited to nuances, well perceivable and significant only for major fans whose eyes turn into magnifying glasses and ears into stethoscopes at the first note of the uke.

 

No surprise that almost every review of the album that I have seen immediately turns to the only aspect of the record that is relatively easy to discuss — the lyrics and their realization. No sur­prise, indeed, because now we know that Allo Darlin', the pop band, is really nothing but a front for Elizabeth Morris, Singer-Songwriter (Extra)-Ordinaire, and that their soft, lyrical, gentle, but rhythmic and tightly focused melodies are just a mood-enhancing accompaniment for the world philosophy of Ms. Morris.

 

The problem is, that philosophy hasn't changed much, either, and is getting a bit wearisome third time around. There is nothing wrong with hazy-eyed romantic «can-I-really-really-make-this-sound-intelligent-rather-than-clichéd?» confessions as such, but if they turn out to be your regular way of making a living rather than a phase that you go through in life, there's something unspea­kably wrong with that — I mean, Kate Bush's The Kick Inside has always been one of my personal favorites indeed, but I would not be happy at all if the rest of her career all consisted of innumerable clones of that album.

 

And this is the way the title track begins: "First snow's melting on the ground / And I can see my breath / In your silhouette / And I remember what it felt like to be warm / And to be safe in love". Uhh... okay. All right, so maybe I was wrong here — maybe the lyrics do not really matter, maybe this whole album is just Elizabeth's way of saying "I want to hold your hand" on a slightly (very slightly) advanced level of technicality. Maybe we should forget all about that singer-song­writer business. But in this case, where are the great pop melodies? If the words do not matter, give me great pop melodies, not just this unmemorable jingle-jangle.

 

A tune like ʽSanta Maria Novellaʼ (the name of one of the most principal basilicas in Florence) helps uncover some of life's realities — namely, that the band, or at least its principal member, has relocated to Italy where, according to her interviews, she teaches English for a living because the band has no way of making any serious money. Strange as it is, though, you could not guess that from the music, which bears no traces of Italian influence (perhaps for the best, because I am not sure how Allo Darlin' would have coped with a whiff of canzone Napoletana) — yet knowing something about their struggles at least confirms the single positive thing about We've Come From The Same Place: as predictably monotonous as it is, Morris and her pals are being true to themselves, and, unlike so many poseurs, only agree to record stuff that is imbued with reflec­tions of real feelings, sifted as they are through an intentionally intellectual "and you read your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost"-type verbal sieve. (Not quite as much here as on the previous two records, though — even in a song called ʽHistory Lessonsʼ, the only namechecked piece of historical reality turns out to be... the Lion King!).

 

Probably the only song here that could have some limited radio potential is ʽBright Eyesʼ, a duet between Morris and one of the boys where she asks him "do you believe in fun? do you believe in love?" in a thrilled exorcising voice and he calls back "I surely do, I do if you ask me to" in the voice of a happy willing victim, fully conquered through hypnotism (James Braid strikes again!). Additionally, this is one out of only two or three songs where they allow their guitars to develop a touch of distorted laryngitis (along with ʽHalf Heart Necklaceʼ), and Paul Rains plays a nice guitar solo. Who knows, maybe what this music really suffers from is the lack of sufficient con­tributions from the band's other members.

 

In the glowing AMG review — glowing, because Morris does have this knack of melting the hearts of cruel guys with keyboards — Tim Sendra called the album a collection of "intimate and true songs about love, life and how to deal with each", and implied that only somebody tired of hearing such songs could be dissatisfied with the record. Well, strange enough, because (a) I do agree with the definition in general and (b) I am in no way tired of hearing such songs, and am not prepared to ever get tired of hearing them, and yet I am still dissatisfied. Mostly, I am dissa­tisfied because, no matter how «intimate and true» these songs may be, the truth and intimacy have turned into a predictable formula, like minor variations on the exact same sermon that, for some reason, you have to attend every Sunday.

 

How do we mend this? I have not the faintest idea, even if I am sympathetic enough to the band to keep on hoping and wishing that it eventually gets mended. Perhaps the first thing to do would be to write a song that tries to deal with something other than the basic theme of «me and you». How about «me against the world?» Nah, too pre­tentious for a girl with a ukulele. Perhaps «me and my evil twin». On second thought, there's no evidence so far that she even has an evil twin. Maybe «me and my traumatic childhood experiences»? But I guess if she had any, she'd have let the cat out of the bag a long time ago. Ah, forget it. Just brace yourself for about fifty-six more Allo Darlin' twee albums that will tweely explore the twee-sted relations between the protagonist and the antagonist from all geometrically possible perspectives — under the Tower of Pisa, on top of Notre-Dame, and, ultimately, at the bottom of Niagara Falls. As the already mentioned Paul Simon also said, "there must be 50000 ways to say weird crap about your lover".

ALT-J

AN AWESOME WAVE (2012)

 

1) Intro; 2) ❦ (The Ripe & Ruin); 3) Tessellate; 4) Breezeblocks; 5) ❦ (Guitar); 6) Something Good; 7) Dissolve Me; 8) Matilda; 9) Ms; 10) Fitzpleasure; 11) ❦ (Piano); 12) Bloodflood; 13) Taro.

 

Let us begin with this: the front sleeve of the album features a radar image of the Ganges delta. Delta, see? That is the actual name of this band — the Δ symbol, indicating mathematical diffe­rence. Difference, see? This is because this band wants to make a difference. So why are they regularly called alt-J, then? Because apparently this is how you type out the delta on a Mac key­board. They use Macs, see? Or, rather, their immediate target group is Mac users. Because they want to make a difference. They all went to Leeds University, where they started up this band around 2009, and, allegedly, developed their unusual sound because the use of bass guitars and drums was prohibited in student halls. Ironic, isn't it — what with the name of «Leeds» being most closely associated for millions of people with Live At Leeds, one of the most deafeningly loud concert albums ever... but that's sort of beyond the point, since the Who are just about the least probable choice to be associated with Δ.

 

If I am going to make a point here, it has to be made rudely: I can find no better description for the overall sound of alt-J as a sound produced by a bunch of cerebral palsy survivors. (Not 100% removed from the truth, considering that at least the band's drummer, Thom Green, is reportedly 80 percent deaf because of a case of Alport syndrome). Their harmonies, their propensity for minor tonalities, the complexity of the material all push towards categorizing them as «rock» rather than «pop» — but it is a sort of decalcified rock, or, perhaps, a sort of «breezeblock rock», to borrow the name of the album's most successful single. The rhythm section of the band does keep very quiet most of the time, with the drummer sounding as if he were confined to a tiny junior set (sometimes I get the impression of a drum machine, when in reality it is Green tick-tocking on his quasi-cardboard percussion devices). The guitar is mostly playing standard folk or blues patterns, with an occasional surf-rock or post-punk chord thrown in. The keyboard player, Gus Unger-Hamilton, is arguably the most musically inventive member of the band, but even he ends up sounding like he's renting an apartment in a dollhouse most of the time.

 

And then there are the vocals, most of them courtesy of Joe Newman, who is also the main guitarist and (allegedly) the principal songwriter in the band. These belong to the «take it or break it» category: Alt-J fans naturally love his style, whereas for most other people they may be the single most repulsive element here — easily understandable, because in normal life you'd only hear this kind of tone from somebody with a chronic and incurable disease. Unnaturally high-pitched, shaky, wobbly, quiet, and making a point to apply as little pressure on the articulatory organs as possible — it's as if this guy was saving his voice for after marriage or something. Yet it is hard to deny that this vocal style is, on the whole, very well suited to the overall style of the music: Newman is simply doing with his voice the exact same things that all the other band mem­bers are doing with their instruments. This isn't even «effeminate rock», a term rendered near-useless in the era of Katy Perry empowerment — more like «anti-rock», if we normally associate rock music with power, energy, aggression, burning flames etc. It's the evil twin of Angus Young staring at him from the other side of the mirror; the miscarried bastard son of Thom Yorke's Radiohead propping his crutches against his father's fallen tombstone.

 

Before I get carried too far away with this metaphors, though, I must say that I am absolutely not sure that An Awesome Wave is really all that awesome. Released in 2012, it was sure different (though maybe not at all unexpected), and we are all quite hungry for difference (for Δ, that is!) in the 2010s, so it is easy to understand all the critical praise. Raised in the think-different envi­ronment of an elite art school, these guys seem very much driven by a strong desire to innovate, and from a purely formal viewpoint, they do a really good job with it. Although the overall sound of the album is atmospherically monotonous, it is, by nature, quite eclectic: you will hear echoes of everything from Eighties' synth-pop to Seventies' prog-rock (some of their most complex vocal parts make me think of Gentle Giant) to Nineties' R&B to 21st century hip-hop and various styles of electronic music. Basic structures and arrangements are anything but predictable: any song may shift its signature and tempo at any given minute, or be interrupted by a cute accappella section, or have Unger-Hamilton switch from synthesizer to vibraphone and back, blurring the lines between acoustic and electronic just as Newman sometimes blurs the lines between rapping and singing, because true art has nothing to do with lines, you know.

 

Whether it all works, though, is another matter. Obviously, for those with whom this sound clicks, Alt-J will be a solid pretender for the best band of the 2010s — not only do they innovate like crazy, but they are truly awesome! Those with whom it does not click, though, will find them­selves asking — so what exactly is the point? This music is not all that emotionally resonant, which is actually a good point, I think: one of the seductive sides of Alt-J, to me, is that they are not here for my tears, like certain bearded guys in log cabins. This is odd music, for sure, but I would not call it tragic or even melancholic: tired, perhaps, and meditative, but not trying to wrench out spasms of pity and empathy or emotionally manipulate you in any other way. But if it ain't about power, and if it ain't about pity, then... what is it about? Is it just about making a dif­ference without dropping us even a single hint?

 

The lyrics do not offer much help — even provided you can make out whatever Newman is mumbling (I cannot, but they have all the words conveniently printed out), the only easily under­standable idea is that most of the songs are love songs, hidden under a ton of symbolist metapho­rical makeup. At their densest, they go something like: "In your snatch Fitzpleasure, broom-shaped pleasure, deep greedy and googling every corner... steepled fingers, ring leaders, queue jumpers, rock fist paper scissors, lingered fluffers, they choir ʽin your hoof lies the heartlandʼ"... well, you get the drift. Again, I am not angered at this: the lyrics fit into the puzzle exactly the same way as everything else. This might be a good opportunity to name another possible influence on these guys — Captain Beefheart, of course — but perhaps this would be too much of an honor, because it is unlikely that the sound of Alt-J will have as much of a revolutionary im­pact on the future of pop music as the Captain did in his own time.

 

Discussing the songs on an individual level is a fruitless endeavor. Some are a little louder or a little faster; a few feature slightly more distinct hooks (the sharp "la la la la" counterpoints on ʽBreezeblocksʼ, for instance, or the stop-and-start structure of ʽFitzpleasureʼ whose distorted elec­tronic bassline actually adds a sense of alien menace); a few are distinctly more soulful, like ʽBloodfloodʼ with its pretty harmonies, gentle surf guitars and Newman's friendly suggestion to "breathe in, exhale" that might appeal to certain broken-hearted categories of people. But no matter how many times I listen to the whole thing, in the end it stays with me in that precise man­ner — as a single, holistic experience; an intriguing, complex, but possibly quite meaningless statement. That said, it's also not that weird: it never challenges the good old concept of harmony, the guitars and keyboards sound nice, and most of the weirdness really comes from their mash-up approach to pop music's legacy and the above-mentioned «lack of calcium» in the playing. It will definitely go down in history as an album that tried to say something new in the musically stale climate of 2012; whether that new saying was really worth anything, though, is a matter that still remains to be cleared up. Pending that, I give it an honest thumbs up for the effort.

 

 

 

AMY WINEHOUSE

FRANK (2003)

 

1) Intro/Stronger Than Me; 2) You Sent Me Flying/Cherry; 3) Know You Now; 4) Fuck Me Pumps; 5) I Heard Love Is Blind; 6) Moody's Mood For Love/Teo Licks; 7) (There Is No) Greater Love; 8) In My Bed; 9) Take The Box; 10) October Song; 11) What Is It About Men; 12) Help Yourself; 13) Amy Amy Amy/Outro.

 

I do not feel any great inner love for the voice of Amy Winehouse — an absolute prerequisite for being able to consider Amy Winehouse a (the?) Great Artist of Our Times. White people with black voices have always confused me: much too often, you get the impression that admirers rave about their singing simply because they happen to be white people with black voices. What about black people with black voices — what do they get out of it? Just because nature gave Amy Wine­house (or her equally famous, but far less interesting American "diva" counterpart, Ana­stasia) this weird mutated mix of skin color and vocal cords, we're supposed to go crazy?

 

Obviously, most critics will say that's not it, or not just it, and they will mean it, or they will pretend that they mean it. Of course not! Amy Winehouse doesn't just sing "in blackface". She's mixing old jazz and vaudeville with modern sounds. She writes catchy songs. She's an introspec­tive lyricist. She is, well, an interesting person — just look at her drug and her health and her personal life problems. She's a sensation in so many respects you don't know where to begin.

 

Maybe so. I think I do hear a new type of sound of Frank. It isn't necessarily a good type of sound, though. It's the sound of a young girl brought up in a jazz musicians' environment, soaking in the traditional jazz culture, and then selling it out to trendy dealers in modern sounds and pro­duction values. You could argue that Winehouse does to Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday much the same things that Vanessa Mae used to do (still does?) to giants of classical music. And there is, of course, no consensus on the validity, morality, or overall value of this approach.

 

The big difference is, Amy writes her own songs (or, at least, her own lyrics, with lots of help on the music from friends in the trade). Are they good on their own? To my liking, very uneven. Some of the numbers are almost offensively simplistic and catchy on the nursery rhyme level — these are, obviously, the commercial singles, such as 'Fuck Me Pumps', a song that I like to ins­tinctively tap my toes to but which, on the conscious level, only brings up negative thoughts. Mainly because of the lyrics. In the song, she is pouring venom on Paris Hilton-like (or, more precisely, Paris Hilton-wannabe-like) characters — she might as well skip the whole thing and go straight to shooting fish in a barrel. "Character assassination" songs are a tricky genre; just like there's a big difference between knifing someone in a drunken street brawl and an intricate Aga­tha Christie-style murder, so is there an equally big difference between "character assassination" à la Bob Dylan or Lou Reed, on one hand, and bazaar-squandering style lyrics such as featured on 'Pumps'. It doesn't help matters either that today, Amy Winehouse's main "claim to fame" is hardly her songwriting or recording, but rather all the tabloid stories. And besides, frankly spea­king, I do not even know what looks more ridiculous — the combination of "fuck me pumps" and Gucci bags or the combination of Mountain Girl-style hair and The World's Guide To Exotic Art in tattoos.

 

But enough of that, because 'Fuck Me Pumps' is, after all, just one piece of questionable commer­cial bait. The album compensates for this lapse of taste in many ways, really. 'Stronger Than Me' is enjoyable R'n'B with Amy picking on her lyrical hero for not being stronger than her (now that I can believe); 'You Sent Me Flying' has an excellent combination of minimalistic piano and angelic beauty in the chorus, and also gives us a very rare glimpse of Amy's falsetto, which I believe she should show us more often; 'What Is It About Men', with its lazy mid-tempo, gloomy wah-wahs, and depressive lyrics, refreshens my memories of Portishead; and I am totally deligh­ted by the self-ironic, half-serious, half-joking album closer 'Amy Amy Amy' ('where's my moral parallel?' she asks rhetorically). For every highlight or two, there is a piece of boring jazz muzak filler, but the high points prove that there is much substance, and better substance, beyond the singles and the videos.

 

Finally, about the sincerity of it all. Apparently one of Amy's major idols is Billie Holiday — someone who's gone through more suffering in her pre-success years than Amy is guaranteed to go through in all her life. It is therefore obvious that, no matter how much the latter is willing to mold her life and art in the image of Billie, it will always be fake to a certain degree. After all, the main trouble of artists that emerge today (Western, at least) is that they're all well-fed, well-dressed, have roofs over their heads, and are fully literate, and have been that way since the day of their birth. That doesn't count as a healthy presupposition to making great art.

 

So, just as one has to resort to "artificial" working out in order to compensate for the modern sedentary lifestyle, so does today's artist resort to finding out different ways to suffer in order to produce fuel for his/her art. Of course, one shouldn't go too far: for instance, giving away all your property to the poor wouldn't work, because it would take away your resources for marketing your music (and besides, shouldn't you get at least a little something in return for all the suffe­ring?). Therefore, there are but two easy ways to suffer. One is to sculpt yourself a dramatic love history, at a rate of about one breakup per year to keep thoughts fresh and feelings sharp. The other, of course, is to destroy your body through various unhealthy lifestyles. This may seriously endanger the longevity of your career, of course, but what with the medicine of today making such great strides and all, this risk is considerably lower than it used to be.

 

This should have served as a prelude for writing Amy Winehouse off as a fake like so many others, but now that I have seriously listened to Frank, I don't believe I'm in a position to do that. There really isn't that much suffering on the album, certainly not as much as an appalled Pitch­fork review of this album would have you believe. She is, after all, no Tori Amos. There's plenty of simple, unassuming love songs; there's a ton of extra- rather than introverted material, as if she were speaking to you, the listener, of your problems, rather than her own; and there really is not a single song that would straightforwardly fall under the definition of "self-pitying" — even 'Amy Amy Amy', like I said, is more humorous than depressive.

 

So there's no point to getting turned off by Frank. It's an interesting record by a young girl who likes jazz and her jazz idols and is happy to try her hand at it without sounding too retro. It's not a masterpiece, and I don't believe it will endure (Back To Black has a better chance), but by my third listen, I managed to pacify my brain about it, and get my heart enlivened by some of it, and if there's anything more to be expected out of it, I don't know what it is and I don't really need to know. As for the thumbs, they prefer to remain in a strictly horizontal position.

 

P.S. For the record, there are two hidden tracks after 'Outro' (no great shakes, although 'Mr. Magic' is kind of cute), and there is also a "deluxe" edition of the album with a second CD of demos, outtakes, and live versions that is strictly fan-recommended.

 

BACK TO BLACK (2007)

 

1) Rehab; 2) You Know I'm No Good; 3) Me & Mr. Jones; 4) Just Friends; 5) Back To Black; 6) Love Is A Losing Game; 7) Tears Dry On Their Own; 8) Wake Up Alone; 9) Some Unholy War; 10) He Can Only Hold Her; 11) Ad­dicted; 12) Valerie.

 

Impressive! The overall style hasn't changed (unless you count the visual transformation — by this time, covered with a mix of tattoos and heroin marks and enriched with a hairstyle that would topple the 3rd Marine Division, Amy had begun to look like the Bride of Sauron), but almost all the flaws that made Frank tedious have been remedied. For one thing, the album is much shorter, at the expense of cutting down on the songs' average length — a marvelous decision, if you ask me; this way, they really feel like concise, laconic songs rather than space-taking boring grooves that stretch out like bad toffee just because everyone else is doing this.

 

For another thing, she is no longer setting herself up as a 21st century reincarnation of Billie Ho­liday (except for, perhaps, the nice trifle of 'Love Is A Losing Game'). This is a strongly jazz and R'n'B influenced pop album that follows no one particular idol and no one particular style. It does not sound self-consciously retro (it acknowledges all its influences, but does not make an effort to sound exactly like any of them), and it does not sound self-consciously modernistic; it's already got the potential to endure because it's so wonderfully timeless.

 

Also, it may be just a crazy thought, but it seems like she is reducing the flashiness of her voice, as if intentionally driving home the idea that the main selling point of Back To Black should be the songs and not the "Vocal Diva" visiting card. When the song requires her to stretch out, she stretches out, but there is practically no scatting, no wailing in between verses, no trying to reach out for the harder ranges — even though her voice is still not a favourite of mine, she is quite con­sistently listenable throughout.

 

Finally, no one could any longer accuse Amy of cultivating self-pity. The album rode on the success of the 'Rehab' single, an autobiographical tale of personal problems, but it is quite obvio­usly ironic, and its melody, borrowing some bouncy energy from the classic Motown style, is downright cheerful — lead singles have to be cheerful, after all. Much darker is the title track, but it is also more detached; after all, not all sad songs are supposed to reflect the artist's own perso­nality, and Amy's jazzy imploration — 'you go on back to her, and I'll go back to black' — could be about me and you if we wanted it to be so. Wonderful arrangement, as well, with these trebly guitars and strings and bells and whatever.

 

Or take 'You Know I'm No Good', a song that's even more radio-friendly than 'Rehab' (if only for having the tightest rhythm section on the album). This, too, may be deeply personal, but she sings it closer in style to the jazz queens of old, never overemoting so that there be space left for the mystery of it — just how close is the relationship between the lyrics and the singer? It's a cold and faraway sound, but also catchy, and when the horns come in to announce the bridge, they catch that mystery virus from the singer and end up sounding just as puzzling. It is quite ever so refreshing to see a "mainstream" tune bring back the old intrigue.

 

The album is not a hundred percent consistent — I sense a minor drop of quality towards the second half — but there's really nothing bad on it; even the songs that are not memorable still manage to sound nice. The happiness of it all is in realizing that after an album like Frank, most artists would have gone soft and trendy, but this particular artist quite obviously knows what she likes and she's going to do it no matter what — and she's got such a strong personality that she can actually make the majority pander to her will instead of vice versa. And this means that, as long as we have people like Amy — which, given her drug problems, may unfortunately not be too long — there is still a whiff of hope for the mainstream, and a drop of good taste.

 

So, major thumbs up from the intellectual department and minor same from the heart (major same would never come from the heart because that's not the kind of voice the heart can be truly happy about). Sidenote: Back To Black sometimes comes in a "deluxe" version that adds a se­cond CD worth of demos and covers of Amy's old favs like 'Cupid' and 'To Know Him Is To Love Him'. Only for serious fans, and only on the condition no one of them will be foolish enough to say that 'Amy blows Sam Cooke away' or some other crazy thing like that.

 

LIONESS: HIDDEN TREASURES (2011)

 

1) Our Day Will Come; 2) Between The Cheats; 3) Tears Dry; 4) Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?; 5) Like Smoke; 6) Valerie; 7) Girl From Ipanema; 8) Half Time; 9) Wake Up Alone; 10) Best Friends, Right?; 11) Body And Soul; 12) A Song For You.

 

Well, the third album never came — with Amy joining the «27 Club» on July 23, 2011,  we can only guess how things would turn out. Not that it was reasonable to expect any spectacular deve­lopments, but, clearly, the resurrection of healthy mainstream R&B suffered a major setback in the process. (On the other hand, this brings to a close the rather silly Amy / Adele competition, imagined and fueled by the media).

 

Although the lady's self-destruction process was utterly stupid and irresponsible (neither the times that she was living in nor the level of her personal troubles could justify it in any way), and the numerous scandals (such as the infamous June 2011 Belgrade performance) made it seem that she was «fi­nished»  creatively at least a few months prior to the accidental demise, this collection of outtakes — the first in what will probably become a steady stream of posthumous releases — clearly shows that, in the studio at least, the spirit was still there. That is the only thing that Lio­ness shows: it is not a coherent model of the «third album», only two songs for which had been completed (ʽBetween The Cheatsʼ and ʽLike Smokeʼ), and the relative lack of well-written ori­gi­nals stamps this as a «fan-only» release. But it is definitely not a waste of plastic.

 

ʽLike Smokeʼ is definitely a highlight here, despite my predictable dislike for rapping (I'd much rather hear an extended instrumental passage than witnessing a guy called Nas attempting to steal the tune from Amy — sorry, hip-hop fans): Amy genuinely sounds «like smoke» on the number, and the little echo that producer Salaam Remi puts on her voice emphasizes that feeling. ʽBest Friends, Right?ʼ and ʽHalf Timeʼ also have their moments. That said, the majority of Lioness is given away to covers, and overall, it is much more interesting to watch Amy's take on other peo­ple's material here than fish out her own compositions, which do not generally hold a candle to her self-penned «proper» hits.

 

The covers are all respectable and have a wide range — from Carole King to Leon Russell to Ruby & The Romantics. Their problem is the usual one: the covers may have a wide range, but Amy herself does not, singing all of them in more or less the same (her usual) manner. But that is exactly what makes the result interesting — not everyone can sing ʽThe Girl From Ipanemaʼ (re­mem­ber Astrud Gilberto?) and ʽBody And Soulʼ (remember Billie Holiday?) in the exact same emotional framework, and get away with it.

 

I would claim that Amy can, although it is a hard job trying to characterize that manner. Some­how, it melds together elements of toughness (overall low and razor-sharp voice), insecurity and frailty (reflected in the occasionally «swallowed» phrasing and intentional crackling), and habi­tual jazzy «nonchalance». Or something like that. Fact is, the cover versions of Lioness, like eve­rything else she did, further confirm that the girl was never «just another diva», that she had her own style to which she could easily convert «foreign» material as well as her own. The style may easily seem annoying to some, or monotonous and predictable to others, but we could just as well state the same about Billie Holiday or many other people.

 

The worst, and most misleading, thing about the album is probably its title. Not only is the majo­rity of these tracks completely undeserving of the name «hidden treasures» («unwrapped coo­kies» might have been a more telling expression), but «Lioness»? What's that supposed to mean? Okay, so it is actually the name of the record label she set up herself in 2009; but using it for an album title is not only unimaginative, it is plain wrong — the word suggests something like a combination of beauty, brawn, and aggression, which is not her style at all. Leave that crap for, I dunno, Courtney Love.

 

Anyway, that is just a minor complaint — on the whole, the album does not seem to have any flaws except for the most obvious one (not being an actual album). It goes without saying that if you have been overwhelmed by Back To Black, you need to hear this; but it is also clear that Li­oness on its own will not attract any new fans to the legend, certainly not on the same level that the legend's death has attracted. A modest, perfunctory thumbs up here.

 

AT THE BBC (2012)

 

1) Know You Now; 2) Fuck Me Pumps; 3) In My Bed; 4) October Song; 5) Rehab; 6) You Know I'm No Good; 7) Just Friends; 8) Love Is A Losing Game; 9) Tears Dry On Their Own; 10) Best Friends, Right?; 11) I Should Care; 12) Lullaby Of Birdland; 13) Valerie; 14) To Know Him Is To Love Him.

 

More often than not, the barrel-scraping process these days involves the BBC and their obsession to press the «Record» button every time somebody crosses the threshold into one of their studios. More often than not, the results are only of serious interest for hardcore fans of the somebody in question. With Amy Winehouse, this is somewhat different: she never had the time to release an official live album in her lifetime — and, moreover, her reputation of a live artist was seriously soiled by all the scandalous reports on drunk performances and embarrassed walk-outs towards the tragic end of her career. Essentially, we have next to no reminders of what it really was that launched that career — her inspired and creative performances in small London jazz clubs.

 

Hence, this rag-taggy collection of live recordings from various local gigs, taped by the BBC (At The BBC is a somewhat misleading title: most of the tracks come from festivals such as «T in the Park» or TV shows such as Jools Holland, so The BBC Presents would have been more appro­priate), anyway, this collection is an essential purchase for everybody who has no problem with recognizing Amy as a major artist of her generation. The package consists of a small DVD with six performances from a small church-held gig in 2006, and a CD with material scattered from 2004 to 2009 — the «golden age», during which Amy's rule over British R&B remained uncon­tested. Hits and classics are interspersed with little-known obscurities and covers, bits of stage banter and radio host dialogs are included for authenticity, and the recording quality is predic­tably flawless — this is the BBC, after all.

 

Like every seasoned R&B performer, Amy always comes across as loose and free-flowing when performing live, sometimes coming so close to «chaos» that you almost start wondering just how influential booze and other substances must have been in that particular moment. But apparently they weren't: on each and every one of these recordings, she is actually in complete control, al­ways picking herself up and shooting back into space just as she seems almost ready to hit the ground. Take a listen to ʽRehabʼ, for instance — her phrasing on this live performance takes far more risks than the studio original, with surprising modulation decisions and an idiosyncratic «stut­ter» that sounds amusing rather than annoying. Of course, she is really working based on the pattern of the average great jazz vocalist, searching for a one-in-a-million vocal style that would walk a tight balance between «natural» and «ohmigosh, what is that?», but many people do not succeed in that register, coming out with laughable results — with Amy, it is always her that gets the last laugh, no matter how much fun one might poke at her «heroin-addicted toothless old hag» impersonation.

 

Most of the tracks performed come from the first two albums (and are not limited to major hit singles — ʽOctober Songʼ and ʽJust Friendsʼ are two very welcome inclusions), but towards the end you also have the lady sharpening her teeth on old pop standards (ʽI Should Careʼ, ʽLullaby Of Birdlandʼ) and on Phil Spector (ʽTo Know Him Is To Love Himʼ), all of which sound predic­table, but pleasant in «Amy Winehouse mode». Still, nothing beats ʽRehabʼ and ʽYou Know I'm No Goodʼ (the latter gives me one more pretext to lament the misuse of that wonderful bluesy bass­line in the intro — how come its kickass potential was wasted after the first couple of beats?): it would be strange if Amy were less emotional and convincing on her own personal stuff than an old Phil Spector love ballad.

 

Possibly, a full-fledged live album representing a single event would have been a better choice for release, and I have no doubt that a whole bunch of these will be coming up — plenty of stuff has already been released on DVD or showed up on YouTube, and Amy's nimble backing band is always a delight to hear — but this particular assortment, without necessarily turning into a cheap «greatest hits live», shows the overall scope, and could even work as a perfect introduction to Amy's values for the uninitiated (a «classier» introduction, in fact, than any best-of collection). Thus, although I am no big fan of oversaturating the market with archival residue, so far, every­thing seems pretty reasonable; big delighted thumbs up here.

 

 

AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD

...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD (1998)

 

1) Richter Scale Madness; 2) Novena Without Faith; 3) Fake Fake Eyes; 4) Half Of What; 5) Gargoyle Waiting; 6) Prince With A Thousand Enemies; 7) Ounce Of Prevention; 8) When We Begin To Steal.

 

I cannot judge this record on its own terms. That would require a deep and long familiarity with the "noise" style in all of its genres — punk, post-punk, industrial, prog metal, thrash, "stoner rock", etc. etc. I do not have that familiarity, nor do I ever intend to gain one because I'm some­what afraid for my ears — they're a nice part of myself, and I'd hate to lose them to the nefarious artefacts of Throbbing Gristle or Minor Threat (and no, I'm well aware they don't have much in common). I'm certainly willing to sacrifice my time and tastes for many things, but bleeding noise isn't one of them; if its purposes do not get to me soon enough, I see no reason for me to start getting through to them.

 

This is, by and large, also my basic reaction to the debut album of these Austin guys (which is what I am going to call them, instead of referring to the band's full name all of the time or, God help me, the unwieldy abbreviation AYWKUBTTOD; technically, none of the guys are from Aus­­tin, but the band was formed in Austin). It is clear that, already on their self-titled debut, they are trying to step forward and do something individual in the "noise" vein. They don't take too much cues from metal, because they're all lousy instrumentalists (in the sense that any normal metal guy would call them lousy), but they are quite obviously looking up to all the other noisy genres — hardcore punk may very well be in the middle of it, yet the album's goals are far more artsy, even apocalyptic at times. Wait, "at times"? That's not right — it's about the end of the world from the very beginning, as the ground shakes from the wild blasts of 'Richter Scale Madness', to the very end.

 

The average "song" on here has a blunt mid-tempo, a chainsaw guitar slashing out power chords in one channel, a ringing guitar ringing out the same chords in another channel, a thunderous rhythm section, and, oh yes, a mumbling or screeching guy somewhere in the back yard, hope­lessly lost among all the noise but still trying to sound like he's important. It's not cacophonous: the actual playing is quite melodic and conservative, it's just the way it's all arranged and loaded with feedback that makes the proceedings close to unlistenable. Sometimes they lose the rhythm section, and then it all begins to sound like Neil Young practicing feedback on the soundtrack to Dead Man, but with a far more narrow vision at that.

 

Sometimes the band starts out quiet enough for the listener to be able to make more sense of what is going on — like on 'Novena Without Faith', the first song on the record to do so and, arguably because of this, the one most frequently quoted by listeners. That never goes on for too long, how­ever: everything quiet on this record merely serves as a prelude to something much louder. Other than that, the songs have no individuality, at least, no individuality that I could establish based on three or four listens: it's all a never-ending glop of musical sludge, although, by all means, produced with care and attention.

 

So, if you're into musical sludge, "this note's for you", to quote the title of a minor, but still far superior to this, Neil Young album. If you're not, this pro­bably isn't a bad example of the genre to ever forbid yourself the proper acquaintance with. Predictably, all I can offer is a thumbs down, but don't take my word on it — I feel a little like Captain Cook around the Austronesians about it.

 

MADONNA (1999)

 

1) And You Will Know Them By The Trail Of Dead; 2) Mistakes & Regrets; 3) Totally Natural; 4) Blight Takes All; 5) Clair De Lune; 6) Flood Of Red; 7) Children Of The Hydra's Teeth; 8) Mark David Chapman; 9) Up From Redemption; 10) Aged Dolls; 11) The Day The Air Turned Blue; 12) A Perfect Teenhood; 13) Sigh Your Children.

 

The band's second album feels like it was recorded during the same session as the first one — maybe this explains the minimal gap in time between the two. Amazingly, I have encountered opinions that state it represents "a huge leap in quality" over the self-titled debut; my brain is un­able to fathom this, as I do not hear a single serious difference. Same low quality production, same reliance on a juxtaposition of chainsaw buzz and jangle as the main musical backbone, same — already almost annoyingly — predictable alternation between slow/moody and fast/hard­core, same punk guy shouting instead of singing. The only technical difference is that the songs are generally shorter — but, on the other hand, there's more of them, and I have a hard time tell­ing when one is over and the next is on anyway.

 

I can sense a deep desire to shock and impress, and I am happy for those who are shocked and im­pressed; but I myself can only shrug my shoulders. I was never a big fan of the Cranberries' 'I Just Shot John Lennon', but it was an interesting and coherent statement all the same, after which naming one of your songs 'Mark David Chapman' and leading it off with lines like 'We pierced the side of the idol / With the sharpened neck of an electric guitar' seems sort of... expendable, to put it mildly. Especially when the song has nothing interesting to say in terms of melody.

 

Yes, it is fairly certain by now that this band is trying out something new — the Austin guys are always compared to Sonic Youth, whose brand of avantgarde experimentation they are so bravely trying to sew unto the regular hardcore spine. For the attempt, they deserve respect. In the eyes of those who think it works, they deserve love. I stand on the other side of the fence, hand in hand with those who think it does not work — not one second of the time. That there are no memo­rable melodies should be taken for granted, but neither is the atmosphere captivating, since most of this racket is just pointless noisemaking. Maybe we can all upgrade our level of smartness and say that, well, the point of the record is pointless noisemaking, so that it quite wonderfully achie­ves all its goals. Maybe — but I am well behind that level of abstraction.

 

Since I cannot think of anything good to say about the record, let me just quickly give it an expected thumbs down and turn this over to an ano­nymous fan reviewer on a well-known Internet site. Excerpt:

 

«A song such as 'A Perfect Teenhood', morphing elegantly out of the unstintingly gothic and funereal piano interlude 'The Day the Air Turned Blue', embodies the spirit. It's an oscillating storm of sibilant melody and breakneck punk riffage.When a sudden landslide of drums and vitreous chords halt the pellmell first movement, there's a moment to catch your breath in the shimmering, seesawing euphonies, but not for long. Tommy gun! bloodlust! a perfect teenhood! chants Keely, before declaring, perhaps unsurprisingly given the title, "Fuck you!" He bawls the evergreen mantra of youth about fifty times in the climax, his vocals pitching like a trawler on the ocean amid the clarion chords and, in fact, the sound mixer fades him out after a bit as if he's embarrassed at the sudden outburst of earthy language, then fades him back in a moment later as if to say to the listener, "Yep, sorry guys, still at it, be right with you..." before fading him out again in the enharmonic gloaming. Fucking ace.»

 

Amazing, isn't it? "The evergreen mantra of youth" is priceless all by itself, but to characterize the usual punkish bawl ('fuck you, fuck you, fuck you...') as "vocals pitching like a trawler on the ocean amid the clarion chords" is something else. It agrees splendidly with the fact that no third opinion exists on Madonna: one is either seduced by its kickass power, or is left as cold by it as the Kali image on the front cover (I take it that Kali is supposed to be this band's Madonna, by the way). Maybe it is my own serious problem that I remain impenetrable to the first opinion. But seeing as how I have also seen it expressed in the following way — "this is the best hard rock since Led Zeppelin!" — I may have a right to wonder whether at least part of the admiration for the Austin guys cannot be attributed to serious gaps in musical knowledge on the part of some of the admirers. Best hard rock since Led Zeppelin? You must be kidding, sir. Ever heard of Napalm Death?..

 

SOURCE TAGS & CODES (2002)

 

1) It Was There That I Saw You; 2) Another Morning Stoner; 3) Baudelaire; 4) Homage; 5) How Near How Far; 6) Heart In The Hand Of The Matter; 7) Monsoon; 8) Days Of Being Wild; 9) Relative Ways; 10) After The Laughter; 11) Source Tags & Codes.

 

I do not like to believe, nor would I recommend anyone to believe, in miraculous musical revolu­tions. It's not that musical talent should necessarily show up on the genetic level — one's skills can be honed through time as well — but situations when artists release a 10-star album right after a 2-star album and then go back to a 3-star album before reemerging with a 9-star album have always looked highly suspicious to me, and, upon careful consideration, unsupported. As far as I'm concerned, there's no irrational basis for this, unless rational factors like too much grass, too much booze, or one too many replacements of the band's drummer are involved.

 

With the release of the Austin lads' third album, their first on a major label (Interscope-Geffen), one could think that the age of the miracle is finally upon us. Although Madonna received enough critical praise to warrant that label transfer, it was Source Tags & Codes that finally put the band in the limelight by threatening, two years into the decade, to become the album of the decade (and the threat is still on as the decade is on its way out). An absolutely glowing review at Pitchforkmedia was interpreted by the indie kids as a rallying signal, and the world of Indepen­dent Lovers Of Serious Music has quite independently voted for Source Tags & Codes as one of its key symbols. It has made history already, regardless of whether you, the individual listener, are prepared to ejaculate or vomit upon listening to it.

 

It is hardly pleasant for me to badmouth albums that, this way or the other, have made history, as I am quite a history buff myself. But, happily, I don't feel any need to. No, nothing miraculous on the horizon: Source Tags & Codes is not a giant step in any unpredictable direction. The band's views on what constitutes cool music haven't changed much, their basic musical schtick still consists of interaction between the jangle anode and the noise cathode, and the vocals are as ugly as usual. There is, however, one important change that seems to trigger all the other ones: the band has grown up.

 

Maybe it was their realization that they're recording for a bigger label, or, vice versa, the bigger label picked them up only once they started the maturation process, or something else, but all of the songs end up sounding more accessible — in fact, I'm positively sure some of the old fans could have called the record a crappy sellout after the uncompromising explosions of the self-titled debut and Madonna (in a way that one could also call London Calling a sellout after The Clash — or a miriad other similar situations).

 

Not a great deal more: upon first listen, I remained just as uninvolved as usual. But eventually, this stuff clicks. Of course, a tremendous amount of help comes from improved production: with a bigger and better studio at their disposal, the guys end up with sharper and clearer guitar separa­tion, making it possible for the melodies to come through. They also bring in additional touches, like, for instance, strings arrangements on some of the tracks — they aren't so much heard as felt, according to the Phil Spector principle, but it sometimes adds a real aura of grandness to the tune as compared to the faked aura of grandness on Madonna. The songs still sound similar, but they no longer blend into each other so frustratingly.

 

However, the melodies themselves are improving — it is now possible to connect with some of them on an emotional level that transcends generic headbanging. As far as I'm concerned, for in­stance, there is nothing even remotely close to the exhilarating power of the opening riff for 'Bau­delaire', or the stately grandeur of the mid-tempo melody of the title track, which is quite worthy of a Neil Young, for instance. The dark chords of 'Monsoon' rumble around you like dark clouds; the chiming chords of 'Relative Ways' weave an epic pattern of unexpected optimism; and most other tracks, which I wouldn't count as highlights, have melodies or atmospheres with either ex­plicit meanings or concealed ones that are well worth decoding.

 

I don't think this should necessarily mean that I've been seriously misunderstanding Madonna; I'd rather see this as a successful attempt of imbuing their already well-oiled musical machine with certain classical values. Source Tags & Codes washes away much, if not most, of the "punk" attitude of its predecessors — the necessary condition of including a fast thrashy section in each of the songs is no longer necessary, the lyrics are generally less provocative, the screa­ming less pronounced. The freed-up space is then occupied by a diversity of feelings, from the angry to the contemplative, but mostly, with the epic. You may not know what exactly they're trying to tell you — and analyzing their lyrics won't tell you much except what you already know — but, finally, they have the means to tell it to you with a flair.

 

The proverbial Pitchfork review from Matt LeMay put it this way: "Source Tags and Codes will take you in, rip you to shreds, piece you together, lick your wounds clean, and send you back into the world with a concurrent sense of loss and hope". I fully concur with the 'sense of loss and hope' thing — tragedy and optimism are both expressed very clearly on this album, sometimes on the very same track. The rest, of course, is a starry-eyed exaggeration; the band is sailing the same old angst-and-depression caravel that was freshly rigged and painted in the days of Quadrophenia, and if it honestly 'rips you to shreds, pieces you together, licks your wounds clean', I can't help but picture you as an ecstatic Pacific island native hailing said worn-out cara­vel into his harbour.

 

Source Tags & Codes is quite an emotional roller coaster, but I don't recall it putting me into any kind of emotional state I hadn't experienced a million times before, not to mention it took quite a while for it to put me into those states. If it does turn out to be "the album of the decade", it only goes to show how much that decade had to offer humanity. But if it doesn't (and I'd rather it didn't), it has a much better chance to go down in history as simply one more clever, honest, spiritually satisfying album that, so far, no decade has really lacked. With all that in mind, I'm happy to give it a thumbs up and warn similar-minded people that, unlike Madonna, it does warrant repeated listenings even if your initial conviction that you're still forcing yourself to swallow the same old shit happens to be stronger than mine.

 

WORLDS APART (2005)

 

1) Ode To Isis; 2) Will You Smile Again?; 3) Worlds Apart; 4) The Summer Of '91; 5) The Rest Will Follow; 6) Caterwaul; 7) A Classic Arts Showcase; 8) Let It Dive; 9) To Russia My Homeland; 10) All White; 11) The Best; 12) The Lost City Of Refuge.

 

The higher they drag you, the lower they'll sink you. Critical minds, perhaps already in a state of pre-confusion from having hoisted too much incomprehensible praise — for incomprehensible reasons — on the incomprehensible chaos of Source Tags & Codes, were eagerly anticipating the follow-up, maybe believing, deep down in their souls, that it would be the follow-up that would, in the end, make things a little more comprehensible.

 

Unfortunately, Worlds Apart was — still is — even more confusing. It goes in so many different directions and makes so many unpredictable moves that it's impossible to even categorize it, let alone explain it. It is puzzling, and while trying to sort out the puzzle, some of the critics had the misfortune to sniff out, within its twisted corridors, the next worst thing to wife-beating and neo-Nazism: PROGRESSIVE ROCK!

 

I swear that in one place at least, I saw an ELP reference (!) in the review of the album, and that's just the beginning. Immediately the ratings plummeted (Pitchfork gives this a 4.0 right on the heels of Source Tags' 10.0), the insults heaped up, and yesterday's critical darlings became, for the most part, outcasts. For the most part — due to little more than the painfully hypocritical state of «mainstream alternative» rock journalism in the States.

 

Worlds Apart may not necessarily be "better" than Source Tags, but it is very clearly the band's Tusk after their Rumours. They are evidently in the "artistic growth" regime, still leaving plenty of space for the punkish loudness but reaching out to other approaches for help as well. Pianos, strings, classic rock melodicity, a little bit of Russian music-inspired waltzing, a Wagnerian ope­ning number (!) — yes, there's plenty of pomp and pretense, but it's not the pomp and pretense that's new here; pomp and pretense have followed the Austin guys since day one. What's new is that they decided to take a look back and bring in some fresh new influences from stale old sources, and I, for one, think this resulted in expanding their musical vision and, most important, making the record interesting to listen to.

 

For instance, they now have a different set of policies concerning the 'loud-and-quiet' dynamics, best illustrated on the example of 'Will You Smile Again?'. It begins in the traditional way, an all-out assault on the senses with mammoth drumming, chainsaw and jangle, but then, instead of giving way to the "sonic muck" of incomprehensible mumble against a background of sleepy guitars and pianos, it transforms into a stripped-down martial blues-rock tune that is completely different in dynamics from the opening part. Nothing brilliant about the songwriting, but quite good in the way of attention-grabbing — before it reverts to the ocean of chainsaw and jangle.

 

They also continue writing songs — occasionally, at least — that I understand on an emotional level. 'Let It Dive', for instance, fully justifies its epic ambitions with its loud, yet at the same time weirdly pacifying chorus of 'let it dive, let it die, let it fade out of sight'; the song gives the effect of an oddly grungy U2, and, in fact, I'd be highly interested in seeing it covered by Bono just to know if this gives it a sharper edge. 'All White', with its minor chords, dramatism, and operatic backup vocals has been compared to Ziggy-era Bowie — an apt comparison, and that's probably why I like the song so much (even Keely's whiny voice fits it great). 'The Lost City Of Refuge' finishes the album on a lovely, graceful, shadowy note with an elegant guitar arrangement that's more intricate that everything they'd done on their first two albums put together.

 

Lyrically, they also continue to mature; the texts are getting more coherent, and some of the songs now have implicit or even explicit subject matters — 'Will You Smile', for instance, is about self-imposed blocks on creating grand, sweeping artistic statements (something that the band obviously has no problem with — or, at least, no longer has a problem with, given their pre­occupation with the subject). The title track has caused some controversy; a very distinctly pro­nounced statement against modern day cultural decline ('look at those cunts on MTV with their cars and cribs and rings and shit'), it has been accused itself of being a fairly generic alt-rock pro­duct of its age — a point that works against the song, perhaps, which has obviously been written as merely a vehicle to get it out of their system, but certainly not against the album, which is as far removed from MTV values as could be possible today. Many of the other songs have interes­ting, intelligent lyrical insights as well — perhaps this is why Reece and Keely take the pains to generally sing in a more distinctive manner, and also turn down the loudness during many of the verses. Not that the voices have improved, but at least they're giving it a try.

 

One shouldn't also get the impression that this is so, so, so much different from Source Tags & Codes. Despite all the experimentation, the band's backbone and primary values stay the same. It may be the inclusion of overtly pompous bits, like 'Ode To Isis', or the Russian waltz, or the loss of the wall of sound on some of the songs, that irritated most of the critics and some of the liste­ners, but overall, I am fairly certain that if history chooses to preserve And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead in its memory as an important cultural phenomenon, there is no way Wor­lds Apart can be seen as the point where the rot set in and the shark was jumped. In fact, this is exactly the kind of album I was secretly hoping they'd get along to doing one day if they had any real talent within them, and I am certainly not dissatisfied — and I invite everyone to look at this with an open mind. Thumbs up from the brain for all the experimentation, and partially likewise from the heart that gladly connected with at least three or four songs on here (a major record for this particular band). Yes, and don't forget there's nothing substantially wrong with ELP either, regardless of the fact that nothing on Worlds Apart sounds even remotely like ELP. (The day someone in the band starts playing piano like Keith Emerson is the day that the last person on Earth who still remembers anything about Keith Emerson goes to his grave).

 

SO DIVIDED (2006)

 

1) Intro: A Song Of Fire And Wine; 2) Stand In Silence; 3) Wasted State Of Mind; 4) Naked Sun; 5) Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory; 6) So Divided; 7) Life; 8) Eight Day Hell; 9) Witches Web; 10) Segue: In The Realms Of The Unreal; 11) Sunken Dreams.

 

 

One can sense confusion as the main point of this album: perhaps befuddled by the critical and commercial backlash against Worlds Apart — one that I, for one, could not have predicted ei­ther, were I the one in charge of the band's creativity, since Worlds Apart was a smooth and lo­gical expansion of the journey started with Source Tags — Keely and Reece are all but dancing without a floor, trying out all sorts of ideas and ending up with perhaps their most incoherent album ever, a mess of shards that just can't seem to stick together.

 

For this, they got slapped once again; few people loved the album as a whole — most firefighters from the music review industry slapped on their gear, dashed into the burning house, saved a few precious items and condemned the rest of the building. The band was accused of meandering, philandering, pandering, and rendering their former rock sound soft, lazy, and unbearable. Even the infamous Matt LeMay from Pitchfork joined in the fray.

 

I guess, however, that it all boils down to one's expectations. Discoherence and being "all over the place" are not welcome much in the XXIst century; had The White Album been recorded and released today, chances are the leading critics of our generation would have swept it away, complaining that "its complexity seems inorganic and clumsy, revealing the weakness of the source material rather than elevating and enhancing it... even when the dizzyingly disparate pieces of the album do fall into place, it seems like the work of some external hand; the band achieves crystalline structural vistas, but it's never quite clear how they got there, or why" (a direct quote from the Pitchfork review of So Divided — but isn't this a word-perfect description of The Beatles as well?).

 

And So Divided is this band's White Album (proportionately, of course): the product of a band that, subconsciously at least, understands that it has already reached its highest peak and can now allow itself whatever curious and puzzling moves it can think of at any given moment, even at the expense of "clumsily" sounding like a parody on someone else. Even without being fully and com­pletely versed in all the musical styles of the past fifty years, I can't help but spot influence after influence on the musical world of the album.

 

There is only one straightforward cover: Gui­ded By Voices' 'Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory' (with a more lush and polished ar­rangement than the original, but also with a vocal delivery that is indistinguishable from R.E.M's Michael Stipe, for some reason), but nods to giants are all over the place: 'Eight Day Hell' bor­rows its piano-and-drums intro from 'Good Day Sunshine' and then sounds like a generic late Sixties psychedelic anthem à la early Bee Gees or Status Quo; 'Sunken Dreams' is a spot-on imi­tation of The Cure, from its title to its grim echoey production to Robert Smith-like vocals; 'Stand In Silence' is the kind of pop-punk that stems from The Jam and extends to... oh, whatever; 'Wit­ches Web' may be Pink Floyd-influenced (although I've also seen it compared to the Kinks' style on Muswell Hillbillies, if you can believe that); and at least one or two songs have massive codas that bring to mind Yes' 'Starship Trooper'. Bizarre as it seems, even the non-essential intro to the al­bum has made me think of Blur's 'Tender'!

 

So, if anything, the easiest accusation against the Austin guys here could be that they no longer sound like the Austin guys, but rather like a bunch of imitations of other guys. The title track is arguably the only song on here that still preserves traces of the old band; elsewhere, even the songs that rock no longer rock the way they used to rock — 'Naked Sun', for instance, has blues-rock overtones and even refuses to utilize the chainsaw-and-jangle wall of sound for most of its duration. Worst offense of all: on half of the tracks at least, the vocalists are actually trying to sing rather than shout. Sometimes, they even succeed. Sometimes, when they can't and don't, they bring in female voices: the avantgarde artist Amanda Palmer on 'Witches Web' and Lily Courtney on a few other tracks. Just how "And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead"-like is this?

 

But I like most of these songs; I like the vocal melodies, I like the refined arrangements, and I like how they did manage to re-capture the artistic essence of their influences (I defy you to play the beginning of 'Sunken Dreams' to your unsuspecting neighbour and not have him identify it as The Cure). Their lyrics are getting better and better with each new album as well — although it's hard not to make a jab at lines like 'I had a band, had a song, had a vision, where's my vision gone?', they go along very well with the energetic riffage of 'Stand In Silence'. In fact, quite a few of the texts are all about confusion, loss of direction, disillusionment, and other nice elements that goad sharp-tongued critics into action, but at least they're being honest, and let's face it: if a band that doesn't know what it is that it is doing does it so well, doesn't this mean that the band is essen­tially good? For all it's worth, it may be So Divided that ultimately convinces me the Austin lads have talent, certainly not Madonna — and, perhaps, it ends up convincing me even more master­fully than Source Tags, although it may not be the better album of the two.

 

So thumbs up for a record that I will, by all means, be wanting to eventually revisit — not be­cause it simply "sounds like all these other great bands", but because I have yet to figure out all the subtleties of how these other great bands merge with Reece and Kelly's own musical and spiritual past and present.

 

THE CENTURY OF SELF (2009)

 

1) Giants Causeway; 2) Far Pavilions; 3) Isis Unveiled; 4) Halcyon Days; 5) Bells Of Creation; 6) Fields Of Coal; 7) Inland Sea; 8) Luna Park; 9) Insatiable (one); 10) Pictures Of An Only Child; 11) Ascending; 12) An August Theme; 13) Insatiable (two).

 

For some reason — maybe critical indifference/hatred finally got to them — the experimentation is over, and the lads shift back to the monolithic kind of sound that characterized Source Tags & Codes. The sound is more immediate, most of the songs rock hard, and apparently there is a more "live" feel to the whole thing, as they concentrate less on overdubbing and more on ass-kicking. Does that mean that the framework of So Divided/Worlds Apart is renounced as a temporary blunder? As sort of the band's Their Satanic Majesties' Request? This I don't know, but it's not the kind of thing that I'd like to believe — even if you're convinced that there's only one thing in the world that you do real good, limiting yourself to that one thing is an unnecessary act of chick­ening out. You aren't always your own best judge, you know.

 

Anyway, The Century Of Self did get glowing reviews and restore the confidence of disappoin­ted fans, and, while it disappointed me a bit with its conscious refusal to explore new ground, I can't deny that it is a strong effort, showing that they at least haven't lost the inspiration or the de­dication. If you have already cracked the mystery of Source Tags, you'll probably like this as that album's well-meaning little brother — there's a bit more filler, but all the sonic textures are back and the production, despite the fact that the band has returned to a minor label, remains crisp and clear, no ugly lo-fi in sight.

 

The key track on the album is 'Isis Unveiled' (they really have a fascination with the goddess, don't they?), whose main theme will inarguably remain as one of their strongest "epic" moments in history, the aural equivalent of an unstoppable fantasyland cavalry charge. Again, I can't help but be reminded of how the Who used to create a Wagnerian orchestral feel with but a basic gui­tar/bass/drum set, and, although the Austin guys use two guitars and two drum sets, they're almost up to competing here, generating a wave of symph-rock majesty out of so little. Nothing else on the album comes close to reaching that emotional height, but perhaps nothing should.

 

Elsewhere, once the material started growing on me, all the old reactions fell into place. 'Bells Of Creation' and 'Inland Sea' move slowly, utilizing the help of stately piano chords to get heaven-on-earthly grandeur, while 'Far Pavillions' and 'Ascending' invent a couple more enjoyable pop-punk hooks. Also, they aren't entirely done with the imitations of the preceding album: 'Luna Park' is busy exorcising the collective Bono from their midst, and 'Insatiable One' bor­rows the melody from the Doors' 'Spanish Caravan', but in a modest and respectable way.

 

There is no huge statement I can make about any of this, nor do I wish to use the album as a pre­text for further dissecting what I perceive as their musical philosophy. There is no big news for me here. This could serve as a basis for dismissing the record — this is a "pretentious" band, after all, and a "pretentious" band that does not manage to up the stakes each and every time normally deserves a public whipping. But this would have been the past decision, back when my brain was the only part of me that allowed for positive judgement of their music; since then, I have mana­ged to accommodate certain living quarters for it in the heart as well, and this means that, liste­ning to 'Isis Unveiled', I can go "wow, how high that thing goes!" rather than "just a minute, let me check all the melodies on Source Tags & Codes that this thing borrows ideas from". There­fore, thumbs up, and I'm sure no fan of the band will be disappointed.

 

TAO OF THE DEAD (2011)

 

1) Introduction: Let's Experiment; 2) Pure Radio Cosplay; 3) Summer Of All Dead Souls; 4) Cover The Days Like A Tidal Wave; 5) Fall Of The Empire; 6) The Wasteland; 7) The Spiral Jetty; 8) Weight Of The Sun; 9) Pure Radio Cosplay (reprise); 10) Ebb Away; 11) The Fairlight Pendant; 12) Strange News From Another Planet (Know Your Honor / Rule By Being Just / The Ship Impossible / Strange Epiphany / Racing And Hunting).

 

Since the title of the album makes no sense whatsoever (an on-the-spot concatenation of Tao Te Ching with the Book Of The Dead, I suppose), I am going to assume that neither do the lyrics, and if I am mistaken, I couldn't care less. If I really want someone to teach me the latest trends in crossing metaphysics with mysticism, I'll go to Jon Anderson, still alive and kicking.

 

My duty, the way I see it, is to honestly state that Tao Of The Dead is this band's worst album in ten years. Way, way back in the former millennium And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead used to be a formative, aspiring noise-rock band whose only talent consisted of being able to paint their own unique landscape of Roar-and-Ring. Which they did — on every single track, without much afterthought. Then, somehow, they managed to make a great leap forward by cut­ting out melodic pathways through that landscape — pathways that sometimes even led them away from their preferred wasteland of musical rock, dust, and ash. The entire stretch from Sou­rce Tags & Codes right to The Century Of Self was strewn with these unpredictable diversions and escapades. Critics loved some of these and hated others, but here was a band eager to learn and develop — and I'd almost managed to forget all about their first two albums.

 

Now along comes this mess. Recorded in ten days, with a stripped-down lineup of just the four core band members, with complete emphasis on guitars. Suspicious. All of the songs are cram­med in two lengthy multi-part suites — even more disturbing. And after five honest listens, I still cannot tell one song from another. I hear nothing, feel nothing, like nothing, remember nothing. The whole record is one big nothing. Loud-sounding, pompous, bulging, bursting-out nothing.

 

In fact, especially after reading some of the absolutely glowing reviews, I had to make sure for myself whether a part of my brain had not been misplaced in the interim between 2009 and 2011. So I took down The Century Of Self and refreshed it. 'Isis Unveiled' — still as fabulous as ever, nothing will make me forget its epic stomp. 'Halcyon Days', 'Fields Of Coal', 'Bells Of Creation' — strong, interesting creations, each with a little bit of its own face. Tao Of The Dead? Dead indeed, completely dead in comparison.

 

First of all, apart from the ambition (a track that runs over sixteen minutes, MY GOD!!..), there are no new developments whatsoever. Conrad Keely has not learned to sing like Robin Gibb, Ja­son Reece does not attempt to master the technique of Ginger Baker, the guitars roar and ring like they always do, and the alternations between loud, guitar-dominated and quiet, bass-led parts of songs are completely recognizable. How can this be loved? Only if there are plenty of hooks to compensate. If you listen to the Austin lads simply for the fact that they come from Austin, Tao Of The Dead will make you happy. If you want good songs...

 

...listen to this: «...'Pure Radio Cosplay', a sweaty rocker with an almost Stonesy underpinning that laments the death of rock radio...». From the Pitchfork review. You want to know more about the «Stonesy underpinning»? I will tell you more. «Underpinning» is a nice way to convey the fact that the main melody of the song is an instantly recognizable variation on 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', except that the first nine notes of the looping riff have been muddled around a bit. And, on my own part, I will have to admit that this is the only musical bit I still have in my head after the already mentioned five listens. So much for frickin' hooks.

 

Nothing could be lamer than this: at once a «return-to-basics/roots» approach (my stance has al­ways been that the farther away the Austin lads are from their roots, the better) and a «fuck it all, let's be ambitious and progressive» motto: all across his recent interviews, Keely was namedrop­ping Pink Floyd, Rush, and even Yes as the chief inspirations behind the album's concept and philosophy. Turns out that he played this well: guilt-ridden with having earlier ridiculed and dis­graced progressive rock values, the «cool» musical press of today has been rapidly reversing the trend, so that in 2010 artists who fondly remember how they used to play in the sandpits with their copies of Close To The Edge may safely reap the benefits.

 

Except Tao Of The Dead is not this band's Close To The Edge — it is their Topographic Oce­ans, minus the diversity, freshness of approach, and technical perfection of that deeply flawed al­bum that is still somehow admirable in its boldness. I can only repeat that I find nothing to ad­mire here. In fact, I insist that the band's next album rather be a collection of Sinatra covers — or that it be not, not in my lifetime at least. Ugh. Thumbs down.

 

LOST SONGS (2012)

 

1) Open Doors; 2) Pinhole Cameras; 3) Up To Infinity; 4) Opera Obscura; 5) Lost Songs; 6) Flower Card Games; 7) A Place To Rest; 8) Heart Of Wires; 9) Catatonic; 10) Awestruck; 11) Bright Young Things; 12) Time And Again.

 

With an album title like that, most people would probably think that this is a barrel-scraping out­take collection — coming fresh and hot off the trail of Tao Of The Dead, too, since you do not usually expect bands to put out bunches of new original product each year these days. I have no idea if this was a conscious exercise in self-humiliation, or if somebody just wanted to stamp on the nicely fashionable word «LOST» in there somewhere, but the important statement is: Lost Songs is a damn fine record, and a great return to form. Looks like I was a bit too hasty to write these guys off last time around.

 

Conventional opinion seems to have solidified around something like this: Lost Songs is a retro-oriented record, with a somewhat more blunt, punkish approach, and its lo-fi production values hint at the desire to recapture the impact of the band's earliest records (such as Madonna). To me, this seems both true and untrue. True, in that the «artsy» excesses of Tao Of The Dead — which, I insist, were really excesses, because nobody cuts an art-rock record in ten days — have mostly been drop-kicked in favor of simpler, cruder, but much more effective melodies. The trademark wall of sound stays firmly in place, and now it comes in huge, but properly delineated blocks, rather than one unbearable monolith with tricky subtleties hidden well beneath the surface.

 

But false, in that I do not feel much in common between Lost Songs and the early days — other than, indeed, a somewhat slackier approach to production, so that Keely's vocals are once again buried deep in the mix, reaching out to you from under all the guitar layers like a drowning man's last call. Which is surprising, actually, considering the record's agenda: Lost Songs was supposed to directly address many of today's social and political issues (such as the war in Syria, to which ʽUp To Infinityʼ was supposedly dedicated; later on, the band «re-dedicated» the song to Pussy Riot, and the list may be far from over) — so it is a little strange that none of that can really be guessed without taking a close look at the lyrics sheet. Isn't it clear that, if the world is truly so fucked up these days, the kids might lack the appropriate reading skills?

 

Anyway, the big deal is that many of these melodies hit the senses very effectively — bracing my­self for the worst after all the frustration with Tao, I was all but amazed at how many emotio­nally impressive hooks there are. They may be too simple, yes, for listeners who are already used to jud­ging the Austin lads according to the twistedly esoteric standards of «progressive rock», but I keep on insisting that that is a mistake — loud barrages of relatively generic heavy rock chords are usually inef­fective when used as the basic foundation in «progressive» purposes. In other words, on Lost Songs they are locked in a perfect union with their reason for existence, whereas on Tao the connection was rather... uh... perverted.

 

There is very little that is actually new about the overall sound. A few of the tracks are notably faster than usual — including the already mentioned ʽUp To Infinityʼ, but especially ʽCatatonicʼ, propelled forward by a simple, but very distinctive blues-rock riff, one of those nasty little bas­tards that you feel you have already known for your entire life, yet can never pinpoint the exact source. The final track (ʽTime And Againʼ) is also unusual, in that it rests upon an acoustic bed­rock, while at the same time running along at a good tempo and featuring plenty of electric over­dubs — with a specific folk-rock vibe, to soothe the nerves and provide a slightly relaxing finale to the thunderstorm, this time, stormier than ever.

 

Not everything is equally memorable, but the songs do have their individualities. ʽOpen Doorsʼ is like a heroic Lieder-style opener — Keely's vocal parts match the instrumental chords to give you a fine opportunity to aggrandize your spirit while singing about how "this world is lost in suffer­ing" and "we survive behind the times, we walk through blood to save the world" (okay, so these lyrics could have used fewer clichés, but remember, «bluntness» and «accessibility» was the main motto in the creation of the album). ʽOpera Obscuraʼ is all built on a ferocious tribal/martial drum pattern (war, baby, war) that very reluctantly fades away even after the song is over. The title track is unexpectedly poppy, with a thin, New Wave-era style riff winding its way through the thick drumming and getting intertwined with the catchy vocal chorus. The cool point of ʽFlower Card Gamesʼ is how its very simple, deep bassline and its very simple looped guitar riff com­plement each other — with a strong emission of ominousness in the process — and so on.

 

Yet I have to say that my favorite track here is still the one that comes closest to a «power ballad» status: ʽAwestruckʼ may have the most awe-striking instrumental mid-section these guys ever had the inspiration to come up with. Perfectly calculated, meticulously planned, the guitar melody, beginning as a weeping, quasi-countrified, slide solo, then turns into a series of rising and falling trills that epitomize beauty — like the ringing dreaminess of Cocteau Twins multiplied by the piercing loudness of The Edge. Not that the Austin lads never had this particular kind of sound before, but somehow, this is the first time it hit me that hard. Beautiful sequence — I almost wish the song were completely instrumental, since Keely's nasality can hardly do it justice.

 

Overall, it seems like this impulse to «get back to reality», crawl out of their fantasy worlds and find inspiration for their music directly from all the mountains of crap that surround us on all sides, if we only cared to look — seems like it worked for these guys. (For the record, it does not work for everyone: you are still supposed to have some real talent to burn before you start writing songs about the Arab Spring and global warming). So, here's hoping that complete and total para­dise on Earth does not arrive before they plan on making their next record, and a healthy thumbs up in the meantime.

 

IX (2014)

 

1) The Doomsday Book; 2) Jaded Apostles; 3) A Million Random Digits; 4) Lie Without A Liar; 5) The Ghost Within; 6) The Dragonfly Queen; 7) How To Avoid Huge Ships; 8) Lost In The Grand Scheme; 9) Bus Lines; 10) Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears; 11) Sound Of The Silk.

 

I think it is rather safe to assume that by the end of 2014, very few people give any particularly radiant kind of damn about ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. Times have chan­ged, competition has become brutal, and the trail has become so overgrown that even the stench of rotting flesh has a hard time pushing its way through the legions of new and upcoming indie artists. IX, the band's newest and, apparently, ninth — for those who still remember their Roman numerals — studio album has not, in two months' time, managed to earn itself a separate page on Wikipedia, much less become the focus of attention anywhere where it could matter, or register on any kinds of charts at least in the form of a minor blip. Looks like it is pretty much the end of the trail for these guys, unless they start backing Nicki Minaj or something.

 

Unfortunately, I wish I could say how unjust this is in the light of such great music that they continue to make — but once again, IX is a relative disappointment. The few people that did comment on the record usually pointed out its similarity to Tao Of The Dead, and I agree, but the problem is, I hated Tao Of The Dead, and looked at Lost Songs as a comeback of sort, in which the protagonists agreed to concentrate less on the noise and the muck, and more on actually making some melodic sense. On IX, the muck is back, and the melodic sense once again recedes in the background — not killed off completely, but made to suffer.

 

As in the worst of times, it takes but one track now to get the general gist of the album: ʽThe Doomsday Bookʼ has huge, brawny, half-tribal, half-Keith-Moon drumming; thick, noisy, funky guitars offering several models of walls of sound; a heavy bass foundation where the player sounds as if he's just holding one really huge note throughout the whole song; and vocals that rise over the din in mock-Bono fashion, trying to tell you something important that you still cannot make out, because of the nasal arrogance of the singer. Maybe I am using a couple of fresh words here, but the bottomline is, this is pretty much how the average generic Trail Of Dead song has always sounded, give or take a few. So if you like the style, here is a set of eleven extra mood pieces for you that reproduce the formula exactly.

 

An even more telling example is the mid-album instrumental ʽHow To Avoid Huge Shipsʼ, es­sentially just one lengthy crescendo that rides on one single, simple chord sequence for five minutes — a textbook exercise in «maxi-minimalism» where you take one basic idea and dress it up in so many clothes that the very process may eventually begin to enthrall. Guitars, keyboards, drums, cellos, violins, piled up in gazillions of layers, but reflecting a minimal amount of com­positional work. They are such impeccable masters of the wall of sound, of course, that it is still tempting to give in, but the thing is, right from the start it is all utterly predictable. Only if you are fully new to the band will IX be able to amaze you in any novel manner.

 

They do have one other instrumental piece (ʽLike Summer Tempest Came His Tearsʼ) that is far more enjoyable — a dirge-like symphonic composition, with prominent piano and string parts backed by the usual wall of sound, and genuinely emotional, mainly because the huge musical backing is not made to swallow and dissolve the parts of the individual instruments, making this the analogy of a «rock-orchestrated sonata for violin and piano», alternating between mourning and militaristic segments. Thank God they included at least one such track, reminding me that they can be serious composers. Perhaps they should re-orient themselves as a neo-classical outfit and ditch them heavy guitars altogether.

 

All in all, this is still a little better than Tao Of The Dead — bits of attractive melodies jump out on a few of the tracks here and there, and, importantly, it is a little bit less ambitious, meaning that the music can work as a background soundtrack without irritating the senses. For these vague reasons, I dare not assault it with an indignant thumbs down, but not in a thousand years will this stuff get a thumbs up from me, either. Evolve, dammit, or die already; how many more of these formulaic transcendental-apocalyptic soundscapes do you still have in store for us?..

 

 

 

 

ANDREW BIRD

MUSIC OF HAIR (1996)

 

1) Nuthinduan Waltz; 2) Ambivalence Waltz; 3) Oh So Insistent; 4) Rhodeaoh; 5) Two Sisters; 6) St. Francis Reel; 7) Ratitat/Peter's Wolf/Oblivious; 8) The Greenhorn/Exile Of Erin/Glasgow Reel; 9) Pathetique; 10) Song Of Foot; 11) Minor Beatrice; 12) Oh So Sad.

 

Technically, the date of 1996 makes Andrew Bird an «earlier» artist than the ones tackled in this section. However, Music Of Hair is not really a proper «album» — it is an early self-released ef­fort, belonging in a regular discography because and only because, in our ever progressing world, the phenomenon of «raw early demos», recorded by young inexperienced artists and quickly shel­ved, only to be released decades later as curios — and only if the artist in question had become big enough to warrant some commercial demand for them — this phenomenon has mutated into one of «early self-released tape / CD», in which the artist decides for himself whether he wants or not to have a wider world listen to his very first plinkings and plunkings in the studio (or, even more frequently, in his own bedroom or basement).

 

This has its good and bad sides, with most people brushing away the bad with the sacral maxim of «If you don't like, don't listen». But it is hard for me to imagine anyone who would seriously like Andrew Bird's Music Of Hair — which really only works as a set of rehearsals / tunings for the first real stage of his career, with Bowl Of Fire.

 

A professionally trained violinist, Andrew Bird got his bachelor's degree from Northwestern Uni­versity in 1996 and immediately proceeded to demonstrate that the money was not poorly spent by recording an album full to the brim with violin music — or, should I say «fiddle music» beca­use there is not a lot of Paganini influence to be discerned. Much of this stuff is just Bird exerci­sing solo, occasionally — but rarely — singing as well, although on a few tracks he is joined by fellow musicians, including members of Squirrel Nut Zippers.

 

There is no denying that, already on this patch of demos, Andrew does give the impression of a rare Bird indeed. As long as one does not venture too far outside the first two or three tracks, this is rela­tively traditional folk, mostly Celtic waltzes and ballads played in a rather grating manner, sometimes adorned with Bird's own lyrics that are this music's only hard link to modern times. But the further down we go, the more adventurous the guy becomes, gradually integrating free-form jazz, modern classical, old-style cabaret, and even raga motives into the mix until the only element that ties it all together remains the idea of the violin as lead instrument.

 

I have to acknowledge that my major reaction from all this is a splitting headache; it is very hard for me to stomach fifty five minutes of violin when the violinist is anything less than David Oi­strakh, and Andrew Bird sure has a long way to go to get there. Competent, unquestionably yes; inventive, most assuredly so; and the album as such has a good synthetic reason to exist — but for about thirty-five out of fifty-five minutes, all it does to me is destroy my ears in a way that only people like Yo­ko Ono may be able to understand.

 

So I will take the predictable and conventional route: Music Of Hair establishes Mr. Bird as a guy who can make music, and its release served the good purpose of getting him signed to a real label, but leave it to the MoMA crowds to call it a serious work of art; I call it a curious introduc­tion to the real Andrew Bird.

 

THRILLS (1998)

 

1) Minor Stab; 2) Ides Of Swing; 3) Glass Figurine; 4) Pathetique; 5) Depression/Passillo; 6) 50 Pieces; 7) A Wo­man's Life And Love; 8) Swedish Wedding March; 9) Eugene; 10) Gris-Gris; 11) Cock O' The Walk; 12) Nuthin­duan Waltz; 13) Some Of These Days/Chinatown, My Chinatown.

 

«Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire» is hardly the best name for a band recording this kind of music. «Bowl of Fire» suggests «Ball Of Fire», and «Ball Of Fire» suggests either Deep Purple, or that corny, but funny movie of Billy Wilder's where Gene Krupa and Barbara Stanwyck collectively explode over a version of 'Drum Boogie'. If there is a fire somewhere on Thrills, Bird's first seri­ous contribution to the outside world, it is a highly metaphorical one.

 

Surrounding himself with fellow Chicago musicians, as well as guests from the Squirrel Nut Zip­pers, Bird pays his personal homage to pre-war popular music. Delta blues, small combo jazz, a little swing, a little Charleston, and lots of Kurt Weill. If you are too young to care about them old times, think Tom Waits without all the experimentation and with a sweet croon instead of the toilet rasp. Beyond that, some older folk influences are carried over from Music Of Hair: there are two and a half minutes of a 'Swedish Wedding March' (apparently, the Swedes make little distinction between a wedding and a funeral), and a new, fuller, and slightly less grating version of 'Nuthinduan Waltz' from the previous album.

 

The listing says «all songs written and composed by Andrew Bird», with but a couple exceptions; this is obviously untrue, since on most of them, the only true original writing concerns the lyrics — Bird's end-of-the-century verbal updating of the beginning-of-the-century subjects is astute and funny: even Brecht would have had trouble coming up with stuff like 'Studies have shown that we, like sheep, are prone to sure fatal doses of malcontent through osmosis; but don't be sympathetic, just pass the anaesthetic, 'cuz sheep are benign and on the young we will dine' ('Eu­gene'). The melodies, on the contrary, are fully in the traditional vein, and this means, in mild terms, «appropriated» — 'Cock O' The Walk', for instance, is no more composed by Andrew Bird than 'Amazing Grace' (for some nice competition on that melody, how about checking out Robert Johnson's 'They're Red Hot'?). I have no idea why the tune is credited to Bird when, at the same time, 'Some Of These Days' is credited to Charley Patton (not that Charley Patton actually wrote 'Some Of These Days', either, but I suppose that Andrew just wanted to namedrop the man, which is a cool gesture. If you happen to be the lucky winner who has learned about Charley Patton through Andrew Bird's Bowl Of Fire, contact me and we'll make history together).

 

There is not much to tell about individual tunes: a tribute is a tribute, a stylization a stylization, and all of this has a solid post-modern flair that justifies the album's existence in the first place. Bird and his musicians love their influences, they have a real good time doing what they are do­ing, and yet, Thrills is still not really as thrilling as Andrew's further evolution; at this time, he has made the transition from homebrewed experimentator and self-teacher to a likeable and intel­ligent entertainer, but he is still doing his homework. Thumbs up for the homework, and I will reserve more writing space for things to come.

 

 

OH! THE GRANDEUR (1999)

 

1) Candy Shop; 2) Tea And Thorazine; 3) Wishing For Contentment; 4) Wait; 5) The Idiot's Genius; 6) Vidalia; 7) Beware; 8) Dora Goes To Town; 9) Feetlips; 10) And So...; 11) Coney Island Shuffle; 12) Respiration; 13) (What's Your) Angle; 14) The Confession; 15) Beware (reprise).

 

All right; this sounds almost exactly like Thrills, but it no longer sounds like homework. There was a little bit of Andrew Bird already present on Music Of Hair, but it is his third LP where the Andrew Bird part becomes seriously comparable in size to the «Andrew Bird influences» part. Most of this has to do with the lyrics, ever more entangled, personal, and mixing hip modern ways of thinking about life with traditional ways of expressing these thoughts. At least, such is my tentative explanation of why Oh! The Grandeur is the first FUN Andrew Bird album. Or, as Andrew admits himself, "I've got a new-found fangled fandango tango angle — and it keeps things curious, and it makes folks furious; it takes two part tango and a little tingle tangle, and two orangutans like me and you" ('What's Your Angle').

 

Bird's biggest achievement here, perhaps, is that he has managed to make that old time music feel relevant once again, and maybe even disclose some potential depth that we rarely, or never, per­ceive when listening to Kurt Weill or Fats Waller, not because they were not «deep», but because, in creating all these new sounds, they never bothered to explore them right down to the core. By adding new levels of technical precision, combining rarely combined instruments, juxtaposing rarely juxtaposed sub-styles, and filling them up with present-day realities, the guy gives the old carnival thing a second breath — and does this with more subtlety and personality than the Squir­rel Nut Zippers themselves, who also tried to revive the form but did not truly succeed in filling it up with the proper spirit.

 

On 'Candy Shop', which opens the record on a fast, brawny, danceable note, Bird promi­ses that he is "goin' to set fire to your glamour", but the song is a cunning deception: it merely sounds like a fast outtake from Thrills, another bit of well-polished tribute but with little chance of being sele­cted for preservation in the National Archives. But then 'Tea And Thorazine' takes off at a much slower, in some ways, even creepier pace as Bird sings memoirs of his autistic brother, and from then on, it is a strange journey into the world of gypsy fiddles and jump-blues guitars and voodoo percussion that, at times, evokes images of an early morning dreamy hangover after a long night at the local speakeasy.

 

The record's centerpiece is, I believe, to be faithfully found right in the center: 'Beware', moving from its regular violin intro to the lazy shuffle mood and then, without warning, into the sphere of drunken ominousness: with huge vocal, violin, and piano crescendos, Bird gives us a warning against... uh, I actually have no idea what he is talking about, but I do like the idea of using that old-fashioned cabaret sound to sing about some sort of impending apocalypse. In fact, all through the record there is a vague sense of danger at the end of town, but what kind of danger — that is not so interesting for Andrew to specify.

 

Of course, I may be reading too much into an album that, even with all the darker themes, keeps debasing itself with cheerful lightweight SquirrelNuttish throwaways like 'Dora Goes To Town', but bear with me: Andrew Bird is too smart a guy to be restricted by the tag of «lightweight enter­tainer», and there is no other way to let him escape this restriction than to keep talking about his non-trivial artistic conceptions. And, above all, you cannot accuse him of insincerity or inadequa­cy: if his goal truly is to «keep things curious» and «make folks furious», these are two things that Oh! The Grandeur does splendidly. At the very least, it made my brain cells furious enough and my heart strings curious enough to guarantee this the first truly solid thumbs up in Andrew Bird history.

 

THE SWIMMING HOUR (2001)

 

1) Two Way Action; 2) Core And Rind; 3) Why?; 4) 11:11; 5) Case In Point; 6) Too Long; 7) Way Out West; 8) Waiting To Talk; 9) Fatal Flower Garden; 10) Satisfied; 11) Headsoak; 12) How Indiscreet; 13) Dear Old Greenland.

 

The best Bowl of Fire album ever — or, perhaps, simply the most accessible? Well, if diversity and unpredictability count as sins, probably the latter. But, regardless, this review will be written from the point of view of an incorrigible sinner. Besides, it's not like we are talking teen pop or anything like that. This is a guy who could stand his own with Yo-Yo Ma.

 

The Swimming Hour takes us ever further away from the limitations of «neo-swing», as they like to call it, and into new old realms like power pop, psychedelia, blues rock, and rumba, among others. It has already been likened to The White Album and similar genre-hopping en­cy­clo­pae­dic al­bums, and for good reason, even though, occasionally, Andrew seems to plod through these gen­res rather than hop through them. Perhaps this explains the title — to swim, after all, takes more effort than to fly for those who can do both.

 

Some complain that Bird is hard to understand, and the points he makes are hard to get. Well, ob­viously, because he does not really make any points. He goes for moods and melodies, and he sets them to the kind of lyrics that are in no danger of spoiling said moods and melodies: rooted in the old pop-poetry clichés, either twisted to the point of intelligent-looking absurdity or adjusted to reflect a well-acted theatrical situation that does not cut through to the heart, but is still exciting, all the same. The lyrics are decent, but it's not like they really matter.

 

What does matter? Many things. Like when the crunchy violin riff emerges out of the sonic chaos of the first 40 seconds of 'Two Way Action', and we perceive it as a driving power pop anthem, well worthy of the Big Star legacy except that the strings are bowed rather than plucked. Or when the baroque flourishes on '11:11' bring together the twenty-first and the eighteenth centuries by way of the psychedelic Sixties. Or when the screeching guitar solo emerges out of nowhere on the quiet waltz of 'Fatal Flower Garden', giving it a nice rock flavor. Or when Bird starts whistling on 'Headsoak', giving us a first taste of his tremendous talents in that department. Or the wild rock'n'roll things he does with the violin on 'How Indiscreet', spiritually reminiscent of the British R'n'B rave-ups from around 1964.

 

In short, The Swimming Hour is simply a very melodic, and a very expertly constructed, piece of non-revolutionary modern art. Its intelligence is even reflected in the extremely correct manner in which Bird treats all the styles: thus, when it is power pop, a direction that nurtures originality in the juxtaposition of chords, he actually writes melodies of his own, but when it is the same old swing, we find the same old age-weathered progressions (as in, most notably, his cover of The Mi­ssissippi Sheiks' 'Too Long'), and this should bother us no more than it did on the man's previ­ous couple of records — you don't mess up with an already winning formula, you only polish it for the modern listener's hearing criteria.

 

One of the simplest and most effective examples is 'Why?', a thrilling chunk of «blues de luxe» that Bird arranges in the form of a non-trivial drama (he is a no-good fucker, she sees no problem in tolerating his no-goodness, he only gets more pissed-off as a result — not such a rare situation when you think of it, but, for some reason, generally neglected in the long tradition of refining personal rela­tions into high art). As the bluesy violin scrapes the soul with the efficacy of a trade­mark B. B. King solo, and the vocals effortlessly switch from exasperated falsetto to drunk, reckless wailing on the middle-eight, you know that the guy has created something — a character, a performance, a symbol, whatever, that you just might want to keep with you.

 

At this point in his career, Bird starts taking on the characteristics of an Adrian Belew for his ge­neration — that is, a properly schizoid guy, raised and reared as a tenant of the ivory tower but not above regularly holding a carnival for the local peasants right in front of the moat. No crucial importance for either the current times or the times to come, no clear reason for this kind of acti­vity, no possibility of understanding why we are all gathered here on this day, but the sensation of a significant positive charge is undeniable all the same. It's not post-modern smirk, and it isn't faithful generic tribute. It's groping in the dark with two loving hands, never mind any potentially salacious connotations.

 

I guess that's pretty much the same kind of feeling about which he sings in 'Dear Old Greenland'. There is no reason whatsoever for the protagonist to go to Greenland, but something out there makes him quite certain that this is just the right place to find the necessary peace of mind. Well, I could never quite get my own motiva­tion for being so strongly drawn to The Swimming Hour, but I can definitely confirm that this particular hour of swimming contributed to my own peace of mind. Let science deal with this some other day. The heart acknowledges the presence of a strong magnetic field here, and concedes a thumbs up.

 

FINGERLINGS (2002)

 

1) Action/Adventure; 2) Trimmed And Burning; 3) Gotholympians; 4) Richmond Woman; 5) Sweetbreads; 6) Why; 7) Headsoak; 8) How Indiscreet; 9) T'N'T.

 

Pretty much impossible to find these days — the original was limited to something like 250 co­pies — but, nevertheless, totally essential. Much of Bird's studio recording has a live feel to it all by itself, but to «get» this guy, it is necessary to experience him on stage, at least converted to au­dio (or video). It is there, as he is standing half-plucking, half-bowing his violin, that it is the ea­siest to convince yourself he really does have the required «mystery component» and cannot be simply written off as just another readily trashable post-modern clown.

 

Fingerlings have been assembled from various performances, but structured in a very coherent manner, reminiscent of the original sequencing of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense: the prota­gonist is alone at first, then slowly joined, one by one, by the trusty backup. And this gives an ex­tra reason for comparing Bird with Byrne (beyond the obvious graphic and phonetic similarities in their names, that is) — both artists have been guilty of cultivating a unique mix of craziness and intelli­gence so as to make an impression, and both make it hard for the average listener to dis­cern the average human soul beyond the formalistic trappings; hard, but possible, and richly rewarding in the long run.

 

Bird's solo sound is quite unique. The simultaneous plucking and bowing gives him a great angle — the plucked violin acquires a mandolin-like sound, and this takes care of both rhythm and me­lody. But his real trademark is the use of a special gadget, based on the loop pedal principle, that actually records parts of what he is playing and then plays it back while he is going on to the next part, having just cre­ated a temporary «phonogram» for the next several bars. Cynics will deride this as a crude fi­nancial solution (no need to pay the rhythm player), but admirers will point out the tremendous technical difficulty it takes to measure out something like that in live performance — we know of plenty users of the loop pedal, but this is a very demanding extreme.

 

It could also be qualified as a silly show-off, but with Bird, it works; it might, in fact, be just what is needed, as, over and over again, he wraps himself in his own freshly-generated sounds like a protective cocoon. The first three songs on Fingerlings are strictly solo, solemn and sorrowful, and the traditional 'Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And Burning' perfectly fits in with two of his own compositions. But it is not any kind of sorrowfulness you are easily familiar with; it is a very quiet, introspective kind, a chamber piece for the initiated few, perhaps bringing to mind the old melancholy of Nick Drake, except Bird's blood quietly boils where Nick's used to quietly freeze, if you'll pardon the clumsy metaphor.

 

Things slowly start picking up and shedding some of the moroseness once Bird is joined by Nora O'Connor on guitar and backing vocals for the next three numbers, including a completely re­interpreted 'Why' from The Swimming Hour. These bring on a more traditional folksy attitude (although, lyrics-wise, the extremely bizarre 'Sweetbreads' is anything but traditi­onal); and then, finally, the entire Bowl Of Fire comes forward, first in a stately and graceful ma­n­ner on a stripped-down version of 'Headsoak', then totally letting their hair down and having a rowdy ball on the last two numbers.

 

And then, as you cast a retro-eye on what you have just heard, it turns out you have been taken on one man's journey through three (if not more) different stages. There's the being alone part, the­re's the being together part, and then there's the big company part. Three modes of existence, three ways of conduct, three emotional stages — solitary sadness, thoughtful dialog, and reckless partying, each one equally engaging and convincing. Throw in the idiosyncratic playing te­ch­nique, the note-perfect singing (not forgetting his beautiful whistling), and the general strength of the selections, and the 250 copies will look like a fuckin' joke. A billion thumbs up if that is what it takes to bring this back in print.

 

WEATHER SYSTEMS (2003)

 

1) First Song; 2) I; 3) Lull; 4) Action/Adventure; 5) →; 6) Skin; 7) Weather Systems; 8) Don't Be Scared; 9) ←.

 

This one is perhaps easier to understand, forgive, and take a liking to if one accepts Bird's expla­nation of it as a «side project» tossed off during the several years it took him to perfect his first «proper» solo album (The Mysterious Production Of Eggs). A short, monotonous, lazy, near-ambient slice of chamber-dream-pop, Weather Systems has nevertheless been hailed as a hidden masterpiece by quite a few critics — charmed either by witnessing the final stages of Bird's evo­lution from swinging folkster into raffinated baroque artist or by the channelling of the spirit of the late Jeff Buckley, always a good boost for those critics who get paid by the word.

 

In spirit and in technique, Weather Systems does not add much to the first half of Fingerlings, one of whose songs it even reproduces in a studio arrangement ('Action/Adventure'). Again, the basic message here is that of «intelligent melancholia» — Andrew Bird as the lonesome minstrel, watching the vanity of the world from his favorite cliff high up in the clouds and polishing his lyre (violin). It's all there on 'I', running along a simple plucked rhythm and a morose distorted bassline and a mantraic refrain that sets the tone for the whole record: "...hear a voice that says we're basically alone, says we're basically alone...". (The track would later become the rockier-ar­ranged 'Imitosis' and one of Bird's primary visit cards, but I must say that it is much more effec­tive in its stripped down state. Alone is alone, after all).

 

After a while, it gets louder and denser, acquiring a decidedly psychedelic flavour by the time of the last two or three tracks. 'Don't Be Scared', a cover of a little-known tune by a little-known alt-country outfit (The Handsome Family), has plenty of cloudy gorgeousness — in a way, you could think of it as the blueprint for most of the creations of Beach House. And the title track, although quite unmemorable by itself, does that on purpose, merging the ambient values of late XXth cen­tury with a good mixture of XVIIIth century chamber music.

 

It is funny, come to think of it, that I have used the word «baroque», probably tricked, in an im­pressionistic way, by too much violin — because the skeleton of the record still reflects Bird's fascination with folk, bluegrass, and various ethnic styles. For all I know, the beginning of 'First Song' could just as well be James Taylor. But, through the art of cloning that violin and hybridi­zing the clones in different ways, Bird comes a bit close to providing us with the answer to the rarely asked, but all the more intriguing question: «What would we get if we had the likes of Tar­tini or Paganini interested in learning and assimilating the British/American folk idiom?» Obvi­ously, a direct comparison would be ridiculous, since Bird is no virtuoso (each time he gets hailed as one by any of his professional admirers, it makes me wonder if they actually took the time to get acquainted with his classical influences), yet the basic idea is comprehensible, and nowhere is it expressed as fluidly as on that hard-to-nail title track.

 

I suppose that, once Bird's career has finally been laid to rest, this will be viewed as his equiva­lent of the Beach Boys' Friends: an emphatically hushed, introspective lull (hey, one of the tracks is named 'Lull!') in between bigger, louder, more «public» statements; and today already Wea­ther Systems is a serious candidate for the best A. B. album in the eyes of emphatically hushed, introspective listeners. Thumbs up — there is no significant criticism I can hurl at any of these songs. How could I, when I slept through most of them?

 

(Oops).

 

FINGERLINGS 2 (2004)

 

1) First Song; 2) Skin Is, My; 3) Master Fade; 4) Banking On A Myth; 5) MX Missiles; 6) Spanish For Monsters; 7) Sovay; 8) Way Out West; 9) Depression Pasillo; 10) Happy Day.

 

Having decided to make the Fingerlings project recurrent, Bird did not exactly give it his all to make the second volume as self-contained as one could perceive the first one. More properly, it's like one of those middle-of-the-road movie sequels which are still ruled by the original creator, but only by a chunk of his heart rather than the full load. «The original was great, let's do another one, not for the money, really, it just sucks to let this idea wither without exploring it down to its roots and seeing how far we can go with it».

 

Well, first of all, the album is almost completely redundant. Five out of ten songs are essentially preview versions of tracks on next year's Production Of Eggs, and, as excellent a live performer as Bird is, his reliance on synchronic loop-recording techniques chains him to the machine much the same way Pink Floyd used to be chained to their stage arrangements, meaning that there will be no great difference between live and studio playing aside from the understandably more sparse sound in the live setting. 'First Song' is from Weather Systems; 'Way Out West' and 'Depression Pasillo' hearken back to the Bowl of Fire days; and only two songs are unavailable elsewhere. Of these two, however, 'Spanish For Monsters' is a must-hear for all Bird fans, a bizarre hybridi­zation of gypsy music with traditional blues.

 

He does try to adhere to the same build-up principle, starting off solo, then adding Norah O'Con­nor on two tracks, then joined by My Morning Jacket on one more, then rummaging in the archi­ves to extract two more dusty Bowl Of Fire recordings, and then bringing it all back down with a soft, humble, friendly solo performance of a traditional folk tune. Somehow, though, the magic does not scintillate as brilliantly second time around — even though this is definitely not the material's fault. Maybe it's just a disgustingly sobering realization, somewhere in the back of the mind, that Fingerlings was, after all, a breakthrough in form and substance, but Fingerlings 2 ma­kes it into formula, and no sequel faithfully regenerating the original can be completely worth the original.

 

On a pure heart level, this is the usual beauty coming from the usual Bird; but all the other system registers clearly indicate that its primary purpose is to stop the gap in awaiting the next true manifestation of Mr. Bird. No year without a new LP! And who's to stop you if you're almost gua­ranteed additional positive reviews in any case?

 

ANDREW BIRD & THE MYSTERIOUS PRODUCTION OF EGGS (2005)

 

1) √; 2) Sovay; 3) A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left; 4) Fake Palindromes; 5) Measuring Cups; 6) Banking On A Myth; 7) Masterfade; 8) Opposite Day; 9) Skin Is, My; 10) The Naming Of Things; 11) MX Missiles; 12) ~; 13) Tables And Chairs; 14) The Happy Birthday Song.

 

I freely admit that an album that is called Mysterious Production Of Eggs, sports a picture of a green-tinged zombie goat (sheep?) on the sleeve, and borrows the sign of a square root for the title of its first composition, is a little hard to take seriously. But do we really know all the in­tri­cacies of the mechanism of egg production? Do we understand all the peculiarities of the co­louring of domestic bovids? Have we thoroughly explored all of the properties of the square root function? And if not, what right have we to ridicule Andrew Bird's symbolism, which may just as much be the result of a stunning spiritual revelation as it may be a load of baloney?

 

Regardless — my working hypothesis is that all of this is a load of baloney. The percentage rate of wheat to chaff in Andrew's lyrics this time hovers around 1:9, according to my intuition, and the words matter only inasmuch as they have an intonation attached. Intonations include a lot of questions and just as many plaintive notes, once again confirming Bird's «nerdy whiner» status; but now he has pushed his brand of dream-pop even further, expanding the number of used inst­ruments (in particular, there is much more acoustic and electric guitar playing on here than ever before) and making the background arrangements ever more complex, and this creates a very strange final impression. If Weather Systems was his high-up-in-the-clouds cozy little ivory to­wer, one in which he could lock himself with his small dedicated audience and shun the corrosion of the rest of the world, then on Production Of Eggs he seems intent on somewhat augmenting the property. Still behind barbed wire, but the stakes have moved: now he is not so much defen­ding his claim to intellectual paranoia as he is propagating it.

 

In other words, Production Of Eggs is still «dreamy», but it isn't nearly as «chamber»-like as its predecessor. 'Fake Palindromes', for instance, is a huge-soundin' mother, with a sweeping power-pop violin assault that we have not heard since Swimming Hour; 'Skin Is, My' is a fully vocali­zed re-recording of 'Skin' with a much denser sound that almost approaches pop-punk on the "what a lovely sound" chorus; and 'The Naming Of Things' is a stately anthem on which the man throws in a pinch of Old Testament fervor (not that anyone would ever get the message — pre­suming one existed in the first place).

 

All three of these songs will appeal immensely, I am sure, to the average pop fan who likes his music loud and crunchy. But the true soul of the record probably still lies in tracks like 'Sovay' and 'Masterfade', gentile, vulnerable ballads that are as much soaked in the Elizabethan spirit as they are genuine creations of the XXIst century. Their sweet, melodic, melancholic vibe is com­pletely at odds with lyrics like "Then you realize that you're riding on a para-success of a heavy­handed metaphor" (much as the latter is true for Mr. Bird), but only if you make the mistake of trying to decipher them in some sort of literal way.

 

Or maybe the album's true soul lies in 'Opposite Day', a song that moves from Beach Boys-like choral harmonies to Beatles-like psychedelia to Nick Drake-like hush-folk in several crudely joi­ned movements — and deals with the issue of turning into a cephalopod as "laws of physics lose their sway" and "those who can't quite function in society at large got to wake up on this morning to find that they're in charge". Because over the course of these fifty-plus minutes, it is indeed Andrew Bird who is in charge over your senses, and is there any doubt about his own ability to "function in society at large"? Like I said — the man is trying to expand his corner of the market, quite deliberately so.

 

And, actually, he succeeded: it was Production Of Eggs that, after almost a decade of shadowy existence, put him on some more widely distributed musical maps. The album got positive res­ponses from sources as distant from each other as Pitchforkmedia and Robert Christgau, and pre­t­ty much ensured that the next album would even make a Billboard presence. The fact that he achieved this without sacrificing a single shred of artistic credibility — only a total musical idiot would dare brand Eggs a «sellout» — is a small sign of hope.

 

Interesting trivia bit: Production Of Eggs was released on Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label, which puts to rest the formerly rhetoric-idiotic question of «What does an introvert violin hack­man from Chicago and the head banner of East Coast feminism have in common?» (Other than this, of course). Thumbs up as usual, although beware: if Weather Systems puts you to sleep (in a bad way), Production Of Eggs is not at all guaranteed to wake you up (in a good way).

 

FINGERLINGS 3 (2006)

 

1) Grinnin'; 2) Dark Matter; 3) The Water Jet Cilice; 4) Measuring Cups; 5) The Happy Birthday Song; 6) A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left; 7) Scythian Empire; 8) Dear Dirty; 9) Tin Foil; 10) Ethiobirds.

 

The third and, so far, last volume of Fingerlings hardly deserves a lot of words. It is slightly lon­ger than the other two, mainly at the expense of featuring a couple extra non-live (or «live in the studio») tracks that sort of spoil the principle, but you'd never guess it without additional research anyway. Chief among these is the ten-minute suite 'Ethiobirds', an unusually ambitious piece that I could only describe as «elevator muzak for paradise», with Bird's regular synthesis of folk rhy­thmics, Eastern melodies, and classical sonics stretched out to cover all the time it requires to make that elevator trip from Earth to Heaven, with the rhythm gradually fading out to make way for cloudy cloudy cloudy.

 

Casual Bird fans will want 3 primarily for that particular piece; without it, it is essentially more of the same — slightly altered twists on older songs ('Nervous Tic Motion', for instance, is springier and livelier in the live setting and showcases his seriously underrated whistling talents far more effectively) interspersed with «previews» of newer songs from the upcoming Armchair Apo­crypha ('Dark Matter', 'Scythian Empire'). 'Dear Dirty' is also an original that, as far as I know, has not yet showed up on any other record — a gloomy piece with blues overtones, unusual for its thumbful of bitter bile that Andrew, normally such a nice fella who prefers to mourn over bad things in life rather than to hate them, empties into the mix. 'Tin Foil' is yet another Happy Fami­ly cover that is a nice addition to anyone's collection of Happy Family covers. What else is there to say? Nothing. Maybe Andrew thinks so, too, seeing as how the series has been essentially dis­continued since 2006.

 

ARMCHAIR APOCRYPHA (2007)

 

1) Fiery Crash; 2) Imitosis; 3) Heretics; 4) Dark Matter; 5) Plasticities; 6) Armchairs; 7) Simple X; 8) The Supine; 9) Cataracts; 10) Scythian Empire; 11) Spare-Ohs; 12) Yawny At The Apocalypse.

 

The title has a very nice ring to it, and it is well certified that both the title and the album itself stem from Bird's fervent passion for armchairs. How could such a passion remain undetected when there is a budgerigar on the album cover? If you do not immediately spot the connection between common pet parakeets and armchairs, you are unlikely to be eligible for the fan club.

 

But it does not take a true fan to understand that Apocrypha continues the trend: Bird is making himself look bigger. The record is louder and jumpier, and the first noticeable thing about it is how much more guitar- (particularly, electric guitar-)based most of the songs are; on this record, the violin is degraded from the status of ruthless monopolist to that of a valued, but contractually restricted partner. One explanation is the everlasting quest for new sounds and sensations; the other is that record buyers generally fall for guitar-based music easier than they do for violin-ba­sed one, what with the people still rolling over Beethoven and telling Tchaikowsky the news after all these years, and, true enough, the record became Andrew's biggest seller to that point (mea­ning that it actually sold something).

 

Grim facts, however, indicate that the changes are but superficial. Quite symbolic of everything that this album is is 'Imitosis', essentially a rewrite of 'I' from Weather Systems, with the same main hook of "we're basically alone", but with the addition of booming electronic drums, guitars, chimes, background vocals, and cosmic sound effects. Oh, and a surrealistic video to boot. But as imaginative as the rearranging is, does it truly add up to the original feeling of the song? Not the way I see it, at least.

 

I judge, therefore, that if you do not think an artist like Bird deserving of spending your patience upon his earlier, less accessible, records, Armchair Apocrypha is a good introduction to what he is, always was, and, most likely, forever will be. Long-time fans, however, may be disappointed if they were expecting some sort of spiritual growth or development. On the other hand, long-time fans who think of Bird as a nice lad with a good ear for melody rather than the 21st century Buddha of pop music will find plenty to dig.

 

Because, for instance, 'Heretics' is just a great optimistic pop song with a luvverly strings arrange­ment; when the chorus goes "No, we don't want to hear the sound of a draw", then, provided you are a human being with the capacity of crying rather than a walking brick wall, I predict that, af­ter one or two listens at most, you will be perfectly willing to agree that you really don't want to hear the sound of a draw, regardless of what that sound might sound like. (I'm pretty sure some people will say it's an anti-Bush song, but I do not even want to conduct any research on that). So is 'Plasticities', a cheerful song about fighting for music halls and dying cities driven by a sort of simplistic retro-style Brit-pop guitar riff in the chorus, and 'Dark Matter', which is nowhere near as dark as the actual matter, and...

 

...well, now that I think of it, the attitude has shifted: more drums and guitars mean less brooding melancholia, which, along with the violin, is now confined to select entities ('Armchairs'; 'Scy­thian Empire', probably the only song in existence to unite Scythians, Achaens, Thracians, and Haliburton under one roof; the short instrumental 'Supine', of obvious superficial appeal to lin­guists but, unfortunately, devoid of lyrics, so we never get to know just how well Andrew has studied his Latin grammar).

 

So it's up to everyone to decide what is more precious for history — a cloudy, gloomy Andrew Bird, or a loudy, boomy Andrew Bird. My own verdict is, of course, a thumbs up, but mixed in with a little disappointment. It's wonderful to know the man can find a major enough popular ap­peal to combine artistic integrity with financial stability, but a little sad to know that he has, most likely, reached the summit of his artistic mountain and that there's nowhere to go from here but in the direction of gravity's pull. Fortunately for us all, he's such a light fellow that gravity does not affect him all that much.

 

SOLDIER ON (2007)

 

1) The Trees Were Mistaken; 2) Sic Of Elephants; 3) The Water Jet Cilice; 4) Plasticities; 5) Heretics; 6) Sectionate City; 7) How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm; 8) Oh Sister.

 

A mid-size, near-LP-length EP that Bird put out because... because all respectable artists are sup­posed to release an EP every once in a while? Let us think logically. This EP features: (a) one remix of a previously released tune ('Plasticities'); (b) a demo version of a previously released tune ('Heretics'); (c) a Bob Dylan cover (guess which); (d) a short psycho-Eastern instrumental ('Sectionate City'); (e) a lightly fleshed-out vocal version of an earlier instrumental ('The Water Jet Cilice'); (f) a song that had already been released as a bonus track on the iTunes edition of Arm­chair Apocrypha ('Sic Of Elephants'); (g) a regularly melancholic reading of the old after­war tune 'How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down' from 1918; (h) exactly one fully-fledged, seriously developed new song (the first one).

 

Ergo, this probably means that he had this song about mistaken trees either as a leftover from the Apocrypha sessions or recorded afresh, and then hastily assembled some local trash around it to justify immediate release. It is to Andrew's honor, of course, that he can hastily assemble thirty minutes worth of outtakes and throwaways that still provide a nice listen.

 

'The Trees Are Mistaken' are a magnificent creation, to be sure. The drum loops are somewhat generic, but the violin loops are anything but, and, taken together with the whistling, create a uniquely Birdian au­ra of gentlemanly paranoia. Possible interpretations rank in the millions, espe­cially when concentrating on the lyrics, but the basic impression from the song's primary gim­mick — those nagging, droning violins slowly sawing through your brain — will be the same for most people, I think, provided they can stand a little brain-sawing.

 

'Sic Of Elephants', on the other hand, lacks a distinct hook, unless the worldplay between 'ele­phants' and 'sycophants' can be considered as such. Along with 'Cilice', its strength is in mood and atmosphere, so that it is all the more pleasing that the alternate versions for earlier songs are cho­sen from two of the catchiest tunes on Apocrypha — 'Heretics', in particular, works almost as well in its stripped-down form as it does with the strings-induced bombast.

 

Still, obviously, this is one more for the fans; the average Joe on the street will not gain an extra pass to Heaven by listening to Andrew Bird covering one of the more morally ambiguous songs of Bob Dylan's career ('Oh Sister' is a Biblical stylization about incest, if you have not noticed; granted, what with Andrew's sweet, sweet arrangement and singing, it would be hard for his sister to refuse his yearnings, I think).

 

NOBLE BEAST (2008)

 

1) Oh No; 2) Masterswarm; 3) Fitz & Dizzyspells; 4) Effigy; 5) Tenuousness; 6) Nomenclature; 7) Ouo; 8) Not A Robot, But A Ghost; 9) Unfolding Fans; 10) Anonanimal; 11) Natural Disaster; 12) The Privateers; 13) Souverian; 14) On Ho!

 

Scary — but the well seems to be running dry. From the beginning, Bird has chosen the hono­rable, but risky path of trying to say something new with each album: staying true to his own un­flinching personality, yes, but still travelling the long exciting road from «neo-swing» to neo-wha­tever, adding influence upon influence and new trick upon new trick. With Armchair Apo­crypha, he'd molded his sound closer to indie-rock aesthetics, ensuring himself a steady com­mercial base among those who like their pop as pop, not as atonal brain-teasers, but still won't come within a mile's radius of MTV presence. It worked. What next?

 

Noble Beast is the first Andrew Bird album where I am exceedingly hard pressed to find even a remote trace of progress. (Apart from a couple lame moves, like the electronica elements and te­chno beats on 'Not A Robot' which do not agree with his style at all, I'm afraid). It's just another chunk of guitar-and-violin-driven pop, tied to another chunk of enigmatic, occasionally nerdy ly­rics (he even makes a reference to «proto-Sanskrit Minoans» at one point, which may delight the initiated, but should probably turn off history and linguistics buffs who actually know the meaning of these words). It's all pleasant, and a few of the songs are emotionally wondralicious — but totally surpri­sing in its total lack of surprises.

 

But if, for one moment, we admit that our expectations are skewed — that, perhaps, Andrew has simply found the kind of sound that gives him complete sexual self-satisfaction — then what re­mains is simply to listen to the album over and over again until it clicks like the rest. Then, even­tually, 'Oh No' wins over as one of his delightfullest, most aethereal odes to spiritual liberation (provided this is how we have to interpret the lament about "calcium mines deep in our chest"), with one of his friendliest whistling patterns to boot. 'Fitz & Dizzyspells' is uplifting power pop that ranks up there with 'Heretics' (and also continues to display what I perceive as his serious in­terest in the Arcade Fire anthem style). And the start of 'The Privateers' is his most polished alloy of medie­val balladry and post-modern sheen to date, upon which it builds up layer after layer of grandiosity and then finally explodes in a bunch of electronic noise shambles.

 

For those who like their Andrew all sky-like and pastoral, 'Souverian' will do the job nicely. No one knows who 'Souverian' is; Bird himself was caught mentioning something about this being a French word, but, unless he happened to fall upon a mistyped variant of souverain, or decided by himself that the word would look nicer if disguised as an Armenian family name, he probably did not know what he was talking about (no big surprise here). Regardless, it forms a nice near homo­phone with 'so very young', and that's all it took to build up a genteel, manneristic mini-suite that does a great job extracting you from the world of Miley Cyrus for about seven minutes.

 

But keep in mind that if, like me, you get acquainted with Bird in chronological order, you'd bet­ter be prepared for a tinge of boredom and tiredness. His obvious professionalism and mannered intelligence prevent, and, I think, will always prevent him from releasing a non-respectable re­cord, yet there is only so much hyper-intellectual parallel-universe-building that one's mind will accept from the mind of another. And for Bird, it looks like his particular parallel universe has reached the end of its carefully planned construction — now all that remains is to understand how to spend the rest of the allocated budget. Repave the roads, perhaps?

 

BREAK IT YOURSELF (2012)

 

1) Desperation Breeds...; 2) Polynation; 3) Danse Caribe; 4) Give It Away; 5) Eyeoneye; 6) Lazy Projector; 7) Near Death Experience Experience; 8) Behind The Barn; 9) Lusitania; 10) Orpheo Looks Back; 11) Sifters; 12) Fatal Shore; 13) Hole In The Ocean Floor; 14) Belles.

 

Well... this is another Andrew Bird album, make no mistake about it. In fact, it is so much an Andrew Bird album that I caught myself with a déjà vu feeling on just about every song, even if none of the melodies can be identified as direct carbon copies of past material (I think). Strange enough, though, this looked like a problem on Noble Beast, but not here. It does confirm my con­clusions, stated for that previous album: Andrew Bird is no longer interested in searching, having found exactly what he was loo­king for. But, on the other hand, any formula, no matter for how long you have been sticking to it, may always be perfected. And my own intuition, for reasons I am still trying to understand, whispers that Break It Yourself is a minor rebound upwards from the minor «sagging» of Noble Beast.

 

The album is padded. It runs for sixty minutes, and a significant chunk of them are donated to sheer atmospherics. To be honest, I think that ʽFatal Shoreʼ works rather well as a natural conclu­sion to the album, and that the lazy eight minutes of «chamber ambience» that constitute ʽHole In The Ocean Floorʼ, as well as the even more minimalistic chimes-and-crickets outro of ʽBellesʼ, are a useless waste of everything that can be wasted. Nor is the «bulk» of the album free from moments when Bird's subtle tension slips into subtle languidness — inavoidable, perhaps, when you place quiet introspective melancholia and soft, inobtrusive acoustic guitar and violin patterns at the heart of your sound.

 

But overall, Break It Yourself still does it right by focusing most heavily on Bird's vocals — the atmosphere is closer to «minimalistic» than it was on Noble Beast; the instrumental melodies are fairly simple and predictable; and the hooks are generally tighter, darker, and hit closer to the heart. The word «desperation» is already locked in the title of the first song; and while Bird is never «desperate» in the generic sense of the word, I wouldn't be surprised to ever find out that he was intentionally planning here to deliver the saddest album in his career. More than half of the songs are dirges — semi-obscure laments with lyrics so convolu­ted that they could be relatable to lost love or the downfall of society with equal success. More importantly, more than half of the dirges click like a good dirge is supposed to.

 

It is hard to pick out individual examples, but ʽLusitaniaʼ is one of the more immediate heart-tug­gers, a duet with singer-songwriter St. Vincent, a.k.a. Annie Clark, for which Andrew has saved up his best crooning intonations and a simple, but true conclusion — "we don't study this war no more", with both singers joining in on "go ahead, say something dumb boy, there's no shame". Not everyone will want to interpret Break It Yourself as a cry for humanity, but ʽLusitaniaʼ is one of the more explicit numbers, and these moments of explicitness color the whole record.

 

Come to think of it, while few of the songs reach the levels of complexity that Bird occasionally used to demonstrate, and practically none of them show you something you have not already seen before, they all manage to get by just on the strength of certain isolated lines or phrases. ʽLazy Projectorʼ moves slow and shuffly, and is really all about the subtly condescending "tell me how long till the paint starts to peel". ʽDanse Carribeʼ is all about "here we go mistaking clouds for mountains". ʽEyeoneyeʼ is all about how "no one can break your heart, so you break it yourself". ʽNear Death Experience Experienceʼ is totally about how "we'll dance like cancer survivors, like we're grateful simply to be alive". And so on. Through sheer groping around, he finds all these little bits and turns them into steady bolts that fasten the whole construction.

 

This, in turn, gives the whole album a certain epic, ultra-serious feel; Break It Yourself is neither lightweight/carnivalesque, nor surrealistic/psychedelic, as most of Bird's earlier albums are. Once you decipher the man's lyrics using whatever personal key you may find on your own, the album may not turn out to be telling us lots of things that we do not already know. But I do get the feel­ing that, having already established himself as an unsurpassed master of a certain musical form, Bird is now finally trying to inject that form with substance, or, at least, a little bit of philosophi­cal realism that goes along very nicely with his particular brand of music.

 

For those who will get their first taste of Bird with Break It Yourself, the record may well be a revelation. For those who have already thoroughly explored his career and found it worthy with­out developing a fanatical attitude, it may require a few additional listens — by the end of which you will probably get the feeling that these days, Andrew Bird is treating himself with an extra dose of self-admiration compared to the way it used to be. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing: to me, it made Break It Yourself a more interesting and challenging experience than Noble Beast, with a guaranteed thumbs up. On the other hand, this may also breed trouble for the future. We'll just have to wait and see.

 

HANDS OF GLORY (2012)

 

1) Three White Horses; 2) When That Helicopter Comes; 3) Spirograph; 4) Railroad Bill; 5) Something Biblical; 6) If I Needed You; 7) Orpheo; 8) Beyond The Valley Of The Three White Horses.

 

Two fully formed LPs over the course of one year might be a bit too much even for a wonderboy of Andrew Bird's caliber, so do not expect any big deals from Hands Of Glory, which is basi­cally just a little pony companion to the big white steed of Break It Yourself. It is sparse, mini­malistically produced, very much country-oriented, not entirely self-written, with a subset of co­vers ranging from traditional folk to Townes Van Zandt — definitely not an attempt to win over a new bunch of fans, rather just a small extra Thanksgiving gift for the old ones.

 

Other than this humble statement of fact, I am not even sure what to say. The textures, moods, vocals, instrumental techniques, everything here has already been commented upon in preceding reviews. The people at Pitchfork tried choosing a general «apocalyptic» angle, indicating that many, if not most, of these songs deal with visions of the end of the world, destruction, redemp­tion, and resurrection, but with Andrew Bird, these themes are actually always on the edge of the knife — his trademark fin-du-siècle melancholy has always been that of a morose guy with a fiddle, sitting on the ravine's edge, waiting for the shit to hit the fan once he finally plays his last note and puts down the instrument. Who cares if now, on a couple of songs, he is adding some words on the same subject to the music? The effect is still the same.

 

In a way, it almost looks like the first seven songs have all been assembled here just to provide a «conventional» intro to the album's longest, and only «experimental» number — ʽBeyond The Valley Of The Three White Horsesʼ, with a «looped» reference to the album's opening number, throws on some majorly stoned psychedelic thrills, starting off as a completely innocent ins­trumental shuffle, then gradually burrowing its way into a whirly-wobbly tunnel of sound as the violin backgrounds are phased, inverted, mortified, and sucked out into space. The effect can be donwright hallucinogenic in a proper context — problem is, in an unproper context, it can be se­verely irritating instead, and who knows which context you will be hearing it in? For every per­son for whom this «works», there will be another one who will accuse Andrew Bird of «Going Gaga à la Björk», and the world will not have come one step closer to peace and love for all.

 

Still, the seven «normal» songs, including a scaled-down remake of ʽOrpheo Looks Backʼ from the previous album; a semi-hilarious, semi-sad cover of the traditional country tune ʽRailroad Billʼ that might have been an outtake from Oh! The Grandeur for all I care; and an ominous feedback-meets-fiddle take on The Handsome Family's ʽWhen That Helicopter Comesʼ — these all constitute very pleasant, traditional, entertaining listening for those who dig roots-rock in ge­neral and/or Bird's personal take on it in particular. There is enough professionalism, intelligence, tact, and modest catchiness to even warrant the usual thumbs up. It just happens to be a some­what disinterested thumbs up.

 

(Besides, it seems that, try as he might, Andrew just won't be able to get the guitar out of business as pop music's leading instrument — somehow, it seems easier to keep on writing interesting guitar-based pop songs than violin-based ones. Maybe the problem is in that these songs aren't really based on the violin — it's fairly hard to get it to serve as a stable rhythmic foundation for this kind of music — and end up being just a collection of delicate lead lines hanging out of nowhere and fading back into nowhere, which doesn't exactly work well for the memorability department. But never mind, just a spontaneous speculation on my part here, really).

 

THINGS ARE REALLY GREAT HERE, SORT OF (2014)

 

1) Cathedral In The Dell; 2) Tin Foiled; 3) Giant Of Illinois; 4) So Much Wine, Merry Christmas; 5) My Sister's Tiny Hands; 6) The Sad Milkman; 7) Don't Be Scared; 8) Frogs Singing; 9) Drunk By Noon; 10) Far From Any Road.

 

This is yet another «minor» release, perhaps not worth a lengthy review, but well worth a few verbal niceties. Either suffering from writer's block (and I certainly do not blame him for that at this point in his career), or simply in search for something slightly different, our friend Andrew here releases a short CD with ten covers of songs by The Handsome Family — an alt-country duo from Chicago/Albuquerque, consisting of husband and wife Brett and Rennie Sparks. I've lis­tened to a few of these songs in their original versions, and they sound more or less like an alt-country record is supposed to sound: firmly rooted in the genre's basics, but bravely struggling to avoid the genre's clichés and overall shallowness — lyrically intelligent, musically competent, listenable, but not particularly inspiring.

 

The Andrew Bird touch, though, does these songs some major good. Sparse, minimalistic arran­gements (although he does employ all of his band from the previous album) and especially Bird's familiar tenor give them extra romantic vulnerability and extra emotional depth; he also makes significant melodic changes to suit his own style — for instance, the original ʽFar From Any Roadʼ had a bit of a spaghetti-western aura to it, with an epic brass section and all, whereas Bird's guitar-and-eerie-violin-only arrangement actually does a better job of conveying a wanderer's desert experience with a lonely cactus.

 

One thing about the Sparks duo (no, not those Sparks — Brett and Rennie, I mean) is that they write almost surprisingly decent lyrics, which frequently attract more attention than the music and may actually explain Bird's interest in them. Not every country outfit, not even every alt-country outfit, would write a song about the Köln Cathedral, for instance, and then go from there to a "fiberglass castle in Wisconsin" (ʽCathedral In The Dellʼ) — but somehow Andrew Bird seems just like the guy that you'd associate with singing a song that takes the Cathedral as its central metaphor, maybe because everything about Bird is so «high», like the Cathedral itself — the singing, the whistling, the violin playing, always stuck somewhere high up in the clouds.

 

Then there's the mystical/religious metaphors, like the one with the cactus in the desert, where it is hard to understand if the metaphor is spiritual or amorous or both, but the desert imagery is used cleverly all the same, and Bird's haunting arrangement does phenomenally well agree with New Mexican desert at sunset (something I have had the pleasure of experiencing personally a few times, so I know what I'm talking about here), making ʽFar From Any Roadʼ the definitive highlight of this brief experience.

 

That said, do not expect any great songwriting or innovative arrangements on the whole: the basic structures of the songs are fairly traditional, the style is fairly well unified, and there are no attempts to dazzle the listener (in fact, Bird's violin is kept strictly in check throughout, and the acoustic guitar parts are not particularly interesting by themselves). I would say that the most intriguing aspect of the album is simply that we get to witness the process of taking a non-Bird song and effortlessly transforming it into a Bird song — so it is instructive to listen to this stuff back to back with the originals, see how this man's brain works «when given the data». Without the originals, this is simply another small bunch of very typical and predictable Andrew Bird, albeit with some new, different lyrical angles. Short and sweet, I give it a usual thumbs up, but only because it is adequately low on ambition — and offers us no clue as to whether this guy still has it in him to properly amaze us, rather than give us what we already well know, sometime in the near (or faraway) future.

 

ECHOLOCATIONS: CANYON (2015)

 

1) Sweep The Field; 2) Groping The Dark; 3) Rising Water; 4) Antrozous; 5) The Return Of Yawny; 6) Before The Germans Came; 7) The Canyon Wants To Hear C Sharp.

 

In 2015, Andrew Bird packed his violin and some recording equipment, travelled all the way to the Coyote Gulch canyons in Utah, and conducted a serious scientific experiment to answer the question: "If one plays a violin inside a canyon, will there be an echo?" The results would not only be self-sufficient on their own, but would also function as a part of an installation (of course) presented at the Boston Insti­tute of Contemporary Art for three months, during which any Bosto­ner unable to scrape up the money for a ticket to Utah could come visit and experience what it would be like if you had to spend fifty minutes in a canyon, playing your violin.

 

Needless to say, we here at Only Solitaire immediately had to alert the trusty Bullshit Patrol; but, either out of sheer respect for the hitherto illustrious career of Mr. Bird, or for some deeper rea­son, perhaps, the Patrol refused to make an arrest, stating that, although the album is definitely expe­rimental, it is (a) eminently listenable and (b) experimental in the good sense of the word, as in, «somebody who is genuinely searching for new sounds in hopes of tapping into some hitherto unexplored corner of one's emotions». Nobody can insist that the tapping actually took place, but the attempt is at least curious, and at most — pleasant.

 

Obviously, this is an ambient-minimalist record, with Andrew Bird presenting himself as the Brian Eno of the violin, using it as an impressionist tool while various nature sounds (wind and water, mostly — apparently, there's nothing like an Andrew Bird violin melody to scare all the actual coyotes away) are reverberating in the background. But it is not particularly dissonant, and the things he plays are, in fact, quite diverse — ranging from deconstructed elements of some baroque violin partita (ʽSweep The Fieldʼ, which begins that way and then turns into more of a modern classical piece for violin and whistle) to loops of pretty flourishes without a cause (ʽGro­ping The Darkʼ) to attempts at emulating an Indian, sitar-like sound with the violin (ʽAntro­zousʼ). ʽBefore The Germans Cameʼ, despite the title, sounds like the man's tribute to Bach; and while I am not positively sure if ʽThe Canyon Wants To Hear C Sharpʼ, not being in any way related to the canyon or anything, that last composition gives the impression of somebody trying to play a serious blues jam on solo violin, with more Eastern elements woven in for good measure.

 

Therefore, to avoid falling into the iron hands of the Bullshit Patrol, you'd probably be better off forgetting about the general setting of the recording — honestly, most of the time you'd have no idea that this was not recorded in a studio, and who really cares? — and just view this as a set of experimental violin pieces played by somebody who actually understands what he's doing. As an ambient record, the violin and particularly Bird's individualistic manner of playing it make it a somewhat unique experience, and somehow it still manages to remain permeated with his lonely, melancholic spirit. Well, as Jimi said, "If the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art fell in the sea — let it be, it ain't me, 'cos Andrew Bird got his own world to look through, and at least he ain't gonna copy Vanessa Mae". And since I'm in no position to disagree with Jimi, the worst I can do is not give this record a thumbs up, because I honestly did not enjoy it that much — and besides, it's only the first one in an announced series that promises to bring you even more of those «echolocations» before the industry runs out of violin strings, so I'm saving up on thumbs in ad­vance. But it's got mood-setting potential, all right, and it is Andrew Bird, after all: one of the few modern musicians with near-impeccable taste, whether you hate it or love it.

 

ARE YOU SERIOUS (2016)

 

1) Capsized; 2) Roma Fade; 3) Truth Lies Low; 4) Puma; 5) Chemical Switches; 6) Left Handed Kisses; 7) Are You Serious; 8) Saints Preservus; 9) The New Saint Jude; 10) Valleys Of The Young; 11) Bellevue; 12*) Shoulder Mountain; 13*) Pulaski.

 

Bird likes to be prolific in so many different ways that the border between «basic» albums and «special» (live, ambient, cover, etc.) projects in his career tends to become blurred; but, the way I see it, Are You Serious is really his first «basic» album in about four years, since at least Break It Yourself — comprised of bona fide art-pop songs and nothing else. It appears that, after seve­ral years of fiddling about, the idea here was to produce something normal and accessible, reflec­ting his new family life and values, and, indeed, the songs are generally less cryptic lyrically and less provocative musically than you'd typically expect from the man.

 

And that is perfectly all right with me, except the record does little to shatter my belief that An­drew is about a decade past his creative peak already (which is not a crime — not even the Beatles had themselves the luxury of ten uninterrupted years of creative growth); then again, an album that pursues intimately personal goals need not necessarily strive for originality as well, and this one is just a bunch of family-oriented songs from the most light-footed loner in modern pop music, and should be taken as such, and enjoyed like a familiar, predictable, but still deli­cious gourmet dinner.

 

Most of the songs combine sincerity with catchiness and — how could we make without that? — a lyrical or musical allegory or two. The very first song, ʽCapsizedʼ, will reassure us that, happily settled family man or not, this is still the same old neurotic Andrew Bird, and he still needs some­body by his side when he has to pull it together, and there's just no telling how much worse things get when the somebody in question goes missing: "another break up, this ship is capsized", and we get archaic references to Jesus making our dying bed. The accompanying music is like a cross between James Brown and Tom Waits, borrowing the funkiness of the former and the hoarse, distorted approach to instrumentation of the latter, with broken guitar riffs that could have come from Marc Ribot (actually, they come from Blake Mills) — but unlike either of them, Andrew never loses his cool, so that most of the drama is implicit, reflected in the tense, suspenseful atmosphere but never breaking through to the surface.

 

It's all about paranoia, really — a set of songs written by somebody who allegedly feels confused and insecure around other people, and then finally finds himself in that embarrassing position when someone (even someone loved) is always around. "And if she sees you, it changes you / Rearranges your molecules", he sings on ʽRoma Fadeʼ to an oddly danceable and bizarrely morose beat, continuing and appropriating the old tradition of «love's a wonderfully dangerous and dangerously wonderful thing». It gets worse on ʽPumaʼ: "She was radioactive for seven days / How I wanted to be holding her anyways / But the doctors, they told me to stay away / Due to flying neutrinos and the gamma rays" — no, this is not misogyny, this is more like an inverted case of autophobia, with Bird's jerky, hopping staccato violin rhythms reflecting his agitated state of mind and the seeming impossibility of making the right choice.

 

Musically, the songs seem to draw upon all sorts of local pop traditions, from Mexican to Carib­bean to French to Celtic to good old 1970s R&B, but all the influences are softly converted to «Andrew Bird music», based on violins and jazzy guitars, and essentially it feels like the man has no preferences whatsoever — as long as the whole thing does not come close to stereotypical «rock» or «pop», and as long as he's allowed to keep that guitar / violin setup, anything goes at any time. One of the simpler, folksier songs is a duet with Fiona Apple (ʽLeft Handed Kissesʼ), who, I guess, could in certain respects be viewed as the female Andrew Bird, so the collaboration should come across as natural — yes and no, because with these two certified loners, they have no chemistry whatsoever, and even when they're singing at the same time, they're pretty much doing it without noticing that the other guy is in the same room, so... (actually, most of the time he's not even looking at her in the accompanying video, so even visually it feels as if they're talking to each other and to the wall simultaneously). It's kinda cute, even if there's a bit of pre­tentious artificialness to the performance.

 

In any case, the biggest deal here is that it's easier to relate to a record like this than it is to relate to most of Andrew's usual dialogs with his inner demons, where you really have to be one of the demons in question to «get» everything that is going on. This, and the fact that repeated listens will have the melodies to at least ʽCapsizedʼ, the title track, and ʽPumaʼ stuck in your head for days,  is what makes the record stand out a good bit from the rest of Andrew's over-inflated latter day catalog, even if it does not exactly promise a brighter future. Thumbs up, and a special re­commendation for highly sensitive boys with lotsa girl troubles, just to let you know that you're not alone, and maybe you should pick up some violin lessons.

ANGEL OLSEN

HALF WAY HOME (2012)

 

1) Acrobat; 2) The Waiting; 3) Safe In The Womb; 4) Lonely Universe; 5) Can't Wait Until Tomorrow; 6) Always Half Strange; 7) You Are Song; 8) Miranda; 9) The Sky Opened Up; 10) Free; 11) Tiniest Seed.

 

Strange, strange times, these 2010s — everything is alive, everything is dead, everything is in between, call it the Schrödinger decade if you wish. Here is Angel Olsen, a fresh face (although, as of 2017 when I am writing this text, she already has a six-year solo career behind her back, a time span that was enough for the Beatles to proceed from ʽLove Me Doʼ to ʽA Day In The Lifeʼ) who wants to put her own spin on the genre of acoustic-folk-based singer-songwriting, taking her cues from Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and maybe all these lesser known and more poorly remembered female heroes of the past like Laura Nyro and Janis Ian. A genre whose heyday ended about four decades ago, but hey, it's the 2010s, a time when anything goes, when a nostalgic revival can no longer be called a nostalgic revival, because «nostalgic» presumes a clear distinction between past, present, and future, and we no longer have one. Future is past, past is future, and present is an ephemeral piece of nonsense.

 

Anyway, Angel Olsen. We do not know that much about her yet, except that she comes from St. Louis, Missouri, she sang backup vocals for Will Oldham for a short while, she released her first homebrewed recordings on the short self-produced EP Strange Cacti in 2011, and she got picked up by the tiny indie label Bathetic Records in 2012. Half Way Home, her proper LP debut, appeared one year later, and featured eleven songs that were mostly written, performed, and re­corded by Olsen on her own, with occasional help from some of Oldham's musicians (Ben Boye on organ and Emmett Kelly, also the leader of The Cairo Gang, on guitar). Being quite low-key, the record did not make much of an impact other than on an occasional admirer-reviewer (Laura Snapes wrote a gushing novel on the album at Pitchfork), but now that we all have the opportu­nity to compare it with Olsen's most recent major success, I think it's only fair to say that the lady comes out fully fleshed-out and accomplished here — skipping the ʽLove Me Doʼ stage altoge­ther and aiming straight for a Rubber Soul kind of result, if not higher.

 

Of the four possible aspects of the budding singer-songwriter — musician, melodicist, lyricist, vocalist — I think it is fairly safe to cross out the first two from the start. Olsen plays a nice acoustic guitar, and has clearly excelled at her homework studying those Drake and Mitchell chords, but, like 99% of indie kids these days, exploring non-trivial, innovative ways of riding her instrument is clearly not a priority (admittedly, it is not even clear what a «non-trivial, inno­vative way» of playing folk-based acoustic guitar would sound like these days). Likewise, the melodies aren't particularly interesting because most of these instrumental and vocal patterns had been worn thin the aforementioned four decades ago; the only point of curiosity is that, from time to time, she also tries to integrate a retro pop sound in the tapestry, taking occasional cues from Roy Orbison (especially in the vocal hook department) and from those British kids who were all right back in the day (funny thing, every time she sings "sometimes..." on ʽFreeʼ, I feel a strong urge to finish it for her with "...I feel I gotta get away", though, of course, the majority of Angel's young fans from today probably won't even recognize the reference).

 

As a lyricist, she's okay. Technically, this is an album of love songs; almost every single song is a soliloquy addressed to an imaginary partner, and the real good news — maybe the one thing that makes me instantaneously biased in favor of the record — is that, believe it or not, this is not one of the miriads of «break-up albums» that singer-songwriters tend to be associated with these days. The basic underlying concept here is that of love offering temporary relief and respite from fear and darkness: the heroine was ʽSafe In The Wombʼ before finding herself in this ʽLonely Uni­verseʼ, surrounded by strange and ugly things, and now she is searching for safety, tranquility, and understanding that cannot be reached on one's own. Not an entirely new concept, of course, but at least a fresher one than a ten thousandth attempt at venting your frustration over an inex­perienced teenage love affair, and, most importantly, without annoyingly self-aggravating fits of narcissism that tend to plague these attempts. "Who cares I'm not a moralist / I'm just a lady with some time", she declares in the very first track, and somehow I doubt we'll ever get a line like that from the likes of either Adele or Joanna Newsom.

 

But the main point of attraction, and probably the one and only that managed to so quickly endear her to the fanbase, is her voice and manner — alternating between the serious schoolteacher tone to a strangely fascinating pop vibrato à la Roy Orbison, not necessarily limited to the poppier, rhythmic tunes like ʽThe Waitingʼ and ʽFreeʼ. In a world that has probably seen and heard it all, it's not a totally unique voice, but an interesting one: thick, rich on low overtones, although it seems as if she is intentionally trying to sing much lower than her natural range (like a soprano reaching for contralto) — but it feels okay, symbolic of the idea of life dragging you down, if you know what I mean. That said, I totally disagree with the frequently expressed opinion about sad­ness being the overwhelming emotion on these songs: on the contrary, Half Way Home feels like a pretty happy album, except that happiness is something that the heroine is looking for and stri­ving to achieve, rather than an accomplished state.

 

The only proverbially «sad» song on the album is its only epic-length track, ʽLonely Universeʼ, which drags on for seven minutes and does indeed deal with loss and separation — no wonder it is also the weakest track on the entire album, a slow, lethargic waltz where you are supposed to empathize with a chorus that goes "goodbye, sweet Mother Earth, without you now I'm a lonely universe". It is not melodically stronger or weaker than anything else on here — it's just that its bleakness sounds contrived and generic next to the far more mixed feelings on the other tracks, and also that no Angel Olsen song deserves to be seven minutes long. Give me something short and poppy like ʽFreeʼ instead — it might be a 100% Buddy Holly / Roy Orbison / Pete Town­shend rip-off, but with Olsen's voice behind it, the vibe gets a new reading that combines tender­ness with depth and maturity, or something like that.

 

And basically, that's it. If you want to wax philosophical on the inner strength and magic of the album, go read the Pitchfork review about how the main theme of this album is "a thoughtful, never morbid belief in the finality of death" and how its greatest asset is "its openness to what could be, to potential" (funny, I always thought that the greatest song about "openness to what could be" was McCartney's ʽWhy Don't We Do It In The Road?ʼ). I can only sum up by saying that I enjoyed listening to this stuff — that, upon my third listen, I remained un-irritated by most of it, and that, in itself, is already a big plus, though hardly worth a well-deserved thumbs up: passable lyrics and a special vocal timbre are not enough, after all, to cover for a total lack of original songwriting or interesting musical arrangements. But sufficiently decent, I guess, for the oh-so-vague standards of 2012.

 

BURN YOUR FIRE FOR NO WITNESS (2014)

 

1) Unfucktheworld; 2) Forgiven/Forgotten; 3) Hi-Five; 4) White Fire; 5) High & Wild; 6) Lights Out; 7) Stars; 8) Iota; 9) Dance Slow Decades; 10) Enemy; 11) Windows.

 

I hate to say it because it might seem seriously unfair to some of my readers, but I have to say it anyway: in my opinion, albums that focus exclusively on the artist's (real or imaginary) relation with his/her other simply do not work in the 21st century any longer. Unless this subject simply serves as a generic theme for some catchy pop hooks, chances of the artist offering us some deep­ly original and consistently captivating soulful insights are simply close to zero — even when the artist is as naturally gifted, as striving, and as tasteful as Angel Olsen. She is all these things, yes, and they are disclosed even better on her second album than they were on the first, and yet, even after three or four listens, my reaction is still close to "I really can't wait for this to end".

 

It's not as if she were intentionally running some single idea into the ground — on the contrary, Burn Your Fire For No Witness is a formal expansion on already conquered territory, with deeper production, stronger reliance on electric instruments, an amalgamation of folk and country motives with psycho-pop and experimental rock. Throw in that husky voice, wobbling between harshness and tenderness, acceptance and rejection, vulnerability and whatever is the opposite of vulnerability, and here's solid proof that women have won over men these days, since the female equivalent of Bon Iver at least makes music that does not make you want to sign the petition for an executive order banning the use of log cabins all across America.

 

And still, there is a problem, and that problem is: I do not believe this music. Listening to this, to me, is like watching a magic show delivered by an apprentice whose rubber bands and third arms show all over the place. I hear echoes of all her influences (which remain largely the same as they used to be), I hear commitment, but it's like the spells she tries to cast are totally misplaced, or like the ingredients she uses for them are all made in Taiwan or something.

 

Case in point: ʽWhite Fireʼ, the longest and also one of the sparsest ballads on the album, sounds like a cover of a lost Leonard Cohen song from the Songs Of Love And Hate era — same Cohen-endorsed acoustic picking sequence, same simple poetic verse structure, same mood of loneliness and desolation. But where a real Cohen can (not always, but frequently) put me in a state of trance with this simple trickery, Angel Olsen sounds like a poser in comparison. (I stress the in comparison bit, because in real life everything works in comparison, and if you happen to be a young fan who admires Olsen but has not yet had a chance to seriously check out Cohen, I wish you a long, happy, fruitful, and instructive life ahead). Is it just because Leonard was first and she comes so very very next? Or is it because Leonard's poetry was what it really was — serious poetry, continuing and deepening an old, respectable, well-studied, and perfectly under­stood tradition — whereas Olsen's lyrics sound like half-decent, uneducated, unenlightened imitations? Is it because, even when you cannot suggest any direct interpretation, Leonard still ends up sounding like he's really into something serious and deeply troubling, whereas Olsen's soulful admonition of "if you've still got some light in you then go before it's gone / burn your fire for no witness, it's the only way it's done" seems to be addressed to nobody in particular and to signify nothing in particular?

 

Or maybe I'm just a grumpy old guy, because on YouTube, people behave in a far more simple manner — they just say "She sounds like a female Leonard Cohen! How beautiful!" and leave it at that. Well... something tells me that perhaps, fifty years from now, people will still be listening to those old Cohen records without going "He sounds like a male Angel Olsen! How charming!" At least if there was a shred of something new to this second-hand magic of a monotonous mantra stretched over seven minutes and two chords, that could help me out — but when a clear lack of effort is being passed for artistic humility and «focus on the essential», it just irritates me.

 

It's a bit easier when she embarks on her journey to become the female Roy Orbison rather than Leonard Cohen — the songs are shorter, less pretentious, a bit less monotonous, and incorporate a toe-tapping element that always helps out when you're not a master charmer by trade. So, with lots of psychedelically distorted guitars and happy-tragic vocalizing, ʽHi-Fiveʼ is probably one of the better numbers on the record, with an intentionally simplified, but not trivialized, approach to lyrics — the lady is searching for somebody who'd agree to be her partner in loneliness. Once again, she does not win me over: that "I feel so lonesome, I could cry..." bit does not feel parti­cularly lonesome. But at least it's solidly within the pop tradition, and the whole thing ends up being moderately catchy and somewhat fun.

 

More often, the songs end up between these two extremes, though, and end up being too poppy to be serious and too serious to be poppy. The opening title ʽUnfucktheworldʼ sounds like some­thing you'd expect to see on a hardcore punk record, but the song, like every other song on here, is still about Me and You, and I take this to mean that the world is fucked because Me and You cannot find an ideal understanding, and as soon as that understanding is found, The World Be­comes Unfucked, and the lion lies down with the lamb. But for now, all that we have established is that "I am the only one now", delivered in a semi-frightened cold murmur that probably suggests an element of dehumanization. But who dehumanized her? How did it happen? Was it serious? Was it inevitable? Is there a cure? Does Prozac help? Can we help? Could we at least suggest one extra chord in the musical backing?..

 

Her singing is perhaps most pretty, but also most confusing, on the last track, ʽWindowsʼ. Just like ʽTiniest Seedʼ on the previous record, this last track seems to offer an optimistic way out — "won't you open a window sometime, what's so wrong with the light?" — except it is not clear who she is addressing the question to: the intangible Other or to her own self. "You" suggests the Other, but it is around herself that she spent weaving a frail web of darkness and loneliness for the previous ten songs, so perhaps Me and You simply got merged in one (not too difficult to do considering a common base in loneliness). Or maybe there's a third character in here somewhere, like a fairy of light and hope floating down on two poor would-be lovers and poking them around: "Why can't you see? Are you blind? Are you dead? Are you all right?" Problem is, they're not all right but they're not all wrong, either. As a tear-down-the-wall conclusion to an album that has just spent forty minutes trying to convince us that there was a wall in the first place (and failing to properly convince me, for one), ʽWindowsʼ feels just a tad phony the same way the rest of the album sounded just a tad phony.

 

I mean, I just can't help it, sorry, but when a song like ʽStarsʼ proclaims that "I feel so much at once that I could scream", and then proceeds to murmur and hum instead of, you know, actually screaming, «phony» is really quite a mild word to express my dissatisfaction with the final pro­duct. Sure, we can always find a cop-out — like suggesting that the murmur and hum is a mea­ningful artistic sublimation for loud emotional outburst (and God forbid that Angel Olsen would end up pigeonholed as an emo kid, anyway), or that the entire song is really about closing one's eyes and freezing on the spot — but whatever be the cop-out, intuitively I still feel a mismatch between words, voice, and music, no matter which of the tracks I turn to. Nice try, for sure, but with a communicative breakdown like that, I will not pretend to pass this for a communicative success — nor, for that matter, will I admit that a selection of rave reviews for the album had me even for one second convinced that the reviewers in question were more successful in their at­tempts at communication than poor little me. But I will refrain from a thumbs down, if only be­cause I still respect this sort of effort, and because in this kind of business, it is very easy to de­grade yourself to the state of pretentious whiner (cue Justin Vernon again), which is something that Olsen has securely safeguarded herself against.

 

MY WOMAN (2016)

 

1) Intern; 2) Never Be Mine; 3) Shut Up Kiss Me; 4) Give It Up; 5) Not Gonna Kill You; 6) Heart Shaped Face; 7) Sister; 8) Those Were The Days; 9) Woman; 10) Pops.

 

Third time's the charm, I guess... but then, Olsen did try to pull all the stops in order to attract attention this time around — on My Woman (and no, she's not a lesbian, the title is supposed to read like «the woman in me» or something like that), she dumps the log cabin for an abandoned palace, expan­ding in style, ambition, and production values as if there was a Phil Spector behind her back. Ac­tually, not just Phil Spector: My Woman has a real hodge-podge of influences, ranging from synth-pop to Sixties' girl groups to Stevie Nicks to Neil Young, yet all the songs are still tied together conceptually with Olsen's lyrics and vocal delivery that logically continue and develop what she'd begun on the first two records. Now if only we could find the right words to define and describe what she'd begun on the first two records...

 

I suppose it's really all about confusion, in the end. Once again, some people will speak about the loneliness and depression of the record, but I do believe it is mostly about finding the real me — the very first song goes "doesn't matter who you are or what you've done / still got to wake up and be someone" — and the stylistic mix agrees with that, as Olsen jumps from one musical paradigm into another as if she were trying out an endless wardrobe, lost in the dazzling array of fashions, sizes, and colors. For her, this is way better (and probably more honest) than assuming one particular image, glossing it up and sticking to it — this is why, even if ʽInternʼ sounds a lot like Lana Del Rey, it is much better than any Lana Del Rey song because it still feels more natu­ral, humble, and earthy than Lana's manipulative-theatrical cheapness.

 

The specific thematic particularities of these songs — does she get her man? is she losing her man? is she mistreating her man? is she being mistreated by her man? is she in favor or against free love? is she gay? etc. etc. — do not fascinate me any more than did the themes of her Cohen / Mitchell phase; honestly, you do not need Angel Olsen as your spiritual guru through the world of personal relations. I simply prefer to interpret My Woman as a record that poses more ques­tions than it gives answers ("I dare you to understand what makes me a woman", she belts out on the title track, but it is never clear that she herself understands that), a brooding stream of con­sciousness that sometimes clothes itself in pop hooks and sometimes just in sonic atmosphere, but at least does so with a sufficient degree of energy, diversity, and good taste to keep me involved: something that was barely possible on the previous two albums.

 

According to Olsen herself, the album was structured as a two-part LP: shorter, tighter, hookier pop songs on the first side and longer, looser, more atmospheric rants and broodings on the se­cond one. Most likely, this was a move calculated to attract more listeners (no wonder she did not choose to reverse the order — had ʽSisterʼ and ʽWomanʼ been the first tracks, many would pro­bably not have the stimulus to keep on listening), but since this is a personality-driven record, the difference between the two batches is not really that crucial. For instance, the cool thing about ʽShut Up Kiss Meʼ is not that its melody echoes themes of the Ronettes and the Shirelles — it is that these themes are given a solid reworking, as Olsen forces her love on the other guy rather than pleads for it: the "shut up, kiss me, hold me tight!" hook is delivered in such a nervously sped up manner as could never have been considered proper for any of the classic girl groups. I am still unsure of how sincere this stuff is, or if Angel herself understands properly what it is she is trying to communicate, but it is a brave attempt at taking a good old sound and adapting it for the purposes of the 21st century woman, regardless of whether it succeeds or not.

 

The best song on the first half, as far as I'm concerned, is ʽNot Gonna Kill Youʼ, which survives as an emotional crescendo — melodically, it seems to borrow inspiration from The Who, with lots of choppy chords and a nearly-mad percussion track, but vocally, it features a gradual trans­formation of the singer into a disembodied ghost: the line "'til I'm nothing else but the feeling" is followed by a realisation of that promise, and it's cool — she soars, she echoes, she howls, she goes from bright to dark, it's a pretty darn awesome performance, even a little scary, although she does try to reassure us that "it's not gonna kill you, it's not gonna break you, it's just gonna shake you", as if coaxing us into taking a roller coaster ride. Does she sound possessed or what? Well, at this level she probably still wouldn't be able to stand up to the levels of Janis or Patti Smith, but she still passes the screamer test with flying colors.

 

Whether or not you will be ready to accept the longer tracks is another matter. ʽSisterʼ clearly channels the spirit of Tusk-era Stevie Nicks — she even seems to sing with the same nasal rasp that Stevie had at the time, even though, being cocaine-free, Angel probably has more of an actual nose — but her guitar player ain't no Lindsey Buckingham, and the messy guitar jam at the end of the song just adds confusion, rather than emotional uplift. ʽWomanʼ is better, if you get through the first few minutes — eventually, the vocals become anthemic and banshee-like, and the lead guitar begins playing a grim, jagged, psycho-bluesy pattern that's somewhere in between Neil Young and Bardo Pond, though, again, neither reaching the ecstatic heights of the former nor plunging to the grimy, trance-inducing depths of the latter. All in all, I'd say she tries to bite off far more than she can chew on these «epics» — but at least she doesn't exactly fall flat on her face, which is already a big plus.

 

Towards the end, she returns once more to her beloved minimalism: ʽPopsʼ bobs up and down on two heavily sustained piano chords and seems to tell us that it didn't work out after all — no won­der, because if the real life Angel Olsen is at least half of her lyrical heroine, dating her would probably be a nightmare even for Socrates — but then again, we're never ever even sure of what exactly it was that did not work out. "I'll be the thing that lives in the dream when it's gone", she concludes, which is probably exactly the way I'm going to remember her once this review is over: clearly, there was something here, but it's almost impossible to put your finger on it, or even to tell if you felt sympathetic towards the artist or not.

 

I feel reasonably secure about giving the record a thumbs up, because here is a serious musical effort from an artist who has mastered the art of making her personality override that of her many influences — something that was still far from clear on the previous two records. Unfortunately, I am still under the impression that this personality is overblown way out of proportion: too many of her ideas on the musical/lyrical disclosure of «Love as Transcendental Power Equally Capable of Creation and Destruction» seem to be realized in a theatrical and exaggerated manner. Or, roughly speaking, if this is art rock, then the compositional and musical side of it leaves a lot to be desired — but if this is pop, it takes itself much too seriously. Still, there's no denying that a bigger and brasher sound, as well as stylistic diversity, helped her make the whole thing far more listenable, and it doesn't hurt, either, that in her role of the Ice Queen she at least treated us to some impressive blizzards here, rather than just sit and sulk motionless on her ice throne. Now, do you think it would be too much to ask her for a creative reinterpretation of the Ramones' ʽI Wanna Be Your Boyfriendʼ for her next project?..

 

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

SPIRIT THEY'RE GONE, SPIRIT THEY'VE VANISHED (2000)

 

1) Spirit They've Vanished; 2) April And The Phantom; 3) Untitled; 4) Penny Dreadfuls; 5) Chocolate Girl; 6) Everyone Whistling; 7) La Rapet; 8) Bat You'll Fly; 9) Someday I'll Grow To Be As Tall As The Giant; 10) Alvin Row.

 

The story of what we know today as the «Animal Collective» formally begins with this homebrewed recording, featuring Avey Tare (David Portner) on everything except percussion, on the latter featuring Panda Bear (Noah Lennox). No need to be afraid of the «homebrewed» label: we have come a long way since the dawn of techno­logy, and it all sounds fantastically good for something recorded directly in a living room. Well, actually, the vocals sound like shit, but presu­mably that was the idea, or close to the idea.

 

Since, for the first few years of the team's recording career, Spirit was only available in a two-digit number of copies (perhaps three, but given the world's overall population, that's hardly a significant difference), "important people" only started admiring its quality in retrospect, but the retrospect turned out to be fortunate: most indie bands, no matter how respectable they become eventually, only wish their initial, pre-big label, efforts got the same amount of admiration.

 

What is it that makes this recording important in any way, or simply interesting? As much as I'm left indifferent by it, I can't deny that I haven't heard anything like it before. The best way to de­scribe the genre in which it is cast — or, in fact, which it creates — is arguably "Psychedelic Avantgarde For Kiddies", where "avantgarde" stands for "weirdass unpredictable rhythms and chord changes", "psychedelic" for "trippy effects furnished by the latest in electronic gadgets", and "kiddies" for "an overall feeling of almost overdone furry cuteness all over this thing".

 

Obviously, each of the three directions can be found separately on any number of albums by any number of artists from the last five decades, but to combine all three the way A. T. and P. B. have judged them to be combinable — something fairly unique in here. Many people, even seasoned listeners, will be left dazed and confused by these sounds, uncertain whether this really means anything and whether music like that has any future. And this, I think, is an excellent thing in it­self, because these days, too few things exist that can daze and confuse any more.

 

The magic does not work on me; I find that the "cuteness" clashes with the "avantgardism" angle in a way that sort of flattens both. I'd gather that all of these playful polyrhythms saddled with fairish vocals, all of these innocent nature sounds interwoven with jazz modulations, all of these 'Chocolate Girl' and 'April And The Phantom' song titles mixed with ear-splitting sounds and mind-defying lyrics pretty much kill off each other's effect. Kids won't like this unless they were born and raised in nuthouses, and elitists may scoff at the cuteness aspect. To truly "get into this", you probably have to be an archi-arrogant hipster with a subconscious need to release and satisfy your inner child — a category of people that must be about as rare as Jewish Neo-nazis (but since we know for a fact that Jewish Neo-nazis exist, so should childlike avantgardists).

 

Individual songs do not matter at all; it's probably more correct to perceive all of the album's sixty minutes as one continuous suite, written for the purposes of exploding your mind rather than in­graining itself into it. Even after four listens I still haven't been able to decompose these sixty minutes — not a single moment stands out as particularly inspiring, particularly catchy, particu­larly ugly, or particularly out-of-place. It's as if someone were evenly and meticulously shaking the same sonic kaleidoscope, letting you in on an endlessly shifting array of glistening dots and bits but never allowing you to focus in on any one single configuration; in the end, you're dazzled with what you've just seen but you also find it hard to explain what it is that you have just seen. In my case at least, you're also not quite certain about whether the things you have just seen have any actual meaning, and whether, in fact, there was any necessity in seeing them in the first place.

 

One definite complaint I'd like to voice, though, is that these sonic textures lack any sort of depth. I mentioned that the recording does not suffer from the usual problems associated with lo-fi, but nevertheless, all the tunes might have benefited from professional studio production. In the past, bands like Amon Düül II or the Cocteau Twins would drag you into their fantasy worlds because they really felt like three-dimensional worlds; Avey Tare and Panda Bear do not really go beyond the second dimension, and it feels like you're merely walking on the pages of their book of fairy tales, not diving into it — and the primary fault lies not with their composing skills or the strength of their imagination, but with the poorness of their technical capacities. It is still amazing how much they managed to accomplish within the four walls of their living room, but it is not enough to turn this living room into a flying saucer on chicken legs, if you know what I mean.

 

It is mostly because of this — implying that this obstacle was at least somewhat overcome as the years went by — that the record receives a thumbs down, following a repulsive reaction from the heart that overrides the positive logical argumentation of the brain. If this were the only Animal Collective album ever recorded, some reconsideration might be in order, but this is, after all, a living-room quality recording by two well-meaning, but still relatively unexperienced whackos that went on to bigger and better things. And I don't think this is the best place to start your acquaintance with them, unless you just live for the challenge.

 

DANSE MANATEE (2001)

 

1) A Manatee Dance; 2) Penguin Penguin; 3) Another White Singer (Little White Glove); 4) Essplode; 5) Meet The Light Child; 6) Runnin The Round Ball; 6) Bad Crumbs; 7) The Living Toys; 8) Throwin The Round Ball; 9) Ahhh Good Country; 10) Lablakely Dress; 11) In The Singing Box.

 

On their second album, the future Animal Collective are already a trio, adding "Geologist" (Brian Weitz) on extra keyboards. Since Geologist has gone on record saying that Danse Manatee is his favourite album from the team, I'm going to imply that the shift in sound from Spirit to what we have here has a lot to do with his honourable presence; but it isn't going to change my opinion on the record, which isn't exactly sugar and spice.

 

Spirit — like all seriously notable records by the band, be they good or bad — regardless of whe­ther you like it or not, mixed fairy-tale fantasy with avantgarde in a way that could be annoying and curious at the same time. But the basic idea behind Manatee is different; it's not "let us filter our child fancies through a net of electronic devices", but rather "let us filter whatever comes into our heads at any given moment through a net of electronic devices, utilizing the most astounding and unusual sounds we can produce in our bedroom". And, since in the best of both worlds the most astounding and unusual sounds are also, quite frequently, the most unlistenable ones, the results are predictable. They're also more boring than they used to be.

There's not even the tiniest ounce of melody; worse, there's not even the tiniest ounce of captiva­ting atmosphere. There's a lot of pssh-pssh noises, and a lot of brrr-brrr noises, and a lot of jing-whee-fjjjrr-kllllng-wshwshwsh-pooka-pooka noises, and, of course, plenty of stuff to make your dog wish for stronger animal protection laws to be enforced on its owner. Sometimes they try to sing over it, but it doesn't help matters much, because they have these high frequencies all over the place that make it feel like you're listening to painfully low-quality MP3 recordings, and, instead of tuning in on the vocals, I just tune in to my subconscious desire to rip all that torturous whistling and wheezing out of the track.

 

Granted, all of this is slightly more diverse than Metal Machine Music, but it doesn't have a much larger point, either, belonging to the same category of artistic statement. The only redee­ming quality is Panda Bear's percussion work, in the good old avantgarde tradition of all the King Crimson drummers and suchlike; if not for that, there would hardly be anything here that would distinguish the results from, I'm guessing, millions of crazyass experimental recordings done by millions of kids in their millions of bedrooms all over the world. Nevertheless, if you are into extreme frequencies — for instance, if you believe that God abides in extreme frequencies, and the only way to get close to God is to attune your ears to the unattunable — Danse Manatee may be a revelation. But I rather prefer to think that God abides in 'Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da', so, unsur­prisingly, this one gets a thumbs down without thinking thrice.

 

HOLLINNDAGAIN (2002)

 

1) I See You Pan/Pride And Fight; 2) Forest Gospel/There's An Arrow/Lablakely Dress.

 

This is a live album, credited originally to Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist, and my take on it will be quite short. There are people who live and die for this, and there are people that Nature has rendered unable to get it. I belong to the latter group, and, therefore, feel justified to exercise my freedom of speech and label this a bunch of messy, ugly, unlistenable noise, far more «pre­tentious» in the direct sense of the word than, say, Tales From Topographic Oceans — at least the old proggers could play their instruments. (Well, truth be told, Panda Bear does know how to drum. But this hardly makes me feel any better).

 

The only ray of light is that today, the world knows the Animal Collective can do much better than this. But did the world know it in 2002? In short, there ain't enough thumbs in the world to let you know just how «down» I'm feeling about this record.

 

CAMPFIRE SONGS (2003)

 

1) Queen In My Pictures; 2) Doggy; 3) Two Corvettes; 4) Moo Rah Rah Rain; 5) De Soto De Son.

 

One thing is absolutely impossible to deny about the Animal Collective (by the way, on this al­bum they are still not the Animal Collective — in fact, here they have no name whatsoever): they certainly know how to make the same authentic, organic crap in a whole lot of different ways. Like its two predecessors, Campfire Songs is proverbially unlistenable, but it's an entirely other style of unlistenable. Which, for a brief while, even makes things exciting!

 

The players are Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and new band member Deakin (Josh Dibb in the alterna­tive universe of The Establishment), whereas Geologist's talents are only used to operate the three Sony MiniDisc players that were employed to record the album. The only discernible instruments are acoustic guitars, around which the "Animals" weave a complex web of dreamy, repetitive singing. The finishing touch is the environment — all the recordings, done in one take, were "authentically" made on a screen porch, with chunks of "nature noises" also captured separately and then spliced together with the playing and singing. "Campfire Songs" indeed.

 

From a technical viewpoint, the vocal harmonies are the only thing worth praising. Already on the first album it was clear that Avey Tare and Panda Bear have a serious thing for the Beach Boys, which they like to combine with extra psychedelic punches. The fact that they're able to construct such tight, on-key harmonies while sitting on a porch is admirable, and, under different circumstances, I can imagine myself falling under this type of spell — even despite the piss-poor instrumentation (boring guitar drone that, at its best, somewhat recalls early Tyrannosaurus Rex, and, at its worst, sounds like something a four-year old with half a musical ear could beat out if he found a mysterious piece of hollowed out wood with six nylon strings attached in the closet). In fact, I think the album is at its questionable best when the guitar fades away completely and we are left with nothing but the hypnotic acappella sounds.

 

Unfortunately, the lower-than-lo-fi production completely kills it off for me. Spontaneity and au­thenticity is one thing, and awful recording quality is another. If these mantras were given a solid "brushing up", some part of them at least could have made a cute psychedelic experience in the tradition of Skip Spence and Tim Buckley. But when it all sounds like fortuitously captured trans­missions from a World War II-era receiver, that part of the mind which is responsible for relaxa­tion and tuning in to the Eternal enters into violent conflict with that other part of the mind which is responsible for intellectual decoding of received signals and separation of noise from informa­tion. Results are about as dreadful as combining pills with alcohol.

 

Not that this wasn't the purpose, of course, but it is hardly funny when talented people intentio­nally sacrifice their talents for the sake of making it into the Guinness Book of Weirdness. It may be respectable, especially considering that with each passing year, it becomes ever and ever more hard to actually make it (and the Animal Collective are one of the very few collectives that have a good chance); but it is not enjoyable at all. From a rational point of view, Campfire Songs is yet another album that sounds like nothing else, but in this matter, I'd rather cling to the irrational, which suggests that it is, in fact, bull-de-luxe, and since it so clearly begs for a thumbs down, I'll bite and award it with one.

 

HERE COMES THE INDIAN (2003)

 

1) Native Belle; 2) Hey Light; 3) Infant Dressing Table; 4) Panic; 5) Two Sails On A Sound; 6) Slippi; 7) Too Soon.

 

When trying to appreciate total freak-out pieces of "music", the important thing is whether your mind is able to attach any kind of coherent picture to any of them. The sound of the Animal Col­lective can generally be described as "kaleidoscopic", but kaleidoscopes eventually — in fact, pretty soon — become tremendously boring in their predictable unpredictability, and instead of the usual chaotic glimmer and glow you begin to yearn for more precise imagery.

 

Here Comes The Indian seems to be the first truly "focused" album by the band, or, at least, the first after their psycho-fairy style debut effort. Maybe it is no coincidence that it is also the first record officially credited to "The Animal Collective" — as opposed to earlier efforts which just listed the members by name, as if each were doing his thing without giving a damn about whether it fit in with what the others were churning out at the same time or not. Of course, from a "melo­dic" or "harmonic" point of view, it is still utter crap. But there are signs of change and, perhaps, even growing up without killing off the child within.

 

Basically, Here Comes The Indian just happens to match its title. In small parts, it even reminds me of such classic "tribalistic" efforts as the Residents' Eskimo: filtering the essence of native, shamanistic harmonies through the avantgarde minds of thoroughly modern meta-artists. Except, of course, that the Animal Collective, with their limited means of existence and, perhaps,  a some­what shallow­er view of "authenticity", are not interested in mixing real Indian motives with their electrononsense, but are fully content with their own take on "The Indian". But that's OK, we can forgive them for that. There's too much unnecessary "authenticity" in the world these days anyway — why not replace it with fantasy from time to time?

 

All seven tracks represent "aggressively ambient" sonic panoramas, captured in much better qua­lity than Campfire Songs (even though it still took them about three days in total to do this), and most of them can indeed be viewed as representing various tribal activities — war dances around the campfire, ritual chanting while harvesting the crops, and even the sonic equivalent of a fero­cious brave attack ('Panic'). Wedged in between are all sorts of nature panoramas — superficially peaceful, but loaded with potential danger. Only one track, 'Slippi', might even be called a "song", but it's short, overproduced, and so full of tribalism like the others that it might take you a long time before you start calling it that.

 

I felt more depth, diversity, and excitement in this record than in all of the AC's previous efforts put together (yes, including even Spirit), and not because there really is more depth and diversity — primarily because there is a sense of purpose which lets me through the veils to experience the depth and diversity. I cannot say I like it, of course: it does nothing to sharpen my basic emotions. But there is something formally grand about it; in fact, when you think all of its paintings were recorded in three days, in all their complexity, it's hard not to harbour any respect for the band. The intellectual part of me, therefore, calls for a decisive thumbs up — first time! — even as the heart still refuses to budge. But, let's face it, even if it is shit, it's a kind of shit that at least deser­ves to be heard.

 

SUNG TONGS (2004)

 

1) Leaf House; 2) Who Could Win A Rabbit; 3) The Softest Voice; 4) Winters Love; 5) Kids On Holiday; 6) Sweet Road; 7) Visiting Friends; 8) College; 9) We Tigers; 10) Mouth Wooed Her; 11) Good Lovin' Outside; 12) Whaddit I Done.

 

Finally, the state of Grace has been attained. Sung Tongs is, almost inarguably so, the Animal Collective at their most accessible (which is still pretty darn inaccessible) — and, coincidentally, the one album on which they finally demonstrate the purpose of their very existence.

 

Unlike Indian, it is not at all heavy on special effects; many of the tracks are almost completely acoustic, with light, bright melodies that hearken back to the psycho-folk of Spirit. One big dis­tinction is the production: despite the fact that, just as usual, all the songs were recorded in, shall we say, clinically non-sterile conditions, the "lo-fi feel" is completely missing, making me think that the filthy sonic hooliganry of Campfire Songs was, in fact, perfectly intentional.

 

But, most importantly, the thing that really matters is the singing. To appreciate this, I think one must forget the gimmickry, the weirdness, the musical minimalism, and concentrate on the man­ner in which Avey Tare and Panda Bear weave their waves — best exemplified on the opening track, 'Leaf House'. This time, I know what this reminds me of: the Incredible String Band, at their psycho peak in 1967-68. But the Animal Collective have set themselves the brave task of outdoing their gurus, and in a sense, a technical one at least, they succeed: the up and down and out of town undulations of their speech signals are unlike anything I've ever heard. They're nei­ther heavenly, like with the Cocteau Twins, nor scary, like with your average Siberian shaman; nei­ther ugly, like with Yoko Ono, nor beautiful, like with Tim Buckley. What are they?

 

I am not talking here about the album's low points, mind you, which it still possesses. From time to time the duo seems to be wanting to hypnotize us in the old way — blubbering and grumbling over an endless repetition of two chords (twelve minutes worth of 'Visiting Friends'), or simply letting what starts off as a cute moment of tenderness evolve into seven minutes of boredom ('The Softest Voice' — indeed, and not necessarily a bonus). But everything must be forgiven with 'Kids On Holiday', which plows on ahead on the strength of the same two chords, yet within a vocal setting that will twirl your head until it falls off.

 

In short, the old modus operandi — combining the psychedelic with the child-like — has come back with a vengeance. 'You don't have to go to college', goes the lone lyrical line on 'College', and, sure, why should you? Going to college requires killing off, or at least restraining your inner child, and there's no liking Sung Tongs without releasing the inner child. I cannot imagine any­one who does not have a streak of Peter Pan within, or Tinker Bell at least, to get a kick out of all the wah-wah-wahs on 'Whaddit I Done' (but I refuse to let the truth out about whether I get a kick out of it or not).

 

Actually, at the risk of sounding completely off my rocker, I'd say that the best possible audience for Sung Tongs would be a kiddie one — that a three-year old, under the right circumstances, would get more out of it than any adolescent or adult raised on "proper" music. Some might want to extrapolate this over just about any avantgarde piece of art, but I doubt if a typical three-year old could be enticed with Ornette Coleman or Throbbing Gristle; Sung Tongs, to me, sound like the perfect non-ordinary soundtrack for the non-ordinary mind of the youngster whose speech mechanisms have not yet become fully separate from his musical mechanisms. If you have a tod­d­­ler, try it out. It can do no harm, can it?

 

For all the lovely, unpredictable, and amazingly complex vocal work, these Beach Boys on acid and lollipops get an unquestionable thumbs up from the terrified brain department. Obviously, the heart must keep quiet; not being a three-year old, a mental patient, a ganja lover, or The Man Who Came To Earth, I don't "love" this record and I never will. But some of us here on Earth do happen to be Flying Spaghetti Monsters in denial, so I am not rejecting the possibility of at least a certain amount of mature organic matter dripping real feeling for Sung Tongs.

 

FEELS (2005)

 

1) Did You See The Words; 2) Grass; 3) Flesh Canoe; 4) The Purple Bottle; 5) Bees; 6) Banshee Beat; 7) Daffy Duck; 8) Loch Raven; 9) Turn Into Something.

 

Maybe if you only want one Animal Collective album, Feels is the one to get. Maybe. Starting with Strawberry Jam, they would begin to bury themselves under deep, deep layers of kaleido­scopic sonic panzers, but on Feels you can still experience the band in plenty of intimate ways (and I mean that in the decent sense of the expression) — and, at the same time, still quite acces­sible and, might I suggest, even understandable.

 

Diehard fans of the band may think of 'Did You See The Words' and 'Grass' as way too simplistic and mass-marketed, betraying the unsigned agreement between Panda Bear, Avey Tare and those select few that actually paid them money for their early releases. I prefer, on the other hand, to view all of their earlier career as a preparatory stage for these quirky psycho-pop masterpieces. What I see and feel here is real sunshine-soaked joy, filtered through a crazy impressionistic me­chanism but totally sincere in its essence. The lyrics, as usual, make no sense, but once lines like 'there's something living in these lines' and 'there's something starting, don't know why' are deli­vered, there is an odd "brand new day" kind of feeling — obviously, sharpened by the bright, upbeat melody, the steady rhythmic build-up, and the glimmering production — that can fill you up with optimism if you just lower the deflector shields for one moment.

 

But this is no longer whacko fairy-tale muzak like they used to do early on. This is a different kind of "light", not the kind I would recommend to play to kids: this is denser stuff, and more bent on creating solid musical background than just goofing off on a vocal basis. Certainly the sin­ging is still the central point of attraction: songs on which there are no solid vocal hooks are only half as good as those songs on which they continue to invoke the spirit of Brian Wilson circa 1967. But even when they're only half good, they still make sense — after the initial blast of ener­gy, the album gradually sinks into foggy trance, inviting you to trip along, swooning hazily to the trills and chills of 'Bees' and 'Daffy Duck'.

 

Actually, the best comparison I can make of this new ambient side of theirs is to the early Grate­ful Dead (around the Anthem Of The Sun period), but they're better, because they sing better than the Grateful Dead, and the sound is quite a bit richer than the Dead's (well, this is the 21st century, after all). There is a great, respectable sense of balance on these tracks — neither too mi­nimalistic to become boring, nor too overproduced to become disorienting. Some atmospheric keyboard background, some gentle raga-like guitar strumming, and a general supernatural feel to the proceedings that may have something to do with the odd tuning of all the instruments (band members later confessed they tuned everything around some original loops recorded from a «naturally de-tuned» old piano).

 

Feels is, indeed, one excellent title for the album, all consisting of a bunch of "feels" — and at least one or two of them are probably guaranteed to fall in line with your own. (I'm not speaking here of the upbeat material, restricted to the first two songs and 'Purple Bottle'; this kind of mate­rial, I'm sure, will be pleasing to everyone who has gotten, in his or her life, past the stage of cal­ling things "annoying"). For me, the best of these "feels" is 'Bees', with its tender vocal cascades and deep piano rumble and harp-like strumming. For you, may be anything else. Other "feels" — most of the second half of the album, in fact — leave me in a relatively cold state, but I am not complaining, at least, not the brain part of me, which has, early on, claimed the right to declare a thumbs up state while the heart was still undecisive. Yet, with the added support of the life-affir­ming beauty of 'Did You See The Words' and 'Grass', the decision holds up pretty well, and the album, along with Sung Tongs, means the peak of this band for me.

 

STRAWBERRY JAM (2007)

 

1) Peacebone; 2) Unsolved Mysteries; 3) Chores; 4) For Reverend Green; 5) Fireworks; 6) #1; 7) Winter Wonder Land; 8) Cuckoo Cuckoo; 9) Derek.

 

You know you're in for a special treat when the album you're listening to is known to draw its in­spiration from a strawberry jam packet included in a tray of airplane food — at least, according to Panda Bear's account of it. So many thoughts spring up so immediately. For instance, like any normal human being, I get the urge to throw up at the very idea of airplane food, much more so at the idea of a music record inspired by airplane food. On the other hand, I admit that strawberry jam is just about the most eatable thing out of all the orcish variety of airplane food, and it's a big relief to know that the album wasn't at least inspired by tasteless bread rolls or cashew nuts. Ne­vertheless, the album cover does make me want to throw up.

 

Strawberry Jam is a big progression over Sung Tongs and Feels — it is the first record on which the band really takes advantage of sophisticated production values, adding so much depth and scope to their sound that, in the eyes of "quality sound aficionados", it might as well be the band's first proper album as such. They are also slowly, but steadily drifting more and more into the realms of conventional songwriting — oh, nothing to worry about, ye goofballs and whackos all over the world, because they were so far away from it when they started out it will probably take them at least a couple more decades to become Phil Collins. For now, this is a pleasant "golden middle mix" of the experimental and the traditional.

 

With the addition of new sound layers and all, the Collective's general aim — revival of the Brian Wilson spirit for the new millennium — becomes even more obvious. How else can one explain these whirls of falsetto vocals clinging to baroque-tinged tape loops and bright shiny upbeat gui­tars? Almost every song on Strawberry Jam owes at least something, here and there, to the SMiLE sessions, from the rousing power pop opener 'Peacebone' to the hypnotizing "power folk" closer 'Derek'. This does not do much in the way of diversity — frankly speaking, even the mo­dest length of forty three minutes wears me out somewhat — but it does generate a very consis­tent and convincing sonic kaleidoscope (sorry, could not resist using the word again).

 

There is nothing truly "bad" I could say about the album. It is respectful of tradition yet quite strikingly original, it has songs that carefully avoid cheap catchiness but slowly end up being in­terestingly memorable, it has HARD WORK AND SOLID CRAFT written in invisible ink on every square inch of it, it has enough musical ideas and twisted lyrics to merit deep philological and artistic analysis, and it has justifiedly earned glowing reviews from most alternative sour­ces and even a few mainstream ones.

 

At the same time, I cannot bring myself to love it. Feels worked better towards achieving that goal, and so, two years later, would Merriweather Post Pavilion; but as for Strawberry Jam, I cannot get rid of the feeling that the band's aim here was mostly to practice the new form rather than go for further nurturing of the spirit. The hooks feel hollow, the excitement feels forced, the whole experience has a decidedly post-modernist flavour that either kills emotion off the cuff or makes emotion physically indistinguishable from mock-emotion. And it is not contradictory that I should be mentioning this so late in discussing the Collective's career: if a record keeps continu­ously inviting comparisons with the Beach Boys, it is only fit to mention why it cannot, and should not, really function as a substitute for the Beach Boys.

'An obsession with the past is like a dead fly, and just a few things are related to the old times', they say in 'Peacebone', as if predicting the kind of reaction described in the previous paragraph — a pretty strong statement, considering that most of the things they do are, in fact, quite strongly related to the "old times". But, two lines later, what they say then is 'It's not my words that you should follow, it's your insides' — and here they are perfectly right. I follow my insides, and my insides tell me that either Strawberry Jam has no soul, or, if it has one, then I am way too old-timey and retarded to feel it.

 

And yet, in the final run, with all the wonderful creativity flowing through the record, it would be at the very least disrespectful to give it a thumbs down and, God forbid, maybe prevent some cu­rious seeker to test its charms on himself. Yes, at the very least, it is a total triumph of form, and, on that level, thumbs up are guaranteed. Let's face it: before these guys came along, nobody (at least, no one we regular Joes are aware of) ever dreamed of combining Terry Riley with Brian Wilson, and this means that new and exciting syntheses of ideas, if not exactly new and exciting ideas themselves, are still possible as late in humanity's development as The Pre-Apocalypse Pe­riod we happen to live in.

 

MERRIWEATHER POST PAVILION (2009)

 

1) In The Flowers; 2) My Girls; 3) Also Frightened; 4) Summertime Clothes; 5) Daily Routine; 6) Bluish; 7) Guys Eyes; 8) Taste; 9) Lion In A Coma; 10) No More Runnin'; 11) Brother Sport.

 

One decade of fooling around, and here is the payoff: Merriweather Post Pavilion put the Ani­mal Collective in the big league, not only prompting rave reviews on the part of every respectable penname, but even climbing surprisingly high up the charts, perhaps on the strength of these re­views. Perhaps the most surprising element, though, is how they managed to do it unaccompanied by irate cries of «sell out» from their dedicated guard of honour.

 

There are some important technical differences from Strawberry Jam. All of it was written and recorded in the absence of Deakin, the band's primary guitarist, so that samplers are on the move again and the album has much more of an «electronic symphony» feel to it than its predecessor. On the other hand, the band continues to raise the bar on their production values — this is, I think, the album on which the last traces of the «homebrewed» atmosphere have been erased. Welcome to the professional world.

 

But then there is an even bigger break: Pavilion also continues the trend of transforming the out­fit from a pack of weird fairytale goofballs into a team of super-serious Messengers, equipped with a serious claim. What that claim is, I am not sure; perhaps it does not even exist, because these days it is doggone hard to distinguish real Messengers from phoney ones. However, even if they are phonies, they now know how to do a pretty good job of faking it.

 

My biggest problem with Strawberry Jam was the lack of soul; maybe their own problem was similar, because on Pavilion, it looks like they are actively searching for it, even if they may not necessarily have found it. Whatever the answer, their vision of «soul» includes adding the follo­wing elements: (a) ever-increasing production depth — «soul» implies an impression of being hid under a bunch of layers, and you get a better chance of conveying «soul» if you sound like you're playing out of the bottom of a well than if you're diddling on your listener's front porch; (b) ever improving vocal arrangements — now they're openly quoting the Beach Boys' moves (listen to the "then we could be dancing / no more missing you while I'm gone" passage on the opening track... sound familiar?) and, even when they are not, they still leave behind the scent of Brian Wilson's trail to spiritual enlightenment; (c) including more and more «catchy» and «accessible» melodic elements in many of their songs — the «hit number» 'My Girls' is practically hummable, and the chorus to 'Bluish' ("Put on the dress that I like...") is hummable and gorgeous; (d) injecting more sense — or, at least, pretending to inject more sense — into the lyrics, so that professional reviewers like Mark Richardson of Pitchforkmedia can come up with ultra-mea­ning­ful conclusi­ons like (I quote) "the words reinforce the sense of vulnerability that cuts through the music, and wind up being an essential component on an album that oozes confidence from every pore".

 

Personally, I have no idea how you can combine «vulnerability» with «confidence» in the exact same spot, but then one thing has certainly not changed for the Animal Collective: they still make it one of their major goals to confuse their audiences, especially confuse them into writing as­ses­s­ments of their music whose meaninglessness increases in direct proportion to their assumed seri­ous­ness. So let us not hold it against Mark Richardson who is, I am sure of that, writing from the very depths of his heart. It is just that they have been confused, these depths.

 

In more simple terms, Merriweather Post Pavilion has some beautiful pop melodies ('Bluish'), some inspiring martial melodies ('Summertime Clothes'), some head-spinning atmospheric melo­dies ('No More Runnin'), and some disturbingly pretentious statement songs ('My Girls') that rail against 'fancy things' and 'social status', for the first time ever establishing the band's socio-po­li­ti­cal creed and providing the indie community with one of the decade's loudest anthems. If you can stand all the tape loops and the relatively monotonous style of vocal arrangements, Pavilion may even seem to be their most diverse record, although the quintessence behind all the songs is really the same, and the effect of "kaleidoscopic rainbow" is being generated more or less equally by all of its individual tracks.

 

Whether that rainbow is a real one or made out of plastic is something I have not been able to un­derstand, even on my own personal level — the album has grown much upon me since the first listen, but I am still not ready to accept the same warmth I used to get from 'good, good, good, good vibrations' from 'open up your, open up your, open up your throat' ('Brother Sport'), and it is not just the lyrics — it is still the same nagging feeling that, for Panda Bear and Avey Tare, form comes first and substance comes next, if it comes at all.

 

One thing is for certain: no matter how much critical praise, or even commercial success, is awarded to Pavilion today, it will never do the same thing for its generation that Pet Sounds did for theirs — for one simple reason: only a small handful of people will be able to sincerely react to it on the same level that a lot of people were able to react to Brian Wilson's teenage sympho­nies half a century before. And even if this small handful of people represents the sharpest and brightest minds of their generation (how do we know, though?), this would only mean that their elitist asses will be kicked into the dust pretty soon. And anyway, I do not want to live in a world where the highest standard of "art" is represented by Merriweather Post Pavilion any more than I want to live in a world where Taylor Swift stays at the top of the charts for over a month.

 

In short, my intellect's response to the album is a thumbs up, my heart's response is predictably con­fused, and my overall feeling, upon re-reading the review, seems somewhat suicidal. But I sus­pect that is exactly the kind of reaction that the Animal Collective wanted to extract from me.

 

FALL BE KIND (2009)

 

1) Graze; 2) What Would I Want? Sky; 3) Bleed; 4) On A Highway; 5) I Think I Can.

 

While not the first Animal Collective EP to contain original material, Fall Be Kind was the first one to cross over the 25-minute mark and cautiously approach LP length level, meaning that it probably merits a few words of its own.

 

Strictly formally, this is not much of an «advance» on their previous record. Now that they'd fi­nally found the perfect middle ground between psychedelia, hooliganry, and pop, they are stick­ing to it, and my best guess is they will probably keep sticking to it, provided they do not want to regress back to «cult phenomenon» status. But this time around it truly looks as if they are running quite high on confidence, too — there is a certain «now we do know what we are doing» whiff round all this.

 

'Graze' opens the proceedings with such an intense celestial sound that it comes across as some sort of Heavenly Overture, and the whole twenty-eight minute experience can be conveniently assigned to the genre of «Electronic Oratorio» (as opposed to «Electronic Symphony» of the previous outing — with the emphasis on religious connotations, of course). "Let me begin", the vocals come in, "feels good 'cause it's early, ease open my eyes and let light in". Who wrote these lyrics — Jon Anderson? In­deed, there are quite a few lyrical and musical parallels with the classic, idealistic prog-rock style that can be suggested. Condense Tales From Topographic Oceans into one half-hour, cut out most of the soloing wankery, replace most instruments with electronic gadgets, add a small chunk of Beach Boys harmonies, a little tinge of the Frisco spirit (one of the songs actually samples the Grateful Dead), and there you are.

 

Besides, we now know exactly what these guys want — just refer to the title of track No. 2. We probably knew it at least as far back as Sung Tongs, but it is possible that they did not know it back then. The EP is an intentional statement of purpose: what used to be groping around in the dark, testing the aural effects of each of the miriad of new sonic waves they were able to synthe­size, has finally paid off, and now they are pushing forward this new brand of musical religion. Celestial sound tones, trance-inducing rhythms, ever more complicated choir overdubs to give you a definite feeling of floating in the stratosphere with them angels swooping up and down and left and right all around you, and lyrics that make about as much sense as they used to but are gi­ven a more and more «sanctified» coating.

 

This brings us back to the old question of whether these guys have, or if they did not have, whe­ther they have managed to finally find, «soul» — or, to put it differently, are they still putting us on with this grand, but meaningless, spectacle or have the sounds that they are putting out ended up converting them, too? If someone like myself is still unable to fall under their spell — fully able to appreciate the complexity and excitement of what they are doing, but unable to experience anything even remotely close to a cathartic emotion — does that mean they are still doing some­thing wrong, or is it just me? Or could it be that the pointless hooliganry of their early period has shut off my receptacles, so that even if they become the Bach Collective in a few years, the whole thing will still ring somewhat hollow and artificial?

 

Not clear. Whatever be, it is certain that Fall Be Kind is one of their most accessible creations, and that if its loops, rings, bells, chorals, and words do not exercise their magic on you, it is no use even trying to bother working your way back through the catalog. Thumbs up out of sheer amazement at how firmly they have established their own Church of Heaven, but I do not think I am quite ready to subscribe as of yet.

 

ODDSAC (2010)

 

1) Mr. Fingers; 2) Kindle Song; 3) Satin Orb Wash; 4) Green Beans; 5) Screens; 6) Urban Creme; 7) Working; 8) Tantrum Barb; 9) Lady On The Lake; 10) Fried Camp; 11) Fried Vamp; 12) Mess Your House; 13) What Happened?

 

Technically, Animal Collective's next project after Fall Be Kind was not a proper «album» — it was a joint visual/audio product, with AC providing the music and director Danny Perez provi­ding the spectral hallucinations on the screen. Since the whole thing was made in tandem, it might be reasonably asserted that the music is no good here without the visuals, and that the visuals are worthless without the music. However, anyone familiar with the whole story of Ani­mal Collective will immediately realize that the music is not that different from typical AC so as not to work without the accompanying imagery — and, personally, having watched several of the psychedelic sequences filmed by Perez, I can safely state that this is indeed so. If we can listen to, enjoy, and get inspired by ʽI Am The Walrusʼ and ʽFlyingʼ without necessarily having to watch the Beatles running around in funny suits on the former or delirious rainbow coloring of the sky on the latter, we can do the same with ODDSAC (speaking of which, I do have a suspicion that the experience of Magical Mystery Tour might have been one of the inspirations here).

 

So I'm just going to say a few words about ODDSAC (whatever that title deciphers to — I pro­pose Over­blown Demented Delirious Stories by the Animal Collective) as a collection of new music, free from any sort of ties to any sort of visuals. (Besides, with the aid of proper substances, anyone is probably capable of conjuring one's own visuals here — why should you feel chained to somebody else's artistic vision?).

 

In a way, the whole project might have simply been a clever ruse. With Merriweather Post Pavil­lion and its alarming success that almost (but not quite) put the band on the brink of main­stream acceptance, they must have felt an acute need to remind the world that they were, first and foremost, a bunch of musical crazies, not a school of musical gurus. Listen to ʽMy Girlsʼ and ʽNo More Runnin'ʼ long enough and, who knows, you might start discerning the meaning of life in their basic structures (just as your parents did with Pet Sounds a whole wide world ago). In other words, they got too serious, and the emotionality in their music got way too similar to normal hu­man emotionality. One step further and you turn into Radiohead. Two steps, and you turn into Prodigy. Three steps, and whoah, you're the Backstreet Boys...

 

...all right, that was really a joke, but the idea is clear enough. Hence, a change in direction, slyly motivated by technical reasons — being interested in adapting the music to a set of modern post-post-post-impressionist visuals. This gives the AC a good pretext for turning away from the «nor­malized» melodicity of Pavillion and for returning to their roots — chaotic psychedelia with no limits or boundaries. More than half of ODDSAC is closer in spirit to AC's earliest albums, only with much better production.

 

A few of the tracks are still made in their trademark psycho-folk style — with acoustic guitars, sprinkly chimes, falsettos, criss-crossed vocal harmonies, and a certain sentimental elegance; I mainly refer to ʽScreensʼ and ʽWorkingʼ here; plus, Beach Boys-like harmonies additionally crop up from time to time, for instance, on the closing track (ʽWhat Happened?ʼ). Atmospheric and re­specting the legacy of Pavillion, but nowhere near as memorable as the best stuff on their «main­stream masterpiece», they do an important job — providing some relief from all the weirdness — but they are not what ODDSAC is really about.

 

But what is it about? Overcrowding, I guess. With all the jungly overdubs, all the animalistic and totemistic vocalizing tracks, all the tribal beats and nature sounds, ODDSAC is probably their best attempt, so far, to emulate the living soul of a parallel universe. Not a sci-fi universe, mind you, of the kind usually preferred by their colleagues in the electronic department — quite an or­ganic one, with busy street life (ʽMr. Fingersʼ), ghosts spooking lonely wanderers in the woods (ʽSatin Orb Washʼ), collective celebrations on feast days (ʽTantrum Barbʼ), large swamps spew­ing out poisonous, hallucinogenic fumes (ʽLady On The Lakeʼ), and whatever else you'd like to extract from your own mind to substitute Danny Perez's unnecessary fantasies.

 

Even the album's lonesome attempt at emulating an «industrial» mood (ʽUrban Cremeʼ) never attains the icy, mercyless, robotic cold of, say, Autechre, as the busy, static sonics of functioning equipment are still accompanied by «organic» sounds. Scary robotic equipment can never be that scary when it is humming, beeping, and clanging against a background of chirping birds and croa­king frogs. Or, to be more precise, of chirping-croaking frogbirds, because the world of AC is full of non-trivial species whose evolution path followed the same individual mutations as the brain cells of Avey Tare and Panda Bear.

 

What makes this stuff better than, for instance, Here Comes The Indian (this early AC release is probably the closest in spirit to ODDSAC) is — apart from extra complexity, improved pro­duction, and shorter length of the individual tracks, all of which helps — the fact that in between the two, there was Merriweather Post Pavillion, a demarcation line, having crossed which the band could never really be the same again. Yes, they are making a different album here, but they are not fascistic purists, and they retain all the gained experience, and this concerns not just the lovely vocal harmonies, but also the use of «light» electronic tones — chiming, jingling, sprink­ling, such as the sonic kaleidoscope of ʽMess Your Houseʼ, a track that is way too chaotic to fully match my tastes, but still sounds bright and optimistic, even despite all the jarring explosions and screams with which it is bombarded on a regular basis.

 

My only — minor, but real — disappointment is that, to a large extent, all of this stuff is some­how «nostalgic». It's as if they have grown up, matured, learned a lot, and now are returning back to base to «do it all over again» from scratch, so that you can now throw away all of their pre-Sung Tongs records and replace them with ODDSAC. But then again, who am I to com­plain?... seeing as how I am pretty much doing the same thing with my own reviews. Thumbs up, that much at least is for certain.

 

CENTIPEDE HZ (2012)

 

1) Moonjock; 2) Today's Supernatural; 3) Rosie Oh; 4) Applesauce; 5) Wide Eyed; 6) Father Time; 7) New Town Burnout; 8) Monkey Riches; 9) Mercury Man; 10) Pulleys; 11) Amanita.

 

Having so cleverly blown off the top bubbles from our further expectations with the ODDSAC project, The Animal Collective were now free to generate the «proper» follow-up to Merriwea­ther Post Pavillion without necessarily having to «live up» to it, because «living up» would pro­bably have meant stepping up on the seriousness pedal and making even further concessions to the traditional understanding of «gorgeousness» compared to those already made on Pavillion. But, as we all know, this treacherous road can easily transform mysterious sonic deities into or­dinary musical mortals. As it is, The Animal Collective are quite committed to sticking to that «animal» component in their names.

 

Centipede Hz, marking the return of Deakin from an extended break that excluded him from the fame of Pavillion, is titled like a surrealistic radio station, and, indeed, right from the opening «this is the news...», with its heavy reliance on the use of static, wave functions, and annoying bits of pseudo-announcements and commercials scattered all over the place, the album sounds like a semi-spontaneous extract from such a station. However, that is not all. Building upon the progress of ODDSAC, the Collective now tax the recording tracks to the max — the sound is so much cluttered with layers of overdubs that, most of the time, the immediate impression is that you actually have two or more pieces of music going on at once. Just the kind of thing you'd get from poor reception in a heavy interference zone.

 

This is a risky approach — in the hands of non-professionals, this could end up as unlistenable, irritating chaos. But ten years into their recording career, the Animal Collective have worked out a great feel for how to do it correctly. Any single moment in these songs, if you just push the play button at a random spot, will sound like stupid noise. But altogether, these moments add up to almost perfect mathematical order, not forgetting build-ups, sustained tensions, climaxes, resolu­tions, and even hooks (for the brave ones — even singalong hooks!). Deconstruct the melodies, strip them of their excesses, and you will have yourself some cuddly, unexceptional folk-pop skeletons — when it comes to putting chords together, the band hasn't exactly progressed all that much from the days of Feels (not that they really should have). But the very point of the whole thing is — how much denseness and heaviness is allowed before it all crashes down?

 

Basically, as much as they want. On my favorite tracks — such as ʽApplesauceʼ — flying saucers whoosh by, electronic rivers of sampler sound trickle along, drums alternate between syncopated and straight patterns, and I cannot properly tell how many different roads are being taken by dif­ferent instruments, but none of them detract from feeling the little bit of kiddie happiness in the repetitive chorus of "...I'm feeling like a little honey can roll". Nor do they prevent me from fee­ling a little pinch of moodiness during the chorus reproach of "you got to slide it off like mercury, can I play my parts like mercury?" (ʽMercury Manʼ) — no, the lyrics, in the good old AC tradi­tion, steadily continue not to make any sense whatsoever, but that does not matter one bit.

 

That said, there are almost no individual standouts: every second is so crammed with aural de­lights, and most of the delights in question are so enigmatic when it comes to describing the feelings that they stir up, that I find myself at a total loss trying to single out peculiar moments. Arguably the only «special» track here is at the very end: ʽAmanitaʼ starts out in a very focused, collected manner — rather than scattering themselves all over the place in yet another kaleidosco­pic roll, they open things with a catchy, anthemic synth riff that evokes «progressive» memories. But the sternness of the approach pretty soon falters, shatters, and gives way to the predictable sonic explosions.

 

Yes, the overloaded nature of all these patterns can get monotonous. I mentioned build-ups and resolutions, but it's not the kind of build-ups and resolutions that go from «quiet» to «loud» — over the course of one song, The Animal Collective will be happy to transport you from one part of their surrealistic jungle to another, even denser one, but getting out of the thicket onto the open plains is simply not an option. If you are psychologically unprepared for fifty minutes of electro­nic loops intertwined by twine champions, or all the synthetically processed double-, triple-, and quad­ruple- tracked vocals, it might be better to take these tracks slowly, one or two at a time.

 

Of course, listeners who got acquainted with the band primarily through ʽMy Girlsʼ or ʽBluishʼ or any of those other Brian Wilson-influenced little beauties, and expect more of the same, will get a headache — the gritty reality being that, if one assesses the AC as a whole, the world of Centi­pede Hz is closer to the «true» AC than the baroque flourishes of Merriweather. I certainly miss the baroque flourishes, and wouldn't mind them coming back; but I am also quite amazed at how far they have come in making that same philosophy that irritated me so much on their early re­cords work so well on this one. Apparently, age and experience got to count for something even when it comes to deviant avantgarde mindsets. I don't know how well this thing will be holding up ten years from now, but at least thumbs up will always be thumbs up, I suppose.

 

LIVE AT 9:30 (2015)

 

1) Amanita; 2) Did You See The Words; 3) Honeycomb; 4) My Girls; 5) Moonjock; 6) New Town Burnout; 7) I Think I Can; 8) Pulleys; 9) What Would I Want?; 10) Peacebone; 11) Monkey Riches; 12) Brother Sport; 13) The Purple Bottle.

 

Technically, this is Animal Collective's third live album, but in a sense, it could just as well be the first, because Hollinndagain consisted exclusively of original material (and shit material at that), while the limited edition Animal Crack Box from 2009 was restricted to just a few vinyl copies. Continuing this trend, Live At 9:30 also comes specifically for collectors, pressed on six sides of bright-colored psychovinyl, but at least it is also distributed as digital files, making it more widely available — and it is also officially released on the band's main label (Domino), whereas Animal Crack Box was more of a homebrewed affair.

 

Anyway, the big question is: are these «post-fame» Animal Collective actually worthy of a live album, or is this just a quick (but colorful) money grab at the expense of collectors? Well, I am hardly the band's biggest fan, but my answer is a definitive yes to the first half of this question (although it is also a slightly more doubtful yes to the second half — I mean, high art and money-grabbing are not necessarily mutually exclusive, are they?). The thing is, once they get on stage, these guys do not care so much for an exact reproduction of the spritely pandemonium of their studio recordings as they do for creating spritely pandemonium, period. And the longer it lasts, the better — look at these track lengths: even though most of the songs are taken from officially released records, the collective runtime is almost twice as long as it takes to listen to the studio equivalents of the live record. Time stretches out to indefinite limits at Animal Collective shows, that one's for sure.

 

At this point, the band clearly refuses to rest upon past successes: the largest number of tracks come from the most recent Centipede Hz, with only two coming from Merryweather Post Pavilion (still arguably the centerpiece of the band's modern day legend) and the rest scattered evenly all the way up to Feels (but no earlier). However, track selection really does not matter that much, because when they're up on stage, Animal Collective present themselves as a «jam band», setting up one mind-boggling groove after another (and accompanying them with an equally mind-boggling light show that, unfortunately, stays out of the audio experience) and animating, aggrandizing and accelerating them to ecstatic heights. In this setting, anything can serve as a working theme, upon which they pile up their arrays of keyboard effects, tribal drum patterns, and vocal harmonies that ignite, shoot up, and burst apart like sets of fireworks.

 

The original compositions are not changed to the point of being unrecognizable — no, the melo­dies and even the arrangement details tend to be preserved, but the music gets longer expositions and the repetitive ritualistic grooves get to become truly gigantic (an extreme example is ʽPul­leysʼ, stretched out almost Cream-style from an original three and a half minute length to about 15 minutes). If you put all six sides of vinyl together, there are definite signs of overkill; but if you take it slow, about half an hour at a time, for instance, the result is a strong psychedelic punch that really sounds like nothing else. This is not «electronica» with its formulaic rigidity: these are your past-and-future-merging 21st century SMiLing Beach Boys, where vocals matter as much as instruments (sometimes more) and electronic sound production is no more distant and alienating to the mind as, say, any special production effects on Sgt. Pepper.

 

The usual complaint is that behind all the kaleidoscopic richness of this approach lies a certain monotonousness — that the entire 2-hour long show is just one huge celebration of an alternate psychedelic reality, populated with bizarre, but generally friendly alternate lifeforms that seem, however, all to belong to the same infraclass: not just an «Animal Collective», that is, but rather a «Psychomarsupial Community» or something like that, where each member is slightly different but common enough so that eventually you just get lost in the all-too-similar diversity. With em­phasis on the «jam» parts, this inevitably downplays the memorable main themes of the tunes and concentrates on the vibe, and the vibe is pretty much the same throughout. If they happened to have their own idiosyncratic equivalent of a ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ or at least a ʽWillie The Pimpʼ on here for diversity's sake, their status would have seriously increased at least in this reviewer's eyes — then again, they probably know better than to sacrilegiously break up the spiritual ritual and annihilate the mesmerizing effect on the audience, so forget it.

 

In any case, kudos to what it is they actually manage to do on stage — it's one thing to generate all these multi-layered arrangements in the cozy spacetime of the recording studio, and quite another one to generate all the layers simultaneously in a live environment: with a little help from the same digital technologies, no doubt, but the singing (with all those intertwining harmonies), the drumming, and much of the keyboard work are really live, and display consummate profes­sionalism (to be expected, perhaps, after 15 years of gelling together, but nonetheless amazing). Love 'em or hate 'em, they are pretty much one of the most obvious symbols of innovative musical culture in our little «impoverished through too much enrichment» 21st century, so a guaranteed thumbs up here in any situation.

 

PAINTING WITH (2016)

 

1) FloriDada; 2) Hocus Pocus; 3) Vertical; 4) Lying In The Grass; 5) The Burglars; 6) Natural Selection; 7) Bagels In Kiev; 8) On Delay; 9) Spilling Guts; 10) Summing The Wretch; 11) Golden Gal; 12) Recycling.

 

After the overdubbing excesses of Centipede Hz, its follow-up Painting With almost sounds like an exercise in stripping down to the basics — quieter, less cluttered with bombastic overdubs, sort of an «Animal Collective-lite», back-to-roots version of the transcendental-psychedelic AC of the past ten years. As far as I understand, much of this has to do with the band dropping their reliance on the reverb effect — and so, this time around, they bring the music right into your living room instead of having it drop down on you from the skies, in a benevolent gesture from the Olympian gods of candy-colored psychedelia.

 

Another change is that the songs are getting shorter: the entire record is over in less than fourty minutes, with the longest track clocking in at a measly 4:33 (which led them to jokingly calling this «our Ramones album»). By throwing out lengthy build-ups and drones and relying far more on the strength of vocal melodies than they used to, they are indeed moving as close to the «pop» format as is possible for The Animal Collective without ceasing to be The Animal Collective and beginning to be The Sellout Collective. Not that anybody should be worried — the whole thing still sounds totally insane — but this time we are presented with a lighter, fluffier form of insanity, sort of a silly romp of elfish kids through Central Park rather than a solemn ritual performed with the goal of breaking through into another dimension. Or, perhaps, a more accurate analogy would be that, if Merryweather Post Pavillion is this band's Pet Sounds and Centipede Hz is an attempt at its Smile, then Painting With is their Wild Honey — a definite step backwards in terms of experimentation without sacrificing too much of the essence.

 

Contrary to rumors, Painting With is quite a diverse record: capturing the songs in an analytical web, anyone can see that ʽFloriDadaʼ is retro-sunshine pop, ʽHocus Pocusʼ is folk-based prog­ressive rock, ʽVerticalʼ is contemporary R&B, ʽNatural Selectionʼ is fast-tempo techno-pop, and there's quite a few other musical genres lurking in the shadows, too — the problem being that, once they all go through the prescribed Animal Collective filter, the substantial differences be­tween them are neutralised. Sure there's no more reverb, but the band's technique of overdubbing psychedelic vocal harmonies and entrusting the melodic backbone to humming-bubbling synthe­sizers remains quite stable, so every single song sets almost precisely the same mood, and the inherent differences of all these musical genres are not only not exploited, but diligently covered up by the production. In the end, there's absolutely no reason for me to discuss what makes any two of these tracks stand out from each other — who really cares about complex time signatures or peculiarities of voice distribution over different sound channels when no matter what you do, you come out with more or less the same result?

 

Repeated listens are essential for the record, because at first (and at second, and at third...) it just sounds like a big jar of sweet sonic goo — short song lengths not helping any, and vocal hooks all reduced to the same common psychedelic denominator. Eventually, through the aid of some particularly outstanding vocal lines (like the chorus to ʽFloriDadaʼ), the tracks come apart, but just barely so, and I am still left wondering: it is one thing when we are exposed to, say, a full album of same-mood ballads by Sinatra or Dusty Springfield, but with a band as experimental as these guys, is it really right that it should take so much time to separate one track from another? I guess you really have to love The Animal Collective to death, and to «get» this kind of sound in your heart the way other people «get» Willie Nelson or J. J. Cale, to give Painting With all the admiration it may deserve.

 

But there's the catch — I think that this shorter-song, simpler-sound approach does them a dis­favor in the end. At least for me, much too often, the album ends up on the verge of being annoying: all those hee-haw-hee-haw vocals, when they are not directly carried out into the stratosphere, as they used to, eventually bring on associations with village idiots and bad taste humorists. If the record's major purpose is to convey a feeling of light-hearted joy, as I believe it is, then, as far as I am concerned, it fails. Not that I envy the band's position: having clearly peaked at the turn of the decade, they have nothing left to prove and (probably) nothing left to blow our minds even one more time, so any further experimental detour, be it even in the direc­tion of «de-experimentalizing» themselves, is potentially welcome. But one cannot also avoid asking oneself the horrid question about jumping the shark — because, for all I know, the point of Painting With might be to state "It's Only Psycho Pop, But I Like It, Yes I Do", and if so, who's gonna be carrying the real banner of psychedelia into the 2010s? Kanye West?..

 

 

 

THE ANTLERS

UPROOTED (2006)

 

1) First Field; 2) Keys; 3) Flash Floods Don't Retreat; 4) Nashua; 5) It Seems Easy; 6) Last Folk Song; 7) Stone­thrower; 8) Uprooted; 9) I'm Hibernating.

 

So this is 2006 and «The Antlers» is a multiple-personality-disorder-sort-of-name for just one per­son, New York State resident Peter Silberman, who, on this completely self-released album, plays guitar, dabbles with a bitty-bit of electronic effects and drum machines, sings, and weaves an atmosphere that, for some people (most of them probably fellow New York State residents) will be beautiful, for others will be ut­terly boring in the «oh no, not another indie dude with an ego» vein.

 

Uprooted is a very low-key affair, but it is also short and up to the point: only the title track is a six-minute sprawl whose carefully orchestrated build-up cannot quite compensate for being built on exactly one musical phrase. The rest are shorter things that, in true indie style, more frequently sound like raw demos than well-elaborated creations.

 

Melodically, there is nothing about these light-feathered folkish tunes that we have not heard a million times, but Uprooted was never about instrumental melody: Silberman's strength almost exclusively lies in his voice — take it away and he won't stand a chance, not even against the Lit­tle Mermaid. Think something like an Antony Hegarty, but without the operatic vibrato effect and much, much quieter, only rising beyond «barely audible» during very scant climactic moments; actually, there is more variation to Silberman's singing than to Hegarty's, since Peter allows him­self different modes, ranging from «generic folkster» to «uniquely recognizable», when he laun­ches into those silky-soft falsetto vocalizations that must have played such a significant role in endearing him with normally hard-hearted critics.

 

The artistic message that Silberman tries to convey is simple enough — typical introvert, melan­cholic, pessimistic, you-name-it fare — but the singing does the trick. Usually, that kind of sin­ging voice is reserved for tender ballads; Silberman uses it for chamber odes to his own (real or simulated, I don't care which) depression. 'Keys' is basically a mantra, most of it consisting of two elementary chants ("I can't sleep in the waiting room... I can't stand on only one leg"), but I can­not really remember anything that would sound quite like this: it's not much of an intrigue, yet when you realize it's coming from some out-of-nowhere dude who was recording it locked up in his bedroom in Brooklyn or something like that, it's a little more.

 

Some of this stuff is predictably Paul Simon-ish, but never totally, since all of Silberman's songs have to utilize his vocal advantage, and once they do, they're all his own. 'Stonethrower', for in­stance, begins like it could have easily fit on Parsley, Sage, but the falsetto choruses eventually lead you into an unpredictable direction. 'Flash Floods Don't Retreat' cooks up a bit of magic once the words are over and all that's left is an almost psychedelic woo-wooing (apparently, processed through some weird effect thing that makes it seem like it's coming from inside your head rather than the speakers). And so on. Nothing particularly memorable, for sure, but how many people these days can set out with an individual style already on their first release? Thus, thumbs up.

 

IN THE ATTIC OF THE UNIVERSE (2007)

 

1) In The Attic; 2) Look!; 3) On The Roof; 4) Shh!; 5) The Universe Is Going To Catch You; 6) The Carrying Arms; 7) In The Snow; 8) Stairs To The Attic.

 

With a 26-minute running length, one and only one person to mind the writing, playing, and re­cording, and only three actual songs floating in an atmosphere of lightweight ambience, you'd think the basic conceptual idea behind this recording — an expression of admiration for the in­fi­nity-bound vastness of the universe and recognizal of one person's insignificance in the face of it — is a bit... eh... a bit too bulgy, shall we say, for such an album's tight britches.

 

Fortunately, Peter Silberman has enough taste and, shall we say, originality not to go about it in a corny 'Dust In The Wind'-like manner. Few things are more stupid than assuming a grand prophe­tic tone when you admit your own pettiness, and Silberman has intentionally chosen a suitably petty approach. With but a few exceptions (such as the climactic third minute of 'On The Roof'), In The Attic Of The Universe is a very quiet record; like its predecessor, it almost begs you to let it pass by unnoticed, and, of course, the right thing to do is exactly the opposite.

 

Because the primary musical-and-vocal hook of 'In The Attic' (later reprised on electric guitar in 'Stairs To The Attic') is a simple, but wonderful bit well worthy of a seasoned popmeister like Jeff Lynne or folk-rockmeister like Neil Young (regularly sanctioned comparisons are to Neutral Milk Hotel, but why not go straight ahead to the primary source?). It fuses together melancholy and beauty-admiration in just a few perfectly-strummed/sung notes so well that I'd be tempted to call it a stroke of genius, except I must first deal with the annoying feeling of déjà vu that keeps nag­ging me — just a quick browse through my 10,000 hours-worth of stored music and I'll be right back with you on that one.

 

An even better song, though — actual song rather than one great idea repeated many times over — is 'The Universe Is Going To Catch You', with a chimes-and-falsetto chorus that is totally un­forgettable after you have played it at least once with the proper volume levels. It may just be the lightest-sounding, most flutteringly-butterflying song with such a ponderous name ever recorded — or, at least, a worthy contender — and its presence on the record alone is guaranteed to dis­solve any possible accusations of pretense and pomp.

 

It is only too bad that most of the other tracks constitute nothing but mildly pleasant atmospheric filler — brief instrumental links ('Look!'; 'The Carrying Arms', a pointless exercise in backwards tape-playing), amateurish fun with keyboard programming ('Shh!' — I can just imagine someone giving a professional recitation of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" over its first two minutes), or vocal numbers that are not centered around any sort of actual composing ('In The Snow'). None of this gets out of control for too long, or with too much arrogance, and it is quite possible to con­vince yourself that it's all part of the overall charm, but... well, to me, a more economical solution is just to think of it as an idealistic 20-year old amateur messing around with equipment. Talented, but way too idealistic.

 

Still, I see no reason not to encourage all of us with a thumbs up that this ultra-brief record definitely deserves for the two abovementioned excellent songs and a general atmosphere that is not at all off-putting, despite boasting every prerogative to be so.

 

HOSPICE (2009)

 

1) Prologue; 2) Kettering; 3) Sylvia; 4) Atrophy; 5) Bear; 6) Thirteen; 7) Two; 8) Shiva; 9) Wake; 10) Epilogue.

 

The big breakthrough — a brave gamble on Silberman's part that paid off quite nicely. Having proven to himself that he had style and vision, Peter decided that, for all it's worth, it was high time he interfered in the battle between the light and the dark. To do that, he expanded «The Ant­lers» to real-life band size, recruiting Darby Cicci on brass, keyboards and «bowed banjo», and Michael Lerner on drums — and channelled his powers into the creation of a concept album. Two EPs were released first, mostly consisting of soundbites, previews, and indie rock covers; then the final result broke through in March 2009.

 

Hospice is generally described as a musical description of an abusive emotional relationship in terms of a metaphor — relations between a hospice-abiding dying bone cancer patient and her nurse. The concept sounds pretty bleak on paper, conjuring up smoke-filled visions of Lou Reed­ian blackness (everything from Berlin to Magic & Loss), but if you apply color vision to music, Silberman is always closer to white than to black, so even if he wanted to make Hospice a «de­pressed» album in the traditional sense, he wouldn't have the proper brain mechanism to do it.

 

Speaking of brain mechanisms, Hospice has also been called a major tear-jerker. This is one as­pect of it that I did not get AT ALL — and I am definitely not above having a tear jerked out of me by a real pro jerk (actually, a music reviewer who has never once shed a tear over a musical piece should probably just get a job loading and unloading musical equipment, if, for some rea­son, he so fanatically yearns for a music-related occupation). Although the lyrics are, in a certain man­ner, sung from the nurse's point of view, by no means does Hospice have anything to do with the gritty realities of a true hospice, and, what's even more important, by no means does the emotio­nal content of the album have anything to do with the actual emotions that one might be feeling towards a dying person — loved, unloved, caring, frustrating, whatever.

 

To tell the truth, the mood set by Hospice is almost every bit the same as was the mood set on Silberman's first two albums — and those albums had nothing to do with bone cancer patients. It's almost as if the underlying logic here was: «Hmm... don't I sound sad on these records? As in, really really fucking sad? Doesn't that, like, call for a really really sad theme? Say there — a girl is dying from cancer, and a boy has only just fallen in love with the girl, and they both know it's hopeless but they go along with it anyway... how's that for sad?»

 

But you know what — it's not that sad. It is certainly very pretty, just as pretty as Pete's pre­vious mu­sings. 'Bear' and, later, its reprise on 'Epilogue' is a convincingly solitary piece of melancholic brooding. 'Kettering' and 'Shiva' are competent mood pieces. 'Two' helps you not to fall asleep with a faster, more ironically upbeat melody. 'Sylvia' builds up to a nice climax. Silberman's voice is always attractive (unless your ideal for male vocalization is Lemmy), and his musical mi­ni­malism is never annoying, at least not to the point where you start thinking «gee, would ha­ving just one more chord in this song really kill this guy?» and spoil yourself all the fun.

 

It's all fine and dandy, but then: «The power of the album lies in the album's ability to destroy hope», a hype-stricken reviewer writes. Really? «A heartbreaking aural experience that hits us on a deeper level», writes another. Oh God. What have I missed here?

 

See, there are two problems. First, the guy is 22 years old. Just as a simple matter of fact, Count Tolstoy, being 22 years of age, had not yet written anything, let alone those of his works that were truly committed to exploring life-and-death issues. On a simpler scale of things, Mr. George Harrison, at 22 years of age, was mostly known for writing poetry along the lines of "You don't realize how much I need you / Love you all the time, I'll never leave you" rather than "Nothing in this life that I've been trying / Could equal or surpass the art of dying".

 

Sorry, folks, but that's just the way it goes. In various interviews, Silberman kept dropping hints that Hospice was specifical­ly based on a particular «life-shaking» incident in his own life — that's as fine as can be, terrible or terrifying impressions can start haunting one from age three, but being able to transpose them into high-reaching, philosophical, serious conceptual art is a capacity that comes with experience. Biting off more than one can chew is not a pretty sight.

 

Second, these songs are merely okay. Merely OKAY. When a reviewer writes about the «flouri­shing acoustics» of 'Two', you'd think this were some new kind of Nick Drake, freshly landed off the clouds. Well — take a listen and decide for yourself. The song's not bad — that primitive strum merely serves as background attenuation for the vocals, which constitute the essential part — but in purely musical terms, Hospice is almost sheer nothing; it would, perhaps, have been more honest for Silberman to just come out and sing everything completely a cappella. (Now that would be a novel approach).

 

I have also seen comparisons to Arcade Fire's Funeral — well, both bands begin with an A, and both bands sing about death, and both bands are straightfaced and pretentious, but that's where the similarities end, since, behind all of their sky-high bombast, Arcade Fire actually set them­selves much more modest goals than Silberman pretends to here. Arcade Fire are, above all, a rock band, and they go for big, brawny, blunt blows to the balls, creating catchy and memorable anthems for their generation. This smart little guy aspires towards much finer strokes and subtler senti­ments — that's fine if it works, but in the case of Hospice, it doesn't work quite the way it is supposed to. Fail, fail, fail. Not one tear shed for Sylvia.

 

As vitriolic as these comments may sound, I would still invite everyone to make their own judge­ment — emotions are tricky sons of bitches — and I'd still give the album a thumbs up, on the condition that I can simply forget everything about the concept and the lyrics and just take it as a natural, modest expansion on the sounds of The Antlers' two previous records. After all, the guy is still a masterful singer, and there are two or three nicely composed themes here, and the ambi­ent arrangements weren't too bad. But, for proper punishment, what I'd really like for this guy to do is record a duet with Ke$ha. Come on, Mr. Silberman. One for the kids. You know you can do it. You're a genius. Sky's the limit for geniuses.

 

BURST APART (2011)

 

1) I Don't Want Love; 2) French Exit; 3) Parentheses; 4) No Windows; 5) Rolled Together; 6) Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out; 7) Tiptoe; 8) Hounds; 9) Corsicana; 10) Putting The Dog To Sleep.

 

Perhaps the best thing about Hospice, when you think about it once again, was that the album at least made the world sit up and notice the Antlers (or, rather, that part of the world that is still capable of sitting up, let alone noticing anything of real value). After all, how easy is it just to ig­nore a conceptual record about a nurse-patient relationship in a hospice? With tense psycholo­gism like that, centered around life/death/moral/ethics questions, Hospice fit right into the center of modern trends. Had the music been obviously, grotesquely bad, that would have given the re­viewers a good pretext for killing these guys off; but the music is... questionable, and in conjunc­tion with the controversial subject matter, here was a good chance to reap an impressive bunch of five-star clusters falling from the sky.

 

What this means to me, in the department of «good news», is that this reception gave an equally good chance to Silberman's next album — Burst Apart, as far as I'm concerned, is far superior to Hospice, but it probably would not have generated half as much publicity if it were not preceded by the intense red alert of Hospice's album sleeve. Even despite having better songs divided by fewer ambitions. «You do the math», to quote the Avett Brothers' favourite line of banter.

 

Perhaps having built up a little cash (and a lot more self-confidence), Silberman now expands the Antlers' instrumentation, adding mandolins, organs, and whatever else he may get his hands on; the skeptical result is that it all still sounds just like his bedroom demos in the end, only louder and bigger. But he also writes better songs. Granted, 'I Don't Want Love' opens the album in a ve­ry Hospiceable mood — another bitter-angelic declaration of broken dreams delivered from high up in a puffy cloud, ungraspable by mere mortal: proverbially gorgeous, frustratingly unmemo­rable. And it's not the only such composition here.

 

But elsewhere, Silberman gets a bit snappier, capable of pricking your senses rather than just huf­fing and puffing at them. For instance, 'Parentheses' incorporates a smoky, funky, trip-hop groove somewhat reminiscent of classic Portishead, and is occasionally drowned in ominous alarm siren effects — against this sort of background even Silberman's already well-familiar falsetto gets sar­castic, disillusioned, even mocking overtones, a fine contrast with his usual starry-eyed shtick. (And it is totally up to you to decide if lines like "I'm a bad amputee, with no phantom memory / So close up your knees, and I'll close your parentheses" constitute great modern poetry or a clum­sy, ugly, pretentious heap of words, but this is definitely the first time I have encountered the word "parentheses" in the context of a pop song, let alone in its title).

 

The album's climax, however, is — without a single doubt — 'Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out', one of this century's finest «emo» tunes written by a non-emo artist. Or, actually, it is such a terrific Cure send-up, I'm sure Robert Smith would kill (or, at least, consent to gaining another fifty pounds of body mass) to add this little gem to his own catalog. It is just a good old-fashioned mope-pop tune, bleak, desperate, but moving fast and in a strongly-determined manner towards a brilliantly planned — if not nearly as brilliantly executed, due to Silberman's lack of technical ex­perience — crescendo. Bottomline: don't try too hard — respect the good old golden middle — you might just end up with a real, not fake tear-jerker in the end.

 

The musicianship, overall, is still not all that impressive, but Silberman's friends are slowly try­ing to turn the Antlers into a real band — Darby Cicci's strange «jug-bass» work on 'French Exit' is worth paying attention, and, although Michael Lerner leans way too heavy on the big robot drums of his 1980s childhood, for the purposes of the Antlers this style really works. It's like an «anti-commercial adult contemporary» thing, taking many of the clichés of the past decades' soft entertainment and turning them on their heads. It's okay. And on 'Every Night' he just drums like a fine Brit-popper of the old school — perfectly suited to Silberman's retroish guitar licks.

 

In short, not all of this journey is as smooth as I'd like to, but by the time they get around to the grand finale of 'Putting The Dog To Sleep', they get me. At the risk of sounding way inconsistent, I am somehow far more moved by Silberman's soulful singing from the point of view of an abo­ut-to-be-exterminated animal than from that of a hospice worker (or patient). Maybe because this time around we know it's just a little allegory, a bit of rock theater, rather than a pretense at get­ting so close to the point of ultimate understanding of life and death. Maybe it's something else, but it's a good epic finale all the same.

 

Thumbs up on all levels — this is still nowhere near a masterpiece, but they just might be get­ting close. And, above all, it is imperative that Silberman try to branch out in as many directions as possible: stuff like 'Every Night...' shows that his gift is not confined to cloudbursting falsetto arias, and since, by this point, he has most probably taken that type of aria as high as it could go with him, he'd be an idiot not to try to understand the scope of that gift. Of course, I do not mean branching off into hardcore punk or anything like that, but... the less predictability from these guys, the better.

 

FAMILIARS (2014)

 

1) Palace; 2) Doppelgänger; 3) Hotel; 4) Intruders; 5) Director; 6) Parade; 7) Surrender; 8) Refuge; 9) Revisited.

 

Apparently, the effort that it took to record Burst Apart sucked whatever energy The Antlers had right out of their marrows — and instead of spending the next three years relaxing and recupera­ting some of it, they decided that they would rather capitalize on the situation. Lesson number one: if you have no energy to make an album, make an album with no energy whatsoever and present it as your latest and greatest artistic statement. And don't worry about bad publicity — you'll al­ways have Pitchforkmedia, as long as you stay within certain working limits.

 

There is an undeniable unity (easy to say «monotonousness») to the seven lengthy pieces on Familiars, and an undeniable «ambience» that separates them from the old indie-rock idiom and brings them closer to stuff that has been gruesomely labeled as «post-rock» in the past — the oceanic soundscapes of Sigur Rós and the like. In a way, the Antlers had always worked close to that style, but Familiars pushes them even further in the «music where nothing happens, or at least nothing happens fast enough» direction. Now, everything, in any given track, at any given moment, happens at the intersection of soft-as-silk late-night jazz guitar; atmospheric, mood-set­ting digital and analog keyboards; calmly funebral wailings of trumpets and trombones; and Peter Silberman's vocals, the very same ones that we are well used to but even more reminiscent now of a half-paralyzed person in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

 

In other words, Familiars is the soundtrack to a deeply internalized and restrained personal tra­gedy. Think of it as the equivalent of a Cure album in a world where musical hooks and dynamic playing are considered dangerous for the moral health of the population and are strictly prohibited under pain of death, lobotomy, or one year in the Lana del Rey correctional facility, so you have to come up with a credible substitute that could somehow convey the same idea of suffering, loneliness, and empathy, but without, you know, music in the most common sense of the word. It is hard to make this work, but I think it can be done. The question is, whether it can be done by a band like the Antlers.

 

My personal vote is «no»: I find Familiars to be at best boring, and at worst, irritating. There is nothing wrong about using your instruments to create a statically melancholic atmosphere, but there still has to be something special about it. You might be a genius like Brian Eno, using two or three chord changes, but finding just the right ones and just the perfect keyboard tone and depth and warmth of sound for them. You might be the above-mentioned Sigur Rós, trying out all sorts of combinations until you find the ones that work. You might think about crescendos, quirky overdubs, subliminal messages, whatever. For Familiars, Silberman came up with exactly one (1) idea, and carried it out in several variations for fifty minutes — and it wasn't even a totally undeniably jaw-droppingly awesome idea in the first place.

 

This crude, but honest, explanation takes care of the «boring» part. Where it gets «irritating» is in the department of «adequacy»: like Bon Iver or any of his colleagues in the «dream-whatever» department («dream-folk», «dream-pop», etc.), Silberman's latest creation clearly strives to in­duce catharsis. All those «majestic» keyboards, «saintly humble» guitars, and particularly Peter's broken-heartedly romantic deliveries are integral parts of one big plot — to make your reaction towards Familiars a religious one. The preachy lyrics are certainly religious (e.g., "to find the peace within the combat where we're standing, we have to make our history less commanding" on ʽSurrenderʼ, etc.), but the way they are sung and the way they are surrounded by instruments and echoes gives the impression of one great big Church of The Antlers, and the whole album is one big seven-part Mass that you'd rather attend while standing on your feet (unless you actually get the urge to fall on your knees). But why should you? To subscribe to the Church of The Antlers makes about as much sense as subscribing to any other Church just because it's nice and cool in the great cathedral and the big organ up above looks really awesome.

 

For some reason, one thing that really irritates me about the lyrics is Silberman's odd attraction to expletives this time around, be it the "fuck now, I'm outta here tomorrow" refrain of ʽHotelʼ or the embarrassingly crude "right when the blizzard ends, they throw a fucking huge parade..." intro to ʽParadeʼ. I suppose that the idea is, if we're building this new type of musical church, we might as well set up our own rules, including the right to swear at Mass. But any word has its preferable context, and the F-word, nothing as we have against it in general, sounds gimmicky and stupid when sung in that exaggeratedly «beautiful» tone by Mr. Silberman. He has the undeniable right to count it as part of his artistic vision, I have the undeniable right to call it stupid, you have the undeniable right to see it your way, we'll all be happy some day or in the afterlife.

 

Unfortunately, commenting on the individual songs is an impossibility for me, since great care has been taken for all of them to set the exact same mood, and my descriptions are all focused on moods, not chords. If it were made more clear that this is strictly «elevator muzak», a background sort of hum to accompany your glass of whiskey at sundown, Familiars would be forgivable and forgettable. But since the album sounds like it is making a Big Statement, yet the band members all behave like refrigerated, defrosted, and microwaved members of a post-Waters-era Pink Floyd, Familiars ultimately becomes offensive — one more reminder of what the hell is so goddamn wrong with «serious» music in the 21st century. Thumbs down.

 

 

 

 

 

ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS

ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS (2000)

 

1) Twilight; 2) Cripple And The Starfish; 3) Hitler In My Heart; 4) Atrocities; 5) River Of Sorrow; 6) Rapture; 7) Deeper Than Love; 8) Divine; 9) Blue Angel.

 

Examine a non-provocative picture of Antony Hegarty (say, one on which he does not paint his eyes or face or construct a facial expression that presents him as Saint Anthony), and you will most likely think of the average school nerd, well stocked up on comic books and donut packs but severely suffering from lack of ladies' attention. But then it is exactly that kind of life that deve­lops the perfect Goth sensibilities, doesn't it?

 

Listening to Antony And The Johnsons, an album first released in 1998 on the small label of David Tibet (Current '93) but prominently noticed only upon its more widespread release in 2000 on Secretly Canadian, people usually laugh or cry. Some are touched and shaken down to the very foundations of their soul. Others giggle, at best, or resort to words like «bollocks» (as in ei­ther, «this is total bollocks», or «where are this guy's bollocks?» — witness how the beauty of polysemy can result in the same word acquiring opposite meanings).

 

To be fairly honest, my gut intention would be to join the second camp. Hegarty's major asset is his voice — a high, fragile, tear-filled vibrato that sounds thoroughly unique, out-of-nowhere to his young generation fans, even though old-timers have already heard it all before on those clas­sic Roxy Music albums; indeed, the similarity to Bryan Ferry is so transparent that one can't real­ly help but wonder whether the old crooner had not been fathering illegal offspring in his young and reckless days. The similarity, and obvious debt to Roxy Music, already kills off part of the excitement for me; but there's worse.

 

All of the songs are, generally speaking, written in one key: somber, ominous piano-and-strings ballads whose only purpose is to extol the enticing delights of suffering. «Gothic» certainly co­mes to mind, but, to their credit, Antony and The Johnsons have never been dubbed Goths: there is nothing apocalyptic, or infernal, or zombie-like, or Edgar Allen Poe-ish, about this music, just pounds and pounds and pounds of broken heart for consumption. And Hegarty is not being too cryptic about it, either: "My heart is broken", he says (peace, brother), "here in the cup of my hands — from between cracked fingers old blood spills".

 

The whole thing, with dark, funebral piano chords, strings that tug at the soul as if urged on by a slavedriver's whip, and Antony's tremolo hovering over it all, is a kind of musical theater that as­pires — not even to Classicism, but rather to Antiquity, with a bare hint at Far Eastern tradition as well. It is ridiculous and grotesque, and seriously off-putting, but I cannot even begin to imagine that a guy like Antony Hegarty professes a serious belief in this act; no man alive who does such things from the very bottom of his heart deserves a place in the art business.

 

But as an act, an artistic hyperbole in which reason disguises as feeling and calculation poses as emotion, I can dig this, and hold the opinion that it is the only way at all for the Johnsons to be dug without the digger growing a dunce hat. Because, as a manneristic show, the record is pretty much impeccable. The songs aren't particularly well written or memorable; instead, they unfurl like some sort of modern opera, with but one singer taking on all the parts, nine perfectly staged arias in a row. Their individual merits hardly exist, except each has an individually sick lyrical twist ('Cripple And The Starfish' is a chivalrous paean to masochism; 'Rapture' and 'Deeper Than Love' feature the word "falling", pronounced so many times that the mantra may eventually work, so be sure to have your feet firmly on the ground while listening; 'Hitler In My Heart' says it all with its title, really, etc.); but this cannot be held as an accusation, because it is not really a col­lection of pop tunes from a band — it's a mono-spectacle from an aspiring thespian.

 

It is thus that, out of deep, sincere respect for such elaborate staging, such lifelike decorations, such dazzling costumes, such a perfectly attuned lighting system, and such technical dedication on the part of the performer, I eagerly raise my thumbs up. But if you ever happen to meet some­one who tells you that the debut album from Antony and the Johnsons made a new man / woman out of him / her, you'd better run like hell; like I said, Antony and the Johnsons do not make Go­thic music, but there's a fair chance your rotting corpse will be fucked all the same.

 

I AM A BIRD NOW (2005)

 

1) Hope There's Someone; 2) My Lady Story; 3) For Today I Am A Boy; 4) Man Is The Baby; 5) You Are My Sis­ter; 6) What Can I Do; 7) Fistful Of Love; 8) Spiralling; 9) Free At Last; 10) Bird Gerhl; 11*) Find The Rhythm Of Your Love.

 

Here is the official proscription list of people who love (to hurt) Antony Hegarty: (a) Lou Reed, founding father of the Velvet Underground, punk rock hero and overall horrid guy; (b) Devendra Banhart, singer-songwriter, visual artist, and an overall psychic type who likely has no problem finding God under the rim of the toilet bowl; (c) Boy George, founding father of Culture Club, quintessential icon of androgyny, and an overall queer type; (d) Rufus Waynwright, singer-song­writer, an overall morose introspective type with a penchant for classical influences; (e) Joan Wa­sser, real hot chick successfully mascherading as an indie artist by playing violin.

 

There may be others, of course, but these are the ones openly credited on various guest spots on Antony and the Johnsons' sophomore record — by the vast-reaching range and even distribution of this selection we must understand that everybody loves (to hurt) Antony Hegarty, and those that don't merely don't count as everybody. Apparently, loving (to hurt) Antony Hegarty was the ultimate artsy trend in 2005.

 

Does it help? Frankly, I did not even start to notice until I took a look at the credits. Sure, at times Antony started sounding a little strange — on 'Fistful Of Love', he'd start off with a deep spoken part; on 'What Can I Do?' he'd switched from his usual falsetto to a nasal tenor; on 'Spiralling', on the contrary, he'd pushed that falsetto even further. But how is a regular guy to know it's not just Antony Hegarty playing hypnotic tricks on us? How is he to know the exact limitations of this single man's vocal powers? The man is, after all, a bird now, and still he promises that "one day I'll grow up, I'll be a beautiful woman, one day I'll grow up, I'll be a beautiful girl". But today he is a child, today he is a boy. He may as well be Lou Reed, for all we know, or Devendra Banhart, or he might be Candy Darling, whose deathbed photo adorns the album cover.

 

But seriously, I Am A Bird Now is a terrific piece of work. There are no major stylistic or aes­the­tic departures from the self-titled album, but the formula has been refined and polished, the hooks tightened up, and the guest spots do help to alleviate the monotonousness of it all. Some listeners have complained, stating that the album is specifically geared towards gay audiences. This is bullshit. Obviously, if your ideal of a musical hero is Eric Adams of Manowar, or Ted Nugent, you will most likely take a ritual piss on this record and nail its shards to the doors of the nearest gay bar. But any sensitive, emotional person, regardless of his / her orientation, is equally liable to be entertained, and, perhaps, even moved by at least some of the tracks.

 

If anything, it is the unflinching devotion to masochism, not homosexuality, that continues to form the back­bone of Antony's whole image. It is easy to take 'Fistful Of Love' and laugh at it — either out of condescension for the whole idea of enjoying love-induced pain, or because of the specific way that Antony propagates it, from the «long-term club member» point of view. But it is a fine, nicely constructed song all the same, with a gripping crescendo whose pathos is either completely heartfelt or magnificently simulated, and, in these circumstances, who really cares about lyrics like "I feel the whip, I know it's out of love"? Besides, whoever prevents one from seeing "the whip" as a metaphor — and plus, Lou Reed is here speaking the intro, reminding us that, somehow, we have all somehow managed to love the Velvet Underground's 'Venus In Furs', where the masochistic message was far clearer pronounced. It just didn't use to have that elevated romantic touch to it, but times change.

 

There is, actually, a ton of different things to be said about each individual track on here. Lyrics, intonations, moods — Freud would have a field day, and there'd still be plenty of survivors left for Jung to mop them up. If anything, Hegarty shows you how easy it is to concoct a tragedy out of nothing: all you have to do is locate your inner male (if you are a male, it's not that hard), then find your inner female (a bit harder if you are not a female, but still possible), and make them do battle with each other. The energy of the ensuing conflict is inexhaustible, like the atom's power; and it is especially effective if you have plenty to eat, a good roof above your head, a host of lo­ving and caring people around, and a steady dayjob — because a human being needs suffering to stay a human being, and how do you suffer if there's seemingly nothing to suffer for? Let Antony Hegarty show you how to rub two sticks together.

 

I Am A Bird Now is definitely the man's best album that cannot ever be bested. When you stick to that kind of schtick, memorable vocal melodies, convenient guest spots, and a humble thirty-five minute running length just can't be beat. All of the songs make pretty much the same point, but all of them do it cleverly, and on the peaks — 'Hope There's Someone', 'Fistful Of Love', 'Spi­raling' — the man's unbridled romanticism almost transcends theater and makes one forget all about the conventions of the XXIst century. Thumbs up, brain-wise and partially heart-wise. (And yet, a sidenote: dear Mr. Antony, the line "Forgive me, let live me" may just be the ugliest dis­ruption of English syntactic laws that I have ever encountered).

 

THE CRYING LIGHT (2009)

 

1) Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground; 2) Epilepsy Is Dancing; 3) One Dove; 4) Kiss My Name; 5) The Crying Light; 6) Another World; 7) Daylight And The Sun; 8) Aeon; 9) Dust And Water; 10) Everglade.

 

With the release of The Crying Light, preceded by the EP Another World a year earlier, we fi­nally learn why Antony Hegarty is so sad, and no, it is not because nobody wants to whip him because he is fat and ugly. It is because we have misused our planet and pretty soon we are all going to die — or, at least, mutate into legions of emo-coiffured zombies, lurking by night among the ruins of civilization.

 

At least, such was the conclusion reached by a number of prominent critics, who, upon listening to 'Another World', have decided that Hegarty went eco-conscious, and since there are few things more politically correct than a queer Greenpeace-friendly multiculturalist (the latter side is em­phasized by the sleeve cover, a photo of famous Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno — now that you all know what butoh is, this is practically edutainment!), The Crying Light shot all the way up to #1 on the pan-European Billboard.

 

Nevertheless, it's not that bad. Nobody really forces us to concentrate on the album's essence as a mix of butoh, masochism, and environmentalism, i. e. one more example of an «artist» so despe­rate for acceptance he'll try any combination of the uncombinable as long as each individual ele­ment is currently en vogue. The Crying Light has elements of it all, but they are not crucial. In fact, even the lyrics to 'Another World' need not necessarily be understood straightforwardly, in a «look what they've done to our planet» sense. The guy is simply telling us that he has no more hopes of happiness left for this world. Certainly many of us feel the same way, don't we?

 

A bigger concern than «trendiness» for me is that this third album, clearer than ever, shows that Antony has hit his threshold and has nowhere else to go. We get the exact same formula: minor chord piano ballads with tristesse-oriented strings and floating vocals. And this time around, there are no guest stars to provide the spice of life: it is Hegarty and his own griefs all the way through. Not that it is, in any way, easy to understand where exactly the man could travel from here — he has polished and fortified his niche to the major envy of all possible competitors, but, having dug so deep in it, there is no more way out.

 

It is good, then, that at least Hegarty's melodic talents have not abandoned him. About a half of the tunes are pure atmosphere, but when he gives things a little rhythmic punch, hooks start to materialize with ease. 'Kiss My Name' may be a fairly clumsy song title, but since it actually re­fers to the idea of Antony's mother embracing his future tombstone, it makes sense, and the vio­lins that dance up and down around the main rhythm create a beautiful fairy-tale impression, al­leviating the darkness of the lyrics. See, being dead is not all that bad.

 

'Another World' takes us in the opposite direction — utter minimalism — but makes its point with plenty of stateliness, reminiscent a bit of Brian Eno's faraway successes in the «ambient bal­lad» genre. (On 'Dust And Water', however, I believe Antony is going way too far with the mini­malism — as efficient an instrument as his voice is, he is long past that stage where it merely to­ok him to open his mouth and properly direct the air stream to make his point).

 

A few other tunes may deserve specific mention, but it will take a really major fan to emphasize their individuality, so let me just state this: no big admirer of Antony's inner world will be disap­pointed by the way he extracts it on the outside over the forty minutes of Crying Light, yet if you'd rather treat The Johnsons as a moderately delightful, but passable curio born out of the ne­cessities of the early 21st century, you need not go beyond I Am A Bird Now. Thumbs up, out of respect for the intelligent craft of the final product, but in the immediate future, it would perhaps be better for all of us if Mr. Hegarty finally switched to sepia-tinted visual installations.

 

SWANLIGHTS (2010)

 

1) Everything Is New; 2) The Great White Ocean; 3) Ghost; 4) I'm In Love; 5) Violetta; 6) Swanlights; 7) The Spirit Was Gone; 8) Thank You For Your Love; 9) Fletta; 10) Salt Silver Oxygen; 11) Christina's Farm.

 

He almost did switch to visual installations: accompanying the album, Antony has also produced a 144-page art book — beautiful, expressive, pretentious, and bound to be forgotten as soon as the next Antony takes over the crown of this particular fiefdom. But there is also the small matter of this fourth album, which does exist, even if it is not quite clear if it is the music that is the sup­porting companion to the visual arts or vice versa.

 

"Every everything, everything is new", the man wobbles during the opening twenty seconds, eno­ugh to make you understand that nothing is actually new, and thus, present a jarring paradox from the very start. Once again, morose piano ballads with either minimalistic, or lush strings-adorned arrangements, are the word of the day; occasional acoustic guitar backing, brass fanfares, and gen­tle woodwinds only reinforce the general rule. Trying to assert some sort of individuality for Swanlights is futile. All that is left is just to see if you can enjoy the music.

 

And I believe that it can be easily done, indeed. Perhaps there is one good general observation about Swanlights that can be made: as to what concerns my personal experience, the album has revealed itself to be much less «annoying» than its predecessors. No intelligent person can have a problem with Antony Hegarty's disdain for the ugly trashy world in which we all live, and for his deep-running desire to escape it if he cannot change it; but lots of people, myself included, can have a problem with the theatrical manner in which he expresses that desire — I mean, does one really escape the cynicism and cruelty of life by putting on layers of makeup?..

 

Swanlights, if only a little bit, but a little bit that I seem to have felt, tones down that theatricality. As it often happens, the toning down begins with the album sleeve: where we once saw creepy hallowed figures and photos of near-alien Japanese artists, we now see a mortally wounded polar bear (and 'Swanlights', for that matter, is his name). Pain, suffering, isolation, empathy, and eco­logical concern — all in one, but with a little bit of gritty reality thrown in, too. The same is with the music: a little smoother, a little quieter, a little less overtly manneristic, yet never ever betray­ing Antony's essential schtick.

 

The very idea of Antony doing a duet with Björk, especially at this time in her career, when the «nutty» streak in her brain seems to have infected most of the sane cells, could easily trigger a bathroom response from those who have their feet firmly planted on the ground. No reason to be alarmed: 'Flétta' ("lichen" in Icelandic) is a restrained, humbly-pretty duet that will be appreciated not so much for its melody (which is about as instantly memorable as, say, an average Liszt piano prelude) as for the delicate weaving of two of the most individual singing styles of the past two decades. The piano playing is Hegarty-style, the vocal flourishes Björk-style, and the two mesh together real well without trying to outdo each other in purely technical terms.

 

The title track is also a relative standout: for about six minutes, the regular pianos disappear, re­placed by a bleak apocalyptic nightmare with Eastern/psychedelic overtones, as Hegarty vocali­zes on the pentatonic scale to jarring blasts of feedback and all sorts of analog and digital noise. This is his first attempt at immersing himself into a gentleness-free atmosphere, as if to show us what can happen when the lonesome hero finds himself flung out of his little room at the top of his ivory tower and thrust into the world. Is there any difference between the lights of Broadway and the North Pole? Not for Mr. Hegarty, no.

 

Another highlight is 'Thank You For Your Love', which can be seen as either an original twist on the modern romantic ballad, or even as a cunning send-up; beginning quite generically, it eventu­ally reaches a point at which Hegarty locks himself up in a never-ending loop of "thank you, thank you, thank you"s which, as some astute reviewer has noticed, start sounding more like a "please please" — clearly, he is begging for something he has not yet received rather than simply showing his gratitude in such an obnoxious way. It is at least an intriguing development, and at most, it's just plain funny, even if that may not have been the original intention.

 

And overall, most of the time his minimalistic melodies work. 'Everything Is New' and 'The Spirit Was Gone' are delicate piano pieces; the strings, woodwinds, and chimes on 'Salt Silver Oxygen' interact in a beautiful baroque-tinged manner; 'The Great White Ocean' is a near-gorgeous folk ballad; and even though I am not quite sure why the laconic, Eno-ish piano phrase of 'Christina's Farm' had to be prolonged for seven minutes, that does not make it any less touching, per se.

 

One thing you definitely cannot blame on Hegarty is lack of attention to detail and manner; some of these numbers will pull your strings, others won't, but not a single one can be accused of not having tried to the utmost. Maybe he is a poseur, but he's definitely a worker, and Swanlights convinces me that, provided he goes on working as hard, he might have a couple dozen more albums like this one in him. Thumbs up for mope rock's upcoming AC/DC.

 

CUT THE WORLD (2012)

 

1) Cut The World; 2) Future Feminism; 3) Cripple And The Starfish; 4) You Are My Sister; 5) Swanlights; 6) Epi­lepsy Is Dancing; 7) Another World; 8) Kiss My Name; 9) I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy; 10) Rapture; 11) The Crying Light; 12) Twilight.

 

Poseur or not, Antony Hegarty is enough of a professional singer to merit hearing live; but even then, there must have been some extra measures taken to ensure that a live album from Antony & The Johnsons would make commercial and critical sense. The measure in question was to hook up with The Danish National Chamber Orchestra, and rearrange the setlist with the aid of a whole arsenal of classical tricks — in the grand old tradition of Procol Harum. The addition of an orche­stra would hardly raise the bar on «pretentiousness» (this transcendental quality had already built its nest in Hegarty's mouth quite some time ago), but could allow to explore some additional op­portunities. Besides, Antony and strings had been on friendly terms from the start.

 

The setlist opens with one new song (title track), a trademark Hegarty lament with relatively few lyrics and lots of swooping orchestral atmospherics; includes ʽI Fell In Love With A Dead Boyʼ from a rare EP (Alice Cooper would have definitely misinterpreted that title); and, for the rest, concentrates mainly on selections from the band's self-titled debut and The Crying Light — I Am A Bird Now and Swanlights, for some reason, are underrepresented, although the title track from Swanlights does get a major restructuring — the dark nightmare of the original is replaced by regular pianos and strings, as if acknowledging that the original went way too far in the «cre­epy» department, and that there's always another chance to cut back.

 

I cannot say that the rearrangements open up a new dimension in the music, or anything equally presumptuous. Like the absolute majority of classical reworkings of pop songs, they have a glos­sy, soundtrackish quality to them, and I believe that, in addition to all the strings, pianos, and wood­winds, they could have definitely used more brass (there is a small trombone blast at the beginning of ʽCripple And The Starfishʼ, and brass plays a big part in the crescendo at the end of ʽTwilightʼ, but otherwise it is mostly flutes and recorders), but, understandably, they did not want to cut down too much on the overall fragility and wimpiness of the proceedings — Antony has so consistently cultivated this image of a living being made entirely of pure glass, that a really strong brass blast could shatter him to pieces right there in the concert hall.

 

That said, the arrangements do fit the music and the voice — never detracting from the emotio­nality already present in the songs; the best news is basically that I do not mind their presence, and it makes for a good pretext to hear these songs once more, and since these are mostly good songs, then what's the problem? In a way, it is fun to discover that the effect that Antony Hegarty produces on your senses stays exactly the same regardless of whether he is being backed with forty academic musicians or just a lonesome string quartet (or trio, or duo) in the studio. Maybe that is because he is a like a small chamber orchestra in himself.

 

The very fact that this is a live album, though, is consciously downplayed: audience applause is only included in the mix at the very end of the record, as if the ten songs in question were just separate movements of one single suite (well, in a way you could say they are — in a way, Anto­ny's entire career seems to be), and the only chunk of stage banter is a seven-minute speech that presages the suite and is included as a separate track, called ʽFuture Feminismʼ. Now, in a way, the speech is just a lot of post-New Age mystical bullshit, centered around Hegarty's trans-gender issues and his ideas on the femininity in human nature. But there is something about the way in which he delivers it that commands sympathy — a sort of lightweight, humorous teenage naiveté that makes you forget all the silliness because somehow it all feels normal: just a little fantasizing on issues of nature to help justify your perfectly normal inner queer. Presumably, not all the people with transgender mentality really seem like they feel at home with that mentality. Antony Hegarty, over these seven minutes, gives convincing proof that he does — and, as a bonus, throws in an intel­ligent crack at the Pope, which is not something that everyone in his profession does in an intelligent manner. Good speech.

 

Overall, this is certainly not an essential purchase, and even the hardcore fans should take note — many will find the orchestration excessive, if not generic or downright cheesy, compared to the sparse, elegiac arrangements on the studio records. But even then, it might be interesting to see how easily and comfortably Antony works in a live setting: his songs are so paranoid and claust­rophobic, after all, that it is almost unimaginable to have him reproduce all that suffering and fear of the world before a big bunch of real people — you'd rather imagine him as this total recluse, recording in a self-made studio in some log cabin somewhere in Tibet. Well now, at least we know that much — that he does venture as far out as Copenhagen, and that he does not have an artist's block when working with a large ensemble of classical musicians. Should we feel dis­ap­poi­ntment over the lack of integrity, or relief over the physical and psychiatric sanity? Make your buying choice, depending on the answer.

 

 

 

 

 

ARCADE FIRE

ARCADE FIRE (2003)

 

1) Old Flame; 2) I'm Sleeping In A Submarine; 3) No Cars Go; 4) The Woodland National Anthem; 5) My Heart Is An Apple; 6) Headlights Look Like Diamonds; 7) Vampire / Forest Fire.

 

NB: this review should properly be read AFTER the reviews for Funeral and Neon Bible, since it was written as an afterthought, in anticipation of Arcade Fire's third full-length LP, The Suburbs.

 

There is very little on Arcade Fire's humbly self-titled EP debut from 2003 to suggest that, in less than a year from then, they would start topping critical lists and being regarded as the saviours of their generation. And yet, at the same time, there already is everything: Win Butler's paranoid, bullied-boy-takes-last-stand-in-the-corner vocals and Regine Chassagne's naughty-excited-girl-de­fying-prescriptions «singing»; multi-layered arrangements where each instrument plays some­thing tremendously simple, but like its player's life depended on it; and, of course, the overall starry-eyed idealism within which it is considered sacrilegious to borrow from one's ancestors in a post-modernistic manner (although it is permitted to maintain one's sense of humor).

 

The difference is that these seven tracks are very clearly tentative; the best way to ascertain this is to compare the original version of 'No Cars Go' — easily the most memorable track — with its masterful reworking on Neon Bible, where it is nevertheless only one of several highlights. The lo-fi production (everything was recorded in some cheap barn somewhere in Maine) is violently at odds with the band's ambitions, and does not allow the senses to be properly overwhelmed. God only knows how many of the other tracks could benefit this much from being re-recorded a few years later; my serious bet is on 'Headlights Look Like Diamonds', Chassagne's tour-de-force whose head-spinning harmony line deserves a whole lot more vibrations out of one's speakers.

 

On the other hand, several of the songs, sounding like un-fleshed and, possibly, un-fleshable de­mos, would hardly convince the hardened skeptic about the capacities of indie rock in any setting: 'The Woodland National Anthem' is more like 'The Ragged March Cat Anthem' with the approp­riate musical accompaniment from a band of drunken hobos, and the closing seven-minute num­ber works out the style, but not the essence of true anthems-to-come like 'Power Out' and 'Rebel­lion'. This is probably because most of the songs do not bother to find the proper underpinning musical hook, or do not take enough care with the musical buildup, or just do not hold that rhythm nearly as steadily as they would soon be able to.

 

In short, Arcade Fire is not so much a proper debut as a bit of a training camp, and, in retrospect, should not be anybody's first point of acquaintance with the band; once Butler and his friends get in the history books and stay there, everyone who cares about past sounds will want to visit this departure locus (it is still, after all, a matter of spending thirty minutes in a moderately pleasing way), yet it is not deserving of much on its own, even if 'Headlights Look Like Diamonds' threa­tens to become an unjustly overlooked power pop gem, and 'My Heart Is An Apple', perhaps, an equally unjustly forgotten intimate tearjerker.

 

FUNERAL (2004)

 

1) Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels); 2) Neighborhood #2 (Laika); 3) Une Année Sans Lumière; 4) Neighborhood #3 (Power Out); 5) Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles); 6) Crown Of Love; 7) Wake Up; 8) Haiti; 9) Rebellion (Lies); 10) In The Backseat.

 

The «noughties» have predictably brought back a common interest in the Eighties, as new bands are springing up whose members sacrificed their childhood to that decade. Theoretically, this is quite creepy: what kind of music can we expect from people whose minds had been shaped by the likes of Cyndi Lauper or Duran Duran? Or Mötley Crüe, for that matter? How can one be influen­ced by plastic sound and end up not producing recycled plastic sound?

 

But on practice, it's all in the mind. If somebody can make David out of a spoiled block of marble, then some other body can make great music out of a simple synth-pop theme. And if the members of Arcade Fire had not properly absorbed their childhood influences, there is no way they could have produced an album as flawless as Funeral. Even Cyndi Lauper has its proper place on it — somewhere — maybe in the kiddie keyboard line of 'Haiti' — maybe elsewhere.

 

Funeral was recorded in late 2003, in Montreal, by no less than fifteen musicians who, collecti­vely, call themselves Arcade Fire. All the tracks are credited to «Arcade Fire» as such, but the leading force behind the wall-of-sound is the nuclear family unit of Win Butler and Régine Chas­sagne; they are the only two lead singers, play a good half of the instruments, and, arguably, write the bulk of the melodies and the lyrics. These are the bare facts. Another bare fact is that Funeral has been lauded by just about every critic in existence (including even grumpy old codger Robert Christgau), so that hipsters and indie snobs should find it their duty to hate it — or join the herd. Then again, with the unbelievable degree of musical segregation that we experience today, I am sure many people have not even heard of it in the first place. So let's talk about it all the same.

 

Many critics have already dubbed it the best, or one of the best, albums of the decade. I cannot, and do not want to, speak in those terms, but I would certainly like to discuss it on its own terms, and that way Funeral is no less than perfect. At its heart lies an honest infatuation with the biggest-sounding, pomp-oriented bands of the Eighties — primarily U2 and the Cure (influences which band members confess to quite freely in their interviews), but I also detect whiffs of R.E.M. and New Order and... well, this can go on for quite a bit. Yet, with fifteen members sha­ring the rights and privileges of this democratic musical community, none of the songs really sound like second-hand tributes; rather, this legacy serves as the backbone around which they build up mus­cles from a whole heap of other sources, resulting in a unique kind of synthesis.

 

Obviously, there are progressive elements, with various classically derived subthemes weaving around the main melodies. There is also a strong folk-rock tendency, especially on the record's quieter numbers. The «baroque pop» genre of the Sixties leaves its imprint on songs like '7 Ket­tles' and others. There is unity, for sure, but no strong sign of driving themselves into one particu­lar corner or niche — just as you think you got them finally figured out, along comes some unex­pected surprise that crushes your attempts at pigeonholing them as «arena rock» or «mope rock» or «the Cure with less reverb and a chick playing violin».

At the same time, they are very «commercial», very strongly pop. They know the drill: important thing number one is to establish a basic hook, a simple riff, an unsophisticated, maybe even recy­cled theme, but one that necessarily resonates in the soul. Once that has been done, you hit on all the cylinders, draw on all the resources of your fifteen-strong army to turn your «pop» into «art», and that's when the cat is firmly in the bag.

 

This is what makes 'Wake Up', the album's anthemic centerpiece, the potboiler that it is. I am all but sure I already heard that riff, maybe with some minor changes, somewhere else. But where­ever it was, it was never used in such a powerful, tear-inducing setting. When Win Butler sings 'Somethin' filled up my heart with nothin', someone told me not to cry', you know that he is really inviting you to cry — not to mention that his very voice inherently betrays a man constantly on the verge of  breakdown — and when he goes on saying 'But now that I'm older, my heart's col­der, and I can see that it's a lie', I am glad to accept that invitation. And when all the band mem­bers start chanting the song's refrain in unison, how joyful it is to see the return of the good old cathar­sis: truly, the song's purifying power is easily comparable to 'All You Need Is Love' (and the chorus, quite obviously, is a direct reference to 'Hey Jude'), except it just comes about thirty years too late to exercise that power all over the world.

 

'Wake Up' is the album's only anthem, but there are quite a few other rock-out monsters: 'Rebel­lion (Lies)' with its power-bass derived from the Joy Division school, but used in a far more opti­mistic context; 'Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)', with Edge-style guitar playing over a Robert Smith-style raging-sea sonic panorama; and the album's most tongue-in-cheek tribute to post-mo­dernism, 'Neighborhood #2 (Laika)', combining New Wave arrangements with accordeons, drunk folksy choruses, and lyrics about vampires and, well, Laikas.

 

Then there are the quiet moments, every bit as stimulating — the folk drone of '7 Kettles', the gentle French mannerisms of 'Une Année Sans Lumière', and my favourite, the (perhaps slightly overemoted) confession 'Crown Of Love'. In this quiet section, Butler cedes the spotlight to Régine on two occasions: the lovely nostalgia of 'Haiti', where she sings about her ethnic back­ground, and the gorgeous conclusion of 'In The Backseat', a very autumnesque baroque ballad that somehow combines the subjects of her aversion to driving and her grandmother's death.

 

Death is frequently mentioned, by the way, as the main subject of the album — Captain Ob­vious will be happy to direct you to its title, and a little research tells you that several band members had lost their relatives around the time of its recording (properly speaking, though, most of it was recorded after the death of only one person, Régine's grandmother). But I do not get the impres­sion that it is «about death», per se; that would be too blunt, too Goth. Funeral is a very sad al­bum, indeed — much of it has to do with Butler's voice, which I could see as over-annoyingly whiny for some people — but its atmosphere is not depressive or «funebral».

 

I would rather describe it as ranging from «frightened» to «confused», describing the fright and confusion that arise from living in society — not «Society» en large, but just your immediate so­ciety, the one that forms the central focus of the four parts of the 'Neighborhood' suite. There are no truly grand social statements, which is where they part company with U2 (but not with the Cure, though): Funeral does not deal with Irish independence or poverty in the third world. But there is an idea of discomfort and, perhaps, incomprehension — feelings that every mentally un­challenged person in our society experiences from time to time. The wall of sound that the fifteen members produce is mostly used in a claustrophobic manner — part of it surrounds you with an actual, almost-real wall, and the other part represents your inner demons that, having broken out but found no way to break on through to the other side, only return to torment you more. And over all that din, Butler's tearful voice resonates like the feeble, but stable blubbering of a broken down patient in an asylum. It's not all that bad or inescapably dangerous or apocalyptic, but it is all unsafe and uncomfortable, and only if you 'Wake Up' can you ever regain some comfort.

 

This is the message I'm reading into Funeral, and it may be all a lot of bull, but it is one of those classy records which you can try to decode from multiple angles — or just enjoy mindlessly with­out any decoding. It is big, sprawling, ambitious, and, in a rare instance, it deserves to be just that. My undying respect goes to Butler and Chassagne for pulling it all off. Thumbs up, and, most amazingly, with the melting heart slowly in the lead. Sentimentalism is gonna be the death of me one of these days.

 

NEON BIBLE (2007)

 

1) Black Mirror; 2) Keep The Car Running; 3) Neon Bible; 4) Intervention; 5) Black Wave/Bad Vibrations; 6) Ocean Of Noise; 7) The Well And The Lighthouse; 8) [Antichrist Television Blues]; 9) Windowsill; 10) No Cars Go; 11) My Body Is A Cage.

 

To improve on Funeral is probably impossible. Other bands take years, sometimes decades, to reach that magnitude — or, perhaps, "used to" take years, because, in the age of constant acce­le­ra­­tion and violent competition that puts the best theoreticists of social-Darwinism to shame, even minimalist solo artists can no longer allow themselves a growth period, let alone an entity with a bulk as huge as Arcade Fire's. We can only guess, but it is a fairly strong guess: had Funeral not gar­nered all the rightful accolades, the ensemble would most likely have disbanded by now.

 

Instead, they started their career with their masterpiece. As much as I want to hail Neon Bible as another one, I am unable to extract the same emotional response. It is a different record, but it is inconsistent, and its message occasionally interferes with its musical content. This is strongly linked to the impression that it is too heavily dominated by Win Butler and his personal vision rather than the band's collective one: not only is Régine all but eliminated from the proceedings (nothing like 'Haiti' to lighten things up or 'In The Backseat' for a helpful shot of gorgeousness), but there are also no anthemic tracks like 'Wake Up' to remind you that there is a strong brother­hood feeling behind the music. If this goes on the same way, Arcade Fire as we know it may not have too many years ahead of it.

 

Nevertheless, I have no major problems with Win Butler and his personal vision, because I fully empathize. Having dealt with his most personal demons on Funeral, he now makes the music more extrovert, turning from family ("neighborhood") problems to more global matters. Neon Bible was, for the most part, recorded in a local church that the band bought, restored, and con­verted into a studio, and what kind of an album can you record in a church, of all places? That's right: a record about the end of the world.

 

If you just want to assess Neon Bible from its purely musical side, you will likely be disap­poin­ted: the music per se is not tremendously interesting, and it certainly adds nothing new to the style already shown on Funeral. If your favourite band is The Arctic Monkeys, riding an amphe­tamine-powered bulldozer to assert life and its values, you will probably hate Neon Bible as boring, depressed shit produced by prematurely geriatric imbeciles. ("How many more years do we have to listen to stupid pretentious white guys singing about the apocalypse?" some people ask on the Web — obviously, the answer is "as many as it takes to reach the apocalypse", which, logically, means fewer and fewer all the time). If, however, you think that the rate at which the planet is sinking into a boiling cocktail of stupidity and cruelty keeps accelerating, Win Butler and his friends will be happy to voice your concerns for you.

 

What I really like, though, is that they will do it in their own, powerful and relevant, way, and not be nearly as blunt about it as some of their idols (I am thinking particularly of a well-known band from Ireland). This is a Church album, see, and the Church relies heavily on symbolism, so two of the most important symbols are established at the beginning: 'Black Mirror' and 'Neon Bible'. The former gives Butler and Co. a general vision of the state of the world; the latter represents the (a)moral law according to which this world is living. The album is thus ruled by two slogans: 'Mirror, mirror on the wall — show me where their bombs will fall' and 'Not much chance for survival, if the Neon Bible is right'. The former is creepy, the latter is correct.

 

Musically, the first three songs also form a perfect beginning: they make everything possible to make 'Black Mirror' as bleak and apocalyptic as the lyrics suggest, and the fact that it is so catchy (nursery-rhyme-level catchy, in fact) only makes it all the more scary. 'Keep The Car Running' continues things in a manner that mixes uplifting and paranoid, after which the title track quiets the atmosphere with its melancholy musings upon the fate of mankind (which reminds me that it is the album's only strip­ped-down number in a sea of raging rock power).

 

It is only then that Neon Bible starts to somewhat lose me, featuring one mid-fast-tempo roots-rocker after another, similarly arranged and with similar feeling. This is no way to compete for a second masterpiece in a row. I like the grand pipe organ riff of 'Intervention', but it seems to be the only thing that the song is hanging upon, and stuff like 'Ocean Of Noise' and 'The Well And The Lighthouse' do not have even that (although Butler still manages to grab my attention with the anthemic 'lions and the lambs ain't sleepin' yet!' chorus on the latter).

 

Worst offender is 'Anti­christ Television Blues', a clearly obvious Springsteen imitation that is just not Arcade Fire. There is nothing wrong about wanting to sound grand and pompous, and there is nothing wrong with liking or even admiring Springsteen, but the last thing the world needs is for other people, especially talented people, to write songs like Springsteen. It is not ugly or awful; there is just no need for its existence. I liked them more when they were channelling the spirit of Bowie than when they switched to Bruce (much as I liked watching their joint performance with Bowie more than their joint performance with Bruce).

 

After that low point, however, the record quickly recuperates with another blistering trio. 'Win­dowsill', a tight protest song that contains the most straightforward lyrics on the record — 'I don't wanna fight in a holy war, I don't want the salesman knocking at my door, I don't wanna live in America no more'; many have emphasized the song's "anti-war" and "anti-Bushist" stance, but it goes far beyond that — 'MTV, what have you done to me? Save my soul, set me free — set me free, what have you done to me? I can't breathe, I can't see... World War III, when are you co­ming for me?' Blunt, but it hits harder than most punk rock, and it perfectly captures the thoughts and feelings of everyone else who, like Butler, 'don't wanna see it at my windowsill'. Too bad that there is nothing whatsoever that we can do about it.

 

'No Cars Go' is actually a re-recording of one of their earliest songs, and it shows: its colourful, religious escapism fits into the general subject of the album, but is also way too cheerful and op­timistic to sit comfortably between two of its most depressed numbers: 'Windowsill' and 'My Bo­dy Is A Cage', the latter a grim, organ-driven, bleeding-hearted confession revolving around the infinite mantra: 'My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love — but my mind holds the key'. It is a surprisingly theistic conclusion to the album: 'the one I love' is clearly someone or something more power-endowed than Butler's spouse, and his passionate howls of 'set my spirit free, set my body free' as the song thunders into its dark conclusion almost imply thoughts of intentional ending of one's physical and spiritual suffering, if you know what I mean. The last time I witnessed the notions of 'love' and 'death' so closely intertwined, I guess, was while lis­tening to the final aria of Quadrophenia — an album which I am pretty sure must also have been a strong influence on the band as a whole and Neon Bible in particular.

 

If Butler's conscious and primary goal was to promote Arcade Fire to the status of 'Biggest Band of Our Time', he has succeeded: critical reaction was sometimes even more positive than first time around, and just look at the sales — No. 2 on the Billboard? But "isn't it ironic", as Alanis Morissette would say, that the same year has seen Britney Spears' Blackout rise to the same posi­tion, not to mention both records receiving the exact same three-and-a-half-star rating from Rol­ling Stone? If anything, this comparison should only drive Butler to even greater heights of para­noia: does that not signify that most people simply pay no attention to the nature of the art they happen to be consuming, as long as they have something to consume? 'I know a time is coming, all words will lose their meaning' — I guess that time is here already, eh?

 

Still I hope, in a fit of naïve optimism, that many more people than just the critics will appreciate the record not because it is a cool thing to do but because they can identify with its philosophy, or, in fact, its religion. Which is enough for me to overlook the monotonousness of its middle lump and concentrate on the beauty and power of its beginning and its end, and to give it a collective thumbs up on the part of the overwhelmed intellect and the subdued soul. I can only hope that Butler keeps his ego in control for at least a few more albums; he would never get that far without the collective input of his musicians, and he should realize that very clearly.

 

THE SUBURBS (2010)

 

1) The Suburbs; 2) Ready To Start; 3) Modern Man; 4) Rococo; 5) Empty Room; 6) City With No Children; 7) Half Light I; 8) Half Light II; 9) Suburban War; 10) Month Of May; 11) Wasted Hours; 12) Deep Blue; 13) We Used To Wait; 14) Sprawl (Flatland); 15) Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains); 16) The Suburbs (continued).

 

Arcade Fire's third album seems to have confused the world even more than Neon Bible. Too many people probably expected them to learn their lesson, rebound from the alleged «sophomore slump», and deli­ver another fine barrel of catharsis. Now The Suburbs could be called many things, good or bad, but one thing it does not do is overwhelm emotionally — at least, not imme­diately. And with the stakes raised so high, what is there to do? Most of the «official» reviews have been positive, because no self-respecting critic likes to come across as a dumbass, writing about the same band as saviours of the world one day and as pathetic losers the next. Many, if not most, of the unofficial ones have been honestly hateful.

 

Perhaps the saddest thing about The Suburbs is this: Arcade Fire's third record leaves little, if any doubt, as to the fact that this band will never ever top Funeral as its finest hour, and, on an even sadder scale, confirms my deep-running suspicion that no band or artist of today has it in them to lay more than one definitive masterpiece — with everything else essentially being «just for the fans». The Suburbs is not a bad album by any means, nor does it show any significant de­terioration of the band's enthusiasm, but neither is there any discernible progress. Mostly they are running on the spot, and it does not help matters much that they do this over a running length of sixteen tracks and sixty three minutes, either.

 

Let us begin with the fact that this is a record about... the suburbs. Not exactly the least untapped subject in the world of American art. Not exactly the least untapped subject in the world of Ar­cade Fire, either: suburbs and neighbourhoods belong together, don't they? It is not bad that they decided to move away from the globalistic-apocalyptic ambitions of Neon Bible; it is not too go­od, though, that they decided to retread back to the trodden paths of Funeral in order to stretch wide and dig deep that which has already been stretched and dug quite sufficiently.

 

Of course, this particular weakness is easy to override. Want it or not, lyrics and concepts in rock albums generally exist so as to facilitate the job of the critic, who is supposed to entertain his rea­ders with pseudo-philological and mock-philosophical babble rather than dry descriptions of sca­les, modulations, and tonalities. Burn the CD booklet, unlearn the English language and forget the Latin alphabet, and you will never ever know that Butler and Chassagne's songs are somehow supposed to deal with memories of their suburban lives and reflections on how different those lives are from those of suburban kids today. I have not been able to perform any of these three tasks, yet even so I fail to see a deep connection between the words and the music. I am certainly no expert on the suburbs of Texas, but my intuition quite suggestively tells me that The Suburbs is as much a proper reflection of that life as a hip-hop musical would be reflective of the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci.

 

So let 'em. It may be about the suburbs, or it may be about twelfth century alchemists, or about the secret lives of black beetles — my focus is on the music rather than on homebrewed philoso­phy. And the music, unfortunately, prolongs and, sometimes, even exacerbates the problems al­ready evident on Neon Bible.

 

First, there is the issue of monotonousness: this whole friggin' thing sounds mostly the same. Not only that, it makes little use of the band members' individual talents. I had to doublecheck, for instance, whether Sarah Neufeld is still an official member: her violin, so essential to the sound of Funeral, is pretty much drowned out for good on most of the songs. Guitars have been compres­sed and reduced to one- or two-note drones, or, at best, echoey substitutes for white noise in the background. And even so, with individualities spliced together in one monolith, the album still does not have even one truly collective, boundary-shattering anthem à la 'Wake Up'. At times, it all feels like a huge army of clones, blindly following general Butler's directions.

 

Second, I join the angry chorus of those who insist that the whole thing is just way too drawn out. All of us will have our own choices of which songs are winners and losers, but most of us will probably agree that at least four or five tracks should have been left on the cutting floor (for the record, my immediate choices for the shitter are 'City With No Children', 'Suburban War', 'Was­ted Hours' — indeed! — and maybe one or two other tracks from the way too saggy middle). God had his reasons, you see, for deeming forty — forty-five minutes as the ideal running length of an album, and if Arcade Fire are God's chosen ones indeed, what's up with forgetting His cove­nant? Who are they aiming at — Michael Jackson?

 

If there is one thing that still saves The Suburbs and still shows that Funeral was not an acciden­tal fluke, it is that Arcade Fire still understand the devastating power of the simple vocal and instrumental hook. About half of these songs, when all the nasty words have been spoken, are still great pop music, and they are still capable of reminding us how so much can be done with so little — and then, how it takes so much to make you believe in the power of so little. For instance, the title track, opening the album — first time around — with no build-up at all, but launching direct­ly into battle, would have never worked without its trivial honky tonk piano riff, but it also takes all the Cure/U2-precision-level arrangements of keyboards, strings, and haunting vocals in the background to make that honky tonk piano riff work.

 

The arrangements may be devoid of individuality, but on the best songs their components are still perfectly integrated together; the simple vocal hooks of 'Ready To Start' and 'We Used To Wait' would probably have never worked without all the electronic and analog backing. (On the other hand, 'Empty Room', with Chassagne's vocals brought closer to the forefront, seems to work bet­ter live than in its overproduced studio arrangement). And it still puzzles me why the final grand scale number, 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)', works as well as it does, despite being all rooted in a simplistic, repetitive synth-pop riff that could have come off some Kylie Minogue album, for all I know; most likely, due to Regine's ongoing charm — she still sings the same way as usual, as if she'd just learned the basic technique the previous evening, always on the verge of breaking down but always careful enough not to take that treacherous last step.

 

If there is one totally unusual song on the album, it must be 'Rococo', eerie and creepy in its total absurdism: to mix together mantra-style chanting of the word 'rococo' (yeah, I like the way it sounds, too) with music that has nothing to do with rococo and lyrics that have even less to do with it is something somebody must have dreamt in a nightmare, and that's the exact feeling I get. It may warm my heart to hear the lyrics mercilessly lambasting the kids of today ("they seem wild but they are so tame, they're moving towards you with their colors all the same" — that's right, have at 'em, Will!), but, again, the music itself is much weirder than that, a slow whirlwind of strings, keyboards, and howls the exact likes of which I never heard before, as if the Cure, Coc­teau Twins, and Radiohead all joined forces on that one.

 

One thing is for sure: The Suburbs, like all other Arcade Fire albums, not only stands up to, but definitely requires repeated listens. Do not try it out if you are one of the few unlucky souls that remained untouched by the gruff majesty of Funeral; do not expect to be upgraded to Level 3 with a solid bonus if your soul has been lucky, either; try not to think of it in terms of «how seri­ously they carry on with their world-saving mission» — and your reward will arrive soon enough. Even though I do realize that for many people this reward will be nothing compared with the bit­ter disillusionment: what do you know, Arcade Fire are actually human beings, not infallible dei­ties descended into human forms in our desperate hour of need. Still, painful as it may be,  thumbs up, gentlemen — there's something to be said for imperfection. At least they've dropped most of the Springsteenisms of the last album.

 

REFLEKTOR (2013)

 

1) Reflektor; 2) We Exist; 3) Flashbulb Eyes; 4) Here Comes The Night Time; 5) Normal Person; 6) You Already Know; 7) Joan Of Arc; 8) Here Comes The Night Time II; 9) Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice); 10) It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus); 11) Porno; 12) Afterlife; 13) Supersymmetry.

 

First and foremost, let us get this straight. From my (current) perspective, Arcade Fire are the... no, not necessarily the «greatest band of the 2000s», but simply the band of the 2000s, par ex­cellence. Well, either that or Franz Ferdinand, I guess, but you can't really be the band of any par­ticular decade if you do not manage to rise above and beyond all the given subcultures of that particular decade. Funeral was a great album, Neon Bible and The Suburbs less so, but all three had what it takes to convince me, and maybe you as well — there is really something about these guys that says, summarizes, and wraps up it all. Is there any other song released in those ten years that is more deserving of a generational anthem status than ʽWake Upʼ? Is there a better call-to-action epic than ʽWe Used To Waitʼ? Is there a better band out there that could offer a more sa­tisfactory set of «Happy/Sad» packages where cynicism and idealism would be more elegantly and accurately settled next to one another? Individual flaws, filler issues, technical problems be damned, the 2000s belonged to Arcade Fire if they belonged to anyone at all.

 

But if there is one thing that I am almost certain about, it is that, with Reflektor, the 2010s no longer belong to Arcade Fire. This wouldn't be a big problem, of course (no band has been lucky enough to claim two decades of domination under its belt), if only we knew who exactly would claim the takeover — and if Arcade Fire had not released but its meager share of three albums in their decade of triumph, never landing another Funeral in terms of sheer gut impact. As it is, the change in style that they introduced here is quite likely to become permanent, and gradually trans­form them into an elitist esoteric act, which is, of course, better than transforming into a generic adult contemporary or New Age act (and, all things considered, is still better than having them break up, which is also a possibility), but...

 

If asked to come up with one quote from the album to describe my current feelings about it, that would, of course, be the refrain of the title track: "I thought I found the connector — it's just a reflector". There are good songs on the record, and some bad ones, and some that require a long time to de­cide, but one thing that it doesn't have is even a single tune of genuinely heartbreaking power, of which there were lots on Funeral, and at least two or three on each of its follow-ups. For Arcade Fire, Reflektor is that threshold which separates «meaningful accessibility» from «pretentious obscurity» — and while there is nothing inherently wrong with the latter as such, loving a record like this, for me, is out of the question. Recognizing its complexity and symbolism, recommen­ding it for musicological study, sure. Shedding tears over its convoluted storylines and abstract feelings — thank you very much, I'd rather leave it to arthouse junkies.

 

On the formal musical side, Reflektor picks up right where ʽSprawl IIʼ left us last time — in a tight electronic grip, with synthesized loops, atmospheric backgrounds, and even drum machines prominently featured throughout, giving the band a mock-futuristic feel where in the past they would, on the contrary, bring out various antiquated instruments. This is already not a good sign, because it shows a lack of immunity for the relatively common «Eighties nostalgia» virus that has already infected scores of other artists — and it is particularly strange to see it spread over to Arcade Fire, a band with so many people playing so many different things. (No wonder Sarah Neufeld has been «demoted» from full-time band member to «additional musician» status — she simply does not have as much to do on the record as she used to; synthesizers and violins do not usually need one another too badly).

 

On the formal «artistic» side, Reflektor is something much more bizarre than just «Arcade Fire with synths». Its conceptuality is influenced by Haitian rara music, Marcel Camus' Orfeu Negro, Søren Kierkegaard, and other aesthetic objects and personalities that are all tied up in the grand scheme of things, since, after all, everything is made up of just a small bunch of elementary par­ticles in the final run. Topping it off is the band's presentation of a split-off part of their persona­lity as «The Reflektors», a masked alter ego that they invented for themselves in September 2013 and exploited in a bunch of secret gigs and video clips. Well — you might like the album or hate it, but a lazy affair it certainly is not: quite on the contrary, it is the band's most ambitious, preten­tious, and (at least technically) complicated and multi-layered enterprise so far. That is more or less an objective assessment. Subjective assessment — this is one of those «off the deep end» albums where it never feels certain that the band itself knows what the hell it is doing.

 

Butler confesses that the original idea was to make a «short» album, so it is only natural that, in the end, it all turned into an unprecedented sprawl, stretched over two CDs without an adequate reason. The two parts, as many have noted, are stylistically filtered: Disc 1 is «rockier», concen­trating more on dance-oriented, drums-'n'-bass-heavy tracks, whereas Disc 2 enters the twilight zone of «atmosphere», slowing down and getting in the mood — no wonder, since this is where the bulk of the Orpheus/Eurydice storyline is concentrated. Consequently, the second part is less immediately accessible, and will probably appeal more (in the long run) to hardcore fans, while the first part will be more benevolent to newcomers; in keeping with the spirit, the two singles from the album were ʽReflektorʼ from Disc 1 and ʽAfterlifeʼ from Disc 2 (to be fair, ʽAfterlifeʼ is also quite danceable, but still shares the same shadowy shape with the rest of the disc).

 

Now far be it from me to deny the presence of some really great Arcade Fire tracks on this al­bum. ʽReflektorʼ itself is a good way to start off, using the somewhat corny dance-pop settings of the track as a background for human drama — after all, Black Orpheus, too, did pretty much the same with the somewhat corny Rio carnival settings — and the cold, mechanical drive of the song suits well its basic theme of the «inability to connect», with Win and Regine playing quite skil­fully against each other (greatest pair since Lindsey and Stevie, I guess, except they really have to act it out, since nobody has reported on any alienation issues between the two). However, even ʽReflektorʼ is not entirely free from «what-the-hell-was-that?» musical ideas: the bubbly synthesizer riff that comes in after each chorus, sounding like a memento of an Eighties' video game, is either unintentionally awful, in which case they must have been high when recording it, or intentionally awful, in which case it is a Major Artistic Decision that we can Respect, Tolerate, or Despise, but never Ignore. I choose «Despise», because I just can't help it, but fortunately, that does not affect my general feeling towards the entire track.

 

Two other great songs on Disc 1 are ʽNormal Personʼ and ʽJoan Of Arcʼ. The former arguably is the most «conservative», old-school-Arcade-Fire number on the entire album, a grizzly-grunt against common denominators with distorted guitars and dry saxes from the long-gone era of glam rock and one of those dreamy, but witty «multi-Regine» bridges that nobody really knows how to bake except for good old Arcade Fire. And Win's excited "I've never really ever met a normal person..." coda is a classic finale, though a bit too simple and repetitive to send off real sparks. ʽJoan Of Arcʼ may be even better, with a suitable martial punch and another cool ex­change between Win and Regine (for some reason, the call-and-response thing between the col­lective chorus of "Joan of Arc!" and Regine's «correcting» "Jeanne d'Arc" from the prompter's box is almost intensely cute) — that's the Arcade Fire we know and love.

 

But then there are the questions. ʽHere Comes The Night Timeʼ, for instance — is this really a good song? Is its electronic arrangement with a few piano chords sprinkled around really a good match for its poetry? Is the poetry itself worth your attention? "If there's no music up in heaven, then what's it for?" This sounds almost like a question I would like to re-address to the band: if there is no (well, almost no) music in this song, then what's it for? The piano bits are probably the best part of the song, and the noisy acceleration towards the end, which used to work so well on Funeral, does not work, because if the main part of the song does not wreck your emotions, no use counting on a mad frenetic coda for compensation. ʽYou Already Knowʼ reintroduces the stupid synth tones, moves along at top speed like a generic filler track on Neon Bible or Suburbs, and, judging by the sampled «glitzy» announcement of the band's entrance in the intro, should work as a piece of self-irony, but it really doesn't. It's all just... odd.

 

However, my biggest disappointment still concerns the second («moody») part. This is where the pretense takes over big time, and the band starts thinking of itself as disciples of some abstract Brian Eno — unfortunately, they never had Eno's musical genius, and while ʽAwful Sound (Oh Eurydice)ʼ thankfully does not totally justify its title, its electronic soundscapes are derivative and dull, and its attempts to mount a gargantuan ʽHey Judeʼ-esque coda are uninspiring: where the grand choral movement of ʽWake Upʼ came so naturally, this one sounds too forced, too self-con­scious — a failed attempt at grandioseness. Much better is the counterpart, ʽIt's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)ʼ, driven by a handsome U2-style bass riff and featuring an intriguing duet between Win as Orpheus and Regine as Eurydice; this is easily my favorite number on the entire disc.

 

But that's about it. Much as I hate to admit it, I have no love for ʽAfterlifeʼ, a song quite true to its title because it sounds so totally stiff in its electronic shell. Its basic message has potential, and it could work both as a part of the Orpheus/Eurydice oratorio and an independent rumination on life after death in its own right — but if it is a frickin' anthem, give me the full power of Arcade Fire, the band, instead of a bunch of synthesizers rolling out the tired old tapestries of yesteryear (in fact, to hell with yesteryear, it was all done decades ago and way better on Bowie's Berlin trilogy, among other things). And if I have no love for ʽAfterlifeʼ, there ain't no use even beginning to discuss inferior tracks like ʽPornoʼ or ʽSupersymmetryʼ (except to mention that the latter ends with six minutes of gratuitous electronic noise that either represents the afterlife, or the perfect and imperfect symmetries, or somebody's pet dog left in the studio by mistake after hours).

 

It would be too crude, of course, to say that Reflektor fails to be a great album just because the band decided to rely on electronics (although that is part of the mis-deal). Most of all, it fails to be a great album because this time, the band really decided to open its jaw much wider than usual, and ended up twisting it all over the place. Too much Kierkegaard, not enough violin. Too much Greek mythology, not enough Regine (there isn't a single song here where she'd sing a clear, dominating lead vocal part). Too much general arthouse attitude — we need more songs like ʽNormal Personʼ and ʽWe Existʼ, and fewer songs like ʽAwful Soundʼ or ʽHere Comes The Night Timeʼ (a title that sounds way too close to the old Beach Boys disco disaster, by the way, to sus­pect sheer coincidence). Too long, too beset with problems and issues, too full of itself, too — pardon the bluntness — mea­ningless (if they are able to explain the point of ʽSupersymmetryʼ, I'd prefer rather not hear it) even though it pretends to be going deeper than ever before, and that is what irritates me to no end.

 

I certainly would not want to nail the point further by giving the album a thumbs down: ambitious projects carried out by fabulous artists, even if they turn out to be grandiose failures, do not de­serve nasty slams. It was curious to hear this thing, and if I ever manage to get over the flaccid reac­tion to ʽAfterlifeʼ, trimming all the pompo-fat makes up for about thirty-five minutes of high quality late period (late period? we'll see about that) Arcade Fire music. But on the whole, it was simply wrong what they did here. If I want Orpheus and Eurydice, I'll take Monteverdi — here, it feels I've pretty much lost the connection. Much as I'd like to join the critical ooh la la, it'd just be dishonest. Instead, here's hoping the next album will be a «back to roots» revival, or else some­body is really going to get pissed.

 

ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI

FINGERS CROSSED (2003)

 

1) One Heavy February; 2) Souvenirs; 3) Imaginary Ordinary; 4) Scissor Paper Rock; 5) To And Fro; 6) Spring 2008; 7) The Owls Go; 8) Fumble; 9) Kindling; 10) It's Almost A Trap; 11) Like A Call; 12) Where You've Been Hiding; 13) City Calm Down; 14) Vanishing.

 

Can an Australian band that calls itself «Architecture In Helsinki» be any good? It probably can, but it better be real good, then, since it takes an awful lot of goodness to redeem the original sin of calling oneself «Architecture In Helsinki» when not only do you not live in Helsinki, but you live so far away from Helsinki, you might as well call yourself «Architecture In Eldorado» and get away with it on a much firmer basis. In other words, these guys are so ferociously «indie-indie» even before you hear them play a single note, they have to work double hard to earn our pardon, and triple hard to earn our admiration.

 

The good news is that they try, and the bad news is that they do not try hard enough — in fact, their major purpose seems, above all, to demonstrate their sworn allegiance to generic indie aes­thetics. There are five primary and three secondary members in the band, playing everything from guitars to electronics to woodwinds and brass to melodica to xylophone — and, of course, there is not a single professional, let alone virtuoso, musician anywhere in sight. Vocals are democrati­cally divided between boys and girls — and, of course, there is not a single unique vocal tone or style anywhere in sight, although everything sounds pleasant. The songs are short (we don't want to seem too pretentious), the lyrics are psychedelically introspective (we do want to seem magical and mysterious), and the arrangements are multi-layered (the more instruments we play at the same time, the less people will notice that we cannot play any of them).

 

Did this sound like I just described Arcade Fire? Well, not quite — Arcade Fire are not afraid of letting their songs run for more than three minutes, they do have relatively unique and easily re­cognizable vocal styles, and their lyrics actually make sense and show plenty of aching relevance. Most importantly, Arcade Fire are quite heavily grounded in reality, and these guys are twee-ori­ented, riding on rose-colored clouds until the pants are soaking wet. (To make matters worse, none of this cloud-riding has anything to do with architecture in Helsinki — much of which is conceptually following Saint-Petersburg, and could, with some reservations, be called «light», but not light enough to associate itself with this kind of music).

 

Nevertheless, Fingers Crossed does manage to give us an interesting, not entirely predictable kind of sound. The overall vibe is that of «little-angelish» innocence, due to all the xylophones, glockenspiels, high-pitched electronics, quasi-surf guitars, and pseudo-pre-pubescent vocals. This is not news in itself, but it is made into news by an unusually equal-rights approach to all the separate elements of the band's sound: retro-pop guitar, futuristic electronics, marching band brass combos, street-player style wind-up instruments, and folk-pop singing. With this particular brand of synthesis, Architecture In Helsinki have no problem carving themselves out their own identity — even if nobody needs it, you can't at least deny it's there somewhere.

 

Alas, in the end it all fails for one simple — and way too common — reason: not a single member of the eight-piece band happens to be an accomplished, or even simply talented songwriter. This is not avantagarde music: they do know how to put together strings of notes so that they end up with traditional rhythmics, harmony and melody. Throw in the rose-cloudy style of arrangement, and it's all nice and pretty and you sort of begin to feel bad about criticizing this kind of music — as if you were taking candy from a baby or something. But really and honestly, there is hardly a single song on here that has anything memorable about it. It's all atmosphere, from top to bottom, and on a record that presumably consists of two-and-a-half-minute long pop songs, «pure atmos­phere» is like a humiliating rape of your expectations.

 

The only time where the band did strike a sensitive nerve was on ʽThe Owls Goʼ, whose repeti­tive, childish chorus, sung in feather-light mode by Kellie Sutherland (the band's resident clarinet and God-knows-what-else player), accidentally embottles an ounce of genuine protective tender­ness (it also constitutes a terrific case of misheard lyrics for me — until I looked it up, the line "finding a replacement with a heart sedated" kept coming across as "finding a replacement for the House of David", which, I guarantee it, would give the whole song an entirely different, and far more profound, meaning). In contrast, the verses, sung by one of the band's lead vocalists (pro­bably Cameron Bird, the guitar player), are completely blank and colorless.

 

Every now and then, something will faintly register on the radar, like a much weaker, fluffier va­riant of Broadcast (ʽScissor Paper Rockʼ, where it is clearly seen how Sutherland can come across as a shallower copy of Trish Keenan), or a watered-down imitation, perhaps a subconscious one, of the kaleidoscopic electronics of Animal Collective (ʽImaginary Ordinaryʼ), or a Beirut-like use of the brass section to generate a meekly East European flair (ʽTo And Froʼ). Nothing in these attempts is offensive or even «pathetic», because it is all so innocent and generally unpretentious: when, at the very beginning of the album, the chorus asks us, "Have we missed an opportunity?" (ʽSouvenirsʼ), you probably wouldn't even want to upset the kids with a straightforwardly nega­tive answer. But — shh, don't tell anybody in the band, but this is exactly what it is about: a missed opportunity.

 

I know how it could have all worked: had the band refrained from trying to write original songs and, instead, devoted itself to covering superior material, recasting it in this pretty, cloud-a-licious, modestly innovative mold, Fingers Crossed might have passed for a charming and maybe even thought-stimulating curio. As it is, the album earned mixed reviews from the very beginning, and although the band did manage to achieve minor cult status among certain circles of twee-pop lovers, it seems quite just that they never made it to the big leagues.

 

IN CASE WE DIE (2005)

 

1) Neverevereverdid; 2) It'5!; 3) Tiny Paintings; 4) Wishbone; 5) Maybe You Can Owe Me; 6) Do The Whirlwind; 7) In Case We Die; 8) The Cemetery; 9) Frenchy, I'm Faking; 10) Need To Shout; 11) Rendezvous: Potrero Hill; 12) What's In Store?

 

Maybe they did not follow the optimal strategy (as in, «hire a responsible songwriter»), but there has been a strategic change all the same, and a good one: push up the energy level. The creative, joyful, intelligent kids of Fingers Crossed, sitting in their living-rooms and making psychedelic paintings on wallpaper, are now running out into the yards, so that they can take part in active games and dispel the «lonesome nerd» tag that one could very easily have attached to them just two years ago. In other words — In Case We Die, we are going to leave behind a pretty lively trace of our former existence.

 

All the basic ingredients remain the same: Architecture In Helsinki are still an eight-piece band, with brass and string instruments mattering as much as, if not more than, acoustic and electric guitars, friendly electronics, and the male / female contrast between core members (Cameron Bird and Kellie Sutherland). Just like before, they are unwilling to learn to seriously play those instru­ments, although they do try to attack the songwriting task with a little more responsibility; just like before, they seem to regard their mission as that of building a powerful kaleidoscope of color­ful sounds, preferring to quickly abandon any idea before it actually starts working, rather than stick around it for too much time. Fairies dancing at the bottom of the garden, right?

 

Even the bell chime that opens the album is soft and kiddish — nothing like the deep, chilly toll of Lennon's ʽMotherʼ or AC/DC's ʽHells Bellsʼ — and what it sets out to announce is a small, cutesy «twee-symphony» (ʽNeverevereverdidʼ), spreading its three parts (rhythmless atmospheric intro; slow, slightly dissonant, march; fast, exuberant kiddie song) over five minutes and stating all the important points in the process. The build-up, climax, and release are quite thoughtfully controlled, and if I had been more in love with the essential ideology of the band, ʽNeverever­everdidʼ would probably be the perfect AiH composition for me. «Yes for toddlers», perhaps. The major problem is that a real toddler would be unlikely to appreciate this twee-symphony, and it is not clear whether it truly deserves to wake the internal toddler lurking inside the grown-up lis­tener, because all of this supposedly innocent, free-flowing joy emanating from the song still feels a little forced and artificial.

 

ʽIt'5!ʼ (sic), compressing its point to two rather than five minutes, is also a perfect encapsulation of the band's pseudo-message. Minimalistic, very loosely joined at all of its harmonic hips, with lyrics that make neither literal nor coherent figurative sense, and a vocal hook that transforms indie mumble into cheerleader scream — it will either lure you in with its absurdist naïveness and baby innocence, or deeply offend you by not making artistic sense. On the other hand, there is no use getting offended at a bunch of silly prancing on the lawn, particularly since there is nothing to suggest that the band regards its art as something more deep and meaningful than that.

 

What really does sadden me is that, with such a vast amount of different people, instruments, and musical ideas at their disposal, the mood and emotional impact are so similar on just about every track — so much so that commenting on individual tracks seems essentially useless, even if this does happen to be the band's best album. Admittedly, ʽDo The Whirlwindʼ has a gruffer keyboard tone than usual, and is almost on the verge of becoming a gutsy «electrofunk» number (I detect a little bit of Prince influence here), but even that gets scrambled midway through, as the vocals shift from stern to sissy, and chimes and cellos chase the dance beat away. Everything else stays firmly within the confines of the exact same fairyland playground. («Playful pop majesty» was the expression used by the All-Music Guide reviewer, which I heartily disagree with — playful, definitely, pop, most likely, but there is about as much «majesty» in this album as there usually may be perceived in a typical infant).

 

Still, by speeding up the tempos (ʽThe Cemeteryʼ), introducing a wee bit more screechy / croaky electric riffs (ʽFrenchy, I'm Fakingʼ), and stirring up inevitable memories of SMiLE (to which this album relates like a clumsy, inexperienced, but admiring and aspiring younger brother), In Case We Die manages to wrench out a thumbs up — want it or not, it has its own face, and that face is curious to look upon, even if it is so hard to decide whether you like it or not, or whether it is a natural face or the result of one too many plastic surgeries. Perhaps if Frank Zappa wanted to deconstruct Mother Goose, the end product would look something like that — then again, know­ing Frank, it probably wouldn't: In Case We Die is much too safe, too clean, too sterile for the likes of real naughty music revolutionaries.

 

PLACES LIKE THIS (2007)

 

1) Red Turned White; 2) Heart It Races; 3) Hold Music; 4) Feather In A Baseball Cap; 5) Underwater; 6) Like It Or Not; 7) Debbie; 8) Lazy (Lazy); 9) Nothing's Wrong; 10) Same Old Innocence.

 

In 2006, Architecture In Helsinki parted ways with two of their former members (Tara Shackell and Isobel Knowles), drastically reducing their brass section — not a big problem, as the slots were occupied by an even larger selection of session musicians as soon as the time was ripe for the recording of their third album. A much bigger problem is that the third album introduces se­rious change to their basic style — a change for the worse, which, given AiH's already evident struggle to maintain their own face, means a downright failure.

 

To put it bluntly, Cameron Bird had suddenly decided that AiH need to start thinking of them­selves as a rock band, thinking along the lines of his (presumably) childhood idols from the pop-punk, New Wave, and electro-funk departments — the accursed «1980s nostalgia», the great bane of the 2000s indie movement, hits again with full devastating force. Consequently, ʽRed Turned Whiteʼ is AiH working à la Prince; ʽHold Musicʼ is AiH working à la Talking Heads; ʽLazyʼ is AiH working à la... UB40? Something like that. ʽSame Old Innocenceʼ is a most decep­tive title to finish off the record with — for the most part, Places Like This is busy chasing out the «same old innocence» of the band's first two LPs, and replacing it with dance beats, fast grooves, and a drunk, mildly surrealist, party atmosphere.

 

I am not saying that such a transformation could not succeed in theory. But there are two huge, purely practical problems that prevent that theory from working. First, as many other reviewers have noted before, we have here a complete shift in singing style: not only do Bird's vocals now occupy most of the space (largely ushering out the generally far more agreeable leads from Su­ther­land), but he has also switched from psychedelic hushes, murmurs, and whispers to screaming and barking, and there are few things more irritating in this world than to have to listen to an un­skilled screamer and barker, unable to properly align his vocal noise with the general atmosphere of the composition or the entire album. When David Byrne played the «paranoid intellectual idiot» part on the early Heads records, he did it credibly, both through his own singing and the perfect agreement with the music that surrounded it. When Bird tries to do the same on ʽHold Musicʼ, he seems to only respect the «idiot» part — there is nothing paranoid or intellectual about his effort. No meaning at all, for that matter, just an empty form.

 

Second, this is still the same old Architecture In Helsinki — in that they still haven't figured out a proper way to come up with memorable songs. And now that the original aura has dissipated, it is unclear what exactly should justify listening to something like ʽRed Turned Whiteʼ. The openly annoy­ing vocals? The playful, but emotionless synth patterns? The lack of a clear opposition be­tween verse and chorus? The predictably incomprehensible lyrics? Whatever they wanted to say with this song, it seems to me that they did not manage to say it in a language I understand, either on the sensual or the intellectual level. And the same goes for 90% of this album.

 

Here are the minimal bits and pieces that did manage to speak out. Number one: the high-pitched, swirling, supernatural vocal harmonies on ʽHeart It Racesʼ (slightly Arcade Fire-like in style). Number two: some peculiarities of the arrangement on ʽUnderwaterʼ that really manage to con­vey an «underwater» atmosphere (not that this is in any way original in 2007) — the song in ge­neral is arguably the closest in spirit to the «proper» AiH. Number three: cute pop guitar interplay at the end of ʽLazyʼ. Number four: big relief when the whole thing is over — and an even bigger thank you for the fact that it only barely runs over 30 minutes.

 

In all, this is one of the most displeasing transitions from «mediocrity with a promise» to «embar­rassment without redemption». What is most offensive about the whole enterprise, of course, is that the entire record still has a defiantly «artsy» feel — the band retains their multi-instrumental kitsch, the complexity of compositions, the inscrutability of the lyrics. But as far as my heart and mind conspire to tell me, there is not an ounce of genuine substance or meaning in the whole thing. One could, perhaps, see a bunch of college freshmen getting high to this kind of thing, party spirit and all. However, they'd still have to be sorry about it the morning after the party. A disgusted, rather than simply dazed and confused, thumbs down here.

 

MOMENT BENDS (2011)

 

1) Desert Island; 2) Escapee; 3) Contact High; 4) W.O.W.; 5) Yr Go To; 6) Sleep Talkin'; 7) I Know Deep Down; 8) That Beep; 9) Denial Style; 10) Everything's Blue; 11) B4 3D.

 

Architecture in Helsinki's fourth album does revert some of the inauspicious changes witnessed on Places Like This — namely, it does not sound nearly as dumb and irritating, with significant­ly less emphasis on dated dance beats and idiot vocals: my guess is that Bird did pay attention to at least some of the original reviews, and understood that he went a little too far in his search for a new face for the band. Alas, though, neither is this a proper return to the potentially pleasant atmo­spherics of In Case We Die. Formally, it is more like a meticulously calculated averaged va­lue of both these albums — multiplied by a continuous lack of interest in improving the overall level of songwriting.

 

At least the early records told a tale of a fairyland child playground, and Places Like This told the tale of a dance floor for hopeless morons: you could see the former as «cute», and the latter as «awful». Moment Bends merges these notions and thoroughly neutralizes them, so that, for the first time in AiH history, I am utterly perplexed, as the album leaves me with zero emotional im­pressions, and I mean that seriously. I have no idea what the record is trying to say, why it exists, how it should be interpreted, whether it should be considered «art», etc., etc. My current opinion — subject to change, perhaps, but only if I decide to continue exploring the album further, which is not very likely — is that the band has simply lost its way, completely: having swerved from the experimental, but promising path right into a dense thicket, for no reason other than stupidity, they are now proceeding blindly, without the least idea of what it is they are doing.

 

In some historical situations, perhaps, such blind prancing can produce unexpectedly delightful results — but not if you are Cameron Bird and his followers. Take the first track, ʽDesert Islandʼ. It is put together as a ska-based number, but uses cold electronic tones and an equally «icy» vocal style: that is, a rhythmic basis normally used to express smily joy is overridden with stimulants of «cold beauty» — the two successfully kill off each other, and I have not even yet mentioned the general monotonousness and complete lack of attention-attracting melodic twists.

 

Going on to track No. 2, ʽEscapeeʼ, we find a simple, but «potentially efficient» rubber-springed synth-pop riff that eats up everything else about the song (including a vivacious funky guitar part that is only properly audible for about two bars), except for the multi-tracked vocals which try, a bit, to push you in the direction of escapist idealism, but hardly succeed — too glossy and plastic is the processing, too expressionless the singing. And, once again, it's just one repetitive idea bouncing up and down for the entire duration of the song.

 

As usual, those tunes that are vocally dominated by Sutherland are a trifle more accessible and enjoyable: ʽW.O.W.ʼ (which is actually short for ʽWalking On Waterʼ) sounds like Enya on am­phetamines, and at least its icy romanticism passes the «credible» mark. But even Sutherland ul­timately embarrasses herself on the «Prince-for-five-year-olds» bubbly dance groove of ʽThat Beepʼ and on the robotic electro-funk of ʽDenial Styleʼ.

 

Actually, the phrase «significantly less emphasis on the dance beats» that I used above by no means is supposed to say that the dance beats have gone away — on the contrary, about 80% of the album can still be formally qualified as «dance-pop». The difference is that the beats are get­ting softer, and, most importantly, no longer stimulate the singers into behaving like a bunch of overworked DJs with no sense of taste or measure. But for some weird reason, they still insist on having a «body-oriented» underbelly to most of these tunes — even if, whatever that particular essence of Architecture In Helsinki could be, it is not in any way related to dance music. It's as if, oh, I don't know, Bob Dylan got so infatuated with Italian opera that he would try to imitate Pavarotti on every one of his records, ignoring the critical horror and the dwindling record sales. Same type of silliness, if on a smaller scale — quite a natural cause for a thumbs down.

 

NOW + 4EVA (2014)

 

1) In The Future; 2) When You Walk In The Room; 3) I Might Survive; 4) Dream A Little Crazy; 5) (Boom) 4EVA; 6) U Tell Me; 7) Echo; 8) Born To Convince You; 9) 2 Time; 10) April; 11) Before Tomorrow.

 

Okay, even I have to admit that the idea of crossing indie twee-pop with Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez sounds «totally batshit crazy» rather than «disgustingly commercial». But, in fact, this is exactly what Architecture In Helsinki goes after on their fifth album. Almost any of its songs could have been released by any of today's electropopping teen idols — the idea here being some­thing like, «say, what will happen if we take that glossy dance stuff and deconstruct it a bit, with fewer effects and overdubs, maybe even an occasional touch of lo-fi?..»

 

Consequently, guitars and non-electronic instruments are almost completely left out of the picture (with but one or two exceptions that I will touch upon later), but the vocal melodies are improved upon — at the risk of losing it, I'd say that the record probably has a higher percentage of catchy chorus hooks than any previous release by the band. However, it is way too late for this circum­stance to be of much help: these songs are catchy in a «Britney» manner, i. e. silly, vapid hooks devoid of humor, intelligence, or human emotion. On my third listen, I was already distinctively getting the feeling of sitting in a sanitized playground designed for little robot kids. If that was the band's intention, they succeeded admirably, but then this is one of those cases where «total adequacy of intent to realization» does not even begin to equal «good music».

 

Only two of the songs sound like they have anything to do with organic flesh and blood. ʽDream A Little Crazyʼ is an amusing party-oriented «drinking song», melodically a variation on ʽLouie Louieʼ (!) but successfully adding a carnivalesque touch to it. And the closing number ʽBefore Tomorrowʼ is a throwback to the 1970s funk-pop / disco scene that actually features ringing funky guitar riffs, a few lively brass parts, and a credible romantic-optimistic atmosphere that may suck you in without causing any permanent brain damage.

 

Everything else is... well... synthesizers, drum machines, digital soul distilled to the most primi­tive algorithms, and even Autotune-a-plenty. Everything in «homebrewed» indie mode, but that really don't make it «intertextual», «ironic», or «allegoric» unless you are a big, big friend of these guys and feel yourself obliged to come up with some sort of complex justification. ʽAprilʼ is easily one of the worst songs I have ever had the mispleasure of listening to for reviewing pur­poses — at least on their regular material they do not usually go beyond silly hopping, but this here is a faux-ecstatic autotuned electro-ballad. If it is supposed to be a parody on faux-ecstatic autotuned electro-ballads, they forgot to tell. Sounds pretty sincere to me, even coming from a band still named «Architecture In Helsinki».

 

In short, this is just one more example — but this time, one of the most obvious and outrageous — of «Eighties' nostalgia» laid on thick on the already relatively barren musical scene of the 2010s. At least when this kind of crappy dance-pop was made in the Eighties, it was celebrating fresh breakthroughs in technology, production, and cultural style: hicky, vapid, silly, but «pro­gressive» in their own way. But nostalgizing for idiocy? No thank you. Thumbs down. This is simply not fun any more, no matter how much they pretend to be having it.

 

THE ARCTIC MONKEYS

WHATEVER PEOPLE SAY I AM, THAT'S WHAT I'M NOT (2006)

 

1) The View From The Afternoon; 2) I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor; 3) Fake Tales Of San Francisco; 4) Dancing Shoes; 5) You Probably Couldn't See For The Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me; 6) Still Take You Home; 7) Riot Van; 8) Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secure; 9) Mardy Bum; 10) When The Sun Goes Down; 11) From The Ritz To The Rubble; 12) A Certain Romance.

 

In January 2006, British audiences have once again demonstrated that their average tastes are still more «rock-based» and less eroded by the onslaught of crap marketing than the average Ameri­can tastes — by spinning all the way up to No. 1 the debut album of this, still relatively little known, Sheffield band. Critical and commercial response, over a one-year period, have pretty much transformed The Arctic Monkeys into The Jam of their generation, and now it was up to the Monkeys to prove that they had something to offer history that the Jam already had not — or, perhaps, not to prove anything, but simply to fill in the old pair of shoes that, for every new gene­ration, needs to be filled in by a pair of young stinkless feet.

 

But I am in a little trouble here. I have never liked The Jam all that much; I liked Blur and Oasis a lit­tle bit better, but not enough to worship at their altar; and as for the band's more immediate influ­ences including The Strokes and The Libertines — the obvious question is, what kind of space are these influences actually leaving this new band to stand out on its own?

 

No space at all, except for the kind of space that is inevitably provided by the passing of time. Alex Turner (lead vocals, guitar, lyrics), Jamie Cook (guitar), Nick O'Malley (bass), and Matt Helders (drums) are a bunch of kids who grew up in 1990s Britain, and are obviously reflecting 1990s Britain (they are also quite obviously influenced by older music, which they freely admit, but it is safe to assume they grew up on Blur rather than Beatles). They are young, moderately intelligent — the moderate way you'd expect from a bunch of middle-class Sheffield kids — and very, very relevant. So relevant, in fact, that even Gordon Brown had to admit to liking them (say­ing something along the lines of 'they really wake you up in the morning' and sending the whole nation up in hysteria at the thought of the Right Honourable MP hopping in the direction of the bathroom to the bright sounds of 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor').

 

If it is still possible, today, to make interesting music with bass, drums, and two electric guitars with no special effects, then The Arctic Monkeys make interesting music, or at least honestly try to. Their style is «punk pop», with an occasional outburst or two of outside influences like ska, and they are constantly looking for unusual riffs, time signature varieties even within two-minute long songs, and non-trivial decisions for the vocal hooks. Of course, there is never any guarantee that these riffs and hooks are completely fresh — any major connoisseur of punk and pop will be able to trace these elements back thirty years — but, just like The Jam thirty years back, they are seriously striving to create their own brand of songwriting. And (no question about it) they rock; this is not some sort of sanitized alternative bullshit, but a very live, angry, sharp sound.

 

Are the individual songs memorable? To their young audiences, I can imagine, they will be very much so, but against the background of fifty years of guitar-based rock records, they really look like, well, just another guitar-based rock band. Strange enough, the thing that lingered in my own brain longer than anything else was not their riffs, but rather Turner and Co.'s crazy vocal explo­sions — such as 'I don't want to hear you... KICK ME OUT, KICK ME OUT!' ('Fake Tales Of San Francisco'), or the immortal line 'Get on your dancing shoes, you sexy little swine' (sic!!), which I will treasure forever. These, at least, feel more 'immediate' than the melodies — the me­lodies place too much emphasis on smartness, and in the end I am not too sure if I am supposed to just bop and drop to those beats or to view them in a post-modern light, or both.

 

But the saddest thing is that I just cannot appreciate the atmosphere of it all. There is a big, ugly, smelly difference between the whole goddamn aura of Whatever People Say I Am and, let's say, Paul Weller's This Is The Modern World. In the late 1970's, British youth — not all of it, but the smartest part of it — was breathing discontent, and their spiritual leaders were singing and playing about getting out of this fucked-up place. The Arctic Monkeys, children of a (mostly) satisfied and content generation (in relative comparison, of course), are singing and playing about the drugged charms of this fucked-up place. Their attitude may be ironic — I hope it is ironic, at least in part; no, screw that, I know it is ironic, they have too many different words in their lyrics and too many notes in their melodies to be truly dumb — but if so, not many will see the irony, and those that will might think twice about headbanging to this music, which, controversially, is the most natural reaction to it.

 

Whatever People Say I Am is a loud, gruff record about the lives of loud, gruff people living loud, gruff club-lives that tempt them into using only one particular side of their brain, the one that is responsible for animal pleasures. All of the album's twelve songs are like one big concep­tual ensemble of a 12-hour period in the life of a jaded clubber. Typical subjects: [a] music, [b] dancing, [c] drinking, [d] necking / pulling / shagging, [e] talking trash, [f] various other human-level manners of animalizing. Sung in a brawny, disrespectful manner with a thick, almost inten­tionally amplified Yorkshire accent. Accompanied by music that is technically and theoretically «rock» but, once you start thinking about it, owes just as much to the hedonistic synth-pop of Duran Duran (for those who doubt it, Turner has dropped an extra lyrical cue in one of the lines on 'I Bet You Look Good') — and is a perfect match for the lyrical subjects.

 

A perfect symbol of the album's ambiguity is its cover, a photo of one of the band's friends (Chris McClure, frontman of The Violet May) taking a cigarette puff in Liverpool's famous Korova bar in the early morning hours. As a photo, it's an amazing piece of work — few images convey the idea of feeling absolutely terrific and like total shit at the exact same time. As food for thought, though, it's a serious downer. We need not feed ourselves illusions: the majority of the album's audience will simply use it for having a good party time, just like the majority of the Jam's audi­ence would use their music in 1977. However, the minority of the Jam's audience would be likely to sit down, listen, and be prompted into some kind of meaningful action. In the case of the Arc­tic Monkeys, though, I have no idea what the minority of their audience would be prompted into. Going out and simply hanging or shooting themselves is my best guess. 'Get on your dancing shoes, there's one thing on your mind'.

 

I like the Arctic Monkeys, really, I do. They are creative, intelligent, and when you see them playing onstage, they always look like the kind of smug, self-assured pricks that think of the rest of the world as undeserving crap — a very positive and healthy attitude. Even if I forget every single song of theirs tomorrow, today I still give this album a thumbs up for all the stimulating it does. I simply happen to hate the world that has produced the Arctic Monkeys. Clubbers, party animals, hipsters, Korova bars, 'banging tunes and DJ sets', 'lad at the side drinking a Smirnoff Ice came and paid for her Tro­pical Reef', 'classic Reeboks or knackered Converse' — could we have a hydrogen bomb for all that stuff and all the causes that cause that stuff and all the reasons underlying the causes that cause that stuff, too? Pretty please.

 

FAVOURITE WORST NIGHTMARE (2007)

 

1) Brianstorm; 2) Teddy Picker; 3) D Is For Dangerous; 4) Balaclava; 5) Fluorescent Adolescent; 6) Only Ones Who Know; 7) Do Me A Favour; 8) This House Is A Circus; 9) If You Were There, Beware; 10) The Bad Thing; 11) Old Yellow Bricks; 12) 505.

 

This review will not be lengthy, because I have pretty much said it all before. On their sophomore effort, the boys continue doing the same old thing — constructing brainy patterns of multi-riff sequences, setting them to sharp, but convoluted lyrics, and recording them in a Brit-pop-punk style with Jam/Blur as the backbone and randomized influences, ranging from the Smiths to Du­ran Duran, as the muscle. Please support them financially if you like this description.

 

Well, perhaps there is one difference: instead of writing lyrics about deadend clublife, Alex Tur­ner is now writing lyrics just about everything, from flight experiences to character assassinations to things that cannot be decoded at all. Unfortunately, there is very little about this new, conven­tion-free writing style that catches the eye, except for an occasional Duran Duran quote ('I don't want your prayers, save it for the morning after') or smarmy references to the Wizard of Oz.

 

Also, even though they are very intent on putting together new sets of chords rather than re­cy­cling the old ones, second time around they come up with an even lesser number of interesting sets than before — these riffs are just too smart and «mathematical» to rock out to, yet too simplistic to admire from a constructionist's point of view. Besides, they, too, have their limits; I started out seriously liking the main theme of 'Teddy Picker' — before realizing that it is merely a minor twist on the main theme of 'Fake Tales Of San Francisco'. So, intuition tells me that there is pro­bably a lot more lazy rewriting going on here than I suspect — if only I could remember what the «original» melodies on Whatever sounded like.

 

The two other singles were 'Brianstorm' (sic, about some guy named Brian — not Jones, just some random guy named Brian), which does sound like a storm but completely passes by me every time I put it on; and 'Fluorescent Adolescent', a very nice, but not jaw-dropping, piece of hyper-British hypersarcasm ('you used to get it in your fishnets, now you only get it in your night dress') that sounds like it could have been a stolen outtake from Blur's Parklife.

 

The other songs — no idea if they really deserve any special mention (e. g., many people rave about how clever it was to take an Ennio Morricone organ sample and use it as the start to '505'. DUH?) A very typical «so­phomore slump», if you ask me, but perhaps you just shouldn't ask. Thumbs down, say the brain and the heart in a quintessentially Russian situation of «tan­de­mocracy».

 

HUMBUG (2009)

 

1) My Propeller; 2) Crying Lightning; 3) Dangerous Animals; 4) Secret Door; 5) Potion Approaching; 6) Fire And The Thud; 7) Cornerstone; 8) Dance Little Liar; 9) Pretty Visitors; 10) The Jeweller's Hands.

 

Now the Monkeys have most certainly stepped on the path of evolution, and should be dubbed the Arctic Paranthropi. Reports on Humbug have varied accordingly, from insulted cries of be­tra­yal to placated admissions of growing up. But then Alex Turner and his buddies never took the sacred AC/DC oath of forever staying true to one style, and, with their implicit claims of intel­lectuality and twenty-first century smartness, it was inevitable that sooner or later they would get bored with bare-bones rock'n'roll, no matter how multiangular they made it.

 

It is, however, hard to define their new direction. They slow down the tempos; bring in more of the old stu­dio tricks (echo, reverb, delay, etc.); variegate the instrumentation, throwing in organs and a bit of old-fashioned synths and even some glockenspiel; and entrust Turner with new algo­rithms to encrypt his lyrics, so that most of the time you do not have the faintest idea what they are singing about. (Detailed analysis shows they are still mostly singing about getting some, and if you listen carefully, you will be rewarded with such great hookup lines as "Coax me out, my love, and have a spin of my propeller" and "Yours is the only ocean that I want to swing from, yours is the only ocean that I want to hang on to". How the heck can you swing from an ocean?).

 

In the end, Humbug is decidedly darker than its predecessors, who themselves were no joyfests either. Turner assumes a sinister, impenetrable stance, sucking in a mix of Ian Curtis/Nick Cave influences, and each second song is extremely bass-heavy, sometimes bordering on metallic. (Not coincidentally, one of the bonus tracks on the Japanese edition is a straightahead — and excellent — cover of Cave's 'Red Right Hand'.) But it is all very much a matter of bluff: this kind of preten­tious darkness only works when there is substance behind it. Is there?

 

If there is, I have yet to sense it. For the most part, it feels like a bunch of well-meaning manne­risms. The guitars howl, the bass growls, the vocalist insinuates some eerie crap, the production is all wobbly and echoey, but no matter how hard the magician's apprentice tries to master the spell, the magic just isn't there. Some songs are more memorable than others: I count stronger hooks on 'My Propeller', 'Crying Lightning', 'Potion Approaching' (the most energetic number on the al­bum), and 'Dance Little Liar', but even these could have been written by anyone. Not a single riff on here manages to shake my foundations in the slightest way possible. Not a single lyrical bit manages to convince me that they have something all their own to tell me. They just love their old heroes and they want to be like them. But they have no power to be like them.

 

Yes, sadly, it all means the simplest of things: the Monkeys have brains and ambitions, but very little musical talent — or, putting it more optimistically, their talents are still waiting to be shook up and awakened. Nowhere is this more evident than on the final tune: 'The Jeweller's Hands' has a long, atmospheric coda that is presumably supposed to leave the listener in an overwhelmed state of «depressed beauty», but they lack the power to pull it off properly, and all of their wailing gui­tars and melancholy choruses just go to waste. There is no reason whatsoever for anyone to vo­lun­ta­rily submit to their third-rate hypnosis. It is all too trivial. I applaud the desire to change, the escape from the pigeonhole, the smartness, the coolness. Now how about writing some good songs, guys? Thumbs down.

 

SUCK IT AND SEE (2011)

 

1) She's Thunderstorms; 2) Black Treacle; 3) Brick By Brick; 4) The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala; 5) Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair; 6) Library Pictures; 7) All My Own Stunts; 8) Reckless Serenade; 9) Piledriver Waltz; 10) Love Is A Laserquest; 11) Suck It And See; 12) That's Where You're Wrong.

 

The band's fourth consecutive No. 1 album in the UK continues to prove that The Arctic Mon­keys are a brute force to be reckoned with, but why that is is still anybody's guess. Seems like everybody loves these guys anyway, so why in the hell bother explaining what it is they set out to accomplish in the first place? Just suck it, brother, and you'll see. (The title, by the way, comes from a grafitti in Clockwork Orange, and had the luck of getting censored over with a sticker in some corners of the world, further increasing its popularity).

 

Musically, it is sort of a «return to roots», or, rather, a dialectical synthesis of the Monkeys' initial style with the artsy-intellectual excesses of Humbug. The songs are generally more immediate and, quantitatively, kick a larger square area of ass than the previous time, but Turner's lyrics and ways of delivering them are, if possible, even more convoluted and «mysterious»: gone for good are the days of focusing on local nighttime hipster culture — the Humbug way of grimly delive­ring pseudo-messages has so pleased the man that he has fixed it permanently.

 

To be fair, about half of these songs seem to be love confessions, written on a perilous quest for the Ultimate Metaphor — you know, the one that is sitting locked high up in the tower guarded by fire-breathing Clichés and Embarrassments. For the most part, Turner does well on the quest, contributing neat little touches that do not always register upon first listen/consideration. Like, for instance, just how much «neater» is the song title/chorus 'She's Thunderstorms' than 'She's Like A Thunderstorm'? Or how often do you tell your partner that "your love is like a studded leather headlock... you're rarer than a can of dandelion and burdock"?

 

On the other hand, everyone is engaging in original metaphors these days, stretching the abilities of language as far as they can be stretched (and they still are stretchable). But does it go hand-in-hand with great music? Not exactly. By this time, the general style of the Monkeys is recogni­zable, but their ability to come up with first-rate pop riffs is still close to zero: 'Brick By Brick', a psycho-garage monster oozing «ringing brutality» with mathematical precision, is the only song to have made a lasting musical impression on me. Vocal melodies fare a little better, particularly on the more lyrical numbers like 'She's Thunderstorms' and 'Reckless Serenade', but not enough to wring out tears or anything.

 

The biggest ongoing problem with the Monkeys is that it is still impossible to understand just how much real bite these guys are threatening. A song like 'Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair' sounds all mean and lean, with a grumbly metal-pop riff sitting it through and Turner allowing you to "go into business with a grizzly bear" in the snottiest, snarliest tone he can put to­gether, but... is this for real? Who exactly is he flailing his fist at? His girlfriend? His record com­pany? His listeners? The Fifth Earl of Chesterfield? What is really disturbing is that it's not just the lyrics that are confusing, it is the whole way of doing it — all of the time, staying tight in con­trol, cool, calm, and collected. For a musicologist, dissecting Suck It And See may be fun, so close it is to «math-rock» in some of its jagged angles. But everyone else just gets the same old thing — an album that is too well-calculated to attract the genuine spirit of rock'n'roll, yet too bluffy and obscure for obscurity's sake to be revered on a «brainy» level.

 

'Brick By Brick' is fun, though. Certainly not to be missed in a world where the art of fun keeps getting re­duced to FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN.

 

AM (2013)

 

1) Do I Wanna Know; 2) R U Mine; 3) One For The Road; 4) Arabella; 5) I Want It All; 6) No. 1 Party Anthem; 7) Mad Sounds; 8) Fireside; 9) Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High; 10) Snap Out Of It; 11) Knee Socks; 12) I Wanna Be Yours.

 

Either I am getting dangerously used to this band, or this is not only the best Arctic Monkeys album ever, but the first real, authentic proof of why these guys did need to get together in the first place, even if took them seven years to finally whip it out. I have no idea what happened. Maybe they all sat down, took a long time to think, ponder over the responsibility that undeser­vedly gained fame and fortune piles upon the aspiring artist, then took a solemn vow not to leave the studio until the «no-filler» principle reached a Beatlesque level. Not that the songs are in any way Beatlesque as such. They are simply all good, and it puzzles me.

 

Atmosphere-wise, AM once again cuts down on aggressive rock'n'roll and returns to the moody darkness of Humbug (see ʽMy Propellerʼ and all that follows), but this time, the darkness has been shaped and beaten into a much more precise form — presuming memorable riffs and evoca­tive choruses, not to mention some very clever use of vocal harmonies. As if to state that they no longer plant their trust in bashing the hell out of everything, ʽDo I Wanna Know?ʼ opens the re­cord with the sound of a drum machine, which could just as easily have been a regular drum part, but the song is not about drumming — it is about a dark night setting where the protagonist, drunk, bitter, depressed, but still retaining some cool, reflects on whether there is still a chance at reconnecting with his other half, and it works astonishingly well, with the feeling perfectly ex­pressed by the melodic hard riffage and the contrast between Turner's irritated, sarcastic solo parts in the verses and the group's choir harmonies on the "Crawling back to you..." chorus.

 

Pretty much the same mood permeates the rest of the tracks, so that the entire album shares this nocturnal mood — not a dreamy, romantic, candle-lit night, but a bit of a werewolfish one, ex­acerbated by way too many cups of coffee, cigarettes, and self-revving-up into a state of rather inexplainable nervous tension. No other tune gets this more right than ʽArabellaʼ. Starts out quietly, grim syncopated bassline against lonesome guitar howls and hoots, then rapidly switches to «Sabbath» mode for a threatening bridge where Turner's singing is performed in a call-and-response pattern with the heavy guitar riff rather than in complete tandem with it, and this helps make both sides more imposing. Technically, it's a love song, with Alex serenading a mystical lady who "got a Seventies' head, but she's a modern lover" — but arranged as a complex heavy rocker, giving a fairly brutal edge to the romance.

 

Another excellent example — the aptly titled ʽFiresideʼ, but, again, it's not about cuddling down by the fireside, it's about how "Isn't it hard to make up your mind / When you're losing / And your fuse is fireside?": a tense, paranoid rocker, driven mostly by acoustic guitar, which keeps ringing out like an alarm system. The devil is in the tiny details — such as, for instance, the extra alarm signal from the organ that gets turned on just as Alex switches tonality on the third line of the verse. This sudden attention to subtle detail, or, at least, to meaningful and immediately notice­able sudden detail, is really a new turn for the Monkeys, as is a penchant for cleverer, ticklier riffs — check out ʽKnee Socksʼ with its poppy melody, sounding a little like Suzanne Vega with dis­tortion, or the martial grunt of ʽI Want It Allʼ, which echoes Sabbath's ʽChildren Of The Graveʼ, but with a psychedelic twist instead of an apocalyptic one (with falsetto choruses and colorfully tinged lead guitar melting your mind against the heavy riffage).

 

When they start sentimentalizing the mood and slowing things down, nothing disastrous happens, either: ʽNo. 1 Party Anthemʼ goes a bit too heavy on the "come on come on come on" refrain, but the arrangement, the singing, and the vocal resolution of the chorus all gamble on «grand» and end up winning the pot. On ʽMad Soundsʼ, they try their hand at the good old R&B formula, and, astonishingly, it also works — with a long, subtle buildup to the "ooh la la la"'s of the chorus, which they ironically play upon in the lyrics: "...you just can't figure out what went wrong / Then out of nowhere, somebodcy comes and hits you with a... / Ooh la la la, ooh la la la...".

 

Of course, the Arctic Monkeys had been a «midnight-oriented» band from the very start. And, of course, the Arctic Monkeys never had, and still do not have, any grand, all-penetrating artistic vision that could shake the foundations of one's existence. They started out as relatively shallow hipsters, way too bent on proving their cool to have much time left for anything else. But if AM (their best album title so far, by the way), with its one-track orientation, does not pretend to sol­ving the problems of the universe any more than its predecessors, there is at least nothing shal­lowly-hipsterish about it any longer, or, at the very least, they have learned to make music that can be enjoyed by a much wider audience than «cool people for the sake of coolness». Jealous lovers, pissed-off losers, old-school power pop and hard rock fans, all of those and other catego­ries of listeners are bound to find something in common with the spirit of these tunes.

 

Whether this enthusiastic thumbs up is going to be an accidental exception or the start of a new, mature band cannot be predicted, but I am fairly sure that this new «midnight rock» formula is viable and, with the appropriate effort, could be advanced to even further heights. Another album like this and I might be joining Gordon Brown on account of this band.

 

 

ART BRUT

BANG BANG ROCK & ROLL (2005)

 

1) Formed A Band; 2) My Little Brother; 3) Emily Kane; 4) Rusted Guns Of Milan; 5) Modern Art; 6) Good Week­end; 7) Bang Bang Rock And Roll; 8) Fight; 9) Moving To L. A.; 10) Bad Weekend; 11) Stand Down; 12) 18,000 Lira.

 

If the lovable Gumbies from Monty Python's Flying Circus decided to get together and play rock'n'roll, they would, most likely, sound like Art Brut — not forgetting that behind the retarded characters of the Gumbies hide the hyper-intellectual personalities of the Pythonites, and that be­hind the carefully staged low-class dumbness of Art Brut hide the personalities of... who are these guys anyway?

 

Obviously, garage- and punk-rock are still alive and kicking, and will be so until there are no more honestly aggressive, but smart young people left in the world (MTV is working hard on sol­ving that problem, but give it a bit more time to come up with the ultimate solution). But it is not every day that a punk band with a fresh new twist comes along, and this here is definitely a fresh new twist. Instead of joining the usual crowd of deadly serious anti-social rockers who hardly know the difference between a guitar and a Tommy gun, Art Brut play it with the utmost in irony ('it's not irony', lead singer Eddie Argos objects on one of the tracks, only further convincing everyone for miles around that it is).

 

Whenever people start talking about Art Brut, they cannot help from spurting out tons of lyrical quotes — understandably, because this band is mainly about the lyrics. The music is run-of-the-mill garage noise, a bit more complex than the Ramones and very nicely retro-arranged, but no­thing to write home about (and some of the riffs are just irreverently copped from golden oldies, e. g. the intro to 'Good Weekend' is 'Let's Dance' by the Monkees and suchlike). Lead vocalist Eddie Argos, in age-honed punk fashion, never ever sings, but just speaks or shouts out the words. Alto­gether, they synthesize a good drive, but good drive alone hardly suffices to throw you over the threshold; you have to feed it with great melodies or great attitude.

 

Well, they do have great attitude. Normally, a single chorus line shouted over and over again is guaranteed to stick in the brain, but the process is painful and even shameful if it is a bland, banal, hyperseriously taken chorus line. However, how can you go wrong with 'Formed a band! We formed a band! Look at us — we formed a band!' Or with 'My! Little! Brother! Just Discovered Rock And Roll! My! Little! Brother! Just Discovered Rock And Roll! There's A Noise In His Head And He's Out Of Control!' (Sung over a clone of the melody of The Clash's 'London Cal­ling', no less). Or with 'Modern Art! Makes Me! Want To Rock Out! Modern Art! Makes Me! Want To Rock Out!' Or with 'I can't stand the sound of the — Velvet Underground!' (Backing vocals go 'white light, white heat!' at the same time).

 

This is my dutiful share of the album's lyrics, but believe me, there is much more than that. Not coincidentally, Art Brut attracted the admiring attention of Pixies' founder Frank Black, who even went on to produce one of their albums — their groove is wedged in the tradition that covers the ground between the Stooges and the Ramones, but their absurdism and irony far surpasses the basic level of the Ramones and is, indeed, much better aligned with the post-modern excesses of the Pixies. Except that Frank Black you could accuse of being «pretentious», while these guys are completely unassailable from such an angle. At least in the narrow sense of the term: if by «pretentious» we simply mean «claiming to have something important to say», then Art Brut are, by all means, quite pretentious.

 

But they really do have something important to say. They may seem like they are singing about themselves, yet, in fact, they are singing about everybody else. Irony is their deadly weapon, with which they exterminate their dim-witted competition: bands that do suppose they are the shit just because they'd mustered the intelligence to get together ('Formed A Band'), street gangs whose norm and ideal of significant communicative expression is a good punch in the nose ('Fight'), braindead sex-obsessed teens ('Good Weekend', which includes what is arguably the band's most oft quoted line — 'I've seen her naked TWICE!'), and what is likely Art Brut's primary target — the hipster crowd, which they hate with my own kind of passion ('Modern Art'; 'Moving To LA', about 'drinking Hennessy with Morrissey' etc.).

 

Certainly this is not a «masterpiece»: it is way too dependent on its inspirations and way too limi­ted in its goals to advance the band to some sort of top rank. But its limited goals are masterfully achieved, and its thirty minutes, particularly if you are paying close attention to whatever Eddie has got to say to you, fly by almost unnoticed. Many people have a soft spot for headbanging al­bums that make fun of headbangers — this is possibly the best representative of the genre in the «noughties», and it happens to perfectly fit in with my conception of good humor, which automa­tically guarantees an intellectual-and-emotional thumbs up.

 

IT'S A BIT COMPLICATED (2007)

 

1) Pump Up The Volume; 2) Direct Hit; 3) St. Pauli; 4) People In Love; 5) Late Sunday Evening; 6) I Will Survive; 7) Post Soothing Out; 8) Blame It On The Trains; 9) Sound Of Summer; 10) Nag Nag Nag Nag; 11) Jealous Guy.

 

Second time around, the exact same groove will obviously not sound as fresh. With the element of surprise and shock gone, and nothing else taking its place, It's A Bit Complicated is a bit com­plicated to adore the same way it was possible to adore Bang Bang. As clever as Argos and company show themselves to be, too much cleverness can be dangerous; and since these guys' main strength is in their lyrics rather than in their loins, I mean, riffs — once the joke starts get­ting old, they are all over and done with.

 

And the joke does start getting a little old. At the very least, it starts getting less obvious and in your face, meaning that I, for instance, have to strain myself somewhat to get it, and what good is an Art Brut album where it is necessary to strain oneself to get it? 'Formed a band, we formed a band!' and 'My little brother just discovered rock'n'roll!' were ready-made slogans with near-uni­versal appeal, immediately forcing you to acknowledge the band's presence. On It's A Bit Com­plicated, in contrast, nothing is ready-made, you have to cook it yourself. Thirty three minutes, high temperature, constant survey and flipping required, results not guaranteed.

 

Some riffs are good — the anthemic U2-ish line that drives 'Nag Nag Nag Nag', the cute love theme of 'People In Love', the brutal stomp of 'St. Pauli' — but the overall quality is certainly not enough to make this any more stupendous musically than Bang Bang. As for the lyrics, they seem way too frequently to drift into more intimate territory, focused more on the grotesque sides of personal relationships than on the absurdities of society ('Jealous Guy', 'Late Sunday Evening'), etc. — and it does not help much that they continue strictly adhering to the principle of repeating each chorus (and, sometimes, each verse) as many times as it takes to get the Gumby effect. But it is not nearly as funny when the repeated chorus sounds something like 'There's nothing that's been done that can't be undone / You were sick, now you're better, there's work to be done' or 'People in love lie around and get fat / I didn't want us to end up like that' (admittedly, the latter is funny, but lots of things in life are funny).

 

Overall, this is not a good sign: the lyrics are more boring, the melodies are not improving, and the groove has been carved in stone. I do not want to officially tag this as a good or bad album, because, although on the surface it is not very pleasant, the Art Brut vibe still sort of transcends the line between good and evil — like one of their role models, the Ramones, whose only album worth of sacred admiration is the first one, but who never really ever made a truly bad record be­cause you could not put down or corrupt the vibe. But perhaps it's a bit too complicated, after all.

 

ART BRUT VS. SATAN (2009)

 

1) Alcoholics Unanimous; 2) DC Comics And Chocolate Milkshake; 3) The Passenger; 4) Am I Normal?; 5) What A Rush; 6) Demons Out!; 7) Slap Dash For No Cash; 8) The Replacements; 9) Twist And Shout; 10) Summer Job; 11) Mysterious Bruises; 12*) Just Desserts; 13*) Catch.

 

Finally, Art Brut and their idol/admirer Frank Black get to work together. Come to think of it, it is not exactly clear why this band would need a «producer» at all — as long as they can properly plug in their instruments and get a part-time recording engineer assistant to keep the tapes rolling, this is pretty much everything that an Art Brut album requires. But, on the other hand, if we are simply talking about a chance to hang out and exchange one or two creative ideas, then perhaps it was the presence of Black Francis that freshened things up a bit.

 

«A bit» is the strongest measure of degree that I can mention, because, as long as Art Brut hold on to their groove, it will always hover somewhere just below the level of 'Formed A Band' and 'My Little Brother'. But intuition does cautiously suggest that the melodies may be a little more memorable, and that the lyrics may be back to the same level of sharpness that we first saw from these guys; at the very least, this time around very few songs are about relationships — boring, boring, boring! — and many more are about mocking the average representative of the consume­rist society — fun, fun, fun.

 

Certainly It's A Bit Complicated had nothing approaching the simplistic genius of 'The Replace­ments', a song whose riff has fewer chords than the average Ramones song but which, for some reason, I do not remember having heard on any Ramones record, and whose lyrics adequately sum up the brainset of the intellectually challenged music fan, spoilt to utter hopelessness by rea­ding one too many bad reviews: 'So many bands are just putting it on / Why can't they be the same as their songs?.. / I can't believe I've only just discovered the Replacements / Some of them are nearly as old as my parents!'

 

Nor did it have anything of the caliber of 'DC Comics And Chocolate Milkshake' — a song that some reviewers have called the ultimate anthem of arrested development, forgetting, out of mode­sty, to mention that, with lyrics like 'DC comics and chocolate milkshake, some things will al­ways be great; DC comics and chocolate milkshake, even though I'm twenty-eight', this is really the ultimate anthem of about half of the first world's population. And finally, finally someone got the guts to come out and ask the Artist's Most Important Questions: 'How can you sleep at night when nobody likes the music we like? How am I supposed to sleep at night when no one likes the music we write? Record buying public, we hate them — this is Art Brut versus Satan!' ('Demons Out!'). So many times we heard people implying these questions in cryptic, convoluted forms; it is so refreshing that these guys at least do not beat around the bush like everyone else.

 

Whether the last song, 'Mysterious Bruises', deserves its seven minute length — an obviously in­tentional and provocative breach of the aesthetic norm — is debatable, given that it is essentially a repetitive account of the protagonist's unhappy party experience ('I've had one Zirtec, two Advil, with a drink that made me feel invincible'). But it did manage to supply the album's second-most quoted paraphrase: 'I fought the floor, and the floor won!' (The first-most is 'Cool your warm jets, Brian Eno!' off 'Slap Dash For No Cash').

 

So Art Brut Vs. Satan is hardly a kind of record one would use as a bait for new fans, but it works fine as a device to re-encourage the old ones and earn the band a couple extra critical po­ints. If these guys need to go on, and if you need to hear more of them, the album is a surefire thumbs up album; and if they do not, and if you do not, either, you should have stopped reading this a long time ago anyway.

 

BRILLIANT! TRAGIC! (2011)

 

1) Clever, Clever Jazz; 2) Lost Weekend; 3) Bad Comedian; 4) Sexy; 5) Is Dog Eared; 6) Martin Kemp; 7) Axl Rose; 8) I Am The Psychic; 9) Ice Hockey; 10) Sealand.

 

Eddie Argos has openly proclaimed this to be Art Brut's best album so far, but I believe that's just marketing. After all, if you are going to make your fourth record sound exactly like the previous three, you have to point the potential buyer's mind in the right direction. Now everyone who va­lues Eddie Argos' opinion will spend hours, days, weeks of their formerly precious time trying to decode all the subtle differences and G-E-T what it is exactly that makes Brilliant! Tragic! so brilliant. Which, in the logical end, is somewhat tragic.

 

No cosmetic changes this time: the band is still the same, and Frank Black remains in charge as producer. Bassist Freddy Feedback's backup vocals and a few lines of actual singing from Eddie (mostly confined to the line "Goodbye, don't cry" on 'Ice Hockey', hearing which makes it easy to under­stand the reluctance to use his voice as a musical instrument earlier on) are by far the only thing that makes a difference. That, and the near-total absence of fast and furious rock'n'roll, as the band drowns itself in either alt-rock-sludgy or indie-rock-fudgy mid-tempo.

 

'Ice Hockey' and 'Is Dog Eared', at five and a half and six minutes respectively, are brave attempts to pull themselves out of the trench they dug out for themselves with Bang Bang — brave, but ultimately useless, since neither gives any clear indication of where exactly they could be heading. Uh... art rock? 'Ice Hockey' is sort of like a tribute to David Bowie's space sagas, with multi-sec­tioning, moody acoustic intros, heavy-psychedelic guitar tones, astral voice overdubs, but it is way too crude and boring to be parody or kitsch, and way too primitive (not to mention out of place) to be a source of real inspiration. Maybe it was Mr. Black Francis pushing the band in that kind of territory, but it is simply not the kind of territory on which they will ever feel safe. They may be inspired by the Pixies, yes, but they will never become the next Pixies.

 

Whatever be, they are still at their best when they are just being good old Art Brut. The album's saving grace are Eddie's seemingly infinite waves of wisecracking, never lost on the critics — critics, being smart guys (or, more precisely, Smart Guys™) themselves, love other smart guys, and here are some samples of smartness for you:

 

"Clever clever jazz, man — sorry that doesn't sound like it's planned — we're working in a genre you don't understand"; "He's a bad comedian, I don't know what you see in him" (okay, that one doesn't really look all that smart outside of its context); "I want to be played in the background / While a couple drinks their wine / That would be a triumph, with a voice like mine"; "I want to give the world the finger / With the exception of my favourite lead singer... When the world's got you by the fucking throat / Who'd you want in your corner? AXL ROSE!"; "People in love lie around and get fat — I think I'm okay with that". Admit it, that's smart. And funny.

 

It is just that all this wicked sarcasm, masquerading as post-modern sacrilege, sort of gets lost in the haze: most of the lyrics aren't even discernible through the noise, and riff-wise, Brilliant! is the least satisfactory Art Brut album so far. Perhaps I need to rephrase that: it is their most «Art», but their least «Brut» album so far, and I have always preferred them for the latter rather than the former. Furthermore, we cannot even understand if they really are a one-trick pony or if they are capable of other kinds of goodness — because each and every attempt at broadening the palette so far has been feeble and tentative, and the results were neither here nor there. Perhaps it's high time Black Francis actually ditched them; his presence clearly does not help.

AUSTRA

FEEL IT BREAK (2011)

 

1) Darken Her Horse; 2) Lose It; 3) The Future; 4) Beat And The Pulse; 5) Spellwork; 6) The Choke; 7) Hate Crime; 8) The Villain; 9) Shoot The Water; 10) The Noise; 11) The Beast.

 

Here's even more proof that Canada might truly be taking the lead in the artistic creativity race in the 21st century. You might be a fan of Justin Bieber and Carly Rae Jepsen, or you might be more into Arcade Fire and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but you're gonna have to serve somebody... actually, there's a good chance that Toronto-based, progressively-oriented Katie Stelmanis and her main musical project, Austra, might appeal, for different reasons, to both audiences. She's into electronics, she's into strong rhythm, she's into darkness and Freudism, she's into Debussy and opera, everybody go take your pick.

 

Artsy synth-pop with stylistically monotonous arrangements, high-pitched vocalizing, and lyrics that only make sense to the singer and her personal deity of choice can be a real pain in the ass, if all of this is not handled properly and is there only to make a point like «I like music and they told me it only counts if you push forward boundaries, so I'm pushing like crazy, really I am». In the worst case, you get somebody like Zola Jesus, to whom Austra's music has frequently been compared (in fact, Austra's music has frequently been compared to all female-fronted, dark-over­toned synth-pop ensembles, because Big Brother demands instantaneous reference points): lots of pretense, lots of stunning visual images, and no truly interesting music behind it.

 

But in the best case, you get Austra, or at least, this, dare I say it, genuinely brilliant debut album from Austra, to whose brilliancy Austra, like so many other bands out there, will probably never live up again. The difference? Most people will say Katie Stelmanis' classically-trained voice, with its impressive range, perfectly held vibrato, great capacities of modulation, and a strange aura of nervousness and vulnerability, as if she's either impersonating a human on the verge of being transformed into a robot, or a robot on the verge of being humanized. There's great poten­tial here to sound whiny, obnoxious, and irritating, but I sense a healthy balance between technique, mannerism, and genuine feeling, enough to earn my sympathy even if most of the time I have no idea what she is singing about (and neither might she; we can only hope that lines like "I want your blood, I want it in my hair" and "The morning I saw your face again, I was made into a beast" are not deeply encoded hints at a criminal past).

 

However, it is not Stelmanis' singing that makes Feel It Break sound really special. All the tracks are credited to Austra as a band, so we also have to mention Katie's old colleague Maya Postepski on drums (yes, there are real drums here, though electronically processed as per regulation) and Dorian Wolf on bass — yet the melodies are probably Katie's general responsibility as well, and as much as I am usually wary of synth-pop, there are some truly stellar parts on here. So many people these days (or any days, actually), when making electronic-based pop, take out the easy way, relying on simple stock phrasing with the idea that music should simply provide the groove, while the main melodic burden will be placed on vocal hooks, that it is nothing less but a tremen­dous relief to hear a whole album of tracks where this ideology is reversed.

 

Perhaps the best example of this approach is ʽBeat And The Pulseʼ, a song where the vocals do not even enter in the picture until the groove, with all of its counterpoints, has become fully estab­lished at about 1:30 into the song. It does not take more than the opening chords to understand that the author of the track is probably a big fan of Beethoven's 5th, and even though it would take a bit more genius and a tad more equipment to make an electronic tribute to Beethoven's 5th, ʽBeat And The Pulseʼ succeeds at a different task — creating a cold, robotic sonic environment that feels equally influenced by 19th century romanticism and 20th century Kraftwerk. The way those two «waves» of synthesizer chords wash over each other, and are then attenuated further by subtle bell toll and dripping ah-ah vocal harmonies, creates an atmosphere of stern, but soft doom busily spun right before your very eyes — really great texture here.

 

Elsewhere, the atmosphere is usually more sensual and bitter-romantic, but the base principles of work remain the same. ʽLose Itʼ, the second single, does largely get by on the strength of the vocals — namely, the unforgettable falsetto vocalizing of the chorus, reflecting Katie's former training as an opera singer — but the third single, ʽSpellworkʼ, would have been equally great as a fully instrumental piece: it produces a cool cavernous sound out of the juxtaposition of the deep rumbling neo-disco bassline and the crystal-tinkling, water-dripping lead overdubs. But then there are also such wonderful album-only tracks as ʽThe Futureʼ, which begins with a simple baroque piano flourish and then takes on a kaleidoscopic look with multiple small interlocking keyboard and vocal parts; ʽHate Crimeʼ, where the kaleidoscope turns even more psychedelic by means of adding extra sound effects like phasing; and ʽShoot The Waterʼ which, with its boppy bouncing rhythmic structure and fairy wood vocal harmonies, sounds like it could have easily fit onto Kate Bush's The Dreaming (think ʽThere Goes A Tennerʼ, but with a darker mood).

 

With this much creativity going on, there's not even a good reason to discuss what it is all about. Stelmanis' words generally feel like they are there simply for allowing her to practice her vocal gymnastics; if you try to invest too much meaning into all these choruses ("don't wanna sympa­thize with the darkness!", "shoot the water, baby, I've been found!", "arise sweet demon and have your say!"), you might find yourself wondering what the hell you have been doing with your life one day. There may be a bit of politics here, but mostly it's the same old me-and-you, with the singer not afraid of a little provocation every once in a while ("I came so hard in your mouth" is an actual line in ʽThe Futureʼ) — like sort of a dark reflection of Beach House, with the warm magic vibe replaced by a cold sorcery one. And even if all the songs share the same vibe, Katie's diligent attention to the melodic side of the music perfectly justifies this.

 

Only on the last track, ʽThe Beastʼ, does she switch over to a regular piano, and, strangely but perhaps predictably, the results are not as interesting — the entire piece rests on two chords and, as such, sounds suspiciously similar to Adele's ʽHometown Gloryʼ. I still accept it as a suitable gesture of farewell that slips in a little acoustic warmth next to all the electronic coldness, wrap­ping things up in style — a style that, to me, sounds derivative, but still not deprived of its own intriguing identity. At the very least, as far as 21st century synth-pop goes, Feel It Break has to qualify as a nice, fresh take on a thirty-year old style; and I'm sure Depeche Mode would love to have added something as juicily doom-laden as ʽBeat And The Pulseʼ to their own catalog. Thumbs up, of course.

 

OLYMPIA (2013)

 

1) What We Done?; 2) Forgive Me; 3) Painful Like; 4) Sleep; 5) Home; 6) Fire; 7) I Don't Care (I'm A Man); 8) We Become; 9) Reconcile; 10) Annie (Oh Muse, You); 11) You Changed My Life; 12) Hurt Me Now.

 

Just as I feared, the talents of Kate «Still Not Bush» Stelmanis are one-sided after all: sufficient to craft a well-working formula, insufficient to avoid getting trapped by that formula. Even though she and the rest of Austra had plenty of time to write and record the sophomore follow-up, and even though she claimed to have taken even better care of the production, and even if that album cover looks even more stylish (Bryan Ferry would probably get all ecstatic about that choice of... umm, colors), Olympia remains nowhere near as exciting as Feel It Break, at least, as far as my formerly stunned ears are telling me at the moment.

 

The big difference is that the melodic base of the songs has become less challenging. The general textures remain the same, but the keyboard riffs are significantly simpler and more «back­groundish» — not coincidentally, there is nothing here like the careful 90-second instrumental build-up of ʽBeat And The Pulseʼ, because the emphasis is always on the singing, almost never on the backing track. At least half of the songs on Feel It Break could have worked very well as instrumentals, simply letting you revel in the smooth, gentle interplay between melodies and counter-melodies; the melodies of Olympia, once I succeed in focusing my ears on synthesizers instead of Stelmanis' vocalizing, move dangerously close to atmospheric mush. It's far from the worst atmospheric mush I've heard, but the disappointment is inevitable: where Feel It Break was a record of not-so-trivial electronic compositions, Olympia is a record about the trials and tribulations of Katie Stelmanis, 21st Century Schizoid Woman.

 

Even her lyrics are beginning to sound less nonsensical (which I almost regret) and, at times, start to approach the dangerous levels of that olde break-up statement. Even the song titles read like one — ʽWhat We Done?ʼ, then ʽForgive Meʼ, then ʽPainful Likeʼ, then ʽReconcileʼ, then ʽHurt Me Nowʼ (actually, "don't hurt me now"). The combination of her unusual vocal style with retro-sounding synth-pop flourishes still elevates it above the average break-up record, but in a way, it's like a trivial explication of an enigma right before your eyes: Feel It Break was about making you feel it break, regardless of the «it» in question, whereas Olympia is all about "how can I make you believe me?" and about "can you hear me now? don't hurt me now!". Boring!

 

Okay, not boring as in really boring. At least these vocal melodies are still unusual and enticing. On ʽWhat We Done?ʼ, the contrast between the ghostly group harmonies and the shrill, strained, glass-cutting solo trills from Katie works in quite an epic manner. On ʽPainful Likeʼ, the same ghostly chorus of "who will carry?.." inadvertently brings back memories of Til Tuesday's ʽVoices Carryʼ, as if hinting that the problem exposed thirty years ago still remains unsolved. On ʽSleepʼ, the vocal treatment of the simple question "could I feel more?", with each word artificial­ly divided into two syllables with the accent on the second one, probably defines the idea of «frigid orgasm», whatever that one might be. And the list goes on — I would never dare accuse the vocal parts on the album of sharing the laziness of their instrumental counterparts. Problem is, you cannot introduce that much emotional variety in your vocal parts, and sooner or later, you are bound to begin repeating yourself — right down to the verse melodies of ʽHomeʼ and ʽReconcileʼ being pretty much identical, for instance.

 

Exactly once does the record try to break out of the formula: ʽYou Changed My Lifeʼ is a curiously ironic piece, beginning as a simple, soulful piano ballad of gratitude ("you changed my life for the best"), and then, with an abrupt stop to the vocal bit, re-fading in as a dark, bass-heavy, drum-crashing instrumental with glitchy overdubs, implying that maybe the guy who changed her life for the best actually turned her into a vampire or something like that. No great musical ideas here, but at least a welcome element of surprise — had there been more tracks like that, I would not have to deliberate so long before finally agreeing on a thumbs up. As it is, the thumbs up are essentially due to the voice, not the instruments; in fact, at this point it does not even matter all that much that Stilmanis nominally continues to function in the same synth-pop paradigm — for all I know, she could have sung all those lines to a battered acoustic guitar, and the effect, in most cases, would have remained the same.

 

FUTURE POLITICS (2017)

 

1) We Were Alive; 2) Future Politics; 3) Utopia; 4) I'm A Monster; 5) I Love You More Than You Love Yourself; 6) Angel In Your Eye; 7) Freepower; 8) Gaia; 9) Beyond A Mortal; 10) Deep Thought; 11) 43.

 

First time I put this on, it absolutely sucked, the verdict being simple: it took Stilmanis but two records to become so full of herself that on the third one, she simply pushes forward her socio­political agenda (which is not too different from your basic leftist values, just stated in her own way) without caring too much about how good the music is. Sound familiar? Yes, many people took that same road before, so why shouldn't she, as a responsible Canadian citizen?

 

Fortunately, this did not turn me off to the point of not allowing for further listens — and even­tually, it became possible to warm up to Future Politics. See, it's still quite a decent pop album, with plenty of vocal hooks and a nice shot of personality. It seems self-evident to me that at this point, the lady is much less interested in the intricacies of musical textures than she is in stating her beliefs, issues, and manifestos through the musical medium — but the one thing that conti­nues to separate her from much of the competition is that she still has her own style, and that style is... well, suitable enough for the expression of beliefs, issues, and manifestos without causing an irrepressible urge to use a waterhose on the expressor (expressionist?).

 

The opening track, ʽWe Were Aliveʼ, is proof enough of that. The entire synth palette here is restricted to about two chords, plus a trip-hoppy percussion track that almost seems out of place (Katie herself said she was inspired by Massive Attack, but if you smoothen out the percussion and replace her vocals with something less shrill, you will rather get Enya) — the emphasis is placed squarely on the chorus hook, where, in the most plaintive tone imaginable, she asks you "what if we were alive?", transparently suggesting that we are not, because "I believed in nothing before". This immediately sets up a somewhat more realistic tone for the rest of the album, even more realistic than on Olympia, and opens up a more human dimension to her voice and general aura — not exactly a «compensation» as such for the lack of musical depth, but at least some­thing to keep you respectfully distracted from the drop in pure musicality.

 

On the other end of the atmospheric pole, the title track is a techno-stylized dance number with predictably, perhaps even generically bubbling synth loops, but a catchy chorus ("I'm never coming back here, there's only one way — future politics!" she chirps with the accent placed on the last syllable of "politics" and the mood of a little girl, innocently hopping from tussock to tussock), reflecting pretty utopian beliefs in a kind world ruled by socialist technology. Again, this is melodically simple, but it states its point in a non-obnoxious way, which, paradoxically, might make you want to take it seriously — efficient, not stupid, simplicity.

 

The rest of the album veers and wobbles between these «balladeering» and «rocking» extremes: I do not see even a single song here that would approach the unusual sonic overlays and interesting classically-influenced chords of Feel It Break, but even without that, most of the tracks have some emotional tug. ʽUtopiaʼ is a broken-hearted-falsetto-laden obituary to the «old Toronto» disappearing under the alleged onslaught of mindless urbanization; ʽI'm A Monsterʼ has the line "I don't feel nothing, anymore" delivered in a creepily believable manner; and ʽI Love You More Than You Love Yourselfʼ is an excellent ballad whose troubled and caring verse melodies make a cool contrast with the strangely grandiose delivery of the chorus hook — reminds me of all that arch-deeply-felt Sinead O'Connor dark romanticism, except this is better.

 

Without spending too much on this, let me just summarize the main points. These songs are not at all musically challenging or original. Most of them are also intentionally non-enigmatic, with lyrics that could easily be decoded even by those who shun, detest, and close their minds to any sort of symbolism. The system of beliefs and values behind the music is quite standard: socialism, environmentalism, compassion, and a bit of New Age to tone down the anger. But Stilmanis is a natural talent, if not exactly genius, and when she asks me, "do you acknowledge what I'm saying?" on the last track, I'm tempted to reply in the positive. I still like the atmosphere, I admit she still uses her voice as a cool and experimental musical instrument, and, aw shucks, I just think there's plenty of catchiness in these choruses to merit a thumbs up. At the same time, I'm also pretty sure that if she does not recapture proper composer's inspiration in the near future, any subsequent albums are bound to get much worse — there's only so long you can sustain public interest in a rigid formula if you just keep simplifying it.

 

THE AVALANCHES

SINCE I LEFT YOU (2001)

 

1) Since I Left You; 2) Stay Another Season; 3) Radio; 4) Two Hearts In 3/4 Time; 5) Avalanche Rock; 6) Flight Tonight; 7) Close To You; 8) Diners Only; 9) A Different Feeling; 10) Electricity; 11) Tonight; 12) Pablo's Cruise; 13) Frontier Psychiatrist; 14) Etoh; 15) Summer Crane; 16) Little Journey; 17) Live At Dominoes; 18) Extra Kings.

 

It is not difficult to understand the concept of «plunderphonics»: all you have to do is to agree that, in art at least, the total does not always equal the sum of its parts. If you take sample A from one artist and sample B from another artist and put them together, you are not performing a crude act of «stealing» as long as you acknowledge the sources — you may be trying to generate a new meaning. As in — sample one of Hitler's speeches over ʽStar Spangled Bannerʼ and you will de­finitely be generating a new meaning, albeit one that might cause you some headache if thrown about in the public sphere.

 

It is much more troublesome, though, to understand if the very art of «plunderphonics» has, in it­self, anything to do with «music». The Avalanches themselves, a merry bunch of Australian DJs with a heavy interest in old used vinyl, would, and have, understandably argued that it does. After all, Since I Left You — their debut, and, so far, their only record — is not merely something that has to be perceived through one's ears, it is also something that is targeted at provoking a rhyth­mic reaction from your body: stuff that you should, and could, dance to, and it is fairly hard to dance to anything other than music. Even architecture.

 

On the other side, it can hardly be argued that Since I Left You is «just» a dance-oriented pop album. Its composition — a super-complex kaleidoscope of over 900 different samples — all by itself positions it as a work of art, to be processed and analyzed through your mind just as well as it could be picked up by the irrational nerve centers in your body. And this is where one begins to have problems with viewing it as «music»: from this point of view, Since I Left You becomes an analogy of something like a Duchamp readymade.

 

The hour-long album, all of it structured like one long track, without a single break between the separate tracks, seamlessly flowing in and out of each other, is mostly rooted in the groovy sounds of generic 1970s R&B — so generic, in fact, that I confess to not recognizing any of the samples involved (supposedly, there has to be a bit of Madonna's ʽHolidayʼ in here somewhere, but I don't remember where exactly). Part of the band's preference for these obscure funk / disco grooves probably stems from the understandable fear of getting sued by the big gangstas of pop entertainment (they'd rather be sued by the small ones), but part of it is symbolic — as some sort of adepts of the Andy Warhol school of pop-art, they find their interest in dragging out long-for­gotten chunks of routine mediocrity and going the "it ain't art because it's inherently fabulous, it's art because we are inherently fabulous and we say it's art" route with them.

 

On the outside layer, having chopped up, remixed, and loop-de-looped those R&B grooves, they mix them with miriads of sound effects, everything from neighing horses to movie soundtracks to phaser blasts from crappy (or not so crappy) 1980s video games, and offer it for our attention and appreciation. The overall effect, if there is an overall effect, could only be described as «The Mad Hatter's Disco Ball» — an experimental, sprawling panorama of sonic absurdity, completely open to analysis, interpretation, admiration, derision, or the occasional flight of a rotten tomato. Unfor­tunately, there is nothing «revolutionary» in this approach per se — «plunderphonics» as a con­cept dates back to at least John Oswald's invention of the term in 1985, or, to a smaller extent, to the works of The Art Of Noise in the early 1980s. So one can only evaluate the merits of The Avalanches based on a question like «so, what exactly are they doing here to convince us that the art of plunderphonics deserves further existence?»

 

My brief personal answer to this would then be something like «uhhh...». A longer answer would involve mumbling out phrases like «well, I guess they can sound funny at times», «you know, it doesn't really sound all the same if you really put your ear to it», and «hey, sometimes it is more productive to ask questions than to give answers».

 

In all honesty, I do not «get» this album, and have no reason to think that anyone does (at least, certainly not based on the actual glowing reviews of it that I have read). I do remember myself, in early childhood, playing two tapes on different tape recorders and recording the results on a third one, just for pointless fun — the results could sometimes be unpredictably hilarious. I have very strong suspicions that this here is simply a case of several overgrown kids who somehow re­mained stuck in the same mood, only with access to far superior technologies and far larger data banks. Consequently, the results are essentially the same: sometimes, through sheer chance, it works, sometimes it doesn't, but what works and what doesn't work will most likely be complete­ly different and unpredictable for different people.

 

On one thing there may be no disagreement: a heavy shitload of work went into the creation of this whole project — several years of toil and trouble, in fact (and the real curious thing about The Avalanches is that, while they are still alive and kicking, they have by now spent more than a decade planning and recording their follow-up record). Serious plunderphonics requires serious skills at plundering — which may be one reason behind all the positive reviews: even if these overdubs make little sense, they are all fitted together quite smoothly, so that the album never ever becomes truly cacophonous. Crazy, but not dissonant or chaotic. The horses are neighing in all the right spots — where somebody else would have probably inserted a repetitive lead guitar lick or synth loop. Even the video game phaser blasts on ʽA Different Feelingʼ are all blasting out on time and in perfect harmony with the disco beats.

 

In other words, I am quite ready to agree that Since I Left You is a triumph of form — and an awesome soundtrack for a party that has to combine opportunities for dancing, hip intellectualism, and an atmosphere of whacked out surrealism. But on the other hand, I do not wish for a second to overestimate this stuff — for instance, by trying to over-analyze and «interpret» any of these tracks (and, given the complexity of their structure, treating even one of them in this manner could take a long time and make the writer look seriously afflicted). You have your own perfect right, for instance, to regard the record as a symbolic expression of pop culture's diversity, or as a symbolic expression of pop culture's vanity and cheapness, or as a symbolic expression of pop culture's trashy beauty and seductiveness, or as a brave statement saying that nothing that goes into the wastebasket is guaranteed to forever stay in the wastebasket...

 

...whatever. It's all puzzling, curious, and intriguing, but there is also something disturbing in the fact that Since I Left You so often ends up on people's lists of «best-of-the-decade» albums — a rather desperate, if not depressing, decision, I'd say.

 

WILDFLOWER (2016)

 

1) The Leaves Were Falling; 2) Because I'm Me; 3) Frankie Sinatra; 4) Subways; 5) Going Home; 6) If I Was A Folkstar; 7) Colours; 8) Zap!; 9) The Noisy Eater; 10) Wildflower; 11) Harmony; 12) Live A Lifetime Love; 13) Park Music; 14) Livin' Underwater (Is Something Wild); 15) The Wozard Of Iz; 16) Over The Turnstiles; 17) Sun­shine; 18) Light Up; 19) Kaleidoscope Lovers; 20) Stepkids; 21) Saturday Night Inside Out; 22) Frankie Sinatra (extended mix).

 

Perhaps the weirdest thing about The Avalanches' second album and the 15 (!) years that separate it from the first one is realizing that The Avalanches did not, in fact, break up over any significant time period in the interim. They'd always been a fairly loose collective, and the only current members are the core duo of Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi, while other people came and went, but there never really was a specific timeframe in between 2001 and 2016 when The Ava­lanches officially «did not exist» — so one cannot technically call Wildflower a «comeback», especially given the fact that some of its tracks had been conceived as early as 2000.

 

So — fifteen frickin' falls, a period over which most of the band's original adolescent fans gradu­ated from college, got themselves steady jobs, got married, settled down, grew some new or shaved off some old facial hair, only to wake up one fine morning and learn that there was also a parallel reality in which nothing has changed: Wildflower not only picks up from exactly where Since I Left You had, in fact, left us, but it goes on to walk a crooked mile in order to leave us, one hour later, at the exact same starting point once again. As if you needed one more argument to show how little has changed in the world of music since the 21st century introduced us to the concept of Artistic Deep Freeze, the Avalanches are here to teach us a lesson in how «it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place», to quote a truly immortal line.

 

To be fairly honest, if this reaction can be called «enjoyment», then I «enjoyed» Wildflower ab­so­lutely no less (and probably no more) than I did with Since I Left You — a reaction that could hardly be said to agree with the overall critical and fan response to the record, where most people said that it was sort of okay but no Since I Left You. The reason for that seems to be on the sur­face: Since I Left You struck a chord with its novelty factor — few, if any, people up to that point made plunderphonics sound so fun, so light, so danceable, so accessible, and yet so absolute in terms of focus and dedication. There was a certain inspirational whiff to it that may even have led some people to entertain odd thoughts about how this would be the future of music, etc. But now that fifteen years have passed and, while sampling as such remains firmly embedded in our conscience as one of the most heavily (ab)used modern musical means, plunderphonics remains on the fringes of that conscience — and it kind of looks like it was a dead end after all. A fun dead end to find oneself in every once in a while, but hardly one where you can give a slight tap to the magical wall at the end and find yourself in musical nirvana.

 

But perhaps this assessment — «nice, but nothing particularly new or mind-blowing» — is un­fair, and all it takes is a few attentive listens to uncover progress? Well, they do seem to be a little more open to integrating some new sounds in the patchy canopy of old: for instance, rappers Danny Brown and Biz Markie came along for some of the sessions to record vocal parts for several tracks, along with a few other less familiar faces. Indeed, Wildflower goes much heavier on the raps than its predecessor, though it hardly ever feels like a hip-hop record because its «plunderbase» is so much more antiquated than is typical of sampling in hip-hop. That's pretty much the only substantial difference — other than that, Wildflower offers you still the same dizzying kaleidoscope of instrumental and vocal overdubs that find their sources in little-known old vinyl grooves. You will get educated, for sure, as they revitalize long-forgotten niceties: ʽBecause I'm Meʼ, for instance, is all based on loops from ʽWant Adsʼ by The Honey Cones, a cool dance-soul number from the sunniest corner of 1969 (sold a million copies back in the day, by the way, but who remembers that now? Well — The Avalanches do!), while ʽFrankie Sinatraʼ exploits Wilmoth Houdini's ʽBobby Sox Idolʼ and reminds you of how ironically fun classic calypso music could be back in the day, with Danny Brown supplementing Houdini's trembling croak with his own humorous take on the Frank Sinatra thing ("Like Frank Sinatra, bitch, do this shit my way" — welcome to 2016, ladies and gentlemen).

 

On the really obscure side, ʽSubwaysʼ will teach you about the 1980 EP by "Chandra", a pre-teen artist who might be regarded as sort of Eighties' equivalent to Rebecca Black (no, really, I mean it: the original ʽSub­waysʼ is such an embarrassing piece of pseudo-New-Wave/disco-mash-up that it is almost ama­zing how The Avalanches managed to take out a couple lines and make them sound alarming and troubled); and on the «null void» side, ʽThe Noisy Eaterʼ features a hilarious live recording of ʽCome Togetherʼ as performed by the choir of Kew High School in the band's own native Melbourne, mashed with a Biz Markie narrative about a «noisy eater», with language stuck midway between British folklore and gangsta rap. Sounds intriguing, doesn't it? Well, I can tell you that the surrealist absurdity of it all does come through, and I'd be lying through my teeth if I said this wasn't at all entertaining. Plus, there's always the game challenge — how many of these bits and pieces will you recognize on your own? I totally suck at this, but I was at least proud of my Beatle-lore when my ears perceived a snippet from the carnivalesque Lowrey organ of ʽBe­ing For The Benefit Of Mr. Kiteʼ on ʽFrankie Sinatraʼ, or the vocal harmony bit from Ram's ʽUncle Albertʼ on ʽLiving Underwaterʼ (alas, Spirit's ʽWater Womanʼ that constitutes the backbone of the track was stuffed way too deep in my memory to resurface on its own).

 

So yes, it's all fun. They have a good ear for «tasty bits», and if there's a lesson in here that even bad-to-mediocre obscurities can have moments of impressive musical dynamics that might very well work outside of the original context — count me in. The problem is, it still does not work anywhere other than in its own post-modern frame, and aren't we living in a post-post-modern frame already? (Or perhaps even «post-post-post-modern», I've honestly lost count...). Fifteen years have not taught these guys how to plunder their phonics in a way that would truly create an alternate psychedelic reality to which I could, you know, relate or something. There's a lot of fussiness here, for sure, and meta-melodicity, and even some atmospheric warmth, considering how they usually concentrate on life-asserting dance-oriented R&B and sunshine pop for their sources, yet none of this makes the resulting collage properly meaningful on an emotional level, once you've savored the joke.

 

To be honest, I cannot blame them for not having made much pro­gress because I fail to see how it is even possible to make any progress in this direction — al­though, on the other hand, maybe if they had introduced some jarring mood shifts (for instance, added a «dark side» to the bubbly psychedelic frolicking by plundering, oh, I dunno, some death metal archives?), this could help focus our attention? Whatever. In any case, I'd be very surprised if somebody (Danny Brown fans excepted) honestly and flatly preferred Wildflower to Since I Left You — ultimately, it just feels like a bonus hour for those who thought that 2001's Australia summarized the highest points of Western civilization as we knew them. For everybody else, it's mostly a good way to remem­ber Wilmoth Houdini — and Chandra.

 

THE AVETT BROTHERS

THE AVETT BROTHERS (2000)

 

1) Kind Of In Love With You; 2) My Lady And The Mountain; 3) Those Green Eyes; 4) Feb. 20, 2000; 5) Let My­self Live; 6) I Love You Still.

 

What happens, usually, when you take one guy with a guitar and one guy with a banjo? The stan­dard answer is that you just don't, because there is a very high probability that they will start churning out terrible covers of old Bill Monroe material; «Southern spirit» is already a dubious concept to begin with, but «synthesized simulated Southern spirit» is something else. It must be a very specific audience that consistently listens to modern bluegrass, and I am not very much inte­rested in understanding its specificity.

 

Brothers Seth and Scott Avett, however, are a curious exception. Right from the very start (and, actually, they both began playing in amateur college rock bands before going acoustic), they seem to have set their sights on taking the essence of bluegrass and making it palatable for the ge­neral customer as well. This short EP (just six songs), marking the start of their rather laborious career, is merely a taste of things to come, but the Avetts' mission is already transparent.

 

First, the bad points. The brothers are neither great instrumentalists nor, to put it mildly, compe­tent singers. Of course, they know how to play their instruments, but probably they don't spend too much time practicing them: banjo virtuosity can really be intoxicating in the right hands, and these aren't the right hands. As for the vocals, they aren't particularly strong or particularly soul­ful, and they strain seriously on the prolonged notes (sometimes, when they are duetting, this comes across as quite a painful experience). And, of course, if you lack virtuoso technique with the gui­tar and the banjo, yet still insist on recording an album that has nothing but guitar and banjo (a lit­tle primitive piano, occasionally), this also contributes to the risk.

 

The good point is that the brothers place their bets on songwriting, and come up with stuff that is interesting, if not altogether fascinating. These are not simply traditional folkie melodies set to new sets of lyrics (although the lyrics are new). Almost each song incorporates an individualistic riff ('Kind Of In Love With You' and 'Those Green Eyes' are the most noticeable), and even if they are not doing much with the formula, they tweak it just enough to convince me, and others, perhaps, that there might still be a small pop-hook deposit within the bluegrass genre waiting to be mined.

 

It also takes gall, I think, to set the sights high and still come out so straight-faced about it: the Bros.' songs are personal and sentimental with not a whiff of irony — in fact, when 'I Love You Still' starts wrapping things up, its sound is downright pathetic (in the neutral sense of the word, not derogatory). So it is for the better, perhaps, that the vocal technique leaves a lot to be desired: patented Nashville singing would probably just elevate Pathos to Bathos.

 

Overall, though, this first EP is just a first EP, a self-released, long out-of-print, tentative step into the world of creative songwriting. The Avett Bros. «musical philosophy» is all here already, but the execution is flimsy; love 'em or hate 'em, this is not yet the proper place to deposit one's bouquets of gardenias or bundles of dried bear scat.

 

COUNTRY WAS (2002)

 

1) Pretty Girl From Matthews; 2) Jenny And The Summer Day; 3) A Lot Of Moving; 4) November Blue; 5) My Lo­sing Bet; 6) Beside The Yellow Line; 7) Old Wyom; 8) Closing Night.

 

Country Was sounds not a wee bit different from the Bros. self-titled water-testing, but is never­theless a huge improvement, as they keep pumping all of their resources into the songwriting. As much as there is acoustic guitar, banjo, and Southern-style vocals on the album, Country Was de­cidedly sounds more like a pop sort of thing recorded by bluegrass-trained artists rather than vice versa — the chord changes, the lyrics, the overall atmosphere all show that this banjo sound is to the Avetts what the country-rock shift used to be to the Byrds: an attempt to (a) be different and (b) merge the archaic and the innovative in one big friendly synthesis.

 

Take 'Jenny And The Summer Day', for instance, with its slightly Britpoppy electric piano back­ing (think Small Faces circa Ogden's Nut or something), slightly psychedelic slow-down pauses at the end of each verse, and the strained, but fun falsetto on the bridge. The rest of the instrumen­tation, as well as the Bros.' still limited vocal skills, may make you wish the song were donated to a more skillful arranging / performing outfit, but then the extra skill could also make it lose its individuality, and the Avetts do care about individuality. Either way, it's a lovely, uplifting bit of music, well deserving of having a summer day reference in the title.

 

'Pretty Girl From Matthews', initiating a lengthy run of all those other Avett Bros. songs about 'Pretty Girls', is decidedly more traditional-folk oriented, but it still mixes together an old-timey melody for the verses and a newer-timey melody for the chorus, just as it mixes lines like "I'll see you on the good Lord's shores" with "My saviour lives in telephones". If not a masterpiece per se, it is still a fine, soft-ass-kicking lead-in number, and the Bros. still continue to use it as a show-opener fairly often.

 

Speaking of lyrics, the Avetts' approach is extremely intelligent — somehow, they manage to avo­id both the temptation of simply falling back on country/folk clichés and the post-modern curse of wedging late-20th-century intellectual-impressionistic garbage inside old structures (an art that used to be fun but then quickly degraded into lame posturing). They just sing lots and lots of happy/sad love tunes as well as an occasional freedom-rider tune or two — with simple messages, but succeeding in finding enough quirky twists and turns of phrases to not come across as either banal revivalists or pretentious neo-beatniks. No idea if Johnny Cash ever got wind of them before his death in 2003, but I'm pretty sure the MIB would definitely appreciate.

 

Apart from a couple lesser tunes at the end, just about everything is catchy and nice, the high­lights being the first two songs as well as the fast-moving 'November Blue' and the ballad 'My Losing Bet'. Not that everything encompasses a lot: with eight songs clocking in at under thirty minutes, the album's over in a flash; but then again, there is only so much banjo pluckin' that a non-Alabama-reared mind can stand, and, in a way, this is definitely preferable over the longish records that the soon-to-be-confident Bros. would eventually start churning out. Modesty, brevity, intelligence, nicety all win to yearn this a thumbs up despite the obvious anti-odds.

 

LIVE AT THE DOUBLE DOOR INN (2002)

 

1) A Lot Of Moving; 2) Diamond Joe; 3) Sorry Man; 4) Will The Circle Be Unbroken; 5) Jenny And The Summer Day; 6) Pretty Girl From Matthews; 7) Avett Brothers Monologue; 8) I'll Fly Away; 9) Let Myself Live; 10) Novem­ber Blue; 11) My Losing Bet; 12) Gamblin' Man; 13) Cripple Creek; 14) Kind Of In Love; 15) Beside The Yellow Line.

 

As the title suggests without much fuss, this is the Avetts' first live album (out of, perhaps, some­what too many), recorded at some seedy joint that usually promotes itself as «The Oldest Live Music Venue East of the Mississippi», even though its founding year is generally listed as 1973 — go figure. Unless, of course, there's no land east of the Mississippi other than Carolina, a view­point that would go down nicely with some people, I believe.

 

Since the Avetts had not yet mastered the true art of studio polish, the live show is not altogether different from their concurrent studio work. The setlist reproduces most of Country Was, cozily cutting down on the last two numbers which I, too, thought were the weakest of the lot; throws on a couple extra numbers from the debut EP; previews one track from Carolina Jubilee; and, for collectors' sake, includes a few traditional numbers.

 

None of this is essential. The originals are not going to present themselves in any sort of new light, and a few are marred by flubbed notes and a bit of off-key singing as well; and the traditio­nals are fun, but only a deranged diehard will take a serious interest in these versions of 'Will The Circle Be Unbroken' and 'Cripple Creek' — decent ear candy for the hard-working bar-goer who loves a bit of folk music to help him wash down his Budweiser.

 

Occasionally, these things gain an additional charm factor due to cute bits of banter, but the Avetts merely manage to come across as friendly, easy-going chaps, able to work up the audience into an acceptive state. Their understanding of humour does not get them much further than the line "eight dollars, eight songs — you do the math", which they then repeat after each third song or so (sometimes adding that "I personally cannot do the math"). Okay then. All in all, a decent, steady performance with a clearly expressed party spirit, but nothing essential.

 

A CAROLINA JUBILEE (2003)

 

1) The Traveling Song; 2) Love Like The Movies; 3) Sorry Man; 4) Me And God; 5) Pretty Girl From Raleigh; 6) Do You Love Him; 7) I Killed Sally's Lover; 8) Pretty Girl From Locust; 9) My Last Song To Jenny; 10) Walking For You; 11) The D Bag Rag; 12) Pretty Girl From Annapolis; 13) Smoke In Our Lights; 14) Offering.

 

At fifty minutes (there is also an eight-minute long bonus track that contains nothing but bits of poorly recorded dialog, and, frankly, I have not sat through it even once), anyway, at fifty mi­nutes the Avett Brothers' proper record label debut (Ramseur Records) is about as overlong as you'd ex­pect from any traditionally arranged bluegrass album, even if the banjoist were Yngwie Malm­steen in disguise and the acoustic guitarist occasionally launched into Slayer riffs, and both were songwriters on a pants-peeing level for Paul McCartney.

 

None of which should detract the honest listener from the fact that the Avett Brothers did come up with another bunch of fine, friendly, attractive, and not altogether generic songs. There are no «structural» advances whatsoever since Country Was (unless we count the delightful excursion into ragtime territory on the catchy kiddie instrumental 'D Bag Rag'), so that any additional deep thoughts on the album as a whole are hard to come by and mostly present themselves as banalities or idiocies; even those professional reviewers who openly liked the Avett Brothers' first tentative step into mainstream territory usually limited their support to «nice sound, man, worthy lyrics, oh God I'd rather listen to something atrocious instead, I'm paid by the word».

 

Still, stuff like 'Love Like The Movies' and 'Me And God' are a subtle combination of «nice sound» and «worthy lyrics», including some film projector effects and a solid jab at the Church ("my God and I don't need a middle man"). All three of the album's 'Pretty Girls' are honoured well with their respective melodies, particularly the one from 'Locust' because it's an electric pia­no ballad, and, for some reason, the Avett's spirituality always shines out the strongest on these things (or perhaps it is simply because the piano, per se, is a more spiritual instrument than the guitar? now there's one interesting thought for future consideration).

 

The brothers' intentional refusal to vary their instrumentation, or, for that matter, to improve on their instrumentation (the sound is as loose, wobbly, and seemingly «amateurish» as before; record executives showed a surprising lack of control here) continues to grate, especially now that they have gone from 25-minute to 50-minute albums. But who knows, maybe it's their only way to escape mega-stardom: with additional hours of rehearsal, series of overdubs, and overall po­lish some of these songs could be made into country-pop standards that would uphold the ge­nre's ruined reputation against the likes of Taylor Swift — and what sort of a normal person would want to compete with Taylor Swift? Thumbs up.

 

MIGNONETTE (2004)

 

1) Swept Away (sentimental version); 2) Nothing Short Of Thankful; 3) The New Love Song; 4) At The Beach; 5) Signs; 6) Hard Worker; 7) Letter To A Pretty Girl; 8) Please Pardon Yourself; 9) Pretty Girl At The Airport; 10) Pre­t­ty Girl From Cedar Lane; 11) Causey Commentary; 12) One Line Wonder; 13) The Day That Marvin Gaye Died; 14) SSS; 15) Swept Away; 16) A Gift For Melody Anne; 17) Complainte D'Un Matelot Mourant; 18) Salvation Song; 19*) Signs; 20*) Laser Pants.

 

Fourteen guitar-and-banjo folkie romps at fifty minutes not enough for you? Then take this: eigh­t­een guitar-and-banjo folkie romps that clock in at a near-record seventy minutes. It is no longer merely a case of being «prolific» — it is an ever increasingly arrogant gesture, because even if the Avett Brothers were your average mainstream-oriented Nashville act, they would have kept it shorter; but since, five years into their career, they still haven't covered 'Orange Blossom Special', their output continues to be oriented at adventurous people. And the fact that an adventurous per­son will have to endure seventy minutes of banjo music makes it one hell of an adventure.

 

Fortunately, and, in fact, unexpectedly, the Brothers continue to excel at songwriting. In fact, they are excelling at it more excellently than ever before. 'Swept Away', previously released on its own EP and present here in two versions (the «sentimental» one differs from the regular one by adding girlie backup vocals from the Avetts' sister Bonnie and, ha ha ha, dropping the banjo — apparently, the banjo is not a sentimental instrument by the Bros.' reckoning, and I do concur), is indeed a hauntingly beautiful folk ballad: you may easily think you've heard it before, either on some Fairport Convention album or in one of your previous lifetimes — chasing fair Saxon maidens in Sherwood Forest or something — but trust me, you haven't.

 

'Signs' is another subtle tear-jerker, particularly the quiet demo version included at the end, an in­timate plea on the part of an abused and misused lover that, for some reason, again works better without the banjo: clearly, the way I see it, the instrument is simply incapable — or, not to make any sweeping statements, the Avetts are incapable of conveying gentle, soulful emotions with the instrument, making good use of it only on fast-paced dunce numbers (such as the frantic 'Hard Worker', on which they quite masterfully use the hoedown thing to convey the protagonist's buz­zing work atmosphere).

 

The boys get «conventionally adventurous» only twice; once, during a chaotic, nearly free-form coda to 'One Line Wonder', then on the atmospheric instrumental 'Complainte D'Un Matelot Mou­rant', on which a grumbly banjo duets with a somber cello over sea waves and creaking masts for five minutes (apparently related to the album title, which refers to the sinking of the Mignonette in 1884). If played over and over on headphones to a properly attuned brain, the com­position may eventually hypnotize; but overall, it shows that perhaps the Brothers' strenghiest strength still lies in their catchy choruses rather than sonic experimentation.

 

Describing individual songs is useless as always, and, although only 'Swept Away' truly swept me away, there is no filler involved — each composition is well thought out and assigned at least one minor emotional punchline, sometimes more. However, on the technical scale of things, nothing whatsoever has changed since Carolina Jubilee, so do not take my exhilarated thumbs up here as a hidden hint at Seth Avett's having developed an extra octave.

 

LIVE, VOL. 2 (2005)

 

1) Pretty Girl From Annapolis; 2) Love Like The Movies; 3) Walking For You; 4) Do You Love Him; 5) I Killed Sally's Lover; 6) Smoke In Our Lights; 7) A Lot Of Movin'; 8) November Blue; 9) Wanted Man; 10) Old Joe Clark; 11) My Last Song To Jenny; 12) The Traveling Song; 13) Offering; 14) A Gift For Melody Anne; 15) Complainte D'Un Matelot Mourant; 16) Pretty Girl From Raleigh; 17) Please Pardon Yourself.

 

Let's see now: ten songs from A Carolina Jubilee, three from Mignonette, two from Country Was (and both were already released on the previous live album), and an outside medley ('Wan­ted Man' / 'Old Joe Clark'), for the first part of which the gallant gentlemen actually asked per­mission from Doc Watson, even though they never needed to. (It's not that I read about it — that's what they tell the audience, even though it never asked them to).

 

If you really love A Carolina Jubilee, as in really really really, there is some sense in hearing it played live in the usual club setting, but not before you run through the test of putting on the mid­dle of 'Smoke In Our Lights' and seeing if you can stand Seth Avett tear down his voice during the climactic scream bit. If yes, then you will also pardon the mistakes and roughness in the other performances, concentrating on the sheer energy and enthusiasm. If no, the Avett Bros. live expe­rience is not for you; stick to the studio records (which aren't technically immaculate either, but at least it is one of the budget articles out there).

 

Since the songs are good, the album is also good, except for the last three songs, where it seems as if the Bros. ran out of tape and completed the show from somebody's cell phone recorder (this is particularly gruesome on 'Complainte D'Un Matelot', which is, per se, an unsuccessful attempt at replacing the salty dog atmosphere of the original with lots of head-splitting screaming, and the abysmal sound quality only adds to the splitting). There is a little less stage banter, no more silly jokes about doing the math, but overall, this is no Live At Leeds: energy and stage presence are all right when you pay actual admission — for a live record, we need something extra.

 

FOUR THIEVES GONE: THE ROBBINSVILLE SESSIONS (2006)

 

1) Talk On Indolence; 2) Pretty Girl From Feltre; 3) Colorshow; 4) Distraction #74; 5) 16 In July; 6) Left On Laura, Left On Lisa; 7) A Lover Like You; 8) Pretend Love; 9) Matrimony; 10) The Lowering; 11) The Fall; 12) Dancing Daze; 13) Famous Flower Of Manhattan; 14) 40 East; 15) Gimmeakiss; 16) Denouncing November Blue; 17) Four Thieves Gone.

 

In my little world, this is officially the Avett Brothers' masterpiece. Had this collection only been recorded in a «power pop» environment, it might have rocked the indie world to its foundation, except the indie world and bluegrass arrangements do not exactly get along, and I do not blame them — over sixty minutes of banjo-driven tunes, how cool does one need to be to stand that? On a theoretical level, the only thing worse is probably sixty minutes of bagpipes. Or sixty minutes of water pipes (if your name is Blixa Bargeld).

 

There are some minor changes in sound that are most welcome: pianos, with each new album, be­come more and more prominent, and now they also break the taboo on electric instruments, intro­ducing loud amplified sound as a supporting means on some of the songs (e. g. the bombastic dis­torted guitar solo at the end of 'Colorshow'). It also seems to me, though this is a fully subjective sensation, that the playing is generally tighter and the bits of off-key singing less noticeable and jarring than before (and somehow you'd expect that from a musical outfit that's been on a non-stop touring and recording schedule for six years).

 

But the most important piece of news is that the brothers continue honing and refining their song­writing skills, and by the time of Four Thieves, they have clearly mutated into some of the most talented writers of their generation. The ways they subtly bridge the unbridgeable are, well, subtle, but once you cut through, you realize that the brothers, by now, are in a niche all their own, de­spite so superficially limited a formula. Take 'Famous Flower Of Manhattan', for instance, which first came across as a yawn-inducing, meandering ballad, then slowly sank in as a catchy, original, cleverly phrased ballad, then, with the lyrics and the story behind them consulted, emerged as a one-of-a-kind melancholic-to-optimistic ode to the idea that everything belongs in its proper pla­ce (in this particular case, as rumor has it, Regina Spektor, whom the brothers liked so much they almost wanted to abduct her from NYC, but, fortunately, reconsidered). It is one of the most inte­resting country vs. city clashes in recent musical history.

 

Filler still exists for these guys, but, unlike the preceding albums, it is now so overwhelmed with idea-riddled songs that, in any sort of review, is practically negligible. Why concentrate on boring moments at all, when there is so much fun stuff around? 'Talk On Indolence' starts off as a near-sacrilegious «bluegrass rap» before moving on to two or three more, entirely different, sections. 'Colorshow', with its piano pounding, starts out in an arrogantly minimalistic mode, the way a John Lennon or a Neil Young could easily start one of their soul-baring anthems, before adding the above-mentioned jarring guitar solo part. 'Left On Laura, Left On Lisa' slyly borrows a lick from the Beatles' 'I'm Looking Through You', perhaps unintentionally (both are written, after all, within the same folk pop idiom). 'Pretend Love', riding out of nowhere, is a frail, delicate Fifties-style waltz that could have made a fine tearjerker for Elvis or, at least, Hank Williams. 'Matrimo­ny' is the Avetts at the top of their «bluegrass punk» powers — fast, driving, and quite funny: "My dog is loud and my dog is wild / We're too young to have a child / Can you keep the dog next week? / I'll be gone the next three".

 

Actually, the Bros.' sense of humor is at its best when we get to the very end: 'Four Thieves Gone' is a funny twist on 'Ten Little Indians', telling a gruesome lyrical tale of copyright infringement (so it seems) to a nursery rhyme-style melody. Compared to the real highlights, it is but a trifle, but an important one, blowing off some of  the occasional bombast. Not that the bombast is in any way bothersome. There is no concept here whatsoever, no particular brand of musical philo­sophy, just a bunch of really open-minded Southern guys with a knack for a good melody, a good lyric, and lotsa heart and soul. We can only hope that some day some equally talented fan will want to re-record all of this with less banjo and... more cowbell? Thumbs up.

 

EMOTIONALISM (2007)

 

1) Die Die Die; 2) Shame; 3) Paranoia In B-Flat Major; 4) The Weight Of Lies; 5) Will You Return; 6) The Ballad Of Love; 7) Salina; 8) Pretty Girl From Chile; 9) All My Mistakes; 10) Living Of Love; 11) I Would Be Sad; 12) Pretty Girl From San Diego; 13) Go To Sleep; 14) Hand-Me-Down Tune.

 

If I am right in thinking that the title is supposed to imply that the brothers' next record is more about sentiment and tender­ness than about brawny entertainment, then Emotionalism quite close­­ly matches its contents. Unfortunately, it also means that the listener is entitled to nearly one hour of nearly non-stop balladeering based on a nearly never-ending stream of guitar and banjo melodies. And even if the brothers' songwriting talents still yield no sign of waning, this makes the experience tough for those who have short attention spans and seriously impaired tolerance levels for minimalistic «calm» music.

 

Which is all the more sad when you consider how much ass is being kicked by the few exceptions from the rule. For instance, 'Pretty Girl From Chile' is not just another in the continuing series of pretty girls from all over the globe songs, but a multi-part epic that moves quite effortlessly from rootsy Band-sy stuff to a frenzied Latin-influenced section to a loud noise-rock ending, all the while telling a coherent tale of a remorseful protagonist who is not quite sure of whether he is or is not unfaithful to the pretty girl in question — not exactly heartbreaking, but curious stuff.

 

Other interesting tracks would include 'Will You Return' with its transparent harmonic nods to the early Beatles (one of the vocal parts quite closely reproduces the opening vocal line of 'There's A Place', for instance); and the elegant harmony chanting on 'Die Die Die', which I could easily see transformed into a mega-huge-power pop hit monster, were someone like Todd Rundgren placed behind the production wheel. There is also 'Pretty Girl From San Diego', on which the Latin ele­ments are even more distinctly pronounced, with a hilarious samba bit inserted between verses. Diversity, what ho.

 

But in between these occasional «diversions», the brothers are mainly busy with laying their heart and soul on the line, highly polished and radiating for miles around. There is a song called 'The Ballad Of Love And Hate', which almost plays out like a tribute to Leonard Cohen: "Love writes a letter and sends it to hate, 'My vacation's ending, I'm coming home late'". There is 'Living Of Love', on which the brothers implore you to "say love, say for me love" (not unconvincingly, but somewhat overlong-ly). There's a whole bunch of slowly bleeding, feebly creeping confessional tunes — tunes that are oriented at the entire small bunch of sincerity-loving idealists that still re­main in this world, but even sincerity-loving idealists, after ten such odes, may be coerced into putting on some Franz Ferdinand for a change. Not to mention that, for all his talents, Seth Avett is no Scott Walker, after all, or Van Morrison. This band's efficacy closely depends on the quality of their writing, and little else. And slow, lyrical, heartbreaking choruses cannot be a constant source of catharsis — heck, even George Harrison knew that, and he was never above throwing on some basic rock energy or rhythmic pop hooks whenever SOUL began to seem like a threat to the integrity of the record rather than a blessing.

 

The bottom line is that Emotionalism is a good, but very wearisome record, better taken in small doses than at once: too much emotionalism stiffens the actual emotions. Still, with 'Pretty Girl From Chile' at least, the brothers do show some development, and none of the songs are bad (in fact, only one or two ballads are truly «hookless» in the proverbial sense), so, wearisome or not, there is still enough strength to get the thumbs up.

 

THE GLEAM / THE SECOND GLEAM (2006 / 2008)

 

1) Sanguine; 2) When I Drink; 3) Yard Sale; 4) Backwards With Time; 5) If It’s The Beaches; 6) Find My Love; 7) Tear Down The House; 8) Murder In The City; 9) Bella Donna; 10) The Greatest Sum; 11) St. Joseph’s; 12) Souls Like The Wheels.

 

These are but two short EPs, six songs long each, and it would be rather luxurious to discuss each of them separately — not to mention that the titles themselves indicate a sort of coherence, as Cap’n Obvious whispers to me behind my shoulder. What is less obvious — at least, until one has actually listened to both EPs — is that, stylistically, they fit together as two pieces of a single puzzle; and what is even less obvious, but steadily moving closer and closer to a stone-set opi­ni­on of mine, is that they contain some of the brothers’ finest songwriting. In other words, do not, by all means, bypass this stuff simply because it’s in EP format. (For what it’s worth, I really pre­fer taking the Brothers in small doses rather than in their sixty-minute escapades).

 

Stylistic coherence is ensured by the generally stripped down atmosphere: yes, the Brothers are going UNPLUGGED, and by this I mean unplugging the goddamn banjo out of their collective ass and relying strictly on acoustic guitar. Well, there are some banjo parts on a couple of the tracks, just as some others contain harmonicas and fiddles, but for the most part, this is just a stern set of guitar-and-vocal songs, with nothing else in between the listener, the bearded trend-fighters, and whoever is there in charge of the musical duties in the extraterrestrial sphere.

 

And it is not always like this, but usually the Brothers succeed when they just hang their heart out there to cry and dry, and it works. ‘Sanguine’, opening the proceedings, may be snuffed at for be­ing such a Dylan rip-off (‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ certainly comes to mind), but the seaso­ned listener should be wise enough to appreciate it as a respectable variation rather than a blatant steal. The Brothers truly start to weave their web of empathy starting with ‘When I Drink’, such an idealistic, child-like ode to self-improvement that it is hardly possible not to want to pat each of them on the shoulder once it’s over. ‘Backwards With Time’ is a terrific folksy singalong that also finds the wisdom to ask the question “are we losing the fight, are we growing backwards with time?” which must be quite relevant for every remaining intelligent person on the planet (not that I am implying that intelligent people should be obliged to love the song because of that, it’s just that the song speaks to me on several levels at once). Conversely, ‘If It’s The Beaches’ is low on (also Dylanesque) vocals, but nicely incorporates both Spanish (guitar) and Jewish (fiddle) mo­tives in its main me­lody.

 

Perhaps the ultimate test result of whether you are ready to enjoy The Gleam, or, in fact, acknowledge the Avetts at all, depends on whether the near-crooning falsetto chorus of ‘Find My Love’ will be deemed «gorgeous» or «sickening». My bet’s on «homebrewed gorgeous» — not the kind of aching beauty one finds in the work of sincere professionals, but the kind of clumsy beauty one may find in the first attempts of a little kid who really believes in beauty as such. In other words, not enough to professionally squeeze out a tear, but definitely enough to want to play this out loud to everyone in sight, without blushing.

 

The Second Gleam, recorded two years later, is the Brothers’ tender farewell to Ramseur Re­cords, before moving on to bigger things. The songs are slightly more complex, and thus, parado­xically (or not), slightly less involving; still, the closing ‘Souls Like The Wheels’, on which Seth begs the unknown to “let me go, let me go” with all the gallantry of a medieval minstrel, is ano­ther pleasant, less «affected» variant of the same homebrewed gorgeousness, and the other songs are at least modestly catchy.

 

Oh yes, continuing the analogies, ‘Murder In The City’ quite dis­tinctly shifts the veneration from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon. It’s been a long, long time since two guys equipped with nothing but acoustic guitars and voices last managed to make heavenly music... and that time is not over yet, since, for all its worth, The Gleam(s) do not, and do not even want to, compete with the depth and passion of its influences. But it manages to build up on them, and, in a way, it’s got a much harder task to perform: reaffirm the moral ideals that, today, seem so much more distant and, well, ideal than they must have seemed to the affected fans of Dylan, Simon and company fifty years ago. Way to go, Bros! Thumbs up for all the honest work.

 

I AND LOVE AND YOU (2009)

 

1) I And Love And You; 2) January Wedding; 3) Head Full Of Doubt / Road Full Of Promise; 4) And It Spread; 5) The Perfect Space; 6) Ten Thousand Words; 7) Kick Drum Heart; 8) Laundry Room; 9) Ill With Want; 10) Tin Man; 11) Slight Figure Of Speech; 12) It Goes On And On; 13) Incomplete And Insecure.

 

By the time the Avetts were ready to appear on a major label, it was too late already: their best work had all been done. Or, at least, it was just highly unlikely that they would surpass the early consistency levels. Eight years in the business, four super-long LPs and a hundred songs behind their belts, an established, ascertained style — what could their transition to American Recor­dings have accomplished? What could they gain from being assigned under the wing of the legendary Rick Rubin himself?

 

Nothing, and Rick knew it well, so he just left them alone, the same way he did with Johnny Cash fifteen years earlier. The only thing he may have contributed was the same thing that I, too, have always wished for: «More piano, less banjo». I And Love And You softly, but steadily steers the brothers away from bluegrass and more into the direction of «common» folk-based singer-song­writing, further away from the Appalachians and ever closer to New York City, as the brothers themselves unambiguously admit on the opening title track ("we are headed north", they sing, "Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in" — okay, not quite ready for Manhattan yet).

 

For some, that may indicate that the brothers are surrendering their integrity; I have seen not a few indignant remarks that accused the band of moving into a sort of Ben Folds direction that, de­pending on the remarkee's position, either sucks per se or is simply not the kind of direction that the brothers are qualified for. Well, it is true that the record is a bit more «pop» than its predeces­sors; but, to tell the truth, there is only one straightforward attempt here at coming up with a tru­ly upbeat pop tune, and it is a great attempt — 'Kick Drum Heart' is a song that certainly ranks up there with Ben Folds at his best (provided one agrees that Ben Folds is discussable in terms of best and worst; I certainly agree), and as simple as it may be, the 'heart : drum' metaphor is pretty old, but the 'heart : kick drum' certainly isn't, particularly not with the actual kick drum used crea­tively enough to justify the metaphor.

 

That and the title track, with its simple and attractive anthemic character, are the obvious high­lights for me. Unfortunately, the other tunes fall somewhat short of the mark. Each sounds nice while it's on, but the hooks are smothered and splattered — somehow, this piano transition means that they are using the same, or very similar, generic chord sequences on almost every track, and not compensating them with original vocal melodies. It's all mid-tempo, steady, sincere, comfor­ting, occasionally heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking — but now that, with Rubin's aid, they have polished out the early day roughness and pretty much discarded all of the «punkier», ico­noclastic elements that they used to have, it's back to Boreville.

 

So much so, in fact, that I have almost forgotten to write how touching 'Ill With Want' really is, with its "something has me, something has me..." chorus (Aching Beauty™) — and its non-trivial lyrical drive, with the protagonist accusing himself of «ugly greed» which eventually just turns out to be an unstoppable, obsessive desire to achieve rather than a simple to own. It's a little con­fessional gem that almost seems to have gotten lost among all those other similar songs preten­ding to also be confessional gems, but not quite getting there.

 

So, overall, I And Love And You is satisfactory, but still disappointing. It's not okay to be wea­r­ing your heart on your sleeve all the time: for one thing, the heart may get all dusty and withered up and wrin­kled, for another thing, sometimes you just get tired of looking at the heart and would prefer taking a peek at the sleeve instead. And the art of pure songwriting craft suffers a setback here. It's as if they intended to try and make a new 'Imagine' out of every second song on here, but not even Lennon himself ever attempted any such feat. So, while an assured thumbs up is still guaranteed, and the new «more piano, less banjo» ideology is commendable, the Avetts have quite a long way to go to make real good use of that piano.

 

LIVE, VOL. 3 (2010)

 

1) Pretty Girl From Matthews; 2) Talk On Indolence; 3) Ballad False Start; 4) The Ballad Of Love And Hate; 5) Co­lor­show; 6) I And Love And You; 7) Shame; 8) When I Drink; 9) Murder In The City; 10) I Killed Sally’s Lo­ver; 11) Head Full Of Doubt / Road Full Of Promise; 12) The Perfect Space; 13) Paranoia In B-Flat Major; 14) Dis­traction #74; 15) Kick Drum Heart; 16) Salvation Song.

 

While it is always nice to hear about the Avetts' awesome live reputation, it may not always be nearly as nice to digest the actual evidence on their live CDs. With these guys, what really matters is the «vibe» and the «bond» factor, and both can really only be profitable when you are in their actual audience. As for the other factors — such as pure energy, precision in playing, and impro­vised or semi-improvised variations on old songs — none of them, alas, are all that much in ac­tion when you compare the live releases to the studio ones.

 

Vol. 3 marks the Brothers' transition to the big time: instead of patchy clubs and seedy joints, this one was recorded at Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, NC, a.k.a. «HOME», to which they now re­turn triumphantly as major label adepts and overall big time heroes. Clearly, on CD this rup­tures the «bond effect» even more, and they have to resort to subtle tricks to hold your confidence — like, for instance, not cutting out the false start to 'Ballad Of Love And Hate', in which they somehow managed to forget the lyrics (perhaps deliberately?).

 

It doesn't quite work; the atmos­phere simply cannot be all that «homely» with the guys sur­ren­dered by that many people. After all, arena-rock and the Avett Brothers are fairly incompatible (although not entirely incompatible, as the brawny, excited performance of 'Kick Drum Heart', one of the show's major higlights, pro­ves convincingly).

 

The setlist, rather evenly spread between the last three albums (but they do start off with 'Pretty Girl From Matthews' and end with 'Salvation Song' off Mignonette), is excellent, but nothing strikes me as either particularly different from the studio versions or so different as being worth a special mention. A few more flubbed notes than usual, a little bit more screaming, the works.

 

However, what Live Vol. 3 clearly shows is that in North Carolina, at least, these guys have already been enshrined: the entire audience sings along to just about every number, turning the proceedings in­to some weird celebration of the Church of Neo-Bluegrass, which is touching, but not quite the thing for which the Avetts, with their light melancholy and deep introspection, have come into this world, if you ask me. On the other hand, this permanent echo of several thousand voices at least gives Vol. 3 a special sonic flavor. If you are interested in seeing how these songs work as sermons, go ahead. If you prefer to ingest them as solitary prayers, better stay away.

 

THE CARPENTER (2012)

 

1) The Once And Future Carpenter; 2) Live And Die; 3) Winter In My Heart; 4) Pretty Girl From Michigan; 5) I Never Knew You; 6) February Seven; 7) Through My Prayers; 8) Down With The Shine; 9) A Fathers First Spring; 10) Geraldine; 11) Paul Newman Vs. The Demons; 12) Life.

 

For those who have already forgotten what I And Love And You sounded like, here is the direct sequel, sounding every bit the same as its predecessor — not surprisingly, once again produced by Rick Rubin. Permanent fans of the Avetts need not worry: none of the atmospheres, philo­sophies, and stylizations have been betrayed. And there is yet another ʽPretty Girlʼ song out there — what else does one need for total orgiastic happiness?

 

It does seem as if they took one step back from the «excessive» poppiness, cut down on the pia­nos a little bit, brought in lots of guest players to put a little more emphasis on ensemble playing, and only allowed themselves a heavy, distorted guitar sound on two or three of the tracks so as to break up the monotonousness. In other words, The Carpenter is even more formulaic, and it all depends on the sheer number of new hooks they may or may not have brought into this world by writing all this new material.

 

Personally, I think the songs are generally quite good, and that the B-level magic touch is still with the brothers. When they go totally generic, they still remember to wind it up with a cozy slogan — ʽThe Once And Future Carpenterʼ, for instance, is at first a forever-on-the-road anthem worthy of a Neil Young country-folk album, cleverly landing the last line of the refrain ("If I live the life I'm given, I won't be scared to die") at the center of your attention. Then you sort of rea­lize that "once I was a carpenter..." makes this a little more than just a forever-on-the-road an­them, and start nervously searching for a Nazareth reference among all the Dallases and Detroits, but by the time you realize that there isn't one and that you have been lyrically stupefied, the song is al­ready over and you just have to go back one more time. Clever, eh?

 

Of the upbeat songs, the catchiest choruses and vibes are on ʽLive And Dieʼ and ʽI Never Knew Youʼ, and the best use of electric guitar is during the in-between verse interludes on ʽPretty Girl From Michiganʼ — but, other than that, I am at a complete loss trying to say something refresh­ing. Even these hooks, to tell the truth, do not stay around for very long, maybe because the feel­ings they generate are already so «Avettish» that they are unable to attach themselves to any fresh brain cells. But I do like the vibe anyway, and they still write lyrics that are just way too thought-provoking for the average country-western standard (ʽFebruary Sevenʼ).

 

The solitary dark horse of the album is ʽPaul Newman Vs. The Demonsʼ, a significantly darker (as already suggested by the title), louder, and less predictable tune than the rest. It is hardly any­thing like a Pink Floydian masterpiece of fear and paranoia (these guys lack the proper studio wi­zard­ry to brew that sort of sonic magic), but it is still a successful first foray into «darkness» by the Avetts, who usually prefer to converse with their angels rather than demons. Gritty bass, shrie­ky harmonies, guitar feedback, it all could have sounded like generic alt-rock in the end, but it doesn't because all of these things are used sparingly. Not that the song has much to do with Paul Newman, either, but nice of dear late Paul to provide such useful incentives even four years after his demise.

 

A traditional thumbs up out of respect for all the intelligence, professionalism, and sincerity, but that's about it: unfortunately, in three years The Avett Brothers have neither learned anything particu­larly interesting to enlighten us, nor whetted their songwriting instincts to the point where their emotions would burst out, rather than be distributed through the usual modest trickle. Or maybe I'm just too greedy — after all, the way I'd want things done just isn't the way they usually get done nowadays.

 

MAGPIE AND THE DANDELION (2013)

 

1) Open-Ended Life; 2) Morning Song; 3) Never Been Alive; 4) Another Is Waiting; 5) Bring Your Love To Me; 6) Good To You; 7) Part From Me; 8) Skin And Bones; 9) Souls Like The Wheels; 10) Vanity; 11) The Clearness Is Gone.

 

Another album like this and the Avett Brothers may as well apply for sainthood — Scott as St. Augustin and Timothy as St. Francis, or vice versa. They have perfected their heartbreaking skills to smoothly function like an unbreakable machine, churning song after song after song that all produce the same vibe of immaculate brotherly love for all humanity, tempered with immeasu­rable sadness at the current state of said humanity. The only problem is, enjoying each of their subsequent albums with the same strength of faith and will is now akin to meticulously going to church every Sunday and melting in the verbal glow of your favorite preacher. You know damn well that he's already exhausted all of his topics, ideas, and original approaches to Scripture, but you just need one more «fresh» swig of cathedral morality...

 

To be honest, all of the tracks for Magpie And The Dandelion were recorded during the same sessions that already yielded The Carpenter — which explains why it only took them a year to follow it up. However, these are not «inferior outtakes»: it turns out that the Avetts simply deci­ded against a double album (and I, for one, applaud that decision), postponing official release of half their output to keep the fans steady and satisfied. Unfortunately, it also complicates the life of the profane reviewer: thinking of a specific individual character for any Avett Bros. album is already a chore, and this particular one is just a Siamese twin to its predecessor. You'd have to allow a decade of development at least to understand what makes one Siamese twin distinct from the other, wouldn't you?

 

In terms of individual songs, everything here rules (it's the Saint Avett Brothers!) and everything here sucks (it's the fuckin' Saint Avett Brothers!). The very first song announces that "I was taught to keep an open-ended life / And never trap myself in nothin'" — one minute you are to­tally drawn into it, then the next minute you realize that, at the very least, they have trapped them­selves well enough in that banjo sound, so how does this really work? The second song says that "even though I know there's hope in every morning song, I have to find that melody alone". Nice­ly stated, but how many distinct, original melodies have they actually found on this record? The third song says that "money won't do the trick" (okay) "but it will help to open the doors we need it to help someone else" (if you say so) "still we won't need it to turn things around" (somebody take a goddamn decision!) and then concludes that "I've never been alive like I am now" to one of the most limp, slow-dragging rhythms they could think of.

 

In short, the Avetts seem confused, and I suppose this confusion is the most interesting thing on the whole record. The brothers' usual humility saves them from becoming annoying, but their words are often disconnected from their music, and the music presents no breakthroughs since it is not supposed to. "I've got something to say / But it's all vanity / I found a tune I could play / But it's all vanity" — summarizes their attitude fairly well, since the inevitable conclusion is that it is better to say and play nothing than something, and Magpie And The Dandelion is as close a substitute for that option as it gets. (For that matter, ʽVanityʼ is actually the only song on the al­bum that somehow stands out — it has an odd, out-of-nowhere, bombastic, quasi-progressive middle section with a heroic distorted guitar solo; maybe this is supposed to be a musical allegory for «vanity», because the interlude does sound vain. It also kicks ass, though).

 

«Vanity» also shows up with an unexpected live rendition of ʽSouls Like The Wheelsʼ from The Second Gleam, performed before an ecstatic audience that goes berserk every time one of the brothers starts a minimalistic solo — why else would they bother including this live take if not to let us know how much their fans care about them? But again, the song is so nice, the "let me go" chorus is so touching, and even the minimalistic solos are so acoustically pretty that it's no big problem to forget about the vanity aspect. Come to think of it, St. Augustin and St. Francis must have been pretty vain, too, or else we wouldn't be aware of their existence.

 

Anyway, chalk one more up for the dedicated fans — the formula still works — but if you alre­a­dy know what the Avetts sound like and this knowledge has not converted you, the only thing you need to know is that Magpie And The Dandelion, despite the exquisite fairy-tale-style title, sounds exactly like everything else that these lovable, but occasionally nagging, bearded prophets of «alt-country» have ever done. Personally, I enjoyed every minute of it, but it didn't exactly help me come up with any insights on any of the songs; and in the end, I will refrain from a spe­cial thumbs up as well — it might just as well simply share the one I already gave to Carpenter.

TRUE SADNESS (2016)

 

1) Ain't No Man; 2) Mama, I Don't Believe; 3) No Hard Feelings; 4) Smithsonian; 5) You Are Mine; 6) Satan Pulls The Strings; 7) True Sadness; 8) I Wish I Was; 9) Fisher Road To Hollywood; 10) Victims Of Life; 11) Divorce Separation Blues; 12) May It Last.

 

Sooner or later, the Flying Electronic Monster catches up with all of us — there may be times when not using synthesizers for your records is seen as a bold act of artistic defiance, and then there are times when not having a synthesizer on board is like going out on the street with no pants on. (Not that going out on the street without your pants on cannot be seen as a bold act of artistic defiance, but then, how many people around will really be able to tell if you intentionally left them at home or just forgot to put them on? Same with the synthesizers). Anyway, while Seth does use them sparingly, the very first track (ʽAin't No Manʼ) opens with the we-wiil-rock-you sound of a drum machine, and then electronics are all over ʽYou Are Mineʼ and all over ʽSatan Pulls The Stringsʼ and... uh... wait a minute... well, actually, I guess that is all.

 

Admittedly, the electronics work — Rick Rubin does a good job integrating them into the band's overall sound, and I can certainly understand them trying out something a little different from the usual mope-country sound (and there might be just a hint of jealousy here, at the relative success of The Black Keys doing the same thing). All of these three songs are good. ʽAin't No Manʼ is a catchy country-pop tune with a cute bassline, getting by solely on the energy of the rhythm sec­tion and the gospel-style backing vocals. ʽYou Are Mineʼ opens with a simple banjo line, but then quickly becomes techno-psychedelic, with multiple electronic layers over acoustic piano and vice versa — and some beautiful vocal harmonies, McCartney-style. Finally, ʽSatan Pulls The Stringsʼ is an experimental arrangement of a traditional tune, sort of a 50/50 merger between a country-blues and an acid techno track, which works because they choose some particularly evil-sounding synth tones, perfectly adequate for a robotic vision of Satan pulling the strings, I guess.

 

But never worry, these are just minor brushes across a canvas that largely stays the same — just because they dragged in a few extra chips and cables changes nothing about the fact that Scott and Seth Avett still behave as a pair of intelligent, heart-broken, world-weary farm hands who'd rather mess up their lives so they can sing about it than straighten these lives out because what fun is there with a straightened out life? The album's single most memorable tune is ʽSmith­sonianʼ, which lays out their life philosophy as simply and straightforwardly as never before: "Call the Smithsonian, I've made a discovery / Life ain't forever and lunch isn't free / Loved ones will break your heart with or without you / Turns out we don't get to know everything". Okay, so this really used to be their creed all along, but sometimes it helps to set aside the metaphors for a moment and just go for some blunt wording — and few people these days can spell out basic (but true) banalities with the same pleasantly nonchalance as the Avett Brothers.

 

Commenting on the soft acoustic ballads is an impossibility (they just sound like any other soft acoustic ballad ever written by these guys), but I was pleasantly surprised by the increased level of diversity — apart from the electronics, we have some really complex arrangements (on the title track, for instance, where choppy electric chords mingle with jangly acoustic picking, organs and strings), some Latin bounce (ʽVictims Of Lifeʼ with samba elements — should have invited Paul Simon on that one, as it sounds not entirely unlike ʽMe And Julioʼ), and a full-out Straussian waltz arrangement on the album closer ʽMay It Lastʼ that flows in and out of a baroque-pop construction, making this arguably their most complex studio creation up to date (a good structural analogy would be something like Buffalo Springfield's ʽBroken Arrowʼ); and the com­plexity is well deserved, since the song does end the album on a friendly note — sadness and melancholia, yes, but mixed with a note of support ("there is a sea, and I am your captain...").

 

On the whole, I could even call this «progress», if the notion did not sound so ridiculous when applied to the Avetts — who had always been perfectly happy to be the modern AC/DC of folk- and country-rock as long as they still thought they had something to say. So the sonic discoveries of True Sadness are not really an indication of the band expanding its horizons — most likely, they were just introduced so that they could not be accused of making a vain point out of sticking to the formula (the way Angus Young proudly asserts how they put out not 11, but 12 albums that sound the same). It's more like, hey, a synthesizer? A drum machine? Sure, why not — who the hell are we to say no? It's not like God ever told us to stick to guitar and banjo. It's an attitude that seems likeable, and reason enough to give the record a thumbs up, even if I probably will treat it in the future just like any other Avett Brothers album.

 

Oh, and, also for the record, I do like the idea of calling it True Sadness — few of these songs sound proverbially sad (as in, emotionally overdone and making you feel like you're standing in a salty puddle already), but they weave their little nets of personal dissatisfaction and trouble in oblique ways: a well-placed lyric here, a single chord change there, without wallowing in misery or throwing a fit. They can even get sad on something technically upbeat (ʽVictims Of Lifeʼ), and though they're far from the first artist to be able to do that, they just might be the first ones to draw attention to this through the very title of the album. Although in doing so, they bring back accusations of vanity — ain't it a little presumptious to insist that it is your record that represents «true sadness» and not, say, Conor Oberst's, or Bon Iver's? That's Satan pulling the strings for you, brothers...

 

AVRIL LAVIGNE

LET GO (2002)

 

1) Losing Grip; 2) Complicated; 3) Sk8er Boi; 4) I'm With You; 5) Mobile; 6) Unwanted; 7) Tomorrow; 8) Anything But Ordinary; 9) Things I'll Never Say; 10) My World; 11) Nobody's Fool; 12) Too Much To Ask; 13) Naked; 14*) Why.

 

Question: AVRIL LAVIGNE? Why????? What's up with, like, GOOD music?

 

Answer: Hey, wouldn't you be bored, too, if all you ever had to review was good music?

 

Q: But it's not like you haven't written about bad music altogether. What about those fifteen awful Aretha Franklin albums all in a row?

 

A: Nah, that was just side effects of the trade. «Know your enemy» is a fairly wise maxim, and Aretha sure as hell isn't the enemy, no matter how much crap there is in her catalog.

 

Q: But Avril Lavigne? I mean, Avril Lavigne? Who the heck is Avril Lavigne? Who the hell is going to be listening to Avril Lavigne in five years' time? Hell, who on Earth is listening to Avril Lavigne right now? And how is it possible to write anything insightful about Avril Lavigne? I mean, even the T&A factor don't work properly this time!

 

A: Well, yeah, it's probably true that Avril, per se, does not offer all that much insight. It is far more interesting to take a look at the world in which a person as completely gray and un­re­mar­kable as Avril Lavigne could sell 16 million copies of her debut album, Let Go, earn the sucking-up of pretty much all mainstream press in existence, and become one of MTV's lead darling girls of the entire decade.

 

Q: Come on now, surely there is nothing particularly amazing or unpredictable about that. People are sheep and MTV people are their fascist shepherds, and Avril is just one of their poster girls. Nobody gives a damn about the actual music on Let Go being just a bunch of trivially rehashed pop-punk power chords; all that matters is that Lavigne is (a) «one of us» and (b) «a rebellious spirit». Nobody expects her dumb teenage audiences to sit and scratch their heads and think stuff like «hmm, this music is sort of simple and generic and unoriginal compared to Sigur Rós», and the dumb teenage audiences predictably satisfy expectations. What else is there to say?

 

A: Well, maybe not much, but sometimes it takes a good listen to an «awful» album like Let Go to properly trigger the thinking process, rather than to a «decent» recording. For instance, no one would probably insist that, in terms of complexity of melodies and arrangements, Let Go is in any way inferior to any «true» punk album ever released (the ones that really go after the three-chord aesthetics, I mean).

 

Q: You know better than me that it's not the complexity that counts, it's the catchiness and the energy and the spirit and the relevance. Don't tell me you get a kick out of comparing Let Go with The Clash. The bitch calls herself «punk» and she'd never even heard the Sex Pistols before crapping out this shit­pile.

 

A: Well, at the risk of offending somebody who cares, I'd say that Let Go got catchiness — at least, some of the singles, like 'Complicated', are instantaneously catchy, and some choruses eve­n­tually reach even my subconscious on subsequent listens ('Anything But Ordinary', 'My World'). Energy? Spirit? Look at her videos — she sure as hell is willing to invest quite a bit of energy in those performances. Crashing guitars into windshields and all. I mean, she certainly believes in the things she plays. She believes that the real-life opposition between «punk» and «ballet» is still relevant, and that in this opposition, «punk» = «Good» and «ballet» = «Evil», to be overthrown by the «cool people».

 

Obviously, we can be bitter about it and say she's really as dumb as that, to believe in that shit, but to just call her a «fake» and be done with it would be rather rash. How is she more «fake» than, say, The Apples In Stereo, who have built their entire career on mimicry and we still love them? Who is more «fake» — herself, clearly grounded in the realities of her life, no matter how generic it might be, or Björk, who has spent a lifetime constructing an alter ego as far removed from reality as possible? And «relevance» — that's absurd; she's been relevant for millions of people for almost a decade.

 

Q: Yeah, for millions of dumb people happy enough to chew on MTV's cud. I give you it may not be her fault; she's just another brainwashed victim herself, deeply believing that her music helps people out to «break stereotypes», «be themselves», «live their own lives», that she's doing some­thing honest and brave and artistic when in reality she's just a helpless cog in the machine, and her pathetic underdeveloped brain lacks the capacity to understand that. Really, what else is there to say? What next — shall we, God forbid, start discussing her lyrics? "He was a skater boy, she said see ya later boy, he wasn't good enough for her"? Aren't we doing the bitch, and all of her croonies, way too much of a favor even mentioning her existence?

 

A: I don't know, I've thought like that for a long time, but I'm not exactly sure these days. We can always pretend to ignore «artists» like Lavigne — the «we» in question meaning «elitist listeners who have given up on humanity as a whole» — but perhaps, if «we» are at all interested in not dwindling down eventually to something like 0,000001% of the population (statistically nearing to­tal non-exis­tence), it would make sense to at least try and spot the few good things about the girl, if only to make certain that we actually care about the rest of the world.

 

Sure, it's pretty damn grim to see what used to be «The Beatles type» vs. «The Stones type» mu­tate into «Britney or Avril?» these days. It's a tasty, juicy matter for sociologists, perhaps, but har­d­ly for raffinated music lovers. On the other hand, «we» keep seeing ourselves falling into our own trap. «We» do not like to come across as too pretentious and smarmy (or do we?), and «we» normally have no problem about enjoying simple music, but «we» can never resist poking fun at the likes of Lavigne and her fans, either. Maybe there's more to be said about Lavigne than just a bunch of jokes about skater boys?

 

Q: Come on then, let's hear it! Any deep intellectual considerations on Let Go and its overall im­por­tan­ce? Any provoking remarks on how to integrate its values with those of the culturally ad­vanced members of society?

 

A: Well...

 

....uh...

 

...Nah.

 

It's a pretty damn terrible record, to tell the truth. But I'm still thinking.

 

UNDER MY SKIN (2004)

 

1) Take Me Away; 2) Together; 3) Don't Tell Me; 4) He Wasn't; 5) How Does It Feel; 6) My Happy Ending; 7) No­body's Home; 8) Forgotten; 9) Who Knows; 10) Fall To Pieces; 11) Freak Out; 12) Slipped Away; 13*) I Always Get What I Want.

 

It actually takes a few listens to this album — a feat that most sensible, reasonable people will feel no need to perform — to understand that the noun phrases «Avril Lavigne» and «creative growth» are not fully incompatible within a sentence. Yes, the girl's career does follow a curve, and there is a certain pinch of interest in following it.

 

Obviously, I am not talking about the much discussed change of image: instead of the overdriven skater brat of Let Go, Under My Skin gives us a black-and-white, Deeply Tragic, goth-over­toned Lavigne, all set on «maturation», a.k.a. inflating teenage tribulations to cosmic proportions. It is quite telling that one of the hit songs, 'Nobody's Home', was co-written with ex-Evanescence guitar player Ben Moody: the influence of his band's skill at merchandising doom and gloom is all over this record. (I will, however, refrain from deep discussions on whose metaphysical con­ception of art — Lavigne's or Amy Lee's — has contributed more to our spiritual development). The overall best thing I can say about this shift of image, though, is that it doesn't make things any worse. If you are a poseur by nature, it doesn't really matter if you are also a chameleon.

 

The real reason why Under My Skin is a tad more interesting is that Lavigne apparently takes this songwriting business seriously, and that there is a significant jump in song quality from the previous record. Maybe it is her new songwriting partner, fellow Canadian Chantal Kreviazuk, pushing her on to new levels, or perhaps professional obligations spurred her on to digest musical influences other than Blink-182 and Matchbox 20, but, whatever be the case, most of the songs on Under My Skin at least qualify as semi-decent mainstream grunge / pop punk in which music, vocal melodies, and lyrics generally serve one and the same purpose, and that purpose is a tiny bit smarter than just «rock out, dude».

 

See, normally, an album like that should only provoke teeth-grinding reactions. All of these songs with their exaggerated darkness, tales of breakups, self-exile, PAIN PAIN PAIN — the fuckin' brat is twenty years old, what does she know about pain (and let us not start about the age of Ju­liet, whom we only know as a Shakesperian projection anyway)? Yet the obligatory three listens went down smoothly, in fact, each next one was smoother than the one before. How come the barf bag is still empty?

 

Hooks and craft, baby. Kreviazuk (who, by the way, is 10 years older than Lavigne and certainly qualifies better for writing such an album) and whoever else she is working with really did a solid job of providing her with well-written choruses — and Lavigne does an equally good job at sin­ging them. This is where her vocal skills really come in handy: nowhere near diva-level, so the songs don't come across as blown tremendously out of proportion, but still loud, strong, and ex­pressive enough to minimize all the damage from «posing».

 

Hilariously, the most memorable song on the album is also its least typical — the vapid, girlish pop-punk anthem 'He Wasn't', played at breakneck speed and winning us over with its ABBA-like "uh huh"s. (Lavigne must have sensed it herself, or else it wouldn't have served as the blue­print for just about all of The Best Damn Thing). The only other song that is sort of a «stand out» is the already mentioned 'Nobody's Home', because it does, indeed, sound a bit like Evanes­cence lite, with more complex vocal overdubs than usual, falsettos rising into screaming and background guitars that actually seem to at least be wanting to shape their sound into some sort of complex melodic figure (not that they could ever hope to — complex melodic figures are harmful ballast for Avril's legions of fans).

 

The rest... well, actually, I would be interested in seeing if someone could do something with this kind of material if it were freed from the monotonous grasp of post-grunge guitars. Phasing? Wah-wahs? A string quartet? A Mellotron? How about «Avril Lavigne and The London Sym­phony Orchestra»? Or at least spicing it up with bits and pieces of Eastern motives, à la Big Guru Alanis? Until then, Under My Skin is a curious anomaly — a predictable failure at an attempt to add «deep» and «cool» to the list of keywords, yet, in spite of all odds, a thoroughly listenable one. Plus, 'He Wasn't' is, indeed, one of the giggliest pop tunes of the decade.

 

THE BEST DAMN THING (2007)

 

1) Girlfriend; 2) I Can Do Better; 3) Runaway; 4) The Best Damn Thing; 5) When You're Gone; 6) Everything Back But You; 7) Hot; 8) Innocence; 9) I Don't Have To Try; 10) One Of Those Girls; 11) Contagious; 12) Keep Holding On.

 

Color me crazy, but the more I listen to it, the more it does sound like the best damn thing — by Avril's personal standards, of course. So it looks like the whole wannabe-goth schtick didn't quite work out, despite professional help and supportive sales and reviews. No big deal. Now she is back to glossy pop punk basics.

 

What is quite seriously refreshing about Avril's third album is that it is unassailable from any theoretical angle. It assumes nothing. It does not present her as anybody that she is really not. One could foam at the mouth for hours in endless debates about whether she really identified with the «skate culture» on Let Go or was just a pathetic poseur (not to mention the even fatter, juicier question of whether «skate culture» is actually «culture», etc.). The Best Damn Thing baits you into nothing. One may like it or be indifferent to it, but hate it? Maybe only for its hit singles oc­cupying way too much TV and radio space, but, next to most of the stuff that competed with it in 2007, these songs are masterful masterpieces.

 

If you know 'Girlfriend' — and if you were more than two years old in 2007 and were not living in Darfur or Eastern Highlands of Papua, you could hardly not know 'Girlfriend' — you pretty much know the rest of the album. Fast, flashy, pop-punk anthems with catchy choruses, all about boy-girl relations, usually with strong emphasis on «girl». She even swears on a couple of tracks — ooh, controversial! — but don't worry, there are «clean» versions available for underage fans whose parents think that hearing 'I'm the motherfucking princess' as 'I'm the m-m-m-m-m prin­cess' must at least postpone the Doom of the Gods, if not at all cancel it.

 

The main seductive part of the trick is that, even if Lavigne is quite far removed from symbo­lizing intelligence in art, these songs, for the most part, make her sound dumber than she really is, and that's excellent because it makes way for irony. 'Girlfriend' is so grossly overdriven, in its music, its frenzied backing vocals, its minimalistic lyrics (and its obvious tributes to the equally minimalistic past, e. g. the Rubinoos' 1979 hit 'I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend' which contains the exact same "hey-hey, you-you" bit), that anyone who'd like to take it seriously — e. g., as an in­struction for strong-willed gals to take what they want when they see it — must be at the lower rungs of the human adequacy scale.

 

All right, so from time to time she is overdoing it. "I'm the one, I'm the one who wears the pants" ('I Don't Have To Try') sounds stupid rather than dumb (there's a big difference) — if she's the one who wears the pants, what the heck is he supposed to be wearing? "I hate it when a guy doesn't understand why a certain time of month I don't want to hold his hand" — ugh. (Okay, I admit this can be a problem, but I don't want to hear about real problems on an album like this, I want to hear nothing but completely braindead stuff). Some of the lyrical and musical moments are cringeworthy, although they will vary from taste to taste. But overall, the lightweight atmos­phere and the songwriting craft still win me over.

 

To this should be added that the record sounds just fine — Avril's backing band has effectively made a transition from third- (fourth-?)generation grungey blandness to upbeat retro-punk, taking their cues from the Ramones themselves rather than from their far-removed descendants. And she herself finally comes across as a self-confident and versatile singer. Anyone who doubts that ne­eds to check out the standards — for instance, compare any of these explosive outbursts (say, 'Everything Back But You', gurgling with breakneck-speed excitement) with the limp, lifeless likes of Miley Cyrus ("There's seven things I hate about you!").

 

I even admit to liking one of the three power ballads on here (unfortunately, these were most like­ly obligatory inclusions so as not to displease entirely the new «serious» brand of fans she got her­self with Under My Skin) — 'When You're Gone' is maddeningly well written and features a great showcase for the girl's range during the bridge section. Move over, Celine Dion.

 

In short, I don't know how much of a «real thing» this is, but I do know that this is an expertly crafted pop record, and that there is no good reason to praise the world out of, say, the Pipettes, all the while bashing The Best Damn Thing — the only big difference being that the Pipettes want you to have fun by going against the general flow of things, whereas Lavigne is perfectly okay about going after the flow. Assuming that «to everything there is a season», as Roger McGuinn once told us coming down from Mount Sinai, The Best Damn Thing is truly the best damn way, or, at least, one of the few best damn ways, to integrate the snob and the masses, pro­vided the snob can see the links with the non-commercial stuff and the masses can see that there is a line that separates Lavigne from utterly monstruous glam-punk constructions (Pink!), not to mention the ever lowering standards of teen pop.

 

A friendly thumbs up: there is little hope that she will continue making music in the exact same manner (too much pressure from the industry that will force her to start «growing up along with her audiences»), but that does not take away from the pure aural-trash pleasure.

 

GOODBYE LULLABY (2011)

 

1) Black Star; 2) What The Hell; 3) Push; 4) Wish You Were Here; 5) Smile; 6) Stop Standing There; 7) I Love You; 8) Everybody Hurts; 9) Not Enough; 10) 4 Real; 11) Darlin'; 12) Remember When; 13) Goodbye; 14*) Alice.

 

Does the title suggest, in any way, that Canada's latest piece of candy from Pandora's box may be considering early retirement, especially if the album does not sell well enough? (As of late March, it still hasn't reached the top of the charts and it looks like the bus has already been missed). Be­cause Goodbye Lullaby clearly proves one thing: in ten years' time, the lady Lavigne has not been able to grow up, and since in another three years, when she hits thirty, any attempt to recre­ate the burly success of The Best Damn Thing will seem gruesomely inadequate, it is, perhaps, high time to seek another line of work.

 

At least her attempts to sound «serious» on her second album were painted in black overtones. It might not have been «her», really, but it was a misguided attempt to try to move in the generally right direction. Now the lightness and humor take a step back once again, but the overtones are dazzlingly — and sickeningly — white (not surprisingly, check out the album cover and contrast it with the photo on Under My Skin). Goodbye Lullaby is, simply put, an album of simplistic, tender, but «seriously conceited» love songs. A little joy, a little pain, a little happiness, a little suffering, the usual thing, nothing particularly respectable or cutting edge, even from a sternly mainstream point of view.

 

The album starts off deceptively — doubly deceptively, in fact, first with a little bit of a piano bal­lad ('Black Star') setting one up for romance, then suddenly launching into 'What The Hell', an obvious attempt to recreate the smash success of 'Girlfriend'. But if 'Girlfriend' truly had its guilty pleasure side, a head-spinning hyper-dumb rock song that even the Ramones could have endorsed, 'What The Hell' is a lame shadow, an overcompressed bore with no discernible guitar melody, a phenomenal lack of concern for the lyrics (lines like "You say that I'm messing with your head / Boy, I like messing in your bed" cannot be even unintentionally funny) coupled with a strange mes­sage that does not fit at all with the rest of the album ("All my life I've been good, but now, what the hell", she states and then switches over to soppy, inoffensive ballads for the rest of the record), and was that a whiff of auto-tuned vocals I sensed on the chorus? This is the kind of stuff that is usually reserved for the likes of Miley Cyrus these days, and I did think better of Avril.

 

After such a crappy start, one might even get a stronger craving for soppy ballads, and I cannot say that everything here is rotten. These are not power ballads; they're teen-pop ballads, with up­beat rhythms and light choruses and acoustic guitars coming through, with maybe a couple excep­tions ('Remember When' rips it up Diane Warren-style, even though the song is credited purely to Avril — who knows, maybe when she's retired from the stage, she might try on Satan's crown for a while). 'Everybody Hurts' should be docked a point for getting people to mention R.E.M. and Avril Lavigne in the same sentence (see, she's done it again), but its chorus is believable, as is the funky anguish in '4 Real' and even the desperation in 'Wish You Were Here' (what's up with all these titles, anyway, has the English-speaking world finally run out of new verb phrases? Or is this some sort of primitivist defiance — in 2011, to call one of your songs 'I Love You'?).

 

In the end, there are two good sides to this. One: Avril Lavigne is very far from being the worst singer-song­writer you ever heard in your life. She knows what a pop hook is, and she can even craft some that do not carry nauseous side effects. Two: Avril Lavigne is a fan of the good old guitar-and-piano approach, understanding that a pop hook goes best with a traditionally grounded pop arrangement. That's about it (okay, third side: no matter how hard it is to look sexy in a white wedding dress, she does manage it on the front cover). Bad sides: no single idea is explored here to its logical end. Hooks aren't sung with the proper conviction, arrangements aren't given much thought beyond the basic choice of instrument, and, worst of all, the whole thing is simply way beyond her abilities. She wanted to turn this into some Solemn Celebration of the Pure Force of Love, but can a one-armed swimmer win the Olympic 50-metre freestyle?

 

Thumbs down — but, in all honesty, it is nothing short of a miracle that Goodbye Lullaby co­mes across as «disappointing» rather than simply Godawful (well, 'What The Hell' is Godawful). Actually, it is possible that Lavigne's worst mistake was her production team (including people like Max Martin, who has produced albums by just about every horrible teen pop artist on the planet). Apparently, Nigel Godrich couldn't be bought — or, more likely, she just doesn't know who he is in the first place.

 

AVRIL LAVIGNE (2013)

 

1) Rock'n'Roll; 2) Here's To Never Growing Up; 3) 17; 4) Bitchin' Summer; 5) Let Me Go; 6) Give You What You Like; 7) Bad Girl; 8) Hello Kitty; 9) You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet; 10) Sippin' On Sunshine; 11) Hello Heartache; 12) Falling Fast; 13) Hush Hush.

 

The «reboot-style» album title makes it seem like a new potential star has just exploded on the scene — a sensible publicity move, considering that (a) mainstream pop stars seem to have much shor­tened shelf lives in the 21st century and (b) most people have probably already forgotten all about Avril Lavigne in two years. However, the publicity move is incomplete: the first single, ʽHere's To Never Growing Upʼ, immediately betrays the artist's age and pedigree, and ends up putting her on the right wavelength with her old fans of ten years ago, but hardly with the new fans who have no reason to identify with lines like "I'm like yeah whatever, we're still living like that". This ain't too good, Avril. An image slip-up.

 

For the critics rather than the fans, an even bigger slip-up will be the words-to-image connection. ʽRock'n'Rollʼ starts the record out on a punchy "I don't care about my makeup / I like it better with my jeans all ripped up", but then you look at the dark mascara thing around the eyes on the sleeve, and what the hell?.. This doesn't even refer to the fact that ʽRock'n'Rollʼ is anything but rock'n'roll. More of a happy round-the-campfire girlscout anthem, perhaps, dragged through the usual shit-filters of digital compression and autotuning to strip it of all identifiable life signs. And who helped her pen these lyrics? "I don't care if I'm misfit / I like it better than the hipster bull­shit" — perceiving A. L. as a «misfit in the hipster reference frame» is a serious candidate for the Topsy-Turvy Award of the year 2013.

 

Anyway, the basic point is that Avril Lavigne continues to honor the general commitment of alternating one lite-pop album with one attemptedly «serious» album (be it the quasi-goth seri­ous­ness of Under My Skin or the quasi-sensual seriousness of Goodbye Lullaby). This one, yet again, emphasizes the have-fun side of our beloved Canadian rebel, and you can tell it from the song titles alone, without hearing one note of the record. She's having herself a bitchin' summer, sippin' on sunshine like she's still 17, a hello-kitty bad girl stealing her parents' liquor and going all «here's to never growing up». But 17 is also post-pubescence, so behind that screen of eternal fun — hello heartache, she's falling fast and is quite ready to give you what you like, and if you don't like anything, let me go, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

 

The actual music is hardly distinguishable from the latest brand of teen-pop à la Miley Cyrus («harder» sections) or Taylor Swift («softer» sections) — I was kind of hoping for at least a few guitar-dependent catchy pop-punk tunes of the Best Damn Thing variety, but most prefer to fol­low the thoroughly rote standard of ʽWhat The Hellʼ: ʽBad Girlʼ, with «Deep Purple gone nu-metal» guitar parts and completely unexpected growling (!) vocals by Marylin Manson himself (!) in the background, is sort of a pleasant exception to the rule. Everything else is, at best, acoustic-based alt-pop that rarely even takes the trouble of disguising itself as something «rebellious» — at worst, really embarrassing attempts at modernizing one's image, such as ʽHello Kittyʼ, an attempt to amalgamate Japanese pop culture gimmickry with a distinctly K-pop flavor (and I'm assuming the Japanese clichés in the intro signify a defying unwillingness not to confuse Korea with Japan).

 

On the good side, we do have ourselves some catchy vocal melodies, but somehow they all seem to be hiding in the «softer» section — ʽGive You What You Likeʼ has an emotionally resonant series of falsetto flourishes in the chorus, and the la-la-las of the childish, but cute ʽHello Heart­acheʼ also turn out to be surprisingly moody. The same does not apply to boring power ballads like ʽLet Me Goʼ and ʽHush Hushʼ, but it still seems to indicate that, perhaps, she made a mistake by distancing from the vibes of Goodbye Lullaby — that it is sentimental pop, riding on vocal nuances, which should have been her weapon of choice, rather than a «rebellious rock» vibe. At least in 2002, when it already sounded phoney, it was still fresh, and the related marketology still incorporated a tiny bit of naïvete. By 2013, phoneyness is the only thing that remains. So, Avril, thumbs down, and here's to finally growing up, you know. Maybe your loyal fans haven't grown, I can admit that, but if they haven't, it's simply because they're idiots. No need to follow a bad example. You can't even play guitar like Angus Young — why keep on wearing his shorts?

 

BADLY DRAWN BOY

THE HOUR OF BEWILDERBEAST (2000)

 

1) The Shining; 2) Everybody's Stalking; 3) Bewilder; 4) Fall In A River; 5) Camping Next To Water; 6) Stone On The Water; 7) Another Pearl; 8) Body Rap; 9) Once Around The Block; 10) This Song; 11) Bewilderbeast; 12) Magic In The Air; 13) Cause A Rockslide; 14) Pissing In The Wind; 15) Blistered Heart; 16) Disillusion; 17) Say It Again; 18) Epitaph.

 

I have an instinctive distrust for people who wear woolly hats outside of Russian winter, and this means Damon Gough, a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy, is on the prime list of suspects, considering that, according to rumours, he does not take his off even in the shower. Seems like the «hip» people have that distrust, too, but not so much because of the hat as because nobody really seems to un­derstand what to do about Badly Drawn Boy. Is he a genius? Is he a fraud? Is he a committed pro­moter of the indie spirit before the hideous Mainstream Monster? Is he a cunning sellout, molding his music in lightweight, inoffensive forms so as to be able to reap praise from all sides? Above all — if you don't love his music at first sight, is it worth trying to «get into it» at all, or is it really just a waste of precious time, which you could use, for instance, to go out and buy yourself a woolly hat all your own?

 

One thing upon which pretty much everyone agrees is that Damon Gough has talent — the issue is whether he has managed or not to apply it to all the right things. Another point of consensus is that Badly Drawn Boy's music is very, very, very derivative (but then, whose isn't, these days?). Everyone from the Beatles to Nick Drake to Elliot Smith to the Magnetic Fields and beyond in­evitably crops up in just about every review of The Hour Of Bewilderbeast that's got enough space to cram in all these references. After that, opinions start to differ.

 

My own two cents are as follows. Damon Gough clearly loves music — including all of those namechecked artists and many more — and understands the many different ways one can go aro­und making music. But the three factors that dominate his brand of music are not an ideal combi­nation. First, he is nowhere near a melodic genius: at his best, he can produce moderately catchy folk-pop, yet nothing that would put him in a truly big league. Second, he goes for grand pur­poses: in line with the early XXIst century tendency to return to heart-on-the-sleeve idealism from the ubiquitous post-modern sarcasm of the 1990s, Badly Drawn Boy is always trying to break your heart, or, at least, share his broken heart with you because.

 

Third, he is decidedly avoi­ding the Arcade Fire way — this is where the woolly hat makes its big entrance — going for the quiet and subtle approach. He certainly sings his way through his songs, not talks through them like some of the even humbler minimalists, but the listener has to decode the emotion, rather than get it directly, in an uncompressed format. And it is great when big-hear­ted feelings and ideas get conveyed through a half-cloused mouth — but when the accompanying melodies are mostly so-so, this undermines the effect. In all honesty, there were several times I was all set to fall asleep during the record's sixty minutes — even on the louder numbers.

 

And yet, I would say that The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, Gough's critically acclaimed debut that, according to most critics, he has not been really able to surpass ever since, does justify additional listening. If anything, it is fascinating just to see him tackle so many different styles on the album — yes, they all relate to Badly Drawn Boy's fragile, insecure, melancholy-and-tenderness-over­flowing heart, but at least he is never repeating himself on a formal level. And although the hooks are just like his heart — fragile and tender — with the passage of time, they tend to solidify. Fi­nally, there is simply the basic aspect of the sound itself. Gough himself plays at least a couple dozen different instruments here, everything from ancient harps to modern drum machine organs, and then, further on, he's got about twenty or thirty (!) different people to assist him — including members of fellow indie bands Alfie and Doves and the Northern New Orleans Brass Band con­tributing horn arrangements. The miracle of the century is that, with all that crowd behind his back, not a single song on the album ends up having a wall-of-sound atmosphere to it. (Possibly it's all because of the hat — one of those new-fangled models that absorb sound waves).

 

In any case, the cello and horns that announce a brand new dawn on 'The Shining' is a cute touch, and once the guitar rolls in and, together with Gough's explanation that he is only 'trying to put a little sunshine in your life', threatens to turn this whole thing into «indie elevator muzak», the cel­los and horns give it a solid protective 1967-like sheen that elevates the experience to at least a B+ level. On 'Fall In A River', a basic folk shuffle is steered into «magic» direction with the won­derfully trippy echoing chime-like sounds whose production mechanism I am unable to determine (processed xylophones? multi-channeled acoustic guitars? whatever). The somber, almost hard rocking (by Gough's sissy standards) 'Another Pearl' has a couple of beautifully acid guitar solos.

 

Towards the end of the album, if you happen to be tired from too much folk-pop, 'Disillusion' jumps at you with a completely unexpected disco beat and classic funk guitar arrangement — ex­cept that, somehow, it does not feel like a tribute to the late 1970s, an era towards which Badly Drawn Boy shows fairly little interest. He just happened to borrow a danceable rhythm from those times to provide a little diversity, that's all.

 

There really is a lot of good stuff to be said about almost each of these songs (only the small sonic interludes, such as 'Body Rap', do not really work at all, because Gough is much better at atmospherizing his actual songs than synthesizing bits of pure atmosphere), but I will not do this intentionally — at the risk of creating the illusion that I was somehow deeply moved by the re­cord, and am now promoting the woolly hat guy as the new Nick Drake / Elliot Smith / whatever. I was not, and am not: like I said, Gough's obsessive clinging to the idea that he must never show you how much of a damn he actually gives plays a bad trick on him — in response, I just don't give a big damn about him altogether. But The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, with its nice, never an­noying, vibe, miriads of instruments and styles, and at least an ideal formal understanding of how a classy pop record should sound (the guy's taste is impeccable), still deserves a thumbs up. With a little patience, goodwill, and, above all, renouncement of the historical perspective, I can easily see Bewilder­beast become one's personal journey towards the proverbial enchanted forest — with the wood birds happily chirping to your arrival on the album's closing track.

 

ABOUT A BOY (2002)

 

1) Exit Stage Right; 2) A Peak You Reach; 3) Something To Talk About; 4) Dead Duck; 5) Above You, Below Me; 6) I Love N.Y.E.; 7) Silent Sigh; 8) Wet, Wet, Wet; 9) River-Sea-Ocean; 10) S.P.A.T.; 11) Rachel's Flat; 12) Wal­k­ing Out Of Stride; 13) File Me Away; 14) A Minor Incident; 15) Delta (Little Boy Blues); 16) Donna & Blitzen.

 

I admit to having never read any of Nick Hornby's novels, and, furthermore, I am nowhere near a major Hugh Grant fan (according to my humble opinion, the man belongs to that unfortunate ca­tegory of talented actors who never get to play in worthwhile movies), but I did see About A Boy when it came out, and... uh... well, it was one of those Hugh Grant movies. But, honestly, I was simply too concerned trying to figure out whether the movie itself had any redeeming qualities to it to notice the quality of the soundtrack. My bad — had I called up some more brain cell reinfor­cements back then, I would have learned about Badly Drawn Boy eight years earlier, when his career had not yet been spoiled by years of torturous anti-reviews on Pitchforkmedia.

 

About A Boy is just a soundtrack to the movie, but apparently, Damon Gough was a major Nick Hornby fan (or Nick Hornby was a big Damon Gough fan, I keep mixing these things up), and the commission to write all of the music for the movie pronged him into releasing the strongest collection of «sad sunshine pop» tunes he'd ever assembled for one album. Leave out the brief in­strumental links and there are 13 good-to-great compositions here, simple, but vital, proving that at least as late as 2002 your average basic retro-pop recipé was still working.

 

Unlike Bewilderbeast, which sort of rocked back and forth between all sorts of emotions, this one here is a fairly happy affair — not «happy» as in «Prozac-happy», but «intelligently happy», one of those records that purports to cheer you up in the face of well-acknowledged and genuine­ly troublesome odds. 'A Peak You Reach' opens the album on exactly that particular note: starting out all worriesome, then slowly and softly rocking its way into an exciting mash of acoustic and slide guitars and falsetto doo-doos that prop up the song's message — "I'd like you to feel we've reached our peak" (and he has, definitely).

 

Ensuing highlights include 'Something To Talk About' (nice old music-hall-ish piano shuffle à la Small Faces or something like that); gorgeous piano-pop on 'Silent Sigh', most of whose very confused lyrics are delive­red in an odd, post-psychedelic aspirated falsetto; the overtly cutesy 'File Me Away', whose doo-doos and la-las could easily fit into Sesame Street (but that has never been a crime in and out of itself); and the bravely romantic finale of 'Donna And Blitzen', epic in scale and mostly cheese-free in the little details. Some of the instrumentals are quite listenable on their own, too — 'Delta' and 'S.P.A.T.' both have cool beats and make good use of the brass sec­tion (with a particularly splendid bass sax solo on the former).

 

If it's at all possible, About A Boy creates an even more fragile and delicate world than Bewil­der­beast, one in which human relations seem to be made of thin porcelain, and emotional life on­ly exists within the confines of a specially constructed clean room. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Hornby and Gough found each other — creators of perfectly sanitized environments are rare eno­ugh these days, and they sure must get lonely from time to time. If you believe that «grit» should be an essential component of even soft pop music, the shiny, Platonic, above-the-clouds atmos­phere of About A Boy will be irritating. But I'd rather take the perfect, removed-from-life abstra­ction of the soundtrack than the accompanying movie, which, as I remember it, was sort of insis­ting on its happening in real life, despite essentially consisting of a fairy-tale dream. Me, I like my fairy-tales properly disconnected from my immediate neighborhood, so it's a thumbs up for the soundtrack, and let's pretend I forgot my thumbs at home when I rented the movie.

 

HAVE YOU FED THE FISH? (2002)

 

1) Coming In To Land; 2) Have You Fed The Fish?; 3) Born Again; 4) 40 Days, 40 Fights; 5) All Possibilities; 6) I Was Wrong; 7) You Were Right; 8) Centre Peace; 9) How?; 10) The Further I Slide; 11) Imaginary Lines; 12) Using Our Feet; 13) Tickets To What You Need; 14) What Is It Now?; 15) Bedside Story.

 

Trying to understand what the heck went wrong here is like trying to solve a particularly infuria­riting mathematical problem. With sweat rolling down my back and brain tissue on the point of self-ignition, I am still nowhere near close to an answer that I would like myself, let alone could hope it to be appreciated by others. All I know is, the first two albums ruled, and this third one... well, it doesn't suck, as such, but The Force is no longer with Badly Drawn Boy. And the most puzzling thing about it is — he didn't even remove the hat. What the...?

 

It got to the point when I just had to add both Have You Fed The Fish? and Bewilderbeast to my playlist, scramble the running order, and concentrate on whatever it could be that triggered the like switch on one group of tracks and left it untouched on another. Clearly, it was the worst (for any descriptive purposes) kind of difference. There were solid memorable melodies on Be­wilderbeast — and some sort of smoothly-running, nicely-sounding, but almost completely emo­tion-free highway on Fish. Why? Was it a rushed job? Not necessarily, because some of the subse­quent albums would get even worse in that respect. Was it overproduced? Perhaps, a little bit, but it's not as if Gough's previous records were all just about a whiny guy and his guitar — on the contrary, the diverse and complex arrangements helped a lot. Was it «too mainstream-orien­ted», as some reviewers have complained, was it a sell-out? Not at all, it still sounds light years away from generic 2000s pop (thank God). So?

 

Perhaps, and this is just a feeble guess, it has something to do with Badly Drawn Boy shifting his allegiances. As loud as the previous two albums could sometimes get, they were very much in the «chamber pop» vein. Introspective, sometimes bordering on autistic, stuff, dominated by folksy guitar or music-hallish piano melodies that Gough had a solid ear for. Nick Drake and Elliott Smith listed among the chief influences. Lots of innocent pseudo-kiddie mid-to-late-1960s kinds of vibes. Harry Nilsson, too. You know the score.

 

With Have You Fed The Fish?, however, he seems to be making a move into louder, much more out-there, territory; you could almost say he's transferring himself from 1960s to 1970s style. And this is an area where his nose for melody is somehow left behind. The title track, beginning with a solemn series of strings-and-piano swoops, eventually becomes a cross between sub-standard El­ton John (that kind of Elton John which seems to value the sheer physical force with which you press down the keys more than the actual sequence of keys, if you get where I'm going with this) and sub-standard Wings (the first flying guitar line almost seems to come out straight from 'Band On The Run', but, alas, that's all there is to it). The song is as bombastic as Badly Drawn Boy's powers can afford, but behind the bombast, there is not much memorability.

 

And the feeling lingers. 'Born Again' experiments with hard rock grooves — unsuccessfully, be­cause the rhythm guitar work is boring, and the wild soloing pressed against it has no basis on which to assert itself. 'All Possibilities' seems as if it just came off fresh from the Xanadu sound­track, with cheesy string swoops and cheesier chorus vocals. The minor hit single, 'You Were Right', could have been more convincing if it were placed in the hands of Lou Reed — he'd have filtered out the unnecessary sound layers (strings, keyboards, etc.), and, perhaps, even transfor­med it into a highlight on one of his softer albums, like Coney Island Baby. Here, too, the real version is indeed a highlight, but... against what background?

 

In the lyrics department, it also seems like there's an unwarranted confusion. The words on Be­wil­­derbeast could be naïve and technically laughable, but they matched the overall naïveté of the music. Now the words are becoming more obscure and complex, but they are not conveying any particular message. Is the guy happy? Is he sad? Is he more concerned about the future of the uni­verse or about his dirty socks? Does the line "How can I give you the answers you need when all I possess is a melody" make much sense to you? Especially in the light of the evidence that there are next to no good melodies on the album, but lots and lots and lots of words — many of which could qualify as answers, were we smart enough to decipher them? And what's with this odd sud­den infatuation with bashing Madonna, a reference to whom ("I'm turning Madonna down, I'm cal­ling it my best move") crops up in not one, but two of the songs? What's Madonna got to have with all this in the first place? Is this meant to symbolize the turning down of mainstream music values? Who does he think he is, then, being so explicit about it — And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead?

 

In short, I don't like the melodies, I could care less about the grumbly lyrics, and this shift just plainly does not work, regardless of whether I have or have not managed to characterize it cor­rectly. 'You Were Right' rocks straightforward enough; 'Bedside Story' is a moody enough con­clusion to the story with a credible acid vibe; but overall, this record makes about as much sense to me as does its intro, in which a staged airplane pilot voiceover announces that "if you look out of the right side of the plane, you'll see a cloud that looks exactly like Badly Drawn Boy". Uh... okay. Maybe that's where we are all supposed to laugh. Or just an imminent omen of an impen­ding thumbs down.

 

ONE PLUS ONE IS ONE (2004)

 

1) One Plus One Is One; 2) Easy Love; 3) Summertime In Wintertime; 4) This Is That New Song; 5) Another Devil Dies; 6) The Blossoms; 7) Year Of The Rat; 8) Four Leaf Clover; 9) Fewer Words; 10) Logic Of A Friend; 11) Stockport; 12) Life Turned Upside Down; 13) Takes The Glory; 14) Holy Grail; 15*) Don't Ask Me, I'm Only The President; 16*) Plan B.

 

Perhaps one of the problems with listening to Gough's increasingly frustrating output is that Bad­ly Drawn Boy himself seems to have taken in too many musical influences. He is not the sum of all of these parts; he is their collector, and once he gets all of them together in one circle and punches a hole in the middle, he has too little energy left to properly inseminate the hole, if you know what I mean.

 

Take the title track. As the simple guitar chords and heart-on-sleeve vocals roll on out, it becomes clear that the man is chasing a John Lennon vibe — something simple, punchy, honest, naïve, an­themic, inspirational. As pianos, chimes, drums, strings, and brass progressively join the picture, and Damon begs us to «give me some peace» (John used to ask for some truth instead, but it's easy to go from one to another without changing one's life philosophy), one could hope for a bu­cket of tears, but... no click. Nothing. An empty stylization that does not work; to my ears and mind, the clever arrangement is just completely wasted.

 

Another case — 'Summertime In Wintertime', with a hard rock groove and wild flute solos that openly remind of Jethro Tull. Why? The main melody is rather dull, plain pop, and I do not get the idea why, in the composer's mind, it had to be sewn together with a well-done, but pointless imitation of Ian Anderson's madness. I could go on further and say, for instance, that 'Four Leaf Clover' sounds exactly like one of those bad late period Ray Davies songs that may sound all cud­dly and friendly, but can never be memorized, because it really has nothing but style to it. Or... but you get where I'm going already.

 

It is sad, because One Plus One actually moves away from the mistakes of Have You Fed The Fish?: it is generally more quiet, relying once again on chamber-pop rather than large-scale arra­ngements. But something has been lost in transition, and that «something» is the ability to come up with charming hooks, which were still in abundance on About A Boy, but have been since then sacrificed for these bits of musical chameleonism — that may touch and impress someone, but I won't lie to you: I was bored stiff throughout, several times over.

 

Amazingly, the one song that did stick with me was 'Year Of The Rat', and it was the one big piece of bombast on the album, mainly due to the anthemic chorus, on which Damon is joined by a children's choir (sometimes the choir is left on its own, as if this were a tribute to John and Yo­ko's 'Happy Xmas'... okay, I'll shut up now). It's silly, it's stupid, it's derivative, it's overblown, and it wasn't even anywhere close to the true year of the Rat in 2004. But the chorus still packs an optimistic spirit that feels like an optimistic spirit. Same goes for the eight-minute epic closer 'Holy Grail', which is silly, overblown, and also overlong and repetitive, and features the brilliant line "you forgot you've got oxygen running through your veins" (the natural question here is not «what makes you think so?», but rather «so frickin' what?»). But there is something there in its grand idealism that at least makes you want to take note. And it's got a cool speed-up thing to­wards the end, as if it were paying homage to 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'... high time somebody stopped me from this already.

 

Anyway, in a nutshell: I don't like most of these songs, and it may have something to do with the fact that Gough thought too much of others here, and not enough of himself. His so-so streak would not, however, be over with this record, so perhaps it was just one prolonged case of bad writer's block — except writer's block usually prevents one from coming up with anything, and here we have our out-of-steam God of Chamber-Pop disregard that and let us all see the contents of his Chamber-Pot. (As rude as it may sound, I feel entitled to it after all the hours I wasted try­ing to penetrate the hidden beauty — but try as I might, I just cannot force myself to come to terms with the statement that one plus one really is one). Thumbs down.

 

BORN IN THE U.K. (2006)

 

1) Swimming Pool; 2) Born In The U.K.; 3) Degrees Of Separation; 4) Welcome To The Overground; 5) A Journey From A To B; 6) Nothing's Gonna Change Your Mind; 7) Promises; 8) The Way Things Used To Be; 9) Without A Kiss; 10) The Long Way Round; 11) Walk You Home Tonight; 12) The Time Of Times; 13) One Last Dance.

 

Oh my dear God. Never as of yet has Badly Drawn Boy seemed so earnestly eager to offer me his buzzing, pulsating, emotion-soaked, passion-drenched heart on a lovingly crafted plate of piano-based melodies. It almost breaks my own heart to admit that, no matter how hard he tries, there is no way this big, colorful, friendly, but thoroughly useless object could possibly be transplanted in­to my own body. Sorry, Mr. Gough, maybe it's just me, or maybe it's just that your fifth (sixth?) album is simply your worst up to date.

 

Associations invoked by the title, whether one is reluctant to admit it or not, are clear enough. Yet it would sound strange, saying that Damon Gough aspires to become the Bruce Springsteen for his own generation / side of the Atlantic / whatever. He's shorter, probably cannot do as many push-ups, draws his lyrical inspiration from Nick Drake rather than the beat scene and Dylan, and is arguably the least likely person in the UK to identify with the unspoken hopes and dreams of the Average Joe. (In fact, one little smack from the Average Joe and you can hang up that furry hat on the wall as a souvenir). On the other hand, no one can prevent you from trying to become the spokesman for your little sub-tribe of intellectual / artsy / idealistic wimps — and, if so, the title's association with Born In The USA takes on a subtly ironic nature. In a different age and context this could have been a masterpiece of understatement.

 

Unfortunately, B.D.B. is trying way too hard. So hard, in fact, that he has almost completely aban­doned everything that used to make his music sensually attractive, in favor of laying his soul on the line. Most of the melodies here are completely flat, very much in the 1970s soft-rock vein once again (with a small touch on the artsy side, sort of like a passable avatar of a Barclay James Harvest) — so that even when he comes up with a bit of memorable phrasing (e. g. 'Nothing's Gonna Change Your Mind'), the basic flash reaction is still «Does he really need to emulate that kind of sound? What, have all the other better retro influences been distributed already?»

 

It comes off worst of all when you realize that the man is striving to make himself look big, a sta­tely figure capable of processing his emotions and relations through a historical framework — the whole album is basically one large statement that says «Yeah verily, the whole way I feel has been shaped by the strange times I had to live through, and if you were born around the same time, you might as well pay me for articulating it all out for you» — but this bigness is conveyed through dull, predictable, and completely un-individual means. It's as if, say, John Lennon deci­ded to record Plastic Ono Band, arranging all the songs as generic crooner music from the 1930s. But even that, coming off from a guy as whacky as John, might have been taken for a hoot. Badly Drawn Boy, on the contrary, just makes me yawn.

 

If there are any fans in the audience with machine guns at the ready — I am not saying that Born In The U.K. is, in any way, just a fraud affair. Gough's lyrics are touching, if never particularly original, and, at any rate, even when he is so blatantly at his worst, the sentiments still feel real and ho­nest next to any average mainstream pop record of 2006. But this is good news only for those who have to make the choice between Badly Drawn Boy and Taylor Swift; in choosing be­tween B.D.B. and his childhood influences, I'll still take the childhood influences. Sorry for not talking a lot about individual songs — that would just raise the hatred bar, and I really would not like to talk in terms of hatred about this guy: for all I know, I could have been him had I, too, been born in the U.K. and learned to play a musical instrument at an early age. Just a quick thumbs down, then, before we move on.

 

IS THERE NOTHING WE COULD DO? (2009)

 

1) Opening Theme; 2) Is There Nothing We Could Do?; 3) A Gentle Touch; 4) All The Trimmings; 5) Welcome Me To Your World; 6) Guitar Medley; 7) Is There Nothing We Could Do? (reprise); 8) Big Brian Arrives; 9) Amy In The Garden; 10) Been There, Verified; 11) Just Look At Us Now; 12) Wider Than A Smile; 13) Piano Theme; 14) The Letter; 15) I'll Carry On.

 

Having disclosed his place of birth to all those who don't know how to use Wikipedia, Badly Drawn Boy fell off the radar for three years — because, after all, an intelligent singer-songwriter is always expected to undergo occasional periods of withdrawal. But whether this was intended to be a pose or not is irrelevant: the important thing is, it helped. A little.

 

2009 saw Damon Gough return to the world of soundtracks; this time, he contributed some back­ing music to the TV movie The Fattest Man In Britain, and later on, created a whole LP around that soundtrack: the album sleeve bears the inscription Music inspired by..., which is damn right, because, for the first time in almost five years, the music does sound inspired. Somehow it turns out that Badly Drawn Boy is at his best when he tries to get under other people's skins, rather than explore the subcontents of his own.

 

The record is very quiet, sternly sticking to the chamber format, with very infrequent outbursts of strings and brass. This is just a statement of fact, not a positive evaluation: Born In The U.K., much to my dismay, showed that this guy could be shy, minimalistic, and subtle, and still ooze boredom from every pore. Worse, since this is still a «semi-soundtrack», much of this quiet music is just tiny snippets presenting half-baked ideas, moody but dismissable. ('A Gentle Touch' sounds exactly like those twenty-five seconds that you spend tuning and strumming up while get­ting comfortable on your chair, before the real recording session starts).

 

However, all of the principal songs that carry the principal weight of the album — and whose mu­sical themes, as befits a soundtrack, are occasionally reprised throughout — are surprisingly moving. It is a bit odd to imagine a guy in a woolly hat inflamed by compassion towards a victim of obesity, but the title track, particularly its refrain of "ooh I am sorry...", is the gentlest, most convincing expression of empathy in B.D.B.'s entire catalog: somehow, this emotion feels real, not just a hollow, formalistic shape as it used to be all over his last record.

 

Likewise, the man's fingers now seem to hit all the right keys on the intro to 'Welcome Me To Your World', a piano ballad that finds a few gorgeously dusky note combinations and skilfully uses a pompous, but «hushed» brass overdub to build towards its climax. 'Just Look At Us Now' departs from a variation on the familiar 'Imagine' chord sequence, but is eventually led into entire­ly different territory, a cute mix of upbeat joy and melancholy. And 'I'll Carry On' provides a perfectly optimistic conclusion for the whole grim matter.

 

So, if in order to get these nice songs, we have to wallow through a set of disfocused guitar and piano ramblings, or a few unmemorable background muzak themes with overdubbed patches of dialog from the movie, let it be so — it's not an unreasonable cost to pay for Gough's re-emerging inspiration. The one thing that really worries me, though, is that even the good songs still sound somewhat too mature: play this back to back with About A Boy and see how enchantingly light and fluffy (in the good sense of both words) B.D.B. started out, and how much gloomy weight he has put on since then — not enough, perhaps, to earn him the title of The Fattest Man In British Music, but enough, I guess, to get him interested in a movie dedicated to a similar problem.

 

From this point of view, Is There Nothing We Could Do? is not really a comeback — it is a modestly successful creative re-christening, and it gives no guarantee that Gough's future records would ever be as good again, at least, not if he tries to retreat within his own eggshell. Here would be a moment as good as any for all the filmmakers in the UK to start swarming the man with commissions, if we allow ourselves a little fantasizing. A surefire thumbs up.

 

IT'S WHAT I'M THINKING (PART ONE) (2010)

 

1) In Safe Hands; 2) The Order Of Things; 3) Too Many Miracles; 4) What Tomorrow Brings; 5) I Saw You Walk Away; 6) It's What I'm Thinking; 7) You Lied; 8) A Pure Accident; 9) This Electric; 10) This Beautiful Idea.

 

Subtitled as Photographing Snowflakes, this is the first in a series of albums that promise to tell us what exactly Badly Drawn Boy is thinking. There is, however, I believe a problem with the title and the way it's spelled. Namely, there's a preposition missing: is he thinking about photo­graphing snowflakes, or is he thinking about something else while photographing snowflakes? Because the former merely applies to a good old dreamer, whereas the latter indicates a po­ten­tially dangerous schizophrenic.

 

You have to wait until the third track, 'Too Many Miracles', for an explanation — a lush, slightly Phil Spectorian ballad, on which it becomes clear that the man is simply speaking in trusty old metaphors and hyperboles. He is neither going mad, nor complaining about the impossibilities of achieving the impossible. He is on a recuperative roll, trying, I think, much more earnestly to be himself than he has been trying for most of the '00s. And above everything else, he is trying to justify, at all costs, the «chamber pop» tag that has been applied to him ever since Bewilderbeast and whose authenticity he'd violated so much on Born In The UK and other records.

 

Snowflakes is awash in hushed, echoey, reverb-drenched vocals and similarly out-of-the-deep key­boards, acoustic guitars, and strings. The only thing that bugs me are the drum machines — maybe they have been chosen over real drums because Gough credits them with otherworldliness, well connectible with the idea of letting the music speak directly from inside the mind, but I do not agree. In my world, drum machines just don't belong in «traditionally oriented» pop music; let them stay in the domain of Kraftwerk and Aphex Twin.

 

But other than that little disagreement, it's a good kind of sound for Badly Drawn Boy, and may­be that is why the songs work some magic on me — I couldn't know for the life of me if they are really so much better written than the ones on Born In The UK, they simply succeed where those former ones have failed. Even if there is still no return to his light youthful past, and all the songs are rigidly covered with the same frost of moroseness.

 

My favorite tunes here are the ones with string arrangements, which, I believe, he should do more often: the above-mentioned 'Too Many Miracles' and 'This Electric', whose main attractions are not at all electric, but consist of optimistic 1970s-style string «swoops» that bring to mind... uh, Al Gre­en perhaps? Strings are also put to good use on 'I Saw You Walk Away', which trots along at a faster pace than the average song on here and has a slightly more nervous attitude that brings to mind... uh, Arthur Lee perhaps? (Sorry — it's Badly Drawn Boy we're talking here. The guy wants his reviewers to namecheck his large sack of influences, or else he wouldn't be so straight­forward about it). The attempt at falsetto on the chorus might be too much, but otherwise, it's a good, memorable pop song with an angsty edge to it.

 

I am not implying that the record is any sort of masterpiece. It brings on all the usual problems — lack of originality, lack of individuality (this introspective persona that B.D.B. keeps pushing on us has been invading our private space at least since the late 1960s), and very few songs remain firmly wedged in my conscience even after several listens. Drum machines suck, and so do a few odd individual decisions — for instance, presenting the title track as a hyper-long, deadly slow, stompin'-folk-like arranged ballad that should have been subtitled Step right up! see the artist with the furry hat pull out his brains and dissect them in little pieces, patiently explaining the sig­nificance behind each one in the process. I'd rather wait to hear the guy's confession on his death­bed than in his prime. But that's just me.

 

Still, it is good to know that the album continues the mildly upward trend that started with Is There Nothing We Could Do. Its best songs show that Gough's melodic instincts still function properly — when properly triggered. And they also show that he is returning to that tricky prac­tice of combining an overall quiet sound with multiple sonic layers, which worked so well on his early records, before he went for more crunch and ruined it. It can only be hoped that on his sub­sequent albums he will not attempt to turn into a one-man Arcade Fire, traces of whose influence are quite visible here, too ('This Beautiful Idea' could have easily been written by Win Butler and friends). For now, a cautious thumbs up.

BAND OF HORSES

EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME (2006)

 

1) The First Song; 2) Wicked Gil; 3) Our Swords; 4) The Funeral; 5) Part One; 6) The Great Salt Lake; 7) Weed Par­ty; 8) I Go To The Barn Because I Like The; 9) Monsters; 10) St. Augustine.

 

Band Of Horses is basically the brainchild of Ben Bridwell, a guy who formerly used to sell pizza in Tuc­son, Arizona, but, over a period of ten years, went on to be selling loud indie-pop music to... well, honestly, I have no idea who exactly is buying his albums, but supposedly, there is very little overlap between his current customers and his old ones.

 

In between these two extremes, he also played drums and wrote some songs for a little-known «sadcore» outfit called Carissa's Wierd (sic), hanging around Seattle; once that institution (the band, not Seattle) col­lapsed, he learned to play himself some guitar and, taking some old friends and some new discoveries along for his own personal project, formed Band Of Horses. The line­up here, beyond Bridwell himself, includes Mat Brooke on second guitar, Chris Early on bass, and Tim Meinig on drums — simple to the indiest.

 

Although the band was formally inaugurated in Seattle, Bridwell himself is an obstinate Caroli­ner, and one could expect the final result to sound like a synthesis of Piedmont blues with grunge — which, come to think of it, could be fun. In all actuality, the music sounds more like a synthesis of... umm, let's say James Taylor, Brian Wilson, U2, and Wayne Coyne's Flaming Lips. In other words, baroque arena-roots-rock with a decidedly modernistic sensibility. Get that?

 

Let us begin with what prevents Band of Horses from greatness. First, a common thing with the indie crowd — instrumental-wise, the playing throughout is «accomplished», nothing more. Ap­parently, Bridwell was learning to play guitar at the same time as he was assembling the band, and although he did an impressive job in such a brief period, the man is certainly not the one to be revolutionizing this, or any other, instrument any time soon. For that matter, the most professio­nal playing on the entire album comes from... the drummer, and even that may be just an illusio­nary effect of his trying out more stylistic variety than the others.

 

Second, all of the vocals are recorded with a faraway echo effect. Now this may just be one of those Nashville-inflicted things — them country singers like you to picture them as the ride-out-of-the-sunset type — or it may be an artsy Bono-type thing — them arena-rockers like you to per­ceive them as the as the stroll-out-of-the-clouds type — but whatever be the true grounds behind this, it always creates at least a small wall of alienation between the artist and the listener, and what sort of artist (counting out Bono himself) should want to alienate his listeners on his very first album? Not a good move.

 

Third, they chose 'The Funeral' as the lead single, singing it on Letterman and then syndicating it to something like a couple dozen movies and TV shows. Why? Just because it is the album's «gra­ndest» and most blatantly «tragic» song? Or because it was a subtle attempt to suck up to Ar­cade Fire's success with the same word two years before? Beware: if you happen to have heard the song and not liked it, having passed out a «too simple + too pretentious = generic indie crap» judgement, do not let it forever ruin your relationship with Band of Horses. There are much bet­ter songs on Everything All The Time than this so-so, in my opinion, attempt at self-aggrandizing at the expense of genuinely interesting ideas.

 

In Ben's place, I would rather bet it all on the aptly titled 'First Song' and its intricate wall of sound, constructed out of mostly trivial guitar jangle and slide runs, but in a way that spells «an­the­mic» without immediately reminding you of all the negative connotations of indie aesthetics. The «pop» and «roots» elements of the tune cleverly complement each other — the redneck and the hipster neutralize one another's yucky sides, and the result is quite refreshing.

 

The other songs are usually less well balanced, moving either too far in the pop-rock ('Wicked Gil') or in the country-rock ('Part One') department, but Bridwell has a good ear for hooks, and almost each song has something going for it either in the instrumental or in the vocal department. The thick guitar riff that opens 'The Great Salt Lake' almost promises a pop masterpiece — unfor­tunately, the song eventually transforms into 'The Funeral Part 2', i. e. a three-chord anthem, and is nearly ruined, but for about two minutes out of five it sparkles. As do 'Wicked Gil', 'Our Swords', and 'Weed Party'. The slow country waltzes and the James Taylor-ish 'St. Augustine' — not sure about these, but they do not offend or anything.

 

As long as you do not take the album's name too literally — let us assume that this is what they want to be eventually happening, in the process of gathering firewood for the machine to run — Everything All The Time is a fine enough record with a face of its own, even if that face is very trans­parently assembled from several mutilated face parts. But them horses have not yet been gi­ven a proper ride: it's a thumbs up all right — from behind the back.

 

CEASE TO BEGIN (2007)

 

1) Is There A Ghost; 2) Ode To LRC; 3) No One's Gonna Love You; 4) Detlef Schrempf; 5) The General Specific; 6) Lamb On The Lam (In The City); 7) Islands On The Coast; 8) Marry Song; 9) Cigarettes, Wedding Bands; 10) Win­dow Blues.

 

The recording of this album was marked by huge lineup changes — in fact, just about everyone simply quit, tacitly acknowledging that «Band Of Horses» was the individual brainchild of Ben Bridwell and that Ben Bridwell alone would be responsible for all the creative activity under that moniker. To be fair, new band members Rob Hampton (bass and second guitar) and Creighton Barrett (drums) are both co-credited as writers on each of the album's tracks, but you will have to ask them yourself how much they contributed to the fleshing out of the melodies.

 

By now, it is clear that Bridwell wants us all to view him as an enigma, and he is in a fairly good position to do it, too, because it does not happen every day that you meet such a transparently roots-rock-sprung artist bent on bending the clichés and conventions of his native genre into odd shapes that either do not make sense at all, or make it in a parallel universe that you couldn't prove to have visited even if you really have. The lyrics are mostly inscrutable (case in point — 'Detlef Schrempf', named after a German basketball player but featuring no connection between the guy and the actual words whatsoever). The melodies, in a way, are too.

 

A few of the songs are fairly «normal» mid-tempo country shuffles, softly brushed drums and steel guitars and what-not ('Marry Song'; 'Window Blues'). Just as often, they only use typically rootsy chord changes and bits of rootsy arrangements within an indie-pop or alt-rock aesthetics. This means marrying the unmarriable: the don't-give-a-damn, come-what-may attitude characte­ristic of roots-rock with the sharp rebellious desperation of the wanna-change-the-world (but smart-enough-to-understand-the-futility) indie approach. This means it's all interesting and shit, but uh what's the real deal? This guy may simply be too smart for his own good.

 

When Rolling Stone selected 'Is There A Ghost' as one of its top 100 songs of 2007, the reason­ing behind the choice went «Southern rock goes shoegazing in this atmospheric jam», which I, for one, thought was almost uncharacteristically precise for the one magazine that all of us usually prefer to put down. But I feel vindicated on the second part of the description: «There are fewer than fifteen words in the lyrics, but packed into Ben Bridwell’s vocals is a whole doctoral thesis on what it means to be bummed out».

 

Bummed out? The words, repeated over and over until you start wondering if they really mean something, are: "I could sleep / When I lived alone / Is there a ghost in my house?" It is the easi­est thing in the world to surmise it's all about depression, because most indie music is about de­pression, one way or another. But how do we know it's true? That the effect, with all the jangling folk guitars and the waves of echo around the vocals, is pretty and elegant, is undeniable; but is there actual sadness here, or misery, or any other sort of discontent? That one could write a docto­ral thesis around the song is obvious (because one can easily launch into a miriad different issues from here), but would the subject of the thesis really be dedicated to the art of «bumming out»? I could just as well argue that the song is about the miracle of discovering the unexpected — and that its message is one of cautious optimism rather than bitter pessimism.

 

The album's other single, 'No One's Gonna Love You', must have been specially designed as a commercial antidote to the opaqueness of 'Is There A Ghost': not only does it have the catchiest vocal melody on the album, but it is also the least intriguing one — in fact, this is as close to ge­neric «adult contemporary» as Bridwell ever got; just replace the ringing guitar line with a soft synth pattern and the man turns into Chris de Burgh. Even the lyrics are transparent: it's all over for the both of us, but we still love each other blah blah blah Wuthering Heights blah blah blah.

 

I would rather urge you to check out such tunes as the above-mentioned 'Detlef Schempf' (beau­tiful, McCartney-worthy vocal phrasing on the "when eyes can't look at you any other way" cho­rus), 'The General Specific' (simple, uplifting, anthemic, truck-driving music for all those who hate driving trucks), and 'Islands On The Coast', which is exactly the way And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (Aural Nerves) would sound if they only cut down on the crappy noise level and let their sense of melody show through — a cool, inspiring, catchy power pop song that also instructs you that "when islands want to coast, they'll know how", and perhaps some day you will, too, if you manage to convince yourself that Ben Bridwell knows more answers to life's questions than you do.

 

Personally, I don't: I think most of these lyrics are puffed-up nonsense. But I also think that the melodic gift of Ben Bridwell is undeniable, and that the songwriting on Cease To Begin is, in ge­neral, a huge improvement over the first album. Not only is this guy getting harder and harder to categorize and pigeonhole, but he also exercises better and better care over his hooks. Now all that is really missing is a little more diversity in the arrangements: the lack of talented instrumen­talists or seriously inventive «flourishes» will make many people turn away from the record, de­claring it «boring», and not even my thumbs up will make any of them give it a second chance. Which, I think, it deserves regardless of the competition.

 

INFINITE ARMS (2010)

 

1) Factory; 2) Compliments; 3) Laredo; 4) Blue Beard; 5) On My Way Back Home; 6) Infinite Arms; 7) Dilly; 8) Evening Kitchen; 9) Older; 10) For Annabelle; 11) NW Apt.; 12) Neighbor.

 

For his third album, Bridwell decided a major structural change couldn't hurt, and proclaimed that, from now on, Band Of Horses would be a real, authentic band. Changing one horse in midstream (Rob Hampton is out) for a whopping three (former guest unit Tyler Ramsey is fixed in place, and multi-instrumentalists Ryan Monroe and Bill Reynolds also join the fold), Ben has stated his intention that that's the way it's gonna be, for some time at least. Friendship, partnership, demo­cracy, free flow and exchange of ideas, the works.

 

The fact that seven out of twelve songs here are still exclusively credited to Bridwell, three more at least co-credit him, and the only non-Ben lead vocal is by Monroe on ʽOlderʼ, somewhat belies that statement — in the end, the stability of this new 5-piece ensemble depends on the compara­tive weight of all these other guys' egos. But there is no denying, for me at least, that Infinite Arms is the best BoH record so far — it could easily remain as their unbeatable top masterpiece — and if it has anything to do with the merits of the new band members, then it's simply more fat food for the argument that the best pop music of our time is usually done in collaboration. Collec­tivism rules, as any respectable Bolshevik could tell you.

 

Third time's the charm, in more than one way: it took me three listens to be able to assert that, on his own third attempt, Bridwell nailed it. Jaded music lovers probably won't be floored, grounded, or pinned against the wall by the massive cathartic waves of the record, but there is really not a single bad or completely uninteresting track on it. It is utterly traditionalist in its approach to me­lody, texture, and emotion, yet still manages to scoop out a killer bunch of rootsy hooks to prove that even in 2010, you can still be traditionalist and get away with it.

 

The most frequent comparisons were to Neil Young, but the five-piece BoH is anything but a collective Neil Young-wannabe. Yes, the backbone of the music is still American folk and count­ry, and Bridwell's vocal tone is lightly similar to Neil's (although far less whiny... and no Canadi­an accent, either), but it will take you, at most, the opening fifteen seconds of ʽFactoryʼ to under­stand that Infinite Arms is at least as much fed by the indie-pop scene as it is by «Americana». If anything, I'd rather say they were channelling the spirit of early Wilco here — this is all some­what close to what Jeff Tweedy used to sound like, before A-R-T got the better of him and he could no longer appear before cowboy audiences with a straight face.

 

ʽFactoryʼ is the album's «grandest» number, with a strings-and-brass «wall of sound» breaking its way through your living room. It is not at all complex, its major musical ideas are all over by the time the intro is replaced with the verse melody, yet it feels very genuine — uplifting in a ʽHey Judeʼ manner, despite the strangely depressed accompanying lyrics. For that reason, it may well claim its place among the «Biggest» compositions of 2010 (not that anybody really gives a damn, because the «bigger» well-written songs get these days, the fewer their audiences).

 

Much of the album is just mid-tempo rock, with hoarse guitars and generic tempos, but also with catchy choruses and passionate solos, e. g. the lead single ʽComplimentsʼ, with its cryptic-apoca­lyp­tic message; or ʽLaredoʼ, sounding like a gallant medieval ballad re-written for bashing drums and feedback-drenched guitar; or ʽNW Apt.ʼ, the album's fastest number, galloping along in post-punk mode. But I like them even more when they drop all signs of the RAWK attitude — this is where Bridwell's mastery of hooks becomes fully evident.

 

Thus, the vocal melody of ʽBlue Beardʼ is sheer McCartney, always a nice thing to say, and you don't even get to snicker at the banality of the accompanying lyrics (because these, as usual, are inscrutable); and ʽOn My Way Back Homeʼ gives Brian Wilson a gentle tap on the shoulder, since the way Ben sings the song title is an exact quotation of the line from ʽSloop John Bʼ. (I wish I could take first credit for discovering that, but obviously I cannot — google the idea and you'll see the whole Internet has been buzzing about the resemblance ever since the album came out.)

 

From time to time, the band comes out with great melodic lines as well — the slide guitar bits on ʽFor Annabelleʼ (otherwise, a rather languid mellow ballad), that sharp tone and cool bends and all, are unforgettable. Excursions into «light» sunshine pop (ʽDillyʼ), acoustic romance (ʽEvening Kit­chenʼ), and even formulaic country-rock (Monroe's ʽOlderʼ, redeemed by one of the album's most inviting sing-along choruses) all work as well.

 

In short, I just cannot find any grounds to complain — except, perhaps, a bit of surprise at ʽNeighborʼ, the album's least idea-packed song, serving as its coda. It seeks to give the record as grand an exit as ʽFactoryʼ gave it an entry, but does not qua­lify, certainly not when they go from quiet to loud and all you have for the last three minutes are these silly crashing power chords, wave upon wave of them. A little anti-climactic after all the subtlety; which will certainly not pre­vent me from a raving variety of thumbs up as the final judgement. If Infinite Arms is to be ta­ken as Bridwell's claim for taking the current lead in the «Roots Meets Arts» movement, I'd say he comes out as a fairly serious contender.

 

MIRAGE ROCK (2012)

 

1) Knock Knock; 2) How To Live; 3) Slow Cruel Hands Of Time; 4) A Little Biblical; 5) Shut-In Tourist; 6) Dum­b­ster World; 7) Electric Music; 8) Everything's Gonna Be Undone; 9) Feud; 10) Long Vows; 11) Heartbreak On The 101; 12*) Mirage Rock; 13*) Irmo Bats; 14*) Reilly's Dream; 15*) Catalina; 16*) Bock.

 

Nothing lasts forever, and few things last shorter than the fruitful periods of modern rock bands. Two years earlier, Band Of Horses seemed to settle into a comfortable pattern of writing not par­ticularly original, but quite seemingly beautiful music. With Mirage Rock, they almost seem bent on proving to us that they do not want to conform to patterns — and in order to do that, they are willing to sacrifice beauty, depth, and quality for the sake of change.

 

First things first: if you have a sound rooted in the roots, is it that necessary to choose a moment for placing production duties in the hands of the man who produced The Eagles? Glyn Johns does have an impressive, but a very uneven, pedigree: this is also the man, after all, who went on from producing Who's Next to producing It's Hard, meaning a total lack of guarantee. I have no idea if it is Johns' presence that determines the transition from the fairly sophisticated sound layers of Infinite Arms to the much more sparse and simple arrangements on Mirage Rock — I suppose that Bridwell must have wanted this shift in approach — but it is Johns' presence that orchestrates the whole deal, and the deal sure goes wrong.

 

Apparently, most of the album was recorded «live in the studio», with lots of re­hearsals required before the final takes. Since none of the band members are really seasoned, notorious musicians, clearly more energy must have been spent on «getting it all to work» rather than on concentrating on the melody and texture side. Result? Mirage Rock sounds about as impressive and memorable as anything done by the kids in your local art college band (just enter your ZIP code to get the name) — maybe worth relaxing to while having a beer or two after a hard day's work on a cold winter evening, then moving on forever.

 

Nothing illustrates this point better than ʽKnock Knockʼ, the lead-in track and the first single re­leased from the album. If there is only one classic example allowed of «impotence in music», this here is a great fine candidate — the song opens up ringing, banging, and whoo-whooing in an­them mode, and then you spend four minutes looking for release without getting it. Verse number one... bridge... verse number two... bridge... where's the frickin' chorus? Wait, what do you mean that was the chorus? That was just the bridge, wasn't it? You mean I'm supposed to sing along to "knockin' on the door, knockin' on the door, knockin' on the door" as the highest climactic point of the anthem? Can you imagine — oh, I don't know — a ʽDead End Streetʼ that goes straight back to the verse melody after "we are strictly second class, and we can't understand"? And this song doesn't even have that sort of verse melody.

 

Most of the rest is equally disenchanting. All sorts of by-the-book midtempo pop / country-rock grooves that barely ever rise above the ground, and float out of memory as soon as they are over (quite often, even way before they are over). Everything is superficially melodic, soft, warm, ne­ver overproduced, never irritating, but there is nothing in the world that would compel me to go back to these songs after I have patiently endured the record four times from top to bottom, and never even once did it manage to hit a nerve that wasn't already worn down to insensitivity by way, way too many hits in the past. So to speak.

 

Poking half-blindly at the titles, ʽA Little Biblicalʼ is not even the tiniest bit biblical, but it is al­most a good, upbeat, well-rounded power pop number — maybe The Alan Parsons Project could have emphasized its stronger sides and polished it to the state of one of their unforgettable ditties such as ʽSooner Or Laterʼ (particularly if they'd found a less ordinary vocalist than Bridwell). ʽDumbster Worldʼ stylishly toys with Neil Young-style folk-rock gloominess, but then crashes into Garbage Planet when the mid-section starts «rocking out» in generic alt-rock fashion. And that's about all there is, really. By the way, quiet country stuff like ʽLong Vowsʼ does sound like the early Eagles, and even though I am not a mortal enemy of the early Eagles, what use do I have for a 21st century imitation of the early Eagles?..

 

One thing that does indirectly confirm that Glyn Johns was indeed chiefly responsible for this failure is the bonus EP on the deluxe edition, called Sonic Ranch Sessions: this was apparently re­corded by the band without Johns' participation, and the five tracks on the EP are much more re­markable than the album itself. For instance, ʽReilly's Dreamʼ is pinned to a hallucinatory oscilla­ting guitar line, turning it into homely dream-pop; ʽCatalinaʼ is saved from immediate death by some amusing experiments with Beatlesque vocal modulations; and ʽBockʼ has a better melan­cholic mix of piano, organ, guitar, and vocals than any other track on the whole package. This is a highly subjective feeling — it's not like we're talking heaven-and-earth scales here anyway — but it did come from somewhere, so I'm noting it just in case. But bonus tracks are bonus tracks, and the album per se gets an assured thumbs down — if you can't do better than the Eagles, why not just turn into an Eagles tribute band? More honest that way.

 

ACOUSTIC AT THE RYMAN (2014)

 

1) Marry Song; 2) Slow Cruel Hands Of Time; 3) Detlef Schrempf; 4) Everything's Gonna Be Undone; 5) No One's Gonna Love You; 6) Factory; 7) Older; 8) Wicked Gil; 9) The Funeral; 10) Neighbor; 11*) Weed Party.

 

Acoustic? Aren't these guys always acoustic? Oh no, that's right, they aren't — it's just my memo­ry playing predictable tricks on me, because that is the way you are going to remember your bearded guys playing your usual «Americana» stuff. Anyway, this here is indeed their version of Unplugged, recorded over two nights in April 2013 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and released as their first and, so far, only official live album.

 

Band Of Horses are not the best band in the world, and you are not going to be subjected to any big surprises. The songs, handpicked in a more or less representative manner off each of the band's four albums, are stripped down, but not significantly changed otherwise — you get to hear them in a more «intimate» presentation, with more emphasis on the vocals and, sometimes, extra piano parts that take the place of orchestral and other overdubs, but mood-wise, everything stays the same. No reinventions, fresh interludes, jamming, no in-between-song banter even, which may be a plus in the context of an actual show, but a minus in the context of a live record.

 

An even harsher minus is that quite a few of these songs worked well only because they were lushly arranged in the first place. Infinite Arms, the band's best album, is only represented by two songs, and the monumental orchestral grandeur of ʽFactoryʼ, especially its coda, is hopeless­ly lost in transition to the live acoustic environment — the «compensating» piano just does not cut it. It sounds like a pleasant demo version. If you cut away grandeur without replacing it with some well thought-out subtlety, what's to like? Bare bones are bare bones, and should be left for under­takers and grave robbers.

 

One good thing I am ready to admit here is that the vocals are beyond reproach: solo parts and harmonies all sound exceptionally nice, and the material seems very well rehearsed. It is a plea­sant listen all right. But even the song selection is generally questionable (most likely, they were picking the songs that seemed like the obvious candidates for transfer to acoustic), so that I could not recommend the album even in the status of a decent, representative intro to the band's catalog — on the contrary, only some very serious fans of Ben Bridwell will find sufficient reason to own it. Not to mention that, if you really want yourself some of that heart-on-a-sleeve bearded-guy acoustic Americana, there's always The Avett Bros., and frankly, in this kind of setting I could easily lose track of the difference between the two. Thumbs down.

 

WHY ARE YOU OK (2016)

 

1) Dull Times/The Moon; 2) Solemn Oath; 3) Hag; 4) Casual Party; 5) In A Drawer; 6) Hold On Gimme A Sec; 7) Lying Under Oak; 8) Throw My Mess; 9) Whatever, Wherever; 10) Country Teen; 11) Barrel House; 12) Even Still.

 

I must say that I have to take some offense at the title. It is staring me right in the eye, silently implying that I am OK when I shouldn't be — even though I am most definitely not OK, nor do I feel like a particularly careless bather who just happened to climb out back on the beach, only to dis­cover all of his/her clothes pilfered by bad fortune. It is, in fact, somewhat presumptuous to assume that the average buyer of your records is doing that because he/she needs to be shaken up from happy bourgeois slumber and face the harsh realities of a ruthless modern world. At least, last time Arcade Fire tried to do this with Funeral, it did not work, so how could it work with a band approximately ten times less talented?..

 

Fortunately, one listen to the album is enough to dispel the prior impression. Ben Bridwell would never agree (not in public, at least) with this assessment, but really, Why Are You OK works best if you not only drop your expectations down a deep well, but, in fact, agree to interpret it as a veritable musical anthem to inactivity, casualness, and even artistic impotence. It features some of the slowest, simplest, most meditative and event-less music written by Ben Bridwell, ever, and from time to time it even drops certain hints that this is the only thing worth doing today. The very first track, for instance, greets you with the cheerful "Listen close wherever you go / Dull times, let them seep into your bones" — and musically, the combination of the tempo, the dro­ning guitar, and the lulling vocals suggest that Bridwell may have spent a bit too much time re­cently listening to the entire catalog of Beach House. Only where Beach House put their faith in the creation of a «magical» atmosphere, here, while retaining the trance-like aura of the music, Band Of Horses offer a more earthly, realistic vision.

 

This is neither too good... nor too bad. Just like the last time around (with Mirage Rock), I don't feel like any of these songs contain any staying power — but unlike the last time around, it's not even a matter of them pretending to contain it. It's very much an album of little, mundane things, enveloped in some humble, mundane sorrow: Band Of Horses are caught in the middle of a de­bilitating vacuum, and since 2016 does look an awful lot like a debilitating vacuum on the whole, Why Are You OK is perhaps even more symbolic of the void to me than it is to its creators. In all of these songs, they either sing about meaningless trifles (ʽIn A Drawerʼ manages to become the most memorable number on the album by featuring the repetitive hook "Found it in the drawer, found it in the drawer, took a little time but I found it in the drawer" — we're never told what the it actually is, but who really cares?), or ask pointless questions whose only purpose is to undermine your self-confidence (ʽHagʼ: "Are you truly in love? absolutely in love? you're happy enough, are you fully in love?"), or produce anthemic invocations delivered in such cold tones that you're sure they don't really mean it (ʽBarrel Houseʼ: "bring some peace to this world and keep passin' it on"). In short, this is an album about trying to make something out of nothing, because what else is there to be made in the first place?

 

Musically, there's not a lot of surprises here: by now we know only too well that Band Of Horses like a soft-rock sound with soaring production, and this time they made it even softer and more soaring than before. The lead single, ʽCasual Partyʼ, accompanied by a fairly bizarre video of the band members forced to play the song for a feast of cartoonish aliens, is really atypical of the album — too fast and upbeat, almost like a jangle-power-pop number, although the lyrical mes­sage is pretty much the same and even more explicitly than ever ("since Ben got that, he's a socio­path", they state without blinking). Most of the rest is far slower and drearier, really — imagine a Beach House record played by rootsy bearded guys. Occasionally, a simple sentimental note still slips by (ʽWhatever, Whereverʼ is Bridwell's ʽBeautiful Boyʼ, but it is too syrupy for my tastes), but really, the music as such does not feel depressing: the point is not to depress, but rather to freeze, and it does have a comatose effect — you might want to throw on some AC/DC once it's over, to spring your muscles back to action.

 

No thumbs up, anyway; I am not sure that I will remember how even one song goes on here in a week's time or so, but I might remember the strange overall effect — and the fact that I did not really enjoy that effect, even if I felt it. And I hope I'm interpreting all of this right, because if I'm not, then I'm losing my last crumbs of interest in this band.

 

BARONESS

FIRST & SECOND (2004-2005)

 

1) Tower Falls; 2) Coeur; 3) Rise; 4) Red Sky; 5) Son Of Sun; 6) Vision.

 

First of all, I have no clue as to why these guys call themselves «Baroness» — it cannot be excluded that one or more of them have those subconscious hots for Margaret Thatcher, but it sure as heck wouldn't have much to do with the music, which blends the conservative framework of heavy metal with the liberal framework of math-rock and is consequently of a neutral nature. There does not seem to be any heavy excess of barons or baronesses in Savannah, Georgia, either, so, ultimately, the name may have simply been chosen in order to distance themselves from their surroundings — the surroundings of yet another band from the Deep South that would do every­thing in its power to avoid reminding us of their local roots.

 

Actually, in this way they only followed the example of their direct predecessor, Mastodon (from Atlanta, Georgia), whose slightly inferior copy version they are sometimes stated to be. Which is not entirely true: although Baroness naturally owe a heavy debt to Mastodon, they have plenty of ideas of their own, or, at the very least, they combine the ideas plundered from Mastodon with ideas plundered from other artists (which sounds like a slur, but in reality is merely a way of de­scribing the working manners of about 90% of the people reviewed here).

 

John Baizley's growling vocals excluded, the music of Baroness really falls more in the «math-rock» than stereotypical heavy metal category. Although each of the band's first two EPs, re­leased in 2004 and 2005 and later packed together on a one-CD edition from 2008, formally con­sists of three tracks, all three are seamlessly joined together and seem to represent three different movements of a single «electric guitar symphony» rather than separate entities. And the sym­phonies in question place more emphasis on complexity, density, and unpredictability of their sound than on «heaviness» as such: no matter how distorted the guitar tones get, or how closely Baizley's vocals approach the mating calls of a stone troll, neither First nor (even less) Second have a truly «metallic» feel to them. Altogether, in order to appreciate this music, one has to appeal to that particular brain department which is responsible for your chess skills, rather than the one that urges you to play the Necromancer campaign in Heroes of Might & Magic.

 

The lyrics, mostly coming in short, spasmodic, frequently unfinished phrases, do have a slightly medieval / fantasy pull rather than, for instance, the «science rock» flair of BATS: the very title of the first track, ʽTower Fallsʼ, and its constant references to burning, pressing soil into dust, and «nothing will ever return», shows the expectable taste for dramatic flashiness. But the music it­self shows nothing of the kind: both Baizley and the second guitarist, Tim Loose, generally avoid screechy, mock-cathartic tones, setting their axes to sludgy «grumble-and-growl» moods, some­times with an acid tone overhaul. This does not work well for immediate memorability, but it also helps them avoid many of the usual metal clichés — and convert those listeners who are initially predisposed to appreciating «intelligent» rather than «heartfelt» heaviness.

 

The downside is that, for all of this «intelligence», pretty much every song on here is played with the exact same intellectual — and emotional — message. The different «movements» shuffle fast and slow tempos without any clear guiding principles, but fast or slow, all the sections have a similar feel of what I could describe as «light-gray melancholia», inherited by these guys not so much from their metal ancestors as from their indie-rock influences. Maybe the worst thing about these EPs is that this kind of music is often salvageable by its inlaid sense of musical humor, yet Baroness show no sense of humor whatsoever. The mission — to save metal-based music from its corny conventions and make it more academically respectable, so to speak — is indeed noble (although it is always a puzzle to me why so many of these noble efforts are ultimately still spoi­led by the obstinate reliance on growling vocals), but the resulting music, technical respect apart, is still way too samey and, in the end, too boring to generate genuine excitement. And the fact that First and Second, from the very outset, present a well-formed, confident, professional sound means very little — these days, most bands in these genres start out with a well-formed, confident, professional sound, or else they do not start out in the first place.

 

RED ALBUM (2007)

 

1) Rays On Pinion; 2) The Birthing; 3) Isak; 4) Wailing Wintery Wind; 5) Cockroach En Fleur; 6) Wanderlust; 7) Aleph; 8) Teeth Of A Cogwheel; 9) O'Appalachia; 10) Grad.

 

By the time the band got around to making the transition from short EPs to long, expansive musi­cal statements, Baizley and friends seem to have undergone subtle, but important stylistic chan­ges.The principle of allowing no breaks between songs is still there, but the songs themselves are a tad more diverse (including acoustic interludes, among other things), and the entire atmosphere is a little less «math-rockish», but not that much more «metallic»: the sound is still generally friendly, and it is now hearkening back to ages both long past, such as the «idealistic» heavy rock of Budgie and Rush, and recent ones, like the noise-rock of And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (but with significant noise reduction).

 

And I think that these subtle changes are for the best — they do not exactly help Baroness carve out a unique identity, but they make them more accessible for those listeners (like myself), who are more easily seduced by, let's say, «unoriginal accessible bands» than by «unoriginal in­ac­cessible bands». In other words, a little extra bit of melody goes a long way in proving your worth, when your previous «musical chess parties» turn out to already have been played by better players (or, at least, equally good / comparable ones).

 

ʽRays On Pinionʼ, the multi-part album opener, illustrates this point better than anything. The first four minutes consist of a minimalistic intro and a bluesy, guitar-weaving jam, both with a psychedelic tinge. Eventually, the band comes in full throttle with a thick hard rock sound and Baiz­ley's trademark warrior scream, then, at about five minutes into the sound, launches a clean, melo­dic double-guitar riff in the best tradition of the 1970s — carrying it on for only a few bars before reverting to a heavier tone. But all the different parts fit together and paint quite a dynamic and meaningful picture — a journey, a battle, a natural phenomenon, whichever way you might like to interpret it. It's not a masterpiece, but the riffs are creative enough, and show fairly well that Baroness are at their best when they don't strive too much for sonic wizardry.

 

Subsequent tracks rarely diverge from the formula, but there are enough changes in tempo, tona­lity, and riffage (the latter seems to suck up to all sorts of heavy music from the previous four decades, as long as they are formally disciplined and organized — thus, echoes of Black Sabbath are more likely to be found than, say, echoes of Hendrix) to keep us entertained for 45 minutes. I am particularly partial to ʽWailing Wintery Windʼ, which, true to its name, goes for a less brutal, but more cold and shivery atmosphere (the main melody is stylistically reminiscent of ʽShe's So Heavyʼ from Abbey Road, which is only natural, considering its own successful evocation of a «wailing wintery wind»); to ʽTeeth Of A Cogwheelʼ, with a fun dialog of «biting» guitar licks and ultra-busy percussion bursts; and to the merry martial exuberance of ʽO'Appalachiaʼ. Less so partial, though, to stuff like ʽWanderlustʼ and ʽAlephʼ, which have a bothering tendency to ske­daddle away into «soulless» math-rock territory, but maybe they just require more intensive lis­tening — in any case, they are all blood relatives, these songs.

 

Altogether, Red Album (this does seem to be its official title, despite the lack of any words on the sleeve; all of the artwork for Baroness albums is painted by Baizley himself, by the way) cer­tainly deserves a thumbs up — despite occasional slips into meaninglessness, and despite Baiz­ley's highly limited caveman vocal style, which many people have complained about. Maybe the best thing about it is how it manages to consistently stay in hard rock territory without ever be­coming vicious or aggressive: where heavy metal usually qualifies as «demonic» music, these guys go for a «titanic» vibe instead — big, brawny, powerful, but ultimately benevolent. And this approach could very easily lead to boredom, but somehow it doesn't.

 

BLUE RECORD (2009)

 

1) Bullhead's Psalm; 2) The Sweetest Curse; 3) Jake Leg; 4) Steel That Sleeps The Eye; 5) Swollen And Halo; 6) Ogeechee Hymnal; 7) A Horse Called Golgotha; 8) O'er Hell And Hide; 9) War, Wisdom, And Rhyme; 10) Black­powder Orchard; 11) The Gnashing; 12) Bullhead's Lament.

 

Alert to lineup change: guitarist Brian Blickle is out, leaving his brother Allen on drums, well, brotherless, and is replaced by Pete Adams. If I am not mistaken, this does result in a slight in­crease of guitar soloing on the album — so maybe they just wanted to procure the services of a flashier lead player. But it isn't as if the replacement had led to a lot of stylistic change: for the most part, the metal heart of Blue is genetically the same as the one on Red.

 

On second thought, though, I would probably agree that it is a tad heavier, darker, and tougher than its predecessor — which we'd expect, I guess, considering the transition from a «redder» to a «bluer» hue. I have no idea what the band means by «Bullhead» (a fish? a town? a movie? an un­disclosed friend?), but both of the two short, «Bullhead»-inspired bits that open and close the al­bums are dirge-like — grim minor key wailings that purge the last bits of «math rock» from the band's legacy. And in between are a lot of aggressive, war-like compositions, although, believe it or not, the sound is still ultimately friendly: if it is battle and slaughter that the band is singing about, then it's some sort of ancient epic battle-and-slaughter, carried out with an honorable smile on one's face, with none of that doom-and-gloom, «war-is-evil» bullshit invented by humanists to spoil our old favorite game of head-gathering.

 

Thus, the album's centerpiece is probably ʽA Horse Called Golgothaʼ, with the band firing away on all cylinders as machine-gun riffage and frenzied soloing (much of which actually resembles a neighing war horse!) assault your ears for five minutes straight. But it is never a vicious assault: guitar tones remain brawny and bulgy, but never evil, and although one would probably expect «a horse called Golgotha» to symbolize something apocalyptic, this particular horse looks like it kills fascists (a dime a dozen), rather than people of good will.

 

In fact, now that the band has gone even farther retro, abandoning all pretenses to pushing the envelope forward, I know that old sound, echoes of which they consciously or subconsciously reproduce here: the Randy Rhoads-era Ozzy Osbourne records — the same lively, gristling-and-bristling, but never too scary or depressing brand of metal that seeks acceptance from all sorts of music fans, not just the «metalheads». Allegedly, there is nothing here that even begins to ap­proach the catchiness of Ozzy's records — because Baroness are not a «pop» band, after all: they might like that kind of sound, but they certainly wouldn't want you to merrily whistle it out, as it is easy to do with the likes of ʽCrazy Trainʼ. But it's very much that kind of metal, shorn of its Eighties gloss and, perhaps, just a little bit intellectualized.

 

Other tracks, apart from ʽHorseʼ, that also invoke that analogy, include ʽThe Gnashingʼ (with yet another series of choo-choo train riffs) and ʽJake Legʼ. ʽWar, Wisdom, And Rhymeʼ tries to be more ominous, but mostly through the lyrics — "we are grave, we are graves, we will die" is sung too often for the song to retain a cheerful face, even if Baizley's grizzly-bear vocals still remain the weak point of the band's sound, mainly because the man sounds forever stuck in one mode of expression, regardless of the circumstances. Whether he gets to bash somebody's head in, or whe­ther it is his own head that gets bashed in, you may be sure he will have the exact same howling in­tonation to inform you of the results in both situations.

 

All in all, the bad news is that, once again, the collective atmosphere forged by these songs, one after the other, is more interesting than the individual riffs and solos, if you pull them apart and start comparing them to various hard rock classics — try as they might (provided they actually do try, which I am not sure of), Baroness are incapable of drawing an economic, concise, meaningful sonic picture, compensating for this in «sprawl mode». (And I am not even mentioning the oc­casional non-metal tunes like ʽSteel That Sleeps The Eyeʼ, where the band harmonizes in a «poor man's Crosby, Stills & Nash» fashion — very boring).

 

The good news is that this «sprawl mode» works, and Blue Record as a whole, with its brawny nature, relative variety, and compositional bravoura, is definitely more than a mere sum of its parts. This is not any sort of great praise — as heard through this reviewer's ears, it signifies the victory of style over substance, and that is always a disappointment in comparison to the opposite. But at least, yep, Baroness have style, and that is already much more than can be said about... oh, well, up to you to complete that sentence, if you are up to it in the first place. So here we go with yet another modest thumbs up, as blue turns out to be the new red and all.

 

YELLOW & GREEN (2012)

 

1) Yellow Theme; 2) Take My Bones Away; 3) March To The Sea; 4) Little Things; 5) Twinkler; 6) Cocainium; 7) Back Where I Belong; 8) Sea Lungs; 9) Eula; 10) Green Theme; 11) Board Up The House; 12) Foolsong; 13) Col­lapse; 14) Psalms Alive; 15) Stretchmarker; 16) The Line Between; 17) If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry.

 

First reaction: No, no, no! Change is good, but not all change is good. This is not genuine heavy metal at all, this is not classic hard rock, this is some kind of gloomy «alt-rock» thing. Limp riffs, sludgy tones, gothic harmonies, medieval tonalities, metronomic beats, electronics... where's the crunch, goddammit? Are we actually supposed to sit back and «think» these songs over? Who do they think they are — Smashing Pumpkins? Heavens be cursed, here is yet another band that started out with a promise and turned to the usual dull crap in just a few years' time.

 

A few more listens into this stuff, though (not an easy challenge, as Yellow & Green is es­sen­tially a double album, with its two «differently colored» parts eventually clocking in at around seventy minutes), and I was already getting into these grooves and — man, what was I thinking? This is really interesting stuff, going way beyond their original formula and... well, could actually be their best album so far. By the fourth time, I was all but convinced.

 

Somehow, it seems that after a few albums of songs that had plenty of atmosphere, but tended to plod and meander, Baroness have managed to grow into very serious «melodicists». For one thing, they have grasped the meaning of the «less is more» concept — listen to ʽGreen Themeʼ, at the heart of which lies just a handful of tenderly arpeggiated chords, repeating themselves over and over before spilling out in a frenzied Mike Oldfield-style distorted folk guitar solo, then reverting back to quiet mode before spilling out again in a shrill psychedelic Floydian solo. The effect is pretty majestic — intelligent, catchy, and, at times, almost «beautiful», which is certainly a new high for Baroness, never yet caught so far in one of those «spiritual» moods.

 

However, their heavy riffs are also growing stronger — at the expense of «metal» elements, per­haps, as ʽTake My Bones Awayʼ, opening the first part of the album, seems more of a personal, confessional, soul-aching statement than a generalized «battle cry», the likes of which populated most of Blue Record. The main riff, processed through some wicked distortion filter, bellows with its own pain this time around — as do Baizley's vocals, which might as well come from a mortally wounded battle elephant, and then the frenetic guitar solo completes the picture.

 

This song and most of the others have nothing particularly experimental about them. This is just heavy (sometimes not so heavy) music with a solid degree of introspection and soul-searching. The spirit of Thin Lizzy is in here somewhere, as well as Rush, Metallica, U2, even The Cure or Radiohead, perhaps, on the not-so-heavy, but skillfully overdubbed, tracks. But nothing sounds like a tribute or a mindless exercise in plagiarism — Baroness are experienced enough to create their own moods and, more importantly, their own melodies.

 

The difference between the Yellow and the Green parts is not crucial. On the whole, the former remains closer to a «metal» sound and the latter moves more firmly in the direction of melancho­lic art-pop, but the distinctions are blurred enough to not let you notice that unless you pay atten­tion to the album and song titles. Both halves, actually, have their share of thoroughly non-metal­lic songs — ʽCocainiumʼ, in the first section, is as much distinguished by its psychedelic bassline / jangly rhythm dialog as ʽPsalms Aliveʼ, in the second section, is distinguished by its «bubbly bass / gentle arpeggios» combo — and they all sound surprisingly good.

 

Altogether, the point of both halves is the same: Baroness have slipped into a mood of «quiet lament», developing a sensitive side — those who'd like them move back into math-rock territory will probably be disappointed, and I know I would have been, too, if all this stuff really weren't so intelligently designed. Not to mention that this is the first album where I did not have any re­grets for Baizley as their lead singer: having purged all «growling» from his voice, he suddenly becomes much more efficient when replacing it with a tinge of desperation. And guess what, when he is not screaming at the top of his lungs, his voice is actually quite nice (ʽCocainiumʼ, ʽFoolsongʼ, etc.) — maybe he should try and experiment more in this department. Who knows, give him a few more years and maybe he'll turn into the next Thom Yorke.

 

I suppose the word «masterpiece» would be pushing it: the songs are not that memorable or breathtaking — and if Baroness really intend to invade the territory of Floyd, Cure, and Radio­head, they have a long road ahead of them before they master all the production intri­cacies, necessary to catch our souls in their web. But as a first, tentative raid in that territory, it surpasses any possible predictions and expectations, showing both a strong will to evolve and solid means to carry that will out. Just do not expect for either Yellow or Green to hit you all that hard upon first listen, particularly if you are a seasoned listener — the moodiness, the stylishness, the indi­vidual hooks of these songs require a little fermentation, so it seems to me. Thumbs up.

 

PURPLE (2015)

 

1) Morningstar; 2) Shock Me; 3) Try To Disappear; 4) Kerosene; 5) Fugue; 6) Chlorine & Wine; 7) The Iron Bell; 8) Desperation Burns; 9) If I Have To Wake Up (Would You Stop The Rain); 10) Crossroads Of Infinity.

 

Apparently, less than one month after Yellow & Green came out, Baroness were caught in a horrible accident when their bus fell from a viaduct somewhere near Bath, England (touring is evil!); miraculously, everybody survived at the cost of some broken limbs and fractured vertebrae, but the whole thing still left the band shaken, debilitated for some time, and ultimately led to the departure of the entire rhythm section, making Baizley the sole remaining original member. They did return to touring at the end of 2013, but it wasn't until early 2015 that they felt themselves properly refreshed and recovered to return to the studio, with new members Nick Jost on bass and Sebastian Thomson on drums (Pete Adams remains as second guitarist).

 

Of course, it is nice to see a band brave the odds and overcome Fate by stubbornly clinging to its own self-designed destiny. The problem, however, is that after the diversity and experimental nature of Yellow & Green, the accident seems to have turned Baroness into testosteronic senti­mentalists — Purple is not so much about the music as it is about wailing and lamenting. "All of us tinderwood / Bound for the fire", we are told in the very first track, and references to "deep wells of despair", "desperation burns", "killing the lights", nursemaids "cutting through my rib­cage", and other unappetizing events and abstractions are to be found just about everywhere. You'd think they should be praising God for saving their flesh, but it's amost as if they'd be feeling better if that bus crash had taken them directly to God. Maybe I was right, and they are turning into Radiohead after all?

 

Then again, if a band that once used to revel in the still-infinite possibilities of riff-molding wants to make an album centered around gloom and depression as a central topic, that should not con­stitute a crime as such. The real downside is that, by and large, this new music of theirs just sucks. "These are some of the biggest, strongest songs that Baroness has written", states a reviewer on Pitchfork, and many others join in the fray with equally adamant reactions. What the heck? Am I alone, then, in thinking that about half of this album sounds like friggin' Nickelback — loud, brash, monotonously distorted alt-rock with the same dull, forgettable sheen throughout? And the other half... well, sounds like someone trying not to sound precisely like Nickelback, but not being very good at it?

 

The first song, ʽMorningstarʼ, opens proceedings with a pleasant promise — a thick, sludgy metal riff, some math-rockish guitar interplay in the bridge section, an anthemic chorus, signature changes along the way, and a desperate, but clean caveman growl from Baizley; strangely remi­niscent of Amorphis or some other heavy metal band wobbling between «melodic death metal» and «progressive metal». Fine enough, yes, but when song after song is unwrapped before your eyes featuring exactly the same style — tempo, tone, mood, vocal intonations — and when many of those songs, beginning with ʽShock Meʼ, cannot even bother to arm themselves with strong riffage, how are they even defensible?

 

Okay, if you thought the Nickelback comparison was too humiliating, I apologize (after all, these guys are definitely better equipped from a technical point of view, and there is no denying a certain level of complexity required from most of these songs), but still, there's absolutely nothing on Purple that you cannot already find in much better quality on an Amorphis or, for that matter, an Opeth album. I insist that it is impossible in 2016 to simply put all your trust in a bunch of de­rivative heavy riffs and one singer's «vulnerable Viking» vocal style and come out with a non-boring, much less awe-inspiring album — which is precisely what they are trying to do here. The only consolation is that at least they did not try to stretch it to 70 minutes.

 

Unfortunately, this safe, comfortable formula is very easy to conform to (see my Amorphis reviews for reference), which might well signify that Baroness are over for me as a potential point of attraction. I am amazed at waves of reviewers who have awarded the usurped imperial clothes of Purple with fairly high ratings — all I can suggest is that they manage to do the impossible and view the songs completely out of context, conveniently forgetting everything about Baroness' own past, as well as the entire past of heavy metal as a genre. That is not something I'd ever be able to do, as necessity drives me to give the album a thumbs down rating — I mean, I'm sorry about the overturned bus incident and all, but then, why should a personal tragedy necessarily lead to a public one? At least from my perspective, this is bland, boring, derivative muzak that totally misplaces the band's talents and never rises up to the task of properly moving the listener; here's hoping that, once the trauma is finally overcome, they will return to what they do best (kicking ass) instead of pushing this crappy pseudo-soulful grunge-metal on us.

 

 

BAT FOR LASHES

FUR AND GOLD (2006)

 

1) Horse And I; 2) Trophy; 3) Tahiti; 4) What's A Girl To Do; 5) Sad Eyes; 6) The Wizard; 7) Prescilla; 8) Bat's Mouth; 9) Seal Jubilee; 10) Sarah; 11) I Saw A Light.

 

Fur. Gold. Bats. Lashes. Wizards. Coats of armor. A girl called Natasha Khan, born and raised in London, UK. Wearing outfits that are one-third medieval Europe, one-third medieval Middle East, and one-third Narnia. All I can say is — we've come a friggin' long way from the world of ele­men­tary particles, or even prokaryotes.

 

Approaching this from another end, these days it takes real skill and strength on the part of a young pretty girl to choose her own way when so many not very good people are getting paid to choose it for her. It is obvious that Natasha Khan is not marketed — no sane marketologist would ever want to market her that way — and it is nice to know that this did not stop her from achie­ving not only critical, but also popular success.

 

It is also reassuring that approximately 40% of the people, upon listening to Fur And Gold, dis­miss or adore her for being a total Björk rip-off, and 40% more condemn or praise her as the la­test in a series of Kate Bush wannabes. The remaining 20% draw comparisons to Tori Amos, Jo­anna Newsom, Sinead O'Connor, Siouxsie Sioux, Imogen Heap, and Fiona Apple; to all of these ladies, digging a little deeper, I could per­sonally add a bit of Grace Slick and a lot of Stevie Nicks. Bottomline: Miss Khan is an autonomous artist in her own right, not capable of coming up with a completely unique, «where-the-hell-did-this-shit-come-from» style — but, in 2006, who in the whole wide world, really is? — but doing the next best thing: adding a drop of her unrepeatable self into a big, boiling synthesis of influences that may reach all the way down to Billie Holiday and Jim Morrison and then stretch all the way up to Radiohead.

 

Fur And Gold is an odd album, not because it is so self-consciously «odd», but because it's odd that I don't hate it when I'm really supposed to. Natasha can sing — but no better or worse than many other girls, and there are no particularly stunning qualities to her voice. She can play, pre­senting herself as a multi-instrumentalist — but no better or worse than anyone with a musical school degree, and her melodies are competent, but never too complex (she quotes Steve Reich as one of her influences, but something tells me she chooses minimalist patterns for her composi­tions not purely as an artistic choice).

 

And her fetish? Somber surrealism. The first lines you hear are "Got woken in the night / By a mystic golden light", and it is not going to get much better. The case defines «classic»: bright, in­trovert kid, misunderstood and mistreated by peers (allegedly, she used to skip class all the time because of racist issues connected with her Pakistani heritage), retreating into fantasy worlds for comfort, and now, years later, opening these fantasy worlds up for paying tourists. This is not exactly Dungeons & Dragons, but technically, it's sort of close. Why should anyone be interested in this, except for similar background people — say, teenage girls who want to be «different» from the riff-raff that is perfectly content with Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift?

 

I don't really know. Possibly because, even though Fur And Gold is almost permanently teete­ring on the verge of Total Crappy Embarrassment, somehow none of the songs ever really get there — there is always some peculiar interesting touch that saves them at the last moment. Also, the lyrics should be totally disregarded. Let us assume they are simply there for the sake of add­ing another instrument, the human voice, and also that Natasha really sings in Urdu, or Quenya, because the moment you start seriously wondering what it is that she is singing about, you are gone, and no ER team is ever going to bring you back. If you really insist, let's assume she is try­ing to remember some of the dreams she had when she was 10 years old.

 

But, like I said, all, or most of these songs have these neat little flourishes. 'Horse And I', the lead-in track that also explains the album sleeve, in order to be put on record, may not have needed that looping melody to be played on the harpsichord, or the stern martial drum pattern à la Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit', or the mind-fucking vocal overdubs coming from different sides. But when put together, they somehow transcend «creativity for the sake of being creative» — this be­comes a new take on musical mysticism, well worth tasting even on the part of those who'd been following the development of mystical motives in pop ever since the 1960s (not to mention gua­ranteed to blow the roof off those who hadn't, but that sort of goes without saying).

 

'Trophy' and 'Sarah' (the latter — a concealed bow to Stevie?) redeem themselves with simple, but gritty bass lines that seem as if they'd been extracted from some early heavy metal classics and put to entirely different use in an entirely new musical context. 'What's A Girl To Do' is like The Shangri-Las all over again, arguably the catchiest and simplest of all the songs here, and so innocent and, somehow, unpretentious that hating it would be out of the question. (You might want to turn your nose at the spoken verses stuffed with tragic-romantic clichés, but I do believe she is consciously paying tribute to Mary Weiss and the girls here — if she is not, count me seri­ously disappointed).

 

Even the lengthy closer 'I Saw A Light', on which she tries to go for a cathartic crescendo, even elevating her voice to screaming levels, is attractive — it certainly does not work the intended way, because her instrumental skills are not enough to create a real «musical orgasm», and her voice only betrays its frailty when she goes for the extra decibels; but the main minimalist melo­dy, be it just four notes, has a strange soothing, comforting quality that you sometimes get from real good ambient albums.

 

Also, it is not really easy to categorize the record: regardless of how many influences there are, the songs seem to have been written from total scratch, without any particular genre restrictions, in a mode of total freedom. Classical, folk, Motown pop, art-rock, piano balladry, it all stops and starts without warning — all of it raw and somewhat under-experienced, because, for the most part, Khan is there on her own, but so what? It merely adds to the braveness factor.

 

True, it's often difficult to tell if the created atmosphere is really teeming with spirit or is just a hollow technical creation — especially on all the plodding ballads like 'Seal Jubilee' and 'Sad Eyes'. But perhaps this is exactly where we should leave it at: Fur And Gold is a lightweight mu­sical enigma, an album over the authenticity / fakeness of which one could, if one wanted to, fight a Trojan War and still not even manage to build a proper wooden horse. All I can offer is my jud­gement: not overwhelmed, but intrigued, and for an album with lyrics like those to be even mo­destly intriguing, its creator must be endowed with talent. Blame it on the cynicism and blandness of the times that some creators get a bit too bluntly derailed by superficial fantasy temptations. I move for a forgiving and encouraging thumbs up.

 

TWO SUNS (2009)

 

1) Glass; 2) Sleep Alone; 3) Moon And Moon; 4) Daniel; 5) Peace Of Mind; 6) Siren Song; 7) Pearl's Dream; 8) Good Love; 9) Two Planets; 10) Travelling Woman; 11) The Big Sleep.

 

Fur And Gold was one of those curious debuts that make any attempts at further predictions to­tally futile. It had its moments of beauty mixed with its moments of cringe, and, all over the place, there seemed to be potential waiting to be tapped into. Lyrics too silly? People don't get born as lyricists, they mature. Melodies too simplistic? But it's not the complexity that counts, it's the spi­ritual power. What mattered most was that Fur And Gold was clearly the creation of an easily influenced, but essentially free-wandering spirit. Meaning that Natasha Khan's next move could be just about anything. For all we know, she could start playing minimalistic reworkings of Or­nette Coleman's material, arranged as duets for sitar and washboard.

 

Alas, Two Suns finds her concentrating on her weakest skill: Artsiness. Almost completely ban­ning tight pop frameworks from sight, she is almost exclusively writing in the «moody» vein now, turning into what some have already christened a «poor man's Björk» — without insinuating that she actually uses the real Björk as a working model, but she aims her ball at more or less the same lane, while scoring — quite predictably — ten times less.

 

The press release for the album has been quoted by almost every reviewer, because who could stay away from lines like «Two Suns addresses the philosophy of the self and duality, examining the need for both chaos and balance, for both love and pain, in addition to touching on meta­phy­sical ideas concerning the connections between all existence»? There were even some people who took that seriously — the lucky few who survived the reading process — and started discussing the important changes of perspective that aspiring young philosopher Natasha Khan brought into our common understanding of the metaphysical structure of the universe. (Roll over, Kierkegaard, tell Heidegger the news).

 

The trouble is, we could all just close our eyes on this pseudo-neo-romantic bullshit and enjoy the music — if it weren't for the fact that Bat For Lashes takes it more than just seriously: with each of these songs, she deliberately wedges her hollow messages into your head. Two Suns still shows signs of true talent, but it is betrayed every step of the way, as she hangs it out to dry, neg­lecting music in favour of ridiculously overblown brainwashing.

 

Crowning it all with her «inven­tion» of an «alter ego» called «Pearl», which the press release describes as «a destructive, self-absorbed, blonde, femme fatale of a persona who acts as a direct foil to Khan's more mystical, desert-born spiritual self». I particularly like that they did not forget to use the word «desert-born» in this context. Doesn't it sound fantastic? Overwhelming? Desert-born! (Then again, I guess if Denmark can be a prison, London — in which she was born — can certainly be a desert).

 

If you make a really strong effort and manage to completely ignore the lyrics (including the wret­ched press release), some of these tracks may eventually redeem themselves. Unfortunately, this almost never concerns the brooding rhythmless ballads, whose boring piano non-hooks, near-per­manent echoey hoo-hoos and aah-aahs, and occasionally varying background instrumentation never really gel into anything special. But once she drags out the bass, things sometimes change for the better: 'Sleep Alone' is a pretty little nightmare on the border of Middle East muzak and dark disco, the lead single 'Daniel' is no Elton John, but still tolerable, and 'Pearl's Dream' has the catchiest, if a bit annoying, chorus on the entire record.

 

The jackpot is hit on the last tune, when, out of the shadows, the one and only Scott Walker sud­denly arises to duet with the pretty dualistic girl on 'The Big Sleep'... for about thirty seconds in total, before falling back into slumber (as she says herself, "Not even out of my dress and already my voice is fading"). How on Earth she managed to lure the man, a well-known recluse, into the studio, I don't know and I'm not sure I do want to know, but he does manage, during these thirty seconds, to turn the tables completely and provide the record with a non-fitting conclusion that is, in itself, more or less worth the entire remaining length of Two Suns. But who wants to listen to forty minutes of bad music for one single magical "How can it be..."?

 

In short, this is very, very lame. Amazon.com warns you (or, if it doesn't, it should) that if you love this album, you probably enjoy reading Castaneda and Coelho, dressing up as Xena (regard­less of gender), and jumping off twelve-storey buildings during your lunch breaks. If, however, you just love good music, buy this lady a ticket to a Pipettes concert for a cure. Confucius did warn us, after all, that «Thought without learning is perilous», and so is this album — I may res­pect the effort, but if the effort is wasted like that, what can I do? Thumbs down.

 

THE HAUNTED MAN (2012)

 

1) Lilies; 2) All Your Gold; 3) Horses Of The Sun; 4) Oh Yeah; 5) Laura; 6) Winter Fields; 7) The Haunted Man; 8) Marilyn; 9) A Wall; 10) Rest Your Head; 11) Deep Sea Diver.

 

Well, it looks like nobody was interested in taking my advice and steering The Enchanted Lady of Pakistan in the direction of lighter entertainment. Or, more likely, this is simply an impossible task: The Lady has a will of steel, tempered by everything from severe childhood experiences to a questionable, but firm taste in literature and other forms of art. The Haunted Man — so haunted, in fact, that all he can do now is rest, naked and lifeless, on Mother Natasha's bare shoulders — is the generally predictable third volume of Bat For Lashes' venture into the world of sensual ro­mantic darkness, usually inhabited by pseudo-intellectuals and con people, but sometimes visited by more demanding visitors as well (by mistake or out of curiosity).

 

On that global level, nothing has changed. Natasha Khan has not improved either as a musician or as a lyricist, and her cherished «artistic vision» has not been expanded from the usual Freu­dian muck. There may be a slightly deeper sexual subtext this time — as she grows older, she gets less shy about letting it out in the open, starting with the provocative album sleeve and ending with tracks like ʽOh Yeahʼ and ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ, particularly the former which really sounds like an invitation to try a new style of lovemaking if you are bored with the traditional stuff. But it is still only part of the story — in her witchy world, sexuality plays an important part, yet you do not reduce everything to sexuality. Or, at least, much of the time you give sexuality another name.

 

On the local level, however, I was surprised: The Haunted Man is definitely a huge improve­ment over Two Suns in terms of individual song quality — in fact, the lady had my attention hooked for almost the entire first half of the record, letting it drop somewhere around ʽWinter Fieldsʼ but still recapturing it with ʽMarilynʼ and, for a brief while, with ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ. Basi­cally, it all seems like a matter of being able, or unable, to exploit her strongest advantages — a good sense of vocal melody, particularly contrastive vocal melodies, and the skill of com­pen­sa­ting for the technically weak instrumentation with an assortment of «musical knick-knacks». Of course, I have no idea how many of the «knick-knacks» Natasha happens to be personally respon­sible for (there is like a million people altogether working on this record), but, in the end, this is a «Bat For Lashes» album, not a «Natasha Khan» one — and who could properly define «Bat For Lashes» and segregate it into individual components?

 

The voice power is probably best illustrated with ʽLauraʼ, a sparsely arranged piano-and-subtle-strings ballad that she co-wrote with Justin Parker — the guy who, not coincidentally, was also responsible for introducing Lana Del Rey's ʽVideo Gamesʼ to the world in 2011, and the two songs do have a lot in common (sad piano ballads delivered by femme-fatales with mystical auras and lotsa makeup). But where, as far as my troubled ears are concerned, ʽVideo Gamesʼ remains a puffed-up nothing like 99% representatives of the genre, ʽLauraʼ is a much better song — it rises, it falls, it starts soft, it gets tense, in short, it lives and breathes. It isn't much of an original composition, with verses sounding as if they were appropriated from an old Dylan folk number and the chorus quoting from ʽRemember (Walking In The Sand)ʼ (well, I suppose The Shangri-Las should be quite a natural influence for Natasha), but even the stock phrases are screwed to­gether in a lively way — normally, I'd just walk away from something like this in bored disgust, but here, I thought I felt a real spark. (Oh, and naturally, the video for ʽLauraʼ has 1 million views on YouTube where the one for ʽVideo Gamesʼ has 30 million — but I suppose it all has to do with the seductive wonders of lip enhancement surgery).

 

Most of the other songs have «deeper» sounds, unfortunately, way too often marred by an un­healthy fascination with drum machines (does she have a Dead Can Dance fetish or what?), but salvaged through great vocal parts — ʽLiliesʼ is a fine example, if you manage to disregard the lyrics (about a magical milkman or something). But she is at her very best here when she opens the tap on the «darkness» barrel — ʽAll Your Goldʼ and ʽHorses Of The Sunʼ (never mind the titles, please!) rank with her very best stuff on the early albums, or maybe even go beyond that level. ʽAll Your Goldʼ, in particular, is a nifty synthesis of a Caribbean bassline, a traditional pop vocal melody, dream-folk harps and chimes, and some grumpy treated guitar chords that seem lifted from some faraway hard rock classic. ʽHorsesʼ is also moderately haunting, mostly thanks to the great idea of singing the verse melody an octave lower than her usual range, which then contrasts with the happy-cloudy psycho-pop chorus in a memorable way.

 

The «tribal», «voodooistic» aspects of the album that involve round-the-fire male choruses of­fering religious support (ʽOh Yeahʼ; the title track) do not work nearly as well, because Ms. Khan is always at her best when she is alone — it works much better when all these «spirits dancing» remain in her (and your) imagination rather than try and make an effort at materializing in the flesh. But it does not necessarily mean that she always sucks when going for a louder, fuller sound — ʽMarilynʼ and ʽDeep Sea Diverʼ both feature quite beautiful arrangements, even if they are a bit too derivative of all that mid-to-late Eighties New Age scene. Not quite so with ʽA Wallʼ, which was, for some reason, «blessed» with a danceable percussion groove even though the melo­dy itself is anything but catchy.

 

Cutting this short, The Haunted Man returns me back on the fence about Bat For Lashes, where I'd already thought that Two Suns would forever land me on the negatively charged side of it. I mean, ever since Kate Bush invented this genre, for every person that used it with the properly input mix of intelligence and creativity, there have been ten whose fascination never went beyond silly clichés. With this lady, three albums into her career, it is still hard to tell if she is just a mild­ly talented phoney, or a real prodigy that is too hampered by childhood attractions and genre con­ventions to let her gift shine properly. But there definitely is artistic merit in The Haunted Man, although it sure enough ain't in the sleeve photo. Thumbs up, with caution and patience.

 

THE BRIDE (2016)

 

1) I Do; 2) Joe's Dream; 3) In God's House; 4) Honeymooning Alone; 5) Sunday Love; 6) Never Forgive The Angels; 7) Close Encounters; 8) Widow's Peak; 9) Land's End; 10) If I Knew; 11) I Will Love Again; 12) In Your Bed.

 

Leave it to Natasha Khan, the illegitimate offspring of a biology-defying union between Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks, to put out a concept album about breaking down when most of her singer-songwriter colleagues prefer those about breaking up. Other ladies get their imaginary (or, sometimes, real) boyfriends to dump them and feed on their imaginary (or real) pain for artistry; the fourth album of Bat For Lashes invents a story about the boyfriend actually dying on the way to the (imaginary) wedding, and the girlfriend still seeing herself as betrothed to his spirit.

 

There's a Tim Burton movie in this somewhere, I guess, or at least a soap opera with supernatural elements, but once we've exhausted all the jokes and fired off all the inevitable (and, might I say, perfectly forgivable) cynical / sarcastic remarks, The Bride demands to be taken seriously — un­like, say, a 100% cybernetic market creation like Lana Del "A Spanish Name Sound So Fuckin' Cool" Rey, Natasha Khan had always had that Stevie Nicks ability of combining romantic artistic clichés with a trust-drawing attitude. Here, she has written herself a personal tragedy and cast herself as the protagonist, and dealing on a yes-or-no basis, I must state, first and foremost, that it works, and everything else is ultimately negligible from that perspective.

 

Since time seems to have gruesomely slowed down lately, I should probably remind all of us, myself included, that it's been a whoppin' ten years now since her first album (more than the en­tire recorded career of The Beatles, right?), and while we rarely expect now to see any significant artistic progression in that interim, we might at least expect maturity — meaning that some of the critical remarks about the album being too slow, too moody, too hookless when compared with the sprightlier, boppier singles from Fur And Gold (aye, remember the jumping rabbit-headed bicyclists in ʽWhat's A Girl To Doʼ?), just refuse to take into account the fact that she is, like, 37 years old now; she can certainly allow a little moodiness. And yes, the hooks take a while to sink in, but three or four listens into the record, I have to admit it's a worthy while.

 

As usual, she relishes in her role of multi-instrumentalist here, with five or six additional musici­ans enlisted for support but not completely replacing her on any of the instruments — guitars, keyboards, vibraphone, celesta, bass, drums, you name it (Ben Christophers does handle most of the bass parts, though, and then there's like five or six different co-producers to prevent it all from going too sloppy). Since she is not a virtuoso on any of those instruments, clearly, it's all going to be relatively slow and technically simple — but she has worked out a knack for emotionally grappling combinations of sounds, and continues to stay in top vocal form. Electronic and acous­tic instruments are combined near-perfectly and used when and where the song's mood / purpose really calls for them (and when it calls for something grander, she does not mind going all the way and commissioning a string orchestra, e. g. ʽClose Encountersʼ); I don't seem to recall being irritated by any of the textures on even one of the songs — and for all of the album's slowness, these textures are remarkably diverse, with guitars, pianos, electronics, strings, bass, etc., domi­nating in succession, so that, despite the thematic unity, each track has its own face.

 

And, honestly, much of the record is innocently beautiful, as she manages to find deeply touching vocal moves and pin them on top of those tasteful textures. Even on the brief and somewhat inten­tionally formulaic ʽI Doʼ (a moment of blissfully unaware pre-wedding happiness), she puts some cool happy-sad melismatic touches on the "I do..." bit — and then, starting with ʽJoe's Dreamʼ, when darkness and dread begin to take over, she becomes so engrossed in her own story that it is hard not to be pulled in (I could swear she gives the strongest "cross my heart and hope to die!" delivery I've ever heard). The falsetto singing on ʽSunday Loveʼ, the album's fastest and most (formally) danceable track, ranks up there with the best of Eighties' synth-pop; ʽNever For­give The Angelsʼ is first-rate dark folk with haunting vocal harmony arrangements; and ʽLand's Endʼ, to me, is reminiscent of Tim Buckley's serenades to the sirens — when she hits that chorus, with just a tiny hint of dissonance, we have that «uncomfortable mystery feel» generated in an instant, where, you know, you just have to give a bit of an unpredictable nudge to your romantic flow and divert it into a wholly new direction.

 

I am not saying that there is some sort of innovative, never-before-witnessed artistic twist here. The story, after all, is not that complex — you get betrothed, you get cheated by Death, you go into shock, you slowly get over it, you finally decide to start your life anew — but then, it might be precisely the natural flow of it all that gives The Bride its charm. There are occasional risks that do not pay off — for instance, I don't know why ʽI Will Love Againʼ needed that lengthy «synth hum over two bass notes» coda; there's a difference between a record depending on ambience and being an ambient record — but then, how long has it been since we last heard a record that took risks and capitalized on all of them? Personally, I am already amazed at the fact that an album with such a concept, recorded by a self-consciously «artsy» UK artist in 2016, does not suck — let alone actually combining pretty vocal melodies with tasteful and diverse arran­gements — so let us not spend time and energy looking for flaws just because the flashing neon sign «This Record Demands To Be Taken Seriously» has got us all riled up.

 

Overall, while in terms of individual songs it is hard to single out particularly obvious highlights (something that was fairly easy on her first three records), as an album — a conceptual suite at that — The Bride is certainly her finest, most «mature» and «artistically adequate» statement so far, though I am not sure how many people will be willing to identify and empathize with it. Well, I guess if you're a girl and your fiancé happened to die in a car crash on the way to your wedding, you'll be needing this for some much-needed psychotherapy. Otherwise, you'll just have to imagine yourself as a girl whose fiancé happened to die in a car crash on the way to your wed­ding — which is... possible, I guess. Not that hard, really. I did give it a try, and ended up with a solid thumbs up on both of my hands.

 

BATS

RED IN TOOTH & CLAW (2009)

 

1) Higgs Boson Particle; 2) Gamma Ray Burst: Second Date; 3) Credulous! Credulous!; 4) Andrew Wiles; 5) Lord Blakeney's Arm; 6) The Cruel Sea; 7) Shadow-Fucking; 8) BATS Spelled Backwards Is STAB; 9) Star Wormwood; 10) Vermithrax Pejorative; 11) The Barley.

 

Science has always needed its home band, but, for some reason, most rock bands have always either shyed away from science completely, or drawn upon para-science, pseudo-science, and sci­ence fiction instead (yay, Hawkwind!), or, every now and then, would just borrow a nifty scienti­fic term or word combination to entitle their latest intricate jazz-fusion instrumental. Now enter BATS, a little-known five-piece entity from Dublin, to occupy that niche. (So little-known, in fact, that most sources still keep misspelling their name as «Bats», resulting in confusion with the equally worthy, but altogether entirely different kiwi-pop band from the 1980s. Not that anyone has ever guessed what the capitalization is supposed to mean).

 

The music here has been alternately classified as «post-hardcore», «screamo», «extreme metal», «math-rock», etc., sometimes all of these at once, but, clearly, «math» is the number one associa­tion to come up here. BATS are clearly in love with numbers, particles, rays, arrays, and the the­ory of everything, and their love goes far beyond stealing hard-to-pronounce Greek and Latin de­finitions in order to make their musical bastions even more impenetrable for the layman. It sim­ply cuts off the layman. If the idea of spending large amounts of money on searching for the Higgs boson, to you, seems like a complete waste of the taxpayers' confidence, BATS will simply whup your ass and be on their merry way.

 

With five members in the band, you'd expect at least one keyboard player, and maybe some indie-style fixture like a cellist, or a harpist, or a multi-instrumentalist that prefers vibraphones, alto sax, and authentic guqin. In this respect, it's all simple with BATS: one drummer, one bass player, and three guitarists, which makes most of their music dependent on «weaving» techniques — which, in turn, reminds one of the good old school of post-1970s King Crimson or Talking Heads, ex­panded with six more strings. The difference is that BATS also want to make it r-a-w-k, in the good old way. That's where it all really begins.

 

The first couple of minutes on the album are so blatantly obvious that it's... marvelous: when was the last time a rock band with artistic pretense would so explicitly state its message to the audien­ces, instead of shrouding it in complexity and obscurity? One looped guitar note, steadily increa­sing layers of perfectly aligned percussion, and a robo-guy monotonously intoning "we have been un-­able to i-den-ti-fy the par-ticle seen in the i-mage be-low", before all hell breaks loose as the entire band, in a fit of scientifico-religious frenzy, starts yelling "WE HAVE NOT SEEN YOU! WE THINK YOU'RE TRUE!" All of a sudden, «math-rock» starts making basic sense.

 

The downside of the band's loudness is that eventually you realize that, for the last ten minutes or so, you've been having a splitting headache; you have simply failed to notice it because of all the accompanying «awesomeness» (put that in quotes, because otherwise it would look like I'm prai­sing the album with the strongest praise, which I'm not). The drums are tremendously high in the mix, the screaming is frequently overdone, and the guitars too frequently put a higher value on metal than on math. That is a bit of an inadequacy — an album dedicated to the glories and mys­teries of science should not be so much of a headbanger's dream.

 

But other than that, Red In Tooth & Claw is an incessant source of enticing musical ideas, close to a true riff-lover's paradise. Most of the riffs in question are in a New Wave type of paradigm, except far more «technically perfectionist» than any of the New Wave kids ever dreamed of: I was all set to write how the main paranoid riff of 'Vermithrax Pejorative' could have easily been taken off a Talking Heads record, and then I remembered that these guys are twice as tight in their playing than the Heads could ever be. (Not that it's necessarily a good thing — just an indi­cation of how the times have changed).

 

Sometimes several of these mechanical riffs go off at the same time (not surprising when three people are playing guitars in your band), which makes tracks like 'BATS Spelled Backwards Is STAB' hard to follow, but does not diminish the coolness of the effect. Also, BATS do not expe­riment much with the basic rhythmics: if I am not mistaken, most of the time signatures are fairly straightforward. In fact, nothing on the album is particularly «complex» per se: the effect of com­plexity is cleverly attained through the «weaving» technique — no individual person on here is a superhero per se, but, together, they concoct a maze that might really induce people to take them for some sort of virtuosos.

 

Then, of course, there are the song titles and the lyrics — through which some might, for instance, get interested in who the heck is Andrew Wiles, what the heck happened to Lord Blakeney's arm (I certainly did not remember that one, even though I had seen the movie), where does the image of Star Wormwood come from and what it stands for, and what really happens upon the burst of a gamma ray (other than a bunch of upbeat rock'n'roll riffs flowing off in several directions). The lyrics are not altogether important — most of the time, you can barely make them out — but they add further coherence to a record that, in a rare show of mercy towards the listener, lays out its reasons for fucking him/her up before fucking him/her up.

 

As a sort of scientist myself, I should probably feel offended by such shameless peddling and pan­dering, but I do not. Instead, I feel vaguely amused — and secretly wishing for these guys to become major players on whatever minor scene they will be condemned to for the rest of their career. Thumbs up for sure.

 

THE SLEEP OF REASON (2012)

 

1) Emergent Properties; 2) Wolfwrangler; 3) Stem Cells; 4) Astronomy Astrology; 5) The Sleep Of Reasons; 6) Heat Death; 7) Creature Collecting; 8) Thomas Midgley Jr.; 9) Luminiferous Aether; 10) The Fall Of Bees; 11) Terrible Lizards.

 

Although the official release date for BATS' second album stands as October 2012, it remains without a «physical» CD version as late as April 2013, and I suspect that is the way it is going to stay. After all, it would be in accordance with these guys' progressive orientation to leave behind the antiquated laser disc form and distribute their music directly through «luminiferous aether» or, at least, through a more conventional means, like optical fiber.

 

In most of the other respects, though, this is very much a near-carbon copy of Red In Tooth & Claw. Same unerring, brain-teasing, «polygonal» riffs. Same nickel-plated group vocals, alterna­ting between robotic announcement tones and hell-metal screaming from outer space. Same edu­tainment value in the song titles, pressing you to learn the latest news on stem cell research and what sort of (dis)services exactly did Thomas Midgley, Jr. provide for society. Same maniacal at­tention to every tiny detail as should characterize the work of everybody guided by science. If there is going to be an explosion, it has to be meticulously planned — these guys have a musical Los Alamos here, not a musical Chernobyl.

 

Same problems, too. Most importantly, everything still sounds alike: no matter how individually different those riffs can be, they all strive for more or less the same effect — to provide us with a respectable source of headbanging that no high school nerd could be ashamed of (I mean, how the heck would you want to explain the ass-kicking powers of ʽHells Bellsʼ to your physics professor from a conventionally agnostic perspective?). Everything is loud, technophilic, moves at the same tempo, and even the levels of distortion, which distinguish their Discipline-style King Crimso­nian riffage from their Tool-influenced riffage, usually fluctuate within the borders of every given song rather than in between.

 

In other words, there will be no talk of individual compositions here: if you have heard one BATS song, you have pretty much heard them all. But if you loved that song — and I almost did — you will want more, and, well, they are based on slightly different triangular configurations, even if the angle sum still equals 180°, no matter what. I guess that some of the songs, sonics-wise, move a bit closer to alt-rock / grunge territory (ʽWolfwranglerʼ), whereas others feature gui­tar tones more typical of thrash (ʽHeat Deathʼ — here is one track I'd be interested in seeing them perform with Metallica), but that does not mean that anything here can really be pigeonholed as either. This is BATS: it is, for all it's worth, a relatively unique style, and they make certain that the trademark is duly slapped on every single track.

 

Repeated listens confirm the suspicion that the album may be, indeed, just a tad heavier, scree­chier, and more particle-hell-raising than Tooth & Claw, and also that the song structures may be just a tad simplified — although, seeing as how this sort of music cannot cry out for mass appeal by definition, I doubt that these subtle changes have been in any way intentional. In fact, I even doubt that they have been, period: maybe my mind is just playing games here, or maybe it is the song titles that suggest a tiny extra bit of an apocalyptic feeling here (for one thing, BATS are now singing about the negative side effects of science as well — "Thomas Midgley, what have you done?" goes one of the refrains). Not a lot, though: this band is still defiantly «pro-science», and there is nothing here that could indicate any influence on the part of the «industrial» scene, with its spooky sonic robots warning us about the evils of all-out mechanization.

 

If this sound, attitude, and dedication were not so immaculately combined, I would probably have to give the album a thumbs down — a band that sings incessant praises to progress without pro­gressing itself is a rather suspicious phenomenon. But the punch is so ferocious, the craft is so... crafty, and the very concept of BATS-style music is so enduring, that, instead of reasoning with cold, testable, failsafe logic, I yield to temptations of the heart and, just like the title suggests, put my reason to sleep and go with a thumbs up in the meantime. Maybe that actually comes off as an insult to these guys, I don't know. But next time around, I'd really like to see some develop­ment — or else they are only going to confirm suspicions of scientific stagnation.

 

 

BATTLES

EP C / B EP (2006)

 

1) B + T; 2) UW; 3) HI/LO; 4) IPT-2; 5) TRAS 2; 6) SZ2; 7) TRAS 3; 8) IPT 2; 9) BTTLS; 10) DANCE.

 

First of all, the track listing you see is incorrect in relation to the album EP C / B EP that Battles released in 2006. That album was indeed a combination of their two earlier EPs, to each of which they, however, appended one new track ('FANTASY' and 'TRAS' respectively). The order was also reversed: on the album EP C / B EP it is B EP that comes first and EP C comes next, which is sort of like the order you'd expect them to follow, but originally, in 2004, it was EP C that was released first and B EP followed it a few months later. For the record, there never was an A EP or EP A, either. Now that everything is as transparent and lucid as the Poincaré conjecture, let us speak freely of these geniuses of math-rock.

 

Ever since Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew crossed their guitars in the early 1980s, there have been plenty of followers trying to paint comparable musical polygons in the air, but few succeed, since, without an emotional interpretation, a musical polygon is nothing but firm proof of the fact that a bunch of pretentious and stubborn shitheads have indeed wasted a few dozen kilohours of their time learning to play that way (when they could have spent that same time in a far more use­ful manner — say, cleaning up the latest oil spill with a bucket and a shovel).

 

But these guys, a quasi-supergroup that unites people from math rock band Don Caballero and alt-metal band Helmet with the son of Anthony Braxton, truly have what it takes. The sound­scapes they create are weird, but not pointless, and complex, but not inacessible. Most important­ly, it has all the magic of trance without being trance — too slow, too sparse, too guitar-depen­dent, and way too technical, of course. Yet, once you get in their groove, the hypnosis starts wor­king, and the chakras start opening.

 

The sound is much more «sci-fi», with a touch of «industrial», than «psychedelic» — which is quite natural if the music completely lacks the element of free improvisation, governed by succes­sive amassment of layers of loops that, however, never mesh in a kaleidoscopic manner, but stric­tly whirl around on their own like a set of cogs. But the more it turns, the more you may get to feel yourself caught up in those cogs and turning along with them, clinging, against your will, to one of the instruments. There is something nasty and humiliating about that approach, perhaps, but we'll just assume it's all in good fun.

 

Some of the tracks are short one-minute links — raw ideas, perhaps, that never got the luck of being tested further — but the emphasis is on the long, drawn out compositions. 'B + T' and 'HI / LO' are so mesmerizing that it doesn't really matter they have more or less the same tempo and mood; 'TRAS 2' is the album's «fast rocker» that allows you to switch gears while sleepwalking; and I even think that 'BTTLS', the record's most vilified track, does the «imagine yourself trapped in the control room of a futuristic space station, listening to all the panels and engines» far more efficiently than anything on those early Kraftwerk albums. Not that it really needs to break the twelve minute mark, but there is something creepy about those sound effects — you almost keep waiting for something to blow up at any moment. (Alas, it never does, although it does get louder towards the end).

 

The big secret behind all this is that their loops have actual resonance, and their combinations have even more of it — they're speaking to each other, like the «low voice» of 'HI/LO's synthe­sized bass against the «high voice» of the whining chimes above it. They threaten, complain, or just mindlessly chirp about like a set of electronic birds; «math-rock» this may be, but it is as good as any a justification of the idea that mathematics and soulfulness are not mutually exclu­sive. It is, perhaps, too bad that, unlike King Crimson, Battles do not transform any of those nice sounds into actual songs — they might reach a far bigger audience that way — but, on the other hand, if it works, it works, so let's not even breathe on it. Thumbs up at a crossroads where the interests of the brain and the heart intersect with each other.

 

MIRRORED (2007)

 

1) Race In; 2) Atlas; 3) Ddiamondd; 4) Tonto; 5) Leyendecker; 6) Rainbow; 7) Bad Trails; 8) Prismism; 9) Snare Hangar; 10) Tij; 11) Race Out.

 

Every now and then, one of the latest «cool» bands releases an album where it intentionally mixes the cool and the immediate with the artsy and the meandering, and a large chunk of the critics cries out something like «Prog-rock is back, but this is just about the only way we could ever like it!» and then the cool band fades away and the other cool band comes in and does the same thing in a different way and gets the exact same response. Had Jon (or Ian, for that matter) Anderson been born twenty years later and started off in some obscure indie rock band in Sheffield or Okla­homa City, they might have been luckier with their tattered critical legacies.

 

With Mirrored, Battles have entered trickier territory than their much more minimalistic EPs could ever suggest; the critics paused, wavered, then, for the most part, gave the green light, be­cause, after all, those guys do not take themselves too seriously, and that's exactly what matters. How exactly they do take themselves is another matter. Nobody really knows. But everybody's intrigued. Could this, like, be the future of rock'n'roll... again?

 

The lead hit single, 'Atlas', is a little bit rock'n'roll, for certain. Its kid-martial rhythm paired with garbled chipmunk vocals is pure novelty, per se, but it is only an integral part of a far more chal­lenging structure, with buildups, fadeouts, external riffs coming in and going away, and a jarring industrial loop to finish things off — definitely more ambitious than just a modern twist on 'The Chipmunk Song'. Besides, it is hardly typical of the entire album: its chipmunkish hook is one of the most obvious, as befits the lead single, but, overall, it is simpler than the rest, and the happi­ness quotient is way too high. Mirrored isn't exactly a depressing or aggressive experience, but neither is it an ode to joy.

 

A few tracks almost sound like a more collected, rhythmic (and cleaner-recorded) Animal Collec­tive: trippy textures from outer space to blow the minds of inferior life forms, only set to rhythms that the life forms can really dance to (most are tricky in terms of signature, yet manageable ne­vertheless), like 'Ddiamondd', for instance, or the shamanistic vocal part of 'Rainbow'. But since the bulk of the band, after all, consists of real guitarists playing real guitars, we all know these similarities may not last too long. Sooner or later, the band enters real-music-playing mode, and then they become the modern day's Gentle Giant.

 

What they do not really share is prog-rock's love for dissonance and atonality, nor do they sup­port the ideology of «stop, shift to a different rhythm, melody, and tempo, play for ten seconds, stop, repeat, do while .T.». Entire seven/eight-minute pieces like 'Tonto' can stay glued to the same rhythm throughout, as if they were some inoffensive, unnoticeable chillout offering, but be­hind that rhythm, different melodies actually shift on a continual basis; the peak of this madness arrives near the end of the album with 'Tij', a sweaty, funky composition, like a fast-going King Crimson number from the early Eighties sped up at twice the norm.

 

In addition to still not caring about «song-ifying» any of their music, Battles may have another Achilles' heel: it is exactly their lighter elements — the chipmunk vocals, the care­free whistling on 'Race In' and suchlike — that may prevent many people from taking them seriously rather than dismissing them as the ten millionth novelty act to come our way, much like John Zorn's Naked City could have a hard time gaining recognition with «true» jazz fans for being influenced by the likes of Napalm Death.

 

And I, too, do not think that every idea they come up with on Mirrored is perfect, if only because there is so much. Nor do I claim to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. Nor do I make a solemn promise that I will want to relisten to this at least once a year, nor would I bet ten dollars on the album becoming a timeless classic for the ages. But I do admit that this kind of sound — this kind of idea, to take a bunch of real instruments, make them sound like Electronica, and then streamline the whole thing into the direction of complex artsiness — is a solid, and potentially quite captivating, creative achievement of the human spirit. Will it lead us on to Mars and Jupiter? I am not sure. Probably not. But it does justify the band haughtily assum­ing its given name, and for that particular blistering moment in 2007, that was fairly well enough. Thumbs up — were the brain disallowed to offer that judgement, what other album, strictly brain-wise, would be more deserving of it?

 

GLOSS DROP (2011)

 

1) Africastle; 2) Ice Cream; 3) Futura; 4) Inchworm; 5) Wall Street; 6) My Machine; 7) Dominican Fade; 8) Sweetie & Shag; 9) Toddler; 10) Rolls Bayce; 11) White Electric; 12) Sundome.

 

With Tyondai Braxton out of the collective Battles in order to wage an individualistic battle of his own, the band loses some of the guitar dexterity — but, in fortuitous compensation, also dumps the annoying chipmunk vocals, replacing them with a few guest vocal spots (including veteran electronic rocker Gary Numan, among others), but mostly with nothing. Now they can lay a real serious claim to being real serious about what they are doing.

 

Let us try and unravel this step-by-step. First things first, they continue to have — and now they are moved right up front — Very. Loud. Drums. If we were to judge everything based on first impressions, the obvious thing to say would be that Gloss Drop is basically that Who album that Keith Moon had always wanted to make, only the others were way too tough for him to capture all the attention. Well, nobody here is too tough for John Stanier, who is filling up every crank and nook he lays his eye upon with crash-boom-bangs of Gargantuan force and Wilhelm Tellian precision. Eventually, it begins to get tiresome (fifty minutes of getting relentlessly bashed on the head can plant muted hatred even towards the awesomest of drummers), but it helps a lot if you decide to sit through the whole thing in two or three small portions.

 

Second, the overall difference between Mirrored and Gloss Drop is not quite as large as some critics decided to see it. Behind the drums, for the most part, we find the same «mathematically» laid out keyboard patterns that are more characteristic of typical electronic than rock music. 'Fu­tu­ra', or 'Wall Street', or 'Inchworm' — these sound like outtakes from Mirrored, no better and no worse than that album's general level.

 

Third, Battles prove their ongoing commitment to merging the accessible with the head-shifting by releasing 'Ice Cream' as their first single. Co-written with the Santiago-born Matias Aguayo, it is basically a Latin dance song gone mad — as if all the instruments somehow got out from under their masters' control and simply go on sparring with each other. There are so many overdubs and subtle volume level trickery (I believe) that it is impossible to cling on to one particular instru­ment or even one particular voice: in giving it a few tries, I almost literally felt the poor head swirling and splitting, and had to stop it immediately. They also give it a try on the poppy number 'Sweetie & Shag', with Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead contributing lead vocals (or, more precisely, phantom vocals), but that song has less stuff going on and thus, not such an immediate threat to one's psychic sanity.

 

None of this implies that we are about to gain a much better understanding of or appreciation for whatever the hell it is that Battles continue to do so well. The album as a whole, in my mind, would make for a perfect soundtrack to a documentary on cubism, what with the band's focusing so tightly on quasi-polygonic modelling of their music (and the geometry can be of an almost hel­lish complexity, but it's still geometry); but this still does not answer the question, since it is not to be implied that we actually understand a doggone thing about cubism.

 

Gloss Drop is louder, busier, more self-assured and dominative than Mirrored, which bothers me, because if this is the way I'm going to be dominated in the future, I'd at least like to know what the hell it is that domi­nates me? Do not trust any of the reviews that seem to pretend as if they know the answer. Okay, the Gary Numan-led 'My Machine' has a lot of industrial boom to it and may be decoded as, uh, eh, an apocalyptic technological nightmarish whatchamacallit. Okay, 'Africastle' does sound African in some of its rhythms and then becomes evil-gloomy in its last section ("castle", right? Fantasy-film medieval castle? Torture racks? Iron maidens?). Okay, 'Tod­dler' is one minute of rhythmless keyboard sweetness. Does that answer the question «Who are Battles and what sort of battles do they represent»?

 

Most accounts of Gloss Drop I have read do not ask questions. «Good fun», «cool grooves», etc., rule the positive energy waves, but I can neither feel the fun nor get in the groove. With this al­bum, Battles have veered much further into unknown territory than even King Crimson, whose «disciplined» sound was still very much rooted in the well-known rock idiom. That is their big selling point — wondering about this album is like wondering about an oddly shaped alien device dropped on the planet, without having the faintest idea about its purposes, all the while admiring its out-of-the-ordinariness. But even the alien device has got a purpose, goddammit, we just don't know it. Does Gloss Drop have a purpose? Or am I giving these guys way too much credit, over­stating their unusualness when, in reality, they are just having good clean fun?

 

Whatever the answer, I have never managed to solve a Rubik's Cube, but I deeply respect every­one who did, which logically leads me to a thumbs up for this album. Or, perhaps, it is just be­cause of the drummer guy. After all, nobody messes with that drummer guy — one bass drum punch out there is a solid equivalent of a kick in the head by a Clydesdale horse.

 

LA DI DA DI (2015)

 

1) The Yabba; 2) Dot Net; 3) FF Bada; 4) Summer Simmer; 5) Cacio E Pepe; 6) Non-Violence; 7) Dot Com; 8) Tyne Wear; 9) Tricentennial; 10) Megatouch; 11) Flora > Fauna; 12) Luu Le.

 

Well, the third Battles album is here, and the main difference is that this time, they have omitted vocals altogether. Which is a plus — because they used to know a million ways of making vocals sound annoying and irritating — but also a minus, because without the vocals, Battles move even closer to the status of a «pure intellectual construct» than ever before. Now they just play robot-engineered progressive rock, which is all right for a world soon-to-be populated with robots, but not quite all right for a world still populated with organic brains.

 

That said, in the long run it might be a noble decision, and not just because the time of our being overrun with robots is nigh at hand (I have no idea, really), but also because in this way, they have intentionally and viciously massacred all hopes for a «pop» career in an epoch when even the deepest and subtlest performers can hardly withstand such a temptation. I mean, maybe ʽIce Creamʼ and ʽAtlasʼ could still hope to find some sort of mass audience, but ʽThe Yabbaʼ and ʽFF Badaʼ, released as singles from this album, will shoo away people with their titles first, their lack of vocals second, and the "Oh! I thought they were cool clubbin' weirdos, but apparently they're just weirdos!" reaction nailing the final nails. And that is okay for the 2010s, a time period where the equation «popularity» = «overhyped crap» probably holds truer than ever.

 

Not that it immediately warms my heart, or should warm anybody's heart, to the music on La Di Da Di. It is consistently interesting and consistently «classy», but there ain't much progress here: Battles are too clever to re-write their melodies, but not too clever to break through their math-rock formulas. It's like the next step after Kraftwerk — Kraftwerk wrote humanistic music from a robotic perspective, and these guys write robotic music from a humanistic perspective. And who can really understand these robots? My best attempts to «visualize» this album see it as a long journey, maybe a digital one, that a pack of very determined, very tightly focused robotic units undertakes from Point A to Point B, crossing various obstacles along the way. In fact, it does sound very much like a soundtrack to an arcade game of jumping, dodging, and hitting, stretched across 12 levels of varying length and complexity.

 

Few reviews of the album find sufficient strength to dwell in detail on any of the individual tracks, and for a good reason — of all Battles albums so far, this one has the least individuality on any of its tracks, although that does not necessarily make it the worst Battles album so far. I do have to observe that a lot of the tracks are structured like dialogs, usually between a low-pitched guitar, bass, or keyboard and a high-pitched instrument, which is probably this band's attempt to avoid accusations of «pretentiousness» or «indulgence» (such accusations are most commonly associa­ted with lengthy solo passages), but ultimately it makes an even stronger point in support of the «video game soundtrack» interpretation — you can imagine yourself as the high-pitched Hero, and your evil antagonist(s) as the low-pitched bastard(s) that you have to outsmart. And you have exactly 49 minutes and 13 seconds — ready, set, go.

 

In this capacity — a fun, adventurous, bouncy-bubbly-dynamic pseudo-video game soundtrack — I have no problem issuing a thumbs up rating for the album. I also like the idea that they are still largely using live drums and real guitars, instead of completely giving in to the seduction of electronics: contrary to what some of the reviewers have said, this does not provide «human warmth» to the compositions (because every possible effort has been made to simulate non-hu­ma­nity), but it does provide a certain aura of realism to the proceedings. It's as in, which one do you prefer, a robot behind an actual drumkit or a drum machine? I'd definitely go for the former, although that's just me.

 

 

BEACH HOUSE

BEACH HOUSE (2006)

 

1) Saltwater; 2) Tokyo Witch; 3) Apple Orchard; 4) Master Of None; 5) Auburn And Ivory; 6) Childhood; 7) Love­lier Girl; 8) House On The Hill; 9) Heart And Lungs.

 

HE is Alex Scally, grown up in Baltimore, Maryland, where there are no beaches, and playing guitar and some keyboards when he feels like it. SHE is Victoria Legrand, grown up somewhere around the same place, and playing keyboards and singing when she feels like it. Together they are Beach House. Why Beach House? No one knows for sure.

 

What we do know for sure is that these days, it does not take much to be able to create psychede­lic-ious otherworldly magic. The duo's debut album was recorded in Scally's home, released on a tiny indie label, and still sounds like it has travelled to us all the way from Wonderland. Certainly, there are signs of cheapness all over the place — the most obvious and ugly of these is the syn­the­sized pshht-pshht percussion, which can spoil much of the fun; sometimes I find myself wish­ing they hadn't included any rhythmic support at all — or at least bothered to install a mini-drum set. Then again, these days it is not that hard to synthesize a «proper» drum sound either, so I guess we have to take this as an intended part of the picture. Apparently, there are people in this world who like pshht-pshht percussion, believe it or not.

 

Nevertheless, many were charmed with this strange mix of sonic magic and DIY attitude, and I can see why — the music is, at the same time, complex enough to understand that this is not just another couple of starry-eyed amateurs overpricing their egos, and yet simple enough, with even a touch of child­ish naïveness, to disarm the potential haters. Plus, although many possible influ­en­ces come to mind, it is hard to directly trace the sound that they achieve to a single source, so as to be able to say «Anyone who is already a fan of [insert some big name here] will find listen­ing to Beach House a waste of time». In fact, some of the standard comparisons were downright misguided — the most common comparison of Legrand's singing, for instance, that you will find is to that of Nico, which would miss the point entirely. For one thing, Nico is (was) German; Vic­toria is American, of French descent. For another, think of all the implications.

 

(I would, of course, favor a comparison with Cocteau Twins — but only as yet another example of a creative male-female duo with their own conception of a musical cosmogony, because musi­cally, there is very little in common between the two, and technically, it would take Beach House a long, long time to catch up with the advanced level of the Twins).

 

Beach House do not strive for diversity, nor for catchiness; their aim is to set up one specific mood, wire the listener up to it and keep him electrified for about thirty five minutes. The typical Beach House song is a three-four-minute mid-tempo drone, consisting of a moody synth hum in the background, a fairy-tale synth melody in the foreground, and sliding guitar flourishes in the middle. And the vocals, of course, whose only technical similarity to Nico's lies in their slightly mechanic flavour — Legrand often keeps the same note for the entire line — otherwise, they are far more «human» and closer to the listener. In fact, for all the parallel-reality-quality of this kind of music, one rarely gets the feeling that this other world is impenetrable. It isn't exactly inviting, but its constituency is something that you will probably crack quite easily. There is nothing on here that makes me go: «What the hell was that?» or «How in the world did they come up with this aura?» Of course, it is partially due to the cheapness of the production, but also, probably, to the lack of excessive ambition. And it works.

 

The songs flow so gently and, more often than not, unnoticeably into one another that it is impos­sible for me to choose favorites or attempt multiple individual descriptions. 'Apple Orchard' and 'Mas­ter Of None' are probably the best known tracks, and the double drifting of the lazy old-fashioned or­gan and the sweet old-fashioned slide guitar is as emblematic of the band's whole approach as anything else. Why did I say «old-fashioned»? Probably a subconscious call trigger­ed by a glance at the lyrics: 'Let's lie down for a while, you can smile, lay your hair in the old old fashion'. Which, pretty much, sums up the basic message of the album.

 

Beach House is far from a masterpiece, yet it is friendly, lovely, and graceful. It is also immu­table, monotonous, and boring. But I find that it helps if you think about it as a lovingly hand-made musical box, produced to accompany some retroish phantasmagoric show — a hint at which may actually be provided by the duo's official video to 'Master Of None'. And, just like any such show, it will hardly charm and bewilder the jaded listener, but it will make his life a little brighter, if he happens to be in need of a bit of extra brightness. As long as we do not expect these guys to rip our confined world apart, this is by all means a thumbs up.

 

DEVOTION (2008)

 

1) Wedding Bell; 2) You Came To Me; 3) Gila; 4) Turtle Island; 5) Holy Dances; 6) All The Years; 7) Heart Of Chambers; 8) Some Things Last A Long Time; 9) Astronaut; 10) D.A.R.L.I.N.G; 11) Home Again.

 

If Beach House want to become the AC/DC of dream pop, they are well on the way with their second album. Nothing has changed: each single part of the general description of their sound in 2006 is equally applicable here. This concludes the most significant part of my review, but per­haps a little postscriptum is in order.

 

First, they may be a little fuller and plumper here; after all, a debut is always a debut, and you al­ways learn a little by the time you start producing your sophomore effort. So the keyboards are more dense, and the pssht-pssht percussion more muffled and thus less annoying. The singing is more trying, especially on songs like 'Gila' where Legrand experiments with pitch, and on 'Heart Of Chambers', where she shows her range (which actually exists). And they produced no less than three different musical videos, which is about two more than before. Progress!

 

Second, I really like the two songs mentioned above. They are melodic, evocative, and catchy, and just about the only two songs on the record whose magic actually works. Why, I have no idea. Certainly not because of the lyrics that typically look something like this: 'In your heart of cham­bers where you sit / With your picture books and ancient wit / In that nook I found you / So old and tired / Would you be the one to carry me?' If this verse looks okay to you, how about the next one: 'Made our iron bed side cold as graves / So we stoke the organs that may comfort grace / And they conjured spirits to make you smile / Would you be my long time baby?'

 

But it is true: my stoked organs do comfort grace and conjure spirits to make me smile whenever I hear that song. It is suitably stately, appropriately grand, and mixes traditional melody and inno­vative incomprehensibility with enough conviction to register itself in my mind. So does 'Gila', whose point, as I see it, is to create an old-time feeling of nostalgia constrained by a tragic — but not thoroughly tragic — understanding of being unable to satisfy that feeling. Actually, this is pretty much what Beach House are all about: recreate the future by exploring the past. Or was that vice versa?

 

Sadly, the two singles seem to be the pivotal elements around which I can only see a lot of end­lessly revolving filler. This is inevitably what happens when you record a bunch of same-sound­ing tunes, two or three of which are notably stronger than the rest. By including 'Gila' and 'Heart Of Chambers', they made me think of individual songs rather than the overall picture, and where Beach House worked primarily as homebrewed enchanting ambience, Devotion attempts to put on slightly different faces as it goes along, and it does not work. Once 'Gila' is replaced by the far less interesting 'Turtle Island', you may feel a pang of disappointment, and since nothing kills magic more efficiently than a good pang of disappointment, Devotion may crumble right under your very eyes, as it very nearly crumbled before mine.

 

Then again, it may not. If you loved Beach House — and I never loved it — you will never be disappointed by the follow-up. Instead, you will feel that Legrand's nonsensical lyrics merely re­flect the existence of a parallel world, difficult to understand on the part of a mere mortal, and that you are ready to accommodate yourself to its living conditions, even if, as a side effect, they involve listening to stupid electronic percussion. And I will try to understand your feelings, even if I will have a decidedly hard time learning to respect them. In the meantime, I will surreptitious­ly whisk 'Gila' and 'Heart Of Chambers' off this record and spoil your fun by giving the rest a mischievous thumbs down. This is just not my ideal of a good dream-pop album.

 

TEEN DREAM (2010)

 

1) Zebra; 2) Silver Soul; 3) Norway; 4) Walk In The Park; 5) Used To Be; 6) Lover Of Mine; 7) Better Times; 8) 10 Mile Stereo; 9) Real Love; 10) Take Care.

 

An amazingly accurate title. Brings on associations with Brian Wilson's «teenage symphonies», replaces the «symphony» bit (hardly appropriate for Beach House, whose minimalistic sound is anything but symphonic) with the «dream» of «dream-pop», and looks as innocent and simple as possible without looking silly and vapid.

 

With this title, Beach House make the inevitable transition to the big time; inevitable, because the sympathy that they bred so carefully among the indie critics should have eventually pushed them up the ladder, and it did. Not only was Teen Dream recorded in a church building (obviously a step up from Scally's bedroom) under the supervision of well-known indie producer Chris Coady, but it was also subsequently released on the Sub Pop label — not exactly Warner Bros. level, but relatively notorious all the same — and hit the Billboard charts. What's most important, though, is that there are REAL DRUMS! REAL DRUMS! Or, at least, decent imitations.

 

As for the songs and the magic — this is a really tough question. There have been changes, yes, but, just like before, you have to work in order to notice them. Generally, there is more dynamics; if, on their first and second albums, you did not usually need to go beyond the first twenty se­conds or so to find out what it was all about, the songs on Teen Dream frequently rely on build-ups, with additional keyboard and guitar lines rolling in (e. g. '10 Mile Stereo', where Scully eve­ntually starts a series of psychedelic trills similar to Cream's 'Dance The Night Away'), or with pompous codas swelling the melody ('Walk In The Park', 'Take Care').

 

Beyond that, it is hard to make any generalizations. Cautiously, I would suggest the idea that the guitar sound is more important to the effect of Teen Dream than it used to be; it is hardly coin­cidental that the album's opener, 'Zebra', begins with a minute-long folksy guitar drone, and the keyboards do not join in until later, and even then they form an atmospheric wall carpeting rather than the melodic backbone. This may actually explain the irritation of some long-term fans who complained about Teen Dream sounding like «standard indie»: people who fell in love with the band based on Legrand's ambient synthesizer patterns will definitely feel occasional lack of oxy­gen in these songs. On the other hand, those who mostly viewed Beach House and Devotion as a set of pretty lullabies might want to form another opinion.

 

As for the tricky issue of  «how many meaningful melodies does the record provide?», all I can say is that, on the whole, I feel more pleased by it than Devotion. At the very least, the first five songs all register. 'Zebra' is a paean to zebras — well, not really, but I like to think of it as such, and Legrand's chorus of 'any way you run, you run before us' is very evocative in tandem with Scully's picking. 'Silver Soul' is terrific nerd entertainment if you are hungry for Harry Potter-style magic. The sound of 'Norway' is, perhaps, the duo's biggest original achievement so far: the «wobbly» effect that they get with their guitar and organ processing adds an extra color to the already oversaturated palette of psychedelia, and the Norwegians, completely free of charge, have now received their country's new national anthem (granted, they could always refuse on the ra­tional grounds that the song has nothing whatsoever to do with Norway, but why should they?). 'Walk In The Park' is stately, and I wish I knew what the 'more, you want more...' coda was all about, because it is beautiful.

 

Finally, the single 'Used To Be' is their simplest, catchiest, and most childish song to date — a re-recording, actually, of an older version that had already appeared in 2008, and, as we now under­stand, heralded the arrival of a moderately updated, livelier, jumpier Beach House («jumpy» is a much better term here than «danceable», because 'Used To Be' must really be a great song to jump to when you are three years old). But oh the frustration! Out of three equally possible op­tions — loving it, ha­ting it, or failing to notice it — I cannot choose a single one. Loving it seems stupid (can you admit to «loving» 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider'?), hating it would be overreacting, and failing to notice it would be impossible, since I am already writing about it.

 

And, in a way, this is indicative of the entire album. Again, we have these two people inviting us to believe in their magic, and you can choose between faith and skepticism. It is one of those ca­ses where I almost equally sympathize with those fans who are ready to drop their tools and fol­low Legrand and Scully to the end of the world and those haters who would like to see the duo tarred, feathered, and driven out of town for good. Middle ground is useless — there is no reason whatsoever to listen to Beach House if you are not deeply in love with them.

 

In my case, Teen Dream still has not convinced me of the necessity of this enamouration, but there are enough flashes of beauty, and enough signs of growth (as well as delightful obstinate conservatism, which can also be a good thing), to warrant this from a negative judgement. So let us say that, while the heart still refuses to open its doors wide to these guys, it at least tolerates their serenading on the porch; and, while the brain insists that they still know much less than is ne­cessary to know about weaving your dreams into music (as compared to the Cocteau Twins, for instance), it also admits that they know enough to be treated seriously, and that it will be curious to learn where they will be going to head from here, if anywhere. Oh, and is this the best Beach House album so far? Well, it is definitely the first Beach House album so far where I am able to say five different things about five songs in a row. Maybe that makes it eligible, and maybe it does not. A vague album deserves a vague judgement. But thumbs up, all the same.

 

BLOOM (2012)

 

1) Myth; 2) Wild; 3) Lazuli; 4) Other People; 5) The Hours; 6) Troublemaker; 7) New Year; 8) Wishes; 9) On The Sea; 10) Irene.

 

For about forty seconds, ʽIreneʼ, the last official song on this album, hangs on a single, extre­me­ly shrill, almost mind-torturing note, as if Victoria Legrand finally got stuck in her own loop and were only too happy to stick there for eternity. This only happens once, but it is still highly sym­bolic of the entire record. Bloom abandons any weak attempts that Teen Dream might have to broaden and stretch out the band's sound — and sticks to the good old formula, tried and true, more loyally than any Beach House album so far. Not only are the diligent duo not attempting at all to «progress»: on the contrary, they are doing everything in their power to let us know that here they are, and here they will stay. Apparently, for Scully and Legrand, this is perfection, and as long as they continue to make music, there is no need to move away from perfection.

 

I do not generally believe in remaking the same message ten times in a row, and I had hopes for at least another Teen Dream, where you could at least move from ʽZebraʼ to ʽNorwayʼ to ʽUsed To Beʼ without a feeling of being force-fed the same meal over and over again. No surprise that the first reaction was vicious hatred. Again, song ofter song that creeps along at a static midtempo, rolling over trivial synthesizer rhythms and minimalistic «heavenly guitar» countermelodies. Again, Victoria Legrand is playing her role of yer sympathetic ghost from the closet, blowing mystical fluff into your ears, seductive as long as you do not start interpreting the lyrics. Again, it all sounds imposing, important, and impervious, and the listener is manipulated into kowtowing before the stately, holy iciness... of whom? an exhausted, depleted one-trick pony? Come on!

 

Fortunately, once the initial disappointment sinks in and you realize that, after all, everybody has a right to the «AC/DC work method» as long as that method is applied to work, not just to dick­ing around, it gets better — much better. Eventually, it becomes evident that there is some pro­gress, and that progress is in Legrand's ever-increasing skill of coming up with wonderful vocal melodies and delivering them with the experience of a well-seasoned sorceress.

 

And eventually, Bloom just emerges as a container of some of Victoria's subtlest and prettiest hooks. It's too bad that they are never used as song titles, triggering the memory centers with tra­ditional pop ease. The album opener, ʽMythʼ, should probably have been called ʽHelp Me To Name Itʼ, because it is exactly the falsetto transition to that line that really «makes» the song, pushing it from «simply solemn» to «magically transfigured» mode. ʽWildʼ should be ʽGo On Pretendingʼ — there is a deliciously unresolved arcanum in the way she draws out that line, with maybe just the faintest tinge of irony, but well enough to separate the one cool fairy from a series of generic alumni of the Magical Mystery School.

 

ʽThe Hoursʼ, of course, should be ʽFrightened Eyes (Looking Back At Me)ʼ — and, while we're on it, it is hard not to notice that the opening aaaah aaaah harmonies are a direct reference to the Beatles' vocal arrangements on ʽBecauseʼ; not that this should surprise anyone, since, if there is one Beatles song that could serve as the blueprint for Beach House, it is ʽBecauseʼ (yes, yes, here again, John Lennon did it earlier and did it better, but let us not hold that against anybody). As a matter of fact, the song also has some of the finest guitar-based hooks on the album as well.

 

In the end, my personal favorite of the bunch has emerged as ʽNew Yearʼ. It isn't for much: you can't get «much» of any single song on here, but it beats 'em all in one ungrammatical line: "All I wanted comes in colors vanish every day", sung with such humane sadness that it gets real hard not to be moved. Sometimes one line like that is enough to distinguish the real thing from the fac­simile, and this, mind you, is the real thing.

 

So, in the end, Bloom is a retreat from Teen Dream into more conventional territory — but it is like Devotion done really well, with better production, better guitars, better keyboards, fewer drum machines (the pssht-pssht effect is still present on a few of the tracks, but most of the time it's real drums), better vocal hooks, more credible sentiments, and, overall, simply more mature, as the duo's fairy-tale world enters adulthood and the protagonist, armed with extra spell credits, is now able to weave the love magic on an advanced level.

 

There are still a couple really weak songs here, I'd say, on which the hooks never succeed in ma­terializing (ʽOther Peopleʼ, for instance, sounds too much like generic pop balladry, despite being arranged the same way as everything else), but that is, in itself, a sign of maturity — the very fact that, with such a similar approach to everything, some songs step out of the background and some do not means that the duo is now going for something larger than sheer atmosphere. Also, the silly old trick of adding a «hidden» track after about six or seven minutes of silence never truly works, because the track itself is easily the most boring thing on the album — but this probably explains why it was «hidden» in the first place.

 

But neither complaint will prevent Bloom from getting a thumbs up — and that title might even be justified, because you can really feel these two guys «blooming», self-assured and totally in control over their strictly limited, but honest trade. I'm glad I did not give in to the initial tempta­tion of trashing the album. On the chronological scale, it is no progressive masterpiece, but in terms of sheer craft and feeling, it annihilates the band's first two albums, which now seem like half-baked, preliminary attempts to «get things right».

 

DEPRESSION CHERRY (2015)

 

1) Levitation; 2) Sparks; 3) Space Song; 4) Beyond Love; 5) 10:37; 6) PPP; 7) Wildflower; 8) Bluebird; 9) Days Of Candy.

 

You know, despite the fact that the sound of Beach House has evolved over the years — arguably reaching a «grandeur peak» with Teen Dream and mostly staying there with Bloom — frankly speaking, it's not that much of an evolution. Everywhere you look, you still find largely the same formula of misty-moisty dream-pop with chiming keyboards and floating guitars and Galadriel vocals. Therefore, to read that "this record shows a return to simplicity" in their press release is, to say the least, dismaying; and to read, just a few lines later, that "here, we continue to let our­selves evolve while fully ignoring the commercial context in which we exist" is downright terri­fying. Not to mention that, you know, they are actually selling this record — they cannot "fully" ignore the commercial context in which they exist unless they feed on wild fruits of the jungle and drink water from pure, untainted mountain streams. An impression that their music might convey, for that matter, but then don't they, like, need to at least pay for studio time?..

 

Anyway, Depression Cherry — a rather awful title, if I may so suggest — is indeed a conscious return to the rather subdued, minimalist textures of the band's first two albums, where they did not use real drums or, indeed, much of anything beyond ancient-sounding keyboards, guitars, and the pssht-pssht drum machine. The question is — why? «Evolving» with this working pattern is pretty much out of the question, as the music has almost exactly the same moods, tones, tempos, associations as it «used to be». Fine, so we have already established them to be the AC/DC of dream-pop, but even AC/DC could get dull after a while, unless the Young brothers sat down and crapped out a particularly fine batch of new (if still derivative) riffs. What about these guys? Bloom could still grow on you with time. Do these songs still have any fresh signs of magic, slowly, but steadily working on your brain?

 

A few, I'd say. Speaking of riffage, the main riff of ʽSpace Songʼ weaves a beautiful pattern in­deed, although I couldn't say the same about the bubbly space-synth countermelody that domi­nates the bridge section — they should have rather allowed the guitar to build upon that riff. ʽBe­yond Loveʼ also has a great guitar tone — colorful, sustained, slightly distorted, perfectly atte­nuating Victoria's vocals. And the two extended tracks, ʽPPPʼ, and ʽDays Of Candyʼ, have those trademark hypnotizing Beach House codas — ʽPPPʼ turns into a fairyland waltz that manages to be completely sentimental and totally non-corny at the same time, and the wailing lead guitar line of ʽDays Of Candyʼ is a simple-graceful-magical way to finish the album, but... but...

 

...ultimately, it's unsatisfactory. All of this is just way, way, way too safe, cozy, comfortable, predictable, expectable. All the tricks of the trade have been learned, studied, reproduced, all the techniques explained and chewed over, including the technique of always playing the same chord at least twice or thrice before turning it over to the next one — otherwise, you know, you can create the sense of «rushed», or, even worse, entrap Beach House in the boring layman conven­tions of that stupid old fourth dimension called «time». And timelessness is the essence of the Beach House sound — woe to him who suddenly gets the impulse to ask, "oh wait, haven't I already heard this song before?" Before? What before? There is no before, or after. There's just "a place I want to take you / When the unknown will surround you" (ʽLevitationʼ). Wait! you cry, I frickin' know this place already, I've been in that place since 2006! No, no, they say, that won't do. In the world of Beach House, there is no 2006, or 2015. "There is no right time", she sings, "you will grow too quick, then you will get over it".

 

Coming back to our senses (briefly), I should conclude that Depression Cherry has its moments, but that its ideology of «getting back to basics» is flawed to the core, because (a) this band had never moved too far away from its basics in the first place, (b) this band had already explored its basics so thoroughly that deliberately returning there almost feels like an auto-lobotomy, and (c) who do they think they are — the Beatles on the friggin' rooftop? No thumbs up, thank you very much, though I do single out ʽSpace Songʼ here as particularly luvvable. Apparently, all of their space is dressed in red velvet, and each asteroid is inhabited by its own native siren.

 

THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (2015)

 

1) Majorette; 2) She's So Lovely; 3) All Your Yeahs; 4) One Thing; 5) Common Girl; 6) The Traveller; 7) Elegy To The Void; 8) Rough Song; 9) Somewhere Tonight.

 

Well, yes, thank your lucky stars that instead of releasing one huge album, Alex and Victoria decided to split it in two and put out two small packages — because, honestly, there is no stylistic difference whatsoever between Depression Cherry and its unexpected follow-up, and the very decision to have it out seems to me as largely a show of artistic unpredictability: these days, we are so totally unaccustomed to artists coming up with new product so quickly that «wow, Beach House actually managed to release two albums in one year!» will probably be a hotter topic for discussion than the essence of the albums in question.

 

As for that essence, well... here we have nine more Beach House songs that are totally typical Beach House songs, not a single one breaking the mold of Depression Cherry, which, in turn, stretches all the way back to the mold of Beach House. Same vocal and instrumental textures, same recycled ideas. Had they had the nerve to come up with two such albums in rock music's golden age, critics would have immediately written them off as conservative has-beens, only too happy to jump the shark in their washed-up smugness; today, both albums seem to be getting rave reviews from critics who have completely forgotten what it is to think big, and it drives me nuts, and the only explanation is that they take Beach House to be little more than a set of pretty sounds that constitute food for the brain much the same way as regular food constitutes food for the stomach. A couple hours for digestion, and then...

 

...the problem is, why would we want to spend money or extra effort on it, when we have the old records? Oh, that's right: Beach House and Devotion were then, and Thank Your Lucky Stars is now. This is supposed to be more contemporary, more relevant, more relatable to the way they — and you — feel today about stuff. This is Beach House Vista, 2015 edition. Unfortunately, I haven't quite forgotten the old edition yet, and as a (potentially) paying customer, I see no seri­ous incentive for upgrading. I want floating icons and shit, goddammit. I have no problem giving an extra spin to ʽGilaʼ or ʽUsed To Beʼ instead of saying, "oh wait, I have already listened to these songs once, have I? What kind of idiot would want to listen to the same song twice? Now a dif­ferent song that sounds exactly like those two, but with slightly different chords — that's far more suitable for a true music lover's ears!"

 

Okay, I apologize and will try to atone by saying a few good things about these songs. (They're actually quite nice songs, by the way — it's not their fault that their so-called authors have de­cided to, like, write them). ʽShe's So Lovelyʼ is a stately, melancholic, slide guitar-embellished lesbian anthem (I have no idea about Victoria's sexual orientation, but in Beach House's fantasy world, the very idea of sexual orientation may be completely different from our usual ones anyway) — the vocal modulations on the verses have a strangely tragic aspect, though. ʽAll Your Yeahsʼ starts off with a somewhat unusually ominous, maybe even nervous guitar line — too nervous for this band, whose emotions usually run in perfectly formed and balanced sinusoids. ʽElegy To The Voidʼ must have been inspired either by Mozart's Requiem, or by ʽComfortably Numbʼ, or by both — and it eventually culminates in an aggressively howling solo (yes, it must be the void — it heard the elegy, and now it's coming for you!). ʽRough Songʼ is this band's equi­valent of The Rolling Stones' ʽGirls Need More Respectʼ... wait, what are you saying? the Stones never had a song like that? well, Beach House never had any «rough songs» either. This one, in particular, is as smooth as Victoria's... oh never mind.

 

I enjoyed listening to the record, but a thumbs up? You gotta be kidding. These guys are, like, artists. Evolve, goddammit. Do not confirm my pessimistic suspicions that there's no direction left to evolve. Don't give me these multiple entities beyond necessity. And do not think you can get away by simply naming your album after a nearly-forgotten TV show. Or should this be taken as a hint that from now on, your output will be as interchangeable as most of the hit singles they broadcast on it circa 1961?

 

BEACHWOOD SPARKS

BEACHWOOD SPARKS (2000)

 

1) Desert Skies; 2) Ballad Of Never Rider; 3) Silver Morning After; 4) Singing Butterfly; 5) Sister Rose; 6) This Is What It Feels Like; 7) Canyon Ride; 8) The Reminder; 9) The Calming Seas; 10) New Country; 11) Something I Don't Recognize; 12) Old Sea Miner; 13) See, Oh Three; 14) Sleeping Butterfly.

 

It is said that the name «Beachwood Sparks» was coined together by the band's original drummer, Jimi Hey, out of the names of two adjacent streets in Burbank, California, native to the band's founding father and bass player Brent Rademaker. Whatever be the circumstances, the choice is brilliant. «Sparks», of course, suggests a psychedelic orientation, something along the lines of Tommy-style noise freakouts, which these guys certainly have a penchant for; but choosing «Beachwood» as a title modifier suggests something earthy, rootsy, and eco-clean — and is, con­sequently, in perfect agreement with the band's country-rock orientation.

 

The roots of this band reach all the way up to the «space cowboy» era of The Notorious Byrd Brothers, Easy Rider, and such — in fact, this categorization is so obvious that it gets verbally rehashed in just about any text that has to do with Beachwood Sparks. It is hard for me to judge in which particular location on the long line of evolution of that genre they happen to stand, since I am no big fan of country, be it «authentic» or «astral». However, they have such a good sense of balance that it is illegitimate to brand them as «country» — being no foes to distorted riffs, deep folk, sunny martial pop, or noisy interludes. Steel and slide guitar melodies lie at the core of their sound, but they have a pretty impressive «sonic periphery» as well.

 

This pretty little self-titled debut is fairly charming, if not altogether memorable. The band's weakest point is interesting songwriting — pretty much the bane of all country-based music, I guess — but they try, and, every once in a while, come out with a winner: my personal favorite is ʽThe Calming Seasʼ, with a pedal steel part from Dave Scher that's just as pretty as a songbird, but way catchier. On the rockier side, there is ʽSister Roseʼ, steadily galloping along on a light­hearted merry note, then gradually melting away in a sea of noise before, right at the very end, emerging once again to a steady country-rock mode of operation. (It actually seems to be a rip-off of some old Flying Burrito Brothers tune, but nothing exact pops to mind).

 

The album wins over through its complete lack of «pretense» — even the loud tunes are really quite quiet, including the band's two-part and three-part vocals, harmonizing together in a soft, high-pitched, semi-whispered manner. The arrangements, which may spill over into the noisy / trippy without a single warning and just as easily snap out of that state, are only as much experi­mental as they can allow themselves without breaking up with old-timey traditions of melody and harmony — and the basic idea of the album is a good old-fashioned celebration of peace, beauty, and idealism, without any excesses or overplaying.

 

Almost inevitably, the album tends to drag a bit, particularly in its slower parts. When they really put their backs to it, the band members are capable of generating a convincing atmosphere — for instance, on the brief instrumental interludes ʽSinging Butterflyʼ and ʽSleeping Butterflyʼ (despite the titles, there is not much difference between the two) where minimalistic steel guitar and keyboard parts merge together in a dreamy, otherworldly landscape populated with alien crea­tures making odd sounds («butterflies» don't really cut it, or maybe they're giant prehistoric but­terflies equipped with powerful sonic generators). But just as often, they don't put their backs to it — ʽThe Reminderʼ and ʽNew Countryʼ are downright boring, with the latter of the two realizing this way too late, when, for its last thirty seconds, it launches into a fast country groove.

 

Nevertheless, on the whole this is a positive experience, heartily recommended to all the fans of a good, not too professional, but inventive, steel guitar sound, and to all those who like their «Ame­ricana» a little less self-conscious and a little more experimental than we usually see it. Maybe the idea of a band like Beachwood Sparks sounds more exciting than the actual band turns out to be, but that does not preclude ʽThe Calming Seasʼ from being one of the prettiest soft-rock num­bers of the year 2000, so I would like to present the record with a modest thumbs up. Sure they aren't Wilco-level, but there is something to be said about the humble guy who doesn't like taking too many risks along the way.

 

ONCE WE WERE TREES (2001)

 

1) Germination; 2) Confusion Is Nothing New; 3) The Sun Surrounds Me; 4) You Take The Gold; 5) Hearts Mend; 6) Let It Run; 7) Old Manatee; 8) The Hustler; 9) Yer Selfish Ways; 10) By Your Side; 11) Close Your Eyes; 12) Banjo Press Conference; 13) Jugglers Revenge; 14) The Good Night Whistle; 15) Once We Were Trees.

 

Everything about the concept of this album suggests that, with a little luck, it could have been one of the greatest records of the new millennium. An established country-rock band with a penchant for old-style psychedelia. An «eco-conscious» overtone. A musical link between all the green things that grow and one's own existence, a pantheist's paradise expressed in modern sounds, but steeped in tradition. A suggestive album title, and a pretty album cover to go along with it, some­how reminiscent of Friends by The Beach Boys — another record that seemed bent on exploring man's relation with nature and the transcendence of things.

 

This is what makes the ultimate reaction so bitter. There is no way to ignore the ambitiousness of the goals — not with a thirty-second introductory track called ʽGerminationʼ — but there is no way, either, that one could admit the goals have been fulfilled. To do that, Beachwood Sparks de­cide to move even further away from the idea of writing sharp, memorable melodies, and replace them with «atmosphere», understood as «unbreakable tissues of repetitive guitar / keyboard pat­terns». Now maybe there is a philosophical idea behind that decision — as in, plant growth hap­pens on a steady, but quiet and inobtrusive basis, and so should the music. But at least that idea would have required better production than what we have here.

 

The album never really gets much better, or much worse, than its first real song, ʽConfusion Is Nothing Newʼ. Slow, echo-laden, with three or four guitars going off at the same time just mind­ing their business — four different trees growing in their own different ways... okay, time to dis­pense with these comparisons. The multi-tracked vocals that come in are almost totally devoid of expression: they hit the notes all right, but this ain't even Byrds level, let alone the Beach Boys. Is it pretty? By all means. Tasteful? No complaints about that. But does it make you feel small? Big? Happy? Sad? A part of Mother Fucking Nature? One with the universe? One against the universe? All I can say is that, perhaps, the song would stand a better chance if differently produced, so that the vocals, guitars, and keyboards wouldn't get all glued together.

 

Another observation is that the songs, in their desire to combine elements of «normal» country pop with elements of ambience, simply end up too limp and diluted to qualify as pop songs — and too poppy to qualify as true atmospheric panoramas to relax and meditate to. The band is at its best not when it tries to take the middle ground, but when they give it their all in one or the other direction. Thus, ʽYou Take The Goldʼ and ʽYer Selfish Waysʼ, two numbers that pick up the tempo, are moderately fun and catchy; and on the other side of the fence, ʽThe Good Night Whistleʼ, with its repetitive structure ("train's going to sleep tonight, train's going to sleep to­night...") and train-whistle-imitating harmonica, is as close to putting you in a specific old-timey mindset as they ever get here.

 

In a nutshell, Once We Were Trees is a classic example of setting your plank so impossibly high, all that remains is sit back and hope the audience will only stare in awe at how high the plank is, failing to notice that you have not the least chance of making it. Maybe if they had themselves a Lindsey Buckingham in the band, or any other such master with a gift for melody and playing technique and atmospheric production, things would have turned out differently. As it is, they should have stuck with ʽThe Calming Seasʼ paradigm — aiming for fairy-magical slide guitar melodies that are not impeded by lethargy, numbness, and a cloak of redundant overdubs for maximum effect. As a not-unpleasant, but still jarringly disappointing sequel to a promising de­but, Once We Were Trees (And We Still Play Like Ones) gets a thumbs down, I'm afraid.

 

THE TARNISHED GOLD (2012)

 

1) Forget The Song; 2) Sparks Fly Again; 3) Mollusk; 4) Tarnished Gold; 5) Water From The Well; 6) Talk About Lonesome; 7) Leave That Light On; 8) Nature's Light; 9) No Queremos Oro; 10) Earl Jean; 11) Alone Together; 12) The Orange Grass Special; 13) Goodbye.

 

With the kind of fame that Beachwood Sparks had been able to earn (each of their albums has amassed from 10 to 20 customer reviews on Amazon, to give a rough picture), one might get a little puzzled about why this band felt the need to get back together under the same old name, ten years after they'd all dissipated to test out various alternate projects. A «Pink Floyd reunion» or a «Fleetwood Mac reunion» or an «Eagles reunion» — that kind of makes sense, whatever the ac­tual results might be, but a «Beachwood Sparks reunion» just sounds weird.

 

However, just one listen to The Tarnished Gold, the band's third album, is enough to set things straight. This is not a reunion because the band never really felt apart. What they did was take their own advice and go back to a tree-like state — that way, no matter how long the breaks be­tween albums, time stands absolutely still, and the next one picks up where the last one left off even if the tectonic plates themselves had relocated in the meantime. There is only one problem: the more time you spend standing still, the deeper your roots sink into the ground, and thus, ten years of phantom existence resulted in the band's third album becoming their dreamiest — nay, their most lethargic — creation thus far.

 

With the exception of maybe just one or two mid-tempo soft country-rockers, and a highly artifi­cial and unfunny excursion into Latin territory (ʽNo Queremos Oroʼ), all of these songs are slow, atmospheric, brooding segments of psycho-folk, and all of them could be roughly described as spiritual variations on the theme of ʽConfusion Is Nothing Newʼ. Except that there is neither any confusion here, nor anything new — the Sparks still place their trust in tender, caressing mixes of acoustic guitars, echoey slide leads, retro-sounding keyboard tapestries in the background, and hushed, relaxating vocal harmonies. No individual part of this sound is ever great by itself, and when they are all merged together, The Tarnished Gold is, at best, a pleasing, instantaneously forgettable lullaby. Listen to it every evening, seven days in a row, and by the end of the test period you will probably not be able to remember a single song — but you just might get a week of heal­thy, eco-friendly sleep.

 

Where this album fails, as far as I see it, is in its goal to generate transcendental magic — the very goal to which everything else, like lively tempos and catchy melodies, is sacrificed without mercy. In ten years, Beachwood Sparks have not managed to pick up any new tricks: they think that their three cherished muses — Echo, Repetition, and Tenderness — will somehow do the job for them. But, like all responsible muses, all these three can offer is a helping hand — they cannot teach the band to learn new chords or implement original instrumentation. Hence, another dis­appointed thumbs down. Put it this way: good taste may be a virtue, but who needs good taste if there's nothing on the horizon to be tasted?

 

 

THE BEES

SUNSHINE HIT ME (2002)

 

1) Punchbag; 2) Angryman; 3) No Trophy; 4) Binnel Bay; 5) Sunshine; 6) A Minha Menina; 7) This Town; 8) Sweet Like A Champion; 9) Lying In The Snow; 10) Zia; 11) Sky Holds The Sun.

 

The Bees are perhaps the best thing to have happened to the Isle of Wight ever since the 1970 Fes­tival. There are really but two of them: Paul Butler and Aaron Fletcher, and I like it how Wi­ki­pedia tells us that both «had been notables on the Isle of Wight scene for a while» before relea­sing this album — with a whopping population benchmark of 140,000, there certainly must be some real cut­throat competition on the Isle to become «notable».

 

Yet The Bees certainly do not sound at all as if they would be fit for the cutthroat business. For the most part, this is wimpy, harmless, friendly music for friendly harmless wimps. Even when the band «rocks out», they do that to such a blatantly retro type of garage-influenced sound, that it is impossible to suspect any toughness. Actually, they only rock out once, on their lead single, 'A Minha Menina', not even an original, but a rather faithful cover of an old Os Mutantes song. And the only rocking presence on there is the grumbly riff, distorted exactly the same way that Os Mu­tantes were distorting it in 1968. A thirty-four year old cover... hmm... could the Beatles ever cover anything that was 34 years old, and put it out as a single? Some prime time old-fag-ism we have here, no doubt about it.

 

Dissection time. In 2002, The Bees mostly draw their inspiration from: (a) yer basic sunshine pop and pop-rock of the 1960s; (b) yer dreamy introspective pop and folk-pop from singer-songwri­ters and art-rockers circa the early 1970s; (c) various black music genres like dub / reggae / funk, more precisely, those varieties that still sounded fresh and inspiring circa the mid 1970s. This is an interesting and not utterly wasteful combination — I am not sure if I have really heard any­thing thoroughly similar to 'Angryman' before, with its dub/disco/pop synthesis. But I don't hear any conscious emphasis on innovation. It's just two charismatic indie guys who are not afraid that they will be drowned in the sea of all those other indie guys playing their retro games. They just go into that sea, and swim in it, and have fun. That's the best way to go about it.

 

Since the basic styles of the tracks are so diverse, everyone will have personal favorites. It is hard for me to take these guys as «Serious Artists» (as distinguished from serious artists, who they cer­tainly are), so my favorites are the numbers that I feel and think they do best – soft bouncy rhythmic kiddie-ditties. Like the opening 'Punchbag', whose main hook – "whooh, use me like a punchbag" – just floats along on a soft cushion of bells, chimes, and brass, creating a warm atmo­sphere that only a total Mr. Grumpy could refuse. Or the closing 'Sky Holds The Sun', whose mi­nimalism should, in theory, already be annoying these days (I mean, everybody's a minimalist, gimme some Mahler in pop music already), but still wins my trust because that main (and only) hummable line is so goshdarn pretty.

 

Every once in a while, they try to raise the bar, and somehow succeed by failing. For instance, 'Sunshine' is a slow-moving instrumental that seems to emulate the romantic spirit of the early art-rock movement – nobody in the band really has, or is brave enough to show, the chops for that (indie bane strikes again), but the music still sounds very nice, with moody guitar and organ solos, dreamy vocal harmonies, etc. However, when they try to do it one more time ('Zia'), with more emphasis on solo piano work, it already feels a bit like déjà vu, so no thanks.

 

'Angryman' is still the best – that groove is totally infectious, let alone the ominous lyric "an an­gry man needs attention", with the best moment hitting around 2:50, when the «soft» version of the groove is (alas, for a few bars only) replaced by a «hard» version, with tough brass and wah-wah guitar coming in from the dark side of the street. It shows that the Bees have a subtle snap next to their omnipresent smile, and that the snap can bite as hard as the smile can dazzle.

 

Whether these songs will manage to stay with you once the sunshine is out and you're in for a long cold winter, is not for me to say. Like all retro-oriented records of the XXIst century, Sun­shine Hit Me will hardly ever take the place of its influences in the public or critical conscience. But for that particular part of the public who frequently wonders – what would all these once-cool styles sound like today, had punk, New Wave, electronica, and hip-hop not swept them away? – here's your answer. Happy? Join me in my thumbs up.

 

FREE THE BEES (2004)

 

1) These Are The Ghosts; 2) Wash In The Rain; 3) No Atmosphere; 4) Horsemen; 5) Chicken Payback; 6) The Rus­sian; 7) I Love You; 8) The Start; 9) Hourglass; 10) Go Karts; 11) One Glass Of Water; 12) This Is The Land.

 

«Sophomore slump» usually refers to the artist's second album being much less impressive than the first, but the expression can, in fact, apply to different situations. Sometimes your second al­bum is a failure because the first one is where you have expressed your long-nourished ideas to the max, and now you need more time to breed and nurture new ones than the recording business has allocated for you. Sometimes you just need to step back, take a long breath, regroup your for­ces, and whammo, the «sophomore slump» is overcome, and your third record is a new master­piece with a completely different spirit, and you become the speaker for your generation and...

 

...anyway, I'm not talking about the Bees here. Free The Bees is not really a proper «sophomore slump». It simply gives you a vector — and that vector points downwards, at an angle that may be clo­ser to 80° than it is to 10°, yet the little arrow is definitely not directed towards the sky, but fairly distinctly towards the ground. It is still a very nice little record, but it is fairly less diverse and less original than Sunshine Hit Me, and with its release, The Bees solidify their reputation as that of a well-meaning, intelligent, moderately talented retro-oriented band... like so many others. Will there be anyone still wanting to «Free The Bees» ten years from now (2011)?

 

The entire record sort of emulates the generic British pop-rock sound (teetering towards the harder edge of the platform), and, occasionally, the generic American roots-rock sound of the late 1960s. Rough, but jangly guitar riffs; snowy electric organ back­grounds; catchy, melodic backing vocals; country waltz and music hall influences — many of these songs could easily mingle with any disc of the Nuggets II boxset and come out with steady B+ tags. Repeated listens faithfully endear the melodies and, eventually, make them me­morable and laudable. The only question is, what for?

 

In order to suck up even more authenticity, the band recorded the album at Abbey Road Studios. And don't worry, they do sound authentic. 'These Are The Ghosts' greets you with Byrdsey jan­gle, CSN-style vocal harmonies, and a dreamy/stoned peacenik attitude that might make you want to locate your old torn jeans and go out dancing in the streets. Then the mist clears, and, starting with 'Wash In The Rain', it's basically one upbeat pop-rocker after another, with moderately fun­ny lyrics, moderately amicable hooks, and occasional kick-ass passages that take proper care to kick that ass softly enough, so that you don't confuse them with punks or anything ('No Atmos­phere'). The problem is, in terms of sheer power, they do not even begin to compete with the likes of the Action, let alone the Kinks or the Who.

 

Oddest stuff is placed in the middle of the album. 'Chicken Payback' supposedly emulates the bub­ble-gum-R'n'B approach of the decade, with juvenile lyrics, vocals, and atmosphere — it usu­ally bears the brunt of all the panning, but, upon first listen, I was actually delighted to hear it after a string of samey medio-pop-rockers (at least one has to admit that emulating that kind of style in 2004 may be an even trickier thing than emulating more serious types of sounds). And the instrumental 'The Russian' is the only trace of the band's open-mindedness on Sunshine, a very hard to define composition, sort of a jerky pop/R'n'B hybrid — in the late 1960s, of all people I know only somebody like Al Kooper might have envisaged that kind of sound, but he didn't.

 

Then it's back to basics, including the annoyingly-pretentiously titled 'I Love You' (quite a soul­ful ballad in its own right, but hardly a genuine tear-jerker), at least two waltzing Matildas, and some more folk-rock guitar on the intersection of the Byrds and the Beatles circa Rubber Soul.

 

As much as I should looooove this stuff, I just don't. If these guys have genius, they are dissipa­ting it on pointless emulation; if this is just perfect craftsmanship, it is even more pointless. I en­joyed the album every single time I heard it — and now I just don't want to hear it ever again. I don't even know which way my thumbs are pointing. Too many other questions to be settled be­fore I can pay them any attention.

 

OCTOPUS (2007)

 

1) Who Cares What The Question Is?; 2) Love In The Harbour; 3) Left Foot Stepdown; 4) Got To Let Go; 5) Lis­te­n­ing Man; 6) Stand; 7) (This Is For The) Better Days; 8) The Ocularist; 9) Hot One!; 10) End Of The Street.

 

This is definitely an improvement over the relative monotonousness and pleasant mediocrity of Free The Bees, yet it still does not invalidate the point stated in that album's review — there is simply no way on Earth or in Heaven that these guys could beat the impact of Sunshine Hit Me. Fortunately, they are not obligated to do it. As long as they are able to sustain the level of fun dis­played by Octopus, we can all be happy just looking at them keeping afloat.

 

There is some movement towards «roots-rock» and «folk-rock» here. More acoustic guitar, more emphasis on collective vocal harmonies, a more overtly laid-back, friendly, on-the-porch-like at­mo­s­phere; but a few of the songs carry on with the same jangly Brit-pop flavor of the band's se­cond album, and a few more bring back the R&B and «Caribbean» vibes of Sunshine. In brief, it's a synthesis, and if you have already stated your goal of becoming a retro-oriented band, you might as well learn to synthesize — go all the way.

 

Under that sauce, the individual hooks that, on their own, may or may not be stronger than the ones on Free The Bees, still come out more distinctly. I like that playful slide guitar on the open­ing number, 'Who Cares What The Question Is?', quite a bit — it isn't every day that this kind of bluesy slide technique is used in the context of an overtly pop song, even if it certainly isn't the very first time someone ever thought of doing this. Or the harmonies on 'Stand', inspired by the old folk-pop tradition, but set to a steady, metronomic R&B rhythm section that wouldn't seem inappropriate in the hands of Booker T. & The MGs.

 

Just like before, there does not seem to be much ideological unity to all of this, except for, per­haps, some sea-related themes (rather appropriate for a band whose usual place of residence al­lows it to see as far as it can see and still see nothing but sea), starting from the album title (Octo­pus may be a bold move in the presence of the seminal Gentle Giant album of the same title, but, frankly speaking, the name is more appropriate here than it was there) and ending with the lyrics that frequently refer to seas and long distance travel. Some of the acoustically based songs could even be thought of as individualistic variations on the sea shanty thing ("Is there any love on the harbour, is there any love, is there any love?").

 

Nevertheless, it isn't the kind of observation that would be likely to hit you upon first listen: there certainly is no conscious attempt here to write a musical guide for aspiring seafarers (or, if there is, it is a failed one). Without any attempts at deep analysis, it is simply a collection of pretty and, this time, diverse-sounding pop tunes. In addition to the ones already mentioned, highlights would probably include 'The Ocularist' (with its super-catchy, heart-warming "It's good to get back to the sea..." chorus); 'Listening Man' (brass-led blue-eyed soul, performed in a very ade­quate and convincing manner); and the anthemic '(This Is For The) Better Days', with a subtle, but fabulous, funky-pop guitar arrangement.

 

Essentially, though, there are no bad songs here. These guys may not know, and may never learn, how to truly stun, but their ear for fine melody is still undeniable, and Octopus is just too good for us to make any reprimands on the issue of unoriginality. They are certainly squeezing the same old lemon, but yep, some juice is definitely still running down the old leg. Thumbs up.

 

EVERY STEP'S A YES (2010)

 

1) I Really Need Love; 2) Winter Rose; 3) Silver Line; 4) No More Excuses; 5) Tired Of Loving; 6) Change Can Hap­pen; 7) Island Love Letter; 8) Skill Of The Man; 9) Pressure Makes Me Lazy; 10) Gaia.

 

No, no, no. What are they doing? Nostalgia and classic rock worship are one thing, but crossing Crosby, Stills, & Nash with Atom Heart Mother-era Pink Floyd is carrying it way too far. On their fourth album, The Bees abandon any «rock» aspirations altogether, and plunge into the world of acoustic jangle, faraway trippy vocal harmonies, snowy atmospheric organs, moodiness, reverb, and echo. Rhythm? Groove? There's, like, no audible bass guitar on most of these tracks. They simply invite you to kick off your shoes, sit back, and relax. Pot wouldn't hurt, either.

 

Frankly speaking, this is suicide. Butler and Fletcher are not songwriting geniuses, and neither are they sonic wizards — when, for instance, The Flaming Lips were recording The Soft Bulletin, the final product was so overloaded with minor atmospheric touches, production effects, mixing techniques, etc., that even if you could not remember the melodies, it was impossible to deny the monumental ambitiousness and the sheer amount of work that went into it. Every Step's A Yes, in comparison, utilizes only the bare ingredients. Guitar, keyboards, vocals, echo, there you go. Add to this the usual nice, but not stunning, melodies; the usual nice, but not stunning, vocals; the usual clever, but not overwhelming, lyrics; and the expected reaction is... why the heck did I bother to listen to this bland stuff a whole five times?

 

The subversive counterargument is that, on its own, each individual song is «acceptable». 'I Really Need Love' bops along some upbeat acoustic strum, the most sunshiny tune on the album, a nice, mind-numbingly catchy (because of the endlessly repeated title) folk anthem that gets its required three thumbs up from Steve Stills and his buddies. 'Winter Rose' has this tired, world-weary groove punctuated by the tired, world-weary brass section and the tired, world-weary vocal delivery. 'Island Lover Letter' goes for gorgeousness in its vocal/acoustic interaction, and, techni­cally, gets there, although I still hate the vocal for some reason. Etc.

 

But overall, this is just mind-numbingly boring. You'd think that, in the year 2010, humanity would have learned to make bold steps ahead in the art of crossing folk, psychedelia, melancholia, and romanticism. Well — you have another think coming. Naturally, the Bees do not speak up for the entire humanity, but Every Step's A Yes is, so far, the 2000s' best and most convincing proof of the fact that «nostalgic» tributes even to «peak» musical eras can be as trite and forgettable as generic «modern» pop crap. The only difference is that Every Step's A Yes at least sounds «nice» while it is playing. Will even a single one of these songs be more than a momentary blip on the radar? Will 'I Really Need Love' ever replace 'Love The One You're With' in the public conscience — even if its lyrics may be more «intelligent» than the latter's? Will the moody epic 'Skill Of The Man' and the gallant minstrel ballad 'Island Lover Letter' find a place on the same shelf as Nick Drake and Sandy Denny?..

 

To make matters worse, the last track unexpectedly offers an uptempo «redemption» after thirty minutes of revved-up moodiness: 'Gaia' is a calypso-whatever dance number that, being all alone in that stylistics, feels like a last-minute bonus addition. It isn't particularly interesting, and it cer­tainly does not do much to perk up the spirits. It just reminds us that the guys still remember how to set up a dance groove. Uh... big deal?

 

Thumbs down in disgust — even if I do not hate any single track on its own. Take the judgement with a grain of salt, though. It should not look like I'm saying that The Bees have lost their talent, or interest. As I already stated, Sunshine Hit Me was the only album in their catalog that tried to say something mildly special, anyway. It's just that, when faced with a mediocre upbeat pop/rock album and a mediocre atmospheric/«folk-artsy» creation, my own dear little psyche will always go for the former. Basically, gimme a so-so energizing pop riff instead of a so-so «angelic» vocal melody. A third-rate Beatles clone instead of a third-rate Beach Boys one. But honestly, I believe that making a successful «ambient», «atmospheric», «folk-pop», or «symph-pop» record takes far more skill, talent, and dedication than making a successful pop-rock record. So why don't these guys just stick to their Octopus schtick instead?

 

 

BEIRUT

GULAG ORKESTAR (2006)

 

1) Gulag Orkestar; 2) Prenzlauerberg; 3) Brandenburg; 4) Postcards From Italy; 5) Mount Wroclai (Idle Days); 6) Rhi­ne­land (Heartland); 7) Scenic World; 8) Bratislava; 9) The Bunker; 10) The Canals Of Our City; 11) After The Curtain.

 

Even if you have only just arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, without having spent an overall total of around two and a half years in it like I happened to have, you will immediately notice that the town thrives on kitsch. Being located almost equally far away from every civilized center in the world, it compensates by sucking in superficial cultural elements from each of them and regurgi­tating them in series of some of the most oddly, randomly, and — for tourists — excitedly juxta­posed sets of display cases in the world. You may spend all your life in Zia Country, never setting foot outside the domain of coyotes and cottontails, and still, through the power of ersatz, travel the globe, albeit mostly in an exoticized state of mind.

 

Granted, Zachary Francis Condon, who, based on all the sources I could find, was actually born in Santa Fe (a rarity, that — up to now, I thought people don't ever get born in Santa Fe, they just sort of materialize there from time to time), founded his band and wrote his music through the ac­tual experiences of travelling in Europe rather than pure ersatz; most, or maybe all, of the places mentioned on this LP are locations whose air the young prodigy has actually breathed in.

 

Still, why the heck am I not surprised that a band fronted by an American, consisting mostly of resi­dents of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, NM, calling itself Beirut (the one city that Zach ad­mittedly never ever visited in person), releasing an album called GULAG (how do you sleep, Alexander Isayevich?) Orkestar (that's Croatian spelling, FYI), adorning it with a photo found in a Leipzig library, filling it with songs whose titles and lyrics travel from Germany to Slovakia to Italy, and playing them in a manner most reminiscent of Yugoslavian folk music — why am I not surprised that the whole thing keeps reminding me of that first visit to the Museum of Internatio­nal Folk Art on Santa Fe's Museum Hill, where the basic reaction was uncontrolled giggle: «so, which two cultures are going to shake the unshakable hands in the next display case?»

 

Nevertheless, even if the kitschy, predictably unpredictable «Santa Fe Style» mostly sucks (I mean, I am still fond of the place, but for entirely different reasons), the debut album of Beirut does not. It is not a masterpiece: the style is way too monotonous, and Condon's pop hook senses are seriously underdeveloped, or perhaps he is consciously trying to bury them. But neither is this simply an ecstatic declaration of the «ooh, look at me, I'm so advanced in my knowledge and in­fluences» kind, the perennial bane of indie music. Well, there certainly are elements of that, or else the guy wouldn't probably have included so many toponyms in the song titles (on the other hand, what a better way to make local kids interested in European geography?). Yet the basic motivation for Gulag Orkestar, (I want to believe), is quite different.

 

What we have here is a young impressionable artistic mind, smitten with the folk tradition of Eastern Europe and beset with the idea of describing its own experiences and feelings through the medium of that tradition. Much as I dislike quoting old man Christgau, he hit the nail on the head when writing that, in comparison to Condon's Yugoslavian influences — «contained chaos and wild drums» — Condon's own music is «irrepressible melodicism tempered by harmonic me­lancholy». Indeed; Condon borrows the superficial elements of Balkan music (the instrumenta­tion, mainly brass and accordeon, and the basic melodic structures) and, rather than using them to reproduce the reckless drunken debauchery of that tradition, adapts them as background for the retro-romantic yearnings of his own heart.

 

Of course, one could easily bring in field experts deriding us for the clichéd association of Balkan folk music with gypsies, bears, and frantic bop-till-you-drop dancing in the streets, and stating that Zachary Condon simply demonstrates a deeper, subtler understanding of that musical culture than any of us bloody tourists can ever hope to develop. Possibly, but I'd bet all of those field ex­perts' credentials would be fairly flimsy. Condon is a bloody tourist himself, and way too young and inexperienced (he was barely 20 years old upon the album's release, and his first close en­counters with the emulated musical tradition began when he was about 17) to gain a properly de­ep understanding of all those things; it is fairly obvious that he is doing his personal schtick, bor­rowing the formal trappings from another culture — much like the Kinks and the Beatles did their naïve imitations of the Indian vibe with 'See My Friends' and 'Norwegian Wood'.

 

But this is exactly what makes Gulag Orkestar worthy of your attention. The delicate mix of kitsch and sincerity. This is not some sort of lame tribute to Goran Bregović or Boban Marković, but an original creation that borrows elements of their music, originally used for an entirely diffe­rent purpose, to paint a sort of one-of-a-kind «An American In Eastern Europe» picture. And even if the songs, with their balalaikas, accordeons, trumpets, and what-not, all tend to merge to­gether after a short while (I only find 'Postcards From Italy', with its tender, friendly brass riff, to stand on its own as a truly memorable composition), the overall impression is lite-wond'rous.

 

Condon does not have much originality, but he's got taste: his lyrics are simple, but never flash­ing their clichéd nature, and his singing, admittedly inspired by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields yet also showing traces of Andrew Bird's influences (in fact, quite a few of these songs could ea­sily be passed off as obscure Bird outtakes), is impeccable on the grounds it covers. He also seems to have his feet planted steadily on the ground: there is sadness and loneliness all over this thing, but he never overplays it, drowning in mannerisms and pathos — it's loud, but still low-key and humble. In short — unmemorable, but charismatic.

 

I must warn you, though, that I really hated the record upon first listen. Not being a big fan of drunk Serbian parties and Emir Kusturica in the first place, I was even more upset when it turned out that the songs were so flabby, dynamics-deprived, and hookless at that, and it took a few listens to understand it all contributed to making the experience worthwhile rather than incre­asing its ugliness. So beware: if you do like wild gypsy stuff, this is not wild gypsy stuff. It's not party music at all — it's a one-man project! «Beirut» does consist of several people when they're playing live, but in the studio, Condon overdubs most of the instruments all by himself. So Gulag Orkestar may just be one of the non-rowdiest albums ever to be recorded in a rowdy manner, and for that alone deserves a thumbs up.

 

THE FLYING CLUB CUP (2007)

 

1) A Call To Arms; 2) Nantes; 3) A Sunday Smile; 4) Guaymas Sonora; 5) La Banlieue; 6) Cliquot; 7) The Penalty; 8) Forks And Knives (La Fête); 9) In The Mausoleum; 10) Un Dernier Verre (Pour La Route); 11) Cherbourg; 12) St. Apollonia; 13) The Flying Club Cup.

 

One album and a few EPs into his career, «Beirut» goes west. Well, technically speaking, it is still east of New Mexico, but definitely west of the Balkans (where, as skeptical people tell me, Zachary Condon never actually set foot on his voyage of self-discovery): almost the whole album is ba­sed on the exotic country of France and its pictorially beautiful cities. The title is based on a suitably random bit of France-related trivia — a hot air balloon festival held in the early 1900's — and, totally true to the Santa Fe style, at least one song ('Guaymas, Sonora') deviates from the concept, being dedicated, mariachi-style, to Mexico, and the album cover, naturally, is an old photo shot of a Mexican beach. Putting a picture of a French paysage on an album paying tribute to French chanson? You'd call that true artistry? What are you, a Renaissance retrograde?...

 

And, of course, none of this sounds one bit like French chanson, despite all the accordeons and shit. Condon's travelog is well reflected in the lyrics, and his admiration for Jacques Brel, Fran­ce's biggest cultural export asset of the century, is also on record; but at the end of the day, The Flying Club Cup still ends up sounding like... Beirut. Listen to 'Cliquot': they sound like they're using this brass-accordeon punch to reproduce the structure of some old Celtic ballad from the deep depths of Condon's American subconscience. Bizarre.

 

Musically, the album's greatest advantage may be the smooth, but exuberant strings arrangements, courtesy of Owen Pallett who is mostly known as the orchestral mastermind behind Arcade Fire, but is also an accomplished solo artist in his own right; his waltzing intro to 'Forks And Knives' is my personal favourite moment on the whole record. But overall, despite the announced transition from the Dionysian wildness of Serbia to the Apollonic refinery of France, the changes in style are mostly cosmetic. Sonic texture and atmosphere still preside over hooks; Condon's vulnerably romantic, several-feet-above-the-ground vocals still bring to mind a shallower, more naïve and in­no­cent avatar of Andrew Bird; and the whole thing is still so damn cute and harmless that I do not understand how anyone could ever hate this kind of music (I think most of the hate letters in its address that I've seen were from silly people who actually expected it to sound like a collec­tion of French pop tunes circa 1920 or something).

 

One thing that is a little annoying is that most of the songs are taken at the same tempo, and way too many of them ('A Sunday Smile', 'Cliquot', 'Forks And Knives', 'Cherbourg') are waltzes — okay, folk mu­sic is not supposed to be diverse, but this is, after all, an advanced individual's processed take on folk music, and just how advanced can an individual be if he builds every third song of his upon the same POOM-cha-cha-POOM-cha-cha structure? (Let alone the fact that the nostalgia-tinted 'A Sunday Smile' may be the most sincerely moving tune on the album). I ho­nest­ly do not en­dorse Condon's attitude towards rhythm; he seems to be too engulfed in the flow to flesh out the rhythmic work properly.

 

Still, by the time Condon leads us into the grand finale of the title track, he has, once more, con­vinced me that, in between the proverbially stale clichés of (and about) French folk culture and the grotesque, art-for-art's sake, meaningless concatenations of the «Santa Fe style», this whole thing is about the charismatic inner world of a sensitive young person, even if that world, in order to open up to strangers, requires to be fueled by completely random triggers. And so, once again, there may not be a whole lot of great music here, but there is sincerity — and intrigue — and that is enough to justify a friendly, if not ecstatic, thumbs up.

 

MARCH OF THE ZAPOTEC / REALPEOPLE HOLLAND (2009)

 

CD I: 1) El Zócalo; 2) La Llorona; 3) My Wife; 4) The Akara; 5) On A Bayonet; 6) The Shrew; CD II: 1) My Night With The Prostitute From Marseilles; 2) My Wife, Lost In The Wild; 3) Venice; 4) The Concubine; 5) No Dice.

 

Condon's next predictably unpredictable move consisted of releasing a double EP whose first half sounds nothing like its second. For the first fifteen minutes, he is being accompanied by the 19-pi­ece Jimenez Band form the suburbs of Oaxaca, fusing Mexican talent with Balkan influences. For the second fifteen minutes, he changes his moniker to that of Realpeople, a pseudonym he had already used before the Beirut days, and experiments with electronic textures, testing how the same Balkan influences can be modeled in digital ways. ART!!

 

What is really reassuring is that Condon's feel for melody and taste for invention seem to have only increased and sharpened since his last album. Despite still being severely tied to waltz tem­pos, he makes great use of his Mexican troopers, and, for once, the melting pot approach really triggers an interesting cultural realization — namely, that Eastern European folk melancholy and Spanish desert-style romanticism have quite a bit of a common flavour. If 'La Llorona' (loosely dedicated to a traditional Mexican legend) is almost entirely Mexican in spirit, 'The Akara' alrea­dy tries to merge the traditions, and by the time 'The Shrew' comes along, I no longer know how to describe the whole thing.

 

It's a funny experience, to see Spaniards and Serbs shaking hands in such an oddly mediated man­ner. (Of course, once you get to the bottom of it, it's all about Gypsy power on both ends — which does not, however, make Condon's astute synthesis any less exci­ting). And, on top of that, both 'Llorona' and 'Akara' feature some of Zack's luverliest vocal melodies so far.

 

Feelings are generally mixed when it comes to the second part. On one hand, Holland is clearly the most innovative work that Condon produced since the basic sound of «Beirut» was establi­shed in the first place. On the other hand, it is hard to get rid of the thought that the lad may just be acting cool here, falling for the ridiculously all-permeating idea that any modern music that as­pires to be «modern» has to make use of electronic equipment. The melodies on Holland are of the usual solid quality, and at least one song, 'The Concubine', with its enchanted fairy-tale sound, might rank among Condon's finest. But couldn't it have sounded even better if the accordeons and chimes were augmented with real strings? I don't know. Actually, I do know: some of these tracks are occasionally performed by Zack's currently playing band without electronic background, and each instance of witnessing that has always seemed far more invigorating to me.

 

Certainly the last track on the EP, a crude dance-pop instrumental called 'No Dice', feels tremen­dously out of place here. As catchy as its main hook may be, it is still in the «dorky» ballpark, better fit for an arcade shooter soundtrack than for a legit Beirut album. I can only assume that it was a silly joke to test fan patience rather than, you know, «All of my life I've been dreaming...» etc. etc., the equivalent of suddenly being able to fulfill your dirtiest sexual fantasy. But, if any­thing, it just further confirms my belief that, in the future, Condon would do much better to stay away from synthesizers altogether. Now that we know that you can do it, Zack, how about getting back in touch with those Jimenez people?

 

Thumbs up, though, because, without 'No Dice', there is still thirty minutes of good music swim­ming around, and the whole thing is an excellent and original variation on the old style. Three more cheers for the synthetic approach.

 

THE RIP TIDE (2011)

 

1) A Candle's Fire; 2) Santa Fe; 3) East Harlem; 4) Goshen; 5) Payne's Bay; 6) The Rip Tide; 7) Vagabond; 8) The Peacock; 9) Port Of Call.

 

On Beirut's next offering, the electronics are mostly out, and it's a good sign. It shows that Con­don is smart enough to distinguish between what works and what doesn't work, and does not in­sist on jamming what doesn't work in his music, just because it's, like, what all them cool kids are doing these days. Why tamper with a formula that is already qualified as post-post-modernist, as it takes all these European folk traditions, fuses them together Santa Fe-style, and then demands that the author declare genuine heartfelt romantic love towards this fusion?

 

Thus, the nice Gulag Orkestar-style sound is back, as if nothing ever happened since then: trom­bones, trumpets, accordions, ukuleles, etc. The problem is, nothing really happens on The Rip Tide, either. It is 9 songs and 33 minutes of niceness — to my ears, completely unmemorable and completely non-innovative compared to Gulag Orkestar. These lazy rhythms, these majestic brass riffs, these Balkans-oriented vocal modulations, this lyrical attitude, we've all received our communion already. Where are the hooks, goddammit?

 

By putting ʽSanta Feʼ out as the lead single, Zack probably thought that he was doing his native city a big favor, but, being well acquainted with the city myself, I cannot imagine it adopting the song as its municipal anthem any time soon. For some reason, it is the only song on the record that still suffers a bit from the electronic disease (a bubbly, poisonous synth pattern acts as its rhythmic base), and, for some other reason, the anthemic chorus "sign me up, Santa Fe, and call your son" is nonchalantly mumbled through the nose rather than belted at the top of the lung­power (which this guy actually possesses in spades).

 

The rest of the songs, despite being purer in sound and smarter in design, still fail to register. I do not really understand what it is: there is no sense in blaming Condon for sticking to the same old tried and true, especially since he obviously does this well, and tinkering with the formula may only blow things up. It's just that, somehow, the formula got stale really, really quick. Where the sound used to be intriguing because it was so novel, now that the novelty factor has worn off, it simply becomes annoying.

 

Sometimes, in fact, I wish that the damn brass people would just go away and leave Condon to sing his melodies a cappella. ʽVagabondʼ, for instance, or the first couple of minutes of ʽPort Of Callʼ, when it's just Zack and his guitar. But then all these musicians disrupt our privacy — and for what? To set up this band-of-gypsies vibe which doesn't even compare to a real band of gyp­sies. Perhaps it's not really the lack of melodic hooks that I am complaining about, but simply the lack of fire in this music. I mean, there's no use in concealing the platitude that most people are attrac­ted to Balkanian motives because of the reckless, crazy, all-out-wild atmosphere. The Rip Tide, in comparison, sounds stiff, cold, and artificial.

 

Or maybe it is the minimalist approach that irks me so much? A glowing review in Pitchfork put some emphasis on how the sound of Rip Tide is so stripped down, compared to how it used to be, and how there was «a newfound sense of restraint and stateliness on display here» — a phrase ty­pical of how little care we reviewers actually pay to what we are writing. In this case, not only because the «sense of restraint» and «sense of stateliness» are two entirely different things, and should not be joined together the way they were, but also because, even if you try real hard, it is fairly tough to imagine a «statelier» album coming out of Zach Condon's head than Gulag Or­kes­tar, so exactly how Rip Tide could boast a «newfound sense of stateliness» is way beyond me — unless, of course, the idea is that, earlier on, Condon had lost that sense somewhere on the road, and now, lo and behold, he's picked it up again. But shouldn't that be rendered with the word «recovered» rather than «newfound»?..

 

Well, never mind the linguistic games. Simply put, The Rip Tide, despite being so short, has ma­naged to bore me so much that, at this point, I am not sure I'd ever be interested in hearing a Bei­rut record again. Then again, it's not as if Gulag Orkestar shook me to my foundations, either; if, to you, it did manage to be an eye-opening experience, I'm pretty sure you'll love The Rip Tide as much as the general critical world pretended to love it. Me, I'm free to just go along with a firm thumbs down, knowing that no harm will be caused — with the major critical success that The Rip Tide has won, there are few chances that Zack will be reverting to electronics any time soon, and that is really what matters.

 

NO NO NO (2015)

 

1) Gibraltar; 2) No No No; 3) At Once; 4) August Holland; 5) As Needed; 6) Perth; 7) Pacheco; 8) Fener; 9) So Allowed.

 

Well now, look at this. Four more years, and only nine more songs — No No No is even shorter than The Rip Tide, meaning that either Condon is at the end of his rope, or he is deliberately trying to convince us that less is more, and that any songwriter entrapped in a formula should at least try and cut down his production to a bare minimum (hear that, Mr. Springsteen?). Keeping in mind that this approach did not help The Rip Tide from being the same old cud, we should not set our expectations too high here — but, curiously, at least in my case these expectations have been pleasantly deceived.

 

As he himself acknowledged in interviews, Condon began writing this next album in a state of creative crisis — and eventually switched to a mini-format, jettisoning his large backing band in favor of a minimalistic piano trio. It seems that this actually helped him to concentrate more on the «melodic skeletons» of the tunes than on his usual East European atmospherics; and although the band was back for the final recording sessions, trombones and trumpets and accordions all in a row, most of the songs still have a transparently minimalistic sheen to them: the percussion and piano lines that open ʽGibraltarʼ are fairly typical of the entire record. Consequently, No No No sounds unmistakably like Beirut — and at the same time it gives us a fresh approach, «deconst­ructing» the classic Condon sound without spoiling it.

 

Some of these songs I would even warily define as «catchy», just because the simple, repetitive, distinctive keyboard lines (such as in ʽGibraltarʼ and ʽPerthʼ) stick in the brain faster than... well, anything Condon ever wrote before. But that's fine, it's really more of an attention spam problem than a sign of quality. What really matters is that this approach helps the man get some of that excessive quasi-Balkanian Weltschmerz out of his system, and the songs become cozier, prettier, more intimate, and intelligently optimistic — the lyrics seem like they were nonsensically thrown together out of a bunch of stock phrases from The Great Relationships Quotebook, but with the amount of air coming from Condon's nose, few people will make out the words anyway; more important is the effect of combining his high-pitched nasal singing with those skeletal acoustic and electric piano melodies, which, to me, sounds very pleasant (sort of a sunnier anti-thesis to the Thom Yorke vibe, if you wish).

 

Even without the vocals, the results can be nice: the instrumental ʽAs Neededʼ is a charming little piece of chamber pop, opened and closed with a gentle folksy acoustic riff and slightly Beach Boy-ish in the middle, with the strings forming a series of soothing musical waves against the relentless, but also soothing, hammering of the piano — a simple, but efficient example of the man's composing skills, so often remaining underappreciated behind the brass wall of sound. If, for some reason, you happen to be irritated by the man's voice (which is a distinct probability for all «crooner»-type singers), this is the only track off the record that you will need; fortunately for me, I can take it all, and twenty-nine minutes is precisely the maximum that can be intaken with­out the gag reflex setting in — because, after all, this is a set formula.

 

A thumbs up it is, even though it is not at all clear where we go from here. The man shows no signs of going back to the little shop of electronica, which is a good sign (there are some synthe­sizers on these tracks, but they are used sparingly and intelligently, like in the merry-go-round carousel intro to the title track); the man has thought of a good way to brush up on his melodic feel — by clearing away everything that is superfluous — which is an even better sign. But the man still retains his "earthy romantic" persona, which means that, most likely, sooner or later he will still return to the Gulag Orkestar mode of functioning, and whether he will manage to snap out of the predictable formula then remains, of course, an open question. In the meantime, all we can do is wish him some of that New Mexican good luck.

 

 

THE BETA BAND

THE THREE E.P.'s (1998)

 

1) Dry The Rain; 2) I Know; 3) B + A; 4) Dog Got A Bone; 5) Inner Meet Me; 6) The House Song; 7) Monolith; 8) She's The One; 9) Push It Out; 10) It's Over; 11) Dr. Baker; 12) Needles In My Eyes.

 

The Beta Band's first batch of EPs is frequently considered to be their finest, or, at least, most «se­minal» (actually, I hate this word) — and it is fairly convenient that, before going on to LP-length material, they bothered to package all three of them together on one disc, delivering me from the bother of thinking whether to review them all separately, or not to review them at all.

 

These guys are Scots, but they actually represent the kind of Scots who are fairly happy to get away from their Scottishness — at the very least, bagpipes are notoriously absent from these re­cordings. Their most deep-reaching influences would probably include the likes of the Holy Mo­dal Rounders, the Fugs, and the Incredible String Band — «psych-folk» outfits who found fun in adding various kaleidoscopic pebbles to basic folk melodies. If you think hard, you will discover that the approach, for the most part of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, was all but dead: folk music went its own way, striving for rigidity, solemnity, and authenticity, and the «psych» bit ten­ded to connect with poppier or hard-rockier stuff instead.

 

Thus it is that Steve Mason and Co. try to revive this spirit — take the folk vibe and marry it to whatever else comes along as long as it's modern and «relevant»: avantgarde, electronica, hip-hop, trip-hop, whatever works. And, for the most part, it works, because it's fresh and fun, and at the same time solidly bound to traditional harmony structures. Do they have a point? No. They are post-modernist goofballs. You are supposed to make that point for yourself.

 

The first of the EPs, Champion Versions, is the most accessible. It is bookmarked by two relati­vely straightforward folk songs, 'Dry The Rain' and 'Dog's Got A Bone', that are catchy, «toe-tap­pity» and almost obnoxiously friendly — but saved by the lazy, nonchalant, seductively static vibe. 'Dry The Rain's opening lines ('This is the definition of my life: lying in bed in the sunlight, choking on the vitamin tablet the doctor gave in the hope of saving me...') could just as well be taken from some obscure Kinks song, and, in fact, there are nuanced parallels between Mason's singing style and that of Ray Davies — even though the Kinks as such could only have been a re­latively minor influence on the Beta Band.

 

In between these two tracks, however, they sandwich something a bit more challenging: two odd constructions that combine trip-hop rhythms with folk-pop guitars (feel the ever increasing magic of the hyphen!), and eventually become psychedelic jams where anything is liable to happen. But the challenge is worth living up to, because somewhere in the middle of 'B + A', everything clicks, and the trip is activated without any additional substances. The rhythm will never get you off the hook, and the addition of keyboard, percussion, and vocal harmony levels might unfurl a few extra cosmic dimensions if you are willing to take them.

 

By the time of the second EP, The Patty Patty Sound, the band has already gone off the deep end. This is full-blown unpredictable psychedelia, also bookmarked by cute folksy ditties ('Inner Meet Me', 'She's The One'), but this time they rather function simply as brief enticing intros / re­lieving outros to the reign of absurdism. Case in point: 'The House Song', which begins with an in­cessant loop going 'Put it in your pocket for a rainy day, sing your song and you know you're wrong now', then adds extra vocal countermelodies reminiscent of Gentle Giant, and then just throws it all away in favor of a (possibly improvised) rap in pseudo-Japanese. The fifteen-minute 'Mo­nolith', for the most part, dumps the rhythmics altogether, and ends up hanging on a deep, brain-drilling bassline while organs swirl, drums crash, guitars reverberate, tapes roll backwards, seagulls whine, and records scratch. It is easy to hate the thing, but there is so much going on that I find myself constantly interested — it is really one of these love-hate-relations that people can have with unpredictable escapades like the Stones' 'Sing This All Together', or certain sonic pano­ramas by Amon Düül II.

 

Finally, the third EP, Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos, tries to find some middle ground — all the songs are weird again, but they are generally shorter, and less strikingly innovative. For instance, 'Dr. Baker', with its ringing vocals, echoey instrumentation swooping at you from high above ground, kiddie chimes, and mantraic chorus, would not have felt out of place on Nuggets II, whi­le the free-jazzy, repetitive 'Push It Out' brings on memories of the early days of The Soft Machi­ne... well, actually, it is not nearly as retro as it all seems: with modern production, modern ap­proaches to rhythmics, and modern ways of genre-mixing, you could never accuse these guys of wanting to exclusively reproduce the styles of old.

 

But, in reality, it does not matter all that much to what exact extent The Beta Band are innovating, and to what extent they are merely making us remember the well-forgotten past. What matters is that these three EPs do a killer job in mixing pretty melodic ideas with odd arranging ideas with totally whacko ideas about sectioning and developing the songs. If you want catharsis and senti­mentality and find yourself here, you got seriously sidetracked; but if you are looking for the old psychedelic vibe bottled in a new, vibrant, ironic post-modernist type of container, you came to the right place. It does not exactly make your brain think, but it does split it in the middle, and that sure as hell deserves a thumbs up.

 

THE BETA BAND (1999)

 

1) The Beta Band Rap; 2) It's Not Too Beautiful; 3) Simple Boy; 4) Round The Bend; 5) Dance O'Er The Border; 6) Broken Up A-Ding-Dong; 7) Number 15; 8) Smiling; 9) The Hard One; 10) The Cow's Wrong.

 

The Beta Band, quite officially, all but disowned this record upon release, complaining that they were not given enough time or money to complete it properly. Therefore, be warned, future lis­tener: The Beta Band does not, in fact, fully conform to representing the completeness of artist-in-question's creative vision, but merely presents the basic cognitive structures that trigger the process of self-realization without bringing it to fruition. Putting it bluntly, it's a godawful mess, which Steve Mason has admitted himself.

 

Then again, I cannot help but wonder how exactly the band could have gone about embellishing these creations, given a more generous budget. Turn them into Lenny Kravitz or Ricky Martin was probably out of the question. Hiring the London Symphony Orchestra would be a better idea, but «The Beta Band with the London Symphony Orchestra» would likely only be as good as the sum of its parts anyway. Spending all the extra money on high-class alcohol and adding a genui­nely drunken vibe to the proceedings would also have been smart, but that would mean the band actually complained about the record being too normal rather than insufficiently accessible.

 

Personally, I would say that the Beta's Band initiation into the world of long-playing art is per­fec­tly fine as it is. A little tiresome in parts, perhaps; most of the «songs» hang around for too long, which is confusing, considering that the band members are overflowing with creative ideas — yet they avariciously hang on to them, only dispensing a few per composition. Where a guy like Zap­pa would have gone for oversaturation, cramming fifteen different melodies in fifty different ar­rangements per one long track (not a very recommendable approach either), these people take their time, hanging each track on one, at most two, different stable grooves, and then seeing what happens over the course of some whacko improvisations.

 

This complaint does not apply to the first song, though, which may give a false impression that the whole record may fly under post-modernist banners. 'The Beta Band Rap' does have a rap sec­tion, but only in the middle; the first part is fast-paced folksy vaudeville that sounds freshly deli­vered from the ovens of Sesame Street, and the last one is delirious rockabilly with some mock Elvis/Gene Vincent imitations — but what they all have in common is that the lyrics, rather strai­ghtforwardly and not without humor ("Since we've been signed, we eat real good / We always wash our hands and chew our food"), retell the story of the band up to the present.

 

But the Beta Band's prime purpose of existence is not to confuse and stupefy your mind: like their faraway ancestors from the unearthly paradise of Pepperland, they are here to blow it, and they begin doing this as early as the second track, 'It's Not Too Beautiful' — which it, fairly eno­ugh, is not, but it is still trippy enough to guarantee a pleasant journey through the white clouds and bright skies, occasionally interrupted with dangerous moments of turbulence that seem to have been sampled from some heavily orchestrated movie soundtracks.

 

What follows is almost completely unpredictable — and undescribable. Actually, it is very much describable, but a detailed description of each track would occupy a few weighty paragraphs of space and would make about as much sense as describing Bosch's The Garden of Earthly De­lights to someone standing on the steps of the Museo del Prado. There is a whole swarm of groo­ves — folksy, funky, hippity-hoppity, even ambient — each one saturated with whatever turns up on the cards: crazy Keith Moon-style percussion outbursts, symphonic swoops, cowbells, whis­tles, tape loops, white noise, electronically treated vocals, you just name it.

 

In terms of innovative power, it could be said that the album could have been a direct influence on Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — or, at least, it independently did pretty much the same thing that Jeff Tweedy and the boys came up with two years later. When Steve Mason sings "Once upon a time I was falling apart, now I'm always falling in love" in the monotonous, but seductive re­frain to 'The Hard One', he pretty much sounds like Tweedy — but, more than that, what they are do­ing is taking the age-old folk-pop singer-songwriting vibe and dipping it into a complex psy­che­delic-electronic sauce, exactly the kind of thing that tracks like 'I Am Trying To Break Your Heart' would be lauded for in a very short while. It's simply that 'The Hard One' is less catchy and more befuddling in its structure — but this should not make it any less deserving of attention.

 

With albums like these, the obligatory question is always «Would this sound better if I were on drugs?» Fortunately, I cannot answer this based on personal experience; but if there ever was an argument that psychedelic music as such puts together a grander, more diverse and exciting uni­verse than any amount of drugs could ever hope to, The Beta Band are its chief proponents in the modern age. At least, their psychedelia leaves plenty of space for humour, dancing, and basic human emotions. Listening to this on drugs could, in fact, close your mind to many of this al­bum's charms rather than the opposite. It is quite a brainy experience, and so the brain takes the lead in awarding it a brainy thumbs up, while the heart still cannot help but see this as a slight letdown after the pleasures of 'Dry The Rain' and 'Dog's Got A Bone'.

 

HOT SHOTS II (2001)

 

1) Squares; 2) Al Sharp; 3) Human Being; 4) Gone; 5) Dragon; 6) Broke; 7) Quiet; 8) Alleged; 9) Life; 10) Eclipse.

 

A strange band indeed: first, they complain that the industry people would not let them turn their unfinished demos into fully shaped songs — then, finally given complete creative freedom, rele­ase a collection of songs that really sound far more like demos than songs. I guess if this reminds you of the typical behaviour of a capricious little kid, that's because The Beta Band have always had this capricious little kid inside them. That's an essential part of their recipe.

 

Hot Shots II is crazy, spacy, and seriously minimalistic. This time around, there is no getting side-tracked from the main groove, which is very sharply pronounced on each individual track. There is also no more fair use for the term «post-modern» when discussing this music. Regardless of the actual personal beliefs and values of the band's members, the music they create no longer confounds genres and challenges the rules for the sake of the challenge: yes, it is an intentional merger of trip-hop rhythms with old time psychedelia, but it feels like a sincere synthesis, a heart­felt attempt at blowing the minds of the young generation by giving them a familiar setting stuf­fed with acid-fuelled idealism from days long gone by.

 

The younger generation did not buy into it as energetically as they hoped, but Hot Shots II still climbed reasonably high up the charts, and why shouldn't it have? Most of this stuff is attention-grabbing, and also pretty accessible. Why deny something like 'Squares', when its head-bobbing rhythm, astral guitar hooks, and singalong vocal melody are as commercial as they come? The opening lines — 'I seen the demons, but they didn't make a sound / They tried to reach me, but I lay upon the ground' — show signs of an uncozy disturbance, but rarely over the course of this album does it become uncozy to the point of putting the record in a different rating category.

 

There are traces of darker darkness, but timid ones, and also beautiful in their timidity — e. g., the gloomy ballad 'Gone', where the «deep»-sounding guitars and sparse minor piano chords define the very idea of light, but pervasive sadness. Check the lyrics and you will find that the protagonist "fell from a spaceship" and "was taken for a little ride" — of course; this whole al­bum was, most likely, created by people who fell from a spaceship and bumped their heads real hard — but, truth is, the song would have just as easily fit onto a Tim Buckley album, to name but one old-timey candidate. Just a good old moody ballad.

 

Timid, yes, but if there is one particular direction in which the Betas were evolving, it is «doom and gloom». In terms of instrumentation, the entire album is light, but the mood it sets is anything but; on one side, the record is bookmarked with 'Squares' and their "I seen the demons", and on the other side we get pricked equally hard with 'Life': "I went to look for shadows, but the sha­dows they found me... I want to be somebody else, I feel I won't be free — is this me for life?" and they loop the last question to the sound of rough, unpleasant synth grunts, too. 'Dragon' gets us high in the sky, cooking up images of psychedelic revelations ("I never been the type to sing all night but AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"), but midway through dissolves into a sea of growling keyboard noises accompanied with the telling refrain: "How the West was won is a lie — but it's made to sound like fun...". So when the record finally comes to a close with the bright, innocent, seductively deranged 'Eclipse' ("We all live together on a little round ball, we all sing together when the cuckoo calls"), it is almost like an apology for the pessimistic vibe of the rest — one that smoothes the side effects, but does not wipe them out entirely.

 

It should, however, be noted that all these things only float out very slowly on repeated listens. With all the minimalism and subdued atmosphere, Hot Shots II defies, denies, and self-parodies its title — this album is as far removed from «hot» as the average portrait of America's First La­dies. To some, it will rather be «tepid» — devoid of aggressive, rousing moments, but not nearly quiet enough to truly count as «ambient»; and «tepid» is clearly a negative assessment. Give it a little time to sink in, though, and you just might get to like these strange furry animals from outer space showing signs of troubled longing for their original homeland. They got the bug, see? Spot the bug, and see why it has forced me to give the album a thumbs up. Unfortunately (or, rather, for­tunately), I don't have the bug myself, so it is only the brain part that reacts positively. But who knows — you may have it, and then Hot Shots II will no longer be just «tepid» to you.

 

HEROES TO ZEROS (2004)

 

1) Assessment; 2) Space; 3) Lion Thief; 4) Easy; 5) Wonderful; 6) Troubles; 7) Out-Side; 8) Space Beatle; 9) Rhodo­dendron; 10) Liquid Bird; 11) Simple; 12) Pure For.

 

Artists are rarely capable of taking off from the exact location of their artistic muse. More often than not, it takes them at least a few years and a few personal crises to get there — not everyone can be Jim Morrison or Angus Young. When The Beta Band released their first set of E.P.s, cri­tics fell over themselves praising their freshness and inspiration, but nobody asked the question: what are these guys, and what do they really care about? Like, it is obvious they are busy piling up these loops and mixing up these styles because they want to push forward musical boundaries, but what will they be when they get bored with pushing forward?

 

Well, now we know. The evolutionary curve has come to end, and on their last album The Beta Band have given themselves away: all they really wanted all along was to sing tender space-pop songs. The loops, the squeaks, the hip-hop trappings, the genre-hopping, none of that was in their blood — they were simply too smart not to try it out. But, six years into their career, they became tired of being smart. It did not pay off too well, and it prevented them from gladdening the heart. So they recorded Heroes To Zeros to gladden their heart. Then they broke up.

 

Each following Beta Band album is more accessible than the previous one; consequently, most fans of the band are split into those who rank their albums best-to-worst in ascending chronologi­cal order, and vice versa. I would probably join the ranks of the former, thinking more highly of The Beta Band at their most «gimmicky» (read: «intelligent») than at their most «honest» — if only because Steve Mason is not that great a songwriter to be able to get by on the bare strength of his basic melodic ideas. But this does not mean Heroes To Zeros is a failure — only that it tends to feel a bit bland when you arrive at it from the past.

 

The age of the free groove is over; these are three-to-four minute songs that sometimes (not too often) mutate into mantras, but more often follow the conventional verse-chorus structures. Out of all the innumerable ingredients of days gone by, the band concentrates on just two: folk-rock melodicity and «astral» arrangements — think some of the early Pink Floyd compositions, but without the depressive aspects. The album opener, 'Assessment', greets you with echoey droning guitars, floating vocals, a steady rhythmic punch and a chaotic coda, firmly anchored to the spirit of Nuggets II, and it does not get tremendously different from there.

 

With everything being so simple, one can only talk about the ratio of beautiful-to-forgettable on the record, renouncing the effort to find and elaborate some overall grand statement. Well, 'Won­derful' is certainly true to its title: a pompous shimmering anthem to beauty, great magical ringing guitar tone, tender romantic vocal, what's not to like? Terrific percussion arrangement on 'Space', making the 'Start is the end, more or less' part of the song one of the most clinging moments on the album. Masterful paranoid atmosphere on 'Liquid Bird'; jangly Byrds-style guitars comple­mented by Cocteau Twins-style background noises. Etc. etc.

 

Still, count me dissatisfied. Do we really want Steve Mason to open up his 2001 Space Odyssey-fuelled (I was going to write «Star Trek-fuelled», but we do not want to alienate all the snobby readers, do we?) heart to us? There are moments of beauty and power on this record, but much more often it simply strives for beauty and power, stopping short a few inches away from the ac­ceptable levels. And this is exactly where a little bit of unpredictable genre-hopping could have helped, but, apparently, they are through with genre-hopping. Too bad: looks like the world was through with The Beta Band, in return. Decent album, but my thumbs are stuck in a strictly hori­zontal position about it. This is no longer The Beta Band that we used to know, and it is only fair that this was its last album.

 

THE ALIENS

ASTRONOMY FOR DOGS (2007)

 

1) Setting Sun; 2) Robot Man; 3) I Am The Unknown; 4) Tomorrow; 5) Rox; 6) Only Waiting; 7) She Don't Love Me; 8) Glover; 9) Honest Again; 10) The Happy Song; 11) Caravan.

 

Among the founding fathers of The Beta Band one used to find musician and composer Gordon Anderson, a fully active member right until the recording of the first of the band's three EPs, upon which he left the band due to health conditions. Upon recovery, it was already too late to come back, so he bitterly rechristened himself «The Lone Pigeon» and began recording critically ac­claimed and publicly unknown self-produced and self-released solo albums. Most probably, he would still be as lone as ever, if not for The Beta Band's eventual dissipation — upon which two unemployed members, keyboardist John Maclean and drummer Robin Jones, not wishing to till the earth or sell car polish for the rest of their lives, suggested a reunion with Anderson in order to explore their destiny a bit further.

 

Calling themselves The Aliens was perhaps a little too far-fetched, because the music they set out to create is even less whacked out than The Beta Band's. Had Astronomy For Dogs come out in the era of Sgt. Pepper and The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, they might have succeeded in blowing everybody's minds to the same degree. As it is, it merely feels like a tribute — a sincere me­mento, dedicated to the 40th jubilee of both these albums; and the name of «The Aliens» feels like a carnival gesture, much like XTC's alter-ego of «Dukes Of Stratosphear» in their own time. When the carnival is over, everyone just goes home.

 

However, as a tribute, Astronomy For Dogs is a perfect success. Except for the final psychojam of 'Caravan', stretching well over twelve minutes, the tunes are big, jangly, shimmering slabs of psychedelic pop, drawing upon the juices of not only early Pink Floyd and the Beatles, but also the Moody Blues, the Byrds, Love, and various other minor British and American art-rock bands of the era. No fan of those styles will be disappointed, or, at least, feel entitled to say that these guys do not know how to recreate those vibes with perfect precision.

 

But at the same time, Astronomy is a difficult record. It is skilfully bookmarked by two lively rockers — the ecstatic 'Setting Sun', steeped in screeching guitars and garage rhythms, and the psycho-bop of 'The Happy Song', whose '1-2-3-4' count at the beginning is clearly an homage to 'I Saw Her Standing There' but whose happy-happy-happy melody surely implies a reverence for substances that began to influence music a few years after 1963. These two songs are immediate­ly memorable and good proof of Anderson's songwriting abilities.

 

The stuff in between, however, is far less trivial. Most of the songs are long, ranging from five to eight minutes, and there is a lot going on there. Arrangements are dense, mostly guitars and key­boards with few extraneous instruments, but lots of those; sections are generally multiple, with time signature changes all over the place and constant recurring motives (such as chants of "we are The Aliens..." and "I am the robot man...") — and it does not trouble them at all to go from Western to Eastern modalities within one song, or to incorporate some very modern electronica-based parts when they feel the need ('Rox' — all of that and more). A song may start out in a music-hall Ray Davies style, transform into a barrage of 'Astronomy Domine'-type noises in the middle, and fizzle out as a madhouse mantra at the end ('Glover'). And, as 'Caravan' shows, they do not use song length as a tool for solidifying their grooves; they use it as a pretext to string to­gether a cartload of half-finished ideas.

 

All this means is that a serious judgement of Astronomy For Dogs (is it just a tribute? is it enti­rely derivative? if yes, does this mean it is not a classic? if no, what is the real depth of its artistic vi­sion?..) cannot be pronounced quickly. It has so much going for it, so many disparate elements synthesized in one barrel that is bursting at the seams, that it might be necessary to memorize all of it before one can answer if all of these elements really deserved being put in that one barrel — at which point, most likely, the answer will already be bound to be positive. Maybe «The Lone Pigeon» is simply indulging in nostalgia rather than continuing the naïve explorations of his Six­ties' idols; that is not for me to decide. But even if he is, he swarms us so much with all the side products of this nostalgia that the very process of arranging them on your own brain shelves will keep you up for a long, long time. And what is wrong with music that stimulates brain activity? Thumbs up, says the brain to the entire experience — and the heart, having been properly bribed with the effervescence of 'The Happy Song', is too confused to object. 

 

LUNA (2008)

 

1) Bobby's Song; 2) Amen; 3) Theremin; 4) Everyone; 5) Magic Man; 6) Billy Jack; 7) Luna; 8) Dove Returning; 9) Sunlamp Show; 10) Smoggy Bog; 11) Daffodils; 12) Boats; 13) Blue Mantle.

 

I would like to be able to put the «rushed» tag on this record (in the 2000s, normal people do not release one new album per year, giving a lengthy, ample, modest, and politically correct chance for an army of underdogs to wash them out of existence instead). But Luna does not feel rushed. It feels very much like the proper, expected, surprise-free follow-up to Astronomy For Dogs, yet one that consumed just as many creative forces as its predecessor.

 

It is also more difficult. This time, the Lone Pigeon has steered clear of enticing commercial book­marks. The album's single 'Magic Man' (nothing to do with Heart) is less immediately stun­ning than 'Set­ting Sun' or 'The Happy Song', and it is stuck in the middle of the record where its catchiness has a psychological chance of remaining unnoticed. Elsewhere, we have plenty of nu­m­bers that break the eight- or ten-minute mark, not always with good reason, and more splurges of moody psychedelia that will only affect those in the proper mood. The proper mood may in­volve many things, from returning home at 5 AM after a serious night on the town to having injected the latest world news on TV, but there is no way Luna can be appreciated regardless of the shape you're in — which explains the wildly different pool of opinions that exists on the al­bum, and The Aliens themselves.

 

Fortunately, they caught me in one such mood, and, in this mood, Luna became an experience even more moving and powerful than Astronomy. Of course, like the former, it is utterly deriva­tive. Ghosts of the Beach Boys flutter all around the place, as does the ghost of Syd Barrett and the Small Faces and, perhaps, even Neil Young ('Boats'). But this is the default situation; were it otherwise — were their influences impossible to pinpoint — you would not be reading this, since I would be too busy looking for my detached jaw rather than writing it. The point is, they integ­rate all these elements so nicely that the ensuing psychedelic stew creates its own version of a Won­derland, dense, majestic, beautiful, and one in which getting lost is not so much a possibility as it is a bare necessity.

 

Surprisingly, only two songs speak to me on a «gut» level. First, there is the experimental perfec­tion of 'Dove Returning', a soft, slow, dreamy Floydian shuffle whose hushed vocals very soon give way to a series of solos (guitars and... phased electric pianos? Or more guitars with crazyass Adrian Belew-style processing?) that go for the good old feeling of catharsis; second, the dry, painful crackle of the Neil Young-ish 'Boats', brutally kicking the mainstream ass with its howl­ing riffage and soloing. These are the ones I fall for very quickly; they are also, however, the least interesting from the experimental viewpoint — if you know Weld, you know this.

 

Those other ones I find hard to talk about, because they form a wild jungle which takes time and better skill than mine to pull apart. The long songs may be hard to tolerate, but they deserve their length: 'Bobby's Song' alone has about ten or fifteen different melodies crammed into it, from drunken gypsy dance to art-rock chorales, to bouncy Brit-pop to electronic collages. And not many musicians these days, outside of the Flaming Lips, can build up such an impressively hea­venly wall of sound as the Aliens manage on the closing 'Blue Mantle'.

 

In short, if you are a grumpy, but romantic old-timer yearning for the return of the Beach Boys, but insulted at the frequent comparisons with Animal Collective (because Brian always had the good sense to stay away from that electronic crap etc. etc.), Luna is the album to get. And if it does not matter who you are, it is still one of the most important and successful psychedelic al­bums of 2008, as little as that suggests. Thumbs up.

BEYONCÉ

DANGEROUSLY IN LOVE (2003)

 

1) Crazy In Love; 2) Naughty Girl; 3) Baby Boy; 4) Hip Hop Star; 5) Be With You; 6) Me, Myself And I; 7) Yes; 8) Signs; 9) Speechless; 10) That's How You Like It; 11) The Closer I Get To You; 12) Dangerously In Love 2; 13) Beyoncé Interlude; 14) Gift From Virgo; 15) Work It Out; 16) Bonnie & Clyde '03; 17) I Can't Take No More.

 

The key to investigating the music of R&B's biggest star of the 21st century (118 million solo albums sold, not counting Destiny's Child? don't you people have to eat sometimes?) is in trying to forget that this music was actually written /where not sampled/, pilfered /where sampled/, per­formed /where not programmed/, and digitalized /where programmed/ by a live human being. Un­less you are her father, mother, close relative, hairdresser, or Jay-Z, you should not think of «Be­yoncé», the sonic/visual package, as a live human being, and try to ignore any encountered at­tempts on her part to induce you into accepting her as such — any such attempt would be merely a ruse, hindering you from admiring the perfectionist gloss of the package.

 

Not being even close to an expert on modern R&B, not to mention hip-hop, not to mention their overtly mass-commercial varieties, I have relatively few points of reference, but as far as I can tell, there was nothing particularly groundbreaking or unpredictable about Dangerously In Love, an album that consciously took few chances, as its basic goal was to test the water and find out if it was warm enough for Beyoncé Knowles to be accepted as a major solo performer in her own right. After all, one member of Destiny's Child can only save up one third of the collective sex appeal of Destiny's Child — unless, of course, the fission process would convert a bit of lost mass into a shitload of nuclear energy. Which is what happened officially, as Dangerously In Love out­sold all three Destiny's Child albums put together, for what reason, one can only guess, but something tells me the musical factor was far from the most significant. I mean, golly gee, just look at that album sleeve...

 

...anyway, where were we? Oh yes, human being issue. Well, it goes without saying, I think, that Beyoncé is rather non-descript in terms of vocal cord operations: her singing is a purely technical process, as she neither has bedazzling technique, nor unbeatable power, nor a unique tone or phrasing (as compared to plenty of other R&B divas), nor the kind of emotional depth that only a tiny handful of these divas possess (most notably, the prematurely departed Aaliyah, who actually did sing like a live human being). But on the other hand, she plays it smart here, almost completely re­jecting the dreaded melisma, mostly staying away from over-emoting, and some­how managing not to get on your nerves even while executing the «soulful ballad» parts (these are usually the worst with that kind of people). In other words, the robot is endowed with some taste, meaning that we have come quite a long way from when people, overwhelmed with hap­piness at the in­vention of the emotion chip, used to stuff three or four in every available slot (poor Mariah Carey was a particularly unfortunate victim of «overchipping»).

 

Music-wise, somebody once noted somewhere that Beyoncé is «only as good as her samples», and I concur: the sample-heavy tracks, such as the lead-in energy dispenser ʽCrazy In Loveʼ (borrowing a pompous brass riff from a long forgotten Chi-Lites track), are generally more im­pressive than either «original» ballads or such complete dross as the attempt to resuscitate, in a duet with smooth talker Luther Vandross, Roberta Flack's old hit ʽThe Closer I Get To Youʼ (if this is a Beyoncé-approved idea of a tribute to the «retro» vibe, it only shows how seriously out of touch the lady is with the entire old school). But ʽNaughty Girlʼ is an interesting experience of fusing an «Eastern» flavor with a bit of Donna Summer (ʽLove To Love You Babyʼ); and ʽBaby Boyʼ continues the trend with sitars (?) and swirling, quasi-psychedelic vocal overdubs. Even­tually, the album degenerates into a cesspool of sterile ballads that work only under the condition that you do accept the singer as a human being — but, since everything is relative, such a deci­sion could be interpreted as your agreement to join the same robot army.

 

Actually, in terms of pure robotics (aerobotics?), the best song on the album is the one that did not even make it to the regular US edition — ʽWork It Outʼ was on the Goldmember soundtrack and, fortunately, it works pretty well outside of the annoyingly silly Austin Powers context, a nice clavinet-horns groove that Stevie Wonder might have approved, although Beyoncé does not quite have the vocal power to light that fire high up to heaven (she does come close with her funny "come on child, blow your horn now!" exortations).

 

In the end, Dangerously In Love is a generic album that nonetheless shows some promise: the problem is that Knowles loves her experiments as much as she loves her clichés, because it is the latter, not the former, that keeps the cash flowing and the fanbase multiplying progressively — and, say what you will, a rational experimenter always needs a bit of financial back-up to ensure the safety of the outcome. In this particular case, the outcome is a thumbs down, but at least half of the record is listenable, and ʽCrazy In Loveʼ, ʽWork It Outʼ, and ʽNaughty Girlʼ may even be salvageable. As it often happens, Dangerously In Love sold more than any subsequent Beyoncé record despite being one of her weakest offerings — but this only seems to confirm the old rule that the more people buy the music, the more they do not listen to the music.

 

B'DAY (2006)

 

1) Beautiful Liar; 2) Irreplaceable; 3) Green Light; 4) Kitty Kat; 5) Welcome To Hollywood; 6) Upgrade U; 7) Flaws And All; 8) If; 9) Get Me Bodied; 10) Freakum Dress; 11) Suga Mama; 12) Déjà Vu; 13) Ring The Alarm; 14) Resentment; 15) Listen; 16) World Wide Woman; 17) Check On It; 18) Amor Gitano; 19) Beautiful Liar (remix).

 

At a certain molecular juncture, I almost caught myself liking this album — a grave error, since «liking» supposes some sort of complex emotional / intellectual reaction, whereas the proper res­ponse to B'Day should probably be purely physiological. For sure, mainstream commercial music may have completely crapped out in the 21st century, but at the same time, it is constantly stri­ving for new ways to conquer the human body, if not the human spirit, and from that point of view, B'Day is a tremen­dous success. No small coincidence that one of the songs bears the up-to-now ungrammatical title of ʽGet Me Bodiedʼ. There is no place for the human spirit on this re­cord, but it seems tailor-made for everything that goes one notch below the spirit.

 

As usual, there has been a boatload of various releases of B'Day in various forms, so that the fans could spend as much money on it as they desired; I am reviewing the «deluxe» version, or one of several «deluxe» versions, whatever, that has 19 instead of 10 tracks on it — and no, that's quite okay, most of this stuff is listenable, and the extra tracks, whatever they are, do provide better in­sight into the masterplan behind this concoction. There are very few ballads (ʽFlaws And Allʼ, ʽIfʼ) and even fewer power ballads — just one, actually (ʽListenʼ), and none of them were even released as singles, because this is not what the whole thing is about. The whole thing is about "giving it to mama" (ʽGreen Lightʼ, which was one of the singles).

 

Exclude the few pieces of hokum, and B'Day is simply one unstoppable groove after another — tenaciously catchy chorus mantras fired over impeccably glued samples of whatever it is that awakens and powers up one's internal epicycles. There is enough diversity in these grooves to please just about everybody: for instance, the classic funk fan will be quickly drawn to ʽSugar Mamaʼ with its guitar samples from an obscure song by Jake Wade & The Soul Searchers, over which Ms. Knowles plasters her "come sit on mama lap hey" in a tone that is all but impossible to disobey (except it's fairly hard to keep still while the groove is on). ʽBeautiful Liarʼ is a duet with Shakira, and thus expectedly combining elements of R&B and Latin styles. ʽFreakum Dressʼ is influenced by go-go, but also adds almost Queen-style vocal crescendos in the middle. ʽGreen Lightʼ moves through like three or four different sections (funk, ska, ballad, jazz?..), and so on.

 

Behind all these grooves lies a big, grinning nothing — curled up and ready to be materialized into some Big Feminist / Materialist / Modernist / Humanist Statement by mainstream criticism, although, frankly speaking, Beyoncé herself gives very little opportunity to overestimate or over­analyze her lyrics and attitudes. Her singing, as usual, is always adequate: she neither rejects her own sexuality and body drive, nor over-emphasizes it, so that even a straightforward dancefloor anthem like ʽGet Me Bodiedʼ is just a song about dancing, not some sort of religious epiphany about how you only come to properly know your inner self through the dancefloor. At least Be­yoncé is smart enough to know that trying to seem smarter than she is will only lead to confusion, and there is nothing as cretinous here as, say, Alicia Keys' ʽSuperwomanʼ. (But don't worry, it will get worse — multiplatinum superstars always end up the same way).

 

In the meantime, «hollow hooks» abound. ʽIrreplaceableʼ is a half-groove, half-ballad that gene­rally sucks, but has an unbeatable chorus of "you must not know 'bout me" that should have re­ceived more songwriting polish. ʽUpgrade Uʼ is the record's best propped-up hip-hop arrange­ment (although, as usual, I could easily do without the Jay-Z part). The four-song stretch of ʽFreakum Dressʼ, ʽSuga Mamaʼ, ʽDéjà Vuʼ, and the siren-driven ʽRing The Alarmʼ is possibly the best four-song stretch ever on a Beyoncé record — on their own, each of these songs is only so-so, but when placed together on the «deluxe» edition, they generate the impression of almost un­bridled creativity. (Besides playing off each other like four distinct, but connected parts of the same musical soap opera where the lady begins by wooing the gentleman, goes on to be hung up on the gentleman, and ends by worrying about the chinchilla coats and houses off the coast that she's going to get if the gentleman happens to dumps her. Uh, okay — we all know Beyoncé is a lady of relatively simple tastes and needs).

 

Eventually, you come to your senses and realize that it's all plastic (ʽDéjà Vuʼ almost takes pride in its featuring real instrumentation, but this is really laughable — who could really be ex­pecting a natural band to be playing on a Beyoncé album, and who could believe that band to be worthy of competition with «old school» R&B outfits?), but it's pretty damn high quality plastic. Wi­thin the framework of a social experiment, I give it a thumbs up, being only human and, sometimes, unable to resist a pretty bit of packaging if it is not too schlocky. B'Day is perfectly safe and saniti­zed, a high-quality product of The Human Robotics Corporation, yet I do recommend it for fans of human robotics worldwide.

 

I AM... SASHA FIERCE (2008)

 

1) If I Were A Boy; 2) Halo; 3) Disappear; 4) Broken-Hearted Girl; 5) Ave Maria; 6) Smash Into You; 7) Satellites; 8) That's Why You're Beautiful; 9) Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It); 10) Radio; 11) Diva; 12) Sweet Dreams; 13) Video Phone; 14) Hello; 15) Ego; 16) Scared Of Lonely.

 

Oh dear — here we have nothing less than a Rebellion of the Machine, carefully preplanned, or­chestrated, and publicized: Beyoncé Knowles advances to the rank of Serious Artist! Introspec­tive, thoughtful, and conceptual, the double shot of I Am vs. Sasha Fierce represents an elegant­ly split artistic personality, capturing the formerly straightforward entertainer at a spiritual cross­roads. Will she take the path of the real Beyoncé, a sensitive, vulnerable soul dependent on male support and struggling to balance romantic ideals with the harsh realities of everyday life? Or is she going to take the proactive road of Sasha Fierce, a real hard-boiled party egg who always hides from trouble and suffering behind a wall of glitz, technology, and tough neo-feminist swag­ger? Intrigue! Excitement! Conflict! Critical acclaim!.. oh, wait a minute.

 

Songwriter Amanda Ghost, who collaborated with Beyoncé on the I Am... part, stated in an in­terview that "she /Beyoncé/ was ready to take risks and redefine who she is... to reach out for a wider audience, the people who buy John Mayer and Carrie Underwood records". As far as I know, little else needs be said — there is nothing wrong with that whole «crossover» business as it stands, but if your artistic ideal in a particular artistic genre is John Mayer or Carrie Underwood, this means that you cannot even properly set yourself the task of «getting higher», let alone fulfill one. But then again, why should you, if your very idea of «artistic growth» simply means «sell my stuff to more people by expanding into other markets»?

 

And one should not underestimate this «reaching out» strategy, either — Amanda Ghost goes even beyond that, pushing her client to grapple the people who buy The Three Tenors as well, by «re-composing» ʽAve Mariaʼ into an «accessible» pop version that decorates Beyoncé's newly-found spirituality with a touch of Schubert (or is that actually a touch of Disney?). It is quite un­fortunate, really, that the Artist was not provided with an equally gifted and versatile aide-de-camp for the Sasha Fierce part — personally, I think that sampling ʽBrünnhilde's Battle Cryʼ for one of the «hotter» dance numbers would have made for an awesome contrast.

 

Irony aside (for a little while, at least), most of the hullaballoo about this album stems from the basic fact that most of the «softer» songs were placed on the first disc (I Am) and most of the «harder» tracks, assembled out of electronic elements around dance beats, made it to the second one (Sasha Fierce), with a whole puffed-up ideology concocted, brewed, and distilled around this simple division. Never mind the fact that, for instance, Rod Stewart had already master­minded this «separation» concept a long time ago, on his Seventies' albums like Atlantic Cros­sing and Night On The Town — and, much to his honor, I think, it never occurred to him that either one of these records should bear the title of I Am... Ivan The Terrible.

 

But I do admit that, from one point of view at least, the album was a bit of a surprise for me. With an announced contrast between the «introvert» and «extravert» parts, and armed with prior know­ledge of Beyoncé's groove-based music, you'd probably expect that the first part would mostly suck and the second part would be more like the «technically acceptable» Beyoncé of B'Day. As it turns out (to my ears at least), the predictable prediction is wrong! Cheap cheese like ʽAve Ma­riaʼ aside, the ballads are really superior to the grooves this time — or, at least, superior when all the vocal overdubs find themselves in place.

 

Frankly speaking, the «dance-oriented» part of Sasha Fierce beats many a record of dumbness, sleaziness, and gimmickry that I have encountered in supposedly «high quality» mainstream pop muzak (we are not discussing the local Brighton Beach scene or anything like that). ʽSingle Ladies (Put A Ring On It)ʼ establishes the «aerobics-as-art» formula that would be even more suc­cesfully milked with ʽRun The World (Girls)ʼ — undermining the «tough seriousness» of its «feminist» message with a backing track that should have never made it beyond the walls of your local gym (and the famous accompanying video only proves the point) — and it is probably the best song of the entire lot.

 

In general, it seems as if the sound was seriously re-routed here from the former target audience of «modern R&B» to a newer — indeed, wider — audience of crappy, generic techno (ʽRadioʼ, boasting the kind of sound that I normally hear only from Russian taxi drivers), as well as fans of technical gadgets (ʽVideo Phoneʼ) and silly vocal gimmicks (ʽDivaʼ, a bland rap piece on which «Sasha» is allegedly making fun of the Diva lifestyle while at the same time actively living it). ʽEgoʼ is, of course, the most «provocative» number on the record, since its chorus ("it's too big, it's too wide, it's too strong, it won't fit, it's too much, it's too tough") comes on before one gets a clear explanation of what the «it» in question is referring to. Naturally, it refers to Sasha's lover's BIG EGO, and what did you think?.. (On a sidenote, though, I used to always hear it as "He got a big Igor, such a huge Igor" before I paid attention to the song title, and it kept me wondering when and how did I exactly miss the point at which the name of Dr. Frankenstein's assistant had become one of the many euphemistic replacements for you-know-what).

 

On the other hand, the ballads on the I Am part seem to have been written with at least some in­tentional attempt not to reduce them to pathetic clichés. It does not work too often — the song­writers and producers are as constrained by the commercial requirements of the genre as a Peter Jackson or a Steven Spielberg are by the laws of Hollywood filmmaking — but every now and then, there is an interesting musical moment or two that briefly elevates the «soul sacrifice» of the first disc above elevator muzak status. This does not concern the title track, which does indeed sound very much like Carrie Underwood («take an old country-folk melody and arrange it with all the pomp of a 19th century opera aria»), but ʽHaloʼ has some fine vocal moves written into it (and it deserved a much better arrangement than those rotten synthesizers and drum machines), and so does ʽDisappearʼ, whose movement towards the chorus is melodically inventive (check out the modality shift from "you're nearly here..." to "...and then, you disappear" — they could have easily done without that, but they didn't, and I akcnowledge that).

 

That said, I have no wish to create the illusion that I Am, on the whole, is «vastly superior» to the silly dance part. Pulling ourselves away from the microscope and assessing the whole album as it is, both of its halves are really near-equal failures, and for a simple reason: it is all but impossible for a mainstream artist to try to go «wider» (embracing more styles and huger audiences) and «deeper» (trying to show the complexity of one's personality) at the same time. The stated goals stubbornly clash with the used means — and, for those of us who generally tend to avoid «mass muzak» but are still willing to give it an occasional benefit of doubt, may simply result in a fee­ling of being aurally and intellectually raped, or, at least, deeply offended. Not to mention all the unresolved questions, of course. Why «Sasha»? What's so «fierce» about her, except possibly the hairstyle? Why two discs and /as usual/ a swarm of different editions? If she were a boy and sit­ting in a record executive chair, would she be reasonable enough to save on plastic? Since we should hardly expect straight and honest answers to all these, I suppose that a thumbs down rating is the only way to go.

 

4 (2011)

 

1) 1 + 1; 2) I Care; 3) I Miss You; 4) Best Thing I Never Had; 5) Party; 6) Rather Die Young; 7) Start Over; 8) Love On Top; 9) Countdown; 10) End Of Time; 11) I Was Here; 12) Run The World (Girls); 13) Dreaming; 14) Lay Up Under Me; 15) Schoolin' Life; 16) Dance For You.

 

Beyoncé Knowles may be dumb, but she's not stupid. Or vice versa. Whatever. In 2010, she pub­licly confessed to «killing Sasha Fierce», saying that she was mature enough to merge both per­sonalities — a glamorized way of admitting that the whole idea just sucked, I think, and that the producers did a boring job on the first half and a muckjob on the second. To atone for somebody else's sins, she now decides to move from «conceptually serious» to «spiritually authentic». A right decision if there ever was one, but... too late, too late.

 

The main ideology behind 4 was to make a good old-fashioned R&B album. Not a sampler's de­light, not an electro-pop extravaganza, not a technofest, but a record that would actually bring in some refreshing retro flavor. You know — real musicians blowing real horns, strumming real guitars, a real emotional singer channeling that gospel spirit to hit high notes at full power, that whole deal. The one that made a star out of Aretha Franklin and... uh... Diana Ross? Tina Turner seems a little too far out for Beyoncé's careful imagemaking. «Wild wild» does not get you nearly as many fans, in terms of sheer quantity, as «gentle wild».

 

However, as you may well guess, there are several problems here that are really hard to beat. First, the trendy keyboards, digital procedures, loops, overdubs, Jay-Z raps, and unbearably repe­titive choruses are not really going anywhere. Understandably, Beyoncé did not want to make a thoroughly «retro» album, but rather one that would look forward to the future by means of looking back at the past — a sensible decision for any progressive artist, provided the futuristic component is every bit the worthy rival of the nostalgic layer. But what good is it when a typical­ly Seventies' piano melody is married to a programmed beat and an assortment of carefully sliced, wrapped, and weighted vocal strips?

 

And the worst thing about it, she can get it right when she really puts her heart into it. ʽLove On Topʼ may be utterly derivative of Stevie Wonder in the verses (and of the Jackson 5 in the chorus, for that matter — her pitch on "you're the one I NEED!" is just plain old little Michael), but it may be the only Beyoncé song in the world that I can freely enjoy from first to last note, with a wonderful groove and chorus that give off happy shiny vibes without sounding too self-conscious or self-important. The song could use a little less obviousness in the production department, for sure (those bass keyboards are way too adult contemporary, although Stevie did use a lot of them in the 1980s), but in terms of melody and sheer emotion, it is beyond any complaints I could think about. The build-up, the come-down, everything perfect.

 

On the other hand, this is the same album that gave us ʽRun The World (Girls)ʼ, which might just be the worst, tackiest, silliest idea for a single — further developing the «aerobics-as-art» line of ʽSingle Ladiesʼ, only this time in an even more repetitive twist, and with a martial rhythm to boot: G.I. Beyoncé and her Girl Squad taking over the world. As «music», the song is a non-song; as «groove», the song belongs in the gym at best; as «feminism», I'd rather have Ani DiFranco, un­less this is actually supposed to be parodic (at least the video for the song definitely bordered on parody, going completely over the top with all of its «military» imagery).

 

The rest of the record fluctuates between these two points, never quite reaching the same high or sinking to the same low (although the power ballad ʽI Was Hereʼ, donated by none other than the Wicked Witch of the West herself — Diane Warren, sounds just like any other Diane Warren song). The songs that are intentionally retro-oriented are generally listenable — ʽ1 + 1ʼ works as an old torch ballad, tastefully arranged (pipe organ!) and interestingly sung, with Beyoncé taking cute little falsetto «dips» at line ends. But they are actually in the minority. More often, the «ret­ro» feel ends up confined to a few lyrical lines, like the James Dean reference in the appropriately lifeless ʽRather Die Youngʼ, or the "killing me softly" reference to Roberta Flack on ʽCount­downʼ, otherwise just a robotic dance groove.

 

Retro references aside, 4 gets a special reprimand for containing some of the lady's worst lyrics ever — every time she lays it down on Jay-Z, we get deeply poetic lines like "still love the way he rock them black diamonds in that chain", and songs like ʽPartyʼ do nothing but solidify the stereotype of «spoiled rags-to-riches mentality» for the general public. You have to appreciate, of course, the lady's being so honest with us — her and her folks are rich, posh, decadent, loving it, and giving the people exactly what they want. But for every ounce of real feeling that a song like ʽ1 + 1ʼ is working its ass off to generate, a song like ʽPartyʼ produces two ounces of disgusted counterfeeling. And what is the point of turning "Who run the world? Girls!" into a mind-numb­ing mantra, if on approximately half of the rest of the tunes she is explicitly "giving you my life, it's in your hands"? "Not only are you loyal, you're patient with me, baby"? ʽDance For Youʼ is neither feminist nor «humanly» sexy — above all else, it sounds like a properly wound-up auto­maton for mechanical sexual satisfaction. (At least Prince could make it sound humorous).

 

In the end, this is just another failure to break out of the exoskeleton. ʽLove On Topʼ accidentally comes close to artistic escape, and I have learned to really enjoy ʽ1 + 1ʼ, but the rest is too full of clichés and stereotypes, too market-oriented, too safe-playing, and too swamped with legions of faceless corporate «musicians», «songwriters», and «producers» to even begin matching the sur­realist claims made by the artist: "I wanted classic songwriting... bolder than the music on my previous albums... really focused on songs being classics, songs that would last..." — every time I re-read that original statement, the only thing that springs up in my head, for some reason, is the line "me and my boo and my boo boo riding" from ʽCountdownʼ, and I cannot help but wonder exactly how long a line like that would «last» in the musical world. Thumbs down.

 

BEYONCÉ (2013)

 

1) Pretty Hurts; 2) Ghost/Haunted; 3) Drunk In Love; 4) Blow; 5) No Angel; 6) Partition; 7) Jealous; 8) Rocket; 9) Mine; 10) XO; 11) Flawless; 12) Superpower; 13) Heaven; 14) Blue.

 

Here is a question. If the first three or four albums released by an entertainer like Beyoncé, despite having their «moments», never really made you believe in the entertainer as «artist», what would it take, then, to trigger that belief? Would it be downright impossible, or might there ever be a chance of her sliding into a different, more respectable paradigm? After all, people have managed to escape the machine before, or, at least, operate with their head slightly sticking out of the window. And now, with the money made and the fanbase established and the name in lights all over the world, why not go for a small push-up of your reputation among the «highbrows»? Not a bad idea at all — but how?..

 

Clearly, this was a subject of deep worry for Mrs. Carter herself, and she embarked on the task with plenty of verve. The self-titled record — «rebooting the franchise!» — came out without a single warning, unexpected and unpublicized, dropped as a package of 14 audio tracks and 17 accompanying videos on iTunes and sending a perfectly predicted shockwave through the fan­base. Physical copies of the album then arrived in an unusually minimalistic shape (the Kazimir Malevich Estate probably settled out of court), with none of the glamor that usually surrounds such releases (to be fair, there is plenty of glamor in some of the accompanying videos, but I guess the day we get to see Beyoncé without makeup is the day that her crypt is excavated by archaeologists, and it wouldn't be a pretty sight anyway). And, most importantly, the songs were almost «artsy» in their stubborn refusal to be dominated by dance grooves — dark, soul-probing exercises in emotional expression of the everyday cares, troubles, worries, comforts, and orgasms of a grown woman: wife, mother, and superstar all in one.

 

So we should all «buy» it, right? The final act of humanization, in which the blue-haired fairy comes down from the sky and gives Pinocchio his well-deserved emotions chip? Having already sat through a whole sack of five-star reviews beginning with constructions like «who would have thought that...» and exclamations like «HOLY COW!» and statements like «finally, Beyoncé comes up with an album worthy of her talent» and suchlike, and, more importantly, having pati­ently endu­red three complete listens to the record, I still would not want to be too hasty about that. Miracles do not happen, and the whole enterprise, to me, smacks of just another well-calculated move — «we got the average Joes hooked up, now let us conquer the demanding critics». Well, congratulations, Mrs. Bey, you and your team got really smart this time: save for a few renegade dis­senters, well within the statistical margin of error, congrats on a decisive victory.

 

In fact, I wouldn't mind joining the saluting crowds as well — the only problem is that, three lis­tens into the record, I still cannot remember a single tune. Removing the hot dance grooves also means removing the hooks, and removing the hooks means that the album is fueled exclusively by «soul» and «atmosphere», yet where are the musical innovations that make the «atmosphere» even marginally interesting? All I hear is same-old same-old: same programmed drums, same electronics, same adult contemporary sonic backgrounds, sometimes interspersed with same lone­some romantic piano pop melodies. «Sonically experimental», Pitchfork called this record, but where are these «experiments»? Oh, that's right, the proper context was «her most sonically ex­perimental to date». This puts stuff in a different light. Maybe twenty years ago this kind of re­cord, minus the benefits of cutting-edge production à la 2013, might have been called «experi­mental» — as it stands, its only braveness is in that it does, indeed, sound significantly different from the lady's previous albums. Different, for sure; but better? Not certain.

 

As far as my opinion is concerned, it is not with the music that Mrs. Carter has managed to sway the critics (who, as a rule, do not even begin to discuss the actual music, and I can empathize, since there is very little to be discussed in the first place), but with the attitude. For that, she must be given credit. Briefly stated, there are few records in the world that manage to share lines like "each day I feel so blessed to be looking at you / 'cause when you open your eyes, I feel alive" (explicitly addressed to her daughter) and "daddy what you gon' do with all this ass up in your face?" (explicitly addressed to her husband), fortunately, not within the same song, or she'd pro­bably have child protective service on her back in an instant.

 

Actually, some do, but very, very few make an active point of it. Beyoncé essentially comes across as a sort of concept album — an «honest» glimpse into the life of someone who has to combine several distinct personalities, not in an artificial Sasha Fierce-like way, but out of pure necessity. First, there remains the glamorous star personality (ʽFlawlessʼ); second, there is the lady of the family, committed to behaving like an angel in the spirit and like a slut in the body; third, there is the responsible loving mother; fourth, there's all sorts of interactions between the three (ʽPartitionʼ, which fuses the public star with the private slut and feels no remorse). I'd be lying through my teeth if I said that this whole concept were completely fake, primitive, and de­void of interest. I'd also be improperly insinuating if I said that Beyoncé's almost «salivating» depiction of sexual scenes with her husband (ʽRocketʼ is the quintessential example, but it's really all over the place) betrays an unhealthy fixation and should rather have been left in their bedroom — I mean, it's a world of free choice, and if you invite me in your bedroom, it'd probably be im­polite to refuse the invitation. I'd probably even fall into the perennial trap if I started doubting the album's feminist stance — since almost every second song here can be interpreted both as an anthem to the equality of the sexes or to sexual objectification of woman, that'd just lure us into another round of the never-ending, long-boring discussion.

 

All this, yes, and much more, but in the end, all it really does is distract us away from the musical qualities of the album. And the good musical qualities, as far as I can tell, are limited to a tiny handful of non-trivial vocal modulations (usually on the ballads: ʽHauntedʼ, ʽHeavenʼ, and ʽBlueʼ all have their moments), which are still heavily set back by unimaginative arrangements (usually confined to ideas like «okay, let's make the synth loops on ʽHauntedʼ sound real dark, bass-heavy, and distorted, it's a sound that's been used fifty billion times already, but we do need to focus on "dark", right?»). Say what you will, but Beyoncé is simply not enough interesting either as an «artist» or as a «human being» to save it all just on the strength of conceptuality and atmosphere. She is nowhere near «proverbially dumb», of course, but neither is she some sort of modern day Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, or even Lauryn Hill. In pitching for this sort of maturity, she over­stepped her boundaries, and made a record which, while striving to be «respectable», has ultima­tely landed in the area of «dull». As entertainment, this does not even begin holding a candle to B'Day; as «serious art», I have a hard time understanding why I should be spending my time trying to digest it as such.

 

Naturally, for someone whose musical world does not extend far beyond the likes of Beyoncé, The Black Album might be a spiritual revelation — more power to you if it helps you become a better human being, or solve your conjugal sex problems, or whatever else. But it'd be even better if it helped such people understand that there might be a better musical world out there some­where: like Amazon.com says, «if you liked this album, you might also like...» — not making any suggestions here, of course, just a small hint at the reason for which I am giving the album quite a violent thumbs down here. And this does not negate the fact that she does have a very cute, adorable daughter, or that having wild sex with Jay-Z cannot serve as a basis for writing exciting songs. It can! It just didn't, that's all.

 

LEMONADE (2016)

 

1) Pray You Catch Me; 2) Hold Up; 3) Don't Hurt Yourself; 4) Sorry; 5) 6 Inch; 6) Daddy Lessons; 7) Love Drought; 8) Sandcastles; 9) Forward; 10) Freedom; 11) All Night; 12) Formation.

 

Look, I really do not want to Queen Bey in this «damned if you do, damned if you don't» posi­tion, particularly not when her latest album almost sounds as if she were personally responding to all of my criticisms for the previous one — well, not mine, obviously, but clearly her goal is to find that one perfect spot where she could have her legions of fans and the small, but demanding, detachment of elitist critics all roll together. There's no stone cold reason why the consummate hitmaker, the glitzy fashion icon, the fight-for-your-rights symbol could never grow into a real artist, even with all the difficulties brought on by fame and fortune. Well... come to think of it, maybe there is: at least, I'd hypothesize that if you were not a real artist before the onset of fame and fortune, the chances of your, let's say, «spiritual transformation» after you have been caught up in the cogs and wheels are pretty slim.

 

But still, at the very least Lemonade has a clear edge over Beyoncé in that here, it is at least interesting to see her take on the challenge — the record is much more turbulent, dynamic, and diverse. It's got some unpredictable collaborators, too: I mean, Kendrick Lamar could probably be expected at some point, sooner or later, but Jack White? (There's also some pseudo-crediting: ʽ6 Inchʼ, for instance, lists The Animal Collective as co-writers, apparently because one of the lines in the song somewhat reminded the production team of a line in ʽMy Girlsʼ — the result is an extra credit for Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist, formally as a safeguard against lawsuits, but I'm pretty sure the lady thought it cool to have some respectable indie names included in the liner notes. I mean, some people might actually think that way that she got The Animal Collective to work for her, you know? And everybody's happy — the guys will probably make more money off ʽ6 Inchʼ than they made off all their records put together, anyway).

 

Like Beyoncé, the record is all about herself, yes, but now that her daughter has grown up a bit, intimate family matters take a small step back, whereas her iconic status makes an advance. The very first single, which preceded the album by a couple months, was ʽFormationʼ, which, for all I know, could just as well have come from Nicki Minaj — people made a stupid fuss out of it be­cause it, like, celebrated Beyoncé's black heritage and all ("I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils" — first time I ever heard about the Jackson family as a metaphor for all Afro-Ame­rican people), but actually, it's more about celebrating Beyoncé's bitchiness: "I'm so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress" sounds just about right to me. She might slay all right, but the song itself is a mediocre piece of very routine hip-hop — and, in the context of the album, one of its weakest tracks, perhaps not incidentally delegated to the very end of the record, almost as if it were a bonus track after the much more logical conclusion of ʽAll Nightʼ.

 

Although it is somewhat atypical of the album in general, ʽFormationʼ still ties in with a whole set of other songs that focus on strength, power, independence, and various ball-breaking activi­ties — at least she's honest about it, because a whole album of whining by one of the world's big­gest superstars would be worse than pathetic. And I have to admit, I really like some of these. ʽDon't Hurt Yourselfʼ has a thick, dark, thrashing groove (not surprising for a song that samples ʽWhen The Levee Breaksʼ — as done by Led Zep, not Memphis Minnie), a cool arrangement of backing vocal harmonies that sound like they're appropriately and shitlessly scared of the lead singer, and enough metallic effects on Beyoncé's vocals to make Jay-Z run for cover ("you ain't married to no average bitch boy"). ʽDaddy Lessonsʼ is a mix of New Orleanian jazz and neo-country-pop (Bey going Taylor Swift on us now?) that unexpectedly turns out to be the catchiest number on the album (even as it formally defends the 2nd amendment, much to the delight of Uncle Ted Nugent — then again, isn't a country song supposed to?..).

 

Best of the bunch is probably ʽFreedomʼ, which was written in line with the Black Lives Matter campaign but avoids any direct lyrical references and could therefore qualify as just a general, abstract anthem to the nice F-word. Kendrick Lamar adds one of his intelligent poetic raps in the middle, but the song's primary point of attraction is still the chorus. Like most choruses for most songs called ʽFreedomʼ, it is lyrically clumsy ("freedom, freedom, where are you? cause I need freedom too") and clichéd ("I break chains all by myself"), but the bombastic ascent all the way to the epic resolution how "a winner don't quit on themselves" is totally believable. Even a rich superstar, you know, should be allowed to flex some muscle every now and then, and she's flexing it just about right on this tune.

 

Of course, a Beyoncé album consisting of nothing but kick-ass empowering statements would be unthinkable, and there are plenty of lyrical moments scattered throughout — some of them quite melodic and emotional, like the album opener ʽPray You Catch Meʼ (gorgeous harmony arran­gements, classy «deconstruction-style» minimalistic atmosphere, non-cloying sentimentality) or ʽLove Droughtʼ with its nice falsetto chorus; also, ʽAll Night Longʼ has a beautifully vocalized title, but drags on for a little too long. ʽSandcastlesʼ is a really bland piano ballad, though, that should probably belong on an Alicia Keyes album instead.

 

Overall, the album is still absolutely not my cup of tea — all that hot-electrifying-sexxxy aesthe­tics of songs like ʽ6 Inchʼ (is it about a podium model or a stripper? who cares, anyway) is ulti­mately just stupid, and although, thankfully, the album is not so thoroughly obsessed with the whole «self-empowering through sex» ideology that was at the core of Beyoncé, it still retains that angle; let, I dunno, Rolling Stone and the NME sing praises of it rather than the grumpy conservative Only Solitaire. But I was pleasantly surprised, this time, at how many of these songs actually stuck around, enough to suspect that from a purely musical angle, Lemonade may indeed be Beyoncé's (or, rather, The Beyoncé Concern's) greatest achievement so far. Strip away all the ideological elements for sociological gender-based analysis, forget the English language (most people outside of the US will probably not get most of the references anyway, and who cares what Red Lobster really means to a starving Afro-American family of three, worth no more than a measly 600 million bucks?), and you're left with a bunch of perfectly crafted vocal hooks, accompanied with elegant arrangements that meld together live playing, electronic programming, and sampling in an undeniably «artsy» style.

 

So yes, this is even better than B'Day, and so here comes another thumbs up. If she keeps it up this way, who knows, maybe the next album will feature Tom Waits as special guest and a fully credited sample from Can's ʽUp The Bakerlooʼ — I guess that she's now pretty much earned the right to do anything, and she'd be a fool not to use it to her advantage.

 

BLACK DICE

BEACHES AND CANYONS (2002)

 

1) Seabird; 2) Things Will Never Be The Same; 3) The Dream Is Going Down; 4) Endless Happiness; 5) Big Drop.

 

From Kraftwerk to Aphex Twin to Autechre to the Animal Collective, my attitude towards elec­tronic music of all kinds is relatively simple — give me a world that lies beyond my imagination, but feels real enough, and we'll be quite likely to share a connection. That is the way I like to review most of those electronica records, by trying to discriminate between those that live, breathe, and tell «wond'rous stories» from those that exist purely as meaningless agglomerations of sounds. However, for the most part, it is just my impressions — there is no telling if the artist in question truly intended this particular track to sound like «copulating refrigerators» or «nanites delousing their circuits».

 

With Black Dice, an experimental noise outfit from Brooklyn, run by brothers Bjorn and Eric Copeland, the situation is different. These guys actually started out as more of a hardcore outfit, gradually moving towards digital magic as their penchant for wildness and experimentation led them to worship at the altar of Merzbow and other similar acts. By the time they got around to recording their debut LP, with Aaron Warren on bass and Hisham Bharoocha on drums, they were completely past any «generic hardcore» stage imaginable — and yet, Beaches And Can­yons does not at all sound like your average «electronic» album. Perhaps I would rather say that it sounds like your above-average experimental album that simply happened to be made with electronic tools lying around. This certainly makes it different from people like Richard D. James, who normally eat transistors for breakfast and sleep on motherboards.

 

Anyway, there is little doubt in my mind that, when Black Dice set out to make an album, they really have it in their minds to construct an alternate universe. Alternate enough, that is, to be fascinating and intriguing, but not enough to be completely incompatible with aural impressions that we have of ours. They present a set of «sonic-scapes», rhythmically and harmonically orga­nized, but very natural sounding — diverse, meaningful, intentionally ugly when the time calls for it and quite pretty when it doesn't. In a way, they achieve here (at least, to my utmost satis­faction) the kind of effect that The Animal Collective were not able to achieve on their early re­cords — probably because they were too obsessed with the «anything goes» aesthetics, whereas Black Dice, as chaotic as their output may seem at first, are, in fact, highly disciplined, and take full responsibility for every twist and turn.

 

The titles occasionally help. ʽSeabirdʼ starts out with a series of coos, caws, bleeps, and scuffles that do actually resemble a scattered, but patterned flock of alien seagulls and other species — gradually increasing in density until they all begin to fly round in dizzying circles. Later on, birds are joined by humans in a cute sort of tribal dance — whether it is supposed to signify a peaceful union between all species, or the primordial hunter's joy at the perspective of some roast seabird, I have no idea, but it all sounds fun, anyway.

 

From there on, the Copelands move to a series of lengthier, noisier suites: ʽThings Will Never Be The Sameʼ puts you inside the promised «canyons», with spirits playing games on your senses through winds, echoes, animal noises, baby cries (for some reason) and, finally, a grating, high tension storm where you seem to be caught up in a sparkling electric booth, afraid to move an inch for fear of being immediately electrocuted. ʽThe Dream Is Going Downʼ does sound like a sonic impersonation of an acute, inescapable nightmare — ten minutes of sirens, confusion, waves of white noise, looped schizo screaming, like a ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ for organized people (same hellish atmosphere but without the jarring unpredictable transitions from one piece of the collage to another). ʽEndless Happinessʼ breaks up the nightmare and gets you back to the can­yons, with chimes and woodwinds providing the atmosphere — then replaced by no fewer than six minutes of waves breaking on the shore, as it happens on one of those «Nature Sounds» CDs. Finally, ʽBig Dropʼ brings back the sonic nightmare, although, frankly speaking, it feels some­what redundant: I am happy enough with the 43 minutes of the first four tracks, and count this further sixteen-minute reprise as a special bonus for those who could not get enough.

 

This is certainly not «music» in the usual sense of the word, but neither is it «noise», produced out of a simple wish to experiment and to shock. Perhaps it could all be described as «simplistic» experimentation, unburdened by excessive complexity and intellectualization. There may be dif­ferent ways to crack the code of Black Dice, but it is not a chess puzzle — it is quite easily acces­sible, and convertible to a fun experience, for, I believe, even the stupidest of us, provided we are at least capable of opening our minds a little bit. Rough around the edges, yes: some of the loops and cycles run a little longer than they should, and, on the whole, the Copelands seem like bright lads, able to easily come up with far more ideas than they have allocated for this record. But still a thumbs up all the way, even if, in retrospect, it now seems more like a teaser for even better things to come.

 

CREATURE COMFORTS (2004)

 

1) Cloud Pleaser; 2) Treetops; 3) Island; 4) Creature; 5) Live Loop; 6) Skeleton; 7) Schwip Schwap; 8) Night Flight.

 

In our era of «one-album bands», there was no obligation whatsoever for Black Dice to top their initial success — but they still went ahead and did exactly that with Creature Comforts, which is, in my opinion, their absolute peak and a major highlight of the decade's non-dancefloor-oriented electronic music in general. Not only that, it is one of the most aurally perfect «Psycho-Tarzan» albums ever recorded... so to speak.

 

Several of the composition titles are indicative of the atmospherics, with references to «islands», «clouds», «treetops», and «creatures» lurking in and out of the landscape. The difference from the usual procedure is that they are genuinely indicative. Where Beaches And Canyons was still sort of all over the place, and some of it worked explicitly on placing you, the listener, on a beach or inside a canyon, and some of it just made bizarre noises, Creature Comforts, from start to finish almost without exceptions, works on transporting you to a mystery island and stranding you there for about 45 minutes (which, by the way, is quite a sparing amount of time: electronic artists tend to make full advantage of the average CD length, as it gives them the opportunity to explore all the nuances of potential of their favorite loops, bells, and whistles — but Black Dice, starting with their second album, have decided to spare our time, and must be thanked for that).

 

Of course, part of that magic comes from the fact that the band, with its «real instruments» past, does not limit itself to computers and synthesizers, but uses them in conjunction with guitars, real (if treated) percussion, and other stuff. Thus, the brief opener ʽCloud Pleaserʼ is seemingly based on a simple, see-sawing, «kiddie-avantgarde» guitar loop, and all the cute little electronic appari­tions cluster around it, popping in and out of the «clouds». Chain-looped jangly drone is also at the heart of ʽTreetopsʼ, although it is not as much in the listener's face as are all the back-and-forth rockings of the treetops in question — along with flocks of birds, howls of monkeys, chirps and squeeks of small rodents in the branches, and, as strange as it may seem, sounds of crying babies, or maybe that is just another sonic illusion caused by the interference of all the different waves up there in the air.

 

The album really hits its stride with ʽCreatureʼ, all suspense and intrigue that never really comes to the surface — imagine yourself traveling on a narrow jungle path from one end of the forest to the other, hearing all the animal noises from all sides but never once actually witnessing the source. Bellowing, cackling, grunting, snorting, hissing, rustling, cooing, guffawing, (insert your own favorite sound-imitating verb from Roget here), all of it sequenced in a manner that does not exactly make the track «musical», but gives it a certain logic of development that makes it inte­resting to follow. My only grudge is that ʽCreatureʼ is hardly the right title — there is no singular «creature» to be represented here, more like a miriad of creatures, freshly released from Noah's Arc or something into the forest and singing their happy songs of freedom. Or is that supposed to be a ʽ(Waiting For) Creatureʼ kind of idea?

 

The 15-minute-long ʽSkeletonʼ is the only track to slightly overstay its welcome: somewhere in the middle, the band hits upon a «wave upon wave of relaxing psychojangle» groove that they be­come so happy about, they let it roll and roll and roll for what seems like ages, even though it hardly has anything to do with any skeletons (some of the other effects do sound like the rattle of bones, though). However, they more than make up for this with ʽNight Flightʼ — an acoustically stunning six-minute closer where, indeed, all sorts of things, from small birds and bats to large birds and bats to spirits, ghosts, and pink elephants charging through the air one or several at a time, before they all come plodding and crashing down at the end. In the meantime, we also realize that we have made a full 24-hour circle, from the greeting dawn of ʽCloud Pleaserʼ to the busy aerial life of the nighttime in the final round.

 

So, once again, be it «music» or «sonic theater», Creature Comforts is an utter delight for the senses, provided you let your imagination run as wild as the sound does, instead of boringly wal­lowing around in modernistic abstractions — which is why, despite the comparative lack of hype, I actively prefer it to most of Autechre's «aural suprematism». Another clear thumbs up, heavily recommended (especially if you are an active zoo-goer or Animal Planet watcher).

 

BROKEN EAR RECORD (2005)

 

1) Snarly Yow; 2) Smiling Off; 3) Heavy Manners; 4) ABA; 5) Street Dude; 6) Twins; 7) Motorcycle.

 

No, no, not that way! To me, this album is about as big a disappointment as its cover, which seems more fit for a gonzo porn DVD (granted, one with a psychedelic flavor) than a collection of atmospheric electronic soundscapes. With just a few exceptions, they have turned their atten­tion to noise, and I don't mean jungle noise or animal noise or wind-in-the-trees noise, I mean kaleidoscopic loops of industrial / computer-ish noise that, for the most part, do not translate into anything meaningful. From having gone beyond the Animal Collective, they have now reverted to behaving like a second-rate Animal Collective. Why?..

 

One big change is that they decide to re-introduce rhythmic patterns, so you can tap your foot to most of these «tunes» if you feel like it. A big potential problem with the rhythmic pattern, how­ever, is that it can be looped forever without any interesting additions — as it does happen on both ʽSnarly Yowʼ and ʽSmiling Offʼ that open the album. The former consists of two or three se­parate, but similar, parts that are too busy shimmering and glimmering in their electronic beauty to ever go somewhere. The latter behaves in a more distorted and schizophrenic manner, before eventually settling into a «madhouse march», driven by pseudo-Mellotron and idiot vocal harmo­nies — you are welcome to take it if you are interested, but I want my jungle life back.

 

Eventually, it sort of dawns on you that the band simply has had enough of beaches, canyons, and jungles, and wants to get back to the big city. ʽStreet Dudeʼ, let alone the title, is chock-full of urban noise, for instance, and ʽMotorcycleʼ speaks for itself as well — actually, I think ʽMotor­cycleʼ is the only genuinely exciting number on here, basically an electronic comedy piece, with the band trying to start off their chopper for about seven minutes and getting nowhere fast (so in­stead they just have to push and lug it around, yelling and yodeling to the rhythm of the slowly turning wheels).

 

But before you get to that final number, you have to deal with the rest — and the rest does not connect, no matter how hard I try. The sound palette on Creature Comforts was truly unique, or even if it was not, it still translated to vivid images in the head. ʽSnarly Yowʼ adds nothing to the accomplishments of the industrial and «freak-electronic» scene, and neither expands my mind nor entertains it. Basically, the guys just lost their angle, simple as that — not that there is anything un­usual about it, they just went the standard route of so many other 21st century artists: say it all first or second time around, then stick around for another decade with third-rate product, instead of doing the right thing by switching to another profession. Thumbs down.

 

LOAD BLOWN (2007)

 

1) Kokomo; 2) Roll Up; 3) Gore; 4) Bottom Feeder; 5) Scavenger; 6) Drool; 7) Toka Toka; 8) Cowboy Soundcheck; 9) Bananas; 10) Manoman.

 

Well, yes, that is right, except for a small correction: the real load was blown two albums ago. This one is more like «blowing steam», if you ask me. A little more impressive on the whole than Broken Ear Record, but still not enough to impress yours truly like the band's original master­pieces. At least the album sleeve picture is nicer than last time around, too.

 

If anything, this whole thing simply sounds like a fussy soundtrack to a video game — some sort of a racing simulator where you have to drive your amphibian vehicle through all sorts of force fields, lava pools, underground factory corridors, and, occasionally, underwater routes. Under the right circumstances, the experience could be fun, but it's all really been done before, many times, and besides, it might have worked better with an actual video game at your disposal — it is really odd when you have to let your imagination work out the details of a frickin' video game (I usually try to reserve it for somewhat loftier goals).

 

With ʽKokomoʼ, you'd probably expect a deconstruction of the Beach Boys song, but I do not discern even a trace of sampling — only an endless series of electronic swoops and wobbly dis­torted vocals in the background. The effect is psychedelic all right, but it is the kind of psyche­delia that is usually produced by a couple of kids fooling around with some digital equipment... in other words, nothing out of the ordinary. ʽRoll Upʼ follows with seven minutes of completely re­placeable sounds — meaning that you probably have to put on your headphones, lie on the floor, and let yourselves go for those seven minutes, otherwise you won't be able to connect with the greatness inside and outside of you. Unfortunately, I hate lying on the floor, and taking this in while sitting straight up did not do a thing. (Neither am I a fan of race simulators, which this track recalls vividly — every once in a while, there's an engine revving up like somebody just rammed the gas pedal right into the floor).

 

The record briefly perks up in its second half, when some of the tracks start going easier on the noise and subtler on the atmosphere: ʽDroolʼ has a slight samba feel to it, with buzzing insects representing a hot summer day somewhere in the tropics; ʽToka Tokaʼ is all built on electronic monkey mating calls, and is the one composition on here that could have easily fit on Creature Comforts; and the album closer ʽManomanʼ is built on trivial sonic sequences, so simple and stu­pid they can't help but infect you — after all, if an album makes you feel like an idiot, it is still better than when it does not make you feel anything at all.

 

But even these tracks seem more like fortuitous exceptions, because, second time around, Black Dice are compromising their original vision — sacrificing it in favor of ideas like «loudness» and «rhythm», which everyone has in spades. I am not informed of what had happened; maybe they really, really wanted for their music to be played on the club scene, which is, indeed, not the best environment for Creature Comforts. If so, this is all a shameful «sellout», never mind that they are still being experimental and «formally creative». Or, perhaps, they themselves did not manage to understand what an imaginative wonder those early sonic scapes were. In any case, I see no reason for anyone to bother with the likes of Load Blown when there is, oh, I dunno, the entire catalogs of Vangelis and Klaus Schulze to explore before that.

 

REPO (2009)

 

1) Nite Creme; 2) Glazin; 3) Earnings Plus Interest; 4) Whirligig; 5) La Cucaracha; 6) Idiots Pasture; 7) Lazy TV; 8) Buddy; 9) Ten Inches; 10) Chicken Shit; 11) Vegetable; 12) Urban Supermist; 13) Ultra Vomit Craze; 14) Gag Shack.

 

Albums like these easily get me confused. There is no denying that, once again, Black Dice are working, and trying, and honestly looking for new ideas and new ways of expression — and yet, not a single one of these ideas registers anywhere, not a single second of this album carries... nay, produces the impression of carrying some sort of meaning. If anything, they are even busier and fussier here than they were before, but what for? Beats me.

 

There is a track here called ʽUltra Vomit Crazeʼ. Now I cannot count myself as a major fan of vomit craze, or vomit in general, but I can admit that a certain musical allegory of an abstract «vomit craze» might have an interesting realization. The problem is that the track has nothing about it that would really come close to a «vomit craze». In reality, it is six and a half minutes of a boring trip-hop rhythm with three or four grumbly electronic loops and some echoey Tarzan-style battle cries in the background. Uh... okay. What am I supposed to do with those? It's way too repetitive to be «normal music» and too poorly put together to become a «sonic painting» of any sort. Maybe if you put on your headphones, inhale some wormwood, stand on your head, and play it backwards, you are guaranteed to «get it», but I dare not try.

 

Supposedly, some of the tracks are multi-level deconstructions — ʽLa Cucarachaʼ would suggest that they are making fun of Latin music, and if you listen hard enough, you can track down cer­tain mutated variations on various Latin rhythms at the beginning of the track, but by the third minute, they are all forgotten in favor of rapidly shifting quirky electronic patterns that sound like a bunch of robots having nothing better to do on a Saturday evening, sitting on the porch and playing some of their jugband robot blues. Wait, that actually might sound intriguing — in reality, these loops are nothing like robot blues. They are just... loops. They mean nothing to me, and I would be very much surprised if they meant anything to you. (Then again, one Amazon reviewer did find this to be «one of the most rewarding listens of my life» — I sure wish he'd donated some of his DNA to a respectable scientific institution).

 

Nor does it help them in any way when they cut down on the overall number of «epics» and start working on laconic ideas — there are several very brief links here that run from twenty seconds to just over a minute, and some of the loop-based «songs» have the length of an old-fashioned pop single, but what good is multiplying and dissecting your ideas if they all suck? It only helps perpetuate the idea that Black Dice are, in fact, devoid of proper talent, and their squandering away their original act was like Samson cutting his own hair for no other reason than... being an idiot? Thumbs down in certified disgust and disappointment.

 

MR. IMPOSSIBLE (2012)

 

1) Pinball Wizard; 2) Rodriguez; 3) The Jacker; 4) Pigs; 5) Spy Vs. Spy; 6) Outer Body Drifter; 7) Shithouse Drifter; 8) Carnitas; 9) Brunswick Sludge (Meets Front Range Tripper).

 

At last, a marginal improvement over the last three albums. No, it does not reinstate the early vibe of Creature Comforts (although ʽPigsʼ has pig sounds, and that seems like a benevolent throw­back), but there is one important change: Mr. Impossible focuses less on noise and more on, let's say, «melody» — apparently, the Brooklyn boys have had enough of «abrasiveness» for abrasive­ness' sake and have started thinking about subtlety and about impregnating the listener's mind rather than just flooding his braincells with one shock effect after another until the brain works out an immunity and begins boring you to death.

 

Like Load Blown, this album also begins with a «song» whose title has been arrogantly pinched from a hit — but just as the original ʽPinball Wizardʼ is a great song where the original ʽKokomoʼ is a catchy pile of horsedung, so is this ʽPinball Wizardʼ a curious and mildly impressive compo­sition where the «alternate ʽKokomoʼ» was just a head-splitting electronic siren run in bubbly mode. Here, we have a deconstructed electronic blues-based bassline, a fuzzy, digitally treated lead guitar wail in the style of Belew-era King Crimson, and a signature change midway through that transforms the song from a threatening «electronic avantgarde jazz» tune into a fast-paced electronic «New Wave rocker». It isn't a triumph of boundless creativity / originality, but it is at least an optimistic introduction that, if anything, states that the band has once again begun to put in some thought about quality control.

 

The record does get fairly uneven, and some of the tracks are quite comparable in dullness to REPO, but ʽPinball Wizardʼ is not a fluke — for every composition that still begs the question "why do I have to listen to this in the first place?", there is one other with a well-explored nifty idea or two. For instance, ʽThe Jackerʼ has a classy math-rockish guitar part, where the ins­tru­ment, true to the song title, is made to sound like a huge jackhammer or drill, but not in a way where you just push it in and loop the effect to infinity — no, rather imitating a real life process where you have to twirl it and twist it and plunge it and withdraw it based on the circumstances. (Why the people at Pitchfork called the song «jazzy» and stated that it «swings», I'll never know, but then, if a song sounds like a malfunctioning jackhammer to one person and like a swinging jazz tune to another, it is already sort of a good sign). And ʽPigsʼ, like I said, does deliver the promised goods in the form of digital pig grunting — more like ʽAttack Of The Killer Robot Pigsʼ than just ʽPigsʼ if you ask me, and kinda fun if you keep thinking about it like that.

 

ʽOuter Body Drifterʼ, seemingly inspired by some break dance soundtrack from the 1980s, is not particularly interesting by itself (too noisy without being too funky), but it is made more interes­ting by being immediately followed by its Doppelgänger, ʽShithouse Drifterʼ, whose electronic bleeps and blasts seem only marginally different, but as the title provokes you to start thinking of them in terms of farts, dumps, and... uh, never mind, this wasn't supposed to be taking a scatolo­gical turn, but somehow it's always more amusing to see an electronic artist with a toilet sense of humor than, say, a hardcore punk artist with a toilet sense of humor.

 

Funny (or not so funny) tidbits like these are not enough to properly conceptualize the record, or save about half of it from being traditionally pedestrian, but still, finally, for the first time in eight years it seems like Black Dice might be back on... well, on a road to something rather than just blindly groping through the desert. At the very least, I am glad that Bjorn Copeland has once more taken up a bit of «creative guitar playing», rather than merely using guitar strings like an alternate way of generating digital signals; in fact, integrating ye olde «Frippertronics» with the modern digital madness of the likes of The Animal Collective might be a viable path to follow, provided they really have no more interest in developing their original «psycho-nature electro­nics» schtick — quite a pitiable decision, if you ask me.

 

 

THE BLACK KEYS

THE BIG COME UP (2002)

 

1) Busted; 2) Do The Rump; 3) I'll Be Your Man; 4) Countdown; 5) The Breaks; 6) Run Me Down; 7) Leavin' Trunk; 8) Heavy Soul; 9) She Said, She Said; 10) Them Eyes; 11) Yearnin'; 12) Brooklyn Bound; 13) 240 Years Before Your Time.

 

Lots of people hate electric blues and blues-rock because it is... well, you know. Many of these same people, however, do not extend that hatred to the fathers of electric blues — hearing angry rants about the banality and lack of soul in the music of Eric Clapton or Robert Cray is one thing, but hearing people condemn Howlin' Wolf is quite a different story. And this does not have so much to do with political correctness as it has to do with the fact that blues-rock has, indeed, be­come a «safe institution» ever since it finally gained mainstream attention and respect. Inevitably, when a technically limited art form becomes a safe institution, this leads to boredom — and, even­tually, ridicule or even hatred.

 

Ever once in a while, though, somebody comes along with a fresh retro perspective: a burning de­sire to tear off this «sacralized», comfy gloss from blues-based music and try and make it sound devilish and disturbing, the way it used to be as late as the 1950s. Actually, it does not even hap­pen as often as we would expect. «Rough and tough» people generally drift towards more ener­getic forms of music (hardcore, metal, etc.), whereas the rootsy stuff falls in the hands of safe and cuddly people (John Mayer!). In this world, The Black Keys, consisting of singing guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney — and no one else! — are a curious exception, and that alone transforms them into one of the more notable figures of the last decade.

 

What we have here is a set of thirteen short songs, most of them featuring nothing but guitar and drums (not even bass!), and drawing heavily from the musical palette of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker rather than any of their «more timid» and «academic» successors, be they black or white. The similarity is in the melodic side of the material (a few of the songs are covers, but most are originals written in the same vein), the careful «retro» selection of chords used, and the grizzled vocals of Auerbach, which certainly cannot compete with Chester Arthur Burnett, but try to follow the same «glass-cutting» pattern anyway.

 

The dissimilarity — in fact, the one thing that distinguishes The Big Come Up from a generic copycat venture — lies primarily in Auerbach's sound. Note for note, he may be rehashing the old playing styles of spooky black guitarists of the 1950s, but the guitar tones go way beyond that, drawing upon the influences of classic garage-rock, proto-punk, Hendrix, perhaps even early Sab­bath-style metal in places. Deep, fuzzy, crunchy, the works. We know this kind of sound already, but we have not yet heard it applied to this kind of material — had it been invented around 1955, even Muddy and Wolf would have thought it too far out to agree to sing to this sort of playing.

 

My ears have decided that the combination works perfectly. (Then again, I also refuse to refuse to listen to Clapton's solo career, so take my opinion for what it's worth — even though the Black Keys sound nothing like solo Clapton). Already the opening number, 'Busted', sounds like the Stooges covering 'Rolling And Tumbling', and if that is good, well, it does not get any worse from there — and, from a certain point of view, makes The White Stripes sound like a bunch of tame, home-schooled kids (in reality, both Jack White and Dan Auerbach share similar back­grounds, but Dan does a noticeably better job of conjuring the spirit of the wild).

 

Also, I should not be giving the impression that the entire album is so completely uniform in its approach. First, the retro-blues thing is done with plenty of attention to diversity. 'Busted' is sheer Delta blues gone Chicago blues gone garage, but there is also 'Countdown', with guitar licks re­cycled from Arthur Crudup and early Elvis circa 'That's All Right Mama' and 'Mystery Train'; and 'Heavy Soul' takes its cues from classic R'n'B stylistics.

 

Other tracks show the influence of «whiter» blues-rock outfits from the 1960s and 1970s: 'I'll Be Your Man', with its sound cleaned-up, could easily fit on any American roots-rock album recor­ded circa 1968, and some of the others would not feel out of place on Led Zep albums. In this set­ting, even the most unpredictable choice — a faithful guitar-and-drums cover of the Beatles' 'She Said She Said' — does not feel so tremendously out of place, even if it is out of place, the only «true» pop song of the whole bunch. But they do it in a fun sort of way.

 

Naturally, one should not expect any sort of genius songwriting here, even though 'The Breaks' features a hugely effective minimalistic shrill riff (and also qualifies as one of the most «moder­nis­tic» tunes on the album, with a brief hip-hop style intro), and the brief coda '240 Years Before Your Time' has some deliciously staged psychedelic guitar on it; with its mock-pompous intro­duction, announcing that Mr. World is going to be speaking to us in his own language, it is clear­ly a minimalist tribute (an homage, even) to Jimi, and a good one.

 

But it is hard to blame an artist for not achieving something he never intended to achieve. What The Black Keys did intend to achieve was to create a slightly different kind of sound using very sparse means, and in that, they succeeded: definitely not a mean feat for two simple guys in the beginning of the 21st century. Not to mention that it is only through these guys that many people might have heard about Muddy and Wolf in the first place — additional bonus for popularization (counteracted, though, by the necessity of dealing with potential YouTube commentators going «Howlin' Wolf? Who needs that prehistoric old crap when we now have Danny Auerbach?»). All in all, for this fuzzy-wuzzy lean-mean kind of sound these guys get going, they naturally deserve their thumbs up.

 

THICKFREAKNESS (2003)

 

1) Thickfreakness; 2) Hard Row; 3) Set You Free; 4) Midnight In Her Eyes; 5) Have Love Will Travel; 6) Hurt Like Mine; 7) Everywhere I Go; 8) No Trust; 9) If You See Me; 10) Hold Me In Your Arms; 11) I Cry Alone.

 

The band's second album caused a slight increase in their influence, but, in retrospect, it may be just a tad less impressive than the debut — if only for the fact that the John Lee Hooker / Howlin' Wolf vibe is less evident here, much of it sacrificed in favor of a late Sixties / early Seventies hard rock spirit. It was one thing when Auerbach applied Leslie West's classic guitar tone to old blues material — it's another thing when he applies it to Leslie West-style material, because why should anyone already familiar with Mountain's classic records care to bother?

 

Well, for one thing, the Auerbach/Carney duet still sounds awesomely cool and modestly unique. The entire record was produced within 14 hours in Carney's basement, but, for all I know, it could have just as well be recorded live in forty minutes in an underground station. Coupled with that guitar tone and those ragged vocals, the spontaneity works. Second, if you dig the sonic vibe at all, and I do, it really only matters if they have enough decent songs to go along with the sound. And Thickfreakness passes the test — barely.

 

Barely, because blues-rock songwriting is a risky business, and Auerbach either does not care to invent new riffs at all, or deems it sufficient to tweak and adjust pre-existing ones. The title track is a good example: I am pretty sure I have heard that fat opening melody many times already, but in slightly differing variants. On the other hand, it still kicks ass, and the nifty little touch of in­serting a Beatlesque "hold me, love me..." bit in the middle of each chorus is enough to carry it over the basic memorability threshold.

 

My personal favorite is 'No Trust', which builds upon a boogie line stolen directly from 'Shakin' All Over', crossed with a Delta blues-style chorus. Less convincing is the album's best-known track 'Set You Free', made popular by being featured in the School of Rock movie: no attempts at presenting any shade of a memorable riff or catchy vocal melody. More convin­cing than 'Set You Free' is the band's take on Richard Berry's 'Have Love Will Travel', whose famous riff is a per­fect match for Auerbach's guitar tone — unfortunately, this version still has no chance to oversha­dow the classic Sonics version (I miss that insane sax solo!). Even more convincing may be 'Hard Row', whose descending guitar lines are somewhat reminiscent of Clapton circa Cream.

 

Still, overall, I'd qualify this as an «enjoyable disappointment». The shift of direction per se is not a good sign, and the uniformity of the tracks is denser than on The Big Come Up: you'd have to be totally wooed by the debut in order to enjoy the follow-up — unless you know nothing of either Chicago blues or 1970s hard rock, in which case Thickfreakness will probably sound more ac­cessible. Still, thank God for Danny Auerbach — if there are even five or six former fans of Limp Biz­kit in this world that found redemption through the man, count my vote for canoni­zation.

 

RUBBER FACTORY (2004)

 

1) When The Lights Go Out; 2) 10 A.M. Automatic; 3) Just Couldn't Tie Me Down; 4) All Hands Against His Own; 5) The Desperate Man; 6) Girl Is On My Mind; 7) The Lengths; 8) Grown So Ugly; 9) Stack Shot Billy; 10) Act Nice And Gentle; 11) Aeroplane Blues; 12) Keep Me; 13) Till I Get My Way.

 

After the expected «sophomore slump» of Thickfreakness, Auerbach and Carney retreat, re­group, and revitalize their act. If the first album mostly channelled the spirit of old Chicago blues­men, and the second album mainly evoked the atmosphere of early 1970s «stoner hard rock», Rubber Factory works mainly as a subtle tribute to sung and unsung American heroes of the «twisted hard rock / blues rock» direction — everyone from the Stooges to early Captain Beef­heart. All of a sudden, the chord changes get more interesting, the edges get jaggier, and the ride becomes bumpier. Putting it short: +10 in the excitement department.

 

Changes burst out at the very start, as 'When The Lights Go Out' opens the record with the usual percussion boom and an unexpected acoustic riff (with some shrill one-note electric wailing in the background). The call rings out: The Black Keys are not going to strictly adhere to AC/DC tactics. They are widening their base without losing the essence. They can be subtle and diversify their emotional range. 'When The Lights Go Out', for instance, introduces «tiredness» and per­haps even «depression», rarely, if ever, seen on the previous two albums because of all the testo­sterone. And now they can even be tender — as seen on the folky ballad 'The Lengths', on which Auerbach sounds like a cross between James Taylor and Eddie Vedder, but still manages to push the bar upwards rather than downwards due to a beautifully constructed set of slide guitar flouri­shes. It is a good thing there's only one song like that on the album, though — just the right num­ber for a band whose main reason for existence is their guitar tone.

 

And their guitar riffs. This time, Danny took some of it to come up with a bunch of real quality tunes. 'Just Couldn't Tie Me Down' uses an archaic distortion effect, similar to the one used on early Burnette Brothers records, to come up with a cool, inescapable rock'n'roll melody — every time the guitar hits back after Auerbach's "Happiness... come around... just couldn't tie me down", there comes that classic rockabilly punch in the stomach, the little JERK that made it all worth your while. Cool riffs also inhabit such modern classics as 'All Hands Against His Own', 'The Desperate Man', and 'Grown So Ugly'. 'The Desperate Man', in particular, with its rough, screech-heavy key changes in between verses, is the closest The Black Keys step to the line that separates their sound from «ye olde avantgarde» — they never ever cross that line, but they titillate, and that's quite enough for me.

 

As song structures get more complex and stylistic influences more diverse, so does the band's choice of covers become more adequate, or, to be precise, more adequately expressed than it used to be. 'She Said She Said' was done well, but it stepped out of the overall paradigm of The Big Come Up. Not so with their current take on the Kinks' 'Act Nice And Gentle', which used to be light as a feather in all of its music-hall-ish-ness, but here, all dressed up in several overdubbed lo-fi guitar parts, mumbled and skipped vocals, and «genuinely faked sloppiness» that even the Davies brothers — no slouches at faking sloppiness themselves — would admire, it fits right in, even if it is still the friendliest and «laziest» number on the record, per the song's nature.

 

The band's openness to experimentation shines through in the most unpredictable places — such as a brief quotation from 'Rhapsody In Blue' in the middle of 'Girl Is On My Mind' — and I am pretty sure that, with their package of influences, you will be able to spot quotations and allusions in every song if you put your mind to it. (As I am typing this, the sound of 'Till I Get My Way' is blasting through the speakers and I am all ready to describe the song as «Status Quo's 'Pictures Of Matchstick Men' meet Paul Rogers and Bad Company»). But the band's sound has further solidi­fied into something instantly recognizable as the Black Keys and the Black Keys only.

 

So, Rubber Factory should be enough to satisfy the skeptics: the band has its own shape and style, and it is capable of processing just about everything through that style. If Gershwin, why not Mozart? If Mozart, why not Eric Dolphy? That's just the way it should be — a blues-rock heart, a garage soul, and a mind open to every other influence. Thumbs up.

 

MAGIC POTION (2006)

 

1) Just Got To Be; 2) Your Touch; 3) You're The One; 4) Just A Little Heat; 5) Give Your Heart Away; 6) Strange Desire; 7) Modern Times; 8) The Flame; 9) Goodbye Babylon; 10) Black Door; 11) Elevator.

 

The Black Keys move in spirals. After the success of Rubber Factory and several pleasant di­versions (such as the release of an «official live bootleg» and a short EP consisting entirely of covers of the recently deceased bluesman Junior Kimbrough), their next full-fledged venture into the studio plays out the formula of Thickfreakness: follow an interesting, stylistically unusual al­bum with a mediocre «shadow» that exemplifies the art of coasting and — the way I see it, at least — can only really count as a muscle-training effort, to keep the brain occupied while at the same time denying it access to anything supernatural. An album that «buys time», in short.

 

Just like Thickfreakness, Magic Potion is a straightahead formulaic album, 90% of which con­sists of mid-tempo «leaden» blues-rockers, whose only point of differentiation lies in riffage. 'You're The One' is a solitary Southern rock-style ballad; the rest sounds more monotonous than your average AC/DC album. The riffs in question are not bad, but, traditionally, represent minor variations on classic garage and hard-rock melodies; hardcore fans of Led Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad, Blue Öyster Cult, Mountain, etc., will no doubt be able to «crack» most of these chord sequences open in no time.

 

Meanwhile, the little touches that made Rubber Factory so individualistic — the Gershwin quo­tes, the quirky rearrangement of the Kinks cover, the knife-sharp signature changes, the moody acoustic pieces — have once again been abandoned in favor of a «hardcore» sonic approach that could only satisfy the proper hardcore fans. By all means, it could not satisfy an aspiring reviewer — how do you verbally review a record whose only asset is a set of similar-sounding blues-rock riffs? So, uh, I like the riff of 'Just A Little Heat', which begins just like BOC's 'Cities On Flame With Rock'n'Roll', and the riff of 'Give Your Heart Away', which ends just like Black Sabbath's 'Sweet Leaf'. Who the heck cares, though?

 

Like I said, 'You're The One' is the only song to step away from the format, but it itself plays out as a light parody on soulful Southern balladry à la Skynyrd — emphasized in the lyrics ("When I was thirteen / My mom said son / You're the one I adore": if this doesn't sound as funny as the Ramones' "Hey little girl, I wanna be your boyfriend", it is only because we don't normally expect The Black Keys to sound funny. We might be wrong about that). In the end, it is about as soulful as Danny Auerbach normally gets — no more, no less. As is all of this middle-of-the-road, mar­king-time album, another burst of joy for neo-dirty-blues-rock fans, another slab of potential dis­ap­point­ment for those who think that neo-dirty-blues-rock is not necessarily supposed to merely flash different subtle shades of one single trick over and over again. As a representative of the lat­ter group, I sadly provide Magic Potion with a thumbs down.

 

ATTACK & RELEASE (2008)

 

1) All You Ever Wanted; 2) I Got Mine; 3) Strange Times; 4) Psychotic Girl; 5) Lies; 6) Remember When (Side A); 7) Remember When (Side B); 8) Same Old Thing; 9) So He Won't Break; 10) Oceans & Streams; 11) Things Ain't Like They Used To Be.

 

Time machine detected: I gave Magic Potion a «thumbs down» in 2011, and the band admittedly reacted to it in 2008. Could it be that someone else gave it a thumbs down, too?.. Because with The Black Keys' fifth major original LP, comes the biggest change in sound these guys ever al­lowed themselves; in fact, the change is so huge that it almost threatens to undermine the band's very reasons for existence.

 

For starters, the album was recorded in a proper studio this time, instead of barns, garages, aban­doned silver mines, and the central sewer system of Shitsville, USA. Next, there is an outside pro­ducer: Danger Mouse, a.k.a. B. J. Burton, formerly known for inventive rap-rock remixes and producing the Gorillaz and Beck — not even close to anything associable with Dan Auerbach. There is also an outside extra musician — guitar player extraordinaire Marc Ribot, whom most people probably know for his Tom Waits collaborations, but who is actually a huge individuality in his own right. Finally, for the first time ever, the songs lose their stern minimalism: in addition to guitar and drums, there are banjos, organs, chimes, flutes (!), backing vocals, whatever. Even the guitar sound is more diverse — there is plenty of acoustic playing here, and several different electric tones as opposed to the monotonous distorted garage growl of yesterday.

 

How does it work? For the moment — it works fine, and was probably the rightest thing to do. Despite cleaner production and instrumental diversity, the subtle sloppiness and rawness are still there, as are Auerbach's songwriting instincts. But now he also has the chance to allow to judge these songs based on more than one criterion (lack/presence of an awesome riff). Some of the songs, in fact, are not riff-based at all, e. g. 'So He Won't Break' — a moody combination of blues rhythms, Ribot's «broken» chord sequences, psychedelic chimes, and psychotic nasal vocals from Danny, instead of the usual roar. Did I say «psychotic»? There's a song called 'Psychotic Girl' here, whose odd vibe would be more suitable for the Pixies rather than the Keys. That's how far they are willing to go this time in order to remodel their face.

 

It is hard to complain, either, when the melodies are so good. On the hard-rocking tunes, Auer­bach regains the ability to strike out those awesome riffs — or perhaps they just sound awesome in contrast to the «softer» tunes this time — the melody of 'Strange Times', for instance, borrows a few chords from Sabbath's 'Sweet Leaf', incorporating them into a faster, sweatier garage riff, to very good effect. 'Same Old Thing' (nothing to do with several classic blues tunes with the same name) is built on a very atmospheric guitar pattewrn, unfortunately, stuffed a bit too deep into the background — making the song less effective and memorable than it could be. Fortunately, the Tull-like flute embellishments will help it register in the mind.

 

Overall, the record is hardly a masterpiece, for the same old reasons — you'd have to be the ge­nius to shame all genii, to put out a «masterpiece» based on reshuffling the good old blues-rock / garage-rock chord stock as late as 2008 — but, for Auerbach and his drummer pal, it opens the road to survival and development. Purists may feel betrayed, yet I think that their schtick can work even with flutes and banjos — thumbs up.

 

It is hardly a coincidence that the closing num­ber, a duet between Danny and minimalist country girl Jessica Lea Mayfield, is called 'Things Ain't Like They Used To Be'. In fact, it is a blatant anthemic statement — so straightforward that it ain't even all that fun. But, like almost everything else on here, the song still manages to be touching and softly inspiring. Who cares if it hangs on just one melodic vocal line? It is still the real thing.

 

BROTHERS (2010)

 

1) Everlasting Light; 2) Next Girl; 3) Tighten Up; 4) Howlin' For You; 5) She's Long Gone; 6) Black Mud; 7) The Only One; 8) Too Afraid To Love You; 9) Ten Cent Pistol; 10) Sinister Kid; 11) The Go Getter; 12) I'm Not The One; 13) Unknown Brother; 14) Never Gonna Give You Up; 15) These Days.

 

I suppose it must be hard for the general public to think of two guys as «brothers» when one is playing all the «real» instruments and singing all the vocals and the other one is «just» drumming, no matter how vital that drumming may be to the music (and, with all due respect to Pat­rick Carney, he ain't no Keith Moon). But more power to the band if slapping on a title like Brothers functions as a placebo to get the creative juice a-flowin'. Actually, for a short while there was a certain danger of The Black Keys breaking up — Auerbach released a solo album and Carney had serious family problems — but eventually, things got better, and, if the band members are to be believed, their personal turmoil only helped to improve the music.

 

There is one serious problem with Brothers: it is way too long. The running time of 55 minutes is the band's personal record, and a highly questionable one: when it's just one guy with a guitar and one other guy with a drumset, things are supposed to wrap up quickly. If you listen to Brothers on a one-song-per-day basis, you might think that there are no truly «weak» cuts here; but if ta­ken together, the last 20 minutes will almost inevitably sound like a rehash of the first 30. Which is especially troublesome considering that, in actuality, Brothers further expands the Keys' musi­cal vision — with Danger Mouse at the helm once again, there are new sounds, new influences, new emotions, and all of it without sacrificing the old spirit.

 

Beginning with the beginning, 'Everlasting Light' is generic folk blues at heart, but the coating is cool — a dry, crunchy tone beaten into a danceable pop-rock pattern, drumbeats merged with handclaps and an out-of-nowhere 'Come Together'-ish «ssh...!», credible attempts at falsetto cro­oning from Auerbach, and minimal, but atmospheric backing whoos and whaas from hip-hopper Nicole Wray (guest-starring here through her partici­pation in «Blakroc», a joint rap-rock side project between the Keys and various hip-hop artists). No better illustration for the devil that is in the proverbial details. The crunch and simplicity firmly tie the song to the band's legacy and style, but the coating shows how successfully they manage to climb out of the rut that said legacy was beginning to turn into.

 

Likewise, the big hit single, 'Tighten Up', could have been a by-the-book roots-rock number with nothing but yer average «soul» to redeem it, if not for all the little things. The cute little Morri­cone-style whistling in the intro. Carney's melodic drum fills, raising tension. The in-between verses guitar riff that transforms the song into power pop before returning it back to R&B territo­ry. The unpredictable key change for the coda. It is good to know that the boys are now open to the idea of having experimental fun in the studio.

 

Similar stylistic mergers characterize most of the material on Brothers. Hardcore blues-rock fans might be appalled, as well as blues-rock haters who firmly cherish the idea that the only thing that will help traditional blues-rock to get better is a terrorist attack on the Chicago Blues Festival (no hostages taken, preferably). We ought to respect those religious feelings — but there is nothing wrong, either, about welcoming intelligent ways of merging blues and pop like the band does here on 'Ten Cent Pistol' (a catchy, hummable chorus there, within a song whose basic melody, lyrics, and attitude are all geared towards dark blues), or on the slightly martial 'Howlin' For You', which is what The Cars could have originally sounded like, if only they'd tacked their tacky key­boards on early British R&B rather than early British pop-rock.

 

That said, I repeat that the bag of tricks is not really full enough to accommodate 55 minutes worth of new Black Keys songs. Individually, none of them register as masterpieces; collectively, there's just too many of them, and, in the end, I walk away from Brothers with a sense of indig­nant admiration that is almost enough to convert the thumbs up to its opposite — here be an al­bum that chooses excellent ways to dispel boredom, but gets so caught up in the excitement that, in the end, it just gets plain boring to watch it chase away boredom. (It does not help, either, that most of the tracks on which experimentation is essentially suspended in favor of «soul», e. g. the heart-on-the-sleeve ballad 'These Days' and the personal confession 'Unknown Brother', are somehow all grouped at the end). Which all translates to a complex, but very often felt (judging by peer reviews) flaw — and kudos to Dan and Patrick for acknowledging the fact by extermina­ting said flaw on their next record.

 

EL CAMINO (2011)

 

1) Lonely Boy; 2) Dead And Gone; 3) Gold On The Ceiling; 4) Little Black Submarines; 5) Money Maker; 6) Run Right Back; 7) Sister; 8) Hell Of A Season; 9) Stop Stop; 10) Nova Baby; 11) Mind Eraser.

 

This record should dissipate any doubts as to whether The Black Keys might eventually shed their garage-blues-rock skin without compromising their very reason for existence. If Brothers could have us feeling uneasy about that, El Camino rights all wrongs — simply by being the band's best album since... well, I have never ever been that excited about The Black Keys ever since I first took a listen to The Big Come Up.

 

With the continuing help of Danger Mouse (who is now not only co-producing the record, but is also listed as co-writer on all the songs), the band puts the finishing touches on its new sound, and that means removing all limits. Yes, you will hear echos of ELO and ABBA on this record in­stead of echos of John Lee Hooker, and this means that the band is bound to lose some of its hard­core fans: I can easily see where 'Sister' would be taken as an offensive sellout by those who swore undying allegiance to 'Run Me Down' nine years earlier. Which should merely serve as a warning — temporary pacts are usually wiser than undying allegiances.

 

But never fear, El Camino is still quintessentially a brutal, brawny rock album, with a serious chunk of its new numbers sounding as minor (but almost always useful) variations on tunes from the band's minimalist period. It's just that they're done with the minimalism (for now). Instrumen­tal credits are still running very low (Danger Mouse is credited for keyboards, and there are three female singers on backup vocals), but the sound still comes out as their fullest and densest yet, and now they have learned to take advantage of this fullness — drawing upon a varied bag of tricks to make each song stand out in a different way.

 

Auerbach's heavy guitar sound is still the leader of the trend: no longer an absolute dictator, but the album's lead-in track and first hit single, 'Lonely Boy', still opens with a burly riff — one that seems to have been born as a «Danny Auerbach does Marc Bolan doing Cliff Gallup» sort of thing: big, catchy, rebellious, and fun. With Danger Mouse's anthemic keyboards and the backup girls joining in on the chorus, 'Lonely Boy' gets a glam-rock coating that, like the best of 1970s glam-rock, never loses its rock'n'roll heart under the glitz. Furthermore, it even preserves a bit of Auerbach's trademark soulful longing — instead of the tongue-in-cheek smarty-pants arrogance that used to make intelligent glam-rock sound too cynical and «nihilist» for many people. El Ca­mino may be glitzy, but it is never «hip».

 

Furthermore, the radical shift of sound seems to have revitalized Auerbach into writing lots of good, if predictably derivative, melodies — and it helps that the album is not as drawn out as Bro­thers, because there ain't no filler anywhere in sight. The few barebones numbers that remain still rock out as crazy ('Money Maker' is another one of those Nuggets-style nuggets whose riff you swear you've heard a million times, yet cannot remember a single song which uses exactly the same chord sequence; 'Mind Eraser' somehow manages a shiver-sending effect with its omi­nous "oh, don't let it be over" chorus). And, on the other end of the spectrum, the Keys' most da­ring shifts in style are just as good. 'Sister' is high-caliber retro-1970s pop-rock with a falsetto chorus, one of the best songs Jeff Lynne never wrote even though he had every chance of doing so. 'Nova Baby' shamelessly steals part of its vocal melody from ABBA's 'Lay All Your Love On Me' ("you walk around in other towns" = "I wasn't jealous before we met", etc.), but sets it in an anthemic power-pop context that works in an entirely different way.

 

Even in between those two extremes, diversity is the word of day. 'Little Black Submarines' be­gins as a touching folk ballad, then, midway through, transforms into a bombastic grunge num­ber with quasi-psychedelic backing whoah-whoah vocals. 'Gold On The Ceiling' is stomp-your-feet boogie-rock accompanied with an electronic harpsichord. 'Dead And Gone' takes the martial pounding of 'London Calling' and imbues it with a broken-hearted love-crazy atmosphere. The same atmosphere resurfaces on 'Run Right Back', but this time punctuated with an unforgettable weepy slide riff. And so on.

 

Summing up, I may not have heard all that many albums from 2011, but El Camino must unque­stionably be one of the year's best — if only due to its consistency in surprising the mind and up­lifting the spirit. And, to me, it is final and irrefutable proof that Auerbach is «the real thing», because his music turns out to be living and breathing even when its surface is muddled with all these extra, and, upon first sight, superfluous flourishes. I mean, when a guy plays distorted gui­tar music à la John Lee Hooker and sings in a growly voice, that alone can seduce «seekers of the truth» into accepting the guy as a mini-Messiah — no matter how inventive or individualistic the actual songs may be. But when the song is given an odd, «unsuitable» musical coating, and still remains inventive and individualistic, you know you're dealing with something real good.

 

And, if nothing goes wrong, I bet we can expect many more surprises from The Black Keys for years to come (especially considering that the breakup potential for a band that consists of two members is fairly low). In the meantime, thumbs up for El Camino as, I repeat, one of 2011's best, regardless of whether I have heard 10 or 1,000 albums from said year.

 

TURN BLUE (2014)

 

1) Weight Of Love; 2) In Time; 3) Turn Blue; 4) Fever; 5) Year In Review; 6) Bullet In The Brain; 7) It's Up To You Now; 8) Waiting On Words; 9) 10 Lovers; 10) In Our Prime; 11) Gotta Get Away.

 

If, for some reason, you happened to miss out on Brothers and El Camino and have stumbled upon this record right after Rubber Factory, prepare yourself for a shock comparable with arri­ving at... well, let's say Genesis' We Can't Dance right after Foxtrot. Or try to imagine AC/DC doing a disco album. Not altogether impossible — with a little overworking of the fantasy machine, you could see Angus Young adapting his guitar style to the good old four-on-the-floor. (In fact, they almost came close to it on a couple songs off Highway To Hell).

 

Although it's not as if there were no going back altogether, Turn Blue sees the finalization of the transformation of the original Black Keys into something completely different. Many critics and fans alike have blamed this on the ever increasing influence of Danger Mouse, who they accuse of practically running this band now and adapting them to his own musical taste and vision. I have a hard time accepting that — unless he keeps Dan and Patrick on drugs or something, these guys don't really look like they could be so easily manipulated into sacrificing their identity and becoming the willing slaves of their producer. More grounded would be an accusation of «selling out»: the success of El Camino has brought The Black Keys to the attention of a much larger fanbase than the old blues-rock revival crowds, and so it could be expected that they might want to go on moving in that same «commercial» direction — and simply retain Danger Mouse as their good luck charm. «If he can get us to No. 2, surely he can get us to No. 1». And that he did.

 

But even so, «commercial» is such a vague term these days that there is little sense in trying to use it as an expletive. In the 1980s, for instance, if you went «commercial», this meant a very well defined style of production and musical values. In 2014, there is a range of «commercial» artists that covers all the vast space between Katy Perry and Lana del Rey, so what exactly would count as a «sellout»? And although Turn Blue does sound «modern» in its choice of production techniques, glossiness of sound, and electronic seasoning, its melodic backbone (like most of the melodic backbones of 2014, for that matter), hails from quite a chronologically different era.

 

In its relatively diverse array of styles, Turn Blue sounds like the band's declaration of love for the Seventies, a decade in which neither of the two band members spent any reasonable amount of time (Dan was born in 1979, and Patrick one year later), but which seems to have shaped most of their musical preferences anyway. Except where, earlier, they would be inspired primarily by the heavy blues-rock acts, now they pay their dues to the R&B, funk, art-pop, and even progres­sive rock corners of the scene. They do adapt all that baggage to the pulls and yearnings of their own soul, it's true — that unexplainable «blues feeling», the one which is so hard to fake when you get to know it, is all over this record. But then it was all over the records by their  predeces­sors just as well. So it does become a tad difficult to understand where the imitation ends and the real Danny Auerbach begins. It's even possible that he doesn't really begin at all.

 

As the album starts, with the multi-part epic ʽWeight Of Loveʼ, you might ask yourself the ques­tion: «Is this really The Black Keys, or is this a Pink Floyd outtake?» Those pensive guitar chords, those wailing keyboard effects sounding like lonely planets zooping by your window, they all seem conspiring to put you in a Dark Side Of The Moon (more exactly, ʽBreatheʼ) state of mind. Then the song changes its time signature, becomes funkier and gradually more violent, before erupting in a climactic solo — but throughout the song, it still retains some of that initial Floydishness, and that's... weird.

 

ʽIn Timeʼ and a couple other songs bring on memories of such recent «R&B» successes as Amy Winehouse, which were, of course, themselves revivals of something older. With a moody, catchy guitar riff but little else in the way of guitar work (most of the other non-percussive overlays are generated with Danger Mouse's array of keyboards), it is a moody «art-groove» that seems to warn us of something we are not sure of ("...you were having your fun, now you're un­der the gun...") in Dan's anguished falsetto (which he uses quite a bit on the album, despite the fact that they never really go into disco: ʽFeverʼ comes close, but it still sounds more like The Cars than Chic). None of it is bad, but none of it is terribly inspiring, either.

 

Sometimes it is downright bizarre: ʽWaiting On Wordsʼ begins in retro-romantic mode, so much so that Auerbach almost sounds like Robin Gibb: the brutal beast trying on some ruffled fabric for a change. As impeccably melodic as these songs are, they are just not too convincing. Wolves in sheep skins? Soulless experiments? Or is it just a case of hopelessly misplaced falsetto? Some­thing like the title track, for instance — to me, despite the paranoid bass line and minor moods, it just refuses to satisfy the «desperate tension» requirement of the lyrics. As The Black Keys «turn blue», there is a nagging suspicion that by «blue» they actually mean «half-frozen to death», and little else. As hard as it is to put my finger on what exactly went wrong here.

 

Something did go wrong, though, if I distinctly feel a sense of relief when it comes to the last track — ʽGotta Get Awayʼ opens with some crunchy Stones-like riffage, then quickly turns into a slightly softened up pub-rocker with a pop chorus. No pretense or ambition, no quirky production tricks... no «classic Black Keys» ambience, either, but somehow the song, even despite its repe­titiveness (before it is over, you will remember exactly how far Kalamazoo is from San Berdoo), feels more «real» than everything else on here.

 

To put it short and blunt, Turn Blue is not a bad album — but it intentionally forgets about what it was that made The Black Keys such an outstanding band; Turn Faceless would have been a more appropriate title. On the other hand, even as a faceless album, it is an interesting experiment in retro-genre-hopping, it sounds tasteful, it has some good songwriting, and in the end, after much deliberation, I still give it a thumbs up. Just do not even think of getting close to it if you come to the Black Keys section with definite expectations.

 

ADDENDA: SOLO WORK

 

THE ARCS

 

YOURS, DREAMILY (2015)

 

1) Once We Begin (Intro); 2) Outta My Mind; 3) Put A Flower In Your Pocket; 4) Pistol Made Of Bones; 5) Every­thing You Do (You Do For You); 6) Stay In My Corner; 7) Cold Companion; 8) The Arc; 9) Nature's Child; 10) Velvet Ditch; 11) Chains Of Love; 12) Come & Go; 13) Rosie (Ooh La La); 14) Searching The Blue.

 

Although «The Arcs» were assembled as a side project of Danny Auerbach, comparison of their first (and so far, only) album with the latest production of The Black Keys shows that Danny probably just wanted to take a break from Carney — because Yours, Dreamily is easily seen as a next logical step in Auerbach's evolution from grizzly blues-rocker into a moody popster, sort of like a one-man Fleetwood Mac in all of its multiple consecutive incarnations (at least he does not have a spare Christine McVie-type personality). Assisting him in this evolution are: keyboard and horn player Leon Michels (who also plays sax in his own band, El Michels Affair), drummer and general multi-instrumentalist Richard Swift (who is also a member of The Shins), and, to a lesser extent, drummer Homer Steinweiss and bassist Nick Movshon, who used to play for the late Amy Winehouse, among others. They all share songwriting credits with Auerbach — particularly Leon Michels — but it is very perfectly clear that this is essentially Danny's project from top to bottom, as his personal unshaved aura is all over the place.

 

And there's nothing wrong with that, either: Yours, Dreamily is an excellent album, full to the brim (a very reasonable 45-minute long brim) with clever, tasteful, and almost instantly memo­rable «blues-pop» songs that are about as worthy a continuation of the Brothers / El Camino / Turn Blue tradition as could be. The sentiments throughout are generally the same — brooding, soulful, a little melancholic, maybe even a tad misanthropic, reflecting an artistic depression that is quiet, but subtly deep enough to make you want to kill yourself if you spend too much time digging: ʽEverything You Do (You Do For You)ʼ, a mean mean reversal of the crappy message of the Bryan Adams song, could be understood as a personal complaint about an egoistic lover, or it could be just as easily interpreted as a bash of the general reason why everything goes wrong in this world of ours. Well, probably not — most of the songs here are directly woman-related — but the music has a consistent «world-weary» makeover that will be of great use to you whenever you feel pissed at either your partner, or The System, or your own unenviable personal role in the consequences of the Big Bang.

 

The songs are generally blues- or jazz-based, but always with catchy vocal hooks, most of which are traditionally lodged in the song title: as a concluding chorus line of each depressed verse, the line "everything you do, you do for you" falls with a heavy falsetto thud like a killer stone (and the percussion is produced like a series of ominous faraway thumps to emphasize the effect), and so does the concluding line of ʽPistol Made Of Bonesʼ, a rather transparent metaphor for the past coming to haunt the protagonist. On the other hand, ʽStay In My Cornerʼ, almost completely sung in falsetto and owing its existence to Sam Cooke, Ben E. King, Al Green, or any other master of the American R&B tradition, has the hook dutifully delivered like a tender plea, because, well, somebody is gotta be there for the protagonist to shield him from all these dark thoughts, and to make his case even stronger, the protagonist is also going to play a loud, slightly distorted, heart-breaking slide guitar solo for that special somebody.

 

Although the album was not produced by Danger Mouse (Auerbach and Michels took care of production themselves), his legacy is noticeable — there's echo all over the place, a wide variety of guitar effects (such as the «burping» tone on ʽThe Arcʼ, whose riff, by the way, bears an iffy resemblance to ʽMoney For Nothingʼ), different percussion on every track, ranging from drum machines to the above-mentioned «distant thumping» on ʽEverything You Doʼ, and other little production tricks that efficiently modernize the music while keeping its melodic backbone firmly in the past. The most questionable production decision is probably on ʽCome & Goʼ, essentially a modern-day cabaret number loaded with love-making moans, a song that you might find a little problematic to play in the presence of your parents (depends on the parents, of course) — certain­ly, the hookline "the more he comes, the more he goes" will take on quite a distinctive meaning next to this bit of softporn soundtrack. But then, we're all grown up here, and this is an inventive addition to the loungy-smoky atmosphere of the track.

 

If there is one single flaw to Yours, Dreamily, it is that no single track stands out above the others — not only is the same mood retained throughout, but it also constantly stays at the same level of room temperature. Auerbach never lets that depression carry him away to madness or imaginary suicide, nor does he allow the fervor of his prayers for delivery to carry him away into the stratosphere. Perhaps he is right, and perhaps he is simply being honest with us, expressing his emotionality exactly in the way that it runs through him, without artificially revving himself up or down — the lamentable consequence of this being that the album, while totally lovable upon first listens, will probably not hold up too long in your head.

 

Then again, was it really meant to? As a mere «detour» from the Black Keys, a side venture that will neither get a lot of publicity nor a lot of critical attention, Yours, Dreamily exceeds all possible expectations anyway, and I don't think we could or should be asking for more. When they finally bring it down with the soothing piano balladeering of ʽSearching The Blueʼ, a dreamy, moving tune with a bit of the old inquisitive Lennonesque spirit, we finally get the main question of the album — "Is anything we do / Ever gonna last? / Couldn't I have a clue, / Searching the blue?" Well, I'm not sure if Yours, Dreamily is going to last, what with all of its humble tone and un-flashy appearance, but at least it is a record that should be taken seriously by its contem­poraries — and, once again, confirms my opinion of Auerbach as one of the leading artists of his generation, even if that may not be meaning all that much in the 2010s. Thumbs up.

 

BLACK LIPS

BLACK LIPS! (2003)

 

1) Throw It Away; 2) Freakout; 3) Ain't No Deal; 4) Stone Cold; 5) I've Got A Knife; 6) Down And Out; 7) Steps; 8) Fad; 9) Sweet Kin; 10) Crazy Girl; 11) Everybody Loves A Cocksucker; 12) Can't Get Me Down; 13) You're Dumb; 14*) Say Hello To The Postman.

 

For a band whose members are known not to be above vomiting onstage and strumming their guitars with their reproductive male organs well in front of their audiences, Black Lips made their self-titled debut album sound surpri­singly tame in comparison. What is even more surprising, though, is that it sounds like nothing else — even if it is perfectly easy segmentable into a nifty sum of its influences. All of the songs are forgettable — but the impression is not.

 

These guys come from Dunwoody, Georgia, and are a fine example of «going against the grain»: instead of the expected country and Southern rock influences, they arrogantly take their lessons straight from Nuggets-era garage rock. In fact, probably the best description for this early sound of theirs is — this is what the Count Five, the Standells, the Strangeloves etc. would have soun­ded like, had modern freedom of expression and hardcore punk ideology been developed around 1965 rather than a decade and a half later. Imagine a Gene Vincent infected by the mentality of a Metallica, or a Dave Clark Five playing with the psychology of a Weezer. Black Lips, then, are a cross between the Seeds, Sonic Youth, and Agnostic Front.

 

And I do mean it. The snotty, wheezy vocals; the jangly guitars, way too «thin» and wimpy for modern standards; the simple, sloppy drumwork that tries to compensate only through energy and aggression — even most of the «nu-garage» bands do not play that authentic. More than half of these songs are decodable as not coming from the Sixties through one single weak spot: they are almost completely hookless. Beyond setting the basic three-chord (sometimes, one-chord) groove, the Lips rarely advance to anything other than just degenerating into random noise. This is some­thing that few mid-Sixties garage groups could be accused of – at least, few that history let us know about, for obvious reasons.

 

But it's not as if the Lips are incapable of hooks (an idea that later albums would dispel): this is a conscious choice, and this is where «modern mentality» steps in — hooks are nothing, attitude is everything. We know that attitude: run your spirit through channels of pure enthusiasm and spon­taneous insanity ('Steps', mad deconstructed surf-rock drowned in wild party noises). They are so focused on the attitude that, after a while, it almost becomes contagious to the point that you start distinguishing hooks where you'd swear they weren't present just a few minutes ago (like the awe­some slide guitar onslaught on 'Fad').

 

Bits of diversity are supplied by occasional raids on territories adjacent to fast-paced noisy garage punk: 'Stone Cold' is a slow, stuttering, two-minute-long «moody» blues-rocker à la early Ani­mals, and 'Down And Out' is an eerie, smoky vaudeville piece with «evil» vocals, whose combi­nation of monotonous power chords and suspicious electric piano in the background might even have been appreciated by the likes of Tom Waits. Then there is a philosophically-minded slow creeper in the vein of Lou Reed, appropriately titled 'Everybody Loves A Cocksucker'. Yeah... right. It is the second-longest track on the album, hence, a real focal piece.

 

Overall, I have no idea who are the people to whose interests this whole deal is targeted. Sixties fans will find it too tuneless and noisy, Eighties fans will find it too post-modern and insincere, and Noughties fans will find it way too overdone in its sucking up to retro values. All of which makes Black Lips! a completely timeless experience, rewardable with a thumbs up for no par­ticu­lar reason. Maybe in ten years I'll think of one.

 

Technical note: This is the only Black Lips album recorded with the participation of the band's first guitarist, Ben Eberbaugh, killed in a car accident prior to the release. So if you happen to complain about the lack of 'Fad'-like guitar parts on their subsequent records, keep that in mind.

 

WE DID NOT KNOW THE FOREST SPIRIT MADE THE FLOWERS GROW (2004)

 

1) M.I.A.; 2) Time Of The Scabs; 3) Dawn Of The Age Of Tomorrow; 4) Nothing At All; 5) 100 New Fears; 6) Stranger; 7) Juvenile; 8) Notown Blues; 9) Ghetto Cross; 10) Jumpin' Around; 11) Super X-13; 12*) Hope Jazz.

 

With a title like that, one would probably expect an album by the likes of The Animal Collective — although, on second thought, The Animal Collective would probably find it too blunt to title their album with a direct quotation from Princess Mononoke. But no, Black Lips are not going all-out psychedelic on our ears (except for maybe the last «hidden» track, which I will get around to in a few moments). Instead, they latch this title on what is their shortest, noisiest, messiest re­cord ever, consequently, for some — the best album these guys ever made.

 

Perhaps it was the tragic death of their guitarist that infuriated the Lips so much, they swore to themselves not just to «carry on», but to carry on with an acute vengeance. The record certainly takes no prisoners. «Production» here is practically non-existent; if someone told me the band had lost the master tapes and had to substitute them with a bootleg recording that one of their fans made on an old cassette player, lurking in one corner of the studio behind a mixing console, I would be inclined to believe it. «Hooks» are out of the question, although, quite by accident, some of the ringing guitar lines happen to be a tad more memorable than others. Vocals, even though they are still emulating the nasal whine of old time garage rockers rather than the word­less barking of classic punkers, are unsegmentable into individual words. And so on.

 

While I appreciate the gesture, I do not quite see the point of carrying garage revivalism into this particular direction. There is nothing fresh or overwhelmingly exciting about noise-rock these days — the novelty has worn off, and nowadays, every lo-fi band putting gurgling fuzz on three chords may be suspected of simply covering a lack of inspiration, instead of making a statement that has meaning both for them and for us. «Fans of the Stooges might like this», I am told, but I do not quite get it — why not go directly to the source, then? When the Stooges made this kind of music, it was a D. H. Lawrence-style act of suicidal bravery, and you could feel that vibe right through the speakers. The Lips go for that noise thing in complete confidence, and the only vibe I feel is boring backyard hooliganry, perhaps alleviated with a slight touch of humor.

 

Repeated listens do reveal that the album is not just one monolithic slab of lo-fi noise. The Lips value emotional and technical diversity enough to move from pure garage ('Time Of The Scab') to ominous songs of rebellion ('Dawn Of The Age Of Tomorrow') to slide-driven blues-punk ('Stranger') to organ-driven rhythm-and-blues ('Notown Blues'); there is even a brief acoustic in­terlude ('100 New Fears'), during which they try to sing something that approaches medieval folk, backed by female harmonies and a harpsichord (!). But I cannot help but take offense at how they completely refuse to work on these songs. Each track is a ragged skeleton, barely covered with a few lumps of flesh and a few threads of skin, waving helplessly in the wind. If you have not sa­tisfied your appetite with this style after a whole decade of lo-fi en vogue, be my (their) guest. If you have, there is no crime in skipping this record altogether, as one of those youthful excesses that the youths in question just had to get out of their system, in order to go to better things.

 

Actually, I only find purpose in the last track — six minutes of avantgarde doodling, set to a jaz­zy (almost lounge-jazzy at that) rhythm section. After all, free-form improv is always free-form improv — one might unexpectedly fall upon exciting combinations of sound, or one might not, but even if one doesn't, the goal is still respectable. It would be a miracle if the Lips did, and, ex­pectedly, they do not, but it's always nice to hope for miracles, which is probably why the track's secret name is 'Hope Jazz'. Every other bit of noise on the album, however, seems pre-planned, which makes the effect even more disappointing.

 

Resumé of the day: I can only recommend this for people whose minds are so far removed from my own that I wouldn't even want to begin to recommend them anything. In other words, as you may have guessed, it's a thumbs down all the way.

 

LET IT BLOOM (2005)

 

1) Sea Of Blasphemy; 2) Can't Dance; 3) Boomerang; 4) Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah; 5) Not A Problem; 6) Gung Ho; 7) Everybody's Doin' It; 8) Feeling Gay; 9) Take Me Home (Back To Boone); 10) Gentle Violence; 11) She's Gone; 12) Fairy Stories; 13) Dirty Hands; 14) Workin'; 15) Punk Slime; 16) Empassant.

 

The Lips' third album seems to be titled much more modestly than their second (although still dealing with the same issue) — but this is a false impression, since any title like that brings on in­evitable as­sociations with Let It Be and Let It Bleed, meaning that this is really an arrogant sta­tement of purpose if there ever was one. Or, at least, a tongue-in-cheek arrogant statement of pur­pose. In any case, it commands attention — in a gambling way.

 

And admittedly, I admit that it is a heart-warming improvement. The band steps back on the noise, just a little bit, opening the window just enough to let in some of that melodic spirit of the 1960s, while at the same time still keeping the production values and the playing style very lo-fi; at the same time, the diversity is back, with garage-blues-rock occasionally giving way to folk-rock, dark blues, and hooliganish R'n'B à la early Stones. (Not a lot of diversity, of course, but still fee­ling like The White Album after the boring monotonous noise of We Did Not Know).

 

Hence the predictable question: now that we see some songwriting going on, how does it com­pare — both to the band's debut album, and to their influences? On the first point, I would say that the songs are a half-notch more interesting and involving, but the sound is still a whole notch dir­tier and noisier, so that only a properly initiated adept of the lo-fi ideology will like them when they are playing this-a-way more than when they were playing that-a-way. On the second point, they are still nowhere near close to competing with their garage ancestors in terms of inventive hooks. Not that they claim to be competing, of course.

 

So, in the end, once again it all comes down to the idea of «reviving and modernizing garage va­lues for the intelligent segment of white trash in 2005». And the fun of it lies, of course, in reali­zing that most of these songs could not be recorded in 1966 — it takes decades of additional de­velopment (and even brain growth) to produce these results.

 

'Can't Dance', for instance, takes a speedy «punk-metal» chord sequence that sounds suspiciously close to 'Mötorhead' (the song), and only then proceeds to dress it up in 1960s' guitar and vocal tones. 'Not A Problem' makes a joke on reasons that drive us to homicidal tendencies ("I woke up in the morning just the other day, found my dog beneath the Chevrolet") – one that probably would not be tolerated or under­stood in 1966, nor would people be necessarily hip to the song's maddening combo of thin jangly guitar driven to non-existence by deafening fuzz noise. But, again, the fuzz, the jangle, and the lead vocals are all as retro as they come.

 

Word problems would also surface as early as on the titles to 'Feeling Gay' and 'Fairy Stories' — both of these songs have their prototypes in the Stones ('Heart Of Stone' and 'Rocks Off', respec­tively), but their messages, whatever they are, are intended for modern audiences. On the other hand, 'Dirty Hands' starts off like the Ramones' 'I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend', then quickly be­comes something like one of those early pop ballads by Manfred Mann — and if you were worry­ing about the meaning of the title, well, the hands happen to be dirty simply because it's an inno­cent story about love on the beach.

 

Whether these quirky little twists on the quirky little twists of days gone by are enough to justify Let It Bloom's existence — that is not for me to decide. It's a fun album, a curious album, a lis­tenable album, but so far, I have been unable to convince myself that it is also an unforgettable album. As far as I am concerned, The Black Lips are still playing childhood games here, and in a way that, either consciously or unintentionally, prevents grown-ups from discerning just how much real talent and artistic drive there is behind the entertainment masks. Fortunately for us and them, childhood would soon be over.

 

LOS VALIENTES DEL MUNDO NUEVO (2007)

 

1) M.I.A.; 2) Boomerang; 3) Sea Of Blasphemy; 4) Stranger; 5) Not A Problem; 6) Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah; 7) Boone; 8) Everybody's Doing It; 9) Fairy Stories; 10) Dirty Hands; 11) Buried Alive; 12) Juvenile.

 

A new contract with Vice Records was celebrated by this supposedly live release – «supposedly», because there has been some debate about whether these tracks have really been recorded in a seedy bar in Tijuana, Mexico, or have simply been made to sound like they have really been re­corded in a seedy bar in Tijuana, Mexico. Whatever be the eventual outcome of that debate, it is hardly significant. Nobody denies the fact that the Black Lips were basically born to play seedy bars, particularly in Tijuana, Mexico, and it would be fairly hard to deny that there is plenty of genuine-sounding seedy bar atmosphere on this record, replete with an off-his-head Spanish stage an­nouncer, rounds of applause steadily flowing into drunken brawl, and sound quality that would be considered awful for anyone else, but is almost pristine, really, by the Lips' usual standards.

 

This might actually be the major point: if you ever wanted to hear 'M.I.A.', 'Stranger', and 'Juve­nile' in a sonic quality acceptable for the average ear, this is your best chance. They turn out to be fun little pop-punk creations that I, for one, could not appreciate one single bit in the original set­ting, but here, the cleaner sound helps bring out all of their non-aggressive aggression. 'M.I.A.', in particular, works very well as the set opener, and 'Juvenile' is an excellent set closer. (Yes, it ta­kes a band as rash as the Black Lips to have their live songs sound cleaner than their studio ones — provided this is really a live recording — but I am not sure if this is really a virtue of gigantic proportions in a world where «lo-fi» has managed to transform from an industrial side effect to a respectable artistic technique).

 

Most of the rest of the setlist, however, comes from the already much better recorded Let It Bloom, and I couldn't say that the amount of energy and pure debauchery on these versions sur­passes the original. Even if all of these songs were indeed to be played in the nude, interrupted by spontaneous bursts of vomit, urination, unprotected sex with each other, coprophagia, animal sacrifices, genuine Satan worship, random rape of audience members, and other innocent bits of Sunday amusement, I am afraid that this does not translate in an understandable manner onto the record — you'd have to look for an accompanying video release. (Popular mythology may claim that there are only four copies in existence, and all are kept away from the public eye under the four pillows of the Washington Wives).

 

That said, the Black Lips are a «naughty party band» almost by definition, and Los Valientes does an honest job in adding the «naughty party» bits that one cannot find on regular studio al­bums. Even if the applause, the cheerings, the drunken brawl have all been dubbed over a studio re-recording, it still places the Lips in a very proper context for them. Note also that there is a hidden track here at the end of the album — a sort of atmospheric acid-folk ditty laced with alter­nating falsettos, «spooky» voices, and birds chirping, that is quite different from everything this band did before, and, to some extent, points the way to their «mature» future.

 

GOOD BAD NOT EVIL (2007)

 

1) I Saw A Ghost (Lean); 2) O Katrina!; 3) Veni Vidi Vici; 4) It Feels Alright; 5) Navajo; 6) Lock And Key; 7) How Do You Tell A Child That Someone Has Died; 8) Bad Kids; 9) Step Right Up; 10) Cold Hands; 11) Off The Block; 12) Slime And Oxygen; 13) Transcendental Light.

 

And here comes maturity — a record that dispatches with the extreme tendencies of lo-fi and tries to be fun for us all, without segregating the listeners into those who will wade through the muck and those who do not think so much of having to wade through muck if it isn't a matter of life and death. Finally, after all these years, we will be able to tell if the Black Lips are really as great as their image has manipulated them into seeming — without having to shake the aural dust and so­nic soot out of our ears as a pre-requisite!

 

Of course, without the safeguard of horrendous production, the band runs an increased risk of pas­sing for trivial fetishists. But in my personal system of values, «trivial fetishism» ranks well above «trivial fetishism masked by intentional sloppiness». And besides, there is still way too much post-punk freedom here — in the lyrics, in the vocals, in the minimalism, in the roughness — for anyone to seriously mistake Good Bad Not Evil for a collection of garage oldies.

 

The singles are generally the best, just the way it is supposed to be with this kind of music. 'Cold Hands' starts off in an Easybeats mode, then, after a couple verses, segues into a Ventures-style surf-rock solo, everything at breakneck speed — the only thing that is missing is a sense of pur­pose, although the lyrics vaguely suggest some sort of social comparison going on ("We get along while their very bones decay"), but a little more fire and desperation could be welcome here. Then again, the Black Lips are hooligans and jokers — they'd rather piss on the cop than stick him up, and that goes for pretty much everything else, including Hurricane Katrina: 'O Katrina' probably would have been misunderstood, had they had the gall to write and release it way back in 2005, but two years later, with the tension gone for good, they can allow themselves to chant "O, Katrina, why you gotta be mean?" to a jolly catchy dance melody.

 

The big «anthem» of the album, however, is 'Bad Kids', whose particular lyrics are not very inte­resting (hardly any new insights into the problem since the days of the Ramones and the Clash anyway); what is interesting is that they are lain over an upbeat retro-pop structure whose roots go well back to Motown — the best proverbial illustration for «flower punk» that any encyclo­pae­dia could ask for. Punk-rock with a Motown smile does not blunder its way under your win­dows every day of the week; with these numbers, the Black Lips may be finally beginning to carve themselves out a niche all their own.

 

Or maybe it is with such «crowd-shockers» as 'How Do You Tell A Child That Someone Has Died' — a song whose lyrical message is quite well disclosed in the title, and whose melody pil­fers a standard country waltz to discuss the uncomfortable subject in Nashville terms? Not neces­sarily, since this approach shows too much of a Ween influence (particularly 12 Golden Country Greats, of course), and the Lips lack the proper musicianship to catch up with Ween in their reckless genre-riding. Which does not mean that the song does not leave a proper «impression»: each decade needs its own dose of brutal, mercyless country-thumping, and it just so happened to have been ten years since Ween gave us theirs.

 

In other news, the Lips poke blunt fun at world religions ('Veni Vidi Vici'), Native Americans ('Navajo'), rednecks ('Lock And Key'), psychedelics ('Off The Block'), and whatever else I might have missed, all of it set to these little ripped-off variations on Sixties' chord sequences that can each be traced to two or three singles from Nuggets once somebody finances the project (to do that, all that is needed is for the Lips to become the next Beatles, and then you could be their Mark Lewisohn). I hereby confirm that the album is indeed an honest example of «good bad not evil», and that corresponds to a thumbs up, offered with limited enthusiasm but, nevertheless, out of sheer free will. In fact, Good Bad Not Evil even raises some hope that, perhaps, some day these kids might actually begin writing songs rather than just pulling them out of their parents' stereos and filtering them through their asses.

 

200 MILLION THOUSAND (2009)

 

1) Take My Heart; 2) Drugs; 3) Starting Over; 4) Let It Grow; 5) Trapped In A Basement; 6) Short Fuse; 7) I’ll Be With You; 8) BBBJOT; 9) Again & Again; 10) Old Man; 11) The Drop I Hold; 12) Body Combat; 13) Elijah; 14) I Saw God; 15) Meltdown (hidden track).

 

This follow-up to Good Bad Not Evil seems to me to go slightly heavier on fuzziness – as if the band suddenly realized they must have overdone it with cleaning up the slop on the previous re­cord – and seriously lighter on hooks and memorability. Where Good Bad Not Evil almost made me forgot how genuinely mediocre these guys are in the songwriting department, on 200 Million Thousand this mediocrity hits back with a vengeance. At this point, these guys are like the Dave Clark Five's evil twin – «cooler» because they are «nastier», but in other terms, simply furnishing paler, less interesting variations on much stronger pop-rock songs.

 

Tim Sendra, reviewing the album for the All-Music Guide, ended up complaining about its ex­cessive «maturity», saying that the record «could use a little more teenage head and a little less brains» – that the Lips are really only worth our attention when they are being silly, chaotic, ju­venile, and totally trashy. By all means, that was their basic aesthetics when they started out, but first of all, I do not see that it has changed all that much (surely the small bunch of slow, «tense», marginally serious-sounding songs on here, like ʽTrapped In A Basementʼ, cannot be defined as overtly «brainy» in comparison to the fast rock'n'roll numbers), and second, I simply couldn't dis­agree any more – these guys need to be brainy in order to come up with something truly worth our while. There's way too much brainless retro-punk in this world already.

 

Unfortunately, 200 Million Thousand is really an album stuck somewhere in between. It does not inject me with a feeling of control-free drunken teenage revelry, nor does it look like a signi­ficant intellectual statement, in need of serious analysis or whatever. It is simply another batch of Nuggets rip-offs, if not always in melody, then always in spirit; and it is excruciatingly boring. The only track to offer something relatively fresh to my ears was ʽElijahʼ, a madcap bass-and-pi­ano blues romp with a deliciously paranoid chorus – the interaction between the goofy "oh yeah"s and the stop-and-start piano bits were novel and fun enough to interrupt the slumber party.

 

I must confess that this may be, once again, just a case of acute lo-fi-itis: I hate this murky pro­duction with such a passion that it almost surprises myself (and here I was thinking that I can stand any kind of sound after spending my entire childhood listening to bunches of chewn and re-chewn cassette tapes). The displeasure is particularly intense after Good Bad Not Evil, which was like a teaser, showing that the Lips (a) do not really have any religiously motivated feelings against a clean sound and (b) seem to produce better hooks when they are working with clean pro­duction. And now we are back to square.

 

Perhaps a quick run through the first few tracks is in order, just to serve up a few concrete exam­ples. ʽTake My Heartʼ is fast, dark, bass-heavy, Count Five-ish, but the guitars sound choked and stuffy as opposed to razor-sharp, which should really be expected on such a track. ʽDrugsʼ is a garage take on Merseybeat with Beatlesque vocal harmonies, but the melody is primitive, and the guitars sound... right, choked and stuffy. ʽStarting Overʼ begins with a nice promise – some Byr­d­sey jangle – but adds nothing to the basic idea of the jangle, except for some more choked and stuffy guitar playing. ʽLet It Growʼ is an anthemic ode to an embryo (or, perhaps, to an erection – you never know with these guys) whose potential hook is tortured to death by overreliance on distortion and the fact that the lead singer has a plastic bag on his head. And so on and on, ad in­finitum – these complaints will all mostly be of the same character.

 

The bottomline is: these songs are not hopeless, but each of them could be so much more if only the band would not mask its laziness and carelessness as «artistry». Let me say this once more: Lo-Fi is not artistry, at least – not in frickin' two thousand and nine it isn't. It used to be cool once, as the underground's proud and vengeful answer to the bloated overproduction of mainstream com­mercial crap, but these days, it is not just boring, it is almost conservative in nature. Somebo­dy please phone Sir George Martin, while he is still alive, and tell him there is this semi-talented flower punk band that is in desperate need of salvation. Until then – a decisive thumbs down. (And, before I forget: ʽI Saw Godʼ might just be the single stupidest and draggiest thing recorded by these guys so far. Totally with Tim Sendra on that one).

 

ARABIA MOUNTAIN (2011)

 

1) Family Tree; 2) Modern Art; 3) Spidey's Curse; 4) Mad Dog; 5) Mr. Driver; 6) Bicentennial Man; 7) Go Out And Get It; 8) Raw Meat; 9) Bone Marrow; 10) The Lie; 11) Time; 12) Dumpster Dive; 13) New Direction; 14) Noc-A-Homa; 15) Don't Mess My Baby; 16) You Keep On Running.

 

Thank you, Mark Ronson, for helping to steer these guys away from lo-fi. On their last three stu­dio albums, the Lips seem to have been wobbling back and forth, but Arabia Mountain is their cleanest-sounding record yet, and something tells me that, by this time, there is no going back. Especially since the result is one of their strongest efforts, second only to Good Bad Not Evil, and even then, just because it does not have as many sharply high points — but overall, it may actually be more consistent in terms of songwriting.

 

Songwriting and diversity, to be precise: the Lips now feel strong enough to tackle as many dif­ferent styles as they can technically afford, with the only condition being that the styles all be sufficiently retro. Brutal aggressive garage, riff-based power-pop, Ramonesy punk, proto-Goth spookdom, drunken folk dances, guitar jangle, a bit of twist, a bit of glam — well, nothing too distant from the parts of each other, but different enough to give each song its own little face. And it's all CLEAN! You actually get to hear and enjoy the riffs, the brass lines, the vocal hooks — without having to pick out the miles of sludge, for no other reason than a hollow pretense at «authenticity» that this band's idols, forty years ago, would have considered unprofessional.

 

Okay, so the songs are not very good, as usual: once a mediocre songwriter, always a mediocre songwriter unless your name is George Harrison and your best buds are a pair of you-know-whos. But they are amusing, curious, involving, and just plain nice to hear, even if most of them are still devoid of significance. ʽFamily Treeʼ, opening the album, is a case in point: fast, fun pop-rock à la early Merseybeat bands with a bit of noise and distortion thrown in — and all for the sake of backing up a chorus that they must have found verbally innovative ("Can I take you out, out to the family tree?"), but for no reason other than sheer absurdism. ʽModern Artʼ makes more sense — a song that is about absurdism and its effect on people, another rocker whose musical back­bone is almost surprisingly normal for a song whose chorus goes "You turn around and you don't know where you've been / You look up at the glass dome and your head begins to spin".

 

Relative highlights (relative, because, as I have said, the album is generally quite even) include ʽMad Dogʼ, a brass-dominated anthem to backward messages and the temptations of shock-rock; the unusually grim-sarcastic ʽBicentennial Manʼ and its appropriation of the guitar jangle for hard rock purposes; the hilarious Ramones tribute ʽRaw Meatʼ that tastes like the Ramones, smells like the Ramones, and revs up like the Ramones (but did the Ramones ever have whistling in be­tween verses?); and the album closer ʽYou Keep On Runningʼ, slower, longer, and more atmospheric than everything else — having started out in fun, fast, playful mode, the Lips decide to end things with something ghostly-spooky. As usual, they are semi-successful: the echoey guitars and whoo­shing and wheeing back vocals keep things modestly convincing, but we have heard all of it too many times be­fore to allow ourselves to fall prostrate at the altar.

 

Arabia Mountain is probably as «solid» as these guys are ever going to get. Here, they are no longer a bunch of hooligan kids with good tastes in influences and bad tastes in producing their own records. Their decade-long career has finally turned them into matured professionals — and for me, it's a fact: if you do not know how to fish fabulous melodies out of thin air, there are but two ways to overcome that obstacle — go drive a truck or turn into a matured professional, no matter how much time and will it takes. The Black Lips proved themselves tenacious enough. I do not understand how it would be possible to love this music, which continues to embrace post-modernism in a post-post-modernist epoch at the expense of inspired melodies; but if they go on making albums like Arabia Mountain, each one will at least be an «event» worth savouring and discussing. Respectfully, a thumbs up.

 

UNDERNEATH THE RAINBOW (2014)

 

1) Drive By Buddy; 2) Smiling; 3) Make You Mine; 4) Funny; 5) Dorner Party; 6) Justice After All; 7) Boys In The Wood; 8) Waiting; 9) Do The Vibrate; 10) I Don't Wanna Go Home; 11) Dandelion Dust; 12) Dog Years.

 

And here it is — why deny it? All these years, deep within their hearts, despite all the lo-fi pre­tense, despite all the «experimentalism», despite all the rebellious image issues, there was one simple thing that Black Lips really wanted to be: a cross between The Squires, The Swingin' Medallions, and a couple other bands prominently featured on Nuggets. This is the music they loved most of all, this is the music that they finally give all their hearts to on their eighth album, where about half of the songs sound exactly like mid-Sixties garage pop and the other half sound like a 21st century tribute to Sixties garage pop. Clean, though. Very clean.

 

Understandably, the album got some negative reviews. For those who miss the old days of lo-fi, Underneath The Rainbow is almost an insult, full of simple, faceless pop ditties that show little of the band's personality. They used to be unpredictable hooligans, and now they are making an album that is almost respectable — not to mention produced by Patrick Carney of The Black Keys at a time when The Black Keys themselves are threatened by a loss of face, with their last two albums decried as way too glossy and commercialized.

 

To a certain extent, this is true, but only if you really believe that the band's original schtick was truly as great as their fans proclaim. As far as I'm concerned, these guys had always been jesters — sometimes friendly, sometimes mean-spirited, but never to be taken too seriously, and from that angle of view, they certainly do not cease being jesters on Underneath The Rainbow. "As long as your butt's clean, it's all good", they sing on the first track, and that could very well pass as the overall motto of the album, and it is also well in line with similar mottos from many a si­milar band in the mid-Sixties. And what's wrong with that?

 

Now, of course, you have to keep in mind that this here reviewer has always favored pop over punk and melody over noise — in general — and this would make me predictably biased towards this kind of music over that kind of music. But, honestly, just as there are some punk-and-noise bands that seem to be born for this style of life, Black Lips, to me, sound like a band that has long wandered in search of a goal in life, and finally came into their own with Arabia Mountain, and now they are having a party of a lifetime with this new record. No, they seem to still be struggling a bit with songwriting, but at least now they seem to get a good grip on whatever it is that they are doing, and, above all else, this is nowhere near a loss of personality: on the contrary, they seem to have finally found what they were looking for.

 

Okay, so it is not a lot, what they were looking for. But it's fun! ʽDrive By Buddyʼ sounds like a long lost B-side to a Who single, with Joe Bradley pulling a Keith Moon and the guitar player laying on Townshend-style power chords a-plenty. ʽSmilingʼ is an equally fast folk-pop rocker where bass player Jared Swilley entertains us with an amicable story of his jailtime experience (if only he were a slightly better singer, the song would have had even more impact — then again, maybe the somewhat off-tone nasal bleat is more in line with the band's jester image). ʽMake You Mineʼ (produced by Tom Brenneck rather than Carney), set to a melody reminiscent of Lindsey Buckingham circa Tusk, is a charming clownish love declaration, perfectly fit for an evening serenade if your chosen one values a good sense of humor over generic sentimentality. And that's just the first three songs — and there is a little something to be said about just about every other one that follows.

 

Only one of the tunes sounds like some sort of anthemic generational statement, and no wonder that it is the one that bit me harder than the rest of them, since it shares its siren-like ringing guitar tone with the classic Squires number ʽGoing All The Wayʼ, one of the best songs to come out of the entire garage movement, as far as I'm concerned. The song in question is ʽWaitingʼ, and its chorus slogan, even if stated a bit clumsily ("I don't wanna wait, waiting for it, waiting for the change"), still sounds convincing — nostalgic, perhaps, and a little outdated in its fight-the-power cockiness, but perfectly capturing that «proud idealistic stance» of the days of yore. For a bunch of guys who used to confuse songwriting with binge drinking, nailing this feeling so well is one hell of an achievement, I'd say.

 

Sometimes they do get a little stuffy: ʽBoys In The Woodʼ is a slow, draggy blues-rocker with some potential of becoming an eerie swampy bogeyman of a tune, but the boys do not have the musical expertise to pull it off properly, and the end result is repetitive and boring (worst of all is the misuse of the brass section, most of it lost in the mix and missing the mark). But usually they are saved by the humor, the speed, and the chorus hooks, and sometimes Carney makes them sound like El Camino-era Black Keys (ʽDandelion Dustʼ), which does not hurt at all: glossy, but bass-heavy blues-rock can be fun if played in a lively manner.

 

On the whole, different as it is from early Black Lips, Underneath The Rainbow finds the band inspired and happy, and this, in turn, makes me inspired and happy, at least a little bit. Of course, there is some irony at work here — the old garage pop style that they worship so frantically used to be all about letting one's hair down and enjoying life without setting up formalistic barriers, and now, by imitating their idols so closely, Black Lips end up introducing such barriers. Thus, rather than renewed self-liberation, the album, like so many other Sixties' revival efforts of the new millennium, celebrates nostalgia. But then again, maybe we do need more of those celebra­tions nowadays — at the very least, I'll take efficient Sixties' nostalgia over ridiculous Eighties' nostalgia, so prominent these days as well, any time. And any album with ʽDrive By Buddyʼ and ʽWaitingʼ on it deserves at least a moderate thumbs up in my book.

 

 

BLACK MOUNTAIN

BLACK MOUNTAIN (2005)

 

1) Modern Music; 2) Don't Run Our Hearts Around; 3) Druganaut; 4) No Satisfaction; 5) Set Us Free; 6) No Hits; 7) Heart Of Snow; 8) Faulty Times.

 

What is it that makes neo-hippies different from old time hippies? In pure theory, the easiest thing is to say «Every­thing!» and go on a lengthy rant about imminently changing times. But, having listened to Black Mountain now, I suppose one could be prompted to think twice about that. These guys have shrunk down my conscience just as neatly as they happened to expand it.

 

Black Mountain, formerly called the «Back Mountain Army» (or, rather, the latter was basically Black Mountain the band plus a bunch of friends, relatives, roadies, cats, dogs, and crack whores), hail from Canada, an ideal place for all the neo-hippies to hail from — tasty social benefits and plenty of open space to procrastinate on, if one doesn't mind a little winter cold. Presumably, they are neo-hippies, but better than most: they not only call themselves artists, they also work pretty hard to deserve that title, which is a rarity.

 

The band's music has gained critical praise (otherwise I wouldn't have known about them), and the band itself has accumulated a moderate fan base, but overall my impression is that «The Peo­ple» have generally been colder towards Black Mountain than «The Judges». This is probably be­cause «The Peo­ple» tend to get irritated when the careful ratio of modern-to-ancient gets signifi­cantly tipped in favour of the latter — and Black Mountain make little, if any, secret about their musical ideals. Let us count off just a few models of adoration: (a) The Jefferson Airplane, (b) Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young... (c) ...& Young again, solo this time; (d) Blue Cheer (I was going to write 'Black Sabbath', but they do not care much for the ultra-heavy Sabbath guitar tone, so Blue Cheer is more like it; (e) The Grateful Dead; (f) The Jefferson Airplane again, because there is just no other way to stress how much these guys want to pass themselves off for a modern day 'Plane. Even their lead singer takes some bad cues from Marty Balin, while their lead singerine takes some good cues from Grace Slick.

 

The band's message is spelt out pretty transparently in the second song: "Let's find a better place, and quit this whole damn race" — not even the Airplane were that blunt about it. With a theme like that, you'd expect the underlying music to be pretty paranoid, and it is. Worried, nervous, consta­ntly shifting melodies, graced with lyrical themes of disgust ('No Hits', 'No Satisfaction', 'Faulty Times'), escape ('Don't Run Our Hearts Around', 'Set Us Free'), and passing out ('Drug­anaut') — although, to be frank, drugs as such have relatively little space on the album.

 

If the general feel of things is that simple, the only way Black Mountain could turn into an exci­ting record would be through songwriting — and performance. Well, one thing that can definitely be said in favour of it is that it is undeniably fun, no matter how bleak it sometimes sounds. From the opening comic chord of the saxophone and right down to the final wall-of-sound blast of 'Fau­lty Times', it is totally non-boring to wait for whatever else the band has in store for us. And, sin­ce they take their lessons from so many teachers, you can never tell if the next song is going to be fuzzy and carnivalesque ('Modern Music'), or strewn with mean heavy riffage ('Druganaut'), or be combining a kind of one-note Velvet Undeground drone with a lyrical nod to the Rolling Stones ('No Satisfaction' — which, musically, is sort of what happens when you mix 'Waiting For The Man' with 'Sing This All Together'), or invoke a sanctified Old Testamental spirit ('Set Us Free'). One song, 'No Hits', even goes out of the way to establish a techno rhythm and pierce you with a fully certified electronic arrangement — but even then, in a way, I see them as paying tribute to the likes of the Silver Apples and early Krautrock artists rather than Aphex Twin or Autechre.

 

On their own, the songs are nothing special. For each of these melodies, a Sixties musicologist will have little trouble establishing an exact list of sources. The playing — technically — is good, but nothing too extraordinary or virtuoso-style. The lead singer (Stephen McBean) has a «little guy» type of nasal whine that will not be for everyone; the second lead singer, Amber Webber, does a much better job at convincing me that the end of the world is near — and yet I still cannot see her beating Grace Slick, whom she quite obviously does set out to try to beat.

 

But, admittedly, this is a good, not bad example of kowtowing: they understand the spirit of how-it-used-to-be and they are capable of conjuring it. If the Jefferson Airplane were a necessary ingredient of their ge­neration, and if today's generation needs another Jefferson Airplane, en­ri­ched by the experience of the previous Jefferson Airplane, so be it. From my own point of view, Black Mountain do not say anything that I have not already heard — but what they repeat are pleasant sayings, and I do not mind at all to hear them again in a new combination. The heart, un­fortunately, refuses to budge, because a tribute is a tribute, no matter how many different people you are trying to pay tribute to all at once. But the brain has appreciated the complexity and un­predictability of the tribute, and, in the hopes of seeing the band eventually mature into something bigger than the sum of its influences, advances them a thumbs up. As a bonus provocation, try to find for yourself which of the eight songs quotes musically from 'Paint It Black'. (That's the one I spotted. There may be a miriad of others as well).

 

IN THE FUTURE (2008)

 

1) Stormy High; 2) Angels; 3) Tyrants; 4) Wucan; 5) Stay Free; 6) Queens Will Play; 7) Evil Ways; 8) Wild Wind; 9) Bright Lights; 10) Night Walks; 11*) Bastards Of Light; 12*) Thirteen Walls; 13*) Black Cat.

 

We here on Planet Earth are a continually bored race, one that, for reasons unknown and fiercely disputed, has been gi­ven the possibility of expanding our minds beyond the bare concept of species preservation and reproduction — and has discovered, much to its own frustration, that there really are no objects in this world worthy of the application of these expanded minds. So we have invented ourselves this thing called «A-R-T» to play around with — extracting previously non-existent sounds, images, and word combinations out of our swollen consciences, feeding our neighbours with the stuff and imagining that we are doing a great service to the Universe, even though there is not the slightest bit of evidence that the Universe actually gives a shit about it.

 

These thoughts may not only be banal, but also off target — yet, for some reason, I never stum­bled upon them when listening to Black Mountain's influences, from Jefferson Airplane to Hawk­wind, and here, well, they have pursued me throughout the entire seventy two minutes of In The Future. Can we call In The Future a boring imitation of a bunch of idols? But if we did, would that be interesting? Wouldn't it be more interesting to come back to the record for a second, third, fifty-fifth time, so that the gist of Black Mountain's contribution to humanity can be stated clearly and transparently? Paradoxically, the more derivative someone's art is, the more you have to think about it — the more justification it may require.

 

The reference to Hawkwind, by the way, was not off the cuff. In The Future justifies its title by giving us a spacier, sci-fi-er picture than the debut album, with more emphasis on trippy studio effects, Mellotrons, astral lyrics, and even the sleeve cover. Like before, Black Mountain do not hide behind a wall of metaphors — the album is called In The Future, and they actually sing about the future. This is honest. The downside is, of course, that they are not doing anything that has not already been done in the past. But we can downplay that, can't we?

 

I wish I could rave and rant about how the opening crunchy riff of 'Stormy High' blows my mind to tiny smithereens, smothers them in the fat sizzling oil of the Mellotrons and feeds them back to me on the acoustic waves of the band's terrifying choir of Valkyries. I cannot; this kind of rant should be left to intelligent, but ignorant fourteen-year-old nerds for whom Black Mountain is the default gateway to parallel worlds. But that does not mean — repeat, does not mean — that 'Stor­my High' is a bad, boring, or completely wasted rocker. On the contrary, I like it a lot, like I do pretty much every song on here. I simply find no meaningful or interesting way to describe its artistic ambitions. There's, uh, a thunderstorm brewing. Or something. Who cares?

 

You have to brace yourself for a lot of long songs — for leaden stoner riffs alternating with astral keyboard solos, for walls-of-sound alternating with quiet minimalistic drums-and-bass passages, for heaps of noise materializing into Grateful Dead-like jams and dissipating back into heaps of noise; for poppy verses and choruses mutating into nauseating repetitive mantras; for Fairport Convention and Black Sabbath sharing the same kennel. Puzzled you will be; bored, no.

 

Pretty much all of this can be found in the 16 minutes of 'Bright Lights', whose many different sections recall the grotesque, flipped out whatever-rock of Amon Düül II, except less technical. Let me quote Thom Jurek of the All-Music Guide on that: "Fuzzy electrics, shimmering acoustics, and trance-like keyboards flit in and out between the alternating vocals of McBean and Webber. The music picks up intensity, shifts direction numerous times, and careens across the rock and folkscapes of rock's history from the late '60s through the '70s with great focus, wit, and am­bition." Perfect description. The only aspect of this that Mr. Jurek has politely swept under the carpet is: WHAT'S THE POINT? If we want to careen across the rock and folkscapes of rock's his­tory, why not go straight to the source?

 

To understand why, let us take one of the album's best songs, 'Wucan'. We know the vibe; similar musi­cal landscapes of astral travel have been laid down by Pink Floyd, Hawkwind and their col­leagues and followers in a thick layer. But we do not know the hook — a morose, Eastern-soun­ding organ riff interweaving with an anthemic art-rock guitar riff. It is a good, strong, memorable hook that neither Hawkwind nor Pink Floyd could have fathered (the former would have drowned it behind a wall of distortion and other instruments, the latter did not much care for repetitive gui­tar riffs like these in the first place). Is it «Trademark Black Mountain Sound»? No; these guys have no real trademarks to call their own. But it is a cool sound that they arrived at under the in­fluence, but through their own free will.

 

The same goes for everything else. There are no rip-offs. There is no deep meaning, there is little adequacy — they make big, bold, bright statements that have no independent value and can only be relevant to those having, up till now, lived in a vacuum; but there is juicy music made here, with talent to burn and pleasures to reap. I like the cooky falsetto on 'Stay Free', the tired"Lay your halo down..." on 'Angels', the big ugly drumming and the good old «woman tone» on 'Evil Ways', I even like all the sixteen minutes of 'Bright Lights'. If they were to tell me that they are making A-R-T here, I would say that I'd be more interested in seeing them fuck a porcupine. But if they are simply having a good futuristic time, more power to them, because I have had a good futuristic time, too. And, although this time around my poor wrecked brain is leading a desperate fight to award the album a thumbs down — simply because it has tried to say so much about it and ended up say­ing so little — the heart holds the day. Thumbs up. Frankly, if they make three dozen more records like this, I won't be disappointed. Don't make the mistake of trying to think about this album, like I did. Feel positive.

 

WILDERNESS HEART (2010)

 

1) The Hair Song; 2) Old Fangs; 3) Radiant Hearts; 4) Rollercoaster; 5) Let Spirits Ride; 6) Buried By The Blues; 7) The Way To Gone; 8) Wilderness Heart; 9) The Space Of Your Mind; 10) Sadie.

 

A funny thing happened to me on my way to summarizing Black Mountain's third album, ladies and gentlemen: I was all set to start talking about its subtle differences from Black Mountain's first and second albums, when I suddenly discovered I had entirely forgotten how Black Moun­tain's first and second albums actually sounded. They were heavy, melodic, and derivative, for sure, but the melodies? Were any of those songs actually worth anything? And will the songs from Wilderness Heart, which seem nice enough while they're still fresh, be worth anything in a few months' time? So many epic questions, so few trustworthy answers.

 

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. Perhaps the key to all this is that Black Mountain themselves do not think the world of their music. It is big and bombastic, not because the bombast is their musi­cal translation of the «blow their minds once and for all» idea, as it used to be, but simply because their pet heroes, from Neil Young to Black Sabbath, all happened to be bombastic — a taste-rela­ted coincidence. Take 'Let Spirits Ride', for instance, whose riff is but a minor variation on Sab­bath's proto-thrash classic 'Symptom Of The Universe'. When Tony Iommi wrote that riff, he laid it down with an inspired vengeance. When Black Mountain play it, they are simply showing their respect for the style. The loudness and brutality are there, for sure, but God-sent inspiration is not, reducing rock'n'roll to mannerism.

 

Don't get me wrong: while the songs are on, they're on. Third time around, the band does not take any unnecessary risks with extra-long tracks, and their influences are spread out in a very careful and deliberate manner, so that my earlier complaint about way too many Airplaneisms is no longer applicable at all. Psychedelia, hard rock, and folk combine in quasi-mathematical ways: for instance, if you divide the 10 songs into an imaginary A- and B-side (and you should: these guys only work in a vinyl day mood), the ratio is 4 heavy songs to 1 soft song on Side A and 4 soft songs to 1 heavy song on Side B.

 

The heavy riffs achieve their purposes, whether they be fake-heavy riffs (extra distortion laid on yer basic folk-rock pattern, as in 'Hair Song') or true-heavy riffs (the Sabbathisms of 'Let Spirits Ride' and the title track). They achieve them even better when attenuated by space-rock whoops from the band's Moog equipment ('Old Fangs') and wheezy, creaky psychedelic solos ('Rollercoa­ster'). Play it all at top volume, let your neighbours experience the kind of emotions their ances­tors had in the old days of heavy metal arisal.

 

The romantic ballads never fall short, either. The acoustic guitar/Mellotron combo on 'Ra­diant Hearts' is evocative. 'Buried By The Blues', with its memorable (for now! I'm listening to it right now — cannot guarantee what will happen in the next three hours!) chorus of "Away from the static and noise", is a gently touching bit of escapism. 'Sadie' is just the kind of perfect con­clusion for such an album: creepy dark folk, ominous for the sake of ominousness, with McBean's and Amber Webber's vocals merging perfectly for the chorus.

 

But it's all too calculated. More than ever before — maybe more than ever before, because, like I tell you, I already cannot recall a thing about Black Mountain's earlier records — I get this feeling that Black Mountain are simply trying to make that particular perfect record, that sincere gift of pity for aging baby boomers who think that punk rock and New Wave throttled good music and have searched, in vain, ever since 1975, for a time capsule. I do not surmise that such a record could not be made, of course, but Wilderness Heart proves, for the third time, that Black Moun­tain, despite all their professionalism and good intentions, are not the ideal band to make it. These songs all depart from old standards — respectable variations on old themes that are just it: varia­tions. When you're sick to death of the old standards, you'll want to suck on the variations. For a while. Then you'll be back to the old standards. Or, in a flash of progressivism, push on to Ani­mal Collective.

 

Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the album, and, like all Black Mountain records, past, present, and most likely future, it is a remorseless thumbs up. It is not up to me to decide if they really «live out» this music or not; I can only judge it on a simple basis — whether or not it bores me, whether or not it is awfully arranged or produced, and whether or not they stole all their melodies from Lenny Kravitz. Since Wilderness Heart is entertaining, tasteful, and about as original as a record of variations on classical subjects can be, why should I want to thwart anyone from explo­ring it? On the contrary — it is every good music lover's duty to convince that local teenage dum­my neighbour that Black Mountain are at least cooler than... uhh... Justin Bieber?

 

IV (2016)

 

1) Mothers Of The Sun; 2) Florian Saucer Attack; 3) Defector; 4) You Can Dream; 5) Constellations; 6) Line Them All Up; 7) Cemetery Breeding; 8) (Over And Over) The Chain; 9) Crucify Me; 10) Space To Bakersfield.

 

A six-year period from 2010 to 2016 actually seems shorter these days than, say, a three-month period from July to September 1969 — therefore, do not get mad at Black Mountain just because they have been twiddling their thumbs all this time. (Technically, they did not: for instance, Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, who'd already released two «synth-folk» or «indietronica» albums as Lightning Dust in the 2000s, used the interval to make a third one — but do not rush to check them out, unless you are very much in love with Amber's wobbly voice and Joshua's antiquated electronic keyboards). At least this gave them a chance to scrape together some moments of real inspiration — I mean, let's face it, a musician only really should work when he or she feels like it, and if they only feel like it every six years or so, well, this kind of looks like a plus in the modern world.

 

Anyway, no title this time, just a small, barely visible Roman number, which might lead one to suspect they are taking their cue from Led Zeppelin here, and indirectly claim that this album will go down in history as containing their most immortal classics. In reality, this is just another Black Mountain album that offers no significant deviations from the old sound. They did have one membership change — Arjan Miranda replaces Matthew Camirand on bass — but other than that, they're still the same gloomy-idealistic neo-hippie band with a love for crushing Seventies' riffs, psychedelic haze, and messages in bottles reaching your 21st century shores from a past so distant, you'd have to spend your entire evening wondering just exactly in what way is this kind of sound and attitude supposed to be relevant. Then, out of sheer frustration, you'd just have to leave it be and simply enjoy the album for what it is rather than for what it could do to you.

 

The best news is that you can still rely upon them to bring out a decent (if thoroughly derivative) riff out of non-existence, or to put together some thick distorted guitar, some muscular drums, and a retro-futuristic synth pattern and make it all sound cool and credible. McBean and Webber distribute most of the lead vocals between themselves, like they usually do, and Webber once again takes the cake — for more than ten years now, she has sounded like a banshee apprentice that can never make it past the first grade, but now that we've got used to that, came to realize that she will probably stay in that mold forever, and dropped all further expectations... well, «peren­nial banshee apprentice» doesn't sound too bad, really.

 

She does a damn good job on the Hawkwind-ish rocker ʽFlorian Saucer Attackʼ, actually, where her usually shaky voice makes a huge effort to break through the thick wall of speedy metal rif­fage and wild Moogs, and, for once, she almost sounds like an overhyped Amazon princess; and the same combination of a quasi-military attitude with doom-and-gloom is heard on ʽConstella­tionsʼ, where she easily outsings McBean and adds proper attitude and feeling to the song's somewhat simplistic and silly-sounding  four-note riff (which seems like a deconstructed version of Led Zeppelin's ʽDancing Daysʼ or some other song like that). Out of McBean's shorter num­bers, ʽDefectorʼ is a good one, though, again, it will probably draw inevitable comparisons — this time, to Pink Floyd's ʽYoung Lustʼ, with which it shares a general «nasty» attitude and the chorus ("and now I wanna be a defector" sort of sounds like "ooh I need a dirty woman", doesn't it?), except that Black Mountain's music is almost totally devoid of sexuality (not that Floyd's wasn't, either — ʽYoung Lustʼ was a sarcastic parody).

 

However, the record in general rests on three 8-minute long pivots — everything else feels un­substantial in comparison to the «epic» numbers. ʽMothers Of The Sunʼ combines a monster Sabbath riff with Webber's organ-accompanied doomsday prayer, and is almost surprisingly efficient: as hard as it is for me these days to fall under the «doomsday spell» coming from any of the new bands, Black Mountain have by now soaked themselves so thoroughly in the spirits of their ancestors that sometimes they seem to be possessed by these spirits, and that might just be the only proper way to get a convincing doomsday attitude today. Compared to this, ʽ(Over And Over) The Chainʼ is a bit of a disappointment, a track closer in spirit to the Gothic cathedral of The Cure — but with a long long long keyboard intro that evokes memories of ʽShine On You Crazy Diamondʼ. Yet it is neither as sublimely textured as the Floyd epic, nor as perfectly over­laid with waves of depressed guitars and tortured vocals as the best stuff by the Cure, and seems way overlong. Well, in terms of build-up and bring-down it needs the length, but they are not as good at generating atmosphere with vast soundscapes as they are with concise riffage.

 

On the other hand, maybe they are when they really put their minds to it: ʽSpace To Bakersfieldʼ is quite a haunting conclusion, ending the album on as much of a high note as ʽMothers Of The Sunʼ started it. This time, it's like a joint tribute to ʽSpace Oddityʼ, with its haunting allegory of absolute loneliness, and ʽComfortably Numbʼ, with its musical marriage of celestial bliss and psychological terror. Here, the tune unwraps slowly and patiently, lulling you with velvety synth tapestries (Schmidt uses ABBA's ʽEagleʼ synth tone to put you high up in the sky), soft vocal harmonies, and minimalistic guitar effects for about five minutes, after which McBean slowly starts to unveil his best guitar solo on the record and maybe the best of his entire career — a choking, wobbly wah-wah wail the likes of which I remember previously hearing mostly on those drug-soaked Bardo Pond records. It might not be a particularly great guitar solo per se, but it feels supercool emerging out of the «celestial» part of the song and burying it underneath its acid fire for a couple minutes.

 

Overall, six years of waiting have not resulted in a major masterpiece, but they have resulted in Black Mountain managing to sound conservative and fresh at the same time, and that's the only thing that matters — personally, I'm pleased as heck to award them their fourth thumbs up in a row just for managing to stay so consistent. Not all the songs are equally nice (a few acoustic clunkers like ʽCrucify Meʼ are neither atmospheric nor hooky enough), and you could probably trim some fat off the 56-minute running length quite easily, but as far as imaginative trips down memory lane are concerned, IV is among the best ones I've heard in the last few years — not that it would do a lot of difference to anyone, since it sort of feels like Black Mountain have pretty much squandered away their entire fanbase in these six years. (Heck, as of July 2016, there's still no one around to even get this record its own Wikipedia page!).

 

BLITZEN TRAPPER

BLITZEN TRAPPER (2003)

 

1) The All-Girl Team; 2) Cunning Revolution; 3) Appletrees; 4) Reno; 5) Whiskey Kisser; 6) Triggafinga; 7) Ansel And Emily Desader; 8) Cracker Went Down; 9) Christmas Is Coming Soon; 10) Donkie Boy; 11) Texaco.

 

Blitzen Trapper did not really «blitzen» on the pop scene radar until 2007's Wild Mountain Na­ti­on; by that time, however, they were already active for more than five years on the local scene of Portland, Oregon, and had two self-recorded and self-distributed albums on an unknown indie label called «Lidkercow Ltd.» (which, I suspect, was run by the band themselves in a basement or something — no other releases but their own on it). Coincidentally, at least one of them, the self-titled debut, happens to be one of their very best albums, so, if you like Furr, it is your patriotic duty to locate Mr. Lidkercow, presumably living on Pirate Bay Avenue, and demand that he sur­render the goods, so that the glory of the state of Oregon may go undiminished.

 

The music of Blitzen Trapper is largely the product of bandleader Eric Earley, who also, not sur­prisingly, sings and plays guitar and the occasional keyboards. Initially, one might see Eric as a sort of wannabe Jeff Tweedy, and one might even be right: Blitzen Trapper has all the trade­marks of «intellectualized alt-country», although its debts to «alt-rock» are heavier than those of early Wilco records. However, Earley generally takes stuff less seriously than Tweedy — where even the earliest Wilco records already yield hints that these guys may wanna rule the world, Earley's creations are somewhat less accessible, somewhat more on the «obscurely hip» side.

 

The best news in town, however, is that Earley comes across as an accomplished songwriter. There is nothing particularly mind-blowing about these songs — but they are good songs with interesting melodies, whe­ther they are governed by tough riffage or moody slide guitars, and al­so regardless of whose territory the band intrudes upon: ʽThe All-Girl Teamʼ, opening the album, for instance, could easily be mistaken for a long-lost Blur song — it has all the required ingredients, apart from the lack of a clearly discernible Bri­tish accent: traditionally put together, but original riffs, catchy chorus, angry young man vocal delivery that occasionally spills into heart-warming poppy vocal modulations, and properly sarcastic lyrics ("I'm in charge of the all-girl team!").

 

But it isn't particularly typical of the album. Soon afterwards, it takes a sharp turn in a roots-ro­ck­ier direction; yet the songs are almost always positioned at some sort of genre crossroads. ʽCun­ning Revolutionʼ, for instance, alternates between mystically-oriented guitar jangle and a hard-rocking bluesier section. ʽAppletreesʼ, with its multi-tracked mind-warping vocals and melodic guitar phrasing loaded with special tones and effects, is dance-style psychedelia. ʽRenoʼ is an acou­­stic shuffle with some impressive slide guitar work that weaves a subtly dark-magical atmo­sphere. ʽWhiskey Kisserʼ is an uptempo «barroom rocker» with plenty of slide guitar as well, more in the «smart» department than in the «kick-ass» one, but still intriguing. And that's just the first five songs — there is definitely more.

 

Even if none of the melodies strike me personally as «phenomenal», to the point of wanting to take a particular riff or slide guitar flourish and frame it on the wall next to bits and pieces of To­ny Iommi or George Harrison, Earley and pals make the best they can of them. The album was recorded properly in a proper studio (which, according to their own accounts, nearly ruined them financially, but I'd say it was worth it), and the production is perfect — every note that needs to be accentuated is accentuated, every instrument that is supposed to play a larger role than the others gets to play that role. It is perfectly possible that, had a different band written and recorded the album, I would not be struck by the sweetness of the psychedelia of ʽAppletreesʼ, or by the brutality of the fuzz assault of ʽDonkey Boyʼ, or by the plaintive sentimental atmosphere of ʽAn­sel And Emily Desaderʼ (which, by the way, betrays a very strong Ray Davies influence).

 

I do not know, and cannot possibly know, the exact number of albums like this recorded over the last decades — there may be hundreds of them, really, with the level of their notoriety depending exclusively on the luck factor — but retro-oriented bands that do not stimulate their listeners into asking the question «why do I actually need to listen to this?» are few, and I would say that Eric Earley has enough talent to conveniently fall into that minority. Here be a nicely resonant, intel­lectually comfortable alt-hard-roots-psych-record for us all; thumbs up, no questions asked.

 

FIELD REXX (2004)

 

1) James & Larry Earley; 2) Lux & Royal Shopper; 3) Love I Exclaim; 4) Summer Twin; 5) Cold Gold Dia­mond; 6) Concrete Heaven; 7) 40 Stripes; 8) Asleep For Days; 9) Dreamers & Giants; 10) Turkey In The Straw; 11) Dirty Pearls; 12) Leopard's Will To Live; 13) Country Rain; 14) Moving Minors Over County Lines; 15) Love.

 

The band's second album had an extremely limited budget, making the sound suffer: a little mud­dier and duller, but still, this is hardly «lo-fi»: wherever they recorded it, they made the best of whatever they had at their disposition. In fact, they even invented a certain pretext to justify the shoddier standards — parts of the album are introduced with snippets of archival recordings by a certain James Earley (could he be Eric's father?), singing bits of old hillbilly tunes. So that almost makes it into genuine «Field Rexx» indeed. In any case, whatever they recorded will inevitably sound much better than archive field tapes. Genius idea, no?

 

The good news is that the songwriting has not been impaired at all by financial troubles. On the contrary, Eric Earley is slowly, but steadily growing into a Renaissance man of pop music, sprea­ding his nets far and wide and always successfully. Furthermore, Earley steadily continues to link his persona to that of Jeff Tweedy's: soulful and literate roots-rocker with an experimental drive and vast ambitions. If that already sounds awful, do not despair: the ambitions are not vast eno­ugh to prevent the man from abandoning archaic concepts like melody, harmony, rhythm, or even «rock and roll». On the contrary, the record is even more accessible than the first one.

 

ʽLux & Royal Shopperʼ, for example, takes a simple, effective garage riff and turns it into the ba­sis for a small exploration that first takes us to the country (with a little backyard harmonica in­terlude), then into outer space, with classic psychedelic sound effects, treated guitars, and multi­ple head-warping overdubs. The other end of the record is symmetrically bookmarked with ʽMo­ving Minors Over County Linesʼ, the album's only other genuine «rocker», albeit with a country-pop whiff all the same — think Mike Nesmith or something in that vein.

 

In between we have some old-school pop-rock (ʽCold Gold Diamondʼ; ʽAsleep For Daysʼ, with the catchiest vocal melody on the album, wisely reproduced note-for-note in the solo in the good old Beatles tradition); some meditative country balladry with lazy harmonica and sentimental, but intelligent vocals (ʽConcrete Heavenʼ — with a bigger-than-ever nod to Tweedy); some banjo plunking tied to a well-imitated Southern accent (ʽDirty Pearlsʼ); a hipness-oozing novelty indie-pop number that would not be out of place on a Flaming Lips record (ʽLeopard's Will To Liveʼ); and some post-Woody Guthrie acoustic folk thrown in for good measure (ʽCountry Rainʼ). None of these songs are masterpieces on their own, but all of them are growers, and, if nothing else, al­most each one boasts an ear-catching sonic combination of some sorts. On ʽCountry Rainʼ, for in­stance, you do not just get an acoustic guitar and a fiddle, but a Jew's harp as well plinking and plunking in the background. It needn't be there, but if it weren't there, attention would not be drawn to the song's melody nearly as much. Who wants to simply hear an acoustic guitar and a fiddle? Bring on the Jew's harp — and, for that matter, where is the «electric jug»?..

 

Another pair of tracks that bookmark the album is ʽLove I Exclaim!ʼ and its reprise, performed in a style that I could only define as «homely-funky», or, perhaps, as a deconstructed version of trip-hop performed with actual instruments, rather than pre-programmed. It's all novel, yet it provides the album with a «mutant anthem», a song that establishes an idealistic agenda and, by the way, prevents me from being able to recognize this band as «The Ween of the 2000's», as I have seen a few people call it. It took the real Ween more than ten years before they started letting us in on some of what was going on behind the Boognish mask; Eric Earley had no problem with that right from the start.

 

Hence, another thumbs up. The diversity of the styles and approaches here compensates for the re­lative lack of hard-rocking material (especially as compared to the self-titled debut): most pro­ba­bly, Field Rexx should be best enjoyed when «lazing on a Sunday afternoon in the summer­time», to quote the classics, but all it takes is to properly synchronize it with one of those moods, and you will be taking a trip to Portland in no time.

 

WILD MOUNTAIN NATION (2007)

 

1) Devil's A Go-Go; 2) Wild Mountain Nation; 3) Futures & Folly; 4) Miss Spiritual Tramp; 5) Woof & Warp Of The Quiet Giant's Hem; 6) Sci-Fi Kid; 7) Wild Mtn. Jam; 8) Hot Tip / Tough Cub; 9) The Green King Sings; 10) Summer Town; 11) Murder Babe; 12) Country Caravan; 13) Badger's Black Brigade.

 

Switching from the phantom label of «LidKerCow» to the very much real Sub Pop records, Blitz­en Trapper finally announce their existence to a whole wide world outside Oregon, with their loudest, braggard-est, and best produced record yet. Actually, a correction: they do not so much want to come out into the whole wide world as they want the whole wide world to come to them. "Come out from the world and into my arms / Like wind on the water with me / Come out from the city come out from the town / Build stone by stone a wild mountain home". This is the way the title track greets you, on a shallow warm wave of slide and electric guitars and a swaying an­themic rhythm that goes particularly well with a mug or two.

 

But Blitzen Trapper are not The Avett Brothers, and their wildland hearts never stay for too long in the wildlands: their real ambition stays the same — to capture all sorts of audiences by means of an intelligent synthesis. This is where the bearded hillbilly is supposed to peacefully coinhabit the same territory with the smug hipster, trading quite a few floating genes in the process. Why they have to do this, other than provide a reason for another rock band's existence, is another question... and it is up to each one of us to decide if we want to enrich our meaning of life by try­ing as hard as we can to find the answer.

 

At this point, a responsible reviewer would need to write something like «Me, I'm too busy just enjoying all the cool music to give a damn». The problem is — despite all of Earley's unquestio­nable talent, this music is just way too cool to be normally enjoyable. It begs for all sorts of ques­tions, and provokes confusion after confusion. The band's previous albums were, after all, a little less «over the top», but on Wild Mountain Nation they pull so many different rabbits out of the hat that, eventually, the magic show turns into a zoo.

 

ʽDevil's A-Go-Goʼ kicks off the proceedings with a three-minute multipart suite that includes elements of power pop, tricky Captain Beefheart-influenced avantgarde rhythms, Grateful Dead-style mind-melting psychedelia, and a noisy dissolution into chaos. Out of its ashes rises the title track — mind you, these guys that beg you to come to their wild mountains with them are the same ones that just infested your mind with a ridiculously incoherent concatenation, so I would think twice, personally, before «saddling up to ride». Then, after being lulled into a peaceful easy feeling with the colorful, bouncy folk-pop of ʽFutures & Follyʼ and its McCartney spirit, you are immediately given a gut-kick by the thick Panzer distortion of ʽMiss Spiritual Trampʼ — a hard-rocking sound through which, however, they still seep through occasional slide guitars and har­mo­nicas, just to place the «rootsy-tootsy» seal on everything, for protection.

 

Actually, it all sounds great. The soft songs lull and pacify, the loud songs invite the air guitar, and the avantgarde / experimental bits and pieces are a fine glue to keep the soft and loud songs together. It all sounds so great that you do not even immediately notice the utter silliness of some­thing like ʽWoof & Warp Of The Quiet Giant's Hemʼ — even if, in reality, it is just a repetitive, off-yer-head carnival stomp where you are supposed to jump around the fire and shout «yeah yeah yeah» to spook off a bloodthirsty demon or something. It simply falls in place as part of that crazy kaleidoscope: a bit of its own craziness rubs off on everything else.

 

But you know what? I would rather have preferred it all with a different sequencing. For instance, place all the quiet acoustic songs on one side and all the wild romps on the other. Because I feel that the quiet songs are actually the stronger ones, reflecting a juicier, brighter side of Earley's heart than his attempts to make himself feel at home with the loud rock scene. ʽSummer Townʼ, in particular, is a beautiful ballad, all minimalistic acoustic lines, flutes, and soft psychedelic overdubs, one of those tunes where you cannot decide whether it is melancholy or tenderness that rules the scene, and this indecision keeps sucking you in. And my personal fav is ʽCountry Cara­vanʼ, one of those tunes where you know that all that separates this rather ordinary country-pop tune from greatness is the lack of a big fat friendly electric guitar solo, and then it finally comes and you're all like, "I knew it! Didn't I?"...

 

Yet with all this mixing going on, neither the soft nor the hard songs help out each other. It is one thing to have yourself a White Album, one that can allow itself to disregard sequencing because each number is so strong on its own that it creates a special link to its context in your mind regar­dless of whether that link was originally planned or not. Eric Earley, on the other hand, is no J. P. Len­non-McCartney, and these songs are not highly memorable — they are of the «make you feel so good while they're on» kind rather than the «forever and ever you'll stay in my heart» kind. And Wild Mountain Nation's eclectic mix keeps confusing me. On the good side of things, it means that I will definitely be coming back here, to keep checking on the potential greatness I have missed; but on the bad side of things, the overall reaction is still a large question mark, and I wouldn't want to be coming back without some sort of guarantee that I will not be wasting my time. Anyway, thumbs up for the ongoing mystery of Blitzen Trapper while it is still a mystery.

 

FURR (2008)

 

1) Sleepytime In The Western World; 2) Gold For Bread; 3) Furr; 4) God & Suicide; 5) Fire & Fast Bullets; 6) Sa­turday Nite; 7) Black River Killer; 8) Not Your Lover; 9) Love U; 10) War On Machines; 11) Stolen Shoes & A Ri­fle; 12) Echo / Always On / EZ Con; 13) Lady On The Water.

 

Big critical success here, but I am not all that impressed. Too rootsy! Not enough rock'n'roll! With the exception of one or two big-scale numbers, Furr is almost yer average camping album — and I am sure that few people are more qualified to write wildlife camping albums than a bunch of gifted sons of authentic Oregon trappers, but there is not enough inventiveness running through their veins to turn Furr into the next John Wesley Harding, or into one of those classic John Prine or Willie Nelson albums.

 

The title track is suitably «nice», but does not really do justice to Eric Earley's songwriting talents: just a basic country-pop acoustic shuffle with a derivative vocal melody. His warm vocal tone is always welcome, and the metaphorically Mowgli-like story in the lyrics is original enough, but truly and verily, many people sing these kinds of stories, few are capable of making them stick. Writing and recording a song like ʽFurrʼ, to me, seems a bit like winning in a local songwriting contest — the basic requirements are met, the clichés successfully worked around without losing an atmosphere of authenticity, the resulting grade is A+, and now off you go to continue with your dayjob at the local sheet metal factory.

 

That Blitzen Trapper are capable of more than just «making the grade» is clearly seen from the other single, ʽBlack River Killerʼ. Technically, it is just another acoustic folk tune, with a darker overtone this time, as the title already suggests, but this time, with a poppier hook in the chorus, and a moody «theremin-synth» line in between the verses to spice up the atmosphere. Of course, it is always easier to write a «sticky» dark song than a happy one (most of us are easier drawn to gruesome tales of serial killers than to simple stories of settling down to raise a family), but the darkness itself does not account for the special catchiness of the chorus or that particularly glo­omy synthesizer flourish.

 

Unfortunately, such flourishes are rare on Furr. With a pretty piano ballad like ʽNot Your Loverʼ, you could hope for at least a small bit of musical development throughout the album, yet there is none, and I am not just going to fall over for lines like "Cause I'm a moonwalkin' cowboy, dusty ridin' / And I don't know what's in store" if they are simply accompanied with a pretty (but whiny) voice and one finger on a piano. Lazy! Get out of bed!

 

Yes, there are a few upbeat pop tunes here, fattened with wailing electric guitar and other ingredi­ents, but after the opening successful punch of ʽSleepytime In The Western Worldʼ, with its organ leads and amateurishly eccentric guitar pyrotechnics, something like ʽSaturday Niteʼ, very similar in terms of upbeat-ness, is already nowhere near impressive. Nor is ʽWar On Machinesʼ, where they take the same stomp and change the time signature just a bit, to let in some barroom-rock atmosphere. But it's the same multitracked acoustic guitars all over again. ʽLove Uʼ, a slowly crawling «screamfest», is certainly different — but not very good, as far as I am concerned. (Eric is not a professional screamer at all).

 

So, if Blitzen Trapper in general are a good band, very occasionally being put through to a stra­ight line with God, Furr is the album that shows all of their limitations. Earley's strength is in his diversity: no matter if each individual song is not Beatle-quality, there are so many of them done in so many different ways that the cumulative effect is disarming the critic. Furr, on the other hand, is an attempt at creating something semi-conceptual, a 21st century look at the rudiments of two hundred years' time, and its tighter focus is at the same time its Achilles' heel. I have nothing against these guys employing roots-rock elements in their music — but I never asked them to go ahead and «reinvent» roots-rock as such for me. If I want rootsy, I just go and put me on some Robbie Robertson. A disappointing thumbs down here — which should not prevent neither you nor myself from easily enjoying ʽBlack River Killerʼ.

 

DESTROYER OF THE VOID (2010)

 

1) Destroyer Of The Void; 2) Laughing Lover; 3) Below The Hurricane; 4) The Man Who Would Speak True; 5) Love And Hate; 6) Heaven And Earth; 7) Dragon's Song; 8) The Tree; 9) Evening Star; 10) Lover Leave Me Drowning; 11) The Tailor; 12) Sadie.

 

With this album title, it almost looks as if Blitzen Trapper are really becoming interested in justi­fying the occasionally flashing tag of «New Ween For The 2000s» — reading like a parody on a self-important prog rock record. And indeed, look at the running times: the title track clocks in at 6:17, and the third one at 5:26 — of all their previous creations, only ʽConcrete Heavenʼ ran that long, but even that one was anything but a multi-part suite. Lord help us, Eric Earley has truly gone «progressive» on our asses. How does it feel?

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't feel at all. The attempt to branch out in terms of complexity simply ends up going nowhere. There is no purpose whatsoever to the title track other than telling us that the band can and will change keys midway through the song and then one more time, three quarters into the song. There is no interesting original theme to catch the proper attention; nothing ever goes beyond «sonically nice» as they drag out the old-fashioned synthesizers, the «epic» (but tech­nically simple) guitar solos, the choral backing vocals, the back-and-forth loud-to-quiet alter­nations. I've heard it all before and I don't want this. It's BOOOOORING!

 

Perhaps Earley realized it himself, because, no matter how ambitious the first third of the album tries to make itself, he just cannot help but eventually get carried away on the rootsy tide. ʽLaugh­ing Loverʼ still combines folksy upbeat pop with arena-rock riffs, psychedelic keyboard and vo­cal overdubs, and rhythmless harmony-based choruses, and ʽBelow The Hurricaneʼ is still long enough to envelop a two-part acoustic suite and an atmospheric «look at us making alien noises with our electronic toys» coda. But after that, Earley's «progressive drive» seems to either be­come exhausted, or satisfied, and the band turns back on its trusty Oregon Wilderness Machine.

 

For some reason, though, the Machine seems to be virtually infested with a colony of Dylan bac­teria this time around. Where Bob's influence on the band used to be obvious, but indirect, it now becomes an obsession — as if playing around with progressive complexities had somehow lower­ed Earley's defensive shields that used to protect him from resorting to direct plagiarism. ʽThe Man Who Would Speak Trueʼ plays on like a straightahead outtake from Selfportrait (yes!!), and ʽThe Treeʼ, in itself a lovely duet between Earley and fellow Oregonian Alela Diane, «bor­rows» quite a few chords and vocal moves, not to mention the overall atmosphere, directly from ʽMr. Tambourine Manʼ. Why? Damn me if I know.

 

Both of these things — the band's inability to become interesting when going in for extra com­plexity, and the inexplainable switch from Dylan influence to Dylan worship — are very disap­pointing, and the best tracks on this album, stuck in the middle (the heavy rock anthem ʽLove And Hateʼ, with a cool-bellowing distorted guitar opposed to an optimistic singalong chorus, and the dreamy/aching piano-and-strings ballad ʽHeaven And Earthʼ), are not jaw-dropping enough, either, to heal the wounds.

 

It is good to know that Destroyer Of The Void does not at least repeat, note-for-note, the formu­la of Furr, and that Earley is still busy searching, and that the arrangements are still in great taste, and that the band still has its honest Oregon heart. But alas — the album continues to suggest that Blitzen Trapper may be past their peak, and that Earley will never again manage to sustain the same level of original chemistry and overall quality that he did on his first three albums, and that, therefore, despite the best of our hopes, Blitzen Trapper share the usual genetic disease of most of the bands of the de­cade: thoroughly great for a one-night stand, thoroughly lacking what it takes to build up a long-term relationship. Too bad.

 

AMERICAN GOLDWING (2011)

 

1) Might Find It Cheap; 2) Fletcher; 3) Love The Way You Walk Away; 4) Your Crying Eyes; 5) My Home Town; 6) Girl In A Coat; 7) American Goldwing; 8) Astronaut; 9) Taking It Easy Too Long; 10) Street Fighting Sun; 11) Stranger In A Strange Land.

 

The baby might sport pretty facial features and weigh the expected eight or nine pounds, but none of that would matter much if he were stillborn. An uncomfortable metaphor, perhaps, but fully ap­plicable to American Goldwing — the first officially bad album, according to my personal views, that Blitzen Trapper have produced. Bad, as in B-A-D-bad. Not tastelessly bad, not stupidly bad, not annoyingly bad. Just good old bad, that's all.

 

Once again, just like Furr, the whole venture is an Americana celebration, now flaunted on the front sleeve even more explicitly than it used to be. Once again, the tracks shuffle between acous­tic folk balladry, «roots-pop» à la early Wilco, some sludgy stoner proto-metal, and Seventies-style blues-rock. But more than ever before, the band simply embraces all the clichés and forma­lities of all these styles, instead of at least attempting to reinvent them, or at least marry them to one or two chord sequences that wouldn't be completely, thoroughly safe and predictable.

 

There is not a single song on here that would linger in my head for even a few minutes after the album is over — simply because there is not a single cell in my brain that would not already be occupied by one or more tenants, once any given song from American Goldwing starts politely knocking on its door. «Go away, ʽGirl In A Coatʼ!», they say, «we'd be happy to let you stay overnight, but the whole floor has already been rented by a Mr. Zimmerman». «Sorry, ʽTaking It Easy Too Longʼ, we just don't see the extra benefits from accommodating you that we have not already received by lending this space to Mr. Willie Nelson». And the list goes on.

 

The damnedest thing about all of this is, these melodies just sound way too lazy. For ʽMight Find It Cheapʼ, one of the guitarists just reuses a standard old hard rock riff, and the other one plays a slightly more complex, but equally weary ring of acoustic circles around it. The multi-guitar over­dubs on ʽFletcherʼ, including a clever move of combining slide guitar with a wah-wah sound, are totally wasted, since they are not structured as a coherent, independent melody. ʽLove The Way You Walk Awayʼ might as well be recorded by a Hank Williams Jr. or any single other by-the-bo­ok professional country hack to have come around in the past fifty years. ʽStreet Fighting Sunʼ, although its title bears non-incidental similarity to the Stones, actually rips off the old style of Mountain, without any changes for the better.

 

In the end, it simply drives me crazy. When these guys started out, they clearly had ambitions —  there was never a time in which they were not utterly derivative, but they were tearing that house apart and rebuilding it anew. Now, with what limited critical success and recognition they might have acquired after the success of Wild Mountain Nation and Furr, they seem to have sunk into a sea of mildly ear-pleasing, but utterly forgettable and irrelevant genericity. Sure, Earley's voice is still moderately moving, and I can imagine some people still being interested in what he has to say lyrically (I myself could care less), but, in a way, it only makes American Goldwing ever so more irritating for me, because even the sensible, lyrical heart of this guy is no more different now from the sensible, lyrical hearts of a grand army of roots-rockers.

 

All I can hope for is eventually getting a confirmation that the album might simply have been rushed out too quickly after Destroyer, for whatever reason (lack of fresh cash flow?). Since it has now been almost two years since then, chances are that, perhaps, for their upcoming new pro­ject the Blitzens will finally try out something different, rather than just keep on wallowing in their «heartland» phase. But as of now, a disheartened thumbs down — I fail to see how any­body who doesn't think that all the music in the world should sound like James Taylor could ma­nage to be converted by these stale sounds.

 

VII (2013)

 

1) Feel The Chill; 2) Shine On; 3) Ever Loved Once; 4) Thirsty Man; 5) Valley Of Death; 6) Oregon Geography; 7) Neck Tatts, Cadillacs; 8) Earth (Fever Called Love); 9) Drive On Up; 10) Heart Attack; 11) Faces Of You; 12) Don't Be A Stranger.

 

Yes, we can: two years into the disappointing disaster of American Goldwing, Blitzen Trapper once again redo their image, and come out with an album that honestly sounds nothing like any of its predecessors — confirming our trust in Eric Earley as a musical force to be reckoned with, at least on a formal level. However, the change is somewhat bizarre. Without abandoning their roots-rock orientation, the band now crosses it with modernistic elements of hip-hop, trip-hop, and various electronic sub-styles. The result? Now they sound like lately-discovered children of Beck, which begs the question — are we finally past Eighties nostalgia, and advancing now into the age of Nineties nostalgia?

 

Seriously, at least half of these tracks might have been accepted as filler on Odelay or Midnite Vultures: swamp guitars crossed with dance beats, rapped vocals crossed with bluesy harmonicas, earthy country moods crossed with urban swagger. Most of the instrumentation remains live, and the album is hardly ever burdened with the stuffy digital overload of mainstream production, which is why the Beck analogy springs to mind before anything else — he, too, would always take time to bother that the songs sounded like advanced-updated variations on all their predeces­sors. The standard problem, however, remains: on individual levels, the tunes are not particularly memorable; not on a level, at least, where I could single out highlights and lowlights.

 

The overall sound is beyond complaint: even at his worst, Earley would always retain profes­sionalism, and now that he's found a new old way to fool around, the band seems re-energized from the slackness of American Goldwing. On ʽFeel The Chillʼ, stinging electric guitars, tasty slides, banjos, organs, harmonicas, and whistling synthesizers generate an impressive polyphony, over which Eric's rapped verse vocals and nursery-rhyme chorus resonate with irony and humor. There may be a bit too much happening here to successfully latch on to a distinct hook, but this feeling of overwhelmed ear canals is quite strong in itself.

 

Then the second song, ʽShine Onʼ, comes on, and it's like... uh, okay. The time signature is ever so slightly changed, but other than that, we have the same electric riffs, slides, organs, harmoni­cas, rapped vocals... the song hardly ever makes its own point. ʽEver Loved Onceʼ follows at a slower pace, in a more sentimental mood, but other than fewer synthesizers and more slides, the difference is not that big, either, and seems to become less and less as the song becomes louder and Eric's singing gradually slides towards the same rapping style.

 

There is no need whatsoever to mention any of the other tracks until we get to ʽHeart Attackʼ: the last three tracks somehow manage to dispense with the «retro-modernistic» sheen and simply plunge us into pure archaic retro — ʽHeart Attackʼ is like an old-fashioned glam-rocker crossed with country elements, sort of a cross between T. Rex and the Flying Burrito Brothers; ʽFaces Of Youʼ is a gloomy keyboard-dominated blues-rocker; and ʽDon't Be A Strangerʼ ends the album with a bit of friendly fast-tempo acoustic bluegrass (the Avett Brothers do this kind of stuff some­times, although this one does not quite have enough heart on its sleeve for Avett level).

 

Still, I give the album a light thumbs up. It is much less innovative than it seems to think it is, and the hooks take ages to sink in, if they ever do, and the «trendy-hopping on your country house front porch» vibe is already fully disclosed on the first couple of minutes — but at least they got some energy, some tact, some humor, and sorting out all these endless overdubs can also be fun, in a technical way at least. Rest assured, though, Blitzen Trapper VII is in no way poised to displace Beck from his properly guaranteed position of king of this particular mountain.

 

ALL ACROSS THIS LAND (2015)

 

1) All Across This Land; 2) Rock And Roll (Was Made For You); 3) Mystery And Wonder; 4) Love Grow Cold; 5) Lonesome Angel; 6) Nights Were Made For Love; 7) Cadillac Road; 8) Let The Cards Fall; 9) Even If You Don't; 10) Across The River.

 

Stylistically, this is a return to the vibe of American Goldwing — unassuming retro-rock with emphasis on the «nobody should be able to tell that we are not The Eagles or at least The Doobie Brothers!» side of the business. But impression-wise, All Across This Land seems to be the better bet of the two, if only because it's got more muscle; and I mean that almost literally — the riffs, the rhythm section, the vocals all seem to be infected with a strange brawny vivaciousness. Not only that, but Earley and his mates intentionally lower the «intelligence shield» of the music and go as far as to offer a few really simplistic anthems to, uh, simplicity — ʽRock And Roll (Was Made For You)ʼ does sound about as dumb as its title.

 

And, for once, this is sort of a plus, because throughout their career, Blitzen Trapper have consis­tently failed to convince me that they were truly qualified for the status of a «subtle», «intellec­tual», «innovative» rock band. In reality, a few happy exceptions aside, Earley is a natural-born barroom rocker and little else — and All Across This Land is just that, an album of barroom rock with a Southern edge to it that "just wants to rock'n'roll", as they themselves acknowledge on ʽNights Were Made For Loveʼ. Meaning that it all sounds nice and tasteful and adequate, even if, as usual, few songs stick out.

 

General gripes involve the superfluous use of synthesizers — cheesy fake strings really do not belong on these kinds of songs — and, more importantly, the fact that Earley has not become any more distinctive as a singer than he used to be: his husky, earthy voice is good for this music, but he still has such minimal range and flexibility that if anybody said he was «singing with feeling», I would have to assume that «feeling» is an immanent, unchanging quality for this guy. This is, however, a grudge that can be held against the absolute majority of Blitzen Trapper's roots-rock idols from the Seventies, so why should we blame poor Eric?

 

Speaking of sticking out, I'd probably have to put in a good word for the title track, featuring the album's most distinctive and memorable set of riffs and passing off for, let's say, a second-rate Skynyrd; the already mentioned ʽNights Were Made For Loveʼ, a fast tempo pop-rocker stuffed with romantic nostalgia (like a sped-up variation on the Byrds' cover of ʽMy Back Pagesʼ or something like that); and the closing acoustic ballad ʽAcross The Riverʼ, which could have been so much better if sung by Neil Young, but... ah, hell.

 

Overall, I'm not giving this a thumbs up so as to avoid upholding the illusion that this is some sort of «creative rebound» or that you can find here something that cannot be found on a solid selec­tion of soft rock nuggets from the early-to-mid Seventies. But since the record clearly does not pretend to anything more than telling you, "We love our smelly roots, and what's wrong with that?", I'm not giving it a thumbs down, either. If you just can't get enough of those Southern vibes and need your fill replenished daily, All Across This Land is highly recommendable. If, however, you still vaguely remember Blitzen Trapper as that odd try-anything-once band that arrogantly mixed Brit-pop, roots-rock, and psychedelia on its debut album, that old band just ain't coming back. They made their choice and settled down on the farm. Oh well, I guess somebody at least has to settle down on the farm in these days of urban dictature.

 

 

BLOC PARTY

SILENT ALARM (2005)

 

1) Like Eating Glass; 2) Helicopter; 3) Positive Tension; 4) Banquet; 5) Blue Light; 6) She's Hearing Voices; 7) This Modern Love; 8) Pioneers; 9) Price Of Gas; 10) So Here We Are; 11) Luno; 12) Plans; 13) Compliments.

 

Here is another band whose recent status as «critical darlings» has pissed off so many people that, behind the endless discussions on the nature of overratedness, one almost forgets to talk about the nature of Bloc Party. Here are the bare facts. Bloc Party is an Essex-based rock band, formed from 1999 to 2003 by a bunch of college students/dropouts of highly mixed origin (lead guitarist and bass players are Brits, lead singer and rhythm player Kele Okereke is of Igbo descent, drum­mer Matt Tong is Malaysian — a melting pot paradise) and highly developed intellect. The band's first recordings provoked interest on the part of figures like Franz Ferdinand, and their first album became a smash success in the UK, making them hip-hip-hip for most of 2005, all the way up to their being blown away as the next best hip-hip-hip thing by the Arctic Monkeys next year.

 

It goes without saying that, these days, three guys with guitars and one guy with drums cannot become a smash success if they do not make strange new tricks with these things, or, as it more frequently turns out, if they do not give out the popular impression that they are making strange new tricks with these things. On the general scale, what they give out is a post-punk type sound, songs that are simple and complex at the same time, combining fast three-chord riffs in so many different ways that they start sounding like multi-note riffs, not to mention fluent, impressive in­terplay between the two guitarists that certainly took quite a bit of sweat to orchestrate. On the more particular scales, they occasionally bring in small bits of electronic sound that they also in­herited from their Eighties' childhood, and melodies that are fairly hard to crack. Either they do not really know how to write them, or I do not really know how to read them.

 

I do not want to reduce these guys to the sum of their influences, which include quite a few res­pectable outfits from around 1978 to around 1999. People have done that — successfully — and, as usual, it has led to some dismissing them as talentless copycats and others to endorsing them as bona fide inheritors. For me, the one impressive thing about this band is the playing. Even if the melodies as such usually do not work, all four of these guys sound like seasoned pros. Particular kudos goes to drummer Matt Tong, whose inventive fills and overall precision level I would im­pressionistically rate among the finest I'd heard from the 21st century; but the rest of the guys are no slouches, either — phenomenal coordination and discipline, even when it comes to relatively difficult passages. The entire album went very smooth with me for that reason alone.

 

The weakest spot is arguably Kele Okereke's singing. He certainly can sing, and he is expressive enough, but a voice is a voice: you can pour as much fiery spirit in your guitar playing as your body contains, but the vocal tract is a far less reliable mediator, and it always sounds like he is seriously constrained by it — wants to give out a hundred percent but only comes out with fifty, so to speak. As a result, most of the time it sounds like he's pitifully whining about life rather than apocalyptically threatening about it, and pitiful whining just doesn't sit too well with the musical moods they create. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that, as a modestly preservable piece of art, Silent Alarm might have worked better as a completely instrumental album.

 

Like I said, the songs aren't catchy; in fact, even as I am giving it a fourth and fifth listen, all of them are instantaneously forgettable on their own. What could you ask, after all, from an album based on generic pop-punk riffs, not a single one of which stays around for too long at that? An album whose chorus lines do not rhyme and are usually hard to separate from verse melodies? An album on which every second song plays at the exact same tempo, and almost every first song has the exact same arrangement? With the hit singles completely interchangeable with the LP-only tracks? Nothing.

 

What does the album aim for as a whole? Hard to say. It is clear that these guys are being serious; tired of endless cynicism and post-modern intellectualism like so many of their peers, they create this dreary grey landscape against which they stand, complaining and complaining and complai­ning about every aspect of life. Just look at this: (1) "It's so cold in this house, like drinking poison, like eating glass"; (2) "Are you hoping for a miracle? Some things will never be dif­ferent"; (3) "You're just as boring as everyone else, nothing ever happens"; (4) "Heaven's never enough, we will never be fooled"; (5) "You didn't even notice when the sky turned blue"; (6) "I'm tearing down posters, I was never ever alive"; (7) "This modern love breaks me, this modern love wastes me"; (8) "We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?"; (9) "Nothing ever comes for me, the ghosts are here, red white and blue"; (10) "I really tried to do what you wanted, it all went wrong again"; (11) "You've been lying to me, you deserve it"; (12) "Stop being so laissez-faire, we're all scared of the future"; (13) "We sit and we sigh and nothing gets done... what are we coming to, what are we gonna do?" Yep, that's all of the songs in a nutshell. Seems like there's more depression inside of Kele than in all the Igbo people combined.

 

I would not buy this attitude without a second thought. It is nice to think of it as a good antidote not just for MTV-type cultures, but also for the animalistic hedonism of the hipster club ones, but it does not always seem like the band is speaking with its own voice; their desire to be heard is obviously sincere, but what they say is such goddamn old news that it would have taken more than Kele Okereke's whiny delivery and the combined professionalism of his band to make it work in a new way. A decade from now, Silent Alarm will be a fascinating culturological study for those interested in the average intelligent mindset of a typical mid-noughties' youth from the EU; but in the meantime, it will be inevitably washed away by a couple dozen «no better, no wor­se» albums exploring more relevant musical trends and speaking more actual lyrical jargons.

 

But lingering still in my memory is the superb musicianship, for which alone thumbs up are guaran­teed. If you find a karaoke version of the record lying around, let me know.

 

A WEEKEND IN THE CITY (2007)

 

1) Song For Clay (Disappear Here); 2) Hunting For Witches; 3) Waiting For The 7.18; 4) The Prayer; 5) Uniform; 6) On; 7) Where Is Home; 8) Kreuzberg; 9) I Still Remember; 10) Sunday; 11) SRXT.

 

Well, looks like they didn't want to be post-punk-rockers anyway — they wanted to be a guitar-and-keyboards dance troup! Leaping from synth to synth, as they drill into the minds of desperate listeners... excuse me. When a band is mediocre from the start, and then takes a sharp turn to Shitsville at the first crossroads it reaches, it is only natural that a reviewer may be goaded into lame paraphrasing.

 

Anyway, the things that made me sit up and take notice while listening to Silent Alarm, a.k.a. This Band's Saving Grace, are mostly absent on their second release. The quirky guitar interplay and Matt Tong's super-precise drum-rattling work have faded into the background, and the fore­ground is almost completely dominated by Kele Okereke's New(est) Romantic artistic vision and personal brand of urban poetry. If, for some reason, you hate that guy, do not come within ten miles of this album's radiation field.

 

Pretense runs very high here, as Kele and his Party openly join the new line of indie bands who have made it their purpose to try and strip their teenage audiences out of consumerist apathy: a brave, idealistic, and ultimately doomed goal, but also one theoretically capable of lighting a new flame through the same old means (Arcade Fire etc.). From the angst, spite, and self-pity of Si­lent Alarm they try to move one level up, making the message more overwhelming and univer­salist. But it all just results in having bitten off far more than they can chew.

 

The music hardly registers. Too many of these songs sound like they have been stolen out of Robert Smith's wastebasket — including the lead-off single, 'The Prayer', with its deep-running ambience-setting electric guitar waves, «intelligent dance» rhythms, and Kele's prophetic, ago­ni­zing screams (that still sound a tad weak and mild when you compare them to The Cure at their best). So the lyrics lambast the trendy hipster of 2007: big deal. Who ever succeeded in changing the world with such a silly thing as lyrics? Even with Bob Dylan, the exact words never mattered half as much as the setting and the way in which they were delivered.

 

It is not, of course, as if Silent Alarm had a ton of great guitar riffs and here they have all been replaced by same-sounding, «backgroundish», guitar-keyboards droning. To me, at least, those riffs never spoke on a personal level — but it was interesting and amusing to watch them weave the patterns around each other, in the hopes that, one day, all of it would grow into something completely different. On Weekend, allegedly expressing their dissatisfaction about sounding like all the other indie guys out there, they just threw it all away, resulting in... uh... sounding like all the other indie guys out there. What, did they really think that, by replacing complex chords with U2-ish chimy jangle and spicing it up with electronics, they could become more interesting? This I cannot possibly understand.

 

Granted, accidents will happen, sometimes pleasant ones. Way way near the end, a few songs af­ter complete desperation has set in, the band unexpectedly erupts into a fabulous power pop tune: 'I Still Remember' has not just the best guitar melody on the album, but one of the best guitar melodies of the decade — simple, charming, and beautifully fitting in with the rare exception of a shy, intimate lyrical piece, as Kele reminisces about a botched romance. If you like The Cure's 'Friday I'm In Love', you are almost guaranteed to like this as well. I also happen to be a big fan of 'Sunday' and its ultra-catchy 'I'll love you in the morning' chorus... somehow, it seems that love song territory is a better bet for Bloc Party than their gopherish attempts to uproot the grand oak of social inertia and indifference.

 

Probably because of the passion involved, A Weekend In The City is a slow grower, and those who generally prefer denser, pseudo-orchestral sounds to in-yer-face smash guitar may even come to like it over its predecessor. Yet even after a few listens, to my ears it comes out as a pain­fully wrong direction for these guys, although it took them two more years to become definitively fixed in that direction. Thumbs down, bar a special rescue mission for the two songs I mentioned.

 

INTIMACY (2008)

 

1) Ares; 2) Mercury; 3) Halo; 4) Biko; 5) Trojan Horse; 6) Signs; 7) One Month Off; 8) Zephyrus; 9) Talons; 10) Better Than Heaven; 11) Ion Square; 12*) Letter To My Son; 13*) Your Visits Are Getting Shorter.

 

With the release of the single 'Flux' in November 2007, an atrocious electronic monstrosity with auto-tuned Kele vocals (welcome to the world of Cher, brother), Bloc Party have officially swit­ched from «indie rock» to what they call «alternative dance». Fortunately, 'Flux' was more of a wild, stupid experiment than a genuine shift of direction; the follow-up album is nowhere near as disgusting. It is simply bland, and has no reason whatsoever to be listened to in an era when the entire musical output of 2008 might quantitavely match the entire musical output of several deca­des of the XXth century.

 

If Weekend In The City downplays the band's strengths, then Intimacy commands us to forget they ever existed in the first place. Guitars and drums are either buried under computer-electronic layers, or filtered through them, making individual playing talent unnoticeable — an exercise in humility, some might say, but perhaps «self-humiliation» would be a more precise term. Conside­ring that melody writing has never been one of Bloc Party's fortes, what need have we of this kind of plastic sound, which is not even innovative in the least degree? The retro inspiration be­hind this stuff are the likes of U2's Zooropa, but even if we manage ourselves not to despise that particular model, that sort of ideology still went out of style ages ago. Why bring it back at all?

 

Absolutely everything that could go wrong with this album, did go wrong. Starting with the title: Intimacy would suggest something very personal (or, at least, something very dirty), but the whole thing is just as loud, noisy, and chaotic as it used to be, with Okereke's «vision», if the word may be used at all, drowned in the sea of electronic effects, drum machines, and overall musical brawn. If you bother to drag out individual songs, tear them apart and scrutinize every de­tail, I concede that you will find lots of different «trivia» to write about. But all of them serve the same purpose: transform «generic dance» into «alternative dance» by introducing the factor of unpredictability. So, what kind of effect will they adorn Kele's voice with on the next track? Will they just introduce a synth-guitar riff or will it be backed up by an «atmospheric» sci-fi fart noise? Will Matt Tong engage in a battle with a drum machine or will he just be taking a nap? Why, how come I don't really give a damn?

 

All the more painful to realize that, somewhere behind all this misconstructed wall of outdated sonic shit, Kele «Pink» Oke­reke is still lurking as a sympathetic, vulnerable, lyrical kind of guy who can be quite sincerely committed to the art of tear-jerking. The first few minutes of 'Biko', a song that has nothing to do with the 'Biko' of Peter Gabriel but is instead a funebral lament for a loved one, almost Poe-style, are so powerfully delivered that the song races fast towards the beau­ty mark — only to have the cretinous drum simulations come in and remind the listener that «this is the world of machinery, a mechanical nightmare» (© Ray Davies). There is also a funny bit at the beginning of 'Zephyrus', where the engineers construe a Björk-ian psychedelic concoction out of Kele's owwws and ooohs, but that, too, will disappear in a few seconds, buried under a layer of irrelevant, boring vocal harmonies as the band goes for some sort of poor man Dead Can Dance imitation which I cannot figure anyone swallowing except those who don't know one single thing about music from the last three decades. Oh God.

 

It is true that these days, decent bands tend to commit artistic suicide far more swiftly than they used to, but even under contemporary conditions, Bloc Party have outshone most of their compe­tition. It does not help, either, that many of the reviews have been surprisingly positive: want it or not, apparently, this combination of banal guitar indie with even more banal electronic dance hap­pened to be considered trendy in 2008, winning the band support from Rolling Stone and proba­bly ensuring that, instead of getting their heads straight, they will want to repeat something like this in the future, wasting good CD plastic and hours of our precious time, much better spent learning the basics of string theory or something. Thumbs down to the ground.

 

FOUR (2012)

 

1) So He Begins To Lie; 2) 3x3; 3) Octopus; 4) Real Talk; 5) Kettling; 6) Day Four; 7) Coliseum; 8) V.A.L.I.S; 9) Team A; 10) Truth; 11) The Healing; 12) We Are Not Good People; 13*) Mean; 14*) Leaf Skeleton.

 

Let it not be insinuated any further that ambitious indie work horses cannot take lessons. A bloc party has to learn to compromise, and this here Bloc Party, clearly taken aback at the generally less than tepid reaction to Intimacy, wisely refuses to continue the Intimacy line unabated. With a three year break and some sunken solo projects behind them, the original four, still tight as a nutshell, finally return to make a new album called... Four. Well, actually, it isn't called anything — it just draws four electron orbits on the front cover. But since it is the fourth album by four band members, that's what everybody calls it anyway.

 

The good news: not only did they get rid of excessive electronics, they are also trying desperately to remember what it was that made their debut album so successful — in particular, crunchy gui­tar riffs are back, and so are the complex, precise, powerhouse drum dramas of Matthew Tong. Memories of Silent Alarm do spring out of all corners, with enough stylistic changes retained so as not to invoke «carbon copy» accusations. The bad news: Four is still a much worse album than Silent Alarm, and there is very little reason to bother oneself with any Bloc Party album that is much worse than Silent Alarm — life is too short and all.

 

The main problem is that, even after introducing reasonable quotas on the use of synthesizers, Okereke and friends did not completely reverse the tendency. On their first record, they were still very much within the «punk» idiom — brutal, kill-'em-all riffs coupled with targeted shotgun blasts from the drums and a singer who was, perhaps, a bit «whiney», but dangerous all the same (you don't mess with the Igbo!). Then they started drifting farther and farther into «artsy» territo­ry, where they never properly felt at home — and Four still sees them trying to woo you with upbeat intelligence rather than brute force.

 

Already the first track, ʽSo He Begins To Lieʼ, lets its potentially cool combo of «broken» hard rock riffage and percussion rhythms be underwhelmed by vocals excessively disguised with echo effects, murky guitar tones, and noisy «anthemic» sections. They may be trying to go for a Cure-style atmosphere, but if so, they are lazy — Robert Smith would invest extra dozens of hours and at least several additional counter-melodies in this stuff, not to mention making all them fit toge­ther; these guys just do a bunch of «outer space guitar trills» that we have already heard a million times — and hope to inspire us that way. Thanks, guys; I already have my ʽFrom The Edge Of The Deep Green Seaʼ and I am sticking to it.

 

At other times, they succeed in getting more of a «self» thing going on, but then you sort of don't know what it is, exactly. ʽOctopusʼ, the lead single, for instance — what is it? A power pop num­ber? Why place the «jammed PC speaker» effect in the center of attention, then? An ode to teen insanity? Why do I have to guess that by scrutinizing the lyrics, what's wrong with the atmo­sphere itself? An aggressive rocker? Why the nursery rhyme approach to the chorus? «Happi­ness», «sadness», «anger», «joy», «depression», «melancholy» — none of the standard emotional tags seem to fit, and I'm all out of non-standard ones. It is sort of a curious creation, but I get a strong feeling that it was created blindly — and that the final result is more «frustrating», or at least «confusing», than «revelatively unusual».

 

A couple of the numbers are real heavy rockers: ʽColiseumʼ (starts out like a dark acoustic blues number, then goes into noise-rock territory but with a metal riff at the heart) and the very last track — ʽWe Are Not Good Peopleʼ, picking up speed and pinned to a riff that seems to be a cre­ative variation on Anthrax's ʽCaught In A Moshʼ or any such-sounding tune (must be lots of 'em). They are, predictably, quite well executed, but the «artsy» bug spoils them anyway — because the production, honestly, sounds awful in both cases. With all the echoes, multi-tracking, and «felt, but not heard» electronic undertones (they're there, aren't they?), the in-yer-face brutality is undermined, and subtlety is not gained anyway.

 

Overall, this is a strange case: Four seems more «mature» than their preceding albums, but in this maturity, a basic sense of purpose is somehow lost. Yes, it is still the sound of four bright, de­pressed, disillusioned, disoriented young lads locked in an urban jungle, that much I get. If they want to emphasize the senselessness of their urban existence by making senseless music, I sup­pose they got every right to do so. But senseless music is being made before our eyes in virtual tons every day without any subtext to it anyway — why should we need senseless music from a supposedly «intelligent» rock band?

 

There are albums by brilliant artists out there that succeed in marrying the opposites. Bloc Party are simply not talented enough to make it work — too artsy to be «punk», too basic to be «art», too limp to bring your spirit to a boil, too clumsy to conjure subtle beauty, too turn-of-the-century depressed to bring their musical structure experiments to successful conclusions, too musically smart-for-their-own-good to evoke basic heartfelt reactions. They have a little bit of everything — this is not an awful album, and, like I said, at least it beats the hell out of the awful Inti­macy — but I have no desire whatsoever to write about these, ultimately very boring, songs. I do admit that this is a highly subjective situation, though, so if ever you were an admiring fan of Bloc Party, do not take my word for it: for everybody who had Silent Alarm as an A+, Four will just have to be at least a B-, or higher.

 

HYMNS (2016)

 

1) The Love Within; 2) Only He Can Heal Me; 3) So Real; 4) The Good News; 5) Fortress; 6) Different Drugs; 7) Into The Earth; 8) My True Name; 9) Virtue; 10) Exes; 11) Living Lux; 12*) Eden; 13*) New Blood; 14*) Paraiso; 15*) Evening Song.

 

That's right, kids — Hymns. Please to remember Bloc Party, once an indie rock band with a Liverpudlian Igboid frontman venting out all the frustration that a progressive-thinking modern day British youngster with African roots could accumulate. To be honest, ten years on few people probably remember the original impact of Silent Alarm, but you just might remember at least the fact that its power was very much dependent upon a fabulous young drummer called Matt Tong. Well, this is a new Bloc Party, kids: Matt Tong is no longer in the band, and neither is bass player Gordon Moakes, and that's all right because Bloc Party are no longer a rock band — they sing hymns now. It's all about the soul now, brother. ʽOnly He Can Heal Meʼ, see? With ʽThe Love Withinʼ. ʽThe Good Newsʼ is ʽSo Realʼ, you're just one step away from learning ʽMy True Nameʼ and spending the rest of your life on ʽDifferent Drugsʼ. Instead of multiplying ʽExesʼ, you will learn to live on the ʽFortressʼ of ʽVirtueʼ, and when you finally go ʽInto The Earthʼ, this will be but a mere technical formality to accede to ʽLiving Luxʼ.

 

Incidentally, Kele Okereke "has denied the new material is explicitly religious" (The Guardian) — that's like saying that ʽMy Sweet Lordʼ was actually a song about a chocolate Sauron. True, not all the songs on the album are about religion: some are about fucking, but they, too, are hymns from a certain point of view. In any case, there's nothing wrong, per se, about a musician suddenly taking a strong spiritual turn — after all, Kele has been in the music business for ten years now and he is certainly entitled to a bit of ambition, and at least one long-distance call to the Transcendental Plains. The problem is, Bloc Party have never been that great a band when it comes to pure music, and ever since Intimacy showed us how really bad they can get when they mellow out (and Four showed us that not all was lost as long as they returned to a rock paradigm), the general ability of Kele Okereke to stun us with the highly charged emotional vibration of his suffering heart has been under heavy suspicion.

 

I have to admit that he really tries, and that Lissack has also joined this game of searching for advanced spiritual enlightenment — by experimenting with his guitar and making it sound like a synthesizer (he claims that he did not play any actual synths on the record, but that's sort of a moot point, since new band member Justin Harris, besides bass, is also credited for synths any­way). It is a novel approach, for instance, when your opening hymn begins with the request "Lord, give me grace and dancing feet", and the Lord proceeds to do just that as the song becomes a straightforward dance-pop number (once it has evolved through the "ugly synth loop that sounds like a stalling spaceship" phase of the first couple of minutes). I'm sure this is probably far from the first time that the Lord has been praised in techno terms (I just googled "techno gospel" and I already wish I didn't), but it might be the first time that a former rock band switched to techno gospel, so throw on an extra point for Brave New World Exploration.

 

As the music goes on, it becomes clear pretty soon that this is still a «pop» band (at least Kele still thinks largely in terms of verses and choruses), but that they have no more intentions of rocking out — and if the musical evidence is not enough to convince you, then further on down the line the man makes it verbally clear as well: "Rock and roll has got so old / Just give me neo-soul" (ʽInto The Earthʼ). This is not «neo-soul» in the sense of D'Angelo, though — the band does not enlist any jazzy brass sections, does not show signs of hip-hop merger, and there are only a few tracks that employ a (not too prominent) gospel choir. «Soul» as in «self-consciously soulful vocalization», yes, but one that is sur­rounded by music that is equally influenced by Talk Talk, Radiohead, Al Green, and Donna Summer. Admirably expe­rimental, yes, but not too memorable and, worst of all, not too breath­taking.

 

Yes, Kele somehow emerges endowed with an almost beautiful singing voice, but in his search for originality he seems to overstep the line. It begins with the lyrics — trying to update erotic lyricism in ʽFortressʼ, he ends up with lines like "And I'm a fool for the sight / Of all the gold between your thighs", or "Reach down and feel how strong / My love grows just for you". If he were a swaggy hip hopper, that would at least be adequate — but ʽFortressʼ is a soft-textured ballad with lilting falsetto vocals, an ode of tenderness, and even romantic pornography deserves less cheesy verbalization than this. And this inadequacy pervades the album from start to finish: every single song just takes itself way too goddamn seriously without providing enough musical justification for it.

 

It's hard to explain why Hymns does not work as a whole, because almost any individual song here, if liste­ned to long enough, might click on some level (the singing is decent, the arrange­ments are creative, some of the choruses begin to stick etc.; and I have come to almost love the only song on the album that actually rocks — ʽThe Good Newsʼ, with a fairly gritty-swampy steel guitar pattern in the chorus and a certain sense of irony in the title). It is precisely because the album tries to bite off more than it can chew that it fails — there may be enough faith and sincere feeling in the heart of Kele Okereke, but there's just not enough raw (or cooked) talent here to produce a record that would be the modern day equivalent of All Things Must Pass, What's Going On, Spirit Of Eden, and OK Computer all at the same time. ʽOnly He Can Heal Meʼ wants to be the most sincere song about God's love ever written, ʽMy True Nameʼ needs to be the most passionate song about devotion to a loved one ever serenaded, ʽVirtueʼ strives to be the sharpest self-flagellating confession ever put to music — well, maybe not, but all these songs are not so much pop tracks or musical experiments as they are declarations of Spirituality, and in these matters, you can have no objectivity, you can only have faith, and I have no incentive to place my faith in Kele Okereke as the one true God (or at least, one true Prophet) of 2016.

 

That said, I will not denigrate the album, either: I hated it upon the first listens, but it does have its moments, and despite some lyrical crimes against good taste, eventually you might come to appreciate Kele's and Lissack's hunt for Truth. At the very least, Okereke is not an exaggeratedly hateful whiner, and his vibe is a decent balance between depression and optimism. If this is a failure, it's at least an interesting one, rather than just a stupid embarrassment.

 

 

 

THE BLOOD BROTHERS

THIS ADULTERY IS RIPE (2000)

 

1) Rescue; 2) Doctor! Doctor!; 3) The Face In The Embryo; 4) James Brown; 5) Mutiny On The Ark Of The Blood Brothers; 6) Jordan Billie Pets The Wild Horse's Mane; 7) Marooned On Piano Island; 8) This Adultery Is Ripe; 9) Time For Tenderness; 10) Jennifer.

 

There is a little bit of everything in this brief, explosive debut album by Seattle's Blood Brothers. The laconic running length and the loudness qualify it for "-core" status, be it hardcore, grindcore, emocore, or any other core. The riffs suggest influences that go all the way back to King Crimson at least, touching on post-punk, math-rock, etc., anything that has to do with a non-standard, con­vention-breaking approach to guitar melodies. The lyrics are poorly controlled streams of con­scious, suggesting beatnik stuff, psychedelia, nihilism, and street wisdom. And the «singing» — or, rather, twin vocalizing of Jordan Billie and Johnny Whitney — suggest hardcore punk and extreme metal affiliation at the same time.

 

The result is a record that, to my ears, can only sound «curious», but curious it is. Maybe the best way to appreciate it is to imagine that it has been written from the viewpoint of a straight-jacketed, stark raving mad, highly aggressive and dangerous asylum patient — not at all difficult, come to think of it, for a record that kicks off with two guys wildly screaming "THEY'RE FUCKING AFTER US! THEY'RE FUCKING AFTER US!.. The Redcoats are coming like a choir of boi­ling lobsters!...". Not mad enough so as not to watch carefully all their time signature changes, or not to have their screams diligently arranged for counterpoints, that is, but still mad enough to infect you with the madness if you give them a chance.

 

Music-wise, the riffs may start off in classic punk or thrash metal mode, only to splinter and scatter in several different directions within se­conds, more often still preserving the speedy tempos than grinding them down, giving the brain no chance to memorize or latch on to anything. Therefore, do not even begin to look for catchiness, since it is nobody's in­tention to deposit it here. The lack of diversity is also excusable — nobody expects that from a stark raving lunatic, and we only have to thank them for keeping things short, because sitting through forty minutes of such stuff in a row would probably cause irrepairable and irreversible mental damage. Indivi­dual tracks are hardly worth mentioning, because what good is a particularly nifty riff or bass line if it's here one moment and gone the next, anyway?.. This is really just one big 20-minute suite, the pauses between tracks merely letting you draw your breath.

 

So what is it that makes This Adultery Is Ripe a worthier representative of «psychopath rock» than its competition? Well, if it is this particular type of synthesis that we are talking about, they do not actually have much competition — being way too concerned about the technical aspects of their playing for a genuine punk outfit, yet way too rude, screamish, and abrasive for an «intel­lectual» band. John Zorn's Naked City and Les Claypool's Primus are well-behaved gentlemen next to these guys. Not that I am implying that this is a plus: there may be a good reason why there seem to be relatively few groups like The Blood Brothers around — if you look at this from another angle, their guitar heroics are actually obscured and diminished by all the endless screa­ming, while their loudness and abrasiveness are hard to appreciate without being propped up by anything even vaguely resembling catchiness.

 

On the other hand, repeated listenings help — after the first (predictable) gut reaction of what-the-hell-is-this-crap, once you slowly start getting into their act, understanding the complexity and tightness of their playing, and once the endless screaming gradually begins to reveal its own perverse musicality, This Adultery Is Ripe is ready to qualify for «artistic statement», if not ne­cessarily for a sonic masterpiece. Maybe its biggest problem is that the psychopathic act is not altogether convincing — due to a total lack of subtlety. It doesn't really take a whole lot of effort to scream your head off; perhaps, had they thought about adding a touch of suspense to the pro­ceedings, things might have worked out in finer fashion (think Birthday Party or the like). For this reason at least, a bona fide «thumbs up» rating is out of question for me at the moment; but even without subtlety, there is still some intrigue.

 

MARCH ON ELECTRIC CHILDREN (2002)

 

1) Birth Skin/Death Leather; 2) Meet Me At The Water Front After The Social; 3) March On Electric Children!; 4) New York Slave; 5) Kiss Of The Octopus; 6) Siamese Gun; 7) Mr. Electric Ocean; 8) Junkyard J. Vs. The Skin Army Girlz/High Fives, LA Hives; 9) American Vultures.

 

Apparently, this stylistically similar follow-up to Adultery is based around some sort of allegori­cal «story», probably influenced in equal parts by the local comic book department and listening to way too many schizophrenia-oriented records of the avantgarde persuasion. There is a ʽMr. Electric Oceanʼ who personifies media and exploitation, a ʽSkin Armyʼ consisting of zombified nincompoops, and other equally colorful personages and collectives that are impossible to pro­perly assess without consulting the liner notes, because not even Professor Higgins would be able to decode a single word by simply listening to these «songs».

 

Musically, the band members themselves insisted that the album was altogether a little more complex than its predecessor, but this is hard to confirm outside of the fact that many songs make better use of the «quiet / loud» alternation this time — for instance, ʽJunkyardʼ and especially ʽSiamese Gunʼ let you fully appreciate the talents of Morgan Henderson on bass (they are not unique, but you do acknowledge that he is quite professional), while ʽMr. Electric Oceanʼ, first time in the band's career, opens with a pop-punk riff that is quite easily and quickly imprintable in one's brains (fortunately, the start of the screaming is delayed until that happens).

 

Other than these «cosmetic» differences, pretty much nothing can be said about the record that would not also apply to its predecessor — same hyper-energetic, crazyass tempos, same mix of hardcore, math-rock, and thrash-metal elements, same madhouse-style vocals, same moods and attitudes on each single song. The only exception is ʽAmerican Vulturesʼ: apparently, the idea was to include something «different» for the album coda at least, so the band divert themselves by hauling out a piano and gruesomely sodomizing it, which is fairly consistent with the mad­house image — most likely, this is exactly what the patients of a heavy-security asylum would have done with the unfortunate instrument, too. Oddly enough, the chorus to ʽVulturesʼ, screamed out in unison as if the «singers» were all part of some Clockwork Orange universe, is the catchi­est thing on the entire record — there is something sadistically seductive about the lines "you're married to the vultures, I don't want to laugh until you're dead".

 

But on the whole, the flaws here remain the same as the virtues: the addition of «quiet» passages is a welcome move, yet there are still too few of them to save the poor layman's ears from the incessant wall of noise and the never-ending screamo vocals that always obscure, never empha­size the band's technical prowess and instrumental creativity. Only a very select few listeners, possibly with unique peculiarities of their hearing nerve channels, will be able to easily look past this obstacle — I am unable to do that, and, despite acknowledging the musical merits, cannot honestly reward the guys with a thumbs up. At least Adultery had the additional value of a «no­velty» project; but turning the «novelty» into a repetitive «formula» is hardly a good idea.

 

Curiously, the reviewer over at AMG called the album «something you'll find yourself singing over and over again as you plan to throw yourself out a window» — a thoroughly misguided description, the way I see it, since (a) singing even a few songs here just once will, most likely, cause irrepairable damage to your vocal cords, so do at least make sure you have some Strepsils lying around; (b) these guys ain't no Cure or Joy Division, so the only thing you might be planning to throw out the window would be your stereo system — actually, quite an appropriate gesture to commemorate the end of these 24 minutes.

  

BURN, PIANO ISLAND, BURN! (2003)

 

1) Guitarmy; 2) Fucking's Greatest Hits; 3) Burn, Piano Island, Burn; 4) Every Breath Is A Bomb; 5) Ambulance Vs. Ambulance; 6) USA Nails; 7) Cecilia And The Silhouette Saloon; 8) Six Nightmares At The Pinball Masquerade; 9) The Salesman, Denver Max; 10) I Know Where The Canaries And The Crows Go; 11) God Bless You, Blood Thir­sty Zeppelins; 12) The Shame.

 

Moving into the big leagues — this album was produced by no less than Ross Robertson, the «Godfather of Nu-Metal» (a title earned with his production of the first Korn album) as well as a towering figure in «post-hardcore» (At The Drive-In, Glassjaw, etc.); and it takes itself far more seriously than the previous two records, being nearly twice as long and featuring an even weirder and more obfuscated concept than March On. For all that, as well as for being the band's first major label album, Burn, Piano Island, Burn! has earned the average critical consensus of being their masterpiece — although, it must be said, for most critics this was their first exposure to the ritual aural torture that is The Blood Brothers, and few of them had the painful responsibility to understand and describe what it is, exactly, that distinguishes Burn from its predecessors, let alone makes it so much better.

 

To be sure, there are some tiny differences. For instance, ʽThe Salesmanʼ is, I believe, the first song in the band's catalog to begin with an acoustic guitar part — not a particularly good one, sounding a bit like some second-rate country-pop composer trying to figure out a new melody, but certainly shocking enough for a Blood Brothers record (don't worry, though, it all reverts back to normal in about a minute's time). ʽCecilia And The Silhouette Saloonʼ starts out with a gloomy-grinning two-note bass riff that brings to mind Deep Purple's ʽDemon's Eyeʼ, then, ten seconds later, dissolves the subtlety of the intro in the usual sea of screamo noise. And ʽThe Shameʼ, closing out the album, is this band's idea of an anthemic ballad — for once, they are willing to dispense with pure anger, rage, and saliva in favor of a more desperate, maybe even «crying» kind of sound, expressing their negative views of modern civilization in «punk prayer» rather than «punk bonfire» mode. So far, so good.

 

Beyond that, however, nothing much has changed, except that the «songs» have grown longer and there are now more of them — playing these 47 minutes of sound at full volume is going to be a psychic challenge even for experienced listeners, mainly because, with each new release, The Blood Brothers manage to inject ever more and more venom into their voices. It's bad enough to just have people screaming at you for forty minutes, but when they do this in the ugli­est, nastiest, shrillest ways possible, well... then again, supposedly the whole point is that this is the kind of record you usually play not so much to enjoy it yourself but as to spook away your boring neighbors. Blast this out your window at top volume and prepare to get evicted (if your neighbors are brave enough to call the police) or to acquire the status of the local Phantom of the Opera (if they are not).

 

If you do wish to spend a bit of extra time with the album, the lyrics sheet may be worth consul­ting. Most of the lines come across as «pissed nonsense», but whoever wishes to see it all as one big rambling condemnation of the silly excesses of industrial / commercial society will have plenty of evidence in favor of that interpretation. Plenty of references to doctors and ambulances, too, because the Brothers are still playing their «restricted area mental ward» game. Typical quote: "Unfortunately this Marilyn Monroe is a secret Zeppelin / Set on a crash course with your cum­shot museum / With the blowjob bunny mansion". From a certain angle, this might even be con­sidered as worthy poetry. From another angle, though, these «shocking» lines have no true shock­ing potential in the year 2003.

 

That said, the Brothers are capable of thought-provoking lyrical twists — they not only borrow from early Dylan, they may even repay him back: "How many chords till this song vomits out real love? / How many feathers to pluck naked the soiled dove? / How many whores till you send away for that trophy? / How many punches till you give yourself away for free?" Not a bad way to innovatively celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Freewheelin', and it's not even that the two albums' primary messages were all that incompatible (and, for that matter, back in 1963 quite a few people felt much the same way about Dylan's voice as one could feel about the Brothers now — «truth hurts!»).

 

The problem is that, even when taken all together, the advantages of Burn, Piano Island, Burn — such as lyrical cleverness, instrumental prowess, and, above all, glorification of all things Extreme-and-Radical — do not suffice to overcome the simple question of «So what?..» which I ask myself when writing each single review. I mean, say what you want, there is no possible way in human history (not at present, at least) to get more Extreme-and-Radical than G. G. Allin or Anal Cunt. The Blood Brothers know this, and accordingly shift the agenda: they want to get all Extreme-and-Radical on our asses while at the same time retaining an intellectual approach with both the music and the lyrics. But then they punch themselves into a corner, because, when you get to the bottom of it, «intellectualism» and «radicalism» are poor cousins — it's a bit like trying to become the chess champion of the world while bungee jumping naked, because playing chess at the chess table is boring and stereotypical, whereas bungee jumping per se is stupid. Combine these two activities — and you pretty much get the real world equivalent of Burn, Piano Island, Burn, an album to which I could probably give a thumbs up if I had no knowledge whatsoever of pre-2000 music; but, the way things actually are, I can at most give it an encouraging (or «con­descending», if you'd like to call it that) pat on the back.

 

CRIMES (2004)

 

1) Feed Me To The Forest; 2) Trash Flavored Trash; 3) Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck; 4) Peacock Skeleton With Crooked Feathers; 5) Teen Heat; 6) Rats And Rats And Rats For Candy; 7) Crimes; 8) My First Kiss At The Public Execution; 9) Live At The Apocalypse Cabaret; 10) Beautiful Horses; 11) Wolf Party; 12) Celebrator; 13) Devastator.

 

Would we expect one of America's angriest bands to miss out on some of America's greatest blunders? Obviously, The Blood Brothers just couldn't resist dedicating the near-entirety of their fourth album to the social, political, and military developments associated with the Bush admini­stration —and, in the process, catching a corner of the public eye, as this was their first record to actually hit the lower ranges of the charts. Just as obviously, they would never do it the straight­forward way, like a Bad Religion or something, but nobody in 2004 could miss the message be­hind lines like "neon black tanks grope the skyline" or "every soldier's spewing black cum from their victory hard on" (ouch, tough one).

 

Musically, Crimes enhances some of the «softening» tendencies of the previous album — of all Blood Brothers records so far, it is easily the most «accessible», provided you can stomach the traditional ugliness of the vocals (for the record, I still cannot). Many of the songs drop the fast tempos and super-speedy flash-changes of riffs, leads, and time signatures — for instance, ʽLive At The Apocalypse Cabaretʼ is a dark, melodic guitar-and-piano dirge, where it is only the ten­dency to fall back upon the brothers' trademark insane scream-o-logy that reminds us of who we are listening to; and the title track, also recorded in an oppressive-moody fashion, even foregoes most of the screaming, as if they were really interested in conveying the lyrical message through your ears rather than the lyrics sheet.

 

The lead single from the album, ʽLove Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreckʼ, could almost qualify as a pop song — standard 4/4 beat, normal guitars, vocal harmonies, and an almost catchy chorus, that is, if catchiness may be conveyed through caterwauling. Unfortunately, I do not believe this compromise really works, because the resulting melody is boring as heck, a guitar/bass/angry vocal combo that's been done a million times in the era of New Wave and college rock; and the caterwauling, reaching its peak on the "love, love, love... rhymes with pity now" chorus, is so unnaturally affected and irritating that the message, if there is one, seems wasted.

 

The same opinion is applicable to just about every bit of the album that tries to shy away from the old formula — for instance, the quasi-sea-shanty introduction to ʽDevastatorʼ. I do not understand how, if they really wanted to strike a chord here, anybody could be potentially impressed and «devastated» by the lyrical imagery of "neon black tanks" and all that, when both singers sing as if their nuts were being tightly held in a vise... okay, so that just might be the point, but even so, it all sounds artificial and exaggerated.

 

So, to be frank, if there is anything to be preferred here, I much prefer the band at their old game, fast'n'furious, such as the second part of ʽDevastatorʼ ("everybody needs a little devastation!"), or the frantic apocalyptic gallop of ʽBeautiful Horsesʼ (comparing the state of humanity to a parti­cularly mad race where, no matter how fast you ride, you still "collapse and come in fucking last"), or, if I am very hard pressed to select an «experimental» track, the quasi-industrial grind of ʽFeed Me To The Forestʼ, beginning and ending in a nightmarish swirl of roaring cogs, springs, engines, and furnaces. In other words, whenever they try «subtlety», I wish they didn't; whenever they do not, they are predictable, but come across as more adequate.

 

Still, even though the fast'n'furious on Crimes quantitatively overrides the subtly-ugly, a thumbs up judgement is out of the question. The main problem with the Blood Brothers was not their lack of accessibility or purpose — so now that Crimes has adapted their «mental ward on tour» image to sociopolitical reality, this is hardly a reason for frantic applause and reconsideration. The main problem is that the image was never sufficiently strengthened either with a firm melodic base or with recognizable musical innovation. All they had going for them was technicality, lyrical skills, and an ability to produce ugly on-key/off-key screaming for extended amounts of time. To this, Crimes adds «accessible relevance» — but forgive this here reviewer for being old-fashioned, as he would rather have Neil Young's Living With War for «accessible relevance». Other than that, it's all been done before, and done better.

 

Put it this way: some reviewer dude on Amazon wrote that ʽLive At The Apocalypse Cabaretʼ «almost sounds like a cat being strangled singing a Rosetta Tharpe cover)». If this description fits into your definition of «awesome», Crimes is totally your cup of tea. However, personally, I have no idea why a cat being strangled would ever dream of singing a Rosetta Tharpe cover, and even less of an idea of why I would have any interest in hearing a strangled cat singing a Rosetta Tharpe cover — certainly not when I could be simply listening to a Rosetta Tharpe original in­stead. And last, but not least, I have totally-absolutely-whatsoever no idea why, in order to fully com­prehend, abhor, and revile the absurdity, amorality, and apocalypticity of our present world situ­ation, I would have to witness a strangled cat sing a Rosetta Tharpe cover. Then again, on some level of universal existence these are merely signs of extreme close-mindedness, I guess.

 

YOUNG MACHETES (2006)

 

1) Set Fire To The Face On Fire; 2) We Ride Skeletal Lightning; 3) Laser Life; 4) Camouflage, Camouflage; 5) You're The Dream Unicorn!; 6) Vital Beach; 7) Spit Shine Your Black Clouds; 8) 1, 2, 3, 4 Guitars; 9) Lift The Veil, Kiss The Tank; 10) Nausea Shreds Yr Head; 11) Rat Rider; 12) Johnny Ripper; 13) Huge Gold AK-47; 14) Street Wars/Exotic Foxholes; 15) Giant Swan.

 

The Blood Brothers' fifth and last album arguably continues their drift towards «accessibility», although for me, that ain't saying much — as usual, I do not «get» these vocals, and think that whatever good or great musical ideas these guys might have, they consistently sabotage them by stubbornly conti­nuing to sing as if hung overnight by their genitals from a palm tree. From that point of view, they give a fairly realistic performance, but it also makes it quite hard to think of their songs as anything other than an exaggerated, ridiculous farce.

 

Which is too bad, since many of the songs do contain interesting ideas. Young Machetes was announced as a return to the band's «screamo» roots, but in reality it tries to achieve a working compromise between the non-stop fury of their first pair of albums and the experimental develop­ments of the second one — a fairly diverse collection that continues to express the band's disap­pointment with the world and its honest desire to blow it up from the inside in every single way they had tried previously, and a few ones they hadn't, such as the funky keyboard rhythms of ʽLaser Lifeʼ or the moody, almost haunting composition ʽExotic Foxholesʼ, with droning folksy acoustic guitars, bassoons (?) and, most wondrous of all, no vocals, an idea The Blood Brothers should have stuck to with much more enthusiasm, I believe.

 

There are also inklings of catchiness in some of the riffs (ʽCamouflage, Camouflageʼ) and some of the «vocal» melodies (ʽRat Riderʼ, like a crazy man's take on a nursery rhyme). There is also ongoing social protest (ʽLift The Veil, Kiss The Tankʼ), with even denser strung pearls of meta­phors and allegories ("young machetes in lingerie charm us all into a frenzy") that still resolve in truisms ("death's just death no matter how you dress it up"), but if people need truisms to stop wars, well, the brothers might have a point there. And, as usual, there is a fair amount of advan­ced technicalities for all those who think that catchiness is ever so overrated.

 

Problem is, none of that matters from a general point of view. Young Machetes may have, for the first and last time, brought The Blood Brothers into the top 100 (probably due to good promo­tion from V2 and the band's continuing capitalization on the anti-war theme), but I just do not see it working as the kind of statement that they wanted to make. Some things are just not compatible — you may play in 13/8 time to your musically knowledgeable friends, or you may shout wake up! to the sleepy world, but if you try to do both simultaneously, your friends might think that you're an offensive idiot, and the sleepy world might want to lock you up.

 

A good case in point is the epic finale to the album — ʽGiant Swanʼ, an overall good idea marred by uninspiring execution. The lyrics, of an almost totemist nature, conclude the Brothers' vision on a particularly original note — where their ancestors saw the world as a Giant Tree or a Giant Serpent, they have this hallucinatory vision of "ghosts in his wings, his guts are stuffed with pola­roids, and they're all humiliating" and how "he wrote a play and you're the protagonist". The mu­sical buildup goes from solemn dirge to overwhelming noisefest and back, as the Giant Swan completes and restarts its grim cycle of existence. All of this could be fascinating — I find it as ultimately boring as it is respectable, and with the usual mix of vocal ugliness to decisively tilt the scale against these guys.

 

I do, however, give them full praise for deciding to make this their last record and break up, be­cause Young Machetes makes it very clear that, whatever they had to say, whichever points they wanted to stress, they said, stressed, and finalized it all, and their «intellectual-extremist» shtick had largely failed, although it had its brief moments of curiosity — but no, I could never regard them as any sort of ideological analogy for the Stooges courtesy of the 2000s.

BLOOD CEREMONY

BLOOD CEREMONY (2008)

 

1) Master Of Confusion; 2) I'm Coming With You; 3) Into The Coven; 4) A Wine Of Wizardry; 5) Rare Lord; 6) Return To Forever; 7) Hop Toad; 8) Children Of The Future; 9) Hymn To Pan.

 

Nobody could predict that, having hired Tony Iommi to replace Mick Abrahams in Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson pretty much signed his death warrant as a creative force. The entrepreneurial, quick-witted Iommi very quickly assumed command, placing his iron-fingered riffage above everybody and everything else. To ensure his dominance over the rest of the band, he brought in old pal Geezer Butler to play bass and write exclusive lyrics about witches, wizards, and warlocks, while at the same time relegating Ian Anderson to the only thing that, according to Tony's opinion, he really did well: play the flute.

 

Since, because of these changes, the newly reformed band needed a singer, Tony thought of bringing back his other pal, Ozzy Osbourne — seeing as how, though, the latter was just recently sentenced to three years of prison for stealing a broken radio set, they decided to go for a female touch instead and hired Sonja Kristina from Curved Air, and she, in turn, brought along her old pal, Ray Manzarek, from the Doors. The newly gathered supergroup then went on to call itself «Blood Ceremony» and became the chief competitor of Uriah Heep on the «demons & wizards» market, although their melting-pot approach never translated to much commercial or critical suc­cess. Eventually, the enthusiasm just fizzled out, and everybody went their own way. Iommi returned to his old sheet metal factory, Ian Anderson retired to raise Guernsey cows and mistletoe, Sonja Kristina got married to Ritchie Blackmore, Manzarek secured a job as gatekeeper at the Père Lachaise, and Geezer Butler got electrocuted onstage while playing a bass tritone.

 

Fast forward to 2008 and switch from this parallel universe to the one of whose reality we feel a little more certain (with undue arrogance, perhaps), and welcome the new Blood Ceremony, one of these specially designed «what if...?» bands if there ever was one. The settings are a little dif­ferent, but the essence is pretty much the same. They do hail from Toronto rather than England, and their lineup consists of Jeremy Finkelstein on drums, Chris Landon on bass, Sean Kennedy on guitars, and Alia O'Brien on vocals, keyboards, and, yes, flute (so she combines the Kristina, Manzarek, and Anderson parts all in one).

 

It is impossible to even begin to try to take this music seriously — doing so will immediately place this band in the Uriah Heep category. However, it is possible to be amused and even mildly stimulated by it as a contemporary retro-genre experiment. The Internet age exposure to all sorts of all sorts of things shows us that in the 2000s, there is a demand for everything: we are living in a poly-eclectic age the likes of which the world has never seen before, and existing demand for «heavy witchy music» of the early 1970s should come of as little surprise to us as demand for any other style of music that the human mind can imagine. In fact, this type of demand may even be higher than the average — off the top of my head, I can remember Black Mountain doing similar stuff and even getting away with it, critically and commercially.

 

Blood Ceremony, however, are much more «hardcore» than Black Mountain. Once they get their groove going, they do not strive all that much to change or diversify it, and their lyrical focus on «dark pagan practices» ensures that their popularity will forever be limited to a rather specific type of audience. Some critics have noticed them from a pat-pat-pat-her-on-the-butt angle of view, but none of the albums charted anywhere, because most people probably took one glance at the album cover and decided that this is one of those hardcore fan-only archival releases from yet another forgotten band circa 1970. Like Steamhammer or something.

 

Well — they wouldn't be totally off base, because it is only a good audiophile who immediately knows how to tell a 21st century guitar tone from a 20th century one that will quickly understand what period we are talking about here. Other than that, these guys observe the formalities right down to their visual image (robes, capes, long hair, you name it), and this religious devotion to such a special time and place in history should command respect. In fact, fuck respect, I actually admire what they're doing and the cool sound they're getting. Everything stated above is true: Iommi guitar + Anderson flute + Manzarek organ + stern female vocals, song after song after song. And oh, those titles! ʽMaster Of Confusionʼ. ʽInto The Covenʼ. ʽChildren Of The Futureʼ. ʽHymn To Panʼ. Classic stuff.

 

You do know what's coming up, though, right? You do know that the next thing I am going to say is that they have one fatal flaw — and that flaw is, of course, that the songs as such are boring and predictable. What Sean Kennedy, credited as the chief writer for these guys, is trying to do, as far as I can tell, is that he listens long and hard to several Black Sabbath songs, then mixes the different chords from their riffs (as a rule, this has to include the tritone, or else there wouldn't be that much blood in this ceremony), then puts them back together in different configurations. On top of this, Alia sings some nonsense that must have been digitally generated from a list of preset of key­words (typical example: "Worshippers have gathered under cover of dark / The sorceress is stroking her Aeolian harp / A magus seeks alignment of the stars / Coffin-shaped citadel a door to Mars" — I love this!) and adds her somewhat less-than-awesome organ and flute skills to the proceedings (I believe that a few more lessons from Mr. Ian wouldn't hurt — most of the time she sounds like a rather timid first-year student of the instrument).

 

In other words, they fall into the same trap as most of the retro-imitators do: their love for this kind of music is ten times larger than their talent for making this music. There is not a single riff on here that would have the same spine-chilling effect as ʽBlack Sabbathʼ or ʽNo Quarterʼ or even ʽLocomotive Breathʼ, despite the fact that all the songs are riff-based — rule number one for them: if there ain't no distinct heavy riff in the song, there ain't no song, period. But these riffs are... eh... well, I'd say they are on the level of Sabbath's latest (13), but what is excusable for a 65-year old Iommi, who has long since overworked his required quota of greatness anyway, is hardly excusable for a young ambitious pothead. Yes, and neither can these guys really solo — the lengthy organ solo passage that O'Brien plays on ʽMaster Of Confusionʼ Manzarek-style does not go anywhere beyond «atmospheric», and Kennedy's solos rely on the old-fashioned stock of blues licks that we all know by heart anyway.

 

They try to compensate for this by fiddling around with song structures, shifting tempos and tonalities at will, but that, too, is sort of a requirement of the trade, and soon enough you know that if a song begins by slowly going DOOM... DOOM... DOOM..., it will eventually speed up and go CHUG-CHUG-CHUG-CHUG for a while before settling down again. Or there will be a stop-and-start section where Alia is going to blow her flute and go a little crazy. For the record, though, I was almost absolutely sure that the song ʽHop Toadʼ would include a drum solo, in honor of yet another ʽToadʼ, but it didn't (instead, it had a very bad organ solo), so no, you can't predict every move. Also, if you thought that maybe they have a penchant for pastoralism in music, don't: ʽHymn To Panʼ is as dark and somber as everything else on here (other than the flute, I guess — maybe they thought that the presence of the flute obliges them to dedicate at least one song to Pan, something they would repeat on the second album as well).

 

Even so, all of this is such a hilarious experience that I am still tempted to give this time-defying effort a thumbs up. One might ask why, after all the scorn for, let's say, the unquestionably musically superior Uriah Heep — and I would say, «for the guts». The Heepsters were largely driven by fashion, and presented themselves and their music in much too serious a light for me to agree to succumb to its spell. These guys, on the other hand, are the designers and executors of a fancy musical costume ball, and they get all the ingredients just right. Even the relatively tame musicianship — not just by modern standards, but by 1970's standards as well — becomes an asset here, because it helps concentrate on their «time machine» instead of their egos. If only the formula weren't that limited (it even seems limited compared to the original Sabbath, let alone every other band from which they draw inspiration), but I guess branching out is just not something you are supposed to ask at all from an album recorded in 2008. So just relax, sit back, nibble on your mandrake root, sip on your toadstool essence, and welcome into the coven.

 

LIVING WITH THE ANCIENTS (2011)

 

1) The Great God Pan; 2) Coven Tree; 3) The Hermit; 4) My Demon Brother; 5) Morning Of The Magicians; 6) Oliver Haddo; 7) Night Of Augury; 8) The Witch's Dance; 9) Daughter Of The Sun.

 

Odd enough, they're getting better at this. On Blood Ceremony's second album, the riffs get darker, tighter, and a bit less obviously derivative; the solos get ever so slightly more fluent and complex, implying that they may have spent at least a part of these three years actually shar­pening their skills rather than camping at the crossroads at midnight; and a couple of the songs even manage to build up an impressive atmosphere. Well — I guess if you dabble in the black arts long enough, there's an actual chance that people will gradually shift their reaction from ironic snickering to nervous fidgeting.

 

One such song is ʽMy Demon Brotherʼ, where, after the obligatory tritone-filled introduction, they offer us a cool key change between verse and chorus — it's the kind of trick that worked really well on Sabbath albums circa 1972-73, and it works fine here, provided you do not actually follow the lyrics too closely (Geezer Butler would have probably blushed at these inane lines, but then Geezer never actually wrote Satanist lyrics — these guys do, and I hope Satan eventually gives Alia a good spanking for tarnishing his reputation with this nonsense). It really only works for a second before the spell is over, but that is already an improvement — from simple mastery of form, they try to grapple some mastery of the spirit, and deserve commendment.

 

I am a bit offended, though, at their continuous involvement of poor Greek deities into this black magic thing. Come on guys, just because the unfortunate Pan is pictured with horns on his head does not mean that you can freely call him «the horned one» — what next, Moses? He has nothing to do with witches or black magic, and contrary to rumors, his altar does not «burn with pagan fear», and his image should be accompanied with flutes but not Sabbath-style riffs. We admit, yes, that there are some nice sounding Sabbath-style riffs on ʽThe Great God Panʼ (actual­ly, though, the most recognizable riff is a variation on Alice Cooper's ʽIt's Hot Tonightʼ), and that Sean Kennedy's ecstatic solo is better than any guitar solo passage on the debut album (Satan is a good teacher, want it or not), but leave Pan alone, dammit already.

 

On the other hand, their musical juxtaposition of Tullian flute with Sabbath-y riffs may somewhat justify this mixture — presenting everything as if from the misguided view of an uninformed Christian, for whom «paganism» and «Satanism» are the same thing and who views pagan deities as demons by definition. ʽCoven Treeʼ, where the flute accompanies the dark riffs almost inces­santly, is another good example of this approach — "Saturnalia" = "infernal light" and "roots of witch­ery", and so on.

 

The best song on the album is arguably ʽOliver Haddoʼ, indicating that 20th century black arts intrigue these guys at least as much as ancient Greek mythology, although it is not until the sixth minute that the track really catches fire as Alia switches to pseudo-church organ and Sean Ken­nedy starts tossing out a series of really passionate riffs, supported by exceptionally heavy drum­ming. That is yet another moment where, for a brief while, I am inclined to take Blood Ceremony seriously: not seriously enough to become a Crowley adept — not even Led Zeppelin could make me do that, and Lord knows they tried real hard — but seriously enough to think that they may ultimately do a good job in reviving old-school doom metal.

 

Other than that, though, there is little to add: in terms of basic ingredients, the formula remains the same, and you can spot no more formal musical progress here than you can spot any serious deviation from the song title formula. The added emotional nuances suffice to earn them another optimistic thumbs up, but I honestly know not what else to write, so let us stop right here.

 

THE ELDRITCH DARK (2013)

 

1) Witchwood; 2) Goodbye Gemini; 3) Lord Summerisle; 4) Ballad Of The Weird Sisters; 5) Eldritch Dark; 6) Drawing Down The Moon; 7) Faunus; 8) The Magician.

 

Well, I was wondering when they would finally begin to exploit the folk side of their schtick, and here it comes: Blood Ceremony's third album, The Eldritch Dark, has them expanding into the realm of dark acoustic tales (ʽLord Summerisleʼ, a Wicker Man tribute sung as a duet by Alia with bassist Lucas Gadke), ʽMatty Grovesʼ-style murder ballads (ʽBallad Of The Weird Sistersʼ, replete with fiddles and long-winded rhyming sequences), and merry flute jigs (ʽFaunusʼ, an in­strumental that brings up the theme of horned deities yet once more).

 

Predictably, none of this is great — all the melodic structures are completely traditional, and if you are well familiar with the music of at least a few bands like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span... then again, it should be mentioned that Blood Ceremony have no desire to go completely «authentic»: ʽLord Summerisleʼ, for instance, in addition to the acoustic guitar and flute parts, is eventually joined by a Mellotron backing part. Maybe it's just a cheap trick to procure additional «depth» for this simplistic piece, but somehow I do not quite remember that many folk bands singing medieval ballads with Mellotrons, or prog bands with Mellotrons singing medieval bal­lads with flutes. Well, I guess there must have been (Amazing Blondel?), but it's hardly the most natural combination in the world. Likewise, ʽWeird Sistersʼ actually combines flutes, fiddles, and heavy rock riffage in a rather fun way.

 

Still, the best songs on the album are those that go on worshipping the heavy riff as the founda­tion of everything. ʽWitchwoodʼ has one of these in the verses, and the title track has another, although it borrows much of its chord structure from Sabbath's ʽThe Wizardʼ (oh what an obvious choice to rip off). And then, as if they just didn't have enough, they throw on another epic dedi­cated to Oliver Haddo: the eight-minute ʽMagicianʼ which closes the album may be their most successfully realised number so far, with a complex intro, catchy verses and choruses, a nice little guitar and flute storm in the solo section, and a solemn organ melody that serves as the base of the slow, doom-laden crescendo in the coda. I wouldn't say there's a lot of «magic» as such in the track, but it's definitely enjoyable all the way through.

 

The best song on the album, however, is ʽDrawing Down The Moonʼ, which may not have a great riff, but probably has the best Alia part of 'em all — she's developing this witchy sneer that tastes delicious when spiced with a little reverb and accompanied with a slightly distorted organ part, and the song itself has a strong «pull», opening with Gadke's bass and largely «hanging» on that bassline as it leads everybody around it up and down. It is certainly one of the most energetic and exhilarating invitations to the Sabbath ever thought of in popular music.

 

Which brings me to this particular point about Blood Ceremony: although, technically, their music is often assigned to the «goth horror» category or something like that, in reality there is nothing genuinely «horrific» about it. On the contrary, Alia and the gang are being very casual about their black sorcery — as if they were advertising a scuba diving club or something like that. It's serious (no direct humor or irony anywhere in sight), but it's just, you know, routine business, where "we welcome you to the Sabbath with a knowledge of hellfire" is like "we welcome you to the barbecue party with a knowledge of the gas grill". I guess this is the sort of attitude that made me so completely at peace with them from the very start. I mean, yeah, witches and demons have their chores, too, and their paydays and their checkbooks and their social securities. Stop treating them like they were... you know... supernatural. Be realistic.

 

So, another thumbs up here — third in a row, which should not give the illusion that I really adore this band or anything. All three of these albums just barely rise above mediocrity, but they do rise above mediocrity, and somehow they have so far been even able to create an impression of gradual «progress». The big question is whether that impression can be made to last for their next albums, provided they do not disband soon enough — out of general despair to convince the world that the real Satan stays with them rather than with Nicki Minaj.

 

LORD OF MISRULE (2016)

 

1) The Devil's Widow; 2) Loreley; 3) The Rogue's Lot; 4) Lord Of Misrule; 5) Half Moon Street; 6) The Weird Of Finistere; 7) Flower Phantoms; 8) Old Fires; 9) Things Present, Things Past.

 

Ah, how delightful unabashed copycatting can be. Say what you will, but when the first track on your new album opens with a suspenseful guitar riff taken almost note-for-note from Pink Floyd's ʽLucifer Samʼ (because Lucifer!!), and then, eight (or nine) bars into the song, changes into a Black Sabbath-style rocker with Iommi-tone, on top of which the frontlady piles up a Jethro Tull-style lead flute melody with Anderson-fuss, it's hard to get rid of an ironic chuckle: «Man, these guys just might be the most original artists of 2016 — they're, like, the only ones to completely and absolutely waive the right to any originality! Slavish imitation rules the day!»

 

Add to this the fact that, as of now, Blood Ceremony have already been going on for ten years: that's right, time goes pretty fast now, right? Four albums in ten years, all of which essentially sound the same and that «same» is 100% derivative of a bunch of heavy rock / prog rock artists who now probably come to relax and revisit their youth at Blood Ceremony concerts. (At least Anderson and Iommi, I believe, should get a lifelong supply of free tickets to BC shows). I think their rhythm section has changed again for this album (too lazy to check out properly), but the main people stay the same (Alia on keyboards, flutes, and apprentice-demonic vocals; Sean on Iommi-guitar, although, unlike Iommi, he never downtunes it properly enough), and overall, the band just wants to tell you that dark magic is a full-time occupation, with its own routine, schedules, and stability rates. It doesn't pay too much, but hey, it's a job like any other.

 

And it would still be fun, if only, after the first few tracks, one didn't get the feeling that they are treating it like routine. Again, everything follows the same formula — heavy guitar riffage, deriva­tive of Sabbath and their ilk, but never as memorable; witchy woman vocals from Alia, strong and spiteful, but never truly scary or disturbing; and flute or keyboard solos that always sound tasteful, but never too different from each other. Sometimes the music veers far into the field of Celtic balladry (ʽHalf Moon Streetʼ begins like a metallized version of Fairport Conven­tion's ʽMatty Grovesʼ; ʽThe Weird Of Finistereʼ is a slow, mournful waltz with, for once, a more pastoral sound to the flute), and ʽFlower Phantomsʼ is an unexpectedly short and upbeat psyche­delic-melancholic pop song in the vein of British nugget-bands circa 1968-1969, but even these exceptions have the same arrangement style and the same overall mood.

 

Generally, I still think that the heaviest rocking songs here have 90% of the fun — the already mentioned ʽDevil's Widowʼ, with its tribute to ʽLucifer Samʼ, takes the cake (fast tempo rules, and there's something delightfully corny in the way Alia screams "THE DEVIL'S WIDOW! THE DEVIL'S WIDOW!", as if she just saw her walking down the street or something), but the slow, ponderous ʽRogue's Lotʼ, where the lady gets to ask us the question "how do the living raise the dead?" in such a sinister tone you'd think she was going to demonstrate it here and now, is also cool (at least, until it picks up speed and becomes a more forgettable piece of Crowley boogie); and I am also partial to the «dance-metal» pattern of ʽOld Firesʼ and its overdubbed guitars with «woman tones» melodically duelling in the instrumental section. The title track (referring to the legendary title of the presider over the medieval Feast Of Fools) is probably supposed to be the album's centerpiece, what with its epic, power chord-based opening and all, but does not really come across as a standout — however, it does have a well-thought out main riff as well.

 

All said, Lord Of Misrule does find me a little tired of giving out thumbs up as if, you know, it were automatically guaranteed that Blood Ceremony's schtick, as long as it is properly executed, is always a good thing to have in unlimited quantities. Namely, Lord Of Misrule has fewer moments of true excitement than The Eldritch Dark — actually, come to think of it, none at all in comparison — and if it takes them three years to come up with a weaker application of the same formula, why should I be recommending this? If you're new to the witchy world of Alia O'Brien, check out their early stuff; if you already know what they are all about, your time and spiritual energy should probably rather be spent on something else — unless, of course, you need fresh music like this to create the proper vibe for casting incantations over your personal stock of mandrake roots, toadstool powders, and black cat bones.

 

BON IVER

FOR EMMA, FOREVER AGO (2007)

 

1) Flume; 2) Lump Sum; 3) Skinny Love; 4) The Wolves (Act I & II); 5) Blindsided; 6) Creature Fear; 7) Team; 8) For Emma; 9) re: Stacks.

 

For a brief while, Bon Iver (a graphic misrepresentation of French bon hiver ʽgood winterʼ, so make sure you get your French accent on the right syllable) seemed to be one of the hottest things happening on the indie scene. It was, in fact, like a proverbial indie fairy tale come true: a «visi­onary», mildly autistic, highly sensitive guy (Justin Vernon, a twenty-six year old major in Reli­gious Studies from Wisconsin), suffering from mononucleosis and girlfriend problems, secluding himself in a winter cabin, completely alone with his guitar and some recording equipment —and out comes a minimalistic masterpiece of lonely, melancholic beauty. This is the stuff NY Times bestsellers are made of.

 

What really surprised me about this album, upon studying people's reactions, was the rather large amount of «on-the-fence» reviews, along the lines of «fairly nice listen, okay and all that, but cer­tainly not deserving of the hype» and so on. Because For Emma, Forever Ago is certainly not your «average» indie record — it is one of those albums that should be driving people into op­posite tren­ches, machine-guns at the ready. It may be tempting for the evaluator to try and rise above the disagreements, but as tempting as it is, it simply makes no sense. I honestly do not see a way to call Justin Vernon's offering anything other than «genius» or «crap». And in between the two — sorry Bon Iver fans — I can only choose the latter.

 

Note: At this point, every bona fide Bon Iver fan is supposed to say «You just don't get it, do you?» and click the «Back» button on the browser. You have been warned: leave now, be­fore somebody gets hurt.

 

First and foremost: I am sick to my stomach of young bearded melancholic Artists locking them­selves up in log cabins with acoustic guitars. At the very least, one thing which all that time spent inside the log cabin could be devoted to, would be to fuckin' learn to play that acoustic guitar. If Nick Drake's Pink Moon ever had the right to be called a minimalistic masterpiece (which I am not sure of, but in any case, Pink Moon is fifty times the masterpiece For Emma could ever claim to be), it was because the minimalistic guitar parts were produced by a master guitar player, a genuine demi-god of the instrument. Justin Vernon, in comparison, does not seem to know one thing on the guitar that a bright school kid, listening to old folk records, could not master within one month of picking up the thing.

 

Second: The proverbially gorgeous falsetto simply does not cut it any more. Unless this is the first falsetto you have heard in your life, the sweet, soothing, lulling sound of Justin Vernon's voice adds nothing whatsoever to the legions of falsetto-using singers already assembled. The on­ly thing of note is the consistency: unlike such wimps as Brian Wilson, Prince, or even Antony Hegarty, Vernon sings almost exclusively in falsetto, threatening the very reputation of the entire State of Wisconsin. A brave chore (unless he also talks like that), but a head-splitting one.

 

Third and most important. I am not the one to deny the power and importance of atmosphere. I am certainly not against minimalism as such. And I certainly do not agree with Zappa on the ge­ne­ral principle that «broken hearts are for assholes». But there are limits to every sort of patience and tolerance, and as far as I am concerned, For Emma crosses that line quite definitively. The broken heart of Justin Vernon is probably the 10,000th broken heart or so that I have come across in my relations with various kinds of art. Just because it took a log cabin in Wisconsin and an all-out falsetto delivery to acquaint me with it, is not going to make me any more excited. Where is the goddamn music to go along with the broken heart?

 

Admittedly, from time to time there are a few vocal hooks that might, even should be salvaged from the realm of boredom (and if I ever notice someone appropriating them for a better record without sharing the proper credit, I promise to pretend not to have noticed). Most of them are tucked somewhere within the two slightly more upbeat tunes — ʽFlumeʼ and the title track; I also admit to liking the chorus of ʽCreature Fearʼ. The former two have bits of folksy beauty, the lat­ter has a bit of dream-pop charm... somehow, on these three, Vernon must have accidentally fallen upon a few non-standard, evocative vocal moves.

 

But all of these are exceptions, and they never obstruct too much the overall flow of the record, which is quite comparable with the average flow of a water storage basin on a very slightly bree­zy day. Sometimes it outdoes itself by dragging at an absolute tortoise pace (ʽThe Wolvesʼ), as we are supposed to revel in the naked pain and beauty of Vernon's voice and its multiple over­dubs. More often, it picks the tempo up just a little bit, usually on the strength of some basic folk shuffle strumming. Not that there is any big difference.

 

As for Justin Vernon's personal drama... you know what? I'm sorry about the guy as I may be sorry for every other guy or girl that suffers more than he or she deserves to, but I find his poetry clumsy and derivative (here is a typical example: "Only love is all maroon / Gluey feathers on a flume / Sky is womb and she's the moon / I am my mother on the wall, with us all / I move in water, shore to shore / No­thing's more"); his attempts to artistically individualize his problems at the same time overblown to the skies and undercooked to the core; and, of course, all the general indie-trendy hoopla fuss raised about the record reflecting the general crisis of the times.

 

In the end, I have no choice but to agree with Robert Christgau, the lone voice in the crowd to give the album its deserved C+ — or with my old idol Mark Prindle, who dismissed Bon Iver in his usually laconic way: «without the falsetto, it'd just be boring; with the falsetto, it's unlisten­able». Count this whole review as a somewhat superfluous commentary on that judgement. And please, please, PRETTY PLEASE, NO MORE BEARDED LONERS WITH ACOUSTIC GUI­TARS! WHERE THE FUCK IS A ROCK'N'ROLL GUSTAV MAHLER WHEN YOU NEED ONE? THUMBS DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!

 

BON IVER, BON IVER (2011)

 

1) Perth; 2) Minnesota, WI; 3) Holocene; 4) Towers; 5) Michicant; 6) Hinnom, TX; 7) Wash.; 8) Calgary; 9) Lisbon, OH; 10) Beth / Rest.

 

No fewer than seven different musicians accompany Justin Vernon on his sophomore stab at a masterpiece, which should prompt the obvious question: «How the heck did all these people fit within one log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin? Must have been really crammed out there!» Then you learn that the album was not recorded in a log cabin at all, but in an abandoned veteri­narian clinic in Fall Creek, remodeled as a recording studio. Still sounds romantic, although one would expect it to be somehow reflected in the recording — a couple of songs about being kind to animals wouldn't hurt, and yet I can find no traces. Of course, with Bon Iver's lyrics never ma­king figurative sense, let alone literal, you can never be sure.

 

The move from acoustic minimalism to denser art-pop arrangements paid off brilliantly: most re­viewers were happy beyond measure, since they could amply concentrate on discussing the Im­portant Artistic Reasons behind the move, and praise the Important Artist for Progressive Artistic Growth, shown so early on in his career. A few disgruntled voices complained that the growth was actually Regressive, and picketed April Base Studios with signs reading JUDAS and BACK TO THE LOG CABIN and EMMA IS NOT HAPPY. (In their imaginations, at least). But even those voices generally acknowledged that the songs were still great, it's just the idea of develo­ping a bigger sound for them that didn't quite work out.

 

In fact, the atmosphere on Bon Iver, Bon Iver did not change a whole lot from the minimalistic soundscapes of For Emma. The basic vibes, moods, goals, structures remain exactly the same. The falsetto singing has no plans of going anywhere (although, for honesty's sake, Vernon shows a little more range this time around); nor do the lyrics show any signs of advancing from sheer nonsense to, at the very least, some plain old surrealism.

 

We got to give some credit to the Artist. Like so many of them, he is struggling to build himself his own personal dream world, since none of the others seem to be satisfactory enough. This dream world bears a passing resemblance to the United States of America, because it is also di­vided into states, and its towns and cities sometimes even have the same names as the correspon­ding US locations (ʽLisbon, OHʼ), although some of the locations are quite confusing (ʽMinne­sota, WIʼ?) and others could even be offensive to certain Americans (ʽHinnom, TXʼ — you Te­xans do realize that ʽHinnomʼ has the same root as Gehenna, right?).

 

In this dream world, people mostly talk in disjointed, impressionistic associations; play slow, soft, traditionally melodic music; sing in sweet voices, usually multi-tracking them along the way; and always exude a mixed happy-sad feeling because, after all, there are very few things in life over which one couldn't or shouldn't get happy and sad at the same time. If, every once in a while, you start getting the feeling that it all sounds discomfortingly close to banal 1980s-style adult contem­porary, just shake it off. According to a Pitchforkmedia reviewer, it was a brave move on Justin Vernon's side to move things so close to 1980s adult contemporary, and who are we to argue with that? 1980s artists recorded crappy music without understanding how crappy it was (and how much more crappy it would sound with each passing year); recording crappy music with such an understanding is definitely a far braver move.

 

It is true that bringing in extra people at least helped to make some of these songs acquire extra dynamics. ʽPerthʼ, for instance, gradually expands from a pretty guitar flourish to bombastic mar­tial drum patterns and then into a veritable sea of sound with synthesizers, horns, and shrill elec­tric lead lines that is quite far removed from log cabin isolationism — and yet, at the same time, does not really create any different type of mood. It could have been a fantastic track if the flou­rish in question worked in a trance-inducing manner, and the drum patterns and the wall of sound were gelling with it in some sort of meaningful way. To my ears, they don't: the guitar pattern is boring (and, after a while, quite annoyingly boring), the martial drums make no sense, and the wall of sound is neither structured well enough to punctuate the senses, nor dares to whip its brief traces of aggressive atonality into something genuinely alive — for fear that some people might dare to suppose a «rocking» strain to this very, very, very peaceful experience, I guess.

 

I could write a similar diatribe against just about every song on the album, which all range from staggeringly boring (ʽMichicantʼ is a straightahead criminal offense against the slide guitar) to mildly passable (ʽTowersʼ has a cozy country-pop drive, and the strings that double the slide gui­tars are an inventive touch) to almost good (the first half of ʽMinnesotaʼ, with its active fuzz bass lines, is the album's only «gutsy» moment). But what's the use? Just like For Emma, Bon Iver will work for you if you can feel it for this guy, or, more precise, if this guy makes you feel it for him. I feel nothing. All the ingredients are there, but they are all inserted in the wrong order, in wrong amounts, in the wrong handling.

 

When they get around to closing the album, the desire to strangle the producer becomes almost unbearable: as much as I try to, I just cannot interpret ʽBeth / Restʼ, with its electronic drums and keyboards, as a «brave» decision on the songwriter's part — I can only interpret it as a subconsci­ous tribute to one of the miriads of tepid ballads he must have been hearing on the radio when he was six or seven years old. Please do not count me in on this game; I refuse to accept these rules that allow «The Artist» to pass off bland Eighties nostalgia as «Modern Art». It is not a sin to be infected with any sort of influence, even Kim Wilde — it is a sin to extol the very fact of your be­ing influenced as your artistic statement. And no, masking that influence with sets of schizopha­sic lyrics that could just as well be machine-produced does not help.

 

I do not think that Bon Iver, Bon Iver is any «better» or «worse» than For Emma. Technically, it has a different sound, but substantially, nothing has changed. Except for my suspicion that the existence and appraisal of Bon Iver confirms that, on an official level, «indie» has become as much of a rotting corpse as everything else, and that the wheel has completed its next cycle — the so-called «independent musical press» has advanced to approximately the same level of credibi­lity as Rolling Stone. Yep, just my humble personal opinion, nothing else. And a heartfelt thumbs down — the most sincerely emotional outburst from me that could be associated with this record.

 

22, A MILLION (2016)

 

1) 22 (OVER S∞∞N) 2:48; 2) 10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄; 3) 715 - CRΣΣKS; 4) 33 “GOD” 3:33; 5) #Strafford APTS; 6) 666 ʇ; 7) M♢♢N WATER; 8) 8 (circle); 9) ____45_____; 10) 00000 Million.

 

Okay, I think I get it now. It's some of that damn Illuminati business, man. Justin Vernon is their secret weapon — by unleashing him upon the world and using both mainstream and alternative rock critics as their helpless puppets, they are planning to disorient us, confuse us, corrupt and subjugate our aesthetic values and ultimately plunge the world into so much confusion that Kanye West might be able to become president and give the launch codes to Somali pirates, while we're all busy discussing Bon Iver's latest message to humanity. And these song titles? Aren't they already imprinted in your mind like proper subliminal messages, to be activated by the New World Or­der at just the right moment?

 

So even if I'm assuming the highly ungrateful role of Cassandra here, I will still go out and say it, and maybe one or two of you nuclear survivors will have the opportunity to thank me ten or so years from now: to a certain extent, the sound and image of 22, A Million was predictable, be­cause when somebody's search for new and unprecedented ways of self-expression overrides one's talent so mercilessly, the results look something like this. Of course, a radical turn into the direction of sampling, Auto-tuning, and crossbreeding neo-folk with electronica was inevitable for this guy, although the scope of it couldn't have been properly guessed. And, of course, the pro­cess of such cross-breeding was far more important to him than actually caring that the record made some sort of sense. And why bother crafting a record that would make some sort of sense, anyway, if fans and critics alike will be all too happy to invent it for you?

 

Here, have some frickin' quotes. "22, A Million is comparatively strange and exploratory, but its worries are more existential... nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon’s own reckoning with the inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he’s seen or known" (Pitchfork). "The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms—inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar" (Spin). "With his long-awaited third album, Vernon completely breaks from his guitar-hugging persona, leaving it in the woods like a Coen brothers corpse as he flexes a mastery of processed vocals, samples, loops, beats, synths and noise, along with more familiar trappings" (RollingStone)... you get the drift already, don't you?

 

So it's either Illuminati or the man found some serious Al Capone stash buried right under his log cabin, with which he was able to buy up all the significant media sources — because, while I did honestly try to entertain, nurture, and re-kindle the possibility of this being, like, you know, a good album after all, even over the course of several listens... well, gut instincts don't lie: just as in the case of his prior two albums, each new listen only brought an additional wave of disgust, so at least in that respect he's demonstrating a delightful stability. And yes, maybe it is just me and I am still not getting something about all this, but so far, not a single one of these reviews has taken even a tiny step towards convincingly clarifying what that «something» could be.

 

Roughly speaking, 22, A Million is an alien-dimensional take on neo-folk, consisting of three steps: (a) write some fairly bland, hookless, nowhere-near-innovative melodies on the intersec­tion of rootsy Americana and New Age; (b) fill 'em up with lyrics that can barely pass the Turing test, but might serve as fodder for lengthy, bloody battles of interpretation; (c) twist, distort, cut up, paste the material with as many technological devices and in as many different ways as your engineer might suggest. As Pitchfork says, "nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort", and they do, oh yes they do. For instance: "Why is the accappella melody of ʽ715ʼ com­pletely hidden under a wall of Autotune?" (Oh, excuse me, that's not Autotune proper, it's some brand-ass-new device called ʽthe Messinaʼ after the name of Vernon's engineer. I'm sure this technical detail makes a lot of artistic difference). Lo and behold, now your life has meaning, because you can spend the rest of it answering that question.

 

But to return to that old crudeness and bluntness: The melodies on 22, A Million lack memora­bility or originality (I don't think there's really a single chord sequence on here that could not have been used up by the likes of a James Taylor sometime in the past — and, as much as I remain skeptical of the overall artistic merit of Sufjan Stevens, that guy does everything that Bon Iver is capable of and much, much more). The lyrics make no sense whatsoever, except for a few individual lines, and the individual lines are usually nauseatingly pretentious ("Must've been forces that took me on them wild courses / Who knows how many poses that I've been in" — un­less he's been Napoleon in one of his past lives, I'm not prepared to buy this), and it is self-un­derstood that humor and self-irony will be prosecuted if they ever find themselves on Justin Vernon's property. And the «special effects», beginning with the triumphant Unicode of the song titles and ending with all the psychedelic / futuristic / faux-avantgarde sampling and encoding, are little more than annoying. Most of the time, it simply sounds like a kid having fun with his laptop. The kid will find it delightful to turn his voice into a chipmunk's every now and then, but there's simply no reason whatsoever for a grown-up person to do so on the very first line of the very first song and then pretend that it has some artistic significance — or, worse still, prod us into disco­vering, intellectually-symbolically or emotionally-supernaturally, that significance.

 

If the first album was simply boring, and the second album was intolerable because it intentio­nally presented obsolete crappy values as the new Art, then the third one is simply an anti-artis­tic scam — a new low in an already fantastically atrocious career. So why is it that, out of all the gazillions of «experimental» albums released every year, people were ready to fall specifically for this one? Is it the Kanye West endorsement? Is it some sort of irresistible tug that you get when you take two of the most fashionable things of the past decade — the folksy bearded loner and the digital studio processing technology — and mash them together with full force? Is it that the words he chooses for his songs hit some sort of generational nerve, and that his arrangement of these words actually carries a manipulative effect? Or is it simply that so many of us have such a mad craving for a soft, whiny, vulnerable falsetto to take as a partner in weeping over the dis­heveled and confused state of the world? So much so, that even when that falsetto is distorted with five billion layers of Autotune, we take this as a symbolic representation of all the unbea­rable burdens and unsolvable problems that pin the Vulnerable Little Man down to the ground? Oh look at me, I'm almost beginning to rant like a Pitchfork reviewer already.

 

Whatever — I say shake off the haze, cut the crap, and call this one of the most stupid, misguided, and phoney albums of the year 2016. If you want some actual folksy sadness that sounds real, for a change, go listen to True Sadness by the Avett Brothers, who lay no claims whatsoever to Big Fat Innovation, do not put dumb effects on their voices, hardly ever use one special symbol from the user-defined area in their song titles, yet somehow seem to pack more emotion and plain old common sense in a single song than Justin Vernon manages to smear over half an hour of his «muzak of the future». Sure, there's nothing adventurous whatsoever about True Sadness, but when it comes to choosing between (a) sitting in front of the fireplace and sipping hot tea on a cold evening, or (b) wrapping your wife's panties around your head and jogging through the Mojave desert in a pokemon suit, I happen to be the kind of guy who chooses (a). Although, add choice (c) — sit through 22, A Million just one more time in hopes of finally penetrating its transcendental nature — and choice (b) begins to look a bit more promising. I suppose it's only natural that the thumbs down verdict here not be subject to any further appeal.

 

THE BOOKS

THOUGHT FOR FOOD (2002)

 

1) Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again; 2) Read, Eat, Sleep; 3) All Bad Ends All; 4) Contempt; 5) All Our Base Are Belong To Them; 6) Thankyoubranch; 7) Motherless Bastard; 8) Mikey Bass; 9) Excess Stra­uss­ess; 10) Getting The Done Job; 11) A Dead Fish Gains The Power Of Observation; 12) Deafkids.

 

As a friendly disclaimer, I would just like to remind the reader of a strict «no bull» policy that is observed in these reviews. Music that stirs up feelings is welcome; music that stimulates const­ru­ctive thought without stirring up feelings is slightly less welcome, but still welcome; music that begs for just one question — «did somebody just make me feel like a complete idiot?» — just makes me feel like a complete idiot. And it's no fun reviewing music in a state like that.

 

The Books are a creative duo from New York City (the Holy Mother of Progressive Bull, among other won­derful things), consisting of Nick Zammuto on guitar and Paul de Jong on cello, and backed by The New York Symphony Orchestra of Awesome Samples. They call themselves The Books because they have read a lot of books (personal assumption), and if you haven't read a lot of books — and watch­ed a lot of (obscure) movies, and listened to a lot of (obscure) music — you probably have no business listening to them in the first place. As for myself, I am in no way qualified to compete with these guys' level of knowledge of whatever it is they know, even if I did see Godard's Contempt, on which one of these tracks is based (but I'm a Breathless person myself, so, other than a small flash of Brigitte Bardot in the nude, there was really nothing to get too much excited about). Thus, I'm stumped.

 

Basically, The Books just play small snippets and snuffets of folksy melodies, with acoustic gui­tars, violins, cellos, and electric bass (the latter of which periodically blows radioactive holes through my speakers). On their own, these snippets would be completely worthless — the play­ing is unexceptional and the «melodies» are underworked, when they are «worked» at all. The gist is that they are densely peppered with samples, and, if I get it right, the samples are supposed to in­teract with the melodies in creative ways, resulting in... in... aw, crap.

 

I do officially admit that the song titles are original enough to merit a carrot. ʽEnjoy Your Wor­ries, You May Never Have Them Againʼ is a clever tweet — if only it had something to do with the actual track, which sounds like a home rehearsal of a daring, but erratic and vision-less folk guitarist spliced with a quiet mishmash of avantgarde violins and people talking in Robert Altman fashion (including a long story narrated by a lady about a stalker). Verdict: this is approxi­mately 2,000 years ahead of its time, and these guys belong in a MoMA installation.

 

ʽRead, Eat, Sleepʼ is a combination of minimalistic acoustic patterns, chimes, and deep bass, mi­xed in Brian Eno fashion and sprayed with samples of a spelling bee. Conclusion: "By digitising thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose aleatoric music". While this gives the lis­tener a fine chance to learn the relatively recent neologism «aleatoric», I cannot in the least agree with raving critical opinions — as far as my organism sees it, the samples and the vapid musical backing cancel each other out rather than complement each other.

 

Only a couple of tracks actually gives the impression of adhering to the non-rules of mu­sique concrète — ʽExcess Straussessʼ is two minutes of cellos and violins echoing from one channel to another, and the last two snippets really try to weave some sort of pseudo-musical pattern from sampled bubbles and babbles (ʽDeafkidsʼ with its deconstructed thrash metal bassline almost bor­ders on funny — there, I've said it). Other than that, there is no coherence or conceptuality here except for whatever you might want to invent yourself, particularly when you are a professional musical critic for whom «thought for food» is a harsh reality of life.

 

Speaking of life, one opinion that I have encountered is that Thought For Food is supposed to represent a special «panorama of life», with its array of samples gathered from all sorts of sources and the music merely a sonic backing to add an artsier dimension to the documentary nature of the panorama. Well... okay. Perhaps this will make someone reevaluate all of Life's values, bring open-mindedness, freshness, a renewed sense of purpose, and a reignited taste for adventurous feelings into one's existence.

 

My position, unfortunately, will remain rather retrograde — I find Thought For Food, and parti­cularly the excited critical reception that has surrounded it, to be just one more sign of a general creative exhaustion of the 2000s. I admit that, to a certain degree, it is a technical success: the samples have been integrated smoothly enough to make the whole thing listenable as a piece of «music» rather than a patchwork of «avantagrde sonic effects» à la ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ. But «lis­tenable» is certainly not enough, and I'd much rather go back to the meaningful sonic nightmare of ʽNo. 9ʼ than sit once more through the bland «non-statement» of Thought For Food, so care­fully and meticulously crafted by these two guys.

 

Nice, intellectual guys, and there is nothing wrong in trying to look for new ways to revolutionize the musical world — it's just that the hun­ger for change sometimes gets so big that people get inadequately happy at the mere idea of look­ing for it. Never mind if you don't find anything. Just keep looking, it'll come to you. Or maybe it has already come. Yep, that's right, it's here, it's just what we needed. Isn't it great? Yeah, it's not for everyone, but what is? Justin Bieber? Come on now, conservatism won't help make this world a better place. Besides, you wanted progress, didn't you? You want it — you got it. What's the point of your disrespectful thumbs down? Ob­struct development? Cool off the optimism? Sell us all to MTV? When we have just seen the future of rock'n'roll, and its name is... ALEATORIC!!!

 

THE LEMON OF PINK (2003)

 

1) The Lemon Of Pink; 2) The Lemon Of Pink; 3) Tokyo; 4) Bonanza; 5) S Is For Evrysing; 6) Explanation Mark; 7) There Is No There; 8) Take Time; 9) Don't Even Sing About It; 10) The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice; 11) A True Story Of A Story Of True Love; 12) That Right Ain't Shit; 13) PS.

 

Hello and welcome to today's edition of «No Bull Session With Big Daddy». In the news: The Books release a follow-up to their critically appraised debut, Thought For Food. Called The Lemon Of Pink, it is one minute shorter, but one track longer than its predecessor, and continues in the same direction. This makes it, once more, an excellent target for our program.

 

A lot of reviews and evaluations of the album use different words to paraphrase more or less the same conclusion: «a chaotic jumble that should be a complete wreck, but somehow, for some rea­son, it works». Each time I read something of the kind, I want to turn into a little tick and crawl inside that particular person's ear — no, not to eat his brains out (although that might be an op­tion), but simply to witness his true reaction to a Books album. Because the nagging question is: what works? What kind of gold mine are these guys working on that remains inaccessible to us outsiders?.. Could you be more specific? In fact, could you be more specific?

 

That said, let us be just. The Lemon Of Pink is a bit less extremist and a bit more musical than Thought For Food. The samples are still at the forefront of everything, but there are now tracks like ʽTokyoʼ, where an actual acoustic melody — and a pretty one, too — runs over its entire length, while Japanese stewardesses welcome you on the flight and off it. The main theme of ʽTake Timeʼ may even be memorable, with the valuable help of the pendulum chorus ("take – time, take – time..."). And there are bits of impressive acoustic playing scattered here and there all over the place, particularly on the second half of the album.

 

This all makes The Lemon Of Pink sound like a rather vapid, distraught jam session played by a couple of professional musicians that just got together to fight boredom on a lazy, hot summer day. Pile some speech samples on top of it, and whoops, you got yourself an art statement. Take away the samples, and you get back your lazy distraught session. I just keep vacillating between rati­onal hatred for the former and friendly indifference towards the latter.

 

The little speech-filled links are friendlier and funnier this time, though. ʽBonanzaʼ is a bunch of chopped up, mumbled phrases in an unrecognizable language (Dutch?), recited by a toothless old man; ʽExplanation Markʼ sounds like several over-imposed phonetic lessons; and ʽPSʼ finishes the album with a recording of several people preparing to start something potentially important, but always failing due to uncontrollable giggle attacks. While it's all silly, it at least sounds frie­ndly and even «cute», which might be a starting point for liking the whole thing.

 

Alas, even if the record succeeds in not generally breeding negative emotions, it still never gets anywhere beyond «cuddly». Tracks like ʽThe Futureʼ and a few others occasionally sound close to The Beta Band — lulling, melancholic singing to folksy acoustic patterns that may, at any time, be interrupted by a heavy whack on the head with a frying-pan or your local rose-colored alien friend whizzing by in his flying saucer. But the Betas had the will to transform these psycho-folk vibes into actual songs, whereas the Books seem determined to put a totalitarian stop to these vile, commercial, intellectually insulting cravings.

 

With ʽTake Timeʼ and ʽTokyoʼ, their noble goal is almost ruined, because there are two or three things I still manage to remember about these tracks. Elsewhere, they are more successful. But if you are into The Books at all, you should be into hardcore — compared to Thought For Food, The Lemon Of Pink is a fucking sellout. As a pleasant collection of songs, it fails; as an artistic statement, it adds little to its predecessor; as a user-friendly sonic environment celebrating the simple joys of Planet Earth, it probably works best when your name is Major Tom, and you can­not hear me. Thumbs down either way.

 

LOST AND SAFE (2005)

 

1) A Little Longing Goes Away; 2) Be Good To Them Always; 3) Vogt Dig For Kloppervok; 4) Smells Like Content; 5) It Never Changes To Stop; 6) An Animated Description Of Mr. Maps; 7) Venice; 8) None But Shining Hours; 9) If Not Now, Whenever; 10) An Owl With Knees; 11) Twelve Fold Chain.

 

You'd think that, with this clear propensity for «pushing boundaries», The Books would eventual­ly start advancing beyond the format of their first album. For most of their predecessors this was, after all, inevitable. From the nightmarish industrial clang of Einstürzende Neubauten to the psy­chedelic kindergarten of The Animal Collective, they were all moving somewhere. But apparent­ly, that is exactly what Zammuto and de Jong are the most afraid of — that trying to expand their sound and vision will make their «art» more accessible and, consequently, dilute the «impor­tance» of their revolutionary contributions.

 

Which is certainly correct to an extent: speaking of Animal Collective, now that the world has shed a tear over Merriweather Post Pavillion, how many people are going to remember this band through their first batch of far less accessible, «anti-musical» records? Even despite the fact that, in sheer objective terms, they may have been far more «innovative» per se. Thus, it seems that The Books are willing to lock themselves in this curious state of «perpetual revolution» — not a progressive series of revolutions replacing one another, more like the same group of Bol­sheviks running up the steps of the Winter Palace in constant replay mode.

 

The third album is a little bit longer, a tiny bit more diverse in terms of selection of basic «melo­dies», and actually features a large amount of vocal work by the band members themselves — sometimes going as far as real singing, usually in a dreary lethargic mode. That's about as far as they allow themselves to go. As for the samples, these now include occasional poetry readings (e. g. from W. H. Auden and «Jabberwocky»), along with the usual obscure movie quotations and bits of street dialog, describing the details of which is excruciatingly boring, and decoding the reasons of inclusion for which is impossible without performing brain surgery on the creators.

 

You'd think that, perhaps, including a larger proportion of vocals would push these tracks closer in the direction of real songs, but it does not. The minimalistic instrumentation, the chop-and-pa­ste computer effects, the lulling or electronically treated original voices, and the extraneous sam­ples are still interwoven in «art-performance» fashion, so there is no threat of losing the band's precious integrity. In fact, I didn't even notice the change upon first listen — so seamlessly do Zammuto's and de Jong's voices flow into their sample database. I suppose that might be checked as a positive accomplishment.

 

As a curious exception, I'd list ʽIt Never Changes To Stopʼ, the best thing about which is not the "I don't want to hear any more talking, any more moving about" sample part grumbled out by a see­mingly insecure disciplinarian, but rather an excellent overdubbed cello part that is as much Wagner as it is ʽI Am The Walrusʼ. Its very presence makes the sound louder and fatter than just about everything else on here, and teasingly proves that these guys can make actual music when they feel like it. They just don't, most of the time.

 

The bottomline turns out to be the same as usual. If you are sleeping, Lost And Safe may wake you up — slim chances, though, because it won't wake you up by itself: you'll have to find it first, meaning that only authentic somnambulists are eligible. If you consider yourself wide awake, I fail to see any potential emotional or intellectual stimulation here that could be genuine. Just one more hollow attempt at breeding a new cultural stimulus that is only alive as long as there is a firm feeding hand to breed it. Sure ain't my hand, though — my hands go thumbs down!

 

MUSIC FOR A FRENCH ELEVATOR (2006)

 

1) Fralité; 2) Egaberté; 3) Liternité; 4) It's Musiiiiiiic!; 5) The Joy Of Nature; 6) Meditation Outtakes; 7) A Long Villainous Sequence; 8) Millions Of Millions; 9) Of The Word God; 10) Ghost Train Digest; 11) You'll Never Be Alone; 12) Three Day Night; 13) Ah..., I See.

 

Okay, factual foundation first. This is a very brief (barely 15 minutes in length) EP-size release, whose full title is really Music For A French Elevator And Other Short Format Oddities By The Books, but titles of such length do not look too good in all caps. The «French Elevator» seg­ment actually only covers the first four tracks, which were indeed played in a French elevator installed in the Ministry of Culture in Paris for people visiting a special modern art and sound in­stallation in 2004. The other tracks just pad out the «album» with an extra selection of samples from The Books' archives. There is no «music» as such on them — just samples, most of them spoken (or, at most, bleated, bellowed, or whispered).

 

Now the evaluation. As it is, it happens to be my favorite Books album. First of all, fifteen minu­tes of Books per session is just about all I can stand. Second, the goddamn honesty. This time around, if you disregard the word Music in the title, there is really no pretense at all that they may be doing something other than mocking your brains out. What happens here is like... well, a little bit like a Terry Gilliam animation sequence with a broken video cable. It does not make much sense, and it is completely stupid from a rational point of view, but if it somehow hits that one right spot that is located God knows where — it's unforgettable.

 

The «Elevator» tracks, instead of focusing on The Books' usual acoustic guitar and cello (a little bit is still available on ʽFralitéʼ), bring in some lightweight jazz piano (ʽEgabertéʼ) or free-form jazz (ʽLibernitéʼ) that go well with some French fries, er, French spoken samples, and bring the absurdism to its peak by randomly remixing the initial syllables of the song titles. The resulting atmosphere is proverbially nutty, but also uplifting and full of metaphorical sunshine. And since the longest of these tracks clocks in at 1:21, the experience never drags.

 

The rest... weird it may sound, but it seems as if I really like the band's samples more when they are unhindered by all the diddling. For one thing, it helps us see that they are not simply incorpo­rating random stuff from their libraries, but spend a lot of time editing it. ʽGhost Train Digestʼ, for instance, is really a condensed version of an old British movie where they take away all actual content and leave in most of the "God gracious!...", "oh dear oh dear...", "sorry" and other idio­matic stuff. On ʽMillions Of Millionsʼ, a preoccupied female is counting out money. ʽMeditation Outtakesʼ is one minute of several people spelling out the word «meditation». ʽA Long Villainous Sequenceʼ is thirty-five seconds of evil cackling and grunting. ʽThe Joy Of Natureʼ is a bunch of people trying to sound like farm animals. And so on.

 

Since you never really know what to expect — at the very least, you may be almost sure that the next snippet is not going to be a boring minimalistic guitar/cello duet — the sequencing is thrill­ing, funny, and sometimes even thought-provoking. (And ʽGhost Trainʼ is a good vehicle to prac­tice your British pronunciation). Which, logically, brings me to my final point: it might have been a much better idea, given The Books' technical efficiency, if they had always separated their mu­sic from their samples. They are good musicians and clever splicers, but their regular albums do not really let us see the former and always obscure the latter. Here at least, for fifteen minutes, you can enjoy «just the splicing». Believe me, there's more to splicing than life.

 

THE WAY OUT (2010)

 

1) Group Autogenics I; 2) IDKT; 3) I Didn't Know That; 4) A Cold Freezin' Night; 5) Beautiful People; 6) I Am Who I Am; 7) Chain Of Missing Links; 8) All You Need Is A Wall; 9) Thirty Incoming; 10) A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi; 11) We Bought The Flood; 12) The Story Of Hip Hop; 13) Free Translator; 14) Group Autogenics II.

 

Question: so why exactly did The Books break up? Answer: why, cuz the darn kids just don't read 'em no more these days! In this sad, illiterate age, plagued by free porn and Angry Birds...

 

...oops, sorry, wrong platform. The correct answer, of course, is: because so few people really cared if they lived or died that they preferred to die. For publicity's sake, I assume. «The Books broke up today». «What are you talking about? I only just finished rearranging the shelves». «No, apparently there was a whole band out there, called The Books, and they just broke up.» «Whoah, you don't say? A band called The Books? Why didn't anybody tell me? What's their game? Where can I buy their records? Do they offer a last minute garage sale? Is the fan club offering T-shirts for free?»

 

Not sure about T-shirts, but at least the band went out with its most transparently «musical» al­bum ever. Ironically, it is also their one record that is the least dependent on their traditional brands of instrumentation. Most of the backing tracks are either electronic or R'n'B-ish, or both, with the emphasis no longer on guitar and cello. This is not necessarily a plus in itself, but it makes the record more dynamic and jerky, so at the very least it is not that easy to fall asleep to the individual tracks.

 

Moving on, the album, for the first time ever, somehow tries to explain itself to the befuddled lis­tener. "Hello, greetings and welcome. Welcome to a new beginning, for this tape will serve you as a new beginning... On this recording, music specifically created for its pleasurable effects upon your mind, body and emotions is mixed with a warm orange colored liquid. Your body is now a glass container". If you have already signed a written consent allowing your body to be treated as a glass container, who knows? — your mind, body and emotions might even consider The Way Out an introspective masterpiece.

 

Or «outrospective», whatever. The herky-jerky nature of these tunes produces a paranoid impres­sion, which is way better than a lethargic impression. ʽI Didn't Know Thatʼ sounds like a shred­ded and recycled hip-hop (or would that be trip-hop?) track with a free jazz flavor for good mea­sure. ʽA Cold Freezin' Nightʼ features a little boy threatening to blow your brains out to the mer­ry sounds of something in between a robotic electro-funk pattern and a video game soundtrack. ʽI Am Who I Amʼ tips its hat to industrial metal (soft, though) as the protagonist asserts his identity ("I will be who I am and what I am"). And so on — do I really need to go through all the tracks?

 

Actually, a couple of the tracks almost work as actual songs. ʽAll You Need Is A Wallʼ is a rare spot of quiet acoustic meditation and falsetto vocal harmonies; and ʽFree Translatorʼ is an acous­tic folk composition, plain and simple. Neither of the tunes is particularly memorable or original, but at least The Books leave you unable to say: «These guys never made an actual song in their entire life». Although, come to think of it, it would sound cool, especially considering that they are much better at collages anyway.

 

In the end, I would probably have given the whole thing the usual negative assessment, if it weren't for ʽThe Story Of Hip-Hopʼ, a track that lambasts the genre in the subtlest way possible — as actual hip-hop samples are mixed in with a steadier rhythm track, «disrupting the flow» of the whole thing every several seconds, someone narrates «the story of Hip-Hop» as an animate character, including smart observations about the latter, such as "He never rests. He beats and whirrs and whirrs so fast that you can't tell what he looks like". And the moral at the end: "Now you see the trouble little Hip Hop got into. It was all because he didn't look where he hopped..." Hey, could I take credit for that? Guess not. Too bad.

 

So, The Way Out is not a particularly bad way out for these guys. If their purpose in art was to confuse and derail, I must say this is the only record in the catalog that seems to me to have hit at least somewhere near that mark. Occasionally intriguing, occasionally funny, rarely boring, fea­turing ʽA Wonderful Phrase By Gandhiʼ, and lots and lots and lots of «original» text that I very much want to see as a parody on spiritual sermons than the real thing (ʽChain Of Missing Linksʼ is pretty much the apogee here). It's okay. I just hope these guys never come together again. Out is out, after all. It isn't nice to cheat.

BOTCH

AMERICAN NERVOSO (1998)

 

1) Hutton's Great Heat Engine; 2) John Woo; 3) Dali's Praying Mantis; 4) Dead For A Minute; 5) Oma; 6) Thank God For Worker Bees; 7) Rejection Spoken Softly; 8) Spitting Black; 9) Hives.

 

As a rule, the Tacoma/Seattle area is not usually associated with technically prodigious metal bands — the grunge crowds is where it's at, unless you start digging a little deeper, and then, quite early on in the process, you discover oddities like Botch, a band whose commercial career only lasted a couple of years and who were allegedly shunned by the community at the time, yet came to be remembered with a certain amount of reverence over the years. Then again, serves them just right for calling themselves «Botch». I mean, who wants to pay attention to something called «Botch»? At least «Stupid Assholes» would have sounded enticing.

 

In any case, the band was a tight, crunchy four-piece — guitar, bass, drums (the drummer also played a bit of piano when the «unpredictability monitor» flashed red), and vocals. Vocalist Dave Verellen is actually the weakest link: consistent with the basic genre requirements of «metalcore», he does little other than scream his lungs off throughout, and, as usual, any possible excitement connected with this wears off after the second minute, so, honestly, I'd much rather listen to this with the vocals erased, as they mostly just detract from the complexity of the music. Or, at best, just keep them in a few crucial moments where a well-placed scream can emphasize the effect of some sudden powerful musical blast.

 

Fortunately, I have listened to so many of these screaming bands over the years that my ears have become largely desensitized to such vocals — a mistake, perhaps, since the vocals are supposed to be a significant part of the statement, but with a band like Botch, the stuff that the three instru­mentalists are doing with their instruments is just so much more intriguing than Verellen's one single trick that I cannot imagine any serious listener wasting nerve channels on that instead of digging all the cool riffs, tricky time signatures, and crazyass solos. Unless you're heading straight for the mosh pit, but then why Botch in the first place? Anthrax will do the job nicely.

 

Encyclopaedias will tell you that Botch were one of the founding fathers of «mathcore», and, in­deed, I am not familiar with a lot of metal bands before them who would so explicitly use «metal language» to put together song structures of such bewildering complexity and diversity. Because of that language, it all sounds the same, but it really isn't — each song goes through a whole pack of different melodies and rhythms, as the instrumental trio attempts to become a sort of «metal Cream», amazing the world with their freedom flight and faultless technique. On second thought, though, the allegory is not entirely right — Cream improvisations often, if not always, featured the players challenging each other, whereas here everything is tightly pre-coordinated, and all three players are always working towards one common goal.

 

The monotonousness of the music is a serious flaw: apart from maybe one or two special mo­ments, such as the out-of-place funeral-march piano coda to ʽOmaʼ, it's all brutal metallic riffage, supported by massive percussion attacks. For this reason, unless you eat, drink, piss, and shit metal, American Nervoso is best taken in short, merciful dosages to appreciate its concept of «total creative freedom within a rigidly restricted genre formula». The songs themselves do not pretend to be shapeless avantgarde experimental pieces — they are, indeed, songs, often without choruses, but with introductions, verses, bridges, internal development, codas, the works. How­ever, if your intro is in one time signature, your verse is in a different one, and your bridge dis­penses with rhythm altogether, this certainly creates a disorienting effect. It is not necessarily good: the riffs are not always meaningful, and the rapid variation dissipates the Sabbath-created magic of heavy metal — you gotta give that promising groove some valuable time to sink in, otherwise it's going to be just a juggling lights show. But after a while, once your eyes and ears get adjusted to the razzle-dazzle, it begins to work.

 

The overall mood of the album is, of course, chaotic-apocalyptic: "These mirrors break / And now we've lost everything / Pieces collect about me / Despite my efforts", Verellen bellows out on ʽDead For A Minuteʼ, except you cannot discern these words without a lyrics sheet — but you can certainly discern the same crazy-panicky feel that does characterize quite a few of their dis­tantly related brethren from the Seattle area, except that Botch exercise strict military discipline, and their chaotic panic is precisely orchestrated — not coincidentally, perhaps, the second song here bears the name of ʽJohn Wooʼ, as some of its rhythmic pulses would make an awesome soundtrack to a martial arts movie. Elsewhere, song titles like ʽDali's Praying Mantisʼ or ʽThank God For Worker Beesʼ show that, conceptually, these guys are much more influenced by avant-jazz people than the hardcore metal crowds (and, just for the record, it is said that they actually played Destiny's Child songs during warm-up before their shows — no wonder they weren't too loved back in ol' Washington State!).

 

On the whole, American Nervoso is not a great album. Dissecting each of its compositions from a purely musicological stance may be a fun way to kill time, and its total may also be worth more than the sum of its parts — because, after all, most of its songs do sound the same — yet much of the time you do get the feeling that it is, rudely speaking, too complex for its own good, and top­ping that complexity off with ridiculous screamfests is hardly a saving grace. But for a simple bunch of Tacoma kids this is a major achievement, one of those records that can be respected just by looking at what they managed to have done without necessarily «getting» it. Frankly speaking, there are very few heavy metal records that I «love» anyway, but quite a few that command my respect, and Botch's debut does belong in that category. Thumbs up.

 

WE ARE THE ROMANS (1999)

 

1) To Our Friends In The Great White North; 2) Mondrian Was A Liar; 3) Transitions From Persona To Object; 4) Swimming The Channel Vs. Driving The Chunnel; 5) C. Thomas Howell As The "Soul Man"; 6) Saint Matthew Re­turns To The Womb; 7) Frequency Ass Bandit; 8) I Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Terms; 9) Man The Ramparts.

 

I don't think anyone would guess, just by glancing at these song titles, that the underlying album would be metal. I mean, just how many metal artists out there have references to Piet Mondrian or C. Thomas Howell in their song titles? These ones really look like they'd rather belong on a Frank Zappa record, or at least fit in better with some indie poseur like Sufjan Stevens. It is, in fact, a total pity that such a tremendous title as ʽI Wanna Be A Sex Symbol On My Own Termsʼ is completely wasted on three and a half minutes of fairly routine, monotonous metallic riffage and nearly endless head-splitting screaming. Ah well, it was too good to work.

 

The good news is that Botch's second and final album actually covers more stylistic ground than the first one — and a few of the «artsier» tracks here should actually qualify as some of the finest heavy rock offered to the world at the end of the decade. ʽTransitions From Persona To Objectʼ is the composition that springs to mind first and foremost — starting off with some dazzling poly­rhythms, featuring guitarist Dave Knudson and Tim Latona at their best, it eventually explodes into the stratosphere, as Knudson hits upon a sweet, dry guitar tone and constructs a minimalistic high-pitched solo that is truly mindblowing; later on, as the melody shifts once again and be­comes an angular King Crimson-style trance-inducer, he brews up a few more overdubs that make the guitar(s) sound like a meat-hungry swarm of killer bees for a while. That's a pretty awe­some soundtrack to the process of «transition from persona to object» — "see us conquer all the humans that are left / This is our new home and we're still building", screams Verellen, and we see that the band's rather persistent obsession with the bee imagery (remember ʽThank God For Worker Beesʼ and ʽHivesʼ) still holds on.

 

A couple of the tracks are not «metal» at all, such as ʽSwimming The Channel Vs. Driving The Chunnelʼ (what could a band from Tacoma know about that contrast, I wonder?) — a slow bluesy shuffle carried forward by low-tuned, scraggly indie-rock guitar, with more of a Sonic Youth in­fluence than any kind of metal flavor, gradually fizzling away into a hazy cloud of electronic hum and hushed feedback. And the epic conclusion, ʽMan The Rampartsʼ, beginning as the most war­like anthem of the album, eventually turns into a sea of industrial bass rumble, then becomes a Gregorian chant of the album title, and then returns to metal for just one brief minute in the cli­mactic coda. But no, this is nothing like Rammstein — Botch have no interest in Teutonic mili­taristic clichés, they have their own equivalent of military brutality.

 

Even the shorter, more formulaic metal numbers have their surprises. ʽC. Thomas Howellʼ, after an uninteresting minute and a half of bland riffage, is given over to another series of high-pitched guitar overdubs (geez, if only that stupid dick could keep his larynx bolted for just one minute!) that generate a cool psychedelic effect; and in general, I must say that I am impressed by the solos on this album much more than I am by the riffs, which is quite atypical for my metal-listening experience. Whenever Knudson is not teaching his guitar to impersonate a killer bee swarm (which is his preferred trick), he is making it grin, giggle, howl, and go off like an alarm siren, rather than just go off at the usual million notes per minute. Listen to ʽFrequency Ass Banditʼ from about 3:00 to about 3:24 — that's one killer-crescendo solo indeed.

 

It's not as if the flaws of the record (and the band in general) did not exist, of course — yes, it is still monotonous, yes, the complexity of the riffs is undercut by their inefficiency, and yes, the «singer» should be dragged out into the street and skinned alive (which is exactly what his singing style suggests is happening to him). But that is sort of understood. Maybe some day a good fairy will trot along and issue a record of Botch covers that eliminate the vocals, clean up the riffs, and preserve all the solos. Until then, this is just a very modest, but still somewhat res­pectful thumbs up: I appreciate the effort, and I even appreciate the effort it took to put together relatively intelligent and, occasionally, even poetic lyrics for these songs — despite knowing that nobody will ever be able to decipher one word without some printed help. It takes a while to de­code their message (same old o tempora, o mores! stuff — Cicero would be proud, though), but once you do, it fits the insane, structurally-chaotic music quite nicely. Oh, incidentally, isn't We Are The Romans sup­posed to be a bit of a pun on ʽWe Are The Robotsʼ? I'm sure Kraftwerk must have been one of the influences on these guys in any case.

 

BRAND NEW

YOUR FAVORITE WEAPON (2001)

 

1) The Shower Scene; 2) Jude Law And A Semester Abroad; 3) Sudden Death In Carolina; 4) Mix Tape; 5) Failure By Design; 6) Last Chance To Lose Your Keys; 7) Logan To Government Center; 8) The No Seatbelt Song; 9) Seventy Times 7; 10) Secondary; 11) Magazines; 12) Soco Amaretto Lime.

 

Time for a little bit of emo, of which Brand New are the front line representatives in the New England area: Jesse Lacey on vocals and rhythm guitar, Vincent Accardi on lead guitar, Garrett Tierney on bass, and Brian Lace on drums — everything very concise and economical. This debut album was released on the Triple Crown label and, apparently, did not chart at all, but it helped them establish a footing, and even though it is usually dismissed as a «stepping stone» to success, it is not really that different from everything they'd do afterwards.

 

The angle under which this song collection could be discussed best, as far as my perspective is concerned, is «why the hell don't I hate this?» Because, really, the potential of this material to annoy and irritate is glaringly obvious. The songwriting is shoddy, with generic indie-rock riffs all over the place and the «quiet verse / loud chorus» opposition serving as the basis for most of the hooks. The lyrical and emotional themes of the songs concern breakups, breakups, and still more breakups, regardless of the song titles (yes, even a song called ʽLogan To Government Cen­terʼ is about a breakup — the title just metaphorically refers to a highway exit near Boston). The vocals are screechy, and neither the main nor the auxiliary guy have any individual manner of singing that would set them apart from college rockers all over the world.

 

But on the positive side, there is at the same time a tightness and a lightness to these tunes that makes these guys tolerable, and at times even likeable. As a band, they are very well coordinated; the drummer is smooth and flexible, the guitarists lock into each other with perfect precision, and they merge together pop structures and punk simplicity in a very professional fashion (they cer­tainly know their skill way beyond three chords, but this does not prevent them from a speedy and aggressive sound whenever they feel like it). Even more importantly, there is a whiffy sense of humor and a touch of intelligence behind the tunes — the songs are neither too whiny nor too foul-mouthed. It's almost as if they had a plan, to try and take this most boring of subjects (col­lege boy meets college girl, shit happens, college boy dumps college girl or vice versa) and see if they can present it in a way that does not annoy the hell out of demanding listeners. It doesn't always work, but they manage to do it while avoiding many of the usual clichés.

 

The thing is, the lyrics on their own look pretty darn bad ("so don't apologize, I hope you choke and die, search your cell for something with which to hang yourself" is not an atypical example), but they are delivered with a slightly ironic twist: this nervous nerdy character that Lacey por­traits in most of the songs sounds like a half-sincere idiot, half-clown who feeds on nervous tension but never truly suffers from suicidal (or even girlfriend-cidal) tendencies. On ʽMix Tapeʼ, he drops an almost jokey self-reference ("And I'm sick of your tattoos, and the way you don't appreciate Brand New... and me!"); on ʽSecondaryʼ, full of lyrical references to self-mutilation and suicide, he sings about all that stuff as if it were just an obligatory teenage ritual — all too often, it seems like a parody on teen angst, and it could well have been intentional.

 

Not that it saves the album from being forgettable: melody-wise, the songs have little to dis­tinguish themselves from millions of equally faceless pop-punk chord sequences. But the sense of sarcasm is refreshing, particularly on the last track, ʽSoco Amaretto Limeʼ, a semi-drunk acoustic anthem proclaiming that "I'm gonna stay eighteen forever" (hear that, Alice Cooper?), "we're the coolest kids and we take what we can get", and, finally, "you're just jealous cause we're young and in love" — all in perfect irony, of course. This is the best possible course: instead of puffing and huffing and showing off the overblown «tragic sincerity» of hormonal outbursts, lighten up and concentrate on the «fun» aspect of failed relationships, if at all possible. No thumbs up, but I expected so much worse that thumbing this down would feel unjust — even if everybody around seems to agree that the band got much better after this record (where I would quibble with the word «much», but that's just me).

 

DEJA ENTENDU (2003)

 

1) Tautou; 2) Sic Transit Gloria... Glory Fades; 3) I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin Light; 4) Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't; 5) The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows; 6) The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot; 7) Jaws Theme Swimming; 8) Me Vs. Maradona Vs. Elvis; 9) Guernica; 10) Good To Know That If I Ever Need Attention All I Have To Do Is Die; 11) Play Crack The Sky.

 

Already these guys are getting more serious, and I am not sure if they deserve such an enthusias­tic pat on the back for this as they did. Yes, it is hard not to notice that on their second album, Brand New have moved way, way beyond writing about break-ups and are now writing about... well, about whatever they might have caught on TV the day before going into the studio, be it an Audrey Tautou movie or a Wes Anderson movie or a documentary about the shipwreck of the FV Pelican way back in 1951 — all of these subjects and more get faithfully covered on the record, and this, I guess, makes it more mature and makes their «emo» more substantial.

 

Unfortunately, the songwriting does not get improved all by itself just because the covered topics get more serious (or do they?). The lead single was ʽThe Quiet Things That No One Ever Knowsʼ, a song about strained relationships (maybe; if you're not sure what any song is about, write «strained relationships» and you have a 70% probability of getting it right) with lots of metapho­rical hospitals-and-blood imagery (and an appropriate video) but also with a very generic alt-rock melody that mostly rests either on power chords or on metronomically chugging guitars — and plenty of screaming, of course (not very quiet). I guess it is still much better than the average generic emo song — this one at least seems meticulously thought over — but no pop genius is in evidence, and the chorus just sucks.

 

The second single was ʽSic Transit Gloria...ʼ, and it at least has a cool-walking bassline that might remind you of ʽThe Guns Of Brixtonʼ, but the screamy chorus still ends up ruining it. Again I have no idea what the lyrics are about (seems to be at least partially about sex, which covers the 29,99% ground of the remaining probabilities), but I totally feel that the verses, where the vocals are «side-tracked» to the left and to the right of the cool-walking bassline and set up at least some sort of tense mood, deserve a much better, or at least more subtle chorus. As it is, it is hard to get moved when they start raving without any visible reasons whatsoever.

 

Amazingly, the best song on the album is also its longest — with this predictable formula of hookless guitar pop and meaningless screaming so firmly in place, you wouldn't think that Brand New could be at their best when trying to craft a lengthy epic, but they are: ʽGood To Know That If I Ever Need Attention, All I Have To Do Is Dieʼ is not only a funny title, but it also has a loud power pop rather than «screamo» chorus, and a couple of lengthy instrumental passages where Vincent Accardi shows off some nice chops (as well as a ʽHotel Californiaʼ fetish). I feel like most reviewers give up way before the end, so the song rarely, if ever, gets a mention, but it is the most interesting composition on this tiresome record — certainly better than whenever they break out the acoustic guitars and begin to sound like R.E.M. on speed (ʽPlay Crack The Skyʼ).

 

I know it's just the regular emo formula and all, but the music here is largely generic, and so is Jesse's singing — even with a formula in place, one could hope for more involving guitar riffs or catchier choruses. As it is, I doubt that Déjà Entendu, although it achieved some commercial success and got all those positive reviews, will ever get past the original adoration of those young adolescents with which these songs resonated in 2003, just because those guys were young and fresh as well. I find this record just as devoid of musical interest as its predecessor, but more pretentious, so a thumbs down is the proper way to go about this.

 

THE DEVIL AND GOD ARE RAGING INSIDE ME (2006)

 

1) Sowing Season (Yeah); 2) Millstone; 3) Jesus Christ; 4) Degausser; 5) Limousine; 6) You Won't Know; 7) Wel­come To Bangkok; 8) Not The Sun; 9) Luca; 10) Untitled; 11) Archers; 12) Handcuffs.

 

Emotional pain. It's actually a real thing, and most of us have probably experienced it — but the more I listen to 21st century music that got critical acclaim for allegedly bottling and conveying waves of emotional pain to the appreciative audience, the more I get the feeling — and yes, may­be I am alone on this, but I don't care — the feeling that somehow, at some elusive moment in time, musicians have simply lost the ability to express their emotional pain in music in a convin­cing manner. Horribly, it even leads me to suspect that they might have lost the ability to feel emotional pain like a perfectly ordinary, reasonable, sensitive human being could feel emotional pain. Is it stupid on my part? George Harrison, Roger Waters, Robert Smith, Michael Stipe, Aimee Mann, Beth Gibbons — they feel and convey emotional pain. But I have not yet felt a single properly bleeding heart from anyone whose musical career would be separated by more than two thousand years from the alleged birth of the greatest emotional sufferer of 'em all (did that sound grossly pathetic? I thought it sounded grossly pathetic).

 

Case study: The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me, a pretentious title that suggests bracing yourself as you push play — surely, with a statement like this, you can expect to be propelled head forward into the scary turbulence of the Greatest Emotional Drama ever. The light and the dark! The sin and the redemption! The suffering and the deliverance! The crime and the punish­ment! Jesse Lacey has grown up, matured, became initiated into the real serious issues of this world, and this is his take on the grim plight of the human race. The stakes are higher than ever before, and please expect a complete refund if you do not walk away from this experience a deep­ly changed man, with your whole life to rethink and brand new goals and promises to be made.

 

Unquestionably, in terms of overall development this album rises high above Your Favorite Weapon, and corrects some of the problems of Déjà Entendu. It is occasionally intriguing, far from always predictable, and sufficiently restrained in that the band does not come across as a bunch of annoying poseurs when you are forced to inhale their tragic psychologism. But the main issue remains the same: they just do not know. That is, according to my perspective: you will, of course, find plenty of dissenting opinions on how they totally blew the mind of some listener or other. I just wonder, in each such case, where and how exactly our emotional receptors have par­ted ways — finding it unimaginable that one could, for instance, experience the same kind of strong, heartfelt response for this album as one could for, say, The Cure's Disintegration.

 

So let us take a look at the singles first. ʽSowing Season (Yeah)ʼ, opening with a rather tedious minute-long section of overlapping phone chat recordings, is a nicely constructed alt-rock track that teaches us about the difficulties of building your life anew after it had been blown to pieces by some unimaginably horrific experiences. But the fact that Jesse Lacey did not, in fact, have all his relatives killed off in World War Two does not bother me as much as the fact that the transi­tion from the quiet verse section into the bombastic-climactic chorus simply does not have the (obviously intended) cathartic effect. The guitar riff that dominates the chorus is well constructed, but it is more math-rockish than emotionally involving, and the «wild» "yeah yeah"s that accom­pany it are puny and superficial compared to, say, Kurt Cobain's — now there was a guy who could crack a good "yeaaaaah" in such a way that you'd want to quickly call 911 to his place. La­cey's "yeah"s, on the other hand, can't help implying that... well, he'll get over it eventually.

 

The second single was ʽJesus Christʼ — and, well, even with atheism on a steady rise everywhere, you'd still want to think that choosing such a title imposes certain artistic obligations. And it is actually a good song — until they start to scream, that is. The little ringing guitar pattern, unori­ginal as it is, can mesmerize you a little with its steadiness, and the quiet atmosphere of the music goes very well with Jesse's tense, confessional singing, and there is a pretty restrained guitar solo, and the lyrics, dealing with insanity, death, and the afterlife, are intelligent... but then they just can't handle that crescendo — they just begin to scream, and it gets ugly without getting scary, and by the time they chant "we all got wood and nails and we turn out hate in factories", I have stopped being interested in the song. So sad, it started out so well.

 

On the non-singles material, they sometimes do better: top prize here goes to the nearly eight-minute epic ʽLimousineʼ, where the much lengthier crescendo fortunately succeeds — after a few rather mediocre minutes, they grasp a good groove, settle into a nice melancholic tonality, and work it out by adding layer after layer of guitars, keyboards, and even strings, rather than simply resorting to more of that ugly screaming. The "I love you so much / But do me a favor, baby, don't reply" bit and its development shows that they are at least randomly capable of gold mining, because there is romanticism here and tragedy and determination, regardless of whatever the actual message might be (actually, the song is about the accidental murder of a 7-year girl by a drunk driver), and plenty of subtlety and accuracy and thoroughness of arrangement. If it weren't for moments like these, the tables would have turned completely against the band — but the likes of ʽLimousineʼ show that they do have to be taken seriously, and that they do mature further and further with each new record. And that makes the numerous flaws of Devil And God even more infuriating against this background.

 

The hooky numbers, for instance, still tend to be spoiled by overemoting: thus, ʽNot The Sunʼ is designed as a somewhat «apocalyptic» rocker (its spirited intro, echoey produc­tion, and overall tone remind me, for some reason, of Hendrix's ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ) and even has some excellent guitar parts and a frantically tight rhythm section, but there's just too much emphasis on screaming again — an area in which Lacey is rarely convincing. ʽDegausserʼ sounds like a bad parody on Arcade Fire, replete with droning guitars, anthemic, but lackluster choir vocals, and soul­ful echoes — until the screaming comes in and drowns out all the associations in head-split­ting, but still boring loudness. And so on, and on, and on.

 

Honestly speaking, I would really like to love this album. At least, unlike quite a few other lazy hipsters who think that an understanding of «soul» excuses you from understanding the obsolete notion of «work», these guys are clearly trying — exploring many more types of textures here than they used to, writing complex lyrics that tend to avoid clichés, even displaying a healthy penchant for self-irony ("You're shouting so loud, you barely joyous broken thing / You're a voice that never sings" must be a self-reference, right?). It's just that almost everywhere they stop just one or two important steps away from greatness. Why not flesh out the hooks more? Why not work out the guitar figures better? Why not refrain from screaming in favor of a more subtle ap­proach (especially if they are capable of subtlety)? Is it because they are unable to have feelings that can be transposed to such kinds of hooks, or do they just not know how to transpose?

 

In the end, no matter how much I listen, the only thing that stays with me is the repetitive, mildly hypnotizing coda to ʽLimousineʼ, and I have but to constatate that the ambitiousness, although it does not destroy the record as a whole, does not pay off. I cannot agree that the Devil and God are raging anywhere inside this album — at best, they may have sent a couple of their lesser de­puties. Nice level of cultural erudition, but that's hardly sufficient foundation for an emotional masterpiece. Then again, who knows, maybe it's just my grumpy bias speaking up.

 

DAISY (2009)

 

1) Vices; 2) Bed; 3) At The Bottom; 4) Gasoline; 5) You Stole; 6) Be Gone; 7) Sink; 8) Bought A Bride; 9) Daisy; 10) In A Jar; 11) Noro.

 

Eight years into their recording career, it is difficult to expect that a band like Brand New — who, by this time, should really start thinking about a name change — would be able to properly sur­prise their audiences. Most of the critics who agreed to discuss Daisy kinda sorta agreed that it was a «serious» effort, and that the band decided to explore darker and subtler topics, and that evil word «maturity» also made more than a single appearance, but you could also kinda sorta sense from the reviews that nobody was really stunned by this maturity. Because it is not as if Lacey or Accardi mastered any new skills here, or acquired any specific insight. They are still willing to experiment and look for new ways to express their irrational dissatisfaction with what­ever comes their way — that much is obvious. But they're still not geniuses. And they still have solid potential to annoy and irritate, rather than amaze and hypnotize.

 

Take the lead (and only) single, ʽAt The Bottomʼ. The word «bottom», unless you use it in a sexu­al sense (but then you use different prepositions), usually suggests the idea of desperation, being at the end of one's rope. How does the music agree with it? It never really gets more despe­rate than the somber bluesy electric guitar introduction — then the verse melody is really just this one nicely bent chord, which then explodes into a nice mess of slide guitar on the loud chorus, but how «bottom» is that? And how convincing are those vocals, trying once again to convey an aura of suffering and frustration — but failing, as far as I'm concerned, because the music is limp and the lyrics are just too twisted for their own good? "There's a lake / And at the bottom you will find my friends / They don't swim cause they're all dead / We never are what we intend or invent" — look, this is frickin' embarrassing, I'm just too old to pay serious attention to this shit. Where's old Jim Morrison when you really need him? At least he laid his pretentiousness right on the line, not trying to pseudo-invent his own philosophical system from hastily scrapped together pieces of existentialist broodings. Once Lacey writes something as cool as "I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer / The future's uncertain and the end is always near", please wake me up.

 

And it's not as if it's a bad song, really — I like the way how the guitar melody progresses from intro to verse to chorus, and I do find the chorus somewhat catchy, and I like that they do not re­sort to all-out screaming. The only thing I don't like, in fact, is that there are no traces of a guitar solo — something that could really help out here, but, well, you know, wishing for a guitar solo on an indie rock song is like wishing for a sex scene in a Disney movie. So, all in all, I should be kept happy here, and happily recommend the song to everybody. And yet — it just feels so in­adequate to the task. All these references to lake bottoms, darkness, little lies, drowning in floods, "drugs on a silver plate", they just feel pulled out of one's ass, set to feeble musical backing, and then packaged as Great Human Tragedy. And it doesn't exactly feel «fake» — like before, it feels confused. They're trying to get it out, but they don't know how.

 

Now let us take the second longest song on the album: ʽYou Stoleʼ, which, at six minutes running time, forms the central pillar of Daisy. It takes almost three minutes to build up to the (first) cli­max — and the guys should be congratulated for avoiding the usual trap, as all the lyrics are de­livered in a hushed, mourning tone, whereas the loud climax is purely instrumental (but even there they play a shrill double-tracked guitar riff rather than a solo!). But that long build-up peri­od — during most of that, they sound like a handicapped tribute band to British Sea Power, mimi­cking their love for depth, echoes, hush-hush, and mystery, but only possessing like half of that band's skill for instrumental overlays that actually provide the depth. Again, there is a semi-successful attempt at achieving something — but no bullseye.

 

Now let us go to something really pretentious and cryptic. ʽIn A Jarʼ has a guitar riff that sounds like it were, in fact, played from within a jar, with the lid screwed on so tightly it can barely let through a microphone cord. It also has a tricky time signature, with a slightly offbeat rhythm that confuses the senses. Then there are the words: "We live in a jar and think the lid's the sky" (what is this, a rerun of The Truman Show?), "you're hoping for a savior on your cross outside" (outside the jar? is it you or the savior that is outside? I'm sort of confused with these pronouns here), "stars are just a million little fireflies" (nice simile, but hardly original), "the sun is just a hole, it's the light outside" (have they been reading too much Einstein?). Then, unfortunately, there's some screaming in the chorus, but you also get the major decoding clue: "No one saves me cause I'm sinking slowly!". Then you're supposed to go mad with desperation and really feel for the guy, and for the whole universe, because your eyes have just been opened to the meaninglessness and pointlessness of it all.

 

Okay, honestly, I know that silly sarcasm can be used as a weapon against anything and anybody, so you are perfectly entitled to seeing this as a series of cheap shots. What is expensive, though, is the actual feelings I get when listening to this stuff — and they are almost surprisingly neutral. Once again, Brand New just... deliver. Deliver a piece of product that makes me respect them for their efforts, but does not make me love them for the success of these efforts. As long as Lacey does not scream (and, unfortunately, he does that quite a bit on many of the other songs), Daisy is perfectly listenable. It is even meaningful — it sweats and struggles a lot to intellectualize its emotions and emotionalize its intellect. But it just feels way too much like the presupposition is "We suffer" and the rest is a desperate search for the answer to the question "Why exactly is it that we are suffering?", when it actually should feel the other way around — "something is not right", and then "we suffer because something is not right". And this is why, no matter how much I try, I just cannot relate to this album and its alleged complexity.

 

I guess I will just finish this with another bloody comparison: every time I hear Lacey proclaim that "I'm on my way to hell" in the closing number, I close my eyes and just hum the chorus to AC/DC's ʽHighway To Hellʼ, and think that, well, whaddaya know, so many people on their way to hell, and each of them has his own attitude about that, and even if in my own life I would pro­bably be closer to Lacey's personality than to Bon Scott's, in this particular case I'd rather relate to Bon's attitude than Lacey's. Take my word for it — if you're really on your way to hell, don't bo­ther about puffing and huffing and aggrandizing yourself about it. In the end, that's just vanity, and dressing it up in superficial complexity and cryptic verbalizing won't make it into something else — certainly not into genuine, convincing, empathetic suffering.

 

BRIGHT EYES

A COLLECTION OF SONGS RECORDED 1995-1997 (1998)

 

1) The Invisible Gardener; 2) Patient Hope In New Snow; 3) Saturday As Usual; 4) Falling Out Of Love At This Volume; 5) Exaltation On A Cool, Kitchen Floor; 6) The Awful Sweetness Of Escaping Sweat; 7) Puella Quam Amo Est Pulchra; 8) Driving Fast Through A Big City At Night; 9) How Many Lights Do You See; 10) I Watched You Taking Off; 11) A Celebration Upon Completion; 12) Emily, Sing Something Sweet; 13) All Of The Truth; 14) One Straw (Please); 15) Lila; 16) A Few Minutes On Friday; 17) Supriya; 18) Solid Jackson; 19) Feb. 15th; 20) The 'Feel Good' Revolution.

 

In the Golden Age of Music, when the grass was green, cheap, and promoted by Steppenwolf, and the «indie kids» did not draw their power out of the very fact of being pigeonholed, every once in a while there would arise a Poet, capable of stringing together exciting combinations of words, but completely helpless when it came to setting these words to music. And every once in a while he would decide to set those words to music anyway — perhaps because it helped the Poet to reach out to a wider audience, or maybe just because the Poet thought that some sort of non-human accompaniment was required to complete the message.

 

What would the Poet do, then? Most often, he would take a simple, familiar, folk-tradition-san­ctified theme, and adapt the lyrics to it — never pretending to any musical breakthroughs, just getting himself a well-oiled musical launchpad for his charismatic individuality (or for his annoy­ing egomaniacality, whichever way you'd like to call it). Think Leonard Cohen or someone of his ilk, and there you'd have it — nobody in his right mind would call Cohen a great musician or composer, although he is definitely much more than just a «lyricist».

 

But times have changed since then, and now here comes Conor Oberst, an aspiring young singer-songwriter from Omaha, Nebraska, whose creative streak begins around 1992, when he was just a measly 13 years old. Young Conor Oberst has a poetic gift — one might love his creations, or hate them, but it is undeniable that not everyone can write at 20, 30, or 90 like Mr. Oberst could at 15. Problematically, Mr. Oberst does not have any other gifts: I would not go as far as to sug­gest that Mr. Oberst is «tonedeaf», but that is one of the options, even if the critics rarely dare to mention it (why face a potential slander suit from someone who provides you with your daily bread?). At the very least, Mr. Oberst is practically incapable of writing a «song» in the most ba­nal understanding of the term — and I insist on «incapable», not on «unwilling».

 

Be it in 1967, Mr. Oberst could, perhaps, follow the Cohen route, and set his poetic musings to simple adaptations of and simpler variations on the great musical legacy of thousands of nameless folk heroes of the Old and New Worlds combined. But in the mid-1990s, such an approach would be considered obsolete, uncool, and undeserving of a young, ambitious, expressive, and, above all, brutally HONEST and anti-commercial artist. Above all, «indie aesthetics» requires honesty be­fore the listener; throw on some serious poetic talent, and what else do you really need?

 

Nothing, really, and that is why there is nothing else on Conor Oberst's debut album for his gran­dest project, the one-man band Bright Eyes. Well, other than a battered, frequently out of tune acoustic guitar, occasional rudimentary electronics / drum machines, some cheap recording equi­p­ment, and probably a bedroom. (A few of Conor's friends, mostly amateur musicians from Oma­ha, some of whom also played in his earlier «band», Commander Venus, guest on a tiny handful of these tracks, but something like eighty percent of the time it's just The Creative Young Man on his solitary own). In a different world, an album like this would have been laughed off the bat — imagine putting on Please Please Me and hearing a Cavern Club-quality recording of ʽI Lost My Little Girlʼ and ʽIn Spite Of All The Dangerʼ instead of ʽI Saw Her Standing Thereʼ. But in this mad, mad, mad, mad world we happen to live in, A Collection Of Songs actually managed to garner some positive reactions — even some reviewers who obviously did not like it still found it necessary to write something like: «Even at a young age, it's clear that Oberst is an extremely ta­lented songwriter, seemingly incapable of penning a bad tune...». Thus quoth Nathan Bush of the All-Music Guide; then, having realized what he has just done one second too late, reluctant to de-quoth himself, he heads straight for the back door — «...(except in the odd case when you sense he didn't try)». Nice try, Mr. Bush of the All-Music Guide!

 

Unfortunately, as far as my ear is concerned, this whole record consists of nothing but «odd ca­ses», arguably making it one of the oddest albums ever released. ʽThe Invisible Gardenerʼ un­locks the experience with a swift electronic burst, as if you are about to be sent into outer space; three seconds later, the tape recorder clicks, a simple acoustic accompaniment pattern is given a false start, and then it comes again, this time accompanied with an equally trivial «electronic har­monium» pattern. Two and a half minutes later, you might want to ask yourself: «Say! Isn't that just the kind of music-making you'd expect to hear from any fifteen-year old with a tape recorder and a tiny bit of musical education? What strange chain of events has led me into sitting here and listening to this, when I could be saving the world from cancer or dubstep instead?»

 

But two and a half minutes later also comes the first vocal number, and it provides a response. The lyrics aren't exactly jaw-dropping, but they are fairly respectable for someone who wrote them at the age of 15 or 16: not too overloaded with fashionable clichés and «intellectual meta­phors», not overtly romantic, melancholic, or suicidal — and not dumb, either. At any rate, I do not feel too irritated by this wordy stuff as long as I remember the age of the writer. ʽPatient Hope In New Showʼ is basically an ʽI Want To Hold Your Handʼ in a world that has long outgrown 1963, and now we have "and for a moment I could want nothing, your bright eyes burn through my exploding heart" instead.

 

Where I do feel irritated is the delivery department. Conor Oberst would learn to get better as the years went by, but here it almost seems as if he is struggling with puberty before our very eyes: almost everything comes out in a tuneless, strained, grating rasp, occasionally rising to a wild howl without losing the rasp. Try howling and rasping at the same time — see how long it is be­fore they put you in a straightjacket, and this guy managed to avoid the people in white long enough to record an hour's worth of this cr... er, I mean, «quintessence of honesty».

 

There is no need to discuss the individual «songs», because most of these creations are not really «songs» — they are nearly formless, only vaguely outlined demo-level sketches. ʽFalling Out Of Love At This Volumeʼ stands out by being faster and more rhythmic than the rest, with faint hints at a guitar hook and an attitude reminiscent of early Cars (ʽJust What I Neededʼ, etc.); and ʽOne Straw (Please)ʼ features real drums and a basic pop-rock swagger. The rest all seem to have been made on the spot, with Conor dragging out his notebooks and just setting the words to whatever sequences of freshly learned chords came along.

 

Now the thing is, I do not believe that this young gentleman has any real musical talent, but nei­ther, after all, did Leonard Cohen, and it is possible sometimes to get by on the strength of atti­tude alone, or workmanship and craft alone, or a combination of both. But these raw sketches do not have enough attitude: every time Conor tries to sing in a «normal» voice / whisper, it just comes out «normal» — and boring — and every time he begins rasping and howling, the whole experience just becomes unbearable. As for «workmanship»... well, I do not think even the man himself would be able to or wanting to defend the record as a «solid» offering.

 

Sure, in a way, it takes GUTS to introduce yourself to the world with your early jottings instead of saving them up for a twenty-years-later archival release, targeted at armies of fans. But with the indie aesthetics in full flight, and with the whole lo-fi craze, and with the general easiness of releasing anything these days (even if these particular days still predated Myspace), in 1998 this kind of move was not that gutsy — fact is, no matter what sort of shit you release, as long as it agrees with certain trends of the day, you will always end up with at least a minor fanbase. Thus, I fail to appreciate the gesture.

 

Maybe the best thing is to just download the lyrics — as I said, they are damn good for their «age group», and it is always a gas to find a title rendered in proper Latin (ʽPuella Quam Amo Est Pulchraʼ), even if it seems to have been taken from an elementary textbook of the language rather than from Catullus, to whose laurels Conor Oberst may be secretly aspiring. Also, as a sidenote, there is really something eerie about the way in which Oberst howls out "Emily, sing something sweet for me" — maybe they did put him in a straightjacket, after all. But overall, this is a certi­fied thumbs down if there ever was one.

 

LETTING OFF THE HAPPINESS (1998)

 

1) If Winter Ends; 2) Padraic My Prince; 3) Contrast And Compare; 4) The City Has Sex; 5) The Difference In The Shades; 6) Touch; 7) June On The West Coast; 8) Pull My Hair; 9) A Poetic Retelling Of An Unfortunate Seduction; 10) Tereza And Tomas.

 

On his «proper» debut for Saddle Creek Records, allegedly written and recorded as a cohesive LP, Conor Oberst is apparently still «seemingly incapable of penning a bad tune», meaning that the album is only marginally more listenable than A Collection Of Songs. The best I can say is that, this time around, it at least does sound like «a collection of songs» (mostly bad ones), rather than «a collection of sketches that most 12-to-15-year-olds usually stuff under their beds». Thus, if there is any reason to call «Bright Eyes» an actual band, the reason might as well start here.

 

The first two songs will probably be enough to determine everybody's feelings. I find them totally unlistenable — interesting melodic input amounts to zero and then falls below, and the singing... well, keep in mind that this is still slightly before Oberst found his trademark «tremolo ble­a­ting» manner; here, he still seems to be going for the «drunk soulful hipster» approach, one of the most infernal images known to mankind.

 

"And I give myself three days to feel better / Or else I swear I'm driving off a fucking cliff", he blurts out in the opening number. Since the album has been praised so much for the «sincerity» of its emotions, I can only assume that three days after recording the song, Oberst did feel better. The question is — once he did, why the heck didn't he throw away all of these recordings and replace them with something more worthwhile? Some people, when they feel bad, should proba­bly keep away from the studio, especially if they cannot stay focused on anything other than feel­ing bad. Millions of people all over the world are feeling bad at the exact moment that I'm typing this. Heck, I'm not feeling too good myself. But even so, I'd rather go and just bang my head against the wall than sympathize with the plight of one Mr. Oberst from Omaha, Nebraska, who, at the tender age of 18, seems to be more pissed off at life than Dr. Faust in his twilight years — most of it because he doesn't seem to be able to get it on with chicks. (On the other hand, at least he is being honest about it: "And I fell for the promise of a life with a purpose / But I know that's impossible now" is quickly followed by "...because I just can't think anymore about that or about her tonight". Yes, we do know that in most of these cases it is a she that is responsible for most of the problems, not an impersonal metaphysical transcendental it.) Aw come on now, Conor, chicks are trash, just get over it and find your future in furniture polishing. Or speleology.

 

About a third of the «songs» is just Oberst with his broken-hearted raspy screaming; on the other tunes, he is joined by some of his compadres on drums, bass, electric guitars, and poorly tuned or downright broken electronic instruments. Everything is conventionally lo-fi, stumbling, unrehear­sed, and, for the most part, melodically primitive. Deadly slow, too, meaning that the only fast-paced song on the album, ʽThe City Has Sexʼ, will pass off as a highlight by definition — for its frenzied, but still underworked, country-rock arrangement, and its title, which is pronounced far more completely in the opening line: "The city has sex with itself, I suppose". The last verse of the tune is quite telling as well: "And I scream, but I still don't know why I do it / Because the sound never stays, it just swells and decays / So what is the point? / Why try to fight what is now so certain? / The truth is all that I am is a passing event that will be forgotten". Yes, yes, YES! Listen to Mr. Oberst speak the truth about himself.

 

There is exactly one track on the entire album that I found myself caring about — ʽContrast And Compareʼ, a duet with Neely Jenkins who's got the sweetest voice ever; this creates a sort of beau­ty-and-the-beast effect on the tune that works much better on the nerves, and it is only too bad that Oberst did not make more use of this contrast on the other songs as well. By all means, ʽTereza And Tomasʼ, a song that is supposed to bring a relatively peaceful and romantic end to the album, could have benefited from Neely's contribution — if Oberst cannot sing, this does not necessarily mean that every Bright Eyes song is unfit for a real singer.

 

Overall, I can only repeat what I have already said a million times about modern bands. To sing about the literal or figurative End Of The World when you are 15 or even 18 years old is a ridi­culous occupation, unless you have at least won the Nobel Prize when you were 12. To sing about the End Of The World when you are 18 years old and cannot sing — or play — or come up with a unique sound — or write interesting, memorable melodies — or get professional musicians to do all these things for you — or compensate for the lack of everything with at least something that goes beyond «hmm, decent enough lyrics for a teenager» — is simply abysmal. Thumbs down all the way to the floor; I see no reason why, on any objective or subjective scale, this crap should be preferable to Justin Bieber.

 

FEVERS AND MIRRORS (2000)

 

1) A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever And A Necklace; 2) A Scale, A Mirror And Those Indifferent Clocks; 3) The Calendar Hung Itself; 4) Something Vague; 5) The Movement Of A Hand; 6) Arienette; 7) When The Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass; 8) Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh; 9) The Center Of The World; 10) Sunrise, Sunset; 11) An Attempt To Tip The Scales; 12) A Song To Pass The Time.

 

Critic alert! For the first time in Bright Eyes history, Conor Oberst is trying to apply his (lack of) musical talent to the craft of writing and recording actual music. What used to be, only recently, just rudimentary acoustic guitar patterns, is getting seriously expanded: no less than ten different musicians are involved in the project now, and the mysterious «Omaha sound» is gradually be­coming decloaked. Now it basically means: «play the same simple shit, but dress it up in as many musical layers as possible to make up for the lack of interesting chord progressions».

 

For instance, already on the second track we have this little chamber piece where Conor is play­ing an organ, perennial partner Mike Mogis is bowing a pedal steel, Jiha Lee is fiddling with the flute, and A. J. Mogis is punching the piano — all at the same time, imagine that! Almost enough to make you forget that the music is just a simple country waltz, and that all of the parts supplied by the extra musicians are rather predictable flourishes that bake up the mood in strict accordance with traditional old recipés. One impressive musical hook, just one, could have saved the situati­on, but we are not going to get so lucky.

 

The good news is that, although Oberst still has a long way to go towards mastering the art of songwriting, Fevers And Mirrors is nowhere near as irritating in its misery as Oberst’s early es­capades, mainly because he is trying to find a more accessible voice for himself, without losing the individuality. Now most of the wailings are produced with a «bleating» tone — more quiet, more frail, less intrusive. If there is an infectious patient running around town and scattering his bacteria in everybody’s direction, after all, everybody’s only immediate concern will be to get the sick guy back into bed. On Fevers And Mirrors, the sick guy grudgingly does return to bed, and stays there most of the time, blearily contemplating his fevers in his mirrors.

 

He does still attempt to make a few escapades — like on ʽThe Calendar Hung Itselfʼ, whose prime point of attraction is a little foam-at-the-mouth hysteria staged around a «mad» chanting of ʽYou Are My Sunshineʼ that is supposed to reflect the protagonist’s suicidal desperation (she’s gone, you know, and this is sufficient ground for behaving like an ugly spoiled teenager, unfor­tunately suffering from a little bit of poetic gift, etc. etc.). As unbearably pretentious as that mo­ment is, it is at least a moment that kind of stays with you, so there must have been something to the idea, if only it were realized better.

 

Everything that comes afterwards mostly follows the same formula. Slow, steady, rhythmic backgrounds with a rootsy backbone, «graced» by various instrumentation that is not usually as­so­ciated with «rootsy» — vibraphones, Mellotrons, flutes, various «treated» guitars and key­boards, etc. — in addition to the predictable stuff like pedal steel and accordeons. No matter how intricate the arrangements are, though, nothing sticks around for too long, and everything seems to be merely a comfy setting for Oberst’s lyrical floodwaves.

 

Realising, perhaps, that the floodwaves might eventually flood the listener’s patience, Oberst takes a little jab at himself with the aptly titled ʽAn Attempt To Tip The Scalesʼ — a song that disappears rather quickly, in order to make way for a staged «interview» between an announcer and a guy impersonating Oberst himself, so thoroughly full of himself (and it) that it is impos­sible to take any of those replicas seriously. The uncomfortable feeling is that the impersonator is not so much trying to impersonate the real Oberst, as he is trying to capture the spirit of vintage Bob Dylan interviews (the ones in which Bob would turn the interviewer’s boring questions back at the interviewer himself), but without a firm hold on Bob’s complexity or humor.

 

Humor is ac­tually the key element here: if the real Dylan ever tried to befuddle an interviewer by saying “I do have a brother who drowned in a bathtub... actually, I had five brothers who died that way. My mother drowned one every year for five consecutive years. They were all named Padraic, so they all got one song”, it would be in firm keeping with his regular artistic persona, for whom humor, all kinds of it, was an integral part. But nothing about Oberst is ever funny — and so this attempt to have a little «forced laugh» at the expense of his alter ego does not succeed. It certainly breaks up the predictability of the flow, but I wouldn’t put it down as a healthy con­tribution to the «Artistic Reputation Improvement Fund».

 

If you really, really want to make yourself like Bright Eyes, try ʽMovement Of A Handʼ. Oberst is easier to tolerate when he puts away at least a small part of his self-pitying (although this hap­pens very rarely), and on this particular track, the Rhodes piano / dulcimer / Mellotron arrange­ment plus Jiha Lee’s backing vocals — ever so often, Oberst’s only salvation comes from a nice girl who can sing better than he does — create a mood that is so sympathetic, I could even find it «enchanting» on a particularly auspicious day. Yet this is only an exception; already on ʽArie­netteʼ, the guy is back to his cosmic misery.

 

Lyrically, I do not see any positive or negative growth. There are so many words here, such an endless sea of metaphors both boring and startling that we could spend years dissecting them, but I am really reluctant to discuss lyrics whose only underlying subject had already long ago been sufficiently well covered by John Lennon in just one phrase: “If I were you, I’d realize that I love you more than any other guy”. If you are eighteen years old, relatively straight (it’s a big question whether Conor Oberst has any appeal for gay audiences), and have psychological troubles adap­ting to the opposite sex, these songs may have a consoling message for you (at least you’ll know that you are not alone). Go one step further and that’s it. This ain’t a case of «Romeo and Juliet», really, it’s a case of masochistically picking at a small paper cut to see if you can get it to inflame — nothing like a nice little gangrene to keep one’s spirit healthy.

 

The only reason why I don’t give the album an overall negative assessment is because it is really «neutral» rather than overtly «negative». Behind all the nicely planned multi-layered arrange­ments Oberst’s angst and personal apocalypse does not hit as hard on the nerves, so the album just goes by, unfelt, unnoticed, but inspiring a little hope that this could be the beginning of real musi­cal growth. A little, but not too much — Conor Oberst is clearly not going to sacrifice his rich inner universe for the sakes of writing stupid antiquated things like «original melodies».

 

LIFTED OR THE STORY IS IN THE SOIL, KEEP YOUR EAR TO THE GROUND (2002)

 

1) Big Picture; 2) Method Acting; 3) False Advertising; 4) You Will. You? Will. You? Will; 5) Lover I Don't Have To Love; 6) Bowl Of Oranges; 7) Don't Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come; 8) Nothing Gets Crossed Out; 9) Make War; 10) Waste Of Paint; 11) From A Balance Beam; 12) Laura Laurent; 13) Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved).

 

«Why is he suffering so much?» my wife asked me during the last minutes of ʽWaste Of Paintʼ, which I, for some mysterious reasons, was listening to without the headphones. «Did his girl­friend die or anything?» That was the moment when I understood that that was it, that the Bright Eyes were finished for me — because this was the first time ever that I was asked that question. Syd Barrett, Neil Young, Robert Smith, Peter Gabriel, and even Badly Drawn Boy — all of them survived in the end, but the fate of Conor Oberst was sealed, once and for all. It sort of snapped me out of that oozy, dreamy state where I was... well, not exactly ready to fall under this guy's charm, but at least sort of accept his whinery as a given fact of life. Like, some people yell and other people whine, and then there should be tolerance and all.

 

But no, really. On this album, which could have easily been called Lifted, but one-word album titles are for laconic sissies, Conor puts the wheel in reverse and, for the most part, dispenses with the intricate arrangements of Fevers And Mirrors, with just a few notable exceptions that will be noted later. On such minimalistic, but bleeding long acoustic rants as ʽBig Pictureʼ and ʽWaste Of Paintʼ, he seems to be trying to earn his «modern day Dylan» reputation, except that Dylan al­ways took better care of his guitar accompaniment and never ripped as many shirts along the way. At the very least, ʽBig Pictureʼ justifies its title by no longer being exclusively tied to some sort of «woman trouble» — it's a well-made declaration of personal and artistic freedom, but really, Conor, there is no need to impersonate a tortured, mutilated revolutionary being led to the guillo­tine. You're only 22 years old, everything will work out. Maybe you ought to move to North Ko­rea for a couple of years, it'll do you good.

 

When the «songs» reluctantly agree to be more than just a couple of acoustic chords, they still tend to just roll along doing nothing, like the «grand» ten-minute conclusion of ʽLet's Not Shit Ourselvesʼ. Maybe it is Oberst's ʽDesolation Rowʼ, but even ʽDesolation Rowʼ had a nifty acous­tic riff running through it; here, the «music»'s only purpose is to provide Oberst's grand anti-esta­b­lishment rant with a toe-tapping beat. Sincerity? Who gives a damn about sincerity when noth­ing about your sincerity makes it any more attractive than anyone else's sincerity? Or was there no one else in 2002 brave enough to let The Truth out, other than Conor Oberst? The most annoy­ing thing about these «soulful» deliveries is that they are delivered as if the man was a fuckin' Cassandra — completely alone in a world of deaf and dumb people. (Well, I don't know, maybe in Omaha... but nah, not really).

 

The only substantial musical idea on the entire album may be found on ʽDon't Know Whenʼ, where most of the verses are sung to a simple folk-dirge melody with a simple, but effective chord progression. In a way, it almost works like a mantra, and if only Oberst did not eventually succumb to the temptation of ripping one more shirt and self-exploding in a fit of drunken ire, it could almost become seductive — but this guy is under a firm conviction that «sincerity» and «perfec­tionism» are mortal enemies, and in their endless struggle he knows only too well whose side he will take.

 

Of course, there are still quite a few numbers featuring complex arrangements — no surprise here, since a mind-boggling twenty-five musicians altogether were involved in the making of the album, making it a serious contender for «hugest waste of talent ever». Well, not all of these musicians are equally talented, I guess, but on such tracks as ʽLover I Don't Have To Loveʼ or ʽFrom A Ba­lance Beamʼ the keyboards and strings work very well, as before, trying to dress the man's non-descript compositions in shiny technicolor robes. On others, like ʽMake Warʼ, they are going for a «lo-fi country» approach, with slide guitars and harmonicas at the ready. To no avail.

 

Not that you should take my opinion: Rolling Stone itself rated Lifted as the fourth greatest al­bum of 2002, and even The Dean himself, Mr. Robert "I Dare You To Fill In The Blanks In My Opinions, Punk" Christgau invited us all to "feel or indulge his suffering youth" and be awarded with awe. Maybe for all these guys, the weaving techniques of Mr. Oberst really work. Or maybe they were simply so hungry for «genuine rough-cut emotion» after all those years of post-modern cynicism that even Conor Oberst would do. It might not be a coincidence, really, that the Bright Eyes' ratings seriously plummeted with the emergence of Arcade Fire — as far as I'm concerned, when you got Win Butler, the need to have Conor Oberst dissipates in a flash. Thumbs down, anyway: the few decent arrangements that we have here cannot compensate for at least a half hour's worth of total abomination.

 

A CHRISTMAS ALBUM (2002)

 

1) Away In A Manger; 2) Blue Christmas; 3) Oh Little Town Of Bethlehem; 4) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 5) The First Noel; 6) Little Drummer Boy; 7) White Christmas; 8) Silent Night; 9) Silver Bells; 10) Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas; 11) The Night Before Christmas.

 

My favorite Bright Eyes album ever, bar none. Not that I'd want to ever listen to it again, mind you, but there is one thing you cannot deny — no other Bright Eyes album has such a concentra­ted wallop of brilliant, hook-filled melodies over the course of a measly half-hour. ʽGod Rest Ye Merry Gentlemenʼ? Conor Oberst couldn't even begin to dream of writing such a brilliant tune. ʽWhite Christmasʼ? The entire Bright Eyes catalog is exchangeable for that one, and take half of Oma­ha's musical collectives as a free bonus. ʽThe Night Before Christmasʼ? Now that's what I call poetry, «you take all your smart modern writers», like Ray Davies said...

 

...okay, that's getting carried a bit too far, I admit. But seriously, as far as Christmas albums go, this one is no worse than most others, and as far as Bright Eyes albums go, I'd really rather have a Christmas album from these people than sixty minutes of their original «tunes». There is one ad­ded bonus: no matter how obnoxious and annoying Conor may seem in person (in «musical» per­son, I mean: in «real» person, I have no idea), he has this odd talent of attracting sympathetic fe­male performers, sometimes endowed with the prettiest of voices and nicest of attitudes. Here, his main partner is Alabama-born Maria Taylor, who plays some of the keyboards, sings about half of the songs (praise God!) and co-arranges most of them.

 

Production values remain targeted at the indie market — several tunes are defiantly lo-fi, some are defiantly underarranged, and almost everything is made to suffer from a mild form of «un-listen-abili-tosis» one way or another (including sprinklings of electronic noises, echo and other effects cast over traditional instruments, absurdly slowed down tempos, whatever). But that's just to make sure that, God forbid, any of your grandparents should unexpectedly take a liking to the album and start playing it instead of their Sinatra records.

 

Under that slightly scratchy surface, however, rests a perfectly normal Christmas album with very nice folksy crooning vocals from Taylor (ʽAway In A Mangerʼ, ʽWhite Christmasʼ), attempts on Conor's part to sing in a normal voice — yes, he does have one, and even though it can never be completely free of whiny overtones, they are actually quite in place on ʽBlue Christmasʼ, and even more so on ʽHave Yourself A Merry Little Christmasʼ (after all, you can't expect to ac­tually have someone sing this song to you in a merry mood and get away with it, can you?).

 

There is even some modestly successful experimentation here, like with ʽLittle Drummer Boyʼ, which they deconstruct by distorting every sound channel, and then punch up with some crunchy martial drumming to match the title; or with ʽSilent Nightʼ, where the vocals quickly disappear, giving way to a slow, supposedly-mesmerizing mix of dreamy country guitars with psychedelic effects. On the other hand, ending the album with a full recital of ʽTwas The Night Before Chris­t­masʼ, blandly performed by some grumbly guy against a minimalistic piano backdrop, is, at best, an anticlimactic idea — provided that one could expect a «climax» from an album like this in the first place, of course.

 

Clearly, the whole thing was little more than a killing-time project, or, perhaps, just a quick cash-in on Conor's growing popularity — generous cash-in, since the proceeds of the album have been said to go to the «Nebraska AIDS Project» — but I was genuinely surprised at how much of the repulsive side of Bright Eyes was cut off here, while still leaving some of Oberst's typical, and least annoying, trademarks; and I am a bit puzzled at the frequently violent rejection of the record encountered among the fans. Yes, it is a «generic Christmas album», but hey, if you take Oberst as your guru, you have to try and put some sense into it anyway; and if you do not take Oberst as your guru, it's all the more nice to realize he's finally made an album where he isn't trying to teach you something. In the general line of things, it is quickly forgettable; in the overall context of Bright Eyes' history, it works better than I could have imagined.

 

I'M WIDE AWAKE, IT'S MORNING (2005)

 

1) At The Bottom Of Everything; 2) We Are Nowhere And It's Now; 3) Old Soul Song (For The New World Order); 4) Lua; 5) Train Under Water; 6) First Day Of My Life; 7) Another Travelin' Song; 8) Landlocked Blues; 9) Poison Oak; 10) Road To Joy.

 

How difficult can it be for a young artist to record two full-length albums at the same time and re­lease them simultaneously? Maybe not too difficult if the artist in question does not bother to write any new melodies on either one. Why bother, indeed, if a bunch of anonymous hillbillies, Woody Guthrie, and Ludwig van Beethoven already did all the job for you. The good news is — none of them are going to show up and sue you when you least expect it.

 

Okay, that might have been a little harsh. But the really weird thing here is that it is I'm Wide Awake that got the most critical praise, rather than Digital Ash, and from a strictly musical point of view, there is no way that this could be justified — Digital Ash would be largely experimental and at least occasionally successful, whereas I'm Wide Awake sounds like it could have been re­corded in the heart of Nashville by a bunch of understudies awarded a couple of hours in one of the city's studios (the actual sessions all took place somewhere in Nebraska).

 

Yes, Emmylou Harris, whom I do respect a lot and whose talents and gifts I acknowledge quite gratefully, does contribute backing or dueting vocals on three of these tracks — this reflects Co­nor's odd, hypnotizing talent (one of the very few talents he does have) to attract celebrities to give his non-descript creations more «weight». It would have been much better, though, if he just handed all the vocal duties to her, or, for that matter, to Maria Taylor, who had already made that Christmas experience so much lovelier than one would expect — now, again, she is reduced to backups on just two of the songs. What's that he says on ʽLand Locked Bluesʼ? "If you love some­thing, give it away"? Well, how about giving away the right to sing lead, when there are all those lovely ladies around you, Conor?

 

Okay, seriously now. The music here is all generic country and folk, half of it arranged with the bare minimum of instruments (simple acoustic guitar, sometimes with a quiet rhythm section or an extra guitar part in the background), the other half getting the full country treatment — slide and steel guitars, harmonicas, a bit of keyboards, an occasional trumpet, the works. The only ex­ception to the genre rule is ʽRoad To Joyʼ, which takes the textbook part of Beethoven's 9th and turns it into a country tune, too, slowly building up the volume and aggression level towards the end. A meaningful musical joke? Maybe if it capped off an album of startling originality and in­ventiveness, I could say yes. As it is, I find that I cannot.

 

Of course, it's all in the attitude. But we already know the attitude, and the attitude hasn't changed much. As somebody who finds himself completely unable and unwilling to fall under the spell with which Conor Oberst frequently turns people into his personal slaves («Conor Oberst sends shivers down my spine, and I'm not afraid to admit it», quoth the Pitchfork review guy who gave this album an 8.7), I still find his lyrics creative and, perhaps, even getting craftier and craftier with each new record (a line like "the sun came up with no conclusions" is crafty, you'll have to admit it), but the way that he gets them out of his system is, at worst, very poor theater, and at best, a repulsive overstatement of his sincerity. This is not a Shakespearian universe. We're living in post-Dylan times, and if you can't cope with that, well, get yourself a time machine or some­thing. The combination of these simple-as-hell melodic skeletons with this atmosphere of pathos and cosmic suffering is unbearably ridiculous.

 

At least most of the tunes are relatively short (except for the worst ones, which are usually long because they crawl along at snailish tempos), consist of more than one chord, occasionally — ve­ry rarely — develop into mildly pleasant country jamming (ʽTrain Under Waterʼ is a damn fine sound for everyone who isn't completely alergic to country — that is, whenever Oberst shuts up and lets the instrumental players take over), and sporadically — even more rarely — come close to having a tiny bit of an original vocal hook (e. g. the "...yeah they go wild" bit on ʽOld Soul Songʼ, which, going against its title, is one of the most individualistic tunes on here).

 

Hence, I have no violent hate towards the record, nor would I care to propagate any. Maybe the cunning young lad from Omaha was right in using Emmylou Harris and Ludwig van as protec­tive talismans — their ex- and implicit presence, respectively, is what turns I'm Wide Awake from a middle-of-the-road modern country album into something that can get a rave review from Pitch­fork. But I would rather go along with the reknowned Stephen Thomas Erlewine of the AMG, who said this of Oberst: «Instead of reaching musical maturity, he's wallowing in a perpetual ado­lescence». Brilliantly said, mister, even if I disagree with your mainstreamish judgements some­thing like 70% of all the times. But here, you have entitled me to my next thumbs down.

 

DIGITAL ASH IN A DIGITAL URN (2005)

 

1) Time Code; 2) Gold Mine Gutted; 3) Arc Of Time (Time Code); 4) Down In A Rabbit Hole; 5) Take It Easy (Love Nothing); 6) Hit The Switch; 7) I Believe In Symmetry; 8) Devil In The Details; 9) Ship In A Bottle; 10) Light Pollution; 11) Theme From Piñata; 12) Easy/Lucky/Free.

 

Of the two studio albums released simultaneously, Digital Ash seems to have received more critical flack and a little less fan respect, mainly because the word Digital in the title immediately focuses our attention on Conor's extensive use of electronics. I mean — yeah, what the hell, this is Bright Eyes and their frosty «Omaha sound», where the heck do synthesizers and programmed beats belong in this? And if this guy does so much to become the «icon of sincerity» in modern indie music, how does that agree with processing your music through a computer?

 

But that's all theory, and on practice, once you get past the nearly-instrumental intro of ʽTime Codeʼ, the use of electronics on this album is neither particularly annoying nor detracting from the «essence» of Bright Eyes. One thing Oberst is never very much interested in is making music, and that accounts for his approach to the electronic business as well. The programmed beats will hardly make Richard D. James lose much sleep, and the atmosphere-producing synthesizers pro­duce barely enough atmosphere for us to breathe it in, let alone any perspectives of intoxication.

 

Besides, most of the melodies remain in the usual neo-folk ballpark. No matter how many drum machine overlays there may be on ʽArc Of Timeʼ and how strongly the digital effects are pressed on its acoustic guitars, there is no force in the universe that could prevent me from wanting to fi­nish off the lines "...and they twist like sheets, till you fall asleep, and they finally unwind" with "...as we gaze upon the chimes of freedom flashing". You know what I mean: you can take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him bend a circuit.

 

On the other hand, bringing in electronics helps Oberst at least modestly expand his means and make a record more consistently listenable and less consistently predictable than things used to be. ʽGold Mine Guttedʼ is almost a good song — at least it has a simple, melancholic keyboard hook upon which Oberst's latest confessional can be appropriately hung. ʽDown In A Rabbit Holeʼ creates a wall of sound from various electronics and an entire string quartet. ʽTake It Easyʼ has a very pretty coda that joins martial rhythms with kiddie-magic electronic chimes. And so on and on — we are basically back to the complexity level of Fevers And Mirrors, and some of the bits and pieces here may even be more memorable.

 

As for the «attitudes» of particular songs, my brain exercises the old golden rule: the more suf­fering there is in an Oberst song, the more suffering is inflicted on the brain. Namely, that parti­cular part of Oberst that is responsible for ʽHit The Switchʼ and ʽDevil In The Detailsʼ, should be dragged out into the street and shot: lines like "sometimes I pray I don't die, I'm a goddamn hypo­crite", sung in that particular manner, make me want to cart him off at least as far as Somali or something like that. But less straightforward stuff like ʽShip In A Bottleʼ shows that he is just as capable of confessionalism without bad-actor overplay — and he is also capable of smarter-than-average social preaching on tunes like ʽLight Pollutionʼ.

 

Actually, somewhere around mid-album the electronic beats and loops almost disappear, and by the time we get to the end, the digital soldiers have mostly been assimilated by traditionally ori­ented guys, reduced to performing valuable background services. The best is saved for last: ʽEasy / Lucky / Freeʼ is an almost seductive combo of rhythmic loops, dreamy slide guitars à la Beach House, and well-arranged harmonies. As an anthemic coda, it has none of the questionable kitsch of ʽRoad To Joyʼ, never goes over the top, and delivers its condemnation of society's sins in an almost, dare I say it, mature kind of way.

 

Still, it is beyond my powers to clearly state that Digital Ash is a «thumbs up» sort of album. As with Fevers And Mirrors, I'd rather stay neutral about it, because, on the general scale of things, little has changed. Oberst's lyrics, bar a few blatant exceptions, get more complex and tempting for intellectual analysis, but they were never awful to begin with. His vocals here only make me want to throttle him a few times, but even when they don't, he still whines his way through with­out the slightest touch of humor and irony — and, for that matter, why the hell is he handling all the lead vocal duties himself again? And the melodies, for the most part, still suck: use of elec­tronics and this subtle gradual transition from «all-out digital» to «mostly analog» helps cope with that fact, but does not eliminate it.

 

Still, if faced with the necessity of choice, I would definitely take Digital Ash over Wide Awake, because I am afraid of Bright Eyes fans, and I know that for most of them, it is Oberst's bleeding hearted sincerity that serves as the major vitamin, so the more layers of sound this guy can use to muff and choke that sincerity, the more beats and loops he weaves into that bandage that causes the heart to bleed internally rather than externally, the safer I am. What sort of stupid jerk ever said that sincerity was im­portant in music, anyway? Oh, that's right, I did. But that was before I got acquainted with the Bright Eyes catalog, so don't be too hard on me.

 

MOTION SICKNESS: LIVE RECORDINGS (2005)

 

1) At The Bottom Of Everything; 2) We Are Nowhere And It’s Now; 3) Old Soul Song; 4) Make War (short version); 5) Make War (long version); 6) Scale; 7) Landlocked Blues; 8) Method Acting; 9) Train Under Water; 10) When The President Talks To God; 11) Road To Joy; 12) Mushaboom; 13) True Blue; 14) Southern State; 15) The Biggest Lie.

 

A live album from Conor Oberst should not necessarily be unlistenable. After all, when playing before a real audience, he's got some options — for instance, be picky about his own track selec­tion, be inventive in rearranging formerly dull material, be unpredictable in the selection of co­vers, and, overall, try and be less «stuck up» than he is in the studio. How can one safely tell that he is not going to do and be all that prior to actually listening to the record? Perhaps Conor Oberst on stage is a completely different person. Perhaps he plays thrash metal guitar or something.

 

Of course, the track listing is a little suspicious. Although he had released two albums early that year, only the critically acclaimed Wide Awake is represented (and how — with six out of ten numbers getting the honors); Digital Ash is completely ignored, either because Conor didn't feel comfortable about translating the tape loops and digital beats into live reproductions, or because Robert Christ­gau, who once lovingly called Oberst «the poster boy of the American Agony Asso­ci­ation», was in the audience. (I'd rather bet on the latter.) Then there's a smaller bunch of songs from the equally acclaimed Lifted, a newly written anti-presidential rant, a cover of Feist, and a cover of Elliott Smith. Everything properly soulful, acoustic, and, for the most part, neo-country­ish without any serious reservations.

 

Alas, my individual «special» feelings about these tracks are mostly limited to disappointments (and getting «disappointed» in something Bright Eyes-related is a big disappointment indeed). On ʽLandlocked Bluesʼ, there is no Emmylou Harris; prepare to endure a thoroughly solo perfor­mance from the unhappiest man on the planet. The instrumental jam sections on ʽTrain Under Wa­terʼ are reduced to a cacophonous mess, with no traces of the sharp, well-rehearsed guitar so­los of the original. ʽWhen The President Talks To Godʼ is an atrocious bullshit rant that probably earned George W. Bush more supporters than enemies — tuneless, toneless, overwrought, with a mechanical heart on the sleeve pumping gallons of fake blood into the audience. (I used to think that no one could beat Ani DiFranco in the «Worst Anti-Establishment Rant From A Supposedly Intelligent Singer-Songwriter» game, but I'm not so sure any more). And the covers are deadly boring, although this should not discourage anyone from checking out Elliott Smith, Oberst's spi­ritual guru, who must have done many a spin in his grave over the past decade.

 

On the positive side... there's not much, really. The songs, good or bad, generally stick to the ori­ginal arrangements; there is even solid brass support from Nate Walcott on trumpet, who helps build up the appropriate rucus on ʽRoad To Joyʼ and elsewhere. There's a couple extra numbers that aren't available anywhere else, as far as I'm aware, but they are nothing special (big surprise). Well... maybe the most positive thing about it all is that it could have been even worse. At least there's no ʽWaste Of Paintʼ here, even if there might definitely be a «waste of plastic». Thumbs... nah, what do I really care.

 

CASSADAGA (2007)

 

1) Clairaudients (Kill Or Be Killed); 2) Four Winds; 3) If The Brakeman Turns My Way; 4) Hot Knives; 5) Make A Plan To Love Me; 6) Soul Singer In A Session Band; 7) Classic Cars; 8) Middleman; 9) Cleanse Song; 10) No One Would Riot For Less; 11) Coat Check Dream Song; 12) I Must Belong Somewhere; 13) Lime Tree.

 

Since I have pretty much exhausted my share of pejoratives to address the work of Conor Oberst, I will try to simply stick to the facts from now on. Cassadaga was released on April 10, 2007, on the Saddle Creek label. It has thirteen tracks, clocking in at slightly over 62 minutes. Mike Mogis produced the sessions, which altogether included over thirty different musicians — an absolute record for Bright Eyes, who would later return to a much smaller scale. The «real» album art was hidden from view, so that you could only see all the hidden messages (including a poorly done machine-version Russian translation of the phrase «draw another bloody bath») with the accom­panying «Spectral Decoder».

 

Sales were modest; critical acclaim — near universal, with the ar­guable exception of a lukewarm response from Pitchfork. Also, according to Wikipedia, Johnny Depp named Cassadaga one of his favorite things in 2007. Also, in 2007, Johnny Depp starred in Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End. So far, modern science has not conclusively disproven the lack of a logical con­nec­tion be­tween these two events, which, to a tiny degree, somewhat justifies my mentioning them in the same paragraph. And — just in case — be warned.

 

From top to bottom, Cassadaga consists of more or less traditionally-oriented songs: with the ex­ception of some atmospheric intros and outros that involve electronics, noises, and spoken vocals, most of it can be defined as relatively straightforward country-rock, usually with complex, multi-layered arrangements, with an acoustic guitar part at the core and from two to three to thirty extra musicians on top. This makes Cassadaga into the most accessible (for general audiences) album Oberst had released up to that date (not counting the Christmas record) — without electronics, lengthy solo acoustic confessionals, and with a much more restrained, balanced, some would say «mature» approach to singing, Cassadaga could easily be enjoyed by the grandfather and grand­son alike; a true piece of «family entertainment» if there ever was one — and I do insist that I am still sticking to the facts, for now.

 

In terms of melodies, we do not usually expect a lot of invention or originality from roots-rock albums that honor the old traditions, and expect them twice less if the creative force behind the roots-rock album is Conor Oberst. I did not get the impression of hearing even one melody that was not already familiar from somewhere, and there are quite straightforward reminiscences every now and then (ʽFour Windsʼ draws upon ʽThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Downʼ, and ʽMiddlemanʼ recogni­zably reinvents ʽHouse Of The Rising Sunʼ, to quote just two examples). As far as arrangements are concerned, they manage to keep some diversity by staying away from the «wall of sound» conception — despite all the layers, each song is usually defined by just one in­strumental type: fiddle on ʽFour Windsʼ, organ and piano on ʽIf The Brakeman Turns My Wayʼ, strings on ʽMake A Plan To Love Meʼ, woodwinds on ʽCleanse Songʼ, etc.

 

The lyrical journey of Oberst continues unimpeded as his words start making even less literal sense, and his allusions start getting more and more obscure, sometimes to the point where it does not seem like there are any allusions. Conor himself proclaimed that he did not want to include any «political» songs on the record, but not only that, very few of them — if any, in fact — deal with the old subject of «the end of the world through the eyes of a recently dumped loser». In their place, we have a solidified, nearly-finalized prophetic vision, perhaps best summarized in ʽFour Windsʼ: "And it's the sum of man, slouching towards Bethlehem / A heart just can't contain all of that empty space / It breaks, it breaks, it breaks".

 

It could be argued, in fact, that at this point Oberst's primary source of influence is The Band — and their «intellectualized» brand of roots-rock, pumping new wine into the old winebag. (Which, of course, begs for the question — exactly how many times can you fill an old winebag with new wine before it starts leaking on your boots? — but let's not forget about sticking to the facts). The big difference is that the spirit of The Band was more in line with the old folk idea of humble recognition of and submission to one's fate, whereas Oberst — on record, at least — is still a re­bel, and, of course, nobody in The Band would ever think of «offending» the Bible, and a song title like ʽI Must Belong Somewhereʼ is decidedly not «Bandish».

 

(For the record, I personally take significant offense not at the line "the Bible is blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute / If you burned them all together you'd be closer to the truth", but rather at the follow-up: "They're poring over Sanskrit under Ivy League moons while shadows lengthen in the sun". Really, Conor — empty ignorant hacks at abstract «bookishness» are so passé. Write me a letter if you are truly interested in how to poke fun at certain genuinely detrimental scientific practices of the day. Even better still, just write something nasty about Lady Gaga instead. Okay, back to the facts, the facts, the facts).

 

Actually, I have no more facts that would be useful for this here review, so let us just close it with a final flourish of completely subjective opinion, worthless from anybody else's perspective: I met exactly one song on this album that did not sound deadly boring. That was ʽMake A Plan To Love Meʼ, and I ascribe its success almost completely to the exquisitely arranged vocal harmo­nies of Stacy and Sherrie DuPree from the Texan band Eisley. As for everything else — I'd just as soon listen to Garth Brooks. Mush is mush, no matter if it consists of three or thirty-three lay­ers, and Cassadaga is mush supreme — but yes, it probably must take some talent to get thirty professional musicians to play on an album that does not leave even a passing impression. Final judgement? Why don't we all just share my thumbs down and go put on some Animals instead. Heck, I could even go for some Woody Guthrie — even though that guy never got thirty people to play on any of his records.

 

THE PEOPLE'S KEY (2011)

 

1) Firewall; 2) Shell Games; 3) Jejune Stars; 4) Approximate Sunlight; 5) Haile Selassie; 6) A Machine Spiritual; 7) Triple Spiral; 8) Beginner's Mind; 9) Ladder Song; 10) One For You, One For Me.

 

For three whole years, the world was free from the oppression of Bright Eyes, but not from Conor Oberst, who used the time to play around with several new projects: «Conor Oberst and the Mys­tic Valley Band» and «Monsters of Folk» among them. Then it was suddenly announced that, with one last album, Oberst would retire the «Bright Eyes» label completely. Accompanied with predictable commentary — that the brand name has outlasted itself, that it was time to move on, leaving the past behind etc.

 

Now I would be the last person in the world to expect a «grand exit»-style last album from Bright Eyes, but I do admit to a little anticipatory trepidation. What if Conor had decided to «pull all the stops»? Would that mean twelve-minute long howling ballads to the sound of a battered, out-of-tune acoustic guitar? Could that signify retreating into the safety of his bedroom, so as to make that hoarse, creaky, skipping lo-fi epic to put all lo-fi epics to shame? Might that imply using up all of the accumulated money to hire every single professional country musician in Nashville, so as to record the loudest ever version of ʽThat Silver-Haired Daddy Of Mineʼ, retitled as ʽThat Shiver-Sending Nightmare On My Mindʼ?

 

Wrong on all counts. The last album by Bright Eyes — if this is, indeed, the last album by Bright Eyes — is just a normal rock'n'roll album, much like Cassadaga was just a normal «nu-country» album. Other than a slightly above-ordinary emphasis on Rastafarian matters in the lyrics, and recurring bullshit voiceovers from some pretentious crackpot propagating pseudo-New-Age-non­sense about the «Superuniverse», The People's Key is just yer basic singer-songwriter's rock-a-pop. Quite restrained, concise, relatively harmless. Not too exciting — but not without an occa­sio­nal modest charm or two. Had this been my first Bright Eyes experience, I might have greeted it very warmly; as it is presumably my last one, I am almost tempted to regard it as a subtle apo­logy on Conor's part. «Hey guys, I guess I'm sorry for having bullshat you over all these years — here's a little something I cooked up for you that you might, perhaps, find more palatable».

 

These are all fully arranged, well fleshed out compositions, sometimes in the form of bombastic arena rock, sometimes bluesy, sometimes power-balladeerish, loaded with electronic vignettes, processed guitar effects, and prime time Oberstian lyrics, working overtime to avoid, stun, and disarm clichés and trivialities. From the subtly threatening blues-rock chords of ʽFirewallʼ that opens the album and right down to the sprawling, anthemic keyboards and funky percussion of ʽOne For You, One For Meʼ that closes it — The People's Key is beyond technical reproach.

 

Too bad I can no longer enjoy any of it. Honestly, some of these songs at least may rank as the best he's ever written — there are even shades of original catchy vocal melodies on ʽShell Ga­mesʼ, ʽLadder Songʼ, and a few others — but all of it leaves me cold, because the spirit of Bright Eyes remains exactly the same and cannot possibly change, since any radical change in Conor Oberst would ruin his game: sincerity has always been his biggest asset, and if he drops or even slightly shifts those pathetic-melancholic intonations — well, we will end up with a different Co­nor Oberst, and would that mean that the previous one has been insincere? Or the new one?..

 

Anyway, all of these songs are totally accessible, sensible, and probably as honest as anything the son of a bitch has ever written. They are not even as depressed and moronically suicidal as they used to be: a farewell should be farewell-ish, and most of the sadness here is consciously balan­ced with intelligent optimism — even as the lyrics of ʽOne For You, One For Meʼ seem to chastise huma­nity for its sliding away from the ideal of Oneness, its upbeat rhythmic pattern and (perhaps ironic) vocal enthusiasm disseminates a little hope, at least among those who cannot be bothered to study the words too closely. Besides, all these Rastafari references — how can a record like this be an exer­cise in total depression?

 

I guess I'm not entirely through with Oberst — there is still this bit of mystery as to how come I am so totally, utterly bored with an album like this, where nothing much irritates per se, other than the obnoxious guy chattering away about Einstein and Sumerian tablets. Somehow, all of these hooks, guitar and synth tones, vocal intonations, etc., still come across as totally bland; but it will take time to understand if it's really just the earlier anti-Oberst sentiment rising in vehe­ment bias here, or if the man is so genuinely and utterly devoid of talent when it comes to any­thing other than putting words on paper. In the meantime, my thumbs are frozen, and everybody is welcome to observe the purity of experiment and start his/her study of Bright Eyes with their last album — The People's Key, a title that should probably be better suited for the likes of Grand Funk Railroad or Hank Williams Jr., but somehow ended up used by a guy who is one of the least apt candidates for a true «people's artist» in the modern world. Oh, that Conor and his endlessly wasted stream of pointless irony.

BRITISH SEA POWER

THE DECLINE OF BRITISH SEA POWER (2003)

 

1) Men Together Today; 2) Apologies To Insect Life; 3) Favours In The Beetroot Fields; 4) Something Wicked; 5) Re­member Me; 6) Fear Of Drowning; 7) The Lonely; 8) Carrion; 9) Blackout; 10) Lately; 11) A Wooden Horse; 12*) Childhood Memories; 13*) Heavenly Waters.

 

That a band hailing from Brighton, East Sussex, would want to be known as «British Sea Power» is probably not very surprising. That it would choose The Decline Of British Sea Power as the title of its debut album is also nothing to write home about — after all, British sea power has be­en in re­lative decline over the past century, as every self-respecting Somalian pirate will tell you. That the topics, moods, and melodies of the album will, for the most part, have nothing whatso­ever to do with British sea power, and, frankly speaking, not much to do with Britain itself, is a bit more remarkable. But not before you start thinking about it. Come on now, do you really ex­pect a group called British Sea Power to sing about British sea power? What is this — Admiral Nelson's Lonely Hearts Club Band?

 

As a matter of fact, there are times — quite a few times, to be sure — when British Sea Power sound so much like Arcade Fire that the temptation to brand them as a bunch of second-tier rip-off con artists grows sky-high. Except the glitch is that British Sea Power actually were there first: The Decline came out one year prior to Funeral, and it is almost certain that both bands were de­veloping and polishing their personae completely unaware of each other's existence. The fact that it happened that way simply reflects a «convergence» pattern — apparently, there was an intuiti­vely felt demand for this kind of music on both sides of the ocean, and someone, somewhere, somehow simply had to oblige the spirit of the times.

 

Basically, British Sea Power play this big, arena-esque, pathos-soaked, heaven-bound type of art-rock where you need loud, but simple riffs, lots of echo, some blue-eyed soul in your occasionally off-key singing, and a post-post-modern attitude where dense, heavily intellectualized lyrics are delivered with an air of the utmost emotional sincerity. If you can believe that a song may begin with lines like "Oh Fyodor you are the most attractive man I know / Your Russian heart is strong and has been bleeding for too long" and reflect strong, unsimulated feeling from the bottom of one's (British) heart, read on. If you cannot, this band is not for you.

 

Of course, this does not mean that you will never understand what British Sea Power is all about if you haven't read a single line of Dostoyevsky. Unlike Arcade Fire, British Sea Power take very good care to make most of their lyrics more nebulous than the proverbial Brighton fog. Nothing here is about the lyrics as much as it is about attitude: The Decline Of British Sea Power is a ponderous, pretentious lament on the state of things as they are — old ways and lifestyles crum­bling, and new ones not being satisfactory. All the complex words and ambiguous imagery are only there to showcase the band's intelligence: if you want to earn the right to complain about the fates of the world, you have to prove your knowledge of the world. In particular, they may have read some Dostoyevsky. It's always useful to read some Dostoyevsky if you want to learn the proper art of complaining about things, anyway.

 

But no amount of complaining is going to be acceptable if it is stored in faulty song containers, of course. And from a sheer melodic point of view, none of these songs are particularly interesting. There are some fast punk-influenced rockers (one of which, ʽFlavours In The Beetroot Fieldsʼ, clocks in at a hardcore-honoring 1:18), some traditional drone-based shuffles, and some basic Britpop creations with a pretty Kinks stamp on them. If any of the riffs, courtesy of resident gui­tarists Neil Hamilton Wilkinson and Martin Noble, turn out to be memorable, it is mostly because you have heard them all — or their immediate prototypes — before.

 

This leaves the band's leader and principal songwriter, Scott Wilkinson, better known as «Yan», as our major hope. And he is appropriately suitable: very far from a great singer, in many ways, in fact, uncannily similar to Arcade Fire's Win Butler (same tendency to either «whisper» or «screech» in the exact same range), but quite expressive — British Sea Power's main modes of action are «dreaminess» and «despair», so the bandleader whispers when he is being dreamy and screeches when he is being desperate: what could be wrong with that? Furthermore, his vocal me­lodies often succeed where the instrumental ones do not, being transformed into atmospheric in­strumental accompaniment.

 

Thus, ʽFear Of Drowningʼ, the band's first single, is mostly memorable for its slow crescendo, reflected mainly in the vocals — culminating in the chorus ("...we'll swim from these island shores til there's a little fear of drowning, a little fear of drowning..."). It's a nice enough projection of one's own insecurity onto a simple musical canvas, and the lyrical metaphor is fresh and engaging, if not particularly flattering for good old England. The second single, ʽRemember Meʼ, is the al­bum's loudest and angriest rocker, on which Yan exorcises his Sussex demons in a voice that pre­cisely ave­rages David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen (if you thought the theatrical aristocratism of the former and the theatrical working-class straightforwardness of the latter could never be mat­ched, this song transparently proves the opposite).

 

As the album progresses, it moves ever farther away from loud distorted guitar rock and into the realm of loud folk- and Britpop-based 21st century art-rock: ʽThe Lonelyʼ and ʽCarrionʼ, also re­leased as singles, exemplify this «softer», but no less «epic» streak of the band's creativity, and both are decent, but not exactly heartbreaking anthems for pre-specified market shares of their ge­nerations (well, they could be heartbreaking, I guess, for all those youngsters who never gave themselves the trouble of listening to the band's major influences).

 

They do take a serious risk on ʽLatelyʼ, a track that runs for 14 minutes and, in structure only, re­veals yet another influence — Neil Young: starting out as a slow, pompous, and, frankly, rather boring rock-grinder, it then allows itself to be taken into uncharted waters, then return back to shore, share the plunder, and go back into uncharted waters again. As stoner rock / neo-psychede­lic jammers, these guys would probably get something like a «B-» from me — competence with­out excitement — but the gesture can be appreciated for boldness' sake, if not exactly understood. Although there is a fun moment of self-irony somewhere in there, when after a particularly bawdy passage, Yan, distorting his voice, starts asking questions like "do you like my megalithic Rock? do you like my prehistoric Rock? do you like my Teutonic Rock? do you like my hygienic Rock?» Well, I'm not sure if I like it, Yan, but I do like all those nice words you're using. Thanks for asking the question, anyway.

 

All in all, I do like this album, and maybe, in the absence of Arcade Fire, it could have become a favorite from the last decade; the way things are, The Decline Of British Sea Power is more of a trans-Atlantic precursor for things to come. But it does have its own troubles and its own sorrows that could not be shared by our Canadian friends, so it's not like the emergence of Funeral makes these here songs completely redundant. In short, a tepid, but mildly respectful thumbs up with growth potential. But be warned — the album really sounds nothing like its title would suggest. No sea shanties for you, and no trendy, haughty, foul-mouthed Britpop, either.

 

OPEN SEASON (2005)

 

1) It Ended On An Oily Stage; 2) Be Gone; 3) How Will I Ever Find My Way Home?; 4) Like A Honeycomb; 5) Please Stand Up; 6) North Hanging Rock; 7) To Get To Sleep; 8) Victorian Ice; 9) Oh Larsen B; 10) The Land Be­yond; 11) True Adventures.

 

EPIC alert! Maybe, this time around, fueled by the critical success of Arcade Fire, British Sea Power hit it loud, proud, and hyper-arch-pretentious, and never let go for even one second. «Sea power» indeed — Pathos, with a capital P, roars and thrashes here with ferocious wave amplitude. If it weren't for Yan's «anthemic loudest whisper in the world», I'd say they were trying to outdo U2 and The Cure rolled together on most of these tracks, but since the man is so obviously «vo­cally challenged» (yet tries to turn it to his advantage), the comparison would be somewhat off.

 

Surprisingly, the songs are good! I will admit that I totally hated this upon first listen — the stubborn hooks had no intention of climbing out from under all the walls of sound, and the monotonousness of it all weighed heavy on the soul. As in, if you want to make something that loud, that romantic, that pathetic, make it short and sweet: ten songs in a row based on the same approach and groping in the same limited bag of tricks (simple 4/4 beats, droning electric or strumming acoustic rhythms, atmospheric keyboard / female vocal background) get annoying very quickly if each one is slap­ped with the seal of «Hello, I am The Artist, and I am here to help you Get Inspired».

 

Eventually, though, it clicks. No, they are still nowhere near Arcade Fire: Yan and Hamilton's imagination suffers from a serious lack of vitamins compared to Win and Regine's. (On the other hand, Yan's obscure, intricate lyrics might easily make them intellectual darlings compared to Ar­cade Fire's more transparently «populist» approach). But it would be slanderous to say that the music here is just a vehicle for Yan's incomprehensible, yet still overblown ego. With Hamilton and Noble, they are honestly trying to come up with simple, but distinct and, hopefully, memo­rable guitar hooks for each song. Listen to how ʽIt Ended On An Oily Stageʼ begins — with a massive electric riff riding on a crest of unchanging rhythm chords, and then one more riff is tracing and echoing Yan's vocals in the chorus. It's hardly genius, I'd say, but it's an attempt to make some damn good music, and, with a little patience, it gets through.

 

Still more of these simple, but meaningful electric phrases can be found on ʽBe Goneʼ (power­ful, but plaintive, which is probably supposed to agree with obscure references to the French Revo­lution in the lyrics), ʽPlease Stand Upʼ (this song could easily come out as generic alt-rock, but there is something subtly non-generic in the way its guitar wailings mesh with Yan's «gray-eyed soul»), and ʽOh Larsen Bʼ (referring to the collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf and not to a close Norwegian friend of Yan's, as could be suggested).

 

But the best of the lot is arguably ʽHow Will I Ever Find My Way Home?ʼ, which begins like a fast, quintessentially cozy Brit-pop number, then drops the coziness for a totally dandy two-note guitar solo (a real tasty bit of 21st century power-pop aggressiveness here), then races towards a proverbial ecstatic climax. Again, maybe it won't make the annals, but it's a brilliantly executed piece of work all the same — and its main emotions, «cautious tenderness» and «restrained ma­lice», are absolutely not what you'd usually expect with that kind of title (something à la Bee Gees? James Taylor, maybe?).

 

Again, they try their luck on the last number — ʽTrue Adventuresʼ loses the punch, the speed, the energy, and, for much of its duration, even the rhythm, and tends to woo you over with atmosphe­ric trills, frills, and spills. It certainly ties in with the roaring oceanic feel of the rest of the album, but really, guitar-based atmospherics is so passé now, guys: what do you want, bring back shoe­gazing? At least if y'all were a bunch of Robert Fripps... but perish the thought.

 

Altogether, I am still torn. Open Season is most definitively a grower, and there is definitively something of a «real thing» about Yan and his buddies — even now, when they go for a much more streamlined, less experimental, more «rock-oriented», less intellectualized (apart from the lyrics) approach than on their debut. But it's hard to get away from the feeling that the album is inadequate, and that these guys could use some subtlety — all these Herculean efforts to «make yourself look big», in the end, are like a bunch of Springsteen bastards that only managed to im­prove on their father by reading a few extra books.

 

If it weren't for their surprising ability to punch out these nice guitar melodic bits, there would be very little to recommend about the re­cord. Any way you look at it, it is a post-Decline decline; but it still gets a thumbs up. In fact, ʽHow Will I Ever Find My Way Home?ʼ would probably deserve a spot on a top 50 list of «best songs of the 2000s» or something like that.

 

DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC? (2008)

 

1) All In It; 2) Lights Out For Darker Skies; 3) No Lucifer; 4) Waving Flags; 5) Canvey Island; 6) Down On The Ground; 7) A Trip Out; 8) The Great Skua; 9) Atom; 10) No Need To Cry; 11) Open The Door; 12) We Close Our Eyes.

 

All right, if you want it that much, I'll bite. I do like rock music. But if we're talking about the bare essentials, the «narrow» definition of rock music, then British Sea Power is one of the last bands on Earth to have the right to subtly imply to me that what they are doing is «rock music». Heck, I don't even think of Bruce Springsteen as «rock music», no matter what Jon Landau might tell us. True rock music is covered with dust on Earth, not skyrocketing towards Heaven, which is where Yan and Hamilton have set their sights.

 

Not that they don't have a right to; it's just that the album title really rubs me the wrong way, much as if someone had the ingenious idea to release an Andrew Lloyd Webber collection en­titled From Cats, Trains and Phantoms to Ambiguous Argentinian Women: Greatest Classi­cal Hits. Yes, BSP's third album is even more loud and epic than its second. But it doesn't mean that it is any more related to the quintessential spirit of «rock music» than its predecessor. Nor does it mean that it is a better album, for that matter. It is much worse, on all sides.

 

Supposedly what happened here is the inevitable. Praised by critics for all the wrong things — the volume, the scale, the soulfulness, the verbal intelligence, etc. — instead of the right thing, a.k.a. musical creativity, British Sea Power became convinced that they were the UK equals of Arcade Fire, and that, as long as they stuck with their form, they should no longer be under pressure to seek for more substance. In fact, they became so stuck on preserving and polishing the form that they even went to Canada to work with Arcade Fire's producer for a while (the album overall has at least three producers and was recorded all over the world, although the stylistics is so coherent that it does not really show). And so the indie trap closed in on them.

 

For me, there is one big difference between Open Season and Rock Music: the cloud of «bored hatred» that eventually dissipated after a few listens to the first of these never opened up on the second. Why? Most likely — because the melodies have become even more generic, more stereo­typical, more dispensible. They do throw in a little extra dosage of punky scraping and distortion, but it is still not enough to install a firm «rock bite» into fillerish tunes like ʽA Trip Outʼ or ʽLights Out For Darker Skiesʼ (whose rhythm appropriates Blondie's ʽOne Way Or Anotherʼ and turns it into something much more serious and much less exciting). Nor does it excuse them for such obvious Arcade Fire steals as ʽWaving Flagsʼ, which tries to pocket the drive and spirit of ʽNo Cars Goʼ but forgets to sew on a hook of its own.

 

Even worse, their «atmospheric» numbers are becoming even more yawn-inducing than they used to be. ʽThe Great Skuaʼ, a beauty-oriented instrumental number, gets by through sheer exclusive loudness, echo, and wail of overdubs; if we're talking seabirds, Fleetwood Mac's ʽAlbatrossʼ ori­ginally achieved much more with much less. And the closing eight «psychedelic» minutes of ʽWe Close Our Eyesʼ, brave as they are, are a pointless mess of silence, white noise, annoying organ ambience, and a wall-of-sound coda which is completely wasted because all of the rest of this al­bum already had the same wall of sound — try as they might, they just cannot make this conclu­sion sound more «EPIC» than everything else on here.

 

Like any such album, Rock Music is probably not a complete waste of time, but the amount of time spent on sorting out the few tasty grains is quite disproportional to the size of these grains. ʽAtomʼ has some curious dynamics to it, alternating moments of silence and all-out loudness so that one gets to appreciate the relative value of each a little better. ʽNo Need To Cryʼ, as the only relaxed, quiet ballad on the album, presents a comforting change of pace and a few subtle emo­tional pinches on the senses that, I think, actually work better than the incessant tempestuous as­sault on said senses throughout the rest of the album — enough already!

 

But my major disappointment is with the guitar sound: other than on one or two tracks (ʽDown On The Groundʼ might be a particularly good exception), the little colorful power-poppy phrases that helped the material on Open Season so much are almost en­tirely gone now. It's almost as if they consciously sacrificed their best abilities for the sakes of  Ab­solute Power. Now everything is in the vein of ʽNo Luciferʼ — a never-ending high-pitched plink-plink-plink set against an equally monotonous distorted chunk-chunk-chunk, with no indi­viduality whatsoever. In other words, a masterful shortcut towards an irate thumbs down, which I am happy/sad to provide. One more indie nightmare.

 

MAN OF ARAN (2009)

 

1) Man Of Aran; 2) The South Sound; 3) Come Wander With Me; 4) Tiger King; 5) The Curach; 6) Vertiginous; 7) The Sunfish; 8) Coneely Of The West; 9) The North Sound; 10) Woman Of Aran; 11) It Comes Back Again; 12) No Man Is An Archipelago.

 

I have to thank this album for its educational value on my behalf — although I did know about Nanook Of The North and have even seen bits of it, I neither remembered that it was originally filmed by Robert Flaherty, nor did I know of him as a major force in the dubious genre of «ethno­fiction». Apparently, Man Of Aran is one of his better known documentaries, this time, about a bunch of «primitive» Irish seamen living in pre-modern conditions on the Aran Islands. Origi­nally slagged off as being almost completely staged, yes, but people have relented over time: af­ter all, moving pictures do not necessarily have to be as true to life as scientific volumes, and a little staged excitement can be excused.

 

Anyway, for the 2009 DVD release of the movie, the people in charge approached none other than British Sea Power with the request to provide a new soundtrack. Apparently, for an «epic» mo­vie like that, they needed something appropriate, and who would be the most «epic» band in the neighborhood? And not just «epic», but with a special taste for sea-related topics and oceanic effects? There you go.

 

The album is a soundtrack, mind you. There is only one vocal number: ʽCome Wander With Meʼ, a cover of an old tune from Twilight Zone sung by a guest star rather than Yan — Cedric Bixler-Zavala of the Mars Volta. Everything else is strictly instrumental: loud, lengthy, echoey, very British Sea Power-ish, and about as exciting as you would expect from a coherent soundtrack to an old documentary.

 

The tracks are not entirely of an ambient nature. ʽThe Sunfishʼ, in all of its 11-minute «glory», and ʽThe North Soundʼ, for instance, are propelled forward at speedy tempos and sometimes even with nicely distorted post-punk riffage, probably reflecting the tendency of the native population of Aran to follow up a hard day's work by coming home, plugging in, and going at it like there was no work tomorrow. Unfortunately, all of them would end up sounding just like British Sea Power did on Do You Like Rock Music?

 

Other sonic varieties include cutesy piano-and-chimes waltzing (ʽThe Curachʼ), slow dreamy folk shuffles, often with solid help from new band member Abi Fry on viola (ʽConeely Of The Westʼ), and, of course, simply lots and lots of droney atmosphere (title track, etc.). If you can get in the spirit, the sonic waves might really transport you to a different place — not necessarily to Aran, though, because the soundtrack is just too dreamy and epic-romantic to be an appropriate accom­paniment to the rowdy, troublesome life of a pre-industrial population. Maybe to Aldebaran, or to Arrakis (although the latter might have some problems with supporting an oceanic environment).

 

Overall, there is no attempt here to adopt any sort of different musical personality in order to «match the individual vision of Roberty Flaherty». The band just does what it wants to do, cut­ting out the vocals and limiting the «rock'n'roll drive» for technical reasons, but in everything else, not advancing seriously anywhere beyond their latest albums (for comparison, when one of their ap­parent idols, Neil Young, did his own soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, it managed at once to sound Neil Young-ish — and also sound like nothing he'd ever done before). Fans will be happy, non-fans like me will probably be indifferent. But at least, unlike Do You Like Rock Mu­sic?, this release does not even pretend to stocking solid, memorable melodies. And the final de­cision whether it works well as a soundtrack will have to be made by someone else — I have not seen the movie, nor do I plan to in the nearest future.

 

VALHALLA DANCEHALL (2011)

 

1) Who's In Control; 2) We Are Sound; 3) Georgie Ray; 4) Stunde Null; 5) Mongk II; 6) Luna; 7) Baby; 8) Living Is So Easy; 9) Observe The Skies; 10) Cleaning Out The Rooms; 11) Thin Black Sail; 12) Once More Now; 13) Heavy Water.

 

From the enchanted misty coastlines of the Aran Islands, here we go back into well-charted wa­ters once again. What else can I really say? There is very little, if any, quantum difference be­tween this record and Do You Like Rock Music?, nor could we have justifiedly expected any, given Yan and Hamilton's firm indie stance: «we found our Muse early on, and one does not easi­ly commit adultery and get away with it». But I gotta admit, the album title is a good find — cer­tainly nowhere near as cringeworthy as when they ask you a stupid question, the answer to which is completely irrelevant for the music, anyway.

 

The experience of soundtrack brewing did leave some traces — the album steps away from the policy of continuously bashing your head into pulp with an endless stream of fast, furious, monotonous rhythms, and reinjects lots of atmospherics: starting with ʽGeorgie Rayʼ, continuing with ʽLunaʼ and ʽBabyʼ, and ending with the obligatory mammoth-length epic (ʽOnce More Nowʼ), we are exposed to lots of echos, dreamlike late-era Cocteau Twins-ish ambient-psychede­lic guitar pirouets, and even «angelic cooing», mostly courtesy of Abi Fry, credited not only for vocal effects and viola, but also for musical saw passages — you get the drift: we no longer like rock music that much. Who ever makes rock music with a musical saw?

 

In fact, the long list of «influences» now, apart from the perennial Arcade Fire, would probably also have to include at least Beach House — ʽBabyʼ (eat this, Justin Bieber!) moves at a slow, stately pace, weaves an aura of melancholic beauty, populates it with chivalrous lyrics ("I pow­dered rhino horns for you and I'll serve it on a plate to you" — where's the Animal Rights Watch when you need one?), then fades away like the remnants of a relaxating hot bath down the drain. Probably never to be remembered again, just like any given hot bath. If anything, the vocals are just too non-descript, compared to Victoria Legrand's cold-and-warm stimulation.

 

But even though each of these «moody» tracks, taken individually, is no great moody shakes, collectively they do a good job of slowing down and speeding up the record to move it through different emotional fields — technically different, at least. Who knows, maybe if there had been no ʽBabyʼ before it, I would have remained untouched by the impact of ʽLiving Is So Easyʼ — probably the album's best track, and a good choice for a single. Driven by electronics instead of guitars, it is a cool, intelligent «Anti-Party» type of song, whose simple, catchy chorus ("living is so easy, shopping is so easy, dying is so easy, all of it is easy") could easily be mistaken for pro­pagating a «don't worry be happy» attitude. In reality, it is a light-hearted indictment of the «easy living» attitude to which I wholeheartedly subscribe — and fun to sing along to.

 

Of the rest of the tracks, «tuggers» would probably include ʽGeorgie Rayʼ (not too transparently dedicated to Orwell and Bradbury), urging us all to beware of anti-utopian future with a few well placed, rousing "why don't you say something, won't you say something"s; and ʽObserve The Skiesʼ, where they finally manage to hit the Springsteen-ian bullseye, I think (yes, growing up with Born In The USA blasting from the radio will eventually do that to a man) — anyway, great piano parts, high-in-the-sky guitar solo, and another anthemic chorus that is fun to sing along to. Only problem — I don't think Yan's «whispering scream» suits the mood here. They really needed someone of The Boss's caliber to rip it up 100%. What's a fuckin' loud anthem with­out a fuckin' loud screamer, anyway?

 

Overall, I do find this one somewhat more consistent, diverse, and generally intelligently crafted than Rock Music — never by a long shot, for sure, but enough to raise the final count to a half-hearted thumbs up. Maybe the main problems these guys have is that they want this music to be stadium-wise anthemic and intellectually challenging at the same time, and you know how hard it is to intellectually challenge an entire stadium. But, regardless of that overall judgement, you can always succeed at different degrees, and Valhalla Dancehall succeeds at least as often as it fails, which makes up for about thirty minutes of genuinely good music and about thirty more minutes of a nutritious, but tasteless sonic bouillon. But maybe that's just the way they go about it up there in Valhalla. Come to think of it, they used to say the same things about Wagner, too.

 

MACHINERIES OF JOY (2013)

 

1) Machineries Of Joy; 2) K Hole; 3) Hail Holy Queen; 4) Loving Animals; 5) What You Need The Most; 6) Mon­sters Of Sunderland; 7) Spring Has Sprung; 8) Radio Goddard; 8) A Light Above Descending; 9) When A Warm Wind Blows Through The Grass.

 

I like the first song here a lot — make sure you catch at least a glimpse of it before this next British Sea Power album falls into oblivion like all the rest. The atmospheric buildup, the glim­mering folk-pop electric riff that eventually merges with the vocals, the psychedelic string over­dubs, the stately optimistic atmosphere, all of this working towards the anthemic chorus in such a subtle, but tightly focused manner that when Yan finally reaches the conclusion — "we are mag­nificent machineries of joy, and then some" — how could we not believe him?

 

It is only later, once you read deeper into the lyrics, that the song's irony begins to emerge: first, the title itself comes from Bradbury, a guy who wasn't exactly the epitome of optimism, and second, the grand, solemn, soothing music with its mind-melding psychedelic overtones is really a mesmerizing drug, against whose background you slowly get «brainwashed»: "So tell me what he said... it doesn't really matter... tell me what he said... though I don't really care... it's only what he said... and we can make it better... help is on the way...". Once you get through to this level, Machineries Of Joy, with its Bradburian / Orwellian overtones, becomes a much more interes­ting concept than the first superficial listen could suggest.

 

The problem, as usual, is that the concept soon becomes and ultimately remains more interesting than the music. The band tones down their approach a bit, going for a «quiet majestic feel» this time, hushed vocals, muffled guitars and all, but too many of the songs sound exactly the same, mood-wise, and the band's decision that they will never «go all the way» (reasonable, actually, since they could get confused with U2 otherwise) has a negative influence on the songs' hooking power. Machineries Of Joy stands up fairly well to repeated listens, but the first couple of them might be so underwhelming that you simply might not get tempted to go for more.

 

Still, attentive perception will probably show that the songs are well written, the arrangements are cleverly chosen, the lyrics are expertly written, and that there is enough data here to feed your in­tellectual centers, even if the emotional ones remain relatively unaffected. For instance, ʽLoving Animalsʼ, a song about... well, about the wrongness of violence (not just towards animals), cle­ver­ly moves between «harsh» verses, with distorted rhythm guitar, siren-style lead guitar, and tense vocals, and a «soft» bridge / chorus section where the voice of God, or at least one of God's henchmen, riding on an angelic slide guitar part, tells you that "I want you to know that it's wrong man". (Although, fairly speaking, since the preceding mantra goes "loving animals, loving ani­mals", it is not exactly clear what is wrong — maybe God is really letting you know that loving animals is wrong? Whatever you think of BSP, lack of ambiguousness is not possibly considered as an accusation in their case).

 

Of the «rocking» songs, ʽMonsters Of Sunderlandʼ is the most notable, although its point is a little obscure — sort of like a parody on a regional anthem, the song was inspired by the band's visit to Sunderland (Tyne and Wear) and features heavy brass fanfares, buzzing-vibrating guitar riffs, choral harmonies, and lyrics that should make the citizens of Sunderland scratch their heads in confusion. It's one thing to get a song written about you by a popular band when most of the world has no idea of the place you live in — but it's quite another thing to be referred to as a «monster» and be accused of «Darwinian animosity», whatever that means. Are they being reve­rential or are they being mean? Maybe you have to be a Sunderland resident to know the definite answer to that. But the song does sound great at any rate.

 

When they quiet down, however, it does not always work equally well. On one hand, there are beautifully sounding songs like ʽA Light Above Descendingʼ, with its highly obscure sci-fi refe­rences («Aelita» should probably refer to the title character of Alexei Tolstoy's novel from 1923, of which I was not even sure until now that it had ever been translated to English, but apparently, there are at least three different translations, and it seems like the BSP boys are pretty avid rea­ders when it comes to fantasy) — cool romantic atmosphere, brought on mainly by slide guitar overdubs. On the other hand, the repetitive minimalism of ʽWhen A Warm Wind Blows Through The Grassʼ hardly warrants a five-minute loop: that acoustic pattern is not that original and/or haunting to merit serving as the album's coda.

 

Still, «samey», «hookless», and «pretentious» arguments can be sufficiently breached and bru­shed aside here to make space for a well-deserved thumbs up. Like all BSP albums, the lyrics and attitudes make this one very «elitist», inaccessible and impenetrable for the average consumer despite its fairly traditional musical values; and its accent on the «muffled» part of «muffled ma­jesty» will also leave potential fan crowds disoriented — it's like stadium rock without a stadium to play it in. But I am definitely putting this one on the «replay in ten years, see how it works» list. Who knows, maybe from that perspective British Sea Power will be perceived as embracing the Zeitgeist of 2013 after all.

 

FROM THE SEA TO THE LAND BEYOND (2013)

 

1) From The Sea To The Land Beyond; 2) Remarkable Diving Feat; 3) Strange Sports; 4) Heroines Of The Cliff; 5) The Guillemot Girls; 6) Suffragette Riots; 7) Heatwave; 8) Melancholy Of The Boot; 9) Be You Mighty Sparrow; 10) Berth 24; 11) Red Rock Riviera; 12) Coastguard; 13) Perspectives Of Stinky Turner; 14) Bonjour Copains; 15) The Wild Highlands; 16) Docklands Renewed; 17) The Islanders.

 

Apparently, it was a stroke of luck when these guys decided to call themselves British Sea Power and write grand songs with massive hooks — these days, whenever somebody films a movie that involves (a) the sea and (b) the British Isles, they are the first band to whom people turn to pro­vide the soundtrack. This time, it is for From The Sea To The Land Beyond: Britain's Coast On Film, a documentary feature by Penny Woolcock on various aspects, historical and modern, of everyday life on Britain's coastline. I have not watched the movie, but gather, from various descrip­tions, that, like most such documentaries, that the two major types of reaction to it would be either «breathtakingly beautiful» or «butthurtingly boring», depending on whether one is an idea­listic, impressionable artistic soul or a jaded cynical bastard. In both cases, though, the soundtrack by British Sea Power will be a natural part of the impression.

 

Although the album is about as long as the movie, featuring complete versions of compositions that were abridged in the documentary, it is definitely a soundtrack, whose purposes are secon­dary to the visuals. Some of the music is not new at all, but borrows old instrumental mixes from their previous albums (unfortunately, at this point I cannot state for certain which ones are which and am merely repeating outside information); some is new, and a few numbers even feature vo­cals, but on the whole, this is monotonous, atmospheric stuff, absolutely typical of BSP with their symphonic echoey sound, ringing guitars, swooping violas, crashing percussion, and sound effects (waves beating? check. thunder rolling? check. gulls shrieking? check, etc.), and featuring very little in the way of individual hooks. Well, a little. But not much. Really, it's not supposed to. Living on the British coast is not much of a hook-filled activity anyway — it's more about being one with nature, or with hoarding cultural memory.

 

The track titles, while they probably correspond to specific parts of the feature, are not that well correlated with the music. ʽSuffragette Riotsʼ, for instance, beginning with some isolated piano chords and the omnipresent seagulls, slowly builds up towards a crescendo, but hardly of the «riot» variety — these guys are the children of shoegazers and they couldn't properly picture a «riot» under pain of having to listen to Agnostic Front for the rest of their lives. ʽHeatwaveʼ has a lovely-lazy guitar/viola dialog going on, but I wouldn't necessarily call it indicative of a «heat­wave» (and it isn't atmospherically different from something like ʽStrange Sportsʼ), for instance. In fact, the album could definitely use more variety — that is, if the idea of the movie itself, as I understand it, wasn't that «the more it changes, the more it stays the same».

 

In brief, this is what happens when you get British Sea Power to just be British Sea Power and not worry all that much about anything else. I like their «average» sonic vibe a lot, but a thumbs up for this album would at least have to mean that it «got me» a couple of times, and it didn't: it was just nice in the usual, predictable, reliable way. But it is most definitely for you if you are one of those types with a habit of sharing «This Photographer Shoots The Most Amazing Pictures Of The World That Will Totally Amaze You And Make You See The World In A Totally Amazing New Light And Your Life Will Never Be The Same» links on Facebook. I myself tend to gravitate towards The Onion on those matters, so I'll just leave this record unrated, for justice' sake, and secretly hope that nobody on the British Isles is currently envisaging a UK-based movie re­make of The Old Man And The Sea.

 

 

 

 

 

BRITNEY SPEARS

...BABY ONE MORE TIME (1999)

 

1) ...Baby One More Time; 2) (You Drive Me) Crazy; 3) Sometimes; 4) Soda Pop; 5) Born To Make You Happy; 6) From The Bottom Of My Broken Heart; 7) I Will Be There; 8) I Will Still Love You; 9) Deep In My Heart; 10) Thinkin' About You; 11) E-Mail My Heart; 12) The Beat Goes On; 13*) I'll Never Stop Loving You; 14*) Autumn Goodbye.

 

Well, I suppose we all saw this one coming, didn't we?

 

One thing is hard to deny: this is probably the most manipulative album sleeve in record history. Of all the people who ensured this album's 14 times platinum status, I wonder just how many slurped it off the Walmart counter, spellbound by the focused assault of eyes, lips, unbuttoned shirt, and... oh my. Whatever else one might say, the guy who took that photo was the real genius be­hind Britney's career, and should have earned him- or herself a lifelong pass to all of her swim­ming pools and barbecue lawns.

 

But really, there is no way one could not mention this record in one's story of the rise and fall of pop music, since it almost single-handedly transformed... Madonna into a respectable artist. Once, it used to be that people would blame Ms. Louise Ciccone for having downgraded pop to the state where sex comes first and music comes last. Britney symbolized the next stage of that develop­ment — and once you compare Madonna with Baby One More Time, it immediately becomes clear that, compared to this stuff, the former counts as a brilliant masterpiece of composition, ar­rangement, and artistic expression.

 

Every once in a while, you encounter opinions — particularly, of course, in the mainstream mu­sical press — that ...Baby One More Time would have still been a monster hit, effective and im­pressive, even without the photos and the accompanying videos. I beg to differ. The only musical justification behind these dance grooves and synth-pop ballads would be a great set of catchy bubblegum hooks, and few of these songs are catchy to begin with. They aren't even particularly disgusting — most of the time, they are simply «invisible». There are no interesting musical so­lutions (except for one, maybe, on which see below), both the live instruments and the electronic keyboards are primitive and rote — in short, if it's dance pop we're talking about, this shit ain't no Prince, and it even ain't no Madonna.

 

So color me disappointed, because at some point, I almost hoped that the record would turn out to be a «guilty pleasure»: after all, there is nothing wrong per se with the very idea of bubblegum teen pop... well, come to think of it, there is something deeply wrong per se with that idea, but it was always in the power of well-paid musically-endowed corporate songwriters to make us, sometimes, forgive and forget. ...Baby One More Time does not take any chances: it wants us to love it because it is bubblegum teen pop, with a rather transparent nod to Lolita territory, not despite be­ing bubblegum teen pop.

 

The one person I would completely refrain from blaming is, of course, Britney herself — who had not even turned 18 at the time and, in all of her Southern girl innocence, allowed her talents to be molded into this piece of trash. Talents, yes, because she really throws herself into this role that the producers thought up for her. She may not show much range in her singing, or any indi­vidual vocalizing techniques, but she does know how to use what she's got — be it the purring and cooing on ʽE-Mail My Heartʼ or the trademark hushy rasp on the title track. She is not quite «nothing» without the looks, and, if you ask me, given the choice between the average «diva», floating on spasmatic waves of melisma, and Britney's far more natural tones (at this early stage — fortunately, quite free from auto-tuning and other electronic treatments), I would rather have to go for the latter. In fact — shudder, shudder — I almost feel real empathy at the way she phra­ses "I was born to make you happy", with its little subtle mix of joy and weeping; quite professio­nal for a 17-year old. And if you fail to feel a small jolt at the way she croons out "forever... E-mail my heart", a quick doctor checkup may be in order (maybe even if you're female).

 

That said, most of the songs are still atrociously bland and artificial, and the record as a whole never lives up to its opening one second of music — the three ominous piano notes that announce ʽ...Baby One More Timeʼ are arguably the finest moment on here. And while I cannot deny that the chorus of «The Song That Established Britney Spears (And Brought Down Rolling Stone)» is somewhat catchy, that does not excuse the robo-funk of the number immediately re-written as the even less interesting ʽ(You Drive Me) Crazyʼ, nor the awful title, lyrics, and hip-hop / calypso mix of ʽSoda Popʼ, nor the abundance of cheap soft / power ballads (ʽFrom The Bottom Of My Broken Heartʼ) that even Mariah Carey could never have resuscitated.

 

There is one exception-oddity — the last track on the album is an unexpectedly lo-fi, bass-heavy cover of Sonny & Cher's old hit ʽThe Beat Goes Onʼ, replete with «psychedelic» electronic ef­fects, mock-drunk drum outbursts, and lite-spooky echoes. Like Sonny & Cher themselves, this song is just as bubblegummy as the rest of them, but it manages to preserve some of the original Sixties' melodic flair, and Britney certainly does it more justice — it is her element — than she could ever hope to allocate for the unhappy choice of ʽSatisfactionʼ on her sophomore effort. But it is also a song that comes after the croony «finale» of ʽE-Mail My Heartʼ, sort of as a post-scrip­tum specially targeted at the «purveyors of good taste», and in any case, you do not redeem an overall failure of a record by covering fuckin' Sonny & Cher, do you?

 

The absolute worst thing about this album, though, is the stinky flair of hypocrisy that went along with it, as the media were busy cultivating the «innocent» and even «traditional / conservative» attitude of Britney's straight in the face of all the innumerable innuendos both in these songs and in the accompanying videos — let's face it, at the very least Madonna had always been honest about her sexuality, even if, granted, she had already come of age well before launching her pro­fessional career. From this point of view, future Spears albums might have been just as com­pa­rably mise­rable, music-wise, but at least, starting with ʽToxicʼ and the like, they would become more balan­ced in the «sex vs. music» aspect. Not that the music on ...Baby is particularly sexy — no more so than an inflatable doll or something — but Britney herself is, of course.

 

In any case, ...Baby One More Time was a pop culture phenomenon in 1999, no doubt about that, but as of today, I would guess that it is probably one of the least listened to mega-best-sel­lers of the past century — and if so, for a very good reason: admit it, if you ever bought it, you didn't exactly buy it for the music, did you? You just didn't have the proper Internet access to download the album photo, or the proper color printer to zoom it and hang it in the bathroom. But in doing that, you (the «abstract» youse, that is) have created the unfortunate illusion that ...Baby One More Time had something to do with «real music», when, in fact, it had even less to do with that than Debbie Gibson in the 1980s. Rating? Forget it — I'm too bored with this stuff to actually allow myself an extra thumbs movement.

 

OOPS! ...I DID IT AGAIN (2000)

 

1) Oops! ... I Did It Again; 2) Stronger; 3) Don't Go Knockin' On My Door; 4) (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction; 5) Don't Let Me Be The Last To Know; 6) What U See (Is What U Get); 7) Lucky; 8) One Kiss From You; 9) Where Are You Now; 10) Can't Make You Love Me; 11) When Your Eyes Say It; 12) Girl In The Mirror; 13) Dear Diary.

 

Contrary to rumors, Britney's sophomore release is not a carbon copy of ...Baby One More Time — it is more like a slightly genetically modified clone. After all, "hit me baby one more time", unless viewed as a submissive / masochistic statement in the light of violent polysemy of the verb ʽto hitʼ, is a fairly cuddly hook next to "I'm not that innocent" — the coming-down line that really constitutes the true hook of ʽOops!... I Did It Againʼ (along with the moans and groans that hint at an already better understanding of one's bodily powers and wishes than the "oh baby baby" trick on ʽOne More Timeʼ).

 

Then again, Britney did turn 18 during the recording sessions for the album, which explains a few things. In general, the record is still quite strictly targeted at bubblegum teen-pop audiences: rose-colored ballads, Disneyworld-ish dance numbers, and pseudo-schoolgirl-scribbled lyrics form the bulk of it — but already the industry is trying to sex the girl up, starting from the album cover (bellybutton on the loose, and that strange wallpaper bears a suspicious resemblance to a bee­hive... beehive, get it?) and ending with the more-than-obvious choice of «obligatory classic rock cover» — no less than ʽSatisfactionʼ itself. (Or perhaps that was the condition under which Jann Wenner would allow Britney to appear on the cover of his respectable magazine).

 

Funny thing is, ʽSatisfactionʼ in Britney's hands actually sounds interesting, if not exactly good, for the first forty seconds — the acoustic intro, where the chorus is re-imagined as a teen girl's complaint at not being able to satisfy her... oh never mind. Then, as the plastic soul rhythms come in and the song becomes a cruddily programmed anthem to «finding your own self», we quickly plunge into the depths of the ridiculous, such as hearing the line "I've got my own identity!" from Ms. Spears (because she doesn't care much for tight skirts, apparently).

 

Just as before, Britney's worst enemy here is not even the song material, but the production — we are supposed to be taking this in as «live» music, with acoustic guitars, (occasionally) real drums, and played rather than programmed keyboards manning the melodies. But most of the melodies are trivial slow or mid-tempo grooves that require real hot playing to be effective, whereas here there is absolutely no player involvement anywhere in sight — just a bunch of probably well-paid professionals wasting their lives on fluff and letting us all know that they know it, too.

 

In another age, in another world, a song like ʽLuckyʼ, contributed by the ever-present Max Mar­tin, could be a source of inspiration — written with a clear nod to classic Motown conventions, so much that, with a little imaginative effort, you could envisage it done by a Mary Wells or a Diana Ross... okay, at the very least — by an ABBA or someone like that. But the drums are crappy, the synthesizers' only point is to provide tonal accompaniment, the lyrics are trite even for the pop level of a 1962 (although, granted, probably just right for the level of the average 12-year girl), and the hook-forging process involves making one out of "she cry-cry-cries in her lonely heart" which might be embarrassing to sing along to even for certain 12-year olds.

 

Other than the «retro-potential» of ʽLuckyʼ and those amusing forty seconds of the intro to ʽSatis­factionʼ, there is nothing of interest on the album whatsoever — ʽOops!...ʼ is a stylistic clone of ʽOne More Timeʼ, but without the cool piano notes it is even less redeemable; and its companion piece, ʽStrongerʼ, makes the best of Britney's vocal abilities (her lower notes always sound more authentic and realistic than her higher ones), but completely misses its point — there is nothing about her performance that truly suggests getting "stronger than yesterday, now it's nothing but my way" (if one of your idols is Janet Jackson, this does not automatically mean that Max Martin can make you into a Janet Jackson with one wave of his songwriter's pen).

 

Worse, towards the end of the album they really blow it with a set of never-ending adult contem­porary and / or power ballads, including a donation from devil lady Diane Warren and a song called ʽDear Diaryʼ, co-credited to Britney herself — and it shows, it shows! not even a federal grant-supported sociological survey into the blogging activities of middle school teenage girls could have yielded such an authentic reconstruction on behalf of a middle-aged professional song­writer. I wonder if Steve Tyler would still insist that pink is his favorite color, having heard this particular song?

 

So, overall, even though the choice is altogether pathetic, this is probably the worst album in Britney's entire career — generic mainstream bubblegum pop from the late 1990s is bad enough as it is, but recycled generic mainstream bubblegum pop brings «regurgitated spam» to mind, or maybe even more horrendous things than that. Cute bellybutton, of course, but we'd already seen it in her videos anyway.

 

BRITNEY (2001)

 

1) I'm A Slave 4 U; 2) Overprotected; 3) Lonely; 4) I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman; 5) Boys; 6) Anticipating; 7) I Love Rock'n'Roll; 8) Cinderella; 9) Let Me Be; 10) Bombastic Love; 11) That's Where You Take Me; 12) When I Found You; 13) What It's Like To Be Me.

 

Presumably, the commercial success of Britney's first two albums swooshed past the breaking point — that point where, upon having dutily supplied a legion of teens with sweet fodder, she could be dumped by the industry altogether. The legions were still hot for more Britney — but also, the legions were growing up, and so, much like Harry Potter, Britney had to grow up along with her legions. So it was decided — meticulously planned and executed, too — that the third album would be... well, since we all know that «Artists» are supposed to have «Transitional Al­bums» that gradually bring them to their «Mature Stage», that was exactly what the third album was supposed to be. (Never mind that real artists rarely, if ever, calculate their records as «tran­sitional» — they just come out that way naturally — but who are we kiddin' here).

 

If there is a more blatant way to emphasize this «transition» than naming one of the album's key tracks ʽI'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Womanʼ, I'd like to hear it, but it seems like Max Martin had all potential competition beat on that one. Even more important is the fact that throughout, the focus is altogether on «Me, The Real Britney». Defending her «freedom» on ʽLet Me Beʼ, asser­ting her independent personality on ʽWhat It's Like To Be Meʼ, complaining about being way too ʽOverprotectedʼ, and peeking at us with a slightly scared (or was that «stoned»?) Mowgli-type look from the sleeve photo — yep, that's «Britney», all right: the girl who just got told by Justin Timberlake what it's like to be her. Did you ever realize that it is usually the media-baked glitzy shallow stars who like to extol their «independence» and «not-like-everybody-else-ness» and «let-me-live-my-own-life-ness», usually over the blandest melodies and arrangements ever, rather than the ones who are truly independent? You most probably did — and you most probably understand why that is so.

 

However, to achieve the official status of «transitional», the album must not concentrate entirely on pseudo-confession and mock-introspection. In terms of sheer covered ground, Britney is her most mish-mashy, variegated album ever. For one thing, individuality and maturity be damned, there is still a lot of the «old» bubblegummy Britney, still polishing her whitebread dance-pop moves on ʽBombastic Loveʼ and ʽCinderellaʼ, or cooing away little-princess romantic ballads (ʽWhen I Found Youʼ; the techno-spiced, but just as sickeningly sweet ʽThat's Where You Take Meʼ — high up in the skies, silly, whatever did you think? Wait for just a couple more years, we'll get there even­tually).

 

For another thing, there is a brief, thoroughly and healthily failed attempt at dressing her up like a rough'n'tough rock star, with probably the most banal choice that could be made — Joan Jett's (actually, Alan Merrill's, but who cares these days?..) ʽI Love Rock'n'Rollʼ. Since there has never, ever been any additional evidence to the fact that Britney does, in fact, love rock'n'roll, not even her Oh So Cool "hey, is this thing on?" at the beginning manages to justify this next gaffe — granted, not nearly as face-palmish as the fiasco of ʽSatisfactionʼ, but only because, unlike the latter, ʽI Love Rock'n'Rollʼ was never a very good song in the first place.

 

Much better is the lead-off single from the album: ʽI'm A Slave 4 Uʼ, written and produced by The Neptunes, is probably one of the decade's better mainstream R&B dance numbers (not that I'm really an expert!), if only because its main hooks have nothing to do with mainstream R&B, but are based on an odd combination of boing-boing-ing electronic percussion with almost psy­chedelic vocalization (the "I'm a slaaaaaaaave for you..." bit, not the "get it get it get it" bit, which I originally mistook for "kitty kitty kitty", and it was way more fun). This is Britney dipping her toes into the seductive world of syncopation, sampling, and sex-tease, and it succeeds far better than dipping the same toes into bombastic riff-rock — except that ʽI'm A Slave 4 Uʼ is complete­ly «de-personalized» and could have been recorded by just about anyone.

 

But no, this is the first and last time you are going to hear me complain about how «there's not enough Britney in this song», because the last time we really heard «the real Britney» was on ʽDear Diaryʼ, and it is not quite clear why anyone should ever want to hear more of «the real Britney» — thank goodness we now have all those tons of makeup on top, which is really the only reason to give a quick listen to these records in the first place. Problem is, on Britney that makeup is still laid on too thin — remember, we are supposed to be in transition here, not girls, not yet women. ʽI'm A Slave 4 Uʼ and, to a much lesser extent, ʽBoysʼ feature respectable pro­duction jobs — the rest of the N'Sync-ish dance numbers sink through the floorboards as usual. Plus, more trouble looms on the horizon as we see the first elements of auto-tuning on a couple of tracks, squeezing out the last irreplaceable element of Britney's — her sexy rasp — but, for the most part, fans of her limited, but not un-cute, vocal cords will still find plenty here.

 

Altogether, forgetting about the individual imaginativeness of ʽ Slaveʼ for a moment, Britney's «transition-ality» was realized rather poorly — the album lacks both the super-glamor-gloss of ensuing releases and the Lolita-style pesky perverted oh-so-guilty pleasure aura of the bubblegum teen-pop stuff. For the most part, this is bad, utterly sterile music as usual, but now it even sort of lacks the most basic sense of purpose, and in a way, this is the most «boring» album released under the name of B.S. up to date. In fact, I'd rather go and vomit one more time to ʽDear Diaryʼ than have to sit through this no-spine-whatsoever Justin Timberlake duet. On second thought, I just realized that I don't have to do either of these things — see, life isn't so bad after all.

 

IN THE ZONE (2003)

 

1) Me Against The Music; 2) (I Got That) Boom Boom; 3) Showdown; 4) Breathe On Me; 5) Early Mornin'; 6) To­xic; 7) Outrageous; 8) Touch Of My Hand; 9) The Hook Up; 10) Shadow; 11) Brave New Girl; 12) Everytime.

 

All right — this is where the shit really hits the fan. Be it out of sheer bare sociological curiosity, every­body needs to hear this album, or at least its most significant «conceptual» streak that be­gins with ʽShowdownʼ, ends with ʽThe Hook Upʼ, and reaches apocalyptic-evil levels on the ʽBreathe On Meʼ / ʽEarly Mornin'ʼ / ʽToxicʼ sequence. It is not every day that playing just three songs in a row gets you a-thinkin' about the ultimate fate of man- and womankind, and you cer­tainly do not expect that from a Britney fuckin' Spears album — but the last time I remember my­self walking away from a musical record with a comparable feeling was Aerosmith's Get A Grip (incidentally, released a round decade earlier — watch out, 2013!).

 

With Britney now well over 21, and the industry still red-hot yearnin' for another smash, the next move from Britney's ʽI'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Womanʼ was obvious: the fans had to be shown that the girl finally is a woman, and a real woman, «as all men know», lives in constant need of sensual pleasure and in permanent search of sexual conquest. Ain't too sure? Ask Madonna. In fact, don't ask Madonna — better still, invite Madonna to sing a duet with Britney on the opening track and provide her with a motherly blessing and a protective French kiss. Never mind if ʽMe Against The Musicʼ matches its title so well, given that there is so much of «me» in this track and so little actual music — just a regular hip-hop beat. The really important thing is that they got Madonna here to sing "C'mon Britney, lose control, watch you take it down", and this truly creates the illusion of «passing the crown».

 

There are, however, a few problems. For all of the obvious criticisms of Madonna as an artist, there was never any question of her being (a) an independent soul, (b) a modest, but occasionally impressive, vocal talent, (c) an above-average songwriter who could easily pen a catchy tune or, at least, recognize one (ʽInto The Grooveʼ alone should be able to dispel any doubt). And there is quite a hint of trickery in that recommendation — for all we know, Madonna herself never ever «lost control» over a single second of her professional life. Now cut to Britney, pampered from the Mickey Club get-go through the rose-candy bubblegum ickiness — and now, all sex-dolled for the next stage of her career: «if you loved In Bed With Madonna, you're going to be really, really pleased as Britney takes you to the next stage».

 

And yes, this is the next stage — in humiliation, first and foremost. It had been heavily propaga­ted that In The Zone was the album on which Britney allegedly took control in her hands (heed­less of Madonna's call?), and, to prove that, we now have her name added to nine out of twelve songs — kinda suspicious, though, that most of them feature at least three extra songwriters. But more importantly, the image that comes together through these songs can have nothing to do with the natural development of a 22-year old girl from Kentwood, Louisiana, who only recently was spotted talking about saving up virginity for marriage. I can believe in artistic independence for the likes of Taylor Swift — singing her monotonous bores about princes on white horses until the end of time — but Britney Spears herself behind something like ʽTouch Of My Handʼ? (It's not that I doubt the touching aspect, mind you — only the writing).

 

Anyway, that whole stretch I was talking about, once we get done with the lacklustre Madonna number and the even less inspiring Ying Yang Twins collaboration (lesson one: never collaborate with anyone who cannot even properly spell yin-yang), is quite demonstratively evil. Not «bad» as such, since it does feature at least a few really creative musical moves, but «evil», as Britney falls under the heavy press of sexploitation. She does know how to sex up her voice properly — she might even know that better than Madonna, preferring to take lessons from Donna Summer instead, and doing it in different ways: sensual purr on ʽBreathe On Meʼ, breathy hush on ʽEarly Mornin'ʼ, aggressive horniness on ʽToxicʼ, paranoid rutting on ʽOutrageousʼ, post-orgasmic re­covery on ʽTouch Of My Handʼ (what else have we missed here?). But when all of it is taken together, the overall impression is that the girl had been placed under heavy, I mean REAL hea­vy drugs — most of the songs pile on the trance atmosphere so densely that you can almost feel the presence of some invisible manipulative hypnotizer behind the girl's back.

 

ʽBreathe On Meʼ and ʽEarly Mornin'ʼ, in particular, are really creepy — not even minding the ly­rics (which sometimes actually border on questionable irony: "Monogamy is the way to go / Just put your lips together and blow"), they give you what you've always wanted: Britney the sex pup­pet (insert coin and wind up for your pleasure), protected by the illusion of «sexual liberation». All the more creepy, that is, given that no less than the great Moby himself — always happy to play the Joker for an unsuspecting mainstream crowd — masterminds ʽEarly Mornin'ʼ, giving it a spooky, dark, psychedelic twist with a gruff «rotating» bass pulse and swooping electronic strings as we are told that "it don't stop till the early morning / passed out on the couch I'm yawning".

 

The centerpiece of the album has always been, and still is, ʽToxicʼ — musically, the most inven­tive number on here, not only because it manages to fuse Bollywood strings with James Bond-ian surf guitar in a completely natural manner, but also because it gives us three different Britneys (verse, bridge, and chorus so totally different in tone and mood), with «unlawful carnal delight» as the only unifying theme. If the vocals weren't buried so deep under production make-up, one could even say that this is the only song on the record where we could perceive Britney having some genuine fun — but this is not about real people having real fun, after all.

 

By the time we are through with Britney's imaginary sex life and get to the ballads (only two of them this time — power crap on ʽShadowʼ, romantic piano crap on ʽEverytimeʼ), it is hard not to wonder if the famous breakdown, with a complete — at least temporarily — collapse of her per­sonal life in the ensuing three years, was not a direct consequence of the recording of In The Zone, or, rather, the whole shenanigan (recording, touring, calculated need to «uphold the image» etc.); even worse, far be it from me to start moralizing, but I wonder just how many young peo­ple's lives were, in any way, influenced by this stuff.

 

Because, clearly, reasonable adults can take this for what it is — unabashed musical pornography — and put it to the appropriate use. Brit­ney's teen or post-teen audiences are another matter — they could very easily be deluded into taking this for a decisive statement of «sexual liberation», maybe even a «feminist» one (even despite the fact that most of the corporate songwriters and producers behind the raciest moments here were all men), and restructure their life in accordance with the spirit of ʽBreathe On Meʼ, ʽEarly Mornin'ʼ, and, of course, ʽTouch Of My Handʼ, the song that does not justify masturbation, but glorifies it ("Into the unknown, I will be bold, I'm going to places I can be out of control..." and, of course, the completely immortal line "I'm into myself in the most precious way"!!!) — oh yeah, we've gone a long, long way from ʽPictures Of Lilyʼ and even ʽShe Bopʼ.

 

Even if I tend to exaggerate here — after all, it's just a run-of-the-mill dance-pop album, wouldn't it be too much honor to accuse it of raising the sexploitation bar to such hideous heights? — there is no denying the fact, it seems, that ultimately, it is all very cheap. Yes, the involvement of Moby and the inclusion of a few really neat arranging ideas (ʽToxicʼ, first and foremost) does raise the stock value of In The Zone a little bit, but if you take it as a whole — not just the melodies, but the lyrics, the vocal message, the accompanying videos, the racy tour antics — the worst thing about it is that there is nothing here that is truly, genuinely «sexy», it's more like a musical equivalent of a tasteless, boring old peepshow (watch this and tell me if I'm wrong). There is just no getting away from the fact that, no matter how big the size of the image-making army might be, here or in the future, ʽOne More Timeʼ was still the apex of Britney's sexuality — I mean, what fun is there, really, when she's so goddamn legal already?

 

On the other hand, I will admit that, drugged or not drugged, she does at least sound like she is still alive on most of these tracks — if you have some interest in an actual human being on the verge of being replaced with a piece of machinery, In The Zone is your last bet. Everything else, metaphorically speaking, represents the post-lobotomy period. And yes, I'd like to say that I pity the poor girl, but is she really in need of my, or anybody else's, pity? After all, the sales weren't all that bad — three million copies sold in the US alone, and how much coke can one score with those numbers? Even if you have to share with all the ten thousand producers?

 

BLACKOUT (2007)

 

1) Gimme More; 2) Piece Of Me; 3) Radar; 4) Break The Ice; 5) Heaven On Earth; 6) Get Naked (I Got A Plan); 7) Freakshow; 8) Toy Soldier; 9) Hot As Ice; 10) Ooh Ooh Baby; 11) Perfect Lover; 12) Why Should I Be Sad.

 

It is hard not to admit that the «Britney team», no matter how cheap, crass, or cynical it may get (and standards are constantly rising), at least has a sense of crude (exploitative) humor: Blackout is probably the perfect title for a new Britney Spears album in 2007, in the light of — or, should we say, «in the blackout of...»? — everything that we know of Britney's public, and not-so-pub­lic, life over the preceding three years. As the demon that she had foolishly let her mentors unleash on her during the In The Zone sessions predictably entered her offstage life as well, I remember the whole thing almost beginning to take on the shape of a medieval moral tale — sell your soul to you-know-who, and here comes the retribution.

 

Blackout came right in the middle of the turmoil, recorded in the midst of drug-related scandals, broken marriages, trials, psych wards and what-not. For some people, these situations actually act as creative catalysts — great art coming out of great suffering and all that — problem is, since «creati­vity» and «Britney Spears» never belonged in the same sentence, all we could hope for is somebody else getting catalyzed by Britney's ordeal and creating something to match. Clearly, certain such efforts had been made. The results, however, are somewhat puzzling.

 

Blackout is very different from In The Zone. This is a much darker, colder, sterner album — in certain respects, more mature, and definitely more cynical. As a cohesive atmospheric piece, it actually succeeds — where In The Zone was the sound of a wild, no-holds-barred, try-every­thing-once party, Blackout is the hangover effect, and even though the party as such is over, the ef­fect is every bit as disturbing because it seems irreversible. With all the icy, IDM-inspired syn­thesizers, techno beats, and processed vocals, Blackout opens the «robo-phase» of Britney's ca­reer, and, coming straight off the heels of In The Zone, there is no getting rid of the implied fee­ling — this is where too much sexploitation actually gets you. In other words, «one fuck too much» and the senses start shutting down. (Isn't that what happens to porn stars?)

 

On the level of individual songs, Blackout does not work one tiniest bit. Its opening single, ʽGim­me Moreʼ, forever tied to a disastrous «live» MTV performance that introduced the «new-look Britney», is hardly memorable for anything other than the opening "it's Britney, bitch" — and only in the function of «least convincing line in a Britney Spears song ever». The rest is a mess of synthesizer sirens, morose Gregorian chant-inspired vocal harmonies, and atmospheric attempts to turn the message of ʽMe Against The Musicʼ on its head — give it a cynical edge, let the mind show some condescension towards the body — but there is no hook, and dark atmos­phere alone does not suffice, since, after all, this is still dance-oriented electropop for the masses, not a Dead Can Dance record or anything.

 

Then there is the obligatory anti-media rant — ʽPiece Of Meʼ is probably one of the few «sticky» bits on the album, and also one on which the heavy use of Auto-Tune is fully justified: the very idea is that, on this song, the listener who wants a «piece of her» will have to deal with the robo­tic casing, installed by the security system. If it only weren't so predictable, or so hypocritical (don't say they didn't warn you, Brit!), I could almost say that it works: there is something vague­ly Kraftwerk-ian about it, reminding of the good old days of Man Machine. In any case, it clear­ly stands out from the rest of the tracks, be it in a good or a bad way.

 

Because the rest is... well, even compared to the production values of In The Zone, everything is pretty bland. Auto-Tune, electro beats, processed background vocals, no curious or even vaguely interesting overdubs, and an atmosphere of total robo-stupor — depressing and boring at the same time. It is not even quite clear to me how the album could appeal to Britney's established fanbase, what with its near-total lack of the «let's have fun» message. As you slide down to the promises of the track called ʽGet Naked (I Got A Plan)ʼ — a title that should presume some giddy Prince-like bawdiness — you find that, in its essence, the song is more like a dirge than a sex an­them, and that its repetitive message of "get naked, get naked, get naked, take it off, take it off" sounds more like something you'd expect to hear in a doctor's office rather than in a strip club. So much for all the sex symbolism.

 

ʽToy Soldierʼ, masterminded by hip-hop producer Sean Garrett, is probably the closest that this amorphous mass ever gets to a bit of chaotic crazy fun — martial rhythms, burlesque mood, and a «drunk-off-my-head» vocal part that has Britney coming out of her robot shell for once (or, per­haps, more like borrowing a hyperactive emotional chip for three seconds). But even on that song the «fun» in question is not real fun — merely the side effect of a mechanical spring failure in the orgasmatron, with unpredictable results (for once).

 

Overall, the only reason why this is called Blackout and not Meltdown is that the latter excludes the possibility of recovery — here, it was immediately implied in the title that Britney's suffering is deemed temporary. It is also implied that Britney's career as such had nothing to do with it: it's all about the over-demanding fans (ʽGimme Moreʼ), the evil media (ʽPiece Of Meʼ), and that shit­head of a husband (ʽWhy Should I Be Sadʼ, closing the album on a «touchingly» personal note). It is also a nice preventive cop-out in case the album were to become panned — give the lady a break, after all, she clearly isn't in a state to produce her masterpiece. But who are we fooling? As usual, the album has very little to do with Britney herself — and this time around, they did not even bother about raising the enthusiasm bar in the studio: In The Zone might have been state-of-the-art dance-pop when it came out, but Blackout seems to be slacking in that respect. As an attempt to save a bit of face, it isn't that awful — but to say that Britney is «way past her prime» here would be a gross understatement. On the other side, she probably should have been grateful to still have a record contract under the circumstances.

 

CIRCUS (2008)

 

1) Womanizer; 2) Circus; 3) Out From Under; 4) Kill The Lights; 5) Shattered Glass; 6) If U Seek Amy; 7) Unusual You; 8) Blur; 9) Mmm Papi; 10) Mannequin; 11) Lace And Leather; 12) My Baby.

 

This one was recorded and released at a surprisingly fast rate — coming out a little more than a year after Blackout. The hurry is understandable, since that record was produced very much in a daze, and after a series of subsequent collapses and rehabilitations, it was only logical to try and get back in the ring with a fresh start. Again, even the album cover reflects that somehow — the wonders of therapeutic treatment, heavy makeup, and Photoshop combined, we have here a far «fresher» image than on the lost-and-confused Blackout photo. But we do have the album title — and, in fact, the album concept — that still reflects turmoil and media problems, although, truth be told, the Britney team tries to view it with irony.

 

Instead of In The Zone's «sex junkie» and Blackout's «sex on ice» image, Circus toys around with a «sex marionette» approach — Britney as a haughty glamor doll with occasional soul. The arrangements are generally lighter than on Blackout, with less distortion, dark bass, and even fewer «auto-tuned» songs, but what is more important is that Circus, like any circus, strives for more diversity. There are even a couple of syrupy ballads that try to recapture the spirit of «Brit­ney of old» — ʽOut From Underʼ and the cooey ʽMy Babyʼ could have easily fit on her first two albums; the latter, incidentally, is the only song on here credited to Britney without a host of co-writers, which just goes to show that the girl's own «artistry level» has never really advanced beyond the Mickey Mouse demarcation line.

 

Beyond that, there is not only the standard expected electropop (title track, ʽShattered Glassʼ, etc.), but also bits of less techno-crazy, mood-oriented R&B (ʽBlurʼ), bass-heavy funk (ʽLace And Leatherʼ), and straightforward «melodic techno» (ʽUnusual Youʼ). None of it is done all too well — just smooth and professional, as always — but at least the overall effect is that, for the first time in seven years, there seems to be an actual human being somewhere here, behind all the shimmery glitz and all the (still heavily present) robo-antics.

 

Even something really silly, such as ʽMmm Papiʼ, the album's «sex-dolliest» track of all, actually sounds like self-irony in the overall context: with songs like ʽBlurʼ and ʽMannequinʼ covering it from both flanks, lyrics like "with this fast car I can get really far", and teasing-est intonations on the whole record, it is hard to take it straight — and it is the only song here that could be taken straight. Everything else is with a conscious twist; a crude twist, for sure, but there is no doubt that Britney's songwriting team is genuinely trying to lay on a layer of «complexity» on the poor unsuspecting Britney. At the very least, she now has to play the glamor doll and the suffering, exploited soul behind the glamor at the same time.

 

In terms of melody or witty arrangements, however, Circus is not much of an improvement over Blackout. In fact, the arrangements are quite rote throughout — I can only try to imagine how the martial punch of ʽIf U Seek Amyʼ could have sounded in a classic Brit-pop arrangement instead of depending entirely on minimalistic electronic pulp, as if they were on such a tight budget. The chorus part of ʽBlurʼ is successfully creepy ("can't remember what I did last night, maybe I should have given in but I just couldn't fight" sung with a rare authenticity for Britney, stimula­ting  uncomfortable suspicions). The chorus of ʽKill The Lightsʼ is genuinely psychotic (and at least we can hope that somebody took Britney out to see Sunset Boulevard — education rules!). The rest is traditionally rather non-descript.

 

Over all of this looms the shadow of ʽWomanizerʼ, the annoying eardragon that should work much better as a mouth muscle exercise for post-coma patients, but somehow turned into a «clas­sic Britney Spears single» instead. It does not fit in well with the rest of Circus and it does not «ring true» at all — this whole idea of a suddenly «feminist» Britney kicking her Romeo in the guts is like a last-minute attempt to ride the coattails of Pink and Avril Lavigne. On the other hand, it does work as a comical gimmick that is all but impossible to scrape out of your eardrums — after all, the word «womanizer» does have a cool ring to it, and what if it rings 300 times in a row? — and then there was that video with the naked Britney in the sauna... hmm, decent pop song, on second thought.

 

For those actually interested in hearing the album from top to bottom — it does not deserve the honor (nobody in the whole wide world deserves to experience the barbie chimes of ʽMy Babyʼ, at the very least), but it would make sense to hear the bonus tracks on expanded editions: three of them, stacked together, give a good idea of the album's diversity — there is the funny, half-Ma­donna, half-Apples-In-Stereo psycho-techno of ʽRock Me Inʼ, the thoroughly awful, cheap, pri­mitive dance-techno of ʽPhonographyʼ (yes, the lyrics make it obvious that the title was chosen due to phonetic similarity with a different word), and the «Phil Spector Meets The 21st Century (In Jail, While Inferior Crooks Are Running The Show)» electrono-Motown-ish lushness of ʽAm­nesiaʼ. From thoroughly awful to curious, we have it all, making a real circus out of Circus. If only the musical realization of most of these ideas wasn't so bland, I could see this turning into a respectable... nah, into a fun album. But it was, so I couldn't.

 

FEMME FATALE (2011)

 

1) Till The World Ends; 2) Hold It Against Me; 3) Inside Out; 4) I Wanna Go; 5) How I Roll; 6) (Drop Dead) Beau­tiful; 7) Seal It With A Kiss; 8) Big Fat Bass; 9) Trouble For Me; 10) Trip To Your Heart; 11) Gasoline; 12) Crimi­nal.

 

And here comes another change of image — not a radical one, but somewhat appropriately at­tuned to Britney's 30th birthday (yes, it has been that long, hard as it is to believe). The album title is hardly a reference to The Velvet Underground & Nico, but apparently it was decided that Britney's target audience has its own understanding of what a «femme fatale» is supposed to be: if you ask me, the idea of yesterday's Loli-queen Britney Spears as a «femme fatale» is about as ridiculous as the idea of Britney Spears as an intellectual folk-rock queen from the Village, but who am I, for crying out loud? Am I Max Martin? Ke$ha? Lukasz Gotwald? Alexander Kronlund? Mathieu Jomphe? Bon­nie McKee? Jacob Kasher Hindlin? Savan Kotecha? Christian Karlsson? Henrik Jonback? Magnus Lidehäll? Pontus Winnberg? Jeremy or Joshua Coleman? Esther Dean? Benjamin Levin? Henry Walter? Will.i.am? Fraser T. Smith? Heather Bright? Liwi Franc? So­phie Stern? Claude Kelly? Tiffany Amber? All these people know better than me — and they are just the songwriters. For the producers, multiply that by 1.5. So many mouths to feed — Britney could have just as well opened a charity fund or something.

 

Anyway, the point here is to re-cast Britney as the «queen of the modern groove» — somewhat of a slightly less outrageous, slightly more family-entertainment-compatible version of Lady Gaga, with just as much dance energy, but without all the trash pop culture humor and sarcasm. Sex is still being sold a-plenty, too, but this time, from a more «mature» perspective — we are now out of «the zone», fully aware of all the erogenous capacities of the body and ready to teach rather than to learn. A «Femme Fatale», after all, should be way past losing herself in the heavy drug­giness of ʽEarly Morningʼ or the naïve orgy of ʽBreathe On Meʼ. But she is also not supposed to be a post-operational robot à la Blackout, or a confused, vulnerable ex-tramp à la Circus.

 

So, basically, this sounds like a steady, self-assured, in-command set of high-energy electropop dance tunes, loaded with brand new production gimmicks, dubstep influences, and Auto-Tune going for the kill — they use it with more creativity than on Blackout, though, usually to accen­tuate certain bits of the choruses, so that there is no overwhelming «robotic» impression from the singing, only from the musical background (which is expected).

 

As embarrassing as it is to admit it, more than half of the songs here are really catchy — in fact, on a pure song-by-song basis, Femme Fatale might be the most «fun» album in Britney's stash so far. That small army of songwriters and producers assembled for the occasion somehow mana­ged to pull it off in a somewhat less cheap / sleazy / generic way than the previous two records — maybe it's all a matter of hard techno grooving, or echo layering, or whatever, but the idiot hooks on generic dance fodder like ʽTill The World Endsʼ or ʽI Wanna Goʼ are grapply, and it will take all day to get the sticky burr of "I can be your treble (trouble?) baby you can be my bass" out of your system. Silly, manipulative, but it doth work.

 

Actually, if not for the arrangements — which, want it or not, have to follow the conventions of today the same way Madonna's arrangements of her early classics had to follow the conventions of the mid-1980s — if not for the arrangements, I could easily, just like that, see some of these songs handled by the likes of, say, Blondie in the early 1980s. ʽGasolineʼ, for instance, which is near-perfect in terms of vocal form (the verse melody begins kinda flat and stupid, but the chorus is dark, crisp, sexy, and the transition to falsetto adds a nice extra touch). Or the whoa-whoos of ʽSeal It With A Kissʼ. Or the light cooey fun of ʽHow I Rollʼ (with the naughtiness disguised by making the main verse line go "you can be my THUG tonight" in the official lyrics — hey, these songwriting guys are smart enough to know the phonetic proximity of their fricatives).

 

Unlike Circus, the album is almost completely devoid of sentimentality or, God forbid, any deli­berate throwbacks to Britney's ʽDear Diaryʼ-type songs; the only exception is the last song, ʽCri­minalʼ, an acoustic folk ballad (!) with flute (!!) that still rips its verse melody off ABBA's ʽLay All Your Love On Meʼ (!!!). Definitely unusual stuff for Britney, but alas, it does not work — the whole thing, at best, sounds like an unintentional parody on the «stand by your man» genre, and Britney's delivery is as stiff and stuffy here as it is everywhere else. Except that everywhere else it's okay for her to be stiff, because the rest of the album is purely carnal in essence.

 

So I just pretend to myself that Femme Fatale is really just eleven songs of non-stop dancing, and a bonus cut thrown in for sentimental fools who'd spent half their lives dreaming of hearing Britney backed with a pastoral sound. From that point of view, this here image, style, and pack­aging is probably the best deal possible for a «mature» Britney — certainly not one bit worse than Madonna's Confessions On A Dance Floor, as the former teacher and student are now pressing their standards closer to each other from the opposite ends.

 

The best deal isn't much, of course: the synthesizers are sickly, the beats are primitive, the lead singer is «The Return of the Son of Britney Spears and Auto-Tune», the lyrics are uninteresting (if not always atrocious), the guest rap stars are annoying, the sex is artificially staged, the mood is monotonous, and the idea of Britney Spears pushing thirty is a turn-off by itself — predictably, the album sold even less than Circus, which sold less than Blackout, which sold less than In The Zone... you get the tendency, and predictably, her next album will sell even less than that, unless really drastic measures are taken, like a public reve­lation that Britney and Lady Gaga are really the same person.

 

But it is still amusing — and instructive, especially for all the current Loli-queens who have enough intellect to think a few years ahead into their career — that on a pure song-by-song basis, ripped out of historic and cultural context, Britney Spears might have produced her best record (or, rather, «have her best record produced») at a time when her visual image, the one thing that sells best of all in this world of ours, got tattered, withered, and irrelevant. Femme Fatale was criticized heavily for not having enough of Britney «herself» — for getting her totally lost in a crowd of corporate mannequins — and I sort of disagree. First, if «Britney herself» means the Britney of ʽDear Diaryʼ or ʽMy Babyʼ or ʽI'm Not A Girlʼ, that is a definite plus; and second, the crowd of corporate mannequins did such a surprisingly good job that, even if there is not a single songwriting credit of Britney's here anywhere in sight, the «femme fatale» in question must have at least acted as an inspirational coalescing agent. Somehow.

 

BRITNEY JEAN (2013)

 

1) Alien; 2) Work Bitch; 3) Perfume; 4) It Should Be Easy; 5) Tik Tik Boom; 6) Body Ache; 7) Till It's Gone; 8) Passenger; 9) Chillin' With You; 10) Don't Cry; 11) Brightest Morning Star; 12) Hold On Tight; 13) Now That I Found You.

 

Hitting a new image is one thing, but sustaining it on a reasonable level is quite another. With will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas as executive producer, and a small stormtrooper unit of about 50,000 people credited for additional production work, Britney Jean is the (not) long-awaited sequel to Femme Fatale, once again promoting the «Princess of Pop» as reigning ruler of the latest and trendiest in electronic dance groove — even if it means taking cues from K-Pop, which I feel is one of the uncredited influences, or pretending that this is really a «deeply personal» re­cord, aiming for your body and soul at the same time.

 

Which is exactly what makes Britney Jean, ultimately, a draggy disappointment after the harm­less catchy silliness of the previous album. As far as I am concerned, it is impossible to take Britney Spears «seriously», be it fifteen or fifty years into her career (and I shudder to think that the possibility of a 70-year old Britney Spears coming up with another album remains open). The issue of whether she has or does not have real feelings to express does not actually worry me as much as the fact that she is just a bad actor; her only successful role has been that of a sex ma­chine, and this is exactly the role that seems to be missing from Britney Jean.

 

Instead, we get ʽWork Bitchʼ, a relatively generic EDM tune with a message — a message that actually makes sense, considering that we do indeed sometimes forget just how much hard work goes into the success story of a mainstream pop star. The problem is, those techno synth loops and those ridiculous auto-tuned vocals aren't exactly the kind of product that would convince me of the necessity of said hard work. It's such a stupid-sounding groove, and such an expressionless, colorless vocal, that the conversion efficiency looks close to zero: I'd even take Mick Jagger's ʽLet's Workʼ over this one any day as far as the message is concerned, and that was arguably one of the worst songs he'd ever done.

 

The majority of these tunes, however, deal with softer feelings: romance, yearning, loneliness, getting rid of loneliness, jealousy, and whatever else there is in the same line of work — as illus­trated by the second single, the rhythmic power ballad ʽPerfumeʼ that she co-wrote with Austra­lian songwriting hack Sia Furler (who seems to have collaborated with about 99% of «Pop Divas» throughout the 2000s). If the wooden intonations and repetitiveness of the chorus do not get you, maybe the story will — it's like, there's this guy, and Britney's got a crush on him, and there's this other chick, and she's kinda jealous, and she wants her to know she's got the right to this guy without telling it in her face, so she's gonna smear the guy in her perfume to «mark my territory», and we never get to know how it ends, but ain't that a thrill? (Spoiler: the guy gets killed, dismembered, buried in the woods, and his ghost returns from the grave to drive Britney into an asylum... oh wait, that's the officially unreleased Alice Cooper/Rob Zombie mix).

 

Neither the singles nor any other track on here deserves serious comment, I think. There are occasional vocal and instrumental hooks, with Autotune and mind-bogglingly simplistic synth loops accounting for most of them, but it all sounds emotionally fake ("I'm blind from the tears that fall like rain" — yeah, right; are those the same tears that are responsible for Autotune's «dis­ruption» of the vocals?), verbally inane ("I laughed so much that I cried / I danced so much till I was tired" — don't they even try to find decent rhymes any more?), and sonically disappointing (ʽTik Tik Boomʼ could have at least used some realistic ticking and booming effects, but instead it's just the same old creaky synth tones and a robotic vocal).

 

The sequencing is also a drag, as they put a whole bunch of utmostly lethargic sentimental bal­lads at the end of the album — and in the finale, which is supposedly supposed to wrap things up in one big final ball of heavenly joy (ʽNow That I Found Youʼ), do you know how they convey this joy? That keyboard riff would have made Mother Goose turn over in her goosey grave, although maybe some Teletubbies fans would have found it suitable.

 

Cutting a needlessly long story short, Britney Jean is further proof that (a) it is impossible for Britney Spears to sustain a credible new image for more than one record in a row, before it is ruined with futile attempts to add «soul» to it at the expense of groove quality; (b) it is impossible for Britney Spears to convince us that she is an actual human being, at least not through her mu­sic; (c) the majority of today's corporate songwriters and producers should go back to their ploughs, looms, and cowsheds, in order to make the world a better place; (d) no matter what your real birth­name is, you do not go generating associations with classic era Michael Jackson by means of your album titles — I mean, do you really need any extra reasons for looking stupid, when there's already more than enough for a decisive thumbs down here?

GLORY (2016)

 

1) Invitation; 2) Make Me...; 3) Private Show; 4) Man On The Moon; 5) Just Luv Me; 6) Clumsy; 7) Do You Wanna Come Over?; 8) Slumber Party; 9) Just Like Me; 10) Love Me Down; 11) Hard To Forget Ya; 12) What You Need; 13*) Better; 14*) Change Your Mind (No Seas Cortés); 15*) Liar; 16*) If I'm Dancing; 17*) Coupure Electrique.

 

Three times have I sat through this record, and three times have I felt a strong pulling to take a shower immediately afterwards, because sitting out there in a pool of even your own figurative vomit is quite a schizophrenic feeling. But what could I do? Britney Jean "Princess Of Pop" Spears' Glory, her ninth overall studio LP, is not simply the worst record of her career so far — it is, quite literally, one of the worst albums I have intentionally chosen to sit through in the past... ah, heck, ever. And I am not saying that it is unique in its badness: it is simply part of a world where I very, very rarely venture. It may be useful to witness that world occasionally — like it may be instructive for anyone dwelling in a well-to-do quarter of the big city to take an occasio­nal detour to the slums, just to make sure that they actually exist — but then again, even a slum may have something noble and righteous about it, since poverty is not a crime. Listening to Glory, on the other hand, is more like taking a detour into the cheapest, trashiest whorehouse there is, where getting hooked up on heroin and catching a couple VDs is more like an obligatory course of action than an unfortunate side effect.

 

Where do I even begin? Well, maybe just to get this out of the way, this is not the most boring or even the most musically generic set of electropop tunes released in the history of humanity. Whatever the odds, Britney Spears still has not been stripped of the «Princess of Pop» label by the music industry, and the music industry at least has the good sense to hire taboons of corporate songwriters who can supply their victim with a decent enough amount of earworms. You take the required three listens and, sure enough, you glance back at the song titles and you can remember how many of them go, along with some of the beats. Nor could you objectively accuse the arran­gers and producers of not doing anything with the dance grooves once they've been established: what separates high-class stinky trash from low-class stinky trash is that the former has had money, time, energy, creativity and sometimes even a spoonful of talent invested in it. (The number of special effects applied to Britney's vocals alone deserves an objective mention).

 

The (very relative) saving grace of Femme Fatale was that these earworms happened to be amplified by a general «high-energy» approach to the project. Many of the songs had an anthemic feel to them — fast, loud, «empowered», and this helped overlook their essential fakeness and concentrate on their hooks. With Glory, the whole thing is different: it has more of a pseudo-chamber feel, maybe even of a «pseudo-bedroom» feel, if you know what I mean, and instead of giving us Britney Spears as an unstoppable tornado of externalized sexuality, it is more of a ʽPri­vate Showʼ, to use one of the titles as an appropriate metaphor. This is where you are invited to take a little bo-peep. Just send them kids off to school, and we'll get to work right away.

 

In the process, the 34-year old Princess of Pop will first send you out an ʽInvitationʼ, politely inquiring ʽDo You Wanna Come Over?ʼ for a ʽSlumber Partyʼ, as she wants to "take it back to my room" because she "just wants you to make me move... back and forth, like this was all ten­nis" (ʽMove Meʼ). The action gradually intensifies — "slide down my pole, watch me spin it and twerk it" (ʽPrivate Showʼ, with the additional crime of rhyming "satisfy" with "apple pie"); "I love how you go down, head first and style it out" (ʽClumsyʼ — no, in case you're worried, it's ultimately about getting rather than not getting sexual satisfaction); and by the end, we under­stand that the end is only a technical break, because "One time just ain't enough, won't let this fade / I got that good, good stuff you can't erase" (ʽWhat You Needʼ — but I sort of thought it was, you know, time that was supposed to be erasing the good, good stuff? Or is she trying to tell us that her partner is intentionally trying to wear her out? Whatever. I'm confused now... blame it all on lack of sexual education in Soviet school, I guess).

 

Okay, so it's just the words, and if we simply stay on that level, it would be only too natural to accuse the reviewer of sexism — so what's fine and good for a male band like AC/DC, is shame­ful for a female performer? Not at all. The difference is that the important thing for AC/DC is their rock and roll drive, which, all by itself, is (a) genuine and (b) inoffensive. For Glory, the important thing is to give us an artist who, all things considered, ultimately sounds like a blowup doll equipped with a Siri-like component. I mean, listen to ʽPrivate Showʼ or ʽWhat You Needʼ and tell me if this pitch even sounds as if it were produced by a human being — the vocoding effects squeeze the last drops of humanity out of the woman, so much so that I wouldn't want to be caught dead while listening to even ten seconds of either. (What makes it ten times as offen­sive is, I think, the intentional similarity of the basic stop-and-start pattern of ʽWhat You Needʼ to Jimi Hen­drix's ʽFireʼ — if they really want to drop us a hint that Glory is what should pass for the modern equivalent of fiery rock'n'roll, they should rather just all drop dead instead). There's not even a drop of humor or irony anywhere in sight to offer salvation (not that Britney Spears has ever been capable of a drop of intelligent humor or irony).

 

When you come to think of it, did they really have to go down all the way like this? I mean, even in 2016 there must be ways for a 34-year old female artist to express her sexuality without getting totally reduced to that sexuality. Heck, even Madonna knows how to do better. What could be somewhat excusable at the time of In The Zone (at least on ʽToxicʼ she really sounded like she was having honest fun with it), under the condition that the scope would eventually expand, now sounds — please excuse me for the extra harshness, but somebody has got to do it — like the symbolic convulsions of an aging whore, trying to make herself more attractive to customers with extra layers of makeup and provocative clothing. And it's not even a matter of Britney's actual age (I mean, 34 years is nothing these days — the peak of sexuality for some!), it's a matter of how it all sounds and feels, with all these plastic electronic overdubs, ridiculous vocals, trashy lyrics, and, above all, the complete and total and utter reduction of all human qualities to one big bag of sexual urges. If this is really, in her own words, "the best thing I've done in a long time", wouldn't it be more honest to simply switch to pornography?

 

But forget about Britney herself, whose intellectual brightness was never legendary in the first place; and forget about several dozen highway robbers and agents of Satan masking as «produ­cers», «writers», and even «musicians» on this insult to humanity. The most awful thing, of course, are the «critics» who, according to Wikipedia, all gave «generally positive reviews» of the album. Almost nobody even began to look at the obvious — perhaps out of fear of being accused of sexism? — and almost everybody concentrated on the superficial aspects, faintly praising the (undeniable, but still cringeworthy) pop hooks and even, God help us, some of these vocals. It is not the dismal, trashy quality of the album that makes me so worried — it is the fact that it still seems to attract mainstream media attention in a respectful frame. If this is what our liberal framework has come up to — a complete robo-objectification of the woman under the false guise of «sexual empowerment» — then I must say that even conservatively grabbing women by the pussy seems like an innocent prank in comparison. A highly bleargh-style thumbs down here, and a hearty recommendation to retire — if the last ten years of Britney's career were all leading up to this, she should have been sent back to Mississippi a long, long time ago, because, in the immortal words of Timmy Shaw, "Girl that's where you belong — since you've been gone to the big city, girl you started doing wrong".

 

BROADCAST

THE NOISE MADE BY PEOPLE (2000)

 

1) Long Was The Year; 2) Unchanging Window; 3) Minus One; 4) Come On Let's Go; 5) Echo's Answer; 6) Tower Of Our Tuning; 7) Papercuts; 8) You Can Fall; 9) Look Outside; 10) Until Then; 11) City In Progress; 12) Dead The Long Year.

 

«Barrel-organ-pop» is not an actual term, but the more we see that old-time dream-pop fused with electronics, the more pressing the need for such a term becomes. Stereolab may be named as their immediate predecessors and mentors, and Beach House and many other bands may be striving for similar emotional effects, but, really, there are few bands around that deserve to illustrate that category better than Birmingham's Broadcast, who spent the first five years of their lives devising and honing that sound, and then rolled out this debut album which, arguably, they never sur­passed — not in terms of psychological impact, at least.

 

The Noise Made By People is a good title, but a bit self-deprecating: while a certain amount of «ornamental noise» is indeed present throughout, all the compositions respect melody and are completely «accessible», provided you are not in the specific mood for a dance album or some­thing (or, at least, not a fast, energetic dance album — slow, cool-tempered waltzing would be quite appropriate for much of this stuff). The «noise» itself usually comes in the form of various kaleidoscopic effects which rarely detract from the repetitive, but entrancing melodies — on the contrary, considering how Christmas-y the general atmosphere is, they just add tinsel flavor.

 

Most of the ingredients of the music are recognizable, but the overall synthesis is quite idiosyn­cratic. The idea of creating lightly psychedelic pop with (slightly antiquated) electronics may have been borrowed from The United States of America, as is sometimes noted, and then there are further analogies with just about every technology-obsessed dream-pop band from the Coc­teau Twins to Stereolab. On the other hand, lead singer Trish Keenan belongs to the cohort of chilly-voiced femmes mysterieuses, half-Snow Queen, half-Snow White, as Renaissance's Annie Haslam (to whom she bears a particularly striking resemblance every time she reaches for those high notes) or even Karen Carpenter (she doesn't have Karen's lower range, so the vocals sound more generally «air-conditioned», but she has the same introspective / melancholy ring) — and she also seems to have a serious taste for Sixties' vocal jazz fairies like Astrud Gilberto, going for that «deeply human, but utterly impenetrable» aura that used to mesmerize people back when it was so trendy to want to be mesmerized by the little strange wonders of the world.

 

You put it all together — the simple, repetitive melodies, usually formed by drums-and-bass pat­terns with prolonged, trance-oriented keyboard notes laid on top; the additional electronic and, sometimes, electric guitar effects; and those gorgeously cold «don't touch me, I'm spell-genera­ting here!» vocals — and you get yourself one of the finest atmospheric landscapes of the 2000s. In particular, it is a near-perfect experience for lonely wintery evenings, what with its bringing out all the potential beauty of «cold» and «dark» without slipping into banalities and trivialities and without concentrating on the negative sides of it all. You hate the cold season? Let Broad­cast warm it up for you. Never mind that the album was released at the end of March — it's a Decem­berist record if there ever was one.

 

If there is a problem, it's that everything basically sounds the same. ʽLong Was The Yearʼ opens the album on a «sterner» mood, with some stiff, quasi-Teutonic rhythmics and a darker, heavier vocal color from Trish. ʽUnchanging Windowʼ follows it up with a slightly more upbeat tempo, chirpier vocals and a more playful attitude (all strictly within the limits of good old British decen­cy, mind you). Once you are acquainted with these two sub-paradigms, everything else is mostly just further variations on them — including several completely instrumental tunes (the little «toy snowstorm» of ʽMinus Oneʼ is playful, while ʽTower Of Our Tuningʼ and ʽDead The Long Yearʼ are decidedly darker in spirit, though still nowhere near «dangerously dark»).

 

This, as well as the overtly «static» nature of most of the songs, which almost always end exactly the same way as they began, is an obviously self-imposed limitation — it carves out a stylistic niche for the band, but it also traps them in that niche (a feeling not wholly unfamiliar to connais­seurs of the indie market), and a side effect of that trapping is that I cannot discuss the individual songs, unless I really want to get into the peculiarities of all the chimes, bells, and whistles acti­vated in the recording process, or overanalyze the «moods-within-the-moods» reflected in Kee­nan's singing here and there. All I can say is that the melodies are different, and that there is plenty of tiny little nuances that come and go. Well, maybe some of the tunes are a bit jazzier than others — ʽCome On Let's Goʼ, or the waltzing ʽPapercutsʼ, for instance, both of which show that the generally immobile «friendly Snow Queen» can condescend to wiggling it up a bit, just to prove that she does consist of organic compounds. And then again, some are a bit more frozen than others — ʽUntil Thenʼ, for instance, where all the electronics sounds as if they were freshly blown out of a stalagmite or something.

 

On the positive side, the evenness of the material means that all the songs are about equally good, no particular low- or highlights — although some of the instrumentals are guilty of patience-try­ing, but even here it is understandable: «static musical landscapes» are supposed to be like that (for instance, the «who's gonna go and finally close that squeaky door?» bit at the end of ʽDead The Long Yearʼ). The ambitions of The Noise Made By People are lightweight and limited, but within those limits, they are perfectly adequate, and that guarantees a convinced thumbs up — for an album that is not so much «awesome» as it is «touchingly charming», and you know there are actually certain times in life when «touchingly charming» is needed more than «awesome».

 

HAHA SOUND (2003)

 

1) Colour Me In; 2) Pendulum; 3) Before We Begin; 4) Valerie; 5) Man Is Not A Bird; 6) Minim; 7) Lunch Hour Pops; 8) Black Umbrellas; 9) Ominous Cloud; 10) Distorsion; 11) Oh How I Miss You; 12) The Little Bell; 13) Win­ter Now; 14) Hawk.

 

This follow-up to The Noise Made By People is even more full of helium than its predecessor. The major difference is that the snow has melted away, and this, now, is spring come to replace winter, although everything still stays firmly within the confines of the same old magical barrel organ (and winter does come back at the end of the album, at least nominally). Contrary to the title, there are no actual «ha ha's» anywhere in sight — Broadcast do not have a sense of humor, at least, not an «earthly» one — but if the idea is simply to conjure an as­sociation with something lightweight and childishly innocent, that's okay.

 

The very first song, actually, is a kiddie song — a tune that could, with just a little bit of tweaking, easily fit on Sesame Street or the like: "I am grey, still on the page / Oh colour me in / Just an outline, sketchy but fine / Oh colour me in". The psychedelic electronic waltz that unfurls in the background complements the song's basic idea just fine — in fact, the song almost ends up intru­ding into «corny» territory, as Trish Keenan now metamorphoses into a Dusty Springfield for her generation. However, the complex overdubs still contain plenty of dissonance to satisfy both the introvert intellectual child and the grown-up indie hipster kid (not that there's a huge amount of difference between the two).

 

ʽPendulumʼ was already previously released on a short EP of the same name, which makes it the odd one out on the record — driven by a loud, bashing drum pattern instead of the usually soft percussion, and a rather cold synthesizer rhythm track that suggests a bit of dark mystique. But it is the album's equivalent of an ʽAmazing Journeyʼ — guiding the listener through a somewhat uncomfortable interdimensional corridor so that he or she may then revel freely in the multi­coloured pastures and forests of the remaining twelve tracks.

 

And this is where the problem lies: paradise, even one of a cool intellectual design, is actually a boring place to be. The Noise Made By People was fairly monotonous already, but not to this extent: now that Keenan has sacrificed most of the variety in her singing for a single-purpose «ethereal» delivery (hushy, echoey, mid-range, little to no modulation at all), listening to this stuff is like wandering through an endless art gallery of XVIIth century Italian painters — every­thing done in bright, professional, masterful, spiritual ways, but everything completely interchan­geable, dissuading you to focus on anything in particular.

 

However, on second thought, this is not really a «problem» as such. This fairy-tale world that Broadcast have constructed is effective and believable, even though it is so intentionally «fluffy» and «sugary», with only that slight melancholic ring in Keenan's voice to suggest that there may be a darker undercurrent to their «Land of Long-Lasting La-La». So if we have no individual me­mories of what it was that made ʽMan Is Not A Birdʼ fundamentally different from ʽOminous Cloudʼ, why should it matter? (I think the latter was in 3/4 tempo while the former was in 4/4, but that's about it, and anyway I might be wrong...).

 

This is mood music, to be played on a warm spring night or, perhaps, to set the mood of a warm spring night on a cold winter night. Or under a different set of circumstances, whatever. The textures are very pretty. A more serious analysis also reveals that, «under the covers», the band is conducting some experimental research — many of the tracks, while starting out quite conven­tionally, eventually resolve themselves as sonic explorations (for instance, the bizarre electronic drum solo at the end of ʽMan Is Not A Birdʼ, or the trance-inducing repetitive acoustic guitar pat­tern of ʽValerieʼ, eventually fusing with all the electronics in a thin wall of noise).

 

I do want to raise one complaint — there is a bit too much waltzing going on here. Dancing out with the moonlit knight, or with candlewick fairies, or with The Phantom of The Analog Synth is all fine and dandy, but why it so necessarily has to be done in the spirit of Johann Strauss Jr., is not as easy to understand. A minuet, anybody? An old reel? A tango? If they were waltzing all day long and into the night in my paradise, I'd lead a counter-cultural revolution.

 

Thumbs up, overall, but in terms of general trajectory, this is a slight letdown after the debut — too much attention on texture, not enough attention on composing, what with all the generic tem­pos and vocal melodies that, much too often, are reminiscent of conventional lullabies or nursery rhymes. But they most probably were not going for anything other than a specific atmosphere here, and they got that atmosphere all right.

 

TENDER BUTTONS (2005)

 

1) I Found The F.; 2) Black Cat; 3) Tender Buttons; 4) America's Boy; 5) Tears In The Typing Pool; 6) Corporeal; 7) Bit 35; 8) Arc Of A Journey; 9) Michael A Grammar; 10) Subject To The Ladder; 11) Minus 3; 12) Goodbye Girls; 13) You And Me In Time; 14) I Found The End.

 

By 2005, Broadcast were basically a duo, narrowed down to just Trish Keenan and James Cargill (if there is somebody else assisting them here, you won't be learning this from the credits list) — the instrumental ʽMinus 3ʼ is a sarcastic, but steadfast title implying that the spirit will still go on, no matter what. The most unpleasant consequence of all this desertion is that the «band» no lon­ger has a real drummer, and is forced to resort to «pssht-pssht» drum machines — I say «is for­ced to» in the faint hope that this was, indeed, a decision they reached due to pressing circumstances, and not to the newly widespread indie-kid love for those kinky Eighties' sounds (which were once so popular because they were so trendily futuristic, and now are regaining in popularity because they are so trendily retro).

 

But we can all probably tolerate some drum machines if they are only an unfortunate side effect on an album as magnificent as Tender Buttons — easily Broadcast's one and only masterpiece, that one record on which they manage to transgress their own formula and deliver something that is more than just «mood music». Through a creative mistake, HaHa Sound was nearly drowned in tinsel — its ear-candy may have been the epitome of «prettiness», but you really cannot go all the way with just «pretty». In contrast, Tender Buttons does everything it should be doing — it brings back both the hooks and the glaciality of Noise Made By People, and more than that: the hooks are polished and perfected, and the glaciality is somehow combined with the cutesiness of HaHa Sound in a synthesis that is now fully their own, belonging to nobody else.

 

Where ʽColour Me Inʼ introduced the vibe of HaHa Sound as a «ceremoniously jovial» one, here, ʽI Found The Fʼ spells trouble from the beginning — like a melodic folk dirge, with Trish's sad vocals riding on the twin support of a jangly electric guitar and an electronic harpsichord. The vo­cal melody, with its "bridge adjusting to the water, water, water, water..." twist, is unforgettable, and the modest arrangement is perfectly attuned to it. The lyrics are irrelevant (although the line "in all the logic I was lost" is important), like most psychedelic lyrics, but the vocal tones aren't — now that they have slightly gained in darkness and ominousness, Trish Keenan produces a far more hypnotic effect than when asking you to colour her in.

 

The formula is then immediately repeated on ʽThe Black Catʼ, which is where you understand that most of the album is going to carry on the same way: a psychedelic guitar riff, a futuristic synth loop, and that oddly reserved, superficially «colorless», entrancingly «matured» vocal on top. But does it really make the record monotonous? No — there is enough variety in the textures to ensure that you do notice the breaks between songs. On ʽBlack Catʼ, for instance, the instru­ments are notably fuzzier — burrowing deeper into your subconscious as Trish merges the black-cat cliché with the Cheshire cat image. "The black cat, the black cat, curiouser and curiouser", as the synths, guitars, and even these goddamn drum machines spiral deeper and deeper into your head — and the way she sings "awkwardness happening to someone... you love" is nothing short of genius. Okay, one genius, passing through. Here today, gone tomorrow. Still fabulous.

 

The title track is a drone where, apart from the main bluesy melody that they might as well have learned by listening to T. Rex's ʽGet It Onʼ or an AC/DC album, there are also spontaneous ele­ments of raga floating in and out of focus — so that, in the end, it is more reminiscent of early Velvet Underground, with Trish pulling a Nico (stern and impenetrable as always, but shorn of the occasionally annoying Teutonic haughtiness). Due to relative lack of vocal hooks, it is not as memorable or subtly overwhelming as ʽBlack Catʼ, but it shifts the mood once again — no sissi­ness, strictly business — workmanlike psychedelia for «real men», so to speak.

 

This is the way it goes on until the very end — there is no need to describe every song in detail, because eventually they run out of «new moods» (but never of «new hooks»), yet it would take relatively little effort to do so, considering how meaningful and «true-ringing» most of the melo­dies are. Even on the album's most lyrically crude number — ʽAmerica's Boyʼ, an «ironic» com­ment on US foreign policies that over-exploits clichés like "quaker toil and texan oil", "gun me down with yankee power", "cowboy corn and bugle horn", etc.

 

Other favorites include ʽCorporealʼ, driven by an almost rockabilly guitar line and a chorus that, be it captured in another age and in another world, would have been gross ("do that to me, do that to my anatomy" — I mean, really!), but is only used here to convey some world-weary melan­cholia mixed in with a bit of tenderness; ʽMichael A Grammarʼ, which sounds as if the enchan­ted / enchanting little girl of HaHa Sound has been replaced by her stern, but responsible mother, with all the magic remaining in place; and ʽSubject To The Ladderʼ, jogging on a one chord rhythm pattern and looking like the soundtrack to some weird druidic ritual.

 

As usual, the basic tracks, upon completion, are further decorated with electronic sawdust — in a «come-what-may», Sgt. Pepper-ish manner; not much actually comes, but not much goes, either, and the noisy effects may actually be doing the band a good service — without them, the overall sound would have been too thin, what with only two people left to man the controls. As it is, there is a difference between the occasional «quiet ballad» (ʽTears In The Typing Poolʼ, where Trish's only companions are a simple acoustic guitar pattern and something that sounds like a ʽStrawberry Fields Foreverʼ-style-tuned Mellotron — not breathtakingly, but beautiful) and the «pop rockers», not to mention the «experiments» — the codas to some of the tracks still preserve the legacy of HaHa Sound, guiding you out with jarring bursts of noise because, well, even Broadcast remember that «music» should not be restricted to «melody» and «harmony», no mat­ter how much your spirit is drawn towards soothing psychedelic pop.

 

In general, Tender Buttons got a slightly less admiring welcome than its two predecessors — HaHa Sound usually scores higher on the average critical rating meter — which probably has to do with the drum machines and the «thinner» sound: instead of an ocean, critics found themselves in front of a small sonic brook. But as far as my ear tells me, now that they no longer hide behind a huge wall of overdubs, and follow a well-pronounced «less is more» policy, the songs get bet­ter, and the music becomes more meaningful. It's all too bad that the two of them could not bring themselves to completing at least one more «proper» album — before it was too late. Hopefully, this one at least will stay with us for a long time. Totally delighted thumbs up here.

 

BROADCAST & THE FOCUS GROUP INVESTIGATE WITCH CULTS OF THE RADIO AGE (2009)

 

1) Intro / Magnetic Tales; 2) The Be Colony; 3) How Do You Get Along Sir?; 4) Will You Read Me; 5) Reception / Group Therapy; 6) A Quiet Moment; 7) I See, So I See So; 8) You Must Wake; 9) One Million Years Ago; 10) A Seancing Song; 11) Mr Beard, You Chatterbox; 12) Drug Party; 13) Libra, The Mirror's Minor Self; 14) Love's Long Listen-In; 15) We Are After All Here; 16) A Medium's High; 17) Ritual / Looking In; 18) Make My Sleep His Song; 19) Royal Chant; 20) What I Saw; 21) Let It Begin / Oh Joy; 22) Round And Round And Round; 23) The Be Colony / Dashing Home / What On Earth Took You?.

 

«The Focus Group» is a glossy moniker concealing the identity of one Julian House, a graphic designer best unknown for painting album sleeves for Stereolab, Oasis, and, yes, Broadcast them­selves. In between visual feasts, he is also a big fan of library music, and «The Focus Group» is his way of awakening strange, mystical, previously unencountered and unexplored emotions and desires within... oh, never mind. He is doing sound collages.

 

This first, and last, musical collaboration between House and Broadcast is one of those ʽRevo­lution-number-ninishʼ records that splits audiences into one-star and five-star camps, depending on whichever neuron net brain configuration it comes in contact with. In other words, if you are the «neo-sensitive» kind of person, crying your heart out at the latest MoMA installations, these forty eight minutes may turn into a Land of Oz trip. But if you have stricter rules about opening your soul to whatever new combinations of sound waves roll along, the experience will be frust­rating. It certainly was for me — feeling as if I were witnessing a good friend forcefully held with his head below the muck's surface, only occasionally coming up for fresh air. And yes, I am fully aware that nobody here was actually forced, but it does sound like it.

 

At its best, the album is typical Broadcast fare, more in the vein of HaHa Sound than Tender But­tons — ʽThe Be Colonyʼ is particularly salvageable, being both one of the first and one of the longest tracks on the album, a fake-teaser for the non-things to come; and every now and then, some beautiful Trish vocal launches into a midnight fairy dance (ʽI See, So I See Soʼ), a cute counting rhyme (ʽWhat I Sawʼ) or a magical lul­laby (ʽLibraʼ; the appropriately titled ʽMake My Sleep His Songʼ). When extracted, dusted off, and accurately re-spliced, they all make up for a tender, fragile, sympathetic, if already quite predictable EP, particularly valuable for hosting the last scraps of Keenan-era Broadcast material.

 

But these little gems are frustratingly rare incrustations in an overall sea of sound, concocted un­der the supervision of House, that, to me, sounds befuddling and confusing without being proper­ly evocative. The chimes, bells, whistles, ringing power chords, brain-melting fuzz, crashing cym­bals and haunted vocal overdubs are all in the psychedelic ballpark — ʽRitualʼ sounds not unlike the random wild experimental bit on Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Axis: Bold As Love — but really, that ballpark closed ages ago, and you don't just reopen it with a set of equally randomly assembled collages. At least The Animal Collective, who engage in similar activities, tend to look towards the future somewhat, but this stuff has an explicit nostalgic scent to it, and nostalgizing about free-form tape-splicing seems rather silly, particularly when it borders on al­most religious fetishism.

 

Cutting it short, I refuse to take this stuff seriously. The regular psychedelic musical box of Broad­cast is one thing, but this here is a broken, or, rather, intentionally disassembled musical box where they subject you to all the technical aspects of the various forms of cog-grinding and spring-ringing and bell-clanging — interesting enough for a technician, perhaps, but tremendous­ly boring for everyone else. Even if there are a few useful musical ideas here, the average one-to-two minute length of the tracks prevents them from being explored or even just fixated in the listener's brain anyway. (Granted, since most of these ideas are quite useless, the short length usually saves rather than kills, but listening to brief flickering quanta of sonic silliness is only marginally better than listening to lengthy torturous tapestries of sonic silliness).

 

And this whole stuff is so retrogradishly passé anyway — they might as well have put a Jackson Pollock painting on the album sleeve. Thumbs down, although not before the few good examples of actual Broadcast songs have been carefully removed — the rest belongs in the trash heap, as far as I'm concerned.

 

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO OST (2013)

 

1) A Breeze Through The Burford Spur; 2) The Equestrian Vortex; 3) Beautiful Hair; 4) Malleus Maleficarum; 5) Mark Of The Devil; 6) Confession Modulation; 7) Monica’s Fall; 8) Teresa’s Song (Sorrow); 9) The North Downs Dimension; 10) Collatina Is Coming; 11) Such Tender Things; 12) Teresa, Lark Of Ascension; 13) Monica’s Burial (Under The Junipers); 14) Found Scalded, Found Drowned; 15) Monica (Her Parents Have Been Informed); 16) The Fifth Claw; 17) Saducismus Triumphatus; 18) The Gallops; 19) They’re Here, They’re Under Us; 20) Collatina, Mark Of Damnation; 21) Treatise; 22) A Goblin; 23) The Equestrian Library; 24) The Serpent’s Semen; 25)Burnt At The Stake; 26) All Chiffchaffs; 27) The Curfew After The Massacre; 28) Poultry In Mind; 29) The Sacred Marriage; 30) Valeria’s Burial (Under The Fort); 31) Edda’s Burial (Under The Clumps); 32) The Game’s Up; 33) It Must’ve Been The Magpies; 34) The Dormitory Window; 35) Anima Di Cristo; 36) His World Is My Shed; 37) Collatina’s Folly; 38) Here Comes The Sabbath, There Goes The Cross; 39) Our Darkest Sabbath.

 

Trish Keenan's death from pneumonia at the odd age of 42 (way too late to join the «27 Club» — not that there would be any reason in the first place — way too early from every other possible point of view) would seem like a sufficient reason for James Cargill, as the sole remaining mem­ber, to retire the Broadcast brand. However, he is not in a visible hurry to do that: like the remai­ning Doors members after Morrison's passing, his chances at future notoriety without a charisma­tic frontperson are rather feeble.

 

Besides, the old vaults have not been completely emptied yet. First and foremost comes this soundtrack, on which the Broadcast duo had already begun working prior to Keenan's sickness and death — although Trish's vocals are only present on one of the tracks (ʽTeresa, Lark Of As­censionʼ), floating somewhere out there in the aether without actual words. The soundtrack is for some obscure, and generally poorly rated, arthouse movie by British director Peter Strickland, and has the odd distinction — odd even for a soundtrack — of containing more separate tracks than the actual time of its duration (39 tracks in 37.5 minutes, almost a personal record in my col­lection unless we're talking Napalm Death or something). And by «odd», I don't exactly mean «beneficial» — the overall effect is irritating rather than stunning.

 

Normally, Broadcast with their moody, repetitive organ-grinder panoramas would be an ideal band for some particular types of soundtracks — for movies like Scorsese's Hugo, for instance (if anything, they'd definitely beat Howard Shore). However, Berberian Sound Studio is simply not that kind of movie: it is a meta-film focused on the psychological problems of a foley artist en­gaged in creating sound effects for an Italian horror movie, or something like that — simply not the kind of topic that would be particularly suitable for a Broadcast score, so I'm fairly sure they just did it for the money (or maybe for food, since it is hard to imagine any significant revenue from this sort of movie).

 

Furthermore, although I have not seen the movie, nor do I plan to, it actually seems that the sound­track gives a highly distorted perspective of it. Mixed in with the many melodic and ambi­ent fragments are snippets of dialog that mostly stem from the «movie within the movie» — some generic Omen-style Satanist crap consisting of horrified whispers, shit-scared prayers, possessed babbling, hysterical screaming, the works — and the idea you get is that Broadcast, for no good reason whatsoever, simply produced a score for some trashy C-level movie, when, if I get this right, within the actual movie the «trashy C-level movie» only serves as a background setting for the real «drama», none of which translates understandably well onto the soundtrack.

 

Which brings me to the obvious constatation: it would have been much better if all the silly Ita­lian dialog ("Malleus maleficarum! what is it?", etc.) were scrapped, and the remaining voids were filled in by longer, fuller, more satisfying versions of the instrumental tracks — most of which barely exceed one minute in length, fleeing the listener's attention as if too modest to sur­mise that any of them really deserved it. Well, personally, I can't even tell. ʽLark Of Ascensionʼ is a pretty enough piece of «psychedelic church music» (think Catholic mass run through several successive waves of reverb), and ʽOur Darkest Sabbathʼ, closing the album, is a curious mix of the religious and the pastoral, what with the «church organ» and the «woodwind» themes inter­laced with each other so tightly. Both of these run over three minutes, which allows the dedica­tion of at least one phrase to each.

 

Everything else is in the same vein — medieval organ patterns and somber recorders / flutes domi­nate the scene in nine cases out of ten, which is not really what «genuine Broadcast» is all about, but is still done well enough to matter if any of these themes were given a chance to unfurl. As it is, you are basically looking at a large series of barely begun sketches, interrupted, every now and then, with stuff that did not need to be there (worst of the lot is ʽA Goblinʼ, which sounds more like a lame parody on a goblin than an actual goblin — of course, that is the way it was intended to be in the movie, but how are we to guess?).

 

If you adjust your antennae long enough, there is always a chance of transforming these 37 mi­nutes into a personalized trip, under the pretext of «Broadcast and Satanism — a once-in-a-life­time combo!». But as far as I'm concerned, some potential combos are best left alone, and this one, at least the way it has been molded into an album release, is a pointless oddity, particularly disappointing in its adding nothing to Keenan's legacy. Thumbs down.

 

ADDENDA:

 

WORK AND NON-WORK (1997)

 

1) Accidentals; 2) The Book Lovers; 3) Message From Home; 4) Phantom; 5) We've Got Time; 6) Living Room; 7) According To No Plan; 8) The World Backwards; 9) Lights Out.

 

Officially released as early as 1997, this could be qualified as Broadcast's first LP, although in re­a­lity it was just a collection of several singles that the band originally made for several small la­bels (Wurlitzer Jukebox and Duophonic). Warp Records, which became their home in 1997 and stayed that way to the very end, was kind enough to acquire the rights and flesh out a nine-song mini-LP that lasted them all the way to their proper debut, but, of course, it still tends to fall through the cracks a bit.

 

From a historical perspective, the songs show that the basic conception of the band was all ready and boiling as early as 1996, when ʽAccidentalsʼ, in all of its lo-fi roughness and still in some debt to trip-hoppiness, introduced them to the world. Trance-inducing psychedelic roundabouts, Keenan's melancholic-somnambulist lulling voice, echoes of The United States Of America, em­phasis on the «electronic barrel organ» vibe, everything is in place.

 

From a less history-, more context-oriented point of view, though, Work And Non Work (and we could as­sume that the fully fleshed out songs like ʽThe Book Loversʼ could constitute «work», while the more chaotic mood pieces like ʽAccording To No Planʼ — indeed — constitute the «non» part) adds little to one's experience if one is already familiar with The Noise Made By People. ʽThe Book Loversʼ is probably the best song on here (so impressive in its combination of the modern and the retro that it was even borrowed for the soundtrack to Austin Powers), but there is nothing about its emotional powers — that magical-mystery vibe with an ice touch — that they would not do just as well on ʽCome On Let's Goʼ or ʽLong Was The Yearʼ.

 

Still, the songs are all good; even if the band's penchant for waltz tempos may seem irritating at times, repeated listens bring out subtle individualities in the songs — with all their overdubs and tonal varieties, ʽMessage From Homeʼ, ʽLiving Roomʼ, and ʽThe World Backwardsʼ are at the same time the exact same song (rhythmically, coarse-grained emotionally) and three different ones (ʽMessageʼ is a slightly more personalized lament; ʽLiving Roomʼ is a «take-my-hand-I'll-take-you-through-the-looking-glass» kind of joy-buzzer; ʽThe World Backwardsʼ, closing the album, focuses on beautiful folksy vocalizing to give the song a one-with-the-world feeling).

 

All in all, this is probably not the best way to start with Broadcast — the lo-fi crackling on ʽAcci­dentalsʼ may be a bit of a turn-off, the vocal hooks are less prominent than on the best songs from Noise, the experimental atmospheric parts do not properly guarantee their atmosphere, and it's all over way too quickly, if you remember your Woody. But for the intermediate/advanced fan, this is definitely more essential than anything released under the name of «Broadcast» since Tender Buttons. So, one more thumbs up, following up on the rest.

 

THE FUTURE CRAYON (2006)

 

1) Illumination; 2) Still Feels Like Tears; 3) Small Song IV; 4) Where Youth And Laughter Go; 5) One Hour Em­pire; 6) Distant Call; 7) Poem Of Dead Song; 8) Hammer Without A Master; 9) Locusts; 10) Chord Simple; 11) Daves Dream; 12) DDL; 13) Test Area; 14) Unchanging Window / Chord Simple; 15) A Man For Atlantis; 16) Minus Two; 17) Violent Playground; 18) Belly Dance.

 

This other compilation of Broadcast's «classic era» material nicely wraps up the rest of their odds and ends — a variety of tracks culled from singles, EPs, and various side projects that would be hopelessly lost otherwise. As it is, the assemblage makes for seventy minutes of additional mate­rial that is, at best, gorgeous, and at worst, just «nice».

 

There is a small whiff of deception, though. The first track on the album is also unquestionably the best one — ʽIlluminationʼ not only adds a stoner rock guitar line to the band's usual «magic organ» arrangement, but also has a vocal melody that is more Beach House than Broadcast, with Trish's voice pirouetting around and dropping from high to low pitch on a mesmerizing trajectory. It is so convincing in its majesty that, clearly, it was intentionally selected as the lead-in track — who could resist jumping in to check for even more of these hidden gems? Even if you suspect a trap, you will still be tempted to walk into it.

 

Well, «trap» might be a tad too harsh, but in terms of stand-out material, there will not be a lot waiting there for you further on down the road. Much, if not most, of the album is instrumental, meaning that if you are primarily into Broadcast for Trish, you might just stick to ʽIlluminationʼ. Even when she does sing, many of the tracks simply incorporate her voice in the background, in the form of a distant echo (ʽLocustsʼ) — merely one more atmospheric ingredient in an army of well-rehearsed tricks with the band's electronics.

 

More or less finished «vocal numbers», apart from the first and greatest track, include: ʽStill Feels Like Tearsʼ, a pleasant chunk of upbeat syncopated psycho-pop that still ends up drowning Trish in two rivers of feedback, each streaming out of one of the speakers; ʽWhere Youth And Laughter Goʼ, so light, fluffy, caressing, chimey, and echoey that not remembering Astrud Gilberto is a non-option; and ʽDistant Callʼ, where the dialog between the minimalistic bass guitar part and Trish's singing is thoroughly endearing, if not too memorable.

 

The further we go, though, the fewer «songs» there are, their places taken by impressionistic psy­chedelic sonic paintings — more and more of those old rhythms and progressions borrowed from classic Motown-and-the-like records and then heavily spiced, sugared, and peppered with archai­cally-sounding «baroque electronics». In other words, nothing unusual or atypical for Broadcast. Some of the tracks have a more defiantly avantgardist flavor (ʽDDLʼ; ʽMinus Twoʼ has so many beeps and bleeps that, if not for the occasional "aaahhh" on Keenan's part, you could mistake it for Autechre), but this is not totally atypical, either. There is also an alternate version of ʽUnchan­ging Windowʼ, adding little to the original.

 

Which all goes to say: the main problem of Broadcast was that they were way too much in love with their own sound for way too much time. An album like Tender Buttons strives to rise above «formula» and «background-ish-ness», and succeeds admirably well. But on normal average days the band was happy enough to just crank up the barrel and go along. We may think of it as a sign of modesty and humility, yet it definitely transforms the task of making people truly appreciate what they really did into a tough challenge. Whatever be, do not make the mistake of getting to know the band through this album — chances are that, even if ʽIlluminationʼ smites you, the rest of it will either bore or downright stupefy you. Needless to say, seasoned fans will not want to miss any of this — at the very least, this is far more genuine Broadcast than that wretched sound­track, or even that Focus Group collaboration.

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE

FEEL GOOD LOST (2001)

 

1) I Slept With Bonhomme At The CBC; 2) Guilty Cubicles; 3) Love And Mathematics; 4) Passport Radio; 5) Alive In 85; 6) Prison Province; 7) Blues For Uncle Gibb; 8) Stomach Song; 9) Mossbraker; 10) Feel Good Lost; 11) Last Place; 12) Cranley's Gonna Make It.

 

The way Canada's huge landmass kinda stretches out all the way from modern civilization into the vast reaches of ice cold nothing, it might explain this odd propensity of its citizens for super­ficially grandi­ose, but essentially rather simple sonic landscapes — the construction of which in­volves so many people that sometimes it feels like some of them are only there to cast their mind­waves into the air, to emphasize the production.

 

Even before Arcade Fire, in particular, there was Broken Social Scene, a wandering, blundering troop of loosely connected artists revolving around the core elements of Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning. The music they play is sometimes called «post-rock», but since this term holds my per­sonal record for «dumbest genre designation ever created» (do we ever talk about «post-jazz»? «post-classical»? «post-pop»? «post-flamenco»?), I prefer to broadly refer to these exercises as «mood music». For a narrower way of pigeonholing, something like «rhythmic ambient ins­tru­mental folk-pop» might do, at least for this debut album.

 

The title is quite appropriate. This is an album in which it is very easy to get lost — in fact, I got lost in it somewhere around the third track, and have not found a proper way out since then — but just as easy to feel good about it. What Drew, Canning, and their team write and record are, for the most part, «pleasant dream sequences»: mid-length folk-pop compositions, usually based on guitar interplay, less frequently on keyboards or violins, that establish their groove very quickly, develop it very slowly or do not develop it at all, and hunt for a gradual subconscious effect rather than a quick open blow to the brain.

 

The response is not «psychedelic» or anything — for the most part, the band avoids indulging in spe­cial sonic effects; their chief weapon is the density of sound, achieved by cramming the studio with people, some of whom, as I already said, seem only to be there in order to be more «felt» than heard. But the response can be hypnotic, after a short while: they take all those nice, soo­thing, well-polished folksy chord sequences, shuffle them around, add some old-school pop, and then run this approach into the ground to the point where, at first, you might hate it for the mono­tonousness, but then acknowledge that there is really no objective way of criticizing this stuff. Be­cause the guitars sound gorgeous and tasteful, the sound density is achieved professionally, and the songs are all similar, but different enough to vary the mood ever so slightly.

 

If there is a direct old precursor to this style, it would be something like Fleetwood Mac's ʽAlba­trossʼ (strong echoes of which you will experience, in particular, on ʽBlues For Uncle Gibbʼ) — except that, naturally, with the passing of time the «one strong simple hook» approach has been replaced with an intellectualist passion for more complexity, even at the expense of memorability (according to what my brain tells me, ʽAlbatrossʼ is more «hummable» than all of these tunes put together). Not all of the compositions are slow — ʽI Slept With Bonhommeʼ opens the album on a steady toe-tappy note, and only a few numbers are genuinely «somnambulant» — but I feel as if the oddly accelerated tempos are only there to give the band a little bit more of an individual fla­vor — with these dreamscapes, you would normally expect super-slow all of the time, yet there are tunes here explicitly set to danceable rhythms. (One actual flaw is the use of drum machines on some of the tracks — you'd think that with so many people in the studio, they could have easily done with live drums everywhere, but no, there is still this goddamn oh-so-2000s nostalgic fondness for the pssht-pssht sound rearing its ugly head from time to time, as if it were «artsy» or something. It is not — it's just ugly).

 

Repeated listens do bring out molecules of individual charm — ʽGuilty Cubiclesʼ is all about cross-weaving arpeggios from multiple guitars (and mandolins), ʽPassport Radioʼ is about ma­king your violins sound like Mellotrons (or is that vice versa?), ʽAlive In 85ʼ is about how a mer­ry, swinging, looped jazz guitar riff feels in the company of Depeche Mode-style rhythmics (not very well), ʽLast Placeʼ is like a Brian Eno / Harold Budd minimalist piano collaboration set to metronomic rhythms, and ʽCranley's Gonna Make Itʼ gradually transforms into a sunset-style soft jazz mood piece, capped off with an atmospheric horn part. The feelings they generate are all quite similar (peace, warmth, serenity, and an inescapable urge to join the local Eco-watch), but the ways of generating them are different enough to lay off objective accusations of Broken So­cial Scene being a «one-trick» band.

 

That said, this is still a very modest thumbs up: for the most part, Feel Good Lost works as high quality back­ground music (muzak?), which is a bit inadequate in relation to the amount of human resources expended on it (I mean, Brian Eno at his best could achieve much the same effect with two fingers as this band achieves with a small army). Pleasant, positive, and tasteful indeed, but it is hard for me to imagine anybody capable of being «bowled over» with this sort of music.

 

YOU FORGOT IT IN PEOPLE (2002)

 

1) Capture The Flag; 2) KC Accidental; 3) Stars And Sons; 4) Almost Crimes; 5) Looks Just Like The Sun; 6) Paci­fic Theme; 7) Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl; 8) Cause = Time; 9) Late Nineties Bedroom Rock For The Mis­sionaries; 10) Shampoo Suicide; 11) Lover's Spit; 12) I'm Still Your Fag; 13) Pitter Patter Goes My Heart.

 

Only one year has passed and Broken Social Scene have already swelled from a guest-dependent rhyth­mic ambient duo to an eleven-piece orchestra, bashing out idealistically epic indie rock — in their own words, «anthems for a seventeen year-old girl», although most of this stuff is perfectly suitable for seventeen year-old boys as well (maybe it is the lack of any sort of «heaviness» in the arrangements that prompted them to address their female audiences). Their aspirations are noble, their ambitions humble, and their allusions subtle. Nevertheless, the reproachingly titled You For­got It In People fails to be that beautiful, long-coveted masterpiece that the critics had been waiting for, hurrying up to lavish all sorts of praises on the album when it came out.

 

The basic problem is that, despite switching to the traditional «rock song» format, the styles and attitudes remain essentially the same — this is still little more than nicely sounding, polyphonous background music, yet somehow, we are now supposed to be memorizing the themes, singing along to the anthemic choruses, and agreeing with its goal of «teaching» us something. I honestly tried doing all three of these things, but, unlike the average BSS fan, shamefully failed on all counts — the melodies were found unmemorable, the choruses generally uninviting, and the band's «soulfulness» hopelessly stuck in no-man's-land somewhere between Nick Drake, Bruce Springsteen, and Jeff Tweedy, all of whom they try to be at the same time. As you can imagine, it would take a bunch of miracle workers to do that, and even if there is one miracle worker among the eleven current members of BSS, it is pretty hard to spot him / her from among the other ten.

 

Do not get me wrong: nothing is overtly «bad» here, in fact, from a purely technical angle, the album is unassailable — genuine and diverse instrumentation, competent sound layering without any unwarranted chaos, pleasant, unaffected vocal tones, obscure, but not altogether meaningless lyrics, in short, everything within the limits of good taste and intellectual inoffensiveness. I fully understand how, for instance, all those people whose minds were just blown by Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot could want them to be re-blown with this record. But Yankee Hotel Foxtrot had «the spark» — actually, above everything else, it had a strong focus on hooks and personality. Broken Social Scene, in contrast, «focus» on... well, on a broken social scene.

 

It will suffice to make a first conclusion based on the album's first proper song, ʽKC Accidentalʼ, named after Kevin Drew's first band (the hazy Floyd-ian instrumental ʽCapture The Flagʼ is the formal opener, but it is only a brief ambient overture) — a few initially discordant guitar notes and violin scrapes quickly give way to a fast-paced anthem in the «over-the-waves» paradigm: deep rolling guitar waves, seagullish whistling violins, and electronic sirens wailing their way over the surface. But without even a single genuinely exciting part, this anthem only packs the technical ingredients for success — somewhere along the way these guys seem to have forgotten that a massive collective sound still has to have a great backbone, one that would still sound at­tractive when recorded at a piano or on acoustic guitar by one guy on a demo tape.

 

This is actually a proverbial truth that would very soon be made use of by BSS' Canadian partners, Arcade Fire, and this is why the equally anthemic Funeral is a modern masterpiece whereas You Forgot It In People is, for the most part, an impressively tasteful bore. When they revert to their old «moody» self, e. g. on ʽPacific Themeʼ or on the album closer ʽPitter Patter Goes My Heartʼ, they are not overreaching their grasp; when they dip into the freak-folk of ʽStars And Sonsʼ or the pomp-rock of ʽAlmost Crimesʼ, they are.

 

Only two songs on the entire album struck me as being out of the ordinary. The above-mentioned ʽAnthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girlʼ almost accidentally hits upon a beautifully tense vo­cal / instrumental sequence in the chorus — which works even despite the vocals being masked by a (seventeen year-old?) wheezy chipmunk effect; and the immediately ensuing pop rocker ʽCause = Timeʼ has a deliciously emotional riff popping out of the speakers around the 2:30 mark — and coming back in later. Consequently, these two songs have plain old heart-grappling hooks, unlike others that just have vague atmospheres and cool-sounding titles (although in 2002, thirty years after the hip intellectual freshmen had invaded the pop music business, who's to judge exactly how cool a title like ʽLate Nineties Bedroom Rock For The Missionariesʼ is supposed to look?).

 

Oh, actually, speaking of titles, the album was supposed to receive the Mark Knopfler Annual Re­ward for ʽI'm Still Your Fagʼ, but got sidetracked at the last moment as the jury became convinced that it is rather sung from the perspective of an unjustly deserted and psychologically traumatized cigarette butt. Besides, melodically it is a somewhat boring mix of folk and bossa nova — were it given a major stadium riff on the ʽMoney For Nothingʼ scale, the controversy over lines like "I swore I drank your piss that night to see if I could live" would have been much higher. But who really cares, as long as it's only a bunch of unknown Canadian hobos we're dealing with here?

 

I refrain from an overt thumbs down, if only out of respect for how much real sweaty work went into the final product — and an additional bonus of several really really pleasant moments — but as far as my own paradigm is concerned, You Forgot It In People does break the golden rule of «staying adequate»: it bites off far more than these eleven people might chew. Want it or not, they are just your average, regular, well-meaning, self-educated indie kids, and they do not know the meaning of life — heck, they do not even properly understand the meaning of getting eleven people together in one studio. Listenable and pretty, yes, but never great, and definitely overrated back in its time.

 

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE (2005)

 

1) Our Faces Split The Coast In Half; 2) Ibi Dreams Of Pavement (A Better Day); 3) 7/4 (Shoreline); 4) Finish Your Collapse And Stay For Breakfast; 5) Major Label Debut; 6) Fire Eye'd Boy; 7) Windsurfing Nation; 8) Swimmers; 9) Hotel; 10) Handjobs For The Holidays; 11) Superconnected; 12) Bandwitch; 13) Tremoloa Debut; 14) It's All Gonna Break.

 

Thousands of minor differences from You Forgot It In People, but hardly a single major one. Apparently, just because the band comprises so many people now, all of them capable of some­how playing off each other, Drew and Canning seem to think that these songs are gonna write themselves. Which sometimes happens if your band comprises genuine geniuses — but in the case of Broken Social Scene, it just comprises a bunch of freshly baked ambitious idealistic bearded pop in­tellectuals, and the last time idealism, intellectualism, ambition, and beard went together with genius was probably circa 1971, with Pete Townshend working on Who's Next.

 

Once again, sixty minutes into the album I can barely back-focus on anything that I just heard, despite the allegedly tasteful and quite variegated combinations of instruments. The band sets an uplifting, stomping pace, piles up five rhythm parts and seven leads on top of it, adds multi-tracked male or female or androgynous vocals, and then gradually overcharges the motor in order for it to go up in smoke and explode. The chords are loud and bold, the vocals combine high pitch for emotional resonance and breathiness for intellectual depth, and the song titles, as usual, stimu­late you into making new discoveries — such as Canadian writer Ibi (Kaslik). (Not that I will ever find the time to read the lady, but «knowledge is power» all the same).

 

And that is pretty much it. This time, there is not even a single memorable riff of the ʽCause = Timeʼ variety, and out of all their different grooves, only ʽBandwitchʼ managed to stand out due to a cool «magical-mystery» vocalized loop in the background — which did give it a little bit of a «witchy» flavor, a nice change of pace from the core Springsteenisms. Naturally, one resonant idea on a sixty-mninute album falls well within the scope of chance expectations — I am, in fact, profoundly surprised that there were no others. How hard must it be to write twelve epic pop anthems and be unable to make even one of them stick?

 

At least the «grand finale», grandly entitled ʽIt's All Gonna Breakʼ, grandly encased in grand power chords and grand romantic posturing, grandly making its grand point in just under 10 grand minutes, should have been satisfactory. But the way I see it, like everything else, it's all «formulaic form» and no interesting substance. Where Arcade Fire would have soaked this thing in aching end-of-the-world desperation, Broken Social Scene remain firmly stuck directly be­tween sad­ness and joy — at point zero, that is. Which is why, when they finally get to the end and wrap it up with a solemn «mock-classical» coda, I do get the urge... to strangle somebody.

 

For accuracy's sake (as well as extra proof that I did listen carefully to the album, just in case), the start of ʽHotelʼ is not half bad, with a simple, but tough bassline that carries more punch by it­self than any given «loud», «pseudo-symphonic» passage on the rest of the record; ʽFire Eye'd Boyʼ could have been a semi-decent generic indie single if the vocals didn't sound taken from a post-laryngitis recuperating bunch of patients; and ʽWindsurfing Nationʼ has a spoonful of lovely psychedelic guitar licks, barely discernible from under a ton of extra overdubs. But — repeat — this is all just for accuracy's sake. The album as such shows that the critical praise, received by You Forgot It In People, went to someone's head, and if the record is to be evaluated in context, well — it is a further step down, and this time around, I cannot help letting it off with a thumbs down as an impressive heap of pretentious, elaborate, sweet-scented indie garbage.

 

FORGIVENESS ROCK RECORD (2010)

 

1) World Sick; 2) Chase Scene; 3) Texico Bitches; 4) Forced To Love; 5) All To All; 6) Art House Director; 7) High­way Slipper Jam; 8) Ungrateful Little Father; 9) Meet Me In The Basement; 10) Sentimental X's; 11) Sweetest Kill; 12) Romance To The Grave; 13) Water In Hell; 14) Me And My Hand.

 

Discographies formally show a five-year hiatus between Broken Social Scene and Forgiveness Rock Record, but this is an illusion: in reality, two more albums were released in the interim as pseudo-«solo projects», one by Drew and one by Canning, even though many of the members of B.S.S. still played on both records, and stylistically they were not all that different from the usual stuff. We will return to them later on; for now, let us stick to formalities and see what happened on May 4, 2010, when once again they returned to us as Broken Social Scene, with yet another innovative three-word title that implies religious philosophy masking as popular music — or vice versa... hardly any difference either way.

 

Where there is some difference is in the subtle, but important shift of attitude. Over those five years, Broken Social Scene seem to have learned that (a) cramming fifty thousand instruments within the small confines of a five-minute anthem does not automatically make it mind-blowing and stupendous; (b) a distorted guitar rock foundation may endear you to the rigidly traditional «indie rock community», but there are also clear-cut limits to the spiritual power of the power chord; (c) precisely shaped hooks matter, after all, especially if you are trying to target the ave­rage concert-going Joe rather than some whacked out New Age-crazy audience — you have to get at least one or two of those on your album, or else you risk to irritate even the critics.

 

This does not mean that mediocrity will be suddenly replaced by genius or anything, but it does mean that the album never sounds as consistently annoying as its predecessor. Even its only in­strumental number, ʽMeet Me In The Basementʼ, puts a couple of simple, but effectively optimi­stic guitar / violin phrases on top of the usual pompous stomp that may draw your attention away from the generic rhythmics and chain it to something else — when that colorful three-note riff makes its appearance at 1:03 into the song, for instance, it produces a singular emotional jolt the likes of which B.S.S. rarely, if ever, hunted for in their early life.

 

The idea of «forgiveness» as such is exploited in ʽAll To Allʼ, an honestly beautiful little number that relies on electronic loops rather than rhythm guitars and a gorgeously universalist vocal part from Lisa Lobsinger — the manner in which she intones "you made your life on everything" is no different from the usual «hazy nymph» style of the 2000s (think Beach House or Broadcast or whatever else), but no less soulfully engaging because of that. And, God be praised, the song re­mains relatively uncluttered — just a few quiet violin flourishes and kaleidoscopic electronic sprinkling in the background here and there, enhancing the elfish mood rather than cloaking it. Or maybe I am just a sucker for all the ladies of B.S.S. — the second best song here, as far as I am concerned, is ʽSentimental X'sʼ, sung by an entire trio of indie houris (Leslie Feist, Emily Haines, and Amy Millan — apparently, the first time all three pooled their vocal cords together on the same song), also with a one-of-a-kind arrangement: now all the strings, electronics, and brass tacks have been carefully assembled and wound up in the background, leaving only the pulsating rhythms and the vocal harmonies in the foreground. It does feel better.

 

The loud, Wilco-ish folk-rockers have also been improved — ʽWater In Hellʼ, for instance, makes clever use of falsettos, thoughtfully separates the distorted rhythm and clean colorful lead guitars, and slows down the tempo to give the anthem a little barroom bravado; and ʽForced To Loveʼ is more reminiscent of the old noisy B.S.S., but the chorus is catchy anyway. For some fans, the major highlight came on with the melancholia / nostalgia of ʽSweetest Killʼ, and it does give off the impression of gorgeous profoundness for a minute or so; however, beyond the initial impression, the band did not find a proper way to develop the melody, so the song pretty much dug itself a profound pit in a matter of seconds, and then just stayed there.

 

Of course, it is still very hard to understand if there actually is anything that B.S.S. are «about». The line "I get world sick everytime I take a stand" may ring true with many people, but B.S.S. still think too much of themselves to allow the words and the music to shed some of its ambiguity — and if the band is transmitting any «message» at all, it hardly does itself a favor by ending the album with a song titled ʽMe And My Handʼ: "Me and my hand / We've been together since I was born", sung in a «John Lennon circa 1979, baking bread with one hand and playing guitar with the other» sort of style, is an awful idea to end the album, and a good reminder that, no mat­ter how much of an overall improvement the whole thing is, it is still the product of a «B-grade» band at best, sometimes lapsing into C-grade.

 

Still, a step up is a step up — essentially, there are more «pop» elements here than «rock» ones, and for Broken Social Scene, whose emotional palette rather consists of moody optimism and intelligent hope than depression, aggression, and sociopathy, this is a good, adequate shift of fo­cus. Throw in the seductive lady singers and occasional hooks, and a thumbs up becomes self-explainable. I will not force myself into the delusion that any of this stuff will have much «stay­ing power», but as long as it did stay around, it was pretty decent entertainment this time.

 

ADDENDA:

 

SPIRIT IF... (2007)

 

1) Farewell To The Pressure Kids; 2) TBTF; 3) F-ked Up Kid; 4) Safety Bricks; 5) Lucky Ones; 6) Broke Me Up; 7) Gang Bang Suicide; 8) Frightening Lives; 9) Underneath The Skin; 10) Big Love; 11) Backed Out On The...; 12) Aging Faces / Losing Places; 13) Bodhi Sappy Weekend; 14) When It Begins.

 

Apparently, the strange lull in activity for BSS in between 2005 and 2010 was only a formality. What really happened during that period is that the two figureheads, Kevin Drew and Brandon Canning, both released a «solo» album in the interim. However, in this particular case this does not even count as «taking some time off» — the only thing about these records that is really «solo», as far as I can tell, is that the songs on Kevin's album were mostly written by Kevin and the songs on Brendan's album were mostly written by Brendan. But considering that the two have more or less the same amount of songwriting talent; share more or less the same influences and conceptions; have similarly un-annoying, but un-engaging, vocal styles; and even sport compa­rable indie-size amounts of facial hair — all these things considered, should we even begin to care about who wrote what on which album?

 

Other than that, Brendan plays on Kevin's album, Kevin plays on Brendan's, and a solid chunk, or maybe even all of, Broken Social Scene's instrumental corps is engaged in both places, so do not be deceived by the «Broken Social Scene Presents...» moniker: both albums are simply two more Broken Social Scene albums for all grateful victims of the social scene breakup. As an arbitrary  compro­mise, they are placed here in the «addenda» section, but really, it's all quite legit.

 

Furthermore, it's not as if Kevin's Spirit If... is an «unusual» Broken Social Scene album. All the ingredients are present: folk-rock and pop-rock basics, wild love for wild overdubs, intellec­tua­li­zed attraction towards weird or provocative titles (I can assure you that if you came here because of the title ʽGang Bang Suicideʼ, you will be most disappointed upon hearing the actual song), and overtly tepid melodies that take such a long time to sink in, most people probably just don't have that kind of free time on their hands.

 

Let me be brief and just list a few moments that turned out to be likeable in the end. As far as I can tell by the end of the fourth (or was it fifth?) listen, the record does not really begin to hit the proper stride until ʽLucky Onesʼ — a bombastic anthem for which Drew actually found a «lucky» joy-riff; he was so proud of it that he decided not to put anything else of interest in the song, and just hammer it in, over and over, until the very last moment. As the music finally dies down and he uses the last bar to hit it out one last time on solo piano, you can almost feel the sweat of pride trickling down the keys. But it ain't that great a melodic phrase, mind you.

 

The best song, coming immediately afterwards, is probably the shuffling ballad ʽBroke Me Upʼ, and again, its only real claim to fame is the repetitive chorus — there is something surreptitiously sweet and touching about how the colorful slide guitar in the background echoes the chorus of "everybody broke me up", whatever that line should mean, if anything. The hazy, dissipated bits of piano pop chords in the background create a tasty ambience as well.

 

Of the harder rocking numbers, ʽBacked Out On The...ʼ is probably the best one, but again, through endless repetition of the modestly hooky chorus rather than any cunning combination of musical factors. ʽFrightening Livesʼ, combining electronically treated vocals, guitars, and drum machines, has more of a retro-New Wave feel, but, just as well, only thing stands out in the song — a deeply moody, gothic-style chiming guitar line counterbalancing the verse vocals, something that somebody in the BSS camp could have come across in his sleep after finishing the day off with a listen to Joy Division's Closer or something like that.

 

All in all, no big surprises: the album is a steady grower, with each listen bringing you a step closer to the idea that this is not, in fact, completely generic indie rock, but something beyond that. Except that I'm on my fourth (fifth?) listen, and I still can't quite latch on to that idea. Maybe I am asking too much, and one repetitive hook per song should keep me contented... but I'd rather just go back to, oh, I dunno, Blondie for instance — less overdubs, for sure, and a whole lot less pretense at mining something deeply meaningful, but so much more meat, if you get my meaning.

 

SOMETHING FOR ALL OF US... (2008)

 

1) Something For All Of Us; 2) Chameleon; 3) Hit The Wall; 4) Snowballs & Icicles; 5) Churches Under The Stairs; 6) Love Is New; 7) Antique Bull; 8) All The Best Wooden Toys Come From Germany; 9) Possible Grenade; 10) Been At It So Long; 11) Take Care, Look Up.

 

Well, er, I suppose that Brendan Canning quickly followed up on Kevin Drew's «solo» album with his own one since he wanted us to insightfully compare his individual artistic vision with that of his partner. The trouble is, once I'd finished listening to Something For All Of Us..., I for­got absolutely everything I remembered about Spirit If..., so, what with this thing about a revie­wer's responsibility and all, I honestly went back to Spirit If... and gave it another twist. But then it turned out that, by the time the last song was over, I could not keep in mind even a single thing about Something For All Of Us... So, not wanting to disappoint my readers, I immersed myself once again in Brendan Canning's one-and-only solo oeuvre. It was not an unpleasant listen, but, needless to say, once I finally got down to the review, there was nothing in my head to compare it with. For some reason, Drew and Canning just couldn't share adjacent space in my memory cells. It was then that I finally got it — the two guys' styles are so similar that they act upon each other like two positive charges. Whatever you do, don't listen to them in a row. Put some AC/DC in between, or maybe a full CD of didgeridoo soloing.

 

Anyway, it's too late to be drawing serious comparisons now, so just a few quick words on whe­ther this «Broken Social Scene Presents: Brendan Canning» thing has any autonomous value, or if it can be used to generate awesome epiphanies in the brain, or if we should encourage the au­thor to develop this style even further. These few quick words, in their correct order, are: it hasn't, it cannot, and we shouldn't. Nice sound overall, though.

 

Apparently, Canning favours a slightly heavier sound than Drew: there are more distorted guitar parts here, more forceful percussion rhythms, and the anthem-to-ballad ratio seems a little heavier on the anthem side. But none of it matters, since most of the anthems are just straightahead «alt-pop» without any extraordinary melodic content. You know something is definitely not right here when the «element of surprise» on the album consists of unexpectedly encountering a disco bass line on one of the songs (ʽLove Is Newʼ) — as if this decision had some deep meaning (in reality, most likely, it is just part of the same old nostalgic trend, where people raised on disco, even if they thought they hated it when they were in their teens, were still surreptitiously encoded to re­turn to it twenty or thirty years later).

 

Of the rest, ʽChurches Under The Stairsʼ has some funny falsetto awoo-awooing; ʽAll The Best Wooden Toys Come From Germanyʼ is a short and pretty «ambient-folk» instrumental in the vein of BSS' first album; ʽPossible Grenadeʼ has a powerful riff-based coda; and that's all, folks — everything else is non-descript inasmuch as it can all be described by the small world of for­mulae long since set in stone. No better and no worse than the average BSS album, I think that Something For All Of Us... should be legally sued for moral damage by the word «something» — and honestly, I'd take something really wild, offensive, and disgusting, like Ted Nugent, over this sterile-packed «Piece Of Mass Art For The Progressively Illuminated 21st Century Art Lover» any time of day. Thumbs down.

BURIAL

BURIAL (2006)

 

1) Untitled; 2) Distant Lights; 3) Spacescape; 4) Wounder; 5) Night Bus; 6) Southern Comfort; 7) U Hurt Me; 8) Gutted; 9) Forgive; 10) Broken Home; 11) Prayer; 12) Pirates; 13) Untitled.

 

Apparently, for the first few years of his career, William Bevan did not even reveal his true iden­tity, stating out of the gloom that he was «a lowkey person» and that he «just wants to make some tunes, nothing else». It was known only that he was holed up somewhere in London, hooked up to a computer with Sony Sound Forge, and some went as far as to suggest that he was really Aphex Twin in disguise. Reality turned out to be less extravagant than we usually want it to be, but, fortunately, this has little bearing on the extravagance of the music.

 

The genre labels for Burial's self-titled debut that one usually encounters involve «2-step», «dub­steb», «UK garage», etc., but all of this is misleading — yes, with a little effort you might learn to dance to these tunes, yet there is really no serious reason why you should: the real reason why Burial's output is valued so highly is in the atmosphere, not in the beats. And that atmosphere... how should I put it? Well, from my old-timer school's perspective, let me put it this way: Burial sounds as if, above everything else, it drew its chief influence from Side 2 of David Bowie's Heroes — particularly ʽSense Of Doubtʼ; and this point stands even if the resemblance is purely coincidental (which I doubt, since no respectable electronic musician these days may be ignorant on the subject of the «Berlin Trilogy»).

 

«Burial» is right, in fact — it is basically an album about burial, with so many of its beats sound­ing like dull shovels pounding against the clodded earth and loose rocks of the graveyard. What this album really has on so many other electronic productions is that all of its tracks merge toge­ther in a genuine sense of purpose, and that purpose (the way I interpret it) is — to picture a deva­stated, bombed-into-oblivion, post-apocalyptic planet where lonely ghosts, occasional zombies, roaches, and loose radio signals represent the only remaining traces of life. (Strange enough, no Keith Richards in sight, though — must be a parallel universe after all).

 

The actual samples used by Bevan do not interest me in the slightest — the only point of interest is in that they are deliciously random, ranging from bits of Benicio del Toro's dialog in 21 Grams to reggae (Sizzla) to ambient (Eno) to mainstream R&B (Ashanti and Destiny's Child). But they all get the same treatment regardless of their original context: Ashanti's "you hurt me" from ʽFoolishʼ is a ghostly echo now, rising out of some dreary chasm that the nuclear fallout and the acid rains have ripped in the former heart of the city, barely registering against the incessant pum­meling of the excavator and the vaguely mid-Eastern shreds of melodies emanating from the earth's pores.

 

What makes Burial so particularly spooky is that there is nothing intentionally and arrogantly look-at-me-I'm-so-spooky about it. The beats — and all other sounds, for that matter — are deci­dedly quiet and inobtrusive. Nothing ever «builds up» to anything — most «songs» end the same way they started out, so the only suspense to be experienced is found in between the tracks. There is no danger in the air, because it seems as if everything dangerous that could have happened already has — even if there are zombies here, they seem to have completely lost interest in any­thing other than simply hobbling around, moaning and groaning in quietly stunned mode. The two-minute long sonic scape called ʽNight Busʼ is not about going anywhere — it is actually a beatless, rhythmless ambient interlude that focuses, at best, on the rusty remains of a night bus that has long since run its last run. The only serious tension throughout is provided by the bass frequencies — «sensed» rather than «heard», they are the perfect embodiment of the technogenic catastrophe residue, and have a primary role in creating the overall illusion.

 

Individual tracks do not need any description here: this is a cohesive experience where separation of ingredients will only decrease the admiration. Naturally, the pictorial interpretation that I offer here is far from the only one possible, but at least I can honestly state that Bevan paints a musical landscape that is open to a concrete interpretation — one that borrows heavily from the experi­ence of, say, Autechre, but is at the same time much more accessible than Autechre. I am not in­terested in the slightest if Burial does indeed «legitimize dubstep», as Jason Birchmeier pro­claims in the All-Music Guide review — its formal percussive trappings are just that, formal per­cussive trappings. What matters is only that, if you listen to it long enough, you might start be­lieving that what you hear on it is the future of humanity. And that's sufficiently creepy — not to mention oh so frickin' dark-romantic! — to justify a thumbs up.

 

UNTRUE (2007)

 

1) Untitled; 2) Archangel; 3) Near Dark; 4) Ghost Hardware; 5) Endorphin; 6) In McDonalds; 7) Untrue; 8) Shell Of Light; 9) Dog Shelter; 10) Homeless; 11) UK; 12) Raver.

 

Supposedly, the only way I can say something vaguely interesting about Untrue that has not al­ready been said by the ranters and ravers — and there have been quite a few of them around 2007, with Burial's second album predictably making even more of a splash than the first one, since this one was already expected — is by keeping up those visual interpretations. Naturally, Untrue is a logical sequel to Burial, conceived and executed in similar ways, built on similar ideas, and pro­ducing similar reactions. But if there are at least a few departures, how does that agree with the impression of a devastated post-World War III planet?

 

Well, the one thing that is different is that Untrue is a little busier. Its compositions may feature two samples instead of one, or three instead of two. Or there might be one or two extra layers of electronics. Most interestingly, there is a heavy increase in vocal samples of R&B artists — com­pared to Burial, almost every composition is populated with them, and now Aaliyah, Erykah Badu, Amanda Perez, and even Christina Aguilera have joined the roster. Coupled with Burial's dark bass and post-industrial electronics, their vocal loops represent the kinkiest in ironic decon­struction. If I were any of them, I'd probably start campaigning for a ban on sampling now — this is a prime example of «no-fair! use» (as opposed to «unfair»).

 

On the other hand, there are so many of these vocal bits now that they can no longer be interpre­ted as the symbolic last remains of human voices on the destroyed (deconstructed?) Earth. Rather, this might be the start of the rebirth cycle — the little ambient melodies that manage to break through the core of the bass frequencies and the vinyl crackle represent the world beginning to slowly get back on its feet (even if you have to use the vocal talents of Ray J. and Beyoncé to achieve the set goals).

 

In other words, Untrue is not nearly as «creepy» as its predecessor — and, consequently, not nearly as thrilling, at least not for those who have already, like me, formulated their own «rules of the universe according to Burial». It only takes playing the lead-in tracks back-to-back: ʽDistant Lightsʼ with its metallic hum and clanging midsize robots carrying on with their daily tasks, and ʽArchangelʼ, with its pseudo-Mellotron electronic backgrounds and Ray J.'s pleading, high-pit­ched vocals looped so densely that the whole track begins to resemble a goddamn prayer.

 

Of course, we're back in the dark on the correspondingly titled ʽNear Darkʼ, but even that track is hyper-populated with vocals that carry out their rotten task of humanizing the robotic beats. ʽGhost Hardwareʼ is a great title, and the interaction between the sampled Aguilera and the elec­tronics is ghostly indeed, but still there is no genuine sense of danger. Darkness, perhaps, but a peaceful, non-threatening — at least, not immediately threatening — kind of darkness. Later on, there will even be moments of majestic darkness: ʽDog Shelterʼ, for instance, completely free of beats and sounding as if it had been stolen out of one of Eno's vaults.

 

From this point of view, Untrue is a bit of a letdown for me. The combination of dubstep forma­lities with ye old time industrial and dark ambient stylistics that this guy latched on to was not tremendously unique or innovative, but it was quite a find, certainly much more of a find than you'd expect from one of the several million wannabe electronic wizards dicking around with pre­packaged software. Here, it already seems a bit sissied-up and diluted, shedding some of that at­mosphere — even if, paradoxically, I suppose that more work must have been invested in Untrue than in its predecessor. But this is just one of those cases where too many ingredients do not exactly spoil the broth, yet somewhat cancel out each other.

 

Still, a thumbs up, because if my visualisation fails, it's just my problem, right? In most respects, nothing has really changed, and if your perception of this kind of music follows more abstract guidelines, you might not even notice this seeming transition from «dark black» to «dark gray» in this guy's work (to an extent, reflected even on the album sleeves, as I have noticed). In any case, the moods are still there, along with an occasional surprise or two (such as the evil bass swoops on ʽEtched Headplateʼ, grinning at the wimpy R&B samples), and even if the world according to Burial is no longer as thoroughly bleak a place to live in, it is still desolate enough to impress a mind like mine, normally bored to death with this kind of electronic patchwork.

 

STREET HALO / KINDRED (2012)

 

1) Street Halo; 2) NYC; 3) Stolen Dog; 4) Kindred; 5) Loner; 6) Ashtray Wasp.

 

Beat Records took the trouble of releasing two of Burial's EPs, Street Halo from 2011 and Kind­red from 2012, on a single CD — considering that they are ideologically quite close, this makes for a cozy enough «third album» to merit one more autonomous review: after all, much to Buri­al's honor, he does not regard electronic music recording as some sort of inevitable daily activity, on par with going to the bathroom, like quite a few of his peers do.

 

This does not automatically ensure that each new release of a Burial album turns into a mind-blowing event, but these two EPs, in particular, certainly go a step further than Untrue, and, I would say, more or less in the same direction in which Untrue alienated itself from the self-titled debut — namely, the music is gradually becoming louder and livelier, as if, indeed, the guy were busy constructing his own «cycle of life», where Burial represented the post-apocalyptic «cock­roaches, Cher, & Keith Richards» phase, Untrue was the baby organic matter recomposing itself after a lengthy wait period, and now these two EPs let you hear the newly developed steady pulse of life — immune not only to extreme radiation exposure, but even to dirty vinyl scratching.

 

The big difference, of course, is that, for the first time in Burial history, the dance beats are not only perfectly audible and usable, but they are also all over the place. ʽStreet Haloʼ employs a relatively straight techno track, to which Burial pins all his usual trademarks (melancholic ambi­ent synthesizers and vocal samples lifted from select R&B ballads). On ʽNYCʼ, the rhythms are more tricky, with an industrial flavor, but loud, precise, and predictable enough for the track to be classified as «body-oriented» — and then on ʽStolen Dogʼ the techno aspects are back, although, to be fair, all of the tracks are multi-part: every now and then, the beats sink into the mud, and the music takes some time to reform and regroup.

 

Kindred takes this liveliness even further by adding speed and frenzy — not on the title track, which mainly reproduces the atmosphere of ʽNYCʼ, but certainly on ʽLonerʼ, where not only the beats, but even the synthesizers are subjected to some rather unusual acceleration by Burial's standards (resulting in a slightly paranoid, never-stop impression not unlike the one triggered by Pink Floyd's ʽOn The Runʼ), and on the first part of ʽAshtray Waspʼ, whose rhythmic and melo­dic parts have really little to do with the image of an ashtray wasp — the fast-moving synth loops suggest dynamic journeying rather than immobile decomposing insect flesh.

 

That said, whether all this change is for the better or for the worse remains an open question. The transition from a largely «static» sound to a more dynamic ambience may give us reviewers something to write about, but it also steals away some of the bold charm that was the main reason to listen to and speak well of Burial in the first place. Ever so often, I catch myself thinking that, on their own, these tracks have nothing important to add to our understanding of electronic music ever since Richard D. James had expanded it so thoroughly even before the new millennium crept in. In context — yeah, sure, «death breeding life» and all that stuff that crept into my mind while trying to visualize the offered sonic ambience. But solitary standing — not really.

 

Granted, both EPs were generally met with tremendous praise by the critics: Kindred, in parti­cular, has received plenty of ecstatic rave reviews («never before has his music possessed this much majesty, this much command, this much power: the pathos here has moved from sym­pathetic to completely domineering», writes Andrew Ryce at Pitchfork, making me question the very es­sence of such terms as ʽmajestyʼ and ʽpowerʼ, neither of which I would ever associate with the music of Burial). But honestly, in terms of sheer substance, I see little, if any, progress here: basically, this is just the same solid Burial formula, made a bit more accessible for the average electronic listener. As such, this pair of EPs does deserve a solid thumbs up, but it hardly seems to deserve the «amazing techni­color breakthrough» tag that certain people suffering from long / short-term me­mory loss have been so keen on sticking to it.

 

 

 

WHY WRITING ABOUT MUSIC BEATS DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE

(A sort of postface-in-progress)

1. Police And Thieves

 

One of today's trademarks is that many people write about music. No, that didn't sound too convincing. One of the inescapabilities of today is that a hell of a shitload of people write about music. A brief stroll through Amazon.com or RateYourMusic.com will, in fact, create the im­pres­sion that most people write about music, and those few that do not write about music are either tonedeaf or do not have Internet access. And even then, they still talk about the music, which is, come to think of it, hardly different from writing about it. The only difference is in the recipient — somehow, writing about music is supposed to be coming from those who have interesting things to say about it, whereas simply talking about music requires no deep commitment, since it puts no one into a preaching position.

 

Obviously, all these people write about all this music (or any other art form, for that matter) pri­ma­rily because the modern age has provided them, by means of the Internet, with the golden opportunity of having themselves heard — and even listened to, provided they can capture some­body's interest. In a matter of a few more years, we will quite likely be forgetting that before "Liberation Day", the situation was different: musical criticism was a profes­sion like any other, for which you got paid, but for which you also had to be somehow "qualified" — for instance, have a musical, or at least a journalist, education.

 

Today, professional musical criticism still exists — and, as long as the critics can still publish their columns in printed periodicals, it is bound to go on; but its special prerogatives are close to evaporating, as their reviews drown further and further in the ocean of amateur criticism that is flooding the Internet. This is a plain fact; it is neither wonderful nor awful in itself, so it is up to all of us to make the best use of it rather than the worst.

 

Professional criticism has its advantages. People who engage in it are generally expected to write well, in a language that is aesthetically pleasing all by itself, so that one might enjoy a good criti­cal review of something one hasn't even been planning on seeing or hearing, let alone having actually seen or heard. They are expected to be knowledgeable — both on the artists they're wri­ting about and on the basic rules of the game (such as music theory). Finally, although we rarely pronounce it aloud, they're expected to simply be smarter than the average Joe — even in the Gol­den Age of political correctness, no one has put under question the idea that some people are more intelligent than others, and I'd rather read a review from an intelligent critic than a dumbass, and I suppose even a dumbass would back me up here.

 

On practice, though, it is all but useless to expect that the professional critic will possess all these qualities in abundance. For one thing, the demand for criticism seems to be much higher than the supply — most people want a pool of opinions and judgements to choose from rather than simply expect a single guru to guide them through art. For another, good critics cannot be trained; they got to have a gift, just like the artists they're writing about, and gifts are scarce by definition. And history shows us fairly well that, much too often, "training" and "gift" do not go hand in hand at all: well-trained writers may be boring and irrelevant, and gifted writers may simply not be given a chance to write — or to publish, which, until recently, was pretty much the same thing.

 

In that respect, the emergence of Internet-based amateur criticism is a terrific opportunity. It does burden the reader with the necessity of sifting through tons of garbage to find that one pearl, but today, this kind of behaviour seems to be the norm of civilized life anyway — in all respects. The garbage will inevitably sink to the bottom eventually, while really talented people like James Be­rardinelli, for the movies, or Mark Prindle, for the music, will live on for at least some time; and wouldn't we be deprived of the pleasure of reading their stuff if it weren't for Web publishing?

 

However, the main issue here is not exactly what good is Web publishing, but rather why it exists in the first place. What drives people, even those who are not professionally educated musicolo­gists or professionally trained musicians, to opinionate in written form? And — a connected, but different question: what drives other people to read their output?

 

2. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

 

Obviously, I cannot speak on behalf of anyone but myself, yet I have reasons to believe my an­swer would be typical of many. I have been an avid music listener and lover from early childhood — at first, limited and conservative, later, not so much so, although some musical forms still re­main pretty much inaccessible to my soul — and at some point, my desire to take had somehow morphed into an almost equally strong desire to give, to not let the impressions, feelings, thoughts and conclusions that my listening generates within myself to go to waste, but to be able to show them to anyone who might be interested in looking at them. Who knows, said I, maybe this will be able to do some unknown good, and then my musical immersion would not simply be born and be deceased with my own birth and death, but serve some extra purpose as well. Sort of a "missionary drive", if you like.

 

Of course, this is presumptuous. Who am I to make my opinions matter? Basically a nobody — not a musician, not a musicologist, not even a superb connoisseur of the pop culture, and not even a native English speaker. There are so many people in the world who are better "qualified" for this line of work than me, it's not even funny. And who am I to give someone something? How have I been authorized? How have I even been able to suppose that someone might want to con­sider taking this bullshit from me?

 

The answers are simple: you cannot really know until you try. If all of us started operating based on this logic, chances are nobody would ever get nothing done in the world — we'd spend more time doubting our capacity to do something rather than simply trying to do it. For me, the realization that the work I'd done was not entirely useless came in once I started getting — on a regular basis — E-mails of support from people whose knowledge and intellectual power, as it seemed to me, exceeded mine, sometimes vastly. If anything, these letters showed that the "giving" process was at least partially successful, and that kept me going.

 

There were, and still are, other kinds of letters, of course — ranging from polite disagreements and corrections to violent flames, sometimes deserved in all fairness. But those, too, convinced me that I was moving in the right direction; if, to those people, all that crap I wrote seemed deser­ving of a written answer, then there must have been something to it. The only thing that would have completely discouraged me could have been complete indifference, and people were not in­different, and that was nice to know.

 

What I discovered was this: there were plenty of interesting people who were quite willing to take from me — and give in return, usually in the form of reader comments, but sometimes even in the form of mailed CDs of music they wanted me to review, some of which, I am ashamed to admit, I have not even had the time to listen to so far. Sometimes I was enriching their experience — by making them look at some piece of music in a new light, or even by making them want to go out and get a new piece of music — and sometimes they were enriching mine in response, in the very same ways. The thing became an endless, but never boring cycle of "showing off" (in the good sense of the expression, if it ever had one) between myself and my readers, and every new loop would usually leave one of us more open-minded than before. The mutual benefits were good.

 

Then, at one point, the rut set in, and a crisis was imminent. First came the understanding that the process is endless; timeless musical masterpieces may be few, but "good" music stretches out to infinity, in width as well as in depth, and my idealistic "encyclopaedic" dreams of covering eve­ry­thing worth covering were shattered and smashed (especially by the likes of Tangerine Dream and by the fact that, as we progress further in time, the number of musical artists seems to grow on an exponential basis).

 

Second came the understanding that I had run out of things to say — there's only so many different words in the English language, and far from all of them are easily applicable to a music review, and this brings on the horrible idea that, perhaps, if you catch your­self applying the exact same words to a dozen different albums by different artists in different times, this might mean that the music sounds exactly the same? And if it does not, what good it is to try and capture its essence with such inadequate means? And even if you write in different ways, what does the difference between "this album packs a real wallop of energy" and "this album stomps along like a 4,000-pound black rhino" really imply to your reader? Maybe it means something to you the writer, but what if your readers just don't get it anyway? Or, worse, are animal-haters?..

 

At a moment like this, the only thing that keeps you going is understanding that, if you just drop it, this means you have wasted an awful amount of time and potential with all your previous writing. There is also the idea of "obligation": people who like to read you expect you to entertain them further, and maybe they have a certain flimsy right to. But going on just for the sake of going on isn't a lot of fun, either. One can slow down, lose whatever quality one possessed before, or simp­ly go off on all kinds of tangents (something akin to what happened to Mark Prindle, who used to match the definition of 'oddbeat music reviewer' but, today, is more of a cross between Lester Bangs and George Carlin — still a great read, but you have to be equipped with a metaphoric magni­fying glass to actually find scraps of music-related text floating on the waves of his endless impressionistic rants about whatever has just wandered into his head). 

 

What I am coming to is this: it's fun to write about music at first, but eventually you start to think that, perhaps, it would be a nice change to dance about architecture instead. This is where the professional critic has you on your knees: he, at least, is getting paid for his work, and money is a big factor here, especially if you don't really know how to do anything else for money. But that doesn't mean that money is a solid guarantee for quality; even the best paid critics rarely go on be­ing interesting for all of their lives. If you need an example, take a look at Robert Christgau. (And let's not even mention Jann Wenner).

 

3. Baby, What You Want Me To Do

 

Actually, speaking of Robert Christgau and his ilk, there is at least one major plus about reading his brief, snug, holier-than-Jah snippets: he has been around for so long, and has written about so much different stuff, that he has managed to give his regular readers a near-complete, wholesome picture of the critic as a young, mature, and old man combined. One may not agree with the values of "Pop Music Filtered Through The Bowels Of R. C.", but it is hard to argue that the bowels of R. C. are completely incapable of filtering music, or that they are not, per se, a relative­ly interesting place to visit.

 

Let us not forget that, although all people are different, this variation is not nearly as high as a hyper-individualistic mind would like to imagine, and quite a few of us have their bowels gene­tically programmed in a way that is very similar, or maybe even complete­ly identical, to that of R. C. For such people, R. C. will hold a particular interest, and, most likely, will display a major predictability force. Others may not share his views completely, but intersect with them in some points. Still others will rather want to align themselves with the likes of Mark Prindle, or Wilson & Alroy from www.warr.org.

 

The rather obvious trend, as my experience has shown me, is that people usually value musical criticism not so much according to the literary skills or erudition of the writer, but according to how much their opinions on music coincide with those of the writer. This gives even us the illi­terates plenty of hope: we may write like third-graders, but we are still bound to find admiring fans because we think the same thoughts of Led Zeppelin. Or, on the contrary, you may be a rein­carna­tion of Lenny Bruce, Nabokov, and Jean-Paul Sartre combined, but you will still be hailed an incompetent hack by the first reader who takes insult at your sacrilegious treatment of the German industrial scene.

 

In the end, once you have reached your 1,000th review, you probably will have used up all of your words, idioms, and metaphors, regardless of whether you have the gift of a Shakespeare or of a Dan Quayle. But you are not doing this to be really deep or witty; superficial musical cri­ticism isn't drama of the highest order. You're doing this to show your readers on which shelf of your preferences this or that piece of music is supposed to go, preferably with a bit of explanation (you could just give out ratings and leave it at that, but it's kind of boring and doesn't provide for a good opportunity to kill time, which is the main stimulus for people to read criticism).

 

For some reason (call it youthful stupidity), it seemed important to me to make each review as long as possible; the usual explanation was something along the lines of "every piece of music, no matter how bad it is, took time and effort to produce, so shouldn't an honest review also take time and effort?", but in reality I was probably just trying to come out "smarter" than the lazy stupid competitors on the market. Some people liked it, most did not. Looking back at some of that stuff, I am amazed at much of the empty, redundant verbosity — it's one thing to write a mini-monograph on something like Blonde On Blonde, which deserves a dozen big monographs by itself, but a five-page review on AC/DC's Ballbreaker? Did I even write that? Geez. That, of course, is also one key factor of why I fell out of the reviewing process: forcing myself to come up with ideas even when the fields lay completely fallow. It all went in the wrong direction.

 

This, then, is my next and probably last effort to reboot and make some good use of my previous experience. The decision is not to repeat the past mistakes — and write what I think should be written, and not one sentence above that. This does not imply the opposite, namely, that all the reviews will be as laconic as possible; plenty of records inspire plenty of thoughts. But that is much more likely to be expected from the likes of the Beatles or Frank Zappa than the likes of Albert King or J. J. Cale.

 

One other important decision is that I will not be making much use of my earlier reviews. Rerea­ding some of them, I understand that, regardless of how good or bad they are, most need rewri­ting, and usually it is more difficult and takes more time to rewrite a review than to produce a new one, not just because of the editorial work but also because you are essentially one person in your twenties and a seriously different one in your thirties. I have softened up on some stuff and hardened up on some other, which is, I guess, natural (but, thank Heaven, I still love ABBA and still think that Bob Dylan's Selfportrait is vastly underrated); more importantly, too many of the reviews were too heavily dependent on the «name each song, come up with some observation about it» principle, which I cannot and will not uphold any longer.

 

So, let us wait and see. To be continued.